The Fountain Overflows (36 page)

The only occupation she had which she seemed to think legitimate was what she called her “work”: a linen nightdress case stamped on one side with a trivial design of trailing flowers, which she was outlining in the simplest possible embroidery stitch. It must have been important to her, or she would not have packed it among her clothes the night she left the Laurels. But it was a poor defence from fear and grief. She often tired of it, and Mamma would find her quite motionless in the armchair by the sitting-room fire, idle and unprotected, her blue-grey eyes, which were gentle and limpid but nothing more, fixed on the window and the winter world outside. My mother’s heart was wrung, but she could do very little to comfort the girl, who was as effectively separated from her by her lack of interests as she would have been by deafness, or ignorance of all but some exotic language.

“What did they do all day, sitting in that house?” I heard Mamma asking Papa one evening at this time, horror in her voice, as if she spoke of naked savages, pent in their darkened huts while filth and tropical disease and fear of jungle gods consumed them.

“God knows, God knows,” he answered. “This is the new barbarism.”

“What is so terrible,” my mother continued, “is that the girl is quite nice.”

That was indeed the terrible thing. Though Nancy came from a world where life was reduced to nothingness, she was herself not nothing. We had thought that of her at first, but we saw that we were wrong. That she should have had a great love for her aunt was natural enough; in the shadow of her sombre mother she had played with another child who sometimes turned into a protective grown-up. But very soon she came to love Mamma and follow her about the house, very soon she came to see that there was something grand and strange about Papa, and to look about her at his books with proper reverence when she went into his study, and in spite of herself she became fond of Kate. Though we had felt so awkward with her when she came, she liked us too. She could not have enough of Richard Quin, she was enraptured because he was such a pretty little boy, she thought it a shame we did not have a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit for him to wear, and awed because he knew so much that she did not. All this liking she expressed by actions which were of little moment, which were hardly actions at all, but which showed sweetness. They did not amount to very much; one might say she had performed the moral equivalent of laying a few lavender sachets among the sheets in the linen-cupboard. But it was enough to make her one of our family.

So we were sorry when Uncle Mat came to take her away. There was nothing good about that. He came on a Saturday morning, when we children were all in, indeed everybody was in, except Aunt Lily, who had gone up to see some shops in the West End and tell them not to carry out the orders they were fulfilling for her and her sister, if there still were time. Richard Quin and I watched him out of the dining-room window as he was getting out of the cab, and we could tell at once that it would not do. He was big and stout like Mr. Phillips and should have been jolly like him; and his sad expression looked all wrong on him, it was like a serious person wearing a paper hat. He stopped still and looked up at the house before he opened the gate, as if he thought someone inside was going to take advantage of him and he was organizing his forces so that he should give as good as he got. We opened the door, because we knew that Kate was in the middle of her weekend baking, and asked if he could see Papa, reading his name very slowly off a piece of paper he took out of his pocket, doubtfully, as if he suspected Papa was probably really called something quite different.

Mary was practising in the sitting room, but we took him in there, and Richard went and pulled her hair, that recognized social signal among the young, so that she stopped and realized who was there. I asked Uncle Mat to sit down, which he did exactly in the fashion of an actor in a play Kate had taken us to in the local theatre some time before. The actor had walked round in a circle on his way to his chair, staring at the tops of the walls as if looking at the pictures, but fixing his eyes on a level far above that at which pictures are normally hung, and continuing to do so while he slowly sat down. This is a universal convention among bad actors, and I find it interesting that Uncle Mat should have followed it when he wished to emphasize how strange he found it that he should have to visit our house. Then we fetched Papa out of his study, and ran upstairs and told Mamma, who lifted her hand as if she were a conductor collecting his orchestra, and said, “What must we do?” She answered herself by saying that while she was getting tea and biscuits for the visitor, we must find Nancy, and send her down to her uncle, and get on with her packing if we could do it without her.

I found Nancy in the bathroom with Cordelia, they were gossiping over a tedious chore we children always had to do, they were washing all the hairbrushes and clothes-brushes in the house. It was horrid to give her the message, it seemed so natural that she should be in the bathroom, we did not mind her seeing how old the brushes were, she no longer asked us why all our brushes were not silver-backed; as I came in she had been looking at a clothes-brush and wondering how much longer it would last just as if she were one of us by birth.

Struck still, she said, “Aunt Lily is out, I won’t be able to say good-bye to her,” and turned blue-white.

“But your Uncle Mat will ask her to come and see you in Nottingham,” I said.

She said, “He won’t,” not with the howling despair we used sometimes to purge our fears, but with a shrewd hopelessness that was far grimmer. She laid the worn clothes-brush back in the suds, and set about drying her hands, but gave up, shaking her head. If one is unhappy and one’s hands are really wet it is a bother to dry them. Cordelia took the towel away from her and did it for her. Nancy said, “I don’t want to leave here.”

Cordelia said, “Oh, Nancy, we don’t want you to go. We wish you could stay. But you must have noticed that we are very poor. If you stayed here you would find yourself missing a lot of things you had at home.”

“Yes, it’s really awfully like a picnic,” I said. “Such fun, but one has to go home.”

“This is not a picnic,” said Nancy. “It is something I want to last forever.”

“Live with your uncle,” said Mary, “and come back here quite often, we will always want you.”

“Come back in summer specially,” said Richard Quin, who was suddenly there. “We go to Kew, and we do have picnics then, and tea in shops, with ices. I will always take you about with me. You have lots of things my silly sisters have not got.”

“I don’t think I’ll be able to get back,” said Nancy.

“Oh, we will always know each other,” I said, and, of course, I was right.

Mamma called, and we dispersed, our family nodding confidently, Nancy as still as stone. Mary and I went downstairs to scrabble for Nancy’s shoes in the dark cupboard under the stairs, and presently Mary stopped and said, “Can you believe that Nancy is right and her Uncle Mat won’t ask even Aunt Lily to come and see her?”

“I think it’s probably true,” I said. “Nancy isn’t silly, you know.”

“But that is awful,” said Mary. “Nancy loves Aunt Lily. She is rude to her sometimes, but she loves her.”

“I know,” I said, and confessed, choking, “I am horrible, I am so sorry Nancy is going, but I did think too that when she was gone it would be easier about our practising.”

“I am horrible too, I thought of that,” said Mary, “but we are like that, and we cannot help it.” All the same we both settled down among the boots and shoes and wept, until we heard Nancy coming down the staircase above our heads, her feet lagging from step to step. Mary sobbed, “Well, anyway Papa and Mamma have had a little time to work on the beastly old man before he sees her,” and we got on with our hunt, drawing comfort from what now strikes me as one of the oddest paradoxes in our parents’ being. They were incapable of getting on terms with their fellow creatures on the plane where most of us find that easy. My mother could not dress herself to go out of her house tidily enough to avoid attracting hostile stares, she could not speak to strangers except with such naïveté that they thought her a simpleton, or with such subtlety that they thought her mad. She was never much more negotiable than William Blake. My father was unable to abandon to the slightest degree his addiction to unpunctuality, swarthy and muttering scorn, and insolvency, no matter how earnestly his admirers (and there were always new ones to replace those he alienated) begged it as a favour. Yet when people had passed a certain threshold in the lives of either Papa or Mamma, which they did easily enough by attaining a high pitch of desolation, both were able to exercise on behalf of these desolates a celestial form of cunning nearly irresistible. They were as tricky as a couple of winged foxes. They never had a conversation in the interests of those they were protecting which did not sensibly alter the situation in the way they wished, while those with whom they conversed remained quite unconscious of any propulsive force in their surroundings.

Uncle Mat, as we were to learn years later, set them a severe test. It had to be pointed out to him that when Nancy came down he had better stop saying over and over again, “Saw Harry only a month ago. As well as you and me. And a healthy man. Never been ill in his life. It’s no use telling me they won’t find something. Saw him only a month ago …” He had, so to speak, to be taught the facts of life in Nancy’s special case; to be induced to realize that the girl was the child not only of his brother’s wife, who was believed to have murdered his brother, but of his brother, who was believed to have been murdered; and that therefore she must be treated tenderly. I cannot think how Papa and Mamma succeeded in doing this, but certainly when we all gathered on the doorstep to wave Nancy good-bye Uncle Mat was bending on her a gaze that was more kindly than we could ever have hoped. I remember that gaze as proceeding from an eye embedded in crimson jelly like a bull’s; but that is perhaps because of Papa’s answer when we asked whether Uncle Mat had said anything about taking Aunt Lily up to Nottingham. He replied, “No. It would have been as foolish as to ask a bull to be kind to a horse.” He turned about and walked towards his study, but turned again to say, “Man is a political animal. But seeing what the animal is, what may politics become?” His door closed on us.

11

W
HEN
Aunt Lily came in at teatime she did not notice Mamma’s disturbed face, she was so eager to know if there was a letter for her. This was always the first thing she asked when she came down in the morning, and when she returned to the house after even the briefest absence. We had told her the times of the posts quite often, but she did not seem to take them in. This afternoon some letters had come for her but not, it appeared, the one she wanted. She was very tired, and this time she could not bear it that the letter had not come. Her face crumpled, and as soon as she heard that Nancy had been taken away she wept without shame, and it could be seen that she was lamenting both her griefs at once, the letter which had not come, the lost girl. But she was inordinately pleased because Nancy had left her the completed nightdress case, her “work,” as a present. Aunt Lily sat down and drank several cups of tea with the nightdress case spread out on the arm of her chair, breaking off every now and then to say, “It’s the thought that I appreciate, she’s such a thoughtful kiddy,” and, again, “All she had, and she left it as a keepsake for her poor old auntie,” and, yet again, “Well, like my own I always felt towards her, and like my own she feels towards me.” It did not escape us that there was a certain falsity, a greasy and posing self-consciousness, about these expressions. We had very often been sharply warned against sentimentality, and though we might have been able to define it only vaguely as the way one should not play Bach, we recognized it. But there was never any doubt that here the false merely overlaid the true. We had got accustomed to the idea that Aunt Lily had formed the vulgarest image of herself as having a heart of gold, and often wrote herself atrocious lines to be said in that character, and delivered them like the worst of actresses, yet had in fact a heart of gold. It is not unlikely that she owed this pollution to her pure self to her origins, for there had never been a population so doomed to excessive relish of themselves and their own emotions as the Southern English who dropped their h’s in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The music-hall comedians and the funny papers never left them alone for a moment. But we had pierced her affectations and knew she mourned Nancy as poignantly as our austere Mamma would mourn for us, were we taken from her.

Aunt Lily told us what luck she had had in the day’s business. They had been very nice at Jay’s, saying that the musquash cape had indeed been started but in the circumstances (she repeated that they used that word) they would put it in stock and say no more about it; and Peter Robinson’s had been as good about two garments of the sort Mrs. Phillips had worn when she appeared in her drawing room, two matinées. But there had been two tea-gowns (I do not know how these differed from matinées) ordered from a shop in Bond Street, which was unfortunately not disposed to be nice about them at all, although Queenie had spent a small fortune there. “‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m only telling you, you can go on with the order if you like, but you won’t get your money, and don’t say I didn’t tell you you’d have to whistle for it, for I’m telling you straight.’” Mamma made the appropriate sounds, though her eyes were bright as stars because she was not there, she had withdrawn to some musical paradise for refreshment. “Mind you,” said Aunt Lily confidently, taking Mamma’s starry gaze as proof of complete communion, “I should have known, you can always tell, there’s not a creature in the place that hasn’t a French name, this manageress person calls herself Madame Victoire, they’re all Stephanie and Yvettes and Lisettes, and not one of them’s ever been nearer France than the Elephant and Castle. You can’t tell me. And it’s all false. So really you oughtn’t to be surprised when they’re low and tricky. That,” she said, taking a sip from the glass of sherry Papa had poured out for her when he came to help Mamma tell her the sad news, “that is what my Ma used to say. And whatever you could say about my Ma, you couldn’t say she didn’t know her way about.” She shook her head and gazed into the distance, and then asked, very childishly, very pitifully, “What was it I was telling you my Ma used to say?” And none of us found it quite easy to answer.