by Rumer Godden
It was hot under the lavender sunshade but again Fanny felt cold. Darrell had steered her to the stairs and stood in the hall, watching her go up. Then she heard him shutting up the house. In the bedroom she stayed still, listening, and as cold as this, thought Fanny, her arms goosefleshed … but my head and my temples felt as if they were burning, as if my heart was split and was beating there and in my throat. I heard Darrell come upstairs and go into his dressing-room. I heard the sound as he threw his wallet and his keys down on the chest of drawers before he went into the bathroom.
She had stolen into the dressing-room, picked up the keys and quietly closed and locked the door that led into her bedroom. That would make him pause for a minute or two, poor Darrell. Back in her room Fanny kicked off her thin shoes, pulled on street ones and took a coat and scarf; her bag and gloves were where she had left them on her dressing-table. As Darrell came back from the bathroom into the dressing-room, Fanny ran downstairs, along the kitchen passage. Danny got up from his bed to join her but she hushed him peremptorily. She unlocked the back door, slipped through it, taking the key, and locked the door behind her. On the grass she ran to the garage; it was not locked and silently she opened the doors. Thank God the gate was open, thought Fanny, and, thank God, the car was warm. It started at once and she drove out.
She thought she saw the lights go on downstairs; she thought she heard a shout, but it may not have been. She dared not look back. In a moment, she was on the road to London.
In January, up in Scotland, the petition was served on Fanny by post. She had to sign the ‘acknowledgement of service’ as her solicitor called it. ‘Do I need a solicitor as well as you and Darrell?’ she had asked Rob. Mr McCrae had been Aunt Isabel’s solicitor and, for all his Scots disapproval, when Rob had said that indeed she needed a solicitor, Fanny had instinctively gone to him. Rob’s ‘acknowledgement of service’ had to go to Africa, which caused a small delay. She, the guilty one, did not have to appear in court, and it was to Aunt Isabel’s cottage that the telegram came to say that the case was on the warned list. It was heard on April the third and a decree nisi was granted. ‘In ten minutes flat,’ wrote Mr McCrae. Ten minutes, thought Fanny, to undo eighteen years.
The law had disposed of the problem but it can’t dispose of people, thought Fanny. Use them as chattels, not even children.
I was going to roll it all up, roll it into a ball that I could keep hidden in my hand, or in my heart. It was to be only Rob, Rob and I, together for the rest of our lives. I had accepted that, then … and across every plan and thought and feeling came this new triumphant song: ‘They ran away. Hugh and Caddie ran away to me.’
5
‘But how?’ Fanny had not ceased to say that from the time Hugh and Caddie had arrived. ‘How did it happen? How did you get here?’ she asked it again, the next morning on the terrace. ‘How did you come?’
‘Train. Bus. Walked,’ said Hugh.
Breakfast was over. ‘If you can call it breakfast,’ said Caddie.
She had slept round the clock, the drugged unrefreshing sleep that comes with unhappy exhaustion; sleep crossed with dreams, nightmare faces from the journey: the porters at Calais, a French girl who had talked all night, a woman on the platform at Dole, they seemed to have been cut into Caddie’s brain. When she woke, she did not at first know where she was, only that she did not like being there. This last year there had been many places where she did not like to wake; at school where the sight of the white cubicle curtains and narrow iron bed made her feel an exile, the bedroom in the London flat that smelled stuffy and stale and that she had to share with Philippa, which meant that she was squeezed into a corner. At Stebbings she had had the old night nursery to herself and covered it with ‘a rash of animals,’ as Hugh said: her collection of porcelain horses, a string of carthorse brasses, a lucky horse-shoe, photographs cut from magazines of hunter trials and shows, of famous horses: and endless snapshots of Topaz, framed and unframed. Caddie’s room, ‘Caddie’s tack room,’ Hugh called it.
Now she woke in what seemed a shadowed cave, filled with the sound of waves, and it was some time before she remembered what she was doing there; she made out a high pink-washed ceiling, pink walls, bars of sunlight showing through the pull-down shutters. How strange to sleep with shutters down, closed in like a box, thought Caddie. The shape of a wardrobe loomed, a basin with a glimmer of china, a chair over which lay a shape that seemed to be a dress. Hers? There was a dressing-table with three mirrors and gleam of gilt, and she was lying in a large bed, its posts inlaid with flowers. When she reached up and touched one of them with her finger the flower was gilt. On the bed, pushed away, was a hard bolster, the bottom sheet still tucked immovably round it. She had been lying flat. Her pillow and bedclothes were on the floor.
From outside came the sound she had thought was waves, a steady splash splash of water; it was waves, gentle ones; the lake, thought Caddie. Yes, there was a chugging as if a boat passed. Down below in the house someone was singing again.
Caddie’s head had a dull ache. She felt numbed and stupid, and in her mouth was a sour taste. Last night both she and Hugh had drunk the wine Celestina gave them. Presently she slid off the bed and padded over to the basin; there was no tumbler but she managed to drink from the tap; the water only trickled and had a queer strong taste; it was iron, Fanny told her afterwards.
Her eyes were accustomed to the dimness now and she saw that someone had unpacked her grip; clean clothes were put out. They had brought only vests, socks, and pyjamas, but her dress and its knickers had been washed and ironed, already! thought Caddie. She dressed, leaving her pyjamas on the floor – ‘Caddie fashion,’ Fanny would have said – and brushed her hair; her school brush and comb looked childish on the big expanse of dressing-table. She did not bother to put on her shoes. Then she stood listening. Still only that splashing of water, the singing, and, now, the sound of oars. The bars of light through the shutters fell warm on the floor, warm and deep gold. It must be quite late, thought Caddie, and she went to the windows to try to push the shutters up, but they were too stiff for her. Then she saw there was a glass door opening from the room. It opened easily and she stepped out on to a small loggia. It was the twin to Fanny’s, as Caddie found out later, its windows arched like the Annunciation picture again; its tiled floor was already warm from the sun, grateful to her bare feet after the cold of the bedroom. She leaned her elbows on the loggia sill to look.
The lake moved gently in the morning sun; near the shore its blue changed to a clear green, and it was here that the waves splashed their freshness against the lower garden wall. In the top garden scents were beginning to warm; it was full of birds and even from here she could hear the shrilling of Celestina’s caged ones; swallows flashed past the loggia; but after a moment Caddie saw and heard none of these things; below on the terrace was Rob, Mr Quillet, in shorts and singlet, his bare arms and legs looking deep brown.
Caddie had not really been alive to Rob last night, only been aware that he had sat on the balustrade smoking, that he was dark, as Philippa said, dressed in the dark blue shirt and white trousers – she had taken in the trousers because she had not seen a man wearing them in white linen before. Yet, as if she had absentmindedly photographed him, looking down at him now she recognized him with startling distinctness. He was walking up and down and he moved in a way that made other people look stiff, stuffed, thought Caddie. He was not erect like Darrell but he was … graceful? It seemed an odd thing to say of a man. He was not exactly good-looking, his face was too thin, and he hasn’t very much hair, she thought. It grew far back, giving him a high forehead.
Until the last ten days grown people had been to Caddie no more than shades, nothing they said or did was in the least interesting. ‘Your children are completely self-engrossed,’ Lady Candida often told Fanny, to which Philippa, Hugh, and Caddie would have answered that of course they were; but Philippa and Hugh had at least been conscious of what was going on about the
m, at any rate as far as it affected them, but Caddie had been wrapped in the snug cocoon she had woven for herself, the private world of Caddie and Topaz. She had been stripped out of it so suddenly that now she seemed to catch the slightest mood or change and, standing at the loggia window, looking down on Rob, she knew he was more than a little disturbed – because Hugh and I have come? she asked.
‘Children should keep out of grown-up affairs,’ Gwyneth had said, but they shouldn’t, thought Caddie now. Already she and Hugh had made an impact and, with the bright morning, she felt filled with confidence and a self-importance she had had only in her Topaz dreams. Without giving herself time to think, she ran downstairs, down those marble stairs, and out on to the terrace.
‘Hallo,’ said Rob.
‘Good morning,’ said Caddie. She had meant it to sound as distant as Hugh’s ‘How do you do’, but it trailed off into uncertainty. If Rob was disturbed, he was not going to let anybody see it; his shoulders kept their quiet droop, and his ‘Hullo’ had been quite unperturbed. It brought back the memory of his decisive voice last night when he had put Hugh in his place, which is more than Father or Mother can do, thought Caddie, and he had made Fanny go out to dinner when we had just come, thought Caddie, which Darrell certainly could not have done. Caddie had not believed it herself, until she heard the speedboat start. She felt her new confidence ebbing; perhaps he was even more formidable than he had seemed last night, and what do we call him? she thought miserably. Mr Quillet, or Rob? What did people call Fanny now? No one knew what to call anyone, thought Caddie. It was part of the uneasiness and she walked past Rob to the balustrade and stood with her elbows on it feeling the sun on her neck.
Opposite the villa, across perhaps a mile of water, a small town lay along the lake; round it, on the mountain, were strange encrustations that, from this distance, looked like pale and elongated honeycombs.
‘What are those?’ asked Caddie.
‘That’s Limone,’ said Rob. ‘Limone, the place that lemons are called after. Those are the lemon terraces. The lemons have to be grown in screened terraces because of the wind.’
She and Hugh had seen lemons being sold all along the road; inviting-looking bunches, lemons, and oranges, on their branches of glossy green leaves, sold from carts, and wooden stands in the towns and villages, some piled in pyramids on the road wall, with a tattered boy to guard them, but she said nothing more.
‘Are you feeling better?’ asked Rob, Rob Quillet, Mr Quillet; Caddie nodded. ‘Coffee will be here in a minute. We are having it on the terrace this morning.’ He stretched and lifted his face to the sun. ‘Smell the lilacs,’ he said.
He did not, she noticed, talk to her as if she were a child, but levelly; the air in this strange garden was touched with fresh and dewy scent, but all the same she was not going to give in to anything Italian. ‘The lilac would be out at Stebbings, too,’ she said. If she had been watching Rob, she would have seen that she had scored a mark. His face had tightened. ‘I wish I had never seen Stebbings,’ he had said once to Fanny. ‘It never ceases to make me feel guilty.’
Fanny had had to try most of all not to think of Stebbings’ garden. That had been all hers, ‘I made it,’ while the house was Lady Candida’s who had ceded it to Darrell and Fanny when they were married, ‘so it was never mine,’ said Fanny; but she had remade the garden, taking away the orderly laid-out gardener’s plots, and making a tangle of old roses, beds so thick with flowers that there was no room for weeds. It wasn’t a tidy garden, Fanny said, but filled with richness – and ‘intimate friends’, she could have said. She had spent hours there working. Prentice had cut the lawns, clipped the hedges, and he worked in the vegetable garden, ‘But the flowers were mine,’ said Fanny.
‘The house felt comfortable,’ Rob had said. ‘Easy and content.’
‘It was,’ said Fanny. Stebbings had ample rooms, wide sills on which a child could sit, just as a child could sit comfortably reading on the stairs. Lady Candida’s Edwardian furniture had given it heavy sofas and chairs, solid tables, brass beds. Its chintzes had been washed so often the pattern had faded to creams, faint pinks, and blues and browns. The bookshelves were filled with an accumulated jumble of leather editions, Penguins, books on cookery, and gardening, children’s books. Nobody knew where some of the pictures had come from. ‘Some of them were frightful,’ said Fanny. The silver was good but the china and glass often ran short, it was always being broken, and the linen cupboard was a disgrace; but there were always log fires, bowls of flowers, plenty of food for children’s guests, plenty of children, ‘and rabbits, chickens, Danny, Thomas, and Topaz,’ said Fanny. It was a house that was thoroughly well lived in and Rob had said gloomily, ‘I can never give you that again. One can’t buy a house like that.’
‘You can never buy a home,’ Fanny had answered. ‘You have to make one. We will make one,’ she said. The question was where. ‘Where would you like to live?’ she often asked Rob. ‘Live when we are … when we leave the villa?’
They had often talked of it. ‘Somewhere beautiful,’ Rob would say. ‘Away but not so far that I can’t travel backwards and forwards.’
‘Backwards and forwards to where?’
‘Where I’m working.’
‘But that might be anywhere,’ Fanny had objected. ‘Look where you have worked since I have known you. Whitcross. Africa. Rome. Now, if you do Saladin it will be the Holy Land, or do you call it Israel or Jordan?’
‘Which means we can live anywhere,’ said Rob. ‘New England is beautiful, or California, though I think Arizona’s better.’
‘But … they are in America.’
‘One can live in America,’ Rob had said gravely. ‘But we could live in Paris, if you want to stay in Europe, or here, in Italy. We have the whole world to choose from,’ which was not the same thing, he knew, when he was reminded of Stebbings, as having a world of their own, and he was curt as he asked Caddie, ‘Is Hugh getting up?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, tell him to get up and come down. After coffee, your mother and I want to talk to you.’
There was no doubt about it, though he did not give orders as Darrell did, when this man Rob – Mr Quillet – told you to do something, you did it. Caddie went back upstairs and woke Hugh.
He did not want to get up. ‘You must. He says so,’ said Caddie. Hugh said he had a headache, a pain and a bad taste in his mouth. Caddie, remembering the taste in hers, was sympathetic and brought him a glass of water, but when he tried to drink it he retched. ‘I have a hell of a pain. My inside’s all upset.’
‘It’s the strain,’ said Caddie, quoting Gwyneth.
‘It isn’t. I must have eaten something.’
There was one thing he had eaten that Caddie had not, a piece of pork pie an English woman had given him on the bus. There had been none left for Caddie – unfortunately, she had thought then. The only thing that helped Caddie was eating; she buried her sorrow in food as some people drown theirs in drink. In London she had ‘stuffed’, said Hugh, while he had driven Gwyneth to despair, but he had eaten the whole slice of pie. Now, ‘Can’t Mother come up here?’ he said with a groan.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Caddie, remembering Rob’s voice, and Hugh reluctantly got up.
When Rob had said ‘coffee’ instead of ‘breakfast’ Caddie should have been warned, or remembered Switzerland. ‘Don’t you have cereal, or porridge, or eggs, either?’ she asked when she saw the table.
‘Not in Italy,’ said Fanny.
‘They can if they like,’ said Rob. ‘They have only to ask Celestina.’
‘When they are in Italy they should do as the Italians do.’
‘I don’t see why, when they are English.’
Though Caddie would dearly have liked an egg, or better, egg and bacon – but did they have bacon in this barbarous country? – she was not going to take sides with Rob and she ate doggedly through two rolls, though their crust was so hard that it almost cut
her fingers. Hugh ate nothing at all.
‘Hugh, have at least a roll.’
‘Don’t pester him to eat if he doesn’t want to.’
‘I’m not pestering.’
There seemed an edginess between Rob and Fanny. It had begun when Hugh at last appeared. ‘Hugh, you’re up?’
‘I sent Caddie to call him.’
‘Oh, Rob, I wanted him to sleep it out.’
‘They can’t do exactly as they like. There are things to arrange,’ and breakfast was silent. When Giulietta had taken the tray, Rob lit a cigarette and began: ‘Now …’ and, ‘Yes, we must hear all about it,’ said Fanny, covering Hugh’s hand with her own. She meant to make up for Rob’s curtness but Hugh took his hand away.
‘How did you come?’
Train. Bus. Walked.’
‘Yes, but …’
‘Oh, begin at the beginning,’ interrupted Rob. ‘How did you get away without being missed?’
‘Where was – Father?’ asked Fanny.
‘He went the day before Philippa …’ and even in the midst of his unwellness and antipathy, Hugh could not help smiling at the thought of Darrell’s face when he came home. ‘He should be back today.’
‘But Gwyneth was there, and she was always so careful.’
‘She was,’ said Hugh and smiled again, but Caddie felt a pang. Poor Gwyneth had not had a chance. The thought of her left alone in the flat to face Darrell’s questions made Caddie ache. ‘It was all, all so dreadful,’ she said. ‘You don’t know how dreadful it was.’
The last straw had been the sandals, her school sandals. She and Hugh went to buy them the day after Philippa left for Paris, ‘and the flat was worse,’ said Caddie.