Authors: Elizabeth Bowen
‘It used to. Better if it still did.’
Antonia, as so often, spoke into nothing—for Jane, not awaiting the answer to her idle question, had got up and gone to the looking-glass. There she stood, back turned to the bed, searching impersonally for the picture Antonia had failed to care to find—or for the meaning of the picture, without which there could be no picture at all. ‘What egotists the dead seem to be,’ she said. ‘This summery lovely muslin not to be worn again, because
she
could not? Why not imagine me?’ She stepped back on to a flounce of the hem, which tore. ‘Who’d she have been?’ she wondered, roping the fullness round her to see the damage.
‘One of your ancestors?’
‘One of yours too, if so.’
‘Why, yes. Only I have the bar sinister.’
‘By the way, you forgot your father this morning.’
‘No!’
‘So they say,’ said Antonia, still more amiably.
Fred’s child’s first blank then utterly stricken look, in reflection, was to be watched by the woman left behind on the bed; until Jane, suspecting this might be so, hurriedly bent over the dressing-table, to make a play of absorption in what was on it—disentangling pearls, puffing ash or powder off that or this. But the play broke down; nor could her burning forehead, towards the glass, be hidden by the forward fall of her hair. Failing to cover what she felt, she all the more exposed him to mocking pity—her hand shook, she knocked over a plastic bottle, caught a sleeve on the knob of an open drawer. She steadied herself.
‘But he’s busy, out at the hay.’
‘Yes, by now, I daresay. But you kept him dangling about.’
The bluebottle bumbled; Antonia lay; Jane stood. Antonia said suddenly, to the ceiling: ‘I’m not heartless, you know; only bad-hearted.’ She reached for her sunglasses, put them on and sat up. ‘Must have more air. Yes, you’ll have to open the curtains.’ That relieved Jane—rings jangled back after each other along the rod; Antonia winced at the violence with which the gloom tore. Morning blazed fully into the littered room; pungent quivering heat from the roots of grass welled in over the sills of the open
windows; the obelisk and the distance swam into view. Jane, after a look outdoors, was able to say tranquilly: ‘I forgot.’
‘It was not important to you.’
The girl made a sort of denying movement, as though to say, no,
that
had really not been the case. Antonia poked at her packet of Gold Flake—yes, one left—then asked, with a sinister carelessness: ‘Who was there, last night?’
‘At the dancing? Nobody you didn’t see at the Fête.’
‘Oh.’
‘Why?’
Antonia flung the sheet back. ‘I shall get up.’
‘I’ll go away, then?’ the girl too readily said.
‘If you call it going: you’re all the time somewhere else. What’s the matter with you? Why are you in this trance?’
‘Am I?’ Jane asked, with a touch of awe at herself.
‘What have you being doing?’
‘Reading a letter, only.’ Jane hesitated, put up a hand and glanced at it, as though wondering whether it should or should not have sealed her mouth. But she
was
glad to have spoken. ‘One of some letters,’ she said, beginning to smile.
‘What, then the post’s come? What have they done with mine?’
‘Not the post. No, these came out of a trunk.’ Before more could follow, Jane with a few long steps had gone out, shutting the door behind her.
Jane, the evening before, had come home alone. The Fête when darkness began to fall reached its conclusion in outdoor dancing, on the lawn of the castle which had been the scene all day—she like the other girls had stayed on; though not, like Kathie, up to the end. She left on an impulse. Music followed her over the empty country as she bicycled home through the lanes between there and Montefort; dust wraithlike rose from under her wheels. Honeysuckle sweetened the deepening hedges, from beyond which breathed distances cool with hay. The land had not yet composed itself quite to sleep, for light was not gone and might never go from the sky. The air through which she was swiftly
passing was mauve, and tense with suspended dew: her own beautiful restlessness was everywhere.
From somewhere out behind Montefort, she at one time imagined she heard a call—she unchained the gates and rode up the avenue. The house, nothing as she approached it but a black outline, was deserted—doors and windows open, but not a lamp lit. Neither glad nor sorry but mystified, and still with that inexplicable feeling of being summoned, she looked into all the rooms—remains of supper were on a table: having come in, had the others gone out again? She scarcely wondered. For her the house was great with something: she
had
been sent for, and in haste. Why? Only attics now remained to be searched; and how could they (she reflected, for she was practical) show anything? She remembered at least a hat, not unlike Lady Latterly’s of this afternoon, left for years up there to hang on a broken harp. She lighted a candle and went to look.
Of the stuffed, stuffy attics baking under the roof, only one was inhabited—by Kathie. They were loftlike, with here a pane let into the slates, there a floor-low window baulked by the front parapet. The flame of Jane’s candle consumed age in the air; toppling, the wreckage left by the past oppressed her—so much had been stacked up and left to rot; everything was derelict, done for, done with. Out of the dark projected cobwebby antlers or the broken splendid legs of a chair: shocking was it to her that there should be so much ignominy, perhaps infamy. She took the hat quickly, knocking a twang from the harp, and turned to go—she half thought a bat stirred in the rafters. But no, no sound, nothing more at all of that crepitation of opening leathery wings—there was a stir, but within herself. Her halted shadow lay on a trunk. She planted the candle on the floor, knelt down and set about shifting albums, stacks of them, from the top. She unbuckled straps, put the lid back and began to draw out the inexhaustible muslin of the dress—out of it, having been wedged in somewhere, tumbled the packet of letters. They fell at her feet, having found her rather than she them.
The family knew no more than that Jane had come back and gone to bed—they supposed, tired. The homecoming rattle of her bicycle along the ruts of the avenue had been heard by Fred and Antonia, out strolling: they had glanced at one another and turned back, but nowhere was there a sign of her indoors. Lilia had, all the time, been lying silently in the dark on a sofa under a window when Jane passed through the drawing-room—in at one door, out again at the other. They all had been to the Fête, and a backwash from it still agitated their tempers and nerves—in the house itself residual pleasure-seeking ghosts had been set astir. The Hunt Fête, which drew the entire country, now was the sole festivity of the lonely year, for Montefort the annual outing—which, more and more each summer, required nerve. One does not go into the world and come home the same: isolation has altered its nature when one returns. Rare were sallies from Montefort—Fred grudged the time; Lilia, shy and huffy, felt unequal these days even to braving church (Maud had become the solitary, seldom-failing occupier of the family pew). As to the Fête, however, there remained an imperative: this challenging social gathering, which one paid money to enter, was a thing apart. The Danbys ‘appeared’ at it, as unfailingly as they could be relied upon to be nowhere else.
There
they were, still themselves, still alive; forgotten since this time last year they had gone on existing, inside those gates knotted shut with a chain. Fred, wearing a cap, made one of the crowd watching the jumping; while his wife, fashionably got up, stood apart, at bay, high heels ground into the lawn. The lost lady suffered under wandering stares.
This time, the Montefort party had gained by including Jane and Antonia. Jane, legging it round the place swinging a tray and in a small muslin apron, was among the busiest helpers at the tea tent; and Antonia had opened in good form—hatless, jewelled, flashing her black glasses, spotting friends, capping sentiments, barking greetings. Her age, able to be calculated to a day by the many present who still knew her, if anything added to her showing: each year made more of her, not less. The gorgeousness of her parrot-green satin shirt, stuffed into a skirt of inconspicuous flannel, somehow drew the eye from, by defying, her stumpy build: she was of high voltage, as is the case more often with short men than little women—and indeed little she was not: her top half suggested a greater stature, having breadth, poise, carriage, imposing style. Stains on her long fine fingers, actually nicotine, were with awe attributed to her profession—as an artist photographer she had made a name, young; she still had the name, and was understood still to be making money. So widely had she been heard of, and for so long, that she arrived at having been heard of even here: today she was playing her part of fame. Wherever she turned, she by turning flattered: the crowd pleased her because she was pleasing it.
The Fête, dazzling concourse of marquees ringed round a lawn, had as backdrop the stucco face of the castle, a terrace along which urns blazed with geraniums, a cascade of steps upon which the new English chatelaine from time to time interestingly appeared. (It had been during one of these sorties of Lady Latterly’s that she had perceived Jane, had her led up, chatted, noted her name and even address in case of possible future need, and in short taken a fancy to the girl.) The kaleidoscopic shimmer over the Fête spun over and into the shadow of glossy beeches, the cool of which encaved ice cream stalls; while from the mound overspread by a nightlike cedar a handbell clanged or a megaphone bawled in vain. Pungent sweat and heatedly trodden grass, fumes of tea and porter, thrum of hoofs from the paddock, the strikings-up and dyings-down of the band all fused into an extreme for Antonia, whose own senses, boastful, stood up to it.—But then she tripped over a tent peg, jarred the lens in her brain: in the instant revulsion set in, as it now did always. Like a bullet-hit pane, the whole scene shivered, splintered outward in horror from that small black vacuum in its core. She could not wait to get out—where was Fred? Where was the Ford?
It had come to be six o’clock; midges gauzed the air. Megaphones gave out the raffle results: Maud it was who had won the bottle of whisky and who soon came past bearing her prize. Antonia, having given the child a pound (which all things considered she thought enough) snatched the bottle and packed Maud off to find Fred. He arrived, stared, resignedly took Antonia by the elbow and got her through the crowd to the parked car. ‘Sick?’ was all he asked, on the drive home. ‘Only of everything,’ she replied coldly. Once at Montefort, she uncorked the whisky, he got back into working clothes and was seen no more.
Left behind, Lilia resorted to spending money. The dishevelled stalls by now offered not much choice, but what did remain was being knocked down. She acquired a handpainted crock of bath salts, some particles of coconut fudge, a nosegay of woollen flowers to pin on and a Lalique-like amber glass salad bowl. Having given up hoping to know where Jane was, she then set off to track down Maud, to ask
her
how they ever were to get home. But the child, found at the clock golf, merely reiterated loudly: ‘Cousin Antonia owes me much more money!’
‘Or does your father intend us to stay all night?’
‘I don’t know.—What have you got in the bag?’
‘Nothing for you.’
‘Oh, sweets.’
‘Oh, don’t argue, Maud! And do come: it’s time we were going.’
Maud, for some reason, respected this academic statement: she gave a finishing lick to her ice cream cone, stacked up her punnets of oozing strawberries and preceded her mother to the car park, where they stood about in the dust watching others go. ‘If you ever knew anyone,’ Maud remarked, ‘we’d have got offered a ride home.’ Lilia expected to faint, so it came at last to their placing themselves under compliment to a stranger, who detoured to drop them at the Montefort gates. ‘No idea there was anyone living here,’ he confessed, with a glance of renewed amazement at Lilia’s hat. Maud undid the chain, Lilia gave a reproving bow: mother and child set off down the extinct avenue. And there, of course, in front of the house was Fred in the act of starting the Ford to fetch them! Lilia swept indoors past him without a word, hid the fudge in the hall clock and went on into the drawing-room.
Inside the drawing-room, facing the door, a mirror embosked in gilt ferns filled up an alcove. Lilia therefore advanced to meet a figure fit for the Royal Garden Party—white cart-wheel hat, gloves to the elbow, crepe floral gown. She and her image confronted each other and the day’s disillusionment, of which the marvel was that it should recur—summer after summer, the same story. Who else was to know what had been hoped for, always, in spite of all? Disappointment for ever is fresh and young—she could no longer sustain it; she turned away and, vanishing from her own eyes, starting frowning and fretting over a tea-stain on a fingertip of one of her white silk gloves. Damage: that was what it all came down to!
Air had died in here, the windows having been bolted before they started for the Fête; nor indeed was the drawing-room often resorted to. Lilia had failed with it—cretonne tacked to the window-seats, one or two ruched taffeta cushions and a magazine-rack only, today, survived from her few attempts to bring the room into line with her ideas. As against that, she had wreaked a negative vengeance on what she found here, on anything which might have been here before. Any charm of a chattery circle had been broken by condemnatory pushing apart and back of armchairs, ‘occasional’ chairs and sofas; exposed to fade still more, an expanse of carpet remained for Kathie to sweep when she had time; and the effect, according to mood, was that either there had lately been a catastrophe or that there was about to be a performance. Ornaments—ruby Bohemian goblets, Dresden cupids, cameos, shells, pagodas, fruit-painted china, filigree silver-ware—detected in a conspiracy to collect dust, had been banished to cabinets behind whose misted glaze they each year more dolefully disappeared. Water-colours, whose justification was that they covered stains on the walls, here or there dotted the damask paper; and pelmets, again with gilded ferns, topped off the windows’ undraped stare. Uneasily light by day, at night slow to darken, the room seemed to be waiting, perhaps for ever, for its dismantlement to be complete. Shreds of butterflies clung to the cornice, out of reach of the mop.