“We used to drive down to Tallboys — that was before the family — before anything happened,” Mother liked to tell, and joined her hands closer on the kitchen table. “It was quite a journey. Mamma could not endure carriages for any distance. They upset her pug. Poor Grumble! Grannie was so kind to dogs. The gardeners were always setting the stage, it seemed, as we arrived. Nothing ever grew. It was potted out. The shrubs were sculpture which never got finished. Oh, and dogs, more dogs!” Her eyes would shine after sherry, particularly after she took to the four o’clock sherry. “The willowy, bronze and golden breeds, snoozing on the steps, amongst the lichen! And Mollie. Mollie remained good, better than most who accept the status quo. She had a hundred dolls, I believe. I believe we counted them. Once she allowed me to tear up a Japanese doll because I decided I wanted to. It was the nanny who made a scene.”
Mother scarcely ever laughed over any of her pictures, even when they gave her pleasure. They were far too serious, even the funny ones, for laughter.
“Always when we arrived they would take us in, and fortify us with cups of soup, flavoured, I should say, with port — with port-wine.”
This reminded her of her sherry, and although it was only half-past four and she had put the bottle back, she would take it down again, to refresh her tumbler.
“After you had gone upstairs,” Waldo sometimes had to assist.
But she grew vague, with sherry and memory. She did not care to describe elaborate interiors. They yawned too dark in her mind.
Not that he needed reminders. He had dared reconstruct the house, room by room, and add it to his other experience of life.
Sometimes Mother, under the influence of four o’clock, would add a detail, a cupola or tower, and he would lean forward to visualize, and formally preserve.
“Tallboys was an omnium gatherum! A shocking architectural muddle!” How he loved the language her mouth was conducting through a ritual of elaborate slovenliness. “The façade was Palladian. They used to pour out elderberry wine for the huntsmen on frosty mornings. Lord, it was cold! You could almost hear the stone crack.”
She poured herself another.
“But Tudor, the original Tudor, Mother.”
Still so far to go, he grew anxious for the end of it.
“Oh, Tudor! Tudor was too down-to-earth, too much like human beings living and loving and stabbing and poisoning one another. Tudor got pushed back hugger-mugger behind the stone. The kitchens were in the Tudor part of this great baroque treadmill. When I say ‘baroque’ I only mean it fig — figuratively, I think.”
She formed her hands into a globe above the waning gold of sherry.
“Wasn’t there also the gothic,” he dared, “the Gothic Folly?”
“Oh, the Gothick Folly!” she laughed, or sniggered, and they shared in the knowingness. “Uncle Charlie always pronounced it with a k. That was Waldo’s Folly.”
She needn’t have told him. He had been there, gloved and sensual, attended by salukis and an Arab.
“Waldo,” she said, pronouncing it as though it had been someone else’s name, “Waldo had such peculiar vices they were kept locked up, behind a grille, in the library.”
Those peppercorns! He knew. He had fingered the reseda silk through the bars.
But Mother’s voice was dwindling with the sherry.
“He died at Smyrna, I think it was. They brought him home, rather smelly, so they say — the Greeks hadn’t done a proper job — and put him in the tomb he had built for himself. In marble from Paros. Beside the lake. Mollie and I liked to play there in August. It was so — cool. And full of echoes.”
Round about five her mouth grew slobbery on the glass, and she would glance sideways at his abstemious thimbleful.
“They are all dead now,” she said drily, “I suppose.” Adding quickly, however: “When Cousin Mollie writes she will tell us the symptoms.” And more meditative: “A pity your father died. He would have enjoyed hearing. Of course you never knew your father. For a frail man he was strong. Strong.”
Suddenly he hated that strength, and his parents’ withdrawal into a room of their own. Resentment lingered, forcing him on some mornings to deliver lectures.
“Mother,” he said, “I want to talk to you.”
“Oh, yes?”
She did so hope he would. She was raising her face to receive helpful advice.
“The sherry is all very well. In moderation. It is moderation which makes life bearable.”
Her little knotted laughs remained the most youthful sign in her.
“Sherry is the last perquisite!” Then, making an ugly mouth: “The perks! The cooking sherry! The cook wouldn’t have crooked her finger. The housekeeper wouldn’t have gargled with it.”
Waldo said: “I forbid you, Mother!”
He admired the sound of her kind strong son.
“My dear little sherry-wine!”
And it continued to trickle in.
“Poor soul! What else has she got?” was Mrs Poulter’s argument.
“Here’s an odd one, Mother, that I brought back from the store, because it’s Saturday, and it helps you when you’re feeling sick.”
Arthur made Waldo sick. He was glad he had the Library, even though a doubtful blessing.
Because Crankshaw had started playing up.
Crankshaw said: “Mr Brown, can you truly answer for the accuracy of these references?”
“Why should I falsify them, Mr Crankshaw?”
Did he hear a simpering note in his own voice? Sometimes, to his horror, he thought he sounded like a maid in a Restoration play.
He waited for the titters.
Which did not come.
Only Crankshaw grumbling: “I wouldn’t say you falsified. Only that you might have got them wrong.”
He was a heavy man, with a family at Roseville.
“Who can say,” Mr Brown said.
He was only certain that Crankshaw had it in for him.
But, as an alternative to Crankshaw, he had to take the train, the bus, home.
“She is sick,” Mrs Poulter told him. “You ought to get the doctor to her.”
“My health is my own affair,” Mother insisted, making it easier for him. “To the end I shall keep it so. I shall know when it is the end.”
She knew, apparently, it would be a long time from then, because she died ten years after George Brown her husband. Anne Quantrell was carved out of stone, the true gothick. At least Waldo had that satisfaction, although it caused him to suffer before he could inscribe her name on what he always hoped was the authentic dust.
“Mother won’t die easy,” Mrs Poulter became of the opinion.
Mrs Poulter didn’t actually like Mrs Brown, because Mrs Brown would not allow her to. Mrs Brown didn’t actively dislike Mrs Poulter, she simply resented encroachment of any kind. Waldo Brown couldn’t like Mrs Poulter, because of, well, everything. Whether Arthur had loved Mrs Poulter or not, in this one instance he had listened to reason, sensed the shocking anomaly of it, and choked her off. So that human relationships, particularly the enduring ones, or those which we are forced to endure, are confusingly marbled in appearance, Waldo Brown realized, and noted in a notebook.
He knew also he dreaded his mother’s death, in which event, he would be exposed to Crankshaw, and not exposed, but left to Arthur. Perhaps he dreaded Arthur most of all, because of something Arthur might tell him one day.
But for the moment Mother showed no signs of dying, she only grew more difficult.