The Matchmaker

by Stella Gibbons

They clasped each other close for a moment, with one kiss; then he turned quickly away and got into the taxi; the door slammed; she saw him sit back among his khaki bundles and suitcases, and he was driven off through the rain.

  She furled the umbrella and went back across the fields. Each time he went away it was as bad as the first time had been; it never got any better, indeed, it got rather worse. Alda ignored her wet eyes and the ache in her throat and thought that the next time he came the primroses would be in the woods.

  “Jean,” she said presently while they were making Meg’s bed, with the invalid, swathed in a blanket, watching them from the other bed, “when did you think of going home?”

  “Not for ages, unless you want me to. I like being here.”

  “I suppose you realise we shall all get this thing of Meg’s? The doctor seems to think we’re bound to.”

  “Oh well—all the more reason for my staying. You can’t cope alone.”

  “Of course, if you like sick-nursing in the depths of the country in January——”

  “My tastes always were a bit pecu,” said Jean placidly. “No, honestly, Alda, I’d like to stay. I may have to run up to town now and then to see my lawyers or the house agents but no going back to the flat for keeps, thanks. I hope they soon let it.”

  “They’re sure to. You couldn’t be trying to let it at a better time.” Alda lifted Meg back on to her own bed, unrolled her, and replaced her between the sheets. “There isn’t much wrong with you,” she said, gloating over her cool pink cheeks and the clear whites of her eyes. “You’re an old fraud,” and she tickled her. Meg chuckled.

  “I do wish I could hear from my Mr. Potter,” said Jean, sighing. “He might have written when Dad died.”

  “Don’t they think it rather odd, your being down here?” asked Alda, not wishing to indulge this train of thought.

  “Who? Aunt Alice? She doesn’t know I am here. Aunt Daisy did say it was selfish of me but I pretended not to hear.”

  “Good for you, the old monster. As for your Mr. Potter,” said Alda gaily, struck by an excellent new idea as they went downstairs, “don’t give him another thought. I’ve found someone down here who’ll suit you much better than your Mr. Potter.”

  “Oh, have you, darling? Do tell me. This place doesn’t look as if there was a man for miles,” and Jean gave her silly giggle, which was not irritating because it was so infectious, but she felt disloyal towards the gentle woods and meadows that had comforted her during the past week; the bright green stems of sallows shining out in marshy coppices amidst purple thickets of blackberry and thorn, the sage-green catkins swinging in keen winds under hurrying grey skies. Of course this landscape did not look as if there were a man in it, or, indeed, marriages or kisses, for it lay in winter sleep, like the Beauty of the fairy story, dreaming.

  “It’s Mr. Waite, who lives over in the next meadow,” Alda went on. “He runs a chicken farm. He’s awfully good-looking and he adores reading.”

  “How marvellous,” said Jean; dutifully, but also slightly cheered by this picture, “and if he likes reading he’s sure to be—nice.”

  She had intended to say “intelligent,” but checked herself in time; Alda had more than once told her that she could not afford to be choosy, and who was she to demand intelligence in a prospective husband?

  Alda herself had been slightly irritated by Jean’s reference to her lawyer and house agent. Jean did not yet realise it, but when her father’s will was proved, she would be wealthy; and when she was wealthy, and did realise it, she would become self-confident, as were all the other wealthy people whom Alda numbered among her acquaintance.

  Alda did not like the idea of Jean becoming self-confident, after having been for fifteen years biddable and grateful for management and advice; and although her chances of marriage would increase when once she became known as a wealthy orphan, so would her chances of being married for her money. Years ago, Alda had sworn to herself that she would get Jean married, and when I make up my mind (she thought now) I do what I mean to do. She had decided that Mr. Waite was just the type of desolate, gloomy male over whom Jean would enjoy fussing, while he would be only too glad to marry a pleasant, wealthy girl. Alda thought that it would all work out most satisfactorily.

  11

  IN THE HARSH weeks of January, Sylvia learned what work is.

  She had never read the Bible, and therefore she did not know that phrase about hewers of wood and drawers of water which contains the ache of bruised muscles and the sound of labouring breath; coming down through the ages and speaking in that language of the body which is the only language that has remained unchanged by Time, but with her own strong young body she now understood its meaning. In the dark freezing mornings when it seemed that light had gone for ever, in a silence pierced by the spectral far-off crowing of cocks, she staggered up out of a warm bed in which she seemed to have been lying for only a few moments, and by candlelight pulled on breeches and thick socks and boots still stiff from the wet of yesterday, wincing as each aching muscle reluctantly resumed its duties. She would be still dazed with sleep; she never had enough sleep, no matter how early she fell into bed, and her early morning work, the sterilising and milking of the six cows, was carried out as if she were drugged.

  The icy air struck her face when she opened the yard door; the rays of her lantern glided outward, along the frozen ridges of strawy muck and the pools of foul liquid that would enrich garden and fields and send roses and lilies springing up into the sunlight in summer—summer! was there such a time? The sky was silent and black; all about lay the dark, silent fields hidden in freezing mist. Her boots crunched in the puddles and frozen mud as she trudged across the yard, and she would shout “Good morning” to Mrs. Hoadley, of whom she caught a glimpse through the half-open door of the stable where she sat among her goats, neat as ever in turban and white coat, resignedly staring down at her jerking, struggling pensioners. The lantern light threw Sylvia’s huge shadow and its own golden rays against the black weatherboarding of sheds and barn as she plodded by, and then she would be pleasantly hailed by Mr. Hoadley, who belonged in that half of the human race which wakes up alert and cheerful in the morning. (Mrs. Hoadley belonged in the other half: this often happens in a marriage and it is no one’s fault.)

  The appetite for sensation and the instinct to display herself which Sylvia inherited from her father, who had been an actor, were outward symptoms of her inward shrinking from facts. The bull was a fact: when she cautiously pushed open the door of his stable and the light shone along his ponderous grey bulk as he crouched in the straw, and he slowly turned his black dewy muzzle and sombre eyes to gaze at her, she always experienced a thrill of fear which time and experience of his passivity did nothing to allay. She did not find the cows so alarming; the milky, straw-scented odour that floated out from their warm stable was sweet, and all was so calm there, when the lantern light fell on the faded gold of hay sprinkled with dried flowers and the brighter gold of the straw under their hooves. She would look up at the whitewashed ceiling where shadowy cobwebs drooped between the black beams, and listen for a moment to the silence and the little sounds in it; and she would feel comforted. Cows have been going on for a long time, she would think vaguely, standing with her hand resting upon the warm heaving flank of the Jersey; you dear old girl, you, and she would slide her hand along the silky, dove-hued hide.

  Then memories of her friends at the Dramatic School returned to remind her that she was going to be an actress, that she was sleepy, aching, hungry and cold, and must have been crazy when she took on this job.

  Yet in spite of the hardness and roughness of the work, and the scanty leisure, and the knowledge that she was getting older every day and no nearer to obtaining a start in that profession in which the early beginning is more important than in any other, she was not unhappy. Her strength responded to the demands made upon it, and something vigorous and energetic in herself accepted toil and dirty work, assimilated them,
and transmuted them into entertainment, even into profit. She was afraid of the horses and the bull but she was not afraid of hard work; and she won approval from both her employers. The ample, nourishing food which the farm could provide maintained her health, and she bloomed; the ancient tarnished mirror in her bedroom reflected rounded cheeks and hair from which the dye was beginning to fade.

  Sometimes the Hoadleys and Sylvia were still at breakfast when one of the lorries which conveyed the prisoners to work set Fabrio and Emilio down at the edge of the fields. The party at the table would hear the vehicle approaching, and often Mrs. Hoadley would tell Sylvia to fetch two extra cups, and have tea waiting for the men when they put their heads round the door some moments later. Their brown faces would be chilled to blueness and sometimes their hair was silvered by floating hoar-frost but, unlike an English farm labourer in similar circumstances, they never stamped their feet nor slapped their hands together to warm them; they did not even comment upon the weather except by an occasional patient shrug of the shoulders; they slightly inclined their heads towards the group seated about the breakfast table, and sometimes the two of them together would faintly, gravely smile as they said, “Good-a morning.” The tea was received with grateful mutters but in the same spirit of restraint, and it was speedily disposed of and the cup (in case it should be considered a presumption to rinse it in the scullery) set down again in exactly the place from which it had been lifted.

  Sylvia was at first inclined to nickname them The Zombies, but this joke died for lack of anyone with whom to share it, and she knew from her first encounter with them that they did not always behave like Zombies. Emilio, indeed, soon developed a most un-Zombie like trick of pouncing out on her from behind hedges and ricks and kissing her.

  What kick he gets out of it I’m sure I don’t know, [she wrote to one of her friends at the Dramatic School] because I always crown him, and once I pushed him right over in some muck; he didn’t half swear, at least, I’m sure it was swearing. The other one is very up-stage, thank God.

  Indeed, Fabrio took no notice of her beyond the few words that were sometimes necessary when they encountered each other in the course of the day’s work, and then he addressed her so curtly that she had more than once asked him what was biting him and who he thought he was talking to. Emilio always seemed very amused by these brief encounters, and after Fabrio had gone off, he would tap the side of his nose at Sylvia and jerk his thumb after the graceful retreating form of his friend as if he knew some secret about which he would like her to question him. But Sylvia never did question him, for she was a little shy of Fabrio. His silence, his gravity, his unfriendliness towards herself, made him unlike any other man that she had ever known and she could not bring herself to talk about him to Emilio.

  One morning towards the middle of January the weather broke; there were two days on which the clouds drifted off in an ever-thinning veil until a sky of milky blue was revealed, in which gleamed a white sun whose faint warmth touched the wings of the robin, the storm-cock, the sparrow and other all-the-year-round birds which at this season possessed almost in solitude the leafless thickets and dripping hedges.

  Mr. Hoadley was just passing a pleasantry about them all being able to sit out in the garden if this weather went on, and Mrs. Hoadley was just receiving it in silence, when Sylvia looked up from her breakfast, exclaiming:

  “Oo, who’s that singing?”

  A man’s voice rang across the farmyard, in a gay and passionate song whose music seemed to be smothering its words in laughing kisses. Mrs. Hoadley continued to study yesterday’s Daily Express with the corners of her mouth turned down, and Mr. Hoadley’s face expressed only tolerance for the habits of foreigners, but the dog Ruffler, who was near the fire, lifted his head from his paws and thumped with his tail on the warm bricks, while Sylvia’s eyes opened wider and wider.

  “Is that Emilio?” she gasped at last. “Gosh! fancy him being able to sing like that! Why, he ought to go on the air!”

  “Emilio’s singing too but I think it’s Fabrio who’s making the most noise,” retorted Mrs. Hoadley, briskly folding the Daily Express into a neat packet and getting up from her chair. “Now, Neil, if you want me to go into Horsham this morning will you please let me have that list; I’ve got my chickens to do before I go.”

  Sylvia ran across the yard, with the sunlight falling warmly on her laughing, excited face. The song had now ceased.

  “Fabrio!” she cried, waving the hat she had snatched up, “congratulations! I didn’t know you could sing like that—didn’t know you could sing at all! You’re marvellous—you ought to go on the air!”

  She halted at the door of the little shed where the two Italians hung their overcoats each morning, and peered in. All was damp and shadowy within and for a moment she was dazzled; then she saw Emilio’s face grinning up at her as he knelt to lace his boot. Fabrio stood and stared at her in haughty silence.

  “I mean it!” she cried again, making an emphatic downward movement with the hat. “I adore music and you can take it from old Maestro Sylvia, you’re simply wizard!”

  Emilio, who understood more English than Fabrio, turned and said something to the latter which caused him to look haughtier than ever; then suddenly a quick, childish smile lit up his face, his eyes—even his hair, glossy as a chestnut, seemed to take on additional sheen from the sunlight and his own pleasure. But the smile went in an instant, and after one glance at Sylvia, he turned indifferently away and began to arrange his coat carefully upon its peg.

  She, after repeating vehemently, “I mean it, comrade,” lingered for a moment as if expecting him to speak, and, when he continued to be silent, turned away and walked aimlessly back to the house, feeling slightly annoyed that she had made advances towards him. What a sourpuss he is, she thought; I’m quite willing to be friends if only he would. I don’t like him much but I don’t see any point in going on like this; it isn’t my fault I’m an enemy alien—and, come to that, what’s he?

  For she believed that his dislike of her was due to the fact that her country had defeated his own in armed combat. True, he was officially described as a collaborator and as working his passage, but that would not prevent him from expressing his hatred of the English by refusing to be pleasant to them, and this seemed highly foolish to Sylvia.

  Before departing for Horsham, Mrs. Hoadley put her head out of the car window and called:

  “Sylvia, take their milk up to the cottage, will you? They won’t be coming down this morning.”

  The farmer’s wife had encountered Alda on the previous evening and learned that her friend had succumbed to influenza just as all the children were well enough to demand perpetual entertaining but not well enough to come downstairs, and she knew that Alda would not want to spend twenty minutes in going for the milk and bringing it back again. Although she was impatient of “that cottage lot,” her sense of justice compelled her to dispatch Sylvia.

  Sylvia fetched the cans and went singing across the meadow. She had not seen any of the inhabitants of the cottage since the evening of her arrival, and from that occasion she retained a sense of grievance because they had not asked her into the house; she also dimly resented the peaceful slumber in which the cottage was presumably sunk on those black dawns while she tramped about with heavy trusses and buckets, but these feelings were not strong, for her lively animal spirits made her ready to be friends with anyone.

  She clashed the cans down on the step with a ringing “Milk-o!”

  Alda put her head out of the porch window and said: “Oh—thank you very much. I couldn’t have got down this morning: everybody’s ill.”

  This announcement left small impression upon Sylvia, who was never ill, but she made the face which she tilted up towards Alda look sympathetic.

  “That’s all right,” she answered vaguely, thinking how pretty Alda was, while Alda in her turn admired the eyes, the hair, and the complexion.

  “How are you liking it at the farm?”
Alda went on, with an interest half-motherly and half-inquisitive.

  “It’s beastly work but somehow I don’t mind it, and the food’s marvellous, only I’m crazy to get back to my real job, of course.”

  “What is your real job?” indulging an obvious desire to be asked.

  “Acting. The stage. Oo, I just can’t wait to get started! I was training at the Canonbury Academy of Dramatic Art. My father was an actor.”

  “Really ? How interesting. I wonder if I know his name?”

  “Oh—I don’t expect you would, he was pretty ham, and only did tatty little parts in the provinces,” with an embarrassed laugh. “He did play once in the West End, though, with Dennis Eadie, just after the last war, in Milestones, for sixteen performances. Before I was born, that was.”

  “And you’re very keen on it?” Alda ignored the slice of family history, upon which, indeed, no comment was possible.

  “I adore it. It’s my life,” solemnly. “And I know I can act. I feel it.”

  “It was bad luck your being called up,” said Alda sympathetically: she ought to have been carrying round washing-water to the invalids but she lingered, for the sun was pleasant and she found this hearty child amusing.

  “Oh well, I wasn’t exactly called up, but I was scared stiff I would be any minute, so I chucked up the Academy and volunteered for the land, so as to be sure of not being shoved into a factory.”

  “This is your first job, then?”

  “Yes—and my last, on the land. As soon as H.M. Government takes the irons off my legs, I’ve had it. Well,” she grinned and pushed her hat further on to the back of her head, “I must get back. Bye-bye.”

  “Good-bye,” said Alda—with emphasis: Ronald discouraged the translation of God be with you into the language of the nursery. “Will you come and have tea with us when we are all better?”

  “Oo, I’d love to. Thanks awfully. I do get one afternoon off a week,” and she strode away.