by Ursula Bloom
She began to think what it would be like to have the place entirely her own. Maxwell Hewlitt could manage it for her; already she was beginning to think of him as Maxwell Hewlitt, and not as the Colonel any more. He had said that if a little more capital was put into it, then undoubtedly the place would pay, and she could afford to put the extra money into it. It would be delightful to live here for ever. The school was fading permanently out of her life. Those awful mornings when she arrived in her inferior clothes because Miss Halifax liked her mistresses to be dressed so as not to attract undue attention to themselves, which meant that they must look dowdy.
Those beastly little girls who did not wish to learn a thing. The beastlier little swots who asked awkward questions, bobbing up with ‘Please, Miss Marvin’. Damn the little girls!
Now they were done with. There would be no more living in a cheap bed-sitter, always in horror of what the landlady might say or how soon she would turn her out if she got into a bad mood. The days of ‘God is Love’ hung over a cheap bedstead, its thin blankets unskilfully mended, were over. There would be no more mats slipping on overdone lino, for there is too much lino in the bedsitter, there is too much badly darned blanket and rutty mattress.
Now Miss Marvin could live in a palace, and for ever. Her room was carpeted so luxuriously that she did not know if she was walking on a moss bank or not. She looked up at the delicate soft pink of the walls, with the one exquisite picture of flowers which was lit by a shaded light; she glanced at the glistening chandelier of crystal, and her own little escritoire. The new flowers for the day were being brought in by a manservant in white linen. There were huge bowls of roses, the sort she never dared to look at in England because of their flagrant expensiveness. Here there was nothing of the simple bunch of violets and a couple of daffs bought cheaply at the end of the day, because they probably wouldn’t last until tomorrow. Here was something so different that it made her face reflect its beauty. Here was profusion. Joy. Luxury.
She wrote a hasty postscript to Miss Halifax’s letter, and it stimulated her to be able to put it there:
‘If you think I’m coming back, you’re wrong.
Think again, and be damned to your silly school!’
‘That’ll shake her!’ she thought, and gave it to the man to post before she had time to repent.
Miss Halifax and the Preb. had had a row on the very morning when the letter arrived.
They had now finished the first ten days of the holiday together in the rectory, and it had been vile. The weather was not doing its best to help; the mocking fitful sunshine lured her out and then laughed to see her skin dried by a bleak East wind with ice in its teeth. The rectory was extremely cold, because the heating was elementary, and the Preb. was short of coal. Although he had a lot of coke (one of the churchwardens was in this line of life), it was not conducive to cosiness. It gave Miss Halifax a sore throat, and she hated it.
The food was insufficient. At first she had tolerated the nasty little meals and had fortified herself by going out and buying sticky buns at the shop; she had to eat them in a ditch, which was chilly, but it would never do to let the Preb. know what was afoot. In this way she heaped up her resources for lunch.
She was getting more than a little tired of frugality. She thought it very much too bad if she ‒ a guest ‒ couldn’t be fed properly. She had even tried one night to come down again after she was supposed to have gone to bed, and to raid the pantry. But the pantry was pruned to sparseness and she stubbed her toe badly on an empty bread bin in the corner, her torch giving out before she found anything more than a stale rock cake. So that had not worked.
One day at lunch the storm broke. It was the boiled rice that did it. The row lasted through to tea, and when supper came Miss Halifax got her own back by eating all the Preb’s cheese ration. Then the row burst again.
He said with brutal candour, which she thought most ungentlemanly, that if she didn’t like it she could go home. The sickening part was that Miss Halifax couldn’t go home, for before leaving she had arranged to have her rooms distempered. They were in a shocking state and had needed doing so badly that her hand had been forced. The man she had engaged, the cheapest she could get, had insisted on taking his own time at the job, or he wouldn’t do it. She had received a note only yesterday to the effect that the rooms were not getting on at all, and everything was higgledy-piggledy, as the maid wrote.
There was nowhere for Miss Halifax to go, save the inn, and she did not want to spend her hard-earned money that way. So she did not say that most certainly she would go home (as she was bursting to do); she said that she was sorry if she had offended.
‘Nothing you say,’ said the Preb., ‘can give me back my cheese ration.’ He felt bitter for he was that sort of a man. It was a most uncomfortable evening, and next morning when Miss Halifax got down to breakfast, still privately furious, there was the letter with the French stamp on it.
She opened the letter, but that was after she had noticed that it was the morning for that filthy dish the Preb’s help called kedgeree, which meant more boiled rice.
The letter started pleasantly enough, though Miss Halifax disliked the flimsy paper on which it was written, and the faint scent that eddied from the sheet, almost as though the writer had worn some delicious perfume.
The letter was all right, but as some farseeing philosopher once said, the pith of a woman’s letter lies in the postscript. When she came to the postscript, Miss Halifax could not believe that it was true. She shrank from the horror and felt like one gutted.
‘If you think I’m coming back, you’re wrong.
Think again, and be damned to your silly school!’
For the first time in her life Miss Halifax had hysterics. The Preb. was engaged with the new copy of the Church Times when it happened, and he glanced up in horror. He knew already that he had made a great mistake in asking her here, it never did to have relations staying with one, for they always took liberties because they were relations, and it was an impossible situation. He could not forget that she had demolished his cheese ration!
‘Shut up!’ said he.
Miss Halifax couldn’t shut up, for the fact that anyone could call St. Helena’s a silly school had been the final insult. ‘Libel,’ she thought, ‘surely the law of libel would help her? She would go down to Cap Rabat and murder that dreadful Miss Marvin whom she had never liked and who had always been a rebel.’
‘What’s the matter?’ asked the Preb.
‘Be quiet!’ said she, then collapsed again, remembering that if she said too much she would be back in her semi-distempered bedroom at the deserted school. She could not possibly use the bedroom to sleep in whilst the man came into it distempering it. It would be almost like sleeping with a man. ‘I’m going mad,’ she howled.
‘You’re driving everyone else mad,’ remarked the Preb. ‘Why you don’t go home, I don’t know.’
‘Because they’re doing out my bedroom.’
‘Then sleep on the sitting-room sofa, sleep in a dormitory, do something!’
‘The dormitories are much too uncomfortable,’ she said before she had time to think.
‘That’s a good advertisement for your silly school!’ said he.
Miss Halifax had always believed in her school; she fondly preserved her faith in it, because there she was God, and, as God, reigned supreme over her subjects. Within the sacred precincts of ‘dorms’ and classrooms, none dared to argue with her; none dared to express any opinion that had not originally been her own. She knew that. In the profound sanctity of her study she could say what she liked, do what she liked, and conduct life as she liked, because she was surrounded by a noble army of yes-mistresses and yes-pupils. Yet here in a few short minutes, two people ‒ her own cousin, and that atrocious woman had turned on her. They thought her school was silly.
‘How dare you?’ she enquired.
He did dare.
There was a good deal of the very selfsame nature i
n himself, and nothing suited him better than to be rude about that school. Privately he had always hated school marms since the time when, as a little boy, he had unfortunately thrown a snowball at a girls’ school together with other little boys who thought this would exhibit the triumph of the stronger sex. His snowball had had a stone in it! There had been the most appalling sound of shattering glass, and he had been so horrified that he had not been able to run, but had stayed rooted to the spot. He had been the one who had been caught by a large big-boned female in giglamps; she had bounded out of the schoolroom, had caught him by the scruff of the neck, and with the ruler that she was carrying she dealt him several sharp slaps where nature had intended him to receive them. He had always had a grudge against women for that, for other little boys had seen the performance; other little boys hiding behind the evergreens had laughed themselves sick at the state of the one who had been caught. He could never forgive women.
Now he let her have it. ‘Don’t you talk to me like that!’ he informed her, with austerity in his tone. ‘You can’t say, “How dare you?” to me.’
‘I can,’ said Miss Halifax, ‘and I shall. I will not be spoken to like that. My school isn’t silly.’
‘Others think it ridiculous,’ announced the Preb. The result of this most regrettable incident was that shortly after it had ceased, Miss Halifax and her box were in the train returning to Brestonbury and St. Helena’s. She arrived home unexpectedly. The two maids in residence had not supposed that she would return for some time; they had had fun with the decorator, who was ‘rather a one’, and had decided to give a merry little tea party in his honour. The whole place was in dreadful disorder. To make things convivial, the tea party was being conducted in Miss Halifax’s private study, where the chairs were more comfortable, and anyway the old cat would never know, they told themselves, so why worry?
Coming up the drive, Miss Halifax had a faint idea that the lights were on in her study, which faced the wrong way and was always dark. She couldn’t believe it. Had the maids been carelessly running up her electric light bill? How irritating! She clicked her teeth together in petulant annoyance. Her ingrained habit of always finding out everything she could, however unwarrantable the means she employed, caused her to cross the lawn, and after dumping her case in the laurels, go on tiptoe through the shrubberies. If she had not been well acquainted with the ways of snapping twigs and crackling dead leaves, she would never have dared it. But there was little in that line that Miss Halifax did not know, and she got through the shrubberies admirably quietly.
She came unawares on to the house. There was no mistake at all about what was going on, because screams of laughter and applause greeted her. To make the party go, Doreen ‒ one of the maids ‒ had put on Miss Halifax’s sacred cap and gown. She was now strutting down the centre of the room to the intense amusement of the others, singing
Old Miss Halifax walks like that,
Pitter patter pitter patter pitter patter pat.
This couldn’t be happening! They wouldn’t dare! ‘None of this is true, it is a nightmare that I’m going through,’ she thought in agony as she abruptly entered the room.
‘What is going on here?’ she asked in her ‘attention, class!’ manner.
It was a triumph to send them home, and Doreen wept about it, which was reassuring, but it was not entirely a triumph, for when they had gone Miss Halifax came to the awful realisation that now somebody else would have to finish her bedroom; also there were no maids left to cope with her living here in the deserted school. She became aware of the fact that she would have to go to the local inn and see if they could put her up for a couple of nights until she could make other arrangements.
There was something most ignominious in a headmistress, one who had taken a history tripos, having to go into the laurels to retrieve her suitcase, and then hide herself to the Shepherd and his Dog, to see if they could give her a room. Her cup was indeed full; very irritating, she kept saying to herself, really so very irritating.
They didn’t like Miss Halifax at the Shepherd and his Dog, that was plain from the beginning of her enquiry, but they let her have a room, a most unpleasant room, with a large capacious wash stand, a ewer and basin that did not match, and no water in the ewer. There was an iron bedstead, and the mattress was little more than an iron holder, but there was nothing that she could do about it. Anyway, they did promise her early morning tea. She noted that her window did not open, and from it there was a forlorn view towards Manchester across a string of grey roofs that were shiny with rain, and judging by the look of the sky they would soon be shinier still.
‘I hate life,’ thought Miss Halifax bitterly, ‘and it is all Miss Marvin’s fault. Drat the woman! How dare she behave like this!’
Seven
LES PAPILLONS
Miss Marvin was making all the proper negotiations for the purchase of Les Papillons hotel, amiably prompted by Colonel Hewlitt. Purchasing an hotel seemed ridiculously easy.
The extraordinary thing was that when you came into money on this grand scale, everything was made so absurdly easy by it. Also, people immediately became much nicer. There was no more quiet, offhand rudeness in shops, where assistants noticeably had no desire to serve you; no more cheap pensions treating you as though you were something they actively disliked, yet trimming that dislike with the thin veneer of coldness, which made it even harder to bear. Now everyone loved her.
She bought herself a little car; it was a very pleasant little pale grey one with darker grey velvet seats, and an enchanting rug to match. Having done this, her next move was to engage the services of a young man to teach her to drive. Jean was not really a chauffeur, his people had lost a great deal in the war, and these days his maman had turned the family château into a luxurious hotel, whilst he taught people to drive cars. Good-looking and thirty-five perhaps, with a smiling mouth that turned up at the corners in a couple of delicious cupids’ bows, and very bright eyes. He had an air of mystery. His eyes were like sloes, of course, for here everybody had sloes for eyes, but even Miss Marvin decided that they were very nice sloes!
Miss Marvin learnt that he was a Comte, but in France everyone seemed to be a Comte, and all of them were most agreeable.
Every morning she and Jean went into what the French call a country lane off the Grande Corniche to study the gentle art, and she found driving extremely difficult. She had always thought that driving a car would be on the same principle as riding the bicycle at home. One mounted the thing and started off; one applied the brake in emergencies, and if the brake didn’t work one fell off. But driving a car is not on the same principle at all. The brake seemed to be of small importance compared to the ever-present anxiety as to which gear she was in. Everything depended on the gears. You did not just apply the brake, you had to go for the right gear. And could she get it? She could not! It was mysterious. Why invent a gear when a perfectly safe method of stopping had been acceptable for years by the far simpler arrangement of trusting to the brake?
After a few days the complication of the gears got better, or she resigned herself to the system, but although at first she had been sure that she would never drive a car at all, now a strong measure of hope flickered in her.
On their outings, she learnt a little about the mysterious Jean, and told him about herself.
‘You shouldn’t encourage that fellow,’ Francis told her one day when she got home and brought Jean in for a drink. Jean had the attractive manners, and he drank gaily. He obviously did not find Francis Lorimer entertaining, treating him with a friendly if slightly cynical aloofness.
After Jean had gone, Francis stayed and had a couple of champagne cocktails, for these days Miss Marvin never served anything but champagne to her guests, and as they seemed satisfied she did not see that a change was indicated. Francis became reproachful and he gave her a little lecture on the gentle art of being non-encouraging.
‘But he’s been nice to me,’ said Miss Marvin.
‘Well, you’re employing him; you’re rich, everyone is nice to rich people.’
‘Does that include yourself?’ she asked, dismayed.
‘Oh, don’t be absurd! To me any Englishwoman is highly attractive, because I am an Englishman and I just adore my native country. Sometimes it is a trifle lonely on the Riviera, and one hungers for home,’ and he sighed heavily.
She had not quite believed what Colonel Hewlitt had told her about Francis, but thought that he was probably a rich young man living out here because he didn’t get on at home and preferred Cap Rabat to England, as she did. She imagined that most certainly he had private means, for almost everybody here declared that they hadn’t a bob, but as nobody can live on air and the south of France was quite expensive, that was one of those social fibs.
‘I have about fifty pounds a year of my own,’ he said dejectedly. ‘I like nice things (who doesn’t?), I am incredibly sensitive, you must have seen that, haven’t you? Your sympathy and understanding have appealed to me from the very first moment that I saw you, and I knew that you would understand. We think along the same wavelength.’
In point of fact Miss Marvin had not understood.
Vaguely she said, ‘Oh?’
It seemed to Miss Marvin that he was condemning Jean for trying to make a decent living by teaching motoring, when all the time he himself was doing something most peculiar. He really was a lounge lizard. Until now she had thought that that was a name invented by some cynic and had no real meaning, but now she was horribly afraid that this was not so. Francis was one of them.
She changed her manner. There was still sufficient of the school marm left in her personality for her to be able to summon on demand that abrupt, alarming manner which had at times sent all sorts of little girls into the dithers.
She said, ‘Really, Mr. Lorimer, I don’t know that I am sympathetic or understanding. Some of the behaviour out here is most extraordinary, and I should have thought impossible. I am so glad one doesn’t find it like this in Manchester.’