The Brandons: A Virago Modern Classic (VMC)

by Angela Thirkell

  ‘And just as well, probably,’ said Francis to Miss Morris in an undertone.

  ‘Io t’amo o pio bove,’ said Mrs Brandon suddenly, contemplating her ringed hand.

  At this startling statement everyone looked at her.

  ‘My dear mamma, you mustn’t say things like that,’ said Francis.

  ‘I can’t think why it came into my head,’ said Mrs Brandon apologetically. ‘I suppose it was hearing all that Italian. It’s something I had to learn by heart once.’

  ‘A little learning is a dangerous thing,’ said Francis sententiously, ‘talking of which how glad you ought to be to have a son who gets his quotations right. I say, Mr Miller, did you know that they’ve got chickenpox down at Grumper’s End? The postman told me when he brought up the cat’s bit of liver this morning with the letters to save the butcher’s boy an extra journey.’

  ‘Indeed? I am sorry to hear it,’ said Mr Miller. ‘I must go and see them. That means that Jimmy Thatcher won’t be able to carry out his duties on Sunday.’

  ‘Jimmy is an enchanting little boy,’ Mrs Brandon explained to Miss Morris, ‘who helps Mr Miller with the service in a kind of surplice with a frill round his neck. He is very ambitious and wants to be a dentist when he grows up. You would love him, wouldn’t she, Mr Miller?’

  ‘I think,’ said Miss Morris, her pale cheeks flushing, ‘that there is no need for me to tell Mr Miller what I think of such arrangements as he may see fit to make for the celebration of his services.’

  There was no mistaking the open hostility in her voice.

  ‘I had hoped, Miss Morris,’ Mr Miller began in a low tone, but Miss Morris got up and walked away. Everyone felt uncomfortable and each member of the party tried to cover the awkwardness by dashing into an artificial normality of manner. Mrs Morland and Mrs Grant discovered a very dull common acquaintance who lived on the Riviera and discussed her with zeal. Francis plied Mr Miller with details about the chickenpox at Grumper’s End, some gathered from the postman, some invented on the spur of the moment, and Mrs Brandon asked Mr Grant if he would like to have a wish, at the same time stretching out her hand that he might help her to rise.

  ‘How is your work, Hilary?’ Mrs Brandon inquired.

  ‘How did you know about it?’ Mr Grant asked, going rather pink.

  ‘Well, you are doing classics with Mr Miller, aren’t you?’ asked Mrs Brandon, puzzled.

  ‘Oh yes, of course. But that’s only a sort of lessons. I’m really trying to write a book – at least I don’t know if it will ever be a real book, but anyway a sort of article about a French poet called Jehan le Capet, at least his real name was Eugène Duval, but he was a Romantic so he had to have a name that sounded better. No one knows much about him, but I somehow got interested and dug up quite a lot of stuff.’

  ‘Do tell me about him,’ said Mrs Brandon, in a voice whose warm interest would not have deceived Sir Edmund or her son Francis for a moment.

  ‘Well, there’s not very much,’ said Mr Grant, beginning to stammer a little in his excitement at discussing his great work with a goddess. ‘He was a Satanist and died very young of absinthe and only published one very small volume called Belphégor. All his other work was destroyed by his mistress,’ said Mr Grant, rapidly slurring over a word which he suddenly felt might sully the goddess’s ethereal atmosphere, ‘who was really called Angèle Potin, but was known as Nini le Poumon because she had only one lung because of consumption,’ he continued, stammering more than ever as he found his interest in his chosen study involving him in an explanation which must, he felt, be highly offensive to his divinity, ‘because she was jealous.’

  ‘Of whom?’ asked Mrs Brandon.

  ‘Oh, just jealous,’ said Mr Grant vaguely, feeling that a detailed description of Mimi la Salope, Jehanne de Valois, and the other ladies who disputed the unhappy ci-devant Eugène Duval’s attentions while alive and his literary remains when dead, were hardly fit offerings to lay on Mrs Brandon’s altar.

  ‘It sounds enchanting,’ said Mrs Brandon. ‘Will you read me some of it one day?’

  ‘Would you really like me to?’ asked Mr Grant, incredulous.

  ‘I’d love it,’ said Mrs Brandon. ‘When are you going to publish it?’

  Mr Grant had to confess that he hadn’t got as far as a publisher yet. Mrs Brandon said Mrs Morland had a very nice one who she was sure would do and had Hilary a halfpenny to put into the Wishing Well. He had not, but was able to express his devotion by dropping a shining new sixpence to which he was rather attached into the clear, moving water. Mrs Brandon, a practical woman, said it would do for them both and now they must wish.

  ‘Only I find it so difficult to wish,’ she said plaintively. ‘It’s like concentrating. I have to hold my breath and shut my eyes tight, and then I go red in the face and can’t think of anything at all. Oh, I know what I’ve wished. I wished —’

  ‘But you mustn’t say what you wished,’ said Mr Grant. ‘You don’t get it if you do.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ said Mrs Brandon. ‘What did you wish?’

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ said Mr Grant; and truly; for his incoherent and jumbled wish had been entirely a prayer to be allowed to die some violent and heroic death while saving Mrs Brandon from something or somebody, to have her holding his chill hand, and perhaps letting her cheek rest for a moment against his as his gallant spirit fled, all with a kind of unspoken understanding that he should not be really hurt and should somehow go on living very comfortably in spite of being heroically dead. ‘I wouldn’t get my wish if I did.’

  ‘Of course, and I do want you to get it,’ said Mrs Brandon, melting Mr Grant’s marrow with a smile. ‘Laura, have you wished?’ she asked, as Mrs Morland and Mrs Grant came strolling up to them, followed by Francis and Mr Miller.

  ‘It is a splendid well,’ said Mrs Morland. ‘Once when Tony was smaller we came here for a picnic, and he was showing off on his bicycle and frightened me dreadfully and I wished the bicycle would somehow get put out of action without hurting him, and it did. I know what I’ll wish. I’m frightfully stuck in a serial I’ve got to have ready by September, so I’ll wish —’

  ‘You mustn’t tell,’ broke in Mrs Brandon. ‘You won’t get it if you do.’

  ‘I think that is what Tony used to call superstious,’ said Mrs Morland severely. ‘Don’t you, Mr Miller?’

  ‘One might of course condemn the whole ritual as superstitious and highly pagan,’ said Mr Miller, ‘but all the same I do not propose to tell my wish.’ Upon which he dropped a halfpenny into the well and wished with heathen fervour that Jimmy Thatcher might not get chickenpox.

  ‘Oh, do you write?’ Mrs Grant asked Mrs Morland.

  ‘Only to earn my living,’ said Mrs Morland apologetically, for although her stories about Madame Koska’s dressmaking establishment, where spies, Grand Dukes, drug-smugglers and C.I.D. officers flourished yearly, had a large sale, and she had arrived at the happy point where her public simply asked for ‘the new Mrs Morland’, instead of mentioning the name of the book, she thought quite poorly of her own hard-working talent and greatly admired people who wrote what she called real books.

  ‘I expect you know my book about Calabria,’ said Mrs Grant.

  Mrs Morland said the libraries were so stupid and never had the books one wanted.

  ‘I do wish Mother wouldn’t,’ said Mr Grant in a low and unfilial voice to Francis. ‘It isn’t a book, it’s only a sort of little thing in paper covers that she had printed by a very good-looking, bounderish sort of printer somewhere she was staying in Italy, and she behaves as if it were the Encyclopaedia Britannica. What do you think was the matter with Miss Morris?’

  Francis said he couldn’t think, and he supposed it was something someone had said, but why talking about the chickenpox at Grumper’s End should send anyone off their rocker he couldn’t imagine. Mr Grant said perhaps someone she was very fond of had died of chickenpox and anyway she was a very good sort, but so was Mr Mi
ller.

  Mrs Grant, all her necklaces clashing together, now knelt at the pool and dropping a coin into it moved her lips as if in prayer. Everyone looked on in interest, and her son in weary disgust.

  ‘If only Mother wouldn’t be so confoundedly in the spirit of the thing,’ he complained to Francis. ‘I never knew anyone adapt themselves to local customs as she does. She used to make me awfully uncomfortable in Italy, putting little offerings on shrines and things and everyone thought her necklaces were rosaries and it was all frightfully embarrassing, and she would help herself to holy water in the country churches because she didn’t like to be out of it.’

  ‘That was a little prayer that the inhabitants of a village on the south coast of Calabria address to the presiding spirit of wells,’ she said. ‘An invocation from time immemorial. The peasants drink the water and repeat the words that their fathers have taught them.’

  So saying she scooped up a handful of water and put it to her lips.

  ‘Don’t drink it, Mrs Grant,’ cried Mr Miller in great alarm. ‘The water is not fit for human consumption. The Medical Officer of Health condemned it as thoroughly infected from the sewage farm at Southbridge.’

  Everyone waited anxiously to see Mrs Grant burst, or come out all over spots, but she rose, her homespun skirt rather baggy at the knees, and smiling with tolerance said she believed with St Francis that water was her sister and could do her no harm.

  ‘A lot your mother knows about sisters,’ said Francis aside to Mr Grant. ‘Wait till she’s seen Delia in a temper.’

  Mrs Brandon, anxious to change a difficult and controversial subject, said to Mrs Morland that Mr Grant was looking for a publisher and what about her man.

  ‘I think you’d like Adrian Coates very much, Mr Grant,’ said Mrs Morland earnestly. ‘He is the son-in-law of my old friend George Knox, the one who writes biographies, and his wife is a perfect darling and they have two delightful babies. The elder is called Laura, after me, and the little boy, who will be a year old in March, is called Richard, though after whom I don’t know.’

  Having given these eminently satisfactory testimonials to her publisher’s business capacity, she pushed one or two loose hairpins into their place and said it must be nearly tea-time. A general move was made to the picnic place, where they found Miss Morris, outwardly as composed as ever, laying out the tea-things with Tony’s help. Everyone recognised with annoyance that it would be impossible to find out what was wrong between Mr Miller and Miss Morris until one or other of them could be got at alone, and this in the communal atmosphere of a picnic tea was going to be very difficult.

  Mr Grant, though annoyed that his mother should have heard of his publishing plans, about which he knew she would Ask Questions, could not resist talking about himself to a real author, and shaking himself temporarily free from the shackles of Venus transferred his homage to the Muses in the person of Mrs Morland. Her he found kind and communicative but singularly unhelpful, as she did not seem to know anything about the ways of publishers.

  ‘You see,’ she said in her impressive voice, ‘I have only got one publisher and I was really very lucky because I really met him quite by accident and we have always got on very well. He always gives me a bit more for every book, and if I need anything doing in town, like flowers being ordered for someone’s funeral or birthday, or finding out if the name I want to call my new book has been used by someone else, he always gets it done for me at his office. And he plays golf very well, I believe, though I know nothing about the game myself. And Tony likes him,’ she added, looking with dislike and adoration at her youngest son, who was helping Betty and Delia to kill wasps by cutting them in two.

  ‘Do you think he would like my book when it is finished?’ said Mr Grant.

  ‘What kind of book?’

  Mr Grant described to her, with more freedom than he had cared to use when speaking to Mrs Brandon, parts of the career of that unfortunate Satanist, M. Eugène Duval, which made Mrs Morland laugh so much that she had to get several spare hairpins out of her bag and pin herself together.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ she said, when she had stopped laughing, ‘Adrian Coates mostly does either rather bad novels like mine or frightfully dull stuff by journalists about all the European crises and the private lives of dictators, which people somehow like to read, I can’t think why, but he’s always on the look-out for something fresh and I must say your book sounds very funny.’

  Mr Grant then had to explain to Mrs Morland that it wasn’t really a funny book, and when this was thoroughly grasped Mrs Morland became serious again and asked what Belphégor was like.

  ‘Rather wonderful,’ said Mr Grant. ‘He had a special theory of punctuation. He believed in commas, but not in any other sort of stops. In Belphégor you sometimes find a comma after every word. He used to say “La virgule vaut bien la particule.”’

  ‘That was just snobbishness, wasn’t it, sir?’ said Tony Morland, who scenting an intellectual discussion had suddenly deserted the wasp-hunters and come over to his mother. ‘He knew he couldn’t be an aristocrat, so he pretended to despise them. I know all about him because our French master, Mr Knight, who is a very good man on his job, did the Romantics in the upper Sixth last term. He hasn’t got a frightfully good accent, but he knows all about French literature and absolutely hundreds of useful idioms. If I had my notebook here I’d tell you some of them. When I went to France with Mother at Easter I used heaps of idioms and surprised people very much. I expect you’ve heard of Mallarmé, sir,’ said Tony kindly, ‘Well, he was just the opposite of your man because he didn’t believe in stops at all.’

  ‘What have you read of his?’ asked Mr Grant, amused.

  ‘I haven’t exactly read anything,’ said Tony, ‘but we did him with Mr Knight, and Mr Knight read us some of the Après-midi d’un faune.’

  ‘What you mean, Après-midi d’un faune?’ asked Betty, who, also an intellectual, and subjugated by Tony’s free and easy manner of dealing with wasps, had followed him slavishly. ‘You can’t read it. Ackcherly it’s a ballet.’

  Before Tony could collect his forces for a withering reply, the whole of the younger set, hearing the word ballet, burst into the argument without knowing what it was about, intoxicating themselves by the names of their favourite dancers, Russian and English. Tony quickly recovered himself and plunged headlong into the fray, managing to give the impression of one who had lived in the coulisses from earliest childhood, and ogled the legs of Taglioni. Mrs Morland, who knew that her youngest son had not been more than three or four times to the ballet, marvelled humbly at his grasp of the subject.

  ‘Sadler’s Wells!’ said Tony scornfully. ‘What I call Empire ballet. People don’t even dress for it. I’d rather not go to ballet at all if I couldn’t go to decent seats at Covent Garden and wear my dinner jacket.’

  ‘Better men than you haven’t been ashamed to go in tails,’ said the voice of a newcomer whose approach over the grass had not been heard among the warring voices. ‘Shut up, Tony and get me some tea,’ said Dr Ford, Laura Morland’s old friend and physician, the friend of half the county, and at present the medical attendant of Miss Brandon.

  Tony collapsed and Dr Ford folded his long legs up and sat down by Mrs Morland, who introduced him to Mrs Grant and her son.

  ‘And I can’t think why Tony is so uppish about the ballet,’ she said plaintively. ‘Adrian Coates has taken him once or twice, and his dinner jacket suit was too small and there was such a gap between his waistcoat and trousers that he had to crouch instead of standing up, to hide it, but I said I simply would not get him a new suit just for one evening, when he couldn’t be needing it again till the Christmas holidays and I could get it in the sales.’

  ‘Quite right too,’ said Dr Ford. ‘Thanks, Tony, that’s a nice selection of cakes. And now go away and play with your young friends.’

  Tony, who had never yet managed to assert himself against Dr Ford, gave one soft, sullen look at t
he group of grown-ups and strolled away ostentatiously in the direction of Hooper, hoping that everyone would see him not playing with the young friends.

  Mrs Grant began to ask Dr Ford about Miss Brandon’s health in a far from tactful way, and his cool parrying of her questions amused all the onlookers so much that Miss Morris, who had been quietly waiting for this chance, was able to speak aside to Mrs Brandon.

  ‘Could we walk to the Wishing Well again, Mrs Brandon?’ she asked. ‘I forgot to wish.’

  Mrs Brandon willingly got up and accompanied her. When they had reached the well Miss Morris opened her bag, took out a penny and dropped it into the water.

  ‘I really ought to wish for a better temper,’ she said. ‘I can’t tell you, Mrs Brandon, how sorry and ashamed I am for the way I behaved just now. If you knew the reasons – but I don’t want to justify myself, only to apologise and beg you to forgive me.’

  ‘It was nothing,’ Mrs Brandon hastened to reassure her. ‘And Mr Miller is a little trying sometimes with his enthusiasm.’