China Court

by Rumer Godden

  ‘Don’t be stupid. A man must be a soldier, or a sailor, or an engineer.’

  ‘I’m going to be a father,’ says John Henry.

  Adza, when the Brood are all small, meets Anne, dressed in a white sheet trailing down the stairs. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Hush, I’m the angel, bringing the baby.’

  ‘The doctor,’ says the ruthless sense of Eliza. Stace, Bella, and the Graces are brought up to echo that, but Tracy goes back – or further on perhaps. ‘In a way it is the doctor and the angel,’ says Tracy.

  As a child she has a secret game that she plays, a game called Children; in it she has three, Big Boy, Big Girl, and Little A. Sometimes she adds the Chelsea shepherd and shepherdess on the drawing-room chimney shelf: the Little Pink Boy and the Pale Blue Girl. They are all her children and they are not left to be blown about by any wind; they are kept safe and, ‘firm,’ says Tracy. That is the nearest she can put it. ‘Is it a firm promise?’ says her grandmother, which means it will not be broken.

  ‘Where are your mother and father?’ The real children who come to tea with Tracy at China Court usually ask her that. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Gone,’ says Tracy evasively.

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘Well, I think Mother is changing over,’ says Tracy.

  ‘Changing over?’

  ‘Oh, grown-ups marry,’ says Tracy. ‘Then they get tired of each other and they all change over.’ She is not as airy as she sounds. Often, when she first arrives at China Court, she cries in the night.

  Alice, the little nursemaid, tries to get up and comfort her. Alice sits on the edge of the bed, her bare feet on the floor and the moonlight falls through the night-nursery window in a shaft of light that seems to cut her in half; her feet and white nightgown shine on the floor rug, but above she is all in shadow, only her eyes gleam at Tracy.

  It is cold and Alice’s green eiderdown is warm; the pillow is still impressed with her sleep; sleep weighs down her eyelids, fills her mouth and makes her yawn. No words will come to help Tracy’s crying. Alice hears, but her sleep is heavy. She heaves herself off her bed and blunders into the day nursery and goes to the biscuit tin on the red dresser and takes out a biscuit, comes back, and thrusts it into Tracy’s hand. ‘Eat that,’ she says and falls back into bed. Tracy sits crying with the biscuit in her hand, the cold creeps around her, but Alice is asleep.

  A light falls through the door and Mrs Quin comes in, her Paisley shawl around her shoulders, her hair in an unfamiliar grey plait down her back. She removes the biscuit from Tracy, takes her hand and helps her out of bed, then under the shawl walks her down the passage to her own room with its big bed.

  She says nothing, asks no questions, but as Tracy lies against her, the sobs cease to be real and soon she lies abandoned to the warm bed, her arms cast out, her mouth heavy and contented; but Mrs Quin lies awake, staring into the dark. Why couldn’t they, Barbara and Stace, think of the child? Like a little fly Tracy is brushed out of the way, blindly. Is it a wonder if she is maimed? ‘At least, Stace, I thought about you,’ cries Mrs Quin in the night. ‘I thought about you.’ Nobody knew about Stace, least of all Stace himself. Nobody at all. ‘I didn’t harm you. Miraculously I was able to avoid that. If I hadn’t held my tongue you might have been hurt; there could have been an uproar, but I told no one. No one!’ but once again, as she says that, she feels as if John Henry smiles.

  ‘You little ostrich,’ John Henry would have said, only he never speaks of it. ‘There were always the three of us in everything, Boro and me and you. That was why I did what I had to do at the dance.’

  There has never been another at China Court. The dances for Stace, Bella, and her sisters are shared in London with friends. ‘Never another here,’ says Mrs Quin and John Henry does not press it.

  It is the height of China Court’s entertaining. Adza and Eliza would not have believed it; there are house parties for it over half Cornwall, even a small one at China Court itself. The dinner, though, is held at Tremellen – China Court cannot rise to a dinner and dance at once – as it is, most of the furniture of the downstairs rooms has to be taken out and stored, ‘over to Bodmin,’ says the village. The whole house becomes unfamiliar: A marquee is built along the terrace; the french doors of the dining room, and the wide door from the hall to the drawing room, are taken off their hinges; a platform for the band is built below the stairs – it has a gilded railing, palms, and hydrangeas. More hydrangeas and marguerites – ‘from the newfangled glasshouse nurseries over to St Austell,’ the village reports – are set in tubs along the marquee with marguerites, cornflowers, and ferns in vases on the long tables, which have silver candelabra lent from Tremellen. ‘Are candles safe under canvas?’ asks cautious John Henry, but it is uncommonly warm and windless weather, which holds for the dance.

  A chef and waiters take over the kitchen; Cook and the kitchen maids and Paget do not know whether they are on their heads or their heels. The housemaids are on all-night duty upstairs in the big bedroom, which has been opened for the occasion and turned into a ladies’ cloakroom. There is a tent behind the marquee for the men’s cloakroom; the morning room is a card room, the dining room a champagne buffet for the gentlemen. Even the garden is changed with sitting-out places, each with two gilt chairs and a palm, while fairy lamps are strung in the trees and along the paths and among the roses. ‘Fairy lamps! Roses! It sounds like Maud,’ says Bella.

  ‘It was all a little like Maud,’ says Mrs Quin calmly, ‘but then I think Maud is romantic and exciting,’ and painful she could have said. ‘And you must remember,’ she says aloud, ‘dances were far more of occasions then than they are now.’

  Bella and the girls laugh gently at those occasions as quaint; the chaperons, the music – ‘either treacly waltzes or polkas, jig jig jig jig’ – and at the programmes; they would call sentimental the heartbreak those programmes could cause, ‘and of which no girl would ever give an inkling, because the hallmark of those days was politeness,’ says Mrs Quin.

  ‘A false politeness,’ says Bella.

  ‘At least it was tidy,’ retorts Mrs Quin. It is an odd word to use, but people and things, then, kept their faces – ‘and I kept mine,’ says Mrs Quin, but she does not say it aloud. Nor does she tell Bella that the sight of the peculiar kind of silver lettering used on those programmes, or a pale-pink pencil with a fluff of tassel, or a long glove in white kid, even the smell of those gloves, even those little bedizens of fairy lamps, can make her flinch yet.

  The village gathers at the top of the hill to watch the carriages come down, and the big field at the bottom is borrowed from Penbarrow and strewn with cinders for the carriages to turn around and wait, with another small marquee with refreshments for the coachmen and footmen. From midnight until dawn, carriage lamps shine along the village street, taking people home.

  Tremellen is lent for the dinner, but the St Omers, Lady St Omer and Harry, do not come down for it from London. ‘Odd,’ says the county, ‘when it is almost their dance,’ but St Probus knows it is not at all odd. Outrageous though it is, Ripsie, Deborah Russell, has been invited. Why? The whole village is agog to know, but Lady Patrick says nothing about it. Since the day of Ripsie’s call, on the matter of Ripsie she is silent.

  Lady Patrick, in these years, has grown wise. In 1897 Jared dies of a heart attack. ‘What a strange thing for him to die of,’ says Lady Patrick icily, but when she sees him in his coffin, she has such an attack of weeping that even Borowis, called down from Sandhurst, cannot calm her. After that a spring seems to fail in Lady Patrick. She is no longer the mixture that alarmed Father Blackwell, but though the impetuosity is gone, she is still proud. John Henry knows that very well and, ‘What is Mother up to?’ he asks uneasily.

  Ripsie herself is surprised at the invitation – then not surprised. ‘It’s because Boro and I …’ She does not go on but John Henry knows what she is thinking.

  ‘Wake up, Rip,’ he says and warns her, �
�They were not very kind to you when you called. You may be ostracized.’

  ‘I don’t care if I am,’ says Ripsie. ‘I have Boro.’

  ‘You know you can’t count on Boro,’ but she flares up.

  ‘You have always been jealous of Borowis. Ever since I have known you,’ and John Henry says no more.

  Lady Patrick even manages to hold Isabel in check, which is not easy.

  ‘Boro has done his best, consistently, from the very beginning, to spoil this dance,’ cries Isabel.

  Her dress arrives from London, a Paquin dress of net over embroidered satin, its frills threaded with waved ribbon in palest pink-gold, a shade deeper than the net’s pink-ivory.

  ‘Exquisite,’ says Lady Patrick.

  ‘And it will go with Boro’s mess dress perfectly,’ says Isabel. It has been designed for that, but, ‘It won’t, because I shall be wearing tails,’ says Borowis.

  ‘Tails!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But – the Eleventh have the best mess dress of all,’ wails Isabel. She is almost in tears. The cherry-coloured overalls, the dark-blue-and-gold jacket have been in her eye for weeks. ‘You must wear it. I want you to,’ she cries.

  ‘Hush, Isa,’ says Lady Patrick and, ‘I have never seen you in mess dress, Boro,’ she says pleadingly.

  ‘My dear Mother, you don’t wear mess dress to a small country dance.’

  ‘This isn’t small,’ says Isabel hotly.

  ‘I can wear blues if you like,’ says Borowis.

  ‘Blues! When everyone else will be in tails.’

  ‘Then I shall wear tails too,’ says Borowis.

  Lady Patrick does not pursue this as she pursues ‘nothing,’ says John Henry puzzled. Borowis appears to be free to go his own way, yet, as the night of the dance draws near, he grows more and more quiet. Even Ripsie, enraptured, has to notice his silence. ‘Don’t you want the dance?’ she asks amazed.

  ‘Dances are three a penny in the season,’ he says, but they are not three a penny to Ripsie. He can see that by one look at her face and he makes a sound that is very like a groan.

  Ripsie is not, of course, at the dinner. Even in this new acceptance that so puzzles John Henry, it has not been suggested that Ripsie can be asked to Tremellen, and he calls for her on his way from the dinner to the dance. ‘I guessed it would be me,’ he says.

  ‘You? Not Boro?’ He knows that will be his welcome as, with a sinking reluctance, he drives the dogcart, the only available carriage, over the moor roads. The reluctance is not only jealousy – though I suppose I am jealous, thinks John Henry – Ripsie has been invited, and strangely nobody has opposed this, but he knows quite well that he is taking a lamb to the slaughter and he is extraordinarily bad-tempered when he gets to the farm.

  She is waiting in the kitchen. ‘Why?’ snaps John Henry.

  ‘Because I was cold.’

  Cold with excitement, not apprehension, as she should be, he thinks. In the dingy kitchen her dress looks unbelievably pretty and fresh, her bare shoulders and arms gleamingly exposed and, ‘I’m not going to drive you through the village like that,’ says John Henry.

  ‘Is it too low, Jod?’ she whispers coming nearer. ‘In the shop it didn’t look as bare as this.’

  ‘It did.’ John Henry does not tell her what that first sight of her bare shoulders and arms in the shop set up in him, such a tingling in his fingers – and thighs, thinks John Henry shocked – that, all the way home from Exeter, he has to be surly and bury himself in his newspaper. We were alone in the railway carriage, but I might have been a seat cushion, thinks John Henry. Nor does he ever tell her what it feels like to have her brought to him in the showroom in all those different dresses, as if she were his own. ‘They thought I was going to be your wife,’ says Ripsie amused.

  ‘Naturally as I was paying,’ says John Henry disagreeably.

  It is odd that, while it is Borowis she loves, it is to John Henry that Ripsie is able to go about her dress. ‘I haven’t one, Jod. Nothing that will do. You see I have never been to a dance.’

  ‘And you want to come to this?’

  ‘Want.’

  John Henry knows her face when its thinness seems to grow even thinner with longing, her eyes translucent with what she sees, ‘or she thinks she sees,’ says John Henry and weakly he plays truant from Mr Fitzgibbon and takes her to Exeter and buys her a dress.

  As a matter of fact it is not he who buys it; it is Lady Patrick, though Ripsie does not dream of that. ‘John Henry,’ his mother has said, ‘has that girl anything presentable to wear?’

  ‘Ripsie?’

  ‘Who else?’ Lady Patrick is impatient.

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ he says coldly. ‘See to it,’ says Lady Patrick, ‘even if you have to buy her one,’ and she gives him the money – John Henry has not then bullied her and Mr Fitzgibbon into giving him a proper salary. ‘See it’s possible,’ orders Lady Patrick and, What is Mother up to? thinks John Henry.

  Lady Patrick’s idea of the cost of clothes is governed by the couturiers she knows in Paris and London; there is nothing to come near that in Exeter and John Henry worries about the dress.

  ‘It’s too cheap.’

  ‘Cheap! It was wickedly expensive,’ says Ripsie.

  ‘Isabel’s cost eighty guineas,’ he says. ‘And then the real world did come crashing in on me,’ says Mrs Quin afterward. ‘I had a moment of reality.’ ‘Eighty guineas! That’s twice as much as I earn in a year,’ says Ripsie in a small humble voice, but when John Henry is worried he can be insensitive. ‘Too cheap and too pretty,’ he says. ‘Can a dress be too pretty?’ She has to learn that it can; meanwhile he goes gloomily on. ‘It’s not expensive enough and it should have been white.’ The dress is in pale green mousseline de soie caught with apple blossom, that matches a spray to wear in the puffs of her dark hair. Now in the lamplight the foam of green is so becoming that John Henry has to look away and he sees that the farmer’s wife has her lips set thin, while her husband and sons are greedily staring. ‘Put on your cloak, Rip,’ says John Henry.

  She has no evening cloak. John Henry is beginning to fathom the scantiness of Ripsie’s possessions, and the dreaded tenderness, the instant protection sweeps over him again. ‘Your dress isn’t too low,’ he says, speaking slowly and distinctly for the farmer’s wife. ‘Not for a dance. You should see Isabel and Margaret,’ and, ‘Put oh my cloak,’ he says.

  It is his first, sumptuously lined with white watered silk.

  ‘I didn’t know you had this, Jod.’

  She is impressed, as he had meant her to be, which is why he is wearing it on this warm night, but now, ‘God knows why I bought it,’ he says. ‘I suppose because Boro had one. I shall hardly ever wear it.’

  It suits Ripsie far better than it does him. ‘I look like a cabby,’ he says when he first puts it on, while she looks like a young cadet. ‘But they will say I arrived in a man’s cloak.’

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘I expect I shall make every possible gaffe,’ she says, but she takes his arm and squeezes it. ‘Jod, don’t let’s be late,’ and he can feel her shivering with anticipation.

  When Ripsie comes downstairs from the big bedroom, it is the first time at China Court she has ever used the front stairs – she makes John Henry take her up the back way to avoid anyone’s seeing her in his cloak – and she cannot help pausing to take in the wonder. But they will say I’m afraid to come down, she thinks, and makes herself go down the flight and cross the hall where she has to pass the formidable barrier of Lady Patrick, Mrs Loftus Kennedy, and Isabel, who are receiving with John Henry at the drawing-room door. ‘Miss Russell.’ The Tremellen butler, lent for the evening, has a penetrating voice – ‘Well, it was meant to be penetrating,’ says John Henry – ‘Miss Russell.’ Suddenly she feels alone and conspicuous; no other girl, she is sure, has come without a chaperon; she sees several heads turn and unmistakably look as, her own head high but her cheeks as pink as her ap
ple blossom, she goes forward.

  I have an invitation, she is telling herself, they will have to recognize me, but she will get, she is sure, no more than the slightest inclination of the head from Lady Patrick, perhaps the tips of two fingers from Mrs Loftus Kennedy, a stare up and down from Isabel and she braces herself but, ‘Ah, Ripsie! Good evening,’ and Lady Patrick holds out her black-gloved hand. ‘I’m glad to see John Henry brought you safely,’ says Mrs Loftus Kennedy in those ringing tones that can be heard in every corner of the room. ‘What a pretty dress!’ says Isabel, and suddenly, piercingly, Ripsie is afraid.

  John Henry is next and he catches her hands, holding them and beaming with relief. Then does he think everything is to be all right? she thinks, in wonder. ‘Jod, what are they doing?’ she wants to cry, but she cannot even ask him in a whisper – a man and girl are close behind her – she has to pass on into the transformed and beflowered drawing room.

  The girls are gathered all together near the window at the far end, the rhododendron window; cocksure girls, all, Ripsie is certain, possessing evening cloaks, all impeccably chaperoned. They are talking, laughing, careful not to give the least glance to where the men are standing around the Winterhalter fireplace and the garden window. Then as Ripsie stands uncertainly there, as if at a given signal, the men pull down their waistcoats, finger their ties – those not in mess dress – and go skimming across the room to the girls. Once again Ripsie is conspicuously alone; the man and girl who were behind her pass her and join the others, and she catches her breath, then Margaret, in pale-blue satin, forget-me-nots in her hair, is beside her, a Margaret as transformed as the drawing room, and smiling. ‘Hello, Ripsie, Isa asked me to watch for you. Look, here’s a programme.’ She puts the pink-and-silver card with its tiny pencil into Ripsie’s hand. ‘Come along,’ and Ripsie, bewilderingly, is shepherded in among the girls. ‘Ursula, this is Deborah Russell, Isa’s little friend from the country. She doesn’t know anyone. Be nice to her, girls. Ripsie, this is Terence. Terence, this is Miss Russell. Yes, she wants lots of dances. Introduce her to Jimmy. Iris, this is Isa’s little friend.’