I Capture the Castle

by Dodie Smith

  “And the only rhyme I could find for tulips was “blue lips.”” I laughed and told him there were more important things than rhymes—”Lots of good poetry doesn’t have them at all. The main thing is to write what you really feel.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that,” he said.

  “No, that would never do.”

  “But why not, Stephen his Of course it would do.” “No, it wouldn’t,” he said, and smiled straight in front of him as if he were thinking of some private joke. It reminded me of that evening months ago when we were putting saucepans under the drips—he had smiled in just the same private way.

  “Stephen,” I said, “do you remember-why, it was the very night the Cottons first came here! Do you remember looking out of this window and saying: “Beginnings are good times”?”

  He nodded.

  “But I wasn’t expecting any Cottons,” he said, glumly.

  “Did you dance with them last night?”

  “I tried once with Neil.”

  “People look awful dancing—I’d be ashamed. You’d never do it like that one who calls herself Leda, would you?”

  “I’d never dance so well,” I said.

  “But I know what you mean.

  She does rather drape herself over her partners, doesn’t she? You aren’t going to let her photograph you, are you?”

  I said it most casually, not as if I minded at all. To my surprise, he put on his wooden look-which is quite different from his daft look. The daft look is hazy, dreamy; the wooden look is obstinate to the point of sulkiness. It is a look he gives Rose sometimes, but I couldn’t remember his ever turning it on me.

  “I might,” he said.

  “If people want to throw their money about.”

  “But surely you’d hate it, Stephen?”

  “It might be worth hating it to earn five guineas.

  Five guineas would be almost enough” he broke off and turned away to go downstairs.

  “Enough for what?” I called after him.

  “Oh for-for lots of things,” he said, without turning round.

  “Five guineas is more than I can save in a year.”

  “But you were so sure you wouldn’t do it last night.”

  He looked back as he went round the curve of the little attic staircase, his head just above the level of the floor.

  “P’raps I will, p’raps I won’t,” he said maddeningly and went on down. A voice in my head said “I’m damned if you’re going to sit for Leda Fox-Cotton.” Then the bell rang for tea so I followed him down.

  Topaz had boiled half the ham. She said it would go further if we didn’t cut it until it was quite cold, but Thomas insisted he has been very possessive about that ham. We all fanned it with newspapers until the last moment. It was wonderful, of course ham with mustard is a meal of glory.

  Miss Marcy came after tea, to hear all about the party. She told me Mrs. Fox-Cotton’s photographs are very well known; they get reproduced in magazines. She particularly remembered one of a girl hiding behind a giant shell with the shadow of a man coming towards her.

  “And one got the impression that he was wearing-well, nothing, which surprised me rather because one doesn’t often see photographs being as artistic as paintings, does one his But there, he probably had a bathing suit on all the time it would hardly show on a shadow, would it?”

  I laughed I do adore darling Miss Marcy. But I was all the more determined Stephen shouldn’t go near the Fox-Cotton woman.

  The next morning Topaz, Rose and I went into King’s Crypt with the twenty pounds the Vicar gave for the collie dog rug and bought my first grownup dress—pale green linen;

  Rose had a pink one. Topaz said she didn’t need anything herself—and anyway, she looks most unnatural in ready made clothes. I got some white shoes and a pair of practically silk stockings. If anyone asked me to a garden-party I could go. When we got home we found Father hadn’t eaten the lunch Topaz had left for him and wasn’t anywhere in the castle. He turned up about nine o’clock and said he had bicycled over to Scoatney—apparently Simon had given him the run of the library while they were away. I asked if he had read anything particularly interesting.

  “Oh, mostly American magazines—and some critical essays,” he said.

  “I’d forgotten how advanced American criticism is.”

  Topaz said she would get him a meal, but he told her he’d had luncheon and dinner.

  “It seems Mrs. Cotton left instructions that I’m to be fed when I go there.” He went off to the gatehouse looking rather smug.

  I retired to the attic and went on with this journal.

  When I came down to the kitchen again Stephen was writing on an opened-out sugar bag. He went scarlet when he saw me and crumpled the sugar bag up. Just then Topaz came in from the garden wearing Aunt Millicent’s black cloak and no stockings or shoes. I guessed she’d had one of her nude sessions.

  “Thank heaven Nature never fails me,” she said as she stumped upstairs. When I turned round Stephen was poking the sugar bag down into the fire.

  “Was it another poem?” I asked-I feel I ought to encourage him now he is writing his own poems.

  “Why did you burn it?”

  “Because it wouldn’t do at all,” he said, still very red in the face.

  He stared at me for a second, then suddenly dashed out into the garden. I waited for him, sitting by the fire with About and Hcl, but he didn’t come back.

  When I went upstairs, Rose was sitting up in bed varnishing her nails; the varnish had been her special treat out of the Vicar’s money —I had lavender soap.

  “You’re using that too soon,” I said.

  “The Cottons won’t be back for twelve days yet.”

  Little did I think we should see them again in only four days.

  X

  Yesterday was the first of May. I love the special days of the year-St. Valentine’s, Halloween; Midsummer Eve most of all. A May Day that feels as it sounds is rare and, when I leaned out of the bedroom window watching the moat ruffled into sparkles by a warm breeze, I was as happy as I have ever been in my life. I knew it was going to be a lucky day.

  It certainly made a false start before breakfast.

  Father came down in his best dark suit that he hasn’t worn for years. Rose and I gaped at him, and Topaz stopped stirring the porridge to say: “Mortmain-what on earth—?”

  “I’m going up to London,” said Father, shortly.

  “What for?” we all said together; which made it rather loud.

  “Business,” said Father, even louder, and went out of the kitchen banging the door.

  “Don’t worry him, don’t ask questions,” whispered Topaz. Then she turned to me, looking miserable.

  “Do you think he’s going to see her-Mrs. Cotton?”

  “Surely he couldn’t—not without being asked,” I said.

  “Oh, yes he could,” said Rose.

  “Look at him, going to Scoatney three days running, letting the servants feed him grubbing about in the books and magazines! I tell you he’ll end by putting them off .”

  “It wasn’t him who put them off us last time,” said Topaz, angrily.

  I saw there were going to be high words so I went through into the drawing-room. Father was sitting on the window-seat polishing his shoes with the curtain. When he got up he was covered with Heloise’s white hairs from the seat-pad.

  “Is there no place a man in a dark suit can sit in this house?” he shouted as he went to the hall for the clothes-brush.

  “Not unless we dye Hcl black,” I said. I brushed him; but what with the brush having lost most of its bristles, his suit having lost most of its nap and Heloise having lost more hairs than seemed believable, the result was poor. Topaz came to say that breakfast was ready, but he said he would miss his train if he waited for it.

  “Don’t fuss don’t fuss,” he said when she begged him to have just something. Then he pushed past her in the rudest way and grabbed Rose’s bicy
cle because his own had a flat tyre.

  “When will you be back?” Topaz called after him.

  He yelled over his shoulder that he hadn’t the faintest idea.

  “What is the matter with him?” said Topaz as we walked back across the garden.

  “I know he’s always been moody but not bad-tempered like this. It’s been getting worse ever since we went to Scoatney.”

  “Perhaps it’s better than heavy resignation,” I suggested, trying to be comforting.

  “He was shockingly bad-tempered when we were little-when he was writing. You know about Mother and the cake knife

  Topaz looked suddenly hopeful.

  “He can massacre me if it’ll really help him,” she said. Then the light died out of her eyes.

  “But I’m no good to him. It’s that woman who’s started him.”

  “Gracious, we don’t know if anything’s started him,” I said.

  “We’ve had so many false alarms. Where did he get the money to go to London?”

  She said she had given him five pounds of the Vicar’s rug money. “Though I didn’t think he’d spend it on seeing her.” Then she added nobly: “I suppose I oughtn’t even to mind that, if she stimulates him.”

  Rose came out of the kitchen with a slice of bread and jam, and passed us without a word—I gathered she and Topaz had had a very sharp row while I was brushing Father. We found that the porridge was burnt—than which there can be few less pleasing forms of food; and what with this and Topaz’s mood of gloom, we had a depressing meal. (the boys, of course, had gone off earlier; after a hammy breakfast.) “I shall go and dig until I find peace,” said Topaz, when we had done the washing-up and made the beds.

  I felt she would find it better alone and I wanted to write in my journal; I had finished the evening at Scoatney but there were some reflections about life I wanted to record. (i never did record them and have now forgotten what they were.) As I settled myself down on Belmotte mound, I saw Rose going along the lane with Mrs.

  Stebbins’s crinoline; Stephen had brought word that the old lady was fretting for it. He had refused to take it back for Rose because he said he’d feel embarrassed. Rose had it over her shoulder; she did look peculiar.

  I decided to think a little before I began writing, and lay back enjoying the heat of the sun and staring up at the great blue bowl of the sky. It was lovely feeling the warm earth under me and the springing grass against the palms of my hands while my mind was drawn upwards. Unfortunately my thoughts will never stay exalted for very long, and soon I was gloating over my new green dress and wondering if it would suit me to curl my hair. I closed my eyes, as I usually do when I am thinking very hard. Gradually I slid into imagining Rose married to Simon—it doesn’t seem to matter when you imagine about other people, it only stops things happening when you do it about yourself. I gave Rose a lovely wedding and got to where she was alone with Simon at a Paris hotel—she was a little frightened of him, but I made her enjoy that.

  He was looking at her the way he did at dinner when he raised his glass to I opened my eyes. He was there, the real Simon Cotton, looking at me.

  I hadn’t heard a sound. One second I had seen him in the Paris hotel, brilliantly clear yet somehow tiny and far away, rather as one sees things in a convex mirror; the next instant he was like a giant against the sky. I had been lying with the sun on my eyelids so that for a minute nothing was the right color. The grass and sky were bleached and his face looked ashen. But his beard was still black.

  “Did I startle you?” he asked, smiling.

  “I had a bet with myself I’d get up the hill without your hearing. Oh—you weren’t asleep, were you?”

  “Not quite so early in the day,” I said, sitting up blinking. He sat down beside me. It was the queerest feeling—changing the man I had imagined to the real man. I had made him so fascinating, and of course he isn’t really-though very, very nice; I know that now.

  He and Neil had driven down just for the day; Neil had dropped him at the end of our lane and gone on to Scoatney -which sounded as if he weren’t very interested in us.

  “I’m sorry to have missed your sister,” said Simon, “but Mrs. Mortmain hopes she’ll be back soon.”

  I said I was sure she would, though I really thought she would be gone at least an hour, and wondered if I could be interesting enough to keep him talking as long as that. I asked him if they were having a good time in London.

  “Oh, yes—I love London. But it seems a waste not to be here in this weather.” He leaned back on his elbow, gazing across the fields.

  “I never knew the English spring could be so dazzling.”

  I said it astonished one every year.

  “Well, after next week we’ll be back here for some time—that is, Neil and I will; Mother’s absorbed in her new apartment—flat, as I keep forgetting to call it. Leda and Aubrey are helping her to choose the furniture. Oh, that reminds me”—he took an envelope from his pocket—”I ought to have left this at the castle.

  It’s for that nice boy Stephen; his fare to London, from Leda.”

  “I’ll give it to him,” I said. I wondered if Stephen had written saying he could go, or if she had just sent the money to tempt him.

  Simon handed me the envelope.

  “Tell me about him,” he said.

  “How does he come to speak so differently from the other village boys?”

  Of course Stephen speaks just as we do—except that he chooses rather humble words. I explained about him.

  “I wonder what he’ll make of Leda,” said Simon.

  “She wants to pose him with some casts of Greek sculpture.

  She’ll have him in a tunic if he’s not careful, or out of it. He certainly has a marvelous head—perhaps he’ll end in Hollywood.”

  I shut the envelope in my journal so that it wouldn’t blow away.

  “What’s that? Lessons?” asked Simon.

  “Heavens, no, I left school long ago.”

  “I do apologize,” he said, laughing.

  “I still think of you as that little girl in the bath. Is it a story his Read me a bit.” I told him it was my journal and that I had just finished the party at Scoatney.

  “Do I come in it his I’ll give you a box of candy if you’ll let me read a page.”

  “All right,” I said.

  He grabbed the exercise book. After a second or two he looked up from it.

  “You’ve swindled me. Is it your own private code?”

  “More or less—though it did begin as real speed-writing. It changed by degrees. And I got it smaller and smaller, so as not to waste paper.”

  He turned the pages and guessed a word here and there but I could see I was safe. After a minute or two he said:

  “I was reading the journal in Jacob Wrestling again yesterday-I happened to pick up a first edition. It’s odd to remember how obscure I found that part when I read it at sixteen. By the time I came to do it in college it seemed perfectly intelligible.”

  “The only part that still puzzles me is the ladder chapter—you know, where it’s printed so that it actually looks like a ladder, with a sentence for every rung. Father won’t answer questions about that.”

  “Maybe he can’t. I’ve always believed it’s the description of some mystical experience. Of course you know the theory that each rung leads to the next, even though the sentences seem so unconnected?”

  “Indeed I don’t,” I said.

  “Dear me, it’s so extraordinary to hear of people having theories about Father’s work and studying it in college thousands of miles away. It must be more important than we realize.”

  “Well, it’s one of the forerunners of postwar literature. And your Father’s a link in the chain of writers who have been obsessed by form. If only he’d carried his methods further!”

  “But didn’t you say he couldn’t? That Jacob Wrestling was corn complete in itself, as far as he was concerned—that it couldn’t have a successor?”


  He looked at me quickly.

  “Fancy your remembering that! Do you know, I’m ashamed to say that didn’t mean very much it was an effort to be tactful when I knew I’d put my foot in it.”

  I told him I’d guessed that, which made him laugh.

  “You nasty noticing child! But I don’t think your father spotted me. And in one way, what I said’s true, you know —he can’t exactly develop his Jacob Wrestling method, because other writers have gone far ahead of him on rather similar lines;

  James Joyce, for instance.

  He’d have to take an enormous jump over intervening work and he hasn’t even kept in touch with it.

  I wonder if that could be what’s stopping him writing, that the next rung of the ladder-since we’re talking of ladders-has been used by others. How’s that for a theory? Or am I just trying to rationalize my phoniness that first evening?”

  “Well, it’s a nice change from the theory that he can’t write because he went to jail,” I said.

  “That’s fantastic, of course—why, the reports of the case read like something in Gilbert and Sullivan. And Mother says his description of his life in prison was even funnier.”

  “You mean he actually told her?” I gasped never have I heard him mention one word about his life in prison.

  “She asked him point-blank- I must say I wouldn’t have dared.

  She says he looked for a second as if he were going to strike her and then launched cheerfully into a half-hour monologue. Oh, I’m sure prison isn’t the root of the trouble.”

  I said I had never believed it myself.

  “But it is queer that he’s never written a thing since he came out.”

  “It certainly is. Of course he ought to be psychoanalyzed.”

  I suppose no normally intelligent person living in the nineteen-thirties can fail to have some faint inkling of what psychoanalysis is, but there are few things about which I know less. I asked Simon to explain it to me.

  “Good Lord, that’s a tall order,” he said, laughing.

  “And I’ve only the haziest layman’s idea of it myself. But let’s see, now: I think a psychoanalyst would say the trouble lay much further back than those few months in prison—but that prison might have brought it to the surface. He’d certainly explore that period thoroughly-make your Father remember every detail of it; in a way, he’d have to be put back in prison.”