by Jan Struther
“Any luck?” said Clem, reappearing.
“No, none whatever. All the couples we owe dinners to are hopelessly lopsided.”
“I wish to goodness,” said Clem, “we were as brave as old Lady J. She simply asks all the nice halves to one party and all the boaks to another.”
“I know. And as often as not she has a cold and cancels the boak party at the last minute. But anyway, old Lady J.’s a Character. You can’t do that sort of thing unless you’re a Character.”
“Oh, well, better ask both lots, and then you can talk to Nigel, and I can talk to Sara, and Helen and Clive can go into a boakish huddle.”
“All right,” said Mrs. Miniver, shutting up the address-book with relief. But why, oh, why, she wondered, do writers of articles on marriage always confine themselves to the difficulties which it presents to those who are actually involved in it, and never mention the problems which it raises for their friends? To everybody except the protagonists, she thought for the thousandth time, marriage is nothing but a nuisance. A single person is a manageable entity, whom you can either make friends with or leave alone. But half of a married couple is not exactly a whole human being: if the marriage is successful it is something a little more than that; if unsuccessful, a little less. In either case, a fresh complication is added to the already intricate business of friendship: as Clem had once remarked, you might as well try to dance a tarantella with a Siamese twin.
That had been years ago, before they were married; but the phrase had stuck, and to avoid, so far as their friendships were concerned, turning into Siamese twins had been one of their private marriage vows. How well, she wondered, had they kept it? Only their friends could judge: but even to have been aware of the danger was something.
A Drive to Scotland
Although they had driven up to Scotland every summer for fifteen years, they still felt a little stab of excitement when they came to the signpost at the top of Finchley Road which pointed to the left and simply said “The North.” It made a kind of chapter-heading to their holiday.
They always started at seven after an early break-fast and shared the driving between them, changing over every fifty miles or so. This year it had been Clem’s turn to take the wheel first, of which Mrs. Miniver was rather glad. It meant that during the dreary flat expanse between Biggleswade and Stamford she would be pleasantly preoccupied with driving, whereas she would be free, as passenger, to look about her at the beauty of the next stretch, which by along the eastern fringe of the Dukeries. It was an ample, rolling, opulent beauty; Georgian, somehow, with a suggestion of full-bottomed wigs and old port A trifle oppressive to live with, perhaps: but, as a rich dark-green tapestry drawn smoothly and swiftly past one, very satisfying. At Retford they changed places again. This landed Mrs. Miniver with Doncaster, the only big town on the whole route; but after that she had an easy drive across the Plain of York to Boroughbridge, where they stopped for lunch. The great point was that Clem now came in for Leaning Lane, a fast fifteen-mile stretch, as straight as an arrow, which he loved and could do justice to: while she herself could sit back, enjoying the speed but thankful that she wasn’t at the wheel.
At Scotch Corner they swung off to the left towards Bowes; and this, they always felt, was where “The North” really began, spiritually if not geographically. For they were out of the plain at last and climbing up into a completely different country, a country of small steep tumbled fields, rough stone walls, crying sheep, skirling plover, and lonely farmhouses sheltered by clumps of sycamore.
“This,” said Clem, as they topped a rise, “is where we passed those gipsies two years ago.”
“I know,” said Mrs. Miniver. “I was just thinking that. With the skewbald horse.” It was amazing, the number of little memory-flags with which, on their minds’ map, the road was studded. There were dozens of them now, and every year added a few more. There was one, for instance, near Colster-worth, where their first car (a two-cylinder roller-skate with overhead valves and partially exposed viscera, very sweet and willing but extremely secondhand) had dropped a push-rod; which, after a long search, they had recovered from the gutter a quarter of a mile behind. And there was another flag at the point where their third car (a meretricious black beast of an obscure continental make, the only really disloyal one they had ever owned) had venomously run a big end, stranding them for fourteen hours at a tin garage by the roadside. It had rained nearly the whole day; they had played countless games of piquet on the top of a packing-case, and Clem had scored repique and capot twice running. There were flags, too, at all the places where they had ever stopped to picnic; and one at the place where they had seen a particularly fine double rainbow; and one at the place where, after rounding a sharp bend, they had come upon a man in a stationary car hurriedly removing his false black beard. An enigmatic flag, that, five years old. They had, of course, lurked in the next side-turning to let him pass, and then trailed him for miles; but he took the Rotherham fork at Barnby Moor, so they never discovered whether what they had seen was the aftermath of a practical joke or part of a real-life Buchan.
They were climbing steadily now; and presently the bones of the earth began breaking through the grass in rocky scars and outcrops; and higher still there were no fields at all, but only the bare moors. At the summit of the road, half-way between Bowes and Brough, they stopped, according to their invariable custom, and got out to stretch, smoke, and enjoy the view. They were standing on the spine of England, nearly fifteen hundred feet above the sea. Yorkshire lay behind, Westmorland in front; Hunderthwaite Moor and Teesdale to the north of them, Stainmore Forest and Arkengarthdale to the south. The silence, after the monotonous hum of the car, was almost startling. The air was knife-keen and as fresh as lettuce. It seemed a far cry from the lush, matronly, full-blown landscape of the south through which they had set out that morning. Moving northward in space, thought Mrs. Miniver, they had moved backward in time; reversed the irreversible, recaptured in late summer the feeling of spring. By what analogous mental journey, she wondered, what deliberate pilgrimage of the heart, could one—but she did not pursue that metaphor: it would give her the slip, she felt, like the man with the false beard.
Clem finished his cigarette and ground it out carefully with his heel: the grass was tinder-dry. They got into the car again, conscious that one of their most cherished flags was now stuck in more deeply than ever. Mrs. Miniver let the clutch in and set off on the long descent to Appleby. In the convex driving-mirror she could see, dwindling rapidly, the patch of road where they had stood; and she wondered why it had never occurred to her before that you cannot successfully navigate the future unless you keep always framed beside it a small clear image of the past.
The Twelfth of August
“Well,” said Archie McQuern, knocking out his pipe on the lowest stone of the dyke and brushing a crumb of pastry off his kilt. “I suppose we’d better be moving on.”
He hoisted himself out of the heather and blew his whistle. Bess, the young black pointer, leapt to her feet; Duke and Reiver, the two liver-and-white ones, got to theirs more circumspectly, as befitted their age and experience. They all three stood looking up at him with their queer angular faces. It just shows, thought Mrs. Miniver, leaning back against the dyke and watching her brother-in-law, how careful one ought to be about what animals one gets mixed up with. Archie, tall, bony, and chestnut-headed, had been breeding pointers for twenty years and was now almost indistinguishable from Duke; while Alison, his eldest daughter, who was black-haired and who helped him to train them, was beginning to have a distinct look of Bess, especially about the eyes. Oh, well, there were worse things to look like: at any rate pointers had interesting faces, more intellectual and less sentimental than those of other gun-dogs. And she wondered, in passing, whether the narrow jaws and protruding teeth which are so distressingly prevalent among the English ought not be due less to heredity than to their being encouraged to keep rabbits in their impressionable youth. Change a nation’s pets and
you might change its physiognomy: but she could not think, off-hand, of a nice prognathous substitute.
“No, thank you,” she said, in answer to a question from her brother-in-law. “I don’t think I’ll walk the Laosgainn beats—I’ll stay here with Susan and join you again when you’re doing the Low Moor.”
The morning had been enjoyable but strenuous. Archie never dreamed of driving until he had had at least a fortnight of the subtler sport of shooting over dogs, so that the Twelfth at Quern, for onlookers, was not a ladylike affair of lolling in a grouse-butt with a well-powdered nose. It entailed a long and stiffish walk, some of it through very deep old heather. Mrs. Miniver loved it, especially now that she had Vin’s shooting to watch as well as Clem’s; but she was always glad enough to drop out while they did the two steepest beats of all, above the hill loch.
The guns trudged off up the lee side of the dyke. The van, loaded with empty luncheon-baskets and the morning’s bag, blundered away down the cart-track like a drunken bee. The two women moved over to a little grassy knoll shaded by rowan trees. The wind had dropped entirely; it was as hot as one always forgets the Highlands can be. Ben Cailleach and the other high tops were shimmering. Below, they could see the grey roof of Quern House jutting out of its fir plantation, with a column of smoke going up from the kitchen chimney, as straight as a wand. Beyond lay the little strath dotted with haycocks, and beyond that again Judy and Toby and their two youngest cousins were busily damming the burn. It was good for them, thought Mrs. Miniver, to be for a time part of a large family, with the greater complexity, but lower intensity, of its relationships.
She brought her eyes back again from the hazy middle distance to the near, clear presence of Clem’s sister, who had planted her back firmly against one of the rowans and begun to knit.
“Susan,” said Mrs. Miniver, “where did that knitting come from? I swear you didn’t have any on you a minute ago. I believe you materialize bits of knitting out of thin air, the way conjurers do with lighted cigarettes.”
“No,” said Susan, “they grow out of my fingertips, like a thread out of a spider. As a matter of fact my whole inside is made of wool. One gets like that, you know, living in the Highlands all the year round.”
“The great thing about you,” said her sister-in-law, “is that you’ve never let it spread from the neck up.
“Oh, well,” said Mrs. McQuern elliptically, “there’s always Douglas and Foulis.”
Mrs. Miniver lay down on her side to make the colours of the hills clearer. Across the foreground of her picture was a spray of whin in full bloom, upon which two chaffinches were swinging. Above them a pair of white butterflies were weaving quick flirtatious patterns in the air. It was idyllic—a Chinese painting on silk; an exquisite, peaceful oasis in a day of organized death.
“It’s all very well to talk like that,” she said. “But you know you wouldn’t live anywhere else for the world. I believe you’re completely and utterly contented.”
Susan chuckled. “Not always. Not when the cook breaks her leg on the eleventh of August.”
“Oh, everybody has catastrophes. The only thing that matters is to be properly cast, so that you get the kind of catastrophes you can deal with. I think that’s what I meant, more than contented. You’re quite perfectly cast, Susan.”
“Bah-hah,” said Susan. “So are you, for that matter. I’d hate your sort of life just as much as you’d hate mine.”
“Except for a holiday—yes.”
“In fact,” said Susan, “it’s just as important to marry the right life as the right person.”
Well, no, thought Mrs. Miniver, not quite. But near enough for a hot day, after lunch. She shut her eyes, taking the Chinese picture with her inside the lids.
“Listen!” said Susan, presently. “I heard a shot.”
Mrs. Miniver opened her eyes again for a moment. Eight white wings lay scattered on the grass under the gorsebush. The chaffinches were looking as though butterflies wouldn’t melt in their mouths. It was too hot to work out the moral. She shut her eyes again and went to sleep.
At the Games
They all went over to the Crurie Games, though not all for the same reason. Archie McQuern went because he thought he ought to, and Susan went because Archie thought she ought to. The three Miniver children and the four younger McQuerns went because of the Fun Fair in the next field. Alison, the eldest, went because the Ardbennie party were sure to be there, and she knew that Jock Murray was home on leave. Miss Bates, the English holiday governess, who had never been in Scotland before, went because her great-grandmother’s name had been Gillespie, and the sound of pipe-music always made her feel pleasantly queer. Clem went because he would generally rather do things than not, and Mrs. Miniver went because for some obscure reason she liked watching Highland Games.
“I can’t understand it,” said her sister-in-law. “I shouldn’t have thought it was your line at all. Just look how you go on about cricket.”
But the whole point was, Mrs. Miniver tried to explain, that the Games weren’t cricket. In fact, they weren’t games at all, but athletics. There was no team spirit about, and no holiness and winning of Waterloo, but only a lot of ordinary men, each one out for himself, trying to run faster or vault higher or throw a weight farther than any of the others for the sake of thirty or forty shillings in prize-money and a mention in the Crurie Herald. It might not be very heroic, but it was agreeably straightforward.
And beautiful, too, she thought with a lift of pleasure as one of the vaulters soared smoothly upwards at the end of his banded pole, cleared an improbable height, and dropped to the ground as lightly as though he were falling through water. (For some reason, pole-vaulting always gave the impression that it was being performed in slow-motion.) He was a lean lantern-jawed man in a darned sweater and faded blue shorts. He straightened himself up, strolled back to the starting-point, and pulled on his trousers. The next-but-one competitor was just taking his off. They were all completely unconcerned. Miss Bates looked as though she wasn’t quite sure of her ground.
“It must be dreadfully cold for them, poor things,” she said at last, taking the broader view.
It certainly was cold for the middle of August. The occasional gleams of sun were as unconvincing as a forced smile, and most of the time a bitter little wind enfiladed the grand-stand, sending coat-collars up and hands into pockets. There was a burst of applause. An announcement boomed out from the four loud-speakers which clustered back to back like the florets of moschatel. Mrs. Miniver turned to her brother-in-law.
“What was that? I missed it.”
“Heavy hammer,” said Archie. “Willie Muir is going to try and break the ground record. He’s the local blacksmith.”
Mrs. Miniver touched Miss Bates on the arm and pointed to the farther side of the field. Muir was a huge man. His chest muscles stood out through his thin singlet and his kilt was the size of a barrel. He stepped forward, rubbed his hands, stamped his toes into the ground to get a firm stance, and gripped the haft of the hammer.
“Good gracious!” said Miss Bates, appalled, as he began to whirl the hammer round his head and shoulders, slowly at first but with increasing speed. “Look, there are some people sitting quite close to him—supposing he let go at the wrong moment?”
Mrs. Miniver had often supposed this, with horrified fascination; but it never seemed to happen. The hammer was whirling now at a great speed, and at last Muir swung right round with a kind of grunting groan, and twenty-two pounds of brute metal flew through the air, landing with a thump a few feet from the judges. Mrs. Miniver relaxed. There was a storm of applause. Two men measured the distance with a tape. It was announced as ninety-four feet—three inches longer than the ground record. The applause redoubled.
“Well,” said Miss Bates, “I suppose that’s what they call tossing the caber. Or it is cabber?”
“Caber,” said Mrs. Miniver. “No, that wasn’t it, but you’ll see it in a minute, I expect.”
The pipes struck up their sharp thrusting rhythm, drowning the faint noises of the fairground. The two men danced neatly and vigorously, with a passionate precision. Their pointed soft-shod feet twinkled unerringly between the crossed blades and scabbards, in and out and over and round, going through the old intricate ritual with which their forebears had woven themselves a cloak of security on the eve of battle. But now, if toe touched steel, it would mean only the forfeiting of prize-money, not a chill in the heart at the certainty of impending death.
The younger man, as nimble as a cat for all his height, was still smiling a little as he danced. The Alan Breck one was flashing like a wasp in his black-and-yellow. The music began to quicken intolerably for the final steps: and Mrs. Miniver saw the rest of it through a mist. For I defy anyone, she thought in self-defence, to watch a sword-dance through to the end without developing a great-grandmother called Gillespie.