Before Lunch

by Angela Thirkell

  Mrs Stonor’s anxiety about Alister and Daphne had not lessened since the evening at Staple Park. Of young Mr Bond there had been no sign. Daphne had shown an irritability most unlike her usual self, but was always at her nicest with Alister. Mrs Stonor had asked him over a good deal, hoping he would cheer Daphne up, but now he was away and she was wondering whether she had done a foolish thing. It was clear to her that he came to the White House only to talk about Daphne, and she saw no solution to the problems involved. If Alister were really in love with Daphne she would not in any way discourage him, but it all looked out of drawing to her. Daphne’s feeling for young Mr Bond and his for her were an unknown quantity, liable to make an explosion at any moment. She had tried to discuss it with Denis, but he had shrugged his thin shoulders and said one couldn’t interfere and been more than usually affectionate to her. Her vague apprehension of some hurt to come to Denis remained. She made no pretence of understanding him and had never invited a confidence, but her sensitive affection for her stepson who was in a way a creation of her own making, of her own saving, made her too aware of undercurrents in his mind. As far as she knew his heart had never been seriously touched. He had laughed at himself with her over various passing fancies, had always protested that she was the only woman he could bear to live with. But she had observed that Catherine was a person about whom he had not laughed, and she would like to have known whether this meant that he didn’t think about her much, or thought about her a little too deeply. Her one secret comfort was that whether Denis was affected by Catherine or not, he never wavered in his devotion and kindness to herself; and she hoped that as she had never failed him in the past when he was a delicate, hideous fledgeling, she would never fail him in the future.

  Mrs Middleton and Mrs Stonor were doing a little quite preposterous gardening at Laverings, where the gardener took a tolerant view of employers and let them cut off dead roses or pick freely among his sweet peas.

  ‘How is Lady Bond getting on with her meeting about Pooker’s Piece?’ Mrs Middleton asked.

  ‘Daphne has typed a lot of letters about it,’ said Mrs Stonor, ‘but she can’t fill in the date till after the Skeynes Agricultural Show. Why, I do not understand, but the Agricultural appears to wreck the county for so long before and after it takes place that nothing can be decided. I am just going to put these dead roses on the rubbish heap. Shall I take yours?’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ said Mrs Middleton. ‘Put them on the border and Pucken can clear them away when he comes. I do hate green fly when it gets squashed on one’s hand. Jack asks about the meeting at least once a day. He has worked himself up to feeling that he ought to write a personal letter to Sir Ogilvy Hibberd and I expect he will do it. His letters are apt to be intemperate.’

  ‘I should think Sir Ogilvy would be intemperate too,’ said Mrs Stonor. ‘I daresay they will both boil over into The Times. They’ll print anything and Pooker’s Piece would make a good Silly Season heading. Denis went to play to Lord Bond last night when Lady Bond was at the Women’s Institute Meeting at Winter Overcotes and he says there is no talk of Mr Bond coming down till the Agricultural. He has to make a speech then. Oh, dear!’

  ‘Is Daphne still cross?’ said Mrs Middleton, who knew quite well what her sister-in-law’s exclamation meant.

  ‘Suppressed crossness,’ said Mrs Stonor. ‘It’s good of her to suppress it, but I sometimes think it would be less trying if she didn’t. She and Denis went to lunch at Skeynes Agnes, but they’ll be back to tea.’

  ‘Alister will be down this afternoon,’ said Mrs Middleton. ‘He got back from Oxbridge yesterday and wants to have a few days with Jack.’

  ‘Oh, dear!’ said Mrs Stonor again.

  ‘I know,’ said Mrs Middleton. ‘But I don’t see what we can do about it. Come and have some tea. I believe Lady Bond is coming over, but that can’t be helped either.’

  Mr Middleton joined them for tea, full of the letter he proposed to write to Sir Ogilvy Hibberd.

  ‘There is much to be said,’ he began, ‘for the personal approach.’

  ‘I am sure there is, Jack,’ said his sister without malice.

  ‘Much to be said,’ Mr Middleton repeated, glaring suspiciously at his sister. ‘I have weighed every pro and con in my own mind. Whether, I have said to myself, would it be better to hold this public meeting which owing to Stoke’s very selfish behaviour here seems to be fated never to come to birth, and in any case I very much doubt whether Hibberd, a hard-headed business man, hard-headed in every sense of the word, would be in any way influenced by an appeal of that kind, or, taking up the cudgels myself and laying aside all personal pride – and I am a proud man, Catherine, you know it; you too know it, Lilian – to put clearly and dispassionately before Hibberd what the wanton vandalism that he proposes to inflict on this precious corner of England would mean to Me. I have thought long and painfully on the subject and come to the conclusion that there is no more to be said. Do you agree?’

  ‘I am sure there is no more to be said, darling,’ said Mrs Middleton, ‘and if there were you would certainly say it. And as Lady Bond is coming to tea you had better discuss it with her, for Lilian tells me that Daphne says notices for the meeting are all typed and only waiting to go out till the Agricultural is over.’

  As his wife spoke Mr Middleton’s face assumed an expression of horror which she rightly interpreted as a wish that her ladyship were not coming.

  ‘It’s no good, Jack,’ she said. ‘You told me that you had asked her to tea yourself when you met her in town last week.’

  ‘You will make her my excuses,’ said Mr Middleton piteously, rising as he spoke. ‘Tie up the knocker, say I’m sick, I’m dead.’

  ‘That would be quite impossible,’ said Mrs Stonor, turning with some severity upon her brother, ‘because well you know that there isn’t one.’

  ‘And well you know, too,’ said Mrs Middleton, ‘that Lady Bond never comes by the front door in summer. She always comes round by the garden to show that she knew you before I did.’

  ‘And here,’ said Mrs Stonor antiphonally, ‘she is.’

  Mr Middleton, groaning more audibly than the rules of hospitality admit, sank back into his chair as Lady Bond appeared at the library window.

  ‘Here is Lady Bond, darling,’ said his wife, looking at him with mocking affection.

  Mr Middleton got up again.

  ‘Don’t move, don’t move,’ said Lady Bond. ‘Here I am you see, Mr Middleton. And I am so glad to find you, Mrs Middleton, and Mrs Stonor too. I have brought – now where are they, oh, here they are, they were merely admiring your border – Miss Starter, who I am glad to say is finishing her summer holiday with us, and Mrs Palmer’s niece, Betty Dean, of whom you have heard me speak.’

  Miss Starter came in followed by a tall, handsome young woman with dark hair, heavy eyebrows, a well-shaped nose and mouth and a general air of overpowering statuesqueness.

  ‘Betty is staying with her aunt Mrs Palmer for a few days,’ said Lady Bond, ‘and they came over to lunch. Mrs Palmer had to go on to Southbridge, so I thought you wouldn’t mind if I brought Betty to tea. I shall drop her at Worsted on my way home.’

  Having made this very frank and handsome apologia for her guest she seated herself by Mr Middleton and began to tell him about the public meeting.

  ‘We cannot fix the date till after the Agricultural, as everyone is so busy at that time,’ she said. ‘But possibly about the tenth. Most of the people who matter will be down here then and we shall avoid the twelfth.’

  ‘What twelfth?’ asked Mr Middleton, no sportsman in spite of his feudal status.

  ‘The moors,’ said Lady Bond, leaving Mr Middleton to brood, perplexed, upon a procession of swarthy Africans who were somehow to be avoided. ‘Juliana, have you told Mrs Middleton about the new bread that Dr Picton recommended to you at Tunbridge Wells? It is quite a new discovery. Not only is it almost starch free, but you can eat any quantity of it without any effect w
hatever, good or bad. What did you say its name was, Juliana?’

  ‘That is exactly what I can’t remember,’ said Miss Starter, lamenting. ‘When Dr Picton told me about it I said, “Now do write it down, Dr Picton, for everything you tell me goes in at one ear and out at the other,” so he wrote it down on a piece of paper. I am sure I put it into my bag, but I cannot find it anywhere.’

  ‘That is a Dememorizing Fixation,’ said Betty Dean, who had not hitherto spoken, being, as she said, entirely opposed to people speaking unless they had something of value to say. ‘You ought to go to Prack at Cincinnati and be analysed. He is the man on all Memory Fixations. I went to some of his lectures when I was over there. I couldn’t understand much because he is a Mixo-Lydian refugee but his book is very good. You ought to read it.’

  Miss Starter said that she felt herself that quite enough was done for refugees and there was a woman psychopath in Surbiton who had done wonders for a friend of hers.

  Betty Dean favoured her with a baleful stare and was silent, obviously finding Miss Starter of no value at all.

  ‘I think,’ said Miss Starter, who as an ex-lady-in-waiting on minor royalty was immune to snubs, ‘that although many people get great help from such healers, it is better – I speak for myself of course – to trust to the Church. The Bishop of Barchester wrote an article in the Evening Headline on the subject of faith which would I am sure interest you, Miss Dean.’

  Betty said that religion was all very well for people who believed in that sort of thing, but she herself had been an agnostic since she was sixteen and could not take any interest in creeds which simply atrophied the intellect.

  ‘Isn’t it interesting,’ said Miss Starter mildly, ‘to find that young people are still agnostics? I thought that had quite gone out. My grandfather was an agnostic, he was a great friend of Huxley and in many ways one of the most deeply religious men I have ever known. I must lend you a little book of his, Miss Dean, Essays in Anglican Agnosticism, you would like it. We were all brought up as agnostics and of course one’s early training counts for so much, but I remember my father, a great friend of Bishop Colenso, saying, “Without the Church of England where would we agnostics stand?” And it has always seemed so true to me. This new bread of Dr Picton’s is called Ita-lot, pronounced Eat-a-lot, and I get it by post twice a week from Bishop’s Stortford which is the only place where it is made. You should try some, Mrs Middleton.’

  Betty Dean, her guns spiked, publicly convicted of a Mid and Late Victorian creed, was darkly silent, meditating on Milton’s Satan, a character for whom she had an intellectual affinity, or so she felt, waiting for an opportunity to crush someone.

  ‘I have given much thought to the matter,’ said Mr Middleton to Lady Bond, ‘much thought. I am not a man to take lightly any step in which my own name, my position such as it is, is involved, but when I see a duty plainly before me, that duty becomes to me a sacred – what at the risk of tautology I find myself unable to call anything but a sacred – duty.’

  ‘You will come to the meeting then,’ said Lady Bond.

  ‘No, no, dear lady, you misapprehend,’ said Mr Middleton. ‘Without undue pride I may say that my name carries a little weight. I shall write to Sir Ogilvy Myself.’

  ‘Well I wouldn’t if I were you,’ said Lady Bond, entirely unimpressed. ‘No good writing to a man like that. He can always be ruder than you can. I think we’ll have the meeting on the ninth rather than the tenth. The tenth might clash with the Barchester Infirmary Fête. Ah, here is Daphne. That is very nice. I want her and Betty to meet. Betty has some very interesting news for us.’

  As when two bulls of milk-white fleece, ranging the slopes of Illyrian Timavus, espy afar off the heifer, grazing, ah! beneath the ilex whose cold shadow the careful farmer will avoid to seek as roof for the golden swarm lest haply the stored sweetness of the honey turn to maleficent vinegar baneful as the Centaur’s blood on the fatal shirt doomed to lead the club-bearer to the gloomy realms of Dis, anon they paw the ground with equal foot, this flashing forth fire from his eyes as the careful husbandman strikes the spark from tinder that will burn the dried stalks of beans to a rich ash meet for increasing tenfold the produce of his paternal fields (twenty lines of description of various forms of artificial fertilizer are here omitted), that, similar in shape and form to this, shaking wide his flowing locks and with the ivory spears of his forehead turning the turf till sods fly fast as the scudding sails upon the Adriatic what time Boreas plunging from where Taygete the Pleid westers to the Median Hydaspes, causes fishes to be caught up from the waters, where they, ah! now in vain, guard their thousand young destined now to perish waiting a father’s care, whirling them aloft on his wings till they, bereft of Neptune’s element, lie gasping on the shore where to-morrow maidens, washing linen in the sea foam, may haply weep for silver scales stained with blood purple as the Tyrian’s dye, gained by him in no not remote seas from the shelly flocks of Proteus —

  To be short, taking young Mr Bond as the heifer, so did Daphne and Betty take a violent dislike to each other at sight, having determined to do so long before they met. Daphne had heard quite enough, she felt, of how good-looking and nice Betty Dean was from Lord Bond, while Betty did not wish to hear any more thank you about Daphne Stonor who was such a help to Lady Bond and so much liked by everyone. Their antipathy sent out such waves of dislike that everyone except Lady Bond became acutely conscious of it and talked in an unnatural way.

  ‘Did you have a nice time in America?’ asked Mrs Stonor.

  ‘It is difficult to say yes or no when America, or rather the United States, is such a large place,’ said Betty, ‘but I enjoyed what I did see very much. I had an extremely interesting time in New York and made lots of friends. I hope to go back again and do a course at Bryn Mawr. Cedric Bond goes back in the autumn and I might go with him. You ought to go,’ she added, looking at Daphne.

  Daphne said she was sure she would loathe New York.

  ‘You can’t say till you’ve been there,’ said Betty. ‘No one can understand it till they have.’

  Mrs Stonor, distracted, said she had once been to New York, the year Denis was so ill at Laverings, and thought the flower shops were so nice. She remembered, she said, what particularly beautiful gladiolus there were in the shops that winter.

  ‘Oh, do you say gladiolus?’ said Miss Starter. ‘I always say gladiolus.’

  A short and ill-informed discussion on the subject was terminated by Betty who said coldly that as both were incorrect it was of little importance. The i and o of gladiolus were both short she said, and an equal stress should be laid on each syllable, as far as possible approximating to the form gladyolus.

  ‘Well, Betty must know. She got a first at Oxford,’ said Lady Bond.

  ‘When do you expect your son down again, Lady Bond?’ asked Mrs Middleton, seeing Daphne about to express her opinion of the female members of that University.

  ‘We don’t quite know,’ said Lady Bond. ‘He is very busy at the office at the moment. For the Agricultural in any case. Betty dined with him last night. She had something very special to say to him which we shall all know before long,’ said Lady Bond with a stately archness that froze her hearers.

  She then collected Miss Starter and Betty and went away. Daphne said in an uncertain voice she wanted to write some letters and would go home. Her departure was watched with sympathetic anxiety by her stepmother and Mrs Middleton. It had not escaped the notice of either of these ladies that Betty Dean was wearing on the fourth finger of her left hand a very expensive-looking sapphire ring, and they could not imagine that Daphne had not observed it. It was no use going after Daphne in her present condition, so Mrs Stonor sat unhappily with the Middletons, comforted alternately by her brother’s entire want of perception and Mrs Middleton’s unspoken sympathy. Mr Cameron arrived a little later.

  ‘Ha, Cameron!’ said Mr Middleton, who was longing to finish a thriller that he had left upstairs. ‘We will have a t
alk indeed about all you have done. We will tire the sun with talking, though Summer Time makes the feat more of a test for us than for our old Samian friend. But for the moment, for the moment, Cameron, I must leave you with Catherine and Lilian. You will not be in bad hands. Later, washed and refreshed, we will meet again.’

  Upon which he went quickly out of his private door and upstairs.