by Molly Keane
Now I knew, a warm tide coming slowly into my mind, that Papa had said nothing to him about his gift or loan to the Crowhurst girls. I felt in power. I must think for Papa. After all . . . extensive brain damage . . .
‘Will he ever speak again, Dr Coffey?’ – ‘Well, it’s a question. Sometimes these cases do recover. We must be optimistic.’ – ‘How much does he understand? Does he remember?’ – ‘Perhaps. It’s a question . . . it’s hard to tell . . .’ So it went, whispering on in my mind, a sort of contentment.
That was the evening when the Crowhurst girls bicycled over to enquire for Papa. I could hear them taking off their coats – coats beautifully made by themselves out of rust-coloured sailcloth, a kind of poor man’s Burberry; then light footsteps crossing the hall to the library.
Breda, our cross parlour maid, met me, a duck and a bunch of gentians in her hands. ‘It’s the Miss Crowhursts to ask for the Major, and all they brought, you’d think we had nothing here.’ Lightly derisive and disloyal, she went on her way through the swing door, saying: ‘Madam’s up the garden.’ So I was to have them to myself. I wondered if I should ignore their underground trafficking, messages in flowers and ducklings going to Papa.
They were sitting comfortably reading the gardening articles in the last two Fields. I poured out two glasses of sherry, denying the thought of Papa pinching lemon zest into martinis. Actually his martinis were quite ordinary, apart from a lot of gin; their magic was only in his manner.
‘Thank you,’ they said, keeping their fingers in the Fields, so as to find the gardening pages again. ‘And the Major?’ Blink asked sadly. Polite and incurious, specifying nothing much. It might have been a bit of a cold. They had beautiful manners.
‘Not much difference,’ I said. That didn’t tell them a lot.
‘We weren’t thinking of seeing him.’ Nod opened the Field again.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Naturally not.’
‘You might tell him,’ Nod spoke decidedly, ‘that we’ve come for the horse.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Hubert’s horse, the Arch Deacon. The Major thought we might be able to do something with him.’
‘You know he thought he was a bit much.’ Blink left it at that.
‘I really don’t quite follow you. Tommy has him going beautifully. You might like a day on him. After Christmas, perhaps.’
‘Actually, we thought Maxie Riley might ride him home this evening.’ Maxie Riley was their tinker groom. Their calm and conviction were absolute.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m awfully sorry, but don’t you think we must wait till Papa can tell us about this himself?’
‘He has told us,’ they insisted politely, but their long elegant faces flushed. They were more eager and less polite than before.
‘I wonder if he said anything to Tommy about it? Not to me. The moment he does I’ll let you know. Till then, perhaps . . .’
‘Can’t he speak at all?’ Gently as they asked the question, the coarse practical demand was evident in it. I was choked by my resistance towards them and my anger at their curiosity.
‘No – he can’t speak at all.’
‘If he could,’ Nod said, as she and Blink got on their feet in one clocklike motion, ‘I wonder what he’d say to you?’
I was no more ready than usual with a quick answer. Perhaps they saw the tears I would not shed.
Inside the archway of the stable yard Maxie Riley sat on the corner step of the granite mounting block. The grey seeding flowers of traveller’s joy drooped and sprawled above his red tinker’s head.
‘Tommy,’ I said, after I had nodded a surprised ‘good evening’ towards the tinker, ‘did the Major give you any instructions about Mr Hubert’s horse?’
‘No, miss. The first I heard, this man came in here saying he should ride him home for the Miss Crowhursts.’
‘Maxie,’ they said reprovingly, ‘didn’t we tell you to wait in the road?’ I know they exchanged a look. It passed round the three of them like the shoe in a game of hunt the slipper. Then, graceful as lone birds, they mounted their bicycles and drifted away, a wind behind them and their tinker running by their side.
While their awful courage and effrontery really appalled me, I did begin to wonder what Papa would say if he could speak. I was afraid he might be only too pleased with them. Of all their talents, their talent to amuse was the one I felt most repellent.
Rascally as they were, their duck was perfection. Papa could only manage a small piece, Nurse said, and Mummie never eats a thing, so I had two delicious helpings; there’s not very much on a duck really. I enjoyed this one more than anything I had eaten since Papa’s illness. I could feel my pleasure in good things coming back to me, surreptitious but lively.
‘At least one thing doesn’t change,’ Mummie said, getting up without impatience, because the evening was motiveless, ‘and that’s your appetite, dear girl.’
I didn’t feel humiliated. My mind went straight back to the Horse Show, and to Hubert showing off my eating paces to Richard, and Richard’s riveted attention and amusement. Everything she didn’t know about me was a strength. Thank God, I had secrets to keep. Now Papa would keep them too, I was safe.
23
It was the middle of October and Papa showed little change. Sometimes he tried to speak, but the words were sadly unintelligible. We accepted disappointment in his progress as we accepted the shortening days. His pretty nurse dropped some of her antiseptically challenging ways. Her polish dulled and she and Rose were not now the best friends they had been in September. I heard Rose one morning insisting that the Major’s sheets were to be changed.
‘Ah, they’ll do,’ said Nurse. ‘We were a good boy last night.’
And Rose’s answer: ‘Pull that sheet out your side before I hit you,’ spoken with frightening authority. He would look from one to the other, making obedient small noises, ready to please. Four-thirty was Mummie’s hour.
She came in with the China tea and a tin of very special biscuits from Fortnum’s which some friend had sent, and they never ate. Pity. She would bring a sprig of verbena and rub a leaf of it in her ringers and sniff at them before bending over him to murmur a greeting. I don’t know what she said after Nurse left them alone together with the silver teapot and the blue Worcester cups. She never stayed very long in his room. I would hear her calling unhappily for Nurse or Rose before I was halfway through the scones and sandwiches in the library.
One evening she left him sooner than usual and came into the library wearing a lost and injured air. ‘That nurse –’ she said exasperatedly – ‘She is a bore. She’s complaining about her “elevenses.” What are “elevenses”?’
‘Oh, it’s a thing they do,’ I said. ‘It’s quite harmless.’
‘She says Rose has sent her up cold tea and soft Marie biscuits on three mornings running. She says do I expect her to clean her own shoes. What do I know about her shoes?’
‘Or care.’
‘Exactly. What’s more, she wants to be paid. Now.’
‘She’s been here more than six weeks. Haven’t you paid her yet?’
‘Of course not. I leave that kind of thing to Mr Kiely. Anyway she does almost nothing for Papa. Rose does all the real things. It’s like having a guest in the house. An expensive guest. And a boring guest.’
‘Papa does need her.’
‘Rose thinks she’s not as careful about Papa as she ought to be. Rose thought,’ Mummie hesitated, ‘he might have bedsores – Papa.’ She gave the faintest scream of dismay or disgust. ‘And another thing, Rose thinks she’s rather dishing out the sleeping pills.’
‘Let’s talk to Dr Coffey about it all.’
‘Yes, I must.’ She spoke wearily, longing to put it all aside. ‘And I shall have to see that ghastly little man Kiely. I haven’t any money.’
•
A few days after this I drove her into Kildeclan to see Mr Kiely. I sat in the car outside his office waiting for her whi
le rain drove onto the windscreen and trickled on me, small and icy through a tear in the hood between canvas and talc.
Little Mr Kiely came out of his office holding his umbrella over Mummie. He had a face far too handsome for his height. It made him into a grotesque, just as his clothes, faithful imitations of the kind of clothes Papa wore, seemed to be characters on their own account, as foreign to his body as if they had never left the shop.
‘Thank you so much,’ Mummie said, giving him the straight tips of her gloved fingers while she shivered her body back from the rain. He held on to the glove-tips for a moment more, leaning his handsome face, with the great darkness of the umbrella behind it, into the car. He smiled, a glitter against the blackness.
‘No more worrying,’ he said. ‘That cheque should steady things for the moment, and I’ll be over next week to look at the bullocks.’
‘Oh, you are kind.’ She retreated near me, almost to my shoulder. ‘Drive on, Aroon, please.’
‘I think,’ she said as we drove down the street – every house in it, pretty or ugly, black-faced and similar in the rain – ‘I think we might have a cup of tea with the Crowhurst girls.’
‘Oh, Mummie, no! Must we?’
‘You’ve no idea what I’ve been through,’ she said. ‘I know they must invent all these things; one can’t pay too much attention; everything will be all right. But just now I do need a cup of tea. Dreadfully.’ She dredged the last word up with infinite delicacy and certainty.
In spite of my victory in our last encounter, I felt cold and sick and shy as Mummie pushed open their door and called out their names with plaintive authority: ‘Girls,’ she called, ‘girls, girls, Nod, Blink! Tea, please, tea!’
Nod came out of the diningroom to meet us. She seemed less well arranged than usual – her hair not so crisply set, her jersey and cardigan not twins, or not identical twins. ‘How nice of you to come,’ she said in her disparaging way, ‘and on such an appalling day.’
‘Oh,’ said Mummie, throwing back her coat, as if it were sables, ‘business, horrible business. Otherwise we shouldn’t be here.’
‘Do forgive me an instant.’ Nod backed away from us. ‘I’m mending china and my cement’s just setting.’ Mummie followed her into the diningroom. ‘Oh, that lovely piece,’ I heard her say, ‘I’ve always loved it. It’s perfect.’ I knew she didn’t mean the broken china. It was the Regency side-table she had envied and sighed after ever since the girls had bought it for some trifling and never told sum in some poor, never named house.
I put my head round the drawingroom door and saw Blink sitting among a lot of knitting, and wearing a lot of knitting, but not actually knitting. Never before had I seen her without some sharp purpose.
‘Have you been out in the rain?’
She did not bite back as usual on the nervous stupidity of my question. Sitting there in her wet Wellies she seemed unaware that I was waiting, defensive, for a sharp answer. There was an unhappy languor about her. I dimly recognised some sort of patient desperation clouding her habitual smart vigour. It was as though she had a secret to carry.
‘We’ve been for a long walk. Do sit down. I’ll make some tea.’ She spoke to the air as if I were not there, or, if I was, I counted for nothing. ‘China or Indian?’
‘Mummie likes China.’
‘Oh, is she here too? Fancy.’ She got up from the sofa as if the effort were almost beyond her – an odd change from her usual whiplash certainty in word and movement.
When Blink had gone I sat rather quietly on the sofa, hoping that the dogs, stirring aggrievedly in their basket, would forget about me. Knitting billowed round me. I counted the makings of at least five cardigans, not yet stitched together. The industry they represented was a little desperate.
I realised, as the minutes passed, a change in the room since that day when Papa and I had visited the girls. Then the room was bright and dignified. It had a gleam in its eye. Today a sticky dust of cold wood-ash hovered on the tables. The fire was not only cold and dead, it had the look of a fire not cleaned out or set or lighted for days. Flower arrangements had died in their vases, poised to the last dead leaf. The dogs, on that previous day neat and sweet and dangerous, now steamed and smelt in a tousled basket. A glass sat on a book, near to where Blink had sat among the knitting. I smelt that, too. Gin. Gin and what? I dipped in a finger. Just gin. All the small shapeliness and delicate contrivances in the room were overlaid by this new sluttish ambiance. I didn’t enjoy sitting there alone.
At last Nod and Mummie came in with tea. (Only tea. Indian tea, too.) No Blink.
‘Where’s Blink?’ Mummie asked.
Nod looked at her watch. ‘It’s her bath-time,’ she said. Then, noticing that I glanced unbelievingly at my own watch, she added firmly: ‘Nothing like a hot bath if you’re silly enough to have a frightful cold, walk six miles, and get soaking wet all on the same day.’
‘Oh, I see,’ I said. ‘It just seems funny to have a bath in the afternoon, except after hunting.’
‘With one lame horse between us,’ Nod said acidly, ‘we shan’t do much hunting.’
‘You’ll get a lot more knitting done,’ Mummie comforted. She pulled a piece of violet cardigan round her shoulder, and sipped, shivering, at her Indian tea.
‘Yes, that is your colour.’ Nod at once assumed that Mummie was trying on the cardigan. ‘We could let you have it cheap. It’s a small size for most people.’
‘It’s a wonderful colour.’ Mummie took off the piece of cardigan. ‘Wanda primroses. But no. Alas, I mustn’t spend any more money. No lovely new clothes.’
‘Perhaps you could afford a few double pink primroses?’ Nod suggested.
‘Well, perhaps.’ I felt Nod’s fury to sell was having a cumulative effect on Mummie’s resistance.
I looked through the streaming window panes, out to the terrible dahlias, lately so flaming with life and colour; they were sodden and rotting now, their flowers jelly, their leaves gross and blackening.
‘You haven’t lifted the dahlias yet.’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
‘More tea?’ Nod lifted up the teapot. She put it down neatly and decisively before she said: ‘No. We’ll have to get that done before we start for England.’
‘England?’ Mummie and I, for once, spoke together. For once disbelieved the same thing at the same moment. Since leaving school the girls had kept away from England. They avoided their quite grand English cousins, never had them (or anybody else if they could help it) to stay, and certainly never accepted invitations to the courts and halls and manor houses of their family, although we all knew these invitations were issued often and kindly to the two poor relations – who were also almost professional gardeners, inspired knitters and stitchers, and, I will be fair, superb horsewomen.
‘We’re faintly in a pickle,’ Nod said. ‘I mean we have to catch up on the bills a bit.’
‘Oh, don’t,’ Mummie implored her. ‘We all know about that. Monstrous, shop people are. How do you think England’s going to help you?’ she asked enviously.
‘Cousin Imogen has had to move to the dower house at Husband’s Budsworth, and she wants us to design the garden – it’s been a wilderness for years.’
‘Chair covers too, I suppose.’ Mummie envisaged the situation at once. ‘Then you’ll be away for months.’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so. Six or eight months, I don’t quite know.’
So they were going away. I felt quite warmly towards them now. Things must have come to a pass for the girls to leave their whole life – garden, pigeons, ducks, horses (well, horse) – behind and take off into the world of Gloucestershire.
‘The dogs?’ I asked.
‘Oh,’ said Nod snubbingly, ‘they’ll be all right. We’ll make some plan.’ I thought she looked as if reality had drawn back, to strike her fully.
‘I think if you’ve quite finished tea –’ Mummie looked at me as if I had been eating an ox – ‘we really ought to get home
to Papa.’ She pushed back the sleeve of her coat to find her tiny watch. ‘If I might – may I go to your bathroom? It’s been such a long awful afternoon.’
‘I’m afraid you can’t. Blink’s in her bath.’
‘Not still in her bath? She can’t be. It’s more than half an hour.’
‘Yes,’ Nod said firmly, ‘she is. She needs a good soak. You’ll have to try the downstairs. I’ll just turn out the cats. They love it on a wet day.’ I could imagine them there, crouched between the loo and the croquet mallets and the Wellington boots and the weed killer. While we waited for Nod to banish the cats, Mummie nipped into the diningroom. She reappeared with a look of pious gratification about her.
‘It’s much earlier than she thinks it is.’
‘It’s after five now.’
‘Oh, time?’ she said. ‘I mean my side-table. It’s that serpentine front. They could have stuck on the ram’s head later.’ She had always been obsessed by the girls’ side-table.
On the road home, thinking of that lilac, bell heather, or Wanda cardigan, I asked: ‘What about my dress allowance?’
She withdrew a little further to her own side of the seat. I could feel her wrapping herself closer, protectively, in the loose coat. ‘Oh,’ she answered, ‘yes – it was to have come out of that miserable little cheque.’
‘How do you mean, Mummie, “was”?’ A wave of anxiety swelled in me.
‘I’ve had quite a little coup,’ Mummie said contentedly. ‘Do you know – Nod sold me the side-table.’
‘How much?’
‘Do you mind –’ Mummie spoke with polite restraint – ‘I think that’s rather my own affair. I gave her quite enough.’ There was gratification in the way she settled back in her seat as she spoke. ‘More than enough.’
‘Are they in a bad mess?’
‘Yes. I think they are.’ She sounded mercilessly amused.
24
I could see and hear Nurse become every day brisker and at the same time more sullen in her handling of Papa. Fewer happy jokes were cracked as she went about her duties. She was mannerless in her indifference to his jumbled baby talk. Single words that he now struggled to pronounce he achieved only by an exhausting concentration of effort.
