China Court

by Rumer Godden

  When Barbara, the daughter-in-law, takes Tracy back to America and Mrs Quin and Cecily are left alone, the girls do their best to make her leave China Court: Bella and her husband Walter, and Mrs Quin’s three other daughters and their Toms, Dicks, and Harrys, as she calls their husbands for she cannot keep up with them any more than with Barbara’s, they all try to make her give up the house. ‘It has had its day,’ says Walter. ‘It’s time it went.’

  ‘Yes. It’s ridiculous, Mother, you living all alone in that great house.’

  ‘It isn’t a great house. It’s only big.’

  ‘But all alone,’ they say.

  ‘I’m not alone. I have Cecily, Bumble, August, Moses, Trill.’

  ‘But it has no amenities.’

  ‘I don’t want amenities.’

  ‘If you sold it, even as it is now, you could have a much bigger income and a comfortable little flat.’

  ‘I don’t like comfortable little flats.’

  ‘You would be far more free,’ says Bella.

  ‘I don’t wish to be free. Even in this generation,’ says Mrs Quin, her voice disagreeable, ‘a few people do not wish to be free of their house.’

  ‘If they can afford to keep it,’ says Walter. ‘Seriously, in rates and taxes alone—’

  ‘The farm rent pays the rates and taxes.’

  ‘When, and if, you get it.’ That is a thrust and Mrs Quin knows it; the farm, Penbarrow, is let to Peter St Omer and, ‘that young man has got hold of Mother,’ says Bella darkly.

  Penbarrow is all that is left of the China Court estate; John Henry has to sell the quarry to pay off the debts he inherits, and after Stace is killed, Mrs Quin sells the china-clay works and makes a settlement on each of her daughters. It is they who insist she keep Penbarrow, ‘and a lot of good it’s been,’ says Walter. To begin with, she will not turn out the old tenant farmer who has been there for sixty years and is long past farming. ‘Let him die in peace,’ says Mrs Quin.

  ‘And kill the farm,’ says Walter. Over the next tenant he prefers to gloss, ‘because it was his mistake, not mine,’ says Mrs Quin with asperity. Walter persuades her to put in an up-to-date farmer, ‘thoroughly go-ahead,’ says Walter. ‘A college man,’ who spends so much on what Mrs Quin calls gadgets that he goes bankrupt. She refuses after this to lease Penbarrow to the rich gentleman-farmer Walter has patiently found again. ‘Lease it or, better, sell,’ urges Walter, but Mrs Quin will not listen. ‘It would have helped him with his income tax,’ mourns Walter, ‘so that he could have afforded a decent price, which Peter St Omer certainly can’t.’

  ‘No. Peter doesn’t pay any tax because he hasn’t any income,’ says Mrs Quin calmly. She is calm about Peter; she believes in him.

  From her bedroom window she can look over the garden and valley, with its hidden river, to the farm which is so much on the skyline of the opposite hill that its animals often seem to be grazing against the sky. She can look and ‘mark carefully,’ says Mrs Quin. She has marked very carefully, but she does not tell Bella and Walter her findings: that for these four years Peter has worked five hours a day every day for the old farmer at Glentyre, ‘to learn,’ says Peter; that she has heard the tractor working at dawn and again by its headlamp or moonlight far into the night. She has watched Peter build up his stock of chickens and pigs; now that at last he has been able to rebuild the old cowsheds, she has seen the beginning of his herd and, all this summer, as soon as she wakes, and she wakes early, she hears him calling his cows.

  The cows have proper cow names: Clover, Buttercup, Daisy, Poppy, Parsley, which strangely satisfies Mrs Quin, but, ‘If Peter has no income, how did he buy those valuable cows?’ asks Walter.

  Mrs Quin pretends not to hear, but Walter asks it again. ‘Perhaps his father helped him,’ she suggests innocently.

  ‘Nonsense. St Omer hasn’t a penny,’ says Walter.

  The St Omers are scattered now, their town house sold and all their cottages and farms, while Tremellen, their Cornish seat, is leased as a girls’ school. Tremellen is the one great house of the district; Bella is exaggerating when she calls China Court ‘great’; it is a family house, ample and plain.

  It must have looked very plain, quite uncompromising, when it is first built. It is a granite house; naturally, granite is the local stone; only the rich landed families, the St Omers as they once were, can afford to have bricks carried inland to build the turreted hideousness of a new Tremellen in 1850, and China Court’s granite has the added advantage of being cut in Eustace Quin’s own quarry.

  The house stands square to the valley; behind it, the quarry hill rises steeply to the village that lies along the spine of the hill, its houses built low against the moor wind. The hill shelters the China Court garden from those same winds when they whistle over the moor, though it is open to the west and the Atlantic gales.

  The hill is steep and a steep lane runs down it, dividing China Court in two: its orchards and stable block are on the far side and there too is the waterfall, a fall of perhaps twenty feet, its pool choked with rubbish from the quarry above. The stream runs on beneath the land and comes out under the China Court gate making, when the rain swells the water, a loud rushing sound in the darkness below. There is a grating over it so that the gardeners can get down to clear the channel when it is blocked with leaves; the youngest ones of the Brood – that first batch of China Court children – will never go over the grating alone. They quake and wait for their nurse, Polly.

  ‘Why are you so silly?’ asks their mother. ‘What is there to be afraid of?’

  ‘The zeal,’ they say, their eyes round.

  ‘The zeal? What zeal?’ but Polly has diagnosed it. ‘Eliza has been frightening them again,’ she says.

  Eliza has been frightening them, ‘deliberately,’ says Polly. Eliza, second eldest of the Brood and far older than any of them in cleverness, has been learning the Psalms and, ‘The zeal of mine house has eaten them up. Eaten them up. Eaten you up,’ chants Eliza, terrifying her small brothers and sisters.

  The hill is steep and the garden, willy-nilly, is steep too, sloping above and below the house. ‘I’m always grateful,’ says Mrs Quin, ‘that there is nowhere level that is large enough to hold the village fête.’

  ‘You could have it on the drive.’ Bella is more civic-minded than her mother. ‘If you did away with the rhododendrons there would be room.’

  The drive runs from the gate to make a loop round an island of rhododendrons. ‘Not an island, a fort,’ says Mrs Quin and indeed, when they are in flower, red, white, and pink, the clumps look like battlemented walls, bristling. ‘Rhododendrons are always militant,’ says Mrs Quin.

  At the side of the house, and standing there long before it, the elms, rook-inhabited, rise higher than the slates; when the wind is from the west, that Atlantic wind, the elms make a sound in the house like the sound of the sea.

  The rooms are ample, too; the drawing room runs the width of the house from front to back and needs two fireplaces to warm it. ‘Central heating,’ says Bella longingly, but there is no money for that. A great deal of money has been spent; Eustace, for instance, builds on a conservatory that does not match the house at all; Mrs Quin pulls it down. Eustace adds the nursery wing; Lady Patrick makes new stables, but now, for years, little even of repairs and painting has been done. ‘It’s too expensive,’ insists Bella. ‘Too big.’

  Even the hall is spacious, flagstoned, with a stone fireplace and granite kerb. The stairs are wide and also of stone. A passage leads past morning and dining rooms to the big kitchen wing, from which the back stairs go up to the nurseries with, at their top, a white gate that has a catch too high to be reached by adventurous toddlers. A comfortable smell of cooking, of wet wool drying, of hot starched linen always hangs about those stairs.

  A green baize door shuts off the kitchen wing and its noise from the main house, but, before it is reached and opposite the dining room, is a small arched door opening into the office, which has anothe
r outside door so that Jeremy Baxter, Eustace’s clerk, and later Mr Fitzgibbon, his works manager, can come and go without disturbing the house. It is a real office, overflowing with files, papers, and deed-boxes, and has a safe and a copying machine; in 1850 Eustace buys, in one lot from a Penzance sale, a great bookcase with more than four hundred books and for a little while the office becomes the library, but nobody in the family ever sits or reads there and it soon becomes the office again. It was here that Mr Alabaster had been installed the week before Mrs Quin died, ‘and very glad I am that he was,’ said Cecily. ‘He sent all the telegrams.’

  ‘Perhaps I should go,’ Mr Alabaster said. ‘Yet, under the circumstances, I might be doubly useful. Perhaps I had better stay.’

  The best rooms upstairs look over the garden; the big bedroom, where Mrs Quin lies now, is first Eustace’s and his bride, Adza’s; in the dressing room beside it are his wardrobes, shoe stand, and mahogany shaving mirror, but Adza’s furniture is gone. The spare room with two brass-knobbed beds is next door and there are lesser rooms named in colours, the Yellow, the Red, the smaller Brown, and the White, and a room known as the Porch because it is over the front door, though that has no porch. The one bathroom is big and inconvenient, with a mahogany-edged bathtub set into the floor. The nursery bathes in a tin tub shaped like a flowerpot saucer but with a lip; it is painted white inside once a year by the knife-boy – when there is a knife-boy – and a favourite nursery bath pastime is to peel bits of the white enamel off when it has become softened in hot water.

  In the time of the Brood, Polly carries all that hot water up herself, for seven children. It is Lady Patrick who insists on the bathroom. The bath, then, is filled with cold water overnight and every morning the boys, her sons, Borowis and John Henry, have to plunge in. ‘Damned cruelty,’ says Borowis. He cheats, but John Henry faithfully goes through with it.

  Until John Henry’s time there is no downstairs cloakroom except in the servants’ wing, and apart from that only one lavatory, dark and big with a wide mahogany seat and willow-pattern pan; when its plug is pulled the noise echoes through the house.

  The maids sleep two by two in attic rooms, excepting the cook, who always has a room to herself. Now the attics are shut; for a long time Cecily has occupied the Brown Room. Kitchen and laundry maids have always come in daily from the village, but the knife-boy sleeps in a cubbyhole in what was a cupboard below the pantry; his trestle bed is still there, folded up. ‘Then someone slept here?’ said Tracy as a grown-up, appalled.

  The house is so much on the slope of the hill that below the kitchen is plenty of space for a big larder with slated shelves, a storeroom, the laundry, and coal and wine cellars.

  There is neither gas nor electricity, but the drains are well laid; the water, soft and sometimes brown, comes from the moors and is heated by the Eagle range which, as Bella says, eats coal; indeed Eustace arranges for a ton of coal to be delivered from the works each Saturday morning and the custom stays for years; since the war Mrs Quin has only one fire in the morning room, an oil stove in her bedroom, another in the hall. The drawing room is too big to heat at all in winter but in summer she goes back to it again; she loves the long room, with its cabinets of famille rose porcelain, jade, and family bric-a-brac, its pale darned chintzes, split damask, and paintings, ‘two Benjamin Wests and a Winterhalter,’ says Mrs Quin.

  The Winterhalter is over one fireplace, the mantel kept bare; but on the other is a French clock in gilt with an enamelled cupid, holding blue ribbons. Each side of it is a Chelsea figure, a shepherd and shepherdess that the child Tracy loves; she calls them the Pale Blue Girl and the Little Pink Boy and pretends they are hers. One window looks down the drive onto the rhododendrons; the other over the garden to the west; it is by this one that Mrs Quin likes to sit.

  It is an unruly Cornish garden, sloped, with granite rocks and steep paths dark with yews, its beds tangled with flowers. Cornish gardens are famous for their flowers – half Mrs Quin’s neighbours in the big houses live by selling theirs, specializing in Parma violets, arum lilies, mimosa, rhododendrons, ‘but not your mother,’ says Walter to Bella sarcastically. ‘Nothing half as useful.’

  ‘A garden isn’t meant to be useful. It’s for joy,’ says Mrs Quin. To watch her among her flowers is, as John Henry her husband says, like watching a scholar in his library who, as he talks, goes to one shelf or another, pulling out a book to show, to brood over, or to read from. Mrs Quin, each time she comes in from the garden, has a leaf, a flower, or a bud in her hand: a berry with a spider’s web, seeds that she will put in saucers on the windowsills, a spray of bergamot to smell, or a new African day lily of which someone has sent her a root that autumn; sometimes it is an especially well-formed rose, or a tendril of bryony. ‘You are like the householder in the Bible,’ says Cecily.

  ‘The householder?’ asks Mrs Quin puzzled, but Cecily, being chapel, is well versed in texts and cannot be shaken. ‘The householder which bringeth forth out of his treasure things old and new.’

  Mrs Quin likes that; her garden is her treasure; she refuses to commercialize it and at China Court the azaleas, unexploited, are left to shimmer on their banks with the tree peonies, with roses, iris, lilies, and poppies bursting their buds; delphiniums, larkspurs, lilacs, while along the drive edge to the gate are hydrangeas, deep blue and as tall as trees.

  The house date is under the passionflower that has ramped over the front door as other creepers have done over the garden front and side walls, softening their outline and weathering the granite, while lichen and house leek – and rook droppings – have coloured, or discoloured, the roof.

  To how many children has Mrs Quin explained the passionflower? Breaking one off and, because she knows very well the added value given to things by having to wait for them – ‘I waited years,’ she could have said – she keeps the flower in her own hand as she tells the story. ‘The passionflower stays open for three days, because it was three days before Christ rose again; its whiteness is for purity, its blue for heaven. See here’ – and she points to the leaf – ‘is the spear, and here, the five anthers are the five wounds.’ The tendrils are the whips and cords; the stamens, hammer-shaped, are the hammers; the three styles, the nails. ‘And here’ – she touches the threads – ‘is the wreath of thorns, and the fringe, so gaudy on the calyx, is the glory of the nimbus.’ Then she gives the flower to the child.

  To how many children does she tell that? She never knows, but always, below the creeper, she seems to see children’s heads.

  The last child at China Court is Tracy, not counting the evacuees from London in the war. Mrs Quin has a fellow feeling with the evacuees – she was once Ripsie – but they do not stay long. There is little modern drainage in St Probus; the school has only one room and the evacuees are taken away. Nor does she count her other grandchildren: ‘They are not Quins,’ says Mrs Quin. To her Tracy is the only grandchild, the last child at China Court, ‘as far as I know,’ says Mrs Quin.

  ‘I’m not interested in girls.’ She has always said that. Indeed, John Henry has a story that each time he goes in to ask his wife what the newest girl baby is to be called, she absently answers ‘Grace.’ The story is not true, but Bella’s younger sisters are always known as the Three Little Graces.

  Long long ago, Borowis decides to pencil Ripsie’s name into the tree in the family Bible. ‘But what’s your real name?’ he asks her.

  ‘Ripsie.’

  ‘That’s not a real name. The name you were christened.’

  ‘Christened?’ asks Ripsie, mystified.

  ‘Oh, ask your mother,’ says Borowis, bored.

  Ripsie asks and it appears she was not christened. ‘Mother says it’s twaddle,’ she reports cheerfully, but Borowis and John Henry are shocked, especially John Henry. Then Borowis solves it. ‘I will take her up to the church and christen her at once.’

  ‘You will?’ asks John Henry.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In the church?’
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  ‘Yes.’

  ‘From the font?’

  ‘Why not?’ But John Henry is so plainly horrified that Borowis, who now and then listens to his younger brother, remembers that he has not yet fed his ferrets and Ripsie’s christening is put off. Her real name proves to be Deborah, but ‘Ripsie’ stays, in pencil, in the family tree.

  It is not noticed because for years nobody opens the Bible and then nobody bothers to rub the name out. When Tracy is born Mrs Quin pencils in ‘Tracy’, meaning later to put the baby’s full name in the india ink she needs to match it with the others; but the months and years slip away and the name is still in pencil when Tracy finds it: ‘Ripsie’, ‘Tracy’, the pencilling seems to make them kin, apart from the others. ‘We were truly kin,’ says Mrs Quin, and it is true that Tracy is like her grandmother in many ways: For instance both, from the moment they first see it, are enslaved by China Court. ‘Absolute fanatics,’ says Walter.

  The small Tracy is not as interested in the story of the passionflower as she is in the date over the front door, when Mrs Quin pushes aside the creeper to show it to her. ‘Eighteen forty. That is more than a hundred years ago,’ she says.

  ‘Yes,’ says Mrs Quin.

  ‘And we have been here all that time?’

  ‘The house has never changed hands.’

  ‘Hands?’ asks Tracy, startled.

  ‘Yes, hands.’ Hands to direct, to sign letters and write cheques for bills, to put a latchkey in the lock and bolt the doors at night. Other hands that hold keys too, but household keys; write notes that are dispatched, make pothooks in the top lines of copybooks, and pencil verses on canvas for samplers. These hands often write recipes: ‘Our apple jelly with lavender and rosemary flavouring.’ ‘Our duck with cherries.’ ‘Our velvet cream.’ The recipe book is still in the kitchen and Tracy’s Great-great-grandmother Adza’s velvet cream is still made on rare and especial occasions. These ladylike hands sew and knit; garden – but in gloves – play whist, leave cards, rub ointment on bruises; smooth hair back from hot foreheads, spank. There are younger, slimmer hands that embroider, and do the flowers, play the piano, cut the pages of novels, sketch – ‘and twiddle their thumbs,’ says Eliza. There are small hands, very often dirty, that pry and poke, into cupboards, work baskets, jam pots; make mud pies and cut out paper dolls; play cat’s cradle and conkers, marbles, spillikins, Snap, Happy Families, and Monopoly – no, not Monopoly, for no one has played games in China Court for a long time and Monopoly is almost modern. There are humbler deft hands that sweep and dust, wash china and clothes and linen; iron, mend, sew, cook, bake, make fires and beds, sound gongs, carry trays; and rougher hands still that chop wood, clean shoes, groom, dig, wash the motorcar, mow the lawn, ‘but all our hands,’ says Mrs Quin.