by Molly Keane
A tall, dark parlourmaid opened the door. She should have been a butler, but those days were finished, even for Alys Croshawe.
“Oh, Elizabeth, good evening.”
“Madam,” Elizabeth looked coldly and politely at the collection of branches on the wide doorstep.
“Here I am with all my bits and pieces,” May went on blithely. “We’ll take the lot to the drawing-room. Right?”
“Her ladyship thought the morning-room, Madam. I have put the vases there and spread the flower sheet ready for you.”
“Don’t bother about vases. I always bring my own specials. Did you say the morning-room?” her voice changed a little towards regret. “I’ll take the stuff in – don’t touch it, don’t touch it. Perhaps you’ld just carry this and this and this – oh, how kind.”
Elizabeth was balancing a mountain of Oasis on a rusting foundation for a death token when May’s kind friend, Alys, joined them. She came from some further rich distance within the house and brought with her a carelessness over distance or riches – all one to her, all quite natural.
“Alys. This is sweet of you.” May bent across primroses and secateurs and rabbit wire for a kiss. “Quite a thrill for my club – coming here to my lecture.”
“I’m rather frightened of your flower-club ladies,” Alys had a tiny voice, “but we’re going to give them ‘tea and cakes and jam and slices of delicious’ – what have you put in the sandwiches, Elizabeth?”
“Ham and chicken paste, m’lady.”
“Oh dear, can they believe that’s foie-gras?”
May, who was well aware that most of her flower-club ladies knew a great deal more about food than Alys, laughed her agreement. “I’ve brought you some wonderful ground cover,” she filled a silence while their footsteps hushed on rugs before echoing again on tiles, as they proceeded through the halls to the morning-room.
“Not any more of that rare stuff you gave me two years ago? The border’s smothered in it. Reagan says it’s common spurge.”
“Oh, gardeners! I warned him it was a wanderer. No, this is Lamium gobdolba – really rather choice.” May so loved giving presents that, even against her own knowledge, she endowed them with rare qualities.
“Well, here we are.” The morning-room was pretty enough and large enough to contain quite a party.
“Cold, isn’t it?” Lady Alys sounded quite unashamed. “We can’t turn on the radiators – the oil! Too impossible. Should we do something about that fire, Elizabeth?”
“My dinner table, m’lady, my silver, my sandwiches,” Elizabeth made the ghost of a pause, her expression forbidding further orders, before her scrupulously respectful exit.
May, the hour for her lecture near, began to set out her paraphernalia. She picked up the wreath-frame from a glass-topped table where Elizabeth had set it gently down. As she did so she spared a moment to glance down at the small treasures within. Medals and decorations, earned by dead soldiers and diplomats, were laid on velvet, with pendant miniatures of gentlemen in uniform among them. Surrounding the decorations and miniatures a collection of Victorian marbles ran a ribbon-like frame – a touching idea, implying that soldiers and diplomats had once been little boys.
“Oh, marbles, my favourite things.” May seldom missed an opportunity for admiration. “Early, aren’t they? Early Vic?”
Lady Alys was quite inattentive. Useful, peerless Elizabeth still held the first place in her mind. “She does bully us so,” the little bird’s voice quavered happily as she kicked a smouldering log out of place in the grate. “Anyway, it’s better for the flowers to keep cool, and your ladies can stick to their coats, can’t they?” Alys had kept all the airs of youth. Thin hair, fluffy as a baby’s, went with her baby voice. Only the sad crouch, above loosened stomach muscles, and the slightly crooked neck, proclaimed age as withering. She had soft, well-taught manners, through which she was as quick to destroy as to please. “I do hope you approve of my flower vases,” she sounded sure of approval. “I washed them myself.”
“Sweet of you, Alys, but I always use my own containers,” May indicated a chimney-shaped tube from Japan, a flat vegetable dish, a copper mould, green with age, and a brown and white teapot with a broken spout.
“Lovely,” Alys commented doubtfully, “but I don’t quite see them in my drawing-room.”
“But they’re not going in your drawing-room, dear Alys.”
“The thing is, May – a lot of boring people are coming to dinner tonight, so I thought – what a good idea if you left your décor here! A little fellow for the dining-room table, and a couple of big chaps to go in the drawing-room.”
May thought quickly. She had valid reasons for refusing. “I’ld simply love to. So unlucky, I have a lecture at Castle Quilty tomorrow, and I rather need this stuff.”
“That did occur to me, actually. I’ve saved up all last week’s drawing-room flowers for you. Here they are, very perky in their footbath.”
May looked with disgust at the collection of narcissi and forsythia drowning in their footbath. She picked out a spray of forsythia, shook a few petals onto the carpet, and peered closely at the water-blackened oily stem.
“Take the lot,” the kind friend said. “Please do. I know there’s not much in your garden.”
May felt enclosed in the hermetic little world of the moneyless among the rich. Remembering the many treats she accepted from Alys, how, now, to refuse a favour? A slow blush of painful confusion climbed above the polo collar of her jersey. Her eyes grew very bright. She found her situation insufferable; twice over unbearable. That Alys should have offered her half-dead flowers, smelling of nothing but their week-old water, was insulting enough. There was besides that, an arid feeling of neglect in the thought of a dinner-party to which she had not been invited, and for which Alys planned to make shameless use of her unrewarded talents. Most difficult of all, impossible to put into words, or even acknowledge fully to her inmost self, was the problem for her lopped hand, arranging flowers in unfamiliar vases.
Alys’s inconsiderate forgetfulness of her handicap left May defenceless against a familiar impulse, welling through her now, as undeniable as her blush had been; the wish and impulse to assert herself dangerously against a loveless world. She knew how to fulfil her wish. She almost welcomed an occasion for the blinding excitement in the dangers she must risk before her nerve and dexterity left her equal again with others. She would be more than equal – triumphant, heedless of anybody’s love, in a haven of fulfilment which she had reached before, where she would be again. The planning and timing of the adventure meant as much to her as the first movements in a game of sex to a luckier person.
“I won’t promise anything super –” she managed to say it quite pleasantly. “My own containers suit me best, of course. And you won’t mind the funeral wreath for the dining-room, will you? I promised them a special lesson on that – Lent is the season for old people, er, passing on, and that gives plenty of practice for wreaths and sprays.”
“Oh dear, how sad,” Alys said, adding doubtfully, “Make it cheerful, won’t you?”
“Watch me,” May said, snipping a tough twig so viciously that she dropped her secateurs. She stooped to pick them up. “Silly me – I’m always a bit taut before my lecture.”
“Oh, I do so understand,” the gentle voice conveyed complete understanding as Alys looked away from that miniature hand. “Oo-oo,” she cooed out suddenly, “do I hear a car? I dooo. … it’s the first of the milk-in-firsts arriving. Shall I let them in? Saves poor Elizabeth’s feet.” She went away unhurrying. She was the simple great lady now, thoughtful for her servants, opening her own door to the polite mob that she would greet warmly without being quite sure of their names. But at least, boring and unfamiliar as May’s ladies might be, the flowers for her party would be arranged superlatively – what a neat idea that had been.
Left alone, May gazed with something near to hatred at the row of vases, most of them glass, though there was one merciful
affair in white pottery from poor Mrs Constance Spry. The others repelled and filled her with a sick foreboding of failure to give anything like her best in their unfamiliar shapes, although she was so sure and certain of all she had taught her hand to do for her in its accustomed ways. She was proud of its skills, sometimes thinking of it as a different person from herself, a difficult child she had taught to obey – a child she must never betray through nervous awkwardness. She was the keeper of her own defences; of her powers to survive the monstrous injustice in her star.
Her thumb felt cold, chilled to its bone by her nervous expectations. She knew how to restore its usefulness. The therapy contrasted absolutely with her own neat, fulfilled life. Do the thing you most fear: marry fear to the act; go for the coup that balances courage with its dangers; the flow of peace will follow. Success lay in the proper timing, in the moment between danger and safety. May waited purposely until she knew the approaching footsteps, on tiles, on rugs, on tiles again, were close, and closer still. Then, quick as she was careful, she lifted up the lid of the glass-topped table. Her hand hovered, deliberate as a bee taking honey, before it dropped precisely onto the marble of her fancy – an agate marble, brown and white, rabbit coloured. In the fraction of time left – improvising danger was part of the game – she shut down the lid as gently as she had lifted it, and turned quietly away from the table just as the sweet Irish voices, and Lady Alys’s voice, from a different Irish world, were in the room. Happily, warmly, confidently May went forward to meet her friends.
“We’ve got quite a little challenge here today – Lady Alys has lent us her vases. So we’ll create something exciting in an unknown container, shall we? Don’t let’s forget our measurements – from side to side they must not exceed … who can tell me?. …”
There was a covert murmur of inches from the chorus of beautifully and discreetly dressed ladies as they clasped their winter coats to them and settled down to culture and beauty, and to wondering secretly how soon Miss Swift was going to drop something out of that poor hand.
Miss Swift dropped not so much as a leaf. She romped through all the awkwardness of demonstration in Alys’s preposterous vases, and in her construction of the confections she used quite a number of Alys’s own leftovers. As she balanced pussy-willow with narcissi (reserving Jasper’s filbert catkins) a neat feeling of victory lent an extra easiness to her hand. Her lecture, as she delivered it, was outpaced by the inspiration and agility of her thumb and half finger. Could this be not unlike dancing with a loved one? Supposing she was slightly drunk? Silly as the catching of a falling leaf, the notion teased and fled. Drunk or sober, she had never danced with a loved one.
“And now,” she stepped back from her arrangements, everything balanced to a hair’s breadth, firm as a rock, “any questions?” She didn’t want questions; she wanted adulation, and she got it. The cheesy white plasticine of her face tautened on its bones as she breathed in their praises. She was a star, in love with her audience, accepting their applause. The moment could not last, but in the warm ease that succeeded it, in the unfolding of her skills, the cunning of her cleverness, she was as one with her flower club; she had answers for their thoughtful questions, and snapped out quite a sharp reply to some ignorant suggestion from Alys.
Elizabeth brought in tea at the appropriate moment and, as almost every lady was on Weight Watchers (refusing sandwiches or milk in tea, first or last), May could let herself go on the chicken and ham paste. One way and another she was in need of sustenance and took it; more and more praise went with it, and a cigarette to follow, before she embarked on the funeral wreath.
“Here we have rather a different problem,” she began, “so how do we start? We stuff the wire frame with Oasis, previously soaked in plenty of water –”
“Reminds me, I must let out my poor little dogs,” Alys interrupted. Her voice sounded pathetically regretful, a whispered whine. Since she had no curiosity about making a funeral wreath (anyhow, the gardener’s job), she achieved a polite escape.
“The whole idea is. …” May went on, ignoring the stir of Alys’s departure, “keep it simple – we don’t want any florist’s satin bows, do we?” The club was moved to derisive laughter at the idea of satin bows which, not so long ago, had seemed inoffensive and appropriate on an expensive token for a sad occasion.
When the wreath, quite a joyous affair, more of a south-sea lei than a grave-side garland, had been successfully created and immoderately praised, the ladies (after they had carried May’s pots and pans, filbert branches and wire, to the steps) made their polite thanks and tactfully early departure. Cosily re-established in their large, well-heated cars, their comments on the afternoon went much the same as always. “Poor Miss Swift – she shouldn’t take it so seriously” … “I could have cried for that poor little hand” … “Oh, it makes me so nervous, I never look near it” … “And what did you think of that idea for a centrepiece on the dining-room table?” … “Frankly, in very poor taste” … “Oh, certainly, I agree, how true” … “And what about the big house?” … “All that tat and peeling paint? My Richard would never stand for it” … Unimpressed by other people’s lifestyles, and filled with kind thoughts, they enjoyed agreeing with each other along every mile of their homeward roads.
The thought of a bath and a little lie-down were uppermost in Alys’s mind as she waited for May to say her goodbyes. She liked May more and more at the prospect of her imminent departure. “Let me put some of those things in your car,” she said at last.
May rolled the marble in her trouser pocket, fitting its warmed globe into the palm of her hand, “No hurry,” she said easily, “April isn’t here yet.”
“April?” Alys’s voice was frail in dismay.
“No sense of time,” May sounded quite indulgent.
“Well, do come in and have a drink – if you don’t think it’s too early.”
“Never too early for cocktails,” May quoted cheerily.
“Only sherry, I’m afraid. Perhaps Elizabeth has put it in the library.”
“And shall we take a look at my drawing-room flowers? The placement is so vital – I think I’ve got it right.”
In the great mellow drawing-room, still as a well above its worn and faded Aubussons, and warm as toast in readiness for the night’s party, May saw with cries of horror that Elizabeth had changed the positions of her arrangements.
“Actually, she has put the vases in their usual places,” Alys’s voice was as small as a pinprick and she spoke no word of praise or thanks.
“Unimaginable – the stupidity of it! Thank God I saw it in time.” Walking resolutely across the room, heels down first, toes out-turned, May lifted the heavy vases and, without loosing a petal or spilling a drop of water, put them down in her well-chosen situations. So placed, they re-assumed the mysterious and beautiful dimensions she had intended for them. “Tell Elizabeth to leave them exactly where they are,” she said, and put her hand back in her pocket. Alys, her voice failing her utterly, led the way to the library.
In the library the master of the house was seated by a poor fire reading The Field, drinking tea from a mug and eating toast off a plate on a nearby chair. “Only just got in from the river,” he said. “Elizabeth made me some toast. Rather good. I needed it. Lost a lovely fish – broke me in the Tinkers’ Hole.”
“May is here,” Alys interrupted despairingly.
He struggled out of his chair: “Oh, May! Wonderful to see you – it’s ages since. … How did your meeting go? Wish I’d been at it. Did your ladies behave themselves, I mean, enjoy themselves?”
“Oh, yes, absolutely riveted. Didn’t you think so, Alys?”
“Darling May,” Alys put a small glass of sherry into her hand, “her lecture was bliss. I don’t know how she kept it up for so long.”
“Just practice,” May said. “Two hours means nothing to me. They do love it so. I get inspired.”
“Yes.”
“And how is my friend, Baby
June? Dear little soul. …”
Brigadier Croshawe really wanted to know. His mind went back across the years. “Those were the days. What was that great little mare she rode? Don’t tell me – I’ve got it! Magic Flute. They were a combination, terror of the Ladies’ Races. Six in a row, one year, I remember. It must have been ’38 or ’37?”
May could see herself again, standing cold and unnoticed on a hillside, watching another of Baby’s triumphs. She put down her glass and put her hand back in her pocket.
“Changed times, Hippo.” (Hippo was the Brigadier’s pet name.) “One common four-year-old in the yard now, and Baby’s afraid to get up on him.”
“Can’t believe that.”
“Too true. She’s leaving everything to a useless idiot she snatched out of my garden.”
“Can’t be so useless if Baby’s had the schooling of him.”
“Expensive and useless,” May insisted.
“Nothing like catching them young. My poor old Matty is on his last legs, can’t fire him though, can I?”
“I can’t see the point of not,” Alys said simply. Then: “Oh, do I hear a car? Oh, I dooo –” the flute in her voice was in happy contrast to an earlier accent in the afternoon.
“April, I expect,” May looked regretfully at her empty glass.
“April? How is the old girl? What a looker, wasn’t she? Quite lovely. She must come in and have a drink.”
“Oh, Hipp-OH,” Alys wailed, “you know she won’t hear you. May – shall we? …”
“Stay as you are, May. Have another drink. Leave April to me. I’ll make her come in.” He was gone. Slippers flapping on flags, silent on rugs, as he crossed the halls. And he had meant to give himself a rest after the river, and before the party.
