Crooked Wreath

by Christianna Brand

  “I’m seeing to it all, Richard,” said Bella, patiently.

  He stood teetering on the front terrace looking down across the drive and towards the lodge, and in the bright sunshine, all the air was heavy with the scent of Serafita’s roses. Swanswater lay two miles out of the small town of Heronsford, in Kent, on the other side of the downs from Heron’s Park and just across the Tenfold Ridge, from Pigeonsford. It had been a beautiful house in its day and the hall and principal rooms still wore the distinction of their Georgian elegance; but it had been much added to, and on either side of its plain brick front sprawled whole wings of glass houses, squash-courts, orangeries, and a swimming pool, with a nightmare of marble terraces and balconies. To the east, the house fronted on flowered terraces, running down to the river’s edge; to the west, the gravelled arms of the drive enclosing a wide green lawn, opened out through magnificent wrought-iron gates onto the main road. Serafita’s influence had dotted the grounds with little bowers and temples, each quite charming in itself, but utterly ruining the character of the park; and on either side of the gates stood two of them, highly ornamental lodges in pseudo-Grecian style. In one of these tiny houses lived Brough the gardener and his wife; and in the other, Serafita had died.

  The chauffeur had lived there then. Serafita had been fond of this man; he had shared her passion for roses and between them they had ringed his little home with magnificent beds of Ophelias to which, in jealous competition with Brough, he had given devoted care. On the day of her death, she had stood with him for a long time in the hot sunshine, discussing the blooms which were then at the height of their beauty; and there she had been taken suddenly ill, carried into his sitting-room as being the nearest shelter, and so had died. Sir Richard, in his passion for memorial building, had swept the chauffeur into other quarters and built a shrine about the room in which she had breathed her last. One of the innumerable portraits had been moved in and hung upon the wall, a few pieces of furniture of which she had been particularly fond, were placed in the room, and the roses were henceforward to be considered sacrosanct; never picked but to decorate her memory. During all her fetes he haunted the place, increasingly fussy as the years went by over every small detail of ceremonial; but the anniversary of the night she had died, he invariably spent alone in the lodge. His original sentiments had long ago sunk into the dunderheaded obstinacy of, “I’ve always done it and I’m not going to stop now!” There would be a little ceremony in the morning at the actual hour of her death, and after dinner he would march solemnly off and finally settle himself on a specially arranged divan bed underneath her picture, for a night of vigil, often holding out for as much as twenty minutes before falling off into his customary untroubled slumber. This year again, Bella and his doctor protested and with increasing vehemence, but in vain. “My heart’s perfectly all right, and if it isn’t I’ve got this stuff in my pocket, I’ll keep it by the bed. There’s the telephone extension to the house and Brough and Mrs. Brough in the lodge just across the gates. Leave me alone, Bella! I will not be dictated to! And where are those children? It’s nearly a quarter to.”

  “They’re coming, Richard. They’ve all had to go upstairs and change.”

  “I should think so,” said Sir Richard, angrily. “The idea of thinking that just because it’s a hot day again, they can come down here in bits of nonsense not fit to be seen in, at the best of times. I tell you, Bella, these modern young people are more than I can understand.” He started off down towards the lodge, pausing on the lawn to stand and roar up at the bedroom windows on the first floor. Ellen appeared on her balcony like a cuckoo from its clock. “Hallo? Were you calling us?”

  “What do you think I’m doing, girl? A variety turn? Hurry up, the whole pack of you! It’s a quarter to eleven.” He stumped on towards the gates and there vented some more of his irritability on the gardener. “I thought I told you to sand these paths, Brough? They’re a disgrace, and today of all days!”

  Three narrow, sanded paths ran up through the rose-beds to the lodge; one to the front door, one to the back door, and one to the French window of the sitting-room, which faced towards the big house. “The old woman’s been back and forth cleaning the place,” said Brough, giving a perfunctory tug to the peak of his cap. “She’s got the path all scuffed up; and her ladyship, doing the flowers and such …” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder towards his own domain where were his tool sheds and rubbish dumps, neatly hedged in. “I’ve got enough sand there for one more coat–and not a grain more; that’ll be the end of it.”

  “Well, let it be the end of it. Get the paths done before lunch.”

  “I’ve got the geraniums on the front terrace to do,” said Brough. “You always want those picked off special, in her ladyship’s week. Her first ladyship,” he amended, with a sly glance at Bella, whose fair, rather foolish round face flushed a little, uncontrollably, and stiffened into self-conscious unawareness.

  Sir Richard marched forward on his journey. “You’ll get those paths done before the day’s out, Brough, or I’ll know the reason why.” He paused before the French window, always the mode of entry used when going to the lodge from the house. “Well–this doesn’t look so bad. The flowers are very nice, Bella.” His brow darkened, however. “What’s all this rubbish doing here?”

  The aged charwoman had evidently been called away suddenly near the completion of her task of cleaning up the lodge for today’s ceremony; her vacuum cleaner stood abandoned in the middle of the room, its various attachments writhing about it in chromium coils. Bella, tchking, opened the door of the tiny hall between the sitting-room and the front door, and pushed the whole lot in. “Nobody will see it there; we always use the French window. I told her not even to bother to clean it.” With the toe of her shoe she made a little squirl in the dust on the tiled floor of the hall. “Where on earth does dust come from out here in the country? It’s absolutely thick.”

  “Where are those children?” said Sir Richard fretfully.

  “They’re coming, dear, they’re coming.…”

  He stood at the window, looking up towards the house, and at the roses ringing the little lodge. “The Ophelias are at their loveliest; one day more and their petals would be falling. A breath of wind would disturb them, even now.”

  Bella went and stood by his side; still pink-and-white and pretty, but dumpy and short where Serafita had been so slight and tiny with her little hands and feet. “I always think it’s extraordinary that she should have chosen the roses that would be just right for the anniversary of her death!”

  “She was a remarkable woman,” said Sir Richard, evidently accepting this as a tribute to some occult power in his departed wife, rather than a comment on coincidence. “Ah, here they are at last!” He added indignantly that they were only just in time, though there were several minutes yet to go, before the hands of the little gilt clock pointed to the actual moment of Serafita’s death. “Come along now, all of you, hurry up! Peta, be careful of those roses!”

  Peta’s flying hands had brushed a blossom as she came up the narrow path; its pale petals broke away from the ripening calyx and, drifting past her brief white skirt, lay forlornly on the sand. “Oh, Grandfather, I’m so sorry!” She squatted on the path to gather them up. “The very first to fall, and I go and do it! What a clumsy ass!” In the sitting-room of the lodge, she laid them out in formal pattern on the table below Serafita’s picture. “There, Grandmama, my pet–a gesture of apology from your graceless granddaughter.” Sir Richard tutted and frowned, but he was secretly touched and pleased. He chivied the rest of them into a semi-circle round the portrait, one eye on the clock. “All right. Now, Peta!”

  Philip and Ellen might be a trifle sheepish, but the others had attended Serafita rites too long to feel any self-consciousness about them at all. In their childhood, Peta and Claire had been forced into dancing, hopping about unsteadily with earnest faces, flapping thin, pink, apparently boneless arms; but Sir Richard had abandoned th
ese efforts in disgust. Peta, instead, stepped forward a little and sang in her thin, clear, blackbirdy voice a lament over which Serafita had sentimentalized many years ago. Bella had made a wreath of the Ophelia roses, and this, as Peta sang, Sir Richard hung up over the portrait. Portraits of Serafita were everywhere, all over the great house as well as in the little lodge; and under each stood a gilt casket with pressed flowers, a pair of her tiny ballet shoes, and a pair of long, elbow-length gloves. The gloves had been her means to such little fame as she had ever achieved. She had not been, in fact, a very good dancer; but wise before her age to the value of publicity “stunts,” she had singled herself out from her innumerable sisters by appearing always in elbow-length gloves to match her little shoes. Now the gloves were cherished, laid by in lavender in their caskets all over the house: pink in the big drawing-room, scarlet in the dining-room, white in what was now her successor’s bedroom, and black, of course, in the room where she had died. At a sign from Sir Richard, Claire stepped forward and solemnly took them out of the box, laying them on the table with the faded flowers and the little shoes. The song died away, and in the silence, the old man stood beneath the portrait looking up at the smiling, painted face with tears in his foolish blue eyes. “We’ll all be quiet for a little while, and think of her.” After a while he turned towards them. “A little prayer now … Edward …”

  Edward said the little prayer; he was not, in fact, any relation to the dead Serafita, but he had lived at Swanswater since his childhood and accepted as natural his inclusion in the celebrations; indeed, in the absence of his half-cousins, he was much relied upon to make up the congregation. They all said “Amen” to the prayer. Sir Richard took up the black gloves and the shoes. “These are the ones she wore on the night that Dreyfus was convicted. There was a great deal of excitement about the case in Paris, you know. Her reception was tremendous; she danced a sort of dirge; they had been working it out all the week in the hopes that–in case the verdict went against him …” He told the story every time the black gloves were brought out; they listened as respectfully as children to Cinderella, knowing every syllable of it, making it a sort of game among themselves to catch Grandfather out in a word altered from the original, a phrase misplaced. “Two of the officers from the tribunal were there … Everybody knew who they were of course … They had to get up and leave …” When his voice fell silent, you knew that in Grandfather’s mind was the comfortable certainty that Dreyfus had not suffered in vain. “The applause was tremendous, and all the flowers were white, as though it were a funeral …”

  The gloves were returned to the casket with the shoes and the scrap of dusty blossom from that magnificent, far-off day. Peta sang again, and standing in their half-circle, with bent heads they gave themselves up in their different ways to the mood of the moment. Bella thought of the exquisite romance of being able to live on so poignantly, as the newspapers said, in hearts and memories; Claire that honestly it was like a Chekov short story the way Grandfather’s once-tepid love burgeoned with the passing years; Philip that this might be the last summer that the old boy would be here to pay tribute to his lost darling; and Edward that it was all very well for the others but dash it, he wasn’t even her grandson and yet it was he who had to put up with most of this stuff. Peta, trilling a little French love song, reflected that Serafita must have been rather heavenly, she supposed, in a maddening way; and Ellen, thunderstruck by the easy motion with which they all gave themselves over to dramatization, looked up at Serafita’s portrait and almost winked; and for a moment could have sworn that Serafita winked back.

  Only Bella, reflected Sir Richard resentfully, would have presented him with a grandson subject to fugues! A thin, jumpy creature, with untidy hair and sloppy grey trousers, not held up at his waist at all, but by the bones of his gaunt young hips and, therefore, always apparently in imminent danger of falling down. A nice boy, a charming lad, admittedly, with that disarming smile of his; sweet-tempered, in the ordinary way, good-natured, friendly, kind.… But fugues! Automatism! No child of Serafita’s, thought Sir Richard, would have given birth to such a weakling; or if she had, she’d have spanked the nonsense out of it double quick! Look at him now, lounging on the balustrade of the terrace down by the riverside, declaring that he felt exhausted “after all that intensity,” fanning himself with a huge straw hat of Peta’s while they all sat watching the baby do its dance.

  The baby! Concentrating deeply, an animated dumpling in a stitched Viyella smock, gravely, beatifically she danced.… Fat pink hands like Christmas roses, flopped at the ends of fat pink arms; soft hair curled up wispily into shining pale tufts of gold. Round and round and round, waddling in unsteady circles to a tune her great-grandmother had danced to fifty years ago, she teetered on uncertain bare pink feet–toppled–and finally sat down with a plomp on her round pink mushroom of a behind, looking about her with an air of mild surprise. Peta flung herself on her knees beside Antonia. “My wonderful, exquisite one! A very good dance, a beautiful, beautiful dance!”

  “We’ll make a ballerina of her yet,” said Sir Richard, delighted.

  “More than you managed to do with any of us, darling! Oh, those awful mornings at Madame Whatsanameski’s! Will you ever forget, Claire?”

  “We had all the virtues between us, but we’d got them mixed. Peta was all supple grace, but she grew up as leggy as a young colt; and I kept small and neat but about as lissom as a bundle of sticks. I’m afraid there’s nothing of Serafita about your granddaughters, darling!”

  “You’ve got her small feet, Claire,” said Edward. “Claire’s got Grandmama Serafita’s small feet.” But he was bored with all this baby talk and ancestor worship; he wanted to bring the family attention back again to himself and his fugues; he recollected that the psychiatrist had suggested that the stain of illegitimacy galled him, and so he added in a harsh, sarcastic voice: “I mean, of course, your Grandmama Serafita,” and marched off into the house.

  Bella started to follow him, her pretty face all puckered up with distress. “There now–you’ve upset him again!”

  The cousins clamoured indignation. “Well, I like that!”–“We upset him!”–“Nobody said a word!”–“Honestly, Bella.”

  Bella had had a long and trying morning, waiting upon the memory of Serafita. She subsided into her chair and said tearfully that she and poor Edward were always being reminded of their position at Swanswater.

  They collapsed in laughter. “Oh, Bella, nonsense, darling! You know we adore your position here!” Peta said: “It gives glamour to the whole family; it gives us a sort of–of cachet, these entrancing glimpses of the wrong side of the blanket; and anyway, now you’ve been made an honest woman of, darling!”

  “By which you’ve been done a grave injustice, Bella,” said Philip, laughing. “You were our romantic element. You invested Grandfather with an air of naughty-ninetiness which was our pride and joy.”

  “We could never quite think of him without hearing the pop of champagne corks.”

  “By gaslight.”

  “And seeing the thin stream of golden liquid poured into the satin shoe.”

  Sir Richard stood wrapped in gloom. He had never drunk champagne out of any shoe, but if he had, it would have been Serafita’s; Bella had stayed quietly in her bijou house in Yarmouth, with frilly net curtains and little pots of geraniums and a couple of nice, woolly dogs; it had been Serafita, the wife, who had laughed and sparkled and rushed off with him on wild jaunts to the haunts of gaiety and even, in those first days, a little mild vice. And today of all days, to have Serafita’s thunder stolen, to have plump comfortable Bella with her pretensions to “education” being elevated to the throne of a Queen of Glamour.

  “Grandfather, do tell us about it–didn’t the shoe get all wet and soggy? Didn’t it spoil the champagne? Were actresses’ shoes sold in threes, one for drinking out of?”

  Edward, meanwhile, drooped forgotten in the hall, waiting for someone to follow him and implore
him not to upset himself. Through the front door, however, he espied a figure entering the iron gates and, scenting a new recipient for the tale of his troubles, went down the drive to meet him. “Hallo, Stephen. You’re good and early. Bella said you were coming to lunch.”

  “Hallo, Edward,” said Stephen Garde. “How are you?” He strolled back to the house beside Edward, a slender little man whose neat figure would always look slack and untidy because he wore his clothes so carelessly. His hair, ruthlessly brushed flat, was ruffled by his walk up from the village, to ducks’ tails of dark gold. “Is the family safely here? Your cousin Philip? And the famous baby?” With great casualness he added: “And Peta? Has she turned up all right?”

  “Yes, they’re all here and Ellen and Claire. I say, Stephen, I went up to London myself yesterday, and I saw that new psychiatrist, Hartmann. He says I’m pretty bad. I mean I’m liable to pass out any minute, for hours at a time, and not know what I’d been doing.”

  “You wouldn’t have been doing anything, if you’d passed out,” said Stephen, practically.

  “Well, I don’t mean I necessarily faint. I’d just be in a sort of a trance, a fugue it’s called, and I could walk about and talk and do things and nobody would know there was anything wrong with me, only I wouldn’t remember anything about it.”

  “Does this man suggest that you’ve had these attacks, or only that you might?”

  Edward was privately convinced that he had never had one in his life, and never would. “The trouble is, you see, that I wouldn’t know. I mean, what’s to tell me? Nobody would notice anything different so, of course, they wouldn’t know that I didn’t know what I’d been doing.”

  “It’s very interesting,” said Stephen. They crossed the green lawn and made for the central steps up to the house.