Good Behaviour

by Molly Keane

  Mummie escaped us all. The tides of her painting and her gardening, and the spring-tides of her whole life with Papa were as the sea between us – no step we took left a print in the sands. After we had toiled (not without pleasure) for hours on end to present her with wild violets: ‘Oh, darlings, please don’t pick them any more, poor little things. Thank you, yes they do smell ravishing, thank you so much,’ and she would drop them by her plate, or fill a wine glass with water and drop them into it, to be forgotten. I had seen them afterwards on the dinner tray in the pantry, cleared away with the spoons and forks after luncheon. There they retired into a meaner proportion, as if their scent had been apparent only to ourselves, and their floods of blue had died out in our eyes.

  But practical gifts were bound to bring a definite acknowledgement and often a satisfying one. ‘Just what I’ve been wanting. Look, dear –’ to Papa – ‘a pen-wiper. She knows what a letter-writer I am,’ and they would both laugh immoderately. He was the one who patted me and kissed me, lifting me off my feet so that my black-stockinged legs dangled free – he was very easy in the smallest caresses.

  Sometimes Mummie would touch Hubert – always in a reserved sort of way. She never tried to paint him. ‘My black Bubbles,’ she called him. How she disliked that beautiful picture by Sir John Millais! And it bore absolutely no resemblance to Hubert; he was brown as an Italian child, wherever the sun could invade the little boy’s clothes of our day – navy blue jerseys and over-long shorts. Even then he used his looks like a shield before making some outrageous remark in a toothless lisping way: ‘I theen a terrible thing – I theen a thquirrel laying nuth.’ She would laugh with him.

  How to please? During the hour after tea when we came down to the drawingroom, I would sit silent in my blue accordion pleats, my christening locket, turquoise and pearl, swinging on its gold chain round my neck, my feet in their bronze dancing sandals crossed tight as in a vice. While Hubert breathed heavily over his Meccano set, constructing a ladder, or perhaps a dog kennel, speechless I sat, my longing to make a good impression twanging and vibrating within. I might try: ‘We went for a walk today.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘We went across the Horse Park and back along the Ladies’ Walk—’ She would turn up the blue enamel watch with a diamond bird on its back pinned to her blouse by a diamond bow, and glance hopelessly at its face: ‘Yes, and what did my little good-news girl see on her walk?’

  By the time I was in bed I could have listed twenty startling pieces of information – from a salmon rising in the river to the rook splashing down his, well, his . . . onto Mrs Brock’s hat. Now, interrupted in my recital, I could only wait in a blank hiatus before I gabbled out: ‘I saw a rabbit.’

  ‘A rabbit? Really? That is interesting. You saw nothing for your flower collection for instance?’

  We had never given wild flowers a thought on that happy walk, nor grasses, nor birds’ nests, nor frogs’ spawn; we had hung on Mrs Brock’s arms, transported by her tales to the luxurious and easy atmosphere of Stoke Charity. We were living with Richard and Sholto and Lady Grizel; we could nearly taste the delicious little suppers Walter carried up to the schoolroom. Although these suppers had the Hunker-Munker Two Bad Mice quality of false doll’s-house food, the breathing life in her telling held us avid as a good rancid gossip about money or love might hold us in later life.

  Aching as she did for useful occupation, Mrs Brock found her outlet in the linen cupboard. This enormous, dark, mouse-ridden cavern stretched across the end of a passage; on its back wall a window, firmly laced with ivy, gave a little light to the towering shelves. The linen in our house had been wearing thin, or had been stolen away by generations of housemaids, supposedly its menders and keepers, who had charge of the key. The present housemaid was named Wild Rose; she was bred to be hot, as the stable lads said when ducking her in a tank of water in the yard. Rose, screaming, enjoyed this fun as much as anyone but, not unnaturally, lost the key of the linen cupboard in her struggles.

  Mrs Brock’s fatal gift came to the rescue. When she heard that a marquess was coming to stay for the Cloneen Shoot and that there were no sheets for his bed because the key was lost, the fatal feeling came over her again, and she was off on her quest, with renewed triumph. From finding the key it was only a step into the linen cupboard with its quiet, ravaged hordes of sheets and pillow cases, tablecloths, napkins, braided curtains, and old printed stuff forgotten for years. ‘Rose,’ she said, ‘we must sort all this out, and I shall repair everything.’

  ‘Some wet day we’ll be at it,’ Rose said.

  ‘It’s pouring rain today – we’ll start now.’

  ‘Oh, Mrs Brock,’ Rose protested, ‘and his Lordship’s bed not made, and I have ducks to kill for the cook.’

  Mrs Brock knew that killing ducks was one of Rose’s skills and pleasures, but she held to her point, and kept control of the linen cupboard, discovering in it rare things and rotten things. Sorting and piecing together and darning, her hands never ran out of skill or tired of work.

  It was Rose who brought her Papa’s favourite pale tweed coat, gone at the elbows, frayed at the cuffs, for which he had an obstinate adoration. Mrs Brock spread the coat on the table, excited by its problem, and presently worked away in the haze of scents impregnating its stuff: turf smoke and burnt heather roots – it had been handwoven in a cottage. Through and beyond this rough base, other smells came faint and vaporous. Egyptian cigarettes stayed the most constant, defeating horses’ sweat in the coat-tails and hair oil in the collar. As the coat warmed under her hands and on her knees, a masculine presence enveloped and pervaded her.

  Papa noticed the miracle of repair performed on his old favourite. ‘So you did remember to have a go at Rose about this old coat, bless you. You know I love it,’ he said to Mummie. ‘Good old Rose – I knew she had it in her. Never gives her running unless she’s under the stick.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Mummie said.

  ‘Of course you do – you told me to throw it away.’

  ‘Yes, I wish you had. It’s not your colour, really.’ She looked into him, through him, lost in consideration.

  ‘Extraordinary.’ He lifted his arm, the wing of a jungle cock; he preened with pleasure in his old plumage. ‘I shall give her half a sovereign for this job,’ he said with firm intention.

  It was more than I could bear. ‘I know. I know who did it. Shall I tell you? Shall I?’

  ‘Yes, if you like.’

  ‘Mrs Brock. Can I have the half a sovereign for her?’

  ‘No, Aroon – you can’t. I can’t give Mrs Brock half a sovereign. What can I give her?’ he asked, appalled.

  ‘I don’t know, a bit embarrassing. Don’t ask me.’ Mummie drifted away. Her voice coming out of a distance, she said more clearly: ‘I wish she was as successful about your French, darling child. That would fill up her time.’

  ‘Le-chêne-un-jour-dit-au-roseau,’ I started to gabble.

  ‘Roseau,’ she corrected my accent – Mrs Brock’s accent – with a sort of pinching dislike. The word roseau sounded much prettier as she spoke it.

  I longed to be in the schoolroom, cheering and delighting Mrs Brock with the news of Papa’s gratitude and pleasure. But, for a matter of days, I kept it to myself. Somehow the whole affair was now tempered to a chill of silliness by Mummie’s attitude towards it – as if Mrs Brock had been giving herself a treat. However, what with my longing for importance, and my heart bursting with love, finally I could not resist the wish to please.

  It was on a ravingly glad day by the sea that I told Mrs Brock about Papa’s great pleasure. We drove the fat Iceland pony five miles to our nearest sea; the sun shone; the wind twined the long gold sands like feathers on a bird’s back. How seldom we got to the sea; how rarely we found so many cowrie shells, fat little wet pigs, scarce as pearls among the pebbles, as we did on that afternoon. Intoxicated, braced with pleasure and the magical change from dark, inland July,
I stuffed my dress into my knickers and ran yelling out my freedom like a sea bird. Hubert set off alone into the business of shrimping the rock pools; Mrs Brock did not attend him with help or advice. Nor did she run and yell with me. But she laughed at me, and dug herself a grave in the sand for shelter, after she had put the milk bottle in a rock pool. I knew she was on my side, and less interested in Hubert.

  Presently, under capes of striped towelling, we undressed for our swim; Hubert had his cape too, and Mrs Brock her own side of the rock as well.

  We screamed and spattered in the breaking waves while Mrs Brock took her real swim. I watched her fat body, a frilled torpedo in the black bathing costume, standing balanced and poised, ridiculous on a rock, before she dived – a joyous plunge into the deep water. Then she struck out into the bay with the strength and buoyancy of a seal; indeed, when the black bathing dress was sleeked by the water onto her body she had all the armoured rotundity of a seal – the same easy glory and enjoyment of an element that frightened me. Soon she returned to our depth and gave us a swimming lesson. I stayed up four strokes longer than Hubert and nobody said, ‘Nothing to crow about, is there, Aroon? He’s three years younger than you, after all.’ While I was drying and dressing I explained my superior technique to him; he chattered his teeth at me so loudly I could hardly hear myself speak.

  After tea Mrs Brock yawned and snuggled down into her grave while I played a game of burying her feet in the sand. She did not speak, but when I had them buried and patted over she would poke out a toe, cracking the damp sand. I felt this like a secret joke between us, and in this overwhelming moment of intimacy and love I needed absolutely to give her something. I did: I told her all about Papa’s delight in her work on his coat. She listened to me with close attention, sitting upright, her feet still in their mounds of sand. I knew she was tense with pleasure; and, while I glowed in its bestowal, the story was hardly out of my mouth before I knew too that her reception of it was on a different level from mine – a foreign, secret level, leaving me outside, a messenger, not a participant.

  Hubert wandered back to us, no shrimps in his bucket. We packed up the picnic mugs and all the bits of paper and tucked the matchbox full of cowries safely away in Mrs Brock’s handbag before we walked back to the village, where the pony had been left to shelter from the flies in a tiny stinking cowshed belonging to the fisherman whose lobsters were to cost us two shillings each. ‘He’s only now gone to lift the pots,’ his wife told us. ‘Tommy Nangle disappointed him. Wouldn’t you drive to Gulls’ Cry and see Miss Enid and poor Mister Hamish while you’re waiting on them?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ we said. ‘Please, Mrs Brock, don’t let’s.’ Miss Enid and poor Mister Hamish were our cousins, Mummie’s cousins, and they lived in a depleted little manor house looking over the cliffs and the boat cove. They had no money at all; Mummie said they lived on mackerel and sea spinach. We dreaded the hedgehog kiss of Cousin Enid and the drooling silences of Cousin Hamish. So we preferred to wait, sitting on the low wall above the nettles which filled the ditch beneath our feet.

  ‘Any minute now,’ the woman repeated every so often. She didn’t want us to leave the lobsters behind and unpaid for.

  At last the fishermen returned, wet blue lobsters arching their backs as they hung from the men’s hands with nippers tied before they were laid on the floor of the pony cart, strong and lively for an early death. Mrs Brock paid. We thanked, and climbed into the round governess cart behind the fat pony, pulling double for home.

  Leaving the sea at evening is a death – a parting of worlds. We turned inland, past the Round Tower and the roofless church, where small primitive carvings of apostles were worn by time and sea-winds to blunt thumbs among its stones. In the cove small boats, drawn up on the beach, leaned about awkwardly as swans out of water. Lobster-pots were piled each on each, building into netted castles in the evening; and, plain as cooking on the air, the salty rot of seaweed came with us along the road. Mrs Brock whacked the pony with an ashplant; the dust flew round us and lay back heavy on the dog roses in the banks as we turned inland.

  ‘My tired,’ Hubert said, long before we reached home; this baby talk was always a tiresome sign with him. ‘My very tired.’

  ‘Soon home now, chick.’ Mrs Brock banged away at the pony while the lobsters clanked and bubbled at our feet. ‘What about a biscuit?’

  Hubert turned green. ‘I wish we were HOME. I wish we hadn’t waited for the poor lobsters.’

  ‘Oh, Hubert! And you know Daddy loves lobsters.’

  ‘Papa,’ Hubert corrected her faintly.

  Three long miles from home we were met by Ollie Reilly, a stable lad who had had his evening with Wild Rose interrupted to go to our rescue. He was driving a leggy, uppish chestnut mare in the shafts of the dog cart; she sidled and fidgeted about as Hubert and I climbed up to sit side by side on the blue buttoned face-cloth seat.

  ‘What kept her?’ He nodded back to Mrs Brock in the pony cart, fumbling along in the dust far behind us. ‘The Captain made sure ye’d met an accident.’

  ‘She made us wait for the lobsters.’ Hubert, revived now, was full of perky information.

  ‘What about the dirty lobsters at this time of the night?’ Ollie Reilly was derisive.

  Angrily I answered, ‘The boats were late and Mrs Brock’ (not ‘she’) ‘knows the Captain loves lobsters.’

  He made no reply. He considered what I had said as he sent the mare flying along. Deprived of Rose that night, a popular girl who wouldn’t wait for him a second time, his disappointment and irritation were centred on Mrs Brock.

  From that time there was a faint note, hardly sounded but evident in Rose’s manner, a kind of familiarity towards Mrs Brock. She would flaunt in and out of the schoolroom in her starched pink cotton, crunching starch, leaving behind shirt collars for turning, clocked socks for darning, and pyjama coats with their sleeves out. I felt as if she were feeding Mrs Brock. Shooting stockings were a big meal: Mrs Brock would knit and weave heels for these pale stockings, soon to be trampled again into gaping holes, wet shoes in the snipe bogs dragging them apart – and never too soon for Mrs Brock’s eager fingers.

  Papa never said an actual thank-you for all this labour. Perhaps during luncheon, if he was wearing a resuscitated old ghost of other days, he might pat himself and give her a look – a look like a ray of light from a distant star, a look that suggested warmth and pleasure.

  A day came when, I suppose, he felt these silent looks of understanding gratitude were not enough, and there arrived in the schoolroom a neatly packed parcel with a London postmark. Chocolates. Exquisite, expensive chocolates. ‘The best,’ Mrs Brock intoned happily. ‘Charbonnel AND Walker.’ Liqueur and coffee creams, powdered truffles, crystallized rose-leaves, crystallized violets, and a fresh mirror-smooth gleam on the row upon row and layer after layer that filled the big box, each chocolate as beautiful as a chocolate could be.

  6

  About this time Papa decided to take our riding seriously – and what an escalation in misery that proved for us. I know he was a perfect horseman with a beautiful seat and hands and a total command of any horse he rode, but as an instructor he was incomprehensible, impatient, and unnerving.

  He would look at our whey-pale faces in dismayed irritation as our ponies stolidly refused to jump a small gorse fence we could have hopped over easily on our feet. Out through the wings they crashed willingly enough, and on to scrape us off beneath the low boughs of some tree in the park-like field where these exercises took place.

  Refusing defeat, he would make us catch the ponies and, when we had remounted, he would lunge them over the furze bushes on the end of a rope, a stable lad roaring at them to take off. How freely they jumped then, and how freely we flew over their heads; laughter from him followed and tears from us.

  Fears fit for a flogging morning or a hangman’s measuring session possessed us as he pursued our education and that of our ponies. We adored Papa, and his hopeless disapproval
paralysed any scrap of confidence or pleasure we had ever had in ourselves or our ponies.

  One terrible day, when I howled and refused to get up after a bone-shaking tumble, he looked at me with bitter disgust and disappointment, and said: ‘Don’t get up if you don’t want to, of course – lead your pony back to the yard.’ Humbled and thankful I did so, and on the way met Mrs Brock, who wiped my tears and mopped my bubbling nose, and encouraged me to get up again, leading my pony gently and inexpertly until I regained some contact with him.

  ‘Don’t lead him now,’ I said grandly. ‘Where were you going? I’ll come too. No, Fairy – get on with you.’

  ‘Fairy knows who’s boss,’ Mrs Brock said admiringly. Strengthened by her flattery, I drove in my heels and set about beastly Fairy.

  Not long after this sad morning Papa, riding a young horse alone (his patience exhausted and dulled by our frequent failures, he had for the time being given up instruction, our cowardice shamed and worried him too much), saw the surprising and, to him, delightful spectacle of Hubert and me racing our ponies into an obstacle without whips singing behind us, or tears pouring down our purple faces.

  The fence we faced was not one of those made up of nasty, upright little gorse bushes, but a round-lipped shallow ditch. The ditch ran through a screen of beech-trees and was now full of their dry leaves. On the landing side stood Mrs Brock, in one hand a carrot, a chocolate (Charbonnel AND Walker) in the other. Ponies and children raced each other for their rewards. Papa turned his horse and rode away, shaking his head. He could not understand, nor could he discuss the matter, but Mrs Brock’s absurd success in creating our confidence endowed her with an importance which, for him, far exceeded his unspoken gratitude over the restoration of his favourite old clothes.