by Rumer Godden
‘When I grow up,’ says Roly, ‘I am going to be a tailor like Mr Cheep. He says I have the finest chest in London. I like Mr Cheep.’
‘You will go into the Army like Uncle Bunny,’ says Selina. Uncle Bunny is Roly’s godfather, an exalted godfather.
‘No I won’t,’ says Roly. ‘Soldiers get killed. And they have to kill other people. I shan’t like that.’
‘The killing is only a small part.’
‘What else is there?’
‘Brains! Strategy!’ cries Selina with shining eyes.
Roly looks at her. He does not ask her why she is not a soldier because he knows that girls are never anything, but he wishes for a moment that he had been born a girl. This is the last time he ever wishes that; he quickly sets into the fact of being a boy. There is very little that is feminine in Rollo or in Rolls. Selina does with him all that she hopes and wants but in some curious way he still eludes her; he prefers the Eye to her for instance, and yet the Eye can hardly bear to notice him though he fulfils punctiliously all that he did with the other children; Roly still persists in liking dirt and marbles and vulgar sweets and he still makes vulgar friends like Mr Cheep. He is still, mysteriously, himself.
‘Sit up Roly.’
‘Why, as soon as I am told to sit down, am I told to sit up?’
‘Take three tenses.’
Roly sighs.
‘Past, present and future.’
‘Must I?’
‘Yes, you must,’ says Selina. ‘Even a little boy like you has a past, a present and a future. You were a baby, you are a boy, you will be a man.’
‘And then dust,’ says Roly. ‘But I am always here, Lena. Like they say at school “Present.” I am always present so why not only one?’
Selina is called Lena when she is a little girl. She is an extremely controlled little girl, very good and precocious. She is the pride and joy of her nurse and she wants, violently, to be the pride and joy of her mother, but Griselda in some way or another seems always to escape from her. Griselda is not unkind, never neglectful, but ‘Go to nurse,’ ‘It is time for you to go upstairs now,’ sounds like a reprieve on Griselda’s lips. The boys are early sent to school but Lena is a little girl. She should stay at home, be with her mother. ‘Presently,’ ‘By and by,’ says Griselda.
‘You must learn to read, you little dunce,’ she says when Selina is five.
‘And you are going to teach me?’ Lena is joyous. She knows she is anything but a little dunce.
‘We will ask Papa to get a governess for you.’
Griselda has asked Papa very frequently why Lena, and Elizabeth too in her turn, should not also go to school. ‘Perhaps even one day to college. There is talk of a woman’s college at Oxford now.’
‘These are – rather unusual ideas for girls, my dearest.’
‘Why?’ asks Griselda. ‘They are the same ideas as you had for the boys.’
‘Well—’ says the Eye, but he has the wisdom, as he is in a hurry to go out, not to engage on that point. He says instead, ‘You must remember we have six sons to educate.’
‘We should be fair. Lena has as good and quick a brain as any of the boys. Better than most of them.’
‘I am sure she has, but it won’t be necessary for her to exploit it in the same way.’
‘It is given her to use.’
‘So she shall – up to a point. She shall have a governess. We get an excellent superior person for – say – twenty pounds a year.’
‘And meanwhile the boys – even James who is so stupid?’
‘James may have to support a family when he is grown up. Lena will not. Don’t frown Griselda. That is indisputable.’
‘Yes John,’ says Griselda. ‘It is indisputable but it is not the whole dispute.’
‘My dear, surely you want our sons – even James – to be brought up as gentlemen? He is not the milkman’s son.’
It is odd that the Eye should choose that for his point. When Verity is thirteen the question of his senior school arises. Grizel is asked where he will go.
‘We had hoped he might follow Pax to Eton,’ says Grizel, ‘but I doubt now if he has the brains to get in. Isn’t it splendid,’ says Grizel, ‘Jopling’s son has just passed in there. He is such a brilliant boy and of course now Eton is for scholars. Verity will get a grammar school and perhaps two or three years in an exchange to Canada or Australia and of course some time in Italy. He will have estates to manage so they think agriculture—’
‘Who is Jopling, Grizel?’
‘Our milkman,’ says Grizel.
Meanwhile the Eye rules that a governess is sufficient for Lena.
She is too proud to love her governess as she was too proud to love her nurse. Whom can she love? A pet? Pets are not allowed. Once she finds a dead mouse on the stairs and keeps it for three days, until her nurse, horrified, makes her throw it away. When she is older she loves Roly, Rollo, but this love becomes implicated and mixed with such possessiveness and jealousy that Rollo will not have it and Selina is left bitterly alone. It is then that she buys Juno.
Juno is a pug, stuffed to repletion with a gold plush coat and a tail like a curl of vaseline and warm wallflower markings in her creases and on her ears. ‘She couldn’t love it more if it was human,’ the servants say. ‘It might be human the way she goes on.’ They are wrong. It is not Selina who is making Juno into a human – but Juno, Selina.
There is a noise like a chirping of sparrows all over the house. It is the happiest children. It is the twins.
‘Freddie. Elizabeth. Come and get dressed.’
‘No,’ says Elizabeth. ‘I am going in to Mamma.’
No other child is allowed to go in to Mamma. Griselda is not just. She does not attempt to be just. When she loves, she shows it, and she cannot forget when she is hurt. Pelham, John Robert, Lionel, James, Selwyn and Selina, even Freddie, had big heads like the Eye’s; they tore and hurt Griselda hideously when they were born and the horror of that for her is inevitably attached to them. She tries to forget it, but she cannot; nor can she forget that it was the Eye who inflicted them on her. Inflicted? Yes. Left to myself, says Griselda, would I have chosen to have children? Yes. One. Possibly two … but the Eye has big ideas. ‘Nine is my lucky number,’ says the Eye. In all her feelings for him she remembers that.
Elizabeth, her eighth child, slipped easily into the world half an hour after Freddie, and she was a tiny baby with a small round firm head. ‘A delicate child,’ they told Griselda. ‘That is the way with twins.’ ‘Not a fine child like the others,’ said Nurse. ‘Fine. Much finer,’ said Griselda fiercely. ‘Fine in my way, not in yours.’
Elizabeth is a forerunner of Roly. The other children are all replicas of the Eye, with his pale skin and pale blue eyes and mouse-brown hair. Elizabeth has chestnut hair and sparkling daring dark-blue eyes.
‘You are not just,’ says the Eye to Griselda; the boys say it too; Lena is rude about it; Nurse complains. ‘You spoil Elizabeth,’ says Nurse.
I don’t care. I don’t want to be just, says Griselda silently but she tries to make herself listen and for a day or two sends Elizabeth back to the nursery.
Now and again, through the house, up the stairs, there flies a little boy who seems to belong to nobody; a little interloper. He is small and thin and dark-skinned and he is dressed in a foreign-looking dark-blue sailor suit, and black stockings and shoes. The shoes kick in the air with ecstasy and his eyes are always shut with bliss. He never walks. He always flies. Slowly he flies out of sight. Every now and again he comes again.
The children play with the stones when they have prunes for lunch: –
Soldier brave,
Sailor true,
Lawyer grave,
Doctor blue.
‘A blue doctor?’ asks Elizabeth. ‘But Dr Flower is pink.’
Portly rector,
Curate pale …
‘When I marry the curate I am going to be married by the Bishop,’ says Lena. �
��And the church shall be decorated in lilies and smilax – no, roses and smilax – no, lilies, roses and smilax, and I shall have eight bridesmaids dressed in purest white—’
‘Suppose he, or nobody, asks you?’ tease the boys.
‘I shall give them no peace till they do,’ says Lena.
When Roly goes to school and is called Rollo the nursery is empty. No one knows why the sound of the sea, once known to the shell, should still be there, but no one can deny that it is.
As soon as Lark follows Selina over the threshold of the nursery she is in touch with the other children. To begin with, though she has nothing to do with them, as Selina is always reminding her, she inherits their things: she sleeps in their bed, her clothes are, some of them, their clothes, and she keeps her clothes in their cupboards; she eats off their old china with their nursery spoons and forks; she plays with the rocking horse and Lena’s old doll’s tea-set; she reads the books that have their names on the flyleaves: Selwyn. A happy Christmas from Aunt Nellie. Dec. 1853. Rollo from his Father on his eighth birthday. 1871.
Lark is a lonely child. There is no one to notice her in the house; the Eye, who brought her there, is too busy and too sad. Selina shuts her away at the top of the house. Lark’s mind in its loneliness and unhappiness fastens on these children and most of all, perhaps because he is next in age to her, perhaps because he is so important to Selina who dominates her, and to whom she is so unimportant, Lark fastens upon Roly. She takes Roly for a friend and a brother and when she plays at weddings she takes him for a husband; like Lena, like the other children, she quite often plays at weddings. ‘I Roly Dane, take thee Lark, for my wedding wife and we shall have six children and a million pounds a year.’
Lark is wrong in one thing. She is not unimportant to Selina.
It begins early one late December morning at the end of eighteen seventy-nine. The weather, all the week before it, had been unusually wild and there was talk of ships lost at sea, of great trees blown down and in the North of havoc over huge districts and towns. The weather seemed to rise in a crescendo.
Selina is heavily asleep when Athay wakes her, knocking and knocking at her door. ‘Miss Lena. Miss Selina. Will you get up miss. The master has come. Will you come down to the study at once.’
‘Father?’ cries Selina. ‘But he is in Edinburgh!’
‘He is here. In the study miss.’
‘Athay. Has anything happened?’
A pause. ‘He asks you to come down miss,’ says Athay.
Selina does not wait to put up her hair. She comes with a long plait hanging down her back to the end of her shawl. Her forehead with her hair strained back looks clever and indomitable and obstinate as she confronts the Eye. She has a dressing gown of Indian silk with a design of brown swans under Persian trees.
Athay has lit the fire but it is still new enough to crackle and flare with its paper and send out a cold blue smoke; the coals are still untouched and the room has no warmth in it. The Eye has not taken off his travelling coat, a great strapped coat with a cape lined with plaid. His face looks tired and grey and very grave and sad. On the hearthrug stands a little girl well wrapped-up and dressed in mourning.
‘A child!’ cries Selina in the doorway. There is nothing but dismay in her voice. She does not like children. She loved Roly but not because he was a child but because he would presently grow into the man she wanted him to be. She likes him better now he is at school, she will like him more when he is at Sandhurst and grown up. She does not go if she can help it into the nurseries of her friends, nor glance into perambulators, nor watch the nun on her slow progression to the Park with all her orphans on their reins. ‘I could have had children I suppose,’ says Selina but she has no desire that is at all alive or active to have them. She is perhaps too interested in herself to want to give more than a very little of that interest away; what she gives, she gives to Rollo, but then of course she looks on Rollo as a projection of herself. Then with the Eye this child appears. In that instant Selina knows it is to be no slight appearance. She stiffens. She has an immediate sense of trouble and threat. ‘A child!’
‘Lark, this is Selina.’
‘How do you do,’ says Lark politely. Her voice is almost extinct with tiredness. Lark is seven and she is at the moment filled with one overwhelming need, a body that needs to be lain down somewhere to sleep and sleep and sleep. The Eye has tried to comfort her but he continually asks her questions: ‘Are you crying?’ ‘Would you like some milk?’ ‘Some soup?’ ‘A chocolate?’ ‘You will tell me if you want anything won’t you?’ ‘Are you warm enough?’ To all of them Lark answered politely but she was growing desperate. The Eye talked of Selina. ‘When we get to Selina she will look after you.’ ‘Selina will put you to bed.’ Now her longing flows out like a wave to Selina and like a wave it recoils back again on herself. She fixes her eyes, firmly, to look firmly at the end of Selina’s plait to prevent them filling with tears. Grown-up people, especially men, she thinks do not say what is true, but what they hope is true. She can see at once there is no help for her in Selina.
‘Who is she?’ asks Selina.
‘Her name is Lark Ingoldsby.’
‘Ingoldsby? Like the Legends?’
‘Please don’t make jokes, Selina.’ There is so much pain in the Eye’s voice that Selina stops, trembling.
‘What is it, Father?’
‘Her father and – mother were killed in the Tay Bridge disaster, the night before last.’
Selina’s quick mind is caught at once by that infinitesimal pause in his voice before he said ‘mother’. She has not really heard the rest. She says mechanically, ‘Tay Bridge?’
‘It will be in the morning papers. It was a dreadful night,’ he goes on with an effort. ‘Violent and wild. They think – the covered way of the bridge offered – too much – resistance to the wind. The people waiting in the station saw – the lighted train go into the bridge – then there was darkness.’
‘It – never came out?’
‘It never came out. The bridge was gone.’ The Eye turns away from her to the mantelpiece and covers his eyes with his hand.
Lark hears it being said over her head. She has heard it being said over her head over and over again in the last twenty-four hours. She has taken her eyes away from Selina’s plait and is looking at the hearthrug because tears of themselves have begun again to slide down her nose, but her black hair falls each side of her neck and hides her face and nobody can see. She is indeed as black as a little crow. The Eye told the manageress of the hotel to get her into mourning and she is black from head to foot and her hat which she has taken off and put into a chair is heavily trimmed with crape. She feels bowed down with blackness and the tears run down the side of her nose where she has hidden her face. The little nape of her neck gleams like the marble Caesar in the room.
‘Then all the people Father?’
‘No one was saved.’
He takes down his hand. ‘You will have to know,’ he says in a flat weary voice, ‘that her father and – mother were singers, opera singers. She – had a beautiful voice. That is why I went North, to hear her sing.’
‘Father!’
‘Yes,’ says the Eye without the least emotion in his voice. ‘They had taken an engagement in pantomime in Stirling for Christmas week. Dundee the week after.’
‘In pantomime?’
‘Yes,’ says the Eye again. ‘I had business in Dundee so I went on by the morning train and took Lark with me.’
‘Else—’
‘Else I should have been with the company in that train,’ says the Eye plainly, ‘and so would she.’
Lark has ceased to hear what they say. Their voices sound and resound over her head as the black wooliness of the hearthrug, yes it is black too, seems to rise up in front of her eyes into peculiar hills and fall away again; she is now not even conscious of being tired; only her eyes smart and the smell of the new clothes is overpowering, stuffy in her nostrils.
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br /> ‘I went down by chaise but there was nothing –’ Again he turns away and Selina waits and does not prompt him. ‘Nothing to be done. So I brought Lark here.’
‘Why?’
‘She has no one. No relations.’
‘I thought people of that sort teemed with relations.’ He does not answer, only looks at her gravely, but Selina is intrepid. ‘There is an orphanage over the way.’
‘She is to live here always.’
Selina does not answer. She has grown very white and faces the Eye as he faces her.
‘Her past is over, Lena. It is nothing to do with you.’
‘Is that all you can tell me, Father?’
‘That is all I intend to tell you.’
The clock ticks. A coal drops in the grate where the fire is warm now. The black hillocks rise and tumble in front of Lark.
‘Her mother is dead, Lena.’
‘So is mine.’
At that moment Lark falls on the hearthrug. The Eye picks her up and she lies across his arm, her small white face drowned in her hair, meshes of hair caught across his chest and hand. ‘This is my house,’ says the Eye sternly over Lark’s head. ‘My house, though I have let you give orders in it. It is my house and I intend to be obeyed. Lark is to come here and live here as your sister. Do you understand?’
‘Yes Father.’ She looks at Lark in his arms where she used to lie, and her lips tighten.
‘You are to write and tell Pelham and the boys and Rollo.’
‘Yes Father.’
‘Then what is that expression on your face?’
‘Nothing Father.’
‘Answer me.’
‘I was thinking,’ and she says: ‘You told me to answer you. I was thinking, sisters are born, not made. I don’t think you can expect, Father, that we shall feel her to be a sister.’
Selina is quite right.
It is another day, about five years later on – a June morning. Selina is giving her orders.
She is dressed to go out and as she crosses the drawing-room to the desk, her dress trails fashionably after her along the carpet; its dark green fullness is looped and gathered behind; the bodice is tight-fitting with tight-fitting sleeves buttoned to the elbows with tiny gilt buttons; her gloves are dark green and so is her jacket that is trimmed with sable: they lie on the sofa. Her hat has a fall of feathers, brilliant green and russet, and her hair is dressed high showing her ears; it gives her a commanding look; in fact it and the feathers make her look not unlike a general setting out to review his troops. Selina is reviewing her day. The table is covered with memorandum pads and there is an engagement pad standing on the desk with spaces closely filled in. It is headed The second of June, eighteen eighty-five. It is Selina’s thirty-fifth birthday.
