The Magnificent Spinster (38 page)

But for the moment the four sipped infinitesimal glasses of sherry, while Erika and Frances heard the island news, and promised to look in on Nancy, who had before her marriage taught at Warren, so she and Frances were old friends.

As always when Frances came, there was a complete change in atmosphere. She was a highly charged presence, quite unconsciously a star who brought out Jane's homage and chivalry as perhaps no one else did. Lucy sometimes resented this. She didn't like to watch Jane being as deferential as she became when Frances was present. And something in Lucy obviously felt prickly when the conversation became intense. Yet she had to admit that Frances in her eighties was remarkable, still so involved in world affairs, still so caring, still on innumerable committees having to do with education all over the world.

It made Lucy feel in an odd way diminished, and silent. She had sensed the same atmosphere in Germany, as though Jane were not quite in the same league as Erika and Frances. She had certainly been invaluable through the years of negotiating to get the
Nachbarhaus
going, but she had not, Lucy had to admit, been at the center of power.

Here on the island, a tiny microcosm of a world, she was at the center of power, and Lucy sometimes wondered whether anyone really saw with what skill and tact that power was used, by means of how many small decisions and inummerable acts the atmosphere was created in which so many and such various people found rest and nourishment.

She was thinking these thoughts as she followed Erika and Jane back from the pool, where they had all had a glorious swim and were now hurrying back, late as usual for dinner, as it was after one. Then, as their animated voices preceded her, Erika saying how amazing Frances was, Lucy admonished herself not to be as defensive as she felt about Jane. For Jane was clearly both happy and at ease, and that, after all, was what mattered. On the island Jane flourished because here all her gifts could be used. Here she was
empowered
.

Nancy was striking the three-tiered Japanese gong on a long rope that announced every meal as they walked into the house.

“Ah,” Jane called out. “She's up and downstairs!”

“And high time,” Nancy laughed.

“We'll start without Sarah,” Jane told Annie, “she'll be along soon.”

Sarah slipped into her chair just as Jane was saying grace.
“Benedictus bendicant,”
she said with a smile. “Short because we are all starving.”

And for a moment all eyes were fixed on the haddock as Jane very carefully sliced and passed along one portion after another and Lucy passed the vegetables, summer squash, and mashed potatoes.

“John is having trouble with the stove,” Sarah explained. “I wanted to help him get it started. They've got a big pail of mussels to cook.”

Nancy looked around the table and said, “It has been a blessed time, a respite, but I'll go down right after lunch and hear all the news, especially what mussels taste like!”

“They've been doing very well,” Sarah said reassuringly. “Amy had a swim in the shallow end of the pool this morning.”

“I can't believe that baby is old enough to swim!” Frances said.

“She paddles like a little dog.” Nancy smiled across at Frances, who was eager to hear about all the children, and also about Nancy's job at the kindergarden.

“Even those little kids are aware of the war,” she was saying, “and it's hard to explain what is happening.”

“Awfully hard,” Frances said earnestly, “especially since we ourselves don't know what is happening, do we?”

“It's a horrible war,” Erika said, “horrible.”

“I feel sometimes it will never end … that we are being sucked into quicksand,” Nancy said.

“As indeed we are,” Frances was quick to agree. “We are busy destroying a civilization, for what? The chimera of communism!”

“Has a war ever been stopped by people rising up against it?” Nancy asked. “I mean after Kent State surely people must see that it's not possible, that something is cracking inside the country.”

“But how to end it? No government can afford to admit defeat, and we have five hundred thousand men now engaged,” Lucy said. “I really feel for Johnson these days.”

“He won't be re-elected, that's for sure,” Erika said.

“I wonder.” Frances was leaning forward in her chair, intensely absorbed by the conversation. “It is rare to change administrations in the middle of a war—some would think not possible—even after Kent State and all the violence of feeling in the colleges and universities.”

And so the discussion went on through dessert and coffee, until they parted to go and have naps and Sarah and Nancy to go down to the little house.

It was hard to keep quiet after the disturbing talk. Lucy and Jane, lying on their beds, did not feel able to relax for a while.

“What am I going to do without you?” Jane said, looking across at Lucy. “You always manage to pour oil on troubled waters.”

“Do I? I hardly said a word.”

“I know, but somehow when you are there it creates an island of peace even when the discussion gets hot. Isn't Frances amazing? She is just as intense and involved as she ever was.”

“Yes.” Lucy thought this over. “But so are you. And you never make one feel guilty and upset.”

Jane sat up. “That's it,” she said. “I never have admitted it, but you're right. It's that intensity. I always feel attacked by it. But,” she added, “it's wrong, for that is not what Frances intends, Lucy. That is not in her mind at all.”

“But that is sometimes her effect. Nancy looked so relaxed when we got back from the pool, but I saw how tense and upset she was at the end.”

“I'm not a very good lion tamer, am I?” Jane chuckled. “I wanted to change the subject, but I didn't know how.” She lay back then and crossed her arms under her head, looking up at the ceiling. “We can't shut out the world, Lucy. The island just has to be able to contain everything, I feel, and still give all these warriors a chance to rest.”

“You do manage that, you know.”

“The island does it.”

“Yes, but you hold so many threads in your hands, Jane. You hold it all together and make it work.”

Jane sighed. “Tomorrow's going to be a big day. We'd better have a rest if we can. I'm still all stirred up, I must confess.”

After tea Jane for once went off alone to the formal garden to do a little weeding and thinking. She was so rarely alone that it seemed a peculiar pleasure to get out tools and a basket and set to, thinking of Muff, for this garden had been her particular pride and pleasure. When a thrush began to sing, high up in a tall copper beech, and Jane answered him with as thrushlike a sound as she could muster, it seemed a perfect moment. She was so absorbed, her back bent over the flower bed, extricating the frail salpiglossis from an invasion of spreading weeds, that she did not hear footsteps on the grass.

“Hi!” It was Tom, she saw, as she straightened up. “Want a job?” she asked. “It's always a mystery to me why weeds are so much stronger than flowers!”

“I don't want a job,” he said, smiling at her, and Jane was amazed, as she looked up, at how tall he had grown in a year. “We've worked pretty hard on that boat of Sarah's, you know.”

He sat down on the bench and looked around, not at all self-conscious at watching Jane work; but having started, she was determined to finish at least the front so the border would look less ragged. “I'll just keep at it,” she murmured.

Then there was a silence and Jane sensed that maybe what Tom wanted was to talk about something. She really didn't want to stop, but after flinging a last bunch of weeds into the basket, she straightened up. “I guess I'll give my ancient back a rest and sit down a minute myself.” And so she did. “You'll be off to college before we know it, Tom. Do you remember when you were a kid how fiercely we played parcheesi one rainy day?”

“I hate losing,” he said, giving her a sidelong glance, but not amused. “I still do.”

“Well, I hear you're doing awfully well in school. You're not a loser now.”

“Oh school … that's nothing,” he said, rubbing his knee as though to rub out something there.

“What's on your mind, Tom?”

“I don't really know. That's the trouble. I can't seem to connect.”

“It must seem sometimes like a rather long journey ahead,” Jane ventured.

“It's not that. It's that I don't have the foggiest idea what I want to be or to do with my life. I don't have a destination if it's a journey, a life, I mean. You have to have some idea where you are going, don't you?”

Jane considered this for a moment. “I didn't have the foggiest idea either when I was your age. I found out only in college, I guess, that I wanted to be a teacher more than anything.”

“My parents are just too damned
good
!” he exploded then. “I'm tired of all the good deeds and everything. I would like to make a lot of money and not give it to the poor Africans! I'm sick and tired of worrying about conscientious objectors. We never have a meal in peace these days.” Then he added bitterly, “Everyone expects so much of me because I'm the oldest. Those brats are never off my neck!”

Jane couldn't help smiling at this outburst, it was so natural. Amy and Bobbie, the late arrivals, must have been hard to take. “It's no joke being the oldest,” she said. Then she was thoughtful, looking out through the trees at the field and the brilliant sunlight there. “Would you like to go away to school, I mean for these last two years? Would that help?” Then she laughed.

“What's funny?”

“Not you, my dear. I was just remembering that Yeats poem about the cat and tame hare who he says ‘eat at my hearth and sleep there,' and he prays to God ‘to ease his great responsibilities.' It's amusing because cat and tame hare are hardly great responsibilities.… I am not making sense,” she said. But she was still amused by what had flown into her head, a poem Marian had often quoted with a twinkle in her eye whenever things got to be overwhelming at school. “What about a last two years away from home?”

“My parents would say we can't afford it,” he said shortly.

“I have an idea you might get a scholarship.”

“Much too late for that. School starts in six weeks!” Tom was sitting with his head bent, closed in, Jane felt.

“So you've got to find some way to come to terms with family life, I guess … and that cat, Bobbie, and that tame hare, Amy.”

“Animals would be a lot easier,” he said. “Oh well … I'm a hopeless person. “But I just don't see that we are responsible for the whole world.”

“I sometimes get overwhelmed, too,” Jane confessed. “When the talk gets so intense about the war, I just want to run away and be left alone.”

“You do?” Tom looked up, relief on his face. “I didn't think anyone but me felt like that.”

“Is it cowardice, do you suppose? Or is it just that a human being can contain only so much pain?” She asked herself as much as him.

“I don't know. You're supposed to be able to handle it if you are a Quaker. But that's where I don't connect.”

“Well, we're not alone, Tom, that's for sure. Your parents are such extraordinary human beings, they always make me feel ashamed. Most people can't take a great deal of reality, as someone said the other day. But there's your mother with a large family and a job and she still seems able to open the door to every need.”

“She does try,” Tom granted, “but I almost never see her to talk to the way we are talking … and my dad … well, he needs a lot of time to think, you know.”

“We just have to accept—accept each person as he or she is,” Jane said, looking out to the bay, “and that, I guess, is the hardest thing of all.” Then she turned to Tom. “I have to swallow quite a lot of things I don't like about my own family, even here on the island. Most people have no idea how much patience and tolerance is needed in a large family on a day to day basis. You know, Tom, Alix and I were the youngest of five girls, and I expect our sisters sometimes got pretty irritated with us!”

“But you had Snooker,” Tom said, “I mean you were not on their necks all the time, were you?”

“Yes, we had Snooker and she was the one who really brought us up—you are quite right. It's much harder for you.”

“I was not cut out to be a governess,” Tom said, smiling now. Somehow he was feeling a lot better. He got up and stretched. “Want to see if I can beat you at croquet?”

Jane looked at her watch. “If we play hard and fast,” she said, “I can just make it. It's really time to go down to the pool and see what's going on there.”

“Even you are caught, aren't you?”

“I don't feel caught,” Jane answered, “because I suppose everything I have to do I want to do.”

“And nothing I have to do I want to do,” Tom said wryly, daring her now.

“Except maybe to beat me at croquet?” Jane teased. “Let's give it a try!”

It was one of those difficult choices she had talked about with Lucy, but Jane was not sorry that she decided to give Tom what he wanted even though they would be late for lunch. They played a mean game, with only an occasional shout of victory or a groan and the sharp click of mallet on wood. Tom had met his match, and much to his astonishment, Jane won.

“You're a wizard, Aunt Reedy,” he said, throwing down his mallet.

“I've been practicing for about seventy years,” she said, laughing at him. “Anyway, win or lose, it's a fine way to let off steam, isn't it?”

“Yes, but an even better way was to talk. Thanks, Aunt Reedy,” he said, as they walked down the field to the bathhouses in a congenial silence.

We did have an extraordinarily carefree childhood, Jane was thinking, and that was—Tom had hit the nail on the head—in part because of the always available Snooker. Not until World War One did the world break in on the perfect heaven, and by then they were grown-up, she and Alix. Tom was far more grown-up now than perhaps she had ever been. Out of these thoughts she said, “You're such a great person already, Tom. It took me years to grow to where you are now.”