Unfinished Portrait

Grannie’s rough encouragements did not always heal the wound.

‘Quite right to stick to your religion, my girl. Not that I hold with the Roman Catholic religion myself, because I don’t. Most Romans I’ve known have been liars. I’d think more of them if their priests married. And these convents! All those beautiful young girls shut up in convents and never being heard of again. What happens to them, I should like to know? The priests could answer that question, I dare say.’

Fortunately Jeanne’s English was not quite equal to this flow of remarks.

Madame was very kind, she said, she would try not to mind what the other girls said.

Grannie then had up Mary and Kate and denounced them in no measured terms for their unkindness to a poor girl in a strange country. Mary and Kate were very soft spoken, very polite, very surprised. Indeed, they had said nothing—nothing at all. Jeanne was such a one as never was for imagining things.

Grannie got a little satisfaction by refusing with horror Mary’s plea to be allowed to keep a bicycle.

‘I am surprised at you, Mary, for making such a suggestion. No servant of mine shall ever do such an unsuitable thing.’

Mary, looking sulky, muttered that her cousin at Richmond was allowed to have one.

‘Let me hear nothing more about it,’ said Grannie. ‘Anyway, they’re dangerous things for women. Many a woman has been prevented from having children for life by riding those nasty things. They’re not good for a woman’s inside.’

Mary and Kate retired sulkily. They would have given notice, but they knew that the place was a good one. The food was first class—no inferior tainted stuff bought for the kitchen as in some places—and the work was not heavy. The old lady was rather a tartar, but she was kind in her way. If there was any trouble at home, she’d often come to the rescue, and nobody could be more generous at Christmas. There was old Sarah’s tongue, of course, but you had to put up with that. Her cooking was prime.

Like all children, Celia haunted the kitchen a good deal. Old Sarah was much fiercer than Rouncy, but then, of course, she was terribly old. If anyone had told Celia that Sarah was a hundred and fifty she would not have been in the least surprised. Nobody, Celia felt, had ever been quite so old as Sarah.

Sarah was most unaccountably touchy about the most extraordinary things. One day, for instance, Celia had gone into the kitchen and had asked Sarah what she was cooking.

‘Giblet soup, Miss Celia.’

‘What are giblets, Sarah?’

Sarah pursed her mouth.

‘Things that it’s not nice for a little lady to make inquiries about.’

‘But what are they?’ Celia’s curiosity was pleasantly aroused.

‘Now, that’s enough, Miss Celia. It’s not for a little lady like you to ask questions about such things.’

‘Sarah.’ Celia danced about the kitchen. Her flaxen hair bobbed. ‘What are giblets? Sarah, what are giblets? Giblets—giblets—giblets?’

The infuriated Sarah made a rush at her with a frying pan, and Celia retreated, to poke her head in a few minutes later with the query, ‘Sarah, what are giblets?’

She next repeated the question from the kitchen window.

Sarah, her face dark with annoyance, made no answer, merely mumbled to herself.

Finally, tiring suddenly of this sport, Celia sought out her grandmother.

Grannie always sat in the dining-room, which was situated looking out over the short drive in front of the house. It was a room that Celia could have described minutely twenty years later. The heavy Nottingham lace curtains, the dark red and gold wallpaper, the general air of gloom, and the faint smell of apples and a trace still of the midday joint. The broad Victorian dining table with its chenille cloth, the massive mahogany sideboard, the little table by the fire with the stacked-up newspapers, the heavy bronzes on the mantelpiece (‘Your grandfather gave £70 for them at the Paris Exhibition’), the sofa upholstered in shiny red leather on which Celia sometimes had her ‘rest’, and which was so slippery that it was hard to remain in the centre of it, the crocheted woolwork that was hung over the back of it, the dumbwaiters in the windows crammed with small objects, the revolving bookcase on the round table, the red velvet rocking chair in which Celia had once rocked so violently that she had shot over backwards and developed an egg-like bump on her head, the row of leather upholstered chairs against the wall, and lastly the great high-backed leather chair in which Grannie sat pursuing this, that, and the other activity.

Grannie was never idle. She wrote letters—long letters in a spiky spidery handwriting, mostly on half sheets of paper because it used them up, and she couldn’t bear waste. (‘Waste not, want not, Celia.’) Then she crocheted shawls—pretty shawls in purples and blues and mauves. They were usually for the servants’ relations. Then she knitted with great balls of soft fleecy wool. That was usually for somebody’s baby. And there was netting—a delicate foam of netting round a little circle of damask. At tea time all the cakes and biscuits reposed on these foamy doilies. Then there were waistcoats—for the old gentlemen of Grannie’s acquaintance. You did them on strips of huckaback towelling, running through the stitches with lines of coloured embroidery cotton. This was, perhaps, Grannie’s favourite work. Though eighty-one years of age, she still had an eye for ‘the men’. She knitted them bed socks, too.

Under Grannie’s guidance Celia was doing a set of washstand mats as a surprise for Mummy on her return. You took different-sized rounds of bath towelling, buttonholed them round first in wool, and then crocheted into the buttonholing. Celia was doing her set in pale blue wool, and both she and Grannie admired the result enormously. After tea was cleared away, Grannie and Celia would play spillikins, and after that cribbage, their faces serious and preoccupied, the classic phrases falling from their lips, ‘One for his knob, two for his heel, fifteen two, fifteen four, fifteen six, and six are twelve.’ ‘Do you know why cribbage is such a good game, my dear?’ ‘No, Grannie.’ ‘Because it teaches you to count.’

Grannie never failed to make this little speech. She had been brought up never to admit enjoyment for enjoyment’s sake. You ate your food because it was good for your health. Stewed cherries, of which Grannie was passionately fond, she had nearly every day because they were ‘so good for the kidneys’. Cheese, which Grannie also loved, ‘digested your food’, the glass of port served with dessert ‘I have been ordered by the doctor.’ Especially was it necessary to emphasize the enjoyment of alcohol (for a member of the weaker sex). ‘Don’t you like it, Grannie?’ Celia would demand. ‘No, dear,’ Grannie would reply, and would make a wry face as she took the first sip. ‘I drink it for my health.’ She could then finish her glass with every sign of enjoyment, having uttered the required formula. Coffee was the only thing for which Grannie admitted a partiality. ‘Very Moorish, this coffee,’ she would say, wrinkling up her eyelids in enjoyment. ‘Very moreish,’ and would laugh at her little joke as she helped herself to another cup.