A Fugue in Time

by Rumer Godden

  Griselda goes out, her hand on the Eye’s arm; Selina crosses the Place and goes through the iron gate to the church where for the third time, the orphans, their faces bobbing pale in the dusk, go in by their special door below the Mary chapel. The sound of the organ comes out into the Place; the lamplighter comes back from the opposite direction leaving the lighted lamps gleaming in a line behind him; in the houses every moment a fresh window is lit up: the colours of stained glass shine crimson and jewel blue among the lime trees, from the church. Footsteps sound; voices gently call ‘good night’; an area gate shuts and at a front door a house-owner stands and takes out his key. The organ sounds; they are singing the Nunc Dimittis preparatory to going home. Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word.

  Sunday is nearly over. There now remains only cold supper: cold beef and baked potatoes and a sodden English salad of lettuce and beetroot that tastes curiously of earth; cold pudding; a wine jelly with ratafia biscuits perhaps; more biscuits and cheese. Tea in the drawing-room and then leisurely, yawning, one by one to bed.

  Now it is Sunday morning and in the drawing-room at Number 99 someone is practising her singing.

  It is summer and the windows are open and the bowls, the Chinese thousand-flower-pattern bowls, hold yellow roses. Why do yellow roses smell more strongly than the other colours? The smell of these drowns the garden smell of lime-flowers.

  Ah – ahahahahahah – ah

  Ah – ahahahahahah – ah …

  sings the voice.

  Ah – ahahahahahah – ah

  Ah – ahahahahahah – ah …

  It changes to thirds: –

  Ah – ah

  Ah – ah.

  It is Lark.

  She is standing by the piano and the sun on the carpet reaches to her feet. She is wearing a dress of thin cream muslin that hangs in long fluted lines to the floor; it is tied at the waist and wrists and neck with old-gold ribbons, velvet ribbons of the new ‘sunflower-gold’. This is one of the first dresses that have ever been made new for Lark; she has grown so tall that she can no longer wear Selina’s cast-off dresses: Selina is tall but Lark is taller. The neck ribbon makes her neck look slight and rather long as it used to look when she was a child, but her hair is up, though she has not learned to cut it to a length that she can manage and it is a little uncertain and heavy and often tumbles down. Though she is so tall and her figure is magnificently full and rounded, she does not look quite adult; she is not: she has not yet emerged from the cocoon of quiet and separateness and shyness that distinguished her when she was a little girl. It is the same with her singing; each note is correct, full, even powerful, but she sends them out into the air as if she were not quite sure how they will sound.

  She stands so still, so earnestly, that the folds of her dress might even be chiselled except that they fold down a little further when she bends to strike another note on the piano and take the scale up from it again: –

  Ah – ahahahahahah – ah

  Ah – ahahahahahah – ah …

  Ascending and descending: –

  Ah – ahahahahahah – ah

  Ah – ahahahahahah – ah.

  Then, sitting down at the piano, looking out across the garden, over the tops of the syringas to the limes, she begins to sing: –

  O Mary, go and call the cattle home,

  And call the cattle home,

  And call the cattle home,

  Across the sands of Dee!

  The door opens so quietly that Lark does not hear it and Rollo stands there against the darkness of the hall.

  Lark is usually only too much aware of Rollo when he is in the house.

  The house becomes different; it is more alive: stirred, more interesting. His step rings in the hall; when he knocks he makes a tattoo with his cane on the panels of the front door; he laughs and Lark realizes how seldom it is that she, or Pelham or Selina, ever laughs. He has a way of calling for the servants instead of ringing that sounds cheerful and that they like. He brings in new elements; he plays cricket and no one else does; he rides and no one else does: he goes out in the evenings and comes in late; Lark sometimes hears him come in when it is first daylight and the sparrows in the nursery gutter – the nursery is now her bedroom – are cheeping. She hears him come upstairs and go past her door to his own room along the landing. He does not often come down to breakfast and Lark has caught glimpses of him, in a dark red dressing-gown eating kidneys on toast from a tray and talking to Slater. He does not often come down to breakfast but neither is he often in to lunch; nor does he have tea with Selina though she only sees him when he is on leave, nor does he dine at home. He seems, Lark thinks, to eschew the house as much as possible while he is on leave.

  Rollo could have told her that the house to him seems gloomy and boring; there is nothing in his home, he thinks, to interest him. Selina spoils him, if he will let her bully him; Pelham spoils him but cannot help grudging it; Rollo quietly and consistently spoils himself and does not feel he need force himself to spend much time at home however short his leave.

  ‘Look what I have done for you,’ cries Selina.

  ‘And how you did enjoy having someone to order about,’ Rollo might have answered.

  ‘Look what I do for you,’ says Pelham.

  ‘But you would really much rather do nothing at all.’

  It has not occurred to Rollo to notice Lark.

  Because of her old intimacy with Roly, Lark is shy of Rollo. She keeps far out of his way but she knows almost as much about him as she knew about Roly.

  His clothes for instance: they are quite different from Pelham’s. Rollo has uniforms; of course Pelham cannot be expected to have those but Rollo has a cloak lined with white watered silk, Rollo has gardenias waiting on his dressing table and he chooses one when he has dressed. Lark sees Proutie putting studs into Rollo’s evening shirts and Rollo has the magnificent diamond and ruby stud left him by the Eye. Rollo has rows of boots standing to attention with their trees. ‘Can’t he get boots in Worcestershire?’ she hears Pelham say. On Rollo’s dressing table are flasks, wicker-covered, silver-stopped, of cologne and bay rum and macassar oil; his hairbrushes, his handkerchiefs, even his pillow smell of them. In the corners of his mirror he puts invitation cards: Lady Emily Chase – Mr and Mrs Henniker Grey; notes are left open: Dear Mr Dane – Lt R. I. Dane – Dear Rollo – Rollo dear, I wonder … There are programmes, gilded, with miniature pencils, pale-blue or pink or green or white or scarlet: –

  No. 1 VALSE. MYOSOTIS. (Barbara S.)

  No. 2 POLKA. TWO AND TURN AGAIN. (Blonde curls. Under entrance palm.)

  No. 3 VALSE. DOWN THE RIVER OF YEARS. (Blonde. Middle parting.)

  No. 5 BARN DANCE. (Mary B.de V.)

  No. 6 VALSE. SEE SAW. (Brown Eyes?)

  And Lark with a pang reads No. 7, No. 8, No. 11 and No. 12, No. 15, and No. 16: (Brown Eyes?). Sometimes the programmes have notes on them in Rollo’s writing; sometimes the writing is someone else’s: St James 3 P.M., Danvers 10:30. Who – with that pang of envy – is Brown Eyes? Who, male or female, beautiful or hideous, sought or seeking, is Danvers?

  There is, to add fuel to Lark’s secret fire, much talk just now of Rollo in the house. She knows his shortcomings that Selina takes so seriously, and she knows his successes that Selina takes more seriously still. Now he has been transferred to the Indian Army, to the – th Punjab Cavalry. ‘Better pay. Better promotion. Better prospects,’ says Pelham. But … and at last Lark, unable to bear it, has to point out, ‘But he will have to go to India!’

  This vista, so appallingly open to her and to which they seem to blind themselves – ‘Better pay. Better promotion. Better prospects’ – is now close. In the autumn Rollo will sail for India.

  ‘But how does this fit in with your ideas … and Uncle Bunny’s?’ asks Pelham of Selina. ‘Isn’t it a step down?’

  ‘A step down for several steps up,’ says Selina and smiles.

  ‘And he agrees?�
�

  ‘Of course he agrees.’

  Rollo agrees easily. ‘Oh, all right,’ says Rollo, ‘but you must let me play polo this summer.’

  ‘Polo!’ Pelham pulls his upper lip. ‘Polo is fabulously expensive.’

  ‘Nonsense. Expensive but not fabulous. If you are wise,’ says Selina, ‘you will let him play polo.’

  As May opens, and June, Selina in flowered dresses and delightful little tilted flower hats drives down to Ranelagh to watch Rollo play. I should wear hats like that, thinks Lark. I should be wearing them and not Selina. I shall ask Pelham if I can have a hat like that. I shall ask Pelham if I can go to Ranelagh. But, in all she asks Pelham, she cannot bring herself to ask him that, and so the summer goes on and she and Rollo have not seen each other yet.

  In spite of the fabulous polo and the qualities Lark and Selina weave round him, Rollo is truthfully a presentable but not extraordinary young man. He is not a swan but neither is he a goose. He has not grown up as good-looking nor as clever as Selina hoped, but then that was not likely nor, barely, possible. He is very big, very good-natured, and averagely quick-minded; he has a big strong healthy body, sunburned cheeks, Griselda’s chestnut hair and blue eyes that are lazy and even-tempered and easily amused. He has, as well, the Eye’s high forehead and Griselda’s straight nose and something of her straight direct gaze. Rollo is not quite so lazy nor so even as he seems; he is ambitious and he has the Dane way of trenching deeply, leaving nothing undone that might help him in his career; but with this he is moody and he seems to turn even against himself as if he despises this ambition. ‘Why do you do it?’ asks Pelham. ‘Don’t you care about your work?’ Rollo does care deeply but he still behaves as if he did not. ‘He is so wild!’ moans Selina. ‘He won’t go to church. He has such undesirable friends.’ ‘Why do you want to behave in such a worthless way?’ asks Pelham.

  ‘Perhaps because I don’t believe very much in worth,’ Rollo answers slowly.

  ‘Why are you so discontented? No one forced you to go into the Army.’

  ‘Didn’t they?’

  ‘You could have come into the business.’

  ‘Business! What does anyone ever get out of business except a packet of money?’

  ‘Well what do you want out of life?’

  ‘Life.’ Rollo might have answered that quite simply but he does not. He feels it, in moods that fluctuate; he feels it deeply but he is looking for words far more elaborate than that. Rollo once wrote poetry but he discovered quite soon that he was not a poet. I am not a poet but I know what a poet feels like. Even now, when according to Pelham and Selina he has settled down so nicely and become so sensible, still he knows. He has, like Pelham, a nostalgia but unlike most nostalgias, unlike Pelham’s, it has power, a power of vision and penetration. He inherits it, 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, and it is in Griselda’s vision and her love of foreign words and things. For Rollo it is usually in words: in a sentence; in a play or in a poem; but it may also be in a winter morning: in a colour; the movement of leaves; an animal. It has not yet for him been found in a human, though once or twice he has thought … Lark was right to feel that pang; Rollo was very much smitten with (Brown Eyes?), but she turns out to be only Brown Eyes without the (?) and he loses interest.

  This morning Rollo is in evening dress and a little dishevelled; he has not taken off his hat and it is not on quite straight. Slater opens the door to him and Slater notices, and remarks downstairs, that Mr Rollo’s breath was fruity. Rollo is not drunk, he is only elated. Now he stands in the doorway, listening to Lark. The room is full of light and sun and flowers; he blinks a little in the light and listens quietly.

  The western wind was wild and dank with foam,

  And all alone went she.

  Lark is turned slightly away from him, singing towards the window; and Rollo, looking to where she is looking, to the green outside, seems to see a garden; it is another garden, not a London one; it is another garden of trees and groves and a stream with swans perhaps, but the swans are not white, they are black with scarlet bills. It is a poetical garden; the trees are weeping willow trees; there are old stone steps; a pedestal; it is a poetical garden but it is real. It is extraordinarily real. Now Rollo sees a dog, a bounding large curly-coated dog, and with him Lark is wandering, not singing now but walking, in just such trailing feminine skirts and, swinging by its loop of ribbon, a great garden hat. Lark? says Rollo to himself incredulously because he has not noticed or thought about the little girl enough to realize that one day she must grow into a woman; and then, with another shock, he sees Lark, not in any garden, but as she is now. He watches her at the piano and he sees the line of her face turned away from him, the too heavy dark hair, the sunflower ribbons. He has in this moment a perception of Lark; if he had not come at this moment he sees, he would not have seen her ever again as she is now. Women grow in minutes, not in years, thinks Rollo. Yesterday she was a child; to-morrow she will be complete, a woman. And as surely as Pelham saw, as Selina all these years has seen, Rollo, who is more fastidious and discerning, sees that she is beautiful. He sees, as well, how much more beautiful she will grow to be as she matures. He does not think of nymphs and goddesses; he thinks of himself. He is surprised at the feeling that has started up in him. She sings on unconsciously and in her singing is, he finds, his vision of the garden and the groves, the garden hat, the dog, the stream, the red-billed swans.

  Across the sands of Dee!

  There is a ping, a chime from the singing crystal in the chandelier.

  The front door opens and shuts with a slam, quick steps cross the hall with a swishing of flounces, and Selina brushes past Rollo in the door.

  ‘Lark!’ she calls peremptorily. ‘Lark.’

  ‘Hush,’ says Rollo angrily but the song breaks off abruptly and with her hands still on the keys Lark swings round with startled eyes. Then she sees Rollo.

  ‘Lark! Have you forgotten it is Sunday?’

  ‘Sunday?’ says Lark vaguely. She barely hears Selina. She is looking at Rollo and the colour in her cheeks deepens, pales, deepens more vividly again. Rollo comes into the room.

  ‘Take off your hat,’ says Selina to Rollo, and to Lark: ‘They could hear you at the end of the road. Right down the Place.’

  Lark does not listen but Rollo has obediently taken off his hat.

  ‘I am speaking to you Lark.’

  ‘I thought you were at church,’ Lark says absently.

  Rollo has come up to her, leaning on the piano lid, close to the bowl of roses that Selina insists on putting on the case, with a draped Indian shawl and a water colour on a miniature easel. The scent of the roses is heavy and strong.

  Selina has now to speak to Lark past Rollo’s back and he seems to intercept her words so well that they do not reach Lark. ‘You thought I had gone to church. I had but I had to come back for a handkerchief. So this is how you behave as soon as my back is turned. You were positively shouting. What will everyone think?’

  ‘They will think that Sunday morning in Wiltshire Place has lost a little of its depression and repression and gloom,’ says Rollo turning round on her. ‘Its gloom and its smugness and hyp-hyp-hypocritical humbug.’ He turns back again to Lark across the yellow roses and says softly to her, ‘I know now why they called you Lark.’

  She answers still more softly, ‘Were you there, listening all the time?’

  Selina has been looking more closely, very closely, at Rollo. ‘Rollo! Are you going out, like that?’

  ‘I am not going out. I am c-coming in. I am on my way to bed.’

  ‘At this time of the morning?’ She looks at him again and comes closer and recoils. ‘Rollo! Your breath! You smell of wine and spirits – terribly.’

  ‘I have been drinking them,’ says Rollo reasonably. ‘Don’t fuss Lena. I am not drunk.’

  Lark has noticed his breath but she does not mind i
t. It smells rather like raisins and is, she thinks, a little exciting, but Selina is angry. ‘You should go to your room, not appear before ladies, before me or a young girl. Take no notice of him Lark. It is too much!’

  ‘Don’t fuss Lena,’ says Rollo.

  ‘Fuss! I shall speak to Pelham, but Pelham takes no more notice than a sheep. I shall speak to Uncle Bunny. He will deal with you.’

  ‘Don’t fuss Lena,’ says Rollo patiently. He still smiles but his eyes are not amused. The bells for morning service stop their ringing and a fresh thought strikes Selina.

  ‘Rollo! You must have met everyone on their way to church!’

  ‘I d-did.’

  ‘Oh – No! What did you do?’

  ‘I l-lifted my hat and said “G-good night,”’ says Rollo gravely.

  Lark laughs an infectious rich peal in the room and Rollo begins to laugh too. ‘This isn’t funny,’ cries Selina. ‘It is perfectly disgusting. What will people think? What will they say!’

  Then Selina thinks of something else. Lark sees her face change, her eyes go rapidly over Rollo summing him up; a possibility has occurred to her. ‘Well,’ she says and now her voice has altered, it is coaxing, only a little hurried. ‘Oh well. I suppose it is no use being cross with you Rollo. But you must be punished.’

  What does she want, thinks Lark. What is she after?

  ‘You must go straight upstairs and change. I shall ring for Proutie to help you. You must be quick, change in five minutes, and then you must come over with me to church.’

  ‘You will be very late,’ says Lark idly. ‘The bells have stopped.’

  ‘Be quiet,’ hisses Selina. ‘You will do that for me, won’t you Rollo?’

  ‘No I won’t,’ says Rollo.

  ‘Rollo please. To please me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Rollo dear.’

  ‘But why do you want me to Lena?’

  Because, Lark could have told him, because if you appear in church with her, groomed and respectable, it will perfectly correct the scandal of your appearance in the Place this morning. That is what Selina in her mind is saying. Lark could have told him. That is what is in her mind. But Lark does not say anything. She watches to see what Rollo will do.