‘Dear me, Stephen,’ she said, lying back, her hair, her black hair wildly astray on the pillow and her blue eyes filled with a splendid light. ‘I have a thousand things to tell you, but you have driven them all out of my mind.’ She stroked the limp arm lying over her bosom for a while and then said, ‘Tell me, have you just come from the fleet? Are you on leave? Is Jack with you?’
‘I am not. I am just come down from London. I have not
seen Jack these many weeks: he is still with the blockading squadron.’
‘Then you don’t know that my Aunt Williams came to live here after her friend Mrs Morris ran off with that odious manservant they had – Briggs. Just then the west wing was being done up and oh such quantities of other things, so she was put into Jack’s room and there, poking and prying everywhere, she found a box of letters that silly goose Amanda Smith wrote him from Canada, telling him he had got her with child: and certainly she begged him to go through the motions, you know. These Aunt Williams seized and ran to Sophie as fast as ever she could and poured out all her bile and Methody cant about fornication and so on, working the poor girl up into a frenzy of self-righteousness and jealousy. It had always astonished me that a woman with as much sense as Sophie – and she is no fool, you know – can be so influenced by her mother, who is a fool, a downright great Goddamned fool, even where money is concerned, which is saying a great deal. But there it is.
Sophie wrote him a letter with all kinds of high-flown Drury-Lane stuff: and when the poor fellow came posting up from Plymouth to say he was sorry and should never do it again she turned him away, clean away. So away he went, with a parting shot about goddam ill-natured unforgiving shrews that went home. And she has been crying her eyes out ever since.’
‘Poor soul, poor soul. But it was an ill-fated marriage. She has never taken pleasure in the act itself: she has always dreaded pregnancies: and her deliveries have been extremely painful. It has long seemed to me that jealousy and frigidity or at least tepidness are in
direct proportion to one another. And Jack is what is ordinarily called a very full-blooded man.’
‘I dare say you are right about frigidity and jealousy. But I believe you are wrong in calling Sophie frigid. Certainly, when her mother is by, I think she would be a poor companion for a lively, eager man – indeed, Jack would never have got her into his bed at all if she had not run away in
a ship, far from her mother’s eye. And then again I have it on the best authority that Jack is no artist in these matters. He can board and carry an enemy frigate with guns roaring and drums beating in a couple of minutes; but that is no way to give a girl much pleasure.
In better hands she would, I am sure, have been a very likely young woman; and oh so much happier.’
‘Clearly, you know more about these things than I.’
‘She has a lovely body still, in spite of these children,’ said Diana. ‘But what is the use of a lovely body if neither you nor anyone else enjoys it?’
‘Sure it is a great waste: the great shame of the world.’
‘Clarissa, who knows a great deal about the subject, and I – but Lord, I have left out a most important part. I never told you that Aunt Williams is gone back to Bath. Mrs Morris’s fellow turned out to have several wives already and he has been taken up for bigamy, false pretences, personation, forgery, theft and God knows what, a right wrong ‘un. And Aunt Williams is to be the prime witness for the prosecution. She is so proud and important –
swears she will never leave till the man is hanged and she and her friend will end their days together – I bought them a little place just off the Paragon.’
‘Barham Down is sold then? How clever of you.’
‘No, no. That is another thing I was forgetting. After you had been gone a while I began to think it was just Goddamned silly to squalor along on two hundred a year when you have an enormous great diamond like the Blue Peter. I happened to mention it to Cholmondeley
– I still had his coach until a little while ago – and he agreed it was great nonsense: why did I not borrow fifty thousand or so until our affairs were settled? He could easily arrange it in the City. So I said yes, and now I am absolutely swimming in money. Do let me give you some money, Stephen dear.’
‘Sweetheart, honey, you are kindness itself, but our affairs are already settled. They are just as they were, or even somewhat better; my loss of the receipt did not signify, and I shall unpawn your bauble tomorrow. Now I come to think
of it,’ he went on, stalking like Adam across the room to his brown-paper parcel, ‘here is a present to go with the jewel.’ He unwrapped a swathe of Lyons silk velvet, blacker than the darkest night.
After several shrieks of rapture she thanked him very prettily, congratulated him on his brilliant conduct in putting their affairs in order – she had always been sure that he could
do it, however complicated, wrapped a fold or so about her pure white torso, and having collected her thoughts she went on, ‘You would not believe the difference in Sophie with her mother gone. For some time Clarissa and I had been trying to comfort her, trying to make her understand that men and most women see these things quite differently, that for a man to leap into a welcoming bed does not mean treason, felony or real, serious unfaithfulness at all. She scarcely minded what we said. But once it was known that Aunt Williams was settled in Bath with Mrs Morris, busy buying chintz and swearing affidavits, Sophie listened much, much more attentively.’
‘How I wish I had heard you.’
‘You would have learned a good deal, I believe.’
‘That is what I mean. Little notion, very little notion do I possess of the way women talk among themselves, above all on such matters.’
‘And we went on about the very intense delight there is or ought to be in love-making – I said it was an absolute duty to enjoy it and to give as much pleasure in return as ever one could – that the pleasure was infectious. Clarissa spoke, and spoke very much more delicately than I did, quoting some Latin author about the way men like their partners to behave and poor Sophie looked absolutely blank, muttering she thought you just lay there and let it happen. Oh, we said so many things. I made one rather good remark, or so it seemed to •me at the time: a man does like some mark of appreciation of his efforts, you know. Then I said, but in a tone I thought she would understand, that what she most urgently needed was a really kind, gentle and considerate lover to put her in tune and show her what all the talk and
poetry and music and fine clothes were really about, and how it justified them all. A man like Captain Adeane, who danced with her at all the last Dorchester assemblies and who was so discreetly particular. Do you know him, my dear?’
‘I believe not.’
‘He is a soldier, and he has a big place behind Colton, kept for him by a rather young and skittish aunt. Being so absurdly handsome, he is usually called Captain Apollo. He will have nothing whatsoever to do with girls, but the young married women of the neighbourhood – well, I will not say that they actually stand there in lines, but I believe he is a fairly general consolation. He gave a splendid ball last week.’
‘I should like to meet the gentleman.’
‘Oh, and another thing we told her, perhaps the most important of all, we both insisted upon it much, was that there was nothing, nothing so bad for you, or for your looks, as self-righteousness. Nothing so wholly unamiable and souring as that habitual put-upon expression of discontent and implied reproach. The only thing to do, if you knew your lover or husband or whatever was being unfaithful, was to pay him back in his own coin, not out of wantonness or revenge but to avoid worse: to avoid self-righteousness. For having done that you could never be a martyr again or put on a martyr’s horrid face. She cried shame on us for saying such dreadful things: we were really quite immoral and she was ashamed for us. But she did not sound very convincing – she did not hurry away, either –