Good Behaviour (26 page)

That winter at Temple Alice we ignored Christmas; we were too bogged down in disaster for any jollity. We kept our heads above
the morass, stifled screaming despairs only by the exercise of Good Behaviour. Good Behaviour shrivelled to nothing as a support
in my insensate longing for Hubert and Richard as the night of the Hunt Ball drew nearer, came so near that I was within touching
distance of the event.

The afternoon hours before the ordeal were stiff with nothing to be done until the time came for bathing and scenting and
strong girdling, a fortification of pink satin and écru lace, folded away since the Horse Show. At least I could light up
the stove in my bedroom, filled from my ostentatiously private supply of paraffin, then I could manicure and buff my nails
before the light failed and my courage too failed further from me. By then it would be teatime.

I was halfway up the staircase on the way to my bedroom when I was struck by a very practical and rather pleasing idea. It
took me back to the hall and almost ran in front of me to the drawingroom door. Standing inside the doorway I was
immobilised in the draughtless area of unused space; unyielding in its distance from our loves, Richard’s and mine and Hubert’s,
the room contained a malevolent perfection of loneliness. I had not come to breathe back memories; I snatched up the small
black gramophone, frozen all these months to the top of the grand piano. I had decided to practise my dancing before the ball;
at least that would warm me and occupy time.

In my bedroom, I set the gramophone playing softly and set my feet moving with their own strict docility to the rhythm. Hubert
always said I have an amazing sense of rhythm, and it’s true. And I am lighter than air when I am dancing. I danced across
my room holding the afternoon light in my arms. I was good. I was exhilarated. I rewound the gramophone. I gripped the brass
rail of my bed and limbered up my charleston. I didn’t hear Rose’s knock on my door, if she had knocked. She was standing
there respectful, watching, not quite smiling, waiting for me to stop dancing and lift the needle off the record before she
spoke.

‘I thought you might like to know, Miss Aroon,’ she said, ‘the Major’s having a little rest.’ That was all she said.

When she turned and went out, in her splendid, unhurrying way, I was blushing purple into the V of my shirt because she had
watched me holding on to the bed rail, kicking out my strong legs to the music. She must have noticed my bosoms, swinging
like jelly bags, bouncing from side to side; without words she conveyed the impression of what she had seen as unseemly –
the Fat Lady in the peepshow. No. Forget the thought – a blush fails, armpits cease their creeping prickle. If Rose came back
on any pretext, she would find me sitting at the dressing-table buffing my nails in a
dégagé
manner while the gramophone played
softly with the lid down. I saw myself again as I was – a young girl getting ready for a very grand ball. I know I’m big,
but I’m a girl, I suppose, not a joke.

At teatime I told Papa again where I was going to dine and dance. ‘Ah, watchit, watchit. Pretty high pheasants,’ he said.
There was absolutely nothing wrong with Papa’s brain when he thought about shooting.

‘But I’m dancing, Papa.’

‘Awful. Awful,’ he said and caught my hand. I wondered if there was anything he didn’t understand. Even now.

‘No racing today,’ I said, when he began to fidget in an expectant way. I knew he wasn’t thinking of the results, but I clung
to the myth of our usual evening occupation. ‘They’re frozen up in England.’ I got to my feet. I was going to leave him before
I knew I must. ‘I’m changing now. I have to start early. Frozen roads.’

‘What?’

‘Ice.’

‘Take it easy.’ He was relieved to be left waiting for Rose. But when I was at the door he called distressfully.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I hear her on the stairs.’ Now I felt angry.

‘No. No. No.’ He was speechlessly urgent. ‘See you dressed
UP
,’ he said at last. My heart melted and I floated past Rose in the doorway as though she didn’t exist.

Excitement possessed me. I was dressing for somebody. As I strapped down my bosoms, I was outside my body and dressing it
up with extreme care and calculation. At last I was ready for my dress. I struggled in. I looked at unbelievable me. Gold
and pink swooned round, melting my size away. I stepped up to my reflection, then away from it, and I
could find only surprise and delight in what I saw. Holding the rose here and there against my shoulder, I waited for a shudder
of pleasure to run through me before I plunged the point of the safety-pin into the dress and shoulder straps. Last of all
I took off the hair net. It would go back, of course, like the rose to its box, for the journey, but Papa must see me as I
really am, every wave rigidly in its place, flawless. I was hungry for his approval as for a good dinner. I went swaying and
floating round the balustraded circle below the star-filled dome, and on down the further corridor to Papa’s room; I floated
across to the foot of his bed, poised and ripe for his stunned admiration.

Before my moment had time to live, it fell and shattered round me. Mummie was sitting with him, as though she had guessed
I would be doing just this. She sat throwing sprigs of bay and lavender stalks onto the fire and sniffing up their little
bursts of flame and scent, and then throwing on another sprig.

‘Aren’t you starting rather early?’ I might have been going to post a letter for all the notice she took of my dress.

I had meant to laugh and pivot about and show myself from every side to Papa; to kiss him and let him exclaim at my ravishing
scent. But, as she looked across and smiled at Papa, I could only stand muttering about icy roads while my fever dropped from
me and I loomed there, at the foot of his bed, as large as life again.

Papa was lying back against his pillows, his silver cup in his good hand. So arranged one forgot he had no arm to use on one
side and no leg on the other. And almost no speech. His looks and his manner survived.

‘Good girl,’ he said. He looked over to Mummie to join him
and help him elaborate his admiration. She considered me with a dull obedience.

‘Yes. Stupendous,’ was what she said. I blushed as I had when Rose stopped my dancing, and this time I was choking on tears
of pain and hatred. It was a shocking moment for each of us. The worst possible instance of not knowing how to behave.

The door knob was in my hand when a sound from Papa’s bed impelled me towards him. He didn’t have a hand to give me, on account
of the whisky cup, and we hardly ever kissed, but his look held me before him, held me away from him in admiration. And from
the dark of time in his mind a catch-word, a phrase, was snatched back and spoken distinctly: ‘I’m on your side, sweetheart.’
By no possibility could Mummie have avoided or escaped hearing him say it. He had restored me.

I drive well and that evening, along the icy roads to Ballytore Barraway, I felt less nervous than at any hour of the day.
Phrases for the night’s dancing partners slid easily in and out of my mind: ‘I
am
sorry. I’m afraid number eight has gone too … Yes, they’re frozen up in England … no racing at Sandown … Marvellous tune
… Yes, I’d love to … ’ But as I arrived at the great, strange house an incoming tide of shyness belittled all confidence.
A simple ache for Papa and Hubert filled me.

I drove under a stone archway, high as a railway bridge, on which the family coat of arms stood out, gross and gigantic. Beyond
the archway, round three sides of a courtyard, Gothic battlements and towers thrust upwards and bellied outwards. Smaller
archways squatted before dark doorways. Windows bulged on the vast spread of walls. It was Grimm’s fairytales
gone mad in stone, and, like a fairytale, light shone from all the windows. For all the light I found it hard to tell which
was the hall door. Double flights of balustraded steps led to a diversity of possible entrances. I chose the largest door
with the longest, widest flow of steps, and I was right. In the hall a man so aristocratic and severe I thought he might be
my host put me right about his status.

‘You’re staying, miss?’ he said gently.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve come to dinner.’

‘Ah, your coat? Upstairs, miss. The blue room. On your right. We dine at nine.’

‘Oh.’ I reeled. ‘Then I’m much too early.’

‘Oh, no, miss. Punctuality means nothing with us.’ As he said it, early and late fused in a sort of splendour.

The bedroom set apart for the ladies’ coats was blue and cream and blue again. My heels sank behind me in blue carpet that
touched the ivory walls. I was up to my ankles in white fur. Before the swelling kidney of the dressing-table and its winged
gold mirror I sat down on a blue-and-gold stool, my feet lost in the fur rug. I pinned the gold rose on my shoulder. I took
off my hair net. I smeared pale lipsalve on my pale lips and, as I did these things, every easy phrase that I had manufactured
in the car became extinct, leaving not one conversational hint for me to follow.

When I waited, ready and hesitant at the stair-head, a child ran up the flight towards me. She was one of the serene, well-mannered
nursery sisters I had seen at race-meetings: children who knew how to comport themselves in the saddling enclosure. Tonight
she tore past me, eating something. Her jodhpurs were tight as a skin, her little man’s shirt unbuttoned over a liberty bodice.
‘Hullo.’ I had to say something. She was
halfway up the next flight before she stopped.

‘How do you do?’ She sounded corrosively polite. She added: ‘You
are
early,’ and went pounding away into her different life.

At the foot of the staircase I delayed, stretching out a minute before making my early entrance. On my arrival I had been
too nervous to observe the hall. Now, as I looked round, it impressed me like a great Protestant hymn. ‘Pavilioned in splendour
and girded with Praise.’ … Small suits of armour sank their pointed feet in the carpet. Once upon a time someone had said:
I’ll just slip into my armour before we go out. Not here, I corrected myself, remembering how coolly informed Mummie was on
the brief ancestry of these privileged people. Castle and title dated from the 1890s.

I stood there waiting. There was nobody to tell me where to go. I was the lost girl in the fairy story. I dared myself to
go forwards. I opened a door, its architrave crowned by a bunch of swords. Then I was going headlong through a chain of rooms
– large, smaller, smallest. In each room a fire was burning, not very brightly. Light came through deep parchment lampshades.
Knole sofas, heavily tasselled, waited empty. Huge jardinières were filled with hyacinths and freesias. Photographs in lavish
leather frames stood on every table. Photographs of children, race-horses, dogs, brides. I recognised a royal face, set apart
from the rest, its modest isolation calling for attention.

At the end of the third room, from behind a closed door I heard voices. I knew I must go in. I couldn’t just stand in the
doorway. Suppose it was opened? What should I say? ‘I’m Aroon’?

Within the room a man laughed. Nobody joined in the
laugh. Then, as I opened the door, suddenly they all laughed out together, robustly enjoying and sharing a harsh, confident
amusement.

Far off down the room five or six people sat round the fire. One and all, the men wore tweed coats and grey flannel or whipcord
trousers and the women Aertex shirts and the finest wool cardigans and three, four, or five rows of pearls. I had not imagined
them otherwise than in evening dresses and hunt coats with varied silk facings.

Standing unacknowledged in the doorway, I felt my bare shoulders swell into mountainous acres of flesh. I couldn’t find my
voice, even if I could have found any words with which to announce myself. Then I realised they were all listening intently
to a record – a husky thread of a voice galvanised their attention. A man got up to wind the gramophone. I felt he saw me,
but I was none of his business, definitely less important than the record he was changing. I was wrong. He touched a girl
whose great blond head was hung down between her shoulders; she seemed to be eating the pearls off her neck. She got to her
feet and came loping across the room to me in flat leather shoes. She was as tall as I was, but her head was hung like a harebell
on a thread of stem, and the length of her body shrank under her woollen clothes. Her voice was rich and concerned.

‘Aroon,’ she said, ‘how sweet of you to come. Were the roads ghastly? Have a drink. Do you know everybody? John Savernake
… Mary Noisesome … Ronnie Pennine … Gwenny Fishguard … Dominick … Thomasine and Janine I know you know.’ They all murmured,
and when the gramophone stopped they got off the floor and the chairs and went out of the room one behind the other, in a
private follow-my-leader sort of game.

‘Oh, you
rats
,’ she moaned. I thought her name might be Penelope, but I’m glad I didn’t say it because I found out afterwards it was Mary
Ann. She was the beautiful married sister … married to which of the beautiful men? And she was the very soul of kindness.
‘I’ll make you a warming drink.’ She looked down the length of the cocktail shaker; it was as big as a tunnel for a train.
‘This is all ice,’ she said. ‘
What
would you like? Just say. I’m so bad about drinks. Oh, that rotten Dominick, gone to first bath.’

‘May I have a glass of sherry?’

‘No. No sherry.’ She searched desperately among the bottles. ‘They are hopeless. Do forgive if I don’t call O’Brien now; he
is so cross on party nights. Look – have a glass of champagne. Why not? Please do. Can you open the awful thing?’ She stopped
talking and said, ‘Ooo, you
are
clever,’ when the cork came quietly out – Papa had often shown me how to do it.

‘Do be happy. Do keep warm. This room’s icy. Do you think they’ll do anything about the fire? Oh, and do be kind to Uncle
Ulick. He’s quite a sweet, but so peculiar. You do promise? You won’t mind, will you. You
are
kind.’