A Fugue in Time Read online

  The poem lay open on the bookshelf where Rolls had left it open at that page: –

  Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

  The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

  Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

  Isolated, with no before and after,

  But a lifetime burning in every moment

  And not the lifetime of one man only

  But of old stones that cannot be deciphered,

  There is a time for the evening under starlight,

  A time for the evening under lamplight

  (The evening with the photograph album).

  Love is most nearly itself

  When here and now cease to matter.

  Old men ought to be explorers

  Here or there does not matter

  We must be still and still moving

  Into another intensity

  For a further union, a deeper communion …

  … In my end is my beginning.

  And in the house, the clocks tick; the beams in the night grow hot, grow cold – they creak; a late train runs; a late pedestrian, returning, walks down the Place; a clinker drops in the grate, and a gleam of starlight, coming through the Venetians into the drawing-room, catches the little shepherdess on the clock as she lies dreaming.

  Rolls slept in his chair.

  MORNING

  Before eight o’clock the house is given over to the servants and the children.

  Again the past is present.

  Roly is being coached by Selina before he has his breakfast and runs off to school, his pre-preparatory school at Dr Butler’s in Wiltshire Square. Selina is coaching him in grammar at the table on the landing.

  ‘Take three tenses,’ says Selina.

  Roly sighs.

  ‘Past, present and future.’

  ‘Must I?’

  ‘Yes you must,’ Selina answers him.

  Before eight o’clock Proutie, who only came in at four, came down the backstairs and into the kitchen and raked the fire and made it up and opened the boiler to heat the water for Rolls’s bath. Then he stroked the cat, opened the door to let it out, and let Mrs Crabbe in.

  ‘Good morning Mrs Crabbe. A quiet night I am glad to say.’

  ‘Good morning Mr Proutie. How wonderfully those chrysanths do smell.’

  ‘I am just taking up a cup of tea to Mr Rolls. I shall make one for us too.’

  ‘I could do with one,’ said Mrs Crabbe. ‘It pulls your body towards you, don’t it? We didn’t get much of a night. I tell Alfie we would be far better at home and chance it but there is Em’ly. The shelter every time for her ’e says. No bloomin’ risk.’

  ‘No you shouldn’t risk it for her,’ Proutie agreed, blowing gently on his tea. ‘What will you do Mrs Crabbe when we give up the house?’

  ‘Don’t name it!’ said Mrs Crabbe. ‘I just don’t take it in. Alfie wants me to take Em’ly to my sister in Cornwall but “Wait till it ’appens” I says.’

  While Mrs Crabbe sorted out her brushes and changed her shoes, Proutie laid a tray of tea for Rolls. The distance between butler and charwoman had narrowed; it had almost disappeared. In the old days Proutie had his tea brought to him; he had no occasion to speak to Mrs Crabbe, nor she to him. Now they appreciated one another.

  Mrs Crabbe had a song; it could be heard all over the house: –

  Chick chick chick chick chick chick

  Lay a little egg for me.

  Chick chick chick chick chick chick

  I want one for my tea.

  The last I had was Easter

  And now it’s half-past three.

  Proutie listened to it. He looked at Mrs Crabbe’s beret and raincoat and black oilcloth bag hanging on the door and he smiled. Mrs Crabbe was a comfort to him.

  When Mrs Sampson is the charwoman she has a bonnet, not a beret; it is a black bonnet with jet trimming and purple strings. Mrs Sampson does the same work as Mrs Crabbe but it is longer and far harder. She has no Hoover nor Bissell carpet-sweeper; no Vim, no Lightning Black; fires are coal fires, there is no electricity; no water is laid on upstairs; there is no bathroom, not for years and years, and no convenient housemaids’ cupboard; Mrs Sampson’s hands are old and spread, with swollen knuckles and calluses round the nails and cracks at their sides; Mrs Sampson’s hands know brooms and dustpans and pump-handles, her elbows are accustomed to the motion of scrubbing and her knees are accustomed to kneeling; she is in fact very accustomed to being down on all fours. Her back knows the strain of coalscuttles and hot-water pails and she cannot stand up quite straight; whenever she rises into a perpendicular position a spasm of pain twitches her face; she also has varicose veins; she takes a shilling to Mrs Crabbe’s half-crown; she has no insurance and old-age pension; she has her meals in the scullery and she calls Mr Athay, the butler, ‘sir’, and knows he suspects her of stealing the Eye’s gin. She does steal the Eye’s gin. She knows with an unquenchable sturdy independence that something is due to her out of life. She does not get it so she takes it.

  She is Mrs Crabbe’s grandmother.

  In the garden the house cat tidily raked over the November leaves, hiding the little cocoons of faeces it had made. Under the leaves lies Juno who loves Selina and whom Selina loves. The cat was a common white kitchen cat except that it had one blue eye and one green; like many white cats it was slightly deaf. There is, actually, another cat, Gregory – not after the Pope but because he was the colour of Gregory’s powders: he was not as Selina says ‘seen to’, and he is more out of the house than in it so that the kitchen cat, Mouser, could justly claim to be the house cat.

  ‘I am the house dog.’

  Mouser did not hear. He was too busy raking up the leaves.

  ‘I AM THE HOUSE DOG.’

  ‘Well,’ said the cat mildly. ‘I am the house cat.’

  There is sweeping and dusting: brooms and dusters are shaken out of the windows and a housemaid appears with a sacking apron and a pail of water to whiten the front steps. Inside the house, hot water, shaving water and trays of morning tea are taken up. The trays pause outside the dining-room door; Selina first inaugurates morning tea and Proutie as a footman hands out the Apostle spoons. The cans of hot water are heavy; they have brass-bound spouts like port-holes, and they go up as far as the nursery. The Eye has, in his dressing-room, a bath that has to be filled each morning and emptied away; another bath shaped like a saucer is in the nursery. Griselda is up early, she bathes at night; Pelham, when he in his turn inhabits the dressing-room, requires hot water, shaving water and the newspaper in his room: Rollo, on week-end leave from Sandhurst, requires nothing at all: he is still out. His bed is untouched as Agnes turned it down the night before; on his dressing-table in a tooth-glass of water is the one of the two gardenias he did not take to wear. When he comes in he drops the other on the stairs; Lark picks it up and presses it and keeps it.

  Proutie came upstairs with Rolls’s tea. He knocked at the dressing-room door.

  It is half-past eight.

  The Eye and Griselda come out of Griselda’s room. They have separated while they dressed, now they go down to breakfast together and the Eye unnecessarily guides Griselda with his hand under her elbow.

  He is a very large, very well made young man of twenty-nine, with a large clever forehead, pale-brown hair and pale-blue shrewd steady eyes. By the side of his pallor, Griselda glows. Perhaps this is what first attracted him to her, the warmth and colour she has that he lacks. He knows that he needs it. He chose Griselda much as he chose the sapphire blue waistcoat that in its deepness redeems the drab broadcloth of his suit; he chose her as he chose his ruby pin, as he loves rubies, for their fire; but fire can hurt. His eyes follow Griselda; there is no doubt in them, no questioning of his position or hers, but often when Griselda thinks him immersed in something else, his eyes are following her still.

  Griselda this morning is seventeen; very young, very eager and singularly unalloyed. She is tall
but beside the Eye she seems little; her eyes are dark blue and her hair is chestnut, brilliantly rich and dressed in curls each side of the parting that the Eye looks down on, running broad and white and sensitive from her forehead to the knot that holds her hair on top of her head and from which falls another cascade of curls. That parting is singularly straight, and so is Griselda’s nose, and so is the look in her eyes, but the Eye, always bending to look into them from a sentimental angle, has not seen that yet. Griselda is dressed this morning in a wide blue dress, but a much deeper blue than the waistcoat; colours for married women now, however young, are deep or sombre while for girls they are strong and bright. Griselda is no longer only a girl; she is a married woman, fashionably, suitably dressed. The skirt that clogs her movements is fashionably full; the neck is low and the sleeves short: she wears for warmth a little tartan shawl and she has a set of heavy jewellery in gold with a mosaic of blue and red: earrings, bracelet and brooch.

  Breakfast is laid on the table in the dining-room where the sun catches the wedding silver, an October sun. There is a vase of Michaelmas daisies on the table. ‘Our Michaelmas daisies,’ says the Eye. He has a well-developed sense of property. Griselda hesitates and the Eye pulls out her chair at the bottom of the table. ‘This is your place, love.’

  ‘Yes John.’

  The Eye goes to his, and picks up the paper that is lying by his plate. Griselda looks at him and hesitates again and then lifts up the teapot.

  ‘Do you take sugar John?’

  He laughs at her over the paper. ‘Don’t you think you should remember after all this time? A whole honeymoon, Griselda?’

  But she is serious. She flushes. ‘I was thinking.’

  She imagines he is reading but he is watching her. He would like to know what it is she thinks of. A woman’s thoughts are a new idea to the Eye; he had not known they had them, not thoughts such as he suspects Griselda’s to be. Sometimes she is with him, but sometimes she is equally absent, strangely she is not there; sometimes she looks at him as if she had never seen him before. If he asked her what she was thinking of, he knows, after six months of engagement and their honeymoon, that he would not succeed in getting an answer. He sighs. He is beginning to realize that not all of Griselda, not the whole, will always belong to him.

  Now she turns her face that glows so vividly, so beautifully with life that it catches his breath, towards him. ‘Think John! This is the first breakfast!’ Her joy is solemn. ‘Think. No one has ever eaten breakfast in this house before!’

  ‘Except six servants for three weeks,’ says the Eye.

  Occasionally the Eye loves Griselda more than he can bear. Then he has to hide himself and be brusque.

  ‘Have we really six servants?’

  ‘Yes, my dear, and your mother chose them, so they are sure to be paragons. They are yours to direct and command.’

  ‘I don’t think I am very good at directing and commanding,’ says Griselda.

  The Eye is reading the paper. She lifts the heavy cover off the dish that is embossed and twined with silver grapes. It is hard to believe that anything as weighty and important-looking is hers. Her nose wrinkles at the steamy smell that comes out under it.

  ‘John?’

  ‘Mmm’m?’

  ‘John, do you like haddock for breakfast?’

  ‘No,’ says the Eye immediately. ‘You must tell Cook.’

  Griselda hesitates and looks at him and looks at the haddock. ‘John, have you seen Cook?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You tell her,’ says Griselda.

  The Eye laughs at her but again there is no answering laugh on her face or in her eyes. I have been thinking – seriously.

  ‘This is a very big house for only two people,’ says Griselda doubtfully.

  ‘There may not always be only two people, my little dearest.’

  She looks at him as she understands his meaning; the colour in her cheeks deepens but still she does not smile.

  ‘What is it, Griselda?’

  ‘That – is part of what I mean,’ says Griselda very slowly. ‘Part of it. I know I shouldn’t say things like this to you John, but it – all this – seems as if it might swallow – people’s lives.’

  He comes round the table to her at once, dropping his paper on the floor. ‘I won’t let it swallow you.’

  She turns to him and he feels she is fierce in the way she clings to him and looks at him. ‘Promise! Promise!’

  All at once, for some reason that he prefers not to know, he cannot look back at her. He would rather not look at her and meet her gaze. He holds her in his arms and kisses her and smooths her hair.

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘I promise.’

  Perhaps she feels his mood. She asks: ‘John, are you laughing?’

  ‘No, I am not laughing,’ says the Eye.

  ‘One day,’ says Griselda suddenly, ‘you won’t drop your paper. You will go on reading it. You won’t hear.’

  He looks at her gravely. ‘I think you will have to trust me, Griselda.’

  She is disarmed at once. ‘Oh John. I do. I do.’

  ‘I want a big house,’ says the Eye. ‘My ideas, my schemes, are big. Very ambitious and very, very big.’

  Griselda is still doubtful. ‘Do you mean we shall become – substantial?’ she asks. ‘I don’t know that I shall like that.’

  ‘You will. I shall see to that. I think, my darling, I know you better than you know yourself.’

  ‘Do you?’ asks Griselda, but she does not sound convinced. ‘How can you? How can you feel what I feel? I feel so – mixed, John.’

  ‘Yes?’ encourages the Eye.

  ‘I feel—’ But she does not say it. She cannot tell John, who still, besides being her lover, persists in being a stranger, she cannot tell him that sometimes since she was engaged, since she was married, she feels as if she had been put in prison with a life sentence. She says involuntarily, hastily, ‘Don’t be successful too quickly, will you John!’

  He does not answer and she says as if she were discovering something, ‘Sometimes John, you remind me a little of my father.’ The Eye laughs again but Griselda says thoughtfully, ‘I never very much liked my father.’

  ‘You will always like me,’ says the Eye quite quietly and confidently. ‘Can I read my paper now?’

  ‘Of course. I want you to,’ says Griselda. ‘I know brides are supposed to mind that but I don’t. I mean to read the paper myself every day. I don’t see why a woman should not be the equal of men in that. I want us to be well informed – about everything, John. All sorts of things. I don’t see why we should shut ourselves away in our own affairs, behind our walls, just because we have a house and a – you said it first John – a family. I want to keep in touch with the world,’ says Griselda looking far, far into a width of distance. ‘I want to learn. I consider I am just at the beginning of my education John. I mean to go on learning. And touching and tasting and seeing and wondering until I die, and I mean to be a very old lady I warn you. I want to learn languages and then visit the countries and see if I can talk to the people and understand them. I want every day and every year to enlarge my mind and try and understand a little more. I could be your equal in that couldn’t I John? That wouldn’t be – presumptuous? Both of us, together, exploring all these things!’

  She recalls her eyes from that distance and seeks the Eye’s face but she can only see the top of his well-brushed pale-brown head bent into the newspaper. Her eyes widen. Then they harden.

  ‘Of course,’ says Griselda after a minute, ‘to begin with there ought to be two papers.’

  It is eight o’clock.

  Before the grown-ups are awake the children are out of bed.

  They step into a secret servant-ridden world that their elders do not have a chance to see. Servitude, in most people, induces a second face; Mrs Proutie, Agnes, Athay, Slater, Mrs Sampson, even Proutie, have it. The servants have their world; the children have theirs; they impinge on one
another and are commonly impinged on by authority. Authority again has a world to itself, separated into the orbits of men and women. These are worlds within a world, circling round one another and round the suns of religion, custom, money, love – inhabiting the universe that is a house.

  Roly, jumping down the stairs, jumps into Mrs Sampson, sweeping on the landing. ‘Good morning Mrs Sampson. How are your veins?’

  Mrs Sampson wipes her nose on the back of her hand and says her veins are bad.

  ‘And your sister’s kidneys?’ Roly is just putting off time and he knows it. Unfortunately Mrs Sampson knows it too.

  ‘Poorly thank you, Master Roly,’ says Mrs Sampson. ‘Now you must get out of my way and get on yours. It is time for your lessings.’

  Roly goes slowly towards the table.

  Chick chick chick chick chick chick

  Lay a little egg for me.

  Mrs Crabbe wheeled the Hoover briskly out of the drawing-room and plugged it into the study wall, shaking the rugs and clearing away Rolls’s litter before she started on the carpet.

  Mrs Sampson stiffly stands up. For a moment she stays with one hand pressed to her back and her face twisted, until the spasm that she expects and receives has passed. Then with a sigh of which she is not aware, she gathers up her brush and dustpan full of carpet fluff and goes downstairs.

  What a great deal of dirt and dust must be taken out of this house and put into the dustbin, thinks little Roly at the table. And taken out of the dustbin, he goes on, and put into the dustcart and carted away all over London.

  ‘Are we only dust when we die?’ he asks suddenly.

  ‘Certainly not,’ says Selina. ‘We are angels.’

  ‘Or devils,’ says Roly with a chuckle.

  Ever since Roly was born and Griselda died Selina has been shaping him, patiently, quite gently on the whole, but quite implacably to her will, but he still says things like this. ‘That is nothing to laugh about,’ says Selina. ‘It is serious.’ Roly yawns.

  Selina is very like the Eye; she is a large well-made young woman with pale colouring and a steady clever face. Like the Eye she is possessive but where the Eye is tempered with wisdom and genuine kindness, Selina is not. Roly is like Griselda, with her warm skin and brilliant eyes and hair, but he has not the straightness of Griselda’s nose nor of Griselda’s eyes. Roly gives in.