The Fallen Curtain (15 page)

“I don’t know,” I said. “Perhaps because mothers make children and it makes vinegar.”

That only seemed to make her angrier and she kicked at the tree.

“Shall we go down to the pond or are you going to read?” I said.

But Mop didn’t answer me so I went down to the pond alone and watched the bats that flitted against a pale green sky. Mop had gone up to our bedroom. She was in bed reading when I got back. No reader myself, I remember the books she
liked and remember too that my mother thought she ought not to be allowed to read them. That night it was Lefanu’s
Uncle Silas
which engrossed her. She had just finished Dr James’s
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.
I don’t believe, at that time, I saw any connection between her literary tastes and her reaction to the vinegar mother, nor did I attribute this latter to anything lacking in her relationship with her own mother. I couldn’t have done so; I was much too young. I hadn’t, anyway, been affected by the conversation at supper and I went to bed with no uneasy forebodings about what was to come.

In the morning when Mop and I came back from church—we were sent there, I now think, from a desire on the part of Mr and Mrs Felton to impress the neighbours rather than out of vicarious piety—we found the Elsworthys once more at Sanctuary. Lady Elsworthy and her son and Mrs Felton were all peering into a glass vessel with a narrow, stoppered mouth in which was some brown liquid with a curd floating on it. This curd did look quite a lot like a slice of liver.

“It’s alive,” said Mop. “It’s a sort of animal.”

Lady Elsworthy told her not to be a little fool and Mrs Felton laughed. I thought my mother would have been angry if a visitor to our house had told me not to be a fool, and I also thought Mop was really going to be sick this time.

“We don’t have to have it, do we?” she said.

“Of course we’re going to have it,” said Mrs Felton. “How dare you speak like that when Lady Elsworthy has been kind enough to give it to me! Now we shall never have to buy nasty shop vinegar again.”

“Vinegar doesn’t cost much,” said Mop.

“Isn’t that just like a child! Money grows on trees as far as she’s concerned.”

Then Lady Elsworthy started giving instructions for the maintenance of the thing. It must be kept in a warm atmosphere. “Not out in your chilly kitchen, my dear.” It was to be fed with wine, the dregs of each bottle they consumed. “But not white wine. You tell her why not, Peter; you know I’m no
good at the scientific stuff.” It must never be touched with a knife or metal spoon.

“If metal touches it,” said Peter Elsworthy, “it will shrivel and die. In some ways, you see, it’s a tender plant.”

Mop had banged out of the room. Lady Elsworthy was once more bent over her gift, holding the vessel and placing it in a suitable position where it was neither too light nor too cold. From the garden I could hear the drone of the lawn mower, plied by Mr Felton. Those other two had moved a little away from the window, away from the broad shaft of sunshine in which we had found them bathed. As Peter Elsworthy spoke of the tender plant, I saw his eyes meet Mrs Felton’s and there passed between them a glance, mysterious, beyond my comprehension, years away from anything I knew. His face became soft and strange. I wanted to giggle as I sometimes giggled in the cinema, but I knew better than to do so there, and I went away and giggled by myself in the garden, saying, “Soppy, soppy!” and kicking at a stone.

But I wasn’t alone. Mr Felton came pushing the lawn mower up behind me. He used to sweat in the heat and his face was red and wet like the middle of a joint of beef when the brown part has been carved off. A grandfather rather than a father, I thought him.

“What’s soppy, my old Margarine? Mind out of my way or I’ll cut your tail off.”

It was August and the season had begun, so on Sunday afternoons he would take the shotgun he kept hanging in the kitchen and go out after rabbits. I believe he did this less from a desire to eat rabbit flesh than from a need to keep in with the Elsworthys, who shot every unprotected thing that flew or scuttled. But he was a poor shot and I used to feel relieved when he came back empty-handed. On Sunday evenings he drove away to London.

“Poor old Daddy back to the grindstone,” he would say. “Take care of yourself, my old Mop.” And to me, with wit, “Don’t melt away in all this sunshine, Margarine.”

That Sunday Mrs Felton made him promise to bring a dozen more bottles of wine when he returned the following weekend.

“Reinforcements for my vinegar mother.”

“It’s stupid wasting wine to make it into vinegar,” said Mop. I wondered why she used to hover so nervously about her parents at this leave-taking time, watching them both, her fists clenched. Now I know it was because, although she was rude to them and seemed not to care for them, she longed desperately to see them exchange some demonstration of affection greater than Mrs Felton’s apathetic lifting of her cheek and the hungry peck Mr Felton deposited upon it. But she waited in vain, and when the car had gone would burst into a seemingly inexplicable display of ill-temper or sulks.

So another week began, a week in which our habits, until then routine and placid, were to change.

  Like a proper writer, a professional, I have hinted at Mrs Felton and, I hope, whetted appetites, but I have delayed till now giving any description of her. But, having announced her entry through the mouths of my characters (as in all the best plays), I shall delay no more. The stage is ready for her and she shall enter it, in her robes and with her trumpets.

She was a tall, thin woman and her skin was as brown as a pale Indian’s. I thought her old and very ugly, and I couldn’t understand a remark of my mother’s that I had overheard to the effect that Mrs Felton was “quite beautiful if you like that gypsy look.” I suppose she was about thirty-seven or thirty-eight. Her hair was black and frizzy, like a bush of heather singed by fire, and it grew so low on her forehead that her black brows sprang up to meet it, leaving only an inch or so of skin between. She had a big mouth with brown thick lips she never painted and enormous eyes whose whites were like wet eggshells.

In the country she wore slacks and a shirt. She made some of her own clothes and those she made were dramatic. I remember a hooded cloak she had of brown hessian and a long evening gown of embroidered linen. At that time women seldom
wore cloaks or long dresses, either for evening or day. She chain-smoked and her fingers were yellow with nicotine.

Me she almost entirely ignored. I was fed and made to wash properly and told to change my clothes and not allowed to be out after dark. But apart from this she hardly spoke to me. I think she had a ferocious dislike of children, for Mop fared very little better than I did. Mrs Felton was one of those women who fall into the habit of only addressing their children to scold them. However presentable Mop might make herself, however concentratedly good on occasion her behaviour—for I believe she made great efforts—Mrs Felton couldn’t bring herself to praise. Or if she could, there would always be the sting in the tail, the “Well, but look at your nails!” or “It’s very nice but do you have to pick this moment?” And Mop’s name on her tongue—as if specifically chosen to this end—rang with a sour slither, a little green snake slipping from its hole, as the liquid and the sibilant scathed out, “Alicia!”

But at the beginning of that third week a slight change came upon her. She was not so much nicer or kinder as more vague, more nervously abstracted. Mop’s peccadillos passed unnoticed and I, if late for a meal received no venomous glance. It was on the Tuesday evening that the first wine bottle appeared at our supper table.

We ate this meal, cold usually but more than a bread and butter tea, at half past seven or eight in the evening, and after it we were sent to bed. There had never before been the suggestion that we should take wine with it. Even at the weekends we were never given wine, apart from our tiny glasses of educative sherry. But that night at sunset—I remember the room all orange and quiet and warm—Mrs Felton brought to the table a bottle of red wine instead of the teapot and the lemon barley water, and set out three glasses.

“I don’t like wine,” said Mop.

“Yes, you do. You like sherry.”

“I don’t like that dark red stuff. It tastes bitter. Daddy won’t let me have wine.”

“Then we won’t tell Daddy. If it’s bitter you can put sugar in it. My God, any other child would think it was in heaven getting wine for supper. You don’t know when you’re well off and you never have. You’ve no appreciation.”

“I suppose you want us to drink it so you can have the leftovers for your horrible vinegar thing,” said Mop.

“It’s not horrible and don’t you dare to speak to me like that,” said Mrs Felton, but there was something like relief in her voice. Can I remember that? Did I truly observe
that?
No. It is now that I know it, now when all the years have passed, and year by year has come more understanding. Then, I heard no relief. I saw no baser motive in Mrs Felton’s insistence. I took it for granted, absurd and somehow an inversion of the proper course of things though it seemed, that we were to drink an expensive substance in order that the remains of it might be converted into a cheap substance. But childhood is a looking-glass country where so often one is obliged to believe six impossible things before breakfast.

I drank my wine and, grudgingly, Mop drank two full glasses into which she had stirred sugar. Most of the rest was consumed by Mrs Felton, who then poured the dregs into the glass vessel for the refreshment of the vinegar mother. I don’t think I had ever drunk or even tasted table wine before. It went to my head, and as soon as I was in bed at nine o’clock I fell into a profound thick sleep.

But Mop was asleep before me. She had lurched into bed without washing and I heard her heavy breathing while I was pulling on my nightdress. This was unusual. Mop wasn’t exactly an insomniac but, for a child, she was a bad sleeper. Most evenings as I was passing into those soft clouds of sleep, into a delightful drowsiness that at any moment would be closed off by total oblivion, I would hear her toss and turn in bed or even get up and move about the room. I knew, too, that sometimes she went downstairs for a glass of water or perhaps just for her mother’s company, for on the mornings after such excursions Mrs Felton would take her to task over breakfast, scathingly demanding of invisible hearers why she should have been
cursed with such a restless, nervy child, who, even as a baby, had never slept a peaceful night through.

On the Tuesday night, however, she had no difficulty in falling asleep. It was later, in the depths of the night (as she told me in the morning) that she had awakened and lain wakeful for hours, or so she said. She had heard the church clock chime two and three; her head had ached and she had had a curious trembling in her limbs. But, as far as I know, she said nothing of this to her mother, and her headache must have passed by the middle of the morning. For, when I left the house at ten to go with Mrs Potter to an auction that was being held in some neighbouring mansion, she was lying on a blanket on the front lawn, reading the book Mr Felton had brought down for her at the weekend,
Fifty Haunted Houses.
And she was still reading it, was deep in “The Mezzotint” or some horror of Blackwood’s, when I got back at one.

It must have been that day, too, when she began to get what I should now call obsessional about the vinegar mother. Several times, three or four times certainly, when I went into the dining room, I found her standing by the Romford factory antique on which Lady Elsworthy’s present stood, gazing with the fascination of someone who views an encapsulated reptile, at the culture within. It was not to me in any way noisome or sinister, nor was it even particularly novel. I had seen a dish of stewed fruit forgotten and allowed to ferment in my grandmother’s larder, and apart from the fungus on that being pale green, there was little difference between it and this crust of bacteria. Mop’s face, so repelled yet so compelled, made me giggle. A mistake, this, for she turned on me, lashing out with a thin wiry arm.

“Shut up, shut up! I hate you.”

But she had calmed and was speaking to me again by suppertime. We sat on the wall above the road and watched Mr Gould’s Herefords driven from their pasture up the lane home to the farm. Swallows perched on the telephone wires like taut strings of black and white beads. The sky was lemony-green and greater birds flew homeward across it.

“I’d like to put a spoon in it,” said Mop, “and then I’d see it shrivel up and die.”

“She’d know,” I said.

“Who’s she?”

“Your mother, of course.” I was surprised at the question when the answer was so obvious. “Who else?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s only an old fungus,” I said. “It isn’t hurting you.”

“Alicia! Aleeciah!” A sharp liquid cry, the sound of a sight, and the sight wine or vinegar flung in a curving jet.

“Come on, Margarine,” said Mop. “Supper’s ready.”

We were given no wine that night, but on the next a bottle and the glasses once more appeared. The meal was a heavier one than usual, meat pie with potatoes as well as salad. Perhaps the wine was sweet this time or of a finer vintage, for it tasted good to me and I drank two glasses. It never occurred to me to wonder what my parents, moderate and very nearly abstemious, would have thought of this corruption of their daughter. Of course it didn’t. To a child grown-ups are omniscient and all-wise. Much as I disliked Mrs Felton, I never supposed she could wish to harm me or be indifferent as to whether or not I were harmed.

Mop, too, obeyed and drank. This time there was no demur from her. Probably she was once again trying methods of ingratiation. We went to bed at nine and I think Mop went to sleep before me. I slept heavily as usual, but I was aware of some disturbance in the night, of having been briefly awakened and spoken to. I remembered this, though not much more for a while, when I finally woke in the morning. It was about seven, a pearly morning of birdsong, and Mop was sitting on the window seat in her nightdress.