by Molly Keane
‘I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘you’re here for the night.’
‘Oh, no.’ I knew I could never face them – not if I had to sit in the car till the morning.
‘Or, if you prefer it,’ he said, ‘I’ll drive you home.’
‘Oh, would you? Would you really? It’s miles out of your way.’
‘Ah, come on.’ He took the rug off my knees and wrapped it round the engine. ‘I’ll tell the garage to collect the car in the morning.’
He thought of everything. In his car I leaned as far as possible away from him. As our bodies and our breath warmed the air I was conscious of the sour little smell creeping about under my coat and beneath the rug. When he offered me a cigarette and lit one himself, I guessed a whiff had drifted from me. I must say something to take his attention off it.
‘What a good party.’ My voice shook.
‘Was it? I wouldn’t know.’
‘You didn’t enjoy it?’
‘No. Did you?’
‘Yes. Awfully.’
He waited. ‘Kenny Norton was there,’ he said unexpectedly.
‘Yes. I sat beside him at dinner. I’m afraid I cut one of his dances.’ It was almost true. It was true. It sounded impossible.
‘He has the ride on Seamonster at Leopardstown.’
‘Kenny? So he has.’
‘Should the two of us go up and see the race?’
How to answer him within politeness? No one could possibly call me a snob, but some situations promise only total embarrassment. Papa’s friends and the kind Mary Anns would pass me by with a word, or without a word. None of them, none of us, knew Mr Kiely.
As I cringed in my corner of the car, hesitating for the final refusal, I saw again two other pictures: the easy ardent girl at Newbury, intent for the moment on horses, and the calm young woman sitting by water with two glorious children. Tonight, for a minute out of time, these had been pictures of myself, in the world belonging to me, in the world lost to me.
In the shape of the word ‘lost’ my grief bore me down – what had I lost? Nothing, for I had nothing, and my heart was bursting for nothing. But burst it would, and into loud crying.
‘I am so sorry,’ I apologised, almost whispering, I was so ashamed.
‘Better now?’ He was whispering too, as again he tucked the rug neatly round me. ‘What you need,’ he let down the window an inch or two on his side, ‘is a man to look after you. How would you like the idea?’
I couldn’t see him, sitting there beside me, but his voice had the wrong texture, the wrong colour; it was as wrong to me as a false note in music. Ashamed of myself as I felt, his sympathy was unattractive, even alarming. He stopped the car before the gates of Temple Alice and put his hand on my knee: ‘When you need someone,’ he said, ‘will you think of me?’
One of Mummie’s phrases came to me and I spoke it in her voice: ‘You must be out of your mind,’ I said, and I knocked his hand away. In spite of my heartbreak and tears, I was, after all, Aroon St Charles, and I felt it too. He didn’t answer, and when we got to the house he didn’t get out to open the car door for me. He didn’t even answer my ‘Goodnight.’ Perhaps I had really hurt him?
In the cold of the hall I loomed to myself, a great creature within limitless suffering. I took off my shoes before I went upstairs. Step by stockinged step I padded past Mummie’s door. Lemon-shaped above my head, the dome held the perfect form of winter air, as it had held the light and breath of summer evenings. Within this hollow of cold and truth I gave up my dream, its core of fact, its wings of hope, shrivelling to absurdity; I knew that here stood the changeless me, the truly unwanted person.
A streak of light under Papa’s door made a faraway sliver in the darkness. It made a small change and lift in my heart too . . . If he was awake he must need something and I was here to give him whatever he needed. I put down my shoes and my bag, using both hands to turn the door knob softly, in case he had fallen asleep with his lamp still lighted.
He was not asleep. He was leaning back, hollowing his wall of pillows. His eyelids were loosely downwards on his cheeks, and in his entire expression there was a grave concentration of pleasure. Rose sat beside him, her head bent low as if she were whispering; her hand was under the bedclothes warming his foot – his phantom foot that felt the cold as much as his real foot. Rose snatched her hand from under the sheets, and Papa opened his eyes to look up and towards her in a surprised, questioning way. He didn’t see me standing in the doorway. Only Rose saw me, and her eyes blazed, raging, across the bed.
‘His feet are perishing.’ She spoke in a curiously apologetic way as though I might not see or understand that she was warming his feet. Papa did not even try to say goodnight as I went away. He heaved a little on his pillows, turning as much as he was able towards Rose. Before I shut the door I caught the breath of whisky on the warm air.
What must I do, I thought, standing in my own room again, what must I do now, tomorrow and for ever? I put my hand down my bed to where my hotwater-bottle lay, cold as a fish. Here was something I could change, something I must give myself, for without it I would never get to sleep.
Passing Papa’s door, I looked away from the slit of light; passing Mummie’s door I held my breath. Then I was on the staircase, and turning off it down the back stairs with its muffled household smells. In the kitchen my candle expelled the light of the sky and the dark of the trees coming through the unshuttered windows; it made its own giraffe-shaped shadows up the walls. I had a slight feeling of adventure, of getting level with Rose, in this kitchen which was hers. I moved the top ring on the range and put the kettle closer to the heat of the fire. When it boiled up I had a longing for a cup of tea. Why not? I found the thumb-bruised tin where they kept the kitchen tea, and, near the window, a milk jug wreathed in dull roses. I sat on a chair near the heat, waiting a minute for the tea to draw.
In the space of waiting there came a reunion with a moment nearer than the present, when mice had flickered in their cages and I could smell the faint appropriate marriage of hot milk and Marie biscuits. Then love and trust had swelled the air round me, and there had been a wild nonchalance expressed by a hat flung down with its wet pink roses. For a breath I was held in that time before love and trust had failed me. Now, as before, the moment broke into ugliness and terror.
It was Rose, plunging along the passages, crying, calling; throwing her body across the kitchen table, howling; dispossessed of all authority, a wild creature, just as Mrs Brock had been on the evening of her drowning.
‘He’s going . . . he doesn’t know me . . .’ she was gasping.
‘What have you done to him?’
‘Ah, it’s just a little turn he took.’ Her minimising was frightening; it was on a different scale from her grief. She was hiding something.
‘You’ve killed him.’ I stood above her; her head was down on the table between her spread arms.
‘He wanted it,’ she said.
‘I told you whisky would kill him. I told you, didn’t I?’
She looked at me from a distance. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you told me.’ She said it gratefully as if my accusation were some kind of reprieve.
We went back to his room together. He was breathing in a knotted, groaning rhythm. She stood and looked at him. She had been his nurse and washed and dressed him like a doll, and sat him up and laid him down. Now she stood apart from the difficulties of death, accepting all the strife and pain he was in as necessary before death; nothing could ease him, so she stood apart looking on as though at the death of an animal. I felt the same. He was changed. Changing and lessening every moment from a person to a thing. I agreed with her. It was futile to lift him or bring him any comfort. In fact I was afraid to touch him, and Rose leaned far away at the foot of the bed, staring, waiting for him to die. Half an hour ago she had been giving him whisky and warming his feet.
‘Mummie?’ I whispered to her. ‘Shouldn’t we tell Mummie?’
She shook her head. �
��He wouldn’t like it.’
I knew she was right. Papa would spare her anything.
‘I’ll get Dr Coffey.’ I had to speak more loudly against his dreadful breathing. Then I remembered I had no car. ‘Tommy can go for him,’ I said. ‘I’ll wake him.’ I turned away from Papa. I was at the doorway when I felt the change behind me – a stillness, filling the room to its walls. I turned back and looked at Rose. I didn’t want to look at Papa. ‘He’s better, isn’t he. His breathing’s better . . .’
‘He’s gone.’ Rose’s voice was half its size. She stood there far away from him, gripping the bed rail. Then, as though it were an immediate necessity, she rushed across to the window opposite his bed, rattling back the curtains, pushing up the lower sash, and reaching up the strong length of her arms to tear down the top sash. It was as if she were opening a way to nowhere and waiting for something to pass. If Papa had a spirit she was giving it freedom. I knew it was an ignorant Roman Catholic superstition, and I felt it a gross impertinence. I wished I could think of something to keep her in her proper place. But all I could think of was that she should be the one to tell Mummie.
‘I’ll tell her with her morning tea,’ Rose said firmly, ‘when I have him looking nice.’ She looked away from me as though I were of no account, and almost eagerly, I thought, at Papa. I wondered what she was going to do to him now that he was so completely her doll. I had to be grateful for her competence; for her recovery from the creature that had lain across the kitchen table, torn this way and that way before my eyes. Now her ability was a raft on empty waters. I needn’t think about what she would have to do for Papa.
Out again in the dark corridor, alone with the thought of my cold bed, I felt a sick shivering go through me. I thought what a crash there would be if I fell, and I almost wished for a disturbance that would bring me some pity. But there was no such thing. Only good behaviour about Death. So I sat down on the floor before I fell down and waited for the weakness to pass over. Sitting there I felt my grief for Papa and my lost love for Richard as joining together. Only Papa had known that we were lovers. Now half my despair was my own secret. No one could take it from me, or lessen it, or tell of it. My great body had been blessed by love. True. It was true. Some merciless shaft had been ready to pierce me with denial. I must run from it, and keep that truth whole for myself. I could hear Rose stirring busily, sure-footed, behind Papa’s door, and the idea that soon she might be going to the bathroom for water got me onto my feet.
As I stood up I thought of that pot of tea sitting on the kitchen stove and my wish for it felt guilty in all the tragic circumstances. But, the more unseemly I thought it, the stronger came my wish for a cup of hot tea, perhaps a slice of bread and butter, and my hotwater-bottle – how had I forgotten that? They were three necessities, and I was glad of them. There was someone I could help, if it was only myself. But I was relieved to think that there would be nobody there to watch me drinking tea and buttering a slice of bread.
33
Mummie was rigorously set on perfect behaviour. She was eating some breakfast when I came into the diningroom. She put down her knife to write something on the back of an opened-out envelope. ‘There’s such a lot to be done.’ She spoke in her ordinary voice. ‘So many things to remember. One has to be businesslike.’ She wrote something down. ‘And put out the spirit-lamp,’ she said, ‘when you’ve had enough breakfast.’
Eggs and bacon and coffee, the dogs’ porridge and the winter sun coming in on long slanting prongs through the high windows – except that the world had stopped, things were going on much as usual.
‘What must we do this morning?’
I had to break the indecent noise of shovelling down eggs and bacon; my swallowing had an immense sound.
‘I,’ she repeated, ‘I have sent Tommy for Dr Coffey. Rose says that is the first thing to be done. After that he can go on to Kildeclan and get your friend the solicitor to help me about—’ she looked round the table, unable to say ‘funeral’ or ‘coffin.’ Instead she said: ‘Rather a pity about the car. But you mustn’t blame yourself. Really not.’
‘She wouldn’t start, Mummie. It was freezing.’
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘it might have made no difference. One never knows, does one?’ She wrote something down on the envelope. ‘They said someone was waiting to see me.’ She pressed the little mother-of-pearl bell on the table, and when Breda answered it (all importance and restraint), she said: ‘What did I want? Who is waiting?’
‘The steward, madam.’
‘Oh, yes. Tell Foley I’m ready to see him now. In the hall.’ She got up and walked out of the room with brisk intention. She must have forgotten the envelope and pencil beside her plate. On my way to give myself a second cup of coffee I looked at it to see what plans she had outlined for the day. The envelope was covered with doodling scribbles and isolated words, making no kind of sense or guide. Really rather silly.
When I went through the hall to call the dogs in to their breakfast Rose, not Mummie, was in consultation, not with Foley but with Mr Kiely. She had the kitchen scribbling pad on the table and I could see it was written over by her in tidy lists of necessities, marked: 1, 2, 3 – very different from Mummie’s envelope. I read: 1. Near Mr Hubert. Not the vault. 2. Millinery department, Switzers, Grafton Street. Send three black felt hats on appro. 3. Wreath from the staff.
‘Good morning.’ Mr Kiely looked very brisk in his smart little overcoat. ‘I heard the sad news about the Major so I came along to see if I could help about the . . . arrangements.’ It was a relief to hear someone speaking in an ordinary voice – the first I had heard that morning, except for Mummie’s. His businesslike tone conveyed a discreet denial of our contacts of the night before. Perhaps I had imagined things, I was so sick and blinded then.
‘Thank you so much,’ I said. ‘It would be a great help.’
Rose picked her pad up off the table and came a little closer: ‘Madam is so grateful to Mr Kiely for his prompt attention –’ she spoke very grandly – ‘and I have this list for him of her wishes in all matters.’ Mr Kiely looked from Rose to me.
‘Maybe you had better come to my office and telephone?’ he suggested. It was as if he had told Rose to stand aside. He took the list gently out of her hand, and read it aloud to me. His action made nonsense of her presence, and this pleased me. I stood beside him, looking down the list, while I made further suggestions.
Rose left us, going quietly away, as a servant should, but returning, within a few minutes, shepherding, shadowing, almost compelling Mummie towards us down the cold distances of the hall. She stood behind Mummie, as if to support her, or to supply a tactful hint, or a helpful reminder, should they be needed.
Mummie gave Mr Kiely the tips of her tiny, straightened fingers and bowed her head briefly at his condolence. ‘Rose thought there were some other questions to decide about tomorrow.’
‘It can’t be tomorrow, Mummie,’ I said. ‘There won’t be time.’
‘Perhaps, Aroon, Mr Kiely and I had better discuss this. Shall we go into the library, Mr Kiely?’ She turned away, expecting him to follow, and he turned towards me.
‘I made arrangements for the garage to collect your car –’
‘My car. How kind,’ Mummie corrected and commended him.
‘– and to send the account in to my office.’ Mr Kiely was still speaking to me.
‘If only the car had been here last night.’ Mummie spoke as though each word were drawn out of her by pincers. ‘However,’ she added, ‘we mustn’t think about that.’
I was stunned by the assumption that Papa might have lived but for my idiot incompetence or neglect over the car. If I had gone for Dr Coffey as Rose came howling into the kitchen, Papa would still have died in less than an hour. There was a pause until Mummie said: ‘Rose, would you come with us and bring our list?’ Rose threw me a polite, pitying look as she shut the library door.
Because they had shut me out I was still standing in
the hall, raging with my grievance, when Dr Coffey arrived.
‘My dear child, it wouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference if I’d been with him all night.’ Instead of being in his usual flurry to get away to his next patient, he seemed to have all the day’s leisure to hear what I had to say.
‘I know she was giving him whisky,’ I insisted. I had to say it. ‘I told you before, didn’t I? That’s what killed him. Wasn’t it?’
‘Whatever she gave him,’ Dr Coffey said, ‘made no difference. And if he died happy, what about it?’
‘He didn’t die happy. His breathing – if you’d been there . . .’
‘He was unconscious, my dear child.’ He took my hands strongly in his. ‘We all did our best for him. God rest his soul, he was a grand man.’
‘And will you please tell them the car made no difference?’
‘I will, of course. It’s only the truth. Try and put the whisky out of your mind too. It was death from natural causes, and Rose was a great nurse to him.’
‘Oh, I know. She was sitting up warming his bad foot when I came in last night, this morning, whenever it was.’
‘Death from natural causes,’ Dr Coffey repeated with more certainty. He said no more about Rose. My admission of her devotion seemed to stop him.
‘I’ll run up and see the Major,’ he said, just as if this were one of his frequent visits. I almost expected there might be a brace of woodcock in his car. It was just the weather for them, I thought. As I stood and shivered in the familiar cold of the hall, the dogs came dispassionately towards me. They seemed unattractive and dispirited. I was just in time to prevent one of them from peeing on the baize hall-door curtain, their favourite cold-weather lavatory. They conveyed to me a clear picture of myself: the unmarried daughter who doesn’t play bridge, letting out the dogs for evermore. Mummie and Rose would be in power over me, over Temple Alice, until I was old, or middle-aged at best, beyond even the remembrance of time past. They may starve me too – the idea filled me with panic. Mummie doesn’t eat and Rose won’t cook for me alone. They will enjoy starving me. It will be called economy. Daughters at home are supposed to do the flowers. Mummie does the flowers . . .
