This Real Night (11 page)

Very soon after that Nancy’s family and her house grew much stranger in our eyes, because they came to be associated with an event which none of us really believe can happen, though we are warned of it from our earliest childhood by the Bible and the fiercer sort of fairy-tale. Nancy’s father was murdered by her mother. Nancy and her aunt were left alone at the Laurels, and my father and mother took them in, which was a great sacrifice. It was not that poverty made it difficult to find the extra food and linen needed by our guests, for all Mamma’s married life had been spent in performing such conjuring tricks: it was that Aunt Lily talked facetiously and sentimentally and tritely all day long. Until Queenie had met the affectionate and tiresome man who had married her and been poisoned for it, the two sisters had been barmaids, and not at the height of their profession. They had wandered in a defeated continent of the vulgar world, where vulgarity had lost its power and its pride, and had to repeat old jokes because it could no longer invent new ones, and speak of virtues in phrases so worn by use that they gave the same feeling of want as rags. Too often, listening to Aunt Lily’s conversation was like having emptied at one’s feet a dustbin full of comic songs and jokes from pantomimes, catchwords which had not even that flimsy bond with sense, and protestations about being ready to share one’s last crust with a friend and saying what one meant to people’s faces instead of behind their backs. Yet if one gave up the idea of direct communication with her, and put what she said with what she did, and let time fit them into a mosaic, the pattern was beautiful. Though what she said when she was at ease was usually inaccurate and humbugging, when there was much at issue she was candid. She knew that falsity destroyed what was of real value. She never ceased to proclaim her belief in her sister’s innocence, except in our own home; it was as if she wanted there to be one place where it could be understood that she knew her sister was a murderess but loved her all the same. It might have served her sister’s cause if she had pretended the dead man had been a bad husband; but that was not true, so she would not say it, indeed, her Cockney whine changed into something more like a bird-song when she spoke of his gentleness. Through Aunt Lily it dawned on us that murders really were committed, and Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which we had all detested as children, were true. But there was, we also learned from Aunt Lily, a way of behaving under the shadow of murder which deflected its evil.

So the woman who had come into our lives clutching at our mother’s compassion ended by giving us a sense of safety; and we liked going down to see her at the Thameside inn where she was now working as a barmaid, the Dog and Duck, which was owned by Len Darcy, a retired bookmaker, who had married an old friend of hers named Milly. We enjoyed our visits, especially now that our father had left us, for there there was preserved a splendid memory of him. My parents had always been unable to do many things which quite ordinary people found easy. It was beyond the capacity of my father to give his wife and children a home not constantly threatened by ruin. My mother could not dress conventionally enough, one might almost say tidily enough, to escape unfavourable notice when she went out into the street. But they were able to do things beyond the range of ordinary people. Though my father was by then completely ruined, it was within the compass of his failing powers to save Queenie Phillips from being hanged. He had been so great a pamphleteer that men in authority still felt uneasy when they heard he had been angered by an official act; when he wrote one of his indictments it was as if he had spoken it aloud in every quarter of the town at the same hour. There had been irregularities in Queenie’s trial, and he threatened to exploit them. So Queenie was reprieved, and, at the Dog and Duck, my father was looked on as a saint and hero; and also his desertion of us was taken as one of those strange things that ordinary men should not do, but wonderworkers must do from time to time, to restore their magic gifts. ‘Mark my words, he’ll come back,’ Aunt Lily would say to me in a corner, ‘in his own time. Some season of the year. I wonder when Michaelmas is? I never can remember.’

We went so often to the Dog and Duck, then and in later years, that I cannot remember what happened on the day that Mamma took us there for the purpose of healing the wounds inflicted by Mrs Morpurgo, my memories run into a continuum. Our visits all began in the same way. We took train on a branch line from Reading and got out at a halt on the water-meadows. We had to be careful that we left no parcels in the carriage, for Mamma enjoyed taking presents to the Darcy household. It gave her an opportunity to follow a tradition she had inherited from her ancestors, who, before they abruptly became musicians, had been Highland farmers, and paid no visits except to remote farmsteads where guests had to help provision themselves. Most of what we brought was commonplace enough: one of Kate’s veal and ham pies, made with much grated lemon peel and eggs hard-simmered instead of hard-boiled; green gooseberry jelly, flavoured with elder flowers, in the Irish fashion, which Papa had liked to eat with a spoon, and the new American sweet, fudge, which we had just learned to make. Also there was always one present which bore a strange social significance, and that was a jar of mayonnaise. Uncle Len and Aunt Milly liked it very much, and we gave them their one possible chance of enjoying it. For some reason it was then considered a form of food appropriate only to the upper classes; and though both he and she were able cooks, and eggs and olive oil cost little in those days, they would no more have made it for themselves than they would have dressed for dinner, because it would have made them feel, as they put it, la-di-da. There were also some presents which we were very willing indeed to give, but thought it odd that anybody should want to receive. Uncle Len had had very little schooling, and was always very glad of our schoolbooks when we had grown out of them. It was the arithmetical and mathematical ones he wanted, for he wanted, he said, to find out what all this science was about.

We walked out of the little station straight into the moist wealth of the Thames Valley, taking a footpath across fields shining like wet paint, beside ditches choked with rich uprisings of meadow-sweet and Queen Anne’s lace, or peppermint loosestrife. Here and there a fat black crow pecked the grass in unhurried greed; and knots of trees which had never known what it was to be thirsty rose tall and thick-trunked and dense in leaf, giving wide shelter to the negroes in their underclothes. That was what we called the herd of cattle which grazed these pastures. They belonged to a breed which I have never seen anywhere else, with black heads and legs and white bodies. We always paused and surveyed them benignly, for such is the power of words that we came to admire them for their equanimity, as one might reasonably admire people who had had their clothes stolen and kept their tempers. As we went on our way we took in deep breaths, for we liked everything about the Thames Valley, even to the air, and we classed those who called it stuffy with the weaklings for whom cream was too rich.

But Mamma found it tiring. She was not very strong nowadays. When we came to a culvert halfway along the path she would sit down on the low brick parapet and rest, dropping her head and closing her eyes if the sun was strong. I remember one day the rest of us stood by and gossiped about the people we were going to see at the Dog and Duck, Uncle Len and Aunt Milly and Aunt Lily, and the kitchen-maid and the boots and the ostler, all of whom we liked. It struck me as horrible that Nancy was not one of the people we would meet. There was no chance of that, for her dead father’s brother had taken her to live with his family at Nottingham, and out of hatred for Queenie would not let his daughter visit Aunt Lily, nor us either, because we were Aunt Lily’s friends. Suddenly I was hungry to see Nancy again. I found myself near to tears, I drew away from the others, I went and stood close to Mamma, and said to her, ‘What a beast Nancy’s Uncle Mat is. It is not Aunt Lily’s fault that she is Queenie’s sister.’

Mamma said, without opening her eyes, ‘You must not judge him too harshly. The gods behave just as badly in the Greek plays and many people read them for pleasure.’

The hot noon hummed round us. We made Mamma get up and go on; she would be better resting on a deck-chair in the garden. Ahead the course of the river was marked by a line of poplars, the very shape and colour of delicacy. If a waxing or waning moon was a pale fingernail in the heat-blanched sky above them, that was perfect. Beyond the unseen waters the heights of the further bank were soft with woodland. In full summer the rounded hollows between the green treetops were blue-green. When we reached those poplars and the towing-path we always dawdled a little, looking down on the river, the grey-green mystery, the mirror which reflects solid objects so steadily but is not solid, the fugitive which remains. We watched the current and let our eyes run with it, then brought them back to the starting point, so that they could be swept downstream again, until our drunken ecstasy changed to a fear that we were going to feel sick and start squinting. Then we would look across the Thames at the Dog and Duck on its sloping lawns, the tall rockery behind them, the church beside it. The inn was built of plum red brick and sooty black timber, and had been a farmhouse or a forester’s lodge three centuries before. Behind it rose the roofs and chimney stacks of a tall extension which had been added to it in Georgian days, when it had been a coaching inn. The church, like many old Thameside churches, sparkled with black flint, and it had a stubborn stone tower. The two buildings, so disparate in form and size and age and kind, were set at such an angle that the eye took them in as one shapely image, and the river washed the mound on which they stood in a wide clean curve, like the arc of a bow. The underlying diagram of the place was good, it was beautiful even in colourless midwinter; not that midwinter was really colourless here, for though the woods were then bronze and the grass greyish the willows leaned orange-red over the waters, and all along the wall dividing the inn-garden from the churchyard there clambered, yellow hand over yellow hand, the winter jasmine. That grew grossly and gloriously, like all plants at the Dog and Duck, where gardening lost the refined character often ascribed to it. ‘There’s something good in the mere notion of a second helping, no matter what it’s of,’ I have heard Uncle Len say as he sat at the head of his table; and all the roses and clematis which crowned and garlanded the inn, and the delphiniums and peonies plumply congesting the flower-beds, expressed the same happy feeling that the world had gone too far in its enthusiasm for moderation and the thing had to be stopped. But this was not a place where life had run to fat and lost its gravity. Uncle Len was burly and red-faced, but when he came out to see who had rung the ferry-bell so early in the day, he wore his bibbed green baize apron with regal dignity, and looked sternly and kindly at the disordered world, as if it were a rebellious subject and he would not forget his duty to give it protection even if it had forgotten its duty to give him allegiance. The women in his care showed how well he had his life in hand. Aunt Milly was a composed little woman with a small puss face under a pile of prematurely silver hair, dressed on the top of her head in an eighteenth-century style, and a habit of clasping her hands at her waist, raising her chin, and looking down her short, upturned nose, as if she were waiting for life to put its cards on the table. Aunt Lily no longer looked like a doll which a child had thrown too often out of her pram. In those days musical comedies exercised the same powers over the imagination of not very imaginative people that the films do today, so Aunt Lily skipped and trilled like one of the chorus at the Gaiety or Daly’s; and it was tolerable because her joy was real. She profited greatly from the steady, ruminative cultivation of abundance which was the rule at the Dog and Duck. Uncle Len and Aunt Milly loved her not merely with generosity, but in the several forms she needed as she passed from childhood and maturity, and back to something even simpler. Sometimes they treated her as a sister who was helping them bear the burden of the day, sometimes as if she were their child, and sometimes as if she were a petted cat or dog. They never scolded or teased her for her absurdities, and made no protest when she rushed to greet us, crying, ‘All of you with your hair up! All except Cordelia, with her dear little short curls! I can’t believe it, when I think what tiny tots you all were when we first met,’ though they knew that she had never seen us till we were well-grown school girls. There was no counting the worlds of fantasy she called into being at the beginning of a sentence and let die at its end. But that did no harm, for they were inventions and not falsifications; Len and Milly watched her and smiled as if she had been a child blowing soap-bubbles.

It would have been very wrong indeed to think that the healing power of the Dog and Duck rested on mere geniality, for Uncle Len was so hostile to certain conventional attitudes that strangers might have judged him a hard man. For example, he refused to lose his calm over the Phillips tragedy; and showed impatience if we showed signs of losing ours. He set forth his reasons one wet afternoon, when there were no customers at the inn, and I was helping him to prick out some late seedlings. Two people, working together at that simple task in the gentle stuffiness of a greenhouse, fall into a happy trance as they make the same few movements over and over again, their eyes fixed on the brown earth in the boxes, while the wind slaps the sloping roof above them and sends flurried cascades of raindrops down the glass to say how bad things are outside and make inside seem all the snugger; and it is likely that sooner or later these two people will speak their mind to each other. So in the last half-hour before tea Uncle Len said: ‘You may wonder why I keep Lil from losing her hair over her sister in the way people think decent. But I don’t hold with it. By my way of thinking, too much has been made of this business. I grant you, Rose, it was hard luck on Harry Phillips that someone poisoned him. A nasty dirty thing poisoning is, and it shouldn’t by rights happen to anyone. It nearly always means that the dead man’s been done in by somebody he trusted. But a lot of people died that way before Harry Phillips, and a lot more will die that way after him. It’s a risk we all take when we get born. Throw away that seedling, love. It’s too leggy, it’ll never come to anything. Pick one that’s got more body to it. Look, they all ought to be like this.’