Surviving

by Henry Green

  As a botanist knows the best place for his flowers and he will set out and go straight to where he has found that sort before, there he will find them again, under that bank or by those stones on the hill, so they knew so much more about shops. If a man was fond of flowers as a boy and grew up in that fondness, so, as the years went by he would learn more and more where he would be likely to find some particular flower, on a slope looking east or out looking west, and also what combination of shade or wet was most favourable to its growth. As he grew older so he would know more and more, and it wouldn’t be just book learning. So, because they had been so much longer at it, older people knew better where to look for things. And as an older man might be more careful where he looked, more knowledgeable about his flowers and everything to do with these, so even in their sponges, she felt, older women were more expert, they showed a greater choice.

  She laughed. They had more need of them than me, she said of older people and their dresses, but then they have no real need for better sponges. And then she saw everyone in the world, as the years went round and they grew older, becoming more and more careful in their choice, always refining, that is the nice ones.

  There was mother for instance. Being an only child she’d been the chief person mother had lavished on. And as she walked down Oxford Street and saw all these provincial women in their mauves and browns she felt in a blaze her own position, where she was.

  She sees where she is.

  For the way she had been brought up was quiet, quiet. Where they lived in Kent no noise came to them but it was softened by distances and by the trees and the wind: when any noise came in by their tall windows it no more than murmured round her room. Where their house was in London a drumming noise was all they faintly heard: in Oxford Street the traffic clamoured but where they lived not far away nothing was left of it, only a buzz of what went on there.

  In Kent their house was Queen Anne, in London Adams. Her mother came up to London in February and left it in July to go down to Kent again. Weekdays her father was a city man, weekends a squire. All through the year he stayed Monday to Friday in his Adams house, Friday to Monday in his Queen Anne.

  In the gardens at their house in Kent were hot-houses, and, when her mother brought her up in February, flowers were sent to London for them. It was only when her mother was in town that Mr Igtham had one vase of flowers in his room. Their name was Igtham. But Mrs Igtham was most fond of flowers and her room was crammed with them, in banks up against the green-blue walls. Constance, her name is Constance, did not have so many. In her room they were put in old-fashioned silver vases, and they were put separately about, were no great masses of them.

  Always, wherever she went, Mrs Igtham had blocks of flowers tightly packed against the walls, she was devoted to them. All round the year, whether she was in Kent or in London, her room was full of flowers so when you came in you were in a smother of them. She would be sitting plumb in the middle, not quite unlike a beetle. But Constance was not like that. If Mrs Igtham, with all her rings and jewels – not that she ever looked to have too many, if Mrs Igtham made you think she might have been a beetle, all sparkle in Garden of Eden, then Constance, to see her in her own room, looked like really a silver lance sunk in the blue sea, in her blue-coloured room.

  Mrs Igtham was a small dark blackish woman. She wore as jewellery mostly red stones and put more jewels about her than is usually done now, but, in her case, without its ever seeming odd. Having such a deal of stones glittering suddenly here and there about her, and being so dark, so with her it was like that glittering armoured sheath above a beetle’s wings: she might, when you saw her in the middle of her flowers, suddenly burst out flying, that sheath might suddenly burst open on her sharp and iridescent skin – she constantly wore black, she might at moments ride a broomstick.

  Not so Mr Igtham. Their name was correctly pronounced only by those who said Eyetam, not Iggetam or Iththam. He was fat and cared very much for shooting. Also he was a good business man and served on boards of many companies. Everyone knew him and his wife, and these two did not go out of their way to know anyone. Constance was most of their link with other people, she went everywhere and was everyone’s bridesmaid. Constance was utterly charming. This book is about Constance. When you have read it you too will say how charming Constance is.

  As it was like saying Bellevoir or Burkeley to lisp Iththam so you will appreciate that for centuries Igthams had lived in a delightful ease. In the eighteenth century they had been a great family in the church, three of them had been bishops at that time. Before then England, in the larger histories, in a historian’s deep research, had cause to thank the Igthams. They had been a great landed family. Nor were they in that position now when a man might point at someone in the public baths and say: That boy’s family once ruled this island when England was most prosperous of all, five hundred years ago. For the Igthams had stayed prosperous. They had gone into commerce. They were now rich, but not too rich. They had a butler and a footman, a good cook – yet she was not too good a cook – and these two lovely houses.

  Her father, Mr Igtham’s room looked to be what he was, comfortable and prosperous, also a country gentleman. The walls were done in a brown paper and on them hung pictures of horses which might be by Aiken or Sartorius. There was a big desk on which were many papers and that one yellow china vase of flowers. It had flowers in it only when Mrs Igtham was in London. That vase was very ugly and faded, chipped and old, but he held it in a great affection because he could remember where it stood when he was small and his nurse was washing him, and tickling him. Was no telephone in the room, that was outside, in room of its own. These two things were Mr Igtham. His work he kept so to speak at an arm’s length away from him and he worshipped his childhood and his parents in that vase. If a maid, in dusting, knocked it down and chipped another fragment off it, then he was always very angry. His wife used to say that she had never arrived at making him throw the thing away, and she used to threaten him she would break the horror but as things were she was proud of him that he still kept it. If now, this moment, he had thrown that vase down on purpose and smashed it then she would have felt that he was not much longer for this world. She would have had to eat all her flowers then to keep a balance in the home.

  When you came in by the front door there, in the hall, were flowers only from February to July of course, vast bowl of them on the hall table where lay two or three bowler hats of Mr Igtham’s. Was a glass tray also, in which were cards. Then, quite often, under the staircase on a huge table, were large cardboard boxes. From these a sweet sticky smell came. They were boxes of flowers sent up from Kent and waiting there for Mrs Igtham to unpack them. She would unpack them, marshall and mass them, make them form fours, execute a great flanking movement round the corner of her room with them, and here they would be, freshly cut, ready for her lily hand. When she had done she would find Constance and give her what was left over and tell her to arrange them for her own rooms.

  Constance had had no education in needlework or looking after babies or counting. She could talk French well. But she had never been to cooking classes or young conservative unions, Mrs Igtham had never sent her and said go there and learn. And Constance would never have gone on her own. She chose her own dresses and arranged her own flowers, but she did not choose the decoration of her room. She had never ordered dinner. Mrs Igtham thought, and who’ll say she was wrong? thought that girls wanted no more than that, that need be all their accomplishment. Constance could read any book she liked and there you were, cultured, arranging her own flowers and dressing herself, why more? said Mrs Igtham.

  Her sitting room, then, was Mrs Igtham’s doing. Constance had no hand in it. In this room were four plain white pillars which went from floor to ceiling. On the blue walls were a number of old paintings, not good, not bad. Was a lot of yellow furniture about. On one side two long great windows lit this glittering room and by one of these, the nearest to the fire, was her writing tabl
e. The fireplace was Adams with two fluted marble pedestals. In front of this was a deep bearskin rug, the head left on. Mouth open it had a dry, red ink-coloured tongue and gums and dull blue eyes but huge fangs, gloriously white and it was a Polar bear. On the fireplace a great many invitation cards were propped up against the back and some letters, was a shining brass clock, old and Dutch, two Delft candlesticks and on the right-hand edge of it what was really Constance, two small bright painted aeroplanes in wood.

  Lord when you came into that room and looked round and cried out, as you couldn’t help doing, Lord what a fine room, then, when you saw those aeroplanes you might sing those are her pets, that’s what is most hers in here. When you came in and saw them it might be like you came into a King’s rooms and saw a local paper there. Or, more like, the other way about. You came into a common sort of room and then you saw two Kings seated by the fire.

  These aeroplanes were old now, they were stained, and they’d never been any better than a child’s toys. But Constance had bought them when she was no longer tiny, she’d bought them when she was nineteen. She had never played with them but she had put them there, she would have no one move them. And as she walked in Oxford Street, while her fancy walked like a blue cat about her room, the bright shining silver vases, her Dutch painted yellow chairs with flowers painted on them, the Dutch candlesticks, blue, such a lovely blue, then, standing on the Polar bear, then again she met her aeroplanes and it was like where every year she’d gone since she was nineteen, the Mediterranean sea.

  As you came down the beach so when you got into the sea it was like you had a halo round you, where the sun had been and now the warm sea lapped you you felt you could roll like dolphins for that round fat feeling. Oh she had gone plunging out, her wet rubber cap had shone like any god, there were no waves nothing but this blue sea, she rolled on it, the sun played like cymbals on her flanks and on one breast and then from a surfeit of all this she’d lain on her back and floated. She’d closed her eyes. But then was a hum like thousands cheering miles away and she looked and up above in that tremendous blue there was an aeroplane, aluminium painted, all along its wings winking blinding light, high, high above, ever so slowly moving quite straight, like a queen.

  So when she came back to England she’d bought the model aeroplanes, aluminium painted, because she’d been alone the time she saw that one from the sea, and because each time she was alone that was how she wanted it, how she’d always like to be.

  She walks in Oxford Street.

  Nobody would ever know, she sang as she looked about her in Oxford Street, no one, not one of these, not even mother, nobody would know about those aeroplanes. And when mother had had the walls done that gorgeous blue then suddenly she’d seen she could bring her Queens down from where she’d put them, in a drawer in her bedroom. But when she’d brought them down and put them on the mantelpiece, (she’d put them on the same side one with the other because they looked nicer like that – one just poking in front of the other), when she’d stepped back to look, then she saw they weren’t Queens any more, but where they were now they were Kings.

  Oxford Street blazed with the sun. There had been long drought and grass in the Park was khaki coloured, which made leaves on the plane trees look blue. The Marble Arch was white, white. From wooden blocks which paved the roadway oozed tar in which these blocks had been steeped, so, as a drunkard breathes out the smell of what he has been drinking, so the smell of creosote lay over where she walked. But as a drunkard, when he walks about, may be withdrawn into himself, so she, filled with the heady wine of Kings, stepped as though she had divinity about her, as though heat, tar and the crowds were nowhere near her, in her companionship with mighty things.

  As she slowly walked the people divided. Everyone made way for Miss Igtham. She went between mothers and their children, between sisters, between friends. Any men there were about took a look at her because she was beautiful, particularly now. She wasn’t very tall but she had a most lovely body. She walked exactly like herons fly. She was lightly dressed and as she walked it was the balance, the assurance of movements which made you watch her. For was nothing much about her face, and she was far lighter coloured than her mother. Her skin was creamier, it was a good face to draw being fat and round but was nothing remarkable about it except her eyelids were turned up at the outside corners. So all the people were not merely looking at her features, it was the majesty she had just assumed whilst walking, it was her tread, her magnificence which marked her.

  She walked absorbed. And if you had passed your hand over her skin it would have dragged at your fingers. The sun, in crashing down, had opened her pores, each one had opened like it might be flowers to the sun. So for a time she walked, as when in the warm sea the water is exactly at that heat where you forget you have a body. Also she had these dreams I have described.

  But she came back. The sun became too hot for her before she had gone far and, as a good diver will dive into the flat sea to come up again and break the surface with less than one quiver over the water, so she returned. Immediately she thought about her dress. And at once she turned back, immediately thinking she must go to the Park and sit there, under a plane tree.

  This morning she had no ploy, no shopping, nothing to pass the time. Suddenly she was depressed. She crossed over to other side of the street, into the shade, and begged that her shoes might not be ruined by the tar.

  Everyone she passed she hated now, and she felt her dress was not sitting right. She longed for nothing more than to get quickly to the Park, she’d have given anything for someone to offer a lift. It was not far enough for a penny bus ride, it wouldn’t take a minute to walk, but still why couldn’t that idiot Eddy be close by with his Lea Francis. Oh, she cried out to herself, it made you frantic, this useless walking.

  II

  She sees what she used to be.

  When she sat down not far from the Marble Arch, under a plane tree she arranged her dress. She pulled at it at her hip and spread it out to her knees, then at last she felt comfortable again. The damp heat of the day grew over her and then once more she was dreaming. And as in the warm sea the water is sometimes exactly at that heat where you forget you have a body so she might have been floating in the Mediterranean sea, lain on her back.

  She swooned. People were riding about on those pneumatic horses made of rubber, the pink rubber whales, and unicorns, on the water. Their cries as they played had faintly reached her, all softened by the expanse. And she thought of when she was small, when as children they had been playing in the hay-meadows.

  In those days, when she was nine years old, another girl of her age, called Celia, was educated with Miss Igtham. This girl lived with them in Kent, her parents were in India, and shared the French governess hired for Constance.

  In those days, every afternoon at three, they had gone out walking. This day their governess took them down to the hay-meadows.

  Mademoiselle wore white stockings and white kid shoes with high, high heels. On top she had a vast straw hat. She held a big black bag close to her. Except for these she was very small, not so very much taller than they, and she walked in tiny steps. One on each side of her, each of them holding one of her arms in their two hands – she had white cotton gloves to her elbows, they shouted across her to each other, never in French always in English, and she was always away in her thoughts. She did not hear what they said because she would fix all her attention onto keeping clean her shoes, and on her balance, which was precarious on those heels like stilts.

  When they left the road it was harder than ever for her to get along. The children would hop and skip while they held on to her arms and she felt the grass was crawling with what she loathed more than any living thing, ants. But they had persuaded her to let them watch the hay being made because she had seen an opportunity in it to sit under a hedge at her ease. Even sitting on an ant-heap was better than the walk along these enervating roads which went meandering like streams, monuments to waste
. And while she sat they could play and as they ran while they played so they would get so much the more exercise than if she had walked with them. And then again her heart at that time was heavy for Dreyfus. She longed to be back in France while this case was going on, to be at the centre of things.

  When they reached the meadow men there were carting the hay, sun was so fierce that there was a danger the hay would be burnt. The children were sad that they were taking it away so soon. But they planned a game where it still lay as it had been cut and afterwards turned, in great concentric rings, in golden dykes with the blue grass like flowing in between.

  Mademoiselle went to the near corner of this meadow into the shade of an ash tree. Graciously this tree reached out olive-blue branches and poured shade on the ground. Here were two horses harnessed to an empty farm waggon. The sun, striking down between the leaves in tubes, hit their coats in little egg-shaped patches. Flies bothered them. Every now and again one or the other would half kick out and so rattle the chains, and they kept sawing their heads and so jingled the harness.

  Mademoiselle took from her bag a copy of The Times and opening this out she sat down on it as far as she might away from the horses without leaving the shade. She did not rest her back but sat erect, hands folded on her lap, and then, once she was settled, she disappeared completely. For the horses had deep-coloured coats which bayed like tigers from the deep shade out at the sunlight, and she was nothing beside the heavy waggon painted a low, crude blue.

  Constance and Celia went to where the men were working in a knot about the other waggon, loading it. Two men stood on the hay in the waggon while the others pushed hay along with their forks till they had a sufficiency before them. Then they dug the forks in and with the one movement they heaved their fork-load to the two who waited to receive it on the waggon, and these packed that hay in. As the waggon was filled and became stacked up with hay so these two rose higher and higher on it: Constance and Celia watched their red faces and red arms, and listened, as one of them was singing. But they soon wandered off, tired of watching.