Menfreya in the Morning (2 page)

ple, there was a grand piano, for there would be music tonight played by a famous pianist.

I should be able to gaze down at the guests as they mounted the stairs, hoping that none of them would look up and see their host’s daughter, who would he no credit to him. I should be hoping for a glimpse of my father, for it was at such times that I saw a different man from the one I knew. Past fifty, for he had married late in life, he was tall and his dark hair was white at the temples; he had blue eyes which were rather startling in his dark face, and when they looked at me they reminded me of ice. When he was being the host or talking to his constituents or entertaining las guests, those eyes sparkled. He was noted for his wit and the brilliance of his speeches in the House; his remarks were constantly being quoted in the papers. He was rich; and this was why he could afford to be a Member of Parliament Politics was his life. He had a private income from investments, but his great fortune came from steel somewhere in the Midlands. We never mentioned it; he had little to do with it; but it was the great provider.

He was Member for a division of Cornwall, find that was why we had a house near Lansella; we went from London to Cornwall, for when Parliament was not sitting there was the constituency to be “nursed”; and for some strange reason, where my father was, there was I too, though we saw little of each other.

Our town house had a large entrance hall, and on the ground floor the library, dining room and servants’ quarters; on the first floor were two large drawing rooms and the studies; above that were three guest rooms, one of them occupied by William Lister, my father’s secretary, besides my own and my father’s bedroom. On the top floor there were about six servants’ bedrooms.

It was a beautiful Georgian house, and its finest feature, as far as I was concerned, was the staircase, which curled like a serpent from bottom to top of the house and enabled one to look down from the top floor to the hall. But to me it was a cold house. Our house in Cornwall was the same. Any house where he lived would be like that … cold and dead. How different was Menfreya Manor; vital and warm, that was a house where anything could happen, a house that you would always dream of when you were away and never want to leave—a real home.

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Menfreya in the Morning

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The London house was elegantly furnished to suit the architecture; so the furniture was eighteenth century and there were few concessions to our Victorian Age. I was always astonished when I went into other houses and saw their ornate furniture and crowded rooms and compared them with our Chippendale and Hepplewhite.

I have forgotten the names of the servants; there were so many of them. I remember Miss James, of course, because she was my governess, and Mrs, Trant the housekeeper and Polden the butler. Those are all the names I can think of— except, of course, Fanny.

But Fanny was different. I didn’t think of her as a servant Fanny was security in a frightening world; when I was bewildered by my father’s coldness I turned to Fanny for explanations; she could not give them, but she could offer comfort; she it was who made me drink my milk and eat my rice puddings; she scolded me and fretted over me so that I did not miss a mother as much as I otherwise would have. She had a sharp face with deep-set, dreaming eyes, hair that was a shade of grayish-brown, and scraped up to a knot on the top of her head so tightly that it looked as though it hurt, a sallow skin and a thin figure; she was about thirty-five and barely five feet tall, and she had always looked the same to me since I was a baby and first aware of her. She spoke with the tongue of the London streets, and when I grew older and she surreptitiously introduced me to those streets, I grew to love them as I loved her.

She had come to the house soon after I was born to act as wet nurse. I don*t think they had intended to keep her, but I was apparently a difficult child from the first weeks and I took a fancy to Fanny. So she stayed on as my nurse, and although she was resented by Mrs. Trant, Polden and the nanny-in-chief, Fanny did not care about that—and neither did I.

Fanny was a woman of contrasts. Her sharp, cockney tongue did not fit the dreamy eyes; the stories she told me ot her past were a mixture of fantasy and all that was practical. She had been left at an orphanage by persons unknown. “Just by the statue of St. Francis feeding the birds. So they called me Frances—Fanny, for short—Frances Stone. You see, it was a stone statue.” She was not Frances Stone now, because she had married Billy Carter; we didn’t talk much about Billy Carter. He was lying at the bottom of the ocean,

she told me once, and she would never see him more in this life. “What’s done’s done,” she would say briskly. “And best forgot.” There were times when she gave herself up to make-believe, and a favorite game of ours when I was six or seven had been telling stories about Fanny before she was left by the statue of St. Francis. She told the stories, and I urged her on. She had been born in a house as grand as ours, but had been stolen by gypsies. She was an heiress, and a wicked uncle left her at the orphanage after substituting a dead child in her father’s house. There were several versions, and they usually ended with: “And we shall never know, Miss Harriet, so drink up your milk, for it’s time you was abed.”

She talked to me about the orphanage too, of the bells which summoned the children to inadequate meals; I saw them clearly in their gingham pinafores, their hands mottled with cold and blotched with chilblains; I saw them bobbing curtsies to those in authority and learning how to be humble.

“But we learned how to read and write, too,” said Fanny, “which is more than some will ever learn.”

^ She scarcely ever talked of her baby though; and when she did, she would clutch me to her and hold my head down so that I shouldn’t see her face. “It was a little girl; she lived only an hour. It was all I’d gone through over Billy.”

Billy was dead; the baby was dead. “And then,” said Fanny, “I come to you.”

She used to take me to St. James’s Park, and there we would feed the ducks or sit on the grass while I persuaded her to tell more versions of her early life. She introduced me to a London I had never known existed. It was a secret, she said; for it would never do for any of Them—the people at home—to know where she took me on our outings. We went to the markets, where the costers had their stalls; gripping me tightly by the hand, she would pull me along, as excited as I was by these people who screamed the virtues of their wares in raucous voices which I could not understand. I remember the shops with old clothes hanging outside— the queer, musty, unforgettable smell; the old women selling pins and buttons, whelks, gingerbread and cough drops. Once she bought me a baked potato, which seemed the most delicious food I had ever had until I tasted roasted chestnuts hot from the embers.

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“Don’t you tell anyone where you’ve been,” she warned me; and the secrecy made it the more exciting.

There was ginger beer, sherbet and lemonade to be bought, and once we tossed with a pieman. It was an old custom with piemen, Fanny told me; and we stood and watched a young coster and his girl toss the penny and lose, so that they got no pie; Fanny, greatly daring, tossed her penny and we won. We carried the pie to St. James’s Park and sat by the pond devouring every morsel.

“But you haven’t seen the market of a Saturday night That’s the time,” said Fanny. “Perhaps when you’re older …”

It was something to plan for.

I loved the market with its costermongers, whose faces portrayed all the parts one would find in a morality play. There was lust and greed, sloth and cunning in those faces; and occasionally saintliness. Fanny was most excited by the tricksters; she would want to stand and watch the juggler add the conjuror, the sword- and flame-swallowers.

Fanny had shown me a new world, which was right on our doorsteps, although so many people seemed unaware of it The only occasion when the two worlds met was on a Sunday afternoon when, sitting at my window, I would hear the bell of the muffin man and see him coming across the square with his tray on his head and the white-capped and -aproned maids running out to buy from him.

That was my Hfe up to the night of the ball.

On such occasions everyone in the house was pressed into helping, and Fanny was called into the kitchen for the afternoon and evening; Miss James was helping the housekeeper, and I was alone.

My Aunt Clarissa was staying with us because my father needed a hostess. I disliked my Aunt Clarissa—who was my father’s sister—as much as she disliked me. She was constantly comparing me with her three daughters—Sylvia, Phyllis and Clarissa—who were all golden-haired, blue-eyed and, according to her, beautiful. She was going to be very busy bringing them out, and I was to join them in this fearsome necessity for all young ladies. I knew I was going to hate it as much as Aunt Clarissa dreaded it.

So the fact that Aunt Clarissa was in the house was an additional reason why I wanted to be out of it

I had wandered about the house miserably all day, and on

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the stairs I met my Aunt Clarissa. “My goodness me, Harriet” she cried. “Look at your hair! You always look as if you’ve been pulled through a bush backwards. Your cousins don’t have trouble with their hair. They would never go about looking as you do, I can assure you.” “Oh, they are the three graces.”

“Don’t be insolent, Harriet. I should have thought that you might have taken special pains with your hair, seeing that…”

“Seeing that I’m deformed?”

She was shocked. “What nonsense. Of course, you’re not But I should have thought you might …”

I went limping upstairs into my room. She mustn’t know how deeply I cared. None of them must, for then it would be quite unbearable.

In my room I stood before the mirror; I lifted my long gray merino skirt and I looked at my legs and feet. There was nothing to show that one leg was shorter than the other; it was only when I walked that I appeared to drag one behind the other. It had always been like that, from the disappointing day I was born. Disappointing! That was a mild way of expressing it It was a hateful day, a tragic day for everyone, including myself. I knew nothing about it until later, when I began to discover that I was not quite like other children. As if it was not bad enough to be the cause of your mother’s death, you had to be made imperfectly as well. I remember hearing it said of some great beauty—Lady Hamilton, I think—that God was in a glorious mood when he made her. “Well,” I retorted, “He must have been in a bad temper when He made me!”

Sometimes I wished that I had been born anyone but Harriet Delvaney. When Fanny took me into the park and I saw other children, I always envied them. I envied almost everybody—even the dirty children of the man with the barrel organ, who used to stand beside him looking pitiful while the little brown monkey held out the red cap for pennies. Everybody, I thought in those days, was more fortunate than Harriet Delvaney.

I had been told by several nannies under whom Fanny had served that I was a bad, wicked girl. I had a good home, plenty to eat a kind father, a good nanny, and I was not satisfied.

I did not walk until I was four years old. I was taken to

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Menfreya in the Morning

doctors who meddled with my legs and had long discussions about what was to be done and shook their heads over me. I was given this treatment and that; my father used to come and look at me, and there was something in his eyes which told me he would rather look at anything than at me, but he forced himself to pretend he liked doing it.

I remember one day when I was hi the garden of my Aunt Clarissa’s house near Regent’s Park. It was strawberry time, and we had been eating the fruit with sugar and cream near the summerhouse. All the women had parasols and big shady hats to protect their complexions, and because it was Phyl-lis’s birthday there were several children on the lawn and they were running about playing together. I was seated on my chair with my offending, hateful legs stretched out before me. I had come in the carriage and been carried into the garden by one of the footmen and placed hi the chair where I might watch the other children.

I heard Aunt Clarissa’s voice: “Not a very pleasant child. I suppose one must make excuses …”

I did not understand what she meant, although I stored up the remark to ponder on later; when I think of that day I remember the scent of strawberries; the delicious mingling of fruit, sugar and cream, and legs … the strong legs of other children.

I can still recall the great determination which came to me as I almost fell out of the chair and stood on my own legs and walked.

It was a miracle, said the kind ones. Others thought I could have done it before and had been pretending all the time. The doctors were astonished.

I could only totter at first; but from that day I walked. I do not know whether I could have walked before or not; all I can remember is that sudden sense of determination and of gratifying power as I tottered toward those children.

I gradually learned my pathetic little story, mostly from the servants who had worked hi the house before my birth.

“She was too old to have children. Could you wonder … Having Miss Harriet killed her. Operation … Them instruments … Well, it’s dangerous. Lost her and saved the child. But there’s her with that leg. As for him … he was never the same again. Idolized her … Of course, they’d only been married a year or two. Whether it ‘ud have lasted, him being what he is … No wonder he can’t abide the child,

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though. Now, if she’d been like Miss Phyllis or one of her cousins … Makes you think, don’t it? Money ain’t everything.”

There was my story in those few words. Sometimes I imagined that I was” a saint who went about the world doing good and everyone loved me. They said: “Well, she’s no beauty, but one must make excuses and she’s very good.**

But I wasn’t good. I was jealous of my cousins with their pretty pink faces and their silky, golden hair; I was angry with my father who couldn’t abide me because my coming into the world sent my mother out of it. I was difficult with the servants because I was sorry for myself.