“Miss Woodruff!”

“I beg you. I am not yet mad. But unless I am helped I shall be.”

“Control yourself. If we were seen…”

“You are my last resource. You are not cruel, I know you are not cruel.”

He stared at her, glanced desperately round, then moved forward and made her stand, and led her, a stiff hand under her elbow, under the foliage of the ivy. She stood before him with her face in her hands; and Charles had, with the atrocious swiftness of the human heart when it attacks the human brain, to struggle not to touch her.

“I don’t wish to seem indifferent to your troubles. But you must see I have… I have no choice.”

She spoke in a rapid, low voice. “All I ask is that you meet me once more. I will come here each afternoon. No one will see us.” He tried to expostulate, but she was not to be stopped. “You are kind, you understand what is beyond the understanding of any in Lyme. Let me finish. Two days ago I was nearly overcome by madness. I felt I had to see you, to speak to you. I know where you stay. I would have come there to ask for you, had not… had not some last remnant of sanity mercifully stopped me at the door.”

“But this is unforgivable. Unless I mistake, you now threaten me with a scandal.”

She shook her head vehemently. “I would rather die than you should think that of me. It is that… I do not know how to say it, I seem driven by despair to contemplate these dreadful things. They fill me with horror at myself. I do not know where to turn, what to do, I have no one who can… please… can you not understand?”

Charles’s one thought now was to escape from the appalling predicament he had been landed in; from those remorselessly sincere, those naked eyes.

“I must go. I am expected in Broad Street.”

“But you will come again?”

“I cannot—”

“I walk here each Monday, Wednesday, Friday. When I have no other duties.”

“What you are suggesting is—I must insist that Mrs. Tranter…”

“I could not tell the truth before Mrs. Tranter.”

“Then it can hardly be fit for a total stranger—and not of your sex—to hear.”

“A total stranger… and one not of one’s sex… is often the least prejudiced judge.”

“Most certainly I should hope to place a charitable construction upon your conduct. But I must repeat that I find myself amazed that you should…”

But she was still looking up at him then; and his words tailed off into silence. Charles, as you will have noticed, had more than one vocabulary. With Sam in the morning, with Ernestina across a gay lunch, and here in the role of Alarmed Propriety… he was almost three different men; and there will be others of him before we are finished. We may explain it biologically by Darwin’s phrase: cryptic coloration, survival by learning to blend with one’s surroundings—with the unquestioned assumptions of one’s age or social caste. Or we can explain this flight to formality sociologically. When one was skating over so much thin ice—ubiquitous economic oppression, terror of sexuality, the flood of mechanistic science—the ability to close one’s eyes to one’s own absurd stiffness was essential. Very few Victorians chose to question the virtues of such cryptic coloration; but there was that in Sarah’s look which did. Though direct, it was a timid look. Yet behind it lay a very modern phrase: Come clean, Charles, come clean. It took the recipient off balance. Ernestina and her like behaved always as if habited in glass: infinitely fragile, even when they threw books of poetry. They encouraged the mask, the safe distance; and this girl, behind her facade of humility forbade it. He looked down in his turn.

“I ask but one hour of your time.”

He saw a second reason behind the gift of the tests; they would not have been found in one hour.

“If I should, albeit with the greatest reluctance—”

She divined, and interrupted in a low voice. “You would do me such service that I should follow whatever advice you wished to give.”

“It must certainly be that we do not continue to risk—”

Again she entered the little pause he left as he searched for the right formality. “That—I understand. And that you have far more pressing ties.”

The sun’s rays had disappeared after their one brief illumination. The day drew to a chilly close. It was as if the road he walked, seemingly across a plain, became suddenly a brink over an abyss. He knew it as he stared at her bowed head. He could not say what had lured him on, what had gone wrong in his reading of the map, but both lost and lured he felt. Yet now committed to one more folly.

She said, “I cannot find the words to thank you. I shall be here on the days I said.” Then, as if the clearing was her drawing room, “I must not detain you longer.”

Charles bowed, hesitated, one last poised look, then turned. A few seconds later he was breaking through the further curtain of ivy and stumbling on his downhill way, a good deal more like a startled roebuck than a worldly English gentleman.

He came to the main path through the Undercliff and strode out back towards Lyme. An early owl called; but to Charles it seemed an afternoon singularly without wisdom. He should have taken a firmer line, should have left earlier, should have handed back the tests, should have suggested—no, commanded—other solutions to her despair. He felt outwitted, inclined almost to stop and wait for her. But his feet strode on all the faster.

He knew he was about to engage in the forbidden, or rather the forbidden was about to engage in him. The farther he moved from her, in time and distance, the more clearly he saw the folly of his behavior. It was as if, when she was before him, he had become blind: had not seen her for what she was, a woman most patently dangerous—not consciously so, but prey to intense emotional frustration and no doubt social resentment.

Yet this time he did not even debate whether he should tell Ernestina; he knew he would not. He felt as ashamed as if he had, without warning her, stepped off the Cobb and set sail for China.

19

The China-bound victim had in reality that evening to play host at a surprise planned by Ernestina and himself for Aunt Tranter. The two ladies were to come and dine in his sitting room at the White Lion. A dish of succulent first lobsters was prepared, a fresh-run salmon boiled, the cellars of the inn ransacked; and that doctor we met briefly one day at Mrs. Poulteney’s was pressed into establishing the correct balance of the sexes.

One of the great characters of Lyme, he was generally supposed to be as excellent a catch in the river Marriage as the salmon he sat down to that night had been in the river Axe. Ernestina teased her aunt unmercifully about him, accusing that quintessentially mild woman of heartless cruelty to a poor lonely man pining for her hand. But since this tragic figure had successfully put up with his poor loneliness for sixty years or more, one may doubt the pining as much as the heartless cruelty.

Dr. Grogan was, in fact, as confirmed an old bachelor as Aunt Tranter a spinster. Being Irish, he had to the full that strangely eunuchistic Hibernian ability to flit and flirt and flatter womankind without ever allowing his heart to become entangled. A dry little kestrel of a man, sharp, almost fierce on occasion, yet easy to unbend when the company was to his taste, he added a pleasant astringency to Lyme society; for when he was with you you felt he was always hovering a little, waiting to pounce on any foolishness—and yet, if he liked you, it was always with a tonic wit and the humanity of a man who had lived and learned, after his fashion, to let live. There was, too, something faintly dark about him, for he had been born a Catholic; he was, in terms of our own time, not unlike someone who had been a Communist in the 1930s—accepted now, but still with the devil’s singe on him. It was certain—would Mrs. Poulteney have ever allowed him into her presence otherwise?—that he was now (like Disraeli) a respectable member of the Church of England. It must be so, for (unlike Disraeli) he went scrupulously to matins every Sunday. That a man might be so indifferent to religion that he would have gone to a mosque or a synagogue, had that been the chief place of worship, was a deceit beyond the Lymers’ imagination. Besides he was a very good doctor, with a sound knowledge of that most important branch of medicine, his patients’ temperament. With those that secretly wanted to be bullied, he bullied; and as skillfully chivvied, cosseted, closed a blind eye, as the case required.