Читать книгу A Wreath for the Enemy - Pamela Frankau - Страница 6

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I spent most of the day alone working on the Anthology. I had found quite a new Hate, which was headed ‘Characters’. People called the Duchess a character and this was said of others who came here. I made a brief description of each and included some of their sayings and habits.

There was the usual paragraph about the Duchess in the Continental Daily Mail; it referred to her gambling and her emeralds and her joie-de-vivre. Joie-de-vivre seemed to be a worthy subject for Hate and I entered it on a separate page, as a subsection of Jokes.

At half-past four, to my surprise, I looked up from my rock writing-desk and saw the Bradleys’ car sweeping in from the road. Presently Eva came running down the tiers of terrace alone. When she saw me she waved, put her finger to her lips, and signalled to me to stay where I was. She came scrambling up.

“I’m so glad to see you. There’s a row. I can’t stay long. Don has been sent to bed.”

“Oh, dear. I was conscious of an unfavourable aura,” I said. “What happened?”

Eva looked miserable. “It isn’t anything against you, of course. They like you terribly. Mum says you have beautiful manners. When Don and I said we wanted you to come and stop a few days with us at Crossways in September, it went down quite well. Would you like to?” she asked, gazing at me, “or would it be awfully boring?”

I was momentarily deflected from the doom and the row. “I cannot imagine anything that would give me greater pleasure,” I said. She wriggled her eyebrows, as usual, at my phrases.

“That isn’t just being polite?”

“I swear by yonder hornèd moon it isn’t.”

“But, of course, it may not happen now,” she said in melancholy, “although it wasn’t your fault. After all you didn’t make us meet the Duchess on purpose.”

“Was the row about the Duchess?”

“Mm-m.”

“Because of her telling your fortunes and teaching you to play roulette? I did have my doubts, I admit.”

“Apparently they were quite cross about that, but of course they couldn’t say so in front of you. Daddy had heard of the Duchess, anyway. And they cracked down on the dinner party and sent a note. And Don kept on asking why until he made Daddy furious; and there seems to have been something in the Continental Mail, which we are not allowed to read.”

“Here it is,” I said helpfully. She glanced upward over her shoulder. I said, “Have no fear. We are invisible from the villa at this angle.”

She raised her head from the paper and her eyes shone; she said, “Isn’t it wonderful?” I had thought it a pedestrian little paragraph, but I hid my views.

“Mummy said that the Duchess wasn’t at all the sort of person she liked us to mix with, and that no lady would sit in a bar drinking champagne when there were children present, and that we shouldn’t have gone into the bar again anyway. And Don lost his temper and was quite rude. So that we came home early instead of having tea out; and Dad said that Don had spoiled the day and asked him to apologise. And Don said a word that we aren’t allowed to use and now he’s gone to bed. Which is awful for him because he’s too big to be sent to bed. And I’ll have to go back. I’m terribly sorry.”

“So am I,” I said. “Please tell your mother that I deplore the Duchess deeply, and that I always have.”

As soon as I had spoken, I became leaden inside with remorse. It was true that I deplored the Duchess because she was possessive, overpowering, and embarrassing, but I did not disapprove of her in the way that the Bradleys did. I was making a desperate effort to salvage the thing that mattered most to me.

In other words, I was assuming a virtue though I had it not, and while Shakespeare seemed to approve of this practice, I was certain that it was wrong. (And I went on with it. I added that Francis would not have dreamed of bringing the Duchess into the bar if he had known that we were there. This was an outrageous lie. Francis would have brought the Duchess into the bar had the Archbishop of Canterbury been there—admittedly an unlikely contingency.)

When Eva said that this might improve matters and might also make it easier for Don to apologise, because he had stuck up for the Duchess, I felt lower than the worms.

Which is why I quarrelled with Francis. And I knew that that was why. I had discovered that if one were feeling guilty one’s instinct was to put the blame on somebody else as soon as possible.

Francis called to me from the bar door as I came up on to the terrace. I had been freed from R.C.I. on the grounds of having replaced Laurent before lunch at short notice. He grinned at me. “Be an angel and take these cigarettes to Violetta’s room, will you, please? I swear that woman smokes two at a time.”

“I am sorry,” I said. “I have no wish to run errands for the Duchess just now.”

Francis, as usual, was reasonable. “How has she offended you?” he asked.

I told him about the Bradleys, about the possible invitation to Devonshire; I said that, thanks to the Duchess cutting such a pretty figure in the bar, not to mention the Continental Mail, my future was being seriously jeopardised. I saw Francis’ eyebrows twitching.

He said, “Penelope, you are a thundering ass. These people are tedious petits bourgeois, and there is no reason to put on their act just because you happen to like their children. And I see no cause to protect anybody, whether aged seven or seventy, from the sight of Violetta drinking champagne.”

“Mrs. Bradley said that no lady would behave in such a way.”

“Tell Mrs. Bradley with my love and a kiss that if she were a tenth as much of a lady as Violetta she would have cause for pride. And I am not at all sure,” he said, “that I like the idea of your staying with them in Devonshire.”

This was, as the French said, the comble.

“Do you mean that you wouldn’t let me go?” I asked, feeling as though I had been struck by lightning.

“I did not say that. I said I wasn’t sure that I liked the idea.”

“My God, why not?”

“Do not imagine when you say, ‘My God’,” said Francis, “that you add strength to your protest. You merely add violence.”

He could always make me feel a fool when he wanted to. And I could see that he was angry; less with me than with the Bradleys. He said, “I don’t think much of the Smugs, darling, as you know. And I think less after this. Violetta is a very remarkable old girl, and if they knew what she went through in Rome when the Germans were there, some of that heroism might penetrate even their thick heads. Run along with those cigarettes now, will you please?”

I was trembling with rage; the worst kind of rage, hating me as well as everything else. I took the cigarettes with what I hoped was a dignified gesture, and went.

The Duchess was lying on the chaise-longue under her window; she was swathed like a mummy in yards of cyclamen chiffon trimmed with marabout. She appeared to be reading three books at once: a novel by Ignazio Silone, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, and a Handbook of Carpentry for Beginners.

The room, the best of the rooms, having two balconies, had become unrecognisable. It worried me with its rampaging disorder. Three wardrobe trunks crowded it: many dresses, scarves, and pairs of small pointed shoes had escaped from the wardrobe trunks. The Duchess always brought with her large unexplained pieces of material; squares of velvet, crêpe de Chine, and damask, which she spread over the furniture. The writing-table had been made to look like a table in a museum; she had put upon it a black crucifix and two iron candlesticks, a group of ivory figures, and a velvet book with metal clasps.

Despite the heat of the afternoon the windows were shut; the room smelled of smoke and scent.

“Beautiful—beautiful—beautiful!” said the Duchess, holding out her hand for the cigarettes. “There are the bonbons au miel on the bedside table. Help yourself liberally, and sit down and talk to me.”

“No, thank you very much. If you will excuse me, Duchessa, I have to do some work now.”

“I will not excuse you, darling. Sit down here. Do you know why I will not excuse you?”

I shook my head.

“Because I can see that you are unhappy, frustrated, and restless.” She joined her finger-tips and stared at me over the top of them. “Some of it I can guess,” she said, “and some of it I should dearly like to know. Your mother would have known.”

I was silent; she was hypnotic when she spoke of my mother, but I could not make myself ask her questions.

“Genius is not a comfortable possession. What do you want to do most in the world, Penelope?”

The truthful reply would have been, “To be like other people. To live in England; with an ordinary father and mother who do not keep an hotel. To stop having dooms; never to be told that I am a genius, and to have people of my own age to play with so that I need not spend my life listening to grown-ups.”

I said, “I don’t know.”

The Duchess sighed and beat a tattoo with her little feet inside the marabout; they looked like clockwork feet.

“You are, beyond doubt, crying for the moon. Everybody at your age cries for the moon. But if you will not tell me which moon, I cannot be of assistance. What is the book that you are writing?”

“It is an Anthology of Hates,” I said, and was much surprised that I had told her, because I had not told anybody.

“Oho!” said the Duchess. “Have you enough Hates to make an anthology?”

I nodded.

“Is freedom one of your Hates?”

I frowned; I did not want to discuss the book with her at all and I could not understand her question. She was smiling in a maddening way that implied more knowledge of me than I myself had.

“Freedom is the most important thing that there is. You have more freedom than the average child knows. One day you will learn to value this and be grateful for it. I will tell you why.” Her voice had taken on the sing-song, lecturing note that preceded a fifteen-minute monologue. I stared at the figures on the writing-table. She had let her cigarette lie burning in the ashtray, and a small spiral of smoke went up like incense before the crucifix; there was this, there was the hot scented room and the sound of her voice: “It is necessary to imprison children to a certain degree, for their discipline and their protection. In schools, they are largely hidden away from life, like bees in a hive. This means that they learn a measure of pleasant untruth; a scale of simple inadequate values that resemble the true values in life only as much as a plain coloured poster of the Riviera resembles the actual coastline.

“When they emerge from the kindly-seeming prisons, they meet the world of true dimensions and true values. These are unexpectedly painful and irregular. Reality is always irregular and generally painful. To be unprepared for its shocks and to receive the shocks upon a foundation of innocence is the process of growing up. In your case, Penelope, you will be spared many of those pains. Not only do you have now a wealth of freedom which you cannot value because you have not experienced the opposite, but you are also endowing yourself with a future freedom; freedom from the fear and shock and shyness which make the transition from youth to maturity more uncomfortable than any other period of existence. Francis is bringing you up through the looking-glass, back-to-front. You are learning what the adult learns, and walking through these lessons towards the light-heartedness that is usually to be found in childhood but later lost. I wonder how long it will take you to find that out.” She sat up on her elbows and stared at me again. “Do you know what I think will happen to your Anthology of Hates when you do find it out? You will read it through and find that these are not Hates any more.”

By this last remark she had annoyed me profoundly, and now she clapped her hands and cried, “If young people were only allowed to gamble! It takes the mind off every anxiety. If I could take you to the Casino with me tonight, Penelope! Wouldn’t that be splendid? Disguised as a young lady of fashion!” She sprang off the chaise-longue, snatched the square of velvet from the bed and flung it over my shoulders. Its weight almost bore me to the ground; it was heavy as a tent and it smelled musty. “Look at yourself in the mirror!” cried the Duchess. “Beautiful—beautiful—beautiful! A Principessa!” She scuttled past me. “We will place this silver girdle here.” She lashed it so tightly that it hurt my stomach; I was stifled; it felt like being dressed in a carpet. “Take this fan and these gloves.” They were long white kid gloves, as hard as biscuits; she forced my fingers in and cajoled the gloves up my arms as far as the shoulders.

“The little amethyst circlet for your head.”

She caught some single hairs as she adjusted it and put one finger in my eye. Sweat was trickling all over me.

“Now you have a very distinct resemblance to your mother,” said the Duchess, standing before me and regarding me with her head on one side.

“This is the forecast of your womanhood. Will you please go downstairs at once and show yourself to Jeanne?”

I said that I would rather not. She was peevishly disappointed. I struggled out of the ridiculous costume; hot, dispirited, no fonder of myself than before, I got away.