The Brandons: A Virago Modern Classic (VMC)

by Angela Thirkell

  ‘Here, Grant,’ he called, ‘what’s the name of that woman your father married? The dark one?’

  Mr Grant looked round, startled.

  ‘My mother, do you mean, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s right, your mother, you know what I mean. Never mind the name,’ said Sir Edmund, who had evidently satisfied himself on the subject.

  Conversation at dinner was led by Delia, who had been reading the local weekly and had come across a delightful report of the coroner’s inquest on the bodies of the people who were burned in the motor bus.

  ‘It must have been simply ghastly, Sir Edmund,’ she said with relish. ‘The doors and windows got jammed and the ones that got out simply trampled on the others and got all cut to bits on the broken glass, and it took two days to sort the others out, and there was one of them that there was so little of him left that they didn’t know who he was, and even with the false teeth they couldn’t tell because there was another man that died afterwards in the Barchester Infirmary and all he would say was “My teeth, my teeth”, only they couldn’t understand for ages because he hadn’t got any teeth, and you know the way having no teeth makes people so difficult to understand, but anyway one of the nurses who had false teeth herself had a brain wave and said she expected he wanted to know where his false teeth were, because when she was in a car accident once that was the first thing she thought of when she came to, and so they fetched the teeth from the refrigerator or wherever the coroner keeps the bodies, but he was dead then and couldn’t identify them. I think they ought to have buried them with him, like Ur and Vikings and all that sort of thing, but they kept them in case anyone could identify them. I’d have put them in the Barchester Museum.’

  ‘In which department?’ asked Mr Grant, interested in Delia’s maiden fancies.

  ‘Oh, anywhere. Fossils or War Souvenirs or something. I mean then if anyone wanted them they’d always be there.’

  ‘And what happened to the one they couldn’t identify?’ said Francis.

  ‘Oh, he got buried. It’s a pity we couldn’t have had him buried here. It would have been ghastly. I mean seeing a coffin and knowing there was really nothing to speak of inside. Is it all right to bury people in the churchyard, Mr Miller, when there really isn’t any of them to bury except the burnt bits? I mean would the Bishop mind?’

  ‘I have luckily never been faced with such a contingency,’ said Mr Miller, who was very fond of Delia, but had not her strength of mind. ‘It is all rather horrible to think of.’

  Sir Edmund, who owing to the excellent soup and fish had only been a listener to the foregoing conversation, now spoke as the representative of law and order.

  ‘We all know you’d do your duty, Miller,’ he said, wiping his moustache with his table napkin crumpled into a ball. ‘But better to marry than to be burnt, eh?’

  He then applied himself to the next course. Mr Grant and Francis, catching one another’s eye, fell into wild suppressed giggles, and Mrs Brandon applied herself to soothing Mr Miller, which she did so well that the whole dinner was held up while he hung upon her lips and Rose, preferring not to demean herself by making her presence known, stood silently at his elbow with the sweet, till Delia jogged him.

  ‘I say, Mr Miller, it’s an ice,’ she said earnestly. ‘It’s an ice, so do hurry up or my bit will go all to squelch. I say, Mother, let’s have coffee under the chestnut.’

  ‘We might,’ said Mrs Brandon doubtfully. ‘Rose, do you think we could have the little table out there? Mr Francis would help you with it.’

  But Rose had as yet neither forgotten nor forgiven and said, with a manner that froze the blood, that she could manage the table quite well by herself.

  ‘Very well,’ said Mrs Brandon, again driven by persecution and injustice to rebel, ‘we’ll have dessert and coffee and the liqueurs outside, and the port if no one minds.’

  Rose, who had a secret passion for anything that savoured of theatre, gave her outwardly grudging consent to this plan, and with the help of one of the housemaids arranged the fruit and wine under the tree and brought her mistress a black lace scarf. Sir Edmund, Mr Miller and Mr Grant took out chairs, while Francis and Delia triumphantly bore silver candlesticks with shaded candles through the dusk. There was not a breath of air and the candles burnt steadily under the great Spanish chestnut. Rose, contemplating the scene from the front door, said to the housemaid that madam really looked quite the thing tonight in her pink, and it was just like the scene in Moonlight Passion, the one she saw at the Barchester Odeon last week, where the Italian count gives the feet for Princess Alix. Princess Alix, she added, was taken by Glamora Tudor, the one that they called in Hollywood ‘The Woman who Cannot Love’, but madam reely looked every inch as good-looking, and if people who answered the telephone would only write down the messages it would save a lot of trouble to other people she could mention and standing there wouldn’t get the dining-room table cleared nor the washing up done. So she vanished, and the yellow path of light from the front door was suddenly obscured, and in the gathering gloom the radiance of the rising moon could now be seen through the branches.

  ‘The full moon is rising,’ Mrs Brandon breathed.

  At the sound of her low voice uttering these words Mr Grant nearly fainted.

  ‘Nonsense, Lavinia,’ said Sir Edmund, lighting a cigar. ‘Full moon doesn’t rise till much later. Two or three days off the full. Any child knows that.’

  ‘But I’m not a child,’ murmured Mrs Brandon.

  At these words Mr Grant’s soul took flight and, assuming the form of a bird, perched in the chestnut tree, tuning its notes to the music of the spheres which sang ‘Mrs Brandon, Mrs Brandon,’ leaning its breast against a thorn regardless of botany, embracing in its vision the whole universe, for what worlds could exist outside the pool of candlelight below the leaves? It saw Mrs Brandon, a shadowy goddess, draped in the rose light of evening, veiled in the black lace of tattered clouds, a diamond flashing like a star on her finger. It saw the rest of the party, privileged beyond their knowledge, beyond their worth, laughing and talking in that sacred presence; Sir Edmund pulling at his cigar, Francis and Delia eating more peaches than it would have thought anyone could eat who had already had so many at lunch, Mr Miller; to him alone was vouchsafed a glimpse of the true light, gazing from the shadow at the foundress of the feast. It saw the diamond sparkle and flash again with a thousand fires, growing in size till all earths, all seas, all heavens were included in its bounds, a burning rose at the core. Spreading its wings it flew through an infinity of time and space towards that fiery centre, burning to immolate itself on such a pyre and rise again transfigured to the skies.

  ‘Of course you aren’t a child, Lavinia,’ said Sir Edmund. ‘Can’t call a woman of your age a child. What I said was, a child would have more sense.’

  Mr Grant’s soul returned suddenly to his body, but as no one had noticed its absence in the interval between Mrs Brandon’s words and Sir Edmund’s reply, its return passed unobserved. Its owner, a little dizzy, helped himself to port. There was a silence in which Mrs Brandon drew her mantilla round her with one hand and gazed meditatively upon the other with its gleaming ring.

  ‘What’s that you’re wearing, Lavinia?’ said Sir Edmund suddenly.

  ‘Only my old pink,’ said Mrs Brandon, ‘and the Spanish lace shawl that Henry brought from Toledo.’

  ‘No, no, don’t be dense. I can see perfectly well what you have on. The ring I mean. Haven’t seen that before.’

  ‘It is a diamond. Miss Brandon gave it to me today. Isn’t it lovely?’

  She held out her hand to Sir Edmund.

  ‘A good one,’ said he, looking at the ring, but not troubling to raise or support her hand, for which Mr Grant could have killed him. ‘Worth around two hundred, I should say. I’d better have it insured with your other things. Remind me to take it into Barchester next time I go. Queer thing if Amelia Brandon is giving anything away. She must be breaking up. Ne
ver knew her give anything to anyone – except charities, of course. Always go to her if we want anything for the hospital. By the way, Lavinia, does she ever mention her will?’

  At this appalling frankness everyone was struck dumb.

  ‘I don’t think one ought to talk about things like that,’ said Mrs Brandon, ‘do you, Mr Miller?’

  ‘Now never mind Miller, Lavinia,’ said Sir Edmund. ‘He knows what’s what. Render unto Caesar, eh, Miller?’

  ‘Yes, yes, indeed, Sir Edmund,’ said Mr Miller hastily, not wishing to offend his churchwarden, but doubtful as to the applicability or relevance of his statement.

  Francis came to the rescue and said Aunt Sissie was always trying to frighten someone by saying she’d leave something to someone else, but no one wanted that awful Abbey and if he or Hilary got it they were going to give it to each other or turn it into a lunatic asylum. Mr Grant corroborated this statement by saying, Rather. On hearing these subversive remarks Sir Edmund nearly burst. To treat the sacred rights of property as a joke was something almost beyond his comprehension, almost worse than robbing the poor box or shooting foxes. If Amelia Brandon left the Abbey, as he had always understood she might, to Lavinia’s boy, it would be a big responsibility, but Francis would have to take it on and do the best he could for the place and the tenants, and he would give help and advice if Francis needed it and would take it. If the old lady was going to leave it to this new nephew, who seemed a harmless enough young man for one whose mother was a damn silly woman, that was entirely her affair and no one would grudge it to him. But to talk of a stake in the country, and more especially in Barsetshire, as if it were a shuttlecock to be thrown to and fro or dropped, was worse than Bolshevism, worse than Communism, or Germany, or Italy, or Spain, or Russia, or the United States, or the Labour Party, or any of numerous nations, sects or parties which Sir Edmund found unworthy of his approval.

  Filling his glass again, he addressed the two young men on the subject of the rights of property, fixing them with a choleric blue eye that they could not and dared not avoid. Delia melted away and was presently heard playing the gramophone to herself in the drawing-room. A moth fluttered round the candles. Mrs Brandon exclaimed, Mr Miller blew them out, but Sir Edmund’s voice rumbled on in the leaf-chequered moonlight. Presently Rose’s white apron was seen coming from the house, to the young men a welcome diversion, to Mrs Brandon a vague source of uneasiness. Kindly reluctant to interrupt the gentry in their talk, Rose stood on the outskirts of the group emanating an atmosphere of such condescending tolerance that even Sir Edmund became conscious that something was wrong, and was checked in his flow of speech.

  ‘Yes, Rose?’ said Mrs Brandon.

  ‘Curwen would wish to speak to you, madam, if it is convenient,’ said Rose.

  ‘It isn’t really,’ said Mrs Brandon helplessly, ‘but I suppose he’ll have to. Where is he?’

  Rose stepped dramatically aside, revealing the hitherto unsuspected form of Curwen.

  ‘I’m sure I didn’t wish to trouble you, madam,’ Curwen began, an ill-concealed triumph in his voice.

  ‘Can’t hear a word you say. Come up here. Bad enough not seeing anything, without not hearing anything,’ barked Sir Edmund in his orderly-room voice. Curwen, an old soldier, automatically moved forward and stood to attention.

  ‘It was going over the downs done it, madam,’ he announced with gloomy relish.

  ‘Did what?’ asked Sir Edmund. ‘Why the devil can’t your man speak plainly, Lavinia?’

  ‘Done it in, Sir Edmund,’ said Curwen.

  Delia, tired of her gramophone, had drifted back again and wanted to know who was done in and if Curwen had seen the body, and if so if she could see it too.

  ‘That’s enough, Delia,’ said Sir Edmund in a state of exasperation. ‘Let the man get on with whatever he is trying to say. Carry on, Curwen.’

  Curwen, looking straight in front of him, embarked on a long unpunctuated statement from which it appeared that owing to his employer’s complete disregard for and want of sympathy with the sensitive works of the car, he had been forced to drive her, by which he meant the car and not his employer, over roads which the County Council had deliberately made to afford employment to garages, the proprietors and employees of which places would, in his opinion, be all the better for six months in the trenches, that he had said at the time what would happen and was therefore guiltless, but that at the same time he would always hold it against himself what had happened. He had taken her, he continued, straight down to Wheeler’s the minute he found it and Wheeler, who was an honest sort of chap himself, though that young Bert and Harry couldn’t be trusted even to oil her, couldn’t possibly get it done before Friday.

  ‘Well, come clean, Curwen: what is it?’ said Francis. ‘Springs gone? I thought I felt an awful bump when we went over the level crossing.’

  ‘It might have been the springs, Mr Francis,’ said Curwen regretfully, ‘but it happened to be the shock absorber.’

  ‘That’s a bit of an anti-climax,’ said Francis cheerfully, ‘but it dishes the picnic, doesn’t it? Can’t Wheeler get it done by tomorrow night?’

  ‘Not with the Thursday half-holiday, sir,’ said Curwen, cheered by the thought. ‘That young Bert and Harry are going to Barchester to the cricket.’

  ‘Good thing, cricket,’ said Sir Edmund, who was tired of the conversation. ‘Not what it was though. Well, Lavinia. I must be getting along. Glad to have met you, Grant. Where are you staying? With Miller? That’s right. Mensa, eh? They pronounce it all wrong now. Latin’s not what it was in my time.’

  With which unfounded aspersion on the classics Sir Edmund heaved himself up to go.

  ‘I suppose you wouldn’t care to come to our picnic on Friday?’ said Mrs Brandon, taking his hand in farewell.

  ‘No, Lavinia. And what’s more you can’t have my car. My chauffeur is having his holiday and I’m driving myself over to Rushwater about a bull. You know I never go to picnics. Wasps and jam sandwiches. Good night, Miller.’

  He kissed Delia. The whole party moved to the front door. Sir Edmund, assisted by Francis, got into his little car and drove away.

  While Francis was dispensing farewell drinks in the drawing-room a complicated discussion took place about the picnic on Friday. Mrs Brandon was in favour of putting it off till her car was back, but her children protested so loudly that she had to give in, though to drive in Francis’s little runabout was not any pleasure to her. Mr Miller then offered his car which was gratefully accepted, but as it was very small and uncomfortable and everyone insisted on his coming too, matters were not much more forward till Delia remembered Miss Brandon’s offer.

  ‘Look here, Mother,’ she said. ‘Let’s telephone to Aunt Sissie and ask if Miss Morris can come and pick you up and you can go comfortably, and then Francis and I can go in the runabout and we’ll go round by Starveacres and see where they’re dragging for the gipsy that was drowned below the hatches on Monday night, at least Turpin says they think he was, and then Mr Miller and Hilary can come in Mr Miller’s car. You’re coming, Hilary, aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course Hilary is coming,’ said Mrs Brandon. So the matter was left, pending a telephone call to Brandon Abbey on the following morning, and good nights were said. Mrs Brandon, not unconscious of the becoming frame that her black mantilla made for her head, came out to see the Vicarage party into their car.

  ‘Come up for tennis some time tomorrow, Hilary,’ she said, laying her hands on the door of the car. For all answer Mr Grant, pot-valiant with the moon, the candles, the port, the hot still night, raised it to his lips.

  ‘I was thinking, Mr Miller,’ said the goddess, when Mr Grant had finished with her hand, ‘that if Hettie would let us have some of her parsnip wine on Friday it would be so nice. Of course we shall bring everything else.’

  Mr Miller said, Indeed, indeed, yes, and urged his little car homewards. Mrs Brandon went upstairs, thinking not of moonlight, candlelight or th
e hot scented night air, but of how nice it was to go to bed, however nice a party had been. Rose had left everything exactly as she liked it and just as she was settling to sleep a light tap came at the door. Nurse put her face round it with a caution that would have woken the heaviest sleeper.

  ‘Excuse me, I’m sure, madam,’ said Nurse, ‘but I saw the light under your door, so I thought it would be all right.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I thought you’d just like to know, madam, that Rose and I have had quite an explanation. It is always so unpleasant when there is an unpleasantness of any sort, and much more pleasant when things are explained, as they could easily have been in the first place.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ said Mrs Brandon sleepily. ‘That’s all right then. Good night, Nurse.’