Her shot was ineffective, perhaps because she failed to say what was in her mind. She composed and wrote down laborious sentences about the stairs, the cold, the damp and the unaired beds, when she was really consumed by another, quite inexpressible anxiety. To Mrs. Annesley it must seem that this was merely old Muffy grumbling again. She wanted to say that she was worried about Miss Ellen, but all that she could do was to give voice to that tumult of protest which had engulfed her when she was first introduced to the castle keep.
“A keep!” she sniffed. “What and ever did they want to keep in it, I wonder?”
For weeks she had suspected that there would be something funny about this old keep of theirs. Louise had been so much too enthusiastic about it.
“I’m going to give up the whole of the old keep to you, Muffy, for your nurseries. Then you’ll have it all to yourselves, two big rooms, and two little tower rooms, and your own staircase. You’ll like that, won’t you?”
She knew that tone. She had not taken Louise from the month without getting to know it. If Louise was extra sweet to you, then she had something to hide. This keep was not all that it sounded.
“It depends,” was all that she would say.
And to herself:
“No use making a fuss till I’ve seen.”
Now she saw. And really she was quite disgusted. Never in all her born days had she been asked to live in such a hole. And she had seen some funny nurseries in her time, travelling about the world with Mrs. Annesley. Rats in Malta, she’d had, running about the floor as bold as brass. But that was to be expected in a foreign country, and Mrs. Annesley was a very different person to work for. She always gave you your place. She didn’t put you into a stone box, that looked like a prison hospital, and then tell you that you liked it. She didn’t insist that a house was dry when it was wringing wet. She didn’t go on about the beautiful scenery at the end of a journey that was aggravating enough to make anybody say their prayers backwards. Only Miss Louise would have thought of dragging everybody all the way from Oxford to Ireland when they might just as well have gone to Torquay, like they did last year. Thirty-six hours of it they’d had, and all of them seasick, and then at the end, if you please, a house you had to get to in an open boat, if you called it a house when it was more like Oxford gaol. And nothing ready for them, no fires lighted, the beds all unaired, and not a drop of milk in the house. You’d have thought in the country there’d have been a farm or something. But no; it seemed that everything had to come over from the mainland….
Now the uproar was beginning to subside. She had got great fires burning in both the rooms, she had aired the mattresses, and somehow she and the nursery-maid between them had brought the place into some sort of order. The children were all in bed and she must leave the rest of the unpacking till the morning. For that night she was through.
She took one last look round the great upper room, with its rows of cots and cribs ranged round the gloomy walls. Only three of them were filled, for Rosamund had been given one of the little tower rooms. But when Miss Ellen’s children came, she would have seven of them in there, all with pneumonia and rheumatic fever most likely, caught from sleeping in damp sheets.
Her own mattress was now roasting in front of the fire and she turned it before she went downstairs. A little rustle in the nearest cot told her that Jennie was still awake.
“Muffy … can I have a biscuit?”
“No, you can’t have a biscuit. Not now.”
“I’m hungry.”
“Then you should have asked before your teeth were cleaned.”
Jennie sighed. She had not really expected to get a biscuit, but she wanted to prolong the conversation.
“Can I have a drink?”
“You’ve just had one.”
“Then … will you tell me the Three Bears?”
“The idea! You lie down double-quick.”
“I’ve got a pain.”
“Then you’d better get rid of it, or there’ll be no bathing for somebody.”
A faint memory of Torquay sands emerged from the immense vistas of Jennie’s past.
“Shall we dig?” she asked hopefully.
“Wait and see.”
Muffy took up the candle. Her enormous shadow travelled up the wall and across the ceiling as she stumped away down the long room. Jennie, peeping through the bars of her cot, saw the candle go bobbing away through a low, arched doorway and out of sight. Now there were no moving shadows, only a pink glow in the walls thrown up by the turf fire. It was different from the firelight in the nursery at home. There were no dancing flames and no tall wire guard to throw a criss-cross pattern on the ceiling. For a moment she thought of howling for Muffy to come back, but she went to sleep instead.
Between the upper and lower floors of the keep there was a winding stone staircase, with worn treads and no banisters, dangerous even in daylight. Anyone coming up or down at night would always be obliged to carry a candle. Muffy thought out a dozen unpleasant possibilities as she felt her way along the rough walls. Rosie, bringing up a kettle of boiling water, would trip and scald herself. The children would certainly break their necks. And what about Miss Ellen?
The day nursery was filled with half-open trunks and Rosie was wrestling with a spirit lamp which would not light.
“Now then, not so much dratting,” said Muffy sharply. “You can’t expect everything in these old-fashioned houses. Have you found the teapot? I put it in the end of the ‘old-hall’.”
“I thought you wanted to get the big box unpacked first.”
“I shan’t unpack nothing more to-night, not till I’m told where my cupboards are. We’ll make ourselves a nice cup of tea and then we’ll go to bed. We’ve done quite enough work for one day, and that’s a fact.”
Rosie could hardly believe her ears. It was the first time that she had ever heard Mrs. Murphy admit that anyone had done enough work for one day. But her spirits rose. A nice cup of tea was the one thing which would stop her from using language. She foraged in the hold-all for the tea-pot and some enamel cups, while Muffy got the kettle to boil.
In ten minutes they were both at the table, sipping slowly, their tired bodies relaxed into a pleasant coma. There was something eternal and primitive about their attitudes and the silence in which they sat. They gazed thoughtfully at the flame of the candle between them, but they were not thinking of anything at all. They were reposing.
The day, with its labours, was, after all, only one day in a lifetime of toil. Rosie, at sixteen, was at the beginning of it. Muffy, at sixty, was nearing the end. And their strength came from a secret power which their employers had lost. They knew how to repose. In the littered room, with all its paraphernalia of change and travel, they preserved a note of stability. They sat. It was as if they had been sitting for ever. And when Louise Lindsay came in they managed to make her feel that she had interrupted some ancient and mysterious rite.
“I only came to see if you were settled,” she said hurriedly. “Don’t … don’t get up.”
But of course they got up. They could repose before each other, but not before Louise. Rose cleared away the cups and saucers and vanished with her candle up the tower stairs.
“You are leaving the unpacking till to-morrow, I see,” said Louise, with a conciliating smile. “I’m so glad. You must be tired.”
“There don’t seem to be any cupboards,” observed Muffy.
“Oh, aren’t there? There must be. We must explore to-morrow. Did the … did the children get off all right?”
“Oh, yes, I think so. If only the beds aren’t damp. I put all the mattresses …”
“I know. It can’t be helped. There is nothing else you want, is there, Muffy?”
Their eyes met for a moment and then they both looked away. Muffy’s face became perfectly wooden. She smoothed the corner of her apron. She wanted a dozen things. She had a hundred complaints to make. But what was the use? There they all were. She had been against coming. S
he had wanted to go to Torquay again, where there were nice sands for the children and a proper nursery with oilcloth on the floor. But she had said her say in the beginning, and she was not going to say it all over again. There was no use crying over spilt milk. She was not going to grumble.
But neither, on the other hand, was she going to be bullied into saying one word of approval. Nothing would ever make her like living in a keep, and nothing would ever make her say that she liked it. And that was to be the next battle. For Louise was never merely content with getting her own way. She insisted that everyone must say that she had been right. She could bear no opposition. She must extort open praise and approval for everything that she did. Now she was in one of her moods. Muffy knew them. When her eldest nursling was like this, quivering, exalted, ready to fall into a passion of despair at the faintest breath of criticism, there was nothing to be done.
Something about this castle had set her off. She had been quite mad about it ever since she saw the advertisement in the newspaper. She had taken it without consulting anyone, and then she had bullied her brothers and her sister into sharing the rent. It had been the castle and the island, and the island and the castle, for weeks and weeks. Nobody else wanted to come. But they must all give in, just as they had given in to her when they were children.
“On her high horse,” thought Muffy. “Working herself into a fever because I won’t say she’s right. I knew how it would be. Waking up my lambs in that dratted boat to make them look at a couple of old swans flying across. And then she was surprised because they made a fuss. As if any child wants to look at scenery at that time of night! But I shan’t say anything.”
She smoothed her apron.
“Because, if there’s nothing more you want, I think I will say good night. I am tired, too.”
“Good night ’M.”
Louise blenched, in spite of herself. It was only in their most violent moments of antagonism that Muffy called her ’M. This was a declaration of war.
“But I don’t care,” she thought. “I won’t care. I won’t let her spoil it. We are here. I have got them all here, and it is going to be perfect. It’s only because I am tired that I feel so depressed. That way they were sitting when I came in … how mulish servants are … just the way they sit in the nursery at home. It’s as if I’d brought the Woodstock Road with me en bloc. Am I never going to get away from it?”
Her lip quivered. Thirty years ago she would have burst into a fit of screaming. She turned away abruptly and groped among the boxes and bundles towards the door of the keep.
“Take care!” cried Muffy. “There’s a step down there.”
Louise tripped over her long skirt and just saved herself from falling.
“For heaven’s sake give me a candle,” she snapped.
Muffy found one for her, and stood listening to her footsteps as they went down the little flight of stairs and out into the courtyard.
“Supposing if it had been Miss Ellen,” she thought.
As she felt her own way up to the night nursery again, she thought of Miss Ellen falling about in the dark, being hurt, losing her baby, perhaps. That was something to be resisted. She had resolved to say nothing, but she must speak about that. It was a sin and a shame to bring Miss Ellen to such a place. She would say a word to-morrow. And she would write to Mrs. Annesley. Mrs. Annesley ought to know what a dreadful place it was.
The children were all fast asleep and the firelight on the walls had faded to a pale glimmer. Shivering with cold and fatigue she pulled her mattress back on to its bed and undressed herself. The bed was hard and lumpy. A sharp twinge of rheumatism began to nag at her left shoulder. Her head was full of trains and boats and shifting landscapes and Miss Ellen falling downstairs. She was overwhelmed with foreboding.
She tossed and turned, unable to take refuge in the stoicism wrung from a lifetime of servitude. At the thought of harm to Ellen, her heart’s darling, she became vulnerable. She would speak. She would say:
“Mrs. Lindsay, you should study your sister more than you do. You are very selfish. You think only of yourself.
“Louise, you have never been fair to Ellen. Never!
“You are jealous. You’re jealous of your own sister.
“You’re jealous of my lamb.
“You’re jealous because she’s got a better man than you have …”
No. She would never say those things. She must not even think them. But she could write to Mrs. Annesley, and perhaps they might stop Ellen from coming. There was still a week before she would come. It might be stopped. Mrs. Annesley might understand. At least she always listened. She gave you your place….
2
LOUISE had expected to be happy at Inishbar. And when she woke up next morning to find that she was not she scarcely knew at whom to hurl the blame. At breakfast, she announced sombrely that they might all just as well have stayed in North Oxford.
Which meant that, in the first place, she blamed Gordon for having married her. It was his fault that she, who loved beauty, was to be condemned to live for ever in an ugly house in the Woodstock Road; that she, cultured and cosmopolitan, should be imprisoned in the trivialities of provincial and academic society. It was his fault that the other dons’ wives were so extraordinarily dull, and that the undergraduates who came to call on Sunday afternoon never seemed to know when to go away.
She flung her ruined life at Gordon across the breakfast table, and he promptly absented himself from the conversation. He grew dim and impersonal. He was not there at all. His spirit had retired to some cloudy fortress of its own and only the shell of him was left sitting with Kerran and Louise.
“It will be all right,” said Kerran consolingly, “when we have been out to pick mushrooms.”
Instantly her face changed. She turned to him with a charming sparkle of excitement and interest.
“Oh, Kerran! That is quite true. I do believe that you understand why I wanted to come here. But why mushrooms? What is it about mushrooms?”
“Of course I understand why you wanted to come here. It’s because you have taken to reading Russian novels.”
Kerran stopped to peel himself an apple, and Louise, with earnest pleasure, implored him to go on.
“Why mushrooms?”
“People in Russian novels are always going out to pick mushrooms. And you would like to be a person in a Russian novel. You want to live in a large house in the country with a lot of sensitive, intelligent and talkative relations, who are content to do nothing in particular for weeks on end.”
“That is quite true. That is perfectly true. Oh, Kerran! How well you understand me! It’s what I have always wanted … to do nothing in particular, if I could only find the right place to do it in. I want to get away from all the petty apparatus of living. It’s choking me.”
“But you have been too faithful to your model, my dear. I know that people in Russian novels generally have a great many relations, but I think you were wrong to bring your family here en masse. Maude, for instance …”
“We can’t have Barny without her.”
“Oh, Barny’s a Slav all right. He’ll fit in perfectly because there must be somebody who strums on the piano all the time, if we are to do the thing in style. And he is always ready to go on with yesterday’s conversation.”
“Yesterday’s conversation! Kerran, you’re perfect. How do you know it all so well? Don’t you feel that this is a place where one could go on with yesterday’s conversation?”
“I know my Turgenev, you see. But what about Maude? Isn’t she just a trifle Anglo-Saxon?”
“She is going to do the housekeeping,” said Louise quickly. “We must have one person like that and she will enjoy it. She loves triumphing over difficulties. And to balance her we’ll have Dick. He is tremendously important, because we must have at least one person with overwhelming charm.”
She paused expectantly, as if waiting for him to agree. But Kerran said nothing. He had never been overwhelmed hims
elf by Dick’s charm, though he had heard so much about it from other people that he supposed it must be there, and he had missed it. Not that he disliked Ellen’s husband. They were on very friendly terms. But he was not charmed by a nature which had so much arrogance, and so little simple geniality.
“He must play lead,” suggested Louise.
“Play lead? How? All by himself?”
“Why not?”
Louise poured out some more coffee. As she sipped it she looked across at Gordon, who was still in his Olympian cloud.
Twelve years ago, when she was still a girl in her twenties, she had been taken to Oxford for Commemoration Week. She had seen that cultured profile for the first time against a glamorous background of gleaming spires, stately libraries and moonlit college gardens. It had thrown her into one of her moods. In order to be happy (and she always expected to be happy if only she could rearrange a few small details of her life), she must marry a don and live for ever in Oxford. And her chaperone had looked on, smiling fatuous approval, instead of taking her for a warning tour through those regions which lie north of the Parks. She had never envisaged Woodstock Road till afterwards.
Gordon was well off, as dons go. He had private means. The marriage was thought to be a good one and all her friends had told her she was lucky, praising her for choosing a man so much older than herself, who would comprehend and cherish her sensitive nature. For once they had all agreed that she was right.
And then, a few months later, just when the Woodstock Road and a first baby had begun their dreadful work, there had come the rejoicings over Ellen’s marriage. Feeling sick and languid, she had gone home to join in the festivities, to be gracious to this young doctor over whom they all seemed determined to make such a fuss. The cut of her maternity gowns depressed her, but she tried to be glad, for Ellen’s sake, and to remember that it was Ellen’s turn to take a share of the limelight. She had, in her day, made a beautiful bride. Ellen made a pretty one. But at this wedding the centre of interest had not been Ellen, but the bridegroom. He had an air. There was something about him; they all felt it, though they did not very well know what it was. He was poor. He had his way to make in the world. Gordon’s position was infinitely more distinguished. But he cut a better figure than Gordon, both in church and out of it. He seemed able to get whatever he wanted out of life. He was under thirty and on the staff of St. John’s Hospital in Bermondsey.
A Long Time Ago Page 6