by Jan Struther
When they got out of the car Toby discovered that he had left the key of his motor-boat at home. It was much too late to go back, of course: there was nothing to be done except wait and see how he would take it. One never knew, when setting out to comfort Toby, whether to prepare first aid for a pinprick or a broken heart He was not yet old enough to be able to grade his own misfortunes: it is one of the maturer accomplishments. Fortunately he was in a philosophical mood. He just said: “Oh, well, we can watch the others,” and trotted off to the pond with Clem, his feet beating crotchets against his father’s minims.
Mrs. Miniver found a deck-chair and sat down in the sun. Judy walked about, carrying Christabel rather ostentatiously so that people could see her new coat. It was really magnificent—pale yellow tweed with a brown velvet collar and brown buttons. Watching her, Mrs. Miniver wondered whether the modern unbreakable dolls, which lasted for years, were more, or less, precious to their owners than the old china ones, whose expectation of life had been a matter of months. The old ones had had the agonizing charm of transience: the modern ones held the promise of a reliable and enduring companionship—you could make plans for their future, think out their next winter’s wardrobe. But it was a silly problem, after all. For love is no actuary: and a new-born baby was probably neither more, nor less, treasured three hundred years ago than it is now, in spite of all our statistics about infant mortality.
The sun was getting quite hot. From where she sat Mrs. Miniver could see two street orators setting up their flimsy platforms and angling for an audience. Judging by their clothes and general demeanour she guessed that the one on the right was Left-wing and the one on the left Right-wing: but she was too far away to read the wording on their notice boards, and when they began to speak nothing reached her except a confused gabble, like a mix-up of stations on the wireless. Seeing Clem and Toby leave the pond and walk over towards the speakers, she collected Judy and joined them. As soon as she got near she found that her guess had been wrong: the right-hand speaker was extreme Right and the left extreme Left. But how many of their audience, she wondered, would have noticed if they had got up behind the wrong placards by mistake?
It was hard to take in the sense of what the speakers were saying, so confusing was the double clamour. But one thing was certain, that the fabric of both speeches was shot through and through with the steely tinsel of war. “To combat the forces of tyranny …” one of them ranted. “To crush down the menace of revolution …” mouthed the other just as glibly. “Is any sacrifice too great … ?” “Which of us would not willingly lay down … ?”
And now, from somewhere behind them, came the sound of a third voice, so shrill, reedy and raucous that it made itself heard even through the babel nearer at hand. It seemed only half human, and for a moment Mrs. Miniver had a sense of nightmare; but as soon as she realized what it was she grabbed Clem by the arm. “Come on!” she said. “There’s a Punch and Judy!” Clem’s face lit up. He hoisted Toby on to his shoulder and they all four edged their way out of the crowd.
The rest of the morning was pure bliss. For over an hour they stood, absorbed, while the immortal melodrama unfolded itself before their eyes. The proscenium was shabby, the properties crude, the puppets battered almost featureless by the years of savage slapstick they had undergone: but the performance was superb. The baby yelled and was flung out of the window; Judy scolded and was bludgeoned to death; the beadle, the doctor, and the hangman tried in turn to perform their professional duties and were outrageously thwarted; Punch, cunning, violent and unscrupulous, with no virtues whatever except humour and vitality, came out triumphant in the end. And all the children, their faces upturned in the sun like a bed of pink daisies, laughed and clapped and shouted with delight.
“So what?” said Mrs. Miniver at the end, to Clem.
“So nothing,” said Clem, shrugging his shoulders. “It’s great art, that’s all. Come on, I’m hungry.”
A Country House Visit
They went to Cornwall for Easter, to stay with the Edward Havelocks.
People who didn’t know Mrs. Miniver very well, and even some of those who did, would have found it difficult to believe what a feeling of leaden oppression always came over her during the last few miles of the approach to a strange country house visit. If they were arriving in their own car she could comment on it half-jokingly to Clem, which helped to dispel it: but if, as now, they had come by train and been met at the station, she could only watch the back of the chauffeur’s neck in dumb dismay, or at the most make some cryptic reference to her state of mind.
“These modern tumbrils are so fast,” she said in an agonized murmur to Clem as the car swept them all too rapidly towards Fenzarron.
“Look!” said Clem. “More standing stones. This place must have been stiff with Druids.” He was not unfeeling, but he thought, quite rightly, that she ought to have grown out of this by now. Also he knew that her panic would disappear the moment she set foot in the house, and that she would most likely end by enjoying herself. Mrs. Miniver knew all this, too, in her mind, but she could never quite succeed in transferring the knowledge to the pit of her stomach.
It wasn’t shyness: she had never experienced that. She got on easily with strangers, and there were few things she enjoyed more than that first tentative groping among wave-lengths, followed—if you were unlucky—by a Talk on Accountancy, but far more often, thank heaven, by a burst of music. No, it wasn’t shyness. It was more like a form of claustrophobia—a dread of exchanging the freedom of her own self-imposed routine for the inescapable burden of somebody else’s. She must be prepared to adjust herself all day to an alien tempo: to go out, to come in, to go to bed, to sit, to stride, to potter (oh! worst of all, to potter), whenever her hostess gave the hint. There was always a chance, of course, that the Havelocks’ tempo might turn out to be the same as her own: that they might hate sitting long over meals; walk quickly or not at all; enjoy arguments, jokes, and silences, but detest making conversation; and realize that a day without a chunk or two of solitude in it is like a cocktail without ice.
There was certainly a chance: but at moments like this it seemed a very remote one. They had come out on to the coast road now, and Cornwall was out-postering itself, as usual, with rocky headlands and sandy coves and fishing villages that spilled themselves down the cliff face like cascades of mesembryanthemum. The year was older here: the oak-woods were rounded, cushiony and mustard-gold, the grass under the fruit trees was already scattered with petals, the cottage gardens were little glowing squares of rich embroidery. It was being a lavishly lovely spring, almost frightening in its perfection, as though for some reason it was meant to be a final performance. “Positively the last appearance on any stage. …” She suggested this to Clem, wondering whether by any chance it had struck him, too.
“But that’s what I feel every spring,” said Clem unexpectedly. And I’ve known him through seventeen of them, thought Mrs. Miniver, without knowing that. But it was quite natural really: she had long ago discovered that whereas words, for her, clarified feelings, for Clem, on the whole, they obscured them. This was perhaps just as well. For if they had both been equally explicit they might have been in danger of understanding each other completely; and a certain degree of un-understanding (not mis-, but un-) is the only possible sanctuary which one human being can offer to another in the midst of the devastating intimacy of a happy marriage.
She saw every relationship as a pair of intersecting circles. The more they intersected, it would seem at first glance, the better the relationship; but this is not so. Beyond a certain point the law of diminishing returns sets in, and there aren’t enough private resources left on either side to enrich the life that is shared. Probably perfection is reached when the area of the two outer crescents, added together, is exactly equal to that of the leaf-shaped piece in the middle. On paper there must be some neat mathematical formula for arriving at this: in life, none. She breathed surreptitiously on the window of the
car and drew two circles with her finger; but they hardly intersected at all—a mere moonlight infatuation which would soon peter out—so she added ears and whiskers and turned them into Siamese-twin cats. (But would that count, she wondered, as being Siamese cats?) Then she met the chauffeur’s eye in the driving-mirror and hurriedly rubbed the whole thing out, pretending to peer at the view.
“But it’s all right,” said Clem, pursuing his own train of thought. “She always decides to stage another come-back.”
“Who? Oh—spring. Yes.” But she could not respond with much gaiety, for they were actually turning in at the gates of Penzarron. This was the worst moment of all. There was no escape now. In four days’ time, she told herself, they would be on their way back to London, having probably made several new friends: but somehow this was no comfort to her at all. At any rate, she thought, clinging to a straw, she had just bought herself a really grand dressing gown, the kind one always caught glimpses of, exquisitely laid out, through other women’s bedroom doors. The vision of it sustained her all the way up the drive between the mountainous rhododendron combers which never quite broke on top of the car.
And all of a sudden the ordeal was over, and they had arrived, and Leila Havelock was introducing them to their fellow-guests; and the tuning-knobs were turning, turning, in broad preliminary arcs, ready for more delicate adjustment as soon as the first faint throbbing of music should beat upon the ear.
Mrs. Downce
The first week-end after the school holidays were over, the Minivers kept away from Starlings, so as to let Mrs. Downce give the house a thorough turning out. By the time they went down again it was well into May. A noticeable change had come over the countryside: it had lost the coltish uncertain grace of spring and taken on a more poised, though still virginal, loveliness.
As soon as Mrs. Downce appeared at the door Mrs. Miniver knew, with that morbid sensitiveness to emotional atmosphere which is common to lovers and housewives, that something was amiss. She was not sure which of the two possible types of bad weather the omens portended—the subjective (or dudgeonly) or the objective (or catastrophic). On the whole, knowing that it couldn’t be anything to do with the children, she hoped that it would turn out to be the latter. Burst water-mains were so much easier to deal with than injured feelings. But mightn’t it, after all, be something to do with the children? There might have been a telephone message while they were on their way down—
“Is everything all right?” she asked in a casual voice, pulling off her gloves.
“Well, no, madam, I’m afraid I couldn’t hardly say that.” Mrs. Downce paused ominously.
“(Oh, come on, you old fool, don’t keep me on tenterhooks like this—which of them is it? Toby? Judy? Vin?) I’m sorry to hear that. What’s happened?”
“Well, madam, there’s nothing what you could call happened, it’s just there’s a norrible smell.”
Mrs. Miniver nearly laughed out loud with relief.
“Smell? Where?”
“Everywhere, madam. All over the back part of the house, that is. A norrible smell.”
Mrs. Miniver crossed the hall, opened the door which led to the kitchen premises, and shut it again very quickly.
“Good heavens!” she said. “It’s unspeakable.”
Mrs. Downce’s face bore the triumphant look peculiar to those who, suspected of hyperbole, are found to have been employing meiosis.
“Downce thinks it’s the drains. His mother died of typhoid.”
Clem came in from putting away the car.
“Look here, Clem, you ought to know—is this drains, or isn’t it?”
“I’m an architect,” said Clem, “not a sanitary inspector. Still, I’ll have a sniff—oh, Lord!” He, too, shut the passage door, appalled.
“Me and Downce have been sitting in the library, sir, and cooking on a spirit lamp. We thought you wouldn’t mind.”
“Of course not,” said Clem. “But why on earth didn’t you get in a plumber?”
“We thought at first it might go off,” Mrs. Downce explained. “But when it got too bad we did ring up Mr. Bateman. But that’s three days ago now —he’s putting in a new bathroom up at the Hall, and you know what the tradesmen are like down here when they’re busy. Independent. They don’t care who gets typhoid.” She was a Cockney, but had married into Kent; and the last twenty-five years had only strengthened her conviction that anywhere outside London was virtually Central Africa.
“Nobody’s going to get typhoid,” said Clem impatiently, striding over to the telephone.
“It’s Saturday afternoon, sir,” Mrs. Downce reminded him with melancholy relish. “You won’t get nobody now till Monday.”
“Come on,” said Mrs. Miniver, in whom curiosity had at last overcome squeamishness. “Let’s try and find out what it is. It may not be drains at all. It may be a dead rat under the floor.”
“Bore like a dead sheep,” said Clem, as, holding their noses, they proceeded down the kitchen passage.
“Bore like a dead babboth,” said Mrs. Miniver. They tracked the smell past the kitchen, scullery, and larder, until they came to the small wash-place and cloakroom just inside the garden door, where it seemed to be at its worst.
“I suppose that beads it bust be draids,” said Mrs. Miniver. But Clem, after looking round suspiciously among the litter of waterproofs, walking-sticks, nets, rods, and golf-clubs, took down Vin’s fishing haversack from a hook on the wall.
“Bait,” he said briefly. “Dab the boy.” They carried the haversack out into the garden and emptied it. Among the floats, leads, and other paraphernalia there were two tins. The first contained earthworms, the second lugworms, both in an indescribable state.
“Really,” said Mrs. Miniver, “this is a bit much. Such waste, too,” she added. “I helped him dig those lugworms the day we went over to Dungeness. They took us nearly two hours to get.”
Clem’s face was grim. He got a spade from the tool-shed and buried the bait very deep in the kitchen garden. Then he went indoors and wrote a letter to Vin. From the time it took, and the look of his shoulder-blades, Mrs. Miniver was afraid that for once in a way he was being over-stern; but when he leant back in his chair to re-read the letter she saw that it was profusely illustrated down the margin with his own particular brand of pin-man picture: so she knew it was all right. And Mrs. Downce, as she brought in the tea, remarked amiably and with an air of discovery that boys would be boys. Mrs. Miniver breathed more freely. The trough of low pressure was already over: it was going to be a fine week-end.
Married Couples
“We might get the Danbys,” said Mrs. Miniver, looking through her address-book over early morning tea. Clem’s father had just sent them a salmon, and it seemed a good opportunity to ask a few people to dinner.
“We-ell,” said Clem, “I’d love to have Negel, but I don’t feel like coping with Helen. She yatters.”
“What about the Pritchards?”
“There again,” said Clem. “Only the other way round. It would be grand to see Sara again, but Clive’ll talk nothing but shop. It’s too hot for Clive. Look—I must go and shave. Call out if you get any other ideas.”
Mrs. Miniver put down the address-book and poured out some more tea. As she did so her eye fell on an article in the newspaper which Clem had just thrown aside. “Problems of Marriage,” ran the title. She glanced through the first paragraph.
“I am not setting out to decry marriage. Nobody pretends that it is a perfect institution, but nobody has yet suggested a better one. At the worst it is seldom quite beyond repair: at the best it can be delightful. Most married people are neither more nor less happy than they would have been if they had remained single. They may not be able to go round the world on a tramp steamer: but there is not that start in the evening when the coal falls out of the grate.”
Good of its kind, she thought; written, at any rate, with more restraint and a lighter touch than most articles on that well-worn subject: though, l
ike all the rest of them, it bristled with three-quarter truths. She would finish reading it later, when she had settled the dinner question.
She applied herself again to the address-book. The Frants? The Palmers? Really, it was lamentable, the unevenness of most married couples. Like those gramophone records with a superb tune on one side and a negligible fill-up on the other which you had to take whether you wanted it or not. Only in this case you could not simply ignore the vapid backing, but were forced to play it through to the bitter end exactly the same number of times as the side which you treasured. How silly it was, this convention—relaxed a little nowadays but still surprisingly obstinate—that you must not invite one half of a married couple to dinner without the other. Even when both were equally charming, she often wished she could ask them on different days. For in order that the game of dinner-table conversation may be played to its best advantage, it is essential that every player should have a free hand. He must be at liberty to assume disguises, to balance precariously in untenable positions, to sacrifice the letter of the truth to the spirit of it. And somehow the partner’s presence makes this difficult. She does not, if she is civilized, chip in with “No, darling, it was Tuesday”; but she is apt to crumble the bread, and to have a look in her eye. The pronouns, of course, can be reversed, thought Mrs. Miniver hastily, remembering Clive and Sara.