Prodigies

by Francis King

  ‘I’ll tell her before she goes to bed.’

  Addy frowned. Her eyes were still red from tears, even though she and Philip had never been close and she had never greatly liked him, thinking that he neglected her sister and took her too much for granted. Harriet, on the other hand, had not once cried over the death, and was never to do so, not even in the privacy of her bedroom. ‘ Why not tell her now? As soon as she comes down from the schoolroom.’

  Harriet shook her head. ‘No. If I tell her when she’s already in bed, then she can have a good cry and sleep on it. Better that way.

  Don’t you remember that that was how Mama told us of Grandmother’s death?’

  ‘But she’ll guess, of course she’ll guess. Nanny Rose or Mademoiselle – or even one of the servants – will let something slip.’

  Without an answer, Harriet got up and began to mount the stairs to Philip’s study, a room which she had rarely entered in the past. As she opened the door, she half expected to see him seated at his desk. He would look up, startled; he would frown briefly at the interruption; then he would say, ‘Yes, dear?’ in that voice of controlled impatience which made it clear that she should not be there.

  She pulled out a drawer of the desk and looked down at the papers that Hans had set neatly in order before his departure abroad with Philip. The letters were all to do with the business, in which she had never been allowed to play any part. The boys would now take over and she still would not be allowed to play any part. Nor would Alexine. But she was convinced that she – and Alexine in due course – would be quite as capable of taking over from the dead man as those two tall, pale, prim sons of his.

  She sank into Philip’s leather-covered armchair and inhaled the lingering smell of the countless expensive Cuban cigars that he had smoked while sitting there. In that far distant past when they had made love, she had hated most of all that smell of cigar-smoke that wafted from the mouth seemingly set on devouring her each time that it fastened on hers. But now, suddenly bereft of him, she found solace in it.

  She got up, went to the humidor and took up a cigar in trembling fingers. With its band still on – Philip would have exclaimed in horror as much at that social solecism as at the sight of a woman putting a cigar to her lips – she lit it and then took one cautious puff after another.

  Suddenly she began to feel dizzy and sick. She crushed out the cigar in an ashtray. What would the housemaids think when they next came to do out the room? No doubt they would decide, giggling among themselves, that old Daan had lit the cigar while his master was absent abroad and had then thought better of smoking it.

  ‘Is she in bed?’

  Nanny Rose nodded. ‘Yes. The poor dear.’ Alexine had always struck her as too bossy and bumptious to be deserving of the wholehearted love that she had lavished on that dear little lad who had died so young of diphtheria; but now, as she herself had put it to Mademoiselle, her heart ached for the poor little dear.

  Harriet entered the room. She had dreaded this moment.

  ‘Darling.’

  The lamp still lit on the table at her bedside, Alexine went on reading.

  ‘Darling!’ Harriet repeated, more loudly.

  Now Alexine raised her head. The braids of thick hair, falling on either side of her pale, expressionless face, gleamed in the lamplight.

  ‘I have something to tell you. Something – something very sad.’

  ‘Is it to do with Papa?’ The voice was alarmingly matter-of-fact.

  So the child had guessed! ‘Yes. Yes, I’m afraid it is. I’m afraid that – that he won’t be coming back.’ All through the day Harriet had been rehearsing what she should say; but what now emerged at once struck her shamingly inept.

  Alexine gazed fixedly into her mother’s eyes, with what at the time Harriet thought to be contempt. Later, alone in her bedroom, seated in her nightdress before her dressing-table mirror, she tried to persuade herself that no, of course not, of course it wasn’t that, why on earth should the child be contemptuous of her? But then, as on many occasions of later brooding, she was unable to do so.

  ‘Do you mean – he’s dead?’

  After a long day during which everyone had been retreating into euphemisms – ‘Now that he’s gone’, ‘Now that he’s no longer with us’, ‘Now that we shall never see him again’, ‘Now that he’s passed over’ (from Nanny Rose) – Harriet recoiled at the brutality of Alexine’s monosyllable. ‘Yes, darling. I’m afraid so. What can I say?’ She sank on to the bed and bent forward to put her arms around her daughter. But Alexine rolled away to the far end of the bed. Having crossed her arms over the bolster, she rested her face on them.

  Yearningly, Harriet again reached out and, having now placed her hands on Alexine’s, shoulders, attempted to ease her round. ‘Darling. Look at me. Listen to me.’

  Muffled by the pillow she heard: ‘Go away. Leave me.’

  ‘But darling …’

  ‘Please. Please! Go away!’

  Harriet got up off the bed with a sigh and went and sat on the armchair that faced it. She stared at Alexine’s prostrate body, willing her to turn, to speak to her, at least to make some acknowledgement of her presence. Then, after several minutes, she again sighed, got up, walked over to the bedside table to extinguish the lamp, and left the room.

  Downstairs, Addy was waiting for her. ‘Well? How did she take it?’

  Harriet told her. ‘She’s such a strange child,’ she concluded.

  ‘We all have to cope with grief in our own way. Even children.’

  ‘Then I’d better leave her to cope with it,’ Harriet said with uncharacteristic bitterness.

  ‘Precisely.’

  The next day Alexine continued to show no emotion.

  ‘It’s the shock of it all,’ Addy said. ‘She hasn’t fully taken it in. That’s the way with children.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I’ve fully taken it in myself.’ Harriet pulled a face as she inadvertently pricked her finger with the needle with which she was doing her petit point, and then raised the finger to her lips to suck it. ‘ When I told her that there would be no lessons today, she merely asked me if Mademoiselle was ill. And now she’s gone out riding.’

  ‘Riding! On day like this! With that boy?’

  Harriet nodded.

  ‘What’s going to become of him?’

  Harriet shrugged. But she had already decided.

  No one, other than Alexine, had wondered how to convey to Sammy that Philip was dead, much less had attempted to do so. Throughout their ride together, during which they rarely broke into even a trot, Alexine brooded on the problem. Somehow she would have to tell him. But how? It was useless to write PAPA DEAD on a scrap of paper, as she would write ALEXINE LESSON or COME TEA.

  From time to time, as the two horses paced slowly along beside each other through the flat, dreary landscape, she glanced over to him, in the riding-breeches and the highly polished boots bought for him by Philip only a few days before his departure. She felt increasingly oppressed by the feelings of pity and exasperation that his isolation in the prison of his deafness always brought out in her.

  When, the ride over, they had once more entered the house, she put out a hand and firmly gripped his arm. He looked at her in bewildered questioning and she smiled and nodded her head. She mouthed ‘Come’ and, as always now, he understood that. She released his arm and, taking his hand instead, she began to lead him up the stairs. Eventually, she was walking briskly down the corridor to her father’s study and, trailing fingers along the panelling, he was following after her. She hoped that the door had not been locked.

  They went in and she shut the door behind them. It was difficult to see anything because the curtains had been drawn, and so she crossed over and, reaching up, jerked one of them back. The weak winter sunshine briefly touched one side of her face and her outstretched arm, but without any warmth.

  On the wall above the chimney-piece there was a crude but still recognizable portrait of Philip
in his youth, painted, during a period when Liverpool was his home, by a mediocre itinerant artist. Addy had once made fun of this portrait in Alexine’s hearing – remarking that the left hand looked more like a dog’s paw, and that any art-student of average talent could have improved on the perspective of the house behind the seated figure. Alexine pointed up at the picture and mouthed ‘Papa’. She repeated the procedure. Sammy nodded. Then he produced his version of the word, as he had done more than once in the past: ‘ Baba’. Alexine nodded, So far so good. What had to follow would be far more difficult, perhaps impossible.

  Again she pointed at the portrait, then she waved a finger back and forth. No use. She waved it again, shutting her eyes. He stared at her in perplexity. Could it be that, having inferred that she was forbidding him something, he was trying to work out what it might be? She lay down on the floor, crossed her arms over her chest, and again closed her eyes. She opened them and looked up at him. His perplexity had intensified. He began to look panicky. Suddenly she thought of the dumb charades that she and her friends would often play at parties. On those occasions, when an attempt to communicate ended in either total failure or some bizarre misapprehension, there would always be shrieks of laughter. But now she felt no impulse to laugh, only a frustrated vexation.

  An idea came to her. It was ludicrous but it might just be effective. She jumped up off the floor and once more went over to the chimney-piece. Resting on it, at its centre, was a bird of paradise, its plumage still a briliantly unfaded kaleidoscope of colours, which Philip had shot somewhere in the East Indies and had then had stuffed. He had brought the bird back to Europe as a present for Harriet, but when he had given it to her, in its glass case, she had pulled a face and shuddered, exclaiming, ‘ Oh, the poor, thing! I’m sorry. No, I just can’t bear to look at it. How could you have brought yourself to shoot something so beautiful and harmless?’ Philip had been annoyed both by her squeamishness and. by the criticism. In a cold voice, he had pointed out that she thought nothing of wearing the feathers of dead birds on her hats. He had then said that, if she really did not want it, he would keep the bird in his study. He had not really wished to have it there, but had hoped that that would shame her.

  Having carefully removed the glass dome of the case in which the bird perched on a branch as dead as itself, Alexine no less carefully placed it on the desk. Then, extricating it from the branch, to which its legs were fastened by wire now grown rusty, she took down the bird. She showed it to Sammy, like a conjurer about to perform a trick. She stooped and laid it, legs in air, on the carpet. She looked at him in enquiry, head on one side.

  He stared at the bird, then at her, then once more at the bird. He was frowning. She pointed at the bird, again at the portrait. Once more she mouthed ‘Papa’, and followed that with ‘Dead’, though there was no chance that he would understand the word.

  At last, with a rising sense of triumph, she could see that comprehension was about to dawn. His brows went up, stretching the skin on either side of his eyes, his mouth began to open, he tilted his head backwards. Finally, he nodded eagerly. There was always this feeling of triumph, even more for him than for her, when one of them at last succeeded in communicating something difficult to the other.

  She picked up the bird and, carefully twisting the rusty wire – one strand snapped off in her fingers – eventually managed to restore it to its perch. Then she picked up the glass dome. But as she raised it, it somehow slipped through her fingers and crashed down into the grate. In horror, she let out a brief cry, raising her hands to her cheeks. Looking across to him, she saw the change in his expression. A moment ago he had been smiling in triumph. Now his face was rigid with what could only be terror. What had terrified him? Was it the smashing of the dome? Or was it the news of the death? Once again she cursed the impossibility of their ever having anything more than a vague, fleeting communication with each other about their inmost feelings.

  Suddenly overwhelmed both by the sadness of his situation and by her desire to console him in it, she rushed over to him, put her hands on his shoulders, leaned forward, and gently laid her right cheek against his. It rested there for several seconds, until she hurriedly jerked it away as she heard the sound of feet hurrying down the corridor. That heavy tread could only announce either Nanny Rose or one of the male servants.

  ‘What are you both doing in here? I heard a crash from the linen room.’

  Alexine did not answer, looking not at Nanny Rose but at Sammy.

  ‘Alexine, answer me!’ Only then did Nancy Rose notice the broken dome. She stared down in horror. ‘How did that happen? What were you doing with it? Alexine!’

  Still Alexine remained silent. Going down on her hands and knees, she began to pick up the jagged fragments of glass, cupping them in the palm of one hand as the other retrieved them.

  ‘Leave that alone! You’ll only cut yourself. It needs a dustpan and brush. Liliane can see to it tomorrow morning. Did your mother give you permission to come in here? I’m sure she didn’t. Come on! Out, out! I really don’t understand you. At a time like this! What’s the matter with you?’

  Alexine jumped to her feet and hurried out of the room. After a moment, during which he seemed to be at a loss what to do, Sammy followed her.

  Nanny Rose’s voice pursued Alexine: ‘ What would your poor father think if he were still alive? You know he never liked anyone to go into his study. He’d be horrified. I’ll have to report this to your poor mother. As though she didn’t have enough to upset her at the moment …’

  Although Alexine was now almost nine, Nanny Rose still treated her like a small child. In the years ahead she was to continue to do so.

  Chapter Nine

  TWO DAYS LATER, John Tinne and his wife Irene arrived. The younger brother, William, invalided out of the Navy because of epilepsy, was too ill after a cluster of attacks to have come along too.

  Harriet and Addy would often privately mock at the clothes, extravagant but dowdy, that Irene’s Liverpool dressmaker produced for her. Once they had even urged her to accompany them on a trip to buy clothes in Paris, but Irene had replied that there was little point in making the journey when at home there was Madame Loussiere, herself French, the best dressmaker in the whole of England. On this occasion, Madame Loussiere’s mourning dress was made of a jet silk so shiny that it looked as if Irene’s painfully thin body had been sealed in lacquer. Irene’s face was still yellow from sea-sickness – ‘We were being thrown about, here, there, everywhere. I’m such a terrible sailor. You’d never believe that I’m descended from Drake.’ Because her maiden name was the same as the seafarer’s, she was in the habit of claiming, with no other justification, her descent from him.

  Both she and John were eager to know the contents of the will, but only she showed that eagerness. ‘Have you any idea what his last’ – she sought for a genteel word – ‘dispositions were?’ she ventured, as Nanny Rose handed her a cup of camomile tisane. As soon as she had come down from her room after a preliminary reconnoitre, she had requested the tisane ‘ to settle my stomach’. She ran her tongue over her lips and then raising her veil and hitching it back over her hat with the hand not holding the cup, lowered her head on its long neck, and took one sip and then another.

  ‘Not now,’ John told her in a low voice. ‘Let’s consider that later.’ He was an essentially decent man, with none of his father’s appetite for money and power. If he had been so successful in managing the English side of the business, that was solely because of his unspectacular but formidable intelligence and his sense of duty.

  ‘The lawyer is coming the day after tomorrow,’ Harriet said. In its lead coffin, Philip’s body was awaiting burial on the following day. ‘That’s the usual way of doing things, isn’t it?’ she added with a sharp edge to her voice. She and John had always got on, but she had, from their first meeting, decided, as she put it at the time to Addy, that Irene was ‘coarse-grained’.

  Later Irene announced, ‘I thi
nk I’ll go up to my room for a rest – I couldn’t sleep a wink on that packet’, and then, with many pauses for breath, mounted the stairs and vanished. Harriet and John, left alone together, talked of the circumstances of Philip’s death. ‘I can’t help thinking that Hans must be right,’ Harriet said. ‘He could only have been killed by mistake for the Baron – that friend of his. Why else should anyone have killed him? Apart from his business connections, he knew hardly anyone in Italy. And nothing, nothing whatever was stolen.’

  John leaned forward in his chair, bony hands, disfigured by chilblains, clasped between his knees. ‘I wonder,’ he said. ‘I wonder. All through the crossing – I left Irene down in the cabin and spent most of the time on deck – I was wondering. There was always something mysterious about Papa.’

  ‘Mysterious?’ Her tone expressed surprise. But she too had felt that mystery. Often, even after years of marriage, she would remark to Addy, always her confidante: ‘I don’t feel I really know him.’ There was some small part of him that persisted in remaining inviolable and unapproachable, like a locked attic in a mansion otherwise always wide open to inspection.

  ‘You know how he started life?’

  ‘Vaguely. The family was poor, he struggled in inferior jobs – just as Hans is struggling now. He went abroad. He started to make money. When the English took over Demerara, he became Secretary to the Governor. That’s about all I know. He never wanted to talk about the past, even about your mother. He was someone who was impatient even of the present. What interested him was the future.’

  ‘Did you know that his first job was in the Foreign Service?’

  Harriet was astonished. ‘No. He never told me that. How did he manage to get such a post? I mean, with those beginnings.’

  ‘He was helped by an influential cousin of his grandfather. Or his grandmother. I don’t remember. And of course he had that remarkable gift for languages. He served for a while in London and after that he came back here. He never spoke to me about what his tasks then were, but he once told my mother – oh, in the vaguest way – that he had been somehow involved in intelligence. Opening letters, examining documents. Assessing what was in them. That sort of thing. When Napoleon invaded, he at once fled the country – unlike most of his colleagues in the Foreign Service. It was then that he started his career in the Caribbean.’