The Brontes Went to Woolworths

by Rachel Ferguson

  But the looking forward to the evening is lovely . . .

  Mother’s final words were, ‘And the Lalique! Did she have a lot?’

  ‘Not a hap’orth! It was suède bags, and little disgustboxes of olive wood.’

  11

  Agatha Martin was shut into her bedroom. The schoolroom was pleasant enough, but she had often read that governesses were not expected to have a human side, and in any case the Carne girls, particularly Deirdre, used her pupil’s room to a degree which was surely unusual.

  Mabel’s old lady was dying – she took up Flossie’s letter. There was a rumour that Mr Francis was to be transferred to another curacy.

  Miss Martin turned yet again to his photograph. Between the two exhibits she unhappily pondered. Then, from the inner flap of her writing-case, she drew three closely, neatly written sheets. They were signed Arthur M. Francis, and in phrases well-expressed, if a little stilted, he offered her marriage. They would be definitely poor, but he ventured to think that as neither Agatha nor himself was of extravagant habits, as their outlook on life was essentially settled, as neither was one of our Bright Young People, he thought that a fire and a pipe for him, and a fire and some fancywork or a book for her when the day’s long trick was over . . .

  Miss Martin smiled a little at the Bright Young People touch and the Masefield reference. They were typical of the man. Then she dwelt again upon the sincere love he had for her, the admiration of her pluck in becoming a part of strange families . . . the words swam before her eyes. What need to read on? She knew the letter by heart. She had written it herself. It was nearing the end of October, and so there was always the schoolroom fire in case of emergency.

  Goodness really knew where Carne vagaries might move Agatha next summer, not that they could take her much further from Cheltenham than that appalling Yorkshire village. Such uncomfortable rooms, and the natives so terribly weird and unmannerly. Their sitting-room so close to the public bar, and their privacy not always respected, with that red-haired boy staring in over the curtains whenever he wished. A little more, and Agatha would have mentioned it to Mrs Carne. She had suspected once or twice that he was not sober.

  It was, perhaps, the contrast of having travelled to it all fresh from home. Arthur had called round twice, and they had had one of their glorious afternoons under the mulberry, with the Pater in good spirits and Flossie more like a mother to him than a daughter. But already there were changes. Agatha’s desire for re-incorporation had, it seemed, meant little adjustments. Already she (and presumably Violet and Mabel) was counted out of the domestic reckoning. In the future, they were to be beloved visitors . . . Agatha Martin looked involuntarily and with a dreadful clarity into the future.

  There was a postal order to send to Mabel. She would not have saved much of her salary . . . that winter coat . . . Arthur would be certain to drop in to say good-bye, if the rumour was true. On the other side of the writing-case were several letters from him; newsy, semi-affectionate, semi-fraternal.

  What a year!

  Unfamiliar railway stations, one’s trunk marooned on the platform. And all over the country, Violet and Mabel on platforms, too, wondering what their bedrooms were like? For that was, now, what mattered most . . . and Mabel, soon to be out of a post, for which she must hope as she must dread.

  Agatha wondered how it had all come about? It was, she supposed, inevitable, since finances were the Pater’s concern, and if his arrangements for his family miscarried, the universe was to blame for a display of bad taste. What a mercy she herself was a Newnham woman! And that, before Cheltenham suspicion could have been awakened. The dates tallied, beautifully . . . quite three years before the Pater had to retrench . . . Arthur had called her Our Blue-stocking . . . and threatened to appear from her wardrobe, suddenly, at one of the cocoas, and get her sent down in disgrace (‘I want to hear what you girls really do talk about, only I’m afraid of being horribly shocked’). They had often stood joking on the pavement during the morning shopping, Mr Francis leaning on his bicycle.

  For a long time she dwelt upon the idea of writing to him again. He was a friend of the family . . . it was a bother that Sheil said so few quotable things . . . but professionally speaking, Miss Martin believed she had cause for congratulation in general directions. There was, for instance, a sensible diminution in the nonsense-talk about that Dion Saffyn at luncheon, and his probably imaginary and in any case unremarkable daughters. It was only when they all returned so suddenly from Yorkshire that she, catching sight of the paragraph about his funeral, had condoled with Katrine about it and discovered – Miss Martin was overcome by a backwash of indignation – that the Carnes didn’t know him, even slightly. Katrine had said so, quite coolly, very quietly reducing Agatha to bewildered Buts – , then with an authority she had never assumed before, ‘Miss Martin, we have all agreed that Sheil mustn’t be told, if you don’t mind trying to remember,’ she walked out of the schoolroom.

  After that, ready, she assured herself, for anything, Agatha was quite prepared for the Toddingtons to go by the board as well, but her calculations were thrown out once more, and Lady Toddington called, and remained to tea . . . Miss Martin had been present. She considered that Lady Toddington was probably one of the most respectable friends the Carnes possessed. A society woman. But when Miss Martin compressed her lips – it came to persons like Mr Pipson, she thought Mrs Carne was going altogether too far even for Katrine’s sake.

  He had come to tea a week ago driven up in an immense car, and had been treated altogether as an equal by his hostess and her daughters. Agatha had made the terrible mistake of liking him, in spite of his accent and grammar. He had been most attentive and polite, and by his abstention from bad language or calls for beer, had given her no clue whatsoever as to who or what he was. He said to her, for all to hear, ‘Ah, I often wish I’d had more education. If you’ll believe me, Miss Martin, I couldn’t write till I was fourteen, and as for spelling – well!’ and she, assuming he was some business magnate of such long standing that his beginnings were purged, opened her mouth to expound her theories to a sympathetic ear, when Mrs Carne said, ‘I can’t spell, either, Mr Pipson,’ and Sheil, bright-eyed, called out, ‘I won’t spell – – if you can’t!’ and had evidently taken one of her terrible fancies to the little man, and that meant goodness really knows what, for Agatha to cope with and disperse. And she dragged him upstairs to see the toy theatre, and he examined it and said, ‘You’ll get the LCC down on you in the twinkling of a ton of bricks, Miss Sheil,’ which remark, for the usual baffling reason, delighted the child, for she exclaimed, ‘Now I really adore you!’ and Mr Pipson said, ‘Then we’ll be married on the Tuesday, if it falls early in the week, and I’m not laid up with one of my attacks of synopsis of the scenario.’ And then they had walked round the little garden, and he told Mrs Carne what to do for green-fly and how to deal with wire-worms (‘My gardener’s a good man but that old-fashioned you wouldn’t hardly believe. Now, what you want to do, Mrs Carne ’). And he showed Sheil some dance steps, and the child was enraptured, and they cut capers all over the borders, and Mrs Carne laughed until she cried. But as he was shaking hands he looked at Katrine and said, ‘In a fortnight we shall be in Bradford. Eh, Braaadford!’ then, to his hostess, with a sudden seriousness, ‘You can trust me to watch out for Miss Carne as if she was my own, Mrs Carne.’ And Mrs Carne said, ‘I know I can,’ and he put his arm round Sheil and said, ‘God bless you, dear, pleased to have met you, Miss Martin.’

  Later, Agatha delicately approached the subject of the departed guest. It had called for tact, of course, but the elder girls, she had to admit, were seldom touchy.

  ‘A charming man, but – would one say he was quite a gentleman?’

  ‘Pipson? A gentleman?’ answered Deirdre, ‘he’s a low comedian, Miss Martin. He’s Freddie Pipson.’

  And it was then that Agatha had begun to see that his good manners were merely bohemianism, helped out by the courtesy of herself
and the family. The Carnes should have warned her, but they were an incalculable family. Kind, in many ways kinder than any of her previous families, but, somehow, having the effect of making one want, as never before, to have a long chat with Flossie, or to set out on a good walk with Violet and Mabel . . .

  The latest Carne joke, it appeared, was to say, ‘Pleased to meet you,’ whenever they passed each other on the stairs, and to do what they described as ‘pipsonising’ at mealtimes. Deirdre would say, ‘If you’ll pardon me, Mrs Carne, you’re commencing to cut the beef wrongly, if you know what I mean,’ and Katrine would reply, ‘If I’m not robbing you, may I ask you to pass the cruet?’ then both together would enquire, ‘Is your tea as you like it?’ And even Sheil would call out, ‘Don’t spill it, Miss Carne; if I may pass the remark, whatever are you doing?’

  Agatha had actually stopped all this. Sheil was admittedly her province, and her own possibly impulsive rebuke had nominally been addressed to the child. But she rather thought the others had taken the hint . . .

  ‘Well, really, Sheil, I quite thought Mr Pipson was a friend of yours, but one wouldn’t say so to hear you making fun of him.’ Silence had fallen round the table. Sheil flushed angrily, and began an incoherent sentence.

  ‘I wasn’t making fun of him. When – when – when ’ then, tiresomely, Deirdre finished her meaning for her, a way she had . . .

  ‘When one is really fond of people, you know, Miss Martin, it’s sometimes the greatest compliment one can pay them.’

  Agatha, at a loss, remembered that she had replied, ‘Then I shall look forward to the day when you all begin to imitate me,’ and Mrs Carne offered her more beef. But after that there was no more Mr Pipson. ‘It may take time,’ thought Miss Martin, ‘but in the end I think one’s influence will be felt.’ It was all quite harmless, but it was beyond doubt the result of friendships with impossibles. It was lucky for the Carnes that they had known the Toddingtons for some years, or they might have scared them away, but Agatha supposed they were accustomed to it all, by now, though Lady Toddington had certainly seemed rather formal with them, for a friendship of such long standing. Now Agatha came to think of it, she had kissed nobody, on leaving – except Sheil, of whom she had said, ‘I can’t help it, she’s such a little pet, aren’t you, Baby?’

  Agatha, praising Lady Toddington later to the elder girls, had delicately regretted the public compliment, and Katrine said, ‘Ah, but you see, Miss Martin, she’s got no s. no d.,’ and Agatha had hinted that she understood that Judges made very high incomes, and Katrine and Deirdre had burst into great noisy shouts of laughter.

  Voices outside on the landing: Sheil’s shrill ‘Pass the preserves, please,’ and Deirdre’s, ‘Believe me, laddie, I was a riot at Hartlepool. The Guv’nor offered me ten pounds to play Harmlett, but I said, “I won’t touch it under fifteen, and that’s m’last word.” ’ Katrine cut in: ‘The Bard, laddie, the Bard needs playing. But pass me off with fit-ups and ask me to double in brass and I’m thrown away, dear boy, thrown away!’

  Steps on the stairs, and Mrs Carne’s voice: ‘Trrr-a! mes enfants! Ah, Trotty, ça marche, hein? Amuses-toi bien, ma mignonne!’

  ‘Oh shut up, Ironface!’

  ‘Hé? Shot op? Mais, qu’est-ce que c’est, ce “shot op”?’

  ‘Go away. It’s pure affectation, Ironie – and you who came from a suburban village shop!’

  Mrs Carne said, ‘Now you have done it! She’s flown back to Isidore.’ She added, ‘Ahem! Let’s be talking, said Mrs Kenwigs.’

  Miss Martin began to cry. She remembered to muffle her face, because Deirdre had caught her, once before.

  12

  Really knowing the Toddingtons was, I should think, rather like marriage: sometimes it was disappointing and at others it exceeded expectation. The disappointments were affairs of the cook not being faithful and dour and Scotch, and called Grania, but an angular Cockney whose name was Bessie; and of the parlourmaid answering to the name of Ethel, who, so far from being tossy and called Henderson, is eminently approachable and seems really fond of both the Toddingtons, with a slight list to larboard in favour of Sir Herbert. But female servants always prefer the master of the house. I don’t read Freud, but I suspect that he would explain why, in gross and in detail particularly in the former. –

  And then the rooms in the London house . . . Toddy’s study, for instance. The fireplace was, from our point of view, on the wrong side of the room, and his armchair on the right of the gas-stove instead of the left, while his bedroom was even on the incorrect side of the second-floor landing. Otherwise, it was very much as we had planned it.

  When Lady Toddington first took me ‘over’ the house, after her At Home, I noted, of course, plenty of familiar things: an overcoat and a walking-stick and umbrella of Toddy’s, of which I have had photographs for eighteen months on my own mantelpiece, and one of his hideous little jam-pot collars on his dressing-table, and I knew all about that, too. It figures in all his portraits (except when he golfs at Sandwich, and then his neckwear is winged).

  I remembered his college trophies, and found one or two, in study and dining-room, and I knew that in one of his cupboards hung his hunting-coat. I had never, so to speak, seen it in the flesh, but I knew when he had worn it last, and where.

  Following in the wake of his wife I walked as though treading on glass. Liable to be confounded at every turn, my remarks were probably going to be shattering in one direction or another. Actually, I only made two false steps that afternoon. One for each plane. We had stepped on to familiar ground after much that was strange when she led me into the dining-room and gave me a cocktail, and this episode, and my relief at rejoining the current, made me incautious. Mildred absently looked out of the window and suddenly seemed to see her own window-boxes and said, ‘They’re half dead already. I’ll never have geraniums any more. Last summer we had lobelias.’

  ‘No. Calceolarias,’ I answered, putting down my glass. Luckily she failed to ‘hear between the lines,’ and only fastened on to the flower, which she said she was sick of.

  The second occasion was infinitely more serious. It was also bad luck, as I might have easily come out with something traceable by her to a tangible source, such as news items or Who’s Who, had her conversational lead happened to veer in another direction.

  She is, obviously, one of those open-hearted women who are apt to play expansiveness upon friend and acquaintance alike, and this again caught me off my guard. At the moment, I forgot that it was a manner rather than an accurate gauge of intimacy, and for that moment we were in the current again: we were Deirdre and Lady Mildred having cocktails, with Henderson shortly due to swim along the hall and take away the tray.

  It must have been past seven, and she glanced at her wristwatch and said, ‘Lord! I must run and dress. We’ve got a crush on to-night.’ Then, in her sociable way, behind which I sensed that she meant it, ‘My dear, don’t marry a brainy man unless you’re brainy too. Must keep one’s end up all the time.’ ‘That’s not what he likes best,’ I answered.

  ‘Eh?’

  I fell upon the subject. ‘Toddy’s rather easy to misunderstand. We used to, until we got the hang of him. That austere business, you know . . . but he loves best to sit and smoke and be chaffed, and lots of books, and a dog to take out ’

  ‘Chaffed? Herbert?’

  ‘Yes. He knows his manner frightens people, and inside him he wants people who’ll get past all that . . . ’

  ‘Well !’

  ‘There are so few people, Lady Mildred, who have the time or enthusiasm to – to dig for one, don’t you find it so?’ I was actually, in the excitement of the moment, putting in a word for Toddy; was trying to break down the smart, Harrods-and-Pekingese side of Mildred that we all believed existed, superimposed on the kindly Brockley that we all agreed was there. We know now that the dressy, Harrods side of her had never seriously existed at all – it was one of our bad guesses. Inevitably one makes a few.

&n
bsp; She put her glass down on the tray. ‘My dear girl, how long have you known my husband?’

  That was an easy one. ‘I don’t know him.’

  ‘But ?’

  ‘I’ve met him once, for half an hour, on the bazaar evening,’ I answered, speaking like a witness in the police court.

  ‘Oh I see.’ She seemed to be engaged in some mental wrestling match.

  ‘And, by the way, I must have seemed abominably impertinent. I’m afraid we all call him “Toddy,” at home, and I’m awfully sorry but we call you “Lady Mildred.” ’

  ‘Toddy’ . . . she toyed with it. ‘He’d bite your nose off if you ever called him it.’

  ‘I’ll sell it,’ I answered, smiling at her.

  ‘Nothing doing, my dear. I should catch it too.’

  ‘I believe he’d adore it. He’d pretend not to for ages, but he’d go away and shake all over – you know his way, and then come back and make one of his long-lip faces at you . . . Good Lord! I’d better go!’ I ended, appalled.

  ‘Have another? No? I’m going to. Well, you seem to have thought it all out!’

  ‘I’m dreadfully sorry, and I am going!’

  ‘Don’t, unless you must. You know, I like you. I don’t know many young girls, I wish I did. I can’t make you out, but I ought to be used to that b’now, with people . . . you know, I’m the sort that ought to have a hat trimmed with ostrich tips and a feather boa, instead of model gowns and shingles and trying to live up to everybody.’

  ‘You’re a dear,’ I said.

  Somehow, one had never arranged to get really fond of Mildred, before . . . I wondered what difference it was going to make?

  ‘I’m glad. Nice to be liked, ain’t it? Even if it’s only reflected glory. Bless you, I’m used to that.

  ‘It isn’t that, a bit.’

  ‘Come up and let’s hunt out a photo of Herbert for you. He hates me saying “photo,” by the way. Can’t imagine why.’ ‘Does he object to “whatever” too, on the same principle?’ I chuckled.