Blackground

by Joan Aiken

  “Oh, come on, Olga!” I said, sick with disgust and pity, “why in the world would I do a thing like that?”

  “Olga my dear — take a biscuit,” said Sophie materializing at her shoulder.

  Automatically Olga did so, never removing her eyes from my face.

  “The three of diamonds,” I said. “What does that mean, Sophie?”

  “It must be something in connection with your work, Olga.” Sophie looked a little perturbed. “Are you perhaps meeting any opposition in your plans at the theatre?”

  “Always — always!” Olga made a large gesture with her glass, then quickly swallowed the rest of its contents. “I never yet worked on any job where I did not encounter the opposition of fools.” Like Papa, I thought. “It is lucky, so lucky, that I have good friends to cheer me up.” And she gave me a sudden vigorous embrace, nearly unbalancing me. “Good friends, good good friends like my darling Cat. Hmnn?” She grinned at me sidelong, catlike, and munched up the three of diamonds in one bite.

  I told Sophie that I believed I had better be going.

  “It has been a lovely party, but crutches aren’t the best support for parties —”

  “Oh, my dear, you should have sat down —”

  “Yes, but then I’d never have been able to get up again.”

  As I worked my way towards the door, I noticed Pat Limbourne just arriving. “Only this minute got back from Dorchester,” I heard her say, and something about Arts Council awards. Her eye fell on me and a look passed over her face which I was unable to analyse — troubled, harassed, disapproving, perhaps?

  Oh hell, I thought. Let’s get out of here — but it’s going to be hard work toiling back up the hill . . .

  To my surprise, I found small birdlike Miss Morgan at my elbow.

  “I’m going too,” she chirped. “We never like to leave Shuna for too long on her own — not that she isn’t perfectly sensible — and it was so stuffy in there — such a lot of people still smoke, though you’d think they’d know better —”

  In a businesslike way she removed my left-hand crutch and took my arm, supporting me with a remarkably strong grip, unexpected in somebody of her size.

  “It’s all the karate lessons,” she explained simply. “And archery: that strengthens one’s biceps. And, of course, gardening; I spend so much time out of doors.”

  I said how very grateful I was; and then told her about Odd Tom’s ministrations.

  “Isn’t he a wonderful little man?” she exclaimed, delighted. “I did hope that he would — but he has to like you first, otherwise he wouldn’t lift a finger. He’ll probably have you walking in a day or two.”

  “That’s what he said.” I hesitated, wondering whether to ask if Odd Tom bore a grudge against my husband. In the end I decided not to.

  Miss Morgan saw me to my door, and through it. “If I were you I’d go to bed very soon.”

  “Thank you, I shall.”

  I lay down on my bed, fully clothed. I felt exhausted, but sleep was far off. There had been too many cross-currents at Sophie’s party, after my days of solitude. Faces, voices, surged through my consciousness in a clattering, glittering cataract. No way could I bring the flow to a stop, or even slow it down. I tried reciting poetry, of which I have a goodly store, old stage parts, dates of English kings, but stuck at Henry V 1413. Then I tried another expedient, which sometimes helps when I am suffering from over-stimulation. I took my mind for a walk around the rooms and gardens of Yetford Rectory.

  It was not a beautiful house, nor even a particularly comfortable one. The rooms were too high and too cold. But it had much character, and there was plenty of space in which we could spread out. And Masha loved the garden, because of the great cedar tree, and the shrubbery, and the stone bench . . . I loved it too. The cedar was the first tree I managed to climb — then the walnut, the wild cherry, the great willow, the oak, the copper beech — you had to cheat on the copper beech and throw a clothesline over the lowest branch, for otherwise there was no possible means of getting up its huge smooth trunk.

  If I were offered a day to live again out of the whole of my life, I would choose a summer afternoon at Yetford.

  Even if it meant having the rest of what followed over again?

  No, no, not that. Not on any account. One life, once over, is quite enough.

  Thinking about Yetford brought me unawares up to the day, the worst in my life, I suppose, when I had to tell Masha that I was pregnant.

  She took the news like a stern General — in her habitual way; instantly began to plan, ignoring the past, concentrating on the future. She had never been given to post-mortems. Andrei was back in Russia, there was no earthly use in telling him; if, indeed, it would even be possible to get in touch with him.

  “You’ll go on working as long as you can, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “And Papa need not be told until a good deal later — I’m afraid he will be very upset —”

  Papa by then had retired more and more into that exclusive male club which he shared with God. Occasionally he would wander into the kitchen and say, “Can you tell the staff to serve my lunch in the study?” What staff he had in mind we never knew. Perhaps, Fitz once suggested, much later, it was an allusion to the Twenty-Third Psalm: “Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” In the fullness of time, Fitz became wonderful at managing Papa, could conduct him like a string quartet. But that was years after. At first there were troubles; terrible, terrible troubles.

  I can see now, what I could not then, that a part of Masha must have been overjoyed at my news. So much of her life must have seemed a complete waste, a write-off — except in some mystical balance-sheet which she entirely accepted but which the rest of us have to take on trust. Now, though, she had a second chance to be really useful, to employ her neglected powers. None of this, I am sure, showed in her face (which, as she aged, took on more and more of the aspect of a rocky landscape in a dry mountain region).

  Her sheer surprise was hard to bear: “But, I taught you ethics? I thought that would be sufficient to keep you out of trouble.” A deep, deep sigh. “I suppose I have been too preoccupied with Edred . . . ”

  Childbirth itself was neither here nor there. All I remember of it is the woman in the next bed. “Allah, Allah, Allah,” she was murmuring, accent on the last syllable, a la, a la, a la, as if giving birth and the name of God were both the very last word in style.

  And Fitz’s first year was a time of calm. It was when he began to run about, and develop, and have a will of his own, and come into conflict with Papa, that all hell broke loose.

  That day, that excruciating day, when Masha said to me, “Katya, I really don’t think you had better come home any more.” (I was still working at one of the hospitals then.) “It’s too painful for all of us,” Masha said.

  “Not—”

  “Not come home, any more,” she repeated. “Not until Fitz is a whole lot bigger. It is too hard on him. Too hard on Papa. Too hard on you.” Of herself she did not speak.

  Was it because Papa had cut her off from her sisters? Was that why she separated Fitz from me?

  I can remember — it is printed on my ear for ever, for ever — his desperate, frantic heartbroken cry — “Mammy — Mammy — Mammy!” as she held him in and shut the front door and I raced off down the drive, blind with tears.

  Nothing, ever again, can be as bad as that.

  Such wounds cannot be healed. I feel it ache to this day. And Fitz? He seems completely stable. Masha undoubtedly brought him up much better than I would have.

  Joel strongly disagrees about this.

  “You mean she just let you go — off into the world by yourself at the age of sixteen —”

  “Seventeen by then I think —”

  “Just like that, after one terrible trauma —”

  �
�The burnt child, Masha thought; and she was quite right.”

  “That was barbarous. It was uncivilized.”

  “Well, but Masha wasn’t exactly civilized — though she had such exquisite manners. She was Welsh and Russian —”

  “I’m Irish and Jewish,” Joel said. “I wouldn’t behave like that.”

  “You are civilized, Joel. Masha was tribal. She was a matriarch. She thought in terms of the family.”

  “You were her family, damn it.”

  “But I’d introduced Fitz — the next generation. So now it was my job to get on and provide for him. She undertook to rear him — which she did perfectly; she managed to do that as well as take care of Papa, who was her primary job, she reckoned, the one she’d undertaken for life.”

  “I can’t see why? When he was such a hopeless old stick? Didn’t he ever do anything at all useful?”

  Casting my mind back, I could think of no such occurrence. His contribution, at any time of crisis, was to stand awkwardly in the way, saying, “What shall we do? What do you think should be done, Maria?”

  The surgery, his skill in the theatre, was a one-off; it had left him, like the dew of the morning, like Wordsworth’s early genius. What remained was only a shell.

  “No,” I said slowly, “he didn’t . . .”

  “Well, then —”

  “But, you see, she looked on Edred as a wounded eagle. No, more than that. After all, he had once been the most brilliant surgeon in London, maybe in the world. He had given it up — of his own choice —”

  “More fool him,” said unsympathetic Joel.

  “That’s not the point! He had given it up to go and look for God. If there was one thing Masha had, it was a respect for other people’s integrity —”

  “Integrity! That old catchword! Godsakes!”

  “For all she knew, Edred was on the point of some great discovery — something far finer than all his surgical nippiness. She respected his choice — as she did mine when I told her I couldn’t be a nurse any longer and got myself a job selling stockings at D. H. Evans. And she did look after Fitz, she made him what he is —”

  “But why, why, when the old boy went senile, had his stroke or whatever — when she could see he wasn’t going to get wherever it was he wanted —”

  “But she couldn’t see that! Don’t you understand? For all she knew, he was there already — at Shangri-la! Wherever he was going. Everyone knows that saints are difficult and impossible. For all she knew, he was one. He had to be given the benefit of the doubt. She gave everyone that benefit.”

  “Except you.”

  “She knew I’d make out. I was like her. Her great strength was that she always accepted what happened, never asked the reason why —”

  “She should have!”

  “Well that wasn’t her way. She just got on with the next option. Like an ant, like a termite. Somewhere once I read an essay on the necessity and senselessness of all human activity. Necessity, okay; senselessness I deny. Masha’s activities were no more senseless than those of a coral-insect; she had to be, she had to do.”

  And I have to be and do, I thought.

  “Yet she was educated,” said Joel wonderingly.

  “Sure she was educated. What has that to say to anything?”

  “Education teaches you to argue and make an outcry.”

  Perhaps that’s why I don’t do much of that, I thought. Because of having no education after age fifteen, except what I could pick up in snatches.

  “Well,” I said, “if so, Masha had jettisoned that aspect of her education. All she kept were the mental stores that saw her through bad times. That was why The Idiot was always her favourite novel. Endlessly she — she chewed the cud of all she had once learned.”

  “Very indigestible.”

  “Maybe. But the result was that she survived. And was a huge help to other people. In those villages — where Papa was such a hopeless rector — people depended on her. They used to come to her with problems. She was an appreciator. People need that. There aren’t enough of them.”

  Just the same, I wondered, had the frustration within her, the knowledge that she might have had a career in public affairs, that she never made proper use of her abilities — had that caused the cancer? This was no new thought. It had come to me many times. I don’t think she missed the Buck House parties, the fame, the income. But she did always keep her beautiful Liberty dresses. After she died, I found them folded carefully away, unfaded, in tissue paper, with mothballs. She must have been too fat to wear them for the last thirty years. A cheap diet is very fattening. She had never offered those dresses to me. But they would not have suited my life-style either.

  Just before I slept I thought again about Olga’s furious accusation: “Sometimes I’m almost sure that it was you who told Cal Pendennis I was planning to leave him.” Now that was really paranoid, I thought. Why in the world should Olga think that — when I had been her aide, her confidante, her heart-and-soul partisan?

  Was it because she knew herself to be capable of such a betrayal?

  I woke, later, with a start. Somebody was calling me — over and over, persistently: “Lady Fortuneswell, Lady Fortuneswell!” And then, “Cat! Cat Conwil!” At last I was obliged to acknowledge that the voice was real, and I hoisted myself heavily off the bed, and crutched myself slowly to the front door.

  The caller was Pat Limbourne.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” she said, taking in my dishevelled appearance. “Were you asleep? It’s not very late really — but, I suppose —”

  “Never mind,” I said yawning. “What time is it?”

  “Quarter to ten. Elspeth was for not disturbing you, but he sounded so urgent —”

  “Who?” I yawned again. My sleep had been short but heavy. I felt like a block of concrete.

  “Your husband. On the phone.”

  “Oh! Good heavens!” I swayed, and grabbed for the splaying crutches.

  “It’s all right. Don’t panic. I said I’d fetch you, and he said he’d call back in ten minutes. Would you like me to push you in your wheelchair?”

  “No, no, I’m fine now, thank you. It was just the surprise of being woken.—Where is he?”

  “In Dorchester.”

  “Dorchester?”

  “At the Close Hotel. He did say he’d tried to call earlier,” explained Pat, helping me down the steps. “I suppose we were all at Sophie’s party. I happened to know, actually, that he was in Dorchester, because I’d seen him this morning at a Wessex Arts meeting. And —” she stopped while she guided me solicitously over a stretch of slippery marble pavement; the fine day had turned to a night of soft rain. The sea’s murmur could be heard very clearly. I paid it little heed however; I was startled to death over the fact that Ty was so close, in Dorchester — had actually got in touch!

  What did he want? Were all my wild imaginings quite wide of the mark? Were we about to resume our marital relationship? I have to confess that my heart went pit-a-pat. I felt a crazy, feverish curiosity at the prospect of seeing Ty again. As if he were a stranger with whom I was in love. Women used to dream romantic dreams about Hitler, I’ve been told. In the Middle Ages I suppose they dreamed the same kind of dreams about the Devil. A mixture of wild attraction and fear.

  Well, that was how I felt about Ty just then.

  Pat and I talked no more on our way to the Ladies’ house; the causeway was greasy with rain and mud, demanding attention even from a person with two good feet.

  When we reached the house, we found Miss Morgan fidgeting about the kitchen; it could not be said that she was tidying it, as she simply moved things from one place to another. She and Pat exchanged a significant look. Up to this moment I had assumed their mutual sympathy and agreement to be total, but now, I perceived, they were at odds; some question had driven a breach between them. />
  Nervous in the strained silence, I asked if I might use their bathroom.

  “You know where it is, go ahead,” Miss Morgan said.

  Returning, I heard her mutter urgently, “I don’t care what you say, she ought to be told.”

  “It’s gossip,” Pat Limbourne replied curtly. “Trifling, spiteful —”

  “Well, I’ll risk it. I’m not ashamed!” And, as I hobbled back into the kitchen — so warm, cluttered, lived-in with its piles of school textbooks and half-mended jerseys, compared to the austerity of my house, Elspeth announced to me, “Pat saw your husband in Dorchester earlier today, lunching with Olga Laszlo.”

  I was a little surprised, but said, “Oh, really? Something to do with the theatre, I imagine. He’s on the board, isn’t he? And she’s known him for a long time.” (“Fancy you being married to old Ty,” I recalled, from the other morning.) I added, “Queer that she didn’t mention it this evening at Sophie’s. But she was in rather a twitchy mood.”

  “Tipsy, not twitchy,” said Elspeth. “When Olga’s taken a drink or two she has a tongue like a puff-adder. Really nasty.”

  “Oh well,” I said, “she won’t remember a thing about it tomorrow. It’ll be all hugs and kisses and best friends again. I’ve known Olga quite a few years, too, remember.”

  “That’s not what concerns us.” Elspeth took her hearing-aid out of her ear, scowled at it, and slipped it back in again: a process with which I was becoming familiar, denoting perturbation of mind. “The thing is, Pat says, when she saw them at lunch, she could see that Olga was in the same kind of state then.”

  Pat’s face bore the expression of someone biting on a rancid hazelnut.

  I said, “Ty had been giving her too much to drink, you mean?”

  “Yes, and she was all worked up — excitable — ready for mischief.”

  The phone rang.

  “Well,” I said, levering myself towards it, “I don’t really think there is much mischief she can make between me and Ty.”

  All possible harm has been done already, I thought, picking up the receiver, as the ladies tactfully removed themselves to the other room.