However, it did not rain, the wind was not a gale, and Miss Holly and Heather set off for their tennis party, speeded from the front gate by Mrs Merivale, who hoped they would thoroughly enjoy themselves and not to worry about supper as it could all be kept hot and if Mr Adams came in before they were back she would give him a nice cup of tea. A few minutes’ ride brought them to the level crossing and so to the foot of the High Street. Here Miss Holly dismounted, saying with truth that she was not so young as she used to be, but Heather whose legs though ungraceful were extremely powerful, rode scornfully on, tacking from side to side, to the great alarm of an army lorry, two jeeps and a motor despatch-rider, none of whom were accustomed to keep the rule of the road and therefore deprecated such action in others. Miss Holly was not unduly anxious for her charge. She knew Heather had an excellent head and no nerves to speak of, and further she had on taking the job contracted out of all responsibility for her physical safety, knowing from experience that she had no fear of heights and a passion for climbing to the top of any high building and walking round it, preferably on the parapet. To this Mr Adams had agreed, adding with ill-concealed pride that his little Heth had a will of her own, same as her Dad.
So Miss Holly pursued her way peacefully up the hill and when she got to the Watsons’ house found Heather on the front doorstep, her face bright red, her sandy hair damp and clinging to her head. Miss Holly was no snob, and as we know she liked her pupil in her own businesslike way, but she did for a moment wish that she were not meeting Molly Glover with quite such an unattractive not to say temporarily repellent creature in tow.
‘Well!’ said Mrs Watson, throwing open the door and beaming at her guests. ‘This is nice to meet you again, Cicely, after all these years. And this is Heather Adams? You do look hot, dear. Don’t leave the bicycles outside or they’ll be pinched. Charlie!’ she shouted towards the back of the house.
Mr Watson came into the hall from his study.
‘This is my husband,’ said Mrs Watson, presenting Mr Watson to the visitors. ‘This is Cicely Holly, Charlie, that was at Fairlawns with me, only she was a great swot and I was a dunce. It was always tennis with me, wasn’t it, Cecily, only in those days it was basket-ball. What a foul game only they call it netball now. And this is Heather Adams whose father you know. Take the bicycles round to the back, Charlie, there’s a good boy. He’s got a kind of workshop with all sorts of things in it,’ said Mrs Watson with all-embracing indiscriminating pride, ‘and the bikes will be quite safe there. And don’t get any oil or anything on your flannels, Charlie,’ she added, as Mr Watson took a bicycle handle-bar in each hand.
Heather’s rather vacant eyes had lighted up at these words.
‘Have you got a lathe?’ she inquired.
Mr Watson said he had.
‘Electric or foot-drive?’ said Heather.
Mr Watson said electric.
‘I’ll take one of the bikes,’ said Heather, and wrested her bicycle from his grasp. Mr Watson, amused but not disconcerted, for not even the Lord Chancellor’s death could do that, led the way round the house. Mrs Watson shut the front door and took Miss Holly to the drawing-room.
‘Sit down and we’ll have tea as soon as the others come,’ said Mrs Watson. ‘Well, I’d have known you anywhere! And what I always say is, once you’ve been at school with anyone there’s a little bit of the past in common that makes all the difference. Those were the days at Fairlawns. Do you remember Gwenda Hopkins? She married a very nice man in the Indian Civil and has three daughters all in the Forces. And Ivy Paxton? You know she died; a dreadful shock to her mother. And Hilda Cowman; she used to be rather a pal of mine but she got some sort of job in a factory and looks down on me because I’m married. And now do tell me all about yourself.’
During these remarks and while Mrs Watson took a breath for a monologue which would obviously go on until she had said all she thought of saying, Miss Holly sat plumb and upright in her chair, regarding her old school friend with scientific interest. That Molly Glover had recognized her was not surprising, for as Miss Holly freely confessed to herself she had been a plain stout girl and was a plain stout woman, and except that she now wore suits from a good tailor and not a gym tunic or a one-piece frock, her round face with a good deal of colour, her beady black eyes, her smooth black hair neatly brushed back and coiled, her round compact form, were almost exactly the same as in the upper forms at Fairlawns. She could not say the same of Mrs Watson, the large, handsome, rather crumby woman before her, with her hair set in curls and rolls. Under what layers of change her old schoolfellow was buried: how unlikely it was that if they had met by chance she would have disentangled the tall almost gawky Molly Glover with her fair pigtail from the woman who had enveloped her. Not till Mrs Watson patted a shining curl into its proper place did Miss Holly feel sure that it was the old Molly Glover with her trick of pushing a wisp of straggling hair behind her ear.
‘I’ve never seen you at the Old Fairlavinian Reunion,’ said Mrs Watson. ‘You ought to come some time. One of the old girls, you’d remember her, Pixie Macalister, she’s games mistress at a mental home now, and does wonders with the poor things, teaching them all sorts of games with a soft ball and letting them have a free fight in the padded cell on their good days – it gets them uninhibited she says – and, where was I, oh yes, well Pixie belongs to a very nice club in the Buckingham Palace Road called the Ludo Club, from “ludo”, I play, you know – do you remember Miss Stroke’s Latin class, and how cross she used to get with gerunds and things – and she can get a room there for our meetings quite cheap. Last time I went to town specially for a reunion I spent the night at the Westmoreland, a splendid hotel with bed and bath and really good breakfast all included, and we had doodle-bugs all night, only I didn’t hear them. What I always say is, the one that’s going to get you has your number on it, so why worry? But Charlie says, “It’s not the one with your number on it that worries me, Mollie. It’s the one that says, To Whom It May Concern.” So I’ve not been to town again since, because I hate him to be worried.’
At this point Miss Bunting and Anne arrived, and Mrs Watson, having blown off steam, relapsed into her normal self as a kind hostess. Miss Bunting and Miss Holly had not met, but they had a kind of liaison through Dr Sparling, and each conceived a respect for the other as an expert in her own line, while Anne talked quite happily to Mrs Watson, who always got on very well with young people.
‘What has happened to Charlie and Heather?’ said Mrs Watson, suddenly noticing that her husband and her guest were missing.
‘If your husband is showing her an electric lathe, she won’t come till she is fetched,’ said Miss Holly, but at that moment they came in, Heather with a black smear across her white tennis skirt. Had Miss Holly been an ordinary governess she might have felt impelled to remark on this; but being a remarkable woman in her own way, she simply absorbed the fact and made no comment.
Heather, who was by now not so red in the face, had passed a most agreeable quarter of an hour with Mr Watson in his workshop, examining the lathe and entering into a highly technical conversation with him about bushes and chucks. Mr Watson was both amused and interested by her artless talk. No woman, in his experience, knew anything about machinery or would ever want to; for being able to drive a car was simply a trick one learnt. Regarded with friendly tolerance by his wife as an enthusiast who spent on machinery and things time that would be far better employed on the tennis court or the golf course, he had in Hallbury no one to share his simple joys. To find a young woman – for Heather’s imposing figure and large face somehow took her out of the category of girls – who could argue with him as man to man about turret-lathes, poppers, precision work, repetition work and such homely subjects, was a perfect godsend. Had he not been almost as fond of tennis as of his tools they might have stayed there all afternoon, but it was tea time so he took his reluctant guest to the drawing-room.
It has not, we hope, escaped our readers’ notice
that Heather Adams, though much improved in person since she fell in love and into the Harefield lake, had very little social experience. Her father, self-made and slightly suspicious of what he called ‘society’, had plenty of friends, or what passed for such, in his business world, but even in his wife’s lifetime he had never brought them home. She had died some seven or eight years previously, and Heather had led a solitary life, attending the Barchester High School where she made no friends, her sole companionship at home being the housekeeper of the moment. None of these had been very good, none was bad, and she was well enough fed and clothed; but for recreation and talk she had drifted towards her father’s works where the hands were friendly to her on the whole, especially the older men in the fitters’ shops who had found her as useful as any boy and far more intelligent and less cheeky. When at last her father realized that his daughter was growing up, he had packed her off to the Hosiers’ Girls’ Foundation School, then evacuated to Harefield Park. Here Mrs Belton had seen her and been kind to her and Heather had picked up a good deal, as had her father, who had pursued a curious unequal friendship with Mrs Belton, whom he looked upon (rather unfairly for it was her elder son, not she, who had picked Heather out of the lake) as a kind of tutelary genius. Mrs Belton had accepted this new responsibility as she usually accepted what came her way, and though she made no conscious effort to change or improve Mr Adams, her influence with him had been considerable. His taste in clothes had become a little quieter, he had dimly realized that there were people to whom it didn’t matter if you were rich or poor so long as you behaved like a gentleman, a word to which he now attached some favourable connotation.
But miracles are not expected and mostly do not happen. Mr Adams did not turn into a Belton, nor did his daughter. The aboriginal Hogglestock was deep in them; they conceived a slightly suspicious attitude to unknown people, ready to heave half-bricks; but they had also seen and admired another world, and could feel fairly at ease in it when sure that its intentions were good.
So Heather, who a year or two earlier would not have been invited to a tennis party in the rather close society of a small country town, or if she had, would have glowered at her hostess, been sulky with the older people and rude to the younger, was now almost at her ease, quite ready to continue though not to initiate a conversation, and pleased with her host and his hobby. Her visits to the Beltons had made her fairly conversant with the county and Barchester types to which Mrs Watson’s party belonged, but Miss Bunting was something she had not yet come across. That Miss Bunting was old-fashioned in dress, insignificant in appearance, rather precise in manner, was patent enough and from that point of view hardly worth study. But her newly awakened perceptions told her that this small elderly lady, whom any of her father’s housekeepers would have scorned to resemble, was something that mattered. One does not have a scientific brain for nothing. Heather saw before her a fascinating problem which she meant to solve; and here she was well ahead of her father, who would have seen Miss Bunting’s outer insignificance, but probably missed the significance behind it. What Miss Bunting thought about Heather no one can say: for Miss Bunting had been keeping her thoughts to herself for some half-century, and only to those whom she knew to be really interested would she open her store of slow-garnered wisdom.
Mrs Watson, saying that they would not wait for the others, now marshalled her party to the dining-room, where there was a good sit-down tea. Heather and Anne were placed together and told to make friends, such being Mrs Watson’s simple and direct method, while the grown-ups talked about the topics of the day, notably the sudden rebirth of glycerine, which everyone thought had left the world for ever.
The two girls looked at each other. Anne’s chief feeling about Heather was that she was alarmingly strong, yet curiously undefended, though she could not have put this into words. Heather saw a peaky girl, all eyes and nose, who looked as if one could knock her over by blowing, but somehow gave her an impression of living in a very safe world of her own. Each thought, though without formulating the impression, that the other needed some protection or help. Anne, being more used to Hallbury tea-parties than Heather, opened the conversation by asking Heather if she liked tennis. Heather responded and though nothing very brilliant was said, both young ladies were getting on nicely, when Jane Gresham came in, apologizing for being late because Frank had been poking about in the scullery waste-pipe again with a bit of old sponge on the end of a stick and the sponge had stuck and no one could get it out and of course it was Saturday and they’d have to wait till Monday to get it cleared. She then sat down by Miss Bunting, opposite Heather, and smiled at her.
The smile was merely general friendliness to include a strange girl who must be that Heather Adams they had talked about, but to Heather it appeared that the sun had risen, a very good firework display was taking place, peacocks with the voices of nightingales were swinging in cedar-trees, their jewelled tails drooping over flower-edged, gold-sanded streams, and a full moon was filling the world with throbbing rapture. This is, of course, putting it rather mildly.
‘You’re Heather Adams, aren’t you?’ said Jane. ‘Isabella Ferdinand told me about you. I know her aunt.’
As Heather did not reply, she smiled again and turned to Miss Holly. And then Robin arrived to whom Mrs Watson said: ‘Better late than never.’
‘It nearly was never,’ said Robin, making a bow to the company and sitting down by his hostess. ‘I cleaned my tennis shoes and left them on the bathroom windowsill to dry, and one of them fell out into that horrible elder tree outside the pantry window and got stuck. I couldn’t get at it with a stick and I daren’t climb, so there it was. Luckily the cook’s grandson was there, so in the end he got it.’
‘Is that Alfie?’ asked Mrs Watson, who was very strong on people’s connections.
‘No, Wallie,’ said Robin. ‘Adenoids, mentally defective, quite an intelligent child though if you show him twopence; even more intelligent if you show him sixpence. Do you suppose one could cure real full-blown tonsils by bribes? Can I have some of that cake?’
The cake was in front of Heather.
‘Will you cut it, Heather?’ said Mrs Watson. ‘This is Robin Dale. Heather Adams, who is staying at Mrs Merivale’s with Miss Holly; Robin’s father is our Rector so you’ll see him on Sunday.’
Now, we cannot account for these things, but while Heather, for no reason at all, had at once taken to Anne with a kindly protective feeling, and had seen in Jane’s entrance the veritable goddess appear, her almost immediate reaction to Robin was scorn and dislike. Perhaps his easy manner reminded her of Lieutenant Charles Belton, who had so brutally and unconsciously won and broken her heart on that fatal Sunday; perhaps she felt that a young man must be a softy if he couldn’t climb a tree; perhaps she thought his attitude to mental deficients stupid and irritating, that he ought to be in the army. In any case the demon of gaucherie and ill-breeding who had been so long exorcised came rushing back with outspread wings and fiery claws and caused her to say, quite against her own better judgment and with a voice she hardly knew: ‘I’m Chapel, so’s dad.’ After which she wished she was dead.
Luckily no one heard her. Except Anne, who felt so frightened that she almost wished she was dead too. But being a courageous creature for all her shyness, she decided that more than ever must she stand by her new friend, and asked her if she liked Shakespeare. Heather, burning with shame and anxious to make amends, said she liked him very much and told Anne all about the school performance of part of As You Like It, in which she had acted Audrey; and Anne’s eyes grew larger and darker with interest and admiration. So tea came to an end, and stuffed with cake the party went into the garden.
As Anne had already, according to arrangement, had some coaching with Jane that morning, Miss Bunting had asked Mrs Watson not to let her play too much. Mrs Watson therefore arranged a four of Jane, Miss Holly, herself, and her husband. Miss Holly, the unknown quantity, proved unexpectedly good, bounding about the
court like a hard rubber ball, sending a forehand drive with terrifying speed and pouncing on one or two backhanders like a cat on a mouse. So much did the four enjoy itself that by the time the score was thirteen-fourteen, the onlookers lost interest and the two girls went to pick raspberries, while Miss Bunting and Robin sitting on the veranda, from which they could see the court but were out of earshot, talked about the subject near to both their hearts, little boys; approaching it from very different ages and points of view, but always with the welfare of those exhausting and pleasing beings in mind.
‘What is so sad,’ said Miss Bunting, ‘is that so many little boys will go to school improperly prepared for communal life, because they will be only children. Mrs Gresham’s boy, for instance.’
Robin admitted that it was hard on the children. Hard on the mothers too, he said. There was Jane who always meant to have a proper family, but with Francis away so long, what could she do?
Miss Bunting Page 14