She was still not helping Sarah to sing the orchestral parts. Wordless at Constance's interruption, Sarah had started again, doing it all, the whole thing including the singing, for herself. All save that acute appreciation which Constance, now watching her from a position lying on the old sofa, was giving to every nuance of the performance. How did she do it? The piano's first taking that plunge of the right hand, throwing up birds, water, splashes of joy, and desperation, the left hand driving up on the right a strong, warning, independent story. The strength of hands reminds the orchestral singing voice of things other than its joy and glory; hands, voice, music; Sarah in claim and counter-claim. Constance thought she would cry, she was in love with this enchantingly pretty, pink and silver sister of hers. Unbearably pathetic, Constance found it - the glissandos and trills and Sarah's voice deeply baying the brass statement. In the music she heard Frances and Philip and Matthew, her mother and father. She heard all their hidden lives; they were brave and sad. At last the door opened. Frances, intent on interruption, looked at Sarah, who at once stopped playing. In the silence Constance watched them. She experienced the gradually accumulating assemblage, the triangular being, absolutely still, of herself and her sisters. Pale, brown, pink. Watching. Waiting. Time expanding.
"Please don't stop," Matthew said.
(Why come in then?)
Sarah got up.
"At her spiritual exercise again," Aunt Molly said in a congratulatory manner. "Amusing herself. Practising her music; not eating. The child doesn't eat, you know. Celibacy, fasting and toil. That's Sarah's motto. She seems to be training Constance in the same economic habits."
Sarah had never borne piffle gladly. She had been too old for that from birth. Constance looked at her anxiously.
"Sarah doesn't play anything seriously," Frances smiled.
Constance in a flash saw Frances's stupidity. Her actual standing there, as monumental stupidity. A large immovable block of stone hewn to celebrate some socially-acceptable platitude.
"Absolutely unmoved by her own talents. She'll do nothing with them," Aunt Molly added.
Every time! All her life. This stupidity about Sarah. Sarah was glacial.
"But she plays all her life has been I mean all the time," Constance burst out.
"Aha! Speech restored!" Matthew looked at her. He should be looking at Sarah.
"But only to you, and at School, and at St. Anne's. And there are scholarships and competitions going begging for her."
"St. Botolph's, not St. Anne's" Constance put in, outraged. All this concern and Aunt Molly couldn't even get that right!
"I play. And I just let that be enough." They were aware even without looking at her of her huge sullen resistance to all of them.
"Goodbye." Matthew kissed Sarah.
"Goodbye."
"She is very gifted, Molly," Matthew said thoughtfully, quietly, politely, in the hall; and then he stopped. "But I'd let her go her own way." He put his hand to his head, over his eyes and straight back over his hair. "My God, she is so much like her mother." Then they all moved on.
After a moment he said, "Philip seems to be bent on staying in the Army another four years. I wonder what his mother would have made of that? Ah, Lisette! He's like his mother, too. Put Sarah and Philip together and you have those two formidable young women again!"
"Four years?"
"We've been to Grodust to see what he can do. He might do something for Tom when he's called up, too."
"Grodust? Which Grodust?" Molly Absecond's attention was quite fully worked up.
Constance herself was quietly astonished. Grodust. Her own private word. One she had annexed. Along with some others. The Silver Street Baths bomb-site had a notice set up with a word or two on it. Grodust. Site Developers.
"General Grodust. General Gerald Christie-Grodust, the brother of the shipowner," Matthew said. "Barbara's uncle."
"Why in God's name should Philip want to stay in the Army?"
"I don't suppose he would thank you to ask him. But he's a thoughtful chap. The Army seems to have opened his eyes. One or two of his latest poems are very good indeed."
"He sent me one from Wales," Frances said, sulkily, joining them. "The Man Who Fell Off Snowdon."
"Addressed to some unfortunate female writer who said that Nature was passé," Molly said. "What has poetry got to do with the Army?"
"It was addressed to me," Frances said. "It was brutal. Let the sun set on Frances, it said. Morbid. Nothing to do with the Army. I hate the Army. Everything out of the rule book. I hated his horrible mountains. I threw it away."
"A collection of his poems is going to be published. Barbara's behind that."
"What?" Constance thought Frances would choke with disbelief and fury.
"Who's Barbara?" Constance whispered to her, but there was no answer.
Barbara? Some old lady Grodust?
"I'm very glad to hear that. I've got quite a collection of his poems myself. He's always flattered me," Aunt Molly said.
Fallen behind, Constance smiled. No. Aunt Molly would not miss all those poems she had been so flattered to receive and not careful enough to retrieve from the letter cupboard on the landing. Constance now had quite a collection.
"My opinion is that Philip is hoping to see some service. Action abroad," Matthew said, coming to the heart of a preoccupying thought.
"But he can go abroad any day he chooses, and for as long as he likes! What a very extraordinary thing..."
Frances stood by. She came slowly to what was clearly a fresh shock. "He's said nothing to me about even staying in the Army. At least, nothing one could possibly take seriously." She had almost recovered her poise, but her tone suggested, and quite blatantly, that Matthew had got his information wrong.
"I know you take ideas seriously. Perhaps you should try taking people seriously," Matthew said, but pleasantly.
Beethoven's Fourth with vocal accompaniment had started up once more after several small rehearsals and experiments. Frances went to her room.
Molly and Matthew, followed by Constance because Philip Harisonn had now been thoroughly mentioned, made a slow procession down into the hall. Philip was her hero. She did not presume to be in love with him. In any case, Frances had chosen Philip early in life. And even if she had not Constance still would not have presumed to be in love with him because he was real and formidable to her in a way that Matthew was not.
"One must speak to Philip. Matthew, you must give my love to Patricia. I think she is a very brave girl to marry you especially as you have both had such disconcerting previous experiences. You were a sad case of rebound the first time. It mustn't happen again. We have of course been kept very faithfully informed by Tom, you know; we are not surprised. Goodbye, my dear." Molly kissed Matthew, and it was as if he had not heard a word she had said.
As he bent to kiss Constance, she felt the nervous tightness in him again. "As for you," he said, "you have hardly said a word to me. Are your thoughts taboo, or something?"
She put her arms round his neck, for she had no words. She kissed him very fervently, disarranging the red silk handkerchief as she turned her head on his breast. But the precautionary tightness in his arms did not want that. She stood back. He put on his coat. She was not ready for him to go.
"You mean Philip wants to fight? In this new war?" Curiously difficult sentence to make; and not only because it was made to inhibit the tears of Matthew's going for ever.
He looked at her for the first time fully-present. The light in his eyes said that she had keenly interested him. She had exclusively engaged his mind.
"Exactly!" he said, admiringly almost, and as if that told all. He even put his hand, carelessly it is true, but relaxedly, on the back of her neck. "He's coming home for a night to see his father soon. Geoffrey's going to be terribly disappointed, I think. Whether Philip's going to the war or not, and it won't be easy to get him there, that's why I've been in touch with Grodust, he's certainly enamoured of the Army and means to stay in it."
The fact of having all this addressed to one, personally, by Matthew was a heady experience that instantly added years to one's age, and pounds squared horsepower to one's sense of importance. The accommodating of this flattering notion cost her an advantage, however, in the presence of such as Aunt Molly to whom Matthew's attention now passed again.
"You don't mean this outrage in Korea?" Molly was outraged. "I do not believe you can be serious."
Matthew at this point took his hand off Constance's neck and put it fair and square on Molly's shoulder, speaking to her quietly as if she were a child. "Molly, I have to go. It's now going to be a United Nations effort and the Foreign Office and the government has been taking it all absolutely seriously I assure you. I've hardly been home, or seen Patricia, since it started. There will certainly be a British or Commonwealth Brigade, if not two."
"The United Nations. What a farce! No wonder you've been so quiet this evening."
"It's my night off," he smiled.
He kissed Molly, and after arranging his silk handkerchief more to his liking went down the front steps and was helped ceremoniously into his waiting car. Molly departed, but Constance lingered.
"Goodnight," he called and waved.
Trustee or not, Foreign Office or not, another's lover or not, godfather or not, unfaithful to the Yokehams or not, Constance pined. She should have said "please, please don't go." And he should have said, Would you like to meet me for dinner one evening? Ring me at the office. Or, better, he should have taken her hand and they would have run into the summer breeze that was pushing and teasing a newspaper along the pavement in a most accusatory manner. That they did not, she realised at that moment in a striking revelation, was a pure waste of her life, and all it might hold for him. Accustomed to such revelations having repercussions in the physical world she nevertheless held her breath as Matthew's car came to a sudden halt. A small white sports car had come head-on to it round the corner. Yes. He might just have been killed; but he's not he's still alive. Curses were properly exchanged between drivers then both cars passed on into the fine early evening.
As Constance closed the door, Frances was shouting from her room: "If Sarah doesn't stop that noise I shall die." Constance picked up the pineapple bag, screwed it up and flung it up high, higher than the second bend in the staircase. As high as the top of the great stained window. He is still alive. It was almost enough. But it was an impermanent moment of celebration. She looked at the bag returned swiftly to her feet, all screwed up and rocking gently in one of the hall's permanent draughts. She went into her dead uncle Absecond's old office, shut the door, and turned the key in the lock.
Saturday 24 April 2010
Friday 16 April 2010
Post 10
MATTHEW'S ANNOUNCEMENTS
One early evening at the end of June 1950 Matthew Kellory called to tell Mrs. Absecond that he was going to be married again. Not that 22 Golden Square Gardens did not know. Constance, who had planned to be found on the graceful bend of the staircase when he came, in fact met him in the hall and he kissed her on her forehead. She watched him as Mrs. Laver took his coat and he leaned back from his knees to smooth his hair and straighten his tie in the glass of At the temple of Dharma Sabha.
`Perhaps after all Berenice should have married Matthew'. The magic in the sentence naming the name of her dead mother did not work. Light as a stick for a big man, all knees and elbows, in equable temper, bright eyes, the crisp whiff of the cooling evening air still with him (it had been raining a shower at last), and a ridiculous piece of red silk waving out of his top pocket; her searching regard was short and turned out to be her last studied act of the visit. He was not just good-humoured, he had his grand manner on.
For her part, she was dressed for the occasion in a clean white blouse and one of her sister Sarah's brightest batik skirts. Now he had come she felt all the unhappiness she had guarded against. She just stood there. Painfully in love with him.
"Where are we, where are we?" He went to his pockets. "At last! The end of years' of search!" You knew for a certain he had just picked it up. "A first edition. Don't say I don't love you. I do." He kissed the top of her head. He opened the book.
"On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble;
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves."
If nothing else did, his voice which had so often made her laugh, would break her heart. He gave her the poem to read. "I was going to keep that for myself. Truer love hath no man, eh? What's the matter, old thing? Aren't you pleased?"
"You know I am," she whispered.
"What?!" He turned on Sarah hanging over the banisters. "You too?" He took the parcel from the floor and threw it up to her. Sarah gave him a beautiful smile and a shout of thanks as she caught it, high up. It was a pineapple and the bag slowly floated down to the floor of the hall as she ran upstairs with it.
He put his arm over Constance's shoulder to shepherd her up after Sarah. "I can't stay long. Look after that!"
"I always do look after books," she chided him.
"Yes. I know you do."
"Thank you very much for it." A Shropshire Lad. "That's what you were," she whispered.
"That's very much what I was. And I knew the man who wrote it. You don't seem too happy about it. Something up?" They stopped on the stairs. "What's the matter Connie?"
"Nothing. It's nothing." She was angry that he could ask such a big question with so little time left for an answer. She ran upstairs ahead of him.
"Oh, come on, now. Buck up. You don't see me every day. You haven't seen me for weeks."
By the time he reached the sitting-room, his grand manner was perfectly restored. Enquiries about health were exchanged. It was a manner that had to do precisely with the disguising of health, spiritual, physical, meteorological. He would come in, as now he did, and maintain a persistent and unrelenting cheerfulness, his health when asked after was always excellent, the state of the weather always suited him exactly, whatever his eyes said his lips smiled that his soul was serene and the state of the nation was wonderful. It was as if he sent a counterfeit person to stand in for him, one full of aggressive good humour vouching not only for his own great good health but for the great good health of the universe at large, let anyone deny it at peril of being put down, powerfully because so cheerfully, as a moaner. Sometimes it stymied even Aunt Molly Absecond. (It never occurred to me at that time that it was Aunt Molly it was meant to stymie.)
Molly Absecond had an attitude to Matthew in those days which Constance could only describe to herself as `unknowing'. Given the chance, Molly treated him high-handedly, off-handedly, and sometimes more brutally than she ever treated anyone else. Constance felt, nervously, that it was only his superior kindness that kept him from giving back as good as he got. Molly was like a child with a familiar, wild, family-pet, but a child who had not realised that the quiet mangey old beast was still a lion, heart and claws. It was Aunt Molly's attitude that Frances had learned. Neither of them, Constance thought, knew him for what he was.
Molly smiled at him now her sweet old lady's smile, the one she had smiled all her life when there was no smiling matter behind her eyes, congratulated him on his coming marriage.
"I am surprised you men can still get women to do it," she said bright eyed. Then they all smiled at him, save Constance who was not at all surprised that Matthew could get women to do anything; but before tonight she had never begrudged him that. "Of course, the wish to become intimately involved in such a relationship, that probably has to be satisfied in some cases in the way of marriage. With all that burden of loving, the sacrifice of excitement, people have to learn how to do it."
Learn how to do marriage? What does she mean by that? Constance held her breath; her Aunt's discourtesy being so somehow intimate and pointed.
"Twaddle, Molly. If not marriage what do you want for these girls?" Matthew laughed at Molly at the same time as he squeezed Sarah round the shoulders to himself. His grand manner made him uninteresting. His laugh made Constance feel earnest. It reduced her self esteem. He no longer knows who I am. He had accepted the offer of a drink and perched now on the back of the sofa, waiting for Frances to bring it, and ready to leave almost as soon as it came. He stood up as Frances came in. She refused to let him take the tray she carried.
"No Tom tonight? I thought I might catch at least a glimpse of the son and heir."
"He's at a meeting."
"Oh? A meeting?"
No information forthcoming on Tom. Matthew advanced to kiss Fran. It was, if anything, of slightly longer duration and of keener pressure than the kiss to Constance.
"How was Wales?" He kissed her.
"Damn awful," Frances said. She put the tray down.
"Spoiled. You're spoiled." He studied his no-doubt favourite Frances, the eldest, the clear-eyed intelligence radiating out of her brown face, the strong hair a dark streaky gold "What was it, the weather?"
"No. The company." That would be Philip's.
No present for Frances. She was the adult. Sarah, slighter and silvery, swung joyously round his neck. "Darling Matthew," she said. "Congratulations. Wales was glorious." Then she kissed him. Not just easy manners either. Molly offered sherry which they all took but Sarah refused. But then she drank a sip to his health and happiness from Matthew's glass! Sarah had the most inventive reactions to the moment's spur of anyone Constance had ever met. Enviable at the best of times, in this case intensely provoking.
"I've just been lecturing about your grandfather to a rare society of scholar priests."
"Still talking about him?" And whether she referred to the talk of the scholars or to Matthew's Aunt Molly did not make plain.
"What did you say to them?" Frances demanded, exchanging significant looks with her aunt.
"I said he was a very clever clergyman who had three of the wickedest but most goddesslike grand-daughters in the world."
"None of whom he had the good fortune to meet, poor old man," Aunt Molly said. A buzz that crushed her ear-drums filled Constance's head. She had only recently discovered why she had never met her mother's father. His wife had killed him.
"Poor Berenice. Poor kid."
"Oh Matthew," Frances was sighing and putting her glass down. "How boring you can be!" She sat in a chair opposite to him and crossed her legs and drew attention to her skirt by arranging what did not need arrangement. She was going to give him a lecture.
"Have some pineapple," Sarah put in with very thin slivers of pineapple, plates, forks, napkins. Frances looked affronted and declined. Molly put an end to Fran's gathering lecture and the grandfather topic.
"It's a pity you're going to inherit Kenys daughters. Two more girls. There are enough girls," she said over a mouthful of pineapple.
"Two more women... fortune favours the brave..." Constance, at work on her own pineapple, knows nothing of the two new daughters. Two new daughters? The justice of the universe is called instantly to the bar of judgement. But the Judge to whom one naturally looks for Judgement is absent. Always absent. Constance sighed. She could not eat another mouthful.
Molly, in no such straits, enquired: "And what does Tom think of his two new sisters?"
Matthew looked at Molly Absecond, suspended a piece of pineapple and then put it down. Tom? What about me? the look, the smooth dark pointed face now said to Constance. I am too young to have a grown-up family said this talkative face. I have a son of twenty three, and now I am to be father to two very beautiful adult young women. (Constance was still seeing them. Adult. That being the deadly blow to her aspirations in any competition for his attentions.) It's all wrong. I am, after all, quite young enough to be about to be married for love again, and to father new young. And yet here are these girls also treating me like Daddy, and especially Frances who expects me to be quite immune from her attractions and flirtatiousness, who assumes she is perfectly safe with me.
It's true. Frances despite her flirtatious manner does think she is perfectly safe with Matthew. She is entitled one hopes, in principle, to think that. It is exactly what Frances likes. She likes to feel safe with men. Otherwise she gets very bored with them. Otherwise she does not flirt with them.
"Tom?" Matthew said at last. "Now what would you expect him to think? A young man of good character?" And fat, we mustn't forget, Constance smiled to herself. Like that great big wicked jolly imperious girl I've heard stories about. Tom's mother, who refused to come back to England with Matthew for the war. "He's a gift to the university, bound to be called up. He's got a life of his own. They're charming girls. Tom's charmed." So is his father. Constance studied the ceiling and did not withdrawn her gaze until they had ceased to talk of affecting matters.
Molly Absecond spoke in an absent-minded manner of plans for the education and future of her nieces. Frances was preparing herself for a life leading to professorhood [?] at the University. Sarah would turn to Music and Art. She did not mention Constance. Matthew was restive and Constance did not mind if he suffered. She turned her mind to the famous criminal-statistics Patricia of his choice. This lady was known, she had discovered, for her delightful eccentricity in never wearing any colour but green. She had green eyes and red hair. And so had Miss Green, Constance's French mistress, carroty red hair and a fierce red neck to go with her emerald green knitted woollies. Something good.
Constance would like to run her hands from his knees to his thighs. Possibly she would like that, she reflected. But, looked at in this particular, physical way, he was recognisably one with whom one would not care, actually in the flesh, to indulge in even perhaps back-rubbing. In the flesh he seemed rather old; well, anyway, in the presence of the actual physical flesh of the fantasy, there always was her own nervousness waiting. Still, she decided to persist in imagining she would like to run her hands and so on. The weather for one thing demanded it. The sun had come out again. She could hear the swifts, hers and Matthew's going mad round the rooftops. She looked deep into the trees in the Square and after a while they informed her of her own mind. She would like to have all the life in his eyes. Yes. More than anything she would like his eyes to shine upon her alone with that keenness they had once had. She would like to be able to say to him, `Let's take Edgar Allen Poe with us and go to Ludlow. Let's stay there for the whole summer, reading.' She would like to be known by him again, as she had been once years ago. She would like exclusively to engage his mind.
Hopeless!
The direction Molly was now giving to Matthew's mind was towards certain prosaic economic arrangements which had to be attended to in providing the girls with funds to give them `an absolutely unqualified start under their own steam'. As a trustee of their funds he would be concerned with this. Her mother had arranged that.
He had sat upright at first at the other end of the large wing sofa and pulled down his waistcoat self-satisfyingly flat a boring number of times, he had looked complacently at his polished toe-caps for minutes together, but now he had given all that up and lay lounging as usual, his old self, into the sofa's cushiony embrace, his legs taking up the floor, his body home again, his mind elsewhere. But not, as it turned out, and as Constance was holding against him, on his Mrs. Raleigh-Kenys.
"Constance! Where's your tongue. You've been asked a question!"
"Never mind," Matthew said and smiled at her. "She's reading. Which one is it?"
Constance was dumbfounded. Sarah came over her shoulder and took the book and recited.
"Others, I am not the first,
Have willed more mischief than they durst:
If in the breathless night I too
Shiver now, 'tis nothing new."
"What morbid rubbish, Connie. Where on earth did you get that book from?"
"I gave it to her."
"Her head is full enough of nonsense already, as you'd discover if you had to live with her," Molly eyed dismissively the outraged Constance and the giggling Sarah and expanded on the immorality of providing an education for girls which opened horizons beyond marriage without preparing also for some small financial independence to allow of job-fulfilment and training in a man's world. Provision for this was to come from what Molly always spoke of as "the mother's money".
The mother's money. Matthew looked about the room from under his eyebrows in a slightly grim-faced way and Constance was aware that he was conscious that, as ever, the girls were spoken of to their faces as if over their heads and that they were all ears. Constance usually enjoyed that kind of collusion with Aunt Molly and the way it foxed even a friend as close as Matthew. Tonight she felt like crying. She went over and sat next to him. He had folded his arms tightly round his chest, she could feel the tightness in him. Something had passed between him and Molly that she did not understand.
"How is the asthma Matthew? Quite cleared up for the time being, is it?" His grand manner was fading; submerged secrets were surfacing in his eyes.
Constance, who now, definitely - her flesh borrowing a little of her fantasy's boldness - wanted them to run away together, wanted never to leave him, had put up her feet and had her head on his shoulder. Aunt Molly ordered her off as `lolloping all over' him in a voice that said she was too big for that sort of thing. Constance immediately jumped up. But Matthew caught her hand.
"No, no. Let her stay. I like it." And so he did, and a change of subject as well. He could not pull her back. It is much worse to be treated as a child by the man you love than to be treated so by your aunt.
"Con, let's go," Sarah said. "Bring your sherry."
"Yes. Go and eat your suppers, and Connie go to bed early. You look terrible." As if Molly Absecond cared what time anyone went to bed. She was showing off.
"That's the least of her deceptions," Frances said amusingly. "She looks terrible. She could probably swim a mile!"
"You couldn't swim a mile in the prime of health," Sarah said nastily. Frances hated swimming because, Constance was convinced, she had to get undressed.
"This house hasn't the faintest idea what a celebration is supposed to be," Sarah went straight off, but Constance lingered outside the sitting-room door, half-minded to go back in.
"Do you get the impression sometimes that Constance does not pay attention?"
Aunt Molly! Constance was transfixed. Matthew answered.
"Why do you always call on Fran to answer for her sisters as though she were their parent? I have the impression Con pays an unusual amount of attention". He laughed in a way flattering to the ear and heart of the listening Constance.
"One doesn't know about Constance at all. What's in her head? I ask myself. Sometimes she hardly says a word for days together. Occasionally asks an irrelevant question. She simply doesn't attend. When moved she'll go on giving a lecture long after everyone has stopped listening. Sarah one knows about. Will of iron. But sometimes I think Constance is not very... perhaps one is over-sensitive about the family history?"
Frances laughed. One could not be sure from this laugh how Frances had come to see and take hold of what Molly Absecond referred to as `Fran's responsibilities' or exactly how much she, Frances, really knew about `the family history'. There was clearly more to it than the generally accepted story that her mother, Berenice, had been very ill when she and Charles Yokeham had been killed in the Old House in Terminus in 1942.
"Family myth, perhaps," Matthew said firmly and with the intention of being disobliging.
Constance remembered a remark her Aunt had made in the middle of recalling an expedition made to a botanical garden before the war. `Your father and Matthew were students together. They were friends first and last and despite everything.' Constance imagined you had only to be Frances, and stop the anecdote right there, and ask Aunt Molly, and she would tell very precisely what this `everything' was. Constance, although she wanted to know, had a principled preference to leave the knowing to Frances, given it entailed `responsibilities'.
"Matthew, I wish you would have a word with Connie. She thinks a great deal of you. I think she of them all misses a father most."
Upstairs Sarah was playing her own variations on the wedding march at a volume which suggested a touch of temper. Outside the door Constance was beginning to feel very sober. Oh God! That tune and what it meant, and Sarah ignoring, as always, Aunt Molly and Frances, and she herself `missing a father most'. All of it coming together. Constance rubbed her face very thoroughly.
Inside, Frances that well-read goodlooking young woman was now challenging Matthew, as women will challenge men they find for the passing moment attractive, treating him to a bit of pure synthetic talk, woman to man, as a celebration of his coming marriage. On the Position of Women, of all things. You would think she was eighty. Matthew did not think, he was now saying, looking frankly no doubt upon Frances's beauty in that bright-eyed predatory way of his, that certainly the position of Frances Yokeham vis-a-vis the position of women in general had had enough attention. Some rot.
"You are constitutionally incapable of treating women seriously," Frances said (and good for her), for now her heart was set on having her say and she had not yet learned how to do that and flirt at the same time. "All over the world," she was going on, bearing up under one of her heaviest anti-climaxes, "women's work in the house," and here followed much information about domestic machinery, suburbia, the domestic Arts of the Household, and the whole `concept of culture through personal care and hearthside' "is being dangerously reduced in social significance. Boredom is setting in among intelligent women."
"What? Are you bored, Frances?" Aunt Molly asked accusatorialy, and herself only half-listening as usual, as if enquiring after the possibility of a bad cold.
"I? Oh certainly not!" Frances said dismissively.
"I hope at least," Matthew said insincerely, lazily, "that you will keep all this away from Patricia until I have her safely married."
"Yes. I'm sure you do. But there are many things an intelligent person is honour-bound to say," Frances replied.
"Well, that's a noble, old-fashioned view of the world," Matthew said. "And upon it I must leave you."
"She is naturally a pleasant and good young woman," Aunt Molly came in. "She may even prevail against what the world will want to teach her."
Especially, Constance stretched her stiff eyes, in that relationship between Frances and Matthew's son Tom, that, that, that world's representative, that fleshy youth of extreme good humour, pomposity, complacency, sureness. Yes, Tom Kellory had never been unsure of self, opinions, rightness, facts, feelings, in his young life. Tom adored Frances, understandably. But could Frances possibly adore Tom? She could control him, but that was different.
Not necessarily, said a Presence, Frances adores, loves, controllable things.
"As to Constance not being very bright, that's ridiculous," Frances suddenly, out of the blue, said with defiance and feeling. "She always knows what she's doing!"
"She's lucky to have you," Matthew said. They were walking towards the door where Constance stood, still transfixed.
"A missing father enters too much into a young girl's wanting. I always think so. And then heaven knows for what very curious reasons they will feel impelled to get married, and to whom; or not to get married. These girls have never seen a marriage at work, first-hand, of course. They've nothing to go on. They're quite free in that respect. I always do say marriage is a very chancy thing. These days it's become a sort of artificial sex-baited trap. Sex to end all sex, and yet you are to be in it today and out of it tomorrow." Molly Absecond would be smoothing her smooth hair (notably smooth this evening) absentmindedly. (She had also polished her finger-nails. Good heavens!) "Of course, I grant you, it can be a great legal, social, economic, domestic, emotional convenience; but naturally, one would not speak here of convenience."
Or of artificial sex-baited traps, one hoped!
Aunt Molly, in there, was hammering shafts into Matthew's breast-bone and depriving him of speech apparently.
It seemed to Constance obvious, although her senses gave but reluctant assent, that Matthew must be marrying for convenience. Still, she hoped her aunt's giving out her reservations was wasted on him. They would not be wasted on Frances. She would become unsure once more whether she herself was in love, or not in love, and with whom. Certainly Fran's feelings about Philip Harisonn did seem to mitigate against her better self. Love him she might. But did she really more than half like him? Would Fran recognise Aunt Molly's `ready to die' as a misquotation from one of Philip's poems? (Smugly, Constance thought not.)
"Are the men you encourage here, then of a special unmarriageable kind?" Matthew enquired pleasantly, as if reviewing his memories. "You brought up Tom and Philip (no mention of James), and partly in this house for six years; they won't be immune!"
"Tom and Philip?" Aunt Molly said with sudden, sharp attention. Perhaps she had never before seen those two as sex-bait trappers?
"I haven't seen Tom at home all week," Matthew said. "Give him my love."
"We've been working, Tom and I," Frances said severely; and then she giggled.
"Philip's due back very soon, I believe. But I agree, he's not going to give any of us much trouble in the marrying way just yet. Well, I must go. I've been working very hard indeed and I haven't seen Patricia all week."
"Philip is coming home?"
Constance flushed for Frances's puzzled and uncontrollable vivacity. It was a flush reinforced by a second flush for herself. Very soon. Philip!
"It is to be hoped at least that he will spare us any more nonsense with the wretched Camilla," Aunt Molly said regardless of the feelings Frances must be having, and mentioning the unmentionable, which was that Camilla was Philip's half-sister and uninhibited in her loving attentions towards him. And then she added something so that, as was very often the way, Constance could have no idea how seriously affronted, in this case of Philip, Aunt Molly really was. "Exactly like you used to be with your sister Lisette. I didn't approve of that either."
"Oh my god, Molly. You are irresponsible."
Molly laughed and Constance was aware, that very moment, that Matthew's disgust and pain, and Molly's funny sort of laughter, came out of the past; and that the Past, alive, was going to be walled up in Matthew's marriage.
"Oh! Listen!" Inside they all listened. Certainly Constance outside holding her breath listened. Aunt Molly humming. "Sarah is playing Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto and Constance is helping her to sing the orchestral parts. You must come up." But Matthew protested.
Constance crept off in a silent frantic rush.
One early evening at the end of June 1950 Matthew Kellory called to tell Mrs. Absecond that he was going to be married again. Not that 22 Golden Square Gardens did not know. Constance, who had planned to be found on the graceful bend of the staircase when he came, in fact met him in the hall and he kissed her on her forehead. She watched him as Mrs. Laver took his coat and he leaned back from his knees to smooth his hair and straighten his tie in the glass of At the temple of Dharma Sabha.
`Perhaps after all Berenice should have married Matthew'. The magic in the sentence naming the name of her dead mother did not work. Light as a stick for a big man, all knees and elbows, in equable temper, bright eyes, the crisp whiff of the cooling evening air still with him (it had been raining a shower at last), and a ridiculous piece of red silk waving out of his top pocket; her searching regard was short and turned out to be her last studied act of the visit. He was not just good-humoured, he had his grand manner on.
For her part, she was dressed for the occasion in a clean white blouse and one of her sister Sarah's brightest batik skirts. Now he had come she felt all the unhappiness she had guarded against. She just stood there. Painfully in love with him.
"Where are we, where are we?" He went to his pockets. "At last! The end of years' of search!" You knew for a certain he had just picked it up. "A first edition. Don't say I don't love you. I do." He kissed the top of her head. He opened the book.
"On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble;
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves."
If nothing else did, his voice which had so often made her laugh, would break her heart. He gave her the poem to read. "I was going to keep that for myself. Truer love hath no man, eh? What's the matter, old thing? Aren't you pleased?"
"You know I am," she whispered.
"What?!" He turned on Sarah hanging over the banisters. "You too?" He took the parcel from the floor and threw it up to her. Sarah gave him a beautiful smile and a shout of thanks as she caught it, high up. It was a pineapple and the bag slowly floated down to the floor of the hall as she ran upstairs with it.
He put his arm over Constance's shoulder to shepherd her up after Sarah. "I can't stay long. Look after that!"
"I always do look after books," she chided him.
"Yes. I know you do."
"Thank you very much for it." A Shropshire Lad. "That's what you were," she whispered.
"That's very much what I was. And I knew the man who wrote it. You don't seem too happy about it. Something up?" They stopped on the stairs. "What's the matter Connie?"
"Nothing. It's nothing." She was angry that he could ask such a big question with so little time left for an answer. She ran upstairs ahead of him.
"Oh, come on, now. Buck up. You don't see me every day. You haven't seen me for weeks."
By the time he reached the sitting-room, his grand manner was perfectly restored. Enquiries about health were exchanged. It was a manner that had to do precisely with the disguising of health, spiritual, physical, meteorological. He would come in, as now he did, and maintain a persistent and unrelenting cheerfulness, his health when asked after was always excellent, the state of the weather always suited him exactly, whatever his eyes said his lips smiled that his soul was serene and the state of the nation was wonderful. It was as if he sent a counterfeit person to stand in for him, one full of aggressive good humour vouching not only for his own great good health but for the great good health of the universe at large, let anyone deny it at peril of being put down, powerfully because so cheerfully, as a moaner. Sometimes it stymied even Aunt Molly Absecond. (It never occurred to me at that time that it was Aunt Molly it was meant to stymie.)
Molly Absecond had an attitude to Matthew in those days which Constance could only describe to herself as `unknowing'. Given the chance, Molly treated him high-handedly, off-handedly, and sometimes more brutally than she ever treated anyone else. Constance felt, nervously, that it was only his superior kindness that kept him from giving back as good as he got. Molly was like a child with a familiar, wild, family-pet, but a child who had not realised that the quiet mangey old beast was still a lion, heart and claws. It was Aunt Molly's attitude that Frances had learned. Neither of them, Constance thought, knew him for what he was.
Molly smiled at him now her sweet old lady's smile, the one she had smiled all her life when there was no smiling matter behind her eyes, congratulated him on his coming marriage.
"I am surprised you men can still get women to do it," she said bright eyed. Then they all smiled at him, save Constance who was not at all surprised that Matthew could get women to do anything; but before tonight she had never begrudged him that. "Of course, the wish to become intimately involved in such a relationship, that probably has to be satisfied in some cases in the way of marriage. With all that burden of loving, the sacrifice of excitement, people have to learn how to do it."
Learn how to do marriage? What does she mean by that? Constance held her breath; her Aunt's discourtesy being so somehow intimate and pointed.
"Twaddle, Molly. If not marriage what do you want for these girls?" Matthew laughed at Molly at the same time as he squeezed Sarah round the shoulders to himself. His grand manner made him uninteresting. His laugh made Constance feel earnest. It reduced her self esteem. He no longer knows who I am. He had accepted the offer of a drink and perched now on the back of the sofa, waiting for Frances to bring it, and ready to leave almost as soon as it came. He stood up as Frances came in. She refused to let him take the tray she carried.
"No Tom tonight? I thought I might catch at least a glimpse of the son and heir."
"He's at a meeting."
"Oh? A meeting?"
No information forthcoming on Tom. Matthew advanced to kiss Fran. It was, if anything, of slightly longer duration and of keener pressure than the kiss to Constance.
"How was Wales?" He kissed her.
"Damn awful," Frances said. She put the tray down.
"Spoiled. You're spoiled." He studied his no-doubt favourite Frances, the eldest, the clear-eyed intelligence radiating out of her brown face, the strong hair a dark streaky gold "What was it, the weather?"
"No. The company." That would be Philip's.
No present for Frances. She was the adult. Sarah, slighter and silvery, swung joyously round his neck. "Darling Matthew," she said. "Congratulations. Wales was glorious." Then she kissed him. Not just easy manners either. Molly offered sherry which they all took but Sarah refused. But then she drank a sip to his health and happiness from Matthew's glass! Sarah had the most inventive reactions to the moment's spur of anyone Constance had ever met. Enviable at the best of times, in this case intensely provoking.
"I've just been lecturing about your grandfather to a rare society of scholar priests."
"Still talking about him?" And whether she referred to the talk of the scholars or to Matthew's Aunt Molly did not make plain.
"What did you say to them?" Frances demanded, exchanging significant looks with her aunt.
"I said he was a very clever clergyman who had three of the wickedest but most goddesslike grand-daughters in the world."
"None of whom he had the good fortune to meet, poor old man," Aunt Molly said. A buzz that crushed her ear-drums filled Constance's head. She had only recently discovered why she had never met her mother's father. His wife had killed him.
"Poor Berenice. Poor kid."
"Oh Matthew," Frances was sighing and putting her glass down. "How boring you can be!" She sat in a chair opposite to him and crossed her legs and drew attention to her skirt by arranging what did not need arrangement. She was going to give him a lecture.
"Have some pineapple," Sarah put in with very thin slivers of pineapple, plates, forks, napkins. Frances looked affronted and declined. Molly put an end to Fran's gathering lecture and the grandfather topic.
"It's a pity you're going to inherit Kenys daughters. Two more girls. There are enough girls," she said over a mouthful of pineapple.
"Two more women... fortune favours the brave..." Constance, at work on her own pineapple, knows nothing of the two new daughters. Two new daughters? The justice of the universe is called instantly to the bar of judgement. But the Judge to whom one naturally looks for Judgement is absent. Always absent. Constance sighed. She could not eat another mouthful.
Molly, in no such straits, enquired: "And what does Tom think of his two new sisters?"
Matthew looked at Molly Absecond, suspended a piece of pineapple and then put it down. Tom? What about me? the look, the smooth dark pointed face now said to Constance. I am too young to have a grown-up family said this talkative face. I have a son of twenty three, and now I am to be father to two very beautiful adult young women. (Constance was still seeing them. Adult. That being the deadly blow to her aspirations in any competition for his attentions.) It's all wrong. I am, after all, quite young enough to be about to be married for love again, and to father new young. And yet here are these girls also treating me like Daddy, and especially Frances who expects me to be quite immune from her attractions and flirtatiousness, who assumes she is perfectly safe with me.
It's true. Frances despite her flirtatious manner does think she is perfectly safe with Matthew. She is entitled one hopes, in principle, to think that. It is exactly what Frances likes. She likes to feel safe with men. Otherwise she gets very bored with them. Otherwise she does not flirt with them.
"Tom?" Matthew said at last. "Now what would you expect him to think? A young man of good character?" And fat, we mustn't forget, Constance smiled to herself. Like that great big wicked jolly imperious girl I've heard stories about. Tom's mother, who refused to come back to England with Matthew for the war. "He's a gift to the university, bound to be called up. He's got a life of his own. They're charming girls. Tom's charmed." So is his father. Constance studied the ceiling and did not withdrawn her gaze until they had ceased to talk of affecting matters.
Molly Absecond spoke in an absent-minded manner of plans for the education and future of her nieces. Frances was preparing herself for a life leading to professorhood [?] at the University. Sarah would turn to Music and Art. She did not mention Constance. Matthew was restive and Constance did not mind if he suffered. She turned her mind to the famous criminal-statistics Patricia of his choice. This lady was known, she had discovered, for her delightful eccentricity in never wearing any colour but green. She had green eyes and red hair. And so had Miss Green, Constance's French mistress, carroty red hair and a fierce red neck to go with her emerald green knitted woollies. Something good.
Constance would like to run her hands from his knees to his thighs. Possibly she would like that, she reflected. But, looked at in this particular, physical way, he was recognisably one with whom one would not care, actually in the flesh, to indulge in even perhaps back-rubbing. In the flesh he seemed rather old; well, anyway, in the presence of the actual physical flesh of the fantasy, there always was her own nervousness waiting. Still, she decided to persist in imagining she would like to run her hands and so on. The weather for one thing demanded it. The sun had come out again. She could hear the swifts, hers and Matthew's going mad round the rooftops. She looked deep into the trees in the Square and after a while they informed her of her own mind. She would like to have all the life in his eyes. Yes. More than anything she would like his eyes to shine upon her alone with that keenness they had once had. She would like to be able to say to him, `Let's take Edgar Allen Poe with us and go to Ludlow. Let's stay there for the whole summer, reading.' She would like to be known by him again, as she had been once years ago. She would like exclusively to engage his mind.
Hopeless!
The direction Molly was now giving to Matthew's mind was towards certain prosaic economic arrangements which had to be attended to in providing the girls with funds to give them `an absolutely unqualified start under their own steam'. As a trustee of their funds he would be concerned with this. Her mother had arranged that.
He had sat upright at first at the other end of the large wing sofa and pulled down his waistcoat self-satisfyingly flat a boring number of times, he had looked complacently at his polished toe-caps for minutes together, but now he had given all that up and lay lounging as usual, his old self, into the sofa's cushiony embrace, his legs taking up the floor, his body home again, his mind elsewhere. But not, as it turned out, and as Constance was holding against him, on his Mrs. Raleigh-Kenys.
"Constance! Where's your tongue. You've been asked a question!"
"Never mind," Matthew said and smiled at her. "She's reading. Which one is it?"
Constance was dumbfounded. Sarah came over her shoulder and took the book and recited.
"Others, I am not the first,
Have willed more mischief than they durst:
If in the breathless night I too
Shiver now, 'tis nothing new."
"What morbid rubbish, Connie. Where on earth did you get that book from?"
"I gave it to her."
"Her head is full enough of nonsense already, as you'd discover if you had to live with her," Molly eyed dismissively the outraged Constance and the giggling Sarah and expanded on the immorality of providing an education for girls which opened horizons beyond marriage without preparing also for some small financial independence to allow of job-fulfilment and training in a man's world. Provision for this was to come from what Molly always spoke of as "the mother's money".
The mother's money. Matthew looked about the room from under his eyebrows in a slightly grim-faced way and Constance was aware that he was conscious that, as ever, the girls were spoken of to their faces as if over their heads and that they were all ears. Constance usually enjoyed that kind of collusion with Aunt Molly and the way it foxed even a friend as close as Matthew. Tonight she felt like crying. She went over and sat next to him. He had folded his arms tightly round his chest, she could feel the tightness in him. Something had passed between him and Molly that she did not understand.
"How is the asthma Matthew? Quite cleared up for the time being, is it?" His grand manner was fading; submerged secrets were surfacing in his eyes.
Constance, who now, definitely - her flesh borrowing a little of her fantasy's boldness - wanted them to run away together, wanted never to leave him, had put up her feet and had her head on his shoulder. Aunt Molly ordered her off as `lolloping all over' him in a voice that said she was too big for that sort of thing. Constance immediately jumped up. But Matthew caught her hand.
"No, no. Let her stay. I like it." And so he did, and a change of subject as well. He could not pull her back. It is much worse to be treated as a child by the man you love than to be treated so by your aunt.
"Con, let's go," Sarah said. "Bring your sherry."
"Yes. Go and eat your suppers, and Connie go to bed early. You look terrible." As if Molly Absecond cared what time anyone went to bed. She was showing off.
"That's the least of her deceptions," Frances said amusingly. "She looks terrible. She could probably swim a mile!"
"You couldn't swim a mile in the prime of health," Sarah said nastily. Frances hated swimming because, Constance was convinced, she had to get undressed.
"This house hasn't the faintest idea what a celebration is supposed to be," Sarah went straight off, but Constance lingered outside the sitting-room door, half-minded to go back in.
"Do you get the impression sometimes that Constance does not pay attention?"
Aunt Molly! Constance was transfixed. Matthew answered.
"Why do you always call on Fran to answer for her sisters as though she were their parent? I have the impression Con pays an unusual amount of attention". He laughed in a way flattering to the ear and heart of the listening Constance.
"One doesn't know about Constance at all. What's in her head? I ask myself. Sometimes she hardly says a word for days together. Occasionally asks an irrelevant question. She simply doesn't attend. When moved she'll go on giving a lecture long after everyone has stopped listening. Sarah one knows about. Will of iron. But sometimes I think Constance is not very... perhaps one is over-sensitive about the family history?"
Frances laughed. One could not be sure from this laugh how Frances had come to see and take hold of what Molly Absecond referred to as `Fran's responsibilities' or exactly how much she, Frances, really knew about `the family history'. There was clearly more to it than the generally accepted story that her mother, Berenice, had been very ill when she and Charles Yokeham had been killed in the Old House in Terminus in 1942.
"Family myth, perhaps," Matthew said firmly and with the intention of being disobliging.
Constance remembered a remark her Aunt had made in the middle of recalling an expedition made to a botanical garden before the war. `Your father and Matthew were students together. They were friends first and last and despite everything.' Constance imagined you had only to be Frances, and stop the anecdote right there, and ask Aunt Molly, and she would tell very precisely what this `everything' was. Constance, although she wanted to know, had a principled preference to leave the knowing to Frances, given it entailed `responsibilities'.
"Matthew, I wish you would have a word with Connie. She thinks a great deal of you. I think she of them all misses a father most."
Upstairs Sarah was playing her own variations on the wedding march at a volume which suggested a touch of temper. Outside the door Constance was beginning to feel very sober. Oh God! That tune and what it meant, and Sarah ignoring, as always, Aunt Molly and Frances, and she herself `missing a father most'. All of it coming together. Constance rubbed her face very thoroughly.
Inside, Frances that well-read goodlooking young woman was now challenging Matthew, as women will challenge men they find for the passing moment attractive, treating him to a bit of pure synthetic talk, woman to man, as a celebration of his coming marriage. On the Position of Women, of all things. You would think she was eighty. Matthew did not think, he was now saying, looking frankly no doubt upon Frances's beauty in that bright-eyed predatory way of his, that certainly the position of Frances Yokeham vis-a-vis the position of women in general had had enough attention. Some rot.
"You are constitutionally incapable of treating women seriously," Frances said (and good for her), for now her heart was set on having her say and she had not yet learned how to do that and flirt at the same time. "All over the world," she was going on, bearing up under one of her heaviest anti-climaxes, "women's work in the house," and here followed much information about domestic machinery, suburbia, the domestic Arts of the Household, and the whole `concept of culture through personal care and hearthside' "is being dangerously reduced in social significance. Boredom is setting in among intelligent women."
"What? Are you bored, Frances?" Aunt Molly asked accusatorialy, and herself only half-listening as usual, as if enquiring after the possibility of a bad cold.
"I? Oh certainly not!" Frances said dismissively.
"I hope at least," Matthew said insincerely, lazily, "that you will keep all this away from Patricia until I have her safely married."
"Yes. I'm sure you do. But there are many things an intelligent person is honour-bound to say," Frances replied.
"Well, that's a noble, old-fashioned view of the world," Matthew said. "And upon it I must leave you."
"She is naturally a pleasant and good young woman," Aunt Molly came in. "She may even prevail against what the world will want to teach her."
Especially, Constance stretched her stiff eyes, in that relationship between Frances and Matthew's son Tom, that, that, that world's representative, that fleshy youth of extreme good humour, pomposity, complacency, sureness. Yes, Tom Kellory had never been unsure of self, opinions, rightness, facts, feelings, in his young life. Tom adored Frances, understandably. But could Frances possibly adore Tom? She could control him, but that was different.
Not necessarily, said a Presence, Frances adores, loves, controllable things.
"As to Constance not being very bright, that's ridiculous," Frances suddenly, out of the blue, said with defiance and feeling. "She always knows what she's doing!"
"She's lucky to have you," Matthew said. They were walking towards the door where Constance stood, still transfixed.
"A missing father enters too much into a young girl's wanting. I always think so. And then heaven knows for what very curious reasons they will feel impelled to get married, and to whom; or not to get married. These girls have never seen a marriage at work, first-hand, of course. They've nothing to go on. They're quite free in that respect. I always do say marriage is a very chancy thing. These days it's become a sort of artificial sex-baited trap. Sex to end all sex, and yet you are to be in it today and out of it tomorrow." Molly Absecond would be smoothing her smooth hair (notably smooth this evening) absentmindedly. (She had also polished her finger-nails. Good heavens!) "Of course, I grant you, it can be a great legal, social, economic, domestic, emotional convenience; but naturally, one would not speak here of convenience."
Or of artificial sex-baited traps, one hoped!
Aunt Molly, in there, was hammering shafts into Matthew's breast-bone and depriving him of speech apparently.
It seemed to Constance obvious, although her senses gave but reluctant assent, that Matthew must be marrying for convenience. Still, she hoped her aunt's giving out her reservations was wasted on him. They would not be wasted on Frances. She would become unsure once more whether she herself was in love, or not in love, and with whom. Certainly Fran's feelings about Philip Harisonn did seem to mitigate against her better self. Love him she might. But did she really more than half like him? Would Fran recognise Aunt Molly's `ready to die' as a misquotation from one of Philip's poems? (Smugly, Constance thought not.)
"Are the men you encourage here, then of a special unmarriageable kind?" Matthew enquired pleasantly, as if reviewing his memories. "You brought up Tom and Philip (no mention of James), and partly in this house for six years; they won't be immune!"
"Tom and Philip?" Aunt Molly said with sudden, sharp attention. Perhaps she had never before seen those two as sex-bait trappers?
"I haven't seen Tom at home all week," Matthew said. "Give him my love."
"We've been working, Tom and I," Frances said severely; and then she giggled.
"Philip's due back very soon, I believe. But I agree, he's not going to give any of us much trouble in the marrying way just yet. Well, I must go. I've been working very hard indeed and I haven't seen Patricia all week."
"Philip is coming home?"
Constance flushed for Frances's puzzled and uncontrollable vivacity. It was a flush reinforced by a second flush for herself. Very soon. Philip!
"It is to be hoped at least that he will spare us any more nonsense with the wretched Camilla," Aunt Molly said regardless of the feelings Frances must be having, and mentioning the unmentionable, which was that Camilla was Philip's half-sister and uninhibited in her loving attentions towards him. And then she added something so that, as was very often the way, Constance could have no idea how seriously affronted, in this case of Philip, Aunt Molly really was. "Exactly like you used to be with your sister Lisette. I didn't approve of that either."
"Oh my god, Molly. You are irresponsible."
Molly laughed and Constance was aware, that very moment, that Matthew's disgust and pain, and Molly's funny sort of laughter, came out of the past; and that the Past, alive, was going to be walled up in Matthew's marriage.
"Oh! Listen!" Inside they all listened. Certainly Constance outside holding her breath listened. Aunt Molly humming. "Sarah is playing Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto and Constance is helping her to sing the orchestral parts. You must come up." But Matthew protested.
Constance crept off in a silent frantic rush.
Post 9
SPOUTING
Matthew handed me the book back. I wiped my eyes. He winked at me.
"I don't suppose either of you were aware that there was an attempt to make the son of Lucy Waters King of England?"
"What is that, she's got?" Tom wanted to know.
"I sent you a set last summer. I don't suppose for a moment you've ever opened it."
"Haven't I? No, I suppose I haven't. But I've got one, so that's good. Is lunch ready?"
I was kissing Tom's father very heartily and Tom was thinking, I knew, that I was pretty soppy. Tom came back and kissed his father too. I collected the best books, all I could carry and a few over, and I followed Tom upstairs, reciting at full blast: `The nation, awaking from its rapturous trance, found itself sold to a foreign, a despotic, a Popish court.' The pile became inordinate again on the second floor, seriously so, and I was picking them all up when Frances appeared coming down the stairs very dressed. "`Even in the bosom of that very House of Commons which had been elected by the nation in the ecstasy of its penitence, of its joy and of its hope,'" I declaimed to her, and I was just going on when she said, "You're not spouting again?"
"`Of its joy and of its hope,`" I shouted after her, "`an opposition sprang up and became powerful.'" I was leaning too far over the banister in order to get my effect and a book fell off the pile and on to her head beneath, and oh, the ecstasy of that in which there was no penitence whatever. She had a strong arm and chucked it back. It landed behind me somewhere near Tom's door in a painfully flabbergasted state. I was filled with virtuous disgust and staggered on upstairs.
As luck would have it I was still at it at lunchtime, mumbling under my breath. "`The storm had been long gathering. At length it burst with a fury which threatened the whole frame of society..."
"You spend time learning acres and acres of nonsense; why don't you turn your talents to something useful like Shakespeare?" Frances pushed her chair back.
"God spare us," Aunt Molly put in.
"I'm afraid she spent no time at all," Matthew laughed, and his laugh made me feel extremely comfortable. "It runs in the family. You remember, Molly?"
"Have you asked her what it all means?" Aunt Molly enquired severely.
"I wouldn't rely myself for one moment on what it means, but for dramatic effects it can't be beaten." It was not, this trait that ran in the family and as practised by me, held in very high esteem as I well knew. Nevertheless, it ran in the family and I was the only one who had inherited it. It was a mark of Favour. I enjoyed a lovely warm flush of smugness.
In that summer of 1950 such flattering incidents, recalled, set greatly pleasing fantasies fluttering round me every day. I picked out, for special imaginative treatment on the theme of physical encounter with Matthew, back-rubbing, hand-holding, the way he would, in the old days, occasionally lay his hand on the back of my bare neck. Other pieces of mind I had not known I'd got were not idle either. In one of the more respectable ones of these I conducted dialogues with him (indeed invented them only with a view as to how I should in the event conduct them), on such topics as the grace of the swaying acacia trees. I told him how you could crystallise with liquid sugar the long cream floreted bunches of blossom, to eat. I described the shape of birds' heads, the shoes and stockings of pleasant old ladies promenading in the market, and nothing was too trivial to delight us, trapped as we were together in my mind. His responses, all my own work as they were, always congratulated me on my percipience. Even my recent brush, my first, with the authorities (police to be exact) on the prohibited post-war Grodust bomb-site near the Silver Street Baths, I told him about. (I was as a matter of fact on that occasion waiting hopefully there, looking around, for the appearance of certain boys, when the police, one policeman, had taken me unwilling and embarrassed, to stand in front of each DANGER notice, in turn, requiring me to Read!) Having told Matthew an elegantly edited version of this, and he with my assistance having appreciated the lark, I felt better about their having my name and address.
My actual encounters with him had ceased to have any regularity about three years before, after the war had ended, and I now met him on the odd occasions when I happened to be in and he happened to call. (Although I had been known to mope about, waiting for him, when it was almost perfectly certain that he would not come.) But now, I was in love with him again, and this time it was different. There was a curious new element in it all.
Go, go, go! insisted the presences assembling. Write it down! Don't lose a moment of it! I was in great good health, ready to force my way to power with Matthew. It was not so much `and damn Mrs. Patricia Raleigh-Kenys'; I simply did not give her a thought.
Towards the middle of June, when the heat-dreams had at last had to come to terms with the reality of the simmering town, the sameness of work, the dearth of nymphs and knights, and no breeze or shower had loosened the sun's grip on the baked earth and inhabitants, even then, when Matthew had not been near us, this extraordinary assembly of presences in me was still in good fettle. It had worked out exactly how I would be with him when he at last came. "If thou look'st Uncle in my eye thou art undone." That sort of thing. Underneath all the excitement of being in love, and in love with being in love, there was something else. It seemed to me that I had seen the past, the Past, there in Matthew for the finding. It seemed to me, I think, at that point, that my isolation from the past, from any real knowledge of my mad mother and broken father, was the cause of the sadness that was always waiting for me at the bottom of my heart.
*
Matthew handed me the book back. I wiped my eyes. He winked at me.
"I don't suppose either of you were aware that there was an attempt to make the son of Lucy Waters King of England?"
"What is that, she's got?" Tom wanted to know.
"I sent you a set last summer. I don't suppose for a moment you've ever opened it."
"Haven't I? No, I suppose I haven't. But I've got one, so that's good. Is lunch ready?"
I was kissing Tom's father very heartily and Tom was thinking, I knew, that I was pretty soppy. Tom came back and kissed his father too. I collected the best books, all I could carry and a few over, and I followed Tom upstairs, reciting at full blast: `The nation, awaking from its rapturous trance, found itself sold to a foreign, a despotic, a Popish court.' The pile became inordinate again on the second floor, seriously so, and I was picking them all up when Frances appeared coming down the stairs very dressed. "`Even in the bosom of that very House of Commons which had been elected by the nation in the ecstasy of its penitence, of its joy and of its hope,'" I declaimed to her, and I was just going on when she said, "You're not spouting again?"
"`Of its joy and of its hope,`" I shouted after her, "`an opposition sprang up and became powerful.'" I was leaning too far over the banister in order to get my effect and a book fell off the pile and on to her head beneath, and oh, the ecstasy of that in which there was no penitence whatever. She had a strong arm and chucked it back. It landed behind me somewhere near Tom's door in a painfully flabbergasted state. I was filled with virtuous disgust and staggered on upstairs.
As luck would have it I was still at it at lunchtime, mumbling under my breath. "`The storm had been long gathering. At length it burst with a fury which threatened the whole frame of society..."
"You spend time learning acres and acres of nonsense; why don't you turn your talents to something useful like Shakespeare?" Frances pushed her chair back.
"God spare us," Aunt Molly put in.
"I'm afraid she spent no time at all," Matthew laughed, and his laugh made me feel extremely comfortable. "It runs in the family. You remember, Molly?"
"Have you asked her what it all means?" Aunt Molly enquired severely.
"I wouldn't rely myself for one moment on what it means, but for dramatic effects it can't be beaten." It was not, this trait that ran in the family and as practised by me, held in very high esteem as I well knew. Nevertheless, it ran in the family and I was the only one who had inherited it. It was a mark of Favour. I enjoyed a lovely warm flush of smugness.
In that summer of 1950 such flattering incidents, recalled, set greatly pleasing fantasies fluttering round me every day. I picked out, for special imaginative treatment on the theme of physical encounter with Matthew, back-rubbing, hand-holding, the way he would, in the old days, occasionally lay his hand on the back of my bare neck. Other pieces of mind I had not known I'd got were not idle either. In one of the more respectable ones of these I conducted dialogues with him (indeed invented them only with a view as to how I should in the event conduct them), on such topics as the grace of the swaying acacia trees. I told him how you could crystallise with liquid sugar the long cream floreted bunches of blossom, to eat. I described the shape of birds' heads, the shoes and stockings of pleasant old ladies promenading in the market, and nothing was too trivial to delight us, trapped as we were together in my mind. His responses, all my own work as they were, always congratulated me on my percipience. Even my recent brush, my first, with the authorities (police to be exact) on the prohibited post-war Grodust bomb-site near the Silver Street Baths, I told him about. (I was as a matter of fact on that occasion waiting hopefully there, looking around, for the appearance of certain boys, when the police, one policeman, had taken me unwilling and embarrassed, to stand in front of each DANGER notice, in turn, requiring me to Read!) Having told Matthew an elegantly edited version of this, and he with my assistance having appreciated the lark, I felt better about their having my name and address.
My actual encounters with him had ceased to have any regularity about three years before, after the war had ended, and I now met him on the odd occasions when I happened to be in and he happened to call. (Although I had been known to mope about, waiting for him, when it was almost perfectly certain that he would not come.) But now, I was in love with him again, and this time it was different. There was a curious new element in it all.
Go, go, go! insisted the presences assembling. Write it down! Don't lose a moment of it! I was in great good health, ready to force my way to power with Matthew. It was not so much `and damn Mrs. Patricia Raleigh-Kenys'; I simply did not give her a thought.
Towards the middle of June, when the heat-dreams had at last had to come to terms with the reality of the simmering town, the sameness of work, the dearth of nymphs and knights, and no breeze or shower had loosened the sun's grip on the baked earth and inhabitants, even then, when Matthew had not been near us, this extraordinary assembly of presences in me was still in good fettle. It had worked out exactly how I would be with him when he at last came. "If thou look'st Uncle in my eye thou art undone." That sort of thing. Underneath all the excitement of being in love, and in love with being in love, there was something else. It seemed to me that I had seen the past, the Past, there in Matthew for the finding. It seemed to me, I think, at that point, that my isolation from the past, from any real knowledge of my mad mother and broken father, was the cause of the sadness that was always waiting for me at the bottom of my heart.
*
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