Letters From Constance Read online

‘I’m sure I never spoke to my mother like that.’

  ‘But your generation wasn’t very aware of the patterns of social behaviour.’

  ‘We were far more socially conscious, believe me.’

  ‘I don’t mean the never filling a teacup to the brim, or tongs with the sugar and using a butter knife. I mean what is actually going on between people. People in groups compete to establish dominance.’

  Stephen said, ‘Thus spake Cathleen ni Houlihan.’

  ‘Don’t interfere in things you are too young to understand, little brother.’

  ‘She with the fire in her eyes . . .’

  I said, ‘I want you both in the kitchen, please.’

  ‘When you’re losing an argument you always resort to the kitchen,’ Kathleen said.

  ‘Are you winning then, Kathleen?’ Stephen chanted. ‘Is it winning you are?’

  She pushed him into the hall where they wrestled, suddenly serious, faces devoid of expression, like chess players contemplating which piece to annihilate. I hate to see this grim application to violence.

  ‘Where do you get these ideas from?’ I asked Kathleen when I had her installed at the sink. She shrugged her shoulders, her mind now occupied with getting the washing up done so that she could go out with her friend Stella. She has been reading Doris Lessing recently; I suppose that may be the answer.

  I find this all rather distressing. Friendship is something I value. Whatever else I am, I am a good, cherishing friend. It may be that I expect things from Harpo that I wouldn’t expect of my married friends. I admit that I put myself out for them in a way I don’t for her. But this is natural, surely? One person can be absorbed into the family in a way that two cannot. Harpo should regard it as a mark of intimacy and a privilege that I don’t fuss over her. When she arrived I said to her, ‘My children tell me I’m getting bossy and not considerate of my friends’ feelings. How do you find me?’

  She grinned and said, ‘Bossy and not considerate of my feelings, of course.’ She added, without rancour, ‘Well, it’s your home and you are very much in charge. I appreciate that.’

  This is not how I see myself. I see myself as tolerant, open-handed, relaxed, welcoming, accepting of all comers, of whom there are many in and out of this house. I have a few house rules, yes, and I don’t like anyone to get under my feet when I’m working, and I have my own way of doing things and. . . . Am I very much in charge. Sheila? Formidably so? I am so fond of Harpo. I hope I haven’t made her feel I don’t value her.

  I resolved I would bite out my tongue rather than say one unkind word about this ghastly Hugh. In the event, it proved possible to be pleasant to the man. He is tall and thin with crinkly pale gold hair, a long delicate face, vague blue eyes, a weak mouth and a general appearance of fragility. But not the kind whose principles prevent his accepting hospitality. He wined and dined well without being greedy and squared up to long walks on the Downs. He was good with the children. It was easy to see where the charm lay. He fits in and makes an amiable, undemanding companion; there will always be a place for him by someone’s fireside.

  Let me know about your Christmas and tell me - are all children as critical of their parents as mine are of me?

  Love,

  Constance

  Sussex

  March, 1967

  My dear Sheila,

  It was such a surprise to hear your voice on the telephone that I fear I didn’t respond adequately. You were uncharacteristically incoherent. Something is wrong, isn’t it? You have been angry about the school for a long time, but this was more than anger.

  I was left with a jumble of impressions which I later arranged into what may be an erroneous sequence of events. Are you telling me that the Headmistress colluded with the master of the local hunt in an attack on a bunch of hippies who had had the temerity to camp on a field near the school and that you were witness to the scattering of the campers and the mangling of two of their dogs? I’m not clear whether the field is owned by the school or whether it was sufficiently close to the school grounds for the hippy goings-on to represent a moral danger to the pupils (or merely an affront to the Headmistress’s sensibilities).

  Fergus and I had an argument about this. I maintained that the question of ownership was important and he said this was an attitude all too typical of a property-owning culture. To hear him talk one would think he was born in a field and educated in a hedge school.

  Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, it has obviously greatly upset you. I wanted to ring you back, but couldn’t find the telephone number of your friend in the village. When I did find it, you had returned home. Your friend sounded troubled about you. ‘She’s not used to country ways,’ she said gently, as if the beating up of unauthorised campers were a time-honoured rural ritual. ‘People feel very strongly about the land. But it was dreadful that the dogs were savaged - and, of course, she saw it happen.’ I suspect you have a sympathiser there but not an ally.

  Let me know how you’re feeling now. Another, less incoherent, telephone call would be very welcome.

  My love,

  Constance

  P.S. Fergus says you have only to say the word and he will set camp on the lawn of the master of the hunt.

  Sussex

  May, 1967

  My dear Sheila,

  Reports of strange goings-on in Gloucestershire are reaching me.

  First, you tell me that the battle of the hippies is still being waged. I must admit to finding it a rather alarming phenomenon and I can understand that, pathetic or otherwise, local people have the feeling the country is drifting towards anarchy. You say the hippy kind of loose living is nothing to compare with what goes on within the stone walls of many a picturesque farm cottage. I must bow to your superior knowledge.

  Now, in today’s post, comes a distressed letter from Linnie telling me that you offered yourself as a witness when the case went before the magistrates, the Chairman of the Bench also being Chairman of the Governors. She enclosed a cutting from the local paper which suggests that you made some rather wild statements and subsequently attempted to interrupt the proceedings of the court. Fortunately, the fact that you misappropriated the John of Gaunt speech from Richard II convinced the beaks that you were not responsible for your actions. Can it really be true that you were hustled out of court shouting, ‘This fortress bulk by gentry to ensure/Though wits be feeble privilege prevails . . .’?

  I long to hear your version of events and to know the outcome - did you get your resignation in before you were sacked?

  Love from your law-abiding Constance and unstinted admiration from Fergus

  Sussex

  May, 1967

  My dear Sheila,

  I had no idea, so confused was poor Linnie’s letter, that you were really ill. You say you knew at the time that it was a kind of madness, but had not recognised it as madness itself. A purifying madness. The fact that it was followed by a complete collapse - whereas you had expected to feel free as never before - does nothing to detract from its efficacy. Would anything less have convinced you that you cannot carry on at that school? You have not lost your way, my love; you are finding it with every leaden minute that passes.

  Don’t fret Linnie. Let her nurse you. I think you are mistaken in thinking that she is glad of a pretext for being unemployed; she worked hard at the Guildhall and it won’t hurt her to have a break before she looks for work. It’s good for her to have this opportunity to show her love for you. Cherish the time with her.

  I will try to come down soon. In the meantime, we all send our love to you and Linnie,

  Constance

  Sussex

  June, 1967

  My poor darling.

  It was heart-breaking to see you so frail, face all eyes and bone and hair snowy. You say the flakes have been falling for years, but I never noticed a single one. No matter. You have a strong thatch, this whiteness will be becoming once you are well again.

  I have been thinking abou
t you so much since I returned. You, usually so quick to the point, to fear company because you get left behind when words come from all corners of the room; you, to whom disputation was a delight, to lie in bed vainly trying to reconstruct conversations so as to arrive at the meaning, upset when you don’t agree with an opinion, the overworked brain stuffed with cotton wool. These are dark times, indeed.

  Rest, close your ears to conversation, ask no question of your brain, forget the time, the day, the place. Watch the clouds move across the window. The mind will heal slowly.

  You will be in my thoughts and prayers day and night.

  Love,

  Constance

  Sussex

  August, 1967

  My dear Sheila,

  You plead for news because you are tired of lying in bed with nothing to do except watch the clouds drifting across the sky. I had thought quiet would be good for you; but since you ask, the Byrnes’ lives are not short of incident.

  Dominic, my first-born, who at one time my mother thought might well become a priest, is living in sin in a rented room in the seamier part of Holland Park. My mother says he may still become a priest, but I would rather he made an honest woman of the girl, Angela. I am so far gone in middle-class morality that I am not prepared to have them sleep together in our house. I explained this to them in a civilised way - separate bedrooms or the nine- thirty back to London. Fergus, rather to my surprise, didn’t say, ‘Your mother feels . . .’ but ‘We feel . . .’ I was so grateful to him I didn’t attend to what it was he actually told them about our feelings, but he must have put it quite well because they stayed, in separate bedrooms, and during the day wandered off into the countryside to do I care not what. We all got on very well.

  In my heart (or whatever region it is where these things are worked out - it doesn’t seem to be the brain, in my case) I’m not sure that Dominic is wrong. But it’s not my way and I have seven children and can’t at my age start to adapt to seven different life styles. The attitudes of the young are no more attractive in a middle-aged woman than long hair and miniskirts. A line has to be drawn somewhere - in this case, outside the spare room with the double bed.

  While I was in a state of moral confusion, Angela’s mother came down to look us over. She was a haughty, disparaging woman, intimidatingly well dressed in a linen suit the colour of milk chocolate. Displeasure gave her face a slightly bilious hue. She was very much on her guard; but there was something about her, perhaps the need to be on her guard, which my mother would have described as ‘not quite’. She looked round our sitting-room, which was at its best, french windows open on to a tangle of honeysuckle, as if each piece of furniture might give cause for offence.

  ‘You have a lot of space here, haven’t you?’ she said, frowning.

  ‘It doesn’t seem like it when all the children are home.’

  ‘Our house is very compact.’

  The only children who were at home were Stephen and Cuillane. No human being is completely predictable, and on this of all days my quietest child was in the garden learning to play her brother’s drums, while he marched round the lawn doing his impression of Hitler invading the Rhineland.

  ‘What do your neighbours make of this?’ she asked.

  ‘They are out for the day. If it irritates you I can tell them to stop.’

  She was not prepared to admit to irritation. Instead, she addressed herself to the painting of tinkers in Connemara which hangs over the mantelpiece. ‘Times are changing, of course; but this isn’t the kind of thing we expected of Angela.’ She said this not to invite sympathy or an exchange of confidences, but to let it be known that their expectations were of a special order. When I said I could appreciate her concern, she looked affronted. As we were not to discuss our concerns it was difficult to know how to proceed.

  ‘You used to live in East Molesey, I believe?’ I said, with some notion that if you trace a person back to their roots they become explicable, if not likeable. ‘I worked in Twickenham. A long time ago, during the war.’

  ‘We moved from there. It wasn’t what it was. People built a bungalow on the field next to our house. They had gnomes in the garden.’ For the first time she looked me full in the face; it was so important to her to establish that she was a cut above gnomes.

  I said, ‘How awful’, but it wasn’t heartfelt enough to make a bond between us. I took to the kitchen and left her with our photograph album. Cuillane and Stephen joined us for tea. I was amused to note that, nonchalantly though they had accepted Dominic’s affair, they were embarrassed in front of Angela’s mother.

  ‘Though you might not have thought it from that uproar in the garden, Cuillane is the studious one in our family,’ I said, sacrificing my child in time of adversity. ‘When she goes to university . . .’

  ‘Ah, but she will have to pass her exams before she can do that, won’t she?’ Angela, we were reminded, was at London University; any talk of university would, therefore, be regarded as territorial infringement. When she felt she had made the position sufficiently clear, she relented enough to ask Cuillane, ‘And what are you studying?’

  ‘Classics.’

  ‘We weren’t allowed to read anything else when I was at school. Woe betide any girl who was caught with a copy of The Rosary or The Mistress of Shenstone. What are you reading at the moment?’

  ‘Thucydides.’

  She examined the cake on her plate and pushed it to one side. ‘I see.’ She looked towards the french windows, chin high.

  Stephen said, ‘I’m going to read history.’

  She did not ask him what he was reading at present. She was afraid we would score off her again.

  ‘But what I really want is to be a drummer.’

  ‘I hope you’re better than your sister.’ It was a response, tart, but definitely a response.

  ‘Come out in the garden and I’ll show you.’

  Unexpectedly, she accepted his invitation.

  ‘She didn’t like me, did she?’ Cuillane said. It is seldom she arouses hostility in anyone.

  ‘She thought we were too clever by half.’

  ‘I don’t see anything clever in reading Thucydides.’

  Every time I see her reading Greek I am astonished by her cleverness, but I can see that to her it is all a matter of set books. ‘Do you enjoy it?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yes. It helps one to understand how the European mind was formed.’ She got up and went to the window. ‘He really is good, isn’t he? Do you think he will become a drummer?’

  ‘I hope not. It’s such a rackety life.’

  ‘She’s loving it. Look at her. She’s really loving it.’

  As he drummed, her feet stepped to the rhythm. This was not the jigging about of joints by which I acknowledge rhythm; she knew exactly what she was doing with heel, toe, hips.

  ‘My husband and I once won a quickstep competition at the Hammersmith Palais,’ she said when she returned to the sitting- room. She smoothed down her immaculate skirt. ‘That was a long time ago, of course.’ She appended the ‘of course’ as if it were a rebuke intended to curb whatever thoughts I might have on the matter.

  ‘But you still dance?’ I persisted.

  ‘It doesn’t do. My husband is in insurance. One of the old-fashioned, reliable City firms. It doesn’t expect its senior staff to make art exhibition of themselves. The first company dance we went to, we did the rumba and they cleared the floor for us. People applauded; but we could see it hadn’t gone down well at the top table.’

  Stephen said, ‘I bet you were terrific,’ and I said, with a dim idea of giving something in return for this confidence, ‘Would you like to see round the house?’

  ‘What a lot of books,’ she said in Fergus’s study. ‘Do you have to dust them all?’ She bent down to examine the tattered dust jackets. ‘I’d have these off.’

  In our bedroom, she said, ‘You’ve got nice wide window-sills. Ours are so narrow I can’t keep any pots on them and I do like to have flowers
in the room. Of course, I’ve got a lot of china ones, but it’s not the same as the real thing.’

  She hesitated on the landing and I thought I knew what was in her mind. ‘They don’t sleep together while they are here.’ I wanted her to know where I stood, in so far as I stood anywhere.

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘My husband won’t have them in the house.’

  We were both floundering. I thought it was time for mutual comfort. I said, ‘Let’s hope they will be kind to each other.’

  She sorted that out crisply. ‘So long as they are careful, that’s all I ask.’

  She looked at her watch. ‘I shall have to leave now if I am to catch the five-fifteen. My husband doesn’t know I have come here, so I must be back before seven-thirty.’

  I offered to walk to the bus stop with her, but she insisted on calling a taxi. I think she wanted to take a formal leave of us. ‘Angela likes your house,’ she said as she stood in the hall. She seemed to regret this admission and, drawing her personality about her along with her gloves, added, ‘She says it’s so comfortably shabby.’ What did she mean, shabby? I work hard to ensure that our house does not appear shabby. Each spring I touch up any window frame from which the paint has quite peeled away. Was it the bathroom she had in mind? She had said earlier that their house in Surbiton was beautifully decorated when they moved in. ‘We didn’t have to do anything, except for the bathroom. It had a white bath. That had to go, of course.’ Our bath is white and hugely stained where the taps have dripped and the plug needs expert attention, so that when a guest has a bath either Fergus or I has to fit it securely in place; but it holds water and what else does one ask of a bath? Neither that, nor the ingenious bell-rope Fergus has fitted to the lavatory cistern in place of the broken chain, justifies referring to our house as shabby.

  When she had gone, Stephen said, ‘She was fun, wasn’t she?’

  Cuillane was uncharacteristically angry. ‘She was a load of old rubbish. We don’t want her here again.’

  While I was writing this, Linnie’s letter arrived. She tells me she is collecting all your poems and plans to type them and send them to a publisher. That is a commendably sensible daughter. I hope you realise your good fortune.