China Court
Page 30
‘And where will you go this time of night? America? Rome?’ sneered Peter.
She said what she knew would goad him most. ‘I shall go to Aunt Bella tomorrow.’
‘You little cat!’ Peter was up too and coming nearer. Seen through tears he looked so big and menacing that Tracy backed away down the room, around chairs and tables, until a smell of arums warned her she was near the other fireplace.
‘Don’t touch me,’ she cried in panic but, ‘Little cat!’ said Peter again. He was white with temper and Tracy hastily tried to step sideways, but in her blindness and hurry, she stumbled over the kerb; to save herself she clutched at the mantel, narrowly missing the Little Pink Boy and the French clock; then there was a rattle and a crash as her hand swept the Pale Blue Girl into the fender.
Tracy and Peter stood appalled, looking down at the mess of pale-blue china with its gilt and roses. A piece of yellow petticoat and a china hand in a blue sleeve had fallen on the hearth rug; a bit of curly head with a sliver of straw hat lay by the lilies; a shoe had rolled away under the grate. Slowly Tracy knelt down, shivering with nerves as she tried to pick up the pieces. ‘Look what you have made me do,’ she whispered. ‘What I …’ She gave a sob and Peter knelt beside her.
‘That’s how we keep things.’ She had begun to cry in earnest now, the stiffness gone. ‘I loved her ever since I was a little girl. She was ours now and I smashed her.’
‘Yes, thank God.’
‘Th-thank God?’ She turned an amazed face to look up at him.
Peter pulled her handkerchief out of her sleeve and gave it to her. ‘Yes, because we were nearly smashing everything. Don’t try and pick up the pieces now.’ He drew her to her feet. ‘Leave them. I can explain to Cecily in the morning. Just now, I want you.’
‘Yes,’ said Tracy. She dabbed at her eyes and blew her nose and sat down again. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Let’s sit and talk as we have been doing all these days, talk about our plans.’
‘Not now, my darling.’
Darling. Tracy’s stomach seemed to give a small independent leap of itself. ‘But …’
‘There’s one thing we have to do first,’ said Peter.
‘First?’
‘Yes. We have to be married,’ said Peter. ‘Get up, Tracy.’ Tracy stood up. ‘Come here.’
‘I have never touched you,’ said Peter, ‘except for that slap.’ He laid his hand against the hot mark. ‘Never touched you, not because I didn’t want to, but because it wasn’t time. Now …’ Peter’s voice was suddenly husky. He put his other hand on Tracy’s shoulder and gently ran it up her neck so that her hair fell over his hand. ‘Your hair’s like silk,’ said Peter, and picked up again what he had been saying. ‘Now I am going to touch you. Pay attention, Tracy. You are my wife and I am going to kiss you.’ His arms went round her. ‘Stand up straight,’ said Peter, ‘and stop dreaming.’
Startled, Tracy stood in his arms. For a moment she fought against him, but he only held her more tightly, forcing her lips up to his, shutting out the room and the firelight, his face warm and close to hers, as her mouth softened under his kiss. She could feel the hardness of his body pressed to hers, hard where she was soft. Then we are the two halves of a whole, thought Tracy and her heart began to beat as if it were clamouring.
‘Go upstairs,’ said Peter, ‘and get into bed and wait for me.’
At dawn a breeze comes ruffling the trees. The dew, as Peter said it would be, is heavy. The doors are locked; the windows dark with the curtains drawn. The lamps are out, the fires only handfuls of red embers; the dogs are in their baskets while the cats, Minerva, Cuckoo, Moses, curl in the kitchen armchair. A baby cries; a child dreams, somebody snores; someone lies awake, staring at the wall, but the voices hush because the house is asleep, ‘and now the stories seem like tales,’ says old Mrs Quin when she is very old. ‘Perhaps they don’t matter,’ she says, for she is also very tired, ‘except to the people who lived through them. The stories are all different – of course, each has its time and place – yet they are all alike in that, as with every day, they must be lived through from sunrise to sunset, all the hours of the day; and as the day ends, it begins,’ says Mrs Quin.
The Hours of the Day
[in the early usage]
MATINS and LAUDS are night prayers according to the early custom of reciting them after midnight
In Those Days:
PRIME was said at the first hour of the day, i.e. six o’clock
TIERCE or the third hour, at nine o’clock
SEXT the sixth hour, corresponds to noon
NONE the ninth hour, three o’clock
VESPERS at the close of day (when dusk falls)
COMPLINE the evening hour, which terminates the day
Makeup of a Typical Book of Hours
of the Late Fifteenth Century:
1. Calendar
2. Extracts from the Gospels
John I 1–14
Luke I 26–28
Matthew II 1–12
Mark XVI 14–20
3. Hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary
4. Hours of the Cross
5. Hours of the Holy Ghost
6. Seven penitential Psalms and Litany
7. Offices of the dead
8. Memorials to various saints and frequently two long prayers to the Virgin
A Biography of Rumer Godden
Rumer Godden was the prolific author of over sixty works of fiction and nonfiction for both adults and children, including international bestsellers Black Narcissus and In This House of Brede.
Margaret Rumer Godden, also known as Peggy, was born on December 10, 1907, in Sussex, England. Six months after her birth, her family moved to India, where her father worked for the Brahmaputra Steam Navigation Company. Godden spent most of her childhood in a large house along the river in Narayanganj, a trading town in Bengal with her sisters Rose, Nancy, and Winsome, also known as Jon. She fell in love with India, and went on to use it as a colorful backdrop for many of her successful novels, including The Peacock Spring and The River. In 1966, she and her sister Jon, cowrote a memoir about their childhood, Two Under the Indian Sun.
In 1920, at the age of thirteen, her parents sent her and Jon to boarding school in England. The girls struggled to leave their home in India behind, changing schools five times in two years. Godden eventually parted ways with Jon and attended school in Eastbourne, England, where she studied literature and dance. Due to a chronic spinal injury, she could not pursue a career as a professional ballerina and instead trained in London as a dance teacher. When she was eighteen, she opened a dance studio in Calcutta, the Peggie Godden School of Dance, and there she taught both Indian and Eurasian students, a practice that was considered controversial at the time. At twenty-seven, she married Laurence Sinclair Foster, with whom she had two daughters, Jane and Paula. Upon the birth of her children, she briefly returned to Britain, where she published Black Narcissus, a commercial and critical success.
At the start of World War II, Godden took her daughters to Kashmir and parted from her husband, who left her with many debts. She rented a small house by the Dal Lake with no electricity or running water, wrote endlessly, and cultivated an herb farm. At this home, one of her servant’s tried to poison her and her children by putting ground glass, opium, and marijuana in their food, inspiring a scene in her book Kingfishers Catch Fire. At forty, she returned to England again, and truly emerged on the British and American literary scenes. She remarried and lived in England for the rest of her life with the exception of a few visits to India. Godden felt at home in both Britain and India, and wrote, “When I am in one country I am homesick for the other.”
Godden studied many religions of the world and she struck up a friendship with a scholarly Benedictine nun, Dame Felicitas Corrigan. Her studies inspired one of her best-known novels, In This House of Brede, a story about an Englishwoman who leaves her life in London behind to join an order of Benedictine nuns. Godden lived near Stanbroo
k Abbey for three years, researching the book. She officially converted to Catholicism in the early 1960s.
Many of her books were made into classic films, including Black Narcissus, The River, The Greengage Summer, and The Battle of the Villa Fiorita. She collaborated with filmmaker Jean Renoir on The River, and they traveled to Calcutta while working on the movie. In addition to her novels written for adult audiences, she also wrote several children’s books—the most famous being The Doll’s House—and nonfiction books, including a biography of Hans Christian Andersen. In 1972, she won the Whitbread Award for children’s literature, and in 1993 she was named an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. At the age of eighty-six, she visited India—for the final time—with her daughter to shoot a BBC documentary.
She published her last book, Cromartie vs. the God Shiva, in 1997, just a year before she passed away.
The Godden family house at Narayanganj in Bengal in the early 1900s.
Godden in Bengal in 1915 with her parents, Norah and Arthur; her sisters, Rose, Nancy, and Jon; and their dogs, Cherub and Chinky.
Godden at her desk in Dove House in Dal Lake, Kashmir, 1943.
Godden in her garden at Dove House in the 1940s.
Godden on the set of Black Narcissus at Pinewood Studios with Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, and Deborah Kerr.
Godden in Buckinghamshire in the 1950s.
Godden with her daughter Jane in the woods in Buckinghamshire in the 1950s.
Godden at a book launch in New York with Jean Primrose in the 1960s.
Godden with her grandchildren Mark and Elizabeth in Rye, 1962.
Godden’s home, Lamb House, in Rye.
Godden and her cat, Simkin, in Scotland in the 1990s.
Godden in India in 1995 while filming BBC’s Bookmark.
Godden while filming Bookmark in 1995.
(All photographs courtesy of the Rumer Godden Literary Trust.)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks are due to Messrs Sotheby and Co. for help over the rare books found in China Court and for the descriptions from the Bonnefoy Book of Hours; to Charles Causley and the Reverend W. A. Kneebone of Atarnum for checking of Cornish dialect and terms; to Mrs Mary Oliver for the loan of books; and especially to Mrs E. M. Taylor for endless and patient research.
The translations of the Latin quotations from the Book of Hours are taken from The Little Breviary, edited by the Benedictine nuns of Stanbrook Abbey, Worcester, England.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1979 by Rumer Godden
All photos copyright © The Rumer Godden Literary Trust
Cover design by Drew Padrutt
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4038-9
This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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