Sea of Glass (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (5 page)

Her mother knew little English and Russian was usually spoken in their home. Apart from this, there was another reason why, despite the possession of an English father, she grew up without the slipshodness and the slang which mark the indigenous speaker. Fulk Ellison probably went out of his way to avoid teaching her his own habits of speech. He was considered very foul-mouthed in a genial way and no doubt he realized that it would add to his daughter’s handicaps if she returned to civilization cursing like a navvy.

Presently Varvara got up and went to the Ladies. Andrew looked at me with quizzically raised eyebrows.

‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘You tempt one to coin a phrase about dark horses. What a striking, not to say staggering, young piece!’

‘She’s very simple,’ I said deprecatingly.

‘So’s a tidal wave. But it doesn’t make any the less impression.’

I now began to see that I had acquired prestige instead of losing it. So far from being ashamed of my previous cowardice, I was puffed up with smug complacency.

‘She still has a lot to learn. For instance about dressing,’ I said.

‘But nothing, nothing. If you take away that sack and those delicious boats she has on her feet, you’ll destroy half the effect.’

‘Oh well,’ I said rather gruffly, ‘if you merely regard her as a sort of comic turn!’

‘Me!’ said Andrew in an outraged voice. ‘I think she’s one of the most magnificent creatures I’ve ever seen. I can tell you, David, some pretty crude thoughts have been passing through your Uncle Beastly’s brain.’

‘I doubt if there’d be much doing in that way.’

‘Why?’

I did not really know, but I managed to improvise an answer.

‘I rather think that at present she’s preoccupied with other things.’

‘For instance?’

‘Well . . . she seems to imagine that someone is trying to murder her.’

‘Oh, lovely!’ said Andrew, closing his eyes in ecstasy. ‘How right! A dash of persecution mania is just what’s needed to bring out the values in that face. . . . By the way, have you discovered who’s supposed to be after her?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Well, it doesn’t matter. I prefer to supply my own assassins. I think that before she fled from Sinkiang she pinched the gigantic ruby which formed the eye of an idol worshipped by a particularly foul and esoteric cult. Their yellow slant-eyed priests have followed her to England . . .’

Andrew did not do this kind of foolery badly. He practised it a good deal—largely, as he once told me, for the benefit of that wide range of young women who were in love with Dornford Yates’s Berry characters. It often got results which would never have been countenanced at White Ladies.

On this occasion he was interrupted by the return of Varvara. He called for the bill and waved aside my offer of a contribution. He was a generous chap in a way which is too often and too lightly despised: there is still virtue in giving what one can well afford.

On the baking pavement our ways parted. Andrew was going back to his father’s flat in St. James’s and I intended that Varvara and I should catch a bus at Marble Arch. Before he said goodbye, Andrew took the telephone number of the house in Aynho Terrace.

‘One day soon,’ he said, addressing Varvara, ‘I’m going to offer my services as a guide. I’m sure David does his best but I believe I could drag you down at least two circles lower in the pit of iniquity.’

Varvara did not reply; but when we had progressed about twenty yards on our way home, she suddenly said:

‘He is one of the children of this world. What is the name of that smelling stuff which he puts on his hair?’

As was her custom, Mrs. Ellison came down to dinner. I was a little surprised that she had been allowed to do so this evening, for she looked old and tired and worried. The last expression was new to me and it conflicted with my conception of her unshakable aristocratic calm. Whilst she was taking some medicine at the beginning of the meal, I whispered to Varvara who was sitting next to me that her grandmother looked rather ill.

‘Is it strange?’ she replied. ‘All afternoon the fiend is with her and she wears herself out against his snarlings and persuasions.’

‘What do you mean—the fiend?’

‘My uncle,’ said Varvara.

She spoke rather louder than she intended. Mrs. Ellison looked up at us over a glass of frothy pinkish liquid. In her regard there seemed to be a curious and subtly disquieting mixture of emotions: sympathy, disapproval, and the cold quiet amusement of the ancient who know that very soon now somebody else will have to hold the baby. All she said was:

‘Did you have a nice walk, my dear?’

‘Yes, Grandmother,’ replied Varvara in a subdued voice.

Mrs. Ellison turned to me.

‘I am sure you saw that she did not over-excite herself. It is all so novel and stimulating for her.’

The cool, faintly astringent tone was certainly intentional. The old lady knew a good deal more about the cross-currents in her household than one would have expected.

After dessert it appeared that I, as the solitary male in the company, was expected to sit on for an indefinite time in front of a decanter of port. Very wearisome my solitude would have been if Turpin had not appeared after about five minutes. He had poured some interesting-looking sauce which I could not remember figuring on our recent menu over his wasp-striped waistcoat.

‘Mrs. E. pops off right after,’ he said.

‘You mean, goes to bed?’

He nodded.

‘There’s not much doing in the evenings round ’ere—unless you’d like to warm up the Fillet.’

I must not let down Aunt Edna, I thought, by exchanging lewdities with the servants.

‘Turpin—’ I began severely.

But like the rabbits and birds which I had occasionally hunted he would not remain still whilst I took my shot.

‘What about the Gorgeous East, though? All right, eh? Lot of character and body like this Château Ickham.’

He held up a bottle of the rich aromatic Yquem which we had been drinking at dinner.

‘About four years ago,’ he continued, ‘we had another young chap come ’ere. Mr. Sampson, the Honourable Elwood Sampson. Sounds a bit starchy, eh? That’s why I ’ave to laugh. Because you’d never guess. This young Honourable, every night ’e was down in my pantry ’aving a cag with me.’

Having dropped his tactful and unassuming invitation, Turpin swept up an armful of tableware and loped through the door, trailing one decanter at the full stretch of his arm, like a Neanderthal man with his club.

At first it seemed that convention was going to win the day. Against my inclination I went upstairs. But I found it was quite true that the social life of the house broke up immediately after dinner. The big sitting-room stood empty and so did the roof-garden beyond. There was no indication of Varvara’s whereabouts. Perhaps she was upstairs sharpening her knife. Anyway, Turpin’s comparison between her and Château Yquem made contact at another point: both had a very strong flavour and the palate could temporarily become surfeited with it.

What finally decided me was the risk that Nurse Fillis, freed from her evening duties, would come into the sitting-room. Turpin did not impress me as a man who often spoke at random, and I wondered whether he had meant to implant some warning in his jest about warming up the Fillet. She was obviously an emotional young woman. At that age I had a marked fear of becoming involved for life with some female who was totally unattractive to me. This was, I think, largely the work of Aunt Edna; when I was eighteen, she had delivered a long lecture about various men of her acquaintance who had been trapped and compromised into marriage with designing hussies. Neither I nor even she realized that these stories dated back fully thirty years, to an utterly different social climate: and that all the victims were covered in strawberry leaves and dripping with money. ‘Poor Jack Froggett,’ she would say, ‘he was only the second son, but he had ten thousand a year and the place in Gloucestershire. Still, it didn’t go far with that woman and her relatives on his back!’

I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I had realized that anybody who trapped me would be doing so for the sake of a Cambridge scholarship tenable for four years and a capital sum producing £
286
a year at
3
½ per cent which I would inherit on my twenty-first birthday.

I made for the pantry. Above-stairs and below-stairs probably differed far more in an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century mansion than the hall and the dungeons in a medieval castle. The basement at Aynho Terrace was not intrinsically sordid: it was the seemingly deliberate imposition of certain disadvantages which rather shocked me. For instance, need it have been dug so deep that only the last quarter of the barred windows peeped up above ground-level? And why line all the passages with grey stone, when a facing of coloured plaster would have cost hardly more?

Whatever the case had once been the hardships were now more aesthetic than practical. I looked in at the kitchen where the enormous leaded range still occupied most of one wall, but the work was done on an electric cooker of the most modern design. A little further on a door was ajar and inside another large room—the servants’ hall, I suppose—a whole covey of females were seated round a table sipping cups of tea, as earlier in the day, I had seen some of them sipping away the dust with brush and pan from the
bric-à-brac
upstairs.

Turpin’s pantry was at the end of the central corridor. It was lighter than most of the other basement rooms because it looked on to an area. The wall on the house-side was fitted with cupboards and where one or two of them were open I could see the massed silver standing on a lining of green baize cloth. Turpin himself sat at the table with a bottle before him, polishing a multiple candlestick which I never at any time saw used during my stay with Mrs. Ellison. This made not the slightest difference to Turpin who had been trained to an hieratic tradition, in which one of the rites was polishing silver.

Along the wall by the window where they would obtain whatever sun seeped into the area were several birds in cages—a jackdaw, two budgerigars, and a linnet. No doubt the R.S.P.C.A. would have condemned their situation, but I am confident that their lives, though perhaps shorter than the average, were happier than most. Turpin loved his pets, and he was their sun. At intervals they were taken out and allowed to flutter round the table where he fed them on currants and sips of sweet white wine.

Turpin always insisted that all his birds were fluent talkers. Personally I never heard one of them utter a word. On several occasions, however, I did see Turpin, much mellowed, address them very movingly and then reply to himself in a variety of small piping voices which he thought suitable to their personalities. He appeared to be quite unconscious of his share in this performance.

At my entry Turpin rose and said in his episcopal voice:

‘This is indeed a pleasure, sir.’

‘And to me,’ I replied.

‘Will you take a glass of wine?’

He poured out some port which, even to my uncultivated palate, was much superior to the stuff that appeared upstairs.

After these preliminaries I was seized by shyness. I could think of nothing to say. The evening stretched before me in a vista of agonized speechlessness. To hide my embarrassment I wandered round the pantry, pausing at random before a reproduction of Landseer’s
Monarch of the Glen
which hung over the door.

Turpin’s eyes followed me.

‘The stag at eve ’ad drunk ’is fill—

No wonder ’e felt bloody ill,’

he recited in his ordinary tones.

The ice was appreciably thawed.

‘Did you make that up?’ I asked.

Turpin shook his head.

‘It was one of Mr. Fulk’s rhymes. ’E ’ad some ’ot ones.’

‘Who was Mr. Fulk?’

‘ ’Er father,’ said Turpin, jerking his eyes at the ceiling in a way which made his meaning clear in defiance of all logic. ‘And one or two others, I shouldn’t wonder!’

‘So you knew him?’

‘I came as footman about four years before the bust.’ Seeing the incomprehension on my face, he explained: ‘Bust with ’is father, of course. Mr. Fulk was away a lot of the time, seeing to the business abroad. But didn’t we know when ’e came back! Not ten minutes ’e’d be in the ’ouse before you’d ’ear ’im and the old man damning and blasting each other all round the place. “Confounded young puppy!” ’ trumpeted Turpin in a voice which went well with port, ‘ “— — old — !” ’ he replied to himself in a voice like a young bull. ‘Nothing churchey about Mr. Fulk’s language.’

‘What did they quarrel about?’ I asked, fascinated.

‘Business.’

‘Wasn’t Mr. Fulk very good at it?’

‘The way I ’eard ’e was a top-notcher with the machines and the men—all round, in fact, till it come to putting on the bite. Then maybe ’e’d let someone get away with tuppence-’alfpenny. Well that wouldn’t do for old Mr. Ellison. People said ’e chewed ’is tanners till ’e’d flattened ’em into bobs.’ Turpin paused, took a refreshing draught of port and refilled both our glasses. ‘Mind you,’ he went on, ‘I don’t reckon that was at the bottom of it. The real trouble was the same as ’aving two cocks in one pen. Each ’as to show the other. . . . Still, I never believed it would come to anything serious. I thought they could go on shouting the odds at each other like you get in some families and underneath the blood’s as thick as glue. But then one day, bango, Mr. Fulk’s shaken off the dust and that’s the last time ’e came near England, let alone this ’ouse.’

‘Do you know what happened?’

‘Ask me, Mr. bloody Cedric ’ad ’is ’and in it,’ said Turpin. ‘Christ, ’e didn’t ’alf ’ate ’is brother! See, where the trouble was, Mr. Fulk could never leave alone; when ’e saw a bastard ’e ’ad to kick ’im. And anyone who can look at Mr. Cedric without putting a name to ’im wants ’is eyes examined!’

I noted the present tense with surprise. I had not fully realized that Mrs. Ellison had another son who was alive.

‘As live as any other snake,’ said Turpin in answer to my question. ‘It wasn’t no ghost that came round this afternoon and told me at me own door that I’d better smarten up. The dirty sod! And the way ’e goes on at ’is mother. Wheedle, wheedle, wheedle—bully, bully, bully. I never take in the tea to them but I expect to see the poor old girl stretched on the ’earth-rug while Mr. Cedric tries to make ’er sign something with ’er last twitch!’

A peculiar suspicion for which it would have been difficult to give any logical grounds had begun to form in my mind.

‘Do you think his niece is scared of him?’

Turpin did not seem in the least surprised.

‘I shouldn’t wonder. And I dare say if the truth was known, she got cause.’

‘Why?’

‘Money,’ said Turpin succinctly.

Something seemed to be slightly off-centre in his reasoning. ‘I suppose this Cedric does something?’

‘Manages the firm now.’

‘Well, then, he must be pretty rich . . .’

‘Look,’ said Turpin, laying his hand paternally on my arm, ‘it’s like as if a man’s tit-struck. ’E ’as a girl, but ’e can ’ardly wait to finish the job for fear ’e might be missing the chance to ’ave another. Well, it’s the same with money, if you got it bad. Give the old man or Mr. Cedric an ’undred million and they’d ask you in the same breath for the stamp they lent you yesterday.’