Caroline England Page 4

  Up the flight of stairs. Behind the little wooden gate. Caroline’s world collapsed like the brick castles she herself built. Outwardly everything was the same: the chrysanthemums on the walls, the books Papa had when he was a little boy, the wise men, the shepherds and the cow, the text made by Grandpapa. Strangest of all the rocking­chairs were still there, and swung at a touch as they had done when Naomi sat in them. The change was in Caroline. The child who hummed from sheer pleasure in existing vanished. Not all at once: but as the cat vanished to please Alice, slowly, finishing with its smile. Only in Caroline’s case what was left was not a smile.

  It took her a few days before she learnt not to look up hopefully each time a door opened. The fact that Naomi would never come back wore into her so slowly that she had almost forgotten her, before she accepted the truth. She learnt through slappings, and sometimes beatings, that most of the things she had done with Naomi were wrong. Games in the bath, humming, or indeed anything that made a noise, leaving things on your plate you did not want to eat, asking questions, falling down and making rents in your clothes, and, worst crime of all, tears.

  She was slow to learn, for four and a half years during which the strongest reproof she had received was “Doant do that my pet,” or “Upsy daisy, look at the great big hole for poor Naomi to mend,” had ill-fitted her for “Stop that noise at once or I’ll give you something to cry for.” “Stand up at once; Miss Caroline. Look what you’ve done to your dress. You wait till I get you back to the nursery, I’ll teach you to fall down.” Caroline, by nature docile, had no wish to be naughty, but she was scared and so blundered about like some animal in a trap, committing faults she had never conceived in Naomi’s day. Had she been highly strung she must have been driven into nervous tricks and complaints. Instead she became cowed.

  Nurse honestly thought she had improved her. Before she came to Caroline she had a situation with a family called Smithson. The Smithsons were violently evangelical, and great disciplinarians. Mrs. Smithson worked for the National Sunday School Association where she liked to be able to embellish her lessons to the children of the lower orders with tales of the consciousness of the nearness of the devil which existed in her own nursery. She lost no opportunity of getting her nurses and children on to their knees, and would pray extempore for half an hour on end, her prayers lurid with pitchforks, flames, groans, and burning flesh. Mr. Smithson’s especial hobby, when he was free from the City, was The Temperance Society. During his visits to the nursery he scared his children and thrilled his nurse with sordid stories of the goings on in beer and gin palaces, rounding off his tales with word pictures of drunkards burning in Hell’s fires beside which Mrs. Smithson’s prayers were colourless. Nurse had come to the Smithsons as a young woman. She had chosen to take up the career of children’s nurse to satisfy a need in herself for power. A nursery was a limited world but in it she would be all powerful. A very few weeks of the Smithsons and their religion was hers. The God she learnt to worship was greatly to her liking, such a vengeance-filled God was obviously on the side of discipline and therefore on the side of the nurse. Grateful for the support of everlasting flames, she became violently religious. She spent considerable time on her knees morning and evening, managed to arrange to attend church at least once on Sundays, and saw to it that everyone within reach of her tongue thought constantly about sin.

  Caroline, learnt scarcely to raise her voice above a whisper, and then only to say “Yes Nurse,” “Please Nurse,” “No thank you Nurse.” She learnt to swallow everything put in front of her, even fat and the skin off hot milk, without a sign of dislike. Seeing she had at first been sick, and later retched at the mere sight of what she did not fancy, this was a remarkable display of what discipline could do. She learnt to walk instead of run, and therefore seldom fell down and tore her clothes. She learnt to sit on her stool instead of her pet position on the floor, which Nurse said was a dirty habit soiling to the seats of drawers. These things were merely outward signs of improvement. Nurse was glad to think that where the improvement most lay was in the child’s soul.

  In Naomi’s day grace had been for Caroline a casual word of thanks to Heaven, and prayers a matter of kneeling up in bed with warm arms round her asking for blessings on a few people, and thanking for benefits received. Sometimes at night, when Naomi felt in the mood, prayers were followed by one of the hymns that the American, Mr. Moody was making so popular, and which Naomi, who had no opportunities to attend revivalist meetings, had picked up in the same way that she picked up popular songs, and just as inaccurately. Nurse changed all this. Naomi’s teaching had given Caroline the shocking impression that God was a friendly old man sitting on a cloud waiting to grant wishes, just as the genii did in the story of Aladdin. In no time Nurse had this put right. The new God she presented kept Caroline awake at night. He was, as she now saw Him, much more like the ogre Jack found at the top of the beanstalk. He spent his time watching children in order that if they disobeyed their nurses He might strike them dead, make their backs crooked, take away their sight, or any other punishment He could invent, finally to toss them into the fire which He kept permanently blazing in a place called Hell which was somewhere underneath earth. After chastisement Caroline could repeat not only two graces and the Lord’s Prayer, and a new collect every week, but also a prayer of Nurse’s conceiving which she had invented for the little Smithsons and which she liked said in her nurseries night and morning.

  “Oh God that knowest that I am a wicked sinner, worthy only to be thrown into Hell’s flames. I pray Thee to keep me from sin through the coming [here you put in day or night]. Let me learn to obey Nurse in all things, as only so can I be saved. Teach me to be humble, obedient and gentle, and please keep my dear Papa, Mama and Nurse from all harm and help me to live so I may not fear my last hour. Amen.”

  Nurse was shocked to discover that Naomi had irregularly taken Caroline down to morning prayers, and at once arranged that they should both attend daily. Caroline did not mind morning prayers for Papa usually took her on his knee afterwards and gave her a titbit off his fork. She enjoyed seeing the servants march in, the women’s print dresses rustling. She liked the creak that their corsets gave when they turned to kneel down for the prayers. She liked too the sight of all the bows on the backs of their aprons sticking up when they knelt. She only saw this vista once or twice, and then was sorry afterwards that she had, for it meant Nurse had to whip her, not because she wanted to, but because turning round to stare made God so cross. Less pleasant were Matins which Nurse persuaded Grandmama to tell Papa she ought to attend. Caroline hated it. She sat between Grandmama and Papa for three Sundays, and then when Grandmama went away between Nurse and Papa. The walls of the pew were so high she could not see over the top. She could not read, and so had no idea what was happening. Nurse, however, had warned her beforehand what would occur if she did not attend, or fidgeted. Apart from the whipping she would have to give, there seemed to be no saying what form God’s terrible punishment would take. He was extra watchful for, and angry at, ill-behaviour in His House. Caroline was confused by the expression ‘His House.’ If it was God’s house why was He not in it? She spent a lot of time looking surreptitiously at the roof for a flaming angry eye. She was puzzled why God did not mind the behaviour of Papa who slept through the long sermon, even snoring. She had been pink in the face with fright for him the first Sunday he dropped off, expecting to see something happen, such as a leg disappearing, but he woke none the worse, and so it was each Sunday. Caroline came to the conclusion that Papa and God were friends. Though they never spoke much together, these excursions to pray made Caroline and her father take an interest in each other.

  Caroline, forced to invent a world to shut out the real unhappy one, took to heart the dolls’ house. No longer did she kneel in front of it peering through the windows; she opened the front and sat on her stool, and moved the wooden dolls from room to room. Her lips moved all the while she
played.

  “Yes, my dear, I would like to sit on your knee. Shall we sing about the gee-gee and the gentleman? Did you say there was something in your pocket for me? Oh I do wonder what it is, perhaps it’s a sweetie you bought when you went by the carrier to shop in the town. Shall I eat it while I’m riding on your foot? ‘A gee-gee and a gentleman—’”

  She could play like that for hours. She had little imagination, but the sweetness and gentleness that she remembered could be hers again through the mouths of the dolls. They filled for her that human need to come first with somebody. As she opened the front of the house she heard the welcoming squeals of joy; often when she closed it she heard sobs.

  Mama sent up scraps of stuff for new dresses. Nurse disapproved of time wasted on such foolishness and she poked the bits into her scrap bag. Caroline was frightened each time the bag appeared. The dolls were friends as she knew them, they were still Naomi’s ‘Proper little ladies and gentlemen.’ Refurbished in purple poplin she would have felt them strangers. One afternoon she saw Nurse re-cover her needle-book with the largest piece and knew the danger over.

  Pressure from Rose, backed by Nurse, who thought it high time her charge could read her Bible, caused Selina to engage a governess for Caroline. She was no governess by profession, but the rector’s daughter, Prudence Sykes, who was glad of some pin-money.

  Prudence had herself an unusual education. She had been taught the elements of reading and writing by the village school-mistress in her off hours. Until her mother died when she was fourteen she had careful instruction in all manner of sewing and handicrafts. She had loathed these ladylike accomplishments, and after her mother’s death had joyfully forgotten them, and refused to allow the housekeeper who came to run the Rectory to refresh her memory. For the rest she learnt by listening to her father discuss the events of the moment; and by reading.

  Frederick Sykes had not been born to walk a lonely trail. He was happy as rector, being on the most friendly terms with all in his parish, but he needed some fellow creature with whom to talk. A delicate wife suffering constantly from headaches who coughed her way into her grave was not the eager support he needed. Even before she died he was making a confidante of Prudence and afterwards was totally dependent on her. His was a mind that blazed into short-lived emotional fevers. There was seldom matter for fervour in the doings of his own quiet parish, but he succeeded in getting, from the newspapers, fine stuff on which to bite. He could not afford the daily threepence for The Times, but he took it regularly. It reached him in the evening and produced, together with his hot toddy, fine stimulation for the end of the day. In summer he would sit, pipe in mouth, in his chair by the window, looking out over his lawn while the mixed scents of flowers and pine-needles titillated his nose; in winter, still pipe in mouth, he sat by the fire, the logs making a pleasant crackling accompaniment to what he read. Winter or summer Prudence sat facing him either staring across the lawn, or into the fire, until she heard: “My dear child, listen to this.”

  For books Prudence was limited. There were quite a number in Greek which she could not read, and a quantity of collected sermons, but as well there were novels by Thackeray and Dickens. Thackeray, because her father had been up at Trinity with him, and Dickens, because he loved every word he wrote. On the day of her mother’s funeral, which was the day after Dickens’s death, Prudence seeing the tears drip off his nose had put her hand into her father’s arm murmuring that he must not be too upset. He turned on her, his eyes blazing. “Too upset! It is impossible to be too upset when a man like Dickens dies.”

  Prudence was delighted to work at the Manor. The fifteen pounds a year Selina offered meant clothes. When she could get hold of a copy she read The Young Ladies’ Journal and studied the column marked ‘Paris Fashions.’ Her clothes up till the present were chosen by her aunt, her father’s sister, when she paid her annual visit. They were clothes chosen primarily to suit a rector’s daughter, and secondly, to last until the aunt visited again, and then ‘turn’ well. They had no bearing whatsoever on what ‘Paris Fashions’ said were being worn. With a vast sum like fifteen pounds, there was nothing that fashion could dictate that she and Mrs. Eldridge, the village dressmaker, could not concoct.

  Caroline and Prudence looked at each other across the nursery table. Both of them were painfully conscious that the door into the night-nursery was wide open and Nurse inside the room.

  Prudence, who had entered on a career of teaching so gaily, felt her heart sink. She had, of course, glimpsed the child in church, but that had been more a view of a feathered or beribboned hat than Caroline. Now she saw a little girl with brown curls falling to her shoulders, her front hair dragged to the top of her head and secured there with a blue bow. She had on an expensive blue poplin frock, covered by an apron. The skirt was frilled at the back and trimmed in black velvet, which the sour-faced nurse, who had put the child into her chair, had said was not to be creased. It was obvious the skirt would get creased and Prudence felt sorry for Caroline. It was not this, though, that made her heart sink. She had never seen a child with so dull a face. It was like a doll’s. She seemed unaware that she was seeing her governess for the first time. The dark eyes had not the faintest gleam of interest in them.

  Caroline had been told by Nurse that the governess was coming. “And about time too. Such a little ignoramus. How can you hope to be a good girl when you cannot read God’s Holy Word?”As she put on the child’s frock that morning she had said, “Now mind you obey Miss Sykes, she’s the daughter of the rector. God will be watching after her.” Caroline, walking up the church, and from occasional peeps over the pew door, had seen Miss Sykes before, but she had never had a chance of a good stare at her, such as she was having now. She was a bit puzzled. Miss Sykes was not, in her opinion, the sort of person she imagined God watching specially after. She was a pretty, smiling young lady. She had very fair hair, wound in innumerable braids at the back of her head. Her dress was brown and very plain, and did not rustle like Mama’s and Arnagnes’s. She had large blue eyes and they, and her mouth, looked as if they were going to laugh. Caroline knew she could not be going to laugh as clearly there was nothing to laugh about.

  Prudence put a book in front of Caroline and a pencil in her hand. She made a pothook between the ruled lines, and told Caroline to copy it. Caroline tried. She breathed heavily and stuck out her tongue. Prudence guided her hand for a row, then told her to make a pothook by herself. Caroline made four. The fourth was a disgrace. She looked up timidly from under her eyelashes to see what would happen to a child who made a pothook like that. Prudence was not considering pothooks, she had picked up another pencil and; inspired by Caroline’s blue poplin, was designing herself a grown-up edition of the same dress. She felt eyes on her. She looked up and flushed and scribbled on top of her drawing. She looked over her shoulder at the night-nursery door.

  “Sssh!” she whispered.

  Caroline’s eyes opened wide. The ‘sssh’ recalled Naomi.

  Naomi picking a peach off the wall, pulling her out of sight. “Sssh,” she would say, and drag the fruit in half. The juice dripped on the path. She gave Caroline the half without the stone, and bit into the other, her eyes twinkling. “Lawks, what would Mr. Pettigrew say if he caught us at his fruit?” There was just the same twinkle in Prudence’s eye. Could it mean that Prudence saw the same sort of fun in things as Naomi had done? For a second, the beginnings of a smile twitched the corners of her lips, then disappeared. Smiles were wrong; this was the rector’s daughter whom God watched. It was all very puzzling. The one thing was to be good and then no harm could come. Her face became a mask; her lips folded primly.

  Prudence studied her. She had not cried with little Copperfield for nothing. She knew novels were made up, and not true life. But Mr. Dickens studied from real people so her father said. Was it possible that in all this luxury there was a real child who had cause for unhappiness? Prudence was sheltered
from most that was distressing in the village, and knew only children with shiny red cheeks calling “Miss, Miss,” who clutched her knees and gave her flowers; or wax-faced children who died in the fear of God as nicely as conditions allowed. The change from what was almost a smile to that tight prim little mouth stirred her maternal instinct. It was quite a nice little mouth, but now it looked like some bud that the frost had caught and nipped so that it could never flower. Warm with an emotion that was new to her she leant over Caroline. Laughing, she pointed to the worst pothook.

  “Even that is better than those I made to begin with, when I was a little girl.”

  She could not see Caroline’s face. The child made no sign but went on labouring. Prudence deceived herself that she looked less taut.

  Chapter VI

  SELINA’S child was a girl. Again she had a ghastly time over the birth. The nice woman in the good black dress was allowed only as nurse. Thomas Felton supervised. He was in the house for fourteen hours without a break. The greater Selina’s sufferings the more the nice woman rejoiced, murmuring “It’s a shame, poor dear. He should have left you to me. You need a woman when your time comes.”

  When the fourteen hours of Thomas Felton’s efforts, and the forty-six during which the labour had lasted, were at an end, Thomas came down to James. He wiped the perspiration from his forehead and taking the offered drink said the place was like a shambles, and that the whole business was damned nearly murder. Even after the two days’ anxiety he had been through, James had spirit left to resent this tone.