The Ballad and the Source Read online

  This was in the beginning: afterwards—quite soon, I think—her presence became a simple necessity to him. Though a caressing she was not an affectionate child; perhaps because of this, because she was all intuition, calculation, without heart, she knew exactly how to meet him three-quarters of the way and draw from him the sustenance she needed. She soon had the father-daughter ritual established—the romp before bedtime, the good-night visit after she was in bed. They talked fantasies about the cat, and read aloud to each other from the Beatrix Potter books Mrs. Jardine had given her. He read slowly, in a rather quavering solemn monotone; she very loudly and rapidly—(she knew them by heart) pausing now and then to fling out such warnings and encouragements as: “This bit is rather frightening;” or “It’s a little sad here, but it gets all right in the end.” She had a shrill sing-song voice with a plaintive break in it; it always sounded as if tears were behind it. She sang to him too, long droning compositions in mournful récitatif. Obsessed as she was with age and death, her themes were always very morbid, and her renderings caused her face to assume a comic look of strain and anguish. He would listen without a quiver, and thank her politely at the end.

  All this time, while the relationship between Harry, the Thomsons and ourselves was being established, Mrs. Jardine seemed to retire into the background, or to be somehow muffled. Like a constitutional sovereign, without administrative political powers, she presided, she dispensed bounty, graciousness and tact, receiving us as it were in audience on our arrivals and departures. She ceased to confide in us, and never attempted to draw us apart and question us about the grandchildren. We neither spied for her, nor were spied upon.

  She got on very agreeably with Malcolm: he admired her and trusted her, and she showed him an easy straight­forward affection, and encouraged him, and was patient with his uncouthness. His incipient puberty was particularly raw, grubby and graceless, and she who so loved order and distinction, so valued charm, never allowed his unattractiveness to irritate her. “He can’t help it, Lucy,” I once heard her say to her maid after some large-scale breakage. “He is not inside his skin yet, he is all over the place. How can he tell what his legs and arms will do?” She would stroke his dust-coloured scrubbing brush hair, and call him her fellow. She must have settled that her job was to help him—by making him feel loved, not a disappointment­­­—to fit more satisfactorily into his skin. I thought it was sad that she had never had a son: she would have been so nice to him. I thought it must be difficult for her to believe that Malcolm, so common, so nondescript in his flesh, could possibly be descended from her flesh and blood. I did not realise then what poisons from what far-back brews went on corroding her; but not a drop fell on these children—fruit though they were of everybody’s misconceptions and misfortunes. Mrs. Jardine had so fine a respect for human life that she was able to bestow an entire, an objective, uncorrupted value upon every individual, even where her passions and prejudices might have made for most distortion. That was her grandeur.

  Malcolm had unpleasing traits in his character. He was deferential, almost obsequious, to any form of authority, as if he wished—awkwardly enough, poor Malcolm!—to ingratiate himself as a precaution against detection. He cheated just a little in all the games, and did not share his sweets all round, but kept them secretively among the hairy, clogged grey debris of his jacket pocket and consumed them rapidly, on the sly; though sometimes he did offer the bag to Jess, whom he was keen on. He liked to swing with her, standing face to face, on the swing the gardener put up in the walnut tree. Owing to the violence of his exertions, they swooped to dizzy heights. Also he used to wind her up tight in the swing and then let her go. Eyes tight shut, squealing, she would spin round with a whirl of legs and skirts to a bucketting conclusion. He would never be bothered to wind up Maisie or me. Then he would place a cushion for her on the bar of his bicycle and invite her to mount, which she did demurely, side-saddle. Gruffly bidding her to lean against him, he would wobble away with her for secluded rides in the lime alleys.

  In those odorous, subaqueously-lit tunnels, he would share his sweets with her; and once suddenly kissed her cheek. She was flattered by his preference for her, but not reciprocally attracted; and I think his strangled brooding sensuality, the furtiveness of his advances and withdrawals caused her a bored uneasiness.

  Maisie could not be won, so Mrs. Jardine behaved towards her as a sovereign might towards a Communist MP at a royal garden party: she extended hospitality to her, avoided any field of controversy, serenely ignored all treasonable insinuations. Never, in my presence, after that one time, did she permit the battle to be between equals and in the open. Their strategies ran on contradictory lines and never engaged one another for the show-down; but all the same Mrs. Jardine gained the advantage. Maisie’s integrity quickly took on the appearance of mere pig-headedness and ill-breeding.

  Maisie was always falling off objects and falling down, and Mrs. Jardine tended her injuries with exquisite skill and kindness. A relationship might have developed from this,— though it never did—for the sight of blood was Maisie’s heel of Achilles and reduced her to green-faced shuddering sickness and paralysis. It was curious in one so bent upon physical hazards, and so particularly tough to outward view. I got a fearful shock the first time I saw her sitting on the ground, staring with gasps and whimpers at her flowing knee. Mrs. Jardine attempted neither to sympathise nor to stiffen her morale by a bracing attitude. She simply bathed, bandaged with her strong light certain hands, and sent her to lie down for an hour with a hot drink and a book. Each time Maisie fell down the process was repeated. Her surrender was total, abject, but no advantage was taken of it.

  Cherry she treated with indulgent yet somehow remote tenderness. She watched her a good deal, but as it were from the other side of a glass shutter, which she only opened to call her to her side for practical reasons: for instance, when Cherry looked too flushed or too white. She was a delicate creature; what colour she had ebbed and flowed between one hour and the next. Sometimes she had a bluish unearthly pallor. She had constant colds and stomach upsets, and Mrs. Jardine made her rest a lot, and, sick or well, kept her in bed one whole day each week. Maisie fought hard at first against this decree, muttering that there was nothing wrong with her, it was only because she was having too much rich food, and now on top of that she was being made into a mollycoddle; but Mrs. Jardine summoned Dr. Gibson to examine Cherry; and then, during the course of a long private conversation, bewitched him; and then he had a tactful jolly confidential chat alone with Maisie; and after that Maisie threw up the sponge. Sick or well, Cherry greatly enjoyed her days in bed. She cut out dolls’ clothes and chalked and sang. Mrs. Jardine showed her how to cut chains and patterns from delectable sheets of coloured paper. Harry spent hours by her bedside. I observed that it was part of Mrs. Jardine’s policy to leave them together. Listening from a distance to their uninhibited conversations, an expression at once tranquil and expectant would come into her face.

  Once she was in bed with a cold and I had come in to have a grazed hand dressed by Mrs. Jardine. We were in the bathroom, which was opposite to the bedroom she shared with Maisie. Both doors were open, and I could see Harry sitting by her bed. I heard her say:

  “The next one will be still more sad. Lily and Willy both get stolen away. But I’ll put some gladness in. Their mother comes for them. Their mother is a guardian angel, you see, but they don’t know it. Nor do you yet, do you?” He nodded, and leaned his cheek on his hand to listen. When the song was over, she said: “Did you like that? It was beautiful, wasn’t it? Now can I light your cigarette? Your hands smell nice, you have nice smelling soap. What shaky hands you’ve got, haven’t you? Why do they shake so?”

  “Well, I don’t know. It’s just a bad habit they’ve got into.”

  She said in an anxiously casual way:

  “Is it because you’re old?”

  “That might have something to do with it.
”

  She was silent, then she said with false, loving simplicity:

  “You are a shaky man, aren’t you? Shaky, shaky old Harry. … Do ill people have shaky hands?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “I know they do, because—I know.”

  “But I’m not at all ill.”

  “No!” she cried triumphantly. “You’re very well! And you’re not old either—not to me. You won’t die—oh, for fifty years I shouldn’t think, should you?”

  “I shouldn’t think so.”

  “Not ever …?” Her voice was cunning.

  “Some time. Everybody does.”

  “Yes, that’s what Maisie says. It does seem a shame really. I don’t want to. I don’t want anybody to. Do you want to?”

  “I don’t think I shall mind much. People don’t, you know, when they’ve had a lot of life.”

  “Perhaps something will be invented to stop it. If I was God, I should say—” She sat up straight in her dressing-gown and called out in a tone of imperious proclamation: “I have made up my mind! Nobody is to die any more!”

  A sound came out of his throat, stifled, sudden, as if his heart turned over with tenderness and pity. He took the small hand she had raised in the act of decree and held it to his chest.

  “I say, look here, old girl,” he said, even more huskily than usual. “Look here. Listen. We’ll stick together. See? I’ll be here as long as you want me. You’ll be all right. I promise. See?”

  Mrs. Jardine, who had been listening intently while she washed and dressed my hand, dropped the bandage she was rolling and leaned back against the basin. Her hands sank to her sides, she looked far away out of the window, and said, very low:

  “Now she is his child. He will live for her.”

  The tears started to pour down her cheeks, but without blurring or staining her contours. Her eyes remained wide and more than ever brilliant, and the tears went on slipping down as if over the face of a statue. She looked at me, smiling; her smile lit by her tears had a wild and tragic gutter. She whispered: “I knew it would be so;” and kissed me. She put her finger to her lips, and we went out, tiptoeing past the open door, downstairs again.

  The stronger Maisie’s feelings for me grew, the weaker became her grasp on Cherry. I satisfied her violent and jealous sense of ownership. She began to relax. Her scrubbed, harsh, mongrel look disappeared, her face filled out and glowed like a poppy. At rarer and rarer intervals did she pounce on her sister and try to snatch her from the bonfire. For one thing it was into Harry’s hands rather than into Mrs. Jardine’s that Cherry had fallen; and Harry presented no sort of target for desperate acts of will and duty. Assuming no authority, exercising none by word or deed, he took away her weapons. If she shared nothing else with her mother’s mother, she had in common with her an outstanding positiveness of nature. Their feet rang on concrete, their fare was solid. But Harry was a world extinct. Appearing and vanishing in room and garden, haunting the window, he seemed to be proclaiming: “I am nothing;” and this sole assertion, made with singular delicacy and weight, made a cloak, vaporous but impenetrably enshrouding, to throw over Cherry.

  One day, instead of locking herself into the bathroom with Cherry to supervise her evening bath, Maisie simply stayed out in the garden with me. “Ask Lucy to bath you,” she said.

  That was the end.

  6

  Maisie was the first woman friend I ever had. There were plenty of girls, then, and afterwards, with whom I played games and exchanged confidences, but my relationship with Maisie was so far removed from the waist-entwined, I’ve got a secret, giggle and whisper it, cross your heart you won’t tell level that I think of it now as adult. It was she whose steadfast passion and disillusionment, laid bare so firmly, so without obliquity or reserve, first planted deep within the feathery shifting webs and folds of my consciousness that seed which grows a shape too huge, too complex ever to see in outline, clear and whole: the monster, human experience.

  We sat in the fork of the walnut tree, and she said:

  “You know, I loathed you when I first saw you. I thought you were going to be the most ghastly beast.”

  “Oh … why?” I felt hurt.

  “She would go on and on about you …”

  “What did she say?”

  “Well, saying your Grannie had been godmother to my mother and how she hoped this what d’you call it—generation—would be friends again, and all that sort of muck.”

  I reflected. It seemed a venal offence, but to Maisie it had appeared a sinister plot. She added:

  “And now you’re my best friend.” She picked up my hand and gripped it in hers, which was tanned, freckled, bony, and said: “Promise something.”

  “I promise. What?”

  “You’ll be my best friend.”

  I considered one or two others among my circle who had qualifications for this title, but decided to grade them down, and replied without hesitation:

  “Yes. All right.”

  We sat silent for a few moments, holding hands. I was conscious of the flattery, from a girl older than myself. I see now that her life had split her, so that part of her was unusually childish and part had taken the rigid form of premature maturity. After a while she said:

  “She’s given up talking about my mother—I wasn’t going to have any of that. Malcolm can let her feed him up with it if he likes, but I won’t. Besides, I promised Father…”

  “What did you promise him?”

  “That I’d never … that I’d never, never listen to her.”

  The words burst forth with explosive violence. She stared out into the garden. The leafy, sun-saturated shade we sat in brought out a burning green light in her eyes.

  “He told me she’s a liar. And she made my mother a liar. He said if ever he caught any of us lying he’d whip us within an inch of our lives. Once he found out Malcolm had told a lie. He was quite young—only eight—it was soon after Mother went away. He said he hadn’t gone to the Park to sail his boat when he had. …”

  “What did your father do?”

  “He thrashed him.”

  I wanted to ask: “Within an inch of his life?”—but I could not muster the question. I was silent.

  “Malcolm’s afraid of Father,” said Maisie. “I despise cowards, but it’s not all his fault. Father’s awfully down on him. They’re not quite fair to each other really. After that time—when he told a lie—Auntie Mack went in to Father, and I heard them arguing in very loud voices. I don’t know what they said. When I went to say good-night to Father he was crying.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Certain. Sobbing.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing. There was nothing I could do. He was missing Mother. I couldn’t say: ‘Cheer up, she’ll be back soon,’ or, ‘Cheer up, we’ll manage all right without her.’ He’d forbidden us ever to mention her name again. He pulled me on his lap and said was he a very cruel, unkind father to us, so of course I said no, he was the nicest one in the world. I suppose Auntie Mack had been saying things.”

  “Is she your real aunt?”

  “Oh no. She’s an old spinster cousin of father’s, or something. She came to look after us after Mother went away.”

  “Do you like her?”

  “No, not much. She’s a fussy old ass, always talking about her stomach or her liver. Her name’s Miss Flora Mackenzie. Still, she’s not too bad. She’s quite fair.” She paused to put a toffee in her mouth and to give me one, and then added: “She did one thing that was decent. After Mother went, she used to send us postcards, masses of them, from all over the place—abroad. Of course we loved getting them. It showed she hadn’t forgotten us anyway. But father had made Auntie Mack swear if any letters did come she wouldn’t let us have them. So what she used to do was—when these postcards came she gave
them to us secretly and let us keep them a whole day, and then we were on our honour to give them back to her, and she burnt them. We steamed the stamps off and kept them in a box—locked. It’s a Spanish box mother gave Malcolm once. Father never knew. He’d have turned her straight out of the house if he had.”

  “For doing something behind his back …?”

  “Mm. It was awful for her, I do see. First she’d sworn and then she’d broken her sworn word. She explained to us. She said it was a burden she’d have to bear to her dying day, but she’d thought it over and over and taken it to God, and she’d decided we ought to have Mother’s postcards and she could never, never tell him so; so there was nothing to do but trust us not to betray her. So we promised. It was a pity deceiving Father, but we had to because we couldn’t have made him understand. … She always chose lovely postcards. There was never anything on them except: Love. No address. Of course we couldn’t let Cherry have hers. She was only a baby. She’d have blabbed.”

  She lay back full length along the bough, and gazed up into the tree’s great branch-plaited lucent crown of foliage.

  “But after about a year,” she said, “the postcards stopped coming.”

  “I wonder why …?”

  “I suppose she thought it wasn’t any use going on. I thought perhaps she’d died, but Auntie Mack said no, they’d have heard for certain. She said mothers didn’t ever forget their children, so …” I stole a nervous glance at her, but there was no need to be nervous: she spoke and gazed upwards with reflective calm. “I wonder if I shall ever see her again,” she said. “It would be queer … she’s been gone about five years now.”

  After a silence, during which I indulged in fantasies of bringing about a reunion, I asked: