Good Behaviour

by Molly Keane

  ‘Is everybody going to the rectory?’ Mummie asked Breda. ‘Who will bring our tea? Perhaps Rose—?’

  ‘It’s Rose’s afternoon today, madam.’ Breda looked longingly at the coffee cups before she walked off with the cheese plates.

  ‘They’re all so Bolshie, these days.’ Mummie sighed.

  Through all this, having recovered from my blush, I had floated unheeding in the happiness which I would not tell. Held within like this it transcended grief or jealousy. I felt as nearly as could be back in the moment when I had run along the wet sand, when he had touched the inside of my salty arm. Linked with this was the other afternoon when I had first learned to swim, when the sea water had borne me up and Mrs Brock’s delight in my achievement had shone from her to me, joining us blissfully, keeping Hubert out. He was out of this too. I denied the thought, lapping it up in proper grief for him.

  Papa joined me on the steps where I was brushing the clean dogs. ‘They do look lovely,’ he said. ‘You make a wonderful job of them, don’t you?’ He didn’t say ‘thank you.’ ‘Shall we go on a rampage? What about the rectory fête?’ He laughed at his own immoderate joke. ‘Coming for a walk? The dogs are longing.’

  ‘I was going to have a look at the Black Friday yearling.’

  ‘All right.’ He started off faster than his leg could carry him, always his pace when annoyed. ‘If we must we must. I suppose we’ve got to. I wanted to go and see the horses in the Fairy Bog. I’ll have to get some of them out. Can’t keep them eating their heads off all winter.’

  ‘They won’t eat much in the bog,’ I suggested comfortingly.

  ‘They can’t stand and stiffen on the bog.’ His face was quite red with annoyance. ‘You ought to know that much. They have to be fed. Up to its eyes the whole place is. Have you any idea about the wage bill?’

  ‘No.’ I felt dreamy and inattentive to his irritation, far off, and smoothly optimistic.

  ‘I don’t suppose you have. I hadn’t, till this morning. That piddling niggler Kiely – he’s upset me terribly.’

  We walked out from under the beech-trees into the sunlight. ‘I shouldn’t worry,’ I said, blessed by the sun. He took off his hat and mopped at his forehead with a dark red silk handkerchief – Papa, who never sweated.

  ‘I feel hot,’ he said. ‘That damn curry, I expect. God knows what Rose puts in it. Food bills too,’ he said. ‘They’re all pirates. The butcher – he’s not the worst robber, mind you. I’m quite simply just about in the bankruptcy courts. Kiely says so. Looked into his office for a moment to see about a little something when he opened up on me. Frightened me to death, dearest. Rightly in the soup we are, financially. Everything going out. Nothing coming in. Now, take that—’ We had stopped and were looking over to where the yearling and his donkey stood together, making, for me, a perfect picture in the low brilliant light across the grass. ‘I don’t even own that fellow, and he’ll have to be done like a king all winter.’

  ‘He’s come on a lot, hasn’t he?’ A sense of possession filled me warmly.

  ‘Yes, and there’s a lot of improvement in him,’ Papa admitted grudgingly. ‘Just the same, he’s going. Why should I feed him? I’m writing to my old friend Wobbly tonight to remove him. That’ll be a start anyway. That’ll show Kiely I’m serious.’

  ‘Papa, you don’t mean it?’

  ‘Yes, I do mean it. Things are drastic. We have to cut down somewhere.’

  My eyes filled with tears. ‘But he’s mine,’ I whined. ‘I own him.’

  ‘You own the little thief?’

  ‘He’s not little at all. You can’t call him small. Richard gave him to me. His share and Hubert’s share.’

  ‘You might have told me, sweetheart,’ Papa said reproachfully, as though I had been keeping a secret from him. I had. I felt a longing rush through me to share it with him now. ‘I had a letter from Richard today.’ I was blushing cruelly again. This time Papa didn’t take his eyes off my blush. His eyes were eating into me, eager for more.

  ‘Richard gave him to you?’ All the nervous irritation had left his voice. He leaned towards me without saying any more, waiting, pleading for some certainty. What should I tell him? How put into words all that only I could trace behind his big-game catalogue of a letter?

  ‘Well,’ Papa said at last. He lit a cigarette, his hand was shaking. ‘One for you?’ he asked, and I nodded. He gave me his, always a gesture of affection with him, and lit another. I knew he was giving me time. At last he helped me: ‘Did he say when he’d come back to us?’ He put all expression out of his voice. I found his portentous tactfulness, his extreme wish to establish my happiness, beyond my powers to resist. I felt I must please him in return. I must be the person to raise his temperature, to excite him.

  ‘He’s coming back in the spring.’ The lie came jumping out of my mouth. My thumping heart delivered it like a great frog – a monster to torment me as soon as I was sane again. But for the moment I enjoyed the lie, and I felt a hot importance in Papa’s thoughts of me. Pleasurable, that was what it actually was, before the doubts could crowd in. So little was enough to convey so much between us. But I knew he wanted to hear more than this from me. His face was crumpled in anxiety and shyness as, leaning on the fence and looking away from me on the ground, he muttered: ‘That night, darling girl, before they left, don’t tell me if you don’t want to . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, looking steadfastly over at the colt and the donkey.

  ‘The lot?’ Papa said.

  ‘The lot,’ I answered firmly.

  ‘Well, thank God,’ Papa said quite loudly. And then, moderately: ‘Thanks, sweetheart . . . You can’t think how worried I’ve been, dreadfully unfair of me. Impossible, of course, I realise now, preposterous. Looked ugly though. Looked funny. Didn’t like it. All clear now. I am grateful.’

  All this time what had he been thinking? That I might be having a baby? That Richard might have left me for always – so that a hideous interview was before him with his old friend Wobbly? He had endured Hubert’s death and burial, Mummie’s grief, his own grief, deadly anxiety about me – and not a word spoken. To crown it all, today’s morning of stress and worry with that solicitor. No wonder if he was drinking. No wonder if his morning sessions with Rose stood, for a brief moment, between his own suffering and Mummie’s sad possessiveness. And only now I understood the anxiety eating him for me. Darling Papa. I leaned sideways against the fence and put my hand for a second over his: ‘I’m all right, Papa. I promise.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he came back from far away, ‘yes, bless you, you have been a help. Look –’ he said, absently apologetic, ‘I think if you don’t mind, I’ll go on by myself. You take the dogs with you. They’ll be kicked to pieces in the bog.’

  I stood discarded, watching him bundle off down the drive. When he had gone out of sight the implications in my lie to him over Richard’s promise to return set me worrying and biting my nails. When spring came round, where should I be? Each day the post would be quietly observed, and a deadly tactful silence maintained. Of course he would discuss the matter with Mummie, as he would discuss Hubert’s horse with her, and his progress with the girls. Her cold pity would extend itself further over me.

  In the hall Mummie was standing, planned and prepared for some exercise. Not gardening, I thought, because she carried her slight hazel walking stick, a gleam of gold about its handle. A doll-size garden trug sat on the side-table among the letters and whips and hats, and in it a little bunch of cyclamen lay, firmly tied among their spotted leaves. Perhaps she was going to paint them. Sometimes she painted flowers, the completed pictures looking like ghosts of wire and tin.

  ‘Back again?’ she said, commenting on another of my little failures. ‘Why aren’t the dogs with Papa?’

  ‘Because he didn’t want to take them among the young horses in the bog.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said with satisfaction. She looked suddenly sure of some adventure. Her afternoon was to be far more vivid than mi
ne. Of course – idiot me – I had told where to go and meet him. She had got it out of me without even a direct question. As she picked up the little basket of flowers and turned away I saw how languorous was the turning of her felt hat against her cheek; like everything else she wore, it became her in a way that was her own mystery.

  21

  When she had gone, the silence of the house consumed the afternoon. Not even a murmur or sound of servants – all at the rectory fête. The smell of past hours was in the library: flowers, cigars, polish on wood. Newspapers lay baking in the sun.

  Everything was in a trance of the usual. My bedroom waited for me, impassive.

  Looking at my bed, I knew I was no unwanted grotesque: a man had lain there with me. I knew what Papa believed, and his belief encompassed me and made a reality of my hopes and longings. Richard’s letter was an absolute reality.

  I read it again to find all that was there – unwritten. For instance: the river, the moonlight, the old bull elephant – and me. That was what he indicated of course, of course. Anything that brought me to his mind was welcome, but the idea of the old bull elephant and its bulk in the moonlight seemed too much in focus with my own big body. An echo whispered: You’re such a big girl . . . then he had been lying in my arms. No – only in my tilted bed. No. It must have been in my arms. It was in my arms. All the same, I wished it had been a gazelle, or a herd of gazelles, drinking in the moonlight. Then I would have known he remembered our running on the sands and that he had kissed my salty arm. Had he? Once, said the echo. And once was enough, I answered myself, enough to tell me. I don’t need to have everything spelled out. I know how to build the truth.

  Breaking into the void and silence of the afternoon house, a voice came calling distantly, then nearer. ‘Rose,’ it called, ‘Rose, Rose!’ Mummie, of course, forgetting that the servants had gone out; that was quite like her. So she rang the library bell. So nobody answered the library bell. So she called, distractedly demanding. Let her call, I thought as I opened my bedroom door; let her go on calling. Then, as I reached the staircase, I could hear panic, high and faint, in her voice. What a fuss. What nonsense. I proceeded in a calm, sane way downstairs, my hand on the rail, my head still high among the African stars. I was detached from this absurd flurry.

  Then I saw her, pattering and running, stripped of her poise, awkward as an animal in clothing. I was back with terrifying Mrs Tiggywinkle turning into the wild, running from me as she had in the story, elemental before my eyes. And this was Mummie, always so cool, so balanced, here she was, her hair flying loose out of that hat, its pretty tilt ridiculous, her mouth grimacing.

  ‘Rose,’ she called. ‘Rose!’ Then, when she saw me, ‘Oh, it’s YOU.’ Her passionate disappointment infuriated me and kept me outside her terror. ‘Find somebody,’ she said. ‘Find somebody. He’s dying!’ She tottered and ran on towards the swing door, away from me. She didn’t have to say it. I knew it was Papa.

  ‘Where is he?’ I went after her. But she didn’t tell me where to find him, only ran before me, following her hands, her feet fumbling on the flagstones, calling, ‘Rose!’ into the dark pantry door, and the lamp room, and the boot room, and ‘Rose, Rose,’ into the hot empty kitchen. I stood in the doorway before she could escape me. I caught her by the shoulders – something impossible I had never done. I shouted at her: ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He’s terribly ill; he can’t get up. Find Rose, oh you fool, find Rose.’

  ‘You know they’ve all gone to the rectory. Mummie, where is he?’

  ‘I had the cyclamen for Hubert. He’s there – he can’t speak.’

  ‘He’s in the graveyard?’

  ‘Oh, can’t you listen, how often must I tell you? Get the boys, get someone to carry him, get the doctor.’

  If it’s like last night, I thought, must they all know? I had to take this on myself. Nurses faint at operations. The thought sustained me. If they can steady themselves, so can I. I was a young nurse.

  ‘Put hotwater-bottles in his bed,’ I ordered sharply, and turned away.

  ‘Where do they keep hotwater-bottles? How am I to boil the kettle? Don’t leave me like this. How am I to do it alone?’ she cried after me as I ran away from her, down the last passage to the stable yard, out through the stable arch and on to the driveway.

  He was not dying, I knew. He was drunk like last night. I wasn’t going to say it to her; I wouldn’t tell her. Last night I turned away from him, I left him to Rose – Rose, tough as a proper nurse, strong as a man, had brought him up to his bed.

  What must I do, I thought, running down the drive, how to get him home? The car had gone, taking the maids to the rectory. If I pulled him up on his feet I could link his arm and walk him back to the house. I must hurry. I must be the first. No one else shall help him – I’m the one.

  In the dog-shaped shadow cast by the stolid little church on grass and graves, I found him. Rose was sitting on the grass, her knees spread, holding him in her arms. His head was lolled back absurdly against her breast and shoulder. Her blouse was ripped out at the armpit from dragging and holding him. The coat of her navy-blue suit was across his foot. There was a brooding look about her, melancholy and wild. Her flowered hat was lying on the grass. There was a mushroom dew on it and on the graves. I remembered Mrs Brock’s hat, dripping from the wet grass, one silly hat recalled the other, clear and meaningless, conjuring together that night with this evening.

  ‘Rose,’ I said, ‘what are we going to do? He’s drunk.’ We would have to admit it to each other. She just sat there, nursing him in her arms. ‘We must get him back to bed,’ I said. Bed was the proper place. Bed and concealment.

  ‘He’s not drunk,’ Rose said violently, and held him nearer. ‘It’s a seizure – he can’t speak. Look—’ She tilted his head as if he were a sick baby, and I saw the fixed drop of his mouth and his loose hand. ‘Go get the doctor – he could be at the fête – take my cycle, against the church door. Tell them at the lodge to bring me blankets and send for the lads and a gate to carry him home.’

  She gave all these orders in an imperative, hot rush of words. It was impossible to argue against her sense, or to suggest any alternative. There she would sit, spreading her bottom on the wet ground, holding Papa away from its chill, until the gate and the blankets and the doctor were brought to him. It was a distillation of the strength and passion that she put into her cooking. She would have it this way and no other. I was in second place again.

  But as I tore down the road on Rose’s bicycle, beyond the grief and fear and the shock of seeing only an effigy, a bad imitation of Papa, a fearful feeling of ease and relief came over me, linked to something Rose had said: ‘He can’t speak.’ That was it. He might never speak again. God forbid. God forbid. And I pedalled furiously on towards the doctor. Leaning over the handlebars of Rose’s bicycle, yearning for more speed, driving down on the pedals with all my weight, I escaped from my terrible wish.

  22

  Extensive brain damage, that was what they called it. His bedroom became like a nursery with a new baby in it. Every morning Rose helped the nurse from Dublin to lift him in bed. From on and off his bedpan he made great sad eyes of apology at them. The hour was strict and they kept to it with strict enjoyment.

  Rose brought up the ironed and aired pyjama coat, the warmed towels, the new hotwater-bottle, the clean pillowcase, and they made his bed and dressed him up like a clean favourite doll, a doll with no legs, for one was dead and the other was put away in a cupboard. They propped him against the pillows and put the hotwater-bottle in its flannel bag at his foot. ‘Hot or cold, that foot won’t feel it,’ the nurse said.

  ‘His foot feels cold to me.’ Rose was definite, and held Papa’s foot for a moment in her hand.

  Mummie and I came in to see him then. The odd thing was that she seemed to want me to go in with her. She was afraid. She wanted to pretend things were quite ordinary. She would bring the dogs in too. They were something to talk about. />
  ‘Go on. Can’t you say something?’ she whispered to me when, in a silence, Papa shifted miserably. I was not confounded.

  ‘Perhaps he wants his you know bottle?’

  ‘Call the nurse.’ She jumped distractedly to her feet. ‘Don’t touch the thing. What’s she here for? Nurse! Nurse!’

  Nurse came quickly from her bedroom. She was the embodiment of starched calm. ‘I think he wants to do something,’ Mummie whispered so that Papa shouldn’t hear. Papa looked satisfied. I thought he gave my hand a tiny pressure. I felt agony for a moment, wondering how much went on in his mind.

  Everybody in the country made pilgrimages to Temple Alice to ask about Papa; they usually came about six o’clock, and they usually accepted a drink, talking in sad lowered voices becoming to the misery of it all. An evening came when there was only half a bottle of whisky left in the drink cupboard and none in the cellar. The next day Mummie sent an order to the Wine Cellars for six bottles of Scotch whisky. They sent out three bottles and their account. It was for two hundred and thirty-seven pounds.

  ‘Quite impossible,’ Mummie said, and stuffed it into the drawer with all the other bills.

  The dogs felt the change in their lives. They became turgidly bored and unattractive, looking backwards sullenly when asked to leave their baskets and follow with me in the tracks of Papa’s routines and habits – for instance, the stable yard after breakfast. There they moved peevishly around while I had a word with Tommy.

  Tommy was grooming Hubert’s horse. Strength seemed to spurt out of his resistant but pleasured body as Tommy wisped away and shouted warnings and growled and purred as he worked. He stood away from his horse like a groom in a print. ‘I wonder what do the Major intend doing about him?’

  I felt my blood quicken a little. ‘Did he mention anything to you, Tommy, before he, before . . .’

  Tommy came to my rescue. It was so difficult to say that Papa was speechless. ‘Before his little turn, miss? No, miss – only to slacken the oats to him was all he said.’