Never Too Late

by Angela Thirkell

  “Of course here,” she said lightly, “all that sort of thing would seem rather ridiculous, but in America with the time always being much later than ours one feels anything might happen.”

  “That’s about it, miss,” said Peters, ready in the cause of intellectual discussion to consider anyone’s views provided that he had the last word. “But as I said to the boy, things may happen outside the pantry, I said, and that is their own affair, but what happens in the pantry happens in the pantry and the same applies, miss, to what the pantry sees. There was that time, miss, at the Towers when young Mr. Rivers— the one whose mother married the Honourable George Rivers and writes books though I have never read them— he made really what you would call a Scene on the front door steps and him and Mr. Wicklow—that is his present lordship’s estate agent—had what you might call a frackass because Mr. Rivers wished to go to Nutfield to have his hair cut when there was not room in the car for another passenger when Mr. Rivers tried to get in. Mr. Wicklow pushed him off the running board. There was a young footman on approval at the time miss, and when he saw Mr. Wicklow push Mr. Rivers off the car, he so far forgot himself as to Look At Me.”

  “How dreadful!” said Edith, hoping that this was the right thing to say.

  “You may well say that, miss,” said Peters. “Of course I could not demean myself to look back at him, for I could see that he would have winked at me.”

  “Not at you, Peters,” said Edith.

  “Yes, indeed, miss,” said Peters. “I looked straight through him miss, but conveying to him at the same time, if I make myself clear, that what he had done was only human nature and, I may say, human nature at its best, miss. Mr. Rivers was never asked to the Towers again.”

  “And was it really your fault—I mean was it because of you that he wasn’t asked again?” said Edith.

  “Well, miss, it is not for me to speak,” said Peters who had been doing so with much enjoyment, “about what goes on in my employer’s house, whether he is an earl or a baron, or even an honourable, but Mr. Rivers was never invited again miss, so one can draw one’s own allusions.”

  “Mother says he is dreadful—I mean Julian Rivers,” said Edith, “and she won’t go to see his picture exhibitions. I say, Peters, I have enjoyed seeing you, and mother will simply love to hear about you. I’m staying with Mrs. Morland, but I’ll tell mother as soon as I get home. Do you know where they all are?”

  “His lordship has, I believe, taken Mrs. Morland to see her late ladyship’s sitting-room upstairs, miss,” said Peters. “Mr. Crosse is in the library, I think.”

  “Then I’ll go and find him,” said Edith. “Good-bye Peters and I’ll tell mother all about our talk,” and she held out her hand.

  Peters wiped the plate polish off his hand and shook hers, with more warmth, we think, than he would have shown to anyone else; perhaps with a feeling that she had the root of the matter in her where a proper manner of living was concerned and would carry the torch whose sacred flame he, Peters, had so long and faithfully tended. Then he put away his silver, gave a last look round to see that all was well and went to his own sitting-room where it was his habit on Sundays to put on a disgracefully shabby old shooting-jacket, formerly the property of the old earl, its leather patches almost falling off the elbows and cuffs, and in an old basket-work chair, brought by him from Pomfret Towers, to read all the more revolting of the Sunday papers from cover to cover till tea-time.

  After the friendly and almost cosy atmosphere of Peters’s room the house felt to Edith rather large and echoing and chill, for some large houses have a way of keeping their in-sides in cold storage, as it were, through the hottest weather. She had hoped to find Mrs. Morland, but if Mrs. Morland was with Lord Crosse, she felt rather shy about going upstairs to find her. Had it been her own mother, she would have pursued her cheerfully, but Mrs. Morland wrote books, which to Edith seemed something almost magical, and though she was very happy with her hostess she did not wish to appear pushing. As she crossed the hall a tall figure came in from the garden.

  “Hullo, Ludo,” she said. “I didn’t know you were here.”

  ‘Well, I didn’t know you were here either,” said Lord Mellings. “I’ve got some leave today so I came over to the Towers and they had all gone to Gatherum for the weekend, so I rang up your mother and she said you were with Mrs. Morland at High Rising, so I rang her up and whoever answered it said you were here. So I came along. I was looking for John-Arthur. Is he anywhere about?”

  No whit disturbed by her cousin’s openly expressed preference for Mr. Crosse’s company as against her own, Edith said she had been talking with Peters in his pantry and was looking for John-Arthur herself.

  “Oh, good old Peters,” said Lord Mellings. “I adore it when he talks about My Room and My Silver. I’ll look him up before I go. Come on and we’ll find John-Arthur,” who was found with no difficulty as he was sitting in the library trying to do the cross-word puzzle in a Sunday paper.

  “Hullo, Ludo,” he said. “Are you any good at cross-words? This is one of those ghastly ones where you have to black in the black squares yourself and there aren’t any clues,” but Lord Mellings said he only knew that if you got one black square in one place you had to get three other black squares in three other places that were in exactly the same place as the first one only in the other corners. And even then, he added, you weren’t any forrader.

  “Oh, confound the whole thing,” said Mr. Crosse, crumpling the newspaper and throwing it at the waste-paper basket. “Oh, sorry, did anyone want it?” but no one did, or had, or wanted to, so they all went into the garden where Mr. Crosse showed them—though not at all in a boring way—various improvements that his father had made, or was thinking of making. And then they went by winding paths up the hill to the clearing in the wood where the Grotto stood, as it, or something very like it, still stands in many country estates. He went outside, turned a tap in the long grass and then unlocked the door and stood aside to let his guests pass. It was all as Edith remembered it; the light tempered (or as our formerly lively neighbours the Gauls say, sieved) by the thick green glass in the Gothic windows, the basin on a pedestal, and in the basin a small lead figure of a child holding a jar on its shoulder. But from the jar there was not a delicate arch of water. Only a little green damp in the basin spoke of its past glory.

  “It’s a question of the water-supply,” said Mr. Crosse. “Something’s happened to the pressure. I’ll try turning it on again.”

  “There!” said Mr. Crosse. “The water used to spout out like anything. Old Admiral Palliser at Hallbury said I could clean the pipe with a spang-rod. I’d never heard of the thing nor had anyone else, but I met Mrs. Adams the other day—remarkable woman she is—and she said she could get me one from her husband. I wish she would. I’ll try ringing her up again.”

  Lord Mellings said it might be worth having a look at the pipe from the top end to see if any of it was above ground.

  “Good idea,” said Mr. Crosse. “Come up to the spring,” and he led the way along a path half covered by a tangle of grass and weeds to where a little spring bubbled out of the ground some fifty yards higher up the hill.

  “Rum things, these springs,” said Mr. Crosse. “You’d think water lived underground. How on earth does it get up here?”

  “There’s one right up near the top of Coniston Old Man, or Wetherlam. I forget which,” said Edith. “I saw it when mother took us to stay with our cousins up there. And the high ground between Watendlath and Thirlmere is much boggier than the low ground,”

  Mr. Crosse said, not very hopefully, perhaps it got syphoned up, but as he didn’t know exactly what he meant, it was just as well that Edith and Lord Mellings were arguing about the water supply at Pomfret Towers.

  “Well, I don’t know how it got upstairs when old Uncle Giles was alive,” said Lord Mellings, alluding to his father’s predecessor, “but it’s all done by an electric pump now. Mr. Adams had it put in when Amalgamat
ed Vedge took over.

  Mr. Crosse said if there were a mountain in the neighbourhood one might be able to get water from the top of it by gravity, but was unequal to explaining what he meant, though he assured his hearers that it was perfectly clear. Lord Mellings, who had inherited his father’s slow and patient way of dealing with problems as they came, suggested that they should, if possible, follow the pipe downwards, even if it did mean going through the nettles. Accordingly they did so and as the pipe was mostly above ground it was not difficult. About twenty yards above the Grotto it vanished into a thick bed of nettles.

  Without any further words Lord Mellings took a pair of bicycle trouser clips out of his jacket pocket, clipped them round his ankles and walked into the nettles. Presently he stopped.

  “Hi, Edith! chuck me a stick,” he called. “A strong one if you can find one. One never ought to come out without a stick.”

  By great good luck Edith found a fairly straight branch which she threw towards her cousin. After beating about in the tangle of long grass and weeds he stood up and stretched his long legs.

  “Here you are, John-Arthur,” he said. “Water spouting out of the pipe nicely. No wonder the fountain-thing didn’t work. Fll leave the stick here for a mark. Do you think you could find it again?”

  Mr. Crosse, who though pleased that the leak had been detected was rather ashamed that a guest, and one who, though this was nothing at all of course to do with the matter, was Edith’s cousin, should have solved the mystery, said he would easily find the place now that he knew where it was, and what a fool he was not to have noticed it before.

  “Are you hungry now, Ludo?” said Edith, who with three elder brothers was used to young men being perpetually ready for meals.

  “I really don’t know,” said Lord Mellings. “I suppose I am. I didn’t have any breakfast because I wanted to see the Keeper about that vixen,” which to Edith sounded so grownup that her whole view of her cousin Ludo suddenly changed. Ludo, always so much taller than she was; so slow in the uptake though he was awfully nice; never really loving horses as his brother Giles did; this Ludo talking about vixens as if he had lived with gamekeepers all his life.

  “Lord!” said Mr. Crosse, “you don’t mean to say she’s been over your way?”

  “As far as Boxall Hill, anyway,” said Lord Mellings. “You can’t mistake her. There must be a trail of feathers all over the county. But that’s the East Barsetshire’s business, my boy, so I thought I’d let you know, as Mr. Gresham is your Master over this way.”

  Loyal as Edith was to the tradition of preserving and hunting foxes, this was really too much. Was she to be ignored by John-Arthur whom she had thought she liked, and by Ludo, who, although the exact degree of cousinship was too tangled to follow, was kin through Gran, she who was Lady Emily Foster before she was Lady Emily Leslie and for all her long, happy married life continued to think of Pomfret Towers as Home? It was intolerable. Ludo was a dear and a nice cousin, but there were chords in the human breast—limits to what one could put up with even from a nice cousin. So she deliberately lagged behind the young men, nursing her grievance and wondering why she minded anything so stupid, and finding with an uncomfortable kind of pleasure that they had gone on to the stables without even asking her if she would like to come too. Full of such thoughts—black and of course eternal when one is barely eighteen—she went crossly to the house and looked in at the library window. Inside the library Mrs. Morland and Lord Crosse could plainly be seen, seated at a small table. Tea-things were on the table, and what looked like particularly nice cakes, so Edith swallowed her grievances and tapped at the French window.

  Lord Crosse looked round, saw her, got up and opened the window.

  “Come and have tea,” he said. “It has only just been made. And where have you been?”

  Edith, already ashamed of her spurt of temper, said she had been to look at the Temple with John-Arthur and Ludo, and they had found where the leak was and John-Arthur was going to get it mended and then he and Ludo had gone round to the stables and she had come back; which was all fairly true but did not, to Mrs. Morland, adequately account for Edith’s ruffled manner, so very unusual in her. However this was not the moment to enquire into Edith’s girlish troubles, so she went on with the talk which Edith’s arrival had interrupted.

  “But, Lord Crosse, you don’t mean to say that Mr. Gres-ham is really not going to stand for Parliament again?” said Mrs. Morland, evidently taking up a conversation that Edith’s arrival had interrupted.

  “He is as obstinate as a White Porkminster,” said Lord Crosse, half annoyed with Mr. Gresham, half amused by his own annoyance. “He says he has represented East Barsetshire for nearly half a century and it’s time some new blood came in. That’s all very well, but where’s the new blood to come from? And it isn’t everyone who can afford Parliament now. All very well for men like Adams who has the health of a bull and all his business interests behind him, but our younger men here are working hard to keep their wives and families and haven’t leisure for politics.”

  “But couldn’t John-Arthur stand?” said Edith. “He doesn’t have to work for his wives and families.”

  “Quite true,” said Lord Crosse. “He is not really interested in politics, but apart from the bank, where I believe he is giving satisfaction, he likes county work. In fact I hope to see him on the East Barsetshire County Council before long. And of course at any moment he might have a wife, probably followed by a family.”

  “Do you mean he is engaged to someone?” said Edith, slightly piqued by the idea, though in a perfectly Platonic way.

  “Not so far as I know,” said Lord Crosse, amused by the child’s practical way of considering the question. “But they tell one nothing now. Excellent friends but they keep one in one’s place. Do you find that, Mrs. Morland?” which was kindly said to bring that lady back into the conversation. “About one’s children, I mean.”

  “Oh, one’s children,” said Mrs. Morland, who had not been listening very closely. Not that she found the talk uninteresting, but an idea had suddenly come into her head— apropos of nothing at all and formed by the strange other self that lives inside us and goes quietly about its own business till it suddenly erupts without warning—for a slight improvement in the female villain of her new book and she wanted to fix it in her memory. Sometimes she had thought it would be a good idea to keep a small notebook in her bag and jot down any useful thoughts that occurred to her, but when, after a few weeks, she came to look at the book she found that she had only made three notes of which two were by now perfectly unintelligible to her and the third illegible, with a large question mark after it.

  “One’s children,” she repeated, to gain time. “Well, all mine are sons, so I don’t know about daughters. I can’t exactly say that they keep me in my place, because I always am in my place. I mean I am very fond of them and of my grandchildren, but it is very nice not having them to stay. I expect with a house of this size they are less exhausting,” and she looked round the library, evidently hoping to see some tangible and recognizable sign of grandchildren kept at bay.

  “I really couldn’t say,” said Lord Crosse. “Luckily we have the old nurseries upstairs for grandchildren when required, but mine are still very small and not very many and now that my elder daughter has taken Mr. Halliday’s charming house at Hatch End—the one that John-Arthur lived in for a few months when the bank had it—I am less likely to have grandchildren here than when they lived in London. They used to come to stay.”

  “It seems rather waste of the nurseries,” said Mrs. Morland, though more in sorrow than in anger, but at that moment the young men came in from the stables, very ready for tea and cake, and rather boring about the Grotto and its water supply—or so Edith thought. After all, one did not come to lunch at Crosse Hall simply to watch John-Arthur and Ludo looking for a hole in a pipe. But Lord Crosse and Mrs. Morland made such ample amends for her aloofness by the genuine interest they both took i
n the water supply to the Grotto that Edith, deciding to get over her pique, joined the talk and enjoyed herself, also making both the young men laugh by her way of puttings things—though one could hardly call John-Arthur young because he was as old as George Halliday and they had both been in the end of the war and must be quite thirty. And yet Ludo who was much younger than they were and not even a real soldier yet, seemed almost as grown-up. It was all very confusing and perhaps for the first time in her life Edith, the slightly spoilt youngest child, began to realize that life was not all beer and skittles, nor was its way always the way one meant to go. But these thoughts passed through her mind more swiftly and if possible even less intelligently than they have passed through our pen and melted like a cloud—though not in the silent summer heaven, for the sky was grey and there was now quite a nasty wind.

  Mrs. Morland, who had also observed these natural phenomena, said she must take Edith back to High Rising, or they would find the roads too horribly crowded with cars going back to London. Edith, who had inherited from her mother a good sense of social obligations, asked Mr. Crosse if she could say good-bye to Peters and took her cousin Ludo with her, a visit which gave Peters great satisfaction, and Edith could not sufficiently admire the way in which Ludo quite kindly cut short Peters’s flow of talk. Then Lord Mellings got into his little car and Edith got into Mrs. Morland’s and they all drove to their homes.

  CHAPTER 4

  When Edith came down on Monday morning, having begged on the previous evening not to have breakfast in bed so that she could see more of her hostess, she found her dealing with a pile of letters and getting a good deal of butter on them not to speak of honey.

  “Oh! Mrs. Morland, is that Fan-Mail?” said Edith. “Could I see some?”

  “Certainly,” said Mrs. Morland. “You can answer them for me, if you like, on my typewriter.”