Unfinished Portrait. Агата Кристи
‘expanders’—a stretch of royal blue elastic with a handle at each end. After ‘expanders’ came the mysteries of the polka, and after that the small children sat down and watched the glittering beings in the silk skirts doing a fancy dance with tambourines.
After that, Lancers was announced. A small boy with dark mischievous eyes hurried up to Celia.
‘I say—will you be my partner?’
‘I can’t,’ said Celia regretfully. ‘I don’t know how.’
‘Oh, what a shame.’
But presently Miss Tenderden swooped down upon her.
‘Don’t know how? No, of course not, dear, but you’re going to learn. Now, here is a partner for you.’
Celia was paired with a sandy-haired boy with freckles. Opposite them was the dark-eyed boy and his partner. He said reproachfully to Celia as they met in the middle:
‘I say, you wouldn’t dance with me. I think it’s a shame.’
A pang she was to know well in after years swept through Celia. How explain? How say, ‘But I want to dance with you. I’d much rather dance with you. This is all a mistake.’
It was her first experience of that tragedy of girlhood—the Wrong Partner!
But the exigencies of the Lancers swept them apart. They met once more in the grand chain, but the boy only gave her a look of deep reproach and squeezed her hand.
He never came to dancing class again, and Celia never learnt his name.
When Celia was seven years old Nannie left. Nannie had a sister even older than herself, and that sister was now broken down in health, and Nannie had to go and look after her.
Celia was inconsolable and wept bitterly. When Nannie departed, Celia wrote to her every day short, wildly written, impossibly spelt letters which caused an infinitude of trouble to compose.
Her mother said gently:
‘You know, darling, you needn’t write every day to Nannie. She won’t really expect it. Twice a week will be quite enough.’
But Celia shook her head determinedly.
‘Nannie might think I’d forgotten her. I shan’t forget—ever.’
Her mother said to her father:
‘The child’s very tenacious in her affections. It’s a pity.’
Her father said, with a laugh:
‘A contrast from Master Cyril.’
Cyril never wrote to his parents from school unless he was made to do so, or unless he wanted something. But his charm of manner was so great that all small misdemeanours were forgiven him.
Celia’s obstinate fidelity to the memory of Nannie worried her mother.
‘It isn’t natural,’ she said. ‘At her age she ought to forget more easily.’
No new nurse came to replace Nannie. Susan looked after Celia to the extent of giving her her bath in the evening and getting up in the morning. When she was dressed Celia would go to her mother’s room. Her mother always had her breakfast in bed. Celia would be given a small slice of toast and marmalade, and would then sail a small fat china duck in her mother’s wash basin. Her father would be in his dressing-room next door. Sometimes he would call her in and give her a penny, and the penny would then be introduced into a small painted wooden money box. When the box was full the pennies would be put into the savings bank and when there was enough in the savings bank, Celia was to buy herself something really exciting with her own money. What that something was to be was one of the main preoccupations of Celia’s life. The favourite objects varied from week to week. First, there was a high tortoiseshell comb covered with knobs for Celia’s mother to wear in her black hair. Such a comb had been pointed out to Celia by Susan in a shop window. ‘A titled lady might wear a comb like that,’ said Susan in a reverent voice. Then there was an accordion-pleated dress in a white silk to go to dancing class in—that was another of Celia’s dreams. Only the children who did skirt dancing wore accordion-pleated dresses. It would be many years before Celia would be old enough to learn skirt dancing, but, after all, the day would come. Then there was a pair of real gold slippers (Celia had no doubt of there being such things) and there was a summer house to put in the wood, and there was a pony. One of these delectable things was waiting for her on the day when she had got ‘enough in the savings bank’.
In the daytime she played in the garden, bowling a hoop (which might be anything from a stagecoach to an express train), climbing trees in a gingerly and uncertain manner, and making secret places in the midst of dense bushes where she could lie hidden and weave romances. If it was wet she read books in the nursery or painted in old numbers of the Queen. Between tea and dinner there were delightful plays with her mother. Sometimes they made houses with towels spread over chairs and crawled in and out of them—sometimes they blew bubbles. You never knew beforehand, but there was always some enchanting and delightful game—the kind of game that you couldn’t think of for yourself, the kind of game that was only possible with Mummy.
In the morning now there were ‘lessons’, which made Celia feel very important. There was arithmetic, which Celia did with Daddy. She loved arithmetic, and she liked hearing Daddy say: ‘This child’s got a very good mathematical brain. She won’t count on her fingers like you do, Miriam.’ And her mother would laugh and say: ‘I never did have any head for figures.’ First Celia did addition and then subtraction, and then multiplication which was fun, and then division which seemed very grown up and difficult, and then there were pages called ‘Problems’. Celia adored problems. They were about boys and apples, and sheep in fields, and cakes, and men working, and though they were really only addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division in disguise, yet the answers were in boys or apples or sheep, which made it ever so much more exciting. After arithmetic there was ‘copy’ done in an exercise book. Her mother would write a line across the top, and Celia would copy it down, down, down the page till she got to the bottom. Celia did not care for copy very much, but sometimes Mummy would write a very funny sentence such as ‘Cross-eyed cats can’t cough comfortably,’ which made Celia laugh very much. Then there was a page of spelling to be learnt—simple little words, but they cost Celia a good deal of trouble. In her anxiety to spell she always put so many unnecessary letters into words that they were quite unrecognizable.
In the evening, after Susan had given Celia her bath, Mummy would come into the nursery to give Celia a ‘last tuck’. ‘Mummy’s tuck,’ Celia would call it, and she would try to lie very still so that ‘Mummy’s tuck’ should still be there in the morning. But somehow or other it never was.
‘Would you like a light, my pet? Or the door left open?’
But Celia never wanted a light. She liked the nice warm comforting darkness that you sank down into. The darkness, she felt, was friendly.
‘Well, you’re not one to be frightened of the dark,’ Susan used to say. ‘My little niece now, she screams her life out if you leave her in the dark.’
Susan’s little niece, Celia had for some time thought privately, must be a very unpleasant little girl—and also very silly. Why should one be frightened of the dark? The only thing that could frighten one was dreams. Dreams were frightening because they made real things go topsy-turvy. If she woke up with a scream after dreaming of the Gun Man, she would jump out of bed, knowing her way perfectly in the dark, and run along the passage to her mother’s room. And her mother would come back with her and sit a while, saying, ‘There’s no Gun Man, darling. You’re quite safe—you’re quite safe.’ And then Celia would fall asleep again, knowing that Mummy had indeed made everything safe, and in a few minutes she would be wandering in the valley by the river picking primroses and saying triumphantly to herself, ‘I knew it wasn’t a railway line, really. Of course, the river’s always been here.’