Before Lunch

by Angela Thirkell

  ‘A Lloyd George Knight,’ said Lord Bond, ‘something in shipping, I believe, from Goole. I have had to meet him once or twice on committees but my wife does not know him.’

  ‘How did you hear about it?’ asked Mrs Middleton.

  Lady Bond opened her mouth to speak, but Mr Middleton, who had hitherto been silent, suddenly uttered the words, ‘This touches me very nearly.’

  Daphne said Why? but catching an appealing look from her stepmother, said no more.

  ‘Pooker’s Piece,’ said Mr Middleton in an enormous voice, contemplating an unseen audience in a building about twice the size of the Albert Hall. ‘If I had been asked to name one place in which the spirit of England breathes, in which oak, ash and thorn still shelter who knows what woodland divinities under a rustic guise, untouched since the days of the Heptarchy, I should have named Pooker’s Piece. Many is the tramp I have taken over wood and common in this countryside, with Flora enjoying every moment of it as much as I do, with that wonderful dog’s instinct for what is best – not only best because Master likes it, but best in itself. Many, I say, is the tramp we two friends have taken together, but none have been so wholly blessed to us as our walks over Pooker’s Piece.’

  Having thus delivered himself he snapped his fingers affectionately towards Flora, who opened one eye from the rug where she was sleeping, looked at her master with complete lack of recognition or interest and went to sleep again.

  ‘And now, Bond,’ said Mr Middleton, ‘I would like to pick your brains. My man Pucken says that the little pond down beyond his cottage goes dry regularly, every seven years, whether the season is wet or dry, and is therefore poisonous to cows. I think it is an excuse to save himself trouble when the cows are in that field and he doesn’t want to bring them up to the higher pond, but you know the country better than I do. Have you ever heard about it?’

  Lord Bond knew Mr Middleton well enough to be quite sure that picking his brains was only his way of saying that he meant to talk about his own views on folk-lore for at least fifteen minutes, but he was none the less flattered, having a touching belief in professional men, especially in one of his own finding. But Lady Bond put an end to his hopes by asking again in a commanding way what was to be done about it and answering her own question by saying that they had better call a meeting in the Village Hall, or better still have a drawing-room meeting first to decide who was to be asked to the general meeting.

  ‘I don’t think your room is large enough, Mrs Middleton,’ said Lady Bond, ‘so it had better be at Staple Park.’

  If Mrs Middleton felt annoyed at this cavalier treatment of her house she gave no sign of it.

  ‘You must all come, of course,’ said Lady Bond graciously. ‘You of course, Mr Cameron.’

  Mr Cameron said with great presence of mind that his work made any day except Sunday impossible.

  ‘– and Mrs Stonor and her young people,’ her ladyship continued, Juggernauting over Mr Cameron as if he were not there.

  Daphne, who had been bursting to speak ever since her stepmother checked her, saw an opening and said Denis loathed that sort of thing but she would come and help with pleasure. She was, she added, pretty good at meetings and could typewrite the notices if Lady Bond liked.

  ‘Oh, do you typewrite?’ said Lady Bond. ‘That is delightful. You must come over to lunch and we will make out a list of useful people to invite.’

  Daphne at once took possession of Lady Bond and so absorbed did her ladyship become in her plan of campaign that the rest of the company, to their great relief, were able to talk among themselves. Mr Middleton and his sister sat together on the sofa while Mr Cameron and Mrs Middleton talked comfortably about nothing in particular. Denis, rather bored, was wondering if he could slip out and go home to bed, when Lord Bond, almost apologetically, reminded him of his offer to play some ballet music.

  ‘I do so like a good tune,’ he said, ‘and I never feel the wireless is the same as a piano. I used to play a little piece by Chopin myself once. It was quite short. I wonder if you know the one I mean. It had three of those things like noughts and crosses at the beginning, and three quarters written on the lines. Of course I only played it by ear. De-doo-de-doo-doo-doo, it goes, and then the same thing over again only the notes are a little bit different. De-doo-de-doo-doo-doo. And then the same thing again, only with just a little change, De-doo-de-doo-doo-doo – you don’t know it?’

  Denis recognized the little piece with no difficulty as the little Prelude in three-four time which everyone has played badly at one time or another. He obligingly sat down and played it with the soft pedal so that the conversation of his elders should not be disturbed.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Lord Bond when Denis had finished. ‘I do like a good tune so much. My wife and my son like this highbrow stuff, but I do like something with a tune in it and not too long. You were going to play me one of your own tunes.’

  Lady Bond from the other end of the room said, ‘So amusing to hear some Chopin. Do go on, Mr Stonor. I can’t tell you, Miss Stonor, what a handicap I find it with my secretary away, and her mother’s illness will be a very long one, I fear.’

  Mr Middleton sang a few bars of the Chopin in a rather tuneless falsetto and said Denis should study Bach.

  Mrs Middleton looked across with great gratitude at anyone who could amuse Lord Bond, and Denis, interpreting her look, sent her one of the smiles that so changed his ugly face. If pleasing Lord Bond would please Catherine, it should be done, though he very much doubted if his ballet music would give Lord Bond any real pleasure, when suddenly, with what he afterwards considered to be the direct guiding of Providence, a thought came to him.

  ‘I’m afraid my stuff doesn’t go very well on the piano, sir,’ he said to Lord Bond. ‘You see it’s written for orchestra, and piano isn’t quite the same. But I was wondering if you like Gilbert and Sullivan.’

  Lord Bond’s face, which was usually quite devoid of any expression but earnest dullness, suddenly lighted up.

  ‘If you really could play some, not too loud,’ he said, looking nervously at his wife, ‘I would enjoy it so very much. My dear mother took me to Pinafore when I was seven, it was the first play I had ever been to and I shall never forget the impression it made on me. My wife doesn’t much care for that sort of thing, but if you really could play some of the songs, I should enjoy it immensely. I suppose you don’t know the words, do you?’

  ‘Not very well,’ said Denis, amused, ‘but perhaps you could help, sir.’

  Without waiting for an answer he began to play the Judge’s song from Trial by Jury, very softly, while Lord Bond, transfigured, half sang, half spoke the words in a hoarse whisper. At the end of the last verse he shook Denis warmly by the hand.

  ‘We’ll have some more another time,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Come up to Staple Park one day when my wife is in town, mustn’t disturb her you know, and we’ll have what I call a real concert together. We’ve a grand piano in the drawing-room and I’ll make them find the key, they lost it at Christmas when the piano tuner came, and we’ll enjoy ourselves. And I’ve some really good port; you look as if a glass or two would do you good.’

  He went over to his wife, leaving Denis to reflect upon the probable condition of a piano whose key appeared to be permanently lost and the best way of avoiding port which upset him at once. But he liked Lord Bond and was very willing to amuse him.

  ‘Come and talk to us, Denis,’ said Mrs Middleton. ‘We’ll go outside, it’s so hot indoors.’

  Denis and Mr Cameron walked out with her on to the stone flags and sat down on a bench. The late summer twilight still lingered in the north, behind the house, while before them the landscape was fading into darkness.

  ‘You and Daphne are going to be the greatest success,’ said Mrs Middleton. ‘If you can amuse Lord Bond and she can hold her own against Lady Bond, Skeynes will be more peaceful than it has been since I came here.’

  ‘She is a good woman,’ said
Mr Cameron, ‘but stupid, stupid. I don’t know anyone that so exhausts the air from any room where she is. Half an hour of Lady Bond makes you look more tired, Catherine, than three nights in a train. And I know what I am talking about. Mr and Mrs Middleton and I,’ he explained to Denis, ‘all went on the Orient Express one summer because Mr Middleton wanted to meet someone who knew more about Balkan architecture than anyone else. You looked like the inside of a mushroom, Catherine, when we got to Prasvoda. But Lady Bond can produce exactly the same effect on you in three minutes. I dislike her.’

  ‘Was the interview a success?’ said Denis, who felt he ought to slur over Mr Cameron’s very unchivalrous comparison of his hostess to the inside of a mushroom, and rather resented it.

  ‘A great success,’ said Mr Cameron. ‘The man – he was an ex-prime minister whose name I could not pronounce at the time and have never remembered since – could not talk a word of English and only a few words of French. Mr Middleton’s French is, to be candid, entirely inadequate to any situation. It was the height of summer when Prasvoda is quite empty and there was no interpreter to be found. So Mr Middleton talked to the ex-premier for three days and three nights without stopping, not even pausing to suck an orange, about the influence of Graeco-Roman civilization in Prasvoda with divagations on the Greek element in Shelley, Keats and Goethe.’

  ‘And then?’ said Denis, suddenly very tired, but amused by the story.

  ‘We came home,’ said Mr Cameron, ‘and Mr Middleton wrote a most remarkable article on the architecture of the Orthodox Entente, Prasvoda and all those little states, between 1900 and 1936.’

  ‘But did he need to go there to write it?’ asked Denis. ‘I mean if he couldn’t understand what they said and they couldn’t understand what he said —’

  He paused.

  ‘How Mr Middleton comes to know anything is an eternal mystery,’ said Mr Cameron. ‘He has never been able to communicate with any foreigner unless he can speak English, and as far as I can gather from various interviews at which I have assisted none of the people whose brains he says he picks have ever got a word in edgeways. He has an extraordinary power of absorbing not only atmosphere but facts. And he never forgets anything.’

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ said Mrs Middleton quietly.

  Denis, sensitive to voices, couldn’t make out if her words were a statement, or a question to herself. But any further reflections on this subject were cut short by his host calling Mrs Middleton’s name. One did not keep Mr Middleton waiting, so much Denis had already discovered, and all three rose and went in.

  ‘Catherine, I needed you, and you were not there,’ said Mr Middleton pathetically.

  ‘I was just outside the window and I heard you at once and here I am,’ said Mrs Middleton. ‘What is it, Jack?’

  She laid her hand on her husband’s shoulder and he looked up very affectionately.

  ‘I need your advice, Catherine, as always. Lady Bond thinks that perhaps for a preliminary meeting Staple Park would be too large.’

  He looked round him wildly, like a child who only knows half its lesson.

  ‘What about the White House?’ said Mrs Stonor. ‘I don’t think the drawing-room would hold more than five people at a pinch, what with the way it goes round the corner, but we could pull the piano out into the hall, only then I suppose people could hardly get in.’

  Lady Bond said with a smile of gracious impatience that she feared it would be hardly what they needed and looked at Mr Middleton, who appeared to have forgotten his cue.

  ‘We were wondering,’ said Lady Bond, ‘if it would in any way upset Mrs Middleton’s arrangements – but you can put it better than I can, Mr Middleton.’

  Mr Middleton groaned.

  ‘We could easily have it here, Lady Bond,’ said Mrs Middleton, adding with faint malice, ‘If we have it in the middle of the week when Jack is in town, it will put no one out.’

  Lady Bond protested against her host’s absence and said it must certainly be on a Saturday when all the weekend residents would be obtainable. ‘But not that young couple over at Beliers,’ she said. ‘They are Communists and the woman wears shorts and the young man has a beard.’

  As no one had ever heard of the young couple at Beliers Mrs Middleton was able to promise that they should not be asked.

  ‘Then I think to-day week, no I am busy that day, to-day fortnight will suit us all,’ said Lady Bond. ‘Miss Stonor, if you will come up to the Park on Monday we could arrange about invitations and you could begin typing the notices. And perhaps you would look at the accounts for me as Miss Edwards is away and I would give you lunch of course.’

  ‘Thanks awfully,’ said Daphne. ‘Dr Browning paid me three guineas a week for doing his secretary stuff, but this won’t be a regular job, so shall we say half a crown an hour and then I can come as much or as little as you like. I worked four hours a day for five days for Dr Browning, so this would work out a little cheaper, but it’s the country and nothing important, so I think that’s quite fair. Then when your secretary comes back she won’t be able to have the Union down on you for using blackleg labour. It’ll be great fun.’

  Several of the party saw in Lady Bond’s eye how little she had intended to pay Daphne anything at all and felt that Providence was for once taking an intelligent part in affairs at Skeynes. Daphne’s remark about the unimportance of the job also gave great pleasure, for though everyone now hated Sir Ogilvy Hibberd and wished him to be baulked at every point, he was a distant foe, and to see Lady Bond bearded in Mr Middleton’s den was a triumph that could be rolled on the tongue and thoroughly enjoyed on the spot. But her ladyship, who prided herself on doing things in a handsome way, said that the arrangement would suit her very well, and catching up Lord Bond in the whiff and wind of her departure, took her leave.

  ‘I always expect,’ said Mr Cameron, ‘that Lady Bond will pick her husband up under one arm and carry him out of the room.’

  ‘Oh, she’s all right,’ said Daphne tolerantly. ‘You only want to get her where you want her. Most people are like that.’

  ‘Want, up to the present, has been my master, and certainly Lord Bond’s master,’ said Mr Cameron, and then Mrs Stonor, who had for some time been worried about Denis, said they must go home.

  ‘Yes, my dear Lilian, you must be tired,’ said Mr Middleton, looking with benevolent solicitude at his sister. ‘You have done much to-day. Much,’ he added, so that no one should get a word in while he took breath. ‘But here you will I hope find complete repose. I like to think that at Laverings and equally at the White House, the influence of many hundreds of years of settled occupation, of peaceful tilling of the soil, of the rearing of cattle, a contribution to the well-being of the country to which I am far from indifferent, having taken an infinite amount of trouble to obtain the best Jersey cows and feed and shelter them on the more modern and scientific lines, all these forces, I say, must work together to create an atmosphere in which the tension of latter-day life is relaxed, is dissipated. Laverings —’

  ‘Pucken says Lily is going to calve again in August,’ said Daphne, her handsome face alight with anticipation.

  ‘Laverings,’ Mr Middleton continued, raising his voice several tones against this distasteful interruption, ‘Laverings was already in existence, though not in its present form, before the Conquest. Wait,’ he said as no one was doing anything else, though much against most of their wills, ‘I should like to read you an extract from the Domesday Book in which Gorwulf-Steadings, the site of the present Laverings Farm, and the name yet survives in Guestings, one of Lord Pomfret’s places in this neighbourhood, is mentioned in some detail.’

  ‘I think I had better take the children home now, Jack,’ said Mrs Stonor, getting up. ‘Let’s have the Domesday thing to-morrow. I am really rather tired after to-day. I don’t know why, for after all the railway journey is quite short, and I had finished practically all the packing the night before and Palfrey and Mrs Pucken had got everything in pe
rfect order here and I had a most restful sleep this afternoon, but somehow one does get fatigued by any kind of move, so we will say good night.’

  ‘Bear with me one moment, Lilian,’ said Mr Middleton with a patient yet gay smile. ‘When my hand is on the plough I do not like to look back. Cameron, you will find the volume of which I was speaking in the third shelf from the top of the shelves to the right of the fire. I know every book as if it were my child.’

  Mr Cameron, who had at once got up and gone to look, said it was not there.

  ‘You mistake, unless I am gravely in error,’ said Mr Middleton, rising in affronted majesty.

  But even as he embarked upon his search for the book his wife said good night to the Stonors with a gentle finality that left them no choice but thankfully to slip away by the open French window.

  ‘I have it, I have it,’ cried Mr Middleton, turning from the bookcase. ‘Lilian! Where is Lilian?’

  ‘She has gone home,’ said Mr Cameron, who was standing at the window looking after the departing guests.