by Molly Keane
Leda needed to balance her favours. Jealousies and priorities were unwise. That was the reason that brought her one evening (when she might have been drinking vodka with April) to May’s locked door. She knocked. There was a delay full of May’s unattractive cough, and she put a slow sad rhythm into her next knock.
“Oh, Leda, it’s you, Leda?” May said through the locked door before she opened it in lavish welcome. “Jolly good! Come on in.”
“If you could do up this zip for me – you’re locking us in? How mysterious.”
“One must have a place of one’s own,” May stated pontifically, “I do all my porcelain restoration in here, and I design my tweed pictures. This room is very me. I wish you could see it, Leda.”
“I can feel it,” Leda said.
“Yes, I suppose it’s full of atmosphere.”
“Choking with vibes,” Leda agreed. She felt a little cross with longing for a nip of vodka.
“All my precious things are here,” May took her eyes away from the rabbit warren she had been re-arranging when Leda knocked. “At this moment of time, looking back with hindsight, I know where each one came from.”
“Do tell.”
“Wouldn’t you be bored?”
“You’re not exactly a bore,” Leda said: a caress.
“I suppose I have a fairly good eye for porcelain, I’ve picked up some rather nice little pieces in my time.” It was exciting to tell and not to tell. May lit a cigarette with a snap and a flourish.
“I hear you – another death tube,” Leda giggled. “I haven’t smoked since – oh, well, I think I’ll try, just one.”
May put a cigarette between Leda’s fingers with as much care and gentleness as if she put a toy in a baby’s hand, or an ivory ring to bite on.
“I remember now,” Leda said. “Balkan Sobranies.”
“Those were Daddy’s.”
“Of course.”
“I smoke Players and they cost exactly four times as much.”
“Exactly. Take this away, darling. I don’t think I really like it. What a waste.”
May pinched out the cigarette and preserved it. She had liked the idea of their smoking together – rather raffish and forbidden with all the anti-nicotine propaganda.
Leda turned her head, questing the room. “Tell me more,” she said, “about you.”
“There’s the garden – that keeps the wolf from the door. And I think up lectures and displays for my flower group.”
“And you have your little dog – far the nicest dog in the house,” Leda offered the praise as a bone to another dog.
“Gripper. No, Grips, basket! – He’s a character. I wonder if he loves me? Do you think he loves me?” They were statements, not questions. “And then, my tweed pictures. I love the work. I’ve just done something rather special, I’m quite pleased with it. The thatch on the cottage is real heather. And the blue on the mountains, I know I’ve got it right.”
“Did you ever weave a nesting swan?”
“Oh, no. Swans make me think of Jasper.”
“Perhaps. And then? Go on.”
“My collection means a lot to me. Even the broken pieces I’ve found – restoration is my worst hobby, I’m afraid.”
“Let me hold one – oh, it’s a rabbit, how sweet! I’m going to find your mend.”
“I bet you can’t.”
“No. I can’t.” Leda’s finger tip was meticulously tracing the hair-wide scar. “I remember when you had a baby hippo without a head. You took him everywhere with you in a matchbox, lying in cotton wool.”
“Oh, Leda, you can’t remember that,” May coughed luxuriously in her pleasure. “I changed to rabbits,” she said in a collector’s voice. “I’ve secured some really interesting little pieces. Junk shops were much easier once.” She looked across the room to the rabbits, not yet quite properly positioned in or out of their burrows: her fingers itched to place them, while an urge to tell Leda all, to have her entire attention, ran through her like a flame.
May knew that it was a flame to extinguish before it took possession. Telling would belittle the power lent by her secret. Unless she could disclose the whole reason behind her adventures, a reason she neither understood nor questioned, the tale was purposeless. Never told, its vibrations were hers alone. She left Leda, distancing the danger so narrowly escaped. At the fire-place she picked the agate marble from among the grazing rabbits and rolled it between her thumb and middle finger, thinking affectionately of poor duped Alys.
“What are you doing over there?” Leda knew May had moved away. She could hear her fumbling, noisy and invisible, a mouse in the dark.
“Putting the little people to beddy-byes.”
May’s silly voice sounded hurried and secretive. Leda heard an embarrassed delight in it. She thought of a girl longing for, and shunning assault. She heard a drawer closed and locked, and her mind was filled with curiosity. There was a confidence to be won she felt sure, and a proper time in which to win it. Not now. Dinner now.
“What do you think Jasper is giving us? He says a surprise.”
“It’s too obvious. He said he bagged the last cucumber in the supermarket today – got it just before horrid Ulick.”
“What does that tell us?”
“Salmon, of course. Madly extravagant, and one thing Jasper doesn’t cook very well.”
“Yes. What a pity I don’t like salmon. I don’t know why.”
“Don’t eat it.”
“I couldn’t not. Too rude. Poor old boy, he tries so hard.” A thread of denigration and complicity was split between them.
7
Time Translated
Now, when they were together, she leaned towards Jasper’s voice, an inflection of intention as though she must see where it came from. She heard in it the inherited sweetness of voices in an uncle’s generation, the same heights and falls, the narrowness, never a wide sound. Each word was born to its subject, unpremeditated. She enjoyed the level effect, no change to speed or noise, even when he was being nasty to the girls. She knew her voice matched with his. Unaware of age she required of Jasper a response beyond sense or time. She needed him – a bird of youth between her hands.
Evading the sisters’ company became a game between them, a game they played together with unprofessed amusement. She would shrug and laugh at the girls’ absurdities. For their nonsense talks they chose the times when dogs were walked or fed, or, if it was Tiger, scented and dressed. Not that Leda neglected the sisters; she gave her deep attention to April’s spring combinations of stuffs and colours, and obedience to the harsh régimes of diet and exercise. She needed time and she bought it.
May’s flower operations and arrangements demanded a more complicated and exhausting response. May could hear Leda’s comments, and there was no vodka to alleviate absent interest.
“What has she arranged this time?” Leda asked Jasper on one of May’s bustling exits. “Do tell, so that I can say the right things.”
“The Taj Mahal in white daffodils, and it’s not finished building yet.”
“You don’t think we could escape to the kitchen before she gets back? I’m crying with hunger too – April only allowed spinach and junket for lunch. Do let’s. Please.”
She sounded like a pheasant courting in the spring. He supposed it was because her neck was so fat that her voice had neither aged nor roughened. He could listen, but he avoided looking as he took her arm, fearing to let her stumble and crash on the kitchen stairs. “I can do it,” she said, and took only his hand, like a child in the dark, as she went carefully, heavily, down the stone flight, an old woman except in her voice and gestures.
In the kitchen they conversed in a language common to both. In the same way that sculptors or writers may speak a little of their work, not understanding their accepted gifts, only the industry that brought the work to – as it were – the birth, Leda and Jasper discussed cooking. For Leda had probed a chink through Jasper’s reticence. She stood now where no one
had trespassed, and she was sure of her ground.
There is nothing warmer than two cooks confiding. It is a matter of giving counsel and keeping secrets. Hinged to Leda’s true interest in food was her total recall of the methods followed in her father’s great kitchens, the methods by which they cooked, how they served, and with what accompanying sauces, their measurements simmering nostalgically in her mind.
True to himself, Jasper was a little miserly in imparting the secrets of his own great dishes. Although Leda could cook no more, he felt sure her hostess nuns, when she went back to them, could be guaranteed to make a nonsense of his specialities. Less and less was said about the length of her visit; so far, nothing more about payment during her stay. Jasper didn’t want to hear that idea confirmed, he so dreaded permanency. In the meantime, admitting Leda to his kitchen was a good new tease for his sisters, besides providing interest and information on the subject nearest to him – a subject less difficult to follow than his pursuits in the groves.
“Tell me again about your watercress soup,” she might ask. And he would almost tell her, then veer into conger eel soup – he knew the nuns would be hard put to it to capture a conger: saffron, one clove, only one, such a wine, such herbs. “Not so much,” she would amend a quantity, “only so much.” There was something less than a tremor of excitement in his agreement, but there was the edge of a stir.
“And do your sisters actually like conger eel soup?”
“Hate it.”
“Then, why?”
“I must have some fun.”
“Of course,” she accepted the implication absolutely. “Even with Baby June?”
“June would swallow anything I cooked – after all, I swallow Christy Lucey.”
“Do tell, why?”
“Baby’s world spins round Christy Lucey. I know her world costs a fortune. We’ld be nearly solvent if Durraghglass was horseless, henless, pigless and the land was let, or –”
“Sold?” She said it quietly.
“Oh, I can’t make up my mind to go to those lengths,” Jasper escaped even from the notion of such an issue. “Things may never happen.” He looked miserable in his indecision.
“You must like your sisters quite a lot.”
“Not at all. No more than they like me.”
“Oh, they do.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Then how have you lived together so long?”
“That’s the way Mummie fixed it. Charges on the estate. Rights of Residence. April pays quite a bit. June works like a slave.”
“And May?”
“Don’t let’s talk about May.”
“I see your point. So,” she paused, “they’re yours till death.”
Some importance between them shrank as she stopped talking to listen, then broke the silence to say: “May’s back. Do you hear her? Aren’t you aching to know how it went with the flower club? I want to make her say, ‘You know, I’m their President’ again.” She got to her feet and considered the direction of the door.
“You won’t have any difficulty in that,” he said crossly, as he moved to guide her.
“No, Jasper.” She denied his help. “Don’t come. I’ll find my own way. I need to. I’ld like to.”
Jasper let her go, turning back from the kitchen door because he did not care to watch her rather toad-like ascent of the kitchen stairs. Coming down from the hall he heard voices and laughter and felt nonsensically deprived of her company, in which there was neither stricture nor criticism. While she had been there unseeing, a globe of the past held the dirty kitchen in which he stood now, irresolute whether to go upstairs and make his bed before he forgot that he meant to do so, or to take the chicken out of the Frigidaire before it was too late to de-frost it for dinner. Both necessities faded in the immediate beastly task of boiling sheep’s hearts for the dogs’ dinners, before they went rotten. At least he had postponed that long walk upstairs, as well as the familiar trudge round the kitchen to the larder, until a more convenient moment. Jasper’s days were full of such irritating lapses of memory, and the small comforts of their postponements.
* * *
Only June stayed uncharmed, outside the circle shrinking closer in the house. She was occupied with her daily work, too early out in the morning, too early to bed at night. She was supported in independence by the live multitude reliant on her; by her ambitions for the hens to lay, for the calves to refrain from scour, for Sweetheart’s litter to thrive. Everything living on the place depended on her and her acolyte. June was too guileless to be aware of any competition for favour. That opening flash of memory with which Leda had surprised and flattered her was overtaken by the recollection of kittens moving in a bucket of water. The moment when kisses and pinches and tears had been suffered June put aside, unquestioned and disliked.
One of June’s early tasks of the day was the laying and setting of the drawing-room fire. In the morning the drawing-room of Durraghglass was searched through by a cold spring light that had no sun in it. Every damp stain on the wallpaper streeled its evidence of neglect; each worn chair-cover glistened like an unhealthy skin. Wood dust and turf dust were heavy as fur on glass lustres and wall-brackets. Even May’s fragile and poetic decoration of white cherry appeared weighted by what the mind knew of unshadowed dust. The room was colder than the day outside. Frigid and fireless, it waited, silent as if locked and left for evidence after a crime, or perhaps in acceptance of some event or change. The most spoilt and cherished room can retreat into this awful distance before the day’s services have begun and its solitudes are exorcised.
Unaware of any threat in the chill, Leda came in and made her way carefully and surely to her usual chair – it had already become “her” chair – near the now dead fire. Her coat draped its folds round her, elegant as a Chinese robe; she sat, her knees crossed, her back comfortable in a sort of uncomplaining patience. Presently April would take her for the walk prescribed by the sacred regime. The morning would pass and at lunchtime she would entertain Jasper. There would be absurd intimacies. She was constructing them in her head now as she sat in her darkness.
It was June who brought her ringing ash bucket and kindly rustle of newspaper and heavily breathing dog to interrupt this waiting for April.
“It’s Baby, I know. Good morning, Baby.”
“Good morning.”
“And Tiny? Are you going to talk to me today, Tiny?”
“Ah, she’s too deaf,” June excused her. “Sit down there, old girl.” June knelt down for the proper business of setting the fire. Leda was silent for a moment before making a plaintive suggestion.
“Baby, when will you take me to meet your pigs?”
“Ah, you’ld only be all muck.” June’s answer was strictly practical.
“Hens, then, and a new laid egg to hold in my hand – an egg for breakfast tomorrow.”
“I think Jasper wants all today’s for his soufflé.”
“How sad. I haven’t felt a proper egg for years and years.”
“Have your nuns no hens? They should keep a few hens.” June sounded quite disapproving. “I might gather up a setting for you to take back to them,” she offered.
Leda was not looking for that sort of response.
“Would you take me round the stableyard, then?”
“There’s a big change there – you wouldn’t know the place,” June sighed.
“But I could remember. I just want to walk from one loose box to the next. I want to hear doors opening and shutting and bolts slipping in, and horses’ hooves sounding different on bedding and cobblestones, I want to put my hand in oats. I want to smell a stable before it’s mucked out. I want to feel the strength of a horse when I touch him.”
“I didn’t know you were that keen.”
“I used to go round the horses with Uncle Valentine. He laughed at me – I asked such silly questions.”
“Yes.” June’s “yes” put a stop on the past. “Well, the only horse in the yard today
is out in the bog-field this morning under a New Zealand rug.”
“But you have a good groom.”
“Groom? I have a good lad all right.”
Leda heard June’s voice soften and felt instantly that her thumb was on some pulse of change.
“He’s only young and he can turn his hand to any job on the place, and he’s great to ride a school on a young horse.”
“You must value him like gold.”
“I’ld be sunk here only for Christy Lucey.”
“Christy Lucey – lovely-sounding name. You don’t ride any more yourself?”
“I’ve had a few falls too many. Christy’s the fellow gets up on them now.”
Christy, and Christy again. Leda knew that she had picked up the key to some odd little lock. The time might come to turn that key.
Another Tuesday came round and every day that Leda stayed, the lifts and changes, almost imperceptible in each new day, lifted and changed a little further, a little more giddily.
Through the cooking flirtation with Jasper came inspired memories, back to school holidays, when puddings were all-important; together she and Jasper could recall the delicious horror of an orange soufflé crowned by crystallised violets. Mille feuilles they allowed. Once, she reminded him, there had been four different puddings for lunch on Sundays and four silver vases of sweet peas down the length of the table – violet sweet peas.
When she remembered things like that Jasper could nearly smell his mother’s scent and brush with a ghost kiss the faintly mauve powder on her morning cheek. So could Leda. They had this shadow of a share in Aunt Violet. Leda, he thought, must always think of her as she was before any blow struck or sickness dismembered and sucked away all happiness and usefulness. Jasper felt free in Leda’s ignorance of such a change. Leda knew she would enjoy that dark place. In time she would explore it.
With May, Leda’s endless patience was sorely tried. She maintained it, obstinate in scenting out any possibility of usefulness.