Виктория Холт: On the Night of the Seventh Moon

So how could I settle down to this dreary existence? Mr. Clees had come next door with Miss Amelia Clees. They were pleasant and kind and I often went into the bookshop to see them. Miss Clees knew a great deal about books and it was for her sake that Mr. Clees had bought the shop.

“So that I shall have a means of livelihood when he is gone,” she told me. Sometimes they came to dine with us and Aunt Matilda was quite interested in Mr. Clees because he had confided to her that he had only one kidney.

That Christmas Day was dreary. The Clees had not yet taken possession of the shop and I had to spend the time with Aunts Caroline and Matilda. There were no trees, and our presents to each other had to be useful. There were no roasted chestnuts, no ghost stories round the fire, no legends of the forest, no stories of my father’s undergraduate days; nothing but an account of the good deeds Aunt Caroline used to perform for the poor in her Somerset village and from Aunt Matilda the effects of too rich feeding on the digestive organs.

I realized that the reason they were more intimate with each other than they were with anyone else was that they never listened to each other and they carried on a conversation independently of each other.

I would listen idly.

“We did what we could for them but it’s no use helping people like that.”

“Congestion of the liver. She went all yellow.”

“The father was constantly drunk. I told her that the child must not go about in torn garments.

“We’ve got no pins, ma’am,” she said.

“Pins,” I cried.

“Pins! What is wrong with a needle and thread?”

“The doctor gave her up. It had led to congestion of the lungs. She lay like a corpse.”

And so on, happily pursuing their individual lines of thought.

I was amused and then exasperated; I would take my mother’s book called Gods and Heroes of the Northlands and read of those fantastic adventures of Thor and Odin and Siegfried, Beowulf and the rest of them. And I fancied I was there with that unmistakable scent of the fir and pine trees, the rushing of little mountain streams and the sudden descent of the mist.

“It’s time you took your nose out of that book and did something useful,” commented Aunt Caroline.

“Bending over books will send you into a decline,” Aunt Matilda told me.

“It stops the expansion of the chest.”

My great solace at that time was the Grevilles. They could talk of the pine forests. They had a feeling for them. They had spent a holiday there some years ago and often went back to visit them. It was they who had brought me back and forth from the Damenstift, for they had been great friends of my parents. Their son Anthony was studying for the church. He was such a good son, the delight of his parents, who were so proud of him. They were very kind and sorry for me. I spent Boxing Day with them and it was a relief to escape from the aunts.

They tried to make it gay for me and there were little individual Christmas trees just as my mother had arranged them.

Anthony was there, and when he spoke his parents listened in a hushed silence which amused me while it endeared me to them. We played guessing games, and games with paper and pencil, but Anthony was so much more learned than the rest of us that we came nowhere.

It was quite pleasant and Anthony walked home with me and said rather shyly that he hoped I would visit his parents’ home whenever I wished to.

“Is that what you would like?” I asked.

He assured me that he would.

“Then they would want it too,” I said, ‘because they always want what you do. “

He smiled. He had a quick understanding and was very pleasant, but not in the least exciting to be with and it was n. o. s. m. impossible for me now to avoid comparing any man with Siegfried. If Anthony had found a girl in the mist he would have taken her straight back to where she belonged, and if he could not, to his mother; and she would have no need to utter warnings and to take on the role of guardian angel.

I would be pleased to go to the Grevilles and see them and their son; but the desire to be again in that hunting lodge sitting opposite my wicked baron was so intense that it was sometimes like a physical pain.

There were more visits to the Grevilles. The Clees came to the shop and I heard that I had fifteen hundred pounds clear when all debts were paid.

“A nest egg,” said Aunt Caroline; and invested wisely it would give me a small income which would enable me to live like a lady. I would continue under their care and they would teach me how to become a good housewife, an art in which it was obvious to them I was by no means accomplished. I was disturbed. I saw myself growing like the aunts; learning how to run a house, speaking to Ellen so that she cringed, making rows of jams, preserves and jellies and lining them up in chronological order with labels on them denoting that they were blackberry jelly, raspberry jam or orange marmalade of the 1859, 1860 variety and so on through the century, while I grew’ into a good housewife with banisters which held not a speck of dust and tables in which I could see my reflection, making my own beeswax and turpentine, salting my own pork, gathering my black currants for jelly and brooding over the quality of my ginger wine.

And somewhere in the world Siegfried would be pursuing his adventures and if we met again after many rows of jars in my still room he would not know me but I should always know him.

Escape was at the Grevilles’ house where I was always welcome, and sometimes Anthony was there to talk about the past, for he was as enamoured of the past as I was of the pine forests; I found it interesting to learn what the Queen’s marriage had meant to the country, how the Consort had ousted Lord Melbourne, what he had done for the country-of the great Exhibition in Hyde Park which Anthony described so vividly that I could see the Crystal Palace and the little Queen so proud beside her husband. He talked of the war in the Crimea and the great Palmerston and how our country was growing into a mighty Empire.

I should have been very unhappy during that period but for the Grevilles.

But Anthony was not always there and I found it tiring to hear an account of his virtues, which his parents never failed to give me; and I was restless and unhappy and felt sometimes as though I were in limbo, waiting . for what I was not sure.

I told Mrs. Greville that I wanted to do something.

“Young girls really have plenty to do in the house,” she said.

“They learn how to be good wives when they marry.”

“It seems very little,” I replied.

“Oh no, being a housewife is one of the important jobs in the world . for a woman.”

I didn’`t take to it. My jam burned the pans; the labels came off.

Aunt Caroline tut-tutted.

“This is what comes of going to outlandish schools.”

“Outlandish’ was a favourite word, to be applied to anything of which she did not approve.

My father had made that ‘outlandish’ marriage. I had ‘outlandish’ notions about doing something in life.

“What could you do? Go and be a governess to children? Miss Grace, the vicar’s daughter in our old home, went as a companion when her father died.”

“She went into a decline soon after,” added Aunt Matilda grimly.

To that Lady Ogilvy. She was the one who stopped giving soup to the poor because she said they gave it to the pigs as soon as her back was turned. “

“I knew what was wrong with her long before,” put in Aunt Matilda.

“She was that transparent colour. You can tell.

“You’ll go into a decline, my girl,” I said to myself.

“And it won’t be very long before you do either.”

I was thoughtful. I didn’`t fancy looking after children or being a companion to some fratchetty old lady who might well be worse than Aunt Caroline and Aunt Matilda; at least the incongruity of their conversation and the predictability of their views gave me a little amusement.