Unfinished Portrait

by Christie, writing as Mary Westmacott, Agatha

  Celia’s mother answered: ‘I expect she didn’t want to hurt the guide’s feelings.’

  ‘Oh, Mummy!’ said Celia.

  It was all there – in those two words. Her relief, her gratitude – and a great welling up of love.

  Her mother had understood.

  3 Grannie

  1

  The following winter Celia’s father and mother went to Egypt. They did not think it practicable to take Celia with them, so she and Jeanne went to stay with Grannie.

  Grannie lived at Wimbledon, and Celia liked staying with her very much. The features of Grannie’s house were, first, the garden – a square pocket handkerchief of green, bordered with rose trees, every tree of which Celia knew intimately, remembering even in winter: ‘That’s the pink la France – Jeanne, you’d like that one,’ but the crown and glory of the garden was a big ash tree trained over wire supports to make an arbour. There was nothing like the ash tree at home, and Celia regarded it as one of the most exciting wonders of the world. Then there was the WC seat of old-fashioned mahogany set very high. Retiring to this spot after breakfast, Celia would fancy herself a queen enthroned, and securely secluded behind a locked door she would bow regally, extend a hand to be kissed by imaginary courtiers and prolong the court scene as long as she dared. There was also Grannie’s store cupboard situated by the door into the garden. Every morning, her large bunch of keys clanking, Grannie would visit her store cupboard, and with the punctuality of a child, a dog, or a lion at feeding time, Celia would be there too. Grannie would hand out packets of sugar, butter, eggs, or a pot of jam. She would hold long acrimonious discussions with old Sarah, the cook. Very different from Rouncy, old Sarah. As thin as Rouncy was fat. A little old woman with a nut-cracker wrinkled face. For fifty years of her life she had been in service with Grannie, and during all those fifty years the discussions had been the same. Too much sugar was being used: what happened to the last half pound of tea? It was, by now, a kind of ritual – it was Grannie going through her daily performance of the careful housewife. Servants were so wasteful! You had to look after them sharply. The ritual finished, Grannie would pretend to notice Celia for the first time.

  ‘Dear, dear, what’s a little girl doing here?’

  And Grannie would pretend great surprise.

  ‘Well, well,’ she would say, ‘you can’t want anything?’

  ‘I do, Grannie, I do.’

  ‘Well, let me see now.’ Grannie would burrow leisurely in the depths of the cupboard. Something would be extracted – a jar of French plums, a stick of angelica, a pot of quince preserve. There was always something for a little girl.

  Grannie was a very handsome old lady. She had pink and white skin, two waves of white crimped hair each side of her forehead, and a big good-humoured mouth. In figure she was majestically stout with a pronounced bosom and stately hips. She wore dresses of velvet or brocade, ample as to skirts, and well pulled in round the waist.

  ‘I always had a beautiful figure, my dear,’ she used to tell Celia. ‘Fanny – that was my sister – had the prettiest face of the family, but she’d no figure – no figure at all! As thin as two boards nailed together. No man looked at her for long when I was about. It’s figure the men care for, not face.’

  ‘The men’ bulked largely in Grannie’s conversation. She had been brought up in the days when men were considered to be the hub of the universe. Women merely existed to minister to those magnificent beings.

  ‘You wouldn’t have found a handsomer man anywhere than my father. Six foot tall, he was. All we children were afraid of him. He was very severe.’

  ‘What was your mother like, Grannie?’

  ‘Ah, poor soul. Only thirty-nine when she died. Ten of us children, there were. A lot of hungry mouths. After a baby was born, when she was staying in bed –’

  ‘Why did she stay in bed, Grannie?’

  ‘It’s the custom, dearie.’

  Celia accepted the mandate incuriously.

  ‘She always took her month,’ went on Grannie. ‘It was the only rest she got, poor soul. She enjoyed her month. She used to have breakfast in bed and a boiled egg. Not that she got much of that. We children used to come and bother her. “Can I have a taste of your egg, Mother? Can I have the top of it?” There wouldn’t be much left for her after each child had had a taste. She was too kind – too gentle. She died when I was fourteen. I was the eldest of the family. Poor father was heart-broken. They were a devoted couple. He followed her to the grave six months later.’

  Celia nodded. That seemed right and fitting in her eyes. In most of the child’s books in the nursery there was a deathbed scene – usually that of a child – a peculiarly holy and angelic child.

  ‘What did he die of?’

  ‘Galloping consumption,’ replied Grannie.

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘She went into a decline, my dear. Just went into decline. Always wrap your throat up well when you go out in an east wind. Remember that, Celia. It’s the east wind that kills. Poor Miss Sankey – why, she had tea with me only a month ago. Went to those nasty swimming baths – came out afterwards with an east wind blowing and no boa round her neck – and she was dead in a week.’

  Nearly all Grannie’s stories and reminiscences ended like this. A most cheerful person herself, she delighted in tales of incurable illness, of sudden death, or of mysterious disease. Celia was so well accustomed to this that she would demand with eager and rapturous interest in the middle of one of Grannie’s stories, ‘And then did he die, Grannie?’ And Grannie would reply, ‘Ah, yes, he died, poor fellow.’ Or girl or boy, or woman – as the case might be. None of Grannie’s stories ever ended happily. It was perhaps her natural reaction from her own healthy and vigorous personality.

  Grannie was also full of mysterious warnings.

  ‘If anybody you don’t know offers you sweets, dearie, never take them. And when you’re an older girl, remember never to get into a train with a single man.’

  This last injunction rather distressed Celia. She was a shy child. If one was not to get into a train with a single man, one would have to ask him whether or not he was married. You couldn’t tell if a man was married or not to look at him. The mere thought of having to do such a thing made her squirm uneasily.

  She did not connect with herself a murmur from a lady visitor.

  ‘Surely unwise – put things into her head.’

  Grannie’s answer rose robustly.

  ‘Those that are warned in time won’t come to grief. Young people ought to know these things. And there’s a thing that perhaps you never heard of, my dear. My husband told me about it – my first husband.’ (Grannie had had three husbands – so attractive had been her figure – and so well had she ministered to the male sex. She had buried them in turn – one with tears – one with resignation – and one with decorum.) ‘He said women ought to know about such things.’

  Her voice dropped. It hissed in sibilant whispers.

  What she could hear seemed to Celia dull. She strayed away into the garden …

  2

  Jeanne was unhappy. She became increasingly homesick for France and her own people. The English servants, she told Celia, were not kind.

  ‘The cuisinière, Sarah, she is gentille, though she calls me a papist. But the others, Mary and Kate – they laugh because I do not spend my wages on my clothes, and send it all home to Maman.’

  Grannie attempted to cheer Jeanne.

  ‘You go on behaving like a sensible girl,’ she told Jeanne. ‘Putting a lot of useless finery on your back never caught a decent man yet. You go on sending your wages home to your mother, and you’ll have a nice little nest egg laid by for when you get married. That neat plain style of dressing is far more suitable to a domestic servant than a lot of fal-lals. You go on being a sensible girl.’

  But Jeanne would occasionally give way to tears when Mary or Kate had been unusually spiteful or unkind. The English girls did not like foreigners, and J
eanne was a papist too, and everyone knew that Roman Catholics worshipped the Scarlet Woman.

  Grannie’s rough encouragements did not always heal the wound.

  ‘Quite right to stick to your religion, my girl. Not that I hold with the Roman Catholic religion myself, because I don’t. Most Romans I’ve known have been liars. I’d think more of them if their priests married. And these convents! All those beautiful young girls shut up in convents and never being heard of again. What happens to them, I should like to know? The priests could answer that question, I dare say.’

  Fortunately Jeanne’s English was not quite equal to this flow of remarks.

  Madame was very kind, she said, she would try not to mind what the other girls said.

  Grannie then had up Mary and Kate and denounced them in no measured terms for their unkindness to a poor girl in a strange country. Mary and Kate were very soft spoken, very polite, very surprised. Indeed, they had said nothing – nothing at all. Jeanne was such a one as never was for imagining things.

  Grannie got a little satisfaction by refusing with horror Mary’s plea to be allowed to keep a bicycle.

  ‘I am surprised at you, Mary, for making such a suggestion. No servant of mine shall ever do such an unsuitable thing.’

  Mary, looking sulky, muttered that her cousin at Richmond was allowed to have one.

  ‘Let me hear nothing more about it,’ said Grannie. ‘Anyway, they’re dangerous things for women. Many a woman has been prevented from having children for life by riding those nasty things. They’re not good for a woman’s inside.’

  Mary and Kate retired sulkily. They would have given notice, but they knew that the place was a good one. The food was first class – no inferior tainted stuff bought for the kitchen as in some places – and the work was not heavy. The old lady was rather a tartar, but she was kind in her way. If there was any trouble at home, she’d often come to the rescue, and nobody could be more generous at Christmas. There was old Sarah’s tongue, of course, but you had to put up with that. Her cooking was prime.

  Like all children, Celia haunted the kitchen a good deal. Old Sarah was much fiercer than Rouncy, but then, of course, she was terribly old. If anyone had told Celia that Sarah was a hundred and fifty she would not have been in the least surprised. Nobody, Celia felt, had ever been quite so old as Sarah.

  Sarah was most unaccountably touchy about the most extraordinary things. One day, for instance, Celia had gone into the kitchen and had asked Sarah what she was cooking.

  ‘Giblet soup, Miss Celia.’

  ‘What are giblets, Sarah?’

  Sarah pursed her mouth.

  ‘Things that it’s not nice for a little lady to make inquiries about.’

  ‘But what are they?’ Celia’s curiosity was pleasantly aroused.

  ‘Now, that’s enough, Miss Celia. It’s not for a little lady like you to ask questions about such things.’

  ‘Sarah.’ Celia danced about the kitchen. Her flaxen hair bobbed. ‘What are giblets? Sarah, what are giblets? Giblets – giblets – giblets?’

  The infuriated Sarah made a rush at her with a frying pan, and Celia retreated, to poke her head in a few minutes later with the query, ‘Sarah, what are giblets?’

  She next repeated the question from the kitchen window.

  Sarah, her face dark with annoyance, made no answer, merely mumbled to herself.

  Finally, tiring suddenly of this sport, Celia sought out her grandmother.

  Grannie always sat in the dining-room, which was situated looking out over the short drive in front of the house. It was a room that Celia could have described minutely twenty years later. The heavy Nottingham lace curtains, the dark red and gold wallpaper, the general air of gloom, and the faint smell of apples and a trace still of the midday joint. The broad Victorian dining table with its chenille cloth, the massive mahogany sideboard, the little table by the fire with the stacked-up newspapers, the heavy bronzes on the mantelpiece (‘Your grandfather gave £70 for them at the Paris Exhibition’), the sofa upholstered in shiny red leather on which Celia sometimes had her ‘rest’, and which was so slippery that it was hard to remain in the centre of it, the crocheted woolwork that was hung over the back of it, the dumbwaiters in the windows crammed with small objects, the revolving bookcase on the round table, the red velvet rocking chair in which Celia had once rocked so violently that she had shot over backwards and developed an egg-like bump on her head, the row of leather upholstered chairs against the wall, and lastly the great high-backed leather chair in which Grannie sat pursuing this, that, and the other activity.

  Grannie was never idle. She wrote letters – long letters in a spiky spidery handwriting, mostly on half sheets of paper because it used them up, and she couldn’t bear waste. (‘Waste not, want not, Celia.’) Then she crocheted shawls – pretty shawls in purples and blues and mauves. They were usually for the servants’ relations. Then she knitted with great balls of soft fleecy wool. That was usually for somebody’s baby. And there was netting – a delicate foam of netting round a little circle of damask. At tea time all the cakes and biscuits reposed on these foamy doilies. Then there were waistcoats – for the old gentlemen of Grannie’s acquaintance. You did them on strips of huckaback towelling, running through the stitches with lines of coloured embroidery cotton. This was, perhaps, Grannie’s favourite work. Though eighty-one years of age, she still had an eye for ‘the men’. She knitted them bed socks, too.

  Under Grannie’s guidance Celia was doing a set of washstand mats as a surprise for Mummy on her return. You took different-sized rounds of bath towelling, buttonholed them round first in wool, and then crocheted into the buttonholing. Celia was doing her set in pale blue wool, and both she and Grannie admired the result enormously. After tea was cleared away, Grannie and Celia would play spillikins, and after that cribbage, their faces serious and preoccupied, the classic phrases falling from their lips, ‘One for his knob, two for his heel, fifteen two, fifteen four, fifteen six, and six are twelve.’ ‘Do you know why cribbage is such a good game, my dear?’ ‘No, Grannie.’ ‘Because it teaches you to count.’

  Grannie never failed to make this little speech. She had been brought up never to admit enjoyment for enjoyment’s sake. You ate your food because it was good for your health. Stewed cherries, of which Grannie was passionately fond, she had nearly every day because they were ‘so good for the kidneys’. Cheese, which Grannie also loved, ‘digested your food’, the glass of port served with dessert ‘I have been ordered by the doctor.’ Especially was it necessary to emphasize the enjoyment of alcohol (for a member of the weaker sex). ‘Don’t you like it, Grannie?’ Celia would demand. ‘No, dear,’ Grannie would reply, and would make a wry face as she took the first sip. ‘I drink it for my health.’ She could then finish her glass with every sign of enjoyment, having uttered the required formula. Coffee was the only thing for which Grannie admitted a partiality. ‘Very Moorish, this coffee,’ she would say, wrinkling up her eyelids in enjoyment. ‘Very moreish,’ and would laugh at her little joke as she helped herself to another cup.

  On the other side of the hall was the morning-room, where sat Poor Miss Bennett, the sewing woman. Miss Bennett was never referred to without the poor in front of her name.

  ‘Poor Miss Bennett,’ Grannie would say. ‘It’s a charity to give her employment. I really don’t believe the poor thing has enough to eat sometimes.’

  If any special delicacies were served at table, a share was always sent in to Poor Miss Bennett.

  Poor Miss Bennett was a little woman with a wealth of untidy grey hair wreathed round her head till it looked like a bird’s nest. She was not actually deformed, but she had a look of deformity. She spoke in a mincing and ultra-refined voice, addressing Grannie as Madam. She was quite incapable of making any article correctly. The dresses she made for Celia were always so much too large that the sleeves fell over her hands, and the armholes were halfway down her arms.

  You had to be very, very ca
reful not to hurt Poor Miss Bennett’s feelings. The least thing did it, and then Miss Bennett would sit sewing violently with a red spot in each cheek and tossing her head.

  Poor Miss Bennett had had an Unfortunate History. Her father, as she constantly told you, had been very well connected – ‘In fact, though perhaps I ought not to say so, but this is entirely in confidence, he was a very Great Gentleman. My mother always said so. I take after him. You may have noticed my hands and my ears – always a sign of breeding, they say. It would be a great shock to him, I’m sure, if he knew I was earning my living this way. Not but that with you, madam, it is different from what I have had to bear from Some People. Treated almost like a Servant. You, madam, understand.’

  So Grannie was careful always to see that Poor Miss Bennett was treated properly. Her meals went in on a tray. Miss Bennett treated the servants very haughtily, ordering them about, with the result that they disliked her intensely.

  ‘Giving herself such airs,’ Celia heard old Sarah mutter. ‘And her nothing but a come-by-chance with a father she doesn’t even know the name of.’

  ‘What’s a come-by-chance, Sarah?’

  Sarah grew very red.

  ‘Nothing to hear about on the lips of a young lady, Miss Celia.’

  ‘Is it a giblet?’ asked Celia hopefully.

  Kate, who was standing by, went off into peals of laughter and was wrathfully told by Sarah to hold her tongue.

  Behind the morning-room was the drawing-room. It was cool and dim and remote in there. It was only used when Grannie gave a party. It was very full of velvety chairs and tables and brocaded sofas, it had big cabinets crammed to bursting point with china figures. In one corner was a piano with a loud bass and a weak sweet treble. The windows led into a conservatory, and from there into the garden. The steel grate and fire irons were the delight of old Sarah, who kept them bright and shining so that you could almost see your face in them.

  Upstairs was the nursery, a low long room overlooking the garden, above it an attic which housed Mary and Kate, and up a few steps, the three best bedrooms and an airless slit of a room belonging to Sarah.