MOTHERING SUNDAY
‘There is something,’ said Mrs Carpenter with finality, ‘ – there is something quite dreadful about that boy.’
Her small, screwed, selfish eyes probed over the farmyard to where the children were playing in the first soft fall of the snow.
Apart from them a little, watching the game with a curious detached avidity, was the boy she had referred to: very pale, very thin, an angular white rag of a child at that distance, with a head that seemed almost bald so nearly white itself was the growth of scruffed hair on it. His black eyes, like buttons, were intent on the activities of the Gaywood children as they rolled and scuffled; his hands, dangling down by his sides, were sticklike and frigid.
‘He gives me the creeps, the positive creeps,’ Mrs Carpenter went on. ‘I’m peculiarly sensitive to people, Mr Bell – quite peculiarly. I am aware of the auras we all carry about with us. You, for instance, are very comfortable and sanguine, I’d suggest: a person to whom one might cheerfully confess one’s sins . . . but that boy, that boy now: I’d say of that boy—’
She hesitated with a small grimace, sipping her sherry. Andrew Bell watched her with a smile, curling himself in the warmth of the great farm kitchen.
‘You’d say of him what, Mrs Carpenter?’
‘That he’ll come to a bad end – something quite remarkably beastly, which even the Sunday papers will hardly dare to print. One likes to be charitable – as I think you’ll agree, Miss Patillo? – but such deep instincts are not to be laughingly tossed aside, oh no. I remember, many years ago, meeting a man at Bournemouth, in a delightful hotel I found there and which I must recollect to recommend to you, Miss Patillo – I remember meeting a man who positively made me contract, but contract, the instant he came into the room.’ (The vision of Mrs Carpenter contracting occupied Andrew quite unpleasantly for a moment.) ‘He was extremely handsome – the younger and more gullible guests were quite “mad about him”, as the foolish fashionable phrase then had it; but I knew at once that his heart was arid – and the heart is all, Miss Patillo, as you will learn. I was aware of a black halo about his head.’
‘Like a gramophone record,’ thought Andrew. ‘What unimaginable music might it have played?’
‘Two days later,’ said Mrs Carpenter, leaning forward portentously and lowering her voice, ‘ – two days later, Mr Bell, that man was arrested for a singularly brutal murder. It was one of those trunk cases, in Notting Hill or Paddington – as they always are, of course: I can hardly ever bear to set out on a journey from Paddington – certainly, if ever I must, I avoid the left-luggage office.’
‘And has Master Moore, the boy there,’ asked Andrew solemnly, ‘ – has he a black halo?’
Mrs Carpenter leaned more closely still, spoke more portentously still.
‘He has none, Mr Bell – just none; and that is what is wrong. That boy has no halo, no aura. Shall I tell you that I firmly believe that if one could bear to look at those dreadful hands of his one would find no life-line on them? When was he born, do you know? – what month?’
‘I do, as a matter of fact,’ said Andrew quietly. ‘In September, eleven years ago.’ And Mrs Carpenter barked triumphantly.
‘September! I might have known. An appalling month, Miss Patillo. That man in Bournemouth was a September birth – I asked especially when I learned the truth about him . . . What about the boy’s mother, Mr Bell? – did you know her, by any chance?’
‘Very well,’ said Andrew, setting his own sherry glass down. ‘Very well indeed. She was—’ But he hesitated for a long serious moment.
‘She was what?’
‘Nothing. It is very difficult to say. She loved the boy very much, very much. But she is dead now.’
‘And the father?’ Mrs Carpenter spoke more quietly herself, impressed by something in Andrew’s tone.
‘I . . . did not know the father,’ he said, after another brief pause. And then a curious silence fell on the little group by the window, and all three, in their different ways, looked out again towards the children. The boy still stood apart from the others, quite motionless. He was a waxy small figure in the puffs and swirls of the falling snow, some flakes of it clinging to his round head, making it seem whiter than ever. The others, shouting, their voices drifting in flat echoes over the fields, were rolling a gigantic snowball, its track a winding green serpent. One of the Gaywood girls, with a laugh, suddenly scooped up a handful of the snow and threw it at their silent companion. But still he did not move – only smiled in a forlorn way as the snow struck his cheek, adhering to it strangely.
‘The lovely snow,’ murmured Patsy Patillo. ‘How nice to have it for our Christmas visit. So good for the children. And it makes Paul’s farm look like a Christmas card,’ – with a flurried little smile of self-consciousness.
‘Is the father dead too?’ asked Mrs Carpenter, ignoring the girl’s remark. And this time Andrew’s pause was so long that she looked at him sharply and made as if to repeat the question.
‘I think so,’ he said at last. ‘I . . . think so.’
‘Why does Paul Gaywood have him to stay here? Where does he live? – the boy, I mean. I’m sure he can’t be good for the others.’ The inexorable voice was now almost petulant.
‘Paul has old loyalties, Mrs Carpenter,’ said Andrew patiently. ‘He was very fond of Viola – Viola Moore, the boy’s mother. He was – as we all were in the old days – he was sorry for her. He feels that the boy is lonely. He’s at school somewhere in Switzerland. Viola had a little money and was able to put it in trust for the boy. Paul has him for the holidays – at least,’ and again he paused strangely, ‘at least for the Christmas holidays.’
Now, as they watched, the children abandoned the snowball and ran towards the other end of the field where some neighbouring youngsters had appeared and were building a snowman. Stiffly, as if, almost, he were unaccustomed to walking, the gaunt small boy who was the subject of the speculation limped after them. The falling snow intensified – the gusts of it hid the little figure from sight as he plodded on towards the far-off shouting voices.
Mrs Carpenter shivered melodramatically.
‘Well,’ she said, with finality again, ‘there’s something very strange about it all, and that I will insist. Some day I may know the truth – and whatever it is it will be unpleasant.’
She stirred and expanded, with a pronouncement that she proposed to go to lie down before Paul returned from superintending the milking and could give some attention to his guests. And a moment later she had swept from the room, which strangely seemed to sigh, almost, and relax; and Andrew, settling himself in his seat again, smiled very oddly, Patsy thought.
‘She won’t,’ he murmured. ‘She never will, Patsy – know the truth, I mean.’
‘Is it unpleasant?’ asked the girl.
‘I don’t know. In fact, I’m not even sure that I know the truth myself . . . I wonder why Paul ever invited that abominable woman down? If I’d known I might have refused his invitation – except,’ and he stretched out his hand to touch hers, ‘ – except that I knew you’d be here, Patsy, and that would have made me face anything.’
‘I suspect his old loyalties again,’ said Patsy with a smile, returning the pressure of his hand. ‘Mrs Carpenter was an aunt of his wife’s, I think. At least we must bear with her, darling – we shall steal away as often as we can. But tell me,’ and her tone changed, ‘ – you were so serious, Andrew, so very serious. Is the story of that boy so strange? – I’ve heard of Viola Moore before somewhere—’
‘The story,’ said Andrew, his thin face contracting in a frown, ‘the story, Patsy, is hardly a story at all. It’s a kind of dream, I think – or even a parable. It’s absurd – all quite absurd: it’s only something half-formed and a speculation in the night . . . I know nothing, you know – just nothing. Except, perhaps, that prayers are answered sometimes – sometimes. I’m not sure that I wouldn’t go even further and say that prayers are answered . . . always. Pour me more sherry, darling.’
She did, then took his hand again. Outside, the first dusk was settling, the thickening snow falling through it in increasing gusts. They sat on in the gloom, the rising flicker of the great fire sending their shadows high against the old walls and crooked beams of the ancient place. And Andrew’s voice was very quiet through the silence. Patsy listened, half in a dream herself. And Mrs Carpenter, far away, mountainous beneath her eiderdown, snored on and on . . .
That year (said Andrew) there was also snow at Christmas. I’d gone down for the vacation to Korder’s place in Berkshire. I was barely out of adolescence, I suppose – there was something immensely exciting about being the guest of so famous a man, with so many other nearly-famous people there also.
The house was huge – a magnificent place; but even it seemed crowded there were so many of us. Korder used to love to surround himself with young people. I should think that we were all on the best side of twenty-five – except for Korder himself, of course, and . . . Viola.
You said you thought you had heard of Viola Moore. She’s forgotten now, but in those times she was quite celebrated in a strange, insubstantial way. She painted – curious, tenuous watercolours that had about them something of the forlorn air she always somehow wore herself. It’s the one word, the only word – forlorn . . . as you even must have seen it in the boy out there.
Viola was – what? Thirty-seven – thirty-eight . . . perhaps even over forty. She wore clothes that were tragically out-of-date – loose, straight-waisted; somehow out of the late ’twenties, one might guess, or the early ’thirties, from pictures one had seen – old snapshots of lost aunts. There was an indescribable essence of those faded days all round and through her – in tangible things like the clothes and the way she did her hair, but more subtly still as a kind of . . . aura, almost, but in a different way from Mrs Carpenter’s.
She was oddly out of place among us all – and yet, you know . . . and yet, although one would never have expected it, from her whole appearance and flavour – and yet she threw herself into all our activities with an almost bitter intensity – yes, almost bitter. She was queerly . . . hungry, I’d nearly say – hungry to be one of us, to be part of us, to . . . to how shall I put it? – to salvage something.
In a group like that, all young, all still self-consciously a little bohemian, in the old word, since we were most of us just embarking on our various artistic careers, there was naturally a great deal of amorous pairing off – encouraged, of course, by Korder: it was, I think, in his old age, why he loved to have so many of us round him. He used to sit back in his musty corner with a great glass of brandy, watching us through a queer edged smile: you would suddenly, in the midst of a swift grapple with someone or other, find him regarding you from the shadows of a stairway or a hidden window-embrasure. I suppose, looking back now, that it’s all very dated itself and rather unpleasant even; but it was quite delirious and wonderful at the time, you know – we were emancipated and venturesome – we wore Mrs Carpenter’s black haloes, if some of us, as I see now, had to sit up o’ nights painting over their pristine white.
But the snow, the snow. We arrived at the house in snow, driving and plunging through great drifts of it, some of us hours late and with immense adventures to recount. And it still fell for almost a week after we had assembled – we were cut off from the village absolutely. There was much foraging in old store-cupboards for food, and someone found some yeast and we made our own bread – a great deal of that kind of thing. But Korder had a gigantic and subtle cellar, so we didn’t need to eat so very much – not in the overall mood.
And through it all went Viola, always avid, with wilder suggestions for games and subjects for conversation than anyone else – almost drugged, you might think, almost feverish from the pervading young vicarious boisterousness of it all. And Korder always sitting back and watching – watching her particularly, I thought: always watching her, with that quiet damnable smile of his . . .
He was the devil, that old man – and I don’t mean the ancient mountebank with a tail and a smell of sulphur, but the real Devil, the evil that is abroad. Yet in another sense perhaps I do mean the goat with the cloven hooves – as an expression of it all, as the Goat only ever was, of course, even back in the Middle Ages. The Church has its rituals – so has the Church that is no Church.
We none of us knew his age. Behind that awful freshness of his long classical face there was another face, which we only occasionally glimpsed – and comprehended according to our capacities. But we are back to Mrs Carpenter and her auras again: it was his aura that was almost the full curse of him – an essence he somehow exuded that almost was a smell. One hears of the odour of sanctity, whatever that might mean; but his was the odour of unsanctity – of unholiness – of the decay in that bleak corner of the Cosmos, wherever it is, to which God sweeps away His rubbish.
You know how he made his money – at least one way; from those impossible sentimental novels he wrote under some absurd name and which brought him a fortune from the hidden callow lechery in them. He wrote only two books as himself, both printed privately and circulated only among friends. I read one and was offered the other; but I couldn’t stomach it – I was beginning to grow up.
It was whispered, among other things, that he did indeed study necromancy, was a conjurer in the old sense. There was one room, certainly, in that house – like Bluebeard’s – that we were never permitted to enter. And sometimes, you know, as we rambled past it, there was a queer high whining out of it, a kind of breathless incantation of some wicked sort – and a true smell of brimstone after all beneath the black door. Mummery, of course; but it was hideously impressive when you knew him – it was easy in those times to see it all as some kind of gesture, something abandoned and lost and magnificent. We were susceptible – on the brink of the larger romance; which is not love, you know, my dearest Patsy, but hate. Growing up is losing hate and finding love – it is only the older men whose thoughts turn lightly in the spring, not the younger. And Korder had never grown up, for all his age.
But the mummery . . . So pointless, you know – a kind of parlour magic after all, that might easily be contrived with hidden wires and a simple chemical or two. But always with an edge of silly small cruelty to it that was also pointless – childish; yet gave pain.
For instance: In the huge drawing-room where we used to foregather there was a large crooked porcelain vase on an ebony pedestal. An antique of some kind, one supposed – at least old, quite incalculably old; but with its age adding somehow no grace to it, but increasing its unpleasantness. Its shape was unpleasant in some way indefinable – like Mrs Carpenter’s shape: what simple Chesterton called ‘the wrong shape’. Across it were crude intaglio designs of an unequivocal obscenity, and round the belly of the thing an inscription of some sort in an unknown language.
Somehow the conversation had centred on it that evening. Esther Colebrook had asked what the inscription meant – I remember her leaning forward to the fire a little, that dark lovely delicate face of hers and the fall of her hair. And Korder smiled.
‘It is forbidden to ask, dear Esther,’ he said, in his low, slightly mocking voice. ‘It is in the language which cannot be taught – one knows its meaning when the time comes, without translation.’
‘And when does the time come?’ asked Esther.
‘When one is ready. Therefore, be ready to be ready.’
He smiled again, sipping his brandy. And now came the mummery, you see. He said slyly:
‘There is a curious legend about that vase. It is probably why it has survived so long in this house of mine, when it might shatter to pieces in any other. It is said that it will stand so, quite intact, until the end of time itself, no matter what blows may be directed against it. But if once – if once – it is so much as caressed by a virgin, Esther, then it will break in a thousand fragments.’
We laughed: and Esther rose solemnly at once and laid her finger on the ugly rim of the thing.
‘You see?’ said Korder.
And we laughed again. One or two of the others went over in the spirit of it all – one girl, I remember, as an extension of the whole absurd joke, took up a heavy iron poker and struck the vase as hard as she could, and it only rocked a little on its pedestal.
Then Viola, with an incredible childish coyness on that pale face of hers, minced across the room from where she had been sitting all alone, as always, in a dark corner. I don’t think I shall ever forget that little mincing way she walked, like a seaside girl on an eternal esplanade, or the gleam of her dyed hair in the fireshine, the spindly legs thrust out from that sacklike frock of hers that was far too short.
She put out her hand with the immense home-made jewellery on it – and even then, you know, I saw her poor finger-nails bitten down to the quick.
The vase seemed to crumple and collapse, almost before her fingers reached it. The jagged pieces of it rocked and slithered across the floor about her feet.
There was a gale of laughter – and she was trying to laugh too, you know. She cried out, again with that edge of awful dated coyness, and blushing so painfully, and laughing and blushing and stamping her foot pettishly:
‘It’s a liar – oh, such a whopping liar, Mr Korder! It’s a fibber – oh, such a fibber!’
. . .You know, dearest Patsy, I couldn’t laugh, suddenly. There was something in me which couldn’t laugh after all. The green field had come off like a lid, as Auden says somewhere. I suppose, because I couldn’t laugh, that I was the one who escaped from it all – from all that callow bleak world of ours – before any of the others. Where are they now, I wonder? I’ve lost touch except with one or two. Guy Mitcham the sculptor, of course – trying to be a pale shadow of old dead Korder himself these days. And Geoffrey Glaspell, who is a monument of respectability at Motspur Park or somewhere like that – but there are strange tales. And Esther, who died last year, you know – do you remember? – those appalling circumstances of it all? . . . but it was never her fault, never for a moment. One tries to forget – or remember: one remains younger than one thinks . . . or grows older than one thinks.
It was that same Guy Mitcham, the sculptor, who built the snowman, I remember. At least, we all helped, but it was Mitcham who added the expert finishing touches. The snow had gone crisp and hard in the bitter frosts, it was like a crust over the great lawns and gardens, weighting the trees down, hanging pendulously at all the eaves. There was a terrible waiting stillness in the air, before the thaw we knew must come soon. It was as if the whole great process of the world had come to a little deathly pause that icy Sunday, the very quick of things had been mortally chilled for a moment . . . How strange it is, my dear, that I should find myself talking like this in this friendly room with you! – as if I were writing an elaborate pastiche of a style out of those past days themselves. This is not what I am – you know that. I am that comfortable person Mrs Carpenter described, to whom you might cheerfully confess your sins – except that you have none, sweet heart, and I would not like to have hers confessed to me. But you see, as I remember it all, I find myself changing very strangely, under the spell. Let me finish and rid myself – there’s little enough left; and I shall be simple Andrew again – we shall go out into that good snow, among the children. You will recognise me for the man you know.
. . . Our snowman was huge and absurd on the lawn there, before the big blind house. It had begun as a romp – even we, you know, shut up there for so long, had begun to feel the need for exercise. Some of the girls had wrapped themselves up and started a snow-fight, and there was a sudden kind of fleeting young healthiness in each one of us – we streamed out to join them. We bombarded each other as we saw Paul’s children doing outside there a moment ago – the whole spell was broken – something died in that house for a moment. But it crept back again. I can remember Korder standing quietly watching us through the french windows with a glass of his eternal brandy in his hand. He was wrapped about the shoulders in a black shawl, his face very white among the shadows – and for once he was not smiling. But we went on, in the sudden release we all felt.
I remember that Esther had started to roll a gigantic snowball – I remember that Viola, even Viola, had joined with her, and they were both laughing as it crunched over the lawn and grew so vast that they could no longer move it – tilted it over on its side so that it rocked for a moment, then settled, as hard and smooth as a marble boulder.
Glaspell shouted: ‘A snowman – we’ll make a snowman!’ – and in a moment, still in the mood of it all, we had set to rolling another ball, smaller, to heave on top of the first, and were scooping up the snow with our hands and making the thing shapely in the old traditional way. It was to conform, you know, as snowmen always have conformed, as the one the children are building across the field out there will conform: the classical squat pyramid, with pebbles for buttons, and the round face on top with nuts of coal for eyes, and an old pipe in the mouth, and a hat found from somewhere, and a broom beneath the bulge of the arm . . . and it was almost done, it grew very quickly with so many of us at work on it, adding touches here and there and moulding the primitive legs and the fat paunch. But suddenly Mitcham, in his quick deft professional way, gave it a face, a real face . . . and everything changed, and I remember Korder smiling at us again and raising his glass a little in a ghostly toast as he looked out at us through the window.
We still laughed, you know, but now it was a different kind of joke. We saw the sudden possibilities, with the snow so sculpturally hard. We helped Guy Mitcham as he shouted orders, like students in his atelier. His face was flushed as he went to work, there was a real momentary artist’s excitement in him. I remember the grey cold evening as the snowman grew before us there, the Snow Man, no longer the snowman. I remember its completion to every last naked masculine detail, and the face a travesty of some old Greek statue almost, yet with a hint in it – a hint, I suppose as a kind of jest from Mitcham at the very end – of . . . Korder’s face.
Someone – it was Esther – had garlanded some laurel leaves, and we set them over the shoulders and round the brow. It stood immensely there, in the first moonlight now; and we were suddenly silent and tired. But Viola, before we went in – and I shall never forget – Viola suddenly laughed again and skipped forward with her long furs dangling; and she went up on an impossible tiptoe and pecked forward with her sharp cold nose. She kissed it on the hollow mouth.
‘Watch out!’ cried Glaspell. ‘He’ll melt beneath your passion, Viola – he’ll crumple like the vase!’
And she said, giggling, in that voice . . . God forgive me, Patsy! – she said: ‘He’s such a pretty boy – yum-yum! He’s such a pretty big cold boy, and needing comfort in the snow. He’s such a pretty boy – yum-yum!’
She skipped back to join us. She took my arm as we went in to where Korder had the drinks waiting for us.
We were the last to enter and so I closed the door behind us and made to lock it.
‘No, no,’ cried Viola playfully, tapping me on the arm. ‘No, no, Mr Bell – don’t lock the door. He may want to come in in the night.’
Andrew, in his story-telling, paused, he suddenly paused. Outside they heard the boisterous banging of doors as Paul Gaywood came in from the milking parlour. They heard him shout something to one of the men, then his steps in the hallway outside the kitchen. Andrew abruptly rose.
‘That’s all, Patsy – that’s all. I know nothing. I told you it was as insubstantial as a dream. Except that as I lay awake that night, in that house, I heard – oh, I thought I heard . . . God knows! They were the most insubstantial of all: those large soft shufflings along the corridor, icy in the darkness. They stopped outside her room, beyond mine. And there was one small soft scream, of pain, I think, or dreadful pleasure. But I dreamed that too.
‘I said – long ago, when I began, my dear – I said, do you remember? that all prayers are always answered. They are. But God forgive me, it is why I never pray!’
They went across the snow in the yard and over the meadow. Paul, discovering them in the dusky kitchen, had bustled them into clothes and rubber boots to find the children and bring them in to supper. ‘You need air,’ he had cried. ‘You’re so pale, the pair of you, sitting there! Damned city lives you lead!’
He strode out ahead, his red farmer’s face uplifted happily as he breathed in the crisp evening. Andrew and Patsy followed arm in arm, both very quiet, she shivering a little. Behind, awakened from her doze, enormous in her furs and galoshes, Mrs Carpenter plunged and floundered like a galleon in a white sea.
‘It was someone in that house, of course,’ Andrew was saying in a whisper, so that Patsy had to strain a little more closely to hear him. ‘It was someone nearer death than life. It must have been. It was Korder – I dreamed that it must have been Korder somehow. Yet was it? – for as I lay there, there was one thing that I did hear that I knew was no dream: from that locked room of his downstairs the high-pitched dreadful whine of one of his beastly mummeries, some kind of unholy incantation . . .’
Paul beckoned them forward. There were distant voices beyond the rim of the small hollow they now were mounting. The snow gusted round them as they trudged. Mrs Carpenter, behind, called out puffily:
‘One forgets, of course, how inexpert one is in the face of such natural phenomena as snow. One has become too civilised, perhaps.’
She slipped and nearly fell, assembled herself with a shrill self-conscious laugh, and thrust on through the drifts again.
‘I only saw Viola once again – years later,’ said Andrew. ‘I went to call on her in a studio I heard she’d rented in Camden Town. Her boy was three, four perhaps. She had nearly died in the bearing of him that old September. She was still very ill. She knew, quite plainly, that she hadn’t much longer – I could tell: she knew. She sat shivering in shawls, talking to me about a thousand things but the one thing. Her eyes were always on that boy, who sat very quietly beside the empty fireplace. From first to last he said nothing, only sat there so calmly, unmoving in all the cold.
‘I didn’t stay long – I couldn’t. I knew as I left that I would never see Viola again. I knew also that I would never, in all my life, see anything like the dreadful, hungry, overwhelming love in that square pale face in its frame of dyed bobbed hair as she looked and looked and only looked at him: her boy.
‘And I cursed old dead Korder’s memory, with his mummery, his black, white magic. And yet I didn’t. And yet I did.’
They were over the rim of the hollow. Paul had stopped, very strangely. Before them, in the gusting snow, the children had all fallen silent. They stood back in a wide ring from the snowman they had made, looking towards it even fearfully a little.
The boy with white hair stood close to it, peering up into the blank round face, his small black eyes, like nuts of coal, all bright with tears. Even as they gazed he spread his spindly arms and clasped them tightly round the squat effigy, and buried his thin face almost ferociously in the icy breast, his lonely shoulders shaking.
Mrs Carpenter loomed forward, gasping.
‘Look at him – just look at him, Mr Bell,’ she puffed. ‘I told you – he gives me the creeps, that boy. What normal child would behave so? One may not care for him particularly, but someone had better get him away from that thing quickly – he’ll catch his death of cold.’
The small unloved and loveless thing still clung there tightly to the snowman.
‘He’ll catch,’ whispered Andrew to the trembling Patsy beside him, an immense and helpless sadness in his tone, ‘he’ll catch – he’s caught – his life of cold.’