O me, what profits it to put

   An idle case? If Death were seen

   At first as Death, Love had not been,

Or been in narrowest working shut,

Mere fellowship of sluggish moods,

   Or in his coarsest Satyr-shape

   Had bruised the herb and crush’d the grape,

And bask’d and batten’d in the woods.

—Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)

The young people were all wild to see Lyme.

—Jane Austen, Persuasion

Ernestina had exactly the right face for her age; that is, small-chinned, oval, delicate as a violet. You may see it still in the drawings of the great illustrators of the time—in Phiz’s work, in John Leech’s. Her gray eyes and the paleness of her skin only enhanced the delicacy of the rest. At first meetings she could cast down her eyes very prettily, as if she might faint should any gentleman dare to address her. But there was a minute tilt at the corner of her eyelids, and a corre-sponding tilt at the corner of her lips—to extend the same comparison, as faint as the fragrance of February violets— that denied, very subtly but quite unmistakably, her apparent total obeisance to the great god Man. An orthodox Victorian would perhaps have mistrusted that imperceptible hint of a Becky Sharp; but to a man like Charles she proved irresisti-ble. She was so very nearly one of the prim little moppets, the Georginas, Victorias, Albertinas, Matildas and the rest who sat in their closely guarded dozens at every ball; yet not quite.

When Charles departed from Aunt Tranter’s house in Broad Street to stroll a hundred paces or so down to his hotel, there gravely—are not all declared lovers the world’s fool?—to mount the stairs to his rooms and interrogate his good-looking face in the mirror, Ernestine excused herself and went to her room. She wanted to catch a last glimpse of her betrothed through the lace curtains; and she also wanted to be in the only room in her aunt’s house that she could really tolerate.

Having duly admired the way he walked and especially the manner in which he raised his top hat to Aunt Tranter’s maid, who happened to be out on an errand; and hated him for doing it, because the girl had pert little Dorset peasant eyes and a provokingly pink complexion, and Charles had been strictly forbidden ever to look again at any woman under the age of sixty—a condition Aunt Tranter mercifully escaped by just one year—Ernestina turned back into her room. It had been furnished for her and to her taste, which was emphatically French; as heavy then as the English, but a little more gilt and fanciful. The rest of Aunt Tranter’s house was inexorably, massively, irrefutably in the style of a quar-ter-century before: that is, a museum of objects created in the first fine rejection of all things decadent, light and graceful, and to which the memory or morals of the odious Prinny, George IV, could be attached.

Nobody could dislike Aunt Tranter; even to contemplate being angry with that innocently smiling and talking— especially talking—face was absurd. She had the profound optimism of successful old maids; solitude either sours or teaches self-dependence. Aunt Tranter had begun by making the best of things for herself, and ended by making the best of them for the rest of the world as well.

However, Ernestina did her best to be angry with her; on the impossibility of having dinner at five; on the subject of the funereal furniture that choked the other rooms; on the subject of her aunt’s oversolicitude for her fair name (she would not believe that the bridegroom and bride-to-be might wish to sit alone, and walk out alone); and above all on the subject of Ernestina’s being in Lyme at all.

The poor girl had had to suffer the agony of every only child since time began—that is, a crushing and unrelenting canopy of parental worry. Since birth her slightest cough would bring doctors; since puberty her slightest whim sum-moned decorators and dressmakers; and always her slightest frown caused her mama and papa secret hours of self-recrimination. Now this was all very well when it came to new dresses and new wall hangings, but there was one matter upon which all her bouderies and complaints made no im-pression. And that was her health. Her mother and father were convinced she was consumptive. They had only to smell damp in a basement to move house, only to have two days’ rain on a holiday to change districts. Half Harley Street had examined her, and found nothing; she had never had a serious illness in her life; she had none of the lethargy, the chronic weaknesses, of the condition. She could have—or could have if she had ever been allowed to—danced all night; and played, without the slightest ill effect, battledore all the next morning. But she was no more able to shift her doting parents’ fixed idea than a baby to pull down a moun-tain. Had they but been able to see into the future! For Ernestina was to outlive all her generation. She was born in 1846. And she died on the day that Hitler invaded Poland.

An indispensable part of her quite unnecessary regimen was thus her annual stay with her mother’s sister in Lyme. Usually she came to recover from the season; this year she was sent early to gather strength for the marriage. No doubt the Channel breezes did her some good, but she always descended in the carriage to Lyme with the gloom of a prisoner arriving in Siberia. The society of the place was as up-to-date as Aunt Tranter’s lumbering mahogany furniture; and as for the entertainment, to a young lady familiar with the best that London can offer it was worse than nil. So her relation with Aunt Tranter was much more that of a high-spirited child, an English Juliet with her flat-footed nurse, than what one would expect of niece and aunt. Indeed, if Romeo had not mercifully appeared on the scene that previ-ous winter, and promised to share her penal solitude, she would have mutinied; at least, she was almost sure she would have mutinied. Ernestina had certainly a much stronger will of her own than anyone about her had ever allowed for—and more than the age allowed for. But fortunately she had a very proper respect for convention; and she shared with

Charles—it had not been the least part of the first attraction between them—a sense of self-irony. Without this and a sense of humor she would have been a horrid spoiled child; and it was surely the fact that she did often so apostrophize herself (“You horrid spoiled child”) that redeemed her.

In her room that afternoon she unbuttoned her dress and stood before her mirror in her chemise and petticoats. For a few moments she became lost in a highly narcissistic self-contemplation. Her neck and shoulders did her face justice; she was really very pretty, one of the prettiest girls she knew. And as if to prove it she raised her arms and unloosed her hair, a thing she knew to be vaguely sinful, yet necessary, like a hot bath or a warm bed on a winter’s night. She imagined herself for a truly sinful moment as someone wicked—a dancer, an actress. And then, if you had been watching, you would have seen something very curious. For she suddenly stopped turning and admiring herself in profile; gave an abrupt look up at the ceiling. Her lips moved. And she hastily opened one of the wardrobes and drew on a peignoir.

For what had crossed her mind—a corner of her bed having chanced, as she pirouetted, to catch her eye in the mirror—was a sexual thought: an imagining, a kind of dimly glimpsed Laocoon embrace of naked limbs. It was not only her profound ignorance of the reality of copulation that frightened her; it was the aura of pain and brutality that the act seemed to require, and which seemed to deny all that gentleness of gesture and discreetness of permitted caress that so attracted her in Charles. She had once or twice seen animals couple; the violence haunted her mind.

Thus she had evolved a kind of private commandment— those inaudible words were simply “I must not”—whenever the physical female implications of her body, sexual, men-strual, parturitional, tried to force an entry into her con-sciousness. But though one may keep the wolves from one’s door, they still howl out there in the darkness. Ernestina wanted a husband, wanted Charles to be that husband, wanted children; but the payment she vaguely divined she would have to make for them seemed excessive.

She sometimes wondered why God had permitted such a bestial version of Duty to spoil such an innocent longing. Most women of her period felt the same; so did most men; and it is no wonder that duty has become such a key concept in our understanding of the Victorian age—or for that mat-ter, such a wet blanket in our own.*

[* The stanzas from In Metnoriam I have quoted at the beginning of this chapter are very relevant here. Surely the oddest of all the odd arguments in that celebrated anthology of after-life anxiety is stated in this poem (xxxv). To claim that love can only be Satyr-shaped if there is no immortality of the soul is clearly a panic flight from Freud. Heaven for the Victorians was very largely heaven because the body was left behind—along with the Id.]

Having quelled the wolves Ernestina went to her dressing table, unlocked a drawer and there pulled out her diary, in black morocco with a gold clasp. From another drawer she took a hidden key and unlocked the book. She turned imme-diately to the back page. There she had written out, on the day of her betrothal to Charles, the dates of all the months and days that lay between it and her marriage. Neat lines were drawn already through two months; some ninety num-bers remained; and now Ernestina took the ivory-topped pencil from the top of the diary and struck through March 26th. It still had nine hours to run, but she habitually allowed herself this little cheat. Then she turned to the front of the book, or nearly to the front, because the book had been a Christmas present. Some fifteen pages in, pages of close handwriting, there came a blank, upon which she had pressed a sprig of jasmine. She stared at it a moment, then bent to smell it. Her loosened hair fell over the page, and she closed her eyes to see if once again she could summon up the most delicious, the day she had thought she would die of joy, had cried endlessly, the ineffable . ..

But she heard Aunt Tranter’s feet on the stairs, hastily put the book away, and began to comb her lithe brown hair.