Point Counter Point (38 page)

‘Hold the end a moment while I get a safety-pin.’

Burlap lifted his forehead and drew back. Rather flushed, but still very business-like and efficient, Beatrice was detaching one from a little card of assorted safety pins.

‘Now comes the really difficult moment,’ she said, laughing. ‘You won’t mind if I run the pin into your flesh.’

‘No, I won’t mind,’ said Burlap and it was true; he wouldn’t have minded. He’d have been rather pleased, if she had hurt him. But she didn’t. The bandage was pinned into position with quite professional neatness.

‘There!’

‘What do you want me to do now?’ asked Burlap, greedy to obey.

‘Lie down.’

He lay down. She did up the buttons of his pyjama jacket. ‘Now you must go to sleep as quickly as you can.’ She pulled the bedclothes up to his chin and tucked them in. Then she laughed. ‘You look like a little boy.’

‘Aren’t you going to kiss me goodnight?’

The colour came into Beatrice’s cheeks. She bent down and kissed him on the forehead. ‘Goodnight,’ she said. And suddenly she wanted to take him in her arms, to press his head against her breast and stroke his hair. But she only laid her hand for a moment against his cheek, then hurried out of the room.

Little Phil was lying on his bed. The room was in an orange twilight. A thin needle of sunshine came probing in between the drawn curtains. Phil was more than usually restless.

‘What’s the time?’ he shouted at last, though he had shouted before and been told to keep quiet.

‘Not time for you to get up,’ Miss Fulkes called back from across the passage. Her voice came muffled, for she was half-way into her blue frock, her head involved in silken darkness, her arms struggling blindly to find the entrance to their respective sleeves. Phil’s parents were arriving to-day; they would be at Gattenden for lunch. Miss Fulkes’s blue best was imperatively called for.

‘But what’s the
time
?’ the child shouted back angrily. ‘On your watch, I mean.’

Miss Fulkes’s head came through into the light. ‘Twenty to one,’ she called back. ‘You must be quiet.’

‘Why isn’t it one?’

‘Because it isn’t. Now I shan’t answer you any more. And if you shout again I shall tell your mother how naughty you’ve been.’

‘Naughty!’ Phil retorted, putting a tearful fury into his voice—but so softly, that Miss Fulkes hardly heard him. ‘I hate you!’ He didn’t of course. But he had made his protest; honour was saved.

Miss Fulkes went on with her toilet. She felt agitated, afraid, painfully excited. What would they think of Phil—
her
Phil, the Phil she had made? ‘I hope he’ll be good,’ she thought. ‘I hope he’ll be good.’ He could be an angel, so enchanting when he chose. And when he wasn’t an angel, there was always a reason; but one had to know him, one had to understand him in order to see the reason. Probably they wouldn’t be able to see the reason. They had been away so long; they might have forgotten what he was like. And in any case they couldn’t know what he was like now, what he had grown into during these last months. She alone knew
that
Phil. Knew him and loved him—so much, so much. She alone. And one day she would have to leave him. She had no rights over him, no claim to him; she only loved him. They could take him away from her whenever they wanted. The image of herself in the glass wavered and was lost in a rainbow fog and suddenly the tears overflowed on to her cheeks.

The train was punctual, the car in attendance. Philip and Elinor climbed in.

‘Isn’t it wonderful to be here?’ Elinor took her husband’s hand. Her eyes shone. ‘But, good Lord,’ she added, in a tone of horror and without waiting for his answer,’ they’ re building a lot of new houses on the hill there. How dare they?’

Philip looked. ‘Rather garden city, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘It’s a pity the English love the country so much,’ he added. ‘They’re killing it with kindness.’

‘But how lovely it still is, all the same. Aren’t you tremendously excited?’

‘Excited?’ he questioned, cautiously. ‘Well…

‘Aren’t you even pleased that you’re going to see your son again?’

‘Of course.’

‘Of course!’ Elinor repeated the words derisively. ‘And in
that
tone of voice. I never thought there was any “of course” about it; but now the time has come, I’ve never been so excited in my life.’

There was a silence; the car drove on windingly, down the lanes. The road mounted; they climbed through beechwoods to a wooded plateau. At the end of a long green vista the most colossal monument of Tantamount grandeur, the palace of the Marquess of Gattenden, basked far off in the sun. The flag flew; his lordship was in residence. ‘We must go and call on the old madman one day,’ said Philip. The fallow deer browsed in the park.

‘Why does one ever travel?’ said Elinor, as she looked at them.

Miss Fulkes and little Phil were waiting on the steps. ‘I believe I hear the car,’ said Miss Fulkes. Her rather lumpy face was very pale; her heart was beating with more than ordinary force. ‘No,’ she added, after a moment of intent listening. What she had heard was only the sound of her own anxiety.

Little Phil moved about uncomfortably, conscious only of a violent desire to ‘go somewhere.’ Anticipation had lodged a hedgehog in his entrails.

‘Aren’t you
happy
?’ asked Miss Fulkes, with assumed enthusiasm, selfsacrificingly determined that the child should show himself wild with joy to see his parents again. ‘Aren’t you
tremendously
excited?’ But they could take him away from her if they wanted to, take him away and never let her see him again.

‘Yes,’ little Phil replied rather vaguely. He was preoccupied exclusively with the approach of visceral events.

Miss Fulkes was disappointed by the flatness of his tone. She looked at him enquiringly. ‘Phil?’ She had noticed his uneasy Charleston. The child nodded. She took his hand and hurried him into the house.

A minute later Philip and Elinor drove up to a deserted porch. Elinor couldn’t help feeling disappointed. She had so clearly visualized the scene—Phil on the steps frantically waving—she had so plainly, in anticipation, heard his shouting. And the steps were a blank.

‘Nobody to meet us,’ she said, and her tone was mournful.

‘You could hardly expect them to hang about, waiting,’ Philip replied. He hated anything in the nature of a fuss. For him, the perfect homecoming would have been in a cloak of invisibility. This was a good second best.

They got out of the car. The front door was open. They entered. In the silent, empty hall three and a half centuries of life had gone to sleep. The sunlight stared through flat-arched windows. The panelling had been painted pale green in the eighteenth century. All ancient oak and high-lights, the staircase climbed up, out of sight, towards the higher floors. A smell of potpourri faintly haunted the air; it was as though one apprehended the serene old silence through another sense.

Elinor looked round her, she took a deep breath, she drew her finger-tips along the polished walnut wood of a table, with the knuckle of a bent forefinger she rapped the round Venetian bowl that stood on it; the glassy bell-note lingered sweetly on the perfumed silence.

‘Like the Sleeping Beauty,’ she said. But even as she spoke the words, the spell was broken. Suddenly, as though the ringing glass had called the house back to life, there was sound and movement. Somewhere upstairs a door opened, through the sanitary noise of rushing water came the sound of Phil’s piercing young voice; small feet thudded along the carpet of the corridor, clattered like little hoofs on the naked oak of the stairs. At the same moment a door on the ground floor flew open and the enormous form of Dobbs, the parlourmaid, hastened into the hall.

‘Why, Miss Elinor, I never heard you…’

Little Phil rounded the last turn of the staircase. At the sight of his parents he gave a shout, he quickened his pace; he almost slid from step to step.

‘Not so fast, not so fast!’ his mother called anxiously and ran towards him.

‘Not so fast!’ echoed Miss Fulkes hurrying down the stairs behind. And suddenly, from the morningroom, which had a door leading out into the garden, Mrs. Bidlake appeared, white and silent and with floating veils, like an imposing phantom. In a little basket she carried a bunch of cut tulips; her gardening scissors dangled at the end of a yellow ribbon. T’ang the Third followed her, barking. There was a confusion of embracing and handshaking. Mrs. Bidlake’s greetings had the majesty of ritual, the solemn grace of an ancient and sacred dance. Miss Fulkes writhed with shyness and excitement, stood first on one leg and then on the other, went into the attitudes of fashion-plates and mannequins and from time to time piercingly laughed. When she shook hands with Philip, she writhed so violently that she almost lost her balance.

‘Poor creature!’ Elinor had time to think between the answering and asking of questions. ‘How urgently she needs marrying! Much worse than when we left.’

‘But how he’s grown!’ she said aloud. ‘And how he’s ‘changed!’ She held the child at arm’s length with the gesture of a connoisseur who stands back to examine a picture. ‘He used to be the image of Phil. But now…’ She shook her head. Now the broad face had lengthened, the short straight nose (the comical ‘cat’s nose’ which in Philip’s face she had always laughed at and so much loved) had grown finer and faintly aquiline, the hair had darkened. ‘Now he’s exactly like Walter. Don’t you think so?’ Mrs. Bidlake remotely nodded. ‘Except when he laughs,’ she added. ‘His laugh’s pure Phil.’

‘What have you brought me?’ asked little Phil almost anxiously. When people went away and came back again, they always brought him something. ‘Where’s my present?’

‘What a question!’ Miss Fulkes protested, blushing with vicarious shame, and writhing.

But Elinor and Philip only laughed.

‘He’s Walter when he’s serious,’ said Elinor.

‘Or you.’ Philip looked from one to the other.

‘The first minute your father and mother arrive!’ Miss Fulkes continued her reproaches.

‘Naughty!’ the child retorted and threw back his head with a little movement of anger and pride.

Elinor, who had been looking at him, almost laughed aloud. That sudden lifting of the chin—why it was the parody of old Mr. Quarles’s gesture of superiority. For a moment the child was her father-in-law, her absurd deplorable father-in-law, caricatured and in miniature. It was comic, but at the same time it was somehow no joke. She wanted to laugh, but she was oppressed by a sudden realization of the mysteries and complexities of life, the terrible inscrutabilities of the future. Here was her child—but he was also Philip, he was also herself, he was also Walter, her father, her mother; and now, with that upward tilting of the chin, he had suddenly revealed himself as the deplorable Mr. Quarles. And he might be hundreds of other people too. Might be? He certainly was. He was aunts and cousins she hardly ever saw; grandfathers and great-uncles she had only known as a child and utterly forgotten; ancestors who had died long ago, back to the beginning of things. A whole population of strangers inhabited and shaped that little body, lived in that mind and controlled its wishes, dictated its thoughts and would go on dictating and controlling. Phil, little Phil—the name was an abstraction, a title arbitrarily given, like ‘France’ or ‘England,’ to a collection, never long the same, of many individuals, who were born, lived and died within him, as the inhabitants of a country appear and disappear, but keep alive in their passage the identity of the nation to which they belong. She looked at the child with a kind of terror. What a responsibility!

‘I call that cupboard love,’ Miss Fulkes was still going on. ‘And you mustn’t say “naughty” to me like that.’

Elinor gave a little sigh, shook herself out of her reverie and, picking up the child in her arms, pressed him against her. ‘Never mind,’ she said, half to the reproving Miss Fulkes, half to her own apprehensive self. ‘Never mind.’ She kissed him.

Philip was looking at his watch. ‘Perhaps we ought to go and wash and brush up a bit before lunch,’ he said. He had the sentiment of punctuality.

‘But first,’ said Elinor, to whom it seemed that meals were made for man, not man for meals,’ first we simply
must
run into the kitchen and say how-do-you-do to Mrs. Inman. It would be unforgivable if we didn’t. Come.’ Still carrying the child, she led the way through the dining-room. The smell of roast duck grew stronger and stronger as they advanced.

Fretted a little by his consciousness of unpunctuality, and a little uneasy at having to risk himself, even with Elinor for dragoman, in the kitchen among the servants, Philip reluctantly followed her.

At luncheon, little Phil celebrated the occasion by behaving atrociously.

‘The excitement has been too much for him,’ poor Miss Fulkes kept repeating, trying to excuse the child and indirectly to justify herself. She would have liked to cry. ‘You’ll see when he’s got used to your being here, Mrs. Quarles,’ she said, turning to Elinor, ‘you’ll see; he can be such an angel. It’s the excitement.’

She had come to love the child so much that his triumphs and humiliations, his virtues and his crimes made her exult or mourn, feel selfsatisfaction or shame, as if they had been her own. Besides there was her professional pride. She had been alone responsible for him all these months, teaching him the social virtues and why the triangle of India is painted crimson on the map; she had made him, had moulded him. And now, when this object of tenderest love, this product of her skill and patience, screamed at table, spat out mouthfuls of half-masticated food and spilt the water, Miss Fulkes not only blushed with agonizing shame, as though it were she who had screamed, had spat, had spilled, but experienced at the same time all the humiliation of the conjurer whose long-prepared trick fails to come off in public, the inventor of the ideal flying machine which simply refuses to leave the ground.

After all,’ said Elinor, consolingly, ‘it’s only to be expected.’ She felt genuinely sorry for the poor girl. She looked at the child. He was crying—and she had expected (how unreasonably!) that it would be quite different now, that she would find him entirely rational and grown up. Her heart sank. She loved him, but children were terrible, terrible. And he was still a child. ‘Now, Phil,’ she said severely, ‘you must eat. No more nonsense.’