Cold Pastoral

by Margaret Duley

  “Yes, mymother was a cook, a very good cook. Now she cooks and does all the work besides.”

  “Well, my mother wouldn’t let me invite you to my house.”

  “No,” said Mary Immaculate gently; “Lady Fitz Henry wouldn’t let me go. She wants me to have nice things in my life.”

  “Ha, ha, ha, Betty, serves you right, you deserved it.”

  A tall, ungainly girl with horn-rimmed glasses rushed at Mary Immaculate and threw her arms round her neck. Her voice held the feel of a slobber.

  “I think you’re lovely. Look at her hair and eyes, girls. I’m going to walk home with her.”

  Are you, now? thought Mary Immaculate. The girl’s hair smelt dry, like a pony’s mane. Extricating herself, she replied, “Thank you very much, but for a few days my adopted brother is calling for me.”

  A bell put a stop to her considerable attention. She had tried to keep her voice within the bounds of courtesy, but she was savouring all the feelings the mater had warned her against. She felt she understood murder.

  When she found Philip’s car waiting she sped towards him on eager feet. The faint hospital smell that clung to him on operating days returned her to the breath of her adopted world. Settled in the seat beside him, she watched him steer through a congested school area. But the founts of volubility were stilled inside her. A sidelong glance at her face made him question, “What is it, Mary? Have you had a difficult morning?”

  His voice invited her to ease her mind. There was no stifling like his tone to the Little People. Very slowly she told him about her experiences. She was oppressed with the criticism of herself and her mother. As if her troubles were his, Philip’s nostrils responded mutely to her tale.

  “Dreadful little snobberies, Mary. Don’t take your standards from that wretched little girl. Think of Mater! I’m delighted you acknowledged your mother so strongly. As for your voice, it’s improving every day. Keep your chin up, my dear, and if I’m no good to you, Mater will be.”

  The child gave a released wriggle. It was one of the moments when Philip was a god.

  “So kind, Philip,” she whispered.

  That morning having repudiated a physical touch she rubbed her face against his arm.

  Philip stopped his car and bought her a box of chocolates.

  The strain lessened; she was busy following a crowded routine. School and extras over she had to return to the Place to practise five-finger exercises. Loitering on the way was strictly forbidden. From five to six she was allowed to do as she liked in the garden. Often Lady Fitz Henry joined her and they poked in the earth together.

  In spite of Josephine being a cook there were invitations to tea and small maidenly parties. The mater dealt with them all. Many times Mary Immaculate heard her graciously discouraging voice on the telephone.

  “Very kind of you, but at present we think it advisable…”

  “She’s very occupied with as much as she can manage…”

  “Perhaps at a later date, if you would be kind enough to repeat the invitation…”

  Spring progressed, drawing the harshness from the land. Daffodils trod down crocus, Darwin tulips waved tight secret heads, trees in new bloom veiled the faded fronts of wooden houses and, where open country flowed back from the town, meadows made jade squares in sombre green. A winding river, full from snow, rushed through a lake on its way to the sea.

  Winter-born children sped to the country trailing home with hardy blooms. Several times as Mary Immaculate turned into the Place she looked wistfully at the loitering children. Invariably she could identify the flowers in their hands. Where were her own woods, blue ponds and lily-pools, and wet meadows hoarding many secrets? Where were the marsh-marigolds and pale cuckoo-flowers blooming by themselves with no one to see?

  Scales, lessons, voice, dancing, elocution; and reminders of her hair, nails, manners and mien! She ached to walk with her eyes on the ground and part the alders on a quiet pond.

  She forgot her scales for the river in her ears. From its sound it must have a series of short waterfalls and still stretches lazy over stones.

  Neither premeditation nor disobedience made her go! It was an instinct of necessity. Heedlessly she dropped her schoolbooks in the shrub sacred to Lilas’ beret and ran toward open country.

  The western sun was dying in an orange dapple when she strolled up the avenue. All over her was the sleekness of some fulfilment. Her ears held the sounds of birds settling down, children shrilling the last shout of the day and woods and trees singing with sap. Her arms held a cluster of pale mauve flowers and her brown hat dangled from her hand.

  Philip stood at the wide-open door looking as if he had been there a long time. His figure held no peace and his eyes fired like hot coals.

  “Where have you been?”

  She should have been extinguished by his voice, falling like a frost on new flowers. A long hand on her shoulders seemed to dig into her bones. For a moment she blinked at him without focus.

  “Come in at once!”

  The pressure of his hand urged her along. Inside she saw the mater seated quietly by the open fireplace. Furnace heat was gone, but the grate held a pile of crackling birch-billets. Bowls of spring flowers stood on tables and stands round the hall. Raising her eyes from her knitting, the mater regarded the child without anger.

  “Mary dear—”

  “Mater, if you please, let me attend to this.”

  Wonderingly the child gazed at Philip. Here was anger, cold, hard, with an undercurrent of heat. Contained on the surface, it held the undertow of the sea. In the Cove angry people shouted and bawled at the top of their voices. Philip seemed to be shouting in his nose, dilating like a disturbed animal.

  “Answer me, Mary, where have you been?”

  “Just in the country, Philip,” she said mildly.

  The simplicity of her explanation fanned his anger.

  “What do you mean, just in the country? It’s seven o’clock and you left school at three-thirty. Isn’t it a definite rule that you come right home? Whom were you with?”

  “I was alone, Philip, picking flowers and running by the river.”

  Her crime might have been mitigated if she had gone off with her school-friends. The pressure grew on her shoulder.

  “Mary, it’s most unnatural to go off on long tramps at your age. Isn’t one lesson enough for you? Remember the last experience that nearly killed you. Think of—of…”

  He became inarticulate with doubts he could not formulate.

  Her light laugh annoyed him further.

  “Sure, Philip, the Little People are afraid of the town and, if I got lost now, the woods are beautiful with spring.”

  It was the peak of wrong remarks.

  “Be quiet!” he snapped. “I’ve no intention of permitting a repetition of that. You’ve been disobedient and Mater has been extremely worried.’’

  The child glanced at Lady Fitz Henry. In the black and white of her tranquillity she looked as if anger could not touch her. Philip was giving the wrong reason for his anger.

  Then she saw Hannah peering from the dining-room and making a great show of arranging silver on the sideboard. She was nodding her head in applause to Philip. As his voice went on the folds of her face deepened to sardonic approval.

  “Mary, go to bed at once and Hannah will bring you bread and milk. Also you will remember conclusively and irrevocably that you will conform to the life we plan for you. I won’t have any furtiveness or sudden impulses to run away and leave us at the mercy of fantastic thoughts.”

  Furtiveness! The child hated the word, although unsure of its meaning. Convinced that her happiness had been insulted she answered with smooth insolence, “‘Fantastic’, Philip! You told me your thoughts were directive.”

  “Go to bed!”

  Releasing her, the energy of his voice propelled her towards the stairs. For a moment she paused and looked at her great cluster of flowers. Lady Fitz Henry rose from her chair.

&nb
sp; “Give them to me, Mary. You must do as Philip says, but I’ll attend to your flowers. They’re very pretty.”

  “They’re no good now,” she said, shaking her head. With a stately back she walked upstairs, with the feel of Philip’s frown boring her spine.

  In a childish night-dress gathered at the neck, she lay in bed.

  Arriving with bread andmilk, Hannah dumped it on a bedside table.

  “There,” she said with genuine malice, “you’ve discovered that you can’t be a fly-by-night in this house. If I had my way you’d get the flat of the slipper.”

  Mary Immaculate reached for a book and opened it upside down.

  “Please leave me, Hannah,” she said with great aloofness. “I have a quiet hour to myself.”

  From the bottom of the bed the old woman gave an outraged snort.

  “The airs and graces of you! I’d like to make it my job to find out what you were doing. Picking flowers all that time? More likely running wild with some of your own kind.”

  For a moment the child felt soiled, but she gave no sign and the woman had to go. Hannah hated her and none of them saw. She sighed and sipped her milk. Philip was angry with her for her vagabond hour. It had been such happiness, such an escape from conformity. Philip loved her when she was amenable and swung to anger when she did something by herself. Philip who was so kind, who took her to the cinema, called for her at school, bought her chocolates even though he said it was bad for her teeth. Philip who had taken her to the dentist’s that week and stayed until she got used to the sharp picks and whirring machine making a noise in her head.

  How beautiful it was in her room now! Quiet and washed by the setting sun. The three bronze girls on the mantelpiece looked as if they had run lighter-footed for the mildness of the day. Putting the tray aside she reached for the book. The mater had been telling her about India and had given her a copy of the child-stories of Kipling. Settling into her pillow she luxuriated in quiet.

  When Lady Fitz Henry entered two hours later she was gazing unseeingly ahead.

  “Mater,” she sighed, “I’ve just read such a lovely story, The Drums of the Fore and Aft. When the regiment fell back two little boys Jakin and Lew walked out in the open and piped it on with fife and drum. Then they were shot.”

  “I know it well, Mary,” said Lady Fitz Henry, seating herself with a slight smile. “We’ll talk of it when we havemore time. In a moment you must go to sleep. I presume, my dear, you did your homework before you ran off. I should imagine it would be extremely uncomfortable to go to school unprepared.’’

  Mary Immaculate fell back to cold reality and a preversion of what the next day would be. That awful Betty Wilson with her cool derisive voice! She was still in the position when she wished to remain as unobtrusive as possible. Looking into the mater’s eyes she knew she was being shown the results of indulgence.

  “Mater,” she sighed woefully, “you say everything without saying anything.”

  “It’s unfortunate, isn’t it,” she said pleasantly, “the natural results of a lack of discipline? What made you run off, Mary? I think I know, but tell me yourself.”

  She sighed on her pillow and a little shake of her head made the light dance through her hair.

  “Mater, I’m sorry if I upset you but I just had to go. I haven’t been by myself since I left the Cove. I love to be with you, but I was used to spending whole days alone and playing a sort of make-believe. Then I saw the children coming back from the hills with the flowers I used to pick and I got tired of that time-table pinned to the wall. Think of days going on in the country and days in town sliced up into squares.”

  Lady Fitz Henry nodded her head.

  “I expect you’ve been much better than we imagine, dear. Now go to sleep and try to forget that Philip was cross.”

  The child showed no signs of having remembered.

  “Yes, he was cross, Mater. Philip is always mad if I like things he doesn’t like.”

  There was so much adult in the child; a natural maturity from her strong bleak world. In spite of her complex mind, there were moments when she was the sternest realist; the side of her that wanted to say guts and belly. Although she had conformed to all the amenities of daily life, Lady Fitz Henry occasionally discerned a cold wonder for the perpetual need of convention. She could visualise her unshocked in situations that would shake many children.

  Downstairs she found her son holding a medical journal, in a library that had belonged to his father. Wall-space not packed with books was panelled in oak. She found him as she had found the child, gazing unseeingly ahead. Rising as his mother came in, he pulled forward a brown leather chair.

  “Philip, I found Mary reading The Drums of the Fore and Aft and enjoying every second of her punishment. I was so reminded of David. If he was sent to bed it was just what he wanted, because he was very tired. If he had bread and water there was nothing like a glass of nice cold water. Mary had forgotten why she was punished.”

  “I haven’t,” he said grimly. “I thought she might be worrying because I was so angry.”

  “Too angry, my son. I should suggest another attitude.”

  Reasonably she discussed the child with him, but his ideas of Mary Immaculate had no room for wayfaring on lonely country roads.

  There was no reconciliation between them. Perhaps he was glad to find her at breakfast, trying to learn out of two books.

  “Oh, Philip,” she said genially, “I had to find out how many pieces of paper it takes to paper a room, and I haven’t papered it at all, and that awful Betty Wilson will call me a bay-noddy.”

  His more sombre nature could not understand her light repudiation of yesterday. He felt relief for her normality and complete lack of rancour. In spite of himself he said as he sat down: “Couldn’t I do the sum for you, Mary? It wouldn’t take a minute.”

  “Oh no, Philip, thank you just the same. It’s too late to make a pen-and-ink copy in my book so I’ll just have to manage somehow.”

  Watching her long hands over her food at lunch, he had to inquire, “How did you get on with your paper-hanging, Mary?” She looked at him quickly and gave a smile verging towards a grin.

  “When they collected the books there was nothing from me, so I was invited to the desk to explain.”

  The smile left her face and she became serious.

  “Miss Good asked me why I had failed to do my homework, and I told her the truth.”

  Such candour was a shock to family reticence. His voice was reproachful.

  “Was that necessary, Mary? Surely we keep those things to ourselves.”

  “I had to explain, Philip. School-teachers want a real reason for things. I said I went for a long walk yesterday, several miles in fact, and when I got back my guardian, who is a doctor, said it was very bad for me and he made me go to bed with a glass of hot milk.”

  The truth, told with a wistful shading of the voice, suggested childish fraility.

  “Yes,” she said gently. “Miss Good was very sorry I had tired myself so completely, and she told me not to run round too much at recess. She said I looked white.”

  There was nothing to say. She had told the truth and the mater had warned her she must stand on her own feet. Mother and son felt some reproof should be forthcoming. In view of her bland innocence and enigmatical face it seemed impossible to find a chink through which to attack. White she certainly was, but white with the clearness of health.

  The mater was out for a walk and Mary Immaculate was playing scales. The window was open and soft air ballooned the curtains. It seemed impossible to concentrate on scales and see that her thumb went under her fingers. Twice she had heard a beguiling whistle, thin like a gimlet boring a sound.

  Between the mater’s flowers and a disused tennis-court stood a kitchen garden surrounded by a tall privet-hedge. Like a fruitful secret, vegetables grew inside, tended by a man who came three times a week. Age and impoverishment lay at the end of the garden. It had been velvet turf when
the drawing-room had been in constant use. Neglect had allowed it to revert to native coarseness, and grass was ousted by dandelions and flat-leaved plantains. Mary Immaculate loved it. It was a hide-out when she was allowed to be alone in the garden. Behind the old trees ran a high wooden fence, screening the Place from audacious eyes. When the trees were bare, houses could be seen on either side. They were dots compared to the big white house.

  Mary Immaculate went out in the garden. Treading the plantains and dandelions she raised her head to look for the whistle.

  Across the grass came a long, sweet note, expiring as if lips had suddenly opened. It came again, more shrill and compelling, stopping with staccato finish. Then a little jig dropped from a tree, light as a leaf, calling to her feet. Dancing over the plantains, the music left her on the tips of her toes. Silence came down, rich with the smell of earth and the soundless flight of a pair of white butterflies.

  “Hello!” said a voice from a beech tree.

  Mary Immaculate clasped her hands.

  “Hello!” said the voice again. “I drew you out from your rotten scales.”

  “Who are you?” she whispered. Soft as it was, it reached the tree.

  “The Pied Piper! Just wait a minute, I’m going to pipe you up in this tree.”

  “I’m not a rat,” she said, airing recent knowledge.

  “Yes, you are! You’re the one, stout as Julius Caesar, who swam across and lived to carry his commentary out of the woods! I’ll say you had guts to lie out there.”

  “Oh!” she said, very pleased with herself. “I’m not allowed to have guts any more. They’re not polite. Who are you, anyway, and where do you live when you’re not in a tree?”

  “I’m Tim to you and I live in the next house. There’s a field behind us and I make it my summer home. As soon as the trees get green enough to hide me I climb up to my armchair. I’ve seen you lots of times. I know what you’re like because I’ve seen you when you didn’t know I was looking.”

  “Oh!” she said doubtfully. “What am I like?”

  “Swell,” said the voice with enthusiastic brevity.