by Molly Keane
With April’s default there came, of course, a reality to be considered, a reality entailing so much unkindness to Baby June that he lacked the iron-clad resolution necessary for its pursuit. If only some unhappy accident (for which he was unaccountable) might befall, he would be willing to take advantage of it and proceed with – he shuddered – the sale of the land. With the sale of land went Baby June’s lifetime’s occupations; a welter of uneconomic projects, of which one of the most expensive and least rewarding in practical terms was Christy Lucey.
That problem brought unwillingly to mind Leda’s allusions to their great-grandmother, the ex-dairy-maid. Her grace and and good looks had come down to his father and to April; perhaps, in a lesser degree, to himself; might some different inheritance have stirred in Baby June? Leda’s suggestions had been preposterous, or course. Still, there was room to wonder. And for surmise, too, at May’s stricken look when her turn for betrayal came on. He put the absurd idea of shop-lifting a long way behind Leda’s unforgivable allusions to May’s hand – a matter always in camera, undiscussed as his one eye, accepted as April’s deafness, or Baby June’s difficulties with the written word. Mummie had taught them how to grow up with their maiming and how to ignore its different constrictions. His disgust at Leda’s undoing of that work, and the throwing of facts in their faces, went beyond his disgust at a vicious slut’s revenges for any long-past, or long-imagined, injury. As he threw the remainder of yesterday’s Austrian failure into Sweetheart’s bucket, Jasper, leaving unsolved and forgettable the suggestions of breakfast time, set himself to unravel his ideas about lunch.
Hard-boiled eggs in a plain sauce, he decided; that ought to show them he was bent on economy. No luxuries to be added. Well, yes, no, perhaps a few mushrooms? No, again. The mushrooms were in the larder – much too far to walk. Mustard would liven things up a bit and the coriander seed was close at hand. Turning from the table to move a steaming saucepan of dogs’ dinners off the hot ring of the Aga, he felt quietly pleased that today there was no need for the incense of bay leaves. The girls’ protests might sound again over the smells, briefly cloaked for Leda’s benefit. Herbs on a shovel, he thought. That silly chapter was ended.
May spent the rest of the morning perfecting and finishing the restoration of the twice broken candlestick. Although delight was absent from her satisfaction with the work, and the usual tide of pleasure in such an achievement was far out, May decided to bring the candlestick to the Flower Club lecture that afternoon – an object lesson in restoration and an example of dexterity. In unacknowledged defence against Leda’s taunts, she packed, with the candlestick, her latest and most beautifully executed tweed picture. Both objects went into a capacious Greek basket once given her by a travelled Alys. “And I thought she was pure gold,” May bowed her sad head at the memory, but packed up her works of art as though she were still a happy person. A slightly sour note influenced her decision to lecture that afternoon on a Japanese theme; a dried flower arrangement, which some wild parsnip heads, lichened apple twigs, and a few stones would suffice to illustrate.
The time came to give Gripper his run; time, too, for her eighth cigarette of the morning and for a moment’s aberration while she lit it. Then she locked her door – on what? she asked herself again with a sickening recall of Leda’s exposures. Standing outside her own locked door, locked on no secrets now, she picked up Gripper, usually treated with proper austerity, and laid her cheek against his. Since he was as heavy as two telephone directories, she soon put him down, uncomforted.
In the dining-room she found June with her head in the drinks cupboard of the sideboard. She stood up with a bottle in her hand. “Shall we have one?” she suggested. “Just the one,” she added as though to modify the unusual idea.
“Not for me, thank you, Baby,” May refused tightly and brightly, forbidding any necessity for a restoration.
“Well, I will.” June poured out a modest drink.
“Not whiskey? Before lunch?” May was genuinely taken aback, as much by surprise as by disapproval.
“And I need it, too.” Baby June sat down and stared silently at the vacant goatskin; she had been as good as her word about Tiny.
May put out her cigarette to fidget, without interest or approval, with the primroses on the table; primroses, like everything else, had lost their quality.
The lift ground its way upwards, followed by Jasper. Surprisingly, in contradiction to his planned economies, the first thing he took out of it was a bottle of wine – cool and fresh in his hands.
Observing it, May ached at this further celebration of sympathy. Kindness again. She could have struck him.
“I wondered if we might? … Perhaps? … What do you think? After all, a very meagre luncheon. So why not?” He looked up and sniffed disapprovingly as he was about to draw the cork: “Now, who’s been stealing to the sideboard?” he asked the air.
“Me,” June admitted. “It’s not like me, it’s not like me at all, is it? But there it is – I needed a little something.”
“What’s up, Baby? Aren’t you feeling well?” Again he skipped any connection with breakfast’s rough affair.
“Christy’s gone.” June could have announced a death more cheerfully.
Although any significant decision was well beyond him, the announcement eased the foremost tension in Jasper’s ideas for the future of Durraghglass.
“Anyway, who did half his work?” May could not conceal her pleasure.
“I did not, too,” June contradicted.
“Far too much for you, the whole thing. I’ve thought so for some time.” Jasper sounded as if he had actually noticed that June was over-worked. June took him up in the way he had not intended. “So what am I to do without Christy? Who am I to manage a bulling cow without a helping hand?” Her dreaded problem – the young horse – she was too proud and frightened to mention.
“You might manage to keep chickens instead,” May suggested.
“I’m killed from chickens. I’m too old for following them into the briars and nettles after their nests.”
“I mean, intensively.”
“That’s against nature. Free run, or nothing, it’s the only way.”
“Let’s face Facts, I –” Jasper looked across the table at June “I’m snipping the double-leaders in the spruce belt this afternoon,” he finished, dodging whatever fact it was that he had meant to face.
“Anyhow, of all the useless, idle chancers I’ve ever known,” May stopped her indictment, suddenly aware of June’s face, furious as an angry baby’s.
“And I suppose that’s why you recommended him to your friend, Alys.” June’s voice rose.
“Don’t be silly, Baby. As if I would do such a thing.” There was both anger and surprise in May’s denial.
“Oh, great! Great out!” June’s disbelief was manifest. “And you’ld have Tiny put down tomorrow if I didn’t watch it. And who, only Alys, offered Christy a house and an inside toilet and a ride in Dublin Show?”
“Girls, girls!” Jasper was dismayed at the emotion in the room. He went to the lift for the egg dish, hopeful that even plain food might quieten things down. Only a brooding silence settled. He could have found it in him to wish that Leda with her joyaunce and falsity was there to stir up the atmosphere; or even April to achieve the same, with her absurdities and her money. Thinking of the money, he almost joined the brooders; he was held from gloom only by the prospect of an interesting, and, possibly, rewarding afternoon.
Luncheon was silent, unenlivened by glasses of wine – proffered and mutely accepted. When it was over, and the table cleared, Jasper left all the dishes and plates, varied and beautiful in their designs, to soak; cats hated Lemon Quix, and were even less interested in spinach, so the plates might rest unbroken till evening. He put Brother Anselm’s sandwich in a basket along with his stainless steel trowel, fork and secateurs. Then, carrying his heavy clippers, he set out for the rendez-vous. As he went on his way he heard the sound of May
starting up the car; forgetful, for once, of the criminal cost of petrol, he was pleased to think that she carried with her those dreadful suitcases to which he had yielded a shudder of recognition and avoidance as he passed by in the hall.
June went to her bedroom after lunch. She brought Tiny the egg her stomach had refused. The whiskey, fuelling her anger against May, had lost its power now. Even towards Tiny her interest failed a little. She set her mind on the practical details to which she must attend before her ordeal, rather in the way a suicide might measure the length of his rope. “I suppose I must only look out the old cap and the old jodhpur boots,” she told herself. “Sense, child, don’t ride that lad in your wellies!” After a search through discarded sneakers, espadrilles, and awful sandals, she found them at last – blue-moulded and hard as glass, almost crisp, from age and neglect. Miserably oblivious of the past and lazy days when she had worn those boots, June sat on the edge of her bed and crammed her feet into them; an ankle-strap cracked between her fingers as she forced it into a buckle. Her head felt too large for the faded velvet cap – which, in any case, had grown soft as the boots were hard. She picked up a little bamboo stick from a corner in the back of the cupboard, wondering when, or why, she had put it there; the usual feel of it in her hand lent a glint of old procedure to the nervous trial of the present moment.
In the stableyard she leant the little stick against the wall, and balanced the saddle on the half-door of the loose-box, before going up to the big horse, bridle in hand. Surprisingly, almost dolefully subject, he lowered his head, and with an arm across it, behind his ears, she had the bridle on him without the smallest trouble. Saddling up bore no difficulty for her. How often she had the horse ready for Christy to school and exercise. She had never lost the proper knack, and the right tone of her voice, pleasing and subduing, was changeless. The Wild Man swelled himself against the girths, and she led him out before taking them up two holes. When she pulled down the stirrup leathers she saw that Christy, with almost loving care, had shortened them to the length he thought she might ride. That he should have done so made his defection more than ever calamitous. Now, bitter and fearful, June faced the problem of getting up on the young horse. “Will I jump up on you, you bastard?” she asked him aloud.
Her strength and activity a myth now, she only saw Christy’s cat-like nimbleness, the tidy horsemanship he had learned from her. Sometimes she had held his off leather while he got up from the ground – practice for show rings and elderly judges. But now, she was alone, an old woman, worried sick as a nervous child – “And not one of them, Jesus, to give me a thought!” In the tightening of her nerves as she coaxed and fiddled her horse up to the old stone mounting-block (where so many ladies of yester-year had dumped themselves into their side saddles) she was not sure who she blamed for her horrid situation.
She thought the Wild Man looked round at her foot in a nasty way when she was up on him. Her leathers were just the wrong length. But, as she bent to shorten them, changing her reins from hand to hand, the horse walked quietly round the unkempt circle of grass in the yard, and her mind and body found the old familiarity with the horse she rode. The brown hens scratching in the grassy cobbles belonged now to a world of no importance: “Lay, you buggers, lay,” she thought with careless venom. Even Tiny, incarcerated in her bedroom, was less of a loved obligation. She was on a horse again. And who was boss? She was.
Under the archway of the yard, and along the drive, all was perfect decorum between them. She was prepared for him to blow and shy and stop at his usual imagined ghosts in the empty windows of the gate lodge, but today he saw none of them. As if in celebration, the sun came out, and Baby June, enlivened, confident, almost jubilant, caught hold of her horse’s head and sent him jogging, in chaste sobriety, along the grass verge of the narrow mountain road; Jasper’s woodlands were on her left, and on her right gorse, under the sun, was smelling like sweet food.
She expected trouble at the tinkers’ camp where coloured stuffs were spread like flowers or flags, still in the windless afternoon, on thorn bushes and walls. Empty tins and bottles that had held stout and orange juice and meat (how sad, no more baked hedgehog) rolled about, discarded, in the ditch; a woman jogged two whining babies in a smart pram and shouted at a boy who held a quiet pony by the rope rein of its head collar. To all of this the Wild Man paid no heed or attention. And, as they proceeded on through the lovely afternoon, something bordering on ecstasy re-made for June the mind and body of her youth.
It was when she turned for home, after an hour or longer, that the day changed mortally; spikes of hail pierced the thick cream of the hawthorn flower, a wild west wind, warm, but unmerciful, tore flowers from the most sheltered banks. June stooped to her horse’s neck and sent him along faster, correcting his swerves and dodges; the rain had put up his temper. As she steadied and controlled him with all her old acumen, June felt happier and more confident with every passing minute. It’s like the old bicycle, she told herself, you can’t forget how to do it.
Nearer home, she felt the pulse of his will grow stronger. Once he put his head down, and his back tautened under the saddle, but she pulled the bit through his teeth and growled a telling reproof. Remembering Christy’s warning, she sat down in her sadle and shortened her reins as they neared the tinkers’ camp – earlier so quiet under the sunshine. She kicked him out of the idea of stopping for the plausible reason of bright stuffs flapping at their anchorages on the thorns. Disaster struck only when the pram, left unattended and empty of its babies, rolled, wind-driven, towards them. She pulled her horse nearly into the ditch to avoid it, but, caught in a sudden gust of mountain wind, the horrid object swerved nearly across the Wild Man’s forelegs. Then it happened: he put down his head and, at his first lightning buck, June was gone. She landed on her head in the stony road, where she lay quite still, a solid little huddle under the rain and wind. Then, with another plunge in celebration of his freedom, the Wild Man made off – flying reins and stirrups urging him on into an admirable turn of speed.
As he walked through his groves above the river bank, devising his afternoon diplomacies as he went, Jasper saw a clear way towards his intentions; particularly when he considered Christy Lucey’s disloyal defection, and the consequences it must have on Baby June’s stewardship of Durraghglass.
Jasper followed the paths, broad and narrow, indifferent successors to the tamed ways and walks through a pleasance of yesterday. Now, most of the paths were choked and impassable; others, narrow and overhung, he kept clear of briars and wild, insistent growths. In an indiscriminate kind of way they went to and fro, linking his various plantings. It was here that Jasper led his proper life. His kindness, his indulgence never failed towards his trees and shrubs. If some rare subject disappointed, he blamed only himself and sought patiently to remedy his ignorance. He went about among his plantings like a hopeful, but not over-optimistic, doctor, pleased by his successful treatment of some patients, while admitting death and disappointment to be the lot of others. The site was all too open for his exorbitant fancies; river frosts and mountain winds had killed off many of his more exotic subjects. Shelter was what they craved; given honest lengths of shelter, in place of scrawny hazel and mean ash-saplings and alder, Jasper’s garden might fulfil his dreams and plans.
On the other hand, he was sometimes relieved to think that many of his trees and shrubs might never mature, or not in his lifetime. Hoheria populnea, the white witch tree, might never reach the magical ballet-like excitement he knew to be possible. Capparis spinosa already disliked its situation; and, even if it decided to thrive, its flowering could be well below his hopes. Jasper was a visionary gardener. He could see himself, high on some mountain plateau in China – or Korea, perhaps – where rocks were covered in rhododendron, and ice-blue seas of primula spread out to dazzle him past delight. He would never go to China; again he was pleased to think how disappointing it might prove to be. His expectations were the best part of his gardening, changin
g, concluding nothing.
He wandered on, pausing and peering at cherished groupings, his mind set on the necessity for their shelter. There was to be no hesitancy in his proposed alliance with Brother Anselm, an alliance long delayed by his own enervating talent for postponement. Even now he doubted his power to consummate any lasting involvement. He was too early for the planned meeting, he knew, and occupied the time on the slaughter of encroaching briars and nettles. He stopped for a minute near the double white cherry he had planted years ago; full of buds now, and lavish in its still unflowered grace. He thought of some undemanding woman on a summer’s evening; perhaps with a white umbrella. What a pity that women could not grow old gracefully, like a tree. Not that it mattered to him: fortunately.
In contrast to such imaginings, he saw, beyond the bare screens of trees, June riding down the drive on her young horse. He had not seen her on a horse for many years; the sight brought back her triumphant youth, and his own unhappy one. Was he about to betray her? Was it, curiously, a belated revenge he was taking? It was a worrying thought; but one has to have one’s worries, he knew; they gave one something to think about, and led the mind away from major disaster. He refused to feel guilt towards her useless devotion to a ghost cause and a hollow prospect. He stopped his nettle-slashing and stood for a minute watching Baby June. Time dissolved as he noticed how her contact with a horse still had its own truth and balance – a rhythm of yielding and control. Baby June was no longer a stuffed toy. She looked as strong, and as lonely, as she did at eighteen, neat in her colours, riding down to the start of a race; today, a Husky jacket and a bare grey head. As the evocative sound of a horse’s hooves was lost on the grass verge of the mountain road, that whisper from the past ceased to irritate him.