by Jane Gardam
I am sorry, Aunt Frances. I have left this letter for days.
What I have said is not quite truthful.
You see, I do not want to tell you about this place. When I begin to think how to do it, I see your face. Then I believe that I can see you in the ship, and the sun rising redder and hotter every day as you get nearer Bombay and your thoughts getting further and further from us and your old life. I see you with all your old life forgotten, dim, as was the old life of Robinson Crusoe in Hull. I see you walking about the deck with Mr Pocock, and the dolphins playing and the great seas, swinging, mounting, heaving, dropping, and Mr Pocock and Aunt Frances in the midst of them, and above you both the swirling stars. I do greatly envy you this experience Aunt Frances. And so I think—though we do not often talk of it precisely—does Mr Thwaite.
Aunt Frances, will you please forgive me if I speak to you in a way I would find difficult if I were at Oversands with Mrs Woods always just out or sight, and Alice about and Aunt Mary, who is so pure?
Aunt Frances, why did you leave me before telling me anything of any real use to my life? Here I am with Mr Thwaite and Lady Celia and in one sense I do feel very much at home. In another sense I am unsure. I have become even unsure about whether I should have come to live with you at Oversands—where perhaps I have become fragmented and incomplete. I don’t believe that I shall ever really fit in anywhere, although you and Aunt Mary have given me what Robinson Crusoe was told by his father was the greatest blessing. A home in ‘the middle state or what might be called the upper station of low life which he had found by long experience was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness’.
The trouble, Aunt Frances, is perhaps that I am a girl. Had I been a boy—your sister’s baby boy, some solid stubborn boy perhaps called Jack or Harry—how would you have done then? You would have sent me away to school and please, oh please forgive me for saying so, Aunt Frances, but the money would have been found. It would have been a Christian sort of school like Rossall or Repton and you would all have prayed and prayed for me that I would become a priest. But because I am a girl, Aunt Frances, I was to be stood in a vacuum. I was to be left in the bell-jar of Oversands. Nothing in the world is ever to happen to me. Since I have met these people here at Thwaite I have begun to see what I have missed.
I love the marsh and Oversands and I know that I live in a very compelling landscape as the Brontës did. But Aunt Frances I am not at all sure about the Brontës. I am not sure that we were ever meant to become knitted into a landscape. After all, I am in no way mystical, I don’t even want to be Confirmed. When Robinson Crusoe was married to a landscape you know, he had a hard time to keep sane. I am being dissolved into a landscape and all hope for me is that someone will come and marry me to make things complete and take me away.
But is marriage the only completing, necessary thing? I keep thinking of you and hoping that you really thought it out—whether marriage is a necessary thing. I expect by now you will be getting used to it. It may seem quite natural by the time you get to India. There is so much I wish we could have talked about before you left. You have such a secret life now. A shutter comes down when people get married.
Here at Lady Celia’s, though, there are not many shutters coming down. All is very different and nobody seems at all sure that marriage is a necessary thing. There are many people here, all of them artists—writers and poets and painters and musicians—and they seem to be very confused most of the time. Lady Celia looks after them. They spend a lot of time in their rooms or walking in the grounds, sometimes late into the night, up and down the lawns, forgetting dinner. They must be very serious about their work or very rich to miss such lovely dinners which Lady Celia kindly urges them towards.
There is a lady who plays a harp. She is fat and nice. When she walks she wobbles but her hands are white and small. Then there is a funny little painter who snaps at the air like a dog. The other evening I almost fell over him in the rose-garden. He was watching the sun drop down behind the hills and he said ‘Into the heart of darkness or into the heart of light.’ I think it was a quotation. It is all very different from Oversands—nobody goes to church at all. ‘We are all free here,’ said Lady Celia, yet she seems to lie on her yellow sofa holding long threads somehow, and every thread is tied to a guest.
I could not help comparing the snapping painter to Robinson Crusoe. If I had stepped out of the bushes upon Robinson Crusoe in his loneliness, he would, even after year of solitude, have behaved with greater decorum and manners than the painter, who had been talking to people only at tea-time.
Aunt Frances, there seems to be very little simple pleasure here. It does seem very queer that great artists (Lady Celia says that all her guests are famous and some of them great) should be so ugly on the whole and really rather ordinary in their conversation. I wonder if Daniel Defoe was ordinary to meet? I said some of this to Mr Thwaite and he cleared his throat so much that I think he agreed with me. He has a great admiration of his sister and what she does for artists, nevertheless.
We had a piano recital the evening of the day I arrived by a pianist called Grünt. He is very famous and he is, Lady Celia says, ‘the greatest living exponent of the works of Chopin’. We all gathered in the drawing-room and after a time he came in and sat down. He hung down his head so far that his nose very nearly touched the keyboard and he sat there, as praying, and we all sat in tremendous silence, except that Mr Thwaite suddenly gave a very great sneeze. First Lady Celia and then everybody else gave Mr Thwaite a look, but Herr Grünt just hung his face down closer to the keys so that the end of his nose actually brushed middle C–and then his long and bony hands reached up and he began to play.
They played quite independently of his body and even his head, which stayed quite close by middle C for a considerable time. Then his head flung itself up in the air and his face became parallel with the ceiling as the hands went on with a life of their own. His eyes were shut. It was rather warm in the room and all the poets began to sigh and groan and shift about a bit. Only Lady Celia stayed utterly still like a statue in robes.
He went on and on. It’s a wonderful piano. His head is very big–far too large for his shoulders which slope away. They aren’t so powerful as Mr Pocock’s and I thought, well, if Herr Grünt were to get married he would not have the wonderful strength to sing at his wedding. Down flopped his head again, very close to his finger-tips. Then—plinkety . . . plonkety . . . plink. Very quiet. Very separate. One note. Another note. Little water drops. One, two, three . . . And a long long silence.
Then he opened his eyes and everyone stirred.
They didn’t say ‘bravo’ or clap. They stirred, with a very serious, bulgy, bottomy movement and looked at one another with great meaning in their eyes, except for Mr Thwaite, who had taken out his handkerchief and was examining all the hems on it.
Then, a great murmur of awe went round the drawing-room and Herr Grünt rose and went over to Lady Celia and picked up her hand which is terribly heavy with yellow rings and he kissed it and looked at her and her lips moved and everyone began to breathe adjectives; and some people got out their handkerchieves just as Mr Thwaite was putting his away.
And I did so wish that you were there, Aunt Frances. Herr Grünt was actually, and in fact, the most terrible pianist!
Aunt Frances I felt so lonely.
I will write to you again. I am longing for your letters when they come from Oversands. I hope that you and Mr Pocock are enjoying your honeymoon and please forgive me if this letter is not a very controlled one, your loving Polly.
Thwaite
Dear Aunt Frances,
I am afraid that I am writing you a great many letters and it is so aggravating because I know that by now your letters to me must be collecting up at home. I shan’t see them for ages unless Alice posts them on, and somehow I feel that she may not be very quick at that as she’s going to be taken up so much with the spring cleaning and then to have her holida
y. Mrs Woods was still in bed when I left, though I expect she will be well enough now to have gone to her nursing home.
Aunt Mary, of course as you will know, has gone into Retreat and there have to be no letters. She is so terribly good, not needing them. I must say I do—and I need to write them, too—and I keep wishing that there were more people I could send postcards to. I have sent some to the nuns.
So I am going to have to bore only you with what has happened since the Chopin recital. I don’t find it boring, but perhaps it will be to you, so busy at The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Army and Navy Stores. It is very wonderful here, though. Very gracious and beautiful. We live as if we are all extra-special. I’m afraid it isn’t very Christian at all.
After the recital the excitement of the day was far from over. Lady Celia suggested that we all should walk on the terrace for a while and she was helped out by Herr Grünt. He was a bit tottery because of the exhaustion of the piece and Mr Thwaite got hold of his arms and they all three stepped out together through the French doors in a row. Mr Thwaite looked very fine and knightly in his evening dress and his moustache–much more noble in every way than any of the artists and writers and I thought again that perhaps ugliness is one of the things that a creative artist has to put up with as a penance for his other advantages. Apart from Shakespeare and Byron and Shelley, most seem to have been rather plain, don’t they? And they stare so much.
As I thought these things, Herr Grünt suddenly fell over which made Mr Thwaite fall over too and for a terrible minute it looked as if Lady Celia would be pulled down beneath them. And then she would have been extinguished. But the painter who barks like a dog came and slid himself cleverly underneath her.
Then there was a quartette of fallen people collapsed upon the terrace and some of them great artists. And when Mr Thwaite stood up and stood on Herr Grünt’s right hand and Herr Grünt screamed, it really became quite a serious occasion.
People ran about. There was a very substantial man who is a Fellow of all Souls (I think this means a humble person studying to be a priest at a famous church somewhere in Oxford and I expect you will have heard of it) and he cried out, ‘They’re off! They’re off! Finished—his career is finished!’
Everybody ran and helped Herr Grünt to his feet, and he was weeping, and a long lady in purple looked very deeply at a thin lady with a fringe who paints water-colours. ‘What are off?’ asked the little white harpist. ‘Fingers,’ said the FOAS.
Even the butler was laughing—he’s awfully nice—called Barker, and he and the housekeeper, Maitland, are not a bit what you’d expect. I have been invited to supper with them one night in the servants’ hall.
After the multiple falling over, Barker laughed quite openly. Nobody noticed but me. He laughed in a sober sort of way but for quite a long time.
Then we all went early to bed.
This morning Lady Celia sent for me. She said, ‘Child—’ (I think she may just play at being Miss Havisham sometimes)—‘Child, you are very quaint.’
I said I was sorry.
‘It is not in your control,’ she said. ‘Quaintness is caused by circumstance. Nevertheless you ought to wear different clothes.’
I said, ‘Thank you, Lady Celia, but I think Aunt Mary might not like me to have new clothes at present. I have had new clothes for the wedding.’
‘Those?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ she said and closed her eyes. ‘Green,’ she said, ‘kingfisher green. Glossy. Shot.’
I said that actually kingfishers were blue. There were some in The Hall pond at home. I also said that it is virtually impossible to shoot a kingfisher. As well as being a frightful idea. Herr Grünt was sitting near, nursing his right hand which was in a bandage the size of a wasp’s nest and he gave a shocked moan as if I were being remiss.
Then I heard someone laugh and it was the painter; but Lady Celia looked at him and he snapped the air.
Lady Celia’s eyes gave a snap round the room, too, a fierce one. ‘Quaintness may go too far,’ she said. ‘Help me up—no, not you—’ (the big purple woman had lunged forward)—‘Polly Flint.’
So I helped her up and armed her across the room feeling very clumsy and huge. I’m still growing horribly as you very well know. At the door she turned and looked at everyone, one at a time, and they mostly looked frightened (but not the painter) as if they might possibly soon be leaving.
Then we began a long journey, Lady C and I, slowly. Up the main great staircase at last, where she kept stopping and holding on to the front of her neck. You could see a vein beating in it and I was scared and said, ‘Lady Celia, are you well?’
‘No.’
‘Then shouldn’t you—stop? Shall I get Maitland?’
‘Of course not. I am perfectly well. What is not well is the company in this house.’
‘Oh, I’m sure they’re—’
‘They are not what they once were.’
‘Oh, I’m sure none of them is so very old.’
‘My family’, she said, ‘has entertained Tennyson.’
‘Yes I see. But I expect he got old in the end.’
‘His age was immaterial. Mr Dodgson has been a guest in this house. Many times.’
‘Mr Dodgson—oh, did you know him?’
‘Of course. He was at Croft. I was a child.’
‘Oh—did he talk about Alice? And creatures?’
‘He hadn’t thought of Alice then. He kept asking difficult questions. Very queer mathematical things. And he was fond of marmalade.’
‘Yes, I see.’
‘But it was immaterial. Whatever he said or did was immaterial, for he was going to write Alice.’
I said, ‘Oh yes. Oh yes.’ I looked at her—all rings and paint and silly draperies and proud mouth and her old claw hands on her stick. ‘Oh Lady Celia, yes.’ I said it with terrific agreement rather congratulating her. She didn’t like it much.
We were in her bedroom now. ‘Sit me there,’ she said and I settled her on a lovely watered-silk sofa with a curled end and she spread her shawls about. ‘Over there,’ she said and pointed at an old piece of furniture. ‘Open the press.’
So many materials were stacked inside the press that it looked like a pirate’s cave. A female-pirate’s cave. Flimsy bits and silky bits and thick velvety bits and long, long lacy bits all crammed in and layered tight, all the colours there are, all textures, all patterns.
One of the very few mistakes in Robinson Crusoe is his regret about clothes—one of the jokes is his clumsy furry appearance in the nanny-goat skins. Yet there were clothes brought off the ship. He had them by him. He did not use them. Or scarcely. Perhaps he had never really cared about his appearance. I would guess this was true. One can imagine him as a boy of say fourteen, in Hull, looking not very well turned-out I think. And his parents not being enthusiastic about him at all.
Clothes on the desert island are what I should very much have missed. Different, beautiful clothes as time went by. Though I never, never seem to be wearing the right ones.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Different beautiful clothes.’
‘Try the greens,’ she said.
‘I’d love the yellows,’ and I draped one after the other round myself. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we could do worse than that. ‘Try a red.’ There was a dark red velvet a hundred miles long and I paraded about.
‘Frightful,’ she said. ‘Try the blue. There’s a blue there. Kingfisher blue.’
I dropped the red and patrolled in the blue.
‘It gives you eyes,’ she said. ‘A start. It must be the blue. You approve of Alice? Many children don’t.’
‘I love Alice. I mean the book, not the girl.’
‘Why not the girl?’
‘She was a bit stodgy.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, the bows and the frills and she did answer back so.’
‘You are very decisive yourself. Especially for someone who has liv
ed so far from the centre of things.’
‘But it’s the centre of things for me,’ I said, ‘and I’m sixteen years old. Alice was a child and everything was very everyday for her. She’d seen nothing odd. She just lived in Oxford.’
‘Her dreams say otherwise.’
‘She was a child,’ I said.
She looked at me for ages and then said, ‘Come here. Yes, I suppose you are. Older than . . .’ but then she wouldn’t say any more. ‘You shall have the yellow,’ she said, ‘and the blue. I believe there is a brown velvet ready-made somewhere too—Maitland can find it—which will do for now. Wear it tomorrow. Ring the bell for Maitland.’
Then in came Maitland all pursed up and there was a great deal of talk about the lovely material and fussing about. It looks as if I am to be dressed as a princess. I sat at her dressing-table. All the silver! Great fat chunky looking-glass with fat silver cherubs flying and brushes galore, far too heavy for her and rows of glass bottles with silver stoppers.
There was a box made of pink and cream chips of something shiny—Persian people lying on benches and looking lovingly across at each other. She opened it and scrabbled about. All kinds of glittery things. The maid Maitland fastened up her mouth tighter.
‘Maitland,’ she said, ‘shall we have Polly read us some Tennyson?’
‘Yes m’lady.’
‘Some Tennyson, Polly.’
An edition was produced. I read them Tennyson. Maud. I went on for about half an hour. Then Maitland started clanking the water-jug. Lady Celia had shut her eyes. ‘The Lady of Shalott,’ she said, so I started that. I went into a sort of trance over it after a while as I always do with Aunt Mary though it upsets Aunt Mary doesn’t it? She never liked it as you do, Aunt Frances. When I came to.
‘She left the web, she left the loom.
She made three paces—’ Lady Celia said, ‘Stop!’ and took a little greyish glass bottle and sniffed at it. ‘The end,’ she said.
So I read the end—the lovely man looking down over the bridge on the poor dead face, all of her so lovely and never even been for a walk. She must have had an awfully pasty complexion when you come to think of it. ‘Wonderful!’ said Lady Celia. ‘Is it not?’