Good Behaviour (5 page)

‘And did you hear the jockeys cursing, Mrs Brock?’ we would ask. We wanted to belong to the whole magic of the vision.

‘No, dear, I didn’t. I just heard the great crowd shouting, “Come on – come on, Peeping Thomas.”’

‘They don’t usually shout so much when an outsider wins.’

‘They did that day. In my ear,’ Mrs Brock stated firmly. Unfortunately, her selection for that year’s Derby finished down
the course. Although everybody was most generous and considerate about her failure, there was a sense of disappointment not
entirely appeased when she came up with the second in the Oaks, given with a caution on an each-way bet. After this, her questioners
and followers tempered her advice with that of their favourite tipster. But with domestic losses the dramas mounted daily.
The strangest objects were lost and found, as well as the most ordinary.

‘What kind of things?’ we always asked, the list was so varied and lively. The dogs’ leads: Lady Grizel lost one a day, her
plaintive cries of ‘Help! Help! Where did I put it down?’ echoing often and pleasantly in the schoolroom. The cook’s spectacles,
the odd pillowcase missing from the laundry list; keys, of course, were high among the losses; earrings even figured when
the second footman, Walter, rather a dear boy, came to tell her privately that he had lost one of a pair given him by a friend.
After a little talk to put her in touch with the pantry world and a couple of hours’ floating, the earring re-appeared in
a plate of chicken sandwiches Mrs Brock was having for her supper, along with a cup of hot consommé, followed by raspberries
and cream. ‘Your earring,’ she said, quite simply, when Walter came in to take away her tray.

‘Oh, Mrs Brock, wherever was it?’

‘It came to me’ was all she told him.

This was a time when Mrs Brock had the entrée to all sorts of private dramas. Her gift put her in a dreamlike position of
importance. Even to herself she did not admit that it was her powers of detection, her valid interest in the lives of other
people, which gave her the thread to follow in their losses. Having done her homework thoroughly, she would, as it were, get
inside her own infallibility and pull down the blind. ‘I don’t know yet. I’ve got one of my feelings coming on … ’

There were two members of the household who refused to join the circle of excitement and interest created by the exercise
of Mrs Brock’s strange powers. The more considerable of the unbelievers was Nannie; the lesser was horrid Raymond. Nannie
was among the few who had stuck to her own fancy in the 3.30 so had not shared in the Peeping Thomas bonanza. When her fancy
finished down the course she simply expressed her own opinion, which was that Mrs Brock’s powers of divination were neither
natural nor quite nice. But Raymond was the catalyst for disaster. Raymond was a sloven and a malign sloven too.

‘Why, Raymond,’ Mrs Brock asked him, ‘are you using Sholto’s hairbrush?’

‘Mine’s lost.’

‘Lost? You haven’t been grooming the guinea-pigs again?’ Already divination stirred.

‘Oh no. Those rotten guineas are hatching again. They eat their young if you groom them.’

‘Don’t be disgusting, dear.’

‘Nannie says so.’

‘Perhaps. If it’s not with the guineas, when did you use it last?’

‘Brushing my own hair.’

‘When?’

‘Lunchtime. In the bathroom.’

‘What about teatime?’

‘Nannie brushed my hair in the nursery.’

‘Then go and ask Nannie where it is. Nip to it now – be a first-time childy.’

‘It’s not in the nursery.’

‘Nonsense. How can you know if you don’t ask?’

‘Because I can see it looking at me, that’s why. Can’t you? Can’t you, Mrs Brock?’

Stalwart and solid, usually humane, Richard and Sholto joined in the tease. They didn’t know where the hairbrush was themselves,
but they jumped up and down, shouting: ‘We can see it, we can see it too. Find it, Mrs Brock. Go seek!’ they cried as if she
were a dog. She was confused and mortified. There was nothing jolly for her about the situation. When Nannie came in, with
an enquiry for a torn jersey, the matter worsened. They danced round chanting: ‘Mrs Brock can’t find the hairbrush – hairbrush
– hairbrush!’ And Raymond squealed, ‘Mister Brock’s a badger – smelly old badger!’

‘Now, now, steady yourselves.’ Nannie spoke, in a moment restoring order and authority, although towards Raymond she suppressed
a smile. ‘I should leave the whole thing to Mrs Brock. I shouldn’t be surprised if one of her feelings isn’t coming on. Bedtime,
boys, and give her a chance.’

‘I’ve told Raymond to find his own hairbrush.’ Mrs Brock’s voice was less than steady. ‘I don’t really have time for such
a nursery nit … wit,’ she added, after taking a breath.

How had the word popped into her mind, or out of her
mouth? It stung Nannie in a vital, secret spot. Once, long ago, there had been just that trouble in her own sacred nursery
– caught of course from the gate-lodge children as surely as ring-worm came from calves.

‘I don’t think,’ she spoke in her most foxhunting voice, ‘that any of us quite heard what’s just been said, Mrs Brock. Perhaps
you’ll think again before you repeat your remark. It’s not exactly what we’re accustomed to in our nursery.’

That was how the loss of confidence and happiness began. The joking approaches, the laughing asides grew into a mild kind
of persecution. Only kind people, Lady Grizel, Julia, the head housemaid, and Walter, still brought her their losses and mislayings.
To compensate for her frequent failures in detection and to retain their grateful interest she would knit furiously: a cardigan
for Walter, a jersey for Julia, and for Lady Grizel a cloud of purest Shetland wool, light as feathers in a breeze, billowed
towards completion. She longed to see Lady Grizel sit up among her pillows, arranged in this pink cloud. But Mrs Brock held
no possible entrée to Lady Grizel’s bedroom – her place was the schoolroom, ‘her schoolroom.’ At luncheon in the diningroom,
where she had been inspired and eloquent in the family game – inventing conversation, spiced with sharp repartee – between
Lady Grizel’s precious Chang and the Captain’s terriers, Spice, Spider, and Grips, all silent in the tranced discipline of
their baskets; where once she had come up with a forgotten cricketing score, and – in the crown of her heyday, such was her
euphoric application – had even known the top price at Newmarket sales and the breeding of the yearling that made it, she
was silent now.

‘If she would apply her mind to geography,’ Nannie said in
a holy rather than a foxhunting voice, when Lady Grizel remarked upon this surprising change. ‘Only last Thursday Richard
had no idea of the capital cities of Europe. And Mr Entwhistle won’t be very pleased about that.’

The Cambridgeshire came and went and nobody asked Mrs Brock what she thought about it. Perhaps they had grown tired of hearing
her say ‘a very open race.’ Now she sat silent in the diningroom and spent longer hours enclosed in her schoolroom, thudding
away at the piano. Sholto, tone deaf, would talk to his hamster or tease a dog, unheeding; but Richard, leaning against the
throbbing piano, was secretly affected. This first experience of music delighted him. He found it strangely preferable to
the approved outdoor sports.

‘She never takes the boys for a decent nature walk these days,’ he overheard Nannie report to his mother. ‘Remember when you
could hardly get into our nursery for acorns sprouting and tadpoles – well it’s one of the ways of breaking it to them nicely,
at least that’s what
I
think, and from there it’s just a step on to their rabbits and they can draw their own conclusions. Enough said is quite
enough.’

Geography and sex education – perhaps Mrs Brock had failed on both these counts. Such failures were of very little importance
in Lady Grizel’s simple values. Her boys would
grow up as their father and their uncles had done – living and loving the country life, and marrying nice girls with a bit
of money. ‘So long as they’re happy, you old fuss bag,’ was her inattentive, affectionate reply as she went on her afternoon
way, calling for her dogs.

It was unlucky for Mrs Brock that before Nannie’s hints had time to slip quite out of her mind, Lady Grizel should find Richard
alone in the boys’ tree house, halfway up a Spanish chestnut tree, with what could only be a book – a book, and at three o’clock
on a perfect afternoon.

‘Doing your prep, old boy?’ she called laughingly.

‘No. Reading.’

‘Reading? Well, stop it. Come and dry the dogs with me … did you hear me, darling?’ she called again, quite sharply.

‘Coming, Mummie.’ He delayed a moment before climbing rather hesitantly down the tree and the rope ladder that linked the
lowest great branch with the lawn. This upset her, as she liked her boys to do things in the right way, whether they were
getting up on their ponies or eating artichokes – there was a right and wrong ritual in doing anything.

‘What were you reading?’ she asked when no answer came from Richard to quite a funny remark of Grips’s about bath-water in
his ears.

‘Left it in my tree house.’

‘What’s it called?’

‘Just Tree House.’

‘No. The book.’

‘Oh.’ He hesitated. ‘
Robinson Crusoe
’ he brought out triumphantly.

‘Haha. Where’s your Man Friday – that’s what Grips wants to know.’

‘My who?’

‘Man Friday. I remember he came into it.’

The rims of Richard’s ear went very pink. ‘Ask Gripsy,’ he said. ‘Tell us about old Friday, Grips.’ Richard and Grips went
flying round in circles on the enormous close-woven spaces of the lawn. She laughed, watching them. But, for once, a question
stayed at the back of her unruffled brow.

‘Perhaps she doesn’t give them quite enough to do. You may be right,’ she admitted to Nannie that evening. ‘I found Richard
all by himself, reading.’

‘Reading a book?’ Nannie asked, incredulous.

‘Yes,
Robinson Crusoe
. Quite harmless, really.’

‘Harmless? On a lovely afternoon like today?’

Nannie took the matter further. To climb a rope ladder and explore the tree house was beyond her, at her age, but she could
persuade Walter to do it for her.

‘Oh, Master Richard –’ the apology Walter tendered later was heart-felt – ‘talk about crafty! … “You’re a proper active young
chap, Walter” – oh, she was nice! “You wouldn’t take those long legs of yours up the tree-house ladder, would you? Master
Richard’s left his new blue jersey up there. Fetch down anything else you find – looks like rain tonight.” See the cunning
of her cleverness? I put my foot straight in, of course, silly me, I know, and handed her down your book … ’

Nannie took the book of poetry straight to Lady Grizel, who talked it over unhappily with the Captain. His response was a
genuinely worried one: ‘Yes, we’ll have to put a stop to this bookworming. No future in that. And he was having a music lesson
yesterday when old Sholto was schooling his pony.’

‘That’s hardly the point, is it? The awful thing is, he told me quite a big fib.’

‘That’s more natural – it’s this poetry that bothers me. What’s the book called?’

‘
The Children’s Golden Treasury of Verse
.’

‘Unhealthy-sounding stuff.’

‘It’s what Nannie says, they don’t get enough exercise … ’

So, I came to understand, went their comments. They are in accord with Mrs Brock’s remembered phrases and stories, and true
to the intricacies of the rather cruel cult game that, years later, Richard, Hubert, and I were to play at Temple Alice. Richard,
creator of the game, enjoyed recalling every level of life at Stoke Charity in that era of childhood when he lost his first
love, Mrs Brock. We joined in, despoiling our memories of her with horrid fun. Beyond the decorations and inventions of the
game, essential to laughter, behind the lengths and colours of days, or the remembrance of a glance, revealing hidden loves
or spites, we taunted the separate childhoods, which had left us the people we were. Richard could look back unforgivingly
on his parents’ decision: for lying he must take his little flogging, and Mrs Brock, with her music lessons and poetry readings,
must go. It was to be hoped that any damage Richard might have suffered from them would be repaired by an early start at Entwhistle’s.

‘And who is going to sack Mrs Brock?’ Lady Grizel would have wanted to know.

‘You are, of course.’

‘No, my darling, I am not. You are. You thought of it.’

To suit some inescapable duty – judging at a neighbouring hunt’s puppy show, most likely – Richard’s punishment was postponed
until Friday, two days away, and two very dreadful days intervened. Richard, the condemned man, set about his
pony in a fiery way, went a great deal to the lavatory, and was sick after breakfast and very sick after tea on Friday.

Sholto reported that he was unable to sleep a wink because Richard was so quiet. Richard didn’t know how many people knew
he had told a lie and was going to be beaten. He took any kindness or cordiality as an insult. His hair stood up in stiff
little dry peaks on his head. He jumped off the garden wall into a seed-bed to prove to himself his manly side. Walter, white
to the lips, came to the schoolroom to say the Captain was waiting for Master Richard in the gunroom. Richard, white to the
lips too, met the Captain, green about the gills, but prepared to do his duty.

‘Why did you lie to your mother, Richard?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You were ashamed about that rather silly book, I suppose,
and
rightly so.’

‘No, I wasn’t.’

‘But you told a lie. We don’t have liars in our family, do we? Anything to say about that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, bend over this chair.’

‘Oh, please, Daddy. Please, Daddy—’

‘Look – keep quiet, will you, or I’ll have to get Walter to hold you.’

‘No. I’ll be good. I’ll be good.’

‘Now, shut up, old boy,’ the Captain said kindly, as he put down his leather-covered malacca stick. ‘You’ll upset Mummie if
she hears you. Got to take punishment, haven’t we, old son. I’ve had plenty in my time.’ And the Captain laughed heartily,
far more from nerves than from any unkindness. ‘Cut along to Nannie. She’ll look after you.’