Ivy Compton-Burnett - A Family and a Fortune

‘How I remember Mother’s slender figure moving in and out between the two taller ones! That is a different line of thought, but the picture somehow came. And it brings its own train. Mother would have wished things to come right between them. And it may be that they will do so, and the three tall figures move together through life. But I fear it cannot be yet. Uncle was heading for trouble, and at the crucial moment it came. He could not go on too long, keyed up to that pitch. The strain of the last months can only be imagined. None of us can know what it was.’

‘Is Justine transfigured?’ said Aubrey.

‘Well, I am affected by the spectacle of intense human drama. I do not deny it.’

‘It were idle to do so,’ said Clement.

‘It would have been better to go away at once,’ said Mark, ‘and not attempt the impossible.’

‘I don’t know,’ said his sister, gazing before her. ‘It was a great failure. Surely one of those that are greater than success.’

‘I never quite know what those are. I suppose you mean other kinds of success. The same kind involves the same effort and has a better end.’

‘And a much more convenient one,’ said Clement.

‘Yes, yes, more convenient,’ said Justine. ‘But what we have seen was surely something more than that.’

‘Something quite different indeed,’ said Mark.

‘Surely it was worth it.’

‘From our point of view, as spectators?’

‘Well, in the sense that all human effort must achieve something essential, even if not apparent.’

‘Well, now the human drama goes on in the snow,’ said Aubrey.

‘Oh, surely they have got under shelter by now,’ said Justine, laughing as she ended. ‘Oh, what intolerable bathos! You horrid little boy, pulling me down from my heights!’

‘You could not have gone on too long any more than Uncle.’

‘I don’t know. I felt I was somehow in my element.’

‘That may have been what Uncle thought. I believe it was,’ said Mark.

‘A greater than Uncle is here,’ said Aubrey.

‘And they are different heights,’ said Clement.

‘I think Clement is making an effort to conquer his taciturnity, Justine.’

‘Oh, don’t let us joke about it. Do let us turn serious eyes on a serious human situation.’

‘Miss Griffin and Uncle walking through the snow, with Miss Griffin wearing Uncle’s coat and hat!’ murmured Aubrey.

‘She was not wearing his hat. She — she — ’ said Justine, going into further laughter — ‘had a shawl round her head. Oh, why are we laughing? Why cannot we take a serious view of what is serious and even tragic in itself? Miss Griffin’s long relation with Aunt Matty broken! Because I suppose it is the break. And her life at sixes and sevens, because that must be the truth. And we cannot see it without being diverted by silly, little, surface things which in themselves have their tragic side, just because they touch our superficial sense of humour.’ Justine’s voice quavered away as this again happened to her. ‘I suppose we are half hysterical; that is what it is.’

‘That is the usual explanation of unseemly mirth,’ said Mark.

‘Well, happiness is a good thing,’ said Edgar, smiling in the door, his voice as he said Matty’s words illustrating the difference between them. ‘Maria and I are going to walk outside — that is, we are going for a walk before Mark and I begin to work. Your aunt is resting upstairs.’

‘Oh, Father, it seems that we ought not to be in spirits on the day of Grandpa’s death and Aunt Matty’s desolation, and all of it,’ said Justine, taking hold of his coat. ‘But we are in a simple, silly mood. We have agreed that we must be hysterical.’

‘Your grandfather’s death can only seem to you the natural thing it is. He has not been much in your life and he has had his own.’ Edgar’s voice was calm and almost empty, as if his feelings on one thing left him none for any other.

‘But Aunt Matty’s loneliness and all that has happened,’ said Justine, standing with her face close to the coat and bringing the lapels together. ‘You do feel that you have an anchor in your children?’

Edgar turned and walked away.

‘Oh, I suppose I have said the wrong thing as usual. I might have known it was hopeless to attempt to do anything for him. In my heart I did know.’

‘It is good to follow the dictates of the heart,’ said Clement.

‘Yes, you can be supercilious. But what did you attempt after all? I did try to show Father that he had something to depend on in his home.’

‘And he showed you that he could not take your view.’

‘I suppose Maria has taken my place with him. Well, it would be small to mind it. I have never done much to earn the place. And it is better than her taking another. She does not feel she has taken that. We can think of that little place as open and empty, free for Mother’s little shadow.’

Aubrey turned and slouched out of the room, kicking up his feet. He came upon Maria, who had been to fetch a cloak and was following her husband.

‘Are you going upstairs?’ she said. ‘What is the matter? Come back in a minute and tell me.’

Aubrey threw back his head, thrust his hands into his pockets and turned and sauntered back.

‘Odd days these.’

‘Yes, they are strange and disturbed. But they will pass.’

‘Days have a way of doing that. It is the one thing to be said for them.’

‘Too much happened yesterday indeed.’

‘Indeed.’

‘Your grandfather had had his full share of everything. And there is no greater good fortune than sudden death.’

‘No,’ said Aubrey, his face changing in a manner which told Maria her mistake.

‘And he knows nothing now,’ she said, ‘not even that he is dead. And that can be said of all dead people.’

There was a pause.

‘You have had your share of things,’ said Aubrey, with terse and equal understanding.

‘We have all had that and found it enough.’

‘Too much for me. Quickly up and quickly down at my age. But if I am thought callous one minute, I am thought sensitive the next.’

‘We need not mind being thought callous sometimes,’ said Maria, seeing the aspect preferred.

‘No. The heart knoweth,’ said her stepson, turning away.

‘Shall I say what I can see?’ said Mark. ‘Or does it go without saying?’

‘Let us not go to meet her,’ said Clement. ‘Let us begin differently and hope so to go on.’

‘Your aunt is already in the hall or we should meet her,’ said Edgar with a vision of his brother going swiftly to such a scene.

Matty came forward without exhibition of her lameness or of anything about herself.

‘No, I am afraid you must see me as the bearer of ill tidings. And I may deserve to have to bring them. I have made myself the harbinger of sadness and now I am not to come without it. But you will make my hard task easy. You will know that the tidings are sad for me as well as for you.’

‘What is it?’ said Edgar at once. ‘Is it my brother?’

‘Yes, you have helped me. And now I can help myself and tell you that it is not the worst, that all is not lost. There is still hope. He is lying ill at a farmhouse twenty miles away. He walked for days when he left this house, and got wet and got weary, and ate and slept where he could; and came at last to this farm one night, hardly able to say who he was or whence he came.’ Matty dramatized what she had to tell, but spoke without actual thought of herself. ‘And the next day they fetched Miss Griffin to nurse him, and a message came from her to me this morning, to say that there is trouble on the lungs and that she does not dare to hide the truth. She has a doctor and a nurse, and the woman at the farm is good. So all we have to do is to go to him at once All that you have to do. What I have to do is to stay here and keep the house until your return.. And if it seems to me the harder part, I will still do it to the best that is in me. I will do what serves you most and what saves you anything.’