The Beautiful Visit (2 page)

‘I hate my clothes,’ I said. ‘I didn’t choose this house. I can’t start life in it. This is so pretty.’

She shut the door, and began taking off her gloves from slim smooth white hands, fingers unpricked because she always wore thimbles when she worked.

‘Will you take if off now? I don’t want it too crushed,’ she said.

I was struggling with the buttons when she glided forward and I felt her fingers regularly neat, releasing them, down to my waist. I pulled the dress over my head. She took it from me in silence
and replaced it on its hanger in the wardrobe. I reached for my skirt and she said, ‘Have you been trying on all my clothes?’

She saw the drawers open. I bent over my skirt ashamed. She sat down and talked. She would not have minded me trying on her clothes with her there, she said. But did I not feel it a little wrong
to come to her room when she was out, to play with her private possessions? ‘If I had known you were going to do that I should have asked you to wash your hands.’ And she laughed
pleasantly.

I looked at my hands. They were grey and clumsy. I felt they had only become dirty for her to see.

‘We must try and remember that things don’t matter.’ She was leaning forward. ‘I know jealousy is hard. I have suffered from it myself’ (with a weary reminiscent
little smile). ‘But there are other things so much more important and so little time to set sufficient values. Life is hard for us all in different ways.’

She talked for a long time in the same quiet assured unemotional voice. There was a lot about God and trying to live a good life, peace of mind, acceptance of what was given, examples, final
reward, and back to not prying un-asked into other people’s things: and an absolute passion of disagreement grew in me.

‘I split the frock,’ I said.

‘That is a pity. But I expect it can be mended. I am not angry. It’s quite all right.’

‘I’ve got to go. I promised to sort the laundry,’ I said. I couldn’t bear her voice any more.

‘Well we’ll say no more about it. Agreed?’ And she rose suddenly and kissed my cheek. I left her room quickly and ran into mine. ‘Don’t forget the laundry,’ I
heard her voice daintily energetic as I shut my door.

My passion broke and I sat on the floor clutching my knees and repeating her words so that I could fight them more clearly in my mind. Things must matter. Everything existed because someone had
once thought it important. Nobody gave me this house, nobody could love it; if you were peaceful you never wanted to change. I wanted every single simple thing to be different. I should not mind
people looking at my clothes if they were nice. There
wasn’t
anyone to help. If helpful people didn’t care about beautiful stuffs and colours, sounds and more people, then they
weren’t any use to me. But there was nobody to help me here. Hot resentful tears fell down into my hands. Everything was dirty, dusty and grey; no clear colour; no piercing sound; and at tea
everything would be the same. Nobody worth their salt ever had much peace of mind. I wasn’t jealous of her. Good Lord no. And I repeated ‘Good Lord’ aloud in a pompous
self-satisfied manner enjoying its rounded scorn. It was a mistake to put me in this house. I wasn’t suited to it. I couldn’t even cry any more, but my nose was hot and full: horrid. I
got up to search for a handkerchief and rooted for hours among bits of string; postcards; a broken watch; a ring out of a cracker; a musty lavender bag, all dust and spikes; a shoelace; elastic; a
ninepenny Nelson; a little pink china pig with a chipped ear; a balloon, soft, and curiously unpleasant to touch; an envelope bursting with stamps; a penwiper; and, at last, a handkerchief, grey,
but folded. I shook it out, and it smelt of dolls’ houses and the water out of their tea cups. I blew my nose and sat down.

‘I am against everybody,’ I said.

Nothing changed.

‘Everybody and everything. I don’t like it, I’m going to change.’ The gaping drawer reminded me. A lot of those things were too childish to keep. I had outgrown them. I
would throw away everything I hated. Everything in my room.

But it was tea-time.

Two days later I was still in the midst of my private revolution. My room was chaotic and each night when I went to bed the bloated waste-paper basket reminded me of more to purge. The family
took no notice of me, which was comforting as there would only have been an incredulous banality about their comments. I eventually made my room unsentimentally bare; hardly belonging to me, and
only resentfully part of the house. All the books and toys that had verged on grown-up possessions were gone, and it took me no time to find a handkerchief. That was not as enjoyable as I had
expected; but I persevered and sorted my clothes into heaps of the unwearable, mendable, and usable. The mending took several days; I got bored and relegated many garments to the first heap.

The next thing was to find new people. I started walking in Kensington Gardens by myself, watching the people, and trying to find someone to suit my needs. This accomplished, I intended taking
the person home to tea with me. The Round Pond seemed the most likely spot, because people stopped to feed the birds, or watch the yachts, or simply the minnows. I was afraid to speak to anyone.
Each day I resolved to take the plunge but I was determined that it should be thoroughly done and there was a private rule that the person had to be taken to tea. I saw one girl: very pretty,
carrying a little blue book, and gazing at the swans. She sat down on a seat and I watched her, fascinated. She had enormous brown eyes with very long lashes and moth-like eyebrows. She opened the
little blue book, and a stupid duck which was walking on the grass and gravel, moved, hasty and eager, like a shop attendant, thinking about bread I suppose. It waited, then walked to the water and
slid in, swimming smugly away as though it never hurried greedily up to seats at all. The girl stopped reading and looked up pensively. The sun was setting, and gold was slipping uncertainly off
the trees and water and her hair. It was very calm; the yachts were lying on the pond, with their sails shivering still; and the gardens were blue in the distance with the tree trunks dark, like
legs seen from a basement window. On the Broad Walk a leisurely stream of perambulators rolled homewards; stiff gaiters to unbutton and peel off fat frantic legs and square white feeders to be tied
round hundreds of warm pink necks. A clock struck four, and the swans arched their necks for the sound to pass through. A minnow floated on its side in the water, its mouth opening: it was going to
die. The girl shut her book and walked away, and I had not spoken to her. I imagined her walking back to a neat beautiful home with friends all coming to a wonderful tea. She did not walk towards
my gate. ‘She would never have liked me,’ I said. ‘She would not have come home.’ The thought cheered me for the loss of her. She was only a speck among the trees already.
It didn’t matter, there were so many people. It was just a pity to let anyone go. All the way home I imagined her walking with me, telling me many new and exciting things about how to live,
so that tea with the family would be a waste of her. It was cold by the time I reached home; the lamps were being lit in the streets, and the piano sounded in petulant bursts as I stood on the door
step. My father was giving a lesson. My sister was wearing her mauve frock. After tea I darned black stockings and ironed my hair ribbons.

The next day I went to the Round Pond half hoping, half expecting to see the girl with the blue book. It was a fresh, cold day and she was not there. I stood in front of the water: a little
tufted duck dived and came up gleaming with secret pleasure. Beside me was a tall old man, very neat and black, with a stick.

‘Water water everywhere nor any drop to drink,’ he said suddenly. I turned to him.

he went on rapidly with great emphasis.

‘I know it all by heart,’ he said. Then suddenly: ‘Do you know where that came from, young lady?’

‘Coleridge.
Ancient Mariner,
’ I mumbled. My governess had read it with me.

‘Quite right. Exactly right. Not many young people nowadays know that sort of thing. Great poetry. I know it all by heart.’ And he walked away lifting his hat. A dog ran after him
sniffing, but he took no notice and walked faster.

Nothing else happened that day. I told my family at tea about the old man, and they received it with the expected mild surprise. My father had written a choral work which was to be performed at
Christmas, and they were all absorbed with being a composer’s family.

We went to a concert that evening. We always contrived to look poor, cultured, and apart at these functions. The programme was chamber music, mostly Schubert and Brahms. I could never listen to
chamber music for more than an hour; after which I began to count people’s heads; still, bald, hatless, swaying, thrown back, shrunk forward between the shoulders, sunk on the hands, erect,
anguished, emotional, ecstatic; my father stern and bored, and my mother acquiescently rapt; my sister prettily still; and I, I wondered what I looked like. I shut one eye and squinted. No good.
There were red plush and gold paint; fat naked little boys in biscuit-coloured relief. The platform was a pale blue semi-circle, with the players impressively still, driving their instruments with
a delicate force and deliberation. We went to see the players afterwards. They were dazed and friendly, their hands wrung and their faces stretched with answering good-will.

Going home was the nicest.

CHAPTER TWO

I still walked in the Gardens, but I did not feel any less lonely.

One windy day there were kites between the Orangery and the Pond. I went to the slope and stared upward at three of them. They were half proud, half fearful; soaring with wild little tugs at
their strings. I watched their joy at a moment’s release in the dropping wind’s fantasy; their floating in the second’s calm before they were off again; sinuous and wild, and
captive all the time. I looked down, too far of course, to the ground and saw muddy tufted grass and a pair of black boots. Enormous boots. A boy. An old boy; nearly as old as I. His suit was
dirty, his breeches tight, his sleeves too short, and his wrists red and bony. He was very intent on his kite; his eyes were screwed up with the sky and staring cold; his dark hair ruffled up by
the wind into a square crest. He had a large Adam’s apple which reminded me of five notes and then down a fifth on a piano. I stood a little nearer and stared again at the kite because he was
so intent upon it. I was suddenly possessed of a desire to have been flying it with him; for his winding in to be by our mutual consent, because we had other things to do, planned together. The
kite was almost in; it was pink and yellow, with ribs dark and delicate against the sky; and he was winding fast, his fingers hard and capable against the string. His eyes came down to earth, and
he glanced at me just as the kite hit the ground with a thin papery thud.

‘Can I look at it?’

‘What?’

‘Your kite. Can I look at it?’

‘If you like.’ He watched the kite in my hands indifferently.

‘Did you make it?’

‘No.’ I knew he wished he had.

‘Do you often fly it?’

‘No.’

I gave it back to him.

‘I’ve stopped because of the wind,’ he volunteered.

‘It’s dropping.’ My mouth was very dry.

‘I’m going home now. Good-bye.’ He started off, the kite perched in his arms. ‘I’ll be here tomorrow if you want to see it fly properly.’ He was going.

‘I say,’ I called. ‘I say. Would you like to come home to tea?’

He stopped. It was up to him. I saw his eyes faintly curious and defensive, and I longed for him to come.

‘What’s your name?’

I told him.

‘How old are you?’

I told him.

‘All right,’ he said; and we set off down the Broad Walk.

‘Will your family wonder where you are?’

‘Oh no. I shouldn’t get any tea anyhow. They’re against me at the moment. I don’t agree with them.’

I digested that in silence.

‘My father’s a doctor,’ he added as an explanation.

‘I see,’ I said. ‘What school do you go to?’

‘I don’t. I’ve been expelled.’

I didn’t know what to say.

‘How awful.’

‘It jolly well is. I didn’t like it much there but it’s worse at home.’

‘Why did they?’

‘Partly because of God.’ He stopped and transferred the kite from one arm to the other. ‘And partly because of games.’

‘I didn’t know they could expel you for them.’

‘Oh well it wasn’t just them. They just started it. I was a bad influence anyway,’ he said with some pride.

‘How do you start being an influence?’

‘Why?’ He stopped and regarded me again suspiciously. ‘I don’t think it would be easy for you. You might be a good influence of course. Girls always want to be that. But
I shouldn’t advise you to try. It’s no good deliberately trying to influence anyone. My English master taught me that. It’s about all I learned at school. You mustn’t try
and change other people. It’s never good for them in the end. At school they want the masters to change everyone. And they want the boys to be sure of being everyone. He wouldn’t and I
wasn’t and so he left and I was expelled.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘Edinburgh. With his family. They aren’t pleased. I get letters from him. I’ll show you if you like. You seem sensible.’

‘Oh I am,’ I said.

‘We’d better sit down. Letters are too difficult standing up.’

We sat on a black bench. He took a crumpled envelope out of his pocket, and unfolded the letter. The writing was slanting and very difficult.

‘– decision is not simple. Man’s ultimate purgatory could be fraught with endless decisions; the consequences unknown and terrible even with knowledge – ’ a blank
which I couldn’t read, ending with – ‘and he spent twenty years deciding that, incomplete though it is – ’ unreadable again – ‘therefore assess yourself
freely with sincerity and courage and tackle the main problem of what you want to be; once you are at all sure, nothing should stop you. Until then it is just strife for the sake of
self-expression, a grisly means to achieve no positive end. I hope – ’