Marling Hall

by Angela Thirkell

  Lucy decanted Captain Barclay in the stable yard and agreeable to her promise went on to the Hall to see if his gloves were in his car. In normal times, her kind heart would have prompted her to drive his car down to the stables for him, but he had very properly left it locked, so she looked through the windows but could not see any gloves. Her father came up at that moment and talked with her about some ploughing, then she had to go to the kitchen to fetch two eggs for Ed’s mother who had been unwell and by this time it was so late that she decided to drive down to the stables, leave the eggs with Ed who always lingered there as long as possible, and kindly drive Captain Barclay up to the Hall.

  Captain Barclay went up the steep stair with a faint but unmistakable pounding of his heart and rang the bell. The maid had run down to see her mother before supper and Nurse was putting the children to bed, so the door was opened by Lettice, who said, ‘Oh.’

  This word may be interpreted in various ways. It certainly did not sound hostile, and as Lettice stood aside for him to enter the little hall he took it as kindly meant.

  ‘No one ever rings, they just come straight in,’ said Lettice, ‘so I couldn’t imagine who it was.’

  ‘I thought I might have left my gloves here,’ said Captain Barclay.

  Lettice said that she didn’t think any gloves had been seen, but if he would come in she would ask Nurse. She came back in a moment with the news that Nurse knew nothing of them.

  ‘But you must have left them somewhere,’ said Lettice earnestly. ‘Do you think you had them when you came?’

  Captain Barclay said with great truth that he was perfectly sure he had them when he came and how extraordinary it was that things got mislaid just when one wanted them. Lettice said when one particularly wanted things they had a way of vanishing, and turned over several sofa cushions. Captain Barclay, with a sense of guilt tempered with elation, looked behind the piano.

  ‘I am terribly sorry,’ said Lettice anxiously.

  ‘Too stupid of me,’ said Captain Barclay. ‘By the way, I hope Diana wasn’t really upset by “The Silly Little Baa”. It’s certainly an awfully sad song and I felt rather a brute when she began to cry.’

  ‘Oh, she always cries at that,’ said Lettice. ‘So do I.’

  At these simple words a great weight was lifted from Captain Barclay’s soul.

  ‘And we both rather enjoy crying,’ Lettice added.

  This confession seemed to Captain Barclay so rare and beautiful that he had nothing to say.

  ‘It is funny,’ Lettice continued, half to herself, ‘how agreeable crying can be when there is really nothing to cry about; and it doesn’t make one so hideous. But if you are really miserable and try not to cry you get all choked, and then when it comes unchoked it is quite dreadful and one can’t stop and one looks all swollen and disgusting.’

  Captain Barclay looked at her most sympathetically, but still found nothing to say.

  ‘I am so very sorry about your gloves,’ Lettice said, suddenly becoming the hostess again.

  ‘I’m sure I’ll find them somewhere,’ said Captain Barclay, more or less truthfully.

  Lettice began to move cushions again, to feel down the back of the sofa, to look in such improbable places as the inside of the upright piano. Captain Barclay could bear her misguided efforts no longer. She was tiring herself by her fruitless searching and the fault was his.

  ‘I’m awfully sorry, Lettice,’ he said, ‘but I left my gloves in the hall.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Lettice. ‘They weren’t there when you came in just now. At least I didn’t see them.’

  She went towards the door. To see her thus abasing herself to menial tasks (for so Captain Barclay more or less put it to himself, though not exactly in those words) for his sake, for the sake of a deliberate and black-souled liar, was too much for him. He strode across the room and got hold of the door handle before she could touch it.

  ‘They are behind the radiator in the hall,’ he said, with simple nobility.

  ‘Have you just remembered?’ said his hostess with interest. ‘Let me look.’

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Captain Barclay, descending from his noble altitudes and opening the door, ‘I put them there on purpose. Here they are, if you don’t believe me.’ And so saying he reached down behind the radiator and fished up his gloves, with small bits of fluff and flue sticking to them.

  ‘Oh dear!’ said Lettice distressed. ‘I am always telling May she must dust behind the radiator.’

  She stood with her head a little on one side thinking. Captain Barclay’s last words seemed to her singularly devoid of sense. Why the fact of their being behind the radiator should prove that he had put them there she didn’t see. And even if he had, why he should put his gloves in such a silly and, most regrettably, such a dusty place she could not think, when suddenly a thought came into her mind that made her feel as if she were blushing.

  ‘Do you mean you dropped them there on purpose, Tom?’ she said, as a quite new light on the affair.

  ‘Absolutely on purpose,’ said Captain Barclay, observing with slight nervousness her rising colour and wondering how angry she was.

  This interesting conversation then stopped dead while its owners stood tongue-tied.

  ‘The fact is,’ said Captain Barclay in a rather rough voice which he did not recognise as his own, so that he had to stop, clear his throat and start again. ‘The fact is I frightfully wanted to tell you how frightfully sorry I was about making Diana cry, but there were too many people about and Lucy wanted me to go down to the village with her. So I chucked my gloves behind the radiator to make an excuse for coming back.’

  ‘How very nice of you,’ said Lettice earnestly. ‘But Diana wasn’t really unhappy. She was only enjoying being unhappy.’

  Captain Barclay would have liked to shake Lettice. After quite a quarter of an hour’s argle-bargling they were just where they had started.

  ‘It doesn’t really matter about Diana,’ he said with the calm of desperation. ‘It’s you that it matters about. I can’t bear having seen you cry. If I was thoughtless, if I hit on a song that hurt you, something your husband liked perhaps, or —’

  ‘Oh, Tom! How dear of you!’ said Lettice, at last grasping his drift, ‘I think it is the nicest thought anyone has ever had of me. No, no, nothing to do with Roger. I have always cried all my life at “The Silly Little Baa”. Roger used to laugh at me for it, and really I laugh at myself.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Captain Barclay, still suspicious.

  ‘Quite sure,’ said Lettice. ‘Dear Tom, don’t think me very horrid, but there is practically nothing that makes me unhappy now about Roger. It used to be quite dreadful, but you know one does get used to things.’

  Her voice sounded infinitely touching to her guest. He said nothing, for a true instinct made him aware that she was lightening her soul of some burden and his part was to stand by.

  ‘You know,’ she continued, looking very hard at a point on the wall a little to the right of Captain Barclay, ‘it isn’t Roger himself that I miss so much now, and I know it sounds heartless, but it just happens to be the truth, as having a man about the house. Not anyone special, but just to smell a pipe in a room, or Harris tweed in the hall, or to feel that someone else ought to have The Times first; just idiotic things. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to talk about myself. Don’t hate me. It’s difficult enough to know if one is being truthful or only enjoying letting go. I really am being truthful, but I have enjoyed letting go too.’

  Captain Barclay could find nothing better to say than that it was absolutely all right, so he said it with conviction, adding that he must go at once or he would be late.

  ‘Your gloves,’ said Lettice, picking them up from the radiator where he had laid them. ‘Or do you want to put them down behind the radiator again?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Captain Barclay.

  And with such emphasis did he say it that the image of David Leslie might have bee
n driven from Lettice’s mind for good, if at that moment Lucy had not come banging up the stairs and banged into the flat.

  ‘Come on, Tom,’ she said, ‘I’ll drive you back to your car. It’s frightfully late.’

  Captain Barclay could not push Lucy downstairs, so he laughed and thanked her. Lettice fully realised that Tom was Lucy’s property, so she did not attempt to keep him. For a mad instant she thought of dropping his gloves behind the radiator again. Then her upbringing told her that though it would be amusing, though Captain Barclay would at once understand the signal, though it would mean another visit and possibly the fun of talking about oneself again, that it could not be done, because a lady would not do it. So she said goodbye. Lucy clattered down the stairs and Captain Barclay followed her. Lettice shut the door and went to say goodnight to her daughters.

  9

  We will now transport ourselves to Holdings, the gentlemanly residence of Major-General Robert Graham, CB, at Little Misfit. Commodious and comfortable, built by his great-grandfather in the Regency Stucco era, it was under Agnes Graham’s rule a warm and scented abode of peace, with children prettily seen and pleasantly heard at the right times, and incredibly an almost pre-war staff, although of peculiar middle age or extreme youth. Here Agnes, whose husband was at present in the War Office, was housing her father Mr Leslie and her mother Lady Emily Leslie. Mr Leslie, who had been very ill just before the beginning of the war and to his great fury forbidden to ride or to walk much, had driven his wife and family nearly mad by insisting on doing both and collapsing. So Agnes, as we already know, had taken advantage of a visit that her parents were paying her to keep them both under her soft wing. Mr Leslie grumbled a good deal, but Agnes only said, ‘Poor darling Papa,’ looking at him with doves’ eyes. Rushwater, under the care of John Leslie, Mary Leslie and the agent Macpherson, was well looked after and every few weeks Mr Leslie was driven over to pay a state call, inspect the place, find fault, say it was high time he was dead, and come back to tell his wife how well John was doing.

  Sweet and even as Agnes’s temper was, we must admit that without the providential coming of Miss Merriman she might have found her beloved mamma mildly speaking a handful. Miss Merriman, as all that part of the county knew, had been the perfect companion for some years to the late Countess of Pomfret. At Pomfret Towers, at the Casa Strelsa in Florence, in the London house, she had exercised unswerving and equable rule over servants English and foreign, kept the accounts, answered the letters, seen that incoming and outgoing guests were provided with the right trains and cars, arranged the allotment of bedrooms and places at dinner, talked with the same calm to prime ministers, fox-hunting neighbours, or pert nieces, been perfectly friendly to everyone, yet kept an invisible barrier between herself and the world. She was Merry to all the Pomfrets’ friends, yet no one used and few knew her Christian name. To any advances she opposed a courteous steeliness that had never been broken. When old Lord Pomfret’s heir, his distant cousin young Mr Foster had come to live at the Towers, she had come to care for him very deeply but had schooled herself to remember that there were fifteen years between them and he was the heir to an earldom, and when he married Sally Wicklow, the agent’s sister, none was more unfeignedly sincere in her congratulations than Miss Merriman.

  Her countess’s death was a blow that she felt nonetheless because it was not unexpected. She mourned her with the same silent fidelity that had gone to her feeling for Gillie Foster. A legacy from the countess together with her own means made her sufficiently independent, and for a time she lived with a sister. But Lady Pomfret’s friends all remembered her and wanted her and by degrees she became a kind of visiting secretary to a large circle of titled or county families. It was while she was in Shropshire with Lady Humberton, formerly Phoebe Rivers and a niece of Lord Pomfret, helping her with a large christening party, that Mr Leslie had fallen ill. Agnes Graham had invoked her aid to keep Lady Emily company at Rushwater and when she transported her parents to Holdings Miss Merriman had come too and appeared likely to remain for the present. The late Lord Pomfret had been Lady Emily’s brother, so there was much common ground. Miss Merriman after a week of quiet observation, had taken the measure of her entrancing, wilful and maddening new employer and was now able, much to Agnes’s relief, to circumvent her in most of her meddlesome and impracticable schemes: for her ladyship, though much lamer of late and often in pain, had not abated a whit of her brilliant and many-faceted outbursts whether into society, painting, literature, the church, the village, or war activities.

  When war broke out, shortly after the Leslies had gone to Holdings and it had been decided that they should not for the present go back to Rushwater, Lady Emily had conceived a scheme for brightening the blackout by stencilling bright designs of her own creation on all the black curtains and frames that were hurriedly being put up. Agnes had made over to her mother two large rooms on the ground floor as bedroom and sitting-room. Here Miss Merriman, under Lady Emily’s directions, had cut holes in pieces of cardboard to make stencils and had driven her ladyship into Barchester to lay in a store of bright paints and large stiff brushes, also to buy the very largest kitchen table at Messrs Pilchard’s to serve as a work table.

  Her ladyship then added to the distractions of war by insisting on a personal expedition to all the servants’ bedrooms, the better to decide what kind of colour design would suit each member of the staff. Even Agnes blenched at the thought of intruding upon the awful fastnesses of the cook’s bedroom and the kitchen maid’s Regency garret, but Miss Merriman unperturbedly accompanied her employer up the steep stairs that led to the servants’ quarters, low rooms on the top floor behind elegant little pilasters which considerably obstructed the view, and stood by while Lady Emily indulged in detailed examination of such fascinating objects as the cook’s blue sateen nightgown case and the kitchen maid’s collection of threepenny novelettes. Only one room remained a mystery to her ladyship, the room belonging to her French maid, Conque, whom she had brought with her from Rushwater. Conque, who mistrusted all her fellow servants, had during forty years’ service in England always carried the key of her bedroom about with her and as she was never known to have been ill, no one had ever obtained access to her room. Her ladyship was therefore not able to decide what design would be most suitable, and when Conque under great pressure brought her the black curtains that she had sewn and put up herself, Lady Emily emblazoned them with her version of a Gallic cock and the Cross of Lorraine – to the great annoyance of Conque, who was a devout though completely unpractising Catholic and complained that the double cross n’avait pas de sens commun. ‘Et quant au Saint-Esprit,’ she added scornfully, in reference to the cock, ‘ce n’est pas ressemblant du tout. Mais enfin puisque miladi le désire —’ and with a shrug of her shoulders she took her curtains back to her room where she put them up the wrong way round and so avoided any further annoyance.

  For the first eighteen months of war Lady Emily had been fully occupied by her grandchildren at Holdings and at Rushwater, the care of her husband, and occasional visits to relations first in her car, then as petrol became scarce, by train, always accompanied and guarded by the indefatigable Miss Merriman who found that she had a double duty as Conque, after a lifetime spent in England, was quite incapable of taking a ticket for her mistress or speaking to a porter, and had on three separate occasions left valuable pieces of luggage or clothing in the train. Now however the discomfort of travel and her increasing lameness kept Lady Emily at home, so she had conceived the idea of writing an autobiography. It seemed to her loving family very improbable that the book would ever take shape, but it afforded intense pleasure to the author. Day after day she and Miss Merriman would sit down at the kitchen table (which her ladyship had painted pale blue and decorated with arabesques of gold) to attack their task. Day after day Lady Emily would be attracted in every direction by the most delightful red herrings, running into blind alleys among her great-grandparents, divagating into her grandm
other’s exchange of letters with the Duke of Wellington, rambling into the Italian branch of the Pomfret family, re-reading old diaries, going through collections of daguerreotypes and old photograph albums, driving over to Pomfret Towers to ask young Lady Pomfret who knew nothing about it the year in which the late earl had opened the new wing of the Barchester General Hospital, re-reading aloud all the letters her three sons had written her from school, college, the navy, or the army, making elaborate genealogical tables for which no sheet of paper was ever big enough, turning out the contents of various silk bags containing pieces of old dresses, each with a story attached which she could not remember, filling a number of threepenny exercise books with her elegant flowing writing and refusing to number the pages so that not even Miss Merriman could find her way about in them, making additional notes on half sheets, or as paper became a subject for economy on old envelopes slit open, which she left about in books and among her gloves or read aloud, apropos of nothing, at dinner.