Palladian (3 page)

‘Thank you, Alma,’ said Mrs Turner, taking her prayer-book from the head girl, who waited outside her door and followed her into the hall. Cassandra stayed at the back, feeling that there was no especial place for her there any more, except to Mrs Turner, whose love was none the less for being manifested in commonplace ways, who approved of human-nature, reserving intolerance for the truly intolerable.

Cassandra looked about her, hoping to experience nostalgia, at the English mistress, with her head on one side and neck flushed, singing furiously; at Mademoiselle with her moustache growing more emphasised with the years; at the reproduction of Saint Francis and the Birds – a threadbare little picture. This evening, there was no Charity Chapter or ‘O God Our Help’ to
play delightfully upon her nerves, merely half a dozen verses of Old Testament genealogy and a commonplace hymn, much open to girlish parody, ‘O For a Faith That Will Not Shrink’.

‘The trouble is,’ she thought, ‘that I am dead and indifferent to all this, grown out of it and ready for something new. The opportunity for emotion comes when the emotion is dead.’

‘A faith that keeps the narrow way. Cassie Dashwood’s at the back,’ sang one prefect to another.

‘Coming to be on the staff maybe,’ Alma replied, her eyes fixed innocently on her hymn-book.

‘She’s going to be a governess somewhere.’

‘What a corny sort of job – Amen,’ sang Alma, who went a great deal to the cinema in the holidays.

‘How young the prefects look!’ Cassandra was thinking. ‘They are only children.’ When she had come here first as a little girl, they had seemed women to her, some of them with their hair up – Helen Turner herself, with plaited circles clapped over her ears, one of the ugliest of hair fashions. But it had given them a look of maturity, which none of the girls had now.

‘Amen,’ warbled the English mistress, closing her eyes at the same time as her hymn-book; her singing done, the red subsided at her neck. Mademoiselle, it was understood, was there to help keep order, not to assist in the Protestant devotions. She stood with her hands folded on her abdomen, looking as if she were waiting for them to finish.

Mrs Turner went down heavily on her embroidered hassock and began to pray. One of the prefects leant forward and poked with her hymn-book at two juniors whose plaits hung closely together as they whispered.

Mademoiselle made a sort of shelter for her eyes with one hand, but rather as if to rest herself from the glare of the lights than to commune with her maker.

‘And strengthen, O Lord,’ ordered Mrs Turner, ‘those who are going out from our midst into the world. Keep them from all harm and deliver them from temptation.’

When Mrs Turner had dismissed the girls to their beds and said good night to the mistress on duty, she took Cassandra back to her sitting-room, where two glasses of Benger’s had been placed on a tray by the fire.

‘I think I shall write to Margaret to ask her to give you a good look-over when you get there,’ she said, as she warmed her legs by the fire and began to sip. ‘I have no prejudice at all against women doctors. Especially dear Margaret, whom I have known since … dear, I hope you don’t dislike that very much. Ah, good, then drink it up and it will help you to sleep.’

‘But I always do sleep very well,’ said Cassandra.

‘And so you should, dear, at your age. Why, it would be a very strange thing if you did not … No, don’t move, it is just a hairpin, and here it is! They slip into the loose-covers, and here is a penny as well … and some crumbs, I’m afraid … I must speak to Ethel. She is not always …’

‘Won’t you tell me something about the Vanbrughs?’ Cassandra asked. She was not interrupting, for Mrs Turner had stopped speaking while she searched.

‘I can tell you nothing,’ she said. ‘Of course, I knew Margaret – but none of the others. I believe I met her mother once, but nothing remains of that but a picture of her red hat, which I thought unsuitable on such a pale lady, apart from disliking all red hats very much indeed always … but that is not helpful to you … I believe she is delicate … She was very pale … unless she has improved in health, which I hope very much. The little girl I have never met, nor indeed her father, and why she mayn’t go to school like other children, I can’t imagine … it is the forming of character, which contact with other girls would … so much more important
than … no governess can give that … but it will fill in an awkward little time for you.’ She dabbed at her milky upper lip with a crumpled handkerchief and began to shuffle through some papers on the table beside her. ‘There was the letter I had from Margaret.’ She stood up and took a sheaf of envelopes from the mirror … ‘Oh, here is the little snap of Helen’s boy …’

Cassandra sat holding the photograph of a fat baby and waited expectantly.

‘No, it seems not to be here. I kept it, that I do know … for it was a little puzzling to me at first. “My cousin, Marion,” Margaret wrote, “is looking for someone to teach his little girl.”
“His!”
I thought,
“Marion! His!”
But I discovered that it was one of those names like Evelyn or Hilary or Lindsay that can be either. With an “o”, you see. But “o” or not, I think it rather girlish for a grown man. No, the letter has completely vanished … it is most odd. Isn’t he simply a darling … and so like Helen at that age …’ Mrs Turner took up a large speckled sock and began to turn its heel. ‘I shall knit for half-an-hour, I think, but if I were you I should have an early night … tomorrow there will be so much … such a long way … I will get Ethel to call you in time, with a cup of tea … that will start you off well. I shall see you at breakfast.’

So, dismissed and without hope of further information about her future employer, Cassandra stood up. She would have liked to have said ‘Dear Mrs Turner!’, to have made some impulsive and affectionate gesture, but Mrs Turner knitted calmly, her hair collapsing on her shoulder and dropping tortoiseshell pins into her lap. She lifted her cheek and Cassandra kissed her good night, feeling like her daughter. ‘Good night, Mrs Turner.’

‘Good night, Cassandra. Always know this is your home, dear. I asked Ethel to put a hot bottle in your bed, but mind your toes on it, for it is one of those nasty stone ones and I
shouldn’t like you to hurt yourself. You can find your way, dear, can’t you?’

Cassandra crossed the hall, which was dark and glassy. She met no one on her way upstairs. Her room was furnished with odds and ends, an unravelling wicker chair, a bamboo table with a Bible and a jug of lemonade almost solid with pieces of cut-up fruit, an iron bedstead and a thin honeycomb quilt. She opened the window and looked at the playing-field and the tossing plumes of poplars at the far end. She began to think of the past, methodically, as if she could find a phrase to sum-up, to carry with her to-morrow into the future; but the wind had sprung up rather boisterously and the curtains flapped and wound themselves round her. She disentangled herself and began to undress. ‘Marion Vanbrugh is not a name that promises well,’ she thought, as she got into bed and struck her toes upon the stone bottle.

Downstairs, Mrs Turner laid down her speckly knitting and lit a cigarette in a rather amateurish way. From the bookcase she took a little mottled volume vaguely entitled The
Classical Tradition
, which she had written years ago, enriching herself to the extent of eight pounds. On the flyleaf she wrote in red ink ‘To Cassandra Dashwood, with love from Lucy Turner.’ Then she wiped her fingers on a piece of blotting-paper and puffed a little more at her cigarette. ‘Dear Cassandra,’ she sighed. She was a fundamentally optimistic woman and was perfectly prepared for her little book to go a long way to changing some of Cassandra’s melancholy and romantic notions about life, and substituting in their stead, perhaps, that cool and truthful regard which she herself so deeply admired. ‘To see life steadily and see it whole,’ she murmured, putting the little present where she would be sure to find it in the morning. The cigarette was too much for her; she was tired of waving away the smoke. She threw it on the fire.

The wet fields were dealt out one after another for Cassandra’s benefit. She sat with her back to the engine (as Mrs Turner had seen her off), with
The Classical Tradition
and a pile of sandwiches wrapped in a stiff damask napkin on her lap. Sodden cattle stood facing north, or hunched under hedges in the drizzle. The train ripped through the sullen landscape like scissors through calico; each time it veered round westwards rain hit the window in long slashes. ‘Is it time we move through or space?’ Cassandra wondered, lulled by the sequence of the English landscape – the backs of houses and sheds, fields, a canal with barges, brickworks, plantations, the little lane going down under the bridge, fields, the backs of houses. Then the wet blackness of stations, sidings, the jagged edge of shelters beneath which people stood bleakly with luggage, and sometimes children, awaiting trains.

The Classical Tradition
had a strange fungus smell and its pages were stippled with moles. The prose was formal and exact, remote from Mrs Turner’s personality and yielding up nothing between the lines, so Cassandra clicked open her little case and brought out
The Woman in White
.

Behind the cover of the book, she smuggled up her egg sandwiches and began to eat, secretly and without enjoyment, her fingers searching furtively in the table napkin, the printed page guarding her shyness. The other people in the compartment eyed her in a drowsy, dully baleful way, jogging on, lulled into blankness of mind by the rocking of the train, anaesthetised almost by the rain and the darkening afternoon and the train’s rhythm; each wrapped away separately in a cocoon woven of vague dreaming and reflection.

Cassandra folded up the last two sandwiches, brushed some crumbs of egg-yolk off her skirt and began to look out of the window again.

The train was winding its way through water-meadows, and had begun to slow up as the landscape grew lusher and wetter, as if oppressed by the moisture-laden hedges and low, swollen clouds. The plump woman opposite Cassandra smoothed on her gloves, cleared a little space on the misty glass with her cuff, peered out, sank back, holding her ticket ready, yawning repeatedly.

‘Oh, I’m yawning,’ she said, catching Cassandra’s glance, patting her mouth with her fist, her eyes watering. ‘Tiring weather.’

Cassandra agreed, feeling ill at ease, vaguely suspicious of the blonde ripeness of the woman, embarrassed by her, as the young are embarrassed at being singled out by their elders.

‘You going far?’

‘To Cropthorne.’

‘Fancy that!’

Cassandra, too, cleared a little peephole and glanced out.

‘Got friends there, in the village?’

‘No, I’m going to Cropthorne Manor – as a governess,’ Cassandra said wretchedly.

The others, she knew, were leaning back easily, listening, watching through half-closed eyes.

‘Governess, eh? So that’s the latest, is it? Anyone meeting you? If not, come in and have a cup of tea on your way. I’m at the pub down the hill from the Manor. You’re very welcome.’

‘I think someone is meeting me in a car.’

‘That’ll be Margaret, then. Well, another time, perhaps.’ She had a way of settling her blue fox across her breast and smiling down with pleasure and approval – it might equally well have been pleasure at the fur or the bosom, since both were magnificent. A dusky, pleasant perfume came from her as she stirred, and the little charms hanging from her bracelet jingled softly. ‘Tom’s a nice boy,’ she went on. ‘Margaret’s brother, that is. He’s in most nights. But we never see his lordship.’ She winked.

Since her employer was not titled, Cassandra supposed the reference was one of contempt.

‘Governess, eh!’ the woman repeated, smiling comfortingly.

The word had not seemed old-fashioned to Cassandra before. For the first time, she took a glance from outside at all it might imply. She was setting out with nothing to commend her to such a profession, beyond the fact of her school lessons being fresh still in her mind and, along with that, a very proper willingness to fall in love, the more despairingly the better, with her employer.

‘Nearly there,’ said the woman, leaning forward. Cassandra trembled a little as she put away her book, searched for her ticket.

‘Look!’ The woman tapped her on the knee, pointed out of the steamy glass. ‘Oh, it’s gone. Never mind. You’ll see plenty of it before long. All too soon be glad to get away from it, I don’t doubt.’

Cassandra had caught only a fleeting glimpse of grey walls among trees and now could see a broad stream lying in the meadows, unmoving, thick with weeds.

As the train slowed under the spiked edge of the platform
shelter only Cassandra and the woman in the blue fox stirred. The others did no more than move their eyes a little to watch them leaving the compartment.

‘How is she supposed to know you?’ the woman asked, wrenching open the door. ‘You should have worn a red carnation or something of that sort.’ To herself she thought: ‘She’ll know you all right.’

Cassandra had begun to wonder the same thing, astonished that Mrs Turner, who had made all the arrangements, done all the letter-writing, could have overlooked so important a detail.

After all, there were not so many people on the platform to choose from. If Cassandra stood out a mile, as her travelling companion had thought, so did Margaret, waiting beside the ticket collector. She was bare-headed, with frizzy dark hair drawn into a bun at the back; her face was pale, her lips uncoloured. Of course, there had been no necessity to worry, for the woman swept Cassandra in front of her along the platform.