Beth was glad to be back. She came home at tea-time and Tory was waiting for her with Stevie so brushed and tidied that it was almost a reproach. Tory was full of the story of how she had managed to despatch Prudence to the cinema with Geoffrey, and laughed and spoke in a sort of French, above Stevie’s head, explaining how she had contrived it.
Prudence was in the kitchen cutting up lights for the cats. From time to time she rushed to the sink and retched, her face drawn, her eyes watering, and then bravely returned to the job. The cats sniffed delicately at the dreadful stench, their nostrils quivering, as at the bouquet of wine. When the dish was put down, Guilbert hunched up over it, chewing, while Yvette sat behind like a squaw, until he was filled. This always annoyed Beth, whose feminism was kindled at the sight.
‘It is only their instinct,’ Prudence would point out, for nothing would make the queen come forward until her mate had eaten. Beth had for a long time distrusted the nature of all those instincts which work so much for the benefit of the other sex, and she would shut Guilbert outside in the garden and try to make Yvette betray her nature by coaxing her with little scraps of meat.
She would never move. Only her eyes changed, the blue turning slowly to crimson.
Now Guilbert stopped eating, dug his claws into the kitchen rug, stretched, yawned, and walked away. Very humbly, gratefully, Yvette came up to get the leavings.
After tea Beth took the two thousand words she had written in the train and laid them on the top of the pile of papers on her desk. She dared not read them, for it seemed to her now – tired from her journey – that scars, great fissures broke up and marred her work and no genius was there to rivet it together.
She stood for a moment alone in the room. Tory had gone. Stevie pushed her doll’s pram along the garden path. Beth watched her from the window, watched how she moved the doll gently on the pillow, murmuring busily to her, adjusted the torn hood, all her interest and emotion centred there in the pram, an absorption Beth had so often noticed in other mothers, never felt in herself. ‘But it was through no fault of my own,’ she thought, her mind reverting to those cracked and riven chapters of hers; all of her books the same, none sound as a bell, but giving off little jarring reverberations now here, now there, so that she herself could say as she turned the pages (knowing as surely as if the type had slipped and spilt): ‘Here I nursed Prudence with bronchitis; here Stevie was ill for a month; here I put down my pen to bottle fruit (which fermented); there Mrs Flitcroft forsook me.’
Round and round the little garden Stevie went, between the old fruit trees which in autumn dropped twisted, pock-marked apples into the grass. Through the ferns, Guilbert wove his way, stealthily, supple, moisture on his whiskers, his eyes -diamond-shaped, a great jungle animal now, his lean sides brushed by dense foliage.
Beth rapped with her knuckles at the window. ‘Bed, Stevie!’ she called. ‘It’s time for bed.’
After tea, Mrs Bracey felt an aching in her shoulders and Maisie had to leave the washing-up to rub in oil.
‘The left side!’ her mother said. ‘The left side more especially.’
‘Well, that’s the window side. You must be in a draught. You’d be far better moved away against the other wall.’
‘Or downstairs,’ her mother suggested, ‘leaving this room nice and vacant.’
Maisie shrugged.
Nothing but the threat of death would have persuaded Mrs Bracey to move now. She would not read even, except in the most desultory fashion, nor take her eyes from the window for long. Last night, drowsing, she had been aware suddenly of footsteps stopping outside, of low voices, and she had drawn the curtain along a very little, leaning as close to the pane as she could and, waiting there, shivering, had been delighted to see Lily Wilson emerge from the shadows of the houses walking with a French sailor. Just as they had come to the porch of Lily’s home Maisie had brought in the cocoa. Some instinct had made Mrs Bracey drop the curtain and cover her prying; and she sat there sipping, and shivering with frustration.
By the time she was left alone the street was empty, but she did see Lily going to the front window and peeping out between the lace curtains. Lily had not known she was being watched, nor that at that moment her reputation was slipping into that no-man’s-land from which one can fall, with so little warning, from respectable widowhood to being the local harlot: and, as it was in Mrs Bracey’s imagination that the first move towards that decline was made, the descent, no doubt, would be swift as well as untraceable (for gossip is a fluid, intangible thing). Scandals must have their beginnings somewhere, and the soil of Mrs Bracey’s imagination was so fertile that often there seed and flower were one and the same thing.
Peacefully, she let her mind seethe and ferment, relaxed as she did so, and Maisie kneading her oily shoulders.
Beth had put Allegra away in her desk and now tried hard to forget her. She staved her off all the while she was bathing Stevie, and later, when Stevie sat up in bed eating a fruit-salad, Beth told her a story, so determined was she that, beginning with this evening, she would be a good mother. She sat at Stevie’s little dressing-table, dreamily reciting, and brushing her own hair as she did so.
‘. . . And as she sewed, the queen pricked her finger and a drop of blood fell on the snow-white cloth . . .’
Beth thought of her own mother who had so many times told her this story, and many others besides. Nothing ever spoils the first enchantment, she decided. No overlay of vulgarity from Walt Disney, no sicklying o’er from the Children’s Hour ever can penetrate to the heart of the first experience of poetry, of cruelty, of beauty. I remember it now with my vivid child’s mind, the first heart-catching magic – the golden key lying on the glass table, the castle enclosed by briars; and then words meaning more than they mean in after-life. ‘The King sits in Dunfermline town drinking the blude-red wine,’ and ‘Yestr’een the Queen had four Maries, The night she’ll hae but three; There was Marie Seton and Marie Beaton, And Marie Carmichael and me.’
‘Go on,’ said Stevie, spooning up juice.
Beth brushed the hair from her temples.
‘Eat the fruit, dear.’ She watched her through the glass. ‘But the huntsman so loved Snow White that he had not the heart to kill her, and led her deeper into the forest . . .’
‘I suppose you loved this story when you were a little girl,’ said Stevie condescendingly.
‘Yes, but darling, don’t interrupt . . . That night when the old Queen looked into her mirror . . .’
‘You can leave that bit out,’ Stevie said. ‘I don’t like it.’
‘Leave it out!’ Beth cried. Leave out those sinister reverberations! ‘If I am to tell the story I must tell it as it is.’
‘All right,’ Stevie said quickly. She took a mouthful of chopped apple and began to munch, her eyes turned once more upon her mother.
‘Blink your eyes, dear,’ Beth said, seeing them unfocused. Blinking and crunching, Stevie waited. A thunderous darkness lay over the forest scene which Beth described, as the story moved on with composed horror. Stevie finished her fruit and laid the dish aside. Sitting up in bed, looking at her mother through the mirror, her eyes were stretched wide, her mouth loosely open.
‘But as they carried her down the steep path in her glass coffin they stumbled on a rock and the piece of poisoned apple fell out of her cheek.’
‘No more!’ Stevie suddenly screamed. ‘Stop it! Please stop!’
Beth dropped the hairbrush and turned round.
‘Don’t go on!’ Stevie shrieked, beginning to thrash about in bed.
‘What is wrong?’ Beth asked her, and bunched her up in her arms, trying to soothe her.
‘I shall dream about it. I know I shall dream about it.’
‘But it all ended happily, if only you would let me finish.’
‘I don’t want another word even. It isn’t a nice story. A sensible mother wouldn’t tell her children stories like that.’
‘Well, I won’t ever again. Now stop crying.’
‘I can’t. When I start a thing I can’t ever stop until I’ve finished. I never can.’
‘What is the matter?’ Robert asked, putting his head round the door. ‘Stevie, pull yourself together. Let us at least hear ourselves speaking.’
‘My mother frightened me. She’s been trying to frighten me. She made my heart beat.’
‘Well, really . . .!’ Beth began.
‘All right, Stevie,’ Robert said, in his nice, kind, calm, doctor’s voice. To Beth he murmured, ‘Leave her to me. I’ll manage her.’
‘Good night, Stevie,’ Beth said politely.
Going downstairs she could not see that she had done anything wrong, could only assure herself that children nowadays are too coddled. Everything was round the wrong way. In the days when she had been a little girl, the horrors were in the story-books (Sister Anne! Sister Anne!) and the outside world was cosy: now, the horrors were real, and, to compensate, the child’s imagination must be soothed and cosseted with innocent bread-and-milk.
She took Allegra out of the desk again and turned the pages, altering a word here, a word there. No good had come out of the last hour except that her hair had had a good brushing.
Bertram was brought down to spending the evening with Mrs Bracey. He would not try Tory’s door again. Mrs Bracey was in two minds: whether to feel pleased or exasperated. While he was there she could not peek out of the window to see what Lily Wilson might be doing; on the other hand, Bertram’s company was invigorating and lively. She relished his great sea-faring lies: how, in the moonlight, he had mistaken sea cows for mermaids; how he and many of his crew had watched the sunset over the Pacific form into a vast crucifixion scene, the oddly contorted violet clouds against the blood-red, and eastwards the sky a clear pistachio with one pale star. A premonition, Bertram insisted, since that night one of the crew fell ill of yellow fever. The world came very close to Mrs Bracey as she listened to his descriptions. Sometimes, he told her, diamonds were set in the living flesh, or ears weighted to the shoulders and the skin slashed and rubbed with dung for beauty. In one place, the cold might be so intense that the horses’ breath froze solid as it left their nostrils, falling in strange shapes upon the iron roads and breaking there, while only a day’s journey away the moon slowly cooled the burning desert sand. The sheikh, folding back his mosque-embroidered sleeve, touched a scorpion’s bite with the agate of his ring, the pain vanishing at once.
‘I never went there,’ Mrs Bracey thought. ‘I never went any-where. I just stayed here at the harbour all my life, and, just as my eyes first focused on that scene, so they will close upon it.’
Bertram was discussing food with her (how cantaloups were fed with arak until a slice would intoxicate a man, how sucking-pigs were stuffed with truffles and melon-flowers crystallised and filled with burnt cream) when Maisie came in with a jug of cocoa and a plate of Marie biscuits.
As soon as Bertram went Mrs Bracey pulled the curtains aside, but there was nothing to be seen.
‘There’s a button off this jacket,’ Robert said as he undressed.
Beth was in bed already, lying there with her eyes closed.
‘Remind me in the morning,’ she murmured. She heard him taking money and keys from his pockets.
‘I wonder how Prue got on with young Geoffrey?’ Beth continued. ‘What on earth can they have to talk about? For they have nothing in common. Was the stew all right?’
‘Very nice.’
‘You managed to warm it up?’
‘Tory did.’
‘That was thoughtful of her. And did Prue say anything about her evening out?’
‘Not a word. She came in in a state of excited hostility, I thought, and then calmed down and drank a cup of tea and went to bed.’
Beth sighed. ‘And now Tory says she is thinking of going away.’ The relevance of this was that it was the last straw.
‘Oh, yes?’ Robert said casually, as if trying to summon interest for the sake of courtesy.
‘She said at tea-time that she couldn’t bear the thought of another winter here. I shall miss her so very much that, even if it is for her good, I hope it won’t happen. It seemed so lovely when she came to live here, and, even before that, I looked forward enormously to the summer when she came on holidays. If she goes away now there won’t be that, even, for she will sell the house, she says. If she and Edward come to stay with us it won’t be at all the same.’
He contemplated the idea of Tory under the same roof. ‘Aren’t you rather leaping ahead?’ he asked. ‘I can’t seem to find a collar for the morning.’
‘Top right-hand drawer.’ Beth opened her eyes and closed them again. ‘Tory’s so impulsive,’ she resumed. ‘When she was a young girl she used to write letters to actors . . .’
‘What has that to do with it?’
‘And she was always in trouble at school. I remember when she cut off one of her plaits – and she had such lovely hair. She wanted it bobbed, d’you see, and her mother said not on any account. So she snipped it off herself in the school train and threw the plait into some bushes beside the railway lines and when she arrived at the school she said a strange man had cut it off at the station. The headmistress called in the police and Tory told one lie after another until they wore her out and she confessed. She was nearly expelled, but they had to cut off her other plait to match, so she did have her way. She was always so . . .’
‘You speak of her as if she is dead,’ Robert suddenly interrupted.
‘It’s just that I can’t bear for her to go away,’ Beth said pathetically. She lay there imagining life without Tory.
When Robert got into bed, he lay there and imagined the same, but for much longer.