Noel Merton was on the whole relieved to get Lydia back into her place, where she was again stricken to stone. When the lights finally went up she turned a tear-blotched face to Noel and with loud sniffs said it was the loveliest day she had ever had.
‘I loved it too,’ said Noel, who preferred his Shakespeare in comfortable seats, but would not for the world have told Lydia so. ‘Look here, Lydia, I’ve got to catch a train, so we’ll go over to the station together. Would you like some tea?’
He gathered from Lydia that the thought of food revolted her very soul, so he took her across to Waterloo, bought a platform ticket for himself, and put her into her train.
‘Thank you so much for giving me such a nice treat,’ he said through the carriage window.
‘It was all Shakespeare,’ said Lydia, in broken accents.
‘Shakespeare may have written the play, but he didn’t get the tickets or think of asking me,’ said Noel. ‘That was a very kind thought of yours.’
‘I say,’ said Lydia, ‘you’d better come to us for Whitsun. I’ll tell Mother to ask you and we’ll go on the river if it’s fine and talk about Shakespeare.’
‘Do be careful, Lydia,’ said Noel, a little alarmed. ‘Your mother mightn’t want me, and anyway I’m not absolutely sure if I’m free.’
‘Of course Mother will want you,’ said Lydia. ‘Why not? We’ve got plenty of room, due reference of place and exhibition, with such accommodation and besort as levels with your breeding.’
‘Well, thank you very much,’ said Noel, recognising the language of the Moor of Venice. ‘Oh, and would you mind,’ he added, as the train began to move, ‘giving this book to your sister. I promised to send it to her.’
He pushed a small parcel into Lydia’s hand, waved goodbye, and went off to get his luggage from the cloakroom and catch his own train.
Lydia got back in time to make a hasty change of dress and join her family at dinner, during which meal the aftermath of her emotion that afternoon caused her to be extremely uncivil and despise everyone, till her father said she had better go to bed early. Lydia accordingly went into exile as Bolingbroke, undressed as Coriolanus, and got into bed as Richard II. Kate, coming up to kiss her good night, found her in tears again.
‘Nothing really awful, is it?’ asked Kate.
‘Only that I had such a lovely day,’ bellowed Lydia. ‘Oh, here’s a book Noel sent you.’
Kate opened the parcel.
‘What is it?’ asked Lydia.
‘A book he thought I would like,’ said Kate, going a little pink under Lydia’s bleared but piercing eye.
‘Do let me see,’ said Lydia. ‘Hardy’s poems. Gosh! I’ve read a lot of Hardy. I think he’s a bit like Shakespeare, the way no one tells anyone who they really are, or what really happened, till whoever it is is dead, or married someone else. But he doesn’t give you that marvellous feeling Shakespeare does. I suppose no one ever was exactly like Shakespeare. I’ll never forget Othello.’
‘Did he enjoy it?’ asked Kate.
‘He? Who? Oh, Noel. Of course he did. But I always think no one can understand Shakespeare as well as one does oneself. I’ll tell you what I think about Shakespeare, Kate —’
But Kate kissed her sister, turned out the light and went back to the drawing-room. On the stairs she paused, half opened the book, closed it, opened it again at the front page, and when a slight mist before her eyes had obligingly cleared away she read, ‘For K. K. from N. M., with his humble duty.’
For the rest of the evening Kate was so stupid that even her mother noticed it.
For the next two days Lydia was so disagreeable that her parents began to discuss boarding-school, but by Tuesday morning she had recovered and made a very handsome apology, explaining that the fault was not so much hers as that of the Bard. She added that after all Aristophanes, or whoever it was, had said one ought to be purged by pity and terror if one went to the theatre or whatever it was he said, and would it be all right if Noel Merton came down for Whitsun and would her mother write to him. She then crashed out of the room and went off to school.
Mr and Mrs Keith were so thankful to have Lydia her own exhausting self again that they made little difficulty about asking Noel. Mr Keith did go so far as to say that Lydia oughtn’t to have everything her own way, but when Kate explained very sweetly that it would be nice for Colin to get to know Mr Merton better, he withdrew his objection.
‘And Colin is bringing a Mr Carter from Southbridge,’ said Mrs Keith. ‘I wonder if he is any relation of some Carters we used to know at home.’
No one could tell her.
‘There was a Lady Sibyl Carter,’ said Mrs Keith, ‘that lived not far from us, and my Uncle Oswald had known her people in India. Her father was Governor of a province, I think. I just remember her. She died when I was quite a young girl. I know if she had lived till I came out she would have been a hundred, because it was the year King Edward’s Coronation really happened.’
As no one had ever heard of Lady Sibyl Carter before, Mrs Keith was obliged to carry on the conversation by herself. Lady Sibyl turned out to have been the childless widow of an archdeacon, so Mrs Keith’s wish to relate Colin’s Mr Carter to her deceased acquaintance languished and then died.
‘Then will you write to Mr Merton, Mother?’ said Kate.
‘Yes, darling,’ said Mrs Keith. ‘Why?’
‘To ask him here for Whitsun, Mother.’
Mrs Keith obediently sat down and wrote to Mr Merton, and Mr Merton, after doing some very untruthful telephoning, wrote that he was free and would be delighted to come.
Southbridge broke up after school on Friday. Mr Carter drove himself and Colin over in his car to Northbridge Manor. After days of cold and rain the weather had pulled itself together. Everything had rushed into leaf and blossom at once. As they drove through the country the green fields were golden with buttercups, the green hedges white with hawthorn, the green banks yellow with cowslips, the green woods full of bluebell lakes and pools. Colin and Everard Carter stopped at Barchester for a late tea and arrived at the Manor about half-past six. The house was empty, and Palmer said she thought Mrs Keith was out playing bridge and wouldn’t be back till dinner, and Miss Kate was somewhere about.
Colin said they might as well look for her, and took Mr Carter into the garden, calling as he went. There was no sign of Kate in the rose garden, nor among the vegetables, so Colin said they would look in the water meadows. At the bottom of a sloping lawn, where the daisies had not yet been cut, a little gate opened onto a path which wound among rushes, following the course of a tiny stream, tributary to the river. The flat green water meadows were intersected by channels of varying widths, each with its sluice to flood the fields in season. Beyond the river, whose winding course was marked by a fringe of alders, willows and mountain ashes, rose the line of the downs, crowned by a clump of beeches. As they walked Colin had ceased his call for Kate, and Everard Carter was grateful for the deep silence and stillness of the late afternoon. They came to another little gate and leaned over it, comfortably saying nothing, Everard thinking how delightful it was to get away from his boys and how glad he would be to see them again on Tuesday, Colin feeling unmixed gratitude for a home where no boys existed. Presently Colin cocked his head and listened.
‘That sounds like someone in the boat-house,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and look.’
He opened the little gate and they turned to the right along the river bank. Just round a bend was the boat-house, its door open.
‘Hullo, Kate,’ said Colin, peering into the water-lit gloom, ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’
Kate, who was in the boat, arranging cushions, looked up, her eyes so dazzled by the shimmer of the water that she could not see Mr Carter.
‘Hullo, Colin,’ she said. ‘I thought you and your friend might want the boat, so I’ve been doing a spring cleaning. There are still a few more cushions to come down from the house, and we shall need a new oar, I
expect. That one that Lydia used as a jumping pole last year doesn’t seem to have recovered yet. Are you coming on the river?’
‘Rather,’ said Colin. ‘This is Mr Carter – my sister Kate.’
As their eyes became used to the flickering, green, sun-flecked light, Kate saw a tall man in brown tweeds who didn’t look quite as nice as Mr Merton, and Everard Carter thought he saw his journey’s end, so he said How do you do.
Colin said the boat was rather a squash for three on such a warm afternoon. Let Kate steer, he said, and Everard row, and he would take out his dear coracle. The coracle turned out to be a small, almost circular, collapsible canvas boat with no particular bow or stern and one narrow seat across it.
‘One’s supposed to paddle it,’ said Colin, taking off his coat and waistcoat and hanging them on a peg in the boat-house, ‘but I find punting more amusing. If you will excuse the apparent vulgarity of my braces, Everard, I will now give you a demonstration.’
Everard took the sculls and pulled out into the river.
‘Up or down?’ he asked.
‘Down,’ said Colin. ‘There’s a nice wide piece at the bend for me to show off on.’
He pushed his canoe out with a punt pole, bending as he came out of the boat-house, and shot off along the river at lightning speed.
‘Doesn’t he ever fall over?’ asked Everard, turning round to look.
‘Only if the water is low and there are snags sticking up,’ said Kate. ‘Lydia, that’s my sister, is always upsetting, or else she gets left behind with the punt pole. It’s all knack.’
Everard Carter bent to the oars and followed Colin downstream. In a few moments they reached the place where the river broadened, and here Colin was doing a kind of figure-punting by himself, with fantastic bends and swoops of his long body. Everard pulled into the bank and they watched Colin at play. Presently the sound of oars creaking in rowlocks was heard, and a boat with two scullers going at a good pace came up the river. Both ends of the boat were piled high with canvas bags and bundles.
‘Campers,’ said Kate. ‘They often go up to Parsley Island opposite the Rectory. It belongs to Farmer Brown, who lets sites to campers, but we don’t often get them as early as this.’
As the boat passed them, one of the oarsmen suddenly said, ‘Easy all.’ The boat slackened speed, and two hearty voices were raised in the revolting Carmen Southbridgiense, written in 1854 by the headmaster, the Rev. J. J. Damper (better known by his little volume of Perambulations in Palestine, now deservedly out of print), and set to music by the school organist, who also taught piano, violin, composition, singing, and anything parents asked for. As the final lines
Alma Mater, Alma Mater,
None than thou wilt e’er be greater,
(words justly condemned by the modern school of Latin pronunciation who amused themselves vastly by making Alma Mater rhyme with Mr Carter in various libellous ways) came ringing across the water, the singers raised their oars in token of respect.
‘Good Lord, it’s Swan and Morland,’ said Everard. ‘What are you doing?’
As he spoke he pulled towards them, and Colin came skimming over the water to their side.
‘I say, sir, that’s a decent kind of boat,’ said Swan, eyeing the coracle with approval.
‘Would you like to try her?’ said Colin.
‘I’d love to, sir, but we’ve got to get on to camp. Can you tell us how far up Parsley Island is?’
‘About a mile. Is that where you are camping? Tell Farmer Brown you are friends of mine. He knows us pretty well. Come down and have tea one day. We live at the Manor, first boat-house on the right as you go up.’
‘Thanks awfully, sir,’ said Swan. ‘Good night.’
‘And for God’s sake don’t sing Alma Mater again,’ said Everard, giving it the modern pronunciation, ‘or I’ll hold it against you both for the rest of the term.’
‘OK, sir,’ said Morland. ‘Come along, Eric, the stream runs fast, the rapids are near and the daylight past.’
In a few minutes the creaking of the oars had died away, and the water lay untroubled.
‘What nice boys,’ said Kate to Everard Carter. ‘Are they in your house?’
Mr Carter said they were.
‘One of them,’ said Kate earnestly, ‘had a cut on his hand that looked rather horrid. I wonder if they’ve got any iodine.’
‘I expect so,’ said Everard. ‘Morland has a passion for iodine. Matron complains that it leaks all over his clothes.’
‘And the other had a torn shirt with no buttons on it,’ said Kate, her soft eyes shining with compassion.
‘I expect it was an old one he was using up,’ said Everard, uneasily conscious that one of his own waistcoat buttons was hanging by a thread.
‘We might go up to the island tomorrow and see,’ said Kate.
Everard agreed, indifferent as to the fate of Swan’s buttons or Morland’s finger, but overcome by admiration for Kate’s divine pity.
‘Home, James!’ shouted Colin, giving his coracle a shove which sent her perilously rocketing up the river. Everard turned and rowed up-stream with the level sun in his eyes, so that he could not see Kate at all except as a dazzling, blinding glory; which was of course what she was. When they reached the house Kate said dinner wouldn’t be till half-past eight, as Mr Merton couldn’t get down earlier, so the men needn’t hurry to dress.
‘If you’ll give me your waistcoat, Mr Carter,’ she said, ‘I’ll sew that button on for you. It won’t last much longer.’
Everard Carter, though fully sharing his junior housemaster’s views about the vulgarity of braces, could not refuse. There was in Kate a calm air of competence that he had sometimes admired and even feared in matron, against which there was no appeal.
‘It’s awfully good of you,’ he mumbled, handing the waistcoat to Kate and putting his coat on again as quickly as possible. While wallowing in his bath it occurred to him that never in his bachelor career had any woman succeeded in sewing on buttons for him, except housekeepers or other paid employees. He thought madly of cutting off a button a day for the pleasure of seeing that lovely look of pity in Kate’s eyes, of submitting to her authority. He would have reflected on this subject for much longer but that his big toe, becoming entangled in the chain, pulled the plug out of the bath, and the water, with wild shouts of victory, rushed headlong down the waste-pipe. Just as he had finished dressing Colin came in.
‘Kate asked me to bring you your waistcoat,’ he said, ‘and to say the button that was loose was an odd one, so she found one that matched and sewed it on. Come down and have some sherry. It’s only the family and Noel Merton, the man I might be going to read with in the autumn.’
Mr and Mrs Keith were in the drawing-room. Mr Keith gave the guest sherry.
‘Do come and sit here, Mr Carter,’ said Mrs Keith. ‘It is so nice of you to come for a dull family party. I have been wondering if you are by any chance a son of an old acquaintance of mine, Lady Sibyl Carter.’
‘Not exactly a son,’ said Everard, ‘because I don’t think she had any, and in any case she died before I was born, but I remember my mother talking about her. My great-uncle, the archdeacon, who married her, was an Egyptologist and they were both mad.’
‘That explains it then,’ said Mrs Keith, though what it explained was not clear. ‘Lydia, this is Mr Carter. My youngest daughter.’
‘How do you do,’ said Lydia, who was bursting out of a last year’s frock for which she had a great affection. ‘I say, Mother, the beast Pettinger has given us extra prep for the Whitsun holidays. Geraldine Birkett says she jolly well won’t do it. It’s a whacking great ode of Horace and an essay about Compare Addison and Pope, with quotations from their works. What good on earth it can do anyone to compare two people who are quite different, and anyway we’ve only half done Pope this term, so I call the whole thing jolly mean.’
Summer Half: A Virago Modern Classic (VMC) Page 9