Here Be Dragons

by Stella Gibbons

  As for her partner, slightly closer acquaintance with him (they were not getting to know one another quickly or well) was making her suspect that he might be less conventional than he seemed.

  He had a way of suddenly beginning to laugh without explaining, as if his thoughts had overcome him, which she liked; he was unusually observant, often remarking later upon incidents or people which she herself had not noticed, and, as for convention, he could hardly be too outwardly conventional to please Nell, whose attitude to life during the last three months had been a struggle to make herself do, and understand, things which, in her former world, were either not done, ignored or taken for granted.

  She had succeeded: for there was a side of her nature which liked to venture and to do the common-sense, rather than the orthodox, thing, but she felt it surprisingly pleasant to be once more with someone of her own kind. She knew that she and Robert were the same kind.

  She was pleased, too, by his unselfishness in spending nearly two hours one evening chatting with the parents about Willow House, and ‘the old people’; Vernon Lodge, the Misses Halliday (Aunts Eleanor and Nancy), and Anna’s own parents, whom he dimly remembered. He had also actually heard legends, although the facts were well before his time, of the Vernon Lodge parrot, and this had delighted Anna who, inspired by nostalgia, pressed his memory unsuccessfully to yield up the ‘arbitrary and vexatious’ Miss Sullavan.

  Nell and he behaved admirably; their unconscious reactions only took the form, on their release at last, of almost running down Arkwood Road and into the nearest Espresso bar while both laughing at nothing in particular.

  Meanwhile, at The Primula, the only difference made by the coming of Nerina was that Nell occasionally suffered from the annoying pain, and that Nerina’s Chris began to haunt the tea-shop’s back premises.

  He began by hanging a silent red face over the low wall of the garden, appearing the moment after Miss Berringer had gone off to meet her boy-friend, and waving to Nerina, whom he had already accompanied to the back door and left there, whenever she glanced up from her duties—which was not seldom.

  Then, straying like the large rough dog which he resembled into the garden itself, he would moon round and round studying its neglected plants in what seemed to Nell an unexpectedly interested manner, always drawing nearer to the back door. When he got there, he would sit down on the step in the late sunshine and stare up at the trees in the lane, while occasionally Nerina, who seemed to have no scruples about anything if the results benefited Chris, slipped out with a hunk of bread or half a wilting lettuce which she pressed into his huge, sensitive hand; after one or two of these donations the kitchen door would remain ajar (“it’s awfully hot this evening, isn’t it? Miss Cody, don’t you think it’s awfully hot?” from Nerina) and, with the cooler air, into the kitchen drifted Chris, to sit in a corner and watch his love while he slowly masticated whatever happened to be going.

  “I had a great-great-aunt in the early days in Canada who used to feed an Indian at the back door,” was all Miss Berringer (whose Commonwealth connections appeared to be far-flung) observed, when she returned unexpectedly one evening and caught him.

  Nell’s belief that the return was unpremeditated was shaken when Tansy told her, rather triumphantly, that Lady Bottlewasher had knocked half-a-crown off of that poor kid’s money this week, just to learn her not to give Chris Lady B.’s food.

  Nell had to tell herself, rather firmly, that if Miss Berringer had not been a good business woman, with an eye for every detail, there would have been no successful tea-shop to provide jobs for five people, and no back doorstep for Chris to sit on; and after some reflection she persuaded herself that justice had been done.

  Her dislike for the grandiose schemes and hopeless laziness of The Coffee Dishers helped her in reaching the conclusion. The job that was lost because someone preferred to sit arguing rather than go out and keep an appointment, the lofty remarks about freedom which ended in borrowing from someone in regular work, the devotion to art resulting in grubbiness, disorder and, sometimes, dishonesty—were they really better than the Berringer attitude towards money and work?

  John would have said, yes. Nell never hesitated to say, no, except when she was listening to him.

  Mary and Tansy both looked on Chris and Nerina with sentimental approval, Tansy referring to them as The Love-Birds, and Mary sighing and saying it did your heart good to see them in this old world, while neither, in discussing them, showed any of the grim, salacious, disapproving curiosity they had when they talked about Miss Berringer’s affair.

  Nell sometimes felt cross with them; their sloppiness annoyed her. If they had known that Chris and Nerina were really lovers, they would, she was sure, have been as cruel as they were about Miss B. and the one John called ‘her fat man’. But it never seemed to occur to them that ‘the young ones’ were anything but characters from an Anna Neagle film.

  Nerina soon fitted in well with the routine and the staff, joining in the jokes and conversation enough to make her company pleasant, but always, Nell noticed, keeping her reserve about her own affairs.

  She was very what John’s quotee Boswell would have called retenue. She hardly ever said ‘I’; her tastes, her past, her views, her plans for the future, were all hidden away behind the smooth small face framed in the severe line of primrose hair. Only when she spoke of Chris would colour come up there; the ethereal pink colour that stains a seashell; but she never talked of their feelings for one another, or of their relationship, and her only response to the sickly jokes and smirkings of Mary and Tansy was a smile; shy, yet guarded and slight.

  “A dark filly,” said Miss Berringer suddenly, at the end of Nerina’s first week there, while Nell was helping her to slice cucumber for the evening snacks, “don’t you think so? Never be surprised at anything she might do.” Nell had the impression that Miss Berringer did not like her new Evening Girl. “As for him,” added her employer, “he’s nothing but the gardener’s boy.”

  “That was discerning of the Berringer,” said John to Nell, when he had drawn from her somewhat reluctant memory, now hampered by the presence of the tiresome pain, all the staff comments on Nerina and Chris, “because that’s exactly what he was.”

  “Was he?”

  It was a Monday afternoon, and they were sitting in the garden of Fenton House. They had it to themselves; there were a few foreign and American visitors strolling through the rooms of the seventeenth-century place which has been given over to a collection of china and old musical instruments, gazing at the Saxe and the spinets, but fortunately no-one wanted to inspect the garden. Nell and John were sitting on the seat at its end which overlooks the long lawn and the back of the house.

  “Yes, he was. (You’re answering in questions again; don’t do it. It means you’re sulking about something. You do sulk about Nerina … ) I would have told you about her and Chris before, only you always look so sick whenever I mention her name … it’s a beautiful story; it’s like something by George Sand. (Don’t take your hand away; I like to hold it.)”

  The seat felt warm and the air smelled of freshly-cut grass. Nell knew that if she opened her eyes she would see his profile, like a cameo, but with a childish charm warmer than that of any classic head, against the foliage and soft old red brick of the wall. A light wreath of flowers lay along one of the trained climbers there, and a sweet scent crept along the air. Even in this weather his fingers felt cool. Jasmine? Then the summer must be far advanced. She opened her eyes.

  “Don’t you want to hear about it?”

  “M’m.”

  “Well, her people live in Surrey. (I know exactly what they’re like, and they’re frightful, but of course not so bad as television stars and the ‘brilliant, interesting’ type.) They’ve got a wonderful garden; it’s on a hill and full of every kind of flower imaginable, it’s one of those places that are open to the public for charity every summer, and Chris’s father was one of the gardeners there. He lived in th
e nearest village. Chris was rather bright at school (I know he doesn’t look it, but he was) and Nerina’s father took an interest in him and that sort of bull: shocking cheek, and stupid, too, because Chris had made it quite clear from the start that he was going to be a painter and didn’t want to go to the Royal Coll. of Hort. or wherever his papa and Nerina’s were slavishly, and interferingly, planning to shove him; anyway, he often used to come up to help his father, and there was Nerina, still at school in those days, and coming home every day through the garden. She used to stop and talk to Chris, and they fell in love. Later on they simply ran away together. It is like George Sand, you know. Or Paul et Virginie.”

  Nell was silent, thinking about the tall bearded boy clad almost in rags whose personality did suggest, as Miss Berringer had detected, birds’ nests, and paths covered in moss, and rough old trees; everything, in fact, that was the opposite of what was to be found and seen in cities.

  “Were her people very upset?” she asked at last.

  “I don’t know about upset. They made a terrible fuss. Her mother had a kind of collapse. It got into the papers last autumn, in spite of their trying to stop it, only then there was the smog and the floods and people rather forgot about it. You see, they guessed almost at once that she must have gone with Chris, and it was rather biting-the-hand-that-fed-you. Or so they thought. I think they simply asked for it. What else did they expect? He’s a painter, and Nerina is so lovely.”

  There it was again, the little pain. Blow.

  “Didn’t they ever try to find them?” she asked.

  “Oh, just at first. In an inept kind of way. But they’re the sort of people who actually mind what the neighbours think, so they soon dropped that. Oh, and I believe Nerina did send her mamma a card at Christmas saying that she was perfectly happy and not coming back and so forth. So there wasn’t much point in putting the disgusting police on to them, was there? I suppose her parents still do make enquiries from time to time. But they’ve never found them. They’ve been together now for ten months, working, and eating when they can, and starving when they can’t. They’re utterly happy. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Nell was silent again. She could believe that a certain kind of love might well make one indifferent to the feelings of those one had formerly loved best, but should the passion—which she did not call to herself a passion—be given way to?

  “At least,” he went on, slowly and after a pause, “I will say that it’s beautiful with reservations. I don’t think, now, that Nerina’s really in her right place?”

  “What do you mean?” looking at him, “At The Primula?” She tried to keep resentment out of her voice. Was Nerina, then, such a delicate piece that waitressing was not for her?

  “Oh really, Nello. Of course not. (How literal you can be. But I like that, sometimes.) No. I meant that the right place for her is that garden. Petals, and the wind in the leaves, and sheltered, and yet … fresh and … anyway, that’s where I like to think of her.”

  It’s a pity she doesn’t go back there. Nell’s expression was her usual one of steady attention to what was going on and being said (other people besides Nerina could be retenue), but that was what she was thinking.

  “She’s so fragile, you see. She’s like a wind-flower or a brook-fairy.”

  “She seems quite tough to me.”

  “Oh no, Nello. Now you’re tough.”

  “She must be tough, to be able to lead the kind of life she does, when she’s always lived at home and been taken care of.”

  “She can do it because she loves Chris so much. But she ought really to be taken care of all the time. He does take care of her, of course. But when … when he goes into the Army, which he will have to do quite soon—and he will go, because he’s got all the good working-class type’s fear of authority—I quite expect Nerina to collapse. Then we shall all have to take care of her. And I shall expect you to help.”

  “Won’t she go back to her parents?”

  “Of course not, Nello. How can you even suggest it? She would much rather starve. (Talking of starving, can I come back with you to tea and possibly supper? I haven’t any money, and Margie is down in the country and my papa has gone galumphing off to do a lecture to an unhappy literary society in some remote part of Wales, and I do dislike opening tins. I always cut myself—did you know that someone once said, the hands of literary people always hang down like fat white slugs? Mine aren’t like that, are they?”

  “Don’t fish. All right, you can come if you want to. Shall I have to get a cake on the way home?”

  “Yes. How domesticated we are, aren’t we? Shall I come and live with you one day?”

  “No thank you,” Nell said with energy.

  “I meant much later on when we’re both quite old … because I’ve absolutely got to have someone to look after me, you see. We shall be like Rousseau and his wife … she was completely uneducated and ungifted, but all the cleverest people in Europe, who came to see him, thought she was wonderful and asked her advice because, you see, she had commonsense. Now that’s like you. I’ll have a group of dazzling friends—and you can look after me, and they’ll all think you’re wonderful. (I’m fascinated by stories about groups of friends—‘circles’—William Morris and his circle, Ford Madox Ford and his circle—I am going to have a circle instead of a wife and family. It’s better, for a writer, I think, in spite of Flaubert and his ‘Ils sont dans le droit’). Don’t you think it’s a good idea, my coming?”

  “No I do not. I’m a tidy person and you know how you hate things being tidy. And I may have a husband and family myself.”

  “Yes.” He slowly turned his head and fixed her with his beautiful sleepy eyes. “I quite expect you will, Nello. People will want to marry you, because you’re good at looking after them. I expect R. Lyddington will. He isn’t quite so cheerful as he makes out, you know. (I think he got a taste for having an amusing time while he was in the Navy and now he finds life rather dull.) But of course he’ll never break away. He has much too much sense of duty.”

  “Besides, I’m going to have a tea-shop,” said Nell, who rarely uttered non-sequiturs, but now found herself slightly confused by one or two ideas which came as a surprise.

  “That’s all right. I don’t mind. That will be easier for me, as a way of living, than an ordinary domestic routine. You’ll be used to having crowds of people about and feeding them.”

  “John, I’m afraid I must go. I have to telephone Elizabeth at four o’clock and arrange about a meeting. She’s been so booked up, getting ready for her presentation, and my hours are so odd, that so far we haven’t been able to arrange anything.”

  She put aside his suggestion of a mutual establishment in the distant future, refusing to let her fancy play with its sweetness. A nice, disorderly, hopeless arrangement it would be, with never a moment to write letters or do any mending and the house swarming with Coffee Dishers. No thank you.

  But always there would be John; coming and asking for help, kissing good night and smiling his little boy’s smile for good morning, telling her what to wear, swinging hands lightly with cool fingers, clasping close, begging for comfort …

  She got up quickly, arranging her cardigan across her shoulders.

  “Oh, must we go? It’s so delightful here. Is the mint out in your garden?”

  “I don’t know. I never look at the garden; Mummy does it all. Why?”

  “Because if it is I’ll have mint-leaf sandwiches for tea. They’re almost my favourite thing. When we were living at the flat, when I was small, I used to …”

  “What?” Nell said imperiously, in a moment. His voice had died away into a murmur and he was standing still, staring at the long lawn glimmering greenly in the golden light.

  “Nothing. Make mint-leaf sandwiches. Tell me about your Elizabeth,” languidly, in the tone of a young Rajah commanding a slave to dance.

  Nell summoned her rather limited powers of description to present her friend while they were w
alking towards the gates leading out from the garden, but a feeling that she was not succeeding in really interesting her hearer (whom she noticed giving an affectionate glance at the frog of green bronze who supports his bloated form upon his little curved arms near the gate) caused her to end the account with a fact about Elizabeth so unusual that it must surely catch John’s attention.

  “She’s awfully like the portrait of one of her ancestresses in the Steyne Collection. I haven’t seen it, but one of the people at school had, and they said it was really amazingly like.”

  “Oh? The Steyne Collection? In Castlereagh Square?” He turned to look at her, but absently, and did not sound particularly interested. “Isn’t he endearing?” nodding towards the frog, “he looks exactly like a frog, and there’s no nonsense about ‘conveying the essentials of a frog’ or ‘giving you the artist’s individual impression of a frog’, and yet, while he’s much nicer than a real frog, he’s also almost as good. Very satisfying all round.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” said Nell, after some conscientious thought.

  “You’re such a Philistine, Nello … don’t rush on like that; I want to look at the house for a moment.” He put his arm through hers and stood still. “There, isn’t it like a house in a Dutch painting?”

  “I don’t know. I’m a Philistine.”

  “And don’t be pert,” giving her arm a sharp shake. “Go on about your Elizabeth. Is she a deb?”, as they strolled onwards.

  “I suppose she will be officially when she’s been to the Garden Party. She knows lots of debs, and her family lives in a house in Wiltshire that they’ve owned for about three hundred years, and she does the deb things—hunting, and that kind of thing.”