The Greengage Summer

by Rumer Godden

  “Why do you have to have a shopping bag?” Joss would say.

  “To put the shopping in,” said Mother, astonished.

  “Why must Hester wear plimsolls in the street?”

  “She is going on the beach.”

  It was on the beach that it happened.

  We did not go away for the summer holidays—“Or any holidays,” said Joss discontentedly—but spent long days on the beach, picnicking. “Must we?” asked Joss.

  “I thought you liked it,” said Mother, but Joss shuddered.

  Our picnics were even more family ones than most; we had baskets and bags bulging with bathing towels and Thermos flasks, and a dreadful aluminium food container, brought home by Father from India, that was always coming apart in the street. We had buckets and spades and shrimping-nets, jerseys and paper bags. “Like a bank holiday,” said Joss; “and must Hester talk to everyone? She’s such a blatant child.”

  We had to wear what we called our scarecrows, old faded-out patched cottons. “I can’t help it,” said Mother. “I can’t let your good clothes get covered with salt and oil.”

  “We haven’t any good clothes,” said Joss.

  Mother was gentle, but that day we went too far. I do not remember what we did, but she lost her temper. “You are abominably selfish,” she said.

  When she was angry she did not go white as Joss did—she went pink. “You never think of anyone but yourselves.”

  We stared. Whom else should we think of?

  “Everyone tells me you are badly brought up and it’s true.”

  “You brought us up,” said Joss.

  “It’s true,” repeated Mother.

  “What are you going to do about it?” I asked as insolently as I could, and Hester stole a hand into hers.

  “I shall do something.”

  “What?”

  Mother took a deep breath. “I shall take you to the battlefields of France.”

  “The battlefields of France!”

  We were still speaking rudely, but it was feeble, the last intermittent gunfire before surrender. “Why?”

  “So that you can see what other people have given,” said Mother, “given for your sakes; and what other people will do in sacrifice. Perhaps that will make you ashamed and make you think. And Saint Joan,” said Mother, “Saint Joan at the stake. We shall stop at wherever it was and see where she was burned.”

  “Oh, Mother! Not in the middle of the summer holidays!”

  “Holidays or not,” said Mother, and shut her lips.

  “Pooh! You haven’t enough money,” said Joss, but she sounded a little frightened.

  “I shall use the legacy.”

  “The legacy is for college,” said Joss.

  “This is college,” said Mother. “It is education. You need to learn . . . what I cannot teach you,” said Mother, her voice quivering.

  She did not ask Uncle William’s advice. She went to Mr Stillbotham.

  Mr Stillbotham was an elderly Theosophist, who lived in Belmont Road and was the only person in it, as far as we knew, who travelled. Father, of course, could not be said to live in Belmont Road. Mr Stillbotham spent his winters in the South of France; we admired him for that and thought him distinguished with his silver hair, pince-nez, blue-and-white-striped shirts and bow-ties. We also liked his manner to us which was full of courtesy and admiration—particularly for Joss.

  “Standing with reluctant feet,

  Where the brook and river meet,”

  Mr Stillbotham would say when he saw her. Altogether he seemed a suitable person to advise us, and we approved.

  “You wish to visit your dead?” he asked when Mother told him about the battlefields. “They are not dead but liv . . .” but for the purposes of our visit Mother needed them dead and she cut him short. “Can you tell us of an hotel, not too expensive, and near the cemeteries?” she said.

  “Les Oeillets at Vieux-Moutiers.” That was the first time we heard its name. “You will find plenty of motors at the station.”

  Saint Joan had been burned, it seemed, at Rouen. “But you can break your journey there if you go by Newhaven-Dieppe, which will be cheaper,” said Mr Stillbotham; “or if you preferred it you could spend the afternoon in Paris.”

  Spend the afternoon in Paris! Saint Joan had not the slightest chance after that. “I shall see the Louvre,” said Joss. “Mona Lisa. The Winged Victory.”

  “I shall see the shops,” said Willmouse and, as always when he was stirred, his face went white.

  “Do you remember those strawberry tarts, little strawberries in syrup, that Father once brought back?” asked Vicky. “They came from Paris,” she said reverently.

  Hester and I, as usual, were far more ordinary; she would be happy buying postcards and taking snapshots with her Brownie camera, while I, the chameleon, would be with them all in turns. “Well, you enjoy it more in that way,” said Mother. We were all equally excited.

  “If you listen to me . . .” said Uncle William, but nobody listened.

  “Very well,” said Uncle William. “When you get into trouble don’t ask me for help.”

  “We shall not need help,” said Mother, dignified; but the day before we left she was bitten on the leg by a horse-fly. “A little fly,” said Hester, “to do all that!”

  When Mother took down her stocking in the train from Dieppe, the leg was swollen and the skin looked purple, green and blue. “Like a bruise,” said Hester. “Did you bruise it? All over?” she finished uncertainly.

  Mother shook her head. She fumbled with her handbag as if she could not control her hands and she shivered although she was hot.

  “You are ill,” said Joss accusingly, and Mother could not deny it.

  It was altogether a disappointing as well as a dismaying day. From the train France did not look very different from England; it had the Constable, Peter Rabbit colours we had grown up with, and in Paris we did not see the Louvre, nor the shops, nor eat strawberry tarts. We did not buy a single postcard, nor take a photograph; we waited in the waiting-room for Mother to get well. The attendant in a dark-blue overall with a black crochet shawl came and looked at us, but we were too shy to speak to her. “Why didn’t you go to Cook’s? Lunn’s? The American Express? Any of them would have helped you.” Uncle William has asked us that often, but Joss and I had then only one idea: to get Mother, the Littles, Hester, ourselves and our suitcases to Vieux-Moutiers and Les Oeillets.

  There was a train at seven. I remember I went to a food wagon and bought rolls and sausage. I did not know what else to buy and Joss would not go. “But you are the eldest,” I said.

  “You are the best at French,” said Joss cruelly.

  Like a herd we drew together and sniffed the sausage; we had not smelled garlic before and we gave it to the attendant; we ate the rolls.

  I remember when Vicky touched Mother’s leg, Mother gave a little scream and quickly bit her lips. “Don’t worry,” she said in a moment, “one is not sent anything one can’t bear,” but she had to bite her lips again. I remember, too, that Willmouse disappeared. “Il est parti voir les locos,” said the attendant, but there was a new Vogue on a kiosk and he had gone to look at that.

  I do not remember the train, only that Mr Stillbotham had been wrong and there were no taxis at the station. “Mais c’est pas bien loin,” said the porter, and we took the handcart.

  “But Mother can’t walk,” said Hester.

  “She must.” A terrible hardness had come upon us. We took her by her arms. She moaned and stumbled, and Hester wept. At last we came to the gates.

  As we waited after the porter rang the bell I moved away from the others. I had had the sudden sense of a garden, sharp because it cut me from them. Through the gates I could see a courtyard with gravel round a square of grass in front of the house. To the side, paths led away into the trees; the light was almost gone now and trees showed dimly, grey-green along the wall, while the garden was black in the depth of the shadows. There was a s
teady light pattering sound—I did not know then that French sound of poplar leaves. A bird gave a sleepy call; an owl answered it, that strange night noise that I recognised though I had not heard it before.

  I could smell a summer smell of cut grass and, near me, some flower scent that was heady and sweet; a white flower, I thought, jessamine or syringa. After the city and train my skin was cinder-dry and the air was gratefully cool against my face. I was filled with a sense of peace; all the fears and ignorance of the day seemed to drop away. This was the Hotel des Oeillets, real, not the mirage we had held in front of us through the travelling; we had arrived.

  “L’hôtel n’acccepte pas les malades,” said Madame Corbet.

  “Does that mean she won’t take sick people?” I asked Joss.

  “I think it does.”

  The office at Les Oeillets was off the stairs, it was not big enough to be called a room; steps led up from the hall to an entresol with a landing and doors; the office was an annexe to this landing, separated from it by a counter and brass grille. There was just room behind the counter for a safe, a keyboard with pigeon-holes for letters, and Madame Corbet’s desk with its telephone and account books. Now we, Joss, Hester, Willmouse, Vicky and I, stood in front of the grille; Willmouse’s eyes were just level with the counter; only the top of Vicky’s hat showed.

  The staircase was panelled in pale green, riddled with curious holes, but the holes did not take away from its elegance. The hall was elegant too. It was odd that we, who had never seen elegance before—though it was our favourite word—immediately recognised it—except Hester. “It isn’t like the Metropole or Cavendish,” she said regretfully. They were the big hotels on Southstone’s grand parade, but instinctively I liked this better. The staircase made a graceful shape as it led up to the floor above. The banister-rail was dark polished wood, the banisters thin and white; halfway up was a round window that showed a glimpse of trees, and in the wall were crystal wall lamps that matched the chandelier in the hall. We looked at that, amazed, for we had never seen a chandelier in a house. The hall had a squared marble floor; its chairs were gilt with faded brocade cushions; four small tables stood against the walls. “But they are only halves,” said Willmouse in surprise. We had never seen console tables either.

  In that hall our fibre suitcases looked cheap. We had other luggage even more vulgar; a basket, the bag that had held the oranges, a brown-paper parcel of the Littles’ Wellington boots, an untidy heap of raincoats with their belts hanging; and we all carried treasures. Joss’s, of course, were neat, a drawing-board strapped to her wooden paintbox. Hester had her camera, Willmouse his scrapbooks and workbox packed up with Miss Dawn and Dolores, while Vicky had Nebuchadnezzar in a basket. Nebuchadnezzar was a pig made out of a potato, with matchstick eyes and legs; she had made him at school and carried him about ever since, though he was beginning to shrivel a little. “When he is quite shrivelled I shall eat him,” said Vicky. Mother sitting on a chair had her hat on one side and the coat of her good suit wrongly buttoned: she leaned her head against the chair back and shut her eyes, and her face seemed as mottled now as her leg. As for us, we were crumpled, untidy, and dirty, Hester’s and Vicky’s faces were streaked with dirt and tears, their socks had come down, and all our shoes were dusty. I could see that we were not at all the kind of family that would be an ornament to any hotel.

  “I expect a doctor will come and take our mother to hospital,” Joss said in English.

  “L’hôtel n’accepte pas les enfants seuls.”

  “She won’t take children by themselves.”

  “But if we are by ourselves?” said Hester.

  Madame Corbet sat behind the grille with the hotel books spread out round her. On this hot evening she was wearing a black high-necked blouse; a black crochet shawl with bobbles was crossed on her shoulders. She wore a finger-guard of stained celluloid and her face looked stained too with sallow marks; her hair was in two black snakes coiled in a knot on the top of her head and she had a moustache of heavy black down on which Willmouse, straining to look over the counter, had instantly fixed his eyes. All the time we were talking I saw him examining it.

  Joss was desperate. I knew that by her white face and the bigness of her eyes. She had taken over Mother’s capacious old handbag, which looked oddly big on her. “S’il vous plaît, aidez-nous,” she said. I knew how difficult it was for her to humble herself, but Madame Corbet only shrugged so that the topknot and the bobbles of her shawl danced. “Et qu’est-ce que je peux y faire, moi? Je ne suis pas la patronne. Je suis Madame Corbet, c’est tout.” She said that as if to be Madame Corbet was something derogatory.

  “If it is not your hotel, where is . . .” Joss consulted the paper Mr Stillbotham had given us. “Where is Mademoiselle de Presle?”

  “Mademoiselle Zizi? Elle va dîner au château de Méry.”

  Joss and I looked at one another. Did she say going out to dinner. In Southstone we had supper at seven o’clock; now it was nearly ten.

  “Au château de Méry,” repeated Madame Corbet impressively.

  The maid who had helped with our luggage and who was now waiting on the stairs rolled up her eyes and crossed herself; she was pert and Madame Corbet spoke sharply.

  “Y sont des amis . . .” “Amis means friends,” I told Hester. “Mademoiselle de Presle is going to a big house, a château, that might mean a castle, to friends.”

  “Des amis à Monsieur Eliot . . .” said the maid. Why did she say “Mr Eliot’s friends” so meaningly?

  Madame Corbet ignored her. To us she said, “They say the President of the Board of Trade is to be there,” and I thought, So, she can speak English.

  “Then we can’t see Mademoiselle de Presle?” asked Joss.

  “Naturally not.”

  “But what can we do?”

  Madame Corbet shrugged. “Vous feriez bien d’aller au commissariat. Oui, allez au commissariat.”

  “Commissariat?” What was that? We looked at one another mystified. “Police,” said the hotel boy Paul from his place on the landing. “Go police.”

  Joss’s face flamed as though Madame Corbet had slapped it. “Come,” she said to us.

  We left the counter and followed Joss across the hall, walking round the two big Alsatian dogs who lifted their dark-furred faces. One wagged its tail; it was the first sign of friendliness Les Oeillets had given us. Perhaps it was that that made Madame Corbet feel ashamed.

  “Vous pouvez laisser les bagages,” she said.

  “No thank you,” said Joss.

  This was proud but not very practical. The porter had gone and I do not know how we should have managed with Mother and the Littles, but at that moment the dogs stood up, wagging their tails more violently and looking towards a white door on the entresol landing. It opened and Mademoiselle Zizi and Eliot came out.

  It was the first time we had seen anyone in ‘tails’. Uncle William had a dinner-jacket, of course, but our vision had gone no further than that. I say ‘tails’ because it was at Eliot we looked. It seems strange now that, seeing a man and a woman both in full evening dress, we looked at the man first, but there was no question about it. Hester gave a little gasp.

  “Were you ever a sailor?” Joss asked Eliot afterwards. I knew what she meant; he was tall and brown and lean, as were sailors in magazine pictures. His eyes even had lines at the sides as if he had wrinkled them looking at the sun. “Were you a sailor?”

  “Probably,” said Eliot.

  “Don’t you know?” asked Hester incredulous.

  “I know I was a soldier,” said Eliot. “Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, richman, poorman . . .” but Hester interrupted him.

  “You can’t have been everything,” she said.

  “I pretty well was,” said Eliot.

  We took it for granted that his eyes were blue. His hair was brown, a little grizzled. His face had curious high cheekbones. “From my Chinese grandmother,” he told us solemnly. We believed him, and it still
seems to me now that his hands and feet were so small as to be oriental. “I am descended from Genghis Khan,” he was to tell us, and Hester asked, “Who was Genghis Khan?”

  “A fearful Tartar,” said Eliot, smoothing her hair.

  His clothes were so impeccable—that was a word I liked and had taught to Willmouse—that they looked as if he had just bought them.

  “Well, he had.” Hester said that later. “Poor Eliot. He could never keep his clothes long.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He said so. He said, ‘Pity, I like this coat. I hate to leave it.’ That was his checked one; of course, he was thinking aloud. He did not know I was there. Toinette is always saying that his shirts and pyjamas are new.”

  That night he wore medals. “His?” Uncle Willaim always said he doubted it but “Of course they were his,” we said indignantly.

  He had a carnation in his buttonhole, a dark-red one, and it seemed to symbolise Eliot for us. Why are flowers bought by men so much more notable than those bought by women? I do not know, but they are. Father brought flowers into the house but they were dried, pressed brown, the life gone out of them; with Eliot the flower was alive.

  Behind him came Mademoiselle Zizi. When we looked at her we were struck dumb with shyness because Mademoiselle Zizi was . . . “Bare,” whispered Hester. Arms, neck and shoulders, “and back and front,” said Hester reluctantly. We did not know what little puritans we were until we saw Mademoiselle Zizi.

  Privately I thought her very beautiful, with her heavy dark-red hair and eyes that seemed almost too enormous—like a sunflower’s. They were blued . . . “on the lids,” said Hester, surprised, and her mouth was very, very red. What there was of her dress was gauze, black.

  I saw Willmouse looking at the dress critically at first, then satisfied. “That is a real dress,” whispered Willmouse, “and what a smell!”

  “Is the smell the lady?” asked Vicky. It had filled the hall as Mademoiselle Zizi came in.

  They came down the steps from the landing, stopped at the sight of us, and it was then that Eliot said, “Good God! An orphanage!”