China Court

by Rumer Godden

  ‘Then why do you mind?’

  ‘It hurts,’ but Mrs Quin does not say that to Bella or anyone else. ‘It sears’ would be nearer the truth; each time Bella plays this tune, the silly lilting tune – ‘If you’re in love with somebody, Happy and lucky somebody …’ – she hears it again, not tinkled out on the piano or sung, but played by a band, ‘Yes, here at China Court a band, a dance when …’ but Mrs Quin refuses to think of it.

  There are war songs that wound too: ‘Sergeant of the Line’ and ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’ in the Boer War. Borowis is killed at Paardeberg, ‘but for me he had already gone,’ says Mrs Quin. ‘It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary’ is played by a brass band as she watches John Henry marching away with his draft on the way to France; ‘There’s a Long, Long Trail’ and ‘Little Grey Home in the West’ belong to that time too and in 1939 there is another band playing ‘Roll Out the Barrel …’ with again the beginning of dread, this time for Stace.

  Why is there so little of Stace in the house? Mrs Quin’s heart has always cried that. Why? ‘Because he was hardly ever here,’ she says. ‘He was always away.’ Is it John Henry’s doing, or is it simply the pattern of a little boy of that time, of that kind? She never knows, but when she tries to think of Stace, remember him, John Henry is always in the way. Perhaps that is her punishment. Then does John Henry know? He never says and she never asks him, dares not ask, though she has always been able to say anything to John Henry; but it is he who, six months after Stace is born, plans the trip to Cape Town and Johannesburg to see the mines – St Probus is a mining village – and Stace is handed over to trained starched McCann. ‘You will visit the nursery once a day, ma’am, and that at my time,’ and the round-headed rosy baby disappears. He comes back for a year or two as the enchanting small boy in the portrait in her room, but in a moment, it seems to Mrs Quin, there is school, the dreadful system that snatches little boys away from their mothers and turns them into bony objectionable small monsters. ‘But you must not show feeling,’ says Mrs Quin, ‘not even if he is unhappy at school, nor when public school takes him and changes him completely.’ She tries to be scrupulously fair; the girls are given as much as or more than Stace. Remembering Eliza, Mrs Quin insists that they go to boarding schools, and finishing schools abroad, are trained, and have coming-out dances, yet there is no mistaking where her heart is. ‘But what is the use of having a heart?’ she would have asked; for Stace, after school there is Sandhurst, then the army, then marriage, then death. He is killed on the beach at Anzio in 1944.

  Sometimes, in February, come rare days warm and still enough for April, when primroses, celandines, and crocuses that have bent to batterings of rain and sleet stand up in shining and confident colours. The garden is full of birds, the first bees find the catkins and palm buds swell; Mrs Quin is out all day, nor will she lose time by coming in so that Cecily follows her around with a tray. ‘I can’t stop,’ says Mrs Quin. ‘At this time of year it will be dark by five o’clock.’

  ‘Nine hours’ gardening is too much at your age,’ says Cecily unmoved. ‘Sit down and eat,’ but on this February Tuesday of 1944, Cecily is away for the day and Mrs Quin has been gardening unchecked when, in the afternoon, she looks up from the clump of Japanese anemone shoots she is weeding and sees the vicar and Mr Throckmorton, the schoolmaster, walking up the drive.

  The combination of vicar and schoolmaster tells her at once and without words what they have come to bring her. In the village they would know she is alone and the postmaster would not send a telegram like that by the postman or a boy. She would have preferred it to come as usual. ‘The envelope would have been enough,’ says Mrs Quin.

  For a moment she stays where she is, and slowly picks a snowdrop from where it has seeded itself among the stems of the young anemones. She has plenty of snowdrops picked already for there are hundreds out in the dell; she has put a bowl of them in the morning room, but she picks this solitary one now and smells it, her fingers trembling; it smells, very faintly, of honey, but more of cold wet earth and holly, from the old leaves that have blown over the clump.

  Then she stands up. Her knees are stiff with kneeling in the cold, and, as Cecily has warned her often enough, rheumatic pains have started in them. Her tweed skirt bulges at the knees and she is wearing her disgraceful old jerkin – Bella says it is not fit to be seen – two scarves, woollen stockings, and leather boots caked with mud, while her old gardening gloves are two sizes too big. ‘Proper o’ scarecraw,’ Groundsel would have said, but Groundsel is not there that afternoon either; he is on Home Guard duty. No one familiar is near her and, quite alone, she waits for the vicar and Mr Throckmorton to come up to her; she feels wisps of hair blowing across her face and cold gripping her heart.

  As they tell her, she fixes her eyes on the snowdrop, minutely looking at the three green-edged petals, the tiny stamens. It is the schoolmaster who speaks; the vicar is the new young man she has not met yet and obviously it is only a sense of duty that has brought him. Well, duty can be very kind, thinks Mrs Quin. As the words are spoken, though she is expecting them, the snowdrop seems to burn itself into her brain. The pain is so intense that she has to close her eyes against it, but it burns through the lids. Stace! She gives a strange little gasp and the young vicar puts his hand on her arm.

  Mrs Quin opens her eyes. The snowdrop has gone; she has dropped it; there is only the sun-filled day and the two faces regarding her anxiously. ‘Thank you,’ says Mrs Quin politely, and because it is afternoon she asks, ‘Will you stay and have some tea?’

  The faces look shocked. It is the young vicar who recovers first. ‘It is we who should make tea for you. Or perhaps you would like a little brandy.’

  Mrs Quin is silent while they watch her; then she says abruptly – the vicar does not know yet that it is her way – ‘In that case I had better go on gardening.’

  She does not know how long they stay after that. She has no inkling that she has been unconventional, perhaps even ungrateful and rude; she simply gardens on, carefully freeing the suffocated anemones, clearing away the dead prickly leaves, snipping dead stems, picking out stones, which are always a nuisance in the China Court garden. She does not feel it when the sun goes down, though the garden grows very cold, and Sophonisba – the spaniel before Bumble – noses her to go in; Sophonisba likes her comforts, but Mrs Quin takes no notice. At times the snowdrop comes back, and Mr Throckmorton’s words; she can feel them beating in her head.

  Cecily finds her when it is almost dark. Without a word, she takes away the gardening fork and helps Mrs Quin to her feet, when her knees hurt so agonizingly that she cries out. Cecily helps her to the house and takes off her boots and gloves; and presently, when the fire is making its full noise in the kitchen, Mrs Quin has tea, laced with brandy.

  Afterward Cecily puts her to bed; she offers no sympathy; her face is as grim as Mrs Quin’s and they hardly talk, only, as Cecily brings the old stone hot-water bottle wrapped in flannel to put against Mrs Quin’s ice-cold feet, ‘I don’t have a bottle,’ says Mrs Quin.

  ‘You will have one tonight,’ says Cecily and before she leaves the room she comes and stands by the bed. ‘I think you should ask Mrs Barbara to send you the child,’ says Cecily.

  It happens to suit Barbara well; she has been offered her first real part in a picture, ‘How did she get that?’ asks Walter. ‘I can guess how,’ says Bella. The picture is to be made in Mexico and Tracy is getting too big to trundle around, and thin, nervous, and shamefully backward at her lessons. Tracy is sent over to China Court, ‘and to stay,’ says Mrs Quin, but the picture is disappointing – ‘Disappointing! A disaster,’ says Bella – Barbara gets no more parts, and decides to marry again and wants Tracy back and, ‘That was the third time I was stricken,’ says Mrs Quin.

  ‘Memory is the only friend of grief’ – Alice, the village girl who comes as maid-companion to Tracy, writes that on one of the tombstones she designs. Alice likes to draw tombstones for all the peopl
e she knows and Tracy colours them from her paint-box. ‘Memory is the only friend of grief,’ writes Alice. Tracy shows it to Mrs Quin, who says it is not true.

  Even when one is stricken, much remains – often creature things: drinking good tea from a thin porcelain cup; hot baths; the smell of a wood fire; the warmth of firelight and candlelight. The sound of a stream can be consolation, thinks Mrs Quin, or the shape of a tree; even stricken, she can enjoy those. To hold a skeleton leaf, see its structure, can safely lift one away from grief for a moment, marvelling; and sunrises help, she thinks, though sunsets are dangerous, and moon and stars; they stir too much. Shells are safe, and birds and most little animals, kittens or foals especially, for they are not sentimental. Dogs sometimes know too much, though it is then, after Tracy, that she gets a new puppy, Bumble. ‘I have been happy in food,’ Mrs Quin is able to say. How ridiculous to find consolation in food, but it is true, and when one is taking those first steps back, bruised and wounded, one can read certain books: Hans Christian Andersen, and the Psalms, Jane Austen, a few other novels. Helped by those things, life reasserts itself, as it must, even when one knows one will be stricken again: Tracy, Stace, Borowis, those are her private deepest names.

  ‘But what was Borowis like?’ asks Tracy in one of her many times of asking.

  ‘His hair was cut round in what they called a pudding-basin cut,’ says Mrs Quin one day, but it cannot have been; Borowis is thirteen when she first sees him and boys of thirteen do not have their hair cut like that. It must be the ‘Boy with the Hoop’ in the Benjamin West – one of Lady Patrick’s family pictures – who has that pudding-basin cut, but Borowis? It is strange that Mrs Quin cannot remember, although she can describe every line of John Henry, from the pale slow heavy little boy to the pale slow heavy young man, ‘unfailingly kind and steadfast, once he had made up his mind,’ says Mrs Quin.

  John Henry does not make it up quickly, not even as a small boy. Soon after they know her, Ripsie begs to be allowed to say she lives at China Court. ‘You can’t, because you don’t,’ says John Henry.

  ‘She can if she wants.’ Borowis is grandly generous.

  ‘Want or not, Mother would never allow it.’

  It is odd that it is John Henry, not Borowis, who has to fight that particular battle.

  ‘But Borowis was the eldest. He should have had China Court,’ objects Barbara in her short time with Mrs Quin.

  ‘The eldest – technically.’ As soon as she has said that Mrs Quin knows it is not the right word and sure enough Barbara pounces.

  ‘What do you mean, technically?’

  ‘He never grew up,’ says Mrs Quin groping, and then, suddenly, she can exactly describe him. ‘He stayed young and cruel.’

  ‘You loved him,’ says Barbara at once.

  Mrs Quin looks up and sees that Barbara’s eyes are filled with pity and – liking? asks Mrs Quin surprised. Perhaps not liking but kinship; in this moment they are not the daughter-in-law who has wounded the son, the mother-in-law who sits in judgment, but two women who have loved and know how to love.

  ‘You loved him, yet you married John Henry.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Mrs Quin and she adds in justification, ‘John Henry had the house.’

  ‘I think that’s sad,’ says Barbara.

  ‘Sad and glad,’ says Mrs Quin.

  How can something be sad and glad at the same time? For most of the Quin women, it has been like that. ‘All unhappiness,’ says Mrs Quin, ‘as you live with it, becomes shot through with happiness; it cannot help it; and all happiness, I suppose, is shot through with unhappiness. But I was usually happy,’ says Mrs Quin. ‘I had Stace and the garden. There were times when I didn’t remember Borowis for years.’

  Adza is happy because it never occurs to her to be anything else, though she is troubled by the strange egretlike children that she has produced – not swans, egrets, those outlandish birds with the coveted feathers. Perhaps Adza is obtuse; it certainly never occurs to her that Eliza is sharp-tongued and restless because she is bitterly unhappy, but then Adza has never been bitter in her life.

  Eliza, in the end, finds happiness of a peculiar, but to her, satisfactory, kind. No one knows what Anne finds, for Anne is always the same until she springs her surprise: to the end she is quiet and withdrawn as a shadow, if a shadow can be pale gold. Damaris is not happy at China Court, she is blissful. Jared, her dark brother, marries the happy young Lady Patrick and makes her unhappiest of all.

  It is Mr Fitzgibbon who sees the first signs. On the young couple’s first morning at China Court, Jared takes Lady Patrick to look over the quarry, ‘and believe me, I have never seen anyone as lovely,’ says Mr Fitzgibbon. It is beauty that no one can deny, as they cannot deny beauty to a tree in blossom, or to an April sky or a pearl. ‘Yes, a beautiful woman,’ says Mr Fitzgibbon. ‘Now I have seen her I know I have never seen another,’ and, ‘No wonder her father was furious.’

  Beside her Jared’s good looks seem flamboyant. ‘Well, she is another clay,’ as he says himself when he is penitent.

  ‘An earl’s daughter?’ asks Adza when Jared’s first letter comes. ‘How can Jared marry her?’

  ‘An Irish earl,’ says Eustace, trying to keep his head level, but this is not the sort of Irishness Eustace, and most other Englishmen, think they know.

  Jared pretends he knows. ‘My little Patrick,’ says Jared introducing her. He has called her that from the beginning and the name sticks. He thinks it is amusing; her family does not. ‘Arragh! They are a feckless lot, these Patricks,’ says Jared in what he thinks is Irish speech, whereas the Clonferts – the Clonferts of Clonfert and Brandan Abbey, Brandan with an a, not an o – are as aloof and rigidly cold as they are rich. ‘Narrow and noble,’ says Harry St Omer. ‘And we do not say, “Arragh,”’ they might have said, but Jared persists in saying they do. He is almost as obtuse as Adza. ‘Why did she marry Jared?’ asks Eliza, amazed.

  Jared has only to look in the glass to know the reason why. He is the youngest son and, after little Eustace dies and Mcleod the Second goes to China, the only son at China Court and he is quite amazingly spoiled. He goes to Rugby with Harry St Omer, then to Oxford, where he is ‘very well breeched,’ says Jared, not in Lady Patrick’s sense of the words, which means estates, even half a county, very well breeched for China Court. ‘But an earl’s daughter!’ says Adza dazed.

  She does not live to see it, and Eustace has had a stroke and handed over the quarry and works to his son before she comes, because Jared has to wait for his Lady Patrick to grow up; she is still only eighteen when she runs away with him. They are married before her father and family can stop them.

  ‘But they will forgive me.’ She is so happy and confident that she is sure no one can resist her. No one, ‘But they did, damn them!’ says Jared.

  They write and the unkindness of those letters still stings the air. ‘You have married out of your kind and out of your faith. I do not think you can come here again …’

  ‘You have put one of God’s creatures before God.’

  ‘You have chosen your bed. You need not ask us to help you out of it.’

  And Lady Patrick’s quivering pride writes back:

  ‘We shall never come.’

  ‘I love him better than I love God.’

  ‘I like my bed.’

  They are young phrases but she is very young. All the younger and fresher, thinks Mr Fitzgibbon, almost naïve because she has been cloistered and strictly kept. She is as unspoiled as her complexion. ‘Like a rose,’ says Mr Fitzgibbon, who over Lady Patrick is unashamedly sentimental. ‘Like a wild rose.’ Mrs Quin says that too.

  In the summer of 1920, a mouse dies behind the wardrobe in her and John Henry’s bedroom. The weather is so hot that Sam Quin from the village – a village Quin – has to be sent for at once to unscrew the big cupboard with its bevelled looking glasses and flowered china drawer knobs. ‘A fancy piece,’ says Sam.

  It is fancy. Fresh from Dublin and Lon
don, Lady Patrick turns out the bedroom furniture of which Adza is so proud and brings in the luxurious French bed with its brass love knots and wreaths, the gilt-legged chairs with their damask in blue and old rose, the wallpaper striped with tiny roses – peeling now – the grey carpet and white rugs, that match the white curtains embroidered with ferns. The French furniture does not suit the room, nor the house, but it is pretty, the whole room inviting, especially the bed as Lady Patrick first has it, with a pale-blue satin quilt and white muslin pillowcases. Mrs Quin has a honeycomb counterpane and a Paisley shawl.

  There is a narrow space between the cupboard and the wall behind it, not much more than a crack. Stace, as a little boy, pushes marbles into it and cannot get them back. Now Sam finds the marbles and a picture. He dusts it and brings it to Mrs Quin.

  ‘Who is it?’ asks Mrs Quin. John Henry looks, uncertainly at first, then more certainly, and, ‘It must be Mother,’ he says.

  ‘Your mother? Lady Patrick? Did Lady Patrick look like that?’ and Mrs Quin remembers the hard face, the eyes that were icily unfriendly, the mouth that could say such unkind things, even to a little girl. ‘That brat is not to come into the front of the house.’ ‘Who said you could play here?’ and, pointing a whip to the groom, ‘Mason, put that child outside the gate.’ Mrs Quin looks at the delicate painting in the gilt frame and it is then that she says what Mr Fitzgibbon says, ‘But she’s like a wild rose.’

  The picture is pushed out of sight behind the wardrobe. ‘I wonder why,’ says John Henry. ‘She didn’t sleep here. The Porch Room was hers. Ever since I can remember.’

  ‘Then what happened?’ asks Mrs Quin. She never knows; it is before Ripsie is born.

  ‘Even on that first morning,’ says Mr Fitzgibbon, ‘only a day back from their honeymoon, as they were talking to me …’

  Mr Fitzgibbon meets them on the drive. Lady Patrick holds Jared’s arm; it is as if she does not want to let him go, even for a second. Her dress, Mr Fitzgibbon remembers, is olive-green, faintly barred with pink; her head, and here he is a little shocked, is bare; she is only walking up to the quarry but no other China Court lady would go out of the house without a bonnet or hat. To make up for this she has a ridiculous rose-coloured parasol, ‘the size of a postage stamp,’ he teases in the privileged way of an old family manager, and all the time he cannot help seeing the way her hand tightens, loosens, tightens on Jared’s arm; the little movement is such a private caress that Mr Fitzgibbon turns away his eyes.