With the remaining daughters, Amethyst, Jacinth and Sapphire, of the once dashing Mrs. Roundelay, the realization of spinsterhood came slowly, taking the assorted form, from their thirtieth year (or just before all hope was extinct) of sport welfare and culture.
Miss Amy became the tennis star of the county, in long piqué skirts, black ribbed stockings and a small sailor hat, which was all very nice and brought her name forward, as Mrs. Roundelay confided to intimates, but which was also heating (men didn’t like flushed faces which were not the direct or indirect result of their own words or actions) and which, of course, led nowhere since a girl of her class mustn’t become too conspicuous even if it is only on a grass court.
Miss Jessie’s furtive dismays at her single state were drowned in charitable soup: as her expectations of marriage and motherhood receded, the old and infirm of the village of Delaye became more drastically visited, read to and cheered with every year that passed, and by the time all hope was abandoned few cottages were safe from her. The plight of Jessie was far more acute and remarkable than it would be to-day, where post-1918 daughters assume in advance that all men are liars, frequently confuse the issues and queer the more paying pitch by week-ends unblessed by any church and conducted on a fifty-fifty basis, and are practically forced into careers, however much, in reversal of the old order, they would prefer to be at home doing the flowers and walking the dog in peace and content. But in Jessie Roundelay’s day, to arrange the flowers for too long was an unmistakable sign that you yourself were going to become another bloom of the Wall family. And even if the Jessies of the period liked the pretty employment they got no credit for it. There are spinsters-by-instinct in every epoch, a fact which is consistently denied, and although Jessie was of their number, a circumstance of which she was unaware, public opinion was against her, downing her with its condolence. All girls wanted to be married. Whether they possessed one single qualification for that difficult and manysided relationship: if they were culinarily, temperamentally or even physically fit to undertake the job was a point left, as it is to this day, entirely to chance. Men, on their side, chose their horses and dogs far more carefully than their wives and with greater intelligence. A horse was a serious matter, its wants and ailments known and listed. And yet, with that engrained ability to muddle through to victory which is the feature of the British army and the British marriage alike, and that is arrived at by a combination of procrastination, good nature, good luck, rough humour, fair dealing and more good luck, the Roundelay marriages held. There had been no family divorce for over two centuries, though it was felt that poor Marguerite, had she not been murdered in France, might possibly have been a very near thing. The French, you know . . . toojoors femm varry, the male Roundelays would sometimes say over the walnuts and port.
Miss Sapphy’s outlet of culture was perhaps the hardest to come by. Tennis was unmistakably ‘in’, though poor Amy couldn’t hope to play it for ever. Good works, on the other hand, though boring, thankless and smelly, went on for ever, but Jessie had long cornered that meagre market. As you couldn’t get your body off on men, you tried your mind on them. The job was laborious, and, as with the professional entertainer, precarious. Few people (even women) wanted ‘Annie Laurie’ and ‘The Blue Danube’ sung or played to them until at earliest, after tea, and once the men diners had been shown your hand-painted tambourines, poker-worked boxes and water-colours of local views, that ended the current output, and it took at least six weeks more to assemble a new form of artistic detainer, a hiatus in which you read up the news in the morning paper, a process which brought rewards incommensurate with the mental effort.
There were occasional visits to Chrissy, in Kensington, where culture, thanks in a measure to W. S. Gilbert, could raise its head and was at no time dealt such staggering blows as it was in the country, but the advantages of Kensington were, Sapphire Roundelay was to find, largely cancelled out by the Lost Tribes, who kept the drawing-room ominously empty on Sunday afternoons, a time long recognized as being dedicated to the following-up process by ballroom partners, and where intentions could be assumed without committal on either side, the glittering English tea-table of that period serving the dual purpose of charming the male prospector with the sight of dainty hand poised (the sugarbowl), and chaperoning the possible familiarity through barricade (the spirit-kettle). The household was not even relieved by the presence of Sapphire’s nephew, Maxwell. Chrissy Dunston as a matrimonial agency was a hopeless proposition, her sister soon discovered. The men might arrive with flowers, but they left with pamphlets, and quite soon they ceased to arrive at all, and there was not a sandbin or even basement area within a two-mile radius, from Campden Hill to Queens Gate, from High Street to Brompton Square, which did not contain at least one Tribal tract, and some of them two. And Sapphire would return in a four-wheeler, making the six-mile journey from the market-town of Norminster which was, at that date, the nearest point to the village of Delaye, and be driven up the avenue, and passed by poor Jessie on her tricycle, bound for the village, and leaving in her wake splotches of soup and nodules of half-set jelly upon the gravel.
6
Two events marked the timeless days at Delaye for the unmarried daughters, when they became aunts, to Marcus and Edmund through the marriage of Emerald Roundelay to Bertram Cloudesley, and to Maxwell Dunston through Crystal’s match with Colonel Dunston, and when, at close upon sixty years of age, they became great-aunts through a similar process on the part of their junior nephew, Edmund, the present owner of Delaye, who re-entered the family as a Roundelay through deed-poll, with the approval of the entire family.
It was felt, though never admitted between the ageing sisters, that to be in a superior blood relationship to those whose existence had come about through an intimate action everlastingly debarred to themselves of a brother or sister was the next best thing — though, of course ‘removed’, like distant cousinship — to matrimony itself.
The present household at Delaye consists, then, of Sir Edmund, his wife Evelyn, his son Stacey, who was seldom at home, being occupied with his studies in estate management at an agricultural college, his elder daughter Margaret, his second daughter Angela, the great-aunts Miss Amethyst, Miss Sapphire and Miss Jessie, his cousin Maxwell Dunston, who, on leaving the army he had always chafed against and refusing the Kensington home of his mother, had made a mutually advantageous offer to Sir Edmund, which gave Maxwell the country life he preferred for the sum of five guineas a week.
The domestic staff at Delaye was headed by Musgrave, the butler, who on the strength of long service, sometimes presumed ever so slightly in alluding to the senior Misses Roundelay as ‘the old ladies’. The mutual affection and respect in which servant and family equally participated was only intermittently ruffled by Musgrave’s dislike of Miss Sapphire, whom, at these times, he addressed as Miss Sophia, timing his occasion always to coincide with tea-parties and other social occasions. His antagonism was half professional, half private. Miss Sapphire would never come to the table punctually, but after an entire afternoon of doing nothing ascertainable, would wait for the gong to sound, and then begin flurrying round her room putting the finishing touches to her hair and dress, and, once arrived in the dining-room as the soup was removed, and occasionally as the fish came in, would discover for the remainder of the meal forgotten portions of her equipment that she commonly permitted nobody to fetch from her bedroom, and the courses were punctuated by little rushes from the table in search of handkerchief, spectacles and handbag, thus generating a restless and dyspeptic atmosphere which was the equal exasperation of Musgrave and of Major Dunston. The private dislike dated from that evening of 1912 when Miss Sapphire had seen Musgrave in his pyjamas, and about to enter the bathroom for the weekly cleansing that all the servants were permitted in rotation. There was no second bathroom at Delaye. In the Victorian era it was regarded as superfluous, and ever since, no master of the house could afford one. Thus butler and mistress had each other
equally in their power, for as surely as a reminiscent gleam came into the eyes of old Miss Sapphire, so surely did she become Miss Sophia at the next tea-party.
Had there been a proper domestic hierarchy at Delaye, the housekeeper would have jointly reigned with Musgrave. The financial situation had outruled that possibility; for two generations, and even if the cook stayed for a period of years, Musgrave, though strictly respecting her professional rating, still regarded her as an inferior with whom the post-luncheon cup of tea could not be drunk. She might prepare the tea-pot, but, his cup once handed, Musgrave would disappear into his pantry to drink.
After the cook, there were an upper and an under housemaid, when they could be obtained, or, alternatively, a stop-gap of village girls who were glad to come to Delaye, and whose services were called in so frequently, these days after the Great War, that they needed no longer to be ‘shown’ and were house servants in every sense, save that at night they bicycled back to their homes.
Lowest of all came the kitchenmaid, whose name, Sue, on first hearing, seemed incredible for these high-flown days. But the mother of Sue was very properly and thoroughly old-fashioned, and did not believe in annoying her employers by bestowing names above the station of her daughters.
Sue Privett was the latest of a line of Privetts to serve the Roundelays. Sometimes, Sir Edmund, pondering the accounts books in the cellar, would re-tally the Privetts who had been kitchenmaids to former generations.
There were eight, and the first had appeared in 1789.
Polly Privett.
Sometimes he meditated her: flitting the stone-flagged passages. Perky? Saucy? In chintz gown or glazed, beflowered calico, a mob-cap set upon her young, bright hair . . . or unthinkably bedraggled? The kitchen butt? Little slave to everyone?
7
Somewhere between the modest rating of the regular servants and the status of the family itself was Nursie.
Nursie, like Musgrave, had served three generations of Roundelays and now, at a stupendous age and in common with the old retainers of so many other families, she had long been rescued from becoming a social problem and was comfortably installed as family curse. The Roundelays were all devoted to her in a profoundly exasperated way, and the fact that her keep, her pocket-money, washing and whims were a drain on pocket and nerves alike, that was borne without a murmur by all and as a matter of course, did not prevent some of them from occasionally desiring to strangle her.
Nursie ran true to type and was now slightly senile. She constantly asked the family or any passing servant which battle we were fighting now, a query that became progressively easier to answer, but she also believed that Queen Victoria still occupied the throne, and when assured à haute voix (Mr. Maxwell did best at this) that the present sovereign was King Edward, George the Fifth, Edward the Eighth, or George the Sixth, would shake her head and answer, ‘Ah, they’d never get rid of Her’. Nursie also believed, and stated, that she had once seen King William the Fourth, when in service in London. If anyone pointed out to her that, if this were so, she must now be quite one hundred and thirteen years old, she would silence them for ever by announcing ‘I’m ninety and I’ve got my lines to prove it’, upon which, and in spite of polite protestations of belief and congratulation, she would toddle to a chest of drawers and soon transform her room, large though it was, into a lamentable jumble sale, at the very bottom of which, and when the floor was ankle-deep in clothes, photographs, albums and various precious knicknacks the very purpose of some of which was baffling, her birth certificate would be discovered and handed round (only it was sometimes a wedding favour, and twice a funeral card).
Nursie, the family sometimes thought, could be really awful, veering from garrulity — her tiger story was the Diamond jubilee — to that rudeness which society allows to old age on the ground that that condition is sacred, although nobody has yet been discovered capable of connecting the two propositions. Visitors, sometimes of courtesy, often of curiosity, would ask to be ‘taken up’ to Nursie, rather, one supposes, in the way in which the British public will pay sixpence extra to view the Chamber of Horrors, and were to find that almost any way you handled her was fatal. If you were sympathetic, your twitching feet were glued to the floor by reminiscence of weddings you knew nothing about, children you’d never heard of and were never likely to, they, by now, being middle-aged men and women, but set, for Nursie, in an eternal plush frame of youth, and, of course, by memories of the Jubilee, which a large proportion of Nursie’s audience would not admit to remembering in any case. If, on the other hand, you were kind, but crisp and firm with her, she was rude at once. (Her favourite gambit was ‘I don’t remember you’, which pronouncement, oddly enough in one you pitied and profoundly regretted, had the effect of making you feel at once outside all decent social pales, a parvenu, a bounder in grain. . . .)
So there sat Nursie, talkative, rude and sacred, and apparently everlasting. She had unreliable periods of being pleased with trifles, but on the whole the best of everything was good enough for her. She had the servant’s unerring flair for imported meat, however perfectly cooked, and could scent by some devilish extra sense the presence of any substitute matter in fresh butter; imported eggs were, in the Great War, sent down on her tray, via caustic messages to the cook and a subsequent flood of tears that the current Mrs. Roundelay must waste one hour in mopping up. It was price paid for a lifetime of very genuine devotion. And it was Maxwell Dunston, always sarcastic, who dared to put Nursie into a nutshell. ‘She reminds me of that song — y’know, “She was poor but she was honest” — though I’m hanged if she was ever the “victim of a rich man’s sin”. But there’s no doubt “she drinks the champagne that we send her though she never can forgive”.’ But the Major was extra rasped, that morning, on discovering that the book of stamps which somebody had given Nursie for the letters that she still laboriously wrote in a hand wholly illegible to addresses most of which had been razed to the ground twenty years ago, had had every stamp in the book removed by Nursie who had pasted them on to the wall. ‘I’m putting by for the future,’ Nursie had announced. ‘I must look after myself.’
Nursie, when at long last the scheme had been made clear to her, had refused the Old Age Pension which would have slightly relieved the financial strain on the Roundelays on the grounds that she had never taken charity yet and didn’t intend to begin, and had worked hard all her life. She had a post office savings book buried full fathom five among her possessions, none of the family knew if she knew where; this nest-egg, it was hoped, would defray her funeral expenses, but, as Major Dunston remarked, by the time the book was unearthed there’d probably be no one left alive at Delaye to bury her.
A Furrowed Middlebrow Book
FM3
Published by Dean Street Press 2016
Copyright © 1936 Rachel Ferguson
Introduction copyright © 2016 Elizabeth Crawford
All Rights Reserved
The right of Rachel Ferguson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her estate in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 1936 by Jonathan Cape
Cover by DSP
Cover shows adapted detail from painting Children in an Interior by Carl Vilhelm Holsoe (1863-1935)
ISBN 978 1 911413 74 5
www.deanstreetpress.co.uk
A Harp in Lowndes Square Page 36