The Flowering Thorn

by Margery Sharp

  “Yes. You see—” Lesley hesitated, suddenly uncertain, like one who has forgotten the wording of a message; and again her companion turned with that flutter of the hands.

  “Miss Frewen, please say anything you like to me. I can understand exactly how you feel, belonging here and knowing him so well. You must tell us everything he liked done, and how it was all kept. We won’t change anything.”

  “No!” said Lesley, with sudden vehemence. “You mustn’t think of it like that. As though it were dead. Like a museum.” The words, so totally opposed to all she had been thinking for the past weeks, seemed to have been put into her mouth. She looked back at the house and lawn: all the windows were open, the two boys, now joined by a very old retriever, lay flat on the grass with the dog between them. They had less of a tripperish look, seemed almost at home. The butler came out from the library, asked a question, and then glancing towards the lake moved stately down to meet his master. With much the same gait, the dog followed him and was called back. The boys laughed, the dog barked; and the house was alive.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  As soon as the Brookes were fairly settled in, there began to appear at the Hall a constant succession of visitors. They were all very much alike—the men, in pre-war tweeds, so far past the point of mere shabbiness that they might have been taken for dukes, the wives with harassed complexions and home-made clothes who sat and watched their husbands exactly as Mrs. Brooke watched Charles. There were also several small children, considerably better dressed than their parents, and with the beginning of the summer holidays, said Mrs. Brooke, there were going to be more.

  “You don’t know, I suppose,” said Lesley thoughtfully, “anyone with a boy at the Bluecoat School? Pat’s going to the Prep. there in September, and I would like him to get used to the clothes first. Just seeing them on another boy, I mean, and realising that they’re not anything to feel awkward about. I couldn’t explain half so well.”

  Mrs. Brooke looked at her with admiration.

  “I do think you’re splendid,” she said simply. “So does Charles. He says it’s one of the most courageous things he’s ever heard of. I hope one day Pat will be properly grateful.”

  “I hope he’ll be nothing of the sort,” said Lesley. “I think of all the mill-stones round a child’s neck gratitude is the worst. What parents do for them they do purely by instinct: they’d be unhappy if they didn’t.” She broke off, smiling at her own heat and at Mrs. Brooke’s startled face. “A child’s instinct is to take without thanking: it’s a sort of natural insurance against the time when it in turn will have to give without being thanked.”

  “My dear, you’re so—so detached,” said Mrs. Brooke, half-way between admiration and mistrust. “And of course it’s what every mother knows in a way, though she won’t let herself believe it. It’s her duty to sacrifice; as you say, she’d be unhappy if she didn’t. But you hadn’t that duty: you took it up of your own free will. Oughtn’t Pat to be grateful for that?”

  Lesley smiled.

  “I remember quite well the reasons why I adopted him. I had been very bored in London, and had also failed to look my best at an important dinner-party. At least, I thought it was important.… The next day I went down to my aunt’s, and found her at her wits’ end to know what to do with Pat. I thought that if I adopted him it would provide me with a new and amusing topic of conversation. If I’d known what I was taking on I shouldn’t have done it. And when I did know.… I felt like wrapping him in a shawl and leaving him on a doorstep.”

  “But you didn’t, did you?” said Mrs. Brooke.

  For a minute or two they sat silent, so that in the garden all about them could be heard a multitude of soft warm-weather sounds. But Lesley listened only subconsciously, her mind being busied with three separate and absorbing thoughts: of Pat, of the new rose-bed, and of two important letters received a day earlier. One was from Graham Whittal, explaining, a trifle curtly, that Patrick had got his presentation: the other, from Christ’s Hospital, contained a solid body of information and some forms to be filled in. These she had completed without difficulty: the boy had not had Roseola (‘Rose-rash’), nor any of the other ailments with which, as she discovered in surprise, the average parent presumedly had to cope. In fact, the only thing he had had, apart from a few colds, was chicken-pox; and that he had at the Vicarage, where he and two of the Pomfrets all sickened together on the same day. So Pat simply stayed where he was, while Lesley took Alec and the eldest girl back to the cottage and kept them there in quarantine till the danger was past. They did not catch it, and Mrs. Pomfret in her gratitude made nothing of nursing Pat.

  ‘I have been lucky,’ Lesley had thought, filling in the last of the blanks with a prideful ‘No’; and reading further, saw that Pat would also have to run the gauntlet of medical examination in Town, to take place within the last few days before the Michaelmas term, and an entrance examination, also in Town, some weeks earlier. To both of these, however, she looked forward with complete confidence; for Pat was exactly as healthy as a child could be, and unless obviously a half-wit (wrote Graham Whittal) no presentation-boy ever failed in his entrance. Pat might not be brilliant; but he definitely wasn’t a half-wit; his sums went very, very slowly, but they nearly always came out right.…

  A movement on the terrace distracted Lesley’s thoughts. It was the old retriever—his name was Daniel—stretching slowly in the sun as though about to take exercise; but he looked about him, evidently thought better of it, and slowly lay down again. Children laughed, a thrush sang; and the may smelled stronger than the lilac.

  “It all seems so ungrateful,” said Mrs. Brooke suddenly. “No, I don’t mean that. I know we’re not ungrateful, but I do wish we could have shown it. If only he had sent for us! Was he ill very long, Lesley?”

  “A few weeks. No one except the Vicar even knew it was serious.”

  “We wondered, you see, because everything was left in such perfect order. There’s only been one bill to settle ever since we came here, and that was for the bird-bath.”

  “Bird-bath?” said Lesley, startled.

  “The big, rather ornate one down by the stables, that Mr. Povey got for him. It was only set up a few hours before he died, you know, and Mr. Povey very honestly came and offered to take it away again; but of course we couldn’t let him, and Charles paid for it on the spot. Though I must say,” added Mrs. Brooke temperately, “it’s not the kind of thing we either of us really care for.”

  2

  As soon as the summer holidays were well in swing, Mrs. Brooke, with her indefatigable good nature, succeeded in producing a small boy in a blue stuff gown and yellow stockings. His name was Jackson, he arrived unaccompanied, and spent the first afternoon in organising an all-fight-all-boxing tournament among himself, his fellow-guests, Pat and the young Pomfrets. The first four bouts took place next morning, after which secrecy became impossible, and Pat, the smallest Pomfret, and the smallest guest were immediately scratched by Lesley, Mrs. Pomfret and the smallest guest’s mother. The seniors, however, were allowed to proceed, and according to Mrs. Pomfret, received private coaching from their fathers in the Hall barn.

  “You’d better let Pat come too,” said the Vicar to Lesley, “I promise he shan’t get killed;” and a day or two later, when boxing-lessons had become a regular feature of the house-party, the master of ceremonies himself voluntarily observed that young Craigie showed promise.

  “Craigie?” repeated Lesley, in genuine bewilderment.

  “He means Patrick,” interpreted the Vicar, “and he’s quite right. Pat’s always going to be slow, but he hangs on like a bulldog. You don’t want to turn him into a prize-fighter, I suppose?”

  “At the moment,” said Lesley, “he wants to be a policeman. And really, you know, if he sticks to it, and with all these new regulations, there might be a lot of things worse.”

  It was her serious opinion, for she had privately little doubt that Patrick, with a good education and his
already outstanding character, would rapidly rise to a room in Scotland Yard and the privilege of putting down riots. He would be good, she thought, with riots: firm yet kind, and very thorough.…

  In the meantime, however, her chief anxiety was that he should make a friend of young Jackson, who on better acquaintance proved to have more sides to his character than she had previously imagined. For beside his passion for boxing there flourished a passion for music, and he spent whole afternoons listening to Bach, Beethoven and Mozart on the Vicar’s gramophone. He never discussed, he simply listened, but in response to Lesley’s inquiry admitted that some of the chaps at Housey were quite keen on music.

  (‘Housey!’ thought Lesley, ‘I must remember that!’)

  He was also something of a naturalist, and infected Pat with a desire to watch birds; for on learning that young Craigie was destined for Housey too, he at once extended his patronage in the most liberal way imaginable. All day long Pat ran at his heels and imbibed information; and on the day before the entrance exam., which took place in Town, Jackson saw him off at the station with a whole four ounces of peppermint.

  Lesley was there too, of course, but a trifle in the background; she sat in her corner, and looked at Pat, and tried hard to think of him as Craigie.

  3

  Not many weeks later, walking up to the Hall from the lower gate, Lesley observed on the edge of the lawn, in the tentative attitude of the explorer, a small brown boy in a minute green bathing-dress. Advancing up the path, she at once identified him as either the two-year Wootten or the three-year Pratt, for her intercourse with the Brooke house-parties was giving her the memory of a reception-clerk. Before she could address him, however, Pincher, with habitual impetuosity, had bounded amicably forward and bowled him over. The fall was soft—into a bed of marguerites: but there were mothers, Lesley knew, to whom a sound skin spelt internal injuries. Rebuking Pincher as she ran, she hurried forward and dropped on her knees on the flowering grass.

  There was no need for alarm. The two-year Wootten (for such he turned out to be) lay like Moses in the bulrushes, snugly cradled among the green stems. The situation delighted him. He waved his legs, he roared with laughter: he reached up to the white flower-heads, he hugged them to his breast. And Lesley, leaning above like Pharaoh’s daughter, thought suddenly:

  ‘But I don’t remember Pat like that!’

  The next instant she was laughing at her folly. Of course she didn’t remember Pat at two: she hadn’t had him till he was four-and-a-half. And quite casually, there slipped into her mind the odd, the unprecedented thought of a child of her own. It seemed so unremarkable, however, that she at once forgot it again; and picking up her Moses, with Pincher at heel, continued towards the house to tell the Brookes Pat had passed.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  At the beginning of that September when Lesley was to have returned permanently to Town, she went up with Patrick and stayed precisely six days. Of these, moreover, only three were spent with Elissa; for there was a two-day gap between Pat’s medical examination and his departure from Victoria, and in those two days Lesley had early decided that he ought to see life. The backbone of most youthful conversation is boasting pure and simple, and she did not wish him to reach school totally ignorant of both the Zoo and Madame Tussaud’s. There was also the Natural History Museum, and Maskelyne’s Temple of Magic; and with such a programme as that it was obviously impossible that they should stay in Pont Street. When Lesley wrote finally to Elissa, therefore, it was to put off her own unencumbered visit till the afternoon of the ninth; and in the meantime, on Mrs. Brooke’s recommendation, they would provide themselves with a room in a small Bayswater hotel.

  But why, it may be asked, with so carte blanche an invitation—whenever she liked, for how long she liked, and at a moment’s notice—did Lesley not choose to stay longer in Pont Street? And the answer was broadly speaking this, that in the course of an hour’s reflection she had progressed from a vague idea of a few new frocks to the figure-supported conclusion that a week with Elissa was going to cost at least forty pounds. She would have to get some sort of walking-suit, together with shoes and stockings, hat, bag and gloves; she would have to get an afternoon or cocktail outfit (together with shoes and stockings, hat, bag and gloves). She would have to get at least two evening dresses (necessitating shoes and stockings, bags and gloves). If evening cloaks had changed much, she would have to get an evening cloak. And if she stepped an inch outside Oxford Street, the sum would be doubled.

  For the first time in her life the idea of buying clothes afforded Lesley practically no pleasure. She was a woman with whom the need to be well dressed ranked very soon indeed after the need to eat and the need to sleep; and for four years, in her Chanel jumpers and tweed skirts, in her cool gingham and stiff piqué, she had been exactly as well dressed as it was possible to be. And to signalise her return to Town (however temporary) by abandoning that standard was something so contrary to her nature that she never even considered it. If she went to Town for a week, forty pounds she must spend; and forty pounds was more than a twelfth of her income.

  There was another point. When the forty pounds for clothes was translated into forty pounds for the cottage—into rose-bushes, that is to say, and into bricking the hearth, and into a gate-leg table—the disproportion was very striking. It was so remarkably striking, in fact, that she couldn’t consider that either.

  The two points, it will be seen, had thus rapidly developed into the twin horns of a dilemma; but it was at this critical juncture that Lesley suddenly saw a way out. A week in Town was a stay, and as such demanded complete equipment; but to dash up for three days, say—the time to do a couple of theatres and a party—that was different. For that one could wear country clothes till dinner-time, and cover the rest with a single new gown; and after thinking a little longer of her rose-trees, Lesley felt that six days altogether was quite as much as she wanted.

  2

  The life seen by Patrick was an unqualified success. They spent a morning (fine) at the Zoo, a morning (wet) at the Natural History Museum: an afternoon at Maskelyne’s, and an evening at the cinema. The other afternoon Pat had his medical exam., and the other evening he went to bed early; and every nook and cranny in between was filled with either tea-shops or Boys’ Departments. For there was still the matter of his underwear list, which Lesley, having never been brought up in the Public School tradition, had no hesitation in augmenting as she thought fit. She put in nothing that could embarrass him, but she doubled the number of vests; and everything that didn’t come from Jaeger’s came from the Army and Navy Stores.

  No forty-eight hours could have been spent more agreeably: the only fly in the ointment—and that in Lesley’s alone—was the absence of Graham Whittal. To her suggestion for a meeting, dispatched in excellent time, he had replied with a curt six lines (softened, to be sure, by a ten-shilling note for Pat) to the effect that he would be away in Scotland till the end of the month; and without (she told herself) any adequate reason, Lesley felt snubbed. She was also extremely disappointed, for she wanted to show Pat off, to display him to old Whittal as the worthy recipient of any man’s bounty; and now (for he would certainly not interest Elissa, and Aunt Alice was away as well) there was no one to display him to at all.

  But for Pat none of these heartburnings existed, and he enjoyed himself with concentrated energy not only in recognised places of amusement, but also on ’buses, in lifts, and crossing the street. There was something about him, indeed, that made Lesley think of the Locks: what old Horace had been to them, a mounted policeman was to Pat. Policemen, indeed, now fascinated him more than ever, and he and Lesley spent the last hour before the train hanging about Scotland Yard (in any case quite handy for Victoria) and eating ices at a near-by Lyons. It was the cheapest form of amusement Lesley had ever encountered, nor, since the luggage was already at the station, did they need a taxi afterwards; but in a spirit of recklessness Lesley hailed one all the same, and they d
rove up in style with a porter to open the door.

  “I want the train for Christ’s Hospital,” said Lesley, experimentally.

  “Bluecoats?” said the porter. “Over there on seventeen, Madam”; and following his direction they came upon a part of the station covered with small boys. The majority, like Pat, had a parent or guardian; and the majority of guardians seemed to be members of the clergy. These did not stay long, Lesley noted, but deposited their young and went away; while those charges whose guardians lingered wore expressions of slight moroseness. Lesley noted that too, and stationing Pat by a bookstall, near a group of the unattended, went off to find some person in authority. She marked him at once, a tall young master, looking cheerful though harassed, and towards whom more than one other woman was even then making her way. But Lesley happened to be nearest, and got in first.

  “I’ve got a boy for Christ’s Hospital,” she said. “Shall I just leave him here?”

  “Yes, do. That’s right. He’ll be all right,” replied the master rapidly. He did not see her, he did not see Pat: they were merely an Importunate Female and Another Kid. Fully aware that she was being a nuisance, Lesley placed herself squarely in the young man’s path, caught and held his reluctant eye, and directed it towards Patrick’s flaming head.

  “That’s the one,” she said clearly, “with the bright red hair. His name is Patrick Craigie.”

  “That’s right. He’ll be all right,” repeated the young man.

  Slightly reassured—for Pat’s hair, once seen, could never be quite forgotten—Lesley moved out of the way. Her next move was obviously to say good-bye and go home; but she felt a curious reluctance to do so. For though she had no real fear for Pat’s welfare—since he possessed, in such an eminent degree, the capacity to lie low and take his bearings—she could not help feeling that however much they might call him Craigie, he was still, after all, a very small boy.