Good Behaviour (12 page)

I was fiercely shy. I would never have got myself to a party without Hubert and Papa. They really worried themselves silly
about my success or failure with men. I don’t really mean ‘failure’; I can’t have been one, because, since I had become Papa’s
and Hubert’s joke and invented character, men, real grownup men, danced with me quite often. Now I never sat out more than
two dances running and that can happen to any girl. Of course, I have this wonderful sense of rhythm. My charleston was a
poem, and could be the same today if there was any decent dance music.

Dancing with Hubert was the most wonderful experience I shall ever know. Because he was my brother we could do every intricate
step and take the wildest positions without embarrassment. Dancing together we were possessed by the music. The band played
for us, giving us what we needed. To me it was the absolute. I was resistless in the strength of a river that had no source
and reached no sea. With other girls he was not a spectacular dancer. I don’t think his girls ever knew when he had stopped
dancing and was aiming for the bar and a free drink with Papa. That was not always their destination. I once heard him screaming
from a car: ‘Help! Help! I’m being
raped
!’ He was laughing so much when I got there that all he could say was: ‘Atom, she interfered with me.’ ‘Make up your mind,’
the blonde said. ‘What
do
you want?’ And she went flouncing
off. Hubert held my hand. ‘I wish I knew,’ he said. ‘I do wish I knew.’ He was still laughing.

It was so marvellous that I should enjoy myself, perhaps I exaggerate the luxurious sensation these times and parties gave
me. But the parties happened. I was there, in the heart of things. I see chains of rooms opening one out of another. I didn’t
discriminate then as to whether they were rooms in grand eighteenth-century houses, or rooms in grand Victorian country houses,
or rooms in grand hotels. They are all rather dark to me now, as they were then, banked with evergreens, here and there a
gleam from a cold greenhouse – some pallid flower, dim among the mosses and ivies and variegated periwinkle.

The men were the flowers in these mysterious forests, sleek and orchidaceous in their hunt coats, the facings and collars
pale, thin gold watch-chains crossing meagre stomachs, white ties as exact as two wings on a small bird’s back, long legs
black as cypripedium stems, hands sometimes gloved, eyes focused distantly, as if a fox stealing away from its covert was
still the thought in mind. They would look over my shoulder and away, and they never listened to a word I said. If they spoke
it was about the day’s hunting. The theme was always what hounds had done, or what sad stupidity their huntsman had shown
in handling them. It was all a stylish performance, never a human side to it; nothing personal, no boastfulness, or only in
a very sidelong way, never a heart-warming admission of cowardice, or hatred of a horse. No truth that could betray the myth.
When I was twenty, foxhunting was Wholly Holy and everybody was an apostle or a disciple. If you were a doubting disciple,
so much the worse for you – keep quiet and show willing. I was neither cowardly nor unwilling, but my
great height was an awkward problem for me and for my horse; our groom, Tommy Fox, was always whining away about the state
of its back, and encouraging Papa to discourage me from going out.

To be truthful, I rather adored the days when I was horseless and drove our car round after the hounds. The back was stuffed
with good things to eat and drink; our car was a famous bar and buffet. The Master would even
speak
to me sometimes, when I handed him a beaker at the end of the day. ‘Bless you, darling,’ he said once, and the blood drummed
in my ears. But before I had wrenched the lid off the box of pheasant sandwiches he had ridden away and his place was taken
by the Crowhurst twins.

The Crowhurst sisters were almost identical twins; Nod and Blink were the baby names they still went by, although at that
time they were almost thirty, nearing middle age. Everybody was kind to them because they had no money, nothing but Good Old
Blood, and deft inventive ways. They did their own horses, and everything for themselves as well. They almost made their own
boots. They could not make their bowler hats, which were wide and green and had belonged to their aunts, but their neat double-knitted
waistcoats of canary yellow were bright and new and lined with chamois leathers meant for cleaning silver. They rode astride
and very well too, one had to admit, and, of course, never gave sore backs. ‘Your father told us to have a warming drink,’
they said crisply and almost together; it was nearly a challenge to me to offer them soup. ‘Port or whisky?’ I asked and clapped
the lid back on the pheasant sandwiches. The Crowhurst girls were never among my favourites. I cannot understand what Papa
saw in them.

When the last covert was drawn and the last sound of the ‘Go Home’ note had fallen from the air and the hounds, pinch-bellied,
thronged the road before their long jog back to kennels, Hubert and Papa would give me their horses to hold while they rummaged
in the car for drinks and sandwiches. I can smell the sweat and the leather in the evening air as I waited, talking the horses
into quietness, rubbing the itch under their bridles, and doing my all to keep their heads towards the hounds, and their heels
turned towards the ditches. Hubert and I would ride home together, so that Papa might rest his bad leg in the car. Then we
were in confidence and accord: deciding on how to avoid riding home with the Crowhurst girls, or debating the idea of another
drink, when and where we would revive ourselves for the miles that remained of our long hack home.

Once, on a January evening, Hubert delayed so long in the Central Bar (centre of nothing but a bog and a post office) that
the horses were getting cold, and so was I. He came out at last, no drink for me in his hand, and the man who owned the Central
Bar at his elbow.

‘Get him up on his horse,’ he said, ‘if he’s able, and let him keep out of my place; it’s not for his sort.’

I was really shocked at his manner. They are usually more than glad to welcome the gentry. After one look at Hubert I could
see that he was simply faint from lack of food, so I shot into the bar to buy him a packet of biscuits. A dreadfully naughty-looking
boy was standing on a chair and waving to Hubert through a tiny window. He looked as eager as any blonde at a hunt ball. ‘Biscuits,
please.’ I tapped sharply on the counter with half-a-crown. ‘Ginger biscuits.’

‘We have only Kerry Creams,’ he said softly, glancing away
from me and back to the window. I snatched up the packet and hurried out. I didn’t like the place.

Then, just as Hubert failed for the second time to get his foot in the stirrup, the Crowhurst twins rode past. He was laughing
helplessly, and the horses were all over the road.

‘Enjoying yourselves?’ the twins said in their sharp way as they rode neatly together into the evening. When they got home
they would do their horses and give them chilled drinks and warm, long-prepared mashes, before they had some of that wonderful
potted fish (it’s their secret still) on toast for their own tea. Good gals, good gals, people said of them. Really keen.
They were happy, I suppose, in their exact way. Their days must have been full to exhaustion point, what with their horses
to feed and groom and exercise, making all their own clothes, and keeping their dogs as primly perfect as babies with an English
nannie; but they never knew, poor things, what happiness meant, as I knew it with Hubert and Papa – and then, Richard.

It was towards the end of the second summer after Hubert had made the happy break and change in my cheerless social round
that he brought Richard to stay at Temple Alice. Nothing could have been more pleasing to Papa. His oldest friend Wobbly Massingham’s
boy, how right that he and Hubert should be friends; how right, and hopeful, that Hubert should bring him along to be my partner
and escort for the Horse Show balls.

Although I assumed a great carelessness, I felt hopeful too, and I bicycled early and late to my appointments with the local
dressmaker. Mrs Harty was a big heavy woman with a club foot. She had a zest and imagination unsurpassed where clothes were
concerned. My height was a challenge to her; there was such a lot of me to be dressed.

‘Keep to beige, Miss Aroon,’ she would implore, ‘and keep it simple.’ When I brought her patterns of rose-clouded chiffon:
‘We’ll only look like an arbour in a garden,’ she said sadly. I felt a little cross at this uncalled-for comment but I ignored
it, naturally, and ordered ten yards of the rose chiffon.

I was so anxious over the accomplishment of my clothes and so weary from bicycling through hot July afternoons for their fittings
that my curiosity about, even my interest in, Richard stayed below the surface. He was a man for the Horse Show and its dances;
that was God-given and enough. Hubert did say to me: ‘You don’t seem much interested in my friend.’

‘I am, really.’

‘And I’ve asked him all for you.’

‘You know he’ll hate me.’

‘Why should he? He was dotty about Bronwyn Morbyrd and she has the Burnham legs, poor girl.’

‘Oh, don’t tease – what
am
I going to talk about?’

‘Not horses. He likes a good giggle about Mrs Brock.’

‘Mrs Brock? You can’t mean it.’

‘Yes, I do. She was our first laugh.’

‘How weird.’ I felt her wild hands on my shoulders; I saw my little Minnie and her squirming mites; I clearly remembered every
word spoken then. Not very serviceable as light chat.

‘And look what I’ve found,’ Hubert spoke in his most side-long, jeering voice. He pulled it out of the schoolroom bookshelf,
out of a copy of
The Children’s Golden Treasury
. It was from Mrs Brock’s Stoke Charity gallery, a portrait of Richard, eight years old, sitting on a photographer’s balustrading,
eyes lifted upwards from the sloped cricket bat in his hands; he wore a white shirt with a deep Byronic cleft to a plump cherub
chest.

‘Rather silly, isn’t it?’ Hubert laughed and put the picture back inside
The Children’s Golden Treasury
and squeezed the book in between the packed, forgotten song-books and story-books of our childhood.

I was appalled when I met the present Richard. In him I saw the embodiment of all the young men who had paralysed me into
the maintenance of a silence broken only at rare intervals by some vicious platitude. Here he was, and for five days and five
nights he would have to endure my company, my size, and my countrified simplicity. I rocked a little on the Louis heels of
my strapped lizard shoes as I stole looks at him between the business of marking my catalogue and thinking of anything to
say about any horse being judged in Ring 4. Long legs I saw (I had expected that), eyes discriminating and critical as a bird’s;
small ears; crisp hair; rolled umbrella, swinging stylishly as a sword; he came straight from the middle pages of the
Tatler
and
Bystander.
The right family, the right school, the right regiment had all been his. I was stunned between fear and admiration. He was
brown (from Cowes Week), lean and hard (polo at Hurlingham); he had ridden the winner of a Grand Military (Sandown should
have been written on his forehead). How could I think of a word worthy of his attention? Leaning on the rails of the judging
ring I breathed the exhausted atmosphere of
déjà vu
which he exhaled as he indicated exactly which three horses the judges would pull in first, second, and third. I knew he
would move through the show and all its galas in the same mood of exhausted natural disdain. He wore his bowler hat tilted
to a distinctive elderly angle, well calculated to emphasise his own glorious youth. As I leaned beside him, the ache of pride
and shyness drove me into the farthest depths of silence.

‘Don’t try,’ Hubert said that first night before dinner. I felt his constraint and anxiety. ‘Just be your natural self,’ he
advised. So I was not any more the happy joke he and Papa had invented. Desperation filled me. Right, I thought, I can’t
talk. But I can eat. I can be the fat woman in the fairground; the man who chews up iron; the pigheaded woman; anything to
escape from hopeless me. So, at that first dinner before the first ball, I wolfed down sensational quantities of food. Almost
a side of smoked salmon, and I ate a whole lemon and its peel as well; most of a duck; four meringues and four pêches melbas;
mushrooms and marrow on toast; even cheese. ‘What else can we find for her?’ Richard asked Hubert. ‘She really is a great
doer.’ They cheered me quietly. I was a joke again. I was a person. I was something for them to talk about.

He danced with me all night. I longed to exploit the skills Hubert and I had perfected. I ached to show him what I could get
up to. But he persisted in his hesitant, intimate night-club shuffle. There was a trick and a style about it too. It retreated
from the vulgarity of other people’s efforts; it was part of his escape from the usual, a cultivated mannerism such as the
old gentleman’s tilt to his hat.

The Horse Show proceeded on its traditional five-day course, but how differently from earlier martyrdoms of fixed and smiling
loneliness. This time there was no more waiting under the clock for Papa to disengage himself from business or pleasure. Hubert
and Richard jostled me kindly between them from breakfast to bedtime. I was so happy, I felt they loved me. It was enough
that they shared jokes with me; Richard even invented one of his own: ‘Pig-wig,’ he called me. And once I heard him say to
Hubert: ‘Our Pig-wig.’ To this living moment I experience a shudder of bliss.

On the last day Richard bought a yearling in the Bloodstock Sales. I sat between him and Hubert on the circular benches, while
the yearlings, coming up for auction in the ring below us, were pulling back, kicking, or mincing politely
round. I didn’t even realise Richard was bidding, his gestures were so quiet and small and knowledgeable. I thank God still
that I didn’t happen to be talking, just thumbing through the lots in my catalogue. Suddenly I felt Hubert’s tension beside
me, and I saw Richard’s eyes blazing with excitement under the old gentleman’s tilt of his hat. Excitement was caged and unspoken
in a cool exaggeration of restraint. But, beyond the coolness, as the bidding went on, there was white heat. Outside in the
sunlight, on the grass, we looked the colt over.