While I write, Emily and George Arthur are conversing in a corner of the nursery. She has come here, as she does from time to time, to persuade him against a military career. I wish she would not do so in this manner, wandering in and standing by the window to await the end of a lesson. It is distracting for George Arthur, and after all this is my domain.
‘What I mean, George Arthur, is that it is an uncomfortable life in a general sort of way.’
‘Captain Coleborne does not seem uncomfortable. When you look at him he doesn’t give that impression in the least.’
‘Captain Coleborne hasn’t lived in a barracks in India. That leaves a mark, so people say.’
‘I should not mind a barracks. And India I should love.’
‘I doubt it, actually. Flies carry disease in India, the water you drink is putrid. And you would mind a barracks because they’re rough and ready places.’
‘You’d drink something else if the water was putrid. You’d keep well away from the flies.’
‘You cannot in India. No, George Arthur, I assure you you enjoy your creature comforts. You’d find the uniform rough on your skin and the food unappetizing. Besides, you have a family duty here.’
The nursery is a long, low-ceilinged room, with a fire at one end, close to which I sit as I write, for the weather has turned bitter. The big, square lessons-table occupies the centre of the room, and when Fogarty brings my tray he places it on the smaller table at which I’m writing now. There are pictures on the walls which I must say I find drab: one, in shades of brown, of St George and the Dragon; another of a tower; others of farmyard scenes. The nursery’s two armchairs, occupied now by George Arthur and Emily, are at the other end with a rug between them. The floor is otherwise of polished board.
‘Well, the truth is, George Arthur, I cannot bear the thought of your being killed.’
With that, Emily left the nursery. She smiled in her graceful manner at me, her head a little to one side, her dark, coiled hair gleaming for a moment in a shaft of afternoon sun. I had not thought a governess’s position was difficult in a household, but somehow I am finding it so. I belong neither with the family nor the servants. Fogarty, in spite of calling me ‘miss’, addresses me more casually than he does the Pulvertafts; his sister is scarcely civil.
‘Do they eat their babies, like in the South Seas?’ George Arthur startled me by asking. He had crossed to where I sat and in a manner reminiscent of his father stood with his back to the fire, thereby blocking its warmth from me.
‘Do who eat their babies, George Arthur?’
‘The poor people.’
‘Of course they don’t.’
‘But they are hungry. They have been hungry for ever so long. My mother and sisters give out soup at the back gate-lodge.’
‘Hungry people do not eat their babies. And I think, you know, it’s enemies, not babies, who are eaten in the South Seas.’
‘But suppose a family’s baby
‘No, George Arthur, you must not talk like that.’
‘Fogarty says he would not be surprised.’
‘Well, she has settled down, I think,’ Mrs Pulvertaft remarks to her husband in their bedroom, and when he asks her whom she refers to she says the governess.
‘Pleasant enough, she seems,’ he replies. ‘I do prefer, you know, an English governess.’
‘Oh yes, indeed.’
George Arthur’s sisters have developed no thoughts about Miss Heddoe. They neither like nor dislike her; they do not know her; their days of assessing governesses are over.
But George Arthur’s aren’t. She is not as pretty as Emily or Charlotte, George Arthur considers, and she is very serious. When she smiles her smile is serious. The way she eats her food is serious, carefully cutting everything, carefully and slowly chewing. Often he comes into the nursery to find her eating from the tray that Fogarty carries up the back staircase for her, sitting all alone on one side of the fireplace, seeming very serious indeed. Miss Larvey had been different somehow, although she’d eaten her meals in much the same position, seated at the very same table, by the fire. Miss Larvey was untidy, her grey hair often working loose from its coils, her whole face untidy sometimes, her tray untidily left.
‘Now it is transcription time,’ Miss Heddoe says, interrupting these reflections. ‘Carefully and slowly, please.’
Fogarty thinks about the governess, but hides such thoughts from his sister. Miss Heddoe will surely make a scene, exclaiming and protesting, saying to the Pulvertafts all the things a butler cannot. She will stand in the drawing-room or the hall, smacking out the truth at them, putting in a nutshell all that must be said. She will bring up the matter of the stigmata found on the child, and the useless folly of the road, and the wisdom of old Hugh Pulvertaft. She will be the voice of reason. Fogarty dwells upon these thoughts while conversing with his sister, adept at dividing his mind. His faith is in the governess.
‘Declare to God,’ remarks Miss Fogarty, ‘Brigid’ll be the death of me. Did you ever know a stupider girl?’
‘There was a girl we had once who was stupider,’ Fogarty replies. ‘Fidelma was she called?’
They sit at the wide wooden table that is the pivot of kitchen activities. The preparation of food, the polishing of brass and silver, the stacking of dishes, the disposal of remains, the eating and drinking, all card-playing and ironing, all cutting out of patterns and cloth, the trimming of lamps: the table has as many uses as the people of the kitchen can devise. Tears have soaked into its grain, and blood from meat and accidents; the grease of generations polishes it, not quite scrubbed out by the efforts made, twice every day, With soap and water.
The Fogartys sit with their chairs turned a little away from the table, so that they partly face the range and in anticipation of the benefit they will shortly receive from the glow of dampened slack. It is their early evening pose,
