She considered her role with regard to the Virginia property to be more museum curator than owner or consumer. Museum curator was the sort of role that was widely, publicly, approved, valued by many—even those who might incorrectly think she craved possession for the sake of it. She could deal with that—with a degree of misunderstanding. It didn’t bother her at all.
There was hardly anything in the house that was newly made. She had collected the contents from many places—tables, lamps, fabrics, wallpaper, beds, coverings, chests, sofas, tapestries—and they had passed through the hands of many makers, many users, many families; they had been sold and sold again by dealers and auction rooms in London, Paris, New York, further afield. She certainly wasn’t hurting the planet, recycling, reusing, restoring. The collection and its fastidious arrangement reflected her fullest sense of what was possible in terms of visual delight and physical comfort. The house might itself have been a painting or a piece of music—intricate, formally coherent, varied, original. Each detail, each accent of light or color, was carefully meditated upon, calculated to affect, to soothe, to impress or to astonish.
From her little office at home in London, Elizabeth had gone on embellishing until she had to stop herself. She knew that the house had become inordinately important to her. Words like obsession and fetish had passed through her mind more than once during the spring as she had worked away at it. She had tried to reassure herself that she wasn’t using the house to compensate for other things in her life—things that had proved to be beyond her control, that hadn’t gone the way she had expected they might, hadn’t been as fulfilling as she might once have hoped. She told herself that working on the house was like a professional commitment. And if it was a compensation—well, it might nonetheless be a major, a significant, a splendid achievement. Once the house was done, she intended to move on to other things. She already had plans.
But, indeed, the house had come to represent a great deal to Elizabeth. Everything. She realized that she was afraid to go inside. She readied herself. It probably won’t be perfect, she warned herself. There will be things that have been done wrong. They can be fixed. It doesn’t matter. The details will fall into place.
As the chauffeur opened her door, Gordon said, ‘I like that Greek temple.’
She couldn’t help laughing out loud; she found Gordon manly and touching. And she felt relieved. ‘That’s the house, Gordon.’
She got out and went around to his door, opening it herself and bending down to release his seatbelt. ‘Come on, I’ll show you inside.’ And she led him away by the hand.
Hope called out, ‘Mummy!’ and sleepily stretched her arms after them across the empty back seat, but Elizabeth didn’t seem to hear her.
The children couldn’t recognize anything in the house. They were silent as Elizabeth conducted them from room to room, their blue eyes wide open, alert to the sense that they shouldn’t touch any of these beautiful things which might easily break if they did. They crept over the carpets from Persia, squinching their toes inside their shoes to make their feet smaller; they nodded in awe at the Italian chandeliers, the olden-day vases from China, the French clocks.
In the dimly lit, dark green dining-room, Elizabeth moved two of the green silk side chairs closer to the American maple sideboard. She stood back to examine the effect, looked up at the downlighters concealed in the ceiling, sighed, and moved the chairs back again. Hope and Gordon watched from the double doorway, their feet rolling forward and backward over the raised threshold in the dark wooden floor.
In the living-room, glistening with creamy silks and gold ornaments, bursting with flowers, Elizabeth crisply circumnavigated the grouped sofas and chairs, going straight to the mantel. She took down a pair of Meissen swans, one modeled with two cygnets, the other with a raised wing, and repositioned them on a delicately carved pearwood shelf hanging between two of the imposing row of five triple-sash windows ranging across the far end of the room.
Hope looked on anxiously. She took a few steps toward her mother, then she looked back at Gordon, reached for his hand and said, watching Elizabeth, ‘Won’t they get cross at you, Mummy?’
Elizabeth pushed one of the swans back a centimeter with her fingertip and turned her head toward Hope.
‘Get cross?’
Hope stared at her mother, squeezing Gordon’s hand.
‘What do you mean, sweetie?’ Elizabeth said it in a monotone as if she didn’t really want to know, still examining the objects on the pearwood shelf, then dabbing with a finishing-off tap at the swan with the cygnets, one hovering at its side, one on its back.
‘Because you’re touching the things,’ said Hope. She let go of Gordon’s hand, shrugged her shoulders, then pressed her cheeks between the palms of her own small hands, embarrassed.
‘These are my things, Hope.’ Then she corrected herself. ‘These are Daddy’s things.’
‘Where did he get them?’
‘I—bought them for him.’ Elizabeth looked out the window onto the enormous veranda. Those extra pillows on the wicker sofas can’t be right, she was thinking. They look lost. I said big, big, big.
‘Why are they here?’ Hope persisted.
‘What? Here?’ There was an undercurrent of annoyance cracking Elizabeth’s mask. We’re all a little tired, she reminded herself.
‘Why are the things here?’ Hope was squeaking.
‘Because this is—our house.’ She sensed herself faltering; Hope’s importunity made Elizabeth self-conscious, but she went on, ‘I bought the house—for Daddy—and I’ve had it furnished for—us—for everyone.’
‘Oh.’ Hope looked at Gordon and smiled a little, even more embarrassed than she had been before. She smoothed down the skirt of her green-and-blue-plaid cotton dress. Then she looked at Elizabeth again, swinging her arms at her sides and blurted out, ‘Well, what about those men in London? You said they were packing our things for us to have.’
Elizabeth came back across the room with deliberate, clicking steps, crouched down beside Hope, and looked her in the eye. ‘It takes a long, long time for the boxes to come.’ She said this very slowly and rather loudly. She meant it to reassure and to comfort. She meant it to settle things in Hope’s mind.
Hope said, ‘Yes.’
Gordon said, ‘Mummy already told us that, Hopie.’
Hope scowled at Gordon and looked back at her mother. There was a silence. They all knew Hope didn’t settle easily.
Hope’s eyes were clear, expectant, trusting. Elizabeth felt swamped by their solemnity, deeply and unexpectedly challenged. Those eyes are ready to receive anything, she thought, accept anything. Judging me is a long way off. Elizabeth looked away. There’s a way to do this, she told herself, that is the right way. The right way for everyone concerned. Then she said, in her special instructing voice, ‘We need a house to live in right now, don’t you think?’
Again Hope said, ‘Yes.’ But each of her ‘Yeses’ was a question; she wanted more.
Elizabeth took a breath. Everything depended now on whether she could settle the children, on whether she could gather them to her. She mustn’t let Hope spook her. Don’t start imagining a four-year-old child can see inside your head, she told herself. ‘So, I planned this for now, and it’s all ready for us. Don’t you think it’s nice?’ Now Elizabeth smiled cheerfully, as if to bring things to a close.
‘But, Mummy, where will all our things fit? This is full already.’ Hope raised her hands in the air, palms upward, stiff with expostulation.
‘I’m not worried about that