She caught herself up. Disloyalty was not as a rule one of her failings, but when the demon was muscling for action she was like the princess in the fairy tale from whose mouth toads fell. The small part of her which remained outside the dominion of her temper stood aghast but inefficient as one after the other the reptiles showered forth.
Annie, when she could summon the energy, could also lose her temper. She came close to Mary. “And who are you, Miss, to be lecturing me on me duty? You don’t see me carrying on with the children’s fathers out in the drive where the whole of Silverbridge can see me. As soon as you’ve finished your breakfast Mrs. Belling wants to see you.”
“So you’ve been telling tales of me to my aunt, have you?” demanded Mary furiously. “What a slithy tove you are!”
The comparison was lost on Annie, who had not read Through the Looking Glass; but she recognized the tone of insult and came a few steps nearer, so that her greasy face was only a few inches from Mary’s. Her lank hair had not been washed for a long time, and neither had her dress, and the sour smell of dried sweat so sickened Mary that she fell back a few paces, and caught sight of a torn petticoat trailing out of the drawer from which she had taken her stockings. She should have mended that petticoat weeks ago but she hadn’t bothered. That was probably the way in which Annie’s decay had started; tidy and clean in herself but with torn petticoats hanging out of drawers. Her temper fell from her suddenly and misery took its place. That was always the way when the demon let go for a moment. On these days she suffered from a see-saw of sin and its aftermath. Summoning every ounce of will power she possessed, and shuddering all over with distaste, she put her hands on Annie’s shoulders and kissed her. “I’m sorry, Annie,” she said, and turning quickly away stuffed the petticoat back in its place and shut the drawer. When she looked round again she saw to her dismay and astonishment that Annie was crying, sniffing and feeling with trembling dirty fingers for a nonexistent handkerchief.
“Here’s one, Annie,” said Mary, diving into her pockets. “It’s got an Irish shamrock on it and you can keep it afterwards for luck. Cheer up, Annie.”
Annie grabbed the handkerchief and departed, sobbing uncontrollably. What was the matter with her that she should cry like that? Mary noticed for the first time how bowed her shoulders were. She was lazy now but throughout the years she must have carried many trays and buckets of coals, and scrubbed many floors, and she still did. Perhaps she was bone-weary as well as bone-lazy, and crying from sheer fatigue.
Mary sneezed and went downstairs, feeling her temper rising again as she heard the high squeaky voice of Pussy Harker demanding raspberry jam. She disliked children with squeaky voices. She hated raspberry jam made with turnips and chips of wood. She hated English breakfast anyway. It was the most uncivilized meal in the day, everyone herded together and slobbering cereal from bowls like pigs at a trough. It was symptomatic that the French, the only truly civilized people in Europe, partook of croissants and coffee only, and that in the privacy of their own rooms. The English were boors. She could find only one thing to be thankful for on a day like this; that there was not a single drop of English blood in her body. Upon both sides she was pure unadulterated Celt. She opened the dining room door and the faces of the boarders were lifted instantly towards her as flowers towards the sun, then dropped again to their plates as they beheld how darkly the sun was clouded. Miss Giles glanced at Mary and sighed. Her migraine had continued over the weekend and had left her limp and exhausted and O’Hara in a rage was not going to make a difficult day easier.
“Sorry I’m late,” said Mary, accepting a plate of cereal with a martyrish air. “I knocked a vase over. My stocking laddered. One of those days.” She sneezed.
“Have you a cold?” asked Miss Giles.
“Isn’t that obvious?” snapped Mary. How yellow old Giles looked in the harsh morning light, revoltingly yellow and plain. Was it possible that only last Friday she had felt the first stirrings of friendship towards her? Was it possible that only yesterday she had been simmering with Christian charity like a kettle on the boil? One of the children giggled and she shot a look of hatred at her. Was it possible that only yesterday she had thought she loved children? She could have murdered the lot of the odious little beasts. Silence reigned. She had often thought how beautiful convent breakfasts must be, no word spoken and the nuns’ minds busy with holy thoughts, but she realized now the horrid noisiness of a silent breakfast, with heavy breathings and champing jaws and the creakings of false teeth. Giles had false teeth, and Pussy as well as herself had a cold.
“Now I know why language was invented,” she said suddenly to Miss Giles.
“Why?” asked Miss Giles.
“To disguise the noise people make when they eat.”
Miss Giles flushed, conscious of the bad fit of her teeth, but her flush was as nothing to Mary’s as she realized the ugliness and cruelty of her latest remark. Her eyes were suddenly piteous as they met those of Miss Giles, and Miss Giles smiled. What a child O’Hara was! On Friday, when she had brought her the tea and sat on her bed, she had believed herself conscious of a depth of compassion that had seemed far beyond the power of Mary’s youth, and had afterwards marvelled at it. Even now, when Mary’s childish behavior was proving it her fancy, she could not forget it, for it had been her first experience of compassion. Yet how could it have been her first when she had recognized it? We do not recognize the unknown. Nor does fancy produce it. O’Hara’s gentleness that day had tapped something somewhere that she had once known. It was a crude way of putting it but she could find no other words. Yet she could have dispensed with the experience for it had left her with an ache of longing for which there was no possibility of satisfaction, and had if possible increased the hopelessness that always succeeded the worst of her migraines. She was fifty-five and as none of her infirmities was of the type that kills she might live for another twenty years. Another ten years of teaching, struggling on as best she could through pain and weakness, and then retirement on an old age pension, the only pension she was entitled to. Where would she go? How would she live? So many lonely old women ended it all in their lonely bed-sitting-rooms, but the coward’s way was one she had never taken. Breakfast was over and she got up mechanically, said grace and stood by the door to watch the children file out. Mary, who should have gone upstairs to see Mrs. Belling, lingered.
“Giles, I’m in a frightful rage.”
“So I observe,” said Miss Giles coldly.
“I shall be intolerable all day, so watch out. I’m sorry. I’m not disciplined, as you are.”
It was the first time Miss Giles had ever received a compliment in this house, and she started, and then flushed. Discipline? It did not touch her thoughts. Mary looked at her curiously for this was the second time in ten minutes that she had made Giles blush. The poor old thing must be far more vulnerable than she had realized. “I suppose you hate the cinema?” she blurted out.
“I do rather,” said Miss Giles. “It’s my head.”
“There’s not much one can do in this one-horse place,” said Mary. “To get away from school, I mean. But there’s a good string orchestra coming to Otway next week. Did you know? We could take the bus and go. But you don’t care about music, do you?”
“Yes,” said Miss Giles briefly.
Again Mary looked at her curiously, for she had never known old Giles to go to a concert. “Then let’s go together,” she said lightly. “I’ll get the tickets. It’s a good programme. That’s settled then.”
She ran quickly up the stairs without looking back, leaving Miss Giles with her refusal no more advanced than an idiotically open mouth. She shut it and groped for the banisters. It was a long while since she had been to a recital. Years ago she had turned her back on music in the same sort of way that some people leave a house where they have suffered bereavement. As she went upstairs to tidy her room she was trying not to
remember that night when Max Roundham had heard her sing and offered to train her for half the usual fees, and her father had refused. . . He would not spare a penny from the boys.
2
“Come in darling,” said Mrs. Belling sweetly, and Mary entered jauntily. She was feeling jaunty, for she had vanquished the demon. Or, to be strictly accurate, at the very moment when she was informing Giles that he was present he had gone to sleep; like having your toothache vanish as you take the receiver off to ring up the dentist. It was out of the midst of the glow of virtue occasioned by his absence that she had been able to ask Giles to go to the concert with her. She felt extremely pleased with herself, and curling her tongue round into the empty place where the late tooth had been and now wasn’t increased her pleasure.
“Sit down, sweetheart,” said Mrs. Belling, and Mary sat, smiling a cocksure smile. Mrs. Belling was also smiling and her pretty blue eyes were fixed unblinkingly on Mary. It was one of her characteristics that she never seemed to blink. She was looking extremely comfortable, propped up against a quantity of soft but not over-clean pillows. A torn lace cap hid her white hair and she wore a quilted pink satin dressing jacket with egg stains down the front. She had not bothered to take off her rings last night and they gleamed on her pudgy fingers. Mary’s smile became a little strained, but she held it. Mrs. Belling had no difficulty in holding hers. Baba was asleep on her soiled pink satin eiderdown and the eiderdown smelled of Baba. Mrs. Belling smelled of the scent she used and the cigarette she was smoking. The fire was alight (Mrs. Belling liked an old-fashioned coal fire in her bedroom) and the window was shut and the room was unbearably close and stuffy. Mrs. Belling’s clothes were on the floor. “This is my bedroom, and me in bed forty-five years from now,” thought Mary, and the cocksureness went from her smile; but she still held it, and still continued to look at her aunt. Mrs. Belling’s smile became fatter and more smug until it seemed as though it were graven into the dough of her face. Her fixed regard became a blank blue stare. It struck Mary suddenly that the terrible emptiness of the stare was entirely evil. The sweat pricked out on her forehead but she maintained her strained smile and though she blinked once or twice she did not look away. To do so would have been to give ground. She was getting a bit dizzy with the heat of the room but she felt it was extremely important that she should not give ground. If only Aunt Rose would speak. Surely one always blinked when one spoke? Mrs. Belling flicked the ash off her cigarette into a dish on the breakfast tray beside her and spoke, but she did not blink, and even while her mouth moved the smile seemed somehow there.
“Mr. Wentworth is a very charming man, darling, isn’t he?”
Mary swallowed. “I don’t know that I should call him charming,” she said. “Courteous and dignified, but not what one is accustomed to call charming.”
“What is one accustomed to call charming?” asked Mrs. Belling.
“I hadn’t exactly thought,” said Mary uncertainly.
“No, darling, you don’t think. You didn’t think, perhaps, that it might give my school a bad name for you to be seen by the whole of Silverbridge standing in the drive with a man’s arm round you, crying against his shoulder? And the man one of the parents, and a parson? Parsons are always the worst, of course.”
Without this last remark the demon might have remained asleep. Mary might have forgiven Aunt Rose for listening to Annie’s exaggerations but a libellous remark about Don Quixote was too much. She was on her feet in a rage before she knew what she was doing. “How dare you, Aunt Rose!” she stormed. “Yes, I was crying, and that’s the only bit of truth in what you say. But, in any case, would it matter if this school were given a bad name? I mean—”
“Yes?” said Mrs. Belling sweetly, but something about her eyes made Mary stammer over her next words. “I mean—I mean—fewer children would come here. Their parents would know that this is a horrid school.”
She stopped, for in spite of her anger and the heat of the room she felt cold with fear. For the first time she could not look at her aunt. Her eyes fell and she gave ground. She hardly knew what she expected; almost that Aunt Rose would rise up in bed like the evil specter in that awful ghost story of M. R. James,’ and clothed in her sheets arch over her like a breaking wave; and she would be found later dead beneath the soiled linen, an expression of terror graven upon her dead face.
But Mrs. Belling did nothing of the sort. She merely lay back against her pillows and lit another cigarette. “How emotional you are, darling,” she said. “And how childish. A horrid school? You frighten yourself with your imaginings. So very Irish. Poor little Mary. What frightened you? The owls? Why were you crying?”
“I think, for Miss Giles,” said Mary uncertainly, and made herself look at her aunt again. Mrs. Belling was smiling slightly, and her eyes, now, were following the movement of her fingers as she lazily fondled one of Baba’s ears. Now that she could no longer see that blue stare Mary felt that her moment of panic had been ridiculous. Nothing was less like a breaking wave than her aunt at this moment. Was it true that she imagined too much?
“And what is the matter with Anabel Giles?” asked Mrs. Belling. “Crossed in love?”
From a woman who in her day had been loved and desired that struck Mary as a cruel remark. She loathed the sarcasms of women at each other’s expense. “Perhaps so, Aunt Rose,” she said, squaring her shoulders. “But not for a man. There are lots of ways of being crossed in love.”
“Really?” said Mrs. Belling. “I’m always delighted to learn.”
Aware of the sarcasm Mary yet stood her ground. “One’s in love with life when one’s young,” she said. “One trusts it. I expect Giles did. And now look at her, after it’s let her down.”
“I look at her every day,” said Mrs. Belling, “and see a woman in a most enviable position—easy work, a comfortable home and good food.”
“You know nothing about our food, Aunt Rose,” flashed Mary. “And you don’t care. It’s that that makes Oaklands such a vile house to live in—you don’t care.”
Mrs. Belling withdrew her hand from Baba. “What have you been putting on Baba’s ear?” she asked.
“Some stuff the vet gave me.”
“When did you take Baba to the vet?”
“On Saturday.”
“Then you flatly disobeyed me.”
“Yes,” said Mary. “What else could I do with Baba in the state he was and you not caring? Aunt Rose, why do you have Baba, and pet him and pretend to love him when you don’t care? What’s the point of it?”
Mrs. Belling suddenly raised her eyes and for a brief moment of astonishment Mary saw fear in them, and then anger. Yes, actually, anger. Mary had not known it was possible for Aunt Rose to bother to be angry, but she was, and her cold, strong anger was of a sort that beat down Mary’s hot little demon and made her afraid again. Yet, when she spoke, her aunt’s voice was soft as ever.
“Mary, where is the ointment the vet gave you?”
“In my room.”
“Then fetch it.”
Moving like a sleepwalker Mary obeyed. She did not want to, but she was again dominated. She came back with the ointment and put it into her aunt’s hand. Mrs. Belling leaned forward and tossed it over the foot of the bed into the fire. “Now go and make your bed,” she said.
It had been a hateful scene. Trembling and ashamed, Mary went.
3
Mrs. Belling lay back on her pillows trembling not with shame but with the violence of her anger. She was angry not so much at Mary’s abominable rudeness as at the fact of her own capitulation. Fear and anger, the two enemies, had come upon her by stealth and thrown her. As a girl she had had something of a temper but had subdued it with the immense strength of her will, realizing that cold, clear-headed calculation was a more valuable instrument for ambition. Once she had reached maturity nothing had made her angry except the inconvenience of her husband
’s death. In the same way she had dealt with fear; nothing was more inhibiting than fear, nothing more confusing to the judgment. Yet here she was, thrown into a panic by a silly girl’s silly question. “What’s the point of it?” For just a moment it had opened up an abyss of intolerable emptiness. Her comfort had appeared to her not as an achieved Lotus Land that would never know change but as a facade erected to hide that sharp brink beyond which there is nothingness. It was a strange but entirely true fact that until Mary had put her silly question she had never realized the fact of death in relation to herself. She had of course never wanted to, and never tried to, and having never loved she had never known the bitterness of death. Her husband’s death had disturbed her only from the material point of view and she had missed him no more than she would have missed a tradesman who left the place and went elsewhere. But Mary’s question had caused her to miss her own sense of security. It had abruptly left her. If after all there were no security then there was no achievement. The smooth succession of her comfortable days was only a stream carrying her to that sharp brink. She looked at the fat little dog on her bed. A lap-dog had seemed to her a necessary element in her comfort; an extra hot water bottle on a cold day, a sort of extenuation of herself upon whom to lavish the caresses and indulgences of self-love, an aroma of devotion forever arising on the hearth. Now for the first time she saw what a repulsive object the little creature had become under this treatment and with sudden energy she kicked him off the bed. He fell with a yelp to the floor and lay there stunned with hurt astonishment, then picked himself up and stood up against the bed to lick her hand. In a spasm of exasperation she raised herself in bed and slapped his head as hard as she could. One of her rings caught the corner of his eye and he crept under the bed and hid there whimpering.
Mrs. Belling lay back against her pillows, furious, exasperated and afraid. Not for years had she put forth so much energy. She was panting and for the first time in her life she felt ill, not just indisposed but deathly ill. Terror such as she had never known, terror to which her past fear had been a mere nothing, rose up before her like a black wave, crashed down and blotted her out.
The Rosemary Tree Page 20
