Authors: Elizabeth Bowen
‘I—I am not sure,’ faltered Antonia.
His face wore its look of having been struck across, a drawn-out look of amazement, which not yet was either patience or anger. He searched around and slowly picked up a chair—Antonia recollected Lilia’s conviction that Fred had at one or another time killed a man. What he did was to carry the chair to the table and sit down upon it defiantly close to Jane. He drew towards him the glass of milk and tilted it, tongue out at a corner of his mouth as though the operation were precarious; then finally heavily shrugged his shoulders. He muttered something inaudible.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘What d’you mean, “what”?’ he in turn asked.
‘I only couldn’t hear what you said, Fred.’
‘I heard you all right. What am I supposed to say?’
‘There’s nothing
for
you to say. I should never have—’
‘I’m not so sure,’ he said, looking at her squarely. ‘Not so sure there’s nothing for me to say.’
‘Go ahead, then.’ Antonia, standing waiting, stuffed her fists down into her jacket pockets, till she heard one of the linings rip. Fred got the glass of milk back again into vertical on the table, then shook his head. ‘No. After all, what’s the use?’
She could not tell him.
Fred with a frown considered the girl between them. ‘I always have been sorry for you, Antonia. You and I are entitled to our own thoughts; but what I do say is, “Let sleeping dogs lie”.’
‘Sleeping Jane?’
‘She’s
got to be got to bed.’ He turned his wrist to look at his watch, oppressedly. ‘But you know as well as I do, I don’t mean her.’
Antonia turned away to pace round the kitchen. At this post-midnight hour the flagged floor began to be running with cockroaches; in her course she scrunched down hard upon three or four of them. Returning, she sat herself on the table’s edge, her feet swinging clear of the infestation, her torso twisted towards Fred whom she had found the mind to address more boldly. ‘Or there was another answer open to you— “A living dog’s better than a dead lion”.’ She took a cigarette, offered him the packet.
‘Why, yes.’ They both lit up from the candle—he leaned back, and afterwards blew out smoke. ‘Why not? True enough, after all.
I’m
alive—eh?’ Slowly boastful, thumped himself on the midriff. ‘So what of that?’ he asked the unhearing Jane.
‘What of that?’ marvelled Antonia. ‘She
is
your daughter—what more do you want?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said moodily. ‘The moon.’
Jane, with an unwaking sigh, repillowed her head on her forearms: her coinlike profile now turned her father’s way.
‘So did Guy,’ said Antonia.
‘What, sleep like that?’ asked Fred, watching the sleeper.
‘No, want the moon.’
‘He all but got it, I should have thought. Lilia was a most wonderfully lovely girl.’
‘How do
you
know, Fred?’
He said simply: ‘I loved her for what she once was.’
Antonia could only exclaim: ‘Oh, Fred!’
‘Well?’ he said, warily looking up.
‘I’m not sure it’s not you who’ll break my heart!’ She saw the grin go up one side of his face; he paused to knock ash off his cigarette. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘go on, call me a sucker—all right. I know you made me take her; I know you thought you’d been pretty smart. Nevertheless at the time there was more to it—for me, I mean. I mean to say, there it was—I was mad for her.’
‘Mad for what?’
‘What I saw in her.’
‘Tell me, what?’
Fred said: ‘What he once saw—I suppose. That
was
somewhere in her—where do you think Jane came from?’
‘Jane? A shower of gold.’
‘Never have granted Lilia anything, have you,’ he said resignedly more than tauntingly. ‘Not that
I’d
blame jealousy—eats away like a rat in one, doesn’t it? No, it’s no pleasure. But whatever came over you, falling in love with him?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Antonia. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Only look,’ Fred went on, ‘what you chucked away. You and he were something out of the common—looking back, I see even I saw that; though as you know I had my own fish to fry. In those days, I mean, when you, he and I used to be knocking around this place. Naturally, we were kids then; but all the same—. The way you two were, you could have run the world. That still was the way it was when I cleared out.’
‘So you did. And I mucked everything up?’
‘No use asking me.’
‘Fred,’ she said, ‘it was not as simple as that.’
‘No? Good.’
She said: ‘Guy was Guy.’
‘Can’t say I ever knew him.’
‘But you remember there
was
Guy?’
Something snapped in Fred. He shouted: ‘God, Antonia—how can I ever not?’
He then gave a violent obsessive yawn, after which he scrubbed his face with his hands. Jane woke: stupefied by the candle she attempted to ask them why it was not tomorrow.
In the small hours of that night, Lilia reached a decision. She came downstairs next morning pale, as always, but steadied, another woman. ‘I’m going in this morning to have my hair cut.’ (Going in meant going in to Clonmore.) ‘I’ve made up my mind to have an amount off—much of my trouble in this heat has been due to my head having no ventilation. And we need salad servers.’
‘Whatever for?’
‘The salad bowl. Also I might take Maud.’
‘Otherwise I would drive you. I might still.’
‘Thanks, Antonia, really. But I thought it might be practice for Jane.’
‘I’d love to try,’ admitted the elder daughter.
The ladies were in the rampart garden, watching Kathie cutting rhubarb for dinner—one by one they had followed each other out. Here was a smell of thyme and a look of peace; the languid mountains, seen through gaps in the wall, seemed to be fainting behind gauze. Lilia, holding a cup and saucer, wore cotton of an extinct blue, of a shade only less indolent than the sky’s—side-by-side on a stone bench, she and Antonia were under a twisted apple tree silvered over with lichen. Jane had found a bed inside a box-edged oval; and not far off stood the sundial, around which old poppies lolled, bees dozed on the yellow lupins. Below, the river had almost ceased to run; a nonchalant stillness hung over everywhere. It was thought to be about eleven o’clock.
The three were becalmed by each other. Somehow it had happened that they had fallen into one of those dilatory patterns of country house life, little known these days to distracted Montefort. The idea of going in to Clonmore deepened the pleasure of not yet stirring. Jane gave her longest yawn, at which Lilia, not without sombre pride, commented: ‘I don’t wonder!’ Leaning back, yawning also, fanning at her tea, she asked: ‘By the by, what did they have for dinner?’
Jane thought. ‘Well, we began with soup.’
‘Thick or clear? Clear, I should hope.’
‘It was semi-jelled. Then we had fish, I’m sure—yes, it was salmon.’
‘Well go on.’
Jane seemed to go off the air. She at last said: ‘Hash.’
‘Hash at that castle? No, it must have been salmi.—What did she wear?’
‘Miles of chiffon,’ said Jane with gusto.
‘What colour?’
‘Yellow. The other woman wore black, tight.’
‘Men, then, were in the majority?’
‘Yes.—We had pineapple water ice,’ the girl finished up with a rush. ‘The butler’s name’s Duffy, but he’s going.’
‘And the chauffeur’s?’
‘I don’t believe he told me.’
Antonia wanted to know: ‘And your friend, what’s
she
called?’
‘Vesta,’ said Jane, defiantly.
‘After a horse?’
‘Well, so long as you did enjoy yourself,’ Lilia summed up. ‘I could not but wonder.’ She sighed and slowly put down her cup.
‘I ought not to ask you this, but did there appear to be at present anyone in her life?’
‘Yes, Peregrine.’
‘What, a baronet?’
‘Just a man.’
I see.’
Lilia allowed her gaze to wander towards the mountains. Her thoughts ranged also, leaving Jane and Antonia nowhere, in their trance of indifference. Under the tree the moist-green moss of the bench, the runnels worn in the stone, the small fern damply rooted into a crack spoke of the garden’s lonely habituation to other weather—rain soughing through it and down the valley, or the drop-by-drop condensation of utter winter. But all now was clamped under a burning-glass. Today was a day for lizards—hazed colour shimmered, earth at a touch baked up through feet blunt in espadrilles. Kathie, having packed rhubarb into her apron, vanished—big leaves sprang back where she had stood.
‘I say, Antonia!’
‘Well, what?’
‘Funny it sounds without the river.’ Antonia harkened, but said nothing. Jane went on in an other-wordly tone:
‘Quite soon, what will the cattle do?’
‘What shall we have to be doing about the cattle?’
Lilia rolled her eyes their way. ‘
Maud
says the wireless says, “serious drought”.’
‘Has Fred said anything?’
‘Not that I know.—Maud needs another battery,’ Lilia was led to recall. She rose from the seat, shook out and smoothed her skirts. ‘If we are going we probably ought to go.’
‘Or why not,’ said Antonia suddenly, ‘go to London?’
‘Goodness gracious,’ the other said vaguely, vacantly, frowning at a tea-stain upon her bosom, ‘whatever are you talking about?’
‘You.—How would you like to go to London?’
Lilia
became appalled.
‘After
all these years?’
She
looked for a second time at Antonia.
‘Are
you feeling peculiar?’
‘No, only thinking.’
‘What started you doing that?’
‘You,’ reiterated Antonia.
‘After all these years,’ Lilia said again, perspiring at the thought of them, bringing up her hankie to dab her face.
‘Go back to
there
again like a lost dog?’
‘You need a change.’
‘I’m having my hair cut, aren’t I?’
‘Still,’ said Antonia fatefully, ‘think it over.’
‘So now you’re bent on getting me out of here? What do you want, then—Fred all to yourself?’
‘Oh, how can you be such a lunatic, Lilia, really!’
‘Jane
!’ the mother called out, as loudly and widely as though the girl were lost somewhere at the other end of the garden, ‘coming?’ Off she painfully sped towards the distant sanctuary of the house; almost running, so that her toppling white heels were helplessly and perpetually turning over—sleeping-beauty briars along the choked path swung at her, clawing her Clonmore stockings. Her legs were at odds with each other—Lilia was slightly knock-kneed, as she had gracefully (it had been found, adorably) been as a young girl.
Maud, sucking a clove ball, watched the street from the door of a Clonmore grocer, while inside her mother and sister shopped. The dark far end of Lonergan’s was a bar, at which persons were drinking porter, and the interior smelled of that, along with sultanas, salted cod, brown sugar, biscuits and green bacon. Jane, who for minutes had been side-tracked by a kitten in a crate of tomatoes, rejoined Lilia in time to see a couple of tins of Russian salad being added to what they had lately bought. She objected: ‘Oh, do we have to have that? Maud’s going to say it is like vomit.’
‘In that case,’ declared Lilia, in a strong position, ready to tender a pound note, ‘she may leave the table.’
‘But it reminds
me
of something worse—delicatessens.’
‘They say it’s not made in Russia.’
‘Delicatessens are in London.’
‘Then I can’t see why; when you have such a happy life.’
‘Not eating things out of paper bags.—I wonder what Antonia meant just now?’
‘Well, Jane, you heard her,’ Lilia pointed out.
This was the first occasion, since leaving Montefort, that the two of them had been out of Maud’s hearing. While they hunted for salad servers the child had trailed them; she compelled them to go with her to choose the battery; on the road in, she had kept a careful check on her sister’s management of the car. Lilia’s morning outing, shopping with both her girls, had, thanks to thoughtless, heartless words in the garden, all but gone to pieces before the start—in the Ford, for instance, she had sat mute while Jane first shaved a gatepost then charged a bridge, so much was it one to her whether she lived or died. Maud had gone with them to supervise the making of the appointment at the hairdresser’s for an hour later—the establishment of that as a fixed point did something to restore the day to stability. ‘You know we’ll be late for dinner,’ Maud had remarked, to which her mother only returned: ‘That should give the rhubarb time to cool off.’ Clove balls had been bought to allay Maud’s hunger.