Privileged Children

by Frances Vernon

  ‘Keep still!’ snapped Alice.

  There was a knock on the door. ‘Who is it?’ Alice called, surprised at the knock.

  ‘Me,’ replied Mr Tuskin.

  ‘Wait a moment,’ she said. ‘Miranda, put the blanket over you.’

  ‘I’m not embarrassed,’ cried Miranda.

  ‘No, Mirandolina, but he would be, remember?’

  Mr Tuskin put his head round the door and then came in. ‘Miss Molloy, why was I not told that you were going to have an exhibition of your own? I only found out from Leo yesterday, yet I hear that the plan was in the offing weeks ago!’

  ‘I forgot to tell you. I suppose you want to choose the exhibits.’

  ‘Naturally,’ he replied, raising one eyebrow at her.

  Alice laughed. ‘It’s thirteen years since you were responsible for my work.’

  ‘Nonsense, Miss Molloy, there is still a great deal for me to criticise.’

  ‘Yes, but Christopher, you have criticisms to make of Vermeer and Watteau,’ said Miranda coldly. ‘And you’ve never had any of your work exhibited.’

  ‘Don’t be impertinent,’ said Mr Tuskin, without irritation.

  ‘You don’t need to worry, Miranda, I can defend myself.’

  Mr Tuskin walked over to the easel and studied the portrait of Miranda from different angles. ‘I once set out to paint the portrait of the most beautiful boy,’ he commented, ‘but alas, he came from such a respectable family that I was unable even to persuade him to take off his clothes.’

  ‘How’s Harry?’ said Anatole.

  ‘I’m afraid that he’s never quite recovered from having been in prison,’ said Mr Tuskin. ‘The food they gave him there was most harmful to the digestive tract. Twice-cooked meat is so constipating. But apart from that, he’s quite well. Now, Miss Molloy, are you going to show me the work you and Leo have so far decided on?’

  Alice fetched the stack of five oil paintings which were leaning, against the wall, and a portfolio of drawings and watercolours.

  Mr Tuskin examined everything, twitching his lip, wrinkling his nose, and screwing up one eye and then the other. Four of the oil paintings were of London scenes, and the fifth was a portrait of the Bramham Gardens cats, who were called Melbourne, Palmerston, Gladstone and Disraeli. Their names were the picture’s title.

  ‘If you ever do become renowned as an artist, Miss Molloy — creditably renowned, that is, not as a portrait-painter — it will be as a painter of London,’ said Mr Tuskin. He was holding a painting entitled A Child’s View of Ludgate Hill, 1903. Alice’s, jaw dropped.

  ‘Are you all right, Christopher?’ teased Miranda. He ignored her. One’s first impression of the painting was that the street and the people had been deformed by the artist, but on looking closer it became clear that this was because it was painted from a five-year-old’s level of vision. Some subjects were painted as a large muddle, others, such as the City man who was poised in the bottom left-hand corner looking down disapprovingly on the invisible child, were very observantly depicted.

  ‘I suppose the one of the Round Pond is charming,’ said Mr Tuskin, ‘but a little tedious. Nothing in it surprises one. I don’t think it should be included.’

  ‘Alice, can we finish for today?’ asked Miranda, as Alice began to argue with Mr Tuskin.

  ‘Oh, of course, if you’re tired.’

  Miranda went downstairs to get dressed. She came back again with her hair still loose, and asked Anatole to put it up for her. He gladly deserted his pretence of work to do so. She sat in front of him, listening to Alice’s conversation and commenting on the paintings. Anatole slowly twisted the coarse, shining strands of her hair round his hands, pulling it back over her soft ears. He touched one of them gently, and stroked its curve, but Miranda only fidgeted as though a fly had settled there.

  Suddenly she noticed that she had not got her watch on. ‘Where’s my watch?’ she said, biting her lip.

  She went over to the bed, and searched amongst the covers and on the small table beside it. ‘Oh my God,’ she whispered. ‘It’s absolutely vanished! It can’t possibly be anywhere but here.’

  ‘It might be in your room,’ said Alice. She never knew what to do when Miranda lost something. She was no good at searching, and Miranda was never calm until the object had been retrieved. To shout at her for being silly, as Kate had done, made her worse. Alice picked up the portfolio and took Mr Tuskin off to have a drink and look at the drawings in the kitchen.

  ‘It can’t possibly be in my room, it really can’t be. I remember putting it here, here, next to this book! Oh God, why do these terrible things happen to me! Why must they do this to me? What shall I do if I never find it? Why is life such hell? I’ll never, ever find it!’ She was crying, and her eyes were red and wild with fear. The watch she had lost was valuable and handsome, a present from a godfather of whom she had been fond; but she had been as upset over the loss of her hairbrush.

  Anatole, who had been watching helplessly, suddenly got up and shook her, and slapped her face to calm her. ‘Sit down, Miranda. Come on.’ He took her over to the bed. ‘No one is going to punish you for losing something. No one is going to steal your things because they want to see you punished. That’s what the others did to you at school, didn’t they? That’s why you are like this?’ He was sitting on something hard, and, putting his hand in the pillow case, found the watch and put it round Miranda’s quiet wrist. ‘It happened to me too,’ he said. ‘I made myself forget, but my half-brother did it to me. I know that, in childhood, the consequences of losing anything are terrible.’

  Miranda started to cry again, but in a different way. ‘Do you know what it’s called?’ she said. ‘It’s called “teaching you to have a sense of humour”.’

  ‘Teaching you to be passive under continual humiliation,’ said Anatole.

  ‘Exactly. “Oh, Miranda, you must learn to take teasing,” they say. How can it be just to laugh at or tease someone who doesn’t understand and can’t hit back? And, of course, there’s never anything funny to laugh at.’

  ‘All humour is cruel,’ said Anatole, stroking her hair. ‘It always consists of laughing at the misfortunes of others.’

  ‘They used to hide my games clothes,’ sobbed Miranda, ‘because that was the worst. Once my lacrosse stick was gone for three days. The games teacher made me write a thousand lines saying, “I must not be careless.” “You mustn’t be careless, Miranda,” the girl who’d hid it said to me when she handed it back. I hit her with it and knocked her out. Then they put me in solitary confinement for a week. That, of course, was my happiest week at Radfield. They fed me on bread and cheese as part of the punishment, but how delicious that was in comparison to the school food. They used to force us — I mean force — to eat scrag-end of neck, cod, brains, tapioca and junket.’

  Anatole shuddered. ‘Weren’t you all ill on that?’

  ‘Certainly we were. Every February there was an influenza epidemic, and every girl went down with it because they put the sick girls in the dormitories with the healthy ones. I didn’t find that so bad as constipation, though. I honestly thought that I would die, my first term. I begged and begged for some syrup of figs. “Don’t be ridiculous, child, you’re just not trying,” said the matron.’

  ‘How long were you there, Miranda?’

  ‘Five and a half terms. I was twelve when I went. I’d had a governess till then.’

  ‘Was that better?’ Anatole had never heard details about Miranda’s childhood before; for she had never told him, and Alice regarded them as confidential.

  ‘Well, she was dull and cruel through lack of imagination like most people are, but of course it was better, because there weren’t any other girls. Before her, though, I had a very nice governess, but she left, I don’t know why, when I was nine. I suspect that my father sacked her because I didn’t know the Kings of England and my twelve-times table. Teaching that sort of thing wasn’t Miss Heaney’s method.’

  Mir
anda closed her eyes and let her taut body sag for a moment. ‘Oh well, this is all quite irrelevant,’ she said a little later. ‘It’s over, like you said.’

  ‘It’s not over, Mirandolina,’ said Anatole, ‘not while you’re still suffering so much from it.’

  ‘Only because I let myself. Pure self-pity.’ Miranda made her upper lip stiff.

  ‘You must have been told that for a great many years,’ said Anatole. ‘Everyone comes to believe that sort of thing, once their own sufferings are in a sense “over”. That’s why children go on being cruelly treated from generation to generation.’

  ‘Some people believe the lies they’re told about themselves — and about other things, but chiefly about themselves — even when they’re still children. Most do, as a matter of fact.’ Miranda paused. ‘I’ll never forgive myself for believing what they told me for two terms — my third and fourth terms. I was quite a rebel when I first went to school, although I didn’t actually break a single rule. But the mistresses and the other girls could tell that I hated and despised them — that frightened them much more than disobedience. That’s why they told me I was mad, perverted, corrupt, loathsome.’

  ‘Perhaps a child who is an unbeliever is a disease in the body politic,’ said Anatole. He lit his pipe and watched her. Miranda was very white. She had vomited out her emotions and she felt very reasonable.

  ‘I’ve been very crude, you know,’ she said, as she slowly wound up her wrist watch. ‘I used to think that the authorities — you know, just hated disobedience itself. But in fact, actual obedience rather frightens parents and schools — they think it’s unnatural for one not to actually break rules. What they really want is a sort of passive obedience: they don’t mind if you break the rules, so long as you accept the punishments they mete out in absolute submission as completely just. I must go and think it all out properly.’

  She paused.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ll never forgive myself for giving in that time. I remember being thrilled when I heard some senior saying “that young Pagett’s coming on quite nicely” — meaning that I’d started to really conform. My God! The terrifying thing is that it was so very easy to give in, and the rewards were so great. I was hardly bullied at all those two terms. And I had two friends.’

  ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself,’ said Anatole, ‘it’s very understandable that you should have left off struggling after seven years. And remember, you must have been in a great state at that age, just coming up to your menarche.’

  ‘It was my own fault that I was so unhappy. No, I’m not just being conventional. I mean that if I’d either understood none of the truth about my position, or all of it, I’d have been better off. But I just had a very little knowledge; I could see half-way through them all but not the whole way. I’m just not quite clever enough!’

  ‘What nonsense,’ said Anatole. ‘Do you think that at the age of six you should have intellectualised all your pain as you’re doing now?’

  Anatole put his arm round her waist. She sat there, looking into his eyes. He drew her head towards him and tried to kiss her but she shook herself away.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I don’t want to, that’s why.’

  ‘Is it because of Alice?’

  ‘I don’t know. No, it’s not that, I simply don’t find you attractive.’ She saw, looking at him, that he had never been in this position before, and she laughed.

  Then she said: ‘It’s very odd, you know, talking to someone who really does understand. Rather frightening, in fact. I was right not to talk to you all that time — now you have a sort of possession of my mind. Alice doesn’t. She understands — in the sense that she’s happy, and it angers and upsets and puzzles her when someone is not happy — but she doesn’t know.’

  She went out, and left Anatole staring after her.

  CHAPTER 18

  BOND STREET

  MAYFAIR

  February 1926

  Alice and Miranda were in the West End having tea in Lyon’s. They had just been buying material to make new curtains for the kitchen and had also bought various things which they had not intended to buy. They were sitting at a table by the window with their parcels at their feet. Miranda was dressed in black. She wore a hat which was more broad-brimmed than was fashionable, from which there hung a veil. She had discovered that mourning clothes, like an injury, caused people to look away from her.

  Through the thick veil Alice could still see, as she gazed, the gold flecks in the iris of Miranda’s eyes, the light freckles on her cheekbone, the faint cleft in her white chin, and the downward curve of the right-hand corner of her mouth. Miranda’s ankle, encased in a burnt-orange stocking, was just touching Alice’s calf.

  ‘It’s so silly,’ said Alice. ‘Here we are fussing about spending too much money and to cheer ourselves up we go and spend more money on eating here. Oh, why aren’t you eating anything? You said you were hungry.’

  ‘I just don’t feel like eating anything any more.’

  ‘Oh well, we’ll take them home with us.’

  She put the two scones in her bag.

  ‘That’s not considered good etiquette,’ smiled Miranda.

  ‘No, of course not. It’s thrift, and that’s never considered good etiquette, is it?’

  ‘Oh no. It’s good etiquette to wait until your tailor’s bankrupt before you pay your bills.’

  ‘Mirandolina,’ said Alice, ‘not everyone who’s upper-class can be so very wicked in every way, can they?’ She put her hand on Miranda’s and gently pressed her wrist. Miranda took her hand away.

  ‘Pas devant,’ she said. ‘No, of course not. Some who are told that their tailor’s on the verge of ruin look most upset and say, “Oh, I’ll order a new suit.” Give me a cigarette.’

  Alice held the cigarette case out to her and Miranda, fumbling, took a cigarette and pushed up her veil so that it only hid her eyes.

  ‘You don’t look well, you know,’ said Alice. ‘Your hand’s trembling like a leaf.’

  ‘I know,’ said Miranda. ‘I don’t know why.’ She shook her head and her face suddenly crumpled.

  ‘Oh my God, Alice,’ she said in a whisper which was very low but pierced Alice. ‘I don’t think I can stand this thing about Anatole any longer.’

  ‘He’ll get used to it,’ said Alice. Her voice was rasping. She hoped it sounded firm. ‘He’s always been going to bed with other women since he married me, not that I mind but I’ll do the same if I want to.’

  ‘So you’ve said, Alice, but it doesn’t really solve anything, does it, just to keep on asserting that? Especially as Anatole agrees and still looks at us in that awful way.’

  ‘Mother of God, that man’s a brute,’ said Alice. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand, took hold of Miranda’s arm and would not let it go. ‘He says he quite understands, but he resents us so much and when I ask him what he really wants me to do he won’t tell me. He’s torturing me. If he told me he wanted me to give you up and him to divorce me and marry you and go abroad or something, it wouldn’t be so bad.’

  ‘Alice, don’t shout, everyone’s looking at us.’

  ‘They can’t touch us. What do you care about them?’

  Miranda said nothing. She was slowly crying. ‘I don’t want to sleep with him,’ she said at last, ‘but perhaps if I did it might make it better.’

  Alice stared. ‘You can’t mean that,’ she said. ‘I mean, perhaps you’re right, because for sure he wants to go to bed with you himself. He’s human, after all.’

  Miranda smiled.

  ‘But Mirandolina,’ Alice continued, ‘you couldn’t just give in like that. For the love of God, why ever should you? He’s just jealous and possessive and peeved because you don’t want to sleep with him. It’s not as though he loved you. Look, he’s just like all the people you ran away from — he’s trying to force you to do what he wants, and I damned well won’t let him.’

>   ‘Alice, aren’t you possessive? Would you like it if I did want him as much as I want you?’

  ‘I — no, you’ve got me there, I suppose.’ She stroked Miranda’s arm. ‘I don’t want to be part of a triangle. Neither do you, surely. It’s just him.’

  ‘He doesn’t want to be part of a triangle,’ said Miranda. ‘Will you just look at the lot of us. What we all want is to sleep with the two others, and for those two to have nothing to do with each other,’ she sneered. She was still quietly crying.

  ‘That’s not true,’ said Alice. ‘None of us has ever said anything like that. I don’t know what you’re talking about — why, you’re asking me to believe you’re bitch enough to want to split up me and Anatole.’

  ‘Alice, sometimes I think you’re about twelve years old.’

  ‘What do you mean? Thank heaven you’ve stopped crying, darling,’ she added.

  ‘I mean,’ said Miranda, ‘that, like a child, you’re incapable of believing the worst. You’ve got to have your world safe. It’s contemptible. You’ve never rebelled against anything, Alice, have you?’

  ‘I never had anything bad to rebel against, that’s why,’ said Alice. ‘You talk as though rebelling were something necessary to people — to their souls almost — instead of the result of the wrong pressures.’

  ‘It is necessary,’ said Miranda. ‘You’ve got to learn to criticise — I mean criticise yourself, and the things you like, and the people you love, as well as everything you’ve been brought up to dislike. Oh yes, you’re very reasonable when your emotions aren’t involved; you pointed out my crude generalisation about the upper classes just now. This is a fault of mine too, of course, I’m not denying that. But because you love me you refuse to see that I am absolutely filthy, entirely selfish, incapable of giving anyone real unselfish love.’ Her voice was shaking as she crushed and stretched and tore her handkerchief. ‘Don’t interrupt. It’s quite true. I am the greatest bitch that ever lived. If you can say, “I love the greatest bitch that ever lived, I love Miranda,” that’s fine, but you say, “I love Miranda, who is almost perfect,” and what will happen when you realise what I really am? You’ll hate me, and I just can’t bear it.’