Unfinished Portrait

Celia stared dumbly at her mother. She knew now that she could never tell. The cause of her misery would remain locked in her own breast forever and ever. She wanted to tell—oh, how badly she wanted to tell—but somehow she couldn’t. Some mysterious inhibition had been laid on her, sealing her lips. If only Mummy knew. Mummy would understand. But she couldn’t tell Mummy. They were all looking at her—waiting for her to speak. A terrible agony welled up in her breast. She gazed dumbly, agonizingly, at her mother. ‘Help me,’ that gaze said. ‘Oh, do help me.’

Miriam gazed back at her.

‘I believe she doesn’t like that butterfly in her hat,’ she said, ‘Who pinned it there?’

Oh, the relief—the wonderful, aching, agonizing relief.

‘Nonsense,’ her father was beginning, but Celia interrupted him. Words burst from her released like water at the bursting of a dam.

‘I ’ate it. I ’ate it,’ she cried. ‘It flaps. It’s alive. It’s being hurt.’

‘Why on earth didn’t you say so, you silly kid?’ said Cyril.

Celia’s mother answered: ‘I expect she didn’t want to hurt the guide’s feelings.’

‘Oh, Mummy!’ said Celia.

It was all there—in those two words. Her relief, her gratitude—and a great welling up of love.

Her mother had understood.

CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_5b9b7137-5543-5435-9d3f-cffad2f15542)

Grannie (#ulink_5b9b7137-5543-5435-9d3f-cffad2f15542)

The following winter Celia’s father and mother went to Egypt. They did not think it practicable to take Celia with them, so she and Jeanne went to stay with Grannie.

Grannie lived at Wimbledon, and Celia liked staying with her very much. The features of Grannie’s house were, first, the garden—a square pocket handkerchief of green, bordered with rose trees, every tree of which Celia knew intimately, remembering even in winter: ‘That’s the pink la France—Jeanne, you’d like that one,’ but the crown and glory of the garden was a big ash tree trained over wire supports to make an arbour. There was nothing like the ash tree at home, and Celia regarded it as one of the most exciting wonders of the world. Then there was the WC seat of old-fashioned mahogany set very high. Retiring to this spot after breakfast, Celia would fancy herself a queen enthroned, and securely secluded behind a locked door she would bow regally, extend a hand to be kissed by imaginary courtiers and prolong the court scene as long as she dared. There was also Grannie’s store cupboard situated by the door into the garden. Every morning, her large bunch of keys clanking, Grannie would visit her store cupboard, and with the punctuality of a child, a dog, or a lion at feeding time, Celia would be there too. Grannie would hand out packets of sugar, butter, eggs, or a pot of jam. She would hold long acrimonious discussions with old Sarah, the cook. Very different from Rouncy, old Sarah. As thin as Rouncy was fat. A little old woman with a nut-cracker wrinkled face. For fifty years of her life she had been in service with Grannie, and during all those fifty years the discussions had been the same. Too much sugar was being used: what happened to the last half pound of tea? It was, by now, a kind of ritual—it was Grannie going through her daily performance of the careful housewife. Servants were so wasteful! You had to look after them sharply. The ritual finished, Grannie would pretend to notice Celia for the first time.

‘Dear, dear, what’s a little girl doing here?’

And Grannie would pretend great surprise.

‘Well, well,’ she would say, ‘you can’t want anything?’

‘I do, Grannie, I do.’

‘Well, let me see now.’ Grannie would burrow leisurely in the depths of the cupboard. Something would be extracted—a jar of French plums, a stick of angelica, a pot of quince preserve. There was always something for a little girl.

Grannie was a very handsome old lady. She had pink and white skin, two waves of white crimped hair each side of her forehead, and a big good-humoured mouth. In figure she was majestically stout with a pronounced bosom and stately hips. She wore dresses of velvet or brocade, ample as to skirts, and well pulled in round the waist.

‘I always had a beautiful figure, my dear,’ she used to tell Celia. ‘Fanny—that was my sister—had the prettiest face of the family, but she’d no figure—no figure at all! As thin as two boards nailed together. No man looked at her for long when I was about. It’s figure the men care for, not face.’

‘The men’ bulked largely in Grannie’s conversation. She had been brought up in the days when men were considered to be the hub of the universe. Women merely existed to minister to those magnificent beings.

‘You wouldn’t have found a handsomer man anywhere than my father. Six foot tall, he was. All we children were afraid of him. He was very severe.’

‘What was your mother like, Grannie?’

‘Ah, poor soul. Only thirty-nine when she died. Ten of us children, there were. A lot of hungry mouths. After a baby was born, when she was staying in bed—’

‘Why did she stay in bed, Grannie?’

‘It’s the custom, dearie.’

Celia accepted the mandate incuriously.

‘She always took her month,’ went on Grannie. ‘It was the only rest she got, poor soul. She enjoyed her month. She used to have breakfast in bed and a boiled egg. Not that she got much of that. We children used to come and bother her. “Can I have a taste of your egg, Mother? Can I have the top of it?” There wouldn’t be much left for her after each child had had a taste. She was too kind—too gentle. She died when I was fourteen. I was the eldest of the family. Poor father was heart-broken. They were a devoted couple. He followed her to the grave six months later.’

Celia nodded. That seemed right and fitting in her eyes. In most of the child’s books in the nursery there was a deathbed scene—usually that of a child—a peculiarly holy and angelic child.

‘What did he die of?’

‘Galloping consumption,’ replied Grannie.

‘And your mother?’

‘She went into a decline, my dear. Just went into decline. Always wrap your throat up well when you go out in an east wind. Remember that, Celia. It’s the east wind that kills. Poor Miss Sankey—why, she had tea with me only a month ago. Went to those nasty swimming baths—came out afterwards with an east wind blowing and no boa round her neck—and she was dead in a week.’

Nearly all Grannie’s stories and reminiscences ended like this. A most cheerful person herself, she delighted in tales of incurable illness, of sudden death, or of mysterious disease. Celia was so well accustomed to this that she would demand with eager and rapturous interest in the middle of one of Grannie’s stories, ‘And then did he die, Grannie?’ And Grannie would reply, ‘Ah, yes, he died, poor fellow.’ Or girl or boy, or woman—as the case might be. None of Grannie’s stories ever ended happily. It was perhaps her natural reaction from her own healthy and vigorous personality.

Grannie was also full of mysterious warnings.

‘If anybody you don’t know offers you sweets, dearie, never take them. And when you’re an older girl, remember never to get into a train with a single man.’

This last injunction rather distressed Celia. She was a shy child. If one was not to get into a train with a single man, one would have to ask him whether or not he was married. You couldn’t tell if a man was married or not to look at him. The mere thought of having to do such a thing made her squirm uneasily.

She did not connect with herself a murmur from a lady visitor.

‘Surely unwise—put things into her head.’

Grannie’s answer rose robustly.

‘Those that are warned in time won’t come to grief. Young people ought to know these things. And there’s a thing that perhaps you never heard of, my dear. My husband told me about it—my first husband.’ (Grannie had had three husbands—so attractive had been her figure—and so well had she ministered to the male sex. She had buried them in turn—one with tears—one with resignation—and one with decorum.) ‘He said women ought to know about such things.’

Her voice dropped. It hissed in sibilant whispers.

What she could hear seemed to Celia dull. She strayed away into the garden …

Jeanne was unhappy. She became increasingly homesick for France and her own people. The English servants, she told Celia, were not kind.

‘The cuisinière, Sarah, she is gentille, though she calls me a papist. But the others, Mary and Kate—they laugh because I do not spend my wages on my clothes, and send it all home to Maman.’

Grannie attempted to cheer Jeanne.

‘You go on behaving like a sensible girl,’ she told Jeanne. ‘Putting a lot of useless finery on your back never caught a decent man yet. You go on sending your wages home to your mother, and you’ll have a nice little nest egg laid by for when you get married. That neat plain style of dressing is far more suitable to a domestic servant than a lot of fal-lals. You go on being a sensible girl.’

But Jeanne would occasionally give way to tears when Mary or Kate had been unusually spiteful or unkind. The English girls did not like foreigners, and Jeanne was a papist too, and everyone knew that Roman Catholics worshipped the Scarlet Woman.