The Fountain Overflows (12 page)

Mary hugged him closer and they rocked together, tic-toc, tic-toc, while she sang, “There’s all the time in the world,” and he sang back, “There’s not, there’s not, there’s not,” his downy face easing into unmalicious mischief, his grey eyes sending coquettish glances under his black lashes at his three sisters.

Cordelia and I went and knelt before him, and she kissed his left foot and I kissed the right, while Mary went on singing, “There’s all the time in the world,” and he sang back, “There’s not, there’s not,” bubbles of laughter forming on his lips, which were a pale but very bright pink. We all wished the moment could last forever.

Then Kate our servant came in and bent her tall body over us, so that we could kiss her, which we did all at once, Richard Quin scrambling up her bodice from Mary’s arms till she took him to her. We all loved Kate very much, and she loved us, particularly Mamma, although she seemed a little frightened of her, and we realized that there was something about Kate which grieved Mamma. She had given us lovely presents, for each of us girls a handkerchief hemstitched by herself and embroidered with our names, not just initials, in raised white letters, and for Richard two sentry-boxes with two Guardsmen sentinels in busbies. We gave her hatpins; we had covered the heads with sealing-wax which Papa had helped us to make look like flowers. She ran upstairs and brought down her hat, which was enormous. In those days women of all classes wore large hats, and women like Kate, who was something a little more gipsyish than an ordinary servant, wore hats as big as cartwheels, adorned with feathers. She put the huge plumy circle on her head and pierced it with our pins, and turned round and round, still looking like a decent sailor lad dressed in skirts. I do not think there was any aspiration towards beauty expressed in her possession of that hat. She had simply got into uniform.

I said, “Kate, how strange it is to think that last Christmas we did not know you and you did not know us!”

Looking at the image of her wooden face under the great hat in the mirror on our wardrobe, she said, “Last Christmas I was in the town where I was born, and I’ll never go there again.”

We saw that tears were slowly running down her cheeks and we said that it was a shame, and wanted to know who would not let her go back, but she replied, “Nobody could keep me out if I wanted to go back, nor my mother neither. Only I like it better here with you and your Papa and your Mamma.” Then we realized that she was grave not because she was sad but because she was happy, like the great dogs at the Pentland farm when they sat at Mr. Weir’s feet by the hearth in the evening, and, as if she had been a great dog, we patted her. But we were without condescension. We respected her deeply, for we had seen her put her hand in the oven, with a batch of pastry on the kitchen table behind her ready to be put in, and take her hand out in a second, and shake her head, and say sternly, “Not yet,” and do it three or four times and always say, “Not yet,” and then suddenly say, “Now,” and the pastry was always better than anybody else’s. Also her mother had been a washerwoman at Portsmouth for thirty years, before, for reasons we could never quite understand, she had had to move to Wimbledon that summer; and Kate knew many mysterious secrets about laundry work. She could even wash our horrible winter underclothing so that it did not scratch. She had the same relations with everything in the kitchen that Mamma had with her piano.

We were telling Kate that we thought the hat needed still another hatpin to look really grand, and that we would make it on Boxing Day, when Mamma came in, brilliant and flashing, as if she were about to give a performance on the stage. She was not looking very well. The loss of Aunt Clara’s furniture, and the embarrassing circumstances of the move from Edinburgh to Lovegrove, and the trouble about the mayor and mayoress, whatever that might have been, had left her very thin. Also she had been working too hard over our toys. But this was Christmas morning, and she made herself a star by her strong will. We gathered round her and kissed her with adoration, and she bade us dress quickly and hurry down to breakfast, we were already late, we would not have time to be given our presents and enjoy them before we went to church. Then she whisked out, making the queer noise which she always made when she remembered something that must be done at once, which years afterwards I recognized as very much like the sound a flock of starlings makes before it leaves the ground. Kate took away Richard Quin to wash and dress him, and we girls took turns to wash in the bathroom, the ones who were waiting their turn unpacking our stockings, which were full of the best things we had had at any Christmas yet, we thought: little dolls, for though we did not exactly play with dolls any more, we were getting too old, we liked to have dolls about, wreaths made of shells and sealing-wax to wear when we played at going to the balls Father had been to at Buckingham Palace and the Hofburg in Vienna and the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg when he was young, pretty painted pencil-boxes, each of us had a new one in our stocking every Christmas, with the year on it in gold, and packets of sugar almonds in different colours. Then we put on our best clothes, which, like Mamma’s, would not have been recognized as such by any stranger.

The rooms of course were changed to apartments in a green palace. Papa and Mamma had bedecked them with holly and mistletoe and the fuzzed branches of witch-hazel that they had found in the garden. At the head of the breakfast table sat Papa, looking very handsome. It is not considered complimentary to say that a human being resembles a horse; but sometimes a fine horse has a star in its eye that tells of its capacity for speed, its inexhaustible spirit, and there was that sort of light in my father’s eye. We all kissed him, and he lingered over the greeting of each one of us. Then Kate came into the dining room, carrying Richard, who looked at Papa and spread out his arms and said simply “O.” The meanest intelligence would have known at once that if that sound had to be put down on paper it would have to be spelled without an h. It was a pure circle, filled with adoration. Papa smiled back at him with the same adoration and said, “Merry Christmas, Richard Quin.” My mother stood behind them, quite free of her habitual frenzy, soft and serene, brooding over the smiling pair.

There was nothing by our plates except the headgear we would wear in the house that day: a Lifeguard’s helmet made in gilded cardboard for Richard Quin, and for us girls different-coloured stars set on hairpins. The present-giving ceremony was elaborate and followed in about half an hour, for Mamma had to clear the table and tell Kate what she wanted done to start the preparations for dinner. We went upstairs to our room and collected the presents we had made for Papa and Mamma and waited there till we were called. Then we stood outside the dining room until Mamma began to play a piano arrangement of Bach’s “Shepherd’s Christmas Music,” and then we marched in in single file, followed by Kate, and stood round the Christmas tree with our backs to it and sang a carol. That year it was “Silent Night, Holy Night.” Then we handed over our presents to Papa and Mamma. I know what they were, for Mary and I wrote them down in a little book, which somehow never got lost. Cordelia had knitted Papa a silk necktie and had made Mamma a set of muslin collars and cuffs. She was the best needlewoman of the three of us. Mary had practised considerable deception over the money given her for milk and buns at eleven, and had gone to a junk shop we passed on our way to school and bought Papa a little eighteenth-century book about the sights of Paris with pretty coloured pictures and Mamma a water-colour of Capri, where she had spent a wonderful holiday when she was young. I had painted a wooden box to hold big matches for Papa to keep in his study and had made a shopping bag for Mamma out of plaited straw. Richard Quin had given the matches to put in my match-box and to Mamma a bright pink cake of scented soap which he had chosen himself. We were hampered because we had almost no pocket-money, but really these presents were not quite rubbish. All except the necktie and the soap were still in the house when, many years later, we left it, and I do not think they had been preserved simply because Mamma loved us, I believe they survived because of their usefulness and prettiness. We were not specially accomplished or sensible children, but, with Papa and Mamma and Kate in the house, we were propelled along the groove of a competent tradition.

When Papa and Mamma had had their presents we had ours. They were lovely. I really cannot think, looking back over a lifetime in which I have known many quite opulent Christmases, that any children have ever had much lovelier Christmas presents. We had known that Papa was making us new furniture and inhabitants for our dolls’ houses, but he had done better than that. He had given Cordelia’s Tudor palace a maze and a sunken garden and a pleached walk, like the one in
Much Ado About Nothing;
he had given Mary’s Queen Anne mansion a walled garden with espaliered trees all around it and a vinery outside built against the south wall; and he had given my Victorian Gothic abbey a small park with a looking-glass lake with a rocky island in it surmounted by a mock hermitage. Out of her old dresses Mother had made a pale green Mary Queen of Scots dress for Cordelia, an eighteenth-century white dress for Mary, a rose-coloured crinoline dress for me, and a Three Musketeers uniform with a cardboard sword for Richard Quin. Like everything else that Mamma did each was unique, we had never seen anything like them before, any one of them was something only she would have imagined. So enchanted were we with these big presents that we had hardly time to look at the presents Constance had sent us before we had to dress for church, except to see that for us girls she had pretty little pinafores, each with a hair-ribbon to match, and for Richard Quin a little shirt. There was an air of cool composure about the needlework which made these garments as distinctive as my mother’s wilder work.

It had been decided beforehand that Richard Quin was to go to church with us for the first time on Christmas morning. But he was bemused with his toys. He had not even begun to empty his stocking, but was dragging it about with him. If anybody tried to relieve him of it, he said, “Not yet, not yet in a minute,” but he could not bring himself to take his eyes off the fortress Papa had made for him, a proper fortress with casemates and redoubts and glacis and a garrison numbering twenty, all in silver-foil armour. He could not bear to touch it, he liked it so much. So Mamma took pity on him and said that he need not go, perhaps he was too little, it would wait till next Christmas. But he said that if Papa was going he would like to go too. So we started out through a crisp morning, Mamma going to the steps to see us off. “Gloves?” she said sternly to us three, for all over England little girls were starting a revolt against gloves, which was to succeed before very long, but was then discouraged by all adults. “I wish I could come with you.” She sighed. “I would enjoy the service.”

“Oh, come!” we cried, and Papa asked, “Can you not come, my dear?”

“If I did, you would have no dinner,” she said. “Kate could not do it alone, and set the table, and do the beds as well. How strange it is to think of all the women who have to stay on Christmas morning to look after the dinner, and get no Christian blessing, like so many witches.” She checked herself, we did not see why, and waved good-bye and shut the door, and we started off through a scene that, when I remember it, seems peopled by marionettes. A little white dog ran across the road under the hooves of an old horse drawing an old cab, and its master bent and gave it a gentle lash with a lead for disobedience; two men came out of a shop and let the iron rollers of the shop-front shutter fall noisily behind them; a company of Salvation Army officers, the men in their peaked caps and the women in their bonnets, passed by, carrying their musical instruments. Only the horse and dog seem real, the men seem like ill-dressed dolls in their so short coats, the women in their so long skirts. All these beings moved at the bottom of a sea of happiness, an old gentleman we did not know said “Merry Christmas” to us, we passed many other families of children that danced as they walked, as we were doing.

In church we were so contented that we did not think of the singing of the choir as music and did not approve or disapprove, but gratefully took it that it was giving tongue to what was in our hearts. “How bright,” Mary whispered in my ear, “the silver dishes on the altar are.” We liked the holly round the pulpit, the white chrysanthemums on the altar. Of late Mary and I had doubts about religion, we wished God had worked miracles that would have enabled Mamma to keep Aunt Clara’s furniture and saved Papa from his disappointment over the deal in Manchester, but now faith was restored to us. We saw that it was good of God to send His Son to earth because man had sinned, it was the opposite of keeping out of trouble, which was mean, it was the opposite of what Papa’s relatives were doing in not wanting to see him just because he had been unlucky. We liked the way Richard Quin stood on the seat of the pew and, though he had been told he must be good and sit as still as a mouse in this holy place, nuzzled against Papa’s shoulder and sometimes put up his face for a kiss, certain that showing love for Papa must be part of being good. There was a sermon which Mary and I approved, for it was, roughly speaking, against crossness and we thought crossness was the worst thing in the world. People were always being cross with us at school, it made the thing impossible. It broke Mamma’s heart when Papa was cross to her. Cordelia was always being cross to us. But I was disappointed with Mary when she murmured, “We must try to be less cross to Cordelia.” I did not believe there was any hope of solving our problem that way. Outside the church people offered my father greetings about which even then I recognized a special distant quality. I realize now that it showed deference without confidence. So might they have wished a merry Christmas to a shabby Prospero, exiled even from his own island, but still a magician.

We had just time to get into our fancy dresses before dinner, which was wonderful. One of Papa’s relatives in Ireland who never wanted to see us always sent us a turkey and a ham, and we had both sausage and chestnut stuffing with the turkey. Mamma had worried because the removal from Scotland had meant that she could not make her Christmas puddings before October, which was later than she had ever left it before, but really the one we had could not have been better. Each of us children got a charm out of the pudding, which we thought happened by chance. Afterwards we had tangerines, and almonds and raisins, and Carlsbad plums from the box with a picture of a plum on it which Papa’s City friend, Mr. Langham, sent us every Christmas. We could not have crackers, none of us could bear the bang. On the sideboard there was one of the bottles of port which the margarine manufacturer had sent Papa, and he poured out two glasses for himself and Mamma, and then he asked Mamma if it were not true that Kate’s mother, who was now a washerwoman at Wimbledon, and her brother, a bluejacket now on leave, were having their dinner in the kitchen. Since it was so, Cordelia was sent down to ask him to come up and drink a glass of port with Papa. The brother was younger than Kate, and indeed far more fragile and girlish, and at first he was shy. But Papa and the port warmed him, and he sat for quite a while, telling us of Gibraltar and Cyprus and Malta, and hearing Papa’s stories of what they had been like in his day.