Dark Hester/Chapter 16

The door opened and Hester stood before them. Clive turned his head and looked at her. He surveyed her steadily and she surveyed him. Then she said: ‘I’ve come to say good-bye to Clive and he and I must be alone.’

‘You shall be alone.’ Monica stood beside her son. Was she the tigress at bay, or was Hester? Each was fighting for Clive but not against each other, now; against him. ‘You shall be alone, when the time comes,’ she said. ‘But I must speak to you together, first.’

‘The time has come. It’s a quarter to twelve. The taxi will be here directly; and you know, Monica, all this is rather hard on Clive,’ said Hester. ‘I asked you to wait till I’d gone.’ She had closed the door and leaned back against it, keeping her hand on the knob. Her face had no rigidity; a sodden, gentle look, rather; and the dragging, bitter lines had been effaced by desperate weeping.

‘You shall be alone,’ Monica repeated. ‘But you can take a later train. I must speak to you. There are mistakes. There are mistakes between you and Clive as distorting as the ones I made.’

​‘Mistakes? Oh no; there are no mistakes now. There were before but not now, said Hester, glancing at her husband. ‘As for any you made, Monica—if you did make any—they have nothing to do with this situation.’

‘I think they have everything to do with it. I think they have involved us all. And the first thing for us to do is to see the truth together. All the truth.—Clive,’ she stood beside his bed and she looked down at him, ‘Hester saved my life yesterday. I was so miserable, believing that you hated me, that I went out to throw myself under a train, and she saved me. And, as we talked afterwards, she said one or two things that I shall never forget. One was that she thought me rather foolish to have believed that you hated me;—I saw that it was true, when she said it;—and another was that she wondered at me for having believed that anyone who loved you, and who had known your love, could have deceived you. She said that we love the people who do not make mistakes about us and that Godfrey Ingpen had made mistakes that tore her life to pieces; — while you had always understood.—And I have something to say to you, Hester. Clive cannot understand that you should still love the man who hurt you. But I can. I understand ​because I love him, too.—That’s what I’ve been telling Clive.’

She did not look at her son as she found these succinct phrases. They seemed to cut her away from all her past life, that edifice of graces, reticences and dignities, and to set her adrift upon a sea as strange and as uncharted as any that Hester had ever embarked upon. She knew that he had leaned forward as he heard her, his eyes fixed upon her, his arms outstretched along the sheet; but she did not look down at him. ‘Clive can’t understand us, Hester,’ she said, keeping her bright, intrepid eyes upon her daughter-in-law. ‘He believes that we love the other best. Is that true, do you think? And if Clive can make such mistakes about us, do you feel that he loves us still?’

Hester’s hand had slowly dropped from the knob. She leaned back against the door, her arms folded, and her eyes were the Madonna eyes of gloom and reprobation. ‘So that’s what you’ve been doing,’ she said. ‘I see. You’ll cut your heart out to mend Clive’s life, won’t you, Monica? You are willing that he should believe you such another case as I am, if that will give him ease.—As to which we love best, I’m not going to answer; and I’m sure you’re not. If life doesn’t answer that sort of ​question, nothing else will, and as for me, it doesn’t make much difference what Clive believes now, does it?—Perhaps I do love Godfrey best. Who knows?—Though now that I come to think of it, it may be the people who give us most to bear who are the ones we love most at the end, and Clive has certainly shown me that he can hurt as much as Godfrey ever did.—But I’m not going into that. It’s you, Monica. I see you through and through. You love Godfrey; I know it; and I know how he loves you.—He’s never loved anyone so much.—But with all the will in the world you’ll never make me believe that you are like me; nor make Clive believe it either.’

‘Perhaps, if Clive has the insight that I believe him to have,’ said Monica, gazing at her daughter-in-law, while her mind seemed to move in great flashes, ‘he will wish, more than anything, that I were.’

Clive, there beside her, had bowed his head upon his arms while Hester spoke. Now she felt that he put out his hand for hers. He found it. He laid his cheek against it and held it tightly.

‘I can go now,’ Monica murmured, glancing down at her son. ‘I can leave you now. You and Eddie see now that people who love so much cannot part.’

​But Hester put her arm across the door. ‘No; you can’t go now,’ she said. She was pale and trembling. Her eyes were wide and sick. ‘You can’t go now,’ she repeated. ‘I’ve something to say first, too.—Yes, Clive.—She is the best friend you will ever have. No one will ever do for you what she does—or love you as much. But I’m not going to be given back to you by her. I’m not going to have you accept from her what you won’t from me.—It’s not only Godfrey.—It’s deeper than that—the reason for our parting. I’m not the sort of woman you ought to have fallen in love with. Monica saw the truth from the beginning I came into your life and I broke it.’

‘It’s not the truth,’ said Clive. He had raised his head. He held his mother’s hand, but he faced his wife with his own strength. ‘You mended my life. You are my life; and if you leave me now it will be from pride—not from love, as you think.—It will be because you won’t share me with my mother;—as I felt I couldn’t share you with the other man you love. Well; I can. And if it’s because of Mummy, you must put up with it; just as she has to put up with the fact that it’s you who are my life; not she.’

‘All right,’ Hester muttered, and, darkly flushed, ​she seemed to glance at her husband with hostility. ‘All right. You think that the truth.—Sit down, Monica. I’d rather have it out, now.’ She pulled forward the chair from the dressing-table and placed it against the door and sat down, leaning back her head. ‘We’ll have it out,’ she repeated, and she stopped for a moment, controlling her thought with an effort that swept her face clear of its dark passion. ‘We must go back to the beginning,’ she said, ‘the very beginning, when Clive says I mended his life. It’s true that I helped him over his bad time. I knew how to deal with ghosts, because I’d seen so many myself; but any good psycho-analyst could have done as much. It wasn’t to mend his life that I came into it, or to be mended that Clive came to me; it was because we fell in love with each other, and when one’s in love one imagines that it’s enough and that nothing else counts and that it will carry you through.—Well, there are some things it doesn’t carry you through; and that’s what we came to find out; that’s what Clive knows as well as I do.’

She paused to think and in the pause, still keeping her son’s hand tightly held in hers, Monica sat down softly on the bed beside him. They were united as they had never yet been united. Their pulses ​seemed to beat together, and as she felt the deep tide of peace rising within her Monica knew that her strength, now, was greater than Hester’s, and her understanding greater.

‘You didn’t exist for me, Monica; you simply didn’t exist,’ said Hester. ‘If I thought of you at all, I thought of you as the Victorian Aunt Sally my generation has been brought up to shy coconuts at. The only thing that defined you clearly for me was that you were the sort of woman who would think it wicked to have a lover. Not that Clive said you would think it wicked. He only said that you’d be hurt. That was why he wouldn’t tell you. But it was more than that. It was because it would have hurt him, too, most horribly, to tell his mother that his wife had had a lover. I didn’t mind, one way or the other; about your being told. But I didn’t think it your business. And I didn’t see, or suspect, that he was hurt all the time, though he pretended not to be. I wasn’t in the least afraid at first, Monica, of you or your standards, because I didn’t imagine that Clive was. It was only by degrees that I began to see that I was outside, and that you were inside, with him, always.’

As they were now, Hester meant, perhaps, though she did not glance at them. She sat there, with ​folded arms, in her red jumper, against the door, and she made Monica think of a picture she had seen of a young condemned revolutionary sitting up, proud, perverse, unvindictive, to be shot. Her face was the strangest colour; the colour of a white passion-flower, its surface bloom bruised from the petals and the purple pulp showing through. Her eyes were like the flower’s dark centre; bruised, too; soft and expanded; there was no fierceness in Hester’s eyes to-day. ‘It was mistake, then, on your side, from the very beginning, Hester,’ said Monica. ‘Clive was not inside with me. He never once came inside. It was I who was put out; not you. It was you who had put me out;—me and my obsolete standards.’

Hester’s eyes did not move from the window. ‘Of course that was what you felt. That was what Clive meant you to feel; that was what he did for me. Because it was I, not you, who was making him suffer, and he had to hide it from me. I made him suffer from the beginning, because I was too different from you. It wasn’t only in one standard; it was in all the standards; down to the way you dressed and the jokes you had together. He was always hiding from me, poor Clive; in the little things as well as the big ones. It’s impossible in ​marriage, I see that now, if the wife is so different, and the man loves his mother so much. I was very slow in seeing the truth. I was a complacent dolt, of course. But by degrees it came over me that Clive was unhappy, fearfully unhappy; that he was thinking about you all the time, and wondering. He used to call out in his sleep—oh, we joked about it, of course, and pretended it was his nerves;—but I began to see that he called out for you because his heart was full of you and he was wondering if you weren’t miserable down here, alone, with nothing in your life. You played up awfully well, Monica; allow me to say that. I watched you carefully, and I watched him, and I saw that you gave him nothing to go on. But he knew perfectly well that you couldn’t stand me and that you removed yourself lest you should be forced to show it. He saw that you couldn’t stand me, and he saw why,’ and round Hester’s lips there now crept the shadow of the bitter savour. ‘He saw why just as well as you did; better than you did;—And shall I tell you why he could go on standing me?—Simply and solely because he was still in love with me; simply because of sex; nothing else. It was that you were sacrificed to. A man will always sacrifice his mother to the woman he’s in love with, I suppose, and a ​mother will always cut herself in pieces to help mend his life. We understand all that. But it’s what lies underneath that matters now; because there are deeper things in life than even sex.—He sacrifices her because he is in love; but he is nearer her than ever because he has sacrificed her. What I’ve come to see in these last months,’ said Hester, gazing past Monica’s head out of the window, ‘is that it’s the family thing that always conquers in the end. It’s what we all come back to, in the bottom of our hearts;—if we have any family. I have none. I’m an outsider in that way, too. I’ve always been a free lance, with all the conceit and theory of a free lance. But if you’ve ever had a mother and if she’s given you and meant to you all the things you care for most, you never get over it. That’s what has happened to Clive and me. And we all three know it’s true. And we all three know that we can pick up and grow roots again—after I’m gone. And that,’ said Hester, rising and lifting her chair and putting it down in its place before the dressing-table, ‘is why I am going. And please don’t let us be sentimental about it.’

‘Hester,’ said Monica. She, too, had risen. She still stood by her son, but she had dropped his hand and her voice arrested the girl who, half turned ​away, was fumbling, perhaps through sudden tears, for the door-handle. ‘Will you stay for my sake?’

Hester stood turned away, her head bent down in an attitude of sombre attention.

‘I mean,’ said Monica, and she felt her own tears rising, ‘if I need you, too.—I have nothing to do with you and Clive now. I can’t give you back to him, for you’re not mine to give, nor him to you: he is yours in a way he never could be mine; in spite of what you say. But I need you, too, and I believe you can care for me. Didn’t you feel it yesterday? Didn’t you say that you could tell me everything? Isn’t that enough to stay and try to let it grow on?’

She had put out her hands. Hester had turned and leant back against the door, solemnly looking at her. They had kissed each other so often, and the kisses had meant nothing. Now an immense shyness lay between them, but she had taken Hester’s hands and Hester did not move away. She did not acquiesce, but she did not move away; she stood, solemnly looking at her.

‘Perhaps you haven’t changed as much. Perhaps you don’t feel it as I do,’ said Monica. ‘But I know that I have found you and that I love you and don’t want to go on without you. Will you stay and be my daughter?’