You telephoned the Norminster butcher and the line was engaged, and that meant more expense: having got on to him, you found that he did not deliver as far out as Delaye but only to the village of that name. Two alternatives then presented themselves: one, to free the gardener’s boy to go to the village and rescue the meat from the public house, or to telephone the Norminster wine-merchant to call at the butcher before he brought along Major Dunston’s burgundy.
The tradesmen of the market town were immensely obliging both to Delaye and each other, and by a little dovetailing and manoeuvres it was possible to establish a sort of endless chain — respectable dope traffic — by which a commodity passed through as many as three hands before being finally delivered by fourth. As on the morning when Lady Roundelay, telephoning for a pair of ducks, was promised by the fishmonger that they should be sent to the baker who would take them to the grocer with the Delaye order of loaves and by the grocer be put into the butcher’s van with the ordered joint and the stone of flour. Truly, the townsman does not know how the countryman lives. Nor would he believe it if told, and small blame to him, thought the mistress of Delaye: or, as the manager of the long-established grocery at Norminster remarked with respectful facetiousness, ‘Delaye by name and delay by nature’.
Having run her daily bread to earth with as much worrying as hounds put in over their fox, Evelyn Roundelay believed for several months that she would then be free to enjoy the sight of the old city in peace. Wherein she erred, for no sooner did the rumour spread that she was spending the afternoon or the day in Norminster, than requests for the execution of small commissions came to her from all over the house. Even aunt Jessie was apt to want more wool at that tiresome little shop down a pernicketty little turning that led to the bridge under which flowed the river Lex, or to have the newsagent (who was poked away near an alley by the Guild Hall) complained to because of a forgotten delivery of the Parish Magazine, while even the Major was apt to shout a request from the ground to Evelyn as she was descending the flight of steps into the drive that he’d run right out of cobalt or rose madder and if she didn’t mind very much — and he’d settle with her in the evening, and that meant a detour of the cathedral and a turning into Hogsflitch Lane where, for over a year, Evelyn had lost herself completely and handsomely, and from which she had been twice rescued by the Church of England, in the persons of a small choir-boy and the Archbishop himself, gracefully stepping the cobblestones on the way to his car that waited in Morionyard at the end of the lane to convey him back to the Palace of Normansmead two miles out of the city.
That short walk had been awful. To begin with, the Archbishop’s name had escaped her entirely, and she was uncertain as to whether, having remembered it, it was customary to address him as Archbishop or as Doctor Mimms-Welwyn. Servants here had a most unfair advantage in being compelled to call him Your Grace. The ecclesiastic brick, of all others, was probably the most damning to drop; also, the Archbishop evidently didn’t remember if he remembered her or not, and that ruled out any secular exchange about his flowers and his wife — if he had one. The only churchly question that Evelyn really wanted to know (What is The Feast Of The Assumption?) was no doubt an unfortunate choice, for once you became involved with the Virgin Mary (if it were her) it was always a nice question to determine whether the conversation was seemly or not in mixed company. And if of his kindness and benevolence he parted from Lady Roundelay with a blessing, and said Pax Vobiscum or something of that sort, what was the correct answer? ‘Thank you very much’ or ‘The same to you’? She had muttered to herself, ‘High cockalorum to you, sir,’ and then, quite insanely, she thought, ‘and it would be very High cockalorum indeed. With incense.’ But the Archbishop had let her down lightly (one really must get in to the cathedral services somehow, and oftener), and raising his hat had even offered her a lift, and she had lost her head and asked him to Delaye, and, respectability having been established, his face humanized, and he had begun what promised to develop into a chat, until his secretary leant out of the car and reminded him that he was expected at the Palace at four-thirty. Lady Roundelay tumbled into the artists’ requisites shop, resolved that very night, as she put it, to mug up the Archbishop with the help of her husband.
3
She was to discover, gradually, contentedly, that Morionyard actually led out of The Portcullis where the famous antique shop stood: that Keep way faced the taxi-rank and that Vintnerstave Street led in, and was a short-cut to, Stone’s, the wine merchant. And it was fun finding out that Regent Street was a shameful but picturesque slum whose windows almost met and kissed and whose every beam and board had been aspired to and haggled for by wealthy touring Americans for some half a century.
Sometimes, pausing on the narrow pavements to stare like a tripper at some antick goblin carved in wood grey’d by the weather and winds of six centuries and keeping still its blurred, derisive grin above the windows of a wireless shop, Evelyn Roundelay would think ‘I am on holiday, and soon there will be trunks and the train to think of, and a present to the landlady! and I shall never see all this in the winter or spring’, and then is would sweep over her that Norminster was now her county town, these her shops, her tradesmen — even the Archbishop of whom one read in the newspapers was hers in the sight of God!
She was never entirely to lose the incredulous mood, would always remember its potency even after that day upon which she became an accredited daughter of the city through being greeted by the real residents, those tall, flat, neat women from surrounding estates and houses who had also ‘come in’ for their weekly paying of housebooks, catering and diversion. As with the residents of any other town and particularly of cathedral cities, these women were unmistakable twelve yards off; their clothes were well made and of excellent material and never looked smart, the stockings on their long, slender ankles were never silk but of good wool mixtures, their shoes useful and strapped, their hats basonic, their ages fair to middling. When lingering in pairs to talk they spoke in clear voices as of those having authority: they made Lady Roundelay feel sartorially and mentally flippant: they knew, she sensed, the difference between a Dean and a Canon (to say nothing of the Feast Of The Assumption): they could drive cars and breed dogs and shout the right noises in the hunting field. Above all, they knew and told you where to lunch and tea in Norminster.
Coverley’s, for instance, had been ‘going off’ for some time now, and ‘we always go to Silver’s, in Norman Street, they do all our fêtes and wedding breakfasts and the hunt ball, and so on. It’s rather expensive downstairs, but they’ve a very decent two-and-six luncheon upstairs — as a matter of fact I spoke to Silver about starting that two years ago. We’ve put quite a lot of work in his way at one time and another.’
This was reassuring, kindly and massive, but Evelyn insubordinately wanted to make her own discoveries, one of which was that perfect agreement with the conclusions of Lady Shelter in regard to the catering of Silver was not universally felt by the neighbours. ‘Yes, oh they’re quite good, but too ornate for me, and I can’t bear that downstairs room of theirs. Gets too full from one o’clock on and then they keep you waiting for your food and you miss the two-thirty bus.’ Mrs. Holland, personally, always lunched at the tea-rooms over Greensleave, the Fortnum and Mason of Norminster. ‘All the girls know one’, generously intimating that, this oblique advice taken, the waitresses would extend their protection to Lady Roundelay in time. ‘And their cream scones are delicious.’ Mrs. Galbraith, on the other hand, patronized Tatfield and Winter, the principal drapers in Norman Street, because of the view over the river from the restaurant upstairs. Evelyn mentally blackballed Tatfield and Winter for permanent use, though as a good Norminsterite she would go there once. Meanwhile, with smiles and thanks, she walked the highways and byways, eating now at The Cathedral Café, which, though terribly Ye Olde also happened to be three hundred years of age, and to possess a tiny lavatory which had been constructed out of a powder closet, and now at some
raftered Inn, drawing no attention to itself as its faded sign creaked in the breeze, and where the service was entirely twentieth century in its unsociable badness, and the roast beef of the nineteenth in its luscious cuts.
In those beamed and panelled parlours Lady Roundelay sat, interested, unaccompanied, revelling in her midday dinner (which is so infinitely removed from that attenuated refinement, a luncheon), worrying a little as to what social solecism she was committing in the eyes of the county. She was, and knew it, no pioneer, no trail-blazer, and to shock the community was an undesired feat.
Back at home she would do penance, sleuthing her husband to have her latest discovery in public hospitality dispassionately translated.
‘The Armourers’ Inn? I didn’t think any of us went to that, oh it’s perfectly respectable, but I wouldn’t make a habit of it, it mightn’t be understood. It’s more a man’s place. The farmers feed there, and the wholesalers on market day, and so on. Yes, the ordinary is excellent. I remember the present landlord’s father well when I was a boy, remember the Pater driving me in in the trap and my first taste of ale — ’. He was off. ‘The winter was so hard there was snow right up to the sills of the smoking-room, they had to dig a way in.’
Tenaciously she brought him back from the purlieus of reminiscence.
‘And then I found the most heavenly little black place made of boards right down on the water, Edmund. I came on it quite by accident when I was more lost than usual, and it’s witchlike with eld, and they gave me a huge plate of wonderfully fried fish — and nobody in the world’s found it but me.’
‘Down Linklighter Lane,’ said Sir Edmund, unerringly, ‘you can’t go there, you know. It’s no place for your likes. That’s a favourite haunt of the bargemasters and waterside folk.’
‘Have I almost been murdered?’
‘Lord, no. But it’s not fair on the usual customers. You’d either hear a lot of language you never dreamed existed, or these fellows be so stunned by the sight of a lady in their midst they’d go off their food. As a matter of fact that little place — no, it’s got no official name, it’s known as Punshions — did have a shocking bad reputation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century when the women of the town used it. If you’d looked on the wall by the ingle you’d have seen a bit of a sailor’s skin nailed there.’
‘How lovely.’
‘Looks like a thin piece of black wood, by now. Yes . . . many a good fellow has lost his all, at Punshions . . . and woken up to find himself in the next world. You stick to Silver’s and Greens-leave.’ And she had, within reason, finding an amusement in herd movement, by which she would pass the Squire’s wife paying the check as she herself entered, in catching sight of Mrs. Holland vanishing into Greensleave’s, her person hung with parcels, punctually at one o’clock: in finding at Silver’s on the table she had chosen a handkerchief with Mrs. Brouncker’s initials on it, and inspecting the plates to guess what that lady had had for luncheon, in being told at shops that she had just missed Lady Shelter. . . .
It was, so to speak, the same only more so at Christmas. For then (why was one so prone to enchantment at trifles?) the afternoon callers, braving the dusk in bootees or arriving by private car, would, once in each other’s lit and warm drawing-rooms, pass on the rumour of where to get the best cards and which shop specialized in what seasonable luxury, and when and how to order, as though, thought Evelyn happily, we were a fort in a siege or a town in a famine, handing on the essential tip, hint . . . and going into Norminster to confirm information and finding it all true, even down to the Christmas cards (Lady Shelter had admired those hunting-field studies very much, your ladyship), and even discovering a card that Mrs. Brouncker had described, still unsold in the rack . . . and being moved, also, to leave one imprint upon the shop by placing another card slightly crooked and finding it still askew when one next came in. . . .
‘It’s too much,’ thought Evelyn, ‘either I’m not quite right in the head for enjoying it all so or it can’t last.’ That was, perhaps, on the morning she had discovered that Norminster if common with so many other provincial cities possessed its own exclusive delicacy, inimitable (though efforts were made all over the country). Pork and veal sausages that were known as Puddings and which weighed anything you like from four pounds to four ounces; smooth, creamy, of a savour indescribable, they knew not the word gristle, nor were their inn’ards made repellent by cubes of fat. They were the making of any Christmas hamper, but extra care must be taken as to the exact calculation of despatch for when a Norminster Pudding goes bad it does it grandly, imperially, as befits a king among meats.
Or perhaps one might date the childish gusto of Lady Roundelay from that afternoon when she broke down a local tradition and smashed a goddess upon the cobblestones.
Everyone in Norminster knows Dolly’s. It is not, as the name suggests, a nineteenth century disorderly house, but a cake shop and confectioner, which sells boxes of toffee with an etching of the cathedral upon the lids, thus combining high living with higher thought. Dolly’s cakes are never less than fourpence each, and when you have eaten one you have had breakfast, dinner and tea for they are jammed, marzipaned, whipped-creamy and some times fenced about with thin squares of plain chocolate, the whole fortification held together by a silken ribbon. Should you ask for ‘something plainer’ you are brought a sullen and opulent slab studded with cherries, chopped almonds, sultanas and angelica. But its top is not iced. Honour is vindicated, and the strict letter of your demand fulfilled.
Before the name of Dolly even the most sensible women buckle; cakes of an equal elaborateness could be bought elsewhere, there was no caterer in the city whose cups of tea cost as much, Greensleave’s scones were definitely nicer, Tatfield and Winter’s coffee was indisputably finer to any discriminating mind, yet their combined efforts availed them little. They were not Dolly. To buy your children’s birthday cake at Dolly’s put you and your party into the right category at once; to ‘run to’ her sweets (Dolly was a wealthy and rotund little man who was a member of the Town Council) was to admit both to extravagance and the best that money could buy. For such a purchase you laughingly apologized by implication to your friends to put them at their financial ease, or if that wasn’t the idea even God will never know what was.
Evelyn, bemused in advance, found herself tacitly concurring about Dolly’s to the county, also found that she had never yet darkened its pale-green doors. ‘I must not’, she told herself, ‘be disparaging through contrariness, nor will I admire of hypnotism.’ She ate the cakes and found them mawkish: she drank the tea and even the coffee (that ultimate test of an equitable mind) and found the one about the same as everybody else’s and the other open to a strong suspicion of essence, though the dollop of cream on the top put one slightly off the scent. Finally, she took home those sweets and fondants in their signature sacs of pale green with a Dutch doll depicted upon every one, and found them fade and tallowy. She had won in fair fight. Dolly’s was a rumour and a delusion. It would endure, possibly as a landmark, certainly as a tradition in the ancient city from one generation to another until some Cromwell of the future sacked it and all its works; bogusly picturesque (it dated from 1910), battening on cash and reputation to the end, it would impose and intimidate.
And even that was fun.
CHAPTER VII
1
THE business of making friends had offered another territory for the exploration, the serene inquisitiveness, of Evelyn Roundelay. It was a question, looked back upon in after years, which should have bulked much larger and more formidably to any young married woman than in point of fact it ever had, involving as it did the uprooting from a London to a country home with the sudden bestowal upon herself of the bigger rôle of chatelaine, the translation from carefree ingénue to leading lady.
Here, again, her mixed reading acted at once as help and hindrance, steering her clear on the one hand of those gaffes to which a new environment alone can commit the latest brid
e, but rendering her too prone, on the other, to postulate types rather than to allow for a normal humanity. By this method, the Vicar even before introductions, was an eternal Vivian Foster who intoned ‘Yerse, I think so!’: the curate was bespectacled, consumed Bath buns and was the dart-board at which all the local spinsters (frustrated) shot their knitting-needles. She saw him clearly before ever she saw him at all, mincing with mild, foolish benevolence along the road to Delaye, round his attenuated neck a loving muffler, mittens upon his clasped hands, his feet shod to all eternity in the carpet slippers of the faithful, their uppers sprawled with purple heartsease. Alternatively, he was the muscular Christian of the manly damn who clapped choir-boys upon the back (though never chucked them under the chin, Delaye, somehow, wasn’t that kind of village), and for them got up boxing-matches in face of much opposition to keep the lads off the village wenches. One clinch against another . . . and both Vicar and curate were, interestingly and insubordinately, none of her inventions.
The Vicar was very seldom seen at all except in the pulpit, and socially was doomed to be the kind of conventional bore that happens to so many of the laity: his sermons were impeccably respectable and contained, no matter upon what promising text he ostensibly hung his discourse, the sole idea of being good and keeping in that condition, like a crate of greengages.
The curate, Basil Winchcombe, on the other hand, had, and looked it, begun his career upon the stage, first as a marked-out member of the O.U.D.S. and later (the right manager being in front at the time of his pleasant reading of Brutus) upon the stages of endless Number One provincial theatres and one or two West-end ones as well. His sermons were sincere and sensible, but among the villagers they were felt to be so like a person talking to you that you didn’t feel you’d got your spiritual money’s worth since you could get his conversation and advice any day in your own cottage without an offertory bag in sight.
A Footman for the Peacock Page 8