comical stories in which, I began to notice at an early age, she was always the heroine. One was about George Bernard Shaw, who, on a Far Eastern cruise ship, had spotted Aunt Sarah as an interesting woman and had let word drop that he wanted to meet her. Aunt Sarah sent the message that her knees turned to wood if a gentleman wouldn’t make the effort to come to see her. And so, in the story, Shaw came to see her. But what I wanted to know was, what did they talk about? Did they match wits? Did they become friends? The point of the anecdote was Aunt Sarah’s triumph over male chauvinism, but this seemed to me much less important than her actual meeting with Shaw and I was almost ashamed of her for having put principle before the privilege of meeting a great writer.
But all the happy times were at The Peak, where the sun seemed to shine almost all the time. On rainy days, we would play in a back sitting-room with a fire burning and Balfour (a coincidence that this pugnacious little dog had the same name as our governess) for company; and Percy would bring milk toast for supper on a tray. We were glad to be segregated from the grown-ups, except for the ever-vigilant Miss Balfour, their precept in this case being that children should be neither seen nor heard. In the morning, we had delightful little tasks, for Grandmother employed us to pick rosebugs off the bushes at the walled end of the garden. I can still feel their dry claws on my hand as they clambered out of the can of kerosene and over the edge; I feel the squashiness of their beige-grey backs between my fingers when I pried them loose and forced them back into the can. And I smell the mingled smells of the rosebugs, the kerosene and the roses warmed by the sun with their hundreds of fragrant petals lying on the hot dry earth. Each of us had a little manila envelope tied with a different coloured ribbon, and into this envelope our wages were put, one penny for each five rosebugs. I remember sometimes earning as much as thirty-five cents, paid very solemnly by Grandmother in her morning-room, which was bright with polished silver and blue and white chintz.
There is something of The Peak in every house I have ever chosen for myself, even though there have been no servants, no elaborately served meals, even though the furniture is relatively shabby and the gardens like poor relations. Perhaps it is the perfume of box, lilac, roses and peonies that gets into the pores of every house and is exhaled, or the surrounding peace that I choose by imperious necessity. Now and then, the dreams I have about houses translate my love for The Peak into the image of a kind of terrestrial heaven. I remember one dream in which I found myself in a house, Georgian perhaps, with big square rooms, painted white, and flooded with sunlight that came through French windows. Outside, there was an orchard and the apple trees in it were covered with fruit, like big glowing rubies. My happy dreams have always been visions of sunlit rooms, radiant landscapes and birds.
I wonder now why I felt so depressed always in Mater’s city house in Philadelphia, wonder to what extent it formed my tastes and anti-tastes, wonder why some children in the same family absorb and copy the lives of their parents and grandparents and others reject them and determine to do the opposite. Mater’s city house was a splendid example of high Victorian rococo, with oriental rugs laid over flowered carpets and every flat surface covered with objects: gilt French clocks, cloisonné vases, Dresden figurines, ornate brass candelabra. On a small round table in the downstairs library, covered with a pale satin embroidered Chinese tablecloth (I have photographs and a magnifying glass), there are seven highly polished silver objects and a tall bronze and marble lamp, a wingèd maiden standing on a pedestal and holding a polished marble sphere, half hidden by an embroidered linen shade. Among the silver objects, I recognize with a little rush of joy my plump bird with moveable wings and a head that turns, this bird which I take out of his soft brown bag on great occasions and, with a feeling of ostentation, place on the dinner table. Here and elsewhere, there are objects that found their way by inheritance into our house in Washington: a bronze Buddha on a high bookcase, and next to him, incongruously, a terra cotta mastiff with his nose almost touching the box turtle at his feet. His sharply arched back is turned to the Buddha and behind them is an engraving of one of Raphael’s lunettes at the Vatican. On the small wall area between one bookcase and the next, there are ten engravings, miniatures, watercolours and a mirror. The etching of a cathedral interior, the Holbein reproduction, the watercolour of a bluejay, the bronze on the bookcase of the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus (her dangling breasts fascinated me when I was little)—all these moved to my family’s house after Mater’s death.
One might think that, gazing at the concentration of things (one can’t call it a clutter because it has its own highly ordered and intricate and unchangeable composition), I would feel a sense of acute indigestion. On the contrary, having inherited a measure of my grandmother’s acquisitiveness, I rove around this elegant antique shop and dwell with real sorrow on the objects I would like to have, that I never noticed until I saw them under the magnifying glass, objects dispersed, sold, gone forever: a bronze bird, its head turned sideways and up; a white china cat with bright brooding eyes; four musical cherubs perched above the open doorway of the solarium; pillows, huge ones, covered with velvet and satin and needlepoint. This leaves the ninety-eight percent that I do not want, the things that were lovingly bought for a lot of money by Mater, clustered together, polished and dusted with a feather duster by generations of Irish maids. And forgotten? Did she look at them? In the hodgepodge of pictures covering the walls were there some that she studied and loved? Did she ever think, where am I going to put these three Majolica cherubs holding bowls aloft? But there was always a place for everything, and in this case, she put them on top of a high cabinet in the dining room, itself filled with crystal beakers and bowls and compote dishes, all sparkling like diamonds. She was like me, I suppose, but her capacity for acquiring things was infinitely multiplied, untinged by the smallest feeling of guilt and shaped by the ideal image of an elegant house. Was my grandmother competing with other rich Philadelphia families? I study the photographs and look for my grandmother’s soul, for her real loves and attentions, but I see her soul fragmented; see it most concentrated in the plants that crowd the sunny west window of the dining room. I remember the smell of the sweet olive, a smell that mitigated my city depression; I remember that my grandmother’s bathroom was full of plants, and that, at eighty-four, she was found dead there in the bathtub, having fallen peacefully asleep.
The plants spoke of love, whereas the thousands of objects in the house spoke in a loud stage whisper of money. It was not a really welcoming house. There were sofas and chairs covered with velvet on which one decidedly did not fling oneself, but sat precisely. (“Twins, stop fidgeting,” Mater often said to my sister and me, but it was not our fault; the chairs were fidget-provoking.) At Christmas, there was only one room in which the joys of subdued romping were allowed, supervised, of course, by Miss Balfour. This was a back study hung with family portraits and miniatures, plus a Rembrandt self-portrait, a Corot landscape, a Rowlandson coach and four in a storm, and a farm scene, highly idealized, in which a donkey gazes at a large pot of milk, a youth stands embracing the head of a cow, and the children and mother are in an unlikely state of cleanliness. Here, we were given a box of toys and allowed to spread them out on the floor and play with them. Carefully, without making too much noise.
One more detail that will perhaps throw light on my grandparents’ character. In the dining room, there was a fireplace that was never used for fires, with a carved oak mantle above, the oak inlaid with marble. Particularly striking about this fireplace were the words carved in Gothic letters just under the mantlepiece: “Foster the Guest that comes,” it is written, “Further him that maun gang.” Between each word is a little rosette; the “gang” turns the corner and is at a right angle to the “maun.” This sentence was incomprehensible to me and had to be explained, for a “maun gang” was mixed up in my head with a chain gang. I was prone to confuse words with two meanings, as I had confused the multiplication tables, or to take metaphors literally, as when our governess told me I was “skating on thin ice.” Knowing now what the words mean, I try to apply them to my grandmother and her sense of hospitality. She certainly “furthered (perhaps as a family we still do) him that maun gang”; in those days, people were less likely to overstay their welcome, constrained by a sense of fitness and the suggestive silences that hastened their departure. “Foster the guest that comes.” Were we fostered? I remember that Grandmother spent a lot of time trying to draw us out and failed; we were miserably shy and she made shyer. Why? What did she do wrong? What did so many of my relations, including both my parents, do wrong? In this house, there were rules of properness: proper conversation, proper