China Court

by Rumer Godden

  ‘Minna.’

  ‘Please?’ But Minna feels dull, fatigued, heavy. Groundsel has left the door open so that the wind blows in, but to her the wind feels heavy too, with no life or tang of its own.

  Groundsel clears his throat. ‘Are you liking it here?’

  She pauses, her hands on the draining board, then, ‘No, I don’t like – at all,’ she says with energy.

  ‘Well, you must miss your country,’ says Groundsel reasonably. He comes cautiously closer. ‘They say it’s pretty there. People from this country go there for the snow.’

  ‘The snow.’ Minna looks out of the window to the browns and reds of the bare trees and the bracken on the slope of the field and suddenly she shakes her hands free of water, dries them on her apron and, backing away from Groundsel, runs out of the scullery and up the back stairs.

  When Eliza makes her sudden retreat down the passage from Harry St Omer and his friend, she runs to the office and shuts herself in there, leaning against the door, her eyes closed, her hands clenched. She has no intention of crying, but tears roll out from under her lids. I’m perfectly calm, she tells herself, it’s simply that I do not care to meet Harry St Omer and – the man. Eliza has known from the first that it is the other who is ‘the man’. I’m not going to be one of the family laid out for him to see when any of the St Omers choose to lift a little finger, she thinks fiercely. Every girl – every woman, she corrects herself, for she is twenty-six – every woman is free to choose whom she will, or will not meet, but that, of course, is a lie. There isn’t any choice, cries Eliza. It seems as if she cried it out to the housetops, but she has not made a sound; even the door has shut with a small quiet click.

  When the others have gone, in the dogcarts in which Helena is permitted to ride, what will she, Eliza, have to do? The same as any other day, thinks Eliza; read, of course – ‘Liz always has her nose in a book,’ say the family – but one novel is much like another, the few she loves she knows almost by heart before she is sixteen and she devours the magazines, when they come, in a day. What else? thinks Eliza: perhaps write a letter for Mother to Exeter, to complain about defective candles; another to Aunt Emily, Adza’s sister, to thank for a birthday present – a sachet I don’t want, thinks Eliza, for a birthday about which I don’t want to be reminded. Walk up to the village to post the letters; a servant could post them just as well, but I must walk somewhere. Perhaps take old Mrs Neot a milk jelly, though she must be sick of milk jellies; put a tuck in the right sleeve of my new blouse that Miss Dawnay has made uneven – that will take at least twenty minutes. Go over the pattern book with Mother … The pattern book is suddenly too much and, I can’t! I can’t! cries Eliza, but silently. If only there were something, she thinks, if the days were not like being a tame mouse or squirrel in a cage, with a wheel to tread round and round, going nowhere. If there were something to think about, to work for!

  It isn’t that I wanted to go with the others or that I am jealous, cries Eliza passionately, though she does not make a sound. I know perfectly well that if Harry St Omer, yes, magnificent Harry St Omer, fell in love with me – and she almost has to laugh at the idea, she with her angularities and long nose and colourless hair – if he did I would be bored in a week. Or in an hour, thinks Eliza, if I had to sit through that luncheon. She despises them, but most of all she despises herself. Because I don’t run away, thinks Eliza. Don’t do anything. Because I let myself be this – emptiness. Yet how can she do anything else? She shuts her eyes and tears slide under her lids and trickle down her nose, tears like gall, thinks Eliza.

  It is then that she is conscious of an even small murmur, as undisturbed by her emotion as a bee:

  Quaenam discors foedera reum

  Causa resoluit? Quis tanta Deus …

  It is monotonous. At first she does not know where it comes from; then she traces it to the corner behind the old screen.

  She has forgotten that Jeremy Baxter would be in the office, but the old clerk is so much part of its furniture, its muddle of papers and files, that she does not fly out indignantly as she would have done if anyone else had caught her in tears. Besides, he has not caught her; the murmur is steadily oblivious of her. She goes up to the screen and looks around it at his bent back, his face that is the colour of parchment and thin almost to emaciation, and at his long, wild-ended white hair.

  Eliza knows that Eustace pays Jeremy Baxter twelve pounds a year, less than the wages of a housemaid, to work from eight in the morning until seven or eight at night. She sees nothing wrong with this, in fact she, like Eustace, thinks it a good bargain and now, instinctively, she frowns, for what Jeremy Baxter is engaged in doing is certainly nothing concerned with what he is paid to do – Eustace’s letters, accounts, and bills:

  nunc membrorum condita nube

  non in totum est oblita sui

  summamque tenet, singula perdens.

  Igitur quisquis uera requirit

  neutro est habitu …

  Is it Latin? Eliza has to ask herself that. It sounds like Latin, but she is not sure. Her ear is quick and her wits and she can remember the boys, Little Eustace for a while, and Mcleod and Jared, groaning over their Latin prose; but this, in the quiet room, sounds like poetry. ‘I thought Latin was battles’ – she hardly knows she has said it aloud – ‘Roman wars.’

  ‘This is Boethius,’ says Jeremy Baxter not lifting his eyes.

  ‘Both—?’

  ‘Boethius.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘Boethius,’ says Jeremy Baxter and for a moment he looks up from his book. ‘Boethius?’ he says dreamily as if he likes to say it. ‘I should call him the interpreter of the ancient world and its wisdom; no one has ever superseded him. He goes beyond the Schools to the visionary poets. Yes, you will find his influence in the Romaunt of the Rose and in Dante.’

  Eliza’s mouth opens a little. Then she asks: ‘What is the … romance …?’

  ‘Romaunt.’ He raps it out.

  ‘Romaunt.’ Eliza is surprised into meekness. ‘Romaunt of the Rose? and Dante?’

  ‘Surely even in this house you have heard of Dante.’

  ‘I know about Dante,’ says Eliza, nettled. ‘He was an Italian poet.’

  ‘Really?’ says Jeremy Baxter bitingly.

  ‘He was,’ says Eliza. ‘There’s a painting of him by that new painter in London, new to us,’ says Eliza, chafing, ‘because we never see anything until it’s ages old. The painter is called Dante too: Dante Gabriel Rossetti. His people must have cared about things to have called him that. I saw the picture—’

  ‘In that abominable two-colour printing,’ says Jeremy Baxter.

  ‘Was it abominable? I thought it beautiful. Dante and – an angel?’ asks Eliza. ‘I think it was an angel. Dante bends down to look at a girl dead under a pall of flowers – Beatrice – or was it Francesca?’

  ‘You do not know about Dante,’ says Jeremy Baxter, and Eliza’s face, that has been sharp and clear with interest – is she not always the clever one of the family? – falls into sullenness and, How dare he when he isn’t much more than a servant? she thinks, but she has never heard anyone talk like this and she has to ask, ‘Did Dante write the Romaunt of the Rose?’

  ‘Good God, no!’ says Jeremy Baxter.

  ‘Well, how could I tell?’ asks Eliza resentfully. Then the resentment gives way to the complaint that corrodes her: ‘Why don’t I know anything?’

  ‘Because they sent you to school,’ says Jeremy Baxter. ‘A girls’ school,’ he says derisively.

  ‘I couldn’t have gone to a boys’ school,’ Eliza points out.

  ‘Then they shouldn’t have sent you at all. You didn’t learn anything there. Of course not.’

  ‘I did,’ says Eliza.

  ‘Not anything that is anything,’ says Jeremy Baxter, ‘and that’s a pity. I used to listen to you when you were small and thought you were more than likely.’

  ‘Did you?’ Eliza’s face is suffused with a b
lush of sheer pleasure.

  ‘Yes. In this country, at this time, there is only one way to educate a girl,’ says Jeremy Baxter. ‘Turn her loose with books, guide her, but let her read. I told your father that but, as he cannot read himself—’

  ‘He can.’ Eliza is indignant. ‘We all can.’

  ‘Then why don’t you?’

  ‘But I do.’ Eliza’s tears almost start again. ‘I read everything I can lay my hands on. Isn’t that something?’ she asks.

  ‘It depends what you lay your hands on,’ says Jeremy Baxter and Eliza blushes, remembering the trashy novels, as Eustace rightly calls them, that she has pored over: Sylvia by the author of Natalie – many of them are written anonymously – Drifted and Sifted by the author of Until the Shadows Flee Away; John by Mrs Oliphant – but she writes respectably, thinks Eliza – then has to blush more deeply still when she remembers On Credit by Lady Wood, of which one reviewer said: ‘A blunt and revolting narrative, filled with unnecessary details of married relations between husband and wife. We sincerely hope no husband or father will allow it to contaminate his house.’ ‘I shall send for it at once,’ Eliza says when she reads that, but she is glad now that Jeremy Baxter’s small gnat eyes, so sharp and suspicious, cannot see into her mind. ‘We take the Illustrated London News,’ she says defensively, ‘and Punch, and Mr Dickens’s All the Year Round, though that will stop now he has died. I have read his books and Mr Thackeray’s and—’

  ‘Very nice,’ says Jeremy Baxter, ‘but that is not reading. Don’t waste my time.’ He goes back to his book but, ‘Please, Mr Baxter,’ says Eliza and puts out a hand to touch another book that lies open on the table. He makes a quick movement as if he would close it and take it away but she is, after all, grown up – and a Miss Quin, thinks Eliza – and he restrains himself but cautions her. ‘That’s a rare book. Touch it carefully.’

  ‘What is it?’ she asks.

  ‘Among other things, the translation of what I’m reading.’

  ‘A translation? Can that be rare?’

  ‘It’s the 1532 Chaucer,’ says Jeremy Baxter dryly.

  ‘But I don’t understand,’ says Eliza. ‘Chaucer is an English poet. What has he to do with Boethius?’

  ‘He translated The Consolations of Philosophy from Latin into English.’

  ‘Was that the first translation?’

  ‘The first was by King Alfred.’

  ‘King Alfred!’ Eliza is almost dumb with surprise. But then could King Alfred read Latin? She has always thought of him as a far-off savage king, but she sees now that he must have been a scholar, and all I knew of him was that about the cakes!

  ‘I don’t understand Latin and I don’t understand English. I don’t even know our own history.’ In her despair Eliza pounds the page she has been reading.

  ‘How do you expect to know if you don’t study?’ He is quite unsympathetic. ‘Meanwhile, don’t do that to that fine book.’ Eliza looks at the Chaucer again, then back at the shelves with their rows of shut-away books, and Jeremy Baxter follows her look. ‘Yes. There are more there,’ he says. ‘For instance your father has a Religio Medici and Coryat’s Crudities.’

  ‘But are they all religious, serious books?’ asks Eliza.

  ‘By no means.’ The old clerk gets up stiffly and comes over to the bookcase. ‘Here is a novel,’ he says and, putting his hand in beyond the front row of books – the shelves are unexpectedly deep – brings out a book covered in brown paper, and carries it to the table. ‘Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe.’

  ‘But Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe.’

  ‘Does that mean he couldn’t write anything else?’ Jeremy Baxter can be acrid and she flushes. ‘It’s a first edition too,’ and he touches it tenderly. ‘Look at the date: 1722 – but you wouldn’t know.’ At that Eliza becomes haughty. ‘You needn’t despise us,’ she says. ‘Father paid a high price for these books. He knew they were good.’

  ‘But not how good,’ says Jeremy Baxter and chuckles. ‘I used to be something of an authority.’

  ‘Can you read Greek as well as Latin?’ she asks.

  ‘I specialized in Early Christian and Medieval Literature,’ says Jeremy Baxter. ‘For that you need Latin and Greek – and Anglo-Saxon and old French. I was a Fellow of Trinity,’ says Jeremy Baxter, but humbly. Eliza surveys him disbelievingly.

  ‘If you were – all that,’ she asks, ‘why are you here?’

  ‘I drink,’ says Jeremy Baxter. ‘You know that very well.’ Then his gnat eyes soften. ‘No, you are young, you might not dwell on that as most of them do. Perhaps’ – and he says it almost longingly – ‘perhaps you have a mind above scandal. You have a beautiful forehead.’

  No one has ever called any part of Eliza beautiful and she is strangely touched, which makes her all the more severe. ‘You might have made a great name for yourself,’ she scolds. ‘Been successful.’

  ‘People don’t know the consolations of being unsuccessful,’ says Jeremy Baxter. ‘If I had been successful I should have had no peace or time.’

  ‘What time do you have now?’ retorts Eliza. ‘Papa is not a philanthropist.’

  ‘I take an hour,’ says Jeremy Baxter and she knows he is trusting her with a secret. ‘I allow myself that each morning and evening. He owes me that for treasuring his books. I make covers for them and dust them, though nobody knows. Sometimes I take a book home.’

  ‘But you bring it back,’ says Eliza, sharp at once.

  ‘I bring it back,’ says Jeremy Baxter regretfully, ‘though why I should when he doesn’t know …’

  The Romaunt of the Rose; Dante; Boethius; visionary – the words seem to have fallen into Eliza and, as if she were fertile ground, they stir. ‘Mr Baxter.’ Her voice is hesitant, humble, eager, not at all like Eliza’s. ‘Mr Baxter.’

  ‘Yes?’ asks Jeremy Baxter absently, and though he is talking to his employer’s daughter, he keeps his finger in his place. Well, I would too, if I could read Latin and somebody interrupted me, thinks Eliza. She notices that his cuff is frayed and dirty though his manner is regal. ‘Yes?’ he says, but is obviously not prepared to let her waste his time. Eliza has never imagined that time could be precious and she gathers herself together to speak quickly and to the point. ‘Mr Baxter, would you do what you said should be done with girls – though I am not a girl now? Would you do what you said, guide me and turn me loose with books?’

  ‘Tracy! Tracy!’ It was Aunt Bella’s voice; she was upstairs, had opened the White Room door, found nobody there, and was searching, coming nearer. ‘Tracy, where are you? We are having a drink before luncheon. Dr Taft and the vicar are here and Mr Prendergast. You must come down. Tracy! Tracy!’

  I can’t go down like this! Tracy hastily looked at herself in the mirror that hung over the toy cupboard; her eyes were red, her face marked from crying. Why did she cry? Because they criticized, thought Tracy, criticized Gran and me and everything, especially Peter – Mr St Omer. I suppose I’m too prickly, perhaps I was upset before, but it was suddenly too much, she thought, her eyes flooding again. She could not face them like this – and let them see that I mind, thought Tracy.

  ‘Tra-cy!’

  Aunt Bella was coming nearer. Desperately Tracy looked around and her eyes fell on the brass-bound case that had belonged to Eliza. She snatched it up and went to the door. ‘Coming, Aunt Bella,’ she called down the passage. ‘J-just coming, but I promised to take something to show Mr Alabaster,’ and she ran down the back stairs.

  * ‘That you hope for nothing to last forever is the lesson of the revolving year and the flight of time that snatches from us the sunny days.’ – HORACE

  None

  Rerum, Deus, tenax vigor, immótus in te pérmanens.

  Lucis diurnae tempora successibus detérminans.

  O GOD UNCHANGING, BY THY POWER ALL THINGS IN BEING ARE MAINTAINED.

  AT THY COMMAND HOUR FOLLOWS HOUR, AND TIME’S FULL CYCLE IS ORDAINED.

  HYMN FOR NONE FROM MRS QUIN’S Da
y Hours

  The Presentation in the Temple The scene takes place in a Gothic church. Very fine architectural details. The Virgin presents the Infant Christ to the High Priest, who wears rich vestments. Joseph and a few attendants stand by.

  Full border of conventional flowers and ivy leaves, painted in colours and heightened with gold. Grotesque of a serpent with a woman’s head (symbolical of the Fall of Man).

  MINIATURE FACING THE OPENING OF NONE IN THE HORAE BEATAE VIRGINIS MARIAE, FROM THE HOURS OF ROBERT BONNEFOY

  After luncheon, when the vicar and doctor had gone, the family gathered in the drawing room for the reading of the will. ‘Dear Mother’s will,’ said the third Grace, wiping her eyes.

  The clock struck three as Mr Prendergast opened his briefcase on the table that Cecily had set and cleared for him.

  ‘This is just a formality,’ Bella was saying. ‘We have decided how we shall divide it all.’ Mr Prendergast made no comment.

  Tracy had been present at some of that deciding – unwillingly present, she would have said; but I couldn’t get up and go away from the table, she thought, I’m so much the youngest and it would have looked …