He still didn’t quite approve of Fulke and Caspar. But Caspar at least, whose unsignalled apostasy to the Romish persuasion had once so offended him, had been gaining in his estimation. Caspar was clearly booked for an Oxford fellowship, which is a respectable thing, and he could converse seriously but with a courteous observance of what a plain country parson (albeit of ancient lineage) could be expected to be keeping up with. Fulke, on the other hand, was now generally known to be determined on a literary career, and Mr Rich, who found much to dislike in the tone of contemporary literature, was unfavourably impressed by this ambition. It was true that Fulke’s manners were seldom at fault, and that he could be amusing, when prompted that way, irreproachably within the limits of polite conversation. But at the same time he had a strong tendency to ironic and even sarcastic utterance, which the vicar judged a habit of mind particularly to be deprecated in a very young man.
The tennis court fulfilled another of its proposed functions. During the school holidays it provided an attraction both for such local friends as Penelope had and – increasingly as she moved up the school – for several entirely suitable form-mates with whose parents Mr Rich was very content to agree upon an exchange of visits. Yet the presence of these young house-guests, of whom there might sometimes be two, or even three, at a time, was not without its problems in a household over which no lady presided. There were several public-school boys roughly of Penelope’s age within hail of Mallows, and to these it would have been unreasonable not to extend invitations on a tennis-party basis. On such occasions Mr Rich generally contrived that Mrs Martin or some similar parishioner should be present to preside over tea. But at other times his widowed condition generated (or at least so he believed) certain awkwardnesses of a domestic sort with which his housekeeper, the promoted cook, had to cope as well as she could. Things would be easier when Penelope was old enough to be the unquestioned mistress of the household. But by that time she might reasonably be looking forward to marriage within a short space of years, and when that marriage took place the life of the vicarage would change in unpredictable ways. Mr Rich sometimes reflected that it would have been different had he been left with a son. He never felt he quite understood Penelope – although it would have puzzled him to give any very precise definition to this expression. A child of one’s own sex would presumably be easier to understand, and certainly to plan for in an informed way. Moreover he was aware, if vaguely, that in a man’s relationship with a daughter, mysterious though she may be, there can develop an element of dependence less likely to establish itself in his relationship with a son. When eventually he lost Penelope to a husband the deprivation might prove sharper in effect than if he were parting with a son to a wife.
It is improbable that one so good natured as Henry Rich ever remotely betrayed to his daughter even a passing wish that she had been a boy. But it is not improbable that Penelope herself – and at an early age – divined that something of the sort was at least occasionally in her father’s head. She might have inferred it, indeed, from the very punctiliousness with which he asserted her femininity. But this, fortunately, didn’t take extreme forms. He was far from feeling that a girl should in any degree be debarred from active pursuits. He had even tried to teach her a little cricket, and when this had failed of success he dissimulated his impatience very well. When she was at home he was careful to advance her horsemanship as well as her tennis; and from school he liked to hear of her progress at lacrosse.
Penelope herself continued to like tennis best. She practised hard, and watched her father’s game closely, taking pleasure in a proficiency which she supposed to be remarkable in one of his advanced years. It was this that made her so promptly aware of the full portentousness of an event that took place hard upon her fourteenth birthday. Mr Ferneydale, that undistinguished performer, beat the Reverend Henry Rich 6–2, 6–0. This was on the vicarage court. And about a week later it became known that a similar issue had succeeded upon a return encounter at the Hall.
The vicar was very annoyed. He was even more annoyed when his daughter, upon an instant’s decision and without speaking what she knew would be an unavailing word, called in the family doctor. Dr Hurcomb didn’t leave his patient before convincing him that Penelope had been right. Some small thing had happened inside Mr Rich’s head. It need not be serious; it must by no means be regarded as premonitory of certain disaster to come. Men had been known to scale Everest, to walk round the North Pole, years after such an episode. Still, there were precautions to be observed.
When news of this got abroad, a number of people announced that for some time they had felt the vicar to be wearing not too well. He preserved, indeed, the appearance of a thoroughly robust man, but to the more perceptive eye, and reflective mind, there had been evident cause for concern. Always of sanguine complexion, he had of late become more noticeably florid. He had also been putting on weight. His very agility on the tennis court (itself the product of perhaps injudicious effort) had only pointed the fact that he was a shade lumbering at other times: in danger, as he himself had been heard to express it, of becoming too heavy for the saddle. Nobody ventured to suggest that he possibly drank more than he should – but this, as it happened, was the only unwise conduct of which he was willing privately to accuse himself. It had something to do with the emptiness of the vicarage during his daughter’s absences at school. He had always been inclined a little to linger over his port at the dinner-table; latterly he had formed the habit of carrying his glass and the decanter back with him to his study thereafter. This undesirable practice he confessed to Dr Hurcomb, who promptly made light of it, while at the same time advising its discontinuance. Dr Hurcomb, in his inner mind, thought it still improbable that Henry Rich would fail of that almost excessive longevity which distinguishes the clergy as a class. But it might well be that a little caution before the portals of Bacchus would minimise the risk (which he believed also to be a professional one) of a decade or more evidencing a certain desuetude of the intellectual faculties.
Mr Rich, who liked to be alive and breathing, was willing to be cautious, in both this and other regards. He even undertook a serious review of the bent of his activities as a whole; of his ‘life-style’, as it was coming to be called. The image of the country gentleman which he had inherited from his family had conceivably too much commanded him, to the neglect of interests and activities for which he believed himself to be authentically, if modestly, endowed. He had lately read a popular if slightly arcane book entitled An Experiment with Time, and been reminded of his own more philosophic interest in the mysterious fact that all things flow. He began to make fuller use of his dining-rights at his Oxford college (at which Caspar Ferneydale had now become some sort of postgraduate student) and to converse whenever he could with those of the dons whom he judged likely to fructify his own thinking in this field. He thus threatened to become something of a menace, and was even occasionally referred to (very absurdly) as Little Father Time. But he was generally felt to be sufficiently a period piece to be acceptable around the place. People liked, too, his evident enjoyment of other aspects of high-table and common-room life. ‘Tempus pater,’ a college wit said, ‘is without doubt edax, although happily not ferox, when set before a good square meal.’
But time, although possibly to be experimented with, itself experiments without pause. There can be no fable in which it is not exhibited at work.
Part Two
V
‘What sort of people,’ Dora Quillinan asked, ‘live in your Big House?’
‘People called Ferneydale.’
‘Penelope, you do go in for the most uninformative answers. What do I learn from that one?’
‘Probably that they’re not in the peerage, and so can’t be made fun of on that account.’
It was true that Dora Quillinan was given to extracting amusement from the spectacle of the English social hierarchy. She had asked her question as if it were in the nature of things for everybody to have nei
ghbours in a Big House, and for mild absurdity to inhere in the fact. Dora was clever and rather commanding, and these endowments had resulted in her lately having become Head Girl of Penelope’s school. So at this point Penelope might have asserted that Head Girl and Big House were terms belonging to an identical vulnerable vocabulary, satirically regarded. If this was not quite open to her it was because, were she to elect to remain at school throughout her eighteenth year, she would almost certainly become Head Girl herself. Her headmistress would not with any emphasis have declared Penelope Rich to be either commanding or outstandingly clever. But she had decided that Penelope possessed character – an attribute less easily defined – and would at least be an interesting girl to set in authority for a while. Penelope was alert enough to have spotted that she was already being groomed for the position. Whether she thought much of the idea she didn’t yet clearly know. It would please her father, which was something. And it would, of sorts, be a test. That life is much a matter of tests was a proposition that she accepted without question.
The two girls were close friends, and Dora had never stayed at the vicarage before because her father was in the Diplomatic Service and owned a penchant for holding posts abroad, so that during school holidays she was whisked off to distant corners of the globe – which was something that aeroplanes were increasingly making a matter of common form. But during the present summer her father had been given a desk in the Foreign Office – a term pleasingly misleading in suggestion, this one – and Dora had come to spend a fortnight with the Riches. Mr Rich was gratified to have beneath his roof the daughter of a man before whom ambassadorial status in Paris or Washington was said to be looming up.
‘Have these Ferneydales been at your Big House for long?’
‘It isn’t all that big, as you will presently discover. But, yes – ever since I can remember.’
‘That’s most impressive.’
‘Mr Ferneydale is some sort of business man. But only demi-semi self-made. Public school from his cradle, and all that. Daddy quite likes him, I think, so we see a good deal of the family from time to time. Mrs Ferneydale is dim, but nice. There are two sons: young men, I suppose, although I think of them as middle-aged bachelors. They’re not around a lot. Fulke and Caspar Ferneydale.’
‘Fulke Ferneydale? The dramatist?’
‘Yes, that’s him.’ Penelope was surprised by this sharp question. As something of a purist, linguistically considered, she doubted whether ‘dramatist’ was quite right for somebody who had enjoyed precocious acclaim with a couple of West End plays. ‘He turns up every now and then, but isn’t much approved of by the Mallows world in general. Daddy prefers Caspar, who is felt as not being a great success. He is very learned, and got a fellowship at Oxford. But it turned out to be of a kind you hold only for a few years, and then they tell you to move on. Caspar edits a magazine. Or a journal, rather, which probably means less money. It’s Catholic, in a vague way, and full of religion and philosophy.’
‘Why isn’t Fulke much approved in the back-woods?’
‘Daddy says he’s fast.’
‘What a weird expression! It must be Edwardian.’
‘Victorian, as a matter of fact. I’ve heard he’s also what was called a roué. I came across a roué mentioned in Jane Eyre. A young roué of a vicomte — a brainless and vicious youth. I think it was something like that.’
‘Fulke Ferneydale can’t be brainless.’
‘Obviously not. Unlike my father, I find him attractive.’
‘Good heavens, Penelope! Don’t tell me you’re no longer fancy-free.’
‘But I’m not. My heart is not wholly untouched, I confess. But it’s not by Fulke Ferneydale. Shall I tell you my secret, Dora? It’s by Tommy.’
‘Who on earth is Tommy?’
‘There he is, just over the hedge.’ The two girls were in the vicarage garden. ‘He’s Tommy Elbrow, our new garden boy. Snub-nosed and freckled and fifteen. Every night I dream of his slim clean limbs.’
‘Clean limbs? Tommy doesn’t look to me as if he baths all that often. What about telling him you intend to give him a good scrub down? It would be an approach.’
Penelope and Dora talked occasional nonsense of this sort, no doubt because aware of themselves as standing with reluctant feet where the brook and river meet. Not that Penelope, at least, would have been likely to suggest to anybody the Maidenhood of Longfellow’s poem. Primly girlish in childhood, she was distinctly boyish now. This was partly a matter of attitude and manner, which were perhaps not uninfluenced by that suppressed preference which she had long ago thought to detect in her father. But there was something physical about the suggestion as well: subtle rather than patent, and certainly far from displeasing. Dora Quillinan, on the other hand, was physically as feminine as could be, and had become aware of her destiny as attractive to all manner of wholesome-minded men. She was far from sure that she rejoiced in this. On the strength of a distant view of the society within which her parents revolved she had become aware of much time-wasting manoeuvre in that region of behaviour. Dora intended to have a career, but not at the expense of allowing herself to be pestered by predatory males, however unchallengeable their more obvious qualifications might be.
‘Does Tommy do everything? He must be a devoted and industrious youth if he does.’ Dora said this as she moved with a pair of secateurs from one rose-bed to another, since the girls were gathering flowers for the house.
‘My father is a considerable gardener, and an old man called Mr Mace comes for one day a week. But Mr Mace will use nothing more newfangled than a sickle and a scythe and an old-fashioned push-along mower. Tommy understands machines of one sort and another, and can make their little engines work. Perhaps that’s why he looks a bit smudgy. And he tells me he now has almost enough money to buy himself a motor-bike as soon as he’s allowed to ride one.’
‘You really do sound quite interested in your Tommy.’
‘He’s at least a figure in the landscape. I’m afraid you’ll find life here terribly quiet, Dora. After all the glitter and the gold.’
‘I don’t give a fig for the glitter and the gold, or resent the fact that I’m still expected to enjoy only a kind of nursery view of them.’
‘Before coming out, and so forth?’
‘I expect there will have to be a bit of that. But my parents are fairly reliable, and at least won’t lay it on thick. It’s basically disgusting, you know – suddenly having the clothes ripped from your shoulders and being paraded as now beddable before a crowd of inane young men in white ties.’
‘Well, yes. I think I’d be imagining their impertinent paws on me. But perhaps it’s not quite like that. One might just suddenly find oneself seriously in love. And have to face up to it.’
‘You make it sound like having to go to the dentist, Penelope.’
‘Maidenly fears, and all that. Do you know? My father already talks about that coming-out business for me. It will mean rustic revels in houses judged to be of sufficient consequence in this corner of the world, and cadging in on grand relations for a few balls in London – at which I’ll feel I’m undertaking the part of third dairymaid in a comedy.’
‘Or a modest daffadowndilly strayed in among the exotic blooms in a hothouse.’ Dora Quillinan offered her amplification helpfully, and the two girls glanced at one another with satisfaction. Both of them enjoyed this sort of vivacity – Penelope in particular, who went short of anything of the kind on her home ground.
‘Doesn’t it make a difference, Dora, now that you’re sure of that place at Somerville?’
‘My dear kid, Oxford is said to be quite frightful nowadays – at one of the women’s colleges, I mean. Ever since after the war, it seems, the male undergraduates have taken to acknowledging the existence of their female counterparts. And all the old rules have broken down. They positively roam the conventual quadrangles, and you are totally unprotected from them. They themselves at least have bedrooms they can hide in. But there
you are in your minute bed-sitter – and suddenly there is an almost strange young man squatting on the floor, watching you mending your stockings or washing your hair. No, the only true refuge is a convent – and convents are probably going that way too.’
‘You could buy yourself a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, and have something perfectly frightful done to your teeth.’
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