Tea with Mr. Rochester

School was an unpleasing Victorian building, the colour of carbolic disinfectant, with a pseudo tower perched on top of it, a shrubbery of laurels and rhododendrons, and asphalt tennis courts. Prissy knew she would hate it.

That first afternoon they had tea in Miss Pinsett’s study, because Aunt Athene had brought Prissy, and she was not the kind of person to be sent away without tea. Nor was she the kind of person to pay Miss Pinsett the deference that Prissy felt was due to a headmistress. She put her elbows on the table and held her cup between both hands, not bothering at all to be gracious or to say anything clever. Her hair was done in two unfashionable gold shells over her ears and a veil floated from her absurd little hat. Miss Pinsett, in her grey coat and skirt and white frilled shirt, looked very neat, like a prim zinnia near an untidy rose. Their voices were different, too. Aunt Athene talked in a rose’s voice, a yellow tea-­rose’s, and Miss Pinsett in a zinnia’s, crisp and clipped.

Presently Aunt Athene put down her cup and wagged her left forefinger at Miss Pinsett.

‘Not too many mathematics, Miss Pinsett, but as much music as possible. I think music is the most important thing in life.’

‘But, shurly . . .’ began Miss Pinsett.

‘Yes, yes!’ said Aunt Athene, ‘when all else fails, there is still music. What consolation has algebra ever been to a broken heart?’

The diamond in her ring welled up with light that flashed like a star and fell as she moved her hand to adjust the little hat. There was a faint pink smudge on the tea-­cup where her lips had touched it—Prissy hoped Miss Pinsett wouldn’t notice—but the rock-­cakes and the fish-­paste sandwiches had been left undisturbed. Prissy was too miserable to eat, and Aunt Athene never did, anyway.

‘Good-­bye, chérie. You had better run away to the other girls now, while I talk to Miss Pinsett.’

‘Shurly, shurly, Priscilla is not going to cry.’

Aunt Athene made a funny little face that said as plain as plain to Prissy, but not to Miss Pinsett—‘Isn’t she an old idiot?’

‘Cry?’ said Aunt Athene, raising her gold eyebrows. ‘Prissy has Spanish blood. She is as proud as Lucifer, and as detached as . . . as a fish. Believe me, Miss Pinsett, I shouldn’t care to look into the notebook marked “Private” that she sums us all up in. No doubt you’ll figure in it, too. Oh! you’ll have a chiel amang you taking notes.’ She laughed her four glassy notes—so pretty, so heartless.

Aunt Athene had her own cruel way of being kind. She had saved the situation by making one quite thankful to see the back of her. How did she know about the notebook?

Miss Pinsett rang the bell and handed Prissy over to the school matron. It was the last she was to see for a long time of the study with its Axminster carpet and Medici prints and rows of encyclopædias.

Aunt Athene’s gardenia scent seemed to follow her out into the hall.

‘Was that lady your mother, dear?’ asked Matron.

‘My mother is dead. It was one of my aunts.’

‘Aren’t you a lucky girl to have an auntie with such luffly hair! Pure gyold!’ bubbled Matron, wiping her mouth. Gush, thought Prissy. It made her feel as stiff as a poker . . . quite hard and cold.

Prissy discovered that one was too tired at school even to dream. No sooner was one’s head on the pillow, no sooner, it seemed, had the gargling and hairbrushing ceased and the cubicle curtains been rattled back, than the rising-­bell clanged rudely and noisily in the corridors. One’s spine ached where it had bridged the sag in the middle of the mattress. A sharp peppermint smell of toothpaste in the dormitory mingled with the smell of burnt toast coming up from below.

But the worst thing was that there wasn’t a moment of the day to play ball by oneself. She had ‘played ball’ ever since she was nine years old. She could not ‘make up’ without her ball. She needed solitude and secrecy and the rhythm of the ball’s being bounced on a mossy path to spin out of herself an imaginary world and people it with characters as real as any of flesh and blood.

It was so safe (much safer than hours spent with pencil and paper, which might have led to inquiries); because no one could guess what was happening. If one came in looking rather pale and mad, with smudges under one’s eyes, they might say one was a queer little fish and had been overdoing it out there alone in the garden, they might give one hot milk and send one to bed; but they couldn’t know. Not even Aunt Athene, with her piercing look, could ever catch a glimpse of that other world.

All the same, said Prissy to herself, thinking of the holidays, one must watch out for Aunt Athene. It was queer about that notebook. Not that she would ever look at anything marked ‘Private’. Oh, no! She was much too fastidious a person.

The notebook was a comparatively recent affair. It was a kind of a diary, really, and was concerned only with the real world. Somehow, Prissy knew that the things one just ‘thought’ and the things one ‘made up’ came from different parts of oneself. One thought with one’s mind, but ‘making up’ came from so deep inside that one couldn’t tell where.

‘Thinking,’ confided to one’s diary and not to be seen by any honest mortal eye, gave one a delicious feeling of superiority. One was not so impotent as the grown-­ups imagined. When one was sent out of the room on some improvised errand because of Mr. Pargeter’s saying—‘Little pitchers have long ears,’ it was satisfactory to remember the entry—‘Mr. P. is brown and squirmy. He is very like an earwig. If he was trod on, there would be a dark, oily smear and a bitter smell.’

There were poems in the diary, too. Prissy wished there were some way of finding out whether they were real poems. Aunt Elena, perhaps; but was her opinion worth having? Her favourite reading was a mouldy old book called Urn Burial, that she read in bed; and she liked creepy, rustling things like tortoises and cacti. She had a dark, haggard face that made one think of an old graveyard, but her eyes were so dark and deep that when one talked to her, one talked into her eyes, the way one drops a pebble into a pool to watch for the ripples.

The mistresses and the girls were too ordinary for words, too dull to put into the diary. Only Miss Hornblower was a little different because she took the Shakespeare class, and one got the feeling now and again that she was keeping back something too precious to tell. ‘You little owls, with your dull, stupid eyes!’ she cried out once, her nose twitching with exasperation. She looked as if she were going to cry, and suddenly one saw that it was dreadful for her. She had really been in that wood near Athens, and now she had crashed into the classroom, and it was common and awful, and they were all common and awful, too.

Perhaps Miss Hornblower felt about Shakespeare as one felt about Jane Eyre, which one had extracted surreptitiously from the VIth Form library and read in secret under the flap of the desk.

What agony when the tea-­bell clanged rudely and woke one up out of that dream! Gone were the vases of purple spar, the pale Parian mantelpiece. The master of Thornfield Hall had vanished, like the Devil through a trap-­door. But, stumbling down the corridor, one still saw the flash of his dark eyes, heard the deep sardonic tones of his voice. Eating the thick hunks of bread and plum jam, one thought with anguish of the seed-­cake Miss Temple took out of her drawer.

Towards the half-­term a personality disengaged itself from the indeterminate background of moon-­faces and pigtails to the extent of being half-­confided in. Bunty Adams served as a very inadequate substitute for the ball game. The host of imaginary characters had retreated too far into the depths of Prissy’s being to be recalled. Besides, they were not to be shared. One would as soon have said one’s prayers aloud. Bunty was not even quite on the diary plane, but she was a receptive little thing and proved a rapt audience for the real-­life dramas staged by Prissy, in which Aunt Elena and Aunt Athene played their parts, rather touched-­up, rather twopence-­coloured, as befitted creatures translated into the sphere of Art.

And then there was Mr. Considine. But Prissy did not speak of him, because gradually he had come to assume all the characteristics of Mr. Rochester, and Mr. Rochester belonged to that part of Prissy’s experience which was too poignant to be shared. Her voice would go all trembly if she tried to tell Bunty about Thornfield Hall. “Jane, I’ve got a blow;—I’ve got a blow, Jane!” Was ever a woman so honoured? He was so strong, so fascinating. And rather wicked, she supposed. For what was that queer business about Adele? Prissy felt rather wicked, too, as if she had a guilty secret to hide. Aunt Athene’s eyes were so piercing, and she was so particular about what one read.

But she tried out a poem on Bunty, one day, in the dusk of the shrubbery, with the red electric trains clanking up to London beyond the iron railing. She read it in a thin, strangled, unnatural voice.

I looked out of my window this morning

And saw the hawthorns in bloom.

When the golden day was just dawning,

Their scent came into my room.

They were white as the tents of the Arabs

And humming with little brown bees,

With dark little bees like scarabs,

And my heart flew out to the trees.

It is lulled in those bowers so airy

By the incense-­and-­pepper smell

That will make of my heart a fairy,

Of my breast but a hollow shell.

‘Oh, Prissy! I think it’s super. If you hadn’t told me, I could easily have thought it was Shelley or someone. I could, really.’

‘Oh, no—not Shelley!’ said Prissy, modestly. ‘Of course I had to find a rhyme for “Arabs”, and there is only one. You don’t think it sounds dragged in?’ she inquired, anxiously.

‘Definitely, not. I think it’s maharvellous.’

Oh, if only Bunty were a person of authority!

It was queer seeing Aunt Elena again, after all the things one had been saying about her; like meeting a person who had figured the night before in a vivid dream. She was waiting on the platform, in her old toque with the crushed wallflowers. Her kiss was like the peck of a hen; so perfunctory that it bereft one of affection.

But Aunt Athene at the front door, looking more like a rose than ever, drew one down into a secret garden of spices.

When one returned to No. 7 Queen Anne Terrace, it was like opening some old, adorable book and stepping between its covers. The wrought-­iron gate had come from Spain. One looked through it into a paved courtyard, and there was the house, that looked so powdery one felt one could brush off the cedar-­red bloom with one’s fingers. The porch with its fluted columns, the shell under the fanlight, the blue front door and the tip-­tilted windows were the frontispiece. Aunt Athene had come from inside the story to greet one.

You know those golden almonds of light that holy people have behind them in old pictures? Aunt Athene seemed to have one, too, like a person walking in beauty. Not that her light came from God. Oh, no! Her other world was certainly not Heaven.

‘How funny everything looks! I’d forgotten it was like this,’ said Prissy, looking about her. Everything was more beautiful even than she had remembered.

After the drabness of school, the drawing-­room simply took one’s breath away. It was pale, and patternless except for the startled silver deer on the curtains, and colours showed up in it as though spot-­lit. The celadon bowls, the bowls of peach-­blow and sang-­de-­bœuf, shone with a lustre that seemed to shed tinted pools of reflected light, and their delicate curves against the cream walls made one want to stroke them. The tea-­kettle was bubbling over a blue flame and there was a faint smell of methylated spirit and freesias, and a breath from Aunt Elena’s greenhouse as of earth freshly watered.

The aunts asked innumerable questions, most of which were easy enough to answer. But now and again an oblique one came sideways from Aunt Athene.

‘And is there any talking after lights out?’

One had always remembered two cryptic remarks let fall by some grown-­up. ‘There never was such a person for consuming her own smoke as Elena,’ and ‘Athene has such a beautiful mind.’

Aunt Athene had beautiful hair and a beautiful voice and beautiful laughter. Wasn’t that enough? Must she also have a beautiful mind, to set her above other people and make her so fastidious that she wouldn’t ever let one go to a cinema or read a book with love in it?

So, when she said in a casual kind of voice—‘Is there any talking after lights out?’ one knew what she meant. She meant—‘Are there any horrid girls, who try to tell you things you shouldn’t know.’

If she only knew how terrified one was of finding out about things one shouldn’t know.

But one couldn’t believe that reading Jane Eyre was wrong. And if it were, if at fourteen one had no right to have discovered so much about love, well, it couldn’t be helped. It was the most thrilling, glorious, and beautiful thing in the world. It was like stained glass windows and sunsets and nightingales singing in the dark.

‘Not much talking; we’re too tired,’ murmured Prissy, looking into her empty cup.

And suddenly she thought—‘if she asks me what I’ve been reading, I shall get scarlet. And, please God, don’t let them mention him—not just now, when I’m so tired.’

The holidays were haunted by Mr. Considine. There was always the delicious fear that one might meet him face to face. In a way, one wanted to more than anything in the world, but when there was a prospect of such a meeting, one was seized with panic.

Prissy had always known that he was a very special kind of person. When he came to tea in the old days, she used to have hers in the schoolroom. She remembered that his soft black hat on the hall table looked sootier and richer than other people’s, his stick more unusual, his voice coming through the closed door sounded deeper and softer. And afterwards, when he had gone and one was permitted to return to grown-­up society, it seemed as if something of his personality still lingered in the drawing-­room, like the smell of incense in a Catholic church when the Mass is over—a faint tobacco and carnation scent. And the room looked different—kind of hushed and golden. More flowers than usual, the yellow fluted teacups, and a walnut cake. But perhaps it was Aunt Athene herself who seemed the most changed. The pupils of her eyes were so large they almost covered the iris, and she kept moving restlessly about and humming a tune as if she had just come in from a concert. Then she usually went to the piano and played the Brahms Rhapsody over and over again, as if she were continuing a conversation in her own mind.

One night during these holidays there was a dinner-party for some of the Cathedral clergy and their wives, Mr. Pargeter and Mr. Considine.

‘I should think Prissy might come in for dessert,’ said Aunt Elena, stalking in and stealing a salted almond from one of the silver shells.

Aunt Athene was laying the table herself, instructing Prissy in the art for when she should be grown-­up.

Her arrangement looked sumptuous but careless like a banquet in a picture in the National Gallery; as if subtle and exquisite ladies with high, bald brows and bosoms of snow were to pose on the Hepplewhite chairs. The polished mahogany was a dark pool in which floated the reflections of pink, pointed cyclamens spilling out of a Venetian goblet, and iridescent bubbles of glass.

‘A bit medieval, isn’t it?’ said Aunt Elena. She gave her little sniff, and there was a gleam in her dark eyes. That sudden gleam was what one loved her for, that goblin light in the graveyard. It was queer, the way she often echoed some vague, scarce-­formulated thought in one’s mind, making one feel that deep in her heart was the fire that would always warm one.

‘Dinner with the Borgias,’ she said. ‘Alexis, and Simon P., perhaps. But what about the clergymen?’

‘I think it’s lovely,’ said Prissy tremulously. ‘But may I have my dessert in bed, please?’

For she could not, no, it was out of the question that she should be called upon to face the ordeal of adult quizzical eyes, his eyes, upon her awkwardness, her shivering, skinned-­rabbit nakedness, thrust in upon their vinous warmth, their conviviality, their terrible grown-­up patronage, in her skimpy tussore and black ribbed stockings, her sharp little elbows sticking out like ­pins and her arms all gooseflesh.

‘Of course you can,’ said Aunt Elena, hurriedly undoing the mischief she had done, while Aunt Athene’s eyes travelled over her in a distraite fashion. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes. It wouldn’t be very amusing for Prissy.’ Amusing, thought Prissy, was hardly the word. It would be more thrilling, more frightful and perilous, than she could bear. Her dream world would be in mortal danger. She trembled to think what she might have to suffer if Aunt Athene were to catch a glimpse of it. Contempt, perhaps; or heartless tinkling laughter. She could imagine that Aunt Athene might even go to the lengths of telling him. ‘You must know, Alexis, that Prissy has a crush on you.’ The agony of it would kill her.

She had a few other narrow escapes, glimpses of his tall figure at the end of vistas, crossing a street, going into a shop. And then, towards the end of the holidays, the worst happened.

Aunt Athene announced that she was taking Prissy to have tea with Mr. Considine.

‘But I don’t want to go,’ said Prissy, off her guard.

‘You don’t want to go? And why not, may I ask? When a most distinguished scholar has been so kind as to invite a little schoolgirl to tea, she should feel greatly honoured.’

Greatly honoured! But he hadn’t asked her, of course. He scarcely knew she existed. Aunt Athene was taking her along as she might have taken a Pekinese or a sunshade. It was too much. She felt too young, too tender, for such an overwhelming experience. To meet one’s hero in the flesh was terrible enough, but to meet him in the presence of Aunt Athene was an ordeal beyond one’s powers of endurance. Those cool green eyes which missed nothing and dwelt with a faint disdain on schoolgirl blushes and gaucheries! Oh, God! make something happen to prevent it, Aunt Elena . . . if only Aunt Elena could be substituted for that other one. But at the appointed hour, Aunt Athene set off in her lilac dress, her legs looking like glass through the thin silk of her stockings, with Prissy walking, cold with apprehension, beside her.

An elderly maid opened the door, and Aunt Athene stepped into the hall, her delicate scent floating in with her like some invisible attendant spirit.

Prissy felt very strange indeed. She felt as if the foundations of the visible world were shifting under her feet, as if the walls of reality were dissolving and those of the other world sliding into their place.

The pale April sunlight spilled into the hall and touched an old print in a maple frame, and winked in the topaz and agate knobs of a bundle of sticks in a copper jar. A bust of bronze stood in a niche, gazing out coldly into space. Prissy was so strung-­up that she saw everything with unnatural distinctness, as if these inanimate things were possessed of a magical potency, endowed as in a fairy tale with a strange life and consciousness of their own. But what was Aunt Athene doing here, in this perilous place? If one met her in a dream, she was no more than a sprite, a quintessence of aunt, who was gone with just one look out of her green eyes, or a tinkle of laughter, or a key-­word that woke one up, thinking—‘That was most frightening and important.’ For in dreams one sees only those physical attributes of a person which have served to express for one his essential being. But here, on the threshold of the imaginary world, she was too terribly her whole self, taking off her cape and adjusting the hairpins in the gold conches over her ears with those turned-­back thumbs and double-­jointed fingers that made her hands so speaking and thea­trical. Her heels on the parquet floor went clickety-­click, with the sharp little taps of a pony on a hard road. Her eyes were dark to-­day, the pupils so dilated that there were only thin rings of green round them.

Aunt Athene followed the maid up the stairs and into a room on the first floor. A tall figure rose from the chair by the fire to greet her. Prissy hovered in the background. She had time to see, before Aunt Athene called attention to her presence, that this was not the drawing-­room of snow and fire that had so captivated Jane, but a sombre book-­lined room with chairs of red-­and-­gold leather. Then, as if she were crossing a vast stage into a pool of limelight, she came forward, stepping from Persian rug to rug, to take the hand held out to her. But he was still talking to Aunt Athene and shook hands with Prissy without looking at her. His hand was so cold, it gave one a fresh feeling, as of gathering snowdrops in a frosty wood. She stole a look at the face turned away from her. He wasn’t so dark or so stern as she had remembered, and his eyes were blue, as blue as a sailor’s. Prissy felt a little cheated; as one does, for instance, when someone in a book goes out at a door on the right, whereas in one’s mind the door has been all the time on the left.

They were too much interested in their conversation to be aware of her for a long time. She sat on a slippery sofa with elegant golden feet, and drank in everything.

It was a very interesting conversation. Prissy tried to remember every word of it to record in her diary. She was very proud that a relation of hers could evoke the sudden delighted laughter that made Mr. Considine wrinkle up his eyes. She was proud of Aunt Athene’s beauty, her wit, her tea-­rose quality.

When tea came in, it would be terrible. They would have to draw her into their orbit. Perhaps she would make a noise gulping her tea.

The maid came in and set down a tray on a table in the corner. For some time they took no notice of it, but left the tea to get stewed in the silver teapot.

Mr. Considine was talking of the bazaars of Ispahan, and some old tiles he had bought. The one he cherished most, he said, had a design of a prince in a turban of pale petunia riding on a piebald horse, and the glaze on it was of the texture of flower-­petals.

At last they came to the tea-­table, leaving their bazaars and roses. The prince in the turban of pale petunia rode away on his piebald horse through the gates of the secret world.

Aunt Athene poured out the tea in that special way of hers that made everything she touched seem fragile and priceless.

‘The Dean’s wife has cups that are blue inside, and that always makes the tea seem a queer colour and tasteless,’ she said, irrele­vantly. ‘And, do you know, she has redecorated their bedroom a newly-­married pink—so trying! With blue curtains, that sentimental blue! I didn’t know what to say. One feels so sorry for the Dean, who after all quotes Sir Thomas Browne in his sermons.’

‘Poor fellow, poor fellow! He can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a rose,’ said Mr. Considine. ‘But, then, what should a Dean be doing in the bed of Cleopatra?’

‘Hush!’ said Aunt Athene, laughing. ‘Are the pink sugar biscuits for Prissy? Look, Prissy, isn’t that nice? Mr. Considine’s housekeeper knows what little girls like.’

Oh, damn and blast her!

‘I would rather have a cucumber sandwich,’ said Prissy, primly.

They went on with their gay, incomprehensible conversation as if she were not there. It was quite safe to steal glances at Mr. Considine, recalling the moments when he had played with Jane as a cat with a mouse, the delirious moments when he had broken short a sentence with a betraying word, all the moments of agony and bliss one had shared with the little governess. And that most wonderful moment of all, when he had at last declared his love and gathered her into his arms, and one had nearly fainted with delight.

But suddenly Mr. Considine took her by surprise. The blue eyes looked straight into her own, and he said, with an amused smile—‘Prissy has been weighing me all this time in her invisible scales. And what, Prissy, if I may ask so personal a question, is your private opinion of me?’

Prissy gave a little gasp. It was a supreme moment. Something must be said . . . something original, extraordinary . . . Jane would have known. Oh, for words . . . words telling, arresting enough.

They came, quicker than thought, from she knew not where, in her clear, piping treble.

‘I think, Mr. Considine,’ she said, brightly and confidingly out of the innocence of her heart, ‘that you are more knave than fool.’

There was a moment of silence so appalling that all the nerves in Prissy’s body seemed to tingle agonizingly, and then she felt suddenly sick and very cold, as if a great clammy frog were squatting in her entrails.

A deeply-­shocked sound came from Aunt Athene.

‘I am ashamed of you,’ she said, in a hissing whisper. ‘Don’t laugh at her, Alexis, please. If there is anything on earth one abominates, it is a pert, precocious child. I can only apologize for having brought her.’

Out of the abyss of her desolation, Prissy saw with amazement that Mr. Considine was convulsed with silent laughter. He was in a paroxysm of mirth that seemed to come from deep inside him, and was betrayed only by the quivering of his mouth and the twitching of his nostrils. Time stood still while he laughed and laughed, and Aunt Athene sat there looking as if a serpent had stung her.

‘I don’t know when I’ve had such a dusting,’ he said, at last, drying his eyes. ‘What have I done, Prissy, what have I done . . . ?’

But the pain in Prissy’s throat prevented speech. The other world had crashed about her ears. She was smirched and degraded. She had humiliated Aunt Athene, and though Mr. Considine had laughed, he must, in his heart, think her a cheap and common girl. He and Aunt Athene had beautiful minds . . . Oh! you could tell they had, with their talk on music and Cleo­patra and the ghost of a rose. So beautiful.

Aunt Athene turned sideways in her chair, as if she could no longer bear the sight of Prissy, and Mr. Considine began to talk hurriedly. They took no more notice of her. She was cast into outer darkness, she was with the lost and the damned.

Presently Aunt Athene rose to go, gathering up her gloves, and looking in the little glass in her handbag at her cool disdainful face.

‘Wait a moment,’ said Mr. Considine. ‘There is something in the next room I’d like to show Prissy.’

Aunt Athene, with a faint shrug of her shoulders, sat down again.

‘Come, Prissy,’ said Mr. Considine, smiling down at her.

It was terribly kind; but it would only make matters worse, thought Prissy, wretchedly.

Mr. Considine shut the door of his study, and led her to a cabinet, on the shelves of which, neatly arranged and labelled, was a collection of strange and interesting objects.

‘Look, Prissy, at this pink shell. If you hold it to your ear, you can hear the voice of the sea.’

He took out the great cold shell and put it into her hands. It had lovely curves, and ribbed lips, and on the delicate rose-­colour were freckles of brown. The tears poured down Prissy’s cheeks as she held it obediently to her ear.

‘You know,’ said Mr. Considine, ‘I wouldn’t show this collection to your aunt. She wouldn’t care about it. But to me, shells are such . . . enchanted things. This one is for you, because you are . . . rather a fairy kind of person.’

‘Me!’ said Prissy, with quivering lips. She could hardly believe her ears. ‘I was so awful . . . I don’t know why I said it.’

She began to cry now as if her heart would break.

‘My dear child, I think it is the most delightful thing that has ever been said to me,’ said Mr. Considine. He put an arm about her, stooped, and kissed her cheek.

Oh, holy smoke! Oh, God!

The real world and the secret world clashed soundlessly together, like two meteors colliding in space. They fused and became one.

In a daze, she followed Aunt Athene down the stairs and out into the street. Her feet seemed scarcely to touch the earth. Aunt Athene walked on in silence, still in her punishing mood. But she couldn’t reach Prissy in her secret world. She had only pity now for Aunt Athene and all other women; the shut-­out, the unblessed. For was she not Jane’s counterpart, her equal?