Cheerfulness Breaks In

by Angela Thirkell

  Mrs. Brandon was enchanted and they plunged together into an orgy of grandmothering and grandfathering that lasted them till dessert.

  The Colonial Bishop had meanwhile been taken over by Mrs. Crawley and cautiously sounded as to his views about the Bishop of Barchester. With great disloyalty to a colleague he said he already saw eye to eye with the Dean, so he and his hostess got on very well.

  Delia being now claimed by the Archdeacon, Lydia found herself at liberty to deal with Mr. Needham, tucked up her wristbands and came into the ring, asking her neighbour how he had been getting on. Mr. Needham said quite well thank you and how charming Miss Brandon, whom he hadn’t met before, was.

  ‘Oh, Delia,’ said Lydia. ‘She’s awfully nice, but I shouldn’t have thought you’d have noticed it. I thought it was her mother you were gone on. Most people are.’

  ‘Of course I do admire Mrs. Brandon frightfully,’ said Mr. Needham, casting a sheep’s eye across the table to where Mrs. Brandon was enjoying herself with Mr. Birkett. ‘But there is something so very nice about Miss Brandon. She is so very pretty.’

  ‘That’s why she’s engaged,’ said Lydia, determined that Mr. Needham should not be distracted from the one suitable object. ‘She told me before dinner.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mr. Needham, a little dashed.

  ‘I should have thought you might have noticed her ring,’ said Lydia severely, ‘considering which finger it’s on. How’s Octavia? I mean is Matron being horrible? I didn’t have time to ask before dinner.’

  ‘I think Matron is being very unfair,’ said Mr. Needham chivalrously. ‘She has put the worst abdominal in D Ward and Octavia was just going in for abdominals, because she says she has enough head wounds and wants more general experience. Octavia was marvellous about it. I wish I thought about my work as much as she does. But then she’s doing real work and I’m— —’

  ‘That’s enough, Tommy,’ said Lydia. ‘I told you before that you were doing jolly good work. I think Octavia looks ripping to-night.’

  She looked firmly across at Octavia, who was certainly not looking any less uninteresting than usual and finding Mr. Keith curiously unsympathetic to her account of a patient who had had a heart attack.

  ‘She makes me think of some heroine,’ said Mr. Needham, ‘and I feel so ashamed of myself. I know I couldn’t be a hero, but— —’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Tommy,’ said Lydia, exasperated. ‘I’d hit you on the back if it weren’t a dinner party. What about you being a military chaplain? Then if you got wounded Octavia could nurse you.’

  Mr. Needham’s eyes gleamed.

  ‘And now tell me about the Choir School football team,’ said Lydia, feeling that she had done enough for Mr. Needham’s love affairs.

  He needed no encouragement to tell her all she didn’t want to know and she was able to listen in a kind of dream, her thoughts in the past, on a cold winter’s day, walking on the terrace at Northbridge Manor.

  All this time Mr. Miller had been comparing notes with Mrs. Birkett about evacuees and Mrs. Birkett had secretly come to the conclusion, as she always did, that Mr. Miller was that nicest of things, a really good person who was wholly unconscious of being good, and felt that only a devil would have disliked most of the Southbridge evacuees as much as she did, so that it was quite a comfort to her when Mr. Miller confessed that he had harboured un-Christian thoughts against the worst of their boys who had drowned six chickens and kicked the hen and broken her leg.

  ‘What did you do, Mr. Miller?’ Mrs. Birkett asked.

  ‘The old Adam rose in me and I beat him,’ said Mr. Miller. ‘Not even after reflexion, I fear, but in anger.’

  ‘Then I am certain that you did him a great deal of good,’ said Mrs. Birkett firmly, ‘and probably saved him from the gallows later.’

  ‘That is what my dear wife said,’ said Mr. Miller, casting an adoring look at Mrs. Miller who was in the middle of the Mothers’ Union with the Dean, ‘and indeed, indeed I hope that it may be so, though I fear the gallows are still gaping for that boy. He has been trying to dig to Australia among the lettuces, thus causing considerable loss of good food. But my wife is the greatest comfort in these trials and her influence over the boys is astounding.’

  By now Noel was well in possession of Miss Pettinger, but much to his annoyance the game of Pettinger-baiting which he had promised himself had lost its savour. It was not that Miss Pettinger had lost hers, for her horribleness was more pronounced than ever, but instead of being amused Noel found her simply boring. Dinner seemed to him quite interminable. After what felt like hours of the Pettinger’s voice he suddenly heard the words ‘Lydia Keith’ and came to attention with a jerk.

  ‘Lydia Keith and Delia Brandon and the dear Dean’s Octavia and so many more of our Old Barcas-trianas are doing excellent work,’ Miss Pettinger was saying, ‘worthy of the very best traditions of Bar-chester High School. I was very much gratified to have a letter this morning from Miss Wixett, our first head mistress and still among us at Lyme Regis I am glad to say, bidding us all God-speed in our work. I read her letter aloud to My Girls after prayers.’

  ‘How like you,’ said Noel admiringly. ‘I am sure it is largely due to your influence that Octavia and the others are doing such good work.’

  This appalling lie was, as Noel fully realised, merely a bait to Miss Pettinger to go on talking about Lydia, though for some reason Noel found it impossible to mention her name at the moment and had to include her among others.

  ‘I do my best to carry on the wonderful traditions of our old school,’ said Miss Pettinger bridling, ‘and I think I can say that no girl passes the School Certificate from Barchester High School without being in some way moulded or even changed for the good.’

  ‘I am sure Octavia was,’ said Noel generously.

  ‘Dear Octavia is just the type that we wish to turn out,’ said Miss Pettinger, looking with an almost human look at her ex-pupil’s dull but self-satisfied face.

  ‘I know I would feel exactly the same about her,’ said Noel in the pleasant certainty that Miss Pettinger would not understand.

  ‘As for dear Lydia,’ said Miss Pettinger, ‘she is a warm-hearted girl, but I could wish she had had the Honour of the School more at heart. She never seemed to realise the importance of attending to every rule in the School’s Code of Honour. I remember that in her last summer term I had to give her four Red Marks and one Black Mark for repeatedly hanging her shoe bag on the wrong peg in the Senior Cloakroom. Now her elder sister Kate was quite different; so conscientious. And her sister-in-law, Mrs. Robert Keith, who was Edith Fairweather, was a wonderful influence among the girls, so good at hockey and cricket and keenly interested in The Barcastriana, our School Magazine. It is a pity that Lydia has not kept up with us more. She has only come to one Old Girls’ Reunion since she left. She does not look to me so fit as I like to see our Old Girls. I wish she would take up nursing, or land work, or some healthy form of war activity, but one cannot well interfere.’

  ‘No, indeed,’ said Noel, who, having gained his wish and heard Miss Pettinger speak of Lydia, would now have liked to strangle her.

  But at this moment Mrs. Crawley collected her ladies’ eyes and rose.

  The conversation of women is on the whole so much more interesting than that of gentlemen that we will leave the Dean and his guests to discuss local and world affairs and waft ourselves up to the drawing-room. Here Mrs. Brandon, true to her promise, seated herself on the little green settee, but did not fluffle out her dress, because she wanted to talk to Mrs. Crawley.

  ‘Come and sit with me,’ she said to her hostess. ‘I want to tell you about Delia before it is in The Times. She is going to marry our nice cousin Hilary Grant. I am telling everyone, so really The Times will almost be a war extravagance, but one cannot quite get engaged without it.’

  Mrs. Crawley expressed warm congratulations and was glad to hear that Hilary would not at present be in danger.

  ‘We are all in d
anger,’ said Mrs. Brandon stoutly, not wishing anyone to think that Delia would be too comfortable. Mrs. Crawley said it was in a way a comfort.

  ‘No, I really can’t agree with you,’ said Mrs. Brandon with one of her devastating attacks of truthfulness. ‘It would be much nicer if we weren’t, only one doesn’t quite know where to draw the line. If all the children and everyone under about thirty was safe it would be much more comfortable and it wouldn’t matter so much about us, except for all the ones that are being really useful like your husband and Sir Edmund and the Birketts and practically everybody one knows. But what is really annoying, because though it may not be dangerous it is very worrying for her friends, or at least the people that know her, is Hilary’s mother.’

  ‘What has happened to her?’ asked Mrs. Crawley.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Mrs. Brandon, ‘which is just what I complain of, because she will not leave Calabria where she lodges with a very short, stout chemist and his wife who is often a bandit in a small way, at least he is, called Marco Aurelio, and is writing a book about Calabrian folk-lore which she knows far too intimately. And I am so afraid Hilary will feel he ought to go out and bring her home, which she certainly would not do and would be a very great trial to everyone when she got here owing to having no settled home. She spent a few weeks at the Cow and Sickle in the village when she was last in England and owing to her trying to teach Mrs. Spindler to cook macaroni in the Calabrian way with goat’s cheese, which of course one luckily cannot get, Mrs. Spindler has hated me ever since, though all I did was to go and call on Mrs. Grant once or twice.’

  ‘I think I met her at Lady Norton’s,’ said Mrs. Crawley. ‘All homespun and sensible shoes.’

  ‘And hung with distressed jewellery,’ said Mrs. Brandon. ‘And do tell me about all your family.’

  This Mrs. Crawley was not averse to doing and when duty compelled her to move on to Miss Pettinger, who was being held at bay valiantly by Mrs. Miller who made her promise to lend the School Hall for a summer meeting of G.F.S. branches before she could think of an excuse, Mrs. Brandon fluffled her dress and sat all over the little green settee looking like a delicious double sweet-pea, so that the Archdeacon’s daughter, who wanted to tell her about her engagement to Guy Barton, had to bring up a little stool.

  ‘I am very fond of Guy,’ said the Archdeacon’s daughter, clasping her competent, workman’s hands round her knees. ‘He used to be a bit of an ass, but we’ve always got on well and the R.A.F. will do him all the good in the world. I don’t think we’ll get married yet, because I’ve got all the Land Girls to organise for West Barsetshire. Either after the war, or when he is invalided out, if he crashes.’

  Mrs. Brandon, not quite sure how much of this detachment was real, how much a mask, said she didn’t know Mr. Barton, but she had heard how very nice he was.

  ‘A bit too nice if you ask me,’ said the Archdeacon’s daughter dispassionately. ‘He didn’t behave frightfully well to Phoebe Rivers when he was engaged to her, but he won’t do that again.’

  ‘Wasn’t she a cousin of Lord Pomfret’s; a good-looking girl, very smart?’ said Mrs. Brandon.

  ‘Jolly good-looking,’ said the Archdeacon’s daughter. ‘She married Humberton, Lord Platfield’s eldest son, down in Shropshire. I was a bridesmaid and Lord Humberton can’t stand Phoebe’s mother, so that’s all right. It was a nasty slap in the eye for Guy and I had to take him in hand.’

  And now the men came in and Noel advanced upon Mrs. Brandon, who suddenly shrank to half her former size and smiled to him to sit down beside her.

  ‘Need I say how exquisite you are looking?’ said Noel.

  ‘Of course you need,’ said Mrs. Brandon. ‘It is only women who trouble to tell other women that they look nice, so coming from a man it has great value. But this dress is a rag.’

  ‘You are not only the most charming, but the most untruthful woman I know,’ said Noel, so that they both laughed.

  ‘And now,’ said Mrs. Brandon, who would undoubtedly have tapped him with her fan if she had one, ‘what is it you want to say? And pray be quick, for I see the Dean’s eye on me.’

  ‘It’s difficult to be quick,’ said Noel, ‘because you see I’ve never fallen in love before, and I am a little shamefaced about it.’

  Mrs. Brandon’s enchanting face assumed the expression of a child who sees a very large ice-pudding.

  ‘Do you mean you want to tell me about it?’ she said.

  ‘I do, Lavinia,’ said Noel. ‘And nobody else.’

  ‘Is it Lydia?’ said Mrs. Brandon, pretending as she spoke to assure the fastening of one of her diamond earrings, so that her face was half concealed from the room by her arm.

  ‘How did you know?’ said Noel, utterly taken aback.

  ‘Because I’ve seen it coming ever since the Vicarage fête at Pomfret Madrigal two years ago,’ said Mrs. Brandon placidly. ‘And I must say I have been an extremely good warming-pan for your attentions, though to call it chandelier as the French do is much more elegant and I hope you are grateful.’

  ‘Devil!’ said Noel, looking so affectionately at Mrs. Brandon that Lydia Keith, who happened to be looking that way, couldn’t help noticing it and almost wishing she were Mrs. Brandon.

  In a less sophisticated age, Mrs. Brandon would automatically have said: ‘Oh, you naughty man,’ but though she was quite capable of such an anachronism she merely smiled one of her most bewitching smiles and asked if she could help.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Noel. ‘You see I never knew it till all that cold weather we had. And now I can’t help reflecting that I am a great deal older than she is and might lose a perfect friend by trying to gain a wife. Do you think she would consider my application?’

  ‘Of all the nincompoops!’ said Mrs. Brandon, which made Noel, who although considerably her junior had always felt like her contemporary, suddenly realise that she looked upon him as a young man, not belonging to the real world of grown-up people.

  ‘You think I could, then?’ he said.

  ‘How long are you on leave?’ said Mrs. Brandon.

  Noel said he had to go back to town by the night train in about an hour.

  ‘Well, you might manage it to-night, though it would be difficult,’ said Mrs. Brandon. ‘If you can’t, you must do it the very next time you get leave.’

  ‘Thank you, Lavinia. You are an angel,’ said Noel.

  ‘And if you don’t, you need never come to Stories again,’ said Mrs. Brandon. ‘Oh! Dr. Crawley, I did so want to talk to you. What do you think the Bishop’s wife said at Lady Norton’s the other day?’

  Noel took this congé and the Dean, saying that whatever that woman said would be in keeping with the Palace traditions, sat down beside her to gossip. Noel looked towards Lydia, but she was conversing so earnestly with Mr. Needham in a corner that he suddenly felt old and fell into talk with the Colonial Bishop.

  It was not altogether of Lydia’s own will that she was talking again to Mr. Needham, but that young gentleman had waylaid her, to explain to her all over again his efforts to be a military chaplain.

  ‘I believe I could get to France now,’ said Mr. Needham, ‘because two or three of the people who deal with that are old Internationals but I can’t decide if it is my duty or if I am only being selfish. After all I am a priest.’

  ‘A clergyman, you mean,’ said Lydia severely. ‘Priest sounds like a monk. Look here, Tommy, have you read the Thirty-Nine Articles?’

  ‘Do you mean The Thirty-Nine Steps?’ said Mr. Needham who could not believe his ears.

  A year or two earlier Lydia would have said: ‘Of course not, you great fool,’ but that arrogant Lydia was far away, and Miss Lydia Keith said to Mr. Needham that she meant Articles and supposed he was a Christian.

  Thus challenged, Mr. Needham said rather huffily that he saw no point in such a question.

  ‘I’m only trying to help you,’ said Lydia patiently. ‘I’ve been reading it myself and I must say I think it’s a fr
ightfully good bit of work; I mean, there’s room for everyone in it. And it says that it is lawful for Christian men to wear weapons and serve in the wars, so there you are. And if you want a Magistrate to command you, I know Sir Edmund would, or Mr. Keith. They’re both J.P.’s.’

  At this jumbled and earnest piece of special pleading, the scales fell from Mr. Needham’s eyes and to his intense joy and relief he suddenly saw the paths of duty and desire for once coinciding. With real gratitude and humility he thanked Lydia.

  ‘That’s all right, Tommy,’ said Lydia, ‘only don’t ask anyone’s advice again. You just go ahead.’

  ‘Do you think I ought to tell Octavia?’ said Mr. Needham.

  ‘Of course,’ said Lydia. ‘And I’d tell her at once if I were you.’

  ‘If I had anything to offer,’ said Mr. Needham, ‘do you think she would wait for me till I came back? Or perhaps it wouldn’t be fair to ask her.’

  ‘Don’t be an ass,’ said Lydia, with a flash of her old impatience. ‘Take her for a walk when she comes off duty to-morrow and tell her everything.’

  Then Sir Edmund, who was very fond of Lydia, came limping down upon her and she exerted herself to be the kind of girl Sir Edmund liked and gave him an amusing evening. The party broke up early and by half-past ten the guests had said good-bye to Mrs. Crawley and assembled in the hall for their last glimpse of light before plunging into the black-out. Lydia, waiting for her father to get his coat and hat on, found Mr. Needham at her elbow.

  ‘I asked Octavia if she would have a walk with me to-morrow,’ he said in a voice of subdued excitement, ‘and she was going to an extra lecture on peritonitis, but she is going to cut it for me. You are an angel, Lydia,’ he said vehemently.

  ‘Write to me at once, won’t you,’ said Lydia. ‘I can’t tell you how happy I am.’

  And she slipped her arm through Mr. Needham’s and gave it a friendly and encouraging squeeze.