Authors: Elizabeth Bowen
Fred had not, in reality, this June morning, more than once asked where Jane was—upon there seeming to be no answer, he had turned and gone out without a word more. Now, an hour later, he had looked again: here he was, standing in the kitchen, hastily drinking out of a thick Delft cup. Lilia, coming down from Antonia’s room, found him with Kathie the little servant at his elbow, waiting to spoon more sugar in to the tea when he should pause. Fred’s shirt was open, showing the matted black hair, here and there glistening with tea drops, on his barrel chest. He now was a thickset man, about fifty-three, with a touch of the Latin about his pigmentation and cast of features. His skull was broad, with forehead receding somewhat; his muscle-webbed neck was short. His far-apart, dark and prominent eyes were inhabited by a look of curious patience, as though he had at one time been struck across them and might be so again. Grey streaked his short, unevenly-clipped moustache, though not yet the hair plastered flat to his head.
He bumped down the empty cup on the table and, the heat of the tea coming out in sweat, pulled a khaki handkerchief from his breeches pocket and mopped round his face and behind his ears. Kathie nipped to refill the cup, but he shook his head. Seeing Lilia come in, with, perhaps, news, he could not refrain from one glance of hope—she, however, only went straight to put down the glass, saucer and candlestick on the already cluttered board of the sink. After that, subsiding on to a chair, she went on taking pleasure in saying nothing, till he caught her eye by making as though to go. She then asked: ‘Know there’s a fly on your neck?’
To oblige, he slapped at it, but in the wrong place.
‘Oh well,’ she yawned, ‘keep it, if you prefer it. I should break down if one walked on
me.
I too well remember where they have come from. Going out again now, are you?’
‘Mm-mm. Why?’
‘Then what were you waiting for?’
‘Swallow my tea,’ said Fred. He made for the door.
‘Oh, about Jane,’ said Lilia, slowly turning her head. Like a fool he stopped in his course, to hear. His wife went on: ‘Well, she was not up there.’
‘Up where?’ he asked apparently vaguely, plucking away at an old nail loose in the lintel of the door.
‘Not up there with Antonia, for a wonder.’
No more was necessary: Fred was gone. ‘He’s scalded for time,’ remarked Kathie, through one then another window watching him cross the yard—she brought the candlestick to the middle table and began to jab at the wax in it with a broken knife. Lilia looked on at the process with a gahtering frown. ‘It’s extraordinary, Kathie,’ she said at last ‘how you always do what need not be done immediately. Look at those dishes over from last evening, only attracting flies into the sink; and where do I see Miss Antonia’s tea-tray, now she’s awake?’
Kathie willingly scrubbed her hands on her apron and made a dart for the cupboard of better china. Searching about for unchipped pieces, she volunteered: ‘I’m half sure I saw Miss Jane this morning, away out over the country in a ball gown.’
‘Then why not say so?’
‘Away out over, and I’d the sun in my eyes.—Unless could it ever have been a Vision?’
‘Now don’t
you
start being peculiar, in this heat.—Ball gown? There’s no such thing in this house. Miss Jane leaves her fashionable clothes in London, and what should
I
do with a ball gown, I’d like to know?’
‘I’d like to know!’ echoed Kathie, nonplussed. She gave two bangs to a tray, to dislodge crumbs, took a cloth to a smear, then devoutly began to set out Antonia’s tea-things. Through the propped-open windows, the door ajar, came in the sound of the tractor three fields away—they were hay-cutting early, this dewless morning. The mechanical hum was louder because of the stillness around the house—not
a
rustle anywhere; the usual murmurs of
summer were suspended. Not
a breath travelled over these uplands
under the mountains
or fanned its way down the river gorge: the heat
stood over the land
like a white-hot sword, causing an apprehensive
hush. Here
in the kitchen the strips of flypaper hung from
the ceiling without
swaying. What was eerie was that a snowlike
reflection came in
from the sunstruck white buildings across
the
yard.
The green of the ivy over the
window
-bars and the persisting humidity of the stone-flagged floors made the kitchen look cool without being so. This was the room in Montefort which had changed least: routine abode in its air like an old spell. Generations of odours of baking and basting, stewing and skimming had been absorbed into the limewashed walls, leaving wood ash, raked cinders, tea leaves, wrung-out clothes and lamp oil freshly predominant. The massive table, on which jigs had been danced at the harvest homes, was probably stronger than, now, the frame of the house—today’s slops and stains superficially lay on the bleach from years of scrubbing; the grain of the wood was dinted by chopper-blows. The great and ravenous range, of which no one now knew how to quell the roaring, was built back into a blackened cave of its own—on its top, a perpetual kettle sent out a havering thread of steam, tea stewed in a pot all day, and the lid heaved, sank on one or another of the jostling pots, saucepans and cauldrons. Mush for the chickens, if nothing else, was never not in the course of cooking; also, the range remained Montefort’s sole means of heating water—none of the innovations, boilers, plumbing and so on, envisaged once by Antonia, had been yet installed, nor did it seem probable that they would be. There was not the money. The sink’s one tap connected with a rainwater tank which had run dry—since then, a donkey cart with a barrel rattled its way daily down to the river pool. Drinking water came from the spring nearby—a crock with a dipper lived under the Delft-crowded dresser between the windows. On the dresser, from one of the hooks for cups, hung a still handsome calendar for the year before; and shreds of another, previous to that, remained tacked to the shutter over the sink. These, with the disregarded dawdling and often stopping of the cheap scarlet clock wedged in somewhere between the bowls and dishes, spoke of the almost total irrelevance of Time, in the abstract, to this ceaseless kitchen. One arrived, at the most, by instinct, guesswork or calculation at which day of the week it ought to be or perhaps was. What had to be done in here only was to be done at its own pace, always lagging behind a little in the race with necessity. Something was always wanted but not ready.
Outdoors, the farm ran by the watch strapped inexorably to Fred’s wrist. As master he had the name of being a terror, throwing out what he detected to be a slack man as soon as look at him; but as against that he had been bred here and knew fundamentally what he was working with: men he chose to keep chose to stay—it was recognised that himself was the one he drove hardest of all. Inside Montefort, it was only Maud who ever shook or poked at the defective clock or ran round plaguing to know what the time could be. The child worshipped Big Ben, and how was she to hear the ether quiver with His strokes if she knew not when to tune in on her battery set?
Maud’s summer holidays had begun.
Now Kathie started for upstairs with Antonia’s tea, and Lilia seized the occasion to kick her shoes off—they were white canvas, high-heeled, a little grubby. Antonia had given her espadrilles, but she never would sink so low. Her feet, though today swollen, were pretty, and sizes smaller than Jane’s: in winters only, when left alone with Fred, did she flap about all day in her chicken boots. She leaned back, easing herself on the wooden chair, in almost an ecstasy of lassitude. Bust arched up, arms falling slackly down, she drove thoughts off and forgot flies; she was prepared to consider, though not yet, her next move in the unequal battle with the day. She was not long alone, however, for Maud came in—the child, last heard of going off to the river, had somehow got back into the house; and evidently this was to be one of her days for elaborately stalking about on tiptoe, gnawing her lips with the effort to make no sound. Ignoring Lilia—whose willingness not to see her more than matched her wish not to be seen—Maud made direct for the kitchen dresser, where she took a pin from a cup, an egg from a bowl. She could have got out again, always with nothing said, had a crisis of violent itching not come upon her: standing where she was she had to scratch one bare leg, in furious motion, with a loud skinny rasping, against the other. Lilia was so far roused as to turn and stare moodily at her second daughter.
‘What are you doing with that egg?’
‘Taking it.’
‘How am I to know how many there are? And it’s disgusting, keeping on sucking them like a serpent.’
‘Why?’
‘And overheating your blood, with Cousin Antonia unable to stand the sight of you as it is.’
Maud’s high forehead, exposed by the skinning-back of her hair, was indeed bumpy with crimson hives. She was twelve years old. Short plaits were strained round her skull to meet at the top, secured by a limp but precise bow of tartan ribbon. Her cotton frock with its pattern of orange horses had shrunk in the wash and clung to her narrow chest—it was clean, but for some ghostly fruit-stains from the summer before. Maud was the neatest person about the house. In view of all that she was and did, there was something unfair, confounding about her air of propriety—caught out, one might have considered, by developing spots, she carried these with nonchalance, even hauteur. Having been occupied, while her mother spoke, in expertly pricking both ends of the egg, she returned the pin to the cup and looked round the kitchen. Lilia by reflex compressed her toes, as though to appear to have shoes on; but it was upon the candlestick that Maud’s eye lit—the child advanced to the table, put down the egg, and began to scoop up the chipped-off drippings.
Lilia said: ‘What are you doing messing with that wax?’
‘I need it.’
‘Leave it, I tell you!’
‘What, to be thrown away?’ Maud stood working the wax to a ball between the palms of her hands. She pointed out: ‘It’s useful for images.’
‘Why aren’t you out of doors?’
‘Where’s Kathie?’
‘Never you mind. Go out. But keep in the shade.’
‘I am in the shade in here.’
‘Argue, argue, argue,’ Lilia returned, abstractedly—for, what kept Kathie so long in Antonia’s room? Maud dropped the wax into her pocket, picked up the egg, looked once again round the kitchen, decided to go, so went. Kathie, at last, could be heard pegging down the stairs.
Kathie had left the curtains still undisturbed. Antonia finished her cup of tea, groaned, ground a cigarette into the saucer and lay back, with again the idea of sleep. Jane chose this moment to enter; Antonia, equally, chose to fail to bring the girl in the sunny dusk into focus. There was therefore a pause, during which Jane vaguely stood at the bed’s foot. ‘Well come round,’ said Antonia finally. ‘I can’t see you. Oh, so that is the ball dress?’
Jane, crestfallen, cried: ‘Then you’re not surprised?’
‘You were seen.’
‘Someone’s been in, then, already? Somebody told you?’ There sat the morning tray, sad confirmation.
‘Half the world has been in,’ stated Antonia.
‘Which of them saw me?’
‘Kathie.’
‘Oh, that’s all right.—Not that it
is
a ball dress,’Jane went on, touching the high throat, flopping an angel sleeve.
Antonia, after a hostile yawn, said: ‘Well, another beautiful day?’
I think so,’ the girl gently asserted.
‘You do? Then suppose you tell me, we shall be doing—what?’
‘Oh, I expect there’ll be something to do, Antonia.’
‘Nerve-racking ghastly endless sublime weather! No, I can’t simply live in it, can’t take it. What’s it meant for? Something has got to happen.’
Jane flashed on Antonia a brimming speaking look—lips apart, eyes meaning and startled. But then she seemed to retreat, so only said: ‘For instance,
I
put on this.’
‘So you did. Yes, I was wondering why.’
‘I get so sick of the sight of my arms and legs.’
‘That all it was?’
Jane parried: ‘What do I look like?’
‘Where did it come from?’
‘Simply out of a trunk. It must belong, I suppose, to somebody dead.’
‘Don’t be too certain; it may have been mine!’
Jane coloured up for a moment, but then answered composedly: ‘No, surely you can’t be as old as that.’ She trailed into closer view, seated herself on the bed’s edge, turned her bust to show the antique cut of the bodice, invited Antonia to finger the fragile skirt. Antonia grumbled: ‘You may be right.’
‘Oh, you know I am. Also, smell it!’ She bunched up and proffered a sort of bouquet of the yellowing stuff.
‘Pah!’ jibbed Antonia. ‘Musty. Take it away.’
‘Me to go away?’
‘No, I never said that.’
‘Sachets, though, too, in the mustiness,’ Jane insisted. ‘One can know it was meant to be worn again.’
‘No, on the contrary—no, it had had its funeral. Delicious hour for somebody, packing away her youth. Last looks at it, pangs,
perhaps tears even. Then, down with the lid!’
‘What, does youth really end with a bang, like that?’