The Rosemary Tree Page 7

  Fifty years ago she had married the Silverbridge solicitor, a dashing young man with a fine house by the river and apparently considerable wealth. She had been one of a large family, the daughter of a hard-working Irish doctor. She had known hardship in her youth and had hated it. Then at eighteen she had come to England as a nursery governess and had been segregated on the top floor of a country house with her small charges, and had hated that. She was not fond of teaching, and knowing herself to be far more beautiful than any of the women who enjoyed themselves and their jewels on the floors below she had resented her seclusion with bitterness. But she had had her wits about her in those days, and had known how to make good use of a chance meeting with Edward Belling when he came to the house to supervise some alteration to a will. He was able to give her what she wanted and in return she graced his fine house with her beauty, charmed his guests, wore the expensive dresses he gave her with great elegance, and made herself agreeable to him personally with no diminution of her smiling sweetness for four prosperous years. Then he died, leaving her the house by the river and all his debts. Stricken and lovely in her widows’ weeds she was for a short while utterly prostrated by her anger, for her sense of property was very strong. Death had removed her husband and now poverty seemed likely to remove her home. She wept with rage in private and appeared in public most movingly pallid and red-eyed. So pathetic was she that all her husband’s friends rallied round her and the debts were paid. She pulled herself together and wondered what to do for the best. She had no intention of leaving her charming house, in which she had made herself extremely comfortable. She did not want to marry again, for she had found even an indulgent husband exacting in his demands upon her time and attention, and a less indulgent one would be more so. Also she had had one child, born dead, and she did not want to repeat a process which she had found disagreeable.

  In this dilemma it occurred to her to stay where she was and open a school for the little girls of the élite of Silverbridge. It was true that she disliked teaching, and indeed exertion of any kind, but if she could make a success of her venture she would be able to employ teachers and gradually delegate to them the tasks she disliked herself. Everything worked according to plan. She and her husband had always been regular churchgoers at eleven o’clock matins, because it had been her husband’s correct belief that a solicitor praying into his top hat Sunday by Sunday, with a beautiful and devout wife by his side in white kid gloves, was a sight to inspire trust in prospective clients, and so it had been her good fortune to awaken trust as well as pity and admiration in the breasts of Silverbridge churchgoers. They gave their little daughters to her care without a shadow of hesitation and her school grew and flourished. Able business men, parents of her pupils, touched by her lonely plight, invested her earnings for her with great skill and she became very comfortably off. Oaklands acquired an enviable reputation in Silverbridge and after forty-five years, even though it was declining now both in numbers and prosperity, it still retained it, as the scent of a rose still clings to it after the petals have begun to fall. Parents knew it was old fashioned but Mrs. Belling was so charming, with her white hair and blue eyes, that they did not doubt that her influence upon the children was everything that could be wished. And she only took small girls. Boarding school later would correct any deficiencies in educational methods. The atmosphere at Oaklands must be excellent. How could it be otherwise with that sweet old lady at the head?

  But the scent of a dying rose becomes at last tinged with the smell of decay and so had the atmosphere of Oaklands, emanating as it did from the extraordinarily strong personality of Mrs. Belling. For beneath her sweetness and gentleness she had always been strong, in her youth determined in appropriation, and now in her age just as determined in relinquishment. It was not easy to realize that strength could exist enclosed in such fatness and flabbiness, such laziness and self indulgence, and hardly anyone did realize it; apart from a few of the children, and their unconscious knowledge showed itself only as a curious shrinking from Mrs. Belling’s sweetness. Even Mary, intuitive as she was, at present regarded her aunt as less dangerous to the children’s well-being than Miss Giles with her cruel tongue.

  Mrs. Belling’s present state of torpor had not crept upon her unawares but had been deliberately willed by herself. This condition in which she merely sat and everything she wanted came to her without any effort on her part was what she had always wanted. Comfort had always been her god and to achieve union with what she wanted she had in her earlier days been willing to work hard, heartily though she loathed work. Now it was no longer necessary. Opposite the armchair where she sat was a cabinet and on top of it a porcelain figure of the Chinese god of plenty, brought back from the East long ago by her sailor father-in-law. He sat cross-legged, obese and horrible, his flowered robe dropped to expose his bare stomach with its rolls of fat, his half moon of a face with its slits of eyes smiling at her with unholy glee. She did not know whom the figure was supposed to represent, and had never bothered to find out, but to her he represented that which she possessed, and sitting in her comfortable chair, beside her warm fire, she sometimes smiled back at him by the hour. She had never known the emotion of love, but the sense of pleasurable possession of a source of satisfactory supply which she mistook for love she felt in his presence almost as strongly as she had once felt it in her husband’s. She gloried in her god with its own unholy glee and from her laughter the rot had spread. In her warm musty-smelling bedroom, so thickly carpeted and curtained, snuggled down in her feather bed beneath her pink eiderdown, she was visited by no fears in the dark hours, for in spite of the daily chapter, in spite of her past churchgoing activities in white kid gloves and her present ones in grey suede, she remained entirely unaware that this world has frontiers.

  “Thank you, dear,” she said sweetly to Pat as they finished a skein and rested after their frightful exertions. “Have another chocolate, darling, and give another to Baba.”

  Pat gave one to the little Pekinese and took another herself, because any chocolate is better than none, but she did not really like Mrs. Belling’s chocolates. They never had hard insides and Pat liked confectionery with a good crunch to it or alternatively with good staying power. Mrs. Belling’s sweets were scented and squashy like herself. Pat found that she finished one of them quickly, and then wanted another, even though she was feeling slightly sick from the first. Mrs. Belling never seemed to feel sick, and she had eaten five chocolates to Pat’s three during the last twenty minutes.

  “Just one more skein, dear,” said Mrs. Belling.

  Pat straightened herself, feeling very odd. It was partly the heat of the room, she thought. Mrs. Belling had as big a fire as though it were the middle of winter, and the windows were closed. Pat was not herself one of the children who shrank from Mrs. Belling, she just thought she was a silly old thing, but she did dislike Mrs. Belling’s room. She had her mother’s love of the beautiful and she did not like the pink brocade curtains; they were too pink, and not clean either, and neither were the chair covers. The patches of wallpaper that could be seen between the anemic water colors in chipped gilt frames that crowded the walls were faded and dirty, and Pat felt quite sure that behind the pictures there were cobwebs. The flowers in the vases were dead as usual and Baba on the hearthrug was much too fat. Pat had a sudden wave of nostalgia for the cold austerity of the vicarage and her mother’s lofty drawing room with its sea green curtains. Going home, only a few hours away, seemed suddenly to be at the other end of time.

  “I do feel odd,” she thought.

  But mercifully her attention was distracted by a knock on the door, and Winkle came in. Winkle so disliked Mrs. Belling that it took all the will power she possessed to shut the door behind her and advance to her chair. Her dislike dated from the day when she had been with Mrs. Belling in the drawing room and Baba had brought in a live mole from the garden and tormented it upon the carpet, and Mrs. Belling had laughed.
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  What have you done dear?” said Mrs. Belling languidly. She had no desire for an answer, and Winkle gave her none. All her pupils understood that her question was rhetorical and that she would have been very much annoyed if they had answered her. The way her staff sent her naughty children to deal with might have been a nuisance to Mrs. Belling, but by not dealing with them she avoided the nuisance. She did not object to the children in themselves for her hidden strength of will had always made her able to command their obedience.

  “Brush and comb Baba, darling,” she commanded.

  Winkle brushed and combed Baba with reluctance, for she always thought of him as a part of Mrs. Belling. In his obesity, his laziness, his indifference to the suffering of moles, he was so very like her that it was a natural mistake to make. But today, possessed as she was of the extra awareness that was always hers when she had been back to the other country, he seemed under her hands to detach himself from Mrs. Belling. Not that he moved. He lay quite still, not complaining at all when the brush bumped him on the nose and the comb got tangled in his fur, just panting patiently in the heat of the fire and looking up affectionately at Winkle out of his great goggle eyes. They would have been beautiful eyes, Winkle realized suddenly, if they had been set back in his head in a proper manner, for they were as dark and soft as those of Walsingham, Great-Aunt Maria’s dog. And it was not his fault if they goggled. And perhaps it was not his fault about the mole. Orlando was the same with birds. Cats and dogs were made that way and she hated what they did but not them. Perhaps he would not have been such a long time over the mole if Mrs. Belling had not been enjoying what he did. And if he was fat and lazy perhaps that was because Mrs. Belling let him have all the chocolates he wanted and did not take him for walks. He was like her because he had to be. Dogs were always at the mercy of the sort of people their owners were. Baba would not have been like this if mother had had him.

  Winkle sat back on her heels and looked at him with attention. He was pale golden brown with a white waistcoat, and the golden brown part of him was the color of an acorn and the waistcoat was as soft as the inside of a chestnut case. But there was not the gloss on his coat that there should have been and his plume of a tail was ragged. Winkle stroked one of his ears gently and then pulled her hand away because it was so hot. Her arm tingled to the elbow with quick awareness of something wrong there, but she lacked courage to lift up the flap and look. Mother would have looked. Mother would have known what was wrong. Mrs. Belling seemed not even to know there was anything wrong.

  Winkle turned round on the floor and looked at Mrs. Belling, absorbed in winding her wool. People said she had a sweet face and certainly it was white and plump, but Winkle thought that if she pushed her finger into it there would be a permanent dent, like in dough. It was dead-looking like dough, and a very faint dead sort of smell came from her dress, that had stains on the front half hidden by the pretty scarf Mrs. Belling wore round her neck, and from her curly white hair that somehow did not look as white as it ought to have looked. Mrs. Belling used plenty of violet scent, but it did not quite disguise the other, and though in Miss O’Hara’s room Winkle had thought the smell of violets the loveliest in the world it seemed horrible here because fresh violets were not what Mrs. Belling really smelled of. It was a sham smell. And Mrs. Belling’s way of loving Baba was a sham way. And shams were—Winkle did not quite know what they were and did not want to know, because the smell of them was enough for her, but suddenly the heat of the room overpowered her and she wanted to scream. She grabbed Baba and raced to the French window that opened into the garden. But it was firmly closed and with the dog in her arms she could not get it unlatched. She began to tug at it and to sob, making queer breathless sounds that were more like some small animal behind bars than a little girl trying to get out of a French window. Pat ran after them, opened it, set the two of them free and closed it again.

  “Was poor little Winkle going to be sick?” enquired Mrs. Belling placidly.

  “Yes,” said Pat, going back and picking up the wool.

  “But she has taken Baba!” exclaimed Mrs. Belling, suddenly aware of this fact.

  “Only out into the garden,” said Pat.

  “Pat, fetch Baba back to me at once,” said Mrs. Belling. She showed no agitation, for it was always too much trouble to be agitated, but she had never at any time allowed any personal possessions to be removed from her against her will, except only that one removal of her husband by death; and when she thought of that she still, after all these years, boiled with resentment deep within her sham serenity. But Winkle was not death and Baba must return at once.

  “At once. Do as I tell you, Pat.”

  She did not raise her soft voice but the sweetness had gone out of it. Pat had not realized before how entirely they all obeyed Mrs. Belling, but she realized it now. It was as though an iron hand had picked her up and put her by the French window. She opened it and ran across the lawn towards the willow tree, where the drilling class had come to an abrupt end and Miss O’Hara and the children were gathered around Winkle, sobbing with Baba in her arms.

  “What is it?” Mary was asking. “What is it, Winkle?”

  “She shan’t have him,” sobbed Winkle. “Mother’s going to have him.”

  “Who shan’t have him?” asked Mary. She had never seen the placid Winkle in such a state. The sobs were now developing into angry roars, and it was as alarming as though the gentle willow tree had suddenly spouted flames.

  “Mrs. Belling,” roared Winkle. “She shan’t have Baba.”

  Pat arrived upon the scene with two long leaps. “Winkle, let go,” she ordered. “Baba is Mrs. Belling’s, not yours. She wants him back. Give him to me at once.”

  “I won’t,” yelled Winkle. “I’m taking him home.”

  “Miss O’Hara, tell her to give him to me,” said Pat. “Mrs. Belling sent me to fetch him.”

  “Winkle, give Baba to Pat,” commanded Mary, but without her usual crisp authority, for she hated commanding a child in a situation she did not understand.

  “No,” yelled Winkle. “His ears are hot.”

  Baba panted and struggled, for though he liked Winkle the grip of her arms was asphyxiating and he wanted to get down. With a final heave he freed himself and rolled over and over luxuriously on the cool grass. Mary bent over him, looked in his ears and gave an exclamation of anger. Then she picked him up and ran to the French window, burst in upon Mrs. Belling and shut it behind her. Winkle, she realized upon looking round, had bolted roaring into the willow tree and the class was entirely disintegrated. She opened the window for a moment to call out, “Pat, drill them,” and then addressed herself to Mrs. Belling.

  “Aunt Rose, Baba has eczema in his ears. He’s got it very badly.”

  “It is not as a veterinarian that I engaged you, Mary,” said Mrs. Belling with extreme sweetness.

  “Look, he’s got it everywhere. Aunt Rose, didn’t you know?”

  “No, darling, I didn’t,” said Mrs. Belling with increasing sweetness.

  “But didn’t you see him scratching and shaking his head?”

  “Put that dog down before the fire,” said Mrs. Belling.

  “You did see him, and you didn’t bother to look,” flashed Mary. “I must take him to the vet. There is just time before lunch.”

  “No, dear,” said Mrs. Belling. “I will send for the vet myself if I think it necessary. While you remain with me you will attend to the duties for which I pay you. Put Baba down and go back to your class.”

  Mary did as she was told. Aunt Rose was absolutely right, of course, for she should not have left her class. She had lost both her temper and her head. But as she slowly crossed the lawn she realized she was returning to her duty not because it was her duty but because she could not help herself. For the first time she felt frightened by her aunt’s compelling power, and as she disposed her class for drill
again she felt too shaken to make any comment either upon the silence that had succeeded the roars within the willow tree or upon the fact that Margary too had now disappeared.

  2

  Neither child was at dinner but Mrs. Belling was unaware of the fact because she did not attend school dinner. Special food had to be cooked for a digestion that might have been delicate if not nourished on soufflé and it was nicer for her to eat it in private. Miss Giles did not know either for by this time she had such an appalling migraine that she was unaware of anything but the necessity of controlling her pain sufficiently to do her duty, in this case the dealing round of mutton stew and boiled potatoes that she could scarcely see, so blinding was the migraine. Mary made no comment upon the absence of Margary and Winkle, nor did the children. They just applied themselves sorrowfully to mutton stew.

  Annie cooked so badly that it might almost be said that she had a genius for abominable cookery. Her stews were full of fat and as anything she served was always lukewarm, part of the fat quickly congealed on top of the stew. Miss Giles never removed the lid of fat and dived beneath it but apportioned it out fairly between everybody; even to herself on non-migraine days, for she never shirked. Not that it would have done much good if it had been removed, because somehow that fat seemed to go right down to the bottom of the stew and to saturate the vegetables and gristly meat. The boiled potatoes were grey and soapy looking. Upon the side table corn-flour moulds as hard as tombstones awaited them for a second course, together with dishes of stewed prunes of an inconceivable toughness. It was odd about Annie’s cooking. She must have been a good cook once, because she had come to Oaklands when Mrs. Belling was a bride and had cooked for her dinner parties, and she could still make delicious things for Mrs. Belling’s private meals. . . The stews and moulds were all Aunt Rose’s fault, Mary thought suddenly. Such was her power that if she had wanted the school to have decent meals, the school would have had them.