O, These Men, These Men!

by Angela Thirkell

  “We shall be delighted. I suppose, Anna, your brother, Caroline’s husband, is never heard of?”

  “James? No. Father pays him an allowance, and we think he is in South Africa. I hope to goodness he will never come back. Don’t think me horrid, but if you had seen what Caroline used to be like – oh, it’s too horrible, too unfair,” said Anna, a storm of indignation suddenly rising in her as it always did at any mention of James, and tears of pity and rage coming to her eyes.

  “My dear, forgive me,” said Colonel Beaton. “I never meant to give you pain by asking. I only wondered. I admire Caroline so very much and I am naturally anxious for her happiness.”

  “How dear of you. It has been hard work for her, but I honestly think she is through the worst of it. I wish she would marry again, someone frightfully nice and kind.”

  “Do you think she – I don’t want to pry into her affairs – but have you any idea if there is anyone?”

  “Yes, I have, but I don’t think I’d better tell you.”

  “No, much better not. Whoever he is, he is a very lucky man. And now, what about you, my dear? Are you being a good daughter, and a good sister, and a kind, protecting sister-in-law, and a charming unselfish woman as well? All those things that you always are?”

  This praise to Anna, whose kindness and what one can only call dearness were accepted by her family and not perhaps much valued except by her father and Caroline, was almost too much. She colored violently and tried to laugh it off, Colonel Beaton having said his say began to talk of other things, but the memory of his words remained as a warm glow in Anna’s heart. He, like Francis, had said that he wanted her help. The thought of having him as a partner and friend of her father was very reassuring, for sometimes she felt anxious on Mr. Danvers’ behalf. If James had been in the business, if James had been different, her father would have had help and support. But Wilfred and George were so much younger that he would still have to shoulder his burden at an age when he ought to be taking life more easily. If James – oh, it was no use thinking about it. Rather let her think how Francis whom she loved and Colonel Beaton whom she loved too, though so differently, both wanted her help. If one could help where one loved, give with full hands, how happy one could be.

  While she dressed for dinner, she conversed through the doorway with Caroline and told her how anxiously Colonel Beaton had asked after her.

  “Nice creature,” said Caroline, “how kind of him. But he is kind. Oh, Anna, how I wish I could marry an elderly Jew.”

  “My dear! But why?”

  “Well, Jews make such kind good husbands, and an elderly one would make one feel safer. He would be established and settled and one would only have to fit in.”

  “Caroline, do you really want to marry again, or are you only amusing yourself?”

  “How can I tell. Do I ever mean anything I say? ‘I know who I love, but the dear knows who I’ll marry,’” she sang. “At least what I mean is, the dear knows who would care to marry me. People don’t want secondhand goods.”

  Her voice suddenly became so bitter that Anna hardly recognized it. If Caroline was really feeling like that, poor, poor Caroline.

  “Rubbish,” said Anna, with the best air of assurance she could muster. “Anyone would marry you. Why, even an elderly man like Colonel Beaton admires you. He is always saying so.”

  “As I said before, he is a nice creature, though not so elderly, Anna. Only forty-nine, he told me so. Quite young for a man,” said Caroline loftily from her twenty-six years as against Anna’s twenty-five. “If it comes to getting married, Anna, you have far more right than I. I mean I have had a husband and you haven’t, though I doubt whether you need envy me.”

  “But darling, James is en disponibilite now, so it isn’t as if you would make the man shortage worse. Anyway this is a disgraceful conversation and thank goodness the parents can’t hear it. Isn’t it depressing, Caroline, to think that if mother and father heard what we have been saying, they would be shocked at our modern cynicism and wickedness, and if the boys heard it they would laugh at us for silly old frumps trying to be dashing. We come off badly, you and I, between Victorian elders and Georgian youngsters.”

  Caroline appeared in the doorway, dressed for dinner.

  “It all matters so little,” she said. “One gets through the day because there is the night to look forward to, and then one has nightmares. All my days are trances, and all my nights are dreams,” she said self-mockingly, looking over Anna’s shoulder into the glass. “That’s a nice, useful life, isn’t it?”

  Anna knowing how useless it was to try to deal with Caroline in one of her sardonic, self-torturing moods, determined to talk to Colonel Beaton, upon whose quiet strength she had great reliance, and ask his advice and help. Francis – it was no good, one’s thoughts came homing to him at every turn – would not be much help; Colonel Beaton would.

  At this moment, Julia put her head in at the other door.

  “All dressed?” she cried. “Heavens, I must fly. We had such a heavenly time with the gramophone. George put Russian ballet music on, and we danced a lovely ballet that we invented. George is a divine dancer and I did pirouettes and entrechats and George partnered me beautifully with that pleasant set smile they have, and then Wilfred got cross because he can’t play the fool as nicely as George, so he stopped the gramophone and said Russia was a menace to the world, and he put on a record of Hitler or one of them making a speech and George said it made him sick. They are such darling boys. So then we all came up to dress. Can I use your bathroom, Anna? The boys are all over the other.”

  Without waiting for a reply, she ran off, and coming back with an armful of clothes and towels dashed into the bathroom, where she could be heard singing at the top of her voice.

  “That’s a Russian song,” she shouted, interrupting herself for a moment. “I’m singing it so loud to annoy Wilfred. I must learn a German song to annoy George. Caroline, I’ll ask your cousin Hugh to teach me one when we go to tea. He is such a darling. Don’t you adore him frightfully?”

  “Yes,” said Caroline.

  “What is cousin Francis like?” continued Julia. “Is he a darling too?”

  No one answered.

  Chapter V

  Francis Makes A Wrong Move

  On the appointed Saturday, Colonel Beaton gave his lecture on Agricola, whom his devoted but ill-educated daughter continued to think of as Agrippa, moved thereto by recollections of Struwwelpeter. Hugh had joined Caroline, Anna and Julia in the lecture room and sat between Caroline and Julia. From time to time Caroline looked contemplatively at her cousin’s profile and wondered why she liked it, because as a rule she particularly disliked men with good looking profiles. From this, still looking at Hugh, she drifted to a consideration of good looks in general. Beauty of any kind in women roused her deep pleasure and admiration. Julia’s perfect, finished prettiness gave her keen satisfaction. Anna she would have loved in any case for her kindness, but it was agreeable that Anna should also have reddish lights in her brown hair, wide set brown eyes and a clear golden skin. But in men who were attractive in their looks, she always felt an extreme want of interest which they had to conquer by being very charming, or clever, or simply kind. It was kindness always that disarmed her in the end. There was James—

  Hugh, magnetized as one always is by a look fixed upon one, turned towards his cousin and saw a look of terrified distress in her eyes.

  “Are you all right?” he whispered.

  Caroline recalled her thoughts and found Hugh looking at her with affectionate concern. So affectionate that her quick heartbeat sent the color to her face. Hugh, anxious for her, met her deep searching gaze and smiled kindly.

  “Quite all right,” Caroline whispered back, “but thank you for thinking about it.”

  The color died from her face as she retired again into her thoughts, but this time not to memories of pain. It was of Hugh’s kindness that she dreamt, while Colonel Beaton’s voice wen
t on unheard by her. Hugh, relieved to find himself mistaken, settled himself again in his chair in a position which made it easier to look at Julia, the pretty, gay creature.

  Francis, who had been unable to get away from work, was in the drawing room when the lecture party arrived. All afternoon, he had been trying to concentrate on legal papers, but his mind had strayed again and again to a fancied image of Colonel Beaton, who was by now assuming in his mind the appearance and attributes of Mr. Murdstone. To think of Caroline being the possible prey of such a brutal and designing villain made him press on the nib of his fountain pen till it became cross-beaked, and smoke far too many cigarettes. Finally, he gave up trying to work and went into the drawing room to see if the fire were bright enough and the tea sumptuous enough to do honor to Caroline. He looked long and abstractedly at a plate of sandwiches containing Gentlemen’s Relish, wishing that he knew enough about poison to fill one of them with a deadly mixture, whose delayed action would kill painlessly and leave no trace. But even if he had the right poison, he would have to be an accomplished prestidigitateur to force the envenomed sandwich on the colonel; it would never do to kill Anna or Hugh. Then, with a great wave of nobleness and self-pity, he reflected that Beaton’s death might make Caroline unhappy, and anyone who made Caroline unhappy again after what that rotter James had done, would deserve flogging and branding. So thinking, he paced the room angrily, taking a sandwich mechanically whenever he passed the table, till his thoughts and his perambulation were rudely disturbed by finding that the sandwiches were finished. At the same moment, he heard the front door shut and voices on the stairs, so he put the empty plate under a cake plate, hoping that Rose, the parlor maid, wouldn’t see it, and prepared to be a good host.

  Anna and Caroline came in with affectionate greetings, followed by Hugh, Julia and Colonel Beaton. Francis was excessively annoyed to find that his unseen enemy had the appearance of an intelligent and courteous gentleman, but choking down his righteous indignation, he prepared to be deeply suspicious of one whose exterior so craftily concealed an inward depravity. Caroline was asked to pour out, and was in the middle of inquiries about milk and sugar when Hugh interrupted her by getting up and ringing the bell.

  “I’m so sorry,” he explained. “I told Rose to give us Patum Peperium. Why on earth she can’t remember a simple thing like that – but that’s the worst of faithful servants who have seen you grow up – oh, Rose, you have forgotten the Gentlemen’s Relish.”

  “Oh, no, Mr. Hugh,” said Rose. “I cut them sandwiches myself and put them on the table.”

  “Well, look,” said Hugh.

  Rose cast a trained eye over the tea table. With the certainty of a conjurer, she lifted a plate of cakes and took from beneath it a plate, empty save for a few crumbs and a brown smear.

  “They’ve been ate, Mr. Hugh,” she stated. “Should I cut some more?

  “Yes. Quickly. But who ate them? Did Maud bring them up to the drawing room?”

  “No, sir. I brought them up myself. They have been ate upstairs.”

  “All right, Rose,” said Francis, “get some more quickly. I ate them myself,” he added as Rose left the room. “I was thinking about poisoned sandwiches and somehow they all got ate, as Rose would say.”

  “But why poisoned sandwiches, Francis?” asked Caroline. “Because I was thinking of people I’d like to poison.”

  “So would I,” said Julia enthusiastically. “I’d like to poison my Aunt Edith, and a girl I was at school with who had a flannelette blouse with spots on it, and people who aren’t kind to dogs, and that dreadful Baron we met in Berlin. Hugh, do you remember him? The one that had a sister. Father, you didn’t say anything about Agrippina poisoning people in your lecture?”

  As Julia appeared to have a figure in her mind, composed of three or four very different personalities on each of whom she was singularly ill-informed, there was some confusion at the tea table. Her father openly renounced a daughter who could not distinguish between Agricola, Agrippa and the two Agrippinas. The ladies sycophantically sought information from the gentlemen.

  “Well anyway they all end with an A,” said Julia, “and that’s a sign of being a poisoner, like Borgia, or else a Pope.”

  “And Pope and Poisoner both begin with a P,” said Hugh. “Not that that leads you anywhere.”

  “I can’t follow this intellectual conversation,” said Caroline to Colonel Beaton who was next to her.

  “Nor can I. I think Julia, for a really dear girl, is the silliest creature I’ve ever met. Perhaps it comes of having no mother.”

  “If you are trying to make out that it is your fault, that certainly isn’t true. But Julia isn’t silly, Colonel Beaton. She has a genius for a home and making people happy. She is really clever in that way, and she is good with people. She is more grown-up in that way than I shall ever be.”

  Colonel Beaton’s face lighted up at this praise of his daughter. “Thank you, Caroline,” he said. “You are perfectly right and I am over-anxious. She is a kind of genius in that way. Don’t you know how one kind of pride in one’s belonging makes one underestimate them in public?”

  “I know. Like saying something unkind about a person you are fond of, just to have the pleasure of talking about them.”

  “‘Uritur et loquitur’ wasn’t written for nothing. Beware, Caroline, if you ever find yourself saying quite unkind things about a friend just for the pleasure of saying his, or her, name. That will be your fatal hour.”

  Tea was over and people were moving about. As he finished speaking, Julia’s voice could be heard saying to Hugh at her side:

  “No, Hugh, don’t try to confuse me. Borgias were Popes and Caesar was a Roman, and to talk of people being called Caesar Borgia is as silly as cutting a cabbage leaf to make an apple pie. Ask Father. He knows everything, besides being a darling and terribly good looking.”

  “Listen to Julia underestimating you in public,” said Caroline to Colonel Beaton, who had to laugh.

  “Did you feel faint this afternoon?” he asked.

  “At the lecture? Oh, no, thank you.”

  “I thought I saw you looking white. Perhaps it was the faintness of boredom.”

  “But indeed it was not. I was entranced by your lecture. I only suddenly thought of something that frightened me.”

  “My poor child,” said Colonel Beaton. Which remark, being overheard by Francis who was standing near them in a redistribution of groups, caused him to hate the colonel with fresh vehemence. As penance for this un-host-like thought, he tried to be nice to him with such effect that Caroline, as nearly always happens when two men are with a woman, felt herself an unwanted female and went over to Anna.

  “Hugh,” said Anna. “What about your gramophone and a little dancing?”

  “Oh, divine,” cried Julia. “Quick, quick, a rumba. Hugh and I can dance a rumba. I saw it properly in Havana last winter. Have you got ‘Tropical Heat Wave,’ Hugh?”

  “Yes, but you aren’t to sing the words, Julia. This is a respectable bachelor establishment and I must draw the line somewhere. Caroline, will you dance?”

  “Not a rumba. I don’t know it. Ordinary dancing I’d love.”

  “Come on, then, Julia.”

  Jealousy was not in Caroline’s nature. Much as she would have loved to dance with Hugh herself, she could only admire the grace with which Julia swayed to his guiding, the unison of their steps in the intricate rhythm, Julia laughing up to him as she softly sang the words and made him laugh too. Perhaps Hugh would dance with her presently. Colonel Beaton and Anna joined the dancers with a discreet non-committal step. Caroline found Francis by her side.

  “Shall we dance?” he asked.

  Caroline, watching Hugh’s head bend to Julia’s pretty face, suddenly felt such a pang as made her hold Francis’ arm for support. Not jealousy, no not jealousy of that lovely happy child, only a rending devastating wish that she still had a careless gaiety, a thoughtless grace, so that Hugh would look at
her and love her without care; so that she could talk and laugh with Hugh without a heartbeat that stunned and bruised her, making speech a noisy troubling stream running shallow over stones, silence a thundercloud with menace in its heavy folds.

  “Do you think we needn’t dance, perhaps?” she asked. “The gramophone makes such a noise.”

  Without a word, Francis opened the door by which they were standing and led her to his study, behind the drawing room. Here, a fire and the reading lamp on his table made warmth and a peaceful light. Caroline sat down gratefully.

  “Don’t bother about me, Francis,” she said. “I can be quiet by myself quite happily. You go and help the others to dance.” Francis said he would like to be quiet too. Caroline took off her hat and lay back in her chair, while Francis watched her from the other side of the fire. The dance music from the next room made a sentimental background for firelit talk.

  “Do you think I ought to work?” said Caroline, breaking a silence of some minutes.

  “What at?”

  “Oh, anything. Mr. and Mrs. Danvers are so good to me, but after all I’m only living on their kindness. My own money is only enough for pocket money.”

  Francis, who knew well that James had helped himself to most of his wife’s money, sometimes by bullying, sometimes by appeals to her generosity, said nothing for fear of saying too much.

  “I thought,” Caroline went on, “that if I could have a job it would be good for me and make me self-reliant and independent. Only I don’t quite know what sort of job. I don’t think I could do much unless I took little dogs out for walks, or went as under-nurse to very small children. I’m fairly good with children. I often think it is quite a pity that my own baby came to nothing. I would have liked it a good deal. Still, perhaps as things are it is better. I would have been even more of a nuisance than I am if the Danvers’ had had to take in a baby as well. But I do think it is a pity that James couldn’t have been more kind,” she added in a weary matter of fact voice.