by Jane Gardam
And a tear formed then in Mrs Woods’s good eye, welled up over its red under-lid and spilled crookedly down her awful cheek.
Aunt Mary did come back to the yellow house but not then. Not for some time and her return was almost a worse surprise than Mrs Woods, for like the marsh she seemed to be shrunk and poor, unrecognisable as the tall beauty in the oyster-silk at the wedding scarcely more than a month ago.
Stepping out of the taxi she seemed pinched up, strange, and old, in the familiar crazy black veiling. She scarcely noticed me as she came into the house, glanced at the pile of letters in the hall and passed them by, looked at Alice as if she were uncertain who she was and examined the barometer for a long time. Then very slowly she took off her gloves.
At last she said, ‘Polly?’
I tried to hug her but she pushed me vaguely away. ‘No, dear, let me just think.’ She went across the hall and looked round the study door and stood there for ages. Then she crossed over and looked in at the dining-room. ‘Oh how nice!’ she said. ‘I hope the spoons are safe?’
I said, ‘Mrs Woods—’
‘Yes. Never mind. Another time,’ and we went up to the drawing-room and Alice brought tea.
‘Are you all right, Aunt Mary? Was the Retreat—nice?’
‘Very nice, thank you.’ She sat upright holding the flowery tea-cup.
‘I had a—marvellous time. I met all sorts of famous people. It’s a wonderful place, Aunt. Thwaite. You never told me. It’s a vast house. There are suits of armour and things. Lady Celia—’
‘Lady Celia,’ said Aunt Mary. ‘Hah!’
‘Oh—don’t you like her?’
‘Celia Thwaite, we do not talk about. She is a destroyer. She has ruined lives.’
‘Goodness—Yes, she might.’
‘She did. She has. Arthur Thwaite was born to marry a good woman. At the wedding—’
‘Oh—oh yes. I see.’
‘Celia is a wicked woman given over to sin.’ The ring of the old Aunt Mary made me feel better. ‘If you don’t mind, Polly, we shall not speak of her again.’
‘No, of course not. But’, I said, ‘I can’t see why he—Mr Thwaite—listened to her? About getting married?’
‘He is weak. All men are weak. Pocock—your father. Not of course your Grandfather Younghusband, but he was one apart. Women are the strong ones, Polly, but we are not allowed to show it. We have to await men’s pleasure. We can never ask them. If we do there is a fiasco. Like Frances—’
‘Oh, have you heard from her? There are letters from her in the hall—all to you. None to me.’
‘I heard before I left the Retreat. Something or other to do with the armed forces. Shopping in London.’
‘Oh please, can I bring the rest of the letters in?’
‘Not just yet.’ She sat looking queerly at the brown and gold pansies on her tea-cup. ‘I’ve been so happy while I’ve been away,’ she said.
After that she took to wandering about. For the next few days she drifted round the house looking out of all the windows. Then she spent hours sitting still. She ate almost nothing. Once she went to see Mrs Woods, but soon wandered out again and when the doctor called, though she seemed to be listening to him intently, her eyes were on other things. ‘Mrs Woods may well live for many years,’ he said. ‘She is improving all the time. We’re getting her up—Polly and young Alice—now. She will soon be getting downstairs again. I don’t think, since she’s not—er—, that there should be much extra washing. So that we need not think of moving her. I shan’t recommend hospital at present, or nursing home.’
‘There is no money for either,’ said Aunt Mary. ‘It would have to be the nuns. Or the workhouse. She is penniless.’
The doctor tipped his sherry-glass about. ‘The nuns only take the convalescents of the working poor.’
‘We are the idle poor,’ said Aunt Mary. ‘I am nearly penniless too. Frances and I had very little and Frances has taken her share to India. I have only the house and no one would buy that. We are as poor as Our Lord.’
One night I woke up and found Aunt Mary standing in my bedroom looking out of the window again. It was moonlight and she stood still, watching the sea. After a minute she went out. She looked even thinner, madder, with her great white nightdress floating all about her, one hand holding a candle and the other the case of spoons.
I lay awake then until the sun began to rise, thinking about her and about everything that had happened to me since I was born, and how perhaps a dog, a couple of cats, a handful of goats and a parrot might be quite jolly companions.
A week or so later she came into the study and said, ‘Polly, if I went back to the Retreat, could you manage? It is very cheap and I don’t mean it to be for very long. I do so miss it there. Just until I feel better? I don’t seem able to underst—to organise anything here any more.’
I said, ‘Yes, I see. Of course. I’m sure with Alice—She’s very good.’
‘I don’t want to do wrong,’ she said. ‘You’re not seventeen. Could you ring for Alice?’ Her eyes glared and stared.
‘I’d miss you very much,’ I said.
‘Alice, come in. Could you and Miss Polly manage alone for a little longer? If I were to go back to the Retreat?’
Alice looked at me as if she were about to have her throat cut. ‘Yes Miss Younghusband. Yes, I’d think—’
‘I cannot be as near to God here as I should like. Miss Polly understands, although she is—sadly—un-Confirmed. Now I shall go and write the letter.’
When she had gone out Alice said, ‘Oh Miss Polly!’ and I said, ‘Is she ill, Alice? What shall we do? She’s not here any more.’
‘We must bide with her,’ said Alice.
‘Alice, I’m frightened.’
‘I’m frightened, too, miss, but I’d think it might be her age.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Well, her age. Her time of life. We go funny, women.’
‘Funny?’
‘My Mam did. But she’ll come through it. Bear up.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’ (Would I ever know anything? What was this ‘funny’? There was nothing about women going funny in novels. Perhaps if Robinson Crusoe had been a woman—Did men go funny, too, and who was there to tell me?)
‘We’ll fettle grand,’ said Alice uncertainly, but she was watching me. I saw kindness in her face and something better—something that meant she could be strong if need be. She had only to get used to an idea. ‘Oh, we’ll fettle grand,’ she said. ‘We got me Mam through right as ninepence. She took a great fancy to bloaters and we humoured her. She takes in washing again now—strong as a lion, and so’ll Miss Younghusband be.’
But she was wrong for Aunt Mary died a month later from a tumour on the brain and was buried in the churchyard near poor little Mr Woods, which would not have pleased her.
To tell Aunt Frances was the first concern. I wrote at once, of course, but knew that it would be weeks before the letter arrived in Delhi—long before she did, for the Pococks were travelling very slowly. Rome and Naples had been visited and at present they must be steaming across the Indian Ocean. I thought that at the funeral I might be able to ask Mr Thwaite about the telegraph to cable to ships, but Mr Thwaite had bronchitis and could not attend the funeral. After worrying about it—and being advised about it by the Church and The Hall and Mr Boagey and Mr Box and several of Aunt Mary’s nuns—even going to the post-office to enquire of Dicky Dick who had expanded the lino-shop to become the first postmaster to the new esplanade terrace (he had no first-hand information about cabling facilities but gave me tea) I decided that there was no need for haste after all.
Aunt Frances could not come back. Even if she could have done, what sense in it would there be? I was only wanting sympathy.
So I wrote a note to the Society of the Propagation of the Gospel in case they had someone else going to Delhi who might be a comfort to her in her sad loss, and tried to keep my head.
I took to g
oing to church regularly after Aunt Mary’s death, sitting in her pew, using her white prayer-book, thinking about her a good deal. The church-people were kind. They turned round from the pews in front with wide smiles and sympathetic nods and at the church-porch the new young priest thrust out at me his Cardinal Newman jaw and his hand gripped mine like a vice.
He came to the yellow house to see me, too, often stayed after bringing Mrs Woods her Holy Communion and threw back several glasses of sherry, sprawled out in the button-back chair.
After Evensong once—I even started going to Evensong, though I suppose I did let my mind wander rather—watching the new priest tearing about the chancel, scrabbling in his vestments for his handkerchief, singing cheerfully like a Methodist—after Evensong once, a large important woman asked if I would like to do a vase, but as I didn’t know what she meant I said no, and there was rather a cooling off after that.
Then one day I went to the church and met a great blanket of gloom as I stepped through the door. I was handed a prayer-book by Mr Boagey bent in to a hoop, and the ladies here and there had handkerchieves about them as openly as the vicar and nothing to do with hay-fever from the marsh. The vase-lady turned from the pew in front and covered my hand with hers and when Lady Vipont slid into The Hall pew, it was like the arrival of the cloud that worried Noah. ‘Thank God’, said the lady of the vase, ‘that it was painless and swift.’
It appeared that Mr Pocock had died at sea. The vicarage had heard only that morning.
‘My child—you didn’t know! We were sure—! We heard just before the service—a telephone message to The Hall and The Hall to the Vicar. We would have come to you at once—’ After the service clusters of ladies stood talking in whispers in the churchyard and only the nuns, being professionals, looked composed. And only the nuns said ‘Your poor dear aunt. Oh Polly, your poor dear aunt. And still a bride.’
Alice said—we had a brandy together in the kitchen—‘Look at it this way, Miss Polly. She’ll not want. He was a rich man. That’s not nothing. Miss Frances was liked by all when she was poor and now she’ll be the belle of the ball. And she’s so young-looking, too!’
‘But she’ll be coming home, Alice,’ I said, just realising it. ‘She’ll be home again. Oh Alice!’
And then the most astonishing thing happened.
Superstition, habit, respect, what you will, I could not write a letter on a Sunday with the sepia eye of Grandfather Younghusband on me from the wall and the holy eye of Aunt Mary from the clouds and so it was Monday morning before I had the letter of condolence to Aunt Frances ready for the post.
Alice and I did Mrs Woods that morning as usual. I wrote the letter and decided not to wait for the postman to call, but walked across the marsh to Dicky Dick’s myself. It had not been an easy letter to write and I brooded all the way on whether or not I had hit the right note—Aunt Frances had always known very well that Mr Pocock and I had not been the best of friends. He had no idea what I looked like for a start as he had always been intent on something far above my head; and he had hardly addressed a word to me since the business of the refusal of Evensong. I said what I could—the terrible shock, the short time together, and so forth, and described the dreadfully sad atmosphere in church yesterday and the long prayers we’d had for both of them, alive and dead. The last bit was the real bit. Oh when, when, when will you get home? Darling Aunt Frances, when?
At Dicky Dick’s I got another cup of tea and a long discussion on burials at sea and foreign germs. Then we moved to the new vicar and how the nuns were threatening a strike on laundering his albs. ‘As to his cottas,’ said Mrs Dick, ‘they say they’re shameless. They don’t know what he does with them—and his surplices ripped and filthy round the hem like a Roman. It’s the way he rives about in the pulpit. And that sneezing. Mr Pocock, God rest him, always behaved so stately.’
‘Here’s post for you, Miss Polly,’ said Mr. Dick. ‘from foreign. Just arrived.’
I seized and ran—and on the marsh peeled the large envelope from the front of my coat where I had slapped it against me—and gazed. It was. A letter from Aunt Frances. To me. Addressed to me. At last. I ripped it open.
It was heavy and stiff, not like the letters on the hall-table to Aunt Mary, which, still unread by me, had accompanied her to the Retreat. In fact it was not a letter at all, but a photograph taken on board ship and it showed Aunt Frances dressed as a pierrot in a stiff white ruff and a pointed hat with black pom-poms, a satin skirt and bodice cut tight. Surrounding her were other pierrots, male and female, some of them smoking cigarettes in long holders and holding wineglasses at angles. Everyone had a very shiny face. A large man in the middle who was wearing a monocle which accorded strangely with the pom-poms had the shiniest face of all. He was holding a bottle and had his arm round Aunt Frances’s waist and on the back of the photograph in Aunt Frances’s hand-writing were the words, ‘High Jinks on Deck.’
It was after tea before I told Alice. She said as she came to take my tray, ‘She’s managed three scones and honey and she’s walked to the window. My feelings are she could do them stairs now even by herself, if she had a mind. You’re quiet?’
‘Yes. I’ve had some news. I forgot to say.’
‘Forgot? Now what’s this then? Letters?’ (I thought, Alice is changing.)
‘Well, it wasn’t a letter. From Miss Frances. It was a photograph. Taken on board the ship.’
‘Oh Miss Polly,’ she said, reverting to status. ‘Oh, how lovely. Oh, she’ll be glad she had that taken in time. Just the two of them together. Especially after no photos at the wedding. Even our Min had wedding photos. You’ll have to take it round to all of them at Church.’
‘I don’t know that I will, actually. Mr Pocock’s not in it.’
‘Oh dear, I expect he was sickening. Oh!’
She looked at the photograph closely. For a long time, then turned it over and then back.
‘Which one is Jinks do you think, Miss Polly?’
‘I don’t know. It’s rather puzzling isn’t it?’
‘Miss Frances looks rather—over-done. I don’t think I should show it to Mrs Woods.’
‘No. Maybe I could show it to the new vicar?’
‘Well, we could,’ she said. ‘They say he’s a man of the world.’
‘“We”,’ I thought. ‘Yes, Alice is changing. They’d all have had a fit about “we”.’ And then I thought, ‘Whatever should I do without her?’
‘I had this from Aunt Frances,’ I told the vicar the day of the post-Communion sherry and he choked violently in the button-back chair and went wheezing and hacking round the room beating his chest and ended up with his head against the marble chimney-piece. ‘God in Heaven!’ he cried and remembered himself before looking at the photograph again with a grave mouth, his eyes streaming.
‘D’you think it’s some sort of mistake, Father? I hardly recognise her.’
‘She does seem rather—over-excited,’ he said, getting out the handkerchief.
‘Alice has a brother who was stoker on a liner. He told her that people do get rather excited on board ship. It’s vibrations of the engines, though I don’t see quite why.’
‘Harra—yes,’ he said. ‘Did you see the postmark?’
‘It was posted ages ago,’ I said, and left it at that. He kept looking at me however, and at last I had to say, ‘Aden.’
‘Aden?’
‘Yes.’
We looked away from each other then, because we both knew that last Sunday we had prayed for the repose of Father Pocock committed to the deep, and that the deep referred to had been the Mediterranean. An ocean which the Aunt Frances in the photograph had left far behind her.
To the best of my knowledge, that vicar who stayed such a short time with us and whom I missed very much (there was a hay-fever and incense revolt) never told anyone about the photograph. I put it deep in a drawer where it stayed for many years, taking it out only once, a month later, when we heard that Aunt Franc
es had died of amoebic dysentery on the way to Chandrapore. I looked at it for a long time then and felt mystification as before, but a sort of elation, too, at the dizzy joy in her face.
The war began for us, then, with a rainy morning and mist wrapped about a stunned house of death and disease and metamorphosis; and also with the front doorbell giving a loud and tremendous jangling cry.
‘Law, I can’t answer it, look at me,’ said Alice at the dirty fireplace and held out black hands. I said, ‘I’ll go, it’s all right.’
‘That you’ll not. Whatever would they have said?’ She tried to push bits of hair back under her cap and left a black mark on her forehead.
‘I’m going,’ said I. ‘You go off and wash before you go up to the bedroom. I’ll come and help soon. You’re a show, Alice,’ and I opened the door to Paul Treece.
He looked eager, rose-pink and dripping.
It was more than a year. The sight of him meant Thwaite and Roundstone, and there was a great surge of excitement in me. Simultaneously there was the surge of disappointment at the girlish slope of his shoulders, the ears, the overbrightness.
‘Polly—Miss Flint! I came over at once. I had no idea you were so near. I’m at The New House. With the Zeits. I was staying for a visit. None of that now, of course. I’m joining my regiment this afternoon.’
‘You’re frightfully wet. Come in. I didn’t know you were in the army. It drenches you, the mist. You’re flooding the tiles.’
‘I didn’t stop for a coat. I thought I’d get right over to you at once.’
(Goodness! Goodness, goodness, Paul Treece!)
I said, ‘I heard the Zeits were coming at last. But it’s been so long. I don’t go out much.’
‘No. I heard. You’re alone looking after a crowd of sick aunts. They’re very sorry—the Zeits. I was to say so. Look, I’ve a letter here. You’re to go over. I’ll be gone though.’
‘I can’t go over, Paul. Come through to the kitchen and I’ll get you a towel to dry your hair.’