The Chestnut Tree

by Charlotte Bingham

  Maude resisted the temptation to sigh yet again and instead simply raised her eyebrows as pointedly as she could, which was a useless exercise since her husband was staring not back at her, but up at the ceiling.

  ‘Were you to have preserved your soul in patience for once, Lionel,’ she told him, ‘you might have discovered without my having to tell you so that while there may be none of the custard you care to mock, there is cream with the plums this evening. Plenty of cream, as it happens. I managed to get some at the weekend, from the farm beside Owl Cottage. You know, where the old Miss Hardings used to live, before they passed on.’

  There was indeed to be cream with the pudding, but that circumstance was due not to foresight, but to chance. Unusually for Maude she had happened to glance into the kitchen just before she and her husband had gone in to dinner, only to spot a cold carpet of ageing yellow custard in the sauceboat. Knowing full well the sort of repercussions that would follow should such an obscenity find its way to her husband’s dining table, more in hope than in confidence she had raided the Frigidaire, where as good fortune had it she found the remains of a jug of clotted cream left over from dinner two nights earlier.

  ‘Cream, Mr Eastcott, sir?’ Dolly wondered miserably. ‘Not that there’s much.’

  ‘Thank you, Dolly,’ Maude said crisply, noticing a look of alarm spreading across her husband’s face. ‘Just serve the plums, please, without any running commentary. Lionel?’

  ‘What’s she doing with her gas mask? Maude—’ Lionel stared at the government issue gas mask that was hanging by a string from the maid’s waist. ‘The war hasn’t started yet, Dolly. Least not to my knowledge, anyway.’

  ‘Mr Eastcott is right, Dolly. One hardly thinks you need such a thing in here. In the dining room.’

  Maude emphasised the location as if she were referring to some exclusive London club, which it always seemed to her dining rooms everywhere rather resembled.

  ‘We’ve been told to be prepared at all costs,’ Dolly replied valiantly, as if to disobey would be treachery. ‘They told us last evening – at the lecher.’

  ‘Lect-ure, Dolly,’ Maude corrected her. ‘And that will be all, thank you.’

  ‘It’s all very well—’

  Dolly’s protest was cut short by her employer.

  ‘I said that will be all, Dolly.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ Lionel grunted, after sampling his first spoonful of fruit. ‘Sugar. These plums are practically inedible like this, Maude. Is there no sugar?’

  ‘The sugar’s in front of you. Sifter. Sugar. In front of you, Lionel.’

  Maude sighed yet again and stared out of the window. She was so bored she found herself almost longing for the threatened war, anything to break the terrible monotony of what now passed for a life. As for this evening, how she wished that she could be somewhere like the cinema, with her daughter Mathilda. Mattie went to the cinema every Friday evening, lucky thing, but since rather than being Lionel’s daughter Maude was, for her sins, Lionel’s wife, such a treat was quite out of the question. They had been to the cinema together once in the last five years, on a rare joint visit to London, and even then it had really been only because it was Maude’s birthday. In celebration of which Lionel had, very graciously, allowed Maude the treat of going to see the latest Marx Brothers film, an entertainment he himself had found completely without merit. The only good thing about Maude’s present family life was the fact that at least her daughter still lived at home, because without the liveliness of young Mattie’s company Maude seriously believed she might, long ago, have gone mad. Lionel had always been nothing short of dull even at the best of times, but at least most of those times he had been away from home on business. Now, having sold his business in order to enjoy a premature retirement, he was at home all the time that he wasn’t out on the golf course, which was about as exciting for Maude as her WI jam making was for Lionel.

  As she stared out at the beautiful summer’s day that was now drawing to a close, somewhere on the air she thought she could hear a band playing. Hearing the melody she found herself smiling, as the tune was the one to which she seemed to have spent her entire youth dancing.

  ‘Black bottom,’ she sang to herself in her head.

  Suddenly it seemed unbearable to think of how far they had come together, and yet how little they had actually grown together. It had not always been like this. The sound of the clock ticking, Maude’s foot moving up and down, up and down, relentlessly, ceaselessly, under the table. Emboldened by the extra sherry she had managed to steal before dinner she looked down the table at her husband.

  ‘Lionel?’

  ‘What is it now, Maude?’

  ‘Can you hear the music? That tune? Listen—’ Maude cocked her head towards the half-open window.

  ‘Some people have little or no thought for others,’ Lionel sighed, getting up from his chair and going to close the window. ‘If I’ve told the Harrisons once about their wireless—’

  ‘I rather meant you to listen to what was playing. Or have you forgotten how we used to dance to that? How we used to love to dance, Lionel? I can’t remember the last time we did.’

  ‘I should think not. At our age. I don’t know what you must be thinking.’ Lionel sat back down and resumed eating his plums.

  ‘Black bottom,’ Maude sang in a remarkably pretty voice, at once earning a hard stare of disapproval.

  ‘We are at table, Maude, if you don’t mind.’

  To the accompaniment of her husband’s crunching his way through the last of his now well-sugared plums, Maude half closed her eyes and cast her mind back to the days when she was first married, a time when it seemed to her she had spent forever dancing and partying in sequined dresses with little feathers in her hair. Glancing down the table at her husband she found it almost impossible to believe that the stolid, taciturn grump now carefully wiping the ends of his greying moustache with his table napkin was the same person who used quite literally to sweep her off her feet on the dance floor, doing the Charleston and the Black Bottom until they were both fit to drop.

  ‘I should just love to go dancing again, Lionel,’ Maude said suddenly, almost in spite of herself. ‘Why don’t we go to the Pantiles on Saturday?’

  ‘You seem to have forgotten we are on the very verge of a European war, Maude.’

  ‘I have not indeed, Lionel. That was the whole point of my suggestion.’

  ‘To go and disport ourselves on the dance floor? When any moment the world might go up in flames?’

  ‘Eat, drink and be merry was all I was thinking, Lionel,’ Maude said quietly, pushing her pudding plate to one side. ‘I fail to see the harm in that.’

  ‘I fail to see the good.’ Lionel frowned down the table at her, unable as ever to fathom the contradictions of the female mind. Here they were almost certainly about to be plunged into another continental conflict and all his wife could think about was putting on her glad rags to go dancing. It really was too much. But then it was only to be expected. His mother had tried to warn him off marrying Maude.

  She’s a fast girl, just as her mother was, she had kept telling him, with tears in her eyes. You’ll regret it, Lionel. You’re far too conventional to marry a girl like that.

  But in spite of his mother’s advice he had gone ahead and married the vivacious Maude Alderman, attracted more by her unconventionality and her apparent fast ways than anything else. And just as predicted he had lived to regret it because nothing, it seemed, was ever enough for his bride. Whatever she was given, time, attention or gifts, was never enough. So Lionel had long ago given up the unequal struggle to satisfy his restless wife, and hidden himself within his cocoon of social orthodoxy.

  ‘I am about to smoke a cigar now, Maude,’ he said, in warning. ‘So knowing how much you object to the aroma—’

  He eyed her over the cigar he was preparing, cueing her exit. But Maude was not to be hurried away from the dining table, as she usually was. Aware that time might well be runn
ing out for all of them, she remained firmly seated to make one last plea that they should go dancing at the weekend.

  ‘I fail to see how you can think about such frivolities, Maude,’ Lionel replied, carefully disposing of the cut end of his cigar in a small silver ashtray. ‘Europe is gearing itself up to meet possibly its greatest threat since goodness knows when, and all you can think about is enjoying yourself. You would be far better occupied checking your blackout arrangements, making absolutely sure we are properly prepared for any major contingency, instead of entertaining such totally unsuitable notions in that head of yours.’

  ‘I’ll have you remember that is precisely what I have already done, Lionel,’ Maude answered hotly. ‘I have stocked the cellar—’

  ‘As I see. With a bountiful supply of marmalade, not to mention a near endless quantity of tinned sardines – and a vast number of shoelaces and boxes of matches, the sight of which I have to admit quite stumped me. Apart from being quite unable to fathom their use should the balloon go up, I must tell you it is the sort of behaviour of which Whitehall utterly disapproves. Not to mention the opinion of our neighbours, should the fact of your hoarding come to their notice.’

  ‘Goodness gracious. I am not alone, in case you think I am. Everyone’s stocking up on things, Lionel. You don’t go to the shops, so you wouldn’t know. You should have seen the free-for-all for groceries in Underwoods yesterday morning. If I hadn’t got there early—’

  ‘You are not to hoard, Maude,’ Lionel interrupted. ‘It is quite against all the government directives.’

  ‘I don’t see the use of directives, not personally.’ Maude sighed, and she took out a powder compact from her handbag, which was quite against all the rules of etiquette, and powdered her nose. ‘Not if and when it comes to war. It’ll be every man for himself. And much good will your attitudes do you.’

  ‘You would rather we just sat here and let the Nazis walk all over us?’

  ‘Of course not, but what good can you and I do at this moment, except defend ourselves with croquet mallets and golf clubs? I mean really, the government has been, like so many of your sex, just a little slow, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘We will defend ourselves with whatever is to hand, Maude,’ Lionel sighed, over-patiently. ‘Until the provision of arms proper, that is.’

  ‘He’ll huff and he’ll puff and he’ll blow our house down,’ Maude replied, waving the cigar smoke away from her face with her hand. ‘I’ve never heard of anything so ridiculous.’

  ‘At least we’re prepared to fight for our country,’ Lionel said, with a glint in his eyes. ‘Unlike that appeasing family of yours.’

  ‘You know I do not see eye to eye with my family.’

  ‘I should hope not, Maude. It is precisely because of people like your family that we are in the situation we are in now. The petite bourgeoisie, famous for burying their heads in the sand, not to mention the so-called aristocracy and certain members of our royal family who see only good in Mr Chamberlain’s wretched policy of appeasement – they are all responsible for our present grave predicament. We should have been prepared for this conflict – properly prepared, I mean – we should have been ready for it years ago. Instead of burying our heads in the sand.’

  ‘Really?’ Maude looked at him, a hard gleam in her own blue-shadowed eyes. ‘And whose golf club was it that told the Auxiliary Fire Service when they arrived there for an exercise to run along and find somewhere else to play?’

  Lionel ignored the jibe, although he had in fact been one of the officials responsible. Instead he contented himself with tossing the discarded match he had used to light his cigar into the ashtray, and avoiding his wife’s eye as she at last rose to leave the table, allowing him to enjoy his smoke.

  After Maude had swept out, Lionel rose and poured himself a large whisky from the decanter on the sideboard. It was at these times he had little or no idea either why he had married such an infernally stupid woman, or why he had stayed with her. The other mystery was how they had managed to produce a daughter like his beloved Mathilda, a young woman who was so entirely different from her mother it was sometimes impossible to see where Maude had entered the equation. Mattie was such a good and undemanding girl. Unlike most of her contemporaries, she was a model daughter, never giving her parents any trouble or causing them a moment’s embarrassment or worry.

  Lionel checked the time on his gold wristwatch. It was five minutes after nine o’clock, which meant that it would be about an hour before Mathilda would be home to tell him all about what she referred to as the flick she had just seen, rattling off the story in double time and acting out some of the more dramatic bits. Lionel, who professed to be a devout non-cinemagoer, feigned as little interest as possible during these charades, but it obviously never fooled his daughter since she always launched into her cabaret almost before she had taken her coat off. Seeing that he had possibly another hour yet to waste Lionel dallied as long as he could before finally consigning his cigar to the fireplace, draining his second whisky and taking himself reluctantly off to the drawing room to spend yet more slowly passing minutes in the company of his ever restless wife.

  As the Tates prepared to go in to dinner Judy looked around the assembled company, thinking how different life at Shelborne was from her own domestic existence. Here were Walter and his father, relaxed in dinner jackets and chatting idly over cocktails while at home her parents would be sipping a formal sherry, her father in traditional tails, scorning the newer, racier fashion for dinner jackets when dining at home. Lady Melton was also expected to dress in a much more formal style. Beaded gowns from her trousseau, together with embroidered reticules and small diamond earrings, were still adhered to by the admiral’s dutiful wife, so different from the charismatic and utterly modern Mrs Tate.

  Nor would their pre-dinner conversation have been accompanied by the sound of someone playing the piano, let alone being heard to be singing lustily in a fine baritone voice as their guests arrived. Judy’s parents had never made the slightest effort to move with the times, but never had this fact been brought home so sharply as it was on this sun-filled summer evening at Shelborne. As if meeting Walter had not been sufficiently wonderful, there was tonight the originality of his warm-hearted and idiosyncratic family to add to the excitement, their numbers now boosted by the arrival of Walter’s elder brother John.

  ‘I thought Walter had told us all about you,’ John said as he was introduced to Judy. ‘But I see what we got was merely a sketch, although we did all meet once, I think, at a village fête. You won the tombola.’

  Judy blushed, feeling shy at the compliment, accompanied as it was by wide-eyed appreciation. Whereas Walter was of medium build, with a debonair and seemingly careless manner, John was tall and, being more even of feature, appealed as being more handsome, although not in Judy’s eyes, naturally. However, with a sportsman’s physique, and an immediately discernibly different approach to life, he was definitely what Meggie Gore-Stewart would call ‘a dish’.

  And while Walter confessed to fearing boredom more than anything else, which explained his dragonfly manner, preferring as he did to hop quickly from subject to subject, it seemed to Judy that John was the very opposite sort of person, perhaps resolute possibly to the point of stubbornness, as well as serious to the point of solemnity, judging from the way that he was staring down at her.

  In fact this was not the case at all, and had John been able to guess what Judy was thinking about him he would have hooted with laughter, a character trait his mother had long given up trying to cure.

  Young men need a socially acceptable laugh just as much as young women do, John. If you bray like a mule you’ll only attract lady mules in return.

  All this usually fell on deaf ears, until this evening, when the normally garrulous John seemed suddenly silenced by meeting the girl with whom he knew his brother Walter was so in love.

  Quite simply he could not remember when he had seen anyone with such pretty co
louring as Judy. What with her dark eyes and her dark hair, plaited for evening around her head and knotted carefully into her neck, her face seemed to have picked up an extra glow from the evening sun. As he shook Judy’s hand it seemed to John that, with her shy smile, she was some sort of vision sent down to Shelborne for the evening, destined to take flight again once the clock in the hall struck twelve. The elegance in the way she moved, the manner of her smile, her sweetly modulated voice, made her entirely different from anyone else he had ever met.

  ‘Do you think Judy might have her hand back now, John?’ Walter came to Judy’s side. ‘Anyone would think you’d been away at sea for the last ten years without sight of land, let alone a pretty girl.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course.’

  John turned quickly away. Probably the eve of war, but he had never felt jealous of his younger brother before. Walter, the meat in the sandwich, or whatever he called himself. He must be the luckiest young man alive.

  ‘Have you asked her yet?’ Hugh Tate questioned his middle son as they strolled round the gardens after dinner. The others had returned inside, Loopy and Judy finding the air turned chilly and John accompanying them on the pretence of good manners but really because he could not bear to be parted from Judy for a moment longer than necessary.

  ‘Asked her what, Pops?’ Walter countered as casually as he could, glancing back at the house now glowing with lights and alive with the sound of chatter and the dance music someone had just put on the gramophone.

  ‘Asked her if the moon’s made of cheese, you idiot.’ Hugh rolled his eyes and puffed deeply on his pipe. ‘Because if you don’t ask her soon, that great lump of a brother of yours will. Sure as eggs are eggs.’

  ‘It’s rare enough for John to ask a girl to dance, let alone – let alone anything else, Pops.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  Walter followed his father’s look back to the house. Young Dauncy, who had come in from a day’s sailing too late for dinner, was dancing under the good-humoured tutelage of his mother, while Judy was dancing with John, laughing at something he had just said, enjoying herself; but not too much, he hoped.