The Fountain Overflows (28 page)

I was astonished by the question. To begin with, I thought them too old to be interested in the future. Mrs. Phillips was Nancy’s Mamma, and her sister was Nancy’s aunt, and that was the status which had been awarded them by destiny. What else did they think would or could happen to them? Also I was aware that only someone fairly stupid could take the simple act I had performed as an earnest that I could knock down the walls between the present and the future. My contempt for the household increased; and so did my desire to torment and jeer at its mistress. I said, “Well, as a matter of fact, I can.”

I heard Rosamund’s sigh through Mrs. Phillips’s harsh uplifted voice. “Well, let’s have a go at it now. We can slip upstairs to my bedroom.”

“No,” I said cruelly. “I couldn’t do it now.”

“Why not?” asked Mrs. Phillips.

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly do it now,” I repeated, enjoying her incompletely concealed exasperation.

“Not if you have some chocolates?” said Mrs. Phillips.

“No, not if I had anything,” I said. I could have laughed aloud at her expression of defeated hunger.

She had been playing with a teaspoon. Her tense fingers sent it flying to the floor, and Rosamund and poor Aunt Lily grovelled for it. Mrs. Phillips and I were left facing each other across the table, the two principals in the business.

“Well,” she said, surrendering, “when could you do it?”

After a long pause I said Mamma did not like us to do it. I should not have brought Mamma into this horrid business, and for a minute I saw Mamma as she looked when she was very angry, her thin white face shining like polished bone. But when Papa told us about the times when he used to go fishing in Ireland and we said it must have been cruel, he said yes, he supposed it was, but there was something entrancing about playing a trout. I said, “We will come tomorrow.” But instantly I made up my mind to do nothing of the sort. I was sickened by her greed and by her submission to my cruelty. Grown-ups ought to have their pride, and I saw that I was making Rosamund unhappy. She now looked more than ever as if she had started a cold and was blowing her nose a lot. But Mrs. Phillips’s nostrils spread broadly because she thought she had conquered me. She said that I must come about three, and we would get over the fortune-telling first, and then we would have tea, and she would see that there were plenty of brandy snaps. Then doubt came into her eyes. It occurred to her that I might possibly mean to disappoint her, and she said, “Lily, run up and get that new box of chocolates from my room, it will be nice for them.” I nearly said we did not like chocolates, it would have teased her so, but I wanted them for Richard Quin. While Aunt Lily was upstairs and we three were alone, it was awkward, there was nothing we could find to say, Mrs. Phillips was so obviously thinking of something with such fixity. The box Aunt Lily brought back was bigger than any Rosamund and I had ever seen, and it was tied up with very pretty pink ribbon, enough for hair-ribbons for both of us. When I thanked Mrs. Phillips I spoke of the ribbon, and she said, looking at my dress in a calculating way, “Oh, you like pretty things, do you?” She was ready to give me anything if I would tell her fortune.

She did not expect us to go back to the other children; we had assumed a special importance in her eyes. She took us straight to the room where we had left our outdoor things, and was watching me put on my outdoor shoes with an expression that was at once hostile and obsequious, when the front door was opened with a bump. Whoever came in made a great noise in the passage, rubbing his shoes on the mat, pulling off what was evidently a very heavy overcoat, and singing the first two lines of “Old Simon the Cellarer” over and over again. We knew, of course, that it was Nancy’s Papa. This was the hour when Papas came home: when such sounds, of a different quality, brought to my Mamma’s face a look of apprehension, which vanished altogether before delight if he were friendly and began to tell her all his news, but which hardened into a grimace of dread if he were in a bad mood and sat down in the big chair without taking any notice of anybody and read the evening paper. It was the hour when Constance and Rosamund in their cold and bare home turned towards the hall the obstinate calm faces which announced that though Cousin Jock was their enemy, they would do nothing against him. Of course I hoped Nancy’s Papa would come in, for it was always interesting to see other people’s Papas, but Nancy’s Mamma was plainly hoping that he would not. I knew she would not want him to hear about the fortune-telling, I had never seen a grown-up more furtive; and, indeed, when he made his appearance he proved to be the kind of person you do not want about when you are trying to do anything, whether it is allowed or not. Rosamund and I simply wanted to go home, and Mrs. Phillips wished for nothing else; but it became impossible for any of us three to take action to that end once Nancy’s Papa came into the room.

He was not so bad, really. Of course, he was nothing like so handsome and wonderful as my Papa, nobody, not a single person at that school or at the schools of music where Mary and I studied later, had a father like ours. But Mr. Phillips seemed to be completely happy, which was surprising, in this unhappy house. When he came in he said to his wife, “Hello, how’s my trouble and strife?” and put his arm round her waist and pulled her face over so that he could kiss her. She did not help him, she just let her face go the way he was pulling, the way you are told to go with the bicycle when you are learning to ride. But of course it was very bad manners of him to kiss his wife in front of us. Then he said, “Who are these young ladies? Which is Claribel, which is Anna Matilda? Which is going to marry my son?” Of course we had to pretend to laugh. “Oh, that won’t do,” he said. “One of you has got to marry my son, that’s why I’m giving him a slap-up education, that’s the only reason I’ve sent him to Brighton College, so that he can marry Claribel or Anna Matilda.” He went on and on like that, until Mrs. Phillips tugged at his sleeve and said that we wanted to get home. “Home?” he said. “Claribel and Anna Matilda want to get home, well, there’s nothing simpler. I take them in the motor-car.”

At that Mrs. Phillips gave a low moan. “They don’t live far away,” she told her husband, “and George won’t like being taken from his tea.”

“Nonsense, you funny old trouble and strife,” he said, “you don’t understand Georgie-Porgie, old Georgie-Porgie’ll do anything for me, adores me, he won’t mind a bit giving up the last bite of toast. And Claribel and Anna Matilda will be as pleased as punch, going home in a motor-car, won’t they? What’ll the family say, seeing Claribel and Anna Matilda come home in a real live motor-car? Why, look at the two of them, the mere thought of it has set ’em grinning like a couple of cats with a saucer of cream, though they’re much prettier, being young ladies.”

Here he was quite right. We were intoxicated past speech by the idea of going home, or going anywhere, in a motor-car. Some months before, Papa, in the course of a visit to a Scottish peer who admired his political writings, had been driven to and from the station in such a vehicle; but he did such things, he had crossed the Andes on a mule, and had rounded the Cape of Good Hope four times, and had lived for a whole summer just below Pike’s Peak. We had never hoped to rival our father in that sphere. We knew that motor-cars were the way people would travel in the future, but that brought us no nearer them, for as they grew more common we became more poor, and they were fabulously expensive. We knew that, for Mamma had read out of the paper that one cost 1020 pounds and she said it seemed shameful when there was no opera in England outside London and little enough inside it.

It would be quite extraordinary if we had got up that morning thinking everything was going to be just the same as usual and were to come home that evening in a motor-car. Of course we told Mr. Phillips that it was very kind of him, but he need not trouble; all the same we kept our eyes on his face to see if he were going to believe us, and happily he did not. Then it all became awkward, for he went away to get George, and we were left with Mrs. Phillips, who looked very cross and dark. She no longer tried to placate me and we sat there saying nothing, and feeling ashamed of not being embarrassed, we were so excited. Then Mr. Phillips came in with George, and it certainly appeared as if he had been wrong about George adoring him so much that he would not mind being taken from his tea, for George looked very cross, as cross as Mrs. Phillips.

The two men had both put on huge coats and caps with deep peaks and earflaps, and Mr. Phillips made his wife go and fetch rugs and shawls to wrap round us, which made her look more hollow-eyed and grim than ever. She really was not nice at all, she was wanting something very fiercely and dryly, it felt like a sore throat, and yet she could not make allowances for other people’s wanting anything, she thought it was tiresome of us not to have refused to let Mr. Phillips take us home. Aunt Lily was much nicer. She came out of the drawing room to help the servants bring in the lemonade that you get at a party when it is time for you to go home, and found us in the hall, waiting till the motor-car stopped at the gate, because Mr. Phillips and George said they did not want us to get in till they had brought it out of the coach-house, because the fumes in there were always rather horrid. When Mrs. Phillips saw her, she said, “Here, you take over,” and told us that she was so sorry but she had not had her full rest, she must go upstairs and get what she could before dinner. We watched her go slowly up the stairs, looking at the carpet as if her fortune were written there. But Aunt Lily was very pleasant, and when Mr. Phillips opened the front door and asked where the two lovely ladies were who were going to Gretna Green with him and George, she shook hands with us, and bent down to whisper in my ear that she hoped that I would spare five minutes for old Auntie Lil when the fortunes were being told. I wished I had not started the whole business. As she whispered the bit of her that was most visible to me was her high net collar, held up by transparent pieces of whalebone and edged round the top with narrow lace, and the wild version she had made of this very usual fashion showed a vein of fantasy in her which no fortune-teller could satisfy.

Of course it was interesting to drive in a motor-car. The miracle of not being pulled by anything, of the nothingness in front of the driver, was more staggering than can now be believed, partly because it would seem impossible that people so long accustomed to trains should have been so startled by the motor-car. But a locomotive closely resembles an animal in its ardour and its breathy moodiness, and anyway it was there, in front of the carriage you sat in, pulling a weight, according to a principle grasped not only by the mind but also by the muscles. But to sit in anything which moved along by some impulse within itself, which seemed to have nothing to do with the lever and the fulcrum, was an experience which neither the brain nor the arms nor the legs could understand. Rosamund and I sat in a bewildered ecstasy which continued unabated for some time, surviving several discouragements. For there was no windscreen and we were blown about as if we stood on an Atlantic headland. There was also a pestilential atmosphere, far worse than now seems credible on the mechanical facts. I cannot think why the interior of this motor-car, winnowed by the gale of its passage, should have been as murky and evil-smelling as a tunnel in the old underground. Though Rosamund and I were very happy we felt very sick, partly because of the fumes, and partly because of our violent and irregular progress. The car went ahead quickly and passionately for a hundred or two hundred yards at a time, then halted with a spine-jerking crash, and either started again or ran backwards for some yards and stopped in a paroxysm of asthma, till George, crying to Mr. Phillips, “Don’t you touch nothing,” got us going again.

Three times we stopped dead. The first found us in Lovegrove High Street, and we were immediately surrounded by a crowd of youths, who put their heads inside the car and insincerely pretended that we were in a position to sell them roasted chestnuts. “I should hate to be King Edward,” said Rosamund.

“Why do you think of King Edward now?” I asked.

“Well, people stare at him all the time through the windows of his carriage,” said Rosamund.

“But they don’t ask him to sell roast chestnuts,” I said. “Think of asking the King to sell you roast chestnuts.”

“Yes, asking the King to sell you roast chestnuts,” gasped Rosamund, and we laughed and laughed, rocking on our seats, so that the youths outside tapped on the glass and begged us to tell them the joke, and Mr. Phillips, who had kept his seat in front while George got down and struck something with a hammer, turned round and asked us what the good one was. We said it was nothing, but he made us tell him, and he said it was good, dashed good. Asking the King to sell one roast chestnuts, he hadn’t heard anything funnier for years. Then he swivelled round on his seat and inquired, “I say, Claribel and Anna Matilda, do you like picnics?” We said that we did, and he trumpeted, “That’s splendid, we’ll have a picnic someday, my wife and poor old Lil and Nancy don’t like picnics.” George came back at that moment, and Mr. Phillips said to him, “George, these two young ladies like picnics, they must come down to Blackwater.” He turned to us and said, “I’ve got a little place down at Blackwater, and a little boat on the Crouch, we could all be as jolly as sandboys.” George said, “Sand is right. We was stuck on the sands three hours the last Saturday we went down, out in the estuary, owing to those taking the tiller that shouldn’t.” He jerked us on through the sea of mocking faces, and the suffocating smell began again.

Then, at the corner of a crescent about ten minutes from our home, we began to reverse, working up to a considerable speed, emitting puffs of smoke. George had some trouble in coming to a stop, and got out with the hammer, saying, “I want no help.” He never once called Mr. Phillips “sir.” We sat still and tried to look calm, and we debated in whispers whether it would be rude to ask Mr. Phillips whether the car was actually on fire. We were just going to do so when he turned round and said to us, “Funny chap, George, he must have his joke, often says things he doesn’t mean. He loves it down at Blackwater as much as I do. And we weren’t three hours out in the estuary. Barely two. And we had sandwiches with us. You’d love it, you really must come down as soon as it gets warmer. Where are we now? December? Pity, pity.”