The Fountain Overflows (35 page)

Then the grown-ups went away and we took over the hearth; and Richard Quin, who had always, from the time he was very small, had a quick, pliant social gift, saw to it that things went better with Nancy. He rubbed our heads as he always did, really hurting us just a little, just so much that we should ask him to stop urgently enough to make it really exciting; but he did not hurt Nancy at all, and he told her that she had nicer hair than any of us sisters. Just then he was passing through a stage when he loved nonsense more than anything, he was always reciting that funny silly thing by Samuel Foote which begins, “So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage leaf, to make an apple pie, and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street, pops its head into the shop and says, ‘What, no soap?’” So we told him how Nancy had thought we washed our hair with chestnuts, and he was delighted, he rolled laughing on the floor, crying out that he was going to wash his hair with a rolling-pin, with the Houses of Parliament, with a bus-horse, with the crown jewels. Suddenly Nancy said shyly, “I am going to wash my hair with a railway ticket.” She had, as we found out later, hardly ever made up things. She had never made up an animal in all her life, which seemed to us quite dreadful. Now she was too old for Richard Quin’s games, but she liked helping him play them, and he did not seem to puzzle her as we did. Also she liked roasting the chestnuts, she had never done it before. We had a special chestnut-roaster, I have not seen one in the shops for years, it was like a dustpan made of wire netting, with a very long handle.

We were quieter after Richard Quin went up to bed; and suddenly we saw that Nancy had gone to sleep with her head on the seat of the armchair. We knew the grown-ups would come back sometime, so we just waited. Then Aunt Lily put her head round the door (which was an action she performed quite literally, it was no mere phrase, she really stood outside and twisted her neck round the edge of the door) and said, “There’s something I’d love you kiddies to do for me,” and when we interrupted her and pointed to Nancy, she went on, “Well, the poor chickabiddy has had a long day. But first can you just help me, and get me a teeny-weeny bit of notepaper? Your Papa’s gone into the den and your Mamma’s with the sweet little boy, and I just want to have some paper by me so that I can get on with a letter when I’ve a moment.” We found her some in Mamma’s desk, and she seemed strangely pleased, as if now she would pursue some delightful occupation that would wipe out the darkness round her. “And your Papa will have a stamp, I’ll be bound,” she said. “Gentlemen always have stamps.” Then she woke Nancy, saying, “Well, the sandman’s been visiting you all right,” and took her upstairs, and soon was down again, and sat herself at the table in front of the paper.

“Now, I’ve got something all you kiddies would like to see,” she said, diving into the deep pocket in the side of her skirt just below her waistband, and taking out a short, stubby cardboard box. We gathered round her, marvelling at her brightness, which our prophetic blood knew to be pitiful, while she showed us the first fountain pen we had ever seen. “Harry was given one by an American gentleman he does business with, and he was so taken with it that he gave us each one at Christmas. Queenie and Nancy, and me too, he was always very fair,” she said, woe touching her voice again, and she held out the unusual object so that we could admire it. She suggested that she might get one to give Papa for a Christmas present; but though we were fascinated, we dissuaded her, for we really could not imagine him writing with anything but a quill pen, an ordinary swan or goose quill for the rough draft, and for his fair copy the crow quill used by draughtsmen. But she was glad when we left her and she could get down to the delicious task of writing her letter, which she was still pursuing, though it did not seem to be a long one, at our bedtime twenty minutes later. She did not hear us when we first said good night, but looked up absently, joy shining curiously from her tear-raddled face. She called us back to ask when the last post went, which, as a journalist’s children, we were able to tell her with perfect accuracy, and she seemed disappointed when we told her that it had already gone.

The next morning Mamma had to give us a note for our form-mistresses, excusing us for not having finished all our homework. Cordelia and Mary had not touched their arithmetic and mathematics, and I had not touched my French translation, and we had just looked at our history when we were going to bed, because we had been looking after Nancy. Our homework, I realize now, presented a difficult moral problem to Mamma at any time. Because she was Scottish she believed that there was nothing more important in a child’s life than its lessons, but as a musician she knew that there was nothing more important to us than our music. This meant that our homework was perfunctory but never wholly neglected; and Mamma really suffered in writing that note. This was the first and trifling sample of the disorganization brought upon our lives by our involvement in one of the most notorious murder cases of the Edwardian era.

I cannot list all the inconveniences suffered by my father and mother. It is to be remembered that my father was not a young man, for he had married late. He now did not spare himself at all in the service of the Phillips family. By dint of staying up nearly all night to write his leaders for the paper, he made himself free to escort Aunt Lily up to the City on the various errands which, with prudence and tenderness, he had persuaded her to undertake. While we were sitting by the fire in our dressing-gowns on the first evening, we had heard Papa say to her, “You must go to a good solicitor,” and when she answered, “Oh, that’s all right, Harry’s solicitor is a very good man,” gently persist, “No, you cannot have that solicitor, you must have one of your own”; and when she had answered again, “Well, I don’t see why, but if you say so, I’ll do it, but I wouldn’t bother just for myself, time for that when Queenie turns up,” he had said, lowering his voice, “No, you must have a solicitor to help you at the inquest. If you tell him everything, everything, he will be ready to help your sister too.” The next day he went up to London with Aunt Lily and saw a member of the anti-socialist organization for which he spoke, who was a partner in a famous firm of solicitors, and he managed to induce him to accept her as his client, though he owed this man a considerable sum of money and had angered him by forgetting to appear at a public meeting he had arranged. There was no stopping Papa when he was engaged in a crusade for a victory which would bring him no benefit. There were other visits to London, which, I supposed, were made at her request. On all these expeditions Papa was Aunt Lily’s patient escort; and always he gnawed his fingers when he was waiting in the hall for her to come downstairs in the festal array which she assumed in the belief that she was thus showing a proper sense of the social elevation of both Papa and his friends.

This festal array had been to some degree restrained by the efforts of Mamma. When she was helping Aunt Lily to unpack she had mentioned to her that, though she saw that she had some very nice scent, she must ask her not to use it during her visit, as Papa had an abnormal dislike of it, it really made him quite ill to smell it. “What,” Aunt Lily had wistfully inquired, “even some nice violet essence from Paris? It’s good, you know.” “Not even that,” Mamma answered firmly, adding, “It is the same thing, you know, as Lord Roberts and his hatred for cats. They cannot help it.” She had also prevented Aunt Lily from going back to the Laurels to fetch her best hat, on the plea that since envy was a prevalent human trait, a certain moderation should be observed at this moment, if only in order to influence public opinion in Queenie’s favour. It is possible that the hat would really have been quite a nice one, and the scents as good as Grasse could make; for though the Phillipses had, as we were to find out, rewarded Aunt Lily for her many services by nothing more than meagre pocket-money, Queenie had not infrequently bought handsomely for her sister at the shops to which she herself gave her custom.

But the elegancies Aunt Lily thus acquired lost their character when set in conjunction with her nodding and winking bony plainness; and they would indeed have been hard put to it to assert their Tightness against the wrongness of the minor touches which she added to her appearance with the tireless industry and with taste that was never better than infamous. Her necklace of enamel violets had two fellows, one of pansies and one of marguerites. She had a remarkable collection of hatpins and prized highest the set of four, each with one of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ cherubs on its head. With a white veil spotted with black lozenges, she wore black glacé kid gloves with white buttons and strappings, and openwork stockings, sometimes embroidered with violets. When she wanted to make a particularly good impression she added a mauve feather boa. As she descended the staircase my father would raise his eyes and take in the special features of the day’s toilette, and would force himself to nod slowly and make a vague courtly gesture, as if in approbation. Then he would open the front door without his usual haste, hold it while she fluttered out, and slowly set out on his long day of public appearance in her company.

But Papa and Mamma were further tormented by Aunt Lily’s garrulity. She talked all the time. Every evening, in Papa’s study, they gave her a couple of glasses of port, sometimes, I think, even more, though to their fierce abstinence this must have seemed like procuration. I went in once and heard her say, “Anybody but Queenie could have got on with Harry, but of course he never looked at me,” and I am sure, from their recollection of their faces, that she had been uttering a string of confidences which they would have liked to annul by magic, not because these were disgraceful, but because they were more innocent and honest than is safe in this world. But more often Aunt Lily talked not well enough. In her world silence was suspect. With us it was taken for granted that a person who did not speak was thinking, or needed to rest, or, quite simply, had nothing to say at the moment; but to her such a person must either be sad (in which case he was described as “moping”) or nourishing some resentment. In both cases it was the duty of the well-intentioned to distract the affected person by a flow of cheerful conversation, and Aunt Lily was above all dutiful.

Our household found itself peculiarly vulnerable to this diagnosis and to the cure. We were all of us given to spells of silence, particularly Mary and Papa; and none of us (and here again this particularly applied to Mary and Papa) agreed with Aunt Lily’s theory that the use of certain facetious phrases was enough to stamp an occasion with gaiety, however unrelated they were, provided it was unremitting and accompanied by laughter. The second evening she was with us, as it got near Richard Quin’s bedtime, she said brightly that she thought she knew who was ready for a trip to Bedfordshire, a joke which we had heard from Kate years before, when we were all small enough to think it very funny; and she felt it necessary every evening to meet that moment with some synonymous phrase which she considered equally entertaining. In the same way she felt it necessary to say, “When Father lays the carpet on the stairs,” if she happened to see Papa performing any small task such as putting in a new incandescent gas-mantle, and, “Alice, Where Art Thou,” if Mamma called for any of us and we did not hear. We liked her all the more for this, because it meant that she was trying hard to be nice, but it made us very tired.

But my father and mother suffered most acutely from the contact of their fullness with the emptiness of those they were befriending. Nancy’s Uncle Mat was not able to fetch her as soon as she had hoped, though he had taken away her brother, and she remained in our house for some time. It was obviously not the place for her to be. Aunt Lily derived many benefits from staying with us, Nancy none. She could not go to school, and she would not go out for fear of being recognized; and the fear was justified, for everybody in the district had known her handsome and splendidly dressed mother and her expansive father with his snorting motor-car, and the boy and girl, both pale with yellow hair, who silently accompanied them. But there was nowhere to send the girl. Mr. Phillips had had a partner who had sent a message that his wife would be pleased to take the girl, but she did not come herself nor write to Mamma, and this seemed cold and ill-mannered, and Mamma did not like to follow it up. Mr. Phillips’s solicitor spoke of other friends who might be of service, and who were sometimes said to have expressed a kindly concern for the two children. But they too neither called nor wrote. In time it dawned on Papa and Mamma, probably these people would be unused to the idea of calling on strangers, and while they would certainly be able to write, they would be at a loss to compose a delicate letter dealing with unusual circumstances.

For Mamma was very conscious that she was bringing her children up in a social vacuum, and she dreaded lest this horrid catastrophe should put Nancy off from a world ready to accept her. So she questioned the girl often, to find out which of her parents’ friends had lingered in her memory as likely to be affectionate. But they had left only physical impressions on the girl’s mind. She could describe them only by reference to the houses they lived in, to their carriages, to the clothes the women wore, the number and sex of their children, the sort of children’s parties they gave, and the presents they had sent at Christmas. She could not remember anything they had said, or anything they had done, which had a personal significance. They had often met, but not to practise the art of conversation. “Mrs. Robinson? Oh, she was a very big woman. Mamma said she wore too bright colours for anybody so stout,” said Nancy. “What did she talk about?” pressed Mamma. “Oh, about going to the Derby, and she used to go to the piano and sing all the songs that Connie Ediss sings at the Gaiety.”

There spread before Papa and Mamma a terrible nullity of which they had not known before. Nancy sat all day about the house, exercising what was evidently a practised ability for doing nothing. She did not want to read the newspapers, or any books. She had never read the
Alices
or the
Jungle Books
or
Treasure Island
or
Jackanapes
or
The Secret Garden.
Mamma was aware that there were many people who read what she called trashy books, but it was news to her that there were people who read nothing at all. She was more sympathetic when Nancy owned that she could not play the violin or the piano and had no voice and did not care for music, for since the development of Cordelia’s ambition she had seen a new virtue in the acceptance of such limitations. But it alarmed her again when she told Nancy that she was sure none of us would mind if she used our paintboxes, and Nancy looked surprised and said that she did not take art at school. She took pleasure in helping Mamma with some of the housework, but was plainly unused to the task, and a little embarrassed by it, while she grew obviously apprehensive when Mamma suggested that she should go down to the kitchen and see if there was anything she could do for Kate. She had been trained, like many of our schoolfellows, to think that helping servants with their work and feeling love for servants was a risky thing to do, that it was likely to cost her some obscure distinction she might otherwise retain.