Marling Hall

by Angela Thirkell

  David saw them into the car. Lucy was driving and Lettice sitting beside her. David kept his hand upon the lowered glass.

  ‘When shall I come and see you, Lettice?’ he said. ‘This year, next year? They have given me another holiday because there isn’t anything for me to do. And I want to see Frances Harvey again and annoy her. I feel she has uncharted depths.’

  To Lettice’s fury the heart that did not find David in the least adorable rose, panted and sank again. ‘I’m not frightfully busy,’ she said. ‘Ring me up.’ Lucy, impatient, for it was growing dark, drove off. Lettice was able to spend the journey home in wishing she had answered David as the Finished Coquette would have answered. Now she would listen for the telephone bell and her voice would not be her own voice; her thoughts would revolve exhaustingly round one subject. And always she would be wondering if Nurse or her mother thought David meant more to her than any other friend. A ridiculous thought for anyone to have, she told herself loftily, and knew she was not telling the truth.

  10

  The one good thing, as Lucy remarked, that could be said for the war was that time went so fast. Meals, work, sleep, day, night, blackout, followed each other on an ever more swiftly turning wheel. Oliver said that it was the one aim of his life to discover whether bed-time or getting-up-time came the more often. Opinion on this subject was divided, Lettice holding that one did nothing but go to bed, Lucy that one did nothing but get up. Mrs Marling thought it was on the whole breakfast which occurred more frequently than any other milestone in the twenty-four hours. Mr Marling, enquiring what they were all talkin’ about, said Nonsense, you couldn’t alter time any more than the Government could with that damned Double Summer Time which to his certain knowledge had so upset his best Jersey that she had slipped her calf, a statement which led Lucy into such lugubrious details of the too sensitive Jersey’s trials that Oliver begged her rather to tell them about the thyroid operation at the Cottage Hospital, a request with which she obligingly complied and at quite wearisome length.

  As the autumn ran its course every household in Barsetshire, and indeed all over England, became more and more like a small beleagured garrison or an ark resting on Ararat. Servants were called up, or rushed into reserved occupations to avoid being conscripted, a word to which they attached some sinister meaning including an attack on their liberty to entertain members of HM Forces at bed and board at their employers’ expense. Gardeners and chauffeurs had mostly gone except the aged, or boys just leaving school who had been carefully and successfully trained to despise the land and defy authority, though Ed, we are glad to say, continued in his mentally defective kindness and mild wisdom to reign over the stable yard at Marling Hall. The early blackout, besides taking anything from ten minutes to half an hour to do according to the size of the house, cut off evening visiting altogether. The rationing of petrol, more stringent and rightly so, cut people off from most of their friends, while the six hundred highly paid men and girls employed at the aeroplane reconditioning works near where Captain Barclay was stationed, were driven in motor coaches to and from their work over distances varying from five hundred yards to a mile and a half every day, besides being driven over to Barchester to the cinema every week at their employers’ expense. A great many people who wrote to thank friends or relations in Canada and the United States for small presents of food had their letters returned to them by the Censor with a typewritten slip saying that they were soliciting food, a word which roused the recipients to frenzy and made them wonder how they could ever explain to their kind friends abroad how much they had enjoyed the half pound of cheese, the half pound of chocolates and the fifty cigarettes. Gin vanished and reappeared, more frequently the former. Clothing coupons which looked such an imposing array when issued melted to nothing before the onslaught of a coat and skirt, or a winter overcoat. A new kind of gold-digging was evolved by women of all ages, who took up the attitude that their husbands, sons, brothers and men friends would never need any new clothes and so might as well let them have their coupons. About two million gas masks and three million identity cards were left in buses or trains or lost at home. Soap flakes caused much annoyance by being so scarce. Small articles of haberdashery were unprocurable, or soared to fantastic prices. Milk rationing drove everyone from the dairyman to the consumer demented. Powdered milk was nominally issued though many dairy farmers were unable to supply it, and a little later the Food Controller made his stirring announcement that a certain amount of powdered milk that had gone bad would be released for the use of cats engaged on work of national importance such as mousing. Women fed their odious little dogs on pounds of meat obtained illicitly from their butcher or by standing for an hour or two in a queue for meat which was variously said to be horseflesh or bombed cows. An increasing number of people dug up bits of their lawn and planted vegetables or kept hens, while a great many others said it was a shame to destroy the turf and the young people must have their tennis. A day’s shopping in London which used to be one of Barchester’s relaxations now became almost impossible, partly because one spent the whole day going from shop to shop and not getting anything, partly because the cheap day ticket could not be used for the return journey between four and six, and to pay 2s. 1d. more for a period ticket was more than flesh and blood could bear. First-class carriages were done away with on all the shorter runs, which enabled all the people who had been travelling first-class with a third-class ticket to go on doing so and to occupy their leisure by scratching and scraping the blackout off the windows. Also the restaurants in London were rushing downhill with joyous abandon, many of them serving at war prices food that no Barsetshire housewife would have allowed to appear at her own table, while the overworked and overtipped waiters were alternately lachrymose and insolent. Millions of people, old and young, attained the Greater Freedom by not cleaning their shoes.

  A great many people became violently and in most cases very ignorantly Jugo-Slavo-, Czecho-, Polo-, Sino-, Russo-, Uruguay-, and many other phils, while another and equally large section announced that it hated all foreigners including certain portions of the Empire and the British Isles, and always had: but they both meant pretty much the same thing and experienced much relief by airing their opinions in railway carriages or at dinner. The newspapers became a great deal smaller and were just as silly. The vast mass of slightly subnormal electors who had acquired the habit of turning on the wireless as soon as they got up and leaving it on till they went to bed, including all those who had taken advantage of a joyful state of national upheaval not to pay for their licences, were informed that a Mr Pickles had been sent by heaven in answer to their request and continued to leave the wireless on. Not long afterwards they were informed that Mr Pickles had at their request been despatched to wherever it was he came from, and left the wireless on even more than before. But apart from these disasters of war most people were very good, not least among them the elderly whose world had been broken and who knew they could not live to see civilisation remade, even if the young wanted to remake it in their own sense of the word.

  With this brief and prejudiced survey we will leave world issues and return to Marling Melicent.

  Here hens bulked very large through the autumn. Everyone had said How easy to keep hens, of course every cottager has a few and they cost you absolutely nothing. But the stern voice of disillusionment as experienced at the Red House informed the Harveys that those insane animals cost a great deal, laid with reluctance and died with enthusiasm. Even Hilda could not altogether quell them, in spite of her previous experience. If they were left in the run they sulked, refused to jump for cabbages dangling from strings, went broody and had to be put in padded cells to recover. If they were allowed to walk about the garden they ate every green vegetable they could see, or pushed their way like serpents through small gaps in the hedge or loose places in the fence into Dr March’s garden on one side or Colonel Propert’s on the other. Chicken wire was now practically unprocurable, so apart from trying t
o block the holes with some old bits of tennis net, in which the best layer nearly hung herself one Sunday while everyone was at church, nothing could be done. The Harveys, having the intellectual’s humanitarian feelings towards animals on whom kindness is entirely wasted, refused to shut them up and it became one of Mr Harvey’s most disliked tasks to have to go round to one or other of his neighbours in answer to an angry telephone call and catch one of his flock. At first he chased them kindly and brought them back in his arms, trying to placate them with kind words, but as winter drew on and everything got colder and muddier he learnt to carry them back by the legs, using language that made the works of his favourite modern authors sound tame. Miss Harvey, who was very good at business on the theoretical side, worked out that their eggs had cost them about nine and sixpence each first and last, but then, as she so truly pointed out, they did have the eggs.

  It was one of the annoyances of this time that Mrs Smith showed unexpected gifts and a really magic touch with fowls. Little as the Harveys wished to have her about the place, they had to admit that the mere sight of her in the garden would cause the most moulting and dejected hen to brisk up, the broody to begin to take notice, the layer to redouble her efforts. The catering at the Red House with master and mistress out for a good many meals did not give much in the way of scraps, so Mrs Smith took the largest gardening basket, one of which Mr Harvey was particularly fond, and after the manner of an itinerant nun of a begging order collected excellent scraps from houses where the families were larger or more at home, and brought her offerings daily at the back door. It must be said in fairness to her that she never asked for an egg in return, or even hinted at such reward, but all the more did the Harveys feel obliged to pay her a kind of peppercorn rent of two or three eggs every week, though standing as they did between Mrs Smith’s unwelcome benefactions and Hilda’s habit of ostracising them whenever an egg was given away, their position was far from enviable.

  It had gradually become almost a habit with Oliver Marling to be at the Red House. Various causes led to this. As the days grew shorter and colder he used his car for going to Barchester up to the limit of his petrol allowance and gave up any journeys further afield. By changes in the time-table at the Regional Commissioner’s Office he and his secretary were often on duty while Mr Harvey was off, so the brother and sister were increasingly apt to go to or from Barchester separately. It was therefore an obvious economy that Oliver should pick Miss Harvey up on his way in at least twice a week and bring her back after work, while Mr Harvey went by train. And what more natural than that she should ask Oliver in for a cup of tea or a drink, according to their hours.

  The whole question of drink was becoming acute, but the Harveys always had gin and good gin, and never were their guests offered with it products of sunny England warranted to be the equivalent of the products of France or Italy. How they managed their friends enviously wondered and at first did not like to enquire, but as the tooth of thirst gnawed more sharply the veils of politeness fell.

  ‘Where do you and Geoffrey get your stuff?’ said Oliver, to whom Miss Harvey had just given an inspiring mixture of gin and French vermouth. ‘We are lucky if we get one bottle a month from my father’s man, and heaven knows we have dealt with him as a family for about seventy-five years when his grandfather started the business in Barchester and solicited the honour of my grandpapa’s esteemed custom. There is no gratitude nowadays.’

  Miss Harvey, whose not-too-youthful fairness stood up extremely well to the hard work and hours at the office, stood by the fire holding her glass. The light of the flames illumined her face becomingly from below. Oliver thought how lucky he was to have such a secretary. When he looked at the highly education-conscious female BAs with whom most of his colleagues were afflicted, he could not be thankful enough for an intelligent, good-looking, well-dressed woman of the world. Geoffrey was still not exactly his cup of tea, but harmless enough, and even if he were one’s brother-in-law, of which there was no particular prospect, one wouldn’t need to live with him. One of the things he admired in Miss Harvey was her firm, nay almost overbearing attitude towards her brother. He liked her spirit and did not stop to reflect that her power of bullying might be equally applied to a husband. Her sympathetic interest in Bohun’s poems had been very attractive and on thinking it over he had decided that her apparent shrinking from an open discussion on Worme Castes was but a proof of the sensitive and diffident soul under an assured exterior.

  Miss Harvey did not answer directly. The room was warm, the November afternoon securely shut out, one lamp was on the table of drinks and the rest of the room fitfully lighted by the fire. She knew that she looked well standing. She knew too that the relaxation from work, the warmth and the drink were having their effect on Oliver.

  ‘Eyes again?’ she asked, with just the right note of sympathy as Oliver shaded his face with his hand.

  ‘You notice things too much,’ he said, and was rather pleased with the neat repartee.

  ‘One can’t help it – sometimes,’ said Miss Harvey. ‘I’ll get you another drink. Don’t move.’

  She took her glass, refilled it and came back to her old place, conscious that she moved gracefully and stood imposingly.

  ‘Where do you get it, Frances?’ said Oliver, going back to his question.

  ‘Black market, of course,’ she said lightly.

  Oliver laughed, for it was obviously meant as a joke, yet the suggestion did not quite please him. He knew that his parents would look on such a thing as a serious matter, and though he assumed no right to judge other people’s consciences he knew that his own conscience would make him do without luxuries that he could not get by fair means. Then he blamed himself for priggishness and put the question out of his mind.

  ‘It was so good of you, Oliver, to lend me your precious Bohun,’ said Miss Harvey, ‘though not Bane, thank God. I have been reading him in bed and I am so delighted by his poem on the souls that know each other in this world by a secret sign and live on “this incorporeal banquet” as he calls it, with no wish for nearer union. It seems to me so true.’

  And that, she thought, with the artist’s pride, ought to lead to an interesting discussion, and this time I won’t be such a fool as to shy at it.

  ‘You mean that one that begins “Not in our Flesh shall Love be consummate,”’ said Oliver very bravely. ‘Yes, it is a thought one has often had, but Bohun has put in a way, disconcerting I admit but with extraordinary simplicity and strange magic, that is quite beyond one’s power to analyse. I did a bit of research in the Cathedral Library last week and I find that there was a certain amount of talk about him and a Mistress Pomphelia Tadstock, widow of another canon. She was about his own age and highly educated and had been thrice, I mean three times, married. This poem seems to have been addressed to her and evidently describes his own feelings about the relationship. That very fine line about “Dogs to their vomit, we to’r whores return,” probably expresses the attraction and repulsion which he felt simultaneously for her.’

  ‘Yes, a good line,’ said Miss Harvey judicially, while with the rest of her mind she studied how to divert the talk into more useful channels; for Oliver’s quotation, though a fine example of Bohun at his best, was not so lover-like as suited her intentions. ‘But the couplet that seems to me to sum up the whole poem is,

  To sport with Bodies is but Common Use;

  Thy Soule with Mine wantons in Heavenly Stews.

  Of course it is not perhaps exactly how one would put it today,’ said Miss Harvey with great broadmindedness, ‘but it puts what one might roughly call the idea of Platonick love in a charming conceit.’

  Oliver, much to his annoyance, was again overcome with shyness of this interesting subject and could not at once think of a suitable answer.

  ‘I mean,’ said Miss Harvey, in thrilling tones which did her great credit, ‘that there are friends for whom one feels a very deep affection which is almost a thing of the spirit. It is almost
too fine a thing to discuss, but you are a very easy person to talk to.’

  Oliver, half attracted, half nervous, said yes, there were friends, very dear friends whom one would really not mind if one never saw again. Not that he meant exactly that, he added, but he was sure she would understand what he meant; a generous remark as he was far from sure what he understood himself.

  ‘I know so well what you mean,’ said Miss Harvey, thoughtfully draining her glass. ‘In a way I would be quite happy if we never met again, for there would be so much to remember. The senses’ (at which word Oliver blenched slightly) ‘count for so little as against the spiritual understanding. With that safe one does not need to see, to touch.’

  In proof of this very beautiful statement she looked deeply at Oliver, though as his face was in shadow the effect on him was annoyingly inscrutable, and going over to the table of drinks let her fingertips rest on his shoulders as she passed.

  It was but the brush of a bird’s wing (or so Miss Harvey put it to herself when going over the scene in her mind later), but it had its effect on Oliver. He liked Miss Harvey very much, he admired her more and more, he had vaguely considered what a life shared with her might be, but it was suddenly borne in upon him that he did not want people to go touching him, not like that at any rate, so he got up, put his glass on the narrow marbled mantelpiece and said he really ought to be going.