The Brandons: A Virago Modern Classic (VMC)

by Angela Thirkell

  ‘I think your idea is very good too,’ said the voice of Delia, who thought his silence might mean that he disapproved her own plan, ‘and I expect Mother would think it was awfully kind of you. You’ve got a pretty good crush on her, haven’t you? Everyone has,’ said Delia proudly.

  At these words it would not be quite correct to say that the scales fell from Mr Grant’s eyes, for one’s eyes are not as a rule opened to one’s own peculiarities so quickly and finally. But the word crush, deeply as he disliked and resented it, seemed to fill a gap that no other word had filled. For a fleeting moment he wondered if he had been a little ridiculous. Then he put this doubt at the back of his mind and turned his attention to Delia.

  ‘I think your plan is splendid,’ he said, ‘and I only wish I’d thought of it myself. It would be simply perfect to give Miss Morris something. I like her awfully, don’t you?’

  ‘She’s all right,’ said Delia tolerantly. ‘Of course she will drive Mother mad if she stays here long, because she will be humble and grateful. I’m going to see that she has a good rest and get her a bit fatter and then I was thinking Mr Miller’s stepmother at Harrogate might have her.’

  ‘Does she want a companion?’ asked Mr Grant.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Delia, ‘but that’s no reason why she shouldn’t. Mother has an idea of Sir Edmund marrying Miss Morris, but that’s all sentiment. Mother is an angel, but she never sees things except the way she wants them, and that’s the way things don’t go. I say, how many rides have we had?’

  Mr Grant said he should think about ten, but would ask. The oily man when appealed to said it was nine for the young lady and four for the other young lady on the cock and three for the gentleman who had got off and seven for this young gentleman and three for the young gentleman on the ostrich.

  ‘All right, that makes twenty-six,’ said Delia. ‘Four more to go. Oh, Lydia and Tony are getting off. Shall we do the other four, Hilary?’

  Mr Grant said he would love to, and offered to stand his cousin as many more as she liked. So they continued their wild career, talking eagerly whenever the music allowed and enjoying their scheme of philanthropy for Miss Morris, till Mr Grant noticed a sudden thinning of the crowd on the field and looking at his watch said it was four o’clock and they must go to the tea-tent.

  ‘Had a nice ride, sir?’ asked Mr Packer, raising his dirty face from among the machinery as his customers dismounted.

  ‘Splendid, thanks,’ said Mr Grant. ‘We might come back after tea. That’s an awfully good horse I’ve been riding.’

  ‘That’s Persimmon, sir. All called after Derby winners,’ said Mr Packer. ‘He’s getting on, but there’s life in him yet. Needs a new tail, but we all have our troubles.’

  Mr Grant asked if a shilling would be of any assistance towards a new tail and on hearing that it would, he handed it over in trust to Mr Packer, who thanked him warmly and said he would drink the young lady’s health at the Cow and Sickle when he went to get his bit of supper before the evening rush. Old Persimmon, he added, seeing a slight shade of disappointment on Mr Grant’s face at this re-appropriation of the tail-money, wouldn’t grudge a man his pint of beer, and to prevent any further argument on the subject disappeared into the machinery again.

  ‘Don’t say anything about my plan,’ said Delia to her cousin Hilary, as they walked towards the tent. ‘I want it all to be a surprise – I mean if anything did happen. And I won’t say anything about your plan.’

  ‘My plan is dead,’ said Mr Grant with sudden determination. ‘If I did have anything, would you mind if I came into your plan? I don’t want to shove in if you’d rather not, but I think your plan is so good that I’d like to be in it, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘OK,’ said Delia, ‘and it’s very nice of you.’

  Miss Lydia Keith and Mr Anthony Morland, having left the roundabout, as we saw, some time earlier, had done the round of the various side shows pretty thoroughly. At the shooting gallery Tony with his O.T.C. experience was an easy first, hitting a tin rabbit that bobbed up and down at various points on a landscape six times out of six and thus qualifying as the recipient of a small mug left over from the coronation of the summer before, while Lydia, who only fired a gun once a year at the Southbridge Flower Show, missed every time.

  ‘Come on, let’s try hitting the weight,’ said Lydia, leading the way towards an upright plank with figures on it. As they approached, Mr Spindler from the Cow took up a large blacksmith’s hammer, whirled it round his head and brought it down vehemently on a kind of anvil at the base of the plank. A weight rushed about three-quarters of the way up and fell down again.

  ‘Anyone could do that,’ said Tony scornfully, and picking up the hammer he aimed a blow at the anvil. The hammer glanced off it and Tony nearly fell over.

  ‘Here, that’s not the way,’ said Lydia, and wresting the hammer from his grasp she whirled it in the air with all the strength of her hockey-playing muscles. The weight flew up almost to the top and a large rent appeared in the armhole of her dress.

  ‘You’ve split something,’ said Tony with gloomy pleasure.

  ‘Arm, I suppose,’ said Lydia, trying to look over her own shoulder. ‘Bother! I always split something. Do you remember that awful dress of Geraldine Birkett’s that I split for her the summer before last, the one she was sick of? She’s gone to college, as if school weren’t bad enough. Let’s try the coconuts.’

  At the coconuts, for which Tony, chivalrously though ostentatiously, insisted on paying, luck was fairly even, and they were awarded a coconut between them.

  ‘You can have it,’ said Tony. ‘I’ve got the mug.’

  Lydia held the prize up and looked critically at it.

  ‘It’s awfully like someone with a nasty face all close together. I know, it’s like the Pettinger,’ said Lydia, alluding to the headmistress of the Barchester High School. ‘When I had to go into her study before I left and have a holy kind of talk, she looked just like that.’

  ‘What did she say?’ asked Tony.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Lydia indifferently. ‘Something about an opportunity for something or other. I say, this coconut weighs about a ton.’

  ‘Carry it in your hat,’ said Tony.

  This seemed to Lydia a good idea. She took off her hat which had a band of ribbon that went round the back of her head to moor it into place, put the coconut in the crown and carried it by the ribbon as if in a basket.

  ‘Come on,’ said Tony, ‘it’s nearly four and your mother said we were to meet her at the tea-tent.’

  ‘What are you going to do with your mug?’ asked Lydia, who rather coveted it.

  ‘Give it to someone, I expect,’ said Tony. ‘As a matter of fact I’m going to give it to Miss Morris. I saw her when I came.’

  Lydia asked who Miss Morris was.

  ‘She was at a picnic Mrs Brandon had,’ said Tony, ‘and she was rather decent. Mother said she was being a companion to Mrs Brandon’s aunt and had rather a dull time, so I went to the Wishing Well with her and I told her a lot about the early Christian church, because her father was a clergyman. I did early Christians in history last term, so I know them pretty well.’

  ‘Gosh!’ said Lydia. ‘Her old lady was that Miss Brandon that Father and Mother went to the funeral of. I saw Miss Brandon once, like a great black hen with feathers in her hat being rude to people. I expect she Persecuted Miss Morris. I might give Miss Morris the coconut.’

  ‘She’d never be able to open it,’ said Tony. ‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll open it at tea-time with the corkscrew in my knife, and we’ll drink the juice, and then we’ll smash the shell up with something and eat the inside.’

  Lydia said she didn’t like coconut to eat, because one kept on putting bits into one’s mouth and chewing them, but they never seemed to get really chewed and then one had to spit them out. The ribbon of her hat then gave way and the coconut rolled to the ground, so she and Tony dribbled it among the feet of the
crowd, right up to the entrance to the tea-tent.

  Mrs Brandon, after buying conscientiously all the things that were selling least well, and leaving her purchases in a heap at each stall to be fetched by Curwen later, drifted across to the Vicarage garden, where four deck chairs, six rush-bottomed chairs from the dining-room, four cane-bottomed chairs from the bedrooms and three hassocks were disposed for visitors under the beech tree. Here she disposed herself gracefully in the safest looking of the deck chairs and gave herself up to contemplation. No sound came from the Vicarage, so Mrs Brandon knew that Hettie and Cook were at the Fête. The sound of the steam organ came not unpleasantly from the far side of the field, filling Mrs Brandon with a gentle sentiment for a childhood when those well-worn tunes had been popular favourites. Hot sunshine poured down, and as a faint breeze passed over the garden it brought to Mrs Brandon the scent of Mr Miller’s heliotrope in the border beneath the study windows. It reminded her of the spider, which made her think again of Mr Miller and how a woman was needed at the Vicarage. If Mr Miller had a wife, she reflected, he could read his book aloud to her every night instead of having to come over to Stories. Ever since he had so kindly begun to read his Donne to her Mrs Brandon had lived in apprehension of further readings, at some one of which she would, she knew, go to sleep, or hopelessly fail to grapple with some quotation, or otherwise disgrace herself. If only he and Miss Morris did not get on so badly one might have done some match-making in that direction, but though Miss Morris had so nicely come to the rescue and done the notices for the Fête, it was obvious to the meanest intelligence that it was rather a sentiment of duty towards the church that had inspired her than any personal feeling for the Vicar.

  Neither had her encounter with Sir Edmund been wholly satisfactory. True she had offered to recast and type his letter to the Barchester Chronicle, but Mrs Brandon could not conceal from herself that her secretarial conscience would have made her do the same by anyone who was going to make such a fool of himself as Sir Edmund. It would also, she felt, be unkind to force anyone into marriage with Sir Edmund, if it meant having to listen to his letters to the newspaper more than once a week. If no marriage could be arranged, she must bestir herself about finding a new job for Miss Morris, before her guest had quite overwhelmed and exhausted her with doing the flowers and being grateful. She ran through the other bachelors of her acquaintance mentally, but found none suitable. Francis and Hilary were out of the question. As for Hilary, she thought a wife would not be a bad plan for him either, if only to relieve her from having to listen to any more readings of his French poet, whom she found incomprehensible and faintly distasteful.

  Then thoughts of Miss Brandon and that troublesome will, about which they surely must soon know some details, passed through her mind, naturally leading to thoughts of Mr Merton, and at this moment Francis would certainly have observed that his mother had her mysterious mischief face. She had no intention of offering Mr Merton as a husband to Miss Morris, for he seemed to her very amusing and an excellent player at that enchanting game of heartwhole flirtation which she so dearly loved and for which she found so few intelligent players. And as she remembered that Mr Merton was coming over to the Fête with the Keiths and later to Stories for a drink, she did what in the nineties would have been described as dimpling.

  ‘Lavinia,’ said an impressive voice.

  She looked up and saw Mrs Morland, in a flowered frock and a majestic kind of flowing cape which she wore apologetically.

  ‘Darling Laura, I can’t get out of this chair, but I am so glad to see you,’ said Mrs Brandon. ‘Sit down. Have you been to the Fête?’

  ‘No. Tony has gone off to the roundabout, but I saw that nice Miss Morris near the gate and she told me you might be at the Vicarage, so I came to look for you. Tony has really come to talk to Lydia Keith, who is such a nice girl, with no nonsense about her,’ said Mrs Morland, who evidently felt with Mr Edmund Sparkler that this was a high recommendation. ‘I didn’t mean to come, because I’m all behindhand with a book as usual, but Tony hasn’t got his driving licence yet, so I had to bring him.’

  ‘Tell me about the book,’ said Mrs Brandon, obeying the law of her nature.

  Mrs Morland looked piercingly at her friend, pulled her hat impatiently down on her forehead and shook her head.

  ‘It is very kind of you, Lavinia,’ she said, ‘and just like you, but certainly not. You know as well as I do that you only asked me to talk about my book because you like to be nice to people and for people to think how nice you are, and so you are, very nice, but you don’t really want to hear things, except so that you can think about other things.’

  ‘How clever you are, Laura,’ said Mrs Brandon admiringly. ‘I suppose it comes of being a novelist. I don’t know why it is, but I can’t prevent people reading things aloud to me. Mr Miller and Hilary Grant and Sir Edmund all do it, and it is so interesting but I simply can’t attend, and it makes me so nervous in case I suddenly stop thinking of having my black frock altered or whatever it is and don’t say the right thing.’

  ‘I wish I had invented you,’ said Mrs Morland, in her turn gazing with admiration at her friend. ‘No one would believe in you, but they’d all love you. What is that nice Miss Morris doing now? I did like her so much when you brought her to the picnic.’

  Mrs Brandon explained that Miss Morris was staying with her for a rest, before looking for another job, but did not divulge her plans for Miss Morris’s future.

  ‘I simply love having her,’ she said, ‘if only she wouldn’t be so grateful. It’s bad enough when she will do the flowers for me, but when she thanks me it is very alarming.’

  ‘I know,’ said Mrs Morland sagely. ‘I know. I wonder if she would like to go to George Knox’s old mother. The girl that was with her as companion has married a naval man and Mrs Knox is looking out for someone. Shall I mention it to her?’

  ‘Oh do,’ said Mrs Brandon. ‘I expect you will see her at tea. What time is it?’

  But before Mrs Morland could answer, the imposing form of Lady Norton swept into the garden, accompanied by Sir Edmund.

  ‘Don’t move, don’t move,’ said Lady Norton, who as the widow of an ex-Governor knew exactly how to put people at their ease. ‘I have just brought Mrs Grant over and left her at the Cow and Sickle with her luggage; and happening to see Sir Edmund I asked him where you were likely to be.’

  ‘I didn’t know where you were, Lavinia,’ said Sir Edmund. ‘Not my brother’s keeper or anything of that sort, but I saw that Miss Morris of yours near the tea-tent and she said you might be up here. She’s typed that letter deucedly well for me. I’d like you to see it, Lady Norton. It’s about those Council cottages.’

  But Lady Norton was so much occupied in renewing her acquaintance with Mrs Morland, for whose works she had a sincere if condescending admiration, that she did not hear.

  ‘I always say to the girl at the library,’ said her ladyship, ‘“You simply must get me a copy of Mrs Morland’s latest book at once.” I hope we shall have one for Christmas.’

  ‘Well, not exactly Christmas, but Easter,’ said Mrs Morland, with the air of offering a suitable ecclesiastical alternative. ‘Easter is early next year.’

  ‘That is all the better for your readers,’ said Lady Norton graciously. ‘What were you saying, Sir Edmund?’

  ‘You know those Council houses near the crossroads,’ said Sir Edmund. ‘Disgraceful piece of jobbery that whole thing and not even a proper damp course. I’ve written a pretty stiff letter to the Chronicle about it and I’d like to read you what I said.’

  Lady Norton, who enjoyed being consulted about things, inclined her head graciously.

  ‘Don’t tell me that you wrote that letter, Sir Edmund,’ she said when he had finished.

  ‘Not written it?’ said Sir Edmund. ‘Oh, I see what you mean. Not quite so strong as usual, eh? To tell the truth I had a little help. Miss Morris, a very nice quiet woman too, touched it up a bit and typed it for me. Yo
u know her, Lady Norton. Poor Amelia Brandon’s companion or secretary or whatever you like to call it.’