Killing Violets Page 4

  “Mm,” he said. “Margaret Lilian.”

  Anna left a gap. She said, “Your brother told me he was called Raoul.” Another snap decision.

  But Raoul only pulled a stick off a bush, and slashed with it at other bushes, and the high grass now bordering the drive. Live leaves tattered and tore from the stick and were lost.

  “William. He’s named for my father.”

  Anna considered the bouquet of names. Something stirred incoherently in the depths of memory. The Conquest of England, the Norman Conquest. Hadn’t the man who led that invasion been called William? Perhaps William was not the name of Raoul’s brother.

  Water splashed up and entered the galoshes, and now she walked in two cold puddles.

  There was the odour of soaked earth, dead clandestine things rotting, springing plants.

  At the end of the drive, they turned out of the tall gate into a lane. The dreary fields folded away, and trees in patches, and in the distance were smoky woods.

  It was a horrible walk, so wet and pointless. And finally, when they had trundled through several lanes, and clambered over stiles of black wet wood, and a bull had leered at them, black himself as Tartarus, they got down into the sodden village.

  Sallow houses with ebony timbers and fish-bowl windows ran up the street. Flowers lay flat, smashed by rain, in gardens. There was a church, with flinty, scratchy-looking walls, and with a big square tower that had a clock on it.

  “The bells ring all Sunday,” said Raoul. “It gets on my nerves, rather.”

  He took her by the pub, which had a sign of an armoured knight killing a pretty doll-like dragon, strangely similar to a picture she had seen by Ucello. “I’d buy you a drink, but if they see me they get in a lather. The beer’s good. It’s a pity.”

  Anna pictured them, jumping into a vat of lathery beer.

  Two wet cats were yowling by the pub’s garden wall. Roses grew in tubs, but the heads were off and on the street like pools of cerise paint. A horse stood tied by the horse trough, swishing its tail as if the drizzle starting were only flies.

  “You seem different here,” she said softly.

  “Mm. I’m sorry. It’s not much fun for you. There are things I must do, to please my father. Then, maybe we’ll go up to London. You’d like that? Restaurants, and the theatre. Cinemas too. And you can buy your trousseau.”

  “For the wedding.”

  “Yes, darling Anna. For the wedding in that grim church we just saw.”

  She wondered if she should confess to him, at this crucial and quite inappropriate moment, that she could never bear him a child. She felt no responsibility really. A plan of escape was almost before her now. For in London, that great city, she could give him the slip.

  “I’m a foreigner,” she said.

  “Your English is virtually perfect,” he answered.

  The cats began to fight, rolling over and over, screaming, and a woman ran out of the inn or pub to throw a pail of excess water over them.

  “Good day, Mrs Lizard,” said Raoul.

  No, he had said Mrs Izzard.

  The sign of the lizard-dragon swung in a glancing wind, and the woman gave a little bob to Raoul, her sly lemon eyes slipping over Anna.

  “G’dee, Masur Basul. Issis or young lady, mi do I be boldun ask?”

  “Yes, Mrs Izzard. My lady, Anna.”

  The cats, sopping wet, snaked between Anna’s legs, and she felt them even through the galoshes. Counterpoint, warmly, Raoul’s semen ran down her thighs in an abrupt laving.

  Mrs Izzard, the mother perhaps of Lilith, displayed her few teeth. A smile out of prehistory, placatory and trustless.

  “Willastup in, Masr? Take a pint?”

  “No thanks, Mrs Izzard. Not now.”

  “The yun lady loogs tired, she duz.”

  In the inn or pub was darkness. Nothing moved. A den, waiting, for the she-fox to bring in her prey.

  “Good day,” Raoul said again, guiding Anna up the lugubrious street.

  Anna was tired. Enervated. They had the return walk, too. The air was not refreshing.

  At the top of the village were copses of trees, and fields, and Raoul plunged off into the grasses, swinging his vicious slaughtered stick.

  As they strode on, Raoul took off his hat, and shook it. She glimpsed the back of his neck.

  Had that little mole always been there, surely she would remember it?

  “We can go round this way,” he said. “It’s uphill. A bracing walk. We’ll be back like the children in the story, in time for tea.”

  Later on, after the scones and muffins and teacakes and iced cakes and fruit cakes, he took her mildly aside.

  “Mrs Pin says you won’t let the girl dress you.”

  “Who says?”

  “Mrs – the housekeeper. If you don’t like that one maid, you can have another. Just say. That’s what they’re there for, to look after you.”

  “Your servants.”

  “Our servants.”

  “William said,” said Anna, “he thought of the servants as dogs. Obedient and loyal.”

  “Oh, William. Just do as I ask, Anna.”

  “But what do you ask?”

  “Silly girl. Let the maid see to your clothes and hair and so on. You see, Anna, you’ve insulted her in a way. It’s her function to wait on you. If you say no, you’re – frankly, you’re slapping her in the face.”

  One evening at Preguna, when she hadn’t gone to the Professor’s house, Anna was sitting in a café, drinking coffee, and the young man with the birthmark came in.

  Anna looked away at once. Then, in a while, she heard him walk over. His shadow fell between her and the sun.

  “May I – may I sit down?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, not looking.

  The chair scraped, and he was facing her, over the table.

  “I wish to apologise to you,” said the young man. “You were very nice to me, and I was very rude.”

  “Yes,” said Anna. She did not look.

  “You see,” he said, “it’s hard for me. No one,” he said, “can look me in the face. But then you did. And I’d had a drink or two. What can I say?”

  “It’s all right,” Anna said.

  “Excuse me, then,” he said.

  He was getting up again, and she raised her eyes. There he was, his hat inadequately tilted to conceal the silky-mulberry stain. His hair was very fair, almost white on that side. His face was narrow, fine as a poet’s. He had dark blue eyes, the right one, cradled in the mark, tinged faintly with rose, like an alabaster lamp.

  “You see,” he said, halting midway, “you’re doing it now. You’re looking at me.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Anna.

  But he was sitting down again. He said tensely across the table, “What do you see?”

  Anna reached out and put her finger lightly on his lips.

  “You. What else?” Then his face sank, dropped. His eyes were old. She said quickly, “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “I must get up and go away,” he said.

  Just then the girl arrived, and Anna said, “We’ll have two brandies, thank you.”

  The girl went. A tear ran out of the alabaster eye. The young man caught it deftly on his hand. “Sometimes that happens. It’s a weakness. This – thing – on my cheek. It looks as if a woman had slapped me in the face.”

  Anna laughed. She shook her head. “How vain you are.”

  He stared at her. Then the brandies came, and they drank them. Ten minutes later they parted, but he stumbled near the doorway, and Anna had the urge to run and help him. However, she stayed where she was.

  Chapter Three: Waiting and Its Consequences

  Several days passed in the English House. They were the same in almost every respect, peaceful and boring and uncomfortable, fraught with something like a high-pitched singing note, scarcely to be heard, never quite dying away.

  It was continually raining. If the rain stopped, that was only for an ho
ur or so. Anna had heard, or read, of these pluvious English summers. It was as if it had to be since someone had decided. The law.

  In the morning, about nine, the maids brought the breakfast tray. She had asked to be given only bread, and added she would prefer coffee. But the breakfast did not change very much. There was no more meat, but instead little boiled eggs under silver, bullet-like caps, or a coppery fish – was it a kipper? And there was never coffee, always tea. She became used to it.

  She no longer dropped the food down the lavatory but left it untouched on the tray. Perhaps the servants ate these remains, relied on leftovers.

  There were russet kitchens in her past, netted in their strings of onions, tomatoes, garlic, and the cook, the single maid, eating huge feasts at the scrubbed table, their shoes kicked off, belching and cackling.

  Then Lilith Izzard-Lizard came and ran the bath, and threw in, unasked, handfuls of bath salts, so it smelled like the squashed rose garden after the downpours.

  Impervious, Lilith helped Anna out of her robe, like an invalid. Nudity meant nothing apparently. Where had that myth come from, that the English were prudish? But then, the servants were only dogs, beetles, did not matter.

  Lilith dressed Anna. She brushed Anna’s short pale electric hair. She would repeat this procedure at night, in reverse.

  Lilith said nothing unless spoken to.

  Anna saw her narrow fox face over her, Anna’s, left shoulder, the folded lids, and yellow eyes, the hint of the sandy hair sneaking in under the bonnet of the slave.

  “Thank you so much. Thank you. Oh, how kind.”

  Ghastly. Unbearable, really.

  Not that the girl was unwholesome, unpleasant to come into physical contact with. Just this subservience, so sly and slippery. A slavishness relished?

  It’s just me. I was never waited on. I can’t judge.

  Lily brushed Anna’s suede gloves. Lily had put lavender sachets into the underclothes. Nothing could be kept from your maid. If ever one had to have a hidden thing, one would need a special hiding place. No wonder all the antique bureaux you read of had concealed drawers. No wonder there were secret passages.

  One morning the housekeeper – Mrs Pin – entered and asked, directly over Lily’s bowed, blouse-sorting head, if Lily were Adequate.

  “Perfectly,” said Anna.

  “If there is anything you’re not happy with, Miss Moll.”

  “She’s wonderful,” said Anna extravagantly. Wretched fulsomeness.

  Actually Anna had begun to loathe Lilith Izzard. Doubtless it was mutual.

  But: the servants seemed to have no resentments. They came and went like shadows, and if you passed one, it bobbed or nodded or bowed, depending on its lowly position. And if there were several of them, this action was like rabbits bouncing or corn turning before the wind, this idiotic gesture, of self-abasement.

  Anna wanted to cry, “Stand up, for God’s sake!”

  She could imagine their contemptuous surprise. Or would they even have been contemptuous, or surprised?

  They waited on the drinks cabinets, the luncheon table, the dinner table. (Not tea, generally; then the Basultes saw to themselves.) The servants carried things about, circumspectly.

  They were like automata, which ran all day, and almost all night too, for she had asked Raoul uneasily about their schedules, and learned of the seventeen or eighteen hour stints, beginning before the light and extending beyond the light. Generally unseen, this scurrying and scraping and pattering and creeping. Those tireless exhausted arms and knees, thrust against and into tubs of washing and potato peelings, bowed to rub the floors and bent to clean the grates. (She was only able to question Raoul now and then, following lunch. Despite the previous day, the men were not often present during tea.)

  As Anna lay in bed, waking about one or two a.m., she imagined servants crawling through the arteries of the quiet house. They were everywhere. In the midst of anything, sleep, bathing, masturbation, they would knock and step straight in on you.

  The house with infested with them, the servants.

  On Sunday, dinner was taken at two o’clock, a Basulte tradition, in the Great Dining-Room.

  This room was enormous, flanked on one side by windows pierced to the floor as in the smaller dining-room. It was papered and draped in a rich toffee blue. The ceiling had been painted by a minor luminary of the eighteenth century. It was a lighter blue, with clouds: the sky. (Outside the English heaven scowled and urinated on the park.)

  To match the Great Dining-Room, a huge side of beef, black without and reddish within, was carved before them. They drank claret. This quickly gave her a headache, but the Basultes swallowed it undaunted.

  She had come to see the Father was very greedy. He ate in an ugly mannered way, still managing to stuff his mouth with large forkfuls of food. She had been told by now, (Raoul) the Basulte grandfather, who had begun the peasant tradition of the two o’clock dinner, would stalk straight in from the hunt, reeking of horse, hound and blood, put his feet on the table, tearing chunks by hand off the roast, so aroused was his appetite.

  The woman, the Mother, was greedy too, but she ate very slowly, outlasting everyone, going on and on.

  Margaret Lilian would get up and go over to the windows to smoke.

  Normally, when the midday meal was over, they dispersed, and Anna would ascend to her room to play patience, or to doze. Later she would read parts of a novel taken from the Basulte library. These books were old-fashioned, their language outdated to the point of seeming another tongue, and bound in leather. She would make herself stick at a book until four-thirty, the usual hour for the (unwanted) tea.

  After the Sunday meal, at last the Mother-woman rose, casting down her napkin soiled with lipstick. She led the way into another orangery. As they sat among the sullen palms for their coffee, she said to Anna, “Sunday is the day I visit the kitchen. You must go with me, Anna.”

  Evidently this was a command.

  When the coffee was drunk, the woman went upstairs to prepare herself, and returned once more crimson of mouth, her nose floured with powder.

  Beyond what was called the Smoking Room, was a door with felt on it, behind a curtain.

  The butler held this door open, and the woman walked through and down a stair, Anna following dubiously.

  Anna did not want to know any more about the servants.

  But this was the understairs, the below-stairs. A curious fact, the servants slept in the attics overhead, and toiled all day down here, under their feet.

  The kitchen was such a big room, conceivably much bigger than the Great Dining-Room.

  Anna had recalled those rubicund kitchens of the past, the baskets of washing pushed aside, the plants crouched on windowsills. This was not like that.

  It seemed they would have had to tidy it, after all the Sunday food, for this – weekly? – inspection.

  The long tables were bare as bones and nearly as white. The linoleum floor was still damp in patches. A mousetrap stood sentinel in one corner. Even that looked tidy, the bait of cheese fresh and cheery.

  The ovens, which still exuded heat, were clean. A black iron box of fire – a range – had been scoured by devils.

  Even the windows shone.

  There were no vegetables hanging, only on a table a basket of early apples, a jug of intact roses. Picturesque.

  The cook was there, a big fat woman. She wore a starched dark dress and apron of blue-white. She and the butler were the only ones to keep their heads unbowed. All the rest, clean as new pins, waited in a line, starched and ironed, hands raw from work, heads bent as if for a dire punishment – as if they had gravely sinned. Bobbing, bobbing.

  “Very good, Mrs Ox,” said the Basulte Mother of Raoul, (Ox? Had she truly called the cook that? But an ox was a male cow of some kind, wasn’t it?)

  “Thankum, Madum.”

  “And your dinner was quite good. The meat… a little well-done, perhaps.”

  “I regretuz, Madum.�
�

  “No. Don’t trouble. The butcher is probably the one at fault. Just be a little more careful.”

  The Basulte woman moved along the line of maids and boys, examining their shirts, aprons, their starchiness, seeing presumably that their hands were properly flayed and red enough. One hand she pointed to. “Mrs Ox, are these nails quite pristine?”

  Mrs Ox said, fawningly, “Is ona the mushrooms, madum. No hurm.”

  “Harm isn’t the point, Ox.”

  “No um, Madum. I beg pardon. I’ll seeuz she go wont her tea, Madum.”

  The girl, whose nails looked only torn down to Anna, made no remonstrance. And when the woman added, “Very good,” this girl bobbed again, as if she had received her due, some sort of medal.

  As they left, the whole roomful was bobbing, like corks. It made Anna seasick.

  The Mother smiled at her as they came up from the nether regions.

  “You see, Anna.”

  “About her nails?” asked Anna. “It seemed a pity.”

  “Yes. They are so dirty if you don’t watch them.”

  No one had spoken, Raoul had not spoken again, about a wedding. Yet, was this instruction so Anna should learn how the great house must be ordered.

  I, Anna thought, the Jew.

  After the Sunday dinner there was to be a supper, but that was at ten.

  Lilith told her, coming in the room as Anna slept, and beginning to lay out, unasked, a suitable dress. “M’slilum says wulla golong anin.”

  Anna shook her head. “I’m sorry – go along… where?”

  “Toer room.” Lilith Izzard said something else, which Anna didn’t catch at all. She didn’t know where Lilian’s room might be.

  Lilith put a paper in her hand. It was a map of the way, drawn in an impatient yet curlicued manner.

  Raoul had never, though he had drawn her a map of the route to the dining-room, given her a map of the way to his own room. And he hadn’t come to hers since that first – or second – occasion.

  None of the men came to the afternoon tea now, in the orangery. But when Anna had not gone either, a maid had arrived to remind her. (Today dinner had eclipsed the tea.)

  Anna had lit the fire laid in the grate because the bedroom was depressingly dank. And Anna could visualise Mrs Pin telling her she should not have lit the fire, but rung for someone to see to it. A long velvet tail hung by the mantelpiece, to summon the servants. Anna had never used it. Pulling tails seemed unwise.