The Ballad and the Source (7 page)

The stronger Maisie's feelings for me grew, the weaker became her grasp on Cherry. I satisfied her violent and jealous sense of ownership. She began to relax. Her scrubbed, harsh, mongrel look disappeared, her face filled out and glowed like a poppy. At rarer and rarer intervals did she pounce on her sister and try to snatch her from the bonfire. For one thing it was into Harry's hands rather than into Mrs. Jardine's that Cherry had fallen; and Harry presented no sort of target for desperate acts of will and duty. Assuming no authority, exercising none by word or deed, he took away her weapons. If she shared nothing else with her mother's mother, she had in common with her an outstanding positiveness of nature. Their feet rang on concrete, their fare was solid. But Harry was a world extinct. Appearing and vanishing in room and garden, haunting the window, he seemed to be proclaiming: “I am nothing;” and this sole assertion, made with singular delicacy and weight, made a cloak, vaporous but impenetrably enshrouding, to throw over Cherry.

One day, instead of locking herself into the bathroom with Cherry to supervise her evening bath, Maisie simply stayed out in the garden with me. “Ask Lucy to bath you,” she said.

That was the end.

6

Maisie was the first woman friend I ever had. There were plenty of girls, then, and afterwards, with whom I played games and exchanged confidences, but my relationship with Maisie was so far removed from the waist-entwined, I've got a secret, giggle and whisper it, cross your heart you won't tell level that I think of it now as adult. It was she whose steadfast passion and disillusionment, laid bare so firmly, so without obliquity or reserve, first planted deep within the feathery shifting webs and folds of my consciousness that seed which grows a shape too huge, too complex ever to see in outline, clear and whole: the monster, human experience.

We sat in the fork of the walnut tree, and she said:

“You know, I loathed you when I first saw you. I thought you were going to be the most ghastly beast.”

“Oh … why?” I felt hurt.

“She would go on and on about you
…”

“What did she say?”

“Well, saying your Grannie had been godmother to my mother and how she hoped this what d'you call it—generation—would be friends again, and all that sort of muck.”

I reflected. It seemed a venal offence, but to Maisie it had appeared a sinister plot. She added:

“And now you're my best friend.” She picked up my hand and gripped it in hers, which was tanned, freckled, bony, and said: “Promise something.”

“I promise. What?”

“You'll be my best friend.”

I considered one or two others among my circle who had qualifications for this title, but decided to grade them down, and replied without hesitation:

“Yes. All right.”

We sat silent for a few moments, holding hands. I was conscious of the flattery, from a girl older than myself. I see now that her life had split her, so that part of her was unusually childish and part had taken the rigid form of premature maturity. After a while she said:

“She's given up talking about my mother—I wasn't going to have any of that. Malcolm can let her feed him up with it if he likes, but I won't. Besides, I promised Father
…”

“What did you promise him?”

“That I'd
never
…
that I'd never, never listen to her.”

The words burst forth with explosive violence. She stared out into the garden. The leafy, sun-saturated shade we sat in brought out a burning green light in her eyes.

“He told me she's a liar. And she made my mother a liar. He said if ever he caught any of us lying he'd whip us within an inch of our lives. Once he found out Malcolm had told a lie. He was quite young—only eight—it was soon after Mother went away. He said he hadn't gone to the Park to sail his boat when he had. …
”

“What did your father do?”

“He thrashed him.”

I wanted to ask: “Within an inch of his life?”—but I could not muster the question. I was silent.

“Malcolm's afraid of Father,” said Maisie. “I despise cowards, but it's not all his fault. Father's awfully down on him. They're not quite fair to each other really. After that time—when he told a lie—Auntie Mack went in to Father, and I heard them arguing in very loud voices. I don't know what they said. When I went to say good-night to Father he was crying.”

“Are you sure?”

“Certain. Sobbing.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. There was nothing I could do. He was missing Mother. I couldn't say: ‘Cheer up, she'll be back soon,' or,
‘
Cheer up, we'll manage all right without her.' He'd forbidden us ever to mention her name again. He pulled me on his lap and said was he a very cruel, unkind father to us, so of course I said no, he was the nicest one in the world. I suppose Auntie Mack had been saying things.”

“Is she your real aunt?”

“Oh no. She's an old spinster cousin of father's, or something. She came to look after us after Mother went away.”

“Do you like her?”

“No, not much. She's a fussy old ass, always talking about her stomach or her liver. Her name's Miss Flora Mackenzie. Still, she's not too bad. She's quite fair.” She paused to put a toffee in her mouth and to give me one, and then added: “She did one thing that was decent. After Mother went, she used to send us postcards, masses of them, from all over the place—abroad. Of course we loved getting them. It showed she hadn't forgotten us anyway. But father had made Auntie Mack swear if any letters did come she wouldn't let us have them. So what she used to do was—when these postcards came she gave them to us secretly and let us keep them a whole day, and then we were on our honour to give them back to her, and she burnt them. We steamed the stamps off and kept them in a box—locked. It's a Spanish box mother gave Malcolm once. Father never knew. He'd have turned her straight out of the house if he had.”

“For doing something behind his back
…?”

“Mm. It was awful for her, I do see. First she'd sworn and then she'd broken her sworn word. She explained to us. She said it was a burden she'd have to bear to her dying day, but she'd thought it over and over and taken it to God, and she'd decided we ought to have Mother's postcards and she could never, never tell him so; so there was nothing to do but trust us not to betray her. So we promised. It was a pity deceiving Father, but we had to because we couldn't have made him understand. … She always chose lovely postcards. There was never anything on them except: Love. No address. Of course we couldn't let Cherry have hers. She was only a baby. She'd have blabbed.”

She lay back full length along the bough, and gazed up into the tree's great branch-plaited lucent crown of foliage.

“But after about a year,” she said, “the postcards stopped coming.”

“I wonder why
…?”

“I suppose she thought it wasn't any use going on. I thought perhaps she'd died, but Auntie Mack said no, they'd have heard for certain. She said mothers didn't ever forget their children, so
…”
I stole a nervous glance at her, but there was no need to be nervous: she spoke and gazed upwards with reflective calm. “I wonder if I shall ever see her again,” she said. “It would be queer … she's been gone about five years now.”

After a silence, during which I indulged in fantasies of bringing about a reunion, I asked:

“Why did she go away?”

“Because she didn't like living with Father.”

“Why did she marry him then?”

“I suppose she liked him at first and then she didn't.” She continued with a touch of irritation: “People can change their minds, can't they? Haven't you ever liked a person to begin with and then gone off them?”

“Oh, yes.”

But as applied to married couples, this came to me as a new conception. Till this moment, in my view, men and women got married, had children, lived in the same house until they died. They did quarrel, that I realised; but I had never imagined their relations governed by feelings susceptible of total revolution.

“Did she tell you she didn't like living with him?”

“No. But you could tell she didn't. Afterwards I asked Auntie Mack, and she said that was the reason. She said it was the fatal mating of two warring natures: like putting a delicate Arab thoroughbred and a plain working sort of English cob into one team.”

“Is that what she said?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know she was going away?”

“No. She went to pay a visit to a friend in London. And she never came back.

“Of course,” she went on judicially, “Father's got an awful temper. Living in the East gives people bad tempers. Malcolm and I were both born in India. Once when I was a baby, Father came in one night and found a huge, deadly poisonous snake curled up on my cot, ready to strike.”

I nearly fell out of the tree.

“What did he do?” I asked, cold and faint.

“He got a gun and shot it in the head. Shot it dead. Mother was out at a party and our Ayah had dozed off on the veranda. There was an awful row. He sent away our Ayah. They say I was much too young to remember anything about it, but it's funny, I always think I do remember it.” She sat up again, astride of the bough, swinging her bare legs. We had another toffee. “I only
really
remember a few things. I left when I was four. Mother brought me and Malcolm back. We lived in a hotel in London. It was very nice, because we saw much more of Mother. Oh!—there was such a funny old lady.
…”
Her eyes went suddenly fixed, illumined with reminiscence. “She used to come and take us in the Park, and to the Zoo. I do remember her. She'd known Mother when she was a little girl. She had a little cape of curly black fur, like black lamb, and a wee bonnet with jet things in it, and jet earrings. We liked her very much. She
was
small. Almost a dwarf, I should think.”

An electric shock whizzed through me.

“It sounds exactly like Tilly!” I cried.

“It
was
Tilly. That was her name. Tilly.”

We stared at one another, choking with agitation. I tumbled out an explanation of Tilly—that she was ours, and had been our grandmother's; and promised to present her in the flesh to Maisie when she came on her next visit. I had a confused but powerful notion that thus I should be instrumental in reforging some mysterious vital missing link in Maisie's family history. We discussed how it could have come about that our Tilly should, for a brief space, have been their Tilly.

“I bet,” said Maisie,
“she
had something to do with it.”

“Who?”

She jerked her head towards the house.

“Mrs.
Jardine?”

Maisie had already told me that never, never would she be persuaded to call Mrs. Jardine Grannie. When speaking to her she stubbornly avoided any form of address. For the rest, she was a personal pronoun, emphatically enunciated; or else she was Mrs.
Jardine.

“Because that's when
she
turned up.” Maisie looked deeply, darkly, into my face, as if to interpret there the sinister meaning of that visit. “Yes. That's another thing I sort of remember and don't remember. She came to the hotel.
…”
She paused, struggling with the blank, stiff shutter of memory. “I know she did. Somebody in white, with a white parasol, sitting on the sofa, and we came in—and she turned round and looked at us—and Mother told us in a sharp sort of voice to go up to our room at once. … That's all I can think of. But it's funny: the first moment I saw her here, I thought: She's exactly like I thought she'd be.” She sighed and lay back again. “Then we left London and went to Paris. I remember
easily
the lift man there. Then a man with a dark sort of face, called Marcel, began to come. I've often wondered if she went to live with him when she went away. He called her
mignonne
or
ch
érie,
things like that, and he was always teasing her. I hated him because when he first saw Malcolm and me he said something that meant—” She stopped a moment. “We were ugly.”

“What did he say?”

“I couldn't understand, but I know he meant we weren't like her to look at. He laughed; and she gave a kind of laugh too. It's true, of course, we're not—not a bit. Cherry is more.”

“What sort of face did she have?”

“Wait here,” said Maisie. “Don't move till I come back.”

She swung down from the tree, ran full gallop across the lawn and disappeared into the house. In no time she was back, and, resuming her place beside me, took something from her pocket, told me to stretch my hand out, and placed it in my palm.

“On your life, don't drop it,” she said fiercely.

It was an oval miniature, set in brilliants, backed with sapphire blue velvet.

“That's my mother.”

Long curving neck. Bare shoulders, bosom swathed in blue chiffon. Dark hair elaborately piled and puffed out in lateral wings. Eyes painted a melting violet, skin snow-white with faintest wild-rose cheeks. She smiled mysteriously. She was Mrs. Darling. She was a French New Year card angel-face, set in tinsel and blossoms. She was every child's dream of a romantic mother.

“I found it the other day in the drawer of the cabinet, in the drawing-room,” said Maisie. “What do you think of it?”

Her voice was casual, edged with a quiver of triumph.

“Lovely,” I breathed. “Was she
really
like that?”

“Exactly like that,” declared Maisie. “At least, in evening dress. She wore evening dress a lot. She was the most beautiful person I ever saw.” She took the portrait from me, and curled her hand hungrily round the frame. “Wish I dared pinch it. I wonder if she'd miss it.”