by Molly Keane
But at their bedroom door she was met by a brisk Nannie. ‘Oh, there you are Mrs Brock. I’ve just packed those two into their beds. Shouldn’t disturb them if I was you. Richard’s settled down nicely now and Sholto too – what an imp that boy is.’ She stood with her back to the door until Mrs Brock, again defeated, passed on towards the schoolroom. She felt, rightly, that she was betraying Richard. She had not spoken a word to the Captain in defence of The Children’s Golden Treasury of Verse. The lie involving Robinson Crusoe she could neither defend nor understand. She had not attempted any protest or defence of herself either. The whole affair was left in a polite miasma of unspoken suspicions, a net that held her helplessly ignorant and servile. Nothing had been stated, so what charge could she answer in this polite world?
‘Oh, Mrs Brock—’ Walter fluttered and hovered over her supper tray. ‘It’s not true you’ve –’ he brought it out with difficulty – ‘you’re leaving us?’
‘Well,’ she said with brittle valour, ‘the best of friends must part, mustn’t they, Walter?’
‘But tomorrow—’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Yes. Tomorrow – we heard in the hall the Captain had ordered the car for the early train.’
‘Yes, yes, of course. I’d forgotten that was the arrangement. My suitcases will be ready for you by nine o’clock, Walter.’ She sat down neatly behind her supper tray: hot soup, a glass of wine, a wing of chicken under a silver lid. Strawberries. Walter still hovered.
‘Everything all right, Mrs Brock?’
Oh, if he would only go before he saw her frightened tears. ‘Yes, thank you, Walter. Everything. Absolutely perfect, thank you.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Brock.’
•
So neither of them cried. No convention was embarrassed. She would eat her supper, keep up her strength before setting into the business of her packing. It would be a struggle to fit in all Lady Grizel’s gifts. She decided to wear the bulkier of the Busvine suits; a bit hot perhaps for the time of year, but that other gift, the hat, Tagel straw and roses, would produce quite the right summery effect.
By midnight, all her belongings packed and parcelled up, the anaesthetic busy-ness yielding to the horrid truth of her expulsion, she stood and shivered in the tidied emptied schoolroom. Relief from something near to despair and exhaustion came through her own practical reservation of the glass of wine from her supper tray – port wine too. Walter must have considered the sad occasion merited something more fortifying than the usual glass of hock or Beaujolais.
Mrs Brock sipped, and gradually warming from her stunned and wounded state to a livelier interest in future possibilities, she decided to open the Captain’s envelope and assess her financial situation. Counting bank notes is never less than reviving. Captain Massingham and Lady Grizel had been wildly, uncalculatingly generous. But after a recount and another sip or two of port her appeasement and relief were transposed into a new doubt. Perhaps all this overpayment was only compensation for a meagre and demeaning testimonial? She unfolded the thick blue writing paper with its tiny printed heading, and she read avidly: she read how kindly, how adorably kindly, they thought of her . . . patient and understanding . . . interested in racing . . . a strong swimmer . . . musical . . . tactful . . . highly recommend . . . leaving us as our sons go to their preparatory school.
Mrs Brock lifted her bowed head and looked radiantly about her. She was back in those days when her schoolroom, besides being a seat of happy and simple learning, had been (warm in its own mystique) a refuge and sorting house for lost and treasured objects, as well as a bureau of inspired racing information. That was before her study of the wretched form book and her reliance on misinformed correspondents had upset her daemon. Unforgettable happy female hours had passed here, while exquisite knitting flew through her busy hands. A pile of Shetland froth and floss still waited, unfinished, for Lady Grizel’s birthday. Slightly tipsy now, her gratitude for the encomium and her frenzy for loving and giving decided Mrs Brock to sit up, all night if necessary, to finish this last tribute to Lady Grizel.
It took her three hours to complete her masterwork, then damp and pin it, through sheets of paper, to the carpet, stretched out for the careful, cool spirit-iron. Sighing with pleasure, she left it, airing and floating across the back of a bentwood chair, while she went away to undress.
Wearing her blue flowered kimono and with her hair neatly twisted round steel and elastic curlers, she came back to the schoolroom. Crisp tissue paper and a length of narrow blue ribbon in her hand, she delayed the parcelling while she satisfied her eyes on the faultless beauty of her work. When she had taken off her wedding ring and slipped the shawl effortlessly through it, the elation, the need for praise known to all creators, overcame her. Unshared and without praise such moments can never live entirely; they are an uncompleted act of love. She knew now a raving desire for that moment when Lady Grizel’s thanks and delight would overwhelm and satisfy her.
Romantically light-headed and uplifted, Mrs Brock took her terrible decision. Fortified by Walter’s inspired glass of port no less than by the glorious written testimony to herself as a teacher, as a tactful personality, even as a strong swimmer, she would go, before these magical certainties escaped her, to Lady Grizel’s bedroom. She would carry her offering with her, no wrapping to crush or conceal it, and would fling it, a great cobweb spun of love, over Lady Grizel’s feet. So lucky that the Captain had gone up to London; even in her present state of mind she could not picture his reaction under such a cloud.
Nothing stirred in the long distances of the big house as Mrs Brock set out on her adventure. Her slipper soles slapped gently along the black-and-white linoleum tiles of the schoolroom passage before sinking to carpeted silences when she had passed through the heavy door preserving the calm and distance of that other world in Stoke Charity. The house contained different worlds, each designed for its particular occupants: owners, guests, nannies, governesses. To the housekeeper her room, to the butler his pantry, to the servants their hall – a proper setting and place for each and everyone. The least proper place for Mrs Brock – and at four A.M. on a summer’s morning – was Lady Grizel’s bedroom. This room was a vestry for Lady Grizel’s hidden hours. There clothes and under-clothes were laid out with careful ceremony. Corsets were unlaced here and, sighing, thrown aside. It was a place uninvaded except for proper service and for love.
This setting for privilege had ravished Mrs Brock on the few occasions when – in Lady Grizel’s absence – Julia had brought her here to stare and exclaim in unjealous appreciation of the loved one’s luxuries. ‘Everything straight from Waring and Gillow,’ Julia had commented as she indicated the great armoury of a wardrobe, allowing generous provision and perfectly appointed spaces for every imaginable garment. Mrs Brock had nodded in agreement – and turned her attention to the grand altar of the dressing-table, so profligate of vast surfaces and small shelves – Malmaison carnations and, in wintertime, violets in christening mugs stood here between tortoiseshell and gold hairbrushes and photographs of the boys as babies – lush cherubs with folds of muslin dropping off eatable shoulders. She had found it difficult to imagine the originals of these pictures growing into replicas of their father. His lightly tinted photograph – jaw set and huntsman’s cap well down over his eyes (he had been sincerely immortalised by Keturah Collins) – stood, silver framed and cater-corner, between the pictures of his flowerlike children. Captain Massingham’s picture, with its suggestion of coverts full of foxes, kennels full of hounds, and stables full of horses, was in provocative contrast to all the soft and pretty comforts of his wife’s bedroom.
Here – Mrs Brock had breathed it in – scent was present in a perpetual warmth. On the chaise longue (to every bedroom its chaise longue) fat cushions in their fresh muslin covers were piled together with smaller head cushions, pale narrow ribbons sometimes threading a sly way through a lace insertion. Neither Julia nor Mrs Brock had looked long at or questioned t
he validity of the great brass bedstead, unabsolved in ugliness, its springing perfect for love-making or for sleeping. But tonight, the spells of distance and of sanctity broken through, Mrs Brock was to find Lady Grizel sleeping here alone. She would wake her to accept her present, as though to the pleasure of a Christmas stocking.
Lady Grizel was not alone when Mrs Brock, after a discreet knock, came into her room. There were two dogs under the eiderdown of the big bed in which all three were enjoying a delightful night’s companionship. She rather liked these lone nights when the Masters of Foxhounds Association or some other great cause took the Captain away. He disapproved of dogs in bed, so only in his absence was she able to give her darlings a treat she enjoyed as much as they did.
At Mrs Brock’s knock Lady Grizel stirred on her pillows and murmured. The dogs turned under the eiderdown and growled. Now, unbidden, Mrs Brock came nearer to the bed; she stood, a prim, proper little person in the dawning light, her present in her hands. She might have thrown the pink shawl across the eiderdown, where it would have lain light as a mist. She might have gone away without a word, ever after to remember her beautiful restraint. But the dogs, who only acknowledged people in their proper places, plunged about beneath the eiderdown, barking their heads off and thoroughly waking Lady Grizel, who sat up to cuff them into silence and remained sitting up, frozen in her amazement at the sight of Mrs Brock. Whatever doubts she had felt at her dismissal flew instantly from her mind. Worlds apart, they stared at each other.
‘Lady Grizel –’ Mrs Brock faltered – ‘I wanted to see you alone. Just tell me what I’ve done – what’s happened?’
‘Captain Massingham spoke to you and I really can’t say any more, can I?’
‘Oh, but all the money? The wonderful reference?’
‘Yes, I thought we worded it rather nicely.’
Mrs Brock drew nearer to the bed: ‘But if that’s how you think of me, why do you want me to leave?’
‘Oh, do go back to bed, Mrs Brock!’ Lady Grizel felt as repelled and alarmed as she might have done at the approaches of an unwelcome lover. She looked beautiful sitting up among her pillows; her pearls (she always wore her pearls at night) tumbling warm from her sleepy flesh, out of her white long-sleeved nightdress.
‘But do you know I love you?’ Mrs Brock cried out. ‘Mrs Brock loves you, Lady Grizel.’
‘Mrs Brock – have you gone out of your mind?’
Mrs Brock came nearer: ‘I love you,’ she said, ‘and I’ll be with you always wherever I am, whatever happens. I’ve brought you this – I think it’s the very best I ever . . .’ Wordless at last, she almost threw the fine shawl across the bed. At its faint impact the dogs started to bark again, while Lady Grizel, outraged, shrank back against her pillows.
‘You must be over-tired,’ she said, an immense volume of coldness in her voice. ‘Please go back to bed at once – now. And please take this thing with you. I simply don’t need it.’ She scraped up the present and handed it back. ‘Try to get some sleep,’ she said more kindly. ‘I’m sure Julia will call you in time for your train. Julia thinks of everything.’
Mrs Brock stood tearless, wordless, the shawl bunched in a deformed lump under her arm. Lady Grizel said no more. She looked across Mrs Brock to the door and Mrs Brock took the hint.
•
The day of Mrs Brock’s departure was one of the happiest days in Richard’s childhood. Nannie called them early to ride out their ponies. With their favourite stable lad as companion, they clowned their way happily through the next hour or so, laughing at his jokes, lazy and unmindful of their horsemanship. There was none of that ‘Heels down, please, Master Richard,’ or ‘Sit well back, Master Sholto,’ the only piece of advice offered in those days before pony clubs. Richard came home to a second breakfast, yesterday’s pain and shame diminished. The news that Mrs Brock had been called away to London made no grievous impact. Not only were lessons for the day abandoned, but they were to go over to Moribound after luncheon, where Mummie’s great friend Lord Lapsely of Derkley had a private zoo, where a mouse deer had just calved and a tiger had bitten a little boy’s head off only last week.
A thrilling afternoon and a very good tea over, Richard went bouncingly up to the schoolroom, no thought of poetry in his mind, and faintly embarrassed at the memory of Mrs Brock’s lavish comfortings on the previous evening. The room was utterly tidy: all lesson books put away; pencil boxes straight as spirit levels; the piano tightly shut, no open music book stirring its leaves in the empty air. The white mice might have been sugar mice, they stayed so quiet in their night compartments, and the budgies were puffed out sullenly, waiting in their cages for the trilling and the music to set them screaming and raising their wings in ecstasy.
Richard moved about in the hush for a time. He decided to clean out the mice and have them smelling delicious for Mrs Brock’s return; but at the bottom of the corner cupboard, where such things were kept, he could find no newspapers, onto which he usually swept the floors of the cages. An exemplary tidiness pervaded the cupboard; even Mrs Brock’s collection of bits of string had gone from their hook. The birdseed had been emptied out of its coloured packages into a glass jar with a stopper. An apprehension, a chill, crept over Richard. He thought of looking into Mrs Brock’s bedroom to reassure himself, through her belongings, of her presence and person, but he was afraid now of finding nothing. And afraid Nannie might catch him finding nothing. At any rate he hoped to find Walter in the pantry, get some newspapers from him, and give the old mice a proper doing. He could not admit that Walter might have news for him.
In the pantry, lined to its high ceiling with brown cupboards and slices of green baize, Walter was crying quietly; tears fell on the wine glasses he was polishing for dinner, ruining his work, but he was in that nervous state when the repetition of an occupation meant nothing to him.
‘I want some newspapers.’ Richard ignored the tears. ‘I’m going to clean those filthy mice before Mrs Brock gets back.’
‘She’s gone for good, Master Richard.’ Walter felt a tremor of excitement as he broke the news.
It was no shock to Richard. He had expected this. ‘Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘I’ll clean them anyway.’
‘She loved those beastly mice,’ Walter sobbed.
To see Walter, a grown-up, a servant, with silly tears bouncing down his cheeks, pantry tears, tears decorum forbade in nursery or schoolroom, appeased Richard’s shame for his own recent breakage of that earliest rule of life – boys don’t cry. There was a gratified superiority in finding himself the big boy of the two, the dry-eyed one, and the one with power to comfort.
‘Walter,’ he asked, ‘would you like me to say one of my poems?’ Walter made no affirmation. He was really very upset. ‘All right – are you ready? I’ll begin: “She is fading down the river –”’ Richard paused to get a grip on his audience – ‘“She is fading down the river” . . .’
‘Poor thing,’ Walter said brokenly when Richard stopped at last. ‘She’ll have faded out of Paddington Station hours ago. Poor thing. All those crowds!’
5
Mummie didn’t care much about Mrs Brock’s singing. ‘Never quite on the note,’ she would say with chilly tolerance. ‘As the children are so unmusical, it doesn’t matter really, and the schoolroom is far enough away . . .’ I was surprised and hurt when I heard this, as I had begun to fancy my voice under Mrs Brock’s encouragement, and I was learning ‘Two Little Girls in Blue, Dears,’ with which number I expected to stun the Christmas School Treat. Even if I had owned the truest voice in the world, such an idea would have been discouraged as in the poorest taste.
Mrs Brock found life in Ireland a complete change from any previous schoolroom experience, although, in essentials, her relationship with the family was the same. Mummie ran away from any familiar footing in the schoolroom. There was not even the flimsiest bridge across that distance – not even a dog’s lead to be lost or found. Our house stood at the apex of two carriag
e drives and was quite half a mile from any road; there were no young pheasants to disturb on our bog or river walks, only wild swans or snipe, so our dogs, which were few, did not require leads. Any contact or familiarity with Mummie was as far outside her orbit as were the birds. As in Dorset, the servants loved Mrs Brock. Here they were wild and garrulous, speaking a strange language in which she was disappointed at never hearing the word ‘Begorrah,’ but she could hear their distant droning of the rosary at bedtime.
She woke to their footsteps early in the morning, when they swept the dust under the sofa in the schoolroom and lit crackling paraffin-smelling fires by eight o’clock. They wore holy medals and scapulars under their cotton dresses, and ate Robin starch from the laundry, partly as a thinning diet and partly because they were hungry. They didn’t expect much to eat then, and they certainly didn’t get it. Diningroom and servants’ halls fed very differently. Mrs Brock would bring them biscuits when she walked with us as far as the village on the river, where two little grocers’ shops lurked, dark and low, in a terrace of eighteenth-century houses, and the ruin of a great woollen mill hung above the water.
Hubert and I adored Mrs Brock. We lived again with her the conduct of life at Stoke Charity (years afterwards Richard was to contradict or make explicit much of what she told us), we heard about the boys and their fiery ponies, and thought of their courage with distant awe. In those days we hated our ponies and Mrs Brock encouraged us to get off and lead the dirty little beasts past their favourite spots for seeing ghosts and whipping round for home.
She accepted without comment my grotesque, sentimental fixation on Mummie. She designed handkerchief sachets, matching sachets for holding nightdresses, hotwater-bottle covers, raffia napkin rings, egg cosies shaped like chickens’ heads, and countless other objects, at which I would sew while my heart burst with passionate excitement at the prospect of the giving and the gratitude. This manufacture of things was a great happiness to me, and Mrs Brock’s practical genius in manipulating scraps from the ragbag into ever more useless trifles held us together in warm accord.
