by Rumer Godden
‘But it was you who insisted that Caddie and Hugh must go at once,’ she said bewildered.
‘I changed my mind. People do.’ Rob was sitting up in bed. ‘Give me some coffee.’
‘But what made you?’ Fanny still asked. ‘What made you change?’
‘Caddie.’ He leaned over and patted her head. ‘She is so like you.’
‘Like me?’ Fanny was touched, then she could not help the jealousy come again. ‘Nonsense. Except for her hair and eyes, Caddie is Darrell all over again.’
‘No one is anyone all over again,’ said Rob. ‘There are always contradictions,’ and yet Caddie seemed to him almost pure Fanny. She had that same slightly clumsy gaucheness that to him always seemed young and vulnerable, something innocent. Fanny, for all the airs she put on over her children, would never grow out of that. ‘She has your smile,’ Rob could have said, only he would not – that shy flickering smile that had charmed him across Margot’s dinner table; to see it repeated on a child’s face made his heart turn over with tenderness, but Fanny was in no mood now for tenderness and when they came to Hugh a quarrel began. ‘I didn’t see,’ said Rob, ‘why Caddie shouldn’t go back with Hugh this evening or tomorrow.’
Fanny sat up in her chair. ‘Hugh can’t go back today or tomorrow.’
‘Fanny, he must. You say he has no fever now, it’s over.’
‘It may be over but he’s weak, and Darrell would send him straight back to school.’
‘And if he did, would that be wrong?’
‘It would be for Hugh. Hugh has always been delicate. He hasn’t any stamina.’
Darrell’s, ‘I warn you, Fanny is foolish about that boy,’ echoed in Rob’s ear but he tried to argue gently. ‘Schools have matrons, trained nurses to look after the boys. Doctor Isella said …’
‘Doctor Isella doesn’t know,’ said Fanny, ‘and after all, you don’t know, Rob, because you never went to one, how tough an English public school can be. Strode is one of the toughest. I always think that’s why Darrell chose it.’
‘Hugh seems to be a bone of contention, doesn’t he?’ said Rob. ‘Please give me some more coffee,’ but Fanny was holding her hands together in distress.
‘Don’t make me send him back until he’s well. Not for a few days.’ Again there was a note almost of hysteria in her voice.
‘Fanny, you are not going to make me a scene?’ and Fanny recovered herself. ‘Not if you let me do what I want,’ she said, and took his cup.
‘That’s honest, anyhow.’ Rob was feeling too contented to argue. He watched the steam going up from his filled cup, a curl of fragrant steam catching the light. Reflections of the lake rippled gently along the walls, the sun shone on Fanny’s hair, her clear skin. He was, too, full of Saladin and of Bianca Letti. She would make a ravishing Berengaria – if we can get her. She would have to be released, but Aldo has influence – this had given him a new impetus. He wanted to get up and work, not stay here arguing, and, ‘I suppose a few days won’t make any difference,’ he said. ‘We can tell Darrell that Doctor Isella …’
‘Darrell won’t believe an Italian doctor.’
At that Rob’s temper flared. ‘God! You middle-class English!’
Fanny’s tautness broke to match it. ‘Darrell’s not middle-class, by any means. Lady Candida …’
‘Damn Lady Candida,’ Rob said. ‘His behaviour is middle-class; stuffy, conventional, prejudiced, and ignorant.’
‘Like mine, I suppose?’ They were facing each other over the coffee tray.
‘Exactly like yours,’ said Rob, ‘when it touches your children.’
‘Thank you. Stuffy, conventional, prejudiced, and ignorant.’ She got up, turned her back on him and went to the window. After a moment, Rob got up too. She heard him light a cigarette.
‘Fan.’ No one could say that as Rob said it and, as he touched her, Fanny began to quiver. ‘Fan, are we going to quarrel over a clutter of children?’
‘Only two children,’ she said with a half sob.
‘They seem like a clutter. Well, let’s treat them like that. Just a clutter, under our feet. Of course they can stay until you think Hugh is well.’
‘What about Darrell?’
‘He can have another telegram,’ but it was Darrell who sent the telegram, a cable from Peru: ‘Unavoidably delayed.’ ‘I told you, he was always being delayed,’ said Fanny. ‘Unavoidably delayed stop am unwilling Gwyneth take responsibility dispatch Hugh Caddie school and prefer deal with them myself stop please keep them until twenty-sixth stop Clavering.’
‘The twenty-sixth,’ said Fanny. ‘That’s over a fortnight.’ Her face was shining. ‘Oh, Rob! You agree, don’t you?’
‘I have to agree,’ said Rob, then he gave a half-rueful smile. ‘There’s only one thing for me to do.’
‘What is that?’
‘Send for Pia,’ said Rob.
8
‘Pia? Who is Pia?’ asked Caddie.
‘Rob’s little girl.’
‘I didn’t know he had a little girl.’ Fanny thought she had not known it either. She knew of Pia, of course, but it had not really dawned on her, perhaps not really on Rob. He was oddly silent about his affairs while I … I have been making a clamour, thought Fanny, as she had thought when she had touched the split olive tree, still making a clamour; she had been selfish, so absorbed in her own children that she had forgotten the existence of his. How could I? she thought, ashamed.
‘Pia is ten, almost two years younger than you,’ she told Caddie now. ‘Her mother, Lucia, died when she was born.’
‘Her mother died? Oh! Then Rob didn’t put her away.’
‘Caddie! What an expression.’
‘That’s what the Bible says.’
It was only, Fanny told herself, that those words had caught Caddie’s attention; she meant nothing deeper than that, but all the same Fanny seemed to glimpse something formidable in Caddie. ‘Nonsense. She’s only half aware of what goes on,’ she told herself, but Rob did not seem to think so. ‘That child’s an infant Hannibal,’ he said.
‘Why Hannibal?’ Fanny smiled.
‘Hannibal took a solemn oath he would never be at peace with the Romans. I’m the Romans,’ said Rob. ‘He crossed the Alps; they had never been crossed by an army before. I don’t remember hearing of a child fighting a divorce.’
‘Rob, don’t be absurd. Caddie’s not fighting, not consciously, Hugh perhaps, but …’
‘Caddie is fighting,’ said Rob, ‘and she’s a good fighter. In fact I’m not sure she isn’t the general, and her arguments are like elephants. They squash you flat.’
It had been his own fault. He had introduced it, the thing they had been careful not to talk of all through that dinner at the Continentale, until warmed by the wine, the good food, the intimate atmosphere of the restaurant, he had been moved to try to talk of himself and Fanny in a way he had thought a child would understand. Perhaps, too, Saladin was pervading his mind. ‘If this were a tournament – and life is a tournament,’ he had said – ‘if your father and I were knights … well, we fought, and I won Fanny. If I won her, shouldn’t I be able to enjoy her?’ But Caddie had no use for knights, she lived strictly in the present. ‘I won Topaz, and I wasn’t able to enjoy him,’ she said.
Her face had gone back to the sullen heaviness he had known before and she laid down her knife and fork. It had taken Rob ten minutes and all the blandishments of the waiter, the display on the trolley, to get her to eat again. She had torta di mandorle. She had never tasted anything as delectable, but for ever afterwards torta di mandorle tasted, to Caddie, of treason.
‘She will sleep it off,’ Rob had said, but Caddie’s broken night stayed broken. With the first dawn she had appeared at Hugh’s bedside. ‘Hugh. Oh, Hugh! Wake up.’
He had struggled out of sleep, his first deep sleep without fever or dreams. ‘Wha – what is it?’ At last he took in the fact of Caddie’s being there. ‘Then you … then you didn’t go?’
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br /> ‘Rob took me off the plane. He took me out to dinner and, Hugh, I liked it.’
Hugh stared at her in disgust. ‘Can’t you forget for one minute?’ he demanded. ‘Go back to bed.’
Caddie was altogether a torment to him – on top of all the other torments, thought Hugh.
She had been led to go into Fanny’s bedroom and find a Bible, to look up that verse about putting your wife away, thought Caddie, and when she was there had been struck once again by the bedhead. Covered in a silver brocade with a pattern of pink and turquoise flowers, it had a gilded frame that was carved and fluted, and from which hung a necklace, a gold chain with green stones. ‘Emeralds?’ Caddie had asked, awed. ‘Emerald paste,’ said Fanny who was in the room. The necklace ended in a cross and, ‘A cross,’ said Caddie. ‘That’s a funny thing to have hanging over your bed.’
To Caddie the cross had no deep significance. It was just another of the unexpected objects of which the villa had so many: Japanese combs, snuff-boxes, chips of Roman pavement, jewelled daggers, and, ‘A funny thing,’ she said quite naturally, ‘to have over your bed.’ Nor did she put the emphasis on the ‘your’ that Fanny’s sensitivity heard, but Fanny rounded on her with quite extraordinary sharpness. ‘What are you doing here? This is my room and you don’t come in unless you are asked. Now go and don’t come back.’
All the same, Caddie did come back – she still meant to look up that bit in the Bible – and she noticed the necklace and cross were gone.
She found the passage in St Matthew; they had had it at school in the Sermon on the Mount. When she had pored over it she went in to Hugh. ‘What’s fornication?’ she asked in unadorned Caddie fashion. His reaction was startling. ‘Get out of my room,’ shouted Hugh.
A month ago he would have told her with his accustomed lordliness, but now it was as if Caddie had touched him where he had been flayed.
‘I must blink facts,’ Hugh had been saying to himself. ‘If I don’t, I cannot bear them.’
It was Fanny who, quite innocently, would not let him blink them; in fact she seemed to Hugh to rub his nose in them; she was, for instance, always in and out of his room. ‘I must take your temperature.’
‘I haven’t got a temperature.’
‘We must make sure,’ and, helpless, he had to watch her while she put the thermometer in his mouth and waited, standing by the window, humming a little tune.
At Stebbings she had not gone around in her dressing-gown half the morning like this, lingering, smiling, looking at the lake, touching the cowslips on his dressing-table. There, when her hair was down, she had worn it in a plait down her back, not in a loose tail over one shoulder so that it flowed, its tendrils framing her face. He took the thermometer out of his mouth and said with hostility, ‘You are different.’
‘Hugh, put that back,’ but she knew she was different.
All those days as she had lain in the long chair on the terrace, the sun had baked her, gently because it was still spring, though an Italian spring. It had browned her arms and legs, and brought a dewy flush to her cheeks, as if I had new sap in me, thought Fanny. Rob, though he had grown heavier, could not brown any more, his sallowness was sun-accustomed, but she had changed every day, ‘Like a brown rose opening,’ said Rob.
‘A rose again?’ Fanny teased him.
‘Yes, a rose,’ said Rob. ‘One day we will endow a rose and call it Fanny Quillet.’
Fanny had caught up with Rob at last. She was filled with ‘well-being’ she could have said. It was from the quiet and sun, the loosening of the strain; she had wound up the long thread of anguish, worry, and excitement into a secret ball and put it away. The change was from idleness after years of hard work, yes, hard work, thought Fanny; Stebbings was a big house and I only had Gwyneth a few hours a day, the whole garden with Prentice only three days a week. It was from the beauty, she thought; the lake in this May weather was so blue it might have been painted; the wistaria was full out, the roses twining up the cypresses; every puff of wind brought a different scent. It was from Celestina’s cooking, her pastas and risottos, the fresh cheese, fruit, wine. I have never had wine with every meal, thought Fanny. It was from the care, she thought. At Stebbings, she had not had time to spend ten minutes brushing her hair, to have it washed every week at the hairdresser’s, Luigi, Parruchiere, to have her nails done, to cream and massage her face, have her clothes pressed by Giulietta before each wearing. It was all these, but most of all it was in Rob’s love-making. ‘What would you say, my scornful little son,’ she wanted to say to Hugh now, ‘if you knew I had just been kissed from my heels to my head?’ But Hugh knew more than that. Hectically he knew everything, and he groaned. He took the thermometer out again and said, ‘Where did you get that dressing-gown?’
‘At Fortnum’s. I paid thirty guineas for it. Put that thermometer back.’ Fanny seemed driven to try to be provocative, as if Hugh were a man too.
‘I oughtn’t to have bought it,’ she said almost automatically, but she did not look in the least repentant; she looked radiant thought Hugh.
He scowled, but Fanny was impervious that morning, even to him. She was sealed away, into what may be a secret, she could have said, a happy secret. It was in her step, the curve of her cheek, the way she could not help breaking into a smile.
After the reconciliation with Rob – and it was almost worth quarrelling for that – Fanny, brushing her hair, had happened to pick up her diary and idly look at its markings. She had lost track of the days, and weeks, thought Fanny, startled. Weeks. She was two weeks overdue – two weeks and two days, and she laid down her brush in the stillness of all women in the moment of first suspicion. But it can’t be, she thought, I am too old. It’s eleven years since Caddie. It’s just this new life … but a wild hope insisted: I am always regular, most healthy people are. Sixteen days is a long time.
She had said nothing to Rob – it’s far too early yet, give it another month and then I must see Doctor Isella – but every moment since, everywhere she went, she felt as if she were holding some precious excitement, holy and secret.
Hugh lay flat in the bed and could have ground the thermometer between his teeth as he looked at her.
When she bent to take it out he could not help noticing the swell of her breasts, the warm white of her neck, that neck Rob had touched, thought Hugh. He shut his eyes, but it was no use shutting them; he could see Rob’s hand, petting her, thought Hugh in fury. Even when he refused to look at her, she seemed to spill scent, a fragrance he did not remember.
‘When did you start using scent?’ he growled.
‘In London,’ said Fanny lightly. ‘Don’t you like it?’
‘It makes me feel sick. Go away.’
‘But, darling, I must make your bed.’
‘I can make it myself.’ He meant his voice to be gruff but it squeaked an octave higher which made him furious.
‘Don’t be silly. I must make you comfortable.’ But he had lifted his head, his eyes glaring banefully under locks of hair that hung down over his face where he had been screwing his head into the pillow. He looks savage, she thought.
‘Can’t I have anything private?’
To be private, at this moment, was all he asked, but even his thoughts were no longer private.
Raymond of the photographs at school was only one year older than Hugh, but, if one could believe him, years older in experience. Hugh had covered his own ignorance by refusing to subscribe to Raymond’s talk. ‘Obscene little chap, isn’t he?’ he said, which earned him some admiration, but Raymond was not stupid; he was only in a class below his age because he was untidy and did not choose to work, and his descriptions were vivid. Up to now, Hugh had simply looped round them in his mind; he acknowledged them but would not let Raymond throw him off balance. Now, set off by Rob and Fanny, Raymond seemed to have entered into Hugh, to be in full control. ‘I didn’t know what it would be like seeing her with him,’ he could have moaned.
His imagination seem
ed to have become independent, as now and again his body dismayingly became: My … parts, thought Hugh, shrinking. They behaved in an unwarrantable fashion. I can’t go out among people any more, he thought in panic.
‘No fever,’ said Fanny briskly. ‘Get up while I make your bed.’
‘In my thin pyjamas!’ Never! Never! Never! thought Hugh.
‘Hugh, don’t be absurd. I’m your mother.’
‘That’s why. That’s why,’ he could have cried in agony.
Ostensibly he was better; the fever and pain had gone but a bad taste was in his mouth and, as often after food poisoning, his skin and head felt tender; they hurt if they were touched, but a worse hurt was in him; he saw his mind as black, spongy, soaking up, ‘Even what isn’t there,’ he could have cried. Over and over again he saw Rob’s hand on Fanny’s neck. Why that should have made such an impression on him he did not know. Over and over again, too, he told himself, ‘There was nothing to it.’ It was no more than affection, but that was not true. Hugh was quick now, alive to Rob and Fanny. That ordinary simple gesture of loving might have been fire for what had come out of it; it had seared Hugh’s brain and mind. Phrases he had never noticed seemed like signposts now, words that made Raymond snigger. In Hamlet, the last school play – McIndoe, the English master, believed in unexpurgated versions – ‘paddling in her neck,’ Raymond had said with glee. ‘Paddling in her neck for a pair of reechy kisses.’ What was reechy? Hugh did not know but he had that hot shiver again. What made it worse was that he was beginning to have a liking and respect for Rob. Hugh, as well as Caddie, had thought of grown people as shades, uninteresting, middle-aged – anyone from twenty-five to fifty, for Hugh, was middle-aged. After that they were simply old, out-used; Mr Mclndoe, at school, perhaps was different, he had sense, but Rob was more than different. He made Hugh feel, for the first time, not inferior but ill equipped; as if there were, after all, some sense in growing older, working, learning; that he, Hugh, was not completed. But I used to be complete, he thought, and he saw himself, Hugh Clavering, all of one piece, light, sure, agile, quicker than anyone else he knew. Now he was in pieces. Rob, too, made him pity Darrell. Darrell, his father, was pitiable and Hugh resented that; he was ashamed, too, of what he thought of as Darrell’s feebleness. If Rob had talked to Hugh of tournaments, he would have understood. ‘Father couldn’t keep her.’ Somewhere in Hugh was a feeling that a woman should be subjugated, even if you had to beat her, and now, because of circumstances, Darrell was letting them stay with the enemy. Grown people were strangely puny, strangely blind. ‘For a fortnight, more. Isn’t that lovely,’ said Fanny.
