The Matchmaker

by Stella Gibbons

  When Sylvia was sixteen, her passion for displaying herself took shape in an ambition to go on the stage, and her mother (who despised her children, for their lack of will, but was also ambitious for them) exerted herself to find the money for training. She imposed a tax upon the elder Scorbys who were in regular work and herself made a batch of the gaudy, dashing dresses and hats which she designed and executed for local girls and occasionally for small local shops. She had a marked talent for such work but did not make a regular income from it because she was bored by steady application to one task.

  Sylvia went to a cheap dramatic school at Canonbury, a neighbourhood of large trees and mouldering, once-elegant mansions that was a short distance from her home, and there she stayed for eighteen months; greatly enjoying herself, impressing some of the pupils, causing the flamboyant, knowledgeable old actor who ran the place to raise his eyebrows and grit his teeth, and perfectly willing to stay there for evermore.

  She actually paled when she heard stories of the bullying and brutality which the beginner must endure; she dreaded the plunge; she wanted to prolong her training indefinitely in this small, absorbing world where everyone laughed or cried or raged all day, and where everyone, except the teachers, was young; the two stately, crumbling stucco mansions with their furnishings of dusty mahogany and threadbare velvet were enchanted places to her, and while one half of her cruel young mind mocked at the tattiness, the other half transformed the scene.

  But when the elder students began to be taken into the Services and the factories she became frightened; on one side loomed the harsh and terrifying yet infinitely desirable world of the real stage, and on the other loomed the equally terrifying and very undesirable world of the A.T.S. or the war factory. Acting as always upon impulse, she left the dramatic school and joined the Women’s Land Army, because there lingered within her, not yet destroyed by adult urban life, a child’s longing to be in the open air. Her mother was angry and called her a fool and told her that she had had her chance and lost it, and her brothers and sisters laughed at her. Other people’s opinions had no effect upon Sylvia and she went down into Sussex, prepared to shriek and giggle over whatever might come and utterly unaware that her action proved that she would never be an actress.

  She paused for a moment now, and gazed at the farm in its hollow; the landscape lay under faint light from a young moon reflected dimly in the welling pool before the house, and the dark fields were streaked with melting snow.

  To-morrow I’ll speak to Fabrio about teaching him English, she thought.

  Mr. Waite spent the ten-minute walk between the two cottages in thinking what a peculiar woman Mrs. Lucie-Browne was. He simply could not understand her behaviour with the furniture. The idea of the Waites turning out a room half an hour before the arrival of people to tea was unthinkable. It would simply never occur to any of us, thought Mr. Waite. And putting it in the wood-shed! So bad for it; a damp, dirty place like that; putting it there simply because—what was it she had said?—“I couldn’t bear it another minute.” She must be both silly and uncontrolled. And then she had a peculiar manner; at one moment she was being downright with that painted piece of a girl, and the next she was soft and smiling. Soft and smiling, repeated Mr. Waite to himself. Her costume was shabby, and the thick white jersey under her jacket was shrunk; noticeably shrunk, thought Mr. Waite. The Lucie-Brownes could not have much money—unlike Miss Hardcastle, who had been nicely dressed and had worn some good diamonds. But how foolish to wear them in the country—how foolish to wear them at all, for that matter, in these dangerous times! The proper place for diamonds was in the bank, not upon female ears. Miss Hardcastle seemed a nice girl.

  He did not waste much thought upon Miss Blue Eyelashes, whom he had summed up and dismissed at their first meeting.

  In spite of his hostess’s queer ways, it had been a pleasant afternoon and had made a change, thought Mr. Waite, glancing at his watch as he lit the lamp in the kitchen and seeing to his dismay that it was seven o’clock. Good heavens, those birds would be starving! and he hurried into the lean-to where he mixed the battery birds’ food, and began to measure and mince vegetable scraps and scoop out grey, gritty, oily goo from a large tin. Each time he did this (and he did it twice every day) he thought disturbedly about his fifty battery chickens, sitting day and night in cages so small that they could barely turn round and with their every natural faculty, except that of egg-producing, distorted and controlled. There they sat, glossy and plump, showing no excitement except when he approached with their food. The pamphlets explaining the Battery System emphasised that it was not cruel. Mr. Waite always wondered what Buddha would have said about it.

  The soft brilliant light from the lamp shone upon the dusty shelves and ancient, odorous stone sink of this little outhouse, built by some past occupant of Meadow Cottage, and upon the dark worried face of Mr. Waite as he scooped and mixed and chopped at the table while his giant shadow loomed and dwindled upon the whitewashed wall behind his back. His thoughts had returned to Mrs. Lucie-Browne and he decided that he would invite them all to tea in ten days’ time.

  Then he hurried out to the row of cages where sat the battery birds, who greeted him with fierce rattlings of the zinc bars of their huts and starved, reproachful shrieks. He went from cage to cage, doling out food and fresh water, a little figure moving within the feeble circle of light from the hurricane lamp under the vast black sky. The birds ate with insane voracity; their hard golden eyes gleamed in red sockets and the sheen on their copper plumage ran down into the rich fluff on their legs. They looked the picture of health. All the same, he kept wondering whether Buddha—and Mrs. Lucie-Browne—would think him cruel

  The morning was rainy and fresh; the snow had vanished and water-globes slid down the bowed grasses on to Sylvia’s boots as she went down the garden path carrying a pail of food for the Hoadley fowls. All the sticky and shelly creatures were abroad; slugs curled on the wet black mould and fully-exposed snails travelling their fragile horns and brilliant slime across the drying flags. The air was scented with rain and with the tiny faint odours from these dwellers under stones and roots, and with the faded wet grass.

  While she was scattering the grain among the birds in that graceful gesture which must be one of the most ancient performed by man, she glanced down the garden and there, crossing the yard at the end of it by the gate, she saw Fabrio. It was the first time she had seen him alone for a week; he had as usual been avoiding her.

  She hastily poured the last of the food over the chickens, dropped the pail amidst the grass, and ran down the path towards him—lightly, on the tips of her rubber boots. He had paused to make some adjustment in the harness he was carrying over his shoulder and did not hear her until—smiling, eager, her hair lifted by the wind—she was upon him.

  “Fabrio!” she cried. “Hullo! Good morning! I say, how about me teaching you to speak English?”

  Fury flashed into his face; his nostrils distended; he dropped the harness he carried; the very blue of his eyes deepened with rage and his lips worked. He is going to crown me, thought Sylvia, afraid, and even stepped back a pace, but suddenly the fury vanished; and his face lit with mockery. He put one hand on his heart and swept her a low bow (she caught the faint breath of stale clothes as he moved) and began to make her a speech in Italian. She gathered from the tone that it was a bitingly sarcastic speech, but she did not listen to it for long; she rode it down with impatient friendliness.

  “Oh, cut it out, comrade! I’m not trying to insult you, I really mean it. I want to teach you to spik-a da English,” and she held out to him her hand.

  It was no longer white, but it was still dimpled and pretty. It would never—that little hand—seem instinct with knowledge of life’s hardness, or look worn from acquiring some expert craft, or become thin and sensitive because its owner’s spirit had filled it with her life. But it was so friendly, so pretty, so small; it was a young girl’s hand.

  Fabrio stared at i
t. Sylvia patiently kept it extended. He had avoided her; he accused her of insulting him; never mind; she would be really friendly towards him—and she would get her way.

  Suddenly Fabrio put out his own hand, big and coarsened and young, and clasped hers within it. Again, for an instant, she felt afraid. It was one thing to offer friendship to Fabrio; it was another to touch him, and she wanted to draw her hand away but she controlled the impulse and slowly, deliberately, gave to his warm hand (she could feel the dried earth from his early work upon it) a friendly pressure.

  He did not return the pressure or look at her but when she exclaimed: “There, comrade, that’s swell!” he nodded slightly and his expression had less than its usual reserve. She went on talking, and presently he slowly raised his head and looked at her without a guard upon his face. Wonder at this lively, chattering, feminine creature, this woman dressed like a boy, who was so pleased and excited because he had taken her hand, showed in his eyes. She must like me, after all, thought Fabrio, and his head went up into its usual easy, proud pose, and he looked at her with condescension. (He could not look down upon her, because she was as tall as he.)

  “We’ll have a lesson every day,” she was saying. “I have to have my lunch with Mr. and Mrs., but I’ll finish by one. Where do you have yours?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “By Big-a Rick, in room, any place.”

  “Listen, I’ll meet you by the Big Rick every day at twenty minutes to one and we’ll start to-morrow. How’s that?”

  “Good-a,” he said, nodding, and for the first time he smiled. He liked the shed called the granary, where straw and chaff filled the cool dark air with snuff like scents, and when he said that he had his lunch “in room” he meant in the granary. Sometimes Emilio went too, but more often Fabrio ate there alone; lying full-length against the plump sacks and slowly chewing through half a small loaf of stale bread and a small piece of hard cheese, and an onion when he could get it, and gazing at the rain drifting past the open door. The granary stood in a remote part among the scattered farm buildings, and the inhabitants seldom went there, so that he was almost sure of being undisturbed. He did no harm there, except to take twenty minutes over his time for lunch in sleep, and it was the only place, in the camp or in the farm, where he felt at home. It is like San Angelo, he would think, lying alone in the dusk, with the thick grey swags of cobweb above him and the rusty disused objects that had collected in course of time upon natural shelves formed by the massive oak wall-beams all about him, and the sacks of living grain warming his body; it is like home.

  They parted with amiability, more marked upon her side than upon his: she returned to her chickens and he trudged on, past a grey pond brimming to the straight banks that he had helped to clean, with a grey beech sweeping down over it, towards the stable where lived the plough horse Admiral (whom Fabrio did not much like).

  “La Scimmia is going to teach me to speak English,” he shouted gaily to Emilio some time later.

  (The Monkey was their private name for Sylvia. It should be remembered that hers for them had been The Zombies.)

  “Oh yes, that’s a good one!” Emilio called back, pausing with the large bundle of hazel-wands for kindling that he was carrying up to the farmhouse.

  “It’s true. She asked me if I’d let her, and I said yes,” and Fabrio began to whistle. Admiral, whose stable he was sweeping out, slowly turned his head and fixed a large velvet eye upon him.

  “Oh-ho-ho-ho!” cried Emilio with a ribald intonation. “And when do we begin?”

  “To-morrow after dinner.”

  “And where? I’ll be there, you see.”

  “That’s a secret, and you keep your ugly nose out of it.”

  “I’ll be there, you’ll see,” repeated Emilio, and went on towards the house, pleased that his friend was happy but resentful that he should be going to spend time alone with a girl.

  “I am going to teach Fabrio English, Mrs. Hoadley,” said Sylvia brightly, when the two of them were seated at lunch that morning. Mr. Hoadley had taken the car into West Mewling to see a man who had some wire netting to sell and Sylvia knew it; if he had been present, she would not have made her announcement, for she knew his opinion of the Italians.

  Mrs. Hoadley, who was eating roast pork as though rebuking it, glanced up from her plate.

  “I don’t envy you,” she said, but without disapproval.

  “I thought it might make things a bit easier for him—must be awful, not knowing what people are saying all round you.”

  “Oh, he understands a good bit more than he seems to, only he can’t talk.”

  “I’m not doing it in Mr. Hoadley’s time,” said Sylvia earnestly. “We’re going to meet at twenty to one by the Big Rick every day and I’m going to give him a lesson until one o’clock.”

  “It’s kind of you, Sylvia, but I don’t envy you,” repeated Mrs. Hoadley, casting a shrinking eye over a very large dish of the fine dark green winter spinach which was Mr. Hoadley’s favourite vegetable at this time of the year as Sylvia took from it a majestic second helping. “Still, I expect he’ll soon pick it up, he’s quick enough when he wants to be, and it’ll be an interest for you both.”

  Not the faintest smile, not even a lurking echo of a teasing note, showed on her face or sounded in her voice, as she discussed the prospect of a fresh girl of eighteen and a comely man of twenty-three spending twenty minutes alone together every day. Blessed are the cold in heart, for at least they do not put ideas into other people’s heads.

  “He needs brightening up a bit,” said Sylvia meditatively, biting at a hunk of bread. “They’re a low type, those Italian peasants. It’s lack of civilisation and education, isn’t it? Do you know, Mrs. Hoadley”—and she leant across the table and her chicory-blue eyes looked wide and shocked—“Fabrio smells!”

  “A good many people do,” said Mrs. Hoadley resignedly, “but you shouldn’t say that, Sylvia, it’s vulgar. It can’t be very bad, I haven’t noticed it, and I should have.”

  “Oh, it isn’t so bad as all that, it’s only sort of earthy, and his clothes aren’t very clean.”

  “Poor man, I expect he doesn’t get much chance to wash himself or his clothes either in that camp. When the weather gets a little better and Mr. Hoadley’s grandmother at the Wild Brooks sends us another batch of her soap, I’ll tell him he can wash his clothes here.”

  “Yes, do!” cried Sylvia, putting a potato into her mouth and talking through it. “We’ll soon civilise him, won’t we, between us!”

  “What a lot you do eat, Sylvia,” said Mrs. Hoadley—adding hastily in answer to a surprised and reproachful glance, “I don’t grudge it you, but I don’t know how you can. Half a slice, and I’m done.”

  “Oo, I love eating. Food—I could go on for ever!”

  “You’ll get fat,” said the farmer’s wife, with a not unkind smile.

  “Oo, I’m fat now,” glancing down at her shirt, “they said at the School I’d have to lose a stone if I wanted to look right on the stage.”

  “I like a nice slim figure myself,” said Mrs. Hoadley, stroking her sides. “It shows off your clothes.”

  “I want to wash a few things this evening, could you let me have a loan of your soap powder?”

  “I will, but you use such a lot, Sylvia, and we’re a bit short until next month’s ration comes along. Can’t you use old Mrs. Hoadley’s soap?”

  “Doesn’t lather like the powder. Whatever’s it made of, anyway?”

  “Wood ash and pig fat—I don’t know half what she puts in it.”

  “Ugh! The first time I heard you talking about her sending you some soap I thought she kept a shop or was in with the Black Market.”

  “There’s nothing like that goes on here, as you know,” said Mrs. Hoadley sharply. “The old lady and her husband keep pigs on their bit of land just outside Amberley—Amberley God Knows, as they call it round here—and she can always manage to get hold of a bit of fat, in spite of the Pig Board,
to mix up with her wood ash. They’ve got a regular wilderness all round them too, hazels and willow and all that stuff that grows so quickly and the old chap cuts that down and burns it for the ash. You seem to have eaten all the pudding, it’s just as well I’ve put Mr. Hoadley’s by. Come on, there’s just time for our tea before we start again,” and a faint note of satisfaction came into her voice with the words.

  “That’s nice,” she said, when she had drunk some tea, and she sighed.

  “I’ll have to get it a bit earlier for you to-morrow, if I’ve got to be there by twenty to one.”

  “You needn’t trouble, Sylvia, I don’t want it hustled,” said Mrs. Hoadley, decisively. “If I can’t drink it in peace and quiet I don’t enjoy it.”

  Sylvia sucked up her own tea and looked apprehensively over the top of the cup.

  “I could manage to get it before I go, really I could.”

  “It’s kind of you, but I’d rather not. I don’t want you banging and clattering about like a young elephant getting the tea.”