I smiled artfully, not telling him that it was the past I was probing.
"You used to work at Oakland Hall,” I said.
“Aye. Them was the days.”
“Better days, of course,” I commented.
Them lawns I’ he said ecstatically.
“All that grass. Best turf in the country. Just look at this St. John’s Wort. You only have to turn your back and it’s all over the place. It grows while you’re watching it’ ” Nature’s bounty,” I said.
“She’s as generous with St. John’s Wort as she is with you.”
He looked at me suspiciously, wondering what I was talking about.
“Why did you leave Oakland Hall?” I wanted to know.
“I came here with your mother. It seemed the faithful sort of thing, like.” He was looking back to the old days before Nature’s bounty had made him Poor Jarman. He leaned on his spade and his eyes were dreamy.
Them was good days. Funny thing. Never thought they’d end. Then suddenly . “
“Yes,” I prompted, ‘suddenly? “
“Mistress sent for me.
“Jarman,” she said, “we’ve sold the Hall. We’re going to the Dower House.” You could have knocked me down with a dove’s feather though some had said they’d seen it coming. I was took back though. She said: “If you come with us you could have the cottage on the bit of land we’re keeping. You could then marry.” That was the beginning. Before the year was out I was a father “You said there was talk…”
“Yes, talk. Them that knew it all was coming after it had happened .. they was talking. Gambling was in the family. Old Mr. Clavering had been very fond of it, and they said he’d lost quite a tidy sum. There was mortgages for this and that and that’s not good for a house, and what’s not good for a house ain’t good for them that works there.”
“So they sensed the gathering storm.”
“Well, we all knew there was money trouble, ‘cos sometimes wages wasn’t paid for two months. There’s some families as makes a habit of this, but Claverings wasn’t never that sort. Then this man came. He took the Hall. Miner, he’d been. Made a fortune out of something. Came from abroad."
” Why didn’t you stay and work for him? “
“I’d always been with gentry. Miss. Besides, there was this cottage.”
He had eleven children so it must have been about twelve years ago.
One could calculate the years by Jarman’s children, and people were never quite sure which was which so that it was like trying to remember which year something had happened.
“It all took place before I was born,” I went on, keeping his thoughts flowing in the right direction.
"Yes. Tis so. Must have been two years before that. “
So it was twelve years ago—a lifetime-mine anyway.
All I had learned from Jarman was that my father’s gambling had been responsible. No wonder Mama treated him with contempt. Now I understood the meaning behind her bitter remarks. Poor father, he stayed in his room and spent a lot of time playing patience-a solitary game in which he could not lose to an opponent who would have to be paid, yet at the same time preserving contact with the cards he still loved, although they had apparently been the cause of the family’s expulsion from the world of opulence.
Mrs. Cobb could tell me little. Like my family, she had been accustomed to Better Days. She had come to us when we went to the Dower House and was never tired of telling any who would listen that she had been used to parlour maids, kitchen maids, a butler, and two footmen.
It was, therefore, something of a come-down to work in a household like ours; but at least the family, like herself, had known Better Days, and it was not like working for people who had ‘never been used to nothing’.
My father, of course, playing his patience, reading, going for solitary walks, with the heavy weight of guilt on his shoulders, was definitely not the one to approach. He seemed scarcely aware of me in any case. When he did notice me, something of the same expression came into his face as that which I saw when my mother was reminding him that it was his weakness which had brought the family low. To me he was a sort of non-person, which was an odd way to feel about one’s own father, but as he expressed no interest in me, I found it hard to feel anything for him except pity when they reminded him, which they contrived to do on every occasion.
As for Mama, she was even more unapproachable. When I was very young and we sang in church :
“Can a mother’s tender care Cease towards the child she bear?” I had thought of a little female bear cub beloved by its mother bear, but when I had mentioned this to Miriam she had been very shocked and explained the real meaning. I then commented that my mother’s tender care towards me had never really ceased because it had never existed.
At this Miriam had grown very pink and told me that I was a most ungrateful child and should be thankful for the good home I had. I wondered then why for me it was a ‘good home’, though dearly despised by the others, but I put this down to the fact that they had seen those Better Days which I had missed.
My brother Xavier was a remote and romantic figure of whom I saw very little. He looked after the land we had been able to salvage from the Oakland estate and this contained one farm and several acres of pasture land. When I did see him he was kind to me in a vague sort of way, as though he recognized my right to be in the house but wasn’t sure how I’d got there and was too polite to ask. I had heard that he was in love with Lady Clara Donningham who lived some twenty miles away, but because he couldn’t afford her the luxury to which she was accustomed, he wouldn’t ask her to marry him. She apparently was very rich and we were living in what I had heard Mama so often call penury.
The fact was that he and Lady Clara remained apart although, according to Mrs. Cobb who had a link through the cook at the Manor, which was Lady Clara’s house, her ladyship would not have said no if Mr. Xavier had asked her. But as Xavier was too proud, and convention forbade Lady Clara to ask him, they remained apart. This gave Xavier a very romantic aura in my eyes. He was a chivalrous knight who went through life nursing a secret passion because decorum forbade him to speak. He certainly would tell me nothing.
Miriam might be lured into betraying something, but she was not one for confidences. There was an ‘understanding’ between her and the Rev.
Jasper Grey’s curate, but they couldn’t marry until the curate became a vicar, and hi view of his retiring nature that seemed unlikely for years to come.
Maddy told me that if we’d still been at Oakland Hall there would have been coming out dances, people would have been visiting and it wouldn’t have been a curate for Miss Miriam. Oh dear no. There would have been Squire This or Sir That . -and maybe a lord. They had been the grand days.
So it all came back to the same thing; and as Mrs. Cobb could never be kept from telling of her own Better Days I couldn’t hope to get her interested in those of my family.
As I might have known, Maddy was the only one who could really help.
She had actually lived at Oakland Hall. Another point in her favour was that she loved to talk and as long as I could be sworn to secrecy-and I readily promised that-she would at times let out little scraps of information.
Maddy was thirty-five-five years older than Xavier-and she had come to Oakland Hall when she was only eleven years old to work in the nursery.
“It was all very grand then. Lovely nurseries they was.”
“Xavier must have been a good little boy,” I commented.
“He was. He wasn’t the one to get up to mischief.”
“Who, then? Miriam? No, not her either.”
Well, why did you say one of them was ? “
“I said no such thing. You’re like one of them magistrates, you are.
What’s this? What’s that? ” She was hurry now, shutting her lips tightly as though to punish me for asking a question which had disturbed her. It was only later that I realized why it had.
Once I said to Miriam: “Fancy, you were born in Oakland Hall and I was born in the Dower House. ” Miriam hesitated and said: “No, you weren’t born in the Dower House.
Actually. it was abroad. “
Miriam looked embarrassed as though wondering how I could have lured her into this further indiscretion.
“Mama was travelling in Italy when you were born.”
My eyes widened with excitement. Venice, I thought. Gondolas. Pisa with its leaning Tower. Florence, where Beatrice and Dante had met and loved so chastely or so Miriam had said.
“Where?” I demanded.
“It was… in Rome.”
I was ecstatic.
“Julius Caesar,” I said. ‘“Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears.” But why? “
Miriam looked exasperated.
“Because you happened to appear when they were there.”
“Father was with her, then?” I cried.
“Wasn’t it costly?
Penury and all that? “
She looked pained in the special way Miriam could. She said primly:
“Suffice it that they were there.”
“It’s as though they didn’t know I was about to be born. I mean they wouldn’t have gone there, would they, if …”
“These things happen sometimes. Now we have chattered enough.”
She could be very severe, my sister Miriam. Sometimes I was sorry for the curate, or should be if she ever married him-and for the sad children they would have.
So there was more to brood on. What strange things seemed to happen to me! Perhaps it was because they were in Rome that they had called me Opal. I had tried to discover information about opals. After looking up the dictionary I had mixed feelings about my name. It was not very flattering to be called after ‘a mineral consisting chiefly of hydrous silica’, whatever that was, but it did not sound in the least romantic. I discovered however that it had varying hues of red, green, and blue in fact all the colours of the spectrum and was of a changing iridescence, and that sounded better. How difficult it was though to imagine Mama, in a moment of frivolity inspired by the Italian skies, naming her child Opal, even though the more serviceable Jessica had been added and used.
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