Palladian (4 page)

‘Mrs Osborne!’

Margaret had seen, but, nevertheless, gave a little start.

‘Mrs Veal. Good afternoon. I am …’

‘Here she is. Now, what an arrangement. How would you have gone on if I hadn’t been here? No red carnations, I was just saying, or copy of
The Times
in the left hand turned back at the financial news. I should have liked to have seen two people meeting like that, after reading about it so much when I was a girl.’

‘How do you do. I expect you are Miss Dashwood. I am Dr Osborne. Mr Vanbrugh’s cousin.’

Cassandra shifted her case to the left hand and took Margaret’s. ‘Have you your ticket?’

‘Oh, yes!’ She put her case down and went through her pockets.

‘Can I take you to the bottom of the hill?’ Margaret asked Mrs Veal.

‘Well, that would be nice. I certainly won’t say “no”.’

They passed through the gangway, and Margaret walked slightly ahead of them to the car in the station yard.

‘I am in luck’s way,’ Mrs Veal said now and again as they drove down the village street, a long piece of ribbon-building with a couple of shops and three or four chapels, ugly in various ways.

Mrs Veal sat in the back, leaning forward, so that her perfume reached them in little drifts each time she moved.

‘Not
a very picturesque village,’ she observed. ‘But you’ll grow to be very fond of it. That I do know. Dead-alive hole I once thought it. Well, it doesn’t
look
much – especially this weather.’

Margaret’s hair was frosted all over with the fine moisture, her tweeds, too. She drove, with her head a little on one side, her elbow resting on the car window, her large white hands very loose on the steering wheel.

‘Here we are, then. What about a cup of tea?’ asked Mrs Veal, as the car slushed into soft gravel in front of a pub. The pub had its door shut. The signboard – or rather piece of tin stamped with a brewery trade-mark – swung on a sort of gallows near the road. ‘The Blacksmith’s Arms’.

‘Well, no. I think my mother will keep tea for us at home,’ Margaret was saying.

Mrs Veal got together her bag and gloves and parcels and stepped out of the car backwards. ‘
Au revoir
, then. Thanks so much.’

‘Good-bye,’ said Margaret, and then, to Cassandra as she brought the car on to the road again, ‘I hope she wasn’t an annoyance to you on your journey. She has a heart of gold,’ she added unkindly.

Cassandra murmured.

The car slowed and turned off the road into a drive, between gateposts and broken gryphons, past a mouldering lodge where some bits of washing hung limply in the drizzle. They went curving through laurels to the house. Cassandra somehow – while getting out of the car, managing her belongings, and following Margaret – received an impression of the façade and, as well as the rows of sashed windows and not quite central pediment, smaller details were snatched at and relinquished again by her commenting eye; pieces of dismembered statuary, of dark grey stucco fallen from the walls and a wrought-iron lamp at the head of the steps with its greenish glass cracked.

The front door was open and rain had entered the hall.

‘I don’t know what you are going to make of Sophy,’ Margaret said, as they crossed – Cassandra tip-toeing almost – the black and white tiles. Her tone was cold and unpromising, as if she thought ‘Rather you than I!’ But Cassandra had grown up in the dark shadow of her father’s moral courage and could not be daunted so easily or, if daunted, would not show as much or give in.

‘
We
make nothing of her,’ Margaret added, as she opened a door. Then, thinking Cassandra looked stricken, she suddenly put her arm across the girl’s back and patted her shoulder in a clumsy, prefectish gesture. Cassandra felt that she would be embarrassed at any moment by some phrase of old-fashioned slang out of Angela Brazil, but Margaret led her forward and introduced her to a spiderish lady sitting by the fire eating a piece of Ryvita.

‘This is Miss Dashwood, mother. My mother, Mrs Vanbrugh. Where is Sophy?’

‘How do you do, dear. She had some tea and went to her father for her Latin lesson.’ Mrs Vanbrugh brushed crumbs off her skirt into the hearth.

Margaret laid her hands on the sides of the teapot. ‘Oh, mother, let’s have some
fresh
. I’ll take Miss Dashwood upstairs, but I truly am dying for tea.’

‘You ask Nanny then, dear. I hardly like to.’

‘Oh, God!’

Once more they crossed the hall with its oppressive smell of damp stone. Cassandra never allowed herself to have feelings when she was in the company of other people. She was too young to permit herself any forebodings as she followed Margaret upstairs. She was waiting until she should be alone to decide what sort of impression had been made upon her by the toppling statuary without, and faded damask, cobwebs, dusty cornices and unpeeling wallpaper within.

A gallery ran round the hall, giving opportunities for a mad sort of architecture, as if the upper part of the house had been planned solely for games of hide-and-seek, for evasions and sudden encounters. Rooms and landings lay at different levels and staircases ran off to right and left, some ascending, some burrowing down again.

Margaret could not merely open a door; she flung it open, and then, what was more, crossed the room in front of Cassandra and flung open the windows one after another, as if hoping to dilute the mouldy ancient smell of the place. She explained about the bathroom (‘down the little staircase on your left and then across the half-landing and under the archway on the right’), so that Cassandra could never have followed the instructions, and then she said ‘I shall see about the tea,’ and left her to confront her own small label-plastered trunk (for her father had visited some cultural centre every summer holiday), and to inspect the Edwardian bed of brass and pleated silk.

She crossed the threadbare, pink-wreathed carpet and looked out of the window, learning her new limits, like a prisoner going for the first time into his cell. Below her, outside, a
goose wandered through the ruins of an old rose garden, walking between the weeds with a sedate air.

‘What are you looking at?’

A little girl leaned against the door, looking in from the dark landing.

‘Are you Sophy?’

‘Yes. What were you looking at?’

As Cassandra came towards her, so that she could see more plainly the child’s pale, violin-shaped face, a door opened suddenly downstairs, releasing the sound of voices in angry dissent, voices which separated, echoed across the hall and, finally, trailed away.

When Margaret came upstairs, Cassandra was standing beside Sophy in the doorway. They had looked at one another, but scarcely spoken.

Margaret’s forehead was flushed, but whether from anger or the stairs it was not easy to say.

‘The tea is ready,’ she called.

She paused with her hand on the bannister and looked up at them.

‘Ah, there you are, Sophy. Bring Miss Dashwood down for some tea. Where is Marion? Where is your father?’

‘The neuralgia came again.’

Margaret gave a sharp sigh. ‘Come along, then!’ She disappeared down the stairs as if she could not wait longer for her tea.

‘Come along, then,’ Sophy echoed.

‘If you discover anything muttering in dark corners, it is Nanny and you must not mind her,’ said Margaret.

‘Hush dear,’ said the oldish lady, still sitting among the Ryvita crumbs.

‘She wasn’t muttering at you just now,’ Sophy pointed out.

‘How did your Latin lesson go, dear?’

Sophy shrugged. ‘It has gone,’ she said simply.

‘And your daddy has toothache?’

Margaret laughed with pleasure.

‘A perfectly civil question,’ said her mother.

‘Marion does not merely have toothache.’

‘I thought it was toothache … that was all …’

‘Of course it is toothache.’

‘And he won’t be called “Daddy”,’ said Sophy.

‘He is your father, isn’t he? Surely …’

Margaret said: ‘Truth is stranger than fiction.’ It was only
just
said, as she took up a filled cup and passed it to Cassandra. ‘Don’t
you
think truth is stranger than fiction, Miss Dashwood?’ Her tone was engaging, artificial.

‘I think we have to believe things that happen in real life, which we could not believe in a book,’ said Cassandra, who didn’t know what she was being asked.

‘Exactly what I meant,’ Margaret said quietly.

‘Take a spoonful of Bemax on that,’ said her mother.

‘On what? Me? Oh, Sophy! Sophy, eat your Bemax or mushrooms will grow inside you.’

Sophy imagined thick shelves of fungus branching out from her ribs, and sprinkled Bemax on her jam.

‘You are having two teas.’

‘Yes, Aunt Tinty.’

‘What about you, Miss Dashwood?’

Margaret offered a little dish.

‘Oh, no, thank you.’ Then Cassandra blushed, feeling the child’s eyes on her, to see how she would take the teasing.

‘I think Sophy should show you round,’ Margaret suggested. ‘Then you will get to know one another.’

‘But Miss Dashwood is tired. Sitting in a train is so very fatiguing.’

‘No, I should like to do that, if Sophy would like it, too.’

They all thought she was not starting off as she must go on. Sophy’s expression, as she stood up, meant obviously that whether she liked it or not had no significance.

‘Well, it will be a breath of fresh air,’ said Aunt Tinty, with all the reverence of an indoor sort of person for the open air.

‘She is prim,’ said Margaret, when she was alone with her mother.

‘No. She is shy. And she is young. You should not speak harshly of Marion in front of her. After all, you live here …’

‘No, I am staying here … there is a difference.’

‘If you are a guest then your sarcasm is all the more awkward.’

‘How can I be a guest when I pay him thirty-five shillings a week?’

‘And, then, he
is
her employer. If she cannot respect him it will be very wretched for all of us.’

‘We are in for a thin time, then,’ said her daughter.

‘Indoors or out?’ Sophy asked sullenly, out in the hall. She put her arms out stiffly from her body and spun round; then as if that had been her last spurt of energy, she flagged suddenly, cast herself down on a settle and began to chew the end of a pigtail.

‘Indoors first,’ said Cassandra, knowing she must take a strong line. ‘Then,’ she continued, ‘if it has stopped raining and we are not too tired, we can walk round the garden.’

The eyes measured her, the pigtail was flipped back over a shoulder and the child jerked herself to her feet. ‘Come on then,’ she said ungraciously, and they began their tour of the vast, decaying place which was an examination of one another rather than an inspection of the house.

‘The library!’ Sophy began, standing with her back to the opened door, displaying the rows of calf and gilt. ‘There is a priest’s-hole in the side of the fireplace,’ she added, as if she had done this job before. She even led the way forward, but the smell of dampish soot repelled her. Cassandra took down a book and glanced through it, which, on account of her upbringing, she could not help doing.

‘Awake therefore that gentle paffion in every fwain: for, lo! adorned with all the charms in which Nature can array her; bedecked with beauty, youth, fprightlinefs, innocence, modefty and tendernefs breathing fweetnefs from her rofy lips, and darting brightnefs from her fparkling eyes …’

‘Those books smell horrible,’ said Sophy.

Cassandra raised it to her face. ‘It’s a sweet, dusty smell.’

‘It turns my stomach over,’ said Sophy. ‘Like going to church.’

Cassandra put the book back and followed Sophy along the corridors and up little staircases. Sometimes the child opened doors and made announcements. They came to the schoolroom, which was no cosy, shabby place with fireguard and cuckoo-clock. Cassandra could find nothing there more childish than an exercise book and
Caesar’s Gallic War
lying on the table. She fluttered the pages as Sophy went to the window, and was a little relieved to see Caesar’s profile made less austere by inked-in spectacles and moustache.

‘It is only a cat,’ Sophy was saying, bowed secretively over something on the window-seat. ‘It is only an ill cat.’

‘Your cat?’

The creature sneezed and Cassandra came to see. The little black face ran with tears, the creamy fur on the back clung together, as if with sweat. ‘A Siamese?’

Sophy said nothing, swung a foot carelessly, looked out of the window.

‘It is only a kitten,’ said Cassandra.

Then with sudden anguish, Sophy asked: ‘I think it is dying?’ And her voice wavered and dropped, and she turned to the window again.

Cassandra knelt by the cat’s basket, took up one of the silky black legs. The unfocused, blurred gentian eyes were lifted towards her and all the time the tears ran on to its little pink tongue.