by Molly Keane
Wild Rose, still unmarried, was her aide and slave. On some days Mummie painted her or drew her in hideous angular poses: long ribs, lean as a greyhound fit for the track, as she worked away at her polishing, crouched over the brass lyres and swans so prolific in the decoration of Regency furniture. Every painting or drawing was half-finished, and full of gaps and holes and unfailingly ugly, while Rose grew better-looking and blazed with more rude confidence every year that passed. She had a snake-like dart of the head, and then the acid tongue spoke. Ollie Reilly had followed Papa to the wars without leaving her the ghost of a hope for a plain ring on her finger, and she only laughed her way through unkindness or pity in the servants’ hall.
I wisht I was married
And into bed carried
In the arms of my mother-in-law’s son,
That the door would be locked
And the key would be lost
And the night would be seven years long.
She sang it harsh and loud – ‘Marriage is horrible anyway, and we’ve all time enough when we’ll be forty, girl. Isn’t that right, girl?’
Oh love is pleasing,
Oh love is teasing,
Oh love’s pleasure when first ’tis new . . .
When the news came that Ollie Reilly had been killed (‘Tell Rose he died instantly; he never knew what got him,’ Papa wrote, and Mummie read her the letter), she was kneeling at the brass harpstrings of some piece of Regency rubbish, and collapsed like a dead frog, Mummie said. ‘Such a good thing she wasn’t standing up or she’d certainly have fallen on something and broken it, and we’d only just finished washing those Waterford glass rummers. Her howling and screaming made all the glasses ring out.’ Mummie laughed. ‘Ring out wild bells . . .’ Heaven knows what she meant by that. She never meant much. She never finished anything. She never completed an act or pursued a serious undertaking. When, soon after the news about Ollie Reilly, a telegram came to say Papa was wounded, she did not think of leaving Temple Alice to go to him. ‘There are so many loving friends in London,’ she said. ‘They’ll do far more for him without his wife fussing round. All those women, cherishing and longing. Besides, they’re so rich.’ She laughed faintly and went back to her painting, or her quiet fun among the Regency pieces.
We burned to rush over to his bedside. All the letters that came about him lay in piles and heaps on the hall table. There were letters from dozens of Wobbly Massinghams and Lady Grizels multiplied over and over into unknown Dorises and Dianas and Gladyses and Enids and a couple of Joyces. Mummie left them there, sticking out of their envelopes unread or half-read, all saying how cheerful he was, and how funny about his leg – so lucky that the amputation was below the knee. Our stomachs turned over when we heard this; but there was a quiet radiance in Mummie’s acceptance of his calamity. ‘I shan’t mind,’ she murmured. ‘He won’t be able to ride again,’ we said, facing his nameless, blank future. ‘No, perhaps not.’ There was a glow within her quietness.
I planned a great welcome home for Papa – Union Jacks and a wreath of Portugal laurel in the hall, something like that. I would have liked to get in a little piece about Our Hero. WELCOME TO OUR HERO, perhaps. In quite small letters, Hubert suggested. He was against the idea. In any case it came to nothing; Papa returned on leave from his hospital while we were still at our hateful schools.
He was there when we got back for the Easter holidays, reduced in every way: in height; in weight; even his voice was lessened. We kept our eyes off the stump of his leg, with the trouser leg neatly pinned up. He failed entirely to behave like the haloed hero we expected. He repulsed our overtures and Union-Jackish questions, and shunned our riding show-offs, which we had hoped would please him most of all.
This was an interval in his recovery; later in the year he was to have his wooden leg fitted. In the meantime he must rest, he must eat. He did both, and drank as well, growing every day more irritable and rather fatter. He followed Mummie about the garden at first; he even sat in the studio and watched her painting, after he had absorbed the small amount of racing news in the daily papers. All the time he seemed sadly unoccupied, as indeed he was. He couldn’t ride. He fell into the river when he went fishing. Long afterwards I knew things that were on his mind then. Reeking, new, they must have been terrible. He had shot Ollie Reilly as he lay mutilated and dying; when he talked to Rose, Ollie’s death seemed quite enviable, here and gone, out like a light.
Such things were so near and so apart from the honeyed life in Ireland. Every day was a perfect day that April. The scrawny beauty of our house warmed and melted in the spring light. Through the long screens of beech and ash plantations blackbirds flew low to the ground, calling high and scuttling low about their love affairs. All the blackbirds in the county seemed to be courting and mating in these coverts; with piercing sweetness they screamed, morning and dull eternal hours of evening, for love.
9
Papa slept badly. He came down late every morning, white and newly shaved and very cross. Perhaps he went, pegging his way along, down to a field of young horses. Their possibilities and promises of improvement were plain to him, as was the fact that he would have no part in their making.
Mummie suggested that he should drive around in Grandpapa’s donkey-chaise. Papa was appalled. ‘What do you think I am – some kind of invalid?’
‘No darling, an able-bodied gentleman with one leg, most unfortunately, who ought to get about his place a bit more.’
‘You’re always absolutely right.’ His patient voice had a savage note in it.
Hubert and I were fired with curiosity about the donkey-chaise. We found it, stored away in a corner of the cartshed; a broody turkey hen had her nest in it. We yoked a stallion ass called Biddy, and with him between the elegant, frail shafts, Hubert leading me in the carriage, we advanced up the drive towards the house where Papa was standing, morose on his crutches, enduring the long, sunny afternoon. The day changed for him when Biddy, taken by some crazy notion, bit Hubert, kicked out the dashboard, whipped round, and bolted back towards the farmyard.
‘But he’s quite dangerous,’ Papa said, with some life in his voice when, much later, he caught up with us at the farmyard gate, where Biddy had stopped, to stand screaming for his wives.
‘Get out, Aroon, let me at him.’
‘Oh, Papa, should you?’
‘Shut up and get out, darling. And give me that stick.’ It was the end of our fun for the afternoon. Papa drove about till teatime, master-minding every roguery shown by Biddy, who had any stallion’s dangerous temper. So they were pretty well matched. ‘I couldn’t have the little bastard – sorry, darling – biting and kicking your children, could I?’
‘Why not?’ She smiled as she added: ‘All right – kill yourself. Make a good job of it.’ She went back to her painting or her gardening. She could always occupy his absences.
Something from these contests with Biddy lessened Papa’s melancholy and revived him. There was a spice in the daily excursions because Biddy would not be tamed. His perversity was indestructible. ‘I’d be safer on one of your ponies,’ Papa said one day when we rescued him with the chaise upset in a ditch and Biddy on the ground. ‘If I had my wooden leg, I’d kick the little bastard to death.’ Papa spoke quite crossly as we helped him onto his foot again. ‘How am I supposed to get home? Both shafts broken and no crutches.’
‘Papa,’ Hubert said, ‘if you just sat up on Delia, I could lead her, and Aroon could hold you by your leg. Your bad leg.’
He hesitated. Really. He was afraid – we smelt fear. We loved him for it. We waited for him to choose how he would get home. And he chose Delia. It was the start of a new joke. We took him riding every day, and we were the kindest, most understanding instructors. ‘Save me, save me,’ he would shout when he overbalanced, and, running by his side, we would catch the empty loop of trouser leg below his stump and yank him back into the saddle.
‘You’re all right, Papa. You’re going great. Well don
e. You’re wonderful.’ We brought him at last to the dry ditch going into the dry pond. We had all forgotten Mrs Brock; we never gave her a thought in those days – just a dead governess. ‘Come on, Papa, you’ll do it.’
‘I can’t, you know.’ He looked very unhappy.
‘Just let her walk in and out,’ Mrs Brock had said to us. ‘No nasty jumping.’ We said the same to him, and led Delia time and again through the wet beech leaves in the bottom of the ditch and up the plump track out of it, until he found the necessary dash to hit her, one-two, behind the saddle – he couldn’t kick without falling off – and jump the ditch in style.
That was the beginning of our friendship with him, and with each other. The glory of this intimacy with Papa was our discovery and adventure. We had originated his recovery. We had changed him. We were even his superiors in the thing that mattered most in his life. Our own fears and nerves were close to us in time and gave us easy understanding of his helpless withdrawal from danger. We loved the same fears that had shamed him in us. We had forgotten Mrs Brock, but it was by her methods that we deceived and defeated fear. We were excitedly happy in our intimacy with him. The charm that was his second self embraced us for the first time. When he did well I wanted to touch him and caress him; so did Hubert. But we compromised on laughter and long glances. The absolute distance in our childhood, separating children from adults, was bridged. He was dependent, the taker; we the givers.
10
This recovery and reinstatement were a way back for him to his separate life, where all his charm and wandering habits found other adventures and intimates to whom Temple Alice was only a distant name, and Mummie a dim legend. The fitting of his wooden leg provided endless occasions for short stays at the Cavalry Club, which meant, as often as not, a night spent not at the Club but with some friend’s sleek and willing wife. It was the day of the shingle and straight pailletted dresses and huge pearl chokers; gardenias in velvet boxes; white ladies before dinner; and a night-club afterwards. Dancing was beyond him; but that melancholy uncomplaining stare of his, far into the eyes of his partners, never failed him of his purpose. The wooden leg and the wonder of his recovered horsemanship added interest to the encounters between him and his women.
He would return to Temple Alice battered and exhausted. ‘Were your doctors very savage?’ Mummie would ask, giving him a look both indulgent and sly, before she went pleading to the cook for some special effort; then back again to her painting until he was recovered by early nights and Mrs Lennon’s superb cooking.
Mrs Lennon was middle-aged. She had worked for us for fifteen years, on a wage of £30 a year. She was only Mrs Lennon in token of her office. Now she got cancer and died. Her death made a dreadful change, a real chasm in one of his greatest pleasures, a weakening of one of Mummie’s unspoken influences. Mrs Lennon’s secrets died along with her, for she despised receipts and the ignorant and mean-minded who cooked by them; she never wrote anything down and, if possible, shut the door against any inquiring kitchen maid while she composed her greatest dishes. No inheritance was left from her years in office. She could not speak the language of her skill (nor did she wish to). ‘Partridges Mrs Lennon . . .’ some friend might say years after her death, and Papa’s eyes would drop and his face darken. He would not answer, only sigh.
Her successors came and went; they were more expensive and none of them had a vocation. Mummie’s aimless half hints about the Major’s pleasures and displeasures carried no weight. She herself could not have told one of them in plain language how to boil an egg, and Mrs Beeton and Mrs Marshall had hardly more effect. At that time the standard of cooking in Irish country houses was lower than abysmal. Mrs Lennon had been a great exception. Papa did not complain, or not out loud. He had his own ways and means of expressing disappointment, even disgust. He would smile apologetically when his uneaten food was carried away, and ask gently for Bath Olivers and milk. Into the milk would go whisky – quantities of it. He grew fatter and his discontent was sad for Mummie to see.
His wooden leg and alterations to its contrivances sent him oftener, and for longer times, to London, where the Dorises and Dianas, Gladyses and Enids, and the two Joyces took their glad toll. All right – confusion was in their numbers. The outings and matings were immaterial, unconfessed, accomplished within a code of manners. Papa’s love affairs were run on his own terms. Divorce was something Mummie must never be asked to imagine. She was his escape, his freedom. Temple Alice was an island where a strange swan nested, a swan who never sang the fabled song before her many deaths.
While, as though in duty bound, Papa was hunting, fishing, and shooting in their proper seasons, at Temple Alice money poured quietly away. Our school fees were the guilty party most often accused. Then came rates and income tax and the absurd hesitations of bank managers. Coal merchants and butchers could both be difficult, so days of farm labour were spent felling and cutting up trees – the wood burned up quickly and delightfully in the high fast-draughting Georgian grates. As a corrective to the butcher’s bills lambs were slaughtered on the place. Half the meat was eaten while the other half went bad, hanging in the musty ice house without any ice.
Life at Temple Alice went on, well sheltered in the myths of these and other economies. Mummie thought up one which, to her, was as good as putting a big cheque into her dying bank account. I was not to be presented or to have a London season. Papa’s efforts were variable and more pleasurable. Every day’s hunting improved his ability to ride and thus to sell young horses. The victims of a day’s shooting, whether pigeons and rabbits in the demesne, grouse on the mountain, snipe in the bogs, or woodcock by winter springs deep in hazel copses, fed the diningroom. When the servants’ hall sickened at the sight of game: ‘Then let them eat pig’s cheek – delicious. Think of Bath chaps,’ said Papa.
During the holidays Hubert and Papa shot together. Papa took a half-hidden delight in Hubert’s shooting – improving towards excellence. I think his son’s looks were another unadmitted pleasure and satisfaction to him. Lucky Hubert – he never knew the anxiety and disgust of acne. He strode from childhood to youth without pausing in adolescent ugliness. In the fishing season they spent long days and late evenings together on the river. Then the household ate salmon and brown trout until the maids and the stable lads finally struck: ‘We’re killed from fish,’ they said. The cooks, sickened by salmon and exhausted from stoking the Eagle range and its satellite boiler with wood and turf, left, one after another; in those days there was always another to follow, worse if possible than her predecessor.
Wild Rose’s transference from housework to cooking was accidental and unpremeditated. One of the undedicated cooks left without warning. ‘Gone on the bread van,’ Wild Rose reported at dinnertime, ‘and it’s Teresa’s night out so I brought ye a hunting tea – poor Mrs Lennon’s poached eggs and rashers.’ The eggs were perfect, swelling primly on large slices of buttered toast, the lightest dust of cayenne blown over their well-matched pearls.
‘How did you know about my red pepper? It’s years since I’ve seen it,’ Papa said sadly, giving Rose one of his embracing looks, distant, grateful, promising.
‘I seen herself at it, sir, God rest her soul.’
‘God rest her soul,’ Papa repeated, and ate his eggs with reluctant enjoyment.
It was after this that Mummie put Rose’s wages up by £1 a month and persuaded her to stay in the kitchen. An underling, Breda, took Rose’s place as house-parlour maid, rather impeded than helped in her duties by a succession of trainees called between maids. Teresa, a sad, slow-witted character, retained her position as kitchen maid. She cleaned potatoes and other slug-infested vegetables, kitchen sauce pans, and stone-flagged floors. She washed up after the servants’ breakfasts, mid-day dinners, and teas, meals which Tommy Fox (the battered ex-steeplechase jockey who was Papa’s most valued asset in the stableyard) and his helper (successor to Ollie Reilly) shared with the female staff in the servants’ hall.
Rose w
as young for her senior position in the household. But her plain and careful cooking, her flaring good looks, and her biting tongue kept her underlings and the lads from the yard in order; while her indefeatable will to succeed made her torture Mummie daily for receipts and suggestions suited to the diningroom. Mummie was entirely unable to fulfil either demand, try as she might; at the moment she longed to please and distract Papa, for Goodwood was near, where one of the distant harem had taken a house and invited him to stay for the meeting.
‘I don’t know what to suggest.’ She looked at Rose hopelessly, Rose in her lilac cotton dress, standing in the dull lilac gloom of the kitchen. ‘Renoir?’ she murmured to herself. ‘Not quite. Too hungry looking.’ As she looked, a vague idea possessed her, an escape; Goodwood and after defeated, perhaps. ‘I don’t know what to suggest,’ she repeated. ‘Why don’t you ask the Major?’
Wild Rose went off in a wild peal of laughter: ‘Is it ask the Major, madam? – oh, my God—’ She covered her mirth with her hand and bowed her head to her own laughter.
‘Only yesterday he said if you could make that sickening chocolate cake you could make a cheese soufflé. Here he is – ask him.’
He was limping down the stone passage towards the rod and gun room, his mind on the Stewards’ Cup and a week of luxurious liberties, manifold and unquestioned. ‘What’s that? Luncheon? Salmon again? Make a Hollandaise sauce and a sorrel purée, why don’t you – the haggard’s full of sorrel.’
‘So it is,’ Mummie said, happily relieved, ‘and the sauce is sure to be in Mrs Beeton.’
‘Spell it for me, write it down for me,’ Rose insisted. He wrote on the slate, mysteriously, as if marking a race-card for a chosen woman.
That was how a state of things began that added an interesting dimension to his life. He did go over for Goodwood, but he came back very soon afterwards, bringing with him receipts from his hostess’s chef, to whom he had given an enormous tip. The receipts were not easy to follow; their ramifications and the occasional French word involved patient explanations, lengthy sessions. If Mummie sometimes asked: ‘Where’s Papa? Have you seen him?’ the answer to his whereabouts was fairly regularly: ‘Ordering dinner’ instead of the earlier ‘Tying flies’ or ‘Cleaning his gun.’
