Marling Hall

by Angela Thirkell

  In all these activities Miss Merriman was a zealous and untiring helper, beside reading aloud Surtees and Barsetshire Place Names to Mr Leslie, helping Agnes with her sewing parties and other war work, and keeping on good terms with the nursery, and to her it was that Lady Emily first expressed her desire to see the Marlings again.

  Although Lady Emily was a great cultivator of family ties and had always made Rushwater a kind of clearing house for all family news, this was not her sole reason for wishing to renew relations with Marling Hall. She loved all her children with an embracing and almost indiscriminating love, but if she had a favourite it was David. Selfish and unreliable as he was in many ways he had a devotion for his mother which made him in a fit of dixhuitièmerie compare himself with the Chevalier de Boufflers, while by no means attributing to his domesticated mamma the characteristics of Madame de Boufflers, and the tie between them was very close. How much Lady Emily knew of his frequent attachments to charming women, or even of their more frequent attachments to him, David could not be quite sure, but he really did his best to spare his mother uneasiness by telling her nothing and heaping her with affection and small gifts whenever he came to see her. It was naturally Lady Emily’s deep wish to see David happily married and her heart would have opened widely to any bride that he brought home. That it would have opened more widely to a wife from her own set is just possible, but so far no bride, county or otherwise, had been produced. During the summer David’s sudden spate of visits to Marling had roused her ladyship’s interest and wish to interfere to a very high pitch. Agnes and Miss Merriman had managed to restrain her, and David’s visits had stopped for some time. But her curiosity was by now so roused that nothing would serve her but to see Lettice Marling for herself and decide whether there was ‘anything in it’, though how she proposed to find out no one knew.

  Accordingly Agnes had telephoned, the day for a visit had been arranged, and on a fine late-September afternoon Agnes and Lady Emily with Miss Merriman were seated in the drawing-room with their work waiting for their guests. Agnes’s work was sea-boot stockings which she knitted with speedy skill on the grounds that the grease in the wool kept her lovely hands soft. Lady Emily was making a khaki scarf, had been making it for nearly a year, and was likely, as far as anyone could see, to finish it a few days after the end of the war, if then. Not only was she nearly always occupied with other things, with her vast correspondence, with her grandchildren, her painting, her decorating, her autobiography, the mending of the prayer and hymn books in Little Misfit church, a work which entailed yards of transparent adhesive mending paper with which she patched the torn pages rather crookedly or replaced them in the wrong part of the book and became festooned in a kind of spider’s web of paper in the process, but knitting had never been one of her accomplishments. Agnes had suggested that her mother should make many-tailed bandages, for her sewing was exquisite, but Lady Emily said that would not be like real war work and she must do something difficult. So Miss Merriman went by train to Barchester and bought khaki wool and knitting needles and cast on the stitches for a scarf. Her ladyship explained that to do any work really well one must begin from the very beginning and unravelled Miss Merriman’s work with a mischievous face. Miss Merriman composedly wound the ravellings into a ball and began teaching her employer how to cast on, a task which after the loss of two-and-a-half pairs of needles, some of which were afterwards found as far afield as in the dolls’ house in the nursery and others never found at all, was at the end of six weeks more or less successfully accomplished. As Lady Emily had vague recollections of having been taught to knit in her youth by a German governess with the wool wound round her left-hand fingers and Miss Merriman, though a skilled knitter, could only knit in the English way, the period of instruction was complicated and lengthy. At last Lady Emily was fairly launched and proceeded to perform bravura variations on the theme of plain knitting in every row. What she achieved in the way of adding stitches, of losing stitches, of inventing stitches that no one had ever met before, of finding a long ladder where none had been five minutes earlier, of discovering a peculiar knotted lump twenty rows back and insisting on unravelling to that point because nothing was too good or good enough for the soldiers and picking up her row with double its number of stitches, only those who have tried to guide a mother’s early steps in knitting can understand. At the present time her scarf, which varied from nine inches to nineteen in width and had a curiously serpentine appearance when it did not look triangular, was about five feet long. Agnes thought Miss Merriman might now cast off, but Lady Emily, with floating memories of a rugger scarf of John’s at his public school, insisted that it must be at least double the length and continued her Penelope web.

  ‘I really think, Mamma,’ said Agnes for the third or fourth time since Lady Emily had emerged at four o’clock from her afternoon rest, ‘that you are quite wrong about David. If he were really fond of Lettice he would come back and see her; besides one must remember she is a widow.’

  ‘Of course she is a widow,’ said Lady Emily, ‘because she has those two little girls.’

  ‘They are nearly the same ages as Robert and Edith,’ said Agnes, her lovely face assuming a look of maternal pride, ‘only Diana is a little older than Robert. Besides,’ she added earnestly, ‘I do not think that her being a widow has anything to do with it. Widows can quite well marry again and after all John was a widower when he married Mary. Of course they would not marry just yet as poor Roger has only been dead a year. No, it is getting on for eighteen months which makes such a difference. Mamma, you are knitting in the wrong direction.’

  Lady Emily having, as she often did, picked up her knitting in the middle of a row and started backwards, had now discovered a curious loophole in her work and was looking at it with intelligent interest. Miss Merriman put down her air-force-blue sock and came to the rescue.

  ‘You know, Mamma,’ said Agnes, ‘Mrs Stoner who is Mr Middleton’s sister, the architect that we met at Lucasta Bond’s, married a man whose name I have forgotten who is Mr Middleton’s partner, and she was certainly a widow, but then she only had step-children.’

  Lady Emily considered this aspect of the affair and said step-children were of course quite different from one’s own children because they could marry each other.

  ‘Mamma!’ said Agnes.

  ‘You know quite well what I mean, Agnes,’ said her ladyship. ‘Children that have quite different parents and then one of each sort dies and the ones who are left get married, can get married to each other without the faintest difficulty, though it is so perplexing to outsiders. But as David hasn’t any children of his own they can’t marry Lettice’s girls. If he marries Lettice they must have some boys and they can all come to Rushwater when the war is over and use the nurseries again. Thank you, Merry, that is perfect, and now,’ said her ladyship, taking the knitting from her secretary’s hands and pulling one needle right out of its stitches, ‘I can go on beautifully.’

  Miss Merriman without a word took the knitting from her employer, and Parfitt introduced Mrs Marling, Lettice, Lucy and Miss Bunting. This lady had been brought partly for the pleasure of the drive, partly to meet Lady Emily again and partly, though nothing would have induced her to admit it, because she wanted to see Miss Merriman whose fame as the perfect secretary-companion had long ago reached her ears. Agnes coming forward enfolded the Marling ladies in her dispassionate, scented embrace, shook hands with Miss Bunting and led the party to her mother.

  Mrs Marling who had not seen Lady Emily since Mr Leslie’s illness was at first shocked by the change in her. Her cousin Emily’s handsome ravaged face was whiter than ever, or rather of an exquisite colourless parchment look. Her bright dark eyes looked more cavernous, the delicate bones of nose, cheeks and chin were more visible than of old, and she made no effort to rise. But when she spoke her face lighted up with all the glow of affection that Mrs Marling remembered from her earliest days, her thin sensitive mouth retained its entra
ncing curves, and the lace and scarves with which she had mobled her head gave her the noble look of an ageless and distinctly mischievous Sibyl. Mrs Marling saw that the flame in Lady Emily was not quenched by her years and wondered, as she often had, at Agnes’s gentle imperturbability with her adorable and disconcerting mother.

  ‘And Cousin Amabel,’ said Agnes, ‘you remember Miss Merriman at Pomfret Towers. Merry, you know Lettice and Lucy, don’t you. And I want you to know Miss Bunting.’

  The two éminences grises, if we may apply so equivocal a name to two so very respectable ladies, shook hands, looked at each other and acknowledged in that one glance each an equal. It became clear to both ladies that they were the cradle, the guardian power that brought such beings as Agnes, Lettice, David, Lady Emily in safety through the trials of childhood and of the world. Not for a day, Miss Merriman knew, could she have taught and controlled the schoolroom as Miss Bunting had done; not for her was it to tell the sons of dukes on their twenty-first birthday that their hair needed brushing or that their appearance at the christening of their eldest sons left much, by Miss Bunting’s standards, to be desired. Not for a day, Miss Bunting realised, could she have kept her patience with that quicksilver spirit, that wind-blown fountain, that irresponsible fiend angelical, Lady Emily Leslie; nor could she have dealt with her letters, her servants, her writings, her myriad avocations. In the look that passed between Miss Bunting and Miss Merriman a Throne spoke to a Throne and a silent language sped between them which none else in the room could understand, which none else might share.

  ‘And now we must have a long comfortable talk all about our young people,’ said Lady Emily to Mrs Marling. ‘Come and sit quite near me.’

  This invitation Mrs Marling found some difficulty in accepting, for Lady Emily who was seated in a very large comfortable armchair with her feet on a hassock and a shawl over both, constituting a stumbling block for the unwary, had a lacquer table strewn with painting materials on one side of her and on the other a charming papier-mâché-topped table with mother-of-pearl inlay supported not very securely by one leg and three claws, on which were a number of books toppling on the verge of a fall. When we add that her ladyship had a kind of large writing board with a green baize cover laid across her chair from arm to arm covered with exercise books and loose sheets of paper, it will be seen that no very intimate conversation with her was possible.

  Mrs Marling strode over the hassock and pulled up a small chair with a low seat which she wedged up against the papier-mâché table and sat down. Two books fell off and lay sprawling face downwards on the floor. Miss Merriman picked them up and was about to bestow them elsewhere in safety when her employer protested.

  ‘Back on the little table, please Merry, just where they were,’ said Lady Emily, ‘because I do find,’ she continued to Mrs Marling, ‘that if one knows where things are one is so much more comfortable. What books were they, Merry?’

  Miss Merriman, replacing the books on the table though in a slightly safer position, said one was Lady Norton’s garden anthology, Herbs of Grace, and the other Mrs Morland’s last novel.

  ‘Victoria Norton’s book is quite dreadful,’ said her ladyship taking the whole room into her confidence. ‘Snippets about gardens, what David calls “God-wots”, and so many misprints. And a stupid title because it isn’t about herbs at all and makes one think of St John of Jerusalem, not that she does belong to it, which somehow makes it worse. Shall I like Mrs Morland’s book, Merry?’

  Miss Merriman said she had been reading it aloud to her on the previous evening and thought she had enjoyed it.

  ‘Of course; I enjoyed it immensely,’ said Lady Emily, her loving hawk’s eyes sparkling, ‘I know I did, because I was thinking all the time that if someone could get a little petrol from somewhere Merry could drive me over to see Victoria Norton and I would give her a list of all the misprints. I made one in bed this morning and I have it somewhere.’

  Her ladyship stretched out her hand to the other table and upset a glass of painting water. Miss Merriman produced a duster from a drawer and mopped up the mess.

  ‘Here it is,’ said Lady Emily triumphantly, ‘only I painted some doves and some fishes on the same piece of paper so it is rather mixed.’

  With some pride she produced a piece of paper where one of her untaught delicious arabesques of flying fish and floating birds strayed among a good deal of writing, half of which was upside down.

  ‘There,’ she said triumphantly, handing it to Mrs Marling, and then returning, as she always did, however long the divagation, to her earlier theme, she asked if Mrs Morland’s boys were all well.

  Mrs Marling, who had luckily informed herself from Mrs Crawley the day she went to tea at the Deanery, said that so far all Mrs Morland’s boys were safe. The three elder had been serving in various ways since the early days of the war and Tony, the youngest, after considerable muddle and delay from the War Office had at last got into a Field Artillery OCTU and was going to Powderham in Middleshire. This news drove Lady Emily into a welter of kind plans for writing to various friends who lived at distances varying from sixty to a hundred and sixty miles from Powderham and telling them they must ask Mrs Morland’s boy to lunch, when Parfitt came in with the tea things.

  ‘Now we will have a real sit-down tea at the table,’ said her ladyship, ‘and I shall get up and join you and have a talk to Miss Bunting, who was always so wonderful at schoolroom tea and used to make darling David cut his nails, though it was years before he could cut his right hand with his left, which sounds as if one were flying in the face of the Bible, but I daresay there weren’t any nail scissors then. Now I shall get up.’

  In one more second both tables would have been knocked over, the writing board and its contents all over the floor and her ladyship probably tripped up with her own shawl and hassock, but the admirable and all-foreseeing Miss Merriman, swift as lightning but more practical, whisked away the writing board, replaced it by a plain oak board on which Lady Emily could have her tea, tidied the shawl, pushed the hassock more comfortably under her employer’s feet, put another cushion behind her, and all with such decision, neatness and speed that the visitors stood amazed and Miss Bunting’s expert’s admiration went up several degrees.

  Tea was not peaceful, for Lady Emily, demanding private talks with each one of her guests, succeeded in getting Mrs Marling, Lettice and Lucy grouped round her, thus paralysing all intimate conversation, while she read aloud and discussed with herself various fragments of her autobiography, which acquired a good deal of butter and crumbs in the process.

  ‘I want you all to help me,’ she said. ‘Amabel, I am sure you will remember the year my brother opened the new wing of the Barchester General Hospital, because I know you were abroad with your father then which made it stick in my memory.’

  Mrs Marling, who hadn’t the faintest idea and didn’t know that the late Lord Pomfret had opened the wing, had to confess complete ignorance.

  ‘I will look up the files of the Barchester Chronicle, Lady Emily, next time I go into Barchester,’ said Miss Merriman from the tea table.

  ‘And another thing I cannot remember,’ said Lady Emily, distractedly rearranging the scarf round her face, ‘is how many men we had at Rushwater when it was an officers’ hospital in the war – I mean THE war, not this one which is not in the least one’s idea of what a war is like. Lucy dear, you are at a hospital aren’t you, I am sure you would know. We gave up most of the house, including having a ward in the drawing-room, so that would give you some idea.’

  Lucy was for once completely at a loss and tongue-tied. Miss Merriman, without apparently interrupting her conversation with Agnes and Miss Bunting, said she would ring up the agent at Rushwater and get the exact figures from him.

  ‘Then that is all our business for today,’ said her ladyship with a great air of being the very competent chairman of a committee. ‘And now I want to talk to Lettice. David says your children are adorable. You must bring t
hem over here one day. Dear child, I was so grieved about your husband, but we won’t speak of it now. David says you are quite wonderful. Of course everyone adores David, but you and I know how adorable he really is. If he is spared to us in this war,’ said Lady Emily, thinking, as she often did, of her first-born, killed before Arras, so long ago now, ‘he must marry and settle down. He has been enjoying himself quite long enough.’

  Mrs Marling and Lucy in a frenzy of embarrassment had been talking loudly and at random to each other during her ladyship’s speech. Lettice, also acutely uncomfortable, for she could not make out whether her cousin Emily’s words were directed at her, or were merely, as seemed more probable, her ladyship conversing aloud with herself, heartily wished that her mother and sister would not be so ostentatiously tactful, for it made everything much worse. It was no pleasure to her to hear that everyone adored David and she was not sure whether she shared Cousin Emily’s feelings about knowing how adorable he really was. He had not been very adorable to her. He had come over to Marling a great deal and amused and excited her and made her wonder what she really felt and then he had vanished without a word, without telephoning. On the whole she hated him, but did not see her way to telling the state of her mind to Cousin Emily, so as usual she took refuge in a smile.

  Before Lady Emily could do any more damage the contents of the schoolroom and nursery were disgorged into the room. Emmy, Clarissa, John, Robert and Edith said ‘How do you do’ with exquisite courtesy and want of interest to the visitors and flung themselves into an angelic group round their grandmother, all talking at once. It appeared that at nursery tea Robert had put a piece of crust under the rim of his plate to avoid eating it, which Nannie’s eagle eye had at once spotted. He had been made to finish it but Edith, inflamed by his heroic action, had taken out of her mouth her piece of crust and put it into John’s saucer. No one could quite bear to make her eat it; the nurserymaid had borne it away, Nannie had preached a sermon on waste in war time which had made John and Robert offer to give up all their crusts for the poor soldiers for the duration of the war, while Edith had cried so loudly for her crust that the nurserymaid had been told to fetch it back and put it in the canary’s cage. When the story reached this point Lady Emily drew a picture of the canary eating the crust for John and Robert, while Edith danced a private dance with a transfigured face, singing in a very tuneless voice ‘Crust, canary; canary, crust’ over and over again.