Cheerfulness Breaks In

by Angela Thirkell

  ‘Well, not often,’ said Mrs. Brandon. ‘Delia really likes children very much, but of course as she is mostly at the Hospital she has to go to bed a good deal when she is at home, and Francis is at work all day and the children are in bed when he gets back, but he will have to register next month and then he will feel much better.’

  At this point Mrs. Birkett most luckily intervened and took away the Colonial Bishop, who would otherwise have gone mad, to introduce him to the Archdeacon, who was burning for a new audience to whom he could repeat himself about the difficulties of the West Barsetshire pack in war-time.

  Noel Merton now claimed Mrs. Brandon, who said it was a long time since she had seen him, implying by her voice and look the epithet ‘deceiver’.

  Noel said with proper gallantry, Not half so long as it was since he had seen Mrs. Brandon, and they both laughed, for they were excellent friends and voyaged about the Pays du Tendre in great comfort, with return tickets.

  ‘Listen, Lavinia,’ said Noel, serious for a moment. ‘Mrs. Crawley has put me between Mrs. Birkett and Miss Pettinger. I love the one and have every intention of hating the other, but what I really want is to have a talk to you. Will you league with me after dinner?’

  ‘Of course I will,’ said Mrs. Brandon. ‘This dress fluffles out very nicely and if I sit on the little green settee, there won’t be room for anyone unless I choose to make it.’

  And then the party from Plumstead and South-bridge School came in, the Archdeacon’s daughter apologising for their being late, but she had been working the tractor at Starveacre till the last moment and was so stiff she could hardly get her breeches off.

  The Keiths and Lydia followed hard upon, and then the whole party had to wait for Miss Pettinger. Lydia, Octavia and Delia said loudly that the Pettinger had done it on purpose, and it was just like her horribleness. Mr. Needham came in and said someone had rung up to say that Miss Pettinger had been delayed, but was just starting and hoped they wouldn’t wait.

  Dinner was therefore put back ten minutes, at the end of which time Miss Pettinger was announced. Her gracious entry was marked by a black lace dress, a white rabbit-skin coatee, and a very large white, shiny handbag.

  ‘I must really apologise for keeping everyone waiting,’ said Miss Pettinger, ‘but my secretary had mislaid my gas-mask. How are you, Mrs. Crawley? And the Dean? And Lydia and Delia and Octavia? It is nice to see so many old High School Girls.’

  Mrs. Crawley introduced such of the party as were not known to Miss Pettinger, who had just had a very tight new permanent wave (for she believed in setting a standard of personal care to her girls), which made her hair, as Delia said to Lydia, look as false as her teeth.

  ‘You may wonder where I put my gas-mask,’ said Miss Pettinger, while the parlourmaid vainly tried to announce dinner. ‘I carry it in my evening bag at night and I had asked my secretary to transfer it for me, but she had forgotten and so it could not at first be found, till I looked on my writing-table and there it was. So I put it into my bag, took my torch and braved the terrors of the black-out and here I am.’

  Octavia said, rather too loudly, that it was bright moonshine to-night and received an admonishing look from her mother.

  ‘Never take my gas-mask out to dinner,’ said Sir Edmund, who had had more than one tussle with Miss Pettinger on committees and had no fear of her, nor indeed any opinion. ‘Can’t eat with a mask on. Bad manners, too.’

  ‘There’s only one person that can, Pridham,’ said the Archdeacon, who hated Miss Pettinger because she used the word blood-sports and in a deprecatory sense, ‘and that’s a fox.’

  Mrs. Birkett herded her guests downstairs, hoping that Miss Pettinger had not heard the Archdeacon, as indeed she had not, for she was already explaining to the Dean, who took her down, how useful it was to have a white, shiny bag for one’s gas-mask in the black-out, and how hers also held her torch, her identity card, and her name and address on a visiting card contained in a talc-fronted case, besides, she added laughingly, her make-up and other feminine trifles.

  ‘Much as I like sitting next to you,’ said Noel, who was between Miss Pettinger and Mrs. Birkett, to this latter lady, ‘I am looking forward with rapture to the moment when half the heads will turn to the left and half to the right, instead of half to the right and half to the left as at present. I am longing to hear my neighbour’s views on make-up. Tell me, how is the School?’

  Mrs. Birkett needed little pressing to give Noel an account of the activities of Southbridge School and the Hosiers’ Boys during the current term and as he knew a good many of the characters concerned, he was properly interested.

  ‘Talking of the Bissells, Miss Hampton was there not long ago,’ said Mrs. Birkett, ‘and she saw Lydia Keith as she was coming away and thought she looked thin. I haven’t seen her till to-night for some time and I think so too. I think she worries about her mother, poor child.’

  It is one thing to think your nicest friend is thin yourself, but quite another to hear a third person say so, and Noel almost disliked kind Mrs. Birkett for taking so much interest in Lydia. He would have liked to look at Lydia again and satisfy himself about her, but unfortunately she was on the same side of the table, next but one to Mrs. Birkett, and heavily involved with Mr. Miller on the question of a Communal Kitchen, which Pomfret Madrigal had not yet instituted. So he had to content himself, which indeed he found it easy to do, with Mrs. Birkett’s agreeable company, until such time as the heads should turn.

  Beyond Lydia, Mr. Needham and Delia were prattling away very harmlessly, and beyond Delia the Archdeacon discussed with Mrs. Crawley on his right the opening of the new buildings at Hiram’s Hospital, a charitable institution that was one of the prides of Barchester. The reparations and additions to Hiram’s Hospital had been carried out by Mr. Barton, an architect who did much of the cathedral work and about whose wife’s books we have heard Mrs. Morland’s opinion. The ceremony of opening them was to be performed by the Earl of Pomfret, the Lord Lieutenant of the county.

  ‘I was talking to Foster at the Red Cross Committee to-day,’ said the Archdeacon, alluding to Lord Pomfret’s cousin and heir who had for some years been taking an active part in county work. ‘He tells me that Pomfret is not at all well. He has never really been the same since Lady Pomfret died. What a beautiful woman she used to be. I remember her when I was a boy, driving in a victoria and pair under the archway of the Close to a garden party at the Palace.’

  Mrs. Crawley, who was fond of Lord Pomfret in spite of his sometimes terrifying manner, expressed her sorrow at this news.

  ‘There’s no doubt Foster will do well,’ said the Archdeacon, ‘but Pomfret would be very much missed. He stands for a great deal that we need at the present moment.’

  ‘Sally will do very well too,’ said Mrs. Crawley, for Mr. Foster’s wife, who had been Sally Wicklow, was a great friend and ally of hers.

  ‘They are a good lot, the Wicklows,’ said the Archdeacon. ‘You know her brother, Roddy, Pomfret’s agent?’

  Mrs. Crawley said she did and was very fond of little Mrs. Roddy Wicklow, daughter of Mr. Barton, the architect.

  ‘That all brings me round to what I wanted to tell you,’ said the Archdeacon. ‘I don’t know if you remember Mrs. Roddy’s brother, Guy Barton. He and my girl have known each other for a long time and the engagement will be announced in a few days, but I wanted you and the Dean to know before it is public. He left his father’s office last September and is in the R.A.F. and they want to get married before he is sent abroad, which might be fairly soon.’

  Mrs. Crawley expressed sincere pleasure, but her thoughts were more with Lord Pomfret than with the young couple. She and her husband had known him for a good many years and his passing would mean the passing of an old order, far too much of which was already engulfed. Mrs. Crawley did her best to be broadminded about social changes and managed to have faith that the next generation would make the world a little better, but all her broadmindedne
ss could not make her think that it would be so happy for the people of her own age who had seen the golden Edwardian prime. Whatever happened it would mean eating other people’s mental bread and treading strange stairs, and Mrs. Crawley sometimes felt that she would like to shut herself up in the Deanery, stop her ears, and there decay gently in a corner, living in a dream of the past. Pomfret Towers had for many years been a friendly house to her and her husband. When Lord Pomfret died the new Earl and his wife would bring to their duties the same admirable devotion that old Lord Pomfret had always shown and would if possible bring up their children in the same spirit. But with death duties and war taxes the estate would be grievously crippled. The Towers would probably be shut, or the new owners would live in part of one wing, economising; a small runabout instead of the three large cars and the chauffeurs; vegetables, fruit and flowers sold instead of being used in the house or given away on the estate, shooting let to a syndicate, horses put down, nasturtiums sown in the Italian garden whose bedding-out had been the head gardener’s joy. The tenants, she knew, would be the last to suffer, as the new Lord Pomfret and his wife would roof a cottage or mend a gate before they would give themselves a new bathroom; and that was as it should be. But when those days came Mrs. Crawley knew that she and her contemporaries would find themselves in a world where their chief use would be to oil the wheels where they could and to die in decent time so that the young might inherit a world whose most enchanting pleasures they had not known and would not miss.

  Mrs. Crawley looked down the long table at the end of which she was sitting with the Archdeacon. Who among her guests were to inherit this new world? Lydia, Delia, Octavia, the Archdeacon’s daughter; Mr. Needham. Noel Merton perhaps, though his life and thought lay more with the older generation. Four nice, ordinary girls and a young man of no very particular ability. That they would all behave well in any given circumstances Mrs. Crawley did not doubt, but what standard of life were they going to keep? Then she blamed herself for harsh judgment of a generation that had not yet been tried. She remembered that Delia and Octavia were diligent at the Hospital and never tried to change their hours for the sake of a treat, that the Archdeacon’s daughter was training land girls with efficient zeal, that Lydia Keith, who she thought looked more subdued than was her wont, was managing the little estate and both her parents, besides her many other activities, that Mr. Needham was a painstaking secretary though his spirit longed for more active work. ‘Good, good children,’ she said to herself.

  And marriage. Would those girls care to marry? How many would lose a lover, a friend that might have been a lover. If Octavia would only show the faintest interest in men, thought her mother almost angrily, for she herself had married young and had all her large family by the time she was thirty-five, partly owing to the twins, and metaphorically speaking had the decks cleared for action by the time she was forty and full of energy. Were Octavia, Delia, Lydia to go on being nice useful girls for ever. She almost champed with rage at the thought.

  And all this went through her mind while the Archdeacon was talking about Hiram’s Hospital and repeating his anxieties about Lord Pomfret’s health, so that he got a very long innings, by which means the Colonial Bishop, whose name does not matter and who indeed only comes into this book as an excuse for a dinner party, was able to immolate himself thoroughly at Mrs. Brandon’s shrine, who like an exquisite and tender Juggernaut was rolling over him, talking delightful nonsense all the time. While she thus carried out her mission, Mr. Birkett on her right was able to get from the Archdeacon’s daughter some excellent advice about putting in winter greens, to which end he had just had a new piece of ground dug up. This professional talk threw Sir Edmund and Octavia together; not that Octavia minded, for one audience was to her as good as another and she had an abdominal on her mind that she required to get off it. But Sir Edmund, who liked girls to be pretty and ready to flirt, and wanted to talk to the Archdeacon’s daughter about the vixen at Tolson’s corner, did not enjoy himself at all until, Octavia stopping to take breath, he told her about the wound in his leg that he got at the Battle of the Marne and found for once a thoroughly sympathetic listener.

  Beyond Octavia, Mr. Keith talked quietly to Mrs. Miller about some new books and the fate of Brandon Abbey which had been left by old Miss Brandon as a kind of Home of Rest for veterans of her brother’s regiment.

  But owing to trustees and things, Mrs. Miller said, it had not yet been properly organised, for a great deal of alteration and new plumbing had to be done and there was a good deal of red tape with various Ministries. Now, however, the Government had taken it over, plumbing and all, as a military hospital, so it was just as well, and she was sure old Miss Brandon would have been pleased. Looking across the table at Lydia, she said she was so glad to see Miss Keith again, and how delightful she looked, but a little tired. She could not admire the girls enough and the way they tackled everything.

  Mr. Keith also looked at Lydia and wondered if seeing his daughter every day made him not realise how much thinner she had grown. But as she was almost perfect in his eyes, he decided that Mrs. Miller was not only wrong, but slightly interfering, and became rather reserved, which Mrs. Miller did not notice in the least, though she found him so heavy in hand that she was relieved when the Dean, who was sitting beside her at the opposite end from Mrs. Crawley and the Archdeacon, took advantage of a moment’s pause in Miss Pettinger’s monologue to ask her advice about a giant assemblage of Mothers’ Unions which was to be held in the Cathedral in the following month. At this Mrs. Miller said, Ha-ha! inside herself, for daughter of a vicarage and wife of a vicarage, Mothers’ Unions were in her blood and she knew she could organise for ten thousand women if necessary without the slightest difficulty.

  ‘Our chief stumbling block,’ said the Dean, ‘in the Cathedral Service, will be the gas-masks. They have all been told to bring them, but I know, I know that they won’t, and I have had, however reluctantly, to rule that no mother will be allowed into the Cathedral without showing her mask.’

  ‘I know what I would do,’ said Mrs. Miller quietly, ‘though it would be quite wrong. I would collect as many cardboard containers as possible and have them at the various points of assembly. Then each mother who has not brought her mask could first be spoken to severely about her negligence and then given an empty box to carry. My dear father would, I fear, have condemned this as mere expediency, but there are moments when expediency becomes a necessity, and this seems to me the moment.’

  The Dean thanked her warmly and said he would privately make this suggestion to those responsible for convening the various branches.

  Mrs. Miller said that gas-masks in the cathedral, though showing a sense of public duty, would be entirely useless. Last time she went to Evensong, she said, her mind wandered, as one’s mind is, alas, too apt to do, and she could not help reflecting that if a single bomb fell anywhere in the neighbourhood, the rose window, the monument to Lord Pomfret’s grandfather, Vice-Admiral Thorne’s Trafalgar monument with Neptune and a mourning Britannia, besides the draped statue of the Honourable Augustus de Courcy, the last representative of old Barum before it was disfranchised as a Rotten Borough, would at once have fallen in glass splinters and masses of masonry on her head, not to speak of the whole of the roof of the North Transept where it was being repaired.

  ‘I know, I know,’ said the Dean. ‘We should of course try to get everyone out as quickly as possible. But I must confess, though I could not say this to everyone, that I always hope I may be in the Cathedral if there is an air-raid, just to observe some of our clergy and elder choristers leaving the building as they are officially commanded to do, with all reverent speed. I feel that the speed would, in so many cases, get the upper hand. But I oughtn’t to talk like this.’

  Mrs. Miller, however, being of the inner circle, took the remark in very good part and they laughed so much in a quiet way that Mr. Keith, grappling with Octavia, felt very depressed and wished he could share the fun
. Sir Edmund, having exhausted the story of his wound, from which he still suffered though he never complained, was thus enabled to turn with relief to the Archdeacon’s daughter and from her got the most valuable support about the vixen, who had been much harassed by the ploughing of a field that she regarded as her own and had practically implored Sir Edmund’s protection.

  Mr. Birkett, having done his duty by winter greens, had a very pleasant chat with Mrs. Brandon, as indeed everyone always did.

  ‘I do want you and your wife to know,’ said Mrs. Brandon, ‘before it is in The Times, that Delia is going to marry our nice cousin, Hilary Grant. When I say cousin, he is really no relation at all, only a connection which makes it all right though in any case they wouldn’t be first cousins which is, I believe, where the bad blood comes in.’

  Mr. Birkett said he was delighted and he knew his wife would be, and asked if Hilary was in the Army, as nearly all the young men he knew now were.

  ‘Well, not exactly,’ said Mrs. Brandon, ‘because his eyes are not good enough, but he speaks Italian very well and has been taken on for a temporary job in a Government office which I am not supposed to mention though everyone knows about it and exactly where it is. I know it is wicked,’ said Mrs. Brandon plaintively, ‘but I cannot help being glad that Hilary won’t be killed at once. Of course if there is a bomb or anything he will do his best, but it is so very nice to feel that Delia won’t be a widow for the present. If he is sent abroad she will go back to the Hospital unless of course she is going to have a baby which I do hope she will, or Nurse will never forgive me, and then she would come home.’

  Mr. Birkett, disentangling Mrs. Brandon’s various emotions, said a suitable word for each, adding that he saw nothing wrong in being glad that one’s daughter was not likely to be a widow at once.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘that Geraldine is engaged to Geoff Fairweather of the Barsetshires, whose brother married Rose. They are a very undemonstrative couple but they have known each other for years and we are very happy about it. And Rose is to have a baby in August.’