Palladian (2 page)

A substantial part of the beauty of
Palladian
derives from the way Taylor makes coherent music by keeping this minor mode running alongside the sunnier music of the comedic matter of love, romance and marriage and the more hilarious one of the above-stairs-below-stairs dynamics that prevails at the manor. Taylor could well have been one of the last English writers who, unmuzzled by contemporary strictures of posturing political correctness, wrote knowledgeably about servants and extracted witty, astringent and sometimes uproarious comedy from them.
Palladian
is one of the finest showcases of this aspect of her talent. In the bullying and poisonous figure of Nanny, who terrifies everyone at Cropthorne Manor, she fashioned her sharpest and most hilarious portrait of class tension and resentment, comprising all kinds of inversions and counterintuitive power relations. Nanny keeps up an insinuation-laced vitriolic commentary on what she assumes are the various goings-on in the house, past and present, and Taylor’s ear for the vocabulary, accents and rhythms of working-class speech is astonishing. In one instance, Cassandra comes downstairs to the kitchen to fetch some milk for Sophy. (Nanny, of course, doesn’t approve of Cassandra because, being a governess, she is set only just slightly above the station of domestic servants by virtue of her education.) She instantly resorts to barely suppressed bullying of Cassandra, who she thinks is stealing food from the kitchen:

‘I expect [the milk’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.’

This is an extraordinary passage, with a seamless combination
of authenticity of character and authorial irony: the faithful rendition of working-class speech is transformed into a brilliant send-up of affectation with the orthographic trick of changing the word ‘purée’ to ‘pureay’. Nanny affects educated speech with the governess, trips up on it, and Taylor pounces. Ivy Compton-Burnett, whose work she admired and loved, and who was a friend, once remarked of the younger novelist, ‘She’s a young woman who looks as if she had never had to wash her gloves.’ Perhaps belonging to that class gave her unique insight into the world of servants, but I’d put it down to her preternaturally well-attuned ear.

Yet nowhere does this kind of comedy become broad. Her sense of humour, instead, is based on economy, profound intelligence, precision and that terribly difficult thing either to pull off or to define: wit. Turn, for example, to the section where Cassandra tests Sophy’s self-professed competence in French by asking her to conjugate ‘être’. Or to those three paragraphs in which Tinty, Tom and Margaret’s mother, an inveterate hypochondriac who has just been told by a doctor that she’s as sound as a bell, resumes worrying because a man on the bus has given up his seat for her. For all its piercing insights into the essential loneliness of human lives and the intractably complicated, all too often destructive, nature of emotional attachments,
Palladian
is a deeply funny book.

In a thirty-year writing career, Taylor produced twelve novels, one of which was published posthumously in 1976, four volumes of short stories and a children’s book. Prolific, one would think, especially if one takes into account what she said about how her writing was accomplished:

I have been writing since I was a child … I gave up writing when the children were born, except for a few stories printed in obscure magazines … After a while I grew used
to children breathing down my neck while I wrote and scribbling on the MS, and have learnt to write (as I have written everything) while answering questions, settling quarrels and cooking dinners. I write slowly and without enjoyment, and think it all out while I am doing the ironing.

If you then consider the quality of her writing, the output is nothing short of miraculous: I defy anyone to find one dud sentence in her entire
oeuvre
.

Neel Mukherjee
,
2011

Cassandra, with all her novel-reading, could be sure of experiencing the proper emotions, standing in her bedroom for the last time and looking from the bare windows to the unfaded oblong of wall-paper where ‘The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice’ in sepia had hung for thirteen years above the mantelpiece.

The room had quite changed, was curiously smaller without its furniture and, uncurtained, seemed defenceless against the stares of people on the tops of trams outside.

She flung up the sashed pane and leant her elbows on the stone sill. She had knelt there on many evenings, watching the pattern of people in the street, the cyclists free-wheeling down the dip in the road, the tram-lines running with gold in the sunset (for do we not think of the summers of our lives?), and with every nerve responding to and recording for her ever after the sound of the shop-doors opening and shutting across the road (the continual
ping
of one door bell after another), the paper-boy yelling in the gutter, the trams like absurd and angry monsters roaring under the railway bridge. She smelt the sooty garden below, the dusty privet, full of old mauve and white tram
tickets, could see a line of trucks shunted across the bridge, and knelt there, listening to, snuffing up the life of the little piece of street, from bridge to the corner where the trams stopped. With her fingers she began from long habit to prise off the little feet of the Virginia creeper, which sucked close to the stone sill like limpets upon rocks.

Kneeling on the bare boards by the window, she felt as if some hand, enormous, omnipotent, were wrenching her out of her environment, prising her away, as she had the creeper from its background, and pity for herself alternated with the sudden knowledge that another evening in the same place was not to have been borne.

One tram after another racketed by and left sometimes a dribble of people, soon dispersed, at the street corner. From one of these little crowds a woman separated herself and came without hesitation towards the gate. Oddly foreshortened she appeared from the bedroom window. The bell-ringing seemed to wind upwards through the empty house. Cassandra pulled down the sash and ran downstairs. A shape moved beyond the blue and ruby glass of the front door.

‘Ah, I’ve managed to catch you,’ said the woman. ‘Is your mother in?’

‘My mother is dead, I’m afraid.’

‘Well, dad, then. Whoever’s in charge.’

‘My father died a fortnight ago.’ (‘I’m sorry you missed him,’ she managed to prevent herself saying in an excess of nervous courtesy.) ‘There is no one but me … I.’

The woman swept aside her attempts to speak correctly as her father would have wished. ‘I saw you moving out this morning when I was across at the butcher’s. Is the house let, can you tell me? I didn’t want to miss the chance for my daughter. Perhaps you’d give me the name of the landlord?’

She handed pencil and old envelope at once, and
Cassandra, resting the paper against the smoothish stone of the porch, began to write.

‘How many rooms downstairs, did you say?’

‘I … well, there are three.’

‘And bedrooms?’

‘Four bedrooms. And a cellar. A coal cellar. They tip it down through that grating … the coal, I mean.’ She pointed, but the woman looked down the passage instead.

‘What sort of cooker?’

‘A range.’

The woman frowned, clicked her tongue. ‘That won’t suit Ivy. Perhaps I could just give it a glance.’ She led the way down the passage. Cassandra followed helplessly.

‘You leaving this lino?’

‘Yes.’

‘Silly. It’s no use to Ivy. She’s got her own.’

‘The furniture’s gone to be sold. It’s no use to me either.’

‘Silly, though. Lino always goes well at an auction – even odd pieces. Next to chests of drawers, I can’t think of anything that goes better.’

While the woman stopped over the kitchen-range, rattling the dampers, examining flues, Cassandra looked out of the dirty window at the three little trees she had grown from chestnuts, set in diminishing heights and covered now with their bursting sticky buds. She had meant to plant one on each of her birthdays, but had soon forgotten.

‘Ivy won’t make much of this. Did you do all your cooking on it?’ She looked at Cassandra with a new expression on her face, of wonderment, perhaps, or respect.

‘Well, after my mother died, my father and I seemed to live on bread-and-butter.’

The look faded.

If she had worn a diamond ring Cassandra could have cut her
name on the window-pane, to impress something of her personality on the house. As it was, she wrote her initials in the dust, and brushed her fingers on her skirt.

‘Well, I must be away,’ said the woman. ‘I’ll just peep into the other rooms as I go out. Leave the upstairs for now.’

Cassandra turned the back-door key and followed.

‘Well, all these shelves?’ The woman stood in the little room and stared.

‘My father’s books.’

‘Well, we’d have to pull all that down, of course. It needs repapering. ‘They take a good foot off the room all the way round. How many books did he have, then?’

‘He had two thousand,’ Cassandra said, suddenly whitening with fatigue and leaning against the door.

The dirtyish room, with its dusty shelves and the fringe of ivy round the window, filled her with unhappiness – this room in which her father had lain in his coffin, the submarine light of the sun through a bottle-green blind, the green-filled room, the books dimmed and shadowy, the flowers round the coffin even pink and fleshy like water-flowers, and wreaths lying on chairs drowned-looking with their pale shell-colours.

The next room was all right; it had been merely the front-room where her mother had sat at her sewing machine, a noisy room from the street and the trams, and bright now, like another world, with the evening sunlight.

‘Yes, well, I’ll go round and see the landlord, since you say you’ve heard nothing.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ said Cassandra suddenly, picking up a case from the hall and, without glancing round again, following the woman out and slamming the door. ‘I have to take the keys.’ (‘I couldn’t stay there alone one second longer,’ she told herself.)

‘That’s that,’ she also thought, going along beside the railings
with the woman. ‘Not even a good-bye – not a tear. Bang the door quickly after thirteen years and walk out with a stranger. And not a moment for any of the thoughts I meant to have.’

‘I do feel a course of Sanatogen is the thing for you,’ said Mrs Turner. ‘You don’t seem in a fit state to … let me just … one moment …’ She put aside her coffee cup and leant forward and pulled down Cassandra’s lower eyelid. ‘I remember when Helen was your age … Come in! What is it, Alma? Oh, the post! You can just run to the corner, but put on your cloak, dear. Oh, and Alma! Ah, never mind, she’s gone. It doesn’t matter. Yes, Helen! She must have been twenty. I know she was at Somerville at the time, because it was such a pity …’

Cassandra leant back in Mrs Turner’s rocking-chair, dreaming, half-listening, as she had for years. ‘Cups of tea … Sanatogen Benger’s … Change your damp stockings.’ Even the spirit attended to, but with a domestic helpfulness. ‘I
do
think you’d feel ever so much more comfortable in yourself if you would come to church.’ Outside, in the school garden, girls went by in their long green cloaks, against the sad landscape of playing-field and leafless poplars.

‘And your aunt has gone?’ Mrs Turner was asking.

‘Yes, this morning. I had some clearing up to do.’

‘But it was dismal for you there by yourself, dear. You should have come round to lunch; or tea, at least. You could have managed that. I sometimes think you have a tendency towards sadness, Cassandra. You need more pleasure, and I rather wonder how you will contrive to get it at the Vanbrughs. You really do need taking out of yourself … and I don’t remember Margaret Vanbrugh being so very gay … of course, she and Helen parted after they left school and Helen went to Somerville and Margaret to London … and then you know how it is … but I imagine she was sensible rather than gay
when she was a girl. The cigarettes are just beside you … or would you like a bar of chocolate?’

Lulled into peace, Cassandra lay back in her chair. The gas fire roared unevenly in its broken white ribs. Mrs Turner’s wedding-group hung crookedly where and as it always had, and a curtain flapped idly over the papers on the writing-table, which were pretty well held down, however, by pieces of stone from the Acropolis.

‘It must be time for prayers …’ Mrs Turner rose and smoothed – or hoped to smooth – her skirt, and, standing before the mirror, twisted one frond of hair after another into the supporting combs and stabbed-in hairpins and patted gently. ‘Are you coming in, dear? I think it would be rather nice before you go away … unless you are tired and would … I expect you are very tired … stay quietly here and when I come back Ethel shall bring us some Benger’s ah, there’s the bell.’

‘But I should like to come,’ said Cassandra.

Apart from wishing to please Mrs Turner, it was right to be harrowed by such an occasion. It would be like her last day at school all over again.