She crossed the lane and went into the Stonors’ garden. Everything was very quiet. Mrs Pucken had gone home, Palfrey was reading about the Home Life of the Royal Family in the kitchen, on the other side of the house. The only person to be seen was Denis, lying on a chair in the sun, his hat tilted over his eyes, so whether he was dead or asleep she could not tell. As a matter of fact he was neither, but still in that state of blissful half-consciousness that only the right time and place can bring. The slight noise of Mrs Middleton’s approach broke this calm. He looked up and saw what for the moment he took to be a stranger, for he had not seen Mrs Middleton since he had been ill at Laverings some years ago. He looked at a woman no longer young, with a face that proclaimed good breeding, rather tired eyes and a mouth that told him nothing till it broke to a smile and he suddenly knew who she was and incidentally where he was, for his waking had left him for a moment confused. He sat up.
‘Don’t get up, Denis,’ said Mrs Middleton. ‘I’m so glad to see you again.’
Denis, fearing that he was being treated as an invalid, uncoiled himself as quickly as possible and shook hands. Mrs Middleton was a tall woman, but she had to look up to see Denis’s face. In it she saw more than she liked of the invalid whom she had helped to nurse, so she at once said that he was looking much better.
‘Oh, I’m quite all right, thank you,’ said Denis. ‘I expect you want to see Lilian, don’t you. She was going to unpack, but it’s nearly tea-time. Will you come in?
‘I can’t tell you,’ said Denis as they went into the house, ‘how sorry I was that we made Mr Middleton late for lunch. It all seemed to be rather a muddle with our luggage and Flora and Mr Cameron, and darling Lilian did so much explaining. I’ll go and find her and Daphne.’
‘Wait a moment,’ said Mrs Middleton, sitting down. ‘I want to know about you. Are you really better? And how much do you feel like doing? Jack wants you all to come over to-night after dinner, but if it would tire you, please tell me. We have so many people at Laverings and I want you to feel free to come in when you like and stay away when you like. We have rather a good piano if that would amuse you.’
‘That’s a hideous temptation,’ said Denis. ‘I was congratulating myself on the badness of this little piano, because I ought to work at composing without a piano, which this odious little affair would give me every encouragement to do. And now you mention a good piano and all my good resolves go flying away.’
Mrs Middleton suggested that he should give way to his evil impulses in the middle of the week when her husband was in town and so avoid disturbing him. In a few minutes Denis was telling her his plans for some ballet music that he had almost been commissioned to write. Palfrey, bringing in the tea things, was asked to let Mrs Stonor know that Mrs Middleton had come and in a very short time Lilian came downstairs and kissed her sister-in-law with great affection.
‘You look very well, Lilian,’ said Mrs Middleton. ‘And ridiculously young to have such grown-up children.’
‘It isn’t as if they were really mine of course,’ said Lilian seriously. ‘I could nearly be their mother, but not quite.’
‘All this talk about mothers is sheer vanity and one of Lilian’s favourite ways of showing off,’ said her undutiful stepson. ‘She likes people to think I am really her son so that they will say how surprising and they never would have thought it possible.’
Mrs Middleton laughed, but secretly she thought, with compassion, that though Lilian might look younger than her years, poor Denis looked far older than his. Then she asked about Daphne.
‘Daphne was in a very good job with a doctor,’ said Mrs Stonor. ‘She did secretary work for him and then he most selfishly died, so she wants another job, but I rather hope she won’t find one just yet. It would be so nice to have her down here for the summer. She gave the greatest satisfaction to Dr Browning and has a gift for adding up figures that I simply can’t understand, besides knowing people when she sees them again. Oh, Daphne, here is Aunt Catherine.’
Daphne embraced Mrs Middleton, enquired warmly after Lily Langtry and was delighted to hear that her ex-patient, now a thriving grandmother, was well and had beaten Lord Bond’s Staple Selina in the milk competition, though coming second to Mr Palmer’s Phaedra. ‘What a funny name for a cow,’ said Mrs Stonor. ‘Mr Palmer called her after some amateur theatricals they had,’ said Mrs Middleton, which explanation satisfied everyone. ‘Jack wants to know if you will all come over after dinner. We shall be alone except for Alister Cameron whom you know.’
‘Oh how lovely,’ said Daphne, ‘and we’ll play Corinthian bagatelle. Or did Uncle Jack break it to pieces? He said he would when Denis was ill, the night you and I, Aunt Catherine, do you remember, and that nurse that was always taking offence made such a noise.’
‘Yes, Uncle Jack broke it to pieces himself. And then he repented, because the British Legion would have liked it, so he bought them a new one, much better than ours.’
‘But it was yours, wasn’t it, Aunt Catherine?’ said Denis.
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ said Mrs Middleton. ‘Lilian, all this “aunt”-ing. Need your family be so polite? They call you Lilian, so I really think they might call me Catherine.’
‘I’d love to,’ said Daphne. ‘I always do except when I’m talking to you. It’s an awfully nice name somehow.’
Denis said nothing. Catherine was a comfortable kind of name, but he didn’t feel he particularly wanted to use it. One could always manage by saying ‘you’ to people. The Aunt Catherine who had been so kind to him, whom he had expected to see when his stepmother brought him to Skeynes, had mysteriously vanished. Her place had been taken by a stranger, charming enough, but someone he must get to know all over again. When he woke and found her looking at him his first feeling had been a faint resentment that he had been taken unawares. He so wished never to be treated as an invalid and she had stolen upon him, found him having what Nannie used to call a nice lay down, taken him altogether at a disadvantage. Then looking at her as his consciousness emerged from the confusion of a light sleep, he saw her eyes, and it had become, though he only realized it now, extremely important that they should look less tired.
Mrs Stonor went back to Laverings with her sister-in-law to look at the improvements in the garden and the young Stonors were left alone. They went out onto the terrace and strolled into the little wilderness where a stream had been coaxed into miniature pools and waterfalls and planted with delicate clumps of flowers and shrubs.
‘I call it very clever of Catherine to make all this,’ said Daphne. ‘She did a lot of it when you were ill at Laverings. I wish I were about six inches high.’
Denis thought six inches would be too small. One wouldn’t be able to cross such a roaring torrent, he said, if one were that size. He thought about a foot high, tall enough to enjoy the scenery without being frightened of it. Daphne pointed out a very good place for fording the river if there were a few stepping-stones and for the next hour they worked industriously at making travel easier for people one foot high and laughed so much that they didn’t hear Mrs Stonor coming towards them. So she stopped to look at them, full of gratitude that Denis looked so happy, hoping that it was a good omen for a successful summer. The one grief of her happy married life had been that she could not remove her husband’s anxiety about the boy whom he loved and couldn’t understand. If Colonel Stonor had lived she believed the understanding would have grown as Denis’s health improved, and already there had been a hopeful basis of more toleration from the father, more patience from the son. Since she had been a widow she had devoted herself more than ever to her stepchildren, with a vague feeling that if Daphne had a happy time and the right clothes, and Denis was nursed and persuaded into better health, her husband would be pleased. It had meant a good deal of economy, for they were not well off, but her own wants were few and she was not easily tired. She was one of the rare people in whom perfect health goes with real compassion for the weak and to Denis she had given f
rom her strength with both hands.
Denis, perhaps unconsciously conscious of her presence, looked up and saw her. His tired lined face melted into the smile that always touched his stepmother to the quick, in which she saw all the affection and gratitude that the greediest woman could want, and she was not greedy. She came nearer, admired the stepping-stones and suggested one or two small improvements suitable for people a foot high.
‘Oh, a dreadful thing,’ she said suddenly, putting the last stone to a flight of steps by which travellers would get to the top of the beetling river bank, ‘Lord and Lady Bond are coming in after dinner at Laverings. I did hope we would be alone, but they are agitated about something somebody wants to build somewhere and they said they must come and talk to Uncle Jack about it. If you feel too tired, Denis, Daphne and I will go and I will say you are going to bed, which will be nearly true because you will be going to bed sometime in any case.’
‘I remember Lady Bond,’ said Daphne. ‘She came to lunch the day the Jersey calved and she knows a lot about cows, but I had been reading the Stock Breeders’ Gazette when I was sitting up with Pucken the night before waiting for the calf and I caught her out once. She is one of those people that ought to have been a Colonel’s wife in India if you see what I mean.’
‘I’m glad she isn’t,’ said Denis. ‘I’d love to see you arguing with her about cows and I certainly shan’t go to bed. I shall read up Cow in the Encyclopaedia and confound her with my knowledge. Also I shall play the “Ranz des Vaches” to her on the Laverings piano.’
Daphne said she betted he didn’t know what the ‘Ranz des Vaches’ was.
‘Of course I do,’ said Denis. ‘It is the tune that Swiss waiters all over the world get homesick when they hear.’
‘When they hear it, you mean,’ said Daphne. ‘You can’t say It’s the tune when they hear.’
‘Well, It’s the tune when they hear it wouldn’t make much sense either,’ said Denis. ‘You don’t know English Usage, my girl.’
The party at Laverings were having coffee in the library when the Stonors came across from the White House. Mrs Middleton told Ethel to bring three more cups and some fresh coffee, Mrs Stonor protested that they had had coffee at home and didn’t want any more, and, after the senseless hubbub demanded by the conventions, got her own way. Mr Middleton, who had made up his mind that Denis would arrive fainting, in a shabby velvet coat (for such was his rapidly conceived idea of an invalid who was a musician), was agreeably surprised to see his guest in a very ordinary smoking jacket, clean and tidy, his hair (which Mr Middleton for no particular reason expected to have grown several inches since their brief meeting that morning) neatly cut. The boy was certainly no beauty, if not downright ugly, but he looked healthy enough in the waning summer light. And now that there was no danger to his own sensibilities, Mr Middleton was ready enough to be sympathetic. So he asked Denis to sit by him, offered him a cigar which Denis refused and enquired how he liked the White House, and what he proposed to do during the summer. Denis said he liked the White House very much and hoped to write some music for a ballet.
‘Lilian,’ said Mr Middleton to his sister, who was talking to her hostess and did not in the least wish to be disturbed, ‘this boy of yours tells me he is going to write music for a ballet. That is excellent, excellent. The ballet is one of the best exercises for the young musician, for it gives him the rigid framework which is so necessary, the trellis on which the vine can put forth its luxuriant growth. The same applies to all forms of art. The picture must have a limit, hence the arbitrary shape, square, oblong, the lunette, the tondo. Sculpture too has its boundaries, the triangular pediment, the square lines of the tomb, even the actual shape of the mass of marble from which the skilled artist will release the imprisoned group or figure. Similarly with music it has been found necessary to impose upon it the form of the symphony, the sonata, to prune what is excessive that the plant may grow with more vigour. Alister!’ he called to Mr Cameron who was happily talking to Daphne about a river in Scotland where he had once fished, ‘One moment. Would you or would you not agree with me when I say that of all the arts literature, at any rate in England, is that which stands least in need of bounds? That the strength of that glory of our country is such that it can climb and wander at its own will, careless of forms, or creating its own form as it goes?’
Having thus forcibly attracted the attention of his whole audience Mr Middleton, without waiting for the reply which Mr Cameron knew him far too well to waste his time in making, was enjoying himself immensely, when Ethel, seizing a moment between two sentences, announced Lord and Lady Bond.
As her ladyship bore down upon the company Denis at once recognized what his sister had meant when she said that Lady Bond ought to be a Colonel’s wife in India. It was quite obvious that she would arrange the life of any of her friends or acquaintances without the faintest regard for their feelings, bully all the tenants for their good, be on every committee, and in short be a despotic benefactress to the whole country. Her husband, a little round-faced man with a white moustache, followed her closely. ‘How are you, Bond?’ said Mr Middleton. ‘This is my sister’s stepson, Denis Stonor. He is composing a ballet.’
‘Are you a Russian then?’ said Lord Bond. ‘No, no, stupid of me, Middleton couldn’t have a Russian sister.’
‘I’m quite English all over,’ said Denis, ‘and it’s an English ballet I’m trying to do the music for.’
‘English ballet, eh?’ said Lord Bond.’ Now that’s most interesting. I thought it was Russian ballet. I know my wife took me to something Russian last summer. Not much in my line, but there was a nice bit of music by that fellow that wrote the symphony – what is its name, the one my wife’s musical friends are always talking about, the Seventh. You know I always think it’s a funny thing writing a symphony and calling it the Seventh. I knew a man, before your time he was, Abel Fosgrave, he had a very good taste in wine and called his first daughter Septima.’
Denis said gravely that there must be something in the number seven. Lord Bond said he was probably right and the name of the fellow that wrote the symphony was Beethoven, but it didn’t sound Russian, which seemed to depress him so much that Denis kindly offered to play him some of his own ballet on the piano. But before Lord Bond could answer, Lady Bond, having said what she considered fit to Mrs Stonor and Daphne, demanded the attention of the whole room.
‘Something has happened of so serious a nature that I felt I must see you at once, otherwise Bond and I would not have interrupted your family party,’ said her ladyship, whose habit of speaking of her husband by his name without a prefix was the admiration of all who heard her.
‘You know,’ said Lady Bond, graciously including all her audience whether interested or not, ‘Pooker’s Piece.’
Most of them didn’t, but they were too cowardly to say so except Mr Cameron, who simply said No.
‘No, you wouldn’t know it,’ said Lord Bond kindly. ‘ It is on the edge of my property, just above High Ramstead.’
‘Just where we march with Mr Palmer,’ said her ladyship in a feudal way, ‘on the other side of the Woolram, above the hatches.’
‘Oh, you mean Overfolds,’ said Mr Middleton.
‘No, no, Mr Middleton,’ said Lady Bond. ‘Overfolds is the name of that triangle where Mr Palmer’s larches come down the hill. Pooker’s Piece is the part at the bottom, by the little lane that runs up past old Margett’s cottage to Upper Worsted. Any of the old people would tell you its name.’
‘I thought —’ Mrs Middleton began.
‘Yes, Mrs Middleton?’ said Lord Bond kindly.
‘Oh, nothing,’ said Mrs Middleton weakly, remembering that envious shepherds to whom she had talked gave that particular field a grosser name, though Lady Bond did Pooker’s Piece call it.
‘Well, that is the bit of land I mean,’ said Lady Bond firmly. ‘And what do you think we have heard?’
‘Pooker’s Piece,’ said Mr Middleton. �
��The survival of these pre-Norman names, even so near London, is excessively interesting. Pooker, Pook, or Puck —’
‘Pooker wasn’t pre-Norman,’ said Lord Bond, ‘I found out all about him a few years ago. You know the living of Skeynes Agnes is in my gift. I had to go through the records of the Church there and it appears that the Reverend Horatio Pooker was vicar from 1820 to 1843. He bought that field from sheer spite, because my great-grandfather and Palmer’s great-great-uncle both wanted it, and left it to the Charity Commissioners.’
‘And that,’ said Lady Bond, determined not to be forestalled in her news, ‘is where the trouble comes. You remember Sir Ogilvy Hibberd?’
Everyone said Yes: some because they did, the others because they felt it would save trouble.
‘Well, he has bought Pooker’s Piece,’ said Lady Bond, ‘and wants to put a teashop and garage there. As soon as I heard of it I said to Alured that we must see you as soon as possible.’
It was a tribute to the importance of the occasion that Lady Bond should have used her husband’s Christian name, which was only wrenched from her by severe emotion. There was a brief silence of consternation, broken by Daphne who asked who Sir Whateverhisname was.
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