Lying there in a trance of composition I beheld suddenly, some way off, a sight I had never seen before. It was simply my parents walking together. From over the crest of the down they came, down the winding turf path, shoulder to shoulder, a couple like any other couple. Totally unconscious of me, removed from me as if I saw them in a dream, familiar strangers, walking in a place that made a blank of me, cancelled my existence, in a place where they had been together before I was born … Here was I, there were they: my father with his Leander-ribboned panama and his stick, my mother with a white veil tied round her hat: no connection between us. What could they be talking about? They went by and disappeared behind a hedge of brambles.
I began to think there might be a snake somewhere near me in the heather. I could hear it rustling. Unnerved, bored now, resentful besides and hungry, I got up and started to hurry home; my one wish, to return as soon as possible to society; my fear, that by my mystifying absence I had isolated myself once and for all, and would never get back.
There they all were, sitting peacefully in the garden watching the sunset—my parents, the Daintreys, Jess and Sylvia. My brother had been removed to bed, and so had the demon children. With a ghastly attempt at nonchalance I emerged from the shrubbery and advanced towards them.
‘Why, Rebecca, where have you been?’ said my mother with calm affection.
‘Just for a walk.’ Strangled, sheepish voice.
‘She looks flushed,’ remarked Ma Daintrey; and there was that in her tone which hinted at consumption.
‘Come along, old lady, take a pew over here by me,’ said Miss Mildred.
I did so. I suppose the marks of crisis must have been apparent, for neither Jess nor Sylvia questioned me, not even afterwards; and after a few minutes my father looked across at me and winked.
Later that evening while Jess and I were brushing our hair for supper, there was a knock at the door, and Miss Mildred put her head in.
‘Look here, you two old ducks,’ she said, ‘the kiddies want to say good-night to you. We can’t get them to settle till they’ve seen you. Be dears and just pop in for a second.’
They were in their small beds, relaxed for once, harmless-looking, almost appealing in their sleeping-suits. They were on the look-out for us, and wriggled and simpered and rolled over on their backs like puppies as we approached.
‘Good-night,’ we said, embarrassed.
Jess took the plunge and bent down to kiss them. I followed suit, beginning warily with Peter. He flung up his arms and seized us in turn, violently, round the neck, clutching our heads to his. Now for the other one. Would she spurn me, bury herself, hit out at me? She flung up her arms and seized me violently round the neck, clutching my head to hers.
I often wondered afterwards if she planned this good-night episode to test the measure of my resentment or observe the extent of my afternoon’s discomfiture. It could not have been the promptings of remorse.
Jess was the favourite of Miss Mildred. She would take Jess strolling along the turf walk or along the path that backed the beach and ran behind the bathing-huts. More than once, coming out of the voluptuous shop by the pier where the old gentleman with white side-whiskers sold marine objects—tropical shells and shell boxes and frames, and glass models of lighthouses filled with many-coloured sand—I would see them ahead of me; Jess’s little waist encircled by the long arm of her companion, their back views—Miss Mildred’s so large, stiff and military, Jess’s so pliably and neatly turned—leaning sentimentally together. The look of them filled me with mixed scorn and envy. Jess would never refer to these times of communion. Probably the sloppiness made her self-conscious, but on the other hand to be thus distinguished caused her to feel grown-up and important. She always returned from these walks with a proud secretive curl to her lip. I expect Miss Mildred confided in her.
It was over poetry that Miss Mildred and I came together; for she also was a poet. One day she said to me:
‘If you will show me your poems I will show you mine.’
Mine were written out in a black copybook, hers in a white vellum one, stamped with her monogram in gold. Her handwriting was exceptionally delicate, clear and pretty; mine was not. She liked my poems and I liked hers: we were twin songstresses. Her subjects were chiefly religious, but there were some about little children and about friendship, with a refined veiled glance at love. There were also a few humorous compositions which I passed over quickly, for I deplored light verse, thinking it infra dig. I was aware without a word said that she wished her works to be brought to the notice of my father, so I showed them to him. In his position of distinguished man of letters he was constantly being sent manuscripts for his advice and encouragement. He treated the authors—chiefly very young men and middle-aged ladies—in the same way as in my literary capacity he treated me—with unfailing sympathy and consideration. Never would he have crushed an aspirant as I at seventeen was crushed by a clever young man to whom I was rash enough to show a few chosen pieces. He said simply as he handed them back that they were like cream buns. During the course of my life I have had a woman’s share of humiliation, but nothing has ever equalled the deadly effect of this. I am sure my father never told anyone their poems were awful. Once a lady called Marcia MacLanaghan sent him a slim volume called Spindrift with a long letter enclosed saying in a huge frantic slapdash hand: ‘I had to write out my loneliness or DIE OF IT!!!’ This struck me forcibly: desperate remedies seemed called for; and I remember his sigh and comically rueful look when I anxiously inquired what reply he would make.
Miss Mildred’s poems sprang from no such extremity; but there was no doubt, I knew it then, that she was a sad person in search of consolations. I do not know in what terms of cautious benevolence he complimented her, but I know that afterwards she looked extremely gratified, and said to me, wiping her glasses:
‘Your father is my ideal of a gentleman.’
She was a great one for vers d’occasion. Upon my birthday, which fell during the holidays, I received by post a pale pink envelope addressed in her handwriting, and drew from it a pale pink scalloped gilt-edged card inscribed as follows, in a frame of hand-painted roses:
To Rebecca, on her eleventh birthday,
Child of my heart, sing on! Thy childish song
Makes sweet with melody the childish day;
And when life’s shadows fall upon the way
The hearts that love thee best in love will pray
That rose-strewn hours be thine thy whole life long.
M. D.
The effect of this was to inflate me. Child of my heart? I had thought this to be Jess. Sing on? Would I not! But the thought of thanking her suitably gave me a sickly feeling, and my mother had to do so for me, and did it in a deprecating style. My mother had many a subtle way of deflating vanity.
It was some time later that our Pekinese died and one of us wrote to acquaint Miss Mildred of the bereavement. She sent us by return of post an elegy, which my father read aloud to us. I know it hit about below the belt in a staggering way, but I can only recall the last three lines:
But perhaps far away
Where wee angels play
There’s a corner for Mandy too.
We all broke down, and Jess stormed from the room in indignant anguish and slammed the door.
A faint dubious memory returns to me of my father being instrumental in getting a piece of light verse of Miss Mildred’s accepted by Punch, and of the great pride and pleasure this caused the Daintreys, and of my mother saying: ‘Wasn’t it a little rash?’—meaning would he not be deluged by her further efforts. But he never was. Miss Mildred was not my ideal of a lady, but she was one.
Miss Viola sat before the mirror in her bedroom, and I sat curled up on the bed watching her.
‘I wish I had red hair like you,’ I said.
Miss Viola smiled at herself, at me, mysteri
ously in the glass.
‘My hair is auburn,’ she said.
She took the pins out, let it fall down and started to brush it.
‘May I look in your cupboard?’ I said.
‘Do.’
I opened the wardrobe and gloated at her dresses, hanging up long and limp in a row. She said:
‘Which shall I wear to-night? You choose.’
I unhooked a copper-coloured one made of some heavy crêpe-like material, with a studded gold belt, and laid it on the bed.
‘This one.’
‘Oh, that’s your favourite, is it?’ She went on looking amused.
‘You look beautiful in them all.’
‘I designed this one,’ she said. ‘When you’re a little older I’ll design you a dress to wear to dinner parties. I believe you and I like the same things.’
‘Can it be crimson?’ I said.
‘Yes, it can be crimson.’
She took off whatever she was wearing and stood up in a broderie anglaise petticoat and a camisole threaded with mauve ribbons. Her hair came round her shoulders. She looked absolutely unlike herself and I felt embarrassed.
‘Could I be getting fat?’ She smoothed her hips, looking in the glass.
‘No, no.’
Everything I said came out in a strangled voice, and I had difficulty in breathing.
She poured out water in the basin and sponged her face, her neck, and her long strong-looking white freckled arms.
I watched her splashing and dipping and drying. I am sure no creams or lotions went on her face: nothing but water, and afterwards some powder on a big swansdown puff.
I said:
‘I always have thought it’s not very nice to be the middle one of the family … like you and me.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, because you’re not the eldest … and you’re not the youngest …’
She paused in the act of twisting her back hair and looked at me thoughtfully in the glass.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But on the other hand it’s like the jam in a sandwich. Snug. You’ll find there are advantages.’
‘Have you found advantages?’
She nodded and smiled in the glass. She put on the copper dress over her head and the folds fell down round her and she fastened the gold belt round her waist. She looked like the illustrated princesses in the Andrew Lang* fairy books.
I said:
‘Major Trotter’s always following you about, isn’t he?’
Miss Viola broke into a chuckle. That was what fascinated me most about her—her chuckle; and her low slow voice.
‘You extraordinary creature!’ Again she looked in the glass.
‘I think he must be in love with you.’
She leaned back in her chair to laugh.
‘Do you like him?’ I said.
‘Not in the least,’ she said. ‘Not in the—very—least.’
Major Trotter was a retired military gentleman with a heavy white moustache and a skin like that brown corrugated cardboard used for wrapping up books. He wore a spruce white duck suit, white suede brogues and a monocle. We thought him a very elegant figure of a gentleman. He was staying in the hotel and seemed lonely and on the prowl. He had made various attempts to enter into relations with the Daintreys, and I had noticed his monocle fixed in a business-like way upon the beauty of the family; but she never appeared even to see him. As a matter of fact it did not take him long to decide he was aiming too high. A few days later we observed that he had established contact with a high flat lady-like person from the other hotel. She was much taller than Major Trotter (he liked them so, one inferred) and had a gaunt outsize in faces, brightly rouged cheeks, fuzzy hair and a lot of large teeth in a rapacious non-shutting mouth. When he took her out boating she wore a flapping picture-hat. After that we scarcely saw him and when we did he took no interest in us.
Miss Viola took up a green scent-bottle, tipped it and dabbed the stopper behind each ear.
‘Do you like the smell?’ she said, bringing it over to me where I sat entranced, goggling, upon the bed.
‘Mm!’ She dabbed behind my ears. ‘Is that the right place to put scent?’
‘So they say.’ She smiled. ‘Dans la Forêt it’s called.’
Immediately dark green and scented glades enclosed us. By this time I was overcome by such a sense of excitement that I almost had to lie down on the bed; and what should she do next but light a cigarette and smoke it while she moved about the room, tidying things.
‘One little puff before we dine,’ she said. ‘My respected Pa doesn’t like it at all, at all. I try to spare his feelings.’
‘Does your mother mind?’
She nodded, opening her narrow eyes at me.
‘Ma thinks it’ll be the death of me.’
‘It won’t, will it?’
I had never before seen a woman smoke and felt extremely disturbed.
‘No, it won’t.’
She stubbed out the cigarette and threw it far out of the window. She looked at me and chuckled again.
‘Rebecca, Rebecca!’ she said. ‘Come along now.’
The Daintreys were great ones for organising expeditions. Once they took us all round the island in a coach and four. This was before the days of motor charabancs. There was a man beside the driver who blew a tune on a trumpet from time to time. I see Mildred and Viola, Rosie and Dolly, in straw hats and fresh white blouses, sitting with straight backs in a row behind the box. Their faces, warm with reflected sunlight, smile down at me as I clamber up.
We visited Carisbrooke Castle and saw the donkey turn the water-wheel, and after that we threw pebbles down a well and waited, counting, for the thin menacing splash and lugubrious echo at the bottom. We also visited Osborne House, but of its beauties and special features I remember nothing, for by this time I wanted badly to go somewhere and would not say so. I remember Miss Mildred murmuring at one point, ‘Hadn’t we all better take the opportunity?’—and everybody doing so except myself. Pressed further, I replied with a vehement negative, and Rosie said: ‘She must be an angel,’ and there was laughter. Once embarked upon this fatal course, I was obliged to hold to it, and my only other recollection of the outing is the torture I endured upon the long drive home.
Miss Mildred must definitely have enjoyed the society of children, for another time she asked my mother to let her take the whole lot of us, my brother included, over to the mainland to meet my father on a return journey from London.
It was always a pleasure to embark on one of those paddle steamers at the beginning or end of the holidays; but to be taking a pure joy ride, there and back, was a thing we had never thought of, and bore all the marks of a new and intense experience. The first pleasure was stepping over the gangway and finding oneself detached from land, testing the possibilities of another element; the second was the sound of churning paddles as we drew away from the pier; then came the satisfaction of seeing the shore recede, of picking out familiar objects—tents, people, houses, dogs—as they dwindled. Next we kept a sharp look-out for the Needles. When these impressive forms had been observed we were able to turn our attention to the boat itself.
Year after year, everything was the same: same ticket-collector, same stewardess, same smell of shrimps, brasso, red plush and Indian tea; same sailors in navy-blue jerseys with red initials on their chests. There was one in particular, large, with a genial, knobby raw-beef face and a flaxen curl quiffed up in the forefront of his sailor cap who was confused in my mind with Ham Peggotty.* A mystery was that as the boat neared land these Jolly Jack Tars always turned into porters, and said: ‘Porter, madam?’ and carried one’s luggage. It seemed as if some accompanying physical transformation should have occurred; at least a porter’s cap. It bothered us for years: were they porters? Were they sailors? Even the passengers showed only minut
e variations, for the same families came back summer after summer to the island.
Altogether the journey was so queer, so different from ordinary life, and yet with its unalterable features so familiar, that going on board was like re-reading a favourite story known by heart. There was the same sense of partaking in a creative experience: in something unreal and yet more real than life.
The rocking-horse movement of the boat caused my brother to become over-excited. He attracted attention by imbecile shouting and jumping, and made dashes to the side, flinging his burstingly stuffed legs alternately over the rail. Miss Mildred, who had a passive uncritical way with children, wasting no words and emanating an aura of firm serenity—perfect, I now think—removed him by hand to the first-class saloon. There she composed herself beside the window, gazing moonily at nothing, while he ran and rolled upon the red plush benches, or, clasping the pillars which supported the ceiling, let his lower limbs go and swirled drunkenly round and around them.
Unable to stomach the spectacle of our brother’s release, we withdrew once more to the deck. There in the bows stood the boy who always stood in the bows. Clothed in navy-blue seaman’s jersey and shorts, hands thrust in pockets, hair like frayed old rope, a drab nondescript grubby nosing dog’s face. It seemed he travelled back and forth upon the steamer for ever, totally unattached. If one ventured to come and stand beside him, his extinct eye darted over one’s head, he turned away with a wild tuneless snatch of whistling, stern and preoccupied, as if the boat were his and might at any moment be rammed and founder. I wished to hear him speak, in order to discover whether or not he was a common boy; but I never did.
Now comes the best of the voyage, when the boat leaves the channel and begins to wind through ribbony deep-fretted flats to the pier and the harbour. Far over the expanses of glowing burnt sienna mud, a growth of luminous and tawny rice grass is blocked in as if with a palette knife. The same seagulls perch top-heavy upon the white stakes that mark the estuary’s course; other waterfowl skim and scuttle across the marshes. Small sailing craft float past us running before the wind on a wing of red, white or tan sail. There, as usual, comes the sailing dinghy Seamew; the dark boy in a white public school sweater at the tiller; with him the fair pig-tailed girl in a green blazer: brother and sister, or maybe cousins, fortunate pair; and they are hero and heroine of an enthralling Book for Girls about a jolly pair of boy and girl chums, Jack and Peggy (Pegs), who charter a boat for the hols and have ripping adventures. They wave to us; we wave back: romantic moment. Receding, they stay fixed, an illustration, between blue water and blue sky, their crimson sail behind them. Till next summer, next summer …
The Gipsy's Baby Page 7