A Long Time Ago

by Margaret Kennedy

  “That first entrance of hers! It was incarnate innocence crossing the stage for a moment. She was so pure, so untouched, you felt almost frightened. Not that Melba wouldn’t have sung those legato phrases twice as smoothly. But one did feel that only Margarete, the girl herself, would have uttered precisely those sounds. And then, the horrible, cumulative spectacle of ruin that she managed to build up! The jewel song! A lamentable business, technically. (Yes, Barny, it was! If you weren’t so besotted, you’d know it.) But the first suggestion of lost innocence was there all right. The flower was blooming just a little too luxuriantly, as it were. And then there was a revelation of sensuousness in the way she moved … before ever Faust came on the scene she’d fallen a prey to her own frailty. She didn’t yield to him, but to something in herself which she hardly understood. She brought out the inevitability of seduction … the weakness that attracts the exploiter, the weakness which betrayed her in every scene, so that she had no defence against remorse, and despair … disintegration … she had to go mad and die.”

  He broke off suddenly, embarrassed at his own volubility, as, indeed, they all were. Again there was a pause which Maude found so significant that she was obliged to exclaim:

  “What-ho-she-bumps!”

  Louise upset the poker and tongs.

  “And yet,” snarled Barny, “you say she can’t sing!”

  “She can’t. Her phrasing is bad. Her legato is so-so. She can’t take her top notes pianissimo. She breathes in the wrong places. She hasn’t a trill. Her middle register …”

  “I’ve heard her seventeen times …”

  “I know. But in this case you’re merely a glorified stage-door Johnnie. Your critical faculty …”

  “Damn you, Kerran …”

  “Now, now, now!” carolled Maude. “Birds in their little nests agree.”

  “Your critical faculty isn’t working. Your bowels yearn but your brain goes to sleep.”

  “Possibly, my dear Kerran. But an active brain and sluggish bowels produce a condition which we all know very well, and its called …”

  “Barny! Kerran! Barny! Ladies present! We’re shocked! Louise, do tell them to stop.”

  Louise would do no such thing. She did not quite relish this talk of bowels in the drawing-room, but if Barny had been spurred into shocking his wife, that was all to the good. So she turned her back on them all and sat staring into the fire, her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, like some dark and brooding sibyl. Kerran and Barny went over to the piano to settle some dispute about Elissa’s rubato. Gordon returned to his newspaper. There was nothing left for Maude to do but fidget with her bangles.

  A great buffet of wind and rain hurled itself against the castle walls. The carpets rose draughtily along the floor. The candle flames flickered, and a fine dust of peat ash blew up from the hearth. Maude yawned. She was cold and she was dull and she was out of it. Barny, it seemed, was in one of his difficult moods, when all her love and care seemed only to irritate him. It wasn’t all roses being married to Barny; he could be very charming if he liked, but she saw the other side of the picture.

  Still smiling good-humouredly, she got out her fancy work. It was a square of linen upon which she was embroidering spiders webs in thick crewel cotton. She would finish it in no time if every evening were going to be like this one. She began to push the needle up and down, holding the stuff up close to her eyes, for the candle-light was dim. In imagination she was annihilating Louise:

  “Oh, I know you despise me all right. I know you think I’m not good enough for him. But just you try being married to him! If Gordon treated you as Barny does me, it’d do you a lot of good. Just you try being married to a man who’s so soft he’d give every penny he had to the next organ-grinder if I didn’t keep a sharp look-out. Oh, yes, he’s very generous, I know, and all that; I hate a mean man, but there’s such a thing as being too generous when you’ve got a wife to keep. Of course you’ve got plenty of money, so you can take a lofty line about it. You think a lot of yourself, don’t you? What for? You’re not so very much better than other people, all said and done, only you’ve been spoilt and nobody’s ever stood up to you, but you needn’t think we don’t criticise you. If you could hear some of the things Barny says about you in the bedroom you’d sit up; he sees through you all right, and so does your mother even. It’d do you good to see that last letter of hers: I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with a rather uncongenial holiday, for Barny’s sake.

  “But she understands me. She sympathises, she knows how I love him and how worried I get. She quite sees how difficult it all is, him being so silly about money, selling out of Consols like that; I knew he’d lose it all. He’s not strong, whatever you say, and they said if he had another attack it’d have to come out. Supposing he had one here! We’re miles from anywhere, that’s the first thing I thought of when Louise … of course we’d have Dick—at least that would be some comfort. Whatever else he is, he’s a good surgeon, so they say, and if he can do a Cæsar … But I wouldn’t trust him an inch.

  “Do a Cæssar! Well, anyhow, that’s one thing I’ve escaped, though I’d be more frightened of a clot. There’s something about a clot; I don’t know, only I won’t think about it, because it’s no use grieving and if it’s not to be it’s not to be, though how you can think it’s my fault, well, just look at me! I’m perfectly healthy. It’s Barny. There ought to be something done about it. I oughtn’t to have to be so unhappy, it’s not right. And yet you think I’m not good enough for him. But it’s no use getting bitter about it.

  “Where was I before? About Dick doing a Cæsar. About Dick. No, I wouldn’t trust him an inch. A really nice woman knows; she has a feeling. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. I know what men are. I haven’t been a nurse for nothing, and I could tell you a thing or two about the seamy side, my dear. I suppose you think all doctors are angels of light? Well, some are and some aren’t. Some aren’t by a long chalk, and I wouldn’t wonder if this Dick of yours wasn’t a bit of a Don Juan on the Q.T., for all he’s married into the wonderful Annesley family. Haw! Haw!

  “Barny doesn’t see it, but then he’s got no intuition; men haven’t, not like women. You’ve got nothing to go on, he says, and of course I haven’t, only intuition, and little things he’s said from time to time. But I know he’s got a horrid mind. No reverence. Disgusting ideas about women. Fancy being Ellen shut up with him in the bedroom! Thank goodness Barny isn’t like that, he respects me. But you can see he’s got a disgusting mind just from little things he says. It’s his brains, I’ve seen it before. They get coarse-minded and cynical. You’d have thought if they were very intellectual they would be more refined; but no, they get so cynical they don’t seem to care about anything, so that a woman can’t influence them. Goodness and brains don’t always go together, Louise, and that’s what you seem to forget. You think you’re very clever and I daresay you are; you take me up so, if I say anything; I can’t answer you. And you look at me as if I were something the cat’d brought in. You and your great-aunt Harriet. We laugh at you behind your back. We just laugh! We laugh!”

  Backwards and forwards went the needle. Another spider’s web was finished. For a moment Maude’s smile disappeared as she sucked the end of her cotton. And then it was there again, as courageously good-humoured as ever.

  7

  HOPE did not want to be told all about the island and the castle. She did not want to be shown anything. She wanted to tell and to show herself. But there was nobody to listen, nobody who was in the least interested.

  “First of all we got into the train. The boat train!”

  “I know,” said Rosamund. “So did we.”

  No adventure of Hope’s could astonish her. And yet her train must have been a very ordinary affair, just a receptacle for aunts and cousins, while Hope’s train had been a landmark. So was the boat. The little Napiers had never been taken across the sea before. For weeks they had been preparing themselves. Somebody had told th
em that you ought to lie on your back, in a berth, so as not to be sea-sick, and they had all practised lying on their backs, night after night.

  “The crossing’s nothing,” said the intolerable Rosamund. “You wait till you’ve been to Norway!”

  Cousins are like that. It was no use telling Rosamund about the boat train which was so immensely long that it only had a middle. Its ends, never clearly apprehended, were lost in the echoing caverns of the station. Only a little bit of it was stamped upon Hope’s mind for ever, a long row of carriage doors, the names of distant places written above in huge words that came straggling out of the darkness and disappeared into the infinite so that all she could read was … STER and HOLYH…. Crowds pushed under the glare of the lamps, there was a hiss of steam in the murky roof, and they were all climbing into a compartment that smelt of dust and soot, so narrow and dark that they could not see where to put things up on the luggage rack. The children thought that all trains at night must be dark like this, but it was only because the lamps were off, for somebody pulled a cord and there came a wan glare which revealed their solemn faces.

  This was departure by night, a thing in itself so exciting that it made them feel a little sick. Enormous sacks were pushed past the carriage window on trucks and somebody said, “The Irish Mail!” They had seen the Irish Mail! A woman pushed past another truck with pillows on it, and the faces of the people, hurrying under the lamps, were charged with a tremendous importance, for they were all addressing themselves to this unique journey. “The Irish Mail” they were saying to themselves. “We are going by the Irish Mail!” Even the porters were full of it. They must know that this was a moment, that this was drama. Their faces, too, were solemn and urgent. They moved like generals on a battlefield. There was a rhythm in their activities. They were conducting this chaotic scene to its incredible climax, its curtain. A final pause, and the thing was happening. The train had begun to move. The white faces of porters slid past the window, an endless line of porters. The platform slid past. It vanished. What a moment of emptiness must fall upon the silent and deserted station! The drama has been played and the Irish Mail has gone.

  It gathers speed, this train. It thunders through the night. Its music changes as it runs into tunnels or over points. Strange people pass up and down the corridors. A handful of rain-drops splash the smoky dullness of the window. “To Lancashire, to Lancashire, to fetch a pocket handkercher,” sings the train, and something nearer than the wheels, something in the carriage, has a short, sharp rattle of its own: “Conductor, conductor, conDUCtor, conductor,” and then: “Had a cap, had a CAP, had a cap, had a cap.” … More people file down the corridor. What are they looking for? Why do they seem so anxious? Two men are standing just outside the carriage door. Sometimes the shoulders of the overcoat of one of them comes into view. Sometimes they are hidden. They are talking endlessly. “To Lancashire! To Lancashire!” A guard hurries toward some imagined drama. For this train has a life of its own. It is a planet spinning through space and it is peopled, not by travellers but by inhabitants. From end to end of it they are living their hundreds of mysterious lives, talking and laughing, taking things down from the rack, tying up their heads, trying to sleep. They exist only in its medium.

  Outside there is nothing. We are rushing through a void. Even the scattered lights of towns have no substance, and the dark, empty stations, through which we fly, are but the symbols of solid daytime places. At Crewe and Chester we pause and receive into our cosmos a few inferior people, scurrying rabbits who run past the window looking suitably abashed, for they can never join the community of true inhabitants. They are soon disposed of. The station is silent. It is dead. We go on again. “To Lancashire, to Lancashire.” … The void is now called Wales. But it has no reality until the thunder changes to an endless, earsplitting rattle, and somebody says: “The Menai Bridge.” It is happening to all of us. We are all going over Menai Bridge. We must hurry. We must prepare ourselves. The unseen hundreds are all astir. They are getting their things down out of the racks, and rolling up their hold-alls….

  “And then we went on the boat. An enormous boat.”

  It is almost frightening to get out of the train. There is a moment of dismay, of blankness, as we meet the cold night wind that smells of the sea. What shall we do next? What is going to happen to us? We don’t belong to the train any more. The crowd has become alien, incoherent. We cling together. We are the Napiers; Hope and Peter and mother and Emily and the babies. We are travellers, with no place of our own, hurrying through the darkness and the night.

  And now the drama has taken shape again, for here suddenly is the boat, almost before we remember that we were going on a boat. It seems to be part of the station, but its two funnels and its long line of port-holes leap out at us with their promise of adventure. It too has no ends, only a middle with a gang plank, up which we stumble. A hurried and perfunctory business this, and over too soon, so that nobody seems to be saying: “Now we are on a boat.” It is too much like being on land, even when we climb down those unusual stairs, are pushed into a narrow, smelly place and see what we have been picturing for weeks and weeks, our berths, one above the other. This part of it, which we have so vividly imagined, is dull. It is flat. The drama stands still. The boat will not go. It is not a real boat. For hours and hours nothing seems to happen at all, save senseless noises which go on and on: thumps and bumps, footsteps overhead, low voices, shouts, the screaming rattle of a crane, bumps and thumps. What can they be doing all this time?

  This is not being on a boat. It is lying shut up in a horrid little place that is clammy and stuffy The top berth is too near the ceiling and the trampling footsteps. It was fun to climb up there, but now it is not fun any more. Just below, in the dark caverns of the under-berth, mother is already trying to go to sleep. If you lean over you can see her head, tied up in a scarf. Emily and the babies are somewhere else. Peter is poking his head out of the other top berth, a bright yellow head on the end of a long, thin neck. His eyes are popping, and he makes a face. “I say, Hope! This cabin smells of sick!” Oh, disgusting! It does. But we have been trying not to think so. We have not even started and already we have begun…. “Mother! Mother! I feel sick.” “Try to go to sleep, darling.”

  Let me get to sleep! Oh, please, let me get to sleep! But what … oh, what is that! What a glorious noise! VOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! VOOOOOO—OOOOOOM—ooooooom! We are on a boat. At last we are on a boat. It is alive and it has spoken. The echoes of its tremendous, jarring voice come back, and back, over the water of a harbour which is really there, outside. There is space, out there, the gleam of lights in the water, a vista of wharves and quays, the waiting funnels of other ships, and somewhere, close at hand, the sea. Now the harbour knows that the boat is going. She has discovered her purpose. She is gathering herself together with a faint vibration of engines. She has become separate from the land. Now, surely, she is moving, surely that is a sound of waves rushing past. The pulse of machinery grows louder.

  The footsteps still scurry overhead. The bumps and the thumps go on. They never go to bed on a boat. They run up and down, up and down. Everything in the cabin sways slowly, first one way and then slowly the other. We must be out of the harbour by now. We are on the sea! The tossing, desolate, uneventful waves are all round us.

  The sea knows nothing. Its waves fall this way and that, without end or purpose. But our boat knows. She is more wonderful than the train. The train had a path. Here there is no path. But our boat goes on, straight as an arrow, towards Ireland and the morning. She stalks through the night so proudly that she makes even the sea seem unimportant….

  If Hope could have told it all … but there was nobody to listen. They had all been in the train. They had all been in a boat. Yet she still felt that it must have happened only to herself, even though she had not composed a poem on arrival, like Rosamund. She was shown Rosamund’s poem and she thought it affected. What she herself could have told would have been ever so muc
h more exciting. But she could not tell it. She could only say:

  “First we got in a train. And then we got in a boat.”

  Rosamund did the honours of the island patronisingly. She spoilt it all. She always knew about everything first. She allowed no exploring.

  “And that’s the Haunted Glen. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  “All right,” said Hope, gazing at it stolidly.

  “I’m glad you appreciate it. I’m going to write my next poem about it. What shall we do now? I can show you a place up in the woods…. Shall we go up there and tell secrets?”

  Down by the lake edge Charles and Peter were throwing ducks and drakes. Their little flat stones went skipping over the surface of the water. They were shouting and scuffling about, in cheerful, mindless activity.

  “I’ll go and throw stones with the boys,” said Hope.

  Rosamund sighed. It is impossible to love one’s cousins.

  8

  ELLEN was so tired that she took her breakfast in bed. And when she had finished she did not hurry to get up. It was so nice to have arrived and to feel that there was nothing more to do and to settle. She was at the beginning of a real holiday. Muffy would look after the children and Maude would look after the house. In the whole day before her there seemed to be no task at all except that she must write to poor Dick, who had been left behind in London. She must do that every day until he came. She hated writing letters, even to Dick, unless there was something special to say. She could not talk on paper.

  Until he came she could not be quite easy in her mind. To be separated from him gave her a one-sided feeling, as if she were walking on the edge of a cliff. On the one hand there was firm ground, on the other there was nothing, so that she could not walk quite easily. When first she woke up that morning it had been to know that Dick’s bed, beside her, was neat and empty—a gap.