Palladian (19 page)

His head felt as if someone were doing knitting in it. Nothing was simple. He believed that he loved Cassandra tenderly; but marriage is not simple. It brought with it, Nanny had reminded him, so many complications which were beyond his energies. Tinty stood before him, and Tom, Nanny with her talk of refrigerators and change, the thought of beginning a new life in that fast-crumbling house, of leaving a mouldering and rank corner of earth to sons, perhaps, and then engaging servants, spending money, laying down wine, planting and clearing. In the library last night, no one, nothing had stood between him and Cassandra. Now so much interposed. She was a child merely, to be led into so dark, so lonely a wilderness as his heart. For her, so much unravelling of people, so much sorting out of
possessions would have to be done. He might draw her to him and ease the passion which lay under her silence, lead her into the circle of ice which encompassed him: but the obstacles were still outside, where the world was, and even within him, there was Violet.

Cassandra had sat through breakfast, stunned and wounded. Now, in the schoolroom, dictating French to Sophy, she knew that he was avoiding her, that an intolerable situation had come about, which she could end only, she was thinking, by going away. She felt like closing the book there, in the middle of a sentence, and running out of the house, for his sake and her own.

‘Ilya …’

‘What again?’ asked Sophy sharply.

‘Again?’

‘You said it once before.’

‘Oh! No, only once. Le
plaisir
…’

She clasped her hands behind her chair, tightly, for Sophy’s heavy breathing, as she worked, plucked at her nerves.

Sophy wrote slowly in an unfamiliar hand, Greek ‘e’s, German ‘f’s and various other affectations, which she thought would look well one day in the British Museum, or in biographies – a facsimile of the author’s handwriting.

‘Comme un grand frisson …’
Cassandra went on. ‘Sophy, I will not have those “f”s.’

The child looked up blankly.

‘Can’t you hear what I am saying?’

‘Yes.’

(‘Oh, God, give me patience!’ Cassandra prayed. ‘When and how do I go? And where?’) ‘Write as your father taught you. Don’t show off.’

Sophy tried to convey the impression that all her liberties
were infringed, the very expression of her individuality stripped from her and forbidden.

Cassandra had never spoken sharply before. She looked at her with new interest and resumed her writing reluctantly as the dictation began again … ‘un
grand frisson et …’

‘Un
grand what?’

“‘Frisson”
. You are supposed to have prepared this.’

‘Oh, I thought it
ought
to be “frisson”, but you seemed to be saying something different.’ (‘Two can play this game,’ she thought.)

Cassandra, who avoided speaking French in front of Marion, because she knew her accent was that of the English schoolgirl, blushed and then asked firmly, but too late: ‘What did you think I said?’

“‘Poisson”,’
said Sophy, her face so clear, so candid. She could not celebrate her little victory, but liked it none the less. ‘Comme un grand poisson. That was what I
thought
I heard.’

Marion had walked right down the valley and now came up through the woods towards the park. The clouds lumbered by like pieces of torn scenery giving the sun a chance here and there. Perhaps the sun coming out, the earth bracing itself, or perhaps that sight, earlier, of Mrs Veal, had changed him. Whatever it had been, he began to walk quickly, even though the pain still wheeled around his eye-socket. He walked up through the beech-trees, stumbling on the white flints which lay like half-buried bones among the moss.

Sometimes, a small thing, the way words are arranged, or the sun striking the flesh, as it struck his hands now, will set one’s blood tingling and one’s life on a fresh course.

His steps quickened with his decision, as if he were afraid that a few seconds would alter everything.

It was long after breakfast. She would be sitting at the
schoolroom table with Sophy. Her face would be turned towards him as he opened the door. She would smile. But there he checked himself, knowing that, while Sophy was there, he could not speak to her. He would walk over and stand by the window, looking out over the courtyard and listening to Cassandra’s patient explanations. It was remarkable how she always remained gentle, no matter how obtuse Sophy managed to be. Violet could never have been so patient. He frowned. Was he to stoop to comparing the living with the dead? And to the detriment of the dead. He had never censured Violet in his mind before, although he had sympathised with her weaknesses.

In the schoolroom, what were they doing now? He imagined Sophy drawing circles with her compasses which always wobbled and skidded so that the two ends of the circle would never meet: or halving the smudged pear-shaped Africa with a slanting equator; or writing one of her essays – ‘The Death of Chatterton’ or ‘Shelley’s Funeral Pyre’. Every essay-subject could be made to embrace some harrowing scene, and Mary Stuart or Keats or Kit Marlowe would make their sudden appearance in ‘What I Should Like to be When I grow Up’ or ‘My Favourite Walk’.

Just before lunch he would ask Cassandra to walk on the terrace with him. He leant on a stile at the edge of the wood, waiting for the time to pass, and watching the birds bursting out of the hedges and a large striped spider sitting on a webbed bramble, drawing blood from a fly neatly and methodically. ‘We will walk up and down the terrace,’ he thought. ‘I will ask her to marry me, and she will say “yes”.’

A skein of wild geese flew above the trees, with a steady commotion of wings beating, their necks stretched forward into the distance which they desired and made for. He watched them flying over until they were gone beyond the trees, and felt
that they crowned his intention, those strange and beautiful birds.

Mrs Veal, stepping out of her bath, had a Rubens magnificence. Her little rosy knees looked lost under the great massing thighs. One curve of flesh ran into another. Although Rubens might have delighted in her luxuriance, she did not delight in it herself and was soon braced into a different shape, the curves at least separated from one another, if they could not be flattened out.

While she was dressing, her mind remained blank. She went through the complicated ritual of hair-pinning, rougeing and powdering, deft work with dark pencils and mascara, as if she were going on to the stage at Drury Lane instead of the Saloon Bar of a village pub. Stretching her mouth and eyes wide, she painted her fair lashes with a little brush. She tried a little dab of the new perfume inside her wrist, sniffed it, rubbed her two wrists together and thrust her scented fingers into her hair. When she had done all this, her mind began to tick over once more and, going downstairs, she mused upon Marion whom she saw so seldom that she had scarcely recognised him. She could not be said to dislike any kind of man, but he was certainly the kind she liked least, deploring his effeminacy in a self-deluding way, knowing without acknowledging the fact that he would never put himself within her scope. She was, all the same, a little inquisitive about him, and when Tom came into the bar mentioned Marion’s early morning walk. As she talked, she lifted glasses and dusted the shelves beneath them. Tom said nothing, even pulled round a newspaper so that he could see the headlines.

She could never imagine life up at the Big House, as she called it to herself, could have pictured grandeur but could find no standard for the lives they led, met as she so continually was
by hints of dilapidation, of servants giving orders to employers, of discomforts and shabbiness, which she herself could not have endured. On the other hand, Adams in the public bar would speak of carrying in nectarines for breakfast, and how half a tree might burn in the hall and ones hands remain red with cold. And until recently a watchmaker from the village made regular journeys to wind and adjust all the different clocks, going from room to room; and had described the great wreathed carpets and the stained glass at a hall window with foreign words and a coat-of-arms, and how dust lay in the carved wood and a dark tapestry covered a whole wall, only a pale hand and face and a milk-white deer discernible. But now he went there no more; perhaps all the clocks were silent with their hands at different angles.

Mrs Veal was gratified by the nectarines going in for breakfast, as if she were to eat them herself, and had accompanied the watchmaker from room to room in her imagination, unfolded her table-napkin, thick as a board, before displays of Georgian silver, of pink roses.

But next day, Tom would destroy her pieced-together picture, saying he refused to bath, it unnerved him and the water was always cold, or that Nanny would not let them have a fire in the dining-room. And the evening meal was supper merely, and Tinty sat at it in a tweed coat.

Tom had made up his mind this morning to have two whiskies and go. Before lunch he meant to show his drawings to Cassandra, since she had so strangely refused to see them the night before.

Mrs Veal tried not to sense his abstraction, but her week of freedom from her husband, so long anticipated, had become dull and lonely. She even wished Gilbert back.

‘A nice grilled chop for lunch?’ she suggested. ‘Is that a good idea?’ And awaited his next cruelty.

‘I’m not staying down. I’m going in a minute.’

She smiled gallantly, controlling her trembling lips. It was the worst thing she could have done. Tom could not bear stoicism in those he hurt, could not bear the guilt of forcing them into such courage. Marion’s refusal, as a boy, to be broken had increased Tom’s savagery; now, he yawned, glanced at the clock and stood up.

‘Cassandra will be waiting.’

She said nothing.

‘Sophy’s birthday is soon. Cassandra is coming with me to buy her a present. I thought of giving her a Siamese cat.’ The last part was true, for he had once thought of it. The idea had flashed through his mind, fast pursued by the knowledge that he would never have enough money to spare.

‘When shall I see you?’ she asked lightly.

‘Oh, some time, some time!’ He dropped his hat on to the back of his head and sauntered out.

Tears rolled into her eyes.

Tom had nothing to do now. He hissed spitefully at the turkeys as he passed and they scattered in a flurry of panicstricken hauteur. Why had Marion disappeared, he wondered?

The bus lurched into the square before the pub, turned in the loose gravel and stood palpitating while one or two people stepped down. Tom wondered if he should go into the town for a drink. He fingered his money and knew it was not enough.

Thinking of Cassandra, as if she might help him to forget his disappointment, he set off up the hill. ‘I am a reformed character,’ he told himself. ‘Never to be pestered or bored or tortured by that abominable woman again.’ The sun coming out appeared to bless and endorse his resolution. ‘One whisky!’ he marvelled. ‘One less than I intended.’ (‘One less than I could pay for,’ he also thought, but could easily answer the cynicism,
for obviously a little baby-talk would have given him all the drink he wanted, as it had before.)

At that moment the wild geese flew down the valley and he stopped to watch them beating their way forward, unhesitatingly and in union, keeping to their prearranged hierarchy. Smoke wound up out of the pub chimney and the village houses seemed painted flatly, as if in tempera, in the milky morning light.

As he approached the house Sophy and Cassandra came out on to the terrace. Cassandra stood listlessly in the sunshine. Sophy was shooing a hen away from the front door, running behind it and clapping her hands, and when Tom whistled she looked up and waved. She never has a good romp,’ he thought. ‘She will grow up sedate and cold-blooded like Cassandra.’

Crossing the lawn, he picked up a wet fir-cone and aimed at her as she stood waving by the balustrade, made little feints at her until she screamed shrilly with delight and excitement. She clasped one of the grey goddesses, her thin arms quick and alive against the rain-pitted stone, her yellow dress fluttering. She swung herself out of his sight, but he could see an edge of yellow dress and hear her laughter.

In a dreamlike way, the statue appeared to move. It reeled drunkenly and Tom stood frozen in a world where things happened beyond his understanding and Cassandra screamed, her hands clapped over her face.

Tom was strong. He soon lifted the bulk of broken stone, but Sophy, of course, was dead.

Mrs Veal was in church for the funeral service, sitting behind a pillar at the back, where the family would never see her but where she could watch and criticise. There was plenty to criticise. Firstly, she thought it unsuitable that Margaret should be there at all, especially buttoned up in bottle-green and looking well. Few of them seemed to know how to behave on such an occasion. Tom fidgeted, cast bored looks at the stainedglass window and at his finger-nails; Cassandra looked merely frightened as she had done the first time Mrs Veal saw her, in the train; Tinty wept, but into a pink handkerchief: as for Marion, the paler he was, the more effeminate he looked. Only Nanny redeemed them, her hands clasped, her walk impressive, her sealskin coat so funereal. She was right in her heart and knew how to express those emotions rightly. She mourned. She did not gloss over or, in the modern way, deny publicity to her grief.