Palladian (14 page)

The house seemed to absorb people after meals. In the drawingroom Tinty sang a sentimental ballad: somewhere between the notes of the untuned piano and her warbling flat old voice the melody itself lay untouched – ‘The End of a Perfect Day’. On the top of the piano there was always a pile of music she had bought as a girl – the piles of music (mended with gummed transparent paper) which all girls had in those days when Tinty was young and wore bronze shoes and large black bows at the nape of her neck and hid the scented leaves of Papier Poudre in her Dorothy bag. ‘Cynthia Fowler’ was scrawled across the music covers with their ornate scrolled titles – ‘Where My Caravan Has Rested’, ‘Absent’, ‘Nirvana’, ‘I Hear You Calling Me’, and the pictures of nouveau-art lilies, of bulrushes, had been filled in with pale water-colours on far-off wet evenings, long ago at the turn of the century.

The cellar door opened out from the old bakery, the medieval part of the house, upon which the Palladian façade had been imposed. The bakery was full now of old mangles, swede-mincers, vinegar casks, knife-grinders and heaps of broken flower-pots. A little mouse ran round and round inside a sack of maize. The kitchen cat had left a torn-up chaffinch upon the floor. It was all eaten away except the frail, outstretched legs and feet, finedrawn and exquisite, a feather or two and some lead-coloured entrails.

Margaret crossed the flagged passage from the kitchen, eating a slice of bread-and-dripping on which they could see the dark jelly and the sprinkled salt. Cassandra’s mouth watered, although, on account of her love-sickness, the worm i’ the bud, she would have refused food in Marion’s presence.

‘How
can
you, Margaret?’ he asked, sorting out his keys before the locked door.

‘For whose benefit is the cellar locked?’ she inquired. ‘Would you care for some beef-dripping, Cassandra? My cousin does not keep what I call a good table.’

‘You must speak to your mother, then,’ said Marion.

‘No, thank you,’ Cassandra said coldly.

‘No one
eats
in this house,’ Margaret complained. ‘I no longer have erotic dreams, because they are all about food now – great squidgy gingerbreads full of almonds and lardy-cakes, warm and greasy, and ribs of beef and treacle-pudding …’

‘Good God!’ said Marion. He opened the door and the chilly, fusty smell came up from the cellar.

‘No, I wouldn’t touch your wine, my temptations are all with things to eat,’ Margaret went on, leaning ungracefully against the wall. ‘As far as I’m concerned, never lock the door. And Tom, as you know, doesn’t drink wine.’

‘The door is locked because of the stairs,’ Marion said haughtily. Cassandra had observed that his cousin did not bring out the best in him, he became stiff and touchy. ‘Sophy might break her neck if the door were left open.’

But Margaret had gone back for more bread-and-dripping.

‘What do you think you would like?’ Marion asked, and his voice echoed down the steps before him.

Wine had not been much drunk in Cassandra’s home, although there had been the Sunday ritual of her mother’s lunch-time sherry. While she was dishing up, Cassandra’s father would carefully fill a small ruby-stemmed glass and she would have it on the draining-board and sip as she made gravy or strained greens, then she would bring the glass to the table and drink it while her husband carved the joint. Sometimes Cassandra was given a half-filled glass, and sherry would always, she thought, have that association of roast meat and the smell
of Yorkshire pudding and the sound of her father clashing the carving knife against the steel.

‘Sherry – do you think?’ she asked uncertainly.

Going among the bins, brushing aside cobwebs, he was happier than he had been for years; he felt another personality approaching the frozen silence of his own, something he had not expected since his last failure of all, his failure with Sophy. When they came up again and opened the door, Margaret was still mooning about the kitchen.

‘Would you like a glass of sherry?’ Marion was forced to ask.

‘I don’t drink sherry. There’s a cobweb on your sleeve. When you’ve drunk all that’ – she waved her hand at the cellar door – ‘it’s gone. You draw on the old stuff, but you lay nothing down. Like everything else you do. You just hope it will last you out – this house, your bit of money, your mode of life, your wine.’

Cassandra looked awkwardly away.

‘I have enough money,’ said Marion, locking the door. ‘I think I have enough wine.’

‘Ah, Tio Pepe!’ cried Margaret in a different voice, seeing the bottle under his arm. He led Cassandra away as quickly as he could.

‘The Little Grey Home in the West,’ Tinty quavered in the drawing-room. Plonkety-plonk went the old piano, which had the damp in it, and sounded as if it should be on a concert-party platform.

‘How unbearably depressing!’ said Margaret, following them into the hall, but she left them at the foot of the stairs and went in to her mother, and the singing and the piano-playing stopped at once and querulous voices arose in their stead.

The men had reached the stage of confidences, the deepest confidences of all, business confidences. Now their voices were serious and there were no further bursts of laughter. They were
putting one another on to good things. Mrs Veal was banished to Tom’s end of the bar, for this was even more big boys’ talk than the stories about sex which preceded it. Charlie knew all the dodges and they listened to him with respect; he had woven his way unnoticed in and out of the fringes of big business and now interlaced his talk with famous names.

‘Yes, I picked up a lot of useful knowledge there,’ he concluded, and finished his light ale.

‘It has only been useful for boasting,’ Tom said in a low voice.

‘Shush!’ Mrs Veal implored. As she swept a damp cloth over the bar, she picked up his whisky, wiped underneath, and murmured softly, leaning forward: ‘If you go out, wait by the pergola and I’ll be out in a minute.’

They were not busy, but Gilbert would be unable to leave the bar. Tom said nothing, but he drank his whisky quickly and got up and went out, so that she became fretful with impatience, wanting to follow him at once, but holding herself back for a little, for appearance’s, not her dignity’s sake.

Tom walked straight out of the pub and up the road.

There was nothing of roast beef in this sherry, Cassandra thought. It had no Sunday morning associations for her. It was essentially a drink for the violet hour, the cool summer airs, the earth reeling over into darkness and flowers stiffening their petals against the night; it was quiet in the mouth, like olives.

‘You chose better than might have been supposed,’ Marion observed.

‘But you know I hadn’t imagined it being like this,’ she said in a sudden unloosening. Her eyes added: ‘Ask me what you please and I shall tell you.’ Her head was like a globe of shifting flakes; when she moved, it became full of confusion like the snowstorm in a glass paper-weight.

She rested her shoulders against the green watered silk of the
chair behind her, sitting on the rug with her thin pinkish glass like a convolvulus in her fingers.

‘Your profile is like my mother’s cameo-brooch,’ said Marion. ‘A lovely straightness about you – very rare, that.’ He pulled open a little drawer in the table beside him and took out a brooch framed in finely-beaten gold. Then he could see that the cameo profile was quite unlike hers in reality, having a Greek nose and the mature sloping line from chin to neck the Athenians – and Edwardian English – appear to have admired. He supposed that any clear-cut profile against a darker background has the same intaglio quality.

She put her glass on the table with great care and stood rocking a little on the hearthrug.

‘Dear Cassandra, you are a little drunk, I think.’ He took her chin in his hand, and ran his thumb over her eyelid and the bones round her eyes. She felt at peace with his fingers touching her face and the wine shedding its radiance through bone and blood and tissue.

‘Have you ever been drunk before?’

She moved her head slightly. He laughed and put an end to his connoisseurish perusal of her. She picked up the brooch and looked at it in a puzzled way.

‘What’s this owl for?’

‘The lady is supposed to be Night.’

‘And what are these?’

‘Poppies.’

‘And this is the moon, I see.’

‘“The stars about the fair moon …”’ he began and, continuing in Greek, he took the brooch and pinned it to Margaret’s blue dress.

‘Why do you do that?’

‘Because I mean you to have it.’

‘I could never wear it,’ she said quietly.

‘If you can wear that dress to please Margaret, you can wear this to please me,’ he said, deliberately misunderstanding.

‘But the reasons are different – don’t you see?’ The snow had begun to sift and slant in her head and she closed her eyes for a moment.

‘No, I don’t see. Yes, I do, really. But I still mean you to have it. I think you ought to go to bed now. It’s after ten. I’m sorry if I gave you more sherry than you wanted.’

‘How tactful you are!’ she said sleepily. She went lingeringly across the room, looked out of the window for a moment, paused at the door and said: ‘Thank you for my Greek lesson,’ laughed and disappeared. Marion went back to his chair and filled his glass.

Going along the dark passage she thought: ‘He wanted to get rid of me.’ Then she fingered her brooch and put up her hand and stroked her eyelids, ran a thumb round her eye-socket.

‘What
are
you doing?’ Tom asked, coming upstairs. ‘Why are you wearing Margaret’s dress? What are you doing wandering about in the dark?’

‘I’ve been for my Greek lesson.’

‘Come here!’ He stopped by the landing window and looked at her. ‘You’re – not quite yourself?’ he suggested. ‘Greek lesson is a good name for it. Your eyes don’t focus.’

She could well believe it, but feigned alarm.

‘In fact, you’re drunk, my dear.’ Her mouth drooped.

‘Where did you get that brooch from?’ he asked suddenly and in a different voice. With a foolish gesture she laid her hand over it.

‘Who gave it to you?’

He grasped her cold elbows and began to shake her gently. ‘Tell me where you …’

‘Marion!’ she cried. ‘He gave it to me.’ Tears began to flow down her cheeks.

‘How dare he!’ Tom whispered.

Margaret’s door opened and she came out across the landing, her dark hair on her shoulders, the long nightgown held in the medieval way bunched up in her hand over her swollen stomach.

‘Tom, my dear, what is going on? Cassandra, why are you crying?’

‘You look quite beautiful, Margaret,’ her brother said in a surprised voice.

She could not take a compliment gracefully and became surly at once. ‘I suppose you are drunk, Tom.’

No. I am enormously sober. Cassandra, do you want to go to bed?’

She nodded.

‘Don’t let Margaret keep you up, then,’ he said politely.

When Cassandra had gone, he turned away, too.

‘Where are you going now?’ Margaret asked.

‘I am going to say good night to Marion.’

All the way along the passage he was whispering to himself – ‘How dare you, Marion! How dare you!’ But when he reached the door of Marion’s room he checked his anger, as if he were suddenly conscious of danger lying all about him.

‘So you are sober, Marion?’

‘Of course.’

‘Cassandra is not. She was wandering along the corridor looking like Ophelia and wearing Violet’s brooch.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘I sent her to bed – out of Margaret’s way.’

‘Where was Margaret then?’

‘Oh, you know what Margaret is. She has a row with mother and goes to bed at nine out of pique, feels refreshed by ten and ready to interfere with other people’s goings-on.’

‘What goings-on were there?’

‘I was man-handling Cassandra. I was about to take advantage of her by the landing window.’

After a second or two, Marion asked: ‘So you thought you would get in with your story first?’

Tom considered this carefully and then said ‘Yes.’

‘I dare say you have made it sound worse than it was!’

‘Yes. I only had her by the arms – the cold part of the arms, above the elbow. After her Greek lesson I had no hope of rousing her.’

‘Don’t talk like Nanny.’

‘Why
was she wearing Violet’s cameo?’ he asked.

‘I gave it to her. It was my mother’s. I can’t remember Violet wearing it often.’

‘But she
always
wore it, with those print blouses, the lilac one and the grey striped one – and with the black velvet …’ He turned and walked to the window, having forgotten himself. (‘The situation is fraught with danger,’ he thought.) He looked down at the bleached steps before the house. For a while after Violet’s marriage the façade had blossomed with lights; on evenings like this, women in pale frocks had been led down the steps among the colourless moths which encircled the lamp, they had gone looking for romance, sitting under the cedar trees on white seats, had returned to the house later, their faces reflecting neither rapture nor disappointment. He and Violet had not looked for romance, but had walked in the darkness, fingers locked tightly together. One night, he had thought of Rossetti’s picture ‘How They Met Themselves’ and felt that at each turn of the shrubbery they would see Tom and Violet coming towards them, the white and indigo of their clothes in the moonlight, the pale, laced fingers and the darkness of their eyes. But no vision had molested them, nor underlined their guilt. There never had been any ghosts and were none now; neither in this room, nor
across that lawn where the monkey-puzzle tree stood so black and barbed against the fainter sky.