Violet

The only person Violet couldn’t handle was the mistress herself. From the very first, Mrs. Titmus refused, in her obstinate way, to take to Violet; partly, perhaps, because Sophy had engaged her without taking up her references. So lazy of her, and dangerous. At her age, thought Mrs. Titmus, I could have done the work of this house and thought nothing of it. I would have been glad to do something useful. Utterly selfish, thought Mrs. Titmus, and bone-­lazy, eager to grab at the first thing that offered to save herself a little effort.

But to Sophy, who had coped alone with the house for six weeks, it had become a monster that fed on the very marrow of her bones. So that Violet, stepping in and taking the reins in her absurdly small and fluttering hands, seemed like an angel of deliverance. From the beginning, the monster ate out of her hand. In less than no time it had resumed the orderly and polished look of former days. Skirtings acquired a dark glow, furniture a patina of port-­wine richness, silver shone as if newly-­minted. Any qualms that Sophy may have had that such a large house was too much for such a dot of a thing were quieted by her unruffled and competent air. But she had an effect in ways other than the merely physical.

It seemed to Sophy afterwards that it wasn’t till Violet came to the house that the pattern of their lives emerged to her eyes. She was the focal point that related the different planes on which they lived to each other. She drew the design together, so that one became aware of values that had hitherto been submerged below the level of consciousness. With her smirks and the sudden gleam of light in her opaque eyes, her nods and becks, she illumined the hidden corners of their minds, she twitched aside curtains and revealed the fears and passions of their hearts, she smelt out their secrets, pounced on them and laid them out like dead mice, and she took a hand in their destinies.

On the first morning, when she brought the early tea into Sophy’s room, in her neat pink dress with the turned-­back white cuffs at the elbows, Sophy was aware of those dense black eyes taking in the rather tousled and puffy-­eyed look which she knew only too well she presented on first awaking.

With an odd, humiliating feeling of being unworthy of the attentions of this crisp handmaid, she accepted the meticulously prepared tray.

‘But you’ve given me the Queen Anne teapot,’ she said, taken by surprise at the sight of this treasure reserved for guests of consequence.

‘I like to be dainty first thing in the morning. It kind of sets the tone for the day,’ said Violet, surprisingly. ‘Madam’s been down to see if I’d lighted the fire. When I saw her in her dressing-­gown and her little plait sticking out, I didn’t know she was the mistress. She fair frightened me. Must be nice to wake up in this room, miss, with flowers and that. They say you shouldn’t sleep with flowers in the room; but I must say it’s nice—ever so gentle and feminine. Makes you feel all glorious within, I expect. Madam said only toast for breakfast—is that right? But what about the master? Gentlemen like a couple of rashers and a fried egg. He looks a bit thin to me, kind of hungry-­like. He was up ever so early catching slugs in the garden, and I took him out a cup of tea. He seemed ever so surprised. Poor old gentleman, ever so gentle and kind, he seemed. I think I’ll do him a proper breakfast.’

‘You must do as my mother says,’ said Sophy, sipping her tea.

‘Righty-­ho!’ Violet tripped out on her high heels.

But Sophy saw with dismay when she descended to breakfast that the girl had taken the law into her own hands.

Oh, dear! How tactless of her. And Mr. Titmus must needs make it worse.

‘Ho, ho, ho! It looks as if I’m going to be spoilt.’

Mrs. Titmus looked down her nose. When her eyes had that pale, blind look, as if all the blue had been withdrawn from them, Sophy, expert at interpreting signs and portents, knew that trouble was brewing. Her sisters swallowed their coffee and fled to catch the 8.15 to London. They had their careers and were apt to shelve domestic problems.

‘Someone,’ said Mrs. Titmus, fixing the old gentleman with that glazed fishy look, ‘seemed to be creaking about the house all night, pulling the plugs. I couldn’t sleep a wink.’

Sophy began to chatter wildly about the news in the morning paper. The year was 1938.

‘How silly you are, getting all worked up! You don’t know a thing about it,’ Mrs. Titmus said, with a venom that seemed quite unnecessary.

‘Really, mother, I may be allowed to express an opinion, I suppose.’

‘I don’t know when,’ said Mr. Titmus, seeking to throw oil on troubled waters, ‘I’ve had a nicer breakfast.’

Was it possible, wondered Sophy, exasperated, that one so dense, so innocent, could have begotten her?

‘I think there’ll be war, and we shall all be blown to bits,’ she said loudly and vindictively.

The prospect of war seemed a lesser calamity at the moment than the loss of Violet, which was probably imminent.

‘Well, if we are, we are. It can’t be helped, and there’s nothing we can do about it,’ said Mrs. Titmus, with the bored manner of one who wished to hear no more of a tiresome subject.

She rose and pushed back her chair.

‘Ring the bell,’ she said, ‘for that girl to clear.’

‘We must give her time to finish her own breakfast, poor little scrap,’ remarked Mr. Titmus, genially.

There was a hideous pause. Mrs. Titmus stared at her husband, her eyes pale again with venom.

‘What did you say? What term did you apply to the maid-­of-­all-­work?’

‘I know what father means, mother.’ Sophy rushed in where no angel would have ventured so much as the tip of a toe. ‘She really is the tiniest thing I’ve ever seen—like a little marmoset or something.’

‘Well, I don’t care for marmosets about my house,’ was her mother’s parting shot as she went out of the room.

‘Dear, dear, dear! Your mother seems upset about something. You’ve not been cheeky to her, my dear, I hope. You girls are inclined to be cheeky, I’ve noticed.’

‘Father,’ said Sophy, ‘you don’t use a word like that about bitter females in their dim thirties.’ She began to clear the breakfast plates with thin, nervous hands that shook a little.

‘Now, what’s the matter with her?’ wondered Mr. Titmus. Deep in the recesses of his consciousness, he asked himself why one should have married a shrew and become the father of shrews.

‘I don’t like ’em, not one of ’em,’ he said wickedly to himself in the dark depths of his being. ‘This yaller girl, she’s as nugly as an ’orse,’ he thought, regarding her sorrowfully with his innocent, filmy blue eyes.

Oh, what an old dog he was in his deep inwardness! How ugly and vicious! He had a private atrocious language of his own, when things got too much for him, to express the exasperation that boiled within him. They thought he was old Father Christmas, did they? They thought he was a gentle old pet? Ho! Sometimes he was shocked at his own wickedness. Sometimes he was afraid of God’s punishment. Suppose He were to take one of the girls! When little Beatrice had pneumonia, he couldn’t eat or sleep, he couldn’t keep his food down. If God did a thing like that, it could break his heart.

But sometimes he knew such flashes of glory, it was like the gates of Heaven opening. Suddenly a line of poetry would come into his head—or he would hear the strings of his heart playing Sheep may safely graze, and he would feel as light and holy as a sainted spirit.

He looked so wistful that Sophy had a twinge of conscience.

‘Sorry, father. It’s because I’m so tired. This undercurrent of drama all the time . . . Do you ever wish you were dead?’

‘No, no!’ said Mr. Titmus, shocked. ‘With worms that are thy chambermaids,’ he said in a whisper, looking into vacancy, and stole away furtively, his shapeless slippers flapping at his heels.

Sophy’s hands dropped to her sides. If she had opened a cupboard and found a grinning skeleton inside, she could hardly have felt more chilled.

‘I couldn’t help hearing what you said,’ said Violet, suddenly appearing from nowhere with a tray in her hands. ‘If you wish evil, miss, you attract it to you. It would be more sensible, excuse me, to wish to get married. One never knows,’ she added, darkly. Her soft black eyes fastened on Sophy’s face and clung there, like persistent bees. They were so jetty dark, you couldn’t tell if there were compassion in them, or brazen impudence.

Sophy gave her a quelling look, and stalked out of the room with a giraffe-­like dignity.

Seeking refuge a few days later from domestic tension, she went to her room and took a leather-­bound book out of the bookcase. It was tooled in gold, with the title ‘Morte D’Arthur by Malory’, and its pages were blank except for such as were covered by her small pointed script.

‘Notre domestique,’ wrote Sophy, in the green ink she affected, ‘is no ordinary scullion. She might have washed up the wine-­cups of the Borgias, or looked through the keyholes of the Medici. I have an idea that she can hear the mice scampering furtively behind the panels of our minds. I heard one the other day in an unaccustomed place. Father quoted Shakespeare and frightened me. I know now that he is a very lonely old man. La domestique knows it too. He loves his roses better than wife or daughters. It hurts him to have them picked by careless hands. Lalage is ruthless. She snips where she will and fills the vases. She comes into a room and stirs up flowers arranged by someone else, gritting her teeth, as though to say, How inartistic! What insensitiveness! She is a lazy, exquisite person, and, like a saint, exudes a delightful odour. It comes, of course, from a bottle and not from her bones; but is so much hers that the latter source seems the true one. She has the most charming hands and eyebrows, and is about the only person whose bath water one could use without distaste.

‘I am deeply concerned about Bee. The other day a wedding-­ring dropped out of her handbag. She swooped on it, and I pretended not to see. It was sinister, like finding a snake’s eggs in a drawer and knowing that strange rustlings must have occurred while one slept. A mouse behind the panels. And yet her small, rather cynical, face is quite untroubled, and she laughs still in her silent, inward way. It’s the secrecy that hurts, so furtive. And yet, what would you, in our household? V., I fear, has heard that mouse. “There’s something about Miss Beatrice that calls to mind a divorced lady—ever so worldly and stylish. A woman of the world, miss, if you know what I mean. Now, if you was to wear one of her hats, why, you’d look ridiculous!”

‘I told Bee and she went into one of her silent convulsions of laughter. “Poor old Sophy!” she said. “Mind you keep her on the right side of mother! Your face was beginning to look like an old leather bag.” She meant it kindly.

‘Does mother hate Violet for some deep, intuitive reason?

‘ “Lord, madam. I never did see so many pill-­boxes and medi­cine bottles. Makes one think of hospitals and death. It doesn’t do to dwell so much on one’s health—makes the end come all the quicker, I daresay.”

‘I heard mother’s voice, with an edge in it. “You can leave my room. I prefer to do it myself.” She didn’t prefer it, when I was doing all the housework. She preferred to write her lectures for the Women’s Institute.’

Sophy closed her book and returned it to the shelf. In that household, with such a title, it was safe from prying eyes. It was her consolation, her other self.

Lalage and Beatrice drew Violet out and compared notes. She was a source of infinite amusement to them.

Violet’s young man had thrown her over. ‘That’s all right. I’m not breaking me heart,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t love, it was lusk.’

She cast a glance at a photograph on Lalage’s mantelpiece.

‘Excuse me, miss, but that gentleman’s got ever such a nice face. I expect if he gives you flowers, they are real nice ones, gardenias and that. But he’s not one to be kept dangling. He’s got his pride. Never ask you twice, he wouldn’t.’ She sighed. ‘I never had nothing from Bert, except a bit of dried heather he got off a gipsy. Mean he was. Everything for nothing was his motto. I suppose you’ll be getting married, miss, before long?’

‘What makes you think so?’

‘Red hair and brown eyes, and then, your legs, miss . . . like champagne bottles. Miss Sophy, now, she’s different. Only a very spiritual gentleman would single out Miss Sophy, and then he’d love her to the world’s end. She’s an acquired taste, as they say—and that kind’s the most lasting.’

‘The little devil,’ said Sophy, when these remarks were repeated to her, and for some reason she looked at the same time disconcerted and gratified.

Bee might have noticed it. Her small green eyes might have peeped out of their lashes with a piercing glint. ‘Spiritual . . . aha! So that accounts for all these attendances at St. Petroc’s.’

But Lalage was too lazy, too indifferent. One’s heart might crack in two, and she would never guess.

It was a strange thing, but Christian Todmarsh did send her one day not gardenias, but orchids. She looked thoughtfully at his photograph. Yes, he had a proud face. He would easily be lost beyond recall. She rang him up, and their engagement was announced a few days later.

‘Things always seem to happen when I come into a house,’ remarked Violet, dropping her eyelids.

‘The master and his roses,’ she said one day, looking out of the window with a duster in her hand. ‘It’s as well to have a passion, even if it’s only for flowers. My last gentleman had one for pictures. Ever so queer they were. You didn’t hardly like to look at them. He said a thing I’ve never forgotten. He said there was some foreign painter that painted women as if they were roses, and roses as if they were women. That isn’t a thing you’d be likely to forget. It makes a difference to your life . . . gives you ideas and that. Madam isn’t a bit like a rose,’ she added reflectively, almost under her breath; ‘But Miss Lalage is. It comes out in her.’

Violet continued to skate blithely over thin ice. It seemed a shame that a gentleman with such a passion for roses should have no rose in his heart. Madam was like an east wind. She fair shrivelled one up. But she wasn’t going to drive Violet away. So long as there were those that appreciated her, Violet would stay put. They needed her. Oh, but how desperately they needed her! How they had ever got on without her she didn’t know.

She seemed to be moving all the time to some secret tune. Mrs. Titmus hated the way she laid the table, posturing and pirouetting like a ballet-­dancer, setting down glasses and pepper-­pots with a turn of the wrist, as though she were miming to unheard music, stepping back theatrically and regarding her handiwork with her head on one side, waiting for the next beat of the invisible baton. Even more irritating was it to hear her singing below stairs, in raucous abandonment to emotion, with that awful, vulgar scoop of the street singer who seeks to wring the heart.

But there were other and worse things.

‘I don’t like the girl, and I never shall,’ said Mrs. Titmus. ‘She pesters your father. I caught her taking him a cup of cocoa in the middle of the morning. He’s so foolish that I’ve no doubt he drank it.’

‘But what harm in that? She meant it kindly. She isn’t a bad little thing,’ said Sophy nervously, though she knew it was worse than useless to attempt palliation of Violet’s offences.

‘Nonsense! You girls are idiotic about her. She’s evil. She’s always saying things,’ said Mrs. Titmus, with a pinched look about her mouth. ‘Yesterday, she was putting clean sheets on my bed, and she said—“Look, madam, diamonds all down the middle fold.” ’

‘Diamonds?’ asked Sophy, blankly.

‘Yes; the sheet had been badly folded, the way they do in this laundry, and there were little squares. I wouldn’t have noticed them. “That means death,” she said. I didn’t like the look she gave me. If I were ill and alone, I wouldn’t care to be at the mercy of that girl.’

Morbid, thought Sophy. It was a new aspect of her. Was there to be no end to the discoveries one made about one’s nearest and dearest?

She looked at her mother as if she were seeing her for the first time. The thin face, hooked nose and Greek knot at the back of the head gave her the look of a teapot—was it? Or the Indian idol of massive brass that had stood on the hall table ever since she could remember, the head of Lakshmi, the goddess, brought back by some ancestor and bearing on her forehead the red seal of the Brahmin.

Teapot or goddess. She had something of both in her composition. She had comforted her children, and inspired them with fear. ‘And now that one is middle-­aged,’ thought Sophy (who prided herself on facing unpleasant facts, to the extent of being guilty, more often than not, of overstatement) ‘there is no longer need of comfort, but vestiges of the fear remain. I am still afraid sometimes that she can read my thoughts. I still tremble when her eyes go pale. This house, so shabby and so beautiful, is in part her creation, but she has long ceased to take any interest in it. She has become warped about money and won’t spend a penny.’

Atmosphere is a mysterious thing. Like wall-­papers super­imposed to a thickness, maybe, of inches, atmosphere settles upon atmosphere with the succeeding tenants of an old house. The Titmus atmosphere, one felt (if one were a somewhat precious and fantastic creature like Sophy), owed something of its richness and duskiness to those others that it had absorbed since the days of Queen Anne. The sound of the harpsichord, she liked to think, had gone into the old wood. The scent of pomander balls was, perhaps, part of the peculiar Titmus smell . . . faintly peppery, with a hint of Russian leather and petal dust, that clung about the house and permeated all their belongings and even stole out of parcels sent across the seas. All their selves had left slimy invisible trails. The furniture knew it. It had that dumb but sentient look, as if something of their personalities had passed into it and fed and enriched it. Was it too fantastic, Sophy wondered, to imagine that lately it had taken on a darker, stranger glow, a glint as of the reflection of soft black eyes?

One sound had certainly haunted the house since the day it was first built, the sound of the bells of St. Petroc’s. They had a magical significance now for Sophy, like the aromatic poplars in the churchyard and the light that shone through the east window.

‘The Vicar is in the drawing-­room with Madam. But it’s you he came to see, miss,’ announced Violet, bursting in one afternoon when Sophy was communing with her book. Her heart turned over.

Violet fixed her with her soft black stare. There seemed to be the faintest trace of a smirk on her face.

‘Did he ask for me?’ enquired Sophy, turning away.

‘Not to say, asked, but there are some things that are known without words. Madam doesn’t go to his church, does she? Of course, this isn’t his parish. You’re St. Matthew’s, reelly. He preaches lovely, I think. Ever so deep. The silver tea service, I suppose, miss? And I’ll soon make some scones.’

Sophy went slowly down the stairs. If she had been summoned to meet an archangel she could hardly have felt more frightened, more inadequate. Never had she sought the acquaintance of this man who had been so much hers in dreams that she could not bear to face the bleakness of reality. She could not rid herself of the feeling that unwanted love is the basest kind of treachery towards the beloved. She had made herself free of his mind and his heart without his knowledge. How could he ever forgive her? She had created a world in which he was her lover because she could not help herself. But she knew that one breath of reality would blow her world to smithereens, and dash her to pieces. And yet there was a terrible, painful excitement in her heart.

‘I am the Rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys,’ she said to her reflection in the dim Venetian mirror in the hall, speaking out of her dream-­world. For surely it must still be a dream. It couldn’t be that he had intruded into the real world in which one shook hands and took tea and made conversation.

The odd thing was that when she came into the room, Mr. Chandos’s heart gave a sudden leap of recognition. A voice deep inside him said—‘This is the face I have been waiting for. This is the woman for me.’

But Sophy as she looked into the bright pale eyes that were the colour of the sea, that were as cold as aquamarines, was thinking—‘I shall not be able to endure the agony of loving this man.’ The touch of his hand dulled her. There was something alien and terrifying in it, like the feel of a frog in her palm. Her mind felt cold and tingling, as though contact with the strange flesh of the beloved had frozen it. She rubbed it against the folds of her skirt, and still there was this queer, icy glow.

‘Sophy,’ thought Mrs. Titmus, ‘is behaving like a fool. If one could only teach them.’ For in her reveries, she was still the girl she had once been; another Lalage, but much more vivid and vivacious. Lalage would never know the triumphs that had been hers. She remembered that dress she wore that everyone raved about at the Hunt Ball that year. He had kissed her shoulder in the dark. She could never hear the Invitation to the Valse without remembering. What a lover he was! But she had lost him a long time ago. She never identified him with old Mr. Titmus, though they were one and the same person. It seemed strange that she should be married now to this old changeling. Once she had overheard him saying to himself in the bathroom— ‘Now, where has she hidden my razor, the old . . . puss!’ So treacherous! She had been shocked to the heart.

She came to the rescue of her awkward, helpless child.

‘My daughter says the singing at St. Petroc’s is so beautiful. She is very musical, and has perfect pitch—which is quite uncommon, isn’t it? So they tell me.’

Mr. Chandos smiled and looked at Sophy. He couldn’t take his eyes off that face. It made a pattern that fascinated him, like a map of olden times with its ‘Here are dragons,’ and other strange indications. It was a unique face. New faces are seldom unfamiliar. They do not come upon us with a shock of strangeness, but are easily relegated to the different categories of faces which we draw up in our minds. Only out of history does a face sometimes look out with a hint of alien ineluctable charm. To Mr. Chandos, the face of Sophy Titmus had that quality. Her soft mouselike name enchanted him.

‘You are not a communicant. I should have remembered you,’ said Mr. Chandos, making a pyramid with the joined tips of his fingers and resting his chin upon them.

‘No, no. I am a lost sheep. I came in one evening to hear the anthem, and then you preached; and you quoted Donne. And then I had to join your congregation. But how did you know?’

‘A member of your household, Violet Wilson, told me.’ (That girl! thought Mrs. Titmus with a little shiver as though a goose had walked over her grave, and thoughts of witchcraft came into the head of Sophy, already bemused and laid under a spell, so that her own voice, sounding out of the midst of the threefold circle that seemed to have been woven round her, was strange to her ears.) ‘Did you like my sermon, Miss Titmus?’

‘Have I not already told you? I see that priests have their vanities, like other artists.’

How hollow and far-­away her voice sounded, like the voice of a stranger echoing in a cave.

A few weeks later, she was saying to herself amazedly—‘I had no idea it was as easy as this. I had no idea. I had no idea.’

For the unimaginable had come to pass. He was no longer an archangel, but her own Paul.

She had thought everyone must know it when she came into the house, when she floated in with the moon in her hair. But when she looked in at the drawing-­room door, no one seemed aware that something tremendous had happened. They were doing silly, unimportant things, poor earthbound wretches, and glanced at her indifferently with lacklustre eyes.

She retreated and caught Violet coming out of Mr. Titmus’s study. She was carrying a tea-­tray. The old gentleman had been treated to his wife’s best china and the silver muffin-­dish, which still contained what was left of the forbidden dripping-­toast he enjoyed so much. A little posy of wild flowers in a wine-­glass added to the general effect of festivity and loving-­kindness. Violet was playing her favourite game of circumventing the mistress. She was watering the withered old heart. She was shedding the beams of love upon it and re-­awakening it. She was queering the old cat’s pitch.

‘Poor old gentleman!’ she said, with a sidelong glance. ‘He does like a little attention.’ She smirked self-­righteously, and then, catching sight of Sophy’s face, nearly dropped the tray.

‘Oh, miss! Whatever is it? Your heart’s desire come true, that’s what it is! I’m ever so glad.’

There was a strange look of triumph on her face.

After all, it was her doing, thought Sophy.

‘Things always seem to happen when I come into a house,’ said Violet, sotto voce. And suddenly Sophy remembered a greasy pack of cards she had found when looking for something in a drawer in the kitchen.

‘Do you play patience alone down here in the evenings?’ she had asked, with a spasm of pity.

‘Not me,’ Violet had replied. ‘They fall for me the way I want them. It’s wonderful what they tell you, if you have the gift.’

Sophy was moved now to put an arm about the girl. ‘I shall never forget that I owe it to you,’ she said softly.

‘That’s all right, miss,’ said Violet, dropping her eyelids. There was an inscrutable expression on her face, as if she knew what she knew.

‘And now there’s Miss Beatrice. But the cards don’t come out right for her. Not yet, they don’t. A married man, I should think, miss.’

‘What do you mean? You mustn’t say such things. I’ve never heard such nonsense!’ said Sophy, deeply alarmed.

‘Oh, it’s all right, miss! You can trust me. I’m as secret as the grave.’ And she disappeared through the baize door to her own quarters. To the ace of spades and the mice, thought Sophy, with a little shiver. Love, she thought, and Death, dealt out on the kitchen table by those small, clever hands.

So that, in a way, she was prepared for that frightening moment when Mrs. Titmus mounted the stairs to her room.

There was a look on her face, a sick and abject look, as if her pride had crumpled up in her, that hurt Sophy and shocked her.

She gave a backward look over her shoulder and closed the door furtively.

‘Sophy,’ she said, pitiably, in a strange whispering voice, ‘that girl . . . I saw her. She was pinching diamonds into the table-­cloth.’

‘Oh, darling mother, she must go at once!’ cried Sophy, flinging her arms round the gaunt figure.

For she knew now that Violet with a death-­wish in her heart was about as safe to have in the house as a tame cheetah.