Lucy Carmichael

by Margaret Kennedy

  Lady Frances frowned.

  “She came here immediately afterwards,” she said.

  Something in her tone made it clear that Tish had forgotten herself. The suggestion in her unless of course could not possibly, in the circumstances, apply to Miss Carmichael, and should never have been made in connection with her. It was typical of a certain vulgarity which Lady Frances occasionally deplored in all her daughters and which puzzled her, for she had given them the same upbringing which she had received herself. They said and thought things of which she would have been incapable. She did not realise that they suffered from social uneasiness, whence most vulgarity springs. She herself never did. All her principles were founded upon an unshaken belief that earls are superior to commoners. This belief her children could not share, though they wished to do so. The spirit of the age had got at them and they could not be perfectly certain that they were better than anybody else. From their uncertainty sprang these lapses.

  “It explains her clothes,” said Tish. “I always thought her unusually well dressed. Everything new, you know, and everything matching: bags and scarves and shoes. Of course, she’s wearing out her trousseau.”

  “Oh!” cried the other two. “Poor girl!”

  This practical detail touched their rudimentary imaginations and forced them to realise a little of what Lucy must have suffered.

  “She must have a lot of character and courage,” said Lady Anne, “to put it all behind her and come away to work here.”

  “Yes,” agreed Lady Frances. “One respects her for it. And the fewer people who know this story the better; to have it dogging her must be very painful. It must go no further than our three selves. You understand, Tish?”

  Tish agreed, rather sulkily.

  “It explains a lot of things,” went on Lady Frances. “I had wondered why an apparently healthy girl should look so wan and listless, and speak in that tired voice. It had struck me she must have had some great trouble recently. But I must get her away from those sluttish Angeras. That place isn’t fit for a pig to live in.”

  “They can’t make ends meet without a paying guest,” Tish reminded her.

  “Ah. They would take that big house, though I warned them not to. But Mr. Haverstock could go there.”

  “Poor Mr. Haverstock,” expostulated Tish. “Why should he?”

  “It would be no hardship to him. I’m sure he never washes. His finger-nails are always as black as my shoe. Or that new curate, Mr. Finch, might go there, and Miss Carmichael could have those nice rooms in Sheep Lane, where Mr. Finch lodges now. I’ll suggest that to Canon Pillie.”

  “Does Mr. Finch have black finger-nails?”

  “No, but he writes plays.”

  Having come to this conclusion, Lady Frances paid their bill, made enquiries about the waitress’s spine, was snubbed, and led the way out into the square.

  *

  “Don’t turn round, and step out,” said Mr. Garstang to Mr. Thornley, as they picked their way up Church Lane. “The Amazon host is behind us.”

  Both men broke into a brisk pace which was almost a trot. They too were on their way to the Council meeting and they did not want to meet the Millwoods sooner than they need.

  “And you will back me up, won’t you?” panted Thornley. “Angera ought to be on the Council, and now that there’s a vacancy we must say so. It’s only right for a man of his distinction. And if we don’t secure him, who will we get? Somebody with a name, who never comes, or a nonentity who never speaks up. Of what earthly use are Coppard and Miss Foss? We want someone who will occasionally stand up to…”

  He gave a jerk of his head to indicate the ladies behind.

  “Spedding comes and speaks.”

  “Yes. But he’s not the type … if we wanted a solicitor, why couldn’t we have had Corfield? Solid man who does all the solid family business, and his father before him. I can’t think how we ever came to co-opt Spedding. He’s a stranger to the town, only been here four years, and takes all the shady cases that Corfield won’t handle.”

  “He was co-opted down in the bun-shop.”

  “I know. Everything is done in the bun-shop. Look how they wished that washed-out young ’un on me last term, when I wanted the job for poor old Minnie Andrews! Not that I’ve anything against Lucy. But surely I might be allowed to choose my own assistant?”

  “Isn’t she Haverstock’s best girl?”

  “No, no. Nothing of the sort. The Council meetings are a farce, nowadays.”

  Garstang laughed. He thought the Institute very small beer and was amused that Mr. Thornley should take it all so seriously. He had himself been on the Council for many years. He was an elderly bachelor and an authority on church brasses.

  He was still chuckling when they reached the Council room where they found Mr. Hayter, Colonel Harding, who was the chairman, Mr. Poole, the secretary, a stenographer to take down the minutes, and Miss Foss, the daughter of old Canon Foss, who had succeeded her father on the Council, had attended every meeting for seven years, and had never been heard to say a single word at any of them. But she belonged to the town as completely as did the market clock and was unfailing in her support of Institute activities.

  “Coppard coming?” demanded Thornley, as he took a chair at the end of the table.

  The question was unnecessary. Coppard, the headmaster of Severnton Grammar School, was never free at two o’clock on a Monday afternoon.

  The Millwood women clattered in, removed their galoshes, hung up their macintoshes, and greeted everyone, including the stenographer, with appropriate graciousness. Lady Frances took a seat beside the Chairman and told him to begin. It was two o’clock and they need not, surely, wait for Mr. Spedding.

  Hayter, however, was determined to wait for Spedding whose support he needed over the first item on the agenda paper. So he discovered a draught and took such a long time to locate it that another five minutes elapsed before Poole could be told to read the minutes. This he did, very, very slowly, and Garstang, who saw through these manœuvres, nearly laughed. Poole was an inconspicuous young man who had been appointed on Hayter’s recommendation.

  Mr. Spedding arrived just as the minutes were being signed. Hayter deftly dealt with an agenda paper which Colonel Harding was holding upside down. He turned it the right way up, and the Colonel read out:

  “Election to the Council.”

  And sneezed. The vacancy had arisen because old Mr. Hutchins had died on New Year’s Day, and the Colonel still had the cold he caught at the funeral.

  “Any suggestions?” he asked, when he had blown his nose.

  Spedding immediately spoke up.

  “I believe‚” he said, “that local feeling would be in favour of putting Mrs. Meeker on the Council.”

  “Mrs. Meeker!”

  The cry was unanimous. Even Miss Foss contributed a faint squeak.

  “I don’t propose her,” Spedding hastened to add. “I merely thought I ought to mention it. She’s a prominent town personality, very active in all sorts of ways, and … and popular….”

  He paused tactfully. Everybody present detested Mrs. Meeker, and he knew it very well.

  “Popular in certain quarters,” he concluded.

  “But impossible on a committee, surely?” exclaimed Mr. Garstang. “If you say it’s a fine day she bares her teeth at you and says: I challenge that statement! What do you think, Lady Frances?”

  “She’d never do,” said Lady Frances. “She would import politics into everything. This Institute is non-political. Let’s hear some other suggestions.”

  Spedding bowed. He had expected nothing else. His task had been to mention the lady’s name and to give the Council no excuse for ignorance of public opinion. To fellow citizens, who might demand indignantly why Mrs. Meeker was not on the Council, he could reply that he had done his best. He was not sticking his neck out.

  Thornley was opening his mouth to suggest Angera when Hayter forestalled him with a diffident plea that t
he Staff might be more fully represented. There was some feeling about it. Hints had been dropped. Not, of course, that there was any complaint that Mr. Thornley did not adequately convey the Staff point of view. But some of the other Directors were sensitive about their prestige.

  “I quite agree,” said Lady Frances. “I hadn’t known there was this feeling, till Mr. Hayter mentioned it. And when we have so very distinguished a man as Dr. Pidgeon on our Staff, I certainly think we should ask him to join us.”

  “Pidgeon!” exclaimed Thornley. “Why, I don’t believe he cares twopence about his prestige. And I’m sure he’d never come to meetings. He makes song and dance enough about coming over to do the work. I think we should have Angera.”

  “So do I,” said Garstang.

  But the Millwood ladies looked doubtful.

  “He’s such a silly man,” complained Lady Anne.

  “He hates the Institute and he hates us,” said Tish. “He goes about saying so. He hates England.”

  “I would prefer Dr. Pidgeon,” said Lady Frances, who did not much care for Angera.

  But the obstinate Thornley insisted on proposing him, and Garstang seconded the proposal. The four ladies and Spedding opposed it. Hayter abstained. On a further vote Dr. Pidgeon was elected.

  “Treasurer’s Report,” wheezed the Chairman.

  Mr. Spedding was the Treasurer and his report was not stimulating. The Institute, in spite of its lavish endowments, was losing money. The Christmas Nativity Play showed a deficit of £37:5:9.

  Smaller than usual, thought Mr. Garstang, drawing pictures of crabs on his blotting-paper. Perhaps, as the collection of props grew larger, poor Thornley did not have to lay out so much on wings and haloes and beards. But if every Treasurer’s report which Garstang had heard read out in that Council room had been superimposed and photographed, he did not believe it would be blurred, and nobody seemed to be taking it much to heart.

  “There aren’t enough late buses,” said Tish. “People from Gloucester and Severnton can’t get back.”

  “If the town itself would turn up, it would be something,” said Mr. Garstang. “But I suppose they can’t be bothered to climb the hill. Very natural. They’ve their own amusements. Their cinemas and radios. Why should they climb this hill on a beastly night to hear an indifferent performance of Beethoven when they can hear a much better one by their own firesides? … If they like Beethoven, that’s to say.”

  Spedding caught Hayter’s eye.

  “There are some things they haven’t got, that they would climb the hill for,” he suggested. “They’ve no really good dance hall, and no chance of building one, just at present.”

  Hayter cleared his throat.

  “Should I, do you think,” he suggested to the Chairman, “read that letter of Adamson’s in this connection? We’d put it in Other Correspondence, but perhaps I’d better read it now.”

  Colonel Harding had no recollection of the letter but he nodded, and a letter was forthwith read out from a cinema proprietor in the new town with whom Lady Frances had had a brush over the banning of a picture. He wrote to enquire if the great hall at the Institute would be available at any time during the spring for a Bebop Contest, and upon what terms he might hire it.

  “What insolence!” exclaimed Lady Frances, adding reproachfully: “You never told me about this, Mr. Hayter.”

  Hayter looked modestly down his nose. Some things were told to Lady Frances before the meeting, and some were not. Had she heard of this letter it might not have been read, and he wished it to be read.

  Mr. Garstang was explaining Bebop to Lady Anne. He had not seen it, he said, but he had read an article about it.

  “It’s the people’s art,” he said. “It’s modern folk-dancing. I can’t see much difference between Bebop and Catching Lobsters, or whatever they call these square dances.”

  “Bebop might not be very suitable here,” said Spedding. “But the fact remains that the hall and theatre are not often used in the Lent Term. If they could occasionally be hired for some form of … er … popular entertainment it would bring in a nice little sum of money and need not, of course, interfere with the Institute performances, which would always have prior claim.”

  “But Mr. Spedding,” cried Lady Frances, “you don’t understand. This Institute was not built as a profit-making concern. We are not interested in nice little sums of money. That was not my husband’s intention….”

  A shadow of grief crossed her face as she thought of poor Matthew dying, holding her hand and whispering of his hopes for the Institute. In a gentler voice than usual she tried to explain those hopes, as far as she had grasped them, to this common little man.

  Spedding bowed again. He could have told her that the town had some right to ask why its property was being so inefficiently managed. He could have told her that the terms of the bequest, which he had been at pains to study, allowed a wide interpretation of the uses to which the buildings could be put. But he was not sticking his neck out. If she preferred to run up deficits upon performances which the town did not enjoy, and which were notoriously poor in quality, that was all right by him. It was for the town to decide whether or not she was carrying out the Founder’s intentions.

  Nobody had any further comment to make. Poole was instructed to write a snubbing letter to Adamson in the name of the Council. And the Chairman went on to the next item:

  “A letter from the British Council….”

  3

  SNOW came in from the east, over the Cotswolds, over the Severn Valley, silting through the forest ridges of Slane, driving level on a wind so cutting that nobody went out, if they could help it, except the Millwoods, who were herded by Lady Frances to church. They had it all to themselves. Charles was obliged to read both the lessons, which he did with gloomy distinction, and, after the sermon, he had to hand the offertory bag to his mother and his youngest sister, Penelope. There was no hymn. The organist and the choir had blenched at the blizzard. In a shuffling silence Lady Frances pushed a pound note into the bag. Penelope, whose allowance was measured by Ravonsclere austerity, put in half a crown. Charles added his own pound note and then took it up to Mr. Ladislaw, who laid it on the altar. Then, returning to the Millwood pew, he knelt down, was blessed, and repaired to the vestry. It was his duty, as a churchwarden, to count the contents of the bag and to enter in a little book the statement that £2:2:6 had been received for foreign missions. This task did not take long, but the women did not wait, and when he reached the church porch they had disappeared into a flurry of snowflakes.

  “Do you think,” murmured the rector, who was peering out behind him, “that anyone from Cyre Abbey will come to Evensong?”

  There was a flicker of hope in his voice. If the Millwoods did not come, nobody would; he could rattle through the service, cut the sermon, and return to his warm parsonage. But the worse the weather the more likely it was that Lady Frances would insist upon coming to church. She believed that poor Mr. Ladislaw would be discouraged at having no congregation.

  “I don’t expect so,” said Charles reassuringly. “We have a lot of people coming this afternoon, all the people from the Institute who are going to canvass for me. They can’t go till the six o’clock bus.”

  The rector looked despondent. He said that no buses were running between Cyre Abbey and Ravonsbridge. The drifts at Slane Bredy had stopped all motor traffic.

  “They won’t be able to come,” he suggested.

  But Charles knew better. If his mother had told them to come they would come, though they had to walk the whole six miles. And if there were no buses, he himself would probably be forced to drive them home in the station waggon, since Sunday, like Christmas, was a day when the Millwood chauffeurs could not be taken from their families.

  “They’ll come,” he stated. “They’ll get here somehow.”

  “Wonderful enthusiasm,” commented the rector.

  Charles made a non-committal noise and set off to face the wind. He did
not believe that enthusiasm was bringing these wretched people out of Ravonsbridge on their only free day. He felt none himself. He believed Liberalism to be a lost cause. He was only standing because the fatigues of a by-election were less to be dreaded than a disagreement with his mother. He did not expect to poll more than a hundred votes, and, to get as many as that, he would have to make pleasant faces at people, an art to which he did not take naturally. Platform oration troubled him less: nor did he suppose that any other Liberal candidate might hope to do better. If somebody must be obliged to cast the pearls of progressive moderation before this herd of swine, intent upon self-destruction and only divided in its choice of precipices, he might as well see to it that a thankless task was performed with ability and distinction. The swine should not say that the Liberals were unable to put up a first-class man.

  He fought his way across the park to the luncheon table where, over a meal of cold beef and junket, he heard his mother’s plans for the campaign. The staff in the kitchen were eating a hot joint; the Cyre Abbey servants always ate better than their masters. Lady Frances thought it only right and proper that they should; people in that class, she would explain to her family, expect a hot meal on Sundays. Had she been the Spartan queen, whom she so much resembled, she would have referred to it contemptuously as ‘slaves’ food’. A well-bred person, to her way of thinking, eats as little as possible on Sundays in order to allow a day of rest to the Poor.

  “Our people‚” she said, “had better canvass the new town in couples. Mr. Haverstock had better go with Miss Turner. She’ll keep him to the point. Otherwise he’ll merely sing to them.”

  “Won’t he want to go with Miss Carmichael?” asked Penelope. “Aren’t they engaged or something?”

  “I don’t know what you mean by or something,” reproved Lady Frances, with a frown. “It’s a vulgar, slipshod phrase and I can’t bear it. I’ve told you not to use it before. No. They are not engaged. We thought they were, when we appointed her, but it turns out not to be so. No … poor girl….”