by Jane Gardam
He had sat on the terrace looking over the park and the tennis court, day after day after day in a summer not unlike this one. He had sat perfectly still. In a dressing-gown. She remembered all of a sudden the fringe on the silk tie of the dressing-gown—gold thread like a book-mark on a lectern. Or a mediaeval moustache. He had sat looking at the broad lawns, watching the peacefulness of the gardeners and other quiet wounded men in groups under the trees. All their faces and his particularly had looked as if they were listening to other things and seeing another landscape.
She had begun by smiling at him each morning as she walked by with the day’s basket of house-flowers she had taken from the cutting garden near the black shed—stiff, long gladioli, airier spikes of delphinium. Though he had never even lifted his head, or smiled back, soon she found that she had stopped beside him and said this and that about the day. Soon she had discovered that most days were important only because of this meeting, and that at length she was sitting on the terrace beside him without the flowers, but with sewing. Then that the sewing lay for an hour or for two hours in her lap. Later she sat beside him with nothing in her lap and with no excuse and between them there had been such knowledge that she had felt lost and diminished the moment she had moved away from him.
One day, she remembered, arriving on the terrace and finding him not there she had had to cling to the stone jar of geraniums at the top of the steps, had said to the little marble statue from Florence of the boy eating grapes, ‘He’s gone. He’s dead.’ When they had wheeled him round the corner at the same minute and then left him with her she had said in terror, ‘One day you’ll go away,’ and he had looked at her and held her hand.
She tried hard now—Booth was haranguing Effie. Something about Lysol—to remember, and saw a high cheek-boned face, young skin, large and very tired blue eyes, a droop of brown moustache, a long, fine, bony hand along the arm of the metal wheel-chair.
A bouncy bossy rosy wife arrived soon after. Her laugh had clattered over the terrace, shrieked about the lawns and into the wood. She had been called Nancy. He had been called . . .
But she could not remember his name.
The hell of the blowsy August, after the wife had taken him home, remained; and the memory of herself, drifting about, forgetting to keep appointments, bursting once into painful tears at breakfast, running off, down to the beach, walking there all day, until it was dark, by the sea, raging and cursing at the words not said, the love not given. The time—the event, the ‘affaire’—remained now in memories of the puzzled faces of Charles and Binkie. ‘Mama—are you ill or something?’
Edward at the other end of the table, moving forks about, looking grave.
And on holiday—a holiday that had passed like sick sleep at Scarborough, ‘I am lonely with everyone,’ she had thought. ‘It will always be the same. There is nobody but him.’
Then one day, at home again in September, she had noticed the apples in the kitchen garden. With the dark blue sky behind, the multitudinous and polished, crimson hard apples among frills of leaf. Beautiful, she had thought and smiled at them. The bird was flown.
And now she had even forgotten his name.
The waste of emotion. The pointlessness of it. Remembering poor old Edward was better, though even so she could not really, when she put her mind to it, remember Edward’s face.
She couldn’t remember his proposal at all—again it was only herself she remembered, coming through the open windows—these windows presumably, since this had been the drawing-room—and her mother, small, curvaceous, corsetted and frisky, writing ten to the dozen at the little davenport. The desk—lovely desk—with the sloping lid, smiling as she wrote.
‘Darling’—one hand up in the air, sensing Rosalie at the window—‘Catching the post. Won’t be a minute. Writing to—oh, such a scream!’
‘I’m going to marry Edward.’
The pen rushing on. Then flung down. The hour-glass figure turning, arms in air, the bright eyes, little black eyebrows. ‘Rosalie! Rosalie! Oh, oh!’
‘He’s just asked me. I’ve said yes.’
‘Rosalie, Rosalie!’
‘Is it all right?’ she had said. She had been seventeen.
Booth bore down on her with a big ivory hair-brush and a metal bowl.
‘Leave my hair, Booth. It can wait.’
‘You’ll feel better if it’s done.’
‘There’s not enough to show a profit.’
At seventeen, standing in the window her hair had been a heap of heavy, dark orange silk, looped and coiled and pinned and twisted into a final, fat silk plait. Heavy and hot. Rather horrible really, she thought now. Like weeds growing. Animals, she thought, as Booth scrubbed about, are so much more beautiful, covered matt with silk or fuzz. Men like great weedy trails of hair—I wonder why? We all cut it off later. The wounded Captain never saw me with great heaps of hair. Edward had, but had Edward liked her hair?
She couldn’t remember.
Charles had. When he was what—six? He used to sit and watch her brushing it. He said he liked to see the spikes come through. ‘Like hedgehogs.’
Binkie never gave a thought to hair—her mother’s or her own or anybody’s. She never looked at jewellery and she didn’t care a blow for clothes. Or pictures. All Economics with her, Girton, those terrible gaunt women. Political Theory.
What sort of daughters would I have had with the wounded Captain?
The feeding cup was approaching in Booth’s white hands above her head like a moon. It descends. I am like a cat. I am covered in black silk. I see the saucer descend. Shall I purr?
Shall I purr at Booth? Her eyes would bulge out like great melting sweets, sucky sweets. Sweeties, mint bullets. Are there mint bullets any more? Mint Imperials? Mints of Empire? It would be worth purring to see Booth’s fat face.
I shall not cry. I shall not cry out.
She drank soup out of the abomination, Booth expertly mopping up. She swallowed pills. Booth sat by her with the Daily Telegraph. She soon stopped listening to Booth and slept.
She slept till four—she knew that it was four, because four o’clock in the summer was the time when the Renoir was lit by the sun, and when the child’s face shone best. It was a young child with red rather pouted-out lips craning forward to look at something out of the picture, her eyes big and awake and content and her head as round as a football. She had yellow hair. She sat—though it was only a small picture—a head with hardly an inch around it—in a yellow and pink garden in summer. The head looked earnestly across at something and very much at its ease. Edward had bought the Renoir. In Paris when he was young.
‘But he’s so old,’ the hour-glass figure had cried, with the pen tossed out of its hand, then covering her mouth with the other one. ‘Oh—darling—oh! I’m sorry. But should you?’
‘I’ve said yes.’
‘But you’re seventeen. He’s the very first . . . My dear, it’s not . . . It’s nothing to do with me, but . . . ’
A mother so far ahead of her time, refusing to dictate, determined to let her children choose for themselves, determined to let Rosalie make decisions she said girls had been deprived of since the flood. I wanted to be told NO, Rosalie thought now. I suppose that’s why I was such a martinet with my own.
That’s why I never let them alone. I dictated to Binkie and look at her—just like a man. Like a sergeant-major. Not a trace of femininity in her. She’s worse than Booth. Charles I harangued. He just stood there and listened. I knew that everybody was saying that I ran him. But I couldn’t stop. I stopped that marriage. I knew I was doing it—hurting him nearly to death—and I still went on. That self-conscious creature with the bosoms who never stopped blushing, Elinor the dustman’s daughter. Goodness knows where the mother came from. We had been good to her—and there. She caught him—or thought she had. Edward could not have borne Charles to marry someone with—well, no background at all. Even though he was dead by then.
I stopped that. I’
m not sorry. I’m not sure that Charles ever forgave me. He never comes near me. I shan’t ever know. Neither of them comes near me, though Binkie calls. Like some parish visitor. She doesn’t come near me.
Why couldn’t she have said, ‘I forbid it! I FORBID IT, ROSALIE. He is so old?’ Flinging the pen down—right across the room, thumping the davenport (where is the davenport? It was a lovely piece that desk—a delectable piece Edward always called it), ‘Rosalie, I forbid you to marry Edward Frayling. He is FAR TOO OLD.’
I should not have had the Renoir then. I should not have been able to stay in this house. We could not have kept any of it if I had not married Edward Frayling. I should be in a Home now. It would have been some horrible nursing home, not my own house. I shouldn’t have been able to turn the house over to the poor mental patients. I should have been a mental case myself by this time if I’d waited and married someone like the wounded Captain. Giles? Miles? Name gone.
They said I grew very odd. I’d have grown odder. Married to Edward I could keep the oddness under—talk to left and right at dinner parties, open things and cut ribbons, receive bouquets, always impressive, correct, distant, taking soup round in the worst times at the Works. After the War.
‘It’s time you went outside.’
‘Not today, Booth.’ (She makes it sound like a dog.)
‘There’s a bit of a breeze now.’
‘I don’t see how you can know, Booth. You’ve not been out yourself.’
‘There’s a tree top moving over in the woods—you can see the top of it swaying about.’
Perhaps somebody is climbing it. I used to climb the trees. Charles did. (Basil? Nigel?)
Booth rattled the newspaper and sniffed and Rosalie heard her scratching herself. ‘I’ve made up the carriage,’ she said after a while in a voice to cover herself. Rosalie did not believe it. The carriage squeaked and vibrated as it was prepared and she had heard no noise. Booth did not mind missing the perambulation into the air. Like a lazy nannie with a docile child she liked being comfortable indoors. In fact it was almost worth enduring the outing to get Booth’s great reluctant shape heaving about the gardens.
Almost, but not quite. The shift from bed to carriage was getting more painful now each day, leaving her limp, unable to talk for most of the afternoon, trying all the time she lay looking at the sky not to think of the terrible return journey, and giving her hallucinations more extraordinary than dreams. Last week she had seen the Renoir head appear in the full light of day over the side of the carriage in the kitchen garden when she had sent Booth round the back of the black shed so that she need not hear the knitting needles. The head with bright hair, luminous with health, round as a football, wide eyed and strong had examined her with confidence like recognition—and then was gone, leaving just the pattern of the apple tree in its place all lichen and leaf-curl against the harsh blue sky, and not one red fruit.
‘Very well then,’ said Booth contentedly, ‘but we’ll have to go tomorrow. You must get your fresh air.’ She lay back creaking in the easy chair. There was the sound of the knitting bag coming out and then the clicking and the raising high of Booth’s arm pulling out wool. When Booth’s arm rose, the smell of Booth was strong. You could see the damp patches under Booth’s arm sometimes in the afternoon; sometimes in this weather even before lunch. I expect I smell, too, thought Rosalie. How can I know?
A plump figure moved about the room somewhere and Booth was gone. ‘Hello,’ Rosalie called. I must have been asleep. ‘Who’s there?’ Someone had wandered in from the conservatory behind and past her.
‘Drinkwater.’
She felt him moving about, walking up and down the far end of the huge room, and a little tapping noise.
‘What’s the tapping?’
‘I’m looking at Lake Maggiore.’
‘Why should it cause you to tap?’
He drifted up to her with the silver pencil in his mouth and rattled it over his teeth. ‘Magnificent,’ he said.
‘Your teeth?’
‘Lake Maggiore. One of my best.’
‘It’s not one of yours. It’s a William Leighton Leitch.’
‘Ah. I’ve lost Mount Parnassus.’ He wandered off.
‘Behind the washstand.’
‘Ah. Yes. Mount Parnassus on the Road between Livadia and Delphi.’
‘Yes. John Robert Cozens.’
She saw his back droop. He was wearing a navy-blue gaberdine macintosh today, belted in like a schoolboy, and if I could see the feet, she thought, I’d not be surprised by wellingtons.
‘Mount Parnassus was one of mine.’
‘Not that one. That one is John Robert Cozens.’
‘I’ve been to Delphi, you know. Painted there. Summer of eighty–four.’
‘Cozens was dead in eighty-four. Probably in seventeen eighty-four.’
Together they looked at their memory of Mount Olympus on the road near Delphi—the filmy, sunny slope above the dapple of the landscape of trees and shepherds and a haunch of a great ruin, leaning, sun-hardened. Rosalie saw the picture, straining after it as she had done for the name of the wounded Captain, catching only the line of shadow she remembered on the lowest peaks, the splash of sun behind the nearest scrub. ‘Hawthorns,’ she said, ‘I always thought they were probably hawthorns. They’re certainly not olives.’
‘No, no. Certainly not,’ said Mr Drinkwater, peering forward.
‘I wonder if he was only in the Lake District all the time?’
‘No, no. We were at Delphi. I was there with Lear you know. Painting holiday. Summer of forty-nine. Never much cared for the Lakes.’
‘Forty-nine?’ By turning her eyes and then holding her breath and straining her neck she turned her head a very little towards the picture and saw that Drinkwater was peering with satisfaction at the one next to it. ‘You’re not even looking at it,’ she said. ‘That’s William Collins. Trees in Windsor Park.’
‘Certainly not,’ said Drinkwater growing flushed, ‘I’ve never been to Windsor Park in my life. Worse than the Lake District.’ His outraged face swelled like a cat’s above the macintosh which was buttoned to the chin, his beard fluffing out all round. He wore as usual his panama hat. She smiled at him with love.
‘Do you need that macintosh today, Edwin?’
He looked at it surprised. ‘Never know in the Lake District,’ he said. ‘Rain can start any time. Terrible for painting. Light changing minute by minute. Never go a step in the Lakes without a mac. Take my advice.’
‘I will. Are you painting today?’
‘No. No. Too many people about. That nurse in Ward B—the whatsnames—aphrodisiacs . . . ’
‘Euphorics.’
‘Ha—that’s the fellers—Ward B. She has them out in droves.’
‘Do they bother you. I’ll have them stopped.’
‘No. No. I chuck a few things at them. They go off.’
‘Don’t hurt them. What do you chuck?’
‘Oh—stones. Grenades. Anything about me. That girl’s been here again you know.’
‘What girl?’
‘That girl I told you about. Fond of snakes. Rolls about and talks. Child.’
‘A child? By herself? In the grounds?’
‘Yes. Healthy. Rosy thing. Serious. About seven. Looks at you.’
Rosalie eased her head back into its hollow. Soon Booth would be back. The talcum powder, the dressings. She had a way of easing the leaden pressure of the sheets. I only keep Booth, she thought, because she has a gift for preventing bedsores. ‘No bedsores with Booth,’ she says. She had been a famous VAD in the hospitals of the Somme turning and pummelling and heaving and thumping soldiers who had often wept and asked to be left to die in peace. Her medals proved it. She spoke heartily about it all, often.
The sort of woman, thought Rosalie, I would once not have had in my drawing room. No more than the other one—Charles’s.
Drinkwater had wandered to the window and was stepping out. ‘Stay for tea
,’ called Rosalie. ‘Booth will be back soon.’
‘Tea’s over,’ said Drinkwater. Suddenly rational he looked at her amazed. ‘You’re losing your grip, Rosalie. Tea’s over. It’s past supper. There’s your tray. Empty.’
‘I must have been asleep again,’ she said. ‘I suppose I should have let her take me out this afternoon. Then I’d have slept tonight.’
‘You can’t have slept tonight. Tonight isn’t here yet. Not quite.’
Looking up at the Renoir she saw that this was true for the sun was off it—was off the whole room again. There was only a sense of it far outside the windows, still slinking at the edge of the lawns, making a gold edge to the flower borders lighting the red walls of the kitchen garden to an orange-rose. ‘I shan’t see that again, I expect,’ she thought. Looking hard at the shadowed Renoir she said, ‘I wonder if that child was a ghost?’
Drinkwater had moved off.
Still looking at the picture or what she could see of it, Rosalie thought about him and the pleasure he gave her. Drinkwater and fat mongol Joan, she thought. Only the mad now seem to do. It’s only the mad I seem to understand at all. I should like to talk to Charles again sometimes—he had a nonsensical streak. We used to talk rubbish together when he was little. I expect he’s forgotten about it all now. I’ll leave the Renoir to Drinkwater in case they throw him out when I am dead. Find he can’t pay. I shan’t leave it to Charles. He can have all the dying stags—no, I’ll be kind. He can have the Lake District olives.
‘I’ll leave Binkie the dying stags,’ she thought, ‘and the dead pheasants with the glass eyes and the overblown roses. She can sell them if she wants. I’ll leave all the good landscapes to Drinkwater.’ She wondered a little if Binkie—or even Booth—might know something about the wounded Captain.
