by Jane Gardam
‘You know how I love you,’ Mrs Woods was hissing.
I flew. Nobody mentioned the scene. Ever.
When the faint was done and Aunt Frances had come to herself again and been patted on the hands and put in a chair, I asked to go to bed and did so. I did not see, therefore, what happened next, but found out later that Aunt Frances had come upstairs soon afterwards, changed into her outdoor clothes and taken herself off across the marsh to The Holy Rood and had stayed there for four hours. Much later in the evening—it must have been in the middle of the night—I heard Aunt Mary and the spoons coming up to bed. She paused and came into my room.
‘Polly?’
I didn’t answer and she stood by the bed and said, ‘Dear Polly. Oh, poor dear Emma. Oh, how difficult.’
‘We must think of St Paul,’ she said, turning and staring out at the wet night. ‘‘Better than to burn.” Though I don’t believe that Father Pocock could ever really burn. And Frances so quiet.
‘I shall of course be totally on Frances’s side. Totally. Even if it means she is to go to India. I believe you would agree with that wouldn’t you?’
I knew that she was talking to Grandfather Younghusband, not to me, and when she had gone away, to get rid of the feeling that he was still standing about, eyes blazing above the springing beard, I lit the lamp and looked about the bedroom.
Nothing. Nothing. An empty room. The wind and rain. And Aunt Frances going to India.
Out of habit I said some prayers then, wishing there had been someone real to consult who would send me an immediate and precise answer, or some comforting gift—as when Robinson Crusoe had spoken to me and the wonderful brother and sister had appeared, so affectionate and glorious upon the beach. Some telegram from somewhere.
But none came.
In the morning my aunts sat straight and calm at the breakfast-table and although it was Saturday were drinking coffee.
‘Coffee!’
‘Yes dear,’ said Aunt Frances, ‘I thought coffee today,’ she smiled.
I hadn’t realised that anybody but Mrs Woods could make coffee. I had believed it was a rite only to be learned abroad. Yet this was as good as Sunday’s.
‘I think, Mary, we should have coffee more often, don’t you?’
‘Coffee? Oh it would soon run out. Agnes buys only so much—’
‘There is coffee at Boagey’s and at Dicky Dick’s, the lino-shop. He is extending. There’s no need to send for it by the railway.’
‘I’m sure there’s no local coffee Frances. And what price! It would be far from usual.’
‘Nonsense. It should be usual. Coffee. Edwin has it every day. I’ll make enquiries. I’d like to think of you all having plenty of good things when I’m gone.’ (She had said nothing to me.)
We looked at her carefully and Mrs Woods came into the room, looking bleak. We waited for the outburst, for the smell of coffee was wonderfully strong, but all she did was to run a finger over the sideboard as she passed it and say, ‘Filthy.’
And at table she examined a spoon and said, ‘Naples.’
‘It is perfectly clean,’ said Aunt Frances.
‘Since we had vicarage servants we have lived like Naples.’
‘Have you ever been to Naples, Agnes?’
‘I have known the filth of many foreign countries.’
‘Have you been happy anywhere, Agnes? We have had the Vicar’s Alice here for over two years. You haven’t complained before.’
‘I think she should go back where she came from. It was when she came that the rot began.’
‘You’d be very silly to send her away. She’s quite settled. Edwin doesn’t need her. We spoke of domestic arrangements last night. Yours and ours.’
‘Yours and ours?’
‘Mr Pocock is leaving us, Agnes.’ Aunt Mary examined her marmalade. ‘You were perfectly right. He is going to India. The new priest will be making a clean start. He may even bring a wife. And Frances is also to leave us.’
‘A wife? Oh, not at The Rood. Not a wife among the nuns.’
‘I don’t see how a wife would affect the nuns. It’s usually the parsons that distract them,’ said Aunt Frances.
‘The Rood is too High for a wife. A married priest!’ said Mrs Woods. ‘And great goodness, is this my coffee? It is only Saturday!’
‘We thought a little treat today. To celebrate . . .’
‘To celebrate what? To celebrate what, Frances? What is this nonsense of Frances leaving us?’
As I left not one of them moved, nobody whispered. Nobody stirred. But when I passed the window, behind the diseased privet, I heard Aunt Frances laughing—a young laugh, light as a girl’s.
Oh, I missed her so. The wedding was frightful. It seemed that Father Pocock had been vaguely preparing for the Mission Field for some years but that Aunt Frances had only known about it as his vaguest of general intentions.
As was the proposed marriage. Neither had been more than gently touched upon between them and when the results of his years or vague correspondence with old ecclesiastical cronies had at last began to solidify and necessitate publicity and the signatures of bishops, Mr Pocock had all at once become quite remote from the yellow house. Most strangely so.
‘How pinched about the lips he has looked lately,’ Woods had said only the week before the revelation. ‘Of course he fasts a great deal.’
‘Surely not at Christmas and Epiphany,’ said Aunt Mary. ‘It’s still weeks before Lent.’
Aunt Frances said nothing.
Since Christmas, Father Pocock had scarcely been to see us. Presumably all three ladies had seen him at their weekly Saturday confession, but Aunt Frances’s walks to the chaplaincy and the nuns had become brisker than ever. She had stayed for shorter and shorter times. It was some months now, I suddenly realised, since Father Pocock had even been to tea with us. There had always been reasons—but still. Aunt Frances despite her briskness had lately been looking rather white. She was not as she had been after Charlotte—in open misery, walking about with a shadow all around her, weeping for Stanley and her sin, but all, we saw now, had not been well. In the new freedom which Aunt Frances’s confidence had given us, Aunt Mary at her prayers, Woods at her secret broodings and I at my books—all of us had stopped seeing her. She was just steadily, briskly, usefully there.
Now she was rosy, talkative, merry. I thought, ‘Of course. That’s how she used to be, long ago. When I first came. We had all forgotten,’ and it was terrible to think that Aunt Frances might never have been herself again and that we might never have noticed that she was gone.
But it was terrible, too, to know that being herself again was caused by nothing one could feel happy about, and nothing in the very least romantic (I was reading Scott and Charlotte Yonge at this time) but only by her marching out on a very wet night in the most un-feminine way—and bearding Father Pocock. Bearding him.
It is terrible for a woman to beard.
If it were not so unthinkable one might almost imagine that she had proposed to Father Pocock herself; brought him—like someone in Wales or Fisherman’s Square—up to scratch: pale flabby candlegrease Father Pocock with hands like a seal’s flippers and a puffy pink sea-anemone mouth.
And there was the business Charlotte had mentioned and which Scott, Jane Austen, the Brontës and Charlotte Yonge never: ‘Who’d bed thee?’ Charlotte had said. Did Father Pocock understand this aspect of things? The sleeping arrangements, the lying side by side and whatever it was that happened next? And the blood? Well, presumably Aunt Frances had stopped. She was old, after all. And he must know. He had read the Bible. About the woman who had gone on non-stop for twelve years, poor wretched thing. So it might have been worse. But what would Father Pocock have made of the couch business in Wales?
What would Aunt Frances have made of it?
Did she even know? I didn’t know much, but ought I perhaps to pass on to Aunt Frances what I did know?
But the whole thing seemed yet more
terrible again when he came to lunch—Aunt Frances organised it for that very Monday, giving him only the Sunday to compose himself in formal celebration of their betrothal. There he was at our dining-table, so old and pale, smiling tranquilly round and praising the steamed chicken. Mr Casaubon—so much, much worse than Mr Casaubon, for Dorothea’s husband had had a massive mind, a searching scourging soul. He had breathed rare air like Moses on the mountain-top. I could understand the whole of Middlemarch. The passion for a scholar. It was a bit like Jo marrying Dr Bhaer in Little Women: you felt sick about it, but you understood.
But Father Pocock! He looked down at Aunt Frances over the cabbage, so kindly, as if by marrying her he were going to give her a very great treat that had all been his own idea. Where Mr Casaubon had breathed out Olympian sagacity, Mr Pocock gave off a bright, little self-confidence brought on, one felt, by the relief of having had his mind made up for him. ‘We shan’t be eating as well as this you know, ha-ha,’ he said, ‘in India,’—meaning ‘How you must love me’—and fluffing round the sea-anemone with his napkin. ‘We shall think of all this richness in our little hut.’ He was as proud as if he had acquired some small stone saint and breathed it into life.
Aunt Frances said, however, in the quick new voice, ‘Hardly hut in Delhi, Edwin. And I’m really looking forward to proper curries. They say they’re quite a different thing.’ And there was no doubt at all that although she—she who had read me Tennyson—had engineered this whole dread business, herself, Aunt Frances was happy. Her room became full of open sea-trunks, her days of complex, delightful visits. She was endlessly at the dressmakers of the turret room, and twice, she took me with her to York, the furthest I had travelled since I was six—where she brought quantities of gigantic male cotton underwear with buttons fastened all down the front in the most outspoken positions (‘You can’t expect the nuns to buy them and poor Edwin has no sister’).
‘The main body of things of course,’ she said, ‘we shall get from the Army and Navy Stores in London. All the tropic vestments will come from Mowbray’s’—for the honeymoon was to be a working one, spent mostly at the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Tufton Street. ‘I shall see to the worldly matters while he gets on with the spiritual things,’ she said.
She made great lists of most unlikely objects—she must have done considerable previous research, in the vague hopeful years, all neatly ticked off and costed out. ‘It must all be very expensive,’ I said once, and she said, ‘Oh, Edwin’s very well-to-do. We don’t have to worry about that. There’s more than enough and we shall be able to give away a great deal, too, I expect’—and she gave the quick happy nod she used to give Stanley when she slipped the penny into his hand. ‘Oh, I shall enjoy being rich,’ she said in a way I felt unusual in the fiancée of a missionary.
She was married in royal blue and her Leghorn straw hat with big pink peonies on it, made of silk. The wedding was quiet, and on a cold wet morning—it had to be early as they had the connections for the London train to catch. Only Aunt Mary and I and a curious-looking Pocock cousin, the maid Alice, the parson (a colleague from Mirfield) and a trickle of nuns, were in church. There was the usual devout woman at the back who always comes to a parson’s wedding and cries, and leaves before the end: and Lady Vipont who slipped in just before the bride and sat apart in The Hall pew. Mr Pocock became excited at this and tried to make signs to her from the bridegroom’s position: but she didn’t look at him and left before the reception.
Also, I thought that just before the service began I might possibly have seen Charlotte, somewhere behind a pillar, but then I may have been mistaken.
Mrs Woods was unwell and unable to attend. And since she needed the yellow house to be quiet in, the reception was held at The Rood. Aunt Frances drove to the church in a motor driven by Boagey’s First Class Wedding Services and Aunt Mary and I went with her—two cars seeming unnecessary. Aunt Mary, not a whisker in sight, sat beside the bride in a very antique and beautiful dress and a great hat of ivory silk that had been wrapped in black tissue for several people’s lifetimes. She looked astoundingly beautiful and I gazed at her all the time from my tip-up bucket-seat. I could not even look at the bride.
Beside me sat an old friend of the family I had not met before, Arthur Thwaite, who had been something special in Aunt Frances’s girlhood and was to give her away. He lived, I had heard, on the Yorkshire moors and I had hoped for a Heathcliff character, but he had a monocle and a drooping moustache and kept clearing his throat.
After the ceremony the motor swished through the rain to the Chaplaincy at The Rood to sherry and paste sandwiches and a piece of wedding cake. Aunt Frances bustled about, exhorting the nuns to make the most of it all—though she didn’t put it so boldly—and they did, laughing I thought like children younger than me, but not quite easy with her now, and not paying quite the same reverent attention to the groom as when he had, for example, conducted their Litanies.
He, however, had not noticed. He had shone with good humour, not noticing anyone, not even Aunt Frances much, and the arc of his stomach—perhaps it was the new underwear—moved with more than usual gravity among us and high above us all.
At the reception nobody paid much attention to Aunt Mary or to me either—I think Aunt Mary’s sudden beauty had made us all shy—and I stood for most of the time with Mr Thwaite—the Heathcliff—who looked dolefully out at the rain and said at intervals, ‘Fearful weather.’ The Pocock cousin approached—the best man. He had a very large head which he appeared not to be quite right in. He seemed an amiable man, but when Mr Thwaite cleared his throat for the third time and said, ‘Fearful weather,’ yet again, he went away.
At last we all climbed back into the bridal car and the guests gathered upon the steps, a few of the less decrepit convalescents hanging over the balcony above. I sat between my aunts now, with Mr Thwaite and Mr Pocock facing us. Mr Pocock, so large above the tip-up seat that he seemed to be poised in air like God on a ceiling. He waved in various directions sombrely, Aunt Frances merrily, the nuns threw a little rice and we set out for the station.
As we hissed across the marsh, the tassels of the window-blinds scarcely swinging in Boagey’s Rolls Royce, the bridegroom said, ‘We shall see great changes, Frances, great changes when we return. Mark my words there will be an influx soon. An influx. Slum clearances are on the way. The will be huge developments. I fear we may not see our marsh again, or not as it has been.’
Nobody could think of anything to say to this and proceeded in thoughtful silence. Then Mr Thwaite cleared his throat and said, ‘Really frightful weather,’ and I burst into tears.
At the station she said, ‘Oh Polly. Don’t cry. You shall come out to us. You know you shall. For a long, long stay. For ever if you want. In a year or so. When you’re eighteen. You’re not to fret. You’re to be very brave and think and think about India. I’ll write every week. I’ll never miss. I love you, darling, darling Polly, I shall miss you so. You are my very own.’ But she looked so triumphant as she wound down the railway carriage window to wave, with Father Pocock’s great pale face above her, that I sobbed on. I tried not to. I wanted to leave a nice memory of myself. But I couldn’t stop.
I couldn’t stop because I knew that whatever she said she was not what she had been. She was lying. For she was not in love. Not in the very slightest. She did not love him. She had lost her true uncalculating self. She was brimful only with the importance of being a married wife.
At breakfast the next morning Mr Thwaite gave a cough and said, ‘Thought of taking the girl home.’
Aunt Mary blinked at him.
‘The girl,’ he said, ‘Polly Flint. Polly. Little break. Back to Thwaite.’
‘Take Polly?’ She sounded as if there was a host of other girls about the house. ‘Polly?’
‘Little change. Little break.’ He then subsided. ‘Mind if I leave you? Library. Pipe.’
We looked at each other. ‘Polly dear—this is very unexpec
ted.’ And Aunt Mary, her beauty muffled again in her black, looked about for her sister. It was the loss in her face at seeing the chair empty that made me say, ‘Of course not. Of course, Aunt Mary, I can’t leave you. With Mrs Woods ill! Of course not.’
I meant it, too. Mr Thwaite was a mystery and I liked the mystery: the way he commanded his interior life and was so hopeless with his exterior one. And I was beginning to like him. But when it came to it, this was no time for me possibly to leave Aunt Mary and the yellow house.
‘Well, he’ll stay here for a day or two,’ she said. ‘Let’s just see what transpires,’ and she rang for Alice to come and deal with the breakfast things and put coal on the fire. ‘Go to the study, Polly. I’ll go up and see how Mrs Woods is. Just see what he—poor Arthur—has in mind.’
