Palladian (5 page)

‘It means all the more to me, because my mother gave it to me – on the day I was confirmed,’ Sophy went on.

‘But your mother died many years ago,’ Cassandra said, as gently as she could, although she was determined to show herself not gullible. ‘When you were too little to remember.’

‘All the same she gave it me,’ the child said stubbornly, looking desperately affronted.

‘The point is,’ Cassandra said, ‘we need some help for him.’

‘She is a lady cat,’ said Sophy, with great dignity.

‘Your father, does he know?’

‘No.’

‘Then he must be told. These cats are often valuable.’

‘They have royal blood,’ Sophy agreed. ‘I must cure her, though,’ she went on, with a change of voice. ‘If my father did, she would stop being my cat – and she
is
mine – even if she dies, she is still mine.’

‘Mothers with ill children have doctors. That doesn’t make the children less their own. What about your Aunt Margaret?’

‘She is a human-being doctor, not a vet. And she is only a sort of half-cousin to me, anyhow. Not an aunt.’

‘She might help.’

‘
You
cure her,’ Sophy said all at once and, again, it seemed as if she had used her last little bit of energy.

Cassandra was aware of all she had been asked to do and what it meant to the child to place the responsibility of life and death upon another’s shoulders.

‘Let’s coax her with some warm milk,’ she began at once. ‘And a little glucose, if there is any.’

‘Oh, glucose! My Aunt Tinty sprinkles that on everything. There is always a bowlful in the sideboard. It restores vitality.’

‘Then that seems to be just the thing we need.’

At the door, Sophy turned and said: ‘Eight days is the longest a cat can go without food, and she has already been three.’

‘It will be all right.’ Cassandra felt pity, too, watching the cat’s tear-furrowed head turning so aloofly; for it is a sickening thing to bear, seeing the proud laid low, or elegance overthrown. She waited in the cold room, stroking the kitten’s suede-padded paw. Outside, the sky, above a cobbled courtyard, congealed into darkness. Once Sophy’s footsteps had
sped away, no sound came from the house, but still she could not let herself face her depression which, once indulged in, might not be put easily away should anybody come. Someone did come.

A man with a trilby hat forgotten on the back of his head, like some American newspaper man in a film, slouched into the room and stopped. He did not remove his hat, but he said with an assumed Colonial accent: ‘Well, I guess it must be our Miss Dashwood.’

She released the cat’s paw and stood up. ‘How do you do.’

‘
And
how do
you
do?’ As she put out her hand to be wrung, she met a powerful smell of alcohol.

‘Where’s Sophy?’

‘She’s gone to fetch some milk for the cat.’

‘Milk for the cat.’ He seemed to turn the idea over in his mind, then he nodded. ‘Well, we’ll be having some little talks,’ he said, rocking back and forth on his heels. ‘But I must be off now. Make yourself comfortable.’ He glanced round the cheerless room, his hopefulness faltered, and he said good-bye and disappeared.

When Sophy came back, her head bent over the dish of swinging milk, Cassandra said, unsure of herself: ‘Your father looked in.’

Sophy stopped, seeming puzzled. ‘I doubt it,’ she said.

‘Perhaps it wasn’t your father,’ Cassandra suggested hopefully.

‘Did he smell of wine?’

‘Of course not,’ Cassandra said truthfully, although she thought she was telling a necessary lie.

Did he wear a hat, then?’

‘Yes, he wore a hat.’

‘Then that was Tom, my cousin Tom. He’s not the least bit like my father.’ She set the milk down on the window-sill. ‘And he must’ve smelt of wine,’ she said finally.

The cat turned her head fastidiously from the milk, looked out of the window as if offended.

‘You see!’ said Sophy, tragically.

Sophy went to bed before supper. She said her prayers facing a photograph of her mother, as if it were a graven image. Cassandra, fidgeting round the room, a little embarrassed, thought the photograph itself unsuitable for such a purpose, the secretly smiling face, the mocking, insolent eyes.

At supper there were only the three women, but Margaret indicated a folded white note on Cassandra’s plate.

‘My cousin wrote it for you when I took his tablets to him.’

‘You know, Margaret,’ said Aunt Tinty, ‘I wouldn’t wonder if it isn’t migraine Marion suffers from.’ She took cauliflower cheese from a silver dish. The cheese had seethed and bubbled and was a curdled mass.

Cassandra unfolded the paper. A spiky, but beautiful handwriting, very black ink.

‘My Dear Miss Dashwood,

Will you forgive my absence on your arrival. My cousin will have explained. I shall look forward to seeing you and welcoming you to-morrow.

Marion Vanbrugh.’

Cassandra scarcely read it, but fingered it occasionally, waiting to savour it in solitude; for it had a fine measure of importance, this first note, and the crossing of every ‘t’, the flying comma, each linked letter must be analysed for its clue.

‘Forgive my mentioning my own private affairs,’ said Margaret casually, ‘but I find, mother, that I am expecting a child.’

The old woman started, her fork jagged across her plate.
‘Why, Margaret, what a way to say such a thing! What a way to tell your mother such a thing! In the middle of a meal.’

‘It was the way I preferred,’ Margaret said cruelly.

Cassandra realised that she had been waited for, to be used as a screen by Margaret against her mother’s fussing. She flushed, because she resented being put to this use, hated the other’s rudeness.

‘In the circumstances, I shall prolong my holiday. Ben would rather I did that. Dobby must manage.’

Ben was her husband, Dobby her partner. This was not explained to Cassandra.

‘But will Marion like it?’ Tinty began, but fearing lest her daughter might say, in front of the governess, ‘he will like the money,’ or something embarrassing and impossible of that kind, she went on quickly: ‘Well, it will be very nice, I dare say. That is good news your first evening with us, Miss Dashwood. You must forgive our discussing these things, but we have so little time together.’

Indeed, they only had all day.

‘Someone has been at the glucose,’ Tinty went on, spooning it over her stewed apple. ‘It was scattered all over the sideboard.’

Cassandra blushed. Margaret noted the blush.

‘Did you go round the garden with Sophy?’ Tinty asked.

‘No. It went on raining.’

‘So it did. What a pity! It would have given you an appetite.’

‘Nothing could give her an appetite for this,’ said Margaret, pushing aside the mush of apple.

‘No, it isn’t very nice,’ her mother agreed. ‘Never mind.’

After supper, they sat for a while in the drawing-room, and Margaret strummed a little at the piano and then jumped up and went restlessly to the long windows at the front of the house. She looked out at the rainy garden, beating her knuckles on the
glass softly, and Cassandra saw her face quieter and relaxed, her expression peaceful. Aunt Tinty wrote a long letter to a distant relation, exposing it, bit by bit as it was written, to Margaret’s bullying comments.

Soon Cassandra said good night and went upstairs. As she passed the room which Sophy had whispered was her father’s, she heard footsteps going up and down over a carpeted floor. She went on down the corridor, through archways, round corners, and came to her own room.

On the dressing-table she disposed her parents’ photographs, her mother’s ivory and initialled brushes; her few books she stacked on the bedside table; hung up her clothes in a tremendous wardrobe above a pair of old boot-trees. She went to the window and leant out for a moment. The goose wandered no more in the rose garden. Rain fell from leaf to leaf, rolled down the ivy, ran over the windows, oily like gin. She turned away and began to undress, brushed out her smooth brown hair a hundred times as her mother had always said she should and then (her father’s bidding) read a page of Shakespeare, peering at the thin India paper with her rather weak eyes; and, reaching the bottom of the page and leaving Lady Macbeth in the middle of unsexing herself, she closed the book and climbed into the frivolous Edwardian bed.

Now, at last, the luxury might for a little be indulged in – the summing-up, the verdict, the easy weeping, the pity. She cried a little against her arm, the tears running out of the corners of her eyes, until she was forced to stop so that she might strain her ears listening to a muffled commotion somewhere outside, a scuffling on loose wet gravel, a gentle cursing. The noise stopped abruptly and a door slammed. Rather fearfully, for it was all unlike the atmosphere of home or school or any she had ever known, she put her head down upon the pillow and lay
there, not relaxed enough now for weeping, but very tired, and soon, her head still filled with muddled conjecture, the boundaries grew vague, all that was familiar melted away and the fantastic, the forbidden, the gigantic stood in view; lost thoughts slipped through the majestic visions; her will loosened, she sank down through sleep, losing herself, finding herself; yet, however lost, the sleeping are unlike the dead, for still the mind murmured ‘I.’ She said ‘I, Cassandra.’ ‘I, myself, Cassandra.’ Then the lady in the blue fox leant forward very close and rapped on the carriage window, she smiled and drummed her knuckles hard against the glass.

At that moment, there
was
a sound like that in the house, although Cassandra did not know. It was Tom coming up the stairs and trailing his stick along the bannister-rails.

‘Tom!’ hissed Margaret, coming out on to the landing, with her dressing-gown tied tightly round.

He took no notice. He walked on to his own room and slammed the door. Margaret watched for a moment and went back to bed.

In his room, Tom sat on the edge of his bed and rested his elbows on his knees and stared intently at his swinging hands. When he was tired of doing that, he began to pull at his tie; the knot slid tighter, and he cursed. After that, he sat down again for a while and rested. Presently he was altogether undressed. He poured a glass of water and placed it beside his bed, put on his pyjama jacket and suddenly, aloud, said: ‘O.K. Good. Swell. Fine.’ He felt all right, except for his head, which seemed to be opening and shutting or, like swing doors, letting in gusts of sound, long waves of quiet, gusts of sound, alternately, with regularity. He got into bed and took a sip of water. When he put his face to the pillow, lying sideways, ‘the best moment of the day,’ he thought. But the bed swung round suddenly and cruelly, that relentless lurching movement that
gave the feeling of helpless terror in the abdomen. ‘Steady,’ he thought. ‘Not again. Better in the morning.’

He lay very still and quiet, not to frighten sleep away, as if it would creep up stealthily, a timid little animal, would not come if it knew he was there, waiting, greedily, artfully.

In the morning, the garden, the house, sprang up, jewelled in the bright air. Each leaf, each blade of grass flashed with colour, the broken statues of nymphs before the house whitened in the sun. Pomona and Flora, still with wet eye-sockets, wet folds of drapery, held out chipped fruit and flowers to dry.

At breakfast, there was another note beside Cassandra’s plate.

‘Dear Miss Dashwood,

Will you be good enough to make out a timetable for Sophy’s lessons and bring it to my room at eleven?

M.V.’

Cassandra refolded the paper and was trembling a little. Aunt Tinty distributed her patent foods and watched Margaret intently. Margaret ate well and showed no signs of sickness.

After breakfast, in the schoolroom, which the sun would not reach much before Sophy’s bedtime, they sat at the inky table and ruled lines on a large sheet of paper, headed it with the days of the week, and paused.

In her basket, the cat snuffled. She seemed neither better nor worse, but ate nothing and scorned her milk.

‘History,’ Cassandra began. ‘What have you done?’

‘Oh, I had gone all through it once and got to Elizabeth for the second time,’ said Sophy airily.

‘Arithmetic?’

‘I was just doing those sums where there are figures on top of a line and some more underneath.’

‘Fractions?’

‘No, I don’t think that was the name.’

‘Do you know all your tables?’

‘I did once.’

‘Well … it looks like arithmetic every day. French?’ The child shrugged.

‘I can read
Les Malheurs de Sophie
. I had it for my birthday.’

‘Do you know any verbs?’

‘Yes, I think I
do.’

‘Write out the present tense of “être”. Can you do that?’