Palladian (8 page)

When he was silent after speaking, it was as if he wished to reflect on his own remarks, not expecting her to do so; he did not look at her for any reaction, nor watch to see if his words
had sunk in; he might have been talking to himself, a reverie on death. She guessed that the dead one was an undisputed barrier between him and life, a barrier he would never challenge, a fixed standard by which all else would inevitably fail. She felt she hated the beautiful one, the spellbinder, the child who read Homer at the age of eight, who looked out of the photograph in Sophy’s room like Morgan le Fay.

‘And now!’ He went to the table and spread out books. ‘I shall teach you how to write your letters.’

He felt an impatience to see her shaping them on the page, the letters with that old beauty, which seemed to him to cast a violet shadow from the sun.

‘She is like a good child – curiously empty,’ he decided, watching her as she took up her pen. He would have liked to have guided her hand, as if she were really a child, but brushed away the thought, leant back in his chair, rolling a cigarette, not offering her one, for she had her lesson to do. She copied the alphabet from an old primer which had ‘Violet Wilding’ written across it in ink faded brown. The dead again.

‘Your wrist looser?’ he said, lighting his cigarette.
‘Psi
is like a lily.’

She tried to draw the lily, made too much of it, looked up and smiled.

‘This is more like the hammer and sickle,’ he said, turning the paper a little towards him and putting his attempt against hers.

Outside, Margaret and her mother walked up and down the terrace for a little while. Cassandra could hear the name ‘Tom’, first one, then the other, saying it.

After a while, Marion began to read to her in Greek, outlining in rather lame, impatient English from time to time what it was Hector was saying to his lady-wife.

When he closed the book, he said: ‘Cassandra is a beautiful name.’

She waited, her heart falling against her ribs. ‘I should like to call you that,’ he said at last.

‘I shall go up and write to Ben,’ Margaret was saying.

Tinty felt … she was sure … the girl meant to rest her legs. She was too proud to say: ‘I shall go up and lie on the bed for an hour.’ She was very brisk and ordinary about her pregnancy; it made no difference, she seemed to infer. Now they had finished talking about Tom – Margaret worrying her mother about him, knowing she could do nothing, had no power to stop him. It was getting worse and worse. At first (but that was years ago), when he was bored and restless, he would go down for a pint and a chat, something to do; that soon became a habit which fitted easily into his empty life. Now, it was no longer a habit, it was his purpose, the centre of him, the thing that was real, and his life must fit in with that, or he could not answer for living. Margaret said ‘liver’, ‘hardening arteries’, and then she said ‘disgrace’ and ‘bad example ‘and ‘God knows what people say and think’. Her mother, so timid with her, knew that was only the beginning and not important. She knew that it was Tom’s mind that mattered, and his life being so empty of purpose that drink could have taken possession of the centre of him. ‘It was a pity he failed his exams. A pity he gave up so easily,’ she had said to Margaret. She even said: ‘His character was weak. He needed help.’ What she did not say, to Margaret or anyone else, although she thought it, was: The pity was about Violet.’ She would never say that: even the thought did not come to her in words, not explicitly, but in a hushed sickness which had to be comforted away. Her life was made up of little anxieties which had to be soothed and dispersed; as soon as one went, another came, anxieties about her son and about her own health.

She walked up and down the terrace. From Marion’s window, she heard his voice speaking a strange language, words of
lament, she thought, listening for a moment to the long curious vowels; words of grief and woe … that was the word, ‘woe’ … not of anxiety. Anxiety is the modern affliction, belonging to the long twilights, the uncertain modern weather; neither sun nor snow and neither grief nor joy. She thought of Margaret upstairs, lying with her feet up, her sailor husband torn from her at the time when she needed him.
She
seemed not to grieve, gave way to none of those long, wailing vowels; everything casual, hidden, clouded-up.

Margaret was hungry, not tired. She went to the kitchen. As soon as one meal was over, she began to think about the next. Food had started to entrance her.

The kitchen had its scrubbed, afternoon, waiting look. On the rocking-chair lay Nanny’s film paper. Margaret took it to read while she stood in the larder eating. On the stone slab was half a gooseberry pie, caved in, and a jam-tart covered with a trellis of pastry; but she had to eat secretly what would not be missed. In the meat-safe was a slab of grey beef, overcooked, a knuckle of veal gleaming with bluish bones. Sage swung from the ceiling, brushing against a net of onions with a lisping sound; there was a brown crock full of cream cheese. She cut a thick slice of wholemeal bread, covered it with butter, then with the cheese, began to eat greedily, dealing craftily with the crumbs, turning the pages of the cinema paper. When she had finished, she was still hungry, She cut another slice and spread it as before. The thought of all this good, wholesome food going into her was pleasing. A fly from outside tried at the perforated zinc over the window. As strategy failed, it tried force. When it flew suddenly away, the silence was complete, perfect. Margaret ate more slowly, with no further sensuous delight. She felt puffed and fagged with eating. ‘Grossly, full of bread,’ she murmured, thinking she saw what it meant, felt what it meant, for
the first time. And then ‘crammed with distressful bread,’ she remembered. Shakespeare must have been greedy too. She was sickened now by the food around her on the shelves, pulled off some bits of sage and sniffed at them – aromatic, that was better. She heard her mother calling down through the house; the voice winding thinly down the stairs, along the passages, peevishly.

Tinty had gone to see if Margaret needed anything; would have been so happy to have found her lying on the bed and wanting a cup of tea or eau-de-cologne, weeping for Ben, maybe (‘Mother, you are all I have’), softened miraculously by approaching motherhood.

The bed had not been lain upon. The curtains bellied out, the only movement in the still room. So Tinty began to call and call through the house, which seemed to hold silent as if from malice.

Margaret cleared up the crumbs, smoothed over the hollow in the cheese, wiped the knife on a cloth, replaced the lid quietly on the bread-bin and crept out the back way, across the courtyard to the lime avenue, went down to sit on a grave and have a little peace, smoke a cigarette, and think of Ben, and think of the baby.

Up and down the stairs the little voice echoed petulantly, until Tom came out of his bedroom frowning and blinking and saying: ‘What
is
it, mother? What the devil is lost?’

The afternoon blazed as they came out of the cinema. The contrast was too much. The street looked so banal after the dark where emotions grow like mushrooms, a lifetime’s experience telescoped into an hour or two. They felt dissatisfied, not uplifted, rather fretful, certainly thirsty. The American-cloth bag was lighter now. It was not food they wanted, but a cup of tea.

‘Just fits in nicely with the bus. Well, this is a fine day’s pleasure for you,’ said Nanny, walking with assurance into a large and fashionable café where she was stared at.

Sophy sat and fingered her hair-ribbons, watching the people dancing and the pianist’s hands reflected in the back-turned lid above the keyboard.

‘Leave your ribbons alone,’ said Nanny.

‘That Elizabeth Bennet was beautiful.’ Sophy took the lump of sugar from its frilled paper case and put it in her cheek.

‘Yes. She’s good. That’s a lovely place she’s got up in Beverley Hills, swimming pool and one of those Loggias. Some of the old-fashioned stories make up into a nice film.’

‘Such lovely dresses,’ said Sophy. ‘When I’m eighteen I should like a long dress. It must feel wonderful to walk in.’ (She sat down, the skirt spread all around her, she laced her fingers in her lap, leaned forward a little and smiled.) ‘I’d like one like mother had you told me about – the long white one with the tea-rose ribbons.’

‘Ah, that was a sweet dress. Cream, not white. She wore it to your Uncle Tom’s twenty-first. The times I ironed those ribbons and tied them fresh. Everything must be just
à la.’

Sophy saw herself with everything
à la
. She turned the curve of the stairs, one hand on the bannisters, one yellow shoe pointing out of her creamy skirts. Suddenly the music stopped and the dancers in the hall looked up. ‘Why, she is her mother over again!’ they cried, quite overcome.

‘Don’t crunch that sugar!’ said Nanny.

If you have had a beautiful mother, people expect beauty from you and when they turn away puzzled you feel as if your heart will burst.

‘I said don’t crunch. Nor suck neither. Another time put it in your cup. A girl of your age and I can’t bring you into a café for your manners.’

‘Did my mother dance?’ Sophy, entranced, watched the locked sauntering figures.

‘Dance?
She
danced and led all of
us
a dance.’

‘In what way?’

‘Oh, what I was saying over the ribbons, and all the ironing, and losing everything as soon as she so much as laid it down. “Nanny, I’ve lost me sapphire ring.” “There it is,” I’d say, “staring you in the face as bold as brass.” Plenty of servants in the house then to run about at her beck and call. Not a lot of charwomen.’ She stirred her tea scornfully. ‘Yes, helpless as a babe new-born she was.’

There was no question of her speaking of the dead with disrespect. She knew well enough ladies ought to be like that; going off for the day in the pouring rain on a horse which was all temperament and vice, fending for herself; or driving the car, coming back covered with oil, talking in the hall about sprockets and such-like, then, later: ‘Nanny, do me up! Where’s me velvet shoes? Where’s me sapphire ring?’

Now Nanny pulled on her mauve cotton gloves and took up the bill. She never left a tip for the waitress. ‘What have we had that’s been all that trouble?’ she asked herself. ‘A pot of tea and no civility. They get their wages like anybody else.’

She had taken her standards from lives of idleness and plenty and despised those who worked for their living, and could not pick up a duster now without a feeling of being lowered in her own eyes.

‘Two such idle young men as I have never met,’ Mrs Veal was saying.

‘Yes. You would not easily find our like nowadays,’ said Tom. ‘It is money does it.’

‘What money have
you
?’ she asked; pretending to tease.

‘I get my weekly penny from Marion. I am not too proud to take it. I am
so
proud I can take whatsoever is offered and remain myself.’

‘Why should he give you
anything?’

‘Because he is sorry for me,’ Tom said casually.

Mrs Veal did not care for his saying that. She got up, blinking her painted lashes, and pouted.

‘Marion was a very busy little man once, when he married, and before,’ Tom went on. ‘Even after he came into the money, had the house – still trotting off to his office every morning, kiss wifie’s brow, wave good-bye at the gate.’ He finished the whisky and made a face.

‘Why did he pack up, then?’

‘He must keep an eye on … his house,’ he said drily.

‘Where were you?’ she asked.

He gave her a little look and handed her the empty glass. ‘Oh, I was often here.’ She took the glass.

It was after closing time and they were shut in among all the sticky, unrinsed tumblers and the cigarette smoke. Gilbert, her husband, had the day off for the races.

She began to plunge the glasses into the tank of slimy, beery water, standing them on end to drain.

‘Another one?’

He nodded. Between the tips of his fingers he handed a pound note. She flushed and shook her head, turning away from him and running a double from the measure.

‘Drink it in comfort, might as well,’ she said, leading the way into the sitting-room at the back. Standing before the mantelpiece mirror, she rolled up her hair freshly, while he sat on the sofa, eyes half-closed, and sipped.

‘The little governess,’ she said. ‘What is she turning out like?’

He considered. ‘She is so young, so transparent, life seems to flush through her, to glow from her, like …’ he looked at the whisky … ‘like wine,’ he said softly. ‘And she is honest. It would be useless for her to try to be otherwise. Being so transparent, I mean. And she is brave,’ he added. ‘Three things I admire … candour and beauty and bravery.’

‘You said nothing about beauty,’ she cried, rearranging her fringe.

‘That was what I meant when I said about the wine.’

She was crisp and annoyed. ‘Better get some food, I suppose,’ she said.

‘No. Come here.’

Holding his whisky carefully, he put out his free hand and drew her down beside him. As she moved she unsettled a great drift of her best perfume, which she kept for Wednesdays – Gilbert’s day off

Tom was quite at home in the room and did not even notice
all the things that would have made Marion wince – the china rabbits, the ruched taffeta cushions, the meaningless watercolours, the fringed table runner.