shall never touch her or harm her or lay hands upon her …’
His face was tired. He fell into endless repetitions, his pen travelling fast, from left to right across the page, and the light rained down over him, harsh and bright from under the torn silk shade.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was Mrs Parsons’s day. She came up from the village on Saturdays to do the rough, her white hair bound in a mauve turban, her eyes all the time narrowed against her cigarette smoke. She loved praise and constantly invited it, taking Frances to inspect her work, the polished furniture, the turned-out bedroom.
‘Now, madam dear,’ she would say, halting in the doorway, linking her arm with Frances’s as no one else would dare to do, ‘just tell me please if you can find a cobweb. Look anywhere you like, dear; I defy you to find one.’ Frances could not. ‘I like to see everything neat and clean,’ she would say. This was true. She abhorred untidiness or Bohemianism.
Mrs Parsons disliked Camilla, although Camilla was at great pains to be pleasant. ‘Each to their own walk of life,’ she would say, meaning she mistrusted Camilla’s, which she had summed up (from the books on the bedside-table) as a sterile London life – politics, meetings, interference with other people’s affairs. Then, too, people in London seemed not to marry as they did in the country. The village girls married in their early twenties, Mrs Parsons herself at the age of eighteen. In London, womenin their thirties unconcernedly set up house on their own, as if they had all their lives before them in which to find husbands and bear children.
Frances was accepted in the village. She held a place in the community, or rather on the fringe of it, which would have distressed and puzzled her if she had known. Living there, alone in her cottage, just outside the village, they thought of her as an eccentric, as one of those local characters which all such rural societies encompass – the village idiot, the gossiping postmistress, the absent-minded vicar and, thus – Frances herself —the slightly cracked old maid with her bee-keeping and her sketching. Two hundred years earlier she might have been the local witch.
So intent was she on being a normal elderly woman, so much trouble did she take, that she would always rather be praised for her crab-apple jelly than her painting, for the first was a marvel in her, the other natural to her and inevitable. Detesting the artists she had met and the milieu in which they usually worked she painted at set hours and did the washing-up first, remembering always Flaubert’s advice to artists – Be regular and ordinary in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you can be violent and original in your works.’ She would have been distressed beyond measure and bewildered if she had known how extraordinary the villagers thought her, or how Mrs Parsons on Saturday nights at the pub, spoke of her as ‘my poor dear lady’, pitying her, or told stories of her little mad kindnesses, her presents of money, of dried herbs, of cowslip wine, of jars of honey, of advice: how she had searched the snowy fields one winter’s night, hearing a rabbit crying in a trap, and had given her dinner to the dog when she was short of meat and eaten bread and marmalade herself. These actions, so natural to Frances that she would never have believed that ordinary people could behave otherwise, were enough to set the stories circulating,but she remained quite ignorant of them, and when Mrs Parsons took her arm, she thought it a gesture of simple kindness, not protection.
This morning, Mrs Parsons had brought something in with her as well as her basket with its rolled-up pinafore. Tragedy, Frances thought it was. Camilla said she was sullen, that she would give her notice before the day was out. Yet it was grief that made Mrs Parsons carry herself so stiffly, behave so impeccably. Usually loose in her speech, this morning she discriminated with her words;
His face was tired. He fell into endless repetitions, his pen travelling fast, from left to right across the page, and the light rained down over him, harsh and bright from under the torn silk shade.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was Mrs Parsons’s day. She came up from the village on Saturdays to do the rough, her white hair bound in a mauve turban, her eyes all the time narrowed against her cigarette smoke. She loved praise and constantly invited it, taking Frances to inspect her work, the polished furniture, the turned-out bedroom.
‘Now, madam dear,’ she would say, halting in the doorway, linking her arm with Frances’s as no one else would dare to do, ‘just tell me please if you can find a cobweb. Look anywhere you like, dear; I defy you to find one.’ Frances could not. ‘I like to see everything neat and clean,’ she would say. This was true. She abhorred untidiness or Bohemianism.
Mrs Parsons disliked Camilla, although Camilla was at great pains to be pleasant. ‘Each to their own walk of life,’ she would say, meaning she mistrusted Camilla’s, which she had summed up (from the books on the bedside-table) as a sterile London life – politics, meetings, interference with other people’s affairs. Then, too, people in London seemed not to marry as they did in the country. The village girls married in their early twenties, Mrs Parsons herself at the age of eighteen. In London, womenin their thirties unconcernedly set up house on their own, as if they had all their lives before them in which to find husbands and bear children.
Frances was accepted in the village. She held a place in the community, or rather on the fringe of it, which would have distressed and puzzled her if she had known. Living there, alone in her cottage, just outside the village, they thought of her as an eccentric, as one of those local characters which all such rural societies encompass – the village idiot, the gossiping postmistress, the absent-minded vicar and, thus – Frances herself —the slightly cracked old maid with her bee-keeping and her sketching. Two hundred years earlier she might have been the local witch.
So intent was she on being a normal elderly woman, so much trouble did she take, that she would always rather be praised for her crab-apple jelly than her painting, for the first was a marvel in her, the other natural to her and inevitable. Detesting the artists she had met and the milieu in which they usually worked she painted at set hours and did the washing-up first, remembering always Flaubert’s advice to artists – Be regular and ordinary in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you can be violent and original in your works.’ She would have been distressed beyond measure and bewildered if she had known how extraordinary the villagers thought her, or how Mrs Parsons on Saturday nights at the pub, spoke of her as ‘my poor dear lady’, pitying her, or told stories of her little mad kindnesses, her presents of money, of dried herbs, of cowslip wine, of jars of honey, of advice: how she had searched the snowy fields one winter’s night, hearing a rabbit crying in a trap, and had given her dinner to the dog when she was short of meat and eaten bread and marmalade herself. These actions, so natural to Frances that she would never have believed that ordinary people could behave otherwise, were enough to set the stories circulating,but she remained quite ignorant of them, and when Mrs Parsons took her arm, she thought it a gesture of simple kindness, not protection.
This morning, Mrs Parsons had brought something in with her as well as her basket with its rolled-up pinafore. Tragedy, Frances thought it was. Camilla said she was sullen, that she would give her notice before the day was out. Yet it was grief that made Mrs Parsons carry herself so stiffly, behave so impeccably. Usually loose in her speech, this morning she discriminated with her words;
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