Anne Severn and the Fieldings. Sinclair May
Little slim brown minnows darted backwards and forwards under the olive green water of the pond. And every now and then the fat goldfish came nosing along, orange, with silver patches, shining, making the water light round them, stiff mouths wide open. When they bobbed up, small bubbles broke from them and sparkled and went out.
Anne remembered the goldfish; but somehow they were not so fascinating as they used to be.
A queer plant grew on the rock border of the pond. Green fleshy stems, with blunt spikes all over them. Each carried a tiny gold star at its tip. Thick, cold juice would come out of it if you squeezed it. She thought it would smell like lavender.
It had a name. She tried to think of it.
Stonecrop. Stonecrop. Suddenly she remembered.
Her mother stood with her by the pond, dark and white and slender. Anne held out her hands smeared with the crushed flesh of the stonecrop; her mother stooped and wiped them with her pockethandkerchief, and there was a smell of lavender. The goldfish went swimming by in the olive-green water.
Anne's sadness came over her again; sadness so heavy that it kept her from crying; sadness that crushed her breast and made her throat ache.
They went back up the lawn, quietly, and the day felt more and more like
Sunday, or like—like a funeral day.
"She's very silent, this small daughter of yours," Mr. Fielding said.
"Yes," said Mr. Severn.
His voice came with a stiff jerk, as if it choked him. He remembered, too.
ii
The grey and yellow flagstones of the terrace were hot under your feet.
Jerrold's mother lay out there on a pile of cushions, in the sun. She was very large and very beautiful. She lay on her side, heaved up on one elbow. Under her thin white gown you could see the big lines of her shoulder and hip, and of her long full thigh, tapering to the knee.
Anne crouched beside her, uncomfortably, holding her little body away from the great warm mass among the cushions.
Mrs. Fielding was aware of this shrinking. She put out her arm and drew
Anne to her side again.
"Lean back," she said. "Close. Closer."
And Anne would lean close, politely, for a minute, and then stiffen and shrink away again when the soft arm slackened.
Eliot Fielding (the clever one) lay on his stomach, stretched out across the terrace. He leaned over a book: Animal Biology. He was absorbed in a diagram of a rabbit's heart and took no notice of his mother or of Anne.
Anne had been at the Manor five days, and she had got used to Jerrold's mother's caresses. All but one. Every now and then Mrs. Fielding's hand would stray to the back of Anne's neck, where the short curls, black as her frock, sprang out in a thick bunch. The fingers stirred among the roots of Anne's hair, stroking, stroking, lifting the bunch and letting it fall again. And whenever they did this Anne jerked her head away and held it stiffly out of their reach.
She remembered how her mother's fingers, slender and silk-skinned and loving, had done just that, and how their touch went thrilling through the back of her neck, how it made her heart beat. Mrs. Fielding's fingers didn't thrill you, they were blunt and fumbling. Anne thought: "She's no business to touch me like that. No business to think she can do what mother did."
She was always doing it, always trying to be a mother to her. Her father had told her she was going to try. And Anne wouldn't let her. She would not let her.
"Why do you move your head away, darling?"
Anne didn't answer.
"You used to love it. You used to come bending your funny little neck and turning first one ear and than the other. Like a little cat. And now you won't let me touch you."
"No. No. Not—like that."
"Yes. Yes. Like this. You don't remember."
"I do remember."
She felt the blunt fingers on her neck again and started up. The beautiful, wilful woman lay back on her cushions, smiling to herself.
"You're a funny little thing, aren't you?" she said.
Anne's eyes were glassed. She shook her head fiercely and spilled tears.
Jerrold had come up on to the terrace. Colin trotted after him. They were looking at her. Eliot had raised his head from his book and was looking at her.
"It is rotten of you, mater," he said, "to tease that kid."
"I'm not teasing her. Really, Eliot, you do say things—as if nobody but yourself had any sense. You can run away now, Anne darling."
Anne stood staring, with wild animal eyes that saw no place to run to.
It was Jerrold who saved her.
"I say, would you like to see my new buck rabbit?"
"Rather!"
He held out his hand and she ran on with him, along the terrace, down the steps at the corner and up the drive to the stable yard where the rabbits were. Colin followed headlong.
And as she went Anne heard Eliot saying, "I've sense enough to remember that her mother's dead."
In his worst tempers there was always some fierce pity.
iii
Mrs. Fielding gathered herself together and rose, with dignity, still smiling. It was a smile of great sweetness, infinitely remote from all discussion.
"It's much too hot here," she said. "You might move the cushions down there under the beech-tree."
That, Eliot put it to himself, was just her way of getting out of it. To Eliot the irritating thing about his mother was her dexterity in getting out. She never lost her temper, and never replied to any serious criticism; she simply changed the subject, leaving you with your disapproval on your hands.
In this Eliot's young subtlety misled him. Adeline Fielding's mind was not the clever, calculating thing that, at fifteen, he thought it. Her one simple idea was to be happy and, as a means to that end, to have people happy about her. His father, or Anne's father, could have told him that all her ideas were simple as feelings and impromptu. Impulse moved her, one moment, to seize on the faithful, defiant little heart of Anne, the next, to get up out of the sun. Anne's tears spoiled her bright world; but not for long. Coolness was now the important thing, not Anne and not Anne's mother. As for Eliot's disapproval, she was no longer aware of it.
"Oh, to be cool, to be cool again! Thank you, my son."
Eliot had moved all the cushions down under the tree, scowling as he did it, for he knew that when his mother was really cool he would have to get up and move them back again.
With the perfect curve of a great supple animal, she turned and settled in her lair, under her tree.
Presently, down the steps and across the lawn, Anne's father came towards her, grave, handsome, and alone.
Handsome even after fifteen years of India. Handsomer than when he was young. More distinguished. Eyes lighter in the sallowish bronze. She liked his lean, eager, deerhound's face, ready to start off, sniffing the trail. A little strained, leashed now, John's eagerness. But that was how he used to come to her, with that look of being ready, as if they could do things together.
She had tried to find his youth in Anne's face; but Anne's blackness and whiteness were her mother's; her little nose was still soft and vague; you couldn't tell what she would be like in five years' time. Still, there was something; the same strange quality; the same forward-springing grace.
Before he reached her, Adeline was smiling again. A smile of the delicate, instinctive mouth, of the blue eyes shining between