by Dennis Parry
I had heard no sound of footsteps, but when I looked up from replacing an object in the cabinet, there, standing a few inches behind me, was the girl whom I had seen on the upstairs landing. This time she had no knife and she was dressed in a long frock of printed cotton. Her fierce blue eyes eclipsed the feeble colours of the design and her tawny hair and skin glared leonine against the white background.
‘Good morning,’ I said.
‘Good morning,’ replied the girl in a voice which was foreign in texture rather than accent.
‘I’m David Lindley.’
‘I am Varvara Ellison.’
‘I think we met for a moment last night.’ I tried to smile engagingly. ‘You rather scared me.’
From the outset the girl had worn an expression of intense watchfulness. It did not respond to my attempt at levity.
‘I am on guard in the nights,’ she said briefly.
‘But . . . why?’
‘Lest someone should kill me.’
‘Why?’ I repeated in a flabbergasted voice.
‘For gain,’ said Miss Ellison, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
From utter bewilderment I leapt again to the theory which I had entertained on the previous night. Mrs. Ellison’s granddaughter had been sent home from the wilds suffering from mental trouble which took the form of persecution mania. I thought I might have been warned that my invitation involved sharing the house with a deranged person and one who did not appear to be subject to any close control.
‘Oh come,’ I said. ‘I’m sure it’s not as bad as all that.’
Varvara looked at me with contempt.
‘My grandmother wishes to see us,’ she said.
She led the way upstairs to the first landing where she tapped on a door. Nurse Fillis opened it and motioned us to enter. Inside, Mrs. Ellison was sitting up in a bed resembling my own, except that the draperies were even more elaborate. She had aged perceptibly since our last meeting. Her eyes seemed paler and vaguer, and the artificial plaits which she wore like a coronet round her head looked top-heavy against the thin foundation of her own hair. Nevertheless she still diffused an air of aristocratic benevolence which inspired confidence in her control of her surroundings—sometimes rather misleadingly, as I was to find out.
‘My dear boy,’ she said, holding out her hand. The diamonds between the clay-coloured wrinkles looked as if they were finding their way back to their original matrix.
I started to thank her for her hospitality, but she cut me short: ‘You are doubly welcome,’ she said. ‘For your own sake and because it will be so good for Barbara’—she pronounced the name that way—‘to have a companion. Everything in England is strange to her.’
‘That I do not find,’ said the girl.
‘Ah,’ replied Mrs. Ellison, ‘we must learn to know the wood before we can recognize the trees.’
The sudden tautening of phrase was unaccompanied by any change of manner. And this somehow made the mild snub more effective.
Varvara disengaged herself with a shrug and wandered over to the dressing-table where she began to play with a galaxy of toilet articles cut in the solidest and most ornate silver which I have ever seen. She stole (unobserved, I hope) more than half the attention which I should have been giving to the old lady.
‘. . . very sad,’ said Mrs. Ellison, ‘and, of course, a terrible predicament for a young girl. Not much better than being locked up in a cage with a lot of wild beasts after they had eaten their trainer. However she was most sensible. She set out for England a few weeks after the funeral.’
Varvara looked round, and for a moment I could see the line of her body under that shapeless djibbah. She was solid yet sinuous, like a young puma just come to its full growth.
Suddenly the significance of Mrs. Ellison’s words dawned upon me. I was shocked to think what an impression of lackadaisical callousness I might have conveyed.
‘I’m sorry,’ I stammered, ‘terribly sorry about your son. I’d forgotten that he was—’
‘Quite right,’ said Mrs. Ellison. ‘The young should not fill their minds with thoughts of death.’
Nevertheless when I was sixteen my aunt had very sensibly taught me the skeleton of a letter of formal condolence. All I could think of was one of its marmoreal phrases.
‘You must have suffered an irreparable loss.’
‘That is not how I regard it,’ said Mrs. Ellison quite kindly. ‘At my age it may be repaired any day.’
Varvara dropped a nest of scent bottles with a loud clatter. As she came over to the bed with arms outstretched, her face seemed to be lit by an internal fire which rarefied the blunt handsomeness of her features.
‘Those are words of God,’ she said, taking Mrs. Ellison’s hands. ‘We shall meet him again in the bosom of the blessed and immortal Christ who will have forgiven his errors and his blindness. . . .’ She appeared to consider for a moment. ‘At any rate by the time I come to die,’ she added thoughtfully.
Mrs. Ellison did not attempt to withdraw from the embrace. But her eyelids batted in deprecation of this excessive and un-Anglican display.
‘We are given every grounds for hope,’ she said quietly.
Up to this point the old lady had controlled the interview with tact and firmness. Possibly the introduction of an emotional note upset her. But more likely, I think, she was simply tired by coping simultaneously with two diverse creatures from whom she was widely separated in age and outlook. At any rate her grip began to waver. No longer did the ends of sentences entirely match their beginning; and an increasing number of her utterances took the form of commands—not always directed to any clear object. She made Varvara pull back the heavy tasselled curtains to the end of their runners although they were already admitting a blaze of sunshine. Even so she was not satisfied. She seemed to be looking for something beyond the window, but she could not explain what it was.
In the middle of this impasse Nurse Fillis entered and summed up the situation at a glance.
‘Time for a nice rest now, Mrs. Ellison.’
‘I . . . want . . . to . . . see . . . my . . . flowers.’
‘Now you know we had the window-boxes taken away because Dr. Conway thought they stuffy-ied up the room.’
‘My . . . flowers,’ repeated Mrs. Ellison sadly.
Nurse Fillis put a finger roguishly to her lips.
‘Now, I’ll tell you something. We’ve just had our order in from Harrods. Two dozen lovely roses, like a lot of princesses in satin petticoats. I’ll bring them in the moment Gibbons has arranged them.’
‘Drip, drip, drip,’ said Mrs. Ellison distinctly, in her ‘accidental’ voice.
Unhappy Nurse Fillis! Amongst other comparisons still less flattering, she resembled a pair of those linked buckets; of which, when one rises, the second sinks into the depths. As she pulled her credit up with one hand, she let it down with the other. No sooner did I start to respect her professional competence, than she shocked me by showing an unexpected addiction to sickroom whimsy—though perhaps I am being unduly harsh about a defensive habit forced on her by a succession of melancholic and querulous invalids.
‘Now,’ she said, plumping the pillows on the bed, ‘we’ll just lie back and rest for a bit. Otherwise we shan’t be fit for our visitor this afternoon.’
Varvara said: ‘Who is coming this afternoon, Grandmother?’
Nurse Fillis made a shooing motion behind her back, clearly indicating that we should get out. It seemed to me that she was entirely justified: it was not a time to ask idle questions—still less to ask them in the steely, rather menacing tone which the girl had employed.
Sacrificing manners to example, I went first through the door.
I knew that Varvara was following by a peculiar noise which I could not at first identify. Then I realized that she was grinding her teeth.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said.
‘They are making a tool-pigeon of my grandmother,’ she replied.
The atmosphere, super-saturated with eccentricity, was telling on my nerves.
‘Tool,’ I said. ‘Or stool-pigeon. Take your choice. They both seem equally unlikely.’
‘That is because you know nothing.’ She stopped and put her hand on my shoulder, slewing me round so that she looked into my face. She was very strong. ‘Are you my friend, David?’
‘Yes, of course.’
She sighed.
‘I think that you are a person who will see both sides before he chooses where to give his friendship. Well, that must happen, and I am not afraid because your heart is pure, though ignorant.’
I spent the rest of the morning sitting in the roof-garden which I had observed from my bedroom, and smoking one of Mr. Ellison’s cigars. The garden was in effect an unroofed extension of the sitting-room on the second floor. This was the room which Mrs. Ellison chiefly used when she was out of bed. The décor was less flamboyant than downstairs, though a case containing a large stuffed fish with razor teeth looked odd on top of the bookcase. But there was also a high-fidelity gramophone and a magnificent collection of white-label records, to which I later spent many hours listening.
The discovery of the gramophone cheered me at a point when I needed cheering. For some while I had been asking myself whether I was going to enjoy this visit; and the answers which came back were increasingly dubious. When every allowance was made for the narrowness of my horizon, No. 8 Aynho Terrace remained a very peculiar place. If my aunt had gauged the oddity of its inmates, I was convinced that she would never have let me come. She had the true Britannic hatred of ill-defined queerness; at a pinch she would rather have been put down in an unequivocal brothel than a place where one could only say that something funny went on upstairs.
But of course Aunt Edna had never had any great opportunity of judging Mrs. Ellison’s domestic background. After the return from Brittany she and my uncle had several times been asked to Aynho Terrace for tea or dinner. Seen thus fleetingly, and without the presence of Varvara, I could imagine that the household had appeared quite conventional. When my uncle’s leave expired and they went back to India the friendship continued by letter—Mrs. Ellison was a surprisingly active correspondent—and it was in the course of these exchanges that she had so kindly offered to help with the perpetual problem of what to do with me during the vacations.
After I had been sitting out for a while a thought struck me and I returned under cover. I went to the bookcase with the fish on top and looked along the lower shelves. As I had expected in a house of that type I found one devoted to books of reference: as well as copies of Whitaker and Burke and Kelly’s Landed Gentry it contained a large leather-bound atlas. I took this out into the sunlight and opened it on one of the tables at the page which showed Western China and Eastern Turkestan. The map was coloured for contour, so that the dark masses of the mountains to the south and north-west looked like thunder-clouds encroaching on the Gobi and the Takla-Makan, the great deserts whose pale lemon floor shaded off to a dull white where the land dropped below sea-level.
A shadow fell across the book. Varvara who had left me after our talk with Mrs. Ellison was standing behind my chair. She moved very silently for a girl of her size. I was embarrassed by being caught in an occupation which was so obviously inspired by her.
‘I hope you don’t think it impertinent,’ I said, ‘but I was wondering exactly where you lived.’
She studied the map for some seconds, as if she was not very familiar with such things. Then she put her forefinger on a spot under the Northern Tien Shan mountains in that section of the range which is called Bogdo-Ola. Where she pointed there was quite a cluster of small towns, but the scale was large enough to show which one she meant.
‘Hai-po-li’ I read slowly, and no doubt with an utterly false pronunciation.
‘Doljuk,’ said Varvara like an oath or a battle-cry.
She picked up my fountain-pen which happened to be lying on the table and scored through the printed name, cutting the strong paper in her vehemence. Then above the erasure she scrawled in the name which she preferred.
I missed the point because I knew nothing about the politics of Sinkiang. Whilst I was still wondering how to respond, the tubular gong in the hall began to warble, its notes mixing with the quarter-chimes of the innumerable clocks which simultaneously announced the hour of lunch.
The meal was not a very happy one, in spite of the excellence of the food. Considering the small degree of supervision which its mistress could exert, the household at Aynho Terrace ran with surprising smoothness. This was partly due to the unexhausted strength of tradition, and partly to the fact that, for all appearances to the contrary, Mrs. Ellison had collected round her an exceptionally honest and conscientious nucleus of upper servants.
The trouble was, quite simply, the presence at the same table of Varvara and Nurse Fillis. They obviously hated each other.
This intense hostility struck me as something actuated from beyond visible causes. Each had her social disabilities, but in neither did they seem to take a form which should be particularly liable to rile the other.
As at breakfast, Nurse Fillis got up and left the table whilst we were still eating. If I had had to guess about a move which interested me so little, I should have said that she did so either from an inflated idea of her duties, or else in recognition of the fact that the family and their guests might like a chance to talk in private. Varvara, however, had a more original theory. As soon as the door closed behind her enemy she gave a loud, gruff giggle.
‘Now she goes upstairs to wash her armpits.’
‘Why on earth do you imagine she’s doing that?’ I said when I had recovered a little.
‘From desire,’ replied Varvara in a sombre tone. ‘Elle fait la cour au roi des hyènes.’
I had not noticed that the butler was in the room during these exchanges. Otherwise—prig that I was—I should certainly not have abetted them. Now, however, it was too late. Turpin who was doing something mysterious in a corner with the remains of a bottle of white wine gave a loud liquid chortle followed by the almost anguished cry of ‘Box on!’ As he went out of the room, still choking with mirth, Varvara observed:
‘Turpin is a man of God.’
It had been made clear by Mrs. Ellison that I was expected to devote the afternoon to entertaining her granddaughter. Nor had I any intention of welshing. I merely hoped that Varvara, like myself, would prefer some sort of active amusement. Nevertheless for fear of seeming stingy, I felt bound to begin by suggesting a matinée or a visit to the cinema. To my delight she rejected both without hesitation.
‘I wish to walk in the town,’ she said.
I took her by a circuitous route to Kensington Gardens. At the bottom of Queen’s Road we saw a disaster. A middle-aged man lay, either dead or insensible, on the outer edge of the pavement. One constable was bending over him whilst another kept back the usual ring of spectators. Since no vehicle seemed to be near, there was more than the usual scope for speculation.
‘Poor chap,’ I said, ‘I wonder what’s happened to him!’
This presented no problem to Varvara.
‘He was robbing in the street,’ she said confidently, ‘when the guards of the magistrate came by and shot him.’
After a pause I said:
‘How long have you been in England?’
‘Now, three weeks and three days,’ she replied.
‘Well, if I were you I shouldn’t be in a hurry to jump to conclusions.’
If I had been brave enough and cruel enough I might have added: ‘On the other hand, if you like to learn up a few of the simpler conventions, you can’t be too quick for me.’ Like most very young men I was gravely embarrassed by any eccentricities of behaviour or appearance. I certainly did not dress well myself, I was not even neat, yet I was capable of suffering acutely in the company of someone who wore brown shoes with pinstriped trousers. Any breach of the rules by a woman was even more excrucia
ting. Nineteen twenty-eight is not very long ago, but it is an effort to recall how much more conventional people were in those days. For instance, if a girl had walked about the London streets without stockings, the dirty thoughts would have been swarming up her legs like centipedes. Varvara did wear stockings, though without much attention to their grip or alignment. On the other hand she had no hat; her tawny mane seemed to have a peculiarly elastic quality which caused it to bounce and flare out round her head as though a galvanic current were running through it. The garment which I incorrectly thought of as a djibbah was not intrinsically daring, but a piquant effect could be obtained by leaving the buttons which ran down the front open as far as the waist.
It is a curious thing, which I have confirmed more than once, that a woman who comes from a country where there are strict rules of female modesty from which she is exempt will not unconsciously approximate to those standards; much more probably she will go round in a way which would cause comment in a licensed quarter.
But at least I had a companion who never allowed any one embarrassment to chafe monotonously. Brisk as raindrops came half a dozen more, making their impact in as many different quarters.
‘We should be friends,’ announced Varvara, as though she were triumphantly refuting some furious argument to the contrary. ‘We have the same misfortune.’