by Molly Keane
Rose watched her. ‘I wonder does he get his rights,’ she said darkly. ‘She choked my fish down him in five minutes, that way she wouldn’t miss the post with her letter . . . his foot was stiff with the cold and she wouldn’t go to the kettle for a hot jar . . . would he have bed-sores, I wonder? . . . Do you get a heavy smell from him ever? You should speak to the doctor, Miss Aroon.’
Dr Coffey came to see Papa every Thursday, and sometimes more often. He told him about hunting and how many snipe were in the bogs. I caught him hurrying through the hall one morning. In his leisurely patience with Papa one felt he had no other calls on his time, or none so important.
‘How is he today, Dr Coffey?’
‘We can’t expect much change yet. Just carry on the way we are.’
‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘We can’t. Nurse doesn’t seem at all happy.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s our problem. It’s a pity. She’s a capable girl. The trouble is – my dear child – she wants her money.’ He started at once to hurry away from the problem and towards the hall door. I fastened on him.
‘What if she goes, Dr Coffey?’
‘Rose is very competent. Tommy in the yard could help her lift him.’
‘Rose is the cook.’
‘Yes.’ He spoke in an odd, reserved way. ‘Yes. But perhaps she might be the answer.’ So nothing was resolved. There was nothing for me but a powerless doubtful refusal to despair over Papa. I remembered especially what Rose had said about a heavy smell when I watched Mummie bruising and pinching sheaves of frosted verbena leaves as she bent over him at teatime. When she had gone I put medlar jelly on buttered scraps of scones and fed them to Papa in little pieces, and ate them whole myself (Rose’s tiny scones). He looked at me with terrible discontent and made impatient sounds, rabid for something I could not supply. Oh, dear, if it was his bedpan?
‘Do you want Nurse?’
‘No-no-no,’ he could mouth that much. ‘NO-NO,’ I could feel him shouting.
‘Rose will be here for the tray soon,’ I said loudly, and he collapsed back on the pillows in a sad impatience. I managed to finish the scones and a slice of cherry cake before she came in. I had longed for her, and now I resisted her strength and assurance.
‘Her ladyship got a drive into town and not back yet.’ She spoke as though the nurse’s outing were a licentious indulgence. ‘I suppose he’s perished.’ She moved the tea table away from his bedside to turn back the blankets and put her hand on his foot. ‘It’s ice, all right,’ she said, satisfied at the neglect, ‘and his hot bottle dead cold. I bet it wasn’t filled since morning. I’ll rub a bit of life into it for you, Major,’ she said, gently kneeling by the bed so as to reach his foot more comfortably. ‘Could you take the bottle down to Teresa, Miss Aroon, and tell her to boil the kettle – maybe you’d bring it up here to us again – she has my pheasant to pluck yet.’ I left her, bent with wonderful pliancy over the bed; his cold foot in her hands, she was talking to him easily, as if she were part of the drift of his mind.
There was nobody in the kitchen. A glorious pheasant lay unplucked on the table. Dark alcoves yawned back into the walls. High, huge, and Gothic, a framed text hung above the loaded dresser, I AM THE BREAD OF LIFE. The capital letters were blue and red and gold, under years of smoke and dust and grease. I put my hand on the pheasant’s breast, a stone under the fiery feathers. I looked out of the windows to the stars. Tomorrow there would be a letter for me. Or perhaps not. He was moving round Africa. He had never had my letter about Papa. I saw a native running on to nowhere with my letter in the cleft of a forked stick, or it might be his letter to me. The idea cheered me.
Before I picked up the hotwater-bottle I heard laughter in the servants’ hall; someone came out on the laugh, as on an exit line. It was Nurse, neat and lively in her town clothes.
‘Thank God for one hot cup of tea today,’ she said, a sort of bold excuse for enjoying herself in the servants’ hall. ‘Am I seeing things, or is that my patient’s hotwater-bottle you have there, Miss St Charles?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’ve just filled it for him.’ I felt I should have apologised, and I was right.
‘If I may say so, we consider it important that a case like the Major’s should find its own body heat, at its own level.’ The professional tone was far removed from the friendly giggling of the past, or the sulky efficiency of present days.
‘All the same,’ I maintained, ‘his feet were cold.’
‘There’s no sensation whatever in that foot,’ she said coarsely emphasising the singular, as if I didn’t know about Papa’s leg.
‘I wasn’t the only one who thought so – Rose thought so too.’
‘And sent you down for the bottle, I suppose, thank you very much, and please understand that no one comes between me and my patient only excepting the doctor on the case. I’ll take that bottle from you now, please, and that, I hope, will be IT.’
I was cowed by her stunning authority, and gave up the rubber bottle which I had been holding against my chest. I walked away from the beastly girl to the swing door, the benignity of my sense of usefulness falling from me with every step I took towards the library.
Mummie was stitching away at her great summery piece of tapestry, lilies and grey leaves tumbling over her knee.
‘You’ve forgotten the fire, Mummie.’
‘I rang.’
‘I suppose nobody heard the bell.’
‘I suppose nobody listened.’ She went on stitching with blue fingers. There was a haze of damp air round the globes of the lamps. ‘Ring again,’ she said, her eyes on her work.
I was bending over the fire when the door burst open and Nurse, young and strong and furious, flounced across the room towards Mummie, crouching among her lilies and leaves, to pour out a flood of words, accusing Rose – of what? She screamed about getting her money, about leaving in the morning, about a hand under the bedclothes. Mummie was listening too patiently. I was appalled. I had to speak.
‘He was cold – whatever you say, Nurse. He was so cold.’
‘Cold?’ she repeated on a rising note, ‘when the heat of herself would scorch him!’
‘But I was there. His hotwater-bottle was cold. Rose was rubbing his foot.’
‘Foot?’ she screamed. ‘What I have to tell you is what I’ll tell my priest and my matron and my doctor—’
‘If it gave him the smallest pleasure, Nurse, I am only too delighted.’ Mummie interrupted in a cool small voice, and Nurse stared back at her, somehow defeated of her object. She subsided into a sort of sulky acquiescence.
‘You understand, Mrs St Charles, I require my salary and I leave in the morning.’
‘Such a pity it can’t be tonight.’ Mummie went on stitching at her leaves.
When Nurse had gone she stopped stitching. She pushed away the tapestry as if its weight were too much. She got up from her little chair. She went to the writing table and shuffled about among the papers on it, as if she must find something useful in its confusion. ‘It’s no use,’ she said, ‘there simply isn’t any money.’ She left the writing table and went from chair to chair touching their backs, straightening a cushion, marshalling some resource.
‘But what about Mr Kiely’s money?’ I wanted her to see sense. I wanted to distress her.
‘No, no. I gave it to the girls.’
‘Not all of it? You can’t have.’
‘It was necessary.’ She spoke in the cool tired voice in which she had repelled the nurse. ‘They needed it.’
‘And you needed the side-table?’
‘So you may think,’ she said, and went on walking from chair to chair.
25
The next morning, after breakfast, I opened the hall door as usual to let out the dogs. I was waiting for the postman, too. When he came I took the letters from him – four manilla envelopes and another, larger one, marked PRIVATE.
Mummie was coming downstairs as I put the letters on the side-table. She was we
aring her old fur coat, so I knew she was going to paint. I felt the long boards in the hall chill under my feet as I waited, and a chill under my heart from which I had to make some escape. I had to find my way into something that mattered.
‘The post is here.’
‘Oh, letters. There’ll be nothing but nasties. Nasty upsetting things.’
‘Have you thought any more about Nurse?’ I brought out, a blunt rush of words from nowhere.
She picked up her letters and put them down again without curiosity. She pushed the bills into the drawer where they always went and brushed her palms, lightly crossing them against each other. ‘Oh, do we have to think about her? I expect everything will have simmered down by now.’
‘But, Mummie, you know it won’t have simmered down. She was so angry. And Rose doesn’t think she’s looking after Papa. And Dr Coffey thinks she wants her money, and she won’t leave without it.’
‘My dear girl, must you create such a drama out of everything? Why don’t you go and exercise the Arch Deacon?’ She stood for a moment in the circle of winter light under the dome, gathering herself back into isolation. Then she walked away, elegant as if on stilts above all the trouble beneath her feet. Even the old fur coat with its cracked skins had a cloudy airiness as she wore it.
So she guessed I was afraid of Hubert’s horse, and grateful that my own old hunter was lame. What to do? I looked at my watch. Three long hours till luncheon. As I stood, undecided on any occupation, I heard feet running down the back staircase, behind the wall which divided the servants’ stairs from ours, which – except to clean – of course they did not use. The padded door burst softly open and Rose, hot and raging in her thin, cotton dress, came bursting through it. ‘She’s giving the Major a bedbath and the fire not going yet and he crying with the cold.’
I felt as if Papa were being murdered, and I could only stand aside.
‘How can I stop her? What can I do?’
‘He’s crying,’ Rose repeated. She turned away from me. She was crying too. She accepted my uselessness. She went back quietly through the service door, leaving me to myself in the cold. I sat down on the swollen woollen roses on the huge Victorian sociable that stood in the hall, under the gallery and the dome; and on that seat, decorated superbly by a great-aunt, a despairing resentment invaded my acceptance of my powerless status as daughter at home – a child of the house living in the grace and favour of unexplored obedience. I was still sitting, dumb on all those roses, when Breda came past me on her way to answer the hall door bell, which had been ringing, unheard by me, far away in the pantry passage. It was a man’s voice at the door, asking for Mummie, and not the kind of voice for which she would suffer an interruption of her painting.
‘Would you wait inside a minute, sir . . .’ Breda knew her mission would be fruitless. One could hear that in the flat, hesitant politeness of her tone. She opened the door wider, and a warm gust of outdoors welled indoors. Compost, blackcurrant leaves, horses’ urine and bullocks’ breath lived and wavered momentarily before expiring on the suffocating chill within.
Then I saw who it was, coming down the hall towards me, although Breda had indicated a wooden chair, near the door. He was wearing a Jaeger coat, the twin of ours, a rakish highnecked jersey, and whipcord trousers. He carried a brown felt hat with a very broad ribbon, which made all the rest look false. It was Mr Kiely, and I could have told him now that his visit was born to failure. Papa’s name for him, ‘that piddling niggler,’ flitted into my mind, and reproduced itself in my tepid greeting.
‘I thought I’d save Mrs St Charles a journey,’ he said. ‘I have some rather urgent papers for her signature.’
‘Oh, I don’t really know where she is.’ I felt he ought to be prepared for the rebuff which was certainly on its way to him.
Breda brought it, a minute later: ‘Madam is out,’ she said with ominous uncertainty. ‘Would you care to leave a message, sir?’
Through and beyond my dislike of common little men, a feeling of embarrassment and sympathy came over me; Mummie was behaving towards him as she did towards me. ‘I’m so sorry.’ I looked down at him. ‘I suppose I can’t be of any use?’
He sat down on the sociable and sorted some papers out of his briefcase. ‘If you’d ask her to sign these where I’ve pencilled in the signature, and post them to me today. Things are a bit sticky at the moment. Of course, circumstances . . . but banks have very little patience these days. Mrs St Charles mentioned there were a few little accounts pressing.’
A few – opportunity was clear to me. I opened the drawer of the side-table. Let the rabbit see the dog, I thought, matching it up with Papa’s piddling niggler.
‘I expect they’re mostly duplicates,’ he said calmly, taking on himself some of my phobia about that stuffed drawer.
‘These came today.’ I handed him the pile and he opened the envelope marked PRIVATE, screwing up his mouth as he read it.
‘Not very nice. It’s the garage. Cash on all future transactions. And that includes petrol.’
‘But cars won’t go,’ I said, stupefied, ‘without petrol.’
‘Well, yes. It’s one of the facts.’ The drawer was hanging outwards, its full mouth open. I was petrified in my dismay. ‘Put the lot in a sack, and send them in to my office, I’ll see what can be done.’
‘I’ll have to ask Mummie.’
‘I don’t think that will get you far. She’s not, if I may say so, a very businesslike lady.’
‘I know.’
‘And financially we are in a bit of a mess at the moment, or I wouldn’t have come out of my way this morning, on my road to Leopardstown races too.’ That explained his clothes, and a kind of gay financial security in the air about him.
‘I know,’ I said again. The cold bit into me. I could feel Papa crying in his bedroom in the hands of that vindictive nurse. I sat down. I bowed my head. ‘I suppose you couldn’t let me have any money out of the farm account or something . . . Mummie hasn’t been able to settle anybody’s wages.’
‘I gave her—’
‘I know.’
He looked at me. He knew too. ‘The bank’s owed too much,’ he said.
I felt a suffocating band of despair tightening round inside my head. Now, like Dr Coffey, he was hurrying away from my problems, leaving me to agonise alone. We got to our feet together. ‘Couldn’t we sell something?’ An idea came to me: ‘That horse of my brother’s?’
‘Are you talking about a brown five-year-old? By Great Moments out of a half-bred mare?’
‘He’s a brilliant hunter,’ I said. That was true enough of Arch Deacon when Hubert rode him.
‘All the same, there’s a kink in all these Great Moments horses and he hasn’t a very nice reputation.’ He looked at me. It was a penetration. ‘He hops it, doesn’t he?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t call it that.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I don’t know how the story got around.’
‘My father was talking of selling him.’
‘Talking is as far as we’ll get. Now,’ he looked away before his eyes came back to me, ‘as it’s a question of urgency – that’s one great yearling out there. He’s saleable all right.’
‘Yes. I own him.’ I felt pleasurably inflated by the simple statement.
‘There’s something you could turn into ready money.’
‘I’m not thinking of selling him.’ The value of my present from Richard grew immeasurably real to me. What if he did bite or kick me and do nasty things to the donkey, he was there, a solid testimony to my love, our love, growing more cheeky and better-looking every week. He would be there when Richard came back. We would walk up to him together.
‘It’s just an idea,’ Mr Kiely said. ‘Two hundred pounds – perhaps I’m foolish . . . you could have it in notes.’ He paused. ‘I’m meeting an English fellow today; he’s a spotter for one of the big trainers; I could have interested him. However –’ he sighed and gave up the idea. ‘If I’m to see the fi
rst race,’ he said, ‘I must be off.’
A door upstairs banged, clapping shut; the bedrooms were too far off for any voice, even a child’s cry, to reach the civilisation of the hall where we stood, but the angry sound recalled Papa’s circumstance too clearly. I reeled towards a decision: my present, my all. It was the death of my heart. Mr Kiely was edging away. I would lose my only way out. ‘Make it three hundred,’ my voice was saying, ‘and I’ll put the brown horse in the deal.’
‘Right, and not a word to Mother, isn’t that it?’
I resented the degree of familiarity. Why should he know whether or not I kept the matter my own secret? But, as we sat together on the vast round of the sociable and bank notes fell between us among the woolwork roses and petunias, I felt rather less intolerance towards him. I had never seen so much money. I rustled my hand through it, like feet in autumn leaves.
‘I must be off,’ he said. ‘Do you ever have a bet?’
‘Oh yes, sometimes.’ I never did.
He picked up one of my many five-pound notes. ‘There’s a good thing in the fourth race. I’ll put you on a fiver, if you like.’
How could I tell him five shillings would be my limit? I didn’t care for his gesture. Win or lose, it would be another link.
‘That’s all just between our two selves.’ He was smiling as he shook my hand (quite unnecessarily) before he went skipping down the steps as fast as a child, out into the morning and away from Temple Alice. I wished I need never see him again.
I hurried back to the sociable, eager for the comfort and security the money in my hands must give me. No comfort came to me. I sat among the bank notes and the roses, great fat tears bouncing off my fat cheeks. I had sold my only true love-token. The shudders going through me were as deep as my loss.
