Thalia Read online

  ‘If you would wait a little I could do a much better one,’ I said. ‘I’m still a student.’

  ‘But you’re very, very charming, Tintoretta, and you’ll get married very quickly—that’s why I want it done now.’

  She had taken my face between her hands and was looking searchingly at me. ‘It would never be better than it is now,’ she said. ‘A painter should know either nothing or a great deal about his sitter. You know nothing about me. But you’re in love with painting, in love with life—a little in love with your sitter. Aren’t I right?’

  Thalia had listened to this banter with a wooden face. Now she said to me: ‘I don’t like it, Rachel. It’s too fantastic. It’s full of colours I can’t see.’

  ‘How could you see them?’ I said. ‘I’m only just beginning to see them myself and I study them all day.’

  ‘I shall never see them,’ said Thalia obstinately, ‘because they aren’t there.’

  I was annoyed at her vehemence. Catherine was amused. ‘You don’t like me, do you, Thalia?’ she teased her. Thalia was suddenly red-faced. She began blinking nervously and muttering something about not being able to explain what she meant. Catherine hugged me ostentatiously. ‘I do believe she’s jealous. She wants Tintoretta all to herself. Come now, Thalia, be honest. Confess that you really like the painting but dislike the subject!’

  But Thalia had rushed out of the room without answering, and after a moment, Clodagh ran after her. I was scraping my palette and wiping my brushes.

  ‘What a thistly young thing!’ said Catherine. ‘I’m not at all sure that I like her. How’d you put up with her, Rachel? I hear she’s quite uncivilized at school.’

  ‘She’s all right,’ I said shortly. I felt a violent aversion to discussing Thalia with anyone—even Catherine.

  ‘And I hope that you are doing all you can for Cynthia and the children.’ So ran the letter from my aunt which I was reading on the rocks below the steps of the villa. Was I? It seemed to me that I was doing a great deal more than I had ever expected to do.

  Cynthia was now caught up in a whirl of social life in the Colony. She was always out. I saw her every morning to take the day’s orders, and these were becoming daily heavier as she left more and more to me.

  ‘It’s just like India,’ Thalia said contemptuously. ‘Golf, bridge, gossip and tea. Cocktails and dancing with other people’s husbands!’

  ‘I thought you liked India.’

  ‘I like India. Not what people like Mother think is India.’

  She had, I found, a kind of Kipling love for the ordinary poor man and woman in India. She had no use for the attitude of memsahibs in the army circles in which she lived. Her father encouraged her in learning their language and interesting herself in the troubles and miseries of the poor. She told me that she went every week to visit the wives of the men in the regiment, and that she knew all the complicated names of the families and children. Cynthia, on the other hand, was always terrified of the diseases among them, and she didn’t like Indian smells.

  ‘It was her duty as the Colonel’s wife to visit the women in the lines,’ said Thalia. ‘But she’s never learned anything but how to order in Hindustani from the servants, so she can’t talk to the men’s wives.’

  It was the same here in France. Cynthia wouldn’t learn French. It fell to me to see to everything.

  My aunt was on her way to Egypt now, this letter had been posted from Port Said. I had written her at length and complained of the amount of chores Cynthia expected me to do.

  ‘You are extremely lucky to be in such a lovely place and to be able to continue your study of languages. You will very soon have to earn your own living and learn to take responsibilities. This is the best time of your life. Make the most of it.’

  I screwed up the letter into a ball and flung it into the sea. The gulls thought it was food, and cascaded down to it.

  My aunt had never known what it was to have to do chores for other people. She, like Cynthia, employed others to do them for her. Cynthia didn’t even employ me, but the amount she expected me to do in return for the doubtful privilege of living with her seemed to be increasing daily.

  I had come here for Thalia. Tom Pemberton had told me that. The girl interested me enormously. She was unlike anyone I had ever met. When one considered that she was Cynthia’s daughter it was even more extraordinary. There seemed to be no bond of any kind between them.

  By the time I had carried out all Cynthia’s commissions and attended to all Claude’s wants there wasn’t so much time left for Thalia. As to my own studies there was even less. I would draw on the kitchen slate while Cynthia was trying to make up her mind what we should eat for the day. I never listened, because she invariably gave up the struggle, saying: ‘You think of something, Rachel—but it must be cheap. I’ve no money this week.’

  She never had any money for anything except bridge and she was losing heavily.

  ‘Why d’you play for money?’ I would ask her when she would tell me ruefully how much she had lost.

  ‘Everyone does,’ was her reply. ‘I must do as others do.’

  I thought this very stupid—as Thalia did. We both wanted to do something which other people didn’t do. Cynthia, like my aunt, drew a pattern into which they and those surrounding them must be fitted. I preferred to draw the pattern round myself—as did Thalia. Life was too short to be bothered with doing the dull things that everyone else did. Didn’t the sundial in my aunt’s rose garden say: ‘It is later than you think’? And the roses’ death-stained petals strewn over it confirm it?

  Cynthia was wrong when she thought that Thalia and I looked down on older people, that we despised them. We envied them their experience, their advantages over youth. But how blind they all were to our needs. Couldn’t they see that we were thirsting to live? Longing to taste life for ourselves. But did they ever discuss with us the burning questions which beset our minds and stirred our bodies?

  ‘You’re too young . . . you wouldn’t understand!’ they said. Thalia and I discussed the stupidity of Them endlessly.

  At night, after Thalia had reluctantly gone to her room, I would stand at the window and look out at the sea. The mimosa was still flowering—the kind here in Dinard bloomed twice a year and its scent was intoxicatingly sweet. Sometimes the sea was so beautiful that I couldn’t bear it—and I would almost weep. But I didn’t know why except that, as Marie said, to-morrow the storm might change its face to one of savage fury.

  My cousin had died when he was sixteen. He and I had loved poetry. When he lay on that balcony in Davos he would ask me to read to him—and it was always poetry he wanted. I turned to it now again for comfort in the months which lay ahead. I went to Thalia’s school and asked to borrow books of poetry. The English mistress there did more than just lend them. She suggested that as I was in France I should read only French poetry and introduced me to the Renaissance poets—and I fell in love with Pierre de Ronsard.

  Perhaps it was that his exquisite lines about the brevity of beauty reminded me immediately and vividly of the sundial.

  Comme on void sur la branche au mois de May la rose

  En sa belle jeunesse, en sa premiere fleur,

  Rendre le ciel jaloux de sa vive couleur,

  Quand l’aube de ses pleurs au poinct du jour l’arrose

  seemed to me as exquisitely sad as his lovely one about old age.

  Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle,

  Assise auprès du feu, devidant et filant,

  Direz chantant mes vers, en vous esmerveillant:

  Ronsard me celebroit du temps que j’estois belle.

  I was enchanted with him, and tried to make Thalia as enthusiastic as I was. She would listen while I translated as well as I could the lovely sonnets and odes, and she would say: ‘I don’t like them. Some of it is silly. I like Kipling—but some of him is silly too.’

  But if I stopped, she would beg me to go on. ‘I like listening to you, Ra
chel.’

  And I would go on, thinking that surely something of its beauty would touch her, something of the words themselves would remain with her. I persevered not because of this only —but because I was in love with Pierre de Ronsard.

  As to her French, she wasn’t getting on at all according to Julie Caron. Julie was constantly coming to me in tears. ‘She won’t try. She won’t say a word, and yet I know she understands a great deal of what I say to her.’

  And she did understand. I discovered this from Marie. Marie knew no English, in spite of having worked with both English and Americans.

  ‘Why should I speak English?’ she demanded. ‘Breton and French are sufficient for anyone.’

  But Marie carried on some kind of conversation with Thalia because I heard them in the mornings when Marie was waking her.

  ‘Mademoiselle Thalia is clever. She says nothing—but she sees a lot!’ was Marie’s comment on her.

  ‘What d’you talk about to Marie?’ I asked Thalia one morning.

  ‘She was hanging up the crucifix which was in the top drawer of my chest,’ said Thalia. ‘She won’t be happy until she’s done the whole house.’

  ‘She’s done the top floor,’ I said. ‘I wonder who put them all away?’

  ‘Mother, of course. She hates anything like that.’

  ‘But she goes to church!’ I said in astonishment. Cynthia seldom missed the Sunday morning service in the Anglo-American church.

  ‘Her brother went over to Rome and she says it’s because he had a crucifix hanging in his room as a child.’

  ‘We all had them at school,’ I said, ‘but we didn’t go over to Rome.’

  ‘If you ask Mother, she’ll tell you that you’ll be converted to Rome if you leave that crucifix in your room.’

  ‘Marie says it keeps the Devil out.’

  ‘It’s the same as the charms they put round the children’s necks in India to keep away the evil spirits.’

  ‘So you do understand what Marie says!’

  ‘Some of it.’

  ‘Then why don’t you speak French more? Why won’t you do as Mademoiselle Caron wants? She says you won’t say a word.’

  ‘Because Mother wants that very much. I’m not pretty. And I’m not clever. She’d like it if I could chatter French as Claude is beginning to do. She doesn’t count Hindi and Urdu and Marathi as languages.’

  ‘But surely you want to learn French. It’ll make your whole stay here much more interesting.’

  ‘I don’t like it here. I’m just waiting to get back to India and look after Father. I know all the French I shall ever need.’

  Letters were coming from Tom Pemberton. Thalia had received several and he had written a long one to me. He was now up on the North-West Frontier.

  ‘This is a wild place, and the people are wild,’ he wrote. ‘There is a lot of trouble again with the tribes. They can be so quickly stirred up by religious factors and their leaders use them shamefully for their own political ends. The Government made a big mistake in their retrenchment of the Army policy last year. The tribes get to know these things very quickly, and its effect on them has been most exhilarating. They are splendid fighters, in spite of their poor weapons—they have the courage of lions; and emerging from the rocks in the narrow passes in the mountains will swoop wildly down. We lost thirty men in an ambush in the Nahakki Pass recently, and two of my officers. Some of the prisoners we took, fine men with wild elf locks and the look of eagles, hadn’t the least idea of what they were fighting against. They’d just been promised food if they fought and killed some of the British. Here, under the blazing sun, with the vultures above us, one realizes vividly the shortness of life. Any of those bodies we buried so quickly to save them from these foul birds might have been mine. I haven’t told Cynthia of this affray. She would worry—and that’s bad for her heart. But Thalia, she’s of another calibre. I’m writing her an account of the whole exciting incident—although I’m afraid that Cynthia will probably see it in the papers.’

  ‘Of another calibre.’ Was she? I didn’t know what went on under those freckles and the nervous eyes.

  She had brought her letter to me and the hands holding it were shaking. ‘Read it. Read it. He might have been killed. He might have been killed. I can’t bear it. I can’t. He oughtn’t to be out there all alone.’

  ‘A soldier’s always alone,’ I said. ‘No one can go with him on these expeditions. You wouldn’t be allowed near the Frontier.’

  ‘I hate the whole thing. The whole beastly stupid Army and the stupider Government. I wish he’d come out—like Terence.’

  ‘It’s his life, he’s a fine soldier!’ I said mechanically. But I felt like Thalia did. It was a wicked waste of men.

  ‘He may be killed by now!’ she cried dramatically. ‘This letter has taken over two weeks.’

  ‘We can all die at any minute,’ I said, thinking of my cousin. But I was wondering how it would feel to go out on an exciting expedition such as Tom Pemberton’s letter described. To know that at any moment death could come to you from behind those great boulders in the Pass. The tribesmen lying immobile, their bodies melting into the heat of the rocks, waiting with their out-of-date Enfields or their ‘long, lean, Northern knives’, as Tom described them in the words of Kipling, to fall upon the narrow file of soldiers as they entered the Pass. How would one feel?

  I tried to reassure Thalia, who was pinched with anxiety and misery. It was no use telling her not to worry. I made up my mind to write to Tom Pemberton and tell him that Thalia should not be told these things. Although disconcertingly adult in some things, she was only a child. She might be of a different calibre from Cynthia, but it seemed to me that perhaps he had made a mistake as to which of them could take such horrors lightly.

  ‘Robin Thorne was killed. Robin! He was the only one I liked,’ she cried passionately.

  ‘Don’t tell your mother. Your father expressly says not to.’

  ‘She wouldn’t care. He couldn’t dance or play bridge.’

  I was shocked at the cynical way she said this.

  ‘Next to father I love you, Rachel,’ she said, rubbing her face along my arm like a cat does.

  I pulled the arm away. Since my cousin’s death I had shied away from human affection. It hurt too much when it was taken away—and yet I longed for it as much as I sensed Thalia did.

  Claude, rushing up to ask us to play football, chased away our gloom. We kicked the ball over the sands, sending it as near the waves as possible. Claude cried with rage and frustration when he couldn’t get it every time. Thalia laughed and laughed. She could kick splendidly, and sent the ball far up the beach. We collided racing to get it before the sea did, and lay laughing helplessly at poor Claude, who was hopping mad with impatient fury.

  ‘The sea’ll get you. It’ll get you both and drown you for taking my football.’ He screamed as a wave came right up, splashing our heads as we lay giggling in the sand.

  Thalia tore away suddenly and rushed up the steps. Halfway up she leaped dramatically down on to the sand crying wildly: ‘I am Tristram leaping from the castle. Look, here I go!’ and she hurled herself on to the one sandy patch, where she lay laughing. I had to drag her to her feet before a really huge wave caught her.

  Claude looked contemptuously from me to Thalia. ‘You’re not a bit like Tristram. He was a knight. A fighter in armour. You’re silly. Silly, stupid pigs! Girls can’t be knights.’

  And snatching his football from me he stood there glowering at us—but we only went on laughing.

  Madame Anastasia gave her ballet classes in a room built right out over the sea. She was old, with a face like a small fierce eagle. She stood in the centre of the class with a stick which she used on the legs of the pupils. We did our exercises at the barre with the sea before our eyes and its reflection behind ours in the great mirror. We wore short black tunics for the practice classes.

  When one afternoon Cynthia insisted on coming to watch us, Thalia
, always acutely nervous, became so utterly miserable and self-conscious that it was agony to watch her. With Cynthia sitting there looking beautiful and Claude watching every movement, she couldn’t perform the simplest step.

  She was directly behind me at the barre, and I kept encouraging her with instructions and turning as much as I could to help her until Madame’s stick came down on my legs, and Madame’s hands seized my head as if it were screwed on and turned it relentlessly away from Thalia.

  ‘Attend to yourself! Are you so good that you needn’t attend to me?’ And a storm of words was hurled at me.

  Most of the pupils were young French girls, all much younger than I was, but there were one or two who were much older and amongst these was Judy van Klaveren. She was a small, slim American woman with short curly hair cut like a boy’s. Her face was like a mischievous monkey’s, her eyes so intelligent and alert that she held my attention at once. She was chewing gum all the time she went through the routine at the barre, where she was immediately in front of me.

  ‘Don’t take any notice of the old girl. She’s on one of her show-offs to-day,’ she said over her shoulder to me.

  My leg was still smarting from the stick. ‘Does she often use that stick?’ I asked.

  ‘She wouldn’t use it twice on me. I’d like to see her try!’

  ‘I don’t mind if she doesn’t use it on Thalia,’ I said.

  ‘You mean Cynthia’s daughter? The one behind you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why has Cynthia come? Madame doesn’t allow onlookers in the classes. It makes us nervous.’

  ‘She insisted.’

  ‘Madame Klaveren! En troisième position! La TROISIEME!’

  Judy subsided and dutifully corrected her position. She looked delightful in her short tunic, like a naughty little girl. There were little laughter lines all round the eyes and mouth.

  When we rested, Cynthia called me over. ‘You can help Thalia practise at home,’ she said. ‘I see that you have done a lot of this before.’

  ‘They are the routine exercises.’

  ‘Your aunt told me that when you grew so fat last year the ballet classes were your salvation. She said that you were always graceful because of your training. That’s why I’m insisting on Thalia learning ballet.’