Palladian (16 page)

‘History,’ said Sophy.

‘Who wrote it?’

‘I did.’

‘I don’t know about “history”. It might be Amanda Ros going for a row at night. What did Miss Dashwood say?’

‘She said I had a tortured way of expressing myself.’

‘And all these words … I suppose you cannot resist them. Perhaps you will be a writer.’ ‘What would Violet have done with this shadowy child?’ he wondered. ‘Would the disappointment of not having handed on her own beauty have been bitter and rancorous?’

‘Go on learning your Lord’s Prayer till Miss Dashwood comes back,’ he said abruptly, and went out of the room.

‘Patter heemone …’
Sophy began, but she soon stopped. Perhaps, then, she would be a writer, since she was so plain to look at. She tiptoed across to the mantelpiece mirror, held back her hair from her temples, sucked in her cheeks until she looked interesting as she believed, and desperately ill and like the picture of Baudelaire’s mistress. It would not do to be too healthy. She looked with tear-filled eyes into the glass.

‘Sophy, dear, what are you doing?’ asked Cassandra, as she came in with a bowl of marigolds. ‘Have you finished your lesson, then? Are you unwell?’

‘I had a feeling of lassitude.’

Cassandra sat down and opened some books.

‘Perhaps a little parsing will dispel it,’ she said in the schoolmistressy voice with which she often dismayed herself nowadays. She was sometimes alarmed at the idea of this voice gaining on her in the years to come, until she had no other, until it was the scar her profession had left upon her, as sure as a tatto-mark, as distinguishing.

Tinty suffered increasingly from the disease which had killed her mother, the disease of anxiety, with all its haunting persistency,
its continual seeking for new forms in which to manifest itself. Her late husband, who had died (more robustly) on some battlefield, had said in their early married life – ‘Tinty is half the time anxious that she may be pregnant, and the other half worried insane because she is sure she is barren.’

‘Is the child quite normal?’ she had insisted, after the easiest of deliveries. ‘Are you perfectly sure he is not bow-legged? And then his eyes wander so oddly.’ But the child was normal and the milk ‘came down beautifully’ as the nurse said. All the same, nothing stopped Tinty. She weighed, she filled in charts, she pored over books and then over napkins. She snivelled in bed over every nursery upset, every chafed behind, every teethingrash. The children’s lives seemed to depend on so tenuous a thread. She went to their funerals a hundred times and more. Fussing can be a delicious pleasure to some; but anxiety is killing. It ate away all her vitality, for one test of endurance followed another – Margaret had gland trouble, Tom had pneumonia, they both had whooping cough: household pets were ill, were lost, were run over, died: servants caused crises and ‘unpleasantness’: Tom had to go to boarding-school and would surely be homesick, bullied, underfed. He would die suddenly of appendicitis or rugby football and she would arrive too late for his last whisper, after an exhausting train journey, more familiar to her by far than any actual travelling she had ever done.

But her husband’s death she bore with fortitude and equanimity. It was suddenly an accomplished fact and had not been much dwelt on beforehand, because at the time, Margaret was in quarantine for chicken-pox and having her liberty-bodice undone every hour for inspection. Into the words and phrases like ‘incubation period’,’ contact’, ‘isolation’, ‘temperature’, and so on, the stark words of ‘missing, believed killed’ seemed quite unreal and not to be assimilated.

As the children grew up, Tinty was left alone with her own daily ailments. One winter morning she had coughed up a little blood. Margaret was helping her to make beds at the time. Poor Tinty sat on a chair and tried to wonder what she would do at the Sanatorium, how it would alarm and depress her to see the other patients growing weaker, dying. ‘That’s only blood from the upper air passages,’ said Margaret, seeing the handkerchief, the stricken look.

Tinty lived through a month of agony, waiting to be X-rayed; sat, at last, like a pauper on a bench waiting her turn. Her lungs – she heard much later, when she was quite worn-out – were unimpaired.

The next week she coughed another red streak. ‘Perhaps they were wrong,’ she suggested. Margaret walked out, slamming the door. She did not understand that her mother really did suffer and only wanted to be at rest, and could not be.

This afternoon Tinty felt that she had escaped. ‘And now,’ she thought, sitting in the bus which rattled its way through the flat, unremarkable landscape, ‘if only,’ this new doctor she had found in the town and to whom she went so secretly that he might have been known to carry on some more disreputable profession, ‘if only he would say, with a fine, straight look – none of Margaret’s evasiveness – “There is no cause for anxiety. No cause whatsoever. Your heart …”’ But at the very thought of the word she began to fringe her bus-ticket, blink back the tears, for a tap was turned on in her head, it seemed, letting down a great, obliterating stream of anxiety.

The men who climbed into the bus at ‘The Blacksmith’s Arms’ brought with them a prodigious smell of beer. As the bus had turned round at its terminus, they had come noisily out of the front porch, the barmaid (Tinty supposed) waving a hand and then slamming the door.

*

‘Time
if
you please!’ said Mrs Veal.

‘The lady don’t make us very welcome.’

‘Whell oi guess it’s toim oi whas off.’

‘One for the ditch.’

‘Time
, I said.’

‘I’ve a kind of feeling we’re not wanted …’

‘Whell oi guess oim …’

‘Now
come
along,’ said one of Gilbert’s friends, taking a firm line. ‘Lady’s licence to be considered. Finish up, lads.’

Gilbert was at Stockton for a few days and The Boys were rising to a kind of gallantry towards his wife, collecting glasses, calling time. Drunkenness they would deal with for her, but there was none. Like Sixth-form boys, their responsibility about others restrained themselves. Mrs Veal would have liked Tom to have asserted himself, to have protected her, at least carried out a few crates; but he said he neither felt cut out for the part nor wished to make her seem conspicuous, and sat now in her sitting-room holding an empty whisky-glass, waiting with little patience for her to come and fill it.

When at last she came, rather crossly: ‘I am not cut out to do noble things,’ he said. ‘It always makes me feel vaguely uneasy.’

He was sliding away from her, away from everyone, she knew. They had reached a frightening hiatus the evening before. Alone in the sitting-room, he had suddenly gone over to the mantelpiece, slipped a half-crown from the middle of a pile of silver and dropped it quietly in his pocket. She was always leaving little heaps of money about and it had seemed unlikely that she would ever notice; but she had, had flicked at him a little terrified glance as if she herself had been caught out, had flushed in misery and shame. He was sorry for her, but looked back blandly, could not have cared less.

‘What does “Etreinte” mean?’ she asked now, sniffing at some
perfume one of the travellers had brought. She read the name with a fancy accent off the box.

‘It means a death-grapple,’ he said, smiling.

She held the scented palm of her hand before his face.

‘Men and women,’ he thought. ‘In that close and violent contention, how isolated is the soul, how frozen in space, how pitifully solitary, since only the limbs fight, the nerves reply, the blood warms and runs and illuminates, the flesh argues. The soul is afar off, beyond the other’s shoulder, very still, like a star.’

‘I think I want to get away from here,’ he said.

‘Here?’

The village, the house, here, Marion.’

‘Yet you can’t?’

‘Too lazy.’

‘No. Not that reason.’ She closed her eyes and covered her face with her scented hands.

‘Because it’s easier sponging on Marion,’ he said, stretching, yawning.

‘No. Not the money, either.’

‘Then because why?’ He turned to her, a little surprised, and after a while she took her hands from her face and said: ‘Because there is someone you must stay near.’

Silence dropped over the room like a glass dome. They seemed frozen. Her hands seemed so lifeless that she could not even cover her face again.

Tinty climbed into the full-up and shuddering bus in the market-place, in her basket the rennet, the vinegar, the doublesatin ribbon, and in her heart words of whole pure bliss. She tasted her happiness slowly, as if it were a comforting drink to sip. The bus lurched forward and she swung with it, holding the strap, feeling her body light and taut as a girl’s. Odd that such a nondescript man held the keys for her into such healing peace:
a stranger, a man she had never even been introduced to, yet he could put her at rest with a few words.

And now the bus, with the swarming tea-time streets behind, began to blind its way through high-hedgerowed lanes. She rocked, swayed, hanging by one hand. ‘Sound as a bell.’ The words were whole, perfect. She said them to herself until they rang in her ears exultantly.

A little tapping on her elbow was quite an elderly baldheaded man struggling to have her attention, to get to his feet and give her his seat. She smiled, she was gay, shaking her head (for there was not room for the commotion of it all and two or three miles is nothing). But he insisted. There he was on his feet now, easy, like a sailor, with the bus swaying and swinging. She sat down, smiled again and this time nodded, but a little shadow had crossed her face. Had she not detected there in
his
face, too, a shadow of concern?

When Tinty arrived home the others were sitting by opened windows looking at photograph-albums. The air seemed heavy and the park was hushed, the trees strangely lucid against the mulberry sky.

‘It will be a pity if there’s a storm,’ said Tinty, easing her feet in her shoes, sinking into Marion’s chair. ‘That field the other side of “The Blacksmith’s Arms”, I noticed from the bus – a very heavy crop of wheat.’ She was town-bred and liked talking in this way.

‘It’s oats beyond “The Blacksmith’s Arms”,’ said Margaret.

‘It was not pale enough for oats, and it hadn’t that shimmer on it,’ said Tinty, going back to her town talk.

‘All the same, it’s oats.’ Margaret laughed carelessly to show she thought the matter trivial, but added: ‘Isn’t it, Marion?’

Marion shrugged. The squirrels feel the storm coming,’ he said, standing at the window, looking out at the trees and the flashes of grey, plunging, rippling in the branches.

Margaret turned over a photograph-album in a huff, glancing with scorn at relations with babies, bouquets or croquet-mallets. Marion irritated her. It was only through hearing him speak of the oats that she
knew
… not that it mattered … but it was so typical …

Sophy ran from shoulder to shoulder, explaining.

‘Don’t lean over and breathe so,’ said Margaret. Did you get the ribbon, mother? You look done in. It was silly not to let me take the car.’

‘Yes, here it is, dear. How fusty those albums smell.’

‘Everything in the library smells like that,’ said Sophy.

‘One day,’ Marion said to Cassandra, ‘we must really go through the library. Weed out and catalogue and do some repair work.’

She looked up from the album of Marion’s aunts and uncles and smiled.

‘Perhaps to-night,’ he even suggested, shocked at his own decision, the sudden wish to work.

‘Oh, mother, I said
cream,’
Margaret cried.
‘Not
white.’

‘And this,’ said Sophy, giggling, her arms round Cassandra’s neck, ‘is Uncle Charles by the monkey-puzzle.’

‘Sophy, it’s bedtime,’ said Tinty.

‘Oh,
must
I …?’

‘Of course you must.’

‘Sophy!’

‘Yes, father?’

‘Don’t fling out of the room like that. Say good night. No, of course you couldn’t do it graciously now. But another time.’

Margaret was sulky still. She took up another of the albums and turned the stiff pages rapidly. ‘Ah, here is Marion in his hey-day,’ she said spitefully. ‘Age has not withered him …’

No one heard, for Tom burst in, waving some book of Sophy’s. ‘Marion, look!’ he cried. ‘In the conservatory! I found
it just now. How many more times do I need to warn you about it? Don’t you care? Or can’t you control your child? Does she just defy you? Cassandra, where
is
she? Where is Sophy now?’

‘She has gone to bed,’ Marion said.

No one spoke for a moment and then Tinty sighed and said: ‘Well!’ and, putting both hands on the arms of her chair, eased herself up, like an old woman, scattering her parcels, fussing. Cassandra was ill-at-ease. She had been staring at Uncle Charles by the monkey-puzzle for quite five minutes.

The sky looked swollen, as if it held some darker, heavier substance than rain, as if at a finger’s pressure it would let down a stained syrup, like the blackberry juice dripping from the muslin net in the kitchen.

‘Leave it be!’ said Nanny.