A Fugue in Time

by Rumer Godden

  Rollo will not go to church. That is one of the most discussed points of his behaviour. He will not go. On principle he will not go. Lark waits to see what he will do.

  ‘You know I won’t go to church,’ growls Rollo.

  ‘You go to Church Parade.’

  ‘That is because of the men.’

  ‘If you go because of your men, won’t you go for your own sister?’

  ‘No I won’t,’ says Rollo again, and he says – uncomfortably because he is not given to explaining himself – ‘I don’t believe in it Lena. I won’t hurt you by saying what I think, but I don’t believe in it. You know I don’t.’ He is, Lark sees, uncomfortable; nothing deeper.

  Selina brushes his words away as if they were flies. ‘That doesn’t matter,’ she says.

  Doesn’t matter at all, says a cool small voice somewhere inside Lark. Appearances matter. As long as you appear to believe it doesn’t matter what you believe. Will you consent to appear Rollo? Will you lie? And she looks at Rollo’s face that is sulky but not stiff with obstinacy as she would have liked to see it. Oh well … most people lie, thinks Lark.

  ‘To please me, Rollo.’

  ‘Oh very well!’

  ‘Dear dear naughty boy!’ says Selina delighted. ‘Thank you. Thank you.’ She kisses him and her veil tickles his cheek and irritates him. ‘Dear boy! I shall go and tell Proutie to put out your clothes and help you; but you must hurry. Hurry!’

  She goes out quickly. Rollo lingers. There is a silence. Lark says nothing. She looks at her hands on the silent piano keys. She presses one down softly and it gives out the shade of a note, and a shade answers it from the crystal. Then the room is quite silent, fragrant and full of sun.

  ‘It is no use defying Selina,’ says Rollo defensively.

  ‘It is of use,’ says Lark. ‘And you are free of them,’ she points out.

  ‘I am not. I can’t live on my pay.’

  ‘You could.’

  He could. He knows that. ‘And I hate asking Pelham for money.’ He does not realize that he has said that aloud.

  ‘Then why do you?’

  ‘Because he always has some and will always give some of it to me,’ he says disarmingly, but she does not smile. ‘Once—’ says Rollo and stops. He seems lifted by a feeling of freedom, as if with Lark freedom would come. ‘Once I asked him to give me five hundred pounds and let me go,’ says Rollo.

  ‘If I had money,’ says Lark thoughtfully, ‘I would give you five hundred pounds.’

  ‘But I wouldn’t go now for that,’ says Rollo laughing; he has withdrawn. Then he sees the garden again; Lark’s skirts; her dark hair … the birch-green ribbon, the pale chip straw of the hat. ‘Do you know that you are beautiful? Beautiful?’ he says.

  ‘Rollo! What are you doing? We must be quick. Be quick Rollo dear!’ and Selina sweeps between them into the room.

  At half-past eleven Proutie came upstairs again.

  ‘Miss Grizel, I am sorry to disturb you but a young officer has called.’ He held out a salver with a card. ‘Pilot Officer Masterson, miss. He asked to see Mr Rolls, but Mr Rolls is in the study and gave strict orders that he was not to be disturbed. He gets so upset if I go in and I daren’t disturb him, but it seems the gentleman has a very special message. Would you see him Miss Grizel?’

  ‘Of course Proutie. Show him up here.’

  Proutie went down and came up with a small dark-skinned young man in uniform. He had, Grizel noticed, as he crossed the landing, his right arm in a sling and his hand in bandages. She stood up to meet him.

  ‘My great-uncle is busy,’ she said. ‘Can you talk to me instead? I am Grizel Dane.’

  He gave her a quick look of surprise and took her hand as if he did not know he held it. ‘But how do you fit in?’ he said. ‘I haven’t heard of you. You don’t belong here, do you?’

  ‘But I do,’ said Grizel surprised.

  He gently released her hand. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude. I’m sorry. Can I explain?’

  ‘Come and sit down,’ said Grizel. She led the way to the window-seat but he did not sit down. He stood looking round him. Grizel watched him curiously. As he turned, looking intently, he moved in and out of the light, and that changed him and altered him and impressed him on Grizel. He was unusually dark, with an olive southern-looking skin, jet-dark hair, black eyes; his uniform made him look darker still, the blue bringing out the greenishness in his skin. It doesn’t become him, thought Grizel. I had thought it became everyone.

  What was he saying? ‘I remember the geography,’ he said, and he looked at the doors. ‘There is Mrs Dane’s, Griselda’s, room. That is the dressing-room, and that room is Selina’s.’

  ‘Now it is mine.’

  ‘And do you drive Selina out? I bet you don’t. She was a dragon, wasn’t she? And,’ he added gravely, ‘she was unkind.’

  ‘She doesn’t worry me,’ said Grizel. ‘I don’t think I have much sense of the past, or of history, or of family. I like the present. I like people – not ancestors.’

  ‘Ancestors are people,’ he answered and he studied her. ‘You are a Dane. How do you manage to be an American?’

  ‘I was born one,’ said Grizel. ‘My grandfather, Pelham Dane, went to America to be married in eighteen ninety-one.’

  ‘And you have no sense of the past?’ he asked. ‘Then why did you come back here?’

  ‘What has that to do with it? I didn’t come here for the past. If I came for anything,’ said Grizel, ‘I suppose it was for the future. Yes, it has always seemed to me more sensible to think of the future. The past has gone.’

  ‘Has it?’

  ‘Of course it has. It is over. Done with. What are you smiling at?’

  ‘You,’ he said.

  ‘At me?’

  ‘Yes. You are so glib.’

  ‘Glib?’ Grizel could not say more for her astonishment.

  ‘It must be wonderful,’ he said, ‘to be able to divide everything up separately and label it so certainly and put it away in such air-tight, thought-proof boxes.’

  ‘What makes you think I have – boxes?’

  ‘Haven’t you? This is the past. I am not interested in the past. Shut it up, put it away. This is the future. We should think of that. Better keep it open.’ And he said rudely: ‘What about the present? Where does that begin and end? I suppose you know that too?’

  ‘You are very rude,’ said Grizel. ‘I think—’

  ‘You don’t,’ he said. ‘You don’t think.’ His face softened as he looked at her. ‘Probably you won’t think. Try it. Try thinking,’ he suggested.

  ‘Pilot Officer Masterson,’ said Grizel. ‘You have known me five minutes—’

  ‘And nothing can happen in five minutes?’ He stopped and there was silence and then he came closer to her and said, looking out over her head as she sat on the window-seat, ‘Again I am sorry. I don’t know how this argument began. I came here in a perfectly normal state of mind. I don’t usually beard people like this.’ Grizel did not speak. ‘I am stationed at Hornchurch,’ he said, ‘and we have had a bit of a party these months. I suppose it is that and I am not quite normal. It was a strain; people not coming in and the waiting all the time. Then I got my unlucky shot.’

  ‘You crashed?’

  ‘Yes, off Margate. Slap into the drink. Fortunately for me the lifeboat people saw me come down. I was back at the aerodrome in a few hours. All I got was this.’ He showed his hand. ‘Burnt. I have to have an operation but they say I shall use it in a fortnight.’

  ‘Don’t!’ said Grizel, more sharply than she meant. She stood up beside him, looking down into the Place, empty in a cold grey winter morning, with the steeple coldly clearly grey in the daylight and the brass balls of the weathercock shining. All ordinary, commonplace, everyday, like any other winter morning in any time except – Except for what? Not something so different in it, different as it was, but something different in Grizel. ‘I get horrors over this war,’ said Grizel slowly. ‘S
ometimes I don’t think I can bear it. I don’t think I am very good at going on being brave.’

  ‘Why didn’t you stay in America? Why are you here?’

  ‘That is my business,’ said Grizel and there was a different tone in her voice, a shyness.

  ‘It is your business,’ he answered her. ‘Your business. My business. Everyone’s business. I don’t think anyone is meant to escape this time.’ And he added, ‘It wasn’t so easy for me. I am half-Italian.’

  ‘That must have been hard,’ said Grizel.

  ‘It continues to be hard,’ he said lightly and Grizel thought that he spoke particularly lightly when he was particularly moved. ‘The mechanics were easy. I was in the R.A.F. in ’thirty-six. My father was English you see. The mechanics were easy but it was not easy. My childhood was spent in Italy. I was brought up there by my uncle because I was his heir. He had rather large estates. There were things I had to learn. He was the Marchese Zacca del Laudi. He is dead now.’

  ‘Then –’ said Grizel – ‘besides being Pilot Officer Masterson you are the Marchese – I can’t remember the rest.’

  ‘I am both of them,’ he said. ‘That is it. But I am Pax, myself, as well.’

  ‘And you know this house. When were you here?’

  ‘I was never here.’

  ‘But you know it.’

  ‘The Marchesa, my uncle’s wife, was English. She lived in this house as a child, and as a girl. She and I were very dear to one another. She used to play a game with me, hide and seek all over this house.’

  ‘But you said—’

  ‘Oh, we were not here. Neither of us. I think she was homesick, there was something that seemed always – continually to be in her thoughts. She taught me the house from top to bottom. I could show you your way in it I think.’ He laughed. ‘She used to make me fly upstairs. Even then I used to think of flying. That made the game perfect for me. I always flew upstairs.’

  ‘Where is she?’ asked Grizel.

  ‘In Italy. I don’t suppose anything would happen to her,’ he said again lightly, ‘she has been there among the people for too long. No, she will be down at Laudi in Tuscany. That was the country home of ours that she loved and I left it to her to live in. She made a garden there, a famous one. I think she had almost forgotten this house, until lately.’

  ‘Lately?’

  He turned away from the window looking down at Grizel and his eyes seemed very small and bright as Grizel was to learn they looked when he was earnest. ‘I haven’t seen her for two years,’ he said slowly. ‘I haven’t perhaps thought of her very much, or felt the thought of her, but lately it is as if she has been nagging me to come here. No, not nagging, reminding; reminding, continually reminding me. Don’t laugh at me,’ he said to Grizel. ‘She told me to come here and I came.’ And he asked her: ‘Where is General Dane? Where is – Rollo?’

  ‘I called him that,’ said Grizel, ‘and he said “Rollo was my name when I was young. Only one person calls me that.”’

  ‘She has not seen him for fifty years,’ said Pax, objecting.

  ‘But it might not have been your aunt, the Marchesa, who calls him that,’ said Grizel. ‘Why do you take it for granted?’ Then she added, puzzled, ‘But it isn’t “Why do you take it for granted?” It feels more like “What do you take for granted?”’

  ‘There is something, isn’t there?’ said Pax.

  ‘It seems authentic,’ admitted Grizel. ‘He shuts himself away by himself, but it is not to be unhappy. He isn’t unhappy. He seems to be finding some happiness, some joy of his own. What was her name? Your aunt, what was her name?’

  ‘Her name is Lark.’

  As he said that, a sound made them turn. Rolls had come upstairs and stood at the top of the flight by the banisters resting for a moment.

  He did not look at all like an old gentleman shut away to brood inside his study with the door closed against them all. He looked singularly hale and cheerful. Not a blood, not a blood but a blade. ‘Hullo,’ he said to Grizel. ‘Do you sit here too? This has always been where the women of the family like to sit.’

  He crossed to her. He did not appear to see Pax standing full in his way in the window.

  ‘Uncle Rolls,’ Grizel began, ‘this is Pilot Officer—’

  Rolls interrupted her. ‘I come here to look at the snow,’ he said.

  ‘Snow?’

  ‘They used to tell us,’ said Rolls and chuckled, ‘that it was the angels airing their pillows: goose feathers. Geese!’ He peered out past Grizel. ‘And the men with drays put sacks on their shoulders and heads, and if it were bad they put gravel down to stop the horses slipping.’

  ‘But Uncle Rolls—’ said Grizel.

  Pax made a gesture to her to be quiet. It was such an instinctive commanding authoritative rightful gesture that Grizel stopped and was quiet, looking at him. Then she flushed and said again, deliberately: ‘Uncle Rolls—’

  ‘I don’t see it lie as it used to do,’ Rolls complained. ‘Heavy pure snow, and the air was pure too even here in London. That is what I liked. But never mind, even now I like to see it coming quietly down.’

  ‘But Uncle Rolls, it is winter,’ cried Grizel, ‘it is winter but it hasn’t snowed yet.’

  FOUR O’CLOCK

  It was four o’clock and on the landing Pax was having tea with Grizel. It was ten days since Pax had come into the house, ten days that had passed with wings and to-morrow was the eleventh of December when Proutie was to start packing and Grizel and Rolls were to leave the house.

  ‘Have you packed?’

  ‘No-o,’ said Grizel slowly. ‘I still can’t believe we are going. And if I can’t,’ she said, ‘after being here three weeks, what must it feel like for Uncle Rolls?’

  It had turned colder and already the afternoon was growing dusk; outside the window the light was grey and presently, in the twilight, it began to snow. Grizel turned her head and watched the flakes coming down. Angels airing their pillows. That was what Rolls had said. People believed in angels then. I wish I did, said Grizel. I wish I could. I need an angel. I wish I had something to steady me: a hand to cling on to. Yes, I wish I had an angel.

  Grizel was more than ever adrift and confused and she was frightened. She was not accustomed to being anything but clear and firm, confirmed, and secure. That first night in London she had confessed to being rattled but it was more even than that. She had been shaken and continued to be shaken. And now nothing in me can settle. I am all unsettled. Why? Why? What is happening to me? She glanced across at Pax and away again. She refused utterly to think of him.

  She had been a child like every other child; dependent: loving her mother and father; her nurse; she had made friendships at school and had school admirations – though perhaps mine were more temperate, lukewarm than most. I never burned, thought Grizel. She had been in love. In spite of that most firm refusal she found she was looking at Pax again and she knew, most certainly, that she had never been in love. I have been nearly in love then, corrected Grizel. Through all her life, through all these loves, she had remained herself, her entity, Grizel. I am I because my little dog knows me says Gertrude Stein; but I haven’t any little dog, nor even an angel, said Grizel.

  It was her work first she thought that had first disembodied her. She was just a unit in a unit, clothed in khaki, gauntleted, well-shod, pink-cheeked, efficient. Then, when she had finished work and came back to the house, what was left of her was infringed; Eroded, said Grizel indignantly and she said again bewildered, I am not I! It did not occur to her that, perhaps for the first time, she was learning what she really was: infinitesimal; a grain in the sand; the spring-off of her tribe; the continuation, nothing more, of what was gone; and now Pax had come and again she was looking at him, forcing herself to look away and at once looking back at him.

  The landing, in the increasing dusk, was lit by the glow of Proutie’s electric fire, two opal and orange globes in a copper shield; the glow spread over the carpet, was
thrown up to the edge of the white tablecloth, on to the chairs, and up the blue of Pax’s trousers to his knees; it was reflected again in the silver of the tea-things, even in the strainer as Grizel lifted it, the strainer that Griselda uses every teatime.

  The house is filled with possessions like the silver strainer with the silver primroses on the handle that match the tea-pot and hot-water jug, the milk jug, cream jug and sugar basin; there is a massive silver tray; the salvers; much silver and plate of the calibre of the grape-leaved entrée dishes; there is a set of spoons and forks, raft-tailed, worn fine, inherited by the Eye: there is the new set, so much more solid, ordered by him from Mappin and Webb; there are toast racks and butter dishes and jam spoons, and salt-cellars and mustard-pots and a little walnut barrel capped with silver for grinding peppercorns; there is an enormous cruet in a plated holder with eight cut-glass bottles; there are silver labels on the decanters and a set of tiny filigree holders for liqueur glasses; there are candelabra with six branches and a set of silver vases shaped like convolvulus with silver tendrils for the dinner table; there are all the christening mugs of course: a silver rattle and baby forks and spoons; there is a giant ladle of solid silver for soup and a delicate ladle with a tortoise-shell handle for punch. Tortoise-shell too is the tea-caddy on little silver legs; one of the first things Pelham and Selina remember is the little caddy standing on the tea-table above the lace and linen of the cloth and catching the firelight in its tortoise-shell sides, on just such winter afternoons.

  There are six or seven tea-sets in the house, ranging from the plain white kitchen set with its odd pieces and the nursery set, at one time white too with violets, to the Davenport in the cabinet in the hall, in grey and white and gold. There is a doll’s tea-set in Dresden china with an edging of china lace. The dinner service in everyday use is white with a border of royal blue and flowers in red and brown and gold: there is also a French set, a Limoges copy in white porcelain with scattered nosegays of flowers; there is a best set in white fluted china, plain, almost transparent, Spode. The dessert service used every day is hideous with dishes shaped like green china baskets, but there is a Worcester set, white again with a deep cherry border and centre flowers of gold; there are Chinese bowls, sent as presents sometimes to the Eye with his cargoes of tea; blue-and-white bowls with a rice pattern on them and blue-and-white lids; and the thousand-flower-pattern Chinese bowls in the drawing-room.