Palladian (13 page)

‘Is it your father, or your mother?’ he asked, understanding, resigning himself.

Her mother had been a comfortable woman, necessary to her as a child, warm, brave, seldom put out, but unable to provide for ever what her daughter needed, and Cassandra had turned to her father’s learning, seeking someone who threw longer shadows than herself, as the young do.

So – ‘My father,’ she now said to Tom.

‘Tell
me
then.’

‘Oh, I miss him,’ she began. ‘He taught me so much. He loved books and walking in the country and knew all the names of the flowers and how they got them, and about architecture and old churches. We used to go bicycling and doing brassrubbings in the holidays.’ (Tom yawned.) ‘He was much older than my mother and, I think, lonely. In the evenings he used to sit in his little room and prepare lessons and correct exam-papers –
he was a schoolmaster – and he always had a glass of weak whisky to sip as he worked …’

‘What do you mean by weak whisky?’

‘With a lot of warm water in it. And he would read amusing things to me that the boys had written. He rarely spoke or seemed to think about himself. The evening he died, he said: “You’ll have rain to-morrow.” He was looking out at the sky and it was the last thing he said. He seemed not to mind about tomorrow, although he knew he would not be there. It would still exist, because of us. He was never angry, never anything but gentle …’

‘What a boring old man,’ Tom thought. He had asked for it, though.

‘In books, death is just a sad chapter, and then you turn the page and go on with the next. But really it can’t be left behind quite like that. It goes on and on, a sort of nagging parenthesis, coming in brackets at the end of everything that happens …’ She fancied she saw her life spread out in handwriting on a page and again and again in the recurring brackets ‘My father having died.’

‘A parenthesis?’ thought Tom. Death had not been that to him. It was his life which went into brackets.

‘What about your Greek lessons? Do you still have them?’

She looked glad and yet confused when she nodded.

‘What does she want, a tutor or a young man?’ he wondered, not remembering what it was like to be twenty nor that the answer was ‘both’.

‘Was her mother
so
beautiful?’ she asked desperately.

‘Oh, Lord, yes.’

‘The photograph in Sophy’s room …’

‘Oh,
that!
One day I will show you my drawings of her.’

Coolness and the odour of worm-eaten wood came from the church. She got up and went to the door and, putting her handkerchief over her head, went inside quietly. He smiled at her,
especially at the bit about the handkerchief, then settled back and seemed to doze.

Light fell from windows of plain greenish glass beyond the pillars, but the altar was chequered with ruby and indigo and sepia from the bad modern glass of the East window. She tip-toed over stones and gratings. Madonna lilies, in a stage beyond full splendour, stood in brass vases and shed pollen on the cream and yellow embroidery. It was a curious silence in there, as if the outstretched effigies were keeping quiet, but only for a little while.

When she got back to the porch the gravel blazed before her on the other side of the shadows and she stepped suddenly into the full warmth and perfume of the afternoon, the desultory murmur of pigeons and then the sound of footsteps on the path.

Tom sat up with a start, plucking a little yellow rose from his button-hole and letting it fall down behind the seat.

‘Ah, there you are!’ said Sophy. ‘I thought I heard voices a little while ago.’

‘What were you doing?’ Tom asked.

‘I was putting some poppies on my mother’s grave.’

‘She never liked poppies,’ said Tom, yawning.

Sophy’s mouth stiffened. She turned and walked away down the path in front of them. Tom looked neither to left nor right. At the side of the path was Violet’s grave with its rose bush and the jar of poppies, wilting already, their heads leaning down as if sick.

‘I feel like a cup of tea,’ said Tom, the traces of his mid-day whisky in his mouth still. ‘I
will
show you the drawings one day. Yes, I should like to.’ Then he added: ‘When I
do
tell her something about her mother it is wrong, apparently.’ For Sophy walked on ahead, seeming offended.

As they climbed the lyre-shaped steps before the house,
Margaret saw them and leaned from her bedroom window, calling, and holding up the blue frock in great triumph.

Little worries about food disturbed Tinty as she lay on her bed in the darkened room. If the sausages were ‘off’ as she halfsuspected, what then could they have for supper? It had to be something easy, for it was Nanny’s cinema day and Mrs Adams had the baby ill with croup.

And all the time as the clock ticked on, her disappointment grew. She felt no inclination to spring up, crying: ‘What the hell am I lying here for?’ The tablets were taking a long time to raise her spirits. ‘Serve the sausages with an onion sauce,’ she thought. ‘And warn Margaret beforehand. Then I had better go down and prepare the sauce at once.’ But she lay a little longer and presently fell asleep.

Margaret woke her, shouting to the others from her window. Tinty swung violently out of her sleep, lay whimpering a little like a small dog; she had dribbled from the corner of her mouth. When she saw that it was nearly half-past four she slid off the bed and cast white powder over her face until it looked mauve and bleak. She rattled back the curtains, straightened the bed. ‘Nothing happened,’ she thought. ‘Nothing different.’ She had a dull headache from sleeping in the daytime, otherwise nothing. Full of little worries, she hastened downstairs to get the tea.

‘An old pal of mine – Mr Smart.’

‘Pleased to meet you. That’s no recommendation, though,’ said Gilbert, shaking hands across the bar.

‘Heard a lot about you, of course. Worst pub in these parts, Charlie said.’

‘Good old pal – Charlie,’ said Gilbert, with a gesture of cutting his own throat. ‘What’re we having?’

‘Double brandy, since you so kindly ask,’ said Charlie.

‘Half of mild for Charles,’ Gilbert called over his shoulder to his wife.

Tom sat on his corner stool drinking his fourth whisky. On summer evenings he hated this cool, beery interior and the same old backchat across the bar, and Mrs Veal, moving nervily under his scrutiny, pathetically blasé, flirtatious with a little group of car salesmen, travellers and bookies, her every gesture calculated to inflame him, whereas nothing moved him any more but whisky, and all her hard work was wasted, unless it could be that she was satisfied in some way merely imagining the hidden fires consuming him.

He drank in the pub and suffered the irritation of it, to
postpone that last stage of being alone with the whisky, a stage wherein the hours would lose their significance, for there would be no closing time, no reason for stopping. He felt lately that he could for only a very little while put off that final phase, knowing that he was losing grip of the whisky, that it could not be taken any longer in a desultory way, that he must be alone with it and in darkness, to concentrate all his senses upon his struggle with it, in order to wrest from it some paroxysm of delight.

A dreadful metaphor had occurred to him – that his conflict with alcohol was sexual and he like a starved and frantic woman striving by intense yet hopeless concentration to find peace from a casual and heedless lover. Always the culmination was beyond reach. ‘A deeper drink,’ he thought, ‘something to strike deeper so that all the congested longing might be discharged, the blood flow back through its accustomed channels promising peace for a long while.’ He drew his new drink to him and closed his eyes. The neat whisky slipped over his tongue into his throat; but, as always, it evaded him. It faintly warmed, flirted a little with him, withdrew, mocked at him. It was a hateful metaphor, he thought.

A shout of male laughter startled him and his hand shook. Mrs Veal had turned away coyly from their conversation, stood sipping her Guinness, eyelids cast down. If she did not actually blush, she gave the impression of just having done so.

‘Oh, God, they posture before me like madmen,’ Tom thought, feeling like the Duchess of Malfi – that they with their disease and lunacy were put there to destroy or torture him.

One of them, one of the madmen, with a curt gesture to Mrs Veal, included Tom in his round of drinks. The whisky was bought for him in contempt, a coin tossed from a pile of winnings towards some mumbling old whore, he thought, drinking it because neither the whisky nor he himself could be damaged
by the other’s insolence. Mrs Veal placed it before him and stayed nearby. He would not look at her. When he had finished this drink there would only be one more and then home, for the coins in his pocket had dwindled: like a blind man, he had learnt to know them by fingering and turning them; he would not bring them out to look at them.

He damned the woman for standing so close to him. She ruined his act of concentration. He knew she deplored this rapid drinking, but hoped to salvage some brutality from it for herself at the end. In a few minutes he pushed the glass towards her again.

Marion read Sappho to Cassandra. The words seemed to have been brought up, glittering, dripping, from the sea, encrusted still by something crystalline, the fragments and phrases like broken but unscattered necklaces, the chipped-off pieces of coral, of porphyry, of chrysolyte.

Cassandra half-listened as she wrote out her declensions, trying to evade the pain and impatience in her heart and that picture, always before her during these lessons, of the little girl, Violet, reading Homer at the age of eight.

Marion stopped reading and sat watching her, her intent face and her smooth hair dropping against her check. He felt his relationship with her to be of the deepest intimacy, and his gift to her the most precious he could bestow. He sat still, the book drooping in his hand, and watched her pen shaping the unfamiliar and beautiful letters.

After they were married, Violet would never read with him and they never again came near to the intimacy of their betrothal, for she never opened a book nor took up a pen. Instead, there were always people coming and going or she would disappear for long days on her own; then came her uncontrollable gusts of crying, her sickness and restlessness, and
his deep pity for her keeping them apart since it forbade his disturbing her or adding to her distress. She had died without turning to him again, and he remained where he had always been, alone in his room – Marion
contra mundum
, as Tom used to say at school – and more than ever set apart by those months of delight before he had married Violet and changed and indirectly killed her. He had been so oppressed by this idea of his guilt towards her, of blame, that he had spoken of it to Tom, the only occasion when he had asked his help, and Tom had seemed irritated by his sentimentality and said coldly: ‘One scarcely intends murder when one loves a woman. It is what is called a remote contingency,’ and he had walked away repeating and savouring his cliché to himself. He had always warned off those who approached him for sympathy, and Ruskin’s advice ‘Never be cruel, never be useless’ he deliberately turned upside down and was never kind except to those who were in no need of his kindness and never useful to anyone for a single moment.

Cassandra lifted her eyebrows as she wrote – although it was more like drawing than writing – and the skin went tight over her forehead with her effort of concentration. She was transparent because slowly-matured, he thought, wise from books only, and with the innocence of a child.

‘Oh, God, make him touch my hand again,’ she prayed, copying out
from Violet’s old primer.

‘Cassandra!’

She looked at him quickly.

‘Don’t be imposed upon. Your good manners lead you into mistakes. You know what I mean. That dress. Don’t be made to wear it out of kindness. It is so much Margaret. Not you.’

She said nothing.

‘I think you’re depressed. Let’s fetch ourselves a bottle of wine.’ He pushed his chair back and got up, much pleased with
his idea. ‘I have to be very mean and secret about my wine,’ he explained, taking up a bunch of keys from the mantelpiece. ‘Come down to the cellar with me.’

She wrote
and laid down her pen.