The Fountain Overflows (42 page)

So it happened that one morning we all stood outside the gate, waving good-bye to Aunt Lily as she drove away in a dog-cart with Milly’s husband, a retired bookmaker, a florid bloodhound of a man, who had already asked us to call him Uncle Len. Though we were sorry to see Aunt Lily go, our hearts were light. There had been lifted from our house a horror: if we had still to think of Queenie as a block of blackness compressed into a cell too small for it, we had not to think of anything worse. There was also lifted from us the heavy burden of good works too long continued: at last the piano was ours alone, we need not fear that Aunt Lily would seat herself at it, and, to cheer us up, would play by ear (in her case a most treacherous organ) popular songs of the day with the loud pedal down; we need not, if a stray dog ran into the garden or a thrush hopped on the window-sill, nerve ourselves till we heard, “My daddy won’t buy me a bow-wow,” or “The little bird said twee-twee.” The relief was enormous, though we dearly loved Aunt Lily and were glad to see her go away in the charge of such a kind man. For he was very kind, though oddly realistic. We had heard him say, as he took sherry and a biscuit with Papa in the sitting room while Aunt Lily did the last of her packing, that everybody had warned him against marrying Milly, and he had just told them to mind their own business, though he knew what they meant. But they had been wrong. She had gone as straight as a die ever since, he repeated twice. A better wife he couldn’t have wished for, and if she said she wanted Lily behind the bar at the Dog and Duck, she had to have her. But he had to admit that Aunt Lily wasn’t what he had hoped to see in his licensed premises, particularly after Ruby, who had been a good-looking girl.

“That face,” he said sadly, his jowls hanging the heavier; and he said it again when Mamma came down to see him and told him how impressed we had been by Aunt Lily’s loyalty to her sister, and the depth of her unselfish grief. His air suggested that perhaps Mamma was making too much of troubles that would pass, whereas what he deplored was a permanent tragedy. But he meant well by her, he hoped to mitigate that tragedy. When she cried at leaving us as she got up into the dog-cart, he smacked her on the behind and told her to turn off the waterworks, very tenderly.

When they had clattered out of sight Mamma, her arm in Papa’s, sighed, “Well, that is over,” and we all went back into the house, Kate, who was the last, shutting the door with a ceremonial bang. Cordelia ran upstairs and started her violin practice, the rest of us went into the sitting room. Richard found his three balls that he used for juggling and went out into the garden. Mary hung about the piano, longing for Mamma to start her lesson. We would have expected Papa to go straight to his study, but he seemed to want to be with us. He went to the table where the sherry and biscuits were, and took a biscuit, and stood nibbling it at the french windows. We each took a biscuit too, and went and ate them beside him.

He said to Mamma, “Look, Clare, all the bushes are in leaf, most of the trees. It is nearly summer. This thing began in midwinter.”

She sighed. “Yes, Piers, it has been very long for the poor creatures.”

“It has been very long for you,” he said.

“Long for all of us,” she told him, “longest for you, with all the other things you have to do. Oh, what you did for them! And I have had no time to ask how you did it.”

“I hardly know myself,” he answered with determined lightness. “But it is not what one does so much as the way that while one does it time runs past forever. You always take such pleasure in the spring, you have seen nothing of this one.”

“Well, we will make up for that, we must get some days at Kew and Richmond,” she said, “and it will be lovely for the children if you could take them out on the river.”

“Yes, I must do that,” he said, and after we had nibbled in silence for a minute or two, he said, sadly, “It is a pity we are so far from the river, none of the children can row properly. My brothers and I all learned on the lake when we were far younger than Richard Quin.”

“Oh, it will come, my dear, you are so good with them,” said Mamma. She nibbled on, staring out through the window, and murmured, “In justice, a most tiresome man. But still a terrible woman.” Something outside caught her attention, she choked on her crumb, she waved her biscuit at the garden to show she had seen something of great moment out there, and would give us news of it as soon as she could. “The second lilac in that row of four is almost out, see, it has several flowers,” she proclaimed. “It is always the first of the lilacs to bloom. Now, why should that be?” Her mouth fell open at the mystery. Then she went on, “I always think that it looks so nice when the lilacs are out and Rosamund and Richard Quin play their games amongst them. Would you mind, my dear, if I had Constance and Rosamund to stay, now the room is free?”

“No, no,” said Papa eagerly.

13

T
HE LILACS
were fully out when Constance and Rosamund came to stay with us. Richard Quin and I took the luggage up to their room and then went down and sat on the iron steps that led from the sitting room into the garden, and waited for Rosamund. We supposed we would first go round the stables, and though we were now all too old to go on pretending with made-up animals, we thought we might recall the days when such play was possible by greeting Cream and Sugar, Caesar and Pompey. But when Rosamund came down there hung over her arm a billow of white taffeta, and she told us that she must finish making a petticoat. I exclaimed in distress, for it was the kind of female garment that my sisters and I bitterly resented and thought an insult to our native force. At that time schoolgirls were dressed sensibly enough and we were happy enough in blouses and skirts joined by petersham belts with silver buckles, but the adult costume of our sex waited for us round the next bend in the path, as a handicap and a humiliation, heavy, crippling, loaded with rows of buttons and hooks and eyes that were always coming off and had to be sewn on again, and boned in all sorts of places where bones break. I thought she had gone into slavery before she need.

“You’re not going to wear that?” I asked furiously.

Laughing, she shook her head. It was astonishing how her golden simplicity dispelled Queenie’s blackness. Then she stammered out that now she and her mother were sewing for a shop in Bond Street.

“But why? Your Papa has lots of money,” I raged.

“He does not like to spend it.” She smiled.

“But that is horrible,” I said. “Our Papa cannot give us enough money because he keeps on gambling it away, in the hope of making a lot more. But if he ever won anything he would give it all except what he kept to go on gambling. But do you mean to say your Papa has it and doesn’t gamble and doesn’t give you any?”

Richard Quin said, “Never mind. One Papa with another, it works out that we all have nothing, and we can break that into as many pieces as we like, you can do that with nothing, there will be a share for us all.”

“I will make my cakes of nothing, then everybody in the world can have a slice,” said Rosamund, beginning to sew.

“What does nothing taste like?”

She thought. “Nice nothing or horrid nothing?”

“Both.”

“Nice nothing is like lemon sponge. Horrid nothing is like a very thin dusty biscuit, I can’t think of its name.”

“It can’t have a name if it is nothing.”

“But then you can’t call it a biscuit.”

“I didn’t call it a biscuit, you did. It is your bit of nothing. You are giving me nothing and expecting me to find names for it, it is not fair.” He took some strands of her golden hair and pulled it, she threw back her head and laughed at him.

They were not serious-minded. I said, “But look here, about this money—”

“Oh, of course it is very silly,” said Rosamund, getting on with her sewing, “but Mamma says we would be worse off if he were a really poor man, or if he were dead. And we are both very fond of sewing, you know.”

They were indeed as tranquil as could be, though their situation was, as I afterwards came to realize, as exasperating as ever wife and daughter suffered. Cousin Jock was so able that his firm not only paid him a considerable salary as chief accountant but had made him a director of one of its subsidiary companies; but he refused to move from Knightlily Road and he could have been said to live like a poor man, had he not spent large sums on spiritualism. He passed half his evenings playing the flute and the other half taking part in séances; and he even imported mediums from the Continent and supported them for weeks while societies investigated their claims. So little did he give to Constance and Rosamund that, even though they were with us only at holidays or at weekends, they had to bring their sewing with them. But they explained in a good-tempered way that they needed to work continuously because they were so slow, and indeed by their industry they introduced an element of contented leisure into our household, they set an easier pace. They used to settle down on the lawn in two deep wicker chairs we had found in the house when we came, lay clean cloths on their laps, and bring out of bags the lengths of silk and batiste they had to prepare for women who were probably not richer than themselves but were not persecuted by their natural protectors; and very comfortably they would work for some hours. The scallops flowed round the hem of a petticoat under Constance’s fingers, very slowly, as the shadows of the grove behind them moved across the lawn; and Rosamund built stitches on the bosom of a nightdress till, as gradually as a bud changes to a flower, they made a monogram. In the afternoons we went walking, Richard Quin always at Rosamund’s side, going the round of the loved exceptional places children always find in their environment, remembering at the right season to peer through the railings at the house which had so long been empty that the rose-trees had all gone back to briars and were now bushes standing higher than the shuttered ground-floor windows, covered with flat coppery flowers. We had some new pleasures too. Richard Quin was very good at arithmetic and mathematics, and he had a liking for numbers as things in themselves. As we went up a long dull street he would pause in delight when we came to a house with a number that was one of those prime numbers which are four times something plus one and can always be expressed as the sum of two squares. About these he felt as somebody fond of roses might feel in a garden full of them when he came on one rose that was larger and brighter and more fragrant than the others; and of course they were the same to us. He wrote out a table of these prime numbers, and we took it about with us. We had a rapturous moment when, in an endless and horrid street with many shops, we found Number 281 before he noticed it.

During these walks Rosamund was perfectly happy. She exercised a great influence on my sisters and myself, we looked up to her as our superior, but she was most at home talking with our younger brother, and now he was growing older it was apparent that she was lingering on another plane. He spoke of the facts and ideas he learned at school and from his precocious reading of books and magazines, and she answered him on a nursery-rhyme level. Yet no matter how much she was enjoying her walk with us she always and without complaint turned homeward in time for her to start work again at the proper hour. Indeed that was one of the ways she governed me. I was having difficulties with my playing: my mother’s teaching had brought me, perhaps prematurely, to a stage of technical advancement when the spirit flags and passes through a desert. Rosamund’s biddability, and the calm spectacle offered by her and her mother as they sat with their laps full of pale fine stuffs, their eyes bent on their unhurried hands, always made me conscious that I was apt to get into “states” and sent me back to my piano.

Rosamund’s power to make us calm and industrious was not perfect in its exercise. It included Cordelia in its scope; she played the violin no better, and incessantly. But it left Richard Quin untouched. He was doing well, in a way. We had been apprehensive when he had to move to a school for bigger boys, because he was so good-looking and rather like a girl, and he liked doing things his own way. But he was far more of a success at his school than we were at ours. For one thing, he was good at games. He could do anything he liked with a ball, if he threw one or hit it with a bat or kicked it, it did something which nobody expected but himself, and, laughing, he took advantage of everybody’s astonishment. He could run very quickly too. At his lessons he was good, arithmetic and mathematics were like another game to him, but he was naughty about his homework. He neglected it for his music, but that did not put the score right, for he was not industrious about that either. He was more interested in playing a number of instruments than in playing any of them really well. Like Cordelia, he had absolute pitch, which neither Mamma nor Mary nor I had, and he had a far better musical memory than any of us. He had a violin quite early, one of his teachers had given him one that was in the family. People were always giving him presents. The father of one of the boys gave him a flute, and he had always had a recorder, so with the piano that was four instruments to start with. But he would practise none of them properly. What he enjoyed most was playing the flute or the recorder in the stables or to Rosamund in the garden, making up variations on tunes, sometimes absurd ones, so that you had to laugh, and sometimes making up new tunes, which made Mamma very angry.

I remember her throwing up a bedroom window and leaning out to cry, “What is the use of pouring out that stuff if you will not sit down and learn about harmony and counterpoint?” Like all artists, she feared improvisation, though of course you are not really an artist unless you can improvise. “It is like—it is like—”

“Gargling?” suggested Richard Quin, looking up at her very gravely.

“Yes, that is it, gargling,” she agreed, and banged down the window when he laughed and waved his flute at her.

But it did not really matter. We knew he would be all right in the end. Things went very well for us at this time, for so long as a year, or perhaps even two. Papa enjoyed an unusual period of success and prosperity, as an unlooked-for consequence of his intervention in the Phillips case. About a fortnight later Mr. Pennington drove down in his carriage to see him, and burst into our house, the deep wave in his handsome brown hair quite loose and uncontrolled, so excited was he. As soon as I took him into the study he grasped both Papa’s hands and cried, “Really, I have to apologize to you! I see now that you came to the Commons that afternoon to do my uncle and me the greatest of kindnesses! I quite misunderstood you! You came to give me a warning and my uncle and I thought you were forcing our hands, and didn’t like you any better for it. But, upon my word, if you hadn’t told us what you did we should have been in a terrible mess today!”