Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  The cricket practices began as early in the year as possible and, as the season advanced, members of the Culverleigh eleven came up to Rock Place and Aunt and the children and Tansy did not play, but only looked on.

  On Saturdays there were real cricket matches either at Culverleigh or away, and on Sundays, of course, nobody played.

  It was on Sunday, in church, that Callie, week by week, identified her neighbours and rehearsed to herself everything that she had heard about them at home. Awdry and Juliet, in particular, were given to lengthy discussions and conjectures concerning other people.

  It seemed as if everybody was, in some way, interesting, and connected with some odd story.

  Callie sat in her place in the second pew on the left, between Aunt and Juliet, with Mona wedged between Aunt and the wall, and the rest of the family in the pew just in front of them. She looked up at a red-and-blue window — Abraham sacrificing Isaac — and at bald-headed Mr. Visto in the pulpit — and at various stone tablets against the wall, especially a large bas-relief of an urn with a whiskered Sir John Berringer, Bart., in a top-hat bowing over it in grief for Laura Jane Berringer, his wife, deceased in the 28th year of her age — and then, after a short but unsuccessful attempt to attend to the sermon, began to think about the congregation.

  The front pew on the other side of the aisle held the Berringers of Ashe to whom Culverleigh Woods belonged, as well as Ashe itself, and a great many farms and cottages.

  Sir Gilbert Berringer was tall and heavily built, with eyes that stood out prominently from his brick-red face. He was an M.F.H. Lady Berringer was tall and thin, and hardly looked young enough to be the mother of their only child — a skinny little girl of ten called Mary, who was extinguished, summer and winter alike, under innumerable silk neck-handkerchiefs, little wraps, extra coats, and a hideous and ridiculous broad-brimmed felt hat like a man’s.

  Mary’s Mademoiselle was a Catholic and so was not seen in church. She had to bicycle five miles to and from her own place of worship, and did so with pious regularity.

  Behind the Berringers sat Major and Mrs. Palambo, as far away from one another as possible. It was said that they never spoke. But from time to time, in the course of the Psalms or the sermon, it would seem that some obscure reference intelligible to themselves alone would strike them both, and they would then turn and glare for a moment at one another.

  At Rock Place these silent demonstrations of hostility were invariably commented upon later, — usually with an addition to the effect that it was no wonder the Palambos’ only son had turned out a Bad Hat and hadn’t been heard of for more than ten years.

  In a little side chapel, forming a right angle with the chancel itself, the American organ stood, and beside it worshipped the four Misses ffillimore. The place had been theirs for more years than almost anybody in the congregation could remember, from the incredibly far-off days when they had knelt beside their parents, long since dead — four dark-skinned snub-nosed little girls, all very much alike, and each a year younger than the one above her.

  They still dressed alike, in tailor-made coats and skirts, hard hats and spotted veils. Miss fflorens ffillimore played the organ, Miss Totty and Miss Cathy sketched in water-colours, and Miss Isabel played the guitar and sang.

  They were all of them first-rate horsewomen. Their only brother, Mr. Bob ffillimore, was unmarried. They kept house for him at the Hall, and Mr. Bob always referred to them as “the girls,” although he was himself, at sixty-odd years of age, several years younger than the youngest of them.

  “Fifthly, my dear friends, and lastly” said Mr. Visto, and everybody stirred slightly, and Sir Gilbert Berringer shut his watch with a snap and moved it from the ledge in front of him back into his pocket again.

  A stealthy kick on the ankle caused Callie to look round.

  Juliet was directing her attention to a little note, passing from hand to hand.

  It might — it almost must be — meant for their own pew.

  It was.

  Followed by any number of interested glances, the note reached Mona, who gaped at it, was taken from her by Aunt, opened and read.

  “Not quite decent behind” said the disquieting despatch.

  And, the congregation immediately afterwards standing up in order to Fight the good Fight with All its Might, it became evident to Aunt’s immediate neighbours that the placket-hole of her dress was agape, affording a scandalous view of some four inches of stout white cambric petticoat.

  “Not quite decent behind.” The phrase became a household word at Rock Place.

  Simple jokes, daily straggling walks along the lanes to the silent green aisles of Culverleigh Woods, picnics in familiar fields, a routine of lessons, half-holidays, cricket, riding and occasional calls on neighbouring houses, blent into an uncomplex recurrent pattern.

  The leaves of the Virginia creeper tapped against the windows, and the blackbirds sang after the rain, the acrid, piercing scent of mint rose up from the kitchen garden, the rooks circled round and round the tops of the elms in the front meadows, and in the early mornings Callie could hear the hens clucking in the yard, just below the night-nursery window.

  Chapter IV

  Autumn slowly turned the leaves of the Virginia creeper crimson, the Michaelmas daisies made huge mauve and purple clumps against the pink-washed wall that separated the yard from the front garden, and acorns and twigs mysteriously littered the lanes over-night.

  In pursuit of the acorns, unattached pigs wandered independently from their rightful farmyards, nosing along the ditches and lurching away with indignant squeals when joyously pursued by Flock and Rover, the big, untidy sheep-dogs from Rock Place.

  Callie and Awdry got up very early and went to look for mushrooms, bringing back a huge basketful that Ann cooked for breakfast. They were congratulated by everybody on their spirit of enterprise.

  Tansy enquired if they had “got a potato-clock?”

  “A what, Tansy?”

  “A potato-clock,” repeated Tansy with the utmost gravity.

  “What is a potato-clock?” Callie asked.

  “Don’t you know? It’s the only thing that’s known to be an absolutely certain way of getting one out of bed early.”

  Reggie muttered that he’d better take one back to school with him, and Awdry muttered in reply that he could do with it at home, too.

  Mona was enquiring earnestly what Miss Tansfield meant.

  “What I say. The surest way of starting the day in good time is to get a potato-clock.”

  “Could I find one in the kitchen garden?”

  “It might be worth while looking,” said Tansy.

  Mona trotted away after lessons and, after wandering round and round the kitchen garden, looking earnestly at all the beds, went to find Young Hook in the potting-shed.

  “She’s asking him what a potato-clock is,” said Juliet.

  “I bet he doesn’t know,” Reggie said. He was swinging slowly, head downwards, from the garden gate.

  “What is it, really?” Callie asked.

  “It’s a joke. Get up at eight o’clock — don’t you see — if you say it quickly, it sounds like ‘get a potato-clock.’”

  “Oh!”

  Callie was rather disappointed. She had had a faint hope that the potato-clock really did exist, in some magical form.

  Cecil, sitting on the step and very slowly and carefully sifting gravel through his fingers, looked up at her.

  “I didn’t see it, either. I couldn’t imagine what it meant the first time I heard it.”

  Callie realized that he thought she might be feeling rather ashamed of herself because she hadn’t understood the joke.

  She thought, gratefully, what a kind boy Cecil was. He was always like that. Thinking about other people’s feelings, and wanting them not to be hurt, or disappointed, or made to feel foolish.

  But in spite of his kindness, and his readiness to do whatever he was asked to do, Cecil seemed always, in some queer w
ay, to be left out of things. It wasn’t that he didn’t do everything the others did — except hunt — but that he was so much more silent than they were, and never made any suggestion himself.

  Aunt sometimes looked at him in rather a worried way, and his mother took less notice of him than she did of any of the others, but his father was the person to whom Cecil was, obviously, the greatest disappointment.

  “Papa says he won’t make a boy ride if he doesn’t want to,” Awdry had once confided to Callie, “but he doesn’t know what he’s ever done that his eldest son should turn out a milksop.”

  “Does he hate hunting?”

  “Absolutely loathes it. Once he was in at the kill, when he was only about eight, and it made him sick.”

  “Sick? Do you mean really be sick?”

  “Yes. He got behind some bushes or something, but Miss Isabel ffillimore saw him and told Papa. And after that Cecil never really followed properly, and used to lose the Hunt and come home by himself, and Papa said it wasn’t worth while his going out at all if he didn’t enjoy it, when any of the rest of us were only longing to go instead.”

  “Do you mind seeing the fox killed, Awdry?”

  Awdry made a face.

  “It’s soon over, and anyway it’s worth it,” she said. “Besides, heaps of times they get away.”

  “I suppose it’s cruel, in a way?”

  “The fox enjoys it,” Awdry said firmly.

  Callie could see the convenience of this belief.

  Before the boys went back to school, a concert was given in the village in order to raise money for repairs to the church.

  It was a great event, for as a rule there were very few village entertainments beyond the Choir supper, the Harvest-Home and a treat for the school children in the summer. Concerts usually only took place in the winter, one before Advent and the other before Lent.

  Even Mona was taken to the concert.

  The school was decorated with chains of roses cut out of blue paper — pink would have been better, but the post-office only stocked blue — and all the gas-jets were flaring merrily, and a little platform had appeared, its legs modestly shrouded in green baize, at the end of the room where the Infants were usually taught.

  In front of the platform stood a row of potted geraniums from Major Palambo’s greenhouse and behind the geraniums were the footlights — half a dozen oil-lamps from the Vicarage.

  A table stood in the middle of the platform covered with a fringed cloth, and there was a wooden chair with arms — occupied throughout the evening by Mr. Visto — and a tall, thin adjustable music-stand made of brass. It was to be screwed up as high as it would go for the butcher’s solo, and then shot down again as far as possible for short little Elsie Evans, a performer on the violin of some eighteen months’ standing.

  The upright piano had been left in its usual place, in a corner of the room adjoining the platform steps, with the round red-leather-topped piano-stool that had been presented to the school by the Misses ffillimore in memory of their father, who had been one of its managers.

  No more uncomfortable seats than the backless wooden forms in front of the room could have been devised — unless it were those at the back, on which the school children shuffled and giggled and talked, and the half-grown village lads and young men exchanged loud monosyllabic sounds not recognizable as sentences, or even words, by anybody but themselves.

  The front benches were reserved for the gentry and there was a special bench — short, and inclined to tilt up on end every time anybody moved — set against the wall, at right angles to the stage, for the performers.

  Reggie, who was being forced to dance a Sailor’s Hornpipe with Mary Berringer, sat there, looking slightly surly, in a sailor-suit grown too tight for him, and in unnatural proximity to Mary’s Mademoiselle. Beyond Mademoiselle cowered Mary, huddled inside a large Scottish plaid out of which dangled her thin, brown-stockinged legs and strapped shoes.

  The concert began, as was usual, with a duet on the piano by the two daughters of the piano-tuner, who had obligingly driven seven miles in a dog-cart to attend the entertainment, and would drive seven miles back again after it was over.

  They played a terrific rendering of a Marche Turque in which the Turks could plainly be heard stampeding, rather than marching, and which came to an end with some tremendous crashing chords in the bass — Miss Goyle — and a torrent of little runs in the treble — Miss Mabel Goyle.

  The encore was a Fairy Waltz, to which the fairies waltzed at an even more dizzying speed than the Turks had marched.

  “Wonderful agility,” said Miss fflorens ffillimore, shaking her head but at the same time clapping, with her white-gloved hands held well up in the air so that the performers should see them and be encouraged.

  “The next item will be a song by Miss Cecilia Hook,” said Mr. Visto, advancing between the green moreen curtains — once draped across the top landing at Rock Place but given away under suspicion of moth.

  Cissie Hook — as she was known on less formal occasions — was Young Hook’s sister and the Ballantynes applauded her as one connected with themselves.

  Her speciality was the singing of sentimental ballads, and she was listened to with rapt attention whilst she sang of a coquettish maiden who refused to tell her wooer that she loved him, although he was going away to sea. The lover was drowned, and cast up at the feet of the maiden, who wept and, “raining kisses on his brow, said: The angels must have told him For he knows I love him now.”

  Followed “Mignonette” with its poignant refrain:

  Goodbye, Mignonette! Don’t forget

  I love you yet.

  Kiss me! You won’t? Ah well,

  Mignonette, farewell! Mignonette, farewell!

  “Mignonette” was called for three times, with the audience joining in the refrain, which grew slower and slower and sadder and sadder with each repetition.

  It was almost a relief when Cissie Hook, blowing a graceful kiss from the tips of her fingers, tripped off the platform and was succeeded by the carpenter, with a comic monologue about a man who didn’t like having his mother-in-law to stay.

  “Miss Isabel ffillimore comes next, and then it’s Mary’s and Reggie’s Hornpipe,” whispered Juliet to Callie, although all of them knew exactly where abouts on the programme “Dance: by Miss Berringer and Master R. Ballantyne” would figure.

  “Does Reggie hate doing it?” Callie asked, with a compassionate glance in the direction of the two performers, both of whom appeared to be plunged in gloom.

  “Oh, he loathes it,” said Cecil.

  Awdry and Juliet, in one breath, replied:

  “No wonder.”

  “And with Mary Berringer, of all people!” disgustedly added Awdry.

  They all despised Mary Berringer because she was never allowed to go anywhere or do anything without Mademoiselle, and was afflicted with a lisp into the bargain.

  Muscular, weather-beaten, wearing a neat brown coat-and-skirt, shirt and tie, and stout walking shoes, Miss Isabel ffillimore strode onto the platform bearing her beribboned Spanish guitar.

  In an unexpectedly thin high voice she sang something not very audible about red roses, a dark-eyed señorita and an unscaleable convent wall.

  “I believe,” said Miss Cathy impressively to Aunt, “that our dear mother sang that very song to our dear father when they were on their honeymoon. He had a liking for it that was almost passionate.”

  “It must be a very old song,” replied Aunt — and she admitted afterwards, at home, that it was not the best-chosen comment in the world, but she hadn’t really been thinking of what she was saying. Her mind had been on Reggie’s Hornpipe rather than on old Mr. and Mrs. ffillimore singing and honeymooning some seventy-odd years earlier.

  Aunt took the piano-stool herself for the Hornpipe, and although the music was in front of her with Tansy all ready to turn over the page, she played it with her head turned over her shoulder so that she might watch the performers.
Indeed she continued to play, as though wound up, for some six or eight bars after Reggie and Mary Berringer had come to a stop and were standing, breathing heavily, facing the clapping audience.

  Reggie grinned cheerfully and remembered to salute in a nautical manner — but Mary merely looked cross and frightened and scuttled back as quickly as possible to Mademoiselle.

  “Ah, comme tu es peu gracieuse!” said Mademoiselle, and she muffled her up in the Scottish plaid again.

  Callie felt very glad that she wasn’t Mary Berringer, with that awful Mademoiselle.

  The second half of the concert — which bore a marked resemblance to the first half, since nearly all the same performers reappeared, in the same order — was rendered memorable to Callie by the sight of a little girl, whom she had not seen before, seated between Dr. and Mrs. Umfraville.

  She knew the doctor and his wife.

  The little girl attracted Callie immediately. She was pretty, with long curling light-brown hair cut into a short fringe, like the children of the du Maurier drawings in Punch — whom, in fact, she resembled.

  “Who’s that?” Callie whispered to Juliet.

  “Elisabeth Geraldine. Mrs. Umfraville’s her aunt. She often stays with them. Isn’t it a funny name?”

  “Is Geraldine her surname?”

  “Yes.”

  Callie stared, fascinated.

  Elisabeth Geraldine looked at her in return and presently she smiled.

  Callie was entranced.

  Later in the evening she asked, feeling oddly shy, if Elisabeth Geraldine was nice, and was relieved when the other children said yes.

  “She generally comes to tea with us at least once, when she’s staying with Mrs. Umfraville.”

  It would be lovely, thought Callie, to get to know her and perhaps have her for a friend.

  She was given to ardent fancies, although they seldom found any expression outside her own imagination. This one added glamour to the last piano-duet— “The Mill-Wheel” — and the final part-song by the male portion of the church choir: “Come where my Love lies dreaming.”

  Then Mr. Visto made his customary speech, thanking the ladies who had got ready the hall, thanking Major and Mrs. Palambo for the flowers on the platform, thanking the performers and the patrons and being himself thanked for presiding over the entertainment.