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Mary Olivier: A Life by May Sinclair

M >> May Sinclair >> Mary Olivier: A Life




She remembered how beautiful and strong he used to be, when he danced and
when he played tennis, and when he walked up and down the hills. His
beauty and his strength had never moved her to anything but a happy,
tranquil admiration. She remembered how she had seen Maurice Jourdain
tired and old (at thirty-three), and how she had been afraid to look at
him. She wondered, "Was that my fault, or his? If I'd cared should I have
minded? If I cared for Mr. Sutcliffe I wouldn't mind his growing tired
and old. The tireder and older he was the more I'd care."

Somehow you couldn't imagine Lindley Vickers growing old and tired.

She gave him back the books: Ribot's _Heredity_ and Maudsley's
_Physiology and Pathology of Mind_. He held them in his long, thin hands,
reading the titles. His strange eyes looked at her over the tops of the
bindings. He smiled.

"When did you order these, Mary?"

"In October."

"That's the sort of thing you do when I'm away, is it?"

"Yes--I'm afraid you won't care for them very much."

He still stood up, examining the books. He was dipping into Maudsley now
and reading him.

"You don't mean to say you've _read_ this horrible stuff?"

"Every word of it. I _had_ to."

"You had to?"

"I wanted to know about heredity."

"And insanity?"

"That's part of it. I wanted to see if there was anything in it.
Heredity, I mean. Do you think there is?"

She kept her eyes on him. He was still smiling.

"My dear child, you know as much as I do. Why are you worrying your poor
little head about madness?"

"Because I can't help thinking I may go mad."

"I should think the same if I read Maudsley. I shouldn't be quite sure
whether I was a general paralytic or an epileptic homicide."

"You see--I'm not afraid because I've been reading him; I've been reading
him because I was afraid. Not even afraid, exactly. As a matter of fact
while you're reading about it you're so interested that you forget about
yourself. It's only when you've finished that you wonder."

"What makes you wonder?"

He threw Maudsley aside and sat down in the big armchair.

"That's just what I don't think I can tell you."

"You used to tell me things, Mary. I remember a little girl with short
hair who asked me whether cutting off her hair would make me stop caring
for her."

"Not _you_ caring for _me_."

"Precisely. So, if you can't tell me who _can_ you tell?"

"Nobody."

"Come, then.... Is it because of your father? Or Dan?"

She thought: "After all, I can tell him."

"No. Not exactly. But it's somebody. One of Papa's sisters--Aunt
Charlotte. You see. Mamma seems to think I'm rather like her."

"Does Aunt Charlotte read Kant and Hegel and Schopenhauer, to find out
whether the Thing-in-itself is mind or matter? Does she read Maudsley and
Ribot to find out what's the matter with her mind?"

"I don't think she ever read anything."

"What _did_ she do?"

"Well--she doesn't seem to have done much but fall in love with people."

"She'd have been a very abnormal lady if she'd never fallen in love at
all, Mary."

"Yes; but then she used to think people were in love with her when they
weren't."

"How old is Aunt Charlotte?"

"She must be ages over fifty now."

"Well, my dear, you're just twenty-eight, and I don't think you've been
in love yet."

"That's it. I have."

"No. You've only thought you were. Once? Twice, perhaps? You may have
been very near it--for ten minutes. But a man might be in love with you
for ten years, and you wouldn't be a bit the wiser, if he held his tongue
about it.... No. People don't go off their heads because their aunts do,
or we should all of us be mad. There's hardly a family that hasn't got
somebody with a tile loose."

"Then you don't think there's anything in it?"

"I don't think there's anything in it in your case. Anything at all."

"I'm glad I told you."

She thought: "It isn't so bad. Whatever happens he'll be here."


XIII.

The sewing-party had broken up. She could see them going before her on
the road, by the garden wall, by the row of nine ash-trees in the field,
round the curve and over Morfe Bridge.

Bobbing shoulders, craning necks, stiff, nodding heads in funny hats,
turning to each other.

When she got home she found Mrs. Waugh, and Miss Frewin in the
drawing-room with Mamma. They had brought her the news.

The Sutcliffes were going. They were trying to let Greffington Hall. The
agent, Mr. Oldshaw, had told Mr. Horn. Mr. Frank, the Major, would be
back from India in April. He was going to be married. He would live in
the London house and Mr. and Mrs. Sutcliffe would live abroad.

Mamma said, "If their son's coming back they've chosen a queer time to go
away."


XIV.

It couldn't be true.

You knew it when you dined with them, when you saw the tranquil Regency
faces looking at you from above the long row of Sheraton chairs, the
pretty Gainsborough lady smiling from her place above the sideboard.

As you sat drinking coffee out of the dark blue coffee cups with gold
linings you knew it couldn't be true. You were reassured by the pattern
of the chintzes--pink roses and green leaves on a pearl-grey ground--by
the crystal chains and pendants of the chandelier, by the round black
mirror sunk deep in the bowl of its gilt frame.

They couldn't go; for if they went, the quiet, gentle life of these
things would be gone. The room had no soul apart from the two utterly
beloved figures that sat there, each in its own chintz-covered chair.

"It isn't true," she said, "that you're going?"

She was sitting on the polar bear hearthrug at Mrs. Sutcliffe's feet.

"Yes, Mary."

The delicate, wrinkled hand came out from under the cashmere shawl to
stroke her arm. It kept on stroking, a long, loving, slow caress. It made
her queerly aware of her arm--white and slender under the big puff of the
sleeve--lying across Mrs. Sutcliffe's lap.

"He'll be happier in his garden at Agaye."

She heard herself assenting. "_He_'ll be happier." And breaking out. "But
I shall never be happy again."

"You mustn't say that, my dear."

The hand went on stroking.

"There's no place on earth," she said, "where I'm so happy as I am here."

Suddenly the hand stopped; it stiffened; it drew back under the cashmere
shawl.

She turned her head towards Mr. Sutcliffe in his chair on the other side
of the hearthrug.

His face had a queer, strained look. His eyes were fixed, fixed on the
white, slender arm that lay across his wife's lap.

And Mrs. Sutcliffe's eyes were fixed on the queer, strained face.


XV.

Uncle Victor's letter was almost a relief.

She had not yet allowed herself to imagine what Morfe would be like
without the Sutcliffes. And, after all, they wouldn't have to live in it.
If Dan accepted Uncle Victor's offer, and if Mamma accepted his
conditions.

Uncle Victor left no doubt as to his conditions. He wouldn't take Dan
back unless Mamma left Morfe and made a home for him in London. He wanted
them all to live together at Five Elms.

The discussion had lasted from a quarter-past nine till half-past ten.
Mamma still sat at the breakfast-table, crumpling and uncrumpling the
letter.

"I wish I knew what to do," she said.

"Better do what you want," Dan said. "Stay here if you want to. Go back
to Five Elms if you want to. But for God's sake don't say you're doing it
on my account."

He got up and went out of the room.

"Goodness knows I don't want to go back to Five Elms. But I won't stand
in Dan's way. If your Uncle Victor thinks I ought to make the sacrifice,
I shall make it."

"And Dan," Mary said, "will make the sacrifice of going back to Victor's
office. It would be simpler if he went to Canada."

"Your uncle can't help him to go to Canada. He won't hear of it.... I
suppose we shall have to go."

They were going. You could hear Mrs. Belk buzzing round the village with
the news. "The Oliviers are going."

One day Mrs. Belk came towards her, busily, across the Green.

She stopped to speak, while her little iron-grey eyes glanced off
sideways, as if they saw something important to be done.

The Sutcliffes were not going, after all.


XVI.

When it was all settled and she thought that Dan had gone into Reyburn a
fortnight ago to give notice to the landlord's solicitors, one evening,
as she was coming home from the Aldersons' he told her that he hadn't
been to the solicitors at all.

He had arranged yesterday for his transport on a cattle ship sailing next
week for Montreal.

He said he had always meant to go out to Jem Alderson when he had learnt
enough from Ned.

"Then why," she said, "did you let Mamma tell poor Victor--"

"I wanted her to have the credit of the sacrifice," he said.

And then: "I don't like leaving you here--"

An awful thought came to her.

"Are you sure you aren't going because of me?"

"You? What on earth are you thinking of?"

"That time--when you wouldn't ask Lindley Vickers to stop on."

"Oh ... I didn't ask him because I knew he wanted to stop altogether. And
I don't approve of him."

She turned and stared at him. "Then it wasn't that you didn't approve of
_me_?"

"What put that in your head?"

"Mamma. She told me you couldn't ask anybody again because of me. She
said I'd frightened Lindley Vickers away. Like Aunt Charlotte."

Dan smiled, a sombre, reminiscent smile.

"You don't mean to say you still take Mamma seriously? _I_ never did."

"But--Mark--"

"Or him either."

It hurt her like some abominable blasphemy.




XVII

Nothing would ever happen. She would stay on in Morfe, she and Mamma:
without Mark, without Dan, without the Sutcliffes....

They were going....

They were gone.




XXVIII


I.

She lay out on the moor, under the August sun. Her hands were pressed
like a bandage over her eyes. When she lifted them she caught the faint
pink glow of their flesh. The light throbbed and nickered as she pressed
it out, and let it in.

The sheep couched, panting, in the shade of the stone covers. She lay so
still that the peewits had stopped their cry.

Something bothered her....

_And in the east one pure, prophetic star_--one pure prophetic
star--_Trembles between the darkness and the dawn_.

What you wrote last year. No reason why you shouldn't write modern plays
in blank verse if you wanted to. Only people didn't say those things. You
couldn't do it that way.

Let the thing go. Tear it to bits and burn them in the kitchen fire.

If you lay still, perfectly still, and stopped thinking the other thing
would come back.

_In dreams He has made you wise,
With the wisdom of silence and prayer,
God, who has blinded your eyes,
With the dusk of your hair_.

The Mother. The Mother. Mother and Son.

_You and he are near akin.
Would you slay your brother-in-sin?
What he does yourself shall do_--

That was the Son's hereditary destiny.

Lying on her back under Karva, she dreamed her "Dream-Play"; saying the
unfinished verses over and over again, so as to remember them when she
got home. She was unutterably happy.

She thought: "I don't care what happens so long as I can go on."

She jumped up to her feet. "I must go and see what Mamma's doing."

Her mother was sewing in the drawing-room and waiting for her to come to
tea. She looked up and smiled.

"What are you so pleased about?" she said.

"Oh, nothing."

Mamma was adorable, sitting there like a dove on its nest, dressed in a
dove's dress, grey on grey, turning dove's eyes to you in soft, crinkly
lids. She held her head on one side, smiling at some secret that she
kept. Mamma was happy, too.

"What are you looking such an angel for?"

Mamma lifted up her work, showing an envelope that lay on her lap, the
crested flap upwards, a blue gun-carriage on a white ground, and the
motto: "_Ubique_."

Catty had been into Reyburn to shop and had called for the letters. Mark
was coming home in April.

"Oh--Mamma--"

"There's a letter for you, Mary."

(Not from Mark.)

"If he gets that appointment he won't go back." She thought: "She'll
never be unhappy again. She'll never be afraid he'll get cholera."

For a minute their souls met and burned together in the joy they shared.

Then broke apart.

"Aren't you going to show me Mr. Sutcliffe's letter?"

"Why should I?"

"You don't mean to say there's anything in it I can't see?"

"You can see it if you like. There's nothing in it."

That was why she hadn't wanted her to see it. For anything there was in
it you might never have known him. But Mrs. Sutcliffe had sent her love.

Mamma looked up sharply.

"Did you write to him, Mary?"

"Of course I did."

"You'll not write again. He's let you know pretty plainly he isn't going
to be bothered."

(It wasn't that. It couldn't be that.)

"Did they say anything more about your going there?"

"No."

"That ought to show you then.... But as long as you live you'll give
yourself away to people who don't want you."

"I'd rather you didn't talk about them."

"I should like to know what I _can_ talk about," said Mamma.

She folded up her work and laid it in the basket.

Her voice dropped from the sharp note of resentment.

"I wish you'd go and see if those asters have come."


II.

The asters had come. She had carried out the long, shallow boxes into the
garden. She had left her mother kneeling beside them, looking with
adoration into the large, round, innocent faces, white and purple, mauve
and magenta and amethyst and pink. If the asters had not come the memory
of the awful things they had said to each other would have remained with
them till bed-time; but Mamma would be happy with the asters like a child
with its toys, planning where they were to go and planting them.

She went up to her room. After thirteen years she had still the same
childish pleasure in the thought that it was hers and couldn't be taken
from her, because nobody else wanted it.

The bookshelves stretched into three long rows on the white wall above
her bed to hold the books Mr. Sutcliffe had given her; a light blue row
for the Thomas Hardys; a dark blue for the George Merediths; royal blue
and gold for the Rudyard Kiplings. And in the narrow upright bookcase in
the arm of the T facing her writing-table, Mark's books: the Homers and
the Greek dramatists. Their backs had faded from puce colour to drab.

Mark's books.--When she looked at them she could still feel her old,
childish lust for possession, her childish sense of insecurity, of
defeat. And something else. The beginning of thinking things about Mamma.
She could see herself standing in Mark's bedroom at Five Elms and Mamma
with her hands on Mark's books. She could hear herself saying, "You're
afraid."

"What did I think Mamma was afraid of?"

Mamma was happy out there with the asters.

There would be three hours before dinner.

She began setting down the fragments of the "Dream-Play" that had come to
her: then the outlines. She saw very clearly and precisely how it would
have to be. She was intensely happy.

* * * * *

She was still thinking of it as she went across the Green to the post
office, instead of wondering why the postmistress had sent for her, and
why Miss Horn waited for her by the house door at the side, or why she
looked at her like that, with a sort of yearning pity and fear. She
followed her into the parlour behind the post office.

Suddenly she was awake to the existence of this parlour and its yellow
cane-bottomed chairs and round table with the maroon cloth and the white
alabaster lamp that smelt. The orange envelope lay on the maroon cloth.
Miss Horn covered it with her hand.

"It's for Mr. Dan," she said. "I daren't send it to the house lest your
mother should get it."

She gave it up with a slow, unwilling gesture.

"It's bad news, Miss Mary."

"_Your Brother Died This Evening_."

Her heart stopped, staggered and went on again. _"Poona"_--Mark--

"_Your Brother Died This Evening_.--SYMONDS."

"This evening" was yesterday. Mark had died yesterday.

Her heart stopped again. She had a sudden feeling of suffocation and
sickness.

Her mind left off following the sprawl of the thick grey-black letters on
the livid pink form.

It woke again to the extraordinary existence of Miss Horn's parlour. It
went back to Mark, slowly, by the way it had come, by the smell of the
lamp, by the orange envelope on the maroon cloth.

Mark. And something else.

Mamma--Mamma. She would have to know.

Miss Horn still faced her, supporting herself by her spread hands pressed
down on to the table. Her eyes had a look of gentle, helpless
interrogation, as if she said, "What are you going to do about it?"

She did all the necessary things; asked for a telegram form, filled it
in: "_Send Details_, MARY OLIVIER"; and addressed it to Symonds of "E"
Company. And all the time, while her hand moved over the paper, she was
thinking, "I shall have to tell Mamma."


III.

The five windows of the house stared out at her across the Green. She
avoided them by cutting through Horn's yard and round by the Back Lane
into the orchard. She was afraid that her mother would see her before she
had thought how she would tell her that Mark was dead. She shut herself
into her room to think.

She couldn't think.

She dragged herself from the window seat to the chair by the
writing-table and from the chair to the bed.

She could still feel her heart staggering and stopping. Once she thought
it was going to stop altogether. She had a sudden pang of joy. "If it
would stop altogether--I should go to Mark. Nothing would matter. I
shouldn't have to tell Mamma that he's dead." But it always went on
again.

She thought of Mark now without any feeling at all except that bodily
distress. Her mind was fixed in one centre of burning, lucid agony.
Mamma.

"I can't tell her. I can't. It'll kill her.... I don't see how she's to
live if Mark's dead.... I shall send for Aunt Bella. She can do it. Or I
might ask Mrs. Waugh. Or Mr. Rollitt."

She knew she wouldn't do any of these things. She would have to tell her.

She heard the clock strike the half hour. Half-past five. Not yet. "When
it strikes seven I shall go and tell Mamma."

She lay down on her bed and listened for the strokes of the clock. She
felt nothing but an immense fatigue, an appalling heaviness. Her back and
arms were loaded with weights that held her body down on to the bed.

"I shall never be able to get up and tell her."

Six. Half-past. At seven she got up and went downstairs. Through the open
side door she saw her mother working in the garden.

She would have to get her into the house.

"Mamma--darling."

But Mamma wouldn't come in. She was planting the last aster in the row.
She went on scooping out the hole for it, slowly and deliberately, with
her trowel, and patting the earth about it with wilful hands. There was a
little smudge of grey earth above the crinkles in her soft, sallow-white
forehead.

"You wait," she said.

She smiled like a child pleased with itself for taking its own way.

Mary waited.

She thought: "Three hours ago I was angry with her. I was angry with her.
And Mark was dead then. And when she read his letter. He was dead
yesterday."


IV.

Time was not good to you. Time was cruel. Time made you see.

Yet somehow they had gone through time. Nights of August and September
when you got up before daybreak to listen at her door. Days when you did
nothing. Mamma sat upright in her chair with her hands folded on her lap.
She kept her back to the window: you saw her face darkening in the dusk.
When the lamp came she raised her arm and the black shawl hung from it
and hid her face. Nights of insane fear when you _had_ to open her door
and look in to see whether she were alive or dead. Days when you were
afraid to speak, afraid to look at each other. Nights when you couldn't
sleep for wondering how Mark had died. They might have told you. They
might have told you in one word. They didn't, because they couldn't;
because the word was too awful. They would never say how Mark died. Mamma
thought he had died of cholera.

You started at sounds, at the hiss of the flame in the grate, the fall of
the ashes on the hearth, the tinkling of the front door bell.

You heard Catty slide back the bolt. People muttered on the doorstep. You
saw them go back past the window, quietly, their heads turned away. They
were ashamed.

You began to go out. You walked slowly, weighted more than ever by your
immense, inexplicable fatigue. When you saw people coming you tried to go
quicker; when you spoke to them you panted and felt absurd. A coldness
came over you when you saw Mrs. Waugh and Miss Frewin with their heads on
one side and their shocked, grieved faces. You smiled at them as you
panted, but they wouldn't smile back. Their grief was too great. They
would never get over it.

You began to watch for the Indian mail.

One day the letter came. You read blunt, jerky sentences that told you
Mark had died suddenly, in the mess room, of heart failure. Captain
Symonds said he thought you would want to know exactly how it
happened.... "Well, we were 'cock-fighting,' if you know what that is,
after dinner. Peters is the heaviest man in our battery, and Major
Olivier was carrying him on his back. We oughtn't to have let him do it.
But we didn't know there was anything wrong with his heart. He didn't
know it himself. We thought he was fooling when he dropped on the
floor.... Everything was done that could be done.... He couldn't have
suffered.... He was happy up to the last minute of his life--shouting
with laughter."

She saw the long lighted room. She saw it with yellow walls and yellow
lights, with a long, white table and clear, empty wine-glasses. Men in
straw-coloured bamboo armchairs turning round to look. She couldn't see
their faces. She saw Mark's face. She heard Mark's voice, shouting with
laughter. She saw Mark lying dead on the floor. The men stood up
suddenly. Somebody without a face knelt down and bent over him.

It was as if she had never known before that Mark was dead and knew it
now. She cried for the first time since his death, not because he was
dead, but because he had died like that--playing.

He should have died fighting. Why couldn't he? There was the Boer War and
the Khyber Pass and Chitral and the Soudan. He had missed them all. He
had never had what he had wanted.

And Mamma who had cried so much had left off crying.

"The poor man couldn't have liked writing that letter, Mary. You needn't
be angry with him."

"I'm not angry with him. I'm angry because Mark died like that."

"Heigh-h--" The sound in her mother's throat was like a sigh and a sob
and a laugh jerking out contempt.

"You don't know what you're talking about. He's gone, Mary. If you were
his mother it wouldn't matter to you how he died so long as he didn't
suffer. So long as he didn't die of cholera."

"If he could have got what he wanted--"

"What's that you say?"

"If he could have got what he wanted."

"None of us ever get what we want in this world," said Mamma.

She thought: "It was her son--_her_ son she loved, not Mark's real,
secret self. He's got away from her at last--altogether."


V.

She sewed.

Every day she went to the linen cupboard and gathered up all the old
towels and sheets that wanted mending, and she sewed.

Her mother had a book in her lap. She noticed that if she left off sewing
Mamma would take up the book and read, and when she began again she would
put it down.

Her thoughts went from Mamma to Mark, from Mark to Mamma. She used to
be pleased when she saw you sewing. "Nothing will ever please her now.
She'll never be happy again.... I ought to have died instead of Mark....
That's Anthony Trollope she's reading."

The long sheet kept slipping. It dragged on her arm. Her arms felt
swollen, and heavy like bars of lead. She let them drop to her knees....
Little Mamma.

She picked up the sheet again.

"Why are you sewing, Mary?"

"I must do _something_."

"Why don't you take a book and read?"

"I can't read."

"Well--why don't you go out for a walk?"

"Too tired."

"You'd better go and lie down in your room."

She hated her room. Everything in it reminded her of the day after Mark
died. The rows of new books reminded her; and Mark's books in the narrow
bookcase. They were hers. She would never be asked to give them back
again. Yesterday she had taken out the Aeschylus and looked at it, and she
had forgotten that Mark was dead and had felt glad because it was hers.
To-day she had been afraid to see its shabby drab back lest it should
remind her of that, too.

Her mother sighed and put her book away. She sat with her hands before
her, waiting.

Her face had its old look of reproach and disapproval, the drawn,
irritated look you saw when you came between her and Mark. As if your
grief for Mark came between her and her grief, as if, deep down inside
her, she hated your grief as she had hated your love for him, without
knowing that she hated it.

Suddenly she turned on you her blurred, wounded eyes.

"Mary, when you look at me like that I feel as if you knew everything I'm
thinking."

"I don't. I shall never know."

Supposing all the time she knew what you were thinking? Supposing Mark
knew? Supposing the dead knew?

John Crace digests A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell

My English teacher is wearing a barrister's wig. He turns and points towards me as I sit trembling in the dock. "Members of the jury, I put it to you that this man, Tom Robinson, is innocent," he says, rather lugubriously. I want to protest. I want to shout that no, I am not Tom Robinson, but yes, I am innocent! But the words won't come out.

Then I wake up. It's another literary dream – one that's troubled me ever since I studied Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird for GCSE.

Most of the time I'm disappointed to leave my literary dreams, waking to realise that I'm not really ensconced with with the boozing Welsh pensioners from Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils or haven't really been thrashing Harry Potter's Quidditch team. I remember with fondness a skiing trip with William Shakespeare and the delightful discovery that Don DeLillo was serving drinks behind the bar in my local pub.

It's not all sunshine, though. Tom Wolfe once ruined a trip to New York, shouting at me across Fifth Avenue: "You're not even familiar with my work – get outta town, asshole!" But that's nothing on Howard Jacobson. I spent a summer discovering his novels during my waking hours and bumping into him in my sleep. I'd see him in a local restaurant and tell him how much I was enjoying his novels. "Oh right," he'd snap, "that old chestnut, huh?" When I met him for real last year he was, in fact, charm personified. I didn't tell him about the dreams.

But enough about my subconscious, what about yours? It's Friday: forget about work and tell me all about your literary dreams. Don't hold back – it's not like we'll read anything into it.

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John Crace digests The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
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John Crace digests Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford

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