Complete Short Stories (VMC) (51 page)

‘It is ungentlemanly to whistle,’ she said.

‘My sums are always right. It shows how I can chatter and subtract at the same time. Any governess would be annoyed by that. I suppose your brothers never whistle.’

‘Never.’

‘Are they to be clergymen like your father?’

‘It is what we hope for one of them.’

‘I am to be a famous judge. When you read about me, will you say: “And to think I might have been his wife if I had not been so self-willed”?’

‘No, but I hope that I shall feel proud that once I taught you.’

‘You sound doubtful.’

He took his book back to the table. ‘We are having a quiet morning,’ he remarked. ‘No one has visited us. Poor Miss Chasty, it is a pity about the necklace,’ he murmured, as he took up his pencil again.

Evenings were dangerous to her. ‘He said he would come,’ she told herself, ‘and I allowed him to say so. On what compulsion did I?’

Fearfully, she spent her lonely hours out in the dark garden or in her cold and candle-lit bedroom. He was under his wife’s vigilance and Florence did not know that he dared not leave the drawing-room. But the vigilance relaxed, as it does; his carelessness returned and steady rain and bitter cold drove Florence to warm her chilblains at the schoolroom fire.

Her relationship with Mrs Wilson had changed. A wary hostility took the place of meekness, and when Mrs Wilson came to the schoolroom at tea-times, Florence stood up defiantly and cast a look round the room as if to say: ‘Find what you can. There is nothing here.’ Mrs Wilson’s suspicious ways increased her rebelliousness. ‘I have done nothing wrong,’ she told herself. But in her bedroom at night: ‘
I
have done nothing wrong,’ she would think.

‘They have quite deserted us,’ Hilary said from time to time. ‘They have realised you are worth your weight in gold, dear girl; or perhaps I made it clear to my father that in this room he is an interloper.’

‘Hilary!’

‘You want to put yourself in the right in case that door opens suddenly as it has been doing lately. There, you see! Good-evening, Mamma. I was just saying that I had scarcely seen you all day.’ He drew forward her chair and held the cushion behind her until she leant back.

‘I have been resting.’

‘Are you ill, Mamma?’

‘I have a headache.’

‘I will stroke it for you, dear lady.’

He stood behind her chair and began to smooth her forehead. ‘Or shall I read to you?’ he asked, soon tiring of his task, ‘Or play the musical-box?’

‘No, nothing more, thank you.’

Mrs Wilson looked about her, at the teacups, then at Florence. Sometimes it seemed to her that her husband was right and that she was growing fanciful. The innocent appearance of the room lulled her and she closed her eyes for a while, rocking gently in her chair.

‘I dozed off,’ she said when she awoke. The table was cleared and Florence and Hilary sat playing chess, whispering so that they should not disturb her.

‘It made a domestic scene for us,’ said Hilary. ‘Often Miss Chasty and I feel that we are left too much in solitary bliss.’

The two women smiled and Mrs Wilson shook her head. ‘You have too old a head on your shoulders,’ she said. ‘What will they say of you when you go to school?’

‘What shall I say of
them
?’ he asked bravely, but he lowered his eyes and
kept them lowered. When his mother had gone, he asked Florence: ‘Did you go to school?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were you unhappy there?’

‘No, I was homesick at first.’

‘If I don’t like it, there will be no point in my staying,’ he said hurriedly. ‘I can learn anywhere and I don’t particularly want the corners knocked off, as my father once spoke of it. I shouldn’t like to play cricket and all those childish games. Only to do boxing and draw blood,’ he added, with sudden bravado. He laughed excitedly and clenched his fists.

‘You would never be good at boxing if you lost your temper.’

‘I suppose your brothers told you that. They don’t sound very manly to me. They would be afraid of a good fight and the sight of blood, I dare say.’

‘Yes, I dare say. It is bedtime.’

He was whipped up by the excitement he had created from his fears.

‘Chess is a woman’s game,’ he said and upset the board. He took the cushion from the rocking-chair and kicked it inexpertly across the room. ‘I should have thought the door would have opened then,’ he said. ‘But as my father doesn’t appear to send me to my room, I will go there of my own accord. It wouldn’t have been a punishment at bedtime in any case. When I am a judge I shall be better at punishments than he is.’

When he had gone, Florence picked up the cushion and the chessboard. ‘I am no good at punishments either,’ she thought. She tidied the room, made up the fire, then sat down in the rocking-chair, thinking of all the lonely schoolroom evenings of her future. She bent her head over her needlework – the beaded sachet for her mother’s birthday present. When she looked up she thought the lamp was smoking and she went to the table and turned down the wick. Then she noticed that the smoke was wreathing upwards from near the fireplace, forming rings which drifted towards the ceiling and were lost in a haze. She could hear a woman’s voice humming softly and the floorboards creaked as if someone were treading up and down the room impatiently.

She felt in herself a sense of burning impatience and anticipation and watching the door opening found herself thinking: ‘If it is not he, I cannot bear it.’

He closed the door quietly. ‘She has gone to bed,’ he said in a lowered voice. ‘For days I dared not come. She has watched me every moment. At last, this evening, she gave way to a headache. Were you expecting me?’

‘Yes.’

‘And once I called you Miss Mouse! And you are still Miss Mouse when I see you about the garden, or at luncheon.’

‘In this room I can be by myself. It belongs to us.’

‘And not to Hilary as well – ever?’ he asked her in amusement.

She gave him a quick and puzzled glance.

‘Let no one intrude,’ he said hastily. ‘It is our room, just as you say.’

She had turned the lamp too low and it began to splutter. ‘Firelight is good enough for us,’ he said, putting the light out altogether.

When he kissed her, she felt an enormous sense of disappointment, almost as if he were the wrong person embracing her in the dark. His arch masterfulness merely bored her. ‘A long wait for so little,’ she thought.

He, however, found her entirely seductive. She responded with a sensuous languor, unruffled and at ease like the most perfect hostess.

‘Where did you practise this, Miss Mouse?’ he asked her. But he did not wait for the reply, fancying that he heard a step on the landing. When his wife opened the door, he was trying desperately to light a taper at the fire. His hand was trembling, and when at last, in the terribly silent room, the flame crept up the spill it simply served to show up Florence’s disarray, which, like a sleep-walker, she had not noticed or put right.

She did not see Hilary again, except as a blurred little figure at the schoolroom window – blurred because of her tear-swollen eyes.

She was driven away in the carriage, although Mr Wilson had suggested the station-fly. ‘Let us keep her disgrace and her tearfulness to ourselves,’ he begged, although he was exhausted by the repetitious burden of his wife’s grief.

‘
Her
disgrace!’

‘My mistake, I have said, was in not taking your accusations about her seriously. I see now that I was in some way bewitched – yes, bewitched, is what it was – acting against my judgement; nay, my very nature. I am astonished that anyone so seemingly meek could have cast such a spell upon me.’

Poor Florence turned her head aside as Williams, the coachman, came to fetch her little trunk and the basket-work holdall. Then she put on her cloak and prepared herself to go downstairs, fearful lest she should meet anyone on the way. Yet her thoughts were even more on her journey’s end; for what, she wondered, could she tell her father and how expect him to understand what she could not understand herself?

Her head was bent as she crossed the landing and she hurried past the schoolroom door. At the turn of the staircase she pressed back against the wall to allow someone to pass. She heard laughter and then up the stairs came a young woman and a little girl. The child was clinging to the woman’s arm and coaxing her, as sometimes Hilary had tried to coax Florence. ‘After lessons,’ the woman said firmly, but gaily. She looked
ahead, smiling to herself. Her clothes were unlike anything that Florence had ever seen. Later, when she tried to describe them to her mother, she could only remember the shortness of a tunic which scarcely covered the knees, a hat like a helmet drawn down over eyes intensely green and matching a long necklace of glass beads which swung on her flat bosom. As she came up the stairs and drew near to Florence, she was humming softly against the child’s pleading: silk rustled against her silken legs and all of the staircase, as Florence quickly descended, was full of fragrance.

In the darkness of the hall a man was watching the two go round the bend of the stairs. The woman must have looked back, for Florence saw him lift his hand in a secretive gesture of understanding.

‘It is Hilary, not his father!’ she thought. But the figure turned before she could be sure and went into the library.

Outside on the drive Williams was waiting with her luggage stowed away in the carriage. When she had settled herself, she looked up at the schoolroom window and saw Hilary standing there rather forlornly and she could almost imagine him saying: ‘My poor dear girl; so you were not good enough for me, after all?’

‘When does the new governess arrive?’ she asked Williams in a casual voice, that strove to conceal both pride and grief.

‘There’s nothing fixed as far as I have heard,’ he said.

They drove out into the lane.

‘When will it be
her
time?’ Florence wondered. ‘I am glad that I saw her before I left.’

‘We are sorry to see you going, miss.’ He had heard that the maids were sorry, for she had given them no trouble.

‘Thank you, Williams.’

As they went on towards the station, she leant back and looked at the familiar places where she had walked with Hilary. ‘I know what I shall tell my father now,’ she thought, and she felt peaceful and meek as though beginning to be convalescent after a long illness.

At an early hour, the pale deer moved down from the high slopes of the park towards the lakes. Sunlight gilded the stone deer on the piers of the main gates, where the steward stopped his horse and shouted to the lodge-keeper to take in a line of washing. As he rode on up the great avenue he could not see a twig that was out of place; on either side, stretches of water – one harp-shaped, one heart-shaped – glinted as if they had been polished. The landscape might have been submerged all night and now risen, cleansed and dazzling, as new as the beginning of the world, this April morning.

Along the avenue, the clear shadow of the man and horse slanted across the gravel. To the steward this was a wonderful hour of the day. His master, the Duke, slept late, shut away in the great house, and until the moment when he rose and came out on to the terrace, his steward claimed his possessions for himself, watched
his
pheasants fly up in a flurry disturbed by the horse, as he passed,
his
hare leaping through the grass. When he met any of the estate men, he lifted his crop as affably as the Duke himself.

Farther up the hill, the road forked. The avenue with its lime trees continued up towards the stables, and the second road, treeless, austere, led over the Palladian bridge which spanned the narrow end of the harp lake; and there the house came into view.

The steward took this road, and, looking up at the great building, felt his sense of ownership lessening. The stained, brown sandstone was crowned with a vast green dome. In some weathers it could look frightening; but this morning the sun mellowed it.

The grassland swept right up to the terrace. There were no flowers, no shrubs to spoil the formality. Even the runs along the terrace were empty. Stuck rakishly among the hundreds of chimneys were three television aerials. Holland blinds made blanks of rows of windows, but at one window on the second storey the curtains were parted and a young boy, still in his pyjamas, was looking out.

Arthur was watching his father’s steward riding along before the house. The horse dancing like a race-horse seemed to be trying to shake off his
own shadow. There was a tremendous certainty about the weather, unlike the apprehensions which had gathered about the day itself. The sun went up in triumph and drenched the park-land with gold. Arthur had a feeling that he was looking down upon an empty stage, awaiting the development of a drama which he wondered if he would ever understand. He imagined, later in the day, cars coming up the drive; the invasion, as his mother named it, beginning – the great house, Hare Park, thrown open to the enemy at half-a-crown a ticket, exposed for the first time in its history to shuffling sightseers, sullied, cheapened. So the Duchess protested. Her husband was robust enough to laugh at her charges and she could not goad him with the sharpness of her tongue. Upon all his money-raising schemes she had poured her scorn. ‘You could let them be photographed in our bed at twopence a time,’ she cried. ‘Or I could pose stark naked on a plinth in the Orangery. I should be no more exposed than I shall be.’

‘What would your mamma have said to that?’ he asked gravely.

‘What would Mamma have said?’ had been her theme for months. Once upon a time, Mamma and her friends had supposed that she had married well. Yorkshire had thought it a staggering match. She had gone from the manor house near Harrogate to the great ducal seat in the south; had gone, as now was shown, from gentility and decency, to vulgarity, publicity and flamboyance. Mamma was dead, though, and spared knowledge of such an indecorous traipsing about her daughter’s home, of pryings and pokings, ribald comments, names scribbled, souvenirs stolen, germs breathed out.