Palladian (7 page)

When Tom came he stood the cat on the table before him, looking at it closely.

‘Sophy, fetch me the little attaché case from my room,’ he
said. As soon as she had gone, he turned to Cassandra and asked: ‘There’ll be hell to pay if this cat dies?’

She nodded.

‘As it will,’ he said.

He felt the cat’s stomach, seemed to be concentrating on the animal, yet he went on: ‘Marion coddles her, wraps her in cotton-wool, Sophy, I mean. When it comes to it, she hasn’t anything real to help her. No experience. I don’t believe in governesses, if you will excuse my saying so. I believe in going out and about, finding out things, getting the corners rubbed off.’ He looked at Cassandra.

‘Those are vague phrases,’ she said.

‘My cousin tries to live in the eighteenth century. Latin, and soon there’s to be Greek, I hear. She wants to be rushing round with a hockey-stick, having crushes on the other girls. But there are no other girls. It’s all wrong. Why should I trouble myself, be rude to you, too? Over the important things he never will stir himself. The conservatory, for instance. How many times am I to tell him, ask him? Thank you, Sophy.’

He clicked open the case and took out some pills. All the time the cat was standing piteously aloof upon the table. ‘Hold her legs,’ he ordered Cassandra. The cat became possessed suddenly of a wild strength and struggled insanely. Tom held her mouth shut upon the pill, stroked under the chin, but with a convulsive madness it sought to free itself from Cassandra. Sophy ran to the wall and hid her face, screaming.

‘It’s done,’ said Tom. He laid the cat back in its basket, where it tried to lick a paw, but gave up, lay quivering and exhausted.

A long scratch ripened on Cassandra’s hand, little heads of blood rose up from it. When Tom saw it, he took some antiseptic from his case and dabbed her, dealing with her in great gentleness.

‘All right?’

She nodded.

‘As for you, Sophy,’ he said sharply when he reached the door, ‘for God’s sake, control yourself.’

In the night, the cat died.

Cassandra braced herself to contend with a grief which did not come. Sophy appeared to have accepted death before it happened and was not shocked. She fell busily to preparing a funeral, planning a headstone. She laid the kitten in an old bootbox, covered it with limp ferns and went out with Cassandra to bury it. At the end of a grassy lime avenue near the house were rows of small tombstones at the foot of a round hillock.

Sophy dug the grave, while Cassandra stood by shivering and holding the cardboard coffin. The child’s face, even when the earth went back over the dead animal, reflected satisfaction at a job well done, not sorrow, nor any suggestion of loss.

She brushed soil from her hands calmly.

‘This little hill is a grave, too,’ she explained. ‘There is a ghost who rises from it and walks up and down this avenue, even in broad daylight. Nanny has seen it doing so. A man from the house fought a duel here early one morning and killed his friend. He was so ashamed he tried to hide the body by heaping all this earth upon it where it lay, and planting grass. One day the hill wasn’t there and the next day it was.’

‘And how long ago was all this?’ Cassandra asked drily.

‘Oh, before I was born.’

They walked back down the avenue towards the house. ‘The conservatory is out-of-bounds,’ Sophy said, pointing to the great ruin of dusty glass, in which a large palm tree clattered its leaves. ‘It isn’t safe. It might come down at any time. Anyone who was inside when it happened would be cut into little shreds of flesh. So Tom said.’

They skirted it widely.

‘Never run round this side of the house in case you jar it,’
Sophy went on. ‘I once went inside it very gently to look at a wasps’ nest, but I trembled all the time I was there – thinking of what Tom said. And when he knew I’d been in there, he lost his temper and took hold of my shoulders and shook me till my teeth rattled. And then Marion came and stopped him.’

‘All right,’ said Cassandra,’ but now we must get back to our lessons.’

Marion’s neuralgia was better. He appeared at meals, he came sometimes into the schoolroom and glanced through Sophy’s books, and was to be seen in the afternoons walking in the lime avenue or sitting reading – if it was warm – on the cracked stone seat in the rose garden. ‘What did he do before he was idle?’ Cassanda wondered.

Between meals, the house fell under a spell. The meals brought them all together, but as soon as they were dispersed it seemed as if the rooms were all empty.

When Tom was not at the pub he lay on his bed waiting for his stomach to right itself, or, if he were able, he would sit at his littered desk drawing his strange pictures.

He lived at two levels, the life in the saloon bar; the life with the pen in his hand and the cynical, bitter, unamiable figures growing upon the endless pieces of paper – the harlot stripped of flesh but with eye-sockets coquettish above an opened fan, or the young man with his heart lying in his outstretched hand, but a heart from a medical book, with severed pipes and labelled auricles and ventricles, nothing romantic, nothing valentineish.

Margaret seemed to have established herself with or without Marion’s permission. Cassandra felt towards her pregnancy a sense of both enmity and respect, which women do experience, however faintly, subtly, in the presence of fruitfulness and purpose.

Tinty, nervous and meek, bit down the thousand and one expressions of joy and looking-forward which sprang daily to
her lips, held herself back from her grandmotherly planning, asked no questions, offered no glucose. Tom and Marion watched Margaret closely. Cassandra could feel at mealtimes that they were narrowly observing her with fascination and distaste. Nothing was ever said.

One day at lunch Marion asked: ‘Is Nanny going to the cinema this afternoon?’

‘Oh, I expect so, dear,’ said Tinty. ‘It’s the day they change the film.’

‘Then Sophy may go with her.’

‘Is it a suitable film, though?’

‘No films are suitable,’ said Tom, looking annoyed.

Marion ignored him. Sophy looked from one to the other.

‘It’s
Pride and Prejudice,’
said Tinty.

Tom sniggered.

‘Well that should be very nice,’ his mother said.

‘It should be sweetly pretty,’ he agreed. ‘It should be just the thing.’

‘Would you like to go, Sophy?’ Marion asked.

‘Oh, yes. May Miss Dashwood come too?’

‘Miss Dashwood and I are going to read Greek together.’

Cassandra blushed.

‘She doesn’t
know
Greek,’ Sophy pointed out. ‘I wish someone else could come. Not just Nanny and me. Tom, you come!’

‘Good God, no!’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘Do it because I want you to.’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Sophy, that’s enough,’ said Marion.

She still looked questioningly, accusingly at Tom. He gave his plate a little push, sat back in his chair and stared at her.

He did not bother to cover up the awkwardness of the moment. He sat it out.

Cassandra had a weak stomach. When she was excited or nervous or imagining herself put to a test, her bowels froze, hollowed; wings seemed to beat inside her and various large organs such as lungs and heart appeared to lose balance and plunge downwards, like a lift out of control in its shaft. The thought of the Greek lesson put her most dreadfully to the test, and the food – chocolate sago – turned acid as fast as she could eat it. She trembled – and yet a little from delight – at the prospect of sitting alone with Marion in his room, of showing herself less than intelligent, stupid even, unable to grasp simple things, unfit, therefore, to teach his daughter. Already she had been caught out, had, a day or two before, passed over a wrong gerund in Sophy’s Latin and he had had to point it out when he looked through the lesson book. He had done so with kindness and courtesy, implying that she had rather overlooked the wrong than forgotten the right.

‘Run and tell Nanny to pack two teas, then,’ said Tinty.

‘Tea?’ Margaret looked incredulous.

‘She always takes sandwiches lest she should feel faint during the second film. Faint with hunger, I mean.’

Tom clapped a handkerchief over a laugh.

‘Does she have no lunch, then?’ Margaret asked. ‘Is she so excited at the idea of the pictures that she cannot eat?’

‘Shush, dear. It wouldn’t be the cinema to Nanny if she had no sandwiches.’

‘It makes an outing of it,’ said Sophy, as if she alone understood.

Tom rocked in his chair.

When they saw Nanny standing in the hall in her hard black hat and carrying her American cloth bag of food, they were fearful of having laughed and a little ashamed. The light
divided on the shiny straw boater as on a gramophone record. Hatpins drove into it from all sides.

‘’Hurry that child, for mercy’s sake, miss,’ she called to Cassandra. ‘We shall be late for the Forthcoming Attractions if we don’t catch the first bus.’

‘Speed Sophy and come when you are ready,’ said Marion, leaning over a banister.

Cassandra reddened again at the intimacy, as if it were his bed she was bidden to, not a Greek lesson. She worked in haste to get Sophy ready, plaited up her rather fuzzy hair, tied it with four yellow bows, handed her a handkerchief, mentioned the lavatory.

‘What does “Prejudice” mean?’ Sophy struggled into her coat.

‘It means a pre-conceived opinion,’ Cassandra replied.

‘I don’t think I shall enjoy it,’ said Sophy, wanting to back out. Unstable, she was always swinging from one desire to another, could not endure feeling compulsion, or commitment.

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Cassandra, rushing her down the stairs, from which they could see Nanny, oddly foreshortened under the wheeling lights of her hat, standing in the hall. She took Sophy with as little grace as a girl takes a young brother when she goes to meet her love. ‘Ah, there we are!’ she said grimly, so that Cassandra could not envy Sophy her afternoon out, and turned at last, with a mingling of guilt and delight, towards Marion’s room.

He was standing by one of the long windows with his hands in the pockets of his black velvet jacket. The room was white and gilt and brilliant, untidy with coloured books, not the leathery mouldy books in the library, but the bright modern books that are all gone to-morrow, God knows where. Under the warm sun the bracken in the white jar had begun to unclench its fists; above mirrors pediments were broken to
make room for little gesso cherubs or scallop shells, the mirrors themselves reflecting richness.

‘Did Sophy not change her mind at the last moment?’ Marion asked.

‘She was beginning to … I gave her no time.’

‘That weakness is painful, but it can’t be pandered to. She inherits it from her mother. It must seem a trivial thing to those who are not afflicted. But it really can make hell for everyone. What does one do, I wonder?’

‘She must be made to stand by her decisions. Then it will become a matter of course, I daresay.’

‘You think that?’ It was as if he were prepared to believe whatever she said. ‘Her mother was spoilt as a child. We must not spoil Sophy. In her mother, that little failing at last assumed really distressing proportions. At night … at a party, I mean … she would fall in love with the whole world, and every dull person in it, overflowing with spirits and seeing them all reflecting her own goodness and beauty, invite hosts of dreary people to lunch the next day.’ He took a deep breath, rather theatrically. ‘Every morning, after breakfast, as soon as the post had come, she’d sit down by the fire accepting invitations … there were always so many because she made herself pleasant to everyone, spared her vitality in no way … but when the time came for her to
go
to the party or the dance or picnic, or whatever it was, there would be a painful
crise des nerfs
. She would come to me trembling, her face white.… “I
can’t
go. I couldn’t make myself,” seeming like a cornered animal. Sometimes she would force herself to go, sick and ill as she set out, but all would be well; once there, she lit up, people illuminated her; she would come back worn out, for it had cost her something, but always deliriously happy, committed again and again to the same occasion. But if she didn’t go, if she gave in, then she would mope from room to room, trailing about the house, dead,
regretful, petulant. She had never learnt to know what was best for her, could not have the responsibility of ordering her own life. A terrible drawback, you know. What did you say to Sophy?’

‘I think I said “nonsense” or something like that.’ She could not help feeling that she had dealt too lightly with what was apparently an esteemed and reverenced family fault.

He smiled. ‘I think you are going to be just right for her. Are you happy?’ Seeing her shyness at being asked questions about herself, he went on: ‘Do you like this room? It is the nicest in the house, and I keep it for myself.’ He began to walk about, touching books and china. ‘Once it was my wife’s room.’

‘He cannot forget the dead,’ she thought.

‘But it is a room with a macabre little history. My great-aunt, who left this house to me, died here. She was lonely and eccentric and no servants could bear her. She lived here quite alone after her husband died. In this large house, where never a stroke of work was done or a broom put over the floors. The gardener locked her in at night and unlocked her when he came over from his cottage next morning. It all went to rack and ruin, as they say. One can imagine it. Her husband had left her a cellarful of port. So she settled down to drink it before she died. She liked this room … I suppose because of the sun. And I can imagine her … though, my God, I never came to see … sitting here among the cobwebs, getting drunker, eating almost nothing. The floor rotted and fell in in places, there were great holes … She might have broken her neck, but she never did. The gardener found her one morning, not just dead drunk, but drunk dead. Yet I suppose she died of grief and loneliness as much as anyone … despair and the indifference of the world.’