“Past tense?” It had not occurred to him that perhaps she would tire of him before he tired of her. Arrogant of him, that. And alarming if it was true.
“No,” she said, “not past tense. When I asked about the purpose of life, I was not really expecting an answer. I asked because sometimes one can be happy, so vividly happy that there seems a point to everything. So happy that one is fiercely glad one was born. Happiness that intense never lasts, of course, and even what there is of it often comes at the expense of conscience and responsibility. I have been very happy with you.”
He felt that unease again and released his hold on her wrists. She was still using the past tense.
“Oh, you must not fear,” she said with a fleeting smile. “I have just admitted that I know it cannot last. But are fleeting moments enough anyway, Marcel? Are times like these sufficient to make the whole of life worth living?”
He sighed and set his hands on her shoulders briefly before gathering her loosely into his arms. “Up and down, down and up, light and shade, happiness and unhappiness,” he said. “They are life, Viola. Why we are so seemingly helpless in the face of these opposites, I do not know. I am no philosopher. But seeking happiness—or pleasure—while avoiding pain is human nature. There is nothing selfish about it.”
“Happiness and pleasure are the same thing to you,” she said. “Is seeking them never selfish? What about duty?”
“I suppose,” he said, “indeed I know that you spent more than twenty years of your life ignoring the fact that Riverdale was a scoundrel of the first order and keeping up appearances before your family and the ton. Doing your duty. Being unselfish. And unhappy.”
“Foolish, was it not?” she said. “I ought to have had an affair with you. I wanted to, you know.” She rested the side of her head against his shoulder.
He was arrested for the moment by her admission.
“No, you would not have,” he said. “That was not who you were, Viola. And it was not who I was. You would not have had an affair with me because you were married—apparently married—and had young children. I would not have had an affair with you because you were married. I would have done no more than flirt.”
“You would not?” She drew back her head to look into his face. She sounded surprised. “You did have some principles, then?”
Something in him turned cold. “Precious few,” he said. “Principles are tedious, Viola. They interfere with personal gratification.”
“But sometimes they are part of who a person is,” she said. “You have never seduced a married woman?”
He raised both eyebrows. “I have never seduced any woman,” he said. “It just happens for some reason I have not quite fathomed that a flatteringly large number of them wish to share my bed without having to be seduced there. No, I have never bedded a married woman, except my wife.”
She smiled fleetingly again but did not take the opening he had unwittingly offered her. She did not ask about Adeline.
“It may seem strange,” she told him, “but I do not believe I was actively unhappy during all those years of my marriage. Not all the time, anyway, or even most of the time. It was only afterward, when I knew what an empty shell the whole fabric of my life had been, and when my children had been irreparably hurt, that I saw the emptiness of those years. I was forty years old, more than half my life gone in all probability. But if I could go back and relive it, I cannot think that I would live differently. What havoc I would have caused to so many lives, my own included, if I had behaved just as I wanted. And I would never have been happy. Now is a little different.”
“Only a little?” he asked.
“There are still people to be hurt,” she said.
“This is but a brief idyll, Viola,” he reminded her.
“Yes,” she said. He held her close and kissed her deeply, sensing that somehow this was the beginning of the end. Not the end yet. They had still not finished with each other. But some corner had been turned, and they had begun the journey back to where they had started.
“I do not believe I am willing to wait for tonight,” he said against her lips. It was approaching the middle of the afternoon. They had come down here after luncheon.
“I am not either,” she told him.
And so the affair resumed as it had been proceeding for the past week and more—except that they did not often make love in the daytime. They climbed the hillside together to the cottage and went to bed and made slow, skilled, wonderfully satisfying love.
With perhaps just an edge of desperation.
* * *
• • •
The weather turned overnight. It grew chillier and more blustery. Clouds hung low over the valley, and there were frequent sharp showers. More trees were turning color.
“Autumn always makes me feel a bit sad,” Viola said at breakfast one morning during a brief sunny break. “It is so beautiful but so very fleeting. One knows that winter is not far off.”
“And spring not so far beyond that,” he said with a shrug.
“True,” she said. “But sometimes it seems very far off.”
“Viola,” he said, reaching across the table to take her hand in his. “There is much to be said for winter. Rainy days, snowy days, cold days.” He grinned suddenly, and her heart turned over. “Nothing to do but remain indoors and love.”
He meant make love, of course. He did not know much if anything of love. Though that was perhaps unfair and not necessarily right. She would have said it of him a week or so ago with some confidence. Now she was not so sure. He did not want to talk about his children or about his brief marriage as a young man. His very reticence suggested to her that there was pain there. And where there was pain, perhaps there was love. He had neglected his children since they were infants—not materially, but in ways that mattered. He had visited them twice a year. It was a strange verb to use of time spent with his own children. And the word suggested a stay of days or brief weeks rather than of months.
Humphrey had neglected his children. He had not loved them. She had always thought he was scarcely aware of their existence. Sometimes, when she and they were at Hinsford and he was elsewhere—London, Brighton, or wherever he went during his frequent absences—he would not return home or even write for weeks on end. He missed first steps and first teeth and birthdays. She wondered if Marcel’s neglect of his children was of that nature, but suspected it was not. Perhaps that was because she did not want to believe that his neglect stemmed from indifference. She wanted to believe that there was a person hidden behind the handsome, harsh, often cynical exterior that had so captivated her.
Perhaps it was just that she needed to believe there was. For her own sake. Perhaps she needed to believe that he was not without all heart, as she had always thought. She had flung aside everything she had believed of herself in order to come here with him for a few intense weeks of . . . love.
Nothing to do but love.
“There are always things to do,” she said. “Reading, painting, sketching, making music, conversing, writing, taking the air, sewing, embroidering.”
“And making love,” he said.
“And making love.” She smiled. Ah, how was she going to do without when this was over? How had she done without for most of her adult life?
“Taking the air?” He shuddered. “Is it not enough that you insist upon sleeping with an open window? Or is that what you meant by taking the air?”