First one high startling stately figure, sailing like a figurehead; two more, advancing entwined, bearing down together; yet one more: fabulous sight. Each in turn bends to kiss first an old gentleman, then an old lady; takes her place at table. This table is in the window, and the August morning sun strikes in and kindles their crests into one blaze of blinding intensity.
My mother says to my brother: ‘What would you like now, dear?’ He is two, and replies in a loud coarse husky voice: ‘A hegg.’ Convulsions of shocked pleasure. Dropping his h’s! What will they all think?—a common child. Apprehensively we glance over there. Their shoulders are shaking, then turn laughing faces. They are aware of us. They are of course admiring the blond curls of my brother; perhaps the juicy, up and coming appearance of all the four. Jolly-looking family.
After this the distance between the tables dwindles, vanishes. Subsequently we and the Daintreys will appear at the seaside in mixed groups and pairs.
Miss Mildred Daintrey. Miss Viola. Rosie and Dolly. Four daughters, all six foot or over.
Miss Mildred was the eldest, the family’s chief prop and right hand, the unselfish one. She had a particularly large white face, narrow at the brows, broadening out like a pear, with rather pendulous cheeks. She wore pince-nez, and behind them her protuberant green eyes gleamed out with emotional benevolence. There was something marine about her appearance: that faintly phosphorescent flesh colour, like legs under water; that globularly soulful quality of the faces of fishes, mooning out from behind aquarium glass. She was no longer young, though it would appear now that she cannot have been elderly, as then seemed obvious. Her hair was the most uncompromising assertive red I have ever seen, and she wore it en Pompadour. The fact is, although she was so good and kind, that what with her height, her glasses, her phantasmagorical colouring, and her low, harsh, cockney-genteel voice, she was the picture of a horror-governess in a story by Mr. de la Mare. She gave the impression of one living in a state of perpetual self-dedication, almost of exaltation, due to her being so much in love with her family. Also she had a really tremendous feeling for kiddies, and it was she who set the whole thing going—established the contacts, clamped the bonds between the Ellisons and the Daintreys.
Next came Miss Viola, and I in my parallel position of second in the family felt for her the pangs of a particular sympathy: Not only this: she had established for herself beyond question the position I urgently coveted, of beauty of the family. Plunging once only into that fund of poetry that lurks in us all, Ma Daintrey, all Danäe to pre-Raphaelite influences, had achieved a flawless example of that movement—form, face, colour, name and all. My father admired her very much. She had a long curving goitrous neck and that incandescent skin that some red-haired people have, and long thickly fringed sandy-green eyes, and she did her hair I never could discover how in a low-lying amorphous swarming way over her ears and forehead, without a parting. She wore artistic clothes, peacock-blues and coppers, and she moved languidly, and her expression was ironical, fin de siècle. I don’t know from what signs I deduced that her family feared as well as loved and admired her; that unlike the rest they knew her to be actuated by motives of private rather than group interest, and might prove a disintegrating force in the structure. She never took the initiative in those family demonstrations, those waist-entwinings, pats, pressures, cossetings, endearments, though she accepted all that came her way. Agreeable, dutiful, but cool; and generally thinking something or other funny. She was always the last down to breakfast, and after each meal she lit a cigarette: emancipated. They called her the independent one, but what this really meant was kept dark until friendship had definitely matured and then only revealed, I noticed, in an inhibited way. It was that she had Left Home, and shared a flat in Chelsea with a pal. I believe she had also a career, something in the nature of fashion-designing for a select few. Cold she was, but not virginal as was Mildred, or immaturely sex-conscious, like Rosie. How was I aware that her sexual experience was profound, curious, and that it separated her from her sisters? I suppose I was just young enough. A few years more, and idées reçues, from cousins chiefly, and the Daily Mirror serials, would have interposed between me and the subject.
Rosie and Dolly were twins. Rosie had a red face spattered with such a storm of dark freckles that her features such as they were were almost obliterated. She had an enormous bouncing bosom and her hips and calves sprang out like footballs. Given to bursts of breathy giggling, perfectly good-natured and self-satisfied, she was the jolly one of the family; also the athletic one. She played a smashing game of tennis in the period style for ladies, with low whizzing drives and half-volleys off the back line, and only an occasional portentous starchy forward swoop: none of those leaps, those upward flings and strains then known to be so unwise for girls; and of course covered from neck to just above ankle in stiff white piqué.
Dolly also was plump and freckled, but she did not play tennis. She did not do anything except sit with her parents and go for little strolls with Mildred, holding her hand. She seemed in the best of health, so it was puzzling to hear her referred to as the delicate one. Later we came to understand what delicate meant. Dolly was on the weak-minded side. Overhearing, as was my wont, from a cache in the shrubbery, conversations not intended for my ears, I learnt that this affliction was due to catastrophe at birth. Rosie turned up first, a bonny baby. A few hours later who should come along but Dolly, a surprise to all. Overcome with the shock, Ma Daintrey went off in a deep deadly faint. Back from the edge of the grave she was finally coaxed; but meanwhile, in the general agitation, Dolly, poor soul, had been dropped upon the floor, and Dolly grew up to be the home girl.
Ma Daintrey was immense, a monolith. When she sat she went down backwards all of a piece and there she stayed, semi-reversed, gasping, stuck, until she was pulled up again. Barely confined by taut black satin, her stomach protruded with monstrous abruptness, as if worn superimposed, a fertility symbol, to mark the pregnancies which had been her life’s achievement. Her person expressed with overpowering force every kind of physical process. Even her voice, gassy, ruminative, replete, seemed a kind of alimentary canal and everything she said regurgitated. I remember when she spoke to us, or of us to our parents, how she seemed to swallow us down into her womanly amplitudes. She was prodigal of that kind of clucking indulgent pity whereby all manhood is castrated, the dignity of the intellect made naught, and humanity in general diminished to its swaddling-bands—the toy, pet, cross of suffering Woman.
Pa Daintrey was a very old gentleman, on the brink; he had heart trouble. Ma called him ducky and referred to him as her poor old dear. From him the girls inherited their height, and, one supposed, their pigmentation, but by this time he was totally bald. He had freckles on his huge old hands, freckles on his eyelids and ear-lobes, and a carbuncle on top of his head. Liver-coloured streaks and patches mingled with the freckles on a fungus-grey ground, forming an unappetising whole. He never spoke at all, not a word, nor, apart from an occasional flicker of a smile for Mildred, did he appear in any way receptive to the outer world. It was scarcely credible that he had once had the initiative to produce this giant brood who now enclosed him as a flourishing clump of red-hot pokers might enclose a decaying tree-stump. But initiative in every sense is exactly what once must have distinguished him; for—a point of no interest to me then—his career had been a romance of commerce. Starting as a suburban haberdasher in a very small way he had built up a great West End business, a store whose name was a household word. My mother had an account there. The Daintreys must have been extremely rich. I remember my parents saying so, and it was a surprise, for riches to me meant jewels, furs, silks, Rolls-Royces, a generally lavish style, and there was the reverse of this about the Daintreys. Their key-note was homely simplicity, and Ma was an inveterate postage-stamp remover. She kept a little second-hand store in her reticule, ready for further use.
Was this all of the Daintrey family? No, by no m
eans. There was our boy Norman, in the business; and there was Gladys, our married girl.
They both came down one week-end and stayed in the hotel, Gladys with a husband called Arthur, Norman with a wife called Esmée and a couple of children called, yes, Peter and Wendy. We were impatient to see them, and hung around the pier as the four o’clock boat drew in. Our excitement was in the main scientific—a question of adding and classifying further specimens. Would the hair be red? We had bets on it. My undisciplined imagination led me to declare for red, red, red, but Jess said no, the idea of having six red-haired children was simply idiotic, and she proved to be right. Norman and Gladys were both dark and sallow, with opaque expressionless brown eyes; so that the question then arose; was red hair anti-matrimonial? Esmée was tiny, sharp and glittering, with a lacquered artificial appearance, black, white and vermilion; high heels and a lot of scent. She was the only one of them all in whom the riches seemed to come out. She was a real de luxe piece. The children were skinny and shrill, monkey-faced, a ravening predatory pair. Dancing on their toes in a perpetual nervous frenzy, they questioned, demanded, objected, entreated. They were precocious and self-possessed, and we thought them shockingly spoilt. They looked as if they could bite, and they did bite. We saw Wendy fasten her rat’s teeth into the arm of their Swiss maid. The blood came, and Mariette retired holding a handkerchief to the place, silently weeping. Wendy went running away across the beach, and from a distance started to throw stones into the sea and kick up the sand. Nobody said anything.
Ma Daintrey sighed over her grandchildren and said their little brains were too forward and wore them out, but their mother seemed not to be worried. She took more notice of Norman, who was an excessively uxorious husband; he petted and pawed her and went on as if he were on his honeymoon. ‘He worships her, Mrs. Ellison dear,’ sighed Ma. It was a great man’s weakness. What he went through when the children were born no tongue could tell. Pounds he lost in a single night—pounds. Another facer for me.
Gladys was a placid heavy character, weighted I thought with the consciousness of being the only married daughter. Whereas they were merely loyal and kind to Esmée, they doted on Arthur. He was short, broad, stout, pleased with himself. He had a popular line in wisecracks and gallant repartee. When after some sally they all surrounded and fell on him it seemed each time as if it must be the end of him, as if he must emerge married to another of them or to all of them. But out of all the blouses and hairpins he would bob up again sleek and tough, his small eyes snapping and beaming behind his rimless glasses, and go off well in control of the situation, with Gladys on his arm. They couldn’t make a fool of him, they couldn’t affect his jaunty masculinity. He’d picked Glad, the brunette; he’d meant to, and that was that. They’d been married five years. No little ones? No little ones, not even a Disappointment. It was a grief. But they were an ideal couple. Arthur was a real dear, the best of husbands. There was plenty of time.
Years later, I saw, in an exhibition of French nineteenth-century masters, a painting which stirred me with a peculiar excitement. My belief is that it was by Gauguin, and that it depicted a towering dark blue wave lifting within it the head and breast of a siren with red hair. Undine? All I remember—and this may be distorted by the passage of time and the violence of my feelings of the moment—is the prussian blue, snow-crested wave, a pale cheek laid sideways in it and that barbaric torch of red streaking up across the canvas. The literary, the supernatural elements in this odd work were perhaps enough in themselves to compel my imagination, for I was then an inveterate responder to the romantic in painting; but why that shock, personal, physical and confused? I think now that buried associations were struggling to live again, and that I was being confronted with some phantasy image of Miss Viola Daintrey against a background of summer sea. Not that any bathing photograph of her or any other of them comes back to me. I am sure I should have remembered them in bathing-suits. My belief is that none of them could swim. I know I got the notion that sea-water must be injurious to people of their complexion.
We ourselves were regular and methodical family bathers. My mother would wade out with my brother in her arms and stand waist high dipping him up and down. ‘Boy splash sister! Splash! Sister won’t splash Boy!’ But it was no good. He did as he was told, directing a feeble spray from a limp reluctant paw at one or other of us, his face set grimly in suffering and disgust. After a few moments he turned blue, his teeth started madly to chatter, and he was removed to his Petit Beurres. Then my father, setting an example of stylish limb-work, would swim out a short distance, and we would accompany him, a row of red rubber caps, competing with each other in the length and motive power of our Bath Club breast-strokes.
Peter and Wendy played on the breakwater, jumping from as high as they dared on to the sands. Stuck, Wendy screamed to be got down. I came hot foot from shrimping to assist her. She looked at me and her eyes went sharp and she said: ‘I don’t want you to lift me. I don’t like your face much.’ My arms dropped to my side. A murky tinge overspread the serene blue afternoon light, the caressing breeze scorched me with a sudden fan of flame. Could anyone have heard? In my ears her voice shrieked my murdered vanity from end to end of the bay. But nobody’s head was raised to stare, no finger pointed. Children went on digging and running with buckets, nurses went on sitting with their bare feet stuck out in front, letting the sea air get at their corns. It was a convulsion of nature for me alone. I threw a few pebbles and took myself off—away from the beach, away from all creation. My back was aware of her, still standing on the breakwater watching me. As I started to climb the first steps up the cliff path I saw her, out of the corner of my eye, climb nimbly down and scamper away, spindly, fierce, a stinging insect contained in a shell of sponge-bag waders.
There was nobody in the hotel. Behind lowered sunblinds it dozed and all within was empty vistas and muffled reflections in brass and mahogany and my own figure, slipping across mirrors up the stairs. Furtively I shut the door of my bedroom and went to the glass. The face a child dislikes. Then I am ugly. At this period I wore a plate to straighten my teeth. Hitherto I had been proud of it, but now I deplored its glittering bar and hooks, and observed that it made my mouth protrude in an unpleasing way. My nose was a lump, my eyes not blue, as I wished, but hazel. I thought too there was something sheepish and leering about my expression. A hate object, in a brown holland frock.
I looked out of the window and saw Ma and Pa Daintrey asleep in the garden, side by side in basket chairs. And doubtless their family were somewhere forming a convivial group; and my parents were taking a walk together, and my sisters were, I knew, making a seaweed garden together. Everywhere else was merrymaking and communion; I, I alone, was rejected and cast forth.
There was nothing to do but to embrace solitude. I would go up on to the downs and miss my tea. I went out along the turf walk, up the hill past the crazy grey house with turrets, and the square red house, so prosperous-looking, where a family of public schoolboys in white flannels held perpetual tennis-parties beyond cropped weedless lawns and beds of begonias, geraniums and antirrhinums; through the pine coppice and out on to the climbing cliff path which led through a place of brambles and gorse bushes to the heathery downs.
With some idea of hiding from the world I sought a shallow disused quarry overlooking the sea, and flung myself upon a bed of heather. Between the island and the mainland the sea was laid out like a length of blue silk. Features of the opposite coast were brought near and clear, as in a telescope: a solitary narrow white tower on the horizon; the spit of sand ending in a low sand-coloured castle where Charles I had been imprisoned; the mud flats between whose deeply scooped indentations the island boats churned in and out upon their brief journeys; the heavy woods lipping the flats’ far rim. A long way below me the tide was out, and children bent with nets among the prawn-concealing rocks. That scarlet blob must be Sylvia, clambering in the struts of the lifeboat jetty, plunged, doubtless
, in some megalomaniac dream of shipwreck and single-handed rescue. Rob Roy canoes hovered close to the shore. Farther out a few small red and white sails crawled, paused, crawled on again. Once in a while something invisible seemed to skim the expanse of water, causing it to wrinkle and contract through all its surface. The Duchess of Fife emerged from behind the headland, plying her daily pleasure round, and was drawn across the middle distance.
The heather was springy beneath me, with a musical hiss like the last vibrations of a chorus of infinitesimal tambourines when I moved about on it. Gheen bugs and ladybirds laboured among the dry snapping roots. Heather is homely stuff, its wildness seems domesticated: because of the calendars and picture postcards, I suppose; and that cushiony toughness, like nursery furniture, made for wear and tear; and the amount of minute beetle and spider life that goes on in it. The smell is sweet too: it has a fresh cordial warmth and innocence.
All this combined to comfort me. That state, associated with mental anguish, of intense visual receptivity, gave way to lightness of spirit, and to a desire to make up some poetry. No sooner tapped than the facile fount began to flow. No trouble at all in those days. Heather, weather, brim, dim, bloom, gloom and off we go: every rhyme rhyming, every fairy flitting, stars glimmering, moon beaming, wind sighing, buds breaking—never stumped for a subject, never uneasy about a sentiment, each completed work as neat, tinkling and bland as a poem by Wilhelmina Stitch,* and quite satisfactory to myself.
The Gipsy's Baby Page 6