Sea of Glass (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (3 page)

The resemblance persisted despite the fact that Mrs. Ellison’s drawing-room was overcrowded with furniture, whereas stage-sets are necessarily rather empty. The accumulation of
bric-à-brac
in the one seemed to counterbalance—indeed spiritually to replace—the swarms of coryphées and courtiers in the other.

It was a very big apartment running through the whole length of the house. One set of french windows formed part of the façade of the house, the other looked onto the garden at the back. A grand piano stood in the front embrasure, a splendid Bechstein, but round it, as though for a kindergarten lesson or tea-party, were grouped six or seven little chairs of a truly frightful winsomeness. One—evidently of Swiss manufacture—had a carved Berne bear on each arm: in the worst and biggest the back panel was adorned by an inset plaque of two pre-Raphaelite maidens looking into each other’s eyes with an expression which would cause comment nowadays. The feature which they all had in common was a distinct thickening or downward protuberance of the seat. I even toyed with the idea that they might be a collection of high-minded commodes.

In fact, as I discovered later, they were musical chairs. If they were wound up and one sat on them, the boxes inside played a variety of tunes including
Abide with Me
and
The Minstrel Boy
.

The same contrasts between tawdriness and magnificence persisted throughout the room. Hanging on the walls or standing on cabinets and on the marble overmantel was a part of the grand chorus of chiming clocks. (Other smaller squads were distributed elsewhere about the house.) A few of these were pieces of considerable beauty, but they were outnumbered by the product of Bavarian woodcarvers and imitators of celebrated buildings. A cuckoo popped out from the eaves of a chalet next door to a model of the Leaning Tower executed, apparently, in the substance of moth-balls.

At the further end, near the garden-window, the centre of the floor was held by a tall octagonal cabinet. I opened two or three of its glass-fronted partitions and took out objects at random. I noticed how many of them had a Far Eastern origin. There were at least a dozen Chinese snuff-bottles, several small jade screens, and a model of a junk in ivory. At the time I supposed that Mrs. Ellison’s son must have sent them as gifts to his mother. This was not correct. They had, in fact, been collected from various sources for Mrs. Ellison’s sister who was a congenital cripple. With that strange mixture of good sense and incomprehension so typical of the Victorians it was decided at an early stage that she must be given an interest in life. So a museum was started in order to make her forget her wasted spine. Everything went into it, as into a hot-pot—postage-stamps, sea-shells, coins, an uncut ruby worth a thousand pounds, and hundreds of
objets d
’
art
. The collection, begun in her own family home, was transferred to that of the Ellisons when she went to live with them. It had originally been housed in a single room at the top of the house which still held the core of it; but after her death Mr. Ellison, who combined a keen sense of economy with the aesthetic taste of a Yahoo, had seen no reason why all these rarities should not be used for the general embellishment of the house. So they were duly parcelled out, the drawing-room receiving the articles which were thought to have the highest monetary and decorative value. I believe the cases of sea-shells were put round the servants’ bedrooms.

I had heard no sound of footsteps, but when I looked up from replacing an object in the cabinet, there, standing a few inches behind me, was the girl whom I had seen on the upstairs landing. This time she had no knife and she was dressed in a long frock of printed cotton. Her fierce blue eyes eclipsed the feeble colours of the design and her tawny hair and skin glared leonine against the white background.

‘Good morning,’ I said.

‘Good morning,’ replied the girl in a voice which was foreign in texture rather than accent.

‘I’m David Lindley.’

‘I am Varvara Ellison.’

‘I think we met for a moment last night.’ I tried to smile engagingly. ‘You rather scared me.’

From the outset the girl had worn an expression of intense watchfulness. It did not respond to my attempt at levity.

‘I am on guard in the nights,’ she said briefly.

‘But . . . why?’

‘Lest someone should kill me.’

‘Why?’ I repeated in a flabbergasted voice.

‘For gain,’ said Miss Ellison, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

From utter bewilderment I leapt again to the theory which I had entertained on the previous night. Mrs. Ellison’s granddaughter had been sent home from the wilds suffering from mental trouble which took the form of persecution mania. I thought I might have been warned that my invitation involved sharing the house with a deranged person and one who did not appear to be subject to any close control.

‘Oh come,’ I said. ‘I’m sure it’s not as bad as all that.’

Varvara looked at me with contempt.

‘My grandmother wishes to see us,’ she said.

She led the way upstairs to the first landing where she tapped on a door. Nurse Fillis opened it and motioned us to enter. Inside, Mrs. Ellison was sitting up in a bed resembling my own, except that the draperies were even more elaborate. She had aged perceptibly since our last meeting. Her eyes seemed paler and vaguer, and the artificial plaits which she wore like a coronet round her head looked top-heavy against the thin foundation of her own hair. Nevertheless she still diffused an air of aristocratic benevolence which inspired confidence in her control of her surroundings—sometimes rather misleadingly, as I was to find out.

‘My dear boy,’ she said, holding out her hand. The diamonds between the clay-coloured wrinkles looked as if they were finding their way back to their original matrix.

I started to thank her for her hospitality, but she cut me short: ‘You are doubly welcome,’ she said. ‘For your own sake and because it will be so good for Barbara’—she pronounced the name that way—‘to have a companion. Everything in England is strange to her.’

‘That I do not find,’ said the girl.

‘Ah,’ replied Mrs. Ellison, ‘we must learn to know the wood before we can recognize the trees.’

The sudden tautening of phrase was unaccompanied by any change of manner. And this somehow made the mild snub more effective.

Varvara disengaged herself with a shrug and wandered over to the dressing-table where she began to play with a galaxy of toilet articles cut in the solidest and most ornate silver which I have ever seen. She stole (unobserved, I hope) more than half the attention which I should have been giving to the old lady.

‘. . . very sad,’ said Mrs. Ellison, ‘and, of course, a terrible predicament for a young girl. Not much better than being locked up in a cage with a lot of wild beasts after they had eaten their trainer. However she was most sensible. She set out for England a few weeks after the funeral.’

Varvara looked round, and for a moment I could see the line of her body under that shapeless djibbah. She was solid yet sinuous, like a young puma just come to its full growth.

Suddenly the significance of Mrs. Ellison’s words dawned upon me. I was shocked to think what an impression of lackadaisical callousness I might have conveyed.

‘I’m sorry,’ I stammered, ‘terribly sorry about your son. I’d forgotten that he was—’

‘Quite right,’ said Mrs. Ellison. ‘The young should not fill their minds with thoughts of death.’

Nevertheless when I was sixteen my aunt had very sensibly taught me the skeleton of a letter of formal condolence. All I could think of was one of its marmoreal phrases.

‘You must have suffered an irreparable loss.’

‘That is not how I regard it,’ said Mrs. Ellison quite kindly. ‘At my age it may be repaired any day.’

Varvara dropped a nest of scent bottles with a loud clatter. As she came over to the bed with arms outstretched, her face seemed to be lit by an internal fire which rarefied the blunt handsomeness of her features.

‘Those are words of God,’ she said, taking Mrs. Ellison’s hands. ‘We shall meet him again in the bosom of the blessed and immortal Christ who will have forgiven his errors and his blindness. . . .’ She appeared to consider for a moment. ‘At any rate by the time I come to die,’ she added thoughtfully.

Mrs. Ellison did not attempt to withdraw from the embrace. But her eyelids batted in deprecation of this excessive and un-Anglican display.

‘We are given every grounds for hope,’ she said quietly.

Up to this point the old lady had controlled the interview with tact and firmness. Possibly the introduction of an emotional note upset her. But more likely, I think, she was simply tired by coping simultaneously with two diverse creatures from whom she was widely separated in age and outlook. At any rate her grip began to waver. No longer did the ends of sentences entirely match their beginning; and an increasing number of her utterances took the form of commands—not always directed to any clear object. She made Varvara pull back the heavy tasselled curtains to the end of their runners although they were already admitting a blaze of sunshine. Even so she was not satisfied. She seemed to be looking for something beyond the window, but she could not explain what it was.

In the middle of this impasse Nurse Fillis entered and summed up the situation at a glance.

‘Time for a nice rest now, Mrs. Ellison.’

‘I . . . want . . . to . . . see . . . my . . . flowers.’

‘Now you know we had the window-boxes taken away because Dr. Conway thought they stuffy-ied up the room.’

‘My . . . flowers,’ repeated Mrs. Ellison sadly.

Nurse Fillis put a finger roguishly to her lips.

‘Now, I’ll tell you something. We’ve just had our order in from Harrods. Two dozen lovely roses, like a lot of princesses in satin petticoats. I’ll bring them in the moment Gibbons has arranged them.’

‘Drip, drip, drip,’ said Mrs. Ellison distinctly, in her ‘accidental’ voice.

Unhappy Nurse Fillis! Amongst other comparisons still less flattering, she resembled a pair of those linked buckets; of which, when one rises, the second sinks into the depths. As she pulled her credit up with one hand, she let it down with the other. No sooner did I start to respect her professional competence, than she shocked me by showing an unexpected addiction to sickroom whimsy—though perhaps I am being unduly harsh about a defensive habit forced on her by a succession of melancholic and querulous invalids.

‘Now,’ she said, plumping the pillows on the bed, ‘we’ll just lie back and rest for a bit. Otherwise we shan’t be fit for our visitor this afternoon.’

Varvara said: ‘Who is coming this afternoon, Grandmother?’

Nurse Fillis made a shooing motion behind her back, clearly indicating that we should get out. It seemed to me that she was entirely justified: it was not a time to ask idle questions—still less to ask them in the steely, rather menacing tone which the girl had employed.

Sacrificing manners to example, I went first through the door.

I knew that Varvara was following by a peculiar noise which I could not at first identify. Then I realized that she was grinding her teeth.

‘What’s the matter?’ I said.

‘They are making a tool-pigeon of my grandmother,’ she replied.

The atmosphere, super-saturated with eccentricity, was telling on my nerves.

‘Tool,’ I said. ‘Or stool-pigeon. Take your choice. They both seem equally unlikely.’

‘That is because you know nothing.’ She stopped and put her hand on my shoulder, slewing me round so that she looked into my face. She was very strong. ‘Are you my friend, David?’

‘Yes, of course.’

She sighed.

‘I think that you are a person who will see both sides before he chooses where to give his friendship. Well, that must happen, and I am not afraid because your heart is pure, though ignorant.’

I spent the rest of the morning sitting in the roof-garden which I had observed from my bedroom, and smoking one of Mr. Ellison’s cigars. The garden was in effect an unroofed extension of the sitting-room on the second floor. This was the room which Mrs. Ellison chiefly used when she was out of bed. The décor was less flamboyant than downstairs, though a case containing a large stuffed fish with razor teeth looked odd on top of the bookcase. But there was also a high-fidelity gramophone and a magnificent collection of white-label records, to which I later spent many hours listening.

The discovery of the gramophone cheered me at a point when I needed cheering. For some while I had been asking myself whether I was going to enjoy this visit; and the answers which came back were increasingly dubious. When every allowance was made for the narrowness of my horizon, No.
8
Aynho Terrace remained a very peculiar place. If my aunt had gauged the oddity of its inmates, I was convinced that she would never have let me come. She had the true Britannic hatred of ill-defined queerness; at a pinch she would rather have been put down in an unequivocal brothel than a place where one could only say that something funny went on upstairs.

But of course Aunt Edna had never had any great opportunity of judging Mrs. Ellison’s domestic background. After the return from Brittany she and my uncle had several times been asked to Aynho Terrace for tea or dinner. Seen thus fleetingly, and without the presence of Varvara, I could imagine that the household had appeared quite conventional. When my uncle’s leave expired and they went back to India the friendship continued by letter—Mrs. Ellison was a surprisingly active correspondent—and it was in the course of these exchanges that she had so kindly offered to help with the perpetual problem of what to do with me during the vacations.

After I had been sitting out for a while a thought struck me and I returned under cover. I went to the bookcase with the fish on top and looked along the lower shelves. As I had expected in a house of that type I found one devoted to books of reference: as well as copies of Whitaker and Burke and Kelly’s
Landed Gentry
it contained a large leather-bound atlas. I took this out into the sunlight and opened it on one of the tables at the page which showed Western China and Eastern Turkestan. The map was coloured for contour, so that the dark masses of the mountains to the south and north-west looked like thunder-clouds encroaching on the Gobi and the Takla-Makan, the great deserts whose pale lemon floor shaded off to a dull white where the land dropped below sea-level.

A shadow fell across the book. Varvara who had left me after our talk with Mrs. Ellison was standing behind my chair. She moved very silently for a girl of her size. I was embarrassed by being caught in an occupation which was so obviously inspired by her.

‘I hope you don’t think it impertinent,’ I said, ‘but I was wondering exactly where you lived.’

She studied the map for some seconds, as if she was not very familiar with such things. Then she put her forefinger on a spot under the Northern Tien Shan mountains in that section of the range which is called Bogdo-Ola. Where she pointed there was quite a cluster of small towns, but the scale was large enough to show which one she meant.

‘Hai-po-li’ I read slowly, and no doubt with an utterly false pronunciation.

‘Doljuk,’ said Varvara like an oath or a battle-cry.

She picked up my fountain-pen which happened to be lying on the table and scored through the printed name, cutting the strong paper in her vehemence. Then above the erasure she scrawled in the name which she preferred.