“‘HOW NICE it would be’,” read Roberta’s mother from the Alice book, “‘if we could only get through into Looking-Glass Land! I am sure it’s got such beautiful things in it…. Why, the glass is turning into a sort of mist now, I declare. It’ll be easy enough to get through,’ and certainly the glass was beginning to melt away just like a bright silvery mist.”

Roberta sat up straight on her mother’s lap. “Is it true?” she asked.

“Of course, it’s true,” said her mother, “magic is always true.” And then Nurse came for her to put her to bed and her mother closed the book.

“Oh, can’t you go on and Nurse go away?” said Roberta.

“No, darling, you’ll have to wait till tomorrow evening but I’ll tell you now if you like that Alice did get through into Looking-Glass Land.”

The next day when she was left alone and on one was in her mother’s room where the mirror hung – the big oval mirror that Roberta admired so much – she stole in quietly. The mirror had two little gold boys on top of it, holding a crown of gold leaves between them. On the dressing-table below were two cut-glass scent bottles with silver stoppers and a silver-backed hairbrush and comb, and a beautiful little china tray on which a shepherd in a blue coat was bending over a shepherdess in pink, and looking as if he were just going to kiss her. Roberta loved this tray but now she had eyes only for the mirror. She pushed a chair up close to the dining table and climbed upon it, just as Alice had climbed on to the chimney piece, and she looked and looked and it did seem to her as if the room in the mirror must have something wonderful and exciting round the corner that you couldn’t see. She began to press against the glass, feeling it all over, but it did not melt for her as it had done for Alice. She pressed and pressed; being an impatient child she began to get cross. Then it struck her that magic didn’t always work the same way in stories; but if her mother said it was always true, it was only a question of finding the right way to go about it. Perhaps this looking-glass had to have a door made in it. She looked round for a tool and decided the back of the hairbrush would do. She lifted it up and with both hands hit the mirror a resounding crack. She was a strong child for her five years and there was a splinter of broken glass while the brush, rebounding from contact with the wooden back, flew out of her hands, fell on the china tray and broke it in two. Roberta, standing on the chair among splinters of china and glass, began to cry with disappointment and sorrow. There was no looking glass land after all and the beautiful tray was broken so that the poor shepherd and shepherdess were parted for ever.

But now the room became full of cross surprised scolding people, and rage was added to despair.

“What a wicked little girl!” said Nurse.

Roberta, climbing down from the chair, tried to hit her and burst into a passion of sobbing.

“Stop now, Roberta,” said her father. “You’ve done enough to upset Mama already.” He bore her away and his authoritative but calm tone of voice and his large pocket handkerchief reduced her sobs gradually to silence.

“Now tell me,” said her father, “what made you go smashing up all Mama’s pretty things of a sudden?”

“I was only trying to get through into Looking-Glass Land like Alice. Mama said it was magic and magic was always true but it wasn’t true,” hiccupped Roberta.

“Now listen,” said her father, “magic is true always for Mama, but for you and for me, Roberta, it is different, do you understand?”

She nodded. She did not understand, of course, but dimly she saw that there was something to be understood. She was also for the first time aware that, though a divinity to be worshipped still, Mama was not always to be depended on.

“But the poor shepherd and shepherdess,” she cried.

“Who?” said her father. “Oh, Mama’s tray – I expect that can be mended and the mirror too; if not, we must buy her another mirror and another tray.”

“But they won’t be the same,” said Roberta.

And though the mirror had a new glass, which looked too bright and clear for its frame, and the tray was stuck together cleverly so that you could only see a tiny line dividing the two little figures, things were actually never quite the same again.

By the time Roberta had reached her tenth birthday she was tall enough to see over her mother’s shoulders the reflection of her face as she sat before the mirror. Her father was clasping round her neck a new necklace. It was of greenish-blue turquoises to match her eyes. They were lovely eyes with dark curling lashes and finely arched eyebrows and the face was a classical oval like a Botticelli goddess. It was pale like a Botticelli too with a flowerlike clear pallor that added to its charm. Her father also was looking at the reflection and smiling.

“Why does Father always give you a present on my birthday?” asked Roberta of the face in the mirror.

“She’s jealous,” laughed her mother.

“Well, I give you one too,” said her father. “Didn’t you like it? I thought you wanted a watch.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” said Roberta, “I didn’t mean that.”

But they neither of them answered her.

Long ago, naturally, she had asked her mother the usual questions of how she had come to have a birthday at all.

Her mother’s eyes shone perilously. “Well,” she began, “well, darling, have I never told you? It was like this; one day I woke up early and I heard a great whirring and a beating of wings at the window. I jumped out of bed and looked and I couldn’t see the sky at all for the rose-coloured feathers of a huge bird with eyes like emeralds and a golden beak outside my window. He swooped past once, twice, but the third time he perched upon the sill and I saw that on his back, nestling among those glorious feathers, was a tiny baby girl who stretched out her arms to me – and that was you!”

“Was it?” shouted Roberta. “And what did you do?”

“Of course, I leaned out of the window and caught you up and the bird flew off at once and vanished high up above the clouds.”

This story had charmed Roberta until she grew too old to believe it, or possibly she had never really believed it, not at any rate after she had broken the mirror; and later, instead of pleasing her, it began to haunt her. Perhaps I am adopted, she thought, perhaps this was just Mother’s way of telling me I’m not really their child at all.

At last, making her voice sound as matter-of-fact as possible, she said one day to her father: “By the way, I’ve been reading a story about a boy who was found as a baby and adopted. I’m not adopted by any chance, am I?”

Her father laughed. “My dear Roberta, come and look in Mama’s mirror. Now don’t you see, you and I have got just the same sort of eyes – cat’s eyes my mother called them, a queer kind of yellowish colour that polite people call hazel; and I’m afraid you’ve got my big nose too and jutting-out chin. It’s hard luck on you, my dear, to have taken after me so obviously but you’ve got your mother’s hair.” He pulled Roberta’s thick fair pigtail. “Well, now are you satisfied?”

By that tenth birthday, however, she knew that babies came out of their mothers but she did not know how they got there. Children were never then taught the facts of life, they just picked them up or didn’t, as the case might be.

“Does it hurt getting the babies out?” she asked Rose, her best friend, who was a mine of information.

“Yes,” said Rose, “and sometimes you die.”

“But why don’t men have babies?”

“I don’t know, they just don’t, and it’s their fault too. I don’t quite know how yet, but I don’t think it’s fair.”

Roberta thought this conversation over. Perhaps it had something to do with the presents to her mother on her own birthday. Later, once when she was spending the day with Kitty, her aunt came in from a neighbour’s and exclaimed to her uncle: “Thank goodness, Bessie’s baby’s come at last. It’s a boy. I’m afraid she’s had a bad time but it’s all right now.”

“Oh, what’s he like? Did you see him?” asked Kitty, but Roberta said:

“Did Mother have a bad time when I was born, Aunt Margaret?”

Her aunt looked flustered. “Oh, girls, I didn’t notice you. Whatever makes you ask that, Roberta?”

“I just wondered.”

“Then you needn’t wonder any more. You mustn’t think all babies are difficult. You behaved very well I remember and gave your mother little trouble. Of course,” she added, “your father made a fuss, perhaps you’ve heard something, but he makes a fuss if she pricks her little finger.”

Roberta said nothing. She was aware, and not for the first time, of an edge in her aunt’s voice when she spoke of her mother. It was not at all what she was used to, for everyone else seemed to adore her. Her mixture of beauty, gaiety and a sort of innocent silliness combined with that indefinable grace, which is called charm, was generally irresistible. Men of all ages were her slaves and her husband accepted this with pride, for he was confident in her absolute reliance on himself. As for love, there are infinite varieties of this. When she was old enough to observe such things, Roberta sometimes thought there was little difference between her mother’s love for her father and her own, and that her relationship with other men was rather like a little girl’s pretending to be grown up, pleased with admiration, expanding like a flower in its warmth but never in the least troubled.

The years passed, but her mother’s face in the mirror hardly altered. Roberta, now in her mid-teens, was watching her sitting in front of it trying on hats. Beside her, thrust anyhow into an old blue and white pitcher, was a bouquet of flowers: pink roses, pale blue delphiniums and purple columbine. There was never anyone who took less trouble than her mother arranging flowers, Roberta thought, yet the effect was often unpredictably perfect.

“I look a fright, a perfect hag.”

“Of course you don’t, Mother.”

“Yes, I do, none of these hats will do. Ever since I sold that little black one to my dear, dear friend Helen, I have wanted it desperately. I really must get it back from her.”

“Why on earth did you sell it then?”

“I suppose I must have wanted the money terribly for something and your father must have been away. I thought I had too many hats but I was completely mistaken. Now what am I to do?”

“Why can’t you wear that lovely one with the curling feather that makes you look like a Gainsborough?”

“Too big, especially in a storm.”

“But it’s perfectly fine.”

‘Not when I wear that hat, it always turns to thunder then – there must be something sinister about it. No, I shan’t wear a hat at all, just a wrap, I think.” She threw a rose-coloured scarf round her head. To Roberta it was as if the little shepherdess on the china tray had stepped out of her Virginian landscape into Looking-Glass Land. She said so.

“Darling, you are sweet,” said her mother, “but where is my shepherd? Immured in London, poor fellow. Never mind, I’m going to meet my knight instead.”

“Old Sir Joseph?” enquired Roberta. Sir Joseph Maxwell was the squire of the village and owned the woods around Rowanbank.

Her mother nodded. “Do you know, Roberta, I was walking in the woods one day and I sat down to rest under our special oak tree – the one you used to love to climb – and Sir Joseph came riding by on his great horse and he dismounted and bowed to me and said: ‘Lady of the woods, you must not sit upon the ground. I shall have a seat put here for your own particular use.’ Yesterday he sent the word that it was there ready for me and I am to meet him there this morning.”

“Is this true?” asked Roberta. She never knew.

“True, true, true, as true as Una and the Red Cross Knight in the dark forest,” her mother said, and left.

“It’s a lovely seat,” she told Roberta and her father that evening, “and actually inscribed with my name. Do, do both of you come now and see.”

“I’ve got my preparation to do,” said Roberta.

They were spending most of the year at Rowanbank by now and she had wanted to go with Rose to one of the new big public schools for girls, but her father had said: “We want our only child at home,” so she attended classes in Hastings instead. She knew that if she had been a Robert, though still an only child, there would have been no question of staying at home.

“‘O fret not after knowledge, I have none

And yet the evening listens.’ … Remember Keat’s thrush, Roberta,” said her mother.

“But I’m not a thrush,” said Roberta and would not go. Birds, for her mother, she reflected, were never themselves, always voices or spirits.

The years ticked away on the grandfather clock. Roberta was now so tall that if she wanted to look into the mirror she had to stoop or sit on her mother’s chair, for she had inherited her father’s height as well as his looks. Her mother seemed a sprite beside her. So much change in me, thought Roberta (she was nearly twenty-one), and so little in her. For there was not a grey hair in her mother’s head, nor a wrinkle on her face. But her father, on the other hand, seemed suddenly to have aged and to be always tired. He had become very thin and his skin, instead of being tanned by the summer’s warmth, was dry and sallow. He had been away for a few days, ostensibly on a visit to his brother’s home, but Roberta anxiously suspected it was to consult their old family doctor in London. Her mother had noticed nothing wrong – or had she just shut her eyes to it? One could not tell. She did not seem at all troubled the evening he was expected back.

“Read me some poetry, Berta,” she said.

“What shall I read?” asked Roberta obediently.

“Tennyson, I think. Yes, I feel like some Tennyson today, anything that comes.”

Roberta took down the volume and it opened at “The Lady of Shalott”.

“‘And moving through the mirror clear

That hangs before her all the year,

   Shadows of the world appear –’” She had got thus far when she heard her father’s step on the stairs.

“Hallo, my dears,” he said. “Reading poetry?”

He bent over Roberta and took the book from her; turning the leaves, he read out the last verse himself:

His voice broke and Roberta looked up quickly.

“You look very tired, Father,” she said, “let me get you something to eat.” She got up but he followed her out of the room.

“You mustn’t worry your mother by saying things like that in front of her,” he said. “I’m all right, only a bit washed out by the journey in this heat. I don’t want any food. I think I’ll go and have a swim, that always makes me feel better. Don’t wait dinner for me – goodbye.”

He sounded brusque and, a little hurt, something made her go to the door and wave him off. He waved back and that was the last she saw of him.

They found his clothes in his usual favourite bathing spot, folded up carefully – he was always neat – but they never found him, and Roberta was sure that that was what he would have wished. “He was such a good swimmer,” they said, “it must have been a sudden attack of cramp.”

The next day the letter came for her. Her father knew that she was always down first in the morning and collected the post. As soon as she saw the writing she took it up to her room. It was very short and said: “I have inoperable cancer. Your mother must not be subjected to the strain and ugliness that my probably drawn-out illness would cause her. This is the last thing I can do for her, for she will be able to bear it much better this way. You will keep my secret and there is no need to ask you to cherish her. You are my good daughter. I have left all my affairs in order. God bless you.”

She sat with the letter in her lap for some time and then she found some matches and burnt it and went down to breakfast.

Her mother, thought Roberta, was one of the few people who could cry without making herself look hideous, in fact her tears seemed only to add to her appeal, making her eyes look larger and more vivid in colour. She had wept quietly all the previous day but she was not crying any more now.

She looked up as Roberta came in and said, “It was such a beautiful way for your father to go, wasn’t it, darling, at sunset, with the sea like a shimmering pearl? I noticed it especially that evening.”

“Yes,” replied Roberta, but to herself she was saying: How can I bear this romanticizing? You can’t romanticize death, it is too big. A beautiful way to go – to go where? To some island of Avalon I suppose. “A woman incapable of tragedy”, where had she heard that and about whom? Then she rebuked herself for this bitterness. Tennyson’s poem still rang in her ears. Was not her mother another Lady of Shalott, sheltered behind the magic web of her father’s protective love that had kept her away from reality, among “her space of flowers”, in Looking-Glass Land to the end?

It was too late now for any change and, as far as Roberta could tell, the spell was never broken, for after her father’s death, her mother withdrew further and further away into her dream world. She managed even to evade the reality of her own ageing and death. She never went grey, instead her hair became a moonlit instead of a golden halo round the smooth face and her eyes, lovely still, gradually grew vacant, the enchanting smile meaningless.

 

The grandfather clock struck the hour, but in what year? At first Roberta simply could not think and was it in her mother’s room or her own that the mirror, which had ceased to reflect anything at all, was now just a dim oval shape in the darkness? Slowly the present imposed itself once more upon her consciousness and she pulled her ageing bones out of her chair and switched on the light.