Meanwhile time was running away, whirling past her like a cloud of dust. In three days, they would be driving home. In a week, she would be back at school, struggling with algebra, flinching at lacrosse, showing off about all the famous people her parents knew, reading poetry in the W.C. A vision! She must pray for a vision. She shut her eyes, clenched her fists till the nails ran into her palms and prayed so intensely that she felt perfectly hollow. A vision—or perhaps a voice. The voiceless blood rang in her ears. When she opened her eyes, nothing was there. Presently she realized that she was deathly cold. I am going to faint, she thought, and revised this to, I am going into a trance. But she merely went on feeling extremely cold and bruised all over. She got up and staggered about the church on legs that did not seem like her own. Her heart, too, had become cold.
She observed as impartially as though she were following a guide round yet another palazzo that the building was poverty-stricken and decaying, that the Stations of the Cross were oleographs in Oxford frames, that the altar frontal had been patched with red flannel, that there was a profusion of blood and the usual awful statues. Near the second altar, on a table covered with a green baize cloth, lay a long narrow box with a glass top and sides, like a showcase, containing some she-saint or other dressed in sky-blue satin with a great deal of lace and puffings and furbelows. The figure was about two-thirds life size, but yards and yards of satin must have been expended in the puffings and furbelows. On her head was a wreath of white roses, her face was covered with some sort of dingy kid, and she had yellowish kid gloves on her hands. When she was new, she must have been very smart, and the height of fashion. Even now, Grifone must think quite a lot of her, for there were several bouquets of artificial flowers on the table and a candlestand near by. Fenella had not brought her purse so she could not honourably light a candle. Yet, having thought of it, it seemed impolite not to do so. Miss Wilson had said something about drinking goat’s milk on a terrace overlooking the view, so she must have some money about her. Fenella went rather slowly towards the door, nerving herself to borrow the price of a candle. She noticed the handkerchief, still lying where she had knelt down to pray—so hopefully, so desperately, and now seeming so long ago. She picked it up, saw from its condition how right she had been to spread it between her knees and the floor. In the next breath she was racing back to the glass box. Had she not prayed for a vision? A vision might take any form, might arise from the most unpromising, the most rubbishy lair. She would light all the candles as an Act of Faith and pray all over again, and this time the vision would be granted; the face would smile or a gloved hand would lift and beckon.
There were eight candles—her unlucky number; but never mind, that was only superstition. She had placed three candles when it occurred to her that she would give a little polish to the glass lid of the box. It must have been very devoutly breathed on; dry rubbing did no good at all. She spat on her handkerchief; the grime began to come off in little rolls. Spitting and rubbing, breathing and polishing, she became so absorbed in her attentions to the glass that she did not glance at what lay beneath it until she had cleaned down as far as the hands folded on the rosary. What extraordinary gloves—so thin that the nails, long, and rather dirty, showed through. No kid could be so thin, no silk could fit so closely. Chicken skin? No, it must be wax. The hands were made of wax, that in course of time had yellowed and grown dry. She looked at the face. It had blue glass eyes, to match the blue dress. One of them projected from the face, squeezed out by the shrivelling socket into which it had been fitted. It seemed to stare at her with alarm. The other eye was still in place, and placid. She was looking at a small dead body, dressed in blue satin, with a lace veil falling from under a wreath of white rosebuds and a few grains of rouge adhering to its cheeks. Too small to be a woman, too overdressed to be a child, it lay on a white satin mattress and did not even look dead. It looked like death’s doll.
Setting her teeth, she lit the three candles, and ran for her life. She leaped over the rattling pit, she was out in the sun, propping herself against the entrance of the porch. ‘Stay just as you are!’ shouted Miss Wilson.
Chit or no chit, the girl was certainly a born model. As though the words had nailed her, she remained exactly as she had been when they were spoken, no hand sneaking up to her hair, no redressing shift of balance, no change of expression even. It was an interesting pose, too, with that El Greco quality of artless, outrageous drama that one only sees in the adolescent. The ballerina expansion of her sulphur-yellow skirt would have to be lopped into a more rational shape—but its colour was just what was wanted to pick up the patches of lichen on the church roof. Well, she hadn’t come to Grifone for nothing, this young person.
‘Thank you. Dis-miss!’ Looking up from her canvas, Miss Wilson saw that the girl was still holding that remarkable pose. She couldn’t have heard. ‘Thank you, Fenella. That’s all. I’ve done with you.’
The girl undid herself from the wall—there was really no other word for it—and came slowly through the grasses and the clattering grasshoppers. Her head drooped, and once she put her hand up to it as though to support a suddenly felt weight. That was a good pose, too. It was to be hoped that she hadn’t got a sunstroke.
‘Well, did you enjoy your rest in the church? Did you see the saint?’
‘The Saint?’
‘In the glass case. Didn’t you notice her?’
‘Yes. Is she a saint? She looks sort of Ninetyish.’
‘Eighteen eighty-three. She was the daughter of a local landowner—a girl about your age. Very devout, and died of whooping cough.’
‘Poor thing.’
‘The mountain people were sure she was a saint. They even tried to get her taken up by the Vatican. Nothing came of it. But she’s still called the Saint of Grifone, and there’s still quite a cult of her—though not what it was, of course.’
‘She’s very small—if she was my age.’
‘Girls were smaller then. No fresh air, no exercise.’
‘Perhaps she’s shrunk. Was it because she was a saint that they stuffed her—or whatever it was they did to make her keep?’
‘No, no. That was her father. He was devoted to her, and very rich, so he had her embalmed.’
‘Oh yes, of course! That’s the word. I couldn’t remember it. Miss Wilson, I’m afraid I ought to be getting back. I promised Mamma not later than six, and it’s past that already.’
‘Well, have a look at yourself in my painting first.’
The girl looked. Her face fell, and she instantly began to praise the colouring.
‘But how will you get it back? Won’t the flies settle on it?’
‘If you don’t mind carrying the easel.’
Some of the dead snake was still there but the idiot had been taken indoors. At intervals Miss Wilson remarked on Fenella’s talent for keeping a pose and expressed an increasingly firm intention to paint a portrait of her.
‘But why? I’m so wishy-washy. At my school they call me Creamed Rice.’
‘You’ve got rather an interesting bone structure. Suppose we say tomorrow afternoon? I shan’t keep you long for a first sitting.’
‘But I’m afraid there won’t be time. We’re leaving early on Friday.’
‘I can get all I want in a couple of hours, and work it up later.’
‘And then there will be all sorts of farewell parties. I don’t know what Mamma hasn’t arranged.’
They parted outside the hotel. Fenella rushed upstairs, heard bath water running, hammered on the door.
‘Mamma, Mamma! It’s been too awful. Oh, for pity’s sake, turn off that tap! Mamma! She’s put me into her painting of the church—and made my poor skirt look like a drowned rat. And now she’s determined to paint a portrait of me. You must, must get me out of it!’
‘I’ll think it over. Mind, I don’t promise.’
‘But, Mamma! Her painting was grisly. Like a railway poster.’
‘You don’t know everythin
g, Fenella. Some people think she’s definitely good.’
‘Good? They must be raving.’
‘In any case, it will do you no harm to sit. And later on it might turn out to be quite worth having.’
‘But, Mamma, she’s positively extinct. She’s a living corpse, she’s …’
‘I can’t hear you,’ her mother said, turning on the taps.
HEATHY LANDSCAPE WITH DORMOUSE
‘WELL, Leo, dear—here we are, all settled and comfortable!’ Mrs. Leslie, sitting on the ground, removed a couple of burrs from her stocking and looked round on a flattish expanse of heath. ‘What heaven! Not a soul in sight.’ As though reinforcing this statement, an owl hooted from a clump of alders.
People born into the tradition of English country life are accustomed to eccentric owls. Mrs. Leslie and her daughter Belinda accepted the owl with vaguely acknowledging smiles. Her son-in-law, Leo Cooper, a Londoner whose contacts with nature had been made at the very expensive pleasure resorts patronized by his very rich parents, found midday hoots disconcerting, and almost said so. But did not, as he was just then in a temper and wholly engaged in not showing it.
He was in a temper for several reasons, all eminently adequate. For one thing, he had had a most unsatisfactory night with Belinda; for another, impelled by the nervous appetite of frustration he had eaten a traditional country breakfast and it was disagreeing with him; for yet another, he had been haled out on yet another of his mother-in-law’s picnics; finally, there was the picnic basket. The picnic basket was a family piece, dating, as Mrs. Leslie said on its every appearance, from an age of footmen. It was the size of a cabin trunk, built for eternity out of red wicker, equipped with massy cutlery and crockery; time had sharpened its red fangs, and however Leo took hold of it, they lacerated him. Also it caused him embarrassment to be seen carrying this rattling, creaking monstrosity, and today he had carried it farther than usual. The car was left where the track crossed a cattle bridge, and from there Mrs. Leslie staggered unerringly over a featureless stretch of rough ground to the exact place where they always picnicked because it was there that Belinda as a little girl had found a dormouse.
‘Yes, it was just here—by these particular whin bushes. Do you remember, darling? You were five.’
‘I thought I was six.’
‘No, five. Because Uncle Henry was with us that day, and next year he had that gun accident—God rest his soul!’
Having crossed herself with a sigh, and allowed time for the sigh’s implications to sink in, Mrs. Leslie pulled the picnic basket towards her and began fidgeting at the straps. ‘Let me!’ exclaimed Leo, unable to endure the intensified creakings, and at the same moment Belinda said, ‘I will’
She did—with the same negligent dexterity she showed in every activity but the act of love. Out came the plates and the cutlery and the mugs and the home-made ginger beer and the paste sandwiches and the lettuce sandwiches and the hard-boiled eggs; out came the cakes they had specially stopped to buy at Unwin the grocer’s, because his old aunt made them and it was so nice and right of him to let her feel useful still. Out, too, a few minutes later, came the ants and the flies and those large predatory bluebottles that materialize from solitary places like depraved desert fathers.
‘Brutes! Go away! How Delia used to swear at bluebottles! Poor Delia, I miss her to this day.’
‘Leo will think we have a great many dead relations‚’ said Belinda. She glanced at him—a friendlier glance; as if she had temporarily forgotten who he was, thought Leo, and was ready to give him the kindness one extends to a stranger.
‘We’ve got a whole new live one now,’ said her mother. ‘We’ve got Leo.’
The glance hardened to a stare. Replaced in his role of husband, he appealed no longer. ‘There’s that owl again,’ he said. ‘Is it usual for owls to hoot by day? Isn’t it supposed to be a bad omen?’
‘Frightfully.’ Belinda’s voice was so totally expressionless that it scalded him like an insult. He said with studied indifference, ‘Never mind! I expect it’s too late to do anything about it.’
She continued to stare at him and he stared back into her unreceiving eyes. Clear and round and wide-set, Belinda’s eyes had the fatalistic melancholy of the eyes of hunting cats. Seeing her as a caged puma, silent, withdrawn in a stately sulk, turning her back on the public and on the bars of her cage, he had fallen in love with her at first sight. ‘Belinda Leslie … Better look while you may; it’s your only chance. She’s in London for a week, being a bridesmaid, and then she’ll go back to live with her widowed Mamma in a mouldering grange, and never get out again. She’s one of those sacrificial daughters…. I believe the North of England’s full of them.’ A month later, she had snatched at his offer of marriage as though it were a still warm partridge; yes, exactly as though it were a still warm partridge—snatching the meat, ignoring the hand. So wild for liberty, he thought; later, she will love. But halfway through their honeymoon she insisted on pining for home, on pining for her mother even, so they travelled back to Snewdon and were welcomed as both her dear children by Mrs. Leslie. Before I get away, he thought, and later on revised this to: if ever I get away, she will have sewn labels of ‘Leo Leslie’ on all my underclothes. Yet he felt a sneaking liking for her; she was always polite to him, and he was young.
Since then, three appalling weeks had passed. The weather was flawless; gooseberries appeared at every meal. There was no male society except for the deaf-and-dumb gardener and two rams who pastured on the former tennis court. They went nowhere except for picnics in the neighbourhood. Every picnicking place had associations. If he tried to escape the associations by suggestions of going farther afield in his swifter car, this merely provoked other picnics and more of the rattles and joltings of the family conveyance. And all the time things were as bad as ever between him and Belinda, and the only alleviation in their relationship was that he was now beginning to feel bored by it.
‘I suppose that owl is an old admirer of yours. When does he produce the small guitar? After dark?’ (For a little time, because of her melancholy, merciless eyes, he had called her Pussy.)
‘I loathe Lear.’
‘Darling!’ To soften the rebuke in her voice, Mrs. Leslie offered her daughter a hard-boiled egg, which was rejected. Turning to Leo, she said, ‘Belinda and I do a lot of bird watching. We get such interesting migrants here—quite unexpected ones, sometimes.’
Belinda gave a brief, wounding laugh.
‘Blown off their course, I suppose,’ said Leo. ‘I see I must learn about birds.’
‘Oh, you should! It makes such a difference. There have been times when they were really my only support. Of course, I have always loved them. Quite the first book I remember is The History of the Robins. Flapsy, Pecksy—what were the others called? By Mrs. Trimmer. Did you ever read it, Belinda?’
‘No.’
Leo took out a slim note-book and wrote in it with a slender pencil. ‘I’ll make a note of the title. At last I may be able to give Belinda a book she hasn’t read already.’
‘How delicious lettuce sandwiches are!’ Mrs. Leslie said. ‘So much the most comfortable way of managing lettuces, don’t you think, Leo?’
‘Infinitely. Do you know that lettuce is a mild sedative?’
‘Is it? I never knew that. Belinda, do have another lettuce sandwich.’
‘No, thank you.’
‘But only very mild,’ continued Leo.
Belinda sprang to her feet, took a cigarette from her bag, lit it, and walked away.
‘She never really cares for Unwin’s cakes,’ explained her mother. ‘But do try one. You might.’
‘Thank you. I’d love one.’
Apparently he was doomed to failure in his loves, for the cake tasted of sweat and cough linctus. He laid it down where presently he would be able to trample on it, and stared after Belinda. Mrs. Leslie noticed his stare.
‘Belinda walks exactly like her father.’
‘
She walks beautifully.’
‘Yes, doesn’t she? I wonder where she’s going.’
‘She seems to be making for the car.’
‘Perhaps she has left something in it. Or perhaps she wants to move it into the shade. She has always been so fond of it. She learned to drive it when she was twelve. Of course, yours is much newer. Is it an Austin, too?’
‘A Bristol.’
‘How nice!’
Belinda was certainly walking towards the car. Mrs. Leslie’s ringed hand, clasping a half eggshell, began to crumple it. Hearing her gasp, he realized that she had been holding her breath. Belinda walked on. They watched her cross the cattle bridge and get into the car. They saw her start the car, turn it and drive away.
‘So now they know.’ Belinda spoke in the tone of one who has achieved some stern moral purpose. ‘Or they soon will.’
Belinda was one of those fortunate persons who fly into a rage as though into a refrigerator. Walking across the heath in the glaring post-meridian sun she had felt a film of ice encasing her, armouring her from head to foot in sleekness and invulnerability. She felt, too, the smile on her lips becoming increasingly rigid and corpselike. When she got into the car, though it was hot as an oven she seemed to be adjusting the hands of a marble effigy on the wheel. The car’s smell, so familiar, so much part of her life, waylaid her with its ordinary sensuality, besought her to have a good cry. But righteousness sustained her. She turned the car and drove away, taking a studied pleasure in steering so skilfully among the ruts and ridges of the cart track. The track ran out into a lane, the car began to travel smoothly, she increased speed. The whole afternoon was before her; she could go where she pleased. The whole afternoon was also before Leo and her mother, and a wide range of reflections; for there on the heath, with not a soul in sight, they would have to remain till she drove back to collect them. When would that be? Not till she had forgiven them. And that would not be until she had forgotten them, forgotten their taunts and gibes and the silly smirks they had exchanged, making a party against her, looping their airy conversation over her silence—as though she were a child sulking in a corner. Well, they could practise airy conversation, sitting there on the heath with the picnic basket. Presently the conversation would falter, they would be forced to speculate, to admit, to learn their lesson. Slow scholars, they would be allowed plenty of time for the lesson to sink in.
A Stranger with a Bag Page 5
