Dolly (11 page)

But the summers of which I speak were real enough, as were my long walks, which my mother accepted, as she had accepted the walks she used to take with my father. She no longer took those walks, preferring to move dreamily but contentedly round the flat and to wait for my father to come home and join her. The heart murmur which had been diagnosed when she was a child had resurfaced after years of giving no sign. She was not ill—in fact she had never seemed better—but she obeyed her doctor, rested, and saved her energies for our various homecomings, when she would greet us with joy and satisfaction. Occasionally she would stand still, as if listening to music, and then we knew that her heart had missed a beat, but she was so used to this that it did not seem to alarm her. If my father were present he would unconsciously hold his breath until she began to move freely again. Yet within seconds they would smile at each other
and go about their business, as if disorder had no place in their universe, and as if they therefore had no cause to fear.

When I got home from one of my walks my mother would express gratification at my audacity and would hasten to pour out the tea, summoning Miss Lawlor to witness my prowess. I remember Miss Lawlor standing at the door of the drawing-room, her straw hat already in place (she usually went home in the early afternoon, but occasionally liked to linger) and miming admiration in her typically muted fashion. We were all affected by the weather in one way or another.

‘Sit down, Violet,’ said my mother. ‘You’re not going out in this heat without a cup of tea. It’s supposed to cool one down, although I can’t see how it can. It is simply the best drink of all; ours not to reason why. And help yourself to cake. Jane? Eat something, darling.’

But there was no need to encourage me. I ate and drank substantially, as did my parents. Miss Lawlor, as I have said, shared my mother’s lunch, and mine too if I were at home, and helped to prepare our dinner. Gradually she fell into the habit of joining my mother at teatime, which pleased my mother, as they were very fond of each other. Of the two of them Miss Lawlor was the more discreet, if that is possible. Her conversation consisted largely of gentle murmurings of agreement. She was a timid woman who had long sought a shelter from the world’s harshness, and had found this in the church. My mother tried to make her feel at ease in our home and I think succeeded. Although she had come to us from my father’s side of the family she loved both my parents equally well, and was content to share their lives rather
than seek one of her own. I never knew her age, although she must have been a good fifteen years older than my father. But age had not attacked her as it attacks more robust women; she simply became a little more tentative every year, while from her faded face her large brown eyes shone forth with undimmed faith in the world beyond this world, which my parents, free-thinkers, took care never to disparage in her presence. Even when we were alone together no aspersions were allowed: the world to come was left intact for those who believed in it. This was considered part of a general courtesy, all the more impressive in that it was completely undemonstrative. Such a training is difficult to lose, even in situations which call for something more decisive. I never lost my temper, even as a child, and have remained incapable of doing so to this day.

After tea my friend Marigold Chance might receive a visit. She lived in Bramerton Street, a short walk over the bridge. She had been my friend since we had started school together at the age of four, and now that our schooldays were approaching their end we had become aware that life might separate us: I would go to Cambridge and Marigold would begin her nurse’s training. I loved her, as I loved everyone; I was not jealous of her beauty, which was considerable and was to remain so until after the birth of her third child. If I envied her at all it was for her relations, who were numerous. I particularly envied her for her two great-aunts, Catherine and Eleanor—Kate and Nell—two vigorous and heroically built women who travelled down from Glasgow every summer with a cargo of shortbread, whisky, Shetland pullovers for Marigold’s father and brother, and kilts for her mother
and for Marigold herself. Kate and Nell, who lived together in harmonious spinsterhood, or single blessedness, as they put it, felt vaguely sorry for the perfectly capable girl their nephew had married, simply because they felt sorry for any woman held in bondage to a man. Paradoxically, they doted on Marigold’s father and brother, and were always trying to devise treats for them. From the double bed in which they had spent their chaste night they would rise and make the early morning tea, anxious to get everyone out of the house so that they could get on with some serious baking. ‘Sit down, dear,’ they would say to Marigold’s mother. ‘Let me do that. Or let Nell. That’s what we’re here for, to give you a rest.’

The idea that aunts could be benevolent was new to me. The only aunt I knew was Dolly, who was selfish, capricious and shrewd, but who could not be imagined in the act of doing anyone a good turn. Therefore it was particularly disagreeable to me to get home and find Dolly installed in either my father’s or my mother’s chair. Her visits were now less frequent than they had been after my grandmother’s death, for she seemed to have a mysteriously flourishing social life. She had inherited from my grandmother, or rather she had appropriated from her in lieu of anything more marketable, my grandmother’s entire circle of friends, ‘the refugees’, as she laughingly called them. The old ladies who were my grandmother’s contemporaries still loved their game of cards and were intrigued by Dolly, who seemed anxious to carry on her mother-in-law’s traditions. And these old ladies had married sons and daughters, all of them substantial people, who were not averse to going to St John’s Wood for tea
on a Sunday and staying on for bridge and Annie’s canapés. These soirées were remarkably successful. Curiously enough Dolly got on very well with the women, all of whom became her dearest friends until she fell out with one or other of them. These
déboires
would be reported to my mother with full accompaniment of heaving bosom and flashing eyes. ‘That woman,’ she would say. ‘Don’t even mention the name to me! When I think of all I’ve done for her!’ My mother knew better than to enquire on this point; she knew that her role was essentially a humble one. ‘I’ve introduced her to various people, influential people,’ Dolly would continue. ‘And then she has the effrontery to tell me not to rely on her making up a four in future. She’s going to be busy, she says.’ This was uttered with a fine show of scorn. Neither of us said anything. We knew that Dolly and her ungrateful friend or enemy—it was often difficult to know which—would be on the telephone to each other as usual the following morning. I did not understand such behaviour then, but I do now. It is the behaviour of the true primitive.

Dolly would come to see my mother in the spirit of a benefactor visiting her indulgence on the unfortunate. No doubt she came for another, simpler reason as well, but my mother was so discreet that we never knew whether this was or was not the case. My father never asked her again, aware that to do so would cause her embarrassment.

‘Dolly was here today,’ she might say apologetically. Later that evening she might sigh, ‘Poor Dolly.’ For whatever pity Dolly felt for my mother was as nothing beside the genuine pity my mother felt for Dolly.

One particular day I got home to find Dolly drinking tea
with my mother. It was a chill rainy autumn day, but Dolly was in one of her beautiful silk dresses: she seemed to generate her own microclimate, another characteristic of the primitive disposition. It seemed that she was about to go to Brussels to see Adèle Rougier. She was always about to leave for either Brussels or Nice, although I doubt whether she left London as frequently as she said she did: we had no real notion of her movements since she disregarded matters of fact like dates and times. Her conversation was, as always, filled with the names of people entirely unknown to us but known to Dolly through her bridge-playing afternoons. Sometimes she did go to Nice, to see her mother, but had nothing to say when she returned. Indeed we did not quite know when she had returned, since she was uncharacteristically reticent about her mother, on whom she continued to lavish her entire store of tenderness. The tenderness, I suspect, undermined her: she preferred a more embattled attitude to life, which she was able to exercise more satisfactorily in London or Brussels. Visits to Brussels seemed to yield more in the way of argument and patronage, two of her more preferred modes, as if she were eternally pitted against adversaries, on whom she might decide to confer friendship. My mother, who was treated to a full account of Dolly’s recent triumphs, had nothing against these visits; in fact she encouraged them, no doubt in more ways than one. She regarded Dolly’s life as flighty, even tragic; she wished to get her away from the card table and put her life on an even keel. She saw attendance on an elderly acquaintance as a more serious undertaking than the endless telephone conversations of which her mornings seemed to consist.

‘Poor Adèle,’ Dolly said on this occasion, screwing up her face in that well-known grimace. ‘Poor old thing. I’m afraid she’s not what she was. Not that she was ever very bright, but with her money she didn’t need to be.
De gros sous
,’ she added. ‘I go over to give her a hand, really. I do little things for her, post her letters, remind her to take her pills. She’s always been so fond of me that I can’t really do anything less.’

During the absence of response that this tender eulogy called forth the thought came to both of us, no doubt simultaneously, that the exchange must have been mutually beneficial.

‘Not that it’s very entertaining for me,’ Dolly went on. ‘There are so many people I’d rather look up. But I’m very loyal. And I don’t let her see … I suppose I’ll go on looking after her for as long as she needs me. Poor old girl,’ she added pensively. Her face was a beautiful study in compassion.

‘You stay with her, I suppose?’ said my mother.

‘Well, of course, Etty. Where else would I stay? Her house is all the home I have now.’ Now that your mother has sold Maresfield Gardens was what she meant. This left my mother feeling properly reproached. Dolly, magnanimous in victory, then turned her attention to myself.

‘And what about you, Jane? What are you going to do with your life?’

‘Well, I’m going to Cambridge next year …’

‘Are you indeed? Well, you know best. But I always think that charm is more important to a woman than a lot of degrees.
Don’t underestimate charm,’ she said, peering at me to see if she could detect any.

I was lacking in charm, of course, a tall thin girl with no visible assets and no figure to speak of. For many years I looked younger than I was, which encouraged people to be quite outspoken in my presence, as if I were too obtuse or too juvenile to understand them. Dolly, in particular, was given to dropping huge hints to my mother over my head. If she caught me looking at her she assumed that I was so dim that I would be grateful for any show of interest.

‘When I was your age, Jane, I was thinking of other things, I can assure you.’ She sighed. ‘What wouldn’t I give to have those days again! But times were hard, harder than they’ve ever been for you, Jane. But still I’m sure you’ll want to get married one day.’ She looked dubious, as if such an eventuality were barely credible.

‘Jane has plenty of time,’ said my mother gently.

I think she sensed, instinctively, as I did, that Dolly would examine any romance I might have had for possible worldly advantages, and was as determined as I was to keep this area of my life unexamined. Dolly may have intuited this, and have felt some of her usual contempt for our decorum. But the matter was dropped, except for the fact that she could not resist a final sally. She kissed my mother fondly, patted her cheek, and said that her car must not be kept waiting. She had taken to using the services of a car-hire firm in the Edgware Road, which she said was cheaper than taking taxis. At the door she turned to me and lifted a warning finger.

‘Don’t forget, Jane. Charm!’

She was back some ten days later. As she had not been expected I was not there. I heard my mother describing this second visit, so close to the previous one, to my father.

‘It seems she had a misunderstanding with this friend of hers, this Adèle Rougier,’ she said. ‘Quite a serious one, I believe. She says she would have stormed out of the house, but she had nowhere to go.’

‘Couldn’t she have gone to an hotel?’ asked my father.

‘Oh, no, darling.’ She sounded genuinely shocked. ‘As she said, what would that have looked like? So they stayed in their separate quarters and the maid brought them their meals on trays. It must have been very uncomfortable.’

She left it at that. No doubt she felt genuinely sad that the trips to Brussels were to be discontinued. At the same time she took on the burden of tiding Dolly over without a moment’s hesitation.

My father merely said, ‘Shall we have some music?’ I think he considered Dolly to be something of a joke. Any regrets he might have had that my mother was so vulnerable he kept to himself. But I think her vulnerability was on his mind, and he determined to protect her as best he could.

‘I’ve asked John Pickering to dinner,’ he said.

John Pickering was a slightly younger colleague of my father’s at the bank, a correct and apparently ageless creature whose almost heroic reticence concealed a certain emotivity. My father had befriended Pickering after the latter had been involved in a painful divorce suit: his wife of only five years had announced that she was leaving him for another man, with whom she had been having an affair, and that she was divorcing him for mental cruelty. Mental cruelty
was what she called his apparent impassivity, which was in fact an extreme form of discretion, and a desire not to burden her with his preoccupations. He was a grave man, and perhaps not easy to live with, but his wife was cruel to denounce him. ‘You never make me laugh,’ she is supposed to have accused him, but her bags were already packed. Pickering, as well as losing his wife, lost face, for the case was made public. My father offered friendship at a difficult time in Pickering’s life; he appreciated and trusted the younger man, and this appreciation and trust were returned. They never confided in each other, for that would have involved additional loss of face, but walks were taken together, and at one point powers of attorney were exchanged.