China Court Read online

  Peter comes up the drive one summer day to try and buy the famille rose. ‘I used to come here and see you sometimes when we lived at Tremellen,’ he says.

  ‘I remember,’ says Mrs Quin.

  ‘And sometimes when you didn’t see me,’ says Peter. ‘I was poaching.’ He has a smile that he has been told is charming. It does not charm Mrs Quin.

  ‘I remember that too,’ she says. ‘You tried to sell me a salmon out of your own father’s river, you and that old rogue Jim Neot. How did you get caught up with him?’

  ‘I liked him better than my father,’ says Peter.

  ‘So did I,’ says Mrs Quin. She and Borowis, with John Henry as an uneasy accessory, often poach with Jim Neot – a boy Jim in those days – trespass and poach Lord St Omer’s rivers. Not this Lord St Omer, the one before, Lord Harry, Mrs Quin reminds herself. ‘And now you want to poach my china,’ she says aloud.

  ‘Yes.’ Peter tries to be unabashed, but he is working for the kind of firm that makes Mr Alabaster – of Truscott, Alabaster and Grice, Valuers and Assessors – purse his lips and Peter does not say it with zest. ‘I thought you had some pretty nice things,’ he says. ‘And I’m down here poaching. I hoped the natives might not know the values.’

  ‘Including this native,’ says Mrs Quin.

  ‘You scallywag!’ explodes Walter when he hears. ‘Trying to get round an old woman,’ but Peter does not get round Mrs Quin.

  She raps out, ‘We’re Cornish. If anyone is done it won’t be us.’

  ‘I’m Cornish too,’ says Peter.

  ‘Then what are you thinking of?’

  ‘It is no use thinking,’ says Peter severely.

  Mrs Quin is normally not much interested in people and it is only the severity that makes her look at this young man with more attention. Why does he fence himself in with these barricades? asks Mrs Quin silently, and an odd thought comes into her mind, that if her farm, Penbarrow, has been allowed to run down, this young St Omer is more run-down still. Why has Penbarrow come into her mind just at that moment? She does not know – then, says Mrs Quin. Peter’s face is more than thin, it is haggard; surely young people ought not to be haggard? She can see no reason for it; there is no depression now, no war. His fingers are yellow from cigarettes, his skin yellow too, but yellow-white; too much fug, too little air, she thinks, and his breath smells of drink; his red hair is dull and broken-ended, while his clothes are worn thin, even frayed – she glances at his cuffs. His shoes are cheap, and with certainty she knows how much he hates them to be that, and again Penbarrow, with its good soil given over to thistles and nettles, its tumbledown sheds and vanished stock, is in her mind. ‘When you used to come here, you were going to be a farmer. Why weren’t you?’ she demands.

  At once there is another look in his eyes, then it is promptly throttled, thinks Mrs Quin, and his voice is as carefully light as before as he says, ‘Why wasn’t I? Laziness? Propinquity. All my tribe are in London, haunting the more dubious professions. We are broke, you see. Really broke, even our consciences and our guts.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Mrs Quin.

  ‘Don’t be. It’s quite peaceful; more, it’s miraculous. What do we do for a living?’ His voice mocks. ‘Almost nothing, yet we still live.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ says Mrs Quin.

  ‘There wasn’t any money for training,’ he says quietly. ‘None of us has any brains. And we were brought up to be useless. The old man is wise in his ugly fashion. He has quarrelled with us all so that he is quite justified in keeping what he has for himself, or perhaps he’s keeping it for Harold. Poor old Harold. He’s worse off than any of us; one day he will have to wear the family crown and it’s cardboard now, not even made of tin.’ Then Peter says, as if in spite of himself, ‘I did farm a bit, at Tremellen, on the home farm, but Father wouldn’t let me keep it to try; probably he couldn’t let me. We were thick in mortgages fallen due, like a melodrama.’ He mocks and the light voice comes back. ‘I had to let it go. Everything went.’ He shrugs.

  ‘You could have tried somewhere else.’

  ‘Where?’ asks Peter. ‘We left a nice little trail behind us: bills not paid, repairs not done, cottages falling to pieces, cases against us. Ask your Walter. He will tell you and he’s always right. No one in their senses would trust one of us with a dog kennel, let alone a farm.’

  ‘No one in their senses,’ agrees Mrs Quin and she offers him Penbarrow.

  ‘Good God in Heaven,’ says Walter when he hears what she has done. ‘Good God!’

  ‘He is good; I believe that,’ says Mrs Quin, ‘and, you know, Walter, I thank Him that I am a sinner. At least it prevents me from judging.’

  ‘Evidently,’ says Walter. ‘That scallywag and Penbarrow.’

  ‘Why not?’ asks Mrs Quin.

  ‘Quite apart from being a St Omer—’

  ‘He has quarrelled with them,’ says Mrs Quin serenely.

  ‘There you are. It makes it even more unsuitable. A St Omer and he was trying to swindle antiques.’

  ‘He was never successful. His heart wasn’t in it.’

  ‘Trying to swindle,’ says Walter firmly and, ‘I’m quite sure he knows nothing at all about farming.’

  It must be said now that Walter had cause for alarm. It did not seem likely that any young man, notoriously lazy and irresponsible, with a town weediness, and stamped with all the St Omer characteristics, the flaming-red hair, brown eyes that respected no one and the casual manners that never failed to nettle Walter, could take over a run-down farm and make it pay. ‘Well I didn’t believe it either,’ said Peter. ‘It hasn’t paid yet, but it will,’ and, ‘How could you die?’ he wanted to cry now to Mrs Quin. It seemed to him unpardonable. ‘I was going to surprise you,’ said Peter. He had harvested his real crop, built his first hayricks, and at long last started his herd. Tonight or tomorrow – ’Please God not tonight,’ said weary Peter – his first calf would be born: it would be the firstborn, first fruit, and, little heifer or bull, he had planned to give it to Mrs Quin.

  He looked across the garden to the house. He could see star-shine faint on the roof, catch a murmur of life from Cecily’s guinea fowls in the tree in the kitchen garden where they roosted at night; but it was only the ghost of a murmur, the dark windows of the house gave their own message.

  China Court will be sold, thought Peter. He could not imagine Bella or Walter living there, nor their echoes, the three Graces with their Toms, Dicks, and Harrys. There would be a sale; strangers would flood in as they had at Tremellen, to handle and pick over, assess furniture, pictures, and china. It would all go: the private things, the flowers, even the cat; then the house would be sold, though who would buy it he did not know. ‘People won’t live in big houses now.’ Bella was always saying that, but, looking at China Court across the garden, it seemed to Peter exactly fit, for someone wanting a home, thought Peter. I would buy it tomorrow, thought Peter and had to laugh – though it was a hollow-sounding laugh. Buy China Court. He had, perhaps, forty pounds in the bank and, with a shock, he saw what he had not realized until this moment: he was finished too. With the house, the farm would be sold. Bella and Walter would certainly not have him as a tenant. The knell that had rung for Mrs Quin had run for them all: China Court, Penbarrow, Peter, ‘finished,’ said Peter and lifted his hands from the wall.

  It was then that he saw the lamp. He had not noticed it before, it was so small, small but steady. It shone in one of the upper rooms, in – and for a moment Peter’s heart leapt with shock – in Mrs Quin’s room. Then he knew the reason: someone was watching.

  Watching, not standing lamenting, and dreaming. I never thought of watching, thought Peter, and, if he had, it would have seemed to him something remote from himself, old-fashioned, superstitious; but now he knew it was like China Court itself, fitting and faithful.

  He wondered if he should go in, take his turn. It was, of course, Cecily who watched but, like one of Mrs Quin’s raps, and over the knuckles this
time, he remembered he was not free; there was, after all, another kind of watching, of keeping faith. That calf might be born tonight. Her calf, thought Peter.

  For a moment he stayed, then absurdly heartened, absurdly because nothing was changed, he swung back down the path.

  After he had gone, the light shone steadily through the night.

  Prime

  Jam lucis orto sidere Deum precémur sûpplices …

  NOW DAYBREAK FLOODS THE EARTH WITH LIGHT

  HYMN FOR PRIME FROM MRS QUIN’S Day Hours

  The Nativity The scene takes place at night, the stable being lit by a single lantern hanging in one corner, the rays of which shine full on to the Virgin and Child. The Virgin is seated on a mound of straw and raises one hand to shade the sleeping Child’s eyes from the light. Joseph is in a corner preparing a meal. In the shadows at the back of the stable the heads of three cows are visible.

  Full border of conventional flowers, pimpernels, and fruit, mulberries, and ivy leaves, painted in colours and heightened with gold. Figures of stags, hounds, and hares. Grotesque archer, with the head of a man and the body of a bird, shooting at a stag.

  MINIATURE FACING THE OPENING OF PRIME IN THE HORAE BEATAE VIRGINIS MARIAE, FROM THE HOURS OF ROBERT BONNEFOY

  In the early morning, larks sing on the moors. Not many humans hear them. It is too early yet for men to go to work, or children to walk across the moor to school or, nowadays, wait for the school bus; too early for the farm carts or cars starting on their way to the market at Bodmin, even for the postman’s van or riders to the meet. Only the milkers, like Peter, and one or two shepherds at lambing time, hear that first fine flush of song, the trilling rise, the wings beating up and up until they fold and, like a plummet, the lark drops into the grass and heather; only milkers and shepherds and Damaris and Mrs Quin.

  The villagers do not see Mrs Quin go up the street on those early mornings, as they do not, in her day, see Damaris. The cottages are shut fast, every crack sealed that might let in air, but, on the way back, the doors are open, often a half-door to keep the children in; fires are lit and lamps and candles; pasties and cans are put ready for the men going out; there is the sound of voices, a slap, a child’s cry, or laughing. At half past seven the quarry hooter goes and, farther away, the clay works hooters, and then there is a sound of hobnailed boots hurrying down the road. At half past seven the village is ready for work, but early as the lark is too early for St Probus.

  The village people seldom go on the moor; the most they do is to walk along the road to its edge on Sundays. For anyone to walk up there at dawn, and only to hear birds sing, St Probus would call plainly ‘mazed’; indeed, it disturbs Adza for Damaris, and John Henry for Mrs Quin.

  The high moor is light first, then the village and hill, and the light comes slowly downward until it reaches China Court. It grew now in Mrs Quin’s room, picking out the white sheet, the looking-glasses in the wardrobe fronts. The white cloth glimmered on the table, the white marble in the fireplace, and the light caught Cecily’s white hair, worn in a crown of plaits that had slid a little crooked as she slept. The circle thrown by the lamp was lost as the darkness went; the flame grew pale. ‘Now daybreak floods the earth with light.’

  It is at this time that Mrs Quin still wakes, even after a wakeful night, for she sleeps now as the old sleep, lightly as breath; for the last years she has not been able to walk as far as the moor and it is now that she has taken to reading the black book of the Day Hours, moving the green ribbon marker through the week at Lauds, as she moves a peacock feather tip to mark Compline of the different days; it is these two of the Offices that she chiefly reads.

  She owes this to Tracy because Tracy, in her short years at China Court, starts the habit of coming into Mrs Quin’s bed in the early morning and bringing the other Book of Hours with her, the velvet-bound one with its borders and paintings. ‘What’s the story?’ asks Tracy of each. ‘What does it say?’ and for the first time Mrs Quin realizes that this is not simply a quaint picture book, but that the monk or nun who illuminated it with such delicate care was doing it for a purpose. She cannot make out a word of the Gothic script, the old Latin, but in the loneliness after Tracy is gone, she comes back to it again – it seems to bring Tracy close to her – and, one morning, Do they have books of hours now? she asks herself, modern ones, in translation? In a moment of inspiration she writes to the Abbey at Dozemary to find out.

  Day Hours. The Hours of the Day. The Little Breviary. She is amazed at the list the nuns send. ‘Are they all different?’ she writes to ask and the answer comes back: ‘There are different editions, but they are essentially the same.’ She buys the Day Hours as being the simplest name and, when she has succeeded in finding her way about in them, begins her habit of reading them.

  She grows to value them. The Hours seem to thread the day and give it meaning; like the windows of China Court, they reflect the day: dawn, sunrise, morning, the passing of noon and afternoon, sunset, evening, dusk, and night until, ‘The night is past and the day is at hand … Cast off the works of darkness … put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly as in the day,’ and it is morning.

  ‘But is this English?’ Bella asks distrustfully after looking at the book. ‘I mean, does it belong here?’ It is English of Cynewulf and Caedmon, of Sir Gawain and King Arthur, of Alfred and Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales ‘and Canterbury Cathedral and the Pilgrim’s Way,’ Mrs Quin would have said, as English as it is universal, which is perhaps why she finds it satisfying.

  Great-Uncle Mcleod would have been even more distrustful than Bella; he would have been shocked. ‘Popish! A Papist book in my house!’ China Court is lightly streaked with religion, no more than that, but its prejudices are strong. Adza and Eustace, temperately Church of England, are upset when Anne becomes chapel, ‘like a villager!’ says Eliza scathingly, while Eustace is even more upset when Jared, marrying Lady Patrick, has to agree to their eldest son, Borowis, being christened a Roman Catholic. He is not brought up as one and there is no trouble when John Henry is born; by then Lady Patrick has closed her heart and mind to any faith at all.

  Besides the family Bible and the Books of Hours, there are in the house prayer books, hymn books, Wesleyan as well as Ancient and Modern, Christmas carols, a Child’s Pictorial Gospel and a Peep of Day. In the drawing-room cabinet is an ivory crucifix on the same shelf as bundles of joss sticks and a Chinese God of Plenty that the ignorant Quins always refer to as a Buddha. There is also a real Buddha, a head in green soapstone that the family fondly believes to be jade. Most of them only vaguely connect it with religion, but the peace of its face pervades the room.

  Cecily had fallen asleep. She had meant to watch, but the constant stream of people, the baking, and getting the rooms ready – ‘and grief,’ she could have said – had made her more tired than she knew. ‘And Mrs Quin would want me to sleep if I was tired.’ Toward dawn she had grown cold and crept out and fetched a blanket to put over her knees and feet. She put one over Mrs Quin too. ‘Silly or not, I felt I had to,’ said Cecily. ‘I can take it off before they see it.’

  She could feel, under the sheet, how Mrs Quin had stiffened. ‘You are not afraid to stay alone?’ Mrs Abel had asked, but no more than Mrs Quin was Cecily alone.

  The Quins have always been good faithful employers and they have good faithful servants – almost always; it could have been said, ‘There was Ann Sly.’

  Ann Sly is second housemaid in Lady Patrick’s time. Lady Patrick quite genuinely does not notice servants; for her they are part of the necessary furniture of a house. She would be surprised to know that they have feelings and if she wants a handkerchief or a glass of water in the middle of the night, she rings but, as Ann Sly goes about her work, curiously Lady Patrick has to look at her, and Ann Sly looks back, her black eyes hard and bold as marbles. Lady Patrick seems to see that look again in Ripsie, though why she should it is hard to say, for Ripsie’s eyes are green-grey. Perhaps, to Lady Patrick, t
hey have the same bold interloping look.

  Ann Sly is well named, but faithfulness is more usual. Polly, for instance, comes as nursemaid to Mary and Eliza, the first two of the Brood, and stays until she is nearly ninety. She is not Cornish but no one remembers where she came from or if she has a family of her own because she seems part of the Quins, and no one of them knows, least of all Polly, how much they love and depend upon her; all the Brood: Mary, Eliza, Anne, Little Eustace – until he dies – Mcleod the Second, Jared, and Damaris. Borowis and John Henry love Polly too, but she is not such a power with them, ‘and how I dreaded her,’ says Mrs Quin. She dreads McCann too, when McCann comes to look after Stace. ‘My baby is my religion,’ says McCann and Mrs Quin does not dare to contradict that ‘my’; McCann leaves when the third and youngest little Grace is five years old.

  Among the servants there is, too, the elegant parlourmaid Pringle, who first forbids Ripsie the house, Pringle and after her, Paget; and long before either, when Adza is first married, the maid who is the first in China Court to be called by her surname instead of the homely Emmie or Patty; ‘a grand maid,’ says Adza trembling, the parlourmaid Abbot – though Abbot is soon shortened to Abbie. There is Hester, the upper housemaid, unfairly dismissed; and the little Alice, Tracy’s nursemaid, not very much older than Tracy herself. Alice comes from the village, and many other village girls and boys take service at China Court. ‘We had knife-boys then,’ says Cecily, ‘and stable boys and laundry maids. We used to be seven in the house,’ she says, ‘and two men and a boy outside’; it is nothing, of course, compared to the St Omers, but it is respectable, even Eliza has to admit that.

  There is one foreigner, the Swiss maid Minna. Mrs Quin takes her over from the St Omers when McCann leaves, to wait on the schoolroom, do the children’s bedrooms, sew, wash, iron, and speak German with the little girls.