by Alec Waugh
“I don’t begin to understand,” she said.
“We’ve known each other a good while now.”
“That’s different.”
“In less than a fortnight now I’ll be going over.”
So that was it, then. He had a feeling of responsibility about her. He was going to the war. He might never come back. He had the means of making her life easier and pleasanter. Which he had, far more than he suspected. And it was dear of him to have felt that way about her. It showed that he had really cared. But she was not going to accept a proposal made in that spirit, inspired by a sense of responsibility; particularly from him, particularly at such a time. It was too final, like the making of a will, as though he were saying, “There’s no need for me to come back now.” Almost as though he were not wanting to come back, because the prospect of coming back to a life with her was out of tune with his life as he had planned it. And, no, she thought, it isn’t any good. I can’t marry him that way. I’ll tell him that I don’t want to settle down, that I want my freedom, that I want to look round a little further first. Something like that, something that’ll take away that worry of responsibility so that we can go back to what we were; so that we can be care-free and light-hearted: let this week-end be perfect. Then, when he’s gone, I’ll find some way of settling up my troubles so that my shoulder will bear the weight; so that he’ll never know; so that when he comes back I’ll make his leaves fun for him. That’s how it’s going to be, that’s how it’s got to be.
But he was smiling at her, in a new fond way and his voice had a new tenderness.
“I don’t want to talk dramatically,” he said, “but going to a war isn’t like going on a cricket tour. I may not come back. I’m an only son. My name’s stood for something. I don’t want it to die out.”
If he had surprised her when he proposed, now by the reason for that proposal he even more surprised her. But in a different way.
“You mean…?”
She paused. The idea was so new, so astonishingly new to her.
“But, Victor, darling, there are… I mean, if you are looking at it that way… There are so many other girls… who’d be… oh, I don’t know… so very much more suitable.”
He smiled away her protests.
“I want a son. I want my son to be a man. If I’m not going to make him a man myself I want him to be in the hands of someone I can trust. I want him to have a mother he can respect: someone who doesn’t know what playing crooked means.”
“Victor…”
But she could not trust herself to speak. The colour was flooding into her cheeks. She blinked her eyes. That he, that he of all people, should feel about her in that way. And if that was the way he felt… why, yes… oh, yes… oh, yes.
VI
If Ruth’s surprise had been considerable when Victor had proposed to her, her family’s when she announced her engagement to him was complete. There was a dead silence. Then a rapid, machine-gun spatter of questions.
Said her father: “In the vernacular of the lower orders you could knock me over with a feather!”
Helen asked if she could be a bridesmaid at the wedding.
Francis thought it would be fun to have a rich brother-in-law. “Won’t it impress the fellows! I bet he tips me jolly well.”
Hugh was frankly inquisitive. How long had she known him? When had she been seeing him?
“When I took you to that party of his last summer, you said you’d never met him.”
“I know. It began then.”
Said her father: “Was it what the novelists of my generation described as Love at First Sight?”
For once it was her mother who put the most practical question:
“When are you going to be married?”
“On Monday.”
“What!”
“Victor’s getting a special licence. I’m going down to-morrow to spend the week-end at Tavenham to see his father. Then you’ll all come down for it on the Monday.”
Said Francis: “That means I’ll get a day off from school.”
Hugh supposed that it would be a very quiet show.
“There’ll be bridesmaids, won’t there?” asked Helen anxiously.
“You shall carry my bouquet all right,” Ruth assured her.
“And what about Ruth’s room?” said Francis. “I wonder if I could make a workshop of it, now that she won’t want it any longer.…”
“There was in my childhood, Francis, and probably in yours, a proverb about not counting unhatched chickens,” his father warned him. “I expect Ruth will be very glad to have somewhere in London to keep her things till she has a house of her own in London.”
“Oh.… Still, bags I that room when the war’s over. By the way, how old is the old boy?”
“If you mean Lord Huntercoombe, I should say close on seventy.”
“Um… well, that’s not too bad. I shall like talking about my brother-in-law, Lord Huntercoombe.”
There was a burst of reproving laughter.
“All the same,” said Hugh, “it is rather strange to think of Ruth being the Viscountess Huntercoombe.”
It seemed rather strange to Ruth. She had not somehow visualized herself as Lady Huntercoombe. She had thought of herself as Victor’s wife.
On the next day she and Victor drove down to Tavenham. When he opened the door of the car, she moved over to the wheel. “I’ll show you how well I can drive,” she said.
He hesitated. Lady drivers were a favourite butt of the cartoonist. Then the quick, interested look came into his eyes.
“All right. I’ll have my hand near the brake in case anything too awful happens.”
But he had no need to touch the hand brake, and before they had been driving for ten minutes the interested look had left his face. “That’s all right. You know how to drive. I’ll take the wheel now. It’s a longish journey. I don’t want you to be tired out.”
With Victor at the wheel the speed of the car rapidly increased and more than once the hand brake was tugged back with a sudden jerk.
It was the first time that Ruth had been to Tavenham. The Tavenhams were of solid, county stock, who had been ennobled in the last years of the seventeenth century for services to William the Third of a possibly questionable nature. Their ennoblement had altered their character very little. They had not influenced the history they had lived through. No Huntercoombe had made a speech in the House of Lords. Victor’s father had kept saying that he really ought to do something about Lloyd George’s budget “just to show those fools in London how the country really thinks,” but when the time had come there had been a point-to-point that he could not miss. “One has certain responsibilities, damn it.” The Tavenhams had accepted history but had not made it. They had sent ensigns to the wars who had returned captains. Certain “bad hats” had been despatched to such colonies as the exigencies of the time selected: Barbados in the eighteenth, Australia in the nineteenth centuries. Their sons had been born to the feudal tradition of the aristocracy that prescribed a period of wild oats as a prelude to the sober responsibilities of a seat and title. They looked on London as a glorified Luna Park, where you dined and drank and drabbed where it did not much matter what you did since no one who mattered saw you. In the county you had a position to keep up. You could only maintain the respect of your tenants by observing the conventions: Church going, charities, a firm hand but a kind one; riding your village as you rode a horse. That was how the Tavenhams had lived. And the house that they had built in the last years of the seventeenth century was the symbol and expression of that life.
To her surprise Ruth found that Tavenham reminded her of Ilex. It was long, two-storied, with a low roof; with high rectangular windows, white-shuttered and white-framed; with a portico at the head of a short flight of steps that was scarcely more than an elaborate window frame. There were no creepers on the front. The brickwork had been recently repointed. It had so fresh, new-minted an appearance that apart from its setting, it mi
ght have seemed as recent, if not actually more recent, than Ilex. It needed its setting to explain it. Just as Ilex and the life of its inhabitants was explained by the noisy, wheel-polished sweep of the North End Road, by the row of numbered villas reaching to the hill’s foot, by the pavement, the street lamps, the few poor trees, so was Tavenham explained by the wide parkland stretching from the lodge gates to the dower house, two miles away; by the broad avenues of chestnuts planted by men who could look a hundred years ahead, by the lake, bordered with early flowers, that trailed into a stream midway between the garden and the drive; by the two swans drifting statelily between clumps of water-lilies; the placidly grazing sheep; the trimmed yew hedges that flanked the rose garden, the huddled group of outbuildings; stables, sheds, their thatched roofs showing over the wall of the kitchen garden; the air of spaciousness, of leisure, of life growing wide and deep.
“And this is going to be my home,” Ruth thought.
As the car swung out of the main drive into the carriage drive the front door opened and a tall, stooping, grey-haired figure came out on to the steps. “That’s the old boy,” said Victor.
Ruth had been curious rather than anxious about the reception that she would receive from her future father-in-law.
“There’s nothing for you to worry over,” Victor said.
“I’m not worrying. I’m wondering. I can’t be what he expected. I can’t be what he really wanted. Will he ask lots of questions?”
Victor shook his head.
“He’s not that kind. He takes life as it comes to him. He… “Victor paused, his forehead furrowed. “It’s hard to explain. I’ve known my father so long that I can usually guess what he’s going to do. I’ve no idea why he does it. I’ve never known what he thinks. I can assure you of this: that there’ll be nothing of the heavy father.”
There wasn’t. He stood at the head of the steps, a half smile on his lips. As Ruth came up the steps towards him he leant forward, stretched out his hands, rested them on her shoulders, bent down and kissed her cheek. His face was pale and lined. As it bent to hers, Ruth was reminded of a moth wing when the down is brushed from it; when you see the veins dark against a surface that you are surprised not to find transparent. His kiss was like the contact of a cool, smooth pebble. She was aware of a smell; an old man’s smell, like the bouquet of certain sherries; a faint mustiness. He took her hand in his.
“It is my privilege to lead you across the threshold.”
It was cool and dark inside the hall. Sombre portraits in browns and sepias hung against oak panelling that stopped less than a foot below the moulded ceiling. A tall clock was ticking; in the large marbled fireplace was a framed strip of purple tapestry.
“The period that built this house was afraid of sunlight,” Huntercoombe explained. “They faced their houses east and north. They said that the sun bred disease. Perhaps it did, since they kept their windows shut. The rest of the house is more cheerful.”
He took her round the house, not in the manner of a guide who makes an inventory of historical associations, nor in any sense of personal pride, a saying “This is something remarkable and I own it.” He took the house for granted; assumed that she would. He pointed out certain things less because they would be of interest to her, than because it was necessary for her to be aware of them. He knew the house not as a museum exhibit but as a place that had been built to live in.
It was in that way that such a house should be shown. Tavenham had none of the quaintnesses, the unexpected recesses, thicknesses of wall, turns of passage, uncovered beams, low doorways, unearthed windows, that are the proof of different periods, of renovations and additions, of a long and changing story. Tavenham was not like that. It was of a piece; built in one period by a man who knew his mind. The home for two centuries of men who had accepted that tradition, approved that taste. The broad staircase, the wide passages, the high walls, the solid window-frames, the elaborate ceilings and fireplaces gave an air of solidity; like the broad avenue of chestnuts did. The men who had built this house had known what they were about.
That afternoon Victor took her over the estate; showed her the oast-houses and the hop-fields, the wood that in February had been thick with snowdrops; and in another month would be a lake of bluebells. The trout stream with its yellow bordering of primroses and jonquils; the paddock where he had learnt to ride; where he had practised brassie shots.
“I used to play with the stream in front of me. If I played a bad shot I probably lost the ball. I had only enough money to buy six balls a week. I don’t believe that I’ve ever really enjoyed the game since I passed the ball-losing stages.”
The hour’s walk had not taken them much farther than the dower house.
“I had no idea you had as much land as this. I must be marrying a very rich man,” she said.
He laughed.
“You’d be surprised if you knew how much of it was let off to other people; I don’t believe even my father knows how many mortgages there are.”
He took her through the village. “Nominally, we own this.”
It was a small nestling village, an affair of one main street flanked on the one side by a row of hygienic, modern unprepossessing cottages. On the other by rambler-covered, picturesque, insanitary, thatch-roofed, uneven-windowed amalgams of beams and mortar. At its far end was a square-towered church with the moss-stained roof of the vicarage showing beyond the cemetery. There was only one shop. It served as a post office and recruiting station. A Union Jack was hung across its window. There was no other sign that history had disturbed the village.
“The war seems a long way off in a place like this,” he said.
“There’s a good deal else that seems a long way off,” she answered.
So much else that she could scarcely measure it. The whole of her life as she had lived it, very nearly. For all the West country stock that lay beyond her, she had been brought up as a city child. Her first memories were bound up with city life; its sights and sounds; pavements; traffic; machinery: with those aspects of beauty that are the particular property of the townsman; the morning in May when the plane trees in the squares show a sudden emerald; the glitter of lamps on shining streets; a winter sunset seen through bare boughs across the Park. The countryside was associated with holidays, excursions, week-end visits. It had for her the same kind of unreality that city life has for the countryman: something to be enjoyed and left; not to be taken seriously. Ruth had taken London to be the axle round which English life revolved. She had seen England in terms of city life; so standardized and yet so individualized; where everyone looks alike, dresses alike, does the same thing, echoes the same opinions; yet where in actual fact everybody stands alone, fighting a solitary battle for his independence. Ruth had pictured her future in such a world—though she had never so phrased the problem, nor indeed been consciously aware of it—as one of self-assertion, self-fulfilment, self-realization; a getting of one’s own way as far as was compatible with the obligations one inherited towards one’s family and friends, towards the world of which she had formed a part.
That too was how she had seen her country. But now, walking across the land that one day was to be hers, among these villagers whose welfare would be her concern, she had a feeling of another England that was neither less nor greater than, but was the complement of the England that she had known. A world where everybody looked different, where the postman, policeman, farmers, gentry, grooms who made up the sum of the village were distinguishable from one another at a glance; yet were in fact part of a corporate life. They might be separate and individual, but there was a sense of interwoven interests of which the Londoner was scarcely conscious. Things were different here. People were different. Even Victor was not quite the same. The tweed coat and grey flannel trousers for which he had exchanged his uniform were a symbol of another change. He seemed to have put off something. As he was more at ease physically, so was he more at ease mentally; relaxed; as though he were back where he
belonged. Before, she had seen the country from the outside, through the eyes of a Londoner seeking relaxation and rest from London life. She saw it now from the inside through the eyes of a countrywoman, for whom the country had a corporate existence of its own.
And this was going to be her world, in part.
She had thought that having a large place in the country would be like having a week-end cottage on a grand scale; that you would escape from London but continue a London life in a setting of calm and quiet. But it wasn’t going to be like that. She would be living a different life. When Francis had made his joke about his brother-in-law Lord Huntercoombe, she had laughed to herself, since she had never pictured herself as the Viscountess Huntercoombe, only as Victor’s wife. She saw now that Francis had been closer to the truth than she had been. She was going to be something more than just Victor’s wife.
That night as she sat at her bedroom window, the lamp turned out so that no lighted window might be held by the constabulary as a signal to hostile aircraft, looking out over the shadowed parkland, an emotion that she had not felt before made her heart tender, so that she would have found it difficult to speak. It was an emotion that she would have hesitated to describe as patriotism, that her childhood would not have recognized as patriotism, but that went deeper than the excitement she had felt during those first war weeks, when she had stood with shouting crowds, when she had torn open the papers with eager fingers to read the last press bulletins, when martial music had filled her with a sense of pride, a resolve never to admit defeat, a resentment that she could take no more active part than the washing of dishes, the cutting of sandwiches, later perhaps the driving of a car. The emotion that she felt now was of a different order.