The Pride of the Peacock (2 page)

One could calculate the years by Jarman’s children, and people were never quite sure which was which so that it was like trying to remember which year something had happened.

“It all took place before I was born,” I went on, keeping his thoughts flowing in the right direction.

Tes. Tis so. Must have been two years before that. “

So it was twelve years ago—a lifetime-mine anyway.

All I had learned from Jarman was that my father’s gambling had been responsible. No wonder Mama treated him with contempt. Now I understood the meaning behind her bitter remarks. Poor father, he stayed in his room and spent a lot of time playing patience-a solitary game in which he could not lose to an opponent who would have to be paid, yet at the same time preserving contact with the cards he still loved, although they had apparently been the cause of the family’s expulsion from the world of opulence.

Mrs. Cobb could tell me little. Like my family, she had been accustomed to Better Days. She had come to us when we went to the Dower House and was never tired of telling any who would listen that she had been used to parlour maids, kitchen maids, a butler, and two footmen.

It was, therefore, something of a come-down to work in a household like ours; but at least the family, like herself, had known Better Days, and it was not like working for people who had ‘never been used to nothing’.

My father, of course, playing his patience, reading, going for solitary walks, with the heavy weight of guilt on his shoulders, was definitely not the one to approach. He seemed scarcely aware of me in any case. When he did notice me, something of the same expression came into his face as that which I saw when my mother was reminding him that it was his weakness which had brought the family low. To me he was a sort of

non-person, which was an odd way to feel about one’s own father, but as he expressed no interest in me, ] found it hard to feel anything for him except pity when they reminded him, which they contrived to do on every occasion.

As for Mama, she was even more unapproachable. When I was very young and we sang in church :

“Can a mother’s tender care Cease towards the child she bear?” I had thought of a little female bear cub beloved by its mother bear, but when I had mentioned this to Miriam she had been very shocked and explained the real meaning. I then commented that my mother’s tender care towards me had never really ceased because it had never ex sited

At, this Miriam had grown very pink and told me that I was a most ungrateful child and should be thankful for the good home I had. I wondered then why for me it was a ‘good home’, though dearly despised by the others, but I put this down to the fact that they had seen those Better Days which I had missed.

My brother Xavier was a remote and romantic figure of whom I saw very little. He looked after the land we had been able to salvage from the Oakland estate and this contained one farm and several acres of pasture land. When I did see him he was kind to me in a vague sort of way, as though he recognized my right to be in the house but wasn’t sure how I’d got there and was too polite to ask. I had heard that he was in love with Lady Clara Donningham who lived some twenty miles away, but because he couldn’t afford her the luxury to which she was accustomed, he wouldn’t ask her to marry him. She apparently was very rich and we were living in what I had heard Mama so often call penury.

The fact was that he and Lady Clara remained apart although, according to Mrs. Cobb who had a link through the cook at the Manor, which was Lady Clara’s house, her ladyship would not have said no if Mr. Xavier had asked her. But as Xavier was too proud, and convention forbade Lady Clara to ask him, they remained apart. This gave Xavier a very romantic aura in my eyes. He was a chivalrous knight who went through life nursing a secret passion because decorum forbade him to speak. He certainly would tell me nothing.

Miriam might be lured into betraying something, but she was not one for confidences. There was an ‘understanding’ between her and the Rev.

Jasper Grey’s curate, but they couldn’t marry until the curate became a vicar, and hi view of his retiring nature that seemed unlikely for years to come.

Maddy told me that if we’d still been at Oakland Hall there

would have been coming out dances, people would have been visiting and it wouldn’t have been a curate for Miss Miriam. Oh dear no. There would have been Squire This or Sir That . -and maybe a lord. They had been the grand days.

So it all came back to the same thing; and as Mrs. Cobb could never be kept from telling of her own Better Days I couldn’t hope to get her interested in those of my family.

As I might have known, Maddy was the only one who could really help.

She had actually lived at Oakland Hall. Another point in her favour was that she loved to talk and as long as I could be sworn to secrecy-and I readily promised that-she would at times let out little scraps of information.

Maddy was thirty-five-five years older than Xavier-and she had come to Oakland Hall when she was only eleven years old to work in the nursery.

“It was all very grand then. Lovely nurseries they was.”

“Xavier must have been a good little boy,” I commented.

“He was. He wasn’t the one to get up to mischief.”

“Who, then? Miriam?1 No, not her either.”

Well, why did you say one of them was ? “

“I said no such thing. You’re like one of them magistrates, you are.

What’s this? What’s that? ” She was hurry now, shutting her lips tightly as though to punish me for asking a question which had disturbed her. It was only later that I realized why it had.

Once I said to Miriam: “Fancy, you were born in Oakland Hall and I was born in the Dower House. ” Miriam hesitated and said: “No, you weren’t born in the Dower House.

Actually. it was abroad. “

Miriam looked embarrassed as though wondering how I could have lured her into this further indiscretion.

“Mama was travelling in Italy when you were born.”

My eyes widened with excitement. Venice, I thought. Gondolas. Pisa with its leaning Tower. Florence, where Beatrice and Dante had met and loved so chastely or so Miriam had said.

“Where?” I demanded.

“It was… in Rome.”

I was ecstatic.

“Julius Caesar,” I said. ‘“Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears.” But why? “

Miriam looked exasperated.

“Because you happened to appear when they were there.”

“Father was with her, then?” I cried.

“Wasn’t it costly?

Penury and all that? “

She looked pained in the special way Miriam could. She said primly:

“Suffice it that they were there.”

“It’s as though they didn’t know I was about to be born. I mean they wouldn’t have gone there, would they, if …”

“These things happen sometimes. Now we have chattered enough.”

She could be very severe, my sister Miriam. Sometimes I was sorry for the curate, or should be if she ever married him-and for the sad children they would have.

So there was more to brood on. What strange things seemed to happen to me! Perhaps it was because they were in Rome that they had called me Opal. I had tried to discover information about opals. After looking up the dictionary I had mixed feelings about my name. It was not very flattering to be called after ‘a mineral consisting chiefly of hydrous silica’, whatever that was, but it did not sound in the least romantic. I discovered however that it had varying hues of red, green, and blue in fact all the colours of the spectrum and was of a changing iridescence, and that sounded better. How difficult it was though to imagine Mama, in a moment of frivolity inspired by the Italian skies, naming her child Opal, even though the more serviceable Jessica had been added and used.

Soon after that occasion when I had seen the guests riding out from Oakland, I heard that the owner had gone away for a while. Only the servants remained, and there were no longer sounds of revelry across the stream, for visitors never came-only those, of course, connected with servants and they were quite different.

Life went on for a while in the old way-my father solitary with his patience and his walks and the ability to shut himself away from his complaining family; my mother dominating the household, busying herself with Church matters, looking after the poor, of which community she was constantly’re minding us we had become a part.

However, we were at least still sufficiently of the gentry to dispense benefits rather than receive them; Xavier went his quiet way, dreaming no doubt of the unattainable Lady Clara (my sympathy was tinged with impatience because had I been Lady Clara, I should have said it was all nonsense to make a barrier of her money, and if I were Xavier, I should have said the same); and Miriam and her curate too. Of course she might be like Poor Jarman and bring a lot of children into the world.

Curates did seem to breed rather freely and the poorer they were the more fecund they seemed to be.

So as the years began to pass the mystery remained, but my curiosity did not diminish. I became more and more certain that there was a reason why the family gave me the impression that I was an intruder.

Prayers were said each morning at the start of the day and every member of the household had to be present for them -even my father was expected to attend. These were said in the drawing-room, “Since,” my mother often commented coldly, ‘we have no chapel now! ” And she would throw a venomous glance towards my father and then turn to Oakland Hall, where for so many years she had knelt in what was meant to be humility. Poor Jarman, Mrs. Cobb, and Maddy would be present.

“All the staff,” my mother would say bitterly.

“At Oakland there were so many that one did not know all their names, only those of the ones in higher positions.”

It was a solemn ceremony conducted by my mother when she exhorted us all to be humble, grateful, and conduct ourselves with virtue in the station into which God had called us-which always seemed incongruous to me since she was far from contented with hers. She was inclined to be a little hectoring towards God, I thought. It was: “Look down on this” and “Don’t do that…” as though she were talking to one of the superior servants she must have had at Oakland Hall.

I always found morning prayers irksome, but I did enjoy the church services, though perhaps for the wrong reasons. The church was a fine one, and the stained glass windows, with their beautiful colours, a joy to study. Opal colours, I called them with satisfaction. I loved the singing of the choir and most ‘of all I liked to sing myself. I always thought of the times of the year through hymns.

“Christian, dost thou see them,” used to thrill me; and I would look over my shoulder almost expecting to see the troops of Midian prowling around.

Harvest time was lovely.

“We plough the fields and scatter …” and “Hark the Herald Angels’ at Christmas; but best of all I loved Easter:

“Hallelujah. Christ the Lord is risen today.” Easter was a lovely time, when the flowers were all delicate colours whites and yellows, and the spring had come and the summer was on the way. Miriam used to go and decorate the church. I wondered whether the curate helped her and whether they sadly talked of their inability to marry’ because they

were so poor, I always wanted to point out that the people in the cottages had far less and yet seemed happy enough. But at least the church was beautiful and particularly at Easter time.

We still had the Clavering pew in the church. This consisted of the two front pews with a little door, which had a lock and key, and when we walked in behind my father and mother, I believe she felt that the good old days were back. Perhaps that was the reason why she enjoyed going to church.

After luncheon on Easter Sunday we always went to the churchyard taking flowers, and these we put on the graves of the more recent family dead. Here again, prestige was restored, for the Clavering section was in the most favourable position and the headstones were the most elaborate in the churchyard. I know my mother was constantly irritated by the fact that when she died her memorial would be far less splendid than it would have been if the money to provide a worthy one had not been gambled away.

I was sixteen years old on that particular Easter Sunday. Growing up, I thought, and I should soon no longer be a child. I wondered what the future held for me. I didn’t fancy growing old in the Dower House like Miriam, who was now thirty-one years of age and as far from marriage with her curate as ever.

The service was beautiful and the theme interesting.

“Be content and thankful with what the Lord has given you.” A very good homily for the Claverings, I thought, and I wondered whether the Rev. Jasper Grey had had them in mind when delivering it. Was he reminding them that the Dower House . was a comfortable residence and quite grand by standards other than those of Oakland Hall; Miriam and her curate should be thankful and marry; Xavier and Lady Clara should do the same; my father should be allowed to forget that he had brought us to our present state; and my mother should rejoice in what she had. As for myself, I was happy enough and if only I could find the answers to certain questions which plagued me I should be quite content. Perhaps somewhere inside me I yearned to be loved, for I had never really enjoyed that blessing. I wanted someone’s eyes to light up when I came by. I wanted someone to be a little anxious if I were late coming home-not because un punctuality was undesirable and ill-mannered but because they were fearful that some ill fortune had come to me.

“Oh God,” I prayed, ‘let someone love me. “Then I laughed at myself,

because I was telling Him what i7 to do just as my mother did.

When the time came to visit the graves I took a basket of daffodils and walked with Miriam and Mama from the Dower House to the church.

There was a pump in the Clavering section from which we filled the jars which were kept there, and then put the flowers on the graves.

There was Grandfather, who had begun to fritter away the family fortunes, and there was Grandmother and the Greats, and my father’s brother and sister. We could not, of course, deck out the graves of all the dead. I liked to wander round and look at the shrubs and open books in stone and read the engraved words. There were memorials to John Clavering, who had died at the battle of Preston for his King in 1648. James who had died at Malplaquet. There was another for Harold, who had been killed at Trafalgar. We were a fighting family.