Before Lunch

by Angela Thirkell

  Lord Bond when he bought the property had so altered and improved the White House that it made a very pleasant residence, forming part of the Laverings estate. Up till the beginning of the year it had been let to the widow of a retired General, and when she died Mr Middleton decided to keep it as an overflow lodging for his weekend parties or to lend or let it to friends. Sarah Pucken, the carter’s wife, was willing to oblige when the house was full and could usually produce a daughter for emergencies. Mrs Pucken had been a kitchenmaid at Staple Park before she married and knew her place to quite an alarming extent. It still pained her to feel that her husband was one of the lower class, but she fed him very well and allowed him half a crown a week out of his wages for himself. Her three elder daughters were all in service in good houses. Two were still at home and showed rebellious symptoms of wishing to go into Woolworth’s, but their masterful mother had already found a place as kitchenmaid with Mrs Palmer at Worsted for Ireen whom no one but Mrs Middleton called Irene, and had her eye on a sixth housemaid’s place for Lou. This youngest scion of the Puckens had been christened Lucasta after Lady Bond, who had with overpowering condescension personally stood godmother to her ex-kitchenmaid’s child, but it was well understood by the village that the name Lucasta was no more to be used than the best parlour.

  Mrs Middleton went down the flagged path, through the gate, across the lane and in at the White House gate. With the key that she had brought with her she unlocked the front door. To her surprise she heard voices at the back of the house and going to the kitchen found Mrs Pucken and Lou having what Mrs Pucken called a good clean. Everything in the kitchen was wet. The kitchen table was lying on its side while Lou scrubbed the bottoms of its legs and her mother scrubbed out the drawer. Mrs Middleton stopped short on the step that led down to the kitchen and was one of the architect’s mistakes, and surveying the damp scene with interest, said Good morning to Mrs Pucken.

  ‘I dessay you was quite surprised to see me and Lou, madam,’ said Mrs Pucken in the voice of a conjurer who has produced a rabbit from a top hat. ‘I was just passing the remark to Lou that Mrs Middleton would be quite surprised to see me and her, didn’t I, Lou?’

  ‘Mum said you would be quite surprised seeing her and me,’ said Lou, whom no efforts of her mother’s could bring to say Madam, although she had no wish to be impolite.

  ‘Well, I am surprised,’ said Mrs Middleton, feeling that by making this confession she might escape a repetition of the statement. ‘And,’ she continued hurriedly, ‘I was just coming to ask you to give the house a good dusting as soon as you had time, because Mr Middleton’s sister, Mrs Stonor, is coming down next week with her stepson and stepdaughter.’

  ‘There now, Lou, what did I tell you?’ said Mrs Pucken. ‘When Miss Phipps at the Post Office told me there was a letter from Mrs Stonor gone up to Laverings I said to Pucken, Depend on it, Pucken, I said, we shall be having Mrs Stonor down on us before we can turn round. So I hurried up with Pucken’s breakfast and brought Lou along with me to give the kitchen a good clean out. When did you expect Mrs Stonor and the young lady and gentleman, madam?’

  Mrs Middleton had long ago accepted Miss Phipps’s inquisitions into the mail bag and was indeed inclined to admire her unerring memory for every correspondent’s handwriting. Miss Phipps took the broadest view of His Majesty’s Post Office regulations and would always keep letters back at the shop instead of sending them up to Laverings if Mr Middleton telephoned that he was going up to town by the early train and would call in for his. More than once had she allowed him to hunt through the bag for his own letters, open them and alter a word or a figure, and if Laverings wanted to ring up any neighbour she always knew if the person wanted was at home, calling on a neighbour, or shopping at Winter Overcotes where the chemist would take a message. As she had never put her power and knowledge to any but kindly uses no complaint had ever been made and the Inspector, though he vaguely suspected something, could not put his finger on it.

  Mrs Middleton said she expected the Stonors on Saturday week.

  ‘There,’ said Mrs Pucken, sitting back on her heels, ‘it’s a good thing I’ve got the kitchen clean. Monday me and Lou can do out the drawing-room and Tuesday the dining-room and Wednesday the best bedroom and Thursday —’

  ‘But you did them out only last week, after Mr Cameron had been here,’ said Mrs Middleton, who had housed her husband’s partner and another member of the firm at the White House for a weekend.

  ‘I like that Mr Cameron,’ said Mrs Pucken reflectively, ‘and Lou wished she had his photo, didn’t you, Lou?’

  Lou giggled and set the table on its legs again.

  ‘But I couldn’t let Mrs Stonor come in here not without I give the rooms a proper cleaning, madam,’ said Mrs Pucken, suddenly becoming businesslike. ‘Come along, Lou. There’s some nice suds in the pail and you can wash the scullery floor. I remember Miss Stonor as well as if it was yesterday, the time she came down to Laverings and the Jersey was ill. Miss Stonor was up with her all night and Pucken said she had a heap of sense, madam, not like some young ladies. Mr Middleton quite took on about that Jersey, didn’t he, madam, Lily Langtry, that was her name.’

  Casting her mind back to the last visit the young Stonors had paid them three or four years earlier, Mrs Middleton thought that ‘put out’ but imperfectly represented her husband’s state of mind at the time. His anxiety for his best cow to whom he believed himself to be fondly attached, though he never knew her from her fellows, was combined with intense distaste for the medical details that his sister’s stepdaughter poured out at every meal during her attendance on the invalid.

  ‘And young Mr Stonor, he was took dreadful,’ Mrs Pucken continued, enjoying her own reminiscences. ‘The doctor come twice a day for a week and he looked like a corpse. I do hope he’s better now, madam.’

  Yes, reflected Mrs Middleton, that part of the young Stonors’ visit had not been a success either. It was not poor Denis’s fault that he had been delicate and still got bronchitis when other people were having sunstroke, nor was it his stepmother’s fault that she had been in America at the time and could not come and nurse him herself. But Mr Middleton, while generously supplying money for nurses and doctors, had deeply resented the presence of an invalid in his comfortable house. He had a kind of primitive animal hatred of any kind of illness, except his own occasional colds which were in a way sacred and drove every other subject out of the conversation. Even his wife’s rare ailments drove him almost to frenzy with fear and dislike and it was tacitly understood that no servant must be seen if she was coughing or looked pale. The result of Denis’s unlucky illness had been that Mr Middleton nearly quarrelled with his sister on her return from America and had refused to ask the Stonors to the house again. Mrs Stonor, who really loved her brother, had concocted with her sister-in-law this plan for taking the White House, hoping that at a safe distance he and her stepchildren would get on. If only Denis would keep well and Daphne would be a little less healthy Mrs Middleton thought it might do, and she looked forward to the Stonors as next-door neighbours.

  ‘Yes, he is better, Mrs Pucken,’ she said, ‘and working very hard. You know he writes music’

  ‘Yes indeed, madam,’ said Mrs Pucken pityingly, for as she afterwards said to Lou no one didn’t write music. Play the piano, or the ocarina, or turn the radio on, yes: but write, no. Then she disappeared into the scullery with the nice suds and Mrs Middleton went upstairs. The bedrooms looked spotless in spite of Mrs Pucken’s threats of cleaning. Mrs Middleton automatically straightened one or two pictures which Mrs Pucken would certainly put askew again as she dusted them, and looked out of the window. Through a little silver birch, across the cheerful flower borders and the grass, she saw Laverings comfortably mellow red in the sunlight and could almost see, through the open library window, her husband wrestling with his article for the Journal of the R.I.B.A. Her heart suddenly swelled with affection for her large, overpowering autocrat, who bullied hi
s clients so unmercifully and needed her own strength for his own weakness. How weak he was very few people besides his wife knew. Mrs Middleton thought of them. Lilian Stonor had never admitted it, but Mrs Middleton had once or twice caught a fleeting glance that told her how exactly Jack was estimated by his sister. Mrs Pucken, of all people, knew it and stood in no fear of the roaring domestic tyrant at all. As for Alister Cameron, the junior partner of the firm, she never quite knew what he knew. For ten years he had worked assiduously and untiringly with Mr Middleton, shouldering all the drudgery of the office and never putting himself forward. Beyond the fact that he was absolutely trustworthy, read the classics for his own pleasure, reviewed books on them with cold fury, and had rooms in the Temple, no one knew much about him. That he loved and admired Mr Middleton, she knew. How much his love was the protective pity that she herself often felt she did not quite want to guess. That her husband was a brilliant architect, a most unusual organizer and had an astounding gift for seizing the moment and making money for his firm she was well aware, but she feared that one serious check in his hitherto unchecked career might find him out. She had once hinted at something of the kind to Mr Cameron. He had listened attentively and then said that success could make people very vulnerable. ‘But,’ he added, ‘he will always recover himself because whatever events may do, you won’t let him down, nor, though that is a minor consideration, shall I.’ Mrs Middleton had been much comforted by this remark and she and Mr Cameron had become in a gentlemanly and unemotional way very fast friends. It was one of her treats when she went to town to have lunch in Mr Cameron’s rooms and exchange some ordinary remarks and share some unembarrassed silences before going on to a theatre, or a shop, or a hairdresser. And for her Mr Cameron would occasionally drop his pose of detached tolerance and say exactly what he thought about women undergraduates or the Master of Lazarus’s views on Plotinus, using his guest as an audience as freely as if he were Mr Middleton himself.

  She had sometimes in the earlier days of their acquaintance indulged in sentimental and romantic speculation about his past, imagining him like George Warrington, a blighting marriage or a dead romance in his background. But this pleasing illusion was dispelled one day when they were talking about husbands and wives (with special reference to Lord and Lady Bond) and Mr Cameron had said he had never yet seen anyone he wanted to marry and hoped he never would, having had his blood curdled by two aunts and a governess in early life.

  After that Mrs Middleton had with feminine perversity felt obliged to gather the nicest girls in the neighbourhood to Laverings for his benefit, but though he was only about her own age they had all treated him as an uncle at sight and flung their arms round his neck with a freedom that certainly did not betoken any serious feelings.

  In the distance Mrs Middleton could hear the stable clock chiming eleven from Staple Park and roused herself. There was shopping to be done in the village, the report of the District Nursing Association of which she was secretary to be finished, and a dozen small household odds and ends awaiting her. Alister Cameron was coming down on Saturday week, the Stonors would be arriving on the same day and perhaps he and Daphne – and then she laughed at herself for trying once more to melt Alister’s flinty heart and went off to the garage to get her car.

  2

  Guests at the White House

  On the Saturday morning of the following week Mr Cameron left the office with his weekend suitcase and made his way by underground to Waterloo. The one through train to Skeynes (for by all others you have to change at Winter Overcotes) was on the point of starting. The guard, who knew Mr Cameron, held a door open and called to him to jump in, which he did just as the train began to pull out. The exertion of jumping in and the slight jolt as the train began to move caused him to stumble against some legs and he apologized.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said the owner of the legs, a girl who was doing a crossword.

  Mr Cameron put his suitcase on the rack, looked to see whether it was a smoking-carriage, and saw with slight regret that it wasn’t. The 11.47 was always rather full on Saturdays and the only vacant place was next to the girl over whose legs he had stumbled. So he sat down in it and being rather tired after some late nights and heavy days went to sleep, or at any rate passed into a state of suspended animation which lasted till the train got to Winter Overcotes. Here some rather primitive shunting which was being done by a white horse harnessed to some goods trucks made such a noise that he woke up and found most of the passengers had got out. A young man and a woman were in the two far corners reading and the girl next to him was still doing her crossword. As he had very good long sight he could not help seeing that she had made very little progress since Waterloo and the words she had tentatively filled in were in several cases incorrect. At the moment she was struggling with 7 down, the clue to which was ‘To-morrow to… woods and pastures new (Milton), 5.’ With fascination he watched his neighbour think, frown, lick her pencil and finally write the word Green in block letters. He could hardly control himself.

  ‘I say, Denis,’ said the girl. ‘This seems all wrong. If I put Green for 7 down it makes sense all right but the letters don’t seem to fit. I mean I’d got Socrates for 5 across, because it says “This call for help contains a large parcel,” which was pretty good work, but now it will have to be Socratee. Do you think they spelt it Socratee sometimes? I mean in the accusative or something?’

  The young man, evidently Denis, said he simply couldn’t think.

  ‘Oh, but then it wouldn’t be S.O.S. for the call for help but S.O.E.,’ said the girl. ‘I expect the man that wrote it did it all wrong. Someone told me that they stick next day’s crossword up in the office, I mean the squares of it, and anyone who comes along can put in a word, so someone who didn’t know much about Greek plays put it in wrong.’

  ‘Sophocles you mean,’ said Denis.

  ‘That wouldn’t do,’ said the girl after a moment’s hard thinking, ‘unless you spelt it like sofa; because it’s only eight letters.’

  Mr Cameron could bear it no longer.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but I couldn’t help seeing over your shoulder. It ought to be fresh.’

  ‘What ought?’ said the girl, evidently willing to receive any new idea but quite at sea as to his meaning.

  ‘Green of course,’ said the woman, who had come closer to the girl and was looking at the clues.

  ‘Oh, you mean it ought to be fresh,’ said the girl, licking her pencil again and blacking in the word Fresh. ‘Well, they ought to explain properly and anyway they’ve got two letters the same. If I were the editor I’d see they did the crossword properly. Green woods is just as good as fresh woods.’

  ‘It’s really Milton’s fault,’ said Mr Cameron apologetically.

  ‘Oh, I did see it said Milton,’ said the girl, ‘but I didn’t quite get the idea. Thanks awfully. Could you do any more of it?’

  Crosswords were like drink to Mr Cameron, who willingly took the job and finished it before the train had reached Skeynes, in spite of the Worsted tunnel where the railway company, in accordance with a tradition dating from the days of oil lamps, refused to put on any lights and the carriage windows were obscured with a sulphurous deposit that did not melt away till the train was half-way down the valley on the other side.

  ‘Well, thanks awfully,’ said the girl as the train slowed down for Skeynes. ‘We’re getting out here. Lilian, here we are.’

  The woman shut her book and put it into a small suitcase. As she stood up, Mr Cameron saw her face properly for the first time and recognized it. He got out of the carriage with his suitcase and called a porter, whom he delivered over to his fellow travellers.

  ‘Oh, thank you so much,’ said the woman, and then she looked questioningly at him.

  ‘Yes, we have met,’ said Mr Cameron. ‘It was stupid of me not to recognize you at once. My name is Cameron. I’m your brother’s partner.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Mrs Stonor. ‘I met you once a
t Laverings. These are my stepchildren, Denis and Daphne. Denis has just had influenza. Are you going to stay with Jack? I have taken the White House for the summer. I asked Catherine to send a taxi to meet us, so perhaps we could give you a lift.’

  As she was speaking they walked up the platform towards the exit, through which from the booking office surged the form of Mr Middleton, intent upon meeting his sister and her party. He was in his country squire’s dress, carrying the very large stick with which it was his habit to incommode himself on his walks. As he caught sight of his sister he raised the stick in greeting.

  ‘Lilian!’ he exclaimed, trying to throw into the name a wealth of meaning intended to disguise the fact that he didn’t know what to say.

  ‘That is very nice of you to come and meet us, Jack,’ said Mrs Stonor, ‘and if you would put your stick out of Daphne’s eye I could kiss you. Mr Cameron, would you mind helping me with the luggage? I can’t remember if I had twelve things in the van or thirteen, and the children are always ashamed of me in public’