The Ballad and the Source (4 page)

Her reply came readily.

“Oh, Harry is not Ianthe's father. She had another man for her father. You see, I was married to somebody else before I married Harry. No. … Harry never had a child of his own. A great pity. He is devoted to children, and so unusually good with them.”

Our further questions died upon our lips. It was the final piece of information, the definite statement that the Major had a particular weakness for and way with children, that silenced us completely.

Mademoiselle flutingly announced that it was time for us to make our
adieux.
She asked our hostess to excuse our indiscretions, adding that with us the zeal for accuracy was a veritable malady.

“
C'est tr
ès bien,
”
said Mrs.
Jardine,
with an incisive nod. “
Il n'y a rien au monde de plus important.”

She had stopped trembling, and seemed now all affection and serenity. She went on to say, in French, that she had conducted her life on the sole principle of discovering and speaking the truth in all circumstances, and that this principle must naturally apply in dealing with the young—with the very youngest. Mademoiselle replied with a gesture of indescribable delicacy—something between a bow, a shrug and a deferential
moue.

“
Au revoir,
my dear
dears.
You must come and see me again soon,” said Mrs.
Jardine,
stooping to print on our cheeks a soft dry perfumed kiss. Then she said low, with great tenderness: “One more kiss, because I love you.”

Jess put her arms up, round her neck, and said:

“Please, can I speak to you alone?”

They left the room together, and almost immediately returned.

Mrs. Jardine came back with exactly the same expression on her face: a hostess's cordial solicitude. Jess looked stubborn and triumphant.

We picked up our primrose baskets and went through the garden in the April dusk; out by the blue door, down the grassy hill at a jog-trot.

Mademoiselle inquired disagreeably what Jess had had to say that could not be said aloud to all, in a spirit of straightforwardness and good manners. Jess replied:

“Nothing.”

For this she received a punishment: immediate bed without supper on arrival home. She curled her lip in scorn, and marched with her head high. She muttered for my ear: “Off with their heads!”—a code phrase, arising out of our governess's marked physical resemblance to Tenniel's Queen in
Alice in Wonderland,
employed by us to convey warning and signalise defiance.

My mother heard us open the front door, and called us into the drawing-room, so the punishment lapsed. Later Jess told me what had passed between her and Mrs.
Jardine.

“Next time we come, may we come without Mademoiselle? We should enjoy it more.”

“Certainly,” said Mrs. Jardine. She took Jess's hand, gripped it, and added: “When my grandchildren arrive, I shall send for you to come
alone,
you and Rebecca, to play with them in the garden.”

“Do you promise?”

“I promise. I want you to be friends. Remember that.”

4

I do not know whether it was a long time or not long before we went again to tea with Mrs. Jardine. Looking back into childhood is like looking into a semi-transparent globe within which people and places lie embedded. A shake—and they stir, rise up, circle in inter-weaving groups, then settle down again. There are no dates. Time is not movement forward or backward through them, but simply that colourless globe in which they are all contained. Adolescence coalesces in a separate globe; heavier, more violent and confused in its agitations when shaken.

I think it was a few months later: I know it was summer, because Mademoiselle had vanished unlamented to Belgium for her long annual holiday, and there was no difficulty about going to tea without her. We were invited to come and play with Mrs. Jardine's grandchildren; and when the note came we overheard my father say low and with annoyance to my mother: “There's not got to be too much of this, you know.” And she murmured back: “Well, shall I make an excuse?”

A moment of ghastly suspense and anxiety followed; but it was not in him to deprive us of a pleasure, and he shrugged his shoulders and made some cryptic reference to claws being pulled after all these years. My mother reminded him of the charming letter about us she had received after our first visit. “Oh yes,” he said. “She'd charm the birds off the trees.” My mother said something about people like that always ending up the most respectable and orthodox of all. He uttered a light amused snort. “Let them go,” he said. “So long as it isn't the thin edge of the wedge. … It won't hurt them to get a last-hour impression of her classical dimensions. … Her days of action must be done.” He paused, sighed and added: “Poor old Harry
Jardine. …”
And then: “I wonder if she's kept anything of her looks.
…”

There must have been a long spell of drought that summer, for I remember the brownish-green canvas-like look and feel of the expanse of lawn stretching out parched and dazed in the sun as we came through the blue gate. We saw basket chairs and a table beneath the copper beech, and a figure in white lying on a garden couch. A hand waved. It was Mrs. Jardine. When we came up and stood beside her, we saw that she was propped on cushions, and that she drew loud and labouring breaths.

“Dears, dears,” she said, not smiling. “The virtue has gone out of me. I have not had a bad attack for five years, and now it has its talons in me again. It is my heart. I have, in an acute form, a nervous instability of the heart. Extremes of heat and cold affect it—among other things. But I shall not die of it.” She did smile then, and fanned herself with a large Japanese paper fan. “Oh, dear me, this is so very tiresome!” she exclaimed irritably. “The very
day
they arrive, I collapse. Four days ago. I wanted to have so much to give them. They find a sick old woman. So disastrously unfortunate. They come from a house of sickness. Nothing is more detrimental to the young.” Closing her eyes, she wiped a dew of sweat from her forehead with a filmy handkerchief. “Suffocating heat,” she gasped. “I have been indoors. It seems I am better indoors. But I wanted to see you coming across the lawn. Pretty pets. You look so fresh. I wanted to be present when you meet—” She picked up a little handbell from the table beside her, and swung it with a will. “They will come,” she murmured. “I told them to appear as soon as I rang. They
lurk.”
Her eyes flicked, dilated. “They lurk all day in those tunnels. Emerging at meal times.
I
don't know what they do.”

“What tunnels?” asked Jess.

“Have not you noticed the lime alleys?” she asked in that rather harsh didactic voice she always used, I was to realise later, for speaking of the particular beauties of her house. There was apparent pride, almost arrogance, in the tone; yet in my ears it rang hollow from the first, as if her insistence sprang from the necessity of remaining set in some blind alley of circumstance, some course she knew to be sterile. It was an angular voice of the will, a parrot voice. “No other country house in England,” she went on, “has anything to compare with them. They were planted by Harry's grandfather, and Harry used to love to play in them when he was a little boy.”

Feeling reproved for lack of aesthetic observation, we looked about us and saw, running down the length of the garden, starting near the outer edges of the house's rose brick
fa
çade
and flanking the lawn, two high broad square-clipped tunnels of compact foliage. At the end, each of these was developed into a formal square like a leafy temple with arches cut in it, and beneath the arches we caught a glimpse of stone figures, erect, in pliant dreaming attitudes.

“The fragrance in spring
…”
said Mrs.
Jardine,
meltingly now. “Enough to die of, in aromatic pain. And the bees hum and hum in the green daze. It is like drowning.” Then she said sharply: “Where can they be?” and rang her bell again, with violence.

After a few moments, three figures emerged from beneath one of the arches and came slowly across the lawn towards us: a boy in a cricket shirt and grey flannel trousers, a girl in a brown holland frock leading by the hand a much smaller child in a navy blue overall. They came and stood at the foot of Mrs. Jardine's couch.

“Malcolm and Maisie,” said she, “here are your guests. This is Jess. This is Rebecca. I rang the bell twice.”

“Sorry, Grannie,” said the boy awkwardly.

“We heard you the first time,” said the girl.

“Oh, you did,” said Mrs. Jardine in her matter-of-fact voice. “It seems rather a pity then that you did not come. Since that was our arrangement.”

“Cherry didn't want to come,” said the girl. “I had to persuade her. I wasn't going to have any more tears.”

“I see,” said Mrs.
Jardine.

She closed her eyes and fanned herself rapidly. Yes, she lay there with her eyes sunk and her nostrils looking pinched, as if beaten down by the rudeness of her granddaughter. An overwhelming sense of outrage and struggle oppressed the air.

“Well, perhaps you would not object to shaking hands with your guests,” said Mrs. Jardine in the same dry, equable way, her eyes open again, but not looking at any of us.

We shook hands formally all round, and said how do you do. The three stared at us, and we at them, absorbing one another warily through all our senses.

“How are you feeling, Grannie? Shall I fan you a bit?” said the boy politely. He seemed anxious to show good will.

She turned her face to him.

“Thank you, dear boy.”

Voice, eyes, smile bathed him in streams of tender love. He waved the fan clumsily at her, and she took up his disengaged hand, rough, red, with bitten nails, and held it against her papery cheek. The small girl disengaged herself from Maisie and came and leaned on the arm of the couch, watching the movements of the bright red and blue flowery fan. She was a very pretty child, with long dark wavy hair in profusion, a pale transparent skin and deep blue eyes rayed round with dark curling lashes: dazed-looking eyes with abnormally large pupils.

“Would you like a fan of your own, little one?” said Mrs.
Jardine.

“Yes.”

“I will find you one.”

“When will you?”

“When I go in.”

“Cherry will have a fan and fan herself.”

“Don't talk in that babyish way, Cherry,” said Maisie sharply. “It's silly. When you talk about yourself you say me, not Cherry, you know perfectly well. I'm not going to have you getting into these idiotic habits. Anyway you don't want a fan now. You're coming for a picnic with Malcolm and me.”

“Cherry will—I will stay with Grannie.”

“My pretty,” murmured Mrs.
Jardine,
caressing her hair.

Maisie went black, heavy, swollen; and Mrs. Jardine continued briskly, between labouring breaths: “Well, you are going to take your tea out, and eat it in the trees, or under them somewhere. I told Mary to pack the basket and put it in the hall. Jess and Rebecca, my darlings, I hope you won't hurt your pretty frocks. I see you did not change out of that brown overall after all, Maisie. Perhaps you were right? Cherry's also looks extremely soiled. It cannot be helped.”

“I wasn't going to let her get another cotton dirty,” said Maisie, “just for a picnic. What does it matter what we look like? It's all so stupid, this fuss.”

She gave our clean pink and white striped ginghams a look of disgust and contempt.

“What fuss can you be referring to?” asked Mrs.
Jardine,
with marked lightness. “It always matters what we look like. Harry likes to see people cleanly and neatly dressed. He is very particular. His feelings matter, because he is your host. You have worn an unprepossessing brown holland garment for three days now. He is tired of it. I will not speak of myself.” Her eyes snapped, staring ahead of her. She was powerful and cruel; and Maisie set her lips, flushing sullenly. “Malcolm will care, later on, to have attractive sisters, girls he can be proud of, to take about. Perhaps he does already.”

Malcolm laughed awkwardly, amiably.

“Oh, Maisie!—she'll never care what she looks like. She'd really prefer to shove herself into a sack and tie it up at the neck, wouldn't you, Mais?”

“I'd rather wear a sack and black my face than be taken about like a prize poodle just to be shown off,” she said, with raging scorn.

“Keep your hair on,” he said good-naturedly. “Nobody's likely to burst themselves in the effort to show you off.”

“Cherry has the bud of beauty in her,” remarked Mrs. Jardine. “Why should she be disguised? Is it deliberately done?”

“How do you mean disguised, Grannie?” said the boy, still embarrassed.

“Cherry has her mother's eyes,” said Mrs.
Jardine,
her voice vibrating. “Even when she was a baby I dressed her in brilliant, definite colours—blues and reds. For her sixth birthday I sent her, from America, a black velvet frock, long, to her ankles, with a fitted bodice and a sash of watered silk, the colour of a dark red rose.”

“Cherry would like that,” said Cherry, looking hypnotized.

Maisie began in a choked voice:

“Father doesn't—”

“Oh yes, yes, yes,” interrupted Mrs. Jardine quickly, coldly. “Your father does not approve of beauty. He would like it to be wiped off the face of the earth. The fatal gift of beauty: the unpardonable.
…”
Once again, she was trembling all over. “You tire me rather, Maisie. I must go in. Where is Harry? One of you go and find him, please, to carry me in.”