Good Behaviour (16 page)

‘Pretty awful bit of news, I’m afraid,’ he said. He had a telegram in his hand, and he started to read it in a perfectly ordinary
voice. Then he changed his mind and said with embarrassed importance: ‘There’s been an accident.’ My heart stopped. ‘Hubert’s
been killed.’ My heart went on again. Papa handed me the telegram.

REGRET TERRIBLE NEWS STOP CAR ACCIDENT STOP HUBERT KILLED STOP WIRE TIME ARRIVAL STOP MEET YOU BATH WOBBLY

Mummie looked up from snipping at her roses. She looked at me then and through me to what I really am. She knew
what I was thinking, and she laughed. She went on laughing hysterically.

‘Darling,’ Papa said. ‘Please.’ Tears were pouring down his face. He took her hand and led her back into the house.

In the stillness of my shock there was only one reality: Richard was alive. A shiver of expectation went exuberantly through
me: Hubert’s death must link us more closely.

Papa brought Hubert home to be buried. He didn’t come back to the house. They brought him from the station to Temple Alice
church. The stark little Protestant church at our gates, endowed long ago by the family, was visited only for funerals and
christenings and weddings. I would be married there, naturally. It was chill and stuffy, and dead birds usually lay about
in the aisle. Someone had swept the place up for Hubert’s funeral, and it was all flowers. Everybody sent large homemade wreaths
and crosses and sprays. The only beautiful wreath came from the Crowhurst girls, who did such things to perfection.

Every friend we had came to the church; it was full to the last notch in the last pew. The hunt servants came too, and all
the men on the place. They stood round the graveyard gossiping in whispers about cub-hunting and racing, honey bees, or the
price of oats. They couldn’t concentrate for a whole hour on the tragic circumstances, and as they were Roman Catholics they
couldn’t come into the church. Four lively young stable lads carried Hubert carefully out into the sunlight. His grave was
lined with bright moss, pinned to the sides of the stark hole by long, strong hairpins.

Papa and Mummie stood together, as close as possible without actually touching each other. In the warm air I smelt
brandy on their breaths. They had not thought of offering me any. A deep gust of lonely privation blew through me as I stood
there, towering over them both, until it was time to shovel in the earth. Then Papa turned her round and took her by the elbow
to lead her away. But she walked on composedly, and looking wonderfully distant from it all. Her fine black felt hat would
have been as suitable for a race-meeting (where she never went) as for a funeral; it was exquisitely right and becoming, like
the long wrinkling wrists of her gloves.

Three men were going backwards and forwards, carrying flowers from the church to the grave. The wild bent grass and briars
in the tangled churchyard were overcome by flowers and the scent of flowers. Everything was determinedly beautiful; Mummie
pausing at the right moment to say: ‘Thank you. How lovely your flowers are. Please come back to the house. A cup of tea –
you’ve come such a long way. How kind. How kind … ’

And Papa saying: ‘Thanks. So good of you. Come up for a drink.’

‘Thanks, old man,’ they said. ‘Tragic,’ they muttered. ‘Great boy. Must get back.’

Papa saw the Crowhurst girls standing together. ‘Bless you, sweethearts, your wreath a real winner. Come up to the house and
have a drink.’ They swayed towards him just a little, and remained quite silent. But they came, and so did all the friends.

When the last speechless hand-grip was completed, Papa, Mummie, and I were left in the hall, with the empty glasses and the
empty plates; funerals are hungry work. We exchanged cool, warning looks – which of us could behave
best: which of us could be least embarrassing to the others, the most ordinary in a choice of occupation? I tried first.

‘I might ride out the Arch Deacon.’ I didn’t say ‘Hubert’s horse.’ Papa said it for me, and no nonsense.

‘Ah, that brute of Hubert’s. Watchit, sweetie – pull the bit through his teeth and set into him before he sets into you.’

I shuddered – not really pleasantly. Mummie said: ‘I’ll get out of these ghastly clothes. I must finish dividing my blue primroses.’

Papa had his usual escape. ‘Those poor little miseries, shut up in the gunroom since lunch, they must be bursting.’

‘You can’t go out in those absurd clothes,’ Mummie reminded him.

So when we met each other again we had something to talk about … The right bit for Hubert’s horse. I couldn’t begin to hold
him in a plain snaffle … Which of the dogs had made a huge mess in the gunroom … Why Mummie would have to dig up all the blue
primroses and replant … How wrong she had been to imagine they would like her first choice of situation. She was considerate
towards all weakness and eccentricity in plant life.

For me, the September days held a prospect of hope only before the morning post came in. Each day I expected a letter from
Richard, and each day I delayed longer before looking through the letters on the hall table, dreading that sickening moment
before I could find my excuses for him: I must remind myself he had a bad concussion and broken ribs; Papa had mentioned them
coldly. Who was driving? Hubert. Where I had expected an onslaught, Papa had added nothing to this. Now how I wished it had
been not Richard’s ribs but a broken arm, preferably his right arm, so that I need not rack my brains to excuse him. Later
in the month Mummie had a short letter from him. Little words, miserably polite and inadequate, squeezed together on a huge
sheet of writing paper. She gave it to me to read. It didn’t cross her mind to say: Answer it for me, would you?

Then Papa heard from his old friend Wobbly. They were sending Richard to South Africa on a safari. It might help him a bit.
‘He’s taken this whole ghastly business terribly hard, poor boy,’ Wobbly wrote. Again Papa was wordless.

Our good behaviour went on and on, endless as the days. No one spoke of the pain we were sharing. Our discretion was almost
complete. Although they feared to speak, Papa and Mummie spent more time together; but, far from comforting, they seemed to
freeze each other deeper in misery.

I stood outside in a black frost of my own. It was less hard for me because my loss of Richard was so eating out my heart
I had no strength left for the other desolation.

Papa oiled Hubert’s gun and put it away very much as a matter of course, shouting at his dogs as he oiled and clicked and
put the pieces neatly in their leather case. His rods went into long canvas shrouds and were hung up by little loops on brass
hooks. There was to be no sentimentality. It was the worst kind of bad manners to mourn and grovel in grief. They avoided
his name when possible, but if necessary to speak it, they did so in over-ordinary tones of voice. Mummie, more than Papa,
seemed drained of resolution.

One morning, on my way to the stable yard where I faced the terrible menace of Hubert’s horse, I saw her. She had left the
gardeners at work behind her, hacking down Pontican rhododendron, and now she broke away into the open through an untrimmed
thicket of Portugal laurel. Her face was an old dryad’s, crowned by, and drifting through, shining pointed leaves; her body
was hidden still among the dark thornless branches of her grove. She didn’t see me, or care what I was doing. I knew she was
only greedy to find Papa, to cling silently to his company, to keep him all her own in this time of unspoken mourning. She
absolutely required his presence.

I think her need told on him and drained away his power of recovery and forgetfulness. Every day he expected that she
would lose and satisfy herself in her painting, going, as she used to, quickly and determinedly to her studio, not lagging
uncertainly past the kitchen door where he was having his cheerful ambiguous morning talk with Rose – talk of food inspiring
them both with thoughts of the necessary pleasures.

In this hour with Rose his cheeky balance was restored to him. Later in the morning, when Mummie pursued him to the fields,
he was pulled back into the dull trough of their grief. He appeared to walk lamer when she was beside him; he was doubly infected
by her silent requirement of his presence and company.

I saw her again on the same morning when she had appeared to me like a dryad. She was standing with Papa on the sunny side
of a corn stack. They were watching the dogs fiddling about for mice in the bottom of the stack. I felt jealous towards them
both. They had each other. And they were on their feet in a different world from mine.

My world, as I rode Hubert’s horse, was a fearful place. I could ride him, but every day that he was in and fed and exercised
he grew more devious and abominable. I was afraid and knew it, shamed by my fear and hating the Arch Deacon. Soon I would
have to take him out with the hounds. Last season, with Hubert riding him, he had been a brilliant four-year-old. I faced
the coming season – each falling leaf brought winter nearer – with a weakened stomach. My only thought was to keep my secret,
to smile across my shame. Now, as I felt him tighten under me, preparing to shy and swerve away from the group round the corn
stack, I was ready to deal with this circumstance and to send him past them with a show of ease and determination.

I was not ready for the foxhound puppy which, bitten by a
jealous terrier, galloped howling under my horse’s tail. It was his opportunity of the morning, providing all that I had ever
feared in him and guessed that he could do.

I shall never know how I survived his swinging plunge sideways before he took off across the stubble field. My hopeless hands
were low on his neck in my first pretence of going with him, of sharing in his fun. The field was wide, so somehow I turned
him before we faced the fence at its further end. There was no chance of stopping him. The muscles in his neck stared out
at me as we thundered past the group round the corn stack.

‘Good girl!’ Papa shouted. ‘Take it easy. He’ll come back to you.’ But as he called he was running and hobbling and stumbling
towards the iron gate out of the field nearest to the stable yard. He was standing there when, after a third appalling circuit,
we charged down towards its iron height. I was sobbing, my nose was pouring, I was in an extremity of fear. My enemy, the
horse, knew it all. I was within his terrible strength and will. He would kill me.

Papa brought it to an end. Standing there against the gate, waiting to be ridden into the ground, his friendly, powerful voice,
his assertion and assurance, reached through all temper and delirium. Crazy, black with sweat, Hubert’s horse dropped into
a wild kind of trot and let Papa catch him.

‘Bit much for you, sweetie.’ He laughed. ‘You weren’t nervous, were you?’ ‘Nervous’ was Papa’s word for terror. I laughed
too. Laughing took the horror out of what had been happening. ‘Here –’ he called to Mummie, who was coming towards us over
the sunny field – ‘keep these dogs out of the way, would you?’ She waved a careless acquiescence and wandered from us without
hurrying, whistling to the terriers. In spite of
our laughter I felt he knew how shocked I was. He was panting and sweating too from his run across the field. ‘Nip off and
nip back to the yard and tell Tommy to nip up on this bastard and give him whobeganit. Tommy’ll love that.’

Tommy Fox was smiling in genuine calm pleasure; tucking his ashplant under his arm, he tightened the girths and shortened
my stirrup leathers before he jumped up and settled himself with neat ease in the saddle. As he walked him, jogged him, and
rode him in circles and figures of eight the horse answered to his strong approach and complacent dexterity with the same
good manners he had used to show with Hubert.

My new fear was that Papa, gay executioner for my own good, would put me up on the horse again, just to steady my nerve. Fear
repossessed me entirely. My stomach turned. Again, as Tommy rode back to us, I felt the sweat in my squeezed hands.

‘Ah, only gay in himself is all he is,’ he said. I could have struck him for those words. ‘Canter him down there slowly,’
Papa said. My reprieve. I loosened my hands. I prayed that he might take off and hop it with Tommy as he had with me. As we
watched, it happened. No blundering hound puppy to give him a motive, only out of his wicked will he lengthened his stride,
he set his cheek against the bit, and he was off. I remembered his neck, a pillar of fire against my hands, and a consuming
gladness went through me, nearly a pleasure in Tommy’s danger.

‘The so-and-so –’ Papa was laughing again – ‘No brakes. No brakes.’

How warm the hour became, how human and relaxed I was, standing there apart from the terror I had known so
lately. Now they see he can do it. Tommy can’t hold him either. Can he turn him? Yes, just. They thundered over the stubbles
past us, round again and back down the field. Tommy dropping his hands, smiling, pretending confidence as he passed us again.
They might have gone six times round the big field before he tired. Tommy was driving him on now, up the slope, stopping him,
and kicking him on again, dispossessing his memory of that power he had to take total charge, bringing him back to the habit
of obedience; riding up to Papa and waiting for further orders.

‘A steady hack canter was what I ordered.’ Papa spoke lightly.

So did Tommy. ‘Ah, that’s the lad, Major.’ He jumped off in his spry way, turned the reins over the monster’s head, put his
stirrups up and loosened the girths. Hubert’s horse leaned down his sweating, itching head with a kind of innocence. A shudder
ran through his whole dark frame, a haze trembled in the air over him and round him; he reached out a mild foreleg on which
to rub his cheek while Tommy pulled his ears and waited, giggling, for Papa’s next orders.

‘That’s about enough for one morning,’ Papa said. ‘Walk him round till he cools off.’ He turned to Tommy again after we had
started on our way back to the house. ‘Ask Rose to give you a Guinness when you come in.’ He looked at me. ‘He may need something
to steady him. I do. What about you, sweetie? Let’s have one together, shall we? Just one.’ It was a cheerful idea. His pace
quickened as we crossed the stable yard. On the level flags inside the back door he shouted for Rose in the empty kitchen.
Her presence was in the beautiful smell of hot bread, swathed in a cloth and leaning against the low wooden tower of a sieve.
‘Where were you?’ He looked
through her when she came in, gloriously strong and clean.