Mr Rose observed this at once, and said, ‘You have not had Leberklösse, Louise? It is very good.’ He took a spoonful which included a dumpling and popped it into his mouth. Louise copied him. The dumpling was scaldingly hot and, without thought, she spat it back into her spoon. Everybody noticed this, and she felt herself blushing.
‘It is Otto’s fault. He can eat food hotter than anyone in the world,’ Mrs Rose said kindly. Louise drank some water.
‘You are a sensible young woman not to burn your mouth. A burned mouth, and you can taste nothing.’ Just as she was thinking how kind he was, he put his spoon down with a bang, and almost shouted, ‘This soup is without its celery. Anna! Anna? How is it possible that you have forgotten an ingredient so important?’
‘I did not forget, Otto, I could not find any. All the celery was just white stalks with the leaves already cut. What could I do?’
‘Make another soup, of course. I know that you have in your repertoire fourteen soups, many if not all of which do not require celery leaves. Don’t look like that, woman, it is not a tragedy. I am just telling you that it is not as it should be.’ He picked up his spoon again and smiled at Louise. ‘You see? The smallest criticism – and I am treated like a tyrant. Me!’ He laughed fondly at the absurdity.
In spite of this, he – they all – had a second helping of soup, and while Stella was cross-examined about the school, Louise could look at her friend’s parents in peace. Mrs Rose, although probably quite old – at least forty – was not somebody who had been a beauty once – she still was one. She was immensely tall with wavy iron grey hair fastened with a slide at one side. All her features were large, but so beautifully arranged that looking at her was like a close-up in the cinema. She had enormous dark brown eyes set very wide apart below a broad forehead from which her hair sprang in a widow’s peak. She had cheekbones like Stella, but her nose although large was not bony like her daughter’s: it had exactly the right quantity of flesh and she had sharply delineated and flaring nostrils. Her mouth was wide, and when she smiled these statuesque proportions were lit with a beautiful gaiety that Louise found bewitching.
Peter Rose arrived just as the soup plates had been cleared from the table, and her father was telling Stella that it was absurd that she could not read Italian when he had so often offered to teach her.
‘You trying to teach me things means you losing your temper and me bursting into tears,’ she said.
This, Louise could see, was about to provoke another outburst, quelled only by Peter’s arrival. He slipped into the room and his seat at table very much as though he wished he was invisible. All eyes turned to him: he was bombarded with attention, disapproval and questions. He was late: why was he so late? How had his rehearsal gone? Would he like soup – Anna had kept some hot specially for him – or would he like to go straight to the meat course? (A vast, savoury stew had been brought in by the maid.) He had not had his hair cut in spite of the appointment being made for him; he would have to go after lunch … but this only branched out into a myriad other suggestions of how he should spend his afternoon. He should rest; he should take a bracing walk; he should go to the cinema to take his mind off the concert. Throughout, he sat, his myopic eyes gleaming behind heavy spectacles, his capable very white hand brushing back the lock of hair that fell constantly across his forehead, a nervous smile starting and being suppressed. He opted for soup and Aunt Anna rushed out of the room to procure it. At the same time his father observed that he seemed so full of himself and this concert that he had not even had the common politeness to notice their guest. It seemed astonishing to him, he ruminated, at a volume suited to someone soliloquising in the Albert Hall, how – considering the enormous trouble taken by their parents – two children should seem apparently devoid of any decent behaviour at all. A daughter who answered back, answered her father back, and a son who utterly ignored the presence of a young lady who was a guest in their house. Could Sophie understand it? But his wife merely smiled and continued to serve the stew. Could Anna? – ‘Otto, they are children.’ He turned to Louise but, filled with nervous embarrassment, she began to blush: he observed it, and let her go.
Peter said: ‘Hallo! I know you’re Louise, Stella has told me.’
While the stew, accompanied by red cabbage (another thing that Louise had never had before in her life) and excellent mashed potato, was being eaten, Stella’s father cross-examined her about what she was going to do with her friend during the weekend.
‘We’ll go to Peter’s concert, of course.’
‘You enjoy music?’
‘Oh, yes! Yes, I do.’
‘Louise’s grandfather was a composer,’ Stella said.
‘So? And who was he?’
‘He was called Hubert Rydal. I think he was only a minor composer.’
‘Indeed? I do not think’, he said, chewing furiously as he spoke, ‘that I should much like your children, Stella, describing me as a minor surgeon. What could they know of surgery to make such a pronouncement?’
‘I only meant that that’s what people call him.’ Louise felt herself blushing again and, worse, tears starting in her eyes as she remembered how much she had loved him – how his habitually noble face, hawk nose, snow white beard and large blue, sad, innocent eyes would crumple and dissolve into uncontrollable giggles when he thought something was funny, how he would take her hand, ‘Come with me, little dear,’ and lead her to some treat kept tacitly secret from her grandmother who seldom found anything funny, how when he kissed her, his beard had smelled of sweetbriar … ‘He was the first person I knew who died,’ she said unsteadily, and looked up to find Mr Rose regarding her with a sharp and comprehending kindness.
When their eyes met, he smiled – a curious smile that she would have described as cynical had there not been so much understanding and affection mysteriously there as well – and said, ‘A worthy granddaughter. And tomorrow, Stella? What do you propose to do with your guest?’
Stella muttered that they were going shopping.
‘And in the evening?’
‘I don’t know, Pappy. We haven’t thought.’
‘Very well. I shall take you to a theatre. And then I shall take you out to supper. You will enjoy yourselves,’ he commanded, smiling ferociously round the room at all of them.
The plates were removed and a platter of cheeses brought. Louise, for whom cheese at home consisted invariably of Cheddar for the nursery and servants, and Stilton for the grown-ups and people of her age at Christmas, was amazed to see such a collection. Mrs Rose, who saw this, said, ‘Stella’s father adores cheese, and many of his patients know it.’
Stella said virtuously, ‘Cheese is rationed, Pappy. At school, we get only two ounces a week. Imagine you, Pappy, living on that!’
Peter said, ‘At the National Gallery concerts, you get cheese and sultana sandwiches.’
‘Is that what you go for, you greedy boy?’
‘Of course! I have no interest in music at all: I just adore sultanas.’ As he said this, he imitated his sister.
All the same, Louise noticed that none of the family ate much of the cheese excepting Mr Rose, who, helping himself to three kinds, cut them into smaller pieces, screwed black pepper liberally over them, and then popped them into his mouth.
The cheeses were replaced by a delicious-looking concoction of paper thin pastry which proved to have apples and spices in it, that Louise, although she felt she had eaten far too much already, was unwilling to resist and, as it turned out, quite unable to – since, with the remark that nobody could refuse Anna’s strudel, Mr Rose ordered his wife to pass her an enormous slice. During this course, a furious argument broke out between Peter and his father on the merits of various Russian composers, whom Mr Rose provocatively dismissed as producers of schmaltz or fairytale music, which made Peter so angry that he stammered and shouted and knocked over a glass of water.
It was only after very black coffee served in tiny, brittle red and gold cups tha
t Louise and Stella were allowed to go off by themselves, and then only after much questioning and criticism about how they were to spend the afternoon.
‘Are we going for a walk?’ Louise asked. She felt sleepy after the huge meal, and dreaded the raw freezing air.
‘Good Lord, no! I just said that because it’s the one thing they never seem to mind. We’ll just get the hell out, and then think of some lovely indoor thing to do.’
In the end they took a 53 bus to Oxford Street and spent hours in Bumpus, where after much cheerful browsing, they decided to buy each other a book. ‘Something that we think the other one ought to have read,’ Stella said.
‘I don’t know all that you’ve read.’
‘Well if I turn out to have read it, you’ll have to choose again.’ But she didn’t have to. Stella chose Madame Bovary for Louise: ‘I would have got it in French, but your French isn’t much good,’ she said, and Louise, whose French was almost non-existent although she had tried to conceal this from Stella, did not argue. After much agonising, she had chosen Ariel by André Maurois – a blue Penguin. She felt rather mean about this, because Madame Bovary cost two shillings, and Ariel only sixpence, but she knew that Stella would pour scorn on that kind of discrepancy. ‘It’s about Shelley,’ she said and Stella replied, ‘Oh, good! I don’t know much about him.’ They went home on the bus, deciding to inscribe the books when they got home, and inventing the awful things they thought other pairs of girls at the school would have given each other. ‘Lipsticks, and talc powder and charms to put on their bracelets, and little notebooks to put people’s birthdays in!’ were some of the suggestions, until Louise, remembering Nora, said that they shouldn’t be so superior.
‘Why shouldn’t we be? We are. It isn’t saying much, after all. I mean – look at them!’
‘You know, Stella, considering how democratic you are, you are extraordinarily arrogant!’
‘I’m not. I’m simply being accurate. You’re so undemocratic that you’re used to people being inferior and think it’s kinder to tell lies about them. I don’t.’
‘But there’s a difference between people who’ve had opportunities and made nothing of them, and people who haven’t.’
‘Yes, there is. That’s why I despise our schoolmates so much. They’re nearly all far richer than we are, and expense can have been no object in their education, whereas most people – and certainly girls – don’t get any opportunities to be properly educated at all. Look at your family! The boys all went to school where at least they are taught Greek and Latin, and you just having a governess!’ Stella had been to St Paul’s, one of the few places where education of girls was taken seriously, and Louise knew that if she wanted to go to a university she was clever enough and had certainly been prepared.
‘Miss Milliment did her best. She was just too kind to us, and let us be lazy. Which I was.’ She was beginning to find out all the things she didn’t know, like the classics, languages, political economy, current events – the quantity appalled her.
Stella looked quickly at her, and said, ‘You’ll be all right. You want to know things and, anyway, you know what you want to do. Lucky you!’
‘My father’, she remarked later on when they were having a bath together before dressing for Peter’s concert, ‘says that girls should be educated absolutely as much as boys because then they are less likely to bore their husbands and children. Or, I suppose, if they don’t have any of those, themselves.’
‘It’s funny. I thought your family would talk about politics all the time at meals. I was terrified.’
‘They often do. It just wasn’t a day for that. I think Pappy was anxious not to work Peter up before his concert.’
So they had a scene about Russian music instead, Louise thought, but she did not say so. It was new for her to observe things and have private views about them: at home she seemed to herself to have taken everything for granted. It was a sure sign that she was growing up – getting older and, surely, more interesting?
The family seemed to thrive on scenes. There was a scene between Stella and her mother about the dress Stella had decided to wear for the concert. In fact it wasn’t a dress; it was a scarlet jersey and a black and white check pleated skirt. Her mother said it was not formal enough for the occasion. Voices were so raised that Mr Rose emerged from another of the innumerable doors that lined the long passage and said that it was impossible to hear himself think with such a racket. He then joined the fray with gusto, disagreeing with his wife about the bottle green velveteen being more suitable and insisting upon a cream tussore silk that Stella said was a hundred years old and too short for her. Peter’s taste was quoted by both parents, although they did not agree on what it might be. Mrs Rose said that he would be ashamed of his sister turning up at his concert dressed as though she was going to play some game. Mr Rose said that Peter would detest her appearing in something so clearly meant to draw attention to herself as the bottle green velvet. Stella said that if she wore the tussore silk Peter’s friends would scream with laughter. Aunt Anna arrived and contributed a pink silk shirt to Stella’s black and white skirt. This temporarily united the others – against her and she leaned against the wall with little clucking cries of dismay. Mr Rose, although not exactly shouting, was speaking with that irritable clarity of enunciation that Louise associated with people trying to make an idiot – or a foreigner – understand. ‘It is perfectly simple. You will wear the silk and do as you are told.’ At this both Stella and her mother uttered cries of dismay; Stella burst into tears, her mother broke first into a cascade of sighs, disappeared into her bedroom and returned a moment later with a pale green woollen frock that she held against her daughter while tears slipped slowly down great tracts of her beautiful face. ‘Otto! Otto? Would not this be the answer to the trick?’
He surveyed them both, his wife’s suitably imploring expression, Stella’s mutinous silence. That would have to do, he said at last. He was sick of the whole business: it was not, after all, of the slightest interest to him what his daughter wore; she was quite old enough to make a fool of herself if she pleased. He had no interest in the matter. He could not imagine why there had been such a fuss in the first place. He smiled with a weary, long-suffering kindness and shut his door, leaving Louise, and Stella holding the green woollen dress. Mrs Rose sighed again, and then went briskly down the passage, seemingly rejuvenated.
‘Listen! What shall I wear?’ Louise said anxiously to her friend.
‘Oh, anything you like. They won’t mind what you wear.’
Louise could hardly believe this to be true, but she had very little with her and, as she wished to save her best dress for the theatre, the alternative was a tweed pinafore dress with a cream silk shirt that Aunt Rach had given her for Christmas.
When she thought about Christmas she felt uneasy – sad. It had been spent, as it always had been, at Home Place, and although everybody had made efforts to make it seem the same, it hadn’t been, although it was difficult to say that anything (which really mattered) was different. They had all had stockings – although there was no tangerine in the toe and Lydia had wept because she thought they had simply left hers out. No tangerines and no oranges – no lemons, so no lemon curd tartlets on Boxing Day, one of the Duchy’s traditions – all details but they added up. But the house seemed colder, and there was hardly ever any hot water because the range took so much coke and the Duchy had changed all the light bulbs to a lower voltage to help the blackout, she said, and use less electricity. Peggy and Bertha, the housemaids, had gone off to join the WAAF, and Billy had gone to work in a factory. The garden looked different, the flowers borders gone and McAlpine growing vegetables in them. He creaked about, very bad-tempered because his rheumatism was so much worse, and the Duchy had been trying to get a girl to help in the garden, but the first one left in a week – couldn’t stand McAlpine, who refused to speak to her and complained of her incessantly behind her back. All the horses were gone except the two ol
d ones so Wren, the groom, did odd jobs like chopping wood and stoking the boiler and painting bits of the greenhouse roof. He still wore his shiny leather gaiters and a nutmeg-coloured tweed cap that went, as Polly said, so very badly with his beetroot face, but he seemed shrunken and was often heard talking to himself in tones of great grievance. Dottie had been promoted to housemaid and Mrs Cripps had to make do with a much younger girl in the kitchen, who was worse than useless she continually said. The Brig seemed much blinder than in the summer, and now made Aunt Rach take him to London three times a week when he went to his office and she was, as she said making a joke of it, his very private secretary. Aunt Zoë was pregnant and being sick all the time, or lying with a green-white face on the sofa. Aunt Sybil – who at least had got thinner – seemed quite ratty, especially with Polly who said she spoiled Wills to death and worried Uncle Hugh by worrying so much about him. And her mother! Sometimes she thought that Villy actually hated her; she didn’t seem to want to know anything about school, or her friend; she criticised Louise’s appearance and the clothes that she chose to buy with her new dress allowance (forty pounds a year – for everything her mother reiterated in the kind of voice that, to Louise, meant including STs). She disapproved of Louise growing her hair, which obviously if one was going to be an actress one needed to do in case one played a very old lady with a bun; she complained if she ever caught Louise doing anything that wasn’t useful, like laying the table; she tried to send her to bed at a ridiculous hour, and spoke about her to other people – in front of her – as though she was some kind of petty criminal or idiot, saying that Louise couldn’t be trusted to do anything she promised, that she was utterly wrapped up in herself, that she was so clumsy that she really wondered what would happen if Louise ever got on a stage. This last was the thing that hurt most, and things had come to a head when, on Boxing Day, Louise had broken the Duchy’s favourite china teapot: some scalding tea had spilled from the spout onto her left hand, the shock made her drop the pot, and tea-leaves and tea and bits of china were all over the floor. She had stood appalled, holding her scalded hand with the other one and staring at the floor, and before anyone else could say or do anything, her mother had said in her sarcastic voice, which was like a bad imitation of her friend Hermione Knebworth, ‘Really, Louise, we shall have to start calling you Tony Lumpkin – or Bumpkin would be more appropriate!’ There were strangers to tea: her face burned and, knowing she was going to cry, she rushed blindly from the room, knocking a book off a small table in her flight.
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 63