Palladian (23 page)

‘No, dear, I don’t exactly think you did wrong. I merely said I thought you didn’t do right … I only mean that it is a little awkward …’ ‘Awkward’ was a favourite word with Mrs Turner. She rarely allowed herself a stronger expression.

‘One can hardly go on being a governess to a dead child.’

Although Mrs Tunler was not used to rudeness, she detected the glitter of tears behind Cassandra’s stubborn glance.

‘But, dear, a little talk with Mr Vanbrugh would have settled things more pleasantly.’

‘We had nothing to say to one another.’

‘That was for him to decide. He was your employer, and later there will be a question of references.’ (‘And your money’ she thought.)

‘One doesn’t ask for references from those one loves,’ Cassandra thought. What, for instance, could he write about her – ‘During the few months Miss Dashwood was in my employ, she proved hlerself to be honest and reliable.’

‘It was quite the last thing I would have wished for you, dear. The very worst thing, when you so needed taking out of yourself. You will look back upon this year as one when all your
troubles came at once. I daresay most people have such years, but you are very young to be so disheartened. All the same, I wish you had not run away. There was no … nothing unpleasant …’ Her voice wavered uncertainly.

‘What
can
be more unpleasant than what happened?’ On the morning of the funeral she had picked up from a flower-bed under the terrace a bunch of stone grapes freckled with blood and had carried it in her hand and thrown it into the shrubbery so that Marion might never find it.

‘I should write a letter to Mr Vanbrugh,’ Mrs Turner suggested.

‘I did write him one.’

‘And he hasn’t replied?’

‘No.’

‘Come in!’ Mrs Turner called out, and a girl with her hair in elaborate fronds about her forehead looked in.

‘Oh, Alma. I will see you in one moment.’

The door shut again.

‘I must have a little talk with Alma. She has seemed to be kicking against the pricks this term, I thought. Her essay last week on “The Road to Damascus” was so … she seems a little to have lost her balance … and then this silly business about the nail-varnish … it is difficult to know the best attitude to adopt … they are all trivial symptoms, I know; but symptoms none the less, and I thought a little talk … Anyhow, Cassandra, I shall shoo you away now … think over what I have said … although indeed I seem to have said nothing … If I were you I’d take a walk before … unless Mademoiselle wants any help with the little ones … If you are passing Tucker’s here is this booklist to be left … and will you ask Alma to come in, dear …’

Alma stood in the hall, fiddling with her hair and using a large picture of the Giant’s Causeway as a mirror. She pulled up her stockings and entered Mrs Turner’s room, and Cassandra
heard Mrs Turner’s voice, so hopeful so encouraging, beginning: ‘Now, Alma …’ as the door was shut.

Cassandra went out through the cloakroom, which really was a cloakroom, to the leaf-cluttered drive. The sun after a brilliant autumn day suddenly clouded, leaving the sky, the landscape enclosed in blue. Girls walked back across the playing-fields wearing green and red girdles. Once, out there, Cassandra, standing at the edge of the circle for a penalty corner, had had the ball rebound from her stick into the goal. Little girls had capered at the touch-line, mistresses had clapped their fur-backed gloves together and she had walked to the centre feeling a hypocrite for the first time in her life.

Upstairs, in the music-room, a girl scrooped on a violin. At moments the melody rang out clearly and purely as if it were the untouched vision of the adolescent, and then faltered, for there was no more to it than the adolescent’s lack of skill and the choked emotions which had neither coherence nor direction. ‘The Snowy-Breasted Pearl’.

As she began to walk downhill away from the school she could hear the trams going by on the main road and the sound evoked the empty past and seemed to promise that the future should be no different.

She walked past her old home. The brick front was covered with the reddish stalks of virginia-creeper; a plant with oiled leaves stood in a bronze pot between folk-weave curtains; a pram blocked the doorway. Ivy’s baby? Across the road lights glittered in the little shops.

She went on towards Tucker’s, for Mrs Turner’s so carelessly thrown-out suggestions were in reality commands, as all her pupils were aware. Tucker’s was another detail of the past which had continued, it seemed, just as if she had never gone away and which, so unaltered, made no sign of recognition now that she had returned, even displayed the same title-pages in the
windows, the same wretched dregs in the threepenny box by the door. Once, coming out of that door, reading a copy of
The Picture of Dorian
Gray which she had just bought for ninepence, Cassandra had met Mrs Turner, who had told her to close her book at once and look where she was going. ‘Life is short, but not so short that we must go about the streets reading, spoiling our eyes and running under tramcars and looking studious …’

She handed in the list at the counter and went through to the back of the shop, where shelves dipped in the middle under the weight of tightly-wedged volumes. The books walled her in impersonally, so that she could be alone with herself as if she were in church or in a thick wood.

Now she was parted from Marion, she had over-reached her loving and arrived at the state of infatuation in which to read his name in print in a telephone directory, or the name of his house upon a map, filled her with a cherished melancholy, her eyes loving each letter of his name and seeing upon the map so many things no other eyes would have seen. She took down one Greek book after another, tormenting herself, then a book on architecture with prints of houses, some a little like his, some quite unlike, even opened a copy of
The Provoked Wife
, for at least the surname on the title-page was the same, the letters of the alphabet arranged in that right miraculous order.

‘You are not trying to improve yourself,’ said Marion, his shadow falling suddenly over the page.

It was intolerable to him to see her so overcome, even he, who had never, it had lately appeared, been loved until now, and had wished to be.

‘Mrs Turner sent me to find you. It was no coincidence.’

‘Why did you come?’

‘I will tell you that when we are outside.’

Taking the book from her hands, he carried it to the counter and paid for it and then, with her elbow in his hand, brought
her out – as if she were a sleep-walker, or blind – into the quiet iris-coloured dusk and along the pavement.

‘I am staying here to-night,’ he said, suddenly stopping by an hotel with a large stuffed bear holding a lantern above the porch. ‘I told Mrs Turner I would give you some tea. She seemed very worried about you having a cup of tea and I must keep my promise.’

The vestibule was covered with drugget and very hushed. A porter spoke in whispers to a waiter. The walls were correctly hung with ‘The Rake’s Progress’, in keeping with the gentility of the place.

The lounge was empty. As they entered, the last remnants of pale coal shuddered together in the grate.

‘If he asks me why I ran away, what in heaven’s name can I say?’ Cassandra wondered, sitting down on a window-scat where a draught lifted the cretonne curtains. Marion, looking more austere than ever in these surroundings, gave orders about buttered toast and tea.

With her worn glove twisted round the handle of the teapot, she poured two wavering streams of tea into the cups.

‘I worried about you,’ he said, watching her, feeling that she had become strangely dear to him. ‘And not just about cups of tea and if you are getting them, but about you yourself, and whether you were happy or unhappy.’

She ate a strip of toast without tasting it.

‘I tried one letter after another and none of them would do. So I came myself.’

‘I can’t eat any more,’ she said, shaking her head at the plate offered.

‘The fact is, Tom told me to come. It was his idea.’

‘How is Tom?’ she asked, not caring.

Marion took a piece of toast and looked at it. “‘Let the world slide. Have not you maggots in your brain.” I mean
Tom, my dear,’ for Cassandra looked surprised. ‘There’s another thing about Tom … if you have ever been in a tent in the pouring rain … You know how threatening it seems, with the canvas so drenched and taut and swollen, but you are sure of being safe unless you touch it. Tom could never bear not to after a time, and now he is drowning.’ This metaphor, like the quotation, pleased him, because it meant nothing and betrayed nobody.

‘And Margaret?’ she asked, lifting the lid of the hot water jug and peeping inside.

‘Margaret is as much the same as she can be expected to be. In fact, more so. Her child is as long being born as Tristram Shandy. I can never turn an expectant mother out into the falling leaves, but neither can I much longer bear to have her in the house. I thought those things could always be counted on to take no longer than nine months. That consoled me and kept me going, but nature is not to be relied upon, it seems.’

‘Perhaps it is long to her, too.’

‘Ah, you see, you are on her side. When you went away, you left the cameo-brooch I gave you. Why?’ He looked at her throat where it should have been.

‘Taking it was – not a thing I could do.’

‘Margaret brought your letter to me that evening. I shall never forget her standing in the doorway with the brooch in one hand and the letter in the other, as if it were the dénouement.’

Cassandra flushed, for her action appeared melodramatic now and she saw that it must have seemed so to him.

‘What have you been doing?’ he asked.

‘Helping in the kindergarten. Running errands for Mrs Turner.’

‘Mrs Turner was being very grave with a frightening sort of a girl who kept shaking her hair back off her shoulders. Although
the child sat and made eyes at me, her handkerchief was rolled into a damp little ball in her hands.’

‘She has been writing some very awkward little essays,’ said Cassandra. ‘One about Saint Francis and the Stigmata, which Mrs Turner thought hysterical and unnecessary. And she has been varnishing her nails – only pink varnish, of course.’

‘Pink nails are the worst. They look like cheap sweets, I think. She doesn’t know whether to be a nymphomaniac or a religious maniac. In another year, there will be no doubt at all.’

As she took a cigarette from him her fingers trembled.

‘Cassandra, dear, I don’t really want to sit here talking about schoolgirls, but it seems such an odd and awful place to be asking you to marry me.’ (‘Tom would not have let it happen like this,’ he thought.) ‘Will you? I imagined that after that night when there was the thunderstorm that you would understand that I love you. Yet, when I thought about it, it seemed that all I had to give you was stale and complicated, that you were too young to be drawn into my life, and that disheartening house, so ramshackle and remote – the other night the conservatory fell in. Tom always said it would—’ He pushed his empty cup away from him as if it were something more distasteful to him than a cup could be – ‘and then Aunt Tinty – I am like a wreck with barnacles clinging to me – she is so ineffectual, so exasperating, and Nanny so old and venomous. I am quite encumbered by them.’ He said nothing about Tom.

‘They can’t live for ever,’ Cassandra thought placidly, with the calm optimism of youth.

‘And then, into the middle of my mind-searchings and before I could talk to you, it happened about Sophy and nothing could be said.’

‘The chief obstacle he hides,’ Cassandra thought, seeing the ghost of Violet, palely coloured like her name. ‘That is the only real obstacle between us, the only one which will be
there for ever and ever, and scares me and threatens me – his memories of her perfection, in the light of which I shall always fail.’

‘I ought to kiss her,’ he thought wretchedly, glancing quickly round the lounge. He did not want to take her hand under cover of the tablecloth and said suddenly: ‘Shall we go? Although I have no idea where to.’ He wondered where Tom would have taken her – to the cinema, to a corner of some noisy pub?

‘I shall have to go back. There are jobs I have to do at the children’s bedtime.’

He remembered Sophy standing by the window in her dressinggown, while Cassandra plaited her hair.

They went along the drugget to the swing-doors. The street lights were shaggy and blurred chrysanthemums in the misty air. Windows blossomed high upon buildings.

‘This house is where I used to live,’ Cassandra said, stopping for a moment at the corner to look at the light shed through the honey-coloured blind at an upstairs window and a shadow crossing and recrossing what had been her bedroom once. She felt a great strangeness that she should be standing there with Marion, looking up at the house from outside, and the trams and traffic going down the dip of the road under the railway arch, sounding so different now, for they emphasised how changed her life was to be.

The front door opened and a fan of light and voices came out of the hall. Marion and Cassandra moved on, turning from the main road and climbing up the quiet hill towards the school, between the blank darkness of the houses, where lamplight fell upon the branches of trees with their few leaves. Each time they came to a lamp he looked at her, her paper-white face and dark mouth and her bare head shining. Once he asked: ‘And you truly love me?’