Crooked Wreath (3 page)

Edward said the little prayer; he was not, in fact, any relation to the dead Serafita, but he had lived at Swanswater since his childhood and accepted as natural his inclusion in the celebrations; indeed, in the absence of his half-cousins, he was much relied upon to make up the congregation. They all said “Amen” to the prayer. Sir Richard took up the black gloves and the shoes. “These are the ones she wore on the night that Dreyfus was convicted. There was a great deal of excitement about the case in Paris, you know. Her reception was tremendous; she danced a sort of dirge; they had been working it out all the week in the hopes that–in case the verdict went against him …” He told the story every time the black gloves were brought out; they listened as respectfully as children to Cinderella, knowing every syllable of it, making it a sort of game among themselves to catch Grandfather out in a word altered from the original, a phrase misplaced. “Two of the officers from the tribunal were there … Everybody knew who they were of course … They had to get up and leave …” When his voice fell silent, you knew that in Grandfather's mind was the comfortable certainty that Dreyfus had not suffered in vain. “The applause was tremendous, and all the flowers were white, as though it were a funeral …”

The gloves were returned to the casket with the shoes and the scrap of dusty blossom from that magnificent, far-off day. Peta sang again, and standing in their half-circle, with bent heads they gave themselves up in their different ways to the mood of the moment. Bella thought of the exquisite romance of being able to live on so poignantly, as the newspapers said, in hearts and memories; Claire that honestly it was like a Chekov short story the way Grandfather's once-tepid love burgeoned with the passing years; Philip that this might be the last summer that the old boy would be here to pay tribute to his lost darling; and Edward that it was all very well for the others but dash it, he wasn't even her grandson and yet it was he who had to put up with most of this stuff. Peta, trilling a little French love song, reflected that Serafita must have been rather heavenly, she supposed, in a maddening way; and Ellen, thunderstruck by the easy motion with which they all gave themselves over to dramatization, looked up at Serafita's portrait and almost winked; and for a moment could have sworn that Serafita winked back.

Only Bella, reflected Sir Richard resentfully, would have presented him with a grandson subject to fugues! A thin, jumpy creature, with untidy hair and sloppy grey trousers, not held up at his waist at all, but by the bones of his gaunt young hips and, therefore, always apparently in imminent danger of falling down. A nice boy, a charming lad, admittedly, with that disarming smile of his; sweet-tempered, in the ordinary way, good-natured, friendly, kind.… But fugues! Automatism! No child of Serafita's, thought Sir Richard, would have given birth to such a weakling; or if she had, she'd have spanked the nonsense out of it double quick! Look at him now, lounging on the balustrade of the terrace down by the riverside, declaring that he felt exhausted “after all that intensity,” fanning himself with a huge straw hat of Peta's while they all sat watching the baby do its dance.

The baby! Concentrating deeply, an animated dumpling in a stitched Viyella smock, gravely, beatifically she danced.… Fat pink hands like Christmas roses, flopped at the ends of fat pink arms; soft hair curled up wispily into shining pale tufts of gold. Round and round and round, waddling in unsteady circles to a tune her great-grandmother had danced to fifty years ago, she teetered on uncertain bare pink feet–toppled–and finally sat down with a plomp on her round pink mushroom of a behind, looking about her with an air of mild surprise. Peta flung herself on her knees beside Antonia. “My wonderful, exquisite one! A
very
good dance, a beautiful, beautiful dance!”

“We'll make a ballerina of her yet,” said Sir Richard, delighted.

“More than you managed to do with any of us, darling! Oh, those awful mornings at Madame Whatsanameski's! Will you ever forget, Claire?”

“We had all the virtues between us, but we'd got them mixed. Peta was all supple grace, but she grew up as leggy as a young colt; and I kept small and neat but about as lissom as a bundle of sticks. I'm afraid there's nothing of Serafita about your granddaughters, darling!”

“You've got her small feet, Claire,” said Edward. “Claire's got Grandmama Serafita's small feet.” But he was bored with all this baby talk and ancestor worship; he wanted to bring the family attention back again to himself and his fugues; he recollected that the psychiatrist had suggested that the stain of illegitimacy galled him, and so he added in a harsh, sarcastic voice: “I mean, of course,
your
Grandmama Serafita,” and marched off into the house.

Bella started to follow him, her pretty face all puckered up with distress. “There now–you've upset him again!”

The cousins clamoured indignation. “Well, I like that!”–“
We
upset him!”–“Nobody said a
word!
”–“
Honestly
, Bella.”

Bella had had a long and trying morning, waiting upon the memory of Serafita. She subsided into her chair and said tearfully that she and poor Edward were always being reminded of their position at Swanswater.

They collapsed in laughter. “Oh, Bella,
nonsense
, darling! You know we adore your position here!” Peta said: “It gives glamour to the whole family; it gives us a sort of–of cachet, these entrancing glimpses of the wrong side of the blanket; and anyway, now you've been made an honest woman of, darling!”

“By which you've been done a grave injustice, Bella,” said Philip, laughing. “You were our romantic element. You invested Grandfather with an air of naughty-ninetiness which was our pride and joy.”

“We could never quite think of him without hearing the pop of champagne corks.”

“By gaslight.”

“And seeing the thin stream of golden liquid poured into the satin shoe.”

Sir Richard stood wrapped in gloom. He had never drunk champagne out of any shoe, but if he had, it would have been Serafita's; Bella had stayed quietly in her bijou house in Yarmouth, with frilly net curtains and little pots of geraniums and a couple of nice, woolly dogs; it had been Serafita, the wife, who had laughed and sparkled and rushed off with him on wild jaunts to the haunts of gaiety and even, in those first days, a little mild vice. And today of all days, to have Serafita's thunder stolen, to have plump comfortable Bella with her pretensions to “education” being elevated to the throne of a Queen of Glamour.

“Grandfather, do tell us about it–didn't the shoe get all wet and soggy? Didn't it spoil the champagne? Were actresses' shoes sold in threes, one for drinking out of?”

Edward, meanwhile, drooped forgotten in the hall, waiting for someone to follow him and implore him not to upset himself. Through the front door, however, he espied a figure entering the iron gates and, scenting a new recipient for the tale of his troubles, went down the drive to meet him. “Hallo, Stephen. You're good and early. Bella said you were coming to lunch.”

“Hallo, Edward,” said Stephen Garde. “How are you?” He strolled back to the house beside Edward, a slender little man whose neat figure would always look slack and untidy because he wore his clothes so carelessly. His hair, ruthlessly brushed flat, was ruffled by his walk up from the village, to ducks' tails of dark gold. “Is the family safely here? Your cousin Philip? And the famous baby?” With great casualness he added: “And Peta? Has she turned up all right?”

“Yes, they're all here and Ellen and Claire. I say, Stephen, I went up to London myself yesterday, and I saw that new psychiatrist, Hartmann. He says I'm pretty bad. I mean I'm liable to pass out any minute, for hours at a time, and not know what I'd been doing.”

“You wouldn't have been doing anything, if you'd passed out,” said Stephen, practically.

“Well, I don't mean I necessarily faint. I'd just be in a sort of a trance, a fugue it's called, and I could walk about and talk and do things and nobody would know there was anything wrong with me, only I wouldn't remember anything about it.”

“Does this man suggest that you've had these attacks, or only that you might?”

Edward was privately convinced that he had never had one in his life, and never would. “The trouble is, you see, that I wouldn't
know.
I mean, what's to tell me? Nobody would notice anything different so, of course, they wouldn't know that I didn't know what I'd been doing.”

“It's very interesting,” said Stephen. They crossed the green lawn and made for the central steps up to the house.

“How's the army?” asked Edward, politely abandoning his own absorbing topic.

“No place for a quiet country solicitor. My lot had a rough time in Normandy.”

Peta ran down the broad steps to meet them. “
Stephen!
Darling, how
heavenly!
Stephen, so
divine
to see you!” Under her affectations and over-emphases her heart beat sickeningly and the enamelled fingertips clinging to his arm, shook with her nervous effort to control herself. “Dear Stephen, heavenly Stephen, I
couldn't
be more thrilled to see anyone!”

“You talk as though you weren't expecting me, Peta,” said Stephen in his quiet way.

Edward went on into the house. Philip came out and down the steps. “Hallo, Stephen. How are you? Haven't seen you for ages.”

They shook hands just a tiny bit awkwardly. Eight years ago, Philip had come home from America and presented himself at Swanswater for his grandfather's blessing; and Sir Richard, overjoyed, had immediately summoned his lawyer to alter his will. “The only man in the family–after all, it's simply sense that he should be my heir.”

Stephen had argued. “You've always intended to leave everything to Peta, Sir Richard. It would have gone to your eldest son if he'd lived, and Peta's his heir. I think you'll regret it, if you change things now.”

“What do you know about regretting or not regretting, a boy like you?”

“It's the advice my father would have given you,” said Stephen, doggedly.

Sir Richard had wavered, new wills had been drafted, initialled, altered, and finally laid aside. “You're quite right, Garde, the eldest would have had it and through him, Peta. And after all, what do I know of this lad? He's my grandson, of course, but Peta's been with us all her life, I've more or less brought the child up; she knows my ways, she understands what I feel about her grandmother's memory, she's the fitting one to live on at Swanswater.”

And so Stephen had fought for Peta's inheritance, and won, and in so doing, himself had lost. You do not secure an estate and a hearty fortune for a young woman, and then fall on your knees and ask her to marry you; not if you are a quiet country lawyer with nothing to offer in return but a steady old practice and no hope of anything more, no desire for anything more. So Peta was an heiress, and Stephen a misogynist, and it was never quite comfortable to shake Philip March by the hand. “How did you find Sir Richard?” asked Stephen, to cover it.

“No better, no worse. It's a condition; not a case that improves or deteriorates.”

“Philip says his heart may dicker out at any time,” said Peta, “or he may go on for years.”

“He's in very good hands with your medical man down here,” said Philip, politely. “Brown's prescribed coramine, and, of course, he's right. I've brought a consignment down with me from town; if the old boy always has some by him in case of an attack, we can probably keep him going forever …” He broke off, bored by this profitless discussion with the laity. “Well, I believe Grandfather's sent for some sherry.”

Claire, coming downstairs, met them in the hall. “Stephen, my childhood friend, how
are
you?” She ran towards him holding out her pretty hands.

“How lovely to see you, Claire,” said Stephen, kissing her lightly.

Peta drooped in the background, wrapped in gloom. “Stephen, you kiss Claire, but you didn't kiss
me
, when we met!”

“My dear, you were leaping all round me like a young puppy dog; I didn't have a chance.” Now that the chance was there, however, not to say offering itself, he did not seem very anxious to avail himself of it. “How are you, Claire? Still in the same old job?”

“Yes, sweating away to Grandpapa's great fury.”

“Well, I don't see why you stick to it when you know he hates it and so do you.”

Claire became a trifle intense. “When one
has
writing in one, Stephen, one just has to get it out somehow; of course, journalism isn't regarded as literature and actually I'm rotten at the newspaper stuff, reporting and all that, but still one can do one's little piece trying to raise the standard of decent prose a bit. It's all very mere, of course, but one can't be content, one has to try.” She added, laughing, that anyway, Grandfather having cut her off with a shilling, she had to earn her living and it kept her out of the ATs.

“What's that about a shilling?” said Sir Richard, coming in from the river balcony.

“Darling, I was saying that you having cut me off with one, I have to go on interviewing murdered bodies and asking Street Leaders how much they've collected for the Spitfire Fund and things. Look, Grandfather, here's Stephen; oh, and, Stephen, here come Bella and Ellen.”

“Time for a glass of sherry,” said Sir Richard with the naïve pride of one who, in 1944, still has Amontillado to offer. “I sent Edward to fetch the things; no use waiting for that palsied old crone we have now, and anyway it gives the boy something to do; keeps him from brooding over himself. He's been off to town on his own now, Stephen, would you believe it? and came back filled with a pack of new nonsense, says if he looks up at anything he'll drop whatever he's carrying and go into a fugue or some such nonsense as that.” He pushed open the drawing-room door and stood aside for Bella and the girls to pass through.