Palladian (15 page)

Had he borne with every sort of torment, watched Violet marrying Marion, seen them driving away to their honeymoon (very cool and remote, she had waved her gloved hand), so many times said good night to them on the landing, and sat with Marion the afternoon she died, conceding to him the greater grief, now to be broken by a trivial business of another girl wearing her brooch?

‘Mother’s having quite an evening,’ he said, making an effort. For even up here in Marion’s room, they could hear the faded songs and their unsure, but rubato, accompaniment. He turned his back on the window. ‘Do you really teach Cassandra Greek?’

Marion put his forefinger in his book and looked up. ‘She has reached the fourth declension.’

‘She is so insipid,’ Tom complained. ‘She clasps her hands like a governess in a book. She ought to wear long skirts.’

‘All women ought to wear long skirts.’

‘I couldn’t agree more. Especially out of doors – the long drapery flowing back from the thigh – the Winged Victory, for instance.’

‘Hardly governessy.’

‘No. Bombasine’s the stuff for
them
, I believe. I think I’ll go to bed. If you’re in love with her, Marion, I’m sorry I said she was insipid.’

‘I’m not in love with her.’

‘Well, good night.’

‘Good night.’ Marion began to tidy the room. He picked up Violet’s Greek primer and Cassandra’s exercise book and put them together on his desk.

‘What happened to your besotted boy friend?’ Gilbert asked, getting into bed.

Cassandra stood in the old bake-house arranging the flowers. The only ones to be found were the hardiest perennials; even so, she hoped to achieve something arresting. She carried her great flower-piece of sunflowers and magenta phlox into the kitchen and, leaving them on the table, went back for the honeysuckle.

‘I always thought them colours clashed,’ said Mrs Adams, who was rubbing up some of the silver and drinking tea.

‘And so they do,’ said Nanny. ‘Makes my eyes wince to look at them.’

‘Did she have a cup? ‘Mrs Adams nodded towards the bakehouse.

But governesses are not quite servants in the usual sense of the word: their education puts them out of reach of the continual flow of tea which goes on in kitchens.

‘She did the bowl of fruit nice,’ Mrs Adams went on.

‘That’s a pretty apple, that wine-sap; but I’ll lay the vine leaves are done for before evening. Just like all these young girls. I remember Miss Violet over the cold collation – “Let’s have it all green and coral, Nan,” she used to say, and there it’d
be – great lobsters lolling here there and everywhere on beds of lettuce, cucumbers sticking out in all directions, sliced down lengthwise and cut out like crocodiles with prawns for tongues, everything smothered over with green mayonnaise and red pepper. It
looked
lavish enough, but who could eat cucumbers like that; it was mostly left, wasted. A stand-up buffy, too, and the lobster not rightly cracked, and Mr Tom fixing a claw in the hinge of the library-door and pulling it to – till I rapped his knuckles for him, passing by. All the young gentlemen out on the terrace stamping on lobster with their boots. And laugh! “What goings-on!” I said to Miss Violet afterwards. She knew I didn’t like it, but they didn’t care, being half-cut at the time. I was just saying,’ she added slyly, as Cassandra came back into the kitchen, ‘you remind me of young Mrs Vanbrugh with your flower-arranging. She always liked something a bit different. I remember—’ she turned to Mrs Adams again, ‘– one day she came in and said: “Such an idea for the table to-night. I wonder I’ve never seen it before.” She gets out the flat bowl we used to have tulip heads floating in when that was the rage and fills it with moss and toadstools – all different kinds, puff-balls and red and white spotted ones and those wavy ones like bits of shammy leather. “It smells a bit earthy,” I made so bold as to say, but young ladies and gentlemen are tough, nothing puts them off their food. “How lovely! How original!” I expect they said.’ (Her voice rose in imitation of the gentry.) ‘I can well imagine. Well, in the morning, she was laying-in till lunch, of course, I went into the dining-room first. There it was – quite collapsed – ’eaving, a writhing mass of maggots. When I told her she laughed. “You can’t better the mauve sweet peas in the silver table-centre,” I said. “All that with grass and mirrors and wildflowers – shells full of convolvulus, that was another one – it doesn’t really do. I like smilax on a table, myself.”’

‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Adams, nodding.

Cassandra was held. She stood by the table, fingering the marigolds.

‘Oh, she always saw a picture in her mind and it had to be like that. “I want it all to shine softly,” she says – “branches of honesty and candlelight and me in me pearls and me ivory chiffon.” So, upside-down the house is turned till she gets her way. Or, no! it shall be dark ivy trailing out of that very fluted vase you have the sunflowers in. Then I knew she was up to her tricks – that Grecian frock
he
designed for her and real ivy leaves in her hair – not artificials – and long trailing bits. She went and pulled them off a grave in the churchyard. And sandals with her toes out; mind, she had no corns: it was all right as far as that went. “What’s she up to to-night?” Cook used to ask. All this for some dry old professor or what-not. Well, it was for herself, really. She didn’t care if the others thought her queer as long as
she
was satisfied. Nothing spoilt her looks. How many of us can say the same?’ Nanny rocked in her chair, her cup and saucer held high. Sometimes she sipped, tilting back, her old, beetleish appearance, lined, yellowed, seemed wistful, but was not in reality. Cassandra, with her palely-coloured young face, intent on the evocation of beauty from the past, looked wistful, too. And was.

Nanny had disapproved of Violet, but disapproved of Cassandra even more. She had always loved her boys and was not above setting the girls against one another; whether they were dead or alive. It delighted her to bring Cassandra to the edge of despair about Violet.

Margaret came into the kitchen, with the purposeful and deliberate tread of a pregnant woman, as if battling her way through obstacles.

‘A nice cup of tea, Madam?’ Mrs Adams asked, to cover up her own sipping, really, but she made her words sound like a Salute to Motherhood with the deference in them.

Margaret had a feeling away from tea. ‘One of those things …’ she began, drumming her long white fingers on the deal table, which was so scrubbed that the grain stood up in ribs. ‘Metabolism,’ she murmured to herself. The word was so Greek, so clear and sharp and so unlike the Anglo-Saxon language of the old wives. She did not care for female-talk, as she called it, unless it was very far removed from women gossiping over gates or over the four o’clock fire; unless it was clear, decisive, scientific.

‘I remember with Miss Violet’s mother, that was with the youngest boy,’ Nanny began – (“Oh, God! She’s off!” Margaret thought. “I might have known.”) – ‘Heartburn! I’ve never known anyone to suffer so. As soon as she so much as sat down to the table. “You mark my words, madam,” I said, “that lad’ll have a mane of hair” – I knew it was a boy, she carried so high – and when he was born, there it was, like black feathers down to his shoulders.’

‘How revolting!’ said Margaret. ‘What was that to do with the heartburn, though? And a boy is carried no higher than a girl. How could it be? And why?’

‘A
doctor
should know,’ said Nanny, putting down her cup. ‘A nice drop of tea, Miss?’ she asked Cassandra at long last.

‘Thank you.’ She felt under a spell, standing there in the kitchen with the other women, the day outside beginning to get hot, the smell inside of honeysuckle and plate polish.

Still rocking softly, Nanny took the pot from the hob and poured a tan-coloured stream of long-brewed tea into the steep white cup. ‘I’ve never known it fail,’ she was saying. ‘With Madam she carried the boys right under the bust, it was much remarked upon, but Miss Violet she carried so low that she could never as much as go up the stairs without sitting down half-way for a rest, that’s when we began having the chair on the half-landing. Then trouble with her water. “I’ve been in
and out of bed all night, Nanny,” she used to say. Pressing on the bladder, you see.’

‘Just how it was with me,’ said Mrs Adams, but knew at once that she had gone too far, putting her own pregnancy alongside those of the upper middle-classes. ‘How about when Miss Sophy was born?’ she asked, to make amends and hoping she was in for a treat.

‘Oh, that!’ said Nanny. Too many tears for us to see
what
was going on there.’

‘Kidney trouble,’ Mrs Adams whispered at the coffee-spoons, laying them in a row, bowls cupped together.

‘Eclampsia,’ said Margaret – another Greek word. ‘Do you
eat
anything with these endless cups of tea?’ She looked restlessly round the kitchen. But ‘endless’ annoyed Nanny and she said nothing.

‘Do you feel like anything to eat, Cassandra?’ Margaret asked, putting her into a desperate position. She could not make up her mind which camp to move over to. Luckily, Tinty came into the kitchen at that moment to discuss lunch and make a few rock cakes.

‘Two hospital nurses Miss Violet had at the end, full of long words the both of them,’ said Nanny darkly. ‘For all that, she had fit after fit. They couldn’t stop it. I shall never forget the sight of her, her hands as stiff as frozen fish and the thumbs lying across the palms. Her face was purple.’

‘For goodness’ sake!’ cried Tinty, making wild little gestures behind Margaret’s back. ‘I’m ashamed of you, Nanny.’ Desperation for her daughter’s peace of mind made her brave.

Margaret laughed. ‘I’ve seen it before,’ she said. Nanny decided to take it out on Mrs Adams, hoisting herself out of the rocking-chair, feigning great age; she pounced on the silver rosebowl, just finished, standing on the strip of green baize, reflecting the dresser with its blue cups and Mrs Adams’s elongated face.

‘Look at this!’ cried Nanny. ‘Is it done, or what? Smudge here, tarnish there, thumb-prints all over. I’ve always taken a pride in me polishing – rub till it’s white as a diamond.’

‘Misplaced sexual energy,’ Margaret thought, slipping into the larder. She hated polishing, herself.

Tinty spread the bluish raisins on the table.

‘Are these all we have?’

Margaret was rapidly making them less.

‘That’s all,’ said Nanny, off-handedly. She was not a cook, nor a housekeeper. She only stayed because they were all frightened of her and might as well pay her wages as any other of the families she had bullied in the last forty years. It was as convenient a home as she could expect, unless next door to a cinema, which would mean a ‘bad address’. Her life had woven itself into this house, since the day when Miss Violet’s mother (the only woman she had ever feared) had sent her to look after Miss Violet in early pregnancy. She had known it would be the last job in the long sequence of nursery life. A good life. With authority and ritual. There had been interesting confinements, plenty of male children, involved and interesting feuds with governesses, midwives, housekeepers and fathers, even death. Now she sat in the rocking-chair, shelling late peas, and with a suggestion about her that her frail old body was being taxed beyond its strength.

‘I’ll make out a list,’ said Tinty. ‘Is there anything else we need? I’m going in this afternoon.’

‘I’ll take you in the car,’ said Margaret. ‘I can see if there’s any double-satin ribbon.’

Tinty began to look desperate. ‘I can see for you, dear.’

‘But you’d have to go on the bus.’

‘I enjoy going on the bus.’

‘Rennet,’ said Nanny. ‘And vinegar.’

‘Nut-meat roll,’ wrote Tinty. ‘Irish Moss. Catarrh-herbs.’

‘Well, six yards of cream double-satin ribbon,’ said Margaret.
‘And my calcium tablets. If you insist on going alone. It will give me a chance of writing to Ben.’

Mrs Adams scraped carrots now, humbly silent.

‘I must go up to Sophy,’ said Cassandra, picking up a bowl of marigolds.

‘You’ll get worms eating those raw carrots,’ said Nanny to Margaret.

‘Patter heemone ho en toiss ouranoiss …’
Sophy droned, inking in the grains of the schoolroom table. Marion sighed. He was walking about the room, jingling some keys or coins in his pocket, very depressed, very impatient.

‘Stop, Sophy!’

She had stopped anyhow and looked up mildly.

‘You are ink up to the elbows.’

She looked at her finger-nails and then reproachfully at him, her glance suggesting that he had exaggerated.

‘You hate this?’

She nodded.

‘Your mother could read Homer at the age of eight. What do you say to that?’

‘It was very young,’ she suggested politely.

‘She knew it was the key into the treasure-house, you see. Why are you yawning so much? Were you late to bed?’

‘No.’ She had been writing her journal, though, long after the light began to fade.

He picked up an exercise-book from the table and glanced through it. ‘Never let your hand-writing slope backwards, Sophy.’ He read for a little and then aloud: ‘“So poor ill-fated Mary looked up yet once again into the tumultous vacuity of the star-canopied empyrean and the muffled oars beat sonorously upon the turgid surface of the lake.” What is this?’