A Family and a Fortune

by Ivy Compton-Burnett

  ‘Clement, are you ready for your aunt?’

  ‘Nothing would prepare me for the manners, the morals, and the methods of such a woman. She is at once super- and sub-human. I always wonder if she is goddess or beast.’

  ‘Clement, Clement, that is neither gallant nor kind,’ said Justine. ‘A man does not speak of a woman like that, you know. And can’t you brush the collar of your coat? Not that I have any right to speak.’

  ‘But I think both the boys look very nice, Justine,’ said Aubrey.

  ‘How does Justine appear?’ said Clement. ‘I will hear the accepted view before I express my own.’

  ‘Oh, you are right; it is hopeless. It deserves anything you like to say. You need not be afraid that I shall rise up in its defence like a mother with her young.’

  ‘You might help to smooth it, Clement,’ said Aubrey. ‘It is all that can be done now.’

  ‘Why don’t you change it?’ said Mark. ‘What about that one you generally wear?’

  ‘No, I will stick to it now. I will remain in it and face the music. Mother is expecting to see me in something different, and I daresay she will like it. I won’t take refuge in some old one which does not catch the eye. It will teach me a lesson that I deserve.’

  ‘It is not a matter of such mighty import,’ said Clement.

  ‘Indeed it is! It should be a point of great interest to you all, how your only sister looks. I will not have it in any other way. I have no patience with that kind of high-and-mightiness. It is the last thing that exalts anyone.’

  ‘Clement, are you listening to Justine?’ said Aubrey.

  ‘He does not know how true quality is shown,’ said Mark. ‘That is a thing which cannot be taught.’

  ‘All Clement’s learning will stand him in but poor stead.’

  ‘Here are the guests! And Father and Mother are not down!’ said Justine, in a tone of consternation.

  ‘They are remedying the position,’ said Clement, showing that he did not recommend the feeling.

  Blanche led the way into the room, in an old-fashioned gown of heavy material and indifferent cut, which had been altered to show successfully how it should have been made, and which in its countrified quality and stiffness became her well.

  ‘Well, dear ones, how nice you look! Justine, it is a very pretty colour. I do want Aunt Matty to see you all at your best. And dear Grandpa has seen so little of you for so long.’ Blanche spoke to her children of their relations either from their point of view or her own.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Middleton,’ said Jellamy.

  ‘How are you, Mrs Middleton? It is kind of you to adapt yourselves to our early hours,’ said Blanche, who observed the formalities with guests with sincerity and goodwill. ‘My father and sister will be here in a moment. It is a long time since you have met.’

  ‘Whose idea was it that they should come to live here?’

  ‘It was their own. But we welcomed it with great delight. My sister and I have missed each other for so many years.’

  ‘Isn’t the lodge rather small after their old home?’

  Sarah Middleton’s questions seemed to come in spite of herself, as if her curiosity were stronger than her will.

  ‘Yes, it has to be that. They have lost money lately and are obliged to live on a small scale. And it is a nice little house.’

  ‘Very nice indeed,’ said Sarah, with the full cordiality of relief from pain, which was the state produced in her by a satisfied urge to know.

  Sarah Middleton was a tall, upright woman of seventy, strong and young for her age, with a fair, rather empty face and an expression at once eager and soured and kind. Her grey hair was done in some way which seemed to belong to a world where men and women were more different, and her cap had been assumed in her prime in tribute to matronhood, though to Justine and her brothers it was a simple emblem of age. She looked about as she talked, as if she feared to miss enlightenment on any matter, a thing which tried her beyond her strength and which happily seldom occurred. Her husband, who was ten years younger and in the same physical stage, was a tall, spare, stooping man, with a good head, pale, weak eyes, a surprisingly classic nose, and an air of depression and an excellence of deportment which seemed to depend on each other, as though he felt that the sadness of life entitled people to courtesy and consideration. He had wanted to write, and had been a schoolmaster because of the periods of leisure, but had found that the demands of the other periods exhausted his energy. After his marriage to a woman of means he was still prevented, though he did not give the reason, indeed did not know it. Neither did he state what he wished to write, and this was natural, as he had not yet decided. Sarah felt that the desire gave him enough occupation, and he almost seemed to feel the same.

  ‘Yes, say what you like, Uncle,’ said Justine, standing before Dudley and holding out her skirts. ‘It merits it all and more. I have not a word to say. This will teach me not to waste my time and energy on going backwards and forwards to poor Miss Spurr. She has not an ounce of skill in her composition.’

  Blanche looked at the dress with mild, and Sarah with eager, attention.

  ‘It could be made into a dressing-gown,’ said Dudley, taking a sudden step forward. ‘I see just how it could be done.’

  ‘My dear, that beautiful material!’ said Sarah, holding up her hands and turning her eyes on Justine to indicate the direction of her address.

  ‘I am sure it is a very pretty colour,’ said Blanche, implying and indeed feeling that this was a great part of the matter.

  ‘I knew I could count on a word of encouragement from you, little Mother.’

  ‘Dressing gowns are always the best colours,’ said Aubrey. ‘I go in and look at them sometimes.’

  ‘You little scamp,’ said Justine. ‘You are happy in being young enough for that sort of thing.’

  ‘Dear boy!’ said Sarah.

  ‘What is the matter with the dress?’ said Edgar, with careful interest. ‘Do you mean that it ought to be better made?’

  ‘Yes, Father, I do mean that. Everyone means it. We all mean it. Don’t go unerringly to the point like that, as if it were almost too obvious to call for comment.’

  ‘I don’t think it calls for so much comment,’ said Clement.

  ‘Well, I daresay it does not. Let us leave it now. After all, we all look ourselves in whatever we wear,’ said Justine, deriving open satisfaction from this conclusion, and taking Aubrey’s chin in her hand. ‘What are you meditating upon, little boy?’

  ‘I was expecting Aunt Matty,’ said Aubrey, reluctant to explain that he had been imagining future daughters for himself and deciding the colours of their dressing gowns.

  ‘Well, dear ones all,’ said Matty, almost standing still on the threshold, partly in her natural slowness and partly to be seen. ‘Well, here is a happy, handsome’ - she rapidly substituted another word - ‘healthy family. So much health and happiness is so good to see. It is just what I want, isn’t it?’

  Blanche looked up with narrowing eyes at the change of word, though she knew that it was prompted by the sight of more and not less handsomeness than her sister had expected.

  ‘Is not Father coming?’ she said in a cool tone, putting down her embroidery before she rose.

  Sarah looked from sister to sister with full comprehension and the urbanity which accompanied it.

  ‘Yes, dear, he will not be a moment. He is only rather slow. I came on to get a start of him, as I am even slower.’ Matty kissed Blanche with more than her usual affection in tacit atonement for what had passed, but seemed to feel rather soon that atonement had been made. ‘It seems that I know him better in these days and have to tell you about him. Perhaps he has always belonged to me a little the most. Why, Mrs Middleton, how are you both? So we are to be neighbours as well as friends.’

  ‘It did not take you long to make up your mind to the change,’ said Sarah, her tone leading up to further information.

  ‘No, I am a person of rapid decision. Fleet
of foot, fleet of thought, and fleet of action I used to be called in the old days.’ Blanche looked up as if in an effort of memory. ‘And I have retained as much of my fleetness as I can. So I made my resolve and straightway acted upon it.’

  ‘My dear, you have retained so much of what you had,’ said Sarah, shaking her head.

  ‘Mr Seaton,’ said Jellamy.

  ‘Now I can barely walk forward to greet you,’ said Oliver, pushing his feet along the ground, ‘but I am glad to find myself welcome as I am. There have come moments when I thought that we might not meet again. So, Middleton, I am pleased to see you once more on this side of the grave.’

  Thomas shook hands with an air which accepted and rejected these words in the right measure.

  ‘Why are people proud of expecting to die soon?’ said Dudley to Mark. ‘I think it is humiliating to have so little life left.’

  ‘They are triumphant at having made sure of more life than other people. And they don’t really think they will die.’

  ‘No, of course, they have got into the way of living. I see it is a lifelong habit.’

  ‘Have we no relations who can enter a room in the usual way?’ said Clement.

  ‘None in the neighbourhood,’ said his brother.

  ‘Now, Grandpa, that is naughty talk,’ said Justine, leading Oliver forward by the arm as if no one else would think of the office. ‘Now which chair would you like?’

  ‘Any one will serve my purpose; I ask but to sit in it.’

  ‘Dear Grandpa!’ said Justine, keeping her hands on his arms as he sat down, as if she were lowering him into it.

  ‘That is a fine gown, my dear,’ he said, as he let go the chair and sank back.

  ‘It is the most fearful thing, Grandpa; I forbid you to look at it. It will be my shame all the evening.’

  ‘You know why you put it on, I suppose. I should have thought it was intended to catch the eye, as it has caught mine.’

  ‘I think it is such a nice colour,’ said Blanche. ‘Beautiful,’ said Sarah, shaking her head again.

  ‘Why, so it is, my dear,’ said Oliver, relaxing his limbs. ‘Your girl looks well in it, and what more would you have?’ ‘But the shape of it, Grandpa!’ said Justine, withdrawing her strictures upon his looking to the extent of disposing herself that he might the better do so. The cut, the hang, the balance, the fit!’

  ‘Well, I do not see any of those, my dear; I do not know if you are trying to show them to me.’

  ‘I am trying to show you the lack of them.’

  ‘Then you do so, child; I see it,’ said Oliver, lifting one leg over the other.

  ‘Well, if anyone received a snub!’ said Justine, looking about her at the success of her effort.

  ‘What is the colour?’ said Matty, her easy tone revealing her opinion that enough had been said on the matter. ‘Magenta?’

  ‘No, dear,’ said Blanche. ‘It is a kind of old rose.’

  ‘Is it, dear?’ said Matty, contracting her eyes on the dress and looking almost exactly like her sister for the moment. ‘A new sort of old rose then.’ She smiled at her niece, taking her disparagement of the dress at its literal value.

  ‘Oh, come, Aunt Matty, there is nothing wrong with the colour. It is the one redeeming point.’

  ‘Yes, dear?’ said Matty, in questioning agreement, her eyes again on the dress.

  ‘Oh dear, this garment! It is destined to be a bone of contention in addition to its other disadvantages?’

  ‘I tremble to think about its destiny’, said Clement, ‘as its history up to date is what it is.’

  ‘Why is magenta an offensive term?’ said Mark. ‘It seems to be.’

  ‘It is odd how colours seem to owe their names to some quality in them,’ said his aunt.

  ‘Their names come about in quite a different way.’

  ‘Now we don’t want a philological lecture,’ said Matty, showing her awareness of this.

  ‘Magenta can be a beautiful colour,’ said Sarah, in a tone of considerable feeling. ‘I remember a dress I once had of a kind of brocade which we do not see now. Oh, it would have suited you, Mrs Gaveston.’

  ‘Those old, thick brocades were very becoming,’ said Matty.

  ‘Aunt Matty does not restrict the application of her words,’ said Aubrey, seeming to speak to himself, as he often did when he adopted adult phrase.

  ‘I can imagine you looking regal in one of them, Aunt Matty,’ said Justine, in a tone of saying something that was expected.

  ‘Dinner is ready, ma’am,’ said Jellamy.

  ‘And not too soon,’ said Clement. ‘I hope that food will be a better subject for our attention than clothes.’

  Edgar gave his arm to Sarah and led the way in conventional talk, which he maintained at whatever happened to be the cost to himself. Dudley adapted his step to Matty’s with an exactness which involved his almost standing still, and kept up a flow of conversation at no personal expense at all. Matty was known to prefer Dudley to a son of the house, and her nephews supported her choice. Blanche and her father walked together, as the result of his suggestion that it might be their last opportunity, which was proffered to Thomas as an excuse and duly repudiated and accepted. They were assisted by Justine to link their arms and take their first steps - and indeed there might have been a less perilous association - and checked by her serious hand from a too precipitate advance. Justine herself went with Thomas, placing her free arm in Mark’s.

  ‘Now I do not require four partners, but I may as well use up one superfluous young man. Follow on, you other two. Aubrey can be the lady.’

  ‘I place my delicate hand on Clement’s arm and lean on his strength.’

  Thomas gave a laugh and Clement shook off the hand and walked on alone.

  ‘What a really beautiful room, dear!’ said Matty to her sister, with appreciation brought to birth by the lights and wine and the presence of Dudley and Edgar. ‘It is like a little glimpse of home, or if I may not say that, it is like itself and satisfying indeed to my fastidious eye. And my own little room seems to gain, not lose by the comparison. This one seems to show how beauty is everywhere itself. I quite feel that I have taken a lesson from it.’

  ‘And one which was needed, from what I hear,’ said Mark.

  ‘Is that how happiness does not depend on surroundings?’ said Aubrey.

  Mark and Aubrey often talked aside to each other. Clement would join them when inclined to talk, Justine when inclined to talk aside. Aubrey also talked aside to himself.

  ‘Naughty boys, making fun of the poor old aunt!’ said Matty, shaking her finger at them without interest in what they said.

  ‘What was it, Mark?’ said Edgar, with a hint in his tone that his eldest son should speak for the ears of the table.

  ‘I was agreeing with Aunt Matty, sir.’

  ‘Yes, yes, we may praise our own home, may we not, when it is as good as this?’ said his aunt.

  ‘I was doing the same, Father - the same, sir,’ said Aubrey, who had lately followed his brothers in this mode of address.

  ‘Dear boy!’ said Sarah, moved by the step towards maturity.

  Edgar had come as near to reproof as he ever did. His hints were always heeded, and if it was not true that they were followed more than if he had raised his voice or resorted to violence, it was as true as it ever is. To Justine he never hinted a reproof, partly because of her sex and partly because he might have had to hint too much. Edgar did not love his children, though he believed or rather assumed that he did, and meted out kindness and interest in fair measure. He had a concerned affection for his wife, a great love for his brother and less than the usual feeling for himself. Dudley spent his emotion on his brother, and gave any feeling which arose in him to anyone else. Justine believed that she was her father’s darling, and Edgar, viewing the belief with an outsider’s eye, welcomed it, feeling that it ought to be a true one, and made intermittent effort to give it support. Other people accordingly accepted it, with the e
xception of Dudley and Aubrey, who saw the truth. Clement would have seen it if he had regarded the matter, and Blanche liked the belief and accordingly cherished it.

  ‘Does Jellamy manage by himself in this room now?’ said Matty to her sister. ‘It seems rather much for one person.’

  ‘Yes, he has to, dear. It makes us slower, of course, but it cannot be helped. We have to be very economical.’

  Matty glanced about the room with a faintly derisive smile.

  ‘No, indeed, Aunt Matty,’ said Justine, answering the look, ‘you are quite wrong. Mother is speaking the simple truth. Strict economy is necessary. There is no pose about it.’

  Matty lifted her brows in light enquiry.

  ‘Now, Aunt Matty, you made the comment in all good faith, as clearly as you could have made it in words, intending it to be so taken. And that being the case, it must be so answered. And my answer is that economy is essential, and that Jellamy works single-handed for that reason.’

  ‘Is it, dear? Such a lot of answer for such a little question.’

  ‘It was not the question. It was the comment upon the reply.’

  ‘No one is to make a comment but you, dear?’

  ‘Justine does make them,’ murmured Aubrey.

  ‘Now, little boy, how much did you follow of it?’

  ‘Upon my word, I do not follow any of it,’ said Oliver.

  Sarah leaned back almost in exhaustion, having followed it all. Her husband had kept his eyes down in order not to do so.

  ‘Well, we mustn’t get too subtle,’ said Justine. ‘They say that that is a woman’s fault, so I must beware.’

  Aubrey gave a crow of laughter, checked it, and suffered a choke which exceeded the bounds of convention.

  ‘Aubrey darling!’ said Blanche, as if to a little child.

  ‘Now, little boy, now, little boy,’ said Aubrey, looking at his sister with inflamed cheeks and starting eyes.

  ‘Now, little boy, indeed,’ she said in a grave tone. ‘Poor child!’ said Sarah.

  ‘What shall I do when there is no one to call me little boy?’ said Aubrey, looking round to meet the general eye, but discovering that it was not on him, and returning to his dinner.