The Ballad and the Source (2 page)

I said I had begun music lessons; letting it be inferred that I showed promise. But Jess said:

“We can't any of us sing in tune—not a note. Daddy's tried us again and again, but it's no use. He says Mummy's influence is astonishing.”

“I only saw your dear mother once,” said Mrs. Jardine. “It was in Rome, soon after she married your father.”

“Oh, then she must have forgotten,” I said. “She said she didn't know you.”

“No. We have never met. I was in Rome at the same time. I saw them—at the Opera. They did not see me. I watched her for a long time. I wanted so much to know what kind of girl your father had taken for his wife. Such a pretty, fresh, Puritan face, so much firmness. Yes. … I think she gave you these strong limbs and rosy cheeks. Your grandmother was rather an invalid, you know. Her chest was delicate; and none of her children was very robust. She used to get a dreadful cough in winter and had to leave England and follow the sun.”

“I have bronchitis sometimes,” I said.

“Do you?” she said gravely, observing me. “That must be watched. This damp foggy valley is so bad, if there is an inherited weakness—as well there may be.”

“Oh, I cough all winter,” I said recklessly; but Jess's mood was now so mellow that she let it pass.

We were in bliss: our hearts were bursting to give and to receive. Such reminiscent conversations are what children most delight in: they expand in the glow of an enhanced importance; their identity, to themselves so dubious, so cloudy, becomes clarified. The darkness they feel behind them, from which they are beginning to emerge, is suddenly, consolingly populated by familiar phantoms: shapes with eyes and hands from which theirs are copied, voices which have not altogether ceased to sound, but passed into their new throats. Brains, beauty are enhanced by establishment of their origin and continuity; a clue, a dignity is given to idiosyncrasy of temperament. Even disabilities—fatness, lack of inches, straight hair, tone deafness, failure to spell or do sums, distaste for mutton or greens
—
touched with the mystery of a recurrent phenomenon, receive a kind of consecration; also an absolution from total responsibility. Others before us compounded with these shames and handicaps: so why not ourselves?

Portraits, letters, albums in the library, family legends, all conspired to float these grandparents, dead before our birth, glamorously before us. Figures larger than life size surrounded them, mingled with them in a rich element of culture and prosperity. In that lost land it was always midsummer; and the handsome, the talented, the bearded great moved with Olympian words and gestures against a background of marble-columned­­­­ studios, hallowed giant writing-desks,
du Maurier-like
musical drawing-rooms, dinner tables prodigious with good fare, branched candlesticks and wit.

Without conscious awareness that our circumstances were a decline from all this, we did receive early intimations that our budding time was somehow both graced and weakened by echoes and reflections from the prestige of that heyday. When elderly relations came to stay, and the talk, punctuated with sighs and smiles, turned on the old days, we listened, drinking in wafts of air unknown, yet recognised, with rapt attention. When their eyes fell affectionately, speculatively on us, we felt them wondering what, if anything, was to be hoped for from this generation in the way of particular inherited promise. Although unmusical, and for that reason a disappointment, something, we felt, might be done with writing?—drawing?—acting? … We would be three brilliantly talented sisters, as in the generation before us, and the one before that. Yet sometimes a doubt blew across this simple optimistic programme. That mint was abandoned, the coins were passing out of currency. There seemed something that had once been generated in the family circle, and from thence radiated among friends and acquaintances—a life-wish so crackling with energy that it could overcome no matter what minatory fate, and electrify the whole human span from birth to death. We had a great deal in our childhood, but we had not that. When our father in his middle years married a girl from New England, our cradles were swung at the meeting place of complex and opposing forces, and rocked rather bewilderingly in the process of their conjunction and redistribution. We did not quite know what we were, or from what quarters self-recognition would arise.

A curious figure formed part of our early lives. Her name was Tilly. For many years our grandmother's maid, she had been, subsequently to her death, distributed among various members of the family in the capacity of sewing maid, housekeeper or temporary nurse. She was a diminutive Cockney, just not a dwarf, cased always from head to foot in glossy black, with a little lace-bordered black silk apron, jet ornaments and a cornelian brooch. When she took the air, she wore a waist-length cape called a dolman, and a midget bonnet tied under the chin with broad black satin strings. Her reality belonged entirely to the Dickens world. She had a large pendulous face with caramel eyes on stalks, a long comedian's upper lip and chin, and on her bulging forehead a lump the size of a thrush's egg, which she concealed by arranging over it one circular varnished curl drawn down from her black “transformation.” The effect of this was disturbing, as if a form of animal life—a snail or something—grew parasitically upon her brow. I could never take my eyes off it. Twice widowed before the age of thirty, she had married first one Mr. Pringle, to whom in the course of interminable reminiscences she never once referred; next a handsome and romantic Bohemian cabinet-maker, by whom she had had one son, known to us as the Little Feller. He had been all brains and no stamina, his little spine grew crooked, and she lost him at the age of six. She was now in her eightieth year, and had retired to lodgings in Camden Town, and from thence emerged twice yearly to pay us long sewing visits. She sat in a room at the top of the house, making loose covers, manipulating my mother's furs, exquisitely darning the linen and entertaining us with pink and mauve fondants and conversation.

She was a true Cockney, all sharpness, materialism, irony and repartee. She was also a consummate actress and mimic. In a trembling croak she sang us snatches of old music-hall airs; and she danced for us, holding her skirts with quirked fingers, sedately rotating on invisible feet, round and round and round, and dropping a low curtsey at the end. The remarks she threw off impressed us forcibly. She said: “I wouldn't marry a undertaker—not if 'is 'air was 'ung with diamonds.” She told us that if a person looked a lady in her dressing-gown, then a lady she was. Our grandmother had been an outstanding example of this truth. I studied myself long before the mirror in my red woollen dressing-gown, considering whether the same could be said of me. She said I had her voice, and Jess her clever fingers with a needle, and Sylvia her joking ways. None of our more agreeable qualities could derive from anybody but Grandma. Not that she had ever been a beauty; we pressed her for this, but she was firm; no, never a beauty, not even pretty: it was the ways she had—the loving way, the quick way, that way of flying out; and she would drop her stitching and chuckle at some recollection of the wit, the stinging tongue. She was on her death bed, so weak they thought her gone past rousing, the nurse did something to displease her: up she sat, “as fierce as a maggot,” to protest. Yes, our grandmother came all round us in the upstairs room, beside the cutting-out table and the sewing machine, through the smell of furs and camphor and new chintzes: passionate spirit, loving and loved; modest, self-confident; sheltered, sharply independent; despotic matriarch, young girl pliant and caressing; fragility, energy with a core like the crack and sting of a whip.

It was this, this last that had left our house, and perhaps most similar houses at that period. There were no words for it, of course, and the sense of it came only intermittently. Looking back now, one might express it by saying there seemed disillusionments lurking, unformulated doubts about overcoming difficulties; a defeat somewhere, a failure of the vital impulse.

Now here we were, emerged into this garden to confront this ageing lady who had loved our grandmother, stepping up out of the dead and gone to have our faces searched for clues. We knew we were linked back, as we were with Tilly, to the rich past. The fiery particle snapped in her eyes and in her voice, white, wrinkled, exhausted-looking as she was. Her lips were pale, bluish, but their outline was unblurred, sharply rising and dipping, meeting clear at the outer edges, neither slack, nor sour, nor frightened as many mouths of women grow. There was something about her lips and about her whole face—something dramatic, a sensuality so noble and generous it made her look austere, almost saint-like. Experience had signed her face with a secret, a promise whose meaning people would still watch, still desire to explore and to possess.

We followed her across the lawn into the house.

She showed us to the bathroom, shook rose geranium essence into the water for us, and left us to wash our hands. Then we hurried along the passage to join her in her bedroom. It was a long low spacious room, with white panelled walls and curtains of swathed and frilled white muslin, and a small four-poster bed with delicate columns of fluted mahogany and hangings of white Italian brocade embroidered in blue and gold. In front of the pretty fireplace stood a couch upholstered in mauve watered silk, with a rug of soft silvery fur folded at the foot of it; and over the mantelpiece hung the portrait of a little girl with long brown hair, very queerly dressed in a dark velvet jacket, and on her head a high fur cap. She sat half turned away, looking at us over her shoulder, hand on hip; her face was narrow, with big dark eyes.

“That is my daughter,” said Mrs. Jardine.

“What's her name?”

“Ianthe.” She gave the portrait a dwelling look. “Yes … I
bought
that picture some years ago. It was being sold at auction, I discovered. No doubt it would have been destroyed, but that it had a market value—being the work of a well-known painter.”

Her eyes gave a flick. That was the first time I noticed this peculiarity of her eyes: as if they twitched far back, behind the pupil, then dilated in a long blank stare. There was something inhuman about the trick: it made her eyes look fierce and incandescent.

“I suppose she's probably grown up now?” I suggested, not knowing what to make of her last speech.

“Yes, quite grown up. She has children of her own.”

“Your grandchildren, then! What are their names?”

“Maisie, Malcolm and Charity. Not names I should have chosen.” She drummed with her fingers on the mantelpiece, still staring at the portrait, but not as if she saw it.

Jess, who was stroking the rug, said:

“Do you rest on this sofa?”

“Every afternoon.”

“With the blinds down?”

“No, I do not pull down the blinds. I look out at the garden. I love it so much from here: it frames itself so beautifully in this big window.”

Our eyes followed hers, and saw through the sash window that reached from floor to ceiling the stretch of lawn and two magnificent trees—a giant copper beech, now budding, and near it a silver birch, the tallest I have ever seen. They were as glorious, as different, as brother-and-sisterly as the sun and the moon. In the background rose the old brick wall that edged the garden, and spring flowers—primulas, daffodils, narcissi, crown imperials—massed in the herbaceous borders.

“And when you get tired of looking at the view you can look at the picture,” I said.

She smiled.

“Yes, I look at them alternately. And so the time goes very pleasantly by.”

“Why were they called those names, do you think?”

“I understand,” said Mrs. Jardine, with marked brevity, “that they were named for various defunct members of their father's family.”

“How old are they?”

“Malcolm is thirteen and Maisie is—let me see—she must be twelve. That makes them rather older than you two. The other little girl is a good deal younger.” She looked at us attentively, and said in the brusque, electrifying way we were to know so well: “I have never seen my grandchildren.”

We were dumb, shocked by the impact of what we recognised to be an important confidence. We waited, acutely aware of the trickiness involved in any attempt to follow on from this. What she had said, it was clear that she had said deliberately; we guessed it had been said to our grandmother's grandchildren. To crown all, we began to receive a curious impression: we were about to enter into some sort of conspiracy with Mrs. Jardine. We watched her, responsive as any instrument she had ever in her life fingered and drawn the heart from, to play the part she had appointed.

“Then you don't know if they're nice or not?” said Jess finally.

“I wonder very much,” she said meditatively. “I often ask myself.” She went over to the mirror, took out her turquoise hat-pins and removed her hat, glancing at herself sidelong, as women do who think they have lost their beauty: repudiating a complete reflection. “I wonder what we should find to say to one another.” She dusted her face all over with powder, took from a drawer a scarf of sky-blue gauze and wound it round her throat, pushed her hair up and added: “I think I shall see them soon. I
think
they are coming to stay with me. Then you must come to tea and make friends: at least, if they are nice, as I hope.”

Mademoiselle now appeared with an air of modest good breeding from the bathroom, where we had been bidden to leave her, and told us not to fatigue Madame with our chatter.

“Come down now,” said Mrs. Jardine, stretching a hand out to each of us and drawing us close. “Tea will be ready. You are going to meet Harry now. You will like Harry. Everybody loves him. But he is a little shy.”

3

A tall man with a red face and thin grey hair was standing in front of the drawing-room fire, looking out of the window.