by Barbara Vine
This time, though, I was to remain for many months. Air attacks on London began that September and three months later, in one single night, there were 1,725 fires in the city. My father came down and saw the headmistress and got me into the school Eden had been to. By then I had made a friend in the village, a girl who also went there, so I was happy to have Anne to travel back and forth with and happy, as people of that age are, to conform. Meanwhile it was holiday time and Eden was waiting at Laurel Cottage. ‘Getting the tea’, Vera said. That morning, in my honour, she had made a sponge as only Eden could make it, beating the eggs for no less than ten minutes.
At Laurel Cottage, too, though I had forgotten about this, was Francis.
Until Jamie came along, he was my only cousin, my mother's sister and brother both being childless. As small children we had sometimes met, played together no doubt, perhaps got on, I don't remember. He was about a year older than I. Of his presence in the house Vera being Vera of course said nothing, no doubt expecting me to know he would be there, as perhaps I should have done. After all, it was school holidays for him as well as me and where else would he be but at home? A good many other places, I was later to learn, but that was later too.
It is not hard to remember but it is hard to re-feel the sensations I Lad when I walked into the house and there was Francis in the living-room with Eden. A sinking of the heart, something not far from panic, an idea that now all would be spoiled. Why? Why did I mind so much? Why was I so certain in those first few seconds that he and I would dislike each other and, worse than that, that he would somehow always make me feel awkward, inept and stupid? In those first seconds, too, I was afraid of him, in a defensive way, drawing all my soft parts in under my shell.
Vera's perfect manners did not extend to re-introducing us to each other. Nor did Eden's. And perhaps I was ridiculous to expect anything. We were cousins, we were family – what kind of paranoid little prig was I that I wanted to be told things about him and him to be told things about me, for something we might have in common to be found, and for Vera or Eden, by means of a sympathy for others they conspicuously lacked, start us communicating? Instead I stood there silently, wondering – of all absurd speculations – where I was going to sleep. I knew I wasn't going to be able to bring myself to ask.
He was a handsome boy. If you want to know what he looked like, then get hold of some numbers of the old Boys' Own Paper or a late-nineteenth-century novel for boys with illustrations. Francis looked like the prototype of the young hero, the clean-limbed young Englishman, captain of the first eleven, head prefect, later on rugger Blue, kind to fags and a stern putter-down of injustices, of blue blood but modest about it, in American parlance, the perfect WASP, a youthful Sir Henry Curtis. Nowadays we would say he most resembled the actor Anthony Andrews. He was blond, his features chiselled, the jawline cloven out of teak with a sharp knife, his eyes a piercing blue, the lips not narrow but generously full. Apart from all this, he looked a lot like Eden. In appearance they were nearer to twins than my father and Vera, for Francis at thirteen was already taller than Eden.
We all sat down to tea, Vera embarking at once on praise of the large circular cake, its top scattered all over with someone's whole week's sugar ration. Eden giggled. Though a year older, she seemed less grown-up, less dignified. I could see, too, that others were not inevitably excluded from the charmed circle of two composed of her and Vera. And yet – no, I am wrong there. Now it was Eden and Francis who were a pair and Eden and Vera, but they were never a trio. Francis's behaviour to his mother I will go into later, though even at that first meeting, in those initial hours it shocked and intrigued me. He and Eden together were strange. They mystified and in a way alarmed me. I didn't know why, I was too young. The glances they exchanged, Eden's way of giggling at what he said, the whispering that brought reproaches from Vera to him if not to her, the apparent intense pleasure they took in each other's company until Eden seemed to recollect herself and become once more Vera's partisan – all this was outside my understanding. It threatened me (as the psychotherapists say) in that corner of my being that yearned, and still yearns, to belong. It seemed to set before me a standard of grown-up conduct to which I could never, I was sure, aspire. Years were to pass before I could analyse and solve the mystery. It was that they behaved like secret lovers.
But that evening I was at sea, drifting in an open boat on the deepest and least charted Longley waters. Conversation at tea was devoted to Eden's new job but since everyone expected me to know what I knew nothing of, the nature of the job, the means by which she had got it, the name of her employer, her starting date and so on, I couldn't join in. Without much success I decided to listen and gather what I could. Eden, now school was behind her, wore heavy make-up, one of those tinted liquid foundations that had not long come on to the market – or under the counter to be begged and queued for – bright scarlet lipstick, gingery brown pencil on her plucked eyebrows and a daring streak of blue shadow on her eyelids. Her hairstyle was elaborate, a construction in which the metal grips were visible, which was no drawback to chic in 1940.
The question of whether I should still be sent to bed at eight o'clock was one that I had been anxious about. Francis's presence, though in so many ways upsetting, eased my mind a little. They could hardly send me to bed and let him stay up, and somehow the two of us being sent to bed in the same ignominious fashion would be preferable to my isolated banishment. But soon after tea Francis disappeared.
I dried dishes. Vera and Eden continued to talk about Eden's job which I had by then gathered was something in a solicitor's office, answering the telephone and telling clients where to wait, and she had got it through General Chatteriss, who had been at school with the senior partner. I was relieved to have learned so much without asking. It meant that when the subject came up I should not have to show my ignorance and be castigated for it.
Francis, of course, was not expected to wash or dry dishes or make his bed or do anything around the house. We returned to the living-room and I expected him to be where we had left him, lying in an armchair reading Gone with the Wind. Vera reacted violently (today we should say over-reacted) to his absence. Her face grew red. She stopped in the doorway and said loudly to Eden:
‘He's doing it again, you see!’
‘Darling, it's only ten to seven.’ Eden, I had noticed, was coming to call Vera ‘darling’ more and more often.
‘He takes advantage of our being out of the way.’
This interchange mystified me. Francis was free, it was early. Why shouldn't he go out about the village somewhere if he wished? No one said any more about it for the time being. Vera and Eden were like Victorian ladies with their ‘work’. Their leisure they spent facing each other across a table or sitting in armchairs on either side of the fireplace, sewing or crocheting or doing embroidery. To their tasks they now settled, Eden rather an incongruous sight with her elaborate hairstyle and bright make-up occupied at such a Goody Two-Shoes pursuit as drawn-thread work on a handkerchief hem. But to me then everything she did was admirable and worthy of being copied and when she found me a crochet hook and ball of wool and set me to ‘making squares’ to be sewn together for blankets, I happily complied. Vera was embroidering a design for a firescreen, a lady in bonnet and crinoline with a basket over her arm. Crinoline ladies had been a very popular subject for this kind of art in the thirties and in Laurel Cottage they were all over the place on cushions and teacosies and nightdress cases.
I should have preferred to be out in the garden and the fields. But I feared to go in the light of what had been said of Francis's disappearance. Besides there was delicious pleasure in being at one with the grown-ups, performing a similar task to theirs and being helped by kind Eden who from time to time adjusted my clumsy hands, checked a tendency on my part to make uneven stitches and finally, when a square was complete, remarked:
‘That's really quite good for a beginner!’
Vera had laid her embroidery
aside to write a letter. Sneaking a look, I saw it was to her husband for it began ‘Dear Gerry’. Where he was stationed she didn't know – ‘somewhere in England’ was all she was told unless he could indicate the place by hints subtle enough to get past the censor. The time was coming up to eight and in defiance of it I began another square but I underrated Eden, who heard the church clock chimes begin one minute before the hands of the living-room clock reached eight. She tucked her needle into the linen, folded it, laid it on the arm of the chair, sharp scissors on top, perfectly aligned, stood up smiling at me.
‘Well, little niece, you're going to share my room so I'd better show you where you're to sleep.’
I followed her to the door, disappointed, but with compensation for my disappointment in that I should be sleeping in her room. Vera, however, suddenly jumped up, pushed past us and ran up the stairs. I heard her running from room to room, banging doors. Eden hesitated. She didn't look at me. Then she opened the door and we stood at the foot of the stairs. Vera came running down them, her face flushed, that look about her eyes and mouth of anger boiling up.
‘He's not in the house! I told you, he's doing it again.’
She threw open the front door, ran down to the gate which she hung over, calling ‘Francis, Francis!’ to the left, and then ‘Francis, Francis!’ to the right.
We started up towards Eden's room. Vera's voice could be heard, calling Francis's name, first in the front, then in the back. His bedroom door was shut and Eden opened it to look inside but of course he wasn't in there. I didn't ask and she didn't explain. Her own room was extremely neat and tidy with lace mats for her hairbrush and various pots and jars to stand on, the predominating colour pink, the pictures on the walls including a coloured photograph of the statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. The beds were not side by side but placed at angles to each other and as far apart as the size of the room allowed. There was, I saw to my great relief, no clock.
My suitcase was already there waiting for me to unpack it. I was to hang my things in a certain allotted area of the wardrobe, Eden explained, and I could have the second drawer down in the chest.
Vera's feet pounded up the stairs. She threw open the door. Children are embarrassed by signs of strong emotion in adults and Vera was showing strong emotion at that moment, her face bright red with tears lying on it, her mouth working, her body screwed up spring-like, her hands held up in clenched fists. Eden went up to her, laid a hand on her arm.
‘Why get yourself in such a state, darling?’
‘He does it on purpose!’
‘Well, of course he does. You should take no notice.’ Eden remembered me, waiting awkwardly, wondering what had happened, what could have happened to bring about such intense, furious, hysterical misery.
‘Good-night, Faith dear. I won't disturb you when I come up. I'll get undressed in the dark.’
She closed the door, shutting me on one side of it, herself and Vera and Vera's mysterious agony on the other. I wondered, as I unpacked, if she thought Francis had run away or even been kidnapped. Would the police be called? Was I in on the first scene of some dreadful family tragedy? I went out to the bathroom and saw his door wide open, the bed turned down – Vera turned everyone's bed down after tea, taking off and folding the counterpanes – the room empty. On the mantelpiece the noisy clock was ticking away. Downstairs Vera was crying. I lay in bed, bewildered by the mystery, certain that the house would soon be invaded by policemen, neighbours, searchers. Someone crept up the stairs and I was sure it was Eden coming so I feigned sleep. But Eden didn't come for another half-hour and when she did and Vera with her, the noise they made would have awakened me anyway.
‘He's there! Look at him. And the door wide open. He must have crept in behind our backs. I should like to kill him.’
‘Darling, you shouldn't distress yourself.’
‘Why does he do it? Why? What does he get out of it?’
Curiosity got the better of me. I got out of bed and opened the door and stood there. Vera didn't see me for a moment. Francis's door was still wide open, the clock ticking away with a metallic reverberation enough to keep awake the soundest sleeper, but it hadn't kept Francis awake. He lay sleeping, half uncovered, his breathing heavy, regular and deep.
‘I could kill him,’ Vera said again.
‘The more wrought up you get, the more he's going to do it.’
Vera saw me.
‘Now what are you doing out of bed?’
I said I wanted a glass of water.
‘You get it for her, will you, Eden?’
‘I can get it myself.’
‘Yes, and leave the tap running. I don't know where you get this business of wanting water at night from. Your father and I and Eden never had that as children. I don't know why you were allowed to get into the way of it.’
She was venting on me the anger his sleeping prevented her venting on Francis, though I did not, of course, know this. Nor did I then know, though I was soon to find out, that this behaviour of Francis's was a nightly occurrence, part of the cruel and calculated mother-tease he embarked on at the start of his holidays. This particular feature of it consisted in his disappearing each evening at seven – originally probably to avoid the ignominy of being sent to bed – hiding within earshot of the loud rage and misery Vera was unable to control or inhibit when he couldn't be found and then, once she had begun sobbing in Eden's arms, creeping up the stairs to bed and leaving his door open to display himself as if to say, ‘Look, here I am. What's all the fuss about?’ Vera never became accustomed to it, never took Eden's advice and ignored it. Each evening the same hysterical scene took place, terminating in the two of them standing on the threshold of Francis's room, looking in on him with wonder like courtiers at the couchée of some king of France.
Why did he do it? What made him enjoy so much the sight and sound of Vera's impotent anger? For this was only one of many provocations, among them his obeying of her dictum about eating with one's left hand and drinking with one's right to the extent of holding knife and fork both in his left hand. Then there were his red days and his yellow days, times when he would consent to eat only red food at the three meals or only yellow food, in the latter case subjecting items such as lemon-curd tarts, saffron cake, a hardboiled egg, to the careful analysis needed to establish whether they were yellow enough. Far too subtle and original to resort to conventional practical jokes of the salt-in-the-sugar-basin or apple-pie-bed kind, he preferred the bizarre, knowing only too well how especially this affronted Vera. One hot August day, he turned all the blue flowers in the garden green by carefully bending their heads over and dipping them in a jar with half an inch of ammonia in the bottom of it. The Daily Telegraph would arrive in the morning with the crossword puzzle clues still there but the frame cut out. Vera complained to the paper shop and involved herself in exchanges of abuse with the paper boy for weeks on end before she found out Francis was responsible. Francis would go to incredible lengths to carry out his teases and thought nothing of getting up at six to catch the newspaper and cut out the puzzle the moment it slipped through the door.
Eden asked him why he did it. I was in the room with them but for a while I think they had forgotten my presence. Vera had just run upstairs, weeping. It was one of Francis's white days. Food shortages were making themselves felt by then and there was a general consensus of opinion that it was unpatriotic not to eat up everything on one's plate. Francis had been able to eat his cauliflower and the white meat of chicken but there had been brown gravy on the potatoes which he had insisted on washing off under the tap. Vera – incredibly – went along with him in this food colours stuff to ensure that he ate, presumably, for she thought him too thin, and quite gravely produced this insipid meal with rice pudding to follow. Her compliance was not what Francis wanted. After the first spoonful of rice, he clapped his hand to his forehead like someone who has remembered too late a certain important injunction.
‘Is it Tuesday?’
‘Of course it's Tuesday,’ Vera said.
‘Then it should have been a green day. What a fool I am! It may not be too late to undo the evil, it may be that no harm is done. Quick – have we a tin of gooseberries in the house? An apple, only it must be a green one. A cucumber, even?’
Vera threw down her napkin and rushed upstairs. Francis laughed. With a sideways glance at him, neutral, not willing to commit herself, Eden said:
‘You are awful. Why are you so awful?’
I had never before seen anyone eat a cucumber like a banana. He peeled it like a banana, though necessarily using the knife.
‘When we lived in India,’ he said, ‘I had a nurse, an ayah, called Mumtaz.’
‘You've told me about her before.’
‘OK, so I've told you about her before. You said she had a funny name. It was only the name of the woman they built the Taj Mahal for. But I suppose that doesn't mean anything to you.’
‘Don't be horrible, Francis,’ said Eden.
‘I don't think I will tell you. She died, anyway. She got something awful, typhus, and she died.’
‘You had your mother,’ Eden said. ‘Not like me. My mother died when I was thirteen.’
‘And you had my mother. The point is, I didn't. And I wasn't thirteen, I was seven. She sent me to school the minute she could, she got rid of me the moment she could. Nice, wasn't it? I was to go to school because they were in India, but she wasn't in India for long, she was here. And you were here. So she chose you and sent me away to school.’
Eden suddenly became very grown-up and lofty. She gave me a bright smile. ‘Faith will get a really awful impression from what you've been saying, you know. Of course you don't mean it. I hope you know he doesn't mean it, Faith.’
I was a silent child, at that time without social grace, given to nods and shakes of the head. I nodded, which was about as ambiguous as you could get.