‘That I will not,’ said Captain Barclay, glad for once to be able to speak his mind. ‘I don’t want to catch your cold just when I’m going off on an important bit of work. Take great care of yourself.’
‘Ad led be dough wed you cub back,’ said Lucy with another ferocious sneeze.
Captain Barclay promised and said goodbye. Rather to his surprise Miss Bunting accompanied him to the door.
‘We shall look forward to seeing you on your return, Captain Barclay,’ she said regally. ‘You are always welcome at Marling.’
‘That’s awfully nice of you,’ said Captain Barclay, touched. ‘I’d like to think it was true – I mean of everybody.’
‘It is,’ said Miss Bunting. ‘Lettice of course does not always know her own mind, but she feels as we do at heart. Goodnight.’
Slightly cheered by her Sibylline words Captain Barclay sped away into the night. In normal times he would have been able to depress himself by seeing the light streaming from the stable flat and imagining Lettice listening to David’s honeyed words over Clare’s bath, but the blackout made it impossible to see anything except the piece of the drive immediately before him and he had soon passed the lodge gates. Had he been able to look into Lettice’s flat he might have been slightly cheered by what he saw. Far from pressing his suit on Lettice, David was entering wholeheartedly into the game of Clare being a fish in her bath, finally, to Nurse’s scandalised admiration, taking her bath towel by the ends and scooping Clare out of the bath as if he were landing a fish in a net. Nurse exclaimed that Uncle David had made the towel all wet and hurriedly got another from the hot cupboard, while David, his enthusiasm suddenly dropping from him, blew Clare a goodnight kiss and went back to the drawing-room where Lettice was reading aloud to Diana from Grimm.
‘Lovely, lovely book,’ he said. ‘My dear mamma read it aloud to us when we were small, again and again. Could we have the story about Mrs Fox and her suitors, do you think?’
Lettice found it, and just as Mrs Fox had decided to throw the old fox out of the window the bell rang. Nurse was heard going to answer it and Oliver came in with Miss Harvey.
‘Oliver was so kindly driving me home,’ said Miss Harvey, ‘and we thought we would call on you on the way.’
Lettice enquired after the hen.
‘She is quite well again,’ said Miss Harvey. ‘That is, Mrs Smith says she is, but she has still got her, and the dreadful part is that she has got the eggs too. Hilda is furious and I really hardly know what to do. Oliver is quite heroic and is going to call on Mrs Smith and speak to her about it as soon as we get back.’
She cast an admiring glance on Oliver, who did not look as if he were particularly grateful. He had what Lettice called his ‘eye face’ and was obviously in pain. Lettice felt a slight discomfort at Miss Harvey’s free use of the word ‘we’ and told herself not to be silly.
‘Is that my Miss Perry?’ said David. ‘What a predatory woman she is. Miss Harvey! The way is long, the night is cold, Oliver is if not exactly infirm and old not the right person to drive you back when he is purblind, or is it parblind like parboiled, and if one why not the other. Let me abide at thy left side and drive thee home with me; I mean to your home, not to mine, for though my sister Agnes would adore to see you it might not suit Geoffrey.’
Miss Harvey gave an educated simper and turned her handsome eyes from one cavalier to the other appealingly.
‘Thanks awfully, David,’ said Oliver, ‘but I can really manage all right, and we ought to be going, Frances.’
‘Ah, but not if your eyes are bad,’ said Miss Harvey. ‘Poor eyes! How selfish of me not to realise.’
Oliver looked and felt highly uncomfortable.
‘Not selfish,’ said David, enjoying himself thoroughly. ‘Only beautifully abstracted from these mundane affairs. Together we will beard the Perry-Smith in her den. La ci darem la mano, if you don’t mind getting your bonnet and shawl on.’
When David turned on his facile charm most people fell. Miss Harvey, though she had taken a first in Economics (for what that is worth), was not immune. Oliver made a faint protest, saying quite truly that he would have to go out again to go home and might just as well run her back, but she laughingly declined and made her farewells.
‘Poor eyes!’ she said again, laying her hand on Oliver’s forehead for an instant.
Lettice hoped that her face looked as if it had neither noticed nor resented the action, but was not very sure, so she went on reading Grimm to Diana. When she had finished the story she told Diana to say goodnight to Uncle Oliver and go to bed.
‘Sorry, Lettice,’ said Oliver when his niece had kissed him and gone. ‘My eyes are rotten and I’m not fit for company. I can’t imagine what Frances thought of me.’
It was on the tip of Lettice’s tongue to say that she was thinking of David, but she checked herself.
‘I must seem a hopeless sort of person to her,’ said Oliver in a mood of self-depreciation very unlike him, for he usually kept his troubles close. ‘She can do a gruelling day’s work and be perfectly fresh at the end, and here am I a sheer hulk. Oh, I do wish Pilman hadn’t gone to the wars. This other man doesn’t understand my eyes a bit.’
‘Poor old thing,’ said Lettice, and came and sat on the arm of his chair with her hand on his shoulder. There was no thrill in her presence, but Oliver felt a comfort from it that Miss Harvey’s touch had not given.
‘Good old Lettice,’ he said as he got up. ‘I wish I could think Frances really liked me, but I’m really not fit for anyone to like. I wish to God I had David’s bounding health.’
Lettice said with complete sincerity that anyone who had any sense would like him much better than David, and though the statement coming from a sister was partial in the highest degree it appeared to comfort Oliver, who then went home. Lettice sat musing for a while. If Oliver really liked Frances, it was obvious that he must marry her, for he must not be disappointed. The prospect did not fill her with enthusiasm. She liked both the Harveys well enough, but they were not quite her sort and she felt that once married to Miss Harvey Oliver might drift away towards Bloomsbury, leaving her high and dry at Marling. Suddenly she felt very much alone. Even David had deserted her for Miss Harvey, and though she did not love him she would have enjoyed more of his company. The road to old age stretched before her very bleak and long, and nowhere on her road could she see the figure of Captain Barclay.
David drew up at Mrs Cox’s house and accompanied by Miss Harvey went up the little path. The door was opened by Millie Poulter, who on seeing her daily employer was stricken imbecile and after gaping a good deal fled into the kitchen. From this fastness Mrs Cox emerged and with a dazzling though wavering show of teeth asked if she could do anything. On hearing that they wanted to see Mrs Smith she ushered them into the front parlour.
‘Mrs Smith is upstairs, but I’ll run up and tell her,’ she said, genteelly covering her mouth with her hand while she manoeuvred her uppers, which were rather too easy a fit, into position again.
Miss Harvey and David sat down. The room had a dreamlike resemblance to the Red House. On a foundation of Mrs Cox’s uncompromising red wallpaper and green plush-seated chairs Mrs Smith with patient industry had built up a simulacrum of her home. Conspicuous on the olive plush tablecloth was the green art velvet blotter, the coal tongs from the Red House dining-room were in the grate, an off-white quilted satin cushion adorned the leatherette armchair, prominent on the mantelpiece with its period ball fringe was a green glass animal with bubbles in it which Miss Harvey had missed though not mourned from the hall; in the window showing up handsomely against Mrs Cox’s red rep curtains was the second largest green witch ball from the dining-room, whose absence Miss Harvey had vaguely noticed and mentally added to Hilda’s list of breakages. In fact, wherever she turned her eyes some familiar object, disliked long since and lost awhile, greeted her. All this she saw in a moment and then Mrs Smith tripped down the stairs and glided into the room,
giving, as David said afterwards when describing the scene to his mother, an extraordinarily good impersonation of Mrs Heep, her pleasure at having Miss Harvey and Mr Leslie as visitors to her humble abode being of a quite over-powering nature. Under her blandishments Miss Harvey felt less and less equal to saying she had come to fetch the hen, while even David felt his guns on the whole spiked.
‘You are looking round at my little mementos,’ said Mrs Smith. ‘Just little things that remind me of the happy home days before Mr Smith was taken. Many’s the time he used that cushion, Mr Leslie, when he took his forty winks on the couch, and often of an evening he’d have his glass of something on the occasional table,’ she added, pointing to a small table with a painted giallo antico top and wrought-iron legs which Miss Harvey distinctly remembered being used for much the same purpose by her brother on the previous evening. ‘It was only this afternoon I popped over to my dear wee house to see if it was still there and Hilda happening to be down the garden giving the chookies their tea I just slipped into the drawing-room like a mouse and I said, Well, there’s the occasional table not being used except for the books, so I thought Mr Harvey couldn’t possibly mind if I took it and I put the books on the stool in the corner and just brought the table over and really it gave the room quite a home-like air. I always say furniture knows when it is loved.’
‘There weren’t any books on it,’ said Miss Harvey, speaking to David. ‘There were a lot of New Yorkers.’
‘That’s it. American books,’ said Mrs Smith, who in common with several million of her fellow country-women nearly always meant a magazine when she said a book. ‘And may I enquire after Lady Emily, Mr Leslie.’
David, not so much at ease as usual, said his mother was pretty well, adding with great presence of mind that she would have sent her kind regards if she had known he was going to see Mrs Smith. He then fell silent. Miss Harvey looked at him, confident in his powers of extracting hens from landladies, but such was Mrs Smith’s paralysing effect on him that he did not quite know where to begin.
‘I know what you have come for,’ said Mrs Smith archly, ‘our poor invalid chookie. She’s tucked up all so cosy in her coop in that warm corner just against the kitchen chimney. It seems quite a shame to disturb poor chookie tonight, doesn’t it, when it’s so cold, and how you would get her into the run without a torch I don’t know and the ARP wardens come down on you quite sharp if you so much as show a light.’
Miss Harvey hastily said she quite agreed and confounded herself in excuses for having even thought of reclaiming her own hen.
‘It has been quite a pleasure to assist the poor dumb beast,’ said Mrs Smith, ‘and I must say I shall quite miss my little egg.’
Miss Harvey nervously said that of course Mrs Smith must have some eggs from the hen after being so kind. Mrs Smith said she would bring the hen round next day, or if it were still very cold in a day or two and how truly kind of Miss Harvey to suggest her having an egg a day as it would just make all the difference. Her visitors then thought that being outwitted at all points they had better leave. David took Miss Harvey to her front door.
‘Come in and have a drink,’ she said.
‘It certainly is far more than my due,’ said David, ‘but I will not say no.’
In the drawing-room Mr Harvey was having a cocktail by himself.
‘I thought you were dead,’ he said to his sister, waving his disengaged hand towards David. ‘Help yourself, David. I heard from the Tape and Sealing Wax this afternoon, Frances. Peter rang me up. It seems they are in no end of a hole about Clause Fourteen and Sir Edward says if I will come back he’ll get me released from the Regional. I said what about you and he said he would speak to Establishments. My God, Frances, we may be out of this damned hole by the New Year.’
‘With eighteen months’ lease of this house still to run,’ said his sister.
‘Oh well, don’t be gloomy,’ said Mr Harvey. ‘I came home early on purpose to tell you and the house was empty and now you quibble about the rent.’
‘Considering I pay half of it I well may,’ said Miss Harvey. ‘And where are we to live in London? You know the house isn’t inhabitable.’
‘Peter says come and share his flat,’ said Mr Harvey.
‘With how many other people?’ said Miss Harvey, whose annoyance at being worsted over the hen and having to control it before David was bursting its banks. ‘All his rotten little friends in and out, night and day. And just as I – well never mind that, but you are frightfully selfish, Geoffrey.’
‘This being one of the conversations that are so much more embarrassing to the hearer than to the speakers, and having had the last of your sherry, I think I had better go,’ said David, annoyed to have been let in for such a boring family scene. ‘Bless you both. You must come and dine at Holdings. Agnes would adore it. I must fly.’
The Harveys, hardly stopping to say goodbye, continued their argument. Geoffrey said he couldn’t see why on earth his sister should want to stop in such a ghastly hole when London was gaping for them.
‘I hate it just as much as you do,’ said his sister, ‘and probably more. But if I did marry Oliver Marling, I mightn’t want to share a flat with you and Peter.’
‘I thought it was David you were keen on,’ said her brother.
‘Well, he isn’t keen on me,’ said Miss Harvey testily. ‘But I can get Oliver whenever I want him.’
‘Please yourself,’ said Mr Harvey. ‘Women have such peculiar tastes. Where’s that little table gone that I put my New Yorkers on? I can’t see it anywhere.’
‘Mrs Smith took it,’ said his sister coldly.
Mr Harvey groaned and under cover of his groan was out of the room and into the bathroom with both taps on before his sister could collect herself. If Oliver had seen her face, far from being anxious for her to like him, he would have been glad to escape even as David had done.
But David, well on the way to Holdings, was telling himself that he had been a fool to try to get entertainment from a second-hand highbrow, and that in Lettice lay the secret of content and of the peace that he had never found and almost despaired of finding.
12
Most of the principal characters in this book being by now thoroughly uncomfortable in their various ways, Christmas did its best to bring on the culminating point of horror. Bill Marling with Mrs Bill, whom we must call by that name as no one ever called her anything else, his four children, two nurses, perambulator, quantities of luggage, several very cumbersome dead birds of immense size and a packing case of drink, arrived in full glory at Marling Hall. Bedrooms were unsheeted, extra help was laid in with a good deal of difficulty, and Lettice with her little girls came to stay with her parents for Christmas week so that the children could be with their cousins in spite of the blackout, and Nurse and the maid could help in the house.
The programme, as arranged by Mrs Marling and Miss Bunting, was to include a dinner party on Christmas Eve to which the Harveys, David Leslie and Captain Barclay were invited. This officer was to spend the night, having got leave of absence to that end in order that he might satisfactorily torture himself by seeing Lettice prefer David, and stand by to fell David to the earth if he presumed to trifle with Lettice. How Mrs Marling did it we cannot say, but she and Miss Bunting were past masters at organising, and there was still enough feudal feeling on the estate for some of the older women to feel it was like a real Christmas to go and work at the Hall for a week. The kitchen and back yard were like Bolton Abbey in the Olden Time. More than once Mr Marling was obliged to force his way through three tradesmen, the estate carpenter, the two gardeners aged sixty-seven and seventeen, the cowman’s children, the kitchen-maid’s niece, the housemaid’s sister, the mothers of the evacuee children down at the cottages, Ed’s mother, who was a great one for breaking whatever she washed up, and several other hangers-on, in order to get into his own back door and take his boots off in the butler’s pantry, his regular habit. Tea flowed at all hours in sp
ite of rationing, and somehow the whole kitchen had bacon for breakfast, though we need hardly say that the dining-room mostly did without.
Everyone at Marling, nay in Barsetshire, nay the whole Empire, had sworn that this Christmas there should be no over-eating while millions starved, no buying of presents when the money was wanted for War Savings Certificates. The first of these base proposals was countered by the Food Controller who released some dried fruits and sanctioned the increased ration of fats and sugar, as also by the domestic servants of England who were as a body determined that whoever suffered they shouldn’t. The second was killed at birth by the malign Spirit of Christmas who forced people to go to Barchester and to town where they scoured the shops, sadly empty, or if stocked, with only the drabbest, dullest objects, and bought horrid things, or came empty-bagged and basketed home and hunted out other nasty things left over from previous Christmases. Nor were there wanting economists who said that to give Savings Certificates was anti-patriotic because it only meant that the Government would be paying you interest, and that the only true patriotism would be to take out of the bank as much money as you proposed to spend at Christmas and burn it. But as no one listened to them, or believed them, a great many people bought Savings Stamps, which they attached to a Government Christmas Card bearing a picture of a galleon in full sail, relic apparently of a Boys’ Own Paper special coloured illustration in the late ’nineties, thereby making the recipients, who rightly expected something better, very ungrateful. Those who had enough time bought a quarter of a pound of sweets whenever occasion offered in every sweet shop in Barchester, and very poor sweets, too. A great many turkeys did not arrive till Christmas Eve and had to be parcooked at once to arrest decay, while a haggis, which was sent to Mrs Marling every year by a Scotch cousin, never reached her at all. For this the Scotch cousin blamed the English Post Office, but Mrs Marling replied on a postcard that it must have been stolen north of the border as no Southron would know what it was; or if he did would regard it with insular suspicion.
Marling Hall Page 28