Authors: Elizabeth Bowen
‘This tree?’ Jane guiltily dropped her hand.
‘Just wondered what
you
were making up,’ explained the child, with the air of a connoisseur.
‘Nothing.’
Maud raised her eyebrows, causing Jane to go on: ‘I don’t spy on you; why should you spy on me?’
‘Why pick on
my
place, then, to be so peculiar in, when there are miles of places where no one else is? I didn’t bother to watch you, I simply saw you. But you performed as though you meant to be watched. However.’
‘“However” is Mother’s word.’
Maud merely said, ‘What else am I not to tell?’
‘Do
go
and have your disgusting tea.’
Maud made her sedate way up to the house by the track used by the water-cart; not for her were dog-paths down one of which Jane had made her ecstatic descent. Instinct had not lied: tea was on the table. The early wasp was already probing at last year’s
jam, fatalistically watched by Lilia, who sat there over her lonely cup. ‘No cake?’ Maud asked, looking round as she sat down.
Her mother replied: ‘Cousin Antonia’s gone to the sea.’
Maud confined herself to eating and drinking.
‘Anyone else would have taken a child like you; as it is, she’s even forgotten Jane.—Where’s Jane?’
‘She doesn’t want any tea.’
‘I hardly wonder,’ said Lilia, ‘all things considered.’
‘Is
it five o’clock?’
‘How am I to know?’
The designing glance darted by Maud at the radio in the corner caused Lilia with passion to declare: ‘And I won’t have you running after Big Ben!’ Maud shrugged her shoulders inside her narrow frock; her mother put down her cup, adding: ‘I’m beginning to think I’m ill with all the monomania in this house.’
She spoke as one in search of a fellow-being; her conviction that she was gripped by something mortal made it frightening to be left alone with a child. Her inner face, by now gaunt with solitude, looked out not without nobility through the big white mask padded with flesh. Sorrow was there in front of her like an apparition: she saw now, with belated dread, what life had proved to be, what it had made of her. Could there have been an otherwise, an alternative? Who was to tell her, who was to know? She did not pity herself, for there is an austere point at which even self-pity halts, forbidden. Loss had been utter: not till today had she wholly taken account. Guy was dead, and only today at dinner had she sorrowed for him.
What had now happened must either kill her or, still worse, force her to live: automatically she pressed her hand under her breast on the heart side, testing her lungs at the same time with an uncertain breath. ‘Who here,’ she went on to ask, ‘ever thinks of others? I daresay I myself could have been a more loving mother to you and Jane, but as things are, neither of you require me. I should hardly call us a family. I admit your father works hard to keep us, but sometimes I imagine he wonders why.’
Maud said: ‘I suppose, because we were born.’
‘You know, Maud, I had little to say to that. You never would have been here had things turned out differently; and as it is your father had small reward.’
‘Halving everything up with Cousin Antonia?’ Maud said,
taking a spoon to the melting butter.
‘I don’t consider Jane even halved. Seldom does she permit him to speak to Jane; that is, when the girl
is
allowed home. Now we see what comes of it—making a game of everything!’
‘Cousin Antonia loses her temper at games.’
‘You’re too old for your age, Maud.’
‘Well, look at today.’
‘Leave today alone.’
‘Banging off down the avenue in our motor—’
‘I said, that’s enough!’
The child, turning to stare, said: ‘Are you missing Cousin Antonia?’
That was it: Maud had hit the nail on the head. Who, today,
but
Antonia was the fellow-being? Everything had the two women gone through together; not least, the being against each other. At dinner that outrage had struck at them both, and, while they tried to turn it against each other, had made them one—thirty years, yes, and more, had led up to this. Animosity itself had become a bond, whose deep-down tightening suddenly made itself felt today. Antonia’s half of the past fitted in to Lilia’s: looking back, one saw through both lives the progress of the unfinished story. Thrown together, they had adhered: virtually, nothing more than this had happened to them since their two girlhoods. Thanklessly, intimacy had insisted on being theirs: how, indeed, could either have lived without it? Through bickerings, jibings, needlings, recriminations, sulks, traps set, points scored, ignominies inflicted, they had remained in communication; their warfare met their unwilling need for contact with, awareness of one another. Almost no experience, other than Guy and their own dissonance, could they be said to have had in common; and yet it was what they
had
had in common which riveted them. For worse or better, they were in each other’s hands. Such a relationship is lifelong.
Today, at this very table, had they not both trembled, both feeling the same hand once more upon the door?
Conquering, violating Jane—born of Lilia cold, by Antonia rendered colder—what had she done or been caused to do? Ready, empty, apt—the inheritor; foreign in her beauty with the foreignness of this supplanting new time. Jane, so removed by school education, taking out her trial lesson in love! Not so much the unlikeness of Jane to herself now, but the non-correspondence between Jane’s youth and her own had drained any hope of kinship from Lilia’s motherhood. This idol of Fred’s, this golden changeling was, in so far as she belonged to anybody, Antonia’s—but see, today, how even Antonia had been out-monstered.
‘Wherever
is
Jane? Whatever is she up to?’ Lilia restlessly asked Maud.
The child returned: ‘How old would be Cousin Guy?’
‘When?’
‘Now. Getting on, like you all?’
‘I never speak of him as you know, Maud.’
The child sat rather queerly biting her thumb, till Lilia uneasily said: ‘Well, what?’
‘I wonder how long anyone lasts.’
At the instant, almost without a sound, Lady Latterly’s chauffeur-driven Daimler slid into view and drew up outside the windows. The man sat in profile for long enough to recover from what seemed to be a surprise, then respectfully got out: he placed his gauntlet upon the gate of the little fence. Lilia, appalled, slowly put her hands to her hair; Maud dived under the table, emerged on all fours, in this manner travelled the carpet and, at eye-level with the window-sill, made a swift reconnaissance. A corgi out for the drive and sumptuous daylight, only, occupied the back of the car; the chauffeur, now at the front door, was still failing to find either bell or knocker.
‘Come with a note,’ Maud said. ‘It could have come on a bicycle.’ She was off in a flash, however, to the front door, coming back again a degree more slowly to announce to Lilia: ‘It’s addressed to Jane.’
‘It’s for her, then. Put it down on the table.’
‘They want an answer.’
‘I can’t help that, when she’s out.’
‘He says her ladyship says, to wait.’
The idea of that agitated Lilia beyond proportion: the truth was she had a neurosis about anyone standing outside a door—it linked with the sense she’d had since she came to Montefort of being besieged, under observation or in some way even under a threat. Apprehension was seldom at rest in her, nor indeed were there enough comers to Montefort to wear down fear by familiarity—no calls to the telephone for there was not a telephone, no vans delivering, seldom a passer-by, no neighbours to speak of; even the postman, during Antonia’s absences, for days together gave them a wide berth. When in winter, sometimes, the hunt ran over the land and Maud and Kathie ran whooping out, she trembling locked herself into her bedroom. Was it the place itself, her mistrust of Ireland or the uncanny attentiveness of the country which kept her nerves ever upon the stretch? What was unforeseen boded something abnormal. So, as some dread the telegraph boy, she dreaded any comer at all—men wanting Fred, tinkers with their sky-empty blue eyes annihilating their patter of talk, beggar-women sephulchral in black shawls, with the saints behind them. Worst were those who stood at the door mute, neither speaking nor going away.
But today everything must be faced—Lilia, tightening round the mouth, pushed past Maud to take a look herself. Obliquely, round the bobbled edge of the curtain, she sized up the commissar-like figure of the chauffeur.
‘Giving us orders,’ she said to Maud. ‘I suppose you’re expected to find Jane?’
‘I could, if I liked.’
‘Well, you better had. We can’t have
him
there.’
The chauffeur, overhearing or not, reclasped Martian gauntlets behind his back: he was staring in the other direction faceless. That uniform of his was disaster-dark among the feckless front garden roses. Maud, about to make off into the wilds with the note, squinted once more at the written-on blue envelope, remarking: ‘This time a letter is really
to
her.’ Lilia, rather than hear more, dived her top part out of the open window: she coughed till the chauffeur turned gravely round. ‘Go back and sit in the car,’ she over-loudly said to him, ‘why don’t you?’
He sprang to the peak of his cap, with a ‘Thank you, madam,’ and she, surprised at his having a face at all, on the instant thought: ‘What waste of a man!’ Weakly elated after the broken nightmare, she tottered back to her place at the tea table to pour herself out yet another cup, to stare fixedly while the man obeyed her: the fence gate twanged, the car door shut. He was again in profile, within watch by her eye should she care to watch. Though with time the Daimler seemed to begin to subside from view, as though there were quicksands in front of Montefort.
It took the whole of Maud’s cunning to find Jane. Revulsion had driven the elder sister out from the valley, shame drove her far from the river or very thought of it. Humiliation caused her to pluck Guy’s letter like an asp from her breast: blindly she scrambled uphill with it to entomb it under the flat stone under the stifling elder. There its fellows were. The naivety, as she saw it for now, of the hiding-place made a farce of the letters, the love, herself. Who cared if anyone
were
to find them? Having stamped the stone down, she turned away, that caricatured hour beside the river remorselessly ever before her eyes. Not having been seen by Maud, but what Maud
saw:
that was what so appalled her! She was made a fool of. And shown up: yes, as the thing was, without norm or nature—she, who having humanity waiting round her everywhere in this pathetic house, would have none of it: it was not good enough for her. Oh, how the vice of uncaringness had been hers; she had neither heart nor wish for a living creature—smiling, she humoured, temporized, so got by. Scalded by unredeeming tears, she fought through the undergrowth round the elder, twigs scornfully whipping at her face. What
was
this that grew like a danger in her? What had she been tempted up to the very brink of? Was she lost for ever? Was there a path back?
To and fro she wandered, body and mind: outraged. Thrusting feelings rose to a panic in her—in extremity she was her mother’s daughter, baffled, unable to word thoughts. Her sunny outward ‘finish’, work of Antonia, had been but a certain giving of grace—behind all lay a misgiving, an ineptitude. Now she tried to think, as a form of moral endeavour, but had to perceive that she never could, or that, if she desired to be herself, never must. Everybody (this was enough to realize) was fathomlessly angry with her, and no wonder. What she felt was, she had better get back to London—at once, tomorrow if not today. She pictured streets, and herself anonymous. Why not bolt now, before Antonia could be there to stop her? All but decisively turning towards Montefort, where the one or two things she needed were, she recollected she had no money: hesitating halfway out of the woods she beheld the Daimler—an improbable glitter far away under the shadow of the house. Maud came breathlessly up and said: ‘There’s an answer!’ (The child signalled with something blue.)
‘What answer?’
Maud said: ‘You’ll have to make up your mind.’
Jane in a dream received the Latterly note; Maud, though she ostentatiously walked away, brushing off from her fingers the whole matter, more than once looked over her shoulder—Jane, it seemed, did not know how to read, or even what she should do instead. The girl did at last address herself to the bold blue page—she was wanted for dinner, dinner tonight. She thought: ‘Yes, but what shall I wear?’
‘This has been wonderful of you,’ said Lady Latterly. Turning on her stool at the dressing table, she clawed the air in the direction of Jane’s hand. ‘Sit anywhere, then we can soon talk.’
‘How quickly you’ve cleared up after the Fête,’ observed Jane, gazing out at the castle lawns.
‘I pay all these men; why should they not work?’
‘Still, it was kind of you sending the car twice.’
‘You were not on the telephone; you had no car,’ pointed out Lady Latterly in an unresigned tone.
‘We have a car, but it had gone to the sea.’