by Molly Keane
“The boy rides nicely. Not much prospect for him here.” Alys sounded thoughtful.
“You ought to hear May on his idle ways. Jasper wouldn’t mind getting rid of him, but he can’t take the step. Baby is like a lioness with her cub on the subject of Christy Lucey.”
“Maternal, or? You know, your great grandfather did marry the dairy-maid? No one knew the family for a generation.”
“And my mother married an Austrian Jew.” Leda’s laugh rang out.
“Just when your Aunt Violet was busy living down the dairy-maid. A bit unfortunate, I do see.”
“Aunt Violet was a cruel woman. Can one wonder about Uncle Valentine? Well, I ask you, can one?”
“I suppose he must have? He was so good-looking, too – Jasper’s like him in a depressing sort of way, don’t you think?”
“Yes, I do,” Leda agreed as if she could see. “It’s his voice,” she laughed again. “We’re all maimed – what a family! Even lovely April deaf as an adder and boring for Ireland, but she’s happy with her clothes and her diets and her little booze-ups and a whiff of the grass.”
“Does she? Does she really? She can’t.”
“My dear, can’t she …?” Leda went on with her entertaining hints and disclosures. There was never a dull moment on that drive through the gentle countryside, invisible to both. Leda could not see it and Alys saw nothing to move or interest her in the mild hills, folded cheek to cheek, unless a fox covert showed its dark and gold on a slope and she could re-live in memory some horrendous obstacle which some long-mourned hunter had leaped at her bidding.
When Leda came back to her cousins, late on that light, Lenten evening, there was a chill in the air, a politeness in the indifferent enquiries as to her outing with Alys. Only April was changelessly benign, unaware of defection. Her afternoon had been spent in the careful separation of spring from winter clothes. To touch, to fold and unfold, to consider and reconsider the properties, colours and textures and to plan their changeable marriages, excited April as the first fine morning excites a child.
“Was this the cake my six eggs went into?” June asked.
“Yes,” Jasper said. Even before June said “What happened to it?” Leda knew that her desertion had been calamitous.
“Nothing like accidents in cooking, always best. May I have a slice?” Leda said.
“If you must. But I don’t advise it.” There was no sour note in Jasper’s charming voice, nor any suggestion of their previous intimacies.
“Shall I risk it, May?” Leda asked.
“May’s not here,” June said. “May’s above in her bedroom. She took a toss over her own dog and smashed up a bit of china she was mending, and so now she’s at it again.”
“A candlestick?”
“How would I know what she would be at?” June said, uninterested and unhelpful. And unwon, Leda knew. She knew too that there is nothing like a disturbance in intimacy for its recreation on a closer level. The fear of loss has its own potency. She felt exhilarated in the thought of a change of tactics in the siege of Jasper. The afternoon with Alys had been a passing flight, a pastime only. But it had suggested two new lines of interest – Jasper’s monk and Baby’s groom – on both ideas she built mischievously. Neither to be exploited, only kept in mind: in her own mind and in Alys’s. And Alys needed little prompting. Leda had been aware of the acquisitive note in her half-expressed admiration of Christy Lucey’s horsemanship – an unspoken assumption that such usefulness was wasted unless it served her.
“I think I’ll put my feet up and have a tiny zizz. Wouldn’t a hot-water bottle be bliss?”
“Get it you, April. I have to shut up my hens.” She heard June leave the room, careless that April would not have heard a word. When, a minute later, April said: “All right, Jasper,” she knew that Jasper had written down the message. She heard him go, without speaking, and in his silence felt a quickening of her wish to possess the ghost and the live successor to the ghost. In a tremor of certainty she knew that she must hear that voice again: must always hear it.
It was April who woke her up at seven, laid her clothes and shoes ready and went away, saying, “Drinkies soon.”
Leda liked to dress herself. It was satisfying to know that only she could put on clothes to the best advantage of the body she had so often known irresistible. The hump on the back of the neck, the tubular sag of breasts and swelling ankles that she could not see were immaterial to her. Ignoring them, her walk would always be a Beauty’s walk; her status in any room she came into, a Beauty’s right. While all that survived of her beauty was the ashen hair, its growth as true as a child’s, its cling as easy and tenacious as little ivy leaves on stone.
“Is the bathwater always hot in your convent?” was the first thing April asked as Leda came in to her bedroom, even delaying the drinks for an answer. Longing for the punctual evening drink, Leda’s nod of the head was emphatic. “Ah,” April twirled the glass with a little something in it. “And are the paying guests allowed dogs?” Leda nodded vehemently, and stretched out a hand.
“Just a moment, darling. A little bit delayed tonight, I had to give myself an alco rub – the water’s never cold on Jasper’s bath night.”
“I’m longing, rather,” Leda said. She looked it too.
“Here’s your celery juice and garlic,” April said cheerfully. “Choke it down, it’s pure magic.” She put a glass into Leda’s hand.
“Oh, drop dead, you silly old cow.” Leda smiled her thanks.
“Now! Shall it be ginny-gin-gins or vodders?” April was at her bar. She felt younger than springtime tonight, perhaps it was the alcohol rub. Pearls of twenties slang fell from her lips. She had not heard any later language. “I suppose we are rather naughty,” she mused, “but it’s rather fun. After all, we’re only young once. Let’s have a double.”
The two old ladies sat and sipped. April fitted a curious cigarette into a long black holder. As she lit it she felt, in a satisfied confused way, that she might be in a song by Noel Coward. She was happy; her happiness sheltering and burgeoning in the orderly disciplines of her diets and exercises and in the heady release of the evening’s lift into pleasure. “You are happy? I want you to be happy,” she said to her dog. But now she meant Leda. Tiger jumped onto her knees and nestled, but was not allowed a crumb of biscuit. She loved him so much that she cherished his health and figure as ardently and strictly as she did her own. And now, Leda’s. “Do admit he’s rather heaven. You do like my poppet, don’t you?” she pleaded.
Leda smiled and smiled and held out her empty glass.
“I wanted to ask what you thought about this – it’s a three piece in three parts – awful old Harrods three years ago. It’s all interchangeable, so do you think blue and brown work out together? Even shocking pink, perhaps? I wonder.” She dreamed and held the woollen stuff up to her chin.
“I don’t remember,” Leda said loudly, hoping that the touch of blind tragedy might end the conversation and leave time before dinner for another drink. Her empty glass overlooked, and not from economy or malice, Leda wondered how, when she had won Jasper, she might best contrive to eliminate his sisters. She thought her nuns might suit April very well – they would be patient as angels with her deafness, sympathetic with diets and disciplines and understanding and worldly over the nips of vodka.
“I’m not too sure about the prune and pale blue. Rather too pretty, do you think? A bit ‘vin ordinaire’ …?” April droned on.
May and June were draining the last drop in their sherry glasses when Leda and April joined them. Jasper was not there with any treat in a wine bottle. As she sat and waited for dinner, listening to the girls arguing about their dogs, Leda felt very sober.
“If Tiny is not on heat,” May was saying, “could it be some kind of tumour?”
“Is that the kind of thing interests your dog?” June parried the idea. “And get out, you!” The kick she aimed at Gripper was near enough to its vulnerable mark to earn a screa
m from May. Unhearing, April put Tiger down to share in the sport.
“And keep him to himself, too, he’s forever flashing Tiny and that only upsets her. You’re not able for that kind of thing, are you, Tiny?” June picked Tiger off Tiny’s patient head. “Your two dogs are the two most over-sexed little bastards going. There’s nothing amiss with Tiny.”
“Nothing except this awful smell,” May repossessed herself of Gripper.
“And who made it? He who smelt it, dealt it,” June came up triumphantly with the schoolboy saw.
“Oh, shut up, girls. I could hear you arguing in the dining-room. To the sword with the lot of you.” Jasper appeared at the door and without a bottle in his hand. “Shall we go in? It’s a soufflé.”
Leda touched his elbow and sighed an accord as she passed him in the doorway. She walked as certainly as a girl with wind in her hair. No hesitation, no fumbling as she timed the moment when he would push in her chair. In the bending turn of her head she might have been giving him the next waltz. She misjudged the importance of the moment for him because she could not see that his quickened interest was for his soufflé’s proper maintenance. He dreaded a time-fall from absolute perfection.
There were silences through dinner. Silences unbroken by May who ate on stolidly and without comment. She even accepted a tribute from Leda on her purple sprouting broccoli without launching into a history of its seed time and harvest. Leda recognised sulks and reserved a restoration of intimacy for a further hour. Leda felt no uncertainty. They were hers – three bridges back to her innocence. Some she might diminish (destroy was a word she forgot), when her power at Durraghglass reached its supremacy, when she would live and make love with the voice that belonged to someone else. For the present she held three of them. She was under their skins. The fourth she would hurt when the moment was right, and the hurting would be satisfactory – a more practical vengeance towards the past than spitting into Aunt Violet’s clothes, although she had enjoyed that.
May could see no jealous absurdity, only well-justified grief in her reaction to Leda’s desertion, a desertion with Alys, her own acclaimed friend. That morning she had come down to the hall, candlestick in hand, ready for wondering praise and gratitude. And there was no one in the hall. She could hear the car turning, just turning on the gravel sweep; Alys was waiting for her. She hurried across the hall. Gripper, excited by her speed, ran in front, yapping idiotically: ran back and crossed her. In her natural effort to avoid falling on her darling, she fell on the candlestick.
It was June who picked her up and with June she heard the car’s slow, quiet exit. “They’ve gone without you,” June said with true, horrible sympathy.
“Oh, yes. My idea. Makes a change for Leda,” May managed gallantly.
“Did I hear a crash?” Jasper came delicately onto the scene. “You look rather dazed, May,” he said with remote distaste.
“Sure, they left without her,” June’s appalling sympathy repeated itself.
“Swirled off on a last waltz,” Jasper gave his rat’s grin. He took his gardening gloves and secateurs off an oak chest, put on his graceful hat, and went on his way.
May knew he knew, and her comfort was that she had taken Leda away from him before she herself was deserted.
“If you’re all right,” June said, “I’ll go back to the yard. Christy should be in now.”
Left alone with her shattered candlestick, the forceful habit of May’s life asserted itself. Habit and courage can go together. On her knees she picked up every morsel and chip of china. Like a child about to do a puzzle she considered how best to fit them together again. Lacking Jasper’s hindsight, she made no feasible connection between this morning’s desertion and that cruel day when her knickers had betrayed her and she had stolen and buried a little fox.
“I’ve been so bored all day. And now I think I’ve hurt you somehow. You do know what happened this morning? All my rotten eyes. I thought Alys was just turning the car and waiting. I thought you were coming with us. …” Leda was sitting on her bed, Aunt Violet’s bed, later that evening.
“May,” she had said, “could you help? This zip always beats me.” And May had come unwillingly and pulled down the zip in silence. Leda had caught her good hand and held it. “You understand, you do understand? I can’t bear you to think I was rude.”
“Oh, nonsense. Rot. I was enchantée for you to have a little break from us all. You must be bored stiff.”
“You never make me feel a bore or a nuisance, and I’m both, twice over. Darling, would you, could you help with this suspender clip?” Leda’s thighs, once elastically hard and strong, were now a welter of flesh in which May’s thumb and finger sought diligently for the suspender.
“Oh, bless you!” Leda sighed her thanks and relief. She held May’s finger for a moment. “I wish I could see you,” she said sadly. May took her hand away, glad of Leda’s blindness. “And it makes me so cross that I can’t see all the lovely things you do. You’re so creative.”
“Only in my own small way, perhaps.” The word “creative” had unbound May a little.
“Alys was telling me about your pictures and your porcelain restoration. And what about that flower club?”
So they had talked about her. May warmed a degree further, she felt re-assured. “Alys is too silly about me, far too kind,” deprecatingly she invited more.
“Yes. You mustn’t let people make too much use of you.”
Of course Leda meant the Flower Guild. “We both love a good game of scrabble,” May went on. “It’s a hoot really, neither of us can spell. She loves winning, bless her.”
“She told me you practise in private – left hand against right,” Leda laughed. “You’re so versatile.”
May blushed unseen. “One must take a game seriously, or it’s no fun.”
A small grey silence fell between them. Leda broke it. “May, perhaps you ought to know this – you did the flowers for Alys’s last dinner party – yes?”
“Yes.”
“Well, her parlour maid – a jewel – re-did the lot.”
“Alys told you that?”
Leda evaded the question which she could feel was loaded with belief – Alys had not told her that exactly – but their talk of May and her “flower people” could stand embellishment. “Oh, she was so amused with the flower ladies you brought, too. Ghastly afternoon with a dinner-party pending.”
May remembered the cold morning-room, the cross parlour maid, and the offer of old flowers in their stagnant water. She thought with satisfaction of the agate marble.
“You’re such a very trusting person,” Leda felt for a hand to stroke, then stroked her own. “That’s why I feel you should know that Alys really is not quite the most loyal friend in the world.”
“Alys and I have always been friends,” May’s voice shook in her obstinate loyalty. “Alys is pure gold.”
“Of course, and she’s so fond of you. It’s all a bit the Prefect and Betty in the Lower IV.”
May had a mortifying suspicion as to which of them was in the Lower IV.
“She’s certainly not like your ghastly flower ladies,” Leda went on softly. “She says they are all simply avid to see you drop a twig out of that brave little hand.”
May felt cold, as though she had stepped without warning into an ice age of absolute nullity where all triumph froze. “Brave little hand.” She laid it across her mouth and bit into it with hatred not for her hand, but for those who pitied it. Leda could not see her hand and she must not pity it. May would have no pity. She knew that pity destroyed all that she had put into subduing her handicap. All that she had attained, all her energetic skills, fulfilled in their public displays, were distanced and distorted now through Leda’s hints of betrayals by kindness.
There were other achievements that kindness could not touch – those untamed adventures and triumphs, matchless and apart, irresistible as love, taking the places of wild moments she had never known. The thought of them ov
ercame her and, nearer to love than she had ever been, she was overcome by a wave of lust to tell and to prove herself to Leda, distanced from any slight or pity. Here was an act for which there was no pity. Leda must know. And in the telling May would blot out, even out of her own mind, the suspected shrinkings from her deformity – eyes turned on and away – together with the waves of sympathy and help rejected by her since her hand hemmed, with stitches smaller than April’s, the first cambric handkerchief for Mummie’s birthday.
In the overwhelming luxury of confession and display to a loved one, anything so meagre as discretion forgotten, May’s adventures lived again. Riveted, even amazed, Leda perceived in each event the never-mentioned hand on its gallant escapades. At one moment she was in the dark expensive spaces of Harrods; hardly escaped and hurrying towards Knightsbridge Station, when the narrative sped on, and an ugly moment in a supermarket froze her in expectation of disaster, but lightning thinking and matchless dexterity outpaced detection. The breathless rampage continued in defiance and defeat of all respectable principle. It was so far beyond the ordinary that Leda, as she re-lived the capture of each rabbit or other object now caged in May’s collection, felt in her own pirate’s heart nothing but admiration for such ruthless and useless adventure. When May’s story ended with the agate marble Leda wondered if she heard sobbing, but decided that it was more of an ecstatic gasp that broke between the words. Elated and curious, she groped the air again for May’s sad hand, before she accepted the other on which to swear secrecy.
When, calm after the reckless chastity of her confession, May had at last gone on her way to bed, Leda sat on, her bare feet on the floor under the black skirts, sure and contented in her ascendency. May was hers, April equally so. It was neat and convenient that they rivalled each other for her favours. She heard May’s brusque and meticulous movements in the bathroom; tap turned fully on and sharply off; even after tonight’s emotional confession habit prevailed. A towel was tartly flapped, then came a double flush for the lavatory. She was sure the bath would be left sparkling as crystal. It awed her to know the wild side of this domestic paragon. Such a good story – who should she tell it to?
