Good Behaviour (7 page)

Lady Grizel was not alone when Mrs Brock, after a discreet knock, came into her room. There were two dogs under the eiderdown
of the big bed in which all three were enjoying a delightful night’s companionship. She rather liked these lone nights when
the Masters of Foxhounds Association or some other great cause took the Captain away. He disapproved of dogs in bed, so only
in his absence was she able to give her darlings a treat she enjoyed as much as they did.

At Mrs Brock’s knock Lady Grizel stirred on her pillows and murmured. The dogs turned under the eiderdown and growled. Now,
unbidden, Mrs Brock came nearer to the bed; she stood, a prim, proper little person in the dawning light, her present in her
hands. She might have thrown the pink shawl across the eiderdown, where it would have lain light as a mist. She might have
gone away without a word, ever after to remember her beautiful restraint. But the dogs, who only acknowledged people in their
proper places, plunged about beneath the eiderdown, barking their heads off and thoroughly waking Lady Grizel, who sat up
to cuff them into silence and remained sitting up, frozen in her amazement at the sight of Mrs Brock. Whatever doubts she
had felt at her dismissal flew instantly from her mind. Worlds apart, they stared at each other.

‘Lady Grizel –’ Mrs Brock faltered – ‘I wanted to see you alone. Just tell me what I’ve done – what’s happened?’

‘Captain Massingham spoke to you and I really can’t say any more, can I?’

‘Oh, but all the money? The wonderful reference?’

‘Yes, I thought we worded it rather nicely.’

Mrs Brock drew nearer to the bed: ‘But if that’s how you think of me, why do you want me to leave?’

‘Oh, do go back to bed, Mrs Brock!’ Lady Grizel felt as repelled and alarmed as she might have done at the approaches of an
unwelcome lover. She looked beautiful sitting up among her pillows; her pearls (she always wore her pearls at night) tumbling
warm from her sleepy flesh, out of her white long-sleeved nightdress.

‘But do you know I love you?’ Mrs Brock cried out. ‘Mrs Brock loves you, Lady Grizel.’

‘Mrs Brock – have you gone out of your mind?’

Mrs Brock came nearer: ‘I love you,’ she said, ‘and I’ll be with you always wherever I am, whatever happens. I’ve brought
you this – I think it’s the very best I ever …’ Wordless at last, she almost threw the fine shawl across the bed. At its faint
impact the dogs started to bark again, while Lady Grizel, outraged, shrank back against her pillows.

‘You must be over-tired,’ she said, an immense volume of coldness in her voice. ‘Please go back to bed at once – now. And
please take this thing with you. I simply don’t need it.’ She scraped up the present and handed it back. ‘Try to get some
sleep,’ she said more kindly. ‘I’m sure Julia will call you in time for your train. Julia thinks of everything.’

Mrs Brock stood tearless, wordless, the shawl bunched in a deformed lump under her arm. Lady Grizel said no more. She
looked across Mrs Brock to the door and Mrs Brock took the hint.

The day of Mrs Brock’s departure was one of the happiest days in Richard’s childhood. Nannie called them early to ride out
their ponies. With their favourite stable lad as companion, they clowned their way happily through the next hour or so, laughing
at his jokes, lazy and unmindful of their horseman-ship. There was none of that ‘Heels down, please, Master Richard,’ or ‘Sit
well back, Master Sholto,’ the only piece of advice offered in those days before pony clubs. Richard came home to a second
breakfast, yesterday’s pain and shame diminished. The news that Mrs Brock had been called away to London made no grievous
impact. Not only were lessons for the day abandoned, but they were to go over to Moribound after luncheon, where Mummie’s
great friend Lord Lapsely of Derkley had a private zoo, where a mouse deer had just calved and a tiger had bitten a little
boy’s head off only last week.

A thrilling afternoon and a very good tea over, Richard went bouncingly up to the schoolroom, no thought of poetry in his
mind, and faintly embarrassed at the memory of Mrs Brock’s lavish comfortings on the previous evening. The room was utterly
tidy: all lesson books put away; pencil boxes straight as spirit levels; the piano tightly shut, no open music book stirring
its leaves in the empty air. The white mice might have been sugar mice, they stayed so quiet in their night compartments,
and the budgies were puffed out sullenly, waiting in their cages for the trilling and the music to set them screaming and
raising their wings in ecstasy.

Richard moved about in the hush for a time. He decided to clean out the mice and have them smelling delicious for Mrs
Brock’s return; but at the bottom of the corner cupboard, where such things were kept, he could find no newspapers, onto which
he usually swept the floors of the cages. An exemplary tidiness pervaded the cupboard; even Mrs Brock’s collection of bits
of string had gone from their hook. The bird-seed had been emptied out of its coloured packages into a glass jar with a stopper.
An apprehension, a chill, crept over Richard. He thought of looking into Mrs Brock’s bedroom to reassure himself, through
her belongings, of her presence and person, but he was afraid now of finding nothing. And afraid Nannie might catch him finding
nothing. At any rate he hoped to find Walter in the pantry, get some newspapers from him, and give the old mice a proper doing.
He could not admit that Walter might have news for him.

In the pantry, lined to its high ceiling with brown cupboards and slices of green baize, Walter was crying quietly; tears
fell on the wine glasses he was polishing for dinner, ruining his work, but he was in that nervous state when the repetition
of an occupation meant nothing to him.

‘I want some newspapers.’ Richard ignored the tears. ‘I’m going to clean those filthy mice before Mrs Brock gets back.’

‘She’s gone for good, Master Richard.’ Walter felt a tremor of excitement as he broke the news.

It was no shock to Richard. He had expected this. ‘Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘I’ll clean them anyway.’

‘She loved those beastly mice,’ Walter sobbed.

To see Walter, a grown-up, a servant, with silly tears bouncing down his cheeks, pantry tears, tears decorum forbade in nursery
or schoolroom, appeased Richard’s shame for his own recent breakage of that earliest rule of life – boys don’t cry. There
was a gratified superiority in finding himself the big boy
of the two, the dry-eyed one, and the one with power to comfort.

‘Walter,’ he asked, ‘would you like me to say one of my poems?’ Walter made no affirmation. He was really very upset. ‘All
right – are you ready? I’ll begin: “She is fading down the river –”’ Richard paused to get a grip on his audience – ‘“She
is fading down the river” … ’

‘Poor thing,’ Walter said brokenly when Richard stopped at last. ‘She’ll have faded out of Paddington Station hours ago. Poor
thing. All those crowds!’

Mummie didn’t care much about Mrs Brock’s singing. ‘Never quite on the note,’ she would say with chilly tolerance. ‘As the
children are so unmusical, it doesn’t matter really, and the schoolroom is far enough away … ’ I was surprised and hurt when
I heard this, as I had begun to fancy my voice under Mrs Brock’s encouragement, and I was learning ‘Two Little Girls in Blue,
Dears,’ with which number I expected to stun the Christmas School Treat. Even if I had owned the truest voice in the world,
such an idea would have been discouraged as in the poorest taste.

Mrs Brock found life in Ireland a complete change from any previous schoolroom experience, although, in essentials, her relationship
with the family was the same. Mummie ran away from any familiar footing in the schoolroom. There was not even the flimsiest
bridge across that distance – not even a dog’s lead to be lost or found. Our house stood at the apex of two carriage drives
and was quite half a mile from any road; there were no young pheasants to disturb on our bog or river walks, only wild swans
or snipe, so our dogs,
which were few, did not require leads. Any contact or familiarity with Mummie was as far outside her orbit as were the birds.
As in Dorset, the servants loved Mrs Brock. Here they were wild and garrulous, speaking a strange language in which she was
disappointed at never hearing the word ‘Begorrah,’ but she could hear their distant droning of the rosary at bedtime.

She woke to their footsteps early in the morning, when they swept the dust under the sofa in the schoolroom and lit crackling
paraffin-smelling fires by eight o’clock. They wore holy medals and scapulars under their cotton dresses, and ate Robin starch
from the laundry, partly as a thinning diet and partly because they were hungry. They didn’t expect much to eat then, and
they certainly didn’t get it. Diningroom and servants’ halls fed very differently. Mrs Brock would bring them biscuits when
she walked with us as far as the village on the river, where two little grocers’ shops lurked, dark and low, in a terrace
of eighteenth-century houses, and the ruin of a great woollen mill hung above the water.

Hubert and I adored Mrs Brock. We lived again with her the conduct of life at Stoke Charity (years afterwards Richard was
to contradict or make explicit much of what she told us), we heard about the boys and their fiery ponies, and thought of their
courage with distant awe. In those days we hated our ponies and Mrs Brock encouraged us to get off and lead the dirty little
beasts past their favourite spots for seeing ghosts and whipping round for home.

She accepted without comment my grotesque, sentimental fixation on Mummie. She designed handkerchief sachets, matching sachets
for holding nightdresses, hotwater-bottle covers, raffia napkin rings, egg cosies shaped like chickens’
heads, and countless other objects, at which I would sew while my heart burst with passionate excitement at the prospect of
the giving and the gratitude. This manufacture of things was a great happiness to me, and Mrs Brock’s practical genius in
manipulating scraps from the ragbag into ever more useless trifles held us together in warm accord.

Mummie escaped us all. The tides of her painting and her gardening, and the spring-tides of her whole life with Papa were
as the sea between us – no step we took left a print in the sands. After we had toiled (not without pleasure) for hours on
end to present her with wild violets: ‘Oh, darlings, please don’t pick them any more, poor little things. Thank you, yes they
do
smell ravishing, thank you so much,’ and she would drop them by her plate, or fill a wine glass with water and drop them
into it, to be forgotten. I had seen them afterwards on the dinner tray in the pantry, cleared away with the spoons and forks
after luncheon. There they retired into a meaner proportion, as if their scent had been apparent only to ourselves, and their
floods of blue had died out in our eyes.

But practical gifts were bound to bring a definite acknowledgement and often a satisfying one. ‘Just what I’ve been wanting.
Look, dear –’ to Papa – ‘a pen-wiper. She knows what a letter-writer I am,’ and they would both laugh immoderately. He was
the one who patted me and kissed me, lifting me off my feet so that my black-stockinged legs dangled free – he was very easy
in the smallest caresses.

Sometimes Mummie would touch Hubert – always in a reserved sort of way. She never tried to paint him. ‘My black Bubbles,’
she called him. How she disliked that beautiful picture by Sir John Millais! And it bore absolutely no resemblance to Hubert;
he was brown as an Italian child,
wherever the sun could invade the little boy’s clothes of our day – navy blue jerseys and over-long shorts. Even then he used
his looks like a shield before making some outrageous remark in a toothless lisping way: ‘I theen a terrible thing – I theen
a thquirrel laying nuth.’ She would laugh with him.

How to please? During the hour after tea when we came down to the drawingroom, I would sit silent in my blue accordion pleats,
my christening locket, turquoise and pearl, swinging on its gold chain round my neck, my feet in their bronze dancing sandals
crossed tight as in a vice. While Hubert breathed heavily over his Meccano set, constructing a ladder, or perhaps a dog kennel,
speechless I sat, my longing to make a good impression twanging and vibrating within. I might try: ‘We went for a walk today.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘We went across the Horse Park and back along the Ladies’ Walk—’ She would turn up the blue enamel watch with a diamond bird
on its back pinned to her blouse by a diamond bow, and glance hopelessly at its face: ‘Yes, and what did my little good-news
girl see on her walk?’

By the time I was in bed I could have listed twenty startling pieces of information – from a salmon rising in the river to
the rook splashing down his, well, his … onto Mrs Brock’s hat. Now, interrupted in my recital, I could only wait in a blank
hiatus before I gabbled out: ‘I saw a rabbit.’

‘A rabbit? Really? That is interesting. You saw nothing for your flower collection for instance?’

We had never given wild flowers a thought on that happy walk, nor grasses, nor birds’ nests, nor frogs’ spawn; we had hung
on Mrs Brock’s arms, transported by her tales to the
luxurious and easy atmosphere of Stoke Charity. We were living with Richard and Sholto and Lady Grizel; we could nearly taste
the delicious little suppers Walter carried up to the schoolroom. Although these suppers had the HunkerMunker
Two Bad Mice
quality of false doll’s-house food, the breathing life in her telling held us avid as a good rancid gossip about money or
love might hold us in later life.

Aching as she did for useful occupation, Mrs Brock found her outlet in the linen cupboard. This enormous, dark, mouse-ridden
cavern stretched across the end of a passage; on its back wall a window, firmly laced with ivy, gave a little light to the
towering shelves. The linen in our house had been wearing thin, or had been stolen away by generations of housemaids, supposedly
its menders and keepers, who had charge of the key. The present housemaid was named Wild Rose; she was bred to be hot, as
the stable lads said when ducking her in a tank of water in the yard. Rose, screaming, enjoyed this fun as much as anyone
but, not unnaturally, lost the key of the linen cupboard in her struggles.