WE HAD a specially magnificent Christmas that year, though we were specially poor. For some reason that was left unstated Constance and Rosamund stayed with us all through the holidays; and they helped Mamma to make our dresses, which were the best we ever had; and Rosamund was beautiful to dress up. Richard was in good health by Christmas Day, and Papa had made for him an Arabian Nights Palace with looking-glass fountains in arcaded courtyards, and domes painted strange colours, very pale, very bright. When we saw it none of us could speak, and Mamma put her hand on his arm and said to us, “No other father could do this for his children.” Several times, I remember, she came and sat on the floor with us when we were playing with it, and exclaimed every now and then, “How does he think of such things? How does the idea come into his head?” Very soon I forgot the existence of Mrs. Phillips and Aunt Lily. But one morning all four of us, Cordelia and Mary and Rosamund and I, went into the best confectioner’s at Lovegrove, to buy some meringues for Richard Quin’s birthday tea; and because the assistant said there would be a batch of pink meringues coming up in a minute, we waited and watched the shop behind us reflected in the mirrored wall behind the counter. There was then something called “the confectioners’ licence” which played its part in suburban society; and the place was a cave of well-being, crammed with tables at which well-dressed women, with cairns of parcels piled up on chairs beside them, leaned towards each other, their always large busts overhanging plates of tiny sandwiches and small glasses of port and sherry and Madeira, and exchanged gossip that mounted to the low ceiling and was transformed to the twittering of birds in an aviary.
“Isn’t that the aunt who comes to school and takes Nancy Phillips home when her nose bleeds?” asked Mary.
“Yes, and that is Nancy’s Mamma,” said Cordelia. “She looks very fast.”
I found them in the mirror. They were not chattering. Aunt Lily had an elbow on the table and cupped her chin in one hand, while her other hand twiddled the stem of a wine-glass, and she coquetted with nothingness. Mrs. Phillips was pushing her empty glass back and forwards on the tablecloth, rucking up the linen. As I looked up her fingers closed tightly round the stem and she sat back in her chair, as if she had made an unalterable resolution. Her swarthiness still recalled people far darker than herself, sweeps and miners. She wore a beige beaver hat even larger than the huge invitation to the wind she had worn at our house, and a bird with a greenish iridescent breast stretched black wings across its width; and that the edifice did not waver was proof of her brooding stillness. Suddenly her hands jerked at the fur on her shoulders, a tie made of a dozen or so small brown pelts, and threw it over the back of the chair beside her. Then she was still again.
“Could you put aside what we want of the meringues,” I said to the shop assistant, “and then we could go away and come back?” But she told me they would be coming up at any moment.
Mary, her eyes on the mirror, said, “Mrs. Phillips’s furs—” and stopped.
“What about them?” said Cordelia. “They are sure not to be in good taste.”
“It is not that,” said Mary. “They look downspent.”
“Downspent?” said Cordelia. “There isn’t such a word.” Mary said nothing, and Cordelia got irritated. “What do you mean?”
“I mean downspent,” said Mary.
“I tell you there’s no such word,” fussed Cordelia. “We’ll look for it in Papa’s big dictionary when we get home, but we won’t find it, there’s no such word.”
“There ought to be,” said Rosamund.
As we stared in the mirror, the fur tie slid down the back of the chair and fell on the seat, with the despair of a delicate beast revolted by a gross owner. Mrs. Phillips was one of those people who are natural emblems. One thought absurd things about her which could not be true, which were confused with recollections of disturbing dreams till then forgotten. Her fur cannot have had any opinion about her. Yet we felt a vague unease, we stood beside the piles of cakes and wrangled as to whether one should make up new words, whether it must be taken that there was enough language to fit everything that happened.
About a week later, Rosamund and Mary and I were playing with Richard Quin on the sitting-room floor after tea. It was sad in a way, for it was the last night Rosamund was to be with us, she had to go home because her school started again two days later. Mamma and Constance were sitting by the fire, Constance doing some last services in the way of mending, Mamma comparing the fingering in two editions of a Beethoven sonata that had been bothering both Mary and me. We had the Arabian Nights Palace out on the floor, and we were happily quarrelling about the exact details of a story Papa had told us to fit a particular courtyard when Cordelia came in. She had been playing at a concert and she was still in her outdoor clothes. Standing in the doorway, pulling off her gloves, she said, “Do you know what I heard at my concert? Nancy Phillips’s father is dead. He died last night.”
All of us children were silent, except Richard Quin, who went on telling the story, but in a whisper. I saw and heard Mr. Phillips do and say all he had so blusterously done and said during our brief acquaintance, and I marvelled that it now appeared quite different. For the first time I witnessed the miracle which is worked on the dead, which puts them in the right, though they were in the wrong. I thought I would go and sit at Mamma’s feet in front of the fire for a little, but when I got up I saw that she had let our music books slide to the floor, that Constance had dropped her mending in her lap, and they were looking at each other without speaking.
I said, “I want a drink of water.” Rosamund followed me out of the room and we went downstairs to the kitchen. Kate was sitting at the table with The Daily Mail spread out in front of her, reading the serial. We took cups from the dresser and filled them at the sink. When one is a child, water tastes better out of a cup than out of a glass, it is the other way round when one is grown-up.
I said to Kate, “Nancy Phillips’s Papa has died.” I knew she would remember him, because she had seen him on the doorstep when he wanted to fetch the doctor for Richard Quin; but indeed she would have known all about him in any case, we told her all about the girls at school and she remembered them all.
“Oh, the poor man,” she said. “But soon he will be at rest, and he will miss all the hard things that are to come.”
Rosamund and I finished drinking our cups of water, and Kate folded up The Daily Mail. The January evening looked in, yellowed by light fog, at the basement windows. Somewhere along the street, where the small houses were, a barrel organ was playing.
“Would you like a penny,” asked Kate, feeling in her full skirts for her pocket, “to take out to the organ-grinder?”
I shook my head at her over the rim of my cup. “It’s kind of you,” I said, “but I would rather not, unless you think the organ-grinder may need the penny specially.”
“No,” she said, “you can give it to him some other time.”
We rinsed out our cups, and did not know what to do next.
“We’re having stovies for supper tonight,” said Kate. “If you two could cut up the potatoes I should be glad. You can do it in front of the fire.” And we spent the rest of the evening doing that and other tasks she made for us. Mary, who had not known the Phillipses, could play with Richard Quin; we could not.
I was puzzled by the many signs which showed me that my mother and Constance were gravely distressed by the news about Mr. Phillips. Mamma had seen him for only a few minutes, and Constance had not seen him at all; and both of them knew more about death than other people. Yet when we came back from school the next day and sat down to dinner, and Cordelia reported that Nancy had not come back, and that the teachers had said they did not expect her until after the funeral, Mamma’s face was convulsed as by pain. But I myself, thinking of Mrs. Phillips, felt an aching in the front of my head, and saw against the dark wall which backs the mind’s eye a disturbing image of her as a court-card in a pack printed in earthy colours; her tight waist was in the centre of the card, her shoulders above were as broad as the hem of the spreading skirt below, her hungry face was here or there, above or below, her hunger pressing its claim everywhere.
When we came back from school that afternoon I ran upstairs, as we were always made to do, to take off my good clothes and change into an old dress and pinafore apron and wash my hands; and then I hurried down to get in my scales and arpeggios before tea. As I came round the turn in the stairs and looked down on the gaslit hall, I saw Mamma come out of the sitting room, she must have heard Papa’s key in the front door, for he was just coming in. She greeted him with the timid, lifting cockcrow in her voice that meant he had been cross last time he saw her, and that she wanted to give him a chance to be nice again; but he did not greet her back, though he did not look fierce. He said to her in a troubled voice, “The father of that girl whom the children know, the man who died the other day, was his name Phillips?”
“Yes,” said Mamma, shuddering.
“Did he live at the Laurels, St. Clement’s Avenue?”
“Yes, yes,” said Mamma.
Papa held out an evening newspaper to her. “There has been an exhumation order. There will be an inquest.”
Under our feet an unknown male voice said, “And his missus has gone. She’s skipped.”
I ran downstairs into the hall, and we three peered down through the open door of the steps leading to the basement. Kate and the laundryman looked up at us, their tilted faces drowned in shadow. He said again, “His missus has gone. She’s skipped.”
Mamma said to Papa, “Go, go at once. The child will be there, and that poor aunt. Bring them back if they want to come. You know how terrible people are.”
“Yes, yes,” he said, “but I will go upstairs and put on some decent clothes, the police will be there.” He had a better overcoat than the old one he was wearing, Mamma had made him buy it, we had all helped to choose the stuff from patterns, he looked so well in good clothes that it was always an excitement when he bought anything.
He was down again very soon, and Mamma said, “Thank you, my dear. Mind you, in justice, he was a most irritating man. But, of course, that is no reason.” The front door closed, she called down the basement stairs, “Is the laundryman still there? I just wanted to thank you for telling us. You have done us a great service. Kate, give Mary and Cordelia their tea, tell them that Nancy and her Aunt Lily may be coming here, and they must be nice to them, because—” She halted in perplexity. “Tell them it is because—because people are saying things against Nancy’s Mamma, and she has got frightened and has run away.”
“Well, that is no lie,” said Kate.
“While you are seeing to tea Rose and I will make up the two beds in my room, and when you are ready come up and help me put up the camp bed for me in Richard Quin’s room. I cannot manage it alone.”
“There is no hurry, ma’am,” said Kate. “They will not want to go to bed at once. We have the whole evening to see to them.”
“And what shall I give them for supper?” Mamma mourned. “God knows I have to buy from day to day, and I have gone on so long I have forgotten how other people live, they will expect all sorts of things that are not in the house. They will be used to late dinner, with soup, and some cream or jelly or tart after the main course, and fruit, it will be terrible.”
“Why should you care?” I asked stoutly.
“I care because it will all be so strange for the child,” she said. “Losing her father and the police coming and then having to move out into a strange poor house.”
“But all that will not strike home till tomorrow,” said Kate. “Tonight they will hardly know where they are, and poached eggs and tea are the things for that.”
But Mamma had gone upstairs to the linen cupboard, where she fumbled in the poor light, muttering, “My sheets were good once, but they are all so old, I think there is only one pair which is not patched.” When we had made up the two beds in Mamma’s room, and Kate had neatly thrown and mastered the camp bed in Richard Quin’s attic, we went down and found Mary and Cordelia still having their tea in the dining room, sitting side by side and studying the evening paper, which they had spread out on the table between them.
They lifted solemn faces, and Cordelia asked, “Does this mean they think Nancy’s Mamma killed her Papa?”
We understood quite a lot about murders, chiefly because there were some famous cases in the bound volumes of Temple Bar in Papa’s study. We knew the whole story of Constance Kent, who killed her little stepbrother, and only confessed to it years later when she was in a sisterhood at Brighton; it was hard not to think of her wearing a nun’s draperies when she carried the little boy from his cot down the corridor to the outhouse, although of course she was only sixteen then. Sometimes, too, during the holidays, we used to take a bus to another part of South London, in order to have a walk on a less familiar common, and then we passed a villa with an Italianate tower where Mr. Bravo and his dashing golden-haired wife and the neat and silent widow who was her companion had composed an uneasy household until he died of poisoning.
Mamma answered, “Yes. But you know you are supposed not to read at table unless it is something by Papa that has just come in.”
Mary and Cordelia stopped looking at the paper, but it went on lying there. Mamma gave me my tea and poured out her own, but did not drink it.
“Oh, poor, poor Nancy,” said Cordelia.
“We will not be able to do enough for her,” said Mamma.
“She will mind, she has not the least idea that people are unlucky,” said Mary.
“But why is she coming to us?” asked Cordelia. “I always think of other people as having lots of relatives and friends to help them.”
“No, many families are as alone in the world as we are,” said Mamma. “The least thing starts it.” After a minute she added, “And this is not a little thing.”
We sat in silence, then Mamma said that I had better get on with as much of my practice as I could before they came. In the sitting room Richard Quin was playing on the hearthrug with a courtyard of his new palace. Mamma told him that he might go on in the meantime but must leave when Papa came back with some friends, and she sat down by the fire and listened to my scales and arpeggios. Presently she said, “Rose, you have not begun to learn how to play. You start playing legato, and then when your mind wanders from what you are doing your legato stops being a legato at all, it is as rough as a bathtowel. But when you tell your hand to play legato it should go on doing so till you tell it to stop, no matter if you are thinking of the moon.” Later I tried the third number of Beethoven’s Sonata in D major (Op. 10), and when I got to the twenty-second measure of the first movement, she cried, “Rose, you are a musical half-wit. You have forgotten what I told you, you must supply the high F sharp there though it is not written. Beethoven did not write it because it was not in the compass of the piano as he knew it, but he heard it, he heard it inside his head, and you cannot have understood one note of what you have been playing if you do not know that that is what he heard.” Later, when I got to the second subject, she cried, “You are playing like an idiot. You are playing that appoggiatura not as a short one, thank God you are not such an imbecile as that, but you are not playing it as a long one either. It must have the strict value of a crotchet, otherwise the half-bar does not repeat the pattern of the four descending notes.” Later on she moaned, when I got to the bounding octaves. “Do you mean to say you cannot understand that though the weak beats are doubled by the left hand they must be kept weak, and the strong beats must be kept strong, although the whole thing is piano. I might as well have been teaching a chimpanzee.” I was disquieted by what seemed to be the unnatural mildness of these comments. Had Mamma been her usual self I would surely have heard that Beethoven would not have recognized what I had made of his work, that I had committed faults which nobody would commit if they had one drop of music in them, and that she blamed herself for having ever encouraged me to play. But she recovered her usual vigour when Papa brought in Aunt Lily and Nancy.
Any tragic scene in those days necessarily appeared grotesque, because of the clothes worn by the women. Aunt Lily looked like a wet bird, like one of those hens in the back gardens you see out of a railway train as it approaches a London junction. The rims of her eyes were red, so were her nostrils, and the bridge of her nose shone bare like a beak. Under her winter coat she wore a pongee silk blouse with a high collar, and one of the transparent bone supports had worked loose and stuck out at an angle, so that it seemed as if someone had been trying to dispatch her in the method appropriate to a hen, by wringing her neck. Today she would have the right to look like that, plain and distraught and like a hen, but she was compelled by the mode of the day to make herself absurd as a clown by wearing a hat the size of a tea-tray, which dipped and jerked and swayed as often as she did, which was perpetually. She had adjusted her hatpins carelessly in her distress, so every now and then her hat wobbled, and her hands flew up and tugged at it with a gesture which she herself felt to be clumsy and helpless, and tried to correct to elegance by shooting out her little fingers and crisping them. She could not stop talking, although it was evident that Papa, standing beside her almost as grimly as a policeman, wished she would. She asked Mamma if she could really want them to stay with her, had she thought that it would mean that the house would be watched, there would be coppers everywhere, poking and prying, and there was even one walking up the alley at the end of the garden, though that wasn’t to be wondered at, with poor Queenie and all, but they would come here too. My father told her firmly that he had settled all that with the police, but she did not listen, she went on twisting and turning as the endless coil of words spun from her mouth, while Nancy waited at her side, her eyes half closed, as if she had gone to sleep as she stood.
As Aunt Lily talked on and on, it could be believed that she was Mrs. Phillips’s sister, though till now there had seemed no likeness between them. It was not that she had become sombre and massive and threatening, she was still albino-ish and insipid and flimsy and anxious only to please, though rightly despairing of success. But there was a reckless strength in her contemplation of her sister’s reckless flight, she did not ask us to be sorry for her and Nancy, she spread her wings and soared over the field of their ruin, and her wild voice told us truly what she saw. The servants had all gone yesterday evening, they had never liked Queenie, Queenie was too hard on them, and when she took one of her mad fits to work herself and show them what was what she did it all too well, they knew she had had to work herself when she was young and thought nothing of her. It was the polishing that gave Queenie and herself away, for she admitted that she was the same, polish, polish, polish, as soon as she saw any brass, she couldn’t stop herself, it gets a habit when you have to keep a bar nice, and those girls guessed it, sooner or later you found they all knew, they almost said so to your face. It was a curious thing, Mr. Phillips had moved right away, but people still seemed to find out anything. When the trouble had broken, the sluts had only stayed till evening to suit themselves, to pack up, and she would have liked to have searched their boxes, she was sure they were going out heavier than they came in, but she had not the spirit.
It had broken her heart, she said, and her voice shrilled, and Papa drew closer to her and, his fingers tremulous with reluctance, laid his hand on her sleeve, but he could not stop her. It had broken her heart, she continued, that Queenie had gone in the night without saying a word to her, so that she could not warn her. They didn’t know yet how she had gone, there was a wheelbarrow up against the garden wall by the summerhouse, but there was the copper in the alley on the other side of the wall. She must have crept like a cat all the length of the alley along the top of that wall, fine big woman though she was, then dropped down into the garden of the corner house and out of the front gate when nobody was looking. Queenie had never had any fear, Aunt Lily had often told her that it would be better if she had. The warning Aunt Lily had wanted to give her was not to go back to Southampton. That was where they had both come from, and she would go back there. Ever since Queenie had heard that Mr. Mason had taken a position in Ostend, the very same day he heard that Harry was dead, she had not been herself, and then after the inspector with a beard had come and asked all those questions she had been just like a dumb animal, she couldn’t speak and she couldn’t understand speech, she just looked, and she would act like an animal, she would go back to where she came from. But of course the inspector with the beard knew where they both came from, he had not said so, but he knew everything. Mamma, who had tried to speak a dozen times but had been unheard, slipped her right hand in my right hand and her left hand on Nancy’s left hand, and laid Nancy’s hand on mine, and with a circular ritual gesture bade us leave the room.
In the passage, I said, “I say, can’t grown-ups talk?”
Nancy giggled and said, “Papa says about Aunt Lily that he wishes he could put a handkerchief over the cage.” Then she remembered that her father was dead, and she cried.
When I had wiped her eyes I took her into the dining room. The tea had been cleared away and Mary and Cordelia were doing their homework. They said, “Hello, Nancy,” and I went and got my homework. When I got back they were telling her about something funny that had happened at school during prayers, and I got my arithmetic and algebra done. Then Nancy heard Mary and Cordelia recite their French and German verbs, but she sometimes lifted her eyes from the page and looked about the room with a certain desolation. She put her hand down on the seat of the chair she was sitting on, and picked off one of the curly pieces which were peeling off the worn surface of the leather. Her eyes travelled over our faces, too, very doubtfully. You could see that she had heard the other girls talking about us at school, saying that we were odd, and very poor. Her unease at the place which she had to come to for refuge had struck her sooner than Kate had foretold, perhaps because her mind was so poorly furnished that immediate impressions could move in and extend themselves. She was really very much disturbed by our household. We had so little in common with her that Cordelia struck Mary and me as very clever when she thought of telling her that we all wished so much that we had hair like hers, it was so long and so thick and so fair and so tidy. Nancy’s response showed us that this was the sort of remark which she thought sensible people exchanged. She smiled, straightened her hair-bow, and said that her hair must be looking dreadful, she always had it washed the day before she went back to school, but this time there had been no chance of doing that, because of her Papa.
As her voice faded away, Mary said, “Let’s wash our hairs. It’s about time we did ours.”
I said, “What a good idea. I’ll go and ask Kate if there are any chestnuts in the house,” and Nancy exclaimed, “What, do you wash your hair with chestnuts?” We all burst out laughing, explaining at once that we were laughing not at her but at me, for talking about chestnuts before we had told her that in winter hair-washing was a sort of party in our family. Mary had, indeed, been proposing to comfort the afflicted stranger in our midst by admitting her to one of our chief private joys. On these occasions we all went to the bathroom with kettles of hot water and gave each other shampoos, then came down to the sitting room while Richard, who was allowed to stay up late on these occasions, helped the drying process by pummelling our heads with hot bathtowels, which he enjoyed doing because, he said, it was his only chance to be cruel back to his cruel elder sisters; and at the same time we roasted chestnuts among the coals and ate them very hot with milk that had been put outside the window to get very cold.
All this we explained to Nancy, who told us that of late her Mamma had been taking her to the big hairdresser’s in the High Street opposite the Bon Marche, to save trouble. She said that with some pride. But there was nothing to do but go on with it now we had started it, so I went down to the kitchen and found that Kate had quite a lot of chestnuts, and would put them on to boil, and told Richard Quin that there was going to be a hair-washing, and came upstairs again, and found Papa standing at the front door talking to a policeman. I went into the sitting room to ask Mamma if later on we could come in and dry our hair, and found her and Aunt Lily sitting in silence by the fire. Mamma looked very tired. Aunt Lily had just taken off her hat, the huge disc lay on top of the piano, its brim projecting over the instrument in front and behind; and she was leaning forward over the fire, her hands searching for combs and slides and hairpins lost in the disordered edifice of her yellow hair. As I came in she looked up and said, with her old jauntiness, “Ah, here’s the clever little kiddy,” and flashed one of her familiar smiles that reflected the light from her prominent teeth, though today it shone as brightly from the bridge of her reddened nose and from the tears on her cheek. Before I could ask Mamma what I wanted, she said, “Who was it at the door?”
I answered that it was a policeman and Aunt Lily said, “Perhaps he has news. But“—she sighed—”perhaps he hasn’t. I suppose it will be police, police, police, forever and ever, amen, coming round about every little thing.” She put her hands round her knees, which showed bony through her skirt, and stared at the fire as if the news were there. I had a feeling that she often spoke falsely, like a popular song, she might have been singing “The Honeysuckle and the Bee,” but sometimes she spoke, as my father and mother did, sincerely, of what she really thought and felt.
Papa came back. He said, “Miss Moon, a policeman has brought a message from the family solicitor which he sent down to the Laurels through the police office.” Even the Phillipses had not a telephone, so different was that world from this. It appeared that the solicitor had got in touch with a brother of Mr. Phillips, who lived in Nottingham, and he was coming down tomorrow and would go to the boarding-school on the south coast where Nancy’s brother was, and would bring him up to London, and then he would settle various business arising out of the recent unfortunate events, and the next day or the day after would take Nancy back to Nottingham. It was strange to hear this news about the movements of people we did not know, who lived in places we have never visited. It was as if towns marked on the map had begun to cry out and bleed.
“I’m glad,” said Aunt Lily. “It will get them away from London, I don’t think they sell newspapers as much in the street in those provincial sort of places, do they? It’s a horrid sound, those boys calling out the news, up and down the street. And it’s a lovely big house they have, they’ve pots of money, the kids will have everything. But what they’ll hear about their mother I don’t like to think, for all Harry’s people were against Queenie from the start, I never could think why.” The tears that had been stationary on her cheeks began to roll again. “It’s good news,” she said, “but I did think it might be something about Queenie.”
Mamma told me to go and give the news to Nancy, but not say a policeman had brought them. I wondered at the obtuseness of all grown-ups, even Mamma. Nancy had simply accepted the fact that she had entered a passage in time when policemen brought communications which decided her life. She had already left the dining room and gone upstairs to take off her blouse and skirt and put on her dressing-gown in preparation for the hairwashing ceremony, and I found her sitting on her bed and looking round Mamma’s room as she had looked round the dining room. It must, indeed, have seemed a desolate apartment to poor Nancy, as it would have to most people, for it was almost bare except for remnants of obsolete fame, preserved in a form which few would have recognized, in tarnished laurel wreaths inscribed with such names as Dresden and Düsseldorf and Wien, and signed photographs and prints of conductors carrying batons.
I said to her, “Cheer up, Nancy, you won’t have to be here long. Your uncle in Nottingham is going to fetch Cecil from his school tomorrow, and then only a day or two after that he will take you both home with him.”
She said, “Oh. My uncle. Nottingham? That will be Uncle Mat.” Her eyes wandered round the room and settled on the signed print over Mamma’s bed.
“Brahms,” I said. “He gave it to Mamma of his own accord. She did not even know he was at her concert. So of course she did not even ask for it, he brought it to her hotel the next morning.”
“Oh,” said Nancy politely, “who was he?” Before I could answer she said, “I don’t know Uncle Mat very well. I can’t even remember whether he is married to Aunt Nettie or Aunt Clara.”
“Does it make a difference?” I asked.
“It does, rather,” said Nancy wearily, and her eyes grew wet again.
I ran downstairs and asked Aunt Lily which it was. She said, “Not Aunt Nettie—she’s the sly one, I know well what poor Nancy was thinking about—it’s all right, it’s Uncle Mat and Aunt Clara, and they’re both ever so jolly, quite different from Nettie.” She looked round at Papa and Mamma with a little laugh, as if she knew that she could count on their understanding and sympathy in her references to the amusing guerrilla warfare of family life. They were obliging enough to return the smile, but I knew them to be depressed. When I got upstairs again Nancy was standing in the doorway, and she did not seem as pleased as I had thought she would be at hearing that Uncle Mat was married to Aunt Clara and not to Aunt Nettie, she just stood there. Presently she said, choking, “I can’t wash my hair.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said, “be a good girl, it is fun.”
She muttered, “I keep on crying. I’d better stay by myself and people won’t see.”
I could hear Cordelia and Mary getting the lather ready in the bathroom. I called to them, and when they came I said, “Look here, Nancy doesn’t want to wash her hair with us because we’ll see her crying. Tell her it’s all right.”
“We will not think any worse of you if you cry,” Cordelia assured her. “We always cry when we are upset.”
“Yes,” said Mary, “and we have none of us had nearly as much to upset us as you have. It would really be very odd if you had lost your Papa and did not cry a lot.”
“Yes, it would be sharper than the serpent’s tooth,” I said. “Go on and cry as much as you like, and you can do it all right while you’re washing your hair.”
“Just pretend we are not here,” said Cordelia.
But Nancy looked with some alarm at the three girls, not very well known to her and generally reputed to be rather odd, who were crowding in on her, dressed in shabby dressing-gowns, and inciting her to cry. “Well, it’s not the right thing to do, is it?” she said vaguely; and indeed she and we were thinking of quite different things. To us, a girl whose father had just died and whose mother was suspected of murdering him had passed into the world of Shakespearean tragedy, and we wanted to help her to exercise the functions she would find it necessary to discharge now that she had suffered this abrupt translation from the ordinary. We had imagined that unless she were allowed to walk up and down a room, shedding tremendous tears and uttering cries which would purge her heart of its grief, there would be just such a hole in the universe as would have been left had Lady Macbeth been deprived of her sleep-walking scene. But Nancy saw the situation in quite another light. She did not know much, but among the things she had learned was the disgracefulness of crying. It had perhaps been brought home to her that she had made Aunt Lily’s hard lot harder than it need be by untimely bawling. So she looked at us with puzzled disapproval, and we drifted away.
But the hairwashing worked out not so badly. When we went down to the sitting room only Aunt Lily was there. Mamma had gone to see about supper, and Papa came in with three glasses and one of the bottles the margarine manufacturer had given him. He asked Aunt Lily if she would like some sherry, and then looked at the label, and in that soft, polite, withdrawn voice which meant he was speaking about something of no interest to him, said that he was afraid that it was port. But Aunt Lily said that that was all the better, for she understood that port was a temperance drink. Papa hesitated for a minute before replying, “Well, there is no advantage in regarding port as a temperance drink unless one is a teetotaller,” and filled the glass.
Papa had meant nothing more than he said, he was simply considering the manifestly false proposition that port was a temperance drink and wondering whether it served any useful purpose in spite of its falsity, or deserved to be pulled up and destroyed like any other intellectual weed. But Aunt Lily was unused to remarks which had not a directly personal application, and was greatly puzzled by his answer. She threw a sharp glance at him, which she might better have directed at us children, who were settling down before the fire, for my sisters and I (as we were to find out when we first mentioned the matter to one another, many years later) were all thinking of the time when we had seen her drinking sherry in the confectioner’s shop without any visible distaste for its alcoholic nature. We were recalling that memory without malice, indeed it was the foundation of our lasting affection for her, because it suggested to us that she was not really a grown-up, and, like a child, was always having to protect herself against criticism which asked more of her than she could give. We liked her too because she came to the conclusion that Papa was nice, she withdrew her eyes from him, said mildly, “Ah, I can see you are a great tease,” and comfortably took up her glass of port.
Then the grown-ups went away and we took over the hearth; and Richard Quin, who had always, from the time he was very small, had a quick, pliant social gift, saw to it that things went better with Nancy. He rubbed our heads as he always did, really hurting us just a little, just so much that we should ask him to stop urgently enough to make it really exciting; but he did not hurt Nancy at all, and he told her that she had nicer hair than any of us sisters. Just then he was passing through a stage when he loved nonsense more than anything, he was always reciting that funny silly thing by Samuel Foote which begins, “So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage leaf, to make an apple pie, and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street, pops its head into the shop and says, ‘What, no soap?’” So we told him how Nancy had thought we washed our hair with chestnuts, and he was delighted, he rolled laughing on the floor, crying out that he was going to wash his hair with a rolling-pin, with the Houses of Parliament, with a bus-horse, with the crown jewels. Suddenly Nancy said shyly, “I am going to wash my hair with a railway ticket.” She had, as we found out later, hardly ever made up things. She had never made up an animal in all her life, which seemed to us quite dreadful. Now she was too old for Richard Quin’s games, but she liked helping him play them, and he did not seem to puzzle her as we did. Also she liked roasting the chestnuts, she had never done it before. We had a special chestnut-roaster, I have not seen one in the shops for years, it was like a dustpan made of wire netting, with a very long handle.
We were quieter after Richard Quin went up to bed; and suddenly we saw that Nancy had gone to sleep with her head on the seat of the armchair. We knew the grown-ups would come back sometime, so we just waited. Then Aunt Lily put her head round the door (which was an action she performed quite literally, it was no mere phrase, she really stood outside and twisted her neck round the edge of the door) and said, “There’s something I’d love you kiddies to do for me,” and when we interrupted her and pointed to Nancy, she went on, “Well, the poor chickabiddy has had a long day. But first can you just help me, and get me a teeny-weeny bit of notepaper? Your Papa’s gone into the den and your Mamma’s with the sweet little boy, and I just want to have some paper by me so that I can get on with a letter when I’ve a moment.” We found her some in Mamma’s desk, and she seemed strangely pleased, as if now she would pursue some delightful occupation that would wipe out the darkness round her. “And your Papa will have a stamp, I’ll be bound,” she said. “Gentlemen always have stamps.” Then she woke Nancy, saying, “Well, the sandman’s been visiting you all right,” and took her upstairs, and soon was down again, and sat herself at the table in front of the paper.
“Now, I’ve got something all you kiddies would like to see,” she said, diving into the deep pocket in the side of her skirt just below her waistband, and taking out a short, stubby cardboard box. We gathered round her, marvelling at her brightness, which our prophetic blood knew to be pitiful, while she showed us the first fountain pen we had ever seen. “Harry was given one by an American gentleman he does business with, and he was so taken with it that he gave us each one at Christmas. Queenie and Nancy, and me too, he was always very fair,” she said, woe touching her voice again, and she held out the unusual object so that we could admire it. She suggested that she might get one to give Papa for a Christmas present; but though we were fascinated, we dissuaded her, for we really could not imagine him writing with anything but a quill pen, an ordinary swan or goose quill for the rough draft, and for his fair copy the crow quill used by draughtsmen. But she was glad when we left her and she could get down to the delicious task of writing her letter, which she was still pursuing, though it did not seem to be a long one, at our bedtime twenty minutes later. She did not hear us when we first said good night, but looked up absently, joy shining curiously from her tear-raddled face. She called us back to ask when the last post went, which, as a journalist’s children, we were able to tell her with perfect accuracy, and she seemed disappointed when we told her that it had already gone.
The next morning Mamma had to give us a note for our form-mistresses, excusing us for not having finished all our homework. Cordelia and Mary had not touched their arithmetic and mathematics, and I had not touched my French translation, and we had just looked at our history when we were going to bed, because we had been looking after Nancy. Our homework, I realize now, presented a difficult moral problem to Mamma at any time. Because she was Scottish she believed that there was nothing more important in a child’s life than its lessons, but as a musician she knew that there was nothing more important to us than our music. This meant that our homework was perfunctory but never wholly neglected; and Mamma really suffered in writing that note. This was the first and trifling sample of the disorganization brought upon our lives by our involvement in one of the most notorious murder cases of the Edwardian era.
I cannot list all the inconveniences suffered by my father and mother. It is to be remembered that my father was not a young man, for he had married late. He now did not spare himself at all in the service of the Phillips family. By dint of staying up nearly all night to write his leaders for the paper, he made himself free to escort Aunt Lily up to the City on the various errands which, with prudence and tenderness, he had persuaded her to undertake. While we were sitting by the fire in our dressing-gowns on the first evening, we had heard Papa say to her, “You must go to a good solicitor,” and when she answered, “Oh, that’s all right, Harry’s solicitor is a very good man,” gently persist, “No, you cannot have that solicitor, you must have one of your own”; and when she had answered again, “Well, I don’t see why, but if you say so, I’ll do it, but I wouldn’t bother just for myself, time for that when Queenie turns up,” he had said, lowering his voice, “No, you must have a solicitor to help you at the inquest. If you tell him everything, everything, he will be ready to help your sister too.” The next day he went up to London with Aunt Lily and saw a member of the anti-socialist organization for which he spoke, who was a partner in a famous firm of solicitors, and he managed to induce him to accept her as his client, though he owed this man a considerable sum of money and had angered him by forgetting to appear at a public meeting he had arranged. There was no stopping Papa when he was engaged in a crusade for a victory which would bring him no benefit. There were other visits to London, which, I supposed, were made at her request. On all these expeditions Papa was Aunt Lily’s patient escort; and always he gnawed his fingers when he was waiting in the hall for her to come downstairs in the festal array which she assumed in the belief that she was thus showing a proper sense of the social elevation of both Papa and his friends.
This festal array had been to some degree restrained by the efforts of Mamma. When she was helping Aunt Lily to unpack she had mentioned to her that, though she saw that she had some very nice scent, she must ask her not to use it during her visit, as Papa had an abnormal dislike of it, it really made him quite ill to smell it. “What,” Aunt Lily had wistfully inquired, “even some nice violet essence from Paris? It’s good, you know.” “Not even that,” Mamma answered firmly, adding, “It is the same thing, you know, as Lord Roberts and his hatred for cats. They cannot help it.” She had also prevented Aunt Lily from going back to the Laurels to fetch her best hat, on the plea that since envy was a prevalent human trait, a certain moderation should be observed at this moment, if only in order to influence public opinion in Queenie’s favour. It is possible that the hat would really have been quite a nice one, and the scents as good as Grasse could make; for though the Phillipses had, as we were to find out, rewarded Aunt Lily for her many services by nothing more than meagre pocket-money, Queenie had not infrequently bought handsomely for her sister at the shops to which she herself gave her custom.
But the elegancies Aunt Lily thus acquired lost their character when set in conjunction with her nodding and winking bony plainness; and they would indeed have been hard put to it to assert their Tightness against the wrongness of the minor touches which she added to her appearance with the tireless industry and with taste that was never better than infamous. Her necklace of enamel violets had two fellows, one of pansies and one of marguerites. She had a remarkable collection of hatpins and prized highest the set of four, each with one of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ cherubs on its head. With a white veil spotted with black lozenges, she wore black glacé kid gloves with white buttons and strappings, and openwork stockings, sometimes embroidered with violets. When she wanted to make a particularly good impression she added a mauve feather boa. As she descended the staircase my father would raise his eyes and take in the special features of the day’s toilette, and would force himself to nod slowly and make a vague courtly gesture, as if in approbation. Then he would open the front door without his usual haste, hold it while she fluttered out, and slowly set out on his long day of public appearance in her company.
But Papa and Mamma were further tormented by Aunt Lily’s garrulity. She talked all the time. Every evening, in Papa’s study, they gave her a couple of glasses of port, sometimes, I think, even more, though to their fierce abstinence this must have seemed like procuration. I went in once and heard her say, “Anybody but Queenie could have got on with Harry, but of course he never looked at me,” and I am sure, from their recollection of their faces, that she had been uttering a string of confidences which they would have liked to annul by magic, not because these were disgraceful, but because they were more innocent and honest than is safe in this world. But more often Aunt Lily talked not well enough. In her world silence was suspect. With us it was taken for granted that a person who did not speak was thinking, or needed to rest, or, quite simply, had nothing to say at the moment; but to her such a person must either be sad (in which case he was described as “moping”) or nourishing some resentment. In both cases it was the duty of the well-intentioned to distract the affected person by a flow of cheerful conversation, and Aunt Lily was above all dutiful.
Our household found itself peculiarly vulnerable to this diagnosis and to the cure. We were all of us given to spells of silence, particularly Mary and Papa; and none of us (and here again this particularly applied to Mary and Papa) agreed with Aunt Lily’s theory that the use of certain facetious phrases was enough to stamp an occasion with gaiety, however unrelated they were, provided it was unremitting and accompanied by laughter. The second evening she was with us, as it got near Richard Quin’s bedtime, she said brightly that she thought she knew who was ready for a trip to Bedfordshire, a joke which we had heard from Kate years before, when we were all small enough to think it very funny; and she felt it necessary every evening to meet that moment with some synonymous phrase which she considered equally entertaining. In the same way she felt it necessary to say, “When Father lays the carpet on the stairs,” if she happened to see Papa performing any small task such as putting in a new incandescent gas-mantle, and, “Alice, Where Art Thou,” if Mamma called for any of us and we did not hear. We liked her all the more for this, because it meant that she was trying hard to be nice, but it made us very tired.
But my father and mother suffered most acutely from the contact of their fullness with the emptiness of those they were befriending. Nancy’s Uncle Mat was not able to fetch her as soon as she had hoped, though he had taken away her brother, and she remained in our house for some time. It was obviously not the place for her to be. Aunt Lily derived many benefits from staying with us, Nancy none. She could not go to school, and she would not go out for fear of being recognized; and the fear was justified, for everybody in the district had known her handsome and splendidly dressed mother and her expansive father with his snorting motor-car, and the boy and girl, both pale with yellow hair, who silently accompanied them. But there was nowhere to send the girl. Mr. Phillips had had a partner who had sent a message that his wife would be pleased to take the girl, but she did not come herself nor write to Mamma, and this seemed cold and ill-mannered, and Mamma did not like to follow it up. Mr. Phillips’s solicitor spoke of other friends who might be of service, and who were sometimes said to have expressed a kindly concern for the two children. But they too neither called nor wrote. In time it dawned on Papa and Mamma, probably these people would be unused to the idea of calling on strangers, and while they would certainly be able to write, they would be at a loss to compose a delicate letter dealing with unusual circumstances.
For Mamma was very conscious that she was bringing her children up in a social vacuum, and she dreaded lest this horrid catastrophe should put Nancy off from a world ready to accept her. So she questioned the girl often, to find out which of her parents’ friends had lingered in her memory as likely to be affectionate. But they had left only physical impressions on the girl’s mind. She could describe them only by reference to the houses they lived in, to their carriages, to the clothes the women wore, the number and sex of their children, the sort of children’s parties they gave, and the presents they had sent at Christmas. She could not remember anything they had said, or anything they had done, which had a personal significance. They had often met, but not to practise the art of conversation. “Mrs. Robinson? Oh, she was a very big woman. Mamma said she wore too bright colours for anybody so stout,” said Nancy. “What did she talk about?” pressed Mamma. “Oh, about going to the Derby, and she used to go to the piano and sing all the songs that Connie Ediss sings at the Gaiety.”
There spread before Papa and Mamma a terrible nullity of which they had not known before. Nancy sat all day about the house, exercising what was evidently a practised ability for doing nothing. She did not want to read the newspapers, or any books. She had never read the Alices or the Jungle Books or Treasure Island or Jackanapes or The Secret Garden. Mamma was aware that there were many people who read what she called trashy books, but it was news to her that there were people who read nothing at all. She was more sympathetic when Nancy owned that she could not play the violin or the piano and had no voice and did not care for music, for since the development of Cordelia’s ambition she had seen a new virtue in the acceptance of such limitations. But it alarmed her again when she told Nancy that she was sure none of us would mind if she used our paintboxes, and Nancy looked surprised and said that she did not take art at school. She took pleasure in helping Mamma with some of the housework, but was plainly unused to the task, and a little embarrassed by it, while she grew obviously apprehensive when Mamma suggested that she should go down to the kitchen and see if there was anything she could do for Kate. She had been trained, like many of our schoolfellows, to think that helping servants with their work and feeling love for servants was a risky thing to do, that it was likely to cost her some obscure distinction she might otherwise retain.
The only occupation she had which she seemed to think legitimate was what she called her “work”: a linen nightdress case stamped on one side with a trivial design of trailing flowers, which she was outlining in the simplest possible embroidery stitch. It must have been important to her, or she would not have packed it among her clothes the night she left the Laurels. But it was a poor defence from fear and grief. She often tired of it, and Mamma would find her quite motionless in the armchair by the sitting-room fire, idle and unprotected, her blue-grey eyes, which were gentle and limpid but nothing more, fixed on the window and the winter world outside. My mother’s heart was wrung, but she could do very little to comfort the girl, who was as effectively separated from her by her lack of interests as she would have been by deafness, or ignorance of all but some exotic language.
“What did they do all day, sitting in that house?” I heard Mamma asking Papa one evening at this time, horror in her voice, as if she spoke of naked savages, pent in their darkened huts while filth and tropical disease and fear of jungle gods consumed them.
“God knows, God knows,” he answered. “This is the new barbarism.”
“What is so terrible,” my mother continued, “is that the girl is quite nice.”
That was indeed the terrible thing. Though Nancy came from a world where life was reduced to nothingness, she was herself not nothing. We had thought that of her at first, but we saw that we were wrong. That she should have had a great love for her aunt was natural enough; in the shadow of her sombre mother she had played with another child who sometimes turned into a protective grown-up. But very soon she came to love Mamma and follow her about the house, very soon she came to see that there was something grand and strange about Papa, and to look about her at his books with proper reverence when she went into his study, and in spite of herself she became fond of Kate. Though we had felt so awkward with her when she came, she liked us too. She could not have enough of Richard Quin, she was enraptured because he was such a pretty little boy, she thought it a shame we did not have a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit for him to wear, and awed because he knew so much that she did not. All this liking she expressed by actions which were of little moment, which were hardly actions at all, but which showed sweetness. They did not amount to very much; one might say she had performed the moral equivalent of laying a few lavender sachets among the sheets in the linen-cupboard. But it was enough to make her one of our family.
So we were sorry when Uncle Mat came to take her away. There was nothing good about that. He came on a Saturday morning, when we children were all in, indeed everybody was in, except Aunt Lily, who had gone up to see some shops in the West End and tell them not to carry out the orders they were fulfilling for her and her sister, if there still were time. Richard Quin and I watched him out of the dining-room window as he was getting out of the cab, and we could tell at once that it would not do. He was big and stout like Mr. Phillips and should have been jolly like him; and his sad expression looked all wrong on him, it was like a serious person wearing a paper hat. He stopped still and looked up at the house before he opened the gate, as if he thought someone inside was going to take advantage of him and he was organizing his forces so that he should give as good as he got. We opened the door, because we knew that Kate was in the middle of her weekend baking, and asked if he could see Papa, reading his name very slowly off a piece of paper he took out of his pocket, doubtfully, as if he suspected Papa was probably really called something quite different.
Mary was practising in the sitting room, but we took him in there, and Richard went and pulled her hair, that recognized social signal among the young, so that she stopped and realized who was there. I asked Uncle Mat to sit down, which he did exactly in the fashion of an actor in a play Kate had taken us to in the local theatre some time before. The actor had walked round in a circle on his way to his chair, staring at the tops of the walls as if looking at the pictures, but fixing his eyes on a level far above that at which pictures are normally hung, and continuing to do so while he slowly sat down. This is a universal convention among bad actors, and I find it interesting that Uncle Mat should have followed it when he wished to emphasize how strange he found it that he should have to visit our house. Then we fetched Papa out of his study, and ran upstairs and told Mamma, who lifted her hand as if she were a conductor collecting his orchestra, and said, “What must we do?” She answered herself by saying that while she was getting tea and biscuits for the visitor, we must find Nancy, and send her down to her uncle, and get on with her packing if we could do it without her.
I found Nancy in the bathroom with Cordelia, they were gossiping over a tedious chore we children always had to do, they were washing all the hairbrushes and clothes-brushes in the house. It was horrid to give her the message, it seemed so natural that she should be in the bathroom, we did not mind her seeing how old the brushes were, she no longer asked us why all our brushes were not silver-backed; as I came in she had been looking at a clothes-brush and wondering how much longer it would last just as if she were one of us by birth.
Struck still, she said, “Aunt Lily is out, I won’t be able to say good-bye to her,” and turned blue-white.
“But your Uncle Mat will ask her to come and see you in Nottingham,” I said.
She said, “He won’t,” not with the howling despair we used sometimes to purge our fears, but with a shrewd hopelessness that was far grimmer. She laid the worn clothes-brush back in the suds, and set about drying her hands, but gave up, shaking her head. If one is unhappy and one’s hands are really wet it is a bother to dry them. Cordelia took the towel away from her and did it for her. Nancy said, “I don’t want to leave here.”
Cordelia said, “Oh, Nancy, we don’t want you to go. We wish you could stay. But you must have noticed that we are very poor. If you stayed here you would find yourself missing a lot of things you had at home.”
“Yes, it’s really awfully like a picnic,” I said. “Such fun, but one has to go home.”
“This is not a picnic,” said Nancy. “It is something I want to last forever.”
“Live with your uncle,” said Mary, “and come back here quite often, we will always want you.”
“Come back in summer specially,” said Richard Quin, who was suddenly there. “We go to Kew, and we do have picnics then, and tea in shops, with ices. I will always take you about with me. You have lots of things my silly sisters have not got.”
“I don’t think I’ll be able to get back,” said Nancy.
“Oh, we will always know each other,” I said, and, of course, I was right.
Mamma called, and we dispersed, our family nodding confidently, Nancy as still as stone. Mary and I went downstairs to scrabble for Nancy’s shoes in the dark cupboard under the stairs, and presently Mary stopped and said, “Can you believe that Nancy is right and her Uncle Mat won’t ask even Aunt Lily to come and see her?”
“I think it’s probably true,” I said. “Nancy isn’t silly, you know.”
“But that is awful,” said Mary. “Nancy loves Aunt Lily. She is rude to her sometimes, but she loves her.”
“I know,” I said, and confessed, choking, “I am horrible, I am so sorry Nancy is going, but I did think too that when she was gone it would be easier about our practising.”
“I am horrible too, I thought of that,” said Mary, “but we are like that, and we cannot help it.” All the same we both settled down among the boots and shoes and wept, until we heard Nancy coming down the staircase above our heads, her feet lagging from step to step. Mary sobbed, “Well, anyway Papa and Mamma have had a little time to work on the beastly old man before he sees her,” and we got on with our hunt, drawing comfort from what now strikes me as one of the oddest paradoxes in our parents’ being. They were incapable of getting on terms with their fellow creatures on the plane where most of us find that easy. My mother could not dress herself to go out of her house tidily enough to avoid attracting hostile stares, she could not speak to strangers except with such naïveté that they thought her a simpleton, or with such subtlety that they thought her mad. She was never much more negotiable than William Blake. My father was unable to abandon to the slightest degree his addiction to unpunctuality, swarthy and muttering scorn, and insolvency, no matter how earnestly his admirers (and there were always new ones to replace those he alienated) begged it as a favour. Yet when people had passed a certain threshold in the lives of either Papa or Mamma, which they did easily enough by attaining a high pitch of desolation, both were able to exercise on behalf of these desolates a celestial form of cunning nearly irresistible. They were as tricky as a couple of winged foxes. They never had a conversation in the interests of those they were protecting which did not sensibly alter the situation in the way they wished, while those with whom they conversed remained quite unconscious of any propulsive force in their surroundings.
Uncle Mat, as we were to learn years later, set them a severe test. It had to be pointed out to him that when Nancy came down he had better stop saying over and over again, “Saw Harry only a month ago. As well as you and me. And a healthy man. Never been ill in his life. It’s no use telling me they won’t find something. Saw him only a month ago …” He had, so to speak, to be taught the facts of life in Nancy’s special case; to be induced to realize that the girl was the child not only of his brother’s wife, who was believed to have murdered his brother, but of his brother, who was believed to have been murdered; and that therefore she must be treated tenderly. I cannot think how Papa and Mamma succeeded in doing this, but certainly when we all gathered on the doorstep to wave Nancy good-bye Uncle Mat was bending on her a gaze that was more kindly than we could ever have hoped. I remember that gaze as proceeding from an eye embedded in crimson jelly like a bull’s; but that is perhaps because of Papa’s answer when we asked whether Uncle Mat had said anything about taking Aunt Lily up to Nottingham. He replied, “No. It would have been as foolish as to ask a bull to be kind to a horse.” He turned about and walked towards his study, but turned again to say, “Man is a political animal. But seeing what the animal is, what may politics become?” His door closed on us.