by Molly Keane
Leda, still sitting on her bed, was waiting in the solitary patience she had learned in her years of blindness for the sound of Jasper’s footsteps passing her door on his way to bed. Her obsession with his voice, sweet as a whistle splitting her darkness, took her senses backwards to her ravished first acceptance of love. If a man might sleep with a stranger and invest the act with his desire for another, a distant love, so might she. And, if this was a fetish substitute, Leda, as she waited to hear Jasper’s voice again, knew its potency.
Jasper was sitting up in bed – rather a little-boy-home-from-school look about his austere pyjama jacket. His eyepatch was off and his hair was turned freakishly upwards by the pillows in their valued habitual arrangement. His mind was concerned absolutely and entirely with the propagation of azaleas; a manual on the subject was in one hand and the violet-patterned cup of Complan, with its powdering of nutmeg and its bottlecap of whiskey, was in the other. He was absorbed in the pleasures of reading about things he would never do, when his door opened and Leda came in. She waited, standing with her back to the dim white door, a dark figure from a dream.
“Speak to me,” she said in a very ordinary tone of voice, “say something, so that I know where your bed is.”
Jasper put down his Complan and reached for his eyepatch, determined on an immediate evacuation of his bed. But she had located him. She was coming across the room, her head forward-seeking: a blind earthworm.
“Do sit. Have some eiderdown,” was all he could think of to say.
“I couldn’t sleep, Jasper.”
“So I see, dear. What a bother.”
“Jasper,” she said, “I’m sorry I ruined our cake.”
“Don’t let that worry you. I thought my failure rather an improvement. Less goo-some. What did you think?”
“Awful. Awful.”
“Perhaps you’re right. We must try again.”
He felt her hand on his knee, above the blankets and the electric blanket. He thought again of the knitted gloves and the blue face-cloth carriage rug. He thought of an evening’s unhappiness by the river, and he thought of a mushroom field. He wished he was back in total forgetfulness. He was glad that he was no longer young, or suffering. Even as a good tease for the girls he did not want Leda in, or even on, his bed. It fidgeted him to think of her weight on the electric blanket. He leaned forward, the battery was on the floor, to click off its switch.
Very quietly Leda slid along the bed to where she thought his arms waited for her. There were no arms waiting. Jasper’s hands were clasped, embarrassed and protective, over the somnolence of his private person.
“Dearest girl,” he said, “let me offer you half a Mogadon. It’s all I have.”
“Oh, thank you. That will be a help.”
When he put the half tablet onto the fat palm of her hand and the tooth-glass of water into the other hand, he congratulated himself on his diplomacy and felt grateful for her tactful acceptance of a non-event.
“Thank you so much. I’m sure I’ll get to sleep now. Awful of me to disturb you, but May was asleep and I couldn’t wake April and June’s not one for pills. So there was only you.” She stilled her voice on the last words. She waited another moment.
“I should get back to bed before the Mog wears off. It was a rather small half,” Jasper said uneasily.
“Yes. So it was. Night-night.”
Jasper felt he should get up and help her downstairs. But he wasn’t wearing his patch, and only the top half of his pyjamas, so what if they should meet one of the girls?. … No. It was better to leave well alone. Not that it was very well either – a miserable distraction from his reading; and the Complan, disgustingly cool now, was less soothing than usual.
On the wrong side of Jasper’s door, turbulent in the certainty of her rejection, each step she took a small purgatory of delay, Leda went slowly down the unfamiliar staircase. She must fumble her way now, where once she had gone running and crying. Some part of that furious disappointment was with her again tonight, but she could not match it with youth’s violence.
Hearing a footstep – was it on the landing below? Was it in the bathroom? Whose step – May’s? April’s? – she stopped, not certain how near she was to the bottom of the flight. Perhaps if she moved across to the wall she would be less noticeable. For it did occur to Leda that she would look pretty silly creeping down from Jasper’s sacred precincts in the middle of the night. She stretched out an arm, feeling with the back of her hand for the wall. Then, its irresistible distance enticing her, she leaned a little farther from her hold on the stair rail and, unbalanced in her darkness, stepped into air, and fell.
It was April who caught her as she pitched forward. April with the lavatory flushing thunderously behind her; April in her beautiful nightgown, nourishing creams and astringent plasters distributed over her face, her hair in careful clips; April, whose arms were a nanny’s loving arms, and distant from any loves that Leda valued.
“Leda, Leda, are you hurt?”
“I lost my way to the loo,” Leda wailed.
“Thank goodness I was here. Thursday is the night for my herbal purge. So lucky – you might have been killed.”
“Oh, go back to bed and leave me alone,” Leda was shaking and gasping.
But April heard nothing. She only saw that picture, always in and out of her mind: Leda tearing down, leaping the same steps of the staircase, her white skirts in a billow, her tears falling. Tonight it was a blind woman, shoeless, in a black dress. But for April their youth was constant.
“Get undressed, darling, and hop into bed. I’ll bring you a magical herbal – you’ll be off in a trice.”
“Oh, for God’s sake! Fuck off in a trice yourself, you old fool,” Leda shouted. April smiled encouragingly and hurried back to her bedroom and the electric kettle.
While Leda waited, impotent to refuse the draught in process of concoction, one certainty lived for her: the voice she was in love with was monstrously embodied. In it she had suffered a second expulsion: time translated – Aunt Violet was here again.
Mogadon totally ineffectual and herbal tranquiliser in the po, Leda sat on, still in her black dress. She sat very quietly, measuring the present with the past, accepting in the stillness of anger the balance between the age she could not realise and the youth that caught up with her so unkindly. Jasper’s polite and certain repulse could have been spoken by Aunt Violet. The two situations were alike and each had been quietly paraphrased, words were used belonging nowhere, implying only a polite ending to an unacceptable situation.
In her own darkness, daytime was as present to Leda as any other hour – tonight she was living in a September afternoon. Corn-coloured sun invaded the luxurious purity of Aunt Violet’s bedroom, warming and fading the glazed chintz chair covers – violet and lilac. Sun splashed over the great padded bed with its lace counterpane, and blotted its warmth into the basket where Aunt Violet’s pekinese stirred about, mottled in the sunlight. She heard Aunt Violet’s voice, sensible and kind: “It was a silly letter to write, dear child. Of course, nothing need be said … of course not. …”
Leda, fifty years older, a survivor, got off the bed and undressed, riotously throwing her clothes about like an angry girl – the banished schoolgirl. Naked in her blue spectacles, her body was unknown to her, its changes distressed her not at all. Tonight, mind and body refused to admit or accept any reason for Jasper’s rejection other than his untried – could it be? – virginity. She sniggered at the idea and instantly replaced it by that of the pretty monk.
Unwinding her nightdress, carefully coiled round the hot-water bottle by May, Leda reconsidered her prospects at Durraghglass. Where did advantage lie? Whom should she betray to whom? How long could she endure April’s implacable routines – and for what end now? Or the constant lesser purgatories of May’s recitals? Or June’s obtuse refusals of confidence? It had all seemed worth the exercise of charm; in any case, for Leda to exercise charm was to exercise power. She need
ed victims and through her life she had found them. She had no remorse, for she felt no guilt. Lying at last near sleep, in the bed made and warmed by loving May, a sudden rift of laughter came to her, briefly dispersing the sullen disappointments of the night. She remembered May’s extraordinary story and thought how much rich Alys would enjoy it. Alys had a warm house. But the cooking was far below Jasper’s standards.
8
Revelations
May laid the dining-room table for breakfast. Shafts of daffodil-yellow sunlight slanted in through the high narrow windows. Spring was here when the sun first beat the mountain’s shadow. May lifted a big flat dish of primroses; the sudden scent of primroses caught the breath in her throat – she was in love. Festive, she swept up all the quite clean place-mats and, with reverence and pleasure, laid out the six she had embroidered last – blue linen with white button-hole edgings and daisies with pierced centres. There was waltzing in her blood as she poured out lavish glasses of orange juice and wiped the crumbs from the tray beneath the electric toaster.
The sunshine grew constant, dazzling back from the table and its silver. With May, a dazzle of hope and pleasure responded. She and Leda were bound in friendship now. In the secrecy between them no one else could have share or part. May’s heart hurried in the ripe thrill of such trust and confidence. In this new ascendency she was ready to be bright and pleasant when April came in.
April carried a basketful of healthy breakfast foods. Tiger followed her closely. He went at once to Tiny’s goatskin.
“Good morning – oh, stop him!” May cried out too late.
“It’s going to be bacon and eggs,” April sniffed at a waft from the lift. “Poison. If only you and Jasper knew what’s going on inside you.”
A patina on the air, the aura of a thousand breakfast times, hovered. Still there were silver dishes on the sideboard and a mixed clutch of china cups huddled round tea and coffee pots. Napkins were linen, never paper. Once kedgerees and kidneys simmered and waited. Family prayers were read, where now there was silence. But in the present, as in the past, a new morning briskly advanced towards its difficulties.
May put an extra spoonful of tea into the pot. She was feeling exorbitantly giving as she filled it with freshly boiling water and clapped on the tea cosy. Jasper followed the grumbling ascent of the lift and took out of it the swollen glass bulb of the Cona coffee machine.
“Good morning. Why coffee? It’s Friday.”
“Good morning. Didn’t Leda say something about coffee?” Jasper was making a small gesture of accord. “April, what are you up to with that doll’s teapot?” He pointed, and April got the idea at once: “Our rose hip tea.”
“Our” stood for Leda and April. Yesterday May would have flinched at the implication. Not this morning.
“China tea – Earl Grey – is what Leda likes,” she said to Jasper.
“Poor Leda.”
May’s thoughts flickered pleasantly in the untried places and promises that were part and structure of her life now. Jasper was hardly worth an answer.
June, a solid twelve-year-old schoolboy in faded jeans and old espadrilles – wellington boots politely discarded – went straight to the lift in search of a proper breakfast. She had her day’s work to do. Tiny was not with her.
“I’m glad you agree the old thing is on heat,” May said.
“There’s nothing wrong with Tiny,” June took a meticulously fair share of scrambled eggs, bacon and mushrooms. “I left her outside. The way your two nasties wouldn’t be shaming me over my breakfast – and that’s it, and all about it.”
They were all eating in a morning silence when Leda opened the door. With her usual extraordinary calculation she carried her body, smoothly as though through water, to her usual chair. She was wearing her beautiful coat and swathed it round her and pushed it closer to her neck as if she invented the cold.
Jasper felt a shade of relief that those sweet fat arms and piercing elbows were hidden away in dark sleeves. He need never see them again, or fear to see the blind blue eyes.
“Coffee?” he asked, getting up at once to bring it over to her.
April waved him back to his chair. “We’re having rose hip tea today,” she almost sang the words as she poured it out.
“Oh, please,” Leda said, “I was thinking of Earl Grey.”
“… And she’s going to love her cereal and some rich, ripe yoghurt.”
“Does she take sugar?” Jasper asked.
“I don’t think that’s very funny.” Leda’s forehead filled with sudden lines as though she strained up her unseen eye-lids to keep back tears. Looking across at her, Jasper wilted, horrified at what he had said.
“For goodness’ sake, April, let Leda have a proper breakfast for once.” May had a cup of tea in one hand and a plate of bacon and eggs in the other. She put them down in front of Leda, pushing April’s goodies onto an outer circle.
“But I’ve only cooked enough for three people,” Jasper peered into the dish where one portion, his own, he hoped, remained.
“Would it be within the bounds of possibility to cook some more?” May asked perkily.
“That’s the last of the eggs,” June stated, “so your guess is as good as mine.”
“You see how it is? You’ll have to eat cake.” Jasper looked nastily at May and helped himself to everything in the dish.
“It’s all right, Leda. I’m not one bit hungry. You have mine.” May’s voice revelled in the sacrifice.
“Take that poison away,” April spoke with authority, “eat it up yourself and put on another pound or two, why don’t you?”
“Because I seem to be the only one giving a thought to Leda’s breakfast. Shall I cut it up for you, Leda?”
“You’ll kill the woman with kindness,” June said, helping herself to marmalade.
Perhaps it was this remark, satirical and uninterested, that broke through all the defensive calculations working in Leda’s mind, stripping down any wish to charm her way forward.
“For God’s sake,” she said, “I don’t want anybody’s breakfast. I don’t want any breakfast.”
“‘So take the nasty stuff away. I don’t want any soup today.’ Struwwelpeter, wasn’t it?”
Unaware that Jasper quoted the lines directly to May, Leda took real and absurd umbrage at the light indifference they conveyed. It was a continuance of last night’s polite dismissal. She stood up, tears rolling out and down from behind the blue spectacles, hands flattened on the table to each side of her plates. Suddenly she lifted them and swept both offerings to the floor. Nothing could have looked less like a disastrous accident befalling and embarrassing the blind.
“Everything under control.” May squatted down to scrape up the disaster.
“Will you watch the woman, she’s very saucy this morning.” Baby June’s comment, reasonable as usual, was enough to set Leda’s tongue terribly free.
“There’s a mental defective in every old family,” she said quietly. “Some of them can read and write, others can’t resist the charms of their stable-boys.”
“Not at all a bad idea,” Jasper hoped to lighten the implication, “if it gets any more work out of them.”
June looked round the table at each member of her family. “It’ll be your turn next,” she said, “you wait.”
“My darling’s eating the bacon,” April wailed.
“Your darling has just made the most horrible smell.” May held her nose and indicated Tiger.
“That’s your brute, May. I know the difference.”
“Shall we put them both outside?” Jasper glimpsed an escape for himself from the difficult scene.
But it was April, in touch with an undeniable reality, who swooped down on both dogs and carried them to the hall door. Back again, she set about reconstructing Leda’s healthy breakfast.
There was silence round the table which April broke, saying: “You all seem very talkative this morning. Anyway, I’m not going to waste this perfect yogh
urt, Jasper can put it on your carrots for lunch.” She sat in a sunbeam spooning up a pool of yoghurt from the table.
Leda lunged towards her: May too uttered a cry of protest. Jasper said, “Don’t worry, I shan’t use it.”
“Now,” April handed the cup of yoghurt to Jasper, “a squeeze of lemon juice perhaps, and it’s perfect.”
“Oh. Christ!” Piercingly sweet, Leda’s voice rang out. “Can no one stop her starving me to death and boring for Ireland?”
They all shook their heads in submission to April’s deafness.
“Deaf as an adder,” Leda proclaimed to the silence, “but she makes up for it. What about all that vodka? And you ought to hear her when she’s on the grass.”
“She’s deaf, all right, but she’s not a horse,” June said.
“All right, perhaps not – horses are tidier about their sex lives.”
“Must we?. …” Jasper flinched.
“You don’t want to know about that old satyr she married? Just one of the things he loved was doing it on trains. He died doing it on the Flying Scotsman.”
“Well, why fuss? People have their little hobbies. What’s wrong with trains?” Jasper spoke in a worldly way.
“And another thing. Shall I tell them, April? What the guard said? Shall I tell them?”
“Yes, do. It was a very fine morning.”
“Oh, do I have to write it all down?”
There was a pause, appalled but interested, while Leda scribbled wildly on her pad, ripped off the page and threw it on the table. “Read that and give it to her,” she said. Jasper picked up the small square of paper and spilled coffee all over it. “Oh, look what I’ve done. I am sorry, April, it’s for you.” He wrote on a corner beyond the spreading coffee: “You were never lovelier” and handed it to April. For a brief moment he felt something like being the head and protector of a family. April read, then squeezed the wet paper together and threw it in the slop bowl. “Thank you, darling,” she smiled shyly at Leda.