The Greengage Summer Read online

  It clanged. There was a deep barking. We did not know Rex and Rita then but could tell it was a big dog’s bark; two voices commanded it to stop, a woman’s, shrill, and a man’s—or a boy’s talking like a man; that was a good guess, for it was a large boy who appeared. He had on a white apron; we saw it glimmering towards us. His apron flapped, his shoes flapped too, and a lock of hair fell into his eyes as he bent forward to pull the bolt; he held the gate open to let us pass, and we smelled his smell of sweat and cigarettes and . . . “Is it onions?” I whispered.

  “Not onion, garlic,” Hester whispered back. “Don’t you remember the sausage in the Gare de l’Est?” He was dirty and untidy and he did not smile.

  Then we went into the hotel and—“Good God! An orphanage!” said Eliot.

  Afterwards he apologised for that. “But you were all wearing grey flannel,” he said, and he asked, “Why were you wearing grey flannel?”

  Hester looked at him. “Perhaps you haven’t been in England for a long time,” she said gently. “Those were our school clothes.”

  In England we—except Joss—had been proud of them. There are two sorts of families; for one a school uniform is a step down, the feeling of being like everybody else; for the other that feeling is an achievement, the uniform a better, more complete set of clothes than any worn before. We belonged to the second category, and Willmouse’s grey shorts and jacket, our St Helena’s coats and skirts and hats, were our best clothes, the only ones suitable for travelling.

  ‘Other girls have other clothes,’ Joss said often.

  ‘Not when an Uncle William pays for them,’ said Mother.

  Now Joss’s eyes threw darts of hate at Eliot though he could not have been expected to know who she was. Our school hats were soup-plate shaped; Vicky in hers looked like a mushroom on two legs, but Joss’s was small on her mass of dark hair and showed her forehead. She looked almost ugly in that hat, and the pleated skirt of her suit was too short.

  Of course a great many things happened before Eliot said that about the orphanage; he did not even come in until later; but it was Eliot whom we remember of that first evening. He was its ace.

  “When he came there was no more dreadfulness,” said Hester, but I had to add, “Except the dreadfulness.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “WHAT! ONLY two passports?” said Mademoiselle Zizi when I took ours to the office next morning.

  “Joss, my sister, has hers; the rest of us are on my mother’s.” I hated to have to say that. The hotel boy who had let us in was listening—his name, we knew now, was Paul; he was scornfully polishing the brass grille and could squint down at the passports. His look said plainly that he would not go about with a mother.

  I had fought about that passport. “Why should Joss have one and not I?”

  “She is sixteen,” said Mother, and added, “You forget how young you are.”

  Three years separated each of us children—Father’s expeditions usually lasted three years—but Joss and I had always been the Big Ones, as Willmouse and Vicky were the Littles, with Hester in a no-man’s-land between. Joss and Cecil, it had been one word though it had meant I had sometimes to be older than I conveniently could; now I was relegated to a no-man’s-land myself. I could see it was inevitable—thirteen is not child, not woman, not . . . declared, I thought, as Joss was now—but it hurt. The separate passport was a public confirmation of the status Joss had taken for herself; she had moved into it quite naturally, leaving me behind as she had moved from the bedroom we had always shared into one of her own. “There are things,” said Mother, purposely vague though she knew I knew perfectly well what those things were, and she had let Joss change with Willmouse, moving him in to me.

  Hester would have been a more natural companion, but she could not be separated from Vicky. “I have to sleep with my foot in her bed, you see,” said Hester.

  “Your foot out, in her bed?” I asked.

  “Yes, or she won’t go to sleep.”

  “But isn’t it cold?”

  “Sometimes.” Hester added I was not to tell Mother. A great deal of the peace in our house was kept by Hester, but I was shocked. I spoke to Vicky. “But that is how I know she is there,” said Vicky as if that justified it.

  “But it’s naughty.”

  “I don’t mind being naughty,” said Vicky.

  A line might have been run through our family dividing it, with Hester, Vicky and me on one side. Joss and Willmouse on the other. Our surname was Grey; I wished it had been Shelmerdine or de Courcy, ffrench with two small ‘ff’s, or double-barrelled like Stuyvesant-Knox, but it was, simply, Grey. “Better than Bullock,” said Joss. We had not quite escaped that; Uncle William was a Bullock, William John Bullock, and Vicky, Hester and I were as unmistakably Bullock as he, short, bluff, pink-faced, with eyes as blue as larkspurs.

  It was not as bad for Hester and Vicky, because the Bullocks made pretty children; Vicky, fair-haired, with pearly flesh, was enchanting, and Hester, with her ringlets and rosiness, had kept her appeal; but in me, as in Uncle William, the plumpness had become a solid shortness, the fair hair was mouse, the rosy cheeks a fresh pinkness. No one ever looked as normal as Uncle William, and I wanted to look startling. Why could I not have been born to look like Joss, to be Joss? Joss and Willmouse were dark and slim, with such an ivory skin that their lashes and hair looked darker. “Like Snow White,” said Hester with the only trace of envy I ever heard in her. They were, too, delicately unusual; Willmouse had the peaked look of an elf while Joss’s eyes had the almond shape that had given her her nickname. “Because Chinese people have slant eyes,” said Joss.

  “Are supposed to have them,” Father had corrected her on one of his times at home. “Most of them have eyes as straight as anyone.”

  “They have them in paintings,” said Joss, who knew all about painting. She and Willmouse were equally vain—and clever; Joss was a serious painter and Willmouse had what we called his ‘dressage’. It was years before we found out that that had to do with horses not clothes. Willmouse’s scrapbooks and workbox and the dolls that so distressed Uncle William—‘Dolls! Gordon’s ghost!’—were part of it; the books held a collection of fashion prints, designs, and patterns of stuffs; Willmouse needed his scissors and pins for draping his designs—‘I don’t sew,’ he said; ‘that will be done in my workrooms’—while the dolls, his models, Miss Dawn and Dolores, were not dolls but artist’s lay figures carved in wood with articulated joints. They had been given to Joss by Uncle William to help her in her painting, but to Mother’s bewilderment she would not touch them, while Willmouse had annexed them. Mother could deal with us little Bullocks. Though we were often rude or obstinate, ‘That is normal,’ said Mother, but with Joss and Willmouse it was as if, in our quiet farmyard, she had hatched two cygnets and, ‘Everything I do is wrong,’ said poor Mother.

  It seemed to be; for instance, when Joss complained that the art mistress at St. Helena’s was no use Mother enrolled Joss in a London correspondence art course, but that had led to difficulties. ‘Dear Mr A . . .’ Joss wrote in the second lesson to her far-off master, ‘I send you the design you asked for using a flower, St John’s Wort, and the drawing of the woman—my mother—I am sorry I cannot find a naked man anywhere.’

  With Joss and Willmouse even the Grey in their names took on an elegance; Joanna Grey, William Grey, had a good sound while Cecil or Victoria Grey were nothing, though Hester Grey suited Hester.

  It had never been fair, but now, I thought, it was growing more unfair, for Joss had blossomed; that was what people said of young girls and I saw it was the right word; she was like a tree or a branch where every bud was breaking into flower.

  She would not undress with me any more, and I was glad because my pinkness was still distressingly straight up and down while she had a waist now, slim and so supple I could not help watching it, and curves that tapered to long slim legs, while her breasts had swelled. I knew how soft these were and that they were tender,
for once, out of curiosity, I touched them and she had jumped and sworn at me. As Joss grew, she grew more irritable, with flashes of temper that were sometimes cruel; she was restless too, as if she were always excited, which was odd because her face was serene and withdrawn, almost secret, I thought, with only the palest pink flush on her cheeks to tell of the excitement inside. “Is Joss beautiful?” I asked with a pang.

  “Just now,” said Mother, “just now.”

  I tried desperately to keep up with Joss. Cecil de Courcy, de Haviland, Cecil du Guesclin, Winnington-Withers . . . Winter. That was a beautiful name, and I thought, I shall use it when I am a writer, or a nun; Cecil Winter, Sister Cecilia Winter; but I was not yet a writer, or a nun, nor did I know that I should ever be either. At the moment I was more like a chameleon, coloured by other people’s business, and now I burned as I had burned about us eating oranges in the train when I saw Mademoiselle Zizi’s lips twitch as she read out our names from Mother’s passport. There was barely room for us all in the space.

  “You went chasing across France with that gaggle of children?” Uncle William said afterwards.

  “We didn’t chase,” said Mother, “we went quite slowly by train.” Sometimes Mother was no older than Hester and that passport with its single stamp, in spite of all the names, looked like a child’s.

  “Et votre père?” asked Madame Corbet.

  “Yes. Where is your father?” asked Mademoiselle Zizi.

  “In Tibet,” said Hester.

  “Ti-bet?”

  I should have done better without Hester, who could never learn to temper anything. It was odd—and annoying—that I always wanted us not to be ordinary, but when we were a little extraordinary I blushed.

  “Juste ciel! What is he doing in Tibet?” asked Mademoiselle Zizi.

  “Picking flowers,” said Hester.

  “Picking flowers!” Mademoiselle Zizi repeated it in French, and Paul gave a short guffaw which made me rap out what was almost a French sentence: “Il est botaniste.” I added, in English, that he was on an expedition. “He usually is,” said Hester.

  Mademoiselle Zizi and Madame Corbet looked at one another. “Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! Eh quoi?” said Madame Corbet. “Il n’y a personne pour s’occuper de tout ce monde-là?”

  They began to talk about us in French as if we were not there. “They have not been in France before,” said Mademoiselle Zizi, looking at the passports.

  “They have not been anywhere,” said Madame Corbet.

  “We have,” I began hotly. “My sister Joss was born in India. Mother’s old passport expired, that’s all . . .”but they did not listen.

  “And they don’t speak French.”

  That was wounding, because up to that moment I had believed that Joss and I, particularly I, spoke French very well. “You ought to,” said Joss, “you learned enough.” That was not kind, for learning French poetry was a punishment at St Helena’s.

  “Never mind,” whispered Hester. “Look how it has helped you, being bad.” Certainly it was the only thing at which I ever beat Joss and the hours I had spent over ‘Le temps a laissé son manteau, De vent, de froideur et de pluie,’ ‘Mignonne, allons voir si la rose’ and the Verlaines I had grown to love, and stood me in good stead; I had been able to understand, all that nightmare day, what people had said, and really it was I, more than Joss, who had piloted us all here. I did speak French, but, as if he knew what I was thinking, Paul sniffed and drew his finger across his nose and wiped it on the back of his trousers, which looked rude.

  “We cannot be expected to look after them,” Madame Corbet was saying.

  “We can look after ourselves,” I said with dignity. “We are not little children.”

  Mademoiselle Zizi picked up Joss’s passport and then threw it down on the desk. “Sixteen,” she said, “a child,” and asked me in English, “Have you no relative, no one at all who could come?”

  Before I could stop her Hester had answered. “Uncle William,”

  Uncle William was Mother’s brother, ten years older than she . . . “though it might have been a hundred,” said Joss. Most grown people are like icebergs, three-tenths showing, seven-tenths submerged—that is why a collision with one of them is unexpectedly hurtful—but Mother was like a child transparently above board and open, “To any scallywag,” said Uncle William.

  I sometimes wondered if he ranked Father as a scallywag, but he did not say it and Uncle William said most things. “If you had listened to me,” was his favourite. I do not think Mother had listened to him when she married, but, all the same, when she brought Joss back from India—babies cannot go on expeditions—he had met them and brought them to Southstone, “And Belmont Road,” said Joss bitterly.

  “How did we know enough to hate it?” she asked afterwards, “when it was all we could remember?” We disliked and were ashamed of the ugly cheap little house with its pebbledash, its imitation Tudor gables and leaded windows. “Silly to cut glass up into all those bits,” said Willmouse, but it was one of Uncle William’s houses—he owned several in Southstone—and he kindly let us live in it. “He is so kind!” Mother said and sighed.

  Uncle William spent money and time and effort on us children, “and words,” said Hester, “heaps and heaps of words,” while Father came only at long intervals and, when he did come, hardly lifted his eyes from his collections of ferns or orchids to look at his wife and children. I think he could scarcely tell the Littles apart, yet we loved him and longed for him to come home; we ran our legs off on his errands and were proud of belonging to him. “Oh well,” said Hester, “I will look after Uncle William when he is old.”

  Did we need Uncle William? I could never make up my mind, just as I could never make out if Mother were very silly or very wise. Take her dealings with Willmouse. “He says he won’t wear it,” she had said, handing back his new school cap at his school.

  “Then he must leave,” said the headmaster.

  Mother consulted with Willmouse and, “He would rather leave,” said Mother, and Willmouse left, until Uncle William heard.

  “Why can’t I go to a girls’ school?” asked Willmouse. “They don’t have caps and perhaps I could wear my muff.”

  “Gordon’s ghost!” said Uncle William.

  The muff was white fur lined with satin; Willmouse had bought it with the money Uncle William gave him for his fifth birthday.

  “What did you buy, boy? A cricket bat? A train?”

  “A muff,” said Willmouse.

  “Gordon’s ghost!” said Uncle William. We never discovered who the ghost was, but Willmouse often made Uncle William say things like ‘Gordon’s ghost!’ and ‘The only boy amongst them and he isn’t a boy!’

  Willmouse was little then, but I think we, ourselves, sometimes wished we had a proper boy. “He is Willmouse,” said Mother. That was what she understood about him, about us all, even Joss, in our different ways. Perhaps if she had been left to deal with us alone there would not have been the discontent and rudeness.

  I think now that the discontent was because we were never quite comfortable in Southstone and the rudeness came from the discontent; it was as if a pattern-mould were being pressed down on us into which we could not fit. For one thing we were much poorer than the people we knew, poor to be Uncle William’s sister, nieces and nephew; and we had this curiously absent father while other girls’ fathers went to offices and caught trains and belonged to the Sussex Club. Mother too was not like other mothers, nor like a grown-up at all; she patently preferred being with Vicky or Willmouse or any of us than playing bridge, or organising bazaars, or having coffee or luncheon or tea with the select Southstone ladies. When any of us—except Hester, who was at home anywhere—went out to tea in one of the big red-brick houses, with lawns and laurel bushes and meticulously gravelled driveways, we felt interlopers. We were odd, belonging and not belonging, and odd is an uncomfortable thing to be; we did not want to belong but were humiliated that we did not. I know now it was not goo
d for us to live in Southstone. We should not have been as odd somewhere bigger, in London perhaps.

  “In London,” said Joss dreamily, “you can be anyone. You never know whom you are sitting next to. He might be a beggar or a duke.”

  “Or a thief,” said Uncle William, who had decided views on London.

  “Southstone . . .” I began.

  “Is where you live,” said Uncle William.

  “It’s all middle, middle, middle,” I said. It was. No beggars and no dukes. “Just middle.”

  “My dear child, that is the world.”

  “The world is not all middle,” said Joss.

  “Most of it is. Why should you be different?”

  We could not think of any reason, yet we knew we were; every heart-beat told us that. “How shall we ever get out of Southstone?” I asked Joss in despair.

  Then we were rude to Mother again and she took us to Vieux-Moutiers—Vieux-Moutiers and Les Oeillets.

  I do not know what it was that drove her to it. Probably Joss and I had been more than usually difficult and unkind, for I had followed Joss in this new bullying of Mother, of being horrid to Hester and snapping at the Littles, of criticising; I joined in from habit and from principle.

  “Oh, Mother! You are so slow!”

  “Do we have to have that disgusting old tea cosy?”

  “Must you wear that hat?”

  I think at that time, she was only happy when she was with Willmouse and Vicky; she and Hester were too alike to know if they were happy together or not; it would have been like trying to know if one were happy in one’s own skin.