Mrs Osmond - Hardcover

Banville, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0241260175 ISBN 13: 9780241260173

Publisher: Knopf, 2017

Synopsis

From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea, a dazzling and audacious new novel that extends the story of Isabel Archer, the heroine of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, into unexpected territory.

Isabel Archer is a young American woman, swept off to Europe in the late nineteenth century by an aunt who hopes to round out the impetuous but naïve girl's experience of the world. When Isabel comes into a large, unexpected inheritance, she is finagled into a marriage with the charming, penniless, and—as Isabel finds out too late—cruel and deceitful Gilbert Osmond, whose connection to a certain Madame Merle is suspiciously intimate. On a trip to England to visit her cousin Ralph Touchett on his deathbed, Isabel is offered a chance to free herself from the marriage, but nonetheless chooses to return to Italy. Banville follows James's story line to this point, but Mrs. Osmond is thoroughly Banville's own: the narrative inventiveness; the lyrical precision and surprise of his language; the layers of emotional and psychological intensity; the subtle, dark humor. And when Isabel arrives in Italy—along with someone else!—the novel takes off in directions that James himself would be thrilled to follow.

About this title

About the Author

JOHN BANVILLE, the author of sixteen novels, has been the recipient of the Man Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. He lives in Dublin.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1
It had been a day of agitations and alarms, of smoke and steam and grit. Even yet she felt, did Mrs. Osmond, the awful surge and rhythm of the train’s wheels, beating on and on within her. It was as if she were still seated at the carriage window, as she had sat for what seemed impossibly many hours, gazing with unseeing eyes upon the placid English countryside flowing away from her endlessly in all the soft- green splendour of the early- summer afternoon. Her thoughts had sped along with the speeding train but, unlike the train, to no end. Indeed, she had never registered so acutely the mind’s unstoppable senseless headlong rush as she had since leaving Gardencourt. The great snorting and smoking brute that had paused with brusque impatience at the meek little village station and suffered her to take her place in one of its lattermost compartments— her fingertips still retained the impression of hot plush and greasy leather— now stood gasping after its mighty efforts under the high, soot- blackened glass canopy of the throbbing terminus, disgorging on to the platform its complement of dazed, bedraggled travellers and their jumbles of baggage. Well, she told herself, she had arrived somewhere, at least.

Staines, her maid, had hardly stepped down from the train before she flew into an altercation with a red- faced railway porter. Had she not been a female it might have been said of Staines thatshe was a fellow with a heart of oak. She was tall and gaunt, aperson all of angles, with long wrists and large feet, and a jaw thatput one in mind of the blade of a primitive axe. In the years thatshe had been in Mrs. Osmond’s employ, or, given how closelythey were conjoined, better say in the years that they had beentogether, Staines’s devotion to her mistress had not wavered bya jot. In their long period of exile in the south her forbearancehad extended to putting up with the Italian market and the Italiankitchen, and, which required an even more saintly fortitude,with Italian plumbing. Indeed, such was her steadfastness that onoccasion Mrs. Osmond— Isabel—foundherself longing wistfullyfor even half a day’s respite from her servant’s unrelenting, stone-hardsolicitude. In their recent travels together the chief tokenand proof of Staines’s loyalty had been a permanently maintainedstate of vexedness, not only in face of the impudence of porters,cab- drivers,boot-boysand the like, but also against what she consideredher mistress’s wilful credulousness, deplorable gullibilityand incurably soft heart. Now, as the maid, her bonnet fairly waggingfrom the force of her indignation,stood berating the porterfor unspecified shortcomings—asa Londoner she was exercisingher right to quarrel with her own kind, in her own city—Isabelmoved away with that wide-eyedblandness of manner she hadperfected over the years at the scenes of so many similar confrontationsbetween Staines’s will and the world’s recalcitrance.

She longed for the hotel and its stilly-breathingcool and shadowedspaces, in which she might sit perfectly immobile for a longtime and let her reeling mind run down of its own accord. Shewould rest if only she could stop thinking, but how to effect thatmarvellous trick? The death of her cousin Ralph Touchett on arecent eve in his mother’s house at Gardencourt—extraordinary to reflect that there had been an exact, measurable moment, marked by a click on the clock, when for him eternity had begun— had left her with a hard task to solve, like an exercise in geometry or algebra. The solution she was required to derive was no more or less than to find a fit mode by which to mourn the young man’s passing. In truth, her cousin could no longer have been described as young, but that was how she thought of him, and no doubt how she would think of him always. Perhaps that was the main part of her difficulty, that it seemed a scandal to shed tears for a person whose life had been so marked by the slow vastation of a wasting illness that he could hardly have been said to have hada life at all. Thinking this, she at once chided herself. Who was she to judge the quality of any life, however brief or burdened? Behind the chidden thought, however, lay a darker, irrepressible formulation, which was, that the intensest living Ralph had done he had done through her, by way of a passionate vicariousness, watching in smiling wonderment from his seat at the ringside her breath- taking flights, her spangled swoopings, to and fro in the powdery light high up, oh, so high up, under the big, the tremendous, top. To have lived through someone else, even someone he professed to adore, that had been the height of Ralph’s triumph, and the depth of his failure. How she wished now she had been capable of that greatness he had hoped for in her, those loftier leaps, those ever more graceful pirouettes in mid- air, those weightless landings on one braced toe, those sweeping bows with swan’ s- - neck arms widespread. If she had lifted him up, she had also let him down. What he could not have expected, what he could not have imagined possible for one so firmly balanced as she, was the great, the catastrophic plunge from airy heights that had been precipitated by her marrying the perfectly wrong person.

Behind her now she heard an unmistakably solid step, and a moment later Staines loomed at her shoulder, her scant plumageruffled and crackling, and she readied herself for the inevitablerebuke.

“Why, there you are, ma’am!” the maid said loudly, for shehad a voice as large and forceful as the rest of her. “I was lookingfor you everywheres among all this pushing and pulling crowd.”

“I merely walked on,” Isabel mildly protested, offering a mitigatingsmile. Staines, however, was in no mood to be mollified,and her mistress waited, almost with interest, to know how sheherself should be implicated in that recent struggle on the platform,of which she had experienced no more than a hard glarefrom the porter’s soiled eye and a muffled oath directed at herdeparting back.

“The gall of that fellow!” the maid said now, puffing out hercheeks in the way she did when she was wroth. “Well, he gota piece of my mind, I can tell you.” Here she made a markedpause, as she notched the barb to her bow-string,and when sheresumed it was in a tone seemingly more of regret than reproval.“Of course, if he’d have known you was in mourning I have nodoubt he would have presented a very different attitude.”

This time Isabel reserved her smile to herself. The maid’sveiled yet pointed reference was to the dispute she and her mistresshad engaged in, before departing Gardencourt, over the matterof a mourning band, a dispute in which, unusually, the moredetermined of the two combatants had been forced to concede.It was to all intents a perfectly acceptable circlet of black crapethat the servant had proffered, with a matchingly solemn mien,and it was a question as to which of them had been the moresurprised when Isabel had declined, politely but firmly, to allow itto be pinned high up about the sleeve of her travelling coat. Aftera second of shocked silence the maid had begun to remonstrate, but her remonstrances proved to no avail; it was one of those instances, few but momentous, when the mistress showed her steel and the maid prudently stepped back. Mrs. Osmond would not wear a mourning band, and that, incontestably, was that. Staines had sulked, of course, and had bided her time, until now, when her mistress’s flashing blade was safely back in its scabbard and she could risk a retributive shot. “Yes, I’m sure,” she said, with a sort of toss of the head in her tone, “I’m sure even a ruffian of his sort would have shown a bit of respect for a person’s loss, if he’d only of been able to see the evidence of it.”

To this Isabel did not respond; she had found, over the years, that a remote and unemphatic silence was often the most effective counter to her maid’s insinuative provocations. In truth, she was not certain herself why she had refused, to the point of vehemence, to have the thing on her sleeve. Perhaps it was that to her it would have been somehow to claim too much to make such publicity of her sorrow; that it would have been a breach of common decency— a breach, even, of common modesty. On the other hand, she was sure Ralph himself would be only too delighted to behold her draped from top to toe in black bombazine, complete with jet veil and broad sash, but only so that he could tease her and laugh at her in his fond, ironical fashion. So perhaps, after all, she thought now, she should have consented to the harmless convention of the band, if only to afford Ralph’s spirit a moment of amusement in the place he dwelt in now, that realm of shades where surely he would welcome the opportunity for even the most wan of smiles. He had given her so much, and had asked so little in return.

Coming out at last from the cinder- smelling confines of the station, she felt as if she had dived into some clear light vaporous medium that was at once more and less than air. She had lived for so long amid southern harshnesses that London looked to heralmost immaterial, with no sharp edges to it at all. Even in sunlight,as now, the city had a pearly sheen, and its shadows were thedeepest shade of mauve. The crowds, too, weaving their endlesslyshifting tapestry to and fro before her, had to her eye a quality ofdreamy vagueness, as if all these people, despite the determinationof their step and the fixity of their forward gaze, were notentirely certain of their destination, as likewise they could notquite remember their setting-offplace, and yet minded not at all,in either case. Already she felt smoothed down and soothed; shehad not been aware, before arriving in it, how achingly she hadyearned for the strangely tender accommodations of this greatmetropolis of the north. She did not know London, not with anyintimacy; she had spent time here, on visits, but for the mostpart she had viewed it not through her own eyes but through theeyes of others—thoseof her husband, of Ralph Touchett and hismother, of her friend Henrietta Stackpole; of painters, too, and ofpoets and novelists—somany!— theDickenses and Thackerays,the Byrons and the Brownings, all the bards who had sung to her,in the far-offcity of Albany where she had passed the years of heryouth, of this magically distant Land of Cockaigne.

Before she discerned the man himself her ear was caught bythe sound of his weeping. It was a strange, unhuman sound, andat first she looked about for some wounded creature nearby, afledgling gull, perhaps, fallen from the edge of some high parapetand mewling for its mother. But, no, it was a man. He was burlyand broad but not at all strong-looking,with a big box-shapedhead and hair of a fiery ginger shade and curly ginger whiskers. He had positioned himself at the corner of the wide thoroughfarethat led the way out of the station precincts. She did not thinkshe had ever seen or heard a grown man crying like this, copiously, helplessly, unstaunchably. His washed- blue eyes were red- rimmed, and his swollen and glistening nether lip trembled like a baby’s. He wore a collarless shirt, an ancient pair of moleskin trousers shiny with grime, and a jacket of rusty serge that was much too small for him and pinched him under the arms and left his frail white wrists defencelessly exposed. He stood in one spot but kept turning his body first in one direction and then the other, caught it seemed in a trance of convulsive indecision. Beside him on the pavement was a shapeless bundle of something tied up in a knotted rag. It had seemed at first he was wearing shoes, but now that Isabel looked more closely she saw that his feet were bare but thoroughly caked with black, tar- like dirt. The coppery brightness of his whiskers, through which dark glinting rivulets of tears were coursing, and the pulpy paleness of his lightly freckled skin, somehow added to and intensified, for her, the sorrow and abjection of the spectacle he made; it was as if he had been flayed of a protective integument, and his flaming hair were blushing for him to be so nakedly and shamefully on show.

“Oh, look, that poor creature!” she breathed, laying a hand on her maid’s arm to stay her. “We must do something to help him.”

Staines, however, was unimpressed, and barely cast a glance in the direction of the weeping man where he stood sobbing and shaking and rocking. “There’s no helping them as can’t help themselves,” she said, with a sniff, and went resolutely on, despite her mistress’s restraining touch. Isabel, after a moment’s hesitation, had no alternative but to follow her, albeit with a troubled heart. It was strange— surely Staines, who most likely had sprung from the same depths of society as had the weeping man, was the one in whom the urge to render him succour should have been strongest, instead of which she had turned her face against him, with lips compressed into a white line. And yet it was understandable, after all: the maid’s instincts were those of a still uninfectedperson spurning a doomed victim of the plague. To Isabel, however,whose store of bullion in the bank guaranteed her immunity,it was plain that her duty lay precisely in helping such as he,the unfortunate and fallen ones of the world. But the rules werethe rules: they applied in both directions, downwards as well asupwards, and she knew the impossibility of disobeying her servantand going to the weeping man even if it were for no morethan to press a coin shamefacedly into his hand.

In the hansom cab, the choosing of which was a right Stainesnaturally arrogated to herself, Isabel sat hard by the open windowto have the benefit of what freshness the city air could offer.After her moment of mild exaltation on exiting the station shehad relapsed once more into her former state of diminishednumbness. The lingering rhythm of the train was replaced bythe harshing of the cab’s steel-rimmedwheels on the metalledroadway. She viewed the panorama of the city passing in the windowas if it were a running series of exhibits under glass. She feltdulled and dazed, like one who after a long illness is taken outfor a supposedly invigorating “spin.” They had crossed the parkand come out into the cacophonous bustle of Knightsbridge. Sheglanced at Staines sitting opposite her, stiffly upright with her bigjaw stolidly set and her sceptical gaze fixed upon the passage ofbrightly bedecked shop-fronts.“Are you happy to be amid familiarsights?” she asked. “I mean, are you happy to be home, even ifonly briefly?”

The maid turned upon her a stare as stony as adamant. “What,you mean London?” she said. She gave herself a scornful sort oftwitch, bridling her bony shoulders. “This”— directingthe tip ofher sharp nose at the fashionable parade of parasols and silk hatsalong the busy pavement—“this is not my London, ma’am.”

To this rebuff Isabel responded with her smile of practised vagueness, and once again retreated into herself, as into the folds of a capacious, all- covering cape. She could never be annoyed with Staines, not fully; she knew that what appeared in the young woman a large, unremitting and ill- tempered disdain was no more than a mask for an incapacity to show her ever- marvelling appreciation of Isabel’s tolerance and loyalty. For the maid loved her mistress, incoherently, inexpressibly, and would be willing, as she might say herself, to walk barefoot over burning coals, if thereby she might strike up for Isabel a spark of needed warmth. Acknowledging this fact to herself for the thousandth time, Isabel found her thoughts turning back to the somehow related matter of the weeping man. It was true, she had never witnessed a grown- - up human being display in public such helplessness, such haplessness, such raw infantile grief, yet now it occurred to her, who had lately suffered so many blows t...

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0241260175
• ISBN 13: 9780241260173
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1