The Crimson Portrait Read online

  She had squandered the time she had been granted to study him. Now she would exchange the hours she’d spent before a mirror, her own chronicle of vanity, for a single glance at him. Her thoughts fused into a circle of regret. If only I had . . . I wish I had . . . If you were yet . . . Even though you are . . . If only she had been more observant.

  Two months after Charles’s death was reported, she had received a photograph of him standing with several other soldiers before a wall of sandbags. The image had been badly developed, or the light on the battlefield had harshly affected the men, because their eyes had faded into halos and their faces were drained and ghostly, too weak to hold the film’s sensitivity. Or perhaps the photographer had captured them as they were in the process of dissolving, dying. Metamorphosis. It was magical that Charles hadn’t returned from war. Death was an envelope, a letter, words. Not a body.

  Catherine lost the grace of sleep. A widow’s burden, to be awake. In darkness, she had no edges, she contained a stain, a vapor that would dissolve her from inside. Charles had been the weight that kept her from floating away.

  CATHERINE’S FATHER HAD forbidden his daughter the use of his library, although its books were never read and haphazardly organized, having been inherited from his own father. When she was barely sixteen and had outgrown lessons with her governess, her father had insisted the elderly woman remain in residence at their home, his strategy to discourage Catherine from attending college, Newnham or Somerville, as some families in society had permitted their daughters. The governess stayed on, a hostile, fretting reminder of her pupil’s abbreviated education. Catherine was launched into society, too young to be regretful.

  During the season she was presented at court, Catherine had worn dresses by Lucille and Redfern, a tiara and shoe buckles set with diamonds. She enjoyed the sleight of courtship with several suitors, the speculation, the whispered confidences, the careful cursive of her misspelled entries scrawled in a journal bound in mauve silk, later burned.

  As a farewell to summer, the Chetwodes had held a ball at Market Drayton on the last day of August. Mrs. Chetwode—Maudie—was Catherine’s dearest friend. The dancing ended at sunrise, when Catherine and Maudie mischievously tossed garlands of wilted flowers at guests from a balcony and fled the house, laughing. Outside, they discovered the deserted tennis court. Without exchanging a word, they picked up two rackets and daringly played a fast game, the diaphanous flounces of their ball gowns rippling around their ankles.

  Years later, Charles confessed he’d secretly watched the young women play and immediately determined to marry Catherine. He had suddenly appeared on the tennis court, a mysterious man in an evening coat, holding an errant chalk white ball as if tempting her with a forbidden fruit.

  Charles had wooed Catherine, sending half a dozen telegrams every day and armloads of Madonna lilies. They were a popular married couple, seldom separated, invited everywhere. There were hunt balls, teas, card games, dinners followed by charades, weekend parties at Lansdowne, Bridgewater, and Londonderry House. Catherine relied entirely on Charles to interpret their social life. By the second year of their marriage, neither of them had close living relations.

  What had Charles said on the tennis court, the first day of September years ago? What was the first sentence he had written to her? How many telegrams had he sent?

  In the first month of the war, Maudie’s husband had been fatally injured, and Catherine was unable to comfort her. She’d grown distant from her friend, and Charles securely ruled the place Maudie had occupied. Now she bitterly regretted Maudie’s absence.

  Catherine’s grandfather had died when she was a child, and though she had attended the funeral, she had no memory of the service. She did remember watching her widowed grandmother while she cut roses in the garden of her house a few months later. “The sound of your grandfather’s voice has faded for me,” the elderly woman had said. “I command his voice to return, but my ear has no memory. No one will ever speak my name as he did.”

  When she had seen the dismay on Catherine’s childish face, she quickly added that it wasn’t important. Not at all. Then Catherine’s frail grandmother had looked away, the pruning shears forgotten in her hand, as the silver arrows of her tears plunged into the grass at her feet.

  TWO STABLE BOYS carried the chairs, tables, and the writing desk from the library, freeing the carpet from the pointed legs that had pinned it to the floor. The boys stripped the shelves, loosely wrapping the books in sheets, newspapers, lengths of burlap and linen found in one of the storage rooms. Although they worked very slowly, Catherine didn’t criticize but studied them from the doorway. She was in no hurry to follow the major’s orders.

  She was at the window as the boys stacked the books in wheelbarrows and pushed them to the stable, each jolt sliding the books out of line. In the afternoon, the boys grew careless, and books fell from the wheelbarrow, splitting their bindings, losing their pages. The younger boy looked up to see whether she’d noticed the papers blowing over the lawn. Catherine dropped the curtain back over the window, couldn’t be bothered to reprimand them.

  Later, Catherine stood in the library and closed her eyes, imagining that nothing had changed, since the scent of the books—ancient paper and leather—still lingered, as the odor of honey is inseparable from its comb. She blinked. Light from the tall windows slanted across the rows of empty shelves, transforming the room into an immense hive. She had a brief sense of peace, a humming contentment.

  IN THE WEEKS since Catherine had announced the arrival of the doctors and hospital support staff was imminent, the servants had quietly rebelled. Catherine noticed that they were neglecting their work. No one wound the clocks. Silver was unpolished, the lamps unlit. The map of conduct that overlaid the house was torn. One morning, Catherine and the youngest housemaid approached each other in the corridor, and she saw that the girl’s cap was crooked. The housemaid had boldly met her stare, and they passed each other without speaking. Catherine had walked five paces before she allowed herself to recognize the girl’s insolence.

  The household staff dwindled as the coachman, butler, footmen, and grooms, the odd men, hall boys, steward’s-room and servants’-hall boys enlisted in a local battalion. All the able-bodied men. Although Catherine barely knew their names, she ceremoniously gave each man a watch in the music room and shook his hand. Godspeed.

  Most of the maids went to work in a munitions factory, where wages were higher and their reddened hands would gradually acquire a yellow tint from the poisonous TNT.

  The four remaining housemaids nestled the china with straw in wooden barrels and packed smaller items from desks, cupboards, and armoires into boxes and trunks. As a farewell gift, the women received new lisle stockings and one of Catherine’s Callot Soeurs hats from last season.

  Only the youngest servant boy and the elderly gardener stayed to attend Catherine and the estate.

  ON THE AFTERNOON of a beautiful day, strangers in uniform entered the house, walked the corridors, gazed at the paintings, commanded the views from the windows. When Catherine encountered these strangers, she acknowledged them with a curt nod, her eyes registering surprise, as if she were unaware that the house was occupied. She fled to her suite of rooms on the third floor.

  With the butler and the first footman gone to war, the gardener had taken it upon himself to act as majordomo, and Catherine asked him to identify the newcomers. He testily replied that they hadn’t properly introduced themselves. In his worn jacket, his gnarled hand guarding the doorknob, the gardener was helpless against these efficient invaders. The men in uniform mockingly called him “the shepherd” and brushed him aside.

  Outside, there was an atmosphere of feverish preparation as carriages, wagonettes, broughams, motorcars, and half a dozen other unfamiliar vehicles lined the back entrance road, their errant wheels immediately tearing up the lawn. Without anyone requesting permission, huge packing crates and boxes were stacked into a shoulder-high wedge along the k
itchen corridor. The cellar was completely filled with supplies. Signs were affixed to interior walls and posts outside, providing directions to unfamiliar destinations: emergency, dry store, orderly station, stockroom, wards, receiving hall. A larger sign, Military Hospital, was secured over the scrolling black iron gate at the entrance to the estate.

  Catherine’s attention was caught by a distinguished older man who gently, tirelessly conducted this campaign. His name—Dr. McCleary—was called from early in the morning until lights-out, but the doctor seldom raised his voice. He apparently had little regard for military protocol, since he casually layered a tweed jacket over his medical garb.

  THE JAGGED HOURS passed, broken, snared by lines on the face of the clock. Catherine sullenly watched the workmen as they moved boxes, trod the gravel drive, smoked, talked—utterly commonplace activities that occupied a familiar realm and now excluded her. Everything was stubbornly set against her wishes.

  Each morning required greater effort for her to rise from bed, sit in a chair. Each mouthful of food was as tasteless as paper. This gave her a bitter satisfaction as the true nature of another pleasure was revealed. The burden of photographs on the dresser, the ormolu clock and porcelain figures on the mantelpiece, a feathered hat on its stand, were flimsy reminders of her place in the world.

  She numbly picked up her clothes in the order they had been dropped the previous evening. She struggled to dress herself, the tiny pearl buttons on the blouse awkward as pebbles, the jacket and riding trousers cumbersome, unyielding. A maid’s clever fingers had always fastened hooks and eyes, tightened the laces of her clothing, retrieved the dresses abandoned on the floor, collapsed circles of silk.

  Catherine emptied her jewel casket, winding lavalieres and pearl necklaces around her throat, hiding them under a high collar. Platinum and gold stickpins were secured inside her lapel, and brooches from Cartier and a hair ornament in the shape of a butterfly weighed the pockets. Rings on every finger. If she must flee, these valuables were safe on her body. She wore a dead man’s jacket for luck. It had belonged to her husband.

  She became a secret nomad in the house. At night, she slipped down one of the three servants’ staircases, confident she would encounter no one, as they were too curved and narrow for the hospital staff. She memorized the treacherous labyrinth of sound, the scrape of board against board on the steps and uneven floors, avoiding spaces with the presence of murmuring voices and cigarette smoke.

  Anchored only by memory, Catherine drifted quickly through the rooms, finding that objects and furniture had been relocated without regard for their value or usefulness. A fine satinwood sideboard had been moved to the medical-supply room and covered with rolled towels. A secretaire from the library had lost its top and now held transparent jars of sterile cotton wool. In the east wing, a heavy crystal bowl on a mantelpiece contained flowers a nurse had surreptitiously picked in the greenhouse. In the top-floor nursery, a valuable portrait had been shoved behind a daybed.

  Metal supply cabinets with glass doors lined the corridors, and nurse stations were set up outside the dining room and ballroom. Glazed white linen screens hid the fine handiwork on the walls, the grissailles, carved detailing, and plasterwork. The grand piano remained in the Blue Drawing Room, its silhouette enlarged by a clumsy canvas cover. The gramophone had been carried to Catherine’s room.

  Linoleum or coarse runners covered the floors, leaving only shining strips of polished wood along the sides. An Aubusson carpet padded the space under the night wardmaster’s desk in the vestibule, the threads of its pattern already distorted by his boots. A mantelpiece carved by Gibbons had been painted over in an attempt to sanitize the room with whitewash.

  In the morning room, orderlies had propped ladders next to the windows, released the draperies from their rods, and the stiff fabric slowly crumpled into sharp-angled, mountainous folds surrounded by storms of dust. Without draperies, the bare rooms became boxes—painted, gilded, or polished—stacked one on top of another, with stairs mounted between them.

  Iron beds were moved into the largest rooms on the ground floor, and there—bored and immobilized—the patients would study the ovolo molding and wreaths on the ceiling, marred by a blurry bloom of rust, as hidden nails slowly oxidized beneath the stucco.

  At night, when the warm air propelled the noise, the determined pulse of hammering sounded from deep in the house. There were odors of sawed wood, of acrid paint. Thin black wires harnessed the house to telephone poles, installed by men who squinted into telescopic devices and then pushed a huge roll of wire like an outsized toy over the fields.

  Catherine left no trace of her passage through the rooms, touching none of the few familiar objects. Only her eye was entitled to possession. She imagined that the furniture and objects had been turned out of the house into water, a stream. Immersed, everything was of equal value. All that mattered was whether these things would break, sink, or float in the water. Or save a life.

  THERE WAS A RUMBLE in the distance. Catherine angled her chair near the window as the headlights of the first vehicle jerked down the drive, revealing its bumpy relief and the narrow ribbons of grass along its sides. Several ambulances stopped under the stark light of flares, and a strange ceremony commenced as men quickly surrounded them, swung open the back doors, and clambered inside. The stretchers—each burdened with a single body—were handled so swiftly they seemed to levitate horizontally from the ambulances and vanish into the house, exactly like a magician’s act. Less severely injured men moved at a measured pace up the steps, heedless as kings to the frantic activity around them.

  A harsh ringing startled Catherine, and the thread of noise pulled her to the telephone. The official’s words were rapid, soothing. “I saw the light in your room,” he said. “The first wounded soldiers have arrived from the battlefield. I hope you weren’t disturbed.”

  “There is no need to notify me. The house is yours.” The receiver loudly struck the telephone as she slammed it into place.

  She woke in a chair turned away from the window with no memory of the previous evening. Outside, the lawn was scattered with objects—crumpled jackets and shirts, a single boot, towels, papers, rags, and a knapsack—discarded as if unnecessary for the next stage of a journey. Who had left these worthless things?

  Catherine listed the occupiers of her house:

  Nurses. White peaked caps with string ties. Dark capes. Nurses have two stripes on their blouse cuffs.

  V.A.D. Volunteer Aid Detachment women. Mauve-and-white pinstripe dresses. Starched collars, and cuffs. Flat black shoes and black stockings. White bib aprons. Caps pinned to heads.

  Doctors. Operating jackets. Rubber gloves.

  Patients. Loose blue suits. Red neckties. Bathrobes worn outdoors.

  Officers. Long jackets. Trouser legs tucked into boots. Suits color of sand. Gold buttons.

  Orderlies. Tunics with four pockets, five buttons. Caps with badges.

  AFTER THE ARRIVAL of the wounded soldiers, night separated itself from day by sounds that ran through the rooms like water, passing doors, windows, walls, a thick tide that carried footsteps, rattling trolleys, the dry click of instruments discarded in metal pans, drawers closing, the whispers of the nurses.

  The clock in the second-floor corridor had been allowed to remain in place. Catherine could hear its sonorous chimes over the constant vibration throughout the house, orchestrating a memory of this place when she had been happy, a married woman. She switched on the light and picked up a book. It was a clumsy object in her hand, papers sewn together, sentences organized into gray shapes on the page, indecipherable, as if fused.

  As Catherine watched from her window, the landscape told the hour. At first horizontal, the rising sun struck the greenhouse, appearing to transform it into a solid shape, silver replacing its glass. She was certain of what followed as the light gracefully rose, extending its familiar pattern across the distant fields, transforming a stream into a white line connected to the
circle of a pool.

  The day was mild, and a number of patients, some in wheelchairs or beds, were steered through the double doors, an armada launched upon the lawn. Other patients made halting progress on crutches to chairs arranged on the grass, where the nurses, distinct in enormous starched caps, stiff white wings around their heads, swooped over them. One woman must have recently returned from the front, since a large Red Cross insignia was sewn on her apron.

  There was a space of silence between Catherine in her room and the patients below, mute men in identical robes or hospital suits of blue, their bandages a tie that bound them together. She watched them for hours, the scene so strangely unreal that only the pressure of her hands gripping the windowsill convinced her that this vision wasn’t unwinding before her in a dream.

  A young nurse in a dark cape leaned close to listen to a man in a wheelchair, her hand on his shoulder. She threw back her head, laughing at his comment, and he turned to her, his body radiating joy from her reaction. Catherine looked away, stricken by their intimacy. No one in the house knew Catherine well enough to please her. Or cared to please her. But wasn’t it better to be alone than to be joined by illness to a stranger, the most unequal relationship? The wounded men who occupied her home were proof of the way luck was distributed. Their misfortune would spread to everyone around them, the rooms they lived in, the objects they touched. The estate was quarantined, unholy, accursed, its purpose to shield the rest of the world from their ruined bodies.

  This must be interrupted.

  She started up the gramophone, leaning on the windowsill as music from The Mikado arranged its gaiety around her, conducting her grief into waves.

  The wind came up, and as if on cue, the nurses clutched their unwieldy caps and moved in the same direction, their long skirts tangling wildly around their legs. It suddenly began to rain, and they moved slowly toward the house, the men stoically lowering their heads or holding a hand over their faces to protect their white bandages, fragile as sugar. The men who were immobilized waited patiently, rain streaming over their bodies, until nurses ran back with armloads of blankets to cover their heads and guide them to their rooms. It rained the rest of the day, then darkness hardened the vast lawn into black stone carved by the hieroglyphic of the drive, a pale and curved line.