Westwood (Vintage Classics)

by Stella Gibbons

  ‘Oh, Mrs Wilson –’ Margaret began. ‘Is that you? This is Margaret. No, nothing’s the matter, it’s only that I wondered if you would look after a little girl, the daughter of a friend of mine, for a fortnight – let her come and stay with you, I mean. She’s a backward child – you know – but very sweet, and the housekeeper has been injured in an air-raid last night, and her father hasn’t anywhere to send her.’

  ‘I would have, and glad to, Margaret,’ replied the unruffled voice of Mrs Wilson from two streets away, serene in the possession of a genuine and cast-iron excuse, ‘but my sister’s staying with us for a fortnight and we’ve only got the one spare room. I’m ever so sorry. Whose little girl is she?’

  ‘Mr Fletcher’s – he came to your New Year’s Party. The little girl’s a sweet little thing, really, but of course she can’t be left, and he’s at the office all day –’

  ‘Yes. It is awkward nowadays, isn’t it, with everybody called up and working in factories, there’s no one to do all the little odd jobs, like looking after kiddies and invalids,’ said Mrs Wilson cheerfully. ‘Have you tried the W.V.S. or the Citizens’ Advice Bureau?’

  Margaret explained the circumstances more fully, and as civilly as she could, but it was clear that there was going to be no help from Mrs Wilson.

  ‘You see, Mother doesn’t want the responsibility,’ she ended in a lowered tone, and Mrs Wilson answered:

  ‘Yes; well, it is a bit of a responsibility, isn’t it, somebody else’s child and a backward one at that; I expect he will find it difficult to get anyone.’

  When Margaret replaced the receiver she had the disagreeable conviction that she had worked herself up into a state and quarrelled with her mother and flung herself upon the mercy of Mrs Wilson (for whom she had some contempt as an entirely commonplace woman) without having helped Dick Fletcher in the least.

  Her mother was sitting by the open French windows of the drawing-room with the evening paper, enjoying the gentle sunset light and faint breeze coming in from the garden. She glanced up and said sarcastically:

  ‘Well, of course she’s going to have her?’

  ‘Of course she isn’t. I don’t know what to do about it; I’m at my wits’ end.’

  ‘That’ll be your permanent place, my dear, if you start taking on other people’s troubles,’ observed Mrs Steggles, glancing discontentedly at the clock. Mr Steggles was late, as usual.

  Margaret sat down and swung one foot idly. Her mother returned to the paper.

  ‘Aren’t you hungry?’ she asked at last, without looking up. ‘We won’t wait for Dad, if you are.’

  ‘Not very,’ said Margaret, indifferently. ‘What have you been doing to-day?’

  ‘The usual things. I went to the pictures with Elaine this afternoon.’

  ‘Who on earth is Elaine?’

  ‘Mrs Piper. Her name is Elaine Sybil,’ retorted Mrs Steggles.

  ‘Gosh!’ and Margaret forgot her cares in a giggle. ‘Er – was it a good film? What did you see?’

  ‘The Four Feathers. Rather far-fetched, I thought. All about the desert.’

  ‘I think I’ll just ring up –’ muttered Margaret, getting up and hurrying out of the room.

  ‘Hullo?’ said Dick Fletcher at the other end of the line. ‘Oh, Margaret. I didn’t recognize your voice at first.’ He sounded tired and depressed.

  ‘Dick, I’m awfully sorry,’ began Margaret tragically, ‘Mother says she can’t have Linda; she thinks it would be too much responsibility. And I did ring up that neighbour of ours, Mrs Wilson, and she would have had her, but they’ve only got one spare room and she’s got someone coming to stay. So I think the best thing –’

  ‘It’s awfully good of you to have taken so much trouble, but our next-door neighbour’s come to the rescue,’ he answered, sounding a little surprised. ‘She’s going to come in and spend most of the day with Linda, and someone from the W.V.S. is coming in every morning while she does her shopping.’

  ‘And I’ll come over every evening, in case you want to go out,’ interrupted Margaret, rather resenting the intrusion of these other women into her new Westwood, and determined that they should not take her place.

  ‘Will you? That’s very sweet of you,’ he answered, and the words did not sound conventional. ‘But won’t it be an awful drag for you?’

  ‘No, I shall like it. What time shall I come over to-morrow?’

  ‘Oh, about twelve, if you will. I’ll have lunch nearly ready. I’m quite a good cook.’

  She made a sympathetic sound but it did not express a quarter of the sympathy she felt for poor Dick, blundering about among the frying-pans. She was not one of those women who admire domesticated men, and she felt impatient when they invaded the kitchen, a place she herself was far from fond of.

  ‘Good-bye till to-morrow, then,’ he was saying. ‘You are a brick. Good night.’

  Margaret was strongly tempted to ring Zita up again. But pride prevented her; she felt that she really could not allow Zita to be so rude and unjust without showing some resentment, and accordingly she went to bed without knowing whether Barnabas had found his monkey or not.

  This proved to be the right way of dealing with Zita, for the next morning before Margaret set out for Brockdale she rang up, laughingly dismissing her annoyance of yesterday and eager to take her friend for a walk on the Heath. There was some return of her irritation when Margaret said that she had to go out, but Zita had so much of interest to tell that she suggested coming round for half an hour and walking up with Margaret to the station.

  Margaret carried deck-chairs and cigarettes into the garden, and soon Zita arrived, very smart in a linen dress with enormous sleeves, and they sat down in the sunshine to smoke and gossip.

  Mrs Steggles watched them from her bedroom, where she was pottering about, with disapproving eyes. Talk – talk – talk! That little creature hadn’t stopped waving her hands about and chattering since she came into the house. Mrs Steggles did not despise Zita, having been impressed against her will by Zita’s manners (which were those of a wider world than Mrs Steggles’s own) and her clothes when she first came to the house to tea, but she thought her odd, and an unsatisfactory friend for Margaret; one likely to put ideas into her head and increase her arty fads. We never see anything of Hilda nowadays, thought Mrs Steggles. I suppose she’s too busy running after all her precious boys.

  Margaret listened eagerly to all that Zita had to say; Grantey had taken to her bed, and Mr Niland’s great picture was safe, after all; Piccy had been found covered in white dust, but otherwise undamaged among the rubble, and, most exciting of all (very sad, of course, dreadful, really), Mr Niland had gone; left Mrs Niland and the children without saying when he was coming back!

  ‘Perhaps nefer,’ concluded Zita, looking bright as a button under a stiff little straw hat like those worn by mashers in the ’nineties.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Margaret thoughtfully, after a pause. Her first excitement was replaced by shame at her own appetite for sensation. She envied Hebe and disliked her, but no one who is sérieuse can hear of a broken marriage without regret, although she did not experience that personal shock which she would have felt if anything so unlikely as the breaking-up of the Challises’ marriage had occurred.

  ‘I am not, I am glad, it serves her right, she hass no soul for art, she iss only a mutter,’ said Zita scornfully. ‘It iss wrong that she should be married to a great painter und so he hass gone to a mistress.’

  ‘Oh, Zita, do you really think so? How dreadful!’

  ‘Of course I think so. Where else should he go? He hass some cultured woman, beautiful and with much sex, und to her he hass gone.’

  ‘But Mrs Niland – Hebe – is beautiful!’

  ‘She hass no sex appeal. All my boy friendts think so. I have ask them all, und they all say the same. Men know such things.’

  Margaret had nothing to say to this, though it occurred to her that such unanimity of judgment was suspicious. Sh
e would have liked to discuss with Zita the difference between sex appeal and beauty, a point which had puzzled her as often as it puzzles most good women, but she was shy and did not wish to sound ingenuous, and it was getting on for the time when she must leave for Brockdale. She was just opening her mouth to say that she must go, when –

  ‘Und Dick Vletcher – who iss he?’ suddenly demanded Zita, leaning forward with a roguish look and smiting her lightly upon the knee. ‘All day you were with him, alone. He iss your boy friendt!’

  ‘Oh, no –’ exclaimed Margaret. ‘He’s years older than I am, he’s a friend of Dad’s.’

  ‘And a friend of Margaret’s too!’ said Zita archly. ‘Why haf you not told me about him? You close your heart to me, Margaret,’ and her marmoset face relapsed into extreme dejection. ‘Can you not trust me with your secrets?’

  ‘It isn’t a secret. I only went over to his house to help look after his little girl because his housekeeper was hurt in the air-raid.’

  ‘But you did not tell me!’

  ‘Well …’ said Margaret, not liking to remind her that every attempt to explain over the telephone had been angrily interrupted.

  ‘You are in lof with him,’ announced Zita, surveying her with narrowed eyes and looking more like a very smart monkey than ever.

  ‘No – no –’ laughed Margaret soothingly, content that if there must be suspicion it should alight upon Dick Fletcher rather than upon Gerard Challis.

  ‘But you like him – and he attracts you – he iss a man attractive to women,’ persisted Zita, following her into the house.

  ‘No, he isn’t, Zita, really. I suppose you don’t know anyone who would have a little girl who is backward but a pet to stay in their house for a week or so?’

  But Zita would not give her attention to the question; little girls who were backward did not interest her, except as subjects for sentimentally horrified comment, and she made some vague answer which was no help at all. They walked to the station still gossiping, and Margaret eagerly listened to all that Zita knew about the notices of Kattë; she herself had ordered copies of the Observer and the Sunday Times to see what the dramatic critics of those papers had to say about the play, and she had both concealed in her handbag; she would read them when she was alone in Westwood-at-Brockdale.

  She had some difficulty in soothing Zita when the latter learned that all her evenings for the next three weeks were to be occupied, but she managed it somehow; and Zita parted from her at the station with frowns but not serious frowns.

  Margaret sat down in the train with a sigh of relief, and gazed absently out of the window. Really, Zita was a great trial; her first pleasure in that lively society was gradually being replaced by exasperation at continually having to placate and soothe her; and yet, whenever she went to Westwood-at-Highgate, its charm was so strong that she felt any sacrifice was worth while to keep her right to visit the house. She went off into a day-dream about its age and beauty, reflecting that she did not yet know in what year it had been built, as Zita was not interested and Margaret had been too shy to ask Mrs Challis. However, under her arm she had Lloyd’s History of Highgate, and she intended to make time to read it while she was with Linda.

  Dick went out immediately after lunch. He took her presence there for granted, she thought, and seemed preoccupied and rather impatient; she did not like him as well as she had on the previous day and began to regret strongly that she had offered to come over every night for the next three weeks – every night, without any respite or refreshing visit to her own Westwood to break the strain. But Linda seemed really glad to see her, shambling forward with a sweet vacant smile and confidently slipping her cold hand into Margaret’s, and standing happily by her side to wave good-bye when her father went away.

  When she was settled with her sand-heap in the garden, Margaret turned eagerly to the notices of Kattë.

  The Sunday Times, after referring to Sarah Bernhardt and Janet Achurch, arrived at the conclusion that Miss Schatter was so greatly aided by her physical affinity to the type portrayed in Kattë that she deserved less credit for her creation of the part than she might otherwise have done, and the word it used to describe the play was ‘painstaking.’

  The Observer, without referring to Janet Achurch or Sarah Bernhardt, said much the same thing.

  Margaret put down the papers with a feeling of dismay.

  Why was it? Why had the critics, who had devoted so much respectful attention to his work before the war and even during the first two years of the war, suddenly become almost impatient with it, finding nothing, or almost nothing, to say in praise of it, save that at least it dealt with passions and predicaments which will endure as long as the human race, and not with merely topical matters or with propaganda? Was it that the mood of England had changed, and that the people had seen and experienced such horrors at first-hand that they did not want to see tragedy at second-hand for which there was no particular reason and in which they did not believe?

  It was true that the public for thrillers and shockers was larger than ever, and that people would pay any price to see tragedies by Shakespeare or Ibsen, but in the first case the horror was softened in its effect by the unreality of the story within its rigid conventional frame, and in the second case the tragedies were great works of art.

  Then were Gerard Challis’s plays not great works of art? She had always believed that they were. But if he could not make people believe that Kattë’s tragedy was inevitable, then they only felt impatient instead of being moved; it was like the last straw on the camel’s back to go to the theatre nowadays and be asked to grieve over something that need never have happened if the people had only pulled themselves together.

  They didn’t even try, she thought, getting up and walking out into the garden. They simply sat down under everything, and went from bad to worse. You can’t feel sorry for people like that, you want to shake them. The reason why you feel so sorry for poor Maggie Tulliver is that she did try; she tried so hard, in spite of being weak and passionate and loving, and she was betrayed by her own weakness, and you feel she was good, in spite of her faults, and so you’re all the sorrier for her.

  After all, she thought, standing in the French windows and looking at Linda without really seeing her, I need not like all his plays equally well, and Mountain Air and The Hidden Well are beautiful. Nothing can take them away from me.

  But I do wish the critics liked Kattë.

  Then she turned from the window and sat down at a rickety little table which had certainly never been designed for concentrated work, and opened her notebook and Lloyd’s History of Highgate.

  She had bought the History as she was hurrying home on a close thundery evening during the previous week, from a little shop which sold old clothes and firewood, as well as a few books whose covers were so filthy that she hesitated to touch them; but as she was gingerly opening the nineteenth-century sermons and biographies of worthy nonentities long dead, she had suddenly seen this large old volume, once handsomely bound in dark green and still having a picture of the Highgate Archway stamped in worn gold-leaf upon its cover. No price was marked inside the cover, but when an ill-tempered woman came out into the shop in response to Margaret’s entrance, the price was given as one-and-sixpence, and she carried the dignified old wreck of a book away.

  During the last few days, she had only had time to glance at its wood engravings and the portrait of Coleridge (looking very inspired and uncomfortable) which was its frontispiece, but now, with a whole long sunny day in front of her, she looked forward to finding out something about Westwood-at-Highgate.

  Slowly she turned the thick cream pages with their large legible type, noticing here and there some quaint verse bearing upon the village’s history, or some paragraph in smaller type quoting from the ancient records of Hornsey and Harringay; pausing to read a footnote or study the drawings of long-vanished mansions and churches since covered by brick and mortar; and dreaming over the pastoral lovelines
s which, in spite of their stylized appearance and their stiff conventional figures of gentlemen and peasants, the pictures one and all conveyed.

  But she could find no reference to Westwood-at-Highgate, for part of the index was missing, and so were some fifteen pages from the middle of the book, and she was forced to conclude that the house had never played an important part in the life of the village; and had never been considered striking enough even to deserve a picture in the History of Highgate.

  It was disappointing, but she read on, her mind darting into the past like a swallow drinking from a fathomless tarn. The quiet minutes crept by; the sunlight poured through the thin silk curtains in a glory, and every now and again the wind-bells tinkled faintly on a passing breeze, and the sound died away. She read eagerly, impatiently, taking the words like messuage and hundred in her stride, guessing at the meaning and using it to build up the picture that was slowly growing in her mind. The history was not easy to read, because it gave so many sociological and geological and historical facts in their own technical language and no attempt had been made to combine them into a general description conveyed in smoothly flowing phrases; the book had been written in the ’eighties, when readers possessed both leisure and attention to give to their serious reading and expected, when they bought a book, to give both; and so the picture which began to form itself in her mind had not the specious clearness of one drawn in a reader’s mind by that modern hybrid, a novelist-historian-antiquarian, but had something of the validity and unexpectedness of truth; it reared itself upon a base of facts plainly recorded, and the more attractive to her because of that plainness. Nevertheless, her imagination began to work.

  Solitude; a solitude of thick forests, occasionally broken by glades and small meadows where the swineherds had their huts; little hovels as close to the earth, and as defenceless, as roots or mossy stones and as much a part of the landscape; a solitude whose rustling stillness was unbroken for days at a time by any sound of human life save the distant note of a hunting-horn. The huts and the fields and churches and even the castles were small in this Haia-gat (or hamlet-at-the-entrance-of-the-enclosure) of nine hundred years ago, and the people themselves seemed to be rising in their armour and straight red and blue clothes that had once been bright but were now stained and dim with dirt and age, out of a darkness of rotten leaves and putrid straw and filth; the peasants wore tunics made from animals’ hides, with the hair left on them. Nothing was clean, as we know cleanliness, except the flowers and leaves and, in the monasteries, the Altar of God. The Name of Jesus was familiar in men’s mouths, and His Name and Spirit burned in this world of nine hundred years ago. Sweet Jesus, they prayed. If a child sickened, it usually died, and so did men and women. There were miles and miles and miles of that fresh, shadowy, awesome forest, horrida sylvis, as the Romans called it; the forest swept up to Hampstead and over Harringay (or Harringhaia, ‘the-enclosure-of-the-field-of-hares’); the forest rolled in blue-green waves in the summer, in brown-purple leafless waves in the winter, over the hills to the north of London. And here, riding through the endless forest along narrow tracks marked by wolf-droppings, came the Bishop of London, who owned these lands, to hunt the wild boar; the purple-black shape rooting busily in the tangles of blackberry bushes, shaking down their white flowers in spring and their red leaves in autumn as he dug for roots to eat. The bristles of the boar’s forelegs were matted stiffly with mud. Margaret thought of the Prince-Bishop’s feet in leather hunting-boots, and the dagger in its chased silver sheath at his side. Every article of his dress had been made by hand and was precious in its rarity; every shoe, hat, glove, was precious in those days because there were so few of them and they took so long to make and so long to send to the few hundred shops in Europe. She remembered a pyx that she had once seen, made in 1520, that had been slightly irregular in shape, beautiful, and with the pathos of an object made by hand and displaying the hand’s fallibility. In the towns – she thought – in the towns the streets were not paved and there were no lights at night. On the long summer evenings, in the streets of those wooden towns built round a small castle of wood and stone, the children must have played in the dust. Perhaps a bell rang from the stone church, tiny and dark, with one Latin book locked away in a wooden chest. They were Christians, those people.