by Rumer Godden
‘Of course it smelled,’ says Jared. ‘I had been drinking.’ He laughs, but to Adza he is still the baby of her sons, the one who makes up to her for Little Eustace, and she cannot bear these signs of – ‘profligacy?’ whispers Adza.
‘Mother, we are not chapel even if Anne is,’ says Eliza. ‘Don’t be narrow-minded.’ But ‘Must they all, always rebel?’ asks Adza; it seems that almost always they must. The morning room feels empty with only Eustace, Adza, and the maids and presently Eustace decides to give up family prayers.
Eliza will not get up because she does not want to get up. ‘What is there to get up for?’ asks Eliza.
Anne is up early to practise before breakfast. Her piano playing – ‘never very good,’ says Eliza – is the solitary accomplishment left of all that Eliza and Anne bring back from school where, at Eliza’s continual ‘worritting’ as Polly calls it, they are sent for a year, to be ‘finished’. ‘Finished, we haven’t started yet!’ says Eliza.
The school is Miss Manners’s School for the Daughters of Gentlemen, at Truro, ‘not even out of the county,’ says Eliza in shame. She knows from village gossip that Helena St Omer, whom she has never met, is being sent to Dresden. Miss Manners’s is distressingly simple and humdrum, its curriculum only an amplification of Eustace’s timetable. In the house, still, are a teapot stand in burnt-poker-work made by Eliza – some of the hollows impatiently burned too deep – and an afternoon tea cloth and dressing-table set embroidered in shadow-stitch by Anne, two sketchbooks covered in linen with a wide band of elastic, and filled with watercolour sketches of the moor, Mother Medlar’s Bay and Penzance. ‘We learned some French, which we shall never speak, the use of the globes, for places we shall never see, and we brought it all home in a portmanteau of pride,’ says Eliza.
She cannot bear to think now, eight years later, of those silly – silly to hope – young creatures, herself and Anne, though it is not easy to know if Anne has any hopes or ambitions. Eliza, when she comes home, has hopes and excitements as swelling and unmentionable as the then rather clumsy breasts behind her new grown-up dresses. The thought of those dresses makes Eliza wince; before she leaves Truro she buys a dress with money that her godmother, Great-Uncle Mcleod’s Mary Bazon, whom she has never seen, sends her for her eighteenth birthday.
It is a ball dress of salmon-pink ‘poult-de-soie,’ as Eliza tells Adza, and it is not crinolined. ‘Crinolines are on their way out,’ says Eliza scornfully. It has the fullness swept around to the back in a pannier, which falls to a train ruched with lace and velvet bows. It makes Eliza’s waist look becomingly slight though the bodice, fashionably low and right off the shoulders, gives her the same knobbly look that she had as a child. With the dress go two stars, mounted on velvet bows, for her hair. ‘Very pretty,’ says Adza doubtfully, ‘but when will you wear it?’
‘The St Omers give balls at Tremellen.’
‘They would hardly be likely to ask us,’ and as Adza looks at the dress, comprehension begins to cloud her china-blue eyes. Mcleod the Second is nearly fifteen, but what good is that to eighteen? and Jared is only a small schoolboy. Dr Smollett has not replaced his young assistant, there is no curate and, Where else are there any young men of our kind? thinks Adza. ‘This is a country place,’ she says slowly. ‘Country and remote.’ The St Omers are often at Tremellen – in fact Jared and Damaris for a while share lessons at the vicar’s with Harry and Helena St Omer, but only lessons, nothing else. The St Omers are often down from London, but there is a firm demarcation. ‘Your father could ask them,’ says Adza doubtfully.
‘It is they who should ask us,’ says Eliza.
Adza does her best. She takes Eliza and Anne to call on old Lady Merron, who is deaf and lives with a companion. They play pool and Pope Joan with the doctor’s wife, the wife of the lawyer in the next village, and with the vicar’s sister, Miss Perry, who has known them all their lives. Anne goes to stay with a school friend in London, with cousins in Bristol, and she has some chapel friends, whom Eliza despises, but she, sharp-tongued and critical Eliza, has never made friends easily and she is asked nowhere. They help one Christmas with a bazaar at St Austell; that is an excitement, ‘but leads to nothing,’ says Eliza. The day when Mr Fitzgibbon, Eustace’s new manager, first comes to midday dinner is an excitement too, but one that speedily fizzles out; he is already middle-aged and, as they learn, he is bringing a wife.
Eustace has installed Mr Fitzgibbon to help him with his expanding businesses, the quarry and the china-clay works. There is much to be done with the integration of two small pits, Canverisk and its neighbour Alex Tor, Eustace’s latest purchase, into one: there are plans for pit development, another pump, new settling pits, a flat floor kiln with the latest hot-air drying, a second warehouse at Fowey. ‘I could do with two Fitzgibbons,’ says Eustace.
‘Why not take me?’ asks Eliza. ‘I could help you, Papa.’
‘You do help me, my dear, by looking after Mamma.’
‘She doesn’t need looking after, and if she did, Anne and Damaris can do that.’
‘You are the eldest now.’
‘Then I should be with you. In the works.’
‘You are a girl, my dear.’
‘And girls can’t learn. They have no brains,’ says Eliza bitterly.
‘My dear, of course they have, only—’
‘They must addle them all day long,’ says a voice.
They are in the office and the voice comes from behind the screen in the corner. It is a shabby old screen hiding the desk where the even shabbier old Jeremy Baxter does his work. Eliza, confronting Eustace at his desk, can just see the old clerk’s wild white hair and every now and then catch a whiff of him, for Jeremy Baxter drinks brandy. Eustace keeps him because, ‘even drunk,’ says Eustace, ‘he’s twice as clever and quick as any clerk in the district.’
‘And twice as cheap,’ says Jeremy Baxter and adds, ‘Quin dearly loves a bargain.’ He persists in calling Eustace ‘Quin’ without the respectful ‘Mister’ and when he has been drinking he can be talkative. ‘Girls are not respectable if they are not addled,’ he says now.
‘But why?’ Eliza cries out.
Jeremy Baxter shrugs. ‘Consuetudo pro lege servatur.’
‘I don’t know what that means,’ says Eliza.
‘Nor does Quin, do you, Quin?’ asks Jeremy Baxter.
Eustace is the most sweet-natured of men, but his rare temper is coming up. ‘I said that will do, Mr Baxter.’
‘But I want to know what it means,’ says Eliza.
‘Consuetudo pro lege servatur? Roughly, “As it is the custom, it must be the law.” At any rate in St Probus. No, there’s no hope for you, Miss Eliza,’ says Jeremy Baxter. ‘No hope at all. You must addle.’
‘But I can learn.’ Eliza’s temper has risen too, though that is not rare. ‘I could do accounts as well as Mr Fitzgibbon, better because I’m quicker.’
‘Which wouldn’t be difficult,’ says Jeremy Baxter.
‘I can give orders and take responsibility. Please, Papa, oh, please!’ but Eliza has not learned to conceal herself; she still clamours and, ‘The men would not like taking orders from a girl,’ says Eustace. He gets up, closing the subject. ‘And you know the works are for Jared.’
‘Who will probably ruin them,’ says Jeremy Baxter.
‘Mr Baxter, you will kindly attend to your ledgers.’
‘Not kindly,’ says Jeremy Baxter, ‘but I will.’
It is of no use Eliza clamouring. Mr Fitzgibbon stays, keeping Jared’s place ready for him while Eliza can arrange the flowers, write notes for Adza, pay calls, visit the cottages, do needlework and sketch, and read all the magazines and novels that come into the house.
‘I shall go to London,’ she says daringly, but London seems impossibly far off and she has no money, no friends. ‘I could be one of those models for painters in Paris,’ she says more daringly still, but she is too thin; those tender young-girl curves have fined down to flatness. ‘I�
��m ugly,’ says Eliza and no one contradicts her; of all the Brood she is the one to inherit Great-Uncle Mcleod’s long nose, her hair is even more colourless than the others’, and her eyes have a touch of green.
‘You could work for poor people,’ says Anne. ‘That’s what I mean to do.’
‘Like Octavia Hill?’ asks Eliza restlessly.
‘More even than that,’ says Anne, her eyes shining, but Eliza is not listening or looking.
‘Octavia Hill only wants people with money,’ she says which is, of course, not true, but she can hardly give her real reason, which is that she does not want to work for other people, she wants to work for herself. I want to see, touch, feel, she cries, silently, but in a frenzy of frustration, and ‘That eldest girl of Eustace’s,’ says Mr Fitzgibbon to his wife, ‘has the eye of a bolting horse.’
In the summer of 1870 Eliza is twenty-six, Anne twenty-five, Damaris just seventeen. ‘Seventeen has a chance,’ says Eliza and cannot trust herself to think of Damaris.
‘Hate your sister,’ says Polly to Eliza, ‘that’s wicked.’
‘I don’t hate her, I pity her,’ says Eliza loftily, but as usual Polly has divined the truth. There are times when Eliza does hate this younger sister who is so different from herself, so beautiful, unashamedly big and free, and so content.
Damaris and Jared are like two towers among the stocky Quins. Where the others have fine straight mouse hair, excepting Anne who is flaxen, their hair is black and Damaris has falling curls, almost vulgarly abundant. They have the only dark eyes in the family, so dark a blue they are almost black, sloe-shaped and lashed ‘like an ox’s,’ says Eliza. Everything about Damaris is big; when she is laced, in an attempt to give her a waist, her bust swells up almost embarrassingly high and firm. ‘It’s all that walking,’ says Adza in despair. Damaris walks, Polly says, ‘like one of the quarrymen’s wives,’ but it is more like a quarry boy, often barefoot and for miles. It is easy to believe that that faraway sailor must have been a peasant. There is no denying that Jared and Damaris are magnificent creatures, but in small society in the seventies, magnificent girl creatures are not thought polite; Jared is accepted as dashing, but Damaris is unmistakably vulgar and Eliza is sure that the reason why the Quins are not ‘accepted in the county,’ as she says, is not only because Eustace is in trade, and Adza homely, nor because Anne has reverted to chapel like a villager – ‘thank God only the village knows that’ – but because, thinks Eliza, this ignorant young sister makes herself conspicuous traipsing over the whole county and running wild.
Adza has to let Damaris run wild. Away from the moors, she is like a caged animal and, like an animal, makes no protest, only wilts, ‘as if she were dumb,’ says Eliza impatiently; wilts and suffers. When Damaris at fifteen is sent to Miss Manners’s, ‘to be tamed,’ as Eustace says, she accepts it, but she neither eats nor sleeps and becomes so thin and starved that she has to be brought home. It is odd to see her with a blanched sick skin and it frightens Adza. ‘But you shouldn’t have brought her home,’ says Eliza. ‘She can’t go on being a savage forever.’
‘Perhaps she would have grown used to school,’ says Adza, whom anyone can talk into anything, but Damaris says simply, ‘I should have died.’
That August there is a three days’ gale. It brings a lilac dawn with the wind still tearing at the sky. Though the gale is blowing itself out, the morning is dark and full of wind and the butcher boy has to force his way down against it from the village. At China Court the elm branches thresh as if they were going to fall, while up above, the wind howls and whistles past the village, where, they say, the sound of bells is blown out across the moor. It is the wind in the church belfry shaking the bells, something heard only on the roughest of days, ‘and Damaris is out!’ moans Adza.
She comes in long after breakfast. ‘Damaris! You haven’t been up on the moor!’ but Damaris only laughs.
‘You will get coarse and brown,’ says Eliza, but Damaris is, rather, ivory and red; her skirt and the disgraceful old purple cloak she wears are soaked, rain hangs on her hair. ‘You might be a Gypsy,’ scolds Adza.
‘They thought I was,’ says Damaris and laughs again.
‘They? Who?’
‘Harry St Omer and a man.’
When, for that brief while as children, Jared and Damaris share those vicarage lessons with Harry St Omer, they know one another well enough for Christian names before they are separated and the boys sent to school. ‘Harry St Omer and a man,’ says Damaris.
‘Then the St Omers are back?’
‘Yes,’ says Adza. ‘They arrived on Wednesday. Mrs Tremayne told Cook. What man?’ she asks Damaris.
‘Just a man,’ says Damaris. After a moment she adds, ‘An American.’
‘How do you know he was an American?’
‘They spoke to me. I was sitting on a wall to get my breath, and they rode up to me. I suppose they thought it odd to see a woman sitting in the rain.’
‘More than odd, mad,’ says Eliza.
‘They rode up to me and I heard Harry say, ‘Good God! It’s Damaris Quin.’ Then he rode closer and asked if they could help me.’ Damaris bursts out laughing, but even Anne, who never censures anybody, feels ashamed for her. ‘Damaris! They must really have thought it extraordinary!’
‘Yes,’ says Damaris serenely. ‘Then Harry seemed to feel he needed something else to say. He asked when we expected Jared.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘I said, “Never.”’
‘You needn’t have said that,’ says Eliza slowly. ‘They might have come over. Goodness knows we never see anyone. Then what did they do?’ she asks.
‘They hovered,’ says Damaris. ‘Perhaps they didn’t like to ride away and leave me there. I said I didn’t need any help, that I was walking, and the American asked, “Is it by choice?” I thought he had a twinkle in his eye, rather like Papa and I wasn’t afraid to speak. I said, “By choice,” and then to help them to go, I jumped off the wall and wished them good day and walked away.’
‘What aged man?’ asks Eliza suddenly. ‘You said like Papa.’
‘Oh! an old man,’ says Damaris. There is a pause. ‘Not very old,’ says Damaris uncertainly.
‘It’s love that makes the world go round,’ sings the little kitchen maid as she peels apples for Cook.
There are very many songs in the house, songs and ballads, hymns and nursery rhymes, and most of them are about love. Love, Liebe, amour, amore, in English, German, French, and Italian. Outside the drawing-room window on summer evenings when the white rhododendrons are out, the lamplight falls on the exquisite full-skirted flowers bunched on the dark-green leaves. At sunset, between the light from the windows and the light from the sky, they hold a mysterious pink fire. Inside the windows there is firelight as well as lamplight – even on summer evenings the big room is chilly. There are green coffee cups with silver edges and the Schubert song falls sweetly as honey – ‘Röslein, Röslein, Röslein roth, Röslein auf der Heide,’ the young woman in the draped dress sings, cascades of lace falling from her sleeves as she lifts her hands.
The young woman’s name is forgotten, but the song is still in the house, as is the moment when Lady Patrick catches sight of her husband’s face, not listening to the song, but watching the singer with an eagerness that Lady Patrick knows. The eagerness is tempered for the moment by politeness, but Lady Patrick knows what will come later. She turns her head away and looks into the fire, not to hide tears – she has no tears left now – but because an old wound throbs as it feels the cold.
Love. ‘Parlez moi d’amour,’ sings Bella. Even as a woman nearly thirty she has the fluting voice of a boy, and McWhirter, the fierce bachelor gardener, is equally contradictory – he who hates women sings as naturally as he breathes: ‘She is coming, my dove, my dear,’ and, ‘My love is like a red, red rose.’
The Lieder are in Lady Patrick’s time, but in Mrs Quin’s and John Henry’s, music is still brought to dinner
parties and left in the hall, or upon the spare-room beds with the wraps, to be modestly fetched after dinner. Stace and Bella and the Three Little Graces sit hidden at the top of the stairs listening to: ‘I passed by your window’, ‘The Rosary’, and ‘Because’. ‘Because God made thee mine,’ thunders the baritone, ‘I’ll cherish theeee,’ which gives the girls sentimental shivers up their spines.
‘Trink, trink, Brüderlein trink,’ sings Minna as she sits at her mending, or ‘Ach du lieber Augustin.’ She is to suffer for her German in the 1914–18 war; none of the St Probus villagers then know the difference between German and German Swiss, but now she sings blithely. She knows that Groundsel makes it his business to rake the path below the kitchen window because of her singing. Raking up the old dead leaves from the elm trees, he pauses and looks at the window as if he would like to see inside, and the look on his dark face is thoughtful and gentle.
Effie, the impertinent little kitchen maid in Minna’s time – Cecily has then just been promoted to under-housemaid – Effie leans across Minna, plucks the thimble off Minna’s hand, and taps on the window with it. That seems an unpardonable liberty. Minna cannot bear it that her thimble should tap to Groundsel in that forward way and immediately she stops singing.
Songs are memories, ‘even when you don’t want them to be,’ says Mrs Quin. ‘They persist,’ she says in pain, and once she is betrayed into crying out to Bella, who has a passion for old tunes, ‘Don’t play that. Don’t.’
Bella can never accept a request without knowing the reason and, ‘Why not?’ asks Bella, playing on. ‘It’s from some old thing called Floradora.’
‘I know.’