by Molly Keane
By now Leda, beyond all sense even for her own advantage, was trembling and shaking, provoking in May distress that was as fulsome as it was abject.
“Of course you’re on edge – you’re in shreds, actually – all that ghastly health food, your nerves are stripped down – right? Am I right? I understand. We know each other in and out, don’t we? Don’t we, Leda?”
“Too damn well we do,” Leda flung at her. “I ought to know every rag in every tweedy bloody picture you ever made, and the thought of your flower life makes me vomit. Perhaps,” she turned towards June, miscalculating Jasper’s position at the table, “you all ought to know about the dangerous thrills in that flower life.”
May’s terrible blush spread down the neck of her shirt to her sweating breasts. “Don’t listen, don’t listen, it’s just my fun,” she cried out.
“Fun?” Leda paused and purred, prolonging pleasure before revelation. “Funny name for shoplifting,” she spoke mildly as though of a delinquent child, making her indulgence the more insulting for May. “Did none of you know? She’s been stealing her little fancies for years. Harrods nearly caught her. Now she sticks to supermarkets. Well, Jasper, how do you like the idea? Amused?”
“I really don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” Jasper waited; then, speaking with difficult hesitation, he said: “My dear May, in my whole life I’ve never felt in such sympathy with anyone. Cheer up. Don’t get caught. That’s all I ask.”
“And another thing,” Leda was insistent, “wait till arthritis sets in. That terrible little mole hand is going to let her down badly.”
“Shut your dirty mouth,” June said suddenly.
“D’accord, absolutely,” Jasper poured out a cup of coffee and pushed it towards May. “Pay no attention. I’ve always understood lots of respectable people are martyrs to it.”
May, very white now, sat entirely disestablished and betrayed. Every picture she had seen and shown to others, every comfort and satisfaction built on her desperate efforts deserted her. She was back where the efforts had started, in the time when they fed her with a spoon until she was six; when Jasper, so much younger, had his own fork and silver knife.
That he should sympathise now brought that lost time into close perspective. If he could be kind, she must be finished. She stared forwards into nothing.
Jasper glanced at the untouched cup of coffee and avoided looking at May. If he could not help her, he could at least avoid upsetting himself. It quite startled him to think of the three sisters he had so long teased and tolerated in their cruelly uneventful lives, so exposed. Here was Baby June in thrall to Christy Lucey (he had always thought those sandwiches a bit excessive); April, once happy prey to a dead pornographer, and now a secret lush and besotted in absurd vanities; while May – an extreme example of propriety and the sister who annoyed him most – had, it seemed, a career of successful shop-lifting behind her – well behind her, he hoped. And wondered. He looked at his three sisters out of a new distance, a distance from which, for the first time, he saw them as objects of curiosity.
“Well, tell me more,” he said chattily. “What about me? Don’t leave me out, will you?”
“Oh, fire-up, fire-on,” June said. “I’m late already getting on my tractor.”
Leda took a breath: “Don’t you want to hear about that brother you maimed, Baby? Between you and Aunt Violet you’ve left him a one-eyed, sexless virgin.”
“Leda, dear, don’t mince your words” – whatever Leda was going to say about him, he felt it would be fairer to the girls to leave it undenied – “Aren’t you trying to say homosexual?”
“Yes, I am. And I hear the Lord Abbot is on to that hedgerow romance. He’s heard about satyrs in woodland groves. Have you?”
“Yes. In old school ties, too,” Jasper answered agreeably. “But aren’t we, all five of us, a bit old for these gambols?”
Leda turned her head away as though in refusal to see or imagine change. “We’re not old,” she said in a different voice, forbidding the subject.
It was June’s laugh that rang out, pitiless. “Take a look – oh, sorry, you can’t. There’s hair on our chins and humps on our backs, our ankles are swollen up with the blood pressure and our knuckles are knotted backwards with rheumatism.”
“Forgetting the name for it … losing our spectacles … impotent without them,” Jasper’s voice made a melody of the list.
“Your voice is the same,” Leda drew a breath and her eyelids dropped behind her spectacles.
“Really, dear, don’t exaggerate – I was in the school choir when you saw me last.”
“It’s not your voice I’m hearing, Jasper. It’s your father’s voice.”
“Can’t we leave him out of this?” A flicker, lighting long silences, flared in Jasper’s mind.
“You do know he was my lover? I suppose he seduced me.”
May raised her head, bent low over her hand, crumbling toast. “He couldn’t possibly have done anything so common,” she stated. “After all – he was in Pop at Eton.”
“And he rode the winner of the Grand Military,” June put in.
“For God’s sake, girls,” Jasper protested hopelessly, “can’t we stop this total recall? Breakfast time, after all.”
“You aren’t interested, are you? You don’t want to know why Aunt Violet turned me out of the house – all care and kindness, and a friend to meet me in London – extra money for the journey, you don’t want to know why? You cousins should see my daughter. She’s very like her father.”
The silence round the table was appallingly polite. Only April, in her own silence, was outside it. Toast lay on plates, coffee and orange juice ignored beside them. Only the innocent scent of primroses reassured the air from which bacon and coffee had failed, as though in shock.
“Didn’t you know?” Leda said. “I came back to find you. I was so happy, once I was so happy.” She burst into tears, covering her spectacles with her hands.
Not a Swift moved to comfort her. April didn’t hear the sobbing. Jasper heard a distant, a welcome sound. “Your dogs are fighting,” he said. “Can’t you hear them – nip to it, girls!”
The noise that even quite small dogs can make when at each other’s throats sounded an appropriate, a horrifying release, and an acceptable interruption. In a moment June, May and Jasper were off their chairs and out of the room, dragging April by the hand along with them.
Leda’s crying stopped while her hands felt about the table for toast, for butter, for honey. The relief and satisfaction she had experienced in her breakfast-time exposé led to a sort of post-orgasmic peace, as when she had spat in Aunt Violet’s dresses. That had been nice too.
Outside the window the dogs’ voices quietened, allowing those of their owners to renew the skirmish. In the dining-room Leda, honey on her hands, on her coat, felt piteously that May at least should return to help her. She did not actually regret her outbursts, but felt they were forgettable – an outlet after weeks of irritation, sustained with charm and patience; a reprisal for the repulse and disappointment of the night before. Footsteps came and went on the gravel. Voices sounded in the hall, but no one came back to the dining-room. “Heartless beasts,” Leda thought as she ate her toast, “people are all the same, disloyal to the core.” She sat on, soaking in her grievance; thinking of much sharper things she wished she had said. She heard a car drive up to the house. She heard someone trying to make April hear. She knew the voice. She stopped eating toast, and waited: old, pale, powerless.
“Good morning, Maman,” a clear little squeak of a voice, small as that of a mouse following its secret ways behind cupboard doors. The woman who spoke crossed the room, came close to Leda, sat down in May’s chair and looked round her shyly, slow in her observations as one who must be careful in their retention. She was a little creature, elegantly made and inconspicuously dressed; she might have been attractive if her big handsome head had not looked so out of proportion with the skimpy, shrimp-like body; a mou
se’s head has the same heavy quality.
“What are you going to tell me this time?” Leda said. “Have they caught up with him?” She sounded only mildly curious.
“Not just yet.” There was a pause. “But they’re getting warmer.”
“Oh, don’t fuss,” Leda said. “He won’t talk!”
“You don’t think. … under interrogation?” The hesitant voice faltered over the word.
“Oh, please, must you? You just like to frighten me about nothing,” Leda said crossly.
“Why did you leave the convent, Maman? All the nuns know about you is that you’re old and blind and in their care. Why did you come here to the cousins. … after all you’ve told me?”
“I thought I might find something again,” Leda said sadly, finally, as though she was deeply hurt. “I didn’t.”
“Then you’ll come back with me?”
“I suppose so.”
“The old lady I met in the hall said she would see about the packing. She asked about the convent.”
“Stone deaf. Doesn’t get a word.”
“I wrote it all down.”
“I much prefer to do my own packing.” Leda stood up and walked across the room with almost boastful certainty, then, turning back at the door: “I wonder if they’ll want to say goodbye to me?” She was asking herself a light, informal question.
“Yes, I wonder if they will,” her daughter answered in a voice mistrustful of the simplest gesture or event.
She was standing in front of the Sargent-like portrait of his father when Jasper came back for another cup of coffee. He had seen a woman get out of a car and thought, as usual, that she was one of May’s avoidable ladies. Unfair, that May should have left her to bother him in the dining-room; there had been quite enough bother for one morning.
The little person turned away from the picture as if she had been caught doing something private and impolite.
“Please excuse me,” she said apologetically. “Isn’t that Valentine Swift?” She added, as explanation: “I’m Leda’s daughter.”
Jasper flinched. What hideous embarrassment was he to be involved in next?
“That’s one of Maman’s fairy stories,” she said, quietly, catching his thought. “I was born two years afterwards. If she was seduced. …” coming from her the word sounded indecent – “but I doubt that very much.” She stood in profile to the picture and ventured a tiny laugh: “I’m a Jewish girl,” she said.
A modifying wave of relief comforted Jasper nearly into friendliness.
“We’re second cousins,” he said, “or do they call it ‘once removed’?”
“Whichever it is,” she said, “from what I know of Maman I’m not very keen on my Swift blood.”
She was no clinger to family relationships, Jasper realised with approval.
“Well. …” to give himself something to do, he began to clear the breakfast table, May’s proper work. “Your mother has been a charming guest. A few difficult moments. … everything passes, yes. Of course. Can we put you up too?” He asked despairingly.
“No. Thank you very much. I have a business appointment. I flew in yesterday from Brazil.”
Looking at her in her cosy knitted suit, beige and belted, Jasper thought it unlikely; but he swallowed the absurdity with gratitude.
“Another time?” the hospitality in his voice warmed a little.
“Thank you. But I only came here to take Maman back to the convent. The sisters were so worried when she flew the nest.”
“I wish you’d come yesterday,” Jasper said, “we’ld have been spared all this … fuss.”
“Has she hurt anyone?”
“One of my sisters does seem a bit upset.”
“Yes. That happens. Maman loves to charm and she loves to hurt,” all uncertainty had left her voice.
“A bit rough on Leda, aren’t you? We do realise what a ghastly time she went through in those camps. We thought, you know, we thought. …” he refused to say “gas chamber”. “Of course she can’t speak about it all,” he ended, relief in his voice.
“No. She can’t. She’s only read about camps and gas chambers. She had a very comfortable war. In Paris, mostly. She had friends, very good friends, in the Occupation.”
“Oh, had she? Did she …,” he failed to bring out the word “collaborate”.
“She was useful. Her mother wasn’t Jewish, so you can understand how. …”
“But your father?” No sooner was the question asked than Jasper regretted it.
“Papa?” The mask of understatement slipped. “Oh, he was on a list. He saved them the trouble of coming for him. Il s’est suicidé, avec son Browning.”
Her escape into French seemed more funny than pathetic. The curiously filmic bang-bang effect of her phrase made Jasper turn his head to smile, before the calculated desperation implied in the words provoked his well-submerged memory of a different suicide; a decision to die taken in less dignified circumstances than those encircling Leda’s Jewish husband. While he avoided even a glance towards the indifferent portrait of his handsome father, he had to allow to himself that Leda’s woundings could be mortal.
“Then what about you?” he asked, turning hopefully to a lighter subject. “Weren’t you rather young for all that?”
“Thirteen, fourteen. I was in Switzerland, in a convent. The Abbess was a wonderful person. Her family were Viennese, so, of course, they knew our restaurant.” (Jasper felt the proud quality of the place in the way she spoke.) “Papa put me in her charge before things got too difficult.” Her small voice brisked up again, “Maman is in the sister house here. It’s a quiet safe place for her.”
Safe from what? Jasper wanted to ask, but he left the question vacant.
“She’s an old woman,” he said. “She’s a blind old woman. No one could. … after all this time. …”
“It took us quite a time to catch up with her friend. Maman got uneasy. She can smell things, so she turned him in – to me, actually.”
“You hunted them out?” Coming from Jasper a question so definite sounded almost melodramatic.
“I’m an Israeli.” In the way she said it he felt there was a two-edged sword flaming and turning every way in the air of the big faded room smelling of primroses.
“Maman will be quite all right,” her voice sobered back into neat practicality, “if she stays inside her convent. Blind or not, I can’t be sure of everybody in my lot. They’ve taken a few wanted ones out of Southern Ireland before now.”
There was a pause while Jasper swept crumbs off the table with a small curved brush into a small mahogany tray, belonging to butler days.
“So, you see how it is.” The little woman took a few steps towards the door; then paused to say apologetically: “I don’t want to hurry anyone, but we ought to start soon. It’s a long drive.” She pushed up her cuff to look at an ugly watch, “and I must make my flight tonight.”
In the last words Jasper heard hesitancy change to a tone of unalterable determination. She sounded a person from a different world, as she had when she said: “I’m an Israeli.”
“I’ll make you some sandwiches for a picnic.” A tin of anchovies, scrambled eggs, mayonnaise, no butter. After the wild talk and the terror that moved, unspoken, behind it, the idea of sandwiches was a solace and an escape.
“Oh, you are kind,” her polite acceptance clipped down a curtain on anything that had been said, or understood, in their talk.
In the hall, on his way to the kitchen, Jasper passed April. She was putting down the telephone. That she should use it at all was another of the morning’s surprises. When she turned from it he saw how beautiful she was looking, almost radiant.
“Leda is leaving us,” he wrote on the telephone notebook. He felt rather pleased that no arrow from the past had struck into her contented beauty.
“Quite right too,” she answered, and sped upstairs, light on her feet as she had always been. When, he wondered, would she be her age? Never, he sup
posed. She wouldn’t hear it coming; or Time’s Chariot, or any of that stuff either. Alone in the kitchen at last, he set himself to the construction of the perfect sandwich of his imagination. Leda didn’t deserve it, of course, but who did? Besides all that, everything is best forgotten. When he put down the flat anchovy tin of oil for Mister Minkles he felt he was back with realities again: “For you, old man,” he said.
In the hall, a departure was imminent: suitcases, dogs suspicious of desertion, and now the beautifully packed sandwiches. Jasper felt as though someone was going back to school, the same cruelty was in the air, unhappiness painfully swallowed, even tears. People waited about to say goodbye. May, silent even with her dog, sat on a wooden hall chair, her knees together, her head down, holding Gripper quietly in her arms. Baby June, back in her wellingtons, was talking to the strange woman about butterflies, and looking at her watch covertly and often. She was longing for May to take the weight of politeness off her shoulders. A peacock butterfly, restored to life out of due time raised and dropped its wings in a pool of dusty sunshine.
It was a relief when Leda came down the stairs, sure-footed, her beautiful coat moving with her. Nobody knew, Jasper was glad to think, whose death had bought it. He felt ashamed of the dramatic thought and denied it to himself immediately.
“I do hate leaving you all,” Leda stopped punctually at the bottom step of the staircase. “It’s been a lovely, lovely time. I promise to be back. I do promise.”
“Yes, Leda, come back.” – “Come back when the weather is warmer.” – “Come in the summer.” – “Next summer.” In turn they came and kissed her, their good manners inviolate.
“But April,” she said, after the third cold cheek and touch, “where’s April?” Nobody knew and it was no use calling. “We must go,” the daughter said, “it’s my flight. I must make my connection. Come along, Maman, please.”
“Say goodbye and kiss her for me,” Leda laughed, her first laugh of the morning. “No more tisanes, no more bran breakfasts.”
She was put into the car, suitcases in the boot, sandwiches in a cool place, when April – beautifully dressed for a journey, the right people never travel in their best clothes – joined the group round the car. Tiger, wearing the jersey that matched up with her tweed ensemble, was on his lead. In one hand she held a feather-weight pigskin case, in the other a neat rotund parcel.
