The Matchmaker

by Stella Gibbons

  “I shall work the farm-a. We have a farm: I tell you, Sylvia.” A little anxiousness came into his expression; he wanted to make her believe the farm was large and his family rich, but he could not find the right English words.

  Yes, we know all about that, she thought, but her eyes dwelt kindly on him. She was going to ask him teasingly if he had a girl out there, at home, but a slight shyness restrained her, and at that moment the sight of Mr. Hoadley in the distance reminded them both that they must get on with their work, and they smiled at one another and moved away.

  They often met in this way throughout the lengthening busy days and exchanged gossip and grumbles and occasionally a little teasing, and she came to accept him as a pleasant part of life at the farm, where everything was pleasant now that the summer had come, though the work steadily increased as it mounted towards its climax, the harvest. It was difficult to remember him as the sullen, silent Fabrio of the winter months, for now he sang as he worked and he and Emilio kept up a cross-fire of insults and jokes in their native tongue which entertained everybody, themselves most of all.

  These weeks were enjoyed by everybody except one. The households at the farm and at Pine Cottage had entered upon one of those times which are afterwards remembered with an affectionate glow—“We did have fun, didn’t we?—I often think of those days”—when the daily round of work and pleasure falls in exactly the proportion to satisfy everyone engaged in it; when unbroken fine weather makes every task easier and adds the splendour of sunlight and clear skies to the simplest excursion or meal.

  Mrs. Hoadley had, as she put it, taken quite a fancy to Meg and liked to have her down at the farm almost every day. Alda always knew where to look for her if she were missing, and this led to more frequent comings and goings between the cottage and the farmhouse, Alda often lingering to admire Mrs. Hoadley’s knitting or to gossip about the prospects for the harvest and the arrival of Joyanna, for now that Jean had gone she was sometimes at a loss for someone to chat and laugh with.

  Jean had now been in London nearly a month—“and hasn’t sent me a word, the blighter,” wrote Alda to Ronald, and Mr. Waite had gone back to his former reserved habits, ceremoniously saluting Alda from a distance and occasionally leaving eggs (only four, now, alas) on the doorstep, but avoiding friendly intercourse. She brushed all this aside and always ran up to him to thank him, and sometimes sent one of the children with a note asking him to tea, but he invariably answered her briefly or returned some polite excuse and made her understand plainly that she was in disgrace. Oh poo, let him get on with it, thought Alda, but all the same she felt a little sorry and a little guilty, too. The summer hat in which he fed the chickens was an ancient boater, almost as derelict as Fabrio’s but less picturesque, and the distant view of Mr. Waite on a glorious morning suggested a bankrupt fishmonger. He was the only plainly unhappy person in the meadows that June, and Alda did feel that it was a pity. Still, there was nothing to be done.

  She herself was full of delightful energy; she gardened, she knitted, she took long rides with her daughters and returned with wild flowers which they looked up in The Wild Flowers of Great Britain and Eire, she dutifully read a page, or nearly a page, of Mr. H. A. L. Fisher’s History of Europe every evening, or almost every evening, and she made long lists, and worked out plans, and wrote letters to builders and plumbers and decorators living in Ironborough. They were to leave the cottage in October: they would have been there almost a year. The children were beginning to become interested in the prospect of having a home of their own after five years of wandering, and Alda enjoyed describing to Jenny and Louise some of the family possessions which were in store, and discovering if they remembered the Japanese tea canisters or father’s Chippendale desk.

  In the long, calm, blue days; during the lingering warm evenings when the sky beyond Chanctonbury Ring was pink as the campion growing in the cottage gardens; and the ruts half-concealed in grass and clover gradually became hard beneath the steady downpour of rays from the sun; when the pools in remote meadows thickened and bore sheets of white flowers where the moorhens nested; when the roads were hard underfoot as they are in winter but muffled in dust; when giant white clouds rolled into the west and stayed there at sunset; then Sylvia began to look, as she went about her work, for Fabrio.

  She began to listen for his voice as he sang. She missed his singing when he was silent. Then, the farm and its buildings seemed lonely, in spite of the house’s curtain of budding roses and the sweet scents and animal odours that hung about it and conveyed a strong sense of life. She no longer wanted to change his appearance and manners, and his hat, which she had at first thought of contemptuously as “Fabrio’s comic lid” now only amused and even touched her. She began to take pleasure in seeing him each day. There’s Fabrio, she would think, glancing out under the eaves of her dim, warm, crowded little bedroom into the green and blue open air, where the massive elms lifted their load of leaves into the heat haze above the pond. Then she would sigh; and suddenly, delight in the summer would rush into her heart, and she would thrust her hands into her hair and twist it up high for coolness and wrinkle up her nose at her reflection in the mirror and run downstairs to see what there was for tea.

  One day when Alda had called in to fetch Meg on the way home from an excursion to Horsham she said to Mrs. Hoadley, laughing:

  “Do Fabrio and Sylvia still fight all the time?”

  “Oh no,” answered Mrs. Hoadley, stirring her tea and shaking her head as if slightly surprised. “They get on ever so well together these days. They’ve got over all that nonsense.”

  “I wonder he hasn’t got keen on her, she’s a pretty girl and Italians are very susceptible,” said Mrs. Lucie-Browne, who had finished her gardening and knitting and letter-writing and list-making for the day and who preferred a situation under her nose to those described in the History of Europe.

  This time Mrs. Hoadley looked decidedly disapproving. She drank some tea, set down her cup carefully, and compressed her lips, which lately had taken a softer curve. Her eyes (so large as to promise an emotional temperament but in colour a pale and lifeless blue) lifted to meet Alda’s.

  “I’m sure I hope he won’t do that,” she said. “It would take their minds off their work and might lead to goodness-knows-what.”

  “It might lead to his marrying her.”

  “She could do better than that, an educated girl like Sylvia.”

  Alda did not challenge this statement. If Sylvia were Mrs. Hoadley’s idea of an educated person, so much the worse for them both.

  “Fabrio’s quite rough, you know,” the farmer’s wife added in a delicate tone.

  “Is he? I haven’t seen much of him but he struck me as having great natural dignity and refinement,” said Alda bluntly, “much more than Sylvia has.”

  Mrs. Hoadley put her head on one side and shook it.

  “Oh no. Quite the reverse. He’s ever so rough, a mere peasant. Besides, Sylvia’s all set for a stage career and I for one don’t blame her.”

  “I doubt if she’ll get it. I think she’s rather heavily handicapped.”

  Mrs. Hoadley replied darkly that you could never tell what would go down nowadays, look at Frank Sinatra, and Alda thought it best to say no more, but she resolved to make an opportunity of speaking to Sylvia.

  It was not easy to find one, however, for the girl was always busy about the farm or else Alda encountered her in the company of others, and on her weekly afternoon’s holiday she hurried off to be with the girls at the Linga-Longa, while her monthly free Sunday was dutifully passed with her family in London. What Alda wanted was an opportunity to give sound advice, because she was so sure that Fabrio was in love and had honest intentions. She possessed that insight into the workings of a deeper, tenderer nature which sometimes belongs to the happy and virtuous of this world: happiness bestows upon them that kind of intuition which is usually only gained by those who have sinned and suffered, but they do not always use it ten
derly. It amused Alda to observe the smile that sometimes passed between the two young people; a silent, friendly, dreamy smile, saying to her experienced eye so much more than either of them realised.

  Poor Fabrio! this smile was now his “happiest thing,” as Maria’s letter had once been; and poor Maria, who had detected the first shade of coolness in his letters; poor Maria who, as the coolness became casualness and the letters arrived at longer and longer intervals, was very jealous and unhappy. Maria had been formed by Nature to be a wife and mother rather than a play-girl, and she lacked the titillating arts.

  “What is the matter, my friend?” wrote Maria; right out, in so many words, in a manner shocking to those who give advice in the women’s papers, “Are you tired of writing to your friend, or have you found some English girl you like better? Please tell me because I am very miserable.”

  Fabrio replied, after a week or so, with a letter describing the work at the farm and the weather in Sussex. He was sorry that Maria felt miserable, but she should not bother him about her feelings when he had enough to do in managing his own, and as the plaintive note in her letters continued, he began to feel irritated with her.

  He made up his mind to ask Sylvia to be his wife on the night of the Harvest Supper.

  He first heard this festival mentioned in the early weeks of hot weather when the wheat began to shoot up tall and fresh. Mrs. Hoadley had said that We Always had a supper for the farmhands after the last sheaves were gathered in, but then (warned by a sudden glint in his eye) she had told him that he must not expect much to eat and drink, because times were not what they used to be. If he had heard any tales from the old folks at the Wild Brooks about veal and ham pies as big as laundry baskets and pigs roasted whole, and all that sort of thing, he had better put them out of his mind right away; because every bit you grew had to go up to some old Board nowadays, and it was as much as you could do to find a couple of chickens and a pint or two of beer, so if he was expecting quarts of cream and bowls of strawberries, she was afraid he was going to be unlucky, and she was only telling him for his own good and didn’t mean it unkindly.

  Fabrio listened with the deepest interest, for this Supper reminded him of the fun they always had at home at the end of the grape harvest, with dancing and drinking and bowls of steaming macaroni with tomatoes and onions. Mrs. Hoadley forgot that she was talking to a peasant of a naturally temperate nation, who had been brought up on fish and dandelion leaves and thought himself lucky if he ate meat once in two months, and she need not have warned him of poor fare. Chicken and beer—the English beer which he had grown to like although it would never taste so good to him as the thick purple wine of his own district—seemed a feast indeed to Fabrio, and when he heard that there would be dancing afterwards, he smiled with delight and asked eagerly if he might sing as well.

  “I daresay; if there’s time,” said Mrs. Hoadley, and then Fabrio and Emilio both Said anxiously that they must make sure of getting their late passes for the occasion. But to this Mrs. Hoadley answered nothing, because Mr. Hoadley was keeping secret his intention of asking permission for both men to sleep at the farm during the week of harvest. He did not want a terrific jawing-set-out beforehand, he said.

  To dance! To dance with Sylvia! and afterwards to ask her to be his wife! The Harvest Supper now became Fabrio’s continual thought; his fancy played about it, looking forward to it with longing, and when he settled himself to sleep at night, indifferent to his hard bed and thin mattress, he prayed before he composed himself for slumber that nothing would happen, no ruining storm of rain, no caprice upon the part of the mysterious and malign Powers that controlled the camp, to prevent his being present at that triumphant feast.

  Sylvia was also looking forward to the Supper. She had listened to a talk on Harvest Suppers on the radio and found it ever so quaint and old-fashioned (though of course the custom was full of superstition, as the lady who broadcast was careful to explain) and she repeated tit-bits from the talk to Fabrio, unaware that her own faith in Reason and Science was already on its way out.

  Mrs. Hoadley thought that with two chickens and some rabbits and the largest piedish filled with plum fool they could manage a supper for ten people, and she even looked forward, with a kind of resigned pleasure, to the event.

  It was delightful to Jean to be back in London, in attendance upon Mr. Potter. Every morning she took her breakfast in her bedroom enjoying (for her return to town coincided with the beginning of fine weather) the view over the Thames. In those days, too, guests at an expensive hotel might pay for a daily bath and take one, and Jean did. After that, she smoked and read. Then she telephoned Mr. Potter to learn if he were free for lunch. If he were, he taxied down from the City to the Embankment, and they lunched in the room overlooking the river and made plans for the evening. In the afternoon she smoked and read, or had her hair or her face done or went to some large, long, lavish musical Technicolor film until Mr. Potter was at liberty to dine with her or take her to the play.

  She wore orchids every night, and bought three new dinner dresses through the Black Market because if a girl were not glamorous and groomed Mr. Potter became pained; one was black with white sequins, and one was white with silver sequins, and the grey one had a silver net shawl.

  A perfect life, many women would think.

  Jean’s small face within its frame of gilt hair gradually became fuller and more like a doll’s She was so smiling and passive and groomed, like a good little idol, that most men would have found her attractive. Mr. Potter found her very attractive; so biddable, so good-tempered, so rich. In taxis he seized her and determinedly gnawed her neck and muttered at her and even slightly shook or bit her, the while breathing upon her the fumes of cigar smoke and champagne. This was passionate love; this was what she had always longed for. A few days after she had arrived in town, Mr. Potter announced that they were going to be married as soon as she had collected a proper trousseau and one of Mr. Potter’s many business connections had found them a flat; and Jean said to herself, how very, very, very happy she was; and thought that she must really write the news to Alda.

  But the days passed, and she did not write. It was because she was afraid to hear news of Mr. Waite; and every day she dreaded to receive a letter from Alda, breaking the silence into which he had disappeared, but as the weeks passed and no letter came, she began to feel easier. She reminded herself that Alda detested writing letters, but surely if he were ill with misery or had shot himself, Alda would have let her know. She decided that he was sensibly getting over it, and thought that he must find this the easier because he had never loved her.

  Mr. Potter, on the other hand, loved her very much. He was always loving her.

  He gave her (just as poor Mr. Waite had thought he would) an enormous diamond mounted in platinum; bulging under her glove like a heat bump or flashing from afar like a lighthouse warning off the poor and the unsuccessful. The ring was slightly too big for her, so that she was afraid of losing it but she was more afraid of asking Mr. Potter to get it made smaller.

  Her capacious handbag easily contained the little worn New Testament, but it requires more courage than Jean possessed to read the New Testament while waiting for someone in a cocktail bar, and she was afraid (oh yes, she was very weak and cowardly; presently she began to accuse herself of both faults) of Mr. Potter’s smart female friends noticing it and exclaiming “How sweet!”

  Mr. Potter had a number of these female friends, all youngish and smart and groomed, with the very latest gadgets to help them in smoking, drinking and painting themselves. They knew, seemingly by instinct, what it was smartest to wear, and eat, and where it was smartest to go. Their only fear was of seeming innocent or soft or dowdy or serious; they were so smart that they stung.

  Mr. Potter, of course, never told Jean in so many words that she was on trial before these ladies, but she presently began to feel herself in that position. He liked her to look exactly as they did, helpful gadgets and all, an
d she willingly spent quite large sums in equipping herself. He also liked her to join in their long, long discussions upon where to obtain this brand of American shoe or that brand of rum (which was at the moment the only shoe and rum to wear and drink) to which he himself listened with the attention and interest the subject demanded.

  Her attention occasionally wandered.

  The ladies had a sixth sense which warned them when someone was bored, and they became suspicious and hostile towards a woman who might not be as interested as they were in shoes and rum. Presently Jean was referred to among them as “Oliver’s Dim-Out.” This would have surprised her very much if she had known, for she took such pains to look and speak exactly as they did that she was sure she had succeeded.

  Mr. Potter was a good-natured and easy-going man when nothing occurred to annoy him, and it was quite six weeks before he, too, became a little disturbed about Jean. There was something wrong about her, but he was not quite sure what it was. She wore the right clothes, and said the right things, and did everything he told her to do and yet he did not feel completely at ease about her. He had the same feeling about her that he sometimes had about a golf- or tennis-ball which afterwards turned out to be faulty: it looked all right; it felt all right; and yet——

  What could it be?

  27

  IN TWO DAYS the harvest would begin at Naylor’s Farm. Sunlight had poured down for three weeks, uninterrupted by rain or cloud, upon the wheat, and the heads bore that shadowy pencilling on their undersides which appears only when they are ripe; the fields were burnished to pale gold, and blew in the wind with a dry rustle that was yet a luxurious sound, full of promise.

  All was going forward cheerfully; with the shed already tidied and swept ready for the Supper, and Mrs. Hoadley planning a day’s baking on Sunday because there would be no time to bake on Monday when the harvest began; and everybody had sampled the wheat and pronounced that the stalk snapped off sharply when bitten, thus proving its excellence by fulfilling an ancient test. The Land Girl provided by the West Sussex Agricultural Office at Mr. Hoadley’s request had arrived; she was a merry little thing named Mary Parkes and everybody liked her at sight. And then the B.B.C. broadcast that all over the country there was Risk of Thunder.