But before her spirit could settle to its devotions she leaned forward and tapped her husband’s shoulder.
‘Henry, are you reading the lessons?’ she inquired.
‘What’s that?’ asked Mr Leslie, through the Venite.
Lady Emily poked at Agnes with her stick.
‘Darling,’ she whispered loudly, ‘is your father reading the lessons?’
‘Of course I am,’ said Mr Leslie. ‘Always read the lessons.’
‘Then, what are they?’ asked Lady Emily. ‘I want to find them in the Bible for the children.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Mr Leslie, crossly. ‘Not my business.’
‘But, Henry, you must know.’
Mr Leslie turned his body round and glared at his wife.
‘I don’t know,’ he insisted, red in the face with his efforts to whisper gently, but angrily and audibly. ‘Holden marks the places for me. Look in your prayer book, Emily, you’ll find it all in the beginning number of the Beast or something.’
With which piece of misinformation he turned round again and went on with his singing. As he announced the first lesson from the lectern, his wife repeated the book, chapter and verse aloud after him, adding, ‘Remember that, everyone.’ She then began to hunt through the Bible. Agnes’s eldest child, James, who was just seven, looked at her efforts with some impatience.
‘Just open it anywhere, Granny,’ he whispered.
But his grandmother insisted not only on finding the place, but on pointing it out to all the occupants of both pews. By the time the second lesson was reached she had mislaid her spectacles, so James undertook to find the place for her. While he was doing this she leaned over to Nannie and said:
‘Do you have the lessons in chapel?’
But Nannie, knowing her place, pretended not to hear.
When the vicar began his good and uninteresting sermon, James snuggled up to his grandmother. She put an arm round him and they sat comfortably together, thinking their very different thoughts. Never did Emily Leslie sit in her pew without thinking of the beloved dead: her firstborn buried in France, and John’s wife Gay, who after one year of happiness had left him wifeless and childless. John had left the navy after the War, gone into business, and was doing well, but his mother often wondered if anyone or anything would ever have power to stir his heart again. Whenever he was off his guard his mother’s heart was torn by the hard, set lines of his face. Otherwise he seemed happy enough, prospered, was thinking of Parliament, helped his father with the estate, was a kind uncle to Martin and to Agnes’s children, went to dances, plays and concerts in London, rode and shot in the country. But Lady Emily sometimes felt that if she came up behind him quietly and suddenly she might see that he was nothing but a hollow mask.
Then there was Martin, so ridiculously like his dead father, and as happy as anyone of sixteen who knows he is really grown-up can expect to be. His mother had remarried, and though Martin was on excellent terms with his American stepfather, he made Rushwater his home, much to the secret joy of his grandparents. Inheritance and death duties were not words which troubled Martin much. He knew Rushwater would be his some day, but had the happy confidence of the young that their elders will live for ever. His most pressing thoughts at the moment were about the possible purchase of a motor bicycle on his seventeenth birthday, and his hopes that his mother would forget her plan of sending him to France for part of the summer holidays. It would be intolerable to have to go to that ghastly abroad when one might be at Rushwater and play for the village against neighbouring elevens. Also he wanted to be in England if David pulled off that job with the BBC.
David should by rights have been Uncle David, but though Martin dutifully gave his title to his Uncle John, he and David were on equal terms. David was only ten years older than he was, and not the sort of chap you could look on as an uncle. David was like an elder brother, only he didn’t sit on you as much as some chaps’ elder brothers did. David was the most perfect person one could imagine, and when one was older one would, with luck, be exactly like David. Like David one would dance divinely, play and sing all the latest jazz hits, be president of one’s university dramatic society, write a play which was once acted on a Sunday, produce a novel which only really understanding people read, and perhaps, though here Martin’s mind rather shied off the subject, have heaps of girls in love with one. But not for a long time.
It need hardly be said that the qualities which filled Martin with the pangs of hero-worship were not altogether those which David’s parents would have most desired. If he had had to earn his living, David would have been a serious problem. But, owing to the ill-judged partiality of an aunt, he had been independent for some years. So he lived in town and had hankerings for the stage and the cinema and broadcasting, and every now and then his looks and his easy manners and his independent income landed him in a job, though not for long. And, as Martin had dimly surmised, heaps of girls had been in love with him. When the Leslies wished that David would settle down to a job and stick to it, they never failed to remind each other that the house would not be the same if David were not there so often.
Mr Leslie was thinking partly how well he had dodged a difficult name in the First Lesson, coughing and turning the page noisily as he came to it, and partly about a young bull whom he proposed to visit after lunch; and occasionally, why Emily couldn’t be like other people.
As for John, he looked at his mother with her arm round James in the pew in front of him and wished, with the ache that was never far from his heart, that there were anyone whom he could hold close to him, even for a moment, even in the coolest way, with no disloyalty to Gay, only not to feel that emptiness at one’s side, day and night.
‘But I suppose one couldn’t do it in church,’ he thought, and then, being his mother’s son, nearly laughed out aloud at his own thoughts and had to pretend it was a cold. Luckily the sermon came to an end at that moment, and among the shuffling of feet his voice was not conspicuous.
Just then his mother, loosening her hold of James, said in an anxious voice:
‘This seems a good moment to escape.’
John leaned over.
‘We can’t yet, Mother,’ he whispered; ‘we must stay for the collection, you know.’
His mother nodded her head violently and asked James to find her bag. After a prolonged scuffle it was found under the hassock, just as the collecting-bag came round. Mr Leslie stuffed some paper into it and passed it along the pew to Agnes, who handed it over the back of the pew to Nannie. The two younger children put their sixpences in, but James only smiled and showed empty hands.
‘Here you are,’ said John, passing sixpence over.
Thank you, Uncle John,’ said James, taking it, ‘but Grand father subscribes to the church, so we needn’t give anything.’
Short of wrenching the sixpence away from James by main force there was nothing to be done. The nursery party filed past Lady Emily and left the church, followed by the men. Only Agnes remained with her mother.
John and his father strolled up and down in the sun, under the low churchyard wall, discussing the young bull.
‘What have you called him, sir?’ John asked.
The naming of Mr Leslie’s bulls was a matter of great moment. All had the praenomen Rushwater, and each had a second name which had to begin with an R. Their owner, who bred them himself, attached great importance to this, trying to find names which would come easily to the tongues of the Argentine ranchers, by whom they were usually bought. But the supply of names which, in Mr Leslie’s opinion, could be easily attuned to a Spanish tongue was nearly exhausted, and a good deal of his time and conversation had been devoted to the subject of late.
‘I had thought of Rackstraw, or Richmond,’ said Mr Leslie doubtfully. ‘But they don’t sound Spanish enough to me.’
‘What does Macpherson say?’
Mr Leslie made an angry noise.
‘Macpherson may have been agent here for thirty ye
ars,’ he said, ‘but he hasn’t any more sense than to suggest Rannoch. How does he think an Argentine is going to say Rushwater Rannoch?’
John admitted the difficulty, while mildly wondering why Argentines should be even less intelligent than other people.
‘And now there’s this business of letting the vicarage,’ said Mr Leslie. ‘Banister will be away for August and wants to let. It’s a confounded nuisance.’
‘But Banister’s tenants needn’t worry you, sir.’
‘He said something about Foreigners,’ said Mr Leslie. ‘People he picked up somewhere abroad. One never seems to have any peace. Your mother will ask them all up to dinner here twice a week. I shall go abroad for August.’
‘Lots of foreigners there,’ said John.
‘Yes, but they’re all right in their place. It’s here we don’t want them. Buy British, you know. If it weren’t for the foreigners we should be much better off.’
‘Then you wouldn’t have any Argentines to buy your prize bulls.’
‘Foreigners, I said. Germans and French and that lot,’ said Mr Leslie, who appeared to make a subtle distinction between the various branches of the non-English-speaking races.
‘Aren’t Argentines foreigners, too?’ asked John, rather unkindly.
‘When I was a boy, foreigners meant French and Germans and Italians,’ said Mr Leslie with dignity.
At this moment Lady Emily came out of the church with Agnes. Her husband and son went to meet her.
She sat down on a bench in the porch and began to wind herself up in a long lavender-coloured scarf, talking all the while.
‘Henry, I was thinking in church that if Agnes’s niece, at least she is really her husband’s niece, but Agnes is devoted to her, is coming to us for the summer, we might have a little dance for Martin’s birthday in August. Perhaps a cricket match first and then a dance. Agnes, dear, see if you can find the other end of my scarf and give it to me – no, not that end, I know about that one, the other one, darling. That’s right. It is so inconvenient having to take one’s gloves off for communion, because I nearly always forget and it keeps Mr Banister waiting.’
By this time she had wound her head into an elaborate turban, very becoming to her handsome haggard face with its delicate aquiline nose, thin carved lips and bright dark eyes. With the help of John’s arm she got up.
‘Now my stick, Henry, and you might put that shawl over my shoulders and I don’t think I shall put on my gloves just to walk home with. What have you and your father been talking about, John?’
‘Bulls, Mamma, and foreigners. Father says he will go abroad if Banister lets the vicarage to unsuitable tenants.’
‘No, Henry,’ exclaimed Lady Emily, stopping short and dropping her bag, ‘not really. Mr Banister would feel it.’
‘Well, my dear,’ said her husband, picking up her bag, ‘he’s going abroad himself and I don’t see that it is any business of his where I go.’
‘We must have a good talk about it,’ said Lady Emily, continuing her progress through the churchyard gate and across her own rose garden, ‘thresh it out all together at lunch-time. It came to me, while we were having that awkward interval which happens while the people who don’t stay for communion are escaping, that if we can get the roof of the pavilion mended before the cricket really begins, it would be such a good thing. Henry, will you speak to Macpherson about it?’
‘I did speak to him, Emily, last October, and it has been mended for the last six months.’
‘Of course it has,’ said Lady Emily, stopping to adjust her shawl, which was dragging on the ground. ‘I must have been thinking of that little shed away by the sawmill, where David sometimes used to put his bicycle. Or was it something quite different? One’s thoughts get so confused in church.’
As no one seemed equal to discovering what she had really been thinking about, she resumed her way, leaving a trail of belongings behind her for her family to collect, and disappeared into the house.
2
The Leslies at Lunch
Rushwater House was a large, rather Gothic house built by Mr Leslie’s grandfather. Its only outward merit was that it might have been worse than it was. Its inner merits were a certain comfortable spaciousness and a wide corridor running the whole length of the top storey, where children could be kept out of sight and hearing, and rampage to their hearts’ content. All the main rooms opened on to a gravelled terrace from which one descended to gardens bounded by a little stream and bordered by woods and fields.
Gudgeon, the butler, was giving the finishing touches to the lunch-table when a short, middle-aged woman in a dark-grey striped dress came in.
‘Good morning, Mr Gudgeon,’ she said, with a foreign accent. ‘’Er ladyship’s bag as usual.’
‘Mr Leslie was carrying a bag when they returned from church, Miss Conk,’ said Mr Gudgeon. ‘It is probably on the library table. Walter, see if her ladyship’s bag is in the library.’
The footman went on his errand. Mr Gudgeon continued his supererogatory finishing touches while Miss Conk looked out of the window. Lady Emily’s maid had come to her many years ago as Amélie Conque, but the assimilative genius of the English language, Mr Leslie’s determination not to truckle to foreigners in the matter of pronunciation, and Mr Gudgeon’s deep-rooted conviction of the purity of his own French accent had all united to form the name Conk. By this name she had been known with terror and dislike by Lady Emily’s children, with love and disrespect by her grandchildren. Whether Conk had softened with years or the new generation were more confident than the old, we cannot say. Probably both.
Conk had, as far as was known, no home, no relations, no interests beyond Rushwater and the family. For her holiday she always went to a retired housekeeper of the Leslies, an ill-tempered old lady called Mrs Baker who lived at Folkestone. Hence it was her habit, after her annual quarrel with Mrs Baker, to make a day excursion to Boulogne, from which glimpse of her native land she always returned in tears because she had been so homesick for England.
Walter returned with the bag, which he attempted to give to Conk. Conk, ignoring his very existence, waited with an air of spiritual suffering till Gudgeon took it from Walter’s hand and gave it to her.
‘We shall be late for lunch,’ said Conk, who was apt to use the royal and editorial ‘we’ in speaking of her mistress.
That’s nothing new, is it, Mr Gudgeon?’ said Walter, as Conk left the room.
Gudgeon gave Walter a look which made him retreat hastily to the service-room, and rearranged everything which Walter had happened to touch. Then he went to sound the gong.
To sound the gong was, though he would have died rather than confess it, one of the great joys of Gudgeon’s life. The soul of the artist, the poet, the soldier, the explorer, the mystic, which slumbered somewhere inside his tall and dignified presence, was released four times a day to empyrean heights unknown and unsuspected by his employers, his equals – these being but two, Conk and Mrs Siddon, the present housekeeper – and his underlings. There had been a black time the previous autumn when Mr Leslie, solicitous for his wife’s nerves after a long illness, had ordered Gudgeon to announce meals by word of mouth. Only his devotion to his mistress had sustained him under this trial. It was no pleasure to him to enter the drawing-room, bringing with him a presence which put the most distinguished guests to shame; no pleasure to him to announce in the voice which might have led him, except for a slight uncertainty in the matter of initial aspirates, to the highest preferment the Church can bestow, that dinner was served. His inner being was mute and starved. One day, in the course of a conversation with Conk, he threw out a feeler, suggesting that her ladyship had been a little less punctual for meals since Mr Leslie had abolished the use of the gong.
‘’Er ladyship is just ze same,’ said Conk. ‘She never ’ear ze gong. If she was in ’er bedroom she often say to me, “Conque, ’as ze gong gone?”’
Gudgeon pondered these remarks. One day he ventured to s
ound the gong, gently and for a short space, for lunch. After a day or two, finding that no one checked him, he sounded it for tea, then for dinner, but always with brevity and restraint. Finally, taking advantage of the absence of Mr Leslie in town, he liberated his soul in tocsins, alarms, fanfares of booming sound. At the end of the week when Mr Leslie returned, Lady Emily remarked at dinner:
‘Gudgeon, did you sound the gong tonight? I never heard it.’
‘Yes, my lady,’ said Gudgeon, ‘but I can sound it a little longer in future if your ladyship wishes.’
‘Yes, do,’ said Lady Emily.
Mr Leslie, occupied with Mr Macpherson about the matter of mending the cricket pavilion roof, did not hear this conversation, and being at the time absorbed in a cattle show at which Rushwater Robert was like to do well, he never noticed that the gong had begun again.
To see Gudgeon sounding the gong for dinner was to see an artist at work. Taking the gong-stick, its round end well padded with wash-leather, which it was his pride to replace with his own hands from time to time, he would execute one or two preliminary flourishes in the manner of a drum-major, or a lion lashing itself to a frenzy with the fabled claw in its tail. Then he let the padded end fall upon the exact centre of the gong, drawing out a low ringing note. With increasing force he sounded it, the end of his stick moving in ever-widening circles upon the dark, pitted surface of the gong, till the sound filled the whole house, booming through corridors, vibrating in every beam, thrilling and pleasantly alarming Agnes’s children in bed upstairs, making David in his bath say, ‘Damn that gong; I thought I had five minutes more,’ making Mr Leslie, in the drawing-room, say, ‘Everybody late again as usual, I suppose,’ making Lady Emily say as Conk pinned up her hair, ‘Has the gong gone yet, Conque?’
Today the last ripples of its booming had hardly died away when Mr Leslie came in with Mr Macpherson, the agent, and Mr Banister. Agnes, with James, who came down to Sunday lunch, David and Martin followed close behind.
Wild Strawberries: A Virago Modern Classic (VMC) Page 2