‘It’s not a very nice day.’
‘Their father keeps a watchmaker’s and jeweller’s shop on the Oxford Road.’
‘A shop?’ said Brook, surprised out of his sulkiness. ‘That’s rather a change, isn’t it; a change from the Massingtons of Alderley Edge. I mean …’
‘My dear boy, don’t take this too seriously. A casual suggestion thrown out to you. And Mrs Blake is a tolerably well-educated woman. I think she married a little beneath her.’
Brook put his hands in his pockets. ‘Wouldn’t I be doing the same thing?’
‘Well, as I was saying the other evening – was the other sort of marriage wholly a success? It’s for you to say. If we could recall Margaret, of course we would. But since we cannot, do we want another sickly woman about the house? We don’t need money, you know that. Your choice should be wide and free.’ Frederick Ferguson patted his son’s shoulder. ‘This – this is the merest suggestion. Don’t hesitate to put it aside.’
He opened the door and went out, turning down the Grove towards the house of his friend Mr Slaney-Smith, who, although not a churchman, seemed to know the whole history of the family of Blake.
Chapter Two
The parish church of St James’s was crowded when Brook and his father entered it. They were the only representatives of the family, since Pridey had stuck to his refusal and Aunt Letitia had been discouraged from coming. Frederick Ferguson liked to maintain his sister in comfort, but he did not want to be seen about with her. There were limits to one’s philanthropy.
They came up the aisle dressed in black frock-coats and carrying glossy silk hats with broad crêpe mourning bands: Brook five feet eight inches and weighing nine stone ten pounds, Frederick six feet one inch and weighing nearly seventeen stone. People whispered together as they passed up the church, and one wag muttered: ‘Reckon service can begin now. Fergusons ’ave come.’
The church was decorated for Easter, and when the choir filed in it sat amid daffodils and primroses and bits of green moss tucked in by anxious maiden ladies on the Saturday before. Normally the choir was male, but on special occasions two rows of women and young girls were admitted to the stalls. From the Ferguson position – in the family pew Frederick had bought – the women were plain to be seen, shiny and smooth and bonneted and self-conscious, fingering their music and keeping their eyes down.
Brook had not been looking forward to this evening. Beside him his father was breathing and settling into the pew; after seating himself in any public place Mr Ferguson seemed to simmer, as if it took a time for all his dynamic energy to come to rest. Brook’s eyes travelled along the choir. He had been married at twenty-one, and had not known any girl intimately before he met Margaret. Margaret had been a case apart. She became in time not one to be included under the genetic title of ‘women’, who were still unapproachable and mysterious; she was his wife, a special dispensation of nature, separate and distinct.
If he married again he would be starting afresh. New difficulties and problems would be on every hand. These thoughts would have frightened him off a second marriage, if they had stood alone. But he was not unhappy in the company of women: he enjoyed talking to a woman – some women – much more than to a man; and he sometimes thought romantically of finding in a second wife all the virtues of sympathy, delicacy, and understanding that Margaret had not seemed to have.
The oratorio began. Two new soloists had been engaged, and Brook felt that Uncle Pridey would have been forced to swallow his intellectual pride and admit this was good.
Music did things to Brook. Under its stimulus his mind floated away into glorious daydreams, rich and full and satisfactory.
He thought of his marriage to Margaret in this church. Margaret had looked a little sallow in her orange blossom. The guests crowding with their perfunctory smiles; two waves meeting, the county and the commercial. Dan, tall, thin and cynical, and Margaret’s mother with her creaky voice going on and on about the old lace. The honeymoon at Filey, walking along the cliffs, fatigue and anxiety and disillusion. But there had been times, little happinesses, kindnesses to recall; they had got used to each other.
Then his mind swept on and up with the music into the far rosier future, where, with a confidence he never knew in real life, he was wooing a lovely young girl, who was enchanted by his looks, his manners, his talk.
Frederick nudged his arm. ‘ There are the three Blakes. You can see them now in the front row. Next to the tall woman with glasses.’
Brook flushed crimson, for his father’s whisper had a resonant quality.
Pleasant, fresh-looking girls, singing brightly under wide-brimmed straw hats. One was dark; then there was a fair girl, and then a shorter girl, younger than the others. Brook glanced at his father, but Mr Ferguson was watching the soloist with a determined look, as if all his thoughts were concentrated there. Only Brook knew that this was the habitual expression of the man – his face didn’t ever really relax, it only altered its focus of attention.
He looked back again, and at the profile of the second, the fair one, with the corn-coloured hair. She had a lovely fresh skin and a preoccupied other-worldly expression, like a young madonna. (She was in fact at that moment thinking about her new straw hat.) For a time Brook stared at her fascinated, puckering his brows to try to narrow the distance between them. He fancied he could hear her voice above the others.
After the oratorio was over, people stood in groups outside in the quarter darkness of the mild fine night and chatted and gossiped and raised hats and stroked beards, and about them the beech trees rustled and the old grey gravestones slept.
While they were waiting for Tomkins with the brougham there was a brief whispered angry argument in which Brook was overborne, and then Mr Ferguson steered his son across the grass to a group standing under the shadow of the tower. There were five in the group. Brook still hung back.
Ferguson said: ‘Ah, good evening, Mrs Blake. A good performance, I should say. We ought to be proud of our old church and its choir.’
Mrs Blake turned.
‘Oh, Mr Ferguson, now isn’t that kind of you to say so! Well, we all did our best; we’re just waiting for Teddy to take his surplice off. Yes, I think it went well.’
She was like a big bee on an autumn afternoon, humming and great with honey. They were there in the shadow, three girls and another older woman, white figures against the grey wall of the church, with glinting eyes and teeth. Introductions, and his father with a turn of his hand brought him into the circle. The older woman, an aunt, Mrs Higginbottom. How d’you do to her, and then the girls. Abruptly they seemed to step out of the darkness, out of anonymity for ever.
‘This is Esther Jane, my eldest. And this is Cordelia. And this is Emma. Emma has only just joined the choir since she had her seventeenth birthday.’ Mrs Blake went on talking, explaining the unexplainable, which was that one woman, plethoric, commonplace, talkative, with wisps of hair falling all over her face, could have produced these three buoyant smooth-skinned creatures, all so different, so young, so unapproachable.
Quick glancing dark eyes and an impudent nose – that was how Brook remembered Esther Jane that night, and his hand, he knew, was beginning to sweat when he touched hers, and he could say nothing but a muttered ‘ How d’you do,’ and then he saw Cordelia, and this was the one he had watched in the choir; quite different full face, still a little remote, a little preoccupied, but with a grave quicksilver charm to her expression that turned his heart over; and Emma had fair braided hair like great gold chains over her shoulders; and the fat Mrs Higginbottom was breathing a smell of camphor over him and trying to tell him something about the choir at St Ann’s where she usually went; and then a tall youth with an ungainly, tumbling sort of way with him came out of the vestry door and was introduced as Teddy.
‘Are you a singer, Mr Ferguson?’
Brook said: ‘ No, I’m afraid – er – not … I play the piano, though.’ What does Father want me to do? he t
hought. Esther Jane too vivacious, Cordelia too beautiful, Emma too young. If any, it would have to be Emma for her extreme youth. But they’re complete to themselves. If they do think of marriage, it’s not to someone nervous and a bit delicate like me, it’s to someone younger and more lively who can laugh and joke with them and meet them on their own ground.
‘Most of my sisters play a bit,’ said Teddy, ‘but not me. I sing: it’s easier. And the trouble with them is that there’s really too many of ’ em to learn on one piano. Have you any sisters?’
‘No. I had two brothers, but they both died when I was a baby.’
‘Ah, too bad. It’s happened to us. Is that your carriage at the gate?’
‘Yes.’
‘She looks a lively mare. I should think she’d go a spanking pace with something lighter behind.’
‘Yes. Oh, yes, she does.’
Teddy glanced at Brook curiously. ‘D’you ride much, Mr Ferguson?’
‘I have a horse. I go for a canter sometimes.’ (But not before Tomkins has taken him for a gallop to work off his first exuberance.)
Teddy was thinking what a queer stick this young man was. He was rich and probably had everything he wanted, but he didn’t seem to find much fun in life. How Mother’s purring, Teddy thought.
‘You must come round and see us one evening during the lighter weather,’ Mr Ferguson said, his voice, his eyes steady, ice-blue, confident. ‘Bring this young man and your daughters, Mrs Blake.’
‘Oh, thank you. We’d like to do that, wouldn’t we? That’s a real pleasure we’ll look forward to, Mr Ferguson. I often pass your gates on the way to my sister’s, and in the spring I always stop to admire the lilac and the laburnum, Mr Ferguson. It will be full out, I suppose, quite soon?’
‘Quite soon.’ He was too well aware of his condescension to need to take the hint. ‘Well, I think we must be going now. We shall meet your husband some time, Mrs Blake.’
‘Oh, yes. Yes, I’m sure he’ll be that disappointed when I tell him about us meeting. He often speaks about you.’
They parted. Brook shook hands with the boy, whom he had rather taken to, and bowed to the ladies and followed his father over the gravel path among the gravestones, taking with him a last impression of soft voices and smooth cheeks and a disturbing, walled-off femininity. Did he wish to climb that wall? A burglar breaking into a strange garden.
Tomkins was waiting, hand on the open door, touched his cap, shut them in, jumped up to his box. They drove off.
Mr Ferguson said: ‘The aunt is a little common. It confirms my earlier view.’
The carriage jolted and rolled in the ruts of the country lane.
‘I wish they’d do something about the road,’ said Brook. ‘Even cinders.’
‘I must meet the father. I’m told he is worthy – wrapped up in his family. What did you think of the girls?’
‘I didn’t see much of them.’
His father’s bulk shifted impatiently. ‘Naturally you couldn’t come to know them in ten minutes. I suppose you got some impression?’
‘They seemed – very nice. Er – what makes you specially interested in this family, Father?’
‘It is for you to become ‘‘specially interested’’ where you choose,’ said Mr Ferguson, breathing his irritation out. ‘I think those girls are suitable in type: young, healthy, modestly well-mannered. I have good reports of them.’
‘Who from?’
‘They’re unlikely to put on their opinions the sort of misplaced importance that Margaret would sometimes do. Not well connected or rich, but one of them, I think, could make a suitable wife for you, could become a suitable mother for your children.’ He lowered the window. ‘Very close in church tonight. If you get to know them a little better and then don’t find them at all to your taste, they can be dropped. Indeed you should look elsewhere while considering them.’
The carriage crossed the main road and Tomkins whipped up the mare to a better pace as they moved into the wooded darkness of the residential suburb. The night was thick and warm about them. Brook took a deep breath. Oh, well, this was just an idea of his father’s. It was in such an early stage there was no need to fret about it yet. (He knew these ideas of old but tried to forget how often they came to fruition, how often before he’d found himself manoeuvred into a position from which there seemed no reasonable retreat.) He tried even to forget his father’s voice in the pleasure of the drive, to remember the fine surging music of the Messiah. As so often before, he turned away from life and found security and comfort in a daydream. He thought of himself writing music as fine as Handel’s, listening to it being performed by massed choirs in the Gentlemen’s Concert Hall. His answers were increasingly absent-minded for the rest of the way home.
Chapter Three
The Blakes lived over the shop in Oxford Road. They were a healthy family; and although there was never quite room for them all in the house at once, they bore the inconveniences of overcrowding with good humour.
Ten of the children were living from a total output of fourteen. Esther Jane was twenty-one, Edward was twenty, Cordelia nineteen, Emma seventeen, Anne twelve, Sarah ten, Mary eight, Penelope six, and Winifred two. Virginia was minus a third, though everyone was at present hoping for a John James.
Teddy worked as a junior clerk at a grey cloth merchant’s, Esther Jane taught at a kindergarten school, Cordelia was apprenticed to a dressmaker, Emma helped with the shop and the house, and the others were at school or in rompers.
On a warm evening in July the Blakes had important visitors. It was late enough for all the workers in the family to be home, but the shop was not yet closed.
It was a tall, narrow building bounded on one side by a pork butcher’s and on the other by Yates’s Wine Lodge, which was a public house in disguise. There were three steps into the shop, and down these Brook stumbled, leading the way for his father, who followed close behind. Outside Tomkins leaned against the step of the phaeton and the two horses shook their harness and put their noses together.
The shop was small and crammed with ailing clocks, many of them surgical cases. Grey-faced grandfathers leered with empty bellies at cuckoos frozen in the moment of calling the hour. German chimers rubbed uneasy shoulders with bow-legged walnut Frenchmen. Marble bracket eight-day leaned against decorated ormolus. And dozens of convalescent clocks ticked.
Mr Blake was working behind a narrow counter – a small man with sloping shoulders and a long neck in a collar too high and too big. Without looking up, he said in a slow voice: ‘Good evening. It’s warm. I’ll not be a minute.’
Brook, sweating, turned to look for an empty chair, but his father did not move, so he gave up the search.
‘Good evening, Mr Blake. Is your wife in? I don’t know if you have a side entrance, but we could not see it.’
Mr Blake looked up. His tired, prominent, quizzical eyes took in the callers.
‘Ah, Mr Ferguson. And Mr Brook.’ He fitted a magnifying glass into his eye and peered down at the watch.
‘We’ve come,’ said Mr Ferguson, ‘on a personal matter, concerning yourself and your wife and one of your daughters.’
‘There,’ said Mr Blake, and ran his hand through his fine grey hair. ‘It’s the compensation balance. They’ve used some sort of alloy muck instead of brass. See?’ He came round from behind the counter, picking his way slowly across. ‘ Cheap watches, sir. Never buy a cheap watch.’
‘My own watch was given me when I was twenty-one,’ said Mr Ferguson, towering, seeming to fill a third of the shop. ‘By my father. It has served me ever since. I made the same present to my son, didn’t I, Brook? The best is always the cheapest–’
The time was a quarter to nine and Mr Ferguson found himself interrupted. He had a strong voice, but it could not compete against twenty-seven chiming clocks. With impatience he waited until they had done. Mr Blake listened to them with an interested but critical expression.
‘As I was saying,’ Mr Ferguson
resumed, ‘although it would be–’
He stopped again. Two clocks had been half a minute late off the mark. All the satisfaction instantly vanished from Mr Blake’s face. He clicked his tongue and frowned until the noise had ceased, and then as Mr Ferguson took a breath he wandered off to put things right.
‘It’s the Louis Quinze,’ he said. ‘And of course this Handsworth thing. Quite erratic.’ He turned his thin neck within its collar and looked at them. ‘ It’s all a question of balances. Did you wish to see my wife?’
‘Yes, and you too, Mr Blake.’
Mr Blake took out a handsome watch and looked at it.
‘It’s not about clocks?’
‘It is not.’
‘Well, I can’t close yet … I’ll get Teddy to come and mind shop.’
The house had been built with a gloomy basement kitchen; but in his early married days, before his children had begun to come so quickly off the assembly line, John James Blake had had a new kitchen built out on the ground-floor level. This had become a common room whose population was continually in a state of flux and change. The only constant was Mrs Blake, who cooked there, laid the meals, washed up, dressed and fed her children, propelled them off to school or work, and was still there to welcome them on the rebound.
On the evening that the Fergusons called, only Emma and her three youngest were with her; Ann and Sarah were upstairs playing duets on the upright rosewood piano, and Esther, Teddy, and Cordelia, having just finished their supper, had been sent out by Mrs Blake to pick peas and dig potatoes before the light failed. Mrs Blake worked hard herself and she had a talent for organizing her children’s lives so that nothing was wasted. The spring which set off her inventive brain was to see one of them sitting down.
But in the warm early dusk of the garden not much work was being done. They had stopped to talk, and talk had led to good-humoured argument. The two sisters sided together and Teddy, finding himself getting the worst of it, had maliciously begun to flip peas at them with his finger and thumb. There was no retaliation for a time, until he added weight to his ammunition with a potato. This bounced off Cordelia’s head and left bits of clayey soil in her hair. She squealed and dropped her basket and picked up the two largest potatoes that had so far been unearthed. One of these hit Teddy on the shoulder, but the other was a wild miss and went rolling down the path to fetch up at the feet of Mr Blake, who at that moment came out.
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