It is now five days since I wrote this letter, and the reason I did not mail it is that I wished to wait a day or two so I might reread it. Now that I’ve reread it, I realize that it’s just as demented as I imagined it to be, because I’ve written one sentence after another in quick succession just as they came into my head, but Henry insists that always I must say straight out what I want to.
I have been dressed for four days. And I wear the beautiful milky beads and nobody has seen anything like them before and they all admire them. Today I went out for the very first time in a taxi to see a nerve specialist. It seemed like a dream all the time—nothing was real. I think I’m going to be sent to a rest home (NOT a lunatic asylum) for a few weeks, and after that I must be quiet and hardly see anyone, and next summer perhaps I shall be allowed to go to dances—but I don’t care because I don’t feel like doing much anyway. Well that’s all now as this piece of paper is quite crammed with words. And I wish you every sort of happiness, but I don’t hope your hotcakes may burn and your children be acrobats! Though it would be nice to have one of them an acrobat to amuse you after a day’s work.
Well do write—
I felt much better after sending that letter. I’d been so casual about Nancy, as if it were nothing at all. It was just a letter. I’d always written him letters; it was the natural thing to do. I felt I’d set things right.
pamela
In June, I began to paint again. Just the one painting, the dancer. She would haunt me forever if I didn’t put her on canvas. I’d painted her over and over in my mind, working and reworking the brushstrokes endlessly. It took me weeks to finish the picture.
The colors in the painting are mostly dark—blues and grays and greens. A woman wearing a blue bell-sleeved dress stands on a stage. Her dress looks heavy, like satiny metal; the skirt twirls open, revealing layers of petticoats that rise in circular patterns like the cross-section of a fruit. Her dress conveys motion, but her body is frozen awkwardly. Her expression is somber. She is looking inward, unaware of an audience. She has no partner, she is alone. She is more wooden doll than woman. Behind her, the backdrop is a landscape, a hill flanked by two gray blockish buildings, like old barns. A leaden sky threatens rain. A tree like no real tree rises behind the dancer—it’s more a tall vine rising into leaves that wreath a giant cluster of blue grapes. The dancer has one foot on the back edge of the stage and one foot just off, as if there were no painted wall behind her. She is about to step off into the abyss.
Days after I finished the painting, I penciled the title on the back of the canvas: The Sad Dancer.
I was ready to go home.
margery
It was torture. I kept seeing Pamela when we left, looking small and lost and empty as we left her there in the dark room with its strange smells.
You’ll be home soon, darling. We love you. Don’t worry.
How could it seem like the end of the world at eighteen? Could we lay it all at the feet of Diccon? Was it just—just!—a broken heart? As simple and as terrible as that?
Well. Enough.
I must take my own advice, think of the here and now. . . .
I’ve not been honest.
I say I don’t know why these things happened, I don’t understand what caused Pamela’s illness. But I do.
Pamela’s melancholia—her breakdown—was not about Diccon. Not altogether.
It’s true that she was willfully blind, that she would not let herself believe that Diccon’s engagement with Nancy was real, and perhaps that pushed her over the edge.
But the truth is, Pamela would have shattered anyway.
What I mean to say is this: Pamela’s illness had to do—has to do—with Francesco. There is such a closeness between Pamela and her father. They are alike in so many ways. They are alike in the blood.
Francesco’s illness is quieter, though I imagine it’s no less painful. His melancholia is more like a slow deflation, as if the life is being sucked out of him. He walks around the house with glazed eyes, sits with a book in his lap but never turns a page. He shuts out the world, travels to a place I cannot imagine. It is wretched to see. Still, there was never a question of sending him off to the hospital.
With Francesco, I can manage. Patience, watchfulness—and time—seem to do the trick in the end.
Francesco’s bouts simmer like a low-grade fever. But it’s not the same with Pamela. Pamela’s attack like the plague.
There’s nothing I can do to fix the hurt inside her. It scares me. I don’t know what to do.
Well, here we are now, and I suppose . . .
There’s nothing for it but to make the best of it, is there?
Who knows? Today could be the beginning of a bad time. But then again, it may be nothing at all. You simply do not know.
pamela
Loves me not, loves me not, loves me not. Loves me not, not, not. . . .
The old hurts are like boomerangs. I can hurl them away all I want but they always come back.
Diccon crushes me like a tiny bug under his boot.
I lie on the floor of my studio, as miserable as the dwarf I have to draw though it’s killing me. It’s an excellent commission, I should be happy. Macmillan’s hired me to do pen-and-ink drawings for Oscar Wilde’s short story, The Birthday of the Infanta. But I hate the work. I can’t escape the wretchedness of the story. Every line I draw makes me feel as naive, as tormented, as the little wood dwarf.
There’d only been one letter from Diccon since I came home from Four Winds. The letter was to all of us. He said he was sorry he hadn’t spent more time with us while he was in New York. His book about the children and the pirates was coming along well. And he was glad to report that Philippa Stallibrass had capitulated in the end, even insisting on a large wedding at Holy Trinity Church and a formal reception at the Rembrandt Hotel. The wedding would be in February. He hoped for snow.
After that we didn’t hear from him, but no one was surprised. After all, he was a very busy man.
Early the next year, a letter came, addressed just to me. The envelope was fat. The postmark was Harlech. Harlech! Oh God, I thought. I didn’t want to open it. I didn’t want to read about his wedding, his glorious honeymoon, how happy they were in Wales.
I sat on my bed a long time, staring at the envelope. Well, nothing can be too shocking, Pamela, you know the worst, I told myself. I tore open the flap.
It took a while to sink in.
Diccon was miserable. As desperate as he’d ever been in his life, he said. He would have written sooner but truly, he could not. He could not even pick up a pen. In February he had fled London for Wales, plunged into his own cycle of despair. He’d not eaten or slept properly. Writing was out of the question. He hadn’t written a word for ages. He hated to admit the reason. He’d been such a coward and a cad. He had not been able to go through with the wedding.
He wasn’t entirely sure why, even now. He said he cringed to think of his abominable behavior. He’d been a monster, inexplicably ignoring Nancy in the weeks before the wedding, hiding out in his flat, not answering her letters. He had been paralyzed. Panicked. He had no excuse for his behavior. Nancy’s last letter had been brief. Coldly, in stark terms, she had broken it off. He was not to think of contacting her or seeing her again.