by Amy Myers
Now the water really was cold. Ugh! She hurried over her ablutions, impatient now for the day to get going as she struggled into corset and stockings. She had already put on her new straight-skirted costume when she remembered she was going for a walk with Reggie Hunney this afternoon. Some consolation for the coming disaster of luncheon. Still, she couldn’t wear her blue walking skirt for church and anyway she’d forgotten to ask Harriet to clean the bottom from last week’s mud splashes. She thought enviously of the frightful Patricia Swinford-Browne and her daring appearance in old-fashioned bloomers on her bicycle. A brief appearance, for Patricia’s mother had all but fainted. All the same, trousers, or at least divided skirts, were entirely sensible forms of dress. She regarded herself critically in the mirror, thankful that for once her wayward hair had condescended to be swept up reasonably neatly and to remain there shackled firmly with pins. Perhaps the day wouldn’t be so bad after all. She raced down the stairs to family prayers and breakfast. Dear Aunt Tilly, still not recovered from the nose and throat problems that had brought her here a few days to convalesce, would be deputising for Father and Mother who were still at early Easter Celebration. Tilly was next in seniority, but it was hardly fair on her, Caroline thought. There was something a little odd about this visit, for her aunt was very vague about how long she intended to stay. She could not, Caroline wondered, by any chance have quarrelled with Grandmother? No, surely not; she was far too quiet and unassuming to quarrel with anybody.
Caroline was a little late in arriving at prayers and the Dibbles, Agnes, Harriet and Myrtle were already sitting in their row. So was eighteen-year-old Felicia who was the most quietly organised of them all, as well as bidding fair to becoming the most startlingly beautiful with her dark hair and deep brown eyes. Amazingly, Isabel was already here, and Phoebe and George were sauntering up behind her with the lackadaisical privileges of youth at sixteen and fifteen respectively.
‘Beastly shame,’ glowered George.
‘What is?’ his elder sister enquired. George’s dislikes varied from day to day.
‘Ever-so, ever-so Edith and What-a-good-fellow-am-I William coming to lunch, of course.’
Caroline laughed at her brother’s apt characterisation of the Swinford-Brownes. Emboldened, George continued: ‘Not to mention Pasty Patricia and Rainbow Robert.’
‘Rainbow?’
‘Have you seen his spotted waistcoats? And his stocks. Striped! I ask you.’ George spoke with the lordly disgust of the youngster for his elders. Not much elder, though. Robert must be twenty-six by now, Caroline guessed, without much interest, as she took her place for prayer.
‘Hast delivered us from the power of our enemy …’ Tilly was intoning, as Caroline brought herself back with a start to ‘Boot parade’, so dubbed from time immemorial because of the row of undersides of servants’ boots in front of her. She was hungry, and breakfast, awaiting them in chafing dishes on the sideboard, smelled good. After prayers, George would bear in the traditional Easter eggs, painted with caricatures – his own work. Caroline began to feel happy again, for life in the Rectory tended to be regulated not by months, or even by seasons, but by the Church calendar, which chimed out the high points, like the hours on Mother’s beloved French Cupid clock: Advent, ding dong, ‘Lo He comes with clouds descending’, help wash and pick over the fruit for the Christmas puddings, Christmas Even, ding dong, decorate the church with greenery, holly, mistletoe, and rosemary, Solemn Evensong; Christmas, ding dong, ‘Born this happy morning’, carols, candles, goose, presents, love and laughter; Epiphany, ding dong, ‘Brightest and best of the sons of the morning’, blessing the orchards or apple howling (according to whether you used the old religion’s terms or the new, Father had explained); Candlemas, ‘Let there be light’, Septuagesima, sing the Benedicite; Lent; Passiontide; Holy Week, and now Easter, which meant that the huge stove in the Rectory entrance hall would stop spreading its warm glow until Michaelmas.
Soon summer and autumn would tumble over themselves with activity. Church Helpers’ Supper, the Sunday school treat, fêtes at Rectory and Manor, and Harvest Supper were but a few of them. The village had its own seasons; hoops, tops, marbles, Ladyday and Michaelmas, for instance, when the farm labourers got bonuses and bought their new boots for the year from old Sammy Farthing. In August the hop-pickers swarmed down from London, in autumn the stonebreakers arrived to break up the huge piles of flints for road-mending. The Rectory too had its immutable timetable: ‘Dibbles day’, for a massive spring-cleaning when carpets were pounded and cleaned with vinegar and water, monkey soap made for the coming year, clothes put away with moth-balls; lavender day, when the church altar cupboard drawers received their new season’s bunches to keep insects away from the purificators and napkins – Caroline’s favourite job as a child; and there were bottling days, wine-making days, chutney and preserving days, all sorts of days, each with its own special flavour.
The more she fretted for new fields to conquer, the more important the measured clock of the Rectory year seemed. And she still could not understand why today it had to be changed.
Elizabeth Lilley closed the heavy front door behind her. The chill of waiting in the porch for the sake of avoiding any more questions about luncheon today was worth it. By the time she and Laurence had returned for breakfast, the family had departed save for George, still munching his ravenous way through toast and marmalade. Her genuinely enthusiastic reception of the egg he had painted for her, complete with caricature of Grandmother Buckford (which she had hastily whipped away before Laurence could see it) had temporarily banished his opposition to the advent of the Swinford-Brownes for luncheon, just as she had hoped. Much the best way to avoid dispute. The cloudy morning was dithering between declaring itself spring and retreating back to the uncertainties of March. She felt rather the same herself: in a few moments she must walk to the church with Laurence thus declaring herself a symbol. To be within the walls of the Rectory with her family would be her preference.
‘Skulking, Elizabeth?’
Tilly had found her out, and come to join her in the porch. Elizabeth liked Tilly though they had little in common and treated each other with caution. One of the few things they did share, however, was a lack of interest in fashion, Tilly because she thought it of no importance, though her tall spare figure and innate grace made her always look smart and stylish, Elizabeth because her striking good looks and mature figure needed little pampering; she wore what colours and styles she chose, not what fashion houses and magazines dictated.
‘Listening to the cuckoo, Tilly.’
You’ve got at least one inside, Tilly thought to herself, but did not speak aloud. This Mother Hen had no sense of humour where her chicks were concerned. ‘The bluebells will be out soon,’ she commented brightly.
Elizabeth did laugh at this. ‘All right. Skulking. Hatted and gloved to go on parade three-quarters-of-an-hour early for once.’
‘I’m honoured.’ Laurence Lilley, carrying stole and chasuble over his arm, came to join his wife. When Laurence saw Tilly as well, he raised his eyebrows even higher. ‘I am doubly honoured. Why so early?’
Elizabeth brushed this aside. ‘Have you talked to Isabel again, Laurence?’
He pulled a face. ‘No chance. I had to return to the vestry and don my Solomon’s mantle to settle a dispute between Mrs Mabel Thorn and Mrs Lettice as to which fair linen cloth should be laid for the Eucharist. It left no time for family discussions. You must have noticed Mrs Lettice had laid her grandmother’s cloth, elegantly trimmed with lace and far too Roman for Mrs Thorn. She insisted on its being changed for this service.’
‘Isn’t that the sacristan’s job?’ Elizabeth asked mildly. She hadn’t noticed, of course. She had been carried away with the music and majesty of Easter.
‘Poor old Bertram has only held the position since Lady Day, Elizabeth, and Mrs Lettice is of Mutter stock. If I set him to resolve a quarrel between a Mutter and a Thorn, he’ll faint into the grave Job Fisher has just fini
shed digging.’
‘Laurence!’ Elizabeth was still capable of being taken aback when her husband joked on ‘church ground’. To her, the division between the formality of Church and the rumbustious informality of home was absolute.
‘Come, Elizabeth. We are adult. I meant no disrespect.’ He paused. ‘And Isabel, too, is adult, you must remember. She makes her own choice.’
It was Tilly who built the bridge. ‘They’re all sensible children, Elizabeth, thanks to you both. They know what they want.’
‘But are they right?’ Elizabeth’s anxiety gripped her with a painful intensity, though no sign of it appeared on her placid face. Four daughters, one son, all her babies. No, that was not all, for there had been her darling Millicent, and the gap her baby left was as real to her as the five living children: Isabel, the butterfly that blindly fluttered where it chose; Caroline, the bird that longed to fly, save in her heart of hearts; Felicia, who wanted only to stay close in the nest; Phoebe the ugly duckling – no, that was wrong, for Phoebe was not ugly, though the future might be easier if she were; and George, the colt that would one day soon become a thoroughbred like his father. Did they all know what they wanted? It is a wise mother who knows her own child, the saying went. Was she wise? Did she know them? Probably not, but she was a peaceful haven from stormy seas. Today even Elizabeth could see the prospect of troubled waters.
‘Caroline, may I walk to church with you?’
Caroline glanced up from her struggles to stab her hatpin into the newly cleaned hat as she sensed the restrained excitement in Felicia’s voice. Her sister was fidgeting on the threshold of the room, her heavy hair carefully swept up under the rose velvet hat. Felicia was gifted with her hands, she had long sensitive fingers, which Caroline envied, as if she expressed through them, whether making a hat, a cake or drawing a wild flower, the inner feelings she kept so firmly to herself. Her other sisters tended to take little notice of her. Isabel was somewhat scornful, sixteen-year-old Phoebe wary, for although closer in age they had nothing in common. Caroline felt fiercely protective towards her, especially since the fiasco of the finishing school. Pushed into it by Grandmother, she had been so unhappy that Father had taken her away after only six months. Yet sometimes Caroline felt Felicia might have a strong inner core that would sustain her however rough the waters.
‘I have to tackle Mrs Dibble first. Mother’s orders.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘Where’s Isabel?’ Caroline was slightly surprised. Usually Felicia avoided any possibility of conflict with Mrs Dibble, whom she found intimidating.
‘She had a headache. Father excused her.’
‘She was well enough half an hour ago.’
Mrs Margaret Dibble, together with her husband Percy, odd-job man, gardener, boilerman and sometime driver, dominated the small servants’ hall. Since the departure of Nanny Oates her position had been undisputed. The Dibbles’ younger son Fred (their two older children, a boy and a girl, had married and moved away) was also nominally one of the staff, but no one talked a great deal about Fred. At nineteen, he affably wandered his way through a life bounded by the Rectory, for he could not cope with the world outside.
When Caroline saw the cook-housekeepers of her friends’ homes, she wondered how Mrs Dibble had escaped the mould. The comfortable plump bodies that stomped heavily round her friends’ kitchens bore no relation to Mrs Dibble. She was small and quick, with lithe movements, and she bustled rather than clonked across the floor. Her eyes were like a robin’s; she watched, and then she hopped. Mrs Dibble was all-seeing, all-doing, the grand vizier to her mother’s sultan.
Caroline and Felicia found her up to her wrists in pastry mix, singing in her surprisingly deep, lusty voice: ‘Once he died, our souls to save; Where thy victory, O grave?’ Mrs Dibble saw it as her duty to uphold the Rectory’s spiritual values at all times, and believed her cooking was only possible with the Lord’s blessing. She and Mother did not always see eye to eye as a result, and Caroline found herself a frequent but unwilling go-between when there were awkward tasks to perform. As now.
‘As we have guests,’ she began brightly, ‘we wondered whether you still had time to make your lovely pond pudding, Mrs Dibble. They –’
Mrs Dibble slowly extracted her hands from her basin, rolled up the mix and slapped it on the marble slab. ‘That’s Palm Sunday, not Easter, Miss Caroline. Easter’s apple and primrose pie, as you well know.’
‘Yes, but –’
‘I daren’t, Miss Caroline.’ Mrs Dibble relented into humanity. ‘Thirteen for dinner. It’ll be unaccountable bad, that I can tell you.’ Her religion was a pastry mix in itself, Caroline thought, old and new mixed with a dash of Dibble.
‘I thought you always told us the sun danced for joy on Easter morning?’ Felicia ventured.
‘That I did, and see it’s cloudy already. Praise the Lord,’ Mrs Dibble added and picked up the rolling pin, having won the argument. Caroline stole one of the precious new mint shoots to chew and retreated in defeat. ‘I’ll do you a Bible cake,’ was thrown after her as a peace offering. Caroline’s heart sank. She hated figs, a prominent feature of the recipe.
‘Nahum, III, 12,’ Mrs Dibble shouted, as if reading her mind. ‘“If they be shaken they shall even fall into the mouth of the eater.” And raisins is up to tuppence a pound.’
Caroline ran, before the first book of Samuel reached her too. George was in the choir so, thanks to Isabel’s headache, only three of them and Aunt Tilly took their decorous places at Elizabeth Lilley’s side in the front pew. How could Isabel bear to miss it, Caroline wondered. After the solemn darkness of Passiontide and Good Friday services, Easter Day was a happy service. She enjoyed the changing liturgical colours, from Passiontide to Palm Sunday’s violet, to white on Maundy Thursday, then black, and now glorious white again for Easter Day, and so on through the year. And she enjoyed watching Ashden dressed up for the occasion, for whatever motive, from Mr Roffey, the sweep, and his wife in their Sunday best to Mrs Swinford-Browne in her ghastly new hat. That must be new. The black ostrich feather was far too stiff and ostentatious to be anything else. The Swinford-Brownes were chapel-goers normally, so this rare visit must be because of the Rectory luncheon. Caroline’s heart sank again at the prospect, but she firmly dragged it up again. They should not ruin her day.
Private pews had been abolished at St Nicholas’s fifteen years ago, despite the loss of their revenue to her father, albeit a small one. Mysteriously, however, there still seemed to be a Hunney private boxed pew, and even a Norville pew, just as there were Hunney and Norville chapels. The Norville pew was rarely occupied for the Misses Norville were recluses and over ninety. Risking her mother’s disapproval, she twisted round to see if the Hunneys were all here – which immediately brought back her sense of grievance over luncheon once more.
Caroline knew Sir John enjoyed the company of his enlarged family at the Rectory, though Lady Hunney behaved more as if it were her social duty to those less fortunate than herself. Poor Lady Hunney, she thought. Her problem was that as leader of village society everyone was her inferior, and the charm that had made her the toast of London society while her husband was still able to pursue his army career had curdled when the death of his father brought him back to Ashden.
Caroline caught Reggie winking at her, while apparently staring straight ahead with a solemn face. Lady Hunney smiled at her with honeyed sweetness. ‘Beware the jaws that bite, the claws that catch …’ Caroline thought, gracefully inclining her head to the Jabberwock, before grinning at Eleanor. Eleanor was wearing her new royal blue costume which they had chosen at Debenham & Freebody’s, and it suited Eleanor’s pleasant looks better than the usual nondescript shades she wore. No doubt Caroline was getting the blame for this radical move. Only Lady Hunney was permitted the height of fashion, having long dismissed nineteen-year-old Eleanor (Caroline suspected) as a non-runner in the social race.
‘Christ the Lord is risen again �
�’ She sang out in happiness as the hymn began.
The Easter Service is glory, all glory … Mrs Thorn got her way over the altar linen – no lace. That meant sometime in the future Mrs Lettice must be appeased … What would the future hold for her sisters, and George? Would they marry? Would she marry?
‘Alleluia!’
Caroline quickly offered an apology to God. How could she take Communion with such secular thoughts on her mind?
Elizabeth rather liked Edith Swinford-Browne, or perhaps it would be more truthful to say she felt sympathetic towards her. She knew Edith was feeling out of her depth in the Rectory drawing room. The high puffed coiffure, the over-ornate Magyar sleeves, and the inappropriate velvet bag all testified to her ordeal. It wasn’t at all like The Towers in Station Road into which she and her husband William had moved five years ago; William was the biggest landowner in the parish, rivalling even Sir John Hunney of Ashden Manor, and he set out to ensure that the village knew of and benefited from his enormous wealth. All except the Rector. Elizabeth was quite convinced, despite her husband’s refusal to discuss the issue, that Swinford-Browne deliberately undervalued his yields for the purposes of the tithe rent charge, on which the Rector depended for his income. He was a self-made man, as he proclaimed modestly, a phrase which had caused much mirth in the Lilley household.
However, the Rectory, not the Manor, was the key to village approval, and Edith knew if she could but grasp the intangible thread that led to this, she need fret no more. Yet here she looked lost, as if she was longing for the moment when the gentlemen – William, Robert and the Rector – would emerge from their little talk to rescue her. Not that she was shy. Far from it. But she obviously liked to know where she stood, and here she did not.
Elizabeth watched her, pityingly.
Poor Edith would see only that the Berlin-worked tapestry on the chairs was well-worn, the piano long past its prime, the rosewood what-not battered, the souvenirs from Worthing and Brighton cheap and chipped, the frames of photographs and sketches crammed together, and the books left lying on tables and chairs, instead of being placed decorously back on their library shelves.