A Fugue in Time

by Rumer Godden

  ‘What are they?’ asks Harry.

  ‘Lilies,’ says Lark.

  ‘Lilies?’ asks Harry in surprise. ‘So small! I always thought lilies was enormous.’ And convent-taught, he surprises Lark who is taught nothing at all. ‘Consider the lilies …,’ says Harry Proutie; ‘they toil not neither do they spin … yet … Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’

  Lark is surprised and humbled. She remembers what she thought or took for granted from the thickness of his boots. She considers the lilies. She also from that day considers other people rather more. The lilies are perhaps the beginning of her career; her manner of life. ‘Solomon’s lilies’, she always calls them afterwards. One of the things that most annoy Selina is that Lark grows up so like them.

  But now Selina’s taunts have pierced to her. In spite of herself tears come into her eyes. In a moment she is blind and she puts out her hand, tries to say something more, and chokes and runs out of the room.

  After she has gone there is silence except for the noise of the fire and, from somewhere outside, the noise of a bell ringing in the fog. The clock sounds on the mantelpiece and Pelham bends forward and picks up the poker and stirs the fire. ‘You are unkind,’ says Pelham.

  Selina gives a shrug.

  ‘And you are wrong. She is deeply sensitive, deeply.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I can see. She is a young girl, just unfolding—’

  ‘How poetical you are Pelham dear.’

  Pelham is not a poet but he knows what a poet feels like; he has often a poetical nostalgia that he inherits, as well as from Griselda, from the Eye; it is in the Eye’s yearning after Griselda and the mother of Lark, after rubies and warm colours; it is in Griselda’s vision, in her love of foreign words and things; Rollo has it as well. Pelham has never given rein to it, he is too timid and conventional to give full rein to anything, but it stirs him at moments still. Now he slowly reddens. ‘You have a horrid tongue, Selina.’ And then an incongruous little memory comes to him. ‘Lena,’ he asks, ‘do you remember your mouse?’

  ‘My mouse? What mouse?’

  ‘A dead mouse you found on the stairs and tried to keep. You kept it in your pocket for days and then Nurse made you throw it away. You cried and clung to it and wouldn’t give it up and she forced it out of your hand. Don’t you remember it Lena?’

  ‘No I don’t,’ says Selina. ‘Why did I want to keep it if it were dead?’

  ‘You have forgotten,’ says Pelham. ‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter. Selina, I have to speak to you about Lark …’

  The mention of Lena’s mouse, that exists though she has forgotten it, brings out all the mice in the house; real mice: the mice that fiddle on the nursery curtains; a china mouse that ornaments the handle of the servants’ cheese dish; a clockwork mouse with its wheels gone wrong that is thrown away in the dustbin; an adventurous mouse that drowns itself in the cistern and costs the Eye forty-two shillings before it is found and removed. The house is full of mice. They have mouse passages behind the wainscot, they abide in the attics, and abound in the cellars; at night they flip and scamper on the dining and schoolroom floors where crumbs are left; even in the daytime they are in the kitchen and larder. Mrs Proutie, bending double with difficulty, her crinoline billowing behind her, her breath short, baits a trap and puts it down. There is a crack-snap of whalebone. ‘Nellie! Nellie! Help,’ she cries to the kitchen maid. ‘Oh Lord, my girl! Look ’ere. The ’ole thing ’as sat!’ A mouse discovers the secret biscuit jar in the cupboard beside Selina’s bed; it whisks away with crumb after crumb in front of the sleeping, snoring, flat pugnacious pug nose of Juno. The cat Gregory is a mouser; brief as the spells of his reign are, there are few mice left after them; fortunately for the mice, Gregory, like Richard Cœur de Lion, is almost always abroad on his crusades. Mouser the kitchen cat was misnamed; he would not mouse; he was too well fed. It makes no difference. There will always be plenty of mice.

  In the study, the Eye and Griselda are discussing where to go for their summer holiday. Every year they discuss this and every year they go to Scotland.

  ‘Couldn’t we go right away, far away?’ says Griselda. ‘Think of going to China – or to Mexico!’

  ‘My dear,’ says the Eye, ‘we are discussing a three weeks’ holiday, not a voyage to the moon. Besides, I want to fish.’

  ‘Yes John,’ says Griselda. ‘Yes,’ she says slowly. ‘Yes – of course.’

  The Eye is watching her, a teasing light in his eyes. ‘If we could go, even if we could go,’ he asks her, ‘you would not leave the children? Or would you? Would you, Griselda?’

  She knows that he is teasing her, but, as with all his teasing, it holds hard grains of what ought to be the truth. ‘You would not leave the children?’

  Oh, but I would! cries Griselda but she does not say it aloud. It must be wrong, it is wrong, not to care for your children; not to want to see them and be with them and nurse them and play with them. ‘You ought not to laugh John,’ says Griselda very seriously. ‘It ought to shock you.’

  ‘But it doesn’t,’ says the Eye and he takes her by the elbows as she stands in front of him and sways her gently to and fro.

  ‘Don’t John dear,’ says Griselda. ‘It is wrong, very wrong not to care for your own little children. I don’t understand it. Some day I shall be punished for it.’

  ‘Oh, my darling love!’

  ‘I wish, I wish I could feel differently about them.’

  ‘We will have some more and perhaps you will like them better.’ The Eye says it lightly but he is not altogether teasing, and her eyes go to his face quickly.

  ‘You have the girl you wanted,’ says Griselda slowly. ‘You have Selina. We have six children.’

  ‘Nine is my lucky number,’ says the Eye.

  Griselda suddenly turns away from him, so quickly that she catches her hoop on the corner of the writing table. She walks away to the window where he cannot see her face and the plane-tree throws its shade across the window. You will kill me with those great lumps of children. That is what she would like to fling at him, hateful coarse horrible words, but she remains silent, gazing, gazing at the plane-tree with hot eyes.

  ‘Griselda dear.’

  ‘I am sorry John.’ And then she says slowly, ‘You will be shocked John, I don’t think I should have married. Perhaps – I am not a womanly woman.’

  ‘And I think of you as the most womanly woman I have known.’

  I might have married an explorer, thinks Griselda, looking at the cool branches of the plane-tree. I might have been an explorer myself. She sees herself returning from peculiar faraway shores in a ship that has a cargo of little precious many-coloured birds. But why returning? she asks herself. Why returning? Why not setting out? In a ship, a sailing ship, with the canvas bent into domes of white against a windy sky and an oily dangerous sea. The more dangerous the better. I have never seen a dangerous sea, thinks Griselda. Nor humming birds, nor a volcano. I have never seen, in the flesh, a Chinaman or an Indian, scarcely a foreigner but Fräuleins and Mademoiselles – and organ-grinders of course. I have seen musicians on concert platforms, but they were usually from far off. I have never seen a palm growing, says Griselda with the concert platform still in her eye. I have seen them at Torquay but that, says Griselda despising them, is like eating those drums of queer fruit that John brings back from the office, eating lichees and persimmons in our own dining-room. I should like, says Griselda, never to see our dining-room again.

  As she says that, the house seems to reproach her. She turns her head and now she can look through the door, which is open, from the Eye’s province to her own. Looking round her she sees the study, the long-shaped room, light resting on the books along the shelves making their colours soft and infinitely rich as if they were the colours of the infinitely wise. But no one, says Griselda to herself, can be wise for everyone. She moves towards the door and now she sees the window behind the Eye’s chair
and his head that is at the moment bent over a guidebook of Wales; the curtains hang in straight crimson lines, and the window-glass is marked with waterings of green, as watered ribbon is marked, by the branches outside. Back the other way through the door, the hall is dim, but the flowers on the stair-carpet show, and the air is full of those tiny tickings from the clocks, faint sounds from the nursery, faint sounds from the road, and an aroma of hot pastry and more sounds rising up the basement stairs. It is, however angry I am, it is, it is, my home.

  ‘But – I should like to have gone all over the world first,’ cries Griselda aloud.

  ‘A house,’ says the Eye looking up, showing that he has been following, not the guidebook, but his wife, ‘a house can be the world. A whole universe. A whole world.’

  ‘A tiny world for a woman,’ answers Griselda hardly. ‘A woman’s world.’

  ‘I think I have spoiled you, my dearest,’ says the Eye.

  You have, but not in the way you mean, she says, but she does not say it aloud, and silently too she says: You have never seen me. Not I who am Griselda. I should like never to see the dining-room again, says that Griselda. I should like to eat dates with – with the Arabs in the desert. White sand; white robes; white quivering sun; and quivering lusty netted Arab horses. I want to see prairies, empty of everything but grass: grass and wind, and is it bandicoots? Or simply, prairie dogs?

  ‘You have never known me,’ says Griselda to the Eye. ‘You have never known what I am, what I could be. All you want and are determined to have is – an angel in the house.’

  ‘I think,’ said the Eye, ‘that an angel would remember after eleven years that I don’t take sugar in my coffee, and that I do like my socks to be darned and that someone should see to my handkerchiefs.’ He holds up a tattered one to show her.

  But Griselda does not look or feel remorseful. ‘Can’t you take me seriously?’ she asks and her dark eyes are darker with anger. ‘I believe you give more respect, John, to the few words a man in the street might say to you, than you do to me when I speak to you with my whole heart. But dolls don’t have hearts do they?’ says Griselda. ‘Nor children? At least not hearts that are big enough to care.’

  ‘There has been enough of this Griselda,’ says the Eye sternly. He can be very stern.

  Griselda is too angry to heed. ‘You will grow larger and larger, and I shall grow smaller and smaller and we shall fill the house with more and more children, and it will begin all over again. I called you the Eye,’ she says, ‘because I thought you knew everything, saw everything, but I was wrong. It still suits you, because,’ she flings at him, ‘because you have only one eye – for yourselves – for all the Eyes in the world, the lords of creation, the race apart.’

  ‘Griselda!’

  ‘But be careful,’ says Griselda. ‘Be careful. Women have hearts and feelings even if you are careless of them. Be careful how you are careless John. You will hurt yourself one day.’

  She turns her back on him and dabs her eyes with her handkerchief, but now her eyes are streaming and it is inadequate. The Eye silently gives her his torn one. She looks at it, and the tears come faster and faster.

  ‘John, you are too good to me,’ she whispers. ‘Too good, and too patient. Far too patient. Why do you let me say things like this? I am a shocking wife.’

  The Eye holds her in his arms, gently, firmly, and from his comfort it gradually comes to her that he is hardly even ruffled by the storm that has shaken her. The tears dry, she looks up at him with a strange almost calculatingly questioning look in her eyes.

  ‘Well now,’ says the Eye, ‘we had better get back to our plans.’

  ‘John, couldn’t we go to Rome?’

  ‘But—’ says the Eye. ‘I couldn’t fish in Rome.’

  It is Sunday morning.

  Sunday morning in Wiltshire Place is distinguished by its quiet. The bells sound from St Benedict’s with all the other London bells, an oranges and lemons chorus that begins before nine o’clock and continues until mid-morning and rings out again at evening into the quiet air.

  The Place is extra quiet; carriages and cabs driven to the church stop at the west door in the Square, but all morning a gentle traffic goes on between the houses in the Place and the iron gate in the railings opposite. There are first a few, a very few in those days, who go to the early services which the newfangled Vicar holds at eight and a quarter to nine; a few bonnets and shawls and a very few hats go over in the first chill winter daylight, often while the street lamps are being put out, the lamplighter running up to each of them to pull its chain and going on to the next lamp with his ladder on his shoulder; in summer, these few stop on their front steps to lift their faces to feel the promise of a day on which it seems a shame to leave the sparrows and the fugitive early freshness and go into the church. In pomp at eleven o’clock comes Matins, morning service. The enclosure round the church is filled; whole family groups, marshalled with sons and daughters, grown-up sons and daughters, schoolboys and girls, little sons and daughters, governesses and tutors, nurses, go in at the church door. There are uncles and aunts; young married couples; children, but if they are under five they will go out before the sermon. There are bachelors, young and old, and there are single ladies but these are always elderly unless they are not solitarily single, but attached to a father or mother or an aunt or a married brother or sister. The nuns come with their orphans; some are in the choir and the rest have pews of their own in the side aisles; they are all in uniform; Harry Proutie wears it; short black gowns for the boys and brown dresses, black aprons and starched white bonnets for the girls. The vergers sweep down the aisles in their black cassocks, their sashes swinging, and one opens and shuts a door giving a glimpse of the choirboys’ starched whiteness and glossy brilliantined heads. The verger quite often cuffs one of those heads. There are figures that are familiar year after year though the Danes never know their names; there are the family with the brown eyes and the hats with cherries in them for instance; there are the old sisters with the hyacinth-coloured dresses, silk in summer merino in winter, and black bonnets and sealskin jackets and muffs; there is the man who comes alone and has such a rich baritone; these are figures year after year, Sunday after Sunday. There are others met here every week but who are friends, intimate since first they bowl their hoops with Pelham or with Selina towards the Basin, as the Round Pond is called then. Morning service is a public and a private ceremony and governs all the Sundays in the Place.

  After it the Place is deserted, everyone has gone to church parade, all in their best Sunday clothes – in carriages if they have them; if not, to walk or sit on green-painted chairs on the green grass under the green trees, admiring the flowers, tulips or wallflowers or begonias, in the long beds, the very air feeling expensive and sanctified and gay.

  At one o’clock the Place is quieter still; there is a long silence in which no front or back door opens and no face is seen at the windows; it is Sunday-dinner time. In every house great trays are carried up from the basement and on the trays are dishes with domes of metal covers, and the covers at Number 99 have black dolphins on the handles. A smell pervades the Place; the smell is chiefly of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and roast potatoes cooked on a spit that turns on a brass cylinder with a cowl above it to keep in the steam and, below it, the roasting dish with the well for gravy, the potatoes and the pudding at the side, and the long-handled ladle to baste meat and pudding and potatoes to the same rich gravy brown. This is how Mrs Proutie cooks her roast. ‘You don’t get it to taste like that now,’ complained Rolls. If it is not roast beef, it may be a saddle of mutton; or lamb and peas and spiced red-currant jelly; or capon; or a country chicken; or even, but this is rare, a sucking pig; Mrs Proutie lays the little pig out tenderly and garnishes it; she puts a little cut paper frill on the leg of lamb as it sticks up into the air from the dish in the rosy stains of its own sweet gravy; capon is not usual at Number 99, but she stuffs a chicken with her own secret stuffing a
nd the kitchen is pungent with the smell of onion and herbs. The next course is almost universally apple tart and cream, but at Number 99 sometimes there may be trifle or plum duff. Then the heavy decanters, with their silver labels slung round their necks, are put on the table after the cloth is taken away; and nuts and the nutcrackers that are nearly as heavy as the decanters; and fruit on high fruit dishes standing on one slender fluted leg: muscatels, dried figs, or even a pineapple. After dinner on Sunday the children are allowed an orange.

  The grown-ups rest after dinner and have a nap. At the foot of Griselda’s bed is a couch and on the couch is a shawl kept folded, a Cashmere shawl that she is fond of for her shoulders, and an afghan for her feet; in the study there is a deep armchair; in Selina’s room there is another armchair with blue and white chintz covers and a cushion. The children cross the Place again, for children’s service. There are no bells to liven them and they silently fill the churchyard; small figures in pelisses and warm coats; buttoned boots; bonnets and Hussar caps, or Glengarrys; muffs and clean white gloves. The nurses have bonnets with veils; the governesses walk with tippets and prayerbooks; and black and brown and white come the colours of the orphans under the trees.

  In the evening, at half-past five, the bells begin again, but they seem less tumultuous, more personal, in the evening; the sound of the bells of St Benedict’s falls into the Square and the Place as if they rang for the Square and the Place alone. It is not obligatory to go to evening service, some go and some do not; some stay indoors and some take a gentle stroll; everything is gentle, a little flat, a little sad on these London Sunday evenings.