The Brandons: A Virago Modern Classic (VMC)

by Angela Thirkell

  ‘Don’t be extravagant, Miss Morris,’ said Francis. ‘And remember I have booked the first ride on the roundabout with you. I bag the cock, but if you don’t like the ostrich you and Delia can go in an aeroplane.’

  As they walked to the Vicarage Miss Morris’s placards drew forth much admiration from the Brandons, who had not yet seen them, and when a carful of obvious strangers was seen to slow down, look at the notice, stop, consult, and turn the car towards the Vicarage gate, Francis, whose relations with Miss Morris were now on much the same gentlemanly and unemotional footing as those of Mr Swiveller and Miss Brass, hit her kindly on the back and said that meant at least ten shillings in teas and side shows. Miss Morris smiled indulgently at Francis and walked quietly on, but her whole being was seething with an excitement she could hardly control. She had been brought up, as the widower parson’s daughter, on mothers’ meetings, G.F.S. meetings, sewing parties, Sunday School excursions, bazaars, fêtes, rummage sales and the hundred activities of the Vicarage. She had given ungrudgingly her time, thought and labour, and it was her secret pride that no event for which she had been responsible had ever been a failure. Under her management receipts had always exceeded expenses, even if only by so narrow a margin as three and elevenpence halfpenny, teas had been generous, no children had ever been lost or had accidents, mothers had happily sat wedged in a motor coach for four hours, spent one hour in the pouring rain at Weston-Super-Mare, and happily and damply sung for four hours on the way home. Fractious children had been quelled by her presence, and for all infantile diseases Miss Morris’s help and advice were infinitely preferred to those of the district nurse by mothers and patients alike. She knew that there was nothing she could not organise and carry through successfully, which gave her a sense of power, very dear to her heart.

  With her father’s death all this had come to an end. For twenty years she had hidden herself under the mask of Miss Morris, rather a reserved kind of woman, my dear, but quite trustworthy and nursed poor Aunt Emma up to the end, and would do splendidly for your husband’s old sister, I am certain. It had been a life of severe self-repression. Not as regarded her old ladies, for to them she felt on the whole a kindly and unsentimental tolerance, but as regarded the arrangements of the houses and hotels where they lived, the organisation of service, the discipline of servants, the regulating of expenditure. But in dreams she beheld a parish, every detail of which was under her hand and eye, every relationship known to her, where she would collaborate with all officials and at the same time protect her flock against them, where everything would be a part of one smoothly running machine of which she was the centre. As for the actual spiritual leader of this parish, she gave him no thought, for her imagination did not work on those lines. If he existed at all it was as a conscientious if shadowy figure who came to her for advice on every point and did not meddle. Today, for the first time since her servitude had begun, she was to live for a few hours in the familiar life, and though no one heard her, she was saying Ha-ha loudly and exultingly.

  Admission Sixpence was paid by Mrs Brandon for the whole party and they entered the field. Mr Grant, who was helping with the coconut shies, had been looking out for them and came forward to meet them.

  ‘I suppose you wouldn’t care to try for a coconut, Mrs Brandon,’ he said.

  Mrs Brandon said she thought not and she would go and buy some things at the Produce Stall and the Fancy Stall and then perhaps sit in the Vicarage garden away from the noise.

  ‘You all go and amuse yourselves,’ she said to the three young people, ‘and come and fetch me at four o’clock and we’ll have tea in the marquee. It is rather horrible but one must. And Francis, ask whoever is in charge of the teas to keep me a table. I’ll get the Keiths to join us and Mrs Morland and your mother, Hilary, and Lady Norton if she stays, so we might be about a dozen. I know they have the two ping-pong tables from the British Legion club room, so do ask them to put them together and that will do nicely.’

  ‘OK, Mamma,’ said Francis. ‘I go, I go, see how I go. Come with me, Miss Morris. I’m sure you can deal with tea-tents better than I can.’

  Miss Morris said she would be very glad if she could be of any help and the two went off.

  ‘And now,’ said Mrs Brandon to Delia, ‘you won’t want to go round the stalls, darling. I know what will happen. I shall have to buy Cook’s jam and cake, and Ethel’s knitted dish-cloths, and Nurse’s baby woollies, and send them all to the hospital. Take Hilary on the roundabout.’

  Mr Grant was wounded to the quick by Mrs Brandon’s summary relegation of him to the rank of a young person, but Delia gave him no time to feel annoyance. Expressing a fear that someone might have bagged the ostrich, she urged her cousin Hilary rapidly in the direction of the roundabout. The boats and other conveyances were just slowing down and several people were getting off. Calling to Mr Grant to follow her, Delia climbed onto the still moving platform and seized the ostrich onto which she leapt and sat side saddle with an expression of pride and contentment. Under her direction Mr Grant took possession of the cock, whose orbit was within that of the ostrich, and mounted it astride. One of the oily men came round.

  ‘I pay this one,’ said Delia, ‘and you pay the next, and so on. Two please.’ And she held out four pennies.

  ‘Threepence, miss,’ said the oily man.

  ‘It was twopence last year,’ said Delia.

  The oily man was understood to say that it was threepence this year because of the Government, and that even so it was a dead loss to the proprietor, Mr Packer, who ran it on a purely philanthropic basis.

  ‘All right,’ said Delia. ‘Here’s half a crown, and tell Mr Packer I’m going to have my rides at twopence a time. That’s seven and a half rides each, and Mr Grant will give you another half-crown and that makes fifteen rides each, or we may use some of them for friends.’

  The oily man said he supposed that was all right and went off to collect the other fares.

  ‘Cheek!’ said Delia to Mr Grant. ‘It’s always twopence a ride, and they know it.’

  ‘Are you really going to have fifteen rides?’ asked Mr Grant.

  ‘Of course. I adore roundabouts,’ said Delia, and the steam organ gave a frightful screech, intended to warn laggards, and burst into ‘The Honeysuckle and the Bee’, the popular song of the year the organ first appeared in public. The platform began to revolve, Mr Packer’s face appeared for a moment above the machinery, even oilier than that of his subordinate, and the whole intoxicating equipage was in motion. To Delia the roundabout had represented since her youthful days the highest point of romance. Seated side saddle, her hair blown by the oil-scented breeze of the ostrich in its career, her elegant legs dangling, Delia felt herself to be d’Artagnan, Sir Lancelot, a Cavalier riding with dispatches to King Charles, a heroine doing something or other for someone she was in love with, Mazeppa, Cortes and several other people. At every flower show she spent most of her money and time, sometimes in a boat or aeroplane body but most often on a bird, and usually descended from her mount in a state of exaltation which lasted until after dinner and sometimes made her rather remote and disagreeable.

  Mr Grant, who did not understand his cousin’s peculiar devotion to this form of mental stimulus, was ready enough to ride on a cock two or three times, but felt a distinct uneasiness at the thought of half a crown’s worth of this exercise. However Delia looked so happy and so pretty, with the flush of excitement on her face, that he determined to endure as long as possible. As the second twopenny worth was coming to an end, he saw a large good-looking girl striding over the grass towards the roundabout, followed by Mr Merton. The last revolution of the platform then carried him away, but as he came round again the girl called out ‘Hoy’ in piercing tones. Delia looked for the noise, saw it, and shrieked ‘Lydia’ at the top of her voice. The girl, barely waiting for the ostrich to stop, mounted the platform.

  ‘I knew it was you on the ostrich,’ she said to Delia. ‘I told Noel you’
d be here, didn’t I, Noel?’ she added to Mr Merton who had climbed up after her. ‘I say, someone’s on my cock.’

  ‘It’s only my cousin Hilary,’ said Delia. ‘He won’t mind changing, will you, Hilary. It’s Lydia Keith that I was at Barchester High School with. Hullo, Mr Merton.’

  Mr Grant, really quite glad of an excuse to dismount, offered his cock to Lydia, who immediately flung a leg over it, explaining that she had put on a frock with pleats on purpose, as she always felt sick if she rode sideways.

  ‘You and Hilary can go in the swan boat behind us,’ she shouted to Mr Merton. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to say Hilary, but Delia never said what your name was.’

  ‘Grant,’ said the gentleman addressed.

  ‘Well, do you mind if I call you Hilary?’ said Lydia. ‘Hurry up and get into the swan.’

  ‘We’d better,’ said Mr Merton to Mr Grant, ‘or Lydia is capable of riding all over the field after us on the cock.’

  Accordingly the two gentlemen seated themselves face to face in a kind of canoe with a swan’s head and shoulders growing out of its prow.

  ‘It makes me feel a bit like Lohengrin,’ said Mr Merton, ‘or half of him.’

  ‘Now I know why he always arrives standing, however unbalanced,’ said Mr Grant, whose knees were hitting his chin. ‘They never thought of people’s legs when they made these boats.’

  ‘It was a poor idea to have swans to drag one about anyway,’ said Mr Merton. ‘I’d always be afraid they might turn round and hiss at me or bite.’

  Mr Grant said he didn’t suppose Wagner had really worked it out. The steam organ burst into ‘Farewell, my Bluebell’, a romantic song of adieu familiar to an older generation, and the whole cavalcade was once more set in motion. The oily man came up for Mr Merton’s fare, but Mr Grant explained that the two half-crowns were covering expenses for his shipmate and also for the young lady on the cock. The oily man, who by now couldn’t hear himself speak, nodded understanding and went away.

  As they slowed down again Mr Grant, who found this circular travel very boring, asked Mr Merton, whom much to his annoyance he still couldn’t help liking, whether he thought they would have to stay much longer.

  ‘Not if you are feeling as sick as I am,’ said Mr Merton, who had been travelling backwards and not liking it. ‘Lydia and Miss Brandon will be talking about their old school for ages, and I know that once Lydia is on her cock nothing will get her off. I came here last year with the Keiths and she had thirteen rides.’

  ‘Delia has paid for fifteen,’ said Mr Grant, with some pride in his cousin’s spirit, ‘and I’m supposed to be having fifteen too, but if we got off Miss Keith could use mine.’

  ‘I’d willingly pay half a crown never to have got on the thing at all,’ said Mr Merton. ‘It’s stopping now. Hullo, there’s Tony Morland.’

  Mr Grant had been aware, during the latter and slower revolutions of this particular twopenny worth, of someone in grey flannels standing near the roundabout and gazing with an expression of detached scorn upon the vagaries of mortals. This person he saw, as the machine came to a standstill, to be the same boy he had met at the picnic.

  ‘I’m frightened of that boy,’ he said to Mr Merton as they staggered off the boat. ‘He makes me feel I am twenty years his junior and slightly imbecile at that.’

  ‘I know,’ said Mr Merton. ‘He is a bit like the gentleman in Tennyson, holding no form of creed but contemplating all. But I believe he is human inside. At least his housemaster, who is rather a friend of mine and married Lydia’s sister, seems to think so. Hullo, Tony.’

  Tony Morland turned his head slightly and saw Mr Merton and Mr Grant.

  ‘How do you do, sir,’ he said, with a distant courtesy of manner, as from fallen royalty to one who was respectfully pretending not to see through his incognito. ‘How do you do, Mr Grant.’

  Both gentlemen felt as if they had been talking in church. Mr Merton was the first to recover himself and asked if Tony was going on the roundabout.

  ‘Perhaps later,’ said Tony. ‘Did you get to the ballet last week, sir?’

  ‘Not I,’ said Mr Merton. ‘This is my holiday and I’m not going back to town till I must.’

  ‘It’s hardly worth seeing this year,’ said Tony negligently. ‘There is nothing new except Les Centaures et les Lapithes with Bolikoff’s decor, and I’d hardly advise anyone to go unless they had read Vougeot’s Entrechats Gris. The whole is a bit determinist, though there’s one of the corps de ballet that really understands the pointes.’

  ‘Do you have to talk like that?’ asked Mr Merton.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Tony, the faintest flicker of a smile passing over his face. ‘You see I have a friend who talks like that and I have to copy his mannerisms at present. I’ll grow out of it. It was much worse last holidays.’

  Lydia Keith, swinging past them on the cock, now shouted a greeting at Tony and a command to join the roundabout.

  ‘Aren’t you coming, sir?’ Tony said to Mr Merton.

  ‘No,’ said Mr Merton, casting a nauseated look at the swan boat. ‘I’m going to find Mrs Brandon. Do you know where she is?’

  ‘With my mother in the Vicarage garden when I last saw her,’ said Tony, and leapt onto the moving platform.

  Mr Grant suddenly felt that if Mr Merton was going to make himself pleasant to Mrs Brandon, he, Mr Grant, might as well emigrate, so he boarded the roundabout again as it stopped. Let Mr Merton go and wanton in Mrs Brandon’s smiles. For him the free roving life of a Conquistador. He mounted the nearest steed, a dapple grey with a red saddle and bridle painted on it, and found to his surprise that Delia was riding abreast with him on a chestnut with violet trappings.

  ‘I gave the ostrich to Tony,’ she said, ‘because Lydia wanted to talk to him. I say, Hilary, do you suppose we’ll soon know about Aunt Sissie? I know it’s rather beastly to say things like that, but I had an idea.’

  ‘About something?’ said Mr Grant.

  ‘Yes. Really as a matter of fact about if she did by mistake happen to have – I mean if there was anything even if it was only a very little,’ said Delia.

  As she had stopped speaking Mr Grant came to the conclusion that she had said what she wanted to say. The wording had been obscure in the extreme, but he guessed what she was driving at. He felt that she was in difficulties and decided that as Aunt Sissie’s will was not a subject that could be indefinitely avoided, he might as well break the ice and save his cousin any further embarrassment.

  ‘It does seem rather beastly,’ he admitted, raising his voice as the steam organ broke again into ‘The Honeysuckle and the Bee’, ‘but after all it’s only business. I’ll tell you what, Delia, but it’s a secret, if I did get anything from Aunt Sissie I’m going to make a will and say if I die first your mother is to have it. I shan’t use any of it myself.’

  He could not hear through the blaring of the organ his young cousin’s hero-worshipping, long-drawn ‘Oh, Hilary’ but he read admiration and approval in her eyes and was not displeased.

  ‘And now tell me yours,’ he said, as soon as a pause in the sequence of melodies allowed him to make himself heard.

  ‘Well,’ said Delia, looking straight in front of her, ‘if I did get anything, I don’t mean me and Francis but only me, I thought I would give it to Miss Morris. She’s had an absolutely rotten time. Do you suppose I could?’

  A great many thoughts suddenly dashed into Mr Grant’s mind. Among the first was a feeling of shame that Delia and not himself should have been the first to think of this. He realised, with some mental discomfort, that his plan of giving up his potential inheritance to Mrs Brandon, who didn’t need it, was a thoroughly selfish piece of self-glorification. If he had been whoever it was who gave his lady his falcon for dinner there might conceivably have been some merit in the sacrifice, though he had always had private doubts as to the amount of eating on a falcon. But to give a quite rich person some money that he didn’t need himself, simply to make hims
elf a benefactor in her eyes and be charmingly thanked, was pure egoism. And considering Mrs Brandon, he now saw how probable it was that she, who never thought of or valued money, because she had always had it, would have accepted his tribute with her usual charm, perhaps said ‘Dear Hilary, this is too sweet of you,’ and laid a hand on his arm, but would have felt no particular obligation, no deep gratitude, and quite likely have refused, lightly, to take it, treating him as a child who did not know what he was doing.

  And here was Delia, to whom in his arrogance, absorbed as he was by his romantic devotion to her mother, he had paid little attention, except as a useful person for tennis, who had seen at once where help was needed and was prepared to give it. Perhaps she too was only expressing a devotion, the devotion of a generous nature to anything that had called out its powers of helping, but in the sacrifice she proposed to make there was at least something very practical. He wanted to give what he didn’t need to someone who didn’t need it, persuading himself that this was a sacrifice to – Well, to what? Thinking of Mrs Brandon as he so often had since he met her, in the night, when he ought to be working, in the melting air of twilight, in the intoxicating warmth of high noon up on the downs, in church (where, he had decided, to think of her was exactly the same as paying attention to the service), in the early morning when the summer mists lay on the world, he had occasionally tried to give his feelings a name. Love, desire; delicious words to intoxicate himself with, but not what he meant. Passion, even with a very small p, would be a desecration of his thought. Adoration, devotion, was perhaps nearer the mark, but did not satisfy him. What human word could ever express one’s feeling, at the same time worshipping and protecting, for so exquisite a creature, the child in the woman. As he thought of her in her sunlit, flowery drawing-room, or by candle-light below the chestnut tree, veiled in shadowy lace, her lovely eyes a little tired, her enchanting voice muted, listening to him as he read to her, or telling him about Nurse and Rose, he was suddenly so pierced and torn by whatever it was he felt, that he nearly fell off his dapple grey steed.