Crusoe's Daughter

by Jane Gardam

  Long, long afternoons, Aunt Frances sitting near me eating Sally Lunns, as I turned and turned about on a table and got pricked with hemming-pins. One of the sewing ladies had had complete circles of rosy paint on her cheeks and each wore a wig. Once one lady stroked me all over and purred at me like a cat when Aunt Frances was out of the room and I cried and kicked out and said the words from Wales again, and the lady went red outside the circles of paint, and that had to be the last visit.

  Then, the bundles on the bed, the open clothes-presses with clean paper linings, the heavy woollen vests, the body-belts and bodices and long drawers and frilly bloomers and petticoats with harnesses over the back and flat linen buttons; and the stockings and the garters and the gaiters and the button-hooks; and the coats and the bonnets and mittens and tam-o-shanters and the Sunday brimmed hat; and the shoes for the house and the shoes for the open air, and the thick wool over-stockings and the goloshes and a pair of boots that seemed weighted with lead.

  Charlotte said, ‘Best not fall in the marsh in them. You’ll sink like an anchor.’ The boots were iron black. All the other clothes were dun.

  When the drawers and the press and the wardrobe were full and I was completed in all my layers like a prime onion, ‘That’, said Charlotte, ‘is something like!’

  ‘I think she looks very pretty,’ said Aunt Frances when I was produced in the drawing-room.

  ‘It’s the best we can do,’ said Mrs Woods.

  Aunt Mary said nothing for she seemed to notice nothing. ‘It’s odd,’ she said. ‘I can never get very excited about clothes.’

  I felt that I understood. I felt uncomfortable and stout, and that there was a very great deal of me. I seemed to be looking down at a globe with two weighted sticks hanging below it. I sat on the button-back chair and swung these weights.

  ‘Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,’ I sang.

  ‘Don’t dangle yourself about, Polly,’ said Mrs Woods. ‘Not in those beautiful boots.’

  ‘I’ve not much of a neck, have I?’ I asked Charlotte, looking in the glass at bedtime—another great mound of clothes waiting on the bed to set me up for the night.

  Charlotte said, ‘Well, maybe it’ll come.’

  Not once, not once ever, after the short cries of surprise on the first morning did it ever occur to my aunts—the Miss Younghusbands was their name—that I should not be there for ever.

  There was no question. I was theirs. I had arrived and should stay. Never in all the years did they suggest that they had been good to me or that there was the least need for my gratitude, or that I had in any way disturbed their lives.

  Very quickly in fact I became muddled about whether I had ever lived anywhere else, and the time before the arrival on the sandy step was very cloudy. I seemed to have been born at the yellow house, delivered there neat and complete without the embarrassments and messiness of conception or birth.

  The total sureness of Aunts Mary and Frances about this was so great and so calm that it spread about the yellow house, and not even Mrs Woods made any demur, not even when I was with her on her own, which I managed to avoid as much as was possible. Charlotte appeared to accept all that came her way. Life simply proceeded.

  There was no mention of loving me of course, nor of any particular affection, but that was nothing, for I wouldn’t have known what to do with love had it been offered. ‘She is a very good child,’ they said. ‘What a very good little girl she is,’—and they said it in front of me, which I found very nice. After the dark, ramshackle years, to be charged with goodness was agreeable. It was like being tucked into bed, which Aunt Frances sometimes did, and sat on the end of it, too, and smiled at me and told holy stories about things called the apostles and the saints as I drank my milk. ‘Not a very demonstrative child,’ they said sometimes, and in front of me. ‘Not at all like her mother. But that may be just as well. We could not cope with another Emma. A stolid little thing. But she is good. And considering—’

  I listened and watched and began to allow myself to be taken charge of and was rather put out to find very quickly that the goodness, though a gift from God, was something I had to see after. For it appeared that I might lose it. I must hold tight to it. I must clutch at it like the newel-post of the stairs, like the string of a kite. I must examine it like my new clothes. As soon as I saw signs of wear and tear it would be well to report.

  Saturdays were the time for this, after the three ladies had all been to church for their own confession. I was asked to sit by Aunt Mary in her study window and we talked of sin. I knew from the very beginning that these occasions were the only ones when she was disappointed in me, and in herself, for she saw in them her own failure. I dreaded them.

  ‘Now Polly, is that all?’

  ‘Yes, Aunt Mary.’

  ‘You have really tried to remember?’

  ‘Yes, Aunt Mary.’

  ‘Don’t kick the window-seat, Polly. Shall we sit in silence for a moment?’

  When we sat in silence all sorts of things welled up from long ago, but I didn’t know if they were exactly about sin.

  ‘What are you thinking, Polly?’

  ‘Nothing, Aunt Mary.’

  But I had been seeing the dipsomaniac at the old and filthy stone sink suddenly up with her skirts and peeing into a basin.

  ‘Shall we say a prayer, Polly?’

  ‘Yes, Aunt Mary.’

  And there was the man who used to come in the afternoons and do things to her in the kitchen. Lie on the saggy couch and roll on her and spread out her legs and make noises and be cruel to her but she didn’t mind.

  ‘I want to talk about angels,’ said Aunt Mary. ‘You do know, don’t you, that there are angels? You believe in angels?’

  ‘Yes, Aunt Mary.’

  ‘If you are very good you may see one. They are invisible most of the time, but when you are very good—in a state of what we call “grace”—then you might catch sight of one. They can be known by their bright raiment. What is raiment, Polly?’

  ‘Clothes.’

  ‘You have raiment, Polly.’

  I thought of my raiment. The mountains of vests.

  ‘And if you keep it bright—?’

  I thought of the body-belts. I thought of the man’s trousers dropped on the kitchen floor.

  ‘If you keep your raiment bright—the raiment of your soul—then you may even see your very own guardian angel. You may catch the gleam of a shining feather.’

  ‘Where, Aunt Mary?’

  ‘Anywhere, wherever you are.’

  I had a vision of myself in several inappropriate settings—clinging for example to the enormous wooden curves of the seat of the water-closet, tightly in case of disappearing and being washed away to sea. One couldn’t imagine an angel in the water-closet. But I should have liked to see one even there. It might be more possible perhaps out upon the marsh.

  While my aunt spoke of hagiography and sin I let my gaze go wandering. The study shelves were filled with books. High up went the books. High up went the books into the shadows. The wooden window-blinds were kept down almost always to protect the books from the sea-light and the sun, and they were dusted twice a week, though seldom read, for they were valuable. The shelves were old dark-red paint and set at different levels to make the books comfortable, yet the shelves were the servants of the books, not the other way round. Every title could be seen. Nothing was squashed, or leaning or lying collapsed, or upside down, and the bindings were old and dark. When you pulled one out, the boards were brighter than the spine, with a bloom on them—rose and blue and chestnut and roof-lead green. They had the look of books that had once been greatly used and loved, and if my sins had not been too bad that week and if I had been able to think up a few more to get rid of, Aunt Mary would read to me from one of them for a little while.

  Aunt Mary taught me my lessons every morning in the study and Aunt Frances taught me the piano every afternoon. Mrs Woods gave me half an hour of frightening French and later o
n some German, too, in the morning-room which was always out of the sun by tea-time. After tea I went usually to sit in the kitchen with Charlotte. Charlotte taught me nothing and went about the potato-peeling and pudding-beating as if she were alone. But I watched her.

  I watched everyone. When Aunt Mary saw me watching she met the look with an austere one back. Aunt Frances would return the look with an immediate smile and a nod. Mrs Woods would turn away.

  Charlotte just gazed. That is to say that her face did not change at all for she always kept what looked like a smile upon it—anyway a smile until you looked again, and then you saw that it was only a drawing back of pink lips that must once have been rosy, the result was an expression of aimless docility.

  The face from a distance looked quite pretty and Charlotte had a reputation for good nature, yet I knew quite early I think that what Charlotte carried about between nose and chin was something rather surprising. It was not a snarl exactly—but something like that. A disguise of some sort. A mask. As smiles went it was a dud.

  I discovered soon, too, that there was some other mystery about Charlotte. One day, in perhaps the second year at the yellow house, I climbed the attic stairs to Charlotte’s bedroom when she was out visiting her sister in the cottages in Fisherman’s Square, and under her iron bedstead I found a sack full of old crusts. Crustless bread was Aunt Mary’s only extravagance and thousands upon thousands of crusts were stuffed into the paper sack, the top ones turning green and curling into twists. I said nothing to anyone of this and made sure not to think of it again.

  Charlotte herself was always washing and scrubbing and scouring—tearing down curtains, whipping off tablecloths, hanging heavy rugs on ropes across the yard and belabouring them with carpet-beaters. Clothes enough for an institution blew board-dry in the wind three times a week, terrible as an army with banners when you considered the ironing. ‘Oh, we’ll never get another Charlotte,’ my aunts would say. ‘We know how very lucky we are,’ and Charlotte drew back her rosy lips in the non-smile.

  Yet Charlotte never seemed clean. She wore her clothes in a bundled way. Her hair was always greasy, her cap held on with oily pins. There was something rather squashy-looking about her feet, and although she did not exactly smell, there was something.

  I never felt she liked me—as I never felt that Mrs Woods liked me, although they both sang in a minor key the song about my general goodness—and Mrs Woods sometimes became a little animated when I felt out of sorts, for illness played some mystical part in her religion. Our Lord had suffered. We are told to do as He did. Ipso facto, to Mrs Woods; illness was blessed. For perhaps five or six years—perhaps many more—I thought that ‘suffer the little children’ meant that Jesus had been all for measles and mumps, and this made me thoughtful. In spite of all the care and generosity and approbation and the lovely security that breathed everywhere in the compelling yellow house, I became wary of God there. Oh very wary, indeed.

  And time went by at the yellow house. One after another the years must have come and gone, summers flashing over the marsh and winters powdering it with snow. The house—it was called Oversands—was very tall and large and foreign-looking with deep roofs and two gable-ends which needed cypresses. It reflected my grandfather Younghusband’s honeymoon in Siena for he had begun to build it on his return, supervising various Medici-like grilles on pantry windows and the panelling of the great front door which he had always longed to make a replica, in majolica, of the Baptistery doors of Florence. ‘A joyful man,’ Aunt Frances called him. Each morning, she said, he would burst from the yellow house and rush into the sea dressed in semi-deshabille—parson’s stock and black old-fashioned dinner-plate hat—which he cast off as he ran. His were the books and his the huge photograph with beard of Jove that hung over the study mantelpiece. He had been a great singer of hymns and a student of old stones.

  Oversands stared at the German Ocean and its back was turned towards the land. ‘Grandfather was a sea-gull man,’ said Aunt Mary, mystifyingly, until I realised that she meant he needed to watch the sea a great deal for the black-headed gull which was his speciality. Between its back-door and the Cleveland Hills was only the marsh.

  On the marsh there were a few but surprising buildings set far apart: a church, a nunnery, an unfinished folly and away over towards the hills in a drift of trees, a long, noble place—The Hall. This had a little domed building beside it gleaming gold when the sun shone.

  Across the wide bay was the clutch of fisherman’s cottages sunk down almost into the sand, and inland from them some sudden terrace houses—where the dressmakers lived—a terrace cut off in the prime of its life and looking as if it wanted to be spirited off to Bath.

  On the northern horizon there was a kind of bruise in the sky which was the Iron-Works, the demon kitchens my father and I had clattered through in the train, and when the wind was from the north these made alarming roaring noises now and then, and great surging sounds like tidal waves; but usually the marsh and everyone who lived on it was very quiet.

  Only the North-East wind was disturbing and this blew almost every day of the year. It piled up sand in front of Fisherman’s Square in a barrier reef which had to be dug away as part of life, normal as washing day. It flung sand into the transparent curls of the bread and butter in the white terraces and in among the naked marble crevices of the incumbents of the golden dome who were fortunately dead, for it was a mausoleum. It howled and bansheed on stormy nights around the nunnery which was run partly as a convalescent home for the poor from the Iron-Works villages over the dunes, giving the patients headaches as they lay out on its healthy balconies; and it blew hardest of all into and onto and through and round the yellow house which was closest to the sea of all of them, shaking its window sashes, hurling pan-lids off Charlotte’s shelves, whisking and pulling at Aunt Mary’s unusual clothes. Aunt Mary wore Florence Nightingale veiling—the old nursing uniform from the Workers’ Hospital—and looked like a black bride. These garments were her statement and her pride, proclaiming that she was not only the daughter of a dead archdeacon, but had once been In Charge of Burns. The wind made Mrs Woods shake her head and reach for her embrocation. It whined and snarled in the rafters of the huge unfinished folly, the house the millionaire-ironmaster had been building for years as one of his seaside retreats.

  But when it dropped, the marsh was utterly still except for birds and bells. The birds swung about and cried, watching the sea and land and the few figures moving over them. The bells kept the time—the church bell with a sombre boom that turned each hour into a funeral (it was very High), the bells from the nunnery canonical and complex, and a bell from the Hall stables far-off and uncertain—clear and thin and old and lovely.

  Sometimes the marsh dazzled. Sometimes it was so pale and unnoticeable that it seemed only an extension of the sea. The fishermen said that a hundred yards from land, it vanished completely and the waves heaved up over it and appeared to wash the hills. The church-spire stuck up out of the water and the bells chimed eerily from nowhere.

  But living on the marsh it was visible enough and had great beauty. Blue-green salt-marsh grasses, shadowy fields of sea-lavender reflected and were reflected in the sky, and the buildings between the salt and fresh-water flats and the rolling skies gave definition and authority to what otherwise would have seemed in the power of the haphazard. Nuns and fishermen went about their business—the fishermen sailing their boats on little wheels across the sand, the nuns, flickers of black and white along their balcony, moving between the scarlet blankets of the sick, or now and then about the beach where they could sometimes be seen laughing, wickedly holding their sandals in their hands. They pushed each other and squealed like bumpkins, though only in the shallowest pools.

  Aunt Frances and I walked on the marsh and on the beach almost every day of my first seven years at the yellow house. Aunt Mary came with us on the marsh now and then, but did not seem aware of it. ‘We’ve seen the sea,’ she said one day. ‘Wh
at shall we do now?’ Charlotte walked abroad on it, but as little as possible, and Mrs Woods crossed it only to go to church. The news of the value of ozone had not reached us. ‘Marshes kill,’ said Mrs Woods. ‘I have lived in Africa, I understand stagnant water.’

  There were very few outings, very few occasions planned for a child. Even Christmas passed almost invisibly. But one day in spring when I was eight years old one great outing was announced. Aunt Mary and I were to go to tea at The Hall with Lady Vipont, Aunt Mary’s old colleague. Not a nursing colleague exactly but someone very closely connected with nursing in a Christian sort of way. After that Lady Vipont had founded the curious nunnery on the marsh, The Rood, and then the convalescent home. At some very remote time she had been a young woman, Aunt Mary living not far from her. They had ridden ponies together. Lady Vipont had been greatly influenced by Grandfather Younghusband and listened often to him discussing stones. They had had holidays together at Danby Wiske at what sounded like the dawning of the world.

  ‘You’re for tea at The Hall,’ said Charlotte.

  ‘Who lives there?’

  ‘One old lady. And one young child. Her grand-daughter. Not much older than you. Though she’s usually at boarding school.’

  ‘Is she an orphan?’

  ‘She’s something. Something queer. Her grandmother—Lady Vipont—has the handling of her. You’re to go as a holiday friend.’

  ‘What’s her name? Is she like me?’

  ‘Her name’s something peculiar. She’s eleven.’

  ‘Is there to be a girl there?’ I asked Aunt Mary in the hired barouche.

  ‘A girl? Oh yes. A little girl. Lady Vipont’s grand-daughter Delphi.’

  We rattled up a weedy drive with tall trees drooping and came to an archway and through it a courtyard with a round building and a chapel beyond that. At the other end of the courtyard, between two broken urns on piers, were pale shallow steps. A young man in some sort of livery was standing there with his mouth open and poking about at his teeth with a twig.