by Denton Welch
I crouched on the platform uncomfortably, afraid to lean back for fear of hurting Mr Mellon’s legs, or of feeling them against me. I imagined terrible skeleton legs that could not bear even the lightest touch. Mr Mellon turned the chair round and we began to glide almost silently towards the house. We passed Phyllis, still riding round the paddock. Mr Mellon waved; she gave us a glance, seemed to take in the fact that I was sitting at his feet, and returned one wooden gesture.
‘I expect you and Phyllis get on like a house on fire,’ Mr Mellon said: ‘she’s as good as any boy at riding and playing games. You should see her throw a cricket ball!’
Again I wondered that Mr Mellon could show such fondness for Phyllis; she seemed so very unenticing to me.
We were now passing the house and reaching the wooded ground behind. As soon as the path began to rise a little Mr Mellon said, ‘I know I told you about the white elephant that lives at the top, but we’d better not go to see him today. It’s not very good for the chair to pull two uphill, and I expect Mrs Slade’s wondering where we’ve got to.’
I was only too pleased to drop the subject of the white elephant and agreed that we ought to go back at once; but when we were near the front door Mr Mellon suggested leaving me, so that he could go back to Mrs Slade and bring her up to the house in the chair.
As I wandered into the hall, I thought dimly that Mr Mellon also enjoyed riding in the chair with Mrs Slade. It might be one of their chief pleasures. I knew he admired her for being so small and supple that she could fit on to the footboard where no one was supposed to sit. I wondered if they ever went out of the grounds in the chair, taking a picnic perhaps and a book; and if they did go out, did people stare to find her sitting there at his feet like an Eastern idol?
How quiet the house was! I guessed that my mother had gone upstairs to write letters or to read on her bed. I began to want to know about the other rooms leading off the hall. I had only seen Mr Mellon’s room and the dining-room. Very gently I opened one of the heavy mahogany doors and found myself in what must have been the drawing-room. The first thing that caught my interest was a cabinet filled with Japanese and Chinese ivories, some too large to have been made out of only one tusk. There was a smiling woodman with a basket of sticks on his back; a woman in fantastic ceremonial dress; then I saw it—a man crouching down, holding out one hand beseechingly. He must have been a beggar; he was naked except for a few rags and so wasted that there seemed to be no more than a film between me and his tiny skeleton. It was a moment before I realised that the little creatures running over him were rats and that they were gnawing his flesh. The carver had shown the tears in the skin, the rats’ minute beady eyes, the teeth of the agonised man. Looking deeper into the open mouth, I saw even a tongue curling back convulsively.
What a horrible thing this delicate ivory was to me! How could anyone carve such hideousness so lovingly? How could another human being be found to possess it? And yet the little figure fascinated me; I had to turn it over in my hands until every detail had been taken in; then I shut it back into the cabinet and left the room tingling.
Tea was being laid out on small tables in Mr Mellon’s room; I went in and found my mother already there. I wanted to tell her about the little starving man, to take her into the drawing-room and show it to her quickly before the others returned; but something held me back. It was as if the sight were indecent and I did not dare to share it with her.
Soon we were all eating scones and guava jelly, sandwiches of several different sorts, and little cakes brightly decorated with silver balls, crystallised violets, rose petals and little spikes of angelica. Mr Mellon said to me, ‘You’ll want to be with Phyllis again after tea; grown-ups aren’t nearly so much fun, are they?’
I wriggled, trying to think of something to say that would not slight Phyllis, yet would show that I preferred the company of the grown-ups.
When tea was over, I managed somehow to get out of the room alone. Perhaps I put on the grave air that children assume when they want to be ‘excused’. Once free, I waited in my room until I felt that Phyllis had settled to some amusement without me; then I stole downstairs again and let myself into another of the unknown rooms.
This one was a sort of study, or perhaps, because of its size, it might have been called the library, although books were not the most important part of its furnishing. A huge roll-top desk stood in the middle of the room and round this were spread all types of wild animal skins: lions, tigers, leopards, polar bears, brown bears. All their heads were mounted, with fierce glass eyes staring, and pink plaster tongues, rough as sandpaper, hungry for the taste of blood. These roaring mouths seemed just to have loomed up through the floor, so that I could imagine the flat skins gradually filling and taking shape after them, until I would be surrounded by living wild beasts.
‘But how can Mr Mellon wheel his chair in here with so many heads on the floor?’ I thought; then I began to notice how unused every object in the room looked. The books were all shut away behind glass in the rather small bookcases. There were no magazines lying about. The ashtrays glistened. Even the blotting-paper on the desk was almost without ink stains.
I sat down on the polar bear and had began to ponder again on the peculiar deadness of all Mr Mellon’s possessions, when the door opened softly and my mother looked in.
‘Darling, don’t prowl so,’ she said, coming across to me, still rather quietly; ‘they might not understand how fond you are of things. They might think you were being too inquisitive.’
‘I expect they think I’m playing with Phyllis,’ I answered. ‘Well, anyhow, let’s say goodnight and go upstairs now; it is nearly your bath-time.’
‘But Mummy, have you ever seen so many animals with stuffed heads in one room before?’ I asked, to keep her for a few more minutes from taking me to bed.
Should I try to hold her interest by telling her about the little rat-eaten ivory beggar? But once more I put the idea from me.
When I was bathed and in pyjamas and dressing-gown by the imitation logs that glowed so rosily on the hearth in my room, I said, ‘Mummy, who will have Mr Mellon’s snuff-boxes when he dies?’
My mother frowned a little.
‘We don’t want to think about people dying.’
‘But I want to know,’ I persisted.
My mother seemed to be wondering whether to tell me something or not.
‘Has Phyllis explained that Mr Mellon is going to adopt her?’ she asked, lifting her eyebrows.
‘No, Phyllis hardly says anything at all.’ Then the full meaning of my mother’s words came to me and I added excitedly, ‘Will she have the snuff-boxes and everything then?’
‘I expect so, darling, but it won’t be for a long time, so don’t talk about it or think about it any more.’
But once in bed, with the lights out, I thought of nothing else. It seemed to me the greatest waste that Phyllis should have anything more than the necessities of life; then my imagination was caught by the wonderful change in her fortunes; for, without having heard a word on the subject, I pictured Mrs Slade and Phyllis in very difficult circumstances before they had come to Mr Mellon.
I must have been asleep for some hours when I was woken by soft bumping sounds and the murmur of voices. The noises frightened me and even after I had recognised one of the voices as Mrs Slade’s, I felt anxious. What could be happening? There was another gentle bump. Mrs Slade said, ‘There we are! Up at last!’ and I heard a sort of comfortable grunt from Mr Mellon.
I realised that she was wheeling him to bed. Could she have pulled him up the stairs alone? The stairs were shallow, but Mr Mellon would be very heavy and awkward in his wheelchair. It did not seem possible for so small a woman. Perhaps the Indians had helped, and now she was only manœuvring some odd steps on the landing. They passed my door, still talking in undertones. Mrs Slade’s sing-song voice was murmuring comforting things, as if she were talking to a child; Mr Mellon just grunted, or replied in monosyllables.
Their intimacy surprised me, for even while riding in the bath chair together there had been some formality; and, before that, I had thought them quite cut off, in spite of Mr Mellon’s jolliness and Mrs Slade’s metallic smiles. Now they were like two old friends who no longer had to be very polite. It is true that Mrs Slade still sounded dutiful, for I remember thinking, ‘She hasn’t finished yet!’ but it was the dutifulness rather of an old nurse than of a professional hostess.
Long after all sound of them had ceased, I felt haunted. My mother’s sudden giddiness in the train had fixed my mind on pain and illness, so that I had been made specially conscious of Mr Mellon’s useless legs; then I had crept into the drawing-room and seen that terrible starving man gnawed by rats. The fearful feelings awakened in me, together with what I thought of as the great ugliness and deadness of Mr Mellon’s surroundings, made me long for tomorrow when we would go back to London. Everybody had been kind, even Phyllis had meant no harm, and yet I wanted to draw away from all of them.
Only the jewelled boxes and the wonderful curry were truly happy memories.
II
I did not see Mr Mellon again for about six years. During this time he had moved to a house of his own building, a few miles from his old villa. My mother was no longer alive, and I paid this second visit with my father on a hot summer’s day.
The approach to the house had lately been planted with all kinds of ornamental shrubs and trees, ranging from green through yellow to pink and greyish-blue. I found myself contrasting their gay feathery leaves with the dark glistening toughness of the monkey-puzzles and rhododendrons at the villa. The drive was so thickly planted that I could see nothing of the rest of the garden, nor did the house come into view until we were almost upon it.
It was long and low, only one storey high, built of a light pinkish-fawn brick, with metal casements; apart from its squatness, the sort of house that any prosperous businessman might build. When the door was opened by an English servant, I grew even more disappointed. What had happened to the Indians? Was nothing strange left? I began even to regret the ugliness which had disquieted me as a child. I would have found it stimulating now.
My eyes brightened when we were taken into the room where Mr Mellon sat, for it was octagonal and the floor was an inlay of rubber in baby blue and pink and yellow; it reminded me of nothing so much as the top of some gigantic cake prettily decorated with soft icing.
As I walked forward to shake hands with Mr Mellon, I felt its slight resilience.
Three sides of the octagon were of glass, and Mr Mellon’s chair stood so that he had the whole of the garden before him. While he was welcoming my father boisterously I stood looking out of the window in some wonder. It was a complete surprise to find the house built almost on the edge of a small ravine. The garden fell away at once in narrow terraces, held back by large flat rocks. More pointed rocks thrust out of the ground, and a path with stone steps wound in and out of these until it reached smooth lawns and a stream at the bottom. A small rustic bridge led to the other heavily wooded bank, where the ground sloped away more gently.
‘Not bad, eh?’ said Mr Mellon, suddenly taking notice of my interest; ‘you’d never think we had anything like this here, would you? I must say the landscape gardener has made a good job of it—really a very clever chap.’
My father went to the window to admire the scene, so that both our backs were turned when Mrs Slade came in with Phyllis. I was the first to hear their footsteps. Mrs Slade, like Mr Mellon, seemed hardly to have changed at all, but Phyllis had grown into ‘a breasted woman’, as I put it to myself. Her arms and legs were beefier than ever, and she was much taller than myself. But the full bosom gave me the greatest shock. I thought of her as the mother of fat twins. And was that lipstick on her mouth? Were girls who were not yet sixteen ever allowed to wear lipstick? Apart from this sudden redness, her face was much as I had remembered it. True, the eyebrows had become even thicker, leaving no sign that the long fat caterpillar had ever been two smaller ones affectionately rubbing noses. The expression too had strengthened; the sullenness was now almost formidable; but I was quick to see again that it was misleading, that it arose from her eyebrows and from her quite unmalicious indifference to other people.
As soon as Mrs Slade had greeted us with many smiles and bright remarks, and Phyllis had nodded her head and held out her thick hand, Mr Mellon suggested that we should be shown the house and garden.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Mrs Slade to my father, ‘you’ve never been to this house before, have you? We like it so much now that it is finished at last. It is much more convenient than the old one; there are no stairs, you see; Mr Mellon can wheel himself wherever he likes without having to call anyone. All the floors are rubber to make things as quiet and comfortable as possible; I wouldn’t have anything else now; they are so bright and so easy for the maids to keep clean.’
Still chattering, Mrs Slade led us into the garden first, to give us an appetite for tea, as she explained. She knew very little about the flowers and rock-plants, but she kept drawing our attention to things by saying, ‘Aren’t those pretty?’ or ‘Mr Mellon’s very fond of that,’ or again, ‘I think this is rather rare, but there’s nothing much to show for it, is there?’
My father was walking with Mrs Slade and I with Phyllis, but since Phyllis said so little, I found myself listening chiefly to the other conversation. I heard Mrs Slade tell my father about the number of men it had taken to move some of the rocks into position.
‘But weren’t they already here?’ my father asked in surprise.
‘Oh no, nothing was here—only the banks and the stream.’
Mrs Slade’s voice was very high and fluting; she seemed to be amused by my father’s simplicity on the subject of gardens.
‘Of course,’ she went on, ‘this is not a very good garden for Mr Mellon, most parts are so steep; but he took a great fancy to the site and would have the house here.’
‘Do you like school?’ Phyllis suddenly asked, bringing me back to her with a jerk.
‘Yes,’ I said hurriedly and quite untruthfully; ‘do you like yours?’
‘It’s all right; some of the mistresses are a bit dim. I needn’t stay after next term though, if I don’t want to. Mello says I can go to a finishing school abroad—I can choose where.’
‘So she calls him Mello,’ I thought; ‘and they’re going to let her go to one of those schools where the girls just do what they like!’
This further proof that Phyllis was being treated almost as a grownup filled me with envy. How I longed to have some attention paid to my own private wishes!
We had now reached the bottom of the cliff garden; Mrs Slade led us across the strip of lawn to the rustic bridge: I leant on the gnarled balustrade and looked down into the water. It seemed quite shallow.
‘Oh, do you know what Mr Mellon has had done?’ she asked, as if here were a topic, of especial interest to men, that had been almost overlooked. ‘He has had the stream stocked with trout. There are gratings underneath the water at the boundaries of Mr Mellon’s land so they can’t swim away. We are hoping they will settle down and have lots of families.’
I now caught a glimpse of a dark shape fanning the water with its silky tail. It held its position under the far bank, then darted away in a flash, leaving me to search for others. I thought of their bodies, soft as mole-skin and with a sort of filmy shimmer over them, perhaps a little like the bloom on untouched plums. I knew very little of trout and probably confused them with my memories of lovely prune-coloured carp.
But I was not allowed to gaze into the water for long; Mrs Slade told me to cross over and look up at the terraced garden and the house.
‘It is rather a good view,’ she said; ‘someone told Mr Mellon it was like the hanging gardens of Babylon, but I don’t know how he knew.’ She gave her little tinkling laugh.
Far away I could see Mr Mellon in his great bow-window; he looked like a captain on the bridge, I thou
ght—a captain who had sat down and given up worrying about his ship.
After a moment he saw me too and waved. He was smiling broadly, as if I had done something to amuse him. I waved back; he took out his handkerchief and pretended to be a boy scout signalling. I wondered how long I ought to keep my eyes on him.
‘We’d better not go any further now,’ Mrs Slade was saying to me; ‘there is much more to show you, but it’s rather a stiff climb back and you’ll be wanting tea; perhaps your father will be able to bring you over again quite soon.’
Crossing the stream rather reluctantly, I started to walk beside Phyllis again. In spite of my envy, I felt warmer towards her since our slight talk; we had never exchanged so many words before. I tried to begin another subject.
‘Can you bathe in the stream?’ I asked.
‘Not now the trout are in it.’
Her tone made me feel I ought never to have asked such a question.
‘Mello says they mustn’t be disturbed.’
‘Does Mr Mellon ever fish for them?’
‘Oh, no, he never goes down there.’
‘Who does fish then?’
‘Nobody’s allowed to until the fish have had babies; they’ve got to settle down.’
‘Well, who will be allowed to fish?’ I persisted, rather hopelessly.
‘Oh, I don’t know, people who come, friends of Mello’s, I suppose. He might let you, if you come next year.’
Phyllis paused after this last kind remark; I realised suddenly that she was about to tell me a secret.
‘As a matter of fact I do sometimes bathe, if you’d really like to know,’ she said, grandly; ‘there’s a place where the trees lean over the water; I take off all my clothes and go in there—with nothing on,’ she added, to make sure that I understood her fully.
She was looking at me, trying, I think, to find out the effect of her words. Did she want me to be confused and red? Or was she hoping for a lively interest in her nakedness? Perhaps she only wanted me to admire her devil-may-care attitude towards Mr Mellon, the carefully nursed trout, and the curiosity of the gardeners.