Palladian (10 page)

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Marion.

‘I have even broken his bowl,’ Tom thought stupidly. ‘I think I shall go to bed,’ he said.

‘Don’t go like that,’ said Marion. ‘Don’t go, feeling sorry for yourself.’

‘You know everything, Marion. How is that?’

‘I only know things out of books.’

‘I think I
shall
go to bed.’

‘All right.’

Tom looked for a second at the smashed china in the hearth. Marion put him at peace with himself. ‘If he knew about Mrs V. even, he would never be disgusted,’ he thought. ‘He would only
read something to me out of a book.’ ‘All things which the something dawn has what?’ he began.

‘Dispersed,’ said Marion.

‘I’m sorry about that bowl.’

Marion said nothing. He had said once that it did not matter and he had spoken the truth.

‘Good night.’

When Tom had gone, Marion knelt on the rug and picked up the pieces of china. He filled another bowl with the coloured fragments and then sat down again and opened his book. The ormolu clock gave out eleven notes and each struck a little chime, a little jarring reverberation from one of the thousandflower bowls upon the mantelpiece.

‘Some queer things are going on in this house,’ Nanny said to Mrs Adams from the lodge. ‘Things we’ve never been used to. There was Mrs Vanbrugh the other day complaining about the glucose going, then I find me
Picturegoer
in the larder lying there as cool as a cucumber on the shelf. It was the day we saw
Pride and Prejudice
and I left that paper on me rocking-chair. That makes me think, so I take a look around – cream cheese missing, and the bread sawed about anyhow. It’s this so-call governess. Don’t she get enough to eat or what?’

‘She don’t look no more like a governess than I do,’ said Mrs Adams, blowing her sandy hair up from her face as she scrubbed.

‘Into the corners!’ Nanny suddenly rapped out.

‘Thursday’s me day for this floor. I’m only giving it a do-over.’

‘Too many do-overs in this house. Nothing done right. Thursday you’ll get one of your funny turns, I daresay. Then where will the floor be?’

‘Where it is now,’ Mrs Adams thought. She fanned out the soapy water over the flagstones, then gathered it up on the
slimy cloth, wrung it into the bucket and shuffled backwards on her knees.

‘She’s no good for gentlemen’s service,’ Nanny thought, watching her. ‘A good do-out of a room, I like,’ she said aloud. ‘Into the corners and behind the pictures. Then you know it’s all sweetness, nothing skimped.’

‘You could spend your life on your knees,’ Mrs Adams said, thinking of the great house. ‘We all like our little bit of shut-eye after dinner. And our look at the paper. Half the world scrubbing on their knees, the other half sitting on its arse. That’s what it looks like to me.’

‘They’ve got their own ways of being busy. Up here,’ said Nanny, tapping her forehead. ‘Where’d we be if it wasn’t for the head-workers?’

‘That’s what I’m saying.’

Mrs Adams shuffled out backwards through the door to do the last bit, the bucket pulled scrooping after her.

‘That’s a lick and a promise if there ever was,’ Nanny said, watching her. ‘Slopping dirty water over it; it’ll be worse than before. Once it’s dried. You’ll see. Them flags always look nice and fresh wet. Wait till they’re dry, that’s all.’ After a while, she went on: ‘When it comes to me doing her job for her, then I begin to see the dawn. Just at the last moment having to cut extra sandwiches and then running for the bus like that takes off all the gilt. Either that or miss the Forthcoming Attractions and the News as well, more than likely.’ To herself, she thought: ‘Them Grecian lessons! Do they think I was born yesterday?’ But she would not imply criticism of her employer to a mere char-woman, a daily woman, paid by the hour, who left, she now observed, the half-wrung-out cloth in a slimy, smelly twist in the bucket.

Mrs Adams came rocking back across the wet floor on her heel-edges, not to mark the clean flags. ‘That job’s jobbed,’ she
said. As she put up her hand to straighten her hair, the inside of her arm showed grey and crêpy. ‘What now?’ she asked, wanting to get back to her baby.

But Nanny had feelings only for the babies of the well-to-do, and even then, it was the baby’s belongings which inspired her most, the tools of her craft – the piles of dazzling folded napkins, the curved blue safety-pins, the padded baskets, the enamelled kidney-bowls. Then she was all-powerful, surrounded by such accoutrements, sitting on the low chair, the bath-apron over her lap, the napkin folded ready, pins in her mouth … ‘Is he a diddums?’ … one hand clasping the fat ankles together, the other fondly smacking the creased buttocks, then flouring the wrinkled, mauve, hanging genitals with powder … ‘and is he a diddums?’ … the little feet fighting in her hand. Oh, all that was long since. Mrs Adams’s baby was not a proper baby, was female, did not smell sweetly, was not real and could not matter, so: ‘There’s the stairs yet,’ she said. ‘If anyone should so much as run a finger down them bannisters, I don’t know, I’m sure.’

Mrs Adams was tired and worried in her heart, for all her tart answers; and the baby, though female, though such a trouble with wind, was real to her and tugged her homewards. ‘Just a flick round then,’ she conceded, and went off with her duster to wipe down the bannisters and rub up the more horizontal surfaces of the furniture.

Nanny feigned eccentricity as Hamlet feigned part of his madness, and for more or less the same reason, so that she could speak her mind, set herself apart from humanity and tell the truth, keep her integrity in words, at least, and have every allowance made.

‘Oh!’ said Margaret, coming so silently and quickly into the kitchen. ‘No cinema then, this afternoon?’

‘They kept the big film on all the week.’

‘And was it a nice film?’ Margaret condescended, in order to gain time, find her reason for being there.

‘It was Russian,’ Nanny said flatly, not caring for foreign countries unless the English aristocracy was settled there. ‘What are you up to?’

Margaret came and stood on the red and black rug.

‘What is it now?’ The old woman could hardly stave off the sleep stealing heavily over her.

Margaret said: ‘It’s Marion. I wanted a cup of tea for him to take with his tablets.’

‘One of them heads again. You’ll have to make it yourself, then. The kettle’s warm. Funny he gets these turns. A drop of warm oil down his ear, I’d try.’ (One of her darlings, Violet’s youngest brother, turning his fist against the side of his head, crying. ‘Lay your head on Nan’s lap. Nanny’s got you!’ Never liked to hear one of the boys crying. Violet was always crying anyhow. Not the boys. When he fell asleep after his warm milk, it was lovely seeing his cheek against the pillow so peaceful …)

Margaret went to the larder, put milk and sugar on a tray and cut herself a slice of custard tart. When she had made the tea and tiptoed back through the kitchen, Nanny was asleep, her shiny, crinkled hands lying like toads in her black lap.

Marion was walking up and down his room.

‘What’s this?’ he asked, suddenly checked, seeing the tray.

‘Tea and some tablets.’

‘How did you know?’

‘I thought at lunch …’

He was surprised by her sudden goodness. ‘And what is that?’ he went on, bewildered by the slice of tart lying beside his cup. Did she think he was going to eat it?

‘Oh, that is for me,’ she said calmly and took it up and bit off a corner. ‘I hate nutmeg,’ she said, eating lovingly. ‘Nanny
wants you to have warm oil in your ear,’ she went on, laughing to herself; but she could really only think about the eating, turning the tart this way and that in her hand thoughtfully; baiting Marion was too stale a sport. It belonged to her childhood, and Tom’s. In those days Tom had turned on him impulsively, savagely, because he could not bear that one emotion – pity forcing him to feel uneasy. It made him impatient, brutal, curdled his kindness. Marion, with his gentleness, his cleverness, his girlish ways was such fair game at school, among other boys. Since Tom had not the character to stand beside his cousin and defend him, he had made a loud noise to confound his better nature and led the bullying himself and, with strange, mixed impulses, swung from day to day between indifference and the devising of new cruelties.

Margaret’s teasing had been feline, less spasmodic, longer sustained, reflecting herself and her love for her brother, and had never really ceased.

Yet Marion (the thin fair boy, tied by his bluish wrists to the beam in the garage, not crying, although knowing he would not be set free until he did), that Marion, grown-up, had won in the end, for the adults’ world was different from the children’s: in the children’s world he had encountered every brutality of flesh and spirit; in the world of grown-ups he had won the house and Violet (she bracketed them in her mind, the house set above the woman).

‘One of your bowls is missing,’ she said, to make conversation. ‘Who broke it?’

Tom. It was an accident.’ He had finished the tea and he wished she would go.

‘Well, I didn’t suppose he threw it on the floor on purpose. Was he drunk?’

‘He was a little – blurred. I don’t know about drunk. But the bowl was nothing to do with that … it was an accident.’ The
pain down the side of his head had the shape of a flower. It grew on a fine stem from his jaw, put out tendrils across his cheek, leaved and budded, and there, below the eye, the pain’s centre, it burst hotly into bloom.

‘Why do you tolerate him?’

‘Tolerate whom?’ He was preoccupied with pain and could not follow her conversation as well.

‘Tom.’

‘I do not tolerate him. I love him.’

‘Surely men don’t talk of loving one another.’

Her look of fastidiousness amused him.

‘A man with neuralgia may talk of anything.’

She thought: ‘It would be a pretty sort of eternal triangle with homosexuality thrown in as well.’ Aloud she said: ‘But the money you give him.’

‘Now you are getting a little out of your depth,’ he suggested. ‘A little confused.’

‘Tablets working yet?’

‘No.’

‘Why do you give him money? If he had none, he’d have to do some work.’

Marion thought: ‘I took his work away from him all those years ago, when I took away the motive of his work, the meaning of his life.’

‘Why don’t you answer me?’

‘Because I am hoping you will go away and leave me in peace.’

‘No, Marion. You have plenty of peace. Your life is so full of it, you might be an old man or an invalid. But I’m not discussing your life, only Tom’s. Stop giving him money, make him go away. There is this awful woman in the village. Please put an end to it.’ She had finished her custard tart and there was nothing left to do with the long afternoon but make a scene.

‘What awful woman in the village?’ He despaired of being left to deal with his aching head in privacy, and sat down at the table, a hand across his cheekbone.

‘There you are! You live in your ivory tower …’

‘Oh, must we have all that clap-trap? Say what you will, but spare me your clichés.’

She did not look offended.

‘There is a very horrible sort of woman at the pub. Tom stays there after closing time. She’s the wife of the publican.’

‘I know nothing about the village,’ he said with indifference.

‘No. I always hated and despised the old Squires and their Lady Bountifuls with their meddling and condescension and their giving back in charity a mere hundredth part of what they had pillaged. But you are worse. You keep the hundredth part, take no responsibility, show no interest, give nothing to the land even, but let the soil go sour and the grass rank. The people who once lived in this house would not have seen the land lying useless, or one of the villagers starve or go without coal at Christmas, and if a girl was in trouble by a man, they’d damn well make him marry her …’

‘I don’t feel cut out for that,’ he said laconically.

‘I never thought I’d be upholding the feudal system,’ she said with amusement, taking a walk to the window and back, wondering what her friends in London would have said. ‘Tablets not worked yet?’

He moved his head slightly to say no.

‘Odd!’

He wondered if she were so cruelly obtuse with her patients, decided not, could even imagine her sympathetic and helpful, with working-class mothers, for instance, those she approved.

Now, she said, polishing her engagement ring, looking at it from the length of her arm, as if it were something new:

‘Well, I wish you would speak to Tom.’

‘Speak to Tom! He is a person, not a child. Even if he were a child, I am not his nurse.’

‘Then don’t behave like one.’

‘I should go down to the village and plead with the woman for your brother’s honour, if I were you.’

She went out in a temper, closing the door not at all quietly. The sound splintered across his face.

After supper, Marion asked his aunt: ‘Have you a good recipe for soup for the poor?’