floor, with my hands reaching upward to get to the keys of the piano, and everything had to be played from the wrist. Fraulein Uder’s method, I think, must have been to sit high and play from the elbows. One was more or less poised above the piano so as to be able to come down on the keys with maximum power. Very satisfactory!
V
It must have been shortly after our return from the Channel Isles that the shadow of my father’s illness began to be felt. He had not been well abroad, and had twice consulted a doctor. The second doctor had pro-pounded a somewhat alarmist view, namely that my father suffered from a kidney disease. After our return to England he consulted our own doctor, who did not agree with that diagnosis and who sent him to a specialist. After that, the shadow was there, faint, felt only by a child as one of those atmospheric disturbances which are to the psychic world as an approaching thunderstorm is to the physical one.
Medical science seemed to be of little use. Father went to two or three specialists. The first one said it was definitely a heart condition. I don’t remember the details of it now; I only remember listening to my mother and sister talking, and the words ‘an inflammation of the nerves surrounding the heart,’ which sounded to me very frightening. Another doctor who was consulted put it down entirely to gastric trouble.
At increasingly short intervals my father had attacks of pain and breathlessness during the night, and my mother sat up with him, altering his position and giving him such medicaments as had been ordered by the last doctor.
As always there was a pathetic belief in the last doctor whom we had consulted, and the latest regime or treatment that we adopted. Faith does a lot–faith, novelty, a dynamic personality in a doctor–but it cannot in the end deal with the real organic complaint that is at the bottom of it.
Most of the time my father was his usual cheerful self, but the atmosphere of our home altered. He still went to the club, spent his summer days at the cricket ground, came back with amusing stories–was the same kindly personality. He was never cross or irritable, but the shadow of apprehension was there–also felt, of course, by my mother, who made valiant attempts to reassure my father and to tell him that he looked better, felt better, was better.
At the same time the shadow of financial worry darkened. The money from my grandfather’s will had been invested in house property in New York, but the buildings were leasehold, not freehold. By now, apparently, they were in a part of the city where the land would have been valuable, but the buildings were worth practically nothing. The owner of the land was, I gather, unco-operative–an elderly woman of seventy odd, who appeared to have a stranglehold, preventing any development or improvement. The income that should have come over seemed always to be swallowed up in repairs or taxation.
Catching scraps of conversation which seemed to me of dramatic import, I hurried upstairs and announced to Marie in the best manner of Victorian stories that we were ruined. Marie did not seem to me as distressed as I thought she ought to have been, however, she must have attempted some condolence with my mother, who came to me with some annoyance.
‘Really, Agatha, you must not repeat things in an exaggerated way. We are not ruined. We are just badly off for the time being and will have to economise.’
‘Not ruined?’ I said, deeply chagrined.
‘Not ruined,’ said my mother firmly.
I must admit that I was disappointed. In the many books I had read ruin happened frequently, and was treated as it should be treated–seriously. There would be threats of blowing out one’s brains, a heroine leaving a rich mansion in rags, and so on.
‘I forgot you were even in the room,’ said my mother. ‘But you understand, no repeating of things that you overhear.’
I said I would not, but I felt injured because only a short time before I had been criticised for not telling what I had overheard of another incident.
Tony and I had been seated under the dining-room table one night just before dinner. It was a favourite place of ours, suitable for the playing of adventures in crypts, dungeons, and the like.
We were hardly daring to breathe, so that the robbers who had imprisoned us should not hear us–this was not true of Tony who was fat and panted–when Barter, the housemaid who assisted the parlourmaid at dinner, came in with the tureen of soup which she placed on the sideboard hot plate. She lifted the lid and inserted the big soup ladle.
Ladling out a spoonful, she took some swigs from it. Lewis, the parlour-maid, came in and said: ‘I am just going to ring the gong–’ then broke off and exclaimed, ‘Why, Louie, whatever are you doing?’
‘Just refreshing myself,’ said Barter, with a hearty laugh. ‘Mm, not bad soup,’ and she took another swig.
‘Now, you put that back and the lid on,’ said Lewis, shocked. ‘Really!’
Barter laughed her fat good-natured chuckle, put back the ladle, replaced the lid, and departed to the kitchen for the soup plates as Tony and I emerged.
‘Is it good soup?’ I inquired with interest, as I prepared to take myself off.
‘Oh, I never! Miss Agatha, you give me such a fright, you did.’
I was mildly surprised, but never mentioned it until one day a couple of years later. My mother, talking to Madge, mentioned our former housemaid, Barter. I suddenly broke into the conversation, saying, ‘I remember Barter. She used to drink soup out of the tureen in the dining-room before you all came into dinner.’
This caused lively interest on the part of both my mother and Madge. ‘But why didn’t you ever tell me?’ asked mother. I stared at her. I couldn’t see the point.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it seemed–’ I hesitated, mustering all my dignity, and proclaimed: ‘I don’t care for parting with information.’
After that it was always a joke brought up against me. ‘Agatha doesn’t like parting with information.’ It was true enough. I didn’t. Unless they struck me as apposite or interesting, I tucked away any scraps of information that came to me, locked them up, as it were, in a file inside my head. This was incomprehensible to the rest of my family, who were all extrovert talkers. If asked to keep a secret they never by any chance remembered to do so! It made them all much more entertaining than I was.
If Madge went to a dance or to a garden party, when she came back she had quantities of amusing things to tell. Indeed my sister was an entertaining person in every way–wherever she went things happened to her. Even later in life, going down the village to do a little marketing, she would come back with something extraordinary that had occurred or something somebody had said. These things were not untruths, either–there was always a good foundation of fact, but worked up by Madge to make a better story.
I, on the contrary, presumably taking after my father in this respect, when asked if anything amusing had happened, would immediately say, ‘Nothing’. ‘What was Mrs So-and-so wearing at the party?’ ‘I don’t remember.’ ‘Mrs S. has done up her drawing-room again I hear; what colour is it now?’ ‘I didn’t look.’ ‘Oh, Agatha, you really are hopeless, you never notice anything.’
I continued on the whole to keep my own counsel. I don’t think I meant to be secretive. It just seemed to me that most things didn’t matter–so why keep talking about them? Or else I was so busy conducting the conversations and quarrels of ‘the girls’ and inventing adventures for Tony and myself that I could not pay attention to the small affairs going on round me. It took something
