by Molly Keane
On the path to the gate the girls’ pigeons were carrying on as if it were Trafalgar Square. ‘You forgot their feed,’ Nod accused Blink. ‘How could you?’ Fantails and birds with heads like Pekinese dogs circled them, cuddling into their shoulders, toppling over red feet on the path. It was a Walter Crane picture – a picture of two lives of innocent content and industry, full of birds and flowers and dogs, not to mention dear old horses and minute tapestry works.
‘Well, we made their day,’ Papa said. ‘I suppose that’s something. You drive. Why are you turning round?’
‘The garage,’ I reminded him. ‘The wine.’
‘No, no, no. Not tonight. First things first. Let’s get home to dinner.’
19
It was after seven o’clock as we drove past the crouching church at the gates of Temple Alice. The church, throughout my life a sight as familiar to me as my breakfast, had adopted a fresh importance now – a grief we must ignore or it would suffuse our lives always.
‘Which reminds me,’ Papa avoided looking towards the church, ‘I’ve made quite a useful plan about the Arch Deacon horse.’
‘Oh, good. What?’
‘The girls want to take him on.’
‘Papa,’ I said, appalled, ‘he’d kill them.’
‘You couldn’t kill them, or tire them.’ Papa spoke crossly. ‘And they’re wizards with a difficult animal – magical.’
His respect for them was like a bad taste in my mouth. This certainty was with me: where I had succumbed and failed, they would succeed and prosper. They would win a lightweight class with him next summer most likely. And I would have to stand at the ringside and echo congratulations and smile approval. In every way I was lessened and abandoned. The morning’s happenings, even my fear and my relief, were losing their truth.
‘Why don’t you see what Tommy can do with him?’ I offered.
‘But Tommy’s such a useful lad,’ Papa said, without thinking. I took in his meaning. It was a ruthless double convenience, and after my horrible afternoon I was less than shocked. I felt a thin kind of connivance. ‘I gave them the true picture, naturally,’ Papa said in his simplest voice.
‘What did you tell them?’
‘Just told them you couldn’t begin to ride him.’ He gave a snort or a chuckle. ‘That clinched it. I knew you’d understand. After all, it’s not a very kind thing to send Hubert’s horse to the kennels. Mummie would be dreadfully upset.’
In my anguish and jealousy even protest was numbed in me. So lately, only this morning, he had been my companion and saviour. I could see him still, stumbling and running, pitching about on his wooden leg, to get to the field gate before another circuit brought me near it again. And in the calm of the diningroom I could hear ‘if I may say so . . . darling . . .’ but after that I had been lessened and left in the cold, undefended from Mummie’s faint amusement. Tears of misery hurtled down my cheeks. How could he treat his poor girl so? Papa put his hand on my knee. ‘You’re the one I mind about. You know that, bless you, don’t you know that, sweetheart?’
He had used me and pulled me down, tumbling something truer than my vanity, and at a soft word I could forgive him. My dependence on him had nothing to do with sense or reason.
When we had changed for dinner we met again in the library.
‘Well,’ Mummie said, lifting up her glass of sherry, but not drinking, ‘then you didn’t get the car fixed, so how did you pass the time away, my darling?’ A cunning light of indulgence was in her eyes: ‘Sparkling before the girls, I suppose.’
‘A bit of that,’ he admitted. I broke into a recital of the endless chain of delays created by the girls, their underground industries, their horses’ legs, their letter-boxes, and his patience through all their nonsense.
She usually enjoyed a story against them, but tonight she only said: ‘If they gave him the smallest amusement, Aroon, I’m only too delighted,’ looking beyond me to him as she spoke. Perhaps she was thinking: anything to take his mind off Hubert. But it was not that. Separate as she stood from him, in the light warm clothes that seemed air-borne on her, wearing jewellery as carelessly as beads, her pale face, her powdery hair, and light eyes were all parts of an immense reserve of power. A power which she might reserve through any self-crucifixion.
There was, as I remember, not the smallest irregularity to enliven that evening. Its hours passed and it was time for Papa to let out the dogs. Then time for Mummie to take her candlestick from him. Leaning up to Papa, as she took the candlestick, she said: ‘Not too long?’ It was partly a question and far less than a suggestion of any obligation on him.
‘I have to tuck up the dogs and write a few letters.’ There was a hurried inventiveness in his voice. ‘If I’m very late, I’ll sleep in my dressingroom.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed with him, ‘you do that.’
Beyond the small busy-ness, I felt there was something else he was longing to get on with; his good manners hardly hid his impatience to be alone. He lit my candle and kissed me. ‘You’ve had quite a day, haven’t you? Bless you, sleepy-well,’ and I was set off on my way to bed.
The staircase at Temple Alice parted right and left under a high window; from there two separate flights took one upwards on light, shallow steps. They embraced the hollow to the hall below them. A single flight went on to the next storey of the house, and above that was the glazed bell of the dome. I took the left stair upwards, and Mummie took the right, so when we got to the bedroom corridor there would be no need to speak or kiss. She wafted up her side, and I trudged up mine.
‘Goodnight,’ we said, ‘goodnight,’ and we turned gratefully away from each other.
Papa was right, I was tired. I was so tired that I could not sleep. All the day had done to me was imperishably clear, bright and certain. Fear seized on me, relief sobbed through me again. Praise elated me, grief was a spasm . . . ‘Now the Day Is Over’ . . . the hymn I had chosen for Hubert’s funeral, Mrs Brock’s hymn . . . ‘With thy tender blessing may our eyelids close’ . . . Hubert’s eyelids would have been burnt: forbid all that. Forbid the private ecstasy in the thought of Richard – he was no more than a great retreating symbol of happiness – a longing now far distanced from reality. No fetish, as when I held his present in my hand, could give him back to me. I was as much alone as the curlew I heard crying briefly from a faraway bog.
Hours passed while I lay, filled with my fuming despairs, alertly, indissolubly wakeful. It was only after I had taken the decision, last resource of the sleepless, of getting out of bed and going to the lavatory that I remembered Papa had not yet come upstairs to his dressingroom. My watch said one o’clock. He was seldom as late as this, but he could not have passed my door on his way to bed without my hearing his lame step. I delayed and hesitated; we would feel shy of each other, meeting on my way to or from the lavatory. After a time the delay had me in an aching fidget. I opened and shut my door and went, without my candle, down the passage towards the one upstairs lavatory. To reach it I must go round the balustraded circle at the stairhead.
Light bloomed below me, welling up and failing in the hollow heights reaching to the dome. The last lamp left burning in the house, a cut-glass bowl on a long silver stem, waited for Papa’s bedtime and its extinction. Before I had passed the stairhead the library door opened and I stopped, hesitating whether to hurry on or to hurry back to my room.
In that paralysis of indecision I watched Papa, dwarfed by my height above him, come out of the library door and stand staring at his bedroom candlestick, placed as usual beside the lamp on the narrow side-table. Instead of following his usual custom – bedding the dogs and a last visit to the downstairs lavatory – he stood by the lamp and his unlighted candle as though he had lost his way through the small ceremonies of bedtime. Finally he picked up the large silver-encased box of safety matches and struck three or more of them before his candle was alight. Next, he set about the business of putting out the lamp. Here again, a dignified patient awkwardnes
s impeded him. He turned the wick up, he turned it down, he blew round the glass chimney top. What was the matter with him? It was all so simple; you turned the wick down and clicked a small lever on the brass burner. Why this puffing and blowing?
I longed to call down directions but, as I hesitated, I saw him put a hand on the table as though to steady himself and, with his other hand, pick up the heavy lamp and lean it nearer to the strength of his breath and blowing.
‘Papa,’ I screamed, ‘wait, let me do it.’ Did I scream or did I whisper? He can’t have heard me, for a last gigantic puff sent the flame flaring up into his face. Still holding on to the lamp, as in a dream one clings to instabilities, he let go of the table’s edge, took a staggering step forwards before – like a tree rocking and going from its roots – he fell. The lamp, flung out of his hand, crashed and splintered and splayed out oil over the floor where he lay. Crazy with fear I hurtled down the long flight, ready to burn with him, and welcome, if it had to be.
Before my moment came, it had gone. The door at the back of the hall opened wide and quietly. It was Rose. I watched her hurrying down the long hall to him; she had no apron on and no shoes. She ran light as a child on her stockinged soles. I could feel she was both tender and angry as she stooped, pulling and lifting him on to his foot.
‘Rose, dear girl,’ I heard him say, ‘where were you all this time?’
‘Playing cards with the lads.’ Her answer was somehow both coarse and playful. ‘Drunk again?’ she said. ‘Well, aren’t you very naughty?’
Drunk? Papa? How dared she speak to him like that? I turned away and crept up the stairs, at one step denying, at the next accepting the shocking possibility; only thankful, if it was true, that I saw no recoil in Rose. She put an arm round him and went on his legless side as they climbed the stairs. She was a good servant, and strong as a horse, of course. He groped for the bannister rail, and paused and clung to her. Once they laughed together.
I padded away from them on my heavy feet. In the dark wood-panelled lavatory I waited, trembling as the minutes passed. His dressingroom was at the end of the long corridor; I must give them time to get there. When I felt it safe to venture back to my room, only the night sky bent to the dome’s shape held some pallor above the dark and quietness.
20
Things happened in our house which, afterwards, seem only to have happened in my mind. Except that I remember them perfectly, they become extinct. This was so the next morning when Papa came into the diningroom, his elegance restored. His skin was newly shaved and brown as a chestnut. His hair smelt delicious. His old tweed suit and his striped flannel shirt were clean as a baby’s clothes. There he sat, eating a big breakfast, making plans for the day: he must drive in to town to see that fool his solicitor and that shark the bank manager. Soon he was trotting briskly round to the yard, shouting at the dogs, calling out orders to the lads, getting into the car, blowing the horn for Mummie, and muttering more about seeing off those sharks and fools. ‘You coming, darling? No? Quite right, quite right.’
Contradicting this restoration to the usual was my remembrance of what I had seen from my window earlier in the morning: his velvet dinner jacket and trousers swinging from the high clothes line in the laundry yard. No doubt Rose had dealt successfully with any whiff of paraffin. When I went down to breakfast, the hall smelt exceptionally airy – no hint of paraffin oil here, either, nor a splinter of glass on the floor. Only the morning currents of furniture polish, methylated spirit from the hot plate in the diningroom, and late roses wavered together on the morning of a new day. I was hypnotised, I was bemused. I was deprived of my certainty that Papa had been terribly drunk and that in Rose’s approach to him there had been something easy and practised which I could not name.
That morning was fresher than any day in spring. This last heat of summer had none of the exhaustion of spring. I had nothing but this abyss of beautiful days. Perhaps I would wash the dogs. Papa would be pleased. He loved to fondle a clean little dog. The very thought of pleasing helped me to distance him from what he had done to me, and from what I had seen.
In the hall, in its usual place on the long side-table, the day’s post was lying. Lately I would hardly cross over to look at it, knowing quite well the fall to disappointment that waited, and happened, and passed. So it was not until another hour had gone, and the dogs were bathed and dried and bustling for a walk, that I came back through the hall and saw, separate from a pile of business letters and bills for Papa, a letter for me, from Richard.
I picked it up and held it unopened because I expected this agony of happiness could not last. I went into the drawingroom to read it. Nobody ever came in there. The blinds were down. The air dead but well preserved. I shut the door and crossed over to one of the long windows and pulled up the blind to let in a great wealth of sunshine. The dogs pushed and shoved me into a corner of the window seat, so that they could warm their damp backs in the sun, and I opened my love letter.
It came from Kenya, and there were at least four pages for me to read. I took a great breath to steady my delight, and I read . . . I read a page totalling the heads and horns of the game he had shot, measurements complete. I read that there was quite a variety of fish in the rivers; that one lights a huge fire at night and fishes for bottle-nose fish, well supplied with cold beer (the fisher I supposed, not the fish). I read of an old bull elephant who came to drink just opposite to where he was fishing. Then I read of the hospitality in the nearly stately homes of the settlers, cousins and cousins of cousins, and friends of old so-and-so’s, who had all been terribly kind. And in all the letter there was not a word to link him with me. Not a word about Hubert, only this total recall of heads and horns and fish and birds and buffalo and draft foxhounds that hunted lynx. ‘Yours ever, Richard,’ it ended.
I thrust the clean dogs away from me and moved out of the sun because I was sweating. I was in a rage of disappointment. I would read the letter again, and slowly. There had to be something I had missed. Between the lines there was some word I could feed on. Religiously, methodically I again devoured the Wild Life of Africa. As I reread hope flickered and grew. I smelt out hints towards the past. Why describe night time and rivers and moonlight – all right, bonfire light – if not to convey that he was alone and that he missed me? And why the catalogue of trophies, if he was not sure of my interest? Was that it? Yes, that was it. We were so sure of each other, it was needless to put it in words. Perhaps there were no words for it. Then I felt it dawning on me: now I could write to him. Of course this letter asked for an answer. I would write easily about the horses (nothing about Hubert’s dreadful Arch Deacon, of course), the dogs, our yearling, hunting, when the season opened. Later I would match woodcock to buffalo, and never a word of love. He would answer and I would write again and he would answer.
I was folding up the sheets of the letter when I saw across the back of the last page the very words which I could translate into glory: ‘I want you to know, Aroon’ (he had written Aroon), ‘the Black Friday yearling is all yours, my share and Hubert’s. Richard.’ All our names together. My happiness appalled me. For the whole morning I was in a state of energy and delight. I would not read the letter again. I did not want to know it so well that familiarity could dissolve my assurance. I had breathed my own truth between the lines – it was the breath of hope, to shelter and harbour and keep secret.
They were very late coming back to luncheon. ‘Did you take the car to the garage?’ I asked Mummie.
Cool, and still hatted and gloved, she stood by the hall table disgustedly turning over the bills. She opened the drawer, swept the lot inside, and shut it again. ‘No more worries till after luncheon.’ She moved away from me, pulling off her gloves by the finger-tips. ‘No. That ghastly solicitor kept Papa there for hours, worrying him dreadfully too.’
‘And did you collect the drink?’
‘Was there drink to collect? Perhaps he forgot. Shall we go in to luncheon?’
The d
ogs followed us. Papa followed the dogs. He didn’t seem to notice that they had had a bath. ‘No post?’ he said to the maid, who was waiting, rather sullenly, to serve us.
‘I left the letters in the hall as usual, sir.’ Luncheon was appallingly late, Breda’s own dinner would be cold, washing up would make her late for the garden fête at the rectory, and now she was being found fault with by implication and unfairly. ‘Didn’t you get your letter, Miss Aroon?’ she asked me defensively. I felt a terrible blush begin behind my ears and spread its way from my hair’s edge to below the cleavage of my shirt.
‘Yes. Actually,’ I said. I felt them all three averting their eyes from me and wondering about my blush.
‘Well, where are mine? That’s all I want to know. That shark Kiely told me there would be some form from some other shark and he had to have it at once.’
‘Now, listen,’ Mummie sounded inspired, ‘could I have swept it into the drawer with a load of other old rubbish? – If I have I am sorry.’
Breda went out and returned with a stack of manilla envelopes on a salver.
‘Oh, good girl, Breda. Thank you.’ Papa groaned miserably through the pile.
‘Don’t open it,’ Mummie said as he picked out one envelope and sat staring at it uncertainly, ‘or you won’t eat any luncheon.’
‘You’re so right. First things first.’ He proceeded to eat an enormous amount of luncheon. After that he was more like himself and able to ignore the offending letter. But it was not forgotten. ‘Tell you what we must do,’ he said to Breda when she came in with the coffee. ‘I hear you’re all booked for this jolly at the rectory. Tommy had better drive you there. Go by the village and post this for me.’ He shuddered as he looked at the letter. ‘I shan’t open it,’ he said to Mummie. ‘I don’t know what I pay Kiely for. I suppose I must re-address the thing.’ He set off for the library, as no gentleman carried a pen about in his pocket.
