VIRAGO
MODERN CLASSICS
656
Angela Thirkell (1890–1961) was the eldest daughter of John William Mackail, a Scottish classical scholar and civil servant, and Margaret Burne-Jones. Her relatives included the pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin, and her godfather was J. M. Barrie. She was educated in London and Paris, and began publishing articles and stories in the 1920s. In 1931 she brought out her first book, a memoir entitled Three Houses, and in 1933 her comic novel High Rising – set in the fictional county of Barsetshire, borrowed from Trollope – met with great success. She went on to write nearly thirty Barsetshire novels, as well as several further works of fiction and non-fiction. She was twice married, and had four children.
By Angela Thirkell
Barsetshire novels
High Rising
Wild Strawberries
The Demon in the House
August Folly
Summer Half
Pomfret Towers
The Brandons
Before Lunch
Cheerfulness Breaks In
Northbridge Rectory
Marling Hall
Growing Up
The Headmistress
Miss Bunting
Peace Breaks Out
Private Enterprise
Love Among the Ruins
The Old Bank House
County Chronicle
The Duke’s Daughter
Happy Returns
Jutland Cottage
What Did it Mean?
Enter Sir Robert
Never Too Late
A Double Affair
Close Quarters
Love at All Ages
Three Score and Ten
Non-fiction
Three Houses
Collected Stories
Christmas at High Rising
COPYRIGHT
Published by Virago
978-0-3490-0741-0
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © Angela Thirkell 1939
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Copyright © The Beneficiaries of Angela Thirkell 1961
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
VIRAGO
Little, Brown Book Group
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50 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DZ
www.littlebrown.co.uk
www.hachette.co.uk
Before Lunch
Table of Contents
Virago Modern Classics 656
By Angela Thirkell
COPYRIGHT
Epigraph
1: Mr Middleton is Alarmed
2: Guests at the White House
3: Guests at Laverings
4: Staple Park
5: Daphne goes to Work
6: Prelude to a Meeting
7: Epilogue to a Meeting
8: Hunting the Folk-Song
9: Mr Cameron is Warned
10: The Agricultural at Skeynes
11: Mr Cameron Escapes
12: Before Lunch
… Le temps adoucira les choses,
Et tous deux vous aurez des roses
Plus que vous n’en saurez cueillir…
1
Mr Middleton is Alarmed
The owner of Laverings looked out of his bedroom window on a dewy June morning. Not the large window that commanded a gently sloping view to the south of his garden, his meadows, and a wooded plain with hills beyond, but the side window to the east that overlooked the little lane. In his hand he held a letter, with whose contents he angrily refreshed his mind from time to time. Neither the mild June air, nor the beneficent warmth of the sun, could counteract the evil impression that the morning post had made. Everything conspired against him, down to the fact that the White House, whose garden marched with his own, was undoubtedly empty, so that there was no valid excuse for not letting it to people that he didn’t particularly want as tenants. Not that he disliked his widowed sister, Mrs Stonor, but her two grown-up stepchildren were an almost unknown quantity and might come bursting into his privacy with the ease of neighbours who are remote connexions by marriage and annoy him very much. All he knew about the young Stonors was that the son was delicate and the daughter, as he shudderingly remembered her, not delicate at all, and at the moment both states of health seemed to him equally repulsive.
Giving his camel hair dressing-gown a petulant twitch he walked back to the table where his breakfast tray and his letters had been put. The cup of coffee that he had poured out ten minutes ago was now tepid with a crinkling skin on its surface. It was more than flesh and blood could stand. He strode to the door, opened it and bellowed his wife’s name into the passage. No one answered. He banged the door to, spooned the horrid skin clumsily into the saucer, drank the tepid coffee to which nauseating fragments of milky blanket still clung, and looked at the rest of his post. Business, letters from the office, contractors’ estimates. He slammed them angrily down again and returned to the east window, chewing the cud of his resentment against his sister, who by her inconsiderate wish to spend the summer near him had entirely and eternally wrecked his peace of mind.
Presently a creaking sound became audible, then the clop of a horse’s hoofs at a slow walk, then a gentle clatter of harness and trappings, the encouraging voice of a carter. Round the corner of the lane came a bright blue farm cart with red wheels, drawn by a benevolent monster with long hairy trousers and a shining coat. The cart was laden with early hay, and one axle was in sore need of greasing. Perched sideways behind the monster’s hind quarters was a middle-aged man, giving monosyllabic instructions to the horse who took no notice at all, knowing by long practice exactly what his driver was going to say. On the side of the cart was painted in slanting white lettering:
J. MIDDLETON ESQ.
LAVERINGS FARM
At the sight of this equipage the watcher from the window felt an exquisite sense of peace and well-being steal over him. There are various degrees of fame. Some would give their name to a rose, some to a mountain, some to a sauce or a pudding, but John Middleton’s secret ambition, ever since boyhood, had been to have a farm cart of his own with his name painted on it. He became vaguely conscious that earth held nothing more satisfying than to look out of one’s window on a summer morning, warmed by coffee, glowing with anticipation of a visit from one’s only sister and her stepchildren, and see a blue farm cart with red wheels, drawn by an imperturbable cart-horse, driven by Tom Pucken, containing fragrant hay, emblazoned with one’s own name.
‘Morning, Pucken,’ Mr Middleton shouted from the window.
Tom Pucken looked up, showing a handsome, crafty, weather-lined face, touched his disgraceful almost brimless hat, shouted some pre-Conquest instructions to his horse, and was carried away towards the gate that led to the farm. Mr Middleton, refreshed by this encounter, took off his camel hair dressing-gown, finished dressing, and went in search of his wife. But he did not, as one might have expected, go out of his bedroom and down the staircase.
In his earnest desire to make life really comfortable for himself he had arranged his house in an unusual way. For at least four hundred years there had been a farm at Laverings and for most of that time it had been in the possession of the same family, passing sometimes to a son, sometimes to a daught
er and the husband, so that however often the name may have changed, the blood was the same. Even so the farmhouse itself had been altered, pulled down in parts and rebuilt, added to, occasionally burnt, but had kept its own spirit and the name of its original builder. When the last owner, having ruined himself by building the White House and trying to be gentry instead of sticking to the farm, decided to sell the place and go to join a cousin with a motor works in Canada, most of the land had been bought by neighbouring farmers, but the house, with a few acres round it, remained derelict.
John Middleton, a rising architect, happened to pass Laverings on a walking tour, recognized it at once as his house, but could not afford to buy it. He had a simple confidence that he would always in the end get what he wanted, a confidence which so far had never been disappointed, though a generous habit of mind and an aged mother to support made it very difficult for him to save money. For ten years Laverings remained empty and desolate. At the end of this time a very unpleasant gentleman called Sir Ogilvy Hibberd suddenly made an offer for it. The county, who disliked and resented Sir Ogilvy because he was a Liberal and not quite the sort we want (though admitting that there had been some perfectly presentable Liberals only one didn’t really know them), suddenly resolved itself into a kind of informal Committee of Hatred, with Lord Bond of Staple Park near Skeynes, well known for having voted against Clause Three of the Root Vegetables Bill, in the chair. Lord Bond, who had more money than he knew what to do with, was pushed by his masterful wife into buying Laverings, together with the White House and four large fields, while Sir Ogilvy Hibberd bought ‘The Cedars’, Muswell Hill, which had come into the market on the death of the Hon. Mrs C. Augustus Fortescue (Fifi), only child and heiress of Bunyan, First Baron Alberfylde.
Lord Bond had felt for some time that there ought to be a sound man at Laverings. What Lord Bond meant by a sound man no one quite knew, nor, apart from a strong feeling against anyone from Cambridge, did he, but a chance meeting with Mr Middleton settled his mind for him. Mr Middleton talked to Lord Bond for an hour and a quarter without stopping and Lord Bond invited Mr Middleton to stay with him at Staple Park. On Sunday afternoon he walked his guest over to Laverings to see the repairs he was doing on the house. By Sunday night Lord Bond, a little dazed, had offered Mr Middleton a long lease of the house at an absurdly low figure and promised to make all the alterations that his new tenant wanted. Mr Middleton at once decided to have the east end of the house entirely to himself, using the original kitchen as a library with the old back stairs communicating directly with a bedroom, bathroom and dressing-room, which he also used as a work-room, on the floor above. His mother, who was unwillingly installed in the country, preferred a hipbath in her bedroom and soon languished and died. Her son mourned her sincerely with the largest wreath of expensive flowers that Skeynes had ever seen, which was described in the local paper as a floral tribute, and then forgot about her, except when sentiment got the better of him.
For ten more years Mr Middleton lived alone at Laverings in great happiness, going to town from Tuesday to Friday every week, working with concentrated violence on Monday and Saturday morning and talking to weekend guests from Saturday afternoon till late on Sunday night or well into the small hours of Monday morning. During this time he set up as a very mild amateur gentleman farmer and had lately added to the little herd of cows; he already possessed the blue farm cart with red wheels whose acquaintance we have just made.
When Mr Middleton met his future wife she was an orphan and over thirty and Mr Middleton was nearly fifty, so it seemed a suitable marriage enough and they had a large wedding in London with a reception at the Bonds’ town mansion in Grosvenor Place and the bride said Thank Goodness now she need never see any of her family again. So she never did, for they lived in quite another county and hunted. Mr and Mrs Middleton had no children, but, as Catherine Middleton truly said, once one had got over the mortification it was really a very pleasant life.
So Mr Middleton went out by the door that led to his little back stair and descended to the library, a large, low, sunny room, with a French window on to the garden, lined with books, furnished with one very comfortable chair, a few less comfortable ones, three large tables heaped with books and papers, and a piano which no one ever played. He looked at the table where material for an article for the Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects was accumulating, put his morning’s post on another table and again bellowed aloud for his wife. This time his appeal met with more success, for Mrs Middleton, who had been doing a little gardening, heard his call and came across the lawn. Her husband went out onto the flagged terrace to meet her and affectionately kissed the top of her head. Not that Catherine Middleton was a small woman, but Mr Middleton’s impressive bulk, topped by a slightly bald leonine head, was apt to make everyone else look frail and insignificant.
‘How are you this morning, darling?’ said Mrs Middleton. ‘You look very nice and peculiar.’
‘I fail to see anything peculiar about myself,’ said Mr Middleton.
‘That is because you can’t see yourself, Jack,’ said his wife. ‘You really look very nice and I like you just as you are.’
Mrs Middleton did not exaggerate in calling her husband’s appearance peculiar, for ever since he had bought the farm cart, he had thrown himself vehemently into the part of gentleman farmer and, after a severe struggle with his tailor, ordered his clothes accordingly. This morning he was dressed in a blue shirt, a kind of shooting jacket in large checks with pockets capacious enough for a poacher, orange tawny plus fours, canvas gaiters and heavy nailed shoes. It is true that no gentleman farmer off or even on the stage ever wore so preposterous an outfit or wore it so unconsciously, but to go about looking like an eccentric gave Mr Middleton such unalloyed pleasure that his wife had not the heart to point out to him the marks his nailed shoes made on the parquet floor of the library.
‘I am glad you can tolerate me as I am,’ said Mr Middleton, still suspicious, ‘for at my age it is very improbable that I shall change. Had I been a younger man when you married me, Catherine, a man more suited to you in age, you might have remoulded my life, shaped me again to your liking. But you took pity on an ageing wreck, your young life twined itself round the rugged roots of a storm-shattered tree, and I cannot alter my way of living, I cannot change my spots.’
‘I do love the way you say everything twice over,’ said Mrs Middleton, ‘and I would hate you to change your spots. What were you calling me for?’
Mr Middleton’s impressive face dissolved in a flash and became as formless as water.
‘I called you because I needed you,’ he said, suddenly becoming a heartbroken child. ‘I called you once and you did not come.’
‘And then you called me again and I did,’ said his wife, whose adoration of her husband was unshadowed by any illusions about him. ‘Can I do anything?’
‘It is my sister Lilian,’ said Mr Middleton, recovering himself under his wife’s bracing want of sympathy. ‘I had a letter from her this morning. It is here, in my pocket. No, it is not. You see, Catherine, my memory is not what it was. It is on the library table.’
He turned and went indoors followed by Mrs Middleton.
‘Sit down, Catherine,’ said Mr Middleton, seating himself in the one comfortable chair, ‘and I will read Lilian’s letter aloud.’
When he had done so his wife asked him to give her the letter as it was much easier to understand things if one read them oneself. Rather offended he handed over the letter with a pained and studied courtesy which Catherine ignored.
‘That sounds very nice,’ she said as she gave it back to him. ‘The White House is quite ready and aired. It only needs the beds making up and it will be great fun to have Lilian and the children, and as she says she will bring her own maid there will be no difficulty at all.’
‘Children!’ said Mr Middleton.
‘Well, Denis is twenty-five and Daphne is four years younger, and I could be their moth
er at a pinch. And at another pinch you could just be their grandfather, I suppose. I mean if you had had a son when you were sixteen and he had had a son when he was sixteen, that’s thirty-two and you are sixty-two, so Denis could be thirty, which leaves him several years to the good.’
‘Why Lilian had to marry a retired Colonel who did nothing but die and leave her with two grown-up stepchildren, I don’t know,’ said Mr Middleton, determined to have a grievance.
‘I daresay she didn’t either,’ said Mrs Middleton placidly. ‘One usually doesn’t. Falling in love makes one do very peculiar things. Look at us. There couldn’t be two people less suited, but we simply had to get married. I do love you, Jack.’
Mr Middleton looked at his wife and his face which had been wearing an uneasy irritated expression melted to pure tenderness, a look that always pierced his wife’s heart, though she did not think it good for him to know this, so she asked when Mrs Stonor wanted to come. Her husband said next week and this was one of his working days and she must know that if he could not break the back of the day’s work before lunch he might as well retire and leave his practice to a younger man. So she laid her hand on his shoulder and went across the garden to the White House.
Before Lunch Page 1