The Ballad and the Source (6 page)

We started for the picnic.

5

So our friendship with the Thomsons began. Summer wore away and they still stayed on, and we saw each other almost every day. Our time was chiefly devoted to strenuous physical recreation—climbing, somersaulting, jumping, turning cartwheels, riding bicycles. My passion for tree-climbing was equalled if not surpassed by Maisie's; it was the basis of what burst rapidly into a close and emotional relationship. I never knew a girl exercise herself as she did: when she was not ranging over walls and among branches, or pedalling furiously round the paths, she would fall upon and wrestle with me. She was several years my senior, and much heavier, and she generally got me down, but I could climb higher and with more agility.

The garden was given over to physical displays. Sometimes Harry would emerge from
the
study where he spent hours alone with his cat, and watch us all competing in the long and the high jump. He seemed to enjoy doing this: he seemed to concentrate on it, and sometimes raised the rope himself with an unsteady hand. He, or rather Mrs. Jardine in his name, had presented all three of them with magnificent bicycles, and we brought our rather inferior ones and played follow my leader for hours on end, whirling in and out of the alleys, toiling, nose on handle bars, up banks and steps, tottering and colliding among the intricacies of the shrubbery. Maisie liked best to lead, but Malcolm was the best leader. He had an offhand slick virtuosity on the wheel which none of us could approach; his balancing feats would not have shamed a music-hall trick cyclist. Maisie took a world of pains, but she was clumsy. Beetroot-coloured, her hair soaked with perspiration, she laboured grimly in his wake. Jess and I had more style but less stamina and frailer nerves: this made the standard of our performances capricious. Cherry began by tagging along with us, and we were patient with her, though she spoilt the games because she had not yet learnt to dismount unaided; but soon she dropped out of her own accord, and sought the more appreciative society of the domestic staff. She had pretty ways, old-fashioned ways, and became the pet of the kitchen, where she made little jam tarts and showed off and prattled about herself in the third person to her heart's content. She formed the habit, too, of trotting into Harry's study and climbing on to his lap. There she would lie against his shoulder, sucking her fingers, her dopey eyes staring, unfocused, unblinking, through half-lowered lids. Obviously she was building him up into a powerful and comforting father-figure, and she clung rapaciously to his male touch. Once during a game of hide and seek, while I was in concealment in the rosemary bush under his window, I overheard her say—in the manner of one sending up coyly, dubiously, a trial balloon
—
that she was going to call him Daddy. I heard him murmur a word or two of dissent. “Then Grandpa
…?”
“No. Harry.” She uttered a formal deprecating little laugh, and exclaimed: “Fancy me saying Grandpa! Oh dear, what a silly I am! You're not nearly old enough for that, are you? You're a young,
young
Harry. … You're more like a sort of Uncle Harry really, aren't you, I suppose?” He uttered a brief chuckle. “Miss,” he said. “Miss Puss.” It was very odd to hear him laugh: it was as if he didn't know how to do it, and was practising. But she did make him laugh. He began to love her tenderly. When she was playing with the rest of us in the garden, he would appear suddenly in our midst, just to see that she was getting on all right—not being left out or left behind. Sometimes one discerned his figure haunting one long window after another, as if watching her from different angles. He had always been so freakish, so apparently aimless in his comings and goings, it was at first difficult to realise that he was now guided by one definite motive—to watch over her.

This was in the beginning: afterwards—quite soon, I think—her presence became a simple necessity to him. Though a caressing she was not an affectionate child; perhaps because of this, because she was all intuition, calculation, without heart, she knew exactly how to meet him three-quarters of the way and draw from him the sustenance she needed. She soon had the father-daughter ritual established—the romp before bedtime, the good-night visit after she was in bed. They talked fantasies about the cat, and read aloud to each other from the Beatrix Potter books Mrs. Jardine had given her. He read slowly, in a rather quavering solemn monotone; she very loudly and rapidly—(she knew them by heart) pausing now and then to fling out such warnings and encouragements as: “This bit is rather frightening;” or “It's a little sad here, but it gets all right in the end.” She had a shrill sing-song voice with a plaintive break in it; it always sounded as if tears were behind it. She sang to him too, long droning compositions in mournful
récitatif.
Obsessed as she was with age and death, her themes were always very morbid, and her renderings caused her face to assume a comic look of strain and anguish. He would listen without a quiver, and thank her politely at the end.

All this time, while the relationship between Harry, the Thomsons and ourselves was being established, Mrs. Jardine seemed to retire into the background, or to be somehow muffled. Like a constitutional sovereign, without administrative political powers, she presided, she dispensed bounty, graciousness and tact, receiving us as it were in audience on our arrivals and departures. She ceased to confide in us, and never attempted to draw us apart and question us about the grandchildren. We neither spied for her, nor were spied upon.

She got on very agreeably with Malcolm: he admired her and trusted her, and she showed him an easy straight­forward affection, and encouraged him, and was patient with his uncouthness. His incipient puberty was particularly raw, grubby and graceless, and she who so loved order and distinction, so valued charm, never allowed his unattractiveness to irritate her. “He can't help it, Lucy,” I once heard her say to her maid after some large-scale breakage. “He is not inside his skin yet, he is all over the place. How can he tell what his legs and arms will do?” She would stroke his dust-coloured scrubbing brush hair, and call him her fellow. She must have settled that her job was to help him—by making him feel loved, not a disappointment­­­—to fit more satisfactorily into his skin. I thought it was sad that she had never had a son: she would have been so nice to him. I thought it must be difficult for her to believe that Malcolm, so common, so nondescript in his flesh, could possibly be descended from her flesh and blood. I did not realise then what poisons from what far-back brews went on corroding her; but not a drop fell on these children—fruit though they were of everybody's misconceptions and misfortunes. Mrs. Jardine had so fine a respect for human life that she was able to bestow an entire, an objective, uncorrupted value upon every individual, even where her passions and prejudices might have made for most distortion. That was her grandeur.

Malcolm had unpleasing traits in his character. He was deferential, almost obsequious, to any form of authority, as if he wished—awkwardly enough, poor Malcolm!—to ingratiate himself as a precaution against detection. He cheated just a little in all the games, and did not share his sweets all round, but kept them secretively among the hairy, clogged grey debris of his jacket pocket and consumed them rapidly, on the sly; though sometimes he did offer the bag to Jess, whom he was keen on. He liked to swing with her, standing face to face, on the swing the gardener put up in the walnut tree. Owing to the violence of his exertions, they swooped to dizzy heights. Also he used to wind her up tight in the swing and then let her go. Eyes tight shut, squealing, she would spin round with a whirl of legs and skirts to a bucketting conclusion. He would never be bothered to wind up Maisie or me. Then he would place a cushion for her on the bar of his bicycle and invite her to mount, which she did demurely, side-saddle. Gruffly bidding her to lean against him, he would wobble away with her for secluded rides in the lime alleys.

In those odorous, subaqueously-lit tunnels, he would share his sweets with her; and once suddenly kissed her cheek. She was flattered by his preference for her, but not reciprocally attracted; and I think his strangled brooding sensuality, the furtiveness of his advances and withdrawals caused her a bored uneasiness.

Maisie could not be won, so Mrs. Jardine behaved towards her as a sovereign might towards a Communist MP at a royal garden party: she extended hospitality to her, avoided any field of controversy, serenely ignored all treasonable insinuations. Never, in my presence, after that one time, did she permit the battle to be between equals and in the open. Their strategies ran on contradictory lines and never engaged one another for the show-down; but all the same Mrs. Jardine gained the advantage. Maisie's integrity quickly took on the appearance of mere pig-headedness and ill-breeding.

Maisie was always falling off objects and falling down, and Mrs. Jardine tended her injuries with exquisite skill and kindness. A relationship might have developed from this,
—
though it never did—for the sight of blood was Maisie's heel of Achilles and reduced her to green-faced shuddering sickness and paralysis. It was curious in one so bent upon physical hazards, and so particularly tough to outward view. I got a fearful shock the first time I saw her sitting on the ground, staring with gasps and whimpers at her flowing knee. Mrs. Jardine attempted neither to sympathise nor to stiffen her morale by a bracing attitude. She simply bathed, bandaged with her strong light certain hands, and sent her to lie down for an hour with a hot drink and a book. Each time Maisie fell down the process was repeated. Her surrender was total, abject, but no advantage was taken of it.

Cherry she treated with indulgent yet somehow remote tenderness. She watched her a good deal, but as it were from the other side of a glass shutter, which she only opened to call her to her side for practical reasons: for instance, when Cherry looked too flushed or too white. She was a delicate creature; what colour she had ebbed and flowed between one hour and the next. Sometimes she had a bluish unearthly pallor. She had constant colds and stomach upsets, and Mrs. Jardine made her rest a lot, and, sick or well, kept her in bed one whole day each week. Maisie fought hard at first against this decree, muttering that there was nothing wrong with her, it was only because she was having too much rich food, and now on top of that she was being made into a mollycoddle; but Mrs. Jardine summoned Dr. Gibson to examine Cherry; and then, during the course of a long private conversation, bewitched him; and then he had a tactful jolly confidential chat alone with Maisie; and after that Maisie threw up the sponge. Sick or well, Cherry greatly enjoyed her days in bed. She cut out dolls' clothes and chalked and sang. Mrs. Jardine showed her how to cut chains and patterns from delectable sheets of coloured paper. Harry spent hours by her bedside. I observed that it was part of Mrs. Jardine's policy to leave them together. Listening from a distance to their uninhibited conversations, an expression at once tranquil and expectant would come into her face.

Once she was in bed with a cold and I had come in to have a grazed hand dressed by Mrs. Jardine. We were in the bathroom, which was opposite to the bedroom she shared with Maisie. Both doors were open, and I could see Harry sitting by her bed. I heard her say:

“The next one will be still more sad. Lily and Willy both get stolen away. But I'll put some gladness in. Their mother comes for them. Their mother is a guardian angel, you see, but they don't know it. Nor do you yet, do you?” He nodded, and leaned his cheek on his hand to listen. When the song was over, she said: “Did you like that? It was beautiful, wasn't it? Now can I light your cigarette? Your hands smell nice, you have nice smelling soap. What shaky hands you've got, haven't you? Why do they shake so?”

“Well, I don't know. It's just a bad habit they've got into.”

She said in an anxiously casual way:

“Is it because you're old?”

“That might have something to do with it.”

She was silent, then she said with false, loving simplicity:

“You are a shaky man, aren't you? Shaky, shaky old Harry. … Do ill people have shaky hands?”

“Sometimes.”

“I know they do, because—I know.”

“But I'm not at all ill.”

“No!” she cried triumphantly. “You're
very well!
And you're not old either—not to me. You won't die—oh, for fifty years I shouldn't think, should you?”

“I shouldn't think so.”

“Not ever
…?”
Her voice was cunning.

“Some time. Everybody does.”

“Yes, that's what Maisie says. It does seem a shame really. I don't want to. I don't want anybody to. Do you want to?”

“I don't think I shall mind much. People don't, you know, when they've had a lot of life.”

“Perhaps something will be invented to stop it. If I was God, I should say—” She sat up straight in her dressing-gown and called out in a tone of imperious proclamation: “I have made up my mind! Nobody is to die any more!”

A sound came out of his throat, stifled, sudden, as if his heart turned over with tenderness and pity. He took the small hand she had raised in the act of decree and held it to his chest.

“I say, look here, old girl,” he said, even more huskily than usual. “Look here. Listen. We'll stick together. See? I'll be here as long as you want me. You'll be all right. I promise. See?”

Mrs.
Jardine,
who had been listening intently while she washed and dressed my hand, dropped the bandage she was rolling and leaned back against the basin. Her hands sank to her sides, she looked far away out of the window, and said, very low:

“Now she is his child. He will live for her.”

The tears started to pour down her cheeks, but without blurring or staining her contours. Her eyes remained wide and more than ever brilliant, and the tears went on slipping down as if over the face of a statue. She looked at me, smiling; her smile lit by her tears had a wild and tragic gutter. She whispered: “I knew it would be so;” and kissed me. She put her finger to her lips, and we went out, tiptoeing past the open door, downstairs again.