Absolute Hush

by Sara Banerji

  Sunlight trailed across her soft silk dress and quivered like water as Elizabeth shivered and thought that she no longer knew the children of her body. They were twins and had always been just the same height, but now Sissy was taller than George, and Elizabeth did not even know when it had happened. There was something else, though, that made her feel as though they had stopped being just faulty reproductions of herself and Tim and had suddenly taken on separate identities of their own. She sighed, tired of being constantly confused by these outlandish children. Then, troubled, she resumed her needlework. Drawing the mazarine crimson into the wing of a mythological bird, she experienced a slight and inexplicable alarm.

  Caressing the thread until the strands lay even, wishing it was her mind, not silk, being soothed, she tried to recover her thought but could not. The plump children looked sordid and unhealthy. George had pimples and Sissy red stains on the corners of her mouth as though she was a dribbling toddler. And she’s really a teenager, Elizabeth’s heart cried out in outraged anguish.

  Pinching her lips together and stabbing at her cloth, she began to anticipate Sissy grown up and away, leaving Elizabeth to Lovage-enhanced graciousness, and then felt instantly dismayed because she did not want to seem, even to herself, a woman who did not love her children. It was graciousness that Elizabeth sought, and peace she needed; and somehow the older Sissy got, the more difficult it became to feel either in her presence. Beauty was as necessary to Elizabeth as was food to other, grosser people and, the other day, she had caught a definite whiff of BO from Sissy’s armpits so that she had had to turn her head swiftly away as she suggested cautiously, without taking in too deep a breath, ‘Why don’t you have a bath, dear? The water’s hot.’

  ‘Huh. So you think I stink, do you?’ Sissy had said, squaring up with blazing eyes.

  When Sissy had been little, Elizabeth would have simply picked her up and carted her, struggling, to the bathroom. Adult dignity is not affected by the kicks and screams of reluctant toddlers, but Sissy’s blaring accusations had left Elizabeth smarting. She sewed and told herself hopefully, ‘I must love her—I wouldn’t even part with her for school …’ then dived aquamarine in, groaned aloud, and thought that only these children could create such muddle and conflict in a mother’s mind.

  Sissy, holding George’s hand, came into the house where she had been born, and was suddenly overwhelmed with the sensation that she was entering for the first time. She looked round, craned, stared, as though she had never before seen the blistered portraits of white-faced young men in dead black velvet, the shelves of dulled pewter, the faded silken bell-tassels and swooping plush pelmets.

  ‘It all looks new, as if it comes out of someone else’s life,’ she whispered, as if sound would wake the watching painted eyes, tug the bell pulls till the ringing reverberated, and alert Elizabeth and Mrs Lovage. ‘I feel as though I don’t recognise my own home.’

  George looked at her and asked, alarmed, ‘Did they give you beer in the pub, then? You must be drunk,’ and Sissy, putting her hands against her stomach as though she had a premonition, said, ‘I just feel something is going to happen. I can feel it in the walls.’

  George said, his voice low, ‘Which room, Sis?’

  ‘But it’s not bedtime,’ said Sissy, her breath very fast.

  Ten minutes later, Elizabeth heard a small sound, glanced up, her fear reawakening and saw Sissy and George reflected in a bellied looking glass, tiptoeing. For two hundred years the slow liquid of the glass had crept and freckled, so that the children were bent and blotchy, as, peeping furtively, they crept past, dragging something behind them.

  Elizabeth put her sewing down, rose and strode to the door. The children were now halfway up the servants’ staircase.

  ‘What are you doing? Where are you going?’ Elizabeth demanded harshly, offended because they had tried to slink past her, unseen.

  She waited, suspicious, and they stared back, blankfaced, while a tide of heavy tapestry began to flow from among their legs like woollen urine.

  ‘Why have you taken the Nymph Quilt?’ Elizabeth demanded, angry because she had expected to find cigarettes, alcohol, her lipstick, the sandalwood soap from London, and felt confused by the bedspread.

  The children shifted nervously, as though if she looked at it long enough it might enable her to guess.

  ‘It’s precious, you know,’ Elizabeth said. She leant forward trying to read their thoughts, but their pale pudgy faces were closed down like shops on Sunday. Perhaps, thought Elizabeth, they were trying to sell the quilt. She wouldn’t put it past them.

  She remembered when they had tried to sell the back gate to the Any-Old-Iron man. Elizabeth had been just in time to see the fellow poised to rip the delicate eighteenth-century wrought-iron masterpiece from its hinges.

  ‘I given Missy Sissy and Master George a shilling for it,’ the old man, who had a mental age of ten, had told Elizabeth. ‘I didn’t mean no harm. Don’t get me into trouble, please, Missus,’ then had burst into tears.

  Elizabeth had ordered the children to return the shilling, but apparently they had spent all but twopence on chemicals for curing the skin of a rabbit, and Elizabeth had paid the man back herself and compelled the children to perform tasks in compensation.

  ‘That’s right, love,’ Mrs Lovage had said approvingly, watching Sissy furiously wash the luncheon dishes. And to Elizabeth, ‘It’s not so much the money as their characters.’

  Sissy, humiliated beyond endurance, left the dirty water and two of Elizabeth’s green crystal wine glasses in the bowl.

  ‘Aren’t you going to empty the bowl,’ Elizabeth had asked.

  ‘Oh, I am so sorry, Mummy, dear,’ cried Sissy. ‘Would you mind doing it for me? I’ve just washed my hands.’

  Elizabeth, gratified and amazed, tilted the basin, smashed her two best glasses and felt full of suspicion, without knowing if Sissy had left them there on purpose.

  Elizabeth did not want to go through another of those gate episodes, goading the reluctant children; George incompetent, Sissy sneering, so asked tentatively, ‘Ah … what are you doing with it?’

  The children were before the bright window so their expressions were invisible. Beyond them, Elizabeth could see May’s leaves unfurling and insects darting.

  ‘You should be outside, not skulking indoors on a lovely day like this,’ she told them, expecting spring to somehow purify them.

  ‘We’re going to have a picnic in the garden later,’ lied George.

  Elizabeth said, ‘You’re not going to take the quilt into the garden, are you? Oh, I hope not! It would have broken your father’s heart, for he was very fond of it.’

  ‘No, we’re not,’ snapped Sissy sharply. ‘We’re not taking it into the garden, so don’t get in a state.’

  ‘A state! A state!’ wailed Elizabeth clasping her breast, breathing wildly. ‘What a way to talk to your mother who loves you so and has given up everything for your sake. Oh!’ She turned and raced away, sobbing, trembling, unable to get quickly enough to the sympathetic protection of Mrs Lovage, peeling potatoes in the kitchen.

  ‘Whew,’ said George, wiping his forehead as if he were Biggies, having just pulled off some deed of amazing danger and heroism.

  ‘We’ll be safe in the attics,’ Sissy said. ‘Mother never goes there.’

  They were not sure if her distaste for the attics was because of spiders or the mess.

  The attics had been divided into six stark rooms for servants, although none lived there now. The bare boards, harsh wall-emulsions, poky windows, low ceilings and gimcrack furniture depressed Elizabeth, and, perhaps, she even felt guilty that, before the war, she had allowed the people who served her to live so drearily.

  Mrs Lovage would give the rooms a good clean then come down with cobwebs in her hair and dust streaks on her apron to say, ‘Those kiddies are such pigs, dearie. You’ve no idea.’ Once she said, ‘What a waste, ducky. If they was mine I’d have PGs up there. Imagine h
aving six young airmen each paying a pound a week. You wouldn’t have to give money another thought. And it’d be a bit of company for you.’

  If Elizabeth wanted the children, she would call shrilly from the foot of the stairs up which, at this moment, Sissy and George were carrying a quilt that smelled a little cheesy because it was stuffed with the wool of sheep that had been sheared nearly two hundred years ago.

  The embroidery on the Nymph Quilt depicted three hairy, virile satyrs doing unspeakably rude things to a group of delighted nymphs. It had been made for a rich merchant in the late seventeenth century whose sexual appetite had become jaded, and this erotic bedcovering not only restored his original virility but made him so sexy that, even in his eighties, healthy young women became worn out with his energetic love-making. The quilt had, by the time George and Sissy borrowed it, lost much of its original brilliance. Its figures were barely decipherable, the colours had darkened, the edges frayed, the grosser aspects faded.

  George and Sissy had known the Nymph Quilt all their lives and had never given the scenes depicted on it very much thought, until the episode with the Italian prisoner, when Sissy had suddenly understood what it was about.

  The quilt had been in Tim’s family for generations and perhaps it was one of Tim’s ancestors who had suffered from the loss of libido. Elizabeth had been going through a stage of telling Tim she was tired. Or had a headache. ‘Not tonight, darling. I couldn’t face it.’ It happened so often that Tim, realising he did not arouse her, started to lose confidence, and found that, even when Elizabeth was willing, he could not get an erection.

  Then one particularly disappointing night he rushed off and returned with the Nymph Quilt. Elizabeth was pretending to be asleep but Tim, ignoring that, threw the quilt down saying, ‘You’ve got to look.’

  ‘Not now, in the morning, I’m tired,’ Elizabeth mumbled.

  ‘Now!’ snapped Tim so sharply that it made her sit up.

  Tim traced the ancient figures out with his finger, telling Elizabeth in the smallest detail what was going on. She tried not to listen, to muffle her ears, to plead exhaustion, but he would not let her.

  It had been marvellous for both of them that night, and the next day Tim had been chucklingly triumphant, saying, ‘Neither I nor the dear old quilt have lost our potency, after all.’

  Elizabeth, who felt ashamed to have been sexually aroused by a seventeenth-century bedspread, said she thought the quilt was disgusting.

  Tim said, ‘An antique bit of sewing can’t be rude, can it?’

  ‘It can,’ said Elizabeth.

  They had nearly had a quarrel, Tim clutching the spread and saying, ‘You are neurotic’

  Elizabeth was no fighter and, seeing Tim would never relinquish the quilt, tried to blot it from her mind.

  She did not like people to see it in her house and after Mrs Lovage had, by mistake, put it on Mr Parson’s bed, and it was too late to do anything about it, Elizabeth had lain awake all night worrying in case he saw the picture. At breakfast she was beginning to feel sure he had not when, after spreading marmalade on to Mrs L’s cold and disastrous toast, Mr Parson had snapped it in half in a noisy explosion, then looked up and winked at her. Before Elizabeth had time to react, he had raised his napkin to his eye, carefully wiped it, and said, ‘Got a crumb in!’

  After that, as the man drank his coffee, slowly, much too slowly for his burning hostess, Elizabeth veered from thinking it was a crumb and feeling relieved, to thinking he had seen the lascivious scene on the Nymph Quilt and had winked at her, and feeling mortified.

  Mrs Lovage, sensing anguish arriving, was already pouring Elizabeth tea. Elizabeth threw herself into the chair, groaning, ‘They dragged the Nymph Quilt off, tumbling all the bedding, with no thought at all for me, who works hand and foot for them.’

  ‘Oh, that one with fellows clutching logs of wood between their knees?’ asked Mrs Lovage, pulling out her packet of Woodbines. ‘I always thought it was a bit of a hoot.’ It was a moment before Elizabeth recognised the description and said ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wonder what they want it for, on a lovely day like this,’ said Mrs Lovage.

  George and Sissy tiptoed upwards, breathing fast, sensing thrills, eager with curiosity, while tumescent satyrs pranced under their sweating palms.

  ‘You have to take all your clothes off and so do I,’ whispered George as they hauled the quilt after them into the darkest bedroom. ‘Then you’ve got to show me what the Italian prisoner tried to do to you.’

  ‘And we can see how to do it properly by looking at the picture on the Nymph Quilt,’ said Sissy.

  Chapter 8

  ‘They’re very quiet,’ Mrs Lovage said, lighting Elizabeth another cigarette. ‘We don’t usually get such peace. Normally it’s in and out with dirty boots all day long, asking for bread and marge.’

  Elizabeth, her eyes narrowed against the romantic swirls, looked out on the garden, thought of beauty, and didn’t answer.

  Mrs Lovage didn’t mind, interpreting Elizabeth’s silence as a sign of her delicate nature, which she much preferred to the humdrumness of her own family: Mr Lovage grunting brief speculations about his cucumbers, ‘They won’t beat last year’s if I can’t get dung’; or her daughter Myrtle’s shrill prayer of, ‘All I want’s a pair of silk camiknicks’.

  ‘Which reminds me of that calf they brought back, do you remember, ducky? Perhaps they’re up to something like that now,’ Mrs Lovage was saying. ‘They’ve seemed pretty shifty ever since they came home. I can just imagine them with some filthy animal up there, and me having to go with a scrubbing brush and clean its messes.’

  Elizabeth announced suddenly, ‘I was not made for war.’ She spoke loudly and mournfully, the words coming straight from the heart. ‘I am a peace person through and through. I can’t bear violence or shortages.’

  ‘Oh, I know, ducky,’ cried Mrs Lovage sympathetically, quickly moving from the subject of the dirty children and the animal in the attics. She felt grateful to Elizabeth for teaching her how to be a flexible thinker. Her own family, parents, children, husband, were all very heavy thinkers and, until Elizabeth, Mrs Lovage had been accustomed to staying strongly and at length with a single subject. Mrs Lovage’s mother was the worst, grabbing the discussion like a bulldog by the throat and, when it had been done to death, starting it all over again.

  ‘I saw Myrtle with an American soldier. She was dressed like a slut.’

  Heated family argument would follow. Whether Myrtle, fifteen, was old enough. Whether the dress she had worn was rude or merely fashionable. Whether it was right for her to go out with an American at all. Whether her school work, her health, her character, her reputation, would suffer.

  ‘Can you get me silk stockings from him?’

  ‘He’s ever so kind to me, even if he is ugly.’

  ‘I bet he’s got a wife and family back there in America.’

  And from Mrs Lovage’s mother, her tone rich with the satisfaction of gloom, ‘He’ll give her the claps, that’s for sure.’

  When no one could think of anything more to say, Mrs Lovage’s mother would announce brightly, as though introducing something perfectly new, ‘I saw Myrtle with an American soldier. She was dressed like a slut.’

  Mrs Lovage said now, ‘You need cheering up. I think you ought to blow the shortages and give a party.’

  ‘How can one give a party in war-time,’ sighed Elizabeth. ‘You can’t get candles, ham, coffee … ’

  ‘We had a nice knees-up the other night,’ said Mrs Lovage hopefully. ‘Homemade cider and soya bangers.’

  Elizabeth gave her a long and reproachful look.

  ‘I know it wouldn’t do for you, dearie,’ said Mrs Lovage hastily. ‘Perhaps Myrtle’s Yank can get you things from the PX.’

  There came a sudden muffled cry from the top of the house.

  ‘I said they’d got some animal,’ groaned Mrs Lovage.

  Sissy and George, in the servants’ bedroom, cha
ir up against the door, window shutters closed, were struggling strenuously to emulate the illustrated postures of the fucking satyrs and the big-bottomed nymphs on the bedspread. The small room got hot, their awakened bodies gave off unfamiliar smells, and the quilt began to smell sharply of antique lanoline fermented in the body odours of the Plague House guests.

  Excited, they thrashed about wildly and let out little screams.

  George felt such a thrill at the sight of Sissy’s fat red mouth that he pressed his own against it. It felt warm and wet and tasty. He ran his tongue across her teeth and felt stirred when he encountered their sharp smoothness.

  They rubbed their fat soft cheeks together, sucked and nibbled each other, and every now and again would study the quilt. After a while, they felt confident enough to try out experiments of their own with toes and tongues.

  They discovered that George’s tits stood up as well as Sissy’s. Sissy did not want to appear jealous but it seemed unfair that George, with his own large talent, should compete so favourably with her small ones.

  Then George found, nestled among Sissy’s scarlet petals, a tiny willy that stiffened when he caressed it with his tongue.

  He sprang up excited, as though he had unburied a treasure. ‘Look! Look!’ he cried.

  Sissy tried to see too, curling her body round like a Chelsea bun, but there were too many bits of her and George in the way.

  ‘I’ll tiptoe down and get Mummy’s mirror,’ said George.

  But Sissy clung to him crying, ‘No! No! Keep doing it! I don’t mind not seeing!’

  Down in the kitchen Mrs Lovage said, ‘I could go and look, dear, if you’re worried.’ She spoke without conviction and was disappointed when Elizabeth agreed enthusiastically. ‘Oh, do, Mrs Lovage. What an angel you are.’

  ‘Well, are you really sure, dear? I mean there’s not much harm they can get up to in the attics, is there?’ There were an awful lot of stairs to the top of the house, and Mrs Lovage’s knees were aching from having just finished the kitchen floor.