by Rumer Godden
She had a sudden idea that, if she sat there, she might be Selina. She laid down her sewing and went to the chair and sat down and, though perhaps it was her imagination, she had immediately the thought that she must speak to the cook about the leg of pork.
Not leg – loin, came the bell in her mind.
Loin, said Grizel going back to the window-seat. I wonder how many notes Griselda had to write in a year. Why should she, Grizel wondered, wonder that? Notes: a note for So-and-so to come and dine, a note of acceptance to dine with So-and-so, a thank-you note for a present of game, an invitation to be accepted for a children’s party, a refusal for another; and memorandum notes written in a notebook: to return a call, to buy this, to buy that, to take something home on approval, to return something else; it must have taken time, thought Grizel, time and thinking to deal with all those notes. She was suddenly and vividly sorry for Griselda. She thought of her going to an endless formal dinner party in a grey moire dress, an enormous crinoline, with an under-ruche of lace and crimson velvet roses.
Not crimson roses – moss, corrected the bell.
Moss? Did Griselda suit moss roses? Perhaps she did. Moss roses are overlaid with close green, green because it is perpetually renewed, countless tiny hairs of moss that bind the rose: duty, love and friendship, order and achievement, food and drink, linen and clothes and medicine, discipline, manners and lessons, charities, going to church, musical evenings, and calling and dinners and dancing and visiting and driving and shopping, listening, agreeing and listening again. Grizel had included almost everything for Griselda except thinking. ‘Gentle,’ murmured Grizel aloud. ‘Gentle, soft-spoken, soft-tempered and dutiful—’
Beautiful – not dutiful, came the bell.
Grizel was surprised. That did not seem in order with her notions of a Victorian wife. Grizel had, as for most things, a pigeonhole in her mind for a Victorian wife, but it seemed, in spite of the firmness of her thoughts, that her great-grandmother Griselda would not quite fit into it. Beautiful – not dutiful. It sounded rebellious. A doubt disturbed Grizel. Did Griselda rebel? Did she feel, of all this, much as I feel? Did she want to be nonattached as I do? As I am? Then why, why did she submit?
It could not have been easy in her day to rebel. Probably she had a father who – probably she didn’t have a real will of her own. But didn’t she? As if Griselda had smiled, Grizel felt her suppositions to be impertinent and a little crude. Griselda had submitted. Perhaps she chose to. Perhaps she gave herself to the Eye and her children and to the house. ‘Well I wouldn’t,’ said Grizel aloud. ‘I can see no sense in it. I won’t give myself away to anyone.’ But this morning she had experienced a little of what it was like to be Griselda; to be Selina. She was not, this morning, only herself, Grizel.
Into the quietness of the house as she sewed came the sound of a cuckoo clock; it struck twelve times – cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo – and sank with a whirr to be quiet again.
It is a bitter dull morning thick with fog at twelve o’clock on a January day. The fog has not lifted for two days, thick and yellow, and the gas lamps have burned in the streets all the time. This morning it is worse than ever. The air is raw and in the house the windows are tightly sealed and fires are lit. Though it is only twelve o’clock Pelham has come in after trying since ten to reach the City. Jamieson the coachman has just been told to put the horses away and Proutie has gone in front of them to light them with a torch.
Pelham comes into the drawing-room where Selina has rung the bell for sherry and plum-cake. Slater brings it on a silver tray: a plate of cake, dark and heavy and rich, its spiced smell filling the fire-warmed air; three glasses and decanter full of clear gold-brown wine from the last six dozen of Amontillado the Eye laid down before he died.
‘I shall go upstairs,’ says Selina. ‘I shall just go upstairs and put on a jacket. It is cold this morning isn’t it? Agnes is busy with my dress for to-night though it doesn’t look as if we should be able to go. That reminds me—’
She goes out and Pelham hears her high clear tones asking Slater in the hall, ‘Hasn’t Miss Lark come in yet?’ and he hears the annoyance in her voice as she says, ‘This isn’t giving Agnes a chance.’
Lark? Is the child out in this? thinks Pelham, but concern does not really touch him. Lark is only a wraith to Pelham, an irritating wraith who has to be paid for. He stands with the fire warming his legs, and looks out of the warm gracious room to the garden outside; he can see the red chairs, the moving fire reflected in the glass, but the fog shuts off the garden in a thick green saffron mist. The child shouldn’t be out, thinks Pelham mildly and he stretches his feet in his warm slippers comfortably. There is something novel and carefree in being at home in the middle of the morning when it is not Sunday or a holiday. There is something extra cosy in being in this room full of warmth and colour and a fragrance that is made up of the smell of apple wood from the burning logs, and of violets from the winter bowl on the writing desk, and of polish from the furniture and parquet, and of wine and rich plum-cake. Pelham does not often expand but now he feels large and genial. He sips his sherry and stands by the fire with its warmth on his legs that are covered neatly with speckled grey trousers; he is a neat small man with neat brown hair brushed back from his forehead; he is sedate and inclined to be pompous, very timid and careful over money, but he is kind.
The door opens suddenly and it is Lark. Before she looks into the room she says in the breathless tired voice, ‘Selina I couldn’t get the silk. I couldn’t.’ She sees Pelham and breaks off at once.
Pelham, with his wine-glass in his hand, stares at her.
She is soaked. She has been lost in the fog for two hours and she is white with cold and her eyes are large with fright. Her eyes seem enormous to Pelham – like anemones, those flowers with black centres, he thinks suddenly and suddenly also he thinks that she looks like a nymph, a water nymph with her wetness and her whiteness and her hair clinging round her forehead. He sees how tall she is, how fully curved in the clinging sodden coat. What curves, thinks Pelham, and what a mouth! It is trembling now but what a full red bow! A nymph? thinks Pelham. Why the child is a perfect goddess! ‘Lark!’ he says aloud. ‘Why Lark! I thought you were still a little girl.’
‘Isn’t S-Selina here?’ asks Lark and he sees that she is shivering.
‘Come here. Come to the fire at once,’ he says.
‘I c-can’t. I’m s-soaking.’
‘Come along at once. Take off your coat.’
‘Can I? I am c-cold.’
‘Come. Come.’ He puts down his glass as she comes. She is taller than he as she stands beside him. She holds out her hands and he sees that they are small for her height and finely shaped though they are red with cold; he also sees that her coat-sleeves are so short that they are halfway up her wrist. ‘Take off that coat!’ he says. ‘My dear child, you are wringing wet. Where have you been?’
‘S-Selina sent me out for some silk she wanted for Agnes to finish her dress, but I c-couldn’t find my way even as far as Oxford Street.’
Pelham does not answer. She has taken off her coat and her dark blue cap and he sees that her hair is still down, hanging to her waist, and that its darkness looks darker still because of the sparks of wetness in it; that wetness clings to her lashes too, dividing them into points. That is why her eyes look so big, thinks Pelham. Well there are black fringes in anemones. He looks at her and the words shape themselves in his head: Nymph. Nymph. Dearest nymph.
‘Do you mind if I kneel down?’ asks Lark politely. ‘It is warmer.’
She kneels down and Pelham is more at ease, less taken aback, as soon as he can look down on her head.
‘I am going to give you a glass of wine,’ he says.
‘O-oh!’ Lark’s eyes light up. ‘But won’t Selina mind?’
‘It doesn’t matter if she does,’ says Pelham jauntily and he pours out a glass of sherry and cuts a heavy slice o
f cake for her. Then he sits down feeling the fire on his face.
Lark is wearing a dress that, though he sees it is old, has colours that are beautiful for her; it is a faded rubbed dress of amethyst-coloured velvet that gives her eyes a darker violet blue; it has a fitting bodice, a little too fitting because it is growing too tight and Pelham finds his eyes keep straying to Lark’s breasts, rounded and breathing as she leans forward to warm her hands. Her skirt is turned back to show an underskirt, a fisher-girl skirt in stripes of purple and black. She has black stockings and black shoes and, in the sole of one shoe shown as she kneels, there is a large crack; Pelham looks at it and he feels guilty but at the same time he notices that it is a small shoe; small hands and feet, he says as he looks again at the beautiful curve of her breast rising to her throat. ‘Are your feet wet?’ he asks sharply with concern. ‘You mustn’t get a cold. You have a hole in your shoe.’
She looks back over her shoulder at it, turning her neck. ‘Oh well, they are old shoes,’ she says reasonably, and Pelham feels a deep twinge of shame.
‘Does Selina often send you out on errands?’ he demands.
‘Of course,’ says Lark but she adds in extreme fairness, ‘but quite often she sends Agnes.’
‘You – and Agnes!’ Pelham cannot remember feeling as unpleasantly and pleasantly stirred. ‘When did you grow up like this Lark?’
‘I have been growing up steadily all the time,’ answers Lark, wiping the tips of her fingers on her skirt. She is losing her whiteness and the heat of the fire is giving a flush to her face like rose on ivory. ‘Do you think I could have some more cake Pelham? It is such heavenly cake.’
Pelham, as he hands it to her, feels gloomy; his gloom is compounded of feeling old and of jealousy and of a sense of hopelessness and this sense of shame; and with these is a weakness that he cannot help, as if he were sliding down some place that was too steep for him, and with it all a strange excitement. ‘How old are you?’ he asks.
‘I am seventeen,’ says Lark, and she looks at him under her eyelashes, a look that is as mature as it was childish when she asked him for more cake. ‘Seventeen is grown-up,’ she says, and as she looks at him Pelham’s blood seems to run more quickly and boisterously.
The door opens again and Selina comes in. Her face hardens and her eyebrows go up when she sees Lark kneeling by the fire. Lark makes a movement to stand up but Pelham puts his hand on her shoulder and presses her down. Her shoulder is warm and firm and smooth under his hand.
‘I c-couldn’t get your silk,’ says Lark.
‘Couldn’t? Why not?’
‘I couldn’t find the way. You don’t know what it was like Selina. I could barely move a step and a man spoke to me, followed me. I was frightened.’
‘Frightened! A great girl like you!’
‘Well a policeman came and took me part of the way and told me to go home,’ says Lark. ‘Truly, it was frightening.’
‘And I suppose it doesn’t matter if my dress isn’t finished for to-night.’
Lark is silent. Her lashes are on her cheek as she looks at the fire. Pelham is silent too, watching, waiting for them to lift.
‘And may I not have a glass of sherry?’ asks Selina. ‘Lark you have taken my glass.’
‘There were three glasses.’
‘Rollo said he might drop in if he could find his way through this.’
‘Rollo?’ Pelham sees the quick upward flicker of Lark’s eyes, the flash of blue, and again he has that unaccountable pang.
‘Rollo?’ he says sourly. ‘What is he doing in town?’
‘He said he had to fit a pair of boots.’
‘Can’t he get boots in Worcestershire?’
‘Fetch another glass.’ Selina’s voice when she speaks to Lark is accustomed to be peremptory. She does not realize herself how harsh it sounds. Lark, when she is near her, seems to become younger, to shrink and become utterly docile, without a trace of the maturity she showed to Pelham. She seems to be in hiding. ‘And take your things,’ says Selina. ‘You needn’t come back here.’
Lark does not go. She stands up slowly on the hearthrug by Pelham and faces Selina and she does not go. Selina pours out another glass of sherry and then she glances up. Pelham thinks she does not glance up until she is ready. Then she asks, ‘What do you want?’
‘I don’t see,’ says Lark, ‘why one person should have food like this and another in the same house have food like mine.’
‘And what is wrong with your food?’
‘It is too young for me.’
It is a surprising answer and she goes on: ‘I am not really talking about food Selina and neither are you. I am seventeen. I am too old to be shut away any more. Shut out. I should come out of the schoolroom now. Pelham thinks I should come out.’
‘Pelham?’
‘Yes. Pelham,’ Lark answers calmly. And again she gives Pelham that look, mature and intimate from under her lashes and again it gives Pelham a titivation of the blood in all his veins and in his heart. Selina sees it too, and bright quick redness, a sign of anger with Selina, comes into her neck and cheeks.
‘Yes,’ says Pelham. ‘Yes, I think she should come out.’
‘Why?’ Selina’s voice is cutting.
‘She is hardly a schoolgirl any longer Lena dear.’
‘No?’ asks Selina. ‘She looks like one.’ Her eyes travel slowly and scornfully over Lark. ‘An inky finger; muddy shoes; that poor old dress. Really Lark, what do you do with your clothes?’
‘I never have new ones, decent ones.’
‘And a hole in your stocking. No,’ says Selina, ‘I am afraid I can’t agree. Lark is hardly ready for the drawing-room. There is another thing,’ says Selina. ‘A thing you might have thought of for yourself. I am sure I should have in your place but you were always insensitive. That isn’t your fault of course. It is your breeding.’
‘My breeding?’ Lark does not quite understand, then she asks, ‘What is wrong with my breeding?’
‘Well,’ says Selina with a little laugh. ‘It is rather delicate to put into words.’
‘You have never been delicate. Please say what you have to, Selina.’
‘Your parents were provincial singers. We can hardly expect fineness, too much niceness from you. You are their daughter in spite of your advantages of upbringing.’
‘My advantages of upbringing!’ Pelham, watching, sees Lark’s eyes burn with temper and he sees her hands clench the folds of her dress.
‘As I say, were you more sensitively bred, your one desire, when you do leave the schoolroom, would be to try and repay something of what you have received, not to make claims for more.’
‘Selina, really I am not going to – Really I must—’
‘One minute Pelham. Hush please.’ Lark holds up her hand. ‘I must say something first, something about these advantages of upbringing.’ Her voice is very clear in the room that is quieter than usual from the silence of the fog. ‘Of my upbringing and my education, only there wasn’t any education. The Eye gave you, Selina, responsibility for that. I can remember my mother,’ says Lark. ‘She was a singer. She sang, as you say, Selina, in the provinces, in little towns, sometimes twice in a night. It was a provincial town she was travelling to, the night that she was killed – from Stirling to Dundee. I often look at them on the map. She was a provincial singer, but the Eye gave me her albums and her books; he had some of them and her press notices were in them. If she hadn’t married my father she might have been a great singer. She sang in Milan and Rome and Paris and London. I can remember her,’ says Lark. ‘She went to school. She spoke four languages, and sang in them; she played three instruments; she painted. Though she had none of your advantages of upbringing, Selina, she did all these things and she was beautiful and witty. And what can I do? I have taught myself a little from your old books, but I have not had a paid lesson, a lesson that had to be paid for, since I came here. You are always telling me, Selina, how lucky I am to be here. Perhaps th
e Eye meant it to be lucky, but you haven’t made it so. Why, Harry Proutie is better-educated than I am. You tell me I must repay you. How can I repay you? You wouldn’t even give me singing lessons. There is nothing at all that I can do.’
‘You are quite useful in the house,’ says Selina quite unmoved. ‘You can sew. Agnes taught you that quite nicely. You can answer notes. You can be trusted, sometimes, to do shopping. You could be a companion, or, not a governess of course, but a children’s maid.’
‘A children’s maid!’ It comes back a whisper into the room.
‘Yes,’ says Selina. She watches Lark’s face with a curious satisfaction. ‘You have a great opinion of yourself, haven’t you Lark?’
Lark stands a moment longer. Any defence from her is new; she has not learned that she too has power; at the moment Selina’s is overwhelming. Lark also is never to be good at fighting; she does not fight, her battles are fought for her. Pelham will fight one for her in a minute and he will win and Selina will not forget nor forgive Lark for that. Lark is right; she does nothing, there is nothing at all that she can do, but as she grows she develops a genius for being.
Long ago one spring afternoon she is sent out with her tea, a slice of bread and jam, to be out of the way in the garden. The house is being spring-cleaned and Proutie, on holiday from the convent orphanage, has to help to clean the windows. He climbs down his ladder from the study windows and stands beside Lark.
‘I hate the spring,’ says Proutie, who is then called Harry. ‘I hate the spring,’ says Harry. ‘Nothin’ but cleanin’.’
Lark knows almost as little about the spring as he does but she knows that this is wrong. ‘Oh no Harry,’ she says. ‘No.’ She looks doubtfully at his boots as if she thinks his understanding may be as thick, and she searches for some unfailingly simple way of conveying to him what she feels he ought to know about the spring. She looks first at her own bread and jam. ‘Spring is being able to come out of doors after the winter, not to have to walk about but to dawdle and stand still and eat your tea.’ She looks up at the window he has just cleaned and at the sparrows in the gutter. ‘It is seeing the sun on the windows again and feeling it getting warmer, and it is the birds not coming for crumbs because they can feed themselves and are too busy making their nests. It is in those buds,’ she says, waving her bread and jam towards the plane-tree, and she looks down at the garden beds and sees that the lilies of the valley have shoots of pale-green leaves. ‘It is in them,’ she says. ‘Presently they will open into bells, they are a bit smutty but they have a lovely smell.’