The Fountain Overflows (51 page)

As we set foot on the path beside the poplar trees which led to the other station, a fist of wind struck each tree in turn, the golden leaves sprayed across the path, out to the muddy fields, Mamma reeled as if she herself had been hit, and she clutched her worthless hat as if it were precious. Cordelia and Rosamund closed in on her, and she leaned on them, and in the rear Mary and Richard Quin and I loitered to keep pace with her slowness, and noted a change. We had played, when we were younger, that the red brick buildings on the landscape before us, the hospital and the workhouse and the sewage farm, were tombs built round ogres that had been slain in battle and were too vast to bury. It had delighted us to discover, or rather to decide, that the long barracks of the workhouse enclosed the corpses of tall ogres, the bungalows and towers of the hospital and the sewage farm had been built round the squat ogres which were broader than they were long. Why did it give us no delight today to think on that happy nonsense? When we got near the dreadful little bluish-crimson brick house at the end of the poplar walk we could see that the familiar notice was pinned on the garden gate, we spoke aloud the demand we knew it would proclaim: “Wanted, a Lady Typewriter to take down letters from dictation in return for swimming lessons.” But these words, which always before had made us laugh until it hurt our middles, now seemed like any other dull public words, like “Please keep off the grass” or “This way to the goods yard.” Had it been necessary, then, before buildings could become a joke, that Papa should be at home and working in his study? It seemed so now. Mary fell behind, dragging her feet, as if we were not nearly grown up, as if we were still small.

We saw the white graves flowing over the hill from the cemetery beyond. Richard Quin pointed to them and muttered, “That is all that matters. Papa is not dead. Oh, Rose, I am so frightened of death.”

I asked, “Why? It cannot be so bad.”

“What? Not so bad,” he demanded, “to lie outside in the rain and cold?”

“One will not feel the rain and the cold,” I said.

“Well, at any rate live people will be warmer,” he said.

“But dying will be over in a moment,” I said. “Oh, poor Richard Quin, I am so sorry you are frightened about that, it must be horrid.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “I’m not frightened of it like that, if I had to die I could do it, I would not run away. But it’s”—he laughed shyly— “such an expensive business, such a trouble, so disagreeable.” Suddenly he shrugged his shoulders, looked ahead of him at Rosamund, and as if he knew she would understand what he meant better than I did, ran forward to her.

When we reached the other station, people were streaming out of it, flushed not only by the ruddy sunshine, but also with haste. They had to take their places in a line of brakes, and the drivers and conductors were crying out that they must hurry, the train had been late, and there was not a moment to spare. But we had all the day on our hands, it did not distress us when we mounted the train they had just left and it did not start for a long time. It did not matter when we got to Kew, it did not matter when we got home, Papa would not be there. We looked out at the encampment of white graves on the hill and no longer did it seem the army of crosses and broken pillars and obelisks that had routed the ogres lying encased in red brick on the plains behind; nor did we try to work out from the washing on the lines in the back yards the train passed (where it was always washing-day even on Saturday) which of the horrid little houses were inhabited by abnormally shaped families. “Nonsense, children, that is not a garment, that is a mat,” Mamma would say, trying to restore us to reason, though only as part of the game. “No, Mamma,” Richard Quin would assure her, “in that house one of the elder children is completely oval and fond of pink.” Now no games were worth playing, none at all. When we got out at the station we had not a look to spare for the reflective rustic derrick by the deserted factory, we went out into the street of villas in silence, as if we were quite another family.

Mary and I lagged behind, but Cordelia left the rest and turned back to stand in our path. She pointed to the villas on each side of us, and said, “You have always been angry with me for wanting to live in a street like this. But if we were the kind of family that lives here, Papa would not have gone away.”

The tears in her eyes did not move Mary. “The kind of family that lives here? Didn’t the Phillipses live in a house like these?”

It did no good. Cordelia drifted away from us, her eyes stricken, as if we had taken her last refuge away from her, she could not even fancy that somewhere else she would have been safe.

Kew Gardens was not what it had always been before. There was nothing there but grass and trees and plants and hothouses and museums, and gardeners sweeping up dead leaves, there was no cause for ecstasy. Without joy we walked about for a time, looking at the beds of Michaelmas daisies and outdoor chrysanthemums and late dahlias. You could see them a long way off, patches of brightness, beyond lawns of dark sullen winter grass, behind the meagre screen of shrubs that had more leaves lying on the wet earth round them than on their branches. We liked the flowers, but not much, and indeed they were much less beautiful than they were to become in later years. All of them then ran too much to a coarse reddish-purple, a maroon stained with magenta, which was miscalled wine-colour, and the indoor chrysanthemums suffered from a prevalence of muddy bronze. Mamma sharply cried out her disapproval of the worst of them, as if their colour was what ailed the world. Then we turned aside to walk among the trees which were scarlet and gold and silver except where the pines and holm-oaks were dark. Then we found ourselves going down Syon Vista, the broad grass avenue which runs alongside the narrow winding lake, and looks down towards the Thames and to the Duke of Northumberland’s battlemented palace, Syon House, on the other bank. Our father had walked here with us, six months before. Each of us drew apart from the rest, because of that memory, and we spread right across the wide walk. I kept my head up and my eyes open so that no gardener working among the groves on either side should look up and see that I was weeping.

Where was my father? He might be here. He might as well be in Kew Gardens as at any place that was not our home. Perhaps he was in the pagoda which we saw over the treetops to the south; on any one of its ten red balconies, under any of their blue roofs, he might be standing. Or he might be in one of the hothouses, immobile, perhaps, among the weightless, saw-toothed monotony of the great ferns. He might be across the river, sheltering within the arcades on the ground floor of Syon House. He might be in one of those twilit museums in the Gardens, where cross-sections of trees and plaster models of beetles swim in half-light behind the glass doors of the cupboards, under the glass lids of showcases, which give back the weak light weakly, and create a dusk where one might take a man for a shadow, a shadow for a man. I shut my eyes and pretended that my father was in any of these places, that he would be in all of them, that there were several of him and I would find them all. I would find him wherever he was, and if he wanted to reject me, that would be all right, if it gave him pleasure. The only thing that mattered was that he should be there to do something to me, it was of no importance what it was. But surely he would not reject me, for it was I whom he had loved the best. I had to smile at myself, for of course each of us was thinking that, with the exception of Mamma, who would be thinking only of how she had loved him.

Cordelia crossed the avenue to say in grieved tones, “Look at Richard Quin.”

Ahead of us was Mamma, her long black skirts trailing on the grass, her head wagging as she talked to Papa, and ahead of her were Rosamund and Richard Quin. He was running backwards, running lightly, though his face was grave, and juggling with three balls. Sometimes he stopped and threw a ball slowly to Rosamund, who sent it back to him. It was always a great pleasure for her, to play ball with him. A clumsiness which was the muscular equivalent of her stammering overcame her when she tried to play games; she dropped any ball sent to her at a normal speed, however hard she tried. So Richard Quin used sometimes to abandon his brilliant skill, and bowl to her gently, from a flat hand that hardly closed, and it was strange when the ball came so slowly, so very slowly through the air, and she sent it so slowly back to him, it was agreeable to watch them, it was how one might see the stars move through space, if one were great enough to watch the whole universe.

Cordelia said, “He should not have brought those balls. Not today.” She burst out wretchedly, “Oh, if only he could have gone to a public school. He is getting no bringing up at all. He thinks of nothing but silly games, not just cricket, and playing all those instruments without working at any of them. It is not fair on any of us.”

Perhaps my father was in the pagoda: high up, in the small round room that each floor must be, with a spiral staircase he would never tread again, as a hole at his feet, as a convolution in the ceiling overhead; standing quite still, vowed to stay there until he died, not looking out of the window, not doing anything, the hollows under his high cheekbones growing darker and darker. If he were going to do anything so absurd as live without me, he might do something as absurd as that.

Cordelia was annoyed because I did not answer. “All this,” she sighed, “is going to be so terribly hard on me. In a year or two it would have been all right.” She walked away, looking down on the ground and shaking her head, her hands folded behind her back.

Now we had reached the lake, and Mamma and the others had halted on the verge, but I ran past them, away from my pain, towards the end of the vista, into the face of the wind that was tearing the leaves from the chestnuts overhead. But Richard Quin ran faster and caught me up.

“Come back,” he said, “Mamma heard a siren in the distance, so we think it must be one o’clock, though we are not quite sure as it is Saturday, and the hothouses should be open.” In our clockless, watchless household, time was always deduced rather than told, often from premises less substantial than this. “So now they are wondering what to do, whether to go out and eat our sandwiches on the seats by the big pond, or to see the lapageria at once, as we are near it.”

Mamma and the others stood with their backs to the brown lake, beside a willow which was slowly shedding on the grass and on the waters its narrow lemon-yellow leaves. One leaf, turning round and round in the air, fell on the shoulder of Mamma’s dark jacket and stayed there, like the flash of a strange uniform. It was an opaque yellow, as if it were made of some thick and not-still living material, like leather. She said feebly, “What shall we do?” We had suffered another strange loss, like our games. Papa had never made plans for us as other fathers did, if there was anything to be done about school, or such holidays at the seaside as we ever had, Mamma had always to do it; and we children often had to choose for ourselves when most people would have thought us too young. We did not count this a hardship, because we enjoyed making up our minds. But now that Papa was gone, we could not make up our minds. Evidently just having him there had been a help.

Mamma said, “You should eat now, you are growing so fast, it is important that you should have meals at regular times. But the lapageria is near.”

“Let us go and see the lapageria,” said Mary. “You are tired, and it will mean less walking.” But it could be heard that she did not care.

“I would be walking up and down, wherever I was,” said Mamma, “I will not be able to rest, do not think of me.”

“It is more sensible to go and see the lapageria and walk less,” Cordelia said.

“But you children always like to eat your sandwiches by the pond,” said Mamma.

“Yes, but chiefly so as not to give anything to the black swans,” said Richard Quin. We had settled that the bad-tempered black Australian swans on the pond housed the souls of people who were horrible to Mamma when they came to ask for money, or who were rude to children, and we took pleasure in never giving them any of our bread and keeping it all for the nicer birds. “And don’t let’s bother about them today, they might feel pleased today because we are all so wretched.”

Yet nobody moved, we could not make up our minds.

Rosamund said, “Please, I would so much like to see the lapageria now.”

“Why, of course, I had forgotten,” said Mamma, “we came here because Rosamund had never seen it.”

It grows across a corner of the Temperate House where the roof is low, and you can really see it. The leaves are nothing much, like the leaves of a clematis, which is good, because you need only look at the flowers. They are rose-pink and might be made of wax. They are not very big, about as long as one’s little finger. The buds are folded into oblongs like neatly packed parcels to hold small Christmas presents, and when they open they are like bells; and there are not too many of them, they hang far apart on the stems, so that you can enjoy each one of them, but not too far apart, it does not seem skimpy. This is characteristic of the creeper, which does everything with a sense of measure. The flowers are bright pink, but not too bright; and they do not wait to fade on the vine, they drop when they are at their best, and they lie on the earth as clean-edged as if they were really made of wax. If you pick them up you see that special arrangements have been made to keep the colour from getting too bright, for the petals are covered with a very faint white network, which you cannot see at all from a distance, but which mutes the colour.

When Rosamund saw it she was so pleased that she could not speak at all, she was as silent as she had been all the first day we brought her to Kew.

“It shows that some things can be pretty and beautiful at the same time,” said Mamma. “Like Mendelssohn. The Violin Concerto.”

“Da-da-dah-da, da-dah-da, da-da-da-da-da-dah, da-da-daha-da-da, dah-ah, da-daha-da-da-dah,” we all sang. It was nice being in the Gardens when there was nobody else there at all.