The Ballad and the Source by Rosamond Lehmann

dissent. “Then Grandpa …?” “No. Harry.” She uttered a formal deprecating little laugh, and exclaimed: “Fancy me saying Grandpa! Oh dear, what a silly I am! You’re not nearly old enough for that, are you? You’re a young, young Harry. … You’re more like a sort of Uncle Harry really, aren’t you, I suppose?” He uttered a brief chuckle. “Miss,” he said. “Miss Puss.” It was very odd to hear him laugh: it was as if he didn’t know how to do it, and was practising. But she did make him laugh. He began to love her tenderly. When she was playing with the rest of us in the garden, he would appear suddenly in our midst, just to see that she was getting on all right—not being left out or left behind. Sometimes one discerned his figure haunting one long window after another, as if watching her from different angles. He had always been so freakish, so apparently aimless in his comings and goings, it was at first difficult to realise that he was now guided by one definite motive—to watch over her.
    This was in the beginning: afterwards—quite soon, I think—her presence became a simple necessity to him. Though a caressing she was not an affectionate child; perhaps because of this, because she was all intuition, calculation, without heart, she knew exactly how to meet him three-quarters of the way and draw from him the sustenance she needed. She soon had the father-daughter ritual established—the romp before bedtime, the good-night visit after she was in bed. They talked fantasies about the cat, and read aloud to each other from the Beatrix Potter books Mrs. Jardine had given her. He read slowly, in a rather quavering solemn monotone; she very loudly and rapidly—(she knew them by heart) pausing now and then to fling out such warnings and encouragements as: “This bit is rather frightening;” or “It’s a little sad here, but it gets all right in the end.” She had a shrill sing-song voice with a plaintive break in it; it always sounded as if tears were behind it. She sang to him too, long droning compositions in mournful récitatif. Obsessed as she was with age and death, her themes were always very morbid, and her renderings caused her face to assume a comic look of strain and anguish. He would listen without a quiver, and thank her politely at the end.
    All this time, while the relationship between Harry, the Thomsons and ourselves was being established, Mrs. Jardine seemed to retire into the background, or to be somehow muffled. Like a constitutional sovereign, without administrative political powers, she presided, she dispensed bounty, graciousness and tact, receiving us as it were in audience on our arrivals and departures. She ceased to confide in us, and never attempted to draw us apart and question us about the grandchildren. We neither spied for her, nor were spied upon.
    She got on very agreeably with Malcolm: he admired her and trusted her, and she showed him an easy straight­forward affection, and encouraged him, and was patient with his uncouthness. His incipient puberty was particularly raw, grubby and graceless, and she who so loved order and distinction, so valued charm, never allowed his unattractiveness to irritate her. “He can’t help it, Lucy,” I once heard her say to her maid after some large-scale breakage. “He is not inside his skin yet, he is all over the place. How can he tell what his legs and arms will do?” She would stroke his dust-coloured scrubbing brush hair, and call him her fellow. She must have settled that her job was to help him—by making him feel loved, not a disappointment­­­—to fit more satisfactorily into his skin. I thought it was sad that she had never had a son: she would have been so nice to him. I thought it must be difficult for her to believe that Malcolm, so common, so nondescript in his flesh, could possibly be