A Footman for the Peacock

by Ferguson,Rachel

  6

  Two events marked the timeless days at Delaye for the unmarried daughters, when they became aunts, to Marcus and Edmund through the marriage of Emerald Roundelay to Bertram Cloudesley, and to Maxwell Dunston through Crystal’s match with Colonel Dunston, and when, at close upon sixty years of age, they became great-aunts through a similar process on the part of their junior nephew, Edmund, the present owner of Delaye, who re-entered the family as a Roundelay through deed-poll, with the approval of the entire family.

  It was felt, though never admitted between the ageing sisters, that to be in a superior blood relationship to those whose existence had come about through an intimate action everlastingly debarred to themselves of a brother or sister was the next best thing — though, of course ‘removed’, like distant cousinship — to matrimony itself.

  The present household at Delaye consists, then, of Sir Edmund, his wife Evelyn, his son Stacey, who was seldom at home, being occupied with his studies in estate management at an agricultural college, his elder daughter Margaret, his second daughter Angela, the great-aunts Miss Amethyst, Miss Sapphire and Miss Jessie, his cousin Maxwell Dunston, who, on leaving the army he had always chafed against and refusing the Kensington home of his mother, had made a mutually advantageous offer to Sir Edmund, which gave Maxwell the country life he preferred for the sum of five guineas a week.

  The domestic staff at Delaye was headed by Musgrave, the butler, who on the strength of long service, sometimes presumed ever so slightly in alluding to the senior Misses Roundelay as ‘the old ladies’. The mutual affection and respect in which servant and family equally participated was only intermittently ruffled by Musgrave’s dislike of Miss Sapphire, whom, at these times, he addressed as Miss Sophia, timing his occasion always to coincide with tea-parties and other social occasions. His antagonism was half professional, half private. Miss Sapphire would never come to the table punctually, but after an entire afternoon of doing nothing ascertainable, would wait for the gong to sound, and then begin flurrying round her room putting the finishing touches to her hair and dress, and, once arrived in the dining-room as the soup was removed, and occasionally as the fish came in, would discover for the remainder of the meal forgotten portions of her equipment that she commonly permitted nobody to fetch from her bedroom, and the courses were punctuated by little rushes from the table in search of handkerchief, spectacles and handbag, thus generating a restless and dyspeptic atmosphere which was the equal exasperation of Musgrave and of Major Dunston. The private dislike dated from that evening of 1912 when Miss Sapphire had seen Musgrave in his pyjamas, and about to enter the bathroom for the weekly cleansing that all the servants were permitted in rotation. There was no second bathroom at Delaye. In the Victorian era it was regarded as superfluous, and ever since, no master of the house could afford one. Thus butler and mistress had each other equally in their power, for as surely as a reminiscent gleam came into the eyes of old Miss Sapphire, so surely did she become Miss Sophia at the next tea-party.

  Had there been a proper domestic hierarchy at Delaye, the housekeeper would have jointly reigned with Musgrave. The financial situation had outruled that possibility; for two generations, and even if the cook stayed for a period of years, Musgrave, though strictly respecting her professional rating, still regarded her as an inferior with whom the post-luncheon cup of tea could not be drunk. She might prepare the tea-pot, but, his cup once handed, Musgrave would disappear into his pantry to drink.

  After the cook, there were an upper and an under housemaid, when they could be obtained, or, alternatively, a stop-gap of village girls who were glad to come to Delaye, and whose services were called in so frequently, these days after the Great War, that they needed no longer to be ‘shown’ and were house servants in every sense, save that at night they bicycled back to their homes.

  Lowest of all came the kitchenmaid, whose name, Sue, on first hearing, seemed incredible for these high-flown days. But the mother of Sue was very properly and thoroughly old-fashioned, and did not believe in annoying her employers by bestowing names above the station of her daughters.

  Sue Privett was the latest of a line of Privetts to serve the Roundelays. Sometimes, Sir Edmund, pondering the accounts books in the cellar, would re-tally the Privetts who had been kitchenmaids to former generations.

  There were eight, and the first had appeared in 1789.

  Polly Privett.

  Sometimes he meditated her: flitting the stone-flagged passages. Perky? Saucy? In chintz gown or glazed, beflowered calico, a mob-cap set upon her young, bright hair . . . or unthinkably bedraggled? The kitchen butt? Little slave to everyone?

  7

  Somewhere between the modest rating of the regular servants and the status of the family itself was Nursie.

  Nursie, like Musgrave, had served three generations of Roundelays and now, at a stupendous age and in common with the old retainers of so many other families, she had long been rescued from becoming a social problem and was comfortably installed as family curse. The Roundelays were all devoted to her in a profoundly exasperated way, and the fact that her keep, her pocket-money, washing and whims were a drain on pocket and nerves alike, that was borne without a murmur by all and as a matter of course, did not prevent some of them from occasionally desiring to strangle her.

  Nursie ran true to type and was now slightly senile. She constantly asked the family or any passing servant which battle we were fighting now, a query that became progressively easier to answer, but she also believed that Queen Victoria still occupied the throne, and when assured à haute voix (Mr. Maxwell did best at this) that the present sovereign was King Edward, George the Fifth, Edward the Eighth, or George the Sixth, would shake her head and answer, ‘Ah, they’d never get rid of Her’. Nursie also believed, and stated, that she had once seen King William the Fourth, when in service in London. If anyone pointed out to her that, if this were so, she must now be quite one hundred and thirteen years old, she would silence them for ever by announcing ‘I’m ninety and I’ve got my lines to prove it’, upon which, and in spite of polite protestations of belief and congratulation, she would toddle to a chest of drawers and soon transform her room, large though it was, into a lamentable jumble sale, at the very bottom of which, and when the floor was ankle-deep in clothes, photographs, albums and various precious knicknacks the very purpose of some of which was baffling, her birth certificate would be discovered and handed round (only it was sometimes a wedding favour, and twice a funeral card).

  Nursie, the family sometimes thought, could be really awful, veering from garrulity — her tiger story was the Diamond jubilee — to that rudeness which society allows to old age on the ground that that condition is sacred, although nobody has yet been discovered capable of connecting the two propositions. Visitors, sometimes of courtesy, often of curiosity, would ask to be ‘taken up’ to Nursie, rather, one supposes, in the way in which the British public will pay sixpence extra to view the Chamber of Horrors, and were to find that almost any way you handled her was fatal. If you were sympathetic, your twitching feet were glued to the floor by reminiscence of weddings you knew nothing about, children you’d never heard of and were never likely to, they, by now, being middle-aged men and women, but set, for Nursie, in an eternal plush frame of youth, and, of course, by memories of the Jubilee, which a large proportion of Nursie’s audience would not admit to remembering in any case. If, on the other hand, you were kind, but crisp and firm with her, she was rude at once. (Her favourite gambit was ‘I don’t remember you’, which pronouncement, oddly enough in one you pitied and profoundly regretted, had the effect of making you feel at once outside all decent social pales, a parvenu, a bounder in grain. . . .)

  So there sat Nursie, talkative, rude and sacred, and apparently everlasting. She had unreliable periods of being pleased with trifles, but on the whole the best of everything was good enough for her. She had the servant’s unerring flair for imported meat, however perfectly cooked, and could scent by
some devilish extra sense the presence of any substitute matter in fresh butter; imported eggs were, in the Great War, sent down on her tray, via caustic messages to the cook and a subsequent flood of tears that the current Mrs. Roundelay must waste one hour in mopping up. It was price paid for a lifetime of very genuine devotion. And it was Maxwell Dunston, always sarcastic, who dared to put Nursie into a nutshell. ‘She reminds me of that song — y’know, “She was poor but she was honest” — though I’m hanged if she was ever the “victim of a rich man’s sin”. But there’s no doubt “she drinks the champagne that we send her though she never can forgive”.’ But the Major was extra rasped, that morning, on discovering that the book of stamps which somebody had given Nursie for the letters that she still laboriously wrote in a hand wholly illegible to addresses most of which had been razed to the ground twenty years ago, had had every stamp in the book removed by Nursie who had pasted them on to the wall. ‘I’m putting by for the future,’ Nursie had announced. ‘I must look after myself.’

  Nursie, when at long last the scheme had been made clear to her, had refused the Old Age Pension which would have slightly relieved the financial strain on the Roundelays on the grounds that she had never taken charity yet and didn’t intend to begin, and had worked hard all her life. She had a post office savings book buried full fathom five among her possessions, none of the family knew if she knew where; this nest-egg, it was hoped, would defray her funeral expenses, but, as Major Dunston remarked, by the time the book was unearthed there’d probably be no one left alive at Delaye to bury her.

  CHAPTER II

  1

  IN the Turret Room of Delaye, Margaret Roundelay bent over a letter to her old schoolfriend, Ortrud Bohm. The good Ortrud had never been a favourite of hers; one respected Ortrud’s sterling worth, valued her affectionate loyalty — and, in short, dear old Ortrud. Ortrud, on leaving the English school to which her far-sighted father, Friedrich Bohm, had sent her, was now returned to the family bosom in Berlin, where her English enthusiasms placed her beyond all marriageable pales with the citizens, just as her nationality and accent in England had contrived to create a social vacuum for her at all entertainments to which she secured an invitation. Deprived at one blow of the standing of the Sofaplatz, as of the British silver tea-pot — those badges of married hostess-ship — she was now in full cry of child welfare work.

  Margaret Roundelay never gave her a thought between Crises and international ultimata, but the moment the political air became thick with Notes, and, as cousin Max caustically remarked, the government prepared as many White Papers and Blue Papers as would supply Seidlitz powders to the entire population of Scotland, so surely was she impelled to write to Ortrud. It was a real pity that one had never been able to learn German. German was the sort of language that made you comfortably feel that you were, anyway, a sound French scholar. Of her school classes, all that she carried away home to Normanshire were a shrill, peevish ‘DOCH! Expletive. Miss. Go on,’ from Fräulein, and a resultant quota of bad marks; that, and the fact that declensions were impossible to memorize and that the verb must be stuck well at the end of your sentence as a cockade decorates the coachman’s hat. The timeless afternoons at Delaye had brought Margaret a few more gleanings; from the novels of ‘Elizabeth’ she had acquired perhaps fourteen more words. Among these were numbered Herr Je! (useless, because an ejaculation apparently only employed by the lower classes), Backfisch: Geheimrat: Duselfritz: Kaffee Klatch: Schwerm: Oberleutnant and Appetitlich. The songs of Schumann had also supplied Warum: Nussbaum and Am Kamin. Impossible to frame a complimentary sentence to a German correspondent which should successfully combine and mainly consist of such conflicting elements as flapper, dunderhead and coffee party, an appetizing crush on an army officer, plus Why?, a nut-tree and the fireside. And, would it be true politeness if one succeeded? Was it not a greater courtesy to waive Ortrud’s nationality and assume for her a gratifying Englishness? Ortrud would like that. In common with most foreigners she was a fluent linguist, even if the British idiom would remain eternally beyond her powers. Ortrud’s notion of eulogistic English slang was still in the Ripping epoch, though she had of late years added the adjective Grim to her repertoire. (Where did you get that hat? — Wo hast du dass hut bekomm? laboriously pondered Miss Roundelay.) And Ortrud never helped out one’s own vocabulary by a single German word or catchword. She was too English for that. Yet Ortrud must know that you knew she was German, but she always gave you the impression of hoping you’d forgotten she wasn’t English. You didn’t know, as a result, whether to be sympathetically insulting about Hitler or respectfully hopeful as to his policy.

  Margaret had begun her letter upon a high wave of loyalty and Auld Lang Syne, the current Crisis being distinctly more acute than usual. The letter was intended not only to show Ortrud that one wasn’t insular and to hint that her nationality wasn’t being held against her, but was inspired by a genuine glow of feeling that the Crises of England punctually called into being, and, during which, friends and acquaintances wrote letters that were not of Christmas or birthday, and a feeling of unity and brotherhood was set up. When the Crisis was over, the friends fell back once more into their places of relative importance in each other’s regard, and all was normal until the next Ultimatum. But it was, while it lasted, a state of emotion both warming, charming, and a little pathetic.

  Margaret sometimes wished it could last, this goodwill towards men that was bred of anything but peace on earth. Though of course it would cost a lot in stamps.

  When she read through her half-finished letter, she was astonished and dismayed to find that with the best will in the world it grew progressively more tactless.

  September 1938

  Dearest Ortrud,

  So here we are again, fighting other people’s battles for them! But it really does look, this time, as if Chamberlain was going to prevent another frightful war. It’s rather wonderful to think that he can go anywhere abroad with just an umbrella and be feted all along the route, while the Dictators daren’t show their noses even in their own country without an armed guard and bullet-proof glass, etc. But if things should come to a head, there is a general feeling in England that we are far better prepared. Even in 1914, with hardly anything ready and muddle everywhere we contrived to come out on top. As usual, how we did it I can’t imagine, except on the principle that ‘thrice is he armed who hath his quarrel just’, etc., and it must be too awful to enter a war feeling that your leaders’ aims and motives are all wrong.

  My dear, this is just a line to hope you and your mother and Mr. Bohm are all well and reasonably happy. I see in the newspapers that you’ve been short of butter and stand in queues for ages. We aren’t, yet, and don’t: You’d never know there was a war impending here, any more than you did in the last one, and I can guess how you must be missing fats, because —

  Margaret leant back, appalled, and murmured ‘Glory!’ But there was still Claudine Vernet, who lived at Versailles.

  Ever since their brief life together at the Villa Cyclamène, in Lausanne, she and Claudine had come to a working agreement about correspondence: Claudine to write in English but to be free to make her meaning clear in her mother tongue, Margaret to reply in French and similarly explain her remarks in English. At school they had understood each other’s spoken remarks almost perfectly, and it was only the answers that went to pieces. Which was very odd, as the fact that they could listen to each other intelligently must indicate that they knew a great deal more French and English than they were aware of. Then, where did the words go to when you came to speak? With Claudine, Margaret had never felt the Crisis-impulse of patronizing protectiveness that she experienced towards Ortrud. Claudine, being French, was able to take care of herself; also, being an Ally of England, she was among the respectable nations for whom you had to feel no pity and no apology. Claudine’s country had never been a Menace that dated from long before your own nursery years, whereas about the German friendship, these day
s, one felt as one did with curates, Jews and nuns: that they were not only not quite human and normal, but needed special treatment as well, of the kind you gave to the invalid, to tradesmen and the servants, and which consisted of extrapoliteness, a form of apology for being a superior being, and a great, grave kindness and humouring. Tact, and a little joke here and there, suited to their capacity. . . .

  To write to Claudine was always a pleasure, to write to Ortrud a duty. Claudine was charming, Ortrud had no personal graces. Yet Claudine was a fearful liar in a perfectly nice way, and not too honest about money. There were those expeditions to the Patisserie for Palmiers, chocolate and brioches, and quite often Claudine forgot her purse, and you paid, or Ortrud paid, and that was the last ever heard of the matter; whereas Ortrud would flog a mile or rise up in the night to repay you a forgotten franc. Also, Claudine’s lay conversation was apt to be rather prone to references that you felt you oughtn’t to understand, whereas Ortrud’s talk was as open as the day, and sometimes as long.