A Fugue in Time

by Rumer Godden

  He steadied himself by the window and watched the searchlights that hid the stars completely by their near brightness. The whole sky and the city were fraught with death and life.

  If he pressed his face against the glass – Highly dangerous, thought Rolls automatically – but if he stayed there he could see the plane-tree. I am that tree, thought Rolls but he flattered himself. It was more than he, as was the other tree of which he truly was a part, the tree drawn on parchment that hung in the hall.

  An aeroplane swooped down closer, so close that it sounded as if it swooped down across the garden. Rolls could not see it, only hear, in the lit darkness, that deafening swoop; the gunfire that followed it seemed to crack in his ears, and there was a deafening shock and the house shook again, the glass rattled loudly and Rolls covered his eyes. Then came a lull and he could hear his own breathing. He uncovered his eyes and now in front of him he could see a glare behind the roofs and chimneys opposite. Near, said Rolls. Edward’s Square I should think. I hope Proutie is all right.

  There is something that no one knows in the house except Rolls himself and Proutie. It is so long ago that Rolls now did not know if Proutie remembered it, but Proutie did remember.

  It is Rollo’s last night before he leaves for India and Afghanistan, across France to Marseilles, with old Fitzgerald. Rollo is used to going away; since he went away to school for the first time he has been going away continuously; he has almost always been away; then why suddenly should he mind? Mind, care, grieve, yes grieve over this going away. Why cannot he be gay and light and casual as he has always been before? Has always been reproached for being before? He cannot. He is miserable and sulky and, when at last the interminable last evening is over and he goes up to bed, he cannot go to bed; he comes downstairs again and flings the front door open and stands on the steps, and presently he goes outside and spends an hour walking, walking, up and down. It is a cold night and he has no coat but he does not notice that except for a slight extra unconscious misery that comes from being chilled. The sky is light enough to see the shape of the spire, the convent cross; and the street lamps shine, each with a blue and yellow gas-jet; they throw his shadow, shaped not unlike a spire itself, before and then behind him as he walks. Before, behind, before, goes the shadow. The fronts of the houses are bland and indifferent, all with dark windows, and an overmastering desire comes to Rollo to see if Her window is dark; if She can sleep. He goes down by the area steps into the garden.

  The plane-tree reaches to the window he is seeking, hiding it, but he can see that behind the branches there is no gleam of light. Rollo goes back into the Place. ‘If she can sleep, then I can too,’ but he begins to walk up and down again; before, behind, before, goes the shadow.

  Rollo is still haunted by his vision. He has eschewed it, torn it in pieces, cast it out, deliberately had nothing to do with it – and it still persists. It still comes back again: the garden, the trees, the flight of steps; the black swans on the river.

  ‘You made a garden at Laudi didn’t you?’ asked Rolls.

  ‘I found a garden there,’ the Marchesa answered. ‘I kept it.’

  ‘You loved it didn’t you?’

  ‘It was a little green jewel,’ said the Marchesa. ‘It sufficed.’

  Now Lark, Rollo supposes, is asleep. How can she sleep? I have avoided her of course, but then she also has avoided me. We have avoided one another, but how can she sleep? Surely she doesn’t mean to end it there? Surely, we must at least be going to say ‘Good-bye.’ We haven’t arranged anything, cries Rollo. There is so much to arrange. But she appears to be asleep in that room that is the nursery. Behind the curtains with the fiddling mice, level with the top branches of the plane-tree. How can she sleep?

  Lark only sees those branches change eleven times – bud; the leaves turn green; turn dry; fall and drift away leaving the branches bare to bud again – eleven times against Selina’s seventy, Griselda’s twenty-three, and the fifty-nine that are to be given to Grizel. Eleven in comparison is a slight number but Lark does not claim a presence as the others do; only a presence through Rollo, through Roly and Rollo and Rolls, whom she loves. In the vision, if Rollo had followed it, she belongs to him and the garden that presages her need not be foreign and unseen; it is his; his are the groves and the river and the bounding dog; even the hat is not like a hat in a vision, it is chosen and bought and paid for by him; she is his; and now, walking in the Place with his shadow, he sees that again and as he sees it, he is filled with such consummate bliss that his guard falls down and with it his prudence and his fears. ‘Good God my God!’ says Rollo. ‘What a fool I have been!’ He comes bounding up the steps just in time to prevent Proutie from bolting the door.

  Young Proutie is in a brown dressing-gown. ‘Proutie! Not in bed?’

  ‘I had a feeling about the door,’ says Proutie. ‘I thought maybe I hadn’t put the chain up, so I came down and found the door wide open.’

  ‘I did that, not you,’ says Rollo.

  ‘You haven’t been to bed.’ Proutie’s eyes, blue tell-tale eyes, are wide and sympathetic. ‘You wouldn’t get me into the Army, Mr Rollo, not with all this serving overseas and wars.’

  ‘When I let them put me into the Army, Proutie, I thought all wars were over,’ says Rollo. He does not sound depressed now, he sounds hilarious and Proutie peers at him in the dimness of the hall. ‘Proutie, you are going to do something for me.’

  ‘Of course Mr Rollo. Anything.’

  ‘Go up to the nursery and wake Miss Lark. Go very quietly and wake her and ask her to come down. Make her come down. Tell her it is important and urgent. And Proutie …’

  ‘Yes sir?’

  ‘It is important and urgent.’

  Proutie goes and Rollo waits in the hall. The candles have burned down. There is only one left on the stairs and it burns low, shedding light only around itself; but it shows a glimpse, circled, of blue walls, cream banisters, serpentine rail. The house is filled with tickings, especially from the big clock near at hand, the grandfather. There is a scurry and rustle in the basement; a stair creaks but it is not Proutie coming down. What an age, an age is Proutie. Rollo strains and cannot hear a sound.

  He walks to the drawing-room door; back again; close to the clock; he looks down into the blackness of the basement; up the stairs; there is not a sound.

  The street door is still open and the Place, as it shows beyond its arch, pale, lighted by the lamps, is imprinted on Rollo’s mind forever. Proutie comes running down the stairs …

  ‘Where is she? Proutie, won’t she come?’

  ‘Miss Lark is not in her room,’ says Proutie, his tell-tale eyes astonished. ‘Her bed hasn’t been slep’ in. There is a note for Mr Pelham, Mr Rollo. She is gone!’

  ‘It is so peaceful to talk to you now,’ said the Marchesa. ‘Those questions, and actions, were like thorns and wounds in our minds. You hurt me so I hurt you. But that is all over. It is so peaceful to talk to you now.’

  ‘I love you Lark. I love you. How much I love you, Lark.’

  The candles are burning quietly along the walls; they shine on the gold in the barley-sheaves and poppies in the paper, on the picture frames, on the gilding of the chairs exactly as they did before; they are reflected quietly in the polished piano lid, in the tables, in the mirror; none of them have burst into torches; the shepherdess on the clock is still dreaming and the hands of the clock have only imperceptibly moved; the bronze chrysanthemums in the Chinese bowls are as they were: they have not hung themselves in garlands nor in wreaths. ‘Then?’ says Lark wonderingly. ‘Then? And now?’

  ‘What are you thinking of?’

  ‘Of us of course.’

  ‘How we shall always be in love?’

  ‘How we shall always be in love.’

  ‘Even when we are old?’

  ‘Even when we are old.’

  There was a shock of impact and noise and the glass of the window was blown in, straight in Rollo’s face. The drawi
ng-room wall sagged inwards, covering him as he fell. The balcony and steps rose up and tore away into the garden in an uprising of bricks and earth. The house shuddered to its foundations. The bomb had fallen on the garden wall between the lines of houses. The house on either side of it seemed to sway apart, but it was the house in Wiltshire Crescent that fell, hidden in a cloud of dust. Number 99 still stood.

  Presently the All Clear sounded.

  In this hour the outside sounds had lessened and the din of the guns died down. The searchlight had ceased to play over the sky, and behind the branches of the plane-tree the stars showed.

  The garden was full of rubble and broken glass and dirt. The steps lay at an angle. The creepers, torn loose, swayed and stirred. There was a dead silence.

  But the house was not silent; nor dead.

  ‘We thought it was going to end to-night, but it isn’t. It is going to live.’

  ‘I am the house dog.’

  ‘I am the house cat.’

  ‘They eat Larks in Italy.’

  ‘I should like never to see our own dining-room again.’

  Chick chick chick chick chick chick

  Lay a little egg for me.

  ‘Ultimately just.’

  ‘Is it so important to be loved?’

  ‘I should prefer it to be my own thigh.’

  ‘We are having a lovely party.’

  ‘You understand about the soubise?’

  No. 6. Valse. See-Saw. (Brown eyes?)

  ‘… at Char-asiab and Kabul and Kandahar.’

  ‘A lease of occupation.’

  ‘When did you grow up like this?’

  ‘Why not be truthful, Grizel?’

  ‘You must learn to read, you little dunce.’

  Ah – ahahahahahah – ah

  Ah – ahahahahahah – ah …

  ‘Do not disturb me. I don’t want to be disturbed.’

  ‘… as your sister. Do you understand?’

  ‘Come back. Come back. Elizabeth!’

  ‘Real snow, Grizel.’

  ‘Come Juno. We must go to bed.’

  ‘How do you pronounce Popocatepetl?’

  ‘Heliotrope, and they call it cherry-pie.’

  And the house continues in its tickings, its rustlings, its creakings; the ashes will fall in its grates, its doorbells ring; trains will pass under it and their sounds vibrate; footsteps will run up the stairs, along passages; dusters will be shaken, carpets beaten, beds turned down and dishes washed; windows will be opened and shut; blinds pulled up, pulled down; the tap will run and be silent; the lavatory will be flushed; the piano will be played and books taken down from the shelf; brushes will be lifted up and laid down again on the dressing-table: the medicine bottle will be shaken and flowers arranged in a vase; children will perhaps play spillikins and perhaps they will not; but mice, for mice will be mice and their fashions do not change, mice will run in the wainscot and the family will set traps for them. ‘In me you exist,’ says the house.

  A Biography of Rumer Godden

  Rumer Godden was the prolific author of over sixty works of fiction and nonfiction for both adults and children, including international bestsellers Black Narcissus and In This House of Brede.

  Margaret Rumer Godden, also known as Peggy, was born on December 10, 1907, in Sussex, England. Six months after her birth, her family moved to India, where her father worked for the Brahmaputra Steam Navigation Company. Godden spent most of her childhood in a large house along the river in Narayanganj, a trading town in Bengal with her sisters Rose, Nancy, and Winsome, also known as Jon. She fell in love with India, and went on to use it as a colorful backdrop for many of her successful novels, including The Peacock Spring and The River. In 1966, she and her sister Jon, cowrote a memoir about their childhood, Two Under the Indian Sun.

  In 1920, at the age of thirteen, her parents sent her and Jon to boarding school in England. The girls struggled to leave their home in India behind, changing schools five times in two years. Godden eventually parted ways with Jon and attended school in Eastbourne, England, where she studied literature and dance. Due to a chronic spinal injury, she could not pursue a career as a professional ballerina and instead trained in London as a dance teacher. When she was eighteen, she opened a dance studio in Calcutta, the Peggie Godden School of Dance, and there she taught both Indian and Eurasian students, a practice that was considered controversial at the time. At twenty-seven, she married Laurence Sinclair Foster, with whom she had two daughters, Jane and Paula. Upon the birth of her children, she briefly returned to Britain, where she published Black Narcissus, a commercial and critical success.

  At the start of World War II, Godden took her daughters to Kashmir and parted from her husband, who left her with many debts. She rented a small house by the Dal Lake with no electricity or running water, wrote endlessly, and cultivated an herb farm. At this home, one of her servant’s tried to poison her and her children by putting ground glass, opium, and marijuana in their food, inspiring a scene in her book Kingfishers Catch Fire. At forty, she returned to England again, and truly emerged on the British and American literary scenes. She remarried and lived in England for the rest of her life with the exception of a few visits to India. Godden felt at home in both Britain and India, and wrote, “When I am in one country I am homesick for the other.”

  Godden studied many religions of the world and she struck up a friendship with a scholarly Benedictine nun, Dame Felicitas Corrigan. Her studies inspired one of her best-known novels, In This House of Brede, a story about an Englishwoman who leaves her life in London behind to join an order of Benedictine nuns. Godden lived near Stanbrook Abbey for three years, researching the book. She officially converted to Catholicism in the early 1960s.

  Many of her books were made into classic films, including Black Narcissus, The River, The Greengage Summer, and The Battle of the Villa Fiorita. She collaborated with filmmaker Jean Renoir on The River, and they traveled to Calcutta while working on the movie. In addition to her novels written for adult audiences, she also wrote several children’s books—the most famous being The Doll’s House—and nonfiction books, including a biography of Hans Christian Andersen. In 1972, she won the Whitbread Award for children’s literature, and in 1993 she was named an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. At the age of eighty-six, she visited India—for the final time—with her daughter to shoot a BBC documentary.

  She published her last book, Cromartie vs. the God Shiva, in 1997, just a year before she passed away.

  The Godden family house at Narayanganj in Bengal in the early 1900s.

  Godden in Bengal in 1915 with her parents, Norah and Arthur; her sisters, Rose, Nancy, and Jon; and their dogs, Cherub and Chinky.

  Godden at her desk in Dove House in Dal Lake, Kashmir, 1943.

  Godden in her garden at Dove House in the 1940s.

  Godden on the set of Black Narcissus at Pinewood Studios with Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, and Deborah Kerr.

  Godden in Buckinghamshire in the 1950s.

  Godden with her daughter Jane in the woods in Buckinghamshire in the 1950s.

  Godden at a book launch in New York with Jean Primrose in the 1960s.

  Godden with her grandchildren Mark and Elizabeth in Rye, 1962.

  Godden’s home, Lamb House, in Rye.

  Godden and her cat, Simkin, in Scotland in the 1990s.

  Godden in India in 1995 while filming BBC’s Bookmark.

  Godden while filming Bookmark in 1995.

  (All photographs courtesy of the Rumer Godden Literary Trust.)

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblan
ce to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1945 by the Rumer Godden Literary Trust

  The lines from “East Coker” by T. S. Eliot are from Four Quartets, copyright © 1943 by T. S. Eliot

  Cover design by Drew Padrutt

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-4202-4

  This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  180 Maiden Lane

  New York, NY 10038

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