The Greengage Summer (3 page)

It had never been fair, but now, I thought, it was growing more unfair, for Joss had blossomed; that was what people said of young girls and I saw it was the right word; she was like a tree or a
branch where every bud was breaking into flower.

She would not undress with me any more, and I was glad because my pinkness was still distressingly straight up and down while she had a waist now, slim and so supple I could not help watching
it, and curves that tapered to long slim legs, while her breasts had swelled. I knew how soft these were and that they were tender, for once, out of curiosity, I touched them and she had jumped and
sworn at me. As Joss grew, she grew more irritable, with flashes of temper that were sometimes cruel; she was restless too, as if she were always excited, which was odd because her face was serene
and withdrawn, almost secret, I thought, with only the palest pink flush on her cheeks to tell of the excitement inside. “Is Joss beautiful?” I asked with a pang.

“Just now,” said Mother, “just now.”

I tried desperately to keep up with Joss. Cecil de Courcy, de Haviland, Cecil du Guesclin, Winnington-Withers . . . Winter. That was a beautiful name, and I thought, I shall use it when I am a
writer, or a nun; Cecil Winter, Sister Cecilia Winter; but I was not yet a writer, or a nun, nor did I know that I should ever be either. At the moment I was more like a chameleon, coloured by
other people’s business, and now I burned as I had burned about us eating oranges in the train when I saw Mademoiselle Zizi’s lips twitch as she read out our names from Mother’s
passport. There was barely room for us all in the space.

“You went chasing across France with that gaggle of children?” Uncle William said afterwards.

“We didn’t chase,” said Mother, “we went quite slowly by train.” Sometimes Mother was no older than Hester and that passport with its single stamp, in spite of all
the names, looked like a child’s.

“Et votre père?” asked Madame Corbet.

“Yes. Where is your father?” asked Mademoiselle Zizi.

“In Tibet,” said Hester.

“Ti-
bet
?”

I should have done better without Hester, who could never learn to temper anything. It was odd—and annoying—that I always wanted us not to be ordinary, but when we were a little
extraordinary I blushed.

“Juste ciel! What is he doing in Tibet?” asked Mademoiselle Zizi.

“Picking flowers,” said Hester.

“
Picking flowers!
” Mademoiselle Zizi repeated it in French, and Paul gave a short guffaw which made me rap out what was almost a French sentence: “Il est
botaniste.” I added, in English, that he was on an expedition. “He usually is,” said Hester.

Mademoiselle Zizi and Madame Corbet looked at one another. “Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! Eh quoi?” said Madame Corbet. “Il n’y a personne pour s’occuper de tout ce
monde-là?”

They began to talk about us in French as if we were not there. “They have not been in France before,” said Mademoiselle Zizi, looking at the passports.

“They have not been anywhere,” said Madame Corbet.

“We have,” I began hotly. “My sister Joss was born in India. Mother’s old passport expired, that’s all . . .”but they did not listen.

“And they don’t speak French.”

That was wounding, because up to that moment I had believed that Joss and I, particularly I, spoke French very well. “You ought to,” said Joss, “you learned enough.” That
was not kind, for learning French poetry was a punishment at St Helena’s.

“Never mind,” whispered Hester. “Look how it has helped you, being bad.” Certainly it was the only thing at which I ever beat Joss and the hours I had spent over
‘Le temps a laissé son manteau, De vent, de froideur et de pluie,’ ‘Mignonne, allons voir si la rose’ and the Verlaines I had grown to love, and stood me in good
stead; I had been able to understand, all that nightmare day, what people had said, and really it was I, more than Joss, who had piloted us all here. I
did
speak French, but, as if he knew
what I was thinking, Paul sniffed and drew his finger across his nose and wiped it on the back of his trousers, which looked rude.

“We cannot be expected to look after them,” Madame Corbet was saying.

“We can look after ourselves,” I said with dignity. “We are not little children.”

Mademoiselle Zizi picked up Joss’s passport and then threw it down on the desk. “Sixteen,” she said, “a child,” and asked me in English, “Have you no
relative, no one at all who could come?”

Before I could stop her Hester had answered. “Uncle William,”

Uncle William was Mother’s brother, ten years older than she . . . “though it might have been a hundred,” said Joss. Most grown people are like icebergs, three-tenths showing,
seven-tenths submerged—that is why a collision with one of them is unexpectedly hurtful—but Mother was like a child transparently above board and open, “To any scallywag,”
said Uncle William.

I sometimes wondered if he ranked Father as a scallywag, but he did not say it and Uncle William said most things. “If you had listened to me,” was his favourite. I do not think
Mother had listened to him when she married, but, all the same, when she brought Joss back from India—babies cannot go on expeditions—he had met them and brought them to Southstone,
“And Belmont Road,” said Joss bitterly.

“How did we know enough to hate it?” she asked afterwards, “when it was all we could remember?” We disliked and were ashamed of the ugly cheap little house with its
pebbledash, its imitation Tudor gables and leaded windows. “Silly to cut glass up into all those bits,” said Willmouse, but it was one of Uncle William’s houses—he owned
several in Southstone—and he kindly let us live in it. “He
is
so kind!” Mother said and sighed.

Uncle William spent money and time and effort on us children, “and words,” said Hester, “heaps and heaps of words,” while Father came only at long intervals and, when he
did come, hardly lifted his eyes from his collections of ferns or orchids to look at his wife and children. I think he could scarcely tell the Littles apart, yet we loved him and longed for him to
come home; we ran our legs off on his errands and were proud of belonging to him. “Oh well,” said Hester, “I will look after Uncle William when he is old.”

Did we need Uncle William? I could never make up my mind, just as I could never make out if Mother were very silly or very wise. Take her dealings with Willmouse. “He says he won’t
wear it,” she had said, handing back his new school cap at his school.

“Then he must leave,” said the headmaster.

Mother consulted with Willmouse and, “He would rather leave,” said Mother, and Willmouse left, until Uncle William heard.

“Why can’t I go to a girls’ school?” asked Willmouse. “They don’t have caps and perhaps I could wear my muff.”

“Gordon’s ghost!” said Uncle William.

The muff was white fur lined with satin; Willmouse had bought it with the money Uncle William gave him for his fifth birthday.

“What did you buy, boy? A cricket bat? A train?”

“A muff,” said Willmouse.

“Gordon’s ghost!” said Uncle William. We never discovered who the ghost was, but Willmouse often made Uncle William say things like ‘Gordon’s ghost!’ and
‘The only boy amongst them and he isn’t a boy!’

Willmouse was little then, but I think we, ourselves, sometimes wished we had a proper boy. “He is Willmouse,” said Mother. That was what she understood about him, about us all, even
Joss, in our different ways. Perhaps if she had been left to deal with us alone there would not have been the discontent and rudeness.

I think now that the discontent was because we were never quite comfortable in Southstone and the rudeness came from the discontent; it was as if a pattern-mould were being pressed down on us
into which we could not fit. For one thing we were much poorer than the people we knew, poor to be Uncle William’s sister, nieces and nephew; and we had this curiously absent father while
other girls’ fathers went to offices and caught trains and belonged to the Sussex Club. Mother too was not like other mothers, nor like a grown-up at all; she patently preferred being with
Vicky or Willmouse or any of us than playing bridge, or organising bazaars, or having coffee or luncheon or tea with the select Southstone ladies. When any of us—except Hester, who was at
home anywhere—went out to tea in one of the big red-brick houses, with lawns and laurel bushes and meticulously gravelled driveways, we felt interlopers. We were odd, belonging and not
belonging, and odd is an uncomfortable thing to be; we did not want to belong but were humiliated that we did not. I know now it was not good for us to live in Southstone. We should not have been
as odd somewhere bigger, in London perhaps.

“In London,” said Joss dreamily, “you can be anyone. You never know whom you are sitting next to. He might be a beggar or a duke.”

“Or a thief,” said Uncle William, who had decided views on London.

“Southstone . . .” I began.

“Is where you live,” said Uncle William.

“It’s all middle, middle, middle,” I said. It was. No beggars and no dukes. “Just middle.”

“My dear child, that is the world.”

“The world is
not
all middle,” said Joss.

“Most of it is. Why should you be different?”

We could not think of any reason, yet we knew we were; every heart-beat told us that. “How shall we ever get out of Southstone?” I asked Joss in despair.

Then we were rude to Mother again and she took us to Vieux-Moutiers—Vieux-Moutiers and Les Oeillets.

“Oh, Mother! You are so slow!”

“Do we have to have that
disgusting
old tea cosy?”

“
Must
you wear that hat?”

I think at that time, she was only happy when she was with Willmouse and Vicky; she and Hester were too alike to know if they were happy together or not; it would have been like trying to know
if one were happy in one’s own skin.

“
Why
do you have to have a shopping bag?” Joss would say.

“To put the shopping in,” said Mother, astonished.

“
Why
must Hester wear plimsolls in the street?”

“She is going on the beach.”

It was on the beach that it happened.

We did not go away for the summer holidays—“Or any holidays,” said Joss discontentedly—but spent long days on the beach, picnicking. “Must we?” asked
Joss.

“I thought you liked it,” said Mother, but Joss shuddered.

Our picnics were even more family ones than most; we had baskets and bags bulging with bathing towels and Thermos flasks, and a dreadful aluminium food container, brought home by Father from
India, that was always coming apart in the street. We had buckets and spades and shrimping-nets, jerseys and paper bags. “Like a bank holiday,” said Joss; “and must Hester talk to
everyone
? She’s such a blatant child.”

We had to wear what we called our scarecrows, old faded-out patched cottons. “I can’t help it,” said Mother. “I can’t let your good clothes get covered with salt
and oil.”

“We haven’t any good clothes,” said Joss.

Mother was gentle, but that day we went too far. I do not remember what we did, but she lost her temper. “You are abominably selfish,” she said.

When she was angry she did not go white as Joss did—she went pink. “You never think of anyone but yourselves.”

We stared. Whom else should we think of?

“Everyone tells me you are badly brought up and it’s true.”

“You brought us up,” said Joss.

“It’s true,” repeated Mother.

“What are you going to do about it?” I asked as insolently as I could, and Hester stole a hand into hers.

“I shall do something.”

“What?”

Mother took a deep breath. “I shall take you to the battlefields of France.”

“The
battlefields of France
!”

We were still speaking rudely, but it was feeble, the last intermittent gunfire before surrender. “Why?”

“So that you can see what other people have given,” said Mother, “given for your sakes; and what other people will do in sacrifice. Perhaps that will make you ashamed and make
you think. And Saint Joan,” said Mother, “Saint Joan at the stake. We shall stop at wherever it was and see where she was burned.”

“Oh,
Mother
! Not in the middle of the summer holidays!”

“Holidays or not,” said Mother, and shut her lips.

“Pooh! You haven’t enough money,” said Joss, but she sounded a little frightened.

“I shall use the legacy.”

“The legacy is for college,” said Joss.

“This is college,” said Mother. “It is education. You need to learn . . . what I cannot teach you,” said Mother, her voice quivering.

She did not ask Uncle William’s advice. She went to Mr Stillbotham.

Mr Stillbotham was an elderly Theosophist, who lived in Belmont Road and was the only person in it, as far as we knew, who travelled. Father, of course, could not be said to live in Belmont
Road. Mr Stillbotham spent his winters in the South of France; we admired him for that and thought him distinguished with his silver hair, pince-nez, blue-and-white-striped shirts and bow-ties. We
also liked his manner to us which was full of courtesy and admiration—particularly for Joss.

Mr Stillbotham would say when he saw her. Altogether he seemed a suitable person to advise us, and we approved.

“You wish to visit your dead?” he asked when Mother told him about the battlefields. “They are not dead but liv . . .” but for the purposes of our visit Mother needed
them dead and she cut him short. “Can you tell us of an hotel, not too expensive, and near the cemeteries?” she said.