by Molly Keane
In those days one did not quite admit the possibility of cowardice even in young children. The tough were the ones who mattered; their courage was fitting and creditable. A cowardly child was a hidden sore, and a child driven to admit hatred of his pony was something of a leper in our society. It appeared to Papa that Mrs Brock had rescued our honour and his credit. Although unspoken, this consideration narrowed the gap between them.
Her part of that autumn was utterly happy. Her influence over us and our ponies was recognised. She was asked to come and persuade us over more formidable fences than the plump-sided ditch. She and Papa walked together across the fields. Sometimes he helped her, with distant carefulness, over a gap or a boggy place. She didn’t speak. But the glow she radiated in the pleasure of his company seemed to include him as well. This happy familiarity was begun in innocence and was chaperoned, for a time closely, by our constant presence.
During that September another and larger box from Charbonnel AND Walker was delivered to the schoolroom. Papa came in once or twice to make or alter arrangements about our riding; lesson times were adjusted to the hours when he was free to instruct us; so soon now he would be hunting four days in the week and shooting on the other two – the pressure of time hurrying on towards winter was on us all. A change was coming, and Mrs Brock was at its centre. Her piano playing was soft and coaxing. She wore Lady Grizel’s Busvine daily, as well as on Sundays, and she took the feather out of a felt hat and dragged its brim into a simple country shape to wear on our rides.
One afternoon, when we were ready and waiting for him in the yard, he was late. Then it seemed he had forgotten us; he never came. We were happy in the prospect of a quiet, safe ride with Mrs Brock; nothing spectacular to be asked of us, and time for stories about Stoke Charity as we lagged beside her in the sunshine. But the fun had gone out of Mrs Brock that afternoon. She was abstracted and borne elsewhere beyond our interests. No tales of Richard and Sholto and nasty little Raymond were forthcoming. Hubert and I quarrelled and picked on one another as we rode down the drive between the darknesses of beech and ilex and the spreads of sunshine between them. At the end of the drive, outside the tall iron gates, Papa and Mummie sat in the dog cart waiting for a lodge keeper or a child to come out and open the gates. Side by side they waited without impatience. She was looking up at him, her face pert and elegant under its luncheon-party toque; a light checked dust-rug was over their knees, and he held the reins and the whip in his right hand. His left hand could have been in hers; he was laughing, in total accord with whatever she had to tell him.
No child came out of the lodge to open the gates: ‘All at school, I suppose. What a tiresome woman! Thank you so much, would you, Mrs Brock?’ Mummie leaned down towards us, as far removed from ourselves as the branch of a tree in a light wind: ‘Just tell her we were waiting rather a long time.’
‘I think she’s having a baby, Mrs St Charles,’ Mrs Brock apologised for the lodge keeper.
‘Ah, well . . . perhaps, pas devant . . .’ Mummie smiled and took her ungloved hand from under the rug, briefly to indicate us, and to wave us a pretty goodbye as they drove off.
Papa had not spoken. He concentrated on the flighty mare, playing up in the shafts, over-excited by waiting so near her stable, by flies, and by the presence of our ponies. Under his black-and-white check cap his face looked dark as a rainy morning. Mrs Brock shut the heavy gates and walked on between us; no tales, no jokes. In the silent afternoon I spent myself in avid wonder as to what was going on in the gate lodge, and as to how, in the first place, a baby got into a mother. I had a good idea about how it got out. I put the question at last in a nature study form: ‘Of course I do know Mrs Rabbit lays her babies, but how do the babies get in before they get out?’
‘They grow.’ Mrs Brock spoke in a hushed, special voice, as though her hands were softly touching the keys on her piano.
‘Yes. But how do they get in?’ Curiosity consumed me. ‘What puts them there?’
‘The dirty old buck rabbit,’ Hubert said in his naughtiest voice. I knew he was making it up. Mrs Brock blushed.
‘Look, look,’ she spoke distractedly, ‘I believe I see a squirrel. Look, look, up the beech-tree – a chocky for whoever spots him before he pops down his hole.’ Hubert gave her a pitying glance and rode on. Later, when I asked him – for I was intent on pursuing the question – what he meant about buck rabbits, he had nothing more to add. He had heard one of the lads make this remark about someone and he supposed it was a rabbit – bucks and does are rabbits.
That was the evening when I persuaded myself that I had an ugly little pain. It was true, I had a tiny pain, and I petted and exaggerated it into a reason for getting out of bed and going to the schoolroom. I felt under an extreme necessity to see if Mrs Brock was still wearing that look of abstracted disappointment. If the atmosphere, impenetrable to any loving inroad, which had lasted sadly and unusually till our bedtime, was still present, I would comfort her.
But, when I opened the door, drooping and evidently in pain, there was no one there. Mrs Brock, meticulous in tidiness, had gone, leaving her knitting, a blue-grey shooting stocking, in a heap among our lesson books. It was too early in the autumn for a fire, but the balloon-like milk-glass bowl of the lamp was as hot as a stove; moths came in to die about it. In their covered cage the canaries swelled their feathers, their bodies enormous on their threads of feet. The only liveliness in the silence was among the mice. No schoolroom in 1912 was lacking in white mice. Tonight they tore about, squealed minute squeals, flew round on their wheel, and jumped on and off each other’s backs. There was a tremendous carry-on, joyous but just a little frightening. It would have cost me something to put my hand into the cage and pick up my own little Minnie. Minnie was romping around, unrecognisable, as though tiger’s blood ran in her veins. Hubert’s Moses was biting her now. Now he was on top of her. I clapped my hands desperately. ‘He’ll kill you – he’ll kill you,’ I shouted; but I was too cowardly to put my hand into the cage and rescue her. The schoolroom door opened and Mrs Brock came in. ‘Moses is killing Minnie,’ I shouted again.
‘Oh, get off it, Moses.’ Mrs Brock gave the cage a smart tap. ‘Just their play,’ she added, as the mice separated, and she pulled the cover over their cage, leaving them to prance away in their familiar dark. ‘But what are you doing out of your bed, my darling child?’ Her voice was almost gross; she could have been singing a low note at the piano for us to sing after her. She was my darling. I longed for her kind embrace.
‘Oh, I had such a pain.’
She sat down and took me on her knee. Only then I noticed that she was wearing her hat; not the riding hat, but the lovely small hat full of flowers and fruit which Lady Grizel had bought in Paris and disliked. She took it off and laid it on the table. The roses, the red-currants were beaded in drops; the fine straw was as wet as if it had lain in wet grass.
‘But where have you been?’ I asked. I ached to know all her movements.
‘Out for a walk.’ She laughed deeply. She was as full of happiness and as eager to share it, as she had been desolate and removed all the afternoon. ‘Suppose we have a Marie biscuit and a drop of hot milk.’ She bustled towards the spirit stove and her tidy milk jug with the bead-weighted muslin cover over its top. Again, as on the evening by the sea, I knew that a space widened between us. I had felt closer to Mrs Brock, she had been nearer to me when I thought she needed my comfort.
7
In the weeks following the night when happiness had swollen like the canaries’ feathers round Mrs Brock, sheltering and conserving her own immense glow, I had the satisfaction of knowing she was less happy, so I was more valuable.
Papa was often away for whole mornings, cub-hunting; or for long days, shooting. It was late September now, so our riding lessons were much less frequent, and we had luncheon with Mummie – dull meals, as she didn’t care what the cook gave us if Papa was not there to enjoy it. She took to speaking French with us too – sim
ple tiny phrases requiring only a correct oui, or non, a merci, Maman. But with Mrs Brock she would embark on complicated conversations requiring answers far beyond Mrs Brock’s limited knowledge of the language. We were aware of this cool play; Mrs Brock’s pink cheeks and embarrassed mouthings were not lost on us.
It was in one of the unhappy silences following on such a French exercise that I piped up, a desperate loyalty sustaining my voice: ‘Madame Brock tricot très bien’ was what I said, and from there, alas, we reached the stockings. Mummie knew now that Mrs Brock was knitting shooting stockings for Papa, and they became a subject for constant inquiry. Papa was teased about them too, but gently, and not in French. ‘Blue too, how sad – I hope they’ll be ready in time for the Cloneen Shoot . . . Cousin Dominick will be amused . . .’ I heard this between them during one of our after-teatime hours. Papa’s half-amused, half-flattered retreat from the teasing seemed to me to put Mrs Brock in the same halfpenny place as Mummie’s French did, with the difference that Mummie lifted her eyes and drawled out her little jokes lightly when she was speaking to Papa, in contrast to the vindictive slow repetition of some impossible phrase in French to Mrs Brock.
When I told Mrs Brock what I had heard about the Cloneen Shoot, the grandest of the season as even I knew, she said: ‘I’m afraid they won’t be ready in time for it.’
‘Oh, Mrs Brock, but why?’
‘Because I’ve ripped them,’ she said. ‘I’ve ripped them up, Aroon.’ She added more quietly, and I knew it was untrue: ‘That pattern was all wrong.’
Papa didn’t look into the schoolroom any more; and each day that came and went Mrs Brock changed before our eyes. We droned our way through our lessons; our exercise books went uncorrected; she played the piano for hours, and the sounds that came out of it were those of a wild, yearning animal. ‘Broken doll – you’ve left behind a broken doll,’ she played; and ‘Where your caravan has rested, flowers I leave you on the grass.’ On some days she could not face luncheon in the diningroom and had biscuits and milk in the schoolroom. I ached for her, but longed now for the happy Mrs Brock I had known; this creature was fluttering and banging itself about in a world unknown to me. Hubert and I were even driven to enjoy each other’s company in preference to the wild gloom which possessed our dear friend’s every mood. The birds’ cages and the mouse houses began to smell; we were never very meticulous about them, only inspired towards Mrs Brock’s ideal – that they ought to smell sweet as a primrose. Now she didn’t seem to care, nor about the linen; her mending days were done. ‘Rubbish!’ she shouted at Wild Rose. ‘It’s all rotten – tear it up,’ and she went zipping and rending through a fine double sheet and laughed at the tatters.
It was the day when Papa came back to the schoolroom that my love for Mrs Brock was, for ever, broken and dispersed. He was a tall man, and I saw him bent over this plump little woman and heard him speaking to her in a patient, reasonable tone of voice. Tears poured over her face, her hands tried to hold on to his coat. He put her hands away from him. ‘I’ll take a ride with you, children, at three o’clock,’ he said. ‘I don’t think Mrs Brock feels too well. Go and tell Hubert to get ready.’
I was dismissed, but I came back to her when I heard his step going down the wooden schoolroom stairs. ‘Are you all right?’ I said. She was standing at the mouse cage, looking in. She didn’t answer. ‘Mrs Brock?’
‘Minnie’s had her babies,’ she said, her voice still thick from crying. ‘Look – aren’t they disgusting?’ They were, squirming and twiddling in their nest. ‘You’re always asking me how they do it,’ Mrs Brock went on. ‘Well, I’ll tell you. It’s that horrible Moses; he sticks that thing of his, you must have seen it – Hubert has one too – into the hole she pees out of, and he sows the seed in her like that.’
‘Oh.’ I felt myself becoming heated; horrified and excited.
‘That’s how it happens,’ Mrs Brock went on, and she gripped me by both my arms. ‘That’s how it happens with people too. It’s a thing men do, it’s all they want to do, and you won’t like it.’
She still held my arms. ‘Is it true?’ I had to know. ‘Papa and Mummie don’t. They couldn’t . . .’
‘Oh, couldn’t they?’ Mrs Brock laughed and laughed. She was still laughing when I tore my arms away and ran out of the schoolroom. ‘Papa’s waiting for us,’ I excused myself, standing for a moment in the doorway. I knew I was deserting her when she seemed to need me, as I had longed for her to need me, but I felt as frightened of her as I had of Minnie and Moses in their antics on that night when Mrs Brock had been so beflowered by happiness. When I joined Hubert and Papa in the yard I looked at him with quite new eyes. Could he and Mummie really do such a dirty thing? Was it possible? There he sat, elegant and easy on his young horse – but I knew it was true, horribly true. No wonder people kept it so secret.
•
I did not hear until long afterwards what happened to Mrs Brock when I ran out of the schoolroom, leaving her staring at the new mice. I only felt an odd relief when I came back and found that she had gone. Gone where? Gone for a spin on Wild Rose’s bicycle. She said she had an old headache, so she took a loan of the old bike and went for a spin. Then Rose, bringing in the schoolroom tea, found an envelope addressed to herself, and in it a letter: ‘Goodbye. Good luck. Don’t forget me. You’ll find the bike at Fitzy Nangle’s.’ There was a pound note enclosed. Rose left us with our milk and bread and butter. I could taste the mice through my milk, which had stood for a while in its mug. ‘After tea, I’m going to clean them out,’ I told Hubert. I needed to do something hygienic and drastic.
‘If you do that, Aroon, Moses will eat the babies.’
‘Men are such filthy creatures,’ I said, and I looked at Hubert with a brooding kind of wonder. Rose came back with slices of chocolate cake from the drawingroom tea. There was a look of delighted excitement about her – an ask-me-not, touch-me-not mystery, longing to be questioned and probed.
‘I’m to put ye to bed,’ she said, ‘and a half hour early if ye don’t mind; it’s my Thursday evening.’
‘And Ollie Reilly waiting in the laurels’; Hubert always knew the latest form in the stable lads’ courtships; it was an established joke and Rose screamed with pleasure: ‘Oh, Master Hubert, who’s the bold unruly boy?’
Far from joining in the fun, I felt a wave of disgust go through me. Heaven knows what they would get up to in the laurels, though not until after they were married, of course.
‘Sweethearts, sweethearts, sweethearts,’ Hubert chanted.
‘Hurry on, now. Wash your dirty mouth out and get down to the drawingroom.’
•
Papa was drinking tea from a tiny flowered cup. The sandwiches were tiny too, and only our two slices had gone from the new chocolate cake. He got up as we came in.
‘I don’t like it,’ he said.
‘I shouldn’t worry – just hysteria.’
‘But I am worried.’
‘Then do whatever you think best, my darling, anything you like, I’m only too delighted – always.’
He came back from the door. ‘Bless you,’ he said, and went out again.
‘Get out your puzzles, children,’ she said, ‘and get on with them.’
Even Hubert didn’t speak; he breathed heavily over his puzzle and took up pieces he knew and put them back again. My puzzle was full of swans, but I couldn’t have fitted a swan’s head onto a swan’s neck I was so abstracted. Every now and then I stole a look at her, sitting there dressed in pale coffee-cream colour, little rosettes on her bronze house-slippers, a book in her hand. It was impossible. She couldn’t have. Mrs Brock invented it.
‘Bedtime’ – the relief in her voice was enormous. Hubert did a funny thing. Going upstairs he took my hand. ‘She’ll be back, Aroon. It’s all right.’ I was happy to give his hand a little squeeze. I forgot about the mice and all that stuff. Mrs Brock had frightened me and failed me and now left me alone. Hubert might need me. Wild Rose didn’t hur
ry us to bed. Nobody waited for her in the laurels; Ollie Reilly had driven the dog cart to Lisadore to pick up Mrs Brock. ‘And I hope they won’t leave my bicycle after them,’ Rose said. But there was a darkness behind every joke. Ollie Reilly returned late, with the bicycle which Mrs Brock had left, carefully propped, behind Fitzy Nangle’s wall, but without Mrs Brock.
•
All that night and through the days after, the house was murmuring with prayers: Hail Mary full of grace . . . Sweet Jesus have mercy . . . Rosary beads were pulled out of apron fronts and churned about in nervous hands. Mrs Brock had gone away, they said. When would she be back? Nobody could say. It was some time before they found her body, swollen almost to bursting the frilled bathing costume. She was a very strong swimmer, and judging from where she was washed up, she must have swum a long way out to sea.
8
I was sent to school the following year. Hubert went the year after, and in 1914 Papa rejoined his regiment. Mummie stayed at Temple Alice and wrote to him nearly every day. On leaves in London he had a splendid time with all his girls – brief leaves from France, too short for the journey home, and unrecorded in his letters to her. Years afterwards I read his letters, straightforward boring accounts of daily happenings: charmless, passionless, with no relation to the magic quality he possessed. He didn’t keep any of her letters, or I have never found them. I don’t suppose they would tell me anything I don’t know. She was so cold.
Her greatest pleasure and distraction at that time was buying junk furniture. At sales and auction rooms she bought French furniture and Regency, considered both ugly and worthless by her contemporaries; I rather agree with them – give me Chippendale every time. But she brought the pieces home and spent hours cleaning and restoring; it was a holiday from the exhaustion of painting and she liked the biting smells of the varnish removers and oil mixtures she lavished on the objects.
