The Heart of the Family Read online

  The idea had had the absurdity of all midnight fantasies, but looking now from Lavender Cottage to the Vicarage, and remembering Damerosehay and The Herb of Grace, Sally thought of it again. Strength, gallantry, quietness and discipline, we’ll need them all before we’ve done, she thought, and we’ll all need each other, pooling our different sorts of courage, not shutting ourselves up each in his own trouble, like we do now.

  David opened the car door and slipped into the seat beside her. He put one hand over hers, that lay clasped in her lap. His hand was warm and hers were cold.

  “All right now?” he asked her.

  “Yes, I’m all right now.”

  They sat without moving or speaking for a few moments, and his warmth sent a glow through her cold exhausted body. She sighed contentedly. These were the best moments of marriage, these times when the surface irritations fell away and each gave to the other what the other needed. For she was giving something to him, too, though she did not know what it was. He could have told her. When she had need of him he forgot about himself and the torment of his self-hatred stopped for a moment.

  The luxurious grey car slid forward slowly beneath the swaying trees of Big Village. Fairhaven was all one parish but two separate hamlets, Little Village and Big Village.

  The houses in both were for the most part old and, like all old houses, looked alive. The houses at Little Village were crustacean creatures, confronting the sea wind with hard grey shells, clinging for dear life to the rock on which they were built. The Big Village houses, with cob walls and thatched roof, grew out of their flower-filled gardens like larger flowers. The winding lane that linked the two ran between tall hedges of wild rose, sloe, blackberry and hawthorn, and deep green fields where black-and-white cows grazed. The country was flat here, and the sky with its masses of hurrying cloud was wide and steep and glorious. David drove very slowly, relaxed in the slowly growing joy of home-coming.

  “What were you thinking of, Sally?” he asked. “In a brown study when I came out of Grandmother’s.”

  It was a question he often asked her, because instead of the usual evasion she always gave him a truthful answer, and the thoughts that came out of Sally’s mind were usually odd and sweet and unexpected, like toys taken out of a child’s playbox.

  Flushing a little, for she always found it difficult to tell her brilliant and sophisticated husband about her childish thoughts, unaware as she was that it was partly for love of her childlikeness that he had married her, she told him about the four winds and the four houses. “And I was thinking that we ought not to be all of us so separate from each other,” she said. “We ought to find some way of sharing whatever in us can help; and what needs help, too.”

  She looked at him and saw the muscles of his face tighten. “Is it possible?” he asked harshly. “Courage, yes, but not the other thing. How could we? It is of the essence of it that it is a lonely thing.”

  “The Thing,” he called it. And he was right. Meg had a Thing which she called the black beast, but though she cried in the night because of it, she could never explain to Sally what it was, any more than Sally could tell David about her fear of separation from him, or her fear of pain.

  “But there are those who at times can reach a world consciousness of suffering,” David went on. “A man who had been in a concentration camp talked to me about it once. He said that for a moment or two there can come to you, through your own suffering, a consciousness of the suffering of the whole world.”

  “How horrible!” said Sally.

  “On the contrary, he said that it was only those moments that made it possible to go on.”

  “We can’t share our particular Things, but deep down somewhere they can link us together,” said Sally.

  “That’s the idea.”

  “But I expect that only great suffering, like that of the man you talked to, would let one in,” said Sally. “Not just the little silly things that fortunate people have.”

  “I think the little things could let us in, too, if we knew the way to let them,” said David. “Only we don’t know the way. If we did, if we could all of us attain to that sort of world consciousness all the time, instead of only the best of us at rare moments, it might yet save the world.”

  “From war?” asked Sally.

  “Or through it. What a conversation for a homecoming day!”

  She laughed, and asked him, “Who was that man you talked to?”

  “My new secretary, Sebastian Weber. It was at our first meeting, the only time he ever talked to me. After that he shut up like a clam, and now he only makes the appropriate noises. Good heavens! Sally, did I phone to Mrs. Wilkes?”

  “Phone to Mrs. Wilkes?”

  “Yes. About Weber.”

  “About Weber? What about him?”

  “Sally, didn’t I tell you I had asked him down to stay? He must have come on the twelve-five. Surely I told you?”

  “No, you didn’t tell me,” said Sally.

  He stopped the car abruptly. “What’s the matter, Sally?”

  “It’s only, a stranger, and I thought it was going to be just us.”

  “Take your hat off and cry,” suggested David. “It’s been a long day. Blast Christopher!”

  She did what he suggested, her rumpled curly head on his shoulder. She had never been the kind of woman who cried, or he the kind of man who could regard unnecessary tears with toleration, but they had both now accepted the fact that she occasionally became what Meg called “unstuck” when a baby was on the way. It was a fact of nature, like the weather, and like the weather must be accepted.

  “Finished?” asked David briskly, when he had had enough of it.

  “Yes,” said Sally, blowing her nose. “But I think it was too bad of you.”

  “You didn’t see Weber on the boat,” said David. “He hid himself away somewhere. If you had seen him you would have realized how necessary it was that he should make contact with Mrs. Wilkes.”

  “Why? He doesn’t drink too much, does he?” asked Sally anxiously.

  “Not that I know of. Though I should if I were he, poor devil. But when unsteady, from whatever cause, one always derives a sense of equilibrium from Mrs. Wilkes.”

  Sally suddenly remembered the concentration camp. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m glad he is there. But what will he do? You’re not working now.”

  “He’s going to translate some German plays for me.”

  “Do you want German plays translated?”

  “No.”

  Sally laughed. “You’ll find a use for them some day. They’ll fit in somewhere. And Mr. Weber too. Everything and everyone always does at Damerosehay.”

  “It’s a way old houses have,” said David. “Whatever comes into them they draw into place by a species of suction.”

  “Drive on quickly, David,” said Sally. “Meg’s waiting.”

  CHAPTER

  3

  — 1 —

  Nursery tea was drawing to a sticky but comparatively peaceful conclusion when Robin suddenly raised himself in his high chair, knocked over the honey, seized his silver mug and flung it violently across the room. It landed in the middle of the goldfish bowl, which broke. Goldfish, water and the milk that had been at the bottom of the mug flowed in a turgid stream over the nursery floor.

  “Yabbit!” yelled Robin, and began to roar again. He had been shouting “Yabbit” throughout the day, and no one knew what he meant by it. Mouse barked. Zelle, after a long day of migraine and Robin’s rages, burst into tears. Mrs. Wilkes, appearing upon the threshold, surveyed the scene with resignation. Then her eyes met Meg’s and a current of wordless and sympathetic understanding flowed between them. Meg put her unfinished chocolate biscuit in the pocket of her cherry-colored cotton smock and slid to the floor.

  “I’ll take Robin and Mouse down to the gate to see if
Mummy and Daddy are coming,” she said.

  “My poppet,” said Mrs. Wilkes briefly, lifting the roaring Robin from his high chair.

  The endearment was addressed not to Robin, whose behind she smacked good and hard as she set him upon his feet, but to Meg. Sally, Mrs. Wilkes and Meg had quite unconsciously formed an alliance together, its object the peace of Damerosehay. Disinterested women, all three of them, they had the sure instinct of the disinterested as to which portion of a bit of bother each should individually tackle, and wasted no time in argument as to who should do what. The gasping goldfish, the mess on the floor, Zelle’s tears and migraine, were now the portion of Mrs. Wilkes, while Meg towed Robin and Mouse into the night nursery and shut the door firmly between Mrs. Wilkes’s sphere of action and her own. Mouse, who was becoming hysterical, she put in the laundry basket with the lid down, and Robin she locked in the wardrobe. Then while masculine rage boomed and thumped in the wardrobe, and female hysterics rocked the basket back and forth, she sat down cross-legged on the floor and finished her chocolate biscuit. She finished it slowly, because she liked chocolate biscuit, and wiped her fingers daintily upon a diminutive square of pocket handkerchief with a kitten embroidered in the corner. Then she sighed, her small face wearing the slightly worried expression it always wore when Robin was in a temper, and that made her look so absurdly like her godmother, Aunt Margaret, whose name she bore by David’s wish.

  In the bringing up of David it had been Margaret who had borne the burden and heat of the day. She had dealt with measles and mumps, explosions of water-pistols, and frogs in the linen cupboard, while Lucilla had had all the beautiful and gentle tasks, such as hearing prayers said and filling Christmas stockings, and had had in consequence a far greater love. David felt a certain compunction now and had made what reparation he could by making Meg Margaret’s special child. Yet as Meg grew out of babyhood he was sorry, for it seemed that Margaret’s mantle as daughter of Damerosehay was falling upon her. She was far too old for her years, as Margaret had always been, and like Margaret was beginning to show signs of becoming an anxious pilgrim. But Meg, unlike Margaret, had beauty and charm to conjure love about her and the quick wits to use it in the cause of peace.

  The turmoil inside the wardrobe subsided quite suddenly, and Meg unlocked the door and looked in. Robin was sitting upon the floor and sobbing heartbrokenly. That was one of the disconcerting things about Robin. He would be an utter devil on and off for an entire day, stamping and roaring, thumping and smashing, no one knew why, and then quite suddenly his rage would turn to a quiet misery which wrung the heart of all beholders; and again no one knew why. Some little thing would start him off—the loss of a toy or a pudding that he did not like—and the small frustration would pass him on to this anger and despair for which no one could find an explanation. Meg perhaps could have done so, but she was too little to explain in words the things which she knew, least of all to herself. If it had been suggested to her that Robin went berserk with rage against the unfamiliar engagement of his spirit within the frustrations of human life, much as a convict who has known the freedom of the world will lose his reason and beat his body against the walls of his cell, she would have shaken her head in bewilderment. And if someone had wondered aloud if he wept because he knew he would never get out until he was an old man, she would have been equally bewildered. Yet she knew it was that. And she knew that once she had dried his tears the only way to comfort him was to put his boots on, take him out of doors and let him run to the edge of the world. If it was pouring with rain, and he had a cold and Zelle would not let her take him out of doors, still she put his boots on—his seven-league boots that would carry him to the edge of the world when his cold was better—and in the contemplation of them he was comforted.

  Meg knew the value of symbols, though she could not have told you that she did. Had it not made it easier for her to bear her fear of the Thing that lived in the dark that she called it the black beast? She knew it was not a beast at all really, but because she was not afraid of beasts, not even Farmer Brown’s bull, the Thing seemed less terrible when she pictured it to herself as a big black horse; only with wings like a bat; try as she would she could not get rid of those bat-like terrible wings.

  “Boots, Robin,” she said. “We’re going out.”

  She fetched her wellingtons, and Robin’s, and put them side by side in the middle of the night-nursery floor. Then she sat down beside them, spread out the skirts of her cherry smock and made a comfortable lap, in the way she had seen her mother do for the afflicted. Robin removed his fat wet fists from his eyes, squinted at the boots through his tears, and then stumbled across the room into Meg’s lap. She rocked him gently, her thin arms straining round his corpulent person. He wept with an immense amount of moisture, and the tears cascaded from his screwed-up eyes to roll off his round fat cheeks like marbles. He was always rosy, but in these times of affliction his face became puce color, and as crumpled and creased as when he had been born. Meg took out the handkerchief with the kitten on it and mopped up his tears, but the handkerchief was not quite adequate in size, and smears of the chocolate that she had wiped off her fingers added themselves to the streaks of dust from the wardrobe that had stuck to the honey on his face. Meg sighed and looked worried again. Her mother and Zelle, and even her father, mopped up with such efficiency, but she was not very good at it yet.

  Mummy and Daddy! In the upset of Robin she had actually forgotten them. Another of those great waves of joy broke over her head. It held her still for a moment, her illumined little face buried in Robin’s mop of red curls, then she pushed him suddenly over backwards, his legs in the air, and pulled his boots on. Leaving him prostrate, she reached for her own. He was all right now, rolling about like a porpoise and chuckling. He was so circular that once down on the floor he had a certain amount of difficulty in getting to his feet again. He just rolled and chuckled until somehow or other he came the right way up.

  “There!” said Meg, her boots in place. It was fine and sunny now, and they did not need their mackintoshes, only their wellingtons for the squelchy puddles. “Quick, Robin! Mummy and Daddy!”

  She grabbed him by the slack of his beech-brown jersey and pulled and he came curly head uppermost, boots down, and strode forth towards the night-nursery door with a grand seven-league motion. With a final desperate heave Mouse tipped over the laundry basket, spilled herself out and dashed after. The stairs slowed them down a little, for even in moments of intense excitement Robin could only negotiate them by lowering his right foot first and bringing his left foot to it, and his right leg, which got all the bumps, got very tired and slow before the bottom of the stairs was reached. It would have rested it if he could have lowered the left leg first for a bit, but he couldn’t seem to do that, even when Meg showed him how. Mouse was silly on the stairs, too. She was always leaving her back legs behind, and finding herself in the most peculiar difficulties as a result. But Meg was patient. Robin and Mouse had lived in the world for only twenty-four months, while she had been in it for forty-eight months, and that made a great deal of difference.

  “We’re going to meet Mummy and Daddy,” said Meg when they reached the hall.

  “Mummy,” said Robin. Yes, he knew about Mummy. He’d seen her yesterday.

  “And Daddy,” said Meg.

  “Daddy?” questioned Robin. He was not quite sure about Daddy. The word connoted an idea partly pleasing and partly not. Chocolate came into it, but there was a suggestion of spanking too.

  “Yes, Daddy,” said Meg firmly, and opened the front door.

  Out in the drive, running down it in the sun and the wind, ecstasy took hold of the three of them. Meg was running to Mummy and Daddy, Robin was running to the edge of the world, and Mouse was just running; and running, to Mouse, did not just mean covering the ground with all four legs twinkling so fast they could hardly be seen, it meant tearing round in circles, leaping into the air wit
h ecstatic barks, chasing unseen presences and snorting and scrabbling at rabbit-holes that the human eye was unable to perceive. Running free in the oak-wood like this she was in an Elysium whose glories a mere human was only able to guess at feebly, through the vibrations of joy that pulsated from the soul of Mouse like music from a violin. Not that one could hear anything, except the earthly barks and snorts, but one’s being quivered in a delight that was not earthly, as when strings that are well tuned are touched with artistry.

  Robin, too, ran in Elysium, for he ran to the edge of the world, and for him the path that lay in any direction from the front door to that place where he took off at the world’s end and was free was enchanted country. What he saw, smelt, heard, no one knew, any more than they knew what Mouse saw, smelt and heard, but the eager tugging of his fat hand in the hand that held his and kept him from falling headlong in his haste, the passionate striving of his short legs, the rosy effusion of joy over his whole face, the flingback of his curly head and his ecstatic chuckles, said that it was good. When he reached the end of the world he tugged his hand free and ran still faster, and to those who watched it seemed that as he ran his body took on a new sort of motion, as though he were indeed flying, not running; until suddenly his wings failed and he fell headlong with a roaring of lamentation that was almost classic in its power and scope.

  But Meg at four years old had forgotten that particular Elysium of the very young. Hers was different now, and the best of all. During the last two years she had been coming to know what human love means, not only in terms of warmth and comfort and protection but in terms of differentiated knowing and giving. Mummy and Daddy were no longer just warm bodies and strong arms and kind voices that charmed away fear, they were separate and most precious people who could receive love as well as give it, and be a little known as well as know. When they were away, with no flow of love coming to her from them and no flow of love going back from her again, it was as though the tides failed and the winds dropped and the birds fell silent, and the world was dead like the parched and pallid moon. She ran now among no imaginary joys to no headlong fall of disappointment, but to a reality that could be actually possessed through days and weeks, perhaps for months, a stretch of time to her as immense as eternity itself.