The Fountain Overflows (21 page)

“And where could we go if we had to leave it?” I pondered. “I think you have to give landlords references.”

“We will have to go somewhere far away and pretend that we have just come from South Africa,” said Mary. “I do not see how anybody could tell that was not true, and you and I and Richard Quin could tell everybody that we do so miss seeing a lot of black people.”

“That would be what Mamma calls falling lower and lower,” I said.

“Of course it would,” said Mary. “I am only trying to be funny. But really I believe that whatever happens we will get through it without anything worse than people not seeing when we are funny.”

“You are burning the toast,” I said.

“You are letting the kettle boil over,” she answered. “We are two silly sisters.” And we kissed each other and laughed.

When we carried in the two tea trays we saw that we need not have troubled to make enough toast for Miss Beevor and bring an extra cup. She would be going any moment now. As we went in Mamma, who was sitting beside her on the sofa, reared up like a striking cobra and said savagely, “You evidently do not understand the true nature of
tempo rubato.
”

Miss Beevor rose to her feet, crying in a high, tremulous voice, “I will leave this house this very instant.” But the letters offering Cordelia engagements had been lying in her lap, and as she rose they flew about the floor. She went down on her knees to pick them up, but she was confused by tears and rage, and we had to kneel down beside her and help.

Over our heads Mamma’s voice sounded remorseful, pitiful, piteous, and yet constrained to uphold the truth as she knew it. “I did not mean to be rude, but hardly anybody nowadays understands what
tempo rubato
really is, I did not myself fully grasp it till I was over twenty and had played in public many times, and one day my brother Ian said to me—”

We picked up all the letters, and the white kid handbag with the word “Bayreuth,” and we took Miss Beevor out into the hall, found her umbrella in the stand, put it up for her in the porch, and stood watching her while she went unsteadily down the path through a fine rain. We had always been told by Mamma that it was terrible to shut the door on departing visitors till they had got outside the gate; it was like saying you had not liked them coming. We felt that we had a special duty not to shut the door prematurely in this case.

“I wish Rosamund were here,” said Mary when she had shut the door.

“Where is Richard Quin?” I asked.

“He is in the stables, playing his flageolet to the horses. He says they like it.”

“I will go and fetch him,” I said. “He will know what to do with Mamma.”

When we went into the sitting room we found Mamma crying. “I didn’t mean to be rude,” she kept on saying, “but I was rude, I hurt the poor creature’s feelings. Oh, it is a dreadful thing never to know the effect you are making on people, and you are all like me in that.” We put our arms round her neck and kissed her and told her that nobody but horrible old Miss Beevor would have thought that she was rude, though about that we had thoughts we would not have shared with her. We could not ourselves understand anybody who, when told they had misunderstood the true nature of
tempo rubato,
felt any emotion except intellectual curiosity; but we had to admit that when Mamma was rejecting anybody on musical grounds her aspect was pretty murderous. But in any case she was, if not absolutely in the right, righter than anybody else. I poured her out a cup of tea and Mary buttered her some toast, and I hurried through the french windows out into the garden to fetch Richard Quin. The late spring rain was bringing a lovely scent out of the earth, and in the chestnut trees the furled candles were little and grey and downy. Mamma had said she would take us to Hampton Court to see the avenue in Bushey Park when the candles were all out. People said it was going to be a wet summer, but that would not matter, we would put up umbrellas and look at the candle-lit trees through the rain, Mamma was much more sensible than most grown-ups, she could enjoy things although the weather might not be fine.

Before I passed through the blue-grey door in the wall I could hear the piping of Richard Quin’s flageolet. He was playing, “Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,” at least he was playing half of it, that was all he had got. I was sorry to hear that he had come to that tiresome time which happens when one is little. He had got past the stage of being contented with the things that are easy and natural because one was really born able to do them, and learning them was only a matter of teaching one’s fingers what they knew they ought to do, and he had come to the stage when one realizes how difficult playing is going to be, but one cannot go back and not be musical, that is how one hears things and there is no help for it. I could tell that he was feeling like that, partly because he sounded as if he were pushing against each note, in a fit of obstinacy, and partly because Mary and Richard Quin and I were not really separate beings. I passed through the yard, which was a little tidier than it had been when we came, but not much, for we were all so terribly busy, and I found him just inside the stable door, close by Sultan’s loose-box and facing Pompey and Caesar and Cream and Sugar. He was looking very little, his baby fingers solemnly busy on the stops, a frown of concentration on his baby brow. In this faded and dusty place his fairness was of another world. He was right in thinking the horses liked his music.

The horses had become made-up animals. I could nearly hear them stirring lightly on their hooves and munching their fodder in quiet content. Richard Quin finished the phrase he was playing, turned to me and nodded, then went from stall to stall, saying good-bye to the horses and patting them with that tactful touch necessary for caressing made-up animals, one has to touch them enough to show one is fond of them but one must not press so hard that it has to be admitted all round that they are insubstantial. When he was rubbing his head against Sugar’s neck and Sugar whinnied, he turned his eyes on me and laughed, as if to say this seeing what is not to be seen and hearing sounds not uttered in this world was a lovely game, like finding the dyed eggs that Papa and Mamma always hid in the garden on Easter Day. I told him that Mamma was unhappy, and we wanted him to make her forget what was bothering her. He took my hand and we went back through the garden, putting our tongues out to taste the rain.

In the sitting room Mamma was saying, “So you see, Mary dear, even you did not realize what
tempo rubato
is and what it is not, and though I don’t want you to think that your playing is anything more than elementary as yet, you probably know as much about the fine points of playing as Miss Beevor, so there was no harm in telling her what
tempo rubato
really means, though you must respect her, you must all respect her, she is doing her best, see what she has done for Cordelia.” Tears were running down each side of her long, thin nose.

Richard Quin carefully laid down his flageolet in a place where he thought it would not be touched, and then ran to Mamma and hugged her knees and kissed her, boisterously, as if he felt compelled to do it by love, but not so much that it was difficult for her to go on holding her teacup. “I want a treat,” he said, nuzzling into her.

“What does my bad lamb want?” she asked, looking down at him in adoration. Of course she loved him more than the rest of us, anybody who ever saw him would know it had to be so.

“I want not to sit up during tea and behave properly,” he begged. “I want to drink my milk on the floor and have the sisters read ‘The City of Brass’ to me.”

“But you can learn to read,” Mamma chided him. “All your sisters were reading long books at your age.”

“Yes,” he answered with a shout of laughter great for his little body, “they learned to read, so I needn’t, it was kind of them.”

“But we shall have to work harder and harder at our playing, and then we don’t have time to read to you,” said Mary, and I said, “Besides, it’s faster, you like things to go fast, you could read things to yourself far quicker than we can read them aloud.”

But as we spoke Mary was getting the
Arabian Nights
out of the bookcase and was finding the place, while I filled his mug with milk and buttered him some toast and put the mug and the plate on the tray he used when he ate sitting on the floor. It was a small eighteenth-century tray we had bought him one Christmas from a rag-and-bone shop, and it was painted with a Turkish scene of mosques and palaces and willow-hung canals. It was so pretty that he let us keep it in the sitting room, leaning against the wall on the top of the bookcase. With the made-up dogs, Ponto and Fido and Tray, lying in a semicircle round him, he ate and drank earnestly, for he was always very hungry, pausing sometimes to trace the minarets of the mosques and the domes of the palaces with the end of a crust. People who did not know him would have thought that he was not listening, but if one left out anything he cried out at once. If one skipped any of the marvels on which the moonlight was shining when the travellers came on the City of Brass, he would put it in, and to tease him we would sometimes leave out some of the languages in which the old sheikh spoke to the motionless sentinels when they did not answer Arabic greetings. “Greek you said, and the language of Hind, and Hebrew and Persian and Ethiopian, but you have not said Sudanese,” he would shrill. “It spoils it all if you do not say Sudanese.”

And he would get restless, sentences before we came to the bit about the travellers finding the beautiful princess sleeping on the bed spread with silken carpets on the ivory dais supported by golden pillars, with two statues of slaves, one black and one white, standing at the head of the bed. Then when we actually got to the sentence which tells how one of the travellers climbed on the dais and tried to kiss the sleeping princess, he would whisper loudly and urgently, “Leave out, leave out.” For he could not bear it when the two statues moved and pierced the traveller’s head and heart with their pikes. He hated all violence. So Mary left that bit out and we went on to the best part, where the travellers went down to the seashore and found the black fishermen mending their nets. Mamma liked that bit very much, particularly when the eldest fisherman was asked to explain the mystery of the City of Brass and he answered, “The people of the City of Brass have been enchanted since the beginning of time and will remain as they are until the Judgment Day.” She told us that it was a very good thing to say about almost anybody. She also liked the bit about the copper jars in which the Jinns who rebelled against King Solomon were imprisoned, and how they were sealed with his seal (Papa drew it for us) and thrown into the depths of the boiling sea, and how the fishermen used to unseal the jars because they wanted them to cook fish in, and told the travellers it was all right if one slapped the jars with one’s hand before unsealing them and made the Jinns inside confess that there was but one Allah and Mohammed was his prophet. When Kate made jelly we also used to slap the mould and force the jelly to acknowledge Allah and Mohammed before we turned it out.

We were just getting to this bit when Cordelia came in and banged the door and threw her satchel down on the sofa and stood and looked at Mamma and stamped.

She said, “I have seen Miss Beevor and she has told me what you have done. Why do you hate me so? Why are you so cruel to me?”

Mamma said, “Go and take off your school dress and we will talk of this quietly.” She put down her cup because her hand was trembling.

Cordelia screamed, “How can I talk quietly about this? You are ruining my life.”

Mamma said, “You mean because I have told Miss Beevor that you must not take professional engagements? That is not ruining your life. It is making sure that it will not be ruined. There is nothing worse for a musician, any sort of musician, than to perform in public too soon. It fixes a player at the stage she is at the time of her first appearance, and it is very hard to struggle on to the next stage.”

Mary and I looked at each other in bewilderment. Mamma got terribly angry with us when we made mistakes, and the whole of Cordelia’s playing was a mistake. But she was speaking to her quite gently about this horrible proposal. This was another instance of Mamma’s curious tenderness towards her, which we could not understand.

Cordelia screamed again. “It would not hurt my playing. Miss Beevor says she would go on teaching me all the time. It is not fair. You are only doing this because you cannot bear me to have more than the others.”

From the floor Richard cried, his light eyes on fire with anger, “Go on with the story. The mermaids come next.”

Mamma said, “But why do you want to play at these concerts? Wait, and if you are good enough you will play to audiences who really know what good music is, it will help you to have them listening to you. But these are second-rate affairs, it is impossible to think why you want to appear at them.”

Cordelia was still screaming when she answered, “Why do I want to play at these concerts? Because I want the money.”

“But they will pay you very little,” said Mamma.

“Have we so much money that I can afford to refuse any?” asked Cordelia bitterly. She spoke so like a grown-up that we stared at her; she had the bitterness of grown-ups, the sort of shrewdness which never gets them anywhere. “Mamma,” she said more gently but desperately, “what is to happen to us all? We haven’t any money. We children know that, we know there isn’t the money to pay the gas and the school fees, and even if you get the money from somewhere this time there will come a time when you won’t.” Her face became a blue-white triangle, because of her intense fear. “How can it possibly happen that the time won’t come when Papa gambles everything away on the Stock Exchange and we won’t have anywhere to go, anything to eat?”

Mamma stood up, then dropped back into her chair, her eyes staring stupidly, her jaw dropping. Mary and I drew nearer to her, to protect her, to dissociate ourselves from Cordelia. We were very much shocked. Of course we talked about our parents’ affairs among ourselves; a child has a right to wonder what is going to become of it. But for children to speak of their parents’ affairs in front of them was like going into the bathroom and finding either of them having a bath. We could not stop Cordelia with our angry looks. She went on, “It isn’t only the rent and the school fees, even as it is. We have horrible clothes, my boots are worn out, and I should not have been expected to wear them anyway, they are cheap and clumsy. Everybody laughs at us at school because we are so badly dressed. Mary and Rose do not notice it, there is only me to worry about us.”