Westwood (Vintage Classics)

by Stella Gibbons

  ‘Wonder if you’ll ever be sending up oysters again,’ said Cortway, beginning to wash the shellfish.

  ‘These are a quarter the price and just as nice – if you like them. They were Mr Alexander’s idea, they were. The water’s just on boiling,’ and Grantey went out to a cupboard in a stone passage beyond the kitchen, where the light was faintly reflected on rows of glittering shallow champagne glasses and big bulbous brandy glasses, odd cups encrusted with gilt mouldings and pink roses or banded with plain gold, and all manner of quaint French and German and Italian pottery which were spoils of the Challises’ travels.

  ‘Here you are,’ she said, bringing in a large round shallow dish whose copper lustre glowed over a dark-blue pattern.

  ‘These won’t take long,’ said her brother, putting the mussels into the boiling water.

  ‘Well, this time the day after to-morrow I’ll be at Harpenden,’ he went on, for he was fond of talking, and one of his grievances against Zita was that when she was present he did not get a word in edgeways. ‘Wonder if I’ll have as easy a journey as I did last time.’

  ‘Going on the Thursday I expect you will. They ask you to go on a Thursday.’

  He nodded. ‘I’ll get that letter off to Mother this evening. I expect she’ll be all on about not giving her longer notice. I can’t help it; there’s always such a lot to do.’

  The brother and sister took it in turn to pay a monthly visit to their aged mother, who lived in a tiny cottage on the outskirts of Harpenden in Hertfordshire on the allowance which they sent her from their wages and her old-age pension. She was nearly ninety, and of a lively and adventurous turn of mind and body, and never hesitated to rebuke them sharply if they failed to pay the strictest attention to her instructions and comfort. She liked to know at least a week in advance when to expect her son or daughter, in spite of the fact that the visits had been an unvarying custom for fifteen years. Seraphina and her children and the little Nilands all took a feudal interest in old Mrs Cortway, and every Christmas she sent the children hideous pen-wipers made of black and purple wool.

  ‘Well, I’m sure I hope there won’t be a raid while you’re gone, for I can’t work that old stirrup-pump,’ said Grantey (Cortway was Number 1 on a party which included Mr Challis and Zita; they were responsible for the defence of the helpless, ancient, beautiful mansion should incendiary bombs set it on fire).

  ‘They won’t come while I’m away; I’ve asked them not to. There you are, that’s the lot,’ and he began expertly on the bearding of the mussels.

  Upstairs, Alexander and his friends had arrived, and were warming themselves at the fire in the hall, a necessary proceeding after their walk across the dark, cold Heath. Alexander, apart from his liking for good food, never noticed if he were uncomfortable or not, and it never occurred to him to alter his plans with a view to his greater ease; it was quickest to walk across the Heath to Highgate, and so he walked; the reluctant Americans accompanying him, with Earl trying to figure out the exact psychological motive for this disagreeable excursion and Lev sardonically resigned to whatever might happen. But when they reached the house, their journey seemed more than worth while to them both. Earl, as he stood warming himself and gazing about the hall, was already planning a letter to his mother and sisters describing this stately home of England, while the half-Jewish Lev’s sensuous love of beauty was instantly charmed.

  ‘You certainly have a beautiful home here, Mr Challis,’ said Earl. ‘It is a privilege to see it.’

  ‘Charming of you to say so,’ retorted Mr Challis drearily. ‘Sherry?’

  Earl would have preferred a whisky-and-soda, but did not like to say so. Lev, however, said easily, ‘I’d rather have a highball, if that’s O.K. by you.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Mr Challis, thinking what an unpleasant language American was; at once low, confusing and illogical. As he poured out the drink he was wondering why on earth Alex had brought these two dull young men here, and also making a mental note to tell Seraphina to tell Hebe to tell Alex not to do it again. It would be an exhausting evening, wasted in trying to entertain them, and he would otherwise have spent it in working on Kattë. Their obvious admiration for his home did not disarm or touch him, for he was used to such demonstrations, and as it seemed natural to him that a man of genius should live in a house worthy of him, he took Westwood’s graces for granted.

  However, he was a gentleman by birth and education and this evening he was a host, so he exerted himself, and asked Earl how long he had been in England, and whether he did not find the climate trying, and soon there was a general conversation between the Challises and Alexander and Earl, but Lev did not take much part in it.

  As he sat in a great chair, made from oak so ancient that it was black, with back and seat padded by a tapestry of large red roses and green leaves worn threadbare in the passing of three hundred years, he was thinking about the room in New York in which he had grown up; with the smell of the chemicals which his father used in the photographic business permeating the close air of the apartment, and the clang of the elevated railway sounding always in his ears, and its lights gliding at night across the dark, hot room in which he slept.

  It’s queer, he thought (as he leant back in the chair which a cousin of the infamous Duke of Buckingham had given to an ancestor of Mr Challis), how different places can be. If anyone’d asked me when I was a kid if I thought I’d ever hit the high spots I’d have said, sure I will, and meant it too, but I never figured on being in a place like this. I didn’t know there were such places outside of the movies. And yet it isn’t like on the movies, either. It’s smaller.

  And he sat there, with his small melancholy dark eyes hardly moving except to turn from one lovely and ancient object to the next, with his long legs in their pale drill trousers extended on a rug from Persia whose faint reds and greens blended with the English roses on the great chair, and the Duke of Buckingham’s cousin himself could not have kept more still or seemed more reserved.

  Cortway came in and announced dinner and then retired, for nowadays they waited on themselves.

  Mr Challis conversed with everybody in his musical voice as if from an immense height on the top of a mountain on a very cold day, though what he said was not noticeably dictatorial or condescending, and Seraphina laughed and talked and was like the sun in the valley. Lev could not take his eyes from her, although he kept in self-defence a sarcastic half-smile on his lips. Earl led the conversation round to books, for he was sure that so cultured a man as his host must like to talk about books.

  ‘In the intervals of my military dooties,’ said Earl, smiling round upon the company with a display of superb teeth, ‘I have been reading, I might almost say studying, a book by a famous modern Chinese philosopher, Lin-Yutang. Have you come across The Art of Living, Mr Challis?’

  ‘A bold title,’ said Mr Challis. ‘Yes, I have glanced at it.’

  ‘Isn’t he the man who says we all ought to be old rogues?’ inquired Seraphina. ‘I think it’s a divine idea myself; I’m too ready to be an old rogue.’

  ‘It is essentially a masculine philosophy,’ said Earl, turning to her and looking shyly into her laughing face for some likeness to Hebe. ‘I cannot imagine it applying to – to – ladies.’ (He had not liked to say ‘your sex, Mrs Challis.’)

  ‘Oh, do you mean you can’t imagine women sitting around being old rogues while other people do all the work? I think you’re too right, myself, most women are never happy unless they’re being martyrs, don’t you think? But I’m sure I’m a natural old rogue.’

  ‘So is Hebe, I think,’ observed Mr Challis, with a smile suggesting a gleam of sunlight upon a glacier.

  ‘Oh – I can’t admit that!’ said Earl, laughing and going red, and flashing his spectacles from one to another. ‘Alex, can you admit that?’

  ‘Hebe? I should think so. I haven’t read it, but I think it describes her very well,’ said Alexander absently. ‘Seraphina, aren’t these real pea-nuts?�
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  Seraphina made a graceful gesture towards Lev. ‘Yes. Aren’t they divine? I’d forgotten how good they were. Lev brought them.’ And her large eyes danced kindly upon him.

  ‘Would you like some chocolate?’ he asked. ‘I can get some if you would.’ His deep musical voice was not congruous with his unprepossessing face.

  ‘I daren’t eat it, though it’s too sweet of you, but my grandchildren would adore it,’ said Seraphina, who had no false shame about Barnabas and Emma. (Mr Challis refrained from outward wincing, but inwardly he winced hard.)

  ‘I bombed them up this evening with candies,’ said Lev.

  ‘It’s too angelic of you,’ said Seraphina. ‘They always eat all their ration in one go, and then poor Alex’s too. Hebe won’t let them have hers.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ said Alexander seriously.

  At this moment Zita came in with coffee. She made better coffee than anyone in the house; far better than Mr Challis, who went to the most terrific pother with special earthenware saucepans from Paris and a very difficult sort of chicory that no one else had ever heard of, and exact calculations as to when to add the coffee to the water, and goodness knows what, and then produced a correct but unexciting beverage hardly worthy of all the fuss. Zita boiled water in a little black saucepan, and then threw in handfuls of coffee, saying carelessly, ‘It is easy – you chust make it strong enough,’ and out came a blazing-hot, fragrant black liquid worthy of Brillat-Savarin at his best. This annoyed Mr Challis, and Grantey said it was a waste of coffee.

  ‘Thank you, Zita,’ smiled Seraphina, and went on, as she began to pour out the coffee into Japanese eggshell cups decorated with gilt flowers and grey birds, ‘no one makes such good coffee as Zita. These Americans have come all the way from New York and Swordsville, Ohio, just to taste your coffee, Zita. Aren’t you flattered?’

  ‘Oh, Mrs Challis! You are choking!’ exclaimed Zita, her eyes moist with delight and her face changing with emotion as she glanced eagerly from the smiling Earl to the unsmiling Lev.

  ‘Not a bit of it. Isn’t that so?’ to Lev.

  ‘Sure,’ he nodded, taking his cup from Zita and smiling unwillingly down at her. He was not attracted. How well he knew that quivering responsiveness of the German Jewess! But she’d bawl you out if she got mad, he thought, sipping the coffee. Now this Challis dame, she’s got class, and she’d never bawl you out. She’d laugh all the time, even – I like a dame that laughs.

  ‘Zita?’ said Seraphina, with the coffee-pot poised over a cup. ‘You’ll stay and have some?’

  ‘Oh, no thank you, Mrs Challis. I haf to go to my club, dey expect me. I am to make a speech this efening.’

  ‘Is that so?’ said Earl respectfully. ‘May I ask what is the naturr of your club?’

  ‘It is the Free German Club in Swiss Cottage. I go dere two three times in a week. We read papers and haf discussion. Dis efening I open a discussion on Stresemann.’

  ‘Should be vurry interesting,’ said Earl. ‘Maybe I’ll have the pleasure of hearing you some time.’

  ‘Dot iss very kind of you, but I am not good speech-maker. Still, I do my best. Now I must go. Good night, Mrs Challis, sank you. Mr Challis. Mr Niland. American soldiers. Good night.’ At each name she put out her hand and each person had to give it a little shake, and when she came to the ‘American soldiers’ she smiled at her small joke, and they smiled too, while Earl wrung her hand almost painfully. Then she hurried away, leaving a pleasant impression.

  ‘She’s a good little soul,’ murmured Seraphina, lighting a cigarette at the flame Lev held out for her, ‘and rather wonderful, too. Her people are Jewish. They lived in Hamburg, and – oh well, it’s a beastly story.’

  They were all silent for a moment, watching the smoke from their cigarettes or staring at the floor.

  ‘Well, that’s what we’re here for,’ Earl said brightly at last.

  ‘You may be. I’m here because I got caught in the draft,’ said Lev, very dryly. ‘Mrs Challis, I hate to break up the party, but Earl and me haven’t got a late pass to-night. Thank you for a vurry pleasant evening, but we’ll have to be going: is there any chance of a taxi around here?’

  ‘Just stand in the middle of the road and shine a torch on your uniform,’ said Seraphina.

  Mr Challis, who often had trouble with war-time taxi-drivers because of his remote and haughty manner, looked annoyed, but everyone else laughed and Lev thought again how lovely – in the American sense of the word – his hostess was.

  ‘Well,’ observed Earl as he and his friend were riding homewards, ‘in my opinion we have passed a most instructive evening, as well as a mighty pleasant one. It is a privilege not many G.I.s get, to be received as guests in a real histawrical English home.’

  Lev said, in the slow voice that meant he was thinking something out, ‘Oh, sure. They were swell. But that joint – when I think about what most places are like, most places you and I’ve been in all our lives, well, maybe not you so much, but me – I get mad thinking about it. It’s got class, anyone can see that, but it’s dead on its feet, too.’ He was silent again for a moment. Then he said suddenly, ‘But it has got class. It’s beautiful.’

  9

  As Margaret travelled home in the bus every evening, she was conscious of the enormous labyrinth of dark streets stretching away on all sides until it ebbed out in the little houses and unmade roads under the Downs in the south and the Chiltern Hills in the north, and it seemed to her that danger, the danger that had always lurked in the alleys and old houses of London but which had been banished into a few dark, poor neighbourhoods by the modern street-lighting and the modern police-force, had returned to the whole city with the coming of the blackout. The stealthy footfalls and muffled figures that haunted the pages of old novels were reappearing in this battered London of the nineteen-forties: again murders were done in the dark, and people waited until there was moonlight before going to dine at one another’s houses, just as they used to do two hundred years ago. Those words of Winston Churchill’s, a darkness made more sinister by the lights of a perverted science, returned to her again and again as she watched the searchlights sweeping and probing the dull night skies; and although there was a fearful fascination in her mood and her thoughts, she was relieved to open the front door every night and step into the ordinary, brightly lit hall of her home, and to shut away the silent, darkened city with its endless maze of houses. It is an underground life that we live, and I have escaped out of the maze by going to ground in it, she would think, as she stood, letting her hat fall from her hand while she gazed unseeingly into space, and she longed for the spring to come with long blue twilights and the almond blossom budding along the leafless branches.

  Then she would go slowly upstairs, thinking of the feast of pleasures and sightseeing that would unfold before her when those light evenings came; the music that she would hear and the theatres she would go to, and the bright rough surfaces of the pictures in the art galleries that she would visit on Saturday afternoons.

  The school was situated in a peculiarly depressing neighbourhood which had once been a handsome, stately residential quarter but was now rapidly deteriorating into a slum. The houses were large and solid, with fifty stairs from their front gardens to their attics, and their grey or cream façades were now discoloured and peeling. They no longer had railings or gates to protect their privacy, and their large windows were either boarded up because they had been blown in by blast, or covered with strips of paper. Cats and dogs and children darted in and out of the defenceless gardens, and trod down what little grass survived, and fragments of newspaper blew into the dusty hedges of privet or laurel, and lodged there until they became yellow with age. Behind the dark windows glimpses of objects in the rooms, as if in an aquarium, could occasionally be obtained; a large bronze statuette of three girls in peasant dress, or an elaborately carved overmantel laden with vases filled with artificial flowers; or, more rarely, a shelf of books that looked as if t
hey were loved and read, and hyacinths growing in a glass.

  Margaret tried not to let her thoughts dwell upon the number of ugly and useless objects that must be collected together in the square half-mile of Curtis Park, Highbury, for the picture depressed her and actually made her feel physically confused. She hurried every day through those long, graciously curved avenues and crescents, for the ghost of the leisurely, spacious, orderly Victorian life that haunted them had no power over her imagination.

  The numbers of the Anna Bonner School for Girls had increased considerably since its return to London from Worthing, where it had established itself in two large houses belonging to an elderly relation of its founder. Many of the secondary schools were still evacuated, and pupils who would have gone to them went to the Anna Bonner instead; as a result, it now had nearly two hundred girls, and still they came. The houses on either side of the school building (which suggested a chapel, with its rusticated stones and heavy gables) had been taken over to accommodate the new pupils, and the classes had grown so large as seriously to reduce the amount of individual attention that could be given to each girl. As individual attention was one of the traditions of the school, Miss Lathom, the headmistress, had set herself to deal with the problem by making two extra forms, consisting of the overflow from other classes, and putting two new mistresses in charge of them. One of these mistresses was Margaret.

  The type of child which attended the Anna Bonner had changed in the twenty-six years that had elapsed since the First World War. The school had begun as a private venture in the ’eighties, modelled upon the famous Frances Mary Buss Schools in Camden Town, and its first pupils had been the daughters of prosperous shop-owners, dentists, business men, or Civil Servants, with a few doctors and parsons; but as the years passed, and Highbury and Curtis Park steadily deteriorated and the big handsome houses were turned into flats and then into tenement houses and the doctors and dentists made money and moved away to newer and more fashionable suburbs, the differences between the Anna Bonner and the secondary schools became less marked.