Palladian (11 page)

Margaret laughed. ‘There is a good one in Mrs Beeton … Benevolent soup it is called.’

The name appeals to me,’ said Tom.

‘It is mostly turnips and lentils, I believe.’

‘Did you say
Bene
volent?’ Tom inquired.

‘Lentils make a good enough soup.’ Tinty looked fussed. ‘But if it is only for a joke,’ she said, ‘there is the recipe your greataunt wrote down. I seem to remember looking at it one day in the library.’ She went out and returned with a green silkcovered book filled with pale handwriting. ‘Here it is! The Beef Tea for the Villagers.’

‘Oh, heavens!’ cried Tom, for the villagers were his friends and enemies and could not be unified, even with beef-tea.

‘But this would never have done,’ said Tinty. ‘Three pounds of beef … draw to the side and beat in eggs … Brandy, two wine-glasses …’ She peered at the page closely … ‘Yes, that’s right … brandy. My goodness!’

‘Mrs Beeton is less generous,’ said Margaret.

‘It is a pity letting soup get into the brandy like that,’ said Tom.

‘My duty seems to lie before me more clearly,’ said Marion, looking at Margaret.

Tinty fluttered the pages of the little book, not understanding.
Cassandra sat quietly by the window, knowing that she had at last seen in Marion the ruthless indifference she had feared in him from the first, and though the conversation had fogged her, she could only wonder why Margaret did not die of shame instead of taking up her knitting so calmly.

‘All this talk abut soup,’ said Tom, jerking himself to his feet, ‘although it is beyond me, has given me a thirst.’

His mother sighed, but only after he had shut the door. Margaret looked across at Marion as if she waited.

‘Cassandra, will you walk round the park with me?’ he asked suddenly, abiding hits cousin’s glance. He had not used her Christian name before, and Margaret’s astonishment was palpable, humiliating to Cassandra herself, who said nothing, only murmured and ran to fetch a jacket from her room.

Sophy watched them go, lifting her bedroom curtain a little to one side, saw the sun outlining their hair as they crossed the park, growing smaller, walking with bowed heads beneath the elms. Then she turned from the window and looked at herself in a mirror; the white cambric nightgown fell like a bell from her shoulders, her hair was tied up in its night ribbons. She unknotted them, combed out the plaits with impatient fingers and shook her hair back loosely, feeling it fan the small of her back; then she smiled into the mirror, eyes sidelong, fingers laced provocatively across her mouth, like her mother’s in the photograph on the dressing-table. But she was born without colour and biting her lips, pinching her cheeks, brought only a fleeting glow. She drew the thin stuff of the nightgown taut across her chest. Sometimes, looking down the length of her body, lying in bed, she fancied she could see the shape of her breasts beginning, but it could only be her ribs curving away shallowly on either side and now, through the nightgown, the bones showed in rows, nothing more.

She took a piece of cucumber from the mantelpiece and rubbed it over her forehead to remove or discourage her freckles.
‘If I didn’t do it, I’d have more,’ she comforted herself, squeezing a little juice on to a mole. Perhaps in the morning she would awake divinely pink and white.

When she had finished, she threw the cucumber out of the window on to the weedy gravel below and watched a lopsided brown hen rush, tottering, at it, stab it with its beak half-heartedly and retire with it into the rose-garden. Then she climbed into bed and took up her diary. She wrote:

‘Pliny about Vesuvius this morning. When my father came in, Miss D’s hand trembled. He says I shall not begin Greek for the present, he is too busy teaching her!!?!! Fancy having to teach a governess. Anyone who reads bad things about themselves in this book have been spying and therefore deserves it. Margaret finished knitting some little shoes blue with forget-me-nots. I pray I shall never have a baby. Of course, not everybody dies or else they wouldn’t take the risk. Tom goes out more and more. He never stays at home and when he does it isn’t worth it. He goes to the inn and has sherry and his fingers are quite brown with smoking. He is far more handsome than my father being darker. He says I am a morebid little fool going to the churchyard. But I didn’t think he was polite when he picked a yellow rose off my mother’s grave and put it in his buttonhole. It was too much like stealing from the dead to make yourself smart. I said when my father dies a red rose would grow on his grave and twine with the yellow ones like Lord Lovell. It was then he mentioned about being morebid. But why was he there himself if it is so morebid, keeping company with the dead, he said. When we were coming back across the park he asked me wouldn’t I like to go to boarding school. He is always asking me wouldn’t I like to go and why don’t I ask my
father. I said I would drown myself if they made me and he sighed heavily. But it will stop him saying any more about it if he knows my life is at stake. It makes me quite sick even speaking about it so I know I should die because I should cry every night if I had to go.

‘Now they have gone across the park, my father and Miss D. What are they saying about me? I hope they decide nothing horrible. Nanny found three eggs in the rose-garden but when she broke them into the basin the smell was awful. It is that brown hen hiding them I think, the one which just eat the cucumber.’

Then she turned the page and dipping her pen into a different coloured ink, wrote:

‘
Marks for the Day.’

Without hesitation, she summed up her day’s behaviour.

‘Goodness. Fair.

Helpfulness to others … Held M’s wool for her, fed hens,

ran errand (Liver salts) for Aunt T.

Industry. Made bed. Learnt vocab.

Did the Pliny. Forgot to turn the mattress, though.

Bravery. Not.

Honesty. O.K.

Prayers. A good ten minutes.

N.B. Must not be morebid any more.’

The mauve ink filled her nails. It had been a good deal of writing for a little girl and had all to be gone through again the next evening. Her life seemed burdened with her own rules. She put away her writing things and lay back (one pillow only lest she should grow a double chin). There was still the antidream formula to be gone through. ‘Please God defend me from
all nightmares, dreams about Chinamen, or gibbets and tumbrils or coffins, or cellars and caves, or snakes and any reptiles or unpleasant creatures, or burglars, or ghosts or skeletons and do not let me be chased or shut up or frightened and do not let me see Thee in a vision because I am not worthy. And last of all, dear God, in your great goodness, do not let me dream anything at all.’

She lay still, looking at the darkening ceiling. ‘Or vampirebats,’ she added, and fell asleep.

They had crossed the park, as Sophy had noted, and now they came to rank grass and the broken boundary fence lying in the nettles. Beyond a little stream the ground rose more steeply towards woods. Marion led the way along the fence, and crossed over a little bridge. They walked through sorrel and clover and came at last to a summer-house, built as a Gothic ruin. It was carefully contrived to look like a fragment of an old abbey and yet not let in the rain.

‘There is a little water-colour of this in my bedroom,’ said Cassandra, sitting down on a stone seat over which he had spread a large yellow silk handkerchief.

‘And I have a pen-and-ink sketch of it in mine,’ he said. ‘I think all the young ladies of the house used to come out here with camp-stools and governesses and sketch-books.’

‘Perhaps I should bring Sophy.’

‘My dear, I didn’t lump
you
in with the camp-stools.’

She was by now so much in love with him that she was ready at all times to take offence at what he said.

‘The woods are most Radcliffean,’ he went on. They were indeed darkly green and menacing and emitted a flustered bird from time to time, a jay with a horrid squawk, or a wood-pigeon breaking out of the branches as if it fled from demons. Before them the plaited water went idly past, weeds of great brilliancy
wavering above the mosaic of white and black and yellow stones. There was a smell of fungus and rotting leaves and water.

‘What happened about Sophy’s little cat?’

‘It died. And was buried.’

‘Why do you suppose she kept that from me?’

‘It was when I first came. I don’t know. I asked her to tell you …’

‘And she wouldn’t? After all, I gave her the cat.’

‘Perhaps that was why.’

‘No. Who else knew? Tom?’

She was flurried, wanting to lie to him, but unable, because she was nervous of committing herself either way.

‘Yes.’

When it was necessary to ease her silence: ‘You must think this a very odd household.’

The sun set, leaving the tops of the sorrel ruddy and luminous, the grass lay this way and that, full of shadows, every blade separate. The mist moving away across the distant prospect of the park was in keeping with the Gothic woods and ruin, and Cassandra, sitting there with the broken flint walls arching above her, felt that she was unreal, an engraved figure in the end-piece to an eighteenth-century romance – and Marion as well.

‘I believe you tried to spare me something,’ he said. ‘But there was no need, you know. Parents should not have to be protected from their children. What do you think about Sophy? I should like to know.’

She looked away from the park, the cadenced levels wreathed in mist, and laid her hand flat upon the yellow handkerchief between them, looked at it as if it would give her some inkling of how to express what she felt.

‘I think she ought to go away from here. To school,’ she said, thinking of her father, of Mrs Turner, and then of Sophy.

He took up her hand and let it lie in his own, but his touch was impersonal and light, as if she herself stopped short at her wrist. If it had been a strange flower or shell lying there curved and shallow he could not have looked at it with less reference to emotion. In his searching way, he learnt and analysed. It was the way he had examined her face, she remembered, the first time she had seen him standing by the window in his room in that sudden unfamiliar flood of sunshine.

‘If she were to go, you would go too.’

Her finger-tips crept a little inwards towards her palm and tightened, so that the nails left the imprint of four half-moons in the hollow. Then the fingers uncurled and relaxed. He sensed that she was agitated and he put his thumb over her palm and smoothed out the little dents.

‘Apart from Sophy, do you want to go away?’

In her agitation her heart cried: ‘I love you.’ Aloud in a prim voice, she said: ‘No. You asked me about Sophy. And that was what I told you.’

The scene somehow missed being quite so idyllic as it would have looked as the tail-piece of an old-fashioned love-story.

‘What would you do if you left here?’

‘I hardly know.’

He gave her back her hand as if it were something he had borrowed, that he was punctilious about returning. For the first and only time she imagined what it might have been like to have been Violet, and pitied her; saw with clarity, for what it was, the titillation of Greek lessons, the cerebral intimacy, the impersonal taking up and dropping of hands. When one is young the blood bounds forward at a finger’s touch, something is – not intolerably – suggested, for the touch is an adventure in itself and may be hoarded, taken to bed as a child takes a present, turned over and contemplated and treasured. It is something complete to be kept a lifetime and,
moved in a million different lights, remains always the same, unimpaired.

With mutual assent they began to walk homewards across the park, the sorrel and the coarse, bleached barley-grass whipping at their ankles. As they came near the house they saw that the bluish-green wooden door to the wall-garden was open. It swung back and Tom came out with a woman. She stood by, waiting, while he closed the door, and then they walked away round behind the empty stables, very close together and his hand brushing her thigh as she moved. Her head was bent. She was eating red-currants out of her hand.

Cassandra blushed. As they passed the wall-garden, a scented warmth seemed to steal out of the bricks. They exhaled a heavy sensuousness, a suggestion of stored ripeness, like the ambient mellowness of a woman very conscious of her power to distract.

Marion said nothing. His face was quite a blank.

When Cassandra reached her own room, she stood for a while by the window, turning her hand, the hand, one way and another in the near darkness. Then she curved it so that it was like a scallop-shell and ran a thumb thoughtfully across its palm.

How obtuse the sensible may be, Cassandra discovered after lunch the next day.

She was not to be Miss Dashwood any more, it seemed, except to Sophy and Aunt Tinty, for Margaret, opening her bedroom door a little, called across the landing to her, using her Christian name. Sophy was lying on her bed for half an hour, reading an old bound copy of
Little Folks
. When she had rested they would go for a walk, collecting grasses in the park, to be brought back, classified, and pressed between pieces of clean blotting-paper.