by Dennis Parry
2
Next morning the same chorus, playing its nine o’clock hymn, accompanied me downstairs. The dining-room, which opened off the hall, was a very big room entirely furnished in dark mahogany. It seemed to speak, in a low rumbling voice, of eight-course dinners attended by company directors. On the overmantel there was a bronze statue of a knight in armour who was prodding a dragon beneath his feet. The knight’s visor was open, and in the sepulchral light I jumped to the conclusion that this was another portrait of Mr. Ellison in fancy dress. Later when I had the chance to examine this awful piece of bric-à-brac I saw how wrong I had been. The knight had an amiable, foolish, Teutonic expression; Mr. Ellison would have had his mailed pants off him in about two minutes.
A young woman in a nurse’s uniform was already at the table. As I came in she looked up and choked slightly. The resultant fit of coughing darkened her high-coloured cheeks until they were almost the same shade as the mahogany. I stood shifting about from foot to foot, trying to look both nonchalant and sympathetic.
Finally she recovered. ‘Pardon me,’ she said. ‘Good morning. I’m Nurse Fillis.’
Not unnaturally it took me several days to discover that she had not introduced herself by her Christian name.
‘I’m David Lindley,’ I said. ‘I’ve come to stay.’
‘I hope you enjoy it.’
‘Thanks. I’m used to entertaining myself.’
‘Oh,’ said Nurse Fillis, ‘it’s not a question of being lonely in this house. Not as things are at present.’
Her voice carried that supercharge of meaning which somehow I associate with outraged landladies.
Before we could pursue this curious conversation Turpin came in with a pot of fresh coffee which he put down at my side. As he did so he belched slightly.
‘Box on!’ I thought he said, and it turned out that I was quite right.
Nurse Fillis raised her head from her plate and gave him a look of distaste. The movement brought her face into a shaft of light so that I saw its details more clearly. She belonged to that considerable and unfortunate tribe of young women whose features are individually presentable, but refuse to add up. She had a small clear-cut nose and a neat mouth, but both appeared trivial and slightly vulgar against the wide expanse of her cheeks and her massive but well-shaped chin. She was not fat, but something—perhaps the high complexion—gave her a plethoric air, which combined badly with her obvious nervousness.
Turpin had gone to the sideboard and was rummaging about in one of the compartments. Presently he looked round and addressed her.
‘You don’t ’appen to ’ve seen Miss Varvara’s ’orn?’
The nurse tossed her head.
‘I have not. You don’t suppose I’d touch the filthy thing.’
Turpin chuckled resignedly, and sloped towards the door.
‘She’ll just ’ave to drink out of a cup this morning.’
‘Or else she could condescend to come down and look for her own nonsense.’
I thought that the sooner I had some idea what was going on, the happier I should feel.
‘What was all that about horns?’ I asked when the butler had gone.
She replied: ‘As well as you, Mrs. Ellison has a granddaughter staying here. She comes from savage parts—which is putting it mildly, if you ask me. Anyway she owns a dirty old goblet carved from some animal’s horn—she says it’s a rhinoceros’s—and every drop she drinks must come out of it.’
‘What’s the idea?’
‘It’s supposed to be a guard against poison.’
I had a vague memory of having heard this superstition before and of its being associated with a particular country.
‘Isn’t that a Chinese notion?’
Nurse Fillis nodded. ‘Mind you, the place she comes from is hardly proper China, where I’m told there are some very nice people. It’s somewhere right at the back.’
‘Why does this girl think she’ll be poisoned?’
‘It is the way she’s been brought up. You should hear her talk to her grandmother—how Governor This strangled Governor That and did I don’t know what to his fancy women—dreadful language sometimes. One makes allowances, but it’s time she learnt.’
I remained silent, partly because I could not think what to say next, and partly prompted by an elementary sense of social tactics. About the young woman with the rhinoceros-horn I had no ideas, but it seemed to me that I recognized Nurse Fillis. She was the counterpart of several undergraduates whom I knew, the nervous, introspective ones who believed that everyone was watching them; who had elaborate fantasies under exteriors like suet; who for long periods would converse only in monosyllables, and then suddenly burst into plaints or denunciations followed by still more embarrassing apologies.
Sure enough, silence produced reaction. First she bent over her plate and began to eat as if she were digging her way to the Antipodes. But what she needed was reassurance, not distraction, and presently she addressed me in a subdued tone.
‘I hope you didn’t think I was talking out of turn, Mr. Lindley.’
‘If I had, I shouldn’t have listened.’
It was a nasty and priggish remark for a boy of twenty. I can only plead that I was not speaking in my own personality. When I was young my dramatic sense (and also a certain lack of self-confidence) often caused me to substitute other people in the situations which I found beyond me, and to speak with their voices. So now I was snubbing Nurse Fillis in the accents of my aunt who was a mem-sahib of the old school, and could smell presumption across half a continent.
Indeed, two years before, when we first met Mrs. Ellison in Brittany, she had once or twice unnecessarily slapped down the nice little Irish nurse who was then looking after the old lady.
Until this summer, Mrs. Ellison had gone every year to St. Plou-les-Navets, chiefly because her husband had done so. Though he travelled widely for business, Mr. Ellison had not really approved of places abroad. But St. Plou he exempted from that category: at which I do not greatly wonder, for it had taken to itself many of the beastlier features of a British seaside resort, including the incivility, the crowds, and the noise. It was not, you would have thought, the place for an elderly woman who had lately suffered a minor stroke. Not that Mrs. Ellison was enfeebled. Although she found it convenient to keep a nurse in attendance, the only outward signs of her illness were a tendency to become confused under mental stress and, even without it, occasionally to forget the context and the company in which she was speaking.
Very likely her excellent recovery was due to self-discipline. So far as possible, she refused to abandon any of her former habits. One of these was doing the crossword in a well-known English paper. This exertion did not turn out so well as some others, for it tended to put too much pressure on her memory. It was sad and comic to see the old lady sitting in the lounge and gnashing her teeth over some elusive clue, whilst Nurse Riordan, who had the brains of a hen, further exasperated her by making imbecile suggestions.
One day when my aunt and I happened to be at the next table she seemed more disturbed than usual.
‘I know it, I know it,’ she kept on repeating. ‘Town in Central Asia. . . . Town in Central Asia. . . .’
‘Now me,’ said Nurse Riordan, ‘I never knew they had any towns in Central Asia. I thought it was all sand and godlessness.’
‘My son wrote from there . . . my son. K— and five more letters.’
‘Karnak,’ volunteered Nurse Riordan. ‘Kanton.’
‘Please remember, Nurse,’ said Mrs. Ellison crisply, ‘that it is my mind which is failing.’
My aunt leant across to them. She knew all about Mrs. Ellison and this was an opening which she did not despise.
‘Could I help? I think Khotan may be the word you want.’
The old lady was grateful, but she slightly disappointed my aunt by showing no surprise at her geographical knowledge. Some delicate angling was therefore necessary before the conversation could be moved on
to the plane of personal reminiscence. But finally the transition was made.
‘I just happen to know a little about that part of the world because my husband was sent on a mission there, about five years ago.’
‘Ah,’ said Mrs. Ellison vaguely.
‘Rather outside the normal run of jobs in the Indian Political Service. As a matter of fact it was supposed to be very hush-hush and I wasn’t allowed to mention it for at least a year after he came back.’
‘But I am sure you did,’ said Mrs. Ellison.
Never doubting that she had misunderstood, my aunt continued: ‘So naturally I was interested when I happened to overhear that your son had been there.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Ellison flatly.
‘So few people get a chance to penetrate into those regions . . . unless they’re archaeologists or missionaries. My husband said that both were doing magnificent work.’
‘They were all pests—particularly the missionaries,’ said Mrs. Ellison without hesitation.
‘Oh! Well . . . it depends on one’s point of view, doesn’t it? I expect your son was tied up in a lot of administrative problems . . .’
Mrs. Ellison let the heavy white lids come down for a moment over her eyes.
‘Bores like a beaver,’ she said in a low sing-song voice. ‘And fat.’ I noticed Nurse Riordan frown and touch her unobtrusively on the sleeve: at which she seemed immediately to recover her sense of the distinction between speech and thought. ‘My son,’ she said, ‘sold guns to the natives so that they could fight each other.’
‘God forgive him his ways!’ added Nurse Riordan in a discreet undertone.
You might think that this was a discouraging start to an acquaintance. But once my aunt had decided that somebody was worthwhile it took a great deal to choke her off. Moreover, to her honour, her mind was as large in some directions as it was small in others. She seldom wasted time resenting the fact that people did not like her; she either moved on or set about improving their opinion.
Nevertheless contact remained at the level of formal greetings and remarks about the weather until my uncle arrived in St. Plou. He was an instant success with the old lady, and we used regularly to sit with her in the lounge. Not that my uncle made any conscious effort to charm: it simply happened to be second nature to him. Aunt Edna was the one who had our fellow-guests graded from the first day. Mrs. Ellison came very high on her list, if not actually at the top. I soon learnt that she was a reputed millionairess—or at least the widow of a man who had been an indubitable millionaire.
I still remember another of the few occasions when she mentioned the mysterious son in Turkestan.
‘They killed my boy, you know,’ she said, her voice wavering not from sentiment but one of her sudden attacks of fatigue. ‘But not till he’d led them a fine old dance. He used to write and tell me things . . . some of them very unsuitable.’
Later, when our family group was alone, my aunt said:
‘I cannot think why Mrs. Ellison persists in pretending that her son was some kind of—well—hobo in Sinkiang. Affectation of that kind is so unlike her.’
‘And what,’ said my uncle in his gentle lazy tones, ‘makes you think that it is affectation?’
‘My dear Henry, I wasn’t born yesterday. It’s perfectly obvious why the son was there.’
‘You tell us.’
‘He was arranging for his father’s firm to get mineral rights. Everyone knows there’s a fortune under the ground in those extraordinary places. Or perhaps I should say there was: most of it’s probably in the Ellison bank account by now.’
‘That was not exactly the impression I gathered when I met Fulk Ellison,’ said my uncle.
‘You met him? You never told me!’
‘I meet a lot of people without telling you, my love.’
‘Well, what was he like?’
My uncle thought for several seconds.
‘He was an amiable and romantic bandit,’ he said at length. ‘A character . . .’ he chortled gently . . . ‘and he damn well knew it.’
Unfortunately at this point a little dog belonging to one French family bit a little boy belonging to another and in the electrifying row which followed my curiosity about Mrs. Ellison’s son was forgotten. That lapse of memory lasted nearly three years.
For several minutes Nurse Fillis continued to radiate faint jarring waves from some source of interior confusion. Whether she talked or remained silent she was an uncomfortable young woman, and I was glad when she finished her breakfast and excused herself.
‘I must go and get my patient up.’
I was reading the morning paper and drinking a final cup of coffee when Turpin made a second appearance. He went over to the sideboard and opened one of the compartments.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said in a tone of unwonted formality, ‘but I thought I’d show you the requirements.’
I joined him and saw that he had pulled out a couple of deep drawers. The top one was stocked with a variety of decanters and bottles; the lower, lined with zinc and fitted with cedar trays, contained hundreds of cigars of various sizes. I was only moderately interested in drink, but I loved cigars, and now with a princely gesture Turpin made me free of that enormous collection.
‘But won’t Mrs. Ellison mind? I mean, oughtn’t I—?’
I think it was my complete ignorance of how to behave with butlers which laid the foundation of Turpin’s amiability towards me.
‘ ’Elp yourself,’ he said. ‘Make the old lady ’appy. There’s a nice nature there, though it is my own employer. Besides, she’s seen enough of scrooging and gouging.’
‘Well . . . thanks.’
‘Mind you,’ said Turpin gloomily. ‘The drink’s no good. Mr. E. didn’t ’old with it. That brandy there—strictly for ’ospitality. Anything decent I look after downstairs.’
‘Of course.’
‘Mrs. Ellison won’t ’ave nothing locked. Asking for it!’ Turpin winked rapidly, then recited so fast that I could scarcely follow him:
‘ ’Ousemaids sip,
Grooms soak,
Nurses nip . . .
Butlers—occasionally—take—a
drop—more—than—would—be—
good—for—other—folk.
Learnt that in me first place, but there’s not the same spirit now.’
Not to choke him off, but because I was afraid that if the conversation continued I should let myself down, I said, ‘I expect you’d like to clear away now.’
‘That’s right,’ said Turpin. ‘You go and ’ave a look round the ’ouse. ’Ighly artistic. Give you a laugh.’ He sucked his front teeth thoughtfully. ‘Not but what you should ’ave come ten years ago.’
‘Why, was it different then?’
‘You was. What I’ve always said about this place, it’s made for kids, like the pantomime.’
He escorted me to the dining-room door and opened it, wrapping, as it were, his robes of office about him and from the midst of them producing an unbelievably plummy and flunkeyish voice.
‘The drawing-room, sir, is situated on the other side of the vestibule.’
After a few seconds I saw what Turpin meant about pantomimes. Indeed the comparison was surprisingly acute. The drawing-room looked strangely like one of those spectacular sets which appear about halfway through the second part of the programme at Drury Lane or the Lyceum, depicting Princess Baldroubadour’s Boudoir or the Hall of Dreams in the Fairy Queen’s Palace. They rely on chandeliers and a generous use of gilt and mirror-panels: in the middle there is often a giant confection—ostensibly a bed or a throne—which is decorated partly with spangles and metalled brocades and partly with human figures arranged in plastic poses.
The resemblance persisted despite the fact that Mrs. Ellison’s drawing-room was overcrowded with furniture, whereas stage-sets are necessarily rather empty. The accumulation of bric-à-brac in the one seemed to counterbalance—indeed spiritually to replace—the swarms of coryphées and
courtiers in the other.
It was a very big apartment running through the whole length of the house. One set of french windows formed part of the façade of the house, the other looked onto the garden at the back. A grand piano stood in the front embrasure, a splendid Bechstein, but round it, as though for a kindergarten lesson or tea-party, were grouped six or seven little chairs of a truly frightful winsomeness. One—evidently of Swiss manufacture—had a carved Berne bear on each arm: in the worst and biggest the back panel was adorned by an inset plaque of two pre-Raphaelite maidens looking into each other’s eyes with an expression which would cause comment nowadays. The feature which they all had in common was a distinct thickening or downward protuberance of the seat. I even toyed with the idea that they might be a collection of high-minded commodes.
In fact, as I discovered later, they were musical chairs. If they were wound up and one sat on them, the boxes inside played a variety of tunes including Abide with Me and The Minstrel Boy.
The same contrasts between tawdriness and magnificence persisted throughout the room. Hanging on the walls or standing on cabinets and on the marble overmantel was a part of the grand chorus of chiming clocks. (Other smaller squads were distributed elsewhere about the house.) A few of these were pieces of considerable beauty, but they were outnumbered by the product of Bavarian woodcarvers and imitators of celebrated buildings. A cuckoo popped out from the eaves of a chalet next door to a model of the Leaning Tower executed, apparently, in the substance of moth-balls.
At the further end, near the garden-window, the centre of the floor was held by a tall octagonal cabinet. I opened two or three of its glass-fronted partitions and took out objects at random. I noticed how many of them had a Far Eastern origin. There were at least a dozen Chinese snuff-bottles, several small jade screens, and a model of a junk in ivory. At the time I supposed that Mrs. Ellison’s son must have sent them as gifts to his mother. This was not correct. They had, in fact, been collected from various sources for Mrs. Ellison’s sister who was a congenital cripple. With that strange mixture of good sense and incomprehension so typical of the Victorians it was decided at an early stage that she must be given an interest in life. So a museum was started in order to make her forget her wasted spine. Everything went into it, as into a hot-pot—postage-stamps, sea-shells, coins, an uncut ruby worth a thousand pounds, and hundreds of objets d’art. The collection, begun in her own family home, was transferred to that of the Ellisons when she went to live with them. It had originally been housed in a single room at the top of the house which still held the core of it; but after her death Mr. Ellison, who combined a keen sense of economy with the aesthetic taste of a Yahoo, had seen no reason why all these rarities should not be used for the general embellishment of the house. So they were duly parcelled out, the drawing-room receiving the articles which were thought to have the highest monetary and decorative value. I believe the cases of sea-shells were put round the servants’ bedrooms.