On the Night of the Seventh Moon (5 page)

In Oxford, Aunt Caroline and Aunt Matilda were waiting for me.

B
ack in England it was the beginning of December with Christmas almost upon us; in the butchers' shops there were sprigs of holly round the trays of faggots, and oranges in the mouths of pigs who managed to look jaunty even though they were dead. At dusk the stallholders in the market were showing their goods under the flare of naphtha lights and from the windows of some shops hung cotton wool threaded on string to look like falling snow. The hot chestnut seller stood at the street corner with his glowing brazier and I remembered how my mother could never resist buying a bag or two and how they used to warm our hands as we carried them home. She liked best though to bake our own under the grate on Christmas night. She had made Christmas for us because she liked to celebrate it as it was celebrated in the home of her childhood. She used to tell us how there would be a tree for every member of the family lighted with candles and a big one in the center of the
Rittersaal
with presents for everyone. Christmas had been celebrated for years and years in her home, she used to say. We in England had also decorated fir trees when the custom had been brought from Germany by the Queen's mother and later strengthened by Her Majesty's strong association with her husband's land.

I had looked forward to Christmases but now this one held no
charm for me. I missed my parents far more than I had thought possible. It was true I had been away from them for four years but I had always been aware that they were there in the little house next to the bookshop which was my home.

Everything was changed now. That vague untidiness which had been homely was lacking. Aunt Caroline would have everything shining as she said “like a new pin.” In my unhappy mood I demanded to know why there should be such desirability about a new pin, which was what Aunt Caroline called “being funny.” Mrs. Green, who had been our housekeeper for years, had packed her bags and left. “Good riddance,” said Aunt Caroline. We only had young Ellen to do the rough work. “Very well,” said Aunt Caroline, “we have three pairs of hands in the house, why should we want more?”

Something had to be done about the shop, too. Obviously it could not be carried on in the same manner since my father's death. The conclusion was reached that it would have to be sold and in due course a Mr. Clees came along with his middle-aged daughter Amelia and bought it. These negotiations went on for some time and it emerged that the shop and its stock would not yield so very much once my father's debts had been paid.

“He had no head, your father,” said Aunt Caroline scornfully.

“He had a head all right,” replied Aunt Matilda, “but it was always in the clouds.”

“And this is the result. Debts . . . I never saw such debts. And when you think of that wine cellar of his and the wine bills. What he did with it all, I can't imagine.”

“He liked to entertain his friends from the university and they liked to come,” I explained.

“I don't wonder at it, with all the wine he was fool enough to give them.”

Aunt Caroline saw everything in that way. People did things for what they got, never for any other reason. I think she had come to look after my father to make sure of her place in heaven. She suspected the motives of everyone. “And what is he going to get out of
that?” was a favorite comment. Or “What good does she think that will do her?” Aunt Matilda was of a softer nature. She was obsessed with her own state of health and the more irregular it was the better pleased she seemed to be. She could also be quite happy discussing other people's ailments and brightened at the mention of them; but nothing pleased her so much as her own. Her heart was often “playing her up.” It “jumped,” it “fluttered,” it rarely achieved the required number of beats per minute for which she was constantly testing it. She frequently had a touch of heartburn or there was a numb freezing feeling all round it. In a fit of exasperation I once said: “You have a most accommodating heart, Aunt Matilda.” And for a moment she thought that was a new kind of disease and was quite cheered.

So between the self-righteous virtue of Aunt Caroline and the hypochondriacal fancies of Aunt Matilda I was far from content.

I wanted the old security and love which I had taken for granted, but it was more than that. Since my adventure in the mist I would never be the same again. I thought constantly of that encounter which seemed to be growing more and more unreal in my mind as time passed but was none the less vivid for that. I went over every detail that had happened: his face in the candlelight, those gleaming eyes, that grip on my hand, the feel of his fingers on my hair. I thought of the door handle slowly turning and I wondered what would have happened if Hildegarde had not warned me to bolt it.

Sometimes when I awoke in my room I would imagine I was in the hunting lodge and was bitterly disappointed when I looked round my room and saw the wallpaper with the blue roses, the white ewer and basin, the straight wooden chair and the text on the wall which said “Forget yourself and live for others,” and which had been put there by Aunt Caroline. The picture which had always been there still remained. A golden-haired child in a flowing white dress was dancing along a narrow cliff path beside which was a long drop onto the rocks below. Beside the child was an angel. The title was
The Guardian Angel.
The girl's flowing dress was not unlike the nightdress I had worn in the hunting lodge; and although I did not possess the pretty features
of the child and my hair was not golden, and Hildegarde did not resemble the angel in the least, I associated the picture with us both. She had been my guardian angel for I had been ready to plunge to disaster—ably assisted by my wicked baron who had dressed himself up in the guise of Siegfried to deceive me. It was like one of the forest fairy tales. I would never forget him. I wanted to see him again. If I had a wishbone again, my wish—in spite of my guardian angel—would still be: Let me see him again.

That was the main cause of my discontent. There was a quality about him which no one else had. It fascinated me so much that I was ready to face any danger to experience it again.

So how could I settle down to this dreary existence?

Mr. Clees had come next door with Miss Amelia Clees. They were pleasant and kind and I often went into the bookshop to see them. Miss Clees knew a great deal about books and it was for her sake that Mr. Clees had bought the shop. “So that I shall have a means of livelihood when he is gone,” she told me. Sometimes they came to dine with us and Aunt Matilda was quite interested in Mr. Clees because he had confided to her that he had only one kidney.

That Christmas Day was dreary. The Cleeses had not yet taken possession of the shop and I had to spend the time with Aunt Caroline and Aunt Matilda. There were no trees, and our presents to each other had to be useful. There were no roasted chestnuts, no ghost stories round the fire, no legends of the forest, no stories of my father's undergraduate days; nothing but an account of the good deeds Aunt Caroline used to perform for the poor in her Somerset village and from Aunt Matilda the effects of too rich feeding on the digestive organs. I realized that the reason they were more intimate with each other than they were with anyone else was that they never listened to each other and they carried on a conversation independently of each other. I would listen idly.

“We did what we could for them but it's no use helping people like that.”

“Congestion of the liver. She went all yellow.”

“The father was constantly drunk. I told her that the child must not go about in torn garments. ‘We've got no pins, ma'am,' she said. ‘Pins!' I cried. ‘Pins!' What is wrong with a needle and thread?' ”

“The doctor gave her up. It had led to congestion of the lungs. She lay like a corpse.”

And so on, happily pursuing their individual lines of thought.

I was amused and then exasperated; I would take my mother's book called
Gods and Heroes of the Northlands
and read of those fantastic adventures of Thor and Odin and Siegfried, Beowulf and the rest of them. And I fancied I was there with that unmistakable scent of the fir and pine trees, the rushing of little mountain streams and the sudden descent of the mist.

“It's time you took your nose out of that book and did something useful,” commented Aunt Caroline.

“Bending over books will send you into a decline,” Aunt Matilda told me. “It stops the expansion of the chest.”

My great solace at that time was the Grevilles. They could talk of the pine forests. They had a feeling for them. They had spent a holiday there some years ago and often went back to visit them. It was they who had brought me back and forth from the
Damenstift
for they had been great friends of my parents. Their son Anthony was studying for the Church. He was such a good son, the delight of his parents, who were so proud of him. They were very kind and sorry for me. I spent Boxing Day with them and it was a relief to escape from the aunts. They tried to make it gay for me and there were little individual Christmas trees just as my mother had arranged them.

Anthony was there, and when he spoke his parents listened in a hushed silence which amused me while it endeared me to them. We played guessing games, and games with paper and pencil but Anthony was so much more learned than the rest of us that we came nowhere near him.

It was quite pleasant and Anthony walked home with me and said rather shyly that he hoped I would visit his parents' home whenever I wished to.

“Is that what you would like?” I asked.

He assured me that he would.

“Then they would want it too,” I said, “because they always want what you do.”

He smiled. He had a quick understanding and was very pleasant, but not in the least exciting to be with and it was impossible for me now to avoid comparing any man with Siegfried. If Anthony had found a girl in the mist he would have taken her straight back to where she belonged and if he could not, to his mother; and she would have no need to utter warnings and to take on the role of guardian angel.

I would be pleased to go to the Grevilles and see them and their son; but the desire to be again in that hunting lodge sitting opposite my wicked baron was so intense that it was sometimes like a physical pain.

There were more visits to the Grevilles. The Cleeses came to the shop and I heard that I had fifteen-hundred pounds clear when all debts were paid.

“A nest egg,” said Aunt Caroline, and invested wisely it would give me a small income which would enable me to live like a lady. I would continue under their care and they would teach me how to become a good housewife, an art in which it was obvious to them I was by no means accomplished. I was disturbed. I saw myself growing like the aunts: learning how to run a house, speaking to Ellen so that she cringed, making rows of jams, preserves and jellies and lining them up in chronological order with labels on them denoting that they were blackberry jelly, raspberry jam or orange marmalade, of the 1859, 1860 variety and so on through the century while I grew into a good housewife with banisters which held not a speck of dust and tables in which I could see my reflection, making my own beeswax and turpentine, salting my own pork, gathering my black currants for jelly and brooding over the quality of my ginger wine.

And somewhere in the world Siegfried would be pursuing his adventures and if we met again after many rows of jars in my stillroom he would not know me—but I should always know him.

Escape was at the Grevilles' house where I was always welcome and
sometimes Anthony was there to talk about the past, for he was as enamored of the past as I was of the pine forests; I found it interesting to learn what the Queen's marriage had meant to the country, how the Consort had ousted Lord Melbourne, what he had done for the country—of the great Exhibition in Hyde Park which Anthony described so vividly that I could see the Crystal Palace and the little Queen so proud beside her husband. He talked of the war in the Crimea and the great Palmerston and how our country was growing into a mighty Empire.

I should have been very unhappy during that period but for the Grevilles.

But Anthony was not always there and I found it tiring to hear an account of his virtues which his parents never failed to give me; I was restless and unhappy and felt sometimes as though I were in limbo, waiting . . . for what I was not sure.

I told Mrs. Greville that I wanted to do something.

“Young girls really have plenty to do in the house,” she said. “They learn how to be good wives when they marry.”

“It seems very little,” I replied.

“Oh no, being a housewife is one of the important jobs in the world . . . for a woman.”

I didn't take to it. My jam burned the pans; the labels came off.

Aunt Caroline tut-tutted. “This is what comes of going to outlandish schools.”

“Outlandish” was a favorite word to be applied to anything of which she did not approve.

My father had made that “outlandish” marriage. I had “outlandish” notions about doing something in life. “What could you do? Go and be a governess to children? Miss Grace, the vicar's daughter in our old home, went as a companion when her father died.”

“She went into a decline soon after,” added Aunt Matilda grimly.

“To that Lady Ogilvy. She was the one who stopped giving soup to the poor because she said they gave it to the pigs as soon as her back was turned.”

“I knew what was wrong with her long before,” put in Aunt Matilda. “She was that transparent color. You can tell. ‘You'll go into a decline, my girl,' I said to myself. ‘And it won't be very long before you do either.' ”

I was thoughtful. I didn't fancy looking after children or being a companion to some fratchetty old lady who might well be worse than Aunt Caroline and Aunt Matilda; at least the incongruity of their conversation and the predictability of their views gave me a little amusement.