That year the daffodils would wait no longer. They forced their way through the earth’s chill carapace and bloomed in the tarnished snow. At once a wild wind swept in from the west and whirled them into crazed confusion, snapping the stems, tearing off the golden trumpets, tossing and flattening the survivors. The cats paced and hovered by the back door, uncertain whether to risk the outdoors; with wrinkled muzzles, they tested the wind. Among the swirling daffodils the old labrador lay out, in the heart of the gale. Her head was raised, her ears were pricked; alertly she snuffed the air; she watched the world turn, the new season approach. Looking at her, Janet thought in sharp sorrow, “I will not see this again,” for now the labrador could scarcely walk; her hind legs were emaciated and she had to be helped in and out and up the stairs. Yet she was couched out there, unafraid, welcoming with dignity whatever was to come, among the reckless, gaudy flowers whose time was even briefer. “Fair Daffodils, we weep to see / You haste away so soon.” Fair labrador. Sometimes Janet thought that life’s sole purpose was to teach one how to die. As in most spheres, so in this, animals did better than people.
She mused upon her own remote and unalarming death and the arrangements for her funeral which she had for a long time now been inscribing in the back of her special notebook, adding new pleasures as they came to mind. The place was, as always, up in the hills, among the pine groves above the brown and secret pool. There would be bagpipes and there would be Gregorian chants. The Papal Count might be present, as a disembodied voice, singing “Danny Boy”; she was not entirely sure about this. For a little time one faithful dog would sit beside the grave, while others ran and skirmished in merry insouciance along the shadowed woodland paths, possibly flushing out the capercailzie. This was another point of uncertainty, for although he was a kind of genius loci, his demeanour might lower the dignity of the occasion. The word preposterous, she thought, could have been coined especially for the mighty caper. Cats would be stretched, couchant and motionless along the tree branches, staring down with glittering eyes. She saw no people there. If John McCormack could be disembodied so could the piper and the chanters. But in time to come an occasional ghostly visitant might make his way through the trees and pause by her stone and think of how she had loved him, furling his cloak against the winds of dawn. At present these pilgrims would include W. B. Yeats, Catullus, Virgil, Alfred de Vigny, Rupert Brooke, John Donne, Racine, Alain-Fournier, Henry Vaughan, Sophocles and Tacitus. Shakespeare would be too busy. She would have liked to have had Baudelaire, but she could imagine no circumstances, ghostly or otherwise, which would have persuaded him to come. If only she were an affreuse juive. Oh well, tant pis.
Chapter Ten
Janet lay in bed in the sanatorium at St. Uncumba’s. In the distance she could hear the girls’ voices, jostling and raucous like birds, the thud and bounce of tennis balls, the click of a cricket bat, cries of seagulls. Through the drawn curtains watery light washed the room, forming and reforming intermittent bright splashes which trembled against the walls and ceiling. She felt weightless and immaterial, deliciously remote. With great caution she moved her head, moved her eyes; the headache had gone. She rolled her eyes in all directions. There was no answering pain. The iron vise which had been clamped about her skull for days on end had dissolved into thin air, just as though it had never been. Now she could scarcely imagine it, had almost forgotten how she had been walking and seen rain about her but had felt none, so that she had moved forward like a blind person, with hands outstretched trying to catch the bright droplets, until the sudden agony had gripped her head and she dared not make one step farther, dared not cry out for help. Motionless she had stood, engulfed in pounding pain while the crazy rainstorm flashed about her and her lips moved silently. Girls wandered past, unsurprised by her behaviour, nudging each other or tapping their foreheads. Break ended, lessons began again and still she stood there. Far away in the black pulsating torture chamber of her skull she perceived the form of the weeping manatee, and the word humanity and the word manatee merged in dolour. At last someone had come and led her in to the matron.
She remembered little after that. But now she was well, miraculously reprieved, and she was to go home for several weeks, perhaps even for the rest of term, and rest. They believed that she had been overworking. Her eyes were strained, the middle finger of her right hand had developed a permanent ink-stained bump from too much writing. Twice she had behaved strangely in class; they had been reading Propertius’ poem about the springs of Clitumnus, and when they reached the lines which describe the great white oxen wading through the shallows Janet had burst into tears, uncontrollable, flooding tears which she had been unable to explain, apart from saying that she found the image moving. Then there had been the mortifying and hideous moment when, in her solitary Greek lesson, the mad old prophet Tiresias’ description of fat floating in the blood of sacrificial beasts had caused her to vomit hugely across the room. And besides, Miss Smith the housemistress, while exercising her trio of Skye terriers in the gloaming, had observed Janet, who was supposedly supervising the younger ones at their prep, emerging furtively from the Catholic church beneath the windswept headland. Great was the fear that she might be succumbing to the blandishments of the Scarlet Woman of Rome. In fact, Janet sometimes went to this lonely church because she loved its glowing banks of candles and the heavy perfume of the air, and the mysterious altar, shrouded in purple draperies in the sad days before Easter. She did not like the statues, saints ecstatic or agonised, blood spouting from every visible orifice. But the place had a powerful feeling of sanctuary; it made her think of the lost traveller’s dream under the hill. And she felt for its abandonment, remote from the life of the town, almost forgotten; she was angered by remarks she had overheard about popery and its works and the triumph of righteousness, which meant that the little church would one day soon slump down the eroding cliff face and into the whelming Protestant waters.
Some of this she told the various people who took it upon themselves to reason with her and warn her of the corruption which threatened her soul. As usual they paid no attention; if she had informed them that she was a pagan, and a moongazer, they would have continued with their obsessive anti-Catholic tirade in just the same way. She let them rant and rave, and thought instead about albatrosses, the doomed bird in the “Ancient Mariner,” Baudelaire’s haunter of storms and rainbows, reduced to clumsy crippledom on earth, object of mockery to man, and the albatross who had been swept off course into the wrong hemisphere and now dwelt on a barren peninsula in the far north of Scotland, obliged to consort with kittiwakes; there it was waiting in vain for the high thermals which might waft it back to that unattainably distant south. As she imagined the plight of this bird her hands clenched, she bit her lip, and she stared hard ahead, willing and praying for its release. People mistook this for the outward show of inner religious turmoil. All in all, it would be best for her to spend some time in the carefree, relaxed atmosphere of her home, concluded Miss Smith. “And not too much of the old bookwork.” She twinkled. “Gosh no, golly, you bet not!” agreed Janet, pretending to be a different sort of person, as was clearly required.
Vera, initially depressed by the prospect of a summer shadowed by Janet’s presence, remembered her dream of girlish camaraderie and decided that now was the moment to implement it. When Janet arrived home, she was astonished to find that her bedroom’s bleak cream walls had been transformed by sprigged wallpaper. Coral pink curtains billowed at the open window and in one corner, confronting a coral-seated stool, there was a dressing table, bridally veiled in swags and festoons of net, as though, thought Janet, her direct reflection might cause the mirror to crack. But her bookcase was still there, and her table, and although there was now a pretty rosy lamp by the bed, her Anglepoise hovered like a lone heron on the wide margin of wooden floorboards at the edge of the coral carpet. She could soon put things right. In fact, she reflected, it might be interesting to live in a new environment, so long as she could see to read and had room for her books.