by Molly Keane
‘Oh, yes, are they?’ My voice came out cold and stifled, as changed as tonight was from last night. I felt him give me a look, but he had the new Horse and Hound to read. Politely occupied we sat on, our thoughts our own, incommunicable. And then, coming faintly from the drawingroom, we heard music: ‘Wien, Wien, nur du allein . . .’ Last night I had swooped round to it, swayed about in its plunging and soaring melodies, sharing all the romance, and the regret.
For a minute or two Papa didn’t turn or rustle a page of Horse and Hound. He stirred round in his chair as though he couldn’t find a comfortable position for his wooden leg. Then, as if it were a new idea, he said: ‘They’re playing the gramophone.’ Then, after a pause: ‘I expect they’re waiting for you in there.’
I couldn’t answer. Mummie said, turning a tiny card: ‘Well, they know where she is, don’t they?’
Papa rustled and bunched up Horse and Hound and threw a dog down from his knees as if to hush or drown what she was saying. Then he was on his feet. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I need some exercise. May I have this one? Shall we dance, darling, shall we dance?’
I was mortified for us both. They didn’t want Papa, he knew it, and they didn’t want me, not this evening or ever again perhaps, and I knew it. Yet here we were, two unwanted children determined to ignore our ostracism. Papa caught my hand and pulled me with him as he hobbled down the hall, a nannie towing a reluctant child to a party.
‘Wien, mein lieber Wien’ came to us, shamelessly sweet through the shut mahogany door of the drawingroom. I hung back, despairing.
Richard and Hubert seemed not to hear Papa opening the door; the room was so filled with music. Hubert was sitting, a dog on his knees, below the Negro’s shaded lamp. The light on his bent head shone his hair to a blue-black, and the forward turn of his neck, between hair and white shirt collar, was as dark a brown as his hands on the white dog. Richard, standing behind the tall wing chair, stooped his extraordinary height over Hubert and the little dog. His eyes, when he raised his head towards us, held a look of anger and loss as if he suffered some unkind deprivation – something quite serious, like getting left in a hunt.
‘Not dancing tonight?’ Papa said.
Hubert didn’t even look up. ‘Fleaing Tarquin.’ He pinched the nail of his forefinger with his thumb, destroying a flea.
‘I’m keeping the score.’ Richard sounded grave. ‘That’s five and two ticks.’
‘Bad light for that work, isn’t it?’ Papa said. No one answered.
Towering in the doorway, I only longed to turn and go. But Papa pushed me forwards into the room. ‘I’ve brought you a partner.’ The words sounded affectedly forced and silly. In my embarrassment I could feel the clumsiness of my hands as I clenched them, of my height as I shrank it together, ashamed of being me, ashamed to be there. A moment more and I was rescued from myself. I was changed, because Richard broke from the group by the Negro lamp and came across the room – his grace, his strength, his intention all towards me. I was their object. I was to be their host.
‘Shall we dance a little?’ As he put a hand on my back, the music sobbed and died. He kept his arm round me while Hubert wound up the gramophone and changed the record. ‘Whispering . . .’ it croaked, ‘Whispering while you . . .’
‘Let’s dance a little more’; the invitation was meagre. His voice always deprived any intention of its worth or warmth. Acceptance should be on the same level. ‘Oh, if you like,’ I said, glowing in his strict embrace. He bent his height over my height. He held me nearer than he had ever done before, as we danced away from Papa. Across my blinding happiness I heard Papa saying: ‘That’s right, that’s it. Keep tambourine a-rolling.’ He hobbled back to the hall – a boy let out of school.
I was shuffling happily through the heap of records for my next favourite when I knew that Richard was saying something urgently to Hubert. Urgent and low, it did not concern me. I was out of the trough of that terrible wave in which I had suffered and endured. I turned to dance with Hubert, when Richard caught me in his arms again; strange, because it was always dance and dance about.
‘Where’s Hubert going?’
‘Walking the dogs with your father – I think that’s what he said.’
We moved away together. With Richard, with the music, with the pallor in the windows and the darkness in the room, my happiness was restored to me, sounder, more assured than it had been in the morning. I took it with me to bed. Next morning, when I woke, I could almost look at it, it was so real.
•
In those last days the boys kept me with them continually. Each day of early September was more perfect than the last. Grapes were ripe in the battered vinery – those muscatels Mummie knew how to thin and prune. Butterflies – fritillaries, peacocks – spread their wings on scabious, sedum, and buddleia, waiting heavily, happily for death to come. We sat among them, eating grapes, the sun on our backs.
15
Our sea picnic was on an afternoon more encompassed by summer than any summer’s day. The haze between water and land carried the one into the other. Cornfields, dry sand, rocks, sea merged in some sort of embrace, denying the summer’s end. And we denied the idea that we should ever part. We swam. I felt a kind of abandon in the water and I showed it by letting my hair flow out in the sea. Richard ascertained Mrs Brock’s rock and dived off it, turning about in somersaults and clasping his knees under the sea. Hubert swam out, and away.
‘Call him back,’ I said. ‘The tide’s going out.’
‘Come back!’ we called. ‘Come back, you fool!’ Richard sounded angry and anxious.
Hubert was slow in returning and sat down on a rock with a towel, laughing and gasping, rather pleased by our anxiety. ‘Terrific current,’ he admitted unwillingly, but anxious that we should know. My hair pouring great gouts of water onto my shoulders, I stooped, crawling on the sands to find cowrie shells at the feet of the rocks among wet shoaling pebbles, shells so small they were only just not sand.
‘Come on, old Sea Cow, unpack the tea.’ Hubert broke my picture of a sea-creature with wet hair. Was I only useful? Before I found time to be hurt Richard was on his feet and caught me by the hands. When he pulled me up from the sand and towards himself, I shall always be sure that his lips touched the sandy, salty crook of my arm.
‘You’re cold,’ he said. ‘Let’s run.’ We ran barefoot together with all our strength, far along the bare wet sands; the indecipherable waves drew faintly back from our footsteps to the sea. I felt light as an antelope; I ignored my bosoms, shuddering and swaying, inseparable from my life.
When we came back, Hubert had unpacked the tea. He had made a long hole in the sand and was sitting in it with all the mugs and jam-pots and packets of food spread within his reach. He was being Mrs Brock. After tea I buried his feet in sand, and we remembered something: Mrs Brock’s toes coming up through the sand like huge pearls; like young pigs. I sanded his feet up again and patted them down.
‘You’re tickling my feet for burial,’ Hubert said. When Richard shivered and said he must walk and run again, Hubert caught my hand this time and said: ‘Stay with me.’ He didn’t really seem to need me, only to stop my going with Richard. ‘I want to talk to you, Aroon.’ He was lying back in his hole, games over. ‘I want quite a serious talk. You’re a big girl now.’
‘Yes – well?’ I had to admit it.
‘Sit down. Stop looking like a swan.’ A swan – my favourite bird. ‘A swan on dry land,’ he took it all back.
‘All right. I know. I don’t care.’ Again I felt my bosoms impeding my true progress; I couldn’t forget them as when I thought I was an antelope. Swans had great bosoms too. But off the water, of course, they look terrible.
‘The place for your bosoms,’ Hubert was reading my thoughts, ‘is bed.’
‘Bed?’
‘I’ve seen you looking glorious in bed, in that white satin nightdress.’
‘The one cut on the cross? Nobody ever sees me in bed.’
<
br /> ‘Shall I tell you something? Richard wants to.’
‘I’ll put my chest-of-drawers against the door,’ I said, delight filling me.
‘Don’t rupture yourself, dear,’ he said crossly. Now I was displeasing. I felt the tide running out from me.
‘What could I talk about?’ I was giving way, little by little.
‘About me, if you can’t think of anything else.’ Hubert’s eyes were full of amusement.
‘And if Papa hears us chattering on about you? It’s past my door to his dressingroom.’
‘Papa won’t interrupt.’ He gave me a longish look. ‘I promise.’ It came back to me, Mrs Brock: ‘It’s a thing men do. You won’t like it.’ Those awful mice.
‘I don’t want to do it, Hubert.’
‘Oh, and you were to have a share in the Black Friday colt.’
To share with them. We were a trinity. Hubert put his hand over mine. ‘Don’t give it another thought,’ he said, ‘just an idea. I’ll tell Richard to forget it.’
‘Hubert,’ I said, ‘don’t tell him.’ We looked at each other deeply. We shared a tremor. But we had neither confessed one another nor told our purpose. The air came between us, chill off the sea and wet sands. I stretched down my long arms and pulled him out of his nest in Mrs Brock’s grave. ‘There’s a boat coming in,’ I said, escaping into occupations. ‘Let’s go to the quay for lobsters.’
‘When Richard’s back.’ He gave a sweet yodelling cry that echoed off the water as stones skip over a quiet surface; it was a gift he had, but he used it very seldom.
‘Did you hear?’ I asked Richard when he came back.
‘Hear what? I didn’t hear anything.’ Hubert smiled.
Low under the quay boats were coming in to their moorings. From its cliff top our cousins’ little house, Gulls’ Cry, seemed to lean and look downwards, calculating the catches or disappointments below its windows. The two old lives up there were as distant from our own as sand martins in a sandbank.
When lobsters were handed up to the quayside Hubert and I laughed and bargained with the fishermen we knew. Richard left us and wandered off down the quay to where a young fellow – a gigantic, sullen blond – had just climbed up the ladder from his boat. They stood together talking, and were still talking when the other men walked back in threes and pairs to the village.
Hubert and I waited, impatient to get our lobsters home in time for dinner. The same frustration and delay had happened here before on the same sort of day; I remembered it now: with Mrs Brock when we were children – the recollection stood far behind me.
‘You call him, Aroon.’ I wondered why Hubert had not sent out that bird-call of a yodel; neither would I shrill and call. I walked down the quay to where they stood together, matched in their similar height. I saw Richard give the boy (he came from a rotten family, drunks and Fenians all) a pound note. In exchange he took from him a fish-scaled box with three crabs in it. I was silenced by his absurd extravagance.
‘We’re to take these crabs up to your cousins,’ his explanation for delay somehow faintly apologetic. ‘He says the old fellow dying up there has a great fancy for a dressed crab.’
‘So have I. Let’s go home.’ Hubert sounded spoilt and tense.
I was entirely on Hubert’s side. I didn’t want Richard to meet our old relations, bearded Cousin Enid and drooling Cousin Hamish hobbling round their dingy little house. Snob, of course I am not, but they would defile the end of such a day. Now there was a division between us three, nervous and unspoken.
Richard didn’t argue. He turned the car and drove away from the sea and up the hill to our cousins’ house as though he had been that way before.
A woman who looked neither a servant nor a friend opened the door: ‘Miss Enid’s above in the bed playing a game of snap with Mister Hamish. I don’t know would she come down. She’s not so well herself.’ She turned away discouragingly.
With his unquestioning acceptance of being welcome anywhere Richard followed her into the house. ‘Oh, go and ask them if they want these crabs.’ He spoke as if to a servant of his own and she succumbed, almost pleasantly, to his authority. He looked back, compelling us to join him.
Hubert and I knew the room where we waited too well for curiosity. We were familiar with its splitting marquetry, its dusty famille rose and verte, its blistered Chinese wallpaper, since miserable childish hours. The window that hung out like a great tongue above the boat quay had been our only entertainment and reprieve from games with an incomplete set of ivory dominoes when we waited for Mummie. Mummie kept hold of a tenuous connection and cousinship as she conned and considered the ever more damaged and neglected pieces and prints. Cousin Enid would never sell – but she might bequeath.
This evening Richard walked across to the window, staring down, absorbed and pleased, into the quiet empty boats as though he saw an open box full of toys.
The woman came back: ‘Miss Enid can’t come down. Mister Hamish is losing and he mustn’t be upset. I’m to take the crabs, dirty things – I hate crabs.’
Crabs, the Cancer sign, I thought, no luck about them. Endless work, picking out the live-boiled flesh from the dead men’s fingers.
As we turned, all three together, from the window breast, a sound above checked and held us waiting. It was a knocking, a stick knocking on floorboards, gentle, querulous, then louder, doubling taps, hammer strokes on coffin lids – or do they screw down the dead? If we had been children we might have held hands, squeezing out fear, not running away.
The woman turned back to us as if she sensed some unreasonable questioning: ‘Ah, don’t mind that noise at all – she must have beat him in the finish. He’ll kill her someday with that old stick if she won’t give up winning.’ She laughed at the absurdity of her joke. I hesitated before I echoed her laugh, and the boys waited before they echoed mine.
We fled the house to sit close together in the big car. Our youth commanded its powers; our youth was immeasurable, we knew; but for a passing moment a shiver had left us defenceless.
•
‘Drinks soon . . . come to the bar,’ they said, as we hurried apart to change for dinner. My gold dress dipped to the floor at the back. A palmful of Richard’s scent behind my ears, yes, and the insides of my arms. I smiled alone, and laid my cheek to them before I picked up my toothglass and tore along the corridor. In Richard’s room they filled my glass to the top with champagne.
‘Steady,’ Hubert said, when Richard filled it again, ‘we don’t want the girl unconscious.’
‘Don’t we?’ Richard answered gently. And I thought, in a second of delight, how he might watch me sleeping.
•
After dinner, sitting together in the library, I felt in my new distance of happiness that Mummie had grown smaller, meaner, of no account. When we heard the men leaving the diningroom I rose to my feet – light as a bird, I felt young as the morning.
‘Must you look so majestic, darling?’ She sighed, considering the word and her tapestry as she cuddled her little body closer into her little chair. I must have heard, or I shouldn’t remember, but at that moment she could have called me a wardress and spoiled nothing for me. Soon I would be dancing. Again my feet would skim the floor. Earlier in the day they had scarcely printed their bare soles on the sand. I was so glad now, levitating in happiness, that my breath alone could have held me off the ground.
We danced, much as usual. Oddly a sort of restraint was on me; it suited with his night-club shuffle, and his hooded, unspeaking look. It was a prelude to a meeting. Were we both afraid? Afraid together? It was beyond delight.
When they went out on a last rat-hunt with Papa and the dogs, I ran upstairs so fast that the flame of my candle rushed backwards in the wind of my going. Every summer night smelt like Christmas when you put a hand behind the candle flame and blew it out. Safety matches always on the po cupboard beside your bed. How often had I struck a match and lit a candle to sit up and read a good detective story, refusing all
impious thoughts. Not tonight.
Alone now I unhooked my gold dress and let it fall sumptuously round my feet. I unhooked my deep bust bodice too, and my bosoms puffed out at me as though filled with proven yeast, alas. No matter. Flat in bed, I would be more like a swan on water. Leaning towards my glorified eyes in the mirror I could have kissed my image. No curlers. No face cream. My nightdress, all on the bias, clung to me like scales to a fish, to a mermaid. Quite literally, my appearance took my own breath away.
I got into bed; I spread my hands on the sheets, I arranged and rearranged myself on the pillows; a nesting swan is beautiful too. Moths pelted against the window panes. Tiny flies met and dispersed and met again at the candle flame. As no man likes an over-eager girl, I had a book with a finger between the pages for a pretence at reading when the door should open.
I heard the dogs and Papa and the boys come back into the house – vague affectionate voices talking to the dogs, not to each other. Pauses. Were they lighting candles? Steps on the stairs. My heart turned over. They passed my door. My heart turned back again. I debated whether or not to blow out my candle. No. Better leave it – how could I be reading in darkness? I would put the book down, finger still between the pages. ‘Richard?’ Whispering, I rehearsed the inflexion for my voice. I must not expect him too soon. Hardly before Papa went to bed. Would Papa ever go to bed? He could be so late. Not tonight, for once; please God, let him go to bed early.
The whole night bloomed for me as the door handle was turning. In the moment before he came in I owned the world. The moment after he came in, a kind of practical reality subdued my mood. He came across to my bed and sat down, near my feet. ‘What are you reading?’ He spoke in quite a loud voice.
‘Shs.’ I leaned towards him and put my hand across his mouth. When I did so I got an odd feeling that he was nearly laughing. It didn’t seem right to me.
‘Oh, don’t put it out,’ he said quickly, when I blew at the candle.
