Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing Page 5

  The tiger began to pace up and down, rather incongruous in her short, low-waisted evening dress, with a cup of cocoa in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

  “Hilary, please don’t!”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t pace about as if you were caged.”

  “I am caged! I don’t fit in, and I never will. You are so right. It’s not being American—it’s being myself. I’m a writer, Adrian!”

  “Well, what if you are? You’re a succès fou.”

  “I hate that book!”

  “Then write another you like better,” he said rather crossly.

  “I want a baby, not a book!” She silenced him, but it was an evasion, and she knew it. She had surreptitiously been making notes for a new novel, but what she had in mind was ironic, and it would surely hurt Adrian. She was caged, caged by being in love with, and married to, a man whose life pattern seemed to her both trivial and confining. She was caged also by the demands of housekeeping, by the late hours they kept, so she never woke up really fresh with the extra psychic energy at her command necessary for writing a single sentence. Housekeeping terrified and absorbed her, and she felt challenged to a kind of perfectionism which gave her no leeway as far as time went. In this mood of emptiness and frustration, she went down to Kent alone to spend a weekend with Adrian’s parents. Whatever ambivalence Hilary might experience in her relation to the society in which she found herself, her response to the cherished, tender, rich countryside was absolute. Her love of the shaped, the orderly (she had never wholly responded to the unpruned, thick, second growth of New England) could bask in this landscape created slowly over the centuries until it had now a kind of perfection. It made her feel drunk with pleasure to walk, as she did that weekend, with Adrian’s mother, through great open groves of trees, across patches of bluebells that sometimes in certain lights gave the illusion of water, so blue and thick they were. To Hilary it seemed a kind of magic not to have to struggle through underbrush as one so often did in New England—it was like certain wonderful dreams where one did not walk so much as float a few inches above the ground.

  “Heaven!” she murmured.

  She had sensed in Margaret Stevens from the beginning the same passionate response. She, who was in every other way so reserved, so delicately poised, became a different person out of doors, as if she shed a skin when she knelt by a border in one of those big straw hats tied under her chin with a chiffon scarf, and weeded fiercely. Now she walked with long free strides beside her daughter-in-law.

  “Isn’t it. amazing that one never remembers what spring will be? I had forgotten about the beech leaves—”

  “You must come down more often, Hilary.”

  “Adrian wants to, but we get so involved in parties and things.”

  They walked companionably along while that last sentence hung in the air between them. Margaret Stevens was an exceedingly shy person who hid her shyness under perfect manners, and wore it with grace, partly because she was such a delightfully pretty woman; she had Adrian’s clear blue eyes, but just a shade darker and a shade more gentle; she always smelled of lavender and refused to follow the fashion for short frocks, so now Hilary thought she looked just right in a plain rather long blue linen skirt, and a frilly white blouse under a soft pink sweater. (With what extraordinary vividness the scene came back to her, even to the sunlight catching in the diamond on Margaret Stevens’ delicate brown hand.) Finally she had spoken.

  “I’m a little anxious about Adrian … are you?” She instinctively included Hilary, not to seem critical. “I do rather dislike this fashion of so many cocktails. It seems a little … a little out of character. Or am I being outrageously old-fashioned?” And she gave Hilary one of her dazzling smiles, meant to dazzle, and so, to hide in, Hilary guessed.

  “We’re dancing on the graves, and no one really forgets it ever. So Adrian drinks too much—we all do.”

  “Does he enjoy his work?”

  “He never talks about it.” One is not a daughter-in-law for nothing, Hilary thought, as the magic ease of the morning began to flow away and she must make the effort to be again her married self, not her self.

  “You are very much in love.” Was it a question? A judgment? What was it?

  “Yes, we are.”

  “And you are very different.” Hilary waited for what would come next. What did come next was not at all what she had expected. “I suppose you are hard at work yourself on another book?”

  “I make notes. There never seems to be any real time …, and I’m so awkward, such a novice about running the flat still. Maybe writing is irrelevant really.…”

  “Oh no!” The response was immediate and firm. “Your writing must be for you what horses are for Adrian,” and she laughed. “It does sound a bit odd, but you must feel only really and fully alive when you are doing it, as Adrian does when he is hunting.”

  “Yes,” Hilary answered, feeling like a starving person who has just been given a piece of bread, “Yes, it is like that. It’s monstrous, but nothing seems real to me unless I can say it. This morning, for instance, this walk, all the time I am trying to find a word for that green of the beech leaves. Why not just see them? It’s idiotic!”

  “Women are so much more conscious than men …, even when they are not writers, you know.”

  “Do you think so? Really?”.

  “Conscious or self-conscious,” and again she laughed, as if to soften perspicacity behind the screen of the feminine. It was what women were supposed to do, and what Hilary found so hard to do herself.

  “What I really want is to write poems,” Hilary uttered on the wave of intimacy. She would never have admitted this to Adrian. She felt, perhaps wrongly, that he would have been terrified; that it would erect a barrier between them, as if an old friend had announced that he was taking Holy Orders.

  “Oh, I’m happy about that,” Margaret said, bending down to look a wood anemone in the face, lifting it on its stalk. “I think perhaps you are on the right track. Perhaps the novel was not your thing, really. Brilliant as it was.”

  It is always hard to hear the buried truth from another person, and Hilary did not answer.

  “I’m being outrageously frank with you.” Hilary felt a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I hope you take it as a compliment. But you are such an honest person yourself. And that is a responsibility.”

  “Yes,” Hilary uttered, full of pain. “It is.”

  “Why did you fall in love with Adrian, I wonder? You know so much more than he does … believe me, dear Hilary, I am grateful, grateful that you did.”

  They walked on in silence while Hilary wrestled with her answer. Could she be honest now? Could she take the risk?

  “You are right about the novel. I didn’t know what I was doing. I am dismayed by the success it has had. Don’t you see, Adrian appeared in the middle of all that brouhaha. He seemed like good bread after too much champagne. Margaret …,” it was the first time Hilary had called her mother-in-law by her first name. “It is hard to be a woman and a writer. Lately I have begun to think it impossible. I want to feel sane and whole. I want what Adrian is, that absolute entity. The safety of it, the peace.” But she couldn’t leave it at that. It sounded so smug. “It seems fantastic that such a person can love me. It seems like a miracle. It is a miracle.”

  “Adrian is my son,” Margaret said. “I want him to be happy. He has married out of his sphere, someone with a touch of genius.… I have grown fond of you, Hilary. I want you two to be happy. But life with Adrian.…” She paused and gave Hilary a quizzical look, “Life with Adrian is going to ask all your tenderness, all your womanliness.…”

  “I know,” Hilary breathed. “He’s an angel.”

  “Hardly!” Margaret was quick to detect a false note. They exchanged a look of amusement, a look in which Hilary admitted that she had been caught out.

  “Oh well,” she amended, laughing, “not an angel maybe, but an angel compared to me!”


  “It is a somewhat irritating thing about men that they are so often good … good because they don’t know the half of it, or because,” and Margaret smiled her delicious dazzling smile, “they only know the half of it.”

  “How do you know so much?”

  “I settled for being a woman. I wonder whether you can,” and quickly she went on, as if to cover or put a dressing on a wound. “I have been blessed with a husband who, if I was unhappy, never knew it, and if he had known it would not have understood why.” She added, “There are enormous comforts in the kind of life I lead.”

  “Such as the garden?”

  “Such as the garden …,” and Margaret left it at that.

  “What are you really asking of me?” Hilary stopped and lifted her head to the great beeches not thinking it odd that, having asked the crucial question, she was also saying over a series of adjectives which might possibly define that particular translucent green over head.

  “I can’t ask you to be less than yourself. But I do wish your life were a little less hectic, Hilary, for Adrian’s sake as well as yours. His job, I quite see, isn’t a real root. But your poems, if you could settle in to write them—your poems might be a kind of root—women seem to be stronger than men, these days.”

  “The men have been mortally wounded,” Hilary said.

  “Yes.”

  And Hilary had tried, for Margaret’s sake, as well as for her own. But it was very queer. She was sometimes moved to tears just seeing Adrian walk into the room, like some hero without a purpose, smiling his great warm smile, but what ever she felt for him, it had nothing to do with writing poetry.

  Standing there looking at her two selves reflected in the Venetian mirror, Hilary wondered what would have become of them if Adrian had not died.… Would the tiger in her finally have turned to rend? The starved, growing, fierce tiger of the imagination who was unappeased? As it was, Adrian had died his own death, wrapped in his own kind of violence, falling over a jump and breaking his neck. It was so sudden, so final, that Hilary went to pieces; she cried a great deal, aware that this also was something “not done”; and she cried perhaps not so much out of grief, as out of some indefinable sense of being now cut off from everything, and most of all from herself. She had a wild hope for a month that she might be pregnant, but that hope proved false. She knew then that never again in her life would she find comfort, the perfect simple comfort of being held in the arms of Adrian. That phase of her life was over for good. So intense was her feeling about it that one day in Kent when she saw the old cat lying stretched out in the sun, perfectly relaxed, she burst into tears and rushed out of the room. Why? It had become in an instant the image of deprivation. But she could not explain this even to herself, only accept Margaret’s tender care, accept the trays that found their way to her room, sometimes with a single rose in a little glass by her cup, or a book of poems. They had hovered on the verge of intimacy for those weeks, but the thread of communication between them depended too much on someone who was not there, of whom Margaret could not speak. Hilary fled as soon as she decently could, got herself a job in London in a publishing house, and began to try to come to terms with her tiger. How cruel memory is, forgetful memory that drops whole lives out without a qualm! It occurred to her, standing in the brilliant morning light, forty years later—and surrounded by her own life, her life alone—that among the letters she had unbundled last night there had been a touching one from Adrian’s father, the ink almost faded, thanking her for having given Adrian “those brief years of happiness.” Tears sprang to her eyes, because she could not remember the old man’s face.…

  Hilary wished she could stop the shuttle which for the last week had been so inexorably weaving the past and the present together.… She walked quickly down the big room to the French windows. No Mar. Perhaps after all he had been put off by her nervousness. But he shouldn’t make me so anxious, she thought, it’s not fair! And on an impulse, simply to get back firmly into the present, she went to the telephone and called Mary back.

  “It’s me, Hilary. I’m sorry I was cross, Mary, but I feel so badgered these days! Besides, you know very well I am not fit for society. I get overexcited and say the wrong thing.… You know, I do! … Besides, this afternoon two young people are coming to interview me about my whole oeuvre.… That’s what they said, oeuvre.… I feel like a hen who has laid a monstrous number of eggs or something. Don’t laugh, I’m serious.… Terrified.… I’ve been reading old letters and things to try to get some perspective, a frightful mistake. It has made me dreadfully depressed and confused.… Of course it’s flattering—of course I shall enjoy it! You are so literal, darling …, well—as long as you still love me.… Goodbye!”

  Sirenica had come to wrap herself around Hilary’s legs, rubbing her nose against Hilary’s sneakers with passion, and purring ecstatically. But when Hilary bent down to scratch behind the delicate white ears, the cat dashed off, holding her tail high. Wyatt’s poem welled up out of this little scene and Hilary was borne out into the garden on the wave of joy, as she found she could recite it still by heart—at least one thing memory had yielded up for keeps.

  They flee from me that sometime did me seek,

  With naked foot stalking within my chamber:

  Once I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

  That now are wild, and do not once remember

  That sometime they have put themselves in danger

  To take bread at my hand; and now they range,

  Busily seeking in continual change.

  “And that’s for you, my pussy,” Hilary said, as Sirenica leapt into the air, paws outstretched, but missed the butterfly she was after, pretended it was all a gambol, and sat down decorously, tucking her paws in, under a rose bush.

  Hilary whistled a self-made tune as she went to the woodshed and got out her basket of gardening tools. On her way back, she heard the oriole give its piercing four notes from somewhere among the apple trees, and dropped the basket to climb swiftly over the stone wall, hoping to catch a glimpse of that orange flame. Elusive bird! Hilary leaned back under each tree, but no luck. She stood quite still and listened, the perplexities and anxieties of the morning gone, as if she had been released from a spell and allowed back into the world of Now. Even Mar was forgotten, while she noted, as she slowly returned, that the rose, Nevada, needed spraying, and she simply must weed the small border along the wall, or it would become a jungle.

  “After all, Sirenica, we have the whole morning. No work today.…”

  Any day when Hilary did not sit at her desk was automatically a holiday, even if there were interviewers lying in wait at the end of it. Soon her fingers were deftly pulling out tufts of grass and violets from around the bleeding heart; nothing like weeding to unknot the mind, nothing except the same thing in another sphere, pruning the fat out of a poem, cutting, shaping, give it space to breathe in.

  “Ow!” Her fingers had struck a rock. Gardening in New England has its peculiar frustrations, she thought. But there the rock was, and it must be dug out. She sat down in the grass to spare her back, but as usual, the rock turned out to be a lot bigger than she had imagined when she bruised a finger against one corner of it. It would be a fine thing if Mar did turn up now to haul it out for her with the crowbar. Hilary looked hopefully around. Not a sign of the rascal! “Very well then,” she said, and began to scratch around it with her trowel; it would have been wise to go and fetch the crowbar herself, but difficulty roused passion; she was too impatient to make that effort. Instead, she hauled away with her two hands, pitting her whole strength against one stone as if her life depended on the outcome. Finally it gave, sucked out like some huge tooth. Hilary sat back, and felt for the cigarettes in her pocket. But the first puff induced an alarming sensation in her head, as if all the juice were being drawn away, and dizziness set in. “It’s such a nuisance,” said young Hilary to old Hilary. But old Hilary was frightened, frightened of death. “Lie down, you fool,” said ol
d Hilary, and for once she was obeyed. “You can’t die yet, you’ve got too much to do,” said young Hilary. And in the center of the vertigo, she experienced the thrust of expectancy and of hope. All the living, all the caring, all the anxiety had only been a prelude to that not impossible poem, the thing that would justify it all, and stop forever the whirling of the past with all its images, make the whole world stand still!

  Lying there, waiting, still unable to focus, she threw the cigarette into the grass with a gesture of impatience. She wanted now above all to get to her desk—to see if she could quietly, by stealth, pounce on the final stanza of a poem which had been nagging at her to get itself finished for almost a year; she had unearthed it again the day before while hunting for something else. Oh dear … but impatient young Hilary waited. It would not do to try to heave her ancient twin upright, only to have her keel over.

  At least when she opened her eyes now, the awful rushing blurr had gone. She looked straight up into apple blossom and noticed a robin’s nest she had not known was there. As always after one of these bouts, the sweetness of life flowed back in, so that she would have liked to thank someone, to pray. The bliss of solitude, when it did not matter a hoot if one lay down on the grass like an old donkey, having been ridiculous enough to strain one’s heart!

  But where is Mar? She sat bolt upright in the deafening silence. Would there ever come a time when one was not waiting for someone?

  Hilary shivered. A cloud had gone over the sun. Mar was not the sort to do himself violence, but anxiety could not be stilled, for human life was always, it seemed, in peril. Lately the boy had appeared to be so much better, but she realized that she had been troubled by the look on his face early that morning; and it haunted her now in her state of depletion. He had looked ravaged, but in an unattractive way, dissipation rather than grief, shame. What was it she had read in that brief glimpse before he turned and ran?