itself untrue: though it was only
As a matter of fact, Rosa was shivering now as she stood in the living-room of La Wide (if living-room it could yet be called) and thought about the tone in which Mrs Du Quesne, her newly found home help with the aristocratic name, had spoken. Nor was it only Mrs Du Quesne's name that seemed to echo breeding. Rosa had read many books during those years she spent abroad; read them mainly, as it had since seemed to her, while waiting for men to keep some appointment or other; and Mrs Du Quesne had brought back Tess of the D'Urbervilles to her, though Mrs Du Quesne was far, far older than Tess had been permitted to be.
Rosa's convent French, though presumably reinforced during the year or two she had lived in Paris (but always with men who were English), was of little avail in understanding the island tongue: not so much a patois, she gathered, as a hybrid, a speech half-Latin and half-Norse. At one period, Rosa had lived in Stockholm with an actual Swede (far and away the worst year of her life — or more than a year: it had all ended in her breakdown), but the language of Sweden (and never would she forget the pitch of it) seemed to have nothing whatever in common with the language of Mrs Du Quesne and her friends. If Mrs Du Quesne had not mixed in equal parts of very clear English, Rosa could hardly have employed her. There were not many left who spoke the local tongue at all; but that was a factor which strongly inclined Rosa to employ, and thus, perhaps, aid, those who did. Any resulting difficulty or sacrifice she fervently justified to herself.
Rosa was fairly well aware that it was the more oracular remarks which Mrs Du Quesne and her friends left in their natal hybrid, nor could by any reasonable persuasion be induced to anglicize. She suspected, indeed, that just now she herself had gone somewhat beyond persuasion that was reasonable. She was sure she had begun to croak, when her gullet had suddenly dried around what had been her voice; and that she had pounded several times upon the Du Quesne kitchen table (except that neither table nor kitchen were the words they all used). When it came to the choice, no doubt important in its way, between one three-letter washing powder and another, Mrs Du Quesne spoke plain advertisers' English; but her warnings, or at least admonitions, deeper and more personal to Rosa and her place of abode, were as masked as the gurglings of any ancient oracle. And everyone else in the kitchen that was called something else kept quiet when Mrs Du Quesne said these plainly important things. Probably those sitting around at Delphi fell silent in like circumstances.
And there could be no doubt at all about La Wide having been unoccupied for years and years before she, Rosa, had bought it. The very first thing she had thought when she had set eyes on it had been, It must be haunted, but it had not so far in her occupancy seemed to be so, and the first twelvemonth was almost over, albeit a casual visitor might not have thought it from the state of the rooms.
The fact that the little structure had been so cheap as to be within Rosa's means had also made her suspect that trouble went with it. She had not been so unsophisticated as not to think of that. But during the year she had realized that on this point the answer might lie elsewhere.
The explanation, she had come to suspect, lay in the present social categorization of the island population. First, there were the few immensely old families, who dwelt in crumbling chateaux, within weedy moats. Second, there were the tax refugees from the British mainland: sad, very loud-voiced people in once- fashionable clothes, who seemed not to have houses at all, but to reside always in not quite compatible bars and restaurants, never truly drunk, never truly sober. Third, there was the great residential majority: the prosperous growers, their suppliers and agents. These lived in new or rehabilitated bungalows or houses, frantically competitive, each with all the others. Finally, there were the few real natives or aboriginals; and they had so diminished in number under the weight of all the others, or of the times in general, that they no longer needed more than a proportion of the cots and crofts built for them, mostly in the solidest, most enduring stone. The first three groups would not have considered La Wide, and the fourth had no need of it. The end of the tomato boom was said to be imminent, but in that event, those who trimmed and watered it would migrate not to La Wide but more probably to the Antipodes.
Moreover, La Wide was to be reached only by a bumpy and neglected track running uphill between hedges: difficult for a baby carriage, impossible for a saloon car. It was, in fact, this track that had initiated the dark talk from Mrs Du Quesne and her group; Rosa having expressed concern about the difficulty Mrs Du Quesne might find in making her way during the season of winter wet that once more lay ahead. (Rosa had arrived the previous October, but then, and right through that winter, there had been no Mrs Du Quesne in her life.)
Rosa, still shivering, sank upon a chair by the small fireplace as she thought about what had been said; though, as far as she was concerned, but slenderly understood. I am far too sensitive, she thought, for the five hundredth or one thousandth time; though words had never been necessary to frame the thought. She was in such distress (surely, this time, without full justification) that she might have gone on to think I am mad, and thus derive some faint, familiar comfort from the implication of non-responsibility for what happened to her and of escape, but instead was struck by the idea that, in this case, the word 'sensitive' might require to be applied in a new meaning.
Dennis, fifteen years ago, had said at first that he thought she might be 'a sensitive', and indeed claimed that it was one reason why he was 'interested in her'. He always professed a special concern with such things, and could certainly talk without end about them, though perhaps without much meaning either. He had, however, quite soon found an Indo-Chinese girl who was far more of a sensitive, and was believed, in so far as you could believe anything about Dennis, to have started living with her instead. Already, Dennis had explained to Rosa that being '
Though it was already the end of October, there was no fire in the grate. This was partly because it was so difficult to get coal. Apparently the tomato-houses required almost all that was imported. The previous winter, Rosa had frozen for as long as eight or nine weeks before she had obtained a supply by making one of her scenes in the merchant's office. She had then received a whole ton, almost immediately, carried by a pair of youths in half- hundredweight sacks all the way up her lumpy lane from the road: which made her wonder whether coal was really so short, after all. Quite probably it was one of the many necessities only to be procured by such as she through resort to degrading devices. Rosa was unsure whether she did not prefer to endure the cold. Then she reasoned with herself that winter had of course not even begun, and that even autumn was less than half gone. She rose, went through to the back room, her bedroom and boudoir, removed her sweater, glanced in the looking-glass at the reflection of her bust, as she always did, and put on a thicker, chunkier sweater. The room was rather sad and dark, because the single window was close to the bank of earth which rose behind almost perpendicularly. Probably the room had been intended for 'the children', while Father and Mother slept in the room adjoining, which was now Rosa's unfinished living-room; and all had lived their waking lives in the remaining room, into which the outer door led, and which had now become Rosa's kitchen and scullery only. Rosa entered this kitchen and scullery, and started to slice up materials for a meal.
But that day it was her first meal her mother could possibly have called 'real', and it had the effect, with the coffee that followed it, of concentrating Rosa's perceptions. Mrs Du Quesne had left her with much to be surmised, but the facts, or rather the claims, were clear, even though the overtones and explanations might not be.
It had begun when Mrs Du Quesne, in a friendly way, had been answering one of the others who had apparently enquired for details as to where Rosa resided. 'Ah,' the other woman had blurted out, 'it is there that they change the porters.' Patois or hybrid the tongue might be, but Rosa could understand that much. 'What porters?' she had enquired, her mind full of French railway stations. There had been a pause and a silence, and then something evasive had been said, though doubtless kindly meant. 'No,' Rosa had cried, the scent of mischief full in her nostrils. 'I want to know. Please tell me.' Mrs Du Quesne then said something much firmer, and perhaps
