The Fountain Overflows (34 page)

It had broken her heart, she said, and her voice shrilled, and Papa drew closer to her and, his fingers tremulous with reluctance, laid his hand on her sleeve, but he could not stop her. It had broken her heart, she continued, that Queenie had gone in the night without saying a word to her, so that she could not warn her. They didn’t know yet how she had gone, there was a wheelbarrow up against the garden wall by the summerhouse, but there was the copper in the alley on the other side of the wall. She must have crept like a cat all the length of the alley along the top of that wall, fine big woman though she was, then dropped down into the garden of the corner house and out of the front gate when nobody was looking. Queenie had never had any fear, Aunt Lily had often told her that it would be better if she had. The warning Aunt Lily had wanted to give her was not to go back to Southampton. That was where they had both come from, and she would go back there. Ever since Queenie had heard that Mr. Mason had taken a position in Ostend, the very same day he heard that Harry was dead, she had not been herself, and then after the inspector with a beard had come and asked all those questions she had been just like a dumb animal, she couldn’t speak and she couldn’t understand speech, she just looked, and she would act like an animal, she would go back to where she came from. But of course the inspector with the beard knew where they both came from, he had not said so, but he knew everything. Mamma, who had tried to speak a dozen times but had been unheard, slipped her right hand in my right hand and her left hand on Nancy’s left hand, and laid Nancy’s hand on mine, and with a circular ritual gesture bade us leave the room.

In the passage, I said, “I say, can’t grown-ups talk?”

Nancy giggled and said, “Papa says about Aunt Lily that he wishes he could put a handkerchief over the cage.” Then she remembered that her father was dead, and she cried.

When I had wiped her eyes I took her into the dining room. The tea had been cleared away and Mary and Cordelia were doing their homework. They said, “Hello, Nancy,” and I went and got my homework. When I got back they were telling her about something funny that had happened at school during prayers, and I got my arithmetic and algebra done. Then Nancy heard Mary and Cordelia recite their French and German verbs, but she sometimes lifted her eyes from the page and looked about the room with a certain desolation. She put her hand down on the seat of the chair she was sitting on, and picked off one of the curly pieces which were peeling off the worn surface of the leather. Her eyes travelled over our faces, too, very doubtfully. You could see that she had heard the other girls talking about us at school, saying that we were odd, and very poor. Her unease at the place which she had to come to for refuge had struck her sooner than Kate had foretold, perhaps because her mind was so poorly furnished that immediate impressions could move in and extend themselves. She was really very much disturbed by our household. We had so little in common with her that Cordelia struck Mary and me as very clever when she thought of telling her that we all wished so much that we had hair like hers, it was so long and so thick and so fair and so tidy. Nancy’s response showed us that this was the sort of remark which she thought sensible people exchanged. She smiled, straightened her hair-bow, and said that her hair must be looking dreadful, she always had it washed the day before she went back to school, but this time there had been no chance of doing that, because of her Papa.

As her voice faded away, Mary said, “Let’s wash our hairs. It’s about time we did ours.”

I said, “What a good idea. I’ll go and ask Kate if there are any chestnuts in the house,” and Nancy exclaimed, “What, do you wash your hair with chestnuts?” We all burst out laughing, explaining at once that we were laughing not at her but at me, for talking about chestnuts before we had told her that in winter hair-washing was a sort of party in our family. Mary had, indeed, been proposing to comfort the afflicted stranger in our midst by admitting her to one of our chief private joys. On these occasions we all went to the bathroom with kettles of hot water and gave each other shampoos, then came down to the sitting room while Richard, who was allowed to stay up late on these occasions, helped the drying process by pummelling our heads with hot bathtowels, which he enjoyed doing because, he said, it was his only chance to be cruel back to his cruel elder sisters; and at the same time we roasted chestnuts among the coals and ate them very hot with milk that had been put outside the window to get very cold.

All this we explained to Nancy, who told us that of late her Mamma had been taking her to the big hairdresser’s in the High Street opposite the Bon Marche, to save trouble. She said that with some pride. But there was nothing to do but go on with it now we had started it, so I went down to the kitchen and found that Kate had quite a lot of chestnuts, and would put them on to boil, and told Richard Quin that there was going to be a hair-washing, and came upstairs again, and found Papa standing at the front door talking to a policeman. I went into the sitting room to ask Mamma if later on we could come in and dry our hair, and found her and Aunt Lily sitting in silence by the fire. Mamma looked very tired. Aunt Lily had just taken off her hat, the huge disc lay on top of the piano, its brim projecting over the instrument in front and behind; and she was leaning forward over the fire, her hands searching for combs and slides and hairpins lost in the disordered edifice of her yellow hair. As I came in she looked up and said, with her old jauntiness, “Ah, here’s the clever little kiddy,” and flashed one of her familiar smiles that reflected the light from her prominent teeth, though today it shone as brightly from the bridge of her reddened nose and from the tears on her cheek. Before I could ask Mamma what I wanted, she said, “Who was it at the door?”

I answered that it was a policeman and Aunt Lily said, “Perhaps he has news. But“—she sighed—”perhaps he hasn’t. I suppose it will be police, police, police, forever and ever, amen, coming round about every little thing.” She put her hands round her knees, which showed bony through her skirt, and stared at the fire as if the news were there. I had a feeling that she often spoke falsely, like a popular song, she might have been singing “The Honeysuckle and the Bee,” but sometimes she spoke, as my father and mother did, sincerely, of what she really thought and felt.

Papa came back. He said, “Miss Moon, a policeman has brought a message from the family solicitor which he sent down to the Laurels through the police office.” Even the Phillipses had not a telephone, so different was that world from this. It appeared that the solicitor had got in touch with a brother of Mr. Phillips, who lived in Nottingham, and he was coming down tomorrow and would go to the boarding-school on the south coast where Nancy’s brother was, and would bring him up to London, and then he would settle various business arising out of the recent unfortunate events, and the next day or the day after would take Nancy back to Nottingham. It was strange to hear this news about the movements of people we did not know, who lived in places we have never visited. It was as if towns marked on the map had begun to cry out and bleed.

“I’m glad,” said Aunt Lily. “It will get them away from London, I don’t think they sell newspapers as much in the street in those provincial sort of places, do they? It’s a horrid sound, those boys calling out the news, up and down the street. And it’s a lovely big house they have, they’ve pots of money, the kids will have everything. But what they’ll hear about their mother I don’t like to think, for all Harry’s people were against Queenie from the start, I never could think why.” The tears that had been stationary on her cheeks began to roll again. “It’s good news,” she said, “but I did think it might be something about Queenie.”

Mamma told me to go and give the news to Nancy, but not say a policeman had brought them. I wondered at the obtuseness of all grown-ups, even Mamma. Nancy had simply accepted the fact that she had entered a passage in time when policemen brought communications which decided her life. She had already left the dining room and gone upstairs to take off her blouse and skirt and put on her dressing-gown in preparation for the hairwashing ceremony, and I found her sitting on her bed and looking round Mamma’s room as she had looked round the dining room. It must, indeed, have seemed a desolate apartment to poor Nancy, as it would have to most people, for it was almost bare except for remnants of obsolete fame, preserved in a form which few would have recognized, in tarnished laurel wreaths inscribed with such names as Dresden and Düsseldorf and Wien, and signed photographs and prints of conductors carrying batons.

I said to her, “Cheer up, Nancy, you won’t have to be here long. Your uncle in Nottingham is going to fetch Cecil from his school tomorrow, and then only a day or two after that he will take you both home with him.”

She said, “Oh. My uncle. Nottingham? That will be Uncle Mat.” Her eyes wandered round the room and settled on the signed print over Mamma’s bed.

“Brahms,” I said. “He gave it to Mamma of his own accord. She did not even know he was at her concert. So of course she did not even ask for it, he brought it to her hotel the next morning.”

“Oh,” said Nancy politely, “who was he?” Before I could answer she said, “I don’t know Uncle Mat very well. I can’t even remember whether he is married to Aunt Nettie or Aunt Clara.”

“Does it make a difference?” I asked.

“It does, rather,” said Nancy wearily, and her eyes grew wet again.

I ran downstairs and asked Aunt Lily which it was. She said, “Not Aunt Nettie—she’s the sly one, I know well what poor Nancy was thinking about—it’s all right, it’s Uncle Mat and Aunt Clara, and they’re both ever so jolly, quite different from Nettie.” She looked round at Papa and Mamma with a little laugh, as if she knew that she could count on their understanding and sympathy in her references to the amusing guerrilla warfare of family life. They were obliging enough to return the smile, but I knew them to be depressed. When I got upstairs again Nancy was standing in the doorway, and she did not seem as pleased as I had thought she would be at hearing that Uncle Mat was married to Aunt Clara and not to Aunt Nettie, she just stood there. Presently she said, choking, “I can’t wash my hair.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said, “be a good girl, it is fun.”

She muttered, “I keep on crying. I’d better stay by myself and people won’t see.”

I could hear Cordelia and Mary getting the lather ready in the bathroom. I called to them, and when they came I said, “Look here, Nancy doesn’t want to wash her hair with us because we’ll see her crying. Tell her it’s all right.”

“We will not think any worse of you if you cry,” Cordelia assured her. “We always cry when we are upset.”

“Yes,” said Mary, “and we have none of us had nearly as much to upset us as you have. It would really be very odd if you had lost your Papa and did not cry a lot.”

“Yes, it would be sharper than the serpent’s tooth,” I said. “Go on and cry as much as you like, and you can do it all right while you’re washing your hair.”

“Just pretend we are not here,” said Cordelia.

But Nancy looked with some alarm at the three girls, not very well known to her and generally reputed to be rather odd, who were crowding in on her, dressed in shabby dressing-gowns, and inciting her to cry. “Well, it’s not the right thing to do, is it?” she said vaguely; and indeed she and we were thinking of quite different things. To us, a girl whose father had just died and whose mother was suspected of murdering him had passed into the world of Shakespearean tragedy, and we wanted to help her to exercise the functions she would find it necessary to discharge now that she had suffered this abrupt translation from the ordinary. We had imagined that unless she were allowed to walk up and down a room, shedding tremendous tears and uttering cries which would purge her heart of its grief, there would be just such a hole in the universe as would have been left had Lady Macbeth been deprived of her sleep-walking scene. But Nancy saw the situation in quite another light. She did not know much, but among the things she had learned was the disgracefulness of crying. It had perhaps been brought home to her that she had made Aunt Lily’s hard lot harder than it need be by untimely bawling. So she looked at us with puzzled disapproval, and we drifted away.

But the hairwashing worked out not so badly. When we went down to the sitting room only Aunt Lily was there. Mamma had gone to see about supper, and Papa came in with three glasses and one of the bottles the margarine manufacturer had given him. He asked Aunt Lily if she would like some sherry, and then looked at the label, and in that soft, polite, withdrawn voice which meant he was speaking about something of no interest to him, said that he was afraid that it was port. But Aunt Lily said that that was all the better, for she understood that port was a temperance drink. Papa hesitated for a minute before replying, “Well, there is no advantage in regarding port as a temperance drink unless one is a teetotaller,” and filled the glass.

Papa had meant nothing more than he said, he was simply considering the manifestly false proposition that port was a temperance drink and wondering whether it served any useful purpose in spite of its falsity, or deserved to be pulled up and destroyed like any other intellectual weed. But Aunt Lily was unused to remarks which had not a directly personal application, and was greatly puzzled by his answer. She threw a sharp glance at him, which she might better have directed at us children, who were settling down before the fire, for my sisters and I (as we were to find out when we first mentioned the matter to one another, many years later) were all thinking of the time when we had seen her drinking sherry in the confectioner’s shop without any visible distaste for its alcoholic nature. We were recalling that memory without malice, indeed it was the foundation of our lasting affection for her, because it suggested to us that she was not really a grown-up, and, like a child, was always having to protect herself against criticism which asked more of her than she could give. We liked her too because she came to the conclusion that Papa was nice, she withdrew her eyes from him, said mildly, “Ah, I can see you are a great tease,” and comfortably took up her glass of port.