Good Behaviour (23 page)

‘All the same, there’s a kink in all these Great Moments horses and he hasn’t a very nice reputation.’ He looked at me. It
was a penetration. ‘He hops it, doesn’t he?’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t call it that.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I don’t know how the story got around.’

‘My father was talking of selling him.’

‘Talking is as far as we’ll get. Now,’ he looked away before
his eyes came back to me, ‘as it’s a question of urgency – that’s one great yearling out there. He’s saleable all right.’

‘Yes. I own him.’ I felt pleasurably inflated by the simple statement.

‘There’s something you could turn into ready money.’

‘I’m not thinking of selling him.’ The value of my present from Richard grew immeasurably real to me. What if he did bite
or kick me and do nasty things to the donkey, he was there, a solid testimony to my love, our love, growing more cheeky and
better-looking every week. He would be there when Richard came back. We would walk up to him together.

‘It’s just an idea,’ Mr Kiely said. ‘Two hundred pounds – perhaps I’m foolish … you could have it in notes.’ He paused. ‘I’m
meeting an English fellow today; he’s a spotter for one of the big trainers; I could have interested him. However –’ he sighed
and gave up the idea. ‘If I’m to see the first race,’ he said, ‘I must be off.’

A door upstairs banged, clapping shut; the bedrooms were too far off for any voice, even a child’s cry, to reach the civilisation
of the hall where we stood, but the angry sound recalled Papa’s circumstance too clearly. I reeled towards a decision: my
present, my all. It was the death of my heart. Mr Kiely was edging away. I would lose my only way out. ‘Make it three hundred,’
my voice was saying, ‘and I’ll put the brown horse in the deal.’

‘Right, and not a word to Mother, isn’t that it?’

I resented the degree of familiarity. Why should he know whether or not I kept the matter my own secret? But, as we sat together
on the vast round of the sociable and bank notes fell between us among the woolwork roses and petunias, I felt
rather less intolerance towards him. I had never seen so much money. I rustled my hand through it, like feet in autumn leaves.

‘I must be off,’ he said. ‘Do you ever have a bet?’

‘Oh yes, sometimes.’ I never did.

He picked up one of my many five-pound notes. ‘There’s a good thing in the fourth race. I’ll put you on a fiver, if you like.’

How could I tell him five shillings would be my limit? I didn’t care for his gesture. Win or lose, it would be another link.

‘That’s all just between our two selves.’ He was smiling as he shook my hand (quite unnecessarily) before he went skipping
down the steps as fast as a child, out into the morning and away from Temple Alice. I wished I need never see him again.

I hurried back to the sociable, eager for the comfort and security the money in my hands must give me. No comfort came to
me. I sat among the bank notes and the roses, great fat tears bouncing off my fat cheeks. I had sold my only true love-token.
The shudders going through me were as deep as my loss.

Tears are such rotten behaviour, but a disgraceful warmth and ease followed them for me, and I knew a purpose, and a power
to fulfil it, actually belonging to me and to nobody else. I was someone. I felt respect for myself and a sense of authority.
I would dismiss Nurse, and I would have her out of the house and on the train to Dublin before Mummie left her studio. But
I owed myself some ceremony in the act. I rang the bell and sent Breda to summons Nurse to the library. I arranged myself
in Papa’s chair at the writing table, pen, ink,
paper, tidy bundles of bank notes, a neat heap of silver, and my own aloof expression all set before she came coolly rustling
in, fresh and pink-cheeked as the African lilies Mummie had left on a low table.

‘I suppose you thought we should have a little talk.’ She sat down, crossing her neat legs. I hadn’t asked her to sit down,
and the only thing I could do about it was to stand up myself.

‘Is there anything for us to discuss, Nurse – except your wages and the time of the train to Dublin?’ My voice sounded frozen
to me, light and disparaging. I don’t know where it came from.

‘My salary amounts to thirty-four pounds, six and eight. I can have my cases packed in ten minutes – and gladly.’

‘Yes,’ I said, still in the same voice. ‘Yes.’ I felt some pleasure in producing it. ‘Perhaps you’d like to count these notes.’

She accepted them from me. She counted them quickly. ‘Well. Thank you.’ She tucked my money warmly between her apron front
and the bold blue stripes of her dress. ‘Will you be driving me to the station, Miss St Charles?’

‘I hope Tommy can take you.’ She still delayed. ‘Perhaps you should start packing.’

She turned back again from the door. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘you can’t name it, and I won’t name it. It’s a nasty name for a nasty
thing.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I was surprised back into the use of my own voice.

‘That’s all I’m going to say. Only, if I was you—’

‘And if I were you I should get my suitcases packed as quickly as possible. I would rather hate you to miss your train.’

My rejoinder was both neat and dignified, but as she went
out of the room a peculiar curiosity, an unspoken unpleasant surmise, stayed with me. It was as if her body, clean and fresh
as pine needles, had left a smell behind it on the air, a clinging smell, which I would rightly ignore.

The wonderful thing that came out of my decision and sacrifice was Papa’s improvement. We all felt it like a radiance.

Rose had a nurse’s freedom with him now. She could warm his foot, or rub methylated spirit and powder into his heel or his
bottom; she could give him clean sheets every day, and freshly ironed pyjamas sometimes twice a day. One guessed that a little
accident had happened, but he never looked frightened or distressed, only amused and apologetic. Rose would soak him in eau-de-cologne,
disparaging to nothing that sharpish tinge of ammonia. She would brighten and tidy him with almost professional dexterity,
and leave him propped on clean pillows, scented and burnished. When she went away to see about tea, he would look after her
longingly. Or perhaps, as he pushed up his moustache, he was looking longingly towards the door because Mummie was coming
in. She would bring a little bunch of cyclamen or a freakish early sprig of daphne, anything that smelled sweet and strong
when she pinched it or threw it on the fire.

Rose and I came in with the tea. Teatime with Papa had
become a habit, now. Mummie was sitting on a low nursing chair near his bed. She was leaning back, away from him, miserably
silent as he tried to tell her something. He was making a great effort.

‘I say, I say, I say,’ he was going on like a comic starting his patter, and Rose was just in time to share in his struggle.
She put down the tray and leaned across his bed to straighten the blue bird’s-eye scarf in the neck of his blue silk pyjama
coat, and to mop his mouth a little. ‘Beastly,’ he struggled on, ‘beastly, beastly … ’

‘Yes, I know, darling. I’ve always thought so,’ Mummie answered at random, desperate for him to stop. When he lay back on
his pillows like a stuffed doll, it was easier for her to sit quietly, and pinch on her verbena leaves and think of other
times. But Rose, lifting him up as if she would shake words out of him, was living in the present, and lending him her strength
for his effort.

‘What’s beastly, Major? Tell us, Major. You nearly had it.’

‘Beastly – cold – bathwater,’ he finished on a senseless note of memory. But not quite – Rose held the clue.

‘No more cold baths,’ she comforted him, ‘since her lady-ship have went. And no more cups with spouts neither.’ She poured
out his tea in a proper china cup and put in cream and sugar, both disapproved by Nurse, and fed him gently. She acted as
though she had dispossessed his life of Nurse, while I had done it, and longed for him to know that it was my doing.

Mummie had been less than grateful when she heard of Nurse’s departure. ‘Gone? Without her wages?’

‘No. I paid her.’

‘You can’t have, without consulting me.’

‘I sold my yearling. I thought you’d be pleased.’

‘You are a remarkably poor judge of pleasure.’

‘Papa and Rose are delighted.’

‘Oh yes. Rose will have him all to herself now.
Far
too much for her.’

‘Dr Coffey thinks Rose and Tommy can manage.’

‘It will give Rose far too much to do,’ she said again. And then, with extreme distaste: ‘Who is going to hear him if he calls
for “something” in the night?’

‘Can’t Rose sleep in the pink room, where Nurse slept?’

‘Not really.’

‘Why not?’

‘Oh, Aroon, would you kindly leave the matter to me. Haven’t you interfered about enough?’ She sounded more distressed and
exasperated than actually angry.

I didn’t press on. I would wait. I felt stronger. It was not happiness that was growing in me, but it was some kind of reason
and purpose. Perhaps I would be the one to undertake the grim discussion with Mr Kiely; he had almost suggested it. Four days
later he did suggest it. A letter enclosing three ten-pound notes and a five-pound note came for me, saying: ‘We got a nice
little price, didn’t we? Your winnings herewith. Perhaps Mrs St Charles or yourself would drop into the office someday soon,
to discuss the other matters.’

How to tell her, without saying he had written to me? Don’t tell her, don’t tell her anything. That became my strength and
my stratagem. That was why I didn’t say that I knew for certain Rose was sleeping in the pink room every night now. If she
didn’t have to know she would let matters take a course of their own. Rose knew that too. She had not asked for any direction
about sleeping in the pink room. There she was and
thank God she was, sleeping lightly, ever ready for his call, and competent in all necessities.

Soon I knew something else I was going to keep to myself. I knew the Crowhurst girls had gone away. I would let Mummie find
it out. Although I could have told her this, I was learning to keep everything to myself now that I was a woman of means;
no, a girl of means; no, a woman. You are a woman if you have had a lover in your bed as I have had. Poor things, always the
Crowhurst ‘girls,’ and without any means.

‘I suppose you heard the Crowhurst girls did a midnight flit?’

I had gone to Mr Kiely’s office without Mummie, and with another great package of bills. He leaned across the wide top of
his desk as if he would narrow the distance between us. I thought it would have suited his position in life better if he had
sat upright. I was there on business. I had not come in for a gossip, or a cup of tea, or a cigarette, all of which I was
offered.

‘Yes. They’re going to Husband’s Budsworth for a month or two,’ I said.

‘Not the address the post office has for forwarding letters,’ he corrected me. ‘I happen to have a little business to settle
up for them. I sold their three-year-old.’

I wasn’t going to ask him about the business, but he had guessed rightly at the creep of curiosity in my mind.

‘They’re terrors to make a deal –’ he laughed – ‘but they’re two great girls.’

‘Who feeds the dogs?’ My voice sounded tremulous to me; the news of their going was such bliss. Still, one had to show some
concern for animals.

‘That tinker fellow they had around the horses; he goes in every day.’

‘Fancy leaving the tinker in charge,’ I said. ‘How
sad
.’

‘About your own little trouble.’ He whisked the papers in a cardboard file together. ‘I think we have the worst cases quietened
for the present. They’ll wait on till they see how things go with the Major.’

‘My father is so much better.’ I felt a broad delight in being able to tell him this. It was my due. He did not look nearly
as pleased as I expected.

‘Ah, well,’ he said, ‘there’s always a change in these cases.’

I put on my gloves before I said goodbye, and I gave him just the ends of the fingers. I had seen Mummie do that. It has a
repelling effect.

‘Pleased with your win?’ he asked. I felt my face flare up. How had I forgotten to say thank you? And he had ignored my glove
tips; he was shaking, no, holding, my hand beyond them. ‘Well,’ he let my hand go easily, ‘we must chance another little gamble.’

Irritated and confused, I stumbled out of the room. Why think of him at all? There were other, less irritating, matters to
consider. The Crowhurst flight for instance. The reason I enjoy other people’s disasters is because they involve my understanding
and sympathy in a way their successes never can – I like feeling genuine pity. Even when I know they are unworthy of my interest,
I don’t think I am ever ungenerous to friends more unlucky than myself. I would have loved to go and see what the Crowhursts’
dear little house looked like, felt like, smelt like now.

Day by day Papa improved a little. His speech was better, although his mind and memory were still utterly confused. There
was a touching quality in his polite acceptance of all his embarrassing dependence on Rose, and every day I was finding more
comfort and order in my heart through my importance to him. I was the one who read aloud the racing correspondents.

‘That fool,’ he would say. And ‘No. No. No,’ to each of the selected runners. On the days when he was right in his contradictions
we were absolutely triumphant. I thought how, when spring came, I would lead him about the place in the donkey-chaise. Papa
would be pleased, and so should I. It would be delightful, taking him round like something in a pram.

I saw quite a vista of things I could do for Papa – plans and pleasures for which he would love me. Now and then I would tell
him of these cheering prospects, but he did not always understand or even much look forward to them. For instance, when I
planned for the future summer, days when I might
drive him to the sea (in the car, of course, not in the donkey-chaise) and even envisaged the kind of sandwiches we might
take with us, he grew quite fussed and angry.