Never Too Late

by Angela Thirkell

  “Do you always call him both his names?” said Lord Mellings deserting Mrs. Morland, who bore up very well.

  “Oh, everyone does,” said Edith. “I’d call you yours, only I never remember them all.”

  Mrs. Morland begged to hear them.

  “Ludovic Neville Eustace Guido Foster, Viscount Mellings,” said the owner of the name. “Ludovic after Lord Luf-ton because Lady Lufton, I mean his mother, is my godmother and Neville after some kind of ancestor and Eustace after the one that turned Catholic under James the Second and went to Italy—we’ve got quite a lot of relations there and Guido Strelsa that I’m called Guido after is a thoroughly bad egg. And Foster is the family name, I really don’t know why. I suppose there was a reason once. Probably an heiress. Is that clear? You really ought to know these things, my girl,” he added, addressing Edith. “Doesn’t your mother tell you? She is Agnes after her aunt Agnes, who didn’t marry.”

  “Gran used to talk about her sometimes,” said Edith. “She was old Aunt Agnes’s sister. I wonder if I’ll know all about everyone when I’m as old as they are—I can’t explain, but you know what I mean. When I was in America with Uncle David and Aunt Rose people used to ask me about the family and I got awfully mixed.”

  “Next time you are at the Towers I’ll show you the family tree,” said Lord Mellings. “It’s disgraceful that you don’t know more about it. What is my aunt Agnes about?”

  “Oh, mother knows,” said Edith with some pride. “She knows families like anything, only she has seen most of them and I haven’t. Seeing makes it easier.”

  “Well, next time you come to the Towers, if I’m there I’ll rub your nose in family trees,” said Lord Mellings kindly.

  “The funny thing about family trees,” said James Graham, who had not previously given tongue, except to eat large quantities of cake and jam, “is that they grow both ways up.”

  Everyone listened for some elucidation, but Captain Graham went on eating in a very self-satisfied way.

  “How?” said Mrs. Knox.

  As she was not one of his relations James Graham was willing to humour her.

  “Oh, it all depends which way you go,” he said. “I mean if you started with Neville de Pomfret it would spread downwards like an open umbrella. But if you started with anyone now—say with me—the tree would go up and out from me till I had about a hundred greats or great-greats, like an umbrella that’s blown inside out. One might make a theory about it. There’s a fellow in the regiment who says if you go by the old way you would need a piece of paper as big as Hyde Park to hold it all. But I said you’d need just as much paper if you do it the other way. It would be much simpler if everyone only had one child.”

  “Then there wouldn’t be anyone at all soon, even if they all did get married,” said Mrs. Knox. “Or am I wrong? I can’t do it in my head.”

  “I was an only child,” said Mrs. Morland in the tragic voice of a Siddons. “And my husband was an only child. Not that it was his fault,” she added kindly.

  “I also was an only child,” said George Knox, who felt that his old friend was unfairly monopolizing the attention of the party.

  “Then that makes three,” said Edith, perhaps a little impertinently, but she was tired of sitting at the tea-table and secretly longing for the wonderful moment when she would be alone with Mrs. Morland, for whose books she had the almost superstitious awe and reverence that the savage feels for the arts of the white man.

  “Any more?” said Stoker from the door. “Young stomachs need filling. I’ve just taken some brandy-snaps out of the oven.”

  “Oh, bless you Stoker,” said Dr. Ford, “but I can’t eat any more. Give them to the children.”

  “How many of us do you count as children, sir?” said Lord Mellings, with a formal courtesy exactly like his father’s, only we fear that his tongue was where Lord Pomfret’s never was, in his cheek. Dr. Ford only laughed his short laugh.

  “I don’t know if any of you care for boats,” said Mrs. Knox. “We have a bit of river and a punt and a canoe. If anyone would like to come over—” but there was no need for her to finish the sentence. So swiftly and eagerly did the Graham boys, who happened to be on the same side of the table, rise to their feet that the table moved an appreciable number of inches towards the opposite wall. Dr. Ford, who was sitting on that side, told them what he thought of mannerless embryo soldiers in no uncertain terms and perfect cordiality reigned.

  “May I stay with you, Mrs. Morland?” said Edith, which flattered her hostess vastly.

  “Oh, come with us, Edith,” said Mr. Crosse, but Edith said No thank you, which somehow gave pleasure to George Halliday. So all the young men went off in their own or each other’s cars and the Knoxes in their own car. Dr. Ford said he must go as there would be patients at the surgery and it wouldn’t do to keep them waiting. So they went into the drawing-room where Stoker had very sensibly lighted a fire.

  Like a good many people who live in and by what their minds imagine, Mrs. Morland was on the whole indifferent to her surroundings. Her house had been furnished when she married—now a very long time ago—mostly with cast-offs from various older members of the family. Everything was comfortable even if not beautiful or what is called period, especially the large family sofa on which a tall man could sleep and in the case of Mrs. Morland’s sons on leave often had slept. The only object of elegance was a work-table of walnut with gilded metal work on it, secret drawers which no one could possibly pretend not to see, and a mirror inside, the lid, so that a lady could look at herself as she sat sewing. This had been a wedding present from George Knox’s mother, dead now many years ago, and was much valued by Mrs. Morland. “Oh! Mrs. Morland, are those all your books?” said Edith, who was looking at the shelves dedicated to her hostess’s works.

  “Well, they are and they aren’t,” said Mrs. Morland, at which Edith begged her, most flatteringly, to explain, adding that it was so difficult ever to say exactly what one meant. “You see” she said “it might sound as if I wanted to know if they were all your books because I wasn’t sure if some of them might be other people’s, but I really meant an exclamation of being so much impressed by so many books all written by one person.”

  Some writers—and the name of Mrs. George Rivers at once leaps to the mind and the pencil—might have taken offence at these words, which indeed did need a considerable amount of disentangling, but Mrs. Morland, who had never had a daughter, took to young girls very kindly and found Edith’s laborious explanation quite reasonable.

  “I see exactly what you mean,” she said, with a good deal of truth and also a good deal of willingness to oblige. “All those three top shelves are my books that I have written in the first editions. The next shelves are the American editions.”

  “Are all your books in American?” said Edith.

  “Not quite all,” said Mrs. Morland, passing over Edith’s peculiar way of putting it. “You see my first novels weren’t published in America, because I wasn’t much known. And then one or two were published in America by different publishers and gradually they all went to one publisher, Mr. Purchase, whose name you see on them all.”

  “Do you have to go to America to publish them?” said Edith.

  “Not a bit,” said Mrs. Morland. “I have been several times and simply loved it, but my journey is not really necessary.”

  “Then if you go to America you have your American money,” said Edith. “How lovely. I hadn’t any, but Rose— that’s Uncle David’s wife—said I wasn’t to bother because there were always plenty of dollars for me.”

  “Bless your heart, my dear,” said Mrs. Morland. “All my American royalties have to come straight to England to pay for the National Health Service which nothing would induce me to join, or the National Debt or something. It sounds silly, but there it is.”

  “Anyway I don’t suppose you need money much there,” said Edith, “because everyone is so kind. When I was there it was just like the war.”
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br />   Mrs. Morland, amused by her young friend’s artless prattle, asked how it was like the war.

  “Oh, I don’t mean really like the war,” said Edith. “I mean the way people did things for other people in the war and nearly everyone got so nice except people like Old Lady Norton.”

  “And some awful people from London who were war refugees at Southbridge,” said Mrs. Morland, thinking of the autumn term she had spent as a kind of general help at South-bridge School in that happy first war year of an England united at home. “I can’t remember their name. And that reminds me—I really cannot say why—that I promised your cousin that I’d see if some of my second son’s suits would fit him. My boy put on so much weight in Germany that he couldn’t get into his English civvies. Come up and see your room and I can put some of his suits out for your cousin.”

  So Mrs. Morland took Edith upstairs, showed her the quite pleasant and uninteresting bedroom she was to have and left her to unpack, which did not take long, for Edith, after the enviable way of our young, was unconscious of cold and almost unconscious of heat. How they do it we often wonder as we pack the woollies and tweeds that we know we shall need for a summer visit. And then Mrs. Morland called Edith into another bedroom and opened a cupboard where men’s suits, both town and country, were hanging.

  “But, Mrs. Morland, you can’t give those to Ludo,” said Edith. “He would feel horrid. Oh do let him pay something.”

  “It may be good for him to feel horrid, said Mrs. Morland.

  “But I don’t understand,” said Edith, suddenly wishing she were at home again. “I mean Ludo could afford it, if that is what you mean. Or at least he could afford something.”

  “I am sure he could,” said Mrs. Morland. “But it is very good for all of us to learn to take, as well as to give. It’s more difficult sometimes, I admit. Nearly everybody is born a Giver or a Taker.”

  “Which are you?” said Edith.

  “A giver as far as my own children go,” said Mrs. Morland, “but quite a good taker otherwise. And just as well, because I was quite poor for a long time with all my boys to educate and all growing out of their clothes and not always being able to wear each other’s because of a different height or shape.”

  Edith said she could understand taking for one’s children, but not for oneself.

  “You had better get over that,” said Mrs. Morland, who found her young guest’s philosophy amusing. “You mayn’t mind going about in an old sack, but your boys won’t like it if you do. I can’t say about girls, because I never had any.”

  “Then I’ll be your daughter-in-law,” said Edith.

  “I’m afraid all my boys are married,” said Mrs. Morland, more touched than she would have liked to show by Edith’s offer. “If you will be an honorary daughter-in-law I shall be delighted. I can’t give you any good advice, but if you are in a jumble of feelings, you can tell me. I daresay I shan’t understand, but that doesn’t matter. And let me know when you get engaged and I will give you all my books specially bound—if you would like them.”

  All Edith said, after a pause in which she went pink in the face, was “Oh, Mrs. Morland,” which seemed perfectly adequate.

  “And I’m so glad you didn’t say I could call you Laura,” she went on. “You can’t think how awful it is when grownup people—I mean very grown-up ones—suddenly ask you to use their Christian name. You can’t do it because it feels so rude, and then it feels rude to go on Mrs.-ing them when they’ve asked you not to, so one just says nothing. And that is rude too.”

  “Some day we must write a book of Etiquette for sensible people,” said Mrs. Morland, “though apart from a few rules it really boils down to an educated mind and a kind heart.”

  “What Conque, that’s my grandmother’s old French maid who comes to Holdings every year, calls bonte de cceur,” said Edith, and then they went downstairs again, not unwillingly, for in that horrible early summer there had to be at least one fire kept going if people were to live. The fire in the drawing-room was burning nicely and they talked about books and life in general very comfortably till the telephone rang.

  “I hope it isn’t mother telling me to come back” said Edith.

  “Of course not,” said Mrs. Morland in a sensible kind of voice as she took up the receiver. Edith had been well trained by elder brothers never to ask about telephone calls, so she quietly took an early book of Mrs. Morland’s from the shelf and began to read about the beginnings of Madame Koska’s fashionable dressmaking establishment where lovely mannequins were always getting abducted or locked in a cupboard by international crooks (if that term really means anything), but always saved in the nick of time. Through her reading a few disjointed words from the telephone reached her ear, among which she distinguished Southbridge and match, but Madame Koska was far too interesting for her attention to be distracted. At last Mrs. Morland put the receiver up. “It was Everard Carter, the Headmaster at Southbridge School” she said. “There is a half-term cricket match tomorrow, Old Boys v. The Rest, and he wants me to come. Would you like it?”

  “To come too?” said Edith. “Oh, I’d love to, thank you. My Leslie cousins were all there and I expect one of them will be an Old Boy.”

  “You know,” said Mrs. Morland apologetically, “I’m not really Barsetshire. I only came to live here. Are those the same cousins as the Leslies at Rushwater?”

  “Oh, that’s Martin, he’s Uncle David’s nephew, his father was killed in the first war so he had Rushwater when grandfather died,” said Edith. “These ones are Uncle John’s boys at Greshamsbury,” which account appeared perfectly clear to her because she was talking about people she knew, but did not altogether enlighten Mrs. Morland. “Minor, that’s the middle one, is a frightfully good climber. He has been up the spire of the School Chapel and over most of the cathedral roof.”

  “Presently I shall tell you all about my sons and their wives and children,” said Mrs. Morland, with no animus, only as a reasonable statement of fact. “That sounds like your party coming back,” and indeed it could not have been anything else, and in a few minutes they all came tumbling in like Mrs. Cat and her kittens in The Frog that would a-wooing go.

  “Did you have a nice time?” said Mrs. Morland. “I expect you are hungry after going on the river.”

  “That’s right,” said Stoker who, as usual, had accompanied the party into the room. “Young blood, that’s what it is. There’s some beer in the fridge and plenty of cake.”

  On hearing this several members of the party offered their help.

  “Get in the way, that’s all the help you’ll give,” said Stoker, whose opinion of the male sex was on the whole low. “You can all wash your hands. And then you can open your mouth and shut your eyes. You can come,” she added to Lord Mellings. He did not particularly want to, but his natural politeness made it difficult for him to refuse a lady, so he followed her, making a face expressive of resigned despair for the benefit of his relations.

  “I suppose we’d better wash our hands,” said James Graham. “I got simply filthy when we got stuck in the mud.”

  “So you did,” said Mrs. Morland, who had been looking with a mother’s eye at her guests. “There is a basin in the cloakroom outside and another basin in the bathroom upstairs.”

  Amid scufflings and mutterings of “Bags I the bathroom” most of the river party left the room.

  “I’m not really dirty,” said Mr. Crosse as the noise died away. “I was only a passenger. Will you really come over to Crosse Hall, Mrs. Morland? Father would love it.”

  “I should like it of all things,” said Mrs. Morland. “Shall we arrange a day now?, I mean if it suits your father. I’m not going away this summer—if summer you can call it. What kind of day? I expect your father is in Town during the week.”

  Mr. Crosse said not very much now, but he himself was kept pretty busy during the week, so if Saturday, or even better a Sunday suited Mrs. Morland, how nice. And what, he added, about Edith Graham who
, he gathered, was staying with her. Mrs. Morland thought this an excellent plan, so the following Sunday was fixed, subject to Lord Crosse being disengaged and the weather not being too awful.

  By this time the Graham boys with George Halliday were moderately clean. All the young men said good-bye to Mrs. Morland and thanked her with rather unnecessary chivalry of speech, but were totally put out of countenance by her replying in the same vein only much better. Edith kissed her brothers in a perfunctory and sisterly way, also George Halliday with equal want of interest.

  “And what to me, my love, and what to me?” said Mr. Crosse.

  “Love’s Labours Lost,” said Edith swiftly.

  “Stap my vitals, I did not know Miss was so well read,” said Mr. Crosse gallantly.

  “Oh, one does read, you know,” said Edith in an affected voice which caused her brothers to hoot at her.

  “Well, good-bye Edith,” said George Halliday. “Have a nice time.”

  “Oh, I know I shall,” said Edith. “I wish I could stay for ever, except for not seeing mother and father and all the boys and—” when she paused.

  “And whom? or what?” said George Halliday and Mr. Crosse together.

  “Oh, anyone,” said Edith, at the same time quite disgracefully making eyes at Mr. Crosse and George Halliday.

  But instead of going green and yellow with jealousy George only laughed and went home, driving his car too fast all the way, along the bad hilly road on the other side of the river. When he got home he found his father in the little summer-house where he often spent the afternoon not reading the Times. For if all the papers now have names in them that you don’t know—very different from the old Morning Post where you could see everyone you knew being born and christened, married and buried and send them letters of congratulation or condolence—you might as well not bother about them. And the cross-word puzzles were so difficult now, not like the good old days when “eme” and “orlop” were in every cross-word at least twice a week. So Mr. Halliday took the Times with him as an old king might take the crown he could no longer wear, with a certain enjoyment in keeping it from his descendants.