The Fountain Overflows (26 page)

There was a ring at the front door, Cordelia was called out, and came back as fussy as the worst kind of grown-up. “That was Nancy Phillips, leaving my algebra book, she took it home by mistake. She was rather upset because I had to tell her that I could not come to her party tomorrow. But I have this unexpected engagement at Richmond. I never,” she said consequentially to Rosamund and Constance, “have any little pleasures now, it is all work.”

My mother’s lips tightened and she made an irritable movement of the hand. Cordelia responded by an old-maidish jerk of the head. In effect Mamma had said, “Then do not play at the concert, you know that I loathe you to take these ridiculous professional engagements,” and Cordelia had replied, “What is to become of all of us if I do not go on with my career?” I was blind with hatred; I saw Miss Furness’s freckled hand playing with the small seed-pearl cross.

Cordelia went on to say, “Nancy was very disappointed at hearing that I was not coming to the party. You know Mary had to refuse because she promised to go to tea with Ida Oppenheimer. Well, it seems Nancy’s Mamma gets cross if anybody doesn’t come, she says it is not worth while giving parties except for a large number, it is all such a bother. So could Rosamund go?”

“What a strange thing for a woman to tell her daughter,” said Mamma. “I would so much like to give proper parties for you, but perhaps there is some trouble in the family that is on her mind. Anyway, Rosamund, you would be doing Nancy a kindness if you go with Rose tomorrow.”

Rosamund said politely that she would like it very much, and went back to the drawings Richard Quin was showing her. These were quite good, especially the ones of the ghost of Napoleon laughing at the Duke of Wellington, when the mob broke his windows on the anniversary of Waterloo, because he wanted them not to have votes. It was funny, Richard Quin was old enough to have understood most of what Papa told us about the Duke of Wellington, but he was so excited about gasometers that he had drawn one in the window of the room in which Napoleon’s ghost was appearing.

“It must have happened,” said Richard Quin. “It is so natural for it to happen, Napoleon’s ghost must have felt like that, it must have happened, I wonder if anybody else knows about it.”

When Rosamund came to the last drawing she sat back and sighed. “Oh, how I have missed you all.”

“Did you miss the horses?” asked Richard Quin. “They have asked after you. Regularly. Let’s go and see them now.”

We crossed the garden, which was metallic with winter. Our breaths were smoke before us, our heels rang on the iron-hard gravel path, on its waterlogged side the thin ice cracked like glass as we took turns in breaking it, above it the bare branches were fine smithy work. Richard Quin stopped before he opened the door in the wall, and said, “You hear them whinnying?”

Slowly Rosamund nodded, slowly smiling. “It’s nice to be remembered. But how do they know it’s me?”

“How do they know things?” Richard Quin shrugged.

In the stable they went from stall to stall, palms spread under unseen muzzles, offering unseen sugar, they plaited unseen manes with their fingers, they slapped and stroked unseen smoothness, answered unheard neighing. I watched them from the doorway, remembering the first night we had spent at Lovegrove, when Mamma and I had stood in the empty stable and had heard stamping hooves, and at last had seen luminous shapes about us; or I had dreamed it so. Surely these two others were also seeing what cannot be seen? I could even persuade myself that I saw the images which their eyes recovered from space, and it surprised me that though Cream and Sugar were as I had imagined since I had received the hint of those luminous shapes, with long curled lovelocks tumbling down their high foreheads and shining, docile eyes, and two rounded shining mounds on their chests, they were not cream-coloured but pearly grey. Soon, however, I could watch no longer, I was so bitterly cold. I had made Richard Quin put on his greatcoat and had come out without my coat or my gloves. The tips of my fingers were blue and numb. I breathed on them, and then held them away from me in distaste, thinking, “This is how my whole body will be when I am dead.” And there might come a time when there would be no living hand anywhere, no hand that could play music, and no music, nor even, so long the reach of death, any remembered music.

I called to them, really for help, though what I said was, “We must go back to the house, it is too cold,” and it sounded cheerful enough.

“Yes,” said Richard Quin, “it is too cold, and silly sister came out without a coat.”

We all ran out of the stable shivering and hissing through our teeth and slapping ourselves. Rosamund said, the words jolted out of her by her running, “It is so cold, I did not bring my hare.”

“He is well off underground,” said Richard Quin. “You should not disturb him. He is all right down in that brown passage, lying curled up on himself, his ears folding back on him like a fur rug, his whiskers fanned by his breath, in-out, in-out, in-out, the whole winter long, till the spring comes.”

“Oh, he does well anywhere,” said Rosamund.

When we got to the iron steps up to the drawing room Richard Quin ran up, and I held Rosamund back.

“Did you see your Great-Aunt Jean die?” I asked. I wanted her to tell me that it was all right.

She answered, “No, she died at noon, when I was at school.”

“But you saw her every day until she died,” I persevered. “You must have seen her that very day.”

“Yes,” she said, “I carried in her breakfast. She took her porridge the same as any other morning. Do you know they all call porridge ‘them’ instead of ‘it’ in Scotland. I thought it was only my Papa who did that.”

“Did it hurt her to die?” I wanted so much to hear that it had not.

She stammered, “Y-yes, it hurt her.”

I looked up at the steel-grey winter sky. I prayed for her to speak the word that would break the metal prison round the earth. “It must be terrible to die?” I said.

She did not say anything at all. Looking as if she saw a horrible event in the far distance, she shuddered. Then she turned to me and gave me the assurance I needed with her eyes, in which I saw fear fade and serenity return.

I asked in awe, “Did you see her afterwards?”

“Yes,” she answered, hesitantly. “Mamma did not want me to, but I had to go into the room when she was shopping, the kitten had got in through the window, I heard it mewing so I went to let it out. But that was nothing. She only lay there looking very white.”

“I don’t mean that,” I said impatiently. “Have you seen her, her, I mean her ghost?”

“Oh, no!” breathed Rosamund, coming as near to disgust as I ever knew her. “Aunt Jean was very sensible, why would she have a ghost?”

I could go no further. There was a vast pyramid, a vast temple, a vast church, built across the path I had proposed to follow into the mysterious woods. I was disappointed. Mamma and Constance, Rosamund and I, had surely driven one poltergeist out of the house in Knightlily Road because we four possessed supernatural powers, and I had hoped to have my fears about death dispelled by something beneficent but as obvious as the careering saucepans, the flying curtains, which the powers we had defeated had used to manifest themselves. Now, as an adult, I realize that I have never been subtle about anything but music.

But all the same my fears about death were dispelled, though I hardly knew how; and a few minutes later I met Mary in the passage and she said, “I do not mind about Cordelia, now that Rosamund is here.” So the next day, when Rosamund and I started off for Nancy Phillips’s party, we were both quite happy, except for a slight anxiety about Richard Quin, who had awakened with a touch of fever and been kept in bed. We felt conscience-stricken lest he had caught a chill in the stables, though he was always allowed to go where he willed out of doors provided he had his greatcoat on. Anyway we supposed he would be all right the next day, we all got over things very quickly. I was pleased to go to this party because Nancy Phillips was older than I was, she was in Cordelia’s class, and I did not really know her, so I had never been able to satisfy a long-standing curiosity about her. She was tall for her age and had a mass of smooth yellow hair, not golden like Rosamund’s, rather the yellow of wild mustard; but she showed none of the confidence which is usually felt by tall schoolgirls with pretty and tidy hair. Against this bright yellow extravagance, her face was pale and reticent and even resentful, and she moved languidly. But at the same time the frills and tucks of her gaily coloured blouses, and her numerous brooches and bangles, which annoyed the teachers by their unsuitability for school, spoke of a frivolity she never manifested in any other way. I felt there was something mysterious about her, and I fully expected to find her living in peculiar circumstances, perhaps with a cruel and crazed stepmother in a richly furnished but cobwebbed mansion. It had, indeed, been quite a shock to me the day before to hear that she had spoken of her Mamma.

Her home did in fact strike me as peculiar. It was a large red brick villa in an avenue of such houses, and no family could have lived there had they not been quite rich. But inside the house could not have been more horrid if the Phillipses had been very poor. In the hall and the little room where we took off our outdoor things, which would have been a study if our sort of family had lived there, were hung pictures which had thick gold frames as if they were real pictures, but were just jokes. Most of them showed men and women in the huge coats and peaked caps which were worn by motorists then, either having breakdowns or driving into ponds or hedges or telephone poles; and others showed dogs and cats and monkeys driving motor-cars and wearing motoring costume. Not a single picture was pretty, they were the sort of thing which sometimes got into our house as calendars sent us by shops at Christmas, and if they came to Mamma she used to say, “Tchk! Tchk!” and tear them across, though her hands were hardly strong enough, and throw them in the wastepaper basket, and if it was Papa who found them he would talk angrily about how he was not bringing us up in the world to which we belonged.

We were received in the drawing room by Nancy, who gave us a faint, sweet smile, and said to Rosamund, “You’re taller than me.” She did indeed look foolishly tall, in a white silk dress with a flounced skirt, embroidered with pink rosebuds. Then we were greeted by a grown-up who strangely said, “This is Nancy’s old Aunt Lily, we’re ever so glad you kiddies have put on your best tatas and come through the wild and stormy to do us honour.” For a moment this grown-up gave the impression of being very pretty, for she had bright golden hair, blue eyes, and pink cheeks, and these were then considered the essential ingredients of prettiness. But almost at once this impression disappeared, her colouring recalled a doll left out in the rain, she had the dislocated profile of a camel. Still she meant to be nice. There were about fifteen of us, all from school, and we stood about in the awkwardness of a party that has not yet become a party, looking about us at the room, which was indeed strange. It was completely furnished in the Japanese style, which was then fashionable. The end of the room was taken up by a gilded extension of the chimney-piece which rose in tiers to the ceiling, each shelf divided into several compartments, in each of which was a single curio, a Japanese cup and saucer, a vase, a carving in jade or rose quartz or ivory; and about the room were lacquered tables and flimsy chairs with cushions of Oriental fabric. But on the walls, which were covered with straw wallpaper striped with fine gold thread, there hung, alongside Japanese prints and Canton enamel dishes, more of those pictures in heavy gold frames representing motor-cars in ditches and cats and dogs dressed in motoring clothes. Nancy passed amongst us, holding out a plate of very large pink and white fondants in fluted paper cases, and I asked her whether her father had lived long in Japan. She made it plain that she thought this rather a stupid question. “No, why should he? Mamma got tired of the drawing room as it was. It was buhl. All this came down from Maple’s. There’s nothing here has anything to do with Papa except those pictures of motor-cars. We have a motor-car, you know. It’s in the coach-house. You could see it if you liked.”

I had been wondering why, if Nancy had a Mamma, she was not at the party; and as Nancy turned away from me she said, “Oh, Rose, here’s Mamma,” and I held out my hand to a dark and handsome woman, very tall, who did not see it. She had not come to receive her daughter’s guests, at whom she was looking with an intense though impersonal dislike, as if we were intruders crowding in on her when she desired to think of something else. She was wearing a kind of elaborate dressing-gown of a sort then called a matinée, made of pleated purple silk, and she told us, with an insincere smile which hardly disturbed the heavy mask of her preoccupation, that she was so glad to see us all but she was very tired, she had been doing too much, and she had to put her feet up. She was sure Nancy and Aunt Lily would look after us better than she would. As she spoke her eyes were ranging over the room, and suddenly she made a predatory gesture, her loose sleeve falling back and displaying a bare beautiful arm which seemed in itself to be bad-tempered, and snatched from a table a book that had had a chocolate box laid down on top of it. “Lily,” she said, and over by the chimney-piece her sister spun round as if she had heard a shot. “Lily, I just found that new Elinor Glyn you and that girl said wasn’t anywhere in this room. Now perhaps I can get my lie-down,” said Mrs. Phillips, terribly, and left the room without giving any of us another glance.

I shook with rage so that Rosamund laid a calming hand on my arm. Almost all grown-ups were constantly rude to children, but of late they had been going too far. I felt again the anguish I had experienced when Miss Furness had launched her insult against Mary and me. But I knew she had meant to be kind, I could not remember her freckled and unaccomplished hand, feeling for the little seed-pearl cross, without knowing that she had poured out something like love on my sister and myself. Besides she had been misled by Cordelia and Miss Beevor. But though Mrs. Phillips was a woman of many possessions I instinctively knew that a small seed-pearl cross was not among them, and low as I placed the plane on which Miss Beevor and Cordelia were I knew that Mrs. Phillips lived somewhere lower still. It gave me no consolation to realize that she had not singled me out as a victim of her insolence, that all her daughter’s guests had been included in the scope of her offensiveness. This only showed that she had not bothered to discriminate. I was in a state of anger that I can hardly account for, save by remembering that Mamma had of late tried to dissuade me from my fierce efforts to master Mozart’s “Gigue in G” by telling me that I was overworking, and supposing that I was more jarred by the humiliations of our poverty than I admitted. Certainly there ran through my head all that afternoon resentment against the awkward and ungracious wealth of this house.