The Fountain Overflows (13 page)

When he got up to go he hesitated, and we thought his shyness had taken him again. Then he said, very gravely, “I have to thank you for being so good to Kate and my mother when they were in trouble.”

“It is nothing,” said Papa, smiling.

“We have already been repaid many times by your sister’s kindness to all the children, and all the hard work she does,” said Mamma, looking very uncomfortable.

“Yes, ma’am, but when you stood by them in their trouble she hadn’t done much work for you,” said the sailor. “Kate says she hadn’t been in the house three days when the policeman come, and you stood by her from the first moment.”

“It is nothing, nothing,” Mamma broke in, with a quick look at my father.

“Of course I know that it’s not as if it were a real crime they had against my poor old mother and my sister,” the sailor continued. “It’s just a way that the women of our family have had since time out of mind, and very natural in a harbour town. They had a cheek, those magistrates, to talk of sending my mother and my sister to prison. Why, fining them the other two times was cheek too, considering how long our family’s been in the town.”

“What little we could do for your mother and sister,” said Mamma, standing up and shaking the sailor’s hand, “we gladly did. Good-bye, good-bye, and may you have Christmas dinner with us every year for many years to come.”

After he had left the room Mamma sank back into her chair and covered her face with her hands, and Papa, looking much amused, poured out another glass of port and dipped a cluster of raisins in it.

Cordelia asked, “But what did Kate do that they wanted to send her to prison for it?”

“I think you had better tell them, my dear,” Papa said. “It is not so terrible, after all.”

“But I think it is,” said Mamma. “I want them to go on loving Kate, for she is a good girl, but I want them to hate what she did. That is very difficult.”

“Is it?” asked Papa in a teasing way. “I have an idea that people find that very thing quite easy to do.”

“You are mistaken if you think they find it easy,” said Mamma with a sudden flash of temper. Papa did not answer, he looked into the distance while he took a raisin out of the port and lifted it to his mouth. I saw the fullness of his lips, the whiteness of his teeth under his moustache. I felt angry because Papa and Mamma had so many secrets from us.

Mary said, tears in her eyes, “But tell us what it was that poor Kate did.”

“Oh, I had better tell you,” said Mamma, “in case you think she stole, which she would never do. She had been with us for just three days, as the boy said, when a policeman came and said that they wanted Kate and her mother, because they had run away from Portsmouth when they were awaiting trial. It seemed that Kate’s mother had been—oh, do not think it was not a wicked thing, though she is such a nice woman—telling fortunes. Oh, dear.”

“Why is that so wrong?” I asked defensively.

“Of course it is wrong. You see, when sailors are away for a long time their wives get frightened lest their ships should have sunk, and they go to women who say they have a gift for seeing what is far away and they fill a bucket with water, and what has happened to the ships appears to them in the water.”

“But surely,” said Mary, in the tones of an advocate, “it is nice for the sailors’ wives to know what has happened to their husbands.”

“No, it is not nice at all,” cried my mother. “For some of the women who say they have this gift are frauds and liars, and cheat the poor creatures out of their money, and though the others may have gifts, what company must they keep, the wretched spirits who hang about this earth when they should leave it! Oh, children, never pry into hidden things, the supernatural is always so very dirty. But it seems that in Kate’s family the women have always done this thing, it must have started long ago when people did not understand, so you cannot blame her and her mother. And they have promised that in this house there shall be nothing, there will not be even tea-leaf readings. And you must help them keep their promise if you have the chance.”

“I hope nobody saw the policeman come to the house,” said Cordelia. “We had just arrived, our neighbours would not know the sort of people we were.”

“But how was it that if the policeman came to take Kate back to Portsmouth he went away without her?” asked Mary.

“Let us help Kate now by clearing the table,” said Mamma, rising from her chair. “Otherwise you will never be able to take me out before tea.”

Papa said, laughing quite loud, “Since you ask, Mary, the policeman got it into his head from something that was said to him that Kate was not the girl he wanted.”

“How fortunate!” we exclaimed.

“Yes, yes,” said Mamma. “Hurry now, dears.”

We changed from our fancy dresses into our outdoor clothes and while Papa stayed with Richard Quin we took Mamma for a little walk. We passed a church and she suddenly cried out with pleasure because she saw lights behind the stained-glass windows at that unlikely hour. When we got inside the service was nearly over, but Mamma was grateful for the twenty minutes or so that she had in the half-empty church. “Now I have not had a wholly heathen Christmas,” she said, when we came out into a world blackening before a rich gold sunset. “It is terrible if I should be denied Christian burial just because turkeys will not baste themselves.” A cold wind blew from the sunset, it had been warm in the church, Mamma shuddered and said, “Let’s see if your poor old mother can still run.” Of course she could, we ran quite a long way, we were nearly home when she had to ask us to stop. Before we went into the house she asked us to be careful never to say anything to poor Kate about her trouble.

We girls all went up to our room and changed back into our fancy dresses. These were of course very roughly made. Mamma was so busy and so tired and could use needles with such difficulty that there were always defects in them which we had to remedy. This time Mamma had forgotten to put a hole for the fang of the buckle in the belt which covered the raw seam she had left at the waist. I asked Cordelia if she thought I could safely snip a hole in the silk with the point of my scissors, but she was dressing in a great hurry, and she told me with an oddly fussy, consequential air that she had no time to look at it; and Mary was not much good at that kind of thing. So I went downstairs and asked Mamma, who was helping Kate to set the table for tea and telling her about Constance’s presents. “There are hours of work in each one of them,” she was saying happily. When I showed her my belt she said, “Oh, my love, you must forgive me. Look, Kate, you see what I mean. My cousin would rather die than give anyone such work.” She said she thought we could drill a hole between the threads with a stiletto which Papa kept on his desk to pierce his manuscripts to take the paper-fasteners. I went into the sitting room to ask Papa if we might borrow it, and then came back to tell her that Papa said we could, and that he and Richard Quin were playing with the fortress, but that Richard Quin had his stocking beside him not yet unpacked, and that sometimes he turned to it and said, “That too.” Turning from the table, she said, “Everything has gone very well today,” and then sighed and added, “so far.” But she was humming again by the time we had crossed the passage and opened the study door.

Then she ceased to hum. Inside the room there was standing a woman who appeared to us for a moment as a total stranger. Then I recognized her as Miss Beevor, the teacher whom Cordelia had once brought to tea. My wonder at her presence in my father’s study was confused and even eclipsed by wonder whether any human being could really have such a yellow skin. This jaundiced effect was the work of her dress, which was made of bright violet velveteen, and of her hat, which was only slightly softer in hue. She was obviously much embarrassed at being discovered, and dipped and cringed before us, nervously transferring a roll of music to her left hand from her right, which she then offered to my mother. She said in a flat voice, “A little surprise,” and my mother said, “Yes?” without taking her hand. I realized that she had entirely forgotten Miss Beevor and thought her a total stranger and was speculating whether she was a lunatic or an unusual type of burglar. Her eyes then fell on the brooch which Miss Beevor was wearing, a mosaic representing two doves drinking from a fountain. My mother was by now exhausted by her efforts to give us a good Christmas, and the shock of discovering this stranger in Papa’s study deprived her of all her self-control. She stared at this brooch with a positive grimace of disapproval.

It was at this point that Cordelia entered the room, looking lovely in her Tudor dress, and holding her violin and bow. On seeing Miss Beevor confronted by my mother and myself, she uttered an exclamation of annoyance and uttered another, which was quite angry, when she looked from my mother’s face, on which there was fixed this extraordinary grimace, to the terrified Miss Beevor’s fluttering eyes and lips. For the first time I realized that a visitor from outside might think it strange that a pretty little girl like Cordelia should be the daughter of an emaciated and shabby and nerve-jerked woman like Mamma, and would for that reason be sorry for Cordelia; and for the first time I realized that Cordelia might share that stranger’s opinion.

She said, with a capable air, “Mamma, don’t you remember Miss Beevor? You know, she came to tea.”

Mamma uttered a sharp sound which she tried, too late, to render cordial and welcoming, and extended her hand to Miss Beevor, who took it tremulously, murmuring again, “A little surprise.”

“Yes, Mamma,” said Cordelia, “Miss Beevor has been helping me with a surprise Christmas present for you.” She made a proud flourish with her bow, and Mamma, who could no longer speak, pointed at the violin with an air of readiness to take any blow.

“Yes, Mamma,” said Cordelia. “Miss Beevor has been teaching me a piece to play to you. We have been working so hard to get it right so that even you would like it.”

“You see, I have been giving Cordelia quite a lot of lessons,” said Miss Beevor. “Usually,” the poor woman added, stroking Cordelia’s hair, so that the force of her rebuke should be directed solely on my mother and not be thought to extend to her favourite, “an extra. But I am proud to make my lessons a gift to your daughter.”

My mother was silent for a second. She had drooped beneath the same lassitude she sometimes showed when she had to deal with a dunning tradesman, or a nail in the sole of one of our shoes. She got the tradesman to go away, the nail was hammered down or prised out, but one felt that however much she rested after this ordeal she would never get back to what she had been before. “How wonderfully kind,” she said. “You must forgive me for not recognizing you, Christmas is such a rush for me that I lose my wits. So you have been teaching Cordelia and have taught her a solo?” She stooped and kissed Cordelia very tenderly. “Now let us go to the sitting room and hear it,” she said, and held the door open for Miss Beevor, turning her head to give me the penetrating look which we knew was her signal that she at once expected us to behave well and recognized that it would be difficult for us to do so.

In the sitting room Papa was still explaining to Richard Quin all about the passages and chambers inside the fortress, and Mary had come downstairs in her eighteenth-century dress, with her dark hair piled on the top of her head, and was sitting in the only chair she could find with a high back, for she liked to do what our schoolmistresses angrily called “lolling on a chair,” reading a little volume of Mrs. Radcliffe’s
The Romance of the Forest
which Papa had given her as a Christmas-tree present. I was alarmed because neither of them seemed to understand when Mamma introduced Miss Beevor that something was going to happen even worse than her being there, though this was a terrible breach of the family tradition that no stranger came into our house on Christmas Day. Papa was wearing the look of braked perception with which he regarded any scientific problem life might bring him, such as the breakdown of a paraffin stove, or whether the swelling we once all had on our throats was mumps. It was as if he thought that he might understand what was wrong if he could restrain the tendency of his mind to rush past the problem to something more interesting. He was in fact wondering, as I had done, why a woman should have such a yellow skin. Mary’s mouth had gone the way that made them say at school that they did not like to see a little girl looking like that.

Mamma told them brightly that Miss Beevor had been kind enough to teach Cordelia a new solo, and had had the even greater kindness to break into her own Christmas Day to come and play her accompaniment. Mary, who had shut
The Romance of the Forest
out of politeness, opened it again and began to read again. But such a look of misery passed over my mother’s face that I myself took the book out of Mary’s hand. She went on looking at the place where the page had been. Mamma waved Miss Beevor to the piano, and sat down in a chair which she had moved so that her face would be hidden from the two performers. Then Miss Beevor ran her hands over the keys in a profusion of what Mary and I scornfully called collywobbles, and Cordelia stepped out into the space beside the piano, her eye running unhappily round the room. She was wishing that our dolls’ houses had been put away and hoping that Miss Beevor would not think her a baby for having one. I sank down on the floor, and Cordelia frowned at me and jerked her bow at me, to show that she wanted me to get up and sit in a chair, but I took no notice. She would have liked us to be tidied away as well as the toys.

After Cordelia turned to the piano and got the note, she set her chin down and raised the bow, but, smiling as if at some intimate and ridiculous memory, lowered it again. Turning back to Miss Beevor, she said, with the simper she always assumed when talking to a teacher, “They all know this quite well, even the children, there was a poor old man who used to play it in the street in Edinburgh.”

My mother leaned forward in her chair and said, “You do not mean the old man who always played outside our flat on Friday nights?”

“Yes, Mamma.” Cordelia smiled.