by Molly Keane
“Yes, you’ve told us that before –” May interrupted.
“… then we danced at the Savoy,” April finished in her dreamy “other world than you poor things” voice.
“Very often,” May shouted the last words of her sentence, putting a stop to that particular nonsense. Protected in her deafness from any necessity to reply, April dipped a finger in her sherry glass and offered the drop on it to Tiger, who shook his head.
Baby June leaned back in her chair. She had changed for dinner, though less elaborately than her sisters. Her clothes were a successful indoor imitation of her outdoor dressing. She wore her off-white evening Husky, a blue Viyella shirt, clean jeans and faded espadrilles. One hand was stretched like a starfish over Tiny’s ear, as she sat contented and tired after her day’s midwifery. She had spent the day with Christy Lucey. In his company she was a world away from her sisters’ and Jasper’s fractious living. A cheese sandwich for lunch (while Christy ate the beef sandwiches she had cut for him), and no tea (watching over Sweetheart at a critical moment) had left her hungry for pigeon pie, and subject to the present effect of a glass of sherry.
May, turning disgustedly from April, said with kind officiousness: “I must have that shirt you’re wearing for the washing-machine on Monday. It’s too filthy – you’ve worn it every evening since Christmas.”
June pulled for a moment on Tiny’s ear before answering: “Blue for Baby June. ‘Blue’s your colour’ Mummie always said. Don’t you remember?”
May was silent. Remembering Mummie was in poor taste. Forget love and grief and pain. Life had gone on. Life should be filled, as she filled it, with useful activities and with creations such as the Garya eliptica under the Chippendale mirror. April and June were indifferent to its beauty – presently she would bring it, quite casually, into the conversation and force their notice and admiration. For the moment it belonged only to her, and with it came the scent from the narcissi, fortified by the presence of their bodies and breath – certainly not by the distant heat of a very small fire in a very big grate.
“Well, lots of time for a cigarette, I expect,” May opened her case, absentmindedly offering it to June, who didn’t smoke and to April, who shook her head and coughed. “Only those filthy asthma fags for you, I forgot. Thank goodness I can enjoy a normal cigarette.” She lit one impatiently, and shook out the match. “Come on, Jasper! What can he be doing? We’re not having six courses, are we, Grips?” Having quelled all response from the sisters, she turned to her dog for an answer, then, in a movement of explicit exasperation, she jumped to her feet as Jasper came into the room.
This was obviously pleasing to Jasper. To prolong the delay he rather sedately poured out for himself a glass of sherry which he did not want. “Your pig delayed me rather,” he said to June.
“He’s happy with Sweetheart now, poor lamb,” she answered. “And he didn’t do anything in the oven, now did he?”
“Not much.”
May screamed: “You had a pig in the oven with the pigeon pie? It can’t be true!”
“You’re not compelled to eat the pie, you know,” Jasper told her as he held the door open for his sisters. Waiting courteously for them to pass through he looked distinguished and charming, standing there in his blue velvet dinner jacket, white silk shirt and dark foulard scarf, pulled through a signet ring – all a bit greasy and spotted from kitchen work. He never demeaned his masculinity with an apron.
In the dining-room there was silence for a time. The pie was excellent beyond words. The pigeon breasts married beautifully to the beef from the dogs’ dinners, the old rashers of bacon and the eggs. A pile of purple sprouting kale sat on the hot-plate to one side of the pie and pommes-de-terre Anna on the other – all three dishes largely depleted when the ladies had helped themselves.
It was not until smaller second helpings and a salad were being eaten that conversation began. June’s Labrador started it off. She heaved herself up from her worn goatskin rug and came to sit between June and May. The gesture of her pale, sad head, as she laid it along June’s thigh said: Am I wanted? Then, with benign stupidity, she raised her head towards May.
May put her handkerchief and her napkin to her nose. “You do spoil that animal rotten. Why can’t she stay in her corner? Question which smells the worst – your dog or that ghastly goatskin?”
“Ah, poor old Nancy! She was a great old girl,” June glanced reminiscently towards the last of Nancy.
“Send her back to bed. Tiny! to your basket! Dogs like discipline. Look at Gripper, never moves.”
Hearing his name spoken, Gripper nipped lightly from his neat basket.
“Tiny’s not the only undisciplined one, is she?” Jasper said.
“What can you expect? That old bitch is still half on heat. She ought to be shut up. Out of doors. And her breath smells appalling. All her teeth should come out.”
“Your little heart wouldn’t stand the anaesthetic, would it, Tiny? No it wouldn’t.” June spoke and answered for her friend.
“Much better done without an anaesthetic.”
“Who says?” June sounded fierce.
“David Doherty says.”
“The worst vet in Ireland,” Jasper joined in.
“You prefer useless Bryan Brendan, don’t you, April? Don’t you?”
“Butter, please,” April answered peaceably.
Jasper gave up his question: “Rather luck, getting hold of this saltless butter.”
“Did you say toothless butter?”
“She must have heard something you said,” June put in gently.
“Actually, I heard everything you said. I can, when people don’t shout. And I’m not going near any dentist. My teeth are quite perfect, thank you very much.” She opened her mouth to show them. They all turned their heads away, and there was silence until Jasper broke it with a curious cry: “What are you doing, May? Picking the cucumber out of your salad!”
“You rather forgot my ulcer – I can’t eat cucumber.”
“Can’t eat this, can’t eat that. Why must you have such a lower-middle-class stomach?”
“Perhaps it has something to do with your idea of Cordon Bleu cooking.”
“It takes imagination and a reasonable digestion to appreciate good cooking.”
“You don’t usually cook cucumber, do you?” The argument drifted into silence.
Pudding time came. Baby rhubarb and rice cream with a vaporous suggestion of nutmeg.
“I hope the rhubarb isn’t too acid for your ulcer.” Jasper eyed May’s lavish helping.
“My ulcer must take its chance. I’ve got to know what this rhubarb is like. New stools, and I grew them myself, personally. Stable manure, straw, boxes, pots – everything on a wheelbarrow. No help from Christy Lucey – much too busy composting your camellias or on some far less important job for Baby. Most probably doing nothing and doing it well, as usual.”
“The day you were after him to cover rhubarb was the same day he was taking Sweetheart to the boar.” June had the whole memory of the illiterate.
“You spoil him ridiculously.”
“Yes. And now we have nine little pigs.” In defence of Tiny or of Christy Lucey June was seldom short of words.
“He’s not altogether a bad sort of fellow, as they go,” Jasper said, “but as we’re on the subject, Baby, do you have to use my cling film for his sandwiches? Wouldn’t a paper bag do?”
“Yes, or newspaper,” May struck in. “And why do you give him sandwiches? On top of his wages and insurance and VAT?”
“It’s cheaper than him wasting the day cycling home to his mother for his dinner.”
“Why can’t his mother make his sandwiches?”
“Oh, God! And she crushing eighty.”
“She must have had him at a very advanced age,” April calculated. She often heard some irrelevant thing not addressed to herself.
“It’s not just a question of sandwiches,” May continued. “What about the broken shutes?
Can’t get a wink of sleep on a rainy night. Take care of your shutes and your roof will take care of itself – that’s what I’ve always heard.”
“Easily said when we had men and ladders at Durraghglass,” Jasper reminded her. “And speaking of ladders, Baby, I see Christy has taken the only sound ladder on the place to close a gap.”
“That was the day Jilly was bulling.”
“She’s had her calf now, and the ladder’s still in the gap.”
“I’ll remind him, Jasper,” June answered as forgetfulness settled purposefully on her memory.
“And what about the overdraft?” May scooped up the last of her rhubarb. “I saw Mr Love in church last Sunday and he gave me a very funny look.”
“Mr Love is far too nice a man for that sort of thing,” April put in.
“Could we leave the Bank Manager until after dinner? I must concentrate on my pudding. I made a few interesting little changes in the receipt.” Jasper never said “recipe”.
“Is there nothing in your life except cooking?”
“Well, yes. Eating for one thing.”
“Cooking – eating – reading garden catalogues – fiddling in your wilderness while basically there’s something ghastly constantly happening at this moment of time.” She took a swig at her wine. “Brown and Kerry’s account has been in three times. And for this” – she put down her empty glass – “Right? So what?”
“Drink rather less, perhaps.”
“Jasper, we have to eat and drink to live. And we have to live here together – Mummie left it like that.”
“Yes, all right. I do the cooking. Baby does the farming. Things go on … What do you do?”
“Everything.”
“What’s everything?”
“Who grew this rhubarb? Who netted the purple sprouting kale? Who does all the hoovering? And if money wasn’t being flung away on Christy Lucey we could have a daily woman three times a week.”
“No.” Jasper’s tone was adamant. “No,” he repeated. “She might start cleaning things up, and she’ld expect tea and biscuits.”
“Tea and biscuits – what I love,” June said enviously.
“Besides,” Jasper enlarged on his objections, “she might talk to me.”
“Talk about you and the filth of your kitchen, more likely,” May said.
“Perhaps. If I gave her the chance. But shan’t’s the word.” Jasper spoke with unruffled decision.
“I’ld give her tea in a thermos,” May promised.
“Do that – I know your tea. She’ll be gone in a week.”
“In any case, how could I run the place without Christy?” June put in, rather belatedly aware of a danger.
“I’ll tell you,” May seized the opening. “Let the land on the eleven months’ system – right? Sell the stock. Pay off the overdraft – you follow me? And sack Christy Lucey. Are you with me?”
“Sack Christy? And the young horse just about going right?” June’s protest was torn from her.
“Well, yes, I suppose we may have to think about it seriously. After all, what do we get out of two hundred and fifty acres? Two eggs from fifty hens.” Jasper liked teasing everybody. Even Baby June – at times more especially Baby June. She was vulnerable, and her provincial way of speaking annoyed him. Of course the village convent school had not given her the same advantages his other sisters had enjoyed at Heathfield. Beastly as they were, at least they spoke English. He looked across at June, solid and elderly in her white Husky, and he could never forget. Bitterly as always he linked her with the accident to his eye – his filthy blind eye.
June, aged seven, his friend and companion in outdoor sports, had shot it out with her air-gun, while aiming at a robin on the clothes line. It had all been a great tragedy and a scandal as well. The bird had been May’s pet robin. The crime of shooting robins diverted immediate anxiety from Jasper’s festering eye. By the time bathing in boracic lotion failed in its efficacy it was too late for the most exclusive and expensive oculists to save the sight, or the eye. While he was being hurried from one surgeon to another, pain changed him to her and, in his fear of more pain, he accused her helplessly and with an unknowing depth that was nearly hatred.
June had been his pride and joy and joke. A tiny creature, her baby size was made accountable for her backwardness in learning to read and write, and created drama out of her dash and brilliance with her pony. He (curse the day) had taught her to shoot. They lay on furze-grown banks together, and from such secret hide-outs she was a deadly shot on a sitting rabbit or a perching rook. She was the Baby wonder, and mostly his creation. How could he have guessed that she would fire at a robin? A robin – perish the thought!
That was all over, of course. Gone and forgotten long ago. But tonight, and at other times, some vague animosity possessed him. He felt like despoiling her confidence a little – just a little. She was so immersed in the place, in Sweetheart’s litter, in the brown eggs or the lack of brown eggs, in her cross Jersey cows, in the Farmers’ Journal that Christy translated slowly for her dyslexic struggle (she had quite a time maintaining that she could read easily). And, beyond all other interests with her, came the series of awkward young horses that she and Christy broke and civilised and sold, sometimes well, sometimes at a loss. Even without being pinched and goaded by May, he could see the ridiculously uneconomic side of her absurd loving methods of farming
Just lately a new plan had been running through Jasper’s mind as to the conduct of the small estate in which they all had a share. It was an idea that rambled rather than ran, coming far behind more accessible and exciting inspirations in his kitchen, in his garden of rare outmoded herbs, in his tree nursery, or among the camellias flowering already in their sheltering bays of ponticum rhododendron and Portugal laurel. These were his refuges from any more complicated responsibilities. Jasper was lazy – “It may never happen” was his favourite motto. Whether or not he brought it to fruition, he must hold this plan, with all its complications, inviolate from the girls.
“Isn’t it time for doggie-dins?” he said. But he waited patiently until April had realized that dinner was at an end and rose, gracefully as always, almost flowing to her feet. She went across to a side table where three dishes, in sizes for the three bears, waited for the darlings. She picked up the smallest dish and looked searchingly at its contents. “My woofie-woof’s dreadfully hungry and there doesn’t seem to be any meat in his dins,” she said.
June didn’t criticize Tiny’s dinner, or even look at it closely, there was too much on her mind. But May moved in to the matter at once: “Where’s the beef I scraped all the blue mould off and left chopped up in their soup and brown bread?”
Jasper gave her a nearly rat-like grin: “You’ve just eaten it,” he said. “I put it in the pie.”
“Ah, don’t mind him,” June felt as usual that she must keep on Jasper’s right side. “He’s only joking.”
“I believe him,” May said stonily.
“And you’ld be right.” Jasper rose to his elegant height. “To the sword with the lot of you is what I say and I must get on with the washing up. Then early bed, two hot-water bottles, and a good book.” Delighting in May’s screams and cries of protest and disgust, he stacked a tray with plates, dishes, spoons and glasses, put it in the lift and from there set off downstairs to the kitchen and the washing up, confident that no one would follow him. Some time previously he had bought, as a particular extravagance and personal treat, a washing-up machine. He wasn’t over fond of it – slightly nervous in fact – but he would not have dreamed of allowing a sister to touch it. May, who would have understood and corrected its every whim, was particularly excluded. If he was found at the old-world sink with his hands in Lemon Quix he let it be understood that the new toy had its moods and disorders and awaited an expert from Dublin.
3
Bedtime
After dinner June was beset by a different worry. Had she remembered to switch on the farrowing light with its fa
int spread of warmth above Sweetheart and her litter? She had better make certain. Although longing for bed, she pulled on her gum-boots, took her dirty anorak off its hook, clipped a lead to Tiny’s collar (you never could tell, she might take a fancy). With a mammoth red torch in her hand she went out of the hall door, delaying for a minute or two on the gravel while Tiny, looking sad as dogs do, prepared to perform her most important act of the evening. As June waited, the sounds of water came clear and insistent about her from the circling mountain river below the house, but custom had deafened her to it; it was as unnoticeable as the square-paned shadow that the kitchen window threw up the grassy area bank, to flatten on the level ground where she stood. The lighted window reminded her that Jasper was still at work. And what was he planning about Christy? Something drastic or he would never side with May. She could protect Tiny from any ugly plan of May’s, but to keep Christy, if money was involved, would prove a difficult matter. June had no bank account. Her handwriting was too strange for cheques. She only counted as a charge and burden on the estate, although she worked harder and more faithfully for its life than anyone else in the family.
June was commending Tiny for her regular habits when May came out of the house with Gripper. “And where are you off to, Baby?” she asked. “Do keep that bitch away from Grips. It’s so unfair on him.” Her tone changed. “When you’ve done your duties we’re off to bedsibyes, aren’t we, old man?”
“Aren’t you mad early?”
“Jasper’s dinner was madly late – right? So now it’s just about bedtime. Right?”
“Right, all right. I’m just going to have a look at Sweetheart.”
“The good Catholic boy couldn’t possibly manage that, could he?”
