China Court

by Rumer Godden

  The family grave of the China Court Quins is a little apart, as fits those who have come from outside: EUSTACE QUIN AND ADZA HIS WIFE – with two hands clasped together and the words: WE SHALL MEET AGAIN. Theirs are the largest-cut names, but the earliest dates are Little Eustace’s, who dies at thirteen, and two others of the Brood who scarcely live at all: Lucy, three weeks old, and Marion aged one year, both dying in the same diphtheria epidemic. Damaris’s inscription is the next: ALSO OF DAMARIS KING LEE, YOUNGEST DAUGHTER OF THE ABOVE, AGED EIGHTEEN. Anne is not here, but Eliza is, and Jared and Lady Patrick with their dates, 1897 and 1904. Borowis is not here either, but John Henry’s date is 1930. Stace’s grave is in Italy, but his name is here: STACE. 1944.

  On one side of the big polished granite headstone is a single name, POLLY. In death as in life she is mingled with the family but when she dies and her certificate has to be made out, ‘What the devil was her surname?’ asks Jared.

  Jared and Lady Patrick go through her possessions, but no one can discover her name. She has not, it appears, had any letters, or if she had she destroys them. There is only a shabby little prayer book with, written on the flyleaf, ‘To my god-daughter, Mary Ann, from her Aunt, A. Parsons, 1831.’ But A. Parsons is long ago forgotten and certainly dead before her niece. ‘Polly must have been nearly ninety,’ and in the end the inscription has to be: ‘Polly, for fifty-four years faithful nurse and friend of the Quin family.’

  Tracy’s own little nursemaid Alice once designs a tombstone for her, Tracy. “‘Here lies a little girl, Tracy, daughter of Eustace—’”

  ‘His name was Stace,’ interrupts Tracy, ‘and he hasn’t a tombstone, but a wooden cross. I have seen it in a photograph with Mother, in a whole school of little crosses. They are in a place in Italy.’

  ‘Eustace,’ says Alice firmly. ‘He must have all he’s names on a grave. “Of Eustace and Barbara Quin. Aged seven years.’”

  ‘And five months,’ says Tracy jealously.

  ‘Seven years and five months. “And a little child shall lead them.” Ow! I likes that!’ says Alice and now Tracy said, ‘I liked the funeral. I didn’t expect to. I had dreaded it, but it was yes, a joining, not a going away; and all the people came.’

  ‘Sheer impertinence, when they weren’t asked,’ said Bella.

  ‘Impertinence!’ cried Tracy, carried away. ‘But it wasn’t.’

  ‘Really, Tracy. Do you have to contradict like that?’

  ‘B-but it wasn’t impertinence,’ stammered Tracy. ‘D-don’t you see; it didn’t occur to them they would n-need to be asked. They t-took it for granted they should come. No one thought of not coming and I thought that was b-beautiful,’ said Tracy.

  ‘I’m sure Mother would much have preferred it private,’ said a Grace.

  ‘She would, but she would have seen it couldn’t be.’

  ‘You were with Mother, how long?’ asked Bella, amused and nettled together.

  ‘Three years,’ muttered Tracy, her head hanging.

  ‘Three years, when you were a child, and you think you know her better than we do?’

  Tracy was silent, but her silence seemed to say she was quite sure she did. ‘Well, really!’ said Bella.

  ‘You have come from America,’ began the third Grace, who was prettier and more gentle than her sisters, ‘you don’t quite understand—’ But she was interrupted by the older second Grace. ‘Americans always set an inordinate value on fusty old customs.’

  ‘But it wasn’t fusty.’ Tracy could not help herself. Her head came up and she forgot to stammer. ‘Fusty means not used and out of date. This was used, all the time; it was everyday, quiet, homely and that is how I should like mine to be,’ she flung at them.

  ‘Dear me! I didn’t know any young people thought like that.’

  ‘They don’t,’ said the second Grace.

  ‘Certainly most of them seem to have no use for homely things,’ said Tom or Harry – Tracy was not sure which.

  ‘Or for home either.’

  ‘Young people over here seem to spend all their time in coffee bars,’ a Grace explained to Tracy.

  ‘Coffee is the new vice.’

  ‘You are behind the times, my child.’

  ‘We shall have to show you some life.’

  ‘We have coffee bars in Rome,’ said Tracy patiently. ‘It’s where they came from, as a matter of fact and, anyway, I’m too old for them,’ and she said with what seemed to her aunts a calm rudeness, ‘Old people are all the same. They read books and newspapers and then think they know all about young ones. You read in the papers about the few interesting ones, what about all the uninteresting ones?’ said Tracy. ‘Why, there are millions of us.’ She became aware that she was laying down the law and stopped, but she was so much in earnest that she had to try again. ‘Wouldn’t everybody want that f-friendliness? I would. People who had known me, wanting to c-come, p-praying for me,’ said Tracy blushing again. ‘Caring, bringing flowers.’

  ‘Oh, Tracy. All those dreadful wreaths!’

  It is like the pendulum of the grandfather clock, swinging from side to side. Adza is comforted after Little Eustace’s death by a beautiful funeral. ‘There must have been a hundred bunches of flowers.’

  ‘Why need we be buried?’ asks Eliza after Adza’s funeral. ‘Why can’t we be burned like the Hindus? It’s far more civilized.’

  ‘Don’t let the girls have me cremated,’ says Mrs Quin, and now Tracy was back to Adza again. ‘They weren’t dreadful wreaths. S-some of them were very beautiful and even those that weren’t, were,’ said Tracy getting tangled, ‘were because they were meant. It wasn’t a shop funeral. You couldn’t b-buy it,’ and a thought struck her. ‘You have to earn it,’ said Tracy, but they were not listening.

  They were talking again – And is their talk always criticizing? wondered Tracy. Now it was criticism of Peter St Omer.

  ‘You would have thought he could have come in a suit.’

  ‘Probably pawned it,’ said the second Grace, whose tongue was even sharper than Bella’s.

  ‘We are only Quins. Why should he bother to dress properly?’ said the first sarcastically.

  ‘If he thinks because he’s a St Omer—’

  ‘Always was a casual young blighter,’ said Walter and even the third Grace said, ‘I thought he would have had more respect.’

  ‘Respect is it?’ Cecily was in the middle of them, her eyes snapping with temper. ‘Peter hasn’t a suit. He hasn’t spent a penny on himself these last four years.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Bella.

  ‘Because he hasn’t had it to spend,’ said Cecily. ‘Because everything he made went straight back into the farm he was trying to pull out of the mess your gentleman had left it in, Mr Walter.’

  ‘He must have had suits before that,’ said Bella.

  ‘So he had,’ said Cecily warmly, ‘and better ones than any of yours, only he is twice as broad now as when he came. Respect!’ said Cecily and she flashed, ‘You wouldn’t have said that, Grace, if you had seen what I did when I went up to tell him about the milk. He was ironing the shirt he had washed himself, and his tie and his coat were hung up, pressed by him with his old flatiron. How many of you,’ she asked rounding on Walter and Tom, Dick, and Harry, ‘How many of you would do that before you came?’

  ‘It won’t do him any good,’ said Walter, stretching. ‘He needn’t think he will get anything out of us. That young man has finished getting things out of this family.’

  Cecily was so taken aback that she was silent; then she seemed to swell with anger. ‘If there’s a mean thought, you will have it,’ said Cecily and her voice was shaking. ‘If there’s a mean thing to do, you will do it.’

  ‘Cecily!’ cried Bella. ‘You are speaking to Mr Walter.’

  ‘So I know,’ said Cecily. ‘I shall speak as I choose, to Walter and all of you. I may have cooked and cleaned here, but I didn’t do it for you. I did it for Mrs Quin and I shall thank you to remember, I’m not you
r servant,’ said Cecily and slammed the door as she went out.

  For a moment they were nonplussed, then they began to cover it up, thought Tracy. ‘Cecily gets more and more impossible.’

  ‘Of course. Mother spoiled her abominably.’

  ‘She has been cock of the walk here far too long.’

  ‘Oh, Cecily was always like that,’ said Bella. ‘She always did flare up about nothing. Half the time one didn’t know what was the matter.’

  You wouldn’t know, thought Tracy. If one threw a stone at Aunt Bella it wouldn’t cut, she thought, it would bounce back, and she had to speak. ‘The matter is that C-Cecily loved G-Gran,’ she said far too loudly, her voice stuttering and trembling. ‘And sh-she knows P—Mr St Omer, l-loved her too, and so did I, while you all s-seem—’ but she choked and had to run out of the room and upstairs.

  Tracy did not go into her own, the White Room; she had the feeling that one of her aunts, the third Grace perhaps, might come after her there; instead she took refuge where she had not been since she came back, in the old day nursery.

  As soon as she pushed open the door, she had again the sense of life that came to her when she saw Mrs Quin’s basket standing on the garden path, of life going on – never having stopped, thought Tracy. She ran her hand up and down a pyramid of painted Russian rings that stood on the windowsill, then leaned her hot forehead against the window bars and instantly remembered the feel of those bars, their coolness and the rough places where the white paint had worn on the iron; and the way too that her hair, as limp a gold-brown then as now, caught on them as it caught now. She used to stand here and look past the elms, out across the valley to Penbarrow, only Pet—Mr St Omer, she corrected herself – didn’t live there then, she thought. Remembering the scene downstairs, she tightened her hand on the pyramid of rings and again that sense of steadiness came to comfort her.

  If the kitchen is the hub of the house, the nursery is its heart. No other room is like the day nursery with its gently hissing fire where, on a trivet, Polly, McCann, and Alice heat milk and warm irons while, on the high fender, socks and vests are hung to dry.

  The varnished yellow wallpaper has never been changed; its pattern of dancing fiddling mice can still be faintly discerned. The armchair has a pattern of flowers on scarlet chintz; the table is oak, stained by generations of paint-water; the chairs have battered legs, and one is a highchair with a tray.

  The elms are on this side of the house and the rooks sound clearly. Their sound is bound up, for the little Quins, with going to bed on summer evenings, rook caws and a good-night hymn: ‘Now the Day Is Over’. ‘But it isn’t, not nearly,’ protests Eliza, and Borowis makes the same objection. It is not always that hymn. ‘There Is a Green Hill Far Away’ and ‘Fight the Good Fight’ are both oddly connected in the children’s minds with perfect peace, mugs of milk, and the smell of new-mown hay.

  On the bookcase was a certain small brassbound case that Tracy remembered too. It was leather over wood and studded with cat’s-eyes set in brass and it held three small leatherbound notebooks; it shut with a brass clasp that locked. The child Tracy has often seen it in the White Room and one day, with her usual curiosity – ‘I was like a little monkey’ said Tracy – she finds its key in the davenport. She fits it into the case and then takes it to Mrs Quin to ask if she may have it.

  ‘It was Aunt Eliza’s, John Henry’s Aunt Eliza’s,’ says Mrs Quin, ‘but I suppose you may.’

  When the key is turned the clasp springs up. It is a curious small case and, I must show it to Mr Alabaster, thought Tracy now. She had thought, she remembered now, of making a secret tombstone book, like Alice’s, but the notebooks were full with figures and writing, and she had put them back and locked the case again and left it here, on the bookcase – And no one has moved it since, except to dust now and then, not all these twelve years, thought Tracy marvelling, but twelve years is hardly more than a breath for a house.

  Children’s voices still seem to be here. In those lonely years after Tracy is taken away, Mrs Quin comes to understand how legends have arisen around toys, for the old toys in the nursery seem to be possessed by a life of their own: the rocking horse is ‘one of milady’s notions,’ says Polly when Lady Patrick has it sent down from London for the small Borowis. Other children have painted rocking horses, dapple grey with red nostrils, but this one, which Borowis calls Banbury Cross, is of real cow skin, skewbald, with a leather saddle and bridle that can be unbuckled. ‘Cost more than ten pounds!’ says Polly. The rocking horse and the pyramid of Russian rings are still here, a donkey with a tuft for a tail and the old Noah’s Ark, while, on the wall, a painting of a faraway little girl, Mary Bazon – destined to be Great-Uncle Mcleod’s wife and give her name to one of his clippers – looks down from her gilded frame, her cheeks as firmly stuffed as the little rocking-horse’s rump. Now, though there was dust on everything, and the armchair was sheeted, and when she patted Banbury Cross a moth came up, Tracy again felt the nursery as living.

  China Court has always been a halcyon place for children, but the only one of them who realizes this is Ripsie, because she is shut out.

  ‘Don’t let the boys play with her, milady,’ Polly cautions Lady Patrick.

  ‘Do you think they will get an accent?’ asks Lady Patrick. Ripsie can talk like any St Probus villager but, though Borowis and John Henry tease her to do it, she never will at China Court, yet still, to the end of her life, it sometimes slips out and she will say ‘daid’ for ‘dead’, ‘braid’ for ‘bread’, ‘knaw’ for ‘know’. ‘Well, I was Cornish born,’ says Mrs Quin.

  It is not the accent that worries Polly. ‘Better have tears now than later,’ she says wisely and does not think of their being Ripsie’s tears. It is strange that Mrs Quin, mistress of China Court, known and respected through the whole county, was once that outcast child.

  ‘Are your father and mother married?’ asks Borowis suspiciously.

  ‘What father?’ asks Ripsie.

  ‘Your father. You have a father, haven’t you, juggins?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ says Ripsie.

  ‘Then you are a bastard,’ says John Henry. It is a word he has learned at school, but it conveys nothing to Ripsie and she agrees equably that she is a bastard.

  She knows she is different. Her mother never stands at the gate of their cottage gossiping like other village women. When she goes into the village shop a silence falls. The cottage mothers call their children away if Ripsie speaks to them; the children, little imitators, will not play with her. ‘But I don’t want to play with them,’ says Ripsie. The only place she wants to play is China Court.

  ‘We can’t let girls in,’ says that conservative John Henry.

  ‘We can let girls in,’ says Borowis.

  ‘Who says so?’

  ‘I say so.’

  Why Borowis decides to take Ripsie under his protection he does not know; perhaps it is because she amuses him with her smallness and the courage with which she goes about the hostile village. She is quite self-contained and un-self-pitying in her tatterdemalion old blue coat, the shoes with holes in them – in summer she goes barefoot – and, like a badge of defiance, that scarlet tam-o’-shanter. Perhaps it is the pleading compulsion of her eyes, overbig in her bony small face, or perhaps even then she is attractive; his little blackberry girl he calls her. He takes her under his wing and, as he is the one person who can wheedle Lady Patrick, Ripsie is allowed to stay, but only on sufferance; she is not allowed in the front of the house – Pringle orders her out if she sets foot even in the hall – nor can she play in the front garden, and she has to use the back stairs. She accepts this without resentment – unless Isabel comes to stay.

  Isabel is an important little girl. Her father, Borowis’s godfather, is Brigadier the Honourable Charles Loftus Kennedy and she will have, Polly says, ‘Ten thousand a year in her own right.’

  ‘Ten thousand what?’ asks the ignorant Ripsie.

  Isabel has long g
old hair like a princess in a fairy tale; the fact that she also has a high nose and pair of merciless grey eyes escapes most people. ‘You have a hole in your stocking,’ she says the first time she meets Ripsie, who does not answer glibly and saucily as she would have done with any child in the village, but tries to twist her foot out of sight. ‘And another in your shoe!’ says Isabel loudly.

  She believes in keeping Ripsie in her place. ‘That’s as far as you may come,’ she commands at the head of the stairs and ‘You can’t use the front door, go around to the back,’ but Isabel only visits now and then; usually Borowis, John Henry, and Ripsie are three, banded together – bonded together, thinks Mrs Quin – and their domain goes far beyond China Court itself, over the wall to the valley where there are no restrictions because Borowis says it is his.

  ‘It’s Lord St Omer’s,’ says John Henry.

  ‘Jod, I have licensed it,’ says Borowis with dignity. He means ‘leased’, which of course he has not, but gullible John Henry believes him and from that day is sure he is not trespassing and that the valley is Borowis’s.

  It does belong to the St Omers, but none of them ever comes there and it is given over to the beech-woods and the river, the bluebell copse on the island that is not really an island but a peninsula cut off by the stream; given over too to the marshfields and the herons and the clapper bridge that is six or seven hundred years old.

  Ripsie is most useful to the boys. When they build a raft and launch it in the river, they put her on it to see if it will float; it will not and she is very nearly drowned, swept down and only just fished out like a kitten by the scruff of her neck in time. Because she is little and light, they send her up trees higher than they can go, to get birds’ eggs. When they concoct a yellow dye, they dip her skimpy linsey-woolsey petticoat in it, and when they brew charms in an old saucepan over a fire between two stones, they make her take their horrible concoctions to see if they have an effect. They do have an effect; once at least she is miserably ill, but she never tells anyone the reason.