by Molly Keane
Relieved as she was that May was not prowling about with her spy’s eyes on his early departure, June very much wished, as she plodded her way back to the house and the stableyard, that Christy had stayed long enough to help her in the search for thorns or other injuries in the young horse’s legs. She spent some time doing this herself, with rigorous carefulness, before she went, by the back door and passage ways, to the kitchen, thinking, late as the hour was, of a quiet cup of tea.
The kettle was simmering complacently on the Aga and toast left over from breakfast perched, limp and leathery, in its silver rack. She had made the tea and poured it into a mug, milk in first and plenty of sugar, when she heard Jasper’s voice coming down fitfully from the hall. She had hoped the longer evening light might have kept him later at his clearing and clipping. “No luck, Tiny,” she said and gave her the piece of buttered toast while she gulped down the tea and rinsed the mug under the cold tap. Jasper entirely disapproved of any casual trespassing in his kitchen. If so much as a skewer was mislaid, its disappearance would be dated from that stolen time. Each sister had an electric kettle in her bedroom for the filling of hot-water bottles or for the occasional private cup of tea, or bedtime drink. The kitchen belonged to Jasper. June had quite a sensation of guilt as she wiped her mouth and went upstairs prepared to suggest that she had merely passed through the kitchen to deposit the three eggs. She hoped that Jasper had not reserved the toast for any special purpose.
On the hall side of the service door June stopped, hesitant in her surprise at what she saw – Jasper, hand in hand with an unknown woman. To June, who could accept any fact of conception, birth, or death in her material world, this was an embarrassing spectacle. The two linked people looked bleakly graceful, advancing across the cold shadowless hall as if about to venture into some stately kind of dance to which she was an awkward audience.
“Put on the lights and the radiators,” Jasper said when he saw her, “and light the fire in the drawing-room, that would be kind.” His words sounded as ceremonious as the half dance with the stranger had looked. And still he held her hand.
“Is that a sister? Which sister?” The woman’s voice was as liquid and easy as if it came out of a bird’s throat. June was without an ear for music or she could have recognised Jasper’s voice in another key, a different octave.
“My sister June.”
“June, Baby June, I do remember, of course I remember! So tiny, and that wicked pony – you were up to all his dirty tricks. What did you call him? Don’t say – I’ll remember.” She was holding out both her hands. Fingers lean and strong as the spring in a rat trap closed together in the blunt paw June offered.
June ignored the half thought of a trap, a trap for rats or rabbits. Something within her warmed in accord with the woman’s recall. “I suppose that was Crotty the Robber” – the mad dead pony’s name was born again in her mind – “he was a right little sod too.”
“It’s Leda, Baby,” Jasper’s introduction came late and awkwardly. There was something else he didn’t say. Leda said it for him. “I’m blind, June, blind as a bat.” Her admission was so light-weight she might have said “I’m the cousin with a cold in her head – nothing serious.”
June stared, appalled. Immediately she felt overcome by a gross comprehensive pity as for an old dog dragging a sightless body across a carpet – a pity lacking in any approach to understanding, belonging only in sad story books – Ginger in Black Beauty filled her mind. “I’ll make a really good fire,” she said, confused and hurrying away from such a tragic state of affairs – a blind cousin now, a Jewish cousin, forgotten even before the times of death camps. It was out of order that she should reappear when long years had quenched her memory, even as a social skeleton in the family cupboard. In the uneasy silences of time there was still something untold and unforgotten about Leda.
June loved laying and lighting and building fires, she had a real hunger for the work, compulsive as eating. To force life into a reluctant or dying fire was to win her way back into a primal urge and necessity. Feeding the need of a present moment suited her abilities perfectly.
“It smells of Easter Holidays – narcissi and wood smoke.” Leda took a breath and choked a little in the crackle of newly lighted wood and newspaper. Jasper led her to a chair, pushing it gently towards her – a butler at a dinner party. She accepted his help as naturally as she had taken his hand crossing the hall. There was a cool grace about her lack of thank you’s, that prompted a wish to help her more. “I must bring in your suitcase,” was all Jasper could think of for the moment.
When his step grew distant: “June, is there a Baby June anywhere?” Leda asked the air.
June’s teddy-bear bottom lifted from the grate. “I’m here. Did you want anything?” She felt pleased and ready to oblige.
“Just – the lavatory, if you could help me. Tomorrow I’ll find the way myself, really I shall. I promise you.”
Like Jasper, June took Leda’s hand as one dances with a child and guided her up the long staircase and down the two deceitful steps to the bathroom.
“This is where I’m such a bore,” Leda said. “I’m all right now, but if you could come back, just this time. I’ll soon know my way everywhere.” She sounded confident of staying for quite a time, June thought with just a glint of mistrust.
On the turn of the staircase June and Jasper met; June on her way back to the drawing-room fire, Jasper with Leda’s suitcase in his hand: “Where is she going to sleep?” he asked. “The Yellow Room, I expect. Better put the electric fire on, don’t you think?” – “And a hot bottle in the bed,” June added. It was at the sound of car wheels turning on the gravel sweep that she stiffened to the stillness of a dog setting game, before her eyes swivelled to Jasper’s eye. “Jesus, child,” she whispered, “the old girls will be killed out.” She looked nearly as malign as Jasper while they waited together in the turn of the staircase.
April and May were still waiting, held together in their surprise at the unusual, when steps came down the staircase. June’s pounding feet and Jasper’s light escapist tread reached the bottom of the flight together. The family met in the hall, and each waited for another to speak. In the oddly ominous pause a flare of dismay went equally through April and May. “Gripper,” thought May, and her hand flew to her mouth. April, in a second of panic, doubted if she had locked her bedroom door.
Jasper came nearer to them, delaying what he had to tell: “Leda has come back,” he said.
“And do you know what?” June came nearer too. “She’s blind.”
“Leda? How embarrassing. Leda’s dead.” May made Leda alive sound like an untidy business.
“She’s back from the grave, if that cheers you up at all.” Jasper’s jibe was spoken absently. He had a worried look. “I must really think about dinner now.”
“Must she stay to dinner? Won’t a drink do?” May was frostily opposed to a live Leda.
“We can’t send her away tonight” – any opposition from May was enough to raise Jasper’s resistance. “She’s staying in County Monaghan.”
“In Monaghan.” May made Monaghan sound almost disrespectable.
“She is so. She is in a convent with the nuns,” June supplied.
“Then why is she here? Have the nuns expelled her?” May persisted.
“Nobody ever tells me anything,” April said with wounded resignation. “Who is here?” She produced her notepad, little pencil attached. Her eyes quested theirs. For once there was no pursuit of her own calm interpretation of what they were saying.
“LEDA” Jasper wrote. “Your cousin Leda.”
“Leda.” Trumpets sounded behind April’s deaf-toned voice. “Where is she?”
“LOO,” June shouted. “Loo?” April repeated the easy word.
“And she’ll break her leg on the stairs. She’s blind, April, she’s blind.”
“BLIND” Jasper wrote.
“Blind?” April put Tiger down. “She’ll need me.”
“She can’t see you. You won’t hear her. Quite hopeless.” Though at first un-welcoming, May was not going to be left out of the fun. Out-distanced, she shrugged a dismissal of any importance, for April had almost taken flight up the staircase. She was at the bathroom door as Leda opened it and stood hesitating, her hands feeling the air for guidance.
“I thought I was just an old lady lost …” she laughed as if the idea was really funny.
“Leda, darling.” April could not hear her own voice, or the jubilant tenderness in her welcome. She put Tiger down and put her hands in Leda’s fumbling hands before she looked at her with deep dismay.
Leda’s hands were strong, searching and unchanged. “You know I’m blind,” she fluted out the news like a jolly bird-song. “Are you still so beautiful?” she asked as though that was what really mattered most.
April laughed – a laugh that could have meant either admittance or denial. No mention of her deafness as she bent over Leda and took her arm. She stole sly looks and looked away as they went together, slowly together, down the staircase where she had watched from above while Leda sobbed aloud and ran and jumped into waiting arms for comfort. Now it was a helpless Leda, feeling her way at every step. “I’ll remember when I’ve done it once,” she promised as though to herself, “I hate to be helped. I need to be left alone.” Her ageless assurance was almost shocking compared with the heavy undisciplined body, the swollen ankles that made her shoes strain and tighten at the insteps. There were no lines in Leda’s face, the pale flesh was as if folded on to its bones. The great blue spectacles swam faintly diabolic, two mocking eyes telling nothing. Only her white hair had the same lyrical quality as when it was blonde. Short now, it clung around her head and face as well placed as feathers on a bird.
At least April could approve the coat that Leda was wearing – a wonderful dark blue overcoat, drifting and moving with the wearer, yet keeping a Napoleonic, a military suggestion. Obviously, to April, it came from some great couture house – but when? The padded shoulders, a certain neatness and definition dated it. It had been made in the forties; a world away.
“Tomorrow,” April said, “you must tell me everything.” Tomorrow she felt she might hear better.
“Oh, I love to tell All. Only ask, I’ll bore on for ever. Now where are we? In the hall? Now the drawing-room – don’t say it. First door on the left.” She preceded a hovering April. Tiger, wounded by the unusual neglect, lagged sulking behind them.
The smell of Hamamelis mollis, not quite honey, not yet primroses, met them as they opened the door. June’s great fire had loosed its cold stored restraint. “Don’t tell me,” Leda said again. She waited, like someone about to step into a warm sea – “It’s witch hazel.”
“Right, first time,” May applauded. “Can you get the other?” It was more than a garden quiz, almost a test question.
Leda walked further into the room. The lily of the valley scent from another of May’s arrangements drifted and rose and sank as she moved about. She knew it like a forgotten word, she knew the scent in the room this evening as it had been fifty years before, surreptitious and elusive, distanced from the plant that carried its flowers or from the vase holding them; from a further place, as you pass by, it finds you. “Mahonia baelii,” Leda hazarded, almost shyly.
May was pleased at her diffidence.
“Right again,” she commended. “You deserve a drink. Would you like a glass of sherry?”
“Oh I would.” Before May got to the sherry bottle Leda put out a hand. Her acceptance made a delightful importance of the pleasure in store. “Thank you, May,” she said. “I know it’s May by the little girl’s voice. You’ve kept it. I love voices.”
A tide of warmth lifted May’s heart. She knew she looked young for her age, but … “little girl’s voice”! “You must meet my Gripper,” she tried for the note in which she had offered the drink, “Grips, come and talk to Cousin Leda.”
“I hope he likes me.” Leda stroked the little dog’s head, the gesture thoughtful as hand in lover’s hand, before she drank, without a shrinking of dismay, from the glass of awful sherry.
“I shouldn’t encourage Gripper, if I were you,” Jasper came into the room, a bottle in his hand. “He has his embarrassing little whims. And I wouldn’t drink that sherry either. I’ve found quite a treat – of course I may have kept it too long.”
“Ever since the sober years of war, all drink has been delicious.” Leda took another small sip of her sherry. There was a silence in which Jasper and May felt for a moment back in the unnamed years, in the shadows of a prison camp and among its horrid graves. It seemed indecent to ask a question Any question. They would refrain. It would be easier.
June came in, Tiny lumbering solemnly beside her – they stopped in the doorway. So framed and waiting they must be going to deliver some portentous news. June spoke for both: “I went up to put a bottle in the bed in the Yellow Room and – do you know what? There’s a whole flood of water down from the ceiling and into the bed.”
“And did I, or did I not remind you about the broken shutes?” May turned pleasurably on Jasper. “How long ago? How often? Well – there you are.”
“And how long since you have inspected the bedrooms, Miss Head Housemaid? If I may ask?” Jasper was drawing the cork out of the bottle with care and ceremony, not the moment for interruption. “The Blue Room, perhaps?” he suggested lightly, as though about to run through a list of guest rooms. June was ready with a good answer: “No, Jasper. That bed is in a mortifying case with the cats.”
“I’ll sleep with anything. Cats? I love cats.” Leda’s lie was obvious enough to ask for disbelief.
“You can’t,” June said, “let alone the bed, you wouldn’t see what you’ld be stepping on before you stepped onto it.”
“Oh, Baby, I carried you to watch them drowning kittens when you were two – you can’t remember?”
“I do so. The kittens scratched me and you pinched me and I yelled,” June recalled faithfully.
“Oh, I was naughty,” Leda laughed indulgently, “and I’m still naughty. So take care.”
“I will too,” June said.
“The question is,” Jasper took Leda’s sherry glass out of her hand and almost closed her fingers on the stem of the wine glass he gave her in its place – “where does Leda lay down her head tonight?” He made her sound like a pitiful vagrant. No one offered their room. No one suggested a sofa.
“What’s the trouble?” April sensed difficulty in the pause.
“Beds,” May shouted. Jasper wrote something down on the back of an envelope. When April read it she said, with the authority of an elder sister – a married and monied sister: “Well, Leda must sleep in Mummie’s room.” Leda smiled happily; her mind circled anti-clockwise.
“A night or two, I suppose.” May was genuinely hesitant.
“And I was so hoping you might let me stay a little longer – of course I must pay like I pay in this convent my darling child has found for me to die in. I’ll never be able to die – the nuns take such good care of me. I’ll just exist. They lead me everywhere, and I need to find my own way – to smell and feel and touch my way.” Her voice was shrill with protest – “Oh, they are so kind” – her voice dropped.
“We shall have to think about it,” Jasper seemed unsure. “Anyway, see to things, May, would you? While I get dinner together.”
“Perhaps you’ld help me, Baby.” May seemed anxious, even pleading.
“And to think you’re the first to sleep in that bed …” June put a hand against her mouth. “Well, your guess is as good as mine,” she amended. Tiny dragged herself up to follow the sisters out of the room.
April and Leda were alone.
April: an old woman, deprived in her infirmity, persistent in the safe-keeping of her beauty, cheerful slave to the disciplines involved and apostle of their benefits.
Leda: in the terrible freedom of the blind exuberantly unaware of lost beauty, con
fident, as always, in her ways to women’s acceptance and to man’s desiring.
April spoke first. She chattered on, veiling her deafness. “Leda, what has happened to you? You’ve put on weight. You must go on my diet – magical. Where have you been? How long can you stay with us?”
“Oh, I can stay. I’m free. Femme seule – I must tell you, my husband is dead.”
“Husband?” April had got the word husband and seen Leda’s mouth fall down and tighten, lines from nose to chin gripping sadly into the loose flesh. “Have another drink,” she suggested, “and I’ll tell you about my breathing exercises – you must follow my regime – you’ll get your shape back, you’ll see.”
What did they have for each other now, divided by sight and hearing? Where did they begin again? Impossible to revive an emotion that belonged only in the strength and pains of youth. After such an absence what could survive? How to communicate? April, from her accepted isolation, her self-made content, saw disaster in Leda’s looks. She felt more disapproval than pity. Even in a death camp April would have struggled to keep up her exercises, control her breathing. “Everybody eats too much, anyway,” she would have said as she gnawed on a cabbage stalk.
“It’s a miracle finding you again,” Leda’s voice swelled, “after all this time – I’ve gone through the looking glass. Time’s a joke,” she stopped, her words wasting into the silent room. She heard someone move a chair. All domestic sounds were catalogued in her mind. “Is it April?”
“I’m going to fill your glass,” April’s voice came from some distance unconnected with Leda’s loving speech, “but tomorrow you must promise to start on my diet. We can’t let ourselves go.”
“Diets? The sadness of it! Oh April, how we stuffed chocolates. Aunt Violet said they gave us spots. We bicycled to the village and ate chocolates on the mountain coming home. April, don’t you remember? Why don’t you answer? APRIL!”
April heard a shout. “I must tell you, Leda,” she said, “I’m slightly deaf.”
