Before Lunch

by Angela Thirkell

  ‘Then your letter to Sir Ogilvy and Lady Bond’s notices of the public meeting will go out at about the same time,’ said Mrs Middleton.

  ‘Precisely,’ said Mr Middleton. ‘The one will add weight to the other.’

  ‘You don’t think they’ll interfere with one another, do you?’ said his wife.

  Mr Middleton, who had just had that thought, said with great dignity that there were certain subjects on which women were hardly qualified to judge, and became remote.

  ‘And now that that is settled,’ said Mrs Middleton, ‘I am going to tell you something. Alister and Daphne are engaged.’

  ‘Blind that I am!’ cried Mr Middleton, striking his forehead with his clenched fist, though cautiously. ‘An exquisite story has been playing itself out before my very eyes and I have seen naught. You must forgive me, Cameron. My perceptions are usually far more acute, but I have been an old, a weary man, I have had much on my shoulders.’

  He paused and became Atlas, the world’s weight upon his neck.

  ‘As a matter of fact we were all surprised,’ said Mrs Middleton.

  ‘Yet I knew, I knew,’ said Mr Middleton, brushing this tactless remark aside, ‘that something was astir, something burgeoning, the eternal miracle of high summer reflected in the mirror of human hearts. This news has made me very, very happy. The friend with whom I have worked, with whom I have always had such cordial relations, has plighted his troth to my sister’s stepdaughter, whom I love as if she were my own, my own daughter I mean not my stepdaughter, and under this very roof.’

  ‘It was at the White House,’ said Mr Cameron, ‘and as a matter of fact not under a roof at all, because Daphne was in the pea-sticks.’

  ‘No matter, no matter,’ said Mr Middleton. ‘And you love her, Cameron, and she returns your love. Forever will you love and she be fair. Make much, Cameron, of these golden hours.’

  He mused, a little obtrusively, for a moment, while his wife and his partner exchanged an amused glance of embarrassment.

  ‘Time like an ever rolling stream,’ said Mr Middleton, by way of a suitable quotation for a newly engaged couple. ‘And that reminds me, Cameron, we shall have to reconsider the whole question of the water supply for that College. There has been a question of contamination in the reservoir and I must find out exactly what is happening.’

  Mr Cameron said he knew a man on the Town Council at Oxbridge whose father had been a scout at his old College and thought something might be done through him. Then the talk became so happily and enthusiastically technical that Mrs Middleton left the men and thought she would go over to the White House, feeling vaguely that her sister-in-law might need her. Laverings dined much later and sat much longer over its dinner than the White House, so it was now after ten o’clock. When she got to her own garden gate she found Denis in the lane.

  ‘Lilian and Daphne have gone to bed,’ he said, ‘and if I could stop working, I’d go too. I suppose you know about Alister and Daphne.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Middleton.

  ‘I wish,’ said Denis, leaning his elbows on the top of the gate, ‘that I had a nice contented easy-going disposition. But I haven’t. And Daphne was really all I’ve got except darling Lilian, and now I have lost her. Oh, I don’t mean because she’s engaged, but I suddenly have no clue to her and I don’t like it at all.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose she and Lilian are all you have,’ said Mrs Middleton quietly and then was silent. The silence became so deep that it menaced like a betrayal. ‘I wish,’ she said, forcing herself to speak, ‘that there were more rapture about it. But I suppose I am romantic.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Denis. ‘You are romantic.’

  He took his elbows off the gate and melted away into the dark shadow of the lane. Mrs Middleton did not move for some time. Then she went back to the house where she found her husband and Mr Cameron still deep in technicalities, so she said good night.

  ‘You are tired,’ said Mr Middleton accusingly.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Mrs Middleton, suddenly conscious, as if his words had released a spell, of boundless fatigue.

  ‘I know you so well, Catherine,’ said Mr Middleton, ‘and every shadow on your face. Don’t get tired.’

  Mrs Middleton lingered, her hand on her husband’s shoulder.

  ‘No, Jack, I won’t get tired,’ she said. ‘Good night, Alister.’

  10

  The Agricultural at Skeynes

  By a miracle of self-restraint on the part of everyone concerned helped by Mr Cameron’s return to London and his work, Daphne’s engagement remained a secret for the next fortnight. There was a kind of agreement that it should be announced in The Times after the Skeynes Agricultural Show, that Grand Climacteric of the rural year. Mr Cameron came down twice to spend the day at the White House and on each of these occasions Daphne was urgently wanted at Staple Park. She explained to her stepmother that if she made excuses to Lady Bond and her ladyship happened to discover, as she certainly would, that the excuses coincided with Mr Cameron’s visits, the county would know the news within twenty-four hours. So Mr Cameron talked to Mrs Stonor, who listened and listened, doing very fine sewing which needed a great deal of attention.

  Mrs Middleton and Mrs Stonor were a great deal together, gardening, working, talking on some subjects, silent on others. Mrs Middleton, kneeling among damp rock plants, a smear of mud across her face from pushing her hair back with a dirty gardening glove, did once go so far as to say that life was very tiring, and Mrs Stonor, picking up from the flagged path a large basket of very earthy weeds which she had just upset, added as a kind of rider that she hoped transmigration wasn’t true, because one life was quite enough. Otherwise, being philosophers in their own way, they left philosophy alone.

  As invariably happened the weather got worse and worse as the Agricultural drew nearer, till on the weekend of the Bank Holiday a kind of equinoctial gale arose, accompanied by driving rain and a falling barometer. A chimney pot crashed on to the terrace at Laverings, hurting no one; the smoke poured downwards from the White House kitchen chimney, smothering the kitchen in fine soot and forcing its way out through hitherto unsuspected crevices into Palfrey’s bedroom. Over at Skeynes the big marquee was nearly blown over in the night and Pucken said with gloomy relish that if Lily didn’t calve on Monday night he was a Dutchman. What with the engagement and the weather and the prospect of a wet Bank Holiday and Lord and Lady Bond’s dreadfully dull dinner party which they gave every year after the Show, partly to do their duty by the county, partly to show that Bank Holiday made no difference to their well-organized staff, everyone was cross. Denis, obsessed with musical composition and the improbability of ever getting his ballet produced, was almost snappish with his stepmother, who in her turn rather crossly told Mr Cameron, at Laverings for the weekend but spending most of his time at the White House, that he and Daphne must really make up their minds about announcing the engagement and thinking of the wedding, while Mr Cameron sat with Mrs Stonor and Mrs Middleton alternately, in a state of gloom very unlike him. Daphne had a cold and when having tea at Laverings on Sunday blew her nose so often that Mr Middleton became almost demented with fear of infection and drenched his handkerchief with eucalyptus. Mrs Middleton was very quiet and did her best to smooth matters, for there seemed to her little else to do.

  On Monday morning the weather was worse than ever and the kitchen chimney more disordered. Lou, whose nerves had been much affected by her oath of secrecy, sulked when Palfrey told her to wash the kitchen dresser and mind she got all the soot off, and answered back. Her mother for once took her side and rounded on Palfrey, saying that it was a shame to put upon the girl and what was the use of washing the dresser with the soot coming down like that? Palfrey said there were some that were glad of any excuse not to do their work; Mrs Pucken retorted that Lou was only coming to oblige, being as she wasn’t getting any wages; Palfrey sniffed, all three ladies cried and the bacon was burnt.

  Daphne’s c
old was better, but her stepmother made her stay in bed till lunch, as a preparation for Lady Bond’s dinner party, and when Mr Cameron came over after breakfast Mrs Stonor was so short with him that he went back to Laverings and shut himself up with the plans of the new water system.

  After lunch a treacherous gleam of sun appeared and everyone said in a hollow way that it would be quite nice for the Agricultural after all. With umbrellas and mackintoshes and in some cases galoshes the inhabitants of Laverings and the White House made their way up the sloppy lane to Skeynes. Only Mr Middleton remained at home, alleging an anxiety about Lily and her calf that deceived nobody.

  The Agricultural was an event eagerly looked forward to by a large part of the county. All those landowners, great or small, who were interested in cattle, pigs, sheep, dead bunches of the greatest variety of wild flowers collected by school-children, and whatever else is shown at an Agricultural Show which is also a Flower Show and a Fun Fair, found it an invaluable opportunity for seeing the friends and enemies that they had been seeing on and off all the year round. Perhaps the best known and most important figure was Lord Stoke, wearing a kind of truncated grey top hat, copied from the hat his father always wore, tweed jacket and leather leggings, and followed in a feudal way by his cowman Mallow, cousin of Mr Mallow the station-master at High Rising. Mallow, as befits the best cowman in the county, was dressed in his hideous Sunday best, but not even the thought of what Mrs Mallow would say when he got home with his boots and the bottoms of his trousers smeared with the sticky clay of the field where the Agricultural was always held prevented him from enjoying every moment of the afternoon to the full. The only competitor he had feared was Mr Middleton’s Lily Langtry, and in her absence the Rising Castle entries had had little or no opposition to face. Rosettes of the first class decorated every one of his entries, while Lord Pomfret, Lord Bond, and Mr Palmer had to be content with second and third class or even Highly Commended.

  Lord Pomfret usually attended the Skeynes show in person to encourage local industry, but his agent Mr Wicklow had telephoned that morning to say that his lordship had to be in Barchester to fight the County Council who were trying to build ten cottages in a lane that had been impassable when the floods were out every year since the oldest inhabitant could remember. But Lord Bond and Mr Palmer had been there ever since nine o’clock and after lunch were joined by their wives. Mrs Palmer, who was wont to boast with considerable truth that she didn’t care what she looked like, was squelching about in gum boots, despising Lady Bond who, in very neat woollen stockings and heavy brogues, felt an equal contempt for her friend’s footgear.

  Lady Bond had determined to use the day, with its chances of meeting most of the neighbouring landowners, to prepare the ground for her campaign against Sir Ogilvy Hibberd. The invitations for the Public Meeting were now all ready to be sent out and Lady Bond had planned to enlist everyone’s sympathy at the Show, give them Monday night to think it over, and post the invitations on the Tuesday afternoon, so that they would be found on every breakfast table on Wednesday and clinch the matter. Seeing Mrs Stonor and Denis at the entrance to the grounds, she bore down on them, demanding Daphne, whom she wished to accompany her on her crusade and make mental notes of likely converts. Mrs Stonor, looking rather draggled in a shapeless old tweed coat and an old tweed hat which was the most suitable toilette she could think of for a wet afternoon among animals, said she was keeping Daphne in bed with a cold.

  ‘That is very annoying,’ said Lady Bond. ‘I wanted her to go round with me. I hope she is coming to our party to-night.’

  ‘Yes, that’s exactly why,’ said Mrs Stonor. ‘I thought if I kept her in bed till tea-time she would be able to come to your dinner, because it isn’t an infectious cold, or I would have rung you up at once to say so, but she sneezed twice and I never think sneezing colds matter, it is the ones that begin with a sore throat that are infectious and she has no throat, absolutely no throat at all. But what with the wet walk here and standing about in all this mud among bulls I felt she would be far better in bed.’

  ‘Open air is much the best thing for colds,’ said Lady Bond, eyeing Mrs Stonor’s coat with disfavour, and forgetting, as she was apt to do, that a well-cut tweed suit, an expensive felt hat and a Burberry are not within everyone’s reach.

  ‘But not for Daphne’s,’ said Denis agreeably. ‘Hers are quite different from anyone else’s, or anyone’s else, if one can speak of an else. She will be quite well to-night.’

  ‘Well, I shall look forward to seeing you all,’ said Lady Bond with vice-regal graciousness and passed on, thinking as she went that Denis, bareheaded and wearing a mackintosh which had obviously spent much of its life on the floor of a car, near an oil can, was even more unsuited to an Agricultural Show than his stepmother.

  ‘Why did we come here, darling?’ said Denis to Mrs Stonor.

  ‘I can’t think,’ said she, ‘except that everyone seemed to think we were. I suppose one could call it mass hysteria. Besides we ought to see Lord Bond’s cows as we are dining with them to-night. It would only be polite.’

  ‘If it is to please Lord Bond, I will take you to see the cows at once,’ said Denis, ‘though at dining with them I draw the line. I do like his lordship. His misfortunes do but mellow his character.’

  ‘Misfortunes?’ said Mrs Stonor, startled.

  ‘I mean Lady Bond,’ said Denis. ‘If I had a wife like that I’d take it out on everyone younger and poorer than myself. Few deeds in my ill-spent life have given me greater pleasure than playing bits from Pinafore to Lord Bond of an evening, bless his heart.’

  ‘Well, I hope you will have a very nice wife,’ said Mrs Stonor, seizing on what struck her as the most important feature of his remark.

  ‘Don’t hope too much, darling,’ said Denis. ‘One can’t have everything and I am very happy as I am.’

  He led his stepmother away in the direction of the cows. Each wondered a little what the other was thinking, but for all their intimate affection neither of them would trespass on the other’s reserves, now or ever.

  Lady Bond had a very shrewd guess as to where her next objective, her brother Lord Stoke, was to be found, and wasting no time on any hens, ducks, wild flowers, or vegetables from the allotments, she went straight to the pens where Barsetshire’s squarest, most bristly pigs were enshrined. Here, as she expected, she found Lord Stoke gloating over a hideous matron, gently scratching her scaly back with his stick. His herdsman, Mallow, who thought but poorly of animals with less than four stomachs, was standing by registering contempt for employers.

  ‘I want you, Tom,’ said Lady Bond, laying her hand on her brother’s arm.

  ‘Eh!’ said Lord Stoke, asserting his deafness in a defensive way. ‘Now look at her, Lucasta. There’s a sow! Pomfret’s showing her. When I look at her I wonder how I ever came to go in for cows. Isn’t she a beauty?’

  The beauty, who was the shape of a giant petrol tin with a snout at one end and a twirly tail at the other, looked with hatred at Lord Stoke out of her small vicious eyes, and turned herself a little to indicate a spot at which more scratching would be acceptable.

  ‘She got a man down the other day and nearly did for him,’ said Lord Stoke, as proudly as if the sow were his own. ‘Nasty thing a pig’s bite. I’d sooner be bitten by a mad dog than by most pigs I know. Remember that old fellow that used to work about the place when the governor was alive? Old Ted they called him. He used to go wherever the bees were swarming because he said bee stings were good for rheumatics. Nasty thing happened to him with a pig when he was a lad. I don’t quite remember the rights of it, but he wore one of the pig’s teeth on his watch chain on Sundays. I think they got the tooth out of his arm. Ought to write all these things down, you know. Make a book about them like that book of Pomfret’s that everyone talked about. Come over now, old lady,’ said his lordship, prodding affectionately at the sow’s portentous flank.

  ‘I’ve been looking for you, Tom,’ said Lady
Bond in a louder voice. ‘You are coming over for dinner, aren’t you?’

  ‘Dinner, eh?’ said Lord Stoke. ‘Bless my soul, yes, Lucasta. Always dine with you after the Skeynes Agricultural. Anything wrong?’

  ‘No, nothing’s wrong,’ said Lady Bond. ‘But I want you to beat up everyone for the meeting about Pooker’s Piece.’

  ‘Pooker’s Piece?’ said Lord Stoke. ‘Now, it’s a curious thing about that field, Lucasta, but you cannot get good butter from any cow that grazes in it. No one can account for it, but there it is. I let old Margett who was farming it in nineteen-two have one of my best Jerseys there for a week, and the butter wasn’t fit to eat. Old Mrs Margett, Margett’s mother, said her grandmother told her a highwayman was buried there, but that wouldn’t account for the taste of the butter. No, there’s more in it than meets the eye.’

  ‘Well, you don’t want Sir Ogilvy Hibberd to build on it, do you?’ said Lady Bond, who had barely been able to control her impatience during her brother’s recital.