The Brandons: A Virago Modern Classic (VMC)

by Angela Thirkell

  This statement Mrs Brandon found it impossible to contradict, though it seemed to have no particular relevance to Mrs Grant’s argument, and she could not help imagining that both intellectuals and illiterates stood a poor chance of expressing their own views in Mrs Grant’s presence. That lady, her necklaces rattling with her enthusiasm, conversed with unceasing fluency on the joys of Italy all through the half-hour’s drive to Southbridge, while Mrs Brandon, throwing in a polite interjection from time to time, thought of a good way of having her pink evening frock renovated by Nurse’s clever fingers and wondered if she would get a black velvet for the autumn.

  From every side the picnic party was now converging upon the Wishing Well, a little bubbling spring pleasantly situated in the beech woods above Southbridge. When Mrs Brandon’s party arrived, they found Mrs Morland from High Rising already there. Mrs Brandon greeted her affectionately and introduced her guests.

  ‘And where is Tony?’ she asked.

  Mrs Morland pointed to a pair of grey flannel legs stretched on the ground below a leafy bank.

  ‘You can’t see the rest of him,’ she said, ‘because it is in the Wishing Well. He wanted to see if he could stop the spring by putting his arm into the place where the water bubbles up. Tony! Here is Mrs Brandon.’

  The legs made a convulsive movement, clearly signifying ‘Bother’, and reared themselves up, together with the body belonging to them. Their owner, his blue short-sleeved shirt soaked with water, his arms muddy to the shoulders, advanced unwillingly upon the group, with an expression of abstracted dislike and resentment.

  ‘This is my youngest boy,’ said Mrs Morland to Mrs Grant and Miss Morris. ‘He is in his last year at school. I’m afraid he is too dirty to shake hands.’

  ‘I always shake hands,’ said Mrs Grant, advancing on Tony with outstretched hand. ‘Mother Earth has no terrors for me. The Italian peasants, who never wash, are among the cleanest of God’s creatures.’

  ‘It’s more Mother Mud,’ said Tony, taking Mrs Grant’s proffered hand. ‘I say, Mother, I can’t think how the water comes up so clean. That hole is absolutely stinking.’

  Miss Morris said How do you do, but made no attempt to shake hands. Tony made a very slight inclination towards her and appeared to be favourably impressed, immediately inviting her to come and see the hole where the stinking mud was. Miss Morris accepted his offer and the two went off to the Wishing Well.

  ‘What a splendid young animal!’ said Mrs Grant enthusiastically. ‘He reminds me of a young fisherman who used to bring me fresh frutta di mare at a little seaside village in Calabria. Your boy is fairer of course, but he and Tonio might have been twins.’

  ‘Perhaps twins that had a different father,’ said Laura Morland, who always tried to sympathise, ‘which would account. And my boy is Tony too.’

  ‘And there are people who do not believe in the transmigration of souls!’ exclaimed Mrs Grant.

  ‘Is your fisherman dead then?’ inquired Mrs Morland. ‘Because Tony is seventeen, so your man would have had to transmigrate a good while ago, and I don’t remember anything particular happening.’

  ‘Non ragioniam di lor,’ said Mrs Grant, finding the philosophical level more than she had bargained for.

  ‘No, indeed,’ said Mrs Morland. ‘And now, Lavinia, where shall we put the food? It is bound to be uncomfortable wherever we sit, but thank heaven it isn’t damp.’

  Mrs Brandon had brought in the car two folding tables on which she proposed to spread the feast and let everyone help him or herself. These were set up by Miss Brandon’s chauffeur, and the three ladies unpacked and arranged the huge store of food provided from High Rising, Brandon Abbey and Stories. While they were thus occupied Mr Miller’s little open car came chunking up and its two occupants joined the company, each bearing a large stone jar.

  ‘Good morning, good morning, or rather good afternoon,’ said Mr Miller. ‘And here is the parsnip wine, Mrs Brandon, to which Hettie insisted on adding some of her dandelion wine. Both are excellent.’

  ‘Thank you so very much,’ said Mrs Brandon. ‘Have you met Mrs Grant yet?’

  Mr Miller expressed his pleasure at meeting his pupil’s mother and hoped she would be staying in the neighbourhood for some time, at which Mr Grant groaned almost audibly. Then five or six pleasant young men and women, friends of the young Brandons, arrived; all, as Mrs Brandon had complained, very intelligent, bursting with information about the ballet, and practically indistinguishable, the girls being in trousers and the men a little long in the hair.

  ‘How are you all?’ said Mrs Brandon. ‘Francis and Delia haven’t come yet. They were going to see the place where the gipsy was drowned.’

  One of the young men said What energy. One of the young women, apparently called Betty, said they had passed a crowd near the river, ackcherly, as they came along, and they all began to talk cryptically among themselves. Tony, returning from the Wishing Well with Miss Morris, who had miraculously persuaded him to clean the mud off his arms, cast a look of withering contempt on the little group and drifted away towards Miss Brandon’s chauffeur, with whom he was soon deep in technical conversation. Mrs Brandon introduced Mr Miller to Miss Morris and had an uneasy feeling that they were not going to take to each other, when much to her relief Francis’s car came up, and he and Delia completed the party. Francis, in pursuance of a plan which he and Delia had been perfecting, approached his mother, took her hand, and bowing low over it, kissed it respectfully, saying as he straightened up, ‘How charming you look this morning, Mamma.’

  Mrs Brandon, accepting with tolerance all Francis’s whims, said she thought she looked much the same as at breakfast, and had he said how do you do to Mrs Grant. Francis, turning to give the customary careless handshake, was horrified to find a far from clean washleather glove rising towards his face. Rapidly though unwillingly grasping what was expected of him, he bent over it, avoided touching it with his lips, and restored it courteously to its owner.

  ‘Mi piace tanto,’ said Mrs Grant in a loud voice to Mrs Brandon, ‘to find a young man with manners. All the Italians, high and low, have such exquisite natural manners. I only wish Hilary had profited by his year abroad. Any Italian who came into my house and did not kiss my hand would never be invited again.’

  ‘Serves you right,’ said Delia to her brother, making a hideous face, and various of his young friends asked what had bitten him, the girl called Betty adding that it was the first time she had seen anyone kiss anyone’s hand, ackcherly, except on the flicks.

  ‘I say,’ said Francis who had been examining the feast, ‘what about marsala? Is that Aunt Sissie’s contribution? When does one drink it, Miss Morris?’

  Miss Morris didn’t know, so Francis said they would have it as a cocktail and served it round in gaily-coloured tumblers made of some composition.

  ‘Bless Uncle Woolworth for these pretty gauds,’ he said, ‘even if they are made of high explosives.’

  ‘Ackcherly,’ said Betty, ‘they’re made of milk, because I know a man that told me. They do something to the milk and make things of it.’

  ‘It’s a much more elaborate process,’ said Tony, who had come back at the sight of food, ‘but you wouldn’t understand if I told you. Oh Mother, potted salmon! Can I take some to Hooper?’

  ‘Who is Hooper?’ inquired Mrs Morland.

  ‘Miss Brandon’s chauffeur,’ said Miss Morris. ‘Yes, please do take him some lunch, Tony.’

  Tony made a selection of tempting food and drink and took it to Hooper, but soon returned with his gifts and the depressing intelligence that Hooper was a teetotaller and had brought what he fancied for his own lunch.

  ‘Great bleeding slices of cold beef and a bottle of pickles,’ he said with gleaming eyes, ‘and a huge chunk of cold plum pudding and some green cheese and some cold tea. Oh Mother, can I have lunch with Hooper?’

  ‘No, have lunch here,’ said Mrs Morland, ‘and you can talk to Hooper afterwards.’

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sp; Her son’s face, still soft and gently rounded in spite of his years, though faint hollows were just beginning to show below his cheek bones, clouded slightly, but at the sight of sausage rolls and meringues he recovered his spirits and explained at length to the uninterested Betty the methods by which milk was transformed to a bright blue tumbler.

  ‘But how do they get plum pudding in the height of summer?’ said Francis to Miss Morris.

  ‘If you lived at Brandon Abbey you wouldn’t ask,’ said Miss Morris. ‘Like Mrs Herbert Pocket’s servants, they allow a very liberal table.’

  ‘Oh, heaven bless you, Miss Morris,’ said Francis fervently, lifting his marsala towards her. ‘And how is Aunt Sissie?’

  Miss Morris said pretty well.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Francis, ‘about what Sir Edmund said the other night. You remember, Hilary, about responsibilities and all that.’

  ‘Well?’ said Mr Grant.

  ‘Well, I was thinking that perhaps we oughtn’t to turn the Abbey into a lunatic asylum. I mean it would be a bit hard on the servants and the gardeners and what not. I thought perhaps you and I could club together and have a sort of what’s its name – you know what I mean.’

  ‘You mean a sort of home for old retainers?’ asked Mr Grant.

  ‘No, you great ass, they’ll all get pensioned off all right. I say, Miss Morris, I’m awfully sorry. I mean I didn’t mean anything, I only meant Sparks and that lot,’ said Francis crimsoning violently.

  ‘It is quite all right,’ said Miss Morris composedly. ‘I’d like to hear your ideas for the Abbey.’

  ‘Would you really?’ said Francis, much cheered. ‘Well, I meant a sort of thing rather like a monastery, only that isn’t the word.’

  ‘Ackcherly one can’t be a monk in England,’ said Betty.

  ‘I never said monk,’ said Francis with some heat, ‘and anyway one can, because there are a whole lot somewhere in Somerset and they make honey in little cardboard pots.’

  ‘Oh, those,’ said Betty scornfully.

  Her friends then all contributed their views on the subject of monks, appearing to have founded their theories largely on the Ingoldsby Legends. Suddenly Francis’s voice dominated the tumult with the word ‘Phalanx’.

  ‘That’s what I meant, phalanx,’ he repeated.

  ‘Phalanstère I expect you mean,’ said Tony Morland courteously, managing at the same time to put half a meringue away in one cheek like a monkey in his desire to impart information. ‘The theory of the phalanstère was begun and put into practice by Fourier, about 1832, but it was never much of a success. He wanted to organise society into bodies called phalanges, who were to live in phalanstère which were a square league. There is a lot more but you wouldn’t understand it. I know about it all because we did it last term.’

  ‘I never heard about him ackcherly,’ said Betty.

  ‘It isn’t phalan whatever you said,’ said one of the young men, who had but imperfectly followed the foregoing conversation. ‘Phalangist is what you mean. God! if only the Government had enough planes to bomb them all!’

  ‘Well, they’re increasing the Air Force ackcherly,’ said Betty.

  ‘The Spanish Government,’ the young man almost spat at her.

  Mr Miller said that Civil Strife was very dreadful.

  ‘Well, anyway you know what I mean,’ said Francis. ‘And if Hilary and I get the Abbey we’ll jolly well not have any politics there. I say, let’s go and wish at the Wishing Well.’

  This suggestion was received with universal pleasure; by the younger members because it would mean that they needn’t help with the clearing up; by the older members because they would be able to clear up in peace without the young; and by Tony Morland because he saw a chance of escaping to his friend Hooper and explaining to him the general outline of European politics in the years after the Congress of Vienna.

  It did not take the grown-ups long to tidy away the food and pack up the baskets, and when they had finished Mrs Brandon suggested a visit to the Wishing Well.

  ‘I think we could manage,’ she said doubtfully, looking at the fifty yards that separated them from the Well, and putting up her parasol. Escorted by Mr Miller and followed by Mrs Morland, Mrs Grant and Miss Morris, she walked to the green, beech-crowned bank under which the springing water for ever troubled a little pool.

  ‘It is so lovely,’ she said. ‘If we had a rug we could sit down.’

  Mr Miller sprang away, seized a rug from Hooper who was putting it into the car, and was back in an instant. Mrs Grant compared him favourably with several of her Italian acquaintance, who, she said, were useless out of doors, though delightful in the drawing-room, and sat down resolutely upon her mackintosh.

  ‘I do hope, Mr Miller,’ she said, ‘that Hilary is going to do well with you. He is a difficult nature, with a certain morbidezza that English people cannot readily understand.’

  ‘I must say I have found him —’ Mr Miller began, but found he might as well spare his breath, for Mrs Grant, merely lowering her voice to a more powerful diapason, continued, ‘Like me he adores beauty, but unfortunately he must work. He is a devoted son, mio figlio, but I do not wish him to be tied to my apron strings. There is a charming proverb in Calabria which runs – but you would not understand it in dialect; I will translate roughly, though of course it does not give the fuoco of the original – the ass that stays at home will never learn to roam. My husband was always under his mother’s domination – ma! una donna prepotente! – and what was the result? My life made me what I am.’

  ‘I do think you are so right,’ said Mrs Morland, giving some of her heavy back hair an extra twist and ramming the hairpins into it. ‘Boys always ought to get away from their mothers. I hardly ever see my three eldest, whom I adore; the eldest is secretary to an American explorer and is always somewhere where he can’t send any news, John is doing very well in Burma, and Dick has just rejoined his ship at Malta. Of course Tony is a little different. He is enough to drive anyone mad, because I never know if he is going to be a mentally defective child of five or a man of the world of thirty, but all the same he does need me, and I really don’t think he despises me as much as he pretends to,’ said Mrs Morland proudly. ‘Of course it is a pity that he hasn’t a father, but my husband wasn’t really very much use, so I daresay we have got on just as well and I think we shall go on getting on well so long as he doesn’t tell me anything. Confidences between people are such a mistake and if he does what he wants to do and doesn’t tell me, it’s all right, like the time he went through the railway tunnel at Southbridge which is half a mile long and entirely forbidden and a train came through when he was there, but most luckily I didn’t discover it till a year afterwards.’

  ‘I am really very lucky with Francis,’ said Mrs Brandon, taking off one glove and looking at her hand, ‘because he tells me nothing at all ever and is never rude. If my husband had lived I am sure he would have wanted to be a father to Francis, and that wouldn’t have done at all.’

  If the enthralled reader will imagine that these three speeches not only followed rapidly upon one another, but were to a certain extent superimposed, he will have a fair idea of how much the ladies were enjoying themselves and how very much out of it Miss Morris and Mr Miller felt. But they didn’t turn to each other for relief and Mrs Brandon still felt, with all the delicate perception of a nature that hopes everything will always be comfortable, that they weren’t going to hate each other at sight.

  ‘I have only just thought of it!’ Mrs Morland suddenly exclaimed in her impressive voice, pushing her hair and her hat wildly back from her forehead with both hands. ‘We are all widows!’

  ‘So we are,’ said Mrs Brandon, looking round distractedly as if she might see a few more somewhere, ‘but not what I would call widows.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Mrs Morland, ‘the longer one is a widow, the less one is a widow. Or is it that one just has it in one or else one hasn’t?’

  To this
entrancing philosophical problem no one was capable of giving an immediate answer, and then Francis and Mr Grant reappeared, saying that the conversation of the others was too intellectual for them.

  ‘Let’s all wish,’ said Francis. ‘You drop a pin or a piece of money into the well and wish and don’t tell anybody, and then it comes true. The trouble is one never knows what to wish. Don’t let’s.’

  Mrs Grant said Hilary must get his hair cut and there was a delightful old custom in Calabria by which young men and maidens spent the night under a tree on the night of the full moon and drew lots with the bristles of a hog who had died a natural death, and whoever drew the longest bristle died in childbirth within the year. She then quoted in support of this interesting piece of folklore several verses of a very old song in an archaic dialect, which she did not, she said, herself fully understand.