China Court

by Rumer Godden

  ‘It isn’t whacking. Most of our chaps have a thousand a year at least,’ says Borowis aggrieved.

  ‘Doesn’t anyone live on their pay?’ says John Henry.

  ‘They couldn’t. You don’t understand, Jod. It’s all very well for you.’

  Mysteriously, it is. John Henry has only an allowance – ‘like a schoolboy,’ he says. It is ridiculously small, but it is all he needs, though sometimes he feels he ought to rebel against this taking for granted. ‘What if I won’t?’ asks John Henry. ‘Won’t stay here? Suppose I say I want to go into the army, or the navy, or be a doctor?’ – but he knows he does not. The St Probus and Canverisk businesses suit him exactly, as they suit his grandfather, and it is a soothing thought that in the quarry and the works he, not Borowis, is the king pin. ‘If it came to a showdown,’ John Henry tells Ripsie – and sometimes he longs for it to come to a showdown – ‘they would have to give me everything I want, because there’s no one else to carry on. No one.’ This gives him a respectability and a decency that Borowis with all his magnificence has not. ‘I haven’t any debts.’ John Henry says this without smugness; he says it gratefully. ‘No debts; no ambitions, but I don’t have to marry Isabel.’

  ‘What can I do?’ groans Borowis.

  ‘Change to a less expensive regiment. Marry Ripsie and be happy and ordinary,’ but John Henry does not say it and it never crosses Borowis’s mind. Well, some people are like show animals, thinks John Henry, born to take the limelight, live in it, be ambitious. Perhaps Mother is right, he thinks, and it is something to do with pedigree. Well it has missed me, and John Henry thinks of his squareness and thick-set arms and legs, his Quin hair and pale-blue eyes; but, he thinks, Ripsie has blood too. Of course, St Omer, and he thinks of her small erect head, her almost Chinese command of face, the sublime disregard of people that is so like Lady Patrick herself, and the glacial edge she can put in her voice. She would be a better wife for Boro than Isabel, thinks John Henry often, but Borowis cannot see it. He is following the laid-down conventional pattern and a surprising thought comes in these May evenings to John Henry: it is that his glamorous wonderful brother is dull. Duller than I am? asks John Henry, but that is heresy and he cannot believe it.

  All that month he has been in torture. ‘Boro, you will do something about Ripsie.’

  ‘I shall take care of her.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I shall take care of her,’ but, as the days before the dance go on, John Henry learns this is as much fantasy as the boy Borowis’s leasing of the valley and that Borowis’s promises are quicksand.

  Now the fairy lamps have burned all night on the paths in the garden; a few are beginning to flicker; some have gone out, and the sky behind the stars is beginning to pale. The music plays heartlessly on, playing that first tune again, the Floradora song, that is bound up with this night forever: ‘If you’re in love with somebody, Happy and lucky somebody …’ and Borowis dances with Ripsie at last.

  She says not a word, neither does he, but holds her close and closer. Ripsie does not mistake that closeness; it is her knell and she makes no protest, not the smallest struggle; only as they dance, she grows colder, while the pain from her fingers that John Henry has crushed in his seems to run up her arm into her heart.

  They dance and as the music ends, Borowis makes a few last turns to the stairs, where the furious Isabel is waiting. He passes her, stops, and very gently gives Ripsie to John Henry.

  Matins

  Domini est terra et quae replent eam orbis terrarum

  et qui habitant in eo.

  THE LORD OWNS EARTH AND ALL EARTH’S FULLNESS, THE ROUND WORLD, AND ALL ITS INHABITANTS.

  PSALM FOR MATINS. LITTLE OFFICE OF THE VIRGIN MARY, FROM MRS QUIN’S Day Hours

  The Annunciation The Virgin kneels in her bedroom with her hands crossed on her breast in an attitude of the deepest humility. She has a charming childlike face expressive of sublime innocence. The Angel stands before her with his right hand raised. The Holy Ghost descends on golden beams shining through an open arched window. In the background is the Virgin’s bed with a shelf at the head containing a few leather-bound books fastened by clasps. In the corner of the room behind the Virgin is a table on which stand a jug and basin and a half-folded towel.

  Full border of conventional flowers, fruit, and ivy leaves, with three birds painted in colours and heightened with gold.

  MINIATURE FACING THE OPENING OF MATINS IN THE HORAE BEATAE VIRGINIS MARIAE, FROM THE HOURS OF ROBERT BONNEFOY

  Adza, all her life, worries about the house and gives it continual care; then she has to relinquish the reins, and the house runs perfectly well without her. Lady Patrick turns her face away from faith and love, but when she is dying she asks for a priest, then a nun to nurse her, ‘and they came at once,’ says Mrs Quin, ‘after all those years.’ Lady Patrick asks, too, if she can be moved into the big bedroom. Perhaps she goes back to those first nights in it because, at the last, ‘So happy,’ she murmurs, turns with a sigh to the other pillow, and, ‘falls asleep,’ says Mrs Quin; a death is not usually like falling asleep, but this one is. Borowis marries Isabel, but the Eleventh has been ordered to South Africa and he throws up the mission to join it. ‘I warned you I would,’ says Borowis. He is killed at Paardeberg in February 1900. ‘She didn’t have him for long,’ says Ripsie and finds she can say, ‘Poor Isabel,’ and when Bella is born, asks Isabel to be godmother. Ripsie’s heart bleeds away at that dance – and she lives happily on with John Henry and makes the garden. ‘Then what was all the pother about?’ asks Mrs Quin.

  ‘No more voices!’ said Peter sinking into a chair. The chorus had died away in a crescendo of good-byes; Walter’s boom, Bella’s commands had faded; the last car had gone up the lane and Peter had come back from the gate to find quiet; only the sound of birds, of the rooks and guinea fowls in the garden and, in the house, of water running, footsteps, the clicking of August’s nails on the hall flagstones and Tracy humming as she helped Cecily to wash up the tea things; ordinary everyday sounds of evening quiet.

  He had to go up to the farm. ‘Yes, even on my wedding day,’ said Peter. ‘I must know that Ern Neot has looked after the calf.’ He had been up after the wedding luncheon to change and bring his suitcases down, but, ‘I haven’t seen Ern about the animals,’ said Peter.

  ‘What will Peter wear for the wedding?’ That had provoked a panic.

  ‘A lounge suit, I suppose.’

  ‘He hasn’t a suit, don’t you remember at the funeral …’

  ‘He can’t wear a jacket and trousers.’

  ‘He simply can’t.’

  ‘I suppose he must,’ and a wail. ‘He will spoil the wedding.’

  ‘Ruin it completely,’ but, when they got to the church, there was Peter with his brother Harold, both in morning dress with pearl-grey waistcoats, identical grey-and-black ties, carnations, and grey top hats.

  ‘Harold brought them down on the train last night,’ said Peter. ‘Remnants of glory,’ but he could say that without bitterness now.

  ‘But how?’

  ‘How did he know?’

  ‘I telephoned,’ said Peter. ‘There is a telephone in St Probus, you know. I couldn’t get near my own old things, but Harold was resourceful and borrowed Father’s. We had to take a fold in the trousers, but my chest is as broad as his, as you can see.’

  Tracy, too, had changed from the lawn wedding dress which Cecily had laid carefully on the White Room bed. ‘I will wash it to take the starch out and put it in blue paper.’

  ‘Is that what you do to keep muslin?’

  ‘To keep’ had become for Tracy the most important verb in the English language. ‘And it isn’t only possessive,’ she had defended herself against Bella. ‘It means to watch over, take care of, maintain.’

  ‘Maintain, that’s an odd sort of word,’ said Tom.

  ‘Is it odd? To hold in one’s hand?’ asked Tracy. She liked it and, ‘The house will not change hands yet,’ s
aid Tracy. It seemed to her a miracle. There would still be hands to direct, write letters, sign cheques; to bolt the doors and close the windows at night; turn keys in cupboard locks and desks and in the ignition switches of cars. Hands that do household chores, use vacuum cleaners and washing machines – ‘if we are lucky,’ said Tracy, ‘if the books bring’ – but it seemed they would. Hands that dial and pick up the receiver of the telephone, switch on lights; and there may be fresh small hands, thought Tracy and, I hope, hands to help – if we are luckier still – but all belonging, all our hands. ‘It’s beginning,’ said Tracy.

  She walked up to Penbarrow with Peter to see the calf and waited for him there. When they came back, up the valley path and over the wall, it was late, nearly nine o’clock.

  The garden had changed in a week. ‘Is it only a week?’ asked Peter. The sweet peas were almost over and though stocks and marigolds still flowered, the Michaelmas daisies were beginning. There were Japanese anemones, black-eyed susans, roses. A sting of cold was in the air – The dew will be heavy, thought Peter – and there was a smell of woodsmoke, Groundsel had been having a bonfire.

  ‘Autumn is so melancholy,’ says Barbara once to Mrs Quin. ‘Dead leaves, dead bracken, withered stalks of flowers, bonfires, mists. Melancholy,’ says Barbara with a shiver.

  ‘That’s a town convention,’ says Mrs Quin. ‘If you lived in the country you would know better than that. Autumn is not just ash,’ she says stirring the bonfire.

  ‘What is it then?’ asks Barbara.

  ‘Potash,’ says Mrs Quin.

  ‘Potash,’ the commonsense word breaks through the mists and the fading colours and, ‘Those must go on the bonfire,’ said Peter now, looking at the withering sweet peas. In the dusk by the wall Tracy found an autumn crocus where last year’s holly leaves were dead; as she knelt down to look at it, brushing the still prickly holly aside, Peter knelt too and, with an almost unbearable happiness, she looked up past his red head and saw a new moon. The sky was still light and the moon’s crescent had a flaky whiteness, almost transparent in the luminous sky. ‘We ought to wish,’ said Tracy and her wish was so strong that she had to take refuge – in antics, thought Tracy. ‘I must curtsy seven times, but you have to bow, Peter,’ and she commanded, ‘turn your money.’

  ‘Turn your ring,’ retorted Peter, and there was a sudden silence.

  It is the latest ring at China Court, that is all, thought Tracy. Adza’s is heavy gold, a plain wide band; Lady Patrick’s narrower, chased and engraved inside. ‘Forever.’ ‘Jared always did have fancy ideas,’ says Polly. Mrs Quin’s is a thin circle of platinum; Tracy’s is gold again but still thin; only the latest wedding ring, but both Peter and Tracy were suddenly so conscious of it that they had to change the subject and, ‘I’m cold and hungry,’ said Tracy. ‘Let’s go in.’

  Lamplight fell from the house windows and as they came up the garden they could see firelight on the drawing-room walls. The room was waiting for them, ready, dusted, and polished, the flowers freshened. Mr Alabaster had finished with the famille rose and it was back, ranged in its cabinets, and the Little Pink Boy, the Pale Blue Girl were back too with the clock and its cupid on the far chimney shelf. A table was laid for two and drawn up to the fire, but as Tracy and Peter walked in, the house was empty. On the hall table was a note from Cecily: ‘Chicken in the oven. Mr Walter left you the wine. I have gone up to Minna and Groundsel for the night. Your room is ready,’ and a question fell between them like a plummet. What room?

  ‘If you will open the wine,’ said Tracy a little breathlessly, ‘I will go and see what is in the kitchen,’ but the moment Peter went into the drawing room, she ran upstairs. The White Room was empty except for the wedding dress laid on the counterpaned bed; all her things had been moved. Slowly, her nerves tingling, Tracy walked out onto the landing and saw Peter’s suitcases in the dressing room. Then? thought Tracy and tiptoed in.

  The door to the big bedroom was open; the fire was lit here too, a lamp was turned low on the dressing table where her brush and comb, looking curiously childish, were put out beside a bowl of double white violets, my bouquet, thought Tracy. The curtains were drawn, the bed turned down, but Tracy’s eyes hastily looked away from the bed. In the same moment she turned and saw Peter in the doorway.

  ‘I thought you were opening the wine.’

  ‘I thought you were in the kitchen.’

  Were these the same two who, not an hour ago, had been leaning in perfect companionship on the cowshed half-door to watch the week-old calf?

  The calf, completely at home in the world now, had turned its unalarmed, deep-lashed eyes, wide in its mole-coloured face, to look at them, then, with a heave of its flanks had yawned, and Tracy had laughed with delight. ‘I have never seen a calf yawn.’

  ‘Haven’t you?’ Then Peter stopped. He had never seen one yawn either. ‘Wait. You will see …’ and it was as if a long glimpse had been unfolded from immortality when he thought of all Tracy should see through him. Was that us? thought Peter. And did we find the autumn crocus, and wish on the new moon?

  ‘W-we can’t s-sleep here,’ stuttered Tracy. ‘It’s G-Gran’s room.’

  ‘The biggest bedroom, my dear’ – Peter tried to be airy but only succeeded in sounding mocking – ‘is where the master and mistress usually sleep. We are the master and mistress.’

  Tracy fled downstairs to the kitchen. In the dressing room Peter began opening the unfamiliar drawers and cupboards. He opened them briskly merely to deflect his thoughts, but it sounded in the kitchen as if he were slamming them and Tracy’s face set into its mask as she put the dogs’ plates down for them, filled their water bowl, then took Cecily’s carefully cooked chicken out of the oven. Cooked with love, thought Tracy miserably, with love, but eaten – she could not predict how it would be eaten, but her hands were shaking as she slid it onto its dish.

  They had finished dinner long ago and cleared away, hours ago, thought Tracy. ‘Don’t wash up,’ said a notice from Cecily on the sink. ‘Cecily seems to be in charge,’ said Peter.

  They came back to the drawing room and lit cigarettes. Tracy sat on the ugly old hassock near the fire, smoothing August’s ears as his head lay on her knee. Every now and then she pushed him away and knelt down to take up the poker and stir the fire. Moses, seeing there was no more chicken, had loped away to the kitchen. Bumble had gone to his basket, but August sat wearily between them looking from one to the other, clearly asking why they did not all go to bed. Tracy got up, peered between the curtains and came back.

  ‘The moon has gone d-down.’

  ‘It would by now. It’s new.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tracy. She poked the fire again and asked, ‘Do you need to go up to P-Penbarrow again?’

  ‘No. Ern is sleeping there.’

  ‘Did C-Cecily arrange that too?’

  ‘No, I did,’ said Peter.

  His face, on the other side of the fire, looked bony and closed and Tracy knew that her own was just as stiff; self-consciousness was on them like a straitjacket. Of course, there have been couples who left each other on their wedding night, she thought and, I don’t know him, she thought in panic.

  She was very tired. The taste of the wine was in her mouth and her head felt swimming. I shouldn’t have drunk all that, thought Tracy. The lamps seemed to be burning on and on, but with a double flame. Have I drunk as much as that? she thought.

  Peter made up the fire, but a moment later she picked up the poker and stirred it again. Then August ran to the door and whined. ‘He w-wants to go out,’ said Tracy. ‘He always g-goes out before he goes to—’ She broke off sharply. It was long past his bedtime, but she did not say that either. Peter got up and stretched and went with August into the garden. He called Bumble too, but it seemed only a moment before they were back. Tracy heard him lock the front door; heard a creak as Bumble got back into his basket, then August scratched at the drawing-room door and Peter came in with him, shut the door, put another and
unnecessary log on the fire and sat down. Are we going to sit here all night, as far away from each other as we can get? wondered Tracy.

  Silence settled on the room. Tracy hunched herself on the hassock, her feet together, her elbows on her knees as she looked at the fire, but Peter sat upright in his chair, one leg crossed over the other. He’s handsome, thought Tracy grudgingly. She’s pretty, thought Peter.

  Handsome and my husband, thought Tracy, cold with dread. This stranger! and she longed, as she had not longed all these years, to be home again, not here that I thought was home, but back in New York, in the world I know. She longed for New York and for Barbara, her gay, light, yes light, mother who would never have dreamed of falling into such depths as this. This comes of being serious, why am I serious? moaned Tracy, but without a sign. What have I done now? In this moment she would have given China Court, and all England, to be back in America again.

  Pretty and utterly baffling, thought Peter. A little fish, or a block of ice. I should have known she couldn’t like me – and he would have given Penbarrow to be back at Penbarrow again; not to be here, tied to this silence, with the inscrutable face opposite him, its eyelids sealed. Prim and ridiculous, thought Peter.

  I ought to have remembered who I was, cried the silent Tracy.

  I should have kept myself to myself as I swore I would, said the silent Peter.

  Tracy was afraid she would cry and, to hide her face, picked up the poker and suddenly Peter said between his teeth, ‘Tracy, if you poke that fire again I swear I shall hit you.’

  She looked at him in cold surprise, turned and poked the fire. Peter leaned forward and gave her a stinging slap on the cheek.

  Never in her life had anyone hit Tracy. She jumped; the poker fell into the grate with a clatter as, astonished and hurt, she stared at Peter, the mark reddening on her cheek, tears welling in her eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Peter, ‘but I warned you. Perhaps another time you will believe me.’

  ‘An-noth-ther!’ Blind with tears, Tracy stumbled over the hassock as she sprang up. Rage and misery made her more incoherent than ever. ‘You great b-b-beast! If you think I shall st-stay here an-other m-m-minute—’