The Ballad and the Source by Rosamond Lehmann

poured out in such unbridled spate.
    She wore a crotcheted cross-over, grey with a border of violet, over her black alpaca while she sat and sewed. She said she was feeling the cold this year. This seemed strange to me, as I looked down from her high window at the parched lawn and the dull, prematurely shrivelled leaves of the grove of chestnut trees. September was wearing away, the drought continued; but she said the summers weren’t what they used to be when she was a girl and our grandmother made her bring her sewing out under the trees of a hot afternoon. She wouldn’t be surprised if those roasting summers weren’t over and done with: our grandmother—she was a great one for a bit of education thrown in while you worked—had said that as time got on the sun would give off less and less heat. At the recollection of these bits of education, the chuckle rattled up out of her throat, more witch-like than ever.
    â€œTilly, do you remember a lady called Mrs. Jardine?”
    She was manipulating a sable collar of my mother’s. She had been apprenticed as a girl to a Polish furrier and knew everything about the skins of animals. She dropped her work and considered. Her tic, so much more pronounced now, made her head shake above her boned collar with rhythmical violence, like one of those Chinese mandarin ornaments that you set nodding by a touch. No, she didn’t recollect any such person. A film came over her eyes, clouding them with a sullen melancholy. I felt accused of forcing on her proofs of failing memory. She’d met a good few in her time, she said; it stood to reason she couldn’t call to mind every Mrs. This and Madam That. …
    â€œI only asked,” I said, “because she lives at the Priory now, and she’s got three grandchildren and we’ve made friends and one of them, called Maisie, says when she was very little they lived in a London hotel with their mother, and you came and took them out in the Park.”
    â€œ Me?” She fairly squawked at me. “Take strange children in the Park? I never. The very idea! She can’t be right in ’er ’ead.”
    â€œAnd to the Zoo. Oh Tilly, I do think it was you. She remembers your name and what you wore and everything. Shall I show her to you next time she comes to tea? You might recognise her. Her mother was Mrs. Jardine’s little girl, who had a funny name: Ianthe.”
    At this word Tilly’s little frame seemed suddenly to contract, then expand. I saw memory strike at her, then pour all through her.
    â€œMiss Ianthe,” she said in a flat, automatic way. “Oh yes, she was godmother to ’er.” I understood that “she” referred to my grandmother. “That was Miss Sibyl’s child. … Mrs. Herbert, I should say. That was her married name. Knowing her as a girl, Miss Sibyl always come more natural. That’s one of them Greek names, ain’t it?—I-anthe? That’s what she said. ‘ It’s a bit of a tongue-twister,’ I says. ‘ Nonsense, Tilly. It’s as simple as it’s beautiful. It’s one of the most beautiful of all the Greek names. It means —’ somethink or other, I forget now what she told me. ‘ Greek to me,’ I says. She never minded a bit of a jokey answer. She knew it was just my way.”
    Her voice trailed off. She looked vacant and foolish. The pouches under her chin wobbled, her earrings tinkled faintly as her head nodded, nodded up and down. I waited, digging pins into her red emery cushion made in the shape of a big bursting strawberry—immemorial part of Tilly’s personal luggage.
    â€œNow do you remember her, Tilly?” I ventured at last.
    â€œRemember ’oo?” she said, rather querulously. “I dare say I do. What of it? I ’adn’t ’eard yet my mem’ry’s failin’—though there’s some a bit nearer than Marble Arch would be glad