Palladian (24 page)

‘Yes.’

‘Since when?’

The shadow of leaves passed over her face, and then darkness.

‘Since the evening when we walked in the park first of all,’ she said, knowing that it was before that. Before she saw him or spoke to him, she had determined to love him, as if she were a governess in a book. Meeting him had merely confirmed her intention, made possible what she had hoped.

At the school gate, she stopped and put her hand on his arm. ‘Let me go in alone.’

‘Your Mrs Turner will think it awkward and boorish of me.’

‘I shall go straight up to the playroom. I shan’t see her until after prayers.’

‘And you will marry me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Soon? Very soon?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘Dearest Cassandra, I will be very good to you.’

‘Marion.’

‘Yes?’ She merely felt that the moment of saying it was the happiest of her life.

‘Good night.’

As she turned away: ‘I mustn’t say it too often,’ she decided, hurrying up the drive.

He walked down the hill and looked again at her house, filled with the tenderest sensations, and then made his way along the road towards the bear with the lantern.

After prayers Cassandra drank a cup of Benger’s with Mrs Turner.

‘Did you leave the list at Tucker’s, dear?’

‘Yes, Mrs Turner.’

‘Oh, your Mr Vanbrugh called and I sent him after you. I hope he found you, but he wouldn’t wait and really it was the least bit inconvenient … Alma at her worst wanting to take the veil, as she herself puts it. Every five years or so I get a girl who has this unsettling influence. It gives the school a bad tone, and it
is
extraordinary how from one girl at the top it can sift down to the youngest in the kindergarten. I don’t want to worry her father … he has other problems … he’s a clergyman and would be upset … I tried to keep my manner very dry and brisk … “You would certainly have less trouble about your hair,” I told her, for the subtle ways she has of making herself look sophisticated irritate one very much, I’m afraid. “Oh, I am willing to sacrifice my hair,” she said and began to cry. Sacrifice her hair, indeed! How she gets such notions is beyond me.’

‘Mrs Turner, I am going to be married.’

‘And a very much nicer idea, too, my dear,’ said Mrs Turner, who had only chattered while she waited for Cassandra to announce this. ‘I expect it is this Mr Vanbrugh. I knew all along that there was some sort of nonsense going on. Well, we must have a good long talk about it, but not now, for you seem quite fagged. Drink up your Benger’s and get an early night.’

Cassandra drank and stood up.

‘Good night, Mrs Turner.’

‘Good night, my dear. And I do wish you very, very happy. It is one nice thing there has been to-day. I thought he seemed a very pleasant young man and not at all what I had imagined, although I felt that any cousin of Margaret’s
must
be nice.’

‘Mrs Turner.’

‘What is it, dear?’

‘Have you a copy of
Tristram
Shandy? I have often
meant
to read it and never have.’

‘Yes, dear, I think you will find it on the top-but-one shelf by
the door there. A red book. Rather middle-sized, because it is small print. No, there it is next to
Little Women
. What odd neighbours. It was my husband’s.’

‘May I borrow it?’

‘Of course, dear, but don’t tire your eyes. Certainly take it if you can make head or tail of it. I never could.’

‘Good night.’

‘Good night, dear.’

Cassandra sped across the hall and upstairs. And Mrs Turner took a large piece of striped knitting from a bag and put on her spectacles.

Upstairs, Alma took up her slipper to squash a large spider on the wall above her chest-of-drawers, but remembered in time. Luckily, the girl in the next bed leaned over and smacked at it with her Bible.

Marion went to bed early, too. As he drew back the sooty curtains and opened the window which faced a wall, he wondered what they were doing at home, remembering how the windows there opened out into the dark tangle of garden, the house creaking, sighing, rustling with mice.

‘Perhaps we could get a cook,’ he was thinking, with the bright optimism of those about to marry.

‘And she is so pale,’ Mademoiselle marvelled; Mrs Turner was only human and keeping good news to herself emphasised her widowhood unbearably.

‘She is very young.’

But Mademoiselle considered the paleness, not her youth, Cassandra’s great disability. ‘And it is a very large house?’

‘One of those country manor houses,’ said Mrs Turner complacently.

Mademoiselle saw a long, turreted façade, castellated, machicolated, at the end of a poplar-bordered drive.

‘A large domestic staff, for sure?’

‘One of his aunts is his housekeeper,’ Mrs Turner hedged.

Mademoiselle imagined nothing at all like Tinty, but a chatelaine in alpaca with keys to stillroom, linen-closet and buttery. ‘And the little girl has died, God-rest-her-soul?’ It was all most satisfactory. ‘The bridegroom is charming?’

‘Well …’ Mrs Turner’s eyes measured the striped knitting. ‘He was very civil and … he is not a very masculine type. By that I mean he looks delicate in a girlish sort of way … a studious young man …’

‘Young?’

‘In his mid-thirties, no more. You must remember his cousin, Margaret Vanbrugh?’

‘Ah, she was a capable, nice girl.’

So Margaret made everything right for Marion, her capability cancelled his effeminacy.

Cassandra lay in bed reading. Her eyes travelled along the lines of print and then she sighed and turned back to page one again.

The weeping fell to Mrs Turner at the wedding, since Cassandra had no mother, nothing very much in the way of female relations. Mrs Turner wept very well, not in a steady way as at funerals, but in a gusty, fussy, protesting fashion, dabbing at her eyes and smiling at her own foolishness. Cassandra very properly looked ‘like a snowdrop’, was rather timid and shy, which is better, perhaps, than being masterful. Marion had neuralgia.

Margaret had stayed at home, unable to travel because of the uncertainty of ‘her Dates’. (‘Are you sure, darling, you didn’t get your Dates wrong?’ her mother asked many times as the days wore on. ‘Oh, I know you should know best, dear, but it
is
a little … I don’t understand these obstetrical calendars and all this about
lunar
months. I always counted up say from the 31st of January …’ ‘Always?’ Margaret asked. ‘It sounds as if you spent your entire life in child-bed.’) So Tinty stayed with her, and the suitcase for the nursing-home stood ready in the hall.

Tom was best man and was heavily jocular towards Marion, as if giving him a treat: really, his mind was not on what he was doing. He flirted a little with the bride, so that Mademoiselle
saw an interesting situation ahead of Cassandra, and felt embittered when she thought that a girl, so pale, so poor, with so execrable a French accent, should fall into this lap of luxury, this vast estate and staff And two young men.

Margaret and Tinty, left alone, felt that the fewer people were in the house, the less it seemed able to support its existence. The sound of voices – of doors slamming – seemed to have prolonged its life beyond what was natural and to be expected. But as the life was gradually withdrawn, the house became a shell only, seeming to foreshadow its own strange future when leaves would come into the hall, great antlered beetles run across the hearths, the spiders let themselves down from the ceilings to loop great pockets of web across corners; plaster would fall, softly, furtively, like snow, birds nest in the chimneys and fungus branch out in thick layers in the rotting wardrobes. Then the stone floor of the hall would heave up and erupt with dandelion and briar, the bats swing up the stairs and the dusty windows show dark stars of broken glass. As soon as grass grows in the rooms and moles run waveringly down passages, the house is not a house any more, but a monument, to show that in the end man is less durable than the mole and cannot sustain his grandeur.

So, ‘You would think,’ said Margaret to her mother, ‘that he would have run to a coat of paint for his bride. She must love him very much.’

‘Why should that be surprising?’ asked Tinty. ‘It seems a very proper emotion for a bride to feel.’

‘I mean, her love will be much put to the test. On the whole, though, decrepit as it all is, I think I was better here than at home in the flat,’ Margaret said, as if she had conferred a favour upon her cousin. She was beginning to speak of her pregnancy (which still went on) in the past tense. ‘We shall have to take the napkins and the nightgowns out of the case and air them.’
She went out and fetched the baby-clothes, hanging them about in front of the fire, where they gently steamed.

‘We can’t have these lying about in the drawing-room when the bride arrives,’ said Tinty. ‘Nanny can hang them on the airer in the kitchen.’

‘I wonder how Tom behaved at the wedding. He and Marion should be getting into their stride by now, good team-work and so on. Their partnership in all these different ceremonies has given them so much practice. If I have a son’ (and she realised that she would), ‘they shall both be his godfathers. It will be a change for them to be standing at a font.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t talk like that,’ said her mother, which was a phrase she had been repeating all her life. ‘I wonder what Nanny is doing?’

‘The last time I saw her she was in her chair in the kitchen sticking large black pins into a wax image of Cassandra.’

‘Don’t be silly, dear. There is no need for there to be any trouble, unless you stir it up.’

‘I suppose she won’t live much longer,’ said Margaret. ‘It is an odd world where the young die so much and the old live so ruinously long. She will fall asleep in her rocking-chair when she is a hundred-and-something. A nice peaceful death, quite undeserved.’

But Nanny was going round the bedrooms, a duster in her hand lest she should be caught prying. She dusted Violet’s photograph and drew it a little forward, in front of Sophy’s. Marion had thought it would be melodramatic to put his first wife’s picture away, although he had no particular wish to look at it ever again. Nanny felt, as politicians say they feel after wars, as if a great new era was opening up before her.

Going along the landing, she avoided Tom’s room because Bony gave her the horrors and once she had discovered there a drawing Tom had done of herself in a coffin, wearing a
nightgown trimmed with valenciennes lace and an enamelled brooch her mother had given her painted with rosebuds and the name ‘Frances’.

‘I wonder what Cassandra wore at the wedding,’ Tinty was saying.

‘I guess white lace,’ said Margaret.

‘Do you remember Violet in the grey velvet? It was really very unsuitable for a wedding, but she did look lovely with the dark red roses.’

‘I thought she looked demented in that dress,’ said Margaret, who had been married at Caxton Hall in a fur coat.

‘Excuse me, Madam,’ said Nanny, at the door.

Tinty looked round suspiciously.

‘I thought, Madam, you ought to have out some wine and biscuits for their arrival.’

‘Oh, that is a very good idea. Why didn’t I think of it earlier? I’m sure they would appreciate it.’

‘There are the little almond biscuits. They are rather soft, so I have crisped them up in the oven.’

‘How thoughtful of you, Nanny. What do you think about the wine?’

‘Madeira would be suitable,’ said Nanny, who fancied a glass of this. ‘It’s a wine no one could take any exception to a young girl drinking.’

When she had shut the door, Margaret said idly: ‘What did I tell you about the black pins? No one can say I started up that particular bit of bother.’

‘Here is the car!’ cried Tinty, running towards the hall. ‘Why, she is wearing the very coat she wore the first day she ever came here.’

The day after Marion and Cassandra returned, Margaret went to the nursing home to be delivered of a large male child.

After breakfast that morning Tom had said: ‘Margaret, how much longer is this to go on? We are at the end of our tether. Besides, Cassandra deserves to be the centre of attention now. You had your turn when you were first married. I thought she looked very pretty at breakfast.’

‘She has made the change from governess to mistress of the house very charmingly,’ said Tinty. ‘It is like one of the fairy tales.’

‘But not a fairy tale in which I should want to be the heroine,’ said Margaret. ‘One begins to see what is meant by “they lived happily ever after”.’

‘What are they doing now?’ asked Tinty, who always liked to know where people were.

‘I think he is giving her a Greek lesson,’ said Tom.

‘No, they have gone to look at the conservatory,’ said Tinty, leaning out of the window and seeing them together on the drive. ‘Marion wonders what can be done with it.’

‘He will never get beyond wondering.’

‘It came down like an avalanche,’ Marion was saying. The palm tree stood up among the mountain of dusty, shattered glass, not impressive, only absurd.