The Fountain Overflows (2 page)

“Good-bye,” Mamma cried to him. “And write! Write! Only a postcard, if you are too busy for a letter. But write!”

We watched the trap take off and cover the stretch of road that ran to the end of the valley, and go over the pass and vanish. That did not take long. The boy who drove was getting the best out of his horse; people always showed off in front of Papa. Then Richard Quin pulled at Mamma’s skirts and told her in his babble that she was not to cry and that he wanted a drink. We all went back to the parlour and adored him while he sat on Mamma’s lap and gulped down some milk, shaking all over with the effort and pleasure of gulping, like a puppy at a saucer.

“Who is Mr. Morpurgo?” asked Mary. “It is a funny name. It sounds like a conjurer. ‘The Great Morpurgo.’” She realized quite well that Mamma had been disturbed by something this unknown man had done, but she was not simply being tactless. We were quite little but we were already cunning as foxes. We had to be. We had to sniff the wind and decide from which quarter the next misfortune was coming, and make our own provisions against it, which were often not quite what our parents would have approved. When the trouble began in
The Caledonian,
whatever it might be, Mary and I thought it prudent to tell the children of the people in the next flat that Papa had had an offer to go to a better post somewhere else. Thus we secured that at a time when Mamma was unhappy she was not treated by her neighbours with less respect but with more; and anyway, as we pointed out to each other, it turned out to be true, for here he was going to the
Lovegrove Gazette.
We had found out a sensible way of behaving, and we were not going to drop it because of adult fussiness.

“Mr. Morpurgo,” said Mamma, “is someone we should bless all our lives. He is a very rich man, a banker, I think, and ever since he met your Papa, on a ship somewhere, he has done everything he could for him. He gave your Papa his position in Durban after the proprietors of his paper in Cape Town behaved so strangely. They made no allowances whatsoever. And now that
The Caledonian
has proved such a disappointment to your Papa, Mr. Morpurgo has made him editor of this paper he owns in South London. I do not know what would have happened to us all if he had not come forward. Though I should not say that. You must never think that your Papa would not find some way of providing for us all. He will never,” she said, tilting the cup so that Richard Quin would get the last drop, “fail us.”

“What does Mr. Morpurgo look like?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Mamma. “I don’t think I ever met him. But your Papa has known him for a long time. He admires your Papa very much. Everybody does except people who are envious of him.”

Cordelia asked, “Why should anybody envy him? We have so little money.”

“Oh, they envy him his brains, his appearance, everything about him,” sighed Mamma, “and then, he is always right when everybody else is wrong. A situation,” she said sternly, fixing her blazing black eyes on each of us in turn, “in which none of you are likely to find yourselves.” Then she grew soft again, and looked down on Richard Quin as he held the cup almost upside down in an effort to get the last drops. “No, my lamb. When you make a great noise eating you must stop, you are doing it the wrong way, unless you stop and do it without making a noise you will turn into a little pig, and then you will have to go and live in a sty, and though you might like that your poor sisters would be distracted. They would want to be with you, but there would be no room for them and you must consider them, they are so good to you. Oh, my little lamb, I wonder what instrument you are going to play. It is irritating not to know.”

For of course we all played something. Just as all the people in Papa’s family in Ireland were soldiers or soldiers’ wives, so everybody in Mamma’s West Highland family was a musician, and always had been, for at least five generations back. They had left no great names in music, perhaps because they had always died quite young; but Mamma’s grandfather had gone to Austria and played in the orchestra of the Viennese Opera, and had spoken to Beethoven and Schubert, and her father had been Kapellmeister at a small German ducal court, her dead brother had been quite a well-known conductor and composer, and she would have been a famous pianist, indeed she was already well known by her middle twenties, when one night, just as she was going on the platform at a concert in Geneva, she had been handed a telegram which told her that her favourite brother had died of sunstroke in India. She had played the programme out and then had gone back to her hotel and fallen into a sort of fever, which had lasted for weeks and left her so melancholy that she had gone on a journey round the world to recover, as companion to an elderly woman who had admired her playing. In Ceylon she had met Papa, who was just then leaving a good position he had held on a tea-plantation. They married and went to South Africa to another good position that some relative of his found him. But he was unfortunate there too, Mamma had never told us exactly how. It did not matter, however. He had been writing for some time, and had discovered a talent for it, and he very easily got a post as leader-writer on a Cape Town newspaper. And Mamma had had all of us, and had been very worried, and now she was past forty, and her fingers were getting stiff, and her nerves were bad, and she would never go back to playing again. But she was teaching us to play, and though Cordelia was no good and she had given her up as hopeless when she was seven, Mary and I were, she thought, all right. And somehow we knew Richard Quin was going to be all right too. He managed the triangle, on which we all were started, quite well.

“I don’t believe it will be the piano,” Mamma said, scrutinizing him narrowly, as if it were written in the grain of one’s skin what instrument one would play. And there was some sense in it. Even then one could not imagine Richard Quin sitting down in front of a piano, which is a forthright, monumental instrument, bigger than the person who plays it, and resistant to all relationships except those affected through the keyboard, though one could imagine him picking up a violin or a clarinet. “And you, Mary and Rose,” she went on, “the Erard in the corner is old but it is in tune. There is a man comes out from Pennycuick every six months and tunes it. Fate is on our side. The Weirs say that you can play it when you like except on Sundays. Let there be no excuses, you must practise just as regularly as you do at home. And while we are here I will give you lessons five times a week instead of three. I will have more time.”

“And what about me?” said Cordelia.

Mary and I looked at her tenderly, though we so often hated her, and there was a pause before Mamma answered, “Oh, you will have your lessons like the others, never fear.”

Cordelia had no idea that she was not musical. When Mamma had stopped giving her piano lessons, a little girl in the house next door was studying the violin, and she had insisted on learning too, and had ever since then shown an extreme and mistaken industry. She had a true ear, indeed she had absolute pitch, which neither Mamma nor Mary nor I had, which was a terrible waste, and she had supple fingers, she could bend them right back to the wrist, and she could read anything at sight. But Mamma’s face crumpled, first with rage, and then, just in time, with pity, every time she heard Cordelia laying the bow over the strings. Her tone was horribly greasy, and her phrasing always sounded like a stupid grown-up explaining something to a child. Also she did not know good music from bad, as we did, as we had always done.

It was not Cordelia’s fault that she was unmusical. Mamma had often explained that to us. Children were like their father’s family or their mother’s, and Cordelia had taken her inheritance from Papa. That gave her some advantages, it did indeed. Mary had black hair and I had brown, and so had many other little girls. But though Papa was so dark, there was red hair in his family, and Cordelia’s head was covered with short red-gold curls, which shone in the light and made people turn round in the street. There was something more to it than mere heredity, too, which made it harder to bear. It was at Papa’s insistence that Mamma kept Cordelia’s hair short at a time when that was a long-forgotten fashion, not to be renewed for years. At his home in Ireland there had been a portrait of his Aunt Lucy, who went to Paris just after the Napoleonic wars and had herself painted by Baron Gérard in a chiton and a leopard-skin, with her hair dressed in the fashion known as
à la Bacchante,
and as Cordelia was very like her he got Mamma to get her curls cut in as nearly the same style as puzzled hairdressers in South Africa and Edinburgh could manage.

Mary and I were not pleased about this. It made us feel that Cordelia was not only closer to Papa than we were, owing to an unfair decision of nature, but that she was also an object on which he had worked to bring her up to the standards of his taste. He had not done that to us. Nor were we worked on by anybody else. With all this piano-playing, Mary and I had no time, and Mamma had no time either, to subject us to any process that would turn us into finished articles, we were raw material. It really was cruel that we had to play the piano as well as do so much, that Mamma had to go shopping and help with the housework and deal with Papa’s worries so that she was never composed and dressed like other mammas, that we had to go to school and always struck our teachers as careless and hurried. Yet it was piano-playing that set our accounts right. For though there was red hair in Papa’s family, there was not a shred of musical talent, and we would rather have been musical with Mamma than have red-gold curls and make utter fools of ourselves by playing the violin as Cordelia did. We were sorry for Cordelia, particularly now, when Papa, from whom she derived such interest as she possessed, had gone away for six weeks. But all the same she was an ass to think she could play the violin, it was as if Mary and I thought we had red-gold curls.

The air of the room swayed with the tides of liking and dislike, forgiveness and resentment, and then the farmer’s wife came in and asked if we would like to see the mare and foal which her husband had just brought back from a sale at a hill farm, and we passed over into the world of the animals. But here too there were tides, nothing was stable. First of all we were introduced to the collie dogs, who were made to sniff us and lick us, so that they would recognize us as members of the household and give us neither bark nor bite. This we did not enjoy because we disapproved of animals so abandoned to ill will that ceremonies had to be performed before they would consent to show common civility to inoffensive people like Mamma and us. “But they are watch-dogs,” Mamma reminded us, “they protect the farm from thieves,” but we jeered, “What thieves?” and looked round the amphitheatre of the clear green hills triumphantly, as if the innocence of the stage-setting proved the innocence of the drama. It is strange how it was in the air in those days, the belief that war, crime, and all cruelty were about to vanish from the face of the earth, even little girls knew it to be a promise that was going to be kept.

Then the farmer’s wife pointed to some fields on the hillside, spotted brown with cattle, and told us not to go there, because a bull was running with the cows. We had no quarrel with that, we must have felt that the mysterious safe-conduct we had been given by the universe did not extend to bulls, our mouths went dry when we thought of what it would be like to be caught in those fields, particularly if we had Richard Quin with us. But in the byres the young stock stood, the calves that were not yet yearlings, as civilized and friendly as we could have wished to be ourselves, and there was a two-day-old calf, lax on the ground like a great skein of fawn-coloured silk, which was frightened of us as we would have been of the dogs and the bull, had we not anaesthetized fear in us, from fear that we might give support to the lie that girls are not so brave as boys. Feminism too was in the air, even in the nursery air. But the farm cats spat at us, and we had to draw back our hands, brave or not, while they glared at us, coarse as burglars, coarse as Charles Peace, not like cats at all. “Remember,” cried Mamma, “the poor things have to fight rats, they could not do it if they let themselves be gentle. It would be a luxury they cannot have.” Was the world kind or was it not, was the farm going to be a safe place for Richard Quin?

But in a loose-box we found the new mare and her foal and knew there was hope. Her long straight forelock, falling between her two big ears, gave her the look of a plain woman wearing an ugly hat, her gaze was anxious as if she were human and could count, she towered over us but it was not imaginable that she would organize her strength against us, her long-legged foal was shy as if it had been warned not to make a noise and irritate the people in this new place where their lot must lie. She made me think of a widow with her orphan child, unresentful and willing to serve, but sad, whom I had once seen in one of the registry offices which my mother sometimes visited. (For though we had so little money we had a servant, in those days even poor households had servants, they shared their poverty with some girl quite destitute.) We went on into the stables, and could see nothing through the darkness except the white stars on the standing horses’ foreheads, the long white blazes on their faces, their white stockings, and a white pattern of light traced high on the wall by a mullioned window. This farm had been built among the ruins of a medieval castle which had been a meeting-place of the Knights Templar, and this stable was where they had dined. After a time we could see the rolling of the mild nervous eyes which showed these horses had wills if they chose to use them, the barrel-bulk of their girdled bodies, the tree-trunk straightness of their forelegs, the cunning elastic spring of their hind legs, the huge spread of their round feet, all the strength that stirred so little and so much more mildly than it might have, had there been malice here. These were kind creatures. We saw two mice dallying in the litter underneath one giant, and knew it was proved.

The journey, and parting from Papa, and meeting all these animals, made us so tired that we went to bed only a little later than Richard Quin, while it was still light, though usually we stayed up to the last moment that we were allowed. Cordelia and Mary and I slept in the same room, Mary and I in a double bed with a high mahogany headboard carved with plump fruit and flowers, and Cordelia in a camp-bed at its foot. Nobody could sleep with Cordelia, she so often threw herself about in her dreams, calling out orders. Mary and I were very comfortable at night, we used to snuggle down with one of us burying her face in the other’s back and pressing her tummy against the other’s behind, and both knowing nothing more till morning. Mary was tall and slim, in a way she looked grown-up though she was a child, she was collected and calculating, at the piano she could work out any problem of fingering quietly while I would rush at it and get excited and cry; but with me she was always soft and yielding, we were like two little bears together.