by Molly Keane
‘You are Uncle Ulick,’ I shouted.
‘They call me “Uncle”; rather unfortunate I always think. I haven’t the remotest connection with them, or any interest if it comes to that – still less since I’m writing a history of the family. I’ve never been so bored. I’ve got so far, and now I can’t think what to put. Actually, there’s nothing to say. Pedigrees are what I like and they don’t have a proper one.’
Thinking of the assurance and beauty I had seen so often, but so distantly, and the wealth of glamour that surrounded me as I sat with an empty glass in my hand, I could only goggle helplessly at his disloyalty.
‘Do you know the Crowhurst girls?’ For once in my life I was glad to say that I did. ‘That’s an interesting family. Three lines go back to my own lot and we go back directly to Cahulahoun, the Hound of Ulster. I could call myself Prince Drumnasole if it wasn’t for this rotten union baronetcy tied round my neck.’
‘Sir,’ I said, and it was the bravest and most successful word I had spoken yet, ‘may I have another glass of wine?’
‘I like that “sir,”’ he said approvingly. ‘Obviously you know how to talk to princes. You must come to luncheon in my pavilion. I make very good mayonnaise.’ He filled his glass again. ‘Not much left in this,’ he said, tipping the bottle into mine. ‘Too bad.’ He put the bottle on a table beside my chair. I was in agony, thinking someone would come back and suppose I had drunk the lot.
‘You’re Beleek’s daughter?’ He looked at me in a hooded, private way.
‘Granddaughter,’ I said.
‘Ugly Tom we used to call him, but I understood his girl was very good-looking.’
‘That was my mother,’ I shouted.
‘Extraordinary.’ He was talking intimately to himself. ‘And all the girls here are wonderful lookers. Superb quality. I don’t know where it comes from. Not in the book. Good vicarage stuff at the best. Lawyers, lawyers.’ He shuddered. He got himself onto his feet as the kind pretty girl came back. She was followed by a quite splendid man – splendid, but distant to a degree that paralysed the air around him. His refuge from speaking was the state of the fire. He rang the bell. He went away. He came back with a frightened boy and a great load of logs. He directed their placement on the bed of ash. Then he sat down to turn the wheel of the fan that blew air below the flat hearth.
‘I like doing this.’ He settled happily to his work.
Again I was in a vacuum. At a distant table, loaded with bottles, Uncle Ulick was standing as close as possible to the one whose name was still unknown to me. I heard her say: ‘Oh, Uncle Ulick, you are looking filthy.’ ‘It’s my tie. You do it for me, my darling.’ How different his voice sounded now from the tone of denigration I had heard in it before. He was imploring her youth to do something for him, to lean towards him, to be kind. Her arms were so long that she kept an airy distance between them as she retied his tie and murmured to him. ‘Can’t hear a word. Come closer,’ he shouted.
I heard her say: ‘. . . do be kind. You do promise? Oh, you are kind.’ The same words she had used to me, and in the same tone of voice.
‘All right,’ he answered with a sort of massive petulance, ‘but first I must put some brandy in this.’
I was suspended in doubt, in a suspicion that soon grew to certainty. The man blowing up the fire stopped his work and pointed to the bottle beside my chair before he spoke to me, directly and for the first time: ‘I bet Uncle Ulick emptied that one.’
‘Well, yes.’ I met his eyes, and thanked God for any link of complicity.
‘Mary Ann asked him. We’re short one man tonight.’
He had been asked for me – I was to be kind to him; he was to be kind to me. I felt a little sick. I wished I knew how to be rude. When she came back to me with a dish of nuts and a great champagne cocktail, my resentment forced tears up to the backs of my eyes.
At least I could honestly think her dress was quite horrid. I could pity her for that. A short white chemise, straight as a pinafore, not even a sequin to liven things up, it was high to the collar-bone, where a six-inch diamond bar held one minimal orchid. At the back it was open to a long U of brown flesh – an unfortunate garment for a girl as big (if in different places) as myself.
‘Do drink. You must eat up.’ She forced biscuits and nuts on me as if I were an ailing pet. ‘Dinner won’t be for years. Oo, you twit, you twerp, you oaf, you person, what a degrading fire.’ She was talking to her husband now. I supposed he was her husband as he didn’t answer. Uncle Ulick came and perched dangerously on the arm of my chair: ‘You seemed interested in my family, so, as I was telling you, we go back to the Hound of Ulster . . .’
I faked absorbed attention and tried out a few ‘Oos’ as he went back through the Crusades, where his forebears had been such career boys.
‘Oh you are kind,’ Mary Ann murmured to me as we all stood, uncertain as to who went in to dinner first. ‘Uncle Ulick loves you and I’ve put him beside you, do you mind? You have Kenny Norton too; be nice, don’t let him drop off. Last time he broke a plate and covered his face in raspberry mousse. Too miserable. He’s never been just the same since he hit the open ditch halfway up at Kempton.’
That was when I knew I was going to be near enough to touch the most famous gentleman rider of the day. It would be something to put in my letter to Richard. I wouldn’t stress it, of course, but when I wrote again I was going to let him know that Kenny (I would write ‘Kenny’) had spoken to me. He didn’t speak while we drank our soup, clear as a mountain stream, and just about as tasteless. Uncle Ulick poured a whole glass of sherry into his soup plate, on the bottom of which I could see a tortoise sprawling among weeds and water-flowers. He put down his spoon and sighed out his disgust. Then he brightened up.
‘Rather a funny incident – I’m a terrible shot you know – it was when Ethelred the Unready was shooting with the Drumnasole of that day, and one of my ancestors’ arrows . . .’ on it went. He was too deaf for comment or interruption.
An inch of sole, in a rather delicious sauce; then terrible venison – Uncle Ulick ate his red-currant jelly with his pudding spoon, which I thought rather grand, and still I had no word from Kenny Norton. He didn’t seem to be saying much to the girl on his other side either, but there was a kind of familiar happy distance between them, not the gulf of worshipping unfamiliarity that separated him and me. At last he spoke. And what he said stunned me: ‘Saw Richard at Newbury.’ A chasm of distance closed between us. He knew about Richard and me.
‘Are you sure?’ I said. ‘He’s in Africa.’
‘Large as life at Newbury. Losing money too.’ He went back to his dreadful venison and his silence. My heart raced. My hands gripped the edge of the table. He was grotesquely mistaken. I had to confirm this.
‘Have you known Richard long?’ It sounded so baldly conversational.
‘On and off. We’re some sort of cousins.’
So he must know. All the same, Richard was in Africa. ‘When did he get back?’
‘Long enough . . .’ He stopped. ‘Just back, I suppose. He was very brown.’
Just back. After weeks on the sea. That made sense of his silence. Tomorrow could bring me a letter. The next day could bring me Richard. Everything in my mind was rhapsody, Fear left me. I turned easily from Uncle Ulick. All that I had practised in the car flowed smoothly back into my head.
‘What about Seamonster for the Gold Cup?’ And I could remember every one of the other entries without effort.
‘Funny little horse . . . funny temperament . . .’ We were off and away. I had all his attention. Now I looked with confidence towards a happy evening and a tomorrow of weightless certainty.
32
Dinner was over. Some of the early arrivals were dancing in the ballroom.
‘Promise to enjoy yourself,’ Mary Ann implored me as we stood together in the respectable gloom of the hall. Through an archway Uncle Ulick came towards me. Mary Ann smiled kindly, covertly, on each of us in turn: ‘I want you to h
ave a beautiful time.’ Uncle Ulick had two dance programmes dangling on their pencil strings from his white-gloved hand. ‘I’ve put myself down for one, three, seven, nine, and eleven,’ he said virtuously. ‘After that I shall go home to bed. I don’t know about you, I’m not very good at these modern dances, but Mary Ann will be disappointed if we don’t try. Shall we?’
‘What do they call this tune?’ he asked me after we had made three circuits of the ballroom, our feet moving in a different world from the music.
‘“The Birth of the Blues,”’ I told him.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘fortunately that seems to be the death of them. Shall we have a drink? Oh, not in the bar.’ He impelled me towards the room where we had had our drinks before dinner. If Uncle Ulick had bought a drink at the champagne bar, I might have become involved and heard the magic words: May I have a dance? But no. He hurried me on to the further door, where a manservant was waiting. ‘Good idea,’ Uncle Ulick said. ‘None of the hoi-polloi in here. Just the family. Now, can I offer you what some people call A Brandy?’
Back in the first salon, that anteroom to life and dancing, I met a girl I knew – someone to speak to. She chatted in a pleased, easy way till a man touched her arm: ‘Ours,’ he said, and they went off to dance, leaving me monstrously alone. A kind old man with a gammy leg advanced with gentle enquiries about Papa.
‘I’m not much of a performer,’ he said, ‘but would you care to . . .’ Halfway round the ballroom, we came to a merciful halt on two gold chairs. ‘Don’t really get the course,’ he gasped apologetically. Later I saw Kenny Norton immersed in talk with two other men. He must see me. He never looked up. Nor did Uncle Ulick appear for his next dance.
I smiled, and hummed, and stood carelessly as the hall emptied into the ballroom and I waited, only for Uncle Ulick. Presently I took myself to the ladies’ cloakroom, the classic refuge of the unwanted. I hurried downstairs again, hoping that I looked as if I were keeping a partner waiting. I stood about, smiling, compressed, submerged in politeness; aching in my isolation; longing to be alone; to be away; to be tomorrow’s person; reading Richard’s letter perhaps; waiting for him in reality. But there was no respite from the party that flowed round me. Beautiful creatures, men’s hands guiding, just not touching, their backs passed by as they went in to dance and came back to drink. Lucky creatures, unknowing as a herd of antelope. I saw them as cherished and set apart. I saw Kenny put his arm round a girl, small and ugly as a child’s pony. I turned my eyes away. A kind middle-aged couple gave me a drink and sighed about Papa with real regret before they went off to play bridge and left me almost longing for Uncle Ulick.
He came back punctually for number seven, and as we struggled in the dance his hand crept resolutely about my backbone. My backbone crept too. ‘Shall we sit the next out, little girl?’ We didn’t get as far as the free drink. In the second salon he left me on a Knole sofa near the fire. ‘Be back,’ he said. There was sweat on his forehead, and he walked away as though he were sailing with great care above his feet. I wondered if he could be rather drunk.
Alone, but with a man, ardent if old, coming back to me, I felt more natural, looser somehow in my joints than I had felt for hours. I have a greedy feeling for total luxury, and waiting here alone I was immersed in its deepest textures. I took note of some ideas that I should perhaps adopt in a house that would be my own; the pale slimy satin cushions on the rougher brocade I liked, and the great basins full of white hyacinths, all their cones of bells evenly grown together, not one mature beyond another. There was a second scent behind the rich penetration of the hyacinths. I prowled the room. I found it. In a long shallow glass box stephanotis lay among its leather leaves. I smelt it, and it breathed out at me like an animal. A turmoil seized on me: the vigour that comes with the full moon.
I stopped prowling about and went back to the chair near the fire. I was safe here while the music was playing – safe to be alone and unpitied. Soon Uncle Ulick would be back. Soon I might rebuff him. I leaned across the table near me, covered in Tatlers, Country Lifes, Bystanders, Punch; I would make my choice among them. I would be reading contentedly; should any couple pass I need not see them. I chose the Tatler and turned to the doings of the great unknown who hunted with the Quorn and the Belvoir, who danced at hunt balls in historic English houses.
A full-page picture changed all the fugitive glamour of the chase and the ballroom to a quiet contemplation of marriage and motherhood as understood by the proper sort of English family. Here, by ornamental water, a young but solid mother sat on a stone bench. A blond child leaned against her; another squatted at her feet. The stone seat and her knee she shared with three terriers and a Pekinese. Melted far in the distance, beyond lawns and terraces, the Palladian façade of a great house filled in the picture. For me, as I looked, a transport in time took my breath. I have been here before, I have heard this before, where? when? The answer came to me clear and comfortable: Mrs Brock’s happy days, and her tales of Lady Grizel and the jolly little boys, and the dogs.
Behind this picture there existed a certain past, and a future when a world of love should enclose me in just such precincts. The moment could not be endless. I let my breath go. I turned the page over.
Ah, Newbury. Next November meeting, more than likely, I would be there with Richard: nodding coolly to Kenny Norton: kindly, so kindly, inviting Mary Ann to stay at Stoke Charity: walking on careless feet from Members’ Stand to Owners and Trainers, last Horse Show’s days come sure and true for evermore. Now I could see without envy the photograph of just such a girl as myself, wearing the very coat Richard had given me. She sat balancing easily on her shooting-stick, Newmarket boots roughly elegant on her supporting legs. She held an enormous pair of glasses to her eyes; the man standing behind her must have lent them to her, although her own were hanging round her neck. I had a feeling he would snatch them back to read the race for himself. I felt a surge of affiliation and sympathy towards these two elegant leisured people. Then I read the caption: ‘Finding a winner – Mr Richard Massingham, elder son of Major “Wobbly” and Lady Grizel Massingham, and the Honourable Alice Brownrigg, who have just announced their engagement.’
For a minute I disbelieved. I denied myself a second look. I put the paper down. I found myself hiding it. When I had done this I knew that it was true, but I could accept nothing. I was on the floor bowing my head, rocking myself against acceptance; I was a rooted thing, torn about in a volume of storm.
Not tears, but pain, seized on me, my insides griping and loosening. The absolute need of getting to the lavatory possessed me. Even my terrible distress had to find this absurd necessity. As I walked carefully down the long, warm room, I had the idea that the light had changed like a short winter afternoon, and the room and my life were both spread with sand and salt.
Back in the hall the fun of the party was blazing up now. I ploughed my way through the drinking, chattering, easy people to the foot of the staircase. The crowd was as impervious to interruption as the crowd at a race-meeting, where faces known and unknown float and pass one by, occupied and avoiding recognition. So I saw, without a nod or a smile, Mr Kiely standing with some of his friends. I didn’t have to know he was there. I breasted on. Kenny Norton put a hand on my arm: ‘Come and dance,’ he said. The miracle was late.
‘I’m sorry, nothing left,’ I said. I felt his appalled stare following me as I flogged on up the stairs to the salvation of the lavatory. I had to get there; pain was twisting in me again, and above it the dreadful childish call: I’m going to be sick – sick in the basin. Partly in the plate holding the Bromo, partly over my dress, into my shoes, on the floor, I was sick. I must escape before it was found, get myself into my coat and run, with this taste in my mouth, and the smell under my coat going with me.
In the hall the crowd had thinned. Music was playing and those lucky ones who danced to it were distanced from me, far and foreign. I was at the hall door, almost on my way home, but the door was locked.
I turned the handle violently. This was the last cruelty; I must get out. The studded door loomed. I shook the lock with both hands. A voice beside me said: ‘I think Jody Kenny in the bar has the key.’ I looked round and down at Mr Kiely, immaculate in his black tail coat, his white tie just too large. ‘Are you on your own?’ he said, when he had opened the door for me into the blessed frozen night.
‘Yes. I was dining.’
‘Ah. So you didn’t enjoy the party?’
‘Goodnight.’ I kept my voice cold and steady against his familiarity and his helpfulness. ‘Thank you so much.’
‘Drive carefully,’ he cautioned me; ‘the roads are all ice.’ He went back into the house, into a great gulf of light.
I was escaping. I was running from Mary Ann’s terrible kindness, from Uncle Ulick’s talking and groping and desertion; I ran from the indifference that was shown me through the endless hours, timed by the numbers of dances when I did not dance and could not hide. I would be alone now with my pain. I would take it home with me, and go to bed with it, and suffer it always, for it would never change, I knew. Grief possessed me, but I would and must behave. No mourning. No whining.
At last I was in the car, pulling the rug round me. It was familiar. Soon I would take off my clothes and get into bed; that was all there was for me.
And not even that, it seemed, because I could not start the car. I was sobbing before I gave up – waited – tried again, waited again, hoped, despaired. There was no attendant among the parked cars; it was too early for departures and largesses. I would try the starting handle myself, though I was afraid of it. And rightly so; the kick nearly broke my arm before the engine gulped and quenched.
‘Ah, you poor little thing, it’s a pity about you,’ a voice spoke near me. ‘You got a great knocking about.’ It was the wrong kind of voice; that was my first impression before I recognised Mr Kiely in his overcoat and tweed hat, and dreadful scarf. ‘Sit in out of the cold,’ he said, and I obeyed, although it was just as cold in the car. After ten minutes, he gave up.
