China Court

by Rumer Godden

  What’s happening? thinks Ripsie in fresh panic. She is introduced, handed round. Young men appear in front of her; are led up by other girls. ‘Deborah Russell.’ Her programme collects scribble after scribble. It is filling up and she is helpless until suddenly she sees Borowis standing by John Henry in the doorway, and, like a fish escaping from a net, she flies across the room to him. ‘Boro! Boro!’

  Borowis is in mess dress. ‘Well, half the regiment is here,’ he defends himself from John Henry’s comments. ‘Practically the whole mess from Bodmin.’ Then he gives up the pretence of that. ‘What does it matter?’ he says.

  Isabel is right; the cherry-coloured overalls, the waistcoat and dark-blue gold-braided jacket are almost theatrical in their effect. They make Borowis look tall, tall but not heavy, for he is very slim; no one has noticed yet that John Henry’s shoulders are broader, but then he does not take the eye as Borowis does. ‘Boro looks a young prince,’ Mrs Loftus Kennedy has said and she is not given to gushing; Isabel is pleased and proud, but Ripsie does not care what he is wearing, she only sees Borowis himself. ‘Boro!’ yet as soon as she touches him, she knows he is a stranger – and strange, thinks Ripsie, more than ever terrified.

  His hair is not combed, one lock is falling over his eye, the tight neck of his jacket, with its frogging, is undone; he has a redness, like painted patches over his cheekbones, while his eyes seem to glitter. Has he been drinking? wonders Ripsie.

  ‘Boro, you are going to ask me to dance.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’ She cannot believe it. As if there were nobody else in the room, she puts both hands on his arm and shakes him. ‘Boro, it’s Ripsie. Look at me,’ but he will not look, he whose look has been only for her, and private and unmistakable. Now he looks over her head.

  Then the music begins. It is the silly catching tune from Floradora: ‘If you’re in love with somebody, Happy and lucky somebody …’

  It filters in from the band in the hall, slowly filling every corner. As this is for their joint birthdays, Isabel and John Henry are to open the dance and he has to leave Borowis and Ripsie and go to Isabel. In a moment the first couples begin circling down the long room and past them into the hall. A red-haired young man in tails, his large hands in white kid gloves, appears before Ripsie. ‘Miss Russell …’

  She ignores him.

  ‘Boro.’

  ‘Rip, you are to dance.’ It is an order, given as he would order her in the old valley days. ‘Dance, and for God’s sake, don’t come near me.’ Abruptly, he walks away.

  She would have run after him, leaving the red-haired young man, but Borowis does what is wise if he wants to be impregnable, goes to his mother and bows. Lady Patrick looks at him, and Ripsie sees the sudden look of dismay on her face. It is gone as soon as Ripsie sees it; almost in a caress Lady Patrick smooths back the lock of hair, fastens his jacket; he puts his arm around her and, holding her – as a shield? asks Ripsie, quivering with the hurt – takes her onto the floor, as the red-haired young man takes Ripsie, and Borowis does not dance again all night – ‘until,’ says Mrs Quin long afterward, ‘until …’

  ‘One of the most successful and brilliant dances ever given in the county,’ the fashion magazines and papers report and, ‘Enjoying it, Ripsie?’ asks Isabel. No one but Isabel and Ripsie herself could suspect the barb in that. The strange solicitude goes on. ‘Miss Russell, are they looking after you?’ ‘Ripsie, have you any dances left? Geoffrey Mafor is dying to be introduced to you.’ ‘Abominably clever of you,’ says Mrs Loftus Kennedy, ‘with your white skin to find that colour green.’ ‘So that is the little Russell girl,’ Ripsie hears more than one chaperon say, ‘the mysterious little Russell,’ and she hears Lady Patrick’s smooth answer. ‘Yes. We have known her since she was a child, of course.’

  One dowager is more direct. ‘Yes, I have heard she and Borowis were friends.’

  ‘Of course they are friends.’ Lady Patrick’s voice is unruffled, ‘I told you, the boys have known her since they were children.’

  ‘It was the first time,’ says Mrs Quin, ‘that I felt the force of a family, banded together. They made me into a pawn. As a pawn I was quite a success,’ she says.

  When she dances she is so light that in the Lancers she is swung too high and Mrs Loftus Kennedy has to protest, though laughingly but, ‘She wasn’t really laughing,’ says Ripsie. To waltz with her, say the young men, is like waltzing with a feather. Girls sitting out, taking refuge in the cloakroom, would have changed with her a dozen times over, ‘though I’m not hallmarked as they are,’ she says. There is a photograph of her afterward in the Sketch: ‘Miss Deborah Russell dancing with the Hon. Tommy Lampson,’ and, ‘Tommy Lampson, Captain Helford, Bunny Porchester, John Philips: I danced with dozens of them,’ says Ripsie, wearily.

  The dances she longed to dance are there:

  ‘Polka Botschaft’

  ‘Waltz Breezes’ from Vienna

  ‘Lancers’, from Floradora

  ‘Barn Dance’, Dusky Dinah

  ‘Waltz’, from San Toy

  ‘Galop’, Tivoli Bazaar.

  Tinkly sentimental dances. ‘Bella is right,’ says Mrs Quin and all the while the hurt and bewilderment gather in Ripsie’s eyes, for Borowis does not come near her. He only looks whiter and whiter, except for that strange red on his cheeks. ‘He didn’t just do it.’ Mrs Quin holds that to herself over and over again. ‘He minded, cruelly.’

  He does not dance again, though several times he sits out a dance with Isabel. For the rest of the time he is at the buffet – ‘Boro, you are drinking too much,’ says John Henry again and again – or else he stands against the wall watching the room with that glitter in his eyes, the lock of hair falling over his eye again and the red flushes that make him look like a wooden soldier.

  Ripsie longs to get away, to be by herself, but she cannot go back to the farm unless she walks through the village street and suddenly she shrinks from the village; besides, in satin shoes she cannot walk over the moor and she cannot take John Henry who, because of Borowis’s behaviour, has to act as China Court’s host. He is not only the host, he is a host of strength, genial and popular and it is then, for the first time, that Ripsie sees John Henry as himself; John Henry Quin, not Jod, an appendage to Borowis.

  John Henry takes her in to supper and they say not a word until he removes her third glass of champagne and then gives it back to her. ‘Drink it,’ he says briefly. After it, the long marquee, the candles, marguerites, and cornflowers on the long tables, the hydrangeas in their tubs, the crowd of people all seem to melt a little and swim in a haze; the smell of scent, French chalk, hot canvas, wilting ferns, and salmon mayonnaise grows overpowering, and Ripsie feels frighteningly giddy.

  She cannot go upstairs; she feels the maids there would be agog over her and Borowis. She cannot disappear in the garden as she used to do in her old camouflage clothes, the pale-green dress is too conspicuous; when she tries to hide in one of the far sitting-out places, Tommy Lampson follows her there and tries to kiss her. ‘He seemed to think he might,’ she tells John Henry, who rescues her. ‘I suppose it is my reputation. My reputation that your mother and all of you are trying to save me from,’ she might have said. ‘Oh, not for my sake, I know that very well.’ It is for the family and she does not care a farthing for the family then. ‘Why did I let them? Perhaps I was stunned,’ says Mrs Quin, but she knows the answer to that, and it is like a cry. ‘I let you because Borowis, my Boro, consented.’

  The night drags on, down to the last dance before the extras, and John Henry comes to Ripsie where she is dancing. ‘Let me dance with Miss Russell, that’s a good chap,’ he says to her partner and when she is relinquished, he says, ‘Boro is going to make an announcement.’

  ‘No,’ whispers Ripsie, ‘no,’ and very gently John Henry answers, ‘Yes.’

  It is an inexorable ‘Yes.’ Borowis is on the stairs. He has, John Henry tells Ripsie, been very sick and he looks pallid now an
d miserably young, years younger than John Henry. He stands a step below Isabel and though Isabel is flushed, her eyes are their usual cold grey, and hard as they were when she was a little girl. She lifts her hand commandingly and the band comes to a stop. ‘Tell them, Boro,’ says Isabel clearly and Borowis is obedient.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt and all that,’ he says. His voice is hoarse and a little blurred, but it is mercilessly clear to Ripsie. She is below, at the foot of the steps, where John Henry has brought her. She wishes he would not stand so near her; she cannot bear anyone, not even John Henry. ‘We, Isabel, John Henry, and I,’ says Borowis, ‘want to thank you all for coming.’ Putting it off, thinks John Henry, wise in the ways of his brother, but Borowis has to go on. ‘As you know,’ he begins, ‘this dance is nothing to do with me, it isn’t my birthday,’ when Isabel steps down one step farther so that she is close behind him. ‘Isabel and I have something to tell you,’ says Borowis, as swiftly as if she had pricked him, and Ripsie gives a little gasp as the words sound through the hall. ‘’Smatter of fact,’ says Borowis, ‘we are engaged,’ and John Henry catches Ripsie’s hand and holds it down against his side, crushing it so that the gasp is cut short as she sways and leans against him, faint with the pain. ‘I hope you are all pleased.’ It sounds like a taunt and Borowis’s gaze sweeps over them, brilliantly deliberately blind. ‘Isabel and I are engaged.’ The band breaks out into ‘They are jolly good fellows’, everyone claps, but there is no morsel of sound from Ripsie; only the hand, crushed in John Henry’s, grows cold and colder and her head, with the puffs of dark hair and the apple-blossom sprays, sinks.

  John Henry can bear no more. His soft heart seems suddenly to swell and almost before he knows what he is doing, he has stepped forward to the stairs taking Ripsie with him. He holds up his hand against the clapping and the band, which stops again. ‘And I have something to tell you,’ cries John Henry more loudly and clearly than he has ever spoken in his life. ‘I have never let my brother beat me yet.’ There is laughter and clapping. By now in the county, John Henry is a beloved buffoon, but he is serious now and a silence falls. ‘I am engaged,’ says John Henry. ‘We are engaged. I and Miss Russell.’

  The laughing and congratulations are all around them, a glow of real approval, and the music starts again. Borowis is still on the stairs with Isabel, Ripsie at the bottom with John Henry, when over the heads of the others, they look at one another. ‘I expect we were very theatrical,’ says Mrs Quin, but still cannot help her voice trembling.

  Slowly, as if in a dream, Borowis comes down the stairs and, as if John Henry were a footman, he brushes him aside, puts his arm round Ripsie and begins to dance with her. His arm is trembling and she can feel his heat, in his dry hands and under the braided jacket. It is as familiar to her as her own skin.

  ‘It began in April,’ Mrs Quin tells Barbara in that strange confidence they have together, ‘April and went on through May.’

  May in Cornwall is more beautiful than anywhere else in the world, Mrs Quin thinks often. It is, too, more heady and lush, with its froth of campions, bluebells, and lady’s lace in the lanes, the apple-blossom buds deep pink in the orchards and, in the China Court garden, even the ugly garden of those days, the vivid strong colours of tulips, forget-me-nots, primulas, the smell of early stocks. It is hot that year for May, and Ripsie often appears in the garden after dinner and she and Borowis walk there until it is late.

  Mrs Quin never ceases to see them – only she will not look. They are up on the knoll by the flagpole; Eustace’s flagpole is still there then and, later, on the night of the dance, it is to glimmer and be struck by the reflections of the fairy lights, blue, dark pink, and emerald. Ripsie and Borowis go down the hidden path behind the yews or to the low wall where the sweet peas are now, or through the kitchen garden and the field to the dell and the valley path. ‘I had a dress,’ says Mrs Quin. She does not say, as most old women do, ‘What ridiculous clothes we wore then,’ she says, ‘How pretty they were,’ and remembers them with love and pain, that dress and the green one of the dance. This, that she wears in those evenings, is white, patterned with roses, ‘but so old, so washed thin, that they were only outlines of pale pink; but I liked it, it was soft and it fluttered and it had, I remember, a patent-leather belt – my waist was tiny then – and a high turn-down collar.’ She knows the collar sets off her dark head that, even though it is dressed with puffs and combs, still looks almost as small as when her hair is cropped. Mrs Quin can see herself, but she cannot see Borowis: the young man, the tall young officer, the tall young man, each description seems to cloak him with fresh anonymity, yet she can feel him, ‘unmistakably and forever,’ says Mrs Quin. She has only to shut her eyes to remember his hands, sure because they know so well what they want, not to be gainsaid, but gentle. ‘I never had a chance against you, Boro, because I was with you,’ says Mrs Quin. When his arm is around her, she knows its curve as she knows the hardness of his shoulder and its surprising size; his lips are cold to feel at first – ‘and possessive,’ says Ripsie with a gasp.

  He disappears with Ripsie for whole days on the moor. The sky there is wider than anywhere else, the gorse is a flush of gold, the grass full of infinitesimal moor flowers, and there are larks; the wild mares have foals, the river pools are churned to froth bubbles. To Ripsie it feels as if she were caught up in that immensity, in the gold and singing, the nuzzling warm tenderness and bubbling life; and all that month John Henry is tethered by Mr Fitzgibbon, labouring all day at the works, riding to Canverisk and back across the moor, spending his evenings ‘swotting,’ says John Henry.

  ‘Swotting what?’ asks Ripsie.

  ‘Chemistry,’ says John Henry. ‘Statistics, prices, costs, wages, all that and learning about mechanization – things are changing even in our works,’ he says and regretfully, because John Henry is conservative. ‘Stick-in-the-mud, I fear,’ says Mr Fitzgibbon. ‘There’s not much in the way of brains, but the boy is steady.’ That is such a welcome relief after Jared that the old manager decides to be satisfied. ‘Yes, machines,’ says John Henry, who dislikes them. ‘Problems about transport, distribution, marketing.’ John Henry sounds weary, but he is satisfied too, deeply satisfied, and as he works at this man’s work, the last traces of the schoolboy fall from him. Coming up in him is something new: responsibility. ‘I followed Boro like a blind sheep. Now I can’t.’

  Because of the hours she spends with Borowis, Ripsie has not only to leave the vicarage, she has lost her post. The schoolmaster will not keep her, though the vicar has promised to talk to her again. ‘But he won’t,’ says Ripsie. ‘I shan’t let him.’

  ‘What can you do to prevent him?’ asks John Henry.

  ‘Not listen,’ says Ripsie again.

  ‘But you must listen. Listen and think. What will you do without any work?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Ripsie dreamily. She has a flower between her fingers and is twirling it.

  ‘You have to eat, keep a room.’

  The flower is a small Dutch iris imported by McWhirter. Ripsie has just found it and is looking at the brown mottling, velvet on the paper-thin petals, each so pale a mauve that she would hardly have said it was coloured at all until she holds it against her white dress, when it is unmistakably mauve. The brown is overlaid with a dust of brilliant pollen; it comes off on her finger. Even in those days a flower can blot out the whole world for her but, ‘You have to eat,’ says John Henry, and takes the iris away.

  He worries, but he is powerless. Borowis and Ripsie are like sleepwalkers, except when they are together. ‘Haven’t you any regard for other people?’ scolds John Henry.

  ‘What people?’ asks Ripsie.

  For her, all that month there are no people; no eyes looking from doorways, faces peering behind the lace curtains that make the tiny cottage windows tinier still, but are screens to see through without being seen. There are no whispers in the China Court kitchen, or talk in the county drawing rooms, no kind friends to wa
rn Lady Patrick: ‘I met them on the moor, my dear, not riding, walking – their horses behind them, the reins positively trailing.’

  ‘Borowis, these days, seems to have disappeared. Where is he, Pat?’

  ‘My dear, I don’t want to repeat scandal but …’

  Lady Patrick still says nothing, but one breakfast time at the end of May, the post brings Borowis’s orders; the mission, it seems, is to start earlier than they had expected. He is to join it the day after the dance. ‘That’s a little too neat,’ says Borowis. ‘That’s Mother.’ There is also an unpleasant note from Mr Fitzgibbon. ‘This is the list of the outstanding accounts you gave me to be settled by your mother. She refers them back to you, and asks me to ask you what you propose to do about them.’ Afterward in the morning room Borowis stands by the window, his fingers drumming a tattoo on the sill. He has had too, John Henry is sure, an ultimatum from Isabel. ‘You have, haven’t you?’ ‘Shut up,’ says Borowis, but he does not leave the morning room to go up on the moor as usual and John Henry, with a clarity that is new to him – because, he thinks, the hero-worship is gone at last – John Henry watches to see what his brother will do.

  ‘Look, Jod,’ says Borowis at last, ‘I believe Mother was right. It would be better not to ask Rip to the dance.’

  ‘You have asked her.’

  ‘I know, but look, Jod, if you explain to her …’

  ‘You can do your own explaining,’ but it seems Borowis cannot, and – ‘What the hell can I do?’ he asks John Henry, over and over again, in those last days before the dance.

  ‘Tell Isabel. Tell her the truth.’

  ‘I can’t. You don’t understand. I’m in debt.’

  ‘On that whacking great allowance?’