Unfinished Portrait

by Christie, writing as Mary Westmacott, Agatha

  Celia privately considered the three best bedrooms much grander than anything at home. They had vast suites in them, one of a dappled grey wood, the other two of mahogany. Grannie’s bedroom was over the dining-room. It had a vast four-poster bed, a huge mahogany wardrobe which occupied the whole of one wall, a handsome washstand and dressing table, and another huge chest of drawers. Every drawer in the room was crammed to repletion with parcels of articles neatly folded. Sometimes when opened the drawers would not shut, and Grannie would have a terrible time with them. Everything was securely locked. On the inside of the door, besides the lock were a substantial bolt and two brass cabin hooks and eyes. Once securely fastened into her apartment, Grannie would retire for the night with a watchman’s rattle and a police whistle within reach of her hand so as to be able to give an immediate alarm should burglars attempt to storm her fortress.

  On the top of the wardrobe, protected by a glass case, was a large crown of white wax flowers, a floral tribute at the decease of Grannie’s first husband. On the right-hand wall was the framed memorial service of Grannie’s second husband. On the left-hand wall was a large photograph of the handsome marble tombstone erected to Grannie’s third husband.

  The bed was a feather one, and the windows were never opened.

  The night air, Grannie said, was highly injurious. Air of all kinds, indeed, she regarded as something of a risk. Except on the hottest days of summer she rarely went into the garden, such outings as she made were usually to the Army and Navy Stores – a four-wheeler to the station, train to Victoria, and another four-wheeler to the stores. On such occasions she was well wrapped up in her ‘mantle’ and further protected by a feather boa wound tightly many times round her neck.

  Grannie never went out to see people. They came to see her. When visitors arrived cake was brought in and sweet biscuits, and different kinds of Grannie’s own home-made liqueur. The gentlemen were first asked what they would take. ‘You must taste my cherry brandy – that’s what all the gentlemen like.’ Then the ladies were urged in their turn, ‘A little drop – just to keep the cold out.’ Thus Grannie, believing that no member of the female sex could admit publicly to liking alcoholic liquor. Or if it was in the afternoon: ‘You’ll find it digests your dinner, my dear.’

  If an old gentleman who came should not already be in possession of a waistcoat, Grannie would display the waistcoat at present in hand and she would then say with a kind of sprightly archness: ‘I’d offer to make you one if I were sure your wife wouldn’t object.’ The wife would then cry: ‘Oh, do make him one. I shall be delighted.’ Grannie would say waggishly: ‘I mustn’t cause trouble,’ and the old gentleman would say something gallant about wearing a waistcoat worked ‘with her own fair fingers’.

  After a visit, Grannie’s cheeks would be twice as pink, and her figure twice as upright. She adored the giving of hospitality in any form.

  3

  ‘Grannie, may I come and be with you for a little?’

  ‘Why? Can’t you find anything to do upstairs with Jeanne?’

  Celia hesitated for a minute or two to find a phrase that satisfied her. She said at last:

  ‘Things aren’t very pleasant in the nursery this afternoon.’

  Grannie laughed and said:

  ‘Well, to be sure, that’s one way of putting it.’

  Celia was always uncomfortable and miserable on the rare occasions on which she fell out with Jeanne. This afternoon trouble had come out of the blue in the most unexpected manner.

  They had been arguing about the correct disposition of the furniture in Celia’s dolls’ house, and Celia, arguing a point, had exclaimed: ‘Mais, ma pauvre fille –’ And that had done it. Jeanne had burst into tears and a voluble flood of French.

  Yes, no doubt she was a pauvre fille, as Celia said, but her family, though poor, was honest and respectable. Her father was respected all over Pau. M. le Maire even was on terms of friendship with him.

  ‘But I never said –’ began Celia.

  Jeanne swept on.

  ‘Doubtless la petite mees, so rich, so beautifully dressed, with her parents who voyaged, and her frocks of silk, considered her, Jeanne, as an equal with a mendicant in the street –’

  ‘But I never said –’ began Celia again, more and more bewildered.

  But even les pauvres filles had their feelings. She, Jeanne, had her feelings. She was wounded. She was wounded to the core.

  ‘But, Jeanne, I love you,’ cried Celia desperately.

  But Jeanne was not to be appeased. She got out some of her most severe sewing, a buckram collar for a gown she was making for Grannie, and stitched at it in silence, shaking her head and refusing to answer Celia’s appeals. Naturally Celia knew nothing of certain remarks made by Mary and Kate at the midday meal as to Jeanne’s people being indeed poor if they took all their daughter’s earnings.

  Faced by an incomprehensible situation, Celia retreated from it and trotted downstairs to the dining-room.

  ‘And what do you want to do?’ asked Grannie, peering over her spectacles and dropping a large ball of wool. Celia picked it up.

  ‘Tell me about when you were a little girl – about what you said when you came down after tea.’

  ‘We used all to come down together and knock on the drawing-room door. My father would say, “Come in.” Then we would all go in, shutting the door behind us. Quietly, mind you, remember always to shut the door quietly. No lady bangs a door. Indeed, in my young days, no lady ever shut a door at all. It spoilt the shape of the hands. There was ginger wine on the table, and each of us children was given a glass.’

  ‘And then you said –’ prompted Celia, who knew this story backwards.

  ‘We each said in turn, “My duty to you, Father and Mother.”’

  ‘And they said?’

  ‘They said, “My love to you, children.”’

  ‘Oh!’ Celia wriggled in an ecstasy of delight. She could hardly have said why she enjoyed this particular story so much.

  ‘Tell me about the hymns in church,’ she prompted. ‘About you and Uncle Tom.’

  Crocheting vigorously, Grannie repeated the oft-told tale.

  ‘There was a big board with hymn numbers on it. The clerk used to give them out. He had a fine booming great voice. “Let us now sing to the honour and glory of God. Hymn No. –” and then he stopped – because the board had been put up the wrong way round. He began again: “Let us sing to the honour and glory of God. Hymn No. –” Then he said it a third time: “Let us sing to the honour and glory of God. Hymn No. –, ’ere, Bill, just you turn that ’ere board.”’

  Grannie was a good actress. The cockney aside came out in an inimitable manner.

  ‘And you and Uncle Tom laughed,’ prompted Celia.

  ‘Yes, we both laughed. And my father looked at us. Just looked at us, that was all. But when we got home we were sent straight to bed and had no lunch. And it was Michaelmas Sunday – with the Michaelmas goose.’

  ‘And you had no goose,’ said Celia, awestruck.

  ‘And we had no goose.’

  Celia pondered the calamity deeply for a minute or two. Then with a deep sigh, she said: ‘Grannie, make me be a chicken.’

  ‘You’re too big a girl.’

  ‘Oh, no, Grannie, make me be a chicken.’

  Grannie laid aside her crochet and her spectacles.

  The comedy was played through from the first moment of entering Mr Whiteley’s shop, a demand to speak to Mr Whiteley himself: a specially nice chicken was required for a very special dinner. Would Mr Whiteley select a chicken himself? Grannie was in turn herself and Mr Whiteley. The chicken was wrapped up (business with Celia and a newspaper), carried home, stuffed (more business), trussed, skewered (screams of delight), popped in the oven, served up on a dish and then the grand climax: ‘Sarah – Sarah, come here, this chicken’s alive!’

  Oh, certainly there were few playmates to equal Grannie. The truth of it was that Grannie enjoyed playing as much
as you did. She was kind, too. In some ways kinder than Mummy. If you asked long enough and often enough, she would give in. She would even give you Things that Were Bad for You.

  4

  Letters came from Mummy and Daddy – written very clearly in print.

  My Darling Little Popsy Wopsums: How is my little girl? Does Jeanne take you on nice walks? How do you enjoy dancing class? The people out here have very nearly black faces. I hear Grannie is going to take you to the Pantomime. Is not that kind of her? I am sure you will be very grateful and do everything you can to be a helpful little girl to her. I am sure you are being a very good girl to dear Grannie who is so good to you. Give Goldie a hemp seed from me.

  Your loving,

  Daddy.

  My Own Precious Darling: I do miss you so much, but I am sure you are having a very happy time with dear Grannie who is so good to you, and that you are being a good little girl and doing everything you can to please her. It is lovely hot sunshine out here and beautiful flowers. Will you be a very clever little girl and write to Rouncy for me? Grannie will address the envelope. Tell her to pick the Christmas roses and send them to Grannie. Tell her to give Tommy a big saucer of milk on Christmas Day.

  A lot of kisses, my precious lamb, pigeony pumpkin, from,

  Mother.

  Lovely letters. Two lovely, lovely letters. Why did a lump rise in Celia’s throat? The Christmas roses – in the bed under the hedge – Mummy arranging them in a bowl with moss – Mummy saying, ‘Look at their beautiful wide-open faces.’ Mummy’s voice …

  Tommy, the big white cat. Rouncy, munching, always munching.

  Home, she wanted to go home.

  Home, with Mummy in it … Precious lamb, pigeony pumpkin – that’s what Mummy called her with a laugh in her voice and a sharp, short sudden hug.

  Oh, Mummy – Mummy …

  Grannie, coming up the stairs, said:

  ‘What’s this? Crying? What are you crying for? You’ve got no fish to sell.’

  That was Grannie’s joke. She always made it.

  Celia hated it. It made her want to cry more. When she was unhappy, she didn’t want Grannie. She didn’t want Grannie at all. Grannie made it worse, somehow.

  She slipped past Grannie down the stairs and into the kitchen. Sarah was baking bread.

  Sarah looked up at her.

  ‘Had a letter from your mammy?’

  Celia nodded. The tears overflowed again. Oh, empty, lonely world.

  Sarah went on kneading bread.

  ‘She’ll be home soon, love, she’ll be home soon. You watch for the leaves on the trees.’

  She began to roll the dough on the board. Her voice was remote, soothing.

  She detached a small lump of the dough.

  ‘Make some little loaves of your own, honey. I’ll bake them along of mine.’

  Celia’s tears stopped.

  ‘Twists and cottages?’

  ‘Twists and cottages.’

  Celia set to work. For twists you rolled out three long sausages and then plaited them in and out, pinching the ends well. Cottages were a big round ball and a smaller ball on top and then – ecstatic moment – you drove your thumb sharply in, making a big round hole. She made five twists and six cottages.

  ‘It’s ill for a child away from her mammy,’ murmured Sarah under her breath.

  Her own eyes filled with tears.

  It was not till Sarah died some fourteen years later that it was discovered that the superior and refined niece who occasionally came to visit her aunt was in reality Sarah’s daughter, the ‘fruit of sin’, as in Sarah’s young days the term went. The mistress she served for over sixty years had had no idea of the fact, desperately concealed from her. The only thing she could remember was an illness of Sarah’s that had delayed her return from one of her rare holidays. That and the fact that she was unusually thin on her return. What agonies of concealment, of tight lacing, of secret desperation Sarah had gone through must forever remain a mystery. She kept her secret till death revealed it.

  COMMENT BY J.L.

  It’s odd how words – casual, unconnected words – can make a thing live in your imagination. I’m convinced that I see all these people much more clearly than Celia did as she was telling me about them. I can visualize that old grandmother – so vigorous, so much of her generation, with her Rabelaisian tongue, her bullying of her servants, her kindness to the poor sewing woman. I can see further back still to her mother – that delicate, lovable creature ‘enjoying her month’. Note, too, the difference of description between male and female. The wife dies of a decline, the husband of galloping consumption. The ugly word tuberculosis never intrudes. Women decline, men gallop to death. Note, too, for it is amusing, the vigour of these consumptive parents’ progeny. Of those ten children, so Celia told me when I asked her, only three died early and those were accidental deaths, a sailor of yellow fever, a sister in a carriage accident, another sister in childbed. Seven of them reached the age of seventy. Do we really know anything about heredity?

  It pleases me, that picture of a house with its Nottingham lace and its woolwork and its solid shining mahogany furniture. It has backbone. They knew what they wanted, that generation. They got it and they enjoyed it, and they took a keen, full-blooded active pleasure in the art of self-preservation.

  You notice that Celia pictures that house, her grandmother’s, far more clearly than her own home. She must have gone there just at the noticing age. Her home is more people than place – Nannie, Rouncy, the bouncing Susan, Goldie in his cage.

  Then her discovery of her mother – funny, it seems, that she should not have discovered her before.

  For Miriam, I think, had a very vivid personality. The glimpses I get of Miriam enchant me. She had, I fancy, a charm that Celia did not inherit. Even between the conventional lines of her letter to her little girl (such ‘period pieces’ those letters, full of stress on the moral attitude) – even, as I say, between the conventional admonitions to goodness, a trace of the real Miriam peeps out. I like the endearment – precious lamb, pigeony pumpkin – and the caress – the short, sharp hug. Not a maudlin or a demonstrative woman – an impulsive one – a woman with strange flashes of intuitive understanding.

  The father is dimmer. He appeared to Celia as a brown-bearded giant – lazy, good-humoured, full of fun. He sounds unlike his mother – probably took after his father, who is represented in Celia’s narrative by a crown of wax flowers under glass. He was, I fancy, a friendly soul whom everybody liked – more popular than Miriam – but without her quality of enchantment. Celia, I think, took after him. Her placidity, her even temper, her sweetness.

  But she inherited something from Miriam – a dangerous intensity of affection.

  That’s how I see it. But perhaps I invent … These people have, after all, become my creations.

  4 Death

  1

  Celia was going home!

  The excitement of it!

  The train journey seemed endless. Celia had a nice book to read, they had the carriage to themselves – but her impatience made the whole thing seem interminable.

  ‘Well,’ said her father. ‘Glad to be going home, poppet?’

  He gave her a playful little nip as he spoke. How big and brown he looked – much bigger than Celia had thought. Her mother, on the other hand, was much smaller. Queer the way that shapes and sizes seemed to alter.

  ‘Yes, Daddy, very pleased,’ said Celia.

  She spoke primly. This queer swelling, aching feeling inside wouldn’t let her do anything else.

  Her father looked a little disappointed. Her cousin Lottie, who was coming to stay with them and who was travelling with them, said:

  ‘What a solemn little mite it is!’

  Her father said:

  ‘Oh, well, a child soon forgets …’

  His face looked wistful.

  Miriam said: ‘She hasn’t forgotten a bit. She’s just boiling over inside.’

  And s
he reached out her hand and gave Celia’s a little squeeze. Her eyes smiled into Celia’s – as though they two had a secret shared between them.

  Cousin Lottie, who was plump and attractive, said:

  ‘She hasn’t much sense of humour, has she?’

  ‘None at all,’ said Miriam. ‘No more have I,’ she added ruefully. ‘At least, John says I haven’t.’

  Celia murmured.

  ‘Mummy, will it be soon – will it be soon, Mummy?’

  ‘Will what be soon, pet?’

  Celia breathed: ‘The sea.’

  ‘In about five minutes now.’

  ‘I expect she’d like to live by the seaside and play on the sands,’ said Cousin Lottie.

  Celia did not speak. How to explain? The sea was the sign that one was getting near home.

  The train ran into a tunnel and out again. Ah, there it was, dark blue and sparkling, on the left hand side of the train. They were running along beside it, popping in and out of tunnels. Blue, blue sea – so dazzling that it made Celia shut her eyes involuntarily.

  Then the train twisted away inland. Very soon now they would be Home!

  2

  Sizes again! Home was enormous! Simply enormous! Great big rooms with hardly any furniture in them – or so it seemed to Celia after the house at Wimbledon. It was all so exciting she hardly knew what to do first …

  The garden – yes, first of all it must be the garden. She ran madly along the steep path. There was the Beech Tree – funny she’d never thought about the Beech Tree before. It was almost the most important part of home. And there was the little arbour with the seat in the laurustinus – oh! it was nearly overgrown. Now to go up to the wood – perhaps the bluebells would be out. But they weren’t. Perhaps they were over. There was the tree with the forked branch that you played Queen-in-hiding on. Oh! Oh! Oh! there was the Little White Boy.

  The Little White Boy stood in an arbour in the wood. Three rustic steps led up to him. He carried a stone basket on his head, and into this basket you placed an offering and made a wish.