A Footman for the Peacock

by Ferguson,Rachel

  Her voice was apologetic. ‘Yes. Could it be possible?’

  ‘Why not? I believe most creatures have the capacity for malice, and all things considered I think they let us down uncommonly lightly! Peacocks are orientals — I fancy they were originally imported from Persia — so a certain element of subtlety could enter into the business! We shall probably never know the extent of the memory of any creature. Peacocks aren’t usually pets in the cat and dog sense; we use them as garnishings, so we are hardly entitled to know what goes on in their small brainpans, and the fact that you and Sue have elected to make a pet of this bird isn’t enough to counteract generations of the splendid isolation to which we have relegated them. How long have you had him?’

  ‘Ever since I can remember. There were always peacocks at Delaye.’

  ‘And this one is the last descendant of the original muster?’

  ‘Probably, yes.’

  ‘Not one of the Severn Court hatchings?’

  ‘Oh no, he’s a Delaye bird.’

  ‘Um . . . well, go on.’

  ‘Have you ever heard The Running Song they sing at Rohan?’

  ‘No, but I’ve heard of it through your mother. She’s very keen on Rohan, isn’t she? So am I, though I’m ashamed to say that she started me off. She loves that song, and also hates it and says it’s horrible.’

  ‘Yes, it’s all that, and there again I can’t feel as she does about it. It seems — oh, I can’t explain — to have something personal to me in it, as though there were something about it I knew of and can’t remember.’

  ‘How does it go?’

  ‘I can only remember odd lines:

  One body for a noble . . .

  Bodies are cheap, . . .

  and

  or make south?

  Is there blood on your mouth? . . .

  Mother thinks it’s a hunting song. I felt it wasn’t when she first sang bits of it in the garden. It upset me. And then, just as mother was being worried, about me, you know, Sue ran up to us. She had no coat though it was cold. She said she’d heard me calling out to her. I hadn’t.’

  ‘Just a second: you mean you thought, then, that Sue sensed you were distressed, and came?’

  ‘Yes. I never said anything, of course.’

  ‘And did you feel you suddenly needed her?’

  ‘I wasn’t aware of it.’

  ‘Unconscious telepathy . . . well, that usually means the existence of some bond. Let’s assume your bond’s the peacock. What happened next?’

  ‘Oh, we went into the kitchen, we were both cold . . . then when war broke out Sue was anxious about the peacock and made him a shelter in the temple. She took things from all over the place. I let her. I only told her I must see them first.’

  ‘Take your time.’

  ‘Thanks . . . One of the things she brought was an old shirt, it had faint stains on it, like ironmould, or the colour old linen goes, only it wasn’t that.’

  ‘How d’you know?’

  ‘I don’t think I did know for certain, at the time. I didn’t want to know.’

  ‘But you’re certain now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you think the stains are — ’

  ‘Blood. Mr. Winchcombe, when father was showing you over the house, did you see the accounts books in the cellars?’

  ‘Yes. Thomas Peacock is among the expenses items, a running footman.’

  ‘Yes. Did father, when he showed you that top room, ever say why he thought Peacock was allowed up there?’

  ‘He said, as far as I can remember, that he didn’t really know but supposed the man was bundled up there to be out of the way. Curiously enough, that explanation never satisfied me.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because of the sensations I myself experienced in that room. They weren’t compatible with callousness, I see that now . . . Anything more?’

  She thought, and hesitated, and picked at the ball-fringe of the tablecloth. ‘Stop fidgeting,’ levelly observed Basil Winchcombe. The deliberate rudeness steadied her. ‘Yesterday, I was up in that room, I thought I might find out something. I don’t know if you will think I did or not. It was jammed in a cupboard. A stave that running footmen carried.’

  ‘Ah . . .’

  ‘It had the metal cap for the hardboiled egg — ’ her voice dwindled until his straining ears could barely catch the words, ‘ — that the peacock wouldn’t eat.’

  He waited with a supreme effort. ‘Something made me go to the window and see if the tip fitted the writing. It did. It was written with that stave.’

  ‘By Thomas Peacock. Well . . . I don’t say I wasn’t rather expecting something of the sort.’

  ‘Then you see what I’m getting at?’

  He seized the opening unsparingly. ‘What are you trying to say, Angela?’

  ‘That the peacock is the running footman. He’s come back, you see.’

  2

  She was waiting in a pitiable anxiety, relaxed as he remarked, ‘You know, I do admire you, that couldn’t have been easy to say. Well, I can accept it, too.’

  ‘It is possible, then?’

  ‘Who are we to say what is or isn’t possible if we limit everything by our own piffling little experience? That’s being smug. And impudent. After all, most of us have got round to the idea of transmigration of souls and of reincarnation, even if we can’t personally believe either of ’em.’

  ‘It seems to point to that,’ she agreed. ‘The peacock wants revenge for what our family made him suffer in serving us. That shirt . . . I’m convinced it was the footman’s and The Running Song was his — not his alone, of course, but about any running servant of those days. Mr. Winchcombe, would he be buried in this churchyard?’

  ‘Possibly, but — a pauper’s grave, you know. No headstone.’

  ‘The poor thing . . . and not even at rest.’

  He answered, ‘Perhaps one day we may find some means of assuring it to him. Evidently this chap is earthbound, half through hate and half by his affection.’

  Angela looked absently about the parlour. ‘What I can’t make out is, does Sue guess?’

  ‘I very much doubt that; not enough education and general reading. Sue is behaving entirely instinctively.’

  ‘How, instinctively?’

  ‘Dear Angela, what a singularly unsatisfactory playwright you would make! Have you never contemplated that curse of the drama and literature, “the love interest?” Here you are, working yourself up, worrying yourself thin over the finale and scamping Act One entirely.’

  ‘You mean Sue Privett and the peacock?’

  ‘I mean, my dear, Polly Privett and Thomas Peacock.’

  3

  He leant elbows on table. ‘This Polly Privett got the sack. Suddenly. In the year Thomas Peacock died. Is it straining coincidence too far to assume a connection between those happenings? Oh, of course he may have pinched things, or she for him, and God knows one wouldn’t blame either of ’em. They’d be a bit thrown together, I imagine: kitchenmaid and running footman, the humblest members of the domestic staff. Or they may have been in love, or Polly found to be “in trouble” as the charming phrase goes in describing the results of a natural instinct that the prayer-book says in black and white is “implanted in us”. That’s point one.

  ‘Point two is Sue’s unaccountable predilection for the peacock’s society and his even more unaccountable liking for hers. Here, I rather think, we’re seeing a working case of inherited memory (Privetts at Delaye for two hundred years in an unbroken line, remember). I think it likely that as bird and as kitchenmaid in this year of grace 1939 they don’t consciously know anything about each other, but their mutual subjective memories of a shared past won’t let them escape.’

  ‘But if that’s so, why didn’t it happen to any one of the Privetts after Polly? Why Sue?’

  ‘Why does red hair skip whole generations and then crop up again in families, to cite a purely physical instance? Why this gap occurr
ed is a thing that we shall never know. I have a friend, a novelist, who has a theory that nothing is ever lost; that in time, every event and scene and set of persons come together again as the pieces of a kaleidoscope fall into the same pattern, and re-enact their particular set of words, movements and so on in the same sequence. I can’t say I can quite swallow that, but I do believe that memory can be handed down in the way in which Sue Privett in her degree is carrying on for Polly. Perhaps you’ve got a place in this as well. Your mother tells me you’re very like the portrait of Marguerite Roundelay, and a bodily resemblance could carry with it some psychic traits, though that’s not to be counted on. It’s more some things you’ve said that make me think it not unlikely. Now, can’t you put the whole business out of your mind?’

  ‘I can’t do that, but I do thank you.’

  He grinned guiltily. ‘I can’t either, to be quite candid! But the difference between us is that I’m interested and you’re obsessed. That’s a mistake. There’s prayer, don’t forget. I’m afraid I’m talking like a clergyman, but you know what I mean. Now, if anything else should happen let me know. I appreciate your having told me more than I can say.’

  ‘I will. I’ll go now.’

  ‘We have now lost our reputations in the village’ — Basil Winchcombe glanced at his wristwatch — ‘for exactly one hour and four minutes; that being the case why not stay to tea?’

  CHAPTER XXII

  1

  CERTAINLY at Delaye just now it was a matter of all hands to the pump. The helpfulness of Miss Sapphy was only to be equalled in labour-making futility by the uselessness of Miss Amy and the patient dejection of Miss Jessie who was now, thanks to war conditions, unable to get in to the village to attend Evensong at 3.30 p.m., and so finding her lifetime of occupation between tea-time and dinner wiped out indefinitely at one blow, a seemingly trivial deprivation which thousands of other insufficiently occupied women all over England were to overcome in ways strange and unforeseen. Some discovered unsuspected talents, books, cards, their kitchens and even their families, while others discovered that politics actually had a bearing upon their shopping, or entered the world for the first time in all their sheltered years. But Miss Jessie had the strength of ten because her heart was pure and successfully resisted any innovation or substitute for the known and trodden way, and it was, Evelyn Roundelay learned, impossible to pack all three sisters off to the Cloudesleys even if they’d go and one could speed them plausibly, because the Cloudesleys had evacuees who were deriving much stomach upset from the change of air and biliousness from unaccustomed food.

  It was Emerald Cloudesley (née Roundelay) who died suddenly in the following January of 1940 of nervous exhaustion and worry when about to celebrate her eighty-second birthday. Of this circumstance, those London newspapers The Daily Wire and The Daily Cable secured stories woven about the venerable dowager which, beginning as ‘human’, ended in a fracas that nearly resulted in a libel action. The Wire contended stoutly that the thirty billeted children were favourites of the entire household of Cloudesley Hall — with a posed photograph of the most tractable cases who were hustled into the dining-room where a reporter, deputizing for the stricken butler, was smilingly photographed handing one of them a silver salver on which he had laid his note-book that would with luck come out like sandwiches in the print — and for the rest fell back upon the age of the defunct as explanation of her tactless action. No more, wrote the reporter who was later to be fined ten pounds himself for refusing to billet a mother and two children on his wife in the throes of her first confinement in a one-servant villa on the Bakerloo line, would Mrs. Cloudesley’s ears be cheered by the sound of childish laughter about the great house, nor her days be enlivened by their quaint, cockney confidences and the small tight posies that they picked for her. The feature article concluded with two quaint cockney confidences that the reporter composed in the train, though his ears still chimed with the infant comments of the thirty, most of which appeared to consist of adjectives beginning with F.B. and S.

  The Daily Cable, on the other hand, enjoyed itself thoroughly, pointing out that the end of Mrs. Cloudesley, who on the testimony of her son and of her butler had hitherto enjoyed perfect health, had been hastened and brought about by the arrival of the evacuated, upon which, as was only to be expected, the noise, upset and domestic dissatisfaction had caused her system to succumb. And the paragraph was illustrated by two photographs depicting a broken window and a dresser of smashed Crown Derby, half of which the staff, catching the idea, enthusiastically exhumed from sundry cupboards where it had lain for up to ten years.

  After that the fat was comfortably in the fire, with Wire chiding Cable for fomenting trivial discomforts at this grave time and Cable advising Wire to check up more conscientiously on its facts in future and to cease to attempt the whitewashing of an unworkable and undesirable scheme that had been foisted, half-baked, upon a helpless public at a time of already sufficient nervewrack, grief, anxiety and gravity. And The Cable viewed with disquiet the increasingly Socialistic tone of The Wire, which in its turn challenged The Cable to come forward in the interests of its readers with its reason for its consistent policy of opposition to the safeguarding of Our Future Citizens.

  Which circumstance closed a valuable and familiar door to Evelyn Roundelay, daughter-in-law of the deceased, on behalf of Angela who was, her mother thought, looking extraordinarily worn and frail as she sewed reams of black-out curtains, while Margaret, Edmund and even Maxwell seemed to live in the carpenter’s shop constructing shutters for the top-lights in which Delaye was so plenteously found.

  The dimming of Nursie’s room remained together with its occupant a well-nigh insoluble problem, though Mrs. Hatchett did by no means badly in criticizing the régime of candles which had set in in her own bedroom, while aunt Sapphy’s war effort consisted of blocking the bathroom to all comers at unexpected times of day to save electric light, though the required valance had already been supplied to that part of the window containing the vent of the geyser. Lady Roundelay more than suspected at least one of her maids of a desire to obtain factory work in Norminster on the principle, parentally handed down, that where there was war there was big money, and oblivious that one factory was turning off hands already owing to shortage of raw materials and that the other had closed altogether, while the second housemaid might have to leave any day to ‘mind’ a horde of young brothers and sisters who, displaced at school by the evacuees, were now on half-time education and under their distracted mother’s feet for the entire morning. Even Sue had recently joined the procession by intermittent flittings over to Rohan to tend her ailing grandmother. Musgrave alone remained a rock of ages and was invaluable at reproving-parties over the matter of forgotten switches when the house was shut up for the night; but Lady Roundelay, mounting the staircase to her bed, was sometimes moved to ejaculate ‘I’d swap the day I’ve had for an old saucepan with a hole in the bottom’, before halting to adore the effect of moonlight on foliated balustrade.

  2

  Basil Winchcombe walked over to Rohan to see the grandmother of Sue Privett. His liking for and interest in the hamlet had grown into a self-supporting pleasure, and now he was interested in the old woman on Lady Roundelay’s kitchenmaid’s account as well.

  Besides, he had an idea . . .

  He hoped that the ancient Mrs. Privett might live to help Angela, though Doctor Elmslie had passed him the word that she could not hold out much longer. The autumnal mists usually took toll of Rohan folk.

  There was if not a chance a distinct possibility that Sue’s grandmother might throw some light upon the clouded record of Polly Privett. Winchcombe calculated as he walked. Polly had been dismissed less than a hundred and fifty years ago; it sounded a long time when expressed in terms of date, but was actually only the lifetime of two men and not notable ancients, at that. Curious . . . yet the French Revolution epoch was in point of thought well-nigh as remote as that of the Tudors. It was all to
o far back for the old woman’s memory but not remote in terms of possible souvenir . . . the highest and the lowest preserved their relics, it was the classes in between that destroyed them. And the old were hoarders, like that poor dear awful old nurse at Delaye whose room was a brainless museum.

  Angela must have considered Rohan as a possible source of information, but unfortunately that song had made her sheer right off the place, her mother had conveyed, and of course, Winchcombe himself had early sensed, the Rohanites were not to be lightly undertaken by the sensitive. Impersonality alone could survive in your approaches: you must—like Lady Roundelay — think these people but never if possible feel them. Knowing that, you were free to appreciate the drama of their being, the essential good theatre that was their self-sufficiency and alien thought, customs and turns of speech. As to the matter of Polly Privett as a bedside topic for a dying woman, it only remained to hope that the old lady would take to it kindly and not elect to close down on him in the Rohan manner.

  As he passed the farrier’s, Ronsell, apparently oblivious of the fact that he was a singer, was behaving exactly like a farrier; he inclined his head to the Reverend Basil Winchcombe in a motion that was something less than a leisured bow yet considerably more than a nod. There was, the clergyman observed, a lantern in the window of the vast barn that meant an impending Harvest-Festal ‘brannel’, and Winchcombe petulantly wished for the fiftieth time that he might be of the chosen gathering. He could dance as well as any of ’em, better, through having shaken a period leg in so many carefully documented Shakespearean productions. Dammit, hadn’t they all nearly passed out at His Majesty’s over the rehearsals of that Cushion Dance that Queen Elizabeth had been reported to dance ‘high and disposedly’? But far be it from him to take the floor in the role of thin end of the wedge. Let Rohan keep its secrets.