Westwood

by Stella Gibbons

  ‘This way. Mind your head!’ said Lady Challis, and opened a door painted yellow, which led straight up a steep narrow staircase. Margaret’s impression of the dining-hall had been pleasant, for the apartment had a wooden floor painted the same soft yellow as the door, and windows hung with glossy white material patterned by scarlet strawberries and their green leaves, and there must (she thought) have been literally thousands of books on shelves set high on the walls; but she was glad to be shown into a bathroom, which was not luxurious but whose appointments were solid and comfortable, and to bathe her eyes.

  When she came out, Lady Challis was sitting at the head of the stairs, with a tray laden with food beside her, absorbed in a book. Margaret could see its title; it was Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World.

  ‘Oh dear, I have been laughing so over this!’ she exclaimed, putting the book into her overall pocket. ‘It makes me think of what Raphael says to Adam in Paradise Lost:

  He His fabric of the heavens

  Hath left to their disputes; perhaps to move

  His laughter at their quaint opinions wide

  Hereafter …

  ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘There!’ she said at last. (They had now climbed another perilous staircase.) ‘You’ll be all right here, won’t you?’ and she pulled out a table and set it near a window that looked across the orchard to some meadows.

  ‘You are kind!’ exclaimed Margaret fervently, putting the tray down on the table, and glancing round the large airy room with its sloping roof and shelves filled with worn, friendly-looking books.

  ‘Not kind; selfish,’ said Lady Challis oracularly, tucking a piece of silver hair into the coil at the back of her head. ‘Good-bye; I’ll see you later,’ and she nodded and smiled and went out of the room.

  As Margaret ate, she was thinking about nothing but her hostess, and trying to grasp the fact that she was Gerard Challis’s mother; she, who was so completely, so utterly unlike what Margaret would have expected his mother to be. The worn loveliness of her features, certainly, was like her son’s, and her faded blue eyes must once have had the depth and colour of his, but whereas (Margaret groped for words to express her impression) – he has made the best of his personality so that it is all in his face, she takes no notice of hers. She could have been strikingly beautiful, I should think, but she ignores her own beauty. Her hair is done anyhow and she hasn’t even a pretty overall, and her hands are rough with gardening, and yet, all the same, she is beautiful. Oh, I do like her so much! I wish I could talk to her; I’m sure she could help me.

  Lady Challis meanwhile wandered downstairs, still reading The Nature of the Physical World, and when she reached the head of the main staircase once more, which provided such a convenient seat, she was just absently sitting down to continue reading when a small voice cried warningly:

  ‘Lady Challis! You’re reading again and your supper will be beastly and cold,’ and a little girl appeared at the bottom of the staircase, busily eating a mouthful of her own supper and gazing up at her.

  ‘Thank you, Jane, I’m sorry,’ murmured Lady Challis, and got up and continued her journey, slipping her hand into that of Jane as she reached the foot of the stairs, and going on reading. ‘Did mother send you to find me?’ she went on absently.

  ‘No. Mr Challis, your son. He said, “Little girl” (I’ve told him my name when he was here before but he never can remember it), he said, “you go and look for Lady Challis and tell her to stop reading and come and eat her supper.”’

  ‘And so you did. Well, thank you very much, and now you run along and eat yours, or that will be beastly and cold too.’

  24

  The shadows of the apple trees were long upon the grass when Margaret at last decided that she must go down and find the children. She was now completely in command of herself, and could have wished that Lady Challis had let her go in to supper with the others, for she thought that everybody must have noticed her absence and commented upon it, but that the wish seemed ungrateful after such delicate kindness. It seemed strange not to be busily cooking an evening meal at this hour, so used had she become to going to Westwood-at-Brockdale, and in spite of the novelty and interest of this new household in which she temporarily found herself, she missed Dick and Linda. There she was needed; there her opinion was valued and her presence was indispensable to the comfort of the family, while here, though she had carelessly been called sweet and an angel for her pains, she was only being used as a convenience. She thought with real affection of the clumsy clasp of Linda’s hand and of Dick’s brief appreciation of the suppers she cooked, and returned again and again to the hope that Mrs Coates (whose large, slightly pop-eyes and loose mouth suggested a weakness for dramatic behaviour) would not make an unexpected return during the week-end.

  I shall miss looking after them, she thought, as she stood by the window gazing out across the apple trees and the cooling meadows; and then she thought (poor Margaret), if only I had someone who belonged only to me, and didn’t always have to go into other people’s homes and share with them; I want someone for my very own. She had at first dreamt of letting her ideal love for Gerard Challis so fill her life with selfless beauty that it should transform all her ways of feeling and thinking, but she had found, on a closer acquaintance with him, that her devotion did not blossom and enrich her existence as she had hoped. Now, at this moment, exactly eight months to a day since she had first spoken to him in the hall of Westwood, when she was to spend three nights under the same roof with him in his mother’s home, she could not truthfully say that he meant as much to her as he had done on that first evening, when she had looked up into the eyes ‘blue and meditative as the eyes of the Roman Augustus,’ and felt that the greatest moment of her life had come.

  ‘Margaret, are you dead or something?’ exclaimed Hebe crossly, bursting into the room and startling her. ‘Can you come down and cope with the brats? We want to go to the local.’

  ‘Of course, I’m awfully sorry,’ replied Margaret guiltily. ‘I was just coming down, only I thought you wouldn’t have finished supper yet.’ She picked up her own supper-tray and followed Hebe out of the room.

  Her tone seemed to have mollified Hebe slightly, for as they followed each other down the perilous staircase she said:

  ‘I’m afraid it’ll be a rigid bind for you, three days of it. It’s angelic of you to do it, really; I’m blowed if I would.’

  This was the pleasantest remark Margaret had received from Hebe since that first day at Lamb Cottage, when she had been charming and polite, with a manner modelled upon that of her mother, because she had wanted something; and it recalled to Margaret the fascinating creature who had sat on the sofa knitting and smiling at Earl’s ingenuousness; the poetic figure gracing the stalls at the first night of Kattë; a personality so different from the sulky girl in the cotton frock she was used to seeing at Westwood that it was possible to show her something of one’s feelings.

  ‘I love the children, only I’m scared of them,’ she answered simply. ‘I’m not much good with kiddies, I’m afraid. And besides, I’m glad to be here because I wanted to be with all of you.’

  Few people can resist a declaration of love which embraces their family and home and milieu and yet does not threaten to involve them in an embarrassing personal devotion. Hebe only said ‘Blimey!’ but the backward glance which she gave Margaret was almost good-humoured, and the latter was encouraged by it to continue eagerly:

  ‘Isn’t your grandmother – Lady Challis, I mean – absolutely fascinating?’

  ‘Yes, she gets me down, though,’ answered Hebe in one breath.

  ‘Does she? I can’t imagine her getting anyone down.’

  ‘She’s a saint, and saints do get you down. She makes me understand why the Romans were always giving the Early Christians the works.’

  Margaret longed to hear more, but did not like to speak.

  ‘If you’d known Grandpapa Challis, you’d see why my papa
is like he is,’ Hebe went on suddenly, pausing at a window to look out into the garden, where the children were playing in the evening light. ‘Papa isn’t a bit like Granny Challis, of course.’

  ‘No,’ murmured Margaret, enthralled.

  ‘He is just like Grandpapa Challis was, though. He was Sir Edwin Challis, the physicist, you know. All he cared about was atoms. He had a house and a lot of land near here and Granny’s pa looked after it for him. She must have been marvellous to look at – though I bet her hair never would keep up, even then. Grandpapa fell for her one morning when he saw her hanging out the washing; she was seventeen.’

  ‘It’s like a fairy story!’

  ‘Not to notice it,’ answered Hebe dryly. ‘I don’t think Granny had much fun and games after they were married. She always wanted swarms of brats (like me) and she only had my papa.’

  Margaret was silent, fearing to break the spell.

  ‘Grandpapa only died five years ago. He was eighty-seven and absolutely terrifying. He’d been so mad on atoms for years he was hardly there at all by that time, if you get me. The minute he’d had it, Granny rushed off and bought these cottages. They were going to be pulled down, but she had them all altered and made into one.’

  ‘I love it here. It isn’t a bit like anywhere else I’ve ever been.’

  Hebe made one of her faces, and saying, ‘Well, we’d better go down, I suppose,’ moved away from the window.

  ‘And all these young-marrieds hopping about the place are the granddaughters of her old friends,’ she went on. ‘She asks them all here with their brats and so she always has the house full of children. She likes children and books better than anything.’

  ‘I noticed the books. There must be thousands.’

  ‘Oh, she buys a book every time she goes out, and has done for years. I don’t get it myself; I don’t like all this reading; but if she’s got a book in one hand and a brat hanging on to the other, she’s all right. Coming!’ she called suddenly, in response to a distant shout of ‘Hebe!’ ‘Look, I must fly,’ she said, turning to Margaret with a charming smile. ‘It is angelic of you. You’ll find them in the garden and mind you don’t stand any nonsense from them,’ and she ran off.

  Margaret was in time to see the party leaving for the local, consisting of several young men in uniform (presumably the husbands of the pretty young women) and the young women themselves, looking weary at the end of a day spent in chasing their children, but cheerful and ready for the pleasures of the evening.

  When they had gone, the hall seemed empty and quiet and shadowed by evening. Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh, thought Margaret, gazing dreamily about her, Shadows of the evening steal across the sky – and now was the moment for Gerard Challis to be discovered sitting quietly in one of those deep chairs at the far end of the hall, or for Lady Challis to enter by an unsuspected door and engage her in a long and wonderful talk.

  But neither of these events took place, and after a pause she put down her tray on a table and went out into the garden through a passage with a stone floor. Sounds of washing-up and voices came from an apartment at the side of this passage, and, glancing in, she saw Lady Challis, Bertie, and a fair young woman who was going to have a baby, standing by the sink and all employed. A weedy young man in peculiar clothes was standing by an Aga cooker, stirring something in a saucepan.

  ‘Hullo,’ said Lady Challis, pushing back a lock of curly hair with one damp finger. ‘Are you looking for Barnabas and Emma? She’s here,’ indicating a pile of miscellaneous cushions and rugs in a corner where lay Emma, fast asleep. ‘He’s outside with Jane and Dickon and the rest. He knows where he’s to sleep. If I were you, I’d put Emma in first.’

  ‘I shan’t wake her to wash her,’ whispered Margaret, lifting the warm, unexpectedly heavy little body from the cushions. Emma sighed and stirred but did not wake, and Margaret gathered her comfortably into her arms.

  ‘My dear!’ suddenly exclaimed the young man who was busy at the stove, ‘it tastes madly strange! Do you think it’s done?’

  ‘I expect it’s all right,’ said Lady Challis. ‘Try it on a plate. If it sticks it’s ready.’

  ‘I’ll show you where Emma’s to sleep,’ said the fair young woman, and Margaret followed her upstairs, pursued by cries from the garden: ‘Help! help! The grandfather’s gone mad again! Where’s the bicarbonate of soda?’

  The fair young woman and Margaret exchanged glances and laughed.

  ‘They’re playing air-raids,’ said the fair young woman, ‘and Robert’s the grandfather who’s mad and keeps on having attacks.’

  ‘Was that why he was lying on the grass and kicking?’

  ‘I expect so. Jane and Claudia and my Edna are refugees from Norway, and they have to keep on taking the dolls into a shelter. Aren’t they queer, wanting to play raids down here? I’m only too glad to forget them.’

  ‘Do you live in London?’ inquired Margaret – softly, so as not to awaken Emma.

  The fair young woman explained that she and her Edna had been bombed out some months ago. Her husband was fighting in Italy. Her mother was an old school-friend of Lady Challis’s, who was an absolute dear. ‘I’m Irene,’ she concluded, smiling.

  ‘I’m Margaret,’ said Margaret, smiling too. ‘Oh, I do like this place!’ she added suddenly. ‘I’d like to live here for ever!’

  ‘Well, there’s nowhere like your own home, I always say,’ said Irene, ‘but I must say I never thought Edna and me would have settled down here the way we have. It’s all Lady Challis, really. She isn’t a bit like the rest of her family, though,’ she added, lowering her voice. ‘I don’t know them awfully well. I was awfully thrilled to meet Hebe; I’ve seen her photo in Home Chat. She’s not as pretty as I thought she’d be and not very pleasant, is she?’

  Margaret agreed heartily that she was not, but added that she thought Hebe was nicer than she seemed, at which Irene (who was evidently one of those women living in a flowery little frame, from which life appears to be both miniature and manageable) looked her disagreement but was too polite to argue.

  When Emma was comfortably bedded down, Margaret went in search of Barnabas, whom she found lying on his stomach on top of the derelict shelter at the far end of the garden with a purple face and threatening the party cowering inside.

  ‘I’m a Messerschmitt!’ he roared, waving his feet ‘Unk-unk-unk-unk!’

  ‘You’ve been shot down,’ coldly said a tall child with long brown hair, putting her head out for a minute. ‘You’re on the ground, so you must have been shot down and you oughtn’t to be making that noise.’

  ‘Oh, Mother, oh, Mother, be careful!’ wailed a voice from the shelter.

  ‘I am being careful, darling, don’t worry,’ said the tall child, turning her large green eyes towards the voice. ‘How is the grandfather?’

  ‘Very bad – e-r-r-r-r!’ came a snarling voice from the darkness.

  ‘One of the children is dead,’ observed a fat younger voice with satisfaction.

  ‘There’s no time to bury it, no time to bury it,’ said the tall child busily, drawing back into the shelter. ‘Dear, have you made the bed?’

  ‘Yes, dear, and supper’s ready. Come along, children,’ answered a little boy’s voice, unusually pure in quality. ‘Hurry up, the Alert will go again in a minute.’

  Margaret peered into the shelter, where she could just make out the six children and a doll’s pram huddled together on some old blankets. Twelve eyes were instantly fixed upon her, waiting.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but Barnabas must come to bed now.’

  ‘Oh no!’ howled everybody, but in a hopeless tone that seemed to express formal protest rather than active resentment, while Barnabas said flatly: ‘I shan’t. It’s not my time.’

  ‘Yes it is your time, Barnabas,’ said the tall child sharply. ‘You know we go in ages. The babies go at six; Jeremy first, because he’s six months, and then William because he’s nine months, and then Em
ma, and Peter at half-past six because he’s four.’

  ‘Emma stayed up till seven this evening,’ interrupted Barnabas, ‘so why should I go at my proper time if she doesn’t?’

  ‘The first evening doesn’t count,’ said the tall child. ‘I’m the eldest; I’m nine and a month and I don’t go until eight o’clock in the summer,’ she added to Margaret, graciously.

  ‘All right, I don’t mind what time any of the rest of you go, you all seem to have got in a muddle with your times, anyway, but Barnabas must come now.’

  ‘Go on, Barnabas,’ said the little boy with the pure voice, who was named Dickon, and Barnabas unwillingly began to crawl out.

  ‘Doesn’t anyone else want to come?” asked Margaret, betraying her inexperience by this absurd question. ‘Some of you must be getting sleepy. Who usually puts you to bed?’ addressing the smallest girl, who had tiny fair pigtails and a pink and white check dress.

  ‘Mummy, but she’s gone to the local,” said the little girl precisely. ‘She said someone else would put me to bed.’

  ‘Yes, Margaret would, she said,’ nodded the tall child, who seemed to be named Claudia, and then Margaret realized what she was in for.

  ‘Well, I am Margaret,’ she said determinedly, ‘and I’ve come to put you to bed. Come on, now. Youngest first. You –?’ pointing at Jane. ‘Are you youngest?’

  ‘Yes!’ shouted everybody, and Claudia added rapidly, waving her long fingers about, ‘then Edna, then Barnabas, then Dickon, then Robert, then me.’

  ‘All right, Edna, I think I see your mummy coming for you now, so Barnabas and Jane can come with me and surely Dickon and Robert and Claudia can put themselves to bed, can’t they?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Dickon and Robert. Claudia looked haughty, and announced:

  ‘I can put myself to bed but I prefer to be put to bed by my mummy.’