Marling Hall

by Angela Thirkell

  ‘I must say I rather agree with you, Bunny,’ said Mrs Marling. ‘We never got more than an after-lunch piece of chocolate. And as for spinach, no natural child can stand it.’

  ‘But, Mrs Marling, the kiddies need the vitamins,’ said Mrs Smith.

  ‘Show me a vitamin, Joyce, and I’ll believe you,’ said Mrs Marling. ‘People don’t want vitamins, they want what they want.’

  ‘And to take oranges away from grown-ups who do want them and force children to have oranges when they want fish and chips!’ said Miss Bunting.

  Captain Barclay said he would rather have fish and chips any day and what about a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Adults?

  Lettice, looking lovingly at her daughters, said she often thought herself of founding a Herod Society.

  ‘What children need,’ said Mlle Duchaux, who had always found the frivolity of the English deeply shocking, ‘is good soup, though of course you others do not understand the art of making real soup. Give a French woman a bone and a crust and an onion and she will produce a nourishing and fortifying soup, fit for a king.’

  ‘I should think a bone and a crust is about all they have now, poor creatures,’ said Mrs Smith. ‘And if they have an onion it is more than we have. Really one would think Someone we won’t mention here had a spite against onions, such a bad year it’s been.’

  The subject of onions was discussed in all its aspects while Mlle Duchaux ate with a steady purpose which, as Lettice said afterwards, made her think of Madame Defarge. Clare cut her cake by proxy, the proxy being her mother, and everyone had a little to wish her good luck. The children then said their after-tea grace and were removed to have their hands and faces sponged.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ said Lettice. ‘Not smoking makes one forget, but I’ve got some here. Mlle Duchaux, will you have one? I’m afraid they’re only Virginian.’

  ‘Merci, je ne fume point,’ said Mlle Duchaux with a clarity that would have won a round of applause at the Théâtre Français.

  Miss Bunting, who occasionally indulged, immediately took one of Lettice’s cigarettes and inhaled in a most dashing and devil-may-care way, pushing back her chair and crossing her elegant elderly legs, while she eyed Mlle Duchaux in a controlled but provocative way. Mrs Smith murmured that Mr Smith didn’t like to see ladies smoking, but was quite a chimney himself.

  Now the little girls, pink and clean, came back and threw themselves upon Captain Barclay.

  ‘Bando,’ said Clare.

  ‘She means piano,’ said Lettice with quite unjustifiable pride. ‘She wants her nursery rhymes. Would it bore you frightfully, Tom, if we had a few?’

  Captain Barclay removed Diana and Clare from his legs and went over to the little piano. Nursery rhymes, he said, were on the whole the governing principle of his life, and which ones did Lettice use? On seeing old copies of the Baby’s Opera and the Baby’s Bouquet, he exclaimed delightedly that he liked them better than anything in the world, and in all seriousness sat down and began to play some of the tunes, adding pleasing harmonies to the accompaniments which even their most nostalgic admirers cannot deny to be barren and unimaginative in the extreme. Clare wormed herself on to his knees. Lettice pulled up a chair and took Diana on her lap. Gradually the children were entirely ignored as the two grown-ups passed eagerly from page to page, Captain Barclay even providing like Mr Frank Churchill a slight but correct second. Mrs Marling and Miss Bunting let themselves go back in thought to so many childhoods in the old sheltered days. Mrs Marling saw herself in the years before the new century, sitting on her mother’s lap, hearing those same songs: she saw her elder children hearing them from her – Lucy had never cared for them. Miss Bunting had visions of one schoolroom after another, always with its well-used upright piano at which she used to play those songs for her younger charges till they escaped her and went to their prep schools. Neither lady was over-given to sentiment, but each found herself in that uncomfortable predicament when one wants to wipe one’s eyes and blow one’s nose yet does not wish to be seen doing it.

  ‘Did you ever know one called “The Silly Little Baa”?’ said Captain Barclay to Lettice.

  She turned over a heap of music and drew out a thin, long-shaped book of songs, worn with much use, which she opened and placed on the music stand.

  ‘Diana and Clare both know it,’ said Lettice, taking the opportunity of coughing and we regret to say sniffing slightly.

  ‘Come on then,’ said Captain Barclay.

  What do you think a silly little Baa

  Said one day to his own mamma,

  ‘I want to go away to those hills afar,’

  sang Lettice and Diana and Clare. The story unrolled itself as the Baa, against all his mamma’s advice, ran away by the bright moonlight, When the pretty little stars gave a pretty little light, And thought Oh how pleasant to be out at night, until he came to the dark, dark wood, And then oh, how he wished he had been good, For the cruel wolf nearly made him its food. Lettice’s voice began to quaver perilously. Diana looked up at her mother and stopped singing. Captain Barclay went on; the shepherd kind and good Hastened away to the dark, dark wood And (with far too many words jammed together in one line after the best traditions of English poetry) saved the little lamb from being the cruel wolf’s food.

  ‘Now, it’s all right,’ said Captain Barclay sotto voce with a side glance at Lettice, ‘come on.’

  Then the kind shepherd took up the little Baa,

  Away from the wood where he’d wandered so far,

  Back to the side of his own mamma

  In the safe, safe fold where the little lambs are,

  he sang, with hearty but inexpert help from Clare. Diana, overcome as she always was by the beauty and pathos of the song, burst into a fit of crying and hurled herself into her mother’s arms. Lettice, equally overcome, tried hard not to show it, failed, and putting Diana down went precipitately into her bedroom. Mrs Marling and Miss Bunting applied themselves to comforting Diana, which usefully hid their own emotion.

  ‘Mais, qu’est ce qu’elle a, Mrs Watson?’ said Mlle Duchaux.

  ‘Je pense qu’elle pense de son mari,’ said Mrs Smith reproachfully. ‘Il était un marin, vous savez.’

  ‘Mais cette histoire d’une brebis égarée – ça n’a rien à faire avec la marine,’ said Mlle Duchaux with the inexorable logic of the French.

  ‘Vous ne comprenez pas,’ said Mrs Smith, enfolding herself in an aura of pitying Britishness against all foreigners.

  By this time Diana was comforted, Lettice had come back quite restored, and Clare on Captain Barclay’s knees was playing single notes with a fat finger, to her own deep satisfaction. Captain Barclay did not feel comfortable. Somehow he had made Lettice cry. That Diana should cry was natural, his sisters had cried when they were small and most of the little girls he had known were apt to cry for a moment if anything went wrong. But for Lettice to cry, Lettice whom he had always found so gently gay, so pleasant a companion, whom he always left with a warm feeling at his heart, was shattering. In fact, he thought, while he held Clare’s finger to play the tune of ‘Three Blind Mice’ and supplied a bass with his left hand, he was a brute. There was probably something connected with that song that struck a deep sacred chord in her. Perhaps her husband used to sing it to her when they were engaged. But at this flight of fancy his sensible mind pulled itself up short and he laughed, so that Clare laughed too.

  ‘Come here, Diana, and I’ll tell you a story on the piano about some giants and some dwarfs,’ he said, ‘if Clare will sit still.’

  The story consisted of loud bangings in the bass (giants), small twitterings in the treble (dwarfs), the approach of the two parties, an awful scrimmage in the middle of the piano in which Diana and Clare joined with all their might, the withdrawal of the combatants glissando, and finally sleepy twitterings in the treble and peaceful grumblings in the bass. The little girls shrieked with joy and begged for it again, but Captain Barclay, scattering them right an
d left, suddenly turned into a grown-up again. Lucy came in from driving her convalescents and after eating a large slice of birthday cake said she would drive Mlle Duchaux and Mrs Smith back as she wanted to ask Hilda about killing ducks and if you killed them the same way as hens. Tom, she added, could come too. Captain Barclay did not want to come too. He wanted if possible to have a word with Lettice and make some kind of apology. But Lucy was not a person one could disobey and he could think of no plausible, nor indeed any courteous excuse. So he said goodbye to all his hostesses, dropped his gloves behind the radiator in the hall and followed Lucy downstairs. That strong-minded young woman opened both the doors of the back seat and saying to Mlle Duchaux and Mrs Smith, ‘Get in one each side,’ ordered Captain Barclay to sit by her in front. The journey was soon over. Mlle Duchaux was dropped at the Red House, and Mrs Smith, with embarrassing humility, said she would get out there as she knew Miss Marling had so many calls on her petrol. In vain did Lucy point out that by going round the village green, which she meant to do in any case to avoid turning the car in the narrow bit of road outside the Harveys’, she would pass Mrs Cox’s door. Mrs Smith again protested. Lucy was not one to waste words, so she said, ‘All right,’ started her car violently and asked Captain Barclay where he had left his car because she hadn’t seen it in the stable yard. Captain Barclay said quite right, he had left it up at the Hall, but he couldn’t find his gloves and had a kind of inner conviction that he must have left them at Lettice’s, so would she drop him there.

  ‘I expect they’re in your car all the time,’ said Lucy.

  Captain Barclay said he remembered having them as he walked down the drive.

  ‘Well then, you go up and see if they’re there,’ said Lucy, ‘and I’ll wait for you and run you up to the Hall.’

  ‘No,’ said Captain Barclay firmly. ‘I’m sure they’re at Lettice’s. I’ll tell you what, you drop me there and then you can go on and look in my car. If you don’t come back I’ll know they aren’t there.’

  He noticed with a faint irritation that it was he who had told Lucy what and not she who had told him and wondered if his disingenuous suggestion would convince Lucy. Apparently it did, for she nodded and, whisking the car in a masterly way round the green, turned in at the gate at the bottom of the hill.

  ‘Goodbye,’ said Mlle Duchaux, extending her well-gloved hand to Mrs Smith outside the gate of the Red House.

  ‘Au revaw but not goodbye, we hope,’ said Mrs Smith, making no effort to take the offered hand, ‘but I am just going to pop in for a moment to see how the dear garden is. You can’t think how I miss my little garden, and having to buy vegetables is dreadful. Ever since I married Mr Smith I have had a little bit of garden and now with things the price they are – but I always say we have much to be thankful for, so I’ll just pop along and have a look.’

  With which words she edged past Mlle Duchaux, skirted the pond and made for the little kitchen garden. Here Mr Harvey, in grey flannel trousers, a yellow pullover, and bare feet in sandals, was picking some late beans in a very dilettante way with his back to her. A basket was on the path nearby.

  ‘Quite a stranger, Mr Harvey,’ said Mrs Smith.

  Mr Harvey turned round and nearly dropped a handful of beans.

  ‘Quite a start it gave me to see you there,’ said Mrs Smith. ‘Many’s the time I used to come down the garden from the house when I’d been helping the girl to get the supper, to tell Mr Smith we were just dishing up. He had quite a fancy for beans and liked to pick those runners himself. Gentlemen have their ways.’

  ‘I’m not really so very keen on picking beans,’ said Mr Harvey, anxiously disclaiming any point of affinity with the late Mr Smith. ‘Hilda wanted some and my sister wanted to write some letters, so I thought I might as well go.’

  ‘Ah, you may put it on them, but it’s really your own kind heart,’ said Mrs Smith. ‘Mr Smith was just such another one. Kindness was his motto as you might say.’

  Mr Harvey said he was sure it was and threw his beans at the basket. Some went in and some again did not.

  Mrs Smith, remarking that Mr Smith though fond of gardening was quite awkward with his hands, picked up the beans, put them in his basket, and to Mr Harvey’s great terror stepped on to the bean patch, where she walked along the other side of the row that Mr Harvey was picking, sometimes culling a few herself, sometimes pushing the basket at him so that he might drop his beans in it. In vain did he suggest that she must be tired. Mrs Smith said with very beautiful resignation that she was always fatigued but tried not to think of Self. By this time they had got to the far end of the bean row and Mr Harvey, emerging from his tendrilled prison, thanked Mrs Smith for her help and said Hilda would be waiting for the beans. Accordingly they set out homewards, Mrs Smith carefully holding the basket on the side away from her companion and ignoring his offer to carry it. Where the little path to the back door branched off behind the laurel hedge Mr Harvey tried to stop, but as Mrs Smith walked on he unwillingly followed her. At the lily pond she paused.

  ‘Do you know, Mr Harvey,’ she said, raising her large, sad eyes to her tenant in a way that made him feel like mud, ‘those dear dwarfs were Mr Smith’s last purchase before he passed over. We had been to the afternoon session at the Barchester Odeon and he was so taken by Snow White that he went straight to Pilchard’s next day and bought these statues as a kind of souvenir. True it is that he was not quite himself when he bought them, owing to something at supper with some gentlemen friends after the pictures that didn’t agree with him, but once having bought them he was quite taken with them as you might say. When I thought of going to Torquay my one real regret was the dwarfs.’

  Mr Harvey heard himself saying that the dwarfs would not run away and blanched at the effect his landlady’s conversation was having upon his conversational style.

  ‘But someone might run away with them,’ said Mrs Smith in what Mr Harvey to his horror realised to be an arch manner. ‘I sometimes feel I could just pop one of them under my arm and carry him off. Just for auld lang syne.’

  Mr Harvey by this time would gladly have put all the dwarfs into the wheelbarrow and taken them over to Mrs Cox’s if by so doing he could have got rid of his landlady. They had now reached the garden gate and he was just about to open it, his hand was indeed on the latch, when Mrs Smith laid her rather predatory and dry-skinned hand with its wide wedding ring on his.

  ‘Pardon me,’ she said tragically. ‘I know I am very foolish, but I like to feel that I can open and shut this dear little gate myself. You must excuse me if I say, Mr Harvey, that being able to pop over and see my little home whenever I like has been quite a comfort.’

  Mr Harvey, alarmedly conscious of his hand imprisoned under hers, said, ‘Oh, not at all’.

  ‘You do not know, Mr Harvey,’ said Mrs Smith, releasing him as she opened the gate, ‘what it is to be a widow. It quite does me good to see my little home with a man about it, so if I pop in and out you must just take no notice at all. I shall just creep in like a mouse, and if you and Miss Harvey are doing anything literary I shall take what I want quite quietly and run away again.’

  With a smile that froze Mr Harvey to the marrow and a look of her fine ravaged eyes, she made off across the green. Mr Harvey went into the house and was just going upstairs when Hilda came out of the kitchen.

  ‘Where’s my beans, Mr Geoffrey?’ she said. ‘Beans don’t string themselves and they aren’t as young as they was.’

  Mr Harvey looked round helplessly.

  ‘I think Mrs Smith must have taken them by mistake,’ he said.

  Hilda looked at him, went back into her kitchen and slammed the door with such violence that Miss Harvey looked out of her bedroom.

  ‘I suppose Hilda is upset because you let Mrs Smith have the beans,’ she said coldly. ‘I saw you from my window. Really, Geoffrey, you are too feeble for words.’

  ‘I couldn’t help it,’ said her brother, too wretched to push back his lock which
hung damply over one eye.

  ‘Help it!’ said Miss Harvey with the impatient contempt of an elder sister for a younger brother. ‘If she asked you to marry her you’d be too feeble to say no. If there aren’t any beans we can’t have them. Don’t be too long with the bath.’

  Mr Harvey vengefully turned on a very deep, hot bath. If Frances chose to treat him as a child he could at least keep her out of the bathroom; a puerile revenge it was true, but a satisfactory one. As he lay in the steaming water, the hot tap running and so depriving factories, railway engines, warships and canteens of the fuel necessary to their existence, he was suddenly transfixed by a thought of horror. When his sister talked of Mrs Smith wanting to marry him had she meant anything? He knew that she hadn’t; it was merely an outburst of temper such as life with Frances had accustomed him to. Yet it made him uncomfortable, so uncomfortable that he tried to turn off the hot water with his toes, swore with agony and got out of the bath. Dinner was accompanied by silent hatred from Hilda, a certain amount of nagging from his sister and the clearly expressed and unfavourable opinions of Mlle Duchaux on Miss Bunting, so that Mr Harvey heartily wished the war were over and he were back in Whitehall.