The Giver of Stars(5)
Six months on, Alice was pretty sure he didn’t think of her as a china doll any more.
They had married swiftly, explaining the haste as Mr Van Cleve’s need to return to his business. Alice felt as if her whole world had flipped; she was as happy and giddy as she had been despondent through the long winter. Her mother packed her trunk with the same faintly indecent delight with which she had told everyone in her circle about Alice’s lovely American husband and his rich industrialist father. It might have been nice if she’d looked a tiny bit mournful at the thought of her only daughter moving to a part of America nobody she knew had ever visited. But, then, Alice had probably been equally eager to go. Only her brother was openly sad, and she was pretty sure he would recover with his next weekend away. ‘I’ll come and see you, of course,’ Gideon said. They both knew he wouldn’t.
Bennett and Alice’s honeymoon consisted of a five-day voyage back to the United States, then onward by road from New York to Kentucky. (She had looked Kentucky up in the encyclopaedia and been quite taken with all the horse-racing. It sounded like a year-long Derby Day.) She squealed with excitement at everything: their huge car, the size of the enormous ocean liner, the diamond pendant Bennett bought her as a gift from a store in London’s Burlington Arcade. She didn’t mind Mr Van Cleve accompanying them the entire journey. It would, after all, have been rude to leave the older man alone, and she was too overcome with excitement at the idea of leaving Surrey, with its silent Sunday drawing rooms and permanent atmosphere of disapproval, to mind.
If Alice felt a vague dissatisfaction with the way Mr Van Cleve stuck to them like a limpet, she smothered it, doing her best to be the delightful version of herself that the two men seemed to expect. On the liner between Southampton and New York she and Bennett at least managed to stroll the decks alone in the hours after supper while his father was working on his business papers or talking to the elders at the captain’s table. Bennett’s strong arm would pull her close, and she would hold up her left hand with its shiny new gold band, and wonder at the fact that she, Alice, was a married woman. And when they were back in Kentucky, she told herself, she would be properly married, as the three of them would no longer have to share a cabin, curtained off as it was.
‘It’s not quite the trousseau I had in mind,’ she whispered, in her undershirt and pyjama bottoms. She didn’t feel comfortable in less, after Mr Van Cleve senior had, in his half-asleep state one night, confused the curtain of their double bunk with that of the bathroom door.
Bennett kissed her forehead. ‘It wouldn’t feel right with Father so close by, anyway,’ he whispered back. He placed the long bolster between them (‘Else I might not be able to control myself’) and they lay side by side, hands held chastely in the dark, breathing audibly as the huge ship vibrated beneath them.
When she looked back, the long trip was suffused with her suppressed longing, with furtive kisses behind lifeboats, her imagination racing as the sea rose and fell beneath them. ‘You’re so pretty. It will all be different when we get home,’ he would murmur into her ear, and she would gaze at his beautiful sculpted face and bury her face in his sweet-smelling neck, wondering how much longer she could bear it.
And then, after the endless car journey, and the stopovers with this minister and that pastor the whole way from New York to Kentucky, Bennett had announced that they would not be living in Lexington, as she had assumed, but in a small town some way further south. They drove past the city and kept going until the roads narrowed and grew dusty, and the buildings sat sparsely in random groupings, overshadowed by vast tree-covered mountains. It was fine, she assured him, hiding her disappointment at the sight of Baileyville’s main street, with its handful of brick buildings and narrow roads that stretched to nowhere. She was quite fond of the countryside. And they could take trips to town, like her mother did to Simpson’s in the Strand, couldn’t they? She struggled to be equally sanguine at the discovery that, for the first year at least, they would be living with Mr Van Cleve (‘I can’t leave Father alone while he’s grieving Mother. Not just yet, anyway. Don’t look so dismayed, sweetheart. It’s the second largest house in town. And we’ll have our own room.’) And then once they were finally in that room, of course, things had gone awry in a way she wasn’t sure she even had the words to explain.
With the same gritting of teeth with which she had endured boarding school and Pony Club, Alice attempted to adjust to life in the small Kentucky town. It was quite the cultural shift. She could detect, if she tried hard, a certain rugged beauty in the landscape, with its huge skies, its empty roads and shifting light, its mountains among whose thousands of trees wandered actual wild bears, and whose treetops were skimmed by eagles. She was awed at the size of everything, the vast distances that felt ever-present, as if she had had to adjust her whole perspective. But, in truth, she wrote, in her weekly letters to Gideon, everything else was pretty much impossible.
She found life in the big white house stifling, although Annie, the near silent housekeeper, relieved her of most household duties. It was indeed one of the largest in town but was stuffed with heavy antique furniture, every surface covered with the late Mrs Van Cleve’s photographs or ornaments or a variety of unblinking porcelain dolls that each man would remark was ‘Mother’s favourite’, should Alice attempt to move them an inch. Mrs Van Cleve’s exacting, pious influence hung over the house like a shroud.