Grace Hardie

by Anne Melville

  ‘Mr Faraday’s a very good painter, isn’t he? Did he draw a picture of Greystones before he built it?’

  ‘A lot of pictures,’ her aunt told her. ‘They’re called plans when architects draw them. They don’t have to be as pretty as a picture like this – just to show what the new building will look like. So he would have made four drawings of the outside – one from each side – and then added another set of plans to show how it would look inside.’

  ‘How do you do that?’ asked Grace. ‘When I do painting with Miss Sefton she tells me to paint what I can see, but you can’t see inside from outside.’

  ‘I’ll show you. Your father’s got the plans for Grey-stones, of course. But Mr Faraday designed the new wing of my school as well, and I have some of his first sketches for it here.’

  ‘That was curious,’ commented Grace. ‘I mean, Mr Faraday doing my house and then your school.’

  ‘It was because he did your house so well that I suggested his name to my governors when they were considering the extension.’

  ‘But I thought he said he only met you a few weeks ago.’

  ‘He met me in the sense of running into me again by accident.’ Her aunt spoke now with a touch of irritation, as though she had had enough of this conversation. ‘I’ll go and look for the portfolio for you.’

  She returned within a few minutes and spread out half a dozen large sheets of paper. Grace, who had spent those moments wondering whether there was some kind of mystery about Mr Faraday, banished the question from her mind as she studied the drawings and tried to work out what it was about the lines that made her feel as though she were indeed looking into one of the classrooms. Miss Sefton had never taught her anything about the rules of perspective.

  ‘I’d like to be able to draw the insides of things like that,’ she said wistfully. ‘Are the girls at your school taught how to do it in that art room I saw?’

  ‘Yes, that’s one of the things they learn.’

  Grace said nothing more then; and the next few days were busy with treats as she was taken to see some of the sights of London. Only as the end of the brief holiday approached did she ask the question which had been in her mind ever since the hockey lesson.

  ‘I wish I could come to your school, Aunt Midge,’ she said. ‘Do you think, if I asked Father …’

  She hardly dared to go on. The chance to become a pupil at the school was only half of what she was pleading for. It would only be possible if she could live in her aunt’s house; and that was a tremendously large favour to ask. The only reason why she dared to hint at it was the feeling she had had when she first arrived in London – the impression that she was expected to ask, and had indeed been taken into the school building expressly to be shown what treats were on offer. But if she had been right about that, her aunt would at this moment be clapping her hands with the enthusiastic pleasure with which she usually greeted Grace’s suggestions. Instead, she looked undecided, her forehead creased in doubt.

  ‘I’d love to have you here, dear, if you think you could manage the work,’ she said. ‘Would you like me to set you a little test tomorrow? You wouldn’t want to come to a school like this if you were always going to be bottom of the orders, of course. But if you felt you could do well and keep up with the other girls, I’d be happy to ask your parents whether you might stay with me during term time. Suppose you sit down now and write a list of all the lessons you do with Miss Sefton – and then tell me what the last thing is that you learned in each subject. Then I’ll know what kind of questions to ask you. There’s no point in my giving you a long division sum to do, for example, if you’ve never been shown how to solve it.’

  Grace licked her lips nervously. She had not expected her request to be answered with an examination. Since the girls at school had tests every Monday morning as well as examinations at the end of each term, she could see that she would have to get used to doing them. But she was not good at sums, and she suspected that the kind of history and geography she had learned was not the kind that Midge would ask her to write down. Her French and German were quite good, she thought, because as well as her lessons with Miss Sefton she spent an hour in conversation with her mother in each language every week. In English, too, she knew her parts of speech and could do parsing. She wrote these three subjects at the top of her list before struggling to think of some rule of arithmetic that she could be sure of applying accurately.

  That night, for the first time since her arrival in London, Grace slept badly. As she brushed her hair in the morning, she could see in the glass that her eyes were ringed with black circles, making her face appear even paler than usual. ‘Did you have a bad night, dear?’ asked her aunt, concerned, as soon as she appeared for breakfast.

  ‘My chest was a bit wheezy,’ Grace confessed. ‘It’s all right now, though.’

  ‘Your room wasn’t damp, I hope. I asked Mrs Linacre most particularly … Your mother said she thought you’d grown out of these attacks. Does your wheezing start again every time you leave home?’

  Grace had not had a bad attack since she was seven. Her holidays at the seaside had never affected her health. But if she were to confess this, it would put an end to her hopes of being invited to live in London. ‘I’m quite all right,’ she repeated. ‘May I do the test straightaway?’

  A paper with two questions on each subject was waiting for her on the bureau in the drawing room. Her aunt read the morning paper whilst Grace settled down to work. The French part of the test was easy, and she could manage the English as well. But the sums refused to come right. Grace scribbled figures and crossed them out and tried again. Tears of frustration and disappointment began to trickle down her cheeks. As long as she kept her back to her aunt, and neither sniffed nor dabbed with her handkerchief, perhaps no one would notice. But as she continued to struggle, a rasping noise made itself heard first in her throat and then in her chest. She had to fight for breath, and soon was unable to think of anything else.

  ‘You must leave that and rest a little,’ said her aunt, alarmed by the sound of her breathing. She came over to the bureau to take the paper away. ‘Oh, Grace dear, it’s not worth crying about. We shouldn’t have spoiled your holiday with nasty things like tests.’

  ‘I can’t make the sums come right,’ sobbed Grace. ‘Miss Sefton tells me what to do, but I keep forgetting.’

  Aunt Midge crumpled up the paper and tossed it into the empty grate. ‘We’re going to forget about all this,’ she said. ‘Off you go and put your hat and coat on. I’ll take you to Kensington Gardens. You can sit down and rest in the sunshine until you feel better – and watch the children sailing their boats in the Round Pond. There’s to be no more talk of lessons or tests.’

  That promise was kept – but the holiday was in any case almost at an end, for it was later the same day that Grace’s father arrived to take her home. This was the moment when the invitation might have been issued – that Grace should become a pupil at her aunt’s school. But nothing was said, and she knew that nothing would ever be said.

  She assumed that it was because she was not clever enough. It was only just as they were leaving that another possibility entered her head.

  Her father was studying the new water colour, which had been hung in the place suggested by Grace herself. ‘Pretty,’ he said to his sister.

  ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ That was her only comment. Nothing about the fact that she knew the artist. No mention even that that artist had designed Greystones and so was known to her brother. Although Grace was not good at sums, she could put two and two together in other ways. She was not supposed to have met Mr Faraday, and her aunt did not want her to meet him again. She would be in the way here: that was why she was being sent back to Greystones.

  Well, Greystones was her home and everyone had taken it for granted that she would return there at the end of her visit. If it hadn’t been for the hockey lesson, no other idea would have entered Grace’s head. She ought not to be disappointed when
she had had no reason to hope. Anyway, Greystones was where she liked to be.

  ‘Thank you for having me, Aunt Midge,’ she said politely.

  Part Four

  First Love 1913–1914

  Chapter One

  ‘Grace! Grace, come and tango with me.’

  Jay was calling from the old schoolroom, which was a schoolroom no longer. On Grace’s sixteenth birthday, two months earlier, her years with Miss Sefton had at last come to an end. The scuffed desks at which all the Hardie children had learned their letters and carved their initials had been pushed to the wall to clear a space on the green linoleum.

  Grace smiled at the eagerness in her younger brother’s voice. Of all the Hardie family, he was the quickest to pick up a new craze – and to drop it again. The year 1913 had come in to the sound of ragtime; but by now, in August, ragtime was old hat. Everyone who was anyone was dancing the tango. That, at least, was the report which he had brought with him from London, where he had just spent a month of his summer holiday with a schoolfriend.

  At the age of thirteen Jay was not precisely sophisticated, but he possessed a talent for social adaptability. His schoolfriend’s sister, an eighteen-year-old debutante, had been doing her season, and Grace listened in amazement as Jay described the timetable of visits to photographers and dressmakers and milliners, rides in Hyde Park and formal calls, soirées and parties, dinners and balls. What a contrast with her own uneventful life!

  Her brother had been too young to act as an escort, but his aptitude for observation and mimicry enabled him to give a realistic impression of a young man about town. He had taught Grace the new dance as soon as he returned. Now, winding up the gramophone, he led her into the tango with self-possessed elegance, as though he were six feet tall and wearing white tie and tails.

  One day, no doubt, he would be six feet tall, but for the moment Grace towered above him. Stronger as well as bigger than her younger brother, she found it hard to follow his lead with the swerving fluidity demanded by the rhythm. It was easier, when the record came to an end and Jay was rewinding the gramophone, to continue dancing by herself to imaginary music, dipping and pausing and turning with a swishing of skirts. Jay restarted the record – the only tango he possessed – and took her hint, touching just her fingertips as they danced side by side, together and yet separate.

  Very soon now, Grace supposed, Jay would enter the clumsy stage through which all their brothers had passed, but for the moment he was a neat dancer, in perfect control of his body. There was a look in his eyes, dreamily intense, which she remembered from earlier enthusiasms. It meant that he had temporarily become someone else – Vernon Castle, perhaps, that most elegant of ballroom dancers, whose fame had crossed the Atlantic. She waited until the record ended for a second time before speaking.

  ‘How’s the poetry going?’ she asked, picking up a gramophone needle and sharpening it.

  ‘Oh, that.’ Jay’s pale cheeks flushed like a girl’s. ‘I’ve given that up.’

  ‘I thought you’d decided you were a poet.’

  Jay had spent the first days of the summer holiday sprawled in the shade of the beech tree while he composed verses addressed to a beautiful young woman – although at that time, as far as Grace knew, he was not acquainted with any girls of his own age at all. He was regularly ragged by the whole family for the wholeheartedness with which he threw himself into each new enthusiasm – a wholeheartedness matched only by the rapidity with which he abandoned one role in order to play another.

  ‘I wasn’t being a poet,’ he mumbled. ‘I was just pretending to be one.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘I can’t explain. I just know, that’s all.’ He turned away with the suspicion of a pout on his face.

  ‘But I want to understand.’ Jay being honest about his previous pretensions was a more interesting person than Jay aggressively pretending. ‘I mean, what you are is a schoolboy. But you won’t stay that for ever. You don’t want to. So I can see that you must be something else at the same time. Our futures – mine as well as yours – must be inside us now, if only we could recognize them. In July you thought you did recognize yours: you were going to be a poet. Now you say you were only pretending. How did you find out?’

  ‘If you put a real thing and a pretending thing next to each other, you can see which is which.’

  ‘So what’s the real thing?’ She tugged at his unwillingness to speak. ‘Come on, Jay. Tell.’

  ‘You’ll laugh.’

  ‘No, I won’t. Honour bright.’

  For a moment longer he hesitated, whilst Grace’s eyes stared steadily into his. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘In London, while the others were all at their parties and things, Barrington and I were allowed to do pretty well whatever we liked. We went to the theatre almost every night. I’d never been before. Have you?’

  Grace shook her head. ‘What did you see?’

  ‘We saw Nijinsky. Of course, I’d never be able to dance like him. And we heard Chaliapin singing Boris Godunov, but I wouldn’t be able to sing either. We went to the music hall lots of times as well. Gosh, performing like that – I mean, standing on a stage and being yourself and trying to make people laugh …’ He gave a mock shudder. ‘No. But as well as that we saw some plays. One of them was frightfully boring. And some of them were rather silly. But that didn’t seem to matter. It was just that while I was in the theatre, watching ordinary people pretending to be other people, I realized what I was. What I am. Really.’

  ‘You mean that you want to write plays instead of poetry?’

  ‘Oh no.’ Jay was indignant at her mistake. ‘I mean that I’m an actor.’

  ‘You want to go on the stage!’ With a struggle Grace managed to keep both laughter and astonishment out of her voice. ‘Mother and Father will have a fit.’

  ‘I don’t know if that’s what I want. It could be. But what I might want to do is different from what I am.’ The sulky expression returned to his face. ‘I knew you wouldn’t understand. But you asked me what was inside me, and that’s the answer.’

  ‘You think that what you are and what you do are two different things?’

  ‘Well, look at Father,’ said Jay earnestly. ‘He’s an explorer. It’s the only thing he cares about, really. Think of those books he reads! All the time he’s fiddling around in his plant room, he’s dreaming of making another trip some day, to look for new plants. He knows a lot about wine and he knows how to run a business, but being a wine merchant is just something he has to do to get money for the family. And even Mother … She’s not interested in running the house and paying calls on people, not really. But when she’s painting – haven’t you noticed? If you go into the studio when she’s painting, she’ll look up but she won’t see you properly for a moment. And then her face changes. As though she’s coming out of a dream. I don’t mean that she wants to be an artist; not to earn money for it. But she’s a painter inside herself, I’m sure. Everything else is a kind of pretending.’

  Grace considered this analysis with surprise and interest. Her youngest brother’s aptitude for mimicking other people frequently led him to reveal – almost without intending it – an unexpected insight into their characters; but she couldn’t recall that he’d ever before put it into words.

  ‘Does everyone feel that, d’you think?’ she asked, genuinely interested. ‘All the boys?’ Her elder brothers were young men now, but she still called them the boys. ‘Frank?’

  Frank, who was twenty-two, had gone into the business which one day he would own, bringing to The House of Hardie his considerable talent for organization. Whether or not he proved to be a knowledgeable vintner, he was certainly going to become a successful businessman.

  ‘Frank likes running things and bossing people about.’ Jay’s summing up agreed with Grace’s own opinion. ‘The being and the doing may be the same thing for him. I don’t know. Or if they aren’t, he hasn’t found out yet, like I have.’

  ‘The roa
d to Damascus!’

  ‘You can laugh, but –’

  ‘Don’t be so touchy, Jay. I’m not laughing. Not really. You’re saying something important. I’m just trying to think whether it’s something general or just about you, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, take Andy Frith,’ said Jay. ‘Andy would know what I mean.’

  Grace allowed her surprise to show. The nineteen-year-old gardener’s son – who had been employed straight from school as assistant to his own father – was her favourite companion, but she couldn’t imagine what he had in common with Jay. She said so.

  ‘Andy is a grower,’ said Jay earnestly. ‘He’s paid to grow things and growing things is what he’d want to do even if he wasn’t paid.’ He laughed, pleased with himself. ‘I shall call this the Hardie theory of happiness. You’re happy when what you are is the same as what you do.’

  ‘What am I?’ asked Grace.

  Jay looked surprised. ‘You’re a girl.’

  ‘Is that everything? Under your theory, I mean? Doing as well as being?’

  ‘You’ll get married and have babies,’ said Jay. ‘That’s what being a girl is.’

  ‘Aunt Midge never married.’

  ‘Perhaps no one asked her to.’

  ‘She might like being a headmistress better than having babies.’ But Grace could tell that her brother, who had little love for his own schoolmasters, was not convinced by the suggestion, and she hardly believed it herself.

  ‘Anyway,’ he assured her. ‘You’re different from Aunt Midge. You’ll get married.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ It was true. That was what would happen. Grace took it for granted. It was what she wanted, in a way. The only problem, if it was a problem, was that she could not quite imagine what it would be like. But probably everyone who was still living at home with parents had the same difficulty in seeing the way ahead. And certainly, unlike Jay, she had no alternative vision of something inside herself which would demand to be expressed in a different way.