Good Behaviour (11 page)

This recovery and reinstatement were a way back for him to his separate life, where all his charm and wandering habits found
other adventures and intimates to whom Temple Alice was only a distant name, and Mummie a dim legend. The fitting of his wooden
leg provided endless occasions for short stays at the Cavalry Club, which meant, as often as not, a night spent not at the
Club but with some friend’s sleek and willing wife. It was the day of the shingle and straight pailletted dresses and huge
pearl chokers; gardenias in velvet boxes; white ladies before dinner; and a night-club afterwards. Dancing was beyond him;
but that melancholy uncomplaining stare of his, far into the eyes of his partners, never failed him of his purpose. The wooden
leg and the wonder of his recovered horsemanship added interest to the encounters between him and his women.

He would return to Temple Alice battered and exhausted. ‘Were your doctors very savage?’ Mummie would ask, giving him a look
both indulgent and sly, before she went pleading to the cook for some special effort; then back again to her
painting until he was recovered by early nights and Mrs Lennon’s superb cooking.

Mrs Lennon was middle-aged. She had worked for us for fifteen years, on a wage of £30 a year. She was only Mrs Lennon in
token of her office. Now she got cancer and died. Her death made a dreadful change, a real chasm in one of his greatest pleasures,
a weakening of one of Mummie’s unspoken influences. Mrs Lennon’s secrets died along with her, for she despised receipts and
the ignorant and mean-minded who cooked by them; she never wrote anything down and, if possible, shut the door against any
inquiring kitchen maid while she composed her greatest dishes. No inheritance was left from her years in office. She could
not speak the language of her skill (nor did she wish to). ‘Partridges Mrs Lennon … ’ some friend might say years after her
death, and Papa’s eyes would drop and his face darken. He would not answer, only sigh.

Her successors came and went; they were more expensive and none of them had a vocation. Mummie’s aimless half hints about
the Major’s pleasures and displeasures carried no weight. She herself could not have told one of them in plain language how
to boil an egg, and Mrs Beeton and Mrs Marshall had hardly more effect. At that time the standard of cooking in Irish country
houses was lower than abysmal. Mrs Lennon had been a great exception. Papa did not complain, or not out loud. He had his own
ways and means of expressing disappointment, even disgust. He would smile apologetically when his uneaten food was carried
away, and ask gently for Bath Olivers and milk. Into the milk would go whisky – quantities of it. He grew fatter and his discontent
was sad for Mummie to see.

His wooden leg and alterations to its contrivances sent him oftener, and for longer times, to London, where the Dorises and
Dianas, Gladyses and Enids, and the two Joyces took their glad toll. All right – confusion was in their numbers. The outings
and matings were immaterial, unconfessed, accomplished within a code of manners. Papa’s love affairs were run on his own terms.
Divorce was something Mummie must never be asked to imagine. She was his escape, his freedom. Temple Alice was an island where
a strange swan nested, a swan who never sang the fabled song before her many deaths.

While, as though in duty bound, Papa was hunting, fishing, and shooting in their proper seasons, at Temple Alice money poured
quietly away. Our school fees were the guilty party most often accused. Then came rates and income tax and the absurd hesitations
of bank managers. Coal merchants and butchers could both be difficult, so days of farm labour were spent felling and cutting
up trees – the wood burned up quickly and delightfully in the high fast-draughting Georgian grates. As a corrective to the
butcher’s bills lambs were slaughtered on the place. Half the meat was eaten while the other half went bad, hanging in the
musty ice house without any ice.

Life at Temple Alice went on, well sheltered in the myths of these and other economies. Mummie thought up one which, to her,
was as good as putting a big cheque into her dying bank account. I was not to be presented or to have a London season. Papa’s
efforts were variable and more pleasurable. Every day’s hunting improved his ability to ride and thus to sell young horses.
The victims of a day’s shooting, whether pigeons and rabbits in the demesne, grouse on the mountain, snipe in the bogs, or
woodcock by winter springs deep in hazel
copses, fed the diningroom. When the servants’ hall sickened at the sight of game: ‘Then let them eat pig’s cheek – delicious.
Think of Bath chaps,’ said Papa.

During the holidays Hubert and Papa shot together. Papa took a half-hidden delight in Hubert’s shooting – improving towards
excellence. I think his son’s looks were another unadmitted pleasure and satisfaction to him. Lucky Hubert – he never knew
the anxiety and disgust of acne. He strode from childhood to youth without pausing in adolescent ugliness. In the fishing
season they spent long days and late evenings together on the river. Then the household ate salmon and brown trout until the
maids and the stable lads finally struck: ‘We’re killed from fish,’ they said. The cooks, sickened by salmon and exhausted
from stoking the Eagle range and its satellite boiler with wood and turf, left, one after another; in those days there was
always another to follow, worse if possible than her predecessor.

Wild Rose’s transference from housework to cooking was accidental and unpremeditated. One of the undedicated cooks left without
warning. ‘Gone on the bread van,’ Wild Rose reported at dinnertime, ‘and it’s Teresa’s night out so I brought ye a hunting
tea – poor Mrs Lennon’s poached eggs and rashers.’ The eggs were perfect, swelling primly on large slices of buttered toast,
the lightest dust of cayenne blown over their well-matched pearls.

‘How did you know about my red pepper? It’s years since I’ve seen it,’ Papa said sadly, giving Rose one of his embracing looks,
distant, grateful, promising.

‘I seen herself at it, sir, God rest her soul.’

‘God rest her soul,’ Papa repeated, and ate his eggs with reluctant enjoyment.

It was after this that Mummie put Rose’s wages up by
£
1 a month and persuaded her to stay in the kitchen. An underling, Breda, took Rose’s place as house-parlour maid, rather impeded
than helped in her duties by a succession of trainees called between maids. Teresa, a sad, slow-witted character, retained
her position as kitchen maid. She cleaned potatoes and other slug-infested vegetables, kitchen sauce pans, and stone-flagged
floors. She washed up after the servants’ breakfasts, mid-day dinners, and teas, meals which Tommy Fox (the battered ex-steeplechase
jockey who was Papa’s most valued asset in the stableyard) and his helper (successor to Ollie Reilly) shared with the female
staff in the servants’ hall.

Rose was young for her senior position in the household. But her plain and careful cooking, her flaring good looks, and her
biting tongue kept her underlings and the lads from the yard in order; while her indefeatable will to succeed made her torture
Mummie daily for receipts and suggestions suited to the diningroom. Mummie was entirely unable to fulfil either demand, try
as she might; at the moment she longed to please and distract Papa, for Goodwood was near, where one of the distant harem
had taken a house and invited him to stay for the meeting.

‘I don’t know what to suggest.’ She looked at Rose hopelessly, Rose in her lilac cotton dress, standing in the dull lilac
gloom of the kitchen. ‘Renoir?’ she murmured to herself. ‘Not quite. Too hungry looking.’ As she looked, a vague idea possessed
her, an escape; Goodwood and after defeated, perhaps. ‘I don’t know what to suggest,’ she repeated. ‘Why don’t you ask the
Major?’

Wild Rose went off in a wild peal of laughter: ‘Is it ask the
Major, madam? – oh, my God—’ She covered her mirth with her hand and bowed her head to her own laughter.

‘Only yesterday he said if you could make that sickening chocolate cake you could make a cheese soufflé. Here he is – ask
him.’

He was limping down the stone passage towards the rod and gun room, his mind on the Stewards’ Cup and a week of luxurious
liberties, manifold and unquestioned. ‘What’s that? Luncheon? Salmon again? Make a Hollandaise sauce and a sorrel purée, why
don’t you – the haggard’s full of sorrel.’

‘So it is,’ Mummie said, happily relieved, ‘and the sauce is sure to be in Mrs Beeton.’

‘Spell it for me, write it down for me,’ Rose insisted. He wrote on the slate, mysteriously, as if marking a race-card for
a chosen woman.

That was how a state of things began that added an interesting dimension to his life. He did go over for Goodwood, but he
came back very soon afterwards, bringing with him receipts from his hostess’s chef, to whom he had given an enormous tip.
The receipts were not easy to follow; their ramifications and the occasional French word involved patient explanations, lengthy
sessions. If Mummie sometimes asked: ‘Where’s Papa? Have you seen him?’ the answer to his whereabouts was fairly regularly:
‘Ordering dinner’ instead of the earlier ‘Tying flies’ or ‘Cleaning his gun.’

I have the most articulate memory of passing the kitchen door one day and seeing Wild Rose suddenly as a person, not as a
housemaid or cook. Her hands were on the kitchen table behind her and the curve of her back leaned towards them; her attitude
had an easiness, and there was a rough, low tone in her voice. They were speaking of the Eagle range and its
awful appetites, of gulls’ eggs, and how long to cook them. There were pauses, dragging out the time of giving and taking
orders for luncheon; their voices had another world beyond them.

Although there had been no London season for me, every winter our own and neighbouring hunts held their hunt balls and lesser
dances. And every long summer came the nightmare galas of the Dublin Horse Show. Papa, wooden leg and all, was in enormous
demand for these routs and parties. His successes with young girls were quite frightening, although he never jeopardised his
place in the middle-aged belt to which he belonged – that company of neat, sweet, tough hunting ladies; blue habited and veiled,
showing their horses by day; by night richly dressed, sweetly scented, and out for further adventure. I was brought along
to the parties; sad boys, often younger than I was, were netted in to partner me. I loved to dance: I suffered in their arms.
Or I sat smiling, smiling; or shut for hours in some lavatory; or chattered hysterically with the unwanted, like myself.

Part of my trouble was being a big girl. I have now come to terms with my height; but in those years, when I was nineteen
and twenty, I bent my knees; I bowed my shoulders; I strapped in my bosoms till they burst out round my back.

More than a year later Hubert was with me, and Hubert was my friend. He was at Cambridge now, where he had achieved a remote
assurance which made our alliance the more surprising and flattering for me. I adored his good looks and I knew he waited
for my admiration – it stood for some necessity that he was missing at Temple Alice. He spoke of next year’s May balls: ‘You’ll
come – we
will
have a rampage.’ He taught me to charleston, a bizarre, pagan exercise, foreign to County West Common. Holding the back of
a chair as practice bar I discovered what syncopation meant. ‘This way? No, this way? Yes, yes, yes! I’ve got it. I’ve got
it, Hubert.’ It was delicious. Better than my first bicycle on its first day. Surprisingly soon, the pupil excelled the master.
But I subdued my genius to his pleasure. He was still capable of that sidelong unkindness I remembered from my childhood.
But beyond that a talent for pleasing, for amusing, for softly getting his own way had grown in him. Mummie had to give him
£5 to sit for her. It was the first time she had painted him seriously and she put all she knew about angles and ugliness
into the portrait. Hubert was neither amused nor pleased. He turned away.

‘It’s not a photograph, you know; it’s a composition.’ Mummie sounded faintly apologetic.

‘A broken bicycle with two heads and one tiny eye – that’s me.’ Hubert laughed sourly.

‘For a start, you have two enormous eyes and two-inch eyelashes,’ I comforted him.

‘Yes, Aroon would see you as a box of chocolates.’

Hubert’s eyes met mine – met in a past for us alone; ‘Charbonnel
AND
Walker,’ he breathed.

‘The best,’ I answered from the same past. I quite liked leaving Mummie out of our jokes.

Papa loved Hubert, loved him in a silent, vain, satisfied way. Hubert was admirable to him in the deepest sense. He rode beautifully,
and with judgement and courage; he was a good shot, and a thoughtful, skilful fisherman. He was all that Papa’s friends most
approved, and all that Papa wished for in a son. Beyond all these things I think Papa was most grateful for the way Hubert
lifted me off his conscience. And I was Hubert’s escape and salvation from the girls who besieged him.

That winter when he grew up, I enjoyed myself for the first time. I acquired consequence. To be needed and liked by two such
popular characters as Papa and Hubert lent me an interest rather better than second hand. Maybe I was a parasite – but what
a happy parasite, happy in their admiration and their kindness, happy in being their new joke. Hubert called me Atom. ‘My
little sister Atom.’ ‘Oh, we can’t go without Atom,’ they said when bidden to some grand junketing, ‘Atom keeps us out of
trouble. Atom will drive us home, if we’re a little tired. We’ve got to have Atom.’ My inclusion became an accepted fact in
any invitation; and if I was asked alone they would come too. ‘We’ve got to look after Atom. She’d be up to all sorts of nonsense
without us.’ They invented a dangerous, glamorous side to me, and took elaborate precautions for my unassaulted chastity.

It was glorious then. There are no beauties now like the beauties of the twenties; theirs was an absolute beauty, and none
the worse for being clean and tidy. I worshipped some of those full-page photographs in the
Tatler
. Today I can still feel the grip of a cloche hat over my earphones of hair, and a little later the freedom and sauce of a
beret on a shingle. We wore our hats, usually of pale rabbit-coloured felt, when exercising our horses or playing tennis,
or for luncheon parties. On our
way to the bathroom we wore crêpe-de-chine and lace boudoir caps – what has become of crêpe-de-chine? Or real silk stockings
with their transparent clocks, if it comes to that? Or those life-giving white ladies before dinner before the ball? Not that
I am actually against martinis, but I want to go back, I want to soak myself in Cointreau, gin, and lemon juice in equal parts.