Good Behaviour

by Molly Keane

  ‘Papa,’ I whispered.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right.’

  There was a longish pause while he took off his dressing-gown. He got into bed beside me as coolly as if he were stepping into a boat. Then he gave a childish kind of bounce, setting the springs screaming and vibrating. He pulled a pillow away from me and stirred about and settled down as if for a good night’s sleep. I longed for something to say. He spoke first.

  ‘You have such enormous bosoms.’ His voice came from a distance in place and time, but still far too loud. ‘Shall I lay my head on one of them just to see what it’s like?’

  Why did I have to think then of the Mrs Brock game? I denied the thought.

  ‘Yes, you may.’ I felt the weight of his head, and I saw the line of his cheek and neck. A ravishing content flooded me. I wanted this. I lay still beside him.

  ‘It’s a bit hot,’ he said after a minute. I turned towards him. He must guess. ‘I really must NOT touch you,’ he said quickly. ‘We’d regret it always, wouldn’t we, Piglet? Wouldn’t we?’

  I could hardly endure the thought that through his chivalry, not through my own faultless behaviour, I had made a lucky escape. I felt cherished and defrauded. ‘Yes. We’d hate ourselves.’

  ‘Let’s talk about something else now,’ he said, back on his pillow.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Oh, anything – Hubert, for instance.’

  Perhaps Hubert was the closest thing in both our lives, but now I would rather have talked about Richard and me – and why not? Here he was in my bed, the bed I still sleep in.

  ‘What do you like about him?’

  I turned on my other side. I didn’t flounce. I just turned over.

  ‘You’re such a big girl,’ he complained. ‘Why do you have to flounce about like that? Every time you move you tilt the bed over.’

  ‘What about getting back to your own room?’ I strangled back the hurt in my voice. It was growing more and more like games some girls played in Number Six Dorm.

  ‘Can’t. Not till the Major’s gone to bed, can I? He is late.’ Plaintive was how he sounded now.

  That was when I heard Papa. He was so dextrous with his wooden leg, but on the stairs you couldn’t help knowing about it. He had a way of throwing his weight onto his good leg, and pausing a moment.

  ‘Does he ever come in to say goodnight?’ Richard asked much too loudly in one of the pauses. I think he wanted everything to be more frightening. Again I put my hand across his mouth. He sat up in bed, making the springs scream. I could feel him swing his feet out to the floor, and the bed sag back to me as he left it. ‘Can’t find these slippers.’ He struck a match, even before Papa had passed the door. I was so tense I could hear myself creak. ‘It’s all right now.’ He was listening. I heard Papa shut the door of his dressingroom. When I looked round Richard was standing over me. His dressing-gown was belted like a vice round his waist, but it was open from the neck to a long narrow nakedness of dark, faraway skin. I didn’t understand how or why he should look so malign and light-hearted. And so friendly. He bent down and kissed me on both eyelids. ‘Sleep well,’ he whispered.

  ‘And you,’ I managed.

  My anger and anxiety at the appalling noise he made getting back to his room suffocated and choked down a different sense in me: one of absolute loss. But we had both known how to behave. We had behaved beautifully. No pain lasts. And another thing: I can never look on myself as a deprived, inexperienced girl. I’ve had a man in my bed. I suppose I could say I’ve had a lover. I like to call it that. I do call it that.

  16

  The next morning, with Mummie and Papa, I stood about in floods of sunlight on the steps, or wandered back to the dark hall while maids carried down suitcases and coats and parcels and armfuls of forgotten unpacked possessions for Richard and Hubert to stow in the car. At last the car was packed. There was a pause while they put on their camel’s-hair coats.

  ‘Good sort of coat,’ Papa commented. ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘From kind Mrs Jaeger.’ Hubert’s little joke sounded confidential; just for Papa. Their good manners sustained them; they showed no impatience to be off. The engine throbbed its great heart out, splendidly ready for the journey; still they delayed, although we had no more goodbyes to exchange. Nobody kissed. Nobody shook hands. At last they were gone. We looked after them for a minute as they went down the drive. Eleven o’clock in the morning, and no shadows on the grass. The trees stood up shadowless, neat and clear as tin trees in a child’s zoo. Horses moved between them. We were thrown out of balance by the leave-taking. We were late for anything we had to do; we had nothing to do, nothing to catch up on. Mummie was making for the studio, but without vigour, when Breda came back to say the young gentlemen had left parcels for us in the library.

  ‘PIG’ was written on mine. Inside was a Jaeger coat like theirs – outsize. Love and trust repossessed me. A case of Heidsieck for Papa. ‘What a dear boy,’ he said, when he had ascertained the year. A huge illustrated gardening book for Mummie. ‘How very sweet. I’m afraid quite useless.’ Presents always disgusted her a little.

  I carried my coat away, upstairs to my bedroom, and there on my dressing-table, a square, squat, tremendously tidy little parcel waited for me. ‘Pig. Pig-wig. Piglet’ written on it. A jewel? A ring perhaps? I could hardly breathe. It was rose geranium for the bath, strong and fragrant and straight from Floris. But four times that morning he had written my name.

  By the next day I had established in my own mind a sober, blessed state of hope. The day they had left had been, after all, quite endurable. Then I fattened out my least memories, slyly building up a future. And why not? I thought on the following afternoon as I bicycled powerfully along towards the dressmaker to have my new coat let out, before Mummie could tell me it was straining at the armholes. The dear dressmaker’s interest and admiration were comforting and unrestrained. But the size of the alteration required depressed me a little. Only when alone could I feel a small cherished person.

  I held on to this minuscule vision of myself as I pedalled homewards, past pale rushy fields and gold fields empty of their corn stooks. The further time and distance separated me from the actual Richard, the more certainly I could hold his image in my mind. I trembled and leaned yearningly over my handlebars, thinking how sometime again I would run with him on the sand, and another time he would come into my bed, and another time . . .

  I was utterly possessed by happiness when I left my bicycle in the yard and went into the house by the back door, passing the warm cavernous kitchen and going along the flagged passages to the swing door and the front of the house. I know I have never breathed in the same way since that evening, since I went through that door, walking on a full sweet breath of happiness, its volume contained within me.

  At the distant end of the hall the door stood open to the steps and the quiet evening. Papa and Mummie stood together in the wide doorway. She had the handle of a flat basket over her arm. With the secateurs in her other hand she snipped, meticulously splitting up the stems of late roses. I hoped to get up the stairs before she saw me. I had the humour of love to preserve. But Papa called me over.

  ‘Pretty awful bit of news, I’m afraid,’ he said. He had a telegram in his hand, and he started to read it in a perfectly ordinary voice. Then he changed his mind and said with embarrassed importance: ‘There’s been an accident.’ My heart stopped. ‘Hubert’s been killed.’ My heart went on again. Papa handed me the telegram.

  REGRET TERRIBLE NEWS STOP CAR ACCIDENT STOP HUBERT KILLED STOP WIRE TIME ARRIVAL STOP MEET YOU BATH WOBBLY

  Mummie looked up from snipping at her roses. She looked at me then and through me to what I really am. She knew what I was thinking, and she laughed. She went on laughing hysterically.

  ‘Darling,’ Papa said. ‘Please.’ Tears were pouring down his face. He took her hand and led her back into the house.

  In the stillness of my shock there was only one reality: Ric
hard was alive. A shiver of expectation went exuberantly through me: Hubert’s death must link us more closely.

  •

  Papa brought Hubert home to be buried. He didn’t come back to the house. They brought him from the station to Temple Alice church. The stark little Protestant church at our gates, endowed long ago by the family, was visited only for funerals and christenings and weddings. I would be married there, naturally. It was chill and stuffy, and dead birds usually lay about in the aisle. Someone had swept the place up for Hubert’s funeral, and it was all flowers. Everybody sent large homemade wreaths and crosses and sprays. The only beautiful wreath came from the Crowhurst girls, who did such things to perfection.

  Every friend we had came to the church; it was full to the last notch in the last pew. The hunt servants came too, and all the men on the place. They stood round the graveyard gossiping in whispers about cub-hunting and racing, honey bees, or the price of oats. They couldn’t concentrate for a whole hour on the tragic circumstances, and as they were Roman Catholics they couldn’t come into the church. Four lively young stable lads carried Hubert carefully out into the sunlight. His grave was lined with bright moss, pinned to the sides of the stark hole by long, strong hairpins.

  Papa and Mummie stood together, as close as possible without actually touching each other. In the warm air I smelt brandy on their breaths. They had not thought of offering me any. A deep gust of lonely privation blew through me as I stood there, towering over them both, until it was time to shovel in the earth. Then Papa turned her round and took her by the elbow to lead her away. But she walked on composedly, and looking wonderfully distant from it all. Her fine black felt hat would have been as suitable for a race-meeting (where she never went) as for a funeral; it was exquisitely right and becoming, like the long wrinkling wrists of her gloves.

  Three men were going backwards and forwards, carrying flowers from the church to the grave. The wild bent grass and briars in the tangled churchyard were overcome by flowers and the scent of flowers. Everything was determinedly beautiful; Mummie pausing at the right moment to say: ‘Thank you. How lovely your flowers are. Please come back to the house. A cup of tea – you’ve come such a long way. How kind. How kind . . .’

  And Papa saying: ‘Thanks. So good of you. Come up for a drink.’

  ‘Thanks, old man,’ they said. ‘Tragic,’ they muttered. ‘Great boy. Must get back.’

  Papa saw the Crowhurst girls standing together. ‘Bless you, sweethearts, your wreath a real winner. Come up to the house and have a drink.’ They swayed towards him just a little, and remained quite silent. But they came, and so did all the friends.

  When the last speechless hand-grip was completed, Papa, Mummie, and I were left in the hall, with the empty glasses and the empty plates; funerals are hungry work. We exchanged cool, warning looks – which of us could behave best: which of us could be least embarrassing to the others, the most ordinary in a choice of occupation? I tried first.

  ‘I might ride out the Arch Deacon.’ I didn’t say ‘Hubert’s horse.’ Papa said it for me, and no nonsense.

  ‘Ah, that brute of Hubert’s. Watchit, sweetie – pull the bit through his teeth and set into him before he sets into you.’

  I shuddered – not really pleasantly. Mummie said: ‘I’ll get out of these ghastly clothes. I must finish dividing my blue primroses.’

  Papa had his usual escape. ‘Those poor little miseries, shut up in the gunroom since lunch, they must be bursting.’

  ‘You can’t go out in those absurd clothes,’ Mummie reminded him.

  So when we met each other again we had something to talk about . . . The right bit for Hubert’s horse. I couldn’t begin to hold him in a plain snaffle . . . Which of the dogs had made a huge mess in the gunroom . . . Why Mummie would have to dig up all the blue primroses and replant . . . How wrong she had been to imagine they would like her first choice of situation. She was considerate towards all weakness and eccentricity in plant life.

  17

  For me, the September days held a prospect of hope only before the morning post came in. Each day I expected a letter from Richard, and each day I delayed longer before looking through the letters on the hall table, dreading that sickening moment before I could find my excuses for him: I must remind myself he had a bad concussion and broken ribs; Papa had mentioned them coldly. Who was driving? Hubert. Where I had expected an onslaught, Papa had added nothing to this. Now how I wished it had been not Richard’s ribs but a broken arm, preferably his right arm, so that I need not rack my brains to excuse him. Later in the month Mummie had a short letter from him. Little words, miserably polite and inadequate, squeezed together on a huge sheet of writing paper. She gave it to me to read. It didn’t cross her mind to say: Answer it for me, would you?

  Then Papa heard from his old friend Wobbly. They were sending Richard to South Africa on a safari. It might help him a bit. ‘He’s taken this whole ghastly business terribly hard, poor boy,’ Wobbly wrote. Again Papa was wordless.

  Our good behaviour went on and on, endless as the days. No one spoke of the pain we were sharing. Our discretion was almost complete. Although they feared to speak, Papa and Mummie spent more time together; but, far from comforting, they seemed to freeze each other deeper in misery.

  I stood outside in a black frost of my own. It was less hard for me because my loss of Richard was so eating out my heart I had no strength left for the other desolation.

  Papa oiled Hubert’s gun and put it away very much as a matter of course, shouting at his dogs as he oiled and clicked and put the pieces neatly in their leather case. His rods went into long canvas shrouds and were hung up by little loops on brass hooks. There was to be no sentimentality. It was the worst kind of bad manners to mourn and grovel in grief. They avoided his name when possible, but if necessary to speak it, they did so in over-ordinary tones of voice. Mummie, more than Papa, seemed drained of resolution.

  One morning, on my way to the stable yard where I faced the terrible menace of Hubert’s horse, I saw her. She had left the gardeners at work behind her, hacking down Pontican rhododendron, and now she broke away into the open through an untrimmed thicket of Portugal laurel. Her face was an old dryad’s, crowned by, and drifting through, shining pointed leaves; her body was hidden still among the dark thornless branches of her grove. She didn’t see me, or care what I was doing. I knew she was only greedy to find Papa, to cling silently to his company, to keep him all her own in this time of unspoken mourning. She absolutely required his presence.

  I think her need told on him and drained away his power of recovery and forgetfulness. Every day he expected that she would lose and satisfy herself in her painting, going, as she used to, quickly and determinedly to her studio, not lagging uncertainly past the kitchen door where he was having his cheerful ambiguous morning talk with Rose – talk of food inspiring them both with thoughts of the necessary pleasures.

  In this hour with Rose his cheeky balance was restored to him. Later in the morning, when Mummie pursued him to the fields, he was pulled back into the dull trough of their grief. He appeared to walk lamer when she was beside him; he was doubly infected by her silent requirement of his presence and company.

  I saw her again on the same morning when she had appeared to me like a dryad. She was standing with Papa on the sunny side of a corn stack. They were watching the dogs fiddling about for mice in the bottom of the stack. I felt jealous towards them both. They had each other. And they were on their feet in a different world from mine.

  My world, as I rode Hubert’s horse, was a fearful place. I could ride him, but every day that he was in and fed and exercised he grew more devious and abominable. I was afraid and knew it, shamed by my fear and hating the Arch Deacon. Soon I would have to take him out with the hounds. Last season, with Hubert riding him, he had been a brilliant four-year-old. I faced the coming season – each falling leaf brought winter nearer – with a weakened stomach. My only thought was to keep my secret, to
smile across my shame. Now, as I felt him tighten under me, preparing to shy and swerve away from the group round the corn stack, I was ready to deal with this circumstance and to send him past them with a show of ease and determination.

  I was not ready for the foxhound puppy which, bitten by a jealous terrier, galloped howling under my horse’s tail. It was his opportunity of the morning, providing all that I had ever feared in him and guessed that he could do.

  I shall never know how I survived his swinging plunge sideways before he took off across the stubble field. My hopeless hands were low on his neck in my first pretence of going with him, of sharing in his fun. The field was wide, so somehow I turned him before we faced the fence at its further end. There was no chance of stopping him. The muscles in his neck stared out at me as we thundered past the group round the corn stack.

  ‘Good girl!’ Papa shouted. ‘Take it easy. He’ll come back to you.’ But as he called he was running and hobbling and stumbling towards the iron gate out of the field nearest to the stable yard. He was standing there when, after a third appalling circuit, we charged down towards its iron height. I was sobbing, my nose was pouring, I was in an extremity of fear. My enemy, the horse, knew it all. I was within his terrible strength and will. He would kill me.

  Papa brought it to an end. Standing there against the gate, waiting to be ridden into the ground, his friendly, powerful voice, his assertion and assurance, reached through all temper and delirium. Crazy, black with sweat, Hubert’s horse dropped into a wild kind of trot and let Papa catch him.

  ‘Bit much for you, sweetie.’ He laughed. ‘You weren’t nervous, were you?’ ‘Nervous’ was Papa’s word for terror. I laughed too. Laughing took the horror out of what had been happening. ‘Here –’ he called to Mummie, who was coming towards us over the sunny field – ‘keep these dogs out of the way, would you?’ She waved a careless acquiescence and wandered from us without hurrying, whistling to the terriers. In spite of our laughter I felt he knew how shocked I was. He was panting and sweating too from his run across the field. ‘Nip off and nip back to the yard and tell Tommy to nip up on this bastard and give him whobeganit. Tommy’ll love that.’