Good Behaviour (28 page)

A full-page picture changed all the fugitive glamour of the chase and the ballroom to a quiet contemplation of marriage and
motherhood as understood by the proper sort of English family. Here, by ornamental water, a young but solid mother sat on
a stone bench. A blond child leaned against her; another squatted at her feet. The stone seat and her knee she shared with
three terriers and a Pekinese. Melted far in the distance, beyond lawns and terraces, the Palladian façade of a great house
filled in the picture. For me, as I looked, a transport in time took my breath. I have been here before, I have heard this
before, where? when? The answer came to me clear and comfortable: Mrs Brock’s happy days, and her tales of Lady Grizel and
the jolly little boys, and the dogs.

Behind this picture there existed a certain past, and a future when a world of love should enclose me in just such precincts.
The moment could not be endless. I let my breath go. I turned the page over.

Ah, Newbury. Next November meeting, more than likely, I would be there with Richard: nodding coolly to Kenny Norton: kindly,
so kindly, inviting Mary Ann to stay at Stoke Charity: walking on careless feet from Members’ Stand to Owners and Trainers,
last Horse Show’s days come sure and true for evermore. Now I could see without envy the photograph of just such a girl as
myself, wearing the very coat Richard had given me. She sat balancing easily on her shooting-stick, Newmarket boots roughly
elegant on her
supporting legs. She held an enormous pair of glasses to her eyes; the man standing behind her must have lent them to her,
although her own were hanging round her neck. I had a feeling he would snatch them back to read the race for himself. I felt
a surge of affiliation and sympathy towards these two elegant leisured people. Then I read the caption: ‘Finding a winner
– Mr Richard Massingham, elder son of Major “Wobbly” and Lady Grizel Massingham, and the Honourable Alice Brownrigg, who have
just announced their engagement.’

For a minute I disbelieved. I denied myself a second look. I put the paper down. I found myself hiding it. When I had done
this I knew that it was true, but I could accept nothing. I was on the floor bowing my head, rocking myself against acceptance;
I was a rooted thing, torn about in a volume of storm.

Not tears, but pain, seized on me, my insides griping and loosening. The absolute need of getting to the lavatory possessed
me. Even my terrible distress had to find this absurd necessity. As I walked carefully down the long, warm room, I had the
idea that the light had changed like a short winter afternoon, and the room and my life were both spread with sand and salt.

Back in the hall the fun of the party was blazing up now. I ploughed my way through the drinking, chattering, easy people
to the foot of the staircase. The crowd was as impervious to interruption as the crowd at a race-meeting, where faces known
and unknown float and pass one by, occupied and avoiding recognition. So I saw, without a nod or a smile, Mr Kiely standing
with some of his friends. I didn’t have to know he was there. I breasted on. Kenny Norton put a hand on my arm: ‘Come and
dance,’ he said. The miracle was late.

‘I’m sorry, nothing left,’ I said. I felt his appalled stare following me as I flogged on up the stairs to the salvation of
the lavatory. I had to get there; pain was twisting in me again, and above it the dreadful childish call: I’m going to be
sick – sick in the basin. Partly in the plate holding the Bromo, partly over my dress, into my shoes, on the floor, I was
sick. I must escape before it was found, get myself into my coat and run, with this taste in my mouth, and the smell under
my coat going with me.

In the hall the crowd had thinned. Music was playing and those lucky ones who danced to it were distanced from me, far and
foreign. I was at the hall door, almost on my way home, but the door was locked. I turned the handle violently. This was the
last cruelty; I must get out. The studded door loomed. I shook the lock with both hands. A voice beside me said: ‘I think
Jody Kenny in the bar has the key.’ I looked round and down at Mr Kiely, immaculate in his black tail coat, his white tie
just too large. ‘Are you on your own?’ he said, when he had opened the door for me into the blessed frozen night.

‘Yes. I was dining.’

‘Ah. So you didn’t enjoy the party?’

‘Goodnight.’ I kept my voice cold and steady against his familiarity and his helpfulness. ‘Thank you so much.’

‘Drive carefully,’ he cautioned me; ‘the roads are all ice.’ He went back into the house, into a great gulf of light.

I was escaping. I was running from Mary Ann’s terrible kindness, from Uncle Ulick’s talking and groping and desertion; I ran
from the indifference that was shown me through the endless hours, timed by the numbers of dances when I did not dance and
could not hide. I would be alone now with my pain. I would take it home with me, and go to bed with it, and
suffer it always, for it would never change, I knew. Grief possessed me, but I would and must behave. No mourning. No whining.

At last I was in the car, pulling the rug round me. It was familiar. Soon I would take off my clothes and get into bed; that
was all there was for me.

And not even that, it seemed, because I could not start the car. I was sobbing before I gave up – waited – tried again, waited
again, hoped, despaired. There was no attendant among the parked cars; it was too early for departures and largesses. I would
try the starting handle myself, though I was afraid of it. And rightly so; the kick nearly broke my arm before the engine
gulped and quenched.

‘Ah, you poor little thing, it’s a pity about you,’ a voice spoke near me. ‘You got a great knocking about.’ It was the wrong
kind of voice; that was my first impression before I recognised Mr Kiely in his overcoat and tweed hat, and dreadful scarf.
‘Sit in out of the cold,’ he said, and I obeyed, although it was just as cold in the car. After ten minutes, he gave up.

‘I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘you’re here for the night.’

‘Oh, no.’ I knew I could never face them – not if I had to sit in the car till the morning.

‘Or, if you prefer it,’ he said, ‘I’ll drive you home.’

‘Oh, would you? Would you really? It’s miles out of your way.’

‘Ah, come on.’ He took the rug off my knees and wrapped it round the engine. ‘I’ll tell the garage to collect the car in the
morning.’

He thought of everything. In his car I leaned as far as possible away from him. As our bodies and our breath warmed the
air I was conscious of the sour little smell creeping about under my coat and beneath the rug. When he offered me a cigarette
and lit one himself, I guessed a whiff had drifted from me. I must say something to take his attention off it.

‘What a good party.’ My voice shook.

‘Was it? I wouldn’t know.’

‘You didn’t enjoy it?’

‘No. Did you?’

‘Yes. Awfully.’

He waited. ‘Kenny Norton was there,’ he said unexpectedly.

‘Yes. I sat beside him at dinner. I’m afraid I cut one of his dances.’ It was almost true. It was true. It sounded impossible.

‘He has the ride on Seamonster at Leopardstown.’

‘Kenny? So he has.’

‘Should the two of us go up and see the race?’

How to answer him within politeness? No one could possibly call me a snob, but some situations promise only total embarrassment.
Papa’s friends and the kind Mary Anns would pass me by with a word, or without a word. None of them, none of us, knew Mr Kiely.

As I cringed in my corner of the car, hesitating for the final refusal, I saw again two other pictures: the easy ardent girl
at Newbury, intent for the moment on horses, and the calm young woman sitting by water with two glorious children. Tonight,
for a minute out of time, these had been pictures of myself, in the world belonging to me, in the world lost to me.

In the shape of the word ‘lost’ my grief bore me down – what had I lost? Nothing, for I had nothing, and my heart was bursting
for nothing. But burst it would, and into loud crying.

‘I am so sorry,’ I apologised, almost whispering, I was so ashamed.

‘Better now?’ He was whispering too, as again he tucked the rug neatly round me. ‘What you need,’ he let down the window an
inch or two on his side, ‘is a man to look after you. How would you like the idea?’

I couldn’t see him, sitting there beside me, but his voice had the wrong texture, the wrong colour; it was as wrong to me
as a false note in music. Ashamed of myself as I felt, his sympathy was unattractive, even alarming. He stopped the car before
the gates of Temple Alice and put his hand on my knee: ‘When you need someone,’ he said, ‘will you think of me?’

One of Mummie’s phrases came to me and I spoke it in her voice: ‘You must be out of your mind,’ I said, and I knocked his
hand away. In spite of my heartbreak and tears, I was, after all, Aroon St Charles, and I felt it too. He didn’t answer, and
when we got to the house he didn’t get out to open the car door for me. He didn’t even answer my ‘Goodnight.’ Perhaps I had
really hurt him?

In the cold of the hall I loomed to myself, a great creature within limitless suffering. I took off my shoes before I went
upstairs. Step by stockinged step I padded past Mummie’s door. Lemon-shaped above my head, the dome held the perfect form
of winter air, as it had held the light and breath of summer evenings. Within this hollow of cold and truth I gave up my dream,
its core of fact, its wings of hope, shrivelling to absurdity; I knew that here stood the changeless me, the truly unwanted
person.

A streak of light under Papa’s door made a faraway sliver in the darkness. It made a small change and lift in my heart
too … If he was awake he must need something and I was here to give him whatever he needed. I put down my shoes and my bag,
using both hands to turn the door knob softly, in case he had fallen asleep with his lamp still lighted.

He was not asleep. He was leaning back, hollowing his wall of pillows. His eyelids were loosely downwards on his cheeks, and
in his entire expression there was a grave concentration of pleasure. Rose sat beside him, her head bent low as if she were
whispering; her hand was under the bedclothes warming his foot – his phantom foot that felt the cold as much as his real foot.
Rose snatched her hand from under the sheets, and Papa opened his eyes to look up and towards her in a surprised, questioning
way. He didn’t see me standing in the doorway. Only Rose saw me, and her eyes blazed, raging, across the bed.

‘His feet are perishing.’ She spoke in a curiously apologetic way as though I might not see or understand that she was warming
his feet. Papa did not even try to say goodnight as I went away. He heaved a little on his pillows, turning as much as he
was able towards Rose. Before I shut the door I caught the breath of whisky on the warm air.

What must I do, I thought, standing in my own room again, what must I do now, tomorrow and for ever? I put my hand down my
bed to where my hotwater-bottle lay, cold as a fish. Here was something I could change, something I must give myself, for
without it I would never get to sleep.

Passing Papa’s door, I looked away from the slit of light; passing Mummie’s door I held my breath. Then I was on the staircase,
and turning off it down the back stairs with its muffled household smells. In the kitchen my candle expelled the light of
the sky and the dark of the trees coming through the unshuttered windows; it made its own giraffe-shaped shadows
up the walls. I had a slight feeling of adventure, of getting level with Rose, in this kitchen which was hers. I moved the
top ring on the range and put the kettle closer to the heat of the fire. When it boiled up I had a longing for a cup of tea.
Why not? I found the thumb-bruised tin where they kept the kitchen tea, and, near the window, a milk jug wreathed in dull
roses. I sat on a chair near the heat, waiting a minute for the tea to draw.

In the space of waiting there came a reunion with a moment nearer than the present, when mice had flickered in their cages
and I could smell the faint appropriate marriage of hot milk and Marie biscuits. Then love and trust had swelled the air round
me, and there had been a wild nonchalance expressed by a hat flung down with its wet pink roses. For a breath I was held in
that time before love and trust had failed me. Now, as before, the moment broke into ugliness and terror.

It was Rose, plunging along the passages, crying, calling; throwing her body across the kitchen table, howling; dispossessed
of all authority, a wild creature, just as Mrs Brock had been on the evening of her drowning.

‘He’s going … he doesn’t know me … ’ she was gasping.

‘What have you done to him?’

‘Ah, it’s just a little turn he took.’ Her minimising was frightening; it was on a different scale from her grief. She was
hiding something.

‘You’ve killed him.’ I stood above her; her head was down on the table between her spread arms.

‘He wanted it,’ she said.

‘I told you whisky would kill him. I told you, didn’t I?’

She looked at me from a distance. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you told
me.’ She said it gratefully as if my accusation were some kind of reprieve.

We went back to his room together. He was breathing in a knotted, groaning rhythm. She stood and looked at him. She had been
his nurse and washed and dressed him like a doll, and sat him up and laid him down. Now she stood apart from the difficulties
of death, accepting all the strife and pain he was in as necessary before death; nothing could ease him, so she stood apart
looking on as though at the death of an animal. I felt the same. He was changed. Changing and lessening every moment from
a person to a thing. I agreed with her. It was futile to lift him or bring him any comfort. In fact I was afraid to touch
him, and Rose leaned far away at the foot of the bed, staring, waiting for him to die. Half an hour ago she had been giving
him whisky and warming his feet.

‘Mummie?’ I whispered to her. ‘Shouldn’t we tell Mummie?’

She shook her head. ‘He wouldn’t like it.’