The Brandons: A Virago Modern Classic (VMC)

by Angela Thirkell

  ‘Oh, Miss Morris,’ said her ladyship thoughtfully. ‘Have you taken her on as secretary then?’

  ‘Good Lord, no,’ said Sir Edmund. ‘She’s staying with Lavinia here. Having a holiday, you know. Anyone would need a holiday after living with Amelia. De mortuis of course, but must face the facts.’

  ‘I was thinking,’ said Lady Norton, ‘that my eldest niece, the one who lives in Cape Town, is needing a secretary. She does an enormous amount of work among diseased half-castes and writes to me that the life is most interesting. She cannot offer a salary, but the opportunities are unlimited. It might suit Miss Morris. I will write to my niece about it.’

  All present felt that this was a plan which had absolutely nothing to recommend it, and comforted themselves by thinking that even with the Air Mail it would take some little time before Lady Norton could get a reply from her niece.

  While this conversation was going on the sound of a bell had been heard two or three times. No one had taken any notice of it, but as it at last impinged on Mrs Brandon’s consciousness she realised that someone must be trying to get into the Vicarage by the front door.

  ‘I wonder if we had better see what that is,’ she said. ‘Someone is ringing the front door bell, but I know Hettie and Cook are at the Fête.’

  ‘I’ll go and see,’ said Sir Edmund. ‘Bad plan, leaving a house empty. Miller ought to have a dog. Often told him so. Quis custodiet, you know.’

  ‘Perhaps they’ll go away if we do nothing,’ said Mrs Brandon hopefully, but at that moment Mrs Grant came round the corner of the house. She had discarded her jet adornments and was again wearing her coral and amber and had a wide sash of what are known as Roman stripes tied round a rather shapeless straw hat.

  ‘Oh there you are, Victoria,’ she said, advancing upon the party. ‘And Mrs Brandon and Mrs Morland and, che piacere! Sir Edmund, isn’t it.’

  ‘Haven’t seen you since poor Edward died,’ said Sir Edmund shaking hands.

  ‘I never, never think of him,’ said Mrs Grant. ‘What is gone is gone. I am afraid I am rather a pagan, but living so much as I do among the gracious rural deities of Calabria, the spirit of Greece beneath the Italian sun, one learns their laughing philosophy. Death comes graciously under that blue sky.’

  ‘Died at Frinton, didn’t he?’ said Sir Edmund. ‘Frinton’s all right if you like it. I don’t. Edward never looked well there.’

  ‘I came to find Hilary,’ said Mrs Grant, ‘but no one answered, so I gathered that the house was empty. Then I heard voices, and eccomi!’

  Mrs Brandon got up and said it was nearly tea-time and she expected they would find Hilary and the others down at the tent, so they all walked across the garden and out through the little gate into the field.

  11

  The Vicarage Fête

  2

  Francis and Miss Morris had gone as Mrs Brandon told them to the tea-tent. Here they found Mrs Spindler and several helpers arranging tables, dragging cloths onto the tables, and hurling crockery and cutlery onto the cloths. On each table Mrs Spindler put a half-pint mug with too many dahlias crammed into it.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Spindler,’ said Francis. ‘You seem pretty busy.’

  ‘That’s right, Mr Francis,’ said Mrs Spindler. ‘It never rains but it pours and we’re two short. I’m sure I don’t know how we’ll manage.’

  ‘I say, that’s too bad,’ said Francis sympathetically. ‘I suppose you haven’t got the ping-pong tables from the British Legion over here, have you?’

  ‘I’m using them for the urns and cutting the bread-and-butter, Mr Francis,’ said Mrs Spindler firmly.

  ‘Mother rather wanted them for her party,’ said Francis. ‘We shall be about twelve, or fifteen, and she wanted to get everyone together.’

  Mrs Spindler said if there hadn’t been that unpleasantness with Mrs Wheeler over the matter of that cask, she would have sent some of the scouts down for the trestle table at the garage, but being as it was she didn’t see what could be done.

  Francis, who was something of a diplomatist, saw that Mrs Spindler was not in a mood for concessions and determined to play his trump card.

  ‘It’s a pity about those ping-pong tables,’ he said, ‘because Mother has got rather a special party. This is Miss Morris, old Miss Brandon’s companion, who has been very ill. The shock of Miss Brandon’s death was too much for her. I hear my aunt never spoke again.’

  He paused to study the effect on Mrs Spindler’s expression.

  ‘I’m sure Miss Morris would like to meet you,’ he added carelessly.

  ‘Well, I’m sure,’ Mrs Spindler began, wiping her hands on a cloth. Francis without waiting to hear what she was sure of darted across to Miss Morris, who had stood a little aside and was looking at the tea-urns with a professional eye.

  ‘I say,’ he said in a low voice, ‘would you mind shaking hands with Mrs Spindler. Her husband keeps the Cow and Sickle, and if she is placated she will let Mother have the ping-pong tables for her tea-party. You wouldn’t feel equal, would you,’ he added as Miss Morris was moving towards Mrs Spindler, ‘to saying a few words about Aunt Sissie’s death. They would go down awfully well. Mrs Spindler, I want you to meet Miss Morris.’

  ‘Pleased, Miss Morris, I’m sure,’ said Mrs Spindler, holding out a damp hand.

  ‘I’m so glad to meet you, Mrs Spindler,’ said Miss Morris, shaking hands warmly.

  ‘I’m sure I am sorry about poor Miss Brandon,’ said Mrs Spindler. ‘Mr Spindler read me the piece in the paper about how she was taken, and I passed the remark to him at tea-time that I was sorry for anyone that happened to be there. I lost my own aunt twelve years ago and to this day I don’t like to think of it.’

  ‘Thank you so much, Mrs Spindler,’ said Miss Morris. ‘You must know exactly what I felt like. When the nurse told me all was over I lay down on my bed, just as I was, and never knew anything till Mrs Brandon came in and woke me.’

  This strictly truthful account gave Mrs Spindler such pleasure that she relented about the ping-pong tables at once. Two scouts were sent to borrow some wooden cases from the Garden Produce tent. On these Mrs Spindler ordered her helpers to put the urns and the bread-and-butter, while Francis and Mr Miller’s Hettie, who had brought down some rockcakes from the Vicarage, put the ping-pong tables together and found a cloth for them.

  ‘Now, I know what you want, Miss Morris,’ said Mrs Spindler. ‘A nice cup of tea. I’ve just got the big urn on the boil, but what with being two short and behindhand with the bread-and-butter, I really hardly know where I am.’

  ‘I would love a cup of tea, thank you,’ said Miss Morris. ‘That is most refreshing. I suppose I couldn’t help you with the bread-and-butter?’

  ‘Really, Miss Morris, you mustn’t think of such a thing,’ said Mrs Spindler, shocked but gratified.

  ‘You’d better let Miss Morris do her worst, Mrs Spindler,’ said Francis. ‘Her father was a clergyman and what she doesn’t know about parish teas isn’t worth knowing. Up, Miss Morris, and at them!’

  ‘Well, if Miss Morris doesn’t mind,’ said Mrs Spindler.

  Miss Morris finished her cup of tea and took out of her large sensible bag a neatly folded overall, which she explained she had brought in case. A moment later she was buttering and slicing tin loaves with a calm competence that overpowered Mrs Spindler and the other helpers. Francis was so enchanted by the sight that he borrowed a clean glass-cloth from Mrs Spindler, tied it round him like an apron, and devoted himself to cutting up enormous slabs of cake and making all Mrs Spindler’s assistants giggle. Here he was presently found by Noel Merton, who had been distracted from his search for Mrs Brandon by a request from Mr Miller to judge the sack-races. They had discovered, in the intervals of disqualifying boys who deliberately bumped into others, that Mrs Brandon was known to them both.

  ‘What a perfectly delightful woman Mrs Brandon is,’ said Mr Merton. ‘Isn’t Miss Morris, Miss Brandon’s companion, staying with her n
ow? I am sure that boy with red hair isn’t running under Queensberry rules. He has got one of his feet out of the sack.’

  ‘Dear, dear, no,’ said Mr Miller. ‘Teddy! Teddy Thatcher! Come here.’

  Teddy shuffled up to him.

  ‘Let me look at your sack,’ said Mr Miller. ‘Now that won’t do at all. Your foot is right out of the sack.’

  ‘Please sir, it had a hole in it,’ said Teddy.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said the Vicar sharply. ‘I looked at all the sacks myself. Let me see.’

  A closer examination showed that a hole had been cut in the corner and Teddy Thatcher was excommunicated.

  ‘I’m always so glad the Scoutmaster isn’t here when that sort of thing happens,’ said the Vicar. ‘He will talk about honour.’

  ‘How dreadful,’ said Mr Merton sympathetically.

  ‘It makes me hot and cold,’ said Mr Miller. ‘What is it, Teddy? Oh, it was your new pocketknife, was it? Well, don’t do it again. Run and get another sack and you can go in for the under-fourteen race. Yes, Miss Morris is with Mrs Brandon at present.’

  ‘I thought she seemed a very pleasant, competent person when I once saw her at the Abbey,’ said Mr Merton.

  ‘Very pleasant indeed. Her future is a source of considerable anxiety to me,’ said Mr Miller, struggling vainly to untie the sack from the neck of one of the young Turpins, who was convinced that he would have to spend the rest of his life in it, armless and legless. ‘It’s all right, Bobby, don’t cry. There you are! Yes; the question of finding another situation arises. Mrs Brandon and I have had a talk about it, but so far there is nothing definite in view.’

  ‘Oh well, I expect it will be all right,’ said Mr Merton in what the Vicar felt to be rather a callous way. Then the Vicar blamed himself for imputing evil motives and by that time he was needed to judge the hat-trimming competition, and Mr Merton, gently abstracting himself from these joys, strolled in the direction of the tea-tent where, as we have already said, he found Francis and Miss Morris whom he entertained with small talk, refusing resolutely to cut cake or fill milk jugs.

  At four o’clock all Mrs Brandon’s guests converged upon the tea-tent, including Lydia’s parents, Mr and Mrs Keith, who are quite immaterial to the progress of this book, except in so far as they made the number up to fourteen, thus causing a good deal of distraction. Mrs Brandon, in consultation with Mrs Spindler, counted the party four times, getting a different result each time, partly because they never remembered if Miss Morris and Francis were guests or helpers.

  ‘If we really are fourteen we can’t possibly fit into the ping-pong tables,’ said Mrs Brandon. ‘And I had forgotten Mr Miller. If he joins us we shall be fifteen. Can we put another table up to these, Mrs Spindler?’

  ‘Don’t trouble about me. I never take tea,’ said Lady Norton, sitting down on one of the school chairs that had been lent for the occasion.

  ‘Then that makes thirteen,’ said Mrs Brandon helplessly.

  Mrs Grant threw out her hand in what she explained was a Calabrian gesture, useful to ward off the evil eye.

  ‘No, darling, it is fourteen all right,’ said Francis. ‘Lady Norton will be one of us, even if she doesn’t have any refreshment. It’s the spirit of the thing that counts. Couldn’t we have that little table near the door, Mrs Spindler?’

  ‘Well, Mr Francis, I did put it there because it’s a bit uneven in the legs,’ said Mrs Spindler. ‘Of course you could have it.’

  ‘Well, if we could, we can,’ said Francis. ‘Will you get it, Tony.’

  Tony Morland picked the table up, balanced it legs upwards on his head and so carried it across the tent to the loudly expressed terror of all the grown-ups and the even more loudly expressed admiration of Delia and Lydia.

  ‘I often carry desks about the form room like that,’ said Tony to the girls as he set the table down.

  ‘What does your master say?’ asked Delia, slightly incredulous.

  ‘He doesn’t say anything,’ said Tony. ‘I have them all well under my thumb except Mr Carter. I do history with him and he gives us some jolly useful notes so I let him do what he likes. Come on, I’m going to eat twenty sandwiches.’

  ‘Bravo!’ cried Mrs Grant. ‘I shall come and sit with you and we will have great fun at our end of the table.’

  Anyone else would have been put off by the mask of stolid indifference, thinly masking hatred and contempt, immediately assumed by the three young people, but Mrs Grant was used to breaking down the barriers between herself and the unwilling peasantry of Calabria, and took her seat at the end of the table with Delia, Lydia and Tony.

  ‘Mr Merton, you must sit by me,’ said Mrs Brandon, ‘and meet Lady Norton.’

  Mr Merton said he would love to. Mr Grant, overhearing this, thought some very scornful thoughts about women and took refuge with Mrs Morland who would, he felt, appreciate hearing a little more about Jehan le Capet. Francis and Miss Morris, removing their aprons, joined the party at the children’s end as Mrs Grant playfully called it. The conversation at the grown-up end was necessarily a little dull, including as it did Lady Norton and Mr and Mrs Keith, though Mr Merton and Mrs Brandon seemed to find it amusing enough.

  ‘I hope,’ said Mr Merton, ‘that having tea with you now is without prejudice to my having a glass of sherry with you later. I rather particularly want to see you.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Mrs Brandon. ‘Won’t Mr and Mrs Keith come too?’

  ‘I think not,’ said Mr Merton firmly. ‘I have got my own car with me and if you don’t mind my bringing Lydia, who clings to me with very flattering affection, we will let the Keiths go home by themselves. In any case they wouldn’t stay long, and I know Lydia won’t be happy till she has done all the side shows.’

  ‘What a nice girl she is,’ said Mrs Brandon. ‘She and Delia were at Barchester High School and went to Paris when they left, but not to the same family.’

  ‘She is one of the nicest girls I know,’ said Mr Merton, ‘and wonderfully toned down since she went to Paris, though she doesn’t seem to have learnt any French there.’

  A hubbub from the far end of the table now attracted everyone’s attention to the finished product of Paris who, together with Delia and Tony Morland, was having a friendly discussion with Mrs Grant about cruelty to animals. The conversation had begun by Mrs Grant loudly lamenting the cruelty involved in allowing a small pony, property of the grocer, to be let out at threepence a ride for children.

  ‘I know that pony,’ said Lydia. ‘He used to belong to the butcher at Southbridge. He was called Toby then, but the man who has him now didn’t like Toby, so he called him Punch.’

  ‘That is typically English,’ said Mrs Grant, ‘not to allow an animal any right even in its own name. But if you know that animal’s owner, Miss Keith, you should protest. I saw it with my own eyes, with no less than two children on its back at once, being beaten with a stick to make it trot up and down the field.’

  ‘If that is Simpson’s pony,’ said Delia, joining in the fray, ‘you have to beat him. I broke one of Mother’s parasols over his back two years ago when I had him in the old governess cart for fun.’

  ‘I wish I’d been there,’ said Tony, his eyes gleaming. ‘I’d have stuck a pin into a stick and jabbed him, all very literary.’

  ‘Have you ever heard of St Francis?’ said Mrs Grant meaningly to Tony.

  ‘Yes, I know all about him. We did him in some notes on the monastic orders last term,’ said Tony negligently. ‘If you want to find out anything about him I can give you the names of one or two really good books. I expect you only know the Brother Elderberry kind. I wrote a pretty good essay on the Influence of the Poverello on Contemporary Society.’

  ‘And do you know what he called animals?’ asked Mrs Grant, almost threateningly.

  Tony’s face assumed a world-weary air which his mother, had she not been so immersed in le Capet, or Dr Ford, had he been present, would at once have recognised as a preparation fo
r showing off. But Lydia, who detested what she called rot, which meant broadly anything she didn’t agree with, was ready with an answer before Tony could collect his forces.

  ‘Of course he called them brother and sister and all that,’ said she, dominating that end of the table by her powerful voice, ‘but that’s nothing to go by. I mean in Italian you call people anything. It’s a very rich language, though I must say I don’t know a frightful lot of it, but what’s the use of learning a language if you aren’t going there and there’s nothing to read except things like Dante. But St Francis lived in the twelfth century – oh, all right, Tony, thirteenth century then, twelve hundreds, it’s all the same thing, and you could easily call people brothers and sisters because there weren’t so many things to call. I mean it would be absolutely different now with aeroplanes and radio and gasmasks and all that. Anyway it was a pity St Francis went off the deep end about animals like that, because it simply set the Italians against animals for life and they’ve been doing cruelty to animals ever since. It’s in the blood too of course. Look at the ancient Romans. Of course Virgil had some quite modern ideas about kindness to bees in the Georgics, but he tells you to pull their wings off all the same, and I expect he’d have made some jolly good hexameters about beating Simpson’s pony if he’d known it. And calling people brothers and sisters doesn’t really mean anything.’