by Molly Keane
When they saw me in the doorway, when I said, ‘I think Hubert’s dead,’ he raised his eyes from her arms (it seemed a long time, while Hubert and I were shut out) to her shoulders, to her eyes, and then he visibly let her go. If my dressing-gown had been in flames round me it would have taken them just as long to part. Although they weren’t near each other I could not have walked, unless they called me, any nearer to that circle they made.
What happened afterwards is less clear to me than that impression of their impervious intimacy. I don’t understand it. Even now, as a sophisticated, quite worldly woman. Not when I have to admit his endless strayings with all the other women who longed after him and won him easily through the years.
Mummie said: ‘My dear child – what can this mean?’
‘Only Hubert’s been sick in his bed and he has a dreadful pain. I’m frightened.’
‘And Mrs Brock?’ she asked.
‘She’s at choir practice.’
‘What a good word for it,’ Papa said.
‘Everybody’s out. There’s a dance in the gate lodge. Oh, do come quickly, he may be dead now.’
‘Extraordinary, people are,’ she said.
Papa got up and put his hands under the lace that covered her shoulders and pressed her down in her chair. ‘I’ll go. You’re hopeless about sick. Finish your drink,’ he said.
Papa was wonderful. He picked poor Hubert out of his cot and took off his sleeping suit before he wrapped him up in a hot bath towel from the airing cupboard. I loved every minute of it. I rushed about emptying the pots and finding clean sheets.
When at last Mrs Brock appeared – it must have been almost ten o’clock, and she was full of explanations – he didn’t listen and he didn’t say a cross word to her. Just: ‘Sit down and keep him warm. I think I’d better get hold of the doctor.’
Mrs Brock did exactly what he told her. She kept on her lovely hat, covered deep in roses. She sat there under her hat, Hubert on her knees, a hot statue, smelling of armpits and amber scent, till Papa got back with the doctor.
They took Hubert off to Cork that same night, and he had an appendix and tubes and nearly died. I prayed night and day for his recovery and that he might get a reprieve from pain. Constantly with me was the thought of his black hair, peaked on his forehead, smooth on his head as if painted on an egg. As I cleaned out his budgies and his mice his eyes haunted my work – his eyes that never lit and sparkled as blue eyes should, as I knew mine would, if only they were big and blue.
When at last he came home he was a very great disappointment to me. The nuns in the nursing home had spoiled him so that he was really unbearably demanding, sending me in all directions and inventing tasks for me while he lay on a chaise longue under the cedar tree with lemonade constantly at his elbow. In those days thrombosis had not been heard of, and invalids, young and old, were allowed a comfortable rest after their operations. Hubert even had a po in the bushes ‘in case.’ Another thing those kind nuns had done was to teach him to say ‘the toilet’ when he meant the po or the lavatory, which was a vulgarity no one seemed able to straighten out. If circumstances forced Mrs Brock to mention it she called it the Place. ‘Have you been to the Place, dear?’ or ‘Have you been?’ Or else ‘Hubert, shouldn’t you run along the passage?’ when Hubert was fidgeting frighteningly from foot to foot.
When Mrs Brock succeeded our last, drunk nannie I was seven and Hubert was four. With her in the schoolroom there came to us a daily security in happiness, and with it the delightful prospect of such a state continuing into an untimed future – a future when the budgerigar would speak his first word, when Magical Nature would create a family for the newly married mice, when I would sing ‘Two Little Girls in Blue, Dears’ in perfect tune. And, exceeding in interest even these prospects, were Mrs Brock’s stories of her past pupils, their parents and their way of life – stories as graphic and truly coloured as the Caldecott illustrations to John Gilpin.
Even the servants, who had skirmished endlessly with the nannies, loved Mrs Brock and served her willingly, and at any hour, with cups of tea. She was smallish and on the fat side, but neat as a bird. Perhaps she had more of a flowerlike quality, a tidy pink-tipped daisy. Her cheeks were firm and pink, her hair was crisp and more blond than grey, her false teeth gleamed fresh as dew every morning of her life. She was the widow of an organist who had saved very little money before he died at a medium sort of age, leaving her (fortunately childless, though she longed for kiddies of her own) to drag a living from a world out of which she had been cosily embedded in a nice little house with a nice little man who had a nice and not so little job in a large London parish. Mrs Brock was musical too; just how musical I don’t know, but she had sung in her husband’s choir, and when she came to us the Bechstein upright piano shuddered deeply under the full treatment which she gave the ‘Indian Love Lyrics,’ with the ‘Rustle of Spring’ never very far behind.
Her first job after her husband died was that of governess in a bishop’s family, where, with the help of Mrs Markham’s History of England and Gill’s Geography, she gave every satisfaction until schooldays closed her employment in that family. Her next pupils, Richard, Sholto, and Raymond, were the sons of Papa’s great friend Wobbly Massingham, a master of foxhounds and lord of the manor of Stoke Charity. Here Captain Massingham pursued, in a now legendary sort of splendour, a life of hunting, shooting, fishing, cricketing weeks, Epsom, Ascot, Goodwood, Newmarket, and Doncaster – a life which rather depleted the inheritance to be expected by Mrs Brock’s three pupils. But at least they were down for Eton, and you can’t take Eton away. Mrs Brock’s task was to prepare them for their preparatory school. This was not difficult, as Entwhistle’s was only too ready to accept the right sort of boy; and if his father and uncles were Old Boys he could be the right sort of moron and welcome. Of Mrs Brock’s pupils, Sholto was the most likely to succeed. A child of few words, greedy in a jolly way, and brutally determined with his pony, he would go further with less effort than his elder brother, Richard.
Richard was Mrs Brock’s favourite, and years afterwards she was to be my first intimate link with him. His curiosity about her held a privacy as exciting to Hubert and me as the shared tree houses or the secret rude rhymes of childhood. We would piece her together; it was a game in which our memories interlocked or contradicted recollections. He could say oddly unkind things about her, and I could deny her too. But I never told about the mice. What nice girl would?
Richard was a beautiful child and, despite a proper interest in and aptitude for all the importances of outdoor life, there were times when he would lean in silence against Mrs Brock as she played the piano, or even join her in singing ‘Speed Bonnie Boat,’ ‘Yip-i-addy,’ or ‘Now the Day Is Over.’ He preferred Mrs Tiggywinkle to the mildest comic, and liked to dwell on the idea of her transference from the washerwoman to the wild. He liked dressing up, too, but Mrs Brock felt that such games were not quite the thing for little boys. Sometimes she allowed herself to read him her favourite pieces from The Children’s Golden Treasury of Verse, when they would charge with the Light Brigade, or even lean from the gold bar of heaven with the Blessed Damozel.
Raymond was the youngest of the boys and the least likeable. He was a delicate child, and Nannie’s darling. He hated his pony. He kicked the dogs when he could do so without being observed or bitten. There was nothing nice or open about him. He in no way resembled his elder brothers. Although he only touched the fringes of schoolroom life – simple Bible stories and an hour of picture bricks – he usually carried some whining tale back to the nursery, where Nannie sat, brooding and mending the linen – spinning in her tower. Nannie was old enough to have been Lady Grizel Massingham’s nannie and she had never been sympathetically inclined towards governesses.
Mrs Brock conceived a senseless star-struck passion for Lady Grizel. Her eyes and her ears absorbed the sight and sound of this cool, contented lady, whose language differed from Mrs Brock’s in being as natural as
a peasant’s. She looked downwards and spoke rather like a child. Quite simple, grown-up words, such as ‘gardening’ got lost. Lady Grizel (and now Mrs Brock, of course) would say instead, ‘She’s diggin’ up the garden.’ I can’t think why Mrs Brock had never ascertained from her the definitive name for W. C.
When Lady Grizel gave Mrs Brock not one, but two grey flannel suits, Nannie made no secret of her disapproval. But Mrs Brock’s acceptance of the gifts was simple and delighted. They had been made, she told us, by Busvine – that holy tailoring name in the holy hunting world – made three and five years previously, of course, but classical tailor-mades never go out of fashion. Other kind gifts included a pair of indestructible and eternally right shoes from Peter Yapp. For some unknown reason these shoes, although made on Lady Grizel’s own last and all that, were never entirely comfortable, and old Yapp could never improve their fit. They were never entirely comfortable on Mrs Brock’s feet either, but she wore them with persistence and courage until at last they became docile friends.
A strange thing about those shoes was the way in which, when she was wearing them, Mrs Brock, who was a heavy treader by nature, planted her feet and walked with the same long steps as Lady Grizel, and stood in the same careless, rather flighty way. A lovely sort of fantasy possessed Mrs Brock as she moved in this new pretty way, this confident way. Part of herself became Lady Grizel – she absorbed Lady Grizel and breathed her out into the air around herself, and the air around was a far less lonely place in consequence.
All that Mrs Brock’s grateful heart and tiny brain could contrive in return for these favours was to knit – and for knitting she had true flair and genius. In the schoolroom she would sit alone in a loving glow as frail clouds of wool grew through her clever fingers into wraps and misty bedwear for Lady Grizel’s birthday or Christmas presents.
Nannie showed nothing but cold amusement when asked to admire these voluptuous clouds knitted with such speed and skill. She felt Mrs Brock’s time would be better employed in organising wholesome outdoor sports for the boys. Nannie herself still bowled to them with a hard ball and had often been heard to shout above any childish uproar: ‘Now, now, do stop this quarrellin’, boys, and let’s have a nice talk about huntin’.’
There came a day when every soul in the big house was alerted in the search for a ring which Lady Grizel had lost – her engagement ring – star sapphire and diamonds. But sapphire and diamonds were as nothing compared to its romantic value. No one had stolen it. No one suspected anybody else of stealing it, and everybody longed and burned to find it.
Nobody was more filled with longing and burning than Mrs Brock, and she set about the business of the search with meticulous generalship. She plotted every step Lady Grizel had taken on the day of her loss, living the day vicariously and minute by minute. And on this day more than on any other she projected herself into the absolute life of Lady Grizel.
We too shared in the day’s life, and a very long and dull day it was, until the paradisaical moment when, in the evening dusk of the flower room, where, besides doing the flowers, Lady Grizel faithfully composed, from a selection of goodies sent daily from the kitchen, the dogs’ dinners, Mrs Brock found the ring hanging, its glitter downwards, its gold unremarkable, on the brass tap of the flower-room sink. Here Lady Grizel – now she remembered – had washed her hands after pinching her way through the Peke’s dinner, eliminating the danger from chicken bones. How Lady Grizel loved that dog. ‘Oh, Changy, why do your little feet smell of mice?’ she would ask him with tears in her eyes.
But to return, as we so often did, to that extraordinary day, that May evening when Mrs Brock made her unexpected appearance in the library. The library was unfamiliar and fearful territory not to be enjoyed by her. It was, as Richard described it to us, an ordinary room of its date and kind, arranged without any feeling that went further than expensive comfort. There was a great dullness about the crowding pictures, as if ignorance of their interest and worth had fogged them. The eighteenth-century gentlemen in their Tailor of Gloucester waistcoats retreated sulking into their century. Only racehorses, of the School of Herring, faithful dogs, and a famous stallion hound were given full importance. Hung where they could be seen and enjoyed, they shared the best light with amusing Spi cartoons. Hepplewhite sofas and loveseats had all been expelled. The present furniture had an assured, comfortable permanence. On club fender and sofas dark red leather was buttoned firmly into place. Low armchairs bulged tidily under their thick, starched covers. Brass-bound tubs of flowers from the greenhouses stood in appropriate spaces, gardeners’ prides in plenty, but no exotics. Romantically invading all that was prosaic, the scent from sheaves of lilies of the valley (arranged in silver vases, tulip shaped, by Lady Grizel herself) throbbed and drifted on the after-tea air.
This was the hour when the men had disappeared into the smoking room and the women gossiped and yawned, and the dogs turned and yawned in their baskets. Two of Lady Grizel’s best friends, Mrs Gladwyn-Chetwynd and Lady Skendleby, were together on the leather sofa. A haze of frilled blouses rose up from their belted waists to frail high collars, boned to the chin line. They sat in a drowse of consideration over their day’s off-course betting, no results known till the next morning’s papers. They were a bit uncertain whether or not Mrs Brock was to be introduced to them, so picked up Racing Form and the last Calendar and went back to Newmarket or Doncaster or Epsom – Mrs Brock was not quite clear on the meeting.
The group could hardly have been further removed from Mrs Brock standing in the doorway. Lady Grizel got up and went towards her, scolding and cuffing the dogs back into their baskets while at the same time agreeing with them that this was something of a surprise, an intrusion.
‘Quiet, quiet, will you be quiet – heavens, you know Mrs Brock – yes, Mrs Brock?’
A query must have hung visibly on the air, the scented air, the distant air of Lady Grizel’s life among her own friends. But Mrs Brock broke through the restraints and skipped the distances. ‘I believe you lost something, Lady Grizel’ was all she said as she held out the ring.
‘Mrs Brock – how divine! How wonderful!’ All the dogs barked again. The air rang with excitement. Lady Grizel glowed with gratitude. The diamonds sparkled hugely. The best friends jumped up from the sofa and entered into the drama – ‘But how too clever.’ ‘And what made you look in the dogs’ dinners?’ they exclaimed, getting the facts wrong at once, and handing the ring to each other without praising it.
Then Mrs Brock had the inspiration that was to be her joy and her undoing. That was when her feet left the ground and she soared into unreality. She ignored all remembrance of her day of exhaustive detective work, the hours she had spent tracing every move Lady Grizel had made, as she answered dreamily: ‘I really don’t know myself. I just closed my eyes and let a picture float up into my mind.’
‘Ha-ha, doggie dindins floatin’ about. Too funny.’
‘Chang-Chang heard you say “dindins” – didn’t you, boy?’
‘I say, Mrs Brock, would it work out over racing? Would the winner of the 3.30 tomorrow float up to you?’
‘Don’t be silly, Violet—’
‘It’s such an open race – her guess is as good as mine – look – I’ll read out the runners – you shut your eyes and float . . . Peeping Thomas . . .’
Peeping Thomas, something told her. And told her correctly, miraculously; for this outsider’s win was to remain for ever one of the most mysterious upsets to form, embarrassment to the handicapper and legendary boon to bookmakers, as indeed it was to Lady Grizel, her best friends, most of the domestic staff at Stoke Charity, and many of those employed on the estate. Taken together with the discovery of the ring, this triumph put Mrs Brock in the class of visionaries. Hubert and I would implore her to try out her powers at Limerick Junction or Mallow races. ‘No,’ she would say firmly, ‘not again. That time I heard the drumming hooves. I saw the flash of colours . . .’
‘And did you hear th
e jockeys cursing, Mrs Brock?’ we would ask. We wanted to belong to the whole magic of the vision.
‘No, dear, I didn’t. I just heard the great crowd shouting, “Come on – come on, Peeping Thomas.”’
‘They don’t usually shout so much when an outsider wins.’
‘They did that day. In my ear,’ Mrs Brock stated firmly. Unfortunately, her selection for that year’s Derby finished down the course. Although everybody was most generous and considerate about her failure, there was a sense of disappointment not entirely appeased when she came up with the second in the Oaks, given with a caution on an each-way bet. After this, her questioners and followers tempered her advice with that of their favourite tipster. But with domestic losses the dramas mounted daily. The strangest objects were lost and found, as well as the most ordinary.
‘What kind of things?’ we always asked, the list was so varied and lively. The dogs’ leads: Lady Grizel lost one a day, her plaintive cries of ‘Help! Help! Where did I put it down?’ echoing often and pleasantly in the schoolroom. The cook’s spectacles, the odd pillowcase missing from the laundry list; keys, of course, were high among the losses; earrings even figured when the second footman, Walter, rather a dear boy, came to tell her privately that he had lost one of a pair given him by a friend. After a little talk to put her in touch with the pantry world and a couple of hours’ floating, the earring reappeared in a plate of chicken sandwiches Mrs Brock was having for her supper, along with a cup of hot consommé, followed by raspberries and cream. ‘Your earring,’ she said, quite simply, when Walter came in to take away her tray.
