Cheerfulness Breaks In

by Angela Thirkell

  ‘Yes, I was there, with my husband,’ she said. ‘I expect you know him. We live in Wiple Terrace.’

  Mrs. Morland said she didn’t quite know Wiple Terrace and was it S.W.7.

  ‘No, no,’ said Mrs. Warbury, laughing even more profoundly, ‘in Southbridge. Oscar is in Dante-Technifilms. They have moved down here from London. I knew I had seen you somewhere. My boy Fritz is down here too. He is on the production side of course. You must come in and have a drink and bring your husband.’

  ‘Well, I can’t exactly bring him,’ said Mrs. Morland with the air of one making a concession, ‘because he is dead, and I am not living in my own house at present, but if I could find any pins or a needle I could start on this leg. Lydia thought you might have some.’

  Mrs. Warbury, saying with her contralto laugh that she had a fatal attraction for pins, rummaged about in her chair and produced a small pincushion quite well stocked which she handed to Mrs. Morland, who thanked her, sat down as far away as possible, and began industriously to pin the seam of the leg together.

  ‘Here’s a needle,’ said Lydia, who managed to keep a firm eye on all the party. ‘You’ll need one. And Miss Hampton will give you some of her cotton. This is Mrs. Morland, Miss Hampton.’

  The rest of the party, mostly nice local people who might just as well have been anyone else, were again silent. Every one of them had read at least one of Mrs. Morland’s and one of Miss Hampton’s books, in most cases one that was in a sixpenny edition, and they all hoped to hear a clash of intellects and really literary conversation.

  ‘Glad to meet you,’ said Miss Hampton. ‘Been wanting to meet you for some time. You and I do the same sort of job, so I gather from Mrs. Birkett.’

  ‘Well, I’ve never been a Banned Book of the Month, I’m afraid,’ said Mrs. Morland, ‘and I never could be. My publisher wouldn’t like it, and I’m afraid I’m not up to it.’

  ‘Bah!’ said Miss Hampton vigorously. ‘Banned Books! Why do you think I write them?’

  Mrs. Morland said she had always wondered.

  ‘Four nephews to support,’ said Miss Hampton. ‘And you have four sons, Mrs. Birkett tells me. They take a bit of supporting. They are all off my hands now, two in the Army, one in the Navy and one in the Consular Service, but it took a bit of doing.’

  Upon this the two celebrated authoresses fell into a heart-to-heart conversation about boys which lasted without a break till Miss Hampton wanted a pair of scissors. Although Mrs. Keith provided several pairs for the working party they always became absorbed during the afternoon, and by tea-time there was usually a single pair which was passed from hand to hand like the eye of the Graiae. On the present occasion the scissors were run to earth in the folds of the hostess’s work, which was not considered quite fair, and Miss Hampton continued the story of her fourth nephew, the one in the Consular Service in Spain, while Mrs. Morland, an excellent listener in spite of her own sons and their doings, sewed industriously away, running and felling.

  ‘I say,’ said Lydia, coming round on a tour of inspection, ‘you must be ready for that other pyjama leg. Here it is.’

  Mrs. Morland took it and compared it in a puzzled way with the leg on which she had been working.

  ‘You’ve sewed your leg up all the way round, Mrs. Morland,’ said Lydia pityingly. ‘Give it to Miss Hampton and come and talk to Mother.’

  Mrs. Morland obediently went across to her hostess and listened with real kindness and interest to what she had to say about her married son Robert and his three children, her daughter Kate Carter and her younger son Colin. As Mrs. Morland saw the Carters nearly every day she was able to give Mrs. Keith the latest news of Master Bobbie Carter. That phenomenal child had just cut another tooth and his grandmother enjoyed herself very much telling Mrs. Morland the approximate dates of every tooth of all her children and her other grandchildren. While this entrancing conversation was going on, tea had been brought in on a trolley by Palmer the parlourmaid whose expression clearly showed what she thought of sewing parties in her drawing-room. Mrs. Keith called Palmer to her side.

  ‘Oh, Palmer,’ she said, ‘Mr. Keith tells me that there was a bright light in one of the maids’ windows when he came in last night from the garage. I don’t know whose it was, but you must be careful, or we shall have the police down on us.’

  Palmer stiffened all over.

  ‘I’m sure it wasn’t me, madam,’ she said, with a good servant’s immediate reaction to any criticism of the staff, namely to take the criticism as directed especially and venomously to herself and angrily rebut it. ‘And it couldn’t have been cook nor the girls, madam, as they was in bed quite early and cook passed the remark to me, only this morning while we were drinking a cup of tea, that Mr. Keith was very late home last night and banged the garridge door so loud she thought it was the air raids.’

  Having thus established the good servant’s second reaction, namely the solidarity, surpassing that of any trade union, which makes her shelter any other member of the staff with lies, if necessary, of the most unblushing incredibility, Palmer became even more rigid and stood over her mistress in a very unpleasant way. Mrs. Keith suddenly looked very grey and tired.

  Lydia, who appeared to be like Niobe all ears (as Mrs. Morland subsequently said when relating the incident to Mrs. Birkett who had been at the other end of the room talking to the Vicar’s wife and had not heard this encounter, or, said Mrs. Morland, was it Argus she meant) suddenly materialised at her mother’s elbow.

  ‘It doesn’t matter whose window it was, it mustn’t happen again,’ said Lydia, still brandishing her cutting-out scissors as a kind of wand of office. ‘I did all the black-out myself and I know it’s all right, so if anyone shows a light, it’s their own fault.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure Miss Lydia,’ said Palmer, retiring to her third line of whining self-justification, ‘no one could be more careful than I am. When I go to bed I turn on the light and first thing I do is to go straight to the window and draw the curtains the way you said, and there’s not a chink of light showing, because I asked cook to oblige me by going out and having a look and she said if there had been a corpse in the room it couldn’t have been darker.’

  Lydia, entirely unmoved by cook’s remarkable appreciation of a good black-out, said she had told Palmer that the black-out must be done every night before lighting-up time and if it wasn’t she would put blue bulbs into the maids’ bedrooms.

  Palmer, with a face that foreboded at least twenty-four hours’ sulks, said the girls had quite enough to do as it was and their bedrooms were all at the back of the house, so no one could see. With which piece of reasoning she scornfully collected the tea-things and took the trolley away.

  ‘I don’t know why it is,’ said Mrs. Morland, ‘that so many people think air raids can only come in at the front windows. One ought to be just as careful at the back, and after all a lot of people’s houses point the wrong way. I mean if the back of your house is east you ought to be particularly careful because one never knows.’

  The Vicar’s wife said the danger of unscreened lights was that they could be seen by enemy aircraft above, a statement so eminently reasonable as to paralyse all further conversation on the subject.

  ‘I wanted to ask you about our next week’s work, Mrs. Keith,’ she said. ‘The billeting officer tells me that the evacuees have all got nightgowns now, but a lot of them will be needing frocks and knickers. I thought we might be getting on with some, if Lydia has a pattern.’

  ‘We’ve got plenty of green stuff and of blue too,’ said Mrs. Keith. ‘Lydia, where are those two frocks we made?’

  Lydia went over to some neatly stocked shelves and produced two frocks, one the colour of dead spinach, the other a dull peacock blue, saying they were a bit Liberty but Mrs. Foster, the head of the Personal Service parties, had sent the material over from Pomfret Towers so they might as well use it.

  The Vicar’s wife examined and approved the frocks which she found very satis
factory except that the necks, she said, wanted arting up a bit, as the frocks were so very plain in cut. To this end she advised a little embroidery, something like a few flowers or leaves done in floss silk. She had at home, she said, some transfers that she could iron off on to the necks of the frocks when Lydia had cut them out. To this Mrs. Keith and Lydia agreed and the party began to break up.

  ‘Stay a minute,’ said Mrs. Keith to Mrs. Birkett and Mrs. Morland. ‘I haven’t seen you at all.’

  Miss Hampton shook hands warmly with Mrs. Morland and pressed her to visit Adelina Cottage. Any one of her nephews, or all of them, might turn up at any moment on leave, she said, but there was always a spot of drink somewhere. Mrs. Warbury, coming up to Mrs. Keith, said she felt too frightfully de trop, but her husband was coming to fetch her on his way back from the Studios, so might she wait. Mrs. Keith looked very faint and said of course and would Lydia ring for some sherry. Lydia did as she was asked and then accompanied Miss Hampton to the front door. Mrs. Birkett, who knew her well, saw that she was boiling up with rage against Mrs. Warbury who would undoubtedly tire and exhaust her mother, but was controlling her feelings in a way that she would have been incapable of six months earlier. Palmer with deep displeasure brought in the sherry which Mrs. Warbury quaffed, for no other word can express her sweeping manner of handling a glass, with abandon.

  ‘And now I want to know all about your wonderful boy, Mrs. Keith,’ she said.

  ‘He is very well. He has cut a new tooth,’ said Mrs. Keith.

  ‘A wisdom tooth, I suppose,’ said Mrs. Warbury, ‘at his age.’

  ‘If you mean his father, he cut all his wisdom teeth years ago,’ said Mrs. Keith, ‘and then had to have them all out, so wasteful, but Nature doesn’t seem to have got used to teeth yet. You would think that after so many thousand or is it million years of evolution she would know that we don’t need wisdom teeth, but nothing seems to teach her.’

  ‘But I didn’t know he was married,’ said Mrs. Warbury. ‘Such a nice boy.’

  It had become evident to Mrs. Birkett that her hostess and Mrs. Warbury were at cross purposes, so she intervened.

  ‘I think, Helen,’ she said to Mrs. Keith, ‘that Mrs. Warbury is talking about Colin.’

  ‘I really forget if he cut his wisdom teeth or not,’ said Mrs. Keith in a very tired voice.

  ‘It is Mrs. Keith’s little grandson who has cut a tooth,’ said Mrs. Birkett to Mrs. Warbury. ‘Her daughter’s little boy. Colin is somewhere in England with his gunners.’

  ‘What a pity—that nice boy,’ said Mrs. Warbury.

  ‘I don’t think it a pity at all,’ said Mrs. Keith, almost sharply. ‘He has been in the Territorials for a long time and I must say he looks wonderfully well, better than he has for months, for the life in London didn’t really suit him. And there are a lot of other lawyers in his regiment, so they get on very well.’

  ‘But the WASTE,’ said Mrs. Warbury.

  No one answered.

  ‘You must be thankful that your boy isn’t old enough to be conscripted, Mrs. Morland,’ said Mrs. Warbury, with a hiss on the ‘s’ of conscripted that caused her hearers to shudder.

  Mrs. Morland, who was very truthful, said she supposed she was, and paused.

  Mrs. Warbury, helping herself to another glass of sherry, said if only all young men refused to fight and we gave back all our colonies to their rightful owners, the world would be a different place. With this sentiment all her hearers agreed, though not quite in the sense she intended. Mrs. Keith felt so unwell that she could not argue the point. Mrs. Birkett, who had no sons, kept silence, feeling that a woman with no sons to lose could not sit in judgment upon a woman who had a son, however disagreeable he might be. Mrs. Morland realised that the defence of anything that she and her friends cared about was in her hands. Heartily did she wish that Lydia were there to do reckless battle, but Lydia did not reappear. Mrs. Morland knew herself to be at her worst in a crisis. To be flustered, as she always was by people she didn’t like, made her talk wildly and at far too great length, and she knew it. Looking madly about her she collected her wits for a reply. It was true that of her four sons the eldest was on an exploration expedition in Central South America and was in any case well over the present military age, the second was with his regiment in Burma, and the third a professional sailor, while Tony, her youngest, was a good eighteen months under military age, but even because of that she felt that it would seem like boasting to speak of what they were doing, or not yet able to do.

  ‘Well,’ she said apologetically, ‘I don’t see how one can stop them. And of course if one is in the Navy there one is, and it’s much the same with the Army, or exploring where you get no news for six months, and Tony really likes the O.T.C. At least he didn’t much like it the first time, but after that he met a sergeant-major in the regular army who swore more dreadfully than anyone he had ever heard which made him feel a real interest. I’m sure your boy must feel the same.’

  As she spoke she heard herself getting sillier and sillier, but was quite unable to do anything about it. Mrs. Birkett and Mrs. Keith exchanged glances of surreptitious amusement at their friend’s flounderings.

  ‘Luckily my boy Fritz is in a reserved occupation,’ said Mrs. Warbury, making up her lips again after the sherry.

  ‘Is he a dentist?’ said Mrs. Morland in a final outburst of trying to be intelligent and do her best.

  ‘Films,’ said Mrs. Warbury in a voice that implied, ‘my good woman.’

  To this there was no answer. A glacial silence, to which Mrs. Warbury appeared quite insensible, descended upon the room, while the three other ladies cudgelled their brains in vain for anything to say. To their great relief and surprise Lydia then came back, bringing Miss Hampton with her.

  ‘I say, Mrs. Warbury,’ said Lydia in what her mother distinguished as a peculiar voice, ‘your husband rang up to say he was stuck on a film or something, so Miss Hampton is going to take you back.’

  ‘Must get back at once,’ said Miss Hampton. ‘Red Lion opens at six and it’s that now. Can’t keep Bent waiting.’

  With which stalwart words she hustled Mrs. Warbury out of the room and into her car before that lady knew what was happening.

  ‘Lydia!’ said Mrs. Keith accusingly, but in a very affectionate way.

  ‘Well, I had to do something, Mother,’ said Lydia. ‘I couldn’t have that ghastly spy boring you to death till her awful husband came and wanted a drink. So I told Miss Hampton and we rang up the film studio and told Mr. Warbury that his wife had gone home.’

  ‘But you’ll be found out!’ said Mrs. Morland dramatically. ‘They will compare notes and discover that you told a lie!’

  ‘I must say,’ said the unregenerate Lydia, ‘that it was rather fun telling that one. I didn’t know I had it in me. Mother, do you think you ought to rest before dinner?’

  But Mrs. Keith, who had recovered a little since her horrid visitor had left, said she thought not, but she would lie down on the sofa if no one minded. So she did, and Lydia produced a hot-water bottle almost at once and put a light shawl over her mother, while Mrs. Morland thought how nice Lydia was and Mrs. Birkett, who had known her intimately for several years, thought how admirably she was teaching herself to be kind and thoughtful in a gentle way; for of hearty indiscriminate good nature there had never been any lack.

  The four ladies talked very peacefully for half an hour about families and friends. Mrs. Keith asked Mrs. Morland if she was writing a new book. At first Mrs. Morland drew in her horns and retreated into her shell, for as we well know she had no opinion of her own work at all. After much pressure, applied with genuine interest, she said she was trying to work on a new story, centring as usual round the dressmaking establishment of Madame Koska, but her great difficulty was to know what nationality to make her distressed heroine. The head villain, who had taken a job as commissionaire at Madame Koska’s shop in Mayfair the better to spy upon the English aristocracy, was of course a
member of the Gestapo, but the heroine, a countess of exquisite form, face and breeding, had to be a refugee and the trouble was, said Mrs. Morland, that refugees were as bad as chameleons and kept on being someone else. On being pressed for an explanation she said she had begun by having a Czecho-Slovakian, but had been obliged to change her for an Albanian and was at the moment turning her into a Pole, which, she added, was extremely difficult because their names were all alike except Paderewski and in any case she would probably be out of date before the book was published and one couldn’t turn her into a Belgian, or a Swiss, or whatever the next refugees were going to be, when the proofs had been passed. And, she added, with deep meaning, and in a slow emphatic voice, she knew Whose fault it was.

  ‘Whose fault, Mrs. Morland?’ said Lydia eagerly.

  ‘Do you know that pair of stockings with black marks on them that I sometimes wear?’ said Mrs. Morland to Mrs. Birkett.

  Mrs. Birkett said she was afraid she didn’t.

  ‘You must, Amy,’ said Mrs. Morland, ‘because you noticed them. All speckled down the front.’

  ‘Do you mean those stockings you had on the evening the Crawleys came to dinner and I thought you must have put them on by mistake?’ said Mrs. Birkett.

  ‘And what evening was that?’ said Mrs. Morland, so portentously that all her hearers and especially Lydia felt that they would burst with so much mystery.

  Mrs. Birkett said with a tinge of impatience that it was the evening the Crawleys came.

  ‘And the day the Royal Oak was sunk’, said Mrs. Morland.

  She then looked round her as if confident that everyone must now understand everything. But Mrs. Keith, who was never very good at understanding things and had the dogged character of the rather stupid, said One thing at a time and what Lydia had asked was Whose fault it was, though what the fault was about she could not now remember.

  ‘It all hangs together,’ said Mrs. Morland, ‘and I was just explaining to Lydia about my stockings. You see, Tony and I were in France when all this trouble began and most luckily I read in someone else’s old Times that there was going to be a railway strike in England, so I said really if there were going to be a strike we had better be at home. So we came back in great discomfort and crossness and of course when we got back the strike was off. Then Tony and I went down to High Rising and did the black-out which was very difficult because my cook Stoker doesn’t approve of it and then the last straw came.’