Scarlet – 1959
Ian told Scarlet he bought the house as a gift. It was an apology for their cramped city quarters, compensation for Scarlet falling so heavily pregnant with their son. He, universally considered the ultimate bachelor, gave majestic permission for his wife to begin the nest-building and home-making he knew she had thirsted for ever since their hasty marriage.
But as she sat beside him while he drove through the desolate winter countryside, she felt nothing but dread: how could he buy a house – reputedly for “her” – without her actual assistance? “Auction” was the answer.
“Truth” presented by Ian seemed always subtly different from Scarlet’s apprehension of actuality, but in Scarlet’s youthfully cynical experience men never told the truth to women. It would be just like Ian to have purchased a ruin for the name alone. He was impulsive – act first, rationalize after – but he never thanked Scarlet for pointing it out. Women were supposed to be the impulsive, hysterical, emotional creatures, men were calm, rational, learned. Period. Scarlet had discovered there was even less room in England than in America for the sexes to locate the androgyny Virginia Woolf had so recently recommended.
What was her fear, exactly? She felt for it nervously as if exploring a bad tooth. Would they be in hock to the moneylenders till kingdom come? The “big money” Ian assured her was right around the corner had yet to arrive, but he confidently continued to expect it. She wished Ian could see that auctions engineered participants into foolish decisions, but Ian considered himself above foolish decisions. In the early months of marriage, Scarlet had earned to pick her battles. Husbands didn’t welcome any overt attempts to “change” them.
Unsaid between them, probably unremembered by him, was an episode early in their marriage where she’d suggested, “That will never work” to one of his passing fancies and he’d grabbed her by the throat. Made her shudder to think about it now. Clearly she should not think about it. Fetuses might be negatively affected by thoughts like those.
After he’d cooled down – and apologized – she’d tried to get him to acknowledge that such behavior should never happen; his response was, “You shouldn’t taunt me.” So the blame was subtly – or unsubtly – placed on her. She was left with the unpleasant sensation that he’d somehow reserved the “right” to lose control – a right denied to her – but at least it had never happened again.
Hadn’t he married her a brief three months after their first meeting, just to stop her returning to America? She’d been dazzled by his beauty, his gorgeous male power, glittering intelligence, tall wide-shouldered body, and those long-lashed blue eyes fixed so deliciously upon her. All Oxford considered him the matrimonial catch of the year – you could certainly claim she personally had benefited enormously from his hasty decision making. Everyone she met envied her; there was no one to whom could she confide marital difficulties.
Not even to the very close sister, her “best friend”, who considered marriage “surrender” and who had refused to attend the wedding. All acquaintances so far collected in England were Ian’s eager slaves. There were certainly trade-offs, in the business parlance of the day. Men might be demanding, self-involved, autocratic, but didn’t that make them better in bed? Wasn’t that the real reason Scarlet had married him, the secret she dared not confess but everyone suspected, that he had overwhelmed her with a display of sexual seduction just the memory of which raised every hair on her body to antennae? Now that she was nine and a half months pregnant it regrettably seemed as if she would never be svelte, or young, or even whole – again.
That was not all that had changed. She didn’t like it when she overheard him describing her as a “born hausfrau” – was there an uglier word in ANY language? She felt misrepresented, as if he deliberately missed the evidence of her true nature and the meaning of her entire existence. Wasn’t such blindness a crime against love? Yet what had he “done”, besides purchase a castle for her? At the apex of pregnancy – you could also call it the nadir – she was willing to admit that possibly she misrepresented HIM.
They needed a fresh start. But with a baby expected, wasn’t that the pattern of couples everywhere?
She couldn’t silence her inner critic. She felt emotionally repelled by all the bluster he deemed necessary to “get ahead”. Maybe she didn’t like the concept of “getting ahead,” especially considering he was so disparaging of America’s “crass commercialism.”
And what was that about, his peculiar reliance on the occult? It was almost a religion with him. He made a game of consulting his “imp” through Tarot cards – a funny party trick morphing into a disturbingly dissociative responsibility dodge. When she suggested as tactfully as she could that perhaps they should not expose a growing child to superstition he “doubled down” with outlandish “universal mythologies” of magic, nemesis, false birth and disguise. Jung, even Freud, was on his side. She had no one.
He had convinced himself his parents were no relation; he translated his envy of the aristocracy into an unshakeable conviction that he belonged rightfully among them. The democratic American in Scarlet tried to show him the pride in becoming truly “free” and his own person, but the lure of imposture seemed too strong.
Thank goodness for her diary – there was nowhere else to confide her unsettling thoughts. She disguised her journal as a “baby book” – a document she could feel certain he would never read. Her totally inadequate London doctor – whom she would be happy never to see again – had assured her that pregnant women were all prey to “nonsense fears” and she would feel completely different following delivery. Scarlet was hopeful that deep in the country – perhaps with a midwife – she could secure more enlightened care.
So she sat beside him on the way to view this new acquisition. And smiled.
Alysse Aallyn 