The Brontes Went to Woolworths

by Rachel Ferguson

  ‘This is unworthy.’

  ‘Your thought, here, suffers confusion.’

  ‘Your intention is pure, but we all feel the inherent worthlessness of such a nature as you depict.’

  And:

  ‘Your Frenchman is, indeed, a laughable creature. D’ailleurs is wrongly inserted in this sentence. You are the Frenchman, and must suffer him to be acquainted with his Mother Tongue.’ I was excited with annoyance. It was awful that my book should have been read and chuckled at . . . I was so pleased and happy, writing it.

  ‘We all feel ’

  We, I suppose, were the publisher, his typist and his office boy. Something about the comments eluded me, and then it returned.

  Of course! Term-end reports. There was a scholastic smack about the notes that used to permeate all our reports at school.

  One has to wait until mid-day for the newspapers, which are sent from Keighley with the bread. We take in the Mail and the Post, and Katrine had just brought them in to mother, next day, and we were sharing the Mail, when mother looked up and said, rather breathlessly, ‘Dion Saffyn is dead.’

  ‘No, oh no!’ I cried, and then added, idiotically, ‘The real Dion Saffyn?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  It was in both papers. The Mail gave him a paragraph (this well-known entertainer . . . concert parties in Arcaly . . . a popular artist . . .).

  ‘How?’ Katrine asked. She was rather white. I think I was, too.

  ‘ “Heart failure following influenza.” We mustn’t tell Sheil. She was so fond of him.’

  ‘And Pauline, and Ennis . . .’

  ‘I know . . . poor old Saffy. Well . . . he’s had a good innings.’

  Katrine and I got up and went out.

  We didn’t speak much as we flogged along. There was nothing to say, and too much. Katrine got the nearest to anything when she stopped and faced me in the sheep-track we were following, single file.

  ‘It’s . . . funny, isn’t it, that we haven’t the right even . . . to send him flowers!’

  ‘Or ring up the girls . . . ’

  Part of our life was over. We both knew that Saffy might come back to us, or might not. He might have to, for Sheil’s sake.

  ‘How many years is it, now?’

  I stopped again, to reckon.

  ‘Over ten.’

  A singular thought struck me.

  ‘And Sheil’s never even seen him. Only photographs.’

  At the end of a fortnight Miss Martin joined us. She was, in her contained way, unsettled. The place, of course, didn’t help her out, and her version of it was that it was ‘very wild.’ Her rendering of wrack was ‘quite weird,’ and as she became more de-Cheltenhamised, she also grew in unhappiness. She joined us on our walks, her neat feet and picked ankles decently navigating the scrambles, but she really preferred a trot up and down the high road in front of the Inn, while Sheil, swaddled in wraps, sniffed and coughed at her side.

  After supper, Katrine said, ‘Let’s table-turn.’ She said it, I know, out of contempt for the whole place, and the forced inaction and the one post a day, and no bath, telephone, geyser or Sunday papers. For we all regard table-turning as the kitchenmaid of the psychic world. It’s too easy, too slavish to all of us, and tells far-fetched and clumsy lies, and altogether it’s like twanging the banjo when you might be playing a viola.

  Mother, always a little self-conscious with Miss Martin, asked her had she ever done any table-turning? And Miss Martin looked hesitant and bright, and was evidently being torn between her duties to her Maker and her employer, plus an illogical conviction that the whole thing was ‘great’ rubbish. I very nearly said it all for her. Inevitably, rubbish and employers won, and we sat in a rough circle.

  ‘Agatha.’

  ‘Why, that’s me,’ squeaked Miss Martin.

  ‘Don’t take your hands off, Miss Martin. It means it wants you to ask it questions.’

  ‘Oh . . . dear.’ Miss Martin fluttered and tittered. ‘What – what do you want?’

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Chah-Cheltenham.’

  And then, in the maddeningly inconsequent way they always do, the table rapped out ‘red hair.’

  ‘No, oh no. Mine is brown.’ Katrine kicked me under the table and I said, ‘You’ll have to dye it, Miss Martin,’ and mother said, ‘S’sh.’

  ‘Crellie and Keeper. Not pleased.’

  ‘Crellie and – there isn’t a keeper here. Lor! I hope he hasn’t run a sheep,’ said Katrine.

  ‘Crellie bit Keeper.’

  ‘I bet he didn’t, did you, my fattest?’ I protested, slapping the sleeping Crellie’s stout stomach. Then, suddenly, ‘Sheil come.’

  ‘She can’t. She’s in bed,’ explained mother.

  ‘Go back.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Go back.’

  ‘Please explain,’ mother asked, with that matter-ofcourse courtesy which she would play impartially upon servants or demons.

  ‘Remember Maria.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Remember Maria. Remember Elizabeth.’

  ‘Is it “Maria” or “Elizabeth” speaking?’

  Pause. ‘No.’

  ‘And remember Anne.’

  ‘Dear! . . . all the queens of England!’ chirruped Miss Martin. ‘Where is “Anne?”’

  ‘Not here. You would say dead. Not here. Further. Sea.’

  ‘Which sea?’ I asked, for Miss Martin was, like Doctor Watson, ‘a little nettled at this want of confidence.’

  Pause. ‘North.’

  ‘ “Anne dead in the North Sea,” ’ I commented.

  ‘Not in. By.’

  ‘This is rather slow,’ complained Katrine. But the table was at it again.

  ‘We will come.’

  ‘What, all of you?’ smiled mother.

  ‘The two who came before.’

  ‘That means Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth,’ said Miss Martin. ‘Anne was so much later.’

  ‘Not Queens. C-H-A-R-L-O-T-T-E and A-N-N-E.’

  ‘When will you come?’ enquired mother hastily.

  ‘Not yet. Not free. Shall we see you?’

  Then, as we returned no answer, ‘K promise.’

  Katrine yawned and said, ‘All right.’

  ‘D promise.’

  ‘Very well,’ I said.

  ‘R promise.’

  But mother is too old a hand to be caught that way, and I could see that she removed her hand for a second, and made the sign of the cross.

  If one could say of a table that it expressed contempt in sound, that is the word I should select for the performance of ours. At this gesture, it was for all the world like the rappings of overbearing knuckles.

  ‘Anglican. No Popery!’

  Mother smiled to herself, and Miss Martin went ‘hoo!’ right up in her head. We silenced the hail of raps with our promises, the table rocked into a corner and we shuffled with it.

  ‘Sheil – go – back – in – time.’

  After that it would say nothing.

  Miss Martin said it was perfectly weird.

  As I moved about the bedroom, Sheil stirred in her sleep, and gave a husky little crow.

  I stood a minute in the middle of the floor, and slinging my dressing-gown round me, opened the door. Mother’s room was at the end of the passage.

  Outside, she was coming towards me.

  ‘Well . . . what about it?’

  ‘I agree with you,’ I answered.

  ‘There’s nothing serious the matter with her, but at the same time ’

  ‘I know.’

  We packed the following day.

  And so, Katrine and I were able to be at Dion Saffyn’s funeral. We hid in a back pew, and when those with a right to be present had laid their wreaths and driven away, we came forward and put our flowers with the rest.

  In the church, I could recognise nobody, but Katrine pulled my cuff and whispered, ‘That’s Pauline – the fair girl up
in front. She’s changed a bit, but it’s Pauline. I remember her face . . . ’ As we left the churchyard, I said, ‘K, I do hope you don’t want hymns for your funeral. They make one feel ’

  ‘Not much! Have what you like, if I do go off first. I’d like some of German’s Nell Gwynne dances.’

  ‘Why can’t they let one have a medley of all the music one’s ever liked? After all, it’s more “us” than The Day Thou Gavest or anything of that kind.’

  ‘I know. I love all sorts of things: Gathering Peascods, and Vanity of Vanities, and I’m One of the Ruins Cromwell Knocked About a Bit, and if one asked for them, they’d say one was irreverent. Aren’t people incredible? What are we going to do now?’

  ‘Cinema? That ought to kill or cure.’

  ‘Couldn’t stick it.’

  ‘Tea?’

  ‘Couldn’t down a thing.’

  ‘Better be on our own.’

  ‘Right you are.’

  I walked and walked, confused with the way things were going and by the fact that I was in London in August. Somehow, the sight of town was rather improper, like seeing your grandmother in her combinations. You knew she wore them, but the shock was none the less. London in August was one of the sights automatically kept from you, like major operations, and yet I have always suspicioned I could love it at forbidden times. One misses so much by slavery to dates and clocks. How many Londoners have seen the vegetables unpacked in Covent Garden? Or the day dawn in Kensington Gardens, or breakfasted at Greenwich and gone back by steamer? And if it comes to that, how many of us have seen the country in October, with wet apples thumping overnight on to the ground? Poor little Pauline and Ennis. What a break-up! I wonder what they do? Saffy really has got a London office, and when I am in Leicester Square, I pass it and look up at the windows.

  Sheil is better already, but she and mother must go away again and finish up the business. Saffy’s death would throw Pauline out of a job, I had said to mother, and then I remembered that probably she had never been in it . . . she may even be married . . .

  Oh well, there’s always work.

  9

  I was returning from Kensington Gardens, the aquatic Crellie, wringing, beaming, and full of pond-water and tiddlers, lumbering on ahead. I adore the autumn and all its smells, and the schoolroom would soon be dark enough to be lit for tea. This October was doing and being all the right things: warm as a June night, and full of subdued colour.

  When I got home, mother leaned over the banisters and said, ‘Mr Binton’s been ringing you up. He wants you to telephone him.’

  It probably meant nine hundred words on ‘Should Widows Re-Marry?’ (‘Have you seen the Express this morning, Miss Carne? There’s a paragraph on page 7, column 5. I’ll read it to you.’) A journalist is always supposed to be able to give the casting vote on these questions, and the fact that she is neither wife, widow, nor what-not, is worried about by nobody.

  ‘Hullo?’

  ‘That you, Miss Carne? Didn’t you tell me a while ago that you’d like to meet Toddington . . . ? Well, there’s a bazaar next week at the Albert Hall for a Legal charity, and Lady Toddington is taking a stall. That any good to you?’

  I stammered, ‘You’re an angel,’ and heard Binton giggling. The moment I had rung off the whole thing flew to my knees, but I got it told to the family, somehow. ‘And Binton said “Lady Toddington,” mother, so Toddy must be a knight.’

  ‘Bless him!’ said mother.

  We didn’t know that judges automatically became knights. It’s a perquisite of office, like the bowls of dripping the cook sells to the rag-and-bone man. And to think my own familiar Binton had known it all these years . . .

  ‘Oh Toddy,’ I exclaimed, ‘you will be pleased to see me, won’t you?’

  ‘I shall be delighted, my dear,’ answered Sir Herbert. ‘I cannot hope to be with you and Mildred before five, but I trust you will let me give you tea.’

  ‘Are you going to have to spend an awful lot, my darling?’ asked Sheil.

  ‘Well . . . you know . . . these affairs . . . I think a fivepound note should cause me to emerge without a stain on my character.’

  ‘Well, I think that’s handsome,’ I said.

  ‘It is expected,’ answered Toddy, with that note of finality he always uses when we have overstepped the mark. ‘It’s in aid of the Browbeaten Barristers!’ Sheil gasped. Sheil, that week, was my safety-valve. At lunch she would shrill, ‘It’s only three days now before Deir’ meets Toddy!’

  Miss Martin, of course, didn’t seem in the least excited . . . her sotto voce comments seemed to convey an attitude of well-what-about-it? that had the usual sedative effect.

  ‘But – she’s going to meet him!’ glared Sheil.

  ‘Yes, dear. There’s nothing so very unusual in that, is there?’

  At the eleventh second, mother managed, ‘It’s rather an occasion, you know,’ to which, Miss Martin, patently at a loss, responded, ‘Oh, of course,’ then more happily, ‘these huge bazaars are very fashionable affairs sometimes, aren’t they?’

  ‘He mayn’t be there at all,’ I cut in, robustly facing the situation. But this was treachery, and Sheil cried out, ‘He told you he would. He gave Mildred a cheque for some Lalique to give her stall kick. You said so, mother!’

  ‘Do you know Lalique, Miss Martin?’ Mother smiled with her eyes at Sheil. ‘It’s a rather wonderful sort of glass . . . no two designs alike . . . Frenchman . . . factory pieces . . . less costly . . . Sloane Street . . . ’

  (Miss Martin thought it sounded very quaint.)

  And, as if life wasn’t doing enough for one, it shot a letter on to the mat at tea-time that made all four of us do our special dance – the famous ‘Pas de Quatre,’ to the hummed music of Meyer Lutz. We only know one of the original steps from theatrical memoirs, but for the time we are all old Gaiety stars, and mother sometimes joins in too, very lightly and neatly.

  I knew the letter was going to be an interesting one because the envelope was square and thin, and the writing unfamiliar. Probably one of my readers, who got me out of the telephone book. We are always howling over their poems, and I picture the writers in their shirt sleeves, sitting on Sundays in the kitchen, breathing heavily over their penny bottle of ink. The unintelligentsia seem to be prolific letter-writers, and I am long used to being asked to meet cycle-makers outside the Coliseum, and to walk out with widower plumbers who write to me on their trade paper, with pictures of lavatory basins on it. Mother once bought a basin from one of my flames, but got no reduction on the price.

  The letter was written quite badly enough to qualify for the plumbing stakes. I looked first at the signature. It was from Pipson.

  ‘MY DEAR MISS CARNE,

  ‘I beleive you mentioned that your sister was hopeing to go on the stage, and I am wondering if I havent something that might suit her. The fact is that I’m booked for revue for six months and if your sister would consider joining the chorus I havent a doubt my reccommendation would get it. It would be tour most of the time and salary low, but you never know. Now my dear Miss Carne you and sister must overlook anything in my suggestion but I know how difficult it is for a lady to get a start. If I may say so, I could put her up to tips as to digs, etc. Above is my PA.

  ‘With compliments to all

  ‘Yours very sincerely

  ‘F. PIPSON.’

  I tore upstairs to the drawing-room where tea was going on, and when Katrine and mother had got the gist of Pipson’s letter, we shouted up the next flight, ‘Sheil! Pas de Quatre!’ Sounds of protest, and a flurry of small, delighted female. Forming in line we kicked our fill. When we’d finished and were having fourth cups of tea, Sheil asked what the dance was for, this time, and she sat by mother and ate cakes that were slightly forbidden, and Crellie stole a macaroon and didn’t get smacked because of Pipson’s letter. And when Miss Martin was discovered in the doorway with resigned complaint in her eye, Crellie belched at her, and mother began to laugh and said,
‘I’m so – sorry, ha ha! – Miss Martin. Yes, go now, darling, oh, ha, ha, har!’

  ‘The stately an’ memorable progress of this ’owly man to the Vatican,’ began Katrine, ‘was only slightly marred by a passing indisposition ’

  ‘What is a “PA”?’ said mother.

  ‘Permanent address,’ answered Katrine.

  ‘My darling, how truly awful! There’ll be two plaster lions on the gate-posts and a stone cauliflower on the lawn with a red-hot geranium in it that never gets watered. PA . . . it’s subtly worse than a “villa residence.”’ Then, with a look at me I knew: ‘Is Pipson all right?’ Her look brushed aside Katrine’s protests and testimonials.

  I just nodded. Her face relaxed instantly.

  ‘We’ll go for a perch this evening, after dinner,’ rejoiced Katrine, and I think we all began to look forward to it. We love walking at night: one feels so light and fresh, and passing faces are shadowed and can’t tire one, or sadden, or set one thinking. And we go hatless, with walking-sticks, and wear what we like, which is restful, and find ourselves in strange streets and squares, and sometimes they abruptly conduct one to eminent localities, as in a dream, and I once found myself outside Buckingham Palace in my dressing slippers. We call these walks ‘gutter-perchings’ and they are wonderful, if you are happy.

  ‘And now I suppose La Martin is offended,’ remembered mother.

  ‘She made a rather heavenly face when Crellie went into liquidation,’ said Katrine.

  Dinner was a priceless affair, with mother at the top of her form. She had just helped herself to a wing of chicken and suddenly began to imitate her French mistress at the school where she was educated, and then she burst quite extempore into a parody of the poetry they were made to learn – all optimistic and no base thoughts of men entertained.

  (Attention, mes enfants!)

  ‘C’était un beau jour d’Avril,