Marling Hall

by Angela Thirkell

  ‘Bad job that,’ said Sir Edmund, speaking of the doctor, ‘bad job. Men like that ought to be shot. Every village in England ought to have a village idiot. There was always an idiot at Worsted and please God there always will be. Been one there ever since I knew the place. Doctor’s a fool, that’s what he is. Sort of man that would cut you up just for fun. Ed Pollett’s all right in the right place. Aren’t you, Ed?’

  Ed, who had placidly accepted the medical examination as part of the queerness of the gentry, with no suspicion of the doom that had been hanging over him, grinned, and Mr Marling quickly took him away lest the board should reconsider their verdict, while Sir Edmund went back to see that a communist hairdresser with no dependants and a fine physique did not slip through the meshes.

  This morning Ed had obligingly worked the pump, which was far too high and too heavy for the little girls, and the horse trough was brimming with water which slopped in a delightful way on to their sandalled feet. Three celluloid ducks, a celluloid fish and a small red boat were floating on the water, while Diana and Clare industriously stirred up waves with their hands. Lettice stood watching them, as yet unperceived, thinking, not for the first time, how enchantingly defenceless little girls’ arms were in their immature curves and how adorably frail they looked, though quite misleadingly, as anyone who tries to pick up a child in a temper knows.

  ‘That’s Daddy’s ship,’ said Diana, giving the little red boat a push, ‘and I’m the Germans.’

  She then threw several handfuls of water over the boat, which heeled and sank.

  ‘Now Daddy’s drowned,’ she said cheerfully.

  Clare, who found it less trouble not to speak, shrieked with pleasure and Ed grinned sympathetically.

  Lettice knew that she ought to go white, put her hand to her heart and gravely lead her little ones into the house. But, mortifying though it might be, she did not think she could give satisfaction in any of these respects. If they could think of Daddy being drowned as a good game, she could only be thankful that it was so. If they had nightmares, or repressions, or complexes about his death it would be far worse. She knew from her own experience exactly what all these feelings were like and did not want anyone else, especially her own little girls with their enchanting boiled macaroni arms, to share her knowledge. So she came up to the trough and smiled at everyone.

  ‘Morning, miss,’ said Ed, pulling his forelock, an archaism which his various sympathetic employers cherished and which Sir Edmund looked upon as his crowning glory. ‘Drowning Daddy, the young ladies are.’

  ‘That’s very nice, Ed,’ said Lettice. And indeed there was really nothing better to say. ‘Did you have a nice supper, darlings?’

  Both her daughters set their lips tightly and nodded with violence.

  ‘Nurse’s brother got free stripes,’ said Diana and began to explore a crack in the celluloid fish’s back with a pink finger.

  Lettice considered this remark. It seemed a peculiar kind of thing to get, rather like a Biblical punishment, or possibly a bit of land. A Browning title, ‘A Bean Stripe; also Apple Eating’, floated into her mind. Or were Free Stripes a new kind of ally, like the Free French? But these unprofitable musings were ended by Nurse, who, having seen her mistress from the night-nursery window, had come down from a sense of duty to interfere.

  ‘Now, Diana, don’t get your frock wet,’ was her very proper greeting to the party. ‘Clare, don’t get your sandals wet, or Nurse will have to take you in. Good morning, madam.’

  Lettice said good morning to nurse. Diana, with a serious and intent expression, had now ripped the celluloid fish quite open and was letting the water gurgle in. She looked up with a pleased expression, and Lettice felt that if she talked about drowning again she might not be able to bear it.

  ‘Nasty fish,’ said Diana, suddenly tearing it in two. ‘All dead.’

  Clare began to cry.

  ‘Now that’s enough, Diana,’ said Nurse, taking the fish’s mangled corpse and putting it in her apron pocket. ‘And stop crying, Clare, and we’ll show Mummy the snap of Nurse’s brother. It’s my brother Sid, madam, the one that was the dentist’s mechanic. He’s just got his stripes and he’s a full sergeant. The children were ever so pleased.’

  She produced a photograph of a young man who looked like an epitome of the whole British Army.

  ‘What lovely moustaches, Nurse,’ said Lettice, unable to think of a more suitable comment.

  ‘Kiss Sid,’ said Diana, pushing the photograph towards her mother’s face.

  ‘That’s quite enough, Diana,’ said Nurse, thoroughly shocked. ‘Now come along, children. We’re going down to the shops to get the rations. Really, madam, you’d think Diana was an officer’s little girl, not a naval gentleman’s. She’s been talking about nothing but Sid’s stripes ever since the photo come.’

  ‘Three stripes, isn’t it, Nurse?’ said Lettice, as her elder daughter’s comment became clear. ‘And you remember it’s dancing today. I am doing Red Cross stores this morning, and I’ll lunch at the Hall, but I’ll be back here by half-past two.’

  The nursery party went off to the village, while Lettice went up to read her letters before going back to the Hall to work.

  2

  At half-past two Lettice put her little girls into her car and drove up to the Hall where Miss Bunting was waiting. With shrieks of joy the children, who had been packed into the front seat by their mother, cascaded out, flung themselves on the old governess and dragged her into the back seat, sandwiching her between them and clamouring for the story of David Leslie who cut all the bristles off his hairbrush because he didn’t want to brush his hair. This story Miss Bunting had told them at least eight times, but its interest never palled and when she came to the climax where the bristles were found blocking the waste pipe in the nursery bathroom both little girls screamed aloud in ecstasy. Lettice, alone in the front of the car, liked to hear her daughters’ squealing voices, and if it occurred to her that Miss Bunting was a far better entertainer of the young than she was she merely felt grateful, for much as she adored Diana and Clare, she also found them highly exhausting.

  The road to Rushwater ran through the little village of Marling Melicent, followed the course of the Rising, went over the hill, leaving the Risings in the river valley on the right, and came into Rushwater near the vicarage, which was one mass of evacuees under the able rule of a retired Colonial bishop who had done locum work at Little Misfit in the beginning of the war and was now doing it with equal enthusiasm at Rushwater, treating his evacuated mothers and children as heathen (which indeed they were) and seeing with his own eyes that the children were properly bathed once a week, regarding it as an only slightly lower form of baptism.

  As they passed the vicarage the bishop emerged with two little girls, and Lettice slowed down.

  ‘Ah, Mrs Watson, we meet again!’ said the bishop. ‘As you see, we are just on our way to the dancing class.’

  Lettice stopped and offered the party a lift if they could fit in. The bishop, who was a man of action and the terror of all backsliders in his sub-equatorial diocese, pushed his two charges into the back, telling them to sit on the floor and himself got in beside Lettice.

  ‘First-rate little tap-dancers those two,’ he said, jerking a very unepiscopal thumb towards the back of the car. ‘Father was an acrobat and is in the Middle East now. Name of Valoroso. It’s an old name on the halls. The mother had taken to drinking, but I soon settled that.’

  Lettice asked how.

  ‘Drank with her, knee to knee,’ said the bishop. ‘Only beer of course. I couldn’t have done it with whisky. I find that is the only way with natives. In my diocese they drank ’Mpooka-’Mpooka, filthy stuff, fermented ants’ eggs, the female ones, mixed with all sorts of unpleasant things. But I made the chiefs drink all one night with me, and next day they were so sick they all took the pledge. I gave them each a Leander cap as a reward – I used to row a bit, you know, and caps were my hobby – and they
passed a law forbidding the manufacture of ’Mpooka-’Mpooka. The High Chief had an interest in a soft drinks factory at Durban, so we did very well. These children’s mother has taken the pledge and I give her my tea ration to stop the craving. Now she’s a different woman and if any of the other mothers bring drink in she throws it into the lily pond. Two of the goldfish died, but the others seem to like it.’

  As he finished this interesting story of missionary effort they arrived at Rushwater House, which was surrounded in Diana and Clare’s eyes with a halo of romance, as having once been the home of the wicked David Leslie who wouldn’t brush his hair. Other cars with mothers and children were there and the air was filled with the twitterings of young voices. The dancing class had been started by Mrs John Leslie for her own nice dull little girls and a few friends’ children, and this was only the second meeting. In the big drawing-room, where most of the furniture was pushed into corners and dust-sheeted, were a dozen or so chairs and a tinkling piano at which a middle-aged woman with a decayed air was sorting music. Another middle-aged woman with a tired though worthy face and very neat feet was already exercising one or two of the early arrivals, holding their hands and making them count and hop: One, two, three. One, two, three.

  Lettice, who was vaguely connected with the Leslies through her mother, kissed Mrs John Leslie and introduced Miss Bunting, who enquired after her hostess’s father and mother-in-law, Mr Leslie and Lady Emily Leslie.

  ‘They are quite well, thank you,’ said Mrs John, as most people called her. ‘They were staying with my sister-in-law Agnes Graham when the war began, and as they are getting on and both a bit invalidish my husband and Agnes and David talked it over and they all thought their parents had better stay with Agnes for the duration, so John and I brought the children down here. John is Regional Commissioner, you know, so it is quite convenient, and we try to keep things straight here. It makes a home for David when he is on leave, except that he much prefers London and practically never comes. And for Martin too, John’s nephew who will have the place if he isn’t killed. Forgive me, but I must go and talk to Sally.’

  She went across the room to greet young Lady Pomfret, also a connection of her husband’s family, who had brought Lord Mellings, aged three. His lordship did not actively partake in the dancing, but was allowed to skirmish in the back row.

  Words cannot describe how Miss Bunting’s heart expanded as she found herself in an assemblage where everyone was what she mentally called the right people. And what was more, where practically everyone was connected by blood or by marriage. As the eagle, soaring in lonely majesty, discerns far below the lamb, or in rarer and less probable cases the swaddling child, and drops like a thunderbolt to seize her prey, so did Miss Bunting, sustained by her intimate acquaintance with so many of England’s gilded youth and fortified by Debrett, pounce upon every relationship and make it her own. In fact she could probably have told many of the young mothers present their exact degree of kin to one another far better than they knew it themselves. Only for a moment did she falter over young Lady Pomfret and in a trice she had it at her fingertips that the present Earl of Pomfret’s father, Major Foster, had been second cousin and heir presumptive to the late Lord Pomfret who was Lady Emily Leslie’s brother and thus uncle to David Leslie, the reprobate, and uncle by marriage to nice Mrs John Leslie. Lady Pomfret had been a Miss Wicklow, whose brother Roddy, agent to the late and to the present Earl, had married Alice Barton, whose brother Guy had married the archdeacon’s daughter from Plumstead, whose mother had been a Rivers. And so the endless, fascinating chain went on in her mind till, via the Honourable George Rivers cousin to old Lord Pomfret, and his wife who was a niece of old Lord Nutfield, Mrs Marling’s father, she came round again to Lettice Watson quietly knitting at her side, and rejoiced that she knew her Peerage and her Landed Gentry so well.

  Ten or twelve mothers with some nurses in the background were by now established, each with her knitting or other useful work, while their young charges jumped about in a cheerful and inelegant way, laughing a good deal and presenting an agreeable picture. Only the two evacuee children showed any real aptitude for the dance and it was evident that they were rather bored by the amateur nature of the proceedings.

  Mrs John came back and joined Lettice who had been talking to Mrs John’s nannie.

  ‘It is rather a small class today,’ she said anxiously. ‘I did hope Clarissa and the little ones would be here. Oh, here they are.’

  She got up as there came into the room four children: a girl of about nine, two little boys who might have been seven and five, and a little girl who could not have been more than three holding her mother’s hand.

  ‘Darling Mary,’ said the mother, giving Mrs John a soft, enfolding embrace, ‘here we are, so late, as usual. It was Edith’s fault, the wicked one. She ate her pudding so slowly that it made us quite late, didn’t it, Edith? So I was quite cross and then Nannie had to put on her blue dress because there was rice pudding on the one she was wearing.’

  ‘Rice pudding,’ said Edith, looking round for approval.

  ‘Agnes darling,’ said Lettice, receiving in her turn the soft, scented, unemotional embrace. ‘How are you all? Here is Miss Bunting, who knows David. She is longing to see the children.’

  Mrs Graham appeared to find this wish quite natural and sat down by Miss Bunting.

  ‘Of course I remember you so well,’ she said, turning on Miss Bunting a smile of vague, ravishing sweetness and starry eyes. ‘David was very naughty the summer you were here and teased everyone dreadfully. I wish you could see James, my eldest boy. He is so like my father, but he is at Eton now. Emmy is exactly like my mother, but she is rather old for this class, so I left her with the governess. Darling Clarissa, come and say how do you do to Miss Bunting. She used to give Uncle David lessons when he was a little boy and he was very, very naughty. Clarissa really ought to be with the governess, but she looks so delicious in green that I had to bring her. Darling John, come and say how do you do to Miss Bunting, and Robert too. John is so like my eldest brother who was killed, Martin’s father you know, and Robert is very like a photograph of grandfather Pomfret when he was a little boy. Darling Edith, say how do you do.’

  ‘Rice pudding,’ said Edith.

  ‘Wicked one, wicked one,’ said her mother fondly. ‘She is called after my aunt who died, Edith Pomfret, and I think she will be very like her when she grows up, though of course there is no relationship. Go and dance now, darlings, and pay attention to Miss Milner, because she is going to show you some lovely dances.’

  The bevy of children, each with a different kind of ravishing good looks and charm, ran across the room.

  Agnes, having exhausted herself in praise of her young, sat benignly quiet, thinking as was her habit of absolutely nothing at all, and occasionally drawing Miss Bunting’s attention to Clarissa’s way of pointing her toes, or John’s bow, or Robert’s neat legs, or even more proudly, Edith’s habit of leaving the class and performing a private dance in a corner.

  ‘I hoped Cousin Emily would be coming,’ said Lettice.

  ‘Darling Mamma!’ said Agnes. ‘She did want to come, but it is so much better for her to rest after lunch and she has a thrush that John rescued from the kitchen cat and is trying to make it eat bread and milk, so I persuaded her to lie down. Besides I wanted her to be quite rested for David.’