Read The Bird in the Tree Page 7


  Lucilla would so have liked to know the whole story of her home but she had no hopes of ever doing that now. Only Obadiah of the village folk was left from those old days, and the gaps in his memory were abysmal; nothing at all could be fished up out of them. Not to be wondered at, said Ellen, seeing that in her opinion Obadiah’s memories were not memories at all but the most outrageous romancing she had heard in all her born days. “We can know only one thing,” David would say teasingly to Lucilla, “that the inhabitants of Damerosehay appear, one and all, to go completely barmy. A cheering thought for us, isn’t it, darling?”

  The memory of his laughing voice was with her in the room. Soon he would be here. She got up and moved to the gilded French mirror that hung between the windows, to see what she looked like. David often told her that she was beautiful; he often told her that he loved her. The second statement she knew was true but the first might not be, for David was undoubtedly a flatterer. And if it was not true would she be able to hold his love? She looked at herself critically but what she saw did not tell her very much. She was tall and still slender. Her white hair was lovely, springing away from her face in soft waves that had never lost their vitality, and though her blue eyes had sunk a little, and looked a trifle bewildered because she ought to have worn her spectacles all the time, but didn’t because they were not becoming to her, they were still wide awake, aware and interested, the purple shadows about them intensifying their deep and lovely colour. She had kept the shape of her face, wide across the cheekbones, then tapering to a narrow heart, and though her lips had lost their fullness they had kept the delicate wavy line that seemed always ready to break into a smile. Her skin was wrinkled and slack about her throat, but it was clear and pale, like ivory, and when she was happy her whole face, as well as her eyes, seemed to shine. She could be very happy, happier than most people, and unhappier too. All that she felt and did she felt and did with the whole of her being. Nothing of her ever lay unused, and every little happening of her day was tremendously important to her, and she lived in it as a child would do. It was this vitality that gave her her undying charm for it gave everyone who was with her a strange sense of assurance. The value of little things was heightened by her enjoyment of them; the value of life itself was heightened because she had bought her knowledge of it with bitter sorrow and yet in her old age could wear it with such grace. Life was worth while when Lucilla was there, but when she was not there the light went out.

  But Lucilla, looking at herself in the glass, could see no reflection of the charm that was so apparent in her when she lived and moved. She noted only with dissatisfaction that the skin of her neck was slack and her hair not so thick as it used to be. But she could see for herself how well her clothes suited her, and she smiled a little. She had always been able to make herself look nice for she had the kind of body, long and slender and graceful, that makes any material fall into lovely lines, and the kind of hair that any hat becomes. Not that she was careless about either her materials or her hats. She bought the best and softest materials and the finest straw, gave all her attention to line and none to ornament, employed the most expensive dressmaker she could find and wore the result for years, looking splendid and spending less on her clothes than most women did. The few jewels that she had left she always wore; her diamond ring that almost extinguished the thin worn hoop of her wedding ring, her big emerald upon the other hand, her pearls, the lorgnette on a long thin gold chain that she used if she wanted to look at something in a hurry and hadn’t time to get hold of her spectacles, and the little gold wrist watch that David had given her with his very first earnings. They seemed a part of her and her family could not imagine her without them. Equally a part of her was the faint fresh scent of verbena that clung to all her clothes, and the large black velvet bag that contained her spectacles, her handkerchief, her purse of small change, the letters she had had during the past week from absent children and grandchildren, her bottle of eau-de-cologne and the silver box of sugared almonds that she kept for the delectation of her younger grandchildren and the dogs. Without this she stirred nowhere. She dared not leave it behind her as she moved about the house lest the maids or children should purloin a sugared almond or a six-pence and so have sin upon their souls. Nor dared she let anyone else carry it, heavy though it was, for they might drop it and smash the spectacles that, becoming or not, were essential to her reading and writing and needlework. It lived always in her hands, showing up to perfection her long white fragile fingers and her two superb rings.

  “But I don’t really know what you look like,” she said to the old lady in the glass. “I don’t really know what you are. I don’t think we any of us know much about ourselves. I don’t even know if I like you. But it doesn’t matter if I like you. What matters is that David should like you.”

  She went back to her chair and she felt a little breathless, for it was an exhausting thing for an old lady to love any one as she loved David. She clasped her hands tightly upon the bag in her lap and watched the iron gate in the garden wall through which, in a few minutes, she would see the silver-grey car sliding by over the moss in the oak-wood. Ten minutes passed and she saw it. Another five and a great clamour broke out as the children and dogs erupted into the hall. Another two minutes and David was in the room, struggling to shut the door against the onslaught on the other side, for he would not have them in the room when he greeted Lucilla. She stood up, tall and slender, and waited while he grappled with them. “Get out, you little demons,” he commanded them, “wait a minute,” and he leaned against the door as though a gale of wind were blowing upon the other side. Then it closed and latched itself inexorably upon the tumult without and he came across to her in a sudden peace.

  “Are you all right, Grandmother?” he asked her, and took her face in his hands and smiled at her. He could not kiss her yet because he had not had time to wash his face. No arriving Eliot ever could kiss Lucilla until after a wash because of the Bastard.

  “Yes, David,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  For years they had always given each other the same greeting when David had come home. He had chosen it himself in his schooldays, considering this form of words adequate and informative without being sloppy, and always the answer had been satisfactorily in the affirmative. But now, with sudden panic, Lucilla knew that David for the first time was not all right. Something had happened.

  CHAPTER

  3

  — 1 —

  MARGARET went straight from her missionary meeting to her bedroom, cast her hat and gloves from her, buttoned on her cooking overall and hurried to the kitchen. Cook had given notice after the Bastard had eaten her fruit hat and not for love or money could Margaret find another. It was strange how few domestics were attracted by the thought of living in a marsh; or by the prospect of cooking for children and dogs. Lucilla thought it very sad that the hearts of the proletariat should be so singularly unsusceptible to the beauties of the country, to the loveliness of child nature and the charms of canine character. She mourned a good deal over this unsusceptibility, which she felt to be a not altogether reassuring characteristic of modern national life. Margaret had no time to mourn. It was all she could do to get the work done.

  Standing in the lovely old kitchen, with its window looking out on to the kitchen garden, its raftered ceiling where the hooks were still fixed in the beams for the home-cured flitches of bacon that were never hung there now, the great built-in range and the rose-red tiled floor scrubbed to a velvet softness, Margaret rolled up her sleeves and wondered a little desperately what there was still left to do. Having to help Hilary with his missionary meeting had put her dreadfully behindhand. She hadn’t even yet cooked Pooh-Bah’s meat and cabbage. . . . Pooh-Bah had to have special dishes all to himself because his well-bred inside rebelled against the bones and oddments and fruit hats that agreed so excellently with the Bastard’s less aristocratic interior. . . . And then Lucilla liked fish but
not pheasant and David liked pheasant but not fish, so she must do both. The soup and the cold soufflé, thank heaven, were prepared already.

  For just a moment, as she rolled up her sleeves, Margaret moved to the window and looked out. After Lucilla the garden was the passion of her life. The marshes and the sea, though like Hilary she thought them rather pretty, never touched her so deeply as they did Lucilla and David, and the house was such a heavy burden that she did not enjoy it so much as she should have done, but the garden was her inspiration and her strength. Unmarried though she was Margaret was no frustrated woman. Her love for Lucilla and the grandchildren satisfied her heart and in the garden her creative instinct had full play. She had “green fingers” and knew them to be one of the happiest gifts that the gods can give.

  The day, twenty years ago, when she had found she had them, had been one of the fortunate days of her life. She had been desperately unhappy when they came to Damerosehay that first spring. She had lost so much in the war, her lover, and with him her hope of marriage and motherhood, two of her brothers, her youth, her looks and much of her strength. There had seemed nothing left; nothing except the backbreaking task of getting Damerosehay fit for Lucilla to live in. And Lucilla had not been as appreciative as she would have been in more normal times; she had been absorbed in her grief for Maurice, in little David, and in spending far too much money on the furnishing of his home; she had hardly seemed aware that Margaret existed. Margaret had understood, of course. She knew Lucilla and her utter absorption in the person or occupation of the moment. She had only to wait patiently for her mother’s love to flow back to her again; but loving Lucilla as she did she never found this waiting easy.

  She had been so desolate one evening that she wandered out to the far end of the flower garden to try and get out of earshot of the song of that wretched blackbird in the ilex tree. His song had been so self-confident, so utterly abandoned to joy, that by contrast it had only intensified her misery. Screened by the cherry trees and the lavender bushes she had sat down on the rough wild grass, her fingers twisting in it and her eyes shut against the tangle of weeds that she would have to cope with sooner or later. Her head and her back were aching and her eyes behind their shut lids were smarting and burning with fatigue. And then she had been suddenly aware, as Lucilla had been, of the scent of violets. “I didn’t know there were any,” she had thought, and pulling herself up on to her knees she had begun eagerly pushing aside the weeds and grasses. Presently she had found them; a few strangled plants under the wall that must once have been a violet bed, gallantly struggling up to the light, holding up their purple flower heads on stalks almost too weak to bear them. “Oh, my poor dears!” Margaret had cried and in a moment, tired as she was, had been hard at work pulling the weeds and grasses out of their way. She had worked on and on, with no tools but her fingers and a sharp stone, taking no notice of the supper bell or of Ellen’s voice calling her, and by dark she had quite a large patch cleared. By the end of the week she had had the whole bed cleared and the freed violets, living creatures sun-warmed once again, had been flinging out their scent to her in a passion of rejoicing. . . . And even though she had as yet done no planting or pruning she had known by the feel of the magic running through them that she had “green fingers.”

  Now, twenty years later, she could see the faces of those freed violets more clearly in her memory than she could see the face of her dead lover. “How awful of me!” she thought, scandalized at herself, and then forgot to be scandalized in noticing that there were three more ripe figs on the tree by the kitchen window. The kitchen garden, like the flower garden, was walled. Espaliered fruit trees covered the walls and in the space between were orderly rows of currant bushes, raspberry canes and vegetables. Margaret and Alf Watson, Obadiah’s grandson who helped her in the garden, and old Obadiah who ambled up from the harbour to lend a hand when he felt inclined, and to criticize their efforts when he didn’t, were very proud of the kitchen garden. Nothing ever went to waste in it, and the Damerosehay vegetable marrows were always the largest and shiniest at Hilary’s harvest festival. . . . Margaret could see them now lying out there under the sun, self-consciously fattening themselves for it. . . . The runner beans, too, growing always the way of the sun and never widdershins, were invariably the finest in the neighbourhood, though less suitable for harvest festival decoration, and her carrots and her turnips were miracles of the gardener’s art.

  But it was the flower garden that Margaret loved best. It was to her as a canvas is to an artist, only to her mind more splendid. “They shall splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comets’ hair.” Kipling’s description of the artists in heaven applied equally well to gardeners upon earth, she thought. She had such a splendid space to splash about in, and the pictures she painted there were forever changing. No sooner had she finished planning pools of purple crocus and rivulets of daffodils than she was lying awake at night intoxicated by the thought of mauve canterbury bells and pink phlox in the herbaceous border, bright against the curtain of honeysuckle over the wall, with purple pansies to edge the border and tall white lilies to give it dignity and strength.

  But in September Margaret threw all careful colour planning completely to the winds and went berserk. Restraint would come later when she had to nurse her iris stylosa in sheltered corners, put glass over her Christmas roses and thank God if the frost spared the chrysanthemums a little longer than usual, and meanwhile she just went mad. Year by year she had been adding to the ranks of her michaelmas daisies, heaping up her blazing dahlias, her globed peonies, her goldenrod and her red-hot-pokers, and now whenever she had a bit of space to spare she poured out floods of pink and purple petunias with an abandon that reduced Lucilla to a shocked and blinking silence. . . . For Lucilla never interfered in the garden. She knew it to be essential to Margaret’s salvation and she endured the September display of savage colour with the same patience which she showed when Margaret draped an unwanted shawl over her knees on the hottest evening of the year. . . . Margaret was not very sensible always, but she meant so very well.

  As she did when, her thoughts wandering to the garden, she held the tin with the basted pheasant in one hand while she tried to open the oven door with the other, the wretched bird slipping sideways and stepping neatly out on to the floor just as Ellen, arriving at just the wrong moment as was her invariable habit, entered with an empty decanter in one hand and the key of the cellar door in the other.

  “There!” said Ellen. “How many more times am I to tell you, Miss Margaret, that you need to take two hands to a baking tin? A basted bird is bound to slip. I’ve told you and I’ve told you, Miss Margaret, but never a word I say is attended to by any of you children.”

  Margaret, as much under Ellen’s thumb at fifty-five as she had been at five, said meekly, “I’m sorry, Ellen,” and stepped aside, pushing her short grey hair nervously back from her flushed face. Ellen, she knew, would not allow her to pick up the pheasant for herself. It was Ellen’s prerogative always to be the one who put things right. Others might make mistakes, but never Ellen. This was a fixed principle in the Eliot family, fixed there by Ellen.

  “There!” she said, resettling the pheasant and warming to Margaret since the child had accepted her rebuke with becoming meekness. “What the eye does not see the heart does not grieve for. I’ll give him a bit of dust up and your mother’ll be none the wiser.” She prodded the pheasant with a knowing forefinger. “Nice bird. Good firm breast. You’ve seen he was properly cleaned, of course?”

  “Yes, Ellen,” said Margaret.

  “No shot left in him so far as you know?”

  “No, Ellen.”

  “You’ve got the string tied right?”

  “Yes, Ellen.”

  “You’ve not forgotten the bread crumbs, dear, have you?”

  “No, Ellen.”

  “And you’ve got the onion in the milk ready for the bread-sauce?”
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  “Yes, Ellen.”

  “There’s a good girl,” said Ellen, and suffered herself to be helped to her feet. The two women smiled at each other, and Margaret had a twinkle in her eye. She did not mind being treated like a child by Ellen. She liked it. One would know the first cold breath of old age, she thought, when one found oneself in a world where there was no one left to whom one was a child.

  “Now I must get me down to the cellar for Master David’s burgundy,” said Ellen, and lumbered on her flat feet towards the cellar door.

  “For heaven’s sake, Ellen,” cried Margaret, “let me go.” She hated to see Ellen on the dark cellar stairs as much as Lucilla hated to see her lifting the tea tray.

  But Ellen gave her a sour look. “I trust nobody on these stairs but meself,” she said with the air of a martyr. “If legs are to be broken it’ll not be the children’s.”

  “But why keep the wine right down there, Ellen?” complained Margaret. “We have so little of it that it might just as well be kept in the dining-room.”

  But Ellen, unlocking the cellar door and hitching her skirts well up above her elastic-sided boots, only sniffed. . . . She liked being a martyr.

  Half an hour before dinner time Margaret left the heavy-handed Rose in charge and hurried up the back stairs to change. Lucilla would never permit the Eliots to sit down to dinner without changing into evening dress first. Even if she and Margaret were quite alone, and their dinner consisted of a boiled egg and a baked apple, they still had to change. Lucilla said it kept up their self-respect. Margaret didn’t know if it did or not, because she had never been allowed to see what happened to her self-respect if she didn’t change. Even if Lucilla was ill in bed and she ate her favourite supper of Heinz baked beans on toast quite alone (she couldn’t possibly have eaten it when Lucilla was there because Lucilla thought it a vulgar dish) she still had to change because she would not have dared to go and say good night to Lucilla attired in anything except her perennial black silk and her pearls. But they didn’t suit her. Looking in her glass she acknowledged this fact with a sigh. Out in the garden, wearing her boots and her weather-pulled tweeds, Margaret could look quite nice, for the roughness of them suited her short rough grey hair, sunburnt weather-beaten face, tall angular figure and roughened gardener’s hands. But her silk didn’t suit her at all. “I look simply silly,” she said to herself, and snapped the pearls that her father had given her on her twenty-first birthday angrily round her thin throat. Generally she did not mind in the least that she was a plain woman; she only minded when David was here. Like Lucilla, she had always been extravagant in her love for David, and also like Lucilla she had wanted to keep the love he had given her when he was a little boy. But she hadn’t kept it. She wasn’t attractive like Lucilla.