Palladian (18 page)

Cassandra came in. When she saw Tom sitting there with his trousers rolled up, his hair untidy, his feet soaking, she drew back in confusion.

‘That water’s no good to you now,’ said Nanny, handing him the towel.

‘I wanted some warm milk for Sophy,’ said Cassandra. ‘The storm has frightened her. Please don’t move. I can find the pan and heat it.’

‘I expect it’s gone sour,’ said Nanny. ‘Mrs Adams did her best with it. We ought to have one of them ‘fig’s. These houses are all swank at the front and inconvenience at the back. If I had babies in the house I’d stand out for one – milk turning overnight and green spots on the blackcurrant pureay.’

‘What happened about the flea?’ Tom asked.

‘I never said anything about no flea,’ Nanny said, frowning, as Cassandra came back into the kitchen with the milk.

‘She gets to be more of a person,’ Tom thought, drying his feet quickly, thinking of Cassandra.

When she had gone, Nanny said: ‘Always running in and out. “Can I have some paste?” “Can I have some hot milk?” Any excuse to get into this kitchen.’

‘Why should she want to come into the kitchen?’

‘You’ve got something there,’ she said; sinister, if meaningless.

Her insinuations failed with Tom also, for he began to laugh.

‘Is that how they talk at the cinema?’

‘Some do. Some don’t.’

‘Don’t they ever have Greta Garbo now?’

‘A rumour here and there. Nothing comes of it. Not that I’m worried.’

‘Her beauty was moving.’

‘Them legs!’

‘She was the only one who ever made me cry.’

‘There’s a pair of dry socks on the airer.’ She was pouring gin over the berries in the bottle, which now seemed to lie under a curious light.

‘What really happened about the flea?’ he asked before he went out of the kitchen.

‘We never found it,’ she said, pressing in the cork of the gin bottle.

Tom went at once, in his stockinged feet, to Sophy’s room. Cassandra sat by the bed palely illuminated by a nightlight in a white saucer: the flame dipped and wavered uncertainly and her shadow reached high and then receded.

She put her hand up and smiled. Once more Sophy lay asleep.

Tom stood at the end of the bed and looked at her.

‘What is this?’ he whispered taking up an exercise-book from the eiderdown. He read:

T
HE
L
OST
G
IRL
by
Sophy Violet Vanbrugh
Dedicated to Thomas Fowler Vanbrugh.

‘She is writing a novel,’ said Cassandra.

‘Good Lord!’ He felt it was the last straw.

Cassandra got up stealthily. Her eyes, he thought, looked brilliant, over-ripe with tears.

On the landing he said: ‘You have never seen my drawings of – of her mother. I once promised to show them to you.’

She turned her head away.

‘Are you tired?’

‘Yes.’ To keep her evening’s happiness intact she knew that she must quickly escape from Tom and his drawings.

But he was beginning to be interested in her and to see for the first time that her innocence was not only a negative attribute and her integrity not merely priggishness.

‘Then to-morrow?’

She looked at him with a smile of relief which was quite incomprehensible to him.

‘Yes, to-morrow.’

For between this day and the next was there not a whole long night of counting the measure of her wealth, a few phrases, a touch, a kiss and, for the first time, the circle of her existence approached and cut across by another’s, the loneliness dispelled and the imprisoning darkness routed; surely, for ever? When we are young, we imagine the circles one day becoming concentric and many other strange fantasies concerning the human personality. At twenty, only death threatens. And that from so afar.

She went into her room and flung up the window from the bottom and leant out into the cool rainy darkness. The rosegarden was like a tangle of ink-scrawls. The storm had been
drawn away across a ridge of hills and now the rain dropped with steady concentration, striking into the foliage and the roots of grass, falling impartially over graves in the churchyard and the goddesses before the house.

Cassandra read her page of Shakespeare, but she had been reading the same page for some weeks.

In Tom’s room Bony was sitting in his corner reading a book. Sophy had arranged him like that for a little joke before going to bed. Tom took
Ben Hur
from Bony’s pelvic basin and went to the window.

He was still thinking of Cassandra. ‘To-morrow,’ he thought, picking up a pen and a scrap of paper. He drew for a little while and then went to bed. Then the house was engulfed in darkness, only Marion’s windows still shedding a faint light down over the wet terrace.

Cassandra, waking in the morning, felt her heart race away from her to greet the day. The sky was grey and blue, watery like a child’s painting of clouds, and chalk-white birds dropped and glided against it. She lay and watched them, her hands clasped between head and pillow.

She was half-reluctant to meet Marion at breakfast, wishing to spin out her happiness, to have it all smooth and without confusion, her delight woven slowly and flawlessly. And she was shy. ‘I shall be as if nothing has happened,’ she thought in her innocence. ‘I shall be quiet. I shall say nothing.’ (She seldom said anything and had never been noisy.) ‘And how will he confront me?’ she wondered. ‘How will he speak to me about the storm, ask whether I slept or not, will I have marmalade or honey, without betraying to the others how I am changed, so that I can never go back to what I was yesterday or ever again be without those words ‘My sweet Cassandra’ to keep me company?’

Her thoughts about breakfast-time were suddenly swept aside by the reality of the little candlelit scene which she had brought, menaced at one point by Tom, to bed and lain with
last night and wakened to this morning – the clear and sensuous memory of being near to him, of tears drying stiffly upon her face as he kissed her, of the rain beating down outside and the smell of candles burning unevenly in the great musty room.

Although she allowed herself to think no further ahead than breakfast-time, she was troubled and impatient when the image of the night before cut into her plans, and her head moved on the pillow, her eyes quickly closing and her profile turned sharply against her crooked elbow. Only after the vision had grown less certain could she relax and open her eyes again to the windowful of blue and grey clouds and the floating birds. And presently got up and dressed, tensely rehearsing before the mirror the look she would wear for breakfast. ‘It has happened to me,’ she thought, combing her hair away from her temples. ‘Love has happened to me.’ And she laid down the comb and moving stiffly as if she were frozen went downstairs.

Marion awoke, but kept his eyes closed. Pain pursued him from his dream into the daylight. Presently, he got up and dressed slowly and went downstairs, down the dark core of the lulled and shadowy house. In the hall was Sophy’s book which Tom had thrown down in his fit of temper the night before,
The Pluckiest Girl in the School
. Tom had given it to her, no doubt. Marion most certainly had not.

A gentle chinking of crockery came from the kitchen as he went down the flagged passage. The kitchen cat crunched her teeth into a dead rat, growled at Marion from behind it, her eyes slit, a white paw laid over her prize.

In the kitchen Nanny was drinking tea. She wore the padded crimson dressing-gown which had been the first glimpse of the morning to so many little children. So often, too, she had appeared in it to young mothers, as she creaked in with their babies at daybreak. Stirring on their pillows, heavy with milk, at five-to-six, they had opened their eyes
upon that dressing-gown with its quilted diamonds, and Nanny, with the two thin plaits over her shoulders as now, had watched her moving sternly as a priestess, handing over the sacred object as if she had kept vigil all night while they, the fruitful, the indolent and heedless, had slept. Even now, to Marion, she gave the impression of having kept her wits about her all night.

‘What’s got you up” she asked, her eyes suspicious over the steaming cup. ‘One of these days I’ll get to the bottom of this everlasting trapesing into my kitchen.’ Then flushed, having spoken as if she were a cook. ‘My kitchen, indeed!’ When you get into a slack household you lose grip of your pride.

‘You think
I
am after the baker’s change now,’ he said. He chose a nice cup off the dresser and held it out for tea.

‘You’ll have to have the ordinary milk. The condensed’s finished. It’s not like you drinking tea.’

‘I’m going out. I shan’t be in for breakfast.’

She couldn’t remember when he had last left the grounds. A little walk in the park, down to the ice-house and back, or along the haunted avenue, but he never went beyond, never into the village, perhaps once or twice a year to London to a dentist, nothing more. She was a little disturbed, as she had all her life been disturbed by anything out of the ordinary. The monotony of nursery life seemed to be still the rhythm which she desired, that routine where only the abnormal is to be feared, where all disturbances, even red-letter days (the birthday, the pantomime, the half-term holiday), are better over. (‘You’ll end up in tears.’ ‘I’m afraid they’re unsettled, madam.’)

‘I thought that milk had turned.’ She watched him skimming the white flecks off with his spoon. ‘I wonder we don’t have a ’frig.’

He could not bear to be bothered about the house. His look of distaste and weariness reassured her, as sudden acquiescence
or enthusiasm would not have done. Still testing him, she went on: ‘Miss Sophy got off all right in the end, then? Last night, I mean.’

‘Was there any trouble?’

‘There was plenty of trouble
made
. Miss Dashwood up and downstairs with hot milk. The storm frightened her, they said.’

‘They?’

‘Her and Mr Tom. They sat up with her till late. When I heard them whispering on the landing I took it she was O.K. More tea?’

‘No more.’

He sat too still for her liking. ‘She’s highly strung, that child. Takes things to heart. Mrs Courage’s girl was the same until they packed her off to school. The Young Ladies’ Cheltenham College. She came back quite different.’

‘I don’t want Sophy different,’ he said, guessing the tenor of her words.

‘What would her mother have said, I wonder?’

‘Her mother never went to school.’

(‘You’re telling me!’ she said to herself grimly in an American accent.) Aloud, she said: ‘But she was different. There will never be another to hold a candle to
her
.’

‘No.’ He still sat very quietly by the window.

‘That sunk in,’ she thought.

But nothing could sink into his mind this morning. A layer of pain interposed, absorbing and destroying each new idea. He could not even make a decision about a refrigerator, let alone search into the remote corners of his heart, analyse his inclinations and put past and future upon scales and come to a conclusion about the result.

He left his tea and went out of the kitchen and across the courtyard, putting himself out of Cassandra’s reach and out of reach of Nanny’s darting, insinuating tongue.

The garden was brilliant, drenched. Roses like sodden, crushed-up paper hung against the stable walls, the stones across the yard were washed clean and little cascades of rain were shaken from the lime trees. Down the lane, rivulets of wet sand crossed and recrossed one another and brown bubbled water hastened still into an occasional drain. At the turn of the lane the whole valley lay exposed. The rain-beaten corn stretched away in great wet swathes as if it were cut and strewn and piled across the fields, with the unevenness of a desert after a sandstorm, undulating, blown and chaotic. Like a great painting of corn, he thought, resting his leather-patched elbows on a gate. The oats beyond ‘The Blacksmith’s Arms’ had fared worst of all. Tinty would certainly have seen no shimmer upon it this morning, he decided.

That moment, that argument the evening before came back to him, puzzled him. The storm brooding over the landscape had perhaps given to the scene its air of unreality, as if what they said (Tinty and Margaret bickering about crops, Sophy trying to draw their attention away from her bedtime) was only the outward and visible sign of an inward, invisible crisis, a crisis in the tension and compulsion of their lives together. ‘Cream ribbon, not white,’ Margaret had said. And rejected her mother, who sat like an old woman with her hands useless in her lap. He, himself, turning from the window had suddenly looked across at Cassandra and said, his own voice surprising him: ‘One day, we must go through the library,’ as if he were really saying: ‘Will you marry me?’ She had looked up from her photograph-album and smiled, saying ‘Yes.’ But Tom had broken in upon them, flinging down Sophy’s book, raising his voice. What meaning had that, Marion wondered? None that he could see. For Tom was outside the stresses and compulsions of human intercourse.

Marion walked on down towards the shallow hollow where
the pub stood with its untidy outbuildings. In the yard, Gilbert’s turkeys turned from his approach with the false, prodigious dignity of camels, going away towards a patch of nettles, with a dipping, spondaic movement, as if they went by clockwork, swans going across a backcloth. As he stood watching them, the pub door opened and he saw a pinkkimona’d arm reaching for the milk bottle. He moved away from the turkeys and, as he crossed the square of gravel in front of the pub, the woman drew back, although staring at him. Before she kicked the door to with a feathered shoe, he had glimpsed the hair coiled and pinned under a net, the grey stork embroidered on her wrap, and he remembered the onesided conversation he had had with Margaret some time before. Perhaps this was the very woman who had disturbed her so on Tom’s account. Even remembering Violet, as he walked on down the road, he was not surprised, still less shocked, for he perceived that when we lose the best, we do not always try for the second-best, but often the very worst of all. At least that is kinder to the second-best, he thought, seeing Cassandra’s face with tears upon it.