A Footman for the Peacock

by Ferguson,Rachel

  Evelyn Roundelay moved to the shell-shaped armchair in the summer and to a sofa in the winter: reading and sewing, whether the latter were domestic or personal, she was content. There was no wireless or gramophone at Delaye to fret the scene with their outside reminders. The question of installing a wireless set had often been touched upon, but never with real feeling, more as two cronies might impersonally agree that the rhododendrons at Kew were exceptionally fine this year. A battery set, it was rumoured, was always in dock for costly repairs, and an electric model to be plugged into the wall would be dangerous to the old panelling in a thunderstorm, should anyone forget to disconnect it (the Squire’s pantry had once been discovered to be smouldering and they had had to dig up half the drive with which to extinguish the contrivance). Besides, the electric lights were all earmarked for family eyesight.

  By 8.45, everyone was settled down for the evening.

  Major Dunston read The New Statesman with every appearance of dislike: it was his bread and butter before the cake of Dorothy Sayers and Sydney Horler. Edmund Roundelay examined The Times from end to end as conscience-money for the frivolous ten-hour day of toil that he put in on the estate: Margaret, at a table of brass and inlay, worked over the Guides accounts and addressed postcards giving details of coming fixtures to members in outlying villages; the drumming of her fingers as she computed could sometimes be heard. Miss Sapphy at another table nearer the Lacquer Room into which the drawing-room led played solitaire, with a cool clicking of marbles, and supplied remark when the silence became too unsociably prolonged. Miss Amethyst read anything left over by somebody else; Miss Jacinth, too resigned to the will of Providence to interfere with the news, sewed and knitted for the poor of the parish, occasionally twitching at the soft mass in her lap and causing the ball of wool to bound towards some relative, upon which the latter tossed it back without comment or aim, as one might play tennis in hell.

  When Angela was at home, she ostensibly read, as well, but actually sat in her place by the window, her feet upon a little footstool of gros point, and thought about the occupants in the room.

  She would never lose her capacity for conscious gratitude at the graciousness with which fate had treated her in allotting to her this home and this family, and her discontents were all vicarious. Of the entire roomful, it was Angela alone, watchful, dark-eyed and pale, who sensed that aunt Sapphy was still longing for someone to ask her to play the piano to them all, longing for as much as she dreaded the ordeal of parading a rusted talent. It was that consideration which kept the girl from making the request herself. To hear her great-aunt falter and fail, to listen to the patter of reassurance and thanks, to guess at the bed-room laughter, kindly as it would be, was unthinkable. . . .

  Sometimes, even now, her friends would ask Angela Roundelay ‘Aren’t you frightfully bored having all the old ladies about all the time, and your nurse. Four!’ but that was a question which never yet had led by stages of laughing derision to disparaging anecdote and open complaint, and the cool, clear gaze and voice with which the answer was given (‘They’re my family, you see’) was final deterrent to further pressure or condolence. Nursie, of course, except that her age was pathetic in itself, needed no sheltering from Angela. She was strong in her weakness, would always fight for her own hand. Even Lady Roundelay had once said of Nursie that she reminded her of that hymn whose final line was ‘I hope to die shouting the Lord will provide’ (Nursie, one felt, might rely on the Lord in the last resort but would put the family through its paces first, and shouting, at that.)

  It was her mother’s sister, Helen Calcott, who had once said to Angela, ‘I always thought it was hopelessly out of date for daughters at home to have no grievances’, and then, ‘You know, my dear, you ought to have been called Ruth. It’s a warm, dark name, and you have such a singular capacity for pity’.

  The family once settled, and not until they were, for his timing by now was instinctive, Musgrave brought in coffee. Lady Roundelay had for years refused to make it herself: she felt that, as with salads, she ought to have theories and phobes about its concoction in which eggshells and attar of roses figured, or the alternative alarmed and unintelligent watching of a glass container to rise up, call her blessed, and explode, but after considerable pondering she had come to the remorseful conclusion that she wasn’t that sort of woman. If the coffee was good that was all she asked of it, if it was not she said so, and another possible combination of quantities, brands and containers was tried out.

  From ten o’clock to ten-thirty, and seldom later, these days, the exodus from the drawing-room began.

  Aunt Jessie went first to bed, whether of choice or as a general act of mortification nobody knew; gathering up her work she would pause in the doorway as a visitor might leave the lounge of an hotel with the bulk of whose inmates she was as yet imperfectly acquainted, and say ‘Well — good-night, everybody’. The response was a little like that of the piano, in that some of its notes were muffled and others completely dumb. The next departures were Miss Sapphy and Miss Amy. As they would not proceed upstairs together an indefinite period of mutual, covert watchfulness set in, punctuated, if the pause became too prolonged, by sotto voce messages to their niece, who passed them to each aunt. It was aunt Amy who commonly gave way first, leaving the field to aunt Sapphy, who, pouring her marbles back into a lacquer bowl, would jauntily announce ‘I think I’m for my downy’.

  Sometimes Margaret accompanied her, sometimes, having stacked her notebooks and postcards into a satchel, she left with her mother. The men followed on, the time of their exit contingent upon the state of their lit pipes.

  When the room was deserted, and not until then, Musgrave would come in, remove the coffee tray, plucking cups and saucers from their customary nooks and crannies, and in the summer months drawing the curtains, of which there were four pairs to be dealt with, counting the Lacquer Room window (in winter he dealt with them between courses at dinner). He would then extinguish every bracket light, standard and table lamp, run his eye computingly over the result, mentally seeking with a meditative cough (augh) for the never yet discovered forgotten duty, and tray in hands disappear to his own quarters.

  In the upper storeys, the serried rows of golden windows were flicked into darkness until the moon took charge, flinging over the house its small change of silver.

  Delaye slept.

  CHAPTER IV

  1

  As with all large households, the occupations and idleness of each member of the family tend to weave themselves into a pattern as unchanging as the movements of the cast in any play. So, at Delaye, it was usually possible to forecast at any given hour the whereabouts of anyone, which, though useful when the telephone rang, was not helpful in any other respect, as the rooms being many and large and the outbuildings and grounds innumerable and larger, by the time Musgrave had located the person called up, the telephone sometimes went dead before that person’s arrival. It was a great distress to Musgrave’s orderly and conscientious mind, and, having summoned his family, he would sometimes stand, receiver at ear, emitting a deferent version of ‘She is coming, my own, my sweet’ into the instrument, reassurances which, on occasion, had to be supplemented by a shout from the flight of steps that led down to the drive, cries which were too respectful to carry far enough. His subservient yelps, punctuated by coughs of distress, made sorry hearing.

  ‘Miss Margaret! Miss Margaret! (augh!).’ Or

  ‘The telephone, m’ lady (oh dear . . . augh!).’

  The occupational pattern was only blurred at times of temperamental upset or national emergency. Family illness, on the whole, left it unchanged, owing in part to a staff that was still adequate by the breadth of a hair and to the fact that it was not seriously out of the ordinary for the old ladies to take their meals in their own room. It put more work on the servants but was a breather that Evelyn Roundelay welcomed, what with Sapphy’s exits from the dining-room, the resigned almost-speechlessness of Jessie, which convict
ed one of bad hostess-ship, and the apparent brainlessness of Amy. Sapphy, Evelyn had had explained to her in the early days of her life as mistress of Delaye, was once the clever one and the agreeable rattle of the family, and she, one must suppose, had rattled ever since out of sheer reflex action.

  But Evelyn Roundelay had escaped that antagonism with which in-law relationship is almost invariably a sine qua non through the sheer age of her aunts by marriage. You can’t quarrel seriously with three women all over seventy, and their adverse criticisms could be lumped in with the querulousness of their years, leaving your personal withers unwrung. Also, inhouses like Delaye, escape was easy. Nor had Lady Roundel to suffer the guerrilla warfare which is the attempt at divided authority; the Roundelay women were too well drilled for that, and in the last resort, too well-bred. They had for so long now rendered unto Caesar the things that were Caesar’s, which some-times, as in the present instance, created a situation on the face of it difficult enough, and which not only involved acquiescence in the arrangements of a bride over a quarter of a century younger than themselves, but more or less dependent deference to the wishes of the master of Delaye who, as in the present case, was not even a father, but merely a nephew, the younger child of a sister. Evelyn Roundelay often wondered with real sympathy what the old ladies thought about it themselves, but the Roundelays were a reserved lot, except, perhaps, her cousin-in-law, Maxwell, whose forthright explosions were doubtless more traceable to the army than to heredity. One never enquired however indirectly or adroitly; the Roundelay atmosphere was too strong for one in that respect. Besides, two of the aunts weren’t on speaking terms, a condition as far as Evelyn could gather, which had already endured for about fifty years, and which was accepted by the family as a matter of course, before which the cries of ‘Why?’ beat themselves in vain. If Evelyn’s husband ever did know the reason he had forgotten it long since. ‘Oh . . . some old woman’s nonsense . . . you know what the aunts are.’ Wherein Sir Edmund erred, for when your presence is taken for granted, kindly and unjoyfully, nobody wastes time upon analysis of your psyche. The tangible result of this social whim of Miss Sapphire and Miss Amethyst was that, unwilling to speak to each other, they were also unable to let each other alone, and contact was established by the conveyance via a daughter of the house or Lady Roundelay herself of postcards to their bedrooms, a fatigue never entrusted to the servants who were officially intended to be unaware of the breach. The whole situation was evidently too late to do anything about, if, indeed, it had ever been in time. Evelyn had once tackled Maxwell upon the subject.

  ‘Hey? Oh, those old packets. We’re a rum lot, Evelyn. Too much intermarriage. It’s a standing wonder to me we aren’t all dotty, or born with pigs’ heads.’

  2

  Evelyn Roundelay was nobody’s fool. She had come to Delaye well primed in theory through a vast quantity of assorted reading with the life she might be called upon to lead, the tastes she might have to forego, the tediums and bores she might have to suffer, the human adjustments that she might have to make and the position she must win to through means other than the purely nominal change of surname. A young woman of spirit, she had at the same time determined not to succumb too slavishly, or be overhandled by anybody, and if she intelligently and dutifully memorized the family portraits, she, of good family herself, was neither overawed by them (not even by The Hair-Comber) nor prepared to identify herself too eagerly with their originals. To be too easily pleased was as contemptible as being too difficult.

  What she had actually expected of Delaye she now, on looking back, perceived to be a blend of Pinero’s His House In Order, in which the entire family snubbed the bride as they sat round on sofas lamenting a dear departed and crushing the governess when that obviously amoral fribble played Chopin upon the piano, with perhaps a dash of Kenilworth, plus a soupçon of Cranford and a faithful maid who cooked a gingerbread Hon for you when you lost all your money, like Ralph Nickleby, ‘in one great crash’.

  And Delaye was none of these things. It was, unbelievably, and in a period of time so brief that Evelyn marvelled at it still, a home. It was no doubt the space that made for content and well-being. And it was the leisure, if that was what you needed, humming as your nervous system was with the impacts of London. The country, hitherto, had been a place to which, once a year, you migrated en masse, thus missing its guises of winter and spring entirely: or a place to which various lines ran cheap day excursions for which you saved up and made an early start that turned your inside upside down for the rest of the day, and you walked about villages, mutually estranged, and your shoes felt towny and your eyes sandy, and always at the back of your mind was the train that must be caught.

  And suddenly, one day, you became a countrywoman yourself, and were able to do the thing properly. It took months for the various implications of this to soak in. The things that space alone could give you! For the first time, all the pet animals you wanted, with appropriate accommodation for each: the fact that you could have a fête on the lawn (or even a full-sized charitable circus in a field!): that the attractive garden luxuries, the rubber swimming pools, the swing-seats, the bulbs could all find a place if you could find the money: the incredible fact that you could confidently give a garden party to a number of guests that ran into three figures instead of having to draw the line at ten and running into all of them! The blessedness of Musgrave handing tea and of the maids dispensing cake! Food and drink were the ruin of small parties in rather small houses, and one had had to be a wearing mixture of Hebe and Madame de Stael for too long . . . no wonder the art of conversation was dead! (‘What I always feel about Churchill is — you did say two lumps?’)

  Evelyn had, after her first introductory party to the county, run to her husband and gloated ‘There wasn’t one single contretemps!’ and he had been gloriously unimpressed. ‘Why should there have been?’ And the sun had shone and the grass had smelt delicious and Evelyn saw with a reminiscent glow of almost affectionate pleasure that what she had ordered at some unremembered period, of cake, iced coffee and fruit drink, had quite miraculously appeared and was being handed by anybody on earth but herself. And for the first time in her life, save on rare country house visits, she could do that which a certain type of novel, portraying a similar function, describes as ‘drifting about the lawns’, while it was now even possible to give your tongue the run of its teeth to people without your mind’s eye on hitch or domestic betrayal. Country servants, it seemed, didn’t let you down in public: they saved up their tiresome nothings for the proper indoor occasion, and as for Musgrave, he shielded you at every turn, and it took a major mishap to evoke from him a murmur, and that a low one, as, for instance, when the Archbishop’s apron came untied and hung like a portière from his left hip as he talked to Mrs. Brouncker. That had called for a conspiratorial importation of Major Dunston to the scene of the wreck and a dégagé suggestion that his Grace might be interested in a quiet and closer view of The Hair-Comber, his visits to Delaye being (most unhappily) so few.

  In those early years, Evelyn Roundelay, distinctly tipsy with enjoyment, had even dared the unconventionality of an autumnal garden party. Why should those with no gardens to speak of (though she hoped she didn’t speak too much of hers, and if betrayed into admiration, jesuitically told herself that the garden, strictly speaking, wasn’t hers, but only an in-law) be deprived of the heaven that was burnt umber and yellow ochre and old rose and mauve? Or of the sight of the apple-spangled trees? There were, of course, in September, no strawberries, and one couldn’t exactly put bowls of nuts about on tables and have people cracking them all over the paths, with Musgrave handing individual screws of salt (what fun if one could!). But she did arrange grapes in baskets and dishes, lying on their leaves, and the weather had been perfect, with a sun warmly smouldering through the trees.

  Since then, she had given several autumn parties, but, although they had obviously enjoyed themselves in a distrait kind of way at the latest party in 1
938, the guests had left at five o’clock to listen in to the symptoms of the Crisis on their wireless, and or of them, who had motored from town and was absent from her party, had later rung up Delaye to tell her, rather unkindly, that we were practically on the verge of war and that the situation was a great deal more grave than the country areas had any idea of. And then, to Parliamentary cheers, Mr. Chamberlain had flown to Munich and had brought back with him not only his suddenly beloved life and his umbrella, but a pact with Germany that should bring peace for ever. And Britannia, always the perfect lady against heavy odds, believed it, and somebody sent the Chamberlain’s pet cat a fish all to himself, in Downing street, and Evelyn Roundelay took it out in another party (fireworks, sandwiches and hot soup).

  What the bulk of England, blinded with relief, failed to see was an instructive and momentary incident in the ensuing topical newsreels in the cinemas. And that was the brand of smile exchanged by Herr Hitler and the representative of another European Power behind the back of the signing English Prime Minister as he bent to the Treaty of Munich.

  And so that blew over until the next time. But there were distinct symptoms that Britannia, though still your perfect lady, was also becoming an exasperated woman.

  3

  There was, of course, even now and after all these years, a slight kick in remembering that one was Lady Roundelay, a state which, in spite of family prophecy, Evelyn had not found to have added appreciably to the summer holiday bills. Knights’ ladies were six a penny. She had once asked her husband, when she knew him a little better, to what cause the country was indebted to him to account for this title, and he had told her simply and seriously that he believed it was a mistake, and had probably been a misreading of the list by a secretary (such things were more common than was suspected) or that the honour was possibly meant for old Edmund Rulley who had made a fortune in 1914 by supplying army huts at retail prices to the Government and then buying them all back after the war at wholesale rates for cricket pavilions for his own staffs.