Marling Hall

by Angela Thirkell

  This remarkable religious creed so enchanted David that he kissed his old governess’s hand with great courtesy.

  ‘God bless you, Miss Bunting,’ he said. ‘It is deeds like this that win the Empire. How are Lettice’s charming children?’

  ‘Diana and Clare, as I suppose you have forgotten their names,’ said Miss Bunting, ‘are very well. You had better ask Lettice what Diana’s last exploit was. Very flattering to you.’

  ‘You pique my curiosity,’ said David, who was now tired of this game. ‘I shall fly like Ariel and ask her.’

  ‘No need; you are sitting next to her at dinner,’ said Miss Bunting. ‘Tell me about your mother.’

  David did so, not without an occasional glance towards his cousin Lettice who was talking to Mr Harvey, and not without an occasional absentmindedness in his speech.

  ‘I always said, David, that your manners were from the head, not from the heart,’ said Miss Bunting. ‘You can go now.’

  ‘Like a faithful though half-witted hound, the more you beat me the more I adore you, even to cringing,’ said David, ‘especially as I need your advice. What do you think of Geoffrey Harvey?’

  But Mrs Marling swept her party downstairs to the dining-room and neither by word nor by look did David get an answer to his question.

  Mr Marling, who rather disliked dinner parties unless he knew everyone present, was naturally suspicious of Captain Barclay and the Harveys. On Captain Barclay he was prepared to suspend judgement as a feller who was a pukka soldier, but his disapproval of Mr Harvey, though based on nothing stronger than a dislike for fellers who didn’t cut their hair properly, was only held in check by his sense of duty as a host. As for Miss Harvey, she was a lady, which was enough to command his tolerance, and good-looking into the bargain, so he was not displeased to have her next to him at dinner.

  ‘And what are you doing, lady?’ he enquired. This mode of address, a part of the Olde Englishe Squire make-up, gave great pleasure to Oliver who was on the other side of Miss Harvey and caused him to wink at Lettice, opposite, who had also overheard it.

  Miss Harvey said she was working in the Regional Commissioner’s Office, in the same department as Oliver.

  ‘Well, well, that’s all new since my time,’ said Mr Marling. ‘What’s it all about, eh?’

  Miss Harvey, in her pleasantly modulated voice, said she was sure Oliver must have explained it to his father much better than she could.

  ‘No one tells me anything,’ said Mr Marling, changing to what Oliver and Lettice called Mr Gummidge. ‘I’m an old man and out of date I suppose and the children go their own way. I don’t understand this war at all.’

  Miss Harvey, showing great sympathy, led her host on to talk of the last war and his own Territorial exploits, so that he cheered up a good deal and told her several very interesting stories without much point. Oliver, on her other side, was grateful for her attention to his father, to whom he was fondly and exasperatedly attached, and telegraphed approval to Lettice, who was getting on very well with David. David, an expert on other people’s feelings so long as they did not involve his own, had spotted almost at once in Lettice her habit of taking a second place. He saw that her mother entirely domineered her, though in all kindness; he saw that her father was very fond of her and took her for granted; he saw that her sister Lucy, though doubtless very fond of her too, would always shout her down and not so much push her out of the way as stride over her as if she were not there. Behind this triple barrier he guessed a new-found cousin who would laugh at his own kind of joke. It would be amusing to help this lovely moth – for butterfly was not a suitable name for Lettice – out of the family cocoon. Also it would be a pleasantly safe game. In David’s experience charming women, and even some who were not so charming, were apt to take him a little too seriously, but this Lettice would not do. They were cousins, which was not romantic, Roger had only been dead a year, and more than this, David, who had had a good deal of experience, was quite sure that Lettice could set to a partner very prettily if encouraged, without the faintest dint in her affections. Had he thought such a misfortune possible he would not have contemplated a cousinly flirtation. Ever since the summer some six or seven years ago when two ladies, one being his present sister-in-law Mrs John Leslie, had refused him in one morning, when he had not the faintest intention of proposing, he had had occasional fits of wariness. But here he instinctively felt he was safe. So he applied himself to amusing Lettice and to his great pleasure found that not only did he make her laugh, but she was making him laugh. And what was more, she showed no particular disposition to talk about her children.

  ‘I cannot tell you,’ he said, ‘how restful it is to be at a party where no one mentions the nursery. And when I say that, I mean how very nice it is that you don’t, for no one else is in a position to do so. At least if the Harveys or Barclay have nurseries they conceal it. My darling sister Agnes has not one idea in her head outside her offspring, and by the time her youngest daughter – if Edith is to be the youngest, which you never know with Agnes – has left the nursery, Emmy will be married and Agnes will begin all over again with grandchildren. A black outlook for an uncle.’

  ‘Why —’ Lettice began.

  ‘Stop,’ said David. ‘I know exactly what you are going to say. The reason I haven’t got a nursery of my own is, surprising as it may seem, that I have not got a wife. Sometimes my kind friends try to find one for me and I feel sentimental and sad. But then I reflect that I might become a wife-beater and remain contented with my humble lot as a roving blade. I expect you adore those nice little girls of yours, even though you restrain yourself from being a bore about them.’

  ‘Diana and Clare, you mean,’ said Lettice, though whether as a statement or as a small reproof for his forgetfulness David was not sure. ‘I think they are very nice little girls, but if I hadn’t got Nurse I mightn’t like them so much. Nurses really make mother-love possible. So do the Bunnies, later on. I think Roger was more devoted to the children than I am, but he saw so little of them that it was fairly easy.’

  ‘You take the words out of one’s mouth,’ said David admiringly. ‘The words that one couldn’t quite say oneself but strongly feels within one. I like mother-love myself. My divine mamma is a living example of how adorable and maddening it can be. Never for one moment is one safe from her putting her head into the room to see what one is doing and try to make one do it differently. Well, here’s to all the nannies and Bunnies that keep it alive.’

  He raised his glass, caught Miss Bunting’s eye across the table and drank to her. That lady, who was talking to Mr Harvey, smiled grimly. Mr Harvey looked faintly surprised.

  ‘Once you have known them in the schoolroom they never change,’ said Miss Bunting. ‘Now tell me more about yourself.’

  From some women this would come as a flattering invitation, implying a deep and almost more than sisterly interest; and even if one knew that it was only surface charm, the charm was there nonetheless. From Miss Bunting the remark paid no tribute to the fascination of Mr Harvey’s life and doings at all. Rather did he feel like a heretic who has had an unexpected respite from the Grand Inquisitor and is now about to be subjected again to the question, for Miss Bunting, with a detached interest in men as children of a larger growth, had so put him through his paces, ferreted out his past and enquired into his present, that he very much wished she wouldn’t, the more so as she obviously found his whole career not up to her standard. Under her unemotional catechism he had confessed to the wrong school, the wrong university, including the wrong college in it, the wrong branch of the Civil Service. He was not married (and if he had been he felt by now morally certain that Miss Bunting would have coolly disapproved his choice of a wife), he cultivated the society of writers and painters who in her estimation did not exist at all, he wrote poems that Miss Bunting had not read and showed no sign of wishing to read. As for his novel about Pico della Mirandola, Miss Bunting, in a perfectly ladylike way, displ
ayed such a knowledge of names and dates as left him feeling very small; for it must be confessed that though he had worked up his subject with considerable industry he had allowed himself to drag in characters who, historically speaking, were hardly contemporaries till, as a very young reviewer who had just discovered the Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin and wished to display his knowledge searingly remarked, the novel was not unlike the procession at the end of The Double Arrangement. The allusion passed over the heads of most of his readers who were distressingly young in mind if not in years and read for the most part sixpenny books of a decidedly pink tendency, but it had rankled in Mr Harvey, who was silly enough to subscribe to a press-cutting bureau and read all his notices.

  ‘You should read some of Mrs Barton’s historical novels about fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy,’ said Miss Bunting. ‘I have found them very useful when telling some of my older pupils facts about the Renaissance period.’

  Mr Harvey would have liked to say that he thought Mrs Barton’s books very dull and pedantic, also that neither he nor his public were pupils, older or younger, of Miss Bunting’s; but though he would have been quite rude to anyone of his own set who had so presumed, something told him that rudeness to Miss Bunting would not be wise, and as that lady went on eating as if he were not there he was not sorry to be addressed by Mrs Marling, who, after having a quiet conversation with Captain Barclay about families, did her duty by asking Mr Harvey how he was getting on at the Red House.

  ‘Very well,’ said Mr Harvey. ‘Our maid likes it, which my sister appears to think the principal thing at present, and the beds are extremely comfortable. We can’t thank you enough for having found it for us. In fact if Mrs Smith would go to Torquay all would be perfect.’

  ‘Is she giving trouble?’ Mrs Marling asked with interest.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to seem ungrateful,’ said Mr Harvey, ‘but she has very original ideas about the relations of landlord and tenant. As far as I can make out she looks on us as a kind of depot or universal store.’

  ‘Troublesome woman, Joyce is,’ said Mrs Marling with what Mr Harvey considered very insufficient sympathy.

  ‘It’s not so much the saucepans and the reading lamp,’ said Mr Harvey, ‘but the day we moved in she took the fire-tongs from the dining-room, last week she borrowed the electric kettle, and this afternoon, so our maid tells us, she took four pillow cases. It is a little awkward, because we are on duty at the Regional Commissioner’s Office and can’t very well defend ourselves.’

  ‘Annoying woman,’ said Mrs Marling, again with provoking complacency. ‘One doesn’t wonder that her husband drank, though to do him justice he drank pretty heavily before he married her. You had better let Lucy know. Are you very busy?’

  Mr Harvey, a little placated by the question, said he was working on a book of poems in his leisure time, but the Muse, he said, tossing his hair back vaguely in that tutelary genius’s direction, was not propitious amid the clash of war.

  ‘Clash?’ said Mrs Marling. ‘I haven’t heard of anything in these parts for some months. The last bomb in this district was in February. I meant busy at the office.’

  Mr Harvey, well trained in his Government Department, made a non-committal answer that would have satisfied his chiefs, but did not satisfy Mrs Marling. To her the Regional Commissioner’s Office was but a branch of the county activities among which her whole life had been passed. John Leslie, the head of it, was a cousin; various other cousins and old county friends were scattered up and down it and undoubtedly a good many so-called secrets were told to Mrs Marling as a matter of course. And as John Leslie said, if all the girls who sat at the telephones or the teleprinters knew what was happening, he saw no reason why Amabel Marling, who could probably have run the office just as well as he could and was as safe as they made them, shouldn’t know too. But he knew, and Mrs Marling knew, that if a secret was important enough to be kept from the clerks and typists she was not the woman to enquire into it on her own account. All of which made Mrs Marling a little impatient of Mr Harvey and she said she hoped the affair of the yellow at Skeynes had blown over. This tactless allusion to the mistake of a woman official in Mr Harvey’s department who had mixed up the purple and yellow raider signals naturally annoyed him and made him say that it were, perhaps, better not to discuss these things in public.

  ‘Public?’ said Mrs Marling, looking round the table. ‘You know and your sister knows and Oliver knows, and if it comes to that I know. I daresay Lettice and Lucy know too; but it isn’t worth talking about. Are you going to keep hens?’

  Mr Harvey, annoyed by her undepartmental attitude, said that he found hens peculiarly revolting. There was, he said, something about their glassy eyes and their passion for suicide in front of his car that made him feel he would rather go without eggs for ever than keep them.

  ‘That is, of course, the alternative,’ said Mrs Marling. ‘I’ll speak to your sister about it after dinner. I think Lucy knows a farmer with some pullets for sale and they’ll be up to thirty shillings before we know where we are, so you’d better get them now. And you might have a few ducks too. There is a little pond in your garden.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think Mrs Smith would care for ducks in her water-garden,’ said Mr Harvey, seeing in his mind’s eye a vision of ducks among the dwarfs and toadstools.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get Lucy to speak to her,’ said Mrs Marling. ‘I’m sure she can get you some layers and you can always eat them later on if they are not satisfactory.’

  She then gave him a great deal of valuable advice about pullets, layers, chicken-food, and nesting boxes, offered to send down some grain from the farm and advocated the occasional introduction of a cock to liven the hens up; or as an alternative livener-up Epsom salts in their drinking water. Mr Harvey hated his hostess more and more. He had not written a book of poems and a novel about Pico della Mirandola, besides being a recognised intellectual in his own set, merely to be ordered to keep hens. And what was worse, Mrs Marling, rising from the table, said she would speak to his sister at once about keeping fowls and Mr Harvey saw no way of getting at his sister and warning her without making himself conspicuous.

  By this time David and Lucy were making such a noise that everyone was glad to get up except Mr Marling whose slight though wilful deafness enabled him to bear his younger daughter’s voice better than most people.

  ‘Lucy!’ said Mrs Marling, across the clamour.

  ‘Oh, Mother —’ Lucy began, but Miss Bunting in her turn said ‘Lucy’, without raising her voice.

  ‘Oh, all right,’ said Lucy. ‘I’ll tell you what, Mother, let’s sit in the Stone Parlour. It’s so hot indoors.’

  Mrs Marling was quite willing. Mr Marling said, What was all that about the Stone Parlour. As no one took much notice, he stopped being deaf and said if people liked to catch their death of damp that was all right; but everyone knew that it had not rained for three weeks, so no sympathy was offered and the company drifted out of the side door and along the gravel walk which lay along the west front of the house. At the end of the walk, at the south-west corner of the house, Mr Marling’s great-grandfather had built out a little two-storeyed pavilion. The lower storey was open to the west and north with stone pillars that supported an upper room much coveted by Marling schoolboy sons. From its window many a home-made rope ladder had been let down before dawn for romantic filibustering expeditions. True, the adventurers could just as well have gone down by the back stairs, but such is youth.

  Owing to its aspect the Stone Parlour was not much use in an English spring, but as the summer waxed and the sun at setting passed round northwards, the last light shone upon it and streaked the grass below the lime avenue with gold. Here coffee was brought, and chairs were placed in the parlour or just outside it on the grass.

  When Mrs Marling had suggested an adjournment, Mr Harvey had a flash of hope that he might snatch a word with his sister and warn her against hens, but Lucy, with the frank selfishness of
those who are determined to do kind deeds for their fellow creatures, pounced on him as he came out of the back door and clung to his side, the better to develop to him her plan for writing a book about Mrs Smith, the anecdotes to be supplied by herself, the hack work of putting them on to paper by him. She had read lots of books, she said, that weren’t half as funny as Joyce was, and she was sure everyone would simply roar with laughter.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ she added, ‘you ought to meet Adrian Coates who publishes Mrs Morland’s books. He’s awfully nice and publishes lots of books. I’m sure he’d publish a book about Joyce. Does he publish your books or are they too highbrow?’

  Mr Harvey said rather huffily that his publishers were Johns and Fairfield.

  ‘Oh, I know,’ said Lucy. ‘They’re frightfully highbrow. They published old Lord Pomfret’s book.’

  Mr Harvey nearly groaned aloud. If ever a peer had written a bad autobiography, Lord Pomfret’s A Land-owner in Five Reigns was the worst. It had sold, Mr Harvey and his friends had been obliged grudgingly to concede, but by an ill-deserved piece of luck. That it was in any way to be compared with Lionel Harvest’s Cast Me Abroad (a scathing exposure of Broadcasting House written after he had inherited his great-uncle General Harvest’s fortune and retired from public life) was not to be thought of, and if Lord Pomfret’s book had sold ten thousand copies and Harvest’s seven hundred and fifty in spite of his friends rallying in the weeklies, it simply proved that the public were fools. In Russia, as Lionel Harvest too often told his friends, a book like his would have been published by the State and sold at least a quarter of a million copies.