Seventeen of us sat down at the kitchen table at half past six and my stepfather poured out cider for us, and orangeade for Betty’s children. Belle Frye’s baby was put to sleep upstairs. I couldn’t think of her as Belle Draper, and haven’t ever been able to since. Martin Draper had been a silly kind of boy at school and he still was silly now.
My stepfather carved the turkey and my mother the ham. Everyone was talking about Challacombe Manor having been sold to the people called Gregary.
‘The son’s going to run the place,’ my stepfather said. ‘Tax fiddle, I dare say.’
You could see that Miss Pritchard didn’t know what he was talking about, and you could see that she suspected he didn’t know what he was talking about himself. In his gossipy way he was always referring to tax fiddles and how people had made a fortune and what price such and such a shop in the town would fetch. The fact that he’d mentioned income tax evasion in connection with the Gregarys didn’t mean that there was any truth in the suggestion. Even so, the reference, coupled with the information that Mr Gregary was in the motor-components industry, established the Gregarys as people of a certain kind. Carving the turkey, my stepfather said that in his opinion Challacombe would be restored to its former splendour.
‘They haven’t the land,’ Mr Frye pointed out, for he himself farmed eighty acres of what had once been the Challacombe estate.
‘It couldn’t never be the same,’ Joe added.
Plates of turkey and ham were passed from hand to hand until everyone present was attended to. My mother said that people must take vegetables and start, else the food would get cold. A more lively chatter about the new people at Challacombe broke out as the cider was consumed. Two of the Gregary daughters were married and living in some other part of the country, a third one was at a university. The son was the apple of his parents’ eye. The father owned a grey Daimler.
The old range which had been in our kitchen all during my childhood had only the week before been replaced by a cream-coloured Aga. The acquisition of an Aga had been my mother’s dream for almost as long as I could remember. I think she’d grown to hate the range, lighting it every morning with sticks and paper, the struggles she’d had with it during the war, trying to burn wood instead of coal. But I’d been sorry to see it go. I tried to stop myself being like that about things, but I couldn’t help it.
‘To the birthday girl,’ my stepfather said, raising his glass of cider. ‘Many happy returns, my best.’
It was that that I didn’t care for in him: I wasn’t his best, my mother was. Yet he’d say it casually, wanting to pay a compliment but overdoing it so that you didn’t believe him, so that you distrusted him.
‘Matilda,’ other people said, holding up their glasses also. ‘To Matilda.’
‘Oh, my love!’ my mother cried out, getting up and running round the table to kiss me. ‘Oh, little Matilda!’ I could feel the warm dampness of tears as her cheek came into contact with mine, and the touch of her mouth, reminding me of childhood. It was a long time since my mother had kissed me.
Everyone made a fuss then, even Martin Draper and Joe and Arthur. I can still see the sunburnt face of Colin Gregg, and his pale smooth hair, his eyes seeming to laugh at me as he wished me many happy returns. For a split second he reminded me of my father.
Betty said the turkey was delicious because she could see I was embarrassed by all the attention. Belle Frye said the next thing after a twenty-first was getting married. She reminded us that she’d been married herself within a fortnight of becoming twenty-one. She giggled and Martin Draper went red because everyone knew they’d got married in a hurry. She’d been terrified at the time of what her father would say, but to her surprise he’d taken the whole thing calmly, pointing out that there were worse than Martin Draper, reminding her that he’d just inherited the Bennett’s Cross mill. It was Mrs Frye who’d been upset, unable to find consolation in her son-in-law’s inheritance of a mill. Belle deserved better, she’d said.
‘There’s that chap on the haberdashery counter,’ my stepfather said, winking his good eye all round the table, resting it for a moment on Roger Laze in order to stir up rivalry. ‘Keen as mustard, that chap is.’
I knew he’d say that. As soon as Belle Frye had mentioned that the next thing after a twenty-first was a wedding I knew he’d refer to the chap on the haberdashery counter, a pimpled youth with no roof to his mouth. It was typical of my stepfather that he’d notice a counter-hand’s interest in me. He’d repeatedly mentioned it before. It was typical that he’d mention it now, in public, assuming I’d be pleased that everyone should know I had an admirer, not thinking to himself that no girl would want even remotely to be associated with an unattractive shop-boy. It wasn’t teasing, even though he winked: it was an attempt to be kind. My father would just have teased. He’d have made me blush and I’d have been angry and would have complained to my mother afterwards. It seemed silly now that I’d ever minded.
‘Delicious, this stuffing is,’ Betty said. ‘Eat every scrap of your ham,’ she warned one of her children, with a threat in her voice.
‘Tip-top ham,’ my stepfather said.
‘I’ll always remember the day Matilda was born,’ Joe said. ‘I nearly got sacked for letting a heifer wander.’
‘A beautiful autumn,’ Miss Pritchard said quietly, ‘1930.’
I was six weeks early, my mother said, a fact she’d told me before. She’d been over to Bennett’s Cross in the trap and had had to pull hard on the reins when the pony had taken fright at a piece of newspaper on the road. It was that that had brought me on.
‘Old Ashburton’s funeral the day before,’ Arthur said.
‘I never knew that.’ I looked at him, interested at last in the conversation, for it wasn’t important that I’d been six weeks early or that the autumn had been beautiful. But it did seem strange that in all my conversations with Mrs Ashburton it had never become established that the man she talked so much about had been buried the day before my birth.
‘Big old funeral,’ Arthur said.
Miss Pritchard nodded and I could see the memory of it in her face. She wouldn’t of course have attended it because the Ashburtons and she wouldn’t have been on any kind of terms, there being nothing to connect them. She’d told me that when I’d asked her once; she’d explained that to people like the Ashburtons she’d been just a schoolteacher, adding that she’d only been invited to Mrs Ashburton’s tennis party because everyone else had. But she’d have drawn the blinds of the school-house and would have waited in the gloom until the funeral had gone by.
I watched her as she ate her turkey and ham. I watched her thinking and remembering, not taking part in the conversations around her. She was slight and fragile-looking, wearing a brown suit with a necklace of beads falling on to a brown jersey. She’d retired about eighteen months ago; it was impossible to believe that we’d ever considered her unfair.
‘You’re looking lovely, dear,’ Mrs Laze whispered across the table at me, leaning and poking her head out so that no one else would hear, for she was a woman who rarely spoke. The story was still told that she’d shot off Roger’s foot during the war so that he wouldn’t be called up, but now that the war was over it was increasingly difficult to visualize the scene and I began to think the rumour wasn’t true. They both still said that an accident had happened when he was setting out to shoot rabbits.
‘Thank you, Mrs Laze.’
I wasn’t looking lovely, just ordinary in a lavender-coloured dress, my hair straight and reddish, freckles everywhere. Betty and Belle Frye were far prettier than I was, as they’d always been. And Betty’s girls were prettier than I’d been at their age. My face was uninteresting, not quite plain, but too round, too lacking in special characteristics. I greatly disliked my hair and always had.
‘D’you remember the day you kept us all in, Miss Pritchard?’ Colin Gregg said, laughing. ‘The entire top class?’
‘Long fields of barley and of rye
,’ Martin Draper said, laughing also. ‘An abbot on an ambling pad’
Miss Pritchard laughed herself. She’d taught Joe and Arthur too. Roger Laze had been a favourite of hers, she’d never liked Belle Frye. She used to shout at Martin Draper because he couldn’t understand things.
‘Who’s else for ham?’ my stepfather cried out, on his feet again, waving a carving knife about. ‘Ham? Turkey? Orders taken now, please. Pass up the plates, young Martin.’
‘The builders moved in today,’ I heard Roger Laze saying in his quiet voice, answering a question Miss Pritchard had asked him. He was referring to Challacombe Manor, and I imagined the builders shaking their heads over the place, over the broken windows and the leaking roof and the floorboards that gave way when you walked on them. ‘D’you remember that day?’ Belle Frye shouted down the table at me, and I smiled at her and said yes, knowing she meant the day we’d climbed in through a window.
‘Go round with the cider, love,’ my stepfather murmured at me because my mother and Betty were busy seeing to the vegetables.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I whispered back at him apologetically, feeling I should have noticed that no one was attending to people’s glasses.
‘No matter,’ he said.
I don’t know what I wanted then. I don’t know what birthday present I’d have awarded myself if I’d been able to, October 2nd, 1951. When I’d left the Grammar School it seemed natural to work on the farm, and I preferred it to the other occupations people suggested to me. My stepfather said he could get me into Blow’s and my mother wanted me to try for a position in the accounting department of the Electricity Board because she said I was good at figures, which I wasn’t. She used also to say it might be nice to be a receptionist in the Hogarth Arms Hotel. Miss Pritchard said I should become a teacher.
But I liked our farm. I liked it all the year round, the cold dairy on icy mornings, the clatter of cans and churns, driving in the cattle on a warm afternoon, working the sheepdogs. I didn’t mind when the yard was thick with muck. I didn’t object to the smell of silage. I even liked the hens.
Joe did all the rough work, clearing drains and the hedging and muck-spreading. My mother helped, especially at hay-making. Everyone helped then, even my stepfather; Colin Gregg and Betty came over, and the Fryes and the Lazes. More than anything else, hay-making reminded me of the past. Belle Frye and I used to run about when we were children, trying to be useful but really being a nuisance. I remembered dinnertimes, pasties and meat sandwiches in the fields, and cider and tea. My father used to eye the sky, but it always seemed to be fine then, for just long enough. ‘We can laugh at it now,’ he used to say when rain came and the hay was safely in.
On my twenty-first birthday I kept thinking of my mother and my stepfather becoming older in the farmhouse, my stepfather retiring from Blow’s and being around all during the day. It was the same resentment I’d had of him when I was a child, before he married my mother, but of course it wasn’t so intense now and it wasn’t so violent. Yet it felt all wrong when I contemplated remaining with them in the farmhouse. It felt as if I’d married him too.
I opened my presents when we’d had our trifle, and I felt that everyone had been generous. Miss Pritchard had given me a cameo brooch which she used to wear herself and which I’d often admired. There were even things from Betty’s children. My mother and stepfather had bought me a sewing-machine and Betty a clock for beside my bed, and Belle Frye a framed photograph of Trevor Howard, which was a joke really and typical of Belle Frye. Joe and Maudie had brought honeycombs and Mrs Laze and Roger a set of make-up and scent. There was another parcel, wrapped in red tissue paper and tied with a bow. It contained an eggcup and a matching saucer, and my stepfather said they came from the youth in Blow’s. I didn’t believe they did. I believed my stepfather had wrapped up the eggcup and saucer, thinking I’d be pleased if he pretended the boy had sent them. I felt awkward and embarrassed; I’d no idea what to say.
We played games with Betty’s children afterwards, Snap and Snakes and Ladders. Roger Laze sat next to me, too shy to say a word; I often wondered if he was in pain from his foot. At a quarter past nine Betty and Colin Gregg had to go because it was long past their children’s bedtime, and Joe and Maudie said they must be getting along also.
‘So must I,’ Miss Pritchard said.
She refused a lift with Colin and Betty and I said I’d like to walk with her because the night was beautiful, glaring with moonlight. I could see my mother thought I was silly to want to walk a mile and a half with an old schoolteacher who was being silly herself not to accept a lift when a lift was going. It was typical of me, my mother was thinking, like not having a more suitable twenty-first birthday party. Yet that walk through the moonlit lanes was the happiest part of it.
‘Well, Matilda?’ Miss Pritchard asked.
I knew what she was talking about. I said I didn’t know; just stay on at the farm, I supposed.
‘You’d be quite good with children, you know.’
‘No.’
‘Oh, well, perhaps you’ll become a farmer’s wife. You could do worse, I suppose.’
‘I don’t want to marry anyone.’ The square face of Roger Laze came into my mind, and the face of the youth in Blow’s. ‘I really don’t.’
‘People often don’t until someone comes along. Mr Right he’s called.’ Miss Pritchard laughed, and then we talked about other things; in particular about the new people at Challacombe Manor and what a difference it would make having that big old house occupied again.
Mr Gregary was a stout man and his wife was exceedingly thin. Their son was much older than I’d thought he’d be, thirty-seven as it turned out. They called him Ralphie. His brown hair was balding, and as if to make up for that he had a moustache. It was extensive but orderly, like a trimmed brown hedge in the pinkness of his face. He was broad and quite tall, rather clumsy in his movements.
All three of them came over to the farm one morning. They’d driven down from London to see how the builders were getting on and they came over to introduce themselves. Neither my mother nor I liked them.
‘Cooee!’ Mrs Gregary called out in our yard, standing there in unsuitable shoes and clothes. Her husband and her son were poking about the outhouses, pointing things out to one another as if they owned the place. They were dressed in tweed suits which you could see had been put on specially for the occasion; Mr Gregary carried a shooting-stick.
‘Forgive the intrusion!’ Mrs Gregary shouted at me when I came out of the byre. Her voice was shrill, like a bird’s. A smile broke her bony face in half. Her hair was very smart; her lipstick matched the maroon of the suit she was wearing.
‘We’re the Gregarys,’ her husband said. ‘Challacombe Manor.’
‘This was the home-farm, wasn’t it?’ his son asked, more modestly than his parents might have, less casually.
I said it had been and brought them into the kitchen, not knowing what on earth else to do with them. I was wearing fawn corduroy trousers and a fawn jersey that was darned and dirty. My mother was covered in flour, making a cake at the kitchen table. She became as flustered as I’d ever seen her when I walked in with the three Gregarys.
They were totally unlike their predecessor at Challacombe Manor, seeming a different species from her. As my mother cleared away her cake-making stuff I kept imagining Mrs Ashburton frowning over the Gregarys, bewildered by them and their conversation. In a humble way that annoyed me my mother apologized because the sitting-room wasn’t warm, giving the Gregarys to believe it just happened to be that on this one particular morning a fire hadn’t been lit there. I don’t ever remember a fire being lit in the sitting-room, which was a room that smelt of must. The only time I remember anyone sitting down in it was when my father entertained a man from the taxation authorities, going through papers with him and giving him whisky.
‘Now please don’t put yourselves out!’ Mrs Gregary shrilled. ‘Anything does for the Gregarys.’
‘We’ve been pigging it up in the house all morning,’ her husband added, and he and his wife laughed over this, finding it amusing. The son laughed less.
‘You could do with tea, I’m sure,’ my mother said. She was cross with me for bringing them into the kitchen to find her all red-faced and floury, but what could I have done? Her hair was untidy and she was wearing a pair of slippers. ‘Put out the cups, Matilda,’ she ordered, finding it hard to keep the displeasure out of her voice, worried in case the Gregarys thought it was directed at them.
‘So you’re a Matilda?’ the woman said, smiling her bony smile. ‘What an enchanting name!’
She’d sat down at the table. The two men were poking about the place, trying to work out what the kitchen had been like when the house had first been built. They murmured about an open fire and an oven in the wall. They glanced up the steep back stairs that led straight out of a corner of the kitchen. They even opened cupboards.
‘There’d have been a wheel there,’ the son said, pointing at the Aga, ‘which you turned to operate the bellows.’
His father wasn’t listening to him. ‘Structurally in splendid nick,’ he was saying. ‘Not a dodgy wall, I’d say.’
‘More than you could claim for the manor!’ the woman cried, her sudden shrillness making my mother jump. ‘My God, the damage!’
‘It’s been a long time empty,’ my mother said.
‘Dry rot, wet rot, you name it!’ cried the woman. She had four rings on the fingers of her left hand and two on her right. It seemed a mistake of some kind that she was coming to live in Challacombe Manor, like an absurdity in a dream.
‘We’ll be interested in buying land,’ Mr Gregary revealed. His head was very neat, with strands of hair brushed into its baldness. His face had a polished look, like faintly pink marble. The flesh of his chins didn’t wobble, but was firm and polished too. His eyes had a flicker of amusement in them.
The Collected Stories Page 78