by Jane Gardam
It was lovely after the storm—the grasses by the river in shiny clumps and feathery with seeds, all the dandelions and meadowsweet polished and clean and the water running fast in the streams. The meadow smells were not like the marsh smells—the rushes and blites and spurreys and scurvy grasses.
I was wearing Maitland’s ‘blue’ which turned out to be a lovely floppy skirt and top and a sailor-blouse with white on it with a big bow and a straw hat with ribbons. I had undone my hair, all loose and long. Maitland said this was acceptable since I was in the country—until I was seventeen. At seventeen, up it must go. I kept imagining Mr Thwaite appearing round the next corner with a cluster of disciples—strong fishermen-type people with hook noses? Very brown, and sandals? Country people—except of course, St Luke, who was a doctor. I wondered how doctors dressed in Galilee about 30 AD and if they carried a bag of any sort and I sat down and took a reed and pulled the brown tufty sprout off it and began to suck the worm of white sorbet inside. I licked it and tapped it with my tongue.
It was a very hot afternoon. I took off my hat. I lay down and looked up at the sky. Then I sat up. There was not a sound anywhere. There could be no people for miles. The path I’d been following was hardly a path at all. I took off the top of my sailor suit. It felt stuffy and hard. Then I took off my liberty-bodice and then I took off my vest and I lay down with no clothes on the top half of myself in the long grass and listened to the river running by. I thought of the disciples walking talkatively along with Mr Thwaite. And then I fell asleep.
When I woke up there seemed to be a disciple looking at me—very serious and reflective. He had a twitchy sort of nose and bright black eyes and I felt he was some old friend. But when I sat up he was not there and I knew that he had been part of a dream.
The sun had gone. It looked like rain again. I knew it was much later. I looked astonished at my bare arms and then more astonished at the bare huge rest of me. I must have been mad. Lying half naked in broad daylight in the middle of the plain of York! I scrabbled back into the blouse, pushed the vest and bodice into the skirt pockets, tried to get myself straightened out round the waist. Then I thought I heard voices calling somewhere along the path and I was filled with wonderfully exciting shame. I found the hat, crammed it on my head and ran frantically back along the way I had come.
I ran for nearly a mile until I came to the door in Thwaite wall and slid through it and leaned against it, then walked quickly along inside the wall, past the bonfire place, the glasshouses, the pink hyacinth still displaying its unseeable underparts to all who passed by like the man who fell among thieves. I sidled into the house and up to my room and saw in the glass a ruby-red face on a rough girl like a well fed gypsy with torn stockings, wild hair and her vest hanging out of her pocket.
Outside on the lawn the guests were beginning to gather for tea from their creative activities for the next part of the comforting time-table Lady Celia had provided for them against the assaults of their calling.
Seeing them pacing so soberly, acquiescently forward, I found that I was crying and the reason for this seemed to be that I had now to go down and join them. I, so nondescript and friendless, and wearing all my clothes. And somewhere, Charlotte peeped from a corner of the room with some triumph and there were some queer shadows behind her from Wales.
Below me, Mr Barker was walking like Rameses over the lawn following two parlour-maids in black and white. He carried a cake-stand and they the heavy trays of silver and the tea-cups. Mr Thwaite had arrived—no sign of the disciples—and his sweet smile brightened at the sight of the cakes and made me calmer. ‘I shall have to join in,’ I thought. ‘I shall have to go down.’
‘Beggars can’t choose,’ said Charlotte from inside the wardrobe as I changed my dress. ‘It’s not as if there’s anything else for you. You’ve no excuse to be different. You can’t write poetry or paint or play very well and you’ll never write a book. You’ve never been to school or felt you were a hyacinth. All you can do is speak German and talk about Robinson Crusoe. There’s no genius in you.’
So I walked sadly on to the landing and there was somebody there. He said, ‘Oh thank goodness—I know absolutely no one. May I go down with you?’
Thwaite
Aunt Frances, most dear and best beloved, I have fallen in love. Paul, he is called, Paul Treece, a friend of Lady Celia and the most beautiful of human beings. Oh let me tell you what has happened.
He was standing on the stairs yesterday as I came out of my room to go down in the garden for tea, and he is twenty years old, which is old, I know, but from the first moment it did not matter. He has quite a godlike air but he has not at all a godlike certainty because he said, ‘Could I go down with you? I don’t know a single soul.’
It seemed amazing. It was exactly what I would have said to him, the very words. I felt that we had changed souls. I said, ‘Oh yes,’ in a very stiff way and we walked downstairs side by side but very far apart. He walks all bobby up and down and bouncy—and all the time he talks—very fast and excited. He is a poet and in his second year at Cambridge. He is very eager all the time. Out of the sides of my eyes I kept getting a look at him and his profile is—oh Aunt Frances—most utterly perfect. His nose could be a nose in a textbook of fine noses.
On the lawn there were two other new people just arrived—very important new ones making their way to Wooller in Scotland: writers of some very significant sort—a melancholy brooding man and a very thin woman in old expensive clothes with the hem coming down, who was beautiful. Even her raggedness looked queenly. She was rather wild about the eyes which were in very deep caves in her face, and the corners of her mouth turned down in a desperately forlorn and anxious, yet sweet way. Her hands were long and bony and she clutched her tea-cup tight. When Lady Celia introduced us all, this woman looked for a long time and then turned her head away, but I think she was thinking of other things. The man smiled gently and nicely at us.
I perhaps noticed them so particularly because since meeting Paul Treece I have noticed everything with very precise and crystalline pertinence, Aunt Frances, as if a skin had been peeled from everything, a gauze or a glass. Even when Paul Treece turned brick-red with awe at the two writers and sat by the bony woman on a stool at her feet and turned on her a very passionate gaze as he put scone after scone in his mouth (which is a bit red. It’s a pity) without looking where it was going, and I went over to sit by Mr Thwaite—even then I thought, ‘Nothing, nothing will ever spoil this day. We arrived on the lawn together. They will think we belong to each other.’
Mr Thwaite said that it was hot for the time of the year and I asked if he had enjoyed his walk. I told him how Mr Barker had been worried by the chauffeur meeting so many trains, because he loves talking about train-times, and we discussed trains generally for a while. He then said, ‘Know who they are, these new cough-drops?’
Mr Thwaite never asks questions—well, so very seldom. You know. He spoke quite loud and it fell very clearly and flatly into the tea-party because nobody was talking much. That is an interesting thing that I have noticed: great artists do not actually say very much in the ordinary way, but go in for great silences. The more famous they are the less they utter at tea-parties, which makes me think that Paul Treece cannot be a genius as he is the most tremendous talker and was only silent at that moment with awe and scones.
Several heads turned to Mr Thwaite and everyone looked at him with long intellectual stares and I felt so sorry for him until I noticed that he did not seem to care at all. He simply opened his mouth over a beautiful piece of black fruit-cake and munched. Lady Celia said melodiously then, ‘When the evenings grow longer, later in the year, we come out here after dinner and listen to the doves.’
Again nobody said anything and the sentence—she has a light slow fluty voice a little like Aunt Mary—hung about among the tea-things for a time and then floated away. In ones and twos then people began to say things blankly—unconnected things, unhurried, and
it turned into a discussion soon between a number of people, quite fast like a chorus. Then between only one or two people, and more dropped out until it was just two—the dark new man and the snapping painter who talks Cockney with a bit of a foreign accent (the lady looked up into the trees. She is called Mrs Wolf which is inappropriate for she is more horse or unicorn-like) and it got very difficult for me to follow.
At least the dark man—Mr Wolf, though he is more dog-like—said something that sounded like the ultimate word of truth, and everybody murmured and stirred about like at the end of a concert. Paul Treece was left stranded by the unicorn lady, who had now closed her eyes, so he came over to Mr Thwaite and me—talking—and said, ‘Mr Thwaite—what a perfectly beautiful garden. What a house! May I ask if you were born in it?’ Mr Thwaite looked quite surprised. Lady Celia’s friends don’t talk to him much. He said, ‘Harrumph grunt grunt ha—yes. Ha. Good old place. Romantic old place. As it happens, yes.’
‘I expect that you must be lord of the manor?’
Lady Celia was listening, though she did not turn her head. Mr Thwaite looked across for guidance from her. ‘Well—my sister, Celia, has taken on all that—’ he said, leaving things trailing. ‘Though I am, in fact.’
‘Might I—might we—walk about a little? I’d love to see.’
‘All means. Delighted. At once,’ said Mr Thwaite, pleased as a cat and got up and went striding off with us after him.
We walked everywhere, Aunt Frances—miles of gardens and shrubberies I hadn’t seen, down to the spinneys and along the near bank of the river, Paul Treece talking all the time and bouncing and springing on his feet (which are very big and may become flattish in later life, but never mind. He is very tall) and making little runs here and there. Once he said, ‘Oh quickly—don’t let us miss this glade, Miss Flint,’ (Miss Flint!) and ran to a gate and rested his elbow on it, his chin in his hand. He sighed and said some Latin. ‘Horace,’ he said.
‘Odes One,’ said Mr Thwaite. ‘Rabbits everywhere. The very deuce. Gun?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘If you’ve a gun—care for a gun?’
‘Oh not at—No thank you.’
‘See about one, tomorrow?’
Paul Treece and I found that we were looking at each other at that moment, very steadily, and reading each other’s thoughts. I knew then everything about him and I felt sure again he knew all about me. ‘Never’, he said, ‘a gun. I could never handle a gun.’
‘May have to,’ said Mr Thwaite, ‘before long.’
‘I am a poet, sir.’
‘Ah well. Some of them did. Horace.’
‘Horace fled the battlefield leaving his shield.’
‘But thought it a disgrace. There’ll be other Horaces. Before long. War coming.’
He went off then by himself, saying he must see the farm people and leaving me and Paul Treece together.
With love from Polly—I won’t write again for a while, as I think I’d like to see the letters that will be waiting from you at home.
The next morning I woke up and went to my window and saw Paul Treece standing with his back to me on the terrace, looking out over the meadows and watching the sun rise. It was a rose-pink sky on the horizon with navy-blue above it and the dew on the nearer grass where the mist had not yet touched it was like rime. Paul Treece’s bony figure looked gawky in the dawn and his clothes which seemed to be the same as yesterday’s—he had not even changed for dinner—looked crumpled as if perhaps he had slept in them or just dropped them on the floor. They were noticeably now too big for him. Also, as I saw him for the first time not in profile, I noticed that he had oval ears, standing out like shells at right-angles to his head and the rays of the sun as I watched shone through them and made them glow.
It may have been the ears that gave me the confidence to dress in two minutes and go down through the early morning house and out to the terrace to join him; though when he turned and saw me all my awe of yesterday came back. I stopped still and said (very silly), ‘It’s early.’
‘It’s not six. Look, here’s the sun.’
We stood side by side and as the sun burst up, listened to the tremendous palaver of the birds. The red farms on the plain were standing now up to their knees in mist and the river-bed was a gentle snake of cotton-wool crawling away to join the Ouse at Ouseburn to the south. He said, ‘It’s like The Mill on the Floss, isn’t it? All the prosperous farms,’ and my shyness went away. I said, ‘Oh no. It’s much prettier. They were great dark ominous places. Solitary. Great barns and things, all heavy and obvious—more like where I live.’
‘Oh—is that near Northamptonshire?’
‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘But you know Northamptonshire?’
‘I don’t know anywhere. This is the only piace I’ve ever been to stay in except for home. And Wales when I was a baby, but I don’t remember much of that.’
‘But the Midlands?’
I hadn’t realised The Mill on the Floss was in the Midlands–or anywhere except in a book. I hadn’t realised you could use a landscape in a book. I’d thought you had to make new ones. I knew the landscape of books–the weird sea-coast of Sallee, the primaeval wastes of Wuthering Heights, the rich isles of the Caribs, all the fancy places of French romance; the expanding-glass places of Gulliver. I knew every inch of Looking Glass Land and the underground places that open out from rabbit holes. It was the landscape of maps I found unreal—that’s to say useless to fiction. I hardly ever looked at Grandfather Younghusband’s globes now, in the study. I feared them rather. I said, ‘I’m not even very sure where The Midlands are.’
He said, ‘Where is “home”?’
‘To the North.’
‘I’m from the North-West. But I met Lady Celia in Cambridge.’
‘Have you known her for a long time?’
‘About three weeks. I met her at a concert. I sat next to her—she was visiting somebody grand. I’m in my second year there. She asked me to stay here.’
‘Yes I see.’
‘I’m a writer.’
‘I expect she had heard of you.’
‘Nobody’s heard of me. I haven’t published anything yet. She is good to poor writers. I was lucky to sit next to her. She invites anybody she thinks is promising. She is quite noted for it.’
‘Are all the others here promising?’
‘Oh goodness, yes. Some of them are Olympians. Are you considered promising in some way? I expect you’re still at school.’
‘I’m a sort of relation. I’ve never been to school. I don’t think I’m at all promising.’
‘Well, you’ve read The Mill on the Floss. It’s a start. Do you read many novels?’
‘I’ve read two hundred and eighty-three.’
‘Good heavens. I didn’t know there were—Were they mostly romantic?’
‘No, I don’t think so. I just read them in sets—they’re all in the study. Scott, Dickens, Hardy, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Disraeli and so on. Most of them I think were my grandmother’s though the study was my grandfather’s really. He was very stuffy. He read mostly holy things and about stones and so on. The Swift is his though. Swift is very good. I’ve read all the French ones too, but I don’t think he read those. He must have kept them out of sentiment when his wife died.’
‘Did you meet Lady Celia in a cultural way?’
‘No. I said—I’m a sort of relation. There was something between one of my aunts and Mr Thwaite. She’s just got married, so it’s rather a tense time.’
‘I am coming to adore Mr Thwaite.’
I thought, what a very strange thing to say.
We walked across the lawn and out of the door in the wall and headed for the water-meadows. Our feet were soaking. Paul Treece’s trousers were black with dew half way to the knee and clinging round his legs, not very engagingly. I said, ‘You’ll catch cold. You’ll have to change when you get in.’
‘Oh, I shall be all right.’
I felt troubled as we walked on and wondered why. We passed a man out hoeing turnips early and a string of cows, red as the farm-building they were leaving. The cows looked hesitantly, one by one, out of the byre and then stepped from it with a dainty step. They swung very slowly across the yard and into the lane watching us, edging by us with anxious eyes. They smelled milky and warm and blew damp mist from their noses. Cocks were crowing about the land and sun blazed up, round and brilliant above the stack-yards. How could I be troubled?
We came to a footbridge—a wooden plank on old stone pillars with a hand-rail polished smooth. The water ran quietly, wrinkling round the stones, and Paul Treece stopped on the bridge and stood smiling at the water, his hands on the rail. He was jumpy with pleasure. I had thought that poets were ruminative and sage—like Wordsworth and Tennyson—but Paul Treece was all arms and legs and jitter.
His trousers were drying and I looked down at my own wet shoes and stockings and realised why I wasn’t totally happy. When I’d been concerned for his wetness he hadn’t given a thought to mine. Also—another thing—one bit of grit can set another scratching—‘I adore Mr Thwaite.’
How could he adore Mr Thwaite? He’d hardly met him. It was not manly. Could one imagine Robinson Crusoe saying that he adored Mr Thwaite? Imagine Swift or Thomas Hardy! No, they would not. It did not do.
And how self-sufficient he was, springing about by the bridge. Now he was on the other bank picking things up and throwing them in the air. He was a bit dotty—as dotty as those Olympian Wolves at tea yesterday though at least he wasn’t so miserable. Dotty as the snapping painter.
