Good Behaviour Read Free Page B

his proper duties among the vegetables. On wet days she spent
     hours of time in the endless, heatless, tumbling-down greenhouses, which had once sheltered peaches and nectarines and stephanotis.
     One vine survived – she knew how to prune it and thin its grapes, muscatels. Papa loved them.
    Her painting was another interest to take the place of the social life she loathed. A pity for herself that she was so withdrawn
     a character.
Recluse
would be a truer word to describe her. She could have had such a lovely time gadding roundwith Papa – hunting and race meetings and all those shoots. But she was really frightened of horses, and if she did go to
     a race-meeting, in Papa’s riding days, she would shut her eyes during his race, and once when he was to ride a bad jumper
     she got drunk in the bar and fell down in the Owners and Trainers. She simply could not endure the anxiety about him.
    I don’t understand what it was that held them together – they never had much to say to each other. He had no more understanding
     of her painting or gardening than she had of horses or fishing or shooting – so what can they have had to talk about?
    Once she had a show of her pictures in a London gallery. During a whole year she painted for it. No art critic noticed it.
     Hardly anybody came in to look – one picture was sold. Even that disastrous experience did not stop her painting. She went
     on with it, making almost anything she painted look preposterous and curiously hideous too. Give her a bunch of roses to paint
     – lovely June roses with tear-drops of morning rain on their petals – and she reproduced them as angular, airified shapes
     in a graveyard atmosphere, unimaginably ugly; but in a crude way you could not forget roses as you looked at this picture
     in speechless dislike. She would laugh and rub her little hands and shiver – it was deathly cold in her studio.
    Nowhere was it possible to sit down in her studio, once a stone-flagged storeroom in the depths of the house. Pyramids of
     cardboard boxes full of old letters, stacks of newspapers and photographs, old hunting boots, leather boxes that might hold
     hats or again might be full of letters, all hovered to a fall. A stuffed hedgehog, the dust of years solid between its spines,
     sat on top of a bird’s egg cabinet, empty of eggs, its little drawers full only of dented cottonwool and the smell of camphor.
     Polosticks hanging in a bunch and obsolete fishing rods in dusty canvas cases, tied with neat, rotten tapes, showed this house
     to have been lived in by gentlemen of leisure – my mother’s family.
    Leisure they may have enjoyed but they knew little about comfort. Our water supply was meagre and my grandfather had deflected
     a considerable quantity of it to a pond on which, in the shelter of a grove of rhododendrons, he loved to row himself about.
     It was his escape from the land agent and other buzzing tormentors of a leisured life.
    I think, now, that Mummie looked at her studio as her escape from responsibility. She had an enormous distaste for housekeeping.
     The sort of food we ate then owed nothing to the splendid Elizabeth Davids of the present day. I think Papa would have fainted
     at the very breath of garlic. It was for his sake only that Mummie expended some extreme essence of herself in bullying and
     inspiring her treasured cook, Mrs Lennon. I have seen her tremble and go green as she faced the slate on the kitchen table
     and the deadly quietness of the cook who stood so cheerlessly beside her. While longing only to put on her gauntlets, pick
     up her trug and trowel and get into the garden or into the blessed isolation of her studio, Mummie would penetrate her cook’s
     mind – praising just a little, demanding always more effort, a higher standard of perfection for the Captain.
    When we were children the food in the nursery was quite poisonously disgusting. None of the fruit juice and vitamins of today
     for us – oranges only at