Outside their bedroom doors Francis and Delia exchanged a few words on life, with special reference to Mr Grant’s too visible passion for their mother, which Delia characterised as a bit slooshy if Francis knew what she meant.
‘Perhaps it is a bit slooshy,’ said Francis, ‘but it doesn’t look bad, this hand-kissing business. Rather like the Prisoner of Zenda and that sort of thing. I wish Mamma had brought up her tall handsome son to kiss her hand. I think I’ll take to it.’
His sister murmured the word potty, adding that she dared him to. Francis at once accepted the dare, they rubbed the tips of their noses together, relic of a nursery superstition connected with the binding powers of a dare, and separated for the night.
In the Vicarage Mr Miller and his pupil found it difficult to go to bed. There was a very sacred subject on which both would have liked to speak, while both felt a very creditable diffidence in embarking upon it. Although there were more than twenty years between them, they were both at that ingenuous stage of a first love which makes it necessary for the sufferer to celebrate aloud the beauties and virtues of the adored. Later may come doubts, torments, secrecies, jealousies; but in the first golden days the young lover, whether young in years or in experience, far from wishing to conceal the beloved in some unsuspected isle in far-off seas, is more inclined to stand at the crossroads and challenge anyone to mortal combat who denies her charms, or to sing those charms with all comers in the alternate verses beloved of the Muses.
So it was with Mr Miller and Mr Grant, but being English gentlemen they found the approach to these mysteries singularly difficult.
‘Well, we really must be turning in,’ said Mr Miller, when he and Mr Grant had consumed respectively a glass of orange juice and a lemon squash and said nothing for three quarters of an hour.
‘Yes, I suppose we must,’ said Mr Grant. ‘It was an awfully nice evening.’
‘Yes, it was delightful to sit out after dinner. There are so few evenings in an English summer when one can comfortably sit out,’ said Mr Miller.
Mr Grant agreed, adding that it was often too cool to sit out comfortably. Also, he said, the light often attracted moths.
Both men thought how a moth had fluttered into the candle under the chestnut, and how Mrs Brandon had exclaimed against it. Both would willingly have celebrated her enchanting childlike terrors, the sweetness of her voice, but neither found himself capable of beginning.
‘Well,’ said Mr Grant, ‘I suppose we ought to be turning in.’
By dint of repeating this comfortable phrase often enough they managed to get themselves upstairs. On the landing they paused.
‘Well, we really ought to be in bed,’ said Mr Miller. ‘Good night, Hilary.’
‘Good night,’ said Mr Grant. ‘And thanks awfully for a splendid evening.’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said Mr Miller. ‘We really ought to thank Mrs Brandon,’ he added in a voice singularly unlike his own.
‘Oh yes, Mrs Brandon,’ croaked Mr Grant. And having let loose this word of power both were overcome with confusion and separated abruptly. Mr Grant took off his dinner jacket and waistcoat and gazed into the night. Unfortunately his window looked in exactly the opposite direction from Stories, but this presented no obstacle to his mind’s eye, which ran lightly up the side of the house like Dracula, scaled the beautiful stone roof, perched on the chimney and thence with extensive view surveyed the landscape. It was during this trance that Mr Grant was suddenly smitten with an idea for a poem, totally new in conception and treatment, containing in itself the finest elements of all previous poetry, yet of an epoch-making originality. Pushing aside the books upon which he had been working earlier in the day, or rather on the preceding day, for it was now well after twelve, he sat down, twisted his legs round the front legs of his chair, tilted the chair forwards, and plunged into literary composition.
An hour or so later he heard a light tap at his door. His tutor, also without coat or clerical waistcoat, entered the room. Mr Grant, drunk with his own written words, gazed at him stupidly.
‘I couldn’t go to sleep,’ said Mr Miller, though his dress afforded no indication of his having tried to do so, ‘and I wondered if you had that stud of mine.’
It seemed to Mr Grant in his present demented state of mind eminently reasonable that Mr Miller should want an assurance of the safety of his stud at one in the morning. Wrenching it from his shirt front he handed it to its owner in silence.
‘Thanks,’ said Mr Miller, apparently much relieved. ‘I just wanted to be quite sure, that was all. Are you working?’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Grant, ‘I mean no. At least yes, but not exactly working. Just writing. An idea I had.’
‘Oh,’ said Mr Miller, interested, but not liking to ask.
‘Just an idea,’ Mr Grant repeated, longing for a sympathetic audience, but not liking to ask.
‘Well,’ said Mr Miller, ‘I suppose I ought to be turning in. Thanks for the stud. I hope I didn’t disturb you.’
‘Oh, rather not,’ said Mr Grant. ‘It was just an idea I had – a sort of idea,’ he explained.
Mr Miller, hearing the appeal in Mr Grant’s voice, said he didn’t suppose he would care to let him look at it. Mr Grant, who wanted nothing more, said he didn’t suppose there was anything in it, but if Mr Miller really cared —. He then pushed a sheet of paper towards his host, saying that it was only an idea.
‘Poetry,’ said Mr Miller. ‘If you don’t mind, Hilary, I’ll read it aloud to myself. I can’t ever quite get the feeling of poetry unless I read it aloud. Let me see,’ he added, looking at the various rough drafts and erasures, ‘where exactly does it begin? Oh, yes, I see.
‘Methinks most like a god is he
Who in Lavinia’s company
Amazed can sit, and gaze the while
On the enchantment of her smile.
But when I, wretched, see my saint,
My tongue is held, my senses faint,
My eyes are darkened with desire
And all my veins consumed with fire.
An imitation of Catullus, I see,’ said Mr Miller, suddenly becoming professional, ‘but free, very free. In a way I think you are right to compress your rendering. It is a more general fault to expand from the original. But you will have to work at it a good deal, Hilary.’
‘I never thought of Catullus,’ said Mr Grant miserably, his golden vision of a totally original poem dashed to the dust.
‘My dear boy, you only have to look at that first line,’ said Mr Miller. ‘By the way, why Lavinia? Surely Lesbia is good enough?’
Mr Grant said it didn’t seem to fit in.
‘Lavinia,’ said Mr Miller, speaking aloud to himself, ‘is Mrs Brandon’s name.’
‘I know,’ said Mr Grant defiantly. ‘That’s why.’
Mr Miller looked at his pupil, who returned his gaze.
‘I think,’ said Mr Miller, very kindly, ‘that you had better finish undressing and go to bed.’
‘I suppose I had. I only once went to bed in my trousers, after a bump supper it was: no, it can’t have been that time because they took all my trousers away. Anyway it was jolly uncomfortable,’ said Mr Grant yawning. ‘Good night, sir, and thanks awfully.’
He tore the paper into fragments, put them in an ash tray, struck a match and watched them burn.
‘Good night,’ said Mr Miller and went away.
Mr Grant was in bed in two minutes and such is human frailty and such is youth that he was asleep in two minutes more, and slept soundly till long after breakfast-time.
4
A Visit to the Wishing Well
After a good deal of telephoning, complicated by Miss Brandon’s butler’s total inability to understand or take any message and Miss Brandon’s refusal to let her companion go to the telephone, the use of her car was obtained for the day. It was to come at twelve with Miss Morris, the crab apple jelly, the potted salmon, the cakes and the marsala, and be at Mrs Brandon’s disposi
tion as long as she needed it, a concession which would have made Sir Edmund even more unhopeful of Miss Brandon’s mental and physical condition.
At half-past eleven on the Friday morning, as Mrs Brandon was thinking of getting ready, Mr Grant came in with a face of such dire portent that even his hostess noticed that something was wrong and asked what it was.
‘It’s the most ghastly thing,’ said Mr Grant. ‘My mother is here from Italy. I never knew she was coming. She turned up last night quite late, in a taxi from Barchester, and she has taken a room at the Cow and Sickle.’
‘I’m afraid she won’t be very comfortable there,’ said Mrs Brandon. ‘They will not have that window in the bedroom made to open and if it did open the pigsty is just outside. But it will be nice for you to have her.’
‘It won’t,’ said Mr Grant, in such anguish that he contradicted his hostess flatly. ‘She has come to see how I’m getting on, and it’s too awful, because she won’t leave me alone and she wants to come to the picnic. It’s all my fault. I let out we were going. I did think perhaps Francis would take her, because there’s room for three in his car, but I found he’d gone already. Mr Miller will have to take her, that’s all, and I’ll stay at home and swot, but I thought I must tell you. I simply loathe missing the picnic, but there it is. I daresay she won’t stay long, because she has a ghastly friend called Lady Norton she is going on to, but I wish to goodness she’d stayed in Italy.’
‘She could come with me and Miss Morris in Miss Brandon’s car,’ said Mrs Brandon kindly. ‘Would that help?’
‘I say, that is kind of you,’ said Mr Grant. ‘Don’t you really mind?’
‘There’s heaps of room,’ said Mrs Brandon, ‘and it will be perfectly easy. Do tell her that I will call at the Cow soon after twelve. We shall have a delightful day. My friend Mrs Morland who writes books is joining us and her boy who is at Southbridge school, and some young friends of my children, and I hope Dr Ford will look in if he has time. I am so glad you let me know about your mother.’
Thus cheered Mr Grant sped back to the Cow and Sickle, while Mrs Brandon put on some very special cream and powder to protect her from the sun, a shady hat, the pinky-purply scarf that Francis had approved, and long gloves. Being thus prepared for a country expedition she read the newspaper in the drawing-room till Miss Brandon’s car arrived. Miss Morris got out of it with a huge bunch of flowers.
‘Miss Brandon sent you these,’ she said, as her hostess met her in the hall. ‘She thought you wouldn’t have enough in your garden.’
‘They are lovely,’ said Mrs Brandon, touching them gently. ‘You look tired. Were you up late?’
‘Rather late,’ said Miss Morris. ‘But I’m used to that. What rather alarmed me was the drive here. Miss Brandon ordered the second chauffeur to drive, and as he never gets a real chance he asked me if I would mind if he let her out a bit, to use his own expression. We seem to have taken every corner in Barsetshire at seventy miles an hour on the wrong side of the road.’
Mrs Brandon sympathised warmly.
‘Miss Brandon was rather upset this morning,’ continued Miss Morris, ‘by a letter from Mrs Grant, Mr Grant’s mother. It seems that she has come over quite unexpectedly from Italy and is going to stay somewhere in the neighbourhood, but she didn’t give any address. Miss Brandon has some kind of prejudice against her and is determined not to see her, so Sparks and the butler have the strictest orders not to open the front door at all today. She was so worried that I hardly thought I would get away.’
‘I’m so glad you did,’ said Mrs Brandon.
‘Nothing would have stopped me,’ said Miss Morris, ‘after you were so kind in asking me.’
‘But,’ said Mrs Brandon as they got into the car, continuing the train of her own thoughts, ‘I must tell you what a dreadful thing has happened. Poor Hilary came up here this morning quite distracted. His mother is here, at the Cow and Sickle, which is a very uncomfortable little inn with roses on the front, and she is coming to the picnic. Now did Rose put the fruit in? Yes, I see it in the corner, so that is all right. I don’t know what she is like, but I daresay she is quite nice. You will like our Vicar, Mr Miller, who is coming, and my friend Laura Morland who writes books and several young friends of my children. I never know who they are, but they are all very intelligent and know all about the ballet, and here we are at the Cow.’
Miss Brandon’s second chauffeur drew up, a little contemptuously, as near the Cow and Sickle as the immense dray of Messrs Pilward and Sons Entire, which was disgorging casks and bottles at the front door, would allow. The two enormous grey cart horses which Messrs Pilward and Sons used with some ostentation for deliveries in the neighbourhood of Barchester, were eating their lunch from modern, labour-saving nosebags hung from the front of the pole; every inch of their glossy coats shone with grooming, every boss of brasswork on their complicated harness glittered, the paintwork of the great dray was spotless in red and black; the draymen, in the scarlet linen coats and black leggings over which the A.U.H.P.B.C. (Amalgamated Union of Horse Propelled Beer Conveyancers) had nearly split, (some saying What about Red Spain, others What about the Blackshirts, both parties agreeing in passing a resolution which called upon the Government to reduce taxation, increase the Air Force, abolish militarism, fight everybody, and establish a thirty-hour week with pensions for everyone at fifty) looked like superior if eccentric hunt servants, and Miss Brandon’s large, powerful, expensive car was entirely put out of countenance.
Mrs Brandon got out and went to the door.
‘Good morning, Spindler,’ she said to the proprietor, who was the uncle of the Vicar’s cook. ‘I’ve come to fetch a Mrs Grant who is staying here.’
Mr Spindler, a stout gentleman of few words, nodded in the direction of the dray horses. At the head of the nearer horse, so that she had not been visible as the car drove up from behind, was standing what Mrs Brandon at once recognised as an Englishwoman Abroad. Her shoes were sensible, her stockings of lisle thread, her light grey homespun skirt dipped slightly at the back, her jumper was of an orange hue, a green handkerchief was round her neck, a grey felt hat was jammed onto her head, on one arm she carried her homespun jacket. With her free hand in its washleather gauntlet she was offering the horse some sugar on her outspread palm. The horse took its face out of its nosebag, looked at the sugar, blew at it several times, decided in its favour, and in rather a slobbery way mouthed it up, then producing a loud champing, roaring, tearing sound, more appropriate to an engineering works on overtime than to a peaceful Beer Conveyancer eating a blameless lump or two of sugar.
‘Excuse me,’ said Mrs Brandon advancing, ‘but are you Mrs Grant? I am Mrs Brandon.’
Mrs Grant turned. Mrs Brandon saw a handsome face, wavy hair, bobbed and going grey, and a multitude of necklaces of amber, coral and other semi-precious stones, which rattled as their wearer moved.
‘That is very kind of you,’ said Mrs Grant, holding out her gloved hand which was fresh with a greenish slime from the horse’s blowings and mouthings.
Mrs Brandon offered her own white-gloved hand as a sacrifice without flinching, reflecting how glad she was that she had told Rose to put a spare pair in the car.
‘I’m so glad you can come to the picnic,’ said Mrs Brandon. ‘Hilary came up to tell me this morning. Are you ready?’
‘I will just get my mackintosh,’ said Mrs Grant.
‘Oh, I don’t think you’ll need it,’ said Mrs Brandon, thinking that Mrs Grant was already far too warmly and sensibly clad for so hot a day.
‘One cannot trust the English climate,’ said Mrs Grant, and striding into the hotel she reappeared shortly with a raincoat and a stout walking stick. Miss Morris had already installed herself on one of the folding seats, introductions took place, the usual polite argument about seats was held, Miss Morris was firm, and the car with Mrs Brandon and Mrs Grant on the back seat drove on towards Southbridge.
‘What lovely horses those were,’ said
Miss Morris.
‘You are treating animals much better in England,’ said Mrs Grant. ‘One hardly ever sees an ill-treated or broken-down horse now.’
‘I suppose you see lots in Italy,’ said Mrs Brandon, rather resenting the aspersion on English humanity.
‘Oh no,’ said Mrs Grant pityingly. ‘Mussolini has stopped all that. Italians adore animals now. Wherever I go in Italy I always ask the peasants if they are kind to their animals and their delightful expressive faces simply light up. After St Francis, Mussolini is the greatest animal lover the world has known. I put them together, don’t you?’
‘I don’t quite know. I never actually met Mussolini,’ said Mrs Brandon cautiously, and somehow implying that she had at some period been introduced to St Francis.
‘Of course you wouldn’t,’ said Mrs Grant. ‘No one does. But going everywhere as I do, among very intellectual people in Rome and Florence and among the most illiterate peasants of Calabria, I hear a great deal.’
The Brandons: A Virago Modern Classic (VMC) Page 8