Music at Long Verney

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

  “Darling Arkie, you’ve saved my life. It was being such a horrible birthday till you walked in.”

  “Bound to be even come odd, love – like kippers. I’ve brought you a little remembrance.”

  They sat side by side, snuffing the uncorked lavender water and recalling Dragon’s exploits, while Mrs Arkenthwaite’s professional eye travelled over the room. Before she left, she made the bed. Byron, too, had his old charwoman, who was faithful to him when everyone else deserted him. It was clear to Ursula that when she went to Pisa Arkenthwaite must accompany her.

  At lunch, after the falling pound, Arkenthwaite was the subject of conversation. “The house was so clean we might have been living in the depth of the country instead of Manchester. Terence, do you remember her pork cheese? And Ursula, do you remember the holystone patterns she used to make on the kitchen floor? Professor James said they went back to the ancient Britons. Why did she go? I don’t know what made her.”

  “I do. She couldn’t stand the way Uncle Terence left his bath towels lying about for her to pick up.”

  “A family trait,” said Uncle Terence. “But at least mine aren’t filthy.”

  “More apple pudding, either of you?”

  Uncle Terence shook his head, so Ursula ate a second helping as slowly and ostentatiously as she could, folded her napkin with exactitude, and left the room with dignity. Halfway upstairs she remembered that the knitted jersey, the bracelet, and the manicure set were still lying unclaimed. Poor Mother had enough to put up with without her feelings being wounded by an apparent ingratitude for all that knitting: the jersey and the bracelet must be collected, the manicure set conspicuously ignored. She descended. Leaving the room with dignity, she had omitted to shut the door. Their voices were raised. One could not call it eavesdropping.

  “The adjective was justified.”

  “I’m not talking about bath towels. I’m talking about the way you nag at the child. You never miss a chance to say something unpleasant, and then you grin at me as if I were your accomplice. Of course she notices. You mean her to notice. She’s sensitive.”

  “So am I.”

  “Pooh!”

  Mother swept out of the room, holding the tray, and collided with Ursula. Inflamed with chivalry, Ursula picked up two broken pudding plates and some cutlery, and said leave the washing-up to her.

  When she had washed everything in sight, paying particular attention to the tines of the forks, and exhausted two dishcloths, and polished the glasses, and swilled the sink and the draining board, she turned round. Mother was sitting sprawled on a kitchen chair, seeming entirely absorbed in breathing. “Angel,” she said absently, and went on breathing. Ursula saw herself single-handedly dealing with heart failure – where were the smelling salts, or did one burn feathers, and where were the nearest feathers? – when Mother drew a sharp breath, sat up, combed her fingers through her hair, and said, “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Oh, good!”

  “Yes, I’ve been thinking. What you and I both need is to get out of the house and have a dash of luxury. So I invite you to a birthday tea at the Vienna Tea Room. I’ll ring up a taxi at quarter to four.”

  The Vienna Tea Room was dusky, spacious, unresonant; it was what a church, if thickly carpeted and draught-proof, might be, and never was. If Mother hadn’t been sitting opposite, though she was actually making no demands, it would have been possible to compose a quite different sort of poetry – less outright, not sarcastic at all:

  On a little gilded chair

  Sit subterraneanly and drink sweet Lethe

  In blank verse, probably.

  “What about a meringue? Or another slice of Sacher Torte? Grand Viennese families had a Sacher Torte delivered every day.”

  “How did you know?”

  “That sort of thing sticks in one’s head. Now it will stick in yours.”

  . . . and drink sweet Lethe . . .

  “You must have had a rather different life when you were young.”

  “I always had Terence. I hated him as a child as much as you do now. Poor Terence! He’s always had something wrong with him, something vexing him – migraine, stomach ulcers. Did you know he was married? She was charming, and then went off with another man while he was having an operation. When he came out of hospital, no Susie.”

  “Is that why we’re stuck with him?”

  “The odd thing is, your father really likes him.”

  When they left, the rain had stopped. The wet streets shone between the dark, clifflike housefronts. The traffic speeded, skidded, bellowed like angry beasts. It felt dangerous, not like Manchester. I shall never be the same again, Ursula thought. I shall never be able to call myself my own again. I shall never go to Pisa, never write another poem, never have a typewriter, never see a poem in print. I only wanted the typewriter because magazines think poems in handwriting are by children. I let myself feel interested in Mother, I almost felt interested in Uncle Terence; now I’m trapped. I shall always have to go on feeling interested in them, sorry for them, wound up with them. She heard her feet, step for step with her mother’s feet, on the wet pavement.

  She had almost decided to be a nun, when her mother stopped. Ursula stopped with her. Mother was hailing a taxi.

  “I’ve just realised how late it is. Your father will be back at any moment, and there’s dinner to get.”

  The change to the unhuman speed of a taxi changed Ursula’s outlook. An earlier poet, a Mrs Greville, had written a “Prayer for Indifference.” It was in the school library, and had a lot of verses; when she was back she would look it up and read it more carefully. For indifference was what mattered, indifference was the answer; not to be upset or caught out or involved or understood – above all, not to be horribly, pawingly, understood. Praying was nonsense, of course. No truly indifferent person would pray; he wouldn’t need to. His indifference would have insulated him against being sensitive, being annoyed, being interrupted. It would set one above all the daily idiocies – above or apart. Probably apart; keeping oneself to oneself, mysteriously aloof, quellingly calm and polite. Vowed to indifference, Ursula enjoyed the superior sensation of being in a taxi, and was calm and polite when they were caught in a traffic jam and Mother began to fuss about time and dinner.

  “At last!” Mother said as the taxi approached the house.

  “If we had gone on walking, it would have taken longer.”

  The taxi drew up. Father also had come by taxi. It was driving away and he was mounting the doorsteps, holding something at the length of his arm. They went in together.

  “Here’s your birthday present, young lady. Don’t drop it. It’s heavy.” He retrieved it from her grasp and laid it on the hall table. Even before she guessed, she knew. She watched him unclasp the case, lift it out.

  QWERTYUIOP

  “Oh! Oh!” The second “Oh” was a yelp.

  Embarrassed by the sight of her face, smitten expressionless by ecstasy, he began to explain as though he were in guilt and must exculpate himself. “You ought to have had it this morning, but it wasn’t ready when I went to collect it yesterday evening. It’s second-hand, you see, and I told them to give it a thorough going-over to make sure it was in working order. There’s a spare ribbon in the case, and a book of directions, and a brush for cleaning the keys. And paper and carbons. Everything. After dinner I’ll show you how it works – which knobs do what. And tomorrow you can start away. Tap-tap-tap!”

  He raised his voice. It would be better if Terence did not hear her being so emotional. “You’ll find it useful later on, too. There’s always work for a typist, especially if she can spell and punctuate. Not so many can nowadays. Even if you don’t learn shorthand and take an office job, there’ll always be stuff you can do at home – typing people’s novels and poems and so forth. It’s my belief that every third person in Manchester is some kind of author. We’re a positive nest of singing birds.”

  He was bound to talk like that, she thought, being a p
arent. She knew better.

  A Brief Ownership

  THE AUTOMOBILE ASSOCIATION had given us a route to Cape Wrath and I was checking it with the Gazetteer of Scotland. “DRUMOCHTER PASS,” I read. “The main Inverness road accompanied by the railway traverses this lofty and desolate pass in the Grampians.” I saw no harm in that. On winter nights the Inverness road might like to be companioned; and if the car broke down we could wait for the next train. At that point there was a crash in the kitchen and I went off to tell the cat that all was discovered. When I got back, a breeze from the window had flapped over the page. “DULL,” I read, “see WEEM”.

  Entangled in an idle curiosity, I began turning over the alphabetical pages of the Gazetteer in pursuit of Weem. In fact, I had not the smallest wish to learn about Weem. We were going to Cape Wrath, and in spirit I had already struck root in Dull.

  Dull – as I seemed to know as if I had actually been there – was a small unvisited town in East Fife. It was not even decayed. It was just small and always had been. There was a good ironmonger opposite the War Memorial (the War Memorial was a non-denominational obelisk of shiny granite, to suit all tastes), and a goodish grocer in East Street. Fish came in a van, for Dull was only seven miles from the coast. Dried fish, though, could be got at the greengrocer’s, and sometimes cockles, and in July gooseberries, and potatoes and turnips and tinned pineapple at all times of year. From Dull you could go to Cupar. A proverb expressing the philosophy of a race indoctrinated with Calvinism says, “He who will to Cupar maun to Cupar.” It is a proverb often on my lips. Even when my hearers don’t understand it, they take the stern sense of it and are quietened.

  I had settled, however, a couple of miles outside the town. In spring (spring took its time in Dull) the words “DULL LODGE” appeared – loomed, rather – in snowdrops on the bank beside the drive gate. Snowdrops multiply in course of time, and the “g” had got quite out of control. Dull Lodge was a stone-built, slate-roofed, three-storied house, of modest proportions but giving an incontrovertible impression of uprightness. It stood back from the road, and a belt of mixed beech trees and conifers sheltered it from the east wind and the morning sun. From the bathroom window (the bathroom was on the third floor) you could see the melancholy shine of the North Sea. The surrounding country was flattish. There was a pervading smell of sea in the air, mingled with a smell of turnips. Dull Lodge was built in 1850 by a retired wine merchant who had somehow got away from Cupar. It was as plain and purposeful as a ledger, but made one concession to Scottish Baronial in the shape of a small bartizan at the northeast corner. The large sash windows had been put in by the hand of a master. They were totally draught-proof, and there was not a rattle among them. Indeed, on stormy nights it could be quite eerie to sit in this impregnable stillness; but comfortable.

  The windows were no trouble to keep clean because I had a gardener. He was dumb and went with the place. He lived a quiet bachelor life in a flat over the disused stables, and when his figs and his wall pears began to ripen he tied them up in small muslin bags. As I did no gardening myself, he thought quite well of me.

  I did no gardening, because I had gone to Dull Lodge in order to retire. I had furnished it with retirement in view. For once in my life, I had a sufficiency of bookshelves. I also had four black horsehair sofas, which I had bought at a local sale – a couple in the sitting room, one in my bedroom, one in the kitchen. (It is a fallacy to suppose that a kitchen is a fountain of perpetual youth and that the moment one sets foot in it energy courses through one’s veins.)

  There, on one or another of these admirable sofas, I put my feet up and pursued my researches into the religious life. Research fortifies retirement, which even in a house like Dull Lodge is an imperiled structure, since we are none of us wholly free from conscience: you suppress it about visiting old Miss Tomkins who would be lost without that weekly little cheerful chat on the wickedness of her relations and it starts up afresh in a compulsion to do something for Punch-and-Judy men. But with a good solid blameless piece of research in hand, conscience can howl without and good works blandish like harlots: you are safe, you are buttressed, you may disregard them and continue to lie on your horsehair sofa with your feet up and read about nineteenth-century Church of England bishops.

  I had chosen these particular bishops because, except by their biographers, they are singularly unexplored. The light that plays on the grandes vedettes, Newman and Pusey and “Satan” Montgomery, leaves them twilit. Yet there they were. I thought a catalogue raisonné would not come amiss. At first sight they appear much of a muchness (and undeniably it is a muchness; if I had realised what a lot of them I was taking on, I might have turned to some other subject for research – unicorns, for instance). However diversely they may have begun, whatever vagaries they may have pursued at the university, whatever persuasions may have led them to scratch each other’s eyes out, their destiny is their destiny, and by the time they are middle-aged it is pretty clear what will become of them: each in his turn will be ordained bishop by other bishops and merge into the mitred flock. But as a good shepherd knows each of his sheep by something personal to it – a squint, a scar, a pinker nose, a more flippant gait, a more searching expression, a tendency to bloat, a pertinacity in baaing – I hoped to become so conversant with my bishops that I should end by perfectly knowing them apart. Naturally, I had my favourites. I felt a particular affection, positively amounting to approbation, for Bishop Thirlwall of St David’s, who kept cats. Naturally, too, I developed preferences; I preferred Broad bishops to High ones. But High, Broad, or Low, I tried to keep an open mind about them, reading with sympathy of their unmitred domestic hours: the deaths of their wives, the disappointingness of their children, their palace chimneys smoking in a north wind.

  And from time to time I found them making remarks of such acumen and humanity that one would have expected everybody to be quite charmed and to leave off snarling immediately, as the animals did when Orpheus played on his lute. Though in fact it proved otherwise.

  Thus, moving from bishop to bishop, returning them to the London Library and unpacking new ones (it was extremely rare for a bishop to be unavailable), listening to the wind, watching the changing colour of the fields, admiring the snowdrops, eating quantities of ripe figs, tapping the barometer, strolling out in the wistful autumnal dusk when the gardener would not be about to suspect my intentions and even staying out long enough to see the public lighting of Dull extinguished at 10:30 p.m., I lived in contentment and self-satisfaction at Dull Lodge.

  And then I turned over another page of the Gazetteer and had seen “WEEM”. In a flash I was out of Dull Lodge, away from the horizon of sea and the gulls and the good ironmonger and a far cry from Cupar.

  “WEEM,” I read. “Perth. Early closing Wed. Lies on the north bank of the River Tay. 2H miles W. is the hamlet of Dull, preserving an old Cross, while in the vicinity are various prehistoric cairns, standing stones and remains of stone circles.”

  No.

  No, such a Dull wouldn’t do. The Tay is a noble river and we shall cross it with admiration on our way to accompany the railway to Inverness. Preserving old Crosses is a laudable industry. Prehistoric remains are pleasing to the young. In short, the revealed Dull, 2H miles E. of Weem, was in every way a superior article. But it wouldn’t do. It wasn’t what I had in mind. And the moral of all this is, as usual, Leave Well Alone. By grasping at the substance, I have forfeited the lovely shadow. By fidgeting through the Gazetteer in pursuit of Weem – a place of no interest to me except as an adjunct to Dull (so peculiarly my own) – I have lost Dull Lodge, I no longer possess a property in East Fife, I am not even retired.

  In the Absence of Mrs Bullen

  WHAT HAD BEGUN as a lick and a promise, provoked by Mrs Bullen’s telephone call (“Sorry, Miss, but I shan’t be able to come today, nor the next few days, actually. My sister-in-law’s been took worse, and while I’m about it, I expect I’ll stay for the funeral . . .”), had hardened in
to a thorough turn out of the sitting room; such a thorough turn out that Leonora had broken off to dress the part, assuming one of Mrs Bullen’s overalls, tying up her head in a duster, and changing into an old pair of sandals. Mrs Bullen worked on spike heels, but Leonora had been taught in her youth what is sense and what isn’t. To be properly armed for the fray is half the battle – a maxim, like keeping your powder dry and not buying fish on a Monday. Those spike heels might well be accountable for the dust along the skirting and the cobwebs that clothed the back of the radiator. An element of scorn for Mrs Bullen’s half-hearted purifications heightened Leonora’s zeal, and sharpened her self-satisfaction as though it were the vinegar trickled into the mayonnaise. But she did not allow herself to be swept away; she imagined no rebuking conversations to take place when Mrs Bullen came back from her sister-in-law’s funeral. Charwomen were non-existent in Pew Green. Mrs Bullen was a Londoner, and travelled to and fro on the Metropolitan, and you don’t lightly shake the faithfulness of someone ready to do that for love of your art.

  Fifteen years before, when Leonora told other lovers of her art that she had bought a cottage in the peace and quiet of the country, and that when she had added a garage with a proper bathroom over it and replaced rhubarb and cabbages with moss roses and lavender, it would be her dream cottage come true, Pew Green was still a village on the outskirts of London, with its own pretty little slum of real cottages with working-class families in them. Post-war housing developments had changed all that; embedded among natty bungalows that were born with garages and bathrooms and had gardens foaming with floribundas, the vestigial Pew Green looked faintly comic, looked, in fact, very much what Leonora in moments of depression was afraid of becoming herself – a leftover. But she stayed on, from inertia, from prudence, thinking that when the day came when she could no longer sing for her living she would be able to sell the freehold of Bramble Cottage as a building lot and do quite well out of it. Just now that day seemed a long way off. Stimulated by virtue and housewifery, she felt as lively as a flea. Her voice, a durable contralto, was as good as ever, her genre as much in demand – more so, indeed, since she had had the foresight to build up a new repertory of songs with religious appeal, to match the new feeling for religion; and her appearance, though inevitably bulkier and bulgier, was just right for the television career of a sweet-faced motherly woman singing welcomes to prodigal sons and cajoleries to St Peter. All this she had jeopardised a few years before by giving way to an impulse to make a feature of “Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-de-Ay”. This revival of a beefier past hadn’t done at all, and like a person of sense she had dropped it. Yet while it lasted it had been a releasing rapture.