Miss Margaret said, ‘I must make a note to get the Guides some First Aid classes.’
Miss Amy, turning out a drawer in her bedroom, looked almost as scared as on that afternoon when she had arrived at the Palace for the Archbishop’s garden party without her pocket handkerchief, and keened ‘What can we do about it? They are sure to mistake the house for the barracks . . . does the master know? Do you think one should send one’s valuables to the Bank? Would they take jewellery or only silver? But perhaps as they know us all so well . . . and they’re shut on Sundays! Or are they open, do you think, as it’s war time? Is anyone going in to Norminster to-morrow? There are the cellars, of course. They’re down very far. I hardly think a bomb would reach them. We must all keep out of the garden. Dickon mustn’t risk coming over — better call Lady Roundelay in at once, Musgrave!’ And she had stood by her window anxiously watching for the return of Miss Sapphy and Miss Jessie, whom, since eleven o’clock a.m., she might never see again.
A rather distressing incident, to Musgrave, and he sighed and reassured and aughed, and even took a couple of handsome shoe buckles of old French paste to the alleged security of his pantry.
Nursie was pottering in her room when Musgrave cautiously tapped at the door. He had consulted with Lady Roundelay as to the advisability of shocking the old woman with the news, but her ladyship (a most sensible woman, herself, always, in his admiring opinion) remarked that Nursie, already not quite right in the head, would have forgotten it in ten minutes and that that was one of the compensations of age. ‘And in any case we can’t keep it from her for ever. She’ll have to learn to wear her gasmask, and senile though she may be, she isn’t so far gone yet as to believe that it’s a cure for asthma, or a new game, or anything of that sort.’
‘Well, Nurse!’ (lightly and cheerfully does it, for the old woman: a smile, even, and perhaps a little joke) ‘It seems we’re having another war.’
Nursie said, ‘ I don’t hear anything. And I don’t smell anything, either. What’s happened to the beef?’
(These old people !) Musgrave contained himself with an effort.
‘There is no beef,’ he retorted austerely, and departed in a Maeterlinckian aura.
The Major was painting in the coach house. At the darkening of his canvas caused by the bulky figure in the doorway he refrained, it being a fellow male, from the otherwise instant and instinctive concealment of his picture, which, so profound was his exasperation with Hitler, was coming rather extra well.
‘Is it war or the telephone?’ he rasped.
‘(Augh!) War, I’m afraid, Major.’
‘Then I needn’t wash my hands yet.’ The gills of Major Dunston crimsoned and he added to the façade of Delaye a perfectly non-existent lilac bush.
Mrs. Hatchett, supervising the kitchen-maid’s dishing up of luncheon, said, ‘It’s to be hoped this war won’t make more work in the kitchen. If it goes on as long as the last one I shall have to think about making a change.’
Sue’s eyes grew big as, cook being in the second kitchen by now, she asked shyly, ‘Was Miss Angela very upset like, Mr. Musgrave?’ Musgrave was paternal in view of events and the day being already at sixes and sevens. ‘She didn’t say much, not much. Never one to show her feelings,’ he instructed the maid who knew that already better than he. ‘We must remember that Miss Angela was doubtless thinking of Mr. Stacey — ’
‘Will — will ’e ’ave to go, Mr. Musgrave?’
‘Naturally. And now I am going to sound the gong.’
3
The Roundelays were at lunch.
Musgrave, stooped to the cellaret, noted that the Major’s burgundy was running low —
‘ — us good, for Jesus’ sake’
concluded Miss Jessie.
— but he had mentioned it to the Major who perhaps had phoned Stone?
‘If that fellow Goebbels — ’ began Sir Edmund.
‘Such an odd name. I never can spell it,’ brightly capped Miss Sapphy. ‘Oh, there! I’ve left my — but all things must be forgiven me to-day.’ She was gone. Miss Jessie looked resigned. On this warm day the ever-open door that marked the wake of Miss Sapphy was pleasant rather than otherwise, but Musgrave with gentle ostentation shut it upon Miss Sophy as a protest and a species of debit note against the winter.
‘I’ve been out of all the fun to-day,’ remarked Evelyn Roundelay, ‘beetroot bed.’
‘We might think of putting those beds to sugar beet,’ affirmed her husband. ‘Where’s the joint?’ The butler murmured. Her ladyship rescued him. ‘Couldn’t get through to the butcher, my dear. If I’d gone on trying it would have cost the price of the sirloin. We shall have to live out of the garden and the shop till things get normal. It’s at times like this I’d give my soul for a store cupboard. You might try — cold tongue, aunt Amy?’
‘Is there a choice, dear? If not, of course, it — ’
‘Yes, ham or sardines and salad.’
‘Then — I think — if it’s all the same, perhaps the tongue.’
‘ — you might try to get us a rabbit, Edmund, this evening. Such a bore the shooting’s let.’
‘Jolly glad of the money,’ said Sir Edmund.
‘Oh, rather. And if it’s true the buses to Norminster have all been altered — they have, haven’t they, Musgrave?’
‘Yes, my lady, and (at present, that is) the time-tables changed.’
‘Confound ’em! That’s the worst of a monopoly. Well . . . there’s your bicycle, Margaret, but one can’t bring home the week’s stores on the handle bars.’
‘There’s the Severns’ car.’
‘Yes, we may have to cadge one lift, but one doesn’t like — but I suppose the tradesmen will send?’
Major Dunston shook his head. ‘Half of their cars impounded by the Government, they’ve even taken over Greensleave’s van. How they expect tradesmen to get a living . . . and no compensation, that I’ve heard of. It’s daylight robbery. And now it seems the Socialists have thrown in their lot with the Government.’
‘Well, that was decent of them.’
‘Decent? My dear lady, it’s not decency, it’s an eye on the next General Election. These fellows see that if they raised a stink at this crisis they’d get in dutch with even the best elements in their own party, so they’re taking the long view. It’s about the most dangerous thing that could have happened, actually, though it’s disguised as public spirit. Quite good tongue, this.’
Musgrave was murmuring. ‘My lady, Nursie . . . very much upset over there being no roast.’
‘Oh dear! Angela, be a dear and run up. We must be firm with her. Tell her we’ve got none, either. If she’d only get a little more dotty we might persuade her that a sardine was a sirloin.’
‘“But beef is rare within these oxless isles”,’ chuckled Sir Edmund gently. ‘I wonder what Byron would have made of Nursie.’
‘I hope nobody’s waited for me,’ announced Miss Sapphy flinging open the door and resuming her seat. ‘Oh, Angela! Quite a collision. What ho, she bumps. What a popular song that was. Vulgar, but popular.’
‘Same thing,’ grunted Sir Edmund, ‘the vulgar tongue — ’
‘Tongue,’ confirmed Miss Amy. ‘No, no more, thank you. Margaret, your aunt Sapphy has dropped her handkerchief.’
‘Aunt Sapphy, aunt Amy says your hanky’s on the floor.’
‘Thank you, dear.’
‘I say, mother, I had a letter yesterday from Ortrud Bohm, that German girl I was at school with — ’
Lady Roundelay smote the table with her fist. ‘No! No she doesn’t! My heart bleeds for the German Jews as much as anybody’s but I cannot face a pale fugitive running tear-stained in what she stands up in down this avenue. I’ve read horrors until I’m sick and I know everything the Nazis have done and I can’t cope with being wept over and having the old home in Hamburg or wherever it is described brick by brick and hearing that Mein Vater was suddenly not there and hasn’t been seen since, and tha
t the Liebe Mutter was raped before her eyes and my German wouldn’t stand the strain. I can only say Bitte and Danke Sehr and Sauerkraut and Mein Kampf, and I won’t, I won’t, I WON’T!’
‘God, no,’ confirmed Sir Edmund. ‘If she comes, I go.’
Margaret finished her ham. ‘I was only going to tell you what she wrote and she’s not Jewish, you know. . . . She says that she’s joined the Youth Movement and her brother’s in the army and he’s got a commission he couldn’t have hoped for in peace time as the Bohms aren’t geboren, you know, and that they’re not half so sniffed at as they used to be when they were only in trade, and she’s really seeing some men at last and is having the time of her life. She actually used some German words, so that really looks as though she might even marry now she sees it’s no good being so frightfully British. She was the one who came into the class once in a tartan skirt.’
‘Gosh . . . well, sorry I spoke. I hope she hooks some ober-leutnant — what happened in church to-day, aunt Jessie?’
Miss Jessie compressed her lips. ‘Mr. Winchcombe preached,’ she answered thinly.
‘Good!’
‘I didn’t think so.’
‘Why?’
Miss Jessie, a little offended at being pressed to give chapter and verse for an instinct and at all times inarticulate, selected, ‘It was unsuitable. Not a sermon at all.’
‘Bless him,’ said Evelyn. Internally she was girding ‘You silly old frump. I wish I’d been there!’ She said aloud, ‘What about you, aunt Sapphy?’
‘Oh, my dear, it was a spectacle, a real spectacle. Most impressive, and the Archbishop giving the news himself — we had a high old time. I know you’ll laugh, but I was reduced to tears. Quite a swamp.’
Miss Amy shot her a furtive glance. She had seen tear marks on her face at table, and Sapphy didn’t cry for nothing. This Judas-like betrayal of her own feelings as a public piece of social chit-chat riled Miss Amy. If you had a grief, stick to it. But Sapphy had always been rather like that, a fribble Mamma called her, and she ought to know, only Mamma had done it on the grand scale and been known as ‘dashing’. It closed Miss Amy’s heart the tighter.
When Musgrave had left Miss Amy after bringing the news about war she had been filled with a kind of awe, a certain excitement too after the immediate shock. Possibilities opened up of an armistice with her sister and of all that implied. No more dodging and watchfulness and timing and feeling left out by Sapphy and Jessie, who only paired together faut de mieux; sisters they all might be, but of the three Amy and Sapphy were of the blood . . . she knew; closest in character, most similar in aim and taste and conviction and will-to-pleasure. Jessie didn’t understand or want pleasure because she was religious. It was because she was plain; competition and participation were wiped out at the start, and she saved her face that nobody else thought worth saving by fixing herself on higher things that nobody was in a position to dispute. Amy and Sapphy had often talked it over together in girlhood days, before Sapphy had started that awful not speaking to one. Pleasant days . . . of outdoor games and knowing one excelled, and Sapphy with her music and the young men round the piano; outings in which rivalries if any were offset by the companionship and the reassurance that a sister stood beside you braving the same social occasion. Borrowing each other’s finery —Mamma had always been a bit chary with her own. And then, out of the blue, everything stopped between her and Sapphy. And it was over such a piece of stuff and nonsense, too: one had run the eye of conscience so closely over the probabilities all these years that they really fined down to two: that Amy had said to a Mr. Marmaduke Fletcher — of a neighbouring family — that Sapphy wasn’t free to play tennis one afternoon when she was, only Amy wanted to protect her sister’s almost certain performance on the court from exposure, because Mr. Fletcher and herself were crack players, or that Amy had eaten all the sausages one morning, thinking Sapphy had already had her breakfast in bed. One could approximately date the sausage episode because it was the morning after the Norminster Hunt Ball and breakfast in bed was a treat and a ritual and not commonly encouraged by Mamma who did any late lying there was in the family; and Amy had felt so bucked with the winter day and the overnight festivity that she’d come down for the meal. She had apologized fifty years ago for both tennis and sausages but it had only made Sapphy angrier. Regarding the sausages she had said that were not such a suggestion almost an insult it would be laughable, and as for the tennis, she had almost stamped her foot and cried that it was preposterous and that Mr. Fletcher’s company was nothing on this earth to her, in the tone of voice which finally convinced her sister that the exact opposite was the case.
And now we were at war again, and Amy longing to cling to everyone, even friends, let alone Sapphy, and sense of injustice and exasperation had taken hold, stronger with keeping.
Well . . . it mightn’t answer, even if one swallowed one’s pride. There would be such a lot to unlearn and remember: not only that one now might say things to Sapphy, but trifles like being free to go downstairs with her and not passing messages through the great-nieces. Quite a worry to memorize! And besides, if they did make it up so late in life it would have seemed to have wasted the years more than ever. They might as well go through with it, now. See it out. Take a line and stick to it. And — what would the servants think if they became friends?
But all the same, one was any moment now in the hands of God, and at any second a bomb might fall through the ceiling Jessie, as was only fair, was probably feeling the least nervous because she was used to being in God’s hands, but Amy came to them fresh . . . and even God’s hands needed time to settle down in.
She began to babble. ‘Evelyn, you won’t go into the garden again – ’
‘No. Too tired.’
‘It can’t be safe. So exposed. And Dickon. Someone ought to go to the village to give him and the boy a chance not to come any more.’
Sir Edmund looked up. ‘Eh? What’s the matter with him?’
‘Well — the raids. And don’t you think we ought to move from our rooms rather more on to the ground floor?’
‘If an incendiary bomb gets us we’re done for wherever we sleep,’ grunted Major Dunston; ‘too big a space between the roof and attic ceilings to extinguish it. Have we a stirrup pump, Edmund?’
‘Two. Use ’em for cleaning the fowl-house.’
‘Ah. Takes two to work ’em properly, of course. Better move ’em in, I suppose.’
‘Oh, I suppose so.’
‘But if the roof isn’t safe,’ persisted aunt Amy, ‘even a stirrup-cup — a stomach-pump — ’
Evelyn laughed. The Major twitched with irritation. ‘And what about the fire-engine? So far from here to Norminster . . .’
‘Keep your hair on, aunt,’ grated Sir Edmund. ‘There’s precious little to be done, in houses like this right off the beaten track, except keep your head and hope for the best.’
‘But — ’
‘Aunt Amy, please!’ Evelyn shot an apprehensive glance at her husband; she hated him to be worried and Delaye was a problem so vast and intricate that one thought about it as little as possible.
‘Yes . . . yes, but they all seem to expect the raids to begin at once.’
‘Oh no. They — ’
Bang!
Past the window fell a hail of débris with assorted clashes, throwing up as finale a generous spattered star of yellow upon the panes. Miss Jessie started and bent her head, her lips moving silently. Miss Amy screamed. Miss Sapphy for the first time in her life called out, ‘Oh my God!’ and ducked under the table as Musgrave hurried in and the men and Margaret rose to investigate, while Lady Roundelay looked resigned. This was all of a piece with the whole morning. It was Margaret who found her voice.
‘It’s Nursie’s tray,’ she explained. ‘She didn’t like her lunch, I suppose. I think practically everything’s broken except a spoon on the gravel. That’s soup on the window.’
Musgrave confirmed. ‘A little left over
that Mrs. Hatchett thought could be spared, Miss. Not enough for the dining-room. I’ll send out Sue.’
CHAPTER XVI
1
THE family dispersed, Lady Roundelay to the Lacquer Room to get away from everybody, an anti-social move which she dispassionately regarded as a sensible precaution, Major Dunston to the coach house, Sir Edmund to his stapling in the sun-filled quiet of the fold-yard. He was passed by Margaret on the way to fetch her bicycle from the old harness room; it was, she felt, up to her to keep a hand on the village pulse, she would sound the parents about those First Aid classes and knock up the school-master at his house which adjoined the playground. Nothing like immediate co-operation.
Mrs. Hatchett went into the kitchen gardens and consumed late raspberries, though it is to be admitted that she occasionally dropped a few into the basin in the crook of her arm. In his pantry, Musgrave, relaxed in alpaca jacket and adjusting the spectacles whose help he still refused himself when in the dining-room, re-read his mother’s letters. In the lounge hall, Miss Jessie, upright in a profusely carved ebony chair with a pine-apple painfully grinding into her back, read through the Parish Magazine from Send For Our Brochure of Designs in Aberdeen Granite via the Vicar’s weekly address to parishioners: (‘Dear People, once again the Harvest Festival draws near reminding us in its kindly abundance, of God’s goodwill towards us. This year, darkened as is its close by threats of war — ’, the Vicar’s words had gone to Press four days ago and were, though helpful, already out of date) to the advertisement of The Ecclesiastical Supply Co. (Telegrams: Religiocentric) which offered Communion cups in plated silver with washable lining, which Miss Jessie thought self-indulgent and ever so slightly profane. One shouldn’t think of the body’s health at such a time. If Christ had been afraid of germs where would the Church of England be?
In their bedrooms, Miss Sapphy and Miss Amy respectively leant out of her window to scan the sky for enemy aircraft and the avenue for callers, and sat in the extreme middle of the room as precaution against what the Germans might think of to send through the windows, a plan whose only drawback was that should emergency arise one was rather far from the embroidered bell-pull that would summon Musgrave.
A Footman for the Peacock Page 15