Good Behaviour

by Molly Keane

  The Horse Show proceeded on its traditional five-day course, but how differently from earlier martyrdoms of fixed and smiling loneliness. This time there was no more waiting under the clock for Papa to disengage himself from business or pleasure. Hubert and Richard jostled me kindly between them from breakfast to bedtime. I was so happy, I felt they loved me. It was enough that they shared jokes with me; Richard even invented one of his own: ‘Pig-wig,’ he called me. And once I heard him say to Hubert: ‘Our Pig-wig.’ To this living moment I experience a shudder of bliss.

  On the last day Richard bought a yearling in the Bloodstock Sales. I sat between him and Hubert on the circular benches, while the yearlings, coming up for auction in the ring below us, were pulling back, kicking, or mincing politely round. I didn’t even realise Richard was bidding, his gestures were so quiet and small and knowledgeable. I thank God still that I didn’t happen to be talking, just thumbing through the lots in my catalogue. Suddenly I felt Hubert’s tension beside me, and I saw Richard’s eyes blazing with excitement under the old gentleman’s tilt of his hat. Excitement was caged and unspoken in a cool exaggeration of restraint. But, beyond the coolness, as the bidding went on, there was white heat. Outside in the sunlight, on the grass, we looked the colt over.

  ‘Bit plain?’

  ‘That’s what I like.’

  ‘And the breeding’s right. I think I bought him pretty well.’

  For perhaps half an hour he walked round us, and we walked round him. To my surprise he was to be boxed to Temple Alice. I wondered how Papa would like that; he complained the land was horse-sick already. Satiated for the time being, we turned to leave the bloodstock paddock. As he took a last look at the yearling Hubert gave a tingling kind of shudder. ‘I think we need a drink,’ he said, ‘and I’m paying for it.’ In the bar they almost forgot to put me between them and, I thought, only just remembered to give me a drink. Of course they were obsessed by that yearling, by Black Friday out of Love Affair by Esperanto.

  That was the last day of the Horse Show; we were leaving the spending and the jollity behind us and going home to Temple Alice and the expanding summer. Hubert was just settling into Richard’s car for the long drive home when Papa, his face darkening, said, on his sweet complaining note: ‘Hubert, dear old boy, I’m a bit anxious about this off-fore tyre. You wouldn’t change places with Aroon, just in case? I’ve had a disgraceful luncheon at the Club.’

  ‘I can change the wheel, Papa,’ I said. How often he had let me do so.

  ‘Just stop arguing, would you, and get out.’ He spoke so gently only I could hear, but the sweet note was out of his voice.

  Richard helped me into his car, wrapped some kind of camel’s-hair robe round my knees, offered me an Egyptian cigarette, and, for the eighty-mile drive home, spoke only to ask the way. I was accustomed to miles of silent trance with Papa so Richard’s silence seemed natural enough. I cuddled my great body down as kittenishly as my size allowed, and beneath the liberal rug I feigned sleep. Later on, when I got round to reading Michael Arlen, I realised that this was the right sort of car in which to roar through the night at eighty miles an hour before a death crash for Purity’s obscure sake.

  13

  Mummie’s reaction to Richard was a question unspoken between us. Our anxiety was ridiculously misplaced. From the first evening, when she found that he actually appreciated Regency furniture, she decided that he was far too intelligent to waste his time on me, and stole his company whenever she could.

  I wondered why he need have bothered to please her when everything came his way, even infrequent birds on the mountain. Snipe, too, flung themselves into the pattern of his shot, trout hurried to the fly he cast over them, and horses, good or bad, went beautifully for him. Glamour circling him about, he pitched it to its lowest key. It was as if he deprecated being the tallest in any room, towering silent and repellent of any advance, dressed in clothes which, though they hinted at the Regency buck, were never inappropriate to the occasion. From the disapproving way in which he paused over certain pages of the Tatler, I knew he had glamorous friends; royal friends too, though naturally he never mentioned them.

  Until now I had been aware of Temple Alice only as our cold comfortless home – large; full of ill-placed furniture; loud with the echoes of feet on thinly carpeted boards or a chill clatter on black and white tiles; a roof leaking winter, or summer, rain; hard beds; soft, cold bathwater. These were my familiar thoughts about the house, to which I occasionally added an impatient sympathy for Papa’s anxieties over rates, leaking valleys in the roof, broken water chutes, as well as his haunting fear and denial of dry rot. But in this eternal August the place took on a sumptuous quality. Every day the lean, deprived face of the house blazed out in the sunlight. Sun poured onto damp-stained wallpaper, through the long windows. It shone on us from when we woke until we changed for dinner.

  One morning, from my bed, I heard the sound of horses ridden out early into silence. I sat up, clasping my knees over the blankets, while I watched them, Richard and Hubert, riding out together. Hubert was riding Arch Deacon (Arch Demon, Tommy Fox named him), a difficult young horse that Papa had bought cheap from a hunting parson and given to Hubert to tame and civilise. Now I saw him compelling Arch Deacon to good manners, opening the gate into the near field, insisting quietly on his horse’s subservience while Richard rode through. They had not told me they would ride out early. I put away the thought and with it the prospect of exercising my fat hunter alone.

  I think it was that day, or the next, that we drove to Kildeclan and Richard bought me a great bottle of scent. He also bought a bottle of Cointreau and a bottle of gin and six lemons, which were stowed away in his bedroom. ‘Cocktails at seven tonight,’ he said. ‘Don’t forget, Piggy-wig. Bring your toothglass.’

  There was something daring and men-only about that little party. Drenched in Richard’s scent and wearing my older flowered crêpe-de-chine, I felt very privileged to be there. I liked to watch the boys as they finished dressing. There was a quick, hard grace about their movements, in the way they put links quickly into the cuffs of evening shirts, such a different tempo from a girl’s considered gesture. They wore narrow red braces and their black trousers were taut round waists and bottoms. I seemed to join in the violent act of hairbrushing – each hair into place and no nonsense. I felt easier, more part of them as the minutes passed. How dear they were. Spoilers of girls. Their silences were pregnant with all the things it was bad form to say, so I wonder how it was that we got round to the subject of Mrs Brock. Hubert had said she was a joke with them. I didn’t think so. They invented that idea and got behind it. Her name had been buried under silences and unspoken questions for so long that mystery, like the sea, had swallowed her up.

  ‘I wonder why she did it – was it awful old love again?’

  ‘Richard – what do you mean?’

  ‘Well – Nannie found her kissing me and she had this school-girl pash for Mummie too.’

  ‘Our Mummie was absolutely foul to her.’

  ‘Did you like her?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t remember. Did you?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘I don’t remember either.’ We all denied her.

  ‘Did she find things here?’

  ‘Find things? I don’t remember. What things?’

  ‘I never think about her now, crazy old ass,’ Hubert said angrily.

  ‘But I want to know,’ Richard insisted. ‘If you can’t remember, invent something. Why did she drown herself?’

  That was the start of the Mrs Brock cult. It grew into a game that Richard loved playing. He drew Hubert and me into it. First, remembering things about her; then inventions, sad, funny, intimate details. It was a charade. She had to seem pathetic, ridiculously sentimental, with sly Hogarthian hints on her private behaviour. I didn’t understand Richard’s avid curiosity. Although, to please him, I fed it for all I was worth, I always kept back what she had told me about the mice, th
ough sometimes I was on the verge. Hubert, when he took wholeheartedly to the game, was a perfect mine of fascinating reminiscence. He remembered how she would sing, and the songs she sang, and how she would twist on the piano-stool, still singing, and draw us close to her for the refrain; and how the faint smell of Mrs Brock beat the faint smell of talcum powder.

  ‘Yes, yes – armpits, armpits.’ Richard was enchanted.

  ‘Papier poudré, Icilma snow,’ I contributed.

  They took to dressing and undressing her like a doll, like an effigy. Hubert screamed at some of the disgusting things he thought up. I laughed, not always hearing or quite getting the point, but determined not to be left out, frightened, yet longing to be a party to this violation.

  ‘She made camisoles and she wound the lace insertions onto strips of postcards. “I do like everything to be dainty,” she said.’

  ‘Dainty, my foot. She pulled up her skirts and warmed her bottom at the schoolroom fire.’

  ‘Hubert, you know she never did.’

  Richard drowned my protest. He laughed so much he lay back in his chair: ‘Split knickers,’ he gasped. The game was like a dangerous secret between the boys. They only let me in because I delved so deeply into what I had put away. Everything I remembered was a denial and a betrayal of the other things she was. But between us we almost called her into being. It was such fun sharing in her persecution.

  All that month after the show, through the excitement of Richard’s presence, we put Papa aside. He had been our darling, but now we formed a charmed circle where the old were uninvited. Until this month of August Hubert and Papa had been interlaced in their interests. They were warm and close in the only things that really counted with them. Now Papa hung back and made excuses over a day’s shooting. Hubert and Richard could walk farther and faster without him; he knew it. The harvest was a blessed retreat for him, and an occupation which relieved an inescapable saddened jealousy. He didn’t actually work in the fields, but he surveyed and supervised, and banged away at rabbits as his dogs put them out of gold margins. His days were full, but not happy. He had been replaced.

  Sometimes the boys drove off after dinner in Richard’s great car. I was left out then, because Hubert was learning to drive that dreadful treasure, and I glowed when they said I was too precious to risk. Papa was uneasy if they were very late, thinking perhaps that Hubert had taken the monster onto the roads, although he had asked him to stay on the two long avenues until he knew the car better. One night he was fidgeting miserably, and showed pleasure and relief when I suggested we should walk out the dogs and meet the boys.

  ‘Yes, they’re asking for a run, poor chaps.’ The importance was shifted onto the dogs. ‘Put on your Wellies, darling, and we’ll walk across Long Acres and the Horse Park.’

  We went together in the soft night, through the beech groves and beyond them, over the fields where the cattle moved through tall flowers and grasses, or lay side by side in quiet crowns, their great pale bodies bruising the grass to darkness. Volumes of their sweet breath and crushed river mint were on the night air. We found the car standing empty at the open gate into the Horse Park.

  ‘Pretty silly place to leave the thing,’ Papa said. ‘Young horses in the field might do themselves an injury, kick themselves to bits kicking at it, or eating pieces out of the hood. Can you drive it through the gate?’

  ‘No. Besides, the cows would eat it in the meadow.’

  ‘So they would. You’re so bright, darling. Sicken them. Well, can you blow the horn?’

  The notes on the horn wavered and echoed into the night, and brought the boys back to us, unhurrying, displeased rather than apologetic when Papa explained the summons.

  ‘The horses were moved to the bog yesterday,’ Hubert said. ‘There’s only my yearling and a donkey here now.’

  ‘Your yearling?’

  ‘Richard’s yearling. The Black Friday yearling. We went down to look at him.’

  ‘I see.’

  There was silence. And the night air that had been so sweet was charged and tense with unformulated, unspoken mistrust. Suddenly, rain fell – the first rain in the month. Papa and I and the dogs bundled into the car with Richard. Hubert shut the iron gate behind us, and we left him with rain pouring on his dark head. When we got to the house Richard kept the engine running, revving it loudly as Papa got out, awkwardly and slowly with his wooden leg.

  ‘Aren’t you coming in?’ Papa said, standing in the headlights.

  ‘No. I’m going to pick up Hubert.’ Richard swept the big car backwards and round and roared down the drive again.

  ‘Bloody nonsense; the rain won’t hurt him,’ Papa was shouting. But Richard was gone far out of ear-shot. Papa stood another moment in the rain, looking after the car helplessly. I understood. He wasn’t first with Hubert any more. It was a lonely business.

  ‘Let’s dry the dogs,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ Papa said, hopping up the steps. ‘Yes, yes. First things first.’

  •

  It was coming to the end of August, and Richard was still with us. Our intimacy grew in value as the days passed. In the mornings we rode out fat, bright horses that had to be exercised, and Hubert’s unruly brute that had to be schooled and civilised. There were the evenings when we danced in the nearly dark drawingroom, one oil lamp poised in a Negro’s hand near the wind-up gramophone, His Master’s Voice, with the alert white dog on the black lifted lid.

  Here, to my delight, Hubert and Richard danced with me in turn. I almost preferred dancing with Hubert, because I loved showing off to Richard. I loved those moments when he seemed compelled to lift his head from the Field or the Tatler and watch us as we charlestoned our exuberant rhythmic way through the spaces between the rugs on the floor. Hubert’s dancing with me had an inspired quality; it was more exciting than I had ever known it, very different from Richard’s cool understatement of the rhythm. Richard would put an iron hand between my shoulders and compel me to a change of style, looking over and across the top of my head while we danced, and my disturbed heart hurried and turned as it never did in the most exciting dance with Hubert – although I adored Hubert then as much as I did Richard. In turn I was fulfilled by them. I felt complete. There was no more to ask.

  14

  Soon he must go. I would face the bright autumn without him and without Hubert. I forbade myself to count the few days left before Hubert went back to Cambridge and Richard to his regiment. I hated to lose a minute of our time together. That evening I was in a haze of melancholy which was to find its climax in one of those pains I had been taught to disregard as slight monthly discomforts, not to be over-rated; to take them seriously was to be guilty of a social nuisance. This time I had the remedy near. At last I knew what gin could do for me. Toothglass in hand, I knocked at Richard’s door.

  ‘Come in,’ he called, not quite at once. He seemed immense and almost lowering, shrouded in his dark dressing-gown, lighting a cigarette, glaring at himself in the square mahogany-framed looking-glass. Hubert was sitting on the edge of the bed, wrapped in one of those great rough bath towels, sampler-stitched in red, which must have been fifty years old even then. He stretched out a bare arm for Richard’s cigarette case. Neither of them offered one to me. After a moment Richard said: ‘Did you want a drink?’

  ‘Yes. I’m feeling rather awful.’

  Hubert didn’t speak. He maintained the sly, withdrawn silence I remembered when, as a little boy, he was Mummie’s favourite and I perched out in the cold. Before I had grown to love him.

  Richard belted up his dressing-gown with exacting discretion and took the bottles out of the clothes basket. ‘No lemon, I’m afraid,’ he said, as he sloshed the gin and dribbled the Cointreau into my toothglass and, as he said it, my unbelieving eyes saw a lemon on the dressing-table, waiting for their drinks, not for mine. I think Hubert knew that I saw it, and knew that he was too late when he crossed from bed to dressing-table to brush his hair with Richard’s hairbrushes. He sat
there, his bare shoulders sloped towards their reflection. Richard gave me back my glass and turned away. I think he looked at his wrist for a watch he wasn’t wearing yet.

  ‘Perhaps we ought to dress,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, you’ll be late,’ I managed, although I knew they had hours of time till dinner, ‘I’ll let you get dressed.’ I put down my glass. No doubt I could come back. In the mirror Hubert saw what I was doing.

  ‘Take it with you, sweetie,’ he said gently.

  I stood outside the door with the dreadful brimming glass in my hand. Inside the room I heard them begin to laugh, relieved giggling laughter, and when they supposed I had gone, shouts of laughter followed me – laughter that expressed their relief from some tension and left me an outsider. Puzzled and anxious I sat on in my bedroom, sipping at the disgustingly powerful gin without gaining from it any lift or exuberance. I waited for the minutes to pass, minutes that I had so carelessly expected to spend in their company. Soon the gin overcame my pain, but not my mistrust in happiness, or certainty in happiness.

  The boys had a lot to say to Papa that night. They stayed a long time in the diningroom while Mummie and I sat in the library, each near a silver lamp, and stitched away, I at my camisole, apricot crêpe-de-chine and écru lace, she with her tapestry, green tulips on a white ground.

  ‘It’s rather sad they’ll be gone on Thursday,’ she murmured, as Papa and the boys delayed longer and longer in the diningroom. She put away her tapestry and took up her patience board, as though to mark how time was going. I felt dry, set for ever in my place as daughter of the house, unmarried daughter.

  Papa came in and sat in his winged armchair. ‘They’re in the gunroom writing up the game book,’ he said to me, certainly supposing that I would want to join them.