Patrick White - Voss

‘I thank you again,’ he said, completing some pattern of formality significant only to himself.

And did bow.

To himself, Laura saw.

All this queerness was naturally discussed as the carriage crunched onward, and the German, walking into the sunset, was burnt up. In the carriage three people were talking. Three held innocent opinions. The fourth was silent.

Laura did not speak, because she was ashamed. It was as if she had become personally involved. So the sensitive witness of some unfortunate incident will take the guilt upon himself, and feel the need to expiate it. So the young woman was stirring miserably in her stuffy corner, and would have choked, she felt, if they had not arrived, driving in sudden relief under the hollow-sounding portico. It was necessary, she knew, to humiliate herself in some way for the German’s arrogance. She could feel her nails biting her own pride.

Then Rose Portion, who had been waiting for them in the dusk, came out and opened the carriage door, and let down the little step for the masters’ feet.

FEW people of attainments take easily to a plan of self-improvement. Some discover very early their perfection cannot endure the insult. Others find their intellectual pleasure lies in the theory, not the practice. Only a few stubborn ones will blunder on, painfully, out of the luxuriant world of their pretensions into the desert of mortification and reward.

To this third category belonged Laura Trevelyan. She had been kept very carefully, put away like some object of which the precious nature is taken for granted. She had a clear skin, distinction, if unreliable beauty. Her clothes were soothing, rather moody, exactly suited to her person. No one in that household could write a more appropriate note on occasions of mourning, or others calling for tact, in that version of the Italian hand which courts the elegant while eschewing the showy. She was the literate member of the family, even frighteningly so, it seemed to the others, and more by instinct than from concentrated study. Not that the merchant had denied his girls the number of governesses requisite to their social position, and the French Mademoiselle, and the music master, it need not be added. The niece’s knowledge of the French tongue, modest, though sufficient, was terribly impressive to some, and on evenings when her aunt entertained, she would be persuaded to perform, with admirably light touch, one of the piano pieces of Mendelssohn or Field.

If she was a prig, she was not so far gone that she did not sometimes recognize it, and smart behind the eyes accordingly. But to know is not to cure. She was beset by all kinds of dark helplessnesses that might become obsessions. If I am lost, then who can be saved; she was egotist enough to ask. She wanted very badly to make amends for the sins of others. So that in the face of desperate needs, and having rejected prayer as a rationally indefensible solution, she could not surrender her self-opinion, at least, not altogether. Searching the mirror, biting her fine lips, she said: I have strength, certainly, of a kind, if it is not arrogance. Or, she added, is it not perhaps — will?

One morning, while the curtains were still keeping the sun at bay, Laura Trevelyan set her mouth, and resolved to exercise that will in accepting the first stages of self-humiliation. As she had been giving the matter thought since quite an early hour, all the young woman’s pulses were beating and her wrists were weak by the time Rose arrived to admit the light.

The girl watched the thick arms reach up and jerk in that abrupt manner at the curtains. Then, when the room had received back its shape, and the can of water was standing in the basin, and one or two things that had fallen had been picked up and set to rights, the woman said:

‘You have not slept, miss.’

‘I would not say that I had not slept,’ Laura replied. ‘How can you tell, Rose?’

‘Oh, I know. There are things you can tell by knowing.’

‘You are determined to mystify me,’ laughed the girl, and immediately frowned to think how she must run the gauntlet of her servant’s intuition.

‘I am a simple woman,’ Rose said.

Laura held her face away. The yellow light was blinding her.

‘I do not know what you are, Rose. You have never shown me.’

‘Ah, now, miss, you are playing on my ignorance.’

‘In what way?’

‘How am I to show you what I am? I am not an educated person. I am just a woman.’

Laura Trevelyan got up quickly. She would have liked to open a cupboard, and to look inside. Her feelings would not have been disturbed by such a reasonable act and sight of inanimate objects. However, nothing important is easy. So she looked instead at Rose, and saw her struggling lip. In moments of distress, or even simple bewilderment, this would open like a live wound.

They were both exposed now in the centre of the thick carpet. They could have been trembling for a common nakedness. In the girl’s case, of course, her nightgown was rather fine.

‘There, miss,’ said Rose, covering her mistress with usual skill. ‘The mornings are still fresh.’

The two women were touching each other, briefly.

‘They are not really,’ shivered Laura Trevelyan, for whom all intimacies, whether of mind or body, were still a plunge.

Then she walked across the room, combing out her hair that the night had thickened.

‘Rose,’ she said, ‘you must see that you take care now. That you do nothing unnecessarily strenuous. That you do not lift weights, for instance, nor run downstairs.’

She was ashamed of the clumsiness, the ugliness of her own words, then, of their coldness, but she had not learnt to use them otherwise. She was, in final appraisal, without accomplishment.

‘You must not hurt yourself,’ she said ridiculously.

Rose was breathing. She was arranging things.

‘I’ll not harm,’ she said at last. ‘I have come through worse. I have been laid right open in my time.’

She did not expect exemption.

‘I shall resist all attempts to make me suffer, or to bring suffering to others,’ said the younger woman, to whom it was still a matter of will and theory.

The rather strange situation made her speak almost to herself, or to an impersonal companion. Since she had begun to prise the other’s close soul, she herself was opening stiffly.

‘I did not expect to suffer,’ Rose Portion was telling. ‘I was a young girl, in service in a big house. I was in the stillroom, I remember, under as decent a woman as ever you would be likely to find. It was a happy place, and in spring, when the blossom was out, you should have seen it, miss. It was the picture of perfection. That was it, perhaps. I did trust, and expect over much. Well, it is all past. I loved my little boy that was given me, but I would not have had him suffer. That was what they did not understand. They said it was a thing only a monster could have done, and all considered, I was getting off light with a sentence of transportation for life. But they had not carried my little boy, nor lain with all those thoughts, all those nights. Well, there it is. I was not meant to suffer, not then, or now — you would have said. But sufferin’ creeps up. And in different disguises. You do not recognize it, miss. You will see.’

Soon after this, as she had done what she had to do, the squat woman went out of Laura Trevelyan’s room. The girl remained agitated, moved certainly by Rose’s story, but disturbed rather by dangers she had now committed herself to share.

So that when Aunt Emmy, in the days that followed, was going about the house, wondering what should be done about Rose, her niece did not know.

‘You are no help at all, Laura,’ Mrs Bonner complained, ‘when you are usually so bright, and full of clever ideas. Nor can I expect help from Mr Bonner, who is too upset by that German. If it is not one thing, it is another. I must admit I am quite distracted.’