I Capture the Castle (18 page)

I began as soon as Rose and I had blown our bedroom candles out. I wasn’t a bit sleepy. I went through the whole evening-it was almost nicer than when it was actually happening until I got to the bit in the kitchen, with Mrs. Fox-Cotton asking Stephen to sit for her; I found I was furious about that. I asked myself why-why shouldn’t he make five guineas for a few hours’ work his Five guineas is a tremendous amount of money. And surely a photographer has every right to engage models his I decided I was being most unreasonable-but I went on feeling furious.

While I was still arguing with myself, Rose got out of the four-poster and opened the window wider; then sat on the window-seat.

“Can’t you sleep?” I asked.

She said she hadn’t even been trying and I guessed she had been going over the evening just as I had; I wished I could change minds with her for a while and re-live her evening.

I got up and joined her on the window-seat. It was such a dark night that I could only see the shape of her.

Suddenly she said:

“I wish I knew more about men.”

“Why specially?” I asked, in a quietly encouraging voice. She was silent so long that I thought she wasn’t going to answer; then the words came rushing out:

“He’s attracted—I know he is! But he’s probably been attracted to lots of girls; it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s going to propose. IF only I knew the clever way to behave!”

I said: “Oh, Rose, have you thought what marriage really means?”

“Yes, I thought tonight-when I looked at him to see if he was like that old painting. I suddenly imagined being in bed with him.”

“What a moment to choose for it! I saw you were pretty preoccupied.

Well, how did it feel?”

“Most peculiar. But I could face it.”

“Is it just the money, Rose?”

“I’m not sure,” she said, “honestly, I’m not—I don’t understand myself. It’s terribly exciting feeling men are attracted to you. It’s but you couldn’t understand.”

“I think perhaps I could.” For a second I thought of telling her about Stephen, but before I could start she went on:

“I like him-really I do. He’s so courteous he the first person who ever made me feel I matter. And he’s handsome—in a way, don’t you think his His eyes are, anyway, if I could just get used to the beard-his “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have Neil? He’s so very kind and he’s got such a nice clean face.”

“Oh, Neil!” Her tone was so scornful that I realized he must have annoyed her even more than I had suspected.

“No, you can have Neil.”

Honestly, that was the first time the idea had ever occurred to me. Of course I didn’t take it seriously—but I felt it deserved a little quiet thinking about.

“If only I could get Simon to shave,” Rose went on. Then her voice went hard.

“Anyway, what does it matter his I’d marry him even if I hated him. Cassandra, did you ever see anything as beautiful as Mrs. Cotton’s bathroom?”

“Yes, lots of things,” I said firmly.

“And no bathroom on earth will make up for marrying a bearded man you hate.”

“But I don’t hate him-I tell you I like him. I almost … was She broke off and went back to bed.

“Perhaps you won’t be sure of your feelings until you’ve let him kiss you,” I suggested.

“But I can’t do that before he proposes-or he mightn’t propose,” she said decidedly.

“That’s one thing I do know.”

I had a strong suspicion she was being a mite old-fashioned, but I kept my views to myself.

“Well, I shall pray you really fall in love with him—and he with you, of course. And I’ll do out-of-bed prayers.”

“So will I,” she said, hopping out again.

We both prayed hard, Rose much the longest—she was still on her knees when I had settled down ready to sleep.

“That’ll do, Rose,” I told her at last. “It’s enough just to mention things, you know. Long prayers are like nagging.”

We were restless for ages. I tried to invent something soothing for Miss Blossom to say but I wasn’t in the mood. After a while I heard an owl hooting and calmed myself by thinking of it flying over the dark fields-and then I remembered it would be pouncing on mice.

I love owls, but I wish God had made them vegetarian. Rose kept flinging herself over in bed.

“Oh, do stop walloping about,” I said.

“You’ll break what few springs the four-poster has left.”

But again and again as I was dropping off she did a wallop. Godsend church clock struck two before I heard her breathing quietly.

Then I got to sleep at last.

It took three days to describe the party at Scoatney-I didn’t mark the breaks because I wanted it to seem like one whole chapter. Now that life has become so much more exciting I think of this journal as a story I am telling. A new chapter happened yesterday which I long to dash straight into, but I shall resist the temptation and bring myself up to date first.

One temptation I didn’t manage to resist was that of letting my imagination leap ahead a bit. As Rose had said I could have Neil, I let myself just toy with the idea; I thought about it when I woke up the day after the party and imagined his proposing—I made it happen in the water-garden at Scoatney. I accepted him and Rose and I arranged to have a double wedding, and bought the most superb trousseaux. Then I dozed off again and dreamt I really was married to Neil. We were shut up together in Mrs.

Cotton’s bathroom in a terribly embarrassing way and Stephen’s face kept floating in the looking-glass walls. I was very glad to wake up and find it wasn’t true. Of course Neil never will propose to me now that I have let myself imagine it. Not that I mind.

I suppose he just might—in a completely different way, and not in the water-garden.

Topaz and I had a good gossip about the party while we made the beds. She was more and more hopeful for Rose, but depressed about Father—he had snubbed her when she asked him what he and Mrs. Cotton had talked about.

“All I got out of him was “Don’t be a fool, my dear—how can one repeat the details of a conversation his She’s a ‘highly intelligent woman and she can listen as well as she can talk.”

And then what do you think he said his That he’d placed her wrongly —her knowledge of literature wasn’t at all superficial; she’s very widely read.

“It just shows,” he told me, “that one shouldn’t generalize about nations on the strength of a brief acquaintance”—and you’d have thought from his tone that I’d been doing the generalizing.”

“How very annoying,” I said, trying not to laugh—I was so tickled that Father had taken to heart Mrs.

Cotton’s little snub about generalizing.

“Anyway, how is it he can discuss literature with her and not with me? I’m always trying to talk to him about books, but he never lets me.”

I blame Father for lots of things but not for that—because it really is agony to talk to her about books. When I was longing for a calm discussion of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, she said “Ah, it’s the overlapping dimensions that are so wonderful. I tried to paint it once, on a circular canvas”—and then she couldn’t remember who Natasha was.

I was most sympathetic with her over Father, but rather quick about it, because I wanted to write my journal. I only managed an hour before lunch but was able to work all afternoon, up in the attic. Stephen came to me there when he got back from Four Stones.

My heart sank as he held out a folded paper-I had been hoping he had outgrown bringing me poems. He stood waiting for me to read it.

After the first line I realized that it was his own work this time-it was about me, sitting on the stairs at Scoatney while the others danced. I was wondering what I could say about it, when he snatched it away and tore it up.

“I know it’s dreadful,” he said.

I told him it wasn’t dreadful at all.

“Some of it rhymed splendidly, Stephen. And it’s your very own. I like it much better than the ones you copied out.” I felt it was an opportunity to stop him copying again.

“I didn’t exactly copy them,” he said, not looking at me.

“I always changed words in them. I didn’t mean to be dishonest, Cassandra-it was just that nothing of my own seemed good enough.”

I said I understood perfectly but he must always write his own poems in future. And I advised him not even to imitate other people’s poems.

“I know you made up every word of this last one,” I told him, “but it was still a bit like Herrick-all that part about lilies and roses and violets. You didn’t really see them in the hall last night there were only white tulips.”

“I bet Herrick didn’t see all the flowers he wrote about,” said Stephen, grinning.

“And the only rhyme I could find for tulips was “blue lips.”” I laughed and told him there were more important things than rhymes—”Lots of good poetry doesn’t have them at all. The main thing is to write what you really feel.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” he said.

“No, that would never do.”

“But why not, Stephen his Of course it would do.” “No, it wouldn’t,” he said, and smiled straight in front of him as if he were thinking of some private joke. It reminded me of that evening months ago when we were putting saucepans under the drips—he had smiled in just the same private way.

“Stephen,” I said, “do you remember-why, it was the very night the Cottons first came here! Do you remember looking out of this window and saying: “Beginnings are good times”?”

He nodded.

“But I wasn’t expecting any Cottons,” he said, glumly.

“Did you dance with them last night?”

“I tried once with Neil.”

“People look awful dancing—I’d be ashamed. You’d never do it like that one who calls herself Leda, would you?”

“I’d never dance so well,” I said.

“But I know what you mean.

She does rather drape herself over her partners, doesn’t she? You aren’t going to let her photograph you, are you?”

I said it most casually, not as if I minded at all. To my surprise, he put on his wooden look-which is quite different from his daft look. The daft look is hazy, dreamy; the wooden look is obstinate to the point of sulkiness. It is a look he gives Rose sometimes, but I couldn’t remember his ever turning it on me.

“I might,” he said.

“If people want to throw their money about.”

“But surely you’d hate it, Stephen?”

“It might be worth hating it to earn five guineas.

Five guineas would be almost enough” he broke off and turned away to go downstairs.

“Enough for what?” I called after him.

“Oh for-for lots of things,” he said, without turning round.

“Five guineas is more than I can save in a year.”

“But you were so sure you wouldn’t do it last night.”

He looked back as he went round the curve of the little attic staircase, his head just above the level of the floor.

“P’raps I will, p’raps I won’t,” he said maddeningly and went on down. A voice in my head said “I’m damned if you’re going to sit for Leda Fox-Cotton.” Then the bell rang for tea so I followed him down.

Topaz had boiled half the ham. She said it would go further if we didn’t cut it until it was quite cold, but Thomas insisted he has been very possessive about that ham. We all fanned it with newspapers until the last moment. It was wonderful, of course ham with mustard is a meal of glory.

Miss Marcy came after tea, to hear all about the party. She told me Mrs. Fox-Cotton’s photographs are very well known; they get reproduced in magazines. She particularly remembered one of a girl hiding behind a giant shell with the shadow of a man coming towards her.

“And one got the impression that he was wearing-well, nothing, which surprised me rather because one doesn’t often see photographs being as artistic as paintings, does one his But there, he probably had a bathing suit on all the time it would hardly show on a shadow, would it?”

I laughed I do adore darling Miss Marcy. But I was all the more determined Stephen shouldn’t go near the Fox-Cotton woman.

The next morning Topaz, Rose and I went into King’s Crypt with the twenty pounds the Vicar gave for the collie dog rug and bought my first grownup dress—pale green linen;

Rose had a pink one. Topaz said she didn’t need anything herself—and anyway, she looks most unnatural in ready made clothes. I got some white shoes and a pair of practically silk stockings. If anyone asked me to a garden-party I could go. When we got home we found Father hadn’t eaten the lunch Topaz had left for him and wasn’t anywhere in the castle. He turned up about nine o’clock and said he had bicycled over to Scoatney—apparently Simon had given him the run of the library while they were away. I asked if he had read anything particularly interesting.

“Oh, mostly American magazines—and some critical essays,” he said.

“I’d forgotten how advanced American criticism is.”

Topaz said she would get him a meal, but he told her he’d had luncheon and dinner.

“It seems Mrs. Cotton left instructions that I’m to be fed when I go there.” He went off to the gatehouse looking rather smug.

I retired to the attic and went on with this journal.

When I came down to the kitchen again Stephen was writing on an opened-out sugar bag. He went scarlet when he saw me and crumpled the sugar bag up. Just then Topaz came in from the garden wearing Aunt Millicent’s black cloak and no stockings or shoes. I guessed she’d had one of her nude sessions.

“Thank heaven Nature never fails me,” she said as she stumped upstairs. When I turned round Stephen was poking the sugar bag down into the fire.

“Was it another poem?” I asked-I feel I ought to encourage him now he is writing his own poems.

“Why did you burn it?”

“Because it wouldn’t do at all,” he said, still very red in the face.

He stared at me for a second, then suddenly dashed out into the garden. I waited for him, sitting by the fire with About and Hcl, but he didn’t come back.

When I went upstairs, Rose was sitting up in bed varnishing her nails; the varnish had been her special treat out of the Vicar’s money —I had lavender soap.

“You’re using that too soon,” I said.

“The Cottons won’t be back for twelve days yet.”

Little did I think we should see them again in only four days.