The Ballad and the Source Page 6

  “Why did she go away?”

  “Because she didn’t like living with Father.”

  “Why did she marry him then?”

  “I suppose she liked him at first and then she didn’t.” She continued with a touch of irritation: “People can change their minds, can’t they? Haven’t you ever liked a person to begin with and then gone off them?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  But as applied to married couples, this came to me as a new conception. Till this moment, in my view, men and women got married, had children, lived in the same house until they died. They did quarrel, that I realised; but I had never imagined their relations governed by feelings susceptible of total revolution.

  “Did she tell you she didn’t like living with him?”

  “No. But you could tell she didn’t. Afterwards I asked Auntie Mack, and she said that was the reason. She said it was the fatal mating of two warring natures: like putting a delicate Arab thoroughbred and a plain working sort of English cob into one team.”

  “Is that what she said?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know she was going away?”

  “No. She went to pay a visit to a friend in London. And she never came back.

  “Of course,” she went on judicially, “Father’s got an awful temper. Living in the East gives people bad tempers. Malcolm and I were both born in India. Once when I was a baby, Father came in one night and found a huge, deadly poisonous snake curled up on my cot, ready to strike.”

  I nearly fell out of the tree.

  “What did he do?” I asked, cold and faint.

  “He got a gun and shot it in the head. Shot it dead. Mother was out at a party and our Ayah had dozed off on the veranda. There was an awful row. He sent away our Ayah. They say I was much too young to remember anything about it, but it’s funny, I always think I do remember it.” She sat up again, astride of the bough, swinging her bare legs. We had another toffee. “I only really remember a few things. I left when I was four. Mother brought me and Malcolm back. We lived in a hotel in London. It was very nice, because we saw much more of Mother. Oh!—there was such a funny old lady. …” Her eyes went suddenly fixed, illumined with reminiscence. “She used to come and take us in the Park, and to the Zoo. I do remember her. She’d known Mother when she was a little girl. She had a little cape of curly black fur, like black lamb, and a wee bonnet with jet things in it, and jet earrings. We liked her very much. She was small. Almost a dwarf, I should think.”

  An electric shock whizzed through me.

  “It sounds exactly like Tilly!” I cried.

  “It was Tilly. That was her name. Tilly.”

  We stared at one another, choking with agitation. I tumbled out an explanation of Tilly—that she was ours, and had been our grandmother’s; and promised to present her in the flesh to Maisie when she came on her next visit. I had a confused but powerful notion that thus I should be instrumental in reforging some mysterious vital missing link in Maisie’s family history. We discussed how it could have come about that our Tilly should, for a brief space, have been their Tilly.

  “I bet,” said Maisie, “she had something to do with it.”

  “Who?”

  She jerked her head towards the house.

  “Mrs. Jardine?”

  Maisie had already told me that never, never would she be persuaded to call Mrs. Jardine Grannie. When speaking to her she stubbornly avoided any form of address. For the rest, she was a personal pronoun, emphatically enunciated; or else she was Mrs. Jardine.

  “Because that’s when she turned up.” Maisie looked deeply, darkly, into my face, as if to interpret there the sinister meaning of that visit. “Yes. That’s another thing I sort of remember and don’t remember. She came to the hotel. …” She paused, struggling with the blank, stiff shutter of memory. “I know she did. Somebody in white, with a white parasol, sitting on the sofa, and we came in—and she turned round and looked at us—and Mother told us in a sharp sort of voice to go up to our room at once. … That’s all I can think of. But it’s funny: the first moment I saw her here, I thought: She’s exactly like I thought she’d be.” She sighed and lay back again. “Then we left London and went to Paris. I remember easily the lift man there. Then a man with a dark sort of face, called Marcel, began to come. I’ve often wondered if she went to live with him when she went away. He called her mignonne or chérie, things like that, and he was always teasing her. I hated him because when he first saw Malcolm and me he said something that meant—” She stopped a moment. “We were ugly.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I couldn’t understand, but I know he meant we weren’t like her to look at. He laughed; and she gave a kind of laugh too. It’s true, of course, we’re not—not a bit. Cherry is more.”

  “What sort of face did she have?”

  “Wait here,” said Maisie. “Don’t move till I come back.”

  She swung down from the tree, ran full gallop across the lawn and disappeared into the house. In no time she was back, and, resuming her place beside me, took something from her pocket, told me to stretch my hand out, and placed it in my palm.

  “On your life, don’t drop it,” she said fiercely.

  It was an oval miniature, set in brilliants, backed with sapphire blue velvet.

  “That’s my mother.”

  Long curving neck. Bare shoulders, bosom swathed in blue chiffon. Dark hair elaborately piled and puffed out in lateral wings. Eyes painted a melting violet, skin snow-white with faintest wild-rose cheeks. She smiled mysteriously. She was Mrs. Darling. She was a French New Year card angel-face, set in tinsel and blossoms. She was every child’s dream of a romantic mother.

  “I found it the other day in the drawer of the cabinet, in the drawing-room,” said Maisie. “What do you think of it?”

  Her voice was casual, edged with a quiver of triumph.

  “Lovely,” I breathed. “Was she really like that?”

  “Exactly like that,” declared Maisie. “At least, in evening dress. She wore evening dress a lot. She was the most beautiful person I ever saw.” She took the portrait from me, and curled her hand hungrily round the frame. “Wish I dared pinch it. I wonder if she’d miss it.”

  “Ask her if you can have it.”

  “Never. I’ll never ask her for anything.” She glared.

  “Truly and honestly,” I said, “won’t you ever stop hating her?”

  What I had in mind was the awkwardness of my own position. Though by now I was prepared to think Mrs. Jardine might—must, somehow—be wicked, I was powerless to resist her magnetic influence. So soon as I was in her presence my whole being churned with passion for her. And now I had been elected best friend, and must receive suggestions detrimental to Mrs. Jardine. If only Maisie could have been indifferent to or bored by her grandmother I could have preserved my loyalty intact; but Mrs. Jardine obsessed her; she felt the pull as strongly as I did. Any day, any moment she might abandon the harsh, gruelling strain in the opposite direction, and collapse, and flow all yielding into her orbit; but she never would. Any hour, hate might tip over and become love; she would never permit it.

  Setting her jaw, she said grimly:

  “Not as long as I live. It would be letting Father down. He talked to us before we came. He said she’d been trying for years to get hold of us, but he wouldn’t let her. But now he’d got to go into hospital for this treatment, he didn’t want to leave us alone with Auntie Mack, because she was very run down from having such a lot to do after he got ill. And there wasn’t enough money to send us somewhere for a nice holiday—so he’d decided we’d better come here for a bit.” She fell silent; then went on in a stifled but resolute voice: “He said he’d been feeling … if anything happened to him ever, it might be a good thing to have a rich relation to take an interest in us. He hasn’t got any relatives, or any m
oney.” She swallowed. “I said I didn’t need anybody, but he said the others—Cherry anyway. … He said what I told you—never to believe anything she said. … He talked about Mother, he hasn’t ever before. He said she had ruined her.”

  A shiver went down me.

  “How?” Ruin was a terrible word, almost as terrible as dead.

  “She left her when she was a little girl.”

  “What, ran away from her?”

  “I don’t know. But she did, he said. And then she tried to get her back, and she couldn’t. Father said that ruined her. I don’t quite know why, but it was something to do with her having to be brought up in a—in an unsuitable way. He said he wasn’t going to have us ruined. I was all right, he said, and he was placing Cherry in my charge, and I was to watch out for her.” She brooded. “How I do wonder what happened when she turned up at the hotel that time. …”

  “Do you think … Don’t you think perhaps your mother will turn up again sometime … soon?”

  “It would be queer.” I could see her concentrating, as she must have concentrated a thousand times before, upon a vision of the meeting. “There’s just one thing, one rather unkind thing I mean, I should have to say to her.”

  “What?”

  “That it would have been better if she’d taken Cherry. It wasn’t fair on Cherry never to have had a mother. She was only a baby and she can’t remember her at all. It wasn’t so bad for Malcolm and me—we were a sort of pair —more on Father’s side.”

  “Didn’t you love her then?”

  “Yes, I did.” Her sudden anger wounded, alarmed and shamed me. “And she loved us. If you think she didn’t, you’re wrong. Anybody who thinks she didn’t is a fool and I’ll murder them.” After a few moments, she put the whole bag of toffee into my lap, and said mildly: “What I meant was, we take after him more—we’re more his. Cherry’s different.”

  I said humbly:

  “Yes. I see.”

  “She didn’t have the same start as us. She was born after we all came back to England. We never went back to India after that time. I don’t quite understand what Father did out there—I know he was quite important. But he gave it up. I have a sort of feeling it was because Mother said she wouldn’t go back. Anyway, he came home and we all went to live in Newcastle. We seemed to be rich in India, but since then we’ve been poor. Father got a new job, teaching in a big school—the one Malcolm goes to. Newcastle isn’t very nice, but Northumberland’s lovely. Oh, I adore it! In the holidays we go to the coast, or to a little farm in the middle of the moors. And I ride.” She glowed. “I wish I was there now. With you. I could never tell you how happy I am there. We could ride together.”

  I was afraid of the very shape of a horse, and my riding lessons had been given up as a bad job, but I was ashamed to tell her so, and agreed with enthusiasm.

  “It’s the middle of September now,” she said. “Father told me he’d send for us as soon as he could. I wonder when he will. … He told me to write once a week, and of course I have. But I’m a hopeless letter writer—I never can think what to say. I just say we’re all well and having a nice time. … Because we are. I said Harry was kind and the house and garden were very nice. I haven’t said anything at all about her. As a matter of fact, it all seemed so difficult, I didn’t know what to say… I told him about you.”

  “Did you honestly? What did you say?”

  “Oh—what you’re called, and you came to play, and you were nice.”

  The indistinct figure of Mr. Thomson appeared to me for a moment, fitted with the head of a plain sort of horse, receiving news of me in a hospital bed. Hitherto, my impression of him had been a gloomy, unsympathetic one, but now I began to warm towards him.

  “He only writes back a few lines,” said Maisie. “It’s ten days now since I had a letter at all. … ” She rolled over on to her stomach, and stretched herself out along the branch with her head laid sideways on her arms. “You know,” she said, “we can make anything happen if we want it to. Do you know that, or don’t you?”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t know.” I hesitated. “Do you mean—praying?”

  “No, I don’t mean praying. I mean yourself! If you want something with every scrap of you, you’ll get it.”

  The moment she had said it, the idea seemed my own. It had the simplicity of all great revelations. A megalomaniac certitude coursed through me like draughts of ginger beer. Of course!—I could, I would have everything I wanted! I had only to want it.

  “For instance,” said Maisie, “I know Father will get better.”

  She lay perfectly still along the bough for another few moments, then sat up. She was still holding the miniature in her hand, but now she thrust it into her pocket.

  “I must put this back,” she said. “Cherry said she had toothache, so she’s taken her to the dentist in the car, but they’ll be back soon. Come on.”

  We lowered ourselves from the tree and walked together over the lawn.

  “I heard her tell Harry our teeth had been shockingly neglected and we ought all to be taken to a proper dentist immediately. There’s nothing wrong with our teeth.”

  “We’re made to brush ours night and morning. Are you?”

  I hoped my tone did not imply how unlikely, judging from appearances, this seemed.

  “I brush them quite often enough,” she said. “Anyway, this everlasting brushing’s all rot. Natives never brush theirs. She’s not going to take me to have all my teeth pulled out by any of her dentists—with her standing over me and gloating.”

  Part Two

  It was not long after this conversation that Tilly came for her pre-autumnal visit. She had suddenly grown much thinner—even we noticed this—and her face was as shrivelled and yellow as the dried kernel of a walnut. The sickly smell of age that always hung about her was more than ever noticeable. She was so light now, we could lift her round the room as easily as we could our giant baby brother; but when we told our mother what fun this was, she forbade it, saying that Tilly had not been very well and we were not to bother her. After that we realised that everything pointed to Tilly’s imminent death, and we avoided her for a bit, feeling that she emanated some nameless infection. Then, a few days having passed during which we saw her trotting up and down stairs to meals as usual, and kneeling to cut out a new cover for the schoolroom ottoman, the miasma that enveloped her faded away, and we mounted to her magnetic room to sit with her as usual. Never had her flood of reminiscences poured out in such unbridled spate.

  She wore a crotcheted cross-over, grey with a border of violet, over her black alpaca while she sat and sewed. She said she was feeling the cold this year. This seemed strange to me, as I looked down from her high window at the parched lawn and the dull, prematurely shrivelled leaves of the grove of chestnut trees. September was wearing away, the drought continued; but she said the summers weren’t what they used to be when she was a girl and our grandmother made her bring her sewing out under the trees of a hot afternoon. She wouldn’t be surprised if those roasting summers weren’t over and done with: our grandmother—she was a great one for a bit of education thrown in while you worked—had said that as time got on the sun would give off less and less heat. At the recollection of these bits of education, the chuckle rattled up out of her throat, more witch-like than ever.

  “Tilly, do you remember a lady called Mrs. Jardine?”

  She was manipulating a sable collar of my mother’s. She had been apprenticed as a girl to a Polish furrier and knew everything about the skins of animals. She dropped her work and considered. Her tic, so much more pronounced now, made her head shake above her boned collar with rhythmical violence, like one of those Chinese mandarin ornaments that you set nodding by a touch. No, she didn’t recollect any such person. A film came over her eyes, clouding them with a sullen melancholy. I felt accused of forcing on her proofs of failing memory
. She’d met a good few in her time, she said; it stood to reason she couldn’t call to mind every Mrs. This and Madam That. …

  “I only asked,” I said, “because she lives at the Priory now, and she’s got three grandchildren and we’ve made friends and one of them, called Maisie, says when she was very little they lived in a London hotel with their mother, and you came and took them out in the Park.”

  “Me?” She fairly squawked at me. “Take strange children in the Park? I never. The very idea! She can’t be right in ’er ’ead.”

  “And to the Zoo. Oh Tilly, I do think it was you. She remembers your name and what you wore and everything. Shall I show her to you next time she comes to tea? You might recognise her. Her mother was Mrs. Jardine’s little girl, who had a funny name: Ianthe.”

  At this word Tilly’s little frame seemed suddenly to contract, then expand. I saw memory strike at her, then pour all through her.

  “Miss Ianthe,” she said in a flat, automatic way. “Oh yes, she was godmother to ’er.” I understood that “she” referred to my grandmother. “That was Miss Sibyl’s child. … Mrs. Herbert, I should say. That was her married name. Knowing her as a girl, Miss Sibyl always come more natural. That’s one of them Greek names, ain’t it?—I-anthe? That’s what she said. ‘It’s a bit of a tongue-twister,’ I says. ‘Nonsense, Tilly. It’s as simple as it’s beautiful. It’s one of the most beautiful of all the Greek names. It means —’somethink or other, I forget now what she told me. ‘Greek to me,’ I says. She never minded a bit of a jokey answer. She knew it was just my way.”

  Her voice trailed off. She looked vacant and foolish. The pouches under her chin wobbled, her earrings tinkled faintly as her head nodded, nodded up and down. I waited, digging pins into her red emery cushion made in the shape of a big bursting strawberry—immemorial part of Tilly’s personal luggage.

  “Now do you remember her, Tilly?” I ventured at last.

  “Remember ’oo?” she said, rather querulously. “I dare say I do. What of it? I ’adn’t ’eard yet my mem’ry’s failin’—though there’s some a bit nearer than Marble Arch would be glad to make it out, no doubt, to suit their book. It’s peculiar what jealousy can demean a man to. But there! Man!”