by Molly Keane
I let the question pass, changing the subject with easy diplomacy. ‘That idiot Breda has let the fire out,’ I said. Although I should have rung the bell, I stooped for the logs myself. I know I’m quite silly about doing the work servants are paid for.
‘Stop,’ Mummie said.
‘But, Mummie, she’s just bringing in dinner, and the fire will be out.’
‘One can’t help noticing how very determined you are on your own little comforts.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as oilstoves burning in every conceivable corner of the house. I imagine it must have been your rather unpretty idea to put one in the PLACE.’ She spoke the word bravely. ‘Don’t you realise that paraffin oil, like most things, costs money? And economy means a little, just a very little, self-denial.’
‘The tank in the yard is full of oil, Mummie.’
‘So you may think – and what about the lamps?’ She went on in her most practical tone of voice. ‘What happens when one can no longer see to read? Tell me that.’
‘I’ll tell you when it happens.’ As soon as I said it I knew I should have kept quiet.
‘That will be very kind, but quite unnecessary. I don’t intend to allow it to happen. I’m determined to put a stop to some of this extravagance and I’m making a start with the oilstoves. From tomorrow.’
‘Won’t that mean more fires?’
‘Not for me. No more fires in my bedroom, or only fircones and sticks which I will pick up for myself. And I advise you to do the same.’
‘My bedroom chimney smokes too dreadfully.’
‘Perhaps then you will have to do without.’ From the way she considered me I guessed she was longing to say: Fat people are supposed not to feel the cold.
‘It’s a total lie,’ I said before she spoke. ‘They do feel the cold.’
‘My poor girl – don’t let’s talk about your size. There are some subjects I do avoid.’ She put a final stitch into the stem of a sharp green leaf. ‘They say whales can live for months on their own fat – do they call it blubber? Or is it seals?’
‘Seals, I think.’ The memory of a summer day came to me, unlocked and visible in that word ‘seal.’ It was Mrs Brock, diving and plunging and playing in the water. Kindness was the word linked with seal. Under my hand, tonight, the texture of my blue velvet dress stood up, electric with cold; this was the present, and that time, before I knew I was ugly, was a myth. Careful love, milk and biscuits, her feet buried in sugary sand, her best hat with all the roses were false assurances. Such things as they gave or promised had no material body. Tonight was real, with my cold hands on my cold dress and my longing for food, coupled to the certain prospect of Mummie’s comment on my appetite. The size of anything appalled her. . .
‘And who,’ she was saying, ‘bought that magnum of 4711 eau-de-cologne I noticed in your father’s bedroom?’
‘Rose needs it. It’s against bed-sores.’
‘Bed-sores,’ she murmured. ‘What disgusting thing will you think of next?’
‘But it happens. Dr Coffey warned us.’
‘Yes. And Dr Coffey’s bill – can you imagine what that will amount to?’
‘Dr Coffey never sends in his bill.’
‘That’s all you know. He charged ten pounds when you were born. It was quite a ridiculous price.’ She looked through me, and back into the past. ‘Nothing’s worth it,’ she said.
29
She could do it all. And she did it. The fires and stoves went out. Maids were sacked. Food became impossible. She stopped painting. She stopped gardening. She prowled the house, bent on economies. It was a game in which every vantage point represented a new economy. But as Christmas and the season of hunt balls came closer she grew solicitous for my entertainment. It was a new tease.
‘Naturally I like to be alone, but I mustn’t be selfish. Why don’t you try to see more of your young friends? Who are your friends? What about the Hunt Ball, isn’t there anyone you can ask for it?’
‘But I don’t want to go.’
‘And you don’t want to hunt – what do you want to do . . .?’
What did I want to do, or to have? I wanted, beyond everything, a letter to illumine my life. I wanted Papa to depend on me more than on Rose (except for bedpans). I wanted the kind of food we used to have when he did the housekeeping. And I wanted to be warm.
Mummie kept on about the Hunt Ball, and the pity of it that I had no friends or partner. She had a list of the most inaccessible social contacts, and she whined on endlessly about people who might ask me, and probably wouldn’t . . . ‘I came out the same year as their mother.’
‘That’s some time ago.’
‘Your father always went to their shoots.’
‘That’s not quite a hunt ball.’
‘No. Of course there is a difference – they have to find men to dance with you.’ The fruitless teasing went on: ‘What about those Barraway girls?’
She knew that the Barraway girls lived in a sphere that was out of my reach. Even with Hubert as a talisman there was never more than a nodding acquaintance between us, a faint recognition at a race-meeting. When an invitation to a hunt ball, to be held at Ballytore Barraway, coupled with a dinner party before the dance, came for me, I was suspended between horror at the idea of going by myself into that unknown world and the longing to let Mummie know I had been invited there. I might never have told her – I was, in fact, composing my refusal – if she had not commiserated with me so gently, one evening, on my lack of friends and invitations to balls and Christmas parties.
‘Poor child,’ she said, stitching into the ragged edges of a pink carnation – carnations have a barbed look, sharp against the intoxication of their scent and texture – ‘what are we to do about you?’ She lifted her tapestry so that the weight did not pull from her hands, and settled back into her little chair. ‘Without Hubert, and without Papa, what can we expect?’
I caught hold of my resolution to tell her nothing, but it escaped from me like the tail of a flying bird. ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I was just wondering whether I felt like going to the Barraways’ party.’
Her surprise was total. She even dropped her tapestry and pretended to lose her needle while she found a reply. ‘I do see,’ she said, ‘that you wouldn’t know anybody there.’
That decided me. The next day I posted my acceptance and bicycled away to Mrs Harty, with two of my horse show ball dresses in a cardboard box strapped on the carrier behind me. One dress was pink chiffon, the other was gold lace. I brought them both because when I tried them on I found they had shrunken miserably in cleaning.
I leaned my bicycle against the wall of Mrs Harty’s house. A winter jasmine grew at the door. Flowerless, only its tight, fish-shaped buds had survived the frost. As I knocked I could hear her lurching across the kitchen floor, and I shared her pause at the thick net curtains before she let me in. After my morning in the starved spaces of Temple Alice, Mrs Harty and her warm house pleased me as though she and her kitchen were a refuge and safety from wolves.
‘Well, and how are you?’ Mrs Harty took the box from me as if it were a Christmas present. ‘And the Major, poor man? A little better . . . ah, please God.’
I stood with my back to the dirty blazing stove; the warmth of the room was sublime.
Mrs Harty put the parcel of my dresses down on top of a stuffed fox in his glass-fronted box. Fashion magazines cascaded past his improbable glass button eyes. It was a doll-like fox and I suppose it was company for her. So was the stuffed badger, curled and nailed on a board where she rested her club foot while the other worked the treadle of her magnificent Singer sewing-machine. Now, shaking out my dresses, she handled them preciously, pinching back their waists so that the skirts were blowing outwards, like those in an advertisement. I was glad to think that that was once how I must have looked to Richard.
Mrs Harty wore a stuffed satin heart hung on a corset lace. It swung, full of pins, between her breasts. I felt some connection between it and
the sacred heart of Jesus flaming away in its holy picture, the constant small light burning below. Mrs Harty plucked pins out of hers and lurched about on her club foot, standing back to survey her work, or pouncing forward to remedy a fault. While the light shrank from her windows she swooped on me and round me with her scissors, and mumbled at me as she changed pins from her heart to her lips, and then to the seams of my dress; at last she staggered away . . . I could feel her dissatisfaction, and through it my bulk loomed to me – a battleship through fog. ‘The wholly all about it is,’ she said, ‘there’s not enough of it in it.’
I could imagine the wedge-shaped gaps to be filled, and the strains that the pink chiffon would not take. I knew better than to look into the narrow slit of mirror. ‘Do you know what we’ll do – how would it work, I wonder, if we used our gold to drape our troubles?’
I demurred – then I agreed. Panels of gold lace swept from my hips to the ground, chiffon clouded my bosom.
‘And a big rose in gold and pink – imagine – on one shoulder.’ The rose was not there. She sketched it on the air, and pinned the air down my left bosom. I moistened my lips and nodded agreement. In the wintry light, between the fox, the badger, and the sacred heart of Jesus, I began to feel a storybook little-princess character taking me over – possessing me.
‘Now. Look at yourself.’ She turned me about like a child or a dummy to face my reflection. I spun willingly round on my Louis heels. I closed my eyes, I spread my hand like a fan across my chest. I decided how I should smile – I smiled. I opened my eyes, I pulled in my stomach, and I leaned a little forwards to my reflection. Gold lace fell in points and godets to the floor. Flesh and chiffon were indistinguishable in the sweetheart neckline. I caught my breath, and for a moment I was standing alone with the beautiful doll that was me.
Mrs Harty broke the silence. She too was looking enchantedly from me to my reflection. ‘Well, Miss Aroon,’ I could feel her searching for the absolute word, ‘wouldn’t you make a massive statue?’
Statue? I knew just what that meant. And I had been feeling so mignonne and cherished. I was Aroon again – a big girl, even a great big girl. She turned away from me. ‘I’ll have to light the lamp,’ she said, ‘till I see how do it fall.’
But how could I face the statue she saw? I had to get away before she said ‘statue’ again. I dragged my dress over my head. I struggled in the slippery darkness of the lining. I tore my way out. When she came back, carrying the lighted lamp, I was walloping round, a great half-naked creature, searching for my winter clothes.
What panic had taken me over? I wondered, pedalling home with the frost on my cheeks, and the wheels of my bicycle sailing effortlessly under my weight. Assurance re-enfolded me as I remembered that ‘massive’ was Mrs Harty’s word for beautiful. A rose could have a massive scent. Six yards of cobweb lace a massive quality. Statue was all right too. A nymph in a glade, perhaps.
I hurried upstairs to Papa’s room, hoping that tea was still there. He was sitting up, comfortable among his pillows. In his blue pyjamas and bird’s-eye scarf he looked delightfully handsome and easy as though there were nothing wrong with him. He pointed to the fireplace where the teapot was sitting. ‘HOT FOR YOU.’ He spoke in slow capitals, but he was smiling in his own covert way. He tried again: ‘Pretty nice cake.’
Mummie had been and gone. A few drops of clear China tea, no milk, no sugar, were left in her cup, and a sprig of rosemary, pinched to death, in the saucer. Papa’s good hand was wandering among the small necessaries on his bedside table. There was something he wanted.
‘No,’ he said when I offered him another cup of tea; and: ‘Horrible – horrible,’ to his barley water. ‘Po cupboard.’ He found the word with triumph. Oh, that bottle, and my tea had scarcely begun – but he waved that idea aside too. I looked again. One of his silver drinking cups was on top of the po cupboard. Rose kept them as bright as buttons. She thought he took his medicine more easily from them, as he could not see the size or colour of the dose. I put the cup into his good hand and hurried back to my tea. Usually he swallowed his medicine down with an exasperated flourish. Tonight, he sipped away at it slowly, looking at me over the top of his silver cup with approval and amusement.
‘Good girl, good girl,’ he achieved the words delightedly as I took the last scone. We both laughed. He went on shaking with laughter.
‘Look out, Papa, you’ll spill the stuff.’ I jumped up too late to take the cup out of his hand. He only giggled at the mishap. As the wet darkened and spread through his pyjama jacket, a smell like a small cloud hung close over his warm body and bed. I sniffed at it, and at the empty cup – whisky! Papa had been drinking whisky. And whisky could lead only to another stroke, to death. Stimulants were forbidden. I was appalled. But, when I looked at him, stilled and cheered from his nervous melancholy, the thought floated to me and away from me, the thought that he required a respite from the misery that held him in terrible polite dependence on us all.
But for his sake I banished the indulgent idea and concentrated my mind on the problem of how he had got hold of the whisky. There was no more of it in the diningroom now, or in the cellar, so someone must have bought it for him. I am not exactly slow-witted, and the answer came to me in less than a minute: ‘We must ask Rose if there is any more.’ I nearly choked on my own diplomacy.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘helps a lot. Good person. Good person.’
When Rose came in to take away the tea things, I followed her out of the room, the empty silver cup in my hand. It was hard to know what to say. She had drained authority away through her usefulness.
‘Rose,’ I said, ‘you know it’s not allowed.’
‘A drop left after the Christmas cake.’ She sounded careless and unrepentant. ‘And he needed it. And it did him good.’
‘Don’t you think the doctor knows best?’
‘Doctors must only go by their own rules.’ There was a resolute turn in her evasions.
30
‘Possibly you may remember,’ Mummie said when I told her about it (I had to tell someone), ‘who dismissed Nurse and put Rose in charge.’
‘It was Dr Coffey who suggested it.’
‘You did it between you. I knew something like this would happen. I was against the whole idea.’
‘Nurse was so beastly. So rude. Rose would do anything for him.’
‘Exactly.’ If she had been at her tapestry Mummie would have pinioned a flower as she said the word. But we were at the end of dinner. A Cox’s orange pippin sat on her green plate. She had moved her fingerbowl and its little mat, but that was as far as she would go in eating the apple.
I said: ‘Aren’t you going to speak to her? It could kill him.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said.
‘Perhaps you’ll speak to her? Or perhaps it will kill him?’
She eyed her apple. ‘Shall we go to the library?’ She put her unfolded napkin down beside her place and pushed back her chair. I had the feeling that she and Rose were allied and I was the intruder. It was a love circle, and Rose was included.
•
Rose swept on determinedly, insolent and inviolable in her care for Papa. The hairbrushing, the shaving, the scenting were her business. The delicate food was all contrived by Rose, and every day she asked for less help from Tommy or from me. She was very strong, rather magnificent in her health and in her ignoring of any time off or comfort for herself.
I maintained the rota of my visits to Papa. And every evening now the smell of whisky hung clearer round him. Unquestioned, unreprimanded, the drink lifted him into a silly sort of buoyancy. I would wait a little longer before taking any drastic step. The Christmas cake whisky must soon be finished, I thought. But, after weeks had gone by, Papa was still enjoying his evening drink. He looked at me longingly across his silver cup, and I took a decision.
‘You’d like another?’ He nodded. ‘Just one,’ I said. ‘I forget. Where does she keep the bottle? In here?’ I tried the po cupboard.
‘No.’
‘In the chest of drawers?’
It was hunt the thimble. ‘Fool. Fool,’ he raged and moaned as I coasted about. It was rather a horrid game, but at last in the empty clothes basket I found the bottle – more than three-quarters full of Scotch whisky. I knew I was going to deprive him of this pleasure. I knew I must. Rose was buying whisky for him and I was going to prevent her. In the morning I would speak to Dr Coffey. Thursday was his day.
Next morning when he came hurrying down the steps, stockings and breeches under his overcoat, his white moustache gleaming and staring in the cold, Rose was behind him, like a nurse waiting for last words about her patient. I thought, really, she goes too far. But it was a brace of woodcock she was after.
‘When were they shot?’ was all she said. And when he told her, a calculation as to when they should be cooked passed clearly over her face. ‘He’ll enjoy them, doctor,’ she said, and went away with his present, faultlessly polite and devoted.
‘Ah, Aroon child, cold old morning.’ He was bustling round his car to the driving seat.
‘I must ask you something.’ Impaled on my urgency, he stopped, his impatience melted in kindness and concern. He listened with absolute attention while I told him of my suspicions: of my present certainty that Rose was buying and supplying whisky; that in ignorance she would kill him; that she was getting above herself . . . I stopped.
‘Should I get you another nurse, I wonder? Of course, Rose understands him.’
‘Well, she knows just how long he likes his woodcock cooked.’
He looked at me in an odd, surprised way. ‘If that was all,’ he said, ‘she’d be replaceable tomorrow. As it is, I think,’ his voice turned back into a doctor’s voice, ‘it wouldn’t help him in his condition at all to make any change. Change is drastic. A drastic thing.’
‘I do see that, Dr Coffey. All I want is for you to forbid her to give him whisky. So that it’s not just me . . . just me against them . . .’
