Good Behaviour

by Molly Keane

  I have the most articulate memory of passing the kitchen door one day and seeing Wild Rose suddenly as a person, not as a housemaid or cook. Her hands were on the kitchen table behind her and the curve of her back leaned towards them; her attitude had an easiness, and there was a rough, low tone in her voice. They were speaking of the Eagle range and its awful appetites, of gulls’ eggs, and how long to cook them. There were pauses, dragging out the time of giving and taking orders for luncheon; their voices had another world beyond them.

  11

  Although there had been no London season for me, every winter our own and neighbouring hunts held their hunt balls and lesser dances. And every long summer came the nightmare galas of the Dublin Horse Show. Papa, wooden leg and all, was in enormous demand for these routs and parties. His successes with young girls were quite frightening, although he never jeopardised his place in the middle-aged belt to which he belonged – that company of neat, sweet, tough hunting ladies; blue habited and veiled, showing their horses by day; by night richly dressed, sweetly scented, and out for further adventure. I was brought along to the parties; sad boys, often younger than I was, were netted in to partner me. I loved to dance: I suffered in their arms. Or I sat smiling, smiling; or shut for hours in some lavatory; or chattered hysterically with the unwanted, like myself.

  Part of my trouble was being a big girl. I have now come to terms with my height; but in those years, when I was nineteen and twenty, I bent my knees; I bowed my shoulders; I strapped in my bosoms till they burst out round my back.

  More than a year later Hubert was with me, and Hubert was my friend. He was at Cambridge now, where he had achieved a remote assurance which made our alliance the more surprising and flattering for me. I adored his good looks and I knew he waited for my admiration – it stood for some necessity that he was missing at Temple Alice. He spoke of next year’s May balls: ‘You’ll come – we will have a rampage.’ He taught me to charleston, a bizarre, pagan exercise, foreign to County West Common. Holding the back of a chair as practice bar I discovered what syncopation meant. ‘This way? No, this way? Yes, yes, yes! I’ve got it. I’ve got it, Hubert.’ It was delicious. Better than my first bicycle on its first day. Surprisingly soon, the pupil excelled the master. But I subdued my genius to his pleasure. He was still capable of that sidelong unkindness I remembered from my childhood. But beyond that a talent for pleasing, for amusing, for softly getting his own way had grown in him. Mummie had to give him £5 to sit for her. It was the first time she had painted him seriously and she put all she knew about angles and ugliness into the portrait. Hubert was neither amused nor pleased. He turned away.

  ‘It’s not a photograph, you know; it’s a composition.’ Mummie sounded faintly apologetic.

  ‘A broken bicycle with two heads and one tiny eye – that’s me.’ Hubert laughed sourly.

  ‘For a start, you have two enormous eyes and two-inch eyelashes,’ I comforted him.

  ‘Yes, Aroon would see you as a box of chocolates.’

  Hubert’s eyes met mine – met in a past for us alone; ‘Charbonnel AND Walker,’ he breathed.

  ‘The best,’ I answered from the same past. I quite liked leaving Mummie out of our jokes.

  Papa loved Hubert, loved him in a silent, vain, satisfied way. Hubert was admirable to him in the deepest sense. He rode beautifully, and with judgement and courage; he was a good shot, and a thoughtful, skilful fisherman. He was all that Papa’s friends most approved, and all that Papa wished for in a son. Beyond all these things I think Papa was most grateful for the way Hubert lifted me off his conscience. And I was Hubert’s escape and salvation from the girls who besieged him.

  That winter when he grew up, I enjoyed myself for the first time. I acquired consequence. To be needed and liked by two such popular characters as Papa and Hubert lent me an interest rather better than second hand. Maybe I was a parasite – but what a happy parasite, happy in their admiration and their kindness, happy in being their new joke. Hubert called me Atom. ‘My little sister Atom.’ ‘Oh, we can’t go without Atom,’ they said when bidden to some grand junketing, ‘Atom keeps us out of trouble. Atom will drive us home, if we’re a little tired. We’ve got to have Atom.’ My inclusion became an accepted fact in any invitation; and if I was asked alone they would come too. ‘We’ve got to look after Atom. She’d be up to all sorts of nonsense without us.’ They invented a dangerous, glamorous side to me, and took elaborate precautions for my unassaulted chastity.

  It was glorious then. There are no beauties now like the beauties of the twenties; theirs was an absolute beauty, and none the worse for being clean and tidy. I worshipped some of those full-page photographs in the Tatler. Today I can still feel the grip of a cloche hat over my earphones of hair, and a little later the freedom and sauce of a beret on a shingle. We wore our hats, usually of pale rabbit-coloured felt, when exercising our horses or playing tennis, or for luncheon parties. On our way to the bathroom we wore crêpe-de-chine and lace boudoir caps – what has become of crêpe-de-chine? Or real silk stockings with their transparent clocks, if it comes to that? Or those life-giving white ladies before dinner before the ball? Not that I am actually against martinis, but I want to go back, I want to soak myself in Cointreau, gin, and lemon juice in equal parts.

  I was fiercely shy. I would never have got myself to a party without Hubert and Papa. They really worried themselves silly about my success or failure with men. I don’t really mean ‘failure’; I can’t have been one, because, since I had become Papa’s and Hubert’s joke and invented character, men, real grown-up men, danced with me quite often. Now I never sat out more than two dances running and that can happen to any girl. Of course, I have this wonderful sense of rhythm. My charleston was a poem, and could be the same today if there was any decent dance music.

  Dancing with Hubert was the most wonderful experience I shall ever know. Because he was my brother we could do every intricate step and take the wildest positions without embarrassment. Dancing together we were possessed by the music. The band played for us, giving us what we needed. To me it was the absolute. I was resistless in the strength of a river that had no source and reached no sea. With other girls he was not a spectacular dancer. I don’t think his girls ever knew when he had stopped dancing and was aiming for the bar and a free drink with Papa. That was not always their destination. I once heard him screaming from a car: ‘Help! Help! I’m being raped!’ He was laughing so much when I got there that all he could say was: ‘Atom, she interfered with me.’ ‘Make up your mind,’ the blonde said. ‘What do you want?’ And she went flouncing off. Hubert held my hand. ‘I wish I knew,’ he said. ‘I do wish I knew.’ He was still laughing.

  It was so marvellous that I should enjoy myself, perhaps I exaggerate the luxurious sensation these times and parties gave me. But the parties happened. I was there, in the heart of things. I see chains of rooms opening one out of another. I didn’t discriminate then as to whether they were rooms in grand eighteenth-century houses, or rooms in grand Victorian country houses, or rooms in grand hotels. They are all rather dark to me now, as they were then, banked with evergreens, here and there a gleam from a cold greenhouse – some pallid flower, dim among the mosses and ivies and variegated periwinkle.

  The men were the flowers in these mysterious forests, sleek and orchidaceous in their hunt coats, the facings and collars pale, thin gold watch-chains crossing meagre stomachs, white ties as exact as two wings on a small bird’s back, long legs black as cypripedium stems, hands sometimes gloved, eyes focused distantly, as if a fox stealing away from its covert was still the thought in mind. They would look over my shoulder and away, and they never listened to a word I said. If they spoke it was about the day’s hunting. The theme was always what hounds had done, or what sad stupidity their huntsman had shown in handling them. It was all a stylish performance, never a human side to it; nothing personal, no boastfulness, or only in a very sidelong way, never a heart-warming admission of cowardice, or ha
tred of a horse. No truth that could betray the myth. When I was twenty, foxhunting was Wholly Holy and everybody was an apostle or a disciple. If you were a doubting disciple, so much the worse for you – keep quiet and show willing. I was neither cowardly nor unwilling, but my great height was an awkward problem for me and for my horse; our groom, Tommy Fox, was always whining away about the state of its back, and encouraging Papa to discourage me from going out.

  To be truthful, I rather adored the days when I was horseless and drove our car round after the hounds. The back was stuffed with good things to eat and drink; our car was a famous bar and buffet. The Master would even speak to me sometimes, when I handed him a beaker at the end of the day. ‘Bless you, darling,’ he said once, and the blood drummed in my ears. But before I had wrenched the lid off the box of pheasant sandwiches he had ridden away and his place was taken by the Crowhurst twins.

  The Crowhurst sisters were almost identical twins; Nod and Blink were the baby names they still went by, although at that time they were almost thirty, nearing middle age. Everybody was kind to them because they had no money, nothing but Good Old Blood, and deft inventive ways. They did their own horses, and everything for themselves as well. They almost made their own boots. They could not make their bowler hats, which were wide and green and had belonged to their aunts, but their neat double-knitted waistcoats of canary yellow were bright and new and lined with chamois leathers meant for cleaning silver. They rode astride and very well too, one had to admit, and, of course, never gave sore backs. ‘Your father told us to have a warming drink,’ they said crisply and almost together; it was nearly a challenge to me to offer them soup. ‘Port or whisky?’ I asked and clapped the lid back on the pheasant sandwiches. The Crowhurst girls were never among my favourites. I cannot understand what Papa saw in them.

  When the last covert was drawn and the last sound of the ‘Go Home’ note had fallen from the air and the hounds, pinch-bellied, thronged the road before their long jog back to kennels, Hubert and Papa would give me their horses to hold while they rummaged in the car for drinks and sandwiches. I can smell the sweat and the leather in the evening air as I waited, talking the horses into quietness, rubbing the itch under their bridles, and doing my all to keep their heads towards the hounds, and their heels turned towards the ditches. Hubert and I would ride home together, so that Papa might rest his bad leg in the car. Then we were in confidence and accord: deciding on how to avoid riding home with the Crowhurst girls, or debating the idea of another drink, when and where we would revive ourselves for the miles that remained of our long hack home.

  Once, on a January evening, Hubert delayed so long in the Central Bar (centre of nothing but a bog and a post office) that the horses were getting cold, and so was I. He came out at last, no drink for me in his hand, and the man who owned the Central Bar at his elbow.

  ‘Get him up on his horse,’ he said, ‘if he’s able, and let him keep out of my place; it’s not for his sort.’

  I was really shocked at his manner. They are usually more than glad to welcome the gentry. After one look at Hubert I could see that he was simply faint from lack of food, so I shot into the bar to buy him a packet of biscuits. A dreadfully naughty-looking boy was standing on a chair and waving to Hubert through a tiny window. He looked as eager as any blonde at a hunt ball. ‘Biscuits, please.’ I tapped sharply on the counter with half-a-crown. ‘Ginger biscuits.’

  ‘We have only Kerry Creams,’ he said softly, glancing away from me and back to the window. I snatched up the packet and hurried out. I didn’t like the place.

  Then, just as Hubert failed for the second time to get his foot in the stirrup, the Crowhurst twins rode past. He was laughing helplessly, and the horses were all over the road.

  ‘Enjoying yourselves?’ the twins said in their sharp way as they rode neatly together into the evening. When they got home they would do their horses and give them chilled drinks and warm, long-prepared mashes, before they had some of that wonderful potted fish (it’s their secret still) on toast for their own tea. Good gals, good gals, people said of them. Really keen. They were happy, I suppose, in their exact way. Their days must have been full to exhaustion point, what with their horses to feed and groom and exercise, making all their own clothes, and keeping their dogs as primly perfect as babies with an English nannie; but they never knew, poor things, what happiness meant, as I knew it with Hubert and Papa – and then, Richard.

  12

  It was towards the end of the second summer after Hubert had made the happy break and change in my cheerless social round that he brought Richard to stay at Temple Alice. Nothing could have been more pleasing to Papa. His oldest friend Wobbly Massingham’s boy, how right that he and Hubert should be friends; how right, and hopeful, that Hubert should bring him along to be my partner and escort for the Horse Show balls.

  Although I assumed a great carelessness, I felt hopeful too, and I bicycled early and late to my appointments with the local dressmaker. Mrs Harty was a big heavy woman with a club foot. She had a zest and imagination unsurpassed where clothes were concerned. My height was a challenge to her; there was such a lot of me to be dressed.

  ‘Keep to beige, Miss Aroon,’ she would implore, ‘and keep it simple.’ When I brought her patterns of rose-clouded chiffon: ‘We’ll only look like an arbour in a garden,’ she said sadly. I felt a little cross at this uncalled-for comment but I ignored it, naturally, and ordered ten yards of the rose chiffon.

  I was so anxious over the accomplishment of my clothes and so weary from bicycling through hot July afternoons for their fittings that my curiosity about, even my interest in, Richard stayed below the surface. He was a man for the Horse Show and its dances; that was God-given and enough. Hubert did say to me: ‘You don’t seem much interested in my friend.’

  ‘I am, really.’

  ‘And I’ve asked him all for you.’

  ‘You know he’ll hate me.’

  ‘Why should he? He was dotty about Bronwyn Morbyrd and she has the Burnham legs, poor girl.’

  ‘Oh, don’t tease – what am I going to talk about?’

  ‘Not horses. He likes a good giggle about Mrs Brock.’

  ‘Mrs Brock? You can’t mean it.’

  ‘Yes, I do. She was our first laugh.’

  ‘How weird.’ I felt her wild hands on my shoulders; I saw my little Minnie and her squirming mites; I clearly remembered every word spoken then. Not very serviceable as light chat.

  ‘And look what I’ve found,’ Hubert spoke in his most sidelong, jeering voice. He pulled it out of the schoolroom bookshelf, out of a copy of The Children’s Golden Treasury. It was from Mrs Brock’s Stoke Charity gallery, a portrait of Richard, eight years old, sitting on a photographer’s balustrading, eyes lifted upwards from the sloped cricket bat in his hands; he wore a white shirt with a deep Byronic cleft to a plump cherub chest.

  ‘Rather silly, isn’t it?’ Hubert laughed and put the picture back inside The Children’s Golden Treasury and squeezed the book in between the packed, forgotten song-books and storybooks of our childhood.

  I was appalled when I met the present Richard. In him I saw the embodiment of all the young men who had paralysed me into the maintenance of a silence broken only at rare intervals by some vicious platitude. Here he was, and for five days and five nights he would have to endure my company, my size, and my countrified simplicity. I rocked a little on the Louis heels of my strapped lizard shoes as I stole looks at him between the business of marking my catalogue and thinking of anything to say about any horse being judged in Ring 4. Long legs I saw (I had expected that), eyes discriminating and critical as a bird’s; small ears; crisp hair; rolled umbrella, swinging stylishly as a sword; he came straight from the middle pages of the Tatler and Bystander. The right family, the right school, the right regiment had all been his. I was stunned between fear and admiration. He was brown (from Cowes Week), lean and hard (polo at Hurlingham); he had ridden the winner of a Grand Military (Sandown sho
uld have been written on his forehead). How could I think of a word worthy of his attention? Leaning on the rails of the judging ring I breathed the exhausted atmosphere of déjà vu which he exhaled as he indicated exactly which three horses the judges would pull in first, second, and third. I knew he would move through the show and all its galas in the same mood of exhausted natural disdain. He wore his bowler hat tilted to a distinctive elderly angle, well calculated to emphasise his own glorious youth. As I leaned beside him, the ache of pride and shyness drove me into the farthest depths of silence.

  ‘Don’t try,’ Hubert said that first night before dinner. I felt his constraint and anxiety. ‘Just be your natural self,’ he advised. So I was not any more the happy joke he and Papa had invented. Desperation filled me. Right, I thought, I can’t talk. But I can eat. I can be the fat woman in the fairground; the man who chews up iron; the pigheaded woman; anything to escape from hopeless me. So, at that first dinner before the first ball, I wolfed down sensational quantities of food. Almost a side of smoked salmon, and I ate a whole lemon and its peel as well; most of a duck; four meringues and four pêches melbas; mushrooms and marrow on toast; even cheese. ‘What else can we find for her?’ Richard asked Hubert. ‘She really is a great doer.’ They cheered me quietly. I was a joke again. I was a person. I was something for them to talk about.

  He danced with me all night. I longed to exploit the skills Hubert and I had perfected. I ached to show him what I could get up to. But he persisted in his hesitant, intimate night-club shuffle. There was a trick and a style about it too. It retreated from the vulgarity of other people’s efforts; it was part of his escape from the usual, a cultivated mannerism such as the old gentleman’s tilt to his hat.