by Rumer Godden
‘Who is the old buster?’
‘My great-uncle, General Dane.’
‘He looks as if he had swallowed a harpoon.’
‘He doesn’t look as if he had swallowed a harpoon!’ She had said that with furious indignation, that surprised herself as much as it surprised them, because that was the first time she had ever paid any attention to the fact of her Great-uncle Rollo. At that moment, a crack opened in her feelings that had up to then been so perfectly firm and consolidated and cemented that nothing Grizel did not plan could enter into them. She had managed to control herself and say judiciously, ‘I prefer him to these,’ and she had looked at the Germans. ‘Their heads are full of bumps; yes, they look bumptious. I like the shape of my old General’s head.’
It was exactly the same shape as her own. A month later she volunteered for the ambulance corps.
Now Rolls was turning her face up to the light, studying it. ‘You make me sound like a patchwork,’ said Grizel.
‘Not patchwork. Hotchpotch,’ said Rolls gravely. ‘A hotchpotch of us all. Of all that have been in this house.’
‘Then how could I be a discord? Uncle Rollo, let me come.’
He moved away from her and went to the bookcase near the wall and rang the bell. ‘It will be your own fault if you do,’ he said. ‘Don’t complain about it afterwards.’
‘Why should I complain?’
‘There is very little room,’ said Rolls. ‘You will have to fit into your place. You can’t be so’ – he looked at her – ‘self-contained. You won’t be alone, you will find. You may even lose yourself and you won’t like that.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Grizel.
‘All you young people think you are so complete,’ said Rolls.
Complete? What a funny word to use, thought Grizel.
‘Nothing is complete. You are only limited. Nothing is certain. We have to leave this house. It is all only a lease of occupation,’ said Rolls. ‘It – you – are only another phase. You must remember that.’
‘Do you?’ asked Grizel.
‘N-no,’ Rolls answered slowly, and then he said defiantly, ‘I am an old man. I know what I am doing.’ He looked at Grizel challengingly.
What is he trying to do? she wondered. What is happening to him? She was not experienced in her dealings with the elderly. She had always eschewed them, avoided them carefully; they were crotchety she understood, required to be humoured, had to have excuses made for them, be helped and waited on; all these things she had no wish to do and she had avoided them. Now Uncle Rolls, Great-uncle Rolls, stood up and challenged her and he had a touch that made her, Grizel, the cool contained experienced Grizel, capable of handling a hundred bushmen – or, more dangerous, one bushman – she, Grizel, had blushed.
‘Listen,’ said Rolls, ‘because I shall not explain this again. There are these people in, connected with, the house: first there is my father, your great-grandfather, John Ironmonger Dane. Ironmonger is a family name, not an occupation. We called him “the Eye”.’
‘Why?’
‘My mother called him that, “Thou God seest me.” She married him when she was seventeen. I have never been able to make up my mind,’ said Rolls, ‘if she were unhappy or not. I don’t think she could make that out either. Perhaps she knew how to be both. Pelham, your grandfather, was their eldest son. I remember thinking when he was my guardian that he could never have been a child, he was so sedate. There isn’t a trace of him here as a child or a boy. Funny! There were four more brothers but they are not here either, but they were sent to school very young. Then came Selina, my eldest sister; Lena she was called as a child. Then there were the twins. Griselda had too many children but I believe she set her heart on one, on the second twin Elizabeth. They died of diphtheria when they were five years old. I never knew them. I was born two years later and Griselda died when I was born. That is all, not counting the servants of course, and of course they are very important. That is all that is necessary for you to know.’
‘Necessary?’ asked Grizel puzzled.
‘Yes. The Eye; Griselda; Pelham; Selina; the twins; me. That is all that it is necessary for you to know.’
Proutie had come up and was waiting by Rolls’s elbow. Now he said, as if he had not heard Rolls, ‘Which room shall I give Miss Grizel, Mr Rolls? Miss Selina’s, or would she go upstairs in the night nursery like Miss Lark? Perhaps Miss Selina’s would be better,’ he added quickly catching the look on Rolls’s face.
‘Lark?’ asked Grizel. ‘You didn’t tell me about Lark. What a beautiful name – why didn’t you tell me about her?’
‘Put Miss Grizel in Miss Selina’s room,’ said Rolls. ‘Go and look at it with Proutie please Grizel.’
‘But who was Lark?’ asked Grizel. ‘I want to know.’
Her question was not answered. Proutie led the way towards Selina’s room to the far right of the landing. Rolls turned from her to the window. The question hung on the air. Grizel waited. After a moment she followed Proutie towards the door.
NOON
Grizel occupied Selina’s room. That exactly expressed it. She could not feel it was her own.
It had not been closed. It was dusted, almost ready; it had taken Proutie only a few minutes to arrange it for Grizel. It was white, it was prim; it was full of a clutter of things but the effect of it was chilly and strangely empty. Even when Proutie had cleared the mantelpiece and dressing-table to make room for Grizel, when she had put her clothes in the cupboard, her shoes on the little shoe-shelf along the wall, her jars and bottles on the dressing-table, her washcloths and toothbrush on the heavy marbled washing stand with the willow-pattern china, when she had put out her photographs and books, and laid down her gas mask and greatcoat on the ottoman, still the room did not belong to Grizel. It was still Selina’s room.
I think this Selina must have taken some defying, thought Grizel. The impression of her was still so strong. But perhaps she was more in the house than the others; girls in those days were so much more in the house, closed into it. Selina was probably born here, thought Grizel, and lived here all her life. Most houses change, she thought. Most houses don’t keep the same inhabitants for generations, especially not in towns. The life in them changes and ebbs and flows; the rooms change; they are not usually, for as long as this, one person’s room. Life does not stay in them as life has stayed in this. She tried to think of the house as it would be when they had all gone, but she could not. We have to go, said Grizel, but the words seemed to have no credibility or truth; she said them, but she could not believe them.
The room opened on the landing, on the narrow end of it above the stairs. The landing led forward and widened into its sitting-room alcove. There Grizel liked to sit and sew and think. She preferred sewing to reading, because it was not easy to read there she found. She could not concentrate; she was interrupted, though no one interrupted her, and she continually lost her place.
Grizel’s unit had been posted to Metropolitan London, and for the first fortnight they had been learning it, learning it so that they could drive it at night with no lights, even under bombing. It seemed incredibly difficult to Grizel. Day followed day and she was giddy with it, with the maze of little streets and the big streets that were still narrow, overtopped with houses and the names interwoven with variations of each other: Wiltshire Square and Wiltshire Crescent; Wiltshire Road, Wiltshire Gardens; Wiltshire Place – all close together except Wiltshire Road, which was the other end of London. Now Grizel had begun to drive by night. By day the huge glossy American ambulance that moved with only a gentle slippery swishing noise of tyres loomed large in the streets; by night the streets enclosed it and its silence seemed part of a dream in which Grizel herself was disembodied. ‘Do it once or twice and you get used to it,’ said the girl who was with her, an English girl lent by a sister corps. ‘I came up from the country myself. Soon you are used to it.’ Grizel did not think she would be ever used to it.
She returned i
n the small hours to the silent house, letting herself in by the latch-key Rolls had given her, shutting out the dark and silence outside for the darkness and silence indoors. As she closed the front door, the quietness of the house closed round her and she found herself listening, her head still giddy from that uncertain dark maze of streets that she had threaded by the powerful wheels under her fingers’ control; that power seemed to stay in her fingers after the car was put away. She came in always a little above herself, a little more than Grizel, and as she stood on the mat, the quietness closed round her and seemed to put her back in her place, but – in a smaller place than she was accustomed to know as her own. She found herself listening, watching the shadows, treading uncertainly, as she went up to bed, and then even her room was not her own: it had been Selina’s and was Selina’s still.
In her time off she did not go out. She did not want, she felt, to see any more of those streets and the house drew her like a magnet. She liked to take her sewing to the landing window and sit there on the window sill. Proutie came up and plugged in the electric fire.
‘The heating is on, Proutie.’
‘You look peaked Miss Grizel and I know your people keep their houses very warm. There is a draught just here. Miss Selina used always to need a shawl. Of course we didn’t have electricity then. Mr Rolls had it put in with the heating even though he wasn’t here. He always took a great pride in the house, though when he was in London he stayed at his club or at the Little Regency Hotel in the Square. He kept it up wonderfully. It doesn’t seem possible Miss Grizel that we really are to go. He says he won’t have anything to do with it when I ask him about the arrangements and time is getting on. He just says, “Do what you think. I won’t be here.” I am arranging to put everything in store till we see what will happen, but it doesn’t seem possible miss.’
‘Isn’t there anything to be done about it?’
‘Young Mr Willoughby of our solicitors miss, though he isn’t what you would really call young, he must be fifty, he says they are trying their best. They can get a short lease, a lease of occupation but he, Mr Rolls, won’t take that.’
‘A lease of occupation,’ said Grizel thoughtfully, and she asked, ‘So Selina sat here?’ She was not it seemed to get away from Selina.
‘The first Mr Dane, Mr Rolls’s father, had it furnished like this for Mrs Dane. He was always doing something for her, changing her room colours or bringing back something from his office for her, my auntie said. She was cook here and used often to describe her. Miss Selina liked to sit at the table with her letters and accounts and that, but Mrs Dane, my auntie told me, would sit here where you are, looking out.
‘If you had seen the Place then,’ said Proutie, ‘it would not have been so quiet. It used to be more fashionable. If you had sat there then, you would have seen carriages stopping at the door, and driving out to the Park in the afternoons, and in the evening standing at the doors with their lamps lit all along the kerb. I have passed them and looked inside and seen the dark green seats and the ivory tabs on the window blinds, and the shine on the panels and the horses’ flanks where the light caught them; there is a wonderful smell to a carriage Miss Grizel, not like the stink of a car. And there would be delivery vans, light green and drab and mustard and olive-green and the coachmen in livery to match; yes, some of the shops kept wonderful smart turnouts. There were the milliner girls with their boxes and the hawkers; the strawberry sellers and the shrimp woman in the summer, and in the winter, coals and country logs and chestnuts; and there was the muffin-and-crumpet man,’ said Proutie. ‘He would come round about tea-time and you would hear his bell. And at night you would hear the watchman: every night you would hear him. He had a noisy old rattle but his calling the hours was comforting to people who couldn’t sleep, people who were up late in trouble or pain. “Twelve o’clock. A starry night. All’s well.” I wish we had him now instead of the syren, don’t you Miss Grizel?’
‘But,’ said Grizel, ‘but, Proutie, you don’t remember all that?’
‘Don’t I?’ Proutie looked uncertain. ‘No, of course I don’t. I don’t know what made me reel it off like that. I suppose I am not sure what I remember and what I have been told. My auntie used to bring me over here as a child. The house was a kind of Mecca to me. I was in the convent orphanage over the way and every time I went in or out with the Sisters I used to look across and know I should come here one day. I was boy first, then footman and then when Slater died I stepped straight into his shoes. I loved it from the first day. The house was like a hive then; as I remember it, it used to hum from top to bottom, but I remember thinking that the further up the house you went the quieter it became. The kitchen was full, the family was not large but there were always visitors and guests, but at the top there was only Miss Lark and she made hardly a sound.’
‘Proutie, who was Lark? I want to know.’
‘She was Mr Dane’s ward,’ said Proutie slowly.
‘John Ironmonger Dane?’
‘Yes, miss, Mr Dane. She ran away.’
‘Oh Proutie! Why?’
‘There were a lot of stories,’ said Proutie evasively.
‘Didn’t she ever come back?’
‘No,’ said Proutie. ‘It is funny. No one ever made less stir in a house as far as you could see than she did but nothing was ever more felt than when she went. She was happy in herself I think,’ said Proutie. ‘She used to sing. I suppose we listened more than we knew. I never knew what happened to her except for the bits we used to read in the illustrated papers, and see her photographs.’ He thought for a moment and then said with resentment in his voice, ‘I used to ask Miss Selina for news of her. “Is there any news of Miss Lark?” and she always said, “None whatever Proutie. None.” Miss Selina didn’t like even to speak of her.’
Softly and evenly from St Benedict’s, the clock on the steeple struck twelve. A moment after the sound came from another clock further away, and another and another, and after them the grandfather clock in the hall struck, too; then faintly they heard the chimes of the clocks downstairs, dining-room, study; the drawing-room clock was always too gentle to hear outside the room.
‘There was one more,’ said Proutie. ‘On the nursery landing. A cuckoo clock that used to come after them all. It grew later and later and then it broke and somehow it never was mended. Well, it is twelve o’clock already. I must get on. You will be in to lunch Miss Grizel?’
‘No, I have to be down at two,’ said Grizel. ‘I can get lunch in the canteen.’
‘I can manage it for you easily,’ said Proutie.
‘No, I will go, thank you Proutie. I don’t know how you do manage,’ said Grizel. ‘Only you in this great house.’
‘There were six servants living in,’ said Proutie, ‘not counting the nursery and schoolroom staff. But I have Mrs Crabbe. You will get to know that our London charladies are an institution Miss Grizel. Why we used to have her grandmother, old Mrs Sampson.’
‘Everything here, even the charwoman, seems to link up with something else,’ Grizel complained. ‘Nothing seems to be only itself in England.’
‘Sometimes when I am working now,’ said Proutie suddenly, ‘I feel that I am not doing only what I am doing but what has been done before; as if a thousand hands were working there with mine. It is a good feeling Miss Grizel, as if you were not doing only your petty little part but something common – big. I seem to hear that humming again. It is like a hum from a hive. I have almost run upstairs expecting to find – well I couldn’t say quite what, but it would be a shock to find the stillness empty.’ And he said slowly, ‘It is noticeable since Mr Rolls came back. Came back here to live. When he was retired, he turned from everyone and everything and hid himself here. I was worried. You see all these years he was so active and so important Miss Grizel. His work and his responsibility, they occupied all his time and thoughts; they took the whole of him and then they were taken away at one blow. He came back here with nothing to do all day long but brood
.’
‘Is he brooding?’ asked Grizel. ‘He doesn’t brood.’
‘No he doesn’t,’ said Proutie. ‘But why not? I don’t know what he is up to. There was only he and I and Mrs Crabbe in the house: no one else came ever. He wouldn’t see anyone. No one else, I am sure of that.’ He turned to Grizel. ‘You don’t know how glad I am that you have come miss. We need you. The house needs you.’
‘Needs me? But I have promised not to interfere.’
‘You won’t be able to help it,’ said Proutie. ‘A house recognizes its own.’
‘Oh Proutie!’
‘I believe it does,’ says Proutie stoutly. ‘And now, more than ever, because of you Miss Grizel, I can’t believe that it is going to end.’
When Proutie had gone downstairs Grizel continued to sew. She had another three quarters of an hour before she need get ready. She sat looking down into the Place, thinking of it as Proutie had told her and she had a sense of the different parts of the house. She felt as if invisible threads were fastened from different places in it to her; some of the threads vibrated easily, some hung slackly and some jerked actually, yet for Grizel nothing that was happening in any part of the house was her concern; even the lunch that Proutie was cooking in the kitchen was not for her; she had refused it. She was herself, apart; nothing that happened in the study or drawing-room or dining-room or front door or hall or bedrooms or nursery or kitchens was any concern of hers; yet, as she sat in the window-seat, she was caught firmly in the web of it.
Isn’t this what I might feel, asked Grizel, if I had a husband in the study, children in the nursery, servants in the kitchen, visitors and letters and notes and parcels at the front door? If I were Griselda? Heaven help me, thought Grizel, I don’t want to be Griselda. I want to be myself, free, not entangled with all this, with anyone.