Cheerfulness Breaks In

by Angela Thirkell

At Everard Carter’s House the bathroom cistern froze and a pipe burst, reminding Matron of the time that Hackett left the hot tap running and nearly flooded the lower dormitory. The Birketts’ supply of coal and coke was held up by the state of the roads and for three days there was no central heating, which made Mr. Birkett go to London and spend two nights at his club, where he had some incredibly dull conversations with the older members who were all waiting to pounce on any fresh face and tell it their valueless views on things in general.

  Adelina and Maria Cottage spent all their evenings together at Maria partly to save fuel and partly because Mrs. Bissell could not go out at night as Mrs. Dingle couldn’t stay and keep an eye on little Edna with the roads in that state.

  At the Barchester Hospital such a crop of road accidents came in that the German measlers were despised by the nurses, nearly all of whom had chilblains, and Geraldine was so cheered by compound fractures that she almost forgot the mortification she had received at young Mr. Warbury’s hands and wrote long letters to Captain Fairweather about the horribleness of Matron who had put the most attractively maimed patients into D. ward.

  The water main in the Close burst and the Bishop’s cellar was flooded, which had last occurred in 1936, and gave intense joy to nearly all the inferior clergy, Mr. Miller at Pomfret Madrigal going so far as to refer to it, in conversation with Mrs. Brandon, as a crowning mercy. Ribald rumour had it that the Bishop’s second best gaiters had been washed onto the front door steps of Canon Thorne, a peaceful elderly bachelor with High Church leanings, whom the Bishop had accused of being a Mariolater and having no soul, but it was universally recognised that this was too good to be true.

  In the middle of all this Noel Merton came down for a night to the Deanery and rang up Lydia Keith, which was just as well, for next day two miles of telephone wires came down, and Sir Edmund Pridham said any fool would have known they could never stand the strain between Grumper’s End and Tidcombe Halt and wrote a long letter to the Barchester Chronicle which they printed with a number of cuts that made nonsense of it.

  ‘I’d love to see you, Noel, but I’m most frightfully busy,’ said Lydia’s voice on the telephone. ‘Wait a minute. I’ve got to go and see about some pig food and there’s a Red Cross thing here and it’s the day I do the Communal Kitchen—look here, could you possibly come here directly after lunch, about two o’clock. I could fit you in then. If you want a bath, our hot water’s all right.’

  Noel thanked her and said the Deanery water was luckily all right so far and he would come at two o’clock unless the chains fell off his car, or the road at Tidcombe Halt was flooded. When Lydia had rung off he felt for a moment unreasonably depressed. It was not like his Lydia to say she would try to fit him in. Then he gave himself a mental shake and reminded himself that Lydia was a very busy person and that so far she had done very much more useful work than he had. He returned to the library and was writing some letters when the Dean’s secretary came in.

  ‘Oh, good morning,’ said Mr. Needham, with a well-simulated start of surprise. ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you.’

  ‘Not a bit,’ said Noel. ‘If anyone is doing any disturbing, I am, writing my letters here.’

  ‘I expect you are frightfully busy,’ said Mr. Needham.

  One is not a distinguished barrister for nothing and Noel’s ear at once detected the voice of someone who wanted to talk, probably about himself. So he licked up an envelope, put his fountain pen in his pocket, and said he had just finished.

  ‘Come and keep me company,’ said Noel. ‘How is everyone? I got here late last night and came down disgracefully late to breakfast and I’ve hardly had a word with Mrs. Crawley.’

  Mr. Needham said the Dean was very well and very busy; very busy and very well, he added, with an earnestness which he hoped might cover the idiocy of his reply.

  ‘And how is Octavia?’ asked Noel Merton. ‘Still at the Hospital?’

  Mr. Needham’s ingenuous face assumed a reverent expression.

  ‘Octavia is quite magnificent,’ he said. ‘She simply lives for the Hospital. Even when she is at home she talks about nothing else. It makes me feel so useless.’

  ‘Oh, come, come,’ said Noel. ‘Think how much the Dean needs your help.’

  ‘Anyone could do a secretary job,’ said Mr. Needham dejectedly. ‘I’m frightfully fit and strong and it seems such waste to be writing letters when all my football friends are doing their bit. There are heaps of people with flat feet or something who could do my job; or even women. I mean it’s a great privilege to be working for the Dean, but it’s pretty awful, especially when I think of Octavia.’

  ‘I suppose you won’t believe me,’ said Noel, ‘but I often feel exactly like that myself.’

  Mr. Needham stared.

  ‘But you’re a soldier, I mean an officer,’ he said.

  ‘As a matter of fact I’m a secretary like you,’ said Noel. ‘Secretary in uniform. I have hopes of being blown to bits or rotting in an enemy dungeon some day, but for the moment I chiefly fill up forms and do odd jobs of interviewing people. And if it is any comfort to you, when I look at Lydia Keith and see how much she is doing, I think it’s pretty awful myself.’

  Mr. Needham almost gaped. That Mr. Merton, that ex-man-of-the-world, now practically a Death’s Head Hussar, or at least a Secret Service Agent of high degree, should feel as out of things as a Dean’s secretary, was extremely upsetting to all his ideas. And yet comforting.

  ‘The fact is,’ said Noel, partly to reassure Mr. Needham, partly following his own thoughts, ‘everyone wants to be doing something different since the war began; except the people who are actually in the thick of it. I don’t suppose either of us are particularly afraid of the idea of danger or discomfort, but we feel we are wasting our time. As a matter of fact I don’t believe we are. Lydia and Octavia make one feel rather ashamed,’ said Noel, basely pandering to Mr. Needham by throwing in Octavia of whom he had no very great opinion though quite in a friendly way, ‘but they have had the luck to find their jobs made to their hand, and the great self-control to stick to them. I know Lydia is pining to nurse, but her mother needs her and so does the estate, and all the local things. Octavia always wanted to nurse, didn’t she?’

  This slight denigration of Octavia could not pass without a protest.

  ‘She loves her work, especially head wounds,’ said Mr. Needham, ‘but she did once tell me when we were talking about things that she thought it would be splendid to train as a medical missionary,’ said Mr. Needham.

  Noel nearly said he would be sorry for the savages, but restraining himself said it was a very fine ambition.

  Mr. Needham said a missionary’s life was of course in many ways the highest calling one could imagine, but of course if one could possibly be a Chaplain at the Front— —He stopped, diffident at having betrayed a secret, mumbled something about meeting a train and went away, leaving Noel to finish his letters with a divided mind.

  After an odious drive along the by-roads, which a fall of snow the day before and a fresh attack of freezing had made into one long pitfall, Noel got to Northbridge Manor, where he found Lydia angrily strewing sand on the front door steps.

  ‘Hullo,’ said Lydia. ‘Our idiot kitchen maid washed the steps with hot water this morning to melt the ice and Father nearly broke his leg when he went out to get the car. Come round on to the terrace, and help me to carry some things indoors. I’ll have to take those two bay-trees in tubs into the hall, or we’ll lose them. I did put straw round them, but it won’t be enough.’

  Noel accompanied her to the terrace, where though the air was cold there was shelter from the wind, and a pale sunlight gave a faint illusion of warmth. He and Lydia were able to lift the two trees and carry them through the garden door into the hall, where they looked very well, though lumpy.

  ‘I’ll take the straw off afterwards,’ said Lydia, surveying their trussed shapes. ‘Come outside for a moment. I feel so stuffy after that Com
munal Kitchen.’

  ‘Was it rabbit stew?’ asked Noel, falling into step with her on the stone flags, where the frozen snow had been partly scraped away.

  ‘Shin of beef and dumplings, and tapioca pudding,’ said Lydia, ‘and we had to bring all the water in pails because the pump froze. I’m pleased to see you, Noel.’

  ‘So am I,’ said Noel; which Lydia quite understood.

  Lydia then put Noel through a searching examination about his physical welfare and the general state of things at the Deanery. It did not pass unnoticed by Noel that she never asked about his work. He was able to report that he felt disgustingly well and the food in the mess was good. He then gave her a fairly faithful narration of his conversation with Mr. Needham.

  ‘He and Octavia don’t seem to get down to it,’ said Lydia, with a touch of her old intolerance for any methods but the most direct and bludgeoning. ‘I must speak to Tommy. He’s really a bit too stupid for Octavia but she is pretty stupid too. I think they ought to get engaged and then Tommy ought to be a Military Chaplain and they could get married after the war. Octavia won’t want to stop being a nurse, but if Matron gets any more horrible she might go to France and then if Tommy were there she might see him sometimes.’

  Having thus disposed of her young friends she stopped and they took another turn.

  ‘You don’t think I ought to be nursing, do you, Noel?’ she asked with what for Lydia was almost diffidence.

  ‘No,’ said Noel. ‘You are a good girl; a very good girl. And you are doing everything you ought to do.’

  Lydia turned on him a look of such gratitude that he was abashed to receive so much for so little. They continued to pace the terrace in silence, very comfortably.

  ‘I wish Mother would get better,’ said Lydia, with such a forlorn note that Noel’s heart was wrenched.

  ‘So do I,’ he said. ‘And if you need me you will let me know, won’t you. I could probably manage to get over at any time if you needed a bit of comforting.’

  ‘I’d like it more than anything in the world,’ said Lydia, ‘but I wouldn’t ever, ever ask you, however much I wanted it. Thank you most awfully though.’

  She slipped her hand into Noel’s as they walked. He, surprised and touched by her mute appeal, so unlike the Lydia he knew, gave her hand the slightest pressure and then let it lie in his, anxious not to presume in any way upon her confidence. If a kind but ferocious hawk had suddenly perched on his hand in a friendly way he would not have been more surprised. Glancing at her profile as she walked beside him in the pale afternoon sunshine he noticed a faint shadow under her cheek bones that again strangely wrung his heart. It occurred to him that ever since he had known her Lydia had been shouldering other people’s burdens, sometimes it is true in a very rumbustious and almost interfering way, but always with the best of intentions; and of late and in a quieter, more self-effacing way, she had taken responsibility more and more upon her, till her father, her mother, the house, the little estate and much of the local war work seemed to depend very largely upon her. Noel thought of his own life, among men of his own sort, doing work that was more interesting than he was allowed to say, full of food for his mind, with no particular troubles except such as the world in general had to share. There was his Lydia, doing work beyond her years, often alone, tied by an ailing mother, the long evenings spent with parents whose life and interests, much as they loved her and she them, were far away from hers. It seemed to him that his Lydia needed a friend. Not needed perhaps, for she seemed to be unconscious that anything was wanting; but a friend she ought to have, someone older than herself who could give her help and support, someone not so much older that he could not see things as she saw them with her younger eyes. What Lydia needed, in fact, he decided, was someone rather like himself, very fond of her, loving her for her very faults, her brusqueness, her occasional overbearing ways; loving her too for her courage, her newly-learnt patience, her capable ways and above all for the rare moments when she let herself bend a little under her burdens. Such a moment was upon her now and Noel cherished it. Deep peace lay on the downs, the water meadows and the Manor. A white unfamiliar landscape, quiet as midnight, untouched by the world’s trouble.

  ‘It is all very solitaire et glacé,’ said Lydia, half to herself.

  ‘If we are spectres évoquer-ing le passé,’ said Noel, ‘it is a very nice past. What fun we have had here. Do you remember the picnic on Parsley Island and how dreadful Rose Birkett was?’

  ‘She was ghastly,’ said Lydia, withdrawing her hand from Noel’s as if the spell were broken, but so kind a withdrawal that Noel felt it almost as a caress. ‘And the day Tony and Eric and I cleaned out the pond and Rose threw her engagement ring at Philip.’

  ‘And you had on that dreadful short frock with no sleeves and all your arms and legs were the colour of a beetroot,’ said Noel.

  ‘And then Philip dropped the ring into the pool below the pond. I wonder if it is there still. Rose got engaged about twelve times before she married John. If I got engaged, I’d get engaged,’ said Lydia with a flash of her old arrogance.

  ‘I think you would,’ said Noel. ‘And mind, you promised to mention it to me when you do, so that I can see if he is good enough.’

  ‘Of course I’ll tell you,’ said Lydia. ‘But I don’t think I will at present, because unless it was someone like you I wouldn’t like them enough.’

  Then Noel knew that it was not as a friend that he wanted Lydia to need him. The blow to his heart made it impossible for him to speak for a moment. Divided between a wish to tell Lydia that she was the core of his life and a fear of disturbing her peace, wrenched suddenly by the violence of his own feelings, his self-possession lay shattered. For the first time in his life he was entirely at a loss. They had come to the end of the terrace.

  ‘Lydia,’ he said, as they turned. And on that his foot slipped on the frozen snow and he would have fallen if Lydia had not supported him with her powerful grasp.

  ‘Hold up!’ said Lydia reprovingly. ‘You ought to have nails in your shoes for this weather like me,’ and she turned up the sole of one of her heavy country brogues to show him serried rows of nails.

  The moment had fled. Lydia said she was frightfully sorry but she must go to a meeting in the village and would walk, as it was so slippery to bicycle. Noel offered to drop her there on his way back to Barchester.

  ‘It’s Mrs. Knowles’s, that stone house with the blue door,’ said Lydia as they slithered down the village street. ‘Thanks awfully, Noel. Give Octavia my love.’

  ‘Take care of yourself,’ said Noel, for banalities seemed the only thing to say. ‘I’m more than likely to be at the Deanery when I get any leave and I’ll always let you know.’

  Lydia crushed his hand to a jelly and strode up Mrs. Knowles’s garden path to the front door, her heart very heavy. The unwonted load lay upon her all that day and for many days and she found herself entirely unable to account for it.

  CHAPTER XIV

  DINNER AT THE DEANERY

  THE long winter of everyone’s discontent like a very unpleasant snake dragged its slow length along. Pipes continued to freeze, burst and thaw with wearisome regularity. Southbridge School and the Hosiers’ Boys went back to work. Men in their early twenties were summoned away and men a little older registered. More than half the evacuated children were taken back to London whence they wrote long letters to their country hostesses expressing a determination to come back and live with them for ever as soon as they were old enough. Those children who remained became stouter of body and redder of face every day, and with wearisome regularity had to return to the clinic to have their heads cleaned. Party feeling raged high over this question, the London teachers saying that their children were infected by the cottagers; the local committees asserting that the cottage children were free from any infection until the London children brought it back from town on their visits to their parents. Mrs. and Miss Phelps, taking no notice of either side, cleaned all
heads with violent impartiality. The Admiral had the intense pleasure of welcoming Bill and Tubby again as his guests when they returned from a cheerful violation of Norway’s highly un-neutral waters, with their rescued fellow-seamen; and when Mrs. Birkett heard that Bill had had the ocarina with him on that glorious occasion she felt that she had in no small measure contributed to the victory and the rescue and became quite bloated with pride.

  Two outstanding events are to be mentioned in that long depressing season before early Summer Time came in again.

  The first was the end of the Warburys, preceded by a crop of rumours which were a perfect godsend to the county. Many people who ought to have known better announced as gospel truth the following perfectly unfounded reports:

  (a) That Mr. Warbury was in the Tower. Origin unknown and firmly believed by everyone until the birth of

  (b) that Mr. Warbury was under arrest in the film studios with an armed guard at the door and only allowed to eat boiled eggs into which it is practically impossible to smuggle notes, files, prussic acid, or bombs. Origin: Mrs. Dingle, who cleaned at the studios once a week and saw some sandwiches going in and a sham soldier waiting to go on the set for a faked propaganda film, who playfully presented a dummy bayonet at her.

  (c) that Mrs. Warbury was under observation by the Secret Service for Luring Officers to tell her Things (unspecified). Origin: Mrs. Phelps who had been to town for a day’s shopping, for once in a coat and skirt, and was taken to lunch at the Café Royal by one of her many naval friends, where she had seen Mrs. Warbury, more dripping with foxes and pearls than ever, drinking Pernod with two dark men who looked like soldiers in civilian dress. The Admiral had rounded upon his wife, reminding her that soldiers did not go to the Café Royal in mufti and she ought to know better. But Mrs. Phelps, who hated Mrs. Warbury without reserve for herself alone, refused to be checked.

  (d) that all the Warburys had been shot. Origin: Mr. Brown of the Red Lion, who after young Mr. Warbury had been throwing his weight about more than usual in the Red Lion, said he wished they were all put up against a wall. This rumour gained immense credence among all the patrons of the Red Lion, whose faith was untouched by the fact that all the Warburys were seen in the village on the following day. But as Eileen said, patting her new bubble curls into place with her well-manicured hand, it was easy to dress up like some people and it stood to reason the Government would do things on the quiet; which convinced all but the most hardened unbelievers.