National Velvet (2 page)

    
“Any spawn,” said Mrs. Brown without looking up, “goes on a tin tray.”

    
“Yes, mother.”

    
“Larder,” said Mrs. Brown.

    
Velvet put her shoes in the corner and the horse in the shell-box and disappeared. The others sat in silence till she came back with the tray.

    
Cold ham, jam, butter were placed on the table, and a dish of radishes.

    
Mr. Brown came in by the slaughter-house door, gumboots drawn to his thighs, his sleeves rolled up, his hands wet from the hose. He passed through the room on his way to wash for supper. Velvet and the three golden greyhounds sat on in brooding silence. A smell of liver and bacon stole in from the kitchen.

    
The two doors, that on the street and that on the kitchen, opened suddenly together. Out of the black hole of the street came Mi Taylor, brushed up for supper. Mrs. Brown came in from the kitchen carrying the liver and bacon.

    
The room filled with smells. Mr. Brown came in putting on his coat. Everyone sat down, Mi last of all, pulling up his chair gingerly.

    
“Well . . .” said Mr. Brown, and helped the liver round.

    
Meredith went out and fetched in the jugs of coffee and milk.

    
“Bin over to Worthing?” said Mr. Brown.

    
“I have” said Mi.

    
“Got that freezing-machine catalogue for me?”

    
“Shops shut again.”

    
“Good God!” said Mr. Brown exasperated. “Don't you ever learn the shut-shop day in Worthing? Whadyer do then?”

    
“Had three teeth out. Dentist was all there was open.”

    
“Oh, Mi, where?” said Velvet.

    
Mi opened his jaw and pointed to a bloody wound.

    
“Oughter eat pap for it,” said Mr. Brown. “It's pulpy.”

    
“S'got to learn to harden,” said Mi.

    
“Donald asleep?” said Mally.

    
“This hour gone,” said Mrs. Brown.

    
They ate, sleek girls' heads bent under the lamp, Mr. Brown and Mrs. Brown square and full and steady, Mi silent and dexterous with his red hair boiling up in curls on his skull.

    
Jacob went grinning round the table from sister to sister.

    
“Nobody feeds him,” ordered Mi under his breath.

    
His red hair boiled up on his skull fiercer than ever at Jacob's presumption.

    
The yard spaniels remained in the street on the doorstep through meals. They lay and leant against the front door, grouped on the step, so that the door creaked
and groaned under their pressed bodies. When the door was opened from the inside they fell in. When this happened Mi sent them out again with a roar.

    
Jacob had been allowed in all his life. His fox terrier body, growing stout in middle age, still vibrated to a look. His lips curled and he grinned at the blink of a human eyelash. His tail ached with wagging, and even his hips waggled as he moved. But under cover of these virtues he was watchful for his benefit, watchful for human weakness, affected, a ready liar, disobedient, boastful, a sucker-up, and had a lifelong battle with Mi. Mi adored him, but seldom said a kind word to him. Jacob adored Mi, and there was no one whom he would not sooner deceive. At meals Jacob wriggled and grinned from sister to sister, making a circle round Mi, whose leg was scooping for him.

    
Just outside the slaughter-house was a black barking dog on the end of a string. This dog had a name but no character. It barked without ceasing day and night. Nobody heard it. The Browns slept and lived and ate beside its barking. The spaniels never opened their mouths. They pressed against doors and knee and furniture. They lived for love and never got it. They were herded indiscriminately together and none knew their characteristics but Mi. The sisters felt for them what they felt for the fowls in the fowlyard. Mi fed them.

    
But Jacob's weaknesses and affectations and dubious sincerities were thrust upon everyone's notice. When Velvet came in at the front door, and pressing back the
leaning spaniels, closed it, Jacob would rise, wriggle his hips at her, bow and grin.

    
“How exquisite, how condescending, how flattering!” said he, bowing lower and lower, with his front legs slid out on the floor and his back legs stiff. But if asked to go for a walk not a step would he come outside unless he had business of his own with the ashbin, or wanted to taunt the chained and raging dog with the spine of a herring dragged in the dust.

    
The chained dog chiefly barked. But sometimes he stopped rending the unheeding air and lay silent. Then he would whirl out on his chain like a fury and fall flat, half choked. And Jacob would stand without flinching, banking on the strength of the chain, and think, “You poor one-thoughted fool . . .”

    
The Browns loved Jacob as they loved each other, deeply, from the back of the soul, with intolerance in daily life.

    
As the girls ate a private dream floated in Velvet's mind. . . . It was a little horse, slender and perfect, rising divinely at a jump, fore-feet tucked up neatly, intelligence and delight in its eager eye, and on its back, glued lightly and easily to the saddle . . . she, Velvet . . . Gymkhana Velvet. As she took the visionary jump in dream her living hand stole to her mouth. She pulled out the torturing plate and hid it in her lap. Mi's eyes were on her in a flash, he who never missed anything.

    
“Be windy for the Fair Thursday,” said Mrs. Brown.

    
“It's coming in wild from the southwest,” said Mr. Brown.

    
“Always does when it comes in at all,” said Mrs. Brown. “Three-day gale.”

    
All the trees in the dark village outside attested this. They were blown like fans set on one side. The rooks shuffled and slept in them, waving up and down among the breaking twigs. The village street was white with rook-droppings.

    
“Put that in again, Velvet,” commanded Mrs. Brown.

    
“She got it out again?” asked Mr. Brown, looking up sharply.

    
“It aches me an' aches when I eat,” said Velvet.

    
“Ache or no, argue or no, that plate cost me four pound ten and it's solid gold an' it goes in,” said Mr. Brown. “I'm not going to have a child like a rabbit if I can help it. You girls have got your faces for your fortunes and none other. I've told you often enough.”

    
The three golden greyhounds sat up straighter than ever and Velvet fumbled with her teeth.

    
“It's got hooked up.”

    
“Unhook it, then,” said Mr. Brown. He sat back, satisfied, commanding and comfortable, and pulled the radishes towards him. Then he passed the dish around.

    
“Take a radish, Velvet.”

    
“Couldn't bite a
radish!”

    
“Go without then,” said Mr. Brown happily, and leant back to light his pipe.

    
All the Browns tilted their chairs. Nobody ever told them it would hurt the carpet. They ate, ruminated,
and tilted. Only Mrs. Brown sat solid and silent. She did not talk much, but managed the till down at the shop in the street. She knew all about courage and endurance, to the last ounce of strength, from the first swallow of overcome timidity. She valued and appraised each daughter, she knew what each daughter could do. She was glad too that her daughters were not boys because she could not understand the courage of men, but only the courage of women. Mr. Brown was with dignity the head of the family. But Mrs. Brown was the standard of the family. When Velvet had fallen off the pier at the age of six her mother went in thirty feet after her, sixteen stone, royal-blue afternoon dress. A straight dive, like the dive of an ageing mammoth. The reporter from the
West Worthing News
came to make a story of it and said to Edwina, “Your mother swum the Channel, didn't she?” Edwina nodded towards her mother. “Better ask
her.”
“What's past's past, young man,” said Mrs. Brown heavily and shut her mouth and her door.

    
Mi Taylor's father had trained Mrs. Brown for her swim, trained her when she had been a great girl of nineteen, neckless, clumsy, and incredibly enduring. Mi himself had been a flyweight boxer, killed his man, because the wretched creature was in status lymphaticus, got exonerated and yet somehow disqualified, tramped the country, held horses, cleaned stables and drifted nearer and nearer to the racing world, till he knew all about it except the feel of a horse's back. Arriving somehow in the ebb of Lewes races he had been taken
on by Mr. Brown for the slaughter-house, for running errands, and lately even for negotiating for stock.

    
Mrs. Brown stared at him when he came with a look of strange pleasure in her hooded eyes. Mi Taylor, the son of Father Taylor! He knew all about her, Taylor did. The only one who ever did. He knew what she was made of. He'd had the last ounce out of her. He and the doctor at her five confinements, those men knew. Nobody else, ever. Mi was his son. Mi was welcome. He could stay. Henceforth he ate with the family and lodged in the extra loose-box. And Araminty Brown, embedded in fat, her keen, hooded eyes hardly lifting the rolls above them, cooked admirably, ran the accounts, watched the shop, looked after the till, spoke seldom, interfered hardly ever, sighed sometimes (because it would have taken a war on her home soil, the birth of a colony, or a great cataclysm to have dug from her what she was born for), moved about the house, brought up her four taut daughters under her heavy eye, and thought of death occasionally with a kind of sardonic shrug. Nobody could have said exactly whether she had a dull brain or no. Ed and Mally and Meredith behaved themselves at the wink of one of her heavy eyes. Velvet would have laid down her stringy life for her.

    
“Yer ma,” said Mi, “'sworth a bellyful. Pity she weighs what she does.”

    
“Why?” said Mally.

    
“Binds her up,” said Mi. And it was not constipation he was thinking of.

    
“Mi,” said Mally to her mother, “thinks you ought to be riding in Lewes races.”

    
Mrs. Brown made a noise in her nose.

    
“What?” said Mally.

    
“That's all right,” said Mrs. Brown.

    
“You can never tell what mother's thinking,” said Mally to Velvet.

    
“She doesn't think where we do,” said Velvet. “She thinks at the back.”

    
In the sitting-room at the close of supper Mrs. Brown stretched out an arm and turned the Albert lamp lower.

    
“Box,” said Mr. Brown, indicating the sideboard. Edwina rose and brought him his small cigar.

    
The shadows whirled.

    
“Monday,” said Mrs. Brown.

    
“Driving night,” said Velvet.

    
“What I was thinking,” said Mrs. Brown. “Get on off!”

    
“First?” said Velvet.

    
“First,” said Mrs. Brown.

    
Velvet hunched her shoulder-blades and sniffed. Was driving worth it? She never could make up her mind. Out of bed it didn't seem so, but in bed it was worth while.

    
“Hush!” she said suddenly and held up her hand. “Cough . . .” she said, and went to the slaughter-house door.

    
“Gone to rub Miss Ada's chest,” said Mi, grinning.

    
In the sitting-room the books for homework came out again.

    
“Gotta see a boy,” murmured Mi as he went out into the street.

    
Velvet lit the hurricane lamp standing in the corner of the empty slaughter-house and passed through to the shed where the old pony lived.

    
Miss Ada was an old pink roan gone grey with age, her ears permanently back, a look of irritation about her creased nostrils, backbone sagging, horny growths on her legs.

    
“Hullo,” said Velvet and opened the door. Miss Ada moved definitely round and turned her backside on Velvet.

    
Velvet put her hand on the quarters and the skin twitched irritably.

    
“You never do anything about being decent!” said Velvet. “Have you got a cough?”

    
Miss Ada bent her head suddenly and rubbed the itch off her right nostril on to her leg, and as she did it she flashed a robust, contemptuous look at Velvet. “Is there sugar?” said the look, “or no sugar? I want no subtleties, no sentimentalities. I don't care about your state of heart, your wretched conscience-prickings, your ambitious desires. Is there sugar or no sugar? State your reasons for coming to see me and leave me to brood.”

    
Velvet produced a piece of sugar and the pony bent her head round with a look of insolence, as though she still suspected the sugar to be an imitation lump. She took it with her lips, but she pressed her old teeth for a minute on the child's palm, and at this trick, as old as Velvet's childhood, Velvet thrust her arms over the sagging
backbone and buried her face among the knobbles of the spine. The pony munched her lump stolidly, flirting her head up and down as though she were fishing for extra grains high up among her teeth.