Let's Misbehave: Chapter 6

Lawrence left with Barrett and the manor resumed its usual dynamics. It was not that I loved him, no, nor that I had loved him once, because I don’t think I ever did but that his presence in my life such as it was (brief holidays of his into my existence, excursions if you will), symbolise something that I rather liked. After he left, my day felt even more decidedly empty than normal.

Or, rather, it was him who seemed decidedly empty, as if he was dead behind the eyes. When I had known him, the glory of his youth had glowed earnestly and vigorously in equal measure in his soul, now he just seemed to be a man standing but crumbling like the ash which falls from the fireplace after a cold winter night. Yes, it was that dust again; it seeped from him like a poison being drawn from a festered wound, but with him, no matter how much poison was drawn the wound never seemed to get any cleaner.

But no, no, please don’t think this is a tale of lost love; it's a tale of a lost world, for pretty soon all the Lawrence Walters - the true romantics - will be dead. How ironic? ‘Lawrence Walters, a true romantic’ and homosexual. I often thought to tell Ainsley of that fact - a thing which Lawrence had told me when we were both quite young - for it could on the surface make him rather happy for he must know that I could never love a homosexual, or at least that if I did it could only ever be in the same way as that I love Mr Stoker. And then every time I reach that point in my reasoning, that eternal internal monologue, I realise that Ainsley could not stand to think that of his brother, so I keep my mouth shut.

Our world - the world of the past - whatever that is, some vague inconsistent concept that every time one comes close to defining it, that same one ever becomes tangled inescapably in their own definition. It's a world that I like to define as La Belle Epoque, which - as I’ve already myself demonstrated - is something that I don’t quite seem to be able to explain. I think it's something like Lawrence Walters; ha! La Belle Epoque is a shell-shocked homosexual. No, no, it's like my vision of Lawrence if he had never been a homosexual and had never gone to war. Yes, it's probably best defined as he himself did all those years ago on that lake of swans; La-Vie-En-Blanc which means, if it means anything, that one ought to live purely and truly and forever in love. Almost like Ainsley, but no, no, to accept that Ainsley is the true La Belle Epoque is to accept that my life is as I dreamed and that, unfortunately, for my sins, is something I cannot accept.

If only I could.

I love Ainsley more than I love myself, but I could not bear to believe that our marriage wasn’t inevitably dark, for perhaps that would spoil it. Ha! So strange, I know.

Lawrence was like that swan from that ballet Ainsley had taken me to see; yes, he was Odette, but this was not the version where the prince swoops in at the eleventh hour to save her, no, it was the tragedy. Ah yes, tragedy is so decidedly English. Like Mr Keats had written, romance is queen of far away, tragedy and the gothic are from our desolate shores. I mean, it rains here.

It would be so infinitely vain of me to suggest that I could save him. Infinite vanity was something that I almost adored on days when I was - or imagined myself to be - Miss Becky Sharpe but that was begotten of nothing but a vain fantasy in itself. So I would not reduce Lawrie once more to be nothing but a reflection of my own fantasies for to do so would dishonour him immeasurably. It would indeed be an incredible disservice.

But into the world of the living my thoughts returned and my mind cast itself back to that diary of Grace’s which acted - to me at least - as a perfect distraction from the intramural tragedy we all faced. It cascaded upon us like truly English rain even if we could not see it; it was a deluge which glutted against the sides of the ever fragile cave that was our paling, evanescent existence, but no, no, we were not paper! Water cannot fragment us and drift us away like a feather caught in an updraft, its dampening witchery will not blot our ink unreadable for we are far, far more than jet black patterns upon a snowy white backdrop of English coldness, we are life itself. We built everything and yet everything, inevitably, built us. We are the blood that runs through Britannia like a river, ever flowing, never halting. And of course, as the protagonist - or antagonist I can never quite decide - of Mr Stoker’s Dracula says Blood is life. He’s right of course.

So strange that even in my attempt to return my thoughts into the world of the living, the past - not the dead - pulled me back with its incalculable, inexhaustible reach.

Helena, now, she was the present, undeniably so. That tangled mess of blonde hair with those green eyes that flashed almost as sharply as Ainsley’s was the now of our world. So was I, however and a far more hopeful representation I was, I might add. Ainsley was now too; so hopelessly now in his everything that it almost made me breathless to keep up with him.

And I hadn’t lied to Ainsley when I had told him that each day he was a soldier in training, I prayed he would come home alive and whole - mentally and physically. We were engaged back then. He had asked me by that lake of swans one day in October 1917. My love for him was and is more than anything I had ever felt for Lawrence, but that was something that I imagined he would never believe. He sat himself in his study of military green leather far removed from the rest of the manor; it was in a little turret which protruded from the edge of the building, rather phallic undeniably, but nevertheless it was his refuge from whatever this was that filled the estate with mist. No, no, I did not resent him for it, on the contrary, I rather admired him for his ability to escape the world of electric lights that illuminated everything like the World’s Fair, leaving all that is or might have been in a deafening glare that was almost luridly brilliant in its nocturnal imaginings with bright green glass that drips like candle wax before forming jagged patterns of lines and angles with their vicious symmetry and motor cars that roar as their mechanisms bump and bang in conjunction with other bumping, banging things that clunk and clank. Yes, it's most possibly a matter of infinite hope, but it is also so indefinitely cold. It was such in its perverse glory that nature itself has been bent into this cast of modernity in which we must all now fit if we desire any chance of survival as our world falls down.

Ah! How beautiful it is to be in love as the world falls down.

The past, to me at least, was a pale jewel that opened upon the nostalgic command of memory with golden mornings filled with never ending sunlight and paths between vague stars that glittered like the silvery trails that glimmer in the light upon gravestones. Oh, it's all so delightfully morbid when I think about it.

In this rather wonderful state of romanticised pensivity, I decided to return once again to Grace’s musings.

The 18th day of October, 1894

Dear Diary,

I do not feel myself falling in love. I feel fear, but perhaps fear is close to love.

That was all she had written in her next entry which had left more than a year’s gap from her previous one where her eternal footprints had ceased their trail if only for a moment; a few sentences and short ones at that. Perhaps she had been busy, or perhaps she simply didn’t know what else to write. It's so perfectly odd to think that these - mere musings that they were - were her unfiltered thoughts, never meant for someone to read, yet in my voyeurism I imagined (perhaps rather vainly) that she had written them in the subconscious hope that they would be read. And yet even in those few words I knew what she meant; for I too realise that love and fear are not entirely inseparable. Perhaps it is by being in love that we also commit in some secret contract to fear as long as that love continues.

How strange it is to be a woman - no, worse, a lady - in this world. I - like Grace - scribe in my waking hours the scenes of my thoughts and dreams; where lies my role? What speak my voice? I live half in shadow in this, my epoque of doubt where I challenge my perceptions and notions and then question the answer rather than answer the question, bidding myself good morn, such as it were. I compose my letters of vain fantasies of La Vie En Blanc.

Grace couldn’t have put it so elegantly as that, no, but Lawrie, if his days when his mind was still whole could have done.

In this state of melancholy weakness, despite the lateness of the hour, I decided that to ease my ever worried mind I would take a walk in the unquiet stillness of the grounds. In the darkness, I found my eyes playing tricks on me; with every turn I made through the mist I found things to be misshapen forms of things I didn’t quite recognise; I saw pillars as women and swirls in leaves as swans. Walking a little faster, my breath so warm in the coldness of the twilight that it condensed before me, I found myself uneasily placed by the main double doors to the manor. She’s back, whispered one of the angels in stone.

“Me?” I laughed, comforted by their familiarity. No, Grace, it continued. “What?” I asked in surprise, remembering the bizarreness of that morning’s conversation with them (I’m not sure what I thought I’d get talking to old gargoyles, but one must try and certainly must not be rude). Nothing, she’s talking nonsense, the other said. No I’m not, she’s by the conservatory, the first said abruptly. “What?” I shouted. Keep it down, do you want the whole estate to hear you? The second said, “No, no, I’m sorry, but what do you mean she’s by the conservatory?” I asked, perplexed. Well she was headed there when she passed as just a moment ago and she always liked it in there so I just assumed, it trailed off. “Who are you on about?” Grace, obviously, it said. “But how? She’s dead.” I think you are confusing dead and gone, they are not the same, one said in a matter of fact tone. Yes, what my colleague suggests isn’t entirely incorrect, you see, the dead, that is to say, those that have lived, may, if they wish, well, return. Not forever because they don’t belong here, but for brief periods they can come back for a while. They usually do it under cover of night so as not

to scare anyone because as I’m sure you can imagine, the sight of a person that is dead would give a lot of people a fright, the other added. “You mean like a ghost?” I asked. I wouldn’t put it quite so cruelly as that, one said, no, no, it's more like a - “like a phantom?” I asked, cutting it off. Perhaps, but not so sinister. “Perhaps it’ll be like Mr Leroux’s novel, how exciting.” I smiled. Oh, trust you to romanticise everything, no, people only return in spectral form if they have some kind of unfinished business, one remarked. “So, if, hypothetically, I believe you that Grace Legare - “ Chevaillier, one stated “Okay - if I believe you that she is somehow roaming the grounds by night - “ Not just the grounds, also the house, the same one continued “Okay, so if I hypothetically agreed with you on that - which I don’t - it would be because she had some unfinished business?” Indeed, one said, if you go now, you might still spot her.

That was all I needed; with a brief word of thanks, I cantered towards the conservatory, hardly able to see in the darkness.

“What on earth are you doing out here?” a familiar voice sounded, I reacted with a shocked scream.

 

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