The Tree of Heaven | Page 9

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"I suppose you're happy," said Grannie, "now you've got the poor child
sent away."
Auntie Emmy raised her eyebrows and spread out her hands, as much
as to say she was helpless under her mother's stupidity.
"He'd have been sent away anyhow," said Frances. "It isn't good for
him to hang about listening to grown-up conversation."
It was her part to keep the peace between her mother and her sisters.

"It seems to me," said Auntie Louie, "that you began it yourself."
When a situation became uncomfortable, Auntie Louie always put her
word in and made it worse. She never would let Frances keep the
peace.
Frances knew what Louie meant--that she was always flinging her
babies in Emmy's face at those moments when the sight of other
people's babies was too much for Emmy. She could never be prepared
for Emmy's moments.
"It's all very well," Auntie Louie went on; "but I should like to hear of
somebody admiring Dorothy. I don't see where Dorothy comes in."
Dorothy was supposed, by the two Nannas, to be Auntie Louie's
favourite. If you taxed her with it she was indignant and declared that
she was sure she wasn't.
And again Frances knew what Louie meant--that she loved her three
sons, Michael and Nicholas and John, with passion, and her one
daughter, Dorothea, with critical affection. That was the sort of thing
that Louie was always saying and thinking about people, and nobody
ever paid the slightest attention to what Louie said or thought. Frances
told herself that if there was one emotion that she was more free from
than another it was sex jealousy.
The proof of it, which she offered now, was that she had given up
Dorothy to Anthony. It was natural that he should care most for the
little girl.
Louie said that was easy--when she knew perfectly well that Anthony
didn't. Like Frances he cared most for his three sons. She was leaving
Dorothy to Anthony so that Anthony might leave Michael and Nicholas
to her.
"You might just as well say," Frances said, "that I'm in love with
John-John. Poor little Don-Don!"

"I might," said Louie, "just as well."
Grannie said she was sure she didn't understand what they were talking
about and that Louie had some very queer ideas in her head.
"Louie," she said, "knows more than I do."
Frances thought: Was Grannie really stupid? Was she really innocent?
Was she not, rather, clever, chock-full of the secret wisdom and the
secret cruelty of sex?
Frances was afraid of her thoughts. They came to her not like thoughts,
but like quick rushes of her blood, partly confusing her. She did not
like that.
She thought: Supposing Grannie knew all the time that Emmy was
unhappy, and took a perverse pleasure in her knowledge? Supposing
she was not really soft and gentle? She could be soft and gentle to her,
because of her children and because of Anthony. She respected
Anthony because he was well-off and efficient and successful, and had
supported her ever since Grandpapa had gone bankrupt. She was proud
of Frances because she was Anthony's wife, who had had three sons
and only one daughter.
Grannie behaved as if her grandchildren were her own children, as if
she had borne three Sons and only one daughter, instead of four
daughters and only one son. Still, Frances was the vehicle of flesh and
blood that carried on her flesh and blood in Michael and Nicholas and
John. She respected Frances.
But Frances could remember a time when she had been unmarried like
her sisters, and when Grannie had turned on her, too, that look that was
half contempt and half hostility or displeasure. Grannie had not wanted
her to marry Anthony, any more than she would have wanted Louie or
Emmeline or Edith to marry anybody, supposing anybody had wanted
to marry them. And Frances and Anthony had defied her. They had
insisted on marrying each other. Frances knew that if there had been no
Anthony, her mother would have despised her in secret, as in secret she

despised Emmeline and Edith. She despised them more than Louie,
because, poor things, they wanted, palpably, to be married, whereas
Louie didn't, or said she didn't. In her own way, Louie had defied her
mother. She had bought a type-writer and a bicycle with her own
earnings, and by partially supporting herself she had defied Anthony,
the male benefactor, Louie's manner intimated that there was nothing
Frances had that she wanted. She had resources in herself, and Frances
had none.
Frances persuaded herself that she admired and respected Louie. She
knew that she, Frances, was only admired and respected because she
had succeeded where her three sisters had failed. She was even afraid