Crooked Wreath (2 page)

“What does he knit for?” asked Ellen, practically, bundling Antonia, the baby, into a state of helplessness in woolly coats and shawls.

“Well, it's most frightfully soothing to the nerves and encourages people to talk about themselves.”

“Then for heaven's sake, Ellen, don't bring any wool down to Swanswater with you. We don't want to spend the whole week hearing about Edward's fugues.” As they all went down the steps together, Peta said, putting her hand on Ellen's arm: “Your first real holiday in years, Nell; you must be quite excited.”

“Deliriously,” said Ellen, dryly. “Bella will drive me crazy the entire time telling me how to manage the baby, and your grandfather will spend the rare intervals telling me that I ought to have lots more–babies, I mean. Which, anyway, I can't, because Philip and Claire have fallen madly in love, and Philip has moved into the spare room out of loyalty to her.”

They climbed into the car; three cousins–Philip and Peta and Claire March–and Ellen, Philip's wife; and Edward Treviss, their half-cousin, whose grandmother Bella had, in the naughty nineties, been Sir Richard March's mistress and was now his wife. Philip sat gloomily at the wheel, in the shamefaced despair of a man over whom two women are quarrelling; Claire beside him regretted the exposure of their love to Ellen's earthy mockery; Peta, her own long legs wound round the packed legs of the baby's cot, prayed earnestly for strength not to appear silly and affected in front of darling Stephen, and Edward practised not looking
up
, with complete success. Ellen, pointing out trees and moo-cows to her daughter, fought with all her hardy spirit against the pain and humiliation of henceforward depending for her everyday bread and butter upon a man who no longer wanted her. “All the same, Ellen,” said Peta, attracted for a moment out of her self-absorbtion, “I do believe you're crying!”

“Antonia hit me on the nose with her wicked fist,” said Ellen. The baby, a helpless cocoon of woolly shawls, looked up at her mother with what well might be reproach.

2

G
RANDMAMA
S
ERAFITA
had kept her husband's love for twenty-five years, by the simple expedient of being everything to him that she fancied his mistress was not. “Tsimple? But of course,” she would insist in her charming broken English when her sons protested, laughing, against this qualification. “What is this Bella, after all? Not so very preeety. Not at all weeety. And,
enfin
, an intellectual! To be a woman and to be an intellectual, my dear boys–this is not compatible.
Le bon Dieu
did not intend men to fly; and he did not intend women to think. Nobody could call
me
an intellectual,” Serafita would declare proudly and with profound truth, “and it is a comfort to your poor father to come home to me from time to time and listen to a little feminine nonsense. She is very well, this poor Bella, but she is a bore. Let her remain peacefully at Yarmouth, and I, Serafita, shall remain here at Swanswater; and when I die, she will marry your father and console him for my loss. And
then
we shall see who will win!”

“Perhaps you may outlive her,
Maman
,” the sons would suggest, laughing again.

“No, no, I am too tactful to grow old,” Serafita would say complacently. “You shall see. I shall die, still young and beautiful” (she was at this time well over forty), “and your father will never forgive himself. He will bring her here, this Yarmouth Bella, with her illegitimate brat, and she shall live in my home and listen to nothing but ‘Serafita,' ‘Serafita,' ‘Serafita,' till she is sick of the very sound of my name.”

This was exactly what happened. Still young and beautiful at fifty, Serafita died; and Sir Richard married his mistress and with her continued at Swanswater–a magnificent old man with his great jutting nose and gentle, deep grey eyes; brilliant, stupid, ruthless, sentimental, splendid, pathetic, a living monument to the memory of the little hybrid ballerina who, in the merry days of the nineties had danced her enchanting way into his heart; and Bella, entering diffidently upon her inheritance, had struggled henceforward beneath the heavy burden of Serafita's posthumous spell. The three gay sons had been killed long ago in the days of the only war that counted for anything with Sir Richard; their wives were dead, too, or remarried and disappeared from the family ken. Only the third generation was left, but mercifully there they were–the grandchildren! Peta, the heiress; Philip, returned from that heathen America where in his childhood his mother had taken him; Claire, who insisted upon working in some dreadful newspaper office, full of nonsense about independence and a career. Not that Sir Richard cared two hoots about Claire; she could do as she liked with her life and so far that had not amounted to much! Peta was the darling; Peta the child of the eldest; Peta with her pretty ways and her fluttering hands whose charm could knock all Claire's blond beauty into a cocked hat. And Philip and Peta and Claire were all coming down today to Swanswater, to take part in the little ceremony that Sir Richard always held on the anniversary of Serafita's death. Serafita had loved fetes and anniversaries, and all the trivial ceremonial of well-conducted family life. And nowadays everything that Serafita had cared about had grown to be the law. Sir Richard stormed through the great house. “Bella! Is everything ready for those children? Is everything prepared for tomorrow? Has that old crone dusted the portraits? Has Brough done the geraniums? Has he sanded the paths?”

“I'm seeing to it all, Richard,” said Bella, patiently.

He stood teetering on the front terrace looking down across the drive and towards the lodge, and in the bright sunshine, all the air was heavy with the scent of Serafita's roses. Swanswater lay two miles out of the small town of Heronsford, in Kent, on the other side of the downs from Heron's Park and just across the Tenfold Ridge, from Pigeonsford. It had been a beautiful house in its day and the hall and principal rooms still wore the distinction of their Georgian elegance; but it had been much added to, and on either side of its plain brick front sprawled whole wings of glass houses, squash-courts, orangeries, and a swimming pool, with a nightmare of marble terraces and balconies. To the east, the house fronted on flowered terraces, running down to the river's edge; to the west, the gravelled arms of the drive enclosing a wide green lawn, opened out through magnificent wrought-iron gates onto the main road. Serafita's influence had dotted the grounds with little bowers and temples, each quite charming in itself, but utterly ruining the character of the park; and on either side of the gates stood two of them, highly ornamental lodges in pseudo-Grecian style. In one of these tiny houses lived Brough the gardener and his wife; and in the other, Serafita had died.

The chauffeur had lived there then. Serafita had been fond of this man; he had shared her passion for roses and between them they had ringed his little home with magnificent beds of Ophelias to which, in jealous competition with Brough, he had given devoted care. On the day of her death, she had stood with him for a long time in the hot sunshine, discussing the blooms which were then at the height of their beauty; and there she had been taken suddenly ill, carried into his sitting-room as being the nearest shelter, and so had died. Sir Richard, in his passion for memorial building, had swept the chauffeur into other quarters and built a shrine about the room in which she had breathed her last. One of the innumerable portraits had been moved in and hung upon the wall, a few pieces of furniture of which she had been particularly fond, were placed in the room, and the roses were henceforward to be considered sacrosanct; never picked but to decorate her memory. During all her fetes he haunted the place, increasingly fussy as the years went by over every small detail of ceremonial; but the anniversary of the night she had died, he invariably spent alone in the lodge. His original sentiments had long ago sunk into the dunderheaded obstinacy of, “I've always done it and I'm not going to stop now!” There would be a little ceremony in the morning at the actual hour of her death, and after dinner he would march solemnly off and finally settle himself on a specially arranged divan bed underneath her picture, for a night of vigil, often holding out for as much as twenty minutes before falling off into his customary untroubled slumber. This year again, Bella and his doctor protested and with increasing vehemence, but in vain. “My heart's perfectly all right, and if it isn't I've got this stuff in my pocket, I'll keep it by the bed. There's the telephone extension to the house and Brough and Mrs. Brough in the lodge just across the gates. Leave me alone, Bella! I will not be dictated to! And where are those children? It's nearly a quarter to.”

“They're coming, Richard. They've all had to go upstairs and change.”

“I should think so,” said Sir Richard, angrily. “The idea of thinking that just because it's a hot day again, they can come down here in bits of nonsense not fit to be seen in, at the best of times. I tell you, Bella, these modern young people are more than I can understand.” He started off down towards the lodge, pausing on the lawn to stand and roar up at the bedroom windows on the first floor. Ellen appeared on her balcony like a cuckoo from its clock. “Hallo? Were you calling us?”

“What do you think I'm doing, girl? A variety turn? Hurry up, the whole pack of you! It's a quarter to eleven.” He stumped on towards the gates and there vented some more of his irritability on the gardener. “I thought I told you to sand these paths, Brough? They're a disgrace, and today of all days!”

Three narrow, sanded paths ran up through the rose-beds to the lodge; one to the front door, one to the back door, and one to the French window of the sitting-room, which faced towards the big house. “The old woman's been back and forth cleaning the place,” said Brough, giving a perfunctory tug to the peak of his cap. “She's got the path all scuffed up; and her ladyship, doing the flowers and such …” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder towards his own domain where were his tool sheds and rubbish dumps, neatly hedged in. “I've got enough sand there for one more coat–and not a grain more; that'll be the end of it.”

“Well, let it be the end of it. Get the paths done before lunch.”

“I've got the geraniums on the front terrace to do,” said Brough. “You always want those picked off special, in her ladyship's week. Her
first
ladyship,” he amended, with a sly glance at Bella, whose fair, rather foolish round face flushed a little, uncontrollably, and stiffened into self-conscious unawareness.

Sir Richard marched forward on his journey. “You'll get those paths done before the day's out, Brough, or I'll know the reason why.” He paused before the French window, always the mode of entry used when going to the lodge from the house. “Well–this doesn't look so bad. The flowers are very nice, Bella.” His brow darkened, however. “What's all this rubbish doing here?”

The aged charwoman had evidently been called away suddenly near the completion of her task of cleaning up the lodge for today's ceremony; her vacuum cleaner stood abandoned in the middle of the room, its various attachments writhing about it in chromium coils. Bella, tchking, opened the door of the tiny hall between the sitting-room and the front door, and pushed the whole lot in. “Nobody will see it there; we always use the French window. I told her not even to bother to clean it.” With the toe of her shoe she made a little squirl in the dust on the tiled floor of the hall. “Where on earth does dust come from out here in the country? It's absolutely
thick.
”

“Where are those children?” said Sir Richard fretfully.

“They're coming, dear, they're coming.…”

He stood at the window, looking up towards the house, and at the roses ringing the little lodge. “The Ophelias are at their loveliest; one day more and their petals would be falling. A breath of wind would disturb them, even now.”

Bella went and stood by his side; still pink-and-white and pretty, but dumpy and short where Serafita had been so slight and tiny with her little hands and feet. “I always think it's extraordinary that she should have chosen the roses that would be just right for the anniversary of her death!”

“She was a remarkable woman,” said Sir Richard, evidently accepting this as a tribute to some occult power in his departed wife, rather than a comment on coincidence. “Ah, here they are at last!” He added indignantly that they were only just in time, though there were several minutes yet to go, before the hands of the little gilt clock pointed to the actual moment of Serafita's death. “Come along now, all of you, hurry
up!
Peta, be careful of those roses!”

Peta's flying hands had brushed a blossom as she came up the narrow path; its pale petals broke away from the ripening calyx and, drifting past her brief white skirt, lay forlornly on the sand. “Oh, Grandfather, I'm so sorry!” She squatted on the path to gather them up. “The very first to fall, and
I
go and do it! What a clumsy ass!” In the sitting-room of the lodge, she laid them out in formal pattern on the table below Serafita's picture. “There, Grandmama, my pet–a gesture of apology from your graceless granddaughter.” Sir Richard tutted and frowned, but he was secretly touched and pleased. He chivied the rest of them into a semi-circle round the portrait, one eye on the clock. “All right. Now, Peta!”

Philip and Ellen might be a trifle sheepish, but the others had attended Serafita rites too long to feel any self-consciousness about them at all. In their childhood, Peta and Claire had been forced into dancing, hopping about unsteadily with earnest faces, flapping thin, pink, apparently boneless arms; but Sir Richard had abandoned these efforts in disgust. Peta, instead, stepped forward a little and sang in her thin, clear, blackbirdy voice a lament over which Serafita had sentimentalized many years ago. Bella had made a wreath of the Ophelia roses, and this, as Peta sang, Sir Richard hung up over the portrait. Portraits of Serafita were everywhere, all over the great house as well as in the little lodge; and under each stood a gilt casket with pressed flowers, a pair of her tiny ballet shoes, and a pair of long, elbow-length gloves. The gloves had been her means to such little fame as she had ever achieved. She had not been, in fact, a very good dancer; but wise before her age to the value of publicity “stunts,” she had singled herself out from her innumerable sisters by appearing always in elbow-length gloves to match her little shoes. Now the gloves were cherished, laid by in lavender in their caskets all over the house: pink in the big drawing-room, scarlet in the dining-room, white in what was now her successor's bedroom, and black, of course, in the room where she had died. At a sign from Sir Richard, Claire stepped forward and solemnly took them out of the box, laying them on the table with the faded flowers and the little shoes. The song died away, and in the silence, the old man stood beneath the portrait looking up at the smiling, painted face with tears in his foolish blue eyes. “We'll all be quiet for a little while, and think of her.” After a while he turned towards them. “A little prayer now … Edward …”