by Molly Keane
Presently Richard’s father came back. He was leaning over me. ‘Can you get up?’
‘You needn’t shout.’ I didn’t want everybody to realise he was what Papa calls a bit foxed. ‘I can hear you.’
‘Come on then, my dear girl; we’re going to miss the whole thing.’
‘Yes.’ I allowed the words to crawl out agreeably: ‘We mustn’t miss Papa’s funeral, must we?’ I looked him over. He was wearing a dark overcoat, so cut and contrived as to take at least a stone from his weight. I thought of Napoleon. No. A Russian officer. The thin stripes in his trousers fizzed together and separated before my eyes. ‘I’m glad you look so splendid.’
‘You’ve a worse head than your father.’
‘Don’t insult my father. I love my father.’ I couldn’t feel angry.
‘That’s all right – so do I. Always have.’
‘Always shall. Say it.’ I put my hand over his and he gripped it and pulled me to my feet. I towered over him laughing. So funny, I didn’t mind being tall. Rather nice. But there was something I must do. I must pay for my drink. I must be meticulous. At the bar I gave the girl a pound note.
‘No, no, no.’ He wouldn’t allow it.
‘No, no, no.’ It was my turn to say it. ‘This was my own idea.’
‘Don’t be silly.’ He stuffed the note back into my bag. ‘Sure you’re all right?’ He looked so bleak with worry that I began to laugh. Dizzy from happiness and laughter let free, I clung to a pillar. The station seemed top-heavy; it needed more support. At that moment I could have borne the world on my shoulders. My strength and certainty were so immense. Even when I slipped and fell on the ice outside the station I went down forgiving its treachery, and when I tried to get up I laughed and moaned together at the shocking pain in my ankle.
‘Now we are souped,’ he said. ‘I can’t carry you, can I? Out of the question. Stay your ground while I find a strong porter.’
So I sat there on the flags, still as a mouse, warding off the pain, until, as if past trees in a wood, I heard his returning voice: ‘My friend’s rather under the weather. Broken something now, I shouldn’t wonder. Can’t put a toe to the ground, and I see very little prospect of luncheon before or after this funeral.’
‘There’s a restaurant car on the five-thirty; you might get a cup of tea.’ It was an official voice. The station master loomed above me, illumined in gold braid.
‘Perhaps a couple of poached eggs?’ Major Massingham insisted.
‘It’s a sad occasion for poached eggs.’ The station master meant Papa I knew, but why sound so disapproving?
‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘we’ll miss him terribly.’ I spoke very clearly.
‘The poor thing—’ the station master said accusingly to Major Massingham.
‘All my stupidity.’ I thought it was kind of him to feel responsible for the ice and my fall. Very kind.
‘If you both put your arms round me,’ I said, ‘I expect I can hop as far as the car.’
‘And why not?’ said the station master.
Gently and kindly they sustained each step. The comfort of their support went through me. I leaned on each in turn, distributing myself as fairly as I was able. Major Massingham smelt delicious. The station master smelt like the station: scalding steam on hot iron, hot feet on cold flags. I leaned on him more trustingly to show that I felt no preference either way.
‘Easy does it,’ he kept saying, ‘take it easy.’
Major Massingham left me in the station master’s arms when we had hobbled as far as the car. ‘It’s not an original T model, is it? It can’t be. I’ve never driven one actually.’
‘We might get a boy from the garage.’
‘Oh, no. What fun. Do let me. I’ve always longed to.’
‘My eleven-forty-two is due now, it’s ten-after-twelve.’ The station master sounded as if he were going to leave us. I held him more closely.
‘Don’t give it a thought,’ I told him. ‘You’ve been so kind, so wonderful.’
When they had lifted me into the car and wrapped me in the blue face-cloth rug with its undefeated fur lining, tears eased into my eyes.
‘Let go his hand; we really must get on.’ Major Massingham settled himself excitedly behind the steering wheel. ‘Which of these jobs is the accelerator? Don’t tell me, don’t tell me. What fun. Clutch? Ah, I have it. Bang in for low gear? Don’t worry, I’ve read about it. Hand brake? Right. We’re off—’
Papa’s orchids leaped and subsided on the seat behind us. ‘Never look back,’ I said to myself, ‘and don’t distract the driver.’ Not that I could. The pain in my foot had eased, and a hot, sugary warmth filled me. As though he knew how happy I was, Major Massingham sang as he drove along: ‘“Whispering while you” . . .’ he whistled the next bar and I was carried back into a September evening . . . past, future, and for always, please God let it be like this, let time be lost, and pain and doubt.
‘Come on – wake up, wakey-wakey – pull yourself together.’ He was shaking my head off his shoulder. I opened my eyes. The demesne walls darkened the winter road. The bare trees released the winter light. We were near the church and the lodge gates. ‘Sit up,’ he insisted. ‘Please.’ He had been so kind I tried to obey him. I sat upright in a dignified way as we drove through the waiting crowds at the church gates and on up the drive to Temple Alice.
‘We’ve made it,’ he said. ‘Hate to be late. So rude, I always think. Feeling better?’
‘Wonderful,’ I said. ‘Really wonderful.’
He stopped the car on the further side of the gravel sweep from the house, then scrabbled up his orchids and got out to stand rigid and bareheaded, waiting, forgetting me, his eyes only on the farm cart drawn up at the foot of the steps, its paint blue as eucalyptus leaves, the spokes of its wheels crisply pink in the morning light. Volumes of breath from the quiet horse stayed low on the air while four of the men on the place carried Papa down the steps; slowly, awkwardly as great crabs, they went sideways, directing each other in ordinary voices.
When Major Massingham moved away, intent on depositing his orchids, I nearly called out to him to wait for me because I knew, although I was floating and weightless, that my ankle might crumple and give if I walked alone, no station master near, no sweet-smelling stranger on my other side. But I had my new reality. I could live on, assured in hopefulness. I felt certain that if I could get nearer to Papa, even reach the farm cart before they drove him away, he would know the blaze of my happiness as he had before, when I told him Richard and I were lovers.
My weight, when I dared to put it on my foot, was bearable, I could have walked straight across the gravel if it had not been for the cold bright air, which affected my movements, strangely muffling my knees. The men were looking at me in an odd way and I saw Wobbly hastily prop his orchids against a wheel before he came to put a hand under my armpit. Then I had the cart to cling to; steadying myself against it, I tried to remember what I wanted to say to Papa.
I was too late to say it, for Mummie was coming out of the house now, coming between us as always. As they settled Papa in the straw-filled cart, she stood on the top step, composed and still. Strong, careful, neat as a packet of black pins, Rose stood behind her; behind Rose I saw Mr Kiely and two men in dark clothes waiting, burdened and wreathed in flowers, until Mummie, looking over her shoulder in the most natural way, signed to them to precede her with their loads of neatly labelled tributes.
She was at the foot of the steps now, her new black hat bending round her face, subject to her feeling for the perfect angle, its veil seemed less than air about her cold face. Her hand in a black glove held her old loose coat up to her throat; her mourning was economically perfect.
Still close behind her Rose came, watchful and ready. Except that she had no veil, she was black as a second widow. Her outfit must have cost her as much as six months’ wages. We were near now; Mummie’s face, shocked and grieved, swam up to mine, and Rose’s face, in some way pleased, was
joined with it. It was then that my ankle gave way and neither Major Massingham’s support nor my hold on the cart could stop me falling. I felt like a house falling, and through the fall I heard his voice saying: ‘Terribly, terribly sorry. My fault, my fault, absolutely.’
And Mummie’s voice, her usual voice to me: ‘Would someone be very kind and carry her into the house?’
The two men in dark clothes came forward. They carried me up the steps and into the library, easily, professionally; they knew about handling bodies in all sizes, I suppose.
‘Footless, poor thing,’ I heard one of them say to the other as though he spoke over my dead body. Mr Kiely was putting a cushion under my knees.
‘Oh, you are kind,’ I said, remembering Mary Ann. But they were turning away, they were going to leave me on the library sofa, alone, out of all the fun. Not fun, of course. ‘Don’t go,’ I said, holding their hands.
‘You get a bit of a kip and you’ll be all right.’ It was Mr Kiely’s voice.
‘Yes – you bundle up there, my dear, and sleep it off. That’s your best bet,’ Major Massingham advised before anxiety for his own problems repossessed him. ‘End of an era. End of an era.’ Their voices removed to connive in the hall. ‘. . . and I don’t see the smallest hope of luncheon . . .’ That was the last I heard before the sound of cartwheels on the gravel caught me in their heavy turning. I breathed together with them and then I fell asleep.
It was Dr Coffey who woke me up. His hand was on my shoulder. How kind people were. It could never last. ‘Let’s have a look at the poor old foot,’ he said. While he was taking off my shoe, I fumbled for my suspenders, and as I rolled my stocking over my knee I remembered what the day was all about. They had been burying Papa. It was evening now, four o’clock, perhaps. The thickness of rain was beyond the windows. A thaw had come and in the changed light I felt all the lone vacancy of the morning. I knew my hope was precarious. Certainty fell away from me as though a loved person dropped my hand in indifference.
‘How was it?’ I asked.
‘Very cold.’ That was all he had to say about Papa’s funeral, as if he wanted me to think I hadn’t missed much. He was examining my ankle and I squeezed my dimpling knee against the pain I expected. I hoped for more pain. I longed for him to say my leg was broken.
‘Only a little sprain,’ he said, and I burst into tears.
‘Don’t upset yourself, child. What is it all only passing through life?’ Did he mean Papa, out there in the cold, or was he thinking of the future days for me with Mummie in power and Rose to abet her power? The hope that had flown me up in the morning to an air-borne delight was seeping away now. I was carried on fluctuating, fractured currents till I reached the ground.
‘Don’t mind me at all,’ he said. He was strapping my ankle. I wished the turning and gripping of the bandage might continue endlessly.
‘I do feel so awful,’ I apologised.
‘It’s just the reaction hitting you now,’ he said. ‘You won’t repeat the experience.’
‘I hope not,’ I said. ‘It was that icy spot that did it.’ He gave me a funny look.
‘They’ll be here any minute now. They’re walking up from the graveyard.’
‘In the rain?’
‘I came on to straighten you out. Jim Kiely told me you were in a poor way.’
‘My head feels pretty ghastly. I must have hit it when I fell.’
‘That’s right. You could have a touch of concussion. Let’s say you have too. I must be off now. I have a patient in labour up the mountain.’ He took a step back towards me from the doorway. ‘Take it easy now. And I left a brace of woodcock on the hall table for you and your mother.’
. . . For you and your mother . . . But would Rose cook them as she did for Papa? Crisp skins and pink flesh – a little blood leaking onto toast? Buttered crumbs and wafer potato chips and a wine sauce? I wondered. Mummie couldn’t bear woodcock.
I had a premonition of future luncheons and dinners: spaghetti with a little melted butter cooling in the depths of the silver sauceboat, and a few crumbs of grated cheese. There would be plenty of baked apples, and stewed rhubarb with junket, roast beef on Sunday, and apple tart, or a grocer’s jelly with preserved ginger chopped through it. The house would grow colder because Mummie never felt the cold; she would paint her peculiar pictures and rub her little hands and fiddle out into the garden and back to her tapestry. Whether she was painting or gardening or stitching, her disgust with me would enlarge as I grew older.
As we lived on at Temple Alice a ceiling cornice would fall or a dog would die; those would be the interests and tragedies to mark passing time. And as time passed there would be new devices invented and contrived for my restriction and humiliation. I could see myself hungry. I would keep my dress allowance to buy food; it was a cosy secret idea. Water biscuits (high-bake) and gentleman’s relish and anchovy fillets, perhaps a bag of sugar for an occasional grapefruit, all to be stored in my bedroom, with a bottle of sherry now and then. But Rose would find out my store, and a scene to satisfy them both would be organised. I could imagine no escape from them or from myself in the interval, and it might be a very long interval, of waiting until Richard came back to me from Kenya – if he came back to me.
Feeling like a rat in a trap, and too big for my trap, I sat on in my overcoat, staring at my bandaged foot, discouragement possessing me, and a disconcerting embarrassment linked with Dr Coffey’s half-spoken excuses for my fall, my double fall. We had agreed that I must have hit my head. I still felt slightly concussed and that was the truth I was going to maintain. ‘Dr Coffey thinks I have a bit of concussion,’ I repeated the words as I heard the returning voices in the hall, quiet voices not yet turned back to ordinary heights of speech. Only one voice sounded clear and natural above the shuffle and murmur.
‘I shall certainly say goodbye. She must be feeling quite awful.’ I felt a pause of silent dissent behind him. I put my leg up on the sofa, and I wished there was a bandage round my head too; the look of the thing would have been a great help.
‘Slept it off?’ he said. ‘Good girl. Good girl. I’m all right too. Very kind fellow with a sharpish sort of car says he’ll put me on the train – drive me on to the boat if it comes to that, shouldn’t wonder. And that nice housekeeper of yours is making me a few sandwiches. I’ll be all right. Don’t worry about me.’
‘But what about me?’ – it came from me in a sort of roaring protest. ‘What can I do?’
‘That’s quite a question. End of an era and all that, my dear. We just have to hack on regardless, don’t we?’ He looked uncomfortable. He was leaving me without a word that mattered. Didn’t he want to hear about my concussion? Has he forgotten all we had said to each other? About Richard? About Papa? Was I less to him now than an object beheld and passed by on a train journey? I must run beside the moving train, press my face upwards to the hastening glass.
‘Give my love to Richard,’ I said, ‘when you write.’
He looked at me; he put me at a distance. ‘We don’t write,’ he said. Then he turned back from the doorway, eagerly, warmly, to say something I must hear, I felt sure of it. ‘One thing,’ he said, ‘my orchids looked absolutely terrific, well worth all the bother.’
Mummie came in alone. She looked tall, as a small dog can sometimes convey a false impression of size. She spoke to someone behind her, so I knew Rose must be near.
‘I think perhaps we should light the lamps. He says he wants to read something . . . We have to let him, I suppose.’ Her voice trailed away in a kind of disgusted obedience to ritual, easier to accept and ignore than to disobey. She came nearer. ‘Am I asking rather a lot, or could someone have kept the fire alight?’
‘I was asleep. Dr Coffey thinks I concussed myself when I fell.’
‘Other people, my dear, think you were blind drunk when you fell.’
‘I suppose you mean Rose thinks so.’
‘I’m afraid Rose was not the only one who thought so
; Major Massingham thought so too. And he’s a remarkably good judge.’
‘Mummie – it’s not true.’
‘It happened and I don’t want to discuss it. Not today.’
I didn’t say: It’s because you hate me. It was in my mind. I only looked at her.
She looked back at me. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘you do rather exaggerate.’
‘Oh, what shall I do?’ I said.
‘Your home will always be here with me,’ she said patiently. ‘And another thing – now that all the responsibilities and decisions for Temple Alice are mine I hope perhaps in small ways you may be more – shall I say – loyal.’
‘Mummie – what do you mean?’
‘You must know perfectly well what I mean – for instance, no more private arrangements with your friend the solicitor – after all, not quite of our class.’
Rose came in with a cardboard box full of kindling wood. She paused near Mummie. ‘You’re perished, madam,’ she said as if she had touched her. But there was a wide respectful distance between them; only her concerned voice crossed it.
‘Oh, Rose,’ Mummie said. Her voice was quite changed. It was an appeal to an outer force, a strength to which she could yield, and still not yield from the astringency of good behaviour. Again a circle was forming – it had already formed. I was back in the diningroom on a summer night, on a hot September morning; the circle was closing to hold me out. Now the fire rose and blazed triumphant. Complacent in her success, Rose swept up the hearth.
‘You shouldn’t be doing this, Rose. Where’s Breda?’ Mummie went closer to Rose’s fire, feeling at her hands. ‘Perhaps better bring the lights. He has to read me something, so he says.’ She looked at me, sitting beyond the heat of the fire, the winter afternoon darker every minute behind me. ‘Rose could help you to your bedroom; that might be best – that is if you feel quite all right.’
Heaving myself up from the sofa, one hand grabbing at its arm, I towered, at last on my feet, toppling in my own dreadful height and world. ‘If you would bring me a stick from the hall,’ I said to Rose, ‘I can manage. Please.’ I cried out, ‘Please,’ in my pain.
