Palladian (6 page)

‘Yes.’

She dipped her pen in the ink, considered, and wrote slanting across the page:

‘j’ êtres

tu êtres

il être

nous êtrons

vous êtrez

ils …’

‘All right!’ Cassandra interrupted. ‘I think French every day, too. It was a gallant try, though,’ she added.

At one minute to eleven, she left Sophy to learn verbs by herself and set off along the corridor with the timetable. Lifts rose and fell in her stomach as she knocked, and when she heard the voice on the other side she opened the door and
stepped out of the sunlit corridor into what seemed like darkness. She closed the door behind her and stood very still to get her bearings, and because she trembled violently.

Strips of light and shadow slanted over the walls of the long room; at all the windows Venetian blinds were drawn. In the barred and chequered light only details stood out; white candles on a table, and flowers, scrolls of gilt on mirrors and furniture, and the light that filtered in was greenish, so that the ceiling had a green pallor and the marble fireplace reflected green and the man who leant his elbow on the mantelpiece had the same greenish tinge upon his face and hands.

He came forward and greeted Cassandra and as she moved across the room towards him she grew accustomed to the shadows and glad of them.

‘You are trembling. Why?’ he asked, as he took the sheet of paper from her. ‘Come and sit down by the fire.’

He drew up a chair opposite her and lifted an earthenware coffee-pot from the hearth and began to fill cups on a tray beside him. He handed her coffee and a cigarette and behind her little smoke-screen she could watch him studying the timetable, observed his thin face, his exaggeratedly long hands like the hands in an Elizabethan portrait, the greenish-gold hair, his rather affected clothes. She was hollowed by the fear of his cold, dissecting glance, the probability of calm sarcasm, of utter ruthlessness in conversation. He laid the paper aside without comment, as if it bored him, then leant back in his chair and laced his fingers together.

‘How are you going to get on with Sophy?’ he asked.

‘I hope … I think … I shall do my …’ she began to falter, in a little governessy voice.

She knew that Jane Eyre had answered up better than that to her Mr Rochester. She looked into her empty coffee cup in panic and then, fearing lest he might take it as a hint, jerked up
her chin and tried to glance at him. His voice, so far, had been gentle and even and his manner patient.

‘You have met my aunt who housekeeps for me. This is her home, but my cousin, her daughter, is here on a visit. She will be leaving soon.’

Cassandra felt less able to speak than ever.

‘There is no period for Latin on the timetable,’ he observed smoothly.

‘I thought … She knows scarcely any French yet.’

‘Latin is more important than French. Do you read Greek, Miss Dashwood?’

‘No.’

‘No, well, I shall take Sophy for Greek myself then. Perhaps in the afternoon … ’

‘She is a little young … surely?’

‘Her mother was reading Homer in the original at the age of eight.’ He drank some coffee, but he still watched her. Cassandra thought, to comfort herself, that it is always the wonderful dead who have done all the marvels.

‘Not that Sophy is much like her mother. In any way. Her looks even. Beauty like her mother’s rarely reproduces itself. No, Sophy is more like her cousin, Margaret.’

His features she considered ill-matched – the two halves of his face belonging, it might have been, to different men, or as if seen through a flawed mirror, like the room itself, which was cracked by the long crooked shadows and the shifting slatted light.

‘When you are not looking after Sophy, what will you do?’

He leaned forward and poured more coffee into her cup. Will you walk about in the garden with a book in your hand, which you will never read? That is all there is to do here. There is all day long and the night, too; and yet, there is only time to dip into books and turn over a few pages. You’ll find that. When
there is so
much
time, there is never enough. Those long summers in the Russian novels – the endless bewitched country summers and the idle men and women – making lace. Do you remember in
A Month in the Country
– that was how Natalia described their conversation – it was love conversation, too – that it was making lace … they never moved an inch to the left or right … only idle people are like that … they talk to pass the time for they know that time is only a landscape we travel across … They hope to make a busy journey of it …’ His fingers stroked between his eyes. ‘… I walk about my room – this room – and about the garden, with a book in my hand, with my finger marking the place, even, as if I were going to read at any moment. But I seldom do. Although I was not always idle.’

‘Why does Sophy tell untruths about her mother?’ Cassandra asked, with the sharp edge to her voice of sudden and undisciplined courage.

‘We all tell lies about her,’ he said calmly.

‘But Sophy could not remember her.’

‘You
can
remember what you have never had,’ he insisted.

‘When did her mother die?’ She said ‘her mother’, since she could not say ‘your wife’.

‘She died in childbirth. Sophy was the child.’ He watched her, then he went on: ‘You see, that does happen in real life as well as in the novels. Though not as commonly.’

‘Then she …’

‘Obviously Sophy can never have known her.
She
is making lace, too, perhaps.’

She had come a long way from the life of yesterday, of the day before that – the shabby home, the traffic, the bush full of tram tickets, the crowds on the pavements, clotting, thinning out, pressing forward; travelling across time, Marion had called it, but they were really going to work, or going home from work, or shopping, or wooing one another. ‘Quite separate,’ she
thought. ‘Each quite separate. That is the only safe way of looking at it. And we can never be safe unless we believe we are great and that human life is abiding and the sun constant and that we matter. Once broken, that fragile illusion would disclose the secret panic, the vacuity within us. Life then could not be tolerable.’ Marion, with his talk of lace-making, had threatened to reveal the panic and confusion and so create an intolerable world for her.

‘I should get back to Sophy, perhaps.’

He stood up, but ignored her remark.

‘
Your
mother died too short a while ago for you to be telling lies about her either to others or yourself. It will be a strange time for you, the time between her death and the day when you begin falsifying her – only a little while since you woke to the first day without her, that first morning!’ He covered his eyes with his hand, but with a gesture of fatigue not of grief. The moment when perhaps you picked up the book she had been reading, with a letter slipped in half-way to mark her place. And took the letter out and put the book back upon the shelf in its place. But soon, out of her bones will grow the new picture of her, more beautiful, more romantic …’ (He cut the air with his hand, which he put in his pocket, a gesture of impatience) ‘… than ever in life, always loving, never angry, never guilty.’ He fell silent and stood looking down into the little gold fire, and the clock ticked heavily in the darkened rococo room.

‘He will do to fall in love with,’ Cassandra thought with some relief. She had never been spoken to in this way before.

‘So bear with Sophy and her little lies,’ he said, not meaning this only. ‘And come and talk to me sometimes.’ He took her hand and then held it longer and led her to the window, where the light faltered over her as if she were beneath broken water. He released the blind and the sun fell warmly upon them. In this new light, he looked very intently at her face as if he
counted her features or would draw her, seeing only the face and not minding her emotions or what she suffered under his scrutiny. She looked back, candid, without coquetry, as sometimes the young can.

‘So you don’t know Greek? Shall I teach you? Shall we read together? And I turn into a governess for a change? How will that be? It will help to keep us both awake for a little, to resist the spell.’

‘Yes. I should like to learn,’ she said – her father’s daughter.

‘Good.’

He stood looking out at the garden as if he had forgotten her, like a sick person whose attention wanders. She realised it was time for her to go away. When she reached the door, not knowing how to take leave, pausing uncertainly, he looked up and smiled and said: ‘No one shall share our lessons,’ meaning Sophy.

As soon as the door was closed, he drew down the blind again and stood very still with his fingers once more pressed against his eyes.

Tom lay in bed until eleven. The room was stuffy and untidy, but he lay there between waking and drowsing, longing for a drink. The water had gone stale, but he drank it. It seemed to wash about in him and slap the sides of his stomach, yet not quenching his thirst. ‘Butterfly stomach!’ he thought.

In one corner a skeleton sat up crookedly in a plush-covered chair. The room would not have been the same without old Bony, who always wore Tom’s hat at night, wore it now, after Tom’s own fashion, tipped to the back of the skull.

Presently Tom got up. Half-dressed, he sat down at his desk to finish the drawing he had begun the day before. The same drawings hung all round the room – the human body, finely done in sepia ink, the anatomy in perfect detail, but
each picture quixotic:, incongruous in some way – flesh vanishing to reveal ribs or thigh-bone, or a skeleton blossoming into flesh, one arm or a face of great beauty, eyes covered with fig-leaves. This one which he did so painstakingly was like an engraving in some ancient medical book – the Rubens ripeness of the woman, the large belly laid open to show a child curled in the womb, the four lappets of flesh furled back like leaves. It was a beautiful and complicated drawing, but done on a scrap of torn paper, not clean. He placed a rose in the woman’s hand, drew in the veins along one arm and the coarse hair starting from the armpit, then, looking pleased, he cleaned his pen-nib carefully and finished dressing.

Cassandra had gone back in a dream to release Sophy from her French verbs. As she turned a corner, she came upon an old woman sweeping some stairs. When she saw Cassandra she muttered angrily and hid her dustpan and brush behind her skirt.

‘Just saw a little dust. The mess they make!’

She appeared not to like being discovered with the dustpan, so Cassandra went on and left her to her mumbling.

Sophy was kneeling at the window-seat beside her cat, dipping her fingers in a saucer of blood.

‘I found this in the larder under the beef – raw blood. I thought it might tempt her appetite.’ She smeared some round the cat’s mouth, but the poor creature moved its head back, looking piteously away and shaking the little red drops off her whiskers.

‘There he goes!’ Sophy leant out of the window, flicking the blood off her fingers over the sill.

Tom crossed the cobbles. He wore his hat; he went jauntily down to the pub, slipping out the back way to avoid his sister and her personal remarks about his liver. ‘A nice dry Martini,’
he thought. ‘Or a couple.’ He felt fine. Only the vaguest whisperings and creakings disturbed him, the shifting perspectives, a little uncertainty in his bowels, the little acid flutterings in his stomach. ‘Otherwise, fine!’ he thought. ‘And a coupla dry Martinis’ll put that right.’

‘He sometimes turns and waves when he gets to the grapevines, but to-day he didn’t,’ said Sophy.

As Tom walked towards his drink he felt grander and grander. The jewelled air smote him, he took breaths of it steadily into his soiled lungs. By the time he reached ‘The Blacksmith’s Arms’ he knew he was committed by the good fortune of his health and spirits to a long morning session of drinking.

Mrs Veal tapped his palm with her pointed red nails as she handed him his change. He tried to close on her fingers with his own, but she was too quick. She pursed her lips as if she were scandalised. She reminded him of a camel, her sandy blondeness, her curved nose and heavy eyelids, the fluffed-up hair upon her forehead.

‘What are you laughing at?’

‘You.’

She could only feign crossness.

So the morning wore on.

After two days of sitting up aloofly, the cat lost strength and lay panting, with its sides fallen in, its long brown-stockinged legs extended, its eyes covered with pus.

Suddenly Sophy lost her nerve and gave in.

‘Anyone can come, if only she will get better, anyone can come.’

‘Fetch your father,’ Cassandra said.

‘No, Tom.’

She went like an arrow out of the room, shot forward by her own nervous tension.

It was early evening and the room looked a little brighter than it did all day. Cassandra thought the cat would not last the night. It had reached the point she had seen before in her parents’ illnesses, when hope, carefully fostered, turns all at once to acceptance and indifference. It is a scarcely perceptible change, quick like the spinning of a coin; but once the coin lies flat there is no more to be done. There is a limit to our hold on life.