England to Me: A Memoir

  “Alice said that he may have been dumped here, as she wouldn’t put it past her family to do that.

  “Oh. And she goes on:

  “Also as there was no food left out for the girls here when Mrs. Alford was away those few days, there was nothing naturally to feed Fitzroy on. And that was the first time he killed. Now I will be responsible for him until you return and find what you want done with him, and if there is any killing I’ll gladly pay for what damage he does.”

  “Hell,” said the Major as I finished. “Well, I only hope she keeps him locked up. He’s cunning.”

  We arrived home late in the afternoon, and found the house strangely silent. Mary appeared at the door of her room as we came up the steps and only said nervously, “Good evening,” before closing the door again. When Lorraine came in, she plunged right into it.

  “Mickey, I kept him in the kennel all night, and this morning I went in to take him out on his lead for some exercise, and—I never saw anything like it, he was so quick, and on top of a good lunch, too, he slipped right out between my ankles and went straight over to Palmers’, like an arrow.”

  “Oh, Lord.”

  “I called them up and ran over with Jan and everybody, but it was too late. He’d killed. There he was, calmly eating the chicken as if five of us weren’t bearing down on him like Furies. It was terrible; he was a dog possessed. I didn’t wait another minute. I was afraid I’d weaken. Oh, and Alice’s mother did dump him at our gates, Trivett saw her earlier in the afternoon in the road near Cordwayne with him.… I guess he must have killed some of their chickens too. Though why they couldn’t have telephoned and said they didn’t want him … Yes, I’m coming to that. I put him in the car and took him straight to the vet in Dorchester, and had him p-p-put down. Oh, I don’t ever want to get fond of a dog again. Don’t tell Carola, will you? She thinks he’s gone back to Alice’s house.”

  “What about the Palmers?”

  “Furious.” Lorraine stopped crying at the memory. “She was awfully rude on the phone. I rushed thirty-five shillings over as soon as I could collect it. Oh, it’s been such a day, what with one thing and another.”

  “Oh, dear. Well, it’s all for the best, I suppose. No, I won’t tell Carola.”

  “He was like a maniac after those chickens. He went straight as an arrow—”

  “You take an aspirin and go to bed,” I said.

  Lorraine gulped and obeyed me. Disconsolately, I sat down by the fire. The house seemed very quiet, and appallingly clean.

  22. THE BROWN-EYED ONE

  “I’ve never seen such lovely country in my entire life,” Mary Toussaint said.

  The Major said nothing, but he looked gratified, as people do when you praise their favorite places. He carries it further than that sometimes, apologizing for bad weather quite as if all Dorset were his responsibility. Mary is a Canadian opera singer, married to a Dutch diplomat. She had come down from London for a four days’ visit, with her three children and their French nurse. We walked steadily to the top of the field under the clear blue sky and turned around to look back.

  “This is the best spot, I should think, for miles around,” said Charles. “Over there’s the heath—there beyond our woods. And now, if you look over there, you can see the sea—there where the white cliff shows. It really is extraordinary weather for March, isn’t it?” He spoke with modest pride. The sun beat down on us so that the ground, still bare in the spring, quivered as if it were midsummer.

  “Where are we aiming for?” asked Mary.

  “There, where that little house just shows. Over beyond that is the cove and the inn.”

  “The kids’ll be there by this time,” I said as we started along the level Downs. We had sent our children ahead by car, with Lorraine and the nurse. “Yours are used to the seaside, too, aren’t they?” I asked. “I suppose the twins are a bit young, though, for paddling.”

  “Oh no, they had a couple of months of it in Holland last year. This year we’re going to Normandy, where they can run wild. Not that they don’t run wild anywhere.”

  “They are a handful,” I said. “Funny the girls are so much tougher than the boy, but maybe it’s always that way.”

  “Do you think so?” Mary pondered the matter. “Vincent’s always been sweet and amiable. I suppose he finds life simpler that way. But the twins aren’t both so rough—they aren’t really alike. They couldn’t be more opposite, actually.”

  “That blue-eyed one is going to be an awful flirt,” said the Major. “Considering she’s barely four, she’s most oncoming. Flutters her eyelashes at me at table.”

  “Oh, Mariette! She’s a terrible flirt, Charles. She’s disgusting,” Mary said. “Once in Paris—she was only three—we were eating ice cream in a shop and she looked over her shoulder and said, ‘Maman. II y a un monsieur la.’ I said, ‘Sure, now eat your ice cream.’ In another minute, looking over her other shoulder, she said, ‘Maman. II y a un monsieur la, aussi.” I hate to think of Mariette’s future, but she’ll wriggle out of anything. Now, Patricia’s quite different. She’s always getting into trouble, in a blundering sort of way. She’s very sensitive, though you mightn’t think it.”

  “Sensitive children are the devil,” I said.

  “Why, is Carola very touchy?” Mary asked.

  “No, no, thank God,” I said. “She may look like Charles but she doesn’t take after him that way. Carola and I are alike—tough. Everything rolls right off us.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  Bored with this maternal discussion, Charles had swung down the hill ahead of us to the road which led into the village. He held the gate for us. “We’ll have to go by road the rest of the way I’m afraid,” he apologized, proprietor-like. “It’s not far.”

  “Oh, it’s marvelous!” Mary said.

  Steeply winding between a few houses and many trees, the road thinned down to a path that led us to a crisp and sudden drop. We stood on the cliff edge looking down past a wiggling pathway to the shingle beach. It’s a pleasantly messy beach, with lobster pots piled everywhere, and there is a concrete dock that belongs to the inn, which lay in the cove at our left. Only one family of strangers was in sight, creeping cautiously down the path; the crowded beach was given over, otherwise, to our party. They were all barefoot; the children’s buckets, spades, and shoes littered the shingle. Monique, the French nurse, with her slacks rolled up to her calves, was picking her way toward the receding waves on slime-covered boulders, holding one of the twins by the hand. The other twin stooped over a shell or a crab near by, poking at it with her finger. At this distance I could not tell which was which; their round little bodies in bright sweaters and their brown plaits were exactly alike. Vincent, who is seven, was trying in a dreamy way to scale the cliff where it was steepest. Carola seemed to be rubbing at her face with her fists. Lorraine was hovering over her. Though one could not tell where it came from, there were cries in the air, a strange cacophony of sounds—children or sea gulls crying. None of them saw us for a moment.

  “Hullo!” I shouted from the edge of the cliff, and Carola looked up and cried in relief and terror, “Mummy!”

  “What’s up?” I shouted.

  “Anything wrong?” Mary added.

  “It’s all right,” Lorraine shouted. “Just a little trouble. She’s all right now. She—she hurt her foot on a stone.”

  We went down the path to them, commenting on how beautifully private the beach was. “The petrol ban,” said the Major. “Bad for the hotels but pleasant for us. Now, then, what’s the matter?” Carola had hobbled over the shingle to throw her arms around my knees.

  “She just hurt her foot,” Lorraine said. “This beach isn’t very comfortable, I must say. We tried to reach that patch of sand over there, but there’s a lot of barbed wire in the way.”

  “I hate shingle,” I said. Mary pulled off her shoes and stockings, picked up the other twin under her arm, and ran for the waves beside the concrete dock.


  “Mummy, can you carry me?” Carola asked. I hesitated. Carola is always apt to get babyish in the presence of younger children, and ever since the twins’ arrival she had been more and more irritating, toddling instead of walking and talking a persistent baby talk.

  “I’ll carry you over the rocky part,” I said, “but you’re a big girl now, you know. You ought to be helping Monique take care of the twins.”

  “I’m not copying the twins. I’m not, Mummy. It’s just that these little rocks hurt my feet frightfully. Anyway, the twins cry much more than me, so there.”

  “Well, I should think so. They’re only just four.”

  I carried her to the smooth concrete and she wriggled to get down. “Thank you, Mummy,” she said, without a trace of baby accent. She ran at her own gait down to the water.

  In the inn garden we sat at a long, sun-blistered refectory table and ate lobster. It was actually warm enough to make one sleepy had there been no bored children to cope with, but there were.

  The brown-eyed twin, Patricia, got up to run in circles around the table, and Vincent followed. He shouted, heading her off from a pram in the corner of the garden, where a strange baby lay sleeping. Mariette climbed on Mary’s lap. Carola promptly climbed on mine, a thing she never does ordinarily. The sun continued to concentrate on us. In the little quiet pool of air, out of the wind, we eventually fell silent. Suddenly there was a mechanical squawk from the road above us. “The car!” I said. “Come on, children.”

  “Patricia!” Monique called. “Patricia! Vite!”

  An angry wail came from the pram, where Patricia was investigating the baby and had waked him up. Monique rushed over and hustled her back to us.

  “That’s a bad bump on that child’s forehead. Was it there before?” asked the Major.

  We all looked at Patricia. Sure enough, there was a bump, a vicious swelling.

  “I didn’t see it before,” Mary said. “Monique, do you know anything about it?”

  Monique shook her head. Patricia stared at us, her brown eyes round and worried.

  “Well, anyway, come on. Up you get!” Mary seized one of the small children and swung along up the stone steps; the other trotted after, and Vincent ran here and there as we went. Carola wanted to be carried.

  “Do stop being so silly,” I said. “Run along with Vincent. Really!” I stared after her in exasperation. “She’s simply awful today,” I said to Mary. “I don’t know what’s got into her. She was fine yesterday, playing with the twins as if they were new dolls.”

  “Oh, they get these phases,” Mary said. “Look at the water now. I hate to go away. I could stay here forever. It’s been a perfect afternoon, hasn’t it?”

  Easter in England is a more important festival than it is in the States. For one thing, the schools close for a month, and for another, as has been pointed out by better writers, spring in England is more than a matter of sentiment. It is a joyous reminder that winter not only comes but goes. Maybe not by Eastertide, maybe not for weeks, but anyway, sooner or later, there comes a rapturous time when it is not quite so cold as it was yesterday. This year, Easter was almost warm. In the pure joy of this warmth I got up early to arrange the traditional symbols on the breakfast table— the cotton chickens in their baskets, the plastic eggs with a few knickknacks and saved-up ration chocolates inside, the hard-boiled eggs that the children had attempted to decorate, and, on each plate, a toy.

  “You can take some of the cotton chickens and rabbits,” I decreed at breakfast, “but the special things—those ducks with hats on, and the black bird—go back into moth balls for next Easter. They belong to the house.”

  One of the new decorations was the duck-with-hat pair—a large duck wearing a bonnet and a knitted shawl and a small one with a scrap of embroidered bib around its neck. Lorraine had not seen these objects when I bought them and brought them home; she picked them up now to examine them more closely.

  “They’re not yours,” Carola said in shrill tones. “They belong to the house.”

  All of us were surprised by the emphasis in her voice. Lorraine flushed. “Well, I can look at them, I suppose,” she said. Deliberately, in revenge, she played with the ducks through the meal, cuddling them, watching Carola maliciously. Carola kept staring at the ducks with jealous eyes; she couldn’t eat.

  “Carola, stop worrying about those ducks,” I said.

  “Well, they’re not Lorraine’s,” Carola insisted.

  “Never mind,” thundered her father. “Eat your egg and stop being nasty.”

  In Carola’s plastic egg was a tiny camera, which allegedly worked. I had, of course, bought it because I liked it myself. The camera was now passed from adult hand to adult hand, with appropriate exclamations.

  “Army stock,” I explained. “They’ve just been released.”

  As Lorraine’s turn came to examine it, Carola said sharply, “It’s mine!”

  This time there was no possibility of ignoring the matter tactfully, but we did ignore it, with a terrible silence. From the other end of the table my daughter’s eyes searched mine in agonized pleading. She knows she’s behaving disgracefully, I said to myself. What on earth is the matter? It might be simpler just to decide to dislike Carola, as Vincent had obviously done already. I played futilely with the notion, but a mother is not her own arbiter; I could not dislike Carola. Come what may, I was committed to her, no matter what the shame. I ignored her eyes and majestically led the retreat from the table. Behind us, tinted eggshells and discarded wrappings littered the cloth. With a joyous howl, Vincent pounced on the bow and arrows Lorraine had made for him and rushed out the front door. Carola started to follow, hesitated, glanced distrustfully at Lorraine, put down what she had been clutching—the duck with the bib—and then she, too, ran out.

  “Did you see that?” Lorraine demanded. “Isn’t she killing? Whatever’s the matter with her?”

  “I don’t know. Jealous of all these new children, maybe,” I said vaguely. “Whatever set her off, though, you carried on with it. You ought to be ashamed. Hanging on to that duck. A woman your age.”

  “I couldn’t help it, she was so awful,” Lorraine said.

  “She was awful,” I said. “She’s been awful since yesterday. I wonder—”

  The telephone rang, interrupting us.

  The day unfolds before the child as an immense, nearly endless journey, during which anything may happen. He does just see the end, far off on the horizon, but the path itself, leading toward bed in the dusk, is not at all visible. There will be lunch, in time; perhaps, years later, there may be tea. Like growing vegetables, the baby twins lived for the moment, but Vincent, worried by the superior wisdom of his years, by the brooding consciousness of going home to the city on the far-distant morrow, tried to forget his seniority in violent action.

  He shot arrows into the air; he collected pine cones and left them in a little heap on the lawn, next to his mother, sleeping on a rug in the sun; and then he ran off to look for birds’ nests. It was such a fine day that Nellie brought out her blond baby and left him, bouncing in his pram, under the hedge.

  “The damned place looks like a crêche,” said Charles, peering through the library window. “Won’t that baby of Nellie’s fall out?”

  “Yes, he always falls out,” I said. “Lord, what a mob of kids!”

  “It’s just as well we have this spell of fine weather,” the Major said. “I don’t think I could take it all indoors.” He sat down at his desk and prepared to lose himself in the seventeenth century, but a twentieth-century thought caught him and held him back.

  “Have you seen Carola lately?” he asked.

  “No. Have you?”

  “Well, she was reading to herself, moping in the corner of the day nursery. Hadn’t she better go out to play in the sun with the others?”

  I found Carola still in the corner, still reading, and drove her out of doors, following close behind to make sure she did not escape. Mary Toussaint had waked up an
d sat blinking on the rug as I came across the lawn. She smoothed her hair and caught Patricia as that little twin staggered by. “Let me take a look at you,” she said. “Baby, where ever did you get that bump? It’s turning plum color.”

  “Sais pas,” said Patricia.

  Carola, standing there, far away in another world, kicked at the turf. Vainly, I waited for her to go and play with somebody.

  “I don’t see why you didn’t tell me then,” I said, putting down my book and sitting up straight. “When was it did you say? Yesterday?”

  “On the beach before tea,” Lorraine said. She stood on the hearth, fidgeting as if she were in a hurry to be off. She talked in a hurry too. It is her way of being embarrassed. “I simply forgot to mention it later. Anyway, I didn’t know the bump would come up so dreadfully. You came along just afterward and called to us from the cliff, don’t you remember?”

  “Yes, of course. I still don’t understand,” I said. “Did Carola do it on purpose?”

  “Heavens, no!” Lorraine said sincerely, and forgot to fidget. “It wasn’t a bit like that. She’d been perfectly charming with the twins, giving Mariette a hand down the cliffs and all that—quite the little nurse. Then she began to throw stones, imitating Vincent, and Patricia ran into the way of one and got hit, that’s all. Patricia howled like a banshee, but you couldn’t hear her for the noise Carola put up. I really believe Carola thought she’d killed her. They’d both just got calmed down by the time you arrived, and I didn’t dare start Carola up again, that’s the truth of it. She’d have had hysterics again. I didn’t exactly lie, anyway. I said she’d hurt her foot. Well, she had hurt her foot, just before she threw the rock and hit Patricia.”

  “But it would have been better, I think, to tell me in front of her,” I said. “This way, don’t you see, you’ve told me a lie, or she thinks you have, and you’re a grownup, and—”

  “I meant to explain as soon as things had been calm for a bit,” Lorraine said. “I only wanted to protect her. Good heavens, it’s not all that important.”