by Molly Keane
‘I don’t feel very hungry,’ she said. A silly remark. I know she always pretends she can’t eat and when I go out makes Rose do her fried eggs and buttered toast and all the things the doctor says she mustn’t touch.
‘Smell that,’ I said, and lifted the cover off my perfect quenelles.
‘I wonder if you’d pull down the blind –’ not a word about the quenelles – ‘the sun’s rather in my eyes.’
‘You really want the blind down?’
She nodded.
‘All the way?’
‘Please.’
I went across then and settled her for her tray, pulling her up and putting a pillow in the exact spot behind her back, and another tiny one behind her head. She simply refused to look as if she felt comfortable. I’m used to that. I arranged the basket tray (straight from Harrods) across her, and put her luncheon tray on it.
‘Now then,’ I said – one must be firm – ‘a delicious chicken mousse.’
‘Rabbit, I bet,’ she said.
I was still patient: ‘Just try a forkful.’
‘Myxomatosis,’ she said. ‘Remember that? – I can’t.’
I held on to my patience. ‘It was far too young to have myxomatosis. Come on now, Mummie –’ I tried to keep the firm note out of my voice – ‘just one.’
She lifted the small silver fork (our crest, a fox rampant, almost handled and washed away by use) as though she were heaving up a load of stinking fish: ‘The smell – I’m—’ She gave a trembling, tearing cry, vomited dreadfully, and fell back into the nest of pretty pillows.
I felt more than annoyed for a moment. Then I looked at her and I was frightened. I leaned across the bed and rang her bell. Then I shouted and called down to Rose in the kitchen. She came up fast, although her feet and her shoes never seem to work together now; even then I noticed it. But of course I notice everything.
‘She was sick,’ I said.
‘She couldn’t take the rabbit?’
Rabbit again. ‘It was a mousse,’ I screamed at the old fool, ‘a cream mousse. It was perfect. I made it so I ought to know. It was RIGHT. She was enjoying it.’
Rose was stooping over Mummie. ‘Miss Aroon, she’s gone.’ She crossed herself and started to pray in that loose, easy way Roman Catholics do: ‘Holy Mary, pray for us now and in the hour of our death . . . Merciful Jesus . . .’
She seemed too close to Mummie with that peasant gabbling prayer. We should have had the Dean.
‘Take the tray away,’ I said. I picked Mummie’s hand up out of the sick and put it down in a clean place. It was as limp as a dead duck’s neck. I wanted to cry out. ‘Oh, no—’ I wanted to say. I controlled myself. I took three clean tissues out of the cardboard box I had covered in shell-pink brocade and wiped my fingers. When they were clean the truth came to me, an awful new-born monstrosity. I suppose I swayed on my feet. I felt as if I could go on falling for ever. Rose helped me to a chair and I could hear its joints screech as I sat down, although I am not at all heavy, considering my height. I longed to ask somebody to do me a favour, to direct me; to fill out this abyss with some importance – something needful to be done.
‘What must I do now?’ I was asking myself. Rose had turned her back on me and on the bed. She was opening the window as high as the sash would go – that’s one of their superstitions, something to do with letting the spirit go freely. They do it. They don’t speak of it. She did the same thing when Papa died.
‘You must get the doctor at once, Miss Aroon, and Kathie Cleary to lay her out. There’s no time to lose.’
She said it in a gluttonous way. They revel in death . . . Keep the Last Rites going . . . She can’t wait to get her hands on Mummie, to get me out of the way while she helps Mrs Cleary in necessary and nasty rituals. What could I do against them? I had to give over. I couldn’t forbid. Or could I?
‘I shall get the doctor,’ I said, ‘and Nurse Quinn. Not Mrs Cleary.’
She faced me across the bed, her great blue eyes blazing. ‘Miss Aroon, madam hated Nurse Quinn. The one time she gave her a needle she took a weakness. She wouldn’t let her in the place again. She wouldn’t let her touch her. Kathie Cleary’s a dab hand with a corpse – there’s nothing missing in Kathie Cleary’s methods and madam loved her, she loved a chat with Kathie Cleary.’
I really felt beside myself. Why this scene? Why can’t people do what I say? That’s all I ask. ‘That will do, Rose,’ I said. I felt quite strong again. ‘I’ll telephone to the doctor and ask him to let Nurse know. Just take that tray down and keep the mousse hot for my luncheon.’
Rose lunged towards me, over the bed, across Mummie’s still feet. I think if she could have caught me in both her hands she would have done so.
‘Your lunch,’ she said. ‘You can eat your bloody lunch and she lying there stiffening every minute. Rabbit – rabbit chokes her, rabbit sickens her, and rabbit killed her – call it rabbit if you like. Rabbit’s a harmless word for it – if it was a smothering you couldn’t have done it better. And – another thing – who tricked her out of Temple Alice? Tell me that—’
‘Rose, how dare you.’ I tried to interrupt her but she stormed on.
‘. . . and brought my lady into this mean little ruin with hungry gulls screeching over it and two old ghosts (God rest their souls) knocking on the floors by night—’
I stayed calm above all the wild nonsense. ‘Who else hears the knocking?’ I asked her quietly. ‘Only you.’
‘And I heard the roaring and crying when you parted Mister Hamish from Miss Enid and put the two of them in hospital wards, male and female, to die on their own alone.’
‘At the time it was totally necessary.’
‘Necessary? That way you could get this house in your own two hands and boss and bully us through the years. Madam’s better off the way she is this red raw minute. She’s tired from you – tired to death. Death is right. We’re all killed from you and it’s a pity it’s not yourself lying there and your toes cocked for the grave and not a word more about you, God damn you!’
Yes, she stood there across the bed saying these obscene, unbelievable things. Of course she loved Mummie, all servants did. Of course she was overwrought. I know all that – and she is ignorant to a degree, I allow for that too. Although there was a shocking force in what she said to me, it was beyond all sense or reason. It was so entirely and dreadfully false that it could not touch me. I felt as tall as a tree standing above all that passionate flood of words. I was determined to be kind to Rose. And understanding. And generous. I am her employer, I thought. I shall raise her wages quite substantially. She will never be able to resist me then, because she is greedy. I can afford to be kind to Rose. She will learn to lean on me. There is nobody in the world who needs me now and I must be kind to somebody.
‘You’re upset,’ I said gently. ‘Naturally you’re upset. You loved Mrs St Charles and I know you didn’t mean one word you’ve just said to me.’
‘I did too, Miss Aroon.’ She was like a drowning person, coming up for a last choking breath. ‘God help you, it’s the flaming truth.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I answered. ‘I’ve forgotten . . . I didn’t hear . . . I understand. Now we’ve both got to be practical. We must both be brave. I’ll ring up the doctor and you’ll take that tray to the kitchen, and put the mousse over a pot of boiling water – it may be hours till lunchtime.’
She took up the tray, tears pouring down her face. Of course I had expected her to obey me, but I won’t deny that before she turned away from the bed, the tray, as it should have been, between her hands, I had been aware of a moment of danger. Now, apart from my shock and sorrow about Mummie, a feeling of satisfaction went through me – a kind of ripple that I needed. I needed it and I had it.
I went into the hall and picked up the telephone. While I waited for the exchange (always criminally slow) to answer, I had time to consider how the punctual observance of the usual importances is the only way to behave at such times as th
ese. And I do know how to behave – believe me, because I know. I have always known. All my life so far I have done everything for the best reasons and the most unselfish motives. I have lived for the people dearest to me, and I am at a loss to know why their lives have been at times so perplexingly unhappy. I have given them so much, I have given them everything, all I know how to give – Papa, Hubert, Richard, Mummie. At fifty-seven my brain is fairly bright, brighter than ever I sometimes think, and I have a cast-iron memory. If I look back beyond any shadow into the uncertainties and glories of our youth, perhaps I shall understand more about what became of us.
2
When Hubert and I were children and after we grew up we lived at Temple Alice. Temple Alice had been built by Mummie’s ancestor, before he inherited his title and estates. He built the house for his bride, and he gave it her name. Now, the title extinct and the estates entirely dissipated, Temple Alice, after several generations as a dower house, came to Mummie when her mother died. Papa farmed the miserably few hundred acres that remained of the property. Mummie loved gardening. On fine days she would work in the woodland garden, taking the gardener away from his proper duties among the vegetables. On wet days she spent hours of time in the endless, heatless, tumbling-down greenhouses, which had once sheltered peaches and nectarines and stephanotis. One vine survived – she knew how to prune it and thin its grapes, muscatels. Papa loved them.
Her painting was another interest to take the place of the social life she loathed. A pity for herself that she was so withdrawn a character. Recluse would be a truer word to describe her. She could have had such a lovely time gadding round with Papa – hunting and race meetings and all those shoots. But she was really frightened of horses, and if she did go to a race-meeting, in Papa’s riding days, she would shut her eyes during his race, and once when he was to ride a bad jumper she got drunk in the bar and fell down in the Owners and Trainers. She simply could not endure the anxiety about him.
I don’t understand what it was that held them together – they never had much to say to each other. He had no more understanding of her painting or gardening than she had of horses or fishing or shooting – so what can they have had to talk about?
Once she had a show of her pictures in a London gallery. During a whole year she painted for it. No art critic noticed it. Hardly anybody came in to look – one picture was sold. Even that disastrous experience did not stop her painting. She went on with it, making almost anything she painted look preposterous and curiously hideous too. Give her a bunch of roses to paint – lovely June roses with tear-drops of morning rain on their petals – and she reproduced them as angular, airified shapes in a graveyard atmosphere, unimaginably ugly; but in a crude way you could not forget roses as you looked at this picture in speechless dislike. She would laugh and rub her little hands and shiver – it was deathly cold in her studio.
Nowhere was it possible to sit down in her studio, once a stone-flagged storeroom in the depths of the house. Pyramids of cardboard boxes full of old letters, stacks of newspapers and photographs, old hunting boots, leather boxes that might hold hats or again might be full of letters, all hovered to a fall. A stuffed hedgehog, the dust of years solid between its spines, sat on top of a bird’s egg cabinet, empty of eggs, its little drawers full only of dented cottonwool and the smell of camphor. Polo sticks hanging in a bunch and obsolete fishing rods in dusty canvas cases, tied with neat, rotten tapes, showed this house to have been lived in by gentlemen of leisure – my mother’s family.
Leisure they may have enjoyed but they knew little about comfort. Our water supply was meagre and my grandfather had deflected a considerable quantity of it to a pond on which, in the shelter of a grove of rhododendrons, he loved to row himself about. It was his escape from the land agent and other buzzing tormentors of a leisured life.
I think, now, that Mummie looked at her studio as her escape from responsibility. She had an enormous distaste for housekeeping. The sort of food we ate then owed nothing to the splendid Elizabeth Davids of the present day. I think Papa would have fainted at the very breath of garlic. It was for his sake only that Mummie expended some extreme essence of herself in bullying and inspiring her treasured cook, Mrs Lennon. I have seen her tremble and go green as she faced the slate on the kitchen table and the deadly quietness of the cook who stood so cheerlessly beside her. While longing only to put on her gauntlets, pick up her trug and trowel and get into the garden or into the blessed isolation of her studio, Mummie would penetrate her cook’s mind – praising just a little, demanding always more effort, a higher standard of perfection for the Captain.
When we were children the food in the nursery was quite poisonously disgusting. None of the fruit juice and vitamins of today for us – oranges only at Christmastime and porridge every morning, variable porridge slung together by the kitchen maid, followed by white bread and butter and Golden Syrup. Boiled eggs were for Sundays and sausages for birthdays. I don’t think Mummie gave us a thought – she left the ordering of nursery meals to the cook, who sent up whatever came easiest, mostly rabbit stews and custard puddings riddled with holes. No wonder the nannies left in quick succession.
Why do I hate the word ‘crusted’? Because I feel with my lips the boiled milk, crusted since the night before, round the rim of the mug out of which I must finish my breakfast milk . . . I am again in the darkness of the nursery, the curtains drawn against the winter morning outside. Nannie is dragging on her corsets under her great nightdress. Baby Hubert is walking up and down his cot in a dirty nightdress. The nursery maid is pouring paraffin on a sulky nursery fire. I fix my eyes on the strip of morning light where wooden rings join curtains to curtain pole and think about my bantams . . . Even then I knew how to ignore things. I knew how to behave.
I don’t blame Mummie for all this. She simply did not want to know what was going on in the nursery. She had had us and she longed to forget the horror of it once and for all. She engaged nannie after nannie with excellent references, and if they could not be trusted to look after us, she was even less able to compete. She didn’t really like children; she didn’t like dogs either, and she had no enjoyment of food, for she ate almost nothing.
She was sincerely shocked and appalled on the day when the housemaid came to tell her that our final nannie was lying on her bed in a drunken stupor with my brother Hubert beside her in another drunken stupor, while I was lighting a fire in the day nursery with the help of a tin of paraffin. The nannie was sacked, but given quite a good reference with no mention of her drinking; that would have been too unkind and unnecessary, since she promised to reform. Her next charge (only a Dublin baby) almost died of drink, and its mother wrote a very common, hysterical letter, which Mummie naturally put in the fire and forgot about. Exhausted, bored, and disgusted by nannies, she engaged a governess who would begin my education and at the same time keep an eye on the nursery maid who was to be in charge of Hubert’s more menial four-year-old necessities.
3
The name of our governess was Mrs Brock and we loved her dearly from the start to the finish of her reign. For one thing, the era of luncheon in the diningroom opened for us with Mrs Brock, and with it a world of desire and satisfaction, for we were as greedy as Papa. Although governesses lunched in the diningroom, they supped on trays upstairs – that was the accepted rule, and Mummie must have been thankful for it as these luncheons meant a horrid disintegration of her times of intimacy with Papa. So much of his day was spent away from her. In the winter months he was shooting or hunting, and in the spring there was salmon fishing – all undertaken and excelled in more as a career and a duty than as the pleasures of a leisured life. In the summer months there was a horse, sometimes horses, to be got ready for the Dublin Show, often evening fishing, and always the supervision of haymaking and harvest with their attendant ghastly weather to worry him. So luncheon and dinner were, I suppose, the brightest hours in her day.
Dinnertime was a formal, nearly a sacred, hour – usuall
y more like two hours. At half past seven they went upstairs to bathe and change into dinner jacket and teagown. During the months of that legendary summer weather, bathwater was too often the problem, for every house was dependent on its own wells, springs, or streams. In the country there was no main supply of water. This was not a problem to defeat people who looked on the bath before dinner as part of the structure of life. There existed, too, an austerity which forbade complaint. It went with loofahs and Brown Windsor soap and large natural sponges draining out the last of the soft water in netted holders hooked to the rim of the bath.
We never came down to dinner of course, but I knew the candles were always lighted on the table, and spoons and forks and plates, salt-cellars and pepper pots were cleared away before dessert. I don’t think they ever had a drink in the drawingroom, not even a glass of sherry – that came with the soup – but they always drank wine and port, and often brandy with their coffee.
I came down only once, because Mrs Brock had gone out and I thought Hubert would die, he was so sick. In spite of the desperate importance of my mission, I stood in the doorway for a whole minute, stunned and silenced by the munificent quality of their intimacy.
The window furthest from where they were sitting was open, and a tide of musky, womanly scent from the wet Portugal laurels drifted in, strong against the delicate smells of strawberries and candle smoke and a breath of past roast chicken. They sat at the far end of the long pale table. Her head was bowed and her eyes were lifted towards him, defeating the heavy gesture of her head. She sat on his right hand. Behind him the green luminous gloom of glass within glass retreated inside the doors of a breakfront cabinet that filled one end of the diningroom. Mummie had lined it with grey linen, so that all glass objects floated and were lost in its spaces. It was like water or air at his back, as though the end wall were open to air or water. The austere outdoor look I knew had melted from him into the air, like the glass in the cupboard. Sitting there, he seemed extraordinarily dulled, dulled and happy. Both their glasses were full and his eyes were downwards on her arms, their flesh firm as partridge breasts. He was speaking to her, asking some question I did not hear.
