The Rose and the Yew Tree

‘But of course I shall.’ Her voice was hollow, insincere.

I said savagely, ‘For God’s sake don’t pretend, Jennifer. It’s finished—it’s all finished.’

She said it wasn’t finished, that she didn’t know what I meant. She was going to spend her life looking after me, she said, and we would be very happy. She was determined on self-immolation, and it made me see red. I felt apprehensive, too, that she would do as she said. Perhaps she would always be there, chattering, trying to be kind, uttering foolish bright remarks … I got in a panic—a panic born of weakness and illness.

I yelled at her to go away—go away. She went, looking frightened. But I saw relief in her eyes.

When my sister-in-law came in later to draw the curtains, I spoke. I said, ‘It’s over, Teresa. She’s gone … she’s gone … She won’t come back, will she?’

Teresa said in her quiet voice, No, she wouldn’t come back.

‘Do you think, Teresa,’ I asked, ‘that it’s my illness that makes me see things—wrong?’

Teresa knew what I meant. She said that, in her opinion, an illness like mine tended to make you see things as they really were.

‘You mean that I’m seeing Jennifer now as she really is?’

Teresa said she didn’t mean quite that. I wasn’t probably any better able to know what Jennifer was really like now than before. But I knew now exactly what effect Jennifer produced on me, apart from my being in love with her.

I asked her what she herself thought of Jennifer.

She said that she had always thought Jennifer was attractive, nice, and not at all interesting.

‘Do you think she’s very unhappy, Teresa?’ I asked morbidly.

‘Yes, Hugh, I do.’

‘Because of me?’

‘No, because of herself.’

I said, ‘She goes on blaming herself for my accident. She keeps saying that if I hadn’t been coming to meet her, it would never have happened—it’s all so stupid!’

‘It is, rather.’

‘I don’t want her to work herself up about it. I don’t want her to be unhappy, Teresa.’

‘Really, Hugh,’ said Teresa. ‘Do leave the girl something!’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She likes being unhappy. Haven’t you realized that?’

There is a cold clarity about my sister-in-law’s thought processes that I find very disconcerting.

I told her that that was a beastly thing to say.

Teresa said thoughtfully that perhaps it was, but that she hadn’t really thought it mattered saying so now.

‘You haven’t got to tell yourself fairy stories any longer. Jennifer has always loved sitting down and thinking how everything has gone wrong. She broods over it and works herself up—but if she likes living that way, why shouldn’t she?’ Teresa added, ‘You know, Hugh, you can’t feel pity for a person unless there’s self-pity there. A person has to be sorry for themselves before you can be sorry for them. Pity has always been your weakness. Because of it you don’t see things clearly.’

I found momentary satisfaction in telling Teresa that she was an odious woman. She said she thought she probably was.

‘You are never sorry for anyone.’

‘Yes, I am. I’m sorry for Jennifer in a way.’

‘And me?’

‘I don’t know, Hugh.’

I said sarcastically:

‘The fact that I’m a maimed broken wreck with nothing to live for doesn’t affect you at all?’

‘I don’t know if I’m sorry for you or not. This means that you’re going to start your life all over again, living it from an entirely different angle. That might be very interesting.’

I told Teresa that she was inhuman, and she went away smiling.

She had done me a lot of good.

CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_972a89fa-d314-5003-8c31-9db0ee4d0da7)

It was soon afterwards that we moved to St Loo in Cornwall. Teresa had just inherited a house there from a great-aunt. The doctor wanted me to be out of London. My brother Robert is a painter with what most people think is a perverted vision of landscapes. His war service, like most artists’, had been agricultural. So it all fitted in very well.

Teresa went down and got the house ready and, having filled up a lot of forms successfully, I was borne down by special ambulance.

‘What goes on here?’ I asked Teresa on the morning after my arrival.

Teresa was well-informed. There were, she said, three separate worlds. There was the old fishing village, grouped round its harbour, with the tall slate-roofed houses rising up all round it, and the notices written in Flemish and French as well as English. Beyond that, sprawling out along the coast, was the modern tourist and residential excrescence. The large luxury hotels, thousands of small bungalows, masses of little boarding houses—all very busy and active in summer, quiet in winter. Thirdly, there was St Loo Castle, ruled over by the old dowager, Lady St Loo, a nucleus of yet another way of life with ramifications stretching up through winding lanes to houses tucked inconspicuously away in valleys beside old world churches. County, in fact, said Teresa.

‘And what are we?’ I asked.

Teresa said we were ‘county’ too, because Polnorth House had belonged to her great-aunt Miss Amy Tregellis, and it was hers, Teresa’s, by inheritance and not by purchase, so that we belonged.

‘Even Robert?’ I asked. ‘In spite of his being a painter?’

That, Teresa admitted, would take a little swallowing. There were too many painters at St Loo in the summer months.

‘But he’s my husband,’ said Teresa superbly, ‘and besides, his mother was a Bolduro from Bodmin way.’

It was then that I invited Teresa to tell us what we were going to do in the new home—or rather what she was going to do. My role was clear. I was the looker-on.

Teresa said she was going to participate in all the local goings-on.

‘Which are?’

Teresa said she thought mainly politics and gardening, with a dash of Women’s Institutes and good causes such as Welcoming the Soldiers Home.