Palladian (17 page)

Mrs Adams put down the purple wooden spoon.

‘Let’s have a clear jelly for heaven’s sake. We can’t hasten Nature.’

Cassandra came in and there was a stubborn silence. ‘I want to make some paste …’ she began. ‘Just flour and water …’

‘Paste?’ said Nanny vaguely, as if she had never spent all those wet afternoons with different generations of children and their scrap-books and the jelly-like stuff in a basin.

‘For some books in the library.’

‘Well, you’re welcome to what you can find, of course. I’ve got me blackberry-jam to get on with directly and Mrs Adams here’s got one of her queer turns …’

‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Adams.

They watched in silence while Cassandra mixed the paste and carried it away.

Did you notice her flushing?’ Nanny began. ‘Quiet as a mouse, but I size her up all right.’

‘What’re you going to do?’

‘I shall speak to him.’

‘I should,’ said Mrs Adams, standing the milk in water and draping it with cheese-cloth. Her face was drawn. She pressed her fist into the small of her back.

‘This weather’s curdled your stomach,’ said Nanny – one of her kind impulses.

‘I feel at the end of me tether.’

Out in the yard there was a sudden rustle of leaves.

‘Wind springing up,’ they said in the kitchen.

The trees seemed smothered in their own foliage, the wind bore the branches down, ruffling them and turning up the whiter undersides of the leaves. Just as it was growing dark the lights fused on the ground-floor of the house, and in the library Marion was obliged to hold aloft a large branched candlestick as they went along the shelves.

‘This corner by the fireplace Violet and I did years ago,’ he explained. ‘Mostly old books on anatomy and eighteenthcentury cookery-books. When she – when we had done that lot we seemed to lose heart.’

Candle-grease slanted on to the floor-boards and hardened opaquely. They opened bird-books, some of them exotic birds from other lands, lyre-birds, parrots and macaws, toucans, the great bird-of-paradise, their plumage beautifully engraved; or books with coloured plates of fruit, rough-skinned brown pears and red-streaked apples, mulberries, quinces, medlars. A grey mould lay on all the books, leather had peeled away and the pages were stippled with little freckles.

Suddenly there was a loud tap at the door, an insulting pause, and Nanny came in.

‘Could I speak to you, sir?’

He lowered the candlestick and brought her into the wavering light.

‘Of course.’

She waited, looking at Cassandra.

‘We are busy, as you see. What do you want?’

‘Only to speak to you, sir.’

‘Please …’ Cassandra began, stepping forward, dropping books from her arms as she did so.

‘All right!’

Marion put the candlestick on the table and went quickly into the hall.

When she was alone, Cassandra sat down at the table and looked through the books, trying to read a little, but the room with its shadows, its long windows, the light which drew grey furry moths in from outside, excited her, enchanted her. It seemed to be an evening quite separate from any other. The crumbling books on the table before her seemed like books which had never been read; dust encrusted what had once been gilded edges; in some there were faint signatures, a pressed brown violet, yellowed newspaper-cuttings; a jay’s feather fell out of one, a dead spider from another. Yet the books themselves seemed clenched together, as if the pages had never been turned.

Lightning ran over the sky behind the monkey-puzzle tree and, when the thunder followed, she thought of the conservatory, waiting for the avalanche of shattered glass which any vibration might begin.

When Marion came back he was laughing. He had despatched Nanny, confounded, as no one else could have done. She had been up against his goodness, which had not allowed her to insinuate.

Cassandra’s hair was like a piece of silk in the candlelight. He ran his hand over it and under her chin.

‘Sophy’s birthday soon,’ he began, moving away from her and walking up and down. ‘Shall we give her another Siamese cat, or would that be an obtuse thing to do?’

‘No. No, I don’t think so.’

‘Poor Nanny had lost a two-shilling piece. She says it is the principle of the thing. Now she has gone back to veil the mirrors and pictures – on account of the lightning, d’you see? Cassandra, what is wrong?’

She sat with her head bent over the books.

‘Look at me!’

She shook her head.

‘All these dirty books have depressed you. Your eyes are tired with so many “f”s and “s”s. Put your palms over them – no, not touching! – relax until there is only darkness. What do you see? Flowers, stars and suns? Your hands are too small.’ (For she had covered her face quickly.) ‘Don’t touch your eyelids.’ He stood behind her and cupped his hands over the hollowed bone, so that no crack or glimmer of light could enter. ‘Now what do you see? Peacocks’ feathers? Nothing at all?’

She saw his face clearly against the darkness.

‘I see – nothing,’ she said.

A tear dropped into his hand and ran down his wrist, he felt her lashes wet against his palms.

He turned her to face him, lifted the candelabrum and searched her face with concern. She tried to cover her eyes with her spread fingers, but tears gathered and ran down between them. At last she gave in, looked up at him, waiting for whatever he would say. She made no sound and scarcely breathed, yet her face was wet and bruised like a flower in the rain.

‘My sweet Cassandra!’

Still holding the candles high, he drew her closer to him and kissed her. She received his kiss, but did not return it, for she did not know how, nor did it occur to her, so netted up in bliss
was she, so content to be held by him, not stirring, heedless of the next day and the next minute.

Marion was happy, too, without knowing or wondering why.

‘How typical!’ cried Margaret. ‘A houseful of young men and no one can mend a fuse.’

‘There are only Tom and Marion,’ said her mother, ‘and Tom is out, and it is not the sort of thing Marion could do. Adams has gone to look for some fuse wire.’ Margaret folded her hands on what remained of her lap and closed her eyes. ‘Oh, Ben!’ she thought. ‘How I miss you! You would have had the house ablaze with light
ages
ago.’

‘She only misses her husband,’ Tinty thought, counting stitches by the lamplight. ‘Any young woman would be the same.’ The smell of the burning wick took her back many years. The light grew up unevenly in a blue crown and she lowered it a little.

‘Fork
lightning!’ thought Nanny, putting scissors and knives quickly into the dresser drawer. She took up her stand away from the window, thinking of young Mr Tom as a boy. What a bad example he had set Miss Violet’s brothers when he came to stay. He was as bold as brass. Running out into the garden under the lightning. She could put no fear into him. Try as she might. And Miss Violet had stood at the window clapping her hands, calling and laughing. The long rain came suddenly down, sticking his fringe close to his forehead, swamping his sailor-blouse, as he capered about on the lawn. … That evening she went to Madam. …

Tom cut across the park homewards, past the ruin in which a hermit had once lived, paid by eighteenth-century Vanbrughs a few shillings a week and board to dwell there and wander
picturesquely against the background of the woods in grey robes. Tom had often liked to imagine him on his evening off (for surely he had had one), his robe left on its hook above the ancient Hebrew tome (he could not, Tom thought, read his own language, let alone another), sitting in the tap-room of ‘The Blacksmith’s Arms’ amusing the villagers with the follies of the gentry, how it was a carefree life and easy, but monotonous. He could not know how precarious his living was; but the Gothic vogue would pass as the Chinese had, and the dead fir trees so carefully planted beside his hermitage would soon be as uninteresting as the overgrown pagodas in the shrubbery.

It was growing dark and the waste, bleached grass rising up on his right, and the blood-red sorrel, stood against the pigeon-coloured sky, curiously still. Yet as he went through the churchyard the wind began to whip through his hair. On Violet’s grave the rose-bush had no blossom to offer. In a jar was a bunch of scabious and Queen-Anne’s-Lace. He seemed to see with such clear outline that he might have drawn it, the picture of the earth on which he walked, the various strata – gravel, chalk, clay – and in one layer the little chambers of death, the boxes of bones lying in rows and, placed grotesquely in one of them, indistinguishable from, say, ‘Hannah Bracewell aged 49’, he thought, passing some very black lettering on granite, lay
his
Violet with her beauty quite vanished, none of it left anywhere in the world (he pushed through the lych-gate – ‘the corpse-gate’ he thought), his memories of it even hardening into mere symbols. A large spot of rain fell on his hand, but he did not walk more quickly, going now up the lime avenue, tented in by leaves. Haunted, this place was, Nanny said and Sophy said, since those who have not fears enough will invent some.

At the end of the avenue was the walled-in garden and he went in and walked round a little in the warmth, felt in the
darkness for a ripe fig, thrusting his hand into the leaves for the ribbed fruit, grazing his knuckles against the warm bricks, walked up and down the paths eating. The churchyard: the walled-in garden – the two sides of himself. As the rain increased, the smell that rose up from the earth and the boxhedging and the nail-pitted bricks was heady and overwhelming. When the thunder came it reminded him of the conservatory and he went quickly towards the house, crossing the lawn in haste.

Lights fell from the façade, blanching the two broken goddesses on either side of the steps – Flora and Pomona, with their chipped fruit and garlands – and the crumbling nymphs along the terrace.

The rain fell all over the conservatory, as rapid as machine-gun fire, the palm clashed its leaves together in the draught. Tom walked right round, peering in through the cobwebbed glass, and then, suddenly conscious of the rain and his wet clothes, turned up his collar and with his hands in his pockets began to trot briskly, head down against the rain, towards the kitchen door.

As he went in through the bake-house Adams came out with a sack over his head and a carpenter’s bag in his hand. He thrust his head out of the sack, turning it to left and right, like a tortoise, and then, satisfied that the rain could not be heavier, plunged out into the darkness.

Nanny sat alone in the kitchen with a bowl of sloes in her lap, pricking them with a darning needle, for gin. The juice spurted out over her stained fingers. Tom stood stamping his wet feet on the doormat.

‘Shake that jacket in the bake-house,’ she said sharply.

When he came back in his shirt-sleeves, he asked: ‘What was Adams doing here so late?’

‘The electric fused. Hang your jacket on the airer for a bit.
It’s gone right through your shirt. Take the roller-towel and give your hair a rub.’

Murmuring and cursing, she put down the basin of sloes and went into the scullery. When she came back she had a bowl of frothy, hot mustard-water.

‘Get your shoes off and your feet into that.’

‘Oh, Nanny, don’t act so silly.’ ‘Is she in her second childhood?’ he wondered. ‘Or does she think I am in mine?’ But he did as he was told, which was more than he would have done as a little boy, she thought, watching him rolling up his trousers, stripping off his wet socks. The imprint of ribbed knitting was on his cold feet. Tinty always made his socks too thick.

‘My God, it’s hot!’

She sat calmly in her chair again, ignoring him.

‘You know, it’s very comforting. I had quite forgotten. How wonderful it is, being a child – sitting there with your feet in hot water, eating bread-and-milk and the smell of clothes scorching on the fire-guard.’

‘The only thing I ever scorched was one of Miss Violet’s holland smocks. I didn’t know how to go to Madam. It was one she had worked herself. Miss Violet set herself off into one of her tantrums, of course.’

‘What did you do about that?’ Tom asked, his arms folded across his chest.

‘Sponged her face with cold water. She wasn’t easy to deal with. Even up till the last, when she was expecting. I remember when I was doing her hair one night and I found a white hair at the back. Not that it means anything at the back. If it’s going white for good it begins at the temples. “Well, Miss Violet … Well, Madam!” I said. I pulled the hair out and showed it to her in the palm of me hand. She looks at it for a moment, then she falls forward on her arms across the dressing-table, thumping with her fists all among the glass bottles and sobbing! I give her a good slapping.’

Tom lifted a pink crinkled foot out of the water and examined it. ‘It feels dead.’

Overhead the thunder seemed to splinter across the rooftop.

‘Is that half-full yet?’ she asked, holding up the bottle with its layers of berries.

‘Not quite,’ he lied. ‘Go on telling me about her.’ He fed on her memories. They seemed more vivid than his own.

The rocking-chair tilted back and forth. ‘“Nanny!” she says to me one morning. “I’ve got a flea! I’m bitten all round the waist.” She was, too. I must say, it looked like a flea. I spread out some of my clean drawer paper over her bedroom floor and I stood her on that and stripped her, keeping a close watch all the time, turning all her clothes inside out, shaking them over the paper. She put her head down and ruffled her hair. Laugh!’