Thalia

by Frances Faviell

  Cynthia returned to England with her sister-in-law and Claude, dazed and incapable of really taking in the whole thing. ‘We might have been friends, Rachel,’ she had said, taking my face between her hands as Catherine had once done. ‘I could have grown very fond of you—if you had let me.’

  ‘If you had let me.’ That had startled me. Surely it was Cynthia who had not wanted to be friends. But was it? And yet it seemed to me that her grief over Thalia was something deeper and more impenetrable than the noisier, impotent anger over Tom. And she had shown real feeling for me in my terrible distress.

  I was staying with Judy at St. Lunaire until the villa had been set to rights and everything finished and settled up here in Dinard. This, I thought, was the least I could do for Cynthia.

  Marie and I had gone through the inventory after cleaning the villa. Shining with beeswax, in stiff and hideous order, it now awaited new tenants. While the agents completed their minute examination for damage of every piece of furniture, Marie had stood with me as a kind of impartial avenging angel.

  ‘Non. They did not do that. It was already there. Those Americans tore that sheet last summer. Yes, Monsieur Claude broke that chair tying the dog to it, pretending it was a sledge. Yes, Mademoiselle Thalia broke the coffee pot balancing it on her head when she was an Egyptian.’

  ‘Mademoiselle Thalia . . . Mademoiselle Thalia.’

  When the agents had gone, Marie asked me to go out with her. She had put on her best clothes—the ones she wore to Mass—and I was curious. We went along the Clair-de-Lune Promenade, past the little white boats—the dories—and the sailing ones below the yacht club, until we came to the image of Notre Dame de Lourdes set in the grotto facing the sea. Surrounded with ferns and flowers, the Virgin, serene and benign, looks out over the water; and all around her are those touching little stone tablets set in the grotto, each with a date and the simple word ‘Merci’ on them.

  Armand had never passed this grotto without pausing to say a prayer, so that I knew the lovely words of the Abbé Perreye almost by heart. I had always looked at them there on the wall of the grotto while I waited for him. I looked at them now. ‘Ayez pitié de ceux qui s’aimaient et sont séparés. . . . Ayez pitié de ceux qui pleurent. . . .’ Have pity on those who loved and are separated. . . . Have pity on those who weep. But I could not weep. I was still scorched by a dry anguish too deep for tears.

  ‘Up there—in that space, you see,’ Marie was saying. ‘The tablet will go there. The stone mason is inscribing it now,’ and she named the date of that terrible night when Thalia had disappeared.

  ‘But she wasn’t saved. She was drowned. You can’t put Merci. She was drowned!’ I cried, passionately.

  ‘And you, Mademoiselle Rachel? Didn’t I drag you back from the sea that night? D’you think I could have pulled you out without help from Her? You were as heavy as an elephant, and I am an old woman!’

  She went on to tell me that although the tablets were possibly intended for those who had been to Lourdes and received miraculous cures there, the curé had approved her desire to place her thanks on record. What better miracle was there than giving to an old woman the superhuman strength she needed to save a life?

  ‘The tablet is to give thanks for me?’ I asked incredulously.

  ‘Who else?’ she said imperturbably. ‘Yves has paid half of the money. He hasn’t been drunk for over a month.’

  I looked at Marie’s calm old face, at its rough nobility, and I was ashamed. I had not even thanked her for saving my life. I hadn’t even thought of it. I took her hard, worn hands and kissed them both. ‘What must you think of me? How can I ever thank you?’

  She pushed me roughly round until I faced the statue.

  ‘Give your thanks in the proper quarter,’ she said sharply. ‘I don’t need them.’

  Thalia and I had often stood there reading the dates on the tablets and even now I imagined that I heard her laughing. It was so clear that, startled, I turned away from the grotto. She seemed suddenly physically close—as if she stood there with us. I thought of that day when we had first gone to Catherine’s, and of how we had laughed and laughed. Of the old peasant who had told us that soon we would weep. Well, the last laugh was on me . . . and I had heard it clearly as I stood there.

  It was my last evening in Dinard. To-morrow, Judy would see me off on the boat from St. Malo. The season was well on its way. Already the Promenade was filled with chattering visitors, the blessed peace of the empty plage was gone. We went back to the villa through streets crowded with holiday-makers.

  ‘I hate it when it’s so crowded—it’s not the real Dinard now!’ I said sadly.

  ‘The holiday-makers are our living. We couldn’t exist on the Colony alone,’ reproved Marie.

  For the last time we went the round of the villa. The jasmine and honeysuckle climbed in at the windows of my room, as they did at Thalia’s. I could not enter either room without seeing her there, leaning at the window in her childish nightgown. In Cynthia’s room the bed with the cupids and the heart looked forlorn with its little curtains removed for cleaning and its silken covers gone. The mirror on the dressing-table still reflected for me that last accusing, contemptuous vision of Thalia. I felt the strangest reluctance to leave the place which held these poignant memories.

  ‘The sooner you get away the better,’ Miss Pemberton had said briskly. ‘You look like a ghost. Cynthia had no right to make such use of you. I could have dealt with a neurotic woman—but you couldn’t be expected to. A woman’s place is with her husband—or as near as the Army will allow her. Put all remembrance of this disastrous year out of your head. As to Thalia—fate is fate! If she was meant to go young, she would have gone anyway. The boy’ll be all right. He scarcely limps at all. In a year he’ll be absolutely normal.’

  ‘Come,’ called Marie to me now. ‘Come, it’s all finished . . . there’s nothing more to be done.’

  ‘Nothing more to be done.’ That was what the police had said when I had frantically implored them to continue the search for Thalia.

  I clattered down the stairs. Marie was standing in the hall with the bunch of keys in her hand, her shawl round her, waiting for me. ‘Nothing good has happened in this house since she married that man from Paris. And nothing good will happen in it until that heathen bed is removed.’

  Outside, Judy was waiting with Kiki in her car. I was taking the dog back with me. No one wanted him. My aunt would grumble, her spaniels would despise the French mongrel; but she preferred dogs to humans too—and she would not be able to resist his appealing face. We dropped Marie off at her cottage by the station and drove out to St. Lunaire.

  The gangway was up. On the quay excited groups were waving to their departing friends. Marie, Yves, Judy and Terence stood together in a little group waving to me. Judy, cupping her hands, was shouting something in farewell, but the strong wind carried her voice away. I saw Terence bend protectively over her and something in that movement gave me a momentary pleasure. It seemed to confirm an intuition I had had when I had last seen them together.

  My hair blew over my face and made it difficult to see them as I waved and waved before I turned to look for the last time at the coast of Brittany. The ship’s siren gave three mournful sharp wails as we veered round from St. Malo towards Dinard and, as in Judy’s cry, I could hear in their sound but one name . . . Thalia, Thalia.

  The sky was a fierce, angry purple and little whisked tongues of flame flicked in and out of the livid clouds piling up in one solid, terrifying bank.

  ‘In for a nice storm, the Captain says,’ offered a red-faced young man who had been following me around. I didn’t answer. I was still staring at the now rapidly receding coast. No longer the beckoning fairy one tinged with the promised gold as when I had arrived: it was now dark, sinister and repellent.

  ‘On this coast I have left my youth,’ I thought. Here, in this land of irresistible myth and fantasy which overlies its stark reality, I had lost that glor
ious certainty with which I had come to it. The world loomed ahead of me—and I was as conscious now of its terrors as I was of that huge, frightening bank of cloud above our small ship.

  ‘You are fortunate that your aunt is a truly Christian woman and is willing to take you back,’ the Reverend Cookson-Cander had written to me at the end of a long sermon which left me unmoved. How much more human and warm had been the few words of comfort given me by Father Ignace—although I was still a heretic.

  ‘Your behaviour to Cynthia, to say the least of it, has been abominable. Miss Pemberton, however, has been to see me and in her opinion there are extenuating circumstances. I am therefore willing to have you back until your Slade training is completed.’ So wrote my aunt.

  And Father? I pulled his latest telegram from my pocket. ‘MEET ME TO-MORROW TEN AM PADDINGTON PLATFORM ONE UNDER CLOCK HAVE BOUGHT YOU NEW FISHING ROD FATHER’.

  He would only be able to tell me what he thought about it all while we were fishing. He had wasted money on a new rod for me although he knew I hated fishing.

  Inside me now there was a continuous weeping, but outwardly not one tear had relieved that inner anguish.

  Qu’as-tu fait, ô que voilà

  Pleurant sans cesse,

  Dis, qu’as-tu fait, toi que voilà,

  De ta jeunesse?

  But it was no longer Armand’s voice I heard repeating the lines I had loved. It was Thalia’s. Just as at night now that last incredulous, contemptuous reflection of her haunted my dreams. ‘Punish me not for my sins for I know not myself,’ said the words of the Amarna prayer. What had I done? What?

  And now the wind began to get up in earnest. The gulls wheeled away from its unleashed fury; and in each shriek of its anger, as in their every harsh cry I heard but one name . . . Thalia . . . Thalia . . . Thalia. . . .

  ‘All passengers below deck!’ shouted the sailors in a sudden flurry of activity. ‘All passengers below!’

  ‘Come on,’ urged the red-faced young man, appearing again at my side. ‘Didn’t you hear? We’ve got to go below.’ And now the coast was blotted out in a veil of sweeping rain. I turned, and followed him down.

  September 1955 — June 1956.

  Dinard — Paris — Dinard.

  The following newspaper story by Frances Faviell was originally published in 1956, in the London Evening Standard. It was part of a series of articles, by various authors, published under the heading: ‘Fact or Fiction? The Answer will be given tomorrow’. Unfortunately we do not now know the answer to the Standard’s question, though the Indian setting was certainly well-known to the author in her youth. Memories of India are also a prominent feature of the novel Thalia.

  THE UNINVITED GUEST

  WHILE an art student I was lucky enough to be invited to spend several months as the guest of Rabindranath Tagore, the poet, philosopher and teacher, in the ashram or college which he founded in Bolpur, Bengal.

  The Guru Devi, as the students called Tagore, provided me with a little two-roomed house of mud with a thatched roof in the compound of the ashram.

  In the afternoons, instead of having a siesta, I used to bake chocolate cakes, for which Tagore had acquired a great liking in England.

  One afternoon when Krishna, my bearer, had placed the tea on the veranda table, I looked up and was astonished to see a very large, ugly monkey sitting on the railing, looking intently at me as I sat in my rocking chair.

  He was as large as a ten-year-old child and I was a little alarmed at his proximity, but as he was staring at the rocking chair and then at the bowl of fruit on the table I took a small reddish banana from it and cautiously offered it to him.

  “Take care . . . some monkeys bad . . . biting very hard,” warned Krishna who was just as excited at our invited guest as I was. The big ape approached closer and accepted the banana very gently from me.

  “This monkey is Hanuman ape—very sacred special monkey. Living far away in jungle, not coming here,” Krishna said excitedly as our visitor peeled the banana very carefully and ate it with obvious relish. I offered him a second one, and this he accepted and ate, but he refused a third, simply ignoring it in my outstretched hand, and after watching me handle the tea-pot and cup intently, he suddenly dropped down from the rail and loped away on all fours, stopping once or twice to look back at the little house before he disappeared into the jungle.

  Imagine my surprise when at about the same time the next day he appeared again on the veranda and stretched out his hand towards the bowl of fruit. Refusing an orange which I offered, he made it plain that he wanted bananas, of which he again ate two. Rejecting a third, he gibbered a little at me, and then leaped with a great bound down from the railing and was gone.

  And so it went on for several weeks.

  The fame of my strange visitor soon spread all over the ashram and both the students and the local natives were most impressed by the favour shown me by this sacred monkey. They began hiding themselves in the bushes round the compound to see with their own eyes the English guest and the strange visitor having tea together on the veranda. Rajat was conservative in his tastes, for he would accept no other fruit than the small pinkish-red bananas which grew locally. To obtain these delicacies and wait there for Rajat became almost an obsession with me.

  Alas, the summer had been a scorching one, and the rains, due then, were late. Fruit became more and more difficult to obtain, and the special bananas beloved of Rajat almost impossible to find. At first for a high price we managed to obtain a few, but there came a day when not one banana could be found in the neighbourhood although the whole community was helping me.

  It was while the chocolate cakes were baking and I was putting my paints ready for my sitting at five o’clock that Krishna had one of his frequent brainwaves. I should, of course, have mistrusted him and been guided by my own judgment, but I reminded myself that Krishna was a Hindu and should know all about sacred monkeys. As he helped me pack the tubes of paint in my box he said: “Why not paint a cucumber pink and red like the banana? Rajat will be deceived, and before he has discovered that it is not a banana he will have eaten it.”

  “No,” I demurred. “The paint might harm him—and in any case the smell would not deceive him.”

  Krishna said nothing but went off to the cupboard in which I kept the ingredients for the cakes. He returned grinning triumphantly with two little bottles. One was cochineal and the other bore the label “Banana essence.” Both had been found by him in the bazaar.

  Reluctantly I did as he suggested. The pale green cucumbers were not unlike bananas in shape and they soon became pinkish red and Krishna anointed them when dry with the banana essence.

  When four o’clock came I waited as usual with the camouflaged cucumbers in the bowl with the oranges, and I had to admit that they looked delectable and smelled delicious. But at the same time I had distinct qualms as to the success of this deception. At a few minutes past four Rajat suddenly appeared. One of the most extraordinary things about this large wild creature was his capacity for appearing as if by magic from nowhere. Krishna said that was not to be wondered at—had not Hanuman, the king of the monkeys, leaped from India to Ceylon in one bound?

  I looked at him sitting so close on the railing and with trepidation offered him one of the camouflaged cucumbers. He took it, sniffed it suspiciously and seemed pleased at the strong scent. But when he licked it his expression changed.

  He began trying to peel it as he did the bananas, and when it would not peel a look of fury came over his face and he bit it viciously, spat the morsel out furiously and flung the remainder straight in my face, leaping at the same time on to the table.

  “Run! Run! Quick! Rajat angry . . . he will harm you. Run! Into the bungalow!” urged Krishna excitedly as Rajat began hurling the fruit in the bowl at me, then the bowl itself, then the teapot, cup and saucer and plates. “Run! Quick!” shouted Krishna, calling wildly for the gardener and the cook.

  I needed no warning to run, but I was
so terrified at the rage of my visitor that for a moment I couldn’t move: then, as he had no more missiles left, still uttering harsh, strange cries which so frightened me, and beating his breast in fury, he prepared to leap from the now empty table right at me.

  I fled into the house and slammed the door. But in a flash Rajat had leaped on to the window ledge. The windows had no glass, only wooden shutters so warped by the heat that they would not close. He pushed them open and sprang through the opening into the room. I tore through the house and out at the back door, slamming it shut after me. “Hold the shutters, Krishna!” I screamed. ‘‘Keep him inside.” “No. Let him out. He will tear up all your clothes and break all the furniture!” cried Krishna, who had a stout stick in his hand. I knew he would not harm Rajat for all monkeys are sacred in India.

  The cook and the gardener had now joined Krishna and cornered thus by the three men, Rajat, with a wonderful leap, gained the roof, and in a veritable fury began tearing up the straw thatch and throwing armfuls down at us, almost blinding us. The three men shouted in unison, waving sticks and throwing stones to frighten him. but not until the cook, an agile intrepid little man, began clambering up himself did Rajat desist, and then with strange terrible cries and one breathtaking leap he reached the ground again, and with a last resentful look at me he loped away across the compound and over the fields to the jungle, leaving me shaken and trembling in the rocking chair.

  When at five o’clock I went as usual to visit Tagore to paint his portrait, I apologised for the chocolate cakes which had burned during the excitement. He had already heard about the happenings of the afternoon and laughed heartily. “You are lucky you were not hurt,” he said, with a twinkle in his wonderful old eyes. “The roof will be repaired and the tea service replaced, but I doubt if the outrage to your monkey friend can be repaired. Did you look up Hanuman in the library?” I said that I had.