A Legacy (20 page)

"You really like claret?" said Julius.

"I love it."

"It is unusual."

"For my underprivileged sex? I daresay. My father taught me. He was very fond of it, poor dear. I was an only child you see, and I suppose Papa had rather have me drink up his claret than let it go to his cousin."

"Why to the cousin?"

"Because our place would go to him."

"Was it mortgaged?" said Julius.

"Entailed."

"So you drink claret with your father. It is a good way."

"Not any longer. I am now—do forgive the Hans Ander-

sen word, one can hardly use it at table; one can hardly use it at all; but what else does one call it?—I'm an orphan."

"You have no father and mother? and no brothers and sisters?"

"That sounds quite different. Much better. Also much worse. It's not usual to be without them at my time of life; no, I'm afraid at my age, the word is orphan."

"An orphan?" said Julius. "That must be rather a nice thing to be? Is it?"

"Not nice for those who died. In India, of one of these unbelievably quick things, four years ago. No, they were not governing it; my part of our family is rather past that stage. They were travelling."

"So the cousin has the claret now?" said Julius.

"The cousin has the claret."

Presently she said, "You know you're so like Sarah describes you. I've heard so much about you. We talk of you a great deal."

"Have you? does she? She's never told me about you."

"Well, she's only known me for such a very short time."

Later on, when they had a moment, she said to Sarah, "Your Jules is rather a pet. And so funny. And of course outrageously decorative; I'm so glad you produced him at last. He's going to take me riding. Francis never rides now. Oh Sarah . . ."

"My dear."

"And I wanted to say, I don't see how you can forgive me for tonight. It was unpardonable. But you know—"

"My dear—it was not Brahms this afternoon, it was Schumann. I know: because I was there."

"No? What a lark." She smiled at Sarah with her eyes. "Darling, then you're able to say that you saw me."

"Please, please, my dear, be careful. Oh I beg you."

"I might. A little. To please you —to throw something to the gods."

"And were you supposed to have changed into this dress in the cab?"

Her look turned inward again as if to meet a memory.

"Should you even talk so much about going alone in cabs?"

"Not alone."

"I am frightened."

"I am happy." The face became drawn; then her eyes met Sarah's fully, she very lightly touched her hand with her hand. "Sarah—I am so happy. The world—"

"It does not make you invisible. Nor invulnerable."

"But it does," said Caroline, "it does, it does."

Julius drew Sarah aside almost forcibly. "Sarah, Sarah, Sarah, do you know? She knew Robert."

"Who?"

"In Hamburg. She was waiting for a boat. His name was on the grille. She bought him a tangerine but he wanted her to give him her ring. So unlike him; he must have liked her. Who is she?"

"A Miss Trafford," Sarah said repressively.

"Miss?" said Julius.

"Yes, yes."

"A great mistake. Unless she really is in a Circus? She doesn't give that impression at all."

"Oh Jules. She's English."

"Oh, authentic Miss."

"Yes."

"Miss for unmarried? Unmarried?'*

"Yes."

"She does not give that impression either. Did you say she is not married?"

"Not married. But my poor Jules, not for you. Not for you."

"I shall ask her tomorrow," said Julius.

1

W
hy?" I said. "Why, Mummy? Why?"

"Is it an idle question?" said my mother, keeping a hand on her book; "is it wise? Don't you know that you may have to stay for an answer. And I may bore you. I don't like boring people."

We are said to reinvent our memories; we often rearrange them. Did we hear this then? Do we remember saying that? or do we remember being told we said it? Did this happen at one time, or is this clear-cut scene, that amber moment, a collation, a palimpsest, a stereographic
recording of many others? I see the lime tree, see my mother in the long dress, at her tea table, alone, the parasol beside her—or is it the lady by the bushes and the ribboned hat in the picture upstairs?—I see the gramophone with the funnel horn set for striking up Vesti la Giubba by the master's orders, the horseshoe outline of the park beyond the lawns; hear the tone of her voice, bear in me the mood of the afternoon, always long, always hot; smell the lilac—

"Why—everything?"

"Now you have stopped me. Before I'd begun. And I did want to talk. What are you after? An outline of the Aristotelian method? the Copernican system? Not Genesis, I take it; I know you only talk theology with the natives. A thirst for knowledge is very well—it wears off so early—but you must be more selective in your inquiries, duck. There is nothing so fatal as a good vast subject. You know, the man you try to talk to about crop rotation and who says Atlantis is more exciting. Well, it isn't. I want your mind—if you turn out to have one—to be concrete and fastidious."

"Yes, Mummy."

"You have already formed this wish yourself? You have grounds of hope for its fulfilment? Or do you merely concur?"

"Concur."

"I must be boring you already. Go away and play."

I did not want to play. I had been playing all afternoon, batting the tennis ball against the coach-house wall. "I like to stay with you."

"How like the young men one used to know. It's not in the least flattering unless you also make yourself agreeable. Girls of course are never sure of their welcome at all, or that was what one heard. I should try to forget it. Do I alarm you?"

"Sometimes."

"Not now?"

"Not now."

"Explain."

"I like it when you talk like this. Not to me."

My mother did turn her attention on me. "Hm . . ." she said.

"I like listening to you."

"Your papa used to say that. But do you understand what I say?"

"I like the words."

"That's what's known as the argument in a circle, duck; petitio principii. Talking is words. La poesie s'ecrit avec des mots"

I squealed.

"There you go roaring with laughter. It may be an approach to education."

"Not for funny. For nice."

My mother gave me a sweet look.

"Are these strawberries?"

"You ought to do better even at your age," my mother said; "how old are you? (no, don't tell me, the last thing I want to be reminded of is years). Do you see why?"

"Because we know they are strawberries?"

"How would you feel if you had friends to tea and what they'd say was, 'Is this bread-and-butter? Is this your mug? Is this a chair?' "

I pondered this. "I think I should like it. Nanny says things like that. Papa, too."

"Does he?"

"Not questions. Papa says, 'This fruit is not entirely bad. This is not an uncomfortable chair.' "

"Go on," said my mother.

But I veered. "Nanny says in the park one makes acquaintances by passing the time of day."

"The park?" my mother said sharply.

"Not ours. Nanny's last charge's. It's full of children and other nannies. Do you know it?"

"Oh yes—full of grownups, too."

"Nannies are a kind of grownups. I should like to have children to tea with me saying those things. It would be a way to get to know them, it is conversation."

"If that's the kind of hostess you intend to become, I mustn't interfere. I only hope I shall find an excuse for not having to dine with you. Oh well, I'll most likely be dead by then, or living in the East."

"Not dead," said I.

"Darling, such a conventional reaction. It comes from thinking of one's own death. That's why people so rarely dare wish it on each other; I'm sure even here nobody positively wishes mine."

"No," I said.

"What?" said my mother, "do I catch a note of doubt? Oh do tell me."

I stood silent and her look was drawn; I knew to my horror that she now shared my sense of being on thin ice.

I feigned ease, but to make matters worse my hand went to my forehead and touched the scar above my eyebrow. I still do this at times; though the scar is hardly visible any longer as a scar and no one knows now the meaning of the gesture. I saw her seeing, and turned scarlet.

I am certain that my mother never experienced an instant's embarrassment in her life; what moved her then must have been dismay, concern. . . . She cleared a space in front of her on the table, then faced me. "Now darling," she said, "you know what that was. It was temper. You know that no one wished your death, no one wanted to kill us. ... A number of people thought they had cause to feel very angry about us and they lost their tempers— perhaps they were right, perhaps they got it all a bit muddled, we shan't go into that now, one day you will hear about it and then you can decide for yourself. Now it is frightening when people are angry, whether we know them or not. These people were not particularly thinking of
you. . . . You've lost your temper, you've chased a chicken—"

"Never," said I. "Throw a stone at a bird?" "I'm glad to hear it," said my mother with the sudden note of exasperation in her voice that I feared. It was the voice I sometimes heard coming through the house. "Very meritorious. Only that was not the point. I used the chicken—bird—to make you realize something about the nature of anger, and the things one does in anger, and you, like a parrot, side track by pleading the specific—/ never chase birds." She sat up straighter, and she seemed to address the trees, "There's no surer way of fobbing off reality than this sleight of mind, this pulling of the small, true, irrelevant, literal fact, no surer way of shutting yourself out. Lie, if you must, lie —as long as you remember you are lying; it's more honest, less stupid, than this niggling shuffle with the general and the particular." Now she swooped on me. "And for goodness' sake don't let's make too much of that absurd episode—it was no flight to Varennes. My grandfather, your great-grandfather that is, faced the Luddites. If you'll ever get to doing lessons you'll hear about that." Then with sudden reversion, "Oh my poor little parrot, fowl or bird, you have much to learn. „ . . And now I have alarmed you."

I had been grateful—I still am—for the trouble of her careful first words; yet they did not touch the core of the unease. I would have liked to reassure her, tell her that she had got it wrong, that what disquieted her for me did not disquiet me, I knew it wasn't anything—an anecdotal outing, the cobble smashing through the glass in the closed carriage—nothing to what Red Indians were up against any day. And I had not been frightened. Excited: interested in the amount of blood I was able to shed. How many stitches, nanny? I never thought of it, or not in the way I felt my mother to mean; but to tell her, the grasp, the technique, the freedom, the whole concept of telling her, were outside my powers as some distant magic. To
tell her that it was not that, that it was—what? Something about the arranged words? the talks that stopped, the servants' looks? Papa. Nanny's exaggerated lightness; her general disapproval, her pity? The almost extrasensory perception of a grownups' disturbance, the whole cloud of uncommunicable knowing of something wrong. . . ?

"Duck," said my mother, "come and sit by me. We'll talk of something else. You were asking me something. What was it? You were asking me about everything." (You never knew with her, the housemaids said. "Never notices a thing for weeks on end and then all of a heap it's, 'Lina, that's the fifth of that set you've smashed this month, do you aspire to the full dozen?' ") "What is your everything, duck? What did you want to know?"

Everything. The garden, the stables, the house, the servants, the animals I knew, my parents, the other house, my games, the pony; Fanny. When nanny was very cross she said, // I could talk, but more often she said that I was a fortunate little girl; and from the books she read me I knew that this was so. My possessions and surroundings were what they ought to be; my routine conformed recognizably with that of my coevals in literature; my family was requisitely complete. Yet there were deviations. . . . There was the fact that we were living in Germany, as nanny was never tired of rubbing in. My mother, I sensed, did not make quite the right kind of mummy in fiction (young and beautiful of course was standard), and she was so much away. Papa did not fit at all. The tall, sad, glossy gentleman who was never either stern or jolly but addressed one in phrases of grave politeness and sometimes offered one a sweet upon his stretched-out palm; I thought of him as belonging to another kind of story. He was the Unlucky Prince who had been changed by the sorcerer into a hare or stork, only the spell was such that nobody could see he was a stork and so he could not be found by the person who was to set out to change him back. Parents, perhaps, were not a serious matter. Henrietta
was. She was too old. It was bad enough to have no brother at school, but to have a sister, one's only sister, who was practically a grownup, worse than a grownup. She played with me as if I were a doll, and she tried to dress me up. Mademoiselle, regardez comme le bleu va bien a ses yeux. Je voudrais tant la coiffer; avec des boucles elle sera ravissante. Tiens, je vais te faire un collier. And when I snarled, she said, "Tu ne devrais pas faire des grimaces, cela abime les traits." It was a lapse. But the worst, the most inadmissible, was Fanny. Surely no child one read of had ever been inflicted with a fiend like her? The whole business of my mount did not bear going into. The pony was an angel; but he was big and strong and, like our saddle horses, was not allowed these days outside our gates. It was one of the things one did not ask about. There was a paddock, and one could ride in the park though it was frightfully overgrown, or one could trot round the lawn, but the horses were stuffed with oats and clever—my mother herself had been thrown—and the pony, without any malice of his own, generally tried to bolt. This seemed a great worry to Papa, and it was not often that I was allowed to ride. To console me, he bought Fanny. Fanny was looked upon as safe, sweet and small. Papa loved and trusted Fanny, and Fanny venerated him. She ate from his pocket, and would take a lighted cigar from his hand and blow a few puffs of smoke. She liked him best in formal clothes, and he always tipped his hat to her; but above all she loved a tophat, and he sometimes wore one to give her pleasure. She was also fond of music full of brass, and it was for her benefit that the gramophone was set a-trigger at tea-time under the lime tree. Fanny had not come that day; she did not care for my mother, though she knew better than to show her open enmity; there was merely a mutual coolness between them, two charmers who had no use for each other. I had been prepared to love Fanny full tilt; but, above all people, Fanny detested me.

She was exquisite to look at. She was a small, grey, high-
bred Egyptian donkey—no longer young—with delicately shaped limbs and the finest markings. Papa had bought her from a passing circus, and he liked to tell of the scene of ceremonial leave-taking when the staff from clowns to ringmaster and director had lined up to kiss her. Now she belonged to me. Every day she and I were made to spend long hours in the park together by ourselves. Nobody but I knew that Fanny could not be ridden. It was her secret. (It was found out later on that it had been her life's career. Her turn had been to throw people from the audience, led on by a wager to try her round the ring, and she had thrown them—men whose feet almost touched the ground, jockeys, Sunday riders, cavalry officers and all.) We would leave the yard, Fanny with a trim little saddle, I on her back, and jog off. When we were out of sight she shed me. She simply toppled over on her side and I was in the grass. When I tried again, she rolled me. She rolled very hard. First I would not give up—I really longed to ride. It tired her. One day she did not topple, she bolted —with surprising speed—into the orchard where the new apple trees were low, and there we cantered to and fro, I face downward flattened against her mane under the grazing branches. I never bothered her again. Hereafter I dismounted at her sign, loosened her girth and bit, and was left to my own devices until it was time for our joint return. The arrangement seemed to suit Fanny, but I knew that she despised me. Sometimes, to put me in my place, she would chase me down a lane, catch the slack of my dress and shake me savagely. As she liked to find Papa whenever she felt like it, she often came to seek him in the house. The floors were too slippery for her to manage, so a set of felt over-hooves were made and kept outside the front door. Fanny, who knew how to make her wishes felt, would stop an outdoor servant to strap them on for her; I never got used to the sudden sight of Fanny turning a passage on a bedroom floor.

I had another function in Fanny's life; both my mother
and papa thought it proper that I should groom her entirely myself. Fanny submitted to the necessary ministrations with the alert impatience of Madame du Deffand having her hair brushed by a dull niece. Only one thing I did could please her—our house was in a still dry valley without natural waters, nanny often talked to me of the seaside and my mother of the sea, and I felt delicious only in the cool water of my tub. I was sure that poor Fanny must feel the same, so I sponged her, squeezing the good fresh water over her nostrils and behind. The first time there was a furious tightening, hoof twitching for the ready kick, then a surprised and pleased relenting; and from then on she always lifted tail and muzzle with gratifying confidence to my sponge.

Perhaps I might not have fallen so much under Fanny's domination had I had other company. We had no visitors, we do not entertain, the servants said; I had met no living children. Everyone I knew was as adult as my poor donkey. There was the grandmother I had felt comfortable with—I remembered cosy drowsy days sitting together in a warm room sharing good things to eat—though that was far away now and I was outgrowing her, besides nanny told me she was not really my grandmama. The maids I held in affection, and sometimes they would play. But their moods changed often. They all came from the village —a place of great allure—they were with us to get trained, and they were least unwilling to let me have their time when they were new. I longed to hear about their home life—how many in that litter? had dad made up his mind to plant rye for fodder? were the turnips lovely again this year?—they usually told me they had sweethearts. They also took it upon themselves to enlighten me as to my religion (I had not known I had one). And here too, I found out, there were some grave shortcomings. I did know the Lord's Prayer, but I knew it with an ending so wrong and wicked that it made them flinch to hear it and use a word like mummy's words, heresy. I had no rosary, I had never