The Fountain Overflows (37 page)

Richard Quin, who was lying on the hearthrug reading a newspaper, called out, “Mamma what is a pork-pie hat?” and Aunt Lily clutched at this straw, saying, “Fancy a sharp little boy like you not knowing what a pork-pie hat is, well I never. Can somebody give me a newspaper and a pair of scissors?” She cut it out with some cleverness and put it on her head and made a funny face, and we all laughed, and she went on to say, “And if there’s those who don’t know what a pork-pie hat is, there’s lots more that don’t know what a pork pie is. It’s a very rare thing, let me tell you, a good pork pie, and I can say so, for I’m one of the few people who can make one, though I say it myself.”

Richard stood up, advanced on her, crying, “A magic?”

“Well, cooking is,” she answered.

“Make me a magic pork pie, make me a magic pork pie with spell and onions,” he bade her, laughing.

“Well, I will, but there’s a whole lot of things you have to get in,” she warned him. “There’s conger eel, for one thing.”

“Conger eel!” exclaimed Mamma, coming out of her musical remoteness, as she was willing to do if just cause were shown.

“Conger eel. Conger eel. Conger eel,” cried Richard Quin, in triplicate.

“Yes, indeed, conger eel,” said Aunt Lily gravely, as if she did not want us to make a joke of something serious. “Veal and ham pie you can have without conger eel, that’s quite natural, but you can’t have a real pork pie without a nice bit of conger eel in it.”

Richard Quin clasped her knees and laid his head in her lap, chuckling, “This is lovely like the
Arabian Nights,
” while Mamma, gazing into the upper air at vast interlacing forms, like supple drainpipes, murmured, “Conger eels, conger eels,” and the name, by reiteration, became something else, even more extraordinary.

“You are a funny crowd,” said Aunt Lily, delighted at the sensation she was creating. “Everybody who can make a good pork pie knows that, though as I say there’s few enough of us who can. I never would have learned the trick, if it hadn’t been that old Uncle Joe Salter who did the cold table for the Admiral Benbow down at the Old Harbour took a fancy to me and showed me.”

Richard Quin seized on this superb supply of raw material for nonsense. “Admiral Benbow, he had a cold table, a very—cold—table—a table dripping with stalactites,” he chanted in ecstasy, shuddering and turning up an imaginary coat collar, “down by the harbour, the very old harbour the one they don’t use any more, it’s far too old and far too deep, and there’s the thing with two heads that eats the anchors, so nobody goes there now except Uncle Joe Salter, and Uncle Joe Salt, and Uncle Joe Saltest—Aunt Lily, Aunt Lily, do, do go on.”

“Hark at the child,” said Aunt Lily. “Goodness, I do wish old Uncle Joe Salter was alive to hear that, Uncle Joe Salt and Uncle Joe Saltest, he’d have died of laughing. But now, since you’re all so interested in pork pies, I wonder if I could make one tonight. Do you know if the girl’s got a good stock-pot going?”

Kate had indeed. And Mamma did what was almost unthinkable, she gave us permission to go out after dark, and presently Richard Quin and I were scurrying through the night beside Aunt Lily, who walked with excessive speed and frequently burst into excessive laughter, and threaded her way through alleys we had never noticed before, into little black shops where Aunt Lily demanded the ingredients necessary to a real pork pie with an air of adept cunning and troglodytish shop-keepers sold them to her with an equally zestful air of complicity. She paused to tell us that whereas there were a great many good butchers, ordinary butchers, a good
pork
butcher was as rare as an archbishop. After that she shot with an air of having dodged a barrier into an establishment where she found some good lean fillets of pork and some lard, which, we gathered from her unctuous explanation, was white as new snow because it came from the farm belonging to the father-in-law of the plump gentleman in a blue overall behind the marble counter. This increased Richard Quin’s sense of the magic inherent in a pork pie, and thereafter a pork-butcher wizard and his father-in-law, a jinn who lived in a haystack and wore a smock, constantly appeared in our games and stories. In a shop crusted like a bottle of port an old grocer with whitening eyes sold us what Aunt Lily certified as by far the best black peppercorns to be bought in the whole of London. There was a conspiracy of silence over the impossibility of obtaining conger eel. We pretended we had done all in order. Then we came back into the commonplace high street and hurried contemptuously by the people who were going to buy the usual things in the shops everyone knew about, and got back to the kitchen just about the right time to take off the bones that had been simmering on the range for gravy since morning.

At length Aunt Lily came to, as it were, her cadenza. She had to build the pastry she had made with the lard into a tower, we called the others down to look, and Kate stood behind us, her hands on her hips, nodding in professional sympathy. It was really very clever, because not only did Aunt Lily have to build the pastry into a tower, she had to fill it with pieces of meat and hard-boiled egg, and pour in some gravy, and put on a pastry hat just to fit, and as you have to make that sort of pastry by boiling the lard with some water and mixing it into the flour it was quite warm and soft, so that the whole thing might have fallen down if she had not been quick and careful. There was an easy way of making it by moulding the pastry on a jar, but Aunt Lily said that that was a mug’s game, and one had one’s pride; and she smiled proudly as she watched her hands perform the remembered trick. “Nancy never saw me do this,” she sighed. “Queenie would never let the children eat anything vulgar. Harry liked it, when he went out in his boat, but I could never get into the kitchen, with those blessed maids always hanging about.” She gave Kate a quick smile. “Not like you.”

“I know what you mean,” said Kate. “That’s why I am a general. I know what girls are like when there’s more than one kept.”

They nodded in understanding. We all felt safe in the warm cave of our kitchen.

“Haven’t any reason, now I come to think of it, to think Clara isn’t a good woman,” meditated Aunt Lily, her fingers still busy. “She’s from the North. They say North Country people are very homely.”

So we got through that sad evening; and we ate the pork pie the following day at luncheon and we thought it wonderful, though Aunt Lily suffered over it as artists do when they have to make compromises for the sake of their friends, for Kate had reminded me that, like most children at that time, we were allowed no condiments, and she had been obliged to leave out the unique peppercorns. But she owned it was as good as could be expected, considering that omission. It was the last satisfaction she was to have for a long time, for a day or two later a policeman came to tell her that her sister had been found and was alive.

Queenie was at liberty so long because a bank of fog had fallen on the South Coast about the time of her disappearance, and hung over it for an unusual number of days. Not till it lifted did a policeman, standing in the early morning at the end of an esplanade of a seaside resort somewhere near Southampton, look down on the line of shacks and bathing-huts that ran along the sandy beach away from the town, and notice that from one chimney there was rising a column of smoke. It was still only February. The policeman went down and looked at the shack, which was one of those places which would now be called a café, which had then, oddly enough, no name, and was vaguely referred to as “a refreshments” or “a minerals.” But it was the same thing. In summer you could be served there with tea or ginger beer and buy oranges and bananas and chocolates; and there was always a mosaic of orange peel and banana skins and silver paper from the chocolates trodden into the sand about the threshold. The windows of this shack were boarded up, and when the policeman knocked there was no answer. He went back and sent a message to the station; and when he and the sergeant and another policeman broke in they found Queenie lying in the bar on a mattress set on the bare floor, among piles of chairs stacked on tables. Somebody had brought her bedding, and had every day fetched food and fuel to her. The owner of the place proved that it was not he, and it was never discovered who it was.

After Aunt Lily had heard the news she spoke nothing that was not brave and false and jarring, save once, in the course of a long monologue over her evening sherry, when she said, wandering into honest sadness, “Bread and corned beef and coal and milk, and the risk of prison. I know who that would be. Mind you, I’d never say. But fancy him caring for her after all these years. Particularly when she treated him the way she did. But there, some people can steal a horse, and others aren’t allowed to look over the gate.” She could not be jealous of her sister Queenie, whom she loved so dearly, but for an instant she, who was vowed to mildness, could not help wondering why the tigress should be set above the lamb.

There began the worst part of my parents’ ordeal. Papa had to take Aunt Lily to Holloway Jail, where she saw her sister, to the local police court, where a preliminary charge relating to the purchase of poison was brought, to the inquest, to the local police court again when another and graver charge was preferred, again and again to her solicitors, and in the end to the Old Bailey; and he gave her hours of instruction, the purpose of which was to prepare her for her appearance in the witness-box, and to control the pious enthusiasm with which she was contemplating perjury as the new cross she must bear for Queenie. Meanwhile Mamma had to censor her costume every morning and get her off in time, and then be ready to receive her at the end of the long day, to force her upstairs to take off the cruel clothes of the day, the huge hat, the boned dresses, the corsets, and suggest she tell her story, since she must tell it, in bed, in one of those flannel nightdresses Mamma lent her because Queenie had not let her wear anything but lawn at the Laurels, in case the servants thought her common. Moreover, my parents were perpetually tormented by compunction lest by obeying their moral sense and befriending an unfortunate family they had exposed their children to experiences unsuitable for their years. Perhaps to be mistaken is a constant human condition; for I cannot imagine parents in that situation who would not feel a like sense of guilt; but I am sure that their self-reproach was quite unjustified. It would perhaps have been different if we had not read Shakespeare from our earliest years, but as it was, though we felt horror and pity, we also felt that this was the last act, and thank goodness, we were minor characters. Besides, we always thought that everything in the end was going to be all right.

Really, it worked out far better than could have been supposed. One evening I was sent up to Aunt Lily’s room after supper with a fresh hot-water bottle, and she detained me by saying, “Rose, I’d like to tell you something. I feel you’ll understand, you’re such an old-fashioned kiddy.” This, in her language, meant that I was old beyond my years. “It’s something you might like to remember when you’re grown up and got kiddies of your own. Your Papa is doing much more for me than he knows. The coppers wouldn’t be half so nice to me if he wasn’t there. They’re only nice because he’s a gentleman. You can’t tell me that coppers are like that all the time. Oh, they’re nice, on and off. But I once worked in a place that backed on a police station and I lived in, and you could hear everything. Why, they used their belts in the cells if anybody made trouble, particularly on Saturday night. Mind you, you couldn’t blame them, most of the people they had to do with were under the influence, and there isn’t anything more tiresome than people who are under the influence. But, take it from me, I wouldn’t be getting ‘Yes, madam,’ ‘This way, madam,’ and ‘If you please, madam,’ and never a push, and me on the wrong side this time, if it wasn’t for your dear Papa. But I don’t think he has the slightest idea. I don’t think either your Papa or Mamma have the slightest idea about half the things that go on in this wicked world.”

I do not suppose that most parents, even in these days, would actually hope that their little schoolgirl daughters should be told, by one who knows, how policemen belt drunks in their cells on Saturday nights; but I went from the room exalted by a vision. I saw a vast prison such as I had seen in a volume of drawings by Piranesi, and in its innumerable cells innumerable Dogberries were beating innumerable Borachios or better still Launcelot Gobbos, an action which I thought quite pardonable; I had often wondered how it came about that Shakespeare had as much gift for drawing comic characters as my sister Cordelia had for playing the violin. Through the black galleries that pierced this penal mass passed my father and mother, crowned with haloes, robed in light, on their way to succour more worthy prisoners than these, whom I had not time to invent, opening dungeon doors with a touch, annulling fetters with a glance, because they were innocent. I was, in fact, inspired to reach the heights of filial piety.

There were a few occasions when Aunt Lily was weak and pitiful; but they were not so trying as those on which she felt herself strong and gloried in her strength. Then her addiction to linguistic fantasy became more than we could bear. Nothing was called by its own name. Money was the ready, to lack it was to be hearts-of-oak, potatoes were murphies, a slice of pork was a cut from the jolly old city of York, when she put anything in her pocket it went into her sky-rocket. Like Japanese poetry, her conversation required to be carefully translated into the same language in which it was composed. But it differed from Japanese poetry in being far from brief. Each day she set her listeners a task equal to the translation of a long novel, which they could not refuse, because her darting glances sought for signs of inattention, which she modestly misread as signs of cold disapproval. She was always offering to leave us, and once she did. A letter came for her which was not the one she awaited, but which nevertheless gave her great pleasure, for it was from a friend she had known long ago, asking, just as if they had met last week, if there was anything she could do for her. “Why, it’s years and years and years since we met, we were just girls,” said Aunt Lily, quite absurdly, for she was not old, she was in her early thirties. “We both worked together in the same place, it was a nice place, I never would have left it, but they weren’t fair to Queenie, and she showed spirit, and they turned nasty, and we had to leave. But I’ve always been sorry, this girl and me were thick as thieves, always giggling together, and everybody made jokes about us, because she was Milly, and I was Lily. Milly and Lily, you see. Oh,” she said ecstatically, “there’s nothing like a friend.” She felt about for a tag about friendship, but was not quite successful. “They say a man’s best friend is his dog,” was all she could do, “but who wouldn’t rather just have a friend?” Now Milly was married to a man who had a nice little pub of his own down on the river and she begged Lily to come and stay with her; and so Lily did, announcing she had gone for four days. There began a delicious period when we all hardly spoke and practised for hours and felt as if we were on holiday.