Full House

Book 221: Virago Modern Classics

by Molly Keane

Genres: General Fiction; Classics; Family Life; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Silverue -- an enchanting Irish mansion -- is owned by one of the most frightening mothers in fiction -- the indomitable, oppressively girlish Lady Bird. Blessed with wealth and beautiful children she has little to worry about except the passing of the years and the return of her son John's sanity. To help her through the potentially awkward occasion of John's return from the asylum she has enlisted the support of Eliza, a woman she believes to be her confidante. But Eliza has her own secrets and John's homecoming will prove the catalyst for revelations which Lady Bird would much rather leave buried.

Release date: May 2, 2013

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 177

Sample

“OH, thank you so much, Miss Parker. Those are lovely. Or do you think you might pick them just a shade longer. Oh, I see you’ve picked the rose-coloureds. It was the flame I wanted. The flame at the back of the border, and then the smoke. Not the rose. Or the yellow.”

Miss Parker, the little bearded governess, gazed sadly at her basket of tulips. All her life long she could trust herself to do the wrong thing. Now she had done it again. Just one little once again mounting up the mistakes and misfortunes of a stupid little thing. But she means well.

“Oh, Lady Bird, I am ever so sorry,” she now breathed distressfully. “Whatever can I do about it now?”

It was sufficiently tiresome of Miss Parker to have gathered dozens and dozens of the wrong tulips, thus entirely defeating Lady Bird’s colour scheme for the drawing-room, without adding to her shortcomings that appalling “ever so” …. “whatever can I do?” …. The question ran once more through Lady Bird’s mind. Was she or was she not justified in keeping Miss Parker on as a governess for Mark? A Swiss girl would probably be cheaper, and certainly sew better, although she might not work so diligently in the garden nor be so attentive to the dogs when they were sick. There again she had nearly killed Susan by administering a most excessive purge, and had dragged up unknown quantities of treasures in the rock garden. But Mark liked her. He would gaze on her tenderly and sometimes pat her face. However, Miss Parker discouraged this sort of play in public because it must draw attention to her beard, a subject on which she was agonisingly sensitive.

The sun shone alike upon Lady Bird and Miss Parker within the shelter of the kitchen garden. The late fruit blossom was trained, rosy and trim, against the walls, the early cabbages throve, the peas and the beans throve, also the spring onions, the lettuces and every other class and kind of vegetable that was grown there. The subdued regularity of their squares and lines and patches was solid and pleasing and as it should be. The flowers were good too. A calendar for 1934 depicting, in gross and in detail, a long pair of borders with a sundial and three fantail pigeons in the middle distance could scarcely have bettered the rich and orderly profusion of Lady Bird’s early summer display of flowers. Except that the calendar would somehow have contrived to reproduce a hedge of yew, preferably cut into zoological shapes.

“Well,” said Lady Bird, squeezing her rolex garden scissors sharply together, to cut out a dead piece of rose wood; “it can’t be helped now, can it? But do be careful another time. When I ask you for Flame don’t pick Rose. Can’t you see how different they are? Where is Markie?”

“Sheena found a wren’s nest for him with eggs in it, and he’s gone to look at it. Wasn’t it funny, Lady Bird? I was reading to him only yesterday in Birdies for our Tinies about the wee wrens, and he was so excited.”

“I wish you would teach him the difference between a Black-backed gull and a Herring gull. Now, Miss Parker, you might take those tulips into the house. The yellow ones will do for Sheena’s room and the red ones can go in the blue vase in the library. I hadn’t meant to do flowers in either of those rooms till to-morrow but there it is. Then perhaps you’d take Chunky and Cheerio for a little bit of a walk, and tell Mrs. Brand the end of the chocolate cake is to go up for the school-room tea, and if Mrs. Blundell has arrived, tell her I’m out here and give her a pair of scissors so that she can do some work. Would you? Thank you so much.”

Oh, lucky, lucky Lady Bird, thought Miss Parker as she stepped out briskly with her bunches of tulips—such smooth, bright flowers. Lucky Lady Bird, still so beautiful, so unbelievably young for all those forty-eight years, set down in many books for all to see; so blessed with riches and with lovely children. Sheena and Mark, and that other who was coming back to-day. But Miss Parker had never seen that other. She had only heard very strange things about him. Whisperings from the servants and more than whisperings. All very peculiar and strange and sad. These nervous breakdowns Miss Parker knew about. They had called it a nervous breakdown when poor Aunt Alice turned on the gas. But one knew what Aunt Alice was. She was as mad as a hatter, and that was all about it. But this must be different. This youth they all spoke of with a sort of hushed worship, withholding any word of pity, was a beloved creature beside itself, who would return both to itself and to them. Who was returning. Who came back to-day.

As she hurried down from the kitchen garden Miss Parker was aware of a sense of waiting, of constant expectancy, that had been on the house and place and every person in it since morning. But especially, most especially, on the place.

The pathway down from the kitchen garden to the house was steep in places, for the garden was on the side of a hill and the wild hills came down nearly to the sea on this side of Westcommon. Between the hills and the sea this house called Silverue had been built. Groves of birch trees came chasing down the feet of the hills nearest the sea. Chasing because birches are forever in flight, maidenly and unsteady as maidens are. Springs burst up among them, wetting the rocks and soaking the dark mosses. These groves were quiet and drenching and full of the sea mists. A perfect buttress of a fuchsia hedge, almost, in parts quite, a tunnel divided them from the climbing path. Polite and formal distances of lawn held them farther apart from the house.

Miss Parker stepped out from the last heavy tunnel of the dark fuchsias, across a turn of the avenue and over the lawn towards the house. The lawn was soaking in the sunlight. It had received so much that now it seemed to be giving out a warmth and light from itself. There was an ample, generous air upon the bland turf, an hallucination of reposeful bosoms about its totally flat expanses. Miss Parker walked across it satisfied.

And now the house. It was dark and flat and just too high in the middle like some early Georgian houses are, but its wings were of such extreme grace and proportion that this steepness was a welcome and faintly acid contrast to their inevitable correctness. A correctness where line answered line and each curved statue niche owned its precise fellow. The face of the house was partly covered in ivy and partly in a fern-like growth of Good Neighbour. They were indeed mistaken who covered stone houses with creepers, but, although we may defend ourselves from committing their errors, in fact, we do not find these errors half so disagreeable as we may pretend. The back of the house was almost precisely like the front, with the occasional delusion of a blind window. Beyond was a long slip of lawn with much bedding-out, protected from the sea winds by further buttresses of fuchsia and escalonia, and between the cliffs and the sea a space of close thyme and pale flowers and paler stones. Then the low horizon.

A car came round the turn of the lawn before Miss Parker had quite crossed it and a tall, sun-burnt woman, very thin and very light on her feet, got out and came towards Miss Parker. This would be Mrs. Blundel. There was a G.B. on the back of the car too. None other could it be.

A large gay mouth painted as bright as a door, the sweetest way of bending her head when she spoke, as though it mattered whether she really saw Miss Parker or not. A little face nearly the shape of a beech leaf, lined and rather dry, brown and curling. Hydrangea eyes and dark hair. She was not old. She was not oppressively and astonishingly young, like Lady Bird. She was her own age which was between thirty and forty. And she was her own age which was anything you please for wit and tolerance and kindness and large experience. She had large plain hands and feet which she used with grace and circumspection. She seemed as tall as a tree and as lovely as a tree.

Miss Parker told her reverently where Lady Bird was to be found.

“I think,” said Eliza (for that was her name—she had been christened Elsie, which indeed she could not bear), “that I will go into the house and have a drink first. I suppose I’ve driven a thousand miles since luncheon, and I see,” she said, with a look at Miss Parker’s gay bunches of tulips, “that Lady Bird is doing the flowers. On the whole I think it would be wise to have a drink before I go up to the garden.”

Miss Parker followed her to the house murmuring confused assents. Up the steps—those stone steps as curved and as thin as if they had been sliced off a lemon—and in through the flat dark doorway to the house they went together.

“OH, Eliza, my dear, how are you? You look marvellous and what an amusing hat. Do you still go to that little woman of Betty’s? I think she’s a robber and rather bad, but she makes lovely things for you, of course. But, my dear, you are painfully thin, aren’t you?”

Lady Bird was genuinely enchanted to see her guest and the more so because she considered her hat to be the last word in unsuccess, also she thought Eliza was looking both old and tired and rather ill—in fact, everything a guest ten years younger than oneself should look. And Eliza, who delighted for a limited time in Lady Bird’s every mood and every absurdity, was pleased to see her hostess being every bit herself. At any rate, her greeting showed that she had not changed much. And if the tragedy of John could not quieten her, nothing but the grave ever would.

Eliza did not answer any of the remarks about her hat or her health. She kissed Lady Bird twice, lightly yet firmly. One kiss on each unbelievably smooth cheek, murmuring: “How lovely, how lovely the garden is looking.” She then embarked her hostess on one of those ambling tours of inspection full of long pausings, bitter complaints and still longer pausings for complacent boastfulness—garden tours which are as the breath of life to gardeners of Lady Bird’s kind.

As they walked and paused and admired and deplored, Eliza in her mind, took a journey backwards from this Lady Bird who walked beside her to the Olivia she had known before the Great War, which Olivia had enjoyed so much. When the war began Olivia was pretty well at the zenith of her beauty and stupidity, and terrifying intensity of feeling. She was but lately married to Sir Julian Bird. Yet not so lately as to have retained much interest in him, or at any rate, not enough to curb her in much promiscuous generosity throughout the war years. She was one of those big-hearted, unrestrained women who always talked a great deal about “giving everything.” A splendid phrase, presupposing a peculiar form of selfless chastity in the most passionate of her entanglements. Apparently she took nothing but just gave and gave in that public-spirited way that women had in the Great War. Such hats as they wore and such love as they gave. But Eliza was always a little sour about the war and the women who enjoyed it, because she still thought that it had devastated her own life. In spite of all her experiences she held a certain thread of faith about that. But that was all such a very long time ago and so absolutely and infinitely past—as past as Olivia’s opportunities for generosity. The values of one’s life changed so absurdly. Here was Olivia standing before a dreary unthriving plant and complaining, as she had often done when her lovers were tiresome or faithless…. “And I gave it everything, everything, my dear….” Poor Olivia, still so beautiful, so enchanting to look at. Her lovely clothes, her romantic body. Only her throat looked a little tired and perhaps her full Fra Angelico eyes; yes, and perhaps those steel cut lines so faint and so sure between her thin short nose, and her pretty mouth.

How had Julian endured and understood and waited, and got her here at last to Ireland where he loved to be? Where he could play at his Heraldry and breed his herd of Kerry and Dexter cattle, and fish for salmon and sea-trout, and shoot snipe and woodcock in the winter months. How had he found his courage and his patience? Once he had said to Eliza, quoting in a defiantly pedantic way: “Not my five wits nor my five senses can dissuade one foolish heart….” But that was as far as he had ever gone in confiding to Eliza to whom everybody told everything that they should have kept to themselves. And no doubt he was properly ashamed of himself. Then he had the children, John and Sheena and Mark. But could he ever get very near them? They were too like himself. He was too intelligent to torment himself about them, but his love must make it very difficult at times. And John was coming home this evening—what a night to arrive at Silverue. “You do like a good drama, dear, you know you do,” Eliza reminded herself with a certain indulgence of personal weakness. One could not know oneself too well.

She sat with Olivia on a stone bench at the end of Oliva’s best border—the spot where she finally brought her guests to an admiring anchor. Indeed it was good. So much colour, and the shadows growing obviously longer, faintly more dewy, and at the end of the path there was an iron gate in the wall through which you saw birches and the untamed evening, withheld and inattentive.

“Darling,” Eliza said, suddenly quiet and insistent; “tell me about John. How is he, really?”

“Oh, he’s marvellously well now,” Olivia said. “This voyage, you know, has done him all the good in the world. The doctor said it would. Do you know Dr. Leeson, Eliza? So attractive and so understanding. He was the only person who realised how hard it all was on me and he’s been marvellous to me over everything. He knew I was the only person who could do anything with John, but he was so sweet explaining how it was better for me that I shouldn’t be with him. Of course John and I have been everything to each other always. He always looks on me as his own contemporary, always—I can’t think why. He tells me everything. He’s rather a wonderful person, don’t you think so, Eliza? I’ve always had the most extraordinary influence over him, why I can’t think.”

“I love John,” Eliza said. What could one ever gather from Olivia? Why did one try? What was her justification for being, and how had she produced her divine, her enthralling children? Of course they were dear Julian’s children.

Through the iron gate Mark came running towards them down the path, hurrying, flying. Such speed and energy he showed that he ran himself out of his coat, a blue woollen coat that lay in a little coloured pool on the path behind him as he came flying towards them. All he said when he arrived was: “Wren’s nest,” rather surlily. But when he saw Eliza he flung himself on her, crying: “Wren’s nest! Wren’s nest! Come and see it. I’ll kill you unless you come. Ah, come. Ah, come, darling. Darling, come. Kind Eliza, come.”

“I will come,” said Eliza; “presently we will go together.”

“When’s presently?”

“In the cool of the evening we will walk there together.”

“We will walk there together.”

“Markie, it’s past your tea-time, darling. And why are you wearing such a hot shirt? Ask Miss Parker to give you a thin one for after tea.”

“Yes, my God, I’m in a hell of a sweat,” said Mark, showing off sadly. When Olivia reproved him he pressed her hand to his head and his bosom to show he spoke truly. His gestures were curiously gentle, but he was only holding himself stilled for a moment—a moment for his own purpose. Eliza thought Mark was the most beautiful creature she knew. She knew no child that had his rare savage and tender quality. He was entirely conscious without being affected. To a large extent he was aware of his own power and used it cruelly or gently. He was the most moving creature; such depths of despair were in him and such an unending ability for happiness. Such cruelty and such tenderness. Eliza had painted Mark and talked of him but it was no use, she could never pretend to get anywhere near him, really. That lovely gaze his changing eyes would show: that broad romantic brow: that grave mouth and exotic complexion: one told them over but they brought him no nearer. Absent one could not see him. He was not, because there was so much in him which was beyond grasping. And what cannot be taken in words or in any other way may be always there. Nothing in the world would have prevented Eliza from going to see the wren’s nest to-night. Perhaps she was a little in love with so much beauty. She worshipped for a while with a pagan pleasure. She would be at war with time on his account that he might stay for ever seven years old. But then she had thought the same when he was six and five and four. And, anyhow, sentimentality over the ages of children was unforgivably nauseating.

“It’s tea-time for everybody,” Olivia said, rising a little regretfully from her seat. “Come on, Markie. Don’t make Mummy speak to you again. Nip to it quickly. Be a first-time childy.”

Markie looked at her, mournfully unconscious of what she might or might not mean. His eyes were now afar upon the asparagus beds. “Look at the Nettle-dog. Look what he’s done,” he cried. “Ha, ha, ha!” The joke was very good.

“I’ve told you fifty times not to let the dogs into the kitchen garden.” Olivia was really angry. “There’s nothing to laugh at. You know what they do to the vegetables and it’s very unhealthy. How would you like to have worms like Tiny?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Mummy.” Markie’s face grew smaller and whiter as if a wind blew through him. He could not bear being scolded. He would avoid it by any means, and he might have weathered this storm had it not been for the Nettle-dog who, as they arrived at the asparagus beds to eject him from the garden, committed his offence once more.

Olivia was furious. Dogs and disobedient children and asparagus and worms boiled within her, and from their stewings was distilled the edict that Markie was to go to bed at six instead of seven.

“I cannot, I cannot. John is coming back. How could I be in bed?”

“You should have thought of that before. How often have I told you what the Nettle-dog does to the asparagus and the lettuce and the cabbages. I’ve forbidden him to come into the garden.”

Then there were tears, terrible vast tears that rolled and fell, and protestations of sorrow. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ve said I’m sorry.”

Eliza felt shattered. She saw Olivia lose her temper and recover it, and become obstinate and a shade vindictive. It terrified her. And that she should have such absolute power, that she should not be ashamed to use it. So merciless a creature and one so young that it should not realise fear. Not fear.

“I didn’t do it. I didn’t,” he cried now despairingly.

“Markie—look at Mummy. Are you telling Mummy a lie? How did he get in?”

“He just got in himself, I promise you.”

How touchingly palpable are the lies of childhood.

“Oh, Olivia, darling, but it was me. I’m so sorry, I let him in, that dirty old Nettle-dog. It wasn’t Markie. He’s speaking the truth for once in his life.”

It was Sheena, coming from nowhere in particular towards them. Sheena stooping to pick up the Nettle-dog, which nobody else had thought of doing, and throwing away a whole cigarette to kiss Eliza almost with passion, at least with a passion of delight. Then she stood apart from them coldly, a little afraid of her enthusiasm.

“He didn’t really,” she said. “Stop wailing, Markie. Mummy knows you didn’t now.”

“Oh, I’m so upset,” said Mark then. There was an extraordinary tearful dignity about this assertion. “To think she wouldn’t believe me.”

“Don’t cry, darling, she does now.”

“I will cry.”

“If you cry any more I’ll beat you. Yes, next time I get you away from your kind mother.”

“You know nobody but myself is allowed to beat Markie,” Olivia said firmly. “Run in to tea now, pet one. Mummy has forgiven you…. One simply must be firm with them,” she said as Mark ran on before them down the windings and tunnels of the fuchsia path. “Otherwise where is one? Can anybody tell me that?”

Nobody could.

Sheena walked back to the house with them. She was as blonde as a eucalyptus with elegant smoothed limbs such as they have and eyes the colour of those leaves, and gentle and Christ-like. The eyes all three children had got from their wanton mother. She painted her face absurdly and chiefly for her own entertainment, an entertainment she varied as the moods took her, and she wore quite literally ragged clothes, but took great trouble over her hair. She was nineteen and perhaps full of affectations. Olivia was very fond of her and touchingly proud of her surprising charm and success.

SHEENA took Eliza up to her room after tea. At Silverue there were two round halls opening one out of the other and a double, twining staircase of lovely swinging curves—two airy curves perfectly resolved in wood. A romantic staircase, perpetually pleasing. Half-way up there was a long mirror on the wall in which one could admire oneself, stepping up or stepping down, in the flattering setting of this beautiful staircase.

Eliza admired herself very much indeed, for she took great pleasure in her own rather austere proportions. But Sheena, though she was as vain as a peacock, paid no more attention to her reflection than a swan might with other matters to occupy . . .