Good Behaviour (3 page)

‘You’re upset,’ I said gently. ‘Naturally you’re upset. You loved Mrs St Charles and I know you didn’t mean one word you’ve
just said to me.’

‘I did too, Miss Aroon.’ She was like a drowning person, coming up for a last choking breath. ‘God help you, it’s the flaming
truth.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I answered. ‘I’ve forgotten … I didn’t hear … I understand. Now we’ve both got to be practical. We must both
be brave. I’ll ring up the doctor and you’ll take that tray to the kitchen, and put the mousse over a pot of boiling water
– it may be hours till lunchtime.’

She took up the tray, tears pouring down her face. Of course I had expected her to obey me, but I won’t deny that before she
turned away from the bed, the tray, as it should have been, between her hands, I had been aware of a moment of danger. Now,
apart from my shock and sorrow about Mummie, a feeling of satisfaction went through me – a kind of ripple that I needed. I
needed it and I had it.

I went into the hall and picked up the telephone. While I waited for the exchange (always criminally slow) to answer, I had
time to consider how the punctual observance of the usual importances is the only way to behave at such times as these. And
I do know how to behave – believe me, because I know. I have always known. All my life so far I have done everything for the
best reasons and the most unselfish motives. I have lived for the people dearest to me, and I am at a loss to know why their
lives have been at times so perplexingly unhappy. I have given them so much, I have given them everything, all I know how
to give – Papa, Hubert,
Richard, Mummie. At fifty-seven my brain is fairly bright, brighter than ever I sometimes think, and I have a cast-iron memory.
If I look back beyond any shadow into the uncertainties and glories of our youth, perhaps I shall understand more about what
became of us.

When Hubert and I were children and after we grew up we lived at Temple Alice. Temple Alice had been built by Mummie’s ancestor,
before he inherited his title and estates. He built the house for his bride, and he gave it her name. Now, the title extinct
and the estates entirely dissipated, Temple Alice, after several generations as a dower house, came to Mummie when her mother
died. Papa farmed the miserably few hundred acres that remained of the property. Mummie loved gardening. On fine days she
would work in the woodland garden, taking the gardener away from his proper duties among the vegetables. On wet days she spent
hours of time in the endless, heatless, tumbling-down greenhouses, which had once sheltered peaches and nectarines and stephanotis.
One vine survived – she knew how to prune it and thin its grapes, muscatels. Papa loved them.

Her painting was another interest to take the place of the social life she loathed. A pity for herself that she was so withdrawn
a character.
Recluse
would be a truer word to describe her. She could have had such a lovely time gadding round
with Papa – hunting and race meetings and all those shoots. But she was really frightened of horses, and if she did go to
a race-meeting, in Papa’s riding days, she would shut her eyes during his race, and once when he was to ride a bad jumper
she got drunk in the bar and fell down in the Owners and Trainers. She simply could not endure the anxiety about him.

I don’t understand what it was that held them together – they never had much to say to each other. He had no more understanding
of her painting or gardening than she had of horses or fishing or shooting – so what can they have had to talk about?

Once she had a show of her pictures in a London gallery. During a whole year she painted for it. No art critic noticed it.
Hardly anybody came in to look – one picture was sold. Even that disastrous experience did not stop her painting. She went
on with it, making almost anything she painted look preposterous and curiously hideous too. Give her a bunch of roses to paint
– lovely June roses with tear-drops of morning rain on their petals – and she reproduced them as angular, airified shapes
in a graveyard atmosphere, unimaginably ugly; but in a crude way you could not forget roses as you looked at this picture
in speechless dislike. She would laugh and rub her little hands and shiver – it was deathly cold in her studio.

Nowhere was it possible to sit down in her studio, once a stone-flagged storeroom in the depths of the house. Pyramids of
cardboard boxes full of old letters, stacks of newspapers and photographs, old hunting boots, leather boxes that might hold
hats or again might be full of letters, all hovered to a fall. A stuffed hedgehog, the dust of years solid between its spines,
sat on top of a bird’s egg cabinet, empty of eggs, its little drawers full only of dented cottonwool and the smell of camphor.
Polo
sticks hanging in a bunch and obsolete fishing rods in dusty canvas cases, tied with neat, rotten tapes, showed this house
to have been lived in by gentlemen of leisure – my mother’s family.

Leisure they may have enjoyed but they knew little about comfort. Our water supply was meagre and my grandfather had deflected
a considerable quantity of it to a pond on which, in the shelter of a grove of rhododendrons, he loved to row himself about.
It was his escape from the land agent and other buzzing tormentors of a leisured life.

I think, now, that Mummie looked at her studio as her escape from responsibility. She had an enormous distaste for housekeeping.
The sort of food we ate then owed nothing to the splendid Elizabeth Davids of the present day. I think Papa would have fainted
at the very breath of garlic. It was for his sake only that Mummie expended some extreme essence of herself in bullying and
inspiring her treasured cook, Mrs Lennon. I have seen her tremble and go green as she faced the slate on the kitchen table
and the deadly quietness of the cook who stood so cheerlessly beside her. While longing only to put on her gauntlets, pick
up her trug and trowel and get into the garden or into the blessed isolation of her studio, Mummie would penetrate her cook’s
mind – praising just a little, demanding always more effort, a higher standard of perfection for the Captain.

When we were children the food in the nursery was quite poisonously disgusting. None of the fruit juice and vitamins of today
for us – oranges only at Christmastime and porridge every morning, variable porridge slung together by the kitchen maid, followed
by white bread and butter and Golden Syrup. Boiled eggs were for Sundays and sausages for birthdays.
I don’t think Mummie gave us a thought – she left the ordering of nursery meals to the cook, who sent up whatever came easiest,
mostly rabbit stews and custard puddings riddled with holes. No wonder the nannies left in quick succession.

Why do I hate the word ‘crusted’? Because I feel with my lips the boiled milk, crusted since the night before, round the rim
of the mug out of which I must finish my breakfast milk … I am again in the darkness of the nursery, the curtains drawn against
the winter morning outside. Nannie is dragging on her corsets under her great nightdress. Baby Hubert is walking up and down
his cot in a dirty nightdress. The nursery maid is pouring paraffin on a sulky nursery fire. I fix my eyes on the strip of
morning light where wooden rings join curtains to curtain pole and think about my bantams … Even then I knew how to ignore
things. I knew how to behave.

I don’t blame Mummie for all this. She simply did not want to know what was going on in the nursery. She had had us and she
longed to forget the horror of it once and for all. She engaged nannie after nannie with excellent references, and if they
could not be trusted to look after us, she was even less able to compete. She didn’t really like children; she didn’t like
dogs either, and she had no enjoyment of food, for she ate almost nothing.

She was sincerely shocked and appalled on the day when the housemaid came to tell her that our final nannie was lying on her
bed in a drunken stupor with my brother Hubert beside her in another drunken stupor, while I was lighting a fire in the day
nursery with the help of a tin of paraffin. The nannie was sacked, but given quite a good reference with no mention of her
drinking; that would have been too unkind and unnecessary, since she promised to reform. Her next charge (only a
Dublin baby) almost died of drink, and its mother wrote a very common, hysterical letter, which Mummie naturally put in the
fire and forgot about. Exhausted, bored, and disgusted by nannies, she engaged a governess who would begin my education and
at the same time keep an eye on the nursery maid who was to be in charge of Hubert’s more menial four-year-old necessities.

The name of our governess was Mrs Brock and we loved her dearly from the start to the finish of her reign. For one thing,
the era of luncheon in the diningroom opened for us with Mrs Brock, and with it a world of desire and satisfaction, for we
were as greedy as Papa. Although governesses lunched in the diningroom, they supped on trays upstairs – that was the accepted
rule, and Mummie must have been thankful for it as these luncheons meant a horrid disintegration of her times of intimacy
with Papa. So much of his day was spent away from her. In the winter months he was shooting or hunting, and in the spring
there was salmon fishing – all undertaken and excelled in more as a career and a duty than as the pleasures of a leisured
life. In the summer months there was a horse, sometimes horses, to be got ready for the Dublin Show, often evening fishing,
and always the supervision of haymaking and harvest with their attendant ghastly weather to worry him. So luncheon and dinner
were, I suppose, the brightest hours in her day.

Dinnertime was a formal, nearly a sacred, hour – usually
more like two hours. At half past seven they went upstairs to bathe and change into dinner jacket and teagown. During the
months of that legendary summer weather, bathwater was too often the problem, for every house was dependent on its own wells,
springs, or streams. In the country there was no main supply of water. This was not a problem to defeat people who looked
on the bath before dinner as part of the structure of life. There existed, too, an austerity which forbade complaint. It went
with loofahs and Brown Windsor soap and large natural sponges draining out the last of the soft water in netted holders hooked
to the rim of the bath.

We never came down to dinner of course, but I knew the candles were always lighted on the table, and spoons and forks and
plates, salt-cellars and pepper pots were cleared away before dessert. I don’t think they ever had a drink in the drawingroom,
not even a glass of sherry – that came with the soup – but they always drank wine and port, and often brandy with their coffee.

I came down only once, because Mrs Brock had gone out and I thought Hubert would die, he was so sick. In spite of the desperate
importance of my mission, I stood in the doorway for a whole minute, stunned and silenced by the munificent quality of their
intimacy.

The window furthest from where they were sitting was open, and a tide of musky, womanly scent from the wet Portugal laurels
drifted in, strong against the delicate smells of strawberries and candle smoke and a breath of past roast chicken. They sat
at the far end of the long pale table. Her head was bowed and her eyes were lifted towards him, defeating the heavy gesture
of her head. She sat on his right hand. Behind him the green luminous gloom of glass within glass
retreated inside the doors of a breakfront cabinet that filled one end of the diningroom. Mummie had lined it with grey linen,
so that all glass objects floated and were lost in its spaces. It was like water or air at his back, as though the end wall
were open to air or water. The austere outdoor look I knew had melted from him into the air, like the glass in the cupboard.
Sitting there, he seemed extraordinarily dulled, dulled and happy. Both their glasses were full and his eyes were downwards
on her arms, their flesh firm as partridge breasts. He was speaking to her, asking some question I did not hear.

When they saw me in the doorway, when I said, ‘I think Hubert’s dead,’ he raised his eyes from her arms (it seemed a long
time, while Hubert and I were shut out) to her shoulders, to her eyes, and then he visibly let her go. If my dressing-gown
had been in flames round me it would have taken them just as long to part. Although they weren’t near each other I could not
have walked, unless they called me, any nearer to that circle they made.

What happened afterwards is less clear to me than that impression of their impervious intimacy. I don’t understand it. Even
now, as a sophisticated, quite worldly woman. Not when I have to admit his endless strayings with all the other women who
longed after him and won him easily through the years.

Mummie said: ‘My dear child – what
can
this mean?’

‘Only Hubert’s been sick in his bed and he has a dreadful pain. I’m frightened.’

‘And Mrs Brock?’ she asked.

‘She’s at choir practice.’

‘What a good word for it,’ Papa said.

‘Everybody’s out. There’s a dance in the gate lodge. Oh, do come quickly, he may be dead now.’

‘Extraordinary, people are,’ she said.

Papa got up and put his hands under the lace that covered her shoulders and pressed her down in her chair. ‘I’ll go. You’re
hopeless about sick. Finish your drink,’ he said.

Papa was wonderful. He picked poor Hubert out of his cot and took off his sleeping suit before he wrapped him up in a hot
bath towel from the airing cupboard. I loved every minute of it. I rushed about emptying the pots and finding clean sheets.

When at last Mrs Brock appeared – it must have been almost ten o’clock, and she was full of explanations – he didn’t listen
and he didn’t say a cross word to her. Just: ‘Sit down and keep him warm. I think I’d better get hold of the doctor.’

Mrs Brock did exactly what he told her. She kept on her lovely hat, covered deep in roses. She sat there under her hat, Hubert
on her knees, a hot statue, smelling of armpits and amber scent, till Papa got back with the doctor.