Deceived With Kindness by Angelica Garnett

Author:Angelica Garnett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

7

At Home in Sussex

Meanwhile life at Charleston continued, bathed it seemed in the glow of a perpetual summer. The household fell into two halves: on the one hand the painters, on the other the writers. If we lived happily together it was largely because, like birds or animals, we each had our own territory, duly respected by the others. Within a domestic framework, rhythmic and reassuring, we all had space and liberty to pursue our own interests, meeting at regular intervals in the dining-room to be sociable and convivial.

Vanessa presided in the dining-room, the magnetic centre of all our thoughts and activities. At breakfast she was always down first, and sat for some time alone, enjoying her solitude. She had dressed and washed quietly, almost secretively, and would be in her habitual place on the far side of the round table, looking with dreamy reflectiveness at the still-life in the centre, or out of the window at the pond and the weather. Her gestures, for the most part slow and even cumbrous, would suddenly reveal her as a girl – virginal and inexperienced. Age showed itself, however, in her furrowed forehead, in the tortoiseshell spectacles balanced on the curve of her nose, and the deep vertical lines between her eyes which recalled that life was uphill, sometimes painful. Nevertheless she was enjoying herself. The luxuries she would have asked for on her desert island would have been a picture by Giotto, and unlimited quantities of black coffee. Now, as she ate a piece of buttered toast with coarse salt and held a steaming cup in long, straight be-ringed fingers, she considered her letters, absorbed the temper of the day, and braced herself to meet its demands.

As always, she was divided: on the one hand she was entranced by what she saw in front of her, on the other worried by her responsibilities. She was faced with half an hour in the kitchen, deciding whether to have spotted dog or treacle tart for lunch, and listening to Lottie’s suggestions, jokes and complaints, which, as she found them irrelevant, she dismissed with a laugh, her hand flying to her head as though she had only just realised the depths to which Lottie could descend. She would have repudiated the idea that, as human beings, the servants were any different from herself, and she did her best to give them as much comfort and liberty as possible, but between them there was a wide gap, seldom crossed, even when she was genuinely fond of them. That she was gentle, patient and self-controlled underlined this distance, as though she were waving from a train to women working in the fields. She did her best, but she could not enter their world, and for them she remained in consequence always a ‘lady’.

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