by Molly Keane
When she had patted nourishing creams into face, neck, arms, feet – a different kind for each and all expensive – April put on her crushed cambric nightdress (she hated nylon) and, smelling sweetly and freshly, got into bed. Pushing Tiger gently away from the hot-water bottle and down to her feet, she leant into her pillows and sat sipping and burping her way through a health drink before picking up Mansfield Park from the top of the po cupboard.
April had got into the way of reading Jane Austen less for pleasure than as a counteraction to those French books and Chinese and Egyptian prints and pictures which Barry liked her to study before he tried to follow out their instructions and illustrations in bed. After his death she never knew how to get rid of his books – too thick to burn and quite inappropriate for Oxfam – so they remained, parcelled up in their dreadful privacy on the top shelf of her wardrobe. Hidden there they were as lost to her memory as were any occasional gleams of pleasure in past experience. Happily now, she knew the value of her own bodily privacy. She even enjoyed the privacy of her deafness, ignoring what she did not want to hear, even when she happened to hear it. In the same way she could contentedly block remembrance.
One thing from which her memory never skated away was darling Mummie’s delight in her marriage – a marriage with a man from the right family, popular in the Regiment, who went well to hounds. How alertly in the courting days Mummie had protected her deafness, answering while April smiled. Silence did not seem to matter during the engagement. Barry only wanted to look and kiss, with gentleness and restraint and a sort of wonder.
April herself had been in a trance of wonder. At that time marriage was the enviable and only true goal. Every morning she woke with something like birdsong in her heart as she realized again: I’ll be married, I’ll be married. There was absolute joy, too, over the assembling of the trousseau Mummie and she bought, with unconsidered spending. Its culmination was a bridal gown of such plain beauty that her looks shone out undiminished by decoration when, her veil lifted, she walked down the flower-filled aisle on the arm of her handsome (if forty-five year-old) husband. Behind her came May, settling the train to rights with a gloved thumb and finger and marshalling the pages and June in a furious whisper. The bridesmaids’ dresses did not really become either May or June – Mummie had decided that nothing must draw a moment’s attention away from the star of the day. All the same, her own dress, muted mauve and pink with a soft plumage of clipped ostrich feathers, had cost more than April’s. Mummie’s tears were pretty, too – everything she did was full of understanding and charm. Later on April was to wonder whether those brief words on the loving obligations of marriage – “It’s a thing men do. You won’t like it” – might have been more explicit. April had thought she knew exactly what men did, and rather looked forward to it. Now, years later, and knowing better, she pressed her back contentedly against her hot-water bottle and putting down her empty glass and Jane Austen she picked up a leather-bound notebook (she never handled anything ugly or cheap). The pages of the book were filled with lists – lists of china, silver, small period pieces of furniture, craftsmen’s samples, baby chairs, clocks, French watches. She turned the pages slowly, giving careful thought before marking some entries with a cross and ticking off others. Business completed, she laid aside her notebook and, with Tiger fumbling contentedly at her feet, she re-opened Mansfield Park wondering, not for the first time, whether Fanny Price had not been rather more than an idiot to refuse Henry. Perhaps so. Perhaps not. Henry might easily have turned out to be an earlier Grange-Gorman. She poked Tiger with her toe and read on peacefully.
4
Separate Pursuits
Early the next morning, having decided to lecture on rather abstruse Japanese lines to her flower ladies, May walked for miles along the river in search of willow with only the most immature pussies. She was able to combine her quest with exercise for Gripper. Gripper only liked walks when he was going home. He cheered up when May turned upwards and homewards towards the mountains – ravished to blue by the sunlight, turning to slate under the shadows of passing clouds. Nearing home, she delayed to nip a few branches from Jasper’s nut grove. He was religious in his protection of his young filberts, so she had to use stealth and care in their pilfering. Before she reached the gates of Durraghglass (gates of spare ironwork always standing open owing to the delicacy of their rusted hinges) she saw Jasper and, quick as lightning, she masked the embryo filberts with embryo willow.
Jasper, who at that hour should have been cooking luncheon, was standing by the roadside, his dark head illuminated by the sunshine and unstirred by the mountain air. The shape of his hair survived even the scissors of the local barber. In spite of his bare head he looked, as he always did, the idle squire. No blue jeans for him. He wore old, but knife-edged, whipcords and a mountain-coloured, faintly checked tweed coat – chosen by Mummie, how many years ago? Little as she liked him, May, with her artist’s eye, recognised and admitted Jasper’s undeniable chic and style. But now it was his companion who stirred her curiosity, malign and vaguely disapproving. She nodded a cool good morning as she passed by.
Jasper had been absorbed in lively conversation with a white-habited monk, a handsome young man from the silent brotherhood of a Cistercian monastery. The brothers of the Order owned land they had rescued from the mountain. Their farm marched with the fields of Durraghglass. These fields, their quarterings fenced by walls loosely built of stones picked long ago off the poor mushroom and thistle-grown grassland, contrasted miserably with the well-husbanded property of the monastery.
Walking away and still listening attentively to the voices behind her, May, although she could not distinguish a word that was said, was aware of a tone in Jasper’s speech, an indulgent, less than serious note very different from his usual sharp interchanges with his family. Suddenly she knew what it was his voice suggested and recalled. That was how it had sounded when he and Mummie talked together – talked happily and confidentially about some interest from which the girls were excluded. May called Gripper back to her. She felt the need of company. She took a cigarette from her case and zipped a flame from her lighter, sheltering it masterfully against the breeze.
When Brother Anselm had gone back towards the mountain, the wind flapping his belted habit against bare legs, Jasper stood for a minute, slightly bent, elderly hands on his stick, evidently contented and unhurrying. The nervous rigidity with which he opposed his sisters’ least harmful, but always annoying, projects seemed melted from him. Then, a suspicion overtaking him, he turned back along the road and went into his nut-grove to find out what May had cut from the young trees in the sheltering bay he had made between alders and wild hazel. Sure enough, he found where she had ignorantly clipped and stolen from one of his choicer subjects. With the ball of his thumb held close over the wounded bark he stood, resentful and dispirited as he had been once before. In familiar places memories are never absolved – they contain perpetual unkindness.
This morning the subdued unchanged voice of the river, running low beneath where he stood, was the same as on that summer evening when he and Daddy, escaping together the awful clutch of school-term tomorrow – Mummie and the girls sewing on name-tapes and packing goodies in the tuck-box – had gone down to the river with their rods – men together, seriously considering the right fly for the water. Then Leda came running after them down the terrace steps. … “Take me too – I want to watch,” she was calling. She looked like a foreign doll in a box – blue and white striped dress and a little muslin apron. “Please let me,” she said. She had never been taught to leave men alone on their sporting occasions. She was green bones in a grave now, but that evening she stood, twisting the ends of her yellow hair, and pleaded, and won.
Again he felt sullen and bereft as he had when Daddy, leaving all the best pools to him, said: “I’ll fish the wood stream. You come with me, Leda.” Why the wood stream, when there were nearer and far better beats? But they left him. They had gone into the
woods together; where the river ran, brown and slow through the close screens of alders and hazels.
Familiar places, keeping their constant hold against forgetfulness, he sighed briefly for that awkward, handsome boy fishing companionless through a long summer evening. Then, back in his present ageing self, he turned his attention towards luncheon, and how little he might cook for his sisters. His mind failed to clinch into anything fully – absurd income tax demands, the annoyance of leaking gutters, these things were the present, and by nature he lacked resolution to combat them. Unfulfilled dreams suited him better, such as the one he shared with Brother Anselm. His only practical legitimate peace lay in cooking. Using his hands and his brain and its inventions he could forget most things – even Mummie’s loss and death – although, for that, memory had no abstinence.
When he quickened his steps towards home and the oblation of cooking, the change in gait to a more free and youthful rate of walking sent his newly roused memory back again to that other world in time when he had been in the inconsolable age of fifteen … beautiful April eighteen? nineteen? … May – his dislike prevented consideration of May at any age … Baby, who had so lately destroyed him, seven? eight? … Baby – that was the hoist in his mind. Not to her, back to Leda and the last hour of the last memory of those summer holidays. The passing thought of a mass grave and her unclaimed bones gave him very little concern, so why should the remembrance of that morning, before the journey back to school, still turn his heart, and sicken him just a little?
It had been a morning of goodbyes to the men on the place, falsely cheery goodbyes, the last exchanged with old Mary Kelly in the gate lodge. Her business was to open and shut the gates at any hour, and keep the gravel sweep raked to perfection. Today, as he walked away from the empty lodge with its pretty broken windows, there was still no escape for him from the embarrassment he had felt because he was eating a large unyielding piece of chocolate, Mary’s present, when Leda came running to him out of the trees into the sunlight. She was swinging a basket in her hand. It ought to have had ribbons on it; she made such a drama out of everything. Now the drama was mushrooms. “You must come with me, Jasper – I am so much afraid of the bulls.”
“Only bullocks.”
“All the same, come with me – please!”
He should have been cleaning his gun and taking his rod to pieces. Why hadn’t he kept these rules?
The exuberant delight of finding mushrooms put guns and rods and cool goodbyes, and the prospect of the horridly familiar dark journey back to school, out of his mind while they quartered the closely grazed fields together in intimate rivalry. He stooped silently when he found a mushroom; Leda screamed with delight and knelt down to lift her mushroom carefully with both hands. Wind blew in their faces, blew out her yellow hair. Their only thought was for mushrooms. Scarcity made them more precious, made competition keener. Here one, there three, a black, dark patch of grass promised, and gave nothing. Then the find of a grouping, fine dark grasses laced across their half-born heads, embryos tacked to their stems, no matter how careful the lifting. Striding fast on his stalk-like legs, he was doing too well, finding more than she did. He missed hearing her screams, and, feeling very grown-up, he left mushrooms behind him for her to pick. He was the author of her pleasure. Soon it would be lunch time. They must go back. He carried the basket. She took his hand and swung it as she had swung the empty basket. “Oh, but what fun we have had,” she said. Then, reaching intimacy without pausing: “Jasper, tell me something – tell me about your eye.”
“Leda,” he said, and swallowed as he had swallowed chocolate, “I haven’t got an eye. You know that.”
“I want to see it,” her voice was secret to them both. They were standing where the road turned into the shelter of the hazel-grove; the low wall, rounding the turning, was made of loose generous stones, rounded, worn to silver and yellow through years of weather, darkening to a peaty base, where loose-strife lifted up purple spires from the ditch. The sun, the luscious September sun, glared on their backs.
“No, Leda.”
“I have to kiss it,” she said. The luxury in her voice reached him in its absolute acceptance of his deformity. It held deliverance from all the hatred and disgust that possessed him, while washing his eye-socket, caring for it, covering it up. He freed his hand from hers and raised it uncertainly to his elegant black patch. Still delaying, he bent down to meet her eyes – cold, rabidly curious eyes. Just for a look at his disfigurement she would have kissed. He pulled back from her, back into his own defended world. And she had laughed good-humouredly, the sporting loser in a little game. They went in. It was past lunch time.
Today luncheon was far beyond its proper hour, and May, her wood and river gatherings deeply immersed in a square glass battery jar, straightened spoons and forks twice over on the dining-room table, bit her lip in annoyance and, to fill in time, turned her transistor on to Radio 4 – only that terrible Robin Day. She never knew which side he was on – always the wrong one, according to her understanding of politics. Soon it would be the still more terrible Archers. There were times when they had their moments of interest for her – she could have sorted out most of their problems. Not today.
April came in. The ladies did not assemble for luncheon as they did for dinner. They drifted unhopefully in and away again, to pick up the Cork Examiner or turn on their transistors and wait for the appalling news from Ulster.
“No sign of lunch?” April sighed her impatience. Unlike May, she did not fidget ostentatiously, but it was obvious that she had a plan for the afternoon. She was wearing her tweed suit, a suit which could equally have lunched at the Berkeley or walked through a bog. Tiger wore his cunning little matching jacket. “I rather hoped lunch would be in time today, Tiger has an appointment for his toenails and I’m meeting Ulick at three o’clock. It’s his Thursday at the shop.”
Ulick Uniacke was the chic antiquarian whose Dublin-London-New York activities had an offshoot in Ballinkerry. Behind the small and pretty shop was a mildly heated and well-ventilated store room. Here objects bought privately or at auction awaited complicated face-lifts, while operations nearer to age and sex changes were performed on others. Ulick stayed on the innermost spin of every ring in the sale world. He was an old Etonian, and a funny, charming and suspicious character. He could appreciate April’s style and they were happy friends in their less than honourable collaborations.
“Jasper must know it’s my Lecture Day – my lecture at Ballynunty – and I shall need the car.”
“Yes – wasn’t it?” April replied.
“The Club will be on its toes,” May was almost shouting.
“Yes, I do agree.” April gave her entire attention to Tiger, murmuring such words of love as lured Gripper from his basket, trustful that they were addressed to him.
“Gripper, basket! To your basket, sir!” May realised that April had neither heard nor wished to hear what she had said. Later she would sort the matter out. There was no question as to who should have the car. The employment of her afternoon was not a matter of convenience of amusement – it was a matter of obligation and duty.
June and Tiny joined the waiting group. As yet there was no grinding of the lift ropes, so May had time to spare for June’s problems; while Tiny settled herself in a sitting position on her goatskin, rather like a pig, forelegs stretched straight and senility written over every inch of her. May got ready to fill the waiting moment with sound advice. “I was wondering,” she began, “if we might burn your dog’s bed? That old goatskin smells like a badger’s sett –”
“Ah, poor old Nancy,” June sighed her usual response. She had spent a happy and profitable morning with Christy, Sweetheart and the young horse. And she knew what Jasper was cooking for lunch. She wasn’t looking for trouble.
“It’s quite a question which smells the sweetest? – your dead goat or your live dog.”
“Between them it is,” June agreed, still peaceably, “isn’t it, Tiny
?”
May came closer, her purpose firming as Tiny sighed and sank slowly to rest. Tiny’s sighs rather poisoned the air. “I don’t want to upset you, Baby, but don’t you think it’s a bit inhuman keeping the poor old thing alive? The RSPCA will be after you soon.”
“Let them come,” June was roused at last. “Let the bastards come.” She stood over Tiny’s bed as though defending her to the death.
“It needn’t happen like that,” May reassured her nicely. “When you do make up your mind to put her to sleep, I’ll do it for you. It’s perfectly simple – first, you give them a tranquilizer – that’s important. Then, one little pill and they’re off.”
“Another little word out of you,” June said, “and there’ll be something in your coffee and you won’t know about it till you’re off.”
The whole air of the big room (as yet without a whiff of Jasper’s cooking) was stilled, as though it waited and accepted June’s threat. “Do you hear what I hear?” April asked the silence. She did not look towards either sister, and there was no further sound until the groan of the lift, bearing luncheon upwards, broke and distracted the hatred in the air.
A quiche, lamb’s lettuce, and a blackcurrant fool, the contents of the lift came as a happy interruption to a tension absurdly stricter than June’s ridiculous threat called for. Jasper arrived soon after the lift. No one but he was permitted to interfere with his dishes or their arrangement. He liked taking things slowly; he stood, licking his lips and sucking the tips of his fingers (he had obviously been enjoying some private pleasure in the kitchen) before taking today’s masterpiece out of the lift and dividing it into four wedged portions – exact as a sundial. “Now, girls,” he said and sat down at the head of the table while they helped themselves. They did not quite push each other out of the way, but their eyes spoke for them. It was time they were greedy for, of course, not food.
