Good Behaviour (20 page)

I read it again to find all that was there – unwritten. For instance: the river, the moonlight, the old bull elephant – and
me. That was what he indicated of course, of course. Anything that brought me to his mind was welcome, but the idea of the
old bull elephant and its bulk in the moonlight seemed too much in focus with my own big body. An echo whispered: You’re such
a big girl … then he had been lying in my arms. No – only in my tilted bed. No. It must have been in my arms. It was in my
arms. All the same, I wished it had
been a gazelle, or a herd of gazelles, drinking in the moonlight. Then I would have known he remembered our running on the
sands and that he had kissed my salty arm. Had he? Once, said the echo. And once was enough, I answered myself, enough to
tell me. I don’t need to have everything spelled out. I know how to build the truth.

Breaking into the void and silence of the afternoon house, a voice came calling distantly, then nearer. ‘Rose,’ it called,
‘Rose, Rose!’ Mummie, of course, forgetting that the servants had gone out; that was quite like her. So she rang the library
bell. So nobody answered the library bell. So she called, distractedly demanding. Let her call, I thought as I opened my bedroom
door; let her go on calling. Then, as I reached the staircase, I could hear panic, high and faint, in her voice. What a fuss.
What nonsense. I proceeded in a calm, sane way downstairs, my hand on the rail, my head still high among the African stars.
I was detached from this absurd flurry.

Then I saw her, pattering and running, stripped of her poise, awkward as an animal in clothing. I was back with terrifying
Mrs Tiggywinkle turning into the wild, running from me as she had in the story, elemental before my eyes. And this was Mummie,
always so cool, so balanced, here she was, her hair flying loose out of that hat, its pretty tilt ridiculous, her mouth grimacing.

‘Rose,’ she called. ‘Rose!’ Then, when she saw me, ‘Oh, it’s
YOU
.’ Her passionate disappointment infuriated me and kept me outside her terror. ‘Find somebody,’ she said. ‘Find somebody.
He’s dying!’ She tottered and ran on towards the swing door, away from me. She didn’t have to say it. I knew it was Papa.

‘Where is he?’ I went after her. But she didn’t tell me where
to find him, only ran before me, following her hands, her feet fumbling on the flagstones, calling, ‘Rose!’ into the dark
pantry door, and the lamp room, and the boot room, and ‘Rose, Rose,’ into the hot empty kitchen. I stood in the doorway before
she could escape me. I caught her by the shoulders – something impossible I had never done. I shouted at her: ‘Where is he?’

‘He’s terribly ill; he can’t get up. Find Rose, oh you fool, find Rose.’

‘You know they’ve all gone to the rectory. Mummie, where is he?’

‘I had the cyclamen for Hubert. He’s there – he can’t speak.’

‘He’s in the graveyard?’

‘Oh, can’t you listen, how often must I tell you? Get the boys, get someone to carry him, get the doctor.’

If it’s like last night, I thought, must they all know? I had to take this on myself. Nurses faint at operations. The thought
sustained me. If they can steady themselves, so can I. I was a young nurse.

‘Put hotwater-bottles in his bed,’ I ordered sharply, and turned away.

‘Where do they keep hotwater-bottles? How am I to boil the kettle? Don’t leave me like this. How am I to do it alone?’ she
cried after me as I ran away from her, down the last passage to the stable yard, out through the stable arch and on to the
driveway.

He was not dying, I knew. He was drunk like last night. I wasn’t going to say it to her; I wouldn’t tell her. Last night I
turned away from him, I left him to Rose – Rose, tough as a proper nurse, strong as a man, had brought him up to his bed.

What must I do, I thought, running down the drive, how to
get him home? The car had gone, taking the maids to the rectory. If I pulled him up on his feet I could link his arm and
walk him back to the house. I must hurry. I must be the first. No one else shall help him – I’m the one.

In the dog-shaped shadow cast by the stolid little church on grass and graves, I found him. Rose was sitting on the grass,
her knees spread, holding him in her arms. His head was lolled back absurdly against her breast and shoulder. Her blouse was
ripped out at the armpit from dragging and holding him. The coat of her navy-blue suit was across his foot. There was a brooding
look about her, melancholy and wild. Her flowered hat was lying on the grass. There was a mushroom dew on it and on the graves.
I remembered Mrs Brock’s hat, dripping from the wet grass, one silly hat recalled the other, clear and meaningless, conjuring
together that night with this evening.

‘Rose,’ I said, ‘what are we going to do? He’s drunk.’ We would have to admit it to each other. She just sat there, nursing
him in her arms. ‘We must get him back to bed,’ I said. Bed was the proper place. Bed and concealment.

‘He’s not drunk,’ Rose said violently, and held him nearer. ‘It’s a seizure – he can’t speak. Look—’ She tilted his head as
if he were a sick baby, and I saw the fixed drop of his mouth and his loose hand. ‘Go get the doctor – he could be at the
fête – take my cycle, against the church door. Tell them at the lodge to bring me blankets and send for the lads and a gate
to carry him home.’

She gave all these orders in an imperative, hot rush of words. It was impossible to argue against her sense, or to suggest
any alternative. There she would sit, spreading her bottom on the wet ground, holding Papa away from its chill, until the
gate and the blankets and the doctor were brought to
him. It was a distillation of the strength and passion that she put into her cooking. She would have it this way and no other.
I was in second place again.

But as I tore down the road on Rose’s bicycle, beyond the grief and fear and the shock of seeing only an effigy, a bad imitation
of Papa, a fearful feeling of ease and relief came over me, linked to something Rose had said: ‘He can’t speak.’ That was
it. He might never speak again. God forbid. God forbid. And I pedalled furiously on towards the doctor. Leaning over the handlebars
of Rose’s bicycle, yearning for more speed, driving down on the pedals with all my weight, I escaped from my terrible wish.

Extensive brain damage, that was what they called it. His bedroom became like a nursery with a new baby in it. Every morning
Rose helped the nurse from Dublin to lift him in bed. From on and off his bedpan he made great sad eyes of apology at them.
The hour was strict and they kept to it with strict enjoyment.

Rose brought up the ironed and aired pyjama coat, the warmed towels, the new hotwater-bottle, the clean pillowcase, and they
made his bed and dressed him up like a clean favourite doll, a doll with no legs, for one was dead and the other was put away
in a cupboard. They propped him against the pillows and put the hotwater-bottle in its flannel bag at his foot. ‘Hot or cold,
that foot won’t feel it,’ the nurse said.

‘His foot feels cold to me.’ Rose was definite, and held Papa’s foot for a moment in her hand.

Mummie and I came in to see him then. The odd thing was that she seemed to want me to go in with her. She was afraid. She
wanted to pretend things were quite ordinary. She would bring the dogs in too. They were something to talk about.

‘Go on. Can’t you say something?’ she whispered to me when, in a silence, Papa shifted miserably. I was not confounded.

‘Perhaps he wants his you know bottle?’

‘Call the nurse.’ She jumped distractedly to her feet. ‘Don’t touch the thing. What’s she here for? Nurse! Nurse!’

Nurse came quickly from her bedroom. She was the embodiment of starched calm. ‘I think he wants to do something,’ Mummie whispered
so that Papa shouldn’t hear. Papa looked satisfied. I thought he gave my hand a tiny pressure. I felt agony for a moment,
wondering how much went on in his mind.

Everybody in the country made pilgrimages to Temple Alice to ask about Papa; they usually came about six o’clock, and they
usually accepted a drink, talking in sad lowered voices becoming to the misery of it all. An evening came when there was only
half a bottle of whisky left in the drink cupboard and none in the cellar. The next day Mummie sent an order to the Wine Cellars
for six bottles of Scotch whisky. They sent out three bottles and their account. It was for two hundred and thirty-seven pounds.

‘Quite impossible,’ Mummie said, and stuffed it into the drawer with all the other bills.

The dogs felt the change in their lives. They became turgidly bored and unattractive, looking backwards sullenly when asked
to leave their baskets and follow with me in the tracks of Papa’s routines and habits – for instance, the stable yard after
breakfast. There they moved peevishly around while I had a word with Tommy.

Tommy was grooming Hubert’s horse. Strength seemed to spurt out of his resistant but pleasured body as Tommy wisped
away and shouted warnings and growled and purred as he worked. He stood away from his horse like a groom in a print. ‘I wonder
what do the Major intend doing about him?’

I felt my blood quicken a little. ‘Did he mention anything to you, Tommy, before he, before … ’

Tommy came to my rescue. It was so difficult to say that Papa was speechless. ‘Before his little turn, miss? No, miss – only
to slacken the oats to him was all he said.’

Now I knew, a warm tide coming slowly into my mind, that Papa had said nothing to him about his gift or loan to the Crowhurst
girls. I felt in power. I must think for Papa. After all … extensive brain damage …

‘Will he ever speak again, Dr Coffey?’ – ‘Well, it’s a question. Sometimes these cases do recover. We must be optimistic.’
– ‘How much does he understand? Does he remember?’ – ‘Perhaps. It’s a question … it’s hard to tell … ’ So it went, whispering
on in my mind, a sort of contentment.

That was the evening when the Crowhurst girls bicycled over to enquire for Papa. I could hear them taking off their coats
– coats beautifully made by themselves out of rust-coloured sailcloth, a kind of poor man’s Burberry; then light footsteps
crossing the hall to the library.

Breda, our cross parlour maid, met me, a duck and a bunch of gentians in her hands. ‘It’s the Miss Crowhursts to ask for the
Major, and all they brought, you’d think we had nothing here.’ Lightly derisive and disloyal, she went on her way through
the swing door, saying: ‘Madam’s up the garden.’ So I was to have them to myself. I wondered if I should ignore their underground
trafficking, messages in flowers and ducklings going to Papa.

They were sitting comfortably reading the gardening articles
in the last two
Field
s. I poured out two glasses of sherry, denying the thought of Papa pinching lemon zest into martinis. Actually his martinis
were quite ordinary, apart from a lot of gin; their magic was only in his manner.

‘Thank you,’ they said, keeping their fingers in the
Field
s, so as to find the gardening pages again. ‘And the Major?’ Blink asked sadly. Polite and incurious, specifying nothing much.
It might have been a bit of a cold. They had beautiful manners.

‘Not much difference,’ I said. That didn’t tell them a lot.

‘We weren’t thinking of seeing him.’ Nod opened the
Field
again.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Naturally not.’

‘You might tell him,’ Nod spoke decidedly, ‘that we’ve come for the horse.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Hubert’s horse, the Arch Deacon. The Major thought we might be able to do something with him.’

‘You know he thought he was a bit much.’ Blink left it at that.

‘I really don’t quite follow you. Tommy has him going beautifully. You might like a day on him. After Christmas, perhaps.’

‘Actually, we thought Maxie Riley might ride him home this evening.’ Maxie Riley was their tinker groom. Their calm and conviction
were absolute.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m awfully sorry, but don’t you think we must wait till Papa can tell us about this himself?’

‘He
has
told us,’ they insisted politely, but their long elegant faces flushed. They were more eager and less polite than before.

‘I wonder if he said anything to Tommy about it? Not to
me. The moment he does I’ll let you know. Till then, perhaps … ’

‘Can’t he speak at all?’ Gently as they asked the question, the coarse practical demand was evident in it. I was choked by
my resistance towards them and my anger at their curiosity.

‘No – he can’t speak at all.’

‘If he could,’ Nod said, as she and Blink got on their feet in one clocklike motion, ‘I wonder what he’d say to you?’

I was no more ready than usual with a quick answer. Perhaps they saw the tears I would not shed.

Inside the archway of the stable yard Maxie Riley sat on the corner step of the granite mounting block. The grey seeding flowers
of traveller’s joy drooped and sprawled above his red tinker’s head.

‘Tommy,’ I said, after I had nodded a surprised ‘good evening’ towards the tinker, ‘did the Major give you any instructions
about Mr Hubert’s horse?’

‘No, miss. The first I heard, this man came in here saying he should ride him home for the Miss Crowhursts.’

‘Maxie,’ they said reprovingly, ‘didn’t we tell you to wait in the road?’ I know they exchanged a look. It passed round the
three of them like the shoe in a game of hunt the slipper. Then, graceful as lone birds, they mounted their bicycles and drifted
away, a wind behind them and their tinker running by their side.

While their awful courage and effrontery really appalled me, I did begin to wonder what Papa would say if he could speak.
I was afraid he might be only too pleased with them. Of all their talents, their talent to amuse was the one I felt most repellent.

Rascally as they were, their duck was perfection. Papa could
only manage a small piece, Nurse said, and Mummie never eats a thing, so I had two delicious helpings; there’s not very much
on a duck really. I enjoyed this one more than anything I had eaten since Papa’s illness. I could feel my pleasure in good
things coming back to me, surreptitious but lively.