| Rose-coloured Teacups |
| There were three women in the room, two sitting in low,
oval-backed armchairs, and one on the end of a bed, her pale head lit by a
summer window, her face slightly shadowed. They were young women, full of
energy; this could be seen in the quick, alert turns of the heads, the movements
of hand to mouth, carrying a cigarette in a long holder, a rose-coloured teacup.
They wore knee-length shifts,
one olive, one russet
(sometimes it was a kind of dull
crimson), one, belonging to the pale head, a clotted cream or blanket-wool colour.
They all had smooth but not shining pale stockings and barred,
buttoned shoes, with pointed toes and very small heels. One dark woman, in a
chair, had long hair, knotted in the nape of her
neck. The other two were shingled.
The pale-headed woman, when she turned her head to look out of the window, could
be seen to have the most beautiful slanting ledge of shorn silver and gold from the turn
of her skull to the fine neck. She had a fine-edged upper lip, still and calm;
a composed look, but expectant. The third woman was harder to see; the haircut
was decisive and mannish; Veronica had to resist seeing it as she had always
known it, pepper and
salt. She could see the chairs very clearly, one with a pale green linen cover, fitted, and one with a creased chintz, covered with large, floppy roses. She could see the little fire, with its dusty coal scuttle and brass fire-irons. Sometimes she saw it burning brightly, but mostly it was dark, because it was summer outside, and through the window, between the rosy chintz curtains, there was the unchanging college garden with its rosebeds and packed herbaceous border, its sunken pool and smell of mown grass. There were leaves coiling into the picture round the outside of the window-frame a climbing rose, a creeper, what was it? She could see a desk, not very clearly. It was no good straining to see; it was necessary to wait quietly. There was a dark corner containing a piece of furniture she had never managed to see at all a wardrobe? She could always see the low table, set for tea. There was a little kettle, on a trivet, and a capacious sprigged teapot, a walnut cake, on a plate, slices of malt loaf, six pink lustre teacups, rosily iridescent, with petal-shaped saucers. The lustre glaze streaked the strong pink with cobwebs of blue-grey and white-gold. And little butter knives with blunt ends and ivory handles there would be, there were, and a little cut glass dish of butter. And one of jam, yes, with a special flat jam spoon. The women talked to each other. They were waiting for someone. She could not hear their conversation or their occasional laughter. She could see the tablecloth, white linen with a drawn thread-work border, and thick embroidered flowers spilling in swags deepening and paler shades of the same colour. She mostly saw the flowers as roses, though many of them, looked at more closely, were hybrid or imaginary creations. She was overdoing the pink. Her daughter Jane called from upstairs, peremptory and wailing. Jane was unusually at home because of some unexpected hiatus in her very busy social life, which flowed and overflowed from house to house, from friend's kitchen to friend's kitchen, loud with rock, pungent with illegal smoke, vigorous-voiced. Jane had decided to sew something. The sewing-machine was in the spare bedroom. She appeared to be slicing up a pillowcase and reconstructing it into the curiously formed bandeaux and rag-ribbons that went with certain versions of her hair. The sewing-machine had given up, Jane said, it was a stupid thing. She sat at the sewing-table and gave the machine a decisive slap, looking up with her extravagant face surrounded by a rayed sooty star of erect and lacquered hair, a jagged work of art. She had her father's big black eyes, outlined in kohl, and Veronica's father's wide and shapely mouth, painted a glossy magenta. She was big and compact, round and slender, very much alive, a woman and a cross child. It wouldn't pick up, the needle, Jane said, rattling the wheel round and round, clattering antique pistons and hinges. It was the tension. The tension had gone to pot. She pulled furiously at the pieces of rag and thread whirred out of the underparts of the machine where the shuttle bustled and nattered. The top thread was snapped. Veronica's mother had had the machine as a wedding present in 1930; it had been second-hand then. Veronica had had it since 1960, when Jane's elder sister had been born. She had made baby clothes on it and nightdresses. Only simple things. She was no seamstress. Her mother had been only moderately efficient with the thing, though she had used it to make do in the war, turning collars, cutting down trousers, making coats into skirts, and curtains into dungarees. Her mother's mother had been a dressmaker in the 1890s. And had also done hand-embroidery, cushions and handtowels, handkerchiefs and "runners" for dresser-tops. Jane tugged at her multiple earrings, coils of gold wire and little glass beads. I had a go at the tension, she said. I can't get it to go back. Jane was forthright and attacking with many things Veronica had her generations' classic inadequacy about: machines, group living, authority. Jane inhabited a mechanical world. She walked the pavements with a pendant black box, she lived amongst a festoon of electricity, hi-fi, hairdryer, tape-deck, curling-tongs, crimpuer. She had undone the tension-gauge on the elderly Swan Vickers and spattered various metal discs over the sewing-table. She had become irritated with the irregular coil of fine wire, with its needle-eye hook at the end, on which the thread bobs jerkily and peacefully when the machine is in running order. She had tugged and jerked at it, teasing it out of its coil so that it now protruded, a wavering, threatening, disconnected spike, pointing out nowhere. |
And abruptly remembered her own mother's voice in the 1950s, unrestrained, wailing, interminable, how could you, how could you, and saw briefly the pair of them, her mother with her miserable disappointed face, the mouth set in a down-droop, and her own undergraduate self, sugar-petticoated, smooth-skinned, eye-lined and passionate, staring at the shards of pink lustre teacups in a road-delivered teachest. The teacups had been given by her mother's old college friend, to take back a new generation to the college. She had not liked the teacups. She did not like pink, and the floral shape of the saucers was most unfashionable. She and her friends drank Nescafe from stone mugs or plain cylinders in primary colours. She had left folded in her drawer the tablecloth embroidered for her by her grandmother, whose style of embroidery was now exemplified by the cloth, so stiff and clean and brilliant, in the visionary teaparty she had taken to imagining since her mother died. It was a curious form of mourning, but compulsive, and partly comforting. It seemed to be all she was capable of. The force of her mother's rage against the house and housewifery that trapped her and, by extension, against her clever daughters, who had all partly evaded that trap, precluded wholehearted mourning. The silence of her absence was like coming in out of a storm. Or like the silence of that still little room, in its bright expectancy, one or any afternoon in the late 1920s.
She could not reproduce that fury against Jane. She repeated, "It's a spring, you can't uncoil it" and Jane said half-heartedly that she didn't see why not, and they sat down together to try to make sense of the scattered parts of the tension-regulator.
Veronica remembered packing the pink cups. Something had been terribly wrong. She remembered moving around her college room in a daze of defeat an anguish barely summoning up the strength to heap the despised crockery, all anyhow, into the crate, thinking that there should have been newspaper to wrap things in and that she didn't have any. And that the effort of finding any was beyond her. But although she could remember the fine frenzy in which the fate of the teacups had seemed immaterial, the cause was gone. Had she lost a lover? Missed a part in a university play? Said something and regretted it? Feared pregnancy? Or had it been merely vaguer fears of meaninglessness and inertia which had assailed her then, when she was lively, and had been replaced now by the stiffer and more precise fears of death and never getting things done? The girl in her memory of that passively miserable day's packing seemed discontinuous with herself looked in on, as much as the imaginary teaparty. She could remember vividly taking a furtive look through a door in the part of the college where her mother's room had been, and seeing two low chairs and a bed under a window. The chairs in her constructed vision were draped anachronistically in the loose covers they had worn in her brief, half-reluctant glimpse of them. Her mother had wanted her to be at the college and had felt excluded, then, by her daughter's presence there, from her own memories of the place. The past had been made into the past, discontinuous from the present. It had been a fantasy that Veronica would sit in the same chairs, in the same sunlight and drink from the same cups. No one steps into the same river twice. Jane's elder sister, Veronica's elder daughter, had also gone to the college, and Veronica, forewarned, had watched her assert her place in it, her here and now.
The telephone rang. Jane said that would be Barnaby and her cross lassitude fell away. At the door on the way out, she turned and said to Veronica, "I'm sorry about the machine. I'm sure it'll mend. And anyway it's geriatric." She could be heard singing on the stairs, on the way to the telephone, to take up her life again. She sang beautifully in a large clear voice, inherited from her father, who could sing, and not from Veronica and her mother who scraped tunelessly. She was singing in the Brahms Requiem in the school choir. She rolled out joyfully, "Lord make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know, that I may know how frail I am."
The three women sat in the little room, imagined not remembered. Veronica detected in her mother's cream-coloured dress just a touch of awkwardness, her grandmother's ineptness at a trade for which she was not wholly suited, a shoulder out of true, a cuff awry, as so many buttons and cuffs and waistbands had been during the making-do in the time of austerity. This awkwardness in her mother was lovable and vulnerable. The other shingled woman raised the teapot and poured amber tea into rosy teacups. Two of these cups and one saucer, what was salvaged, stood now on Veronica's dresser, useless and, Veronica thought, exquisitely pretty. Her mother raised her pale head expectantly, lifting that fine lip, fixing her whole attention on the door, through which they came --Veronica could see so much-- the young men in blazers and wide flannels, college scarves and smoothed hair, smiling decorously. Veronica saw him smile with the wide and shapely smile that had just reappeared, deprecating and casual, on Jane's different, darker face. She saw the little, blonde, pretty face in the window lit with pure pleasure, pure hope, almost content. She could never see any further: from there, it always began again, chairs, tablecloth, sunny window, rosy teacups, a safe place.
(1987)
