Marling Hall

by Angela Thirkell

  ‘I suppose,’ said David to Miss Harvey, ‘you wear those dungarees or oshkoshes – pardon the ignorance of a mere male – to save coupons. How wise. Everyone ought to be in uniform and then we wouldn’t spend any coupons and do the Government in the eye.’

  Miss Harvey said she doubted whether the Government would notice, but certainly uniform was an excellent idea as no coupons were needed.

  ‘I wish they weren’t,’ said Mrs Marling. ‘I was talking to Cousin William this morning, David, about new clothes for Ed Pollett when he drives the car. The tractor has gone right through the seats of his breeches and his jacket is shockingly shabby. Cousin William always gave the chauffeurs their uniforms of course, but he can’t spare his own coupons. Ed’s mother says she doesn’t see why she should give up Ed’s coupons for clothes that he doesn’t wear at home, and I see her point.’

  ‘It will be the same with the maids, of course,’ said Lettice, ‘and with nurse. I always supplied her uniforms and now neither of us can really afford the coupons. It is very awkward. I could put her into boiler suits, but she wouldn’t look as nice as you do, Frances. Nor would mother’s maids.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ said Miss Harvey. ‘Luckily Hilda has always worn her own clothes, so I’m safe.’

  ‘Was that Hilda who brought the ice?’ David asked. ‘I like her clothes. But seriously, Cousin Amabel, what are you going to do about Ed? Would Moss Bros, help; or a marine store, whatever that is?’

  ‘I should think there isn’t a secondhand pair of chauffeur’s breeches left in England,’ said Mrs Marling. ‘You don’t know one do you, Mr Harvey?’ she added, suddenly realising that the host and hostess were rather being left out of the conversation.

  ‘I wish I did,’ said Mr Harvey. ‘I could ask at the Regional Commissioner’s Office if anyone has a pair.’

  ‘What I call really Bolshevik,’ said Lettice, becoming quite animated as she thought of her wrongs, ‘was having to give one coupon for a black velvet glove to put coal on the fire with that I promised to Lucasta Bond. She had never heard of them and wanted one dreadfully. I was furious. Does the Government think one would use a black glove, which is really only a bag with a thumb, to go to church with, or shopping?’

  ‘Not Bolshevik,’ said Mr Harvey deprecatingly.

  ‘Oh, isn’t that the word?’ said Lettice. ‘I mean all horrid and Soviet anyway.’

  Mr Harvey was about to protest against this depreciatory use of the word, but luckily a torrent of complaint burst forth from the company, each member of which had a personal grudge against the whole coupon system. Mrs Marling’s Burberry, wearing out from sheer spite, had run into fourteen coupons. Miss Harvey had been forced to give two coupons for a piece of blue ring velvet to make a turban and having spoilt it in the making was so much to the bad. Mr Harvey had to get a new evening suit owing to the enemy action of moths and was twenty-six out of pocket. Lettice had felt obliged by misplaced generosity to give six to a friend who was getting married and couldn’t get a trousseau on her own coupons, and now deeply regretted it.

  ‘Join the air force and see the world,’ said David. ‘Look at the lovely uniform all coupon-free. But my heart is broken in another way. I can’t give six pairs of stockings to all the girls I know, and the handbags are beneath my contempt. It’s enough to make one wish there wasn’t a war.’

  The hubbub of complaint rose higher than ever. Lettice suddenly saw Mr Harvey’s eyes assume a Gorgon-struck expression. Following their direction she saw that the door was open and Mrs Smith was standing there. The tumult died down.

  ‘Oh, can I do anything for you?’ said Miss Harvey, the first to pull herself together.

  ‘I am sure I didn’t mean to intrude,’ said Mrs Smith, ‘especially in my own house, for I know exactly how Mr Smith used to feel when people came in unexpectedly, but I thought I’d just bring the lime juice bottle back. You’ll excuse my having borrowed it last night, won’t you, but I had none and Millie, my landlady’s niece you know, happened to say there was a bottle open at Red House and your maid being out I said to Millie, “Just run across, I’m sure Miss Harvey won’t mind.” So she just ran over and such a bright girl she wrote a little note to explain, which I hope you found.’

  ‘It was quite all right,’ said Miss Harvey manfully.

  ‘So I thought you’d like the bottle back,’ said Mrs Smith suddenly producing it from a basket. ‘We are told to waste nothing and I thought you would like to put it with the other bottles for the salvage. It just needs rinsing.’

  She thrust into Miss Harvey’s unwilling hand the empty, sticky lime juice bottle. Everyone hoped she would go. But as she didn’t, it became incumbent on the rest of the party to do something.

  ‘Well, Joyce, I hope you are comfortable at Mrs Cox’s,’ said Mrs Marling, while Lettice said much the same.

  ‘Do sit down,’ said Mr Harvey, bringing a chair forward.

  ‘If it isn’t Miss Perry that used to teach in the infant school at Rushwater!’ said David. ‘And I thought it was Mrs Smith. And how are you?’

  The ci-devant Miss Perry looked down at her mourning as though to hint that she was but half a Smith since her husband’s death.

  ‘What you want is a drink,’ said David, pouring several things into the cocktail shaker. ‘One good bottle deserves another. Come on, Mrs Smith, put it down.’

  ‘I hardly like to,’ said the widow. ‘You know Mr Smith had a slight weakness that way and it quite put me against it. Not but what he was always the gentleman.’

  ‘Once a gentleman always a gentleman,’ said David. ‘Here you are.’

  Mrs Smith bridled and sipped the drink.

  ‘Now tell me all your troubles,’ said David, while his audience sat fascinated and admiring.

  ‘Mr Smith was in business, Mr Leslie,’ said the widow. ‘I never thought he’d be taken. We had just furnished the nest and got everything cosy when he went. I never thought I would be living in lodgings before a year was out. My health isn’t what it was and I feel the loss of my own things about me.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said David. ‘Have another short one? That’s the spirit. Now, Mrs Smith, you must look on the bright side. Mr and Miss Harvey are keeping the nest beautifully clean and soon there’ll be some chicks, I mean in the garden. Have you seen the lovely hen house they are making?’

  Mrs Smith said Mr Smith could never abide poultry.

  ‘Nor can Miss Harvey,’ said David. ‘No one can, but we must all be brave in war time. Think of our gallant flying men.’

  Mrs Marling, who was afraid that someone might giggle, suggested that they should all go into the garden and see how the work was getting on, or Lucy would arrive with the hens and have nowhere to put them. Mrs Smith said she would just like a peep at her lovely drawing-room and went across the passage.

  ‘For God’s sake, David, remove her,’ said the agonised Mr Harvey. ‘You seem to have some power over her. She’ll take the armchairs and sofa if we’re not quick.’

  They all followed Mrs Smith into the drawing-room where she stood in an ecstasy of nostalgic admiration.

  ‘Every single thing was paid for before Mr Smith died,’ she said. ‘Cash and comfort was his motto. Now he’s dead I haven’t much of either, but it is a pleasure to roam about the old haunts. Are you using the art blotter, Miss Harvey? If you aren’t I would like to spirit it away to my lodgings. It was at that very blotter that I sent out the funeral notices. It was in the Daily Telegraph and the Infant Scholastic Weekly and the Barsetshire Chronicle. Mr Smith’s business friends sent a lovely wreath with an inscription. I would like you to come to tea in my little room one day and see the mementoes.’

  As she spoke she lifted the olive velvet blotter, inlaid with oxidised gold braid and dripping with tassels, and clutched it convulsively.

  Miss Harvey looked helplessly at her brother and said of course Mrs Smith must take it.

  David, who as usual was getting bored by the scene, said he
thought he saw Govern digging a hole in the turf, which caused Mrs Smith to hurry out, blotter in hand.

  ‘Well; enough, no more,’ said David reflectively, ‘’tis not so off-white now as it was before. We’d better go after her, or she’ll take all the peas and my wire.’

  By the time they got into the garden Govern and Ed were hard at work again. Both the Harveys had a turn for carpentering and acquitted themselves quite creditably, even by Govern’s standards, in putting the wire up round the run. Mrs Marling, having satisfied herself that all was going well, went back to the Hall to do some Red Cross work, so Lettice and David were left to watch the workers. There was, under a birch tree, a curved garden seat constructed and painted to resemble stone, evidently a part of the off-white decorative scheme. On each of its arms a concrete basin with a concrete pigeon on its edge prevented anyone from sitting or leaning. Here Lettice and David established themselves. A few yards away they had the pleasant sight of other people working. The sun came out, the breeze only stirred the smallest branches, Mrs Smith was absentmindedly among the peas with her basket as David had foretold.

  David and his cousin looked at one another and laughed.

  ‘Lord!’ said David. ‘Fancy meeting the ex-Miss Perry here. My darling mamma, who will show her heavenly charity to everyone, used to have her to tea once or twice a year and if I was at home I always escaped by the window. She is the sort that thinks Mamma is so nice, but a little queer, don’t you think: as indeed she is, bless her. By the way, the thrush died, they always do, and she kept the corpse for two days while she painted its portrait in watercolours and then Agnes took it away and the children buried it. Clarissa wrote a poem about it which I can’t remember. It ended,

  ‘See our thrush doth now arise

  And to heaven he quickly flies

  ‘Not really good. Oh Lord! how dull children can be.’

  Lettice did not answer. Since she had re-made David’s acquaintance she had thought much of him. Sometimes she thought with pleasure of his charming ways, his gift of laughter, his ridiculous mock-seriousness. Then she would think of his other moods; his way of suddenly being bored and dropping whatever he was doing and saying, of melting away whenever he was not being amused or interested; his perhaps rather heartless baiting of people like Mrs Smith who, it was true, did not feel it – at least she hoped they didn’t – but who might at any moment awake to the fact that they were being made a motley to the view and be bitterly perplexed or wounded. He had baited Geoffrey Harvey that night in the Stone Parlour, making him show his ignorance about cows; and she was not sure but that he had set her father and Geoffrey at cross purposes about poetry for his own amusement. And what was worse, she too had become part of his private entertainment and had only just stopped herself laughing at her father. Was David a bad influence, she vaguely wondered. Even if he was, she, a woman with two children, was too old to be corrupted by him. Surely she could share his amusement and yet not feel any contempt for his victims. Perhaps she could even influence him to be more tolerant; a thought which shows that she was not very experienced after all.

  David, watching his cousin’s musing face, wondered how he had happened to miss seeing her for so many years and blamed himself. Her faint seriousness, her readiness to laugh when the ice was broken, the fascinating way in which the ice froze again between visit and visit and had to be thawed till laughter came; all this attracted him more than he had been attracted for some time. It was a small, fresh experience for David Leslie to find a delightful woman whom he was at liberty to love as a cousin without prejudice to loving her if he wished as a friend, or as his long-sought-for love. Nothing would have induced him to think of a wife in terms of pleasing his family, but if he did consider making Lettice his wife he knew his parents and Agnes and John would approve wholeheartedly. Lettice had a quiet distinction of manner, good enough looks for any man, the right kind of birth and background. She had loved Roger evidently and though she loved him did not give David the impression that her heart was sunk in the sea before Dunkirk. True there were children, but they were agreeable and well behaved and their half brothers and sisters would not be so very much younger. Money David did not need, but that his wife should have money of her own would not be unpleasing. There was no hurry. He was on leave and had heard that he would be employed in England for some time to come. The field was clear. If Mr Harvey had any thoughts about her, David did not consider it a serious matter. He had already established a supremacy over Mr Harvey in the matter of the polled Angus – rather unfairly, he admitted to himself, for the time he had spent a few years ago in the Argentine buying and examining cattle for his father had made him an authority in a small way – and so had an easy lead.

  It was therefore all the more disconcerting when his cousin, coming back from her musing trance, suddenly said, ‘David, you were really not very kind to Geoffrey the other night. He might easily have seen you were egging him on, and so might Father.’

  ‘Bless your heart, my love,’ said David, with a stirring of guilty feelings to which he was not at all accustomed, ‘he needs no egging. No more than old Perry – I beg her pardon, La Smith – does.’

  ‘But I think you were rather unkind to Mrs Smith,’ said Lettice, womanishly seizing this weak point. ‘I really thought she would see that you were mocking her.’

  ‘What lovely words you use,’ said David admiringly. ‘Anyone else would have said making fun of her.’

  ‘Well, they would have meant the same thing,’ said Lettice spiritedly. ‘David, I know I laugh when you are like that because I can’t help it, but do you really need to mock so much? Don’t you ever like people enough not to laugh at them?’

  ‘That question, my love, requires some notice and a power of consideration,’ said David. ‘So far I may truthfully say no. And when you know how much I adore my Mamma and how often I laugh at her, you will realise the full extent of – I can’t remember how I was going to end that sentence, but anyway you will realise how difficult it is. If I ever met anyone, a woman particularly, that I didn’t laugh at, it would either be because she was so dull that she had nothing in her to laugh about, or because she made me feel that I couldn’t and needn’t mock; and then how dull I’d be.’

  ‘You don’t mock me,’ said Lettice with great simplicity, ‘but I don’t find you at all dull.’

  ‘Bless your heart,’ said David, ‘how little do you understand the implications of your brilliant cousin. What I am trying to say, in halting words, is that if I were head over ears in love, which somehow I’ve never quite been yet, it would make me so stupid that I would be as dull as ditchwater.’

  ‘I do get confused, David, with all your brilliance,’ said Lettice, ‘but I still think it isn’t very kind to laugh at Joyce in front of her face, though I admit she fully deserves it.’

  ‘Listen, love,’ said David, the thought flashing through his mind that if anyone but Lettice had been so gently obstinate over such a trifle he would have found an excellent excuse for getting away ten minutes ago, ‘I will now tell you something. You believe it is your duty to tell me that.’

  ‘I never said anything about duty at all,’ Lettice exclaimed indignantly. ‘I just thought you were not very kind to Geoffrey and Joyce.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what, as your sister Lucy would say,’ said David. ‘You may not have said duty, but you thought duty. And let me tell you, love, that in my peculiar and useless life I have learnt one thing. It is never one’s duty to tell people unpleasant things, because they only make them miserable and usually aren’t true. If you meet the word duty, it always means telling your friends something that hurts them. Have you ever known anyone who felt it his or her duty to tell you something nice?’

  ‘But people often say nice things to me,’ said Lettice.

  ‘Yes, my owl, they do, I am sure,’ said David. ‘But not from a sense of duty; because they want to. Has anyone ever said to you, “I am sorry, Mrs Watson, but I feel it my duty to tell you
that you are being a very good mother and looking after your children who do you great credit”?’

  Lettice opened her eyes wide and said of course not.

  ‘There you are,’ said David. ‘And if they want to say that you are behaving shockingly and bringing up your children like guttersnipes, it is not duty, it is really because they want to.’

  ‘I do my best to bring them up well,’ said Lettice, looking anxious.

  ‘Half-wit; nincompoop; in fact Woman,’ said David, very affectionately. ‘It is hopeless to talk to you, and I feel it is my painful duty to tell you that you are the very nicest cousin I have and that your daughters are perfection, though I wish they wouldn’t hug my legs so hard when we meet, for it spoils the creases in my trousers. Now we will stop talking sense. Besides, I hear a noise which is unmistakably telling people what, and I associate it with your sister Lucy.’

  Even as he spoke Lucy came round the side of the house carrying a pair of hens in a professional way by the legs, upside down.