A Fugue in Time

by Rumer Godden

  The ground floor is a different world. To begin with, it is infinitely more spacious, which is extraordinary because the house is the same width and breadth up all its height. The basement stairs are hidden by cream-painted banisters and a mahogany hand-rail that rises with serpentine twists up the well of the stairs. Grizel, when she arrives from America, remarks that stairs in a house are like highways in a country, exciting when they are unknown, soon familiar, linking all parts of it together, making them accessible and plain. Perhaps that accounts for the enormous traffic on these stairs, the continual endless going and flowing and hastening and toiling up and down them. The carpet, the third carpet, for carpets like butlers wear out, is trodden nearly threadbare in places: the brass rods that fasten it are thinned and fine with polishing; there is no need to polish the hand rail, the hands do that, though the children leave marks that are sticky: Roly sticks a lump of toffee under the rail in the crack where it meets the banister; Lark finds it and recognizes it as toffee eight years later; very faintly it still tastes like toffee. The hall-and-stair paper is blue, a satin paper that the Eye buys in ambitious extravagance; like most of his investments the paper turns out well; in its hundred years it has only faded and soiled to a pleasant Wedgwood blue. The Danes are good at making investments, careers and money; they are faithful lovers but keep their heads in love; Selina keeps hers so well that she never falls in love.

  On the ground floor an inner hall opens into an outer, a vestibule that holds the front door with its wire cage for letters, a doormat, a Kirman rug in a vase pattern of blue and green, a hatrack, a chest with a blue-and-white china bowl for cards, the family tree illuminated in a frame, and the grandfather clock.

  It leads in a chorus the clocks all over the house, and connects them with the clocks outside, the church clock and other clocks in spires and towers, as its chime is too big for an ordinary house clock. It is always a second later than St Benedict’s. Last in the chorus by any number of minutes is the cuckoo clock on the nursery landing; it breaks at last but when it breaks it has not been required for more than thirty years. There are no more children in the nursery.

  There are three doors on the ground floor, doors with white handles and white china door-plates embossed with gold forget-me-nots and roses. They lead to the dining-room, the drawing-room and the study.

  In the dining-room the peacock curtains are drawn; the curtains formerly are dark green but Selina changes them when the craze for changes comes, when she is given to wearing trailing dresses of olive-green and pale blue. Now in the morning dusk the ticking of the black marble clock on the mantelpiece fills the room. A dim daylight shines on the chains of the pictures that, gilt-framed, gilt-chained, are family portraits hung along the walls; the daylight picks up in them a patch of steel, of red velvet, a glove or a sash: it rests on the back of a greyhound, on a greengage; but nothing shows properly, nothing is clear in the room but the ticking of the clock. The table glimmers and the backs of chairs; even the smell is confused; there is a smell of old flowers and coal and of wax polish and, from the sideboard, of wine spilt on wood, and vinegar and nutmeg and chutney and, like an echo, of hot meat and cauliflower. A mouse runs across the table; its feet on the wood in the quiet are louder than the clock, and because they make an uneven sound, they break the quiet. It takes a crumb and scurries down onto the hearthrug and away.

  In the drawing-room the curtains are not drawn and the light creeps into the room through the slats of the Venetian blinds. The drawing-room has a white wallpaper patterned in gold with bunches of poppies and barley-sheaves; it has sofas and armchairs with graceful black-and-gilt legs and they are upholstered in a scarlet damask patterned in diamonds. In eighteen sixty, after the Battle of Magenta, Griselda buys Lena a dress of magenta watered silk; she can never wear it in this room. There is a grey carpet with black and pale-pink roses, a white sheepskin hearthrug, a mantelpiece with white fluted marble sides and on it another clock in a glass case, a clock of painted Dresden china with a china shepherdess asleep on its top in a china meadow. There are long curtains of lace, fine, white and embroidered with fern-leaves. There is a carved walnut table from Cashmere. It is from the Great Exhibition. ‘A mad idea. The hooligans will ruin the Park,’ says the Eye when it first is mooted. ‘Not an idea, a vision!’ says Griselda with shining eyes. There is a crystal in the chandelier that sings, gives out a chime whenever a certain note is struck on the piano, or when a voice in singing reaches top D. There are many songs in the house: popular songs and hymns and carols; sentimental evening ballads; the songs Lark studies when at last she is given lessons; there are nursery songs and rhymes; and there are poems.

  There was a poem in a book left open on the landing bookcase. Rolls left it there when he went up to go to bed.

  He left the study terribly untidy. Now that there was no staff, only Proutie and Mrs Crabbe, Rolls imagined he looked after himself, but after years of batmen, Indian bearers, valets and aides, he was not good at it. Proutie left him a kettle on the hob to make himself a hot toddy before he went up to bed; Rolls had put the kettle down on the carpet and made a dark brown ring. The glass, with the spoon and a piece of lemon in it, was in the fender; the evening paper and a cushion that Rolls had tried for his stiff back were on the floor.

  The curtains in the study are drawn back, the light is bleak but clear. The narrow room, built up on its ground floor plinth, seems to be riding into the branches of the plane-tree. For the rest, the study is an uninviting room with something ambitious in the importance of the desk put halfway across it, and the grey-green walls, the maroon carpet, the black sheepskin rugs, the bookcases full of heavy ornamental books, the black marble mantelpiece and the clock that is a twin of the clock in the dining-room. There is a safe, a bust of Claudius Caesar crowned with laurel, and a picture.

  It is light enough to see the picture. It is a peculiarly gracious picture in a narrow silver frame. It is painted on ivory on a background of grey trees and pillars that belong to an imaginary pavilion, Grecian, as are the dresses; it is of a young woman and a group of children, a large group of children: Mrs Griselda Dane, wife of John Ironmonger Dane Esq., and their children: Pelham, John Robert, Lionel, James, Selwyn, Selina, Frederick, Elizabeth, and Rollo. 1861. Visitors are always surprised to see, on looking into the picture, that Frederick, Elizabeth and Rollo are all of the same size. There is an explanation for that: the first two are twins, Rollo is painted in afterwards.

  The sizes are recorded and the names repeated in pencilled handwriting, the Eye’s handwriting, still faintly to be read, on the blue hall wall by the dining-room door: there the height of every child at two and five and ten years old is recorded in his neat small writing; Rollo is the tallest of the boys, Pelham the shortest; the twins are not recorded after five years old; and in the corner by the lacquer cabinet is another height marked by a crooked line and a name in big round writing quite different from the Eye’s: Lark.

  There is no Lark in the picture. There is not, anywhere in the house, a picture of Lark.

  Though it is painted with deliberate stillness, styled, the picture seems alive in the room; it, and the litter left by Rolls, and the branches of the plane-tree that are reflected in their movement through the window-panes, onto the picture-glass.

  Rolls, last night, was looking at the picture, looking at Griselda’s eyes; at the important simper on Selina’s lips; at the well-set-up sturdy little boys; at the shuttlecock and bunch of roses held by Freddie and Elizabeth; at his own head as it was when he was Roly with his hair cut round in a pudding-basin shape. He looked at himself and he asked a question. There was nothing in that; when he is that little boy he perpetually asks questions; later he ceased to question and to wonder.

  Why? asked Rolls. Because I knew everything? Was always right? Hadn’t the wit to be uncertain? Now, once again, he tingled with questioning as had that eager little boy. Can one remember before one is born? No, manifestly not. But … said Rolls looking at the pictur
e. But I do remember, and I experience what happens; not only what happens when I was not there, but what was not there at all. What did not happen. What only might have been. Might have been. At the very words this new revivifying warmth crept into his veins again. He could not repress it. He had to let it come. The house is a repository of secrets, he excused himself. Then can’t mine repose here too?

  He went upstairs. He had meant to go to bed – but he picked up the book with the poem, and the words Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter seemed to rise to meet him from the print. It was a long poem, that some johnny in the bookshop said Rolls, if he were interested in new poetry, ought to read. Rolls had been turning over several books of poems. ‘If you are interested, sir—’ ‘I am interested in nothing, nothing that happens outside,’ Rolls should have said, but instead, in some confusion, he had bought the poem.

  Upstairs, on the first-floor landing, is the room that belongs to Griselda, Rolls’s mother. Griselda is spoiled; it is a beautiful room with a Morris paper and Morris curtains and colours of blue and peacock-blue and brown and wallflower-brown. Next to it, now inhabited by Rolls himself, is the Eye’s, his father’s, dressing-room. It communicates with Griselda’s by an inner door: Griselda is spoiled but she is always under the Eye.

  Next again, past the bathroom, is the room that is Selina’s, Rolls’s eldest sister. Her room is like her: it is white, it is blue, it is prim; it is full of a clutter of things, but the effect of it is chilly and strangely empty. The stairs lead up and the stairs lead down. After the first floor they lose a little of their spaciousness; after the second floor they narrow and go back to the oilcloth they started with below.

  On the second floor back are the nurseries; the windows are level with the top branches of the plane-tree. In the day nursery the nursery furniture is still there, all the fittings: window-bars; the high fender; the rockinghorse whose tail comes out, so that buttons and beads put down it long ago still rattle when it is rocked. Empty nurseries should be forlorn; these are not. They have a definite sense of an inner cheerful life of their own like the sound of the sea, once known to the shell.

  The night nursery has been converted into a bedroom: the old nursery furniture is there too – the white-painted chest of drawers, the white-painted bed only wide enough to hold a very slender person, and the nursery curtains of fiddling mice on a pale blue ground. Are they mice? They are so faded they are difficult to see, but Rolls thought that he remembered that they were mice. The carpet is there, blue again and very pale and worn, and on its border skip a frieze of girls and boys perpetually coming out to play in old-time scoop bonnets and old-time hats. Someone has tried to turn the room into a bedroom. There are rugs put down on the carpet, newer rugs, and the dressing-table has been looped into skirts, white muslin ones tied with ribbons that are faded and frayed. There are still brushes on the dressing-table and a pincushion and a little china tray of pins; there is another ribbon, a brown hair-ribbon split into fragments, hanging over the glass. The nursery rocking chair has been painted white and given a clover-pink cushion; there is another little straight-backed chair of the kind that holds clothes folded for the night. There is a bookshelf with two rows of books; children’s below; above, an anthology, a little set of classics bound in blue and gold, novels, a Life of Mozart and The Beginner’s Book of Stars. On the shelf there is also a writing case, and if it were opened – and Rolls opened it – there is still a piece of blotting paper that still bears the upside-down imprint of a letter. It begins: Dear Pelham, As I have decided it is better for me to go away … Rolls did not read it. He knew it.

  In the cupboard, if it were opened, are still clothes, folded on the shelves or hanging, their sleeves limp and their skirts wide, from their hooks. On the shelf is a muff with a fox-head that seems to stare; if it is stroked, the hairs fly up from the moths. There is a beaver hat beside it, brown with a brown velvet ribbon and a knot of green feathers: there is moth in that too. By it stands a parasol with the silk cracked from its spokes and the cord and tassel, as good as new, hanging down.

  ‘What shall I do with Miss Lark’s things?’ asks Agnes, the maid.

  ‘Leave them alone,’ says Selina. ‘Leave them alone as they are.’

  ‘Excuse me, Miss Selina,’ says Proutie, ‘is there any news of Miss Lark?’

  ‘None whatever, Proutie. None.’

  Mrs Crabbe went up and dusted the top rooms once a week. No one else went into them until Rolls came back to the house. Rolls did not go into the room last night; he did not need to go. He knew it all by heart. He knew the bed and the chairs, the dressing-table and its muslin skirts; the beaver hat; the sense of stillness; the apartness of the young girl’s room. He did not go into it. He stayed on the landing reading that poem.

  The two flights of stairs, one going up, the other going down, give on the first-floor landing that is wide enough to make a sitting-room. It has an alcove with a window that looks down on the Place, with a window-seat, and by it a table and chairs and a writing desk. The sound of the traffic in the Park Road comes in; and every minute and again, the whole house vibrates slightly as the trains pass underground. The church clock strikes and the clocks follow after it, the clocks outside and the clocks all over the house, and then settle again to their tickings. Every door that opens can be heard on the landing, and every door that shuts; there are rattlings and scrapings when the range is made up. Everything can be heard on the landing.

  When Rolls had read the poem he left it open on the bookcase and sat down in the armchair and listened until he fell asleep.

  ‘Don’t disturb me.’ He was always saying that these days to Proutie. ‘Don’t disturb me,’ said the old man, ‘I don’t want to be disturbed,’ and he pushed back in his mind that date that the objectionable Mr Willoughby had mentioned, the fifteenth of December.

  There was no one to disturb him. Mrs Crabbe had been gone for hours, and Proutie was out. Three nights a week Proutie was a special constable. Now it was Proutie who had the uniform, Proutie whose comings and goings must be obeyed, Proutie who was of use.

  But the bitterness had gone from that. Rolls did not care now. He was in retirement, he had been retired – hung, so the papers said, in his own red tape. He had ceased to care. There was a portrait of him and five other generals of his own day and kind, published in an illustrated paper with six German generals on the opposite page. The comparison was not kind. ‘My photograph was taken in nineteen eleven when photographs did look wooden. The Germans were taken to-day.’ That was all Rolls had said in his defence; now he would not have even said that: he did not care. ‘Don’t disturb me,’ said Rolls. ‘I don’t want to be disturbed.’

  He thought or dreamed that he was in the drawing-room.

  There is a smell of lime-flowers: that means that it is summer. The crystal in the chandelier gives out a chime: that means that somebody is singing, but it is not the somebody that Rolls wanted to hear. Rolls scowled and moved restlessly in his chair. Somebody is singing a hymn. That was not what he intended, but often he is taken on currents like this and not consulted. Dammit! said Rolls. Damnation! Holy Paul! But the someone continues to sing the hymn.

  Who is it? His mother? No. She is dead before he ever hears her sing. Selina? It does not seem to be Selina. A governess? Perhaps, but whoever it is she wears a flower in her dress.

  ‘What is its name?’

  ‘“Fight the good fight, with all thy might”.’

  ‘No, not the hymn. The flower.’

  ‘It has an easy and a difficult name, but that is too hard for you. I will tell you the easy name.’

  ‘No, I want the difficult name.’

  ‘It is too hard for you.’

  ‘I want it. I want it. Tell it to me.’

  She tells it.

  Rolls could not remember it. He could remember only the tiny purple fragrant flowers in her dress and that nostalgia stirred in him again, a nostalgia that was as foreign to him, or as forgo
tten, as the creeping warmth that visited his veins … I can’t remember the name, but it is somewhere … somewhere here in the house.

  Then I delighted in difficult things. My mind then was incandescent … He is an incandescent little boy. Roly remembers easily, but Rolls had far too long been disciplined and schooled and nowadays his mind refused. He allowed it to refuse, and do as it liked, to shy and to deflect and wander away; to refuse the knowledge that soon, soon it must end and that he must make arrangements to leave the house. Why this passion for exactness? asked Rolls. For labels? I refuse. I refuse to know the date. Let the flower go without a name.

  As he said that the singing changed.

  For a moment he was still, tense, and then he sank back to listen in his chair.

  Ah – ahahahahahah – ah

  Ah – ahahahahahah – ah …

  It was a different voice, full, strong and young and rich; where the other had attempted the notes, this voice took charge of them, confidently, beautifully.

  ‘There are so many flowers,’ said Rolls. ‘I didn’t have time for flowers but I seem to have learned them lately. Lime-flowers: smilax and lilies and roses: Solomon’s lilies: the kitchen chrysanthemums. Roses. Did I say roses? Yellow ones. Why can’t I remember that name?’

  ‘Hush,’ said the voice. ‘Hush. Listen.’

  ‘It wasn’t you who wore the flowers,’ he persisted. ‘Why wasn’t it you? You love them. That is what you said.’

  ‘They are the only things that give you comfort without any worry or pain.’

  The bitter little speech hurt Rolls. ‘I gave you pain, Lark.’

  ‘You gave me pain. But hush,’ said the voice. ‘Hush. Listen.’

  Rolls sank back in the chair and his hand, an old swollen dark-veined, dark-freckled hand, opened on the arm of the chair. A feeling of warmth, of indescribable comfort, filled his body. What was it? It was bliss, and in the quiet, the lateness, in the house, the song went on.