China Court

by Rumer Godden

  ‘You have him under control, my lady.’

  ‘Oh no! Not at all! He behaves monstrously!’ Her face is so radiant that Mr Fitzgibbon feels he ought not to look at it in case he intrudes; then, just at that moment, little Dorothy Gann from the village comes down the lane on her way to the laundry or the kitchen; there is not a girl in the village more slatternly than dirty little Dorothy Gann, but as she scurries past them and down the back drive, Mr Fitzgibbon sees Jared’s eyes look after her. ‘Look, and with interest, damned if he didn’t,’ says Mr Fitzgibbon. He has an insane desire to knock his handsome young employer down.

  ‘You are staying in Rome,’ said Peter to Tracy as they were finishing breakfast. Warmed and fed he was beginning to feel ashamed of his defensiveness. ‘It must be a wonderful place. What do you do there?’

  ‘Study.’ Tracy was noncommittal, but Peter persisted.

  ‘Studying what?’ And I’m curious, he thought, surprised. That was something he had vowed he would never be again.

  ‘At college I was supposed to be clever,’ said Tracy as if that were deplorable. ‘I won a grant.’

  ‘But wasn’t that something rather splendid?’ asked Peter puzzled.

  ‘Yes,’ said Tracy forlornly.

  ‘Most girls would give their eyes …’

  ‘Yes, but for me it—’ She broke off. Then, ‘I didn’t know how not to take it,’ she said.

  Peter laughed. ‘Was it so very dreadful?’

  ‘I had to write and research on literary women travellers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women like Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley.’ She seemed more than ever forlorn.

  ‘And you didn’t like that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Tracy was evasive then suddenly lucid. ‘They seemed nothing to do with me,’ she said. ‘I wanted something that was mine. I don’t like living in books. I like living,’ she said. ‘Cooking and doing the flowers and having animals.’ She slid her arm around August’s neck where the big poodle sat beside her. He had attached himself to her almost since Groundsel brought him down. ‘I expect it’s hopelessly ordinary, but I like arranging things and being responsible. There are other girls like me,’ she said as if she were arguing defiantly.

  ‘Not many nowadays.’ And Peter said, ‘I should have thought your mother would have moved heaven and earth to keep you at home,’ but Tracy shook her head.

  ‘People of her age always want you to do things. Besides, we haven’t a home, only an apartment. An apartment can be a home, but it isn’t.’ She broke off again. ‘You have a farm. That’s a real way to live, but we’ – and she drew the checked pattern of the tablecloth with her finger.

  ‘When Gran’s letter came,’ she went on slowly, ‘I thought I would stay here at China Court with her, as I used to, but for always. I guess I was thinking of myself, not of her. I had forgotten she was so old.’ She stared at the tablecloth. ‘Well’ – she gave a little shrug and straightened her shoulders – ‘I must just go back to Rome.’

  Tracy went through the house. ‘If I were blindfold,’ she told Cecily, ‘I think I should remember my way.’ For years after Barbara takes her away, Tracy shuts her eyes in bed every night and pretends she is going about China Court, upstairs and downstairs, and out in the garden where she has romped with the lemon-and-white-spangled Sophonisba – ‘Before you, Bumble,’ said Tracy now, patting his fatness – pretending she is back in the house with her grandmother and Cecily and Alice, or out in the garden with Groundsel. ‘Is Groundsel still here?’ she asked Cecily, and ‘He is!’ she cried when she found his pasty on the sill.

  ‘But only three days a week,’ said Cecily. ‘Mrs Quin had to let the garden go – almost.’ That almost was visible in the rose trees pruned, delphiniums staked, beds weeded. There were no clipped edges to the grass now, few trimmed hedges, but there were compost heaps carefully made, tools taken care of, boxes of fresh seedlings. Tracy went out, and, with August racing backward and forward in front of her, Bumble trundling behind, wandered up the paths and came on an old basket put down beside a half-weeded bed, and holding a trowel, fork, and Mrs Quin’s gardening gloves. The trowel still had earth clinging to it; Tracy knocked a little of it off and crumbled it in her fingers.

  ‘Mother killed herself in that garden,’ Bella was to say and if Mrs Quin could have answered, ‘That’s what I should have chosen to do,’ she would have said.

  On the day that Lady Patrick dies Mrs Quin comes out on the terrace and takes a deep breath. For five years she has lived in the love of John Henry, but also in the dislike of his mother; still, in Lady Patrick’s eye, is the defiance of Ripsie’s scarlet tam-o’-shanter, mysteriously an echo of the intrusion of Ann Sly. From the beginning Ripsie is an intruder to Lady Patrick.

  ‘Who said you could play here?’

  ‘Borowis.’

  ‘Who asked you to come inside?’

  ‘Borowis.’

  Ripsie does not mean it to sound impertinent, but it does. Lady Patrick can forget nothing, and even after John Henry has married Ripsie, dreads and dislikes her. ‘Now you will be able to alter everything,’ she says to her when she knows she is dying, and Mrs Quin is glad she finds the grace to reply, ‘Only in the garden. I shall touch nothing in the house.’ She keeps her word. The house is as it was, but she begins on the garden that very day.

  ‘The gravel must be moved.’

  ‘The gravel?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But it has always been there,’ says John Henry.

  ‘Not always,’ says Mrs Quin. ‘There is good earth underneath – and granite,’ she says, her eyes lighting up.

  ‘It will cost pounds.’

  Mrs Quin does not say he must give her pounds, though she can guess that many, many pounds must be coaxed out of John Henry. ‘All the money is spent on the garden and the girls,’ Stace says often and teases, ‘The girls to get rid of, the garden to keep.’ Even then Mrs Quin is wise in the handling of John Henry. The beds must be moved – not moved, wiped out, she thinks, and these garish flowers burned, and I shall take down the flagpole, but, with her hand on his arm, she says none of that aloud; she tactfully begins with the gravel.

  ‘McWhirter will never consent,’ says John Henry, thinking of the bad-tempered Scottish head gardener, and she drops another bombshell. ‘McWhirter must go.’

  John Henry is incapable of saying ‘no’ – ‘fortunately for China Court,’ says Mrs Quin. Over and over again in his married life with her he begins by saying, ‘It’s impossible,’ only to find he has done the impossible thing. Mrs Quin as a girl and a young woman is not exactly pretty, but she is ‘like no one else,’ says John Henry. Borowis is more apt than he knows when he calls her a little blackberry girl; she is not a flower, as most girls are said to be, but unmistakably a bramble; as an old woman she grows prickly and harsh. The Cornish believe in fairies and Ripsie might easily be a changeling she is so small, her skin as white as if she has ‘green blood,’ teases Borowis, though her lips are red of themselves – ‘We had no lipsticks then,’ says Mrs Quin. Her eyes have always been compelling and they are greenish too, with dark lashes. Now she looks up at John Henry; though he is not tall, her smallness makes him feel that he is and, though she is now more than well looked after – ‘cherished,’ he could have said – for him she always has the waif look that tears his heart, and he knows he is undone.

  ‘McWhirter? Why all these changes suddenly?’ he asks, but feebly.

  ‘It isn’t suddenly,’ says Mrs Quin.

  Long ago, when Mrs Quin is Ripsie, Lady Patrick sees the flash of the tam-o’-shanter and catches Ripsie in the garden where, as it is term time, she has no business to be. Lady Patrick comes right up to her before Ripsie looks up; even then her eyes are unrecognizing, vacant, as if she were somewhere – or someone – else. ‘What are you thinking about?’ asks Lady Patrick, curious in spite of herself.

  ‘Thinking how I should do it,’ says Ripsie.

  ‘But how did you
know about gardens?’ Barbara asks Mrs Quin. ‘How did you begin?’

  Mrs Quin has to look a long way back before she answers, even beyond that day with Lady Patrick. ‘It began with the grotto,’ she says, but she could more truthfully have said, ‘It began with loneliness.’

  ‘I had to have something,’ says Mrs Quin.

  When the boys have gone to school, Ripsie is a small solitary again and has nothing to do or think about. ‘It’s odd, the garden has always rescued me,’ says Mrs Quin. ‘In times when I didn’t want to think, or could not bear to, in any emptiness, there was always the garden. But it began with the grotto,’ she says.

  The grotto is built by Lily, niece of the China Court cook in Lady Patrick’s time. Lily has graciously been allowed to come from London to spend a month in the country. She is an unappetizing little girl, even thinner than Ripsie, with sharp elbows and the curiously bleached skin of the London poor; Ripsie avoids her until one day, on the drive, she sees Lily making a curious little erection.

  It is made of shells, grey-yellow and fluted, and is being built on a bed of ferns that Lily is edging with pebbles picked out of the gravel. ‘What is it?’ asks Ripsie.

  ‘A grotter,’ says Lily.

  ‘A – a grotter?’

  ‘Yus.’

  ‘What do you do with it?’

  ‘Git coppers,’ says Lily tersely.

  ‘Coppers?’

  ‘Pennies, stoopid.’

  Lily does not talk much, she works, ‘fer sumpin,’ says Lily, which means for money, but she enlightens Ripsie a little more because she wants Ripsie to help her. ‘Every year, twenty-fifth ’f July, we mikes grotters – on the pivement, see? Mike ’em pretty, see, and we gits coppers – sime as Guy Fawkes, see.’

  ‘The twenty-fifth of July? Why?’

  Lily has never heard of Saint James the Great, nor seen a statue or a painting of him carrying his palmer’s shell; she does not know why.

  Ripsie watches her fitting the shells into place. ‘Let me help,’ begs Ripsie, as Lily means her to do.

  They work all morning and Ripsie discovers she is better at this than Lily. She does not throw the ferns down carelessly, or mass them, but plants each one, letting every frond show, and sets them off with scarlet pimpernels, lady’s-slippers, and clover. ‘Yer aren’t ’alf fussy,’ says Lily.

  ‘Yes,’ says Ripsie contentedly and goes on working.

  It is almost finished when Lady Patrick comes home on Reynard, her big chestnut hunter.

  Ripsie, wary, would have chosen a more private place than the drive for the grotto, but Lily is adamant. ‘Must be where there’s people.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So’s they kin see it. It’s fer pennies, stoopid,’ but Ripsie cannot get it into her head that they are building the grotto for money; by now she is building it for love.

  Lady Patrick, coming in at the gate, is not in a good temper, and, though she wants Reynard to walk, she gives him a cut with her whip that makes him plunge. Her face, from anger and the moor wind, looks even more ravaged than usual and Ripsie, experienced, immediately makes herself small and silent, but Lily with cockney aplomb, dances up to Lady Patrick and pipes, ‘Penny f’r the grotter, milady. Penny f’r the grotter.’

  ‘Why are you children playing here?’ asks Lady Patrick and reins the snorting Reynard in so that he plunges still more. ‘Stand, damn you!’ she shouts. Then she says, ignoring Ripsie and speaking to Lily, ‘If I see you here again I shall speak to Cook,’ and swivels Reynard around so that his hind hoofs catch the grotto, scattering the shells and sending ferns and flowers flying. ‘Clear that mess away at once,’ calls Lady Patrick to a garden boy and she rides on up to the house.

  Lily puts out her tongue and dances off to the kitchen, but Ripsie has an odd feeling that the small smashed grotto is bleeding, and before the garden boy can move, she has swept it up in her coat, ‘You are not to touch it,’ she cries.

  Next day she builds another grotto, by the waterfall where nobody can see it, and then another, bigger and better, but with fewer shells, more flowers, ‘and the grotto grew into the garden,’ says Mrs Quin.

  ‘Whoever planned this one was clever,’ says Barbara.

  ‘I planned it,’ says Mrs Quin.

  ‘Then it hasn’t always been here?’

  ‘Always,’ says Mrs Quin firmly. ‘This garden was implicit in the house, that other was imposed.’

  McWhirter is dismissed, a new young gardener comes and he and later Groundsel help to make the garden. ‘A garden not dictated,’ says Mrs Quin, ‘but growing out of the land itself, with its own contours,’ not seen all in a moment but a place to explore, and a place not only of flowers but of shape and shades, beauty of foliage, of green and water.

  There are, of course, failures, ‘downright refusals,’ says Mrs Quin as with, for instance, gentians. ‘Four pounds ten shillings, and not a single flower to show for it,’ explodes John Henry. It is money spent, John Henry protests, ‘for nothing’ but, ‘Not for nothing,’ says Mrs Quin. ‘To learn.’ And she says, ‘You must remember garden catalogues are as big liars as house agents,’ but fifty years of learning does produce ‘something,’ says Mrs Quin.

  At the beginning of spring, in the garden, the flowers are pale, the blossom white, some of it so fragile as to be almost colourless; there are snowdrops, primroses, the first pale daffodils, narcissi. Then the yellow deepens with drifts of daffodils along the drive edges while the tops of the old stone walls are thick with celandines. In May, the real colours come: the strong-coloured bluebells and campions in the wood and lanes; gorse among the bracken; buttercups in the fields; and in the garden the brilliance of tulips, primulas, pink apple-blossom buds, and the richness of lilac and irises that have ‘as many colours as a peacock’s tail,’ quotes Mrs Quin. It is strange that the irises flourish where the gentians refuse – but they do, though this is a peat garden. Every May on the sloping lawn where the flagstaff has been azaleas flame higher than her head, apricot, pink, and orange, reflecting through the windows onto the walls of the drawing room inside.

  In summer the beds are like the flowered stuffs sold in shops, blue, white, and pink. The garden is filled with the scent of lilies that sometimes wins against the clove smell of the pinks, and at night there is the scent of stocks and white tobacco flowers. In late July, the great bushes of hydrangeas, blue and purple, have heads as big as dinner plates and sway across the drive if they are heavy with rain.

  Then the mixture of the borders takes a richer colour, with marigolds, begonias, and phlox of the red that is found in velvet and stained-glass windows; there are marguerites, high stacks of white flowers, taking the light as the sun moves around.

  Perhaps Mrs Quin loves the garden best in winter; then shapes are seen, shapes of bush and branch and twig, outlines of paths, humps of granite rock, broken by the darkness of the yews. Flowers are few then, doubly precious: the few leftover summer flowers that so distress Minna, a spray of winter jasmines along the walls; Christmas roses, like the breath of winter; and, full and warm, the dark-purple fragrance of daphne and sweeter still of viburnums. Sometimes in January, when the rare snow comes, the waterfall has icicles and Mrs Quin watches for the first plum blossom; if it comes into flower then, it gives the garden the look of a Japanese print. There is something grotesque in the fringe of the wood, the bare trees have twisted shapes, and the field is straw-coloured where the frost has burned the stubble; the plum trees stand up into the grey sky and on the dark branches the still white flowers unfold.

  Sometimes Mrs Quin stands marvelling at what she has done. ‘Where did I get the vision?’ she asks.

  Now Tracy, with Bumble and August, walked about the tangled garden, avoiding Groundsel by the sound of his clipping. She would have to greet him soon but now she wanted to be by herself, for on these paths, among the flowers, with their scent and the smell of earth and grass and of box hedges and yews, she seemed to step back down the years and was once more a serene
and settled Tracy. She could almost see her own small basket and trowel again beside her grandmother’s. I can remember her giving them to me, thought Tracy, a proper basket, a proper heavy trowel and fork though they were small. They were not toys, thought Tracy with dignity, and they must be somewhere in the house still: at China Court, loved things were not thrown away.

  She turned back to the house and now the guinea fowls came after her, walking companionably with August and Moses. Bumble had gone in, he soon tired, but August would not leave Tracy, and Moses, who still thought August an interloper, was jealous. The two of them followed her in, but the guinea fowls knew the border of their domain and stayed, pecking, around the doorstep.

  Tracy wanted a time alone in the house too before her aunts and uncles came: Aunt Bella and her Walter, thought Tracy. She could not remember him, but Cecily had a reserve in her voice when she spoke of him. Aunt Bella and Uncle Walter, and the Aunt Graces and the Graces’ husbands, Tom, Dick, and Harry. Were those their real names, or only Mrs Quin’s names for them? Tracy did not know. How little I know about my family, she thought, conscience-stricken.

  They were not coming until the afternoon and she was free now to wander through drawing and dining rooms, into the morning room and out again, through the hall, looking, touching, lingering where she wanted to linger, remembering. She knew where Cecily was because Cecily was singing as she put away the clean linen in the hot cupboard upstairs.

  ‘Singin’!’ Mrs Abel would have said shocked, but Cecily had no idea she was singing; she sang as she breathed and, if she had realized, ‘It’s a hymn,’ she would have said, defending herself. Hymns could not offend death. “‘Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee,’” sang Cecily.