Good Behaviour (14 page)

‘Yes. I’m feeling rather awful.’

Hubert didn’t speak. He maintained the sly, withdrawn silence I remembered when, as a little boy, he was Mummie’s favourite
and I perched out in the cold. Before I had grown to love him.

Richard belted up his dressing-gown with exacting discretion and took the bottles out of the clothes basket. ‘No lemon, I’m
afraid,’ he said, as he sloshed the gin and dribbled the Cointreau into my toothglass and, as he said it, my unbelieving eyes
saw a lemon on the dressing-table, waiting for their drinks, not for mine. I think Hubert knew that I saw it, and knew that
he was too late when he crossed from bed to dressing-table to brush his hair with Richard’s hairbrushes. He sat there, his
bare shoulders sloped towards their reflection. Richard gave me back my glass and turned away. I think he looked at his wrist
for a watch he wasn’t wearing yet.

‘Perhaps we ought to dress,’ he said.

‘Yes, you’ll be late,’ I managed, although I knew they had hours of time till dinner, ‘I’ll let you get dressed.’ I put down
my glass. No doubt I could come back. In the mirror Hubert saw what I was doing.

‘Take it with you, sweetie,’ he said gently.

I stood outside the door with the dreadful brimming glass in my hand. Inside the room I heard them begin to laugh, relieved
giggling laughter, and when they supposed I had gone, shouts of laughter followed me – laughter that expressed their relief
from some tension and left me an outsider. Puzzled and anxious I sat on in my bedroom, sipping at the disgustingly powerful
gin without gaining from it any lift or exuberance. I waited for the minutes to pass, minutes that I had so carelessly expected
to spend in their company. Soon
the gin overcame my pain, but not my mistrust in happiness, or certainty in happiness.

The boys had a lot to say to Papa that night. They stayed a long time in the diningroom while Mummie and I sat in the library,
each near a silver lamp, and stitched away, I at my camisole, apricot crêpe-de-chine and écru lace, she with her tapestry,
green tulips on a white ground.

‘It’s rather sad they’ll be gone on Thursday,’ she murmured, as Papa and the boys delayed longer and longer in the diningroom.
She put away her tapestry and took up her patience board, as though to mark how time was going. I felt dry, set for ever in
my place as daughter of the house, unmarried daughter.

Papa came in and sat in his winged armchair. ‘They’re in the gunroom writing up the game book,’ he said to me, certainly supposing
that I would want to join them.

‘Oh, yes, are they?’ My voice came out cold and stifled, as changed as tonight was from last night. I felt him give me a look,
but he had the new
Horse and Hound
to read. Politely occupied we sat on, our thoughts our own, incommunicable. And then, coming faintly from the drawingroom,
we heard music: ‘
Wien, Wien, nur du allein
… ’ Last night I had swooped round to it, swayed about in its plunging and soaring melodies, sharing all the romance, and
the regret.

For a minute or two Papa didn’t turn or rustle a page of
Horse and Hound.
He stirred round in his chair as though he couldn’t find a comfortable position for his wooden leg. Then, as if it were a
new idea, he said: ‘They’re playing the gramo-phone.’ Then, after a pause: ‘I expect they’re waiting for you in there.’

I couldn’t answer. Mummie said, turning a tiny card: ‘Well, they know where she is, don’t they?’

Papa rustled and bunched up
Horse and Hound
and threw a dog down from his knees as if to hush or drown what she was saying. Then he was on his feet. ‘Come on,’ he said.
‘I need some exercise. May I have this one? Shall we dance, darling, shall we dance?’

I was mortified for us both. They didn’t want Papa, he knew it, and they didn’t want me, not this evening or ever again perhaps,
and I knew it. Yet here we were, two unwanted children determined to ignore our ostracism. Papa caught my hand and pulled
me with him as he hobbled down the hall, a nannie towing a reluctant child to a party.

‘
Wien, mein lieber Wien
’ came to us, shamelessly sweet through the shut mahogany door of the drawingroom. I hung back, despairing.

Richard and Hubert seemed not to hear Papa opening the door; the room was so filled with music. Hubert was sitting, a dog
on his knees, below the Negro’s shaded lamp. The light on his bent head shone his hair to a blue-black, and the forward turn
of his neck, between hair and white shirt collar, was as dark a brown as his hands on the white dog. Richard, standing behind
the tall wing chair, stooped his extraordinary height over Hubert and the little dog. His eyes, when he raised his head towards
us, held a look of anger and loss as if he suffered some unkind deprivation – something quite serious, like getting left in
a hunt.

‘Not dancing tonight?’ Papa said.

Hubert didn’t even look up. ‘Fleaing Tarquin.’ He pinched the nail of his forefinger with his thumb, destroying a flea.

‘I’m keeping the score.’ Richard sounded grave. ‘That’s five and two ticks.’

‘Bad light for that work, isn’t it?’ Papa said. No one answered.

Towering in the doorway, I only longed to turn and go. But Papa pushed me forwards into the room. ‘I’ve brought you a partner.’
The words sounded affectedly forced and silly. In my embarrassment I could feel the clumsiness of my hands as I clenched them,
of my height as I shrank it together, ashamed of being me, ashamed to be there. A moment more and I was rescued from myself.
I was changed, because Richard broke from the group by the Negro lamp and came across the room – his grace, his strength,
his intention all towards me. I was their object. I was to be their host.

‘Shall we dance a little?’ As he put a hand on my back, the music sobbed and died. He kept his arm round me while Hubert wound
up the gramophone and changed the record. ‘Whispering … ’ it croaked, ‘Whispering while you … ’

‘Let’s dance a little more’; the invitation was meagre. His voice always deprived any intention of its worth or warmth. Acceptance
should be on the same level. ‘Oh, if you like,’ I said, glowing in his strict embrace. He bent his height over my height.
He held me nearer than he had ever done before, as we danced away from Papa. Across my blinding happiness I heard Papa saying:
‘That’s right, that’s it. Keep tambourine a-rolling.’ He hobbled back to the hall – a boy let out of school.

I was shuffling happily through the heap of records for my next favourite when I knew that Richard was saying something urgently
to Hubert. Urgent and low, it did not concern me. I was out of the trough of that terrible wave in which I had suffered and
endured. I turned to dance with Hubert, when Richard caught me in his arms again; strange, because it was always dance and
dance about.

‘Where’s Hubert going?’

‘Walking the dogs with your father – I think that’s what he said.’

We moved away together. With Richard, with the music, with the pallor in the windows and the darkness in the room, my happiness
was restored to me, sounder, more assured than it had been in the morning. I took it with me to bed. Next morning, when I
woke, I could almost look at it, it was so real.

In those last days the boys kept me with them continually. Each day of early September was more perfect than the last. Grapes
were ripe in the battered vinery – those muscatels Mummie knew how to thin and prune. Butterflies – fritillaries, peacocks
– spread their wings on scabious, sedum, and buddleia, waiting heavily, happily for death to come. We sat among them, eating
grapes, the sun on our backs.

Our sea picnic was on an afternoon more encompassed by summer than any summer’s day. The haze between water and land carried
the one into the other. Cornfields, dry sand, rocks, sea merged in some sort of embrace, denying the summer’s end. And we
denied the idea that we should ever part. We swam. I felt a kind of abandon in the water and I showed it by letting my hair
flow out in the sea. Richard ascertained Mrs Brock’s rock and dived off it, turning about in somersaults and clasping his
knees under the sea. Hubert swam out, and away.

‘Call him back,’ I said. ‘The tide’s going out.’

‘Come back!’ we called. ‘Come back, you fool!’ Richard sounded angry and anxious.

Hubert was slow in returning and sat down on a rock with a towel, laughing and gasping, rather pleased by our anxiety. ‘Terrific
current,’ he admitted unwillingly, but anxious that we should know. My hair pouring great gouts of water onto my shoulders,
I stooped, crawling on the sands to find cowrie
shells at the feet of the rocks among wet shoaling pebbles, shells so small they were only just not sand.

‘Come on, old Sea Cow, unpack the tea.’ Hubert broke my picture of a sea-creature with wet hair. Was I only useful? Before
I found time to be hurt Richard was on his feet and caught me by the hands. When he pulled me up from the sand and towards
himself, I shall always be sure that his lips touched the sandy, salty crook of my arm.

‘You’re cold,’ he said. ‘Let’s run.’ We ran barefoot together with all our strength, far along the bare wet sands; the indecipherable
waves drew faintly back from our footsteps to the sea. I felt light as an antelope; I ignored my bosoms, shuddering and swaying,
inseparable from my life.

When we came back, Hubert had unpacked the tea. He had made a long hole in the sand and was sitting in it with all the mugs
and jam-pots and packets of food spread within his reach. He was being Mrs Brock. After tea I buried his feet in sand, and
we remembered something: Mrs Brock’s toes coming up through the sand like huge pearls; like young pigs. I sanded his feet
up again and patted them down.

‘You’re tickling my feet for burial,’ Hubert said. When Richard shivered and said he must walk and run again, Hubert caught
my hand this time and said: ‘Stay with me.’ He didn’t really seem to need me, only to stop my going with Richard. ‘I want
to talk to you, Aroon.’ He was lying back in his hole, games over. ‘I want quite a serious talk. You’re a big girl now.’

‘Yes – well?’ I had to admit it.

‘Sit down. Stop looking like a swan.’ A swan – my favourite bird. ‘A swan on dry land,’ he took it all back.

‘All right. I know. I don’t care.’ Again I felt my bosoms impeding my true progress; I couldn’t forget them as when I
thought I was an antelope. Swans had great bosoms too. But off the water, of course, they look terrible.

‘The place for your bosoms,’ Hubert was reading my thoughts, ‘is bed.’

‘Bed?’

‘I’ve seen you looking glorious in bed, in that white satin nightdress.’

‘The one cut on the cross? Nobody ever sees me in bed.’

‘Shall I tell you something? Richard wants to.’

‘I’ll put my chest-of-drawers against the door,’ I said, delight filling me.

‘Don’t rupture yourself, dear,’ he said crossly. Now I was displeasing. I felt the tide running out from me.

‘What could I talk about?’ I was giving way, little by little.

‘About me, if you can’t think of anything else.’ Hubert’s eyes were full of amusement.

‘And if Papa hears us chattering on about you? It’s past my door to his dressingroom.’

‘Papa won’t interrupt.’ He gave me a longish look. ‘I promise.’ It came back to me, Mrs Brock: ‘It’s a thing men do. You won’t
like it.’ Those awful mice.

‘I don’t want to do it, Hubert.’

‘Oh, and you were to have a share in the Black Friday colt.’

To share with them. We were a trinity. Hubert put his hand over mine. ‘Don’t give it another thought,’ he said, ‘just an idea.
I’ll tell Richard to forget it.’

‘Hubert,’ I said, ‘don’t tell him.’ We looked at each other deeply. We shared a tremor. But we had neither confessed one another
nor told our purpose. The air came between us, chill off the sea and wet sands. I stretched down my long arms and pulled him
out of his nest in Mrs Brock’s grave. ‘There’s a boat
coming in,’ I said, escaping into occupations. ‘Let’s go to the quay for lobsters.’

‘When Richard’s back.’ He gave a sweet yodelling cry that echoed off the water as stones skip over a quiet surface; it was
a gift he had, but he used it very seldom.

‘Did you hear?’ I asked Richard when he came back.

‘Hear what? I didn’t hear anything.’ Hubert smiled.

Low under the quay boats were coming in to their moorings. From its cliff top our cousins’ little house, Gulls’ Cry, seemed
to lean and look downwards, calculating the catches or disappointments below its windows. The two old lives up there were
as distant from our own as sand martins in a sandbank.

When lobsters were handed up to the quayside Hubert and I laughed and bargained with the fishermen we knew. Richard left us
and wandered off down the quay to where a young fellow – a gigantic, sullen blond – had just climbed up the ladder from his
boat. They stood together talking, and were still talking when the other men walked back in threes and pairs to the village.

Hubert and I waited, impatient to get our lobsters home in time for dinner. The same frustration and delay had happened here
before on the same sort of day; I remembered it now: with Mrs Brock when we were children – the recollection stood far behind
me.

‘You call him, Aroon.’ I wondered why Hubert had not sent out that bird-call of a yodel; neither would I shrill and call.
I walked down the quay to where they stood together, matched in their similar height. I saw Richard give the boy (he came
from a rotten family, drunks and Fenians all) a pound note. In exchange he took from him a fish-scaled box with three crabs
in it. I was silenced by his absurd extravagance.

‘We’re to take these crabs up to your cousins,’ his explanation for delay somehow faintly apologetic. ‘He says the old fellow
dying up there has a great fancy for a dressed crab.’

‘So have I. Let’s go home.’ Hubert sounded spoilt and tense.

I was entirely on Hubert’s side. I didn’t want Richard to meet our old relations, bearded Cousin Enid and drooling Cousin
Hamish hobbling round their dingy little house. Snob, of course I am not, but they would defile the end of such a day. Now
there was a division between us three, nervous and unspoken.