Jerusalem the Golden (14 page)

Clara’s first glance of Candida Denham was through Clelia’s high bedroom window. From this vantage point, she could not see much, except the top of her head, and the colour of her clothes. She was sitting on a rug on the long narrow lawn which lay behind the house, with a pile of books and a baby. Her hair was black, like her daughter’s, and seemed to be cut in much the same shape, and she was wearing a purple dress. The baby was wearing a pink frilly garment on its top half, and nothing at all, as far as she could see, on its bottom half, but she could not see very well. From the pink frilly garment, Clara would have deduced that the baby must be a girl, but
she clearly remembered that it was called James. The baby’s father, who was the man called Martin, was sitting a little way off on a deckchair, chewing an unlit pipe, and reading one of the Sunday papers. There seemed to be no signs of a squabble, but Clara was herself familiar with silent domestic altercation, and was willing to believe that the charmingly grouped apparent peace of the scene belied its true character.

‘It’s quite a nice garden, really,’ said Clelia, watching. ‘There’s another bit, on a lower level – there are some steps going down. And there are steps going down from the drawing room, and up from the dining room. It’s because of the steepness of the hill, it’s all terraced. People can never get used to the levels. When we were little we were only allowed to play on the lower bit, in case we fell over this top wall, and it was like a dirt track down there, with bikes and trucks and lord knows what. And we all used to climb up and fall over the top anyway. Gabriel had five stitches, and he’s still got a scar. But I suppose it kept the bikes off the top bit. They’re trying to make the bottom bit look decent now, they keep buying things for it, but it never looks right … you can’t see it from here, we’ll go out and look at the garden after tea.’

And as she spoke, Mrs Denham, in the garden below, suddenly leaped to her feet, and started gathering up her things; they could not catch what she was saying, but she seemed faintly agitated, and Martin too got to his feet, though not with any movement that could be described as a leap, and appeared to offer, though ineffectively, to help with his baby. Mrs Denham refused his offer, and tucked the baby under one arm, and started to drag the blanket she had been sitting on after her into the house. Martin offered to have that too, but was instructed to pick up her books instead, so he did. And they all went in.

‘I think it must be tea time,’ said Clelia. ‘I think we’d better go down.’

And Clara, as she went down, felt that perhaps her nervousness was just about to outweigh her anticipation. She hoped very much that it would not, for she wanted to enjoy herself: she hoped that Mrs Denham would not be alarming. She felt suddenly, hopelessly
guilty for not having found out all about Mrs Denham before arriving. And she also felt slightly nervous lest the large house should suddenly disgorge many other hidden residents, for what would she do if suddenly confronted, at one go, with Amelia, Magnus, Gabriel, and Annunciata, and all their varying wives and husbands?

But when they reached the drawing room, the only people there were Mrs Denham and Martin, and the baby, which was sitting in a high chair.

‘Hello,’ said Mrs Denham. ‘There you both are. I wondered if you were coming down.’

‘This is Clara, mama,’ said Clelia.

‘Clara, yes,’ said Mrs Denham. ‘Clelia told me about you. Do sit down, have a cup of tea. I would have called Clelia Clara if I’d thought of it, but I didn’t. But I’m sure that that was what I was somehow looking for. To go with Amelia. But then I got led astray, and went and did that awful thing to poor Annunciata.’

‘I think Annunciata is a beautiful name,’ said Clelia, taking up once more what was quite evidently a familiar theme. ‘And she truly likes it, you know, herself. She always did.’

‘I think I must have been mad,’ said Mrs Denham, taking off the teapot lid and staring nervously into its smoky silver depths. ‘And they went and called her Nancy at school. Like something out of
Swallows and Amazons
. Clelia, give James a crust, he’s just about to start to moan.’

And sure enough, just as Clelia ripped a crust from a piece of bread and butter, the baby started to make groaning hungry noises, clenching and unclenching its fists, with histrionic desire.

‘I’m not at all pleased with James,’ said Mrs Denham. ‘He’s just peed all over my review copy of that book on Fanny Burney. And I was going to sell it to Harrods, it’s such an awful book, I really had decided to sell it to Harrods. But I don’t suppose Harrods will want it now James has peed on it, will they?’

‘You shouldn’t let him lie around without his nappy on,’ said Clelia severely.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Mrs Denham. ‘I feel so sorry for them, all bundled up and soggy. And when it’s such a fine day, for once, one
ought to let them kick. It was my fault, I shouldn’t have let him be so near. Girls are so much easier, if you put them on a blanket at least all they do is wet it. But boys have such a long range, Clelia, do pick up that crust. No, give it back to him, he won’t mind. I’m sure he didn’t mean to drop it. Clara, will you have milk or lemon?’

‘Lemon, please,’ said Clara. And as she stirred her cup of tea, and sipped it, she lost track of the conversation entirely, so engrossed was she in the visual aspect of the scene presented to her: she did not know where first to look, so dazzling and amazing were the objects and vistas and arrangements before her. The room itself would have been enough to efface any human material less striking than Clelia’s mother, and it did indeed more or less totally efface the unobtrusive Martin, who sat quietly dissociated, perched on the edge of a gilt-framed armchair, looking as though he did not quite mean to be there. It was a large, high, long room, and so full of furniture and mirrors and pictures and books and chandeliers and hangings and refracted angles of light that the eye could at first glimpse in no way assess its dimensions; it was like some infinitely more complicated and elaborate and intentional version of the hall which Clara had first entered. It seemed to be full of alcoves and angles and small grouped areas of being, though the room itself was a plain rectangle: fish swam in a high globe, a monstrously enlarged goldfish bowl on top of a bookcase, and flowers and foliage stood on small pedestals here and there. Over the marble mantelpiece was a huge oval gold mirror, with an eagle adorning it, and beneath it two gilt and delicate sprays of candle brackets. The floor was wooden, and polished, but most of it was covered by a large, intricately patterned and badly frayed coloured carpet. On one wall hung a large picture of a classical, mythological nature: on another wall was an equally large picture of undulating pale yellow and beige lines. The third wall was lined entirely with books, and the wall that looked over the garden was not a wall but a window, heavily shrouded with curtains of different fabrics and densities. Clara was astonished; she could compare the room to nothing in her experience, nothing at all, unless it were perhaps to those studiously, tediously visited ancient homes which she had been round on various bank holidays
during her childhood. And having arrived at so much in the way of a comparison, she saw, suddenly revealed to her, how much there had been in those other rooms to admire. She had always disliked them, had never for a moment been able to see their virtues; she had been bored by the classical, and had felt a positive, righteous contempt for the baroque and the neo-Gothic. She had thought the quantities of gilt (never did she credit that it might be real gold) an evidence of shocking vulgarity, had sneered at the bad taste of the ornate picture frames, at the ridiculous excesses of the pictures themselves, and had felt a solid, suburban scorn for the frayed and patched tapestry chair seats and the faded hangings: she had wondered why, if so rich, they did not throw out their tatty Persian coverings, and buy themselves a good bit of fitted Wilton or Axminster in a good plain colour. And now, suddenly, stunningly confronted, she saw, if not the details, at least the nature of her errors. For this room was the real thing: so much was unmistakable. Just as Clelia’s particular combination of virtues could never have been arrived at by fraud, so this room could never have been created out of ignorance or servile imitations. And if this room was real, so might the others have been. The aristocratic ideal was vindicated. She stared at the golden eagle, so arrogantly and eternally poised, and wondered why she had ever thought birds on furniture were a bit off: why had she never bothered to look, why had she never asked herself what her eyes had told her? Why had she had to wait for such an education? The eagle was so evidently, so ferociously beautiful; one would have thought that it could have impressed itself upon the most unwilling beholder. She wondered how many other such eagles she had blindly passed.

Mrs Denham herself made a fitting occupant for such a room, poised equally between frayed charm and the austere splendour of riches. After the initiation of Clelia, she was to Clara less surprising than she might otherwise have been, for the resemblance between mother and daughter was marked: the features were the same, though worn and lined by grooves deeper than mere wrinkles: the set of the conscious, curious head was the same, and the hair was the same, though streaked with white, and hanging with the benefits
of expense, as well as of style. Clara had never seen such securely straight hair on so old a woman; even the more fashion-conscious of the middle-aged lecturers at her college were adorned with the permanent waves of their generation. Nor had she ever seen such a dress on anyone over the age of thirty, but seeing it, she had to admit that it did not even look bizarre: it was a pale purple smock, waistless and bustless, with long, much-buttoned sleeves, and yet it managed to give only the faintest, most delicate air of bohemia. Mrs Denham wore heavily rimmed glasses, and she took them off from time to time, restlessly, as she talked: the crows’ feet round her eyes were deeply scored, and her eyes without their glasses had a distant, worried look, as though committed to far other fields of concentration. And yet, when she talked, she seemed to be there, and with them; she did not seem to be elsewhere.

She talked of books, from what Clara, in her haze of observation, could hear: about some books that she was, ah yes, what was that word, reviewing? A critic, then? No, not a critic: her attitude to her present undertaking was too anxious, too casual, to be the attitude of a weekly employee. A writer, then, perhaps: and Clara, searching for help, directed her excellent vision at the distant titles of the books on the shelves behind Martin’s head. And help was forthcoming, for there was a whole row of somehow familiar books, and the name on the back, she could just decipher it, was Candida something, why yes, of course, Candida Gray, she saw it with a flash of inspiration, for it had never occurred to her to look for a surname other than the one that she already knew. Candida Gray, Candida Gray, a name that she had known for as many years as she had known any such names; she had not read as many of the novels as she ought to have done, but she had read one at least, and that one she actually remembered. In the sudden satisfaction of recognition, Clara nearly cried out, into the midst of the conversation, I read your book, I read that book of yours, I read
Custom and Ceremony
: but she didn’t, she kept quiet, she did not want to betray, even directly, the novelty of her discovery. And she thought, a little aggrieved: I do think Clelia might have told me, how could she assume that I knew her mother’s maiden name? Or does everyone know such things but me? Of course they don’t,
and she should have known that if anyone didn’t, it would be me. This is what she said to herself, but at the same time she was alarmed, faintly alarmed by the implication that everyone did know such things. She had a long way, still, to go.

Her discovery did, however, although belated, do much to help her understanding of the conversation: references hitherto obscure became suddenly clear. She began to feel that she knew where she was, a little: and after a while she too began to talk. And they talked to her, most politely: the Martin man asked her when she was doing her Finals, and she told him, and he asked her what she was going to do then, and she said that she thought she would do a teachers’ training course.

‘But will you teach?’ asked Mrs Denham anxiously.

‘I don’t suppose so,’ said Clara, ‘but it makes a qualification, doesn’t it?’

‘I used to teach,’ said Mrs Denham, ‘but I was always so afraid of being boring that I could never talk for long enough. One has to do so much talking, and I don’t like talking. Or only to people. I suppose you will probably get married, will you?’

‘I never seem to feel like getting married,’ said Clara.

‘That’s what Clelia says,’ said Mrs Denham. ‘And she has good reason to say so when she looks at what has happened to all the rest of them.’

‘Why, what has happened to them?’ said Clara, who felt such a question to be not impertinent but positively requested.

‘They all got married,’ said Mrs Denham, ‘all except the little one, and she’s still at Oxford. The eldest one couldn’t have children, and quarrels with her husband, and has gone dotty because she can’t have children, and wanders around in a very odd coat all the time. She lives in the country, it must be a mistake. Then the second one got married, and he’s got four children, and the third got married, and he’s got three children, and they’re both going dotty because they’ve got too many. Aren’t they, Clelia?’

‘No more than most other people, I don’t suppose,’ said Clelia.

‘But you must admit,’ said her mother, ‘that it’s put you off.’

‘No it hasn’t,’ said Clelia. ‘And look at me, I’ve managed to pick
up a baby without even getting married, haven’t I, Jamesie?’ And she gave the baby a lump of sugar.

‘The maternal impulse in your family tends to run riot,’ said Martin, ‘don’t you think?’

‘And a good thing for you that it does,’ said Clelia, with a sudden asperity, ‘or you’d be out on your ear.’

She said this with a certain violence, and Clara’s attention quickened, for she thought she was about to witness the emergence of one of the buried conflicts of which she had heard so much: but Mrs Denham said quickly, ‘For goodness
sake
, Clelia, you know how good it is for me to have James around, it takes me back to those lovely days when you were all so small and docile.’