‘Your lady hasn’t any children not of her own, has she?’ said Mrs Pucken.
‘Oh, no,’ said Palfrey pityingly, ‘being as Colonel Stonor was a widower when she married him.’
She looked Mrs Pucken firmly in the face, as if challenging her to dispute this curious physiological phenomenon and such was her personality that Mrs Pucken very slavishly nodded her head in a knowing way.
‘The Colonel was very particular,’ said Palfrey, putting all the cushions askew on the sofa and chairs as she spoke. ‘Very particular indeed. I was cook there for two years before he died and I never cooked for a gentleman that was more particular. Now madam and Mr Denis and Miss Daphne they don’t hardly seem to notice what they eat, though I will say for Miss Daphne she’s a hearty eater. But what Mr Denis eats wouldn’t feed a cat, Mrs Pucken. A bit here and a bit there and as like as not leave it on his plate after all. That’s why we’ve come down here, Mrs Pucken, to see if the country does him good. Always playing the piano and going to the concert, in London. I wonder madam can stand it, I really do sometimes.’
At this point Mrs Pucken said she heard the car so she and Palfrey went to see if there was any luggage, after which Palfrey ran upstairs to clean herself and Mrs Pucken received Mrs Stonor and Denis, who said how do you do to her very charmingly and sat down abruptly on a chair in the hall.
‘Would you like some sherry, Denis?’ said Mrs Stonor anxiously. ‘Jack said he had sent us some, and if Mrs Pucken knows where it is and there is a corkscrew in the kitchen anywhere we could have some at once. I did put a corkscrew in my big trunk, the one that has your music in it, but it hasn’t come yet, so that’s not much use.’
Mrs Pucken said the sherry was in the larder and there was a corkscrew on the dresser and the sherry glasses were in the pantry and she could get a bottle and have the cork out in a minute and did Mr Denis like the dry or the sweet as Mr Middleton had sent over both. Lord Bond, she said, liked the dry best and she had noticed that gentlemen usually did, but it wasn’t a mite more trouble to open the sweet if Mr Denis liked it. And as a preparation for the festival she called to Lou at the top of her powerful maternal voice. Denis controlled himself with an effort, hoping that neither the effort nor his attempt to conceal it would be visible to his stepmother and said he really didn’t want any sherry and would rather wait for lunch. Mrs Stonor who was acutely sensitive both to his fatigue and to his self-control saw nothing for it in the face of Mrs Pucken’s determined kindness but to accompany her to the larder and there hold her in talk about sherry and corkscrews till lunch was ready, leaving Denis to recover himself as best he could. If only the cart and the luggage with the hat box and the medicine would come soon.
Very luckily Lou had so far exceeded her instructions as to put the potatoes on, a phrase which should need no explanation, while Palfrey was cleaning herself. Her mind, if she can be said to have had any, was running on a bottle of bright red liquid nail polish which she had brought against her mother’s orders and hidden in her other pair of shoes, so she naturally forgot to put enough water in the saucepan and just as Mrs Pucken and Mrs Stonor came into the kitchen Palfrey, summoned by a smell of burning, came clattering down the little staircase that led from the top landing to the kitchen and opened the door at its foot with a dramatic flourish. The storm burst over Lou’s head, thunder and lightning from Mrs Pucken and Palfrey, and Mrs Pucken, sending her home to put her father’s dinner in the oven, quickly washed a few of the smaller new potatoes and put them on so that they might be ready for the travellers as soon as possible.
By this time the sherry was forgotten and then the cart was heard and the staff rushed out to help with the luggage.
‘Good-bye,’ said Daphne to Mr Cameron. ‘I hope you enjoyed yourself. And don’t forget what I said about Denis.’
‘I enjoyed myself very much,’ said Mr Cameron truthfully, ‘and I’ll remember. I hope I shall see you again while I’m here.’
Then he went off to the right to Laverings, while Daphne went through the gate on the left to the White House. Here her stepmother met her, carrying an empty glass.
‘Did you find the medicine?’ Mrs Stonor asked anxiously. ‘I told Mr Cameron to ask you about it, because I wasn’t sure if the cork was in properly.’
Daphne pulled the vest out of her pocket and produced the bottle. ‘Here you are,’ she said. ‘It’s made my vest in a bit of a mess, but there’s heaps left.’
‘Thank goodness,’ said Mrs Stonor. ‘Will you take it to Denis, or shall I?’
‘You take it,’ said Daphne. ‘I want to say good-bye to Pucken, but I wanted to give you the medicine first. Poor old Lilian.’
Mrs Stonor poured out Denis’s medicine and took it into the drawing-room where he was standing at the piano, tapping a note here and there with one finger.
‘To your great pleasure, Lilian darling, I will at once tell you,’ he said in the rather high voice which she knew so well as a danger signal of nerves, ‘that this little upright is quite impossible, so you will not be tormented with my playing at all. And a good thing too, I daresay,’ he added, shutting the lid with great care. ‘I always said I ought to compose without a piano and here is my chance. Oh, darling, you haven’t got some medicine for me?’
‘Daphne has just brought it,’ said Mrs Stonor, handing him the glass. ‘It was in her hat box and if I had had any sense I would have told Pollett to put the hat box in the car, but I didn’t think of it. I only thought of telling Mr Cameron to tell Daphne to see if the cork had come out, and she wrapped the bottle up in her vest and it was rather stained.’
‘I don’t know what I’d do without you and Daphne,’ said Denis, making a face. ‘This is quite the most disgusting medicine I’ve had yet. What a useless encumbrance I am.’
His stepmother looked at him with mild reproach and took the empty glass.
‘Quite right, darling,’ said Denis, laughing in spite of himself. ‘Too much self-pity. But don’t you ever wish you had let that odious, unhealthy schoolboy die a natural death? You wouldn’t have noticed if I’d died then, but now it is quite a habit with you to take care of me and I think you would miss it. Do you know, Lilian, you’ve been standing between me and Kensal Green for nearly ten years?’
‘Well, someone had to look after you,’ said his stepmother apologetically. ‘You looked such a wretched atomy, all eyes and bones.’
‘And someone had to look after Daphne, who was a quite dreadful giggling schoolgirl then,’ said Denis.
‘And there was your father who wasn’t bony or giggling,’ said Mrs Stonor almost sharply.
‘Forgive me,’ said Denis. And then Palfrey disdainfully banged a little gong which stood in the hall and they went in to lunch where the new potatoes were much admired and Denis actually ate two.
After lunch Denis was ordered to lie on a long chair on the little stone terrace in the corner of the L-shaped house and get as much sun as possible, and he was tired enough to obey with very little fuss. The sun was very hot. A lawn-mower at Laverings made a pleasant distant drone and scent from the sweetbriar hedge drifted in the air. Denis felt that he might be quiet at the White House, he might find a little of the inward peace which he so desperately wanted. Whenever, in his experience, his mind settled to some kind of equilibrium, his body would give it a twist or a jerk. How often Lilian had saved him only he knew. She had never pretended to understand his mind, perhaps never thought it worth while to try, but her kindness, her patience, her affection had been as constant as day and night. What she didn’t understand she accepted, and so naturally that one had gradually come to think of oneself as an ordinary person that happened not to be very well, instead of imagining, as that bony schoolboy had done, that one was marked out as different from other people and being savagely proud of it. His gratitude to her was so much part of him now that he sometimes forgot it. He suddenly thought of the words he and his stepmother had exchanged before lunch. As usual he had said something stupid, almost c
ruel, rousing even her tolerance to a protest. He and Daphne had never cared much for their father. Or perhaps, if one delved deeply enough for truth, always an unpleasant work, he had not got on with his father, and Daphne, who could get on very well with everybody, had with her younger sister’s loyalty come over to his side and lost touch with her father. Between them they had decided that Lilian Middleton had married Colonel Stonor so that she could be a good stepmother to two motherless children. But as he got older Denis had realized, with some shame, that Lilian had probably married his father because she was deeply fond of him and had taken on the care of two children not so much younger than herself, not because she thought they were misunderstood or unkindly treated, but because anything that belonged to her husband was dear to her. Denis was thankful to remember how Lilian had so tamed him that he began to have good manners to his father, which were accepted with surprise and silent gratitude, and from his real effort to please had come at last an understanding not deep, but good enough to make life easier for them both. Daphne, pleased to do whatever her brother did, allowed herself to be affectionate to her father and improved vastly under Lilian’s hand. If Lilian had burst out before lunch about her husband, even as little as she did, it meant that her feelings were deeply touched. Denis flushed hotly as he remembered with what fatuousness he had said, or almost said, that she had married his father for his sake, and as an afterthought, for Daphne’s sake. How could he have been such an oaf? He prided himself on a certain sensibility, but there was nothing to be proud of in taking for granted that a woman had not loved very deeply the man she married: gross insensitiveness was the best name he could give to it. That Lilian never suspected an unkindness and never bore rancour made it all the worse. Denis began to feel his heart beating too fast and an answering pulse in his head which would probably mean what was known as ‘one of poor Denis’s heads’, as all this rushed over him. Five years ago he would have made a scene with his stepmother, accused himself, implored forgiveness, left her with a headache as bad as his own, but this at least he had learned, to keep his remorse to himself. So he lighted a cigarette and tried to think of his music, and gradually, though his head was no better, he was drowsy enough to hover not unpleasantly between waking and what was less sleep than a kind of blissful half-consciousness.
But meanwhile who can describe the rage of Mr Middleton? Not only was he late for lunch himself, but when he got back, at two o’clock, he had to wait yet another fifteen minutes for Mr Cameron. In vain did his wife offer him sherry or a cocktail. He was exhausted, a thing of no account, a mere purveyor of motors and general transport for sisters and nephews and nieces, and the whole world would have been taken into his confidence had it been there. As it was, he had to content himself with his wife and the parlourmaid for audience.
‘No, no, Catherine, you well know that sherry is poison to me at this hour,’ he exclaimed. ‘And as for cocktails, this is no weather for them. There is only one thing that I could drink –’
‘Well, if we have got it you shall have it,’ said Mrs Middleton.
‘– and that,’ said Mr Middleton, ‘is beer.’
‘Shall I bring some beer then, madam?’ said Ethel, the parlourmaid, who had brought in the sherry.
‘When I say beer, none of you know what I mean,’ said Mr Middleton.
‘Yes please, Ethel, off the ice,’ said Mrs Middleton.
‘None of you are old enough,’ said Mr Middleton, addressing his wife and the departing figure of Ethel and suddenly becoming a pathetic nonagenarian, ‘to know what beer was. Ah! the beer we used to drink before the war, long long before the war. It had savour, it had body, it was meat and drink to the thirsty body and the thirsty soul. Had Dr Johnson drunk the beer we used to drink he would have amended his dictum to Beer for Heroes. You do not know what it was to come in after a long day’s tramp, hot, sweating, tired as only the walker can be with a divine fatigue, stupefied with the strong air of the hills, the scent of gorse and heather, the salt tang of the sea, the sweet resinous smell of pine-woods above the fiords, the chill wind from the great glaciers, the glare from the sand dunes of the desert,’ said Mr Middleton, who seemed to have done his walking in a very composite kind of country, ‘and grasping a tankard to feel the cool nectar slip down one’s throat, grateful to the palate, to the throat, to the whole body. To relax the body in utter contentment and then to talk. Ah! how we talked in those days. Have I ever told you, Catherine, of my great, my epic walk with Potter and Bagshaw, both now with the great majority, men of infinite learning and humour, ascetics like myself, caring for little but the things of the mind and the use of a well-tempered body?’
‘Yes, darling,’ said Mrs Middleton.
‘I may have, I may have,’ said Mr Middleton, ‘I know I repeat myself, for I get old, I have no longer the brain of the youth who could never be tired or worsted in argument, but bear with me, Catherine, while I repeat for myself, for my own enduring pleasure, the story of our walk up Kirkstone, over Fairfield, across to the long backbone of Helvellyn,’ said Mr Middleton, drinking at one long draught the glass of iced beer that Ethel handed him; ‘Again, Ethel, that was good, you have iced it to a nicety – down across the end of Thirlmere, up and over by Armboth, among the mosses to Watendlath, then unspoilt by the hand or pen of man, down into Borrowdale, up the Stye Head Pass, across Green Gable where we saw the rainbow of Valhalla spanning the valley at our feet, down again to Buttermere – thank you, Ethel, thank you. This beer is the best I have ever tasted. Where do we get it? I must have a cask to hold my high revels.’
‘It’s not in casks, sir, it’s bottled, from the Fleece down in the village,’ said Ethel. ‘Light Lager.’
‘Catherine, we must always have this beer,’ said Mr Middleton. ‘I know beer. Few men know it as I do and this is beer.’
‘It’s what we always have, sir,’ said Ethel.
‘It may be, it may be,’ said Mr Middleton rather crossly. ‘No thanks, no more. It is not so good now as it was before.’
With which Shakespearian echo he reassumed his fit of gloom.
But almost at once Ethel announced Mr Cameron and they were able to go straight in to lunch. The meal was so good that conversation fell to a pleasantly low level and when they had finished their coffee Mr Middleton carried Mr Cameron off to the library to talk business.
‘I shall go over before tea and see if I can do anything for Lilian,’ said Mrs Middleton. ‘She looked so worried about Denis. That poor boy.’
‘I hope he isn’t going to be ill again,’ said Mr Middleton. ‘Ask them all over after dinner to-night, Catherine. After all Lilian is my sister. I may be busy, I may have to work, but she will be welcome, and so,’ he added, battling with his lower self, ‘will her stepchildren. Do not forget, my dear Catherine, to order more of that excellent beer.’
‘I did, yesterday,’ said Mrs Middleton. ‘The Fleece like sending on Saturdays, so I usually order on Fridays. What time do you want to dine, Jack?’
After a great deal of talk it was decided that after so late a lunch it would be agreeable to have dinner at a quarter past eight, and the two men went off to the study while Mrs Middleton prepared to visit her sister-in-law, for it was already almost four o’clock.
3
Guests at Laverings
It was one of Mrs Middleton’s special gifts that her servants stayed with her. In most households a sudden demand for lunch at a quarter past two and dinner at a quarter past eight would have been met with sulks and followed by notice. But though Mr Middleton was entirely inconsiderate of his staff, or perhaps because he was so whole-heartedly inconsiderate, they all felt a protective adoration for him and never left except to marry. The more people came for the weekend, the more unexpected guests turned up for lunch, tea and dinner, the more the Laverings kitchen rose to the occasion. It was not the good wages, nor the large Christmas tips, not the lure of seeing and hearing famous people, for the Middletons’ circle though very well known had not the n
ames that adorn the cheaper Sunday papers. There was in it some of that rather sentimental British feeling for children, drunken men, very small things and dogs; not that Mr Middleton exactly surprised in himself, in Count Smorltork’s words, all or any of these elements, unless it was his occasionally childish attitude. A great deal of the kitchen contentment must have been due to Mrs Middleton, who had the excellent housekeeping tradition of her family, infinite patience in listening to stories of misfortune, and never lost her head or her temper, unless deliberately. A story was current in the kitchen that she had once thrown some Benger’s Food, feeding cup and all, out of Mr Middleton’s bedroom window because it was not properly made. The Benger’s Food was by now in a fair way to becoming a leg of mutton, or a turkey with trimmings, and added greatly to her reputation in the village. Even Lady Bond, who kept her servants by the reign of terror which the better class of that race still admires as being a proof of good blood, had to admit that Mrs Middleton was a past mistress in the art of keeping a staff.
Therefore, when Mrs Middleton wanted dinner at a quarter past eight, she merely gave the order to Ethel and was able to go over to the White House without any foreboding or sinking of the spirit.
Before Lunch Page 4