Privileged Children (14 page)

The house had aged with its inhabitants. It had not been redecorated since 1912, and the paint on the kitchen walls was chipped and peeling. The kitchen had once been the dining room: it would have looked very proletarian, with its laundry steaming over the crowded table, had it not been for the elaborate carved cornices.

‘Leo, you carry on as though nationalisation would end all the miners’ problems,’ Alice interrupted when she started to listen to the conversation again. ‘I can’t for the life of me see how you can improve conditions by replacing several capitalists by a huge bureaucratic state.’

‘Do you suggest then that you leave the mine owners alone? Let them scrape up a few more pounds by allowing them to leave insecure pit props, and put hundreds of men at risk?’

‘Of course I don’t. I suggest that the miners own and
manage the mines. If they dig the coal out, the coal belongs to them by right. And ownership by the miners isn’t the same thing as nationalisation, whatever Fabians say. The State isn’t the same as the people, and never can be.’

‘Indeed it cannot,’ said Volodya.

‘It might be if it were sufficiently decentralised,’ said Clementina. ‘But honestly, I can’t see how cooperative ownership of the mines, if it could work, could bring the miners a decent wage, in the present economic crisis. Do we agree that the miners ought to get at least £8 a week? Good. Well, the only way they’ll get it is if the government pays them that out of public money.’

‘But the Tories aren’t going to do that,’ said Alice.

‘No more will Ramsay Macdonald, for that matter,’ said Kate.

‘Well,’ said Leo, ‘let’s hear the mine owner’s case. Come on, Miranda, you can be Devil’s Advocate. What would your father say?’

‘Oh, of course, he thinks privately that any form of barbarity which increases his income is a Good Thing,’ said Miranda, ‘but he wouldn’t say so. Actually, I’m not sure quite what argument he would use to justify his position. Naturally, I never knew him as a person.’ She helped herself to more macaroni. Her face took on a shut look. She only talked about her family to Alice.

Leo turned away from her. Miranda listened, half-smiling, to Finola’s eager questioning of Volodya. He was very indulgent.

‘So what did the Reds do with your family jewels?’

‘Oh, I expect they sold them and used the money for some Bolshevik purpose.’

‘Didn’t you escape with anything?’

‘One sapphire, which I hid in the heel of my boot, and a hundred and twelve roubles,’ he smiled. He was making it up about the sapphire.

‘Did you used to be a prince?’ said Finola.

‘No, no,’ he laughed. ‘Only a little provincial landowner. Most of my land was mortgaged anyway.’

‘Oh, but you’re still romantic!’

‘You’re incorrigible, Finola,’ said Miranda.

‘Where did you go when you escaped?’ continued Fin.

Miranda gazed up at the rails of airing clothes and sheets which were suspended by ropes and pulleys over the kitchen table. The rooms in this large, dilapidated, rusty brick house formed, she felt, her first real home; and yet it too was an enclosed world. She met only everyone’s oldest friends. Liza had given her many assurances about Volodya yesterday. She had only gone out of the house a few times since November, when she had first ventured outside. Here, she could always be alone if she liked. If anyone was occasionally hostile to her, Alice was always at her side. Naturally, Bramham Gardens was no more like boarding school than it was like the mansion in which she had been brought up.

Miranda felt dizzy from drinking too much gin. She excused herself, and left the table. She climbed the stairs to her small room on the second floor. It was bare, except for a bed, a table, a chair, some books and her clothes. It was cold in the room, and she put the eiderdown round her shoulders. She went over to the window. She saw a taxi drive up to a nearby house, and a man in a bowler hat, who was carrying the evening paper, got out. Oddly enough, things from the outside, like delivery vans and bowler hats and the
Daily
Telegraph
, surprised her when she saw them from this house, just as they had made her feel cold and strange when she had seen them within the grounds of her boarding school.

Alice stood at her easel, scowling, with a cigarette hanging from her lip, her hair strained back out of her way. Anatole sat under one of the windows, obstructing the light which fell on Miranda as little as possible. He hummed to himself and very occasionally scribbled on the music paper before him.

Miranda was posing nude on Alice’s bed. Light fell on her from in front and from behind. She looked sleek and utterly contented. In the painting, Alice had made the room darker than it was, so that Miranda’s body seemed irradiated. Alice had already completed one picture of Miranda naked. That one showed only hints of her body and face: round white curves on which the light happened to fall in varying degrees of strength, only hinting at the remainder.

‘Do you remember the young beech trees at Caitlin’s, the summer Finola was born?’ asked Anatole suddenly. ‘In the evening? Miranda, if you were a tree, you would be one of those.’

‘Really, Anatole, you ought to take up poetry,’ Miranda replied with an exquisite smile.

‘Keep still!’ snapped Alice.

There was a knock on the door. ‘Who is it?’ Alice called, surprised at the knock.

‘Me,’ replied Mr Tuskin.

‘Wait a moment,’ she said. ‘Miranda, put the blanket over you.’

‘I’m not embarrassed,’ cried Miranda.

‘No, Mirandolina, but he would be, remember?’

Mr Tuskin put his head round the door and then came in. ‘Miss Molloy, why was I not told that you were going to have an exhibition of your own? I only found out from Leo yesterday, yet I hear that the plan was in the offing weeks ago!’

‘I forgot to tell you. I suppose you want to choose the exhibits.’

‘Naturally,’ he replied, raising one eyebrow at her.

Alice laughed. ‘It’s thirteen years since you were responsible for my work.’

‘Nonsense, Miss Molloy, there is still a great deal for me to criticise.’

‘Yes, but Christopher, you have criticisms to make of Vermeer and Watteau,’ said Miranda coldly. ‘And you’ve never had any of your work exhibited.’

‘Don’t be impertinent,’ said Mr Tuskin, without irritation.

‘You don’t need to worry, Miranda, I can defend myself.’

Mr Tuskin walked over to the easel and studied the portrait of Miranda from different angles. ‘I once set out to paint the portrait of the most beautiful boy,’ he commented, ‘but alas, he came from such a respectable family that I was unable even to persuade him to take off his clothes.’

‘How’s Harry?’ said Anatole.

‘I’m afraid that he’s never quite recovered from having been in prison,’ said Mr Tuskin. ‘The food they gave him there was most harmful to the digestive tract. Twice-cooked meat is so constipating. But apart from that, he’s quite well. Now, Miss Molloy, are you going to show me the work you and Leo have so far decided on?’

Alice fetched the stack of five oil paintings which were leaning, against the wall, and a portfolio of drawings and watercolours.

Mr Tuskin examined everything, twitching his lip, wrinkling his nose, and screwing up one eye and then the other. Four of the oil paintings were of London scenes, and the fifth was a portrait of the Bramham Gardens cats, who were called Melbourne, Palmerston, Gladstone and Disraeli. Their names were the picture’s title.

‘If you ever do become renowned as an artist, Miss Molloy
— creditably renowned, that is, not as a portrait-painter — it will be as a painter of London,’ said Mr Tuskin. He was holding a painting entitled
A
Child’s
View
of
Ludgate
Hill,
1903.
Alice’s, jaw dropped.

‘Are you all right, Christopher?’ teased Miranda. He ignored her. One’s first impression of the painting was that the street and the people had been deformed by the artist, but on looking closer it became clear that this was because it was painted from a five-year-old’s level of vision. Some subjects were painted as a large muddle, others, such as the City man who was poised in the bottom left-hand corner looking down disapprovingly on the invisible child, were very observantly depicted.

‘I suppose the one of the Round Pond is charming,’ said Mr Tuskin, ‘but a little tedious. Nothing in it surprises one. I don’t think it should be included.’

‘Alice, can we finish for today?’ asked Miranda, as Alice began to argue with Mr Tuskin.

‘Oh, of course, if you’re tired.’

Miranda went downstairs to get dressed. She came back again with her hair still loose, and asked Anatole to put it up for her. He gladly deserted his pretence of work to do so. She sat in front of him, listening to Alice’s conversation and commenting on the paintings. Anatole slowly twisted the coarse, shining strands of her hair round his hands, pulling it back over her soft ears. He touched one of them gently, and stroked its curve, but Miranda only fidgeted as though a fly had settled there.

Suddenly she noticed that she had not got her watch on. ‘Where’s my watch?’ she said, biting her lip.

She went over to the bed, and searched amongst the covers and on the small table beside it. ‘Oh my God,’ she whispered. ‘It’s absolutely vanished! It can’t possibly be anywhere but here.’

‘It might be in your room,’ said Alice. She never knew what to do when Miranda lost something. She was no good at searching, and Miranda was never calm until the object had been retrieved. To shout at her for being silly, as Kate had done, made her worse. Alice picked up the portfolio and took Mr Tuskin off to have a drink and look at the drawings
in the kitchen.

‘It can’t possibly be in my room, it really can’t be. I remember putting it here, here, next to this book! Oh God, why do these terrible things happen to me! Why must they do this to me? What shall I do if I never find it? Why is life such hell? I’ll never, ever find it!’ She was crying, and her eyes were red and wild with fear. The watch she had lost was valuable and handsome, a present from a godfather of whom she had been fond; but she had been as upset over the loss of her hairbrush.

Anatole, who had been watching helplessly, suddenly got up and shook her, and slapped her face to calm her. ‘Sit down, Miranda. Come on.’ He took her over to the bed. ‘No one is going to punish you for losing something. No one is going to steal your things because they want to see you punished. That’s what the others did to you at school, didn’t they? That’s why you are like this?’ He was sitting on something hard, and, putting his hand in the pillow case, found the watch and put it round Miranda’s quiet wrist. ‘It happened to me too,’ he said. ‘I made myself forget, but my half-brother did it to me. I know that, in childhood, the consequences of losing anything are terrible.’

Miranda started to cry again, but in a different way. ‘Do you know what it’s called?’ she said. ‘It’s called “teaching you to have a sense of humour”.’

‘Teaching you to be passive under continual humiliation,’ said Anatole.

‘Exactly. “Oh, Miranda, you must learn to take teasing,” they say. How can it be just to laugh at or tease someone who doesn’t understand and can’t hit back? And, of course, there’s never anything funny to laugh at.’

‘All humour is cruel,’ said Anatole, stroking her hair. ‘It always consists of laughing at the misfortunes of others.’

‘They used to hide my games clothes,’ sobbed Miranda, ‘because that was the worst. Once my lacrosse stick was gone for three days. The games teacher made me write a thousand lines saying, “I must not be careless.” “You mustn’t be careless, Miranda,” the girl who’d hid it said to me when she handed it back. I hit her with it and knocked her out. Then they put me in solitary confinement for a week. That,
of course, was my happiest week at Radfield. They fed me on bread and cheese as part of the punishment, but how delicious that was in comparison to the school food. They used to force us — I
mean
force — to eat scrag-end of neck, cod, brains, tapioca and junket.’

Anatole shuddered. ‘Weren’t you all ill on that?’

‘Certainly we were. Every February there was an influenza epidemic, and every girl went down with it because they put the sick girls in the dormitories with the healthy ones. I didn’t find that so bad as constipation, though. I honestly thought that I would die, my first term. I begged and begged for some syrup of figs. “Don’t be ridiculous, child, you’re just not trying,” said the matron.’

‘How long were you there, Miranda?’

‘Five and a half terms. I was twelve when I went. I’d had a governess till then.’

‘Was that better?’ Anatole had never heard details about Miranda’s childhood before; for she had never told him, and Alice regarded them as confidential.

‘Well, she was dull and cruel through lack of imagination like most people are, but of course it was better, because there weren’t any other girls. Before her, though, I had a very nice governess, but she left, I don’t know why, when I was nine. I suspect that my father sacked her because I didn’t know the Kings of England and my twelve-times table. Teaching that sort of thing wasn’t Miss Heaney’s method.’

Miranda closed her eyes and let her taut body sag for a moment. ‘Oh well, this is all quite irrelevant,’ she said a little later. ‘It’s over, like you said.’

‘It’s not over, Mirandolina,’ said Anatole, ‘not while you’re still suffering so much from it.’

‘Only because I let myself. Pure self-pity.’ Miranda made her upper lip stiff.

‘You must have been told that for a great many years,’ said Anatole. ‘Everyone comes to believe that sort of thing, once their own sufferings are in a sense “over”. That’s why children go on being cruelly treated from generation to generation.’

‘Some people believe the lies they’re told about themselves
— and about other things, but chiefly about themselves — even when they’re still children. Most do, as a matter of fact.’ Miranda paused. ‘I’ll never forgive myself for believing what they told me for two terms — my third and fourth terms. I was quite a rebel when I first went to school, although I didn’t actually break a single rule. But the mistresses and the other girls could tell that I hated and despised them — that frightened them much more than disobedience. That’s why they told me I was mad, perverted, corrupt, loathsome.’

‘Perhaps a child who is an unbeliever is a disease in the body politic,’ said Anatole. He lit his pipe and watched her. Miranda was very white. She had vomited out her emotions and she felt very reasonable.

‘I’ve been very crude, you know,’ she said, as she slowly wound up her wrist watch. ‘I used to think that the authorities — you know, just hated disobedience itself. But in fact, actual obedience rather frightens parents and schools — they think it’s unnatural for one not to actually break rules. What they really want is a sort of passive obedience: they don’t mind if you break the rules, so long as you accept the punishments they mete out in absolute submission as completely just. I must go and think it all out properly.’

She paused.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ll never forgive myself for giving in that time. I remember being thrilled when I heard some senior saying “that young Pagett’s coming on quite nicely” — meaning that I’d started to really conform. My God! The terrifying thing is that it was so very easy to give in, and the rewards were so great. I was hardly bullied at all those two terms. And I had two friends.’

‘Don’t be so hard on yourself,’ said Anatole, ‘it’s very understandable that you should have left off struggling after seven years. And remember, you must have been in a great state at that age, just coming up to your menarche.’

‘It was my own fault that I was so unhappy. No, I’m not just being conventional. I mean that if I’d either understood none of the truth about my position, or all of it, I’d have been better off. But I just had a very little knowledge; I could see half-way through them all but not the whole way. I’m
just not quite clever enough!’

‘What nonsense,’ said Anatole. ‘Do you think that at the age of six you should have intellectualised all your pain as you’re doing now?’

Anatole put his arm round her waist. She sat there, looking into his eyes. He drew her head towards him and tried to kiss her but she shook herself away.

‘No,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘Because I don’t want to, that’s why.’

‘Is it because of Alice?’

‘I don’t know. No, it’s not that, I simply don’t find you attractive.’ She saw, looking at him, that he had never been in this position before, and she laughed.

Then she said: ‘It’s very odd, you know, talking to someone who really does understand. Rather frightening, in fact. I was right not to talk to you all that time — now you have a sort of possession of my mind. Alice doesn’t. She understands — in the sense that she’s happy, and it angers and upsets and puzzles her when someone is not happy — but she doesn’t know.’

She went out, and left Anatole staring after her.