Authors: Margaret Drabble
It was possible, of course, that the staff at Branston House had been a peculiarly dissatisfied lot. Rose’s parents had never been very agreeable to work for. The gardener alone had any enthusiasm for the place, and carried on resolutely with his tasks, coming into the kitchen for a cup of tea every now and then. Rose would have liked him, had she not been so frightened of him: she liked to watch him doing things, digging, planting, trimming, and would hang around, afraid all the time that she was in the way. He, for his part, would have liked to talk to her, if she hadn’t been such a sheepish little thing. But whenever he spoke to her, she started and would then run off, as though afraid to be noticed. When she was older, a mooching adolescent, she would pluck up more courage, and would ask to be allowed to help: he didn’t really like imparting his mysteries, having a deep suspicion of Mr Bryanston’s horticultural notions, but he felt sorry for Rose, recognizing that she was hardly on her father’s side, and would invent little jobs for her to do. Once he came across her in the stables with her pressed-flower book: she showed him, politely. ‘Ah, they’re weeds,’ he said, which was all he could think of to say, but he was impressed nevertheless, and used to look things out for her occasionally. She, by this time, knew as much about it as he did, and had to be kind to him when he produced, triumphantly, some specimen she had collected years before. Oh thank you, Mr Cooke, she would say, how nice. They both liked these almost mute transactions.
But apart from the gardener, the rest of the staff found their chief pleasure in grumbling. They did not even aspire to the mock, paid cheerfulness which some personal servants consider their duty: they soon found out it was not called for. There were times when Rose, at her lowest, would admit to herself that she would willingly, like a despot, have paid for a little kindness, for a little interest, a little flattery. Some of the most humiliating recollections of her life were
memories of having tried to bully Noreen into showing a little tenderness. (Later, she thought it had been a blessing, not to have been offered substitutes. She had preserved at least the ability to distinguish.) Only once or twice in her life had she ever submitted to a servile, professional emotional approach: she recalled one of them now, with amusement and embarrassment, as she watched Christopher across the room, talking to her father about strikes and Industrial Relations, for Christopher had been there at the time, it had been just after the birth of Maria, at home in her own bed. Her cousin Sonia, who still preserved a certain affection for herself and Christopher, related largely to the gallant way in which Christopher had handled her on Folkstone quay, had sent them as a gift for the baby a large maternity nurse with a little dog, to look after mother and child for a fortnight. Rose had been horrified, for there was no room in her little house to establish so large a lady, and no possibility of being able to provide for her the standard of living to which she was accustomed, but she had been too weak and too polite to send her away again, and had struggled bravely, from her bed, to placate the nurse and Christopher and the dog and the larger two children, saying to herself, please God, please God let her go away soon and let me hold my baby.
The nurse, to be fair to her, had accepted the amazing domestic scene with the sang-froid of one constantly parcelled from house to house, and said cheerily from time to time that she had seen stranger sights in her time; she did her best to cope, unlike Christopher, who lost his temper and sulked. He did not want this strange woman in his house, he kept saying crossly and in earshot: she filled the place up, one couldn’t turn round without banging into her, she was a complete waste of money. I’m not paying, said Rose. No, but she eats, doesn’t she, said Christopher, you should see what she eats. Don’t be such a mean bugger, said Rose, and burst into tears, weak from childbirth, from the endless reminiscences of Nurse Williams, from the frustration of not being allowed to hold her own new lovely daughter except to feed her – and even when she was feeding her, Nurse Williams would be there, sitting in the rocking-chair, telling her how to do it (as though she hadn’t reared two on her own
already), telling her about impacted breast ulcers, asking her questions, and then telling her not to talk because of upsetting the flow of the milk when she struggled, occasionally, to answer. It had, to Rose, been a beautiful illustration of what people suffer at the hands of their own laziness. The interchange about Nurse Williams eating too much had been overheard by Nurse, who had been hanging around outside the bedroom door: she burst in, to make it clear that she had overheard, and found Rose weeping. Now then, now then, Mr Vassiliou, she said, what are you doing, upsetting a nursing mother, we can’t have that, can we: and Christopher had sworn, and said he was leaving the house if he couldn’t have a chat to his own wife in his own bedroom without strange women barging in, and had then gone out.
At his departure Rose had continued to weep, largely through fury at being left alone with Nurse Williams, but Nurse, in some quite extraordinary manner, so utterly professional and capable that Rose would never afterwards quite credit that such subtlety had come out of such a hulk, had managed to persuade Rose that it was rage with her husband that had made her cry, that men were like that, that husbands were really incredibly selfish, notoriously ill-mannered, that all wives were long suffering, that she, Nurse Williams, had seen it all, and that Rose had every right to weep her heart out when treated so badly by so boorish a man. And Rose, to her utter amazement, found herself as though hypnotized, reaching out her arms to this large woman, and being clasped to her uniformed bosom, where she wept like a child: she, who never touched except those she loved, she, who had never been allowed to weep, had never wept on a maternal bosom in her life. When Christopher came back, finally, drunk, she had told him about it, giggling, at midnight, describing the starched and glossy swell that had met her hot cheek, and the sense of corruption that had overcome her as she succumbed to so gross and yet so subtly manipulated a manoeuvre. We’ll get rid of her, said Christopher. No, no, don’t do that. She is going soon anyway, said Rose, cutting her toe nails, thinking how nice it was to be able to reach them so easily again, now that the baby was born. Put up with her, Christopher, please put up with her.
She was on bad terms with Christopher, at this stage in her marriage, and all the insults that Nurse Williams could have thought to heap upon him, as a representative of the race of husbands, would probably have fallen short of the lurid truth, but nevertheless she felt tenderly towards him, for a day or two, tenderly, for having betrayed him in a nurse’s arms.
She smiled to herself, remembering this. Christopher, bored by her father, caught the smile, and said, ‘What are you laughing at?’
‘I’m not laughing,’ said Rose, ‘I was just remembering Nurse Williams. I don’t know why. And how glorious it was when she left.’
‘Why on earth were you thinking of her?’ said Christopher, and Rose, whose thought processes had been in fact quite different, suddenly wondered if she had perhaps remembered that incident because then, as now, she had felt a similar softening, at a time when she had no cause to feel it. She ought, perhaps, at this moment, to be at the depth of her outrage and indignation: he had behaved appallingly, dreadfully, irresponsibly: and yet, ever since meeting him in the garden, she had been feeling (in the peace of victory) a slight forgiveness.
‘I don’t know,’ said Rose, untruthfully. ‘Wasn’t she amazing? Do you remember that horrid little dog? Nurse Williams,’ she said, turning to Simon, ‘Nurse Williams was this woman who came round when Maria was born, I can’t tell you what a strange person she was …’
And she continued to describe Nurse Williams, and Simon was able to contribute reminiscences of his own, about a maternity nurse that Julie had engaged, in all seriousness, for her first child, though not for subsequent births, for she had subsequently found that Hampstead, unlike Newcastle, did not consider such adjuncts either necessary or chic, and had thereafter relied on the Nappy Service, a baby-sitting agency, the local clinic, a useless au pair girl, and a tame family doctor. Mr Bryanston listened to these domestic anecdotes with some impatience, though he tried to smile at the story of the day when Nurse Williams tried to air the baby clothes in the oven and forgot about them: he made a few attempts to bring the subject more within his range, but finally gave up, rather sadly, to let
the young people talk. Rose noticed his face fall, as he lapsed into silence, and was surprised to note that she had even noticed: he must have been enjoying his talk with Christopher and Simon, he must have been thinking that he was making a good impression, he could not like the suspicion that they were relieved to turn from him to Rose. This attempt at insight startled Rose: she could not remember that she had ever seen him as a separate person before, and although it was not surprising that she should do so now, for the first time, after so long an absence, it nevertheless gave her a faint shock, a shock which was intensified and made distinct when he rose to his feet (a small elevation, it is true, what a little man he was, and he seemed to be shrinking) and said, ‘Well, I’d better get to bed. Can’t sit up all night.’ He said this in a tone of deep dissatisfaction, locking his hands behind his back, rocking on his feet, staring at them all nastily, and Rose remembered that these were the very words, unchanged, identical, with which he had announced his departure on every evening that she had ever spent with him: it had always enraged her, the malignant gloom with which he would survey the room he was about to leave, the suggestion of accusation towards whoever else were there, as though they had been forcing him to stay up against his will, the note of command, which implied that everybody else had better follow suit immediately and do likewise. In fact, Mrs Bryanston, when she had been at home, had always risen at this announcement and silently left the room: so, too, had Rose, until one day in her last year at school she thought that she would try to sit it out. So she remained seated, her head bent over her book. ‘Aren’t you coming?’ her father had said, surprised, and Rose had shaken her head, without looking up. And that had been that. She always stayed up after that, on principle, and her father’s only gesture of protest was to switch off all the lights in the room except the one on the table where she sat. But he continued, every night, to repeat his parting shot; and Rose had continued, every night, to tremble and shiver inwardly as she heard the repeated words. And suddenly, this evening, after so many years, hearing them yet again, unchanged, it occurred to her that he said them possibly not out of ill will, but because he could not think of any other
way to leave the room. A thousand times one can suffer and resent, but the thousand and first time monotony, however staunchly resisted, becomes endearing after all. Really, thought Rose, whatever has come over me, I sit here forgiving them all, have I been wrong all this time, or is it that I have got tired of resentment?
They all got up to wish him goodnight. When he had left the room, Rose looked at the other two, who were already, in the relief of his departure, pouring themselves another drink, and saw that it would be the easiest thing in the world to settle down to an evening of tears, drink, remorse and confessions. Perhaps, she thought, I could even get Simon to talk. And the thought of it, the phrasing of it to herself in those terms, made her shy away out of a delicacy she could not understand or name: she had gone far enough, there was no farther she could safely go. So she too, like her father, declared her intention of going to bed. And went. She had a sense of some appointment more significant than confession, which awaited her upstairs.
On the way up the stairs – a wide, curved staircase with wooden treads, and an iron handrail, the house’s best feature, which she had rarely ascended as a child, preferring the back staircase – she remembered the last night she had spent in the house. It had been the night before her departure to France with Sonia. Twenty years old she had been, and she had been mad with love and grief. Out of her mind with sorrow. She tucked the fact away into a little shelf of her mind. She would get it out later and have a look at it. It might afford some interest. Meanwhile, it was Noreen that she had on her mind.
She was to sleep in Noreen’s bedroom. As a child, she had not been allowed in Noreen’s bedroom: it had been like the staff room at school, out of bounds, mysterious, and admission to it signified some signal honour or disaster. Her curiosity about it had become so intense that once, when she knew Noreen had gone down to the village, she had crept in to have a look round. Everything here had seemed so significant, so concealed: the pale-green silky watery bedcover, the sausage-shaped cushion on the bed, the ruched nightie-holder, the green basketwork chair, the green china dog on the mantelpiece, the framed print of a vase of flowers on the wall. She
had stayed there only a moment, but her attraction towards it had become so strong that she made a habit of going there whenever she knew Noreen to be safely out of the house: her boldness had increased with her sense of security, and she had taken to opening drawers and gazing in awe at the neatly folded underwear, the silky blouses, the handkerchiefs, inhaling passionately the dry smell of lavender, the smell of moth balls, the indescribable cotton salty hygienic womanly smell of sanitary towels, which lay in a neat blue shoe bag in the bottom drawer.
Outside the door, now, she paused, standing there on the landing, she paused: recollection assailed her so sharply that she shivered, her feet would not move, she felt that a step more would take her across the threshold of time itself, into the dreadful past.
The smell was in her nostrils: threatening, attractive, illicit. The green of the basketwork chair assembled itself in her mind: pale, washed, thirties green, and yes, on the green curved edges there were woven scallops, and they were faintly touched, yes, that was it, they were touched with a fading, much rubbed, washed-out gilt. Basket scallops. It was too much to fear that the chair might yet be there: it must have been relegated years ago to an attic, or given away to a maid. Eau de nil, faint and poisonous, a colour that suggested in itself a lethargic indolence, a languorous repose, almost voluptuous, and yet which, in conjunction with Noreen herself, had managed to exhale self-denial, rigour, restraint. It swam before her, shaping itself now into a chair, now into the bedcover, now into the china dog with popping eyes (a powder container, the dog had been, but Noreen wore no powder) now into a dressing-gown of limp loose woven shiny fabric, embroidered in chain-stitch lilies, lilies which had lain, one each, on each of Noreen’s flat sulking breasts, breasts too flat to fall, which had yet fallen, only to rise again, just in time, almost elegantly, on either side, beneath the cross-over sash tied wrap, below the wide lapels. And there stood Noreen, within the green envelope, herself, as she had been twenty years and more ago, a woman of the thirties, herself in her thirties, her permed hair looking like an advertisement in a fly-blown neglected shop window, her lips thin and disapproving, and yet, like her bosom, not quite
unattractive, her cold eyes and large high nose with a look of a goose about them, though why one should associate that particular association of features with a goose, that most unanthropomorphic and vicious creature, Rose did not know. Frightened, a little now, by the vividness of the ghost she had summoned, looking with some surprise at the exact spot, half-way down the corridor, her feet firmly on the Turkey carpet, where she had paused to meet it, as though she had expected the present to have dissolved from around her, she thought, almost, of going downstairs again, on the pretext of fetching a book to read; but instead went on, the few yards more, past the door of the room where the children were sleeping, and opened the door of Noreen’s room itself.