The Fountain Overflows (7 page)

“Had they heard anything about Papa?” I said.

“How could I ask?” Mamma sighed, and Cordelia frowned and shushed me. I think none of us felt brave any more.

But then the cab took us into a different sort of district, where there were trees along the roads and in the gardens, many trees, which astonished us, because we had believed that London was nothing but houses. The trees were just touched with gold, and the gardens were full of Japanese anemones and Michaelmas daisies and chrysanthemums, growing out of wet earth dark as plum cake. This was not like Scotland. It was a rich, moist, easy place. But then the cab took us into another horrid street of little red brick houses with front doors arched with yellow plasterwork and lace curtains hanging at mean little sharp-angled bow windows. We all grumbled, we had hoped we were going to live where the trees were. But it was all right. We had always known it was going to be all right. The houses came to an end and the road widened, and there were trees and flowers again, and the cab slowed down before a white villa which instantly pleased us. It never ceased to please me. I cannot so adjust my mind that I cancel my intention of living there someday, though it was destroyed by a bomb in the Second World War.

I cannot remember what I saw that afternoon, because I saw it too often afterwards. But here the road came to an end, running to a wrought-iron gateway, flanked by pillars on which two gryphons supported coats-of-arms, and set in a high brick wall. The gates were blind, backed with tarred boards, and this might have been frightening, but reassured, it proclaimed that everybody had gone, the place was private. On the right was a neat terrace of a dozen houses. Just before the gateway, on our left, was our new house. A neat plaque on its first floor gave the figures “1810” and it had the graces of its time. It had a portico to its front door and a veranda screening its lower windows of copper weathered to a wistful, smoke-soft blue-green, and twisted into exotic shapes to satisfy the Chinese taste. Above, the bedroom windows had a little pediment carved above each of them which gave them a certain distinction, and above them the attic windows were disguised by a balustrade adorned at each end with sentimental urns. But it had been newly painted, so my Mamma muttered, “That paint, what does it mean, who can have paid for that? Will that be the first bill?” And she flung out a tragic finger at a wide gate beside the house, ghost-coloured for lack of paint, and the red-purple tiles of the roofs that showed above it, the turret with a broken weathervane and a clock that was telling a shocking lie about the time. “What, are we to keep a carriage?” she said ironically. “Oh, this is far too big. What shall we do? What shall we do?”

“It will be all right,” said Mary.

“Of course it will be all right,” I said. “Let’s go in.”

We three little girls ran along the paced path, and Mamma slowly followed us with Richard Quin. “How good the boy is,” she said heavily, and put the key into the lock. She turned it and stepped inside and at once became rigid, her mouth falling open as if she were a fish, not to the advantage of her appearance. One of the doors opening into the little hall was ajar, and from the room beyond there came a scraping noise. She thought, and so did we, that a burglar had got into the house. Only for a moment did she hesitate, then she ran into the room, and Cordelia and Mary and I followed. My father was standing beside the chimney-piece, scraping with a penknife at the wallpaper where it joined the marble. For a second he persisted in this occupation, then he put down the penknife, opened his arms to my mother, and kissed her on both cheeks, and we stood in a half-moon round them, Richard Quin crawling about our feet. Mamma glowed, we all felt safe, rescued from the abyss, because we had our dear Papa with us again.

“But, Piers, how did you get in without the key? They said there was only one,” said Mamma. “This is the last thing I thought of!”

“I know a dozen ways into the house,” said Papa in the mocking voice that people hated so much. “This time I came in by the coach-house roof.”

“You know this house? It is—it can’t be the house where you used to stay?”

“Yes,” said Papa. “It is indeed the very same house where I used to stay with Grand-Aunt Willoughby.” He stood back from the hearth, closed his knife, and slipped it back into his pocket. “Yes, it’s there,” he told us in parentheses. “There used to be a flat painted panel over this chimney-piece, and they’ve covered it over, I can’t think why. It was really good. We’ll get it clear later.” Fingering the closed knife in his pocket and giving one of his dark, oblique looks round the room, he went on, “Yes, this is Caroline Lodge, only nobody calls it that now. It was built for Grand-Aunt Willoughby by her rich son-in-law who lived in that big house behind the gates. It is a Theological College now. And this house belongs to my cousin Ralph. He has let me have it.”

“Oh, you and Ralph are friends again?” cried my mother.

“No, not noticeably,” said Papa. “But he has let me have it.”

“How good of him,” Mamma said, making the best of that. “But is it not very dear?”

“No, the place is falling to pieces, and nobody wants to live here now it is in the middle of a slum,” said Papa contemptuously. “But we are paying him something.”

“We must never be a day late with the rent,” said Mamma enthusiastically. My father made no response. “Oh,” she cried, looking about her, “it is pleasant to be here, and find you here, and now, children, let us go round the house and see where we are going to be so happy. Is there a nice room for your study?”

There was indeed. The little square room at the back of the house was Papa’s study, and the bigger room beside it was to be our sitting room. The removal men had set down most of the furniture there, but the grace of the room was still apparent. Here Mamma flung open the french windows, and we all stood by her on the top step of the broad iron stairs leading down into the garden, which was a square of lawn edged with flower-beds and ending in a grove of chestnuts, then brightened by their first gold and scarlet leaves. I remember those wild tints, for like my sisters I was looking at the scene with an exalted vision. We were experts in disillusion, we had learned to be cynical about fresh starts even before we had ourselves made our first start, but this house gave us hope. Indeed, it gave us back our childhood. Papa swung me up on his shoulder as he stood behind us, and I was proud, I was wrapped in delight, as if I knew no ill of him. It was not a warming pleasure, but it was glorious, it was like being cradled by the northern lights and swung across the skies. Mamma watched us in ecstasy, when our family life was as it is supposed to be on earth she was as if lifted to heaven.

In the room behind us Cordelia said, “Mamma, the removal men have broken a chair.”

Mamma said absently, “If they have left us enough to sit on, do not worry, this stuff is all rubbish.”

A chill fell. It was as if I had grown heavy in my father’s arms. Of course I had had to tell Cordelia and Mary what had happened to Aunt Clara’s furniture. But we all loved Papa so much that somehow Mamma’s saying that seemed worse than Papa’s selling the furniture, and Mamma felt that too. She turned to him with a desperate movement and cried in tearful gaiety, “Take us round the garden. Did you play here with the other Richard Quin?”

Papa shifted me to his other shoulder and, shambling a little as if he were old, led us out into the garden. He pointed to some straggling thickets on the wall and told us they were peach trees. Their branches hung down like trailing curtains, Cordelia ran and pushed them back and underneath were the neat trunks given them by early care. My mother exclaimed in distress at the neglect which they had suffered since and expressed the fear that they would bear no fruit for us. My father did not seem concerned. He told us how large and juicy the peaches had been, and how he and his brother had always had one each with cream and sugar for dessert with their supper. “We called our ponies Cream and Sugar,” he said. “They were not really our ponies, the old man in the big house lent them to us when we were staying here for our holidays. But we stabled them here.”

“In those very stables?” said Mamma.

“In those very stables,” said Papa. He put back his head and looked through his narrowed eyes at the roofs we could see over the wall, the ruined roofs. “‘Change and decay in all around I see.’” He gave a sneering laugh, set me down on the ground, and strolled towards a door in the wall, and sneered again because the rusty latch broke in his hand. Beyond was a courtyard feathered green underfoot with the camomile which grew thick between the cobblestones, buildings round it which stared with the blank eyes of glass-less windows. My father pushed back a door which hung squint on its hinges, and sauntered into a stable where more motes danced in the sunlight than had danced in that room in Edinburgh which had been so empty, because Aunt Clara’s furniture had gone out of it. The floor was strewn with pale wisps of litter, and where the walls met there were hundreds of brackets made by the dark velvet of old cobwebs. There were four stalls, and a door on which my father laid his hand and said, “This was a loose-box. Grand-Aunt Willoughby had a son called George, he was a naval officer, his horse Sultan was stabled in here, it was a black gelding.” He wheeled about, looking very grave, and called urgently, “Cordelia. Mary. Rose. Do you all understand that you must never go into a loose-box? You can do nothing more dangerous. The horse can get between you and the door in a second, and if he savages you, you are done. You must always remember that. Always.”

Every now and then he used to give us counsels of this sort, which might have been relevant to his childhood, but were not to ours, and I think, from my recollections of his bearing at such moments, that he then felt pride because for once he was properly discharging his duties as a father.

Leaving the dangerous territory, be said to Mamma in an undertone, “By the way, I am afraid that Manchester business came to nothing.”

Softly she answered, “I am sorry for your sake, but what does it matter? You have a good position here.”

Circling round the stalls, he said, “Pompey and Caesar were here. They were the carriage pair. They were fat old dapple-greys and groomed like satin, they always reminded us of one of our mother’s ball-gowns. This is where Cream and Sugar were. I rode Cream, Richard Quin rode Sugar, so did my brother Barry when he was here, but he hardly ever came. He had left Harrow by then and gone to the India Office. It was usually Richard Quin and I that were here by ourselves, and that was the way I liked it, we always ran well together in double harness. We had some wonderful times here. Those were the days when we had that French tutor I have told you about, my dear. . . .”

He was gone from us again, but not, as so often happened, on a dangerous journey, from which he would come back not simply empty-handed, but bearing a loss that was positive. This time he had gone back to his childhood. We listened, our mouths open as if we were singing a hymn in his praise. Mamma was watching him as people watch fireworks. About us another autumn morning was hazy, a little later in another year. My father and his brother had not been able to go back to Harrow at the beginning of term because they had had measles and were being allowed some convalescent weeks. They had ridden a lot with their French tutor, who had to ride Sultan. This was not the hardship that might be imagined, when it was said that a French tutor had to take the mount that belonged to the son of an English household. For this French tutor was a man of mark, member of a gentlemanly Belgian family, who had become a geographer and held a lectureship in Paris when he was expelled from France as an atheist and an anarchist by Louis Napoleon after the
coup d’état
of 1851. My grandmother met him some years later, when she was travelling to forget the pain of her widowhood, and engaged him as tutor to her orphaned sons in the mistaken belief that he had been exiled from France as a Protestant rebel against Catholicism. He had discovered her error shortly after he arrived at her home in County Kerry, and had handled the situation sensitively and honourably, for he gave no hint of his real beliefs while he was under her roof, and taught her boys the elements of the classics and the French language and scientific method, without giving his instruction any peculiar character except a certain mid-nineteenth-century humanitarianism. My father, though very cruel, was very kind.

All this I learned later. That morning Papa simply explained that the tutor knew how to ride, though he was a scholar and not a passionate horseman, and that George Willoughby, like many another naval officer, had his reasons for liking a quiet mount, and Sultan got very little exercise when his master was at sea and had grown thoroughly lazy. He waddled along, and the tutor had no trouble except when his charges got out of sight, for Cream and Sugar were very fast, they were fine spirited creatures and were well exercised during the boys’ term time when they went back to their owners’ stables. That day the tutor had angered the two boys by making them deal more scrupulously with their daily ten lines of Virgil than they thought fair on their holidays, so they lost him in the first few minutes of their ride, where there was a bridge and then a sharp turn and a canter up a hill. Not only were Cream and Sugar neat on their feet as ballet-dancers, they understood every word you said to them. So the two boys were able to dismount and get the two ponies to leave the road and scramble up a steep wooded bank, and keep dead quiet, at a word’s command, when the tutor jogged along the lane beneath, calling his charges’ names.

I have seen miniatures of my father and his brother at that age; they were very lovely with their olive skins, and their light eyes fiery under long lashes, their dark hair streaked with gold, and their air of proud incompatibility with any sort of defeat. Human relations are essentially imperfect. Supposing that Papa had been the best of fathers, I would still have been hungry. Because I was his daughter I could not have known all of him, there was that continent in which I could not travel, the waste of time before I was born and he already existed. I could not have been a child with him, I could not have been with him and his brother when they knelt on the dry red beech leaves, with their laughing faces pressed against the pulsing silken necks of their crouched and panting ponies, the tree trunks rising sharp silver above them to the blue October haze.