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.
*
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
POST 8
BOOKS
As the weather continued hot each day and cloudless, the idea of Matthew (I never could remember in his absence exactly what he looked like), now he was to be married, haunted me daylight as well as night. Vivid, enchanting, fatiguing dreams, memories.
There was the horse incident, but it sickened me to think of that: he put me on it, picked me up all bent. He was at his best soothing the terrors created by literature. I remembered the Poe book, it was later than the horse business. One look at those pictures to go with those stories and I could not go to sleep or endure the dark for nights on end. Matthew rubbed my back and congratulated me on my marvellous perceptions.
"This author," he said, "wishes to seize upon and frighten you out of your living daylights."
"Does he?" I sobbed. I was nonetheless very impressed.
"Oh yes. Yes, it was all in his mind and he wanted to seek out a bit of your mind you didn't know you'd got, and share it with you. It's like weight-lifting. Unpleasant at the time, but it makes you strong."
"It makes me frightened," I protested.
"Worse things happen at sea."
"Worse? Look!" I boldly opened the book at the most terrible page. "This man is tied up and there are rats all over him, and those knives are swinging along up the room and they are going to cut him into...into slices," I said faintly. "There can't be anything worse than that, can there? That must be the very worst." I wanted him to say `That is the worst'. There would be at least that much comfort. Instead he said,
"No worst, there is none."
Nothing to my purpose. "Has anything so bad ever happened to you?" I tried another way.
"Yes. It has," he said, still thoughtful and sweeping with his whole hand a few crumbs perhaps off the picture. I watched him. "Yes, because it came into a bit of my mind I didn't know I'd got." We were in deep waters. I did not know what to say or think. I only wanted him to come back to me. I looked at him in awe. At last a smile came on to his mouth but not into his eyes. He ruffled my hair. "Connie, my darling child, this is nothing. Nothing to worry about. It's all made up!"
He got up, and I was happier. Something worse had happened to him (I almost understood him, almost believed him because his eyes glittered), very bad anyway, and he was still alive! But the picture had lost its power over me because when I looked at it I saw his hand passing across it sweeping it away.
I passed on to my Aunt Matthew's account (of my amazing percipience in the matter of Poe), much improved. I thought she would be as impressed by it as I was. For this piece of `miseducation and mis-information' he had been thoroughly castigated as wicked for encouraging morbid fantasies, nothing to do with life.
Saturday walks with Matthew during his wartime leave when we were back in London always sent us to the old bookshops. He wore his old clothes and I suppose I did not see him in uniform more than once or twice. But in those days I always saw him as a soldier. He never looked so handsome to me (he looked very handsome, but not so handsome) in a sports jacket or a waistcoat and chain. Oh he was handsome all right, upright, military bend, slight, with a confidence in his address to you of a special kind. The reason for this special confidence, according to Aunt Molly, was that `his gifts are recognised'. But I had only to remember the lock of dark hair that fell forward, the rumpled up waistcoat when he was lounging deep down in a chair, feet either in everyone's way on the floor, or perched up on some stool in everyone's way, to make him familiar to me again. Sometimes he was quiet, I mean very quiet, and there were secrets in his eyes. His eyes gave him away, and under the confidence and the good manners, there was something sensuous, furtive, formidable, a lot of things likely to cause trouble if too freely let out. Sometimes when Aunt Molly spoke to him it was to those secrets that she spoke. I knew that from an early age, because it was all spoken over my head in a quite different way from the usual. But the bookshops. Some had gone out of London `for the duration', but the one I liked best had gone underground into a reinforced fire-proofed cellar somewhere off Bayswater Road. Immediately the bent head cleared the doorway (I used to bend mine, needlessly, for it seemed a fitting part of the ritual). The powerful smell of chemicals and old books mingled with the natural must of medieval, well, ancient cellar steps. It was an arched tunnel of dusty stone that we descended, and perhaps the greatest excitement of the venture was reaching that step where I could at last behold the high desk directly in front of us with its bulwarks of books and columns of spiked papers, which parted in the middle not quite so steadily as the Red Sea, which framed the singular face, like a dried apricot with a beard, both in hue and texture, of Mr. Adonijah Perlmutter, as it was painted on his desk-front. The thickest lenses in the smallest brass frames had reduced his eyes to black shiny pinheads like the little balls in cracker puzzles that whizz about under their imprisoning glass discs until you persuade them into the last humiliation and drop them into the capture cups where they tremble mutinously. These eyes trembled sometimes if you were a stranger looking into them, but mostly they whizzed over the top of the glasses, one side, the other side, down the main pathway between the long shelves, up the stairs as you left (Mr. Perlmutter had been known to detect an unpaid for book as far away as the nearly top step), and constantly between the four high large convex mirrors that displayed the behaviour of his clients for his inspection, including a funny view of bottoms alone as their owners dived headfirst into tea chests at the cheap side. What had done his eyes good seemed to have made a nonsense halfway down his nose, for his spectacles rested, rooted there on the bottom of a valley of their own making.
The place was illuminated with strips of bright white light and open only on Saturdays, but the back cellar behind the desk, which Matthew occasionally visited, was open by appointment only to well-known customers on Sunday afternoons. (It was years before I knew the truth of those Sunday visits.) Matthew might make an enquiry after an order he had placed, `Flavius Josephus? Complete set?' and Mr. Perlmutter's eyes would close, squeeze right up for one fraction of a second, open one after the other, whizz round on an inspection and then he would say `Octavo. Fine binding. Uncut. Forty-two and six'. After that he would stoop under the desk, but not so far that his nose disappeared or he was made late for an inspection, and a lanky boy would come from that mysterious back cellar in answer to the bell, and while I was picking out picture books, old note-books, children's books, written-on postcards, and Matthew was picking out Nine French Poets or Das Evanglium des Matthaus or a few old copies of the Journal of Biblical Literature (again, it was a long time before I understood the connection of all this heavy theology with the book Matthew: Studies in the First Gospel, M.L. Kellory to be found in Uncle Paul's library because it was not until that was finally sold I found it lying forgotten on a shelf), a parcel might be wrapped.
I remember his tall straight figure bent backwards beside me, I bent backwards beside him, under our inordinate stacks of books, while we waited impatiently, loaded to the noses, for the door to 22 Golden Square Gardens to be opened. We would make for the nearest sofa in Uncle Paul's old room downstairs, cover it with all categories of reading matter and start examining and reading at once, dirty hands and all. Then I would find out that half his buys were for me and quite often my best ones, and most of what he had bought for himself, apart from the theology were unheard of French novels, and thick German books, or county histories, especially anything to do with Shropshire and Ludlow; occasionally `a binding'. On those days I had to carry my own books back. `Bindings' I understood were usually reserved for Sundays as were the specially ordered ones. I remember one Saturday morning he handed me four volumes of Macaulay's History of England that he had bought me. He was about to be demobilised and there was a festive note in the house. Tom came in, his son, he'd been playing football. I grimaced at Tom, displaying the gift, and then I made a face at Matthew, who took the book from me, opened it at random and started shouting.
"The nation, awaking from its rapturous trance, found itself sold to a foreign, a despotic, a Popish court, defeated on its own seas and rivers by a state of far inferior resources, and placed under the rule of panders and buffoons." Tom and I stood by in concentrated amazement while there rolled into our ears a thunder of sound, every wave bringing some bizarre creature to our senses, prisons and criminals, or Dutch ships in the Thames, or shameful subordinations, offences against liberty, sharpers and courtesans, harlot after harlot and bastard after bastard, or governments becoming odious, bosoms in a House of Commons elected in the ecstasy of penitence, disasters, sequestrations, exiles, seductions and panics, conspiracies, plots, and at high-tide, a gunpowder treason no less. Then on came Oates, and Babington and Digby; Sydney, Rosewell and Cornish. "Till the revolution purified our institutions and our manners, a state trial was merely a murder preceded by the uttering of certain gibberish and the performance of certain mummeries." Tom and I looked at each other through tears of joy, bursting to laugh. Matthew was carried away and bore it out to the very edge of doom, through the character of the king; obstinacy, passion, levity, apathy, indolence, artfulness, until `The panic gradually subsided'.
As the weather continued hot each day and cloudless, the idea of Matthew (I never could remember in his absence exactly what he looked like), now he was to be married, haunted me daylight as well as night. Vivid, enchanting, fatiguing dreams, memories.
There was the horse incident, but it sickened me to think of that: he put me on it, picked me up all bent. He was at his best soothing the terrors created by literature. I remembered the Poe book, it was later than the horse business. One look at those pictures to go with those stories and I could not go to sleep or endure the dark for nights on end. Matthew rubbed my back and congratulated me on my marvellous perceptions.
"This author," he said, "wishes to seize upon and frighten you out of your living daylights."
"Does he?" I sobbed. I was nonetheless very impressed.
"Oh yes. Yes, it was all in his mind and he wanted to seek out a bit of your mind you didn't know you'd got, and share it with you. It's like weight-lifting. Unpleasant at the time, but it makes you strong."
"It makes me frightened," I protested.
"Worse things happen at sea."
"Worse? Look!" I boldly opened the book at the most terrible page. "This man is tied up and there are rats all over him, and those knives are swinging along up the room and they are going to cut him into...into slices," I said faintly. "There can't be anything worse than that, can there? That must be the very worst." I wanted him to say `That is the worst'. There would be at least that much comfort. Instead he said,
"No worst, there is none."
Nothing to my purpose. "Has anything so bad ever happened to you?" I tried another way.
"Yes. It has," he said, still thoughtful and sweeping with his whole hand a few crumbs perhaps off the picture. I watched him. "Yes, because it came into a bit of my mind I didn't know I'd got." We were in deep waters. I did not know what to say or think. I only wanted him to come back to me. I looked at him in awe. At last a smile came on to his mouth but not into his eyes. He ruffled my hair. "Connie, my darling child, this is nothing. Nothing to worry about. It's all made up!"
He got up, and I was happier. Something worse had happened to him (I almost understood him, almost believed him because his eyes glittered), very bad anyway, and he was still alive! But the picture had lost its power over me because when I looked at it I saw his hand passing across it sweeping it away.
I passed on to my Aunt Matthew's account (of my amazing percipience in the matter of Poe), much improved. I thought she would be as impressed by it as I was. For this piece of `miseducation and mis-information' he had been thoroughly castigated as wicked for encouraging morbid fantasies, nothing to do with life.
Saturday walks with Matthew during his wartime leave when we were back in London always sent us to the old bookshops. He wore his old clothes and I suppose I did not see him in uniform more than once or twice. But in those days I always saw him as a soldier. He never looked so handsome to me (he looked very handsome, but not so handsome) in a sports jacket or a waistcoat and chain. Oh he was handsome all right, upright, military bend, slight, with a confidence in his address to you of a special kind. The reason for this special confidence, according to Aunt Molly, was that `his gifts are recognised'. But I had only to remember the lock of dark hair that fell forward, the rumpled up waistcoat when he was lounging deep down in a chair, feet either in everyone's way on the floor, or perched up on some stool in everyone's way, to make him familiar to me again. Sometimes he was quiet, I mean very quiet, and there were secrets in his eyes. His eyes gave him away, and under the confidence and the good manners, there was something sensuous, furtive, formidable, a lot of things likely to cause trouble if too freely let out. Sometimes when Aunt Molly spoke to him it was to those secrets that she spoke. I knew that from an early age, because it was all spoken over my head in a quite different way from the usual. But the bookshops. Some had gone out of London `for the duration', but the one I liked best had gone underground into a reinforced fire-proofed cellar somewhere off Bayswater Road. Immediately the bent head cleared the doorway (I used to bend mine, needlessly, for it seemed a fitting part of the ritual). The powerful smell of chemicals and old books mingled with the natural must of medieval, well, ancient cellar steps. It was an arched tunnel of dusty stone that we descended, and perhaps the greatest excitement of the venture was reaching that step where I could at last behold the high desk directly in front of us with its bulwarks of books and columns of spiked papers, which parted in the middle not quite so steadily as the Red Sea, which framed the singular face, like a dried apricot with a beard, both in hue and texture, of Mr. Adonijah Perlmutter, as it was painted on his desk-front. The thickest lenses in the smallest brass frames had reduced his eyes to black shiny pinheads like the little balls in cracker puzzles that whizz about under their imprisoning glass discs until you persuade them into the last humiliation and drop them into the capture cups where they tremble mutinously. These eyes trembled sometimes if you were a stranger looking into them, but mostly they whizzed over the top of the glasses, one side, the other side, down the main pathway between the long shelves, up the stairs as you left (Mr. Perlmutter had been known to detect an unpaid for book as far away as the nearly top step), and constantly between the four high large convex mirrors that displayed the behaviour of his clients for his inspection, including a funny view of bottoms alone as their owners dived headfirst into tea chests at the cheap side. What had done his eyes good seemed to have made a nonsense halfway down his nose, for his spectacles rested, rooted there on the bottom of a valley of their own making.
The place was illuminated with strips of bright white light and open only on Saturdays, but the back cellar behind the desk, which Matthew occasionally visited, was open by appointment only to well-known customers on Sunday afternoons. (It was years before I knew the truth of those Sunday visits.) Matthew might make an enquiry after an order he had placed, `Flavius Josephus? Complete set?' and Mr. Perlmutter's eyes would close, squeeze right up for one fraction of a second, open one after the other, whizz round on an inspection and then he would say `Octavo. Fine binding. Uncut. Forty-two and six'. After that he would stoop under the desk, but not so far that his nose disappeared or he was made late for an inspection, and a lanky boy would come from that mysterious back cellar in answer to the bell, and while I was picking out picture books, old note-books, children's books, written-on postcards, and Matthew was picking out Nine French Poets or Das Evanglium des Matthaus or a few old copies of the Journal of Biblical Literature (again, it was a long time before I understood the connection of all this heavy theology with the book Matthew: Studies in the First Gospel, M.L. Kellory to be found in Uncle Paul's library because it was not until that was finally sold I found it lying forgotten on a shelf), a parcel might be wrapped.
I remember his tall straight figure bent backwards beside me, I bent backwards beside him, under our inordinate stacks of books, while we waited impatiently, loaded to the noses, for the door to 22 Golden Square Gardens to be opened. We would make for the nearest sofa in Uncle Paul's old room downstairs, cover it with all categories of reading matter and start examining and reading at once, dirty hands and all. Then I would find out that half his buys were for me and quite often my best ones, and most of what he had bought for himself, apart from the theology were unheard of French novels, and thick German books, or county histories, especially anything to do with Shropshire and Ludlow; occasionally `a binding'. On those days I had to carry my own books back. `Bindings' I understood were usually reserved for Sundays as were the specially ordered ones. I remember one Saturday morning he handed me four volumes of Macaulay's History of England that he had bought me. He was about to be demobilised and there was a festive note in the house. Tom came in, his son, he'd been playing football. I grimaced at Tom, displaying the gift, and then I made a face at Matthew, who took the book from me, opened it at random and started shouting.
"The nation, awaking from its rapturous trance, found itself sold to a foreign, a despotic, a Popish court, defeated on its own seas and rivers by a state of far inferior resources, and placed under the rule of panders and buffoons." Tom and I stood by in concentrated amazement while there rolled into our ears a thunder of sound, every wave bringing some bizarre creature to our senses, prisons and criminals, or Dutch ships in the Thames, or shameful subordinations, offences against liberty, sharpers and courtesans, harlot after harlot and bastard after bastard, or governments becoming odious, bosoms in a House of Commons elected in the ecstasy of penitence, disasters, sequestrations, exiles, seductions and panics, conspiracies, plots, and at high-tide, a gunpowder treason no less. Then on came Oates, and Babington and Digby; Sydney, Rosewell and Cornish. "Till the revolution purified our institutions and our manners, a state trial was merely a murder preceded by the uttering of certain gibberish and the performance of certain mummeries." Tom and I looked at each other through tears of joy, bursting to laugh. Matthew was carried away and bore it out to the very edge of doom, through the character of the king; obstinacy, passion, levity, apathy, indolence, artfulness, until `The panic gradually subsided'.
Friday, 19 March 2010
POST 7
THE BUSINESS OF "TALKING TO AUNT MOLLY"
After tea I went to talk to Aunt Molly. I waited about in her room while she consulted her gardening manuals and telephoned the Secretary of the constituency Labour Party. I always misled myself into thinking that I knew my way round her. She talked a lot sometimes, but never to the point. Tonight there were to be man-to-man questions. I had them ready. I would forfeit the letter, and my secrets. `What was actually wrong with my mother?' and `What is all this about she might have married Matthew?' and `What was all that about us going to Washington? What happened?' `Sarah was the favourite, wasn't she?' In the event it was I, as usual, who was not very forthcoming. In the first place I had forgotten to provide myself with an ordinary excuse for being there, so very persistently that is, and I found myself, out of the blue, telling her about the terrible exam result. After condolences this hasty exposure of myself brought forth nothing but a eulogy on Frances. "It is Frances," said Aunt Molly, "who has inherited her mother's capacity for sharp judgement, perhaps divine dissatisfaction. Her brilliance and flair and her looks. Frances is no artist by temper, but I don't think it has ever occurred to her that there is anything the least intractable about the ideas, objects and raw materials of this world. She is very clever, mind and hands alike." I did not know whether Molly actually admired all this in Frances, (or actually believed in the `hands' bit), it having been inherited from my mother, but it was clear to me that Frances was Aunt Molly's favourite niece and always had been. She could do no wrong.
"Sarah too," continued my Aunt seeking to identify in her Dictionary of Trees, the habits of a red oak she had admired in Regent's Park only that afternoon, "seeing more than Frances does, the possibilities of doom and failure in these matters, nevertheless has a courageous and equally masterful way with them (more masterful in my opinion). I have often thought Sarah to be touched with genius. However that may be, she has certainly inherited your mother's musical talent. Whatever she may choose to do with her gift." Here Aunt Molly sniffed. Sarah in respect of her piano playing, as in so many other respects, was not amenable to advice, coercion or control. All this was exactly like Aunt Molly.
What about me?
Where could I place myself? Aunt Molly never did seem to see me. Perhaps, I thought, in giving out of likeness, I might be considered to be more like my father? I knew little about him. In The Times obituary he had been described as a brilliant political analyst and writer 'whose style welded substantial content with a reflective historical mind' had made memorable and lasting despatches 'that must come to mould the history of these war years'. He would be sadly missed, it said. I could find nothing there.
I could recall his playing with us as babies. A great deal of rough and tumble under the rather forbidding presence in the house of my mother upstairs in her room for long hours, either practising or as quiet as death. There were many anecdotes about her. People still referred to her in musical notes to concert programmes.
Perhaps my father had the great gift of paying complete attention to his children when he was with them. Anyway, I had always preferred his company to my mother's. But I was disposed to dislike him for what in the letter he had said about my mother, making her appear to be a woman fanatical about her career as a pianist, hard on her children, intolerably offensive to Matthew for some reason, depressed, and uncaring of her husband's care and feelings. There was nothing like it at all in all his other letters. I had read a good many by that time.
To keep the conversation going, to push it the way I wanted it to go I asked elaborate questions - oh, I was so elaborate and so tired of elaboration. And Aunt Molly was the person in the world hardest to divert from monologue. She went on talking, still complaining about Sarah now, but I was remembering my mother, the treat it was to be with her when we were allowed, her rare sweet intense smiles that made me thrillingly nervous, her large extraordinary hands, with their blunt-tipped fingers. And she had, what? Scorned Matthew? (I could go no further than a cliché) Because of course he must once have been in love with her. How could he not? I don't remember how I had made up my mind to it. My strongest memory of her was that sometimes when I spoke to her, dashed in on her, rarely, unexpectedly, importunately no doubt, as children will, she would frown and turn slowly her whole body towards me in surprise [and then] as though an enormous burden she could neither explain nor bear, was being placed on her heart. I remember looking round, on one occasion, for the uninvited stranger who must have come into the room, and finding only myself.
Even while I endured that heavy image on my heart, while the pain of it was still there, Aunt Molly's voice butted in with a name. "...and Matthew's sister Lisette was your mother's friend. Lisette and Bee. Those two young girls lived in each other's pockets at Loverdale House." Lisette Kellory, Matthew's sister, Philip's mother, not of the smallest interest or memory to me. I had never met her. "I always thought your mother Bee might have married Matthew," Aunt Molly mused. "Is that why she was living in the Kellory House?" "But he was a very callous young man - careless, careless young man. And here he is being careless all over again. Berenice ought to have married Matthew and your father Charles ought to have married Lisette."
I did not stop to ask myself how we had arrived at this familiar but always transfixing turn of the conversation. By my unuttered thoughts no doubt. I had often had that experience. No, all I could think was, `Then I should never have been born.' Tonight the weather was hot and the idea went very naturally and hard home - this idea that seemed to have crossed the minds of so many people - to roost with the thought of being dead anyway. One has been born, fortuitously as it were, as a result of trials of strength and affection between careless young adults. A stunning thought, but a bit of a non-starter. (After all it is against chance, I had established, that you have to wrest meaning from life.) It was at that point that I sat there and prepared myself to look on Matthew Kellory, the next time I saw him, to explore him with new free eyes. I had had crushes on and off him, ever since I was born.
"What?" I said.
"I said Matthew is getting married again."
I could not believe it.
"Don't look so stupid child. The lady is Mrs. Patricia Raleigh-Kenys. Know her? Of course you know her. She was the lady who said, Why don't you send them all away to school. What? I said, Send orphans away? That's a poor notion of the right way to bring up orphaned girls with a family name to live up to. She was a researcher into criminal statistics at the Home Office, some such occupation. She's probably taken him on as a case! We must think of a useful wedding present," Aunt Molly smiled, by no means kindly.
After tea I went to talk to Aunt Molly. I waited about in her room while she consulted her gardening manuals and telephoned the Secretary of the constituency Labour Party. I always misled myself into thinking that I knew my way round her. She talked a lot sometimes, but never to the point. Tonight there were to be man-to-man questions. I had them ready. I would forfeit the letter, and my secrets. `What was actually wrong with my mother?' and `What is all this about she might have married Matthew?' and `What was all that about us going to Washington? What happened?' `Sarah was the favourite, wasn't she?' In the event it was I, as usual, who was not very forthcoming. In the first place I had forgotten to provide myself with an ordinary excuse for being there, so very persistently that is, and I found myself, out of the blue, telling her about the terrible exam result. After condolences this hasty exposure of myself brought forth nothing but a eulogy on Frances. "It is Frances," said Aunt Molly, "who has inherited her mother's capacity for sharp judgement, perhaps divine dissatisfaction. Her brilliance and flair and her looks. Frances is no artist by temper, but I don't think it has ever occurred to her that there is anything the least intractable about the ideas, objects and raw materials of this world. She is very clever, mind and hands alike." I did not know whether Molly actually admired all this in Frances, (or actually believed in the `hands' bit), it having been inherited from my mother, but it was clear to me that Frances was Aunt Molly's favourite niece and always had been. She could do no wrong.
"Sarah too," continued my Aunt seeking to identify in her Dictionary of Trees, the habits of a red oak she had admired in Regent's Park only that afternoon, "seeing more than Frances does, the possibilities of doom and failure in these matters, nevertheless has a courageous and equally masterful way with them (more masterful in my opinion). I have often thought Sarah to be touched with genius. However that may be, she has certainly inherited your mother's musical talent. Whatever she may choose to do with her gift." Here Aunt Molly sniffed. Sarah in respect of her piano playing, as in so many other respects, was not amenable to advice, coercion or control. All this was exactly like Aunt Molly.
What about me?
Where could I place myself? Aunt Molly never did seem to see me. Perhaps, I thought, in giving out of likeness, I might be considered to be more like my father? I knew little about him. In The Times obituary he had been described as a brilliant political analyst and writer 'whose style welded substantial content with a reflective historical mind' had made memorable and lasting despatches 'that must come to mould the history of these war years'. He would be sadly missed, it said. I could find nothing there.
I could recall his playing with us as babies. A great deal of rough and tumble under the rather forbidding presence in the house of my mother upstairs in her room for long hours, either practising or as quiet as death. There were many anecdotes about her. People still referred to her in musical notes to concert programmes.
Perhaps my father had the great gift of paying complete attention to his children when he was with them. Anyway, I had always preferred his company to my mother's. But I was disposed to dislike him for what in the letter he had said about my mother, making her appear to be a woman fanatical about her career as a pianist, hard on her children, intolerably offensive to Matthew for some reason, depressed, and uncaring of her husband's care and feelings. There was nothing like it at all in all his other letters. I had read a good many by that time.
To keep the conversation going, to push it the way I wanted it to go I asked elaborate questions - oh, I was so elaborate and so tired of elaboration. And Aunt Molly was the person in the world hardest to divert from monologue. She went on talking, still complaining about Sarah now, but I was remembering my mother, the treat it was to be with her when we were allowed, her rare sweet intense smiles that made me thrillingly nervous, her large extraordinary hands, with their blunt-tipped fingers. And she had, what? Scorned Matthew? (I could go no further than a cliché) Because of course he must once have been in love with her. How could he not? I don't remember how I had made up my mind to it. My strongest memory of her was that sometimes when I spoke to her, dashed in on her, rarely, unexpectedly, importunately no doubt, as children will, she would frown and turn slowly her whole body towards me in surprise [and then] as though an enormous burden she could neither explain nor bear, was being placed on her heart. I remember looking round, on one occasion, for the uninvited stranger who must have come into the room, and finding only myself.
Even while I endured that heavy image on my heart, while the pain of it was still there, Aunt Molly's voice butted in with a name. "...and Matthew's sister Lisette was your mother's friend. Lisette and Bee. Those two young girls lived in each other's pockets at Loverdale House." Lisette Kellory, Matthew's sister, Philip's mother, not of the smallest interest or memory to me. I had never met her. "I always thought your mother Bee might have married Matthew," Aunt Molly mused. "Is that why she was living in the Kellory House?" "But he was a very callous young man - careless, careless young man. And here he is being careless all over again. Berenice ought to have married Matthew and your father Charles ought to have married Lisette."
I did not stop to ask myself how we had arrived at this familiar but always transfixing turn of the conversation. By my unuttered thoughts no doubt. I had often had that experience. No, all I could think was, `Then I should never have been born.' Tonight the weather was hot and the idea went very naturally and hard home - this idea that seemed to have crossed the minds of so many people - to roost with the thought of being dead anyway. One has been born, fortuitously as it were, as a result of trials of strength and affection between careless young adults. A stunning thought, but a bit of a non-starter. (After all it is against chance, I had established, that you have to wrest meaning from life.) It was at that point that I sat there and prepared myself to look on Matthew Kellory, the next time I saw him, to explore him with new free eyes. I had had crushes on and off him, ever since I was born.
"What?" I said.
"I said Matthew is getting married again."
I could not believe it.
"Don't look so stupid child. The lady is Mrs. Patricia Raleigh-Kenys. Know her? Of course you know her. She was the lady who said, Why don't you send them all away to school. What? I said, Send orphans away? That's a poor notion of the right way to bring up orphaned girls with a family name to live up to. She was a researcher into criminal statistics at the Home Office, some such occupation. She's probably taken him on as a case! We must think of a useful wedding present," Aunt Molly smiled, by no means kindly.
Post 6
A STOLEN LETTER: NOT THE FIRST
The previous evening before I went to bed I had taken a rather high-fettled action, even for me; for although shy and unnoticeable sometimes to a degree that used to make me angry but no longer does, I have never been unadventurous. I had, over the past weeks, found and systematically rifled Aunt Molly's very private old-letter drawer full of the papers of my late Uncle Paul. It was not the place where she kept Philip's letters and, sometimes indiscreetly, letters of `general interest' to the rest of us: which being freely available nobody but me had time to read. This private drawer had no handle, it was at the back of her desk, and to my paralysed astonishment, opened for me to a random touch like Aladdin's cave one day when she had asked me to look for her glasses. It was from Uncle Paul's papers there that I discovered, a little later, that my other grandfather Alistair had been murdered by his wife Jenny my other grandmother. But last night I had stolen a letter I did not intend to put back. It contained an unusual, unsettling revelation. I read it again.
This letter was one of several from my father to his elder half-brother my Uncle Paul. It was about my mother. It was from the Boulevard St. Michel, Paris, Thursday evening, July 1939. `My dear Paul, It is very late. Idleness prevents my getting into bed. I have finished my work. I am driven to letterwriting. This damned war-scare is all over the streets here and no-one talks about anything else. Paris is in a panic; not wild, shouting fear, but gentle quick-glancing panic, which confident official references to the Maginot Line do nothing to allay... Poor Berenice, she still works too hard, practises too long, worries too much about her career, which is all fantasy, as you know, for her gift has left her. She worries, (but with a touch of exaltation), I think, about a new war; she worries about me, about the little girls. In her last letter she writes of `tendencies she does not admire in Sarah', who, let me remind you, is at present under five years old! Berenice writes like this as though I have been away for years. I have been away five days tomorrow. I return on Tuesday, and whatever she means by `tendencies' other than Sarah's natural inclination not to practise the piano eight hours a day, it will be one of the subjects for her interminable, mad, metaphysics when I get back; and a mysterious disappearance will follow. My character, friends, means of livelihood will be called to account once more by my poor sick girl. Sometimes I wonder if I can stand it. I must stand it. Too much has already been sacrificed to standing it. I feel like taking her bodily to see the man that old Streeter advised us to see, for there is no prevailing with her. Something is eating her life away. What a joyful girl she was when we married. How soon that changed. My guilt is boundless when I am with her and eats me up. I hate myself, and sometimes, God help me, I hate her. Perhaps after all she should have married Matthew.
Bee's solution to our `problem' (for she regards them collectively as one, large familiar and revered old friend - and perhaps they are, as most of you seem to believe, but if I accept that I think I might despair) is that the war situation being what it is, she should take the three girls to Washington. Maybe she is right to think we should go our separate ways; but the idea of Matthew, of all people, taking them under his wing in Washington is intolerable to me. In any case, how could he possibly, after all that has happened, want ever to set eyes on Bee again? In the event of war it would probably be the best place for them, there is no doubt, but in her present condition of health she could not even undertake the journey, let alone endure the exile. I do wish she would let herself get well, but I think her heart is now forever set against that...'
I did not finish it. It was signed by my father Charles. I gazed at the handwriting and the signature, upright, bold, astonished and sad that this mark on the paper had lasted so much longer than he had. It was a terrible letter to me, and my mind, as it was the first time I read it, lingered interminably on the one sentence where I stopped. Reading it yet again, I came with a fresh shock, as every time it had shocked me, to: `Perhaps after all she should have married Matthew'. As if the consequences of my mother having married my father and not Matthew were, after all, inconsequential. I felt personally affronted and insubstantial. It brought back a remark to my mind that I had once overhead Aunt Molly make to Matthew himself. `Charles's mistake was that he did not realise that Bee was unfit to have children.' As if the existence of the three of us, in Molly's household and under Molly's care did not give the lie to that!
I sat on the bed a long time, pondering once more. No, I did not have the slightest wish to go swimming, or move. It was not that, later, I did not intend to do my homework; it simply never crossed my mind to do it.
The previous evening before I went to bed I had taken a rather high-fettled action, even for me; for although shy and unnoticeable sometimes to a degree that used to make me angry but no longer does, I have never been unadventurous. I had, over the past weeks, found and systematically rifled Aunt Molly's very private old-letter drawer full of the papers of my late Uncle Paul. It was not the place where she kept Philip's letters and, sometimes indiscreetly, letters of `general interest' to the rest of us: which being freely available nobody but me had time to read. This private drawer had no handle, it was at the back of her desk, and to my paralysed astonishment, opened for me to a random touch like Aladdin's cave one day when she had asked me to look for her glasses. It was from Uncle Paul's papers there that I discovered, a little later, that my other grandfather Alistair had been murdered by his wife Jenny my other grandmother. But last night I had stolen a letter I did not intend to put back. It contained an unusual, unsettling revelation. I read it again.
This letter was one of several from my father to his elder half-brother my Uncle Paul. It was about my mother. It was from the Boulevard St. Michel, Paris, Thursday evening, July 1939. `My dear Paul, It is very late. Idleness prevents my getting into bed. I have finished my work. I am driven to letterwriting. This damned war-scare is all over the streets here and no-one talks about anything else. Paris is in a panic; not wild, shouting fear, but gentle quick-glancing panic, which confident official references to the Maginot Line do nothing to allay... Poor Berenice, she still works too hard, practises too long, worries too much about her career, which is all fantasy, as you know, for her gift has left her. She worries, (but with a touch of exaltation), I think, about a new war; she worries about me, about the little girls. In her last letter she writes of `tendencies she does not admire in Sarah', who, let me remind you, is at present under five years old! Berenice writes like this as though I have been away for years. I have been away five days tomorrow. I return on Tuesday, and whatever she means by `tendencies' other than Sarah's natural inclination not to practise the piano eight hours a day, it will be one of the subjects for her interminable, mad, metaphysics when I get back; and a mysterious disappearance will follow. My character, friends, means of livelihood will be called to account once more by my poor sick girl. Sometimes I wonder if I can stand it. I must stand it. Too much has already been sacrificed to standing it. I feel like taking her bodily to see the man that old Streeter advised us to see, for there is no prevailing with her. Something is eating her life away. What a joyful girl she was when we married. How soon that changed. My guilt is boundless when I am with her and eats me up. I hate myself, and sometimes, God help me, I hate her. Perhaps after all she should have married Matthew.
Bee's solution to our `problem' (for she regards them collectively as one, large familiar and revered old friend - and perhaps they are, as most of you seem to believe, but if I accept that I think I might despair) is that the war situation being what it is, she should take the three girls to Washington. Maybe she is right to think we should go our separate ways; but the idea of Matthew, of all people, taking them under his wing in Washington is intolerable to me. In any case, how could he possibly, after all that has happened, want ever to set eyes on Bee again? In the event of war it would probably be the best place for them, there is no doubt, but in her present condition of health she could not even undertake the journey, let alone endure the exile. I do wish she would let herself get well, but I think her heart is now forever set against that...'
I did not finish it. It was signed by my father Charles. I gazed at the handwriting and the signature, upright, bold, astonished and sad that this mark on the paper had lasted so much longer than he had. It was a terrible letter to me, and my mind, as it was the first time I read it, lingered interminably on the one sentence where I stopped. Reading it yet again, I came with a fresh shock, as every time it had shocked me, to: `Perhaps after all she should have married Matthew'. As if the consequences of my mother having married my father and not Matthew were, after all, inconsequential. I felt personally affronted and insubstantial. It brought back a remark to my mind that I had once overhead Aunt Molly make to Matthew himself. `Charles's mistake was that he did not realise that Bee was unfit to have children.' As if the existence of the three of us, in Molly's household and under Molly's care did not give the lie to that!
I sat on the bed a long time, pondering once more. No, I did not have the slightest wish to go swimming, or move. It was not that, later, I did not intend to do my homework; it simply never crossed my mind to do it.
Friday, 12 March 2010
Post 5
MORE HOT DAYS
At school, the sixth form after lunch, a retiring there of spirit into the deeper recesses of heat, into the enjoyment of bodily stillness, the studying of red patterns on the closed eyelids, fantasies of the male and female life on the edge of sleep.
That morning I had awoken with the luxurious feeling that always comes to me when I have dreamed about my parents. I knew I had been with them. I trusted the dream more than the contents of the letter I had stolen.
"Constance!"
I was informed that a letter had gone to my Aunt Molly advising her of the impossibility of my getting through the coming examinations. I was always ashamed of those letters, although apparently brazen. No, I had nothing to say.
I was sorry about the school letter but not for long downcast by it. Once out in the air I was full of joy, sprightly and inventive, as the first hot days always made me. I rushed home on my bicycle to Golden Square Gardens, enjoying the sunbaked traffic; at one with a community of drivers. I still like that feeling, that we drivers are all powerful and skilful on the roads. As I turned into Golden Square Gardens, the sun was full on the front of No. 22, blazing on it; the clean sharp shadows in the unhacked forest trees enclosed in the communal garden delighted me. I bounced my bicycle down into the basement area and dashed back and up the stone steps to the front door; that scorching once-white door, white again in the sunshine. I was going to the swimming baths in Silver Street. I stood for a moment, my eyes shut and the sun full on my face. It was as if when I opened the door the sun invited itself in with me. As if a dazzling particle split off at the spin and entered with me. The old hall was suddenly flooded with light. I frowned and shaded my eyes with both hands from the radiance. Straight ahead of me, in the very heart of the heat, on the area of wall behind the winding of the stairs stood my mother and father hiding their eyes from the brightness, and between them stood Jesus, not shadowed there, but coloured in clothes of blue and green. I stopped and the door closed behind me although I have no memory of shutting it. The sight faded. I must have stood there moments on end, my heart beating the mind out of me.
I mention the weather.
Frances my elder sister adores heat because it allows her perhaps to wilt and wallow, thus taking many burdens off her conscience and will. It also makes her very beautiful: reddens her lips, glints her hair. This does not always make her better-tempered, with me anyway, but I think it makes her happier. In theory, she is a sun-lover. But one or two days are max. Perhaps this summer was different. Sarah, who is two years older than I am, comes to life in the heat I've noticed. I mean more than usual. She becomes full of inventions for parties (though Sarah's parties never were in our house unfortunately), runs up ridiculous clothes, paints of course (I think she had just started at the Kenttner Annexe in those days as an art student) plays the piano and reduces her sleep to about four hours a night.
I am different. In the heat I begin to simmer quietly; my eyes feed my heart, no reference to me. Many things have happened to me on hot days. The Old House where I lived with my parents in London was blown up by a stray landmine on a hot day just before lunchtime 17th June 1942. Both my parents were killed; and I, but not my sisters who were in Birley Fine, was reported dead. I have seen that in the newspapers that have been kept. A mark of Favour: myself reported dead; I alive to read it. (For years I could not recall whether it was Matthew or Gerald Streeter, our doctor, who took me by force away, I remember yelling and screaming and only just before the explosion. I have never forgotten the force. In dreams I used to hear myself screaming.)
Whenever it gets hot I seem to remember, by that I mean I remember without any will or effort, it comes to me that I was reported killed, and I am naturally very thankful to be alive. (It was a hot day, in the early evening, now I think of it, in May 1951, when the telegram came from the War Office to say that Philip had died in Korea.) What comes back to me when it gets hot is that every day may be your last and there is no heavenly design in life. Any meaning life has you must make entirely for yourself. (I used to get excited about that as an obvious and astonishing idea of pure freedom until I discovered it was not true.) I always remembered that as if I'd just thought of it for the first time. Any meaning life has you must make for yourself; and just to re-have that thought fresh was the actual source of revelations, creative thoughts about sex and friendship and work with me, and it made me very powerful.
It made me daring in the mind, anyway. That summer there were more revelations than usual - above all the power to recognise familiar people and situations as new and strange. I came into a power of language, an inheritance of, how shall I say? my own experiences as a child, all with tongues and I began to understand all this activity as a slowly gathering assembly of portents, Presences, selves, benign, exuberant, and unignorable. All coming, talking to me, answering me from the very limits of my life, out of the heat, out of the twice-granted life, coaxing, whispering Look closely at this! Notice that! Consider! Observe! How delightful! How strange! How promising! Find out! I stood there, with the vision of my parents fading, the geological folds of my mind stirring, the past stirring itself - I had that exact impression, the Past - in the heat and shadow of the hall. The sun is an ancient red ball of fire and life, requires you by sunlight and oxygen, by the energy in the blood and memory, to - urges you to - you are in love with him - go, go, go. The hall was dark green in shadows and above me, coming in at the stained stair window, a dazzling shaft of sun falling.
I went straight upstairs, up and up again, to my bedroom. Instantly, as I opened the door, bringing with me the vision I had seen in the hall, my dream of the night before came to meet me. I sat down on the bed edge and closed my eyes. Hot, quiet, lulled, I was in the presence of my parents.
I did not imagine they were there. I did not even sit there thinking about them. I simply sat in their presence reassured. The red world behind my eyelids has a different time-scale, a moment is an age. When I opened my eyes I did not move, but the old time-scale reasserted itself.
I did not go to the Silver Street Baths to swim.
At school, the sixth form after lunch, a retiring there of spirit into the deeper recesses of heat, into the enjoyment of bodily stillness, the studying of red patterns on the closed eyelids, fantasies of the male and female life on the edge of sleep.
That morning I had awoken with the luxurious feeling that always comes to me when I have dreamed about my parents. I knew I had been with them. I trusted the dream more than the contents of the letter I had stolen.
"Constance!"
I was informed that a letter had gone to my Aunt Molly advising her of the impossibility of my getting through the coming examinations. I was always ashamed of those letters, although apparently brazen. No, I had nothing to say.
I was sorry about the school letter but not for long downcast by it. Once out in the air I was full of joy, sprightly and inventive, as the first hot days always made me. I rushed home on my bicycle to Golden Square Gardens, enjoying the sunbaked traffic; at one with a community of drivers. I still like that feeling, that we drivers are all powerful and skilful on the roads. As I turned into Golden Square Gardens, the sun was full on the front of No. 22, blazing on it; the clean sharp shadows in the unhacked forest trees enclosed in the communal garden delighted me. I bounced my bicycle down into the basement area and dashed back and up the stone steps to the front door; that scorching once-white door, white again in the sunshine. I was going to the swimming baths in Silver Street. I stood for a moment, my eyes shut and the sun full on my face. It was as if when I opened the door the sun invited itself in with me. As if a dazzling particle split off at the spin and entered with me. The old hall was suddenly flooded with light. I frowned and shaded my eyes with both hands from the radiance. Straight ahead of me, in the very heart of the heat, on the area of wall behind the winding of the stairs stood my mother and father hiding their eyes from the brightness, and between them stood Jesus, not shadowed there, but coloured in clothes of blue and green. I stopped and the door closed behind me although I have no memory of shutting it. The sight faded. I must have stood there moments on end, my heart beating the mind out of me.
I mention the weather.
Frances my elder sister adores heat because it allows her perhaps to wilt and wallow, thus taking many burdens off her conscience and will. It also makes her very beautiful: reddens her lips, glints her hair. This does not always make her better-tempered, with me anyway, but I think it makes her happier. In theory, she is a sun-lover. But one or two days are max. Perhaps this summer was different. Sarah, who is two years older than I am, comes to life in the heat I've noticed. I mean more than usual. She becomes full of inventions for parties (though Sarah's parties never were in our house unfortunately), runs up ridiculous clothes, paints of course (I think she had just started at the Kenttner Annexe in those days as an art student) plays the piano and reduces her sleep to about four hours a night.
I am different. In the heat I begin to simmer quietly; my eyes feed my heart, no reference to me. Many things have happened to me on hot days. The Old House where I lived with my parents in London was blown up by a stray landmine on a hot day just before lunchtime 17th June 1942. Both my parents were killed; and I, but not my sisters who were in Birley Fine, was reported dead. I have seen that in the newspapers that have been kept. A mark of Favour: myself reported dead; I alive to read it. (For years I could not recall whether it was Matthew or Gerald Streeter, our doctor, who took me by force away, I remember yelling and screaming and only just before the explosion. I have never forgotten the force. In dreams I used to hear myself screaming.)
Whenever it gets hot I seem to remember, by that I mean I remember without any will or effort, it comes to me that I was reported killed, and I am naturally very thankful to be alive. (It was a hot day, in the early evening, now I think of it, in May 1951, when the telegram came from the War Office to say that Philip had died in Korea.) What comes back to me when it gets hot is that every day may be your last and there is no heavenly design in life. Any meaning life has you must make entirely for yourself. (I used to get excited about that as an obvious and astonishing idea of pure freedom until I discovered it was not true.) I always remembered that as if I'd just thought of it for the first time. Any meaning life has you must make for yourself; and just to re-have that thought fresh was the actual source of revelations, creative thoughts about sex and friendship and work with me, and it made me very powerful.
It made me daring in the mind, anyway. That summer there were more revelations than usual - above all the power to recognise familiar people and situations as new and strange. I came into a power of language, an inheritance of, how shall I say? my own experiences as a child, all with tongues and I began to understand all this activity as a slowly gathering assembly of portents, Presences, selves, benign, exuberant, and unignorable. All coming, talking to me, answering me from the very limits of my life, out of the heat, out of the twice-granted life, coaxing, whispering Look closely at this! Notice that! Consider! Observe! How delightful! How strange! How promising! Find out! I stood there, with the vision of my parents fading, the geological folds of my mind stirring, the past stirring itself - I had that exact impression, the Past - in the heat and shadow of the hall. The sun is an ancient red ball of fire and life, requires you by sunlight and oxygen, by the energy in the blood and memory, to - urges you to - you are in love with him - go, go, go. The hall was dark green in shadows and above me, coming in at the stained stair window, a dazzling shaft of sun falling.
I went straight upstairs, up and up again, to my bedroom. Instantly, as I opened the door, bringing with me the vision I had seen in the hall, my dream of the night before came to meet me. I sat down on the bed edge and closed my eyes. Hot, quiet, lulled, I was in the presence of my parents.
I did not imagine they were there. I did not even sit there thinking about them. I simply sat in their presence reassured. The red world behind my eyelids has a different time-scale, a moment is an age. When I opened my eyes I did not move, but the old time-scale reasserted itself.
I did not go to the Silver Street Baths to swim.
Thursday, 11 March 2010
Post 4
"Saw them in Kew Gardens?" Aunt Molly questioned; seriously, I knew, because she took off her reading glasses again to see me better. "What were you doing in Kew Gardens may I ask?"
She might have asked, she might not. I was prepared. "Ah! Half day. For the exams. I didn't tell you(?)" Not a word of a lie, a self-imposed half-day and I did not make the last sentence even very much of a question. "I took my, a, notebook."
"Good girl. Don't let me get any more letters."
No indeed, for she might feel obliged to the headmistress to answer the next one herself. I went straight upstairs and left a note on Sarah's bed, in code, to tell her I needed a letter forged in Aunt Molly's hand for school next morning. Temperature 103. Aunt Molly would not really have minded giving me a letter to excuse me herself, but it would have been without reference to temperature or any other disobliging disturbance, on the never-apologise-never-explain principle she adopted in commerce with friends, relations, servants alike. But oh, the nuisance for her, of putting pen to paper. It would have been unforgivable to put her to such trouble. And oh, the embarrassment to me, to be the messenger bearing the unconventional, unpredictable, and quite unsatisfactory excuse note to my Head Mistress.
COMPOSITION
Write an account of a very hot day you have enjoyed.
The sky blue enamel, the sun glittering on the grits of London pavement, the trees burdened with a shining splendour of heat to be borne only in absolute stillness, Constance, accompanied at lunchtime by the man person she loves, walked the dazzling dry street. Even the birds were silent.
Under his sunblind, a grocer at quarter past one in the afternoon, sits outside his shop asleep. Constance studies the little pouts of his bottom lip as breaths escape. Behind him, the dark cave of the empty store quiet and cool against the glare from the pavement. Outside the fruit-piled greengrocers' shops, even some oranges, outside the flower shops on the high road, runnellings of water crisscrossing into the gutter from flushing hoses to keep the dust down. No fish on the slabs, no meat rations in the windows, only bunches of tired parsley.
Distant sun-struck windows flash high beams and messages across the squares and by-ways of the town. A reader of such messages, she smiles at her perfect companion. Nothing to say.
In the royal parks, bleached, unpainted deckchairs support bodies lifeless to this world. [From the particular to the generalised] It is as if each body in a deep dream has taken leave to explore some private penumbra which has set up a silence between it and the distant traffic. Everywhere throughout the metropolis, young men stretch upon the public lawns and parish greens, by lakes and ponds; young women in pale cottons, clean blouses, shoes cast upon the grass, lie prone and distant beside the remains of picnic lunches, accepting languidly, here and there, a caress from the breeze or a man's hand; all magazines and newspapers on the droop, few interested in what the world has to bring. The old on the nod and blink, chins upon chests, on the park benches, where you don't have to pay and you don't have to drop your bottom into a deck chair like a spoonful of pudding into a basin.
Four o'clock and in the dark green clubrooms, [What do you know of gentlemen's clubs?] substantial men dream of the evening to come, cold suppers, cool wine and mild flirtations in the summer gardens of the home counties. There is a droning of bees and the whiskery noises of other insects, the distant hum of an occasional aeroplane, the sounds of ships' hooters from the river, smell of mock-orange and petrol and dust and grass and stone and water, all these effects forwarding those plans to get to the sea, get lost in a hot wood, make love, drink nectar. Today. The first day of heat, an hour for dreams and memories. It had come to this: she had a special person there, (though he was reading, and I could not) sitting beside her, on a seat bearing the inscription Swynnerton bore "Silver, a flowered cross sable" Isobel Ferguson who Loved Summer Days. Nothing more than that, but it seemed like everything." [Please see me]
That was about three years after Matthew had married Patricia, when my famous three wishes had come awe-inspiringly true. Later that very evening, I seem to have written:
"This cooling beautiful night with a warm blissful late spring day full of Matthew's company behind me and half a moon up now over the misty park, my world all given back to me, free from school for ever, here I am living in Matthew's flat as part of his household, Patricia and her daughters. The `two women' he had inherited quite as if he were really my father. Not quite. There is between us the promise of something like the loving relationship I used to dream about as a child in all my fantasies. Something like it. The thought of its developing further as my fantasies developed it is very dreadful and attractive to me; and I cannot deny that this possibility of a real love affair between Matthew and me and the weather with its promises is what has set me so hard to write again, and what helps to give zest to this piece of work. I have now undertaken to myself, to put everything I have ever written in order, from the beginning. I know my concealed intentions are ambivalent, because it is a mental desire (I think) which prompts me to say to myself, 'but a love affair with Matthew is simply more life, simply more complicated, rich experience, properly due to the self and its expansion'. But I have to admit that I work superbly well, and I am conscious to the very farthest edges of my senses and my vision of the whole universe it sometimes seems to me, at times when I am, as now, emotionally and sexually aroused to an intense degree."
At that time, if it was a love-affair, it was a love-affair with pen and paper and words. How marvellous it must have been to be so young, so frank, so confident, so delighted; how magnificent to make one's self up as one went along getting it all down on paper with no sense of the intense selection that went into it all. Such careless fantasies; so unaware of the dangers. And how often I sat down to put all my writings in order, to `start again from the beginning', as now I do for the last time. Every day in those days was a new beginning. With the small shore wave breaking over my toes, I watched the deep billows far out in the future and contemplated with such gladness how very softly they would break over my shoulders and I would float above the undertow of my pain at last.
The black martins, the swifts, brought me back to these old bundles, but now I forget why. I was looking for some starting-place in 1950. It was before Matthew came that summer with his announcements. Sometime in May? I wrote about it, possibly about that time.
She might have asked, she might not. I was prepared. "Ah! Half day. For the exams. I didn't tell you(?)" Not a word of a lie, a self-imposed half-day and I did not make the last sentence even very much of a question. "I took my, a, notebook."
"Good girl. Don't let me get any more letters."
No indeed, for she might feel obliged to the headmistress to answer the next one herself. I went straight upstairs and left a note on Sarah's bed, in code, to tell her I needed a letter forged in Aunt Molly's hand for school next morning. Temperature 103. Aunt Molly would not really have minded giving me a letter to excuse me herself, but it would have been without reference to temperature or any other disobliging disturbance, on the never-apologise-never-explain principle she adopted in commerce with friends, relations, servants alike. But oh, the nuisance for her, of putting pen to paper. It would have been unforgivable to put her to such trouble. And oh, the embarrassment to me, to be the messenger bearing the unconventional, unpredictable, and quite unsatisfactory excuse note to my Head Mistress.
COMPOSITION
Write an account of a very hot day you have enjoyed.
The sky blue enamel, the sun glittering on the grits of London pavement, the trees burdened with a shining splendour of heat to be borne only in absolute stillness, Constance, accompanied at lunchtime by the man person she loves, walked the dazzling dry street. Even the birds were silent.
Under his sunblind, a grocer at quarter past one in the afternoon, sits outside his shop asleep. Constance studies the little pouts of his bottom lip as breaths escape. Behind him, the dark cave of the empty store quiet and cool against the glare from the pavement. Outside the fruit-piled greengrocers' shops, even some oranges, outside the flower shops on the high road, runnellings of water crisscrossing into the gutter from flushing hoses to keep the dust down. No fish on the slabs, no meat rations in the windows, only bunches of tired parsley.
Distant sun-struck windows flash high beams and messages across the squares and by-ways of the town. A reader of such messages, she smiles at her perfect companion. Nothing to say.
In the royal parks, bleached, unpainted deckchairs support bodies lifeless to this world. [From the particular to the generalised] It is as if each body in a deep dream has taken leave to explore some private penumbra which has set up a silence between it and the distant traffic. Everywhere throughout the metropolis, young men stretch upon the public lawns and parish greens, by lakes and ponds; young women in pale cottons, clean blouses, shoes cast upon the grass, lie prone and distant beside the remains of picnic lunches, accepting languidly, here and there, a caress from the breeze or a man's hand; all magazines and newspapers on the droop, few interested in what the world has to bring. The old on the nod and blink, chins upon chests, on the park benches, where you don't have to pay and you don't have to drop your bottom into a deck chair like a spoonful of pudding into a basin.
Four o'clock and in the dark green clubrooms, [What do you know of gentlemen's clubs?] substantial men dream of the evening to come, cold suppers, cool wine and mild flirtations in the summer gardens of the home counties. There is a droning of bees and the whiskery noises of other insects, the distant hum of an occasional aeroplane, the sounds of ships' hooters from the river, smell of mock-orange and petrol and dust and grass and stone and water, all these effects forwarding those plans to get to the sea, get lost in a hot wood, make love, drink nectar. Today. The first day of heat, an hour for dreams and memories. It had come to this: she had a special person there, (though he was reading, and I could not) sitting beside her, on a seat bearing the inscription Swynnerton bore "Silver, a flowered cross sable" Isobel Ferguson who Loved Summer Days. Nothing more than that, but it seemed like everything." [Please see me]
That was about three years after Matthew had married Patricia, when my famous three wishes had come awe-inspiringly true. Later that very evening, I seem to have written:
"This cooling beautiful night with a warm blissful late spring day full of Matthew's company behind me and half a moon up now over the misty park, my world all given back to me, free from school for ever, here I am living in Matthew's flat as part of his household, Patricia and her daughters. The `two women' he had inherited quite as if he were really my father. Not quite. There is between us the promise of something like the loving relationship I used to dream about as a child in all my fantasies. Something like it. The thought of its developing further as my fantasies developed it is very dreadful and attractive to me; and I cannot deny that this possibility of a real love affair between Matthew and me and the weather with its promises is what has set me so hard to write again, and what helps to give zest to this piece of work. I have now undertaken to myself, to put everything I have ever written in order, from the beginning. I know my concealed intentions are ambivalent, because it is a mental desire (I think) which prompts me to say to myself, 'but a love affair with Matthew is simply more life, simply more complicated, rich experience, properly due to the self and its expansion'. But I have to admit that I work superbly well, and I am conscious to the very farthest edges of my senses and my vision of the whole universe it sometimes seems to me, at times when I am, as now, emotionally and sexually aroused to an intense degree."
At that time, if it was a love-affair, it was a love-affair with pen and paper and words. How marvellous it must have been to be so young, so frank, so confident, so delighted; how magnificent to make one's self up as one went along getting it all down on paper with no sense of the intense selection that went into it all. Such careless fantasies; so unaware of the dangers. And how often I sat down to put all my writings in order, to `start again from the beginning', as now I do for the last time. Every day in those days was a new beginning. With the small shore wave breaking over my toes, I watched the deep billows far out in the future and contemplated with such gladness how very softly they would break over my shoulders and I would float above the undertow of my pain at last.
The black martins, the swifts, brought me back to these old bundles, but now I forget why. I was looking for some starting-place in 1950. It was before Matthew came that summer with his announcements. Sometime in May? I wrote about it, possibly about that time.
Tuesday, 23 February 2010
Post 3
MARKS OF FAVOUR
As a small child, the first time I ever heard the phrase, I was intensely interested in marks of favour. Aunt Molly asked Father Horbark one day in my hearing how somebody had come by `that mark of favour'. And as she always ignored the presence of children up to about the age of twenty five and had a masterly habit of speaking over our heads without ever giving the impression that she imagined we did not hear what she said, we had the best of the silent world. So I had learned to be quiet and listen; even in young days it never occurred to me to butt into an adult conversation with a question. Personal questions were for one to one where they could not be put aside. I was delighted with this new idea. I turned it over and over, testing it on the senses. I never wanted to ask what a thing `was'. I took this particular gem of a phrase to be a mark left by `Favour', whoever Favour was, so the first time I ever saw a disfiguring but fascinating bright red mark almost covering the face of a crisp old soldierly man with clawlike hands buying carrots in the Birley Fine market-place I knew without being told that it was a Mark of Favour.
Whatever that mark might have told me about Favour I was never to know, being dragged hastily along by one of the young nurse-maids who came and went at that time during the first days of the war to help the Nanny to look after us (five or six of us, sometimes more). They were very carefully brought up these girls, much at home with horses - which I was already by that time in desperate fear of; and they came from families living in the country town where my grandmother, Sarah Yokeham, lived. They were also very young, as even I could tell by their being much inclined to argue gravely with us children, paying the homage of earnest attention to our childish sins of assertion and proposition.
"That gentleman has a birth-mark, and it is something that nice people do not notice," said this very young woman dragging me inescapably after her by reason of having my arm under a painful form of propulsion restricting to the backward stare. That Favour should be implicated in birth did not surprise me; as to `nice' the idea that I was not was disobliging to my sense not of my good manners but of my private self. This young person could have no slightest idea how extremely `nice' my private self was. I was greatly indignant. I concluded that I probably had a special kind of eyes that ordinary nice people had not got. I was most puzzled, perhaps, on account of the young lady herself seeing it only not to notice it.
Before it achieved clarity, my mind fell into a condition of prodigious density in the matter of `marks of Favour'. I had checked with the eager assistance of my sister Sarah that, disappointingly, I had no birthmark - without telling her, of course, what the result of the search might mean to me. After that a Mark of Favour had come by sequent stages to mean any eccentric mark which might be construed as `a sign' providing it took my fancy. A satisfactory image of Favour I could not arrive at. Favour's job in life I could not delineate for myself any further than that it was, at least, to give secrets and pleasure to me and my special eyes.
For example, there was in Birley Fine a tremendous tower. As you came down a paved alley-way, with cottages and little front gardens on one side which were threateningly overpowered by a pale brick wall of tremendous height and length on the other, you turned out then on to a fine piece of common land that lay between my grandmother's house and the town-houses. There was The Tower. It stood decorating and retaining the prodigious brick wall as it came round the corner and rushed through the open space and down into the town to meet there an identical tower, of no significance to me. My tower at the corner of the alley-way had upon its common-facing face one high wide aperture or slot from the sill of which fell, like a beard, a very long black smoky lop-sided stain. It gave the entire edifice a disturbingly vital look as of a being hungry to be fed, despite the number of birds it appeared constantly to swallow and regurgitate, or of a mouth uttering mournful prophecies to a careless because absent multitude; or, of some huge Moloch demanding horrible sacrifices. Sometimes its stained mouth seemed to sing dolefully over the common. And some days what I wanted, impossible I knew (and I discouraged myself on behalf of all those who would discourage me if I mentioned it), was to stand on the top of this uncommonly favour-marked tower, which spoke only to me, and look out over the common and the town, as near the sky as possible, and see what it and I could see: what Favour had in store up there. Some days the old tower wanted that too. But Favour denied it. I can remember coming down that alley-way, with one or other of my elder sisters, Frances or Sarah, full of erotic excitement and fear, to behold the mouth with its strange beard. I can remember waiting in a state of potential nerve-explosion in case either of them mentioned it. Fortunately, neither of them ever did; although it was Frances, catching me transfixed perhaps in fascinated gaze, who told me that the building behind the wall was St. Peter's Hospital. It had never occurred to me to take notice of the building or its vast ornamental gate further down, let alone ask what it `was'. Frances was always very free with information one did not need, and in this case, as in so many, she was wrong. It was St. Peter's Court, the headquarters of the county waterways board.
A line of one of the first hymns I learned to sing deepened the power of Favour. `To whom the lips of children make sweet hosannas ring' it ran. I saw Jesus bending down for each child to kiss him, and each pair of childish lips left on his cheek a sweet hosannas ring. I worked this out after a while to be the unlipsticked equivalent of a lipsticked kiss, a little round mark with tiny radials circling from a vacuole. In short, a mark of Favour called `a sweet-hosannas ring'.
Incidentally, there were several misconstructions of hearing in my head as of understanding in my mind at that time. An evening prayer which one of our Nannies taught us caused me a good deal of dreadful speculation in those moments before I eventually fell asleep, leaving my problem where it fell in the lap of God. It was a very simple prayer, sung to a simple tune.
Lord keep us safe this night
Secure from all our fears
May angels guard us while we sleep
''til morning light appears. Amen.
We used to sing it every evening before she left the room. To me it was badly upsetting, and no sooner had she gone than I would be at it, word for word, somewhere between prayer and exegesis. Lord keep us! This is very necessary, something very frightful might happen to us, might it? It seemed so. Save this night! Oh, save it indeed. But how would the Lord `save' the night? Why did it need `saving'? The possibility of not being able to take night and day for granted was certainly there. And suppose the Lord was not listening to our feeble pipe, and forgot to save it? Or suppose he refused to save it? What would then happen to it? If this were not terror enough, the next line was much worse. Seek cure for all our fears. The idea that even God had to seek cures before He handed them out! Who, on Earth, then, could be sure of finding one for himself? And supposing the answer to the last appeal was No, angels may not guard you while you sleep? What would happen? In our sleep would it be? (Some dreadful Archimago at work, I suppose I thought for although I had never heard of Archimago then, I recognised him at once, that giver of bad dreams having consequences in the real(ish) world, when I met him.) Or would it be behind our backs? Bombs, maybe? But there were perils much worse. Volcanoes? Earthquakes? Floods? All very much worse because although the war had started and bombs had fallen, I still retained a much greater respect for acts of God. And if angels may guard us, I pursued Him, then may they also not depart a moment earlier than morning light, please. I thought it safest to repeat, over and over again, the appeal for the angel-guardians (on the grounds, no doubt, that they at least would know their way to Heaven in the event of emergencies) and I put please at the beginning and in the middle and at the end of that diminished one-line prayer and finished off with several Amens.
Hymns and carols gave me great trouble. The line `Be we low or high' produced the low `beewee' and the high `beewee' to my lasting amazement, and `Joy has come for you and me' caused disgruntlement that Joy, coming as she did with a capital letter, was no further described as to hat or coat nor furnished with a good reason why you and I should go with her on Christmas morning. I settled to my satisfaction that she was Father Christmas's big wife, a replica of the old man himself without a beard but with a very bright red lipstick.
Gradually, egg, larva, pupa, the hosannas-ring and the beewee and the answer-do and that cruel invocation `Suffer! little children' found their way wriggling through the crevices on the outermost margins of the secret place where I had parked them and re-emerging at last shook their wings took their perfect shape and arrived in the common world, unnoticed by me. For it is only later when one recalls, accidentally, how the curious little eggs were laid in the mind that one realises that they, after all, emerged imagos and fled long ago.
`Mark of Favour' was in a quite different case. By the time Aunt Molly applied the phrase to me personally (and I knew not in what respect for I only noticed that I was being noticed just as the substance was disappearing) it had to its name not only kiss marks and rain stains on walls and rust speckles on books and birthmarks, but my grandfather's bookplate (I never saw that grandfather, either), the HMV trademark dog and gramophone; the Royal Standard and, to go with that, an intensely mysterious and magical sentence, bearing to me no sense whatever, which had said Swynnerton bore "Silver, a flowered cross sable", seen once in one of my grandfather's ancient journals and never since rediscovered. It did not need to be. I had copied it out so many times, the mark it made on the page, with its mysterious quotation marks (and the flag, as I took it to be, above it) was enough.
I suppose I had looked up at Aunt Molly very warily, considering perhaps in my mind what mark of favour she had found in me that I had been too nice to notice, and wondering if I should be pleased with it enough to admit it to the pantheon, or if I should be dissatisfied with its insignificance and disappointed in myself. I was asking myself, privately, the questions. But she read my face and she said, "A mark of favour means that you are distinguished, by someone, from the common run of people, and esteemed, by them, above others." I knew better.
Her answers to questions asked often raised more problems than they solved. Either because she did not understand children, having none of her own, only us three Yokehams, her nieces (which, I suppose, with Philip Harisonn, and sometimes James Harisonn, and Tom Kellory, Matthew's son, was quite an experience of children); or because she had a theory about children; or because she was lazy, as I sometimes incline now to believe; all of which are not the same thing but come to the same thing; in any case she never `talked down' to children and forbade others to do so `in her hearing'.
"It means you have been noticed, with interest, by someone," Matthew said, regarding me, his fingers spread out tips to tips, his legs - over which I stood astride, my ankles touching his - stretched out some yard or so in front of him.
"I know. And that someone's name is Favour," I said, always eager to show off for Matthew, ready even to throw my secrets away for him. At the time he was about forty, I supposed, but the most handsome man I had ever seen. He had a lovely face.
He laughed. "I think your Aunt was referring, in a roundabout way, to God."
Two things I knew. One was that Aunt Molly was not interested in God, roundabout or in any other way. The other was that you could not laugh and make jokes about God. So I knew it was Favour. Furthermore, I had enough experience to know that I had been `noticed with interest' by Favour already. I was going to marry Matthew, for one thing. He had a brown triangle mark I liked by his right eyebrow.
By the time the jays had distinguished me and set me above others by their notice, it was Favour's powers of noticing me that I was most keen on. Of course, I still noticed the work of Favour in Marks I found about me. But I was now able to construe the process as Favour noticing me. I was a scrupulous examiner. The jays were shy, therefore I was special. I began to think well of Gallop and Gallop: British Birds.
As a small child, the first time I ever heard the phrase, I was intensely interested in marks of favour. Aunt Molly asked Father Horbark one day in my hearing how somebody had come by `that mark of favour'. And as she always ignored the presence of children up to about the age of twenty five and had a masterly habit of speaking over our heads without ever giving the impression that she imagined we did not hear what she said, we had the best of the silent world. So I had learned to be quiet and listen; even in young days it never occurred to me to butt into an adult conversation with a question. Personal questions were for one to one where they could not be put aside. I was delighted with this new idea. I turned it over and over, testing it on the senses. I never wanted to ask what a thing `was'. I took this particular gem of a phrase to be a mark left by `Favour', whoever Favour was, so the first time I ever saw a disfiguring but fascinating bright red mark almost covering the face of a crisp old soldierly man with clawlike hands buying carrots in the Birley Fine market-place I knew without being told that it was a Mark of Favour.
Whatever that mark might have told me about Favour I was never to know, being dragged hastily along by one of the young nurse-maids who came and went at that time during the first days of the war to help the Nanny to look after us (five or six of us, sometimes more). They were very carefully brought up these girls, much at home with horses - which I was already by that time in desperate fear of; and they came from families living in the country town where my grandmother, Sarah Yokeham, lived. They were also very young, as even I could tell by their being much inclined to argue gravely with us children, paying the homage of earnest attention to our childish sins of assertion and proposition.
"That gentleman has a birth-mark, and it is something that nice people do not notice," said this very young woman dragging me inescapably after her by reason of having my arm under a painful form of propulsion restricting to the backward stare. That Favour should be implicated in birth did not surprise me; as to `nice' the idea that I was not was disobliging to my sense not of my good manners but of my private self. This young person could have no slightest idea how extremely `nice' my private self was. I was greatly indignant. I concluded that I probably had a special kind of eyes that ordinary nice people had not got. I was most puzzled, perhaps, on account of the young lady herself seeing it only not to notice it.
Before it achieved clarity, my mind fell into a condition of prodigious density in the matter of `marks of Favour'. I had checked with the eager assistance of my sister Sarah that, disappointingly, I had no birthmark - without telling her, of course, what the result of the search might mean to me. After that a Mark of Favour had come by sequent stages to mean any eccentric mark which might be construed as `a sign' providing it took my fancy. A satisfactory image of Favour I could not arrive at. Favour's job in life I could not delineate for myself any further than that it was, at least, to give secrets and pleasure to me and my special eyes.
For example, there was in Birley Fine a tremendous tower. As you came down a paved alley-way, with cottages and little front gardens on one side which were threateningly overpowered by a pale brick wall of tremendous height and length on the other, you turned out then on to a fine piece of common land that lay between my grandmother's house and the town-houses. There was The Tower. It stood decorating and retaining the prodigious brick wall as it came round the corner and rushed through the open space and down into the town to meet there an identical tower, of no significance to me. My tower at the corner of the alley-way had upon its common-facing face one high wide aperture or slot from the sill of which fell, like a beard, a very long black smoky lop-sided stain. It gave the entire edifice a disturbingly vital look as of a being hungry to be fed, despite the number of birds it appeared constantly to swallow and regurgitate, or of a mouth uttering mournful prophecies to a careless because absent multitude; or, of some huge Moloch demanding horrible sacrifices. Sometimes its stained mouth seemed to sing dolefully over the common. And some days what I wanted, impossible I knew (and I discouraged myself on behalf of all those who would discourage me if I mentioned it), was to stand on the top of this uncommonly favour-marked tower, which spoke only to me, and look out over the common and the town, as near the sky as possible, and see what it and I could see: what Favour had in store up there. Some days the old tower wanted that too. But Favour denied it. I can remember coming down that alley-way, with one or other of my elder sisters, Frances or Sarah, full of erotic excitement and fear, to behold the mouth with its strange beard. I can remember waiting in a state of potential nerve-explosion in case either of them mentioned it. Fortunately, neither of them ever did; although it was Frances, catching me transfixed perhaps in fascinated gaze, who told me that the building behind the wall was St. Peter's Hospital. It had never occurred to me to take notice of the building or its vast ornamental gate further down, let alone ask what it `was'. Frances was always very free with information one did not need, and in this case, as in so many, she was wrong. It was St. Peter's Court, the headquarters of the county waterways board.
A line of one of the first hymns I learned to sing deepened the power of Favour. `To whom the lips of children make sweet hosannas ring' it ran. I saw Jesus bending down for each child to kiss him, and each pair of childish lips left on his cheek a sweet hosannas ring. I worked this out after a while to be the unlipsticked equivalent of a lipsticked kiss, a little round mark with tiny radials circling from a vacuole. In short, a mark of Favour called `a sweet-hosannas ring'.
Incidentally, there were several misconstructions of hearing in my head as of understanding in my mind at that time. An evening prayer which one of our Nannies taught us caused me a good deal of dreadful speculation in those moments before I eventually fell asleep, leaving my problem where it fell in the lap of God. It was a very simple prayer, sung to a simple tune.
Lord keep us safe this night
Secure from all our fears
May angels guard us while we sleep
''til morning light appears. Amen.
We used to sing it every evening before she left the room. To me it was badly upsetting, and no sooner had she gone than I would be at it, word for word, somewhere between prayer and exegesis. Lord keep us! This is very necessary, something very frightful might happen to us, might it? It seemed so. Save this night! Oh, save it indeed. But how would the Lord `save' the night? Why did it need `saving'? The possibility of not being able to take night and day for granted was certainly there. And suppose the Lord was not listening to our feeble pipe, and forgot to save it? Or suppose he refused to save it? What would then happen to it? If this were not terror enough, the next line was much worse. Seek cure for all our fears. The idea that even God had to seek cures before He handed them out! Who, on Earth, then, could be sure of finding one for himself? And supposing the answer to the last appeal was No, angels may not guard you while you sleep? What would happen? In our sleep would it be? (Some dreadful Archimago at work, I suppose I thought for although I had never heard of Archimago then, I recognised him at once, that giver of bad dreams having consequences in the real(ish) world, when I met him.) Or would it be behind our backs? Bombs, maybe? But there were perils much worse. Volcanoes? Earthquakes? Floods? All very much worse because although the war had started and bombs had fallen, I still retained a much greater respect for acts of God. And if angels may guard us, I pursued Him, then may they also not depart a moment earlier than morning light, please. I thought it safest to repeat, over and over again, the appeal for the angel-guardians (on the grounds, no doubt, that they at least would know their way to Heaven in the event of emergencies) and I put please at the beginning and in the middle and at the end of that diminished one-line prayer and finished off with several Amens.
Hymns and carols gave me great trouble. The line `Be we low or high' produced the low `beewee' and the high `beewee' to my lasting amazement, and `Joy has come for you and me' caused disgruntlement that Joy, coming as she did with a capital letter, was no further described as to hat or coat nor furnished with a good reason why you and I should go with her on Christmas morning. I settled to my satisfaction that she was Father Christmas's big wife, a replica of the old man himself without a beard but with a very bright red lipstick.
Gradually, egg, larva, pupa, the hosannas-ring and the beewee and the answer-do and that cruel invocation `Suffer! little children' found their way wriggling through the crevices on the outermost margins of the secret place where I had parked them and re-emerging at last shook their wings took their perfect shape and arrived in the common world, unnoticed by me. For it is only later when one recalls, accidentally, how the curious little eggs were laid in the mind that one realises that they, after all, emerged imagos and fled long ago.
`Mark of Favour' was in a quite different case. By the time Aunt Molly applied the phrase to me personally (and I knew not in what respect for I only noticed that I was being noticed just as the substance was disappearing) it had to its name not only kiss marks and rain stains on walls and rust speckles on books and birthmarks, but my grandfather's bookplate (I never saw that grandfather, either), the HMV trademark dog and gramophone; the Royal Standard and, to go with that, an intensely mysterious and magical sentence, bearing to me no sense whatever, which had said Swynnerton bore "Silver, a flowered cross sable", seen once in one of my grandfather's ancient journals and never since rediscovered. It did not need to be. I had copied it out so many times, the mark it made on the page, with its mysterious quotation marks (and the flag, as I took it to be, above it) was enough.
I suppose I had looked up at Aunt Molly very warily, considering perhaps in my mind what mark of favour she had found in me that I had been too nice to notice, and wondering if I should be pleased with it enough to admit it to the pantheon, or if I should be dissatisfied with its insignificance and disappointed in myself. I was asking myself, privately, the questions. But she read my face and she said, "A mark of favour means that you are distinguished, by someone, from the common run of people, and esteemed, by them, above others." I knew better.
Her answers to questions asked often raised more problems than they solved. Either because she did not understand children, having none of her own, only us three Yokehams, her nieces (which, I suppose, with Philip Harisonn, and sometimes James Harisonn, and Tom Kellory, Matthew's son, was quite an experience of children); or because she had a theory about children; or because she was lazy, as I sometimes incline now to believe; all of which are not the same thing but come to the same thing; in any case she never `talked down' to children and forbade others to do so `in her hearing'.
"It means you have been noticed, with interest, by someone," Matthew said, regarding me, his fingers spread out tips to tips, his legs - over which I stood astride, my ankles touching his - stretched out some yard or so in front of him.
"I know. And that someone's name is Favour," I said, always eager to show off for Matthew, ready even to throw my secrets away for him. At the time he was about forty, I supposed, but the most handsome man I had ever seen. He had a lovely face.
He laughed. "I think your Aunt was referring, in a roundabout way, to God."
Two things I knew. One was that Aunt Molly was not interested in God, roundabout or in any other way. The other was that you could not laugh and make jokes about God. So I knew it was Favour. Furthermore, I had enough experience to know that I had been `noticed with interest' by Favour already. I was going to marry Matthew, for one thing. He had a brown triangle mark I liked by his right eyebrow.
By the time the jays had distinguished me and set me above others by their notice, it was Favour's powers of noticing me that I was most keen on. Of course, I still noticed the work of Favour in Marks I found about me. But I was now able to construe the process as Favour noticing me. I was a scrupulous examiner. The jays were shy, therefore I was special. I began to think well of Gallop and Gallop: British Birds.
Monday, 22 February 2010
Post 2
I went straight to Aunt Molly's room for her Gallop and Gallop: British Birds.
"Have you seen my reading spectacles?"
"You've got them on. I've just seen a pair of jays. Fed them with breadcrumbs."
"Extremely unlikely." Aunt Molly smoothed the distraught cushions, violently interrogated in the glasses-search, while I described the blue flash. "Jays aren't breadcrumb birds." Buncrumbs to be accurate. "Get me the book."
I'd got it. Handed her British Birds impatiently. She always took longer than I did, and infuriatingly read silently before utterance. "Jays, it seems," she said at last. "If you can be trusted to say what you saw. It says here," she adjusted her reading glasses, "Jays do not tolerate any familiarity with human beings." She chuckled.
"Exactly what one would expect of that book." I had always disliked it for good reasons. All the browns and blacks of the birds I knew well were so very smart and paperweight on the page, the sky so very smart old vicarage drawing room blue, and there is nothing to be said, as I said then and there, for a picture of a sparrow all nicely flecked-out and spruce when the scrabbling in the dust and the tail-twitching hind-uppermost on the rail and the cavorting in the bushes - making the hydrangeas jump and shake and twitter as if they were being tickled to death by fleas - is so missing, there is not even the merest suggestion of life in bone or feather. Here the jay, garrulus glandarius, looked as timid and wistful, and just about as menacing as a willow-warbler, roughly the same size; and certainly without enough energy to pick up so much as an acorn. But the colours were rightish. Aunt Molly had settled to a good bird-read. Here the raggedy crow was hooked and fierce, but impeccably gentrified in city black, just as I remembered on the very margins of memory, my lovely Uncle Paul Absecond, Aunt Molly's husband, used to be even on Saturdays and Sundays.
I did not know much about birds, despite my occasional bird-watching walks of childhood memory with Matthew. They were as much poetry-rendering as bird-watching, and as a consequence perhaps certain birds never were mere birds for me. But I reckoned I knew more than the book about the birds I knew, which were all brown and beige or black and grey; sparrows, thrushes, blackbirds and pigeons, the kestrels on the common, and the choughs on the rocky pre-Cambrian coast of Wales; a bull-finch, a bluetit, a robin, a pheasant, a partridge, oh, and herons.
Once, on a steamer going up to Hampton Court, I counted seventeen shabby herons like judges, at the very least Tulkinghorns, to a man, still and silent, hunched shouldered, slit eyed, stalk legs, each giving off an aura of secrets from the charnel house, standing along the bank in the clear-water margins of an island below Richmond. They were drawn urgently to the attention of a young man opposite me and fiddling with a very large portable radio by his girl-friend who was leaning lovingly on his arm (he having taken the best seat next to the water) to get a better look at them. After a long moment, in which I feared he would miss them altogether, he glanced up at the last one of them for a second. "Some species of a penguin," he said magisterially, and went back to his radio mechanics. Oh yes, I'd seen that. I already had a deep interest in sex and its perversionary process.
There was a class of birds that I did not count as birds at all. They were manifestations of mysterious Ideas, immortals, each with a secret ministry; and that was thanks to Matthew. There was in me, a place where certain delightful creatures, things, people, sayings, poems, stories, lived and thrived together. I do not know by what qualification they passed into this dark sanctum (although some arrived by my faulty understanding and on declaring themselves naturally passed out of it), but at the heart of it I had in it the peacock, the swan, the skylark, and the nightingale. I had abundant evidence that all these creatures actually existed. I had seen the lot. But in my secret mind they had a life richer and of much greater significance in time and story than the feathered one.
I could never see the peacocks, most beautiful, most useless, most mysterious peacock, the Glory of God, hanging like strange foliage in the trees or displaying the iridescent lacy green and the blue and black of the eye feather in the grounds of the old castle, Aunt Molly's (and Matthew's as it turned out) , favourite hotel in Edinburgh; I could never see a swan open its back on the river as if it were a bride or bridegroom of goodly hue needing only to be crammed with flowers to float upriver to its wedding and back to merry London, my most kindly nurse, the air trembling against the bridal day which is not long, sweet Thames running softly, the song never-ending and my hand in Matthew's; I could never see the larks rising higher, higher, higher into the breezy summer skies over the South Downs and trilling with happiness to be so near heaven, singing hymns unbidden until the world is wrought to sympathy with hope and fears it heeded not; I could never hear fall the tiny leaflets of chased silver and gold that the nightingale sprinkled all over the beechen gardens shadows numberless of Golden Square in the small hours of summer mornings, charmed magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faerie lands forlorn; never see nor hear without being captured as if rooted to the ground by my feet, without being tied by my heartstrings to whichever of those creatures it might be, without my heart aching with the loss when I and they were parted. Immortalised in the spun gold web of English poetry, birds they never were, they were not born for death. They belonged to me. They belonged to me and Matthew.
I was fond of the auks and parrots and storks and humming birds that belonged to the fairy tales I read, and I did not at all mind looking at Birds of Java or Birds of India for hours on end, because although they too were paperweight and spruce, I did not miss on the page the life in them because I had never seen them, they were all fairy-tales to me. But they were commonplace-mysterious and they never crept into the secret part of my life.
"Jays are crows. They eat birds, breaking them in pieces with their claws. They eat chicks, eggs, mice, fish. Important to acorn dispersion. Go back to acorn stores in hard winters, and so on." Aunt Molly pushed her glasses back, and the cushions had better look out.
There was about this information much that assorted well with my imagination of the jays, a strong sort of formidable creature intelligence with plenty of backbone, fearlessness; there was something of Matthew there. So I allowed also that they were possibly stand-offish with human beings. Therefore, it followed, I belonged to the elite to whom these predators would come to eat breadcrumbs, buncrumbs to be exact. I conceded that, for that day, there was something very special about me. There are days like that.
"They were probably feeding on the flying ants. There has been a swarm here this afternoon, hateful things."
I did not care. It was still a mark of favour, the jays coming down to me like that; a visitation from the gods. I was not one of those who put a mark of favour lightly aside, or accept[ed] it without letting it do its work. It was a sign. It spoke well for the coming summer.
Aunt Molly brushed her hand fastidiously across her lacklustre greying hair, and knocked her glasses off. I picked them up.
"Have you seen my reading spectacles?"
"You've got them on. I've just seen a pair of jays. Fed them with breadcrumbs."
"Extremely unlikely." Aunt Molly smoothed the distraught cushions, violently interrogated in the glasses-search, while I described the blue flash. "Jays aren't breadcrumb birds." Buncrumbs to be accurate. "Get me the book."
I'd got it. Handed her British Birds impatiently. She always took longer than I did, and infuriatingly read silently before utterance. "Jays, it seems," she said at last. "If you can be trusted to say what you saw. It says here," she adjusted her reading glasses, "Jays do not tolerate any familiarity with human beings." She chuckled.
"Exactly what one would expect of that book." I had always disliked it for good reasons. All the browns and blacks of the birds I knew well were so very smart and paperweight on the page, the sky so very smart old vicarage drawing room blue, and there is nothing to be said, as I said then and there, for a picture of a sparrow all nicely flecked-out and spruce when the scrabbling in the dust and the tail-twitching hind-uppermost on the rail and the cavorting in the bushes - making the hydrangeas jump and shake and twitter as if they were being tickled to death by fleas - is so missing, there is not even the merest suggestion of life in bone or feather. Here the jay, garrulus glandarius, looked as timid and wistful, and just about as menacing as a willow-warbler, roughly the same size; and certainly without enough energy to pick up so much as an acorn. But the colours were rightish. Aunt Molly had settled to a good bird-read. Here the raggedy crow was hooked and fierce, but impeccably gentrified in city black, just as I remembered on the very margins of memory, my lovely Uncle Paul Absecond, Aunt Molly's husband, used to be even on Saturdays and Sundays.
I did not know much about birds, despite my occasional bird-watching walks of childhood memory with Matthew. They were as much poetry-rendering as bird-watching, and as a consequence perhaps certain birds never were mere birds for me. But I reckoned I knew more than the book about the birds I knew, which were all brown and beige or black and grey; sparrows, thrushes, blackbirds and pigeons, the kestrels on the common, and the choughs on the rocky pre-Cambrian coast of Wales; a bull-finch, a bluetit, a robin, a pheasant, a partridge, oh, and herons.
Once, on a steamer going up to Hampton Court, I counted seventeen shabby herons like judges, at the very least Tulkinghorns, to a man, still and silent, hunched shouldered, slit eyed, stalk legs, each giving off an aura of secrets from the charnel house, standing along the bank in the clear-water margins of an island below Richmond. They were drawn urgently to the attention of a young man opposite me and fiddling with a very large portable radio by his girl-friend who was leaning lovingly on his arm (he having taken the best seat next to the water) to get a better look at them. After a long moment, in which I feared he would miss them altogether, he glanced up at the last one of them for a second. "Some species of a penguin," he said magisterially, and went back to his radio mechanics. Oh yes, I'd seen that. I already had a deep interest in sex and its perversionary process.
There was a class of birds that I did not count as birds at all. They were manifestations of mysterious Ideas, immortals, each with a secret ministry; and that was thanks to Matthew. There was in me, a place where certain delightful creatures, things, people, sayings, poems, stories, lived and thrived together. I do not know by what qualification they passed into this dark sanctum (although some arrived by my faulty understanding and on declaring themselves naturally passed out of it), but at the heart of it I had in it the peacock, the swan, the skylark, and the nightingale. I had abundant evidence that all these creatures actually existed. I had seen the lot. But in my secret mind they had a life richer and of much greater significance in time and story than the feathered one.
I could never see the peacocks, most beautiful, most useless, most mysterious peacock, the Glory of God, hanging like strange foliage in the trees or displaying the iridescent lacy green and the blue and black of the eye feather in the grounds of the old castle, Aunt Molly's (and Matthew's as it turned out) , favourite hotel in Edinburgh; I could never see a swan open its back on the river as if it were a bride or bridegroom of goodly hue needing only to be crammed with flowers to float upriver to its wedding and back to merry London, my most kindly nurse, the air trembling against the bridal day which is not long, sweet Thames running softly, the song never-ending and my hand in Matthew's; I could never see the larks rising higher, higher, higher into the breezy summer skies over the South Downs and trilling with happiness to be so near heaven, singing hymns unbidden until the world is wrought to sympathy with hope and fears it heeded not; I could never hear fall the tiny leaflets of chased silver and gold that the nightingale sprinkled all over the beechen gardens shadows numberless of Golden Square in the small hours of summer mornings, charmed magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faerie lands forlorn; never see nor hear without being captured as if rooted to the ground by my feet, without being tied by my heartstrings to whichever of those creatures it might be, without my heart aching with the loss when I and they were parted. Immortalised in the spun gold web of English poetry, birds they never were, they were not born for death. They belonged to me. They belonged to me and Matthew.
I was fond of the auks and parrots and storks and humming birds that belonged to the fairy tales I read, and I did not at all mind looking at Birds of Java or Birds of India for hours on end, because although they too were paperweight and spruce, I did not miss on the page the life in them because I had never seen them, they were all fairy-tales to me. But they were commonplace-mysterious and they never crept into the secret part of my life.
"Jays are crows. They eat birds, breaking them in pieces with their claws. They eat chicks, eggs, mice, fish. Important to acorn dispersion. Go back to acorn stores in hard winters, and so on." Aunt Molly pushed her glasses back, and the cushions had better look out.
There was about this information much that assorted well with my imagination of the jays, a strong sort of formidable creature intelligence with plenty of backbone, fearlessness; there was something of Matthew there. So I allowed also that they were possibly stand-offish with human beings. Therefore, it followed, I belonged to the elite to whom these predators would come to eat breadcrumbs, buncrumbs to be exact. I conceded that, for that day, there was something very special about me. There are days like that.
"They were probably feeding on the flying ants. There has been a swarm here this afternoon, hateful things."
I did not care. It was still a mark of favour, the jays coming down to me like that; a visitation from the gods. I was not one of those who put a mark of favour lightly aside, or accept[ed] it without letting it do its work. It was a sign. It spoke well for the coming summer.
Aunt Molly brushed her hand fastidiously across her lacklustre greying hair, and knocked her glasses off. I picked them up.
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