The Lonely Lady of Dulwich Read online

  A few days later Amelia Legge heard from Zita, who said that she had arrived safely in London. About a fortnight later still Madeleine burst in on Amelia one morning and said she had things of importance to tell her. Jean was ill. At one moment his life had been despaired of. His mother was nursing him in his apartment. She, Madeleine Laurent, had been away during the last fortnight at Fontainebleau, and had only just heard the news. Madame de Bosis had been to see her. It had been brain fever, apparently. Now he was out of danger.

  “Was it because of Zita?” Amelia asked.

  “His mother says so,” said Madeleine. “He seems to have been stunned by her departure, then demented, then ill.”

  “But how extraordinary!” said Amelia, “he had stopped going near her.”

  “He had probably given it up as hopeless, but that did not prevent him feeling what he felt. Madame de Bosis says he was in love with Zita, and that she led him on and then left him. She is furious with her, of course. And she says that is how all Englishwomen behave, that she is a cold-hearted flirt: cold-hearted and hot-blooded. We had a long discussion, and I tried to make her admit that Zita’s going away was the best thing that could have happened. But all she said was: ‘You don’t know Jean. He’s not like the others. He will never get over it.’ I said they would have been equally unhappy whatever else had happened. Suppose she had run away with Jean, I said. ‘God forbid,’ Madame de Bosis had answered. ‘Well, then, what?’ I asked, ‘an ordinary liaison?’… ‘Whatever they did, the mischief was done,’ she said. ‘My son has been poisoned by that woman.’ ”

  “And what do you think, Madeleine?” asked Amelia.

  “I think,” said Madeleine, “that she did not love him and that she never did love him. I think Jean loved her and saw it was hopeless. That he left off seeing her, thought he was cured, and found when she went away that he was not cured at all. Of course, I do not pretend to understand vous autres.”

  “But it is just as difficult for me,” said Amelia plaintively. “I don’t pretend to understand Zita; and the more I see of her, and the longer I know her, the less I feel I understand her.”

  “And Harmer?” asked Madeleine, “did he perhaps play a part?”

  “I wonder,” said Amelia, “Robert is by no means a fool.”

  “If he was jealous it might explain everything,” said Madeleine.

  “He couldn’t have been jealous of Jean,” said Amelia, “Zita has not set eyes on him for weeks.”

  “That is of no consequence,” said Madeleine, “it is not what people do that make men jealous, but what they are. It is the instinct of the male that leads men to be jealous of the right person. That is why it’s not the cleverest men who are the least easily deceived, but often quite ordinary men who have the male instinct. I imagine Mr Harmer had it.”

  “Quite possibly,” said Amelia, “but there was nothing to have it about.”

  “Who knows?”

  “Oh! if it comes to that, we know nothing! Did Jean tell his mother anything?”

  “Not a word, and in his delirium he raved the whole time about someone called Marie.”

  “Well, you see! Zita was never called Marie.”

  “It was fatal for Jean to meet your Zita,” said Madeleine. “She was fated by her beauty, her peculiar beauty, which would not be admired by everyone, still less by every Frenchman, to inspire a passion in a man like Jean, and she was equally destined by her nature and her circumstances to be incapable of satisfying it. It is a great pity.”

  “Perhaps it is just as well for both their sakes,” said Amelia. “Why shouldn’t Jean marry someone and be happy?”

  “Because he is one of those people who are not born for happiness.”

  “Poor boy!” said Amelia, with a tearful voice, “I should like him to be happy,” (and then petulantly) “He ought to be happy.”

  Jean recovered slowly. He told his mother nothing. He left Paris and retired to her house in Normandy, where he started to write a novel.

  The Legges saw nothing of him, neither did the Bertrands.

  Amelia Legge heard from Zita from time to time. Robert had taken a house at Wimbledon, where they were to live until the tenant who had taken Wallington left. But when the time came for him to leave, the tenant proposed renewing the lease for five years, and Robert consented. The truth was that while nothing would persuade Robert to take a house in London, Zita had suddenly made it clear to him that nothing would persuade her to live at Wallington. She had her mother, who was in England, to back her up. She told Mrs Mostyn that sooner than live at Wallington she would leave Robert for good, and Mrs Mostyn persuaded Robert that she meant this. Robert did not greatly care if he lived at Wallington or not so long as he didnot live in London. Living at Wimbledon enabled him to drive up to London every day. He resolved to take a shooting-lodge in Scotland every autumn. He easily could go racing from Wimbledon, and he could always sleep at the club when he wanted to; moreover, Mrs Rylands had taken a house in London for three years, so everyone was satisfied.

  A new life began for Zita. After her brief hour not of fame, but of notice, for she had not only been admired by the French in Paris, but her beauty had been a topic of discussion among English visitors, she passed once more into obscurity and permanent eclipse. She lived as one in a dream. She saw few people; she hardly ever went out in London, except every now and then to some small dinner party or perhaps to a musical evening given by one of Robert’s city friends. She seemed not to care; to be neither happy nor unhappy; just listless, like a person who had been drugged. It was the truth. She had been numbed by what had happened, and was like a person who has taken a narcotic.

  Robert was attentive and devoted to her as before, and did everything he could to please her, but all his efforts were of no avail. Nothing he did seemed to rouse her. She walked amiable and beautiful through life like someone in a trance.

  She seemed to have no interests. She had no real friends, and few acquaintances. Her mother died soon after they came back to England; her sisters both continued to live abroad.

  She was not a reader; when she had first married she read every novel that came her way, and now, as if suffering from all that surfeit, she never opened a book. She was not wrapped up in her religion; she fulfilled her duties and no more. She knew no priests. But she had one engrossing hobby, and that filled her life. It was perhaps more than enough. It was her garden. She had suffered at Wallington from not being able to createa garden. There was one already, a large one; large, but irremediable, and under the eye and relentless hand of a competent North countryman who was not going to change anything: so Zita did not even enter the lists with him. But when she came to live at Wimbledon there was a large garden and a tame gardener, and she set about to create a garden such as she wanted, and Robert was delighted that she should have an occupation. It filled her life, and the garden which she created was, if people could have seen it, one of the sights of England.

  It was a masterpiece of taste and design, a riot of cunningly devised and arranged colour. A feast to the eye, a rest to the body; the shade and the light were in the right place. As it was, few people saw it except Robert’s business friends. And all they said was “Quite a nice lot of flowers you’ve got, Robert. I suppose you do all that, you always were a clever gardener. Those chrysanthemums are doing well,” pointing to the bergamots.

  It is a surprising, but not an uncommon, thing that a woman as beautiful as Zita (and as time went on she became more rather than less beautiful – she was twice as beautiful now as she had been when she had first come out), should, after having been recognized as a beauty in Paris by the French and the English, have lived for nearly ten years in the suburbs of London, now and then paying visits in the counties of England, without attracting more attention than she did. She was the reverse of a professional beauty. She had been forgotten and was never rediscovered.

  There is not one single portrait extant of her by an English artist. The only two pictures t
hat exist of her are the two that Bertrand painted: one of which is at Wallington and the other at the Luxembourg in Paris. She was photographed once or twice on a seaside pier or at a fair, but never by a photographer of note. She went to no large entertainments and took part in no public functions. She was unknown to the general public and unnoticed by any public. She lived alone, content, apparently, in her garden, and looked after her husband.

  He seemed to be happy. Zita fitted in with his ideas of comfort. He liked ordering dinner, but he liked someone to see that his orders were carried out in the way he liked. That is just what Zita did. She did more: much more. She appeared to do nothing, but she did everything: she always had, and Amelia and others had been deceived and wrong about her.

  Robert was happy in his business. He did well. He got richer and richer. Every year he spent one month in Scotland in the shooting-lodge he took, and later in the autumn he would stay for a week with friends for the pheasant-shooting. He attended the Derby regularly, also the Grand National, the St Leger, and at least one autumn and one spring meeting at Newmarket. He entertained his city friends at Wimbledon. The cooking was good and the wines excellent. In addition to everything else, he saw Mrs Rylands every day. She now lived permanently in London, originally to look after a niece, but, now that the niece was married, because she had become so fond of England that she would feel a stranger or an exile were she to go back to Paris, and still more so were she to go back to America.

  What were their relations? Nobody ever knew. Mrs Rylands was a handsome woman about the same age as Robert, possibly younger than he was and looking older than her age, or possibly older than he was and looking younger than her age. She was large, smooth and blonde, with a short Greek nose and magnificent shoulders and rather lustreless eyes, one of those women who are born handsome. She was sensible and universally liked. Whatever their other relations might be, Robert venerated her opinions on every subject in the world, and believed in her absolutely.

  She, in this delicate situation, behaved with tact and did all she could not to annoy Zita or interfere with her. Mrs Rylands disliked women as a rule, but she did not mind Zita. Secretly, in her heart of hearts, she probably thought it was a great shame that Robert Harmer had married such a wife. He ought to have married a woman of the world with a great deal of character who would have pushed him on and helped him and been a real companion, whereas Zita was hopeless, mooning about in a suburban garden and not knowing a soul… She may have thought such thoughts, but if she did she did not express them. She never made things difficult for Zita; she was far too naturally shrewd.

  Zita, on the other hand, seemed to be delighted that Robert should be friends with her, and accepted her as a matter of course. The unwritten rules of the game were observed on both sides with the greatest punctilio. Robert stayed two nights a week in London for dinner – it was called dining at the club. Once a month Robert and Zita gave a small dinner party, to which Mrs Rylands was invited. She never dined by herself at ‘The Birches’, the name of Robert’s house, but she sometimes, though rarely, had tea with Zita when Robert was not there.

  Sometimes she gave a dinner party, to which Zita and Robert were both invited. It was small, and meant going to the play. They drove home in a brougham. Zita accepted one of these invitations once a year and declined the others, and Robert went by himself.

  Robert took Mrs Rylands to the races with a party of other friends, and she always stayed in Scotland at the Lodge.

  During the next few years Zita never went abroad, except one Easter, when they spent a week in Florence and a week in Rome. Robert Harmer went often to Paris on business, and for the Grand Prix and other meetings, and once to Monte Carlo. He suggested that Zita should accompany him, but she declined. They heard little from or of their Paris friends.

  The Legges had been appointed to Tokyo soon after the Harmers left Paris, and they stayed there four years, at the end of which time they went to Stockholm.

  The year after the Harmers left Paris, Jean de Bosis published a book, which made him famous. It was inprose this time, and startlingly different in tone and subject from his volume of verse. It was a short novel dealing with contemporary life: bitter, cynical, rather crude, extremely vivid; and it surprised, shocked, and captivated the public. In the Press it was praised by some and attacked by many. It was discussed by everyone; translated into many languages, but not into English. Jean de Bosis did not send Zita a copy of the book, and she never read it, although echoes of its notoriety reached her through Mrs Rylands, who said “it was disagreeable, although, of course, very well written”.

  A year later Jean published a second book. Fantastic this time and full of colour and sensuality, and some people said the crudest coarseness. This book had a definite success of scandal, and was banned by libraries or booksellers in some countries. Jean came in for a torrent of abuse in France, and he excited the anger of the best and serenest critics, who burst into a chorus of frenzied vituperation; they all agreed that this time he had gone too far. But his sales grew larger than ever. His book was dramatised, turned, that is to say, into a long and crude melodrama. This was extremely successful, too. Then, as if in defiance of criticism, Jean set about to exaggerate the faults which the critics had complained of. His next book read like an imitation of his own manner in which the faults were exaggerated and the mannerisms caricatured. This often happens with writers whose work at the same time excites the vituperation of the critics and wins the favour of the public – the author tends as a result to abound in himself. Not two hours after writing these lines I came across in a book just published a passage referring to Bulwer Lytton, in which the author 1 said that a “combination of readers’ enthusiasm and critics’ brutality always worked on Bulwer’s peculiar temperament in such a way as to bring out the worst of his many mannerisms”. This sentence exactly fits Jean de Bosis, and might have been written about him.

  The new book was more successful than ever with the public. The critics had little left to say. They had already used all their powder and shot. They contented themselves by saying that Jean de Bosis was “finished” and written out.

  After that he produced a new book every year: “the same book,” his enemies said, “slightly deteriorating year by year.”

  The year his second book appeared he married a singer. Her name was Emilia Altenbrandt. She was the widow of an Austrian. Her own nationality was mixed. “She might have been a Russian, French, or Turk, or Prussian, or perhaps Italian,” but what she exactly ‘remained’, it was difficult to say: not French certainly, and not English. She spoke most languages and could be silent in none. She was handsome, dark, and flamboyant, exhausting and exacting. She sang Lieder in French, German and Italian, and sometimes in Russian, all over the Continent. She was more than successful among the musical publics of Europe. They went mad over her, but she had not been to England. It was not for want of being asked by the concert managers, but she refused to come; the climate, she said, would kill her, and she was a woman who knew her own mind.

  Mrs Rylands told Zita all about her and her marriage, all about Jean’s success and Emilia Altenbrandt’s success, of the triumphs they were both enjoying all over Europe: at Vienna, St Petersburg, Berlin, Rome, Milan, Madrid; of their great happiness, and of the wild ecstasy of their double worldwide fame.

  Zita listened with calm as to a story that happened a long time ago.

  “A great while since, a long, long time ago.”

  #xa0;

  Footnote

  1. M. Sadleir

  CHAPTER IX

  It was not until nine years after they had left Paris, the year of the next great Paris Exhibition – that of the Eiffel Tower – that Zita Harmer for a second time came in contact and in touch with her old Paris friends.

  Robert was ordered by his doctor to take the waters at Haréville, and he obeyed his doctor’s orders. They went there in the middle of July.

  Robert took the waters. Zita merely looked on.
The first person she met the morning after her arrival, as she strolled through the Galéries looking at the shop windows, was Amelia Legge, not much changed; a little bit greyer, perhaps, and perhaps even more voluble and plaintive than before. She told Zita all her news in the first five minutes of their meeting. Cyril was now Councillor at Paris; he was arriving the next day, or as soon as he could; he had not to drink the waters. She had to drink the lighter, not the stronger, waters for her eyes. They were back again in Paris, but not, alas, at their old apartment; they had taken one on the other side of the river.

  “It’s wonderful to see you again, Zita,” said Amelia, “and looking not a day older; on the contrary, more beautiful than ever. Madeleine Laurent is alive and flourishing, and Jean de Bosis is married and famous, even more famous than his wife. We never met her, but we heard her at Berlin. He writes too much…and it is a great pity. I found his last book fearfully interesting, in fact, I think all his books are interesting. Cyril says I am wrong, and, of course, I know they shock a great many people. They are shocking, there’s no denying it, but they don’t shock me, so few books do,” she said, with an apologetic sigh.

  “I haven’t read any of them,” said Zita. “I never seem to have time to read now; I’m always busy.”

  “Busy at what?”

  “Oh, lots of things – gardening chiefly.”

  “Ah, you’ve got a garden now, at Wimbledon. You don’t live at Wallington?”

  “Wallington is still let.”

  “I think that is sensible of Robert. Wallington wasn’t a possible place to live in, it was too dark, bleak, too cold, too large, and too uncomfortable.”

  “I sometimes wonder whether Robert doesn’t miss it.”

  “Oh! nonsense, Zita; don’t think such things. If he missed it he would live there. Men, you know, don’t do what they don’t want to. Here is Robert,” she said, as Robert strode towards them in white flannels and a straw hat. He looked, Amelia thought, considerably older and rather ill. No wonder he was taking the waters. He looked infirm, grey and thin, and slightly care-worn. He greeted his cousin warmly.