A Fugue in Time

by Rumer Godden

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  A Fugue in Time

  A Novel

  Rumer Godden

  To Miss Grace Underwood

  Without whose unfailing help and memory

  it would have been very hard

  to write this book

  CONTENTS

  Inventory

  Morning

  Noon

  Four o’clock

  Evening

  Night

  A Biography of Rumer Godden

  … Two, three or four simultaneous melodies which are constantly on the move, each going its own independent way. For this reason the underlying harmony is often hard to decipher, being veiled by a maze of passing notes and suspensions … Often chords are incomplete; only two tones are sounded so that one’s imagination has to fill in the missing third tone.

  A sentence describing Bach’s fugues, written by

  LAWRENCE ABBOT

  And for Rolls personally, the poem he found: –

  Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

  The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

  Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

  Isolated, with no before and after,

  But a lifetime burning in every moment

  And not the lifetime of one man only

  But of old stones that cannot be deciphered,

  There is a time for the evening under starlight,

  A time for the evening under lamplight

  (The evening with the photograph album).

  Love is most nearly itself

  When here and now cease to matter.

  Old men ought to be explorers

  Here or there does not matter

  We must be still and still moving

  Into another intensity

  For a further union, a deeper communion …

  … In my end is my beginning.

  T. S. ELIOT: ‘East Coker’

  Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live … He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.

  Children and the fruit of the womb are an heritage and gift … Like as the arrows in the hand of the giant: even so are the young children.

  The Book of Common Prayer

  INVENTORY

  The house, it seems, is more important than the characters. ‘In me you exist,’ says the house.

  For almost a hundred years, for ninety-nine years, it has enhanced, embraced and sheltered the family, but there is no doubt that it can go on without them. ‘Well,’ the family might have retorted, ‘we can go on without you.’ There should be no question of retorts, nor of acrimony. The house and family are at their best and most gracious together.

  The question of their parting had arisen. The lease was up. ‘And the owners are not prepared to renew,’ said Mr Willoughby, putting his despatch case on the table.

  Rolls Dane – old General Sir Roland Ironmonger Dane, K.C.B., D.S.O. – looked at young Mr Willoughby with dislike. ‘Not renew!’ he said.

  A lease of this sort, a ninety-nine years’ tenancy, was a most unsatisfactory sort of lease, explained Mr Willoughby. He himself always advised against leases of this sort. The tenant was always the loser, all assets accrued to the owner, who in this case was not prepared to renew …

  ‘You need not say that again,’ said Rolls.

  Leases run for ninety-nine years; no more. Was that because, after a hundred years, some change takes place? A hundred years. A century. That had a ring about it. Rolls remembered the turn of the century. Before you were born, Rolls could have said to young Mr Willoughby, whom he disliked. New Year, nineteen hundred. He had been at a banquet. He remembered bells ringing and toasts and flags. There had been a war then too, a banquet in wartime was difficult to reconcile but he was, he confirmed, at a banquet. Wars then were not all-pervading; in any case things continue in spite of perpetual wars. He remembered too his first century at cricket; a spectacular one: sun on grass – small white figures and huge surrounding stands – a small thunder of clapping. Rolls’s mind liked easy familiar phrases for his memories. He remembered, though not with the same pleasure, a fairy tale, a princess who fell asleep for a hundred years, in a spell. Rolls would have said ‘Pshaw!’ to a spell, but it was there all the same in his mind.

  ‘Will they sell?’ he asked abruptly.

  ‘You wouldn’t want to buy just now?’ said young Mr Willoughby. He was Willoughby of Willoughby, Paxton, Low and Willoughby, who had been solicitors to the family for the lifetime of the firm. ‘Besides,’ said Mr Willoughby, ‘I hear it is to be pulled down.’

  But they can’t pull down my house! cried Rolls – but he cried it silently because he was perfectly sensible of the fact that they could and that it was not his house. He was sensible and at the same time he was outraged. Outraged, he said in a voice that was muffled for all its calm: ‘I don’t want the family to go out of the house.’

  The only remaining family was Rolls himself but Mr Willoughby could hardly point that out. He wondered what there was slightly unusual in the sentence Rolls had just said and presently, pondering, he thought it would have been more usual if Rolls had said ‘I don’t want the house to go out of the family.’ Families possessed houses – not houses the family. ‘We could try for a lease of occupation,’ said Mr Willoughby. ‘But I am afraid it would not be for long, say six months or a year, possibly for the duration.’

  Six months. A year. The duration of the war, this war. Ninety-nine years. ‘It is all comparative,’ said Rolls, sitting heavily in his chair. ‘Strictly comparative’ – and every fibre of him, though he betrayed nothing to Mr Willoughby, cried out: Don’t disturb me. Don’t disturb me now. I don’t want to be disturbed.

  How the old boy can want to live on alone in that great barracks of a place! said Mr Willoughby’s face behind his glasses, though his lips politely said nothing. How can you want to? it said.

  Rolls, if he had heard, might have answered: Because there I can live. I have existed a considerable time, Mr Willoughby, Rolls might have said. And I am amazed to find for how little of that existence I have lived. You know the circumstances of my retirement, Mr Willoughby, Rolls might have said with his moustache and eyebrows bristling – and his eyebrows were nearly as thick as his moustache. They were unfailingly public. There was plenty of mud – and stones. I minded then. Now I have only this to say about its compulsion: For the first time since I was sent to school perhaps, I am in possession of my own life, and I intend to do, in its remaining time, exactly as I choose. I intended, he had to correct himself sadly. Footfalls echo in the memory, Mr Willoughby, and you offer me a lease of occupation.

  He tried to remind himself that that was his true status: he was a tenant, an occupier – that is what all of us are. Anything we hold is on a lease – and a precious tenuous one, thought Rolls; but all the same he was outraged and angry and he disliked young Mr Willoughby more and more every minute and he refused to be reminded of anything he did not want to know.

  ‘How long have we got?’ he asked.

  ‘The lease runs out on the fifteenth of December of this year,’ said Mr Willoughby.

  There is in London a Wiltshire Square, a Wiltshire Crescent, a Wiltshire Road; Wiltshire Gardens and Wiltshire Place; the house is Number 99 Wiltshire Place.

  In the house the past is present.

  It is the only house on the Place that has a plane-tree in the garden; for many years a Jewish family live next door and every year
on the Feast of Tabernacles they ask for branches of the tree and build a little sukkoth on their balcony. All the houses have balconies, long ones across the French doors of the drawing-rooms at the back, and all the balconies have scrolled iron steps that lead down into the garden. The gardens are narrow and long, various in their stages of cultivation and neglect, heavily sooted as well. The gardens have an unmistakable London smell from the closed-in walls, and the earth that is heavy and old, long-undisturbed; the smell has soot in it too, and buried leaves, and the ashes of bonfires, and the smell of cat; any child, sent out to play, comes in with that smell; it is part of the memory of Selina and Rolls and the other children and Lark. The Jewish children, in their generations, play rounders in their garden; and the sound of their ball on the bat comes over the wall. The gardens have flowers; in the spring they have lilies of the valley and syringas; in the summer they have lime-flowers from the trees along their back walls; in the autumn there are Michaelmas daisies, at which time there are also bonfires that send a leaf-smelling country-smelling smoke out towards the road; in the winter there is nothing in the gardens but a colder smell of cats and soot and old decaying leaves. All these the houses have in common, but it is only Number 99 that has the tree.

  The roots of the plane-tree are under the house. Rolls liked to fancy, sometimes, lately, that the plane-tree was himself. Its roots are in the house and so are mine, he said.

  ‘You could find another house,’ Mr Willoughby had suggested.

  ‘I could but I would not,’ Rolls had answered, ‘and where could I find another tree?’… I am that tree, said Rolls.

  He flattered himself. The plane-tree is more than Rolls, as is another tree of which Rolls truly is a part; it is a tree drawn on parchment, framed and hung over the chest in the hall by the grandfather clock. Selina draws it, marking the Danes in their places as they are born and die, making a demarcation line in red ink for the time they come to live in the house in the autumn of eighteen forty-one.

  ‘We existed before you, you see,’ the family might have said to the house; and the house, in its tickings, its rustlings, its creakings as its beams grow hot, grow cold – as the ashes fall in its grates, as its doorbells ring, as the trains in passing underneath it vibrate in its walls, as footsteps run up and down the stairs – as dusters are shaken, carpets beaten, beds turned down and dishes washed – as windows are opened or shut, blinds drawn up, pulled down – as the tap runs and is silent, as the lavatory is flushed – as the piano is played and books are taken down from the shelf, and brushes picked up and then laid down again on the dressing-table, and flowers are arranged in a vase – as the medicine bottle is shaken; as, with infinite delicate care, the spillikins are lifted in the children’s game – as the mice run under the wainscot – the house might steadfastly reply, ‘I know! I know. All the same, in me you exist.’

  The tickings of the grandfather clock in the hall make swift and many alterations in the parchment tree, while the changes in the plane-tree are seasonal: In Rolls’s whole lifetime it only grows a little taller, thicker, more leafy in summer perhaps. Its leaves bud and turn green and dry and fall and bud again. Rolls has altered from Roly the baby, and the little boy with the pudding-basin hair-cut, to Rollo the schoolboy and young blade; from Rollo the serious soldier to Rolls the general, the governor; and from that Rolls, who seemed so fossilized that he could never change, to Rolls the old man in the armchair who did not want to be disturbed.

  The Place itself has subdued London colours: the houses, detached in pairs, are cream-grey stucco, their inner division marked by a waterpipe that goes up over their slated roofs among their ornamental chimneypots and down the houses on the garden side. In sunlight the slates are pale, in wet weather a pigeon-purple, and, down below, the dark asphalt of the road, the paler gutters, the still paler paving-stones, repeat, over and over again, the same cautious note.

  On the opposite side of the Place is the church and convent of St Benedict, built in an enclosure that has more limetrees and asphalt walks and gravestones; it has heavy green railings that are afterwards taken away. St Benedict’s vicarage shuts off the bottom of the Place. The steeple of the church has a brass-balled weathercock and it and the cross above the convent seem to fill the narrow space of sky, but the two pinnacles give to the houses their proper perspective of height and save the Place from the sense of imprisonment of other London streets. The church, in its time, has influenced, dominated, the life of the Place: it is stronger in Griselda’s day, strong in Selina’s, but it has never given Selina a sense of proportion and Griselda frequently feels imprisoned. Now, above the houses and the cross and the spire with its cock, floated the barrage balloons.

  The sound of the church clock comes into the house; in peacetime the convent bell sounds there as well and the nuns walk in the enclosure under the limes where now only the occasional shape of a priest in a cassock and biretta can be seen hurrying through on his way from the vicarage to the church. In peacetime, every day, a Sister with a dozen infant orphans on reins, the bundle of reins tied to a ring in her hands, comes slowly out of the gridded convent door, slowly down the steps, and slowly, slowly, with these twelve impediments to her locomotion, sets off towards the Park.

  All the houses in the Place are built alike; they stand in a row opposite the church and convent, and they are joined in pairs through their dining- and drawing-room walls and separated by area paths that lead down steps between walls to their back doors, low down in the house side.

  The kitchens are basement; the servants’ sitting-rooms are in the basement fronts and there, all along the Place, except at Number 5 which is a hostel, the curtains are uniformly, meticulously drawn to a distance of three feet and a table of pot plants put between them. Number 61, later, has a sewing machine instead and Number 17, for some time, a perambulator. The kitchen windows at Number 99 are further shaded by the plane-tree and by creepers that give a green reflection to the metal dishcovers with the dolphin handles in summer, and darker shadows to the room in winter. The servants live in a submerged gloom and they mostly have thin faces and sallow skins, though Mrs Proutie, for forty-seven years the cook, remains rosy and huge; she says it is from eating and handling so much good butcher’s meat. She dies of blood pressure in the summer of ’eighty-seven.

  The kitchen and its range and boiler with its cumbrous thick painted pipes is the core of the house; the burning of the fire, the boiling of the water, keep a warmth and continuity that is like breathing; when the range is raked it can be heard all over the house, and when it is stoked-up and the dampers are opened, cleaned, freshed and strengthened, it is so lusty that it is no surprise that, with it and the fires upstairs, a ton of coal is needed every week. The coal comes on a dray; the horses stand with their nosebags on; the coal sacks are hung one after the other along the iron rail down the centre of the dray as the men go backwards and forwards, emptying a stream of coal into the manhole that leads straight from the pavement to the coal-hole behind the kitchen. If it rains on the day the coal comes, the dray, the men and the horses are streaked and glistening with black and the coal shines and it is understandable that it is called ‘black diamonds’; on a sunny day the horses and men smell strongly; when it is snow and the snow is bad the men have sacks over their backs and shoulders, and gravel is put down on the road to prevent the horses slipping. ‘Gravel?’ says little Verity, Rolls’s great-great-nephew in the bad winter of nineteen forty-seven. ‘Gravel? It isn’t gravel, it is grapenuts.’

  The kitchen fire breathes and the kitchen is living in the same way that the chrysanthemums in pots along its window-sill are living. The kitchen smells of them; even when they are not in flower they seem to scent the air. The air is hardly fresh but it is comfortable; it has a warm pungent smell flavoured with the flowers, and cinders and onions and nutmeg and starch and warm linen and ginger and coffee from the grinder on the corner of the dresser; like the garden, the kitchen smells a little of cat, but not of cats departed,
of live cat. There was a present cat, lying at the table-leg, sunk in the mat, sunk in its bones, opening a little and shutting a little its eyes at the slit of the fire; it was just sufficiently awake to lift its purr into the morning.

  ‘I am the house cat,’ said the purr.

  An echo comes from under the roots of the plane-tree. ‘I am the house dog.’ This echo is immediate and firm, in a jealous, small and certain-centred pug voice, but the twisting of the plane-tree roots, and the leaves that are banked up on them, hide even the mound of its grave.

  ‘I am the house cat.’

  ‘Well, I am the house dog.’

  Outside the kitchen, in the passage that leads to the cellars, the scullery and the butler’s pantry – outside the kitchen is a row of bells each numbered and lettered for the rooms upstairs. Three generations of butlers have answered those bells, each in a black coat, his feelings repressed behind his face, each using the same salvers, a pair presented to the Eye by the office staff on his marriage, heavy silver with his crest, a bird with an ear of wheat in its beak, in the centre. The butlers carry the same salvers, the same tea-tray, set the same dinner table, answer the same bells. As the house is lived in, it absorbs them a little – colours them: Slater is more human than Athay; Proutie than Slater – Proutie, nephew of the fat tyrannical cook, comes to work in the house early, as a boy.

  Proutie was in the house still. He came down in the raw foggy morning to unlock the doors and let the cat out and let Mrs Crabbe the charwoman in. Proutie, Mrs Crabbe, the cat, the range and boiler and the chrysanthemums were all that were left of the denizens that inhabit the basement.

  The stairs go up, oilclothed, brass-bound; steep, up to the ground floor that like most London ground floors is not on the ground at all but raised up from the street and from the garden; the stairs up to it are so designed that it is nearly impossible to carry heavy trays from the basement up them, but heavy trays are carried up them several times a day.