Good Behaviour (10 page)

‘If you do that, Aroon, Moses will eat the babies.’

‘Men are such filthy creatures,’ I said, and I looked at Hubert with a brooding kind of wonder. Rose came back with slices
of chocolate cake from the drawingroom tea. There was a look of delighted excitement about her – an ask-me-not, touch-me-not
mystery, longing to be questioned and probed.

‘I’m to put ye to bed,’ she said, ‘and a half hour early if ye don’t mind; it’s my Thursday evening.’

‘And Ollie Reilly waiting in the laurels’; Hubert always knew the latest form in the stable lads’ courtships; it was an established
joke and Rose screamed with pleasure: ‘Oh, Master Hubert, who’s the bold unruly boy?’

Far from joining in the fun, I felt a wave of disgust go through me. Heaven knows what they would get up to in the laurels,
though not until after they were married, of course.

‘Sweethearts, sweethearts, sweethearts,’ Hubert chanted.

‘Hurry on, now. Wash your dirty mouth out and get down to the drawingroom.’

Papa was drinking tea from a tiny flowered cup. The sandwiches were tiny too, and only our two slices had gone from the new
chocolate cake. He got up as we came in.

‘I don’t like it,’ he said.

‘I shouldn’t worry – just hysteria.’

‘But I
am
worried.’

‘Then do whatever you think best, my darling, anything you like, I’m only too delighted –
always
.’

He came back from the door. ‘Bless you,’ he said, and went out again.

‘Get out your puzzles, children,’ she said, ‘and get on with them.’

Even Hubert didn’t speak; he breathed heavily over his puzzle and took up pieces he knew and put them back again. My puzzle
was full of swans, but I couldn’t have fitted a swan’s head onto a swan’s neck I was so abstracted. Every now and then I stole
a look at her, sitting there dressed in pale coffee-cream colour, little rosettes on her bronze house-slippers, a book in
her hand. It was impossible. She couldn’t have. Mrs Brock invented it.

‘
Bedtime
’ – the relief in her voice was enormous. Hubert did a funny thing. Going upstairs he took my hand. ‘She’ll be back, Aroon.
It’s all right.’ I was happy to give his hand a little squeeze. I forgot about the mice and all that stuff. Mrs Brock had
frightened me and failed me and now left me alone. Hubert might need me. Wild Rose didn’t hurry us to bed. Nobody waited for
her in the laurels; Ollie Reilly had driven the dog cart to Lisadore to pick up Mrs Brock. ‘And I hope they won’t leave my
bicycle after them,’ Rose said. But there was a darkness behind every joke. Ollie Reilly returned late, with the bicycle which
Mrs Brock had left, carefully propped, behind Fitzy Nangle’s wall, but without Mrs Brock.

All that night and through the days after, the house was murmuring with prayers: Hail Mary full of grace … Sweet Jesus have
mercy … Rosary beads were pulled out of apron fronts and churned about in nervous hands. Mrs Brock had gone away, they said.
When would she be back? Nobody could say. It was some time before they found her body, swollen almost to bursting the frilled
bathing costume. She was a very strong swimmer, and judging from where she was washed up, she must have swum a long way out
to sea.

I was sent to school the following year. Hubert went the year after, and in 1914 Papa rejoined his regiment. Mummie stayed
at Temple Alice and wrote to him nearly every day. On leaves in London he had a splendid time with all his girls – brief leaves
from France, too short for the journey home, and unrecorded in his letters to her. Years afterwards I read his letters, straightforward
boring accounts of daily happenings: charmless, passionless, with no relation to the magic quality he possessed. He didn’t
keep any of her letters, or I have never found them. I don’t suppose they would tell me anything I don’t know. She was so
cold.

Her greatest pleasure and distraction at that time was buying junk furniture. At sales and auction rooms she bought French
furniture and Regency, considered both ugly and worthless by her contemporaries; I rather agree with them – give me Chippendale
every time. But she brought the pieces home and spent hours cleaning and restoring; it was a holiday from the exhaustion of
painting and she liked the biting smells of the varnish removers and oil mixtures she lavished on the objects.

Wild Rose, still unmarried, was her aide and slave. On some days Mummie painted her or drew her in hideous angular poses:
long ribs, lean as a greyhound fit for the track, as she worked away at her polishing, crouched over the brass lyres and swans
so prolific in the decoration of Regency furniture. Every painting or drawing was half-finished, and full of gaps and holes
and unfailingly ugly, while Rose grew better-looking and blazed with more rude confidence every year that passed. She had
a snake-like dart of the head, and then the acid tongue spoke. Ollie Reilly had followed Papa to the wars without leaving
her the ghost of a hope for a plain ring on her finger, and she only laughed her way through unkindness or pity in the servants’
hall.

I wisht I was married

And into bed carried

In the arms of my mother-in-law’s son,

That the door would be locked

And the key would be lost

And the night would be seven years long.

She sang it harsh and loud – ‘Marriage is horrible anyway, and we’ve all time enough when we’ll be forty, girl. Isn’t that
right, girl?’

Oh love is pleasing,

Oh love is teasing,

Oh love’s pleasure when first ’tis new …

When the news came that Ollie Reilly had been killed (‘Tell Rose he died instantly; he never knew what got him,’
Papa wrote, and Mummie read her the letter), she was kneeling at the brass harpstrings of some piece of Regency rubbish, and
collapsed like a dead frog, Mummie said. ‘Such a good thing she wasn’t standing up or she’d certainly have fallen on something
and broken it, and we’d only just finished washing those Waterford glass rummers. Her howling and screaming made all the glasses
ring out.’ Mummie laughed. ‘Ring out wild bells … ’ Heaven knows what she meant by that. She never meant much. She never finished
anything. She never completed an act or pursued a serious undertaking. When, soon after the news about Ollie Reilly, a telegram
came to say Papa was wounded, she did not think of leaving Temple Alice to go to him. ‘There are so many loving friends in
London,’ she said. ‘They’ll do far more for him without his wife fussing round. All those women, cherishing and longing. Besides,
they’re so rich.’ She laughed faintly and went back to her painting, or her quiet fun among the Regency pieces.

We burned to rush over to his bedside. All the letters that came about him lay in piles and heaps on the hall table. There
were letters from dozens of Wobbly Massinghams and Lady Grizels multiplied over and over into unknown Dorises and Dianas and
Gladyses and Enids and a couple of Joyces. Mummie left them there, sticking out of their envelopes unread or half-read, all
saying how cheerful he was, and how funny about his leg – so lucky that the amputation was below the knee. Our stomachs turned
over when we heard this; but there was a quiet radiance in Mummie’s acceptance of his calamity. ‘I shan’t mind,’ she murmured.
‘He won’t be able to ride again,’ we said, facing his nameless, blank future. ‘No, perhaps not.’ There was a glow within her
quietness.

I planned a great welcome home for Papa – Union Jacks
and a wreath of Portugal laurel in the hall, something like that. I would have liked to get in a little piece about Our Hero.
W
ELCOME TO OUR HERO
, perhaps. In quite small letters, Hubert suggested. He was against the idea. In any case it came to nothing;
Papa returned on leave from his hospital while we were still at our hateful schools.

He was there when we got back for the Easter holidays, reduced in every way: in height; in weight; even his voice was lessened.
We kept our eyes off the stump of his leg, with the trouser leg neatly pinned up. He failed entirely to behave like the haloed
hero we expected. He repulsed our overtures and Union-Jackish questions, and shunned our riding show-offs, which we had hoped
would please him most of all.

This was an interval in his recovery; later in the year he was to have his wooden leg fitted. In the meantime he must rest,
he must eat. He did both, and drank as well, growing every day more irritable and rather fatter. He followed Mummie about
the garden at first; he even sat in the studio and watched her painting, after he had absorbed the small amount of racing
news in the daily papers. All the time he seemed sadly unoccupied, as indeed he was. He couldn’t ride. He fell into the river
when he went fishing. Long afterwards I knew things that were on his mind then. Reeking, new, they must have been terrible.
He had shot Ollie Reilly as he lay mutilated and dying; when he talked to Rose, Ollie’s death seemed quite enviable, here
and gone, out like a light.

Such things were so near and so apart from the honeyed life in Ireland. Every day was a perfect day that April. The scrawny
beauty of our house warmed and melted in the spring light. Through the long screens of beech and ash plantations blackbirds
flew low to the ground, calling high and scuttling
low about their love affairs. All the blackbirds in the county seemed to be courting and mating in these coverts; with piercing
sweetness they screamed, morning and dull eternal hours of evening, for love.

Papa slept badly. He came down late every morning, white and newly shaved and very cross. Perhaps he went, pegging his way
along, down to a field of young horses. Their possibilities and promises of improvement were plain to him, as was the fact
that he would have no part in their making.

Mummie suggested that he should drive around in Grandpapa’s donkey-chaise. Papa was appalled. ‘What do you think I am – some
kind of invalid?’

‘No darling, an able-bodied gentleman with one leg,
most
unfortunately, who ought to get about his place a bit more.’

‘You’re always absolutely right.’ His patient voice had a savage note in it.

Hubert and I were fired with curiosity about the donkey-chaise. We found it, stored away in a corner of the cartshed; a broody
turkey hen had her nest in it. We yoked a stallion ass called Biddy, and with him between the elegant, frail shafts, Hubert
leading me in the carriage, we advanced up the drive towards the house where Papa was standing, morose on his crutches, enduring
the long, sunny afternoon. The day
changed for him when Biddy, taken by some crazy notion, bit Hubert, kicked out the dashboard, whipped round, and bolted back
towards the farmyard.

‘But he’s quite dangerous,’ Papa said, with some life in his voice when, much later, he caught up with us at the farmyard
gate, where Biddy had stopped, to stand screaming for his wives.

‘Get out, Aroon, let me at him.’

‘Oh, Papa, should you?’

‘Shut up and get out, darling. And give me that stick.’ It was the end of our fun for the afternoon. Papa drove about till
teatime, master-minding every roguery shown by Biddy, who had any stallion’s dangerous temper. So they were pretty well matched.
‘I couldn’t have the little bastard – sorry, darling – biting and kicking your children, could I?’

‘Why not?’ She smiled as she added: ‘All right – kill yourself. Make a good job of it.’ She went back to her painting or her
gardening. She could always occupy his absences.

Something from these contests with Biddy lessened Papa’s melancholy and revived him. There was a spice in the daily excursions
because Biddy would not be tamed. His perversity was indestructible. ‘I’d be safer on one of your ponies,’ Papa said one day
when we rescued him with the chaise upset in a ditch and Biddy on the ground. ‘If I had my wooden leg, I’d kick the little
bastard to death.’ Papa spoke quite crossly as we helped him onto his foot again. ‘How am I supposed to get home? Both shafts
broken and no crutches.’

‘Papa,’ Hubert said, ‘if you just sat up on Delia, I could lead her, and Aroon could hold you by your leg. Your bad leg.’

He hesitated. Really. He was afraid – we smelt fear. We loved him for it. We waited for him to choose how he would
get home. And he chose Delia. It was the start of a new joke. We took him riding every day, and we were the kindest, most
understanding instructors. ‘Save me, save me,’ he would shout when he overbalanced, and, running by his side, we would catch
the empty loop of trouser leg below his stump and yank him back into the saddle.

‘You’re all right, Papa. You’re going great. Well done. You’re wonderful.’ We brought him at last to the dry ditch going into
the dry pond. We had all forgotten Mrs Brock; we never gave her a thought in those days – just a dead governess. ‘Come on,
Papa, you’ll do it.’

‘I can’t, you know.’ He looked very unhappy.

‘Just let her walk in and out,’ Mrs Brock had said to us. ‘No nasty jumping.’ We said the same to him, and led Delia time
and again through the wet beech leaves in the bottom of the ditch and up the plump track out of it, until he found the necessary
dash to hit her, one-two, behind the saddle – he couldn’t kick without falling off – and jump the ditch in style.

That was the beginning of our friendship with him, and with each other. The glory of this intimacy with Papa was our discovery
and adventure. We had originated his recovery. We had changed him. We were even his superiors in the thing that mattered most
in his life. Our own fears and nerves were close to us in time and gave us easy understanding of his helpless withdrawal from
danger. We loved the same fears that had shamed him in us. We had forgotten Mrs Brock, but it was by her methods that we deceived
and defeated fear. We were excitedly happy in our intimacy with him. The charm that was his second self embraced us for the
first time. When he did well I wanted to touch him and caress him; so did
Hubert. But we compromised on laughter and long glances. The absolute distance in our childhood, separating children from
adults, was bridged. He was dependent, the taker; we the givers.