by Molly Keane
“And I’m as blind as a bat.” Some vibration from the past set them laughing together – they went on, laughing as delightedly, as irrepressibly as they had when life was all laughter, or all tears – nothing between the two to be suffered, or to outlive.
As if sharing in some unacknowledged celebration the evening changed its sharp weather to a dream of summertime, false as a dream, and as exciting. Indoors it seemed so because the house was warmed by an extravagant up-turn of radiators and storage heaters. The constant smells of yesterday were lifted to colder heights and their vacancies held breaths of May’s narcissi as well as the crisp incense of bay leaves Jasper toasted on the Aga. “Herbs on a shovel,” he commented to himself, disparaging or excusing this quelling of customary kitchen smells.
When someone opened the hall door to put out a dog the evening seemed warmer even than the house, a warmth with rain to follow. In the starless interval of early dusk lost winter-sweets and forgotten viburnums fed the air with their suggestions. The hour held for its own a brief and passing recreation of the time when Durraghglass was warm and clean, well-served and full of flowers from the now shattered greenhouses; a time when life had its comforts and its dignified reserves. Then children were discouraged from rudeness, even to one another. Sharp retorts were in bad style. Then, an obstinate mist of love clouded over their disabilities, accepting them and accepting an impotence towards any change in their condition. Mummie had indulgence for everything. From Baby June’s dyslexia (“she’ll outgrow it, darling”), past Jasper’s mortifying eye, and beyond their father’s tragic accidental death, she never yielded in her over-looking; never let go her mortal loves, or her strong religious faith and natural jealousies.
These were the submerged days that Leda’s coming rescued from a deep oblivion. Since she could not see Durraghglass in its cold decay, or her cousins in their proper ages, timeless grace was given to them in her assumption that they looked as though all the years between were empty myths. Because they knew themselves so imagined, their youth was present to them, a mirage trembling in her flattery as air trembles close on the surface of summer roads. What more might she recall? What else might she show them of their lost selves?
They sat with her, or left her by turns, imagining, mistakenly, that her blindness was melancholy. April was her most constant companion, her memory a perfect mine of diets and exercises for the restoration of the present Leda to something nearer the girlfriend of the past. May came in to put eucalyptus leaves on the fire, and to advise Leda to pay no attention to April’s prescriptions. She lit a cigarette for Leda with dry-lipped carefulness and put it between her fingers where it stayed, unsmoked, until April took it away and threw it in the fire. Jasper brought pieces of hot toast spread with anchovy butter and parsley and sat with her to prevent April’s interference with the healthy snack. Leda ate one slice, licked her fingers, and ate another. June came in to stack the broken wood-basket, but said nothing. They forbade her to change for dinner because her bedroom would still be cold. They seemed to have overcome their hesitation over putting her to sleep in a bed empty since their mother’s death, and in the room where the cupboards were still full of her clothes and hats.
Oddly charged by her presence, each of them, unthinking of a reason, planned to dress as elaborately for dinner as if she could see and appraise them, or was it a parade for each other?
April curtailed her exercises, swallowed a vitamin pill and a very quick drink. She had a flash of pleasure in the thought of having a bedroom drink with Leda. She too remembered illicit chocolates on the mountain and the idea of a secret to be shared again excited her.
May forgot to chat to Gripper and postponed the placing of the agate marble she had so lately acquired. She could already say to herself “Oh, quite pretty – I wonder where I found it?” The other word for finding never formed itself in her mind: “where I picked it up” came nearest. In the bathroom she gargled lavishly before trying out that little girl’s voice Leda remembered.
Only June made no change in her usual habits of dress. Her importances were her own. Leda’s recall of drowning kittens and a howling baby lived more vividly to her than the other flattering moment, when she had caught her breath in a splendid lost dimension of childhood.
Jasper put watercress in a wooden bowl, rice to dry in the oven, and his fish medley and eggwhites to simmer in peppered cream. Before he went up to dress he turned back from the kitchen door and put another branch of bay leaves to smoke and blacken on the low ring of the Aga. He smiled a twisted sneer at himself as he put his father’s evening cuff-links in the cuffs of a silk shirt. He felt rather defiant over the jewelled links and a Charvet scarf – collar and bow tie might be a bit too obvious – the girls would notice if he overdid it. He must evade their unspoken comment, the look that recognised a change. He despised and mistrusted them, but feared more that they despised him. Jasper felt curiously elated in the suspicion he allowed himself that Leda was not a fourth sister in his life. He saw himself embarking on the hallucination of a flirtation, a fresh leisure interest, a pretence about which to worry the girls. He expected Leda to recognise this as clearly as he did. She would play at the idea, as he would. But beyond this graceful limitation, in every word spoken between them fixed currents changed course. There was a delving interest in a pause. Her voice salvaged the wreckage of her beauty. In any case her body was of little interest to Jasper, but the stuff of old dreams had a frightening potency, a magic to be avoided.
On his way back to the kitchen Jasper stopped for a minute on the turn of the staircase where from the high, floor-length window he saw a swan rise through the ribbons of mist lying along the river. There is ecstasy in a swan’s flying; in the neck leaning lasciviously on air, the body stretched behind the shouting wings. He watched while his swan took her short flight and dropped back through the mists to the water, her landing lost to his sight. It was as much as Jasper asked of any emotional moment: to be, and to cease. He was never one for squandering emotion. He had saved and pinched and scraped on it in so many directions that, finally, there was very little left to squander.
Slightly flown on wine and kümmel with their coffee April and May were in keen competition as to which of them would guide Leda to her room and help her to bed. “I am tired, Jasper.” She had said it conspiratorially behind the argument in process between the sisters.
“I know you want to take your dog out so I’ll show Leda where everything is.” Determination was behind April’s cosy hostess manner.
“You can’t show her anything,” May wrote, “can’t you see she can’t see?”
“I expect we shall manage all right,” April answered smoothly.
“What about your own dog?” ran May’s scribble. “Does he never want to. …?”
“Can’t read a word. Leda, shall we?”
“Please. It’s been such a long flight from the convent.” Leda yawned pitifully. Using April’s deafness as readily as the rest of the family, she said to May: “Come and tuck me up. Promise.”
The door of the mother’s bedroom opened wide in welcome to the room sacredly unused but as sacredly swept and dusted. Leda smiled as she walked through it. She went unguided across the floor to the big elaborate bed. “We had our last talk in here, Aunt Violet and I,” she said. “This room smells just the same. Always violets. …”
“You won’t let it worry you, sleeping here?” April was turning back the bed covers. She felt reassurance might be needed. “Nobody has slept here since. … but I know she wouldn’t mind.”
“Oh, I like to feel her near.” Leda’s voice made the idea into something childish and pretty.
“Your blue nightdress?” April asked, busy at the suitcase, “or the pink?”
“I don’t care. Perhaps the blue.”
“All right. The pink. And where is your night cream?”
“Oh, I never bother. There isn’t any.”
“Leda, I can’t find any nourishing skin food.” April pe
rsisted in her search.
Leda made a pantomime of writing and April blushed. “I can hear if you speak very slowly,” she said, and knelt, fortified by years of exercises, as easily as any child, to take off Leda’s shoes. Leda put out her hands to find April’s head, then stooped her mouth level with April’s ear. “I was longing for a good talk,” she said, “without all the others. Like when we used to escape together.”
“I heard you,” April said. Leda’s sweet voice had touched some thread, for once connecting sound and sense. “Leda, I heard you plainly.” She lifted eyes swimming with tears to Leda’s unresponding glamorous spectacles and she felt, of the two, far the less maimed. “Sit where you are,” she commanded, “while I go to my room for my Cream Vitamin Plus. It’s pure magic.”
“Will it be worth it?” Leda thought, waiting in obedience. “I was rather comfortable in the convent. And safe.”
May came in, her entrance neatly timed to April’s exit. She carried a torch and a bell. She kicked gently under the bed’s valance till the po beneath tingled. “It’s just by the leg of the bed – if you must go to the loo – ring this bell.” She clanged it.
“Oh, how merry,” Leda said.
“April is nearest. She won’t hear, of course, but her beastly little dog will and he’ll wake me.”
“I am being spoilt.”
“And tomorrow we’ll make a space for you in the cupboard. You haven’t brought much, have you?”
“I haven’t got much. Not here. Tania didn’t give me time to pack when we left America.”
“Tania? That’s your daughter. Sounds a very tiresome child to me.”
“Aren’t all children tiresome?” Leda conceded, laughing, “especially when you depend on them?” She took off her coat which she had worn throughout the evening. Under it she was wearing something frail and black and softly pleated, quite unsuitable to the Irish climate; and under that almost nothing. She sat on the edge of the bed, crossed her knees and swung her feet, as lightly as a girl.
“What a lovely coat – shall I hang it up? It’s as light as a feather.”
“It should be. It’s vicuna.”
“You bought it in America?”
“Oh, no. Does it look like it? Paris, in the war.”
“But, Leda, you know we all thought. …”
“Please. I try to forget what you all thought.” Leda’s hands went over her spectacled eyes; long lean hands with fat thumbs, reached past her eyes to her hair. It seemed to May that they changed in a moment from the gesture of defensive protection to a movement lightly moulding and caressing the extravagantly pretty growth round her ears and temples.
Looking at Leda’s hands, used so impartially to shut out remembrance or to caress, a wave of relief broke in May’s mind, a sense of being whole because Leda could not see and, possibly, had no recall of the misfortune that was May’s right hand.
“And you do love my little dog, don’t you, Leda?” Gripper was scouring suspiciously round the unmarked territories of the unfamiliar room. “He wants to say goodnight. Grips – come to Mummie.” The close relief and warmth May was feeling made her long for some return – she demanded approval for her love-object, as a mother seeks the same, sideways, for an unattractive child.
Again Leda’s hand went down to find that vulnerable pleasure spot behind the little dog’s ears. “I wonder what happened to my dogs,” she said gently.
May would not comment or ask a question recalling so much pain, so long ignored.
“Would you like a hot drink? Or biscuits? Could you manage a thermos?”
Before Leda could accept or refuse the night-time comforts offered, April came back, her interruption simplified by her lack of hearing. “This is the stuff Ulick brings me from Paris.” She held, like a chalice between her hands, a small jar. “Just a touch and you must pat it upwards, it cleans and tightens and builds and nourishes.”
“Oh, darling, and does it do all that in French?” Leda took just a very little and smelt it. “Ravishing. I bet it cost the earth.”
“Don’t worry about that. She can afford it,” May reassured her. “Have a good go. Take off your glasses.”
Leda stiffened in her refusal. “No. I feel naked without them – almost ugly.”
For once the sisters looked at each other in perfect appalled accord. They realised together that Leda could have no idea of what she looked like now – an old, pitifully plain woman, blind and in need of their comfort. They found themselves, in their whole health and in their ability to give, in power over Leda, that legendary figure of glamour who had become a victim of a terror and a captivity they had steadily refused to envisage. She had come back to them after their long forgetfulness and they were set to cherish and make amends. They did not want to be disgusted and repelled by tales of terrors and filth they had so long ignored. She was to be their darling and their pet. Already they were squabbling over who should do the most petting. They tried to outstay each other. “You’re sure you’ve got this?” – “Do you want that?” – “Here’s the bell.” – “There’s the po.” – “Don’t get up till I call you.” – “I’ve hung up your clothes in the cupboard.” It was a mistimed duet of helpfulness.
“Where is the cupboard?” was the only question Leda asked. “Ah – straight across from the foot of the bed. But I shan’t want a thing. I’m very cosy.” She rolled her shoulders in the pillows and pulled her hot-water bottle close. “Oh, such bliss. Goodnight, darlings, my darlings, à demain.”
Still arguing about her breakfast tray, they left the room together, each unwilling to allow the other a separate last goodnight.
When she could no longer hear May shouting at April and the sounds of their footsteps on the stairs had thinned into silence, Leda sat up in bed. Before they left her the sisters had carefully switched off the electric blanket and unplugged the fire. Cold was filtering back into the room as it had done before electricity came to the mountains and to Durraghglass. Now Leda pulled April’s bed-shawl round her shoulders and swung her legs out of bed. She sat for a minute, easy and waiting for what she intended to do. She could touch her slippers left carefully in readiness, but she preferred to walk without them, feeling the carpet with her naked feet, the counterparts of her hands. Her feet were flawless, long boned and soft soled; walking, she used them like eyes. She smelled at the air, a gentle dog on a scent. The air of that room, venerated, undisturbed, held the sweet stuffy ghosts of Aunt Violet’s violet scent and violet soap and facepowder on a swansdown puff. She could feel the room the same as on that September morning when Aunt Violet had spoken so gently, had said goodbye with tears, had given her that letter for her mother, then taken it back, saying: no, perhaps better post it. Leda remembered everything. She started on a round of the room. Touching the top of a bookcase that stood along the wall by the bed, she knew her hand would find Aunt Violet’s large prayer book with its elastic band. Did it comfort her much? she wondered. Beyond the bookcase, the dressing-table stood cater-corner to the window. She guessed its position would be unaltered and she was right. Her fingers felt over the moulded flowers on the backs of silver clothes brushes and oval hand mirror, and found the hairbrush. She picked it up and held it close to her face; years of disuse had not quite purged the human smell of Aunt Violet’s hair; not the nicest smell but the most evocative. Near the dressing-table she took a handful of window curtain which gave her a bearing across to the long wall opposite the bed. She stopped at the angular tidy shoe-stand, memory catching exactly at the past as she picked up and handled the little shoes, some old enough for a ribbon rosette on their pointed toes, others with the crossed straps of the twenties. She explored meticulously each token of the past: the suèdes and kidskins, satin pumps with diamanté buckles for evening, flat-heeled brown suede for race-meetings, still carefully tree-ed. The very pointed-toed hunting boots, belonging to the early days of marriage, stood there too, stiff and dry as glass on their wooden trees.
Lastly, Leda reached the va
st wardrobe, constructed with hanging spaces and drawers and shelves for every possible article of dress. When she opened the doors a mixed gush from camphor, lavender and violet sachets, for years suppressed, vomited out into the slightly warmer air of the newly inhabited room. Leda stood and drank it in, as pleasurably as a smoker inhales, before her careful hands fumbled and felt among the orderly hung rows, placed as tidily as a choir on Sundays, of Aunt Violet’s clothes. She delayed when she touched the true silks of the twenties and thirties, ran a finger down the accordion pleats of a skirt, laid a tickled cheek to ostrich feathers, avoided tweeds and held fine wool in her hands with pleasure. She had a true sense of touch on stuffs, and a proper value for their textures and prices.
Her hands quiet, their explorations over, she stood for a stilled moment in reverent recollection before, gathering in her breath so that her body seemed to extend and exude power, she spat with virulent intention into the padded breasts of a beaded evening dress – violet she was sure, though she could not see its colour. She shut the cupboard doors carefully before, getting onto all fours like a big cat, she found the electric heater and plugged it in, neatly and competently. Back in bed she touched the ON switch of her blanket, and when she had clasped her hot-water bottle (forbidden in conjunction with electricity) closely to her, she was as happy in her mischief as any child could be.
It was only when she heard a man’s distinct unhurrying steps coming up the first flight of the stairs, crossing the landing below the long window and continuing up and on and out of hearing, or contact with any interest beyond his own nightly concerns and comforts, unshared in an endless regularity of habit, that she shut her blind eyes behind her glasses, spread, then curled each hand separately as though they held her purpose in their grasps (but one must not know what the other knew), stretched her body into the lengths and depths of Aunt Violet’s bed and then allowed the constant miracle (Leda was a wonderfully good sleeper) to set her free from all purposes on long healthy breaths, drawn in perfect peace.
