Dark Hester/Chapter 3

ROBIN was in his little waterproof hood and cape, all shining in the rain, and her delight at seeing him was so great that she had not time for surprise. He was marvellously like Clive at the same age.—‘Mouse-face,’ she had used to say to her little son, tilting back the face to kiss it; and Robin’s hood framed the same broad brow and narrow chin. His eyes were darker than his father’s and his pallor more golden; but there was the same austerely sweet modelling of the cheek and lip, the same pale, bright hair. Yes, he, too, was the colour of amber, exquisite little creature.

And there went Hester’s rubber boots beside him; she still wore rubber boots in rainy weather and they certainly became her slender form, her small foot, her indolent and decisive gait. As she glanced up, behind her rain-driven pane, at Hester’s face, a phrase from a pitiful little tale of Maupassant’s came to her mind: ‘Elle est ben trop noire’ the old peasant mother had said of the proposed negress daughter-in-law, reiteration her only argument. What if, on first seeing Hester, she had relapsed to the same animal antipathy and said to Clive: ​‘Elle est ben trop noire’? Could it possibly have parted him from Hester? But Hester was not trop noire. It was absurd and malicious to say it. She was the nut-brown maid in type.—‘And as sound as a nut,’ Monica muttered. Her brooding loneliness set her mind singing to these chimes, but this involuntary tribute cheered her. She did not hate Hester if she thought her as sound as a nut. And, keeping her place at the window, she heard her say: ‘Come on, Robin;—don’t dawdle,’ in her rational, unadmonishing voice. Hester was a just and careful mother, but his grandmother felt sure that Robin must miss the ardent, playful improvisation and gaiety that had shone about his father’s childhood.

‘How perfectly delightful of you, my dear!’ Thus she heard herself greet Hester and felt the sane machinery of life close round and sustain her. Hester was kissing her cheek, she was kissing Hester’s. ‘And you walked from the station in all this downpour!—Well, Robin darling.’

‘We were prepared for the rain, and we enjoy it, don’t we, Robin?’ said Hester. ‘Robin was delighted to come. He is always glad to have tea with his Grannie.’

Set upon the background of her dark reminiscences, this remark showed Monica something of ​which she had not till then been aware. Hester was changed since that day of their first meeting. She was as assured, as competent as ever, but she was certainly kinder. Something of her repellent manner on the first day might be set down to girlish awkwardness, and perhaps, in spite of the assurance, she had really been a little frightened. It was possible, if difficult, to believe it.

‘May I see the goldfish?’ said Robin. He was dressed in a little suit of green. Monica did not think it became him. Clive, she had always dressed in blue or white.

‘You may; but let me have a look at you first; the goldfish will wait.’ She drew him to her side while Hester leaned to the fire and held out her hands to the blaze. She had taken off the boots in the hall and showed slender legs and low-heeled shoes; her dark coat and skirt, sparse and formal, gave her again the boyish air, though there was nothing really masculine in Hester’s demeanour. Mingling with the terse competency, Monica felt always an undertone, repellent to her, of something soft and smouldering, and over Robin’s head she cast an oblique glance of the old distaste at her daughter-in-law’s nonchalant form.

‘Why doesn’t our room turn round like this, ​Mummy?’ said Robin. He leaned against his grandmother’s knee and looked about him. ‘I like it. You can’t tell what’s on the other side, down the steps.’

‘I think I can,’ said Hester. Her reasonableness was only just not a snub and for a moment Robin was checked by it; but he took up after a moment: ‘Not if you didn’t know already. If you didn’t know already, there might be robbers down there; or tigers;—or just a kitten asleep on a cushion.’ His fancy as it took substance widened his gaze.

‘Well, I shouldn’t care for robbers in my drawing-room, or tigers either and you’d be the first to be frightened by them if they were there,’ Hester re-joined, turning her head to measure her child with a scientific eye as though hidden meanings might lurk in these images.

‘But they wouldn’t really be there,’ Robin re-joined, quite as reasonably as his mother, and without her dryness. ‘That’s what’s so nice; Grannie might have changed everything and one wouldn’t know.—I do like this room, Grannie,’ he repeated. ‘It’s like that queer room on the ship you took me to.’

Monica’s one remaining brother was an Indian judge and Robin had gone with her to see him off ​that spring. ‘It is rather like the saloon of a ship, with the windows all round and the low ceiling,’ she said. ‘And with such a quantity of rain outside one might fancy oneself on the waves!’

‘I should call this the cosiest of suburban rooms and anything more dismal than the saloon of a ship I can’t conceive of!’ laughed Hester, taking out her cigarette, while Robin, feeling her not at all in the game, whispered to his grandmother: ‘Perhaps there’s a whale round the corner that’s been washed on deck.’

‘Let’s go see!’ she said. Hester no more understood a child’s mind than she understood the drawing-room, which was neither cosy nor suburban. She was glad she did not; glad that Robin whispered. She took him by the hand and led him off and as they turned the corner and went down the steps it seemed to her that she and Robin escaped into fairyland leaving Hester behind them. Tranquil, pale, the rain-swept hedgerow elms outside making it the quieter, the lower room received them as though with a gentle finger laid on its lips, and in their bowl on the lacquer table the goldfish glanced and glittered, living so determinedly their mysterious, circumscribed life. Robin stopped short on seeing them. ‘It’s not a whale:—it’s ​goldfish,’ he whispered, turning up to her a face Clive’s to exactitude in its wistful archness. She stooped and kissed the starry forehead. She felt her love passionately flow over the little boy, sweeping him and Clive together in its tide, the past and the present. ‘Much prettier than a whale and much easier to take care of,’ she said.

‘Could you take care of a whale?’ Robin questioned, still with the archness that showed his recognition of fairyland and its code.

‘Not very well in here;—but you might in the garden — on such a rainy day as this the poor thing would hardly miss the sea!’ laughed Monica.

‘But I like these better. There are no whales at the Zoo. There wouldn’t be room for them.—They’d reach out into the lane if they were in the garden, Grannie; you couldn’t keep them there.’ And as, absorbed now in reality he stood beside her, he added: ‘Don’t you think they have dear little faces? They look so happy as they go round and round and they open and shut their mouths as though they were singing.’

‘If you ask me, I always think they are melancholy mad, said Hester’s voice, devastatingly. She had come to the steps and stood there above them, her cigarette in her hand, looking down. ‘I ​don’t like to see them going round and round. Their cheerfulness doesn’t deceive me.’

Monica felt something of a shock as she heard these words. It was almost as though Hester were reading her thoughts of an hour ago. ‘Aren’t even the fish to be spared psycho-analysis?’ she asked.

‘Well, since they are all repression, I think we need hardly waste our time on them! They offer no problem!’ Hester returned with a slight laugh. ‘They are melancholy mad, poor things—as anything shut up with nothing whatever to do must be. I do hate to see animals shut up.’ She tossed the end of her cigarette into one of Monica’s Chinese bowls, took out another, tapped it against the back of her hand and lighted it as she stood there.

‘If you can call them shut up,’ said Monica. Robin had drawn close to her and was gazing, very earnestly now, at the ambiguous fish.

‘They are as shut up as the lions at the Zoo, and those always make me feel sick,’ said Hester, turning away.

Monica and the child stood in a stillness curiously shared.

‘Are they really unhappy, do you think?’ Robin asked, whispering again.

‘Not one bit, darling,’ she assured him—though ​not herself. ‘They have been here for three years and get bigger and fatter all the time. They would pine if they were unhappy.’

‘But why does Mummy think they’re unhappy?—Could they make a noise to say if they were?’

‘No: they couldn’t make a noise—but they could move slowly and look dull;—that’s the way a fish would show unhappiness;—and not care to eat ants’ eggs.—They had a splendid feed of ants’ eggs only a little while ago and you should have seen them snap them up.’

Still Robin leaned against her and still he gazed at the fish. ‘But I sometimes eat my tea when I’m very unhappy,’ he said in the lowest voice. He trusted her completely; he was hers completely; he would never have said it to his mother—or why the lowered voice? For a moment the selfish joy of her proved possessorship filled her heart, then drew away to give place to apprehension. ‘Unhappy? Are you unhappy, darling? Why? Tell me why,’ she said and looking up at her with Clive’s eyes he said, faltering a little, ‘I don’t know.’

‘That’s enough about the fish.—Don’t let Robin get sentimental about them,’ called Hester from above with kindly peremptoriness. ‘I’ve something to tell you, Monica.’ She had always, from the ​beginning, called her mother-in-law by her Christian name, expressing to Monica’s ear indifference rather than intimacy.

Holding Robin very tightly by the hand, wondering, as she came, about acquired and innate instincts and their inheritance; wondering whether a seed of Clive’s dark time had drifted into the soul of his son—Monica obeyed the summons, drawing Robin to her knee as she took her chair near the fireplace and looked up at her daughter-in-law. As a little boy, Clive, too, had known moods, she remembered, of grief and panic. But she had been there to shield and soothe and understand. He did not hide from her when he was a little boy; as Robin—she felt sure of it—would hide from Hester.

‘I’ve something to tell you, that will please you,’ Hester was repeating. She had taken up her position again at the fireplace, but now she leaned back against the mantelpiece, raising her cigarette to her lips, drawing at it, then holding it off as if for scrutiny, her eyes half closed, her brows slightly knitted. She looked at her cigarette as if its taste disappointed her;—Monica had often noted the trick. She had never seen anyone smoke so constantly and with so little air of relish.

‘It’s a very important decision Clive and I have ​come to,’ Hester went on, ‘mainly because of you—but because of ourselves as well. We are tired of London in some ways. I don’t think it’s very good for Robin, or for Clive either. He still gets those horrid headaches from time to time.—And since last spring we’ve had our eye on The Crofts—the cottage on the hill, you know, under the wood:—and now we’ve bought it.—Yes, actually.—I thought you’d be pleased. We have been very crafty about it all and said nothing to you lest it should fall through and you should be disappointed.—There’s been the London house to get rid of and endless documents to seal and sign. But it’s all done now in law and order, and you won’t be lonely any more.’ And Hester benevolently surveyed her, very much, it flashed over Monica, as she might have surveyed the goldfish, released and making off down stream. She saw the picture of the hurrying fish, golden and glad, and for a moment felt their astonished gladness in herself, before she felt a deep drop of dread. It was not Clive coming back; it was Hester. She had run away; to be safe; to keep safe with Clive; to hide from Clive; and now Hester followed her. No; the goldfish were not released; they were drawn out of their safe retreat in a net.

​‘My dear—what wonderful news,’ she said slowly, looking down at Robin’s head.

‘It is rather, isn’t it? We are rather proud of ourselves. Even Robin didn’t know.’ Hester tapped her cigarette against the mantelpiece and again frowned at the tip. ‘You are coming to live near Grannie, Robin; isn’t that rather jolly?’

Robin, making no reply, turned his eyes up to his grandmother. It was as though he felt all the unuttered things in her, all the things Hester would never feel.

‘Isn’t it wonderful; you can see the goldfish every day,’ she said to him softly. She wanted horribly to cry; to be alone so that she could think.

‘Not if they’re unhappy,’ said Robin, gazing at her. ‘Not if they’re going to die.’

‘But they’re not going to die. Why should they die? We’ll make a little pond for them—since Mummy thinks they’re unhappy in the bowl—and have a fountain to play over them. Wouldn’t you like a fountain to play with? Like the princess, with the three golden balls?’

Robin’s eyes still studied her. ‘But Jeremy died,’ he said. ‘And he was very happy.—Is it true that he’ll never, never come back—however much we want him?’

​‘When things are dead they never come back, Robin; I’ve told you that already.’ Hester checked the sentimental tendency with decision. ‘It’s very kind of Grannie to say she’ll make you a pond and a fountain to play with, and the fish will love it, of course. Jeremy died because he was old and when things are old it’s much better they should go to sleep. He had a very happy life and went to sleep. It’s silly, you know, to go on thinking about things that can’t be helped. Think of all the nice things that are going to happen instead. You are to have a garden of your own, as well as Grannie’s, and if you like you shall have a dog just like Jeremy.’

Robin sat, very straight, on his grandmother’s knee, his eyes downcast, his little face firmly set, and Monica saw that he was frightened.

‘It’s such a nice garden, The Crofts’s,’ she said, diverting Hester’s attention from Robin’s case, shielding him, giving him time—with Clive she had always known that it was merely a question of gently giving him time.—‘They have done some very funny things to it—the good people who lived there—but it’s charmingly placed under the hill and almost anything could be made of it.—You are quite sure it won’t tire Clive to go up and ​down every day—or cut you off too much from all your London occupations?’

‘Not a bit more tiring than it is to get from Chelsea to the city; and we shall be able to afford a car now that will take us to the station in ten minutes. He will have tennis here, and he loves that so, and I shall manage perfectly;—but, you know, we were thinking of you even more than of ourselves. We didn’t like to think of you all alone down here.’ Hester wanted to make it clear. It was the second time she had said it.

‘I know. It’s too dear of you both. How soon will you move in?’

‘We think we can manage in six weeks’ time; by the end of September. Eddie and I and Marcia Jessup are coming down on Saturday to go over the rooms and Beppo Gales, too, perhaps. He says he’ll decorate the dining-room for us if it’s a possible shape.—We’ll call for you, shall we?—and have tea here afterwards.’

‘Beppo’ Gales was a young painter whose fame, in Monica’s eyes, rested upon impudence rather than achievement. He dealt with the human form singularly displayed and distorted and had been one of the young people on the stairs who had called Clive the cigarette-holder. Grievous to think that ​he was to decorate Clive’s dining-room and that to the end of her days she must see, at every meal she partook of at The Crofts, visageless, vast-thighed forms bearing grisly fruits and flowers on their heads. ‘That will be delightful,’ she murmured.

‘It will be nice for Celia, too, our coming, won’t it?’ said Hester.

The tea-table was now placed before Monica and she still kept Robin on her lap, saying to him as she warmed the tea-pot: ‘Will you measure in the tea for me, Robin?’ Robin, she knew, had been on the verge of tears but was now master of himself.

‘Clive can take her and Miss what’s-her-name out in the car for drives,’ Hester went on. ‘There’s no risk of infection now for Robin, is there?’

‘Not the least.’ Monica heard that she spoke dryly. ‘Her lung healed before she left Switzerland.—Clive mustn’t have her on his mind. Norah Unwin has an uncle coming to stay who has a car. He is looking for a place here, too.’

‘Oh, well; in that case Clive can certainly have her much less on his mind. He was very much upset by her breakdown. He’s so fond of her, you know. Lucky we got The Crofts in time if there’s a competitor in the field.’

​‘He wants to rent, not to buy, I gather. He was thinking of the Old Manor Farm, Norah said.’

‘Well, we certainly shouldn’t have competed with him for that. It’s a dismal place,’ said Hester. ‘Now drink your milk and eat your bread-and-butter, Robin.—We’ve not much time before our train and you mustn’t be late for bed.’