The Wooden Shepherdess Read online

  So now the news of her find was finally out, and the Pack were poised for the pounce.

  12

  Sadie was only advance-guard. Late that night, long after Augustine’s bedtime, the Pack arrived in a bunch: he was wakened by Ree reluctantly yodeling “Whoopee!” right in his ear (but soft, like the note of a song-bird), and opened his eyes to find his room was full of electric torches and shadows. They’d come (Ree explained rather glumly, avoiding his eye) to throw a surprise party for him here on his roof, and he’d got to get up.

  Augustine looked round him indeed in surprise: boys and girls of school age out together—at night, with no one in charge! He was more than a little dumbfounded. The British upper-class culture Augustine himself had been reared in had tended to “sex its pubescents in half” as Douglas had put it at Oxford. They kept the two halves apart and taboo to—indeed, repelled by each other by means of hideous protective disguises and ritual masks: “Les jeunes-filles-en-herbe all covered in gym-tunics down to their calves,” said Douglas; “And boys right down to their heels in repressions and acne, until....”

  “Till all of a sudden the girls ‘come out’—like sweet-peas!” put in Jeremy (whereupon someone had said something coarse about pods).

  But Augustine had got to admit this lot looked gay and as pretty as pictures! The party ought to be fun....

  The night was dark, so they climbed the ladder they’d brought and hung their lantern high on his chimney, the only light otherwise coming from fireflies and fitful glimmers of lightning. The night was sultry as well as dark, so the whole lot stripped to their underwear: boys in their white cotton B.V.D.s and girls in their crêpe-de-chine cami-knicks. Up the ladder they went in the dark, and perched astride the ridge of his roof in a row. Soon they were singing and joking pretty inanely, eating huge slices of melon they dribbled all down them and drinking red wine from the neck of a carboy they heaved hand to hand. The wine was heady, so presently each now-and-then one lost his or her balance: rolled down the shingles and fell from the ten-foot eaves with a plonk.

  Augustine had lost touch with Ree from the start and his first next-neighbor up there was a girl called Janis, a charmer who claimed to be gone eighteen (which wasn’t quite true) and also claimed to be Scottish. Augustine liked her a lot.... But Janis fell off; and this left him now next Ree’s cousin Russell, a beautiful lad with contortionist’s double-joints in his shoulders who wrapped his own arms round his own neck from behind like a scarf, and could also talk if he liked in blank verse. Augustine and he got on fine ... until he too fell off in the very act of contorting, and dropped with his hands clasped under his chin.

  Bella beyond in the draggled next-to-nothing she wore had had too many swigs at the carboy by now for a fifteen-year-old to talk very clearly; and yet she was all too keen to converse. But it didn’t last long; and instead of astride the ridge she was sitting side-saddle, which meant when Bella finally went that instead of rolling she slid and tore what little she’d got. They all fell off like that in the end—or else fell asleep and fell off.

  As dawn broke Augustine and Sadie were left to the last: so Augustine fell off on purpose, leaving Sadie up there alone. Silhouetted against the pale green sky in exiguous pink crêpe-de-chine and stockingless garters (and scented this time with Citronella, to ward off the bugs) Sadie the lone survivor had started to sing, in a powerful deep operatic contralto. Augustine kept under the eaves to be out of her sight on his way back to bed in the waxing daylight, picking his way through the light-colored sleeping heaps—for, feeling the cold, they had mostly crept together in heaps in their flimsies (he found Bella’s puppy-fat arm right across Russell’s face obstructing the breathing, so moved it).

  But Ree was sleeping alone, and shivering. Made slightly reckless by wine, this way and that he divided the swift mind as to whether to carry her in under cover; but thought in the end “better not,” and brought out a blanket instead. Just as he tucked it round her she sat up straight and was sick out loud (since she “didn’t drink liquor” it must be the melon had done it?). Then, without noticing who he was, she wound herself tight in the rug and was instantly back asleep.

  That morning Augustine slept late. When at last he went out to retrieve his blanket he found his green purlieus battered and trampled, but everyone vanished. The blanket however still lay exactly as Ree had crawled out, like an empty cocoon. The carboy was gone. But when he looked up he saw they’d forgotten their lantern: there it still hung from his chimney, the tiny flame still orange through smoke-blackened glass in the face of the noonday sun.

  Augustine’s letter to Mary (in which he’d already described the wooden church as “a little deserted shepherdess, scorned by her faithless swain the derelict Ford”: “Ali Baba’s Cave” with its stills and its staybones and so on) remained to be finished. But last night’s party was surely a bit altogether too Malinowski.... Those fabulous Trobriand Islanders, this with a vengeance was Whites keeping up with the Browns! He’d never seen, never dreamed of anything like it.... He felt most loth to write home about it because it had left him far too disturbed, as if something was cracking inside—and excited. The fact is he didn’t know yet what to think: was this Progress or Decadence? Augustine didn’t feel ready as yet to commit himself—quite. It was shocking, girls getting drunk—even anyone not quite grown-up.... Yet one thing at least was fully apparent: life here could be mighty enjoyable—Sadie apart.

  The better to think he sat down, and at once fell asleep in the sun. Sleeping, he dreamed of that fateful day back in Wales, the day he came home from the Marsh to his empty echoing house with a drowned child doubled over his shoulder, and found to his horror on lifting it down it had stiffened bent double. But there things changed: for he knew in this dream (without knowing the reason) that this time he couldn’t just leave the tiny waterlogged body all night as it was in its sopping clothes on the sofa—he’d got to undress it, like putting a live child to bed. Yet as soon as he started to do so, he found that instead of bare skin underneath this child was downy all over with delicate fur; and a fur attractively soft to the touch, like a mole’s.... When he pulled her last vest over her head—leaving all the downy body uncovered except for the socks—he saw that the wide-open eyes in the small dead face were alive and were eagerly watching him take off her clothes: nor were these even the pair of eyes which belonged, they were Ree’s....

  He woke on his back in the sun with his larynx cramped in the soundless act of a scream, and his body-pores squirting sweat.

  13

  In theory some vague kind of Freudist, in practice Augustine tended to treat all lids as something to sit on: he found his repressions the one thing he couldn’t repress with impunity. This was something built-in, which only an earthquake could shift. His shattering dream (what on earth was he up to with Ree?) had hauled him half up by the roots; but he hadn’t a clue as to why.

  As for that party, he still couldn’t make up his mind: therefore the less said to Mary about it just yet, he decided, the better. He finished his letter without it. The letter was then wrapped up with the present he’d bought for the baby (a treasure from Ali Baba’s Cave); and the package finally mailed, he arranged, in New York.

  *

  “If only Augustine were home!” thought Mary. “There’s something so solid about him, as well as intelligent....”

  Mary this morning was feeling badly in need of Augustine’s help. The problem was Nellie, a problem which couldn’t be solved yet couldn’t be any more shelved—poor tragical Nellie! First.... No, first came that hydrocephalous baby, and only then little Rachel drowned untimely—and now her tuberculous husband was out of his pain at last.

  Now that Gwilym was dead she couldn’t stay on in that lonely hovel they’d lent him to die in: for Gwilym’s sect was a poor one, whose maximum pension for Indigent Ministers’ Widows was ten pounds a year. But what possible job could the widow find with a baby hung round her neck and millions of others already hopelessly lookin
g for work? What was she fit for?—Some sort of nursery-governess?—Quite; but not with a baby! For who among all Mary’s friends would take on a growing working-class child who must presently go to the village school and bring nits, impetigo, bad habits and even bad accents into the house? It sounded callous, but mothers had to be tough about this sort of thing and put their own children first. For Polly’s and Susan’s sake she wouldn’t do it herself, so she couldn’t ask anyone else to....

  If only Augustine were home! There was nobody else to advise her. She couldn’t ask Gilbert: right from the start (when Rachel was drowned so soon before Nellie’s new baby was born and her husband sent home as incurable) Gilbert had warned against getting involved. To his way of thinking, a Liberal Humanist’s proper concern was with social measures in general only: private do-gooding only deflects—is unfair to the rest, and therefore morally wrong. He was scathing as hell on the “conscience” which boggles at one Nellie starving in close-up but swallows a million in long-shot.... Who else? Jeremy’s clergyman father, she’d heard, was now Arch-something which sounded terribly powerful: Jeremy though had just gone abroad for three or four months before being put in some government office or other, and atheist Mary hadn’t the nerve for approaching prelates direct....

  Thus Mary was thinking about Augustine already the morning his letter arrived (with Gilbert away up North on the moors, she could read it in peace). Inside the package, addressed “For the Very New Baby—in case,” was a crude glass pickle-dish: moulded in deep intaglio into the bottom, the bust of a woman in Ninetyish corsage had round it the legend in Ninetyish script: “Love’s Request is Pickles.” The sight warmed Mary at once: for here was a christening-present which none but the old Augustine she loved could have possibly sent! Next came some drawings inscribed “For Polly, with love”: one was of deer with floppy white tails, and another called “Mother-skunk with her Little Ones.” Not that Augustine drew very well, but Polly she knew would adore them....

  Unfolding the letter, she saw at once there was still no address to write back to (and yet so much she was longing to tell him, with Susan and all and those snapshots of Polly the day she was six). And as for the letter itself, reading it made her heart sink: it was all about places, with next-to-no people—and as for Augustine, it gave her no news at all. It mentioned—barely—“a child I met bathing last week”; but said nothing at all about anyone else he had met, not even its parents! Just only one child, and otherwise buildings and woods.... Laying it down, she thought of that Moslem painting of bows firing arrows without any archers and battering-rams knocking walls down with no one to wield them.... What could excuse him for writing this Baedekerstuff to his sister, his nearest friend in the world? It saddened her, seeing how far he and she had somehow drifted apart....

  But then came Wantage, bearing a fresh lot of toast with a message from Mrs. Winter who asked, Could the Mistress spare time to see Nellie a minute before Miss Polly’s lessons? And Mary had to say Yes, she would ring.

  Just as a stop-gap arrangement, Nellie was giving Polly “first lessons”: she bicycled down every day with her ten-months child in a basket strapped to her handlebars. Three weeks only remained, however, before Miss Penrose the proper governess came—bespoken since soon after Polly was born, as one must if one wanted a good one (and that reminded Mary: she’d best take a look, Mrs. Winter had said that as well as repainting the schoolroom needed repapering). Three more weeks—if it even lasted that long, with Nanny so jealous that things were already well-nigh impossible! Nannies were like that, apparently: really Augustine was right, it was utterly mad having servants.

  And now she had got to see Nellie. She dreaded the interview: dear little Syl was all poor Nellie had left in the world, and half last night—till three o’clock struck, and her stiffening brain was longing for sleep—Susan Amanda’s loving mother had pictured against the darkness horrible pictures of babies torn from the breast.... No one had said it of course; but what was the need? For it stood out a mile that with Nellie’s living to earn little Syl must be put in a Home.

  *

  That pickle-dish was a “treasure,” so Mary stowed it away in the treasure-drawer up in her private retreat before even ringing the bell. But the parcel’s wrappings already had found their way to the Housekeeper’s Room, where Wantage had gone to borrow some scissors to cut out the stamps. “The blunt ones,” Mrs. Winter said firmly (her best embroidery pair might never be used for paper). “So George still collects stamps, do ’e?”

  George was brother Ted’s eldest boy back in Coventry. “George?” Mr. Wantage said absently: “George ...” Then, after a long pause: “Yes ’e do.”

  He snipped, but without sitting down: for gone were the days when he used to spend half his off-duty hours slumped in the big basket-chair over there by the window! Indeed he seldom nowadays came here at all except (as iron custom dictated for butlers) to meals. The Room just wasn’t the same place it used to, since Nell. Not that he’d got any grouch against Nellie herself the poor thing, and one must make allowances: still, her sitting silent for hours on end staring into the ferns in the fireless grate, or loving her babe like an octopus loving its only fish of the week—it gave you the creeps! But even that wasn’t the lot (and he quivered his nose).

  Mrs. Winter looked at him, troubled. A shame that his habits should have to be upset by Nell! Poor old Fred, there wasn’t much comfort for middle-aged bones in his pantry; but what could she do, when her sister just couldn’t bear to go home to that lonely old place till she had to? She must sit somewhere.... The Schoolroom was being repainted against that governess came—and as for the Nursery, Nanny would never let Nellie sit there!

  Meanwhile Mr. Wantage sniffed as he snipped, convinced that his sensitive nose told him “baby.” It lingered; and that was what most got his goat—that baby, in here!—Laid out to kick half the time on the old horsehair sofa: he’d hardly dared even sit down since the day when he’d sat on a sopping napkin. I ask you! In what other Housekeeper’s Room in the country had babies ever been changed?

  “Seven!” said Wantage aloud: “Poor old Ted!”

  “It’s a packet,” agreed Mrs. Winter.

  “Bought his own three-up-and-two-down out at Canley. Detached. And Select. But not much fun with that lot of nippers—not any three-up-and-two-down.”

  “Twins twice over you told me,” she said; and thought in her own mind: “Poor Mrs. Ted!”

  “Mind you, I feel right sorry for Nellie: I hope she finds somewhere to go!”—and he certainly meant it.

  “She’s up with the Mistress this moment, talking things over.”

  He put back the scissors with care. “Now if Mr. Augustine was home and they asked him, I bet you he’d send her to Wales to caretake that big empty house—with her baby and all, and perhaps the old woman as well.”

  Mrs. Winter eyed him aghast: for her mind’s eye saw old water-stains marking a drawing-room carpet and by them the caretaker, wondering....

  “I know!” said Wantage, a higher note in his voice: “But finer feelings is something as some of us can’t afford when Belly’s the Master. And mark my words, Maggie: your Nell would rather go down below and stoke for Old Nick than ever let go little Syl.” Then he paused in the doorway, and added: “But anyway, that horse isn’t a starter: for nobody knows where His Lordship has got to, to ask him.”

  Poor little brat ... and poor young Nellie! He hadn’t meant to be harsh but a thing he couldn’t get out of his mind was the look he had caught in the mother’s eyes, more than once, as she watched her baby crawling away from her over the floor: the look you see in a cat’s eyes watching a bird.

  14

  In years Augustine was far too old for the pack, like Sadie; but after that party they seemed to be only too keen to adopt him, at least as some kind of elderly mascot. So now the lonely Augustine had no more need to be lonely, nor focus it all on to Ree: for they carted him everywhere with them—if willing.

  “If wil
ling....” Because at times he still had his doubts. These girls weren’t quite—not quite Miss Porter’s Farmington kind of American Girl, if you know what that means—the charming innocent cultured sort with orgies on Cokes and candy bought at the Gundy, their meetings with males confined to those two-a-term decorous Sunday Callers received after worship at Congo or Pisco (that is, if you don’t count “Speech Correction” with Mr. King in the Gym). These were a kind Augustine was rather less used to: they drank even more than they smoked (mostly whisky from half-gallon jars, it was easier come-by than wine and knocked you out quicker) and frequently passed right out, if they didn’t throw up. Nor did they—putting it mildly—show many traces of shyness with boys. Of Sadie, Augustine was downright afraid: she would eat him alive for two-bits by her looks, and once when she caught him alone she had slipped her shirt off her shoulder to show him her scars. She told him she had one hole he could sink his finger right in, and had laughed like a drain when he bolted. Among those nearer his age than Ree it was Janis, the Scottish charmer he’d sat next first on the roof, that he cottoned to most: for Janis never made passes.

  Nor were these boys exactly coon-coated Yale boys: these weren’t Fitzgerald types with prestigious rides to offer in dashing Oaklands, Pierce-Arrows or Stutzes. These were a kind more likely possessed of down-at-heels knock-kneed flivvers of various ages (though Tony’d a ten-year-old Buick, and Ree’s cousin Russell a seven-year Dodge): “Cars going from time to time,” Augustine had said of them once, “rather than place to place.” Still, there seemed to be always just enough cars off the sick-list whenever the pack did want to go places for the whole pack to pile in together, in heaps.