A Desirable Husband

by Frances Vernon

  ‘I hope not,’ said Finola, who had never been able to understand why Constance seemed to dislike her, for Gerard would not say that she was simply jealous of her influence with Hugh.

  ‘Alice is very amusing about her!’ said Gerard.

  ‘Yes,’ said Finola. Both thought of their childhoods.

  It was eleven o’clock, but they felt they could not go to bed yet because they kept quite late hours. They went to sit in their drawing-room on the first floor, where Finola read Love in a Cold Climate and Gerard, who seldom used his study, attended to some papers. The room was cold and a little shabby, quite conventionally decorated and made untidy by Gerard. When they had bought the house before Gerard was demobilised, they had been able to borrow old furniture and curtains from his parents and from Alice, but they had had to buy some Utility lamps, carpets and chairs, and these they had not yet been able to replace. Recently Finola had bought some new drawing-room curtains, but they were not a success. The stripes were too narrow. She dressed prettily, but was inclined to make mistakes in decoration, and her house never looked as Alice’s did, as though there had been no attempt made at decoration at all.

  ‘Aren’t you in court tomorrow?’ said Finola.

  ‘No, Wednesday,’ said Gerard, who was very rarely in court because no one gave him briefs. He was a criminal barrister and he refused, though too subtly to make him feel he had obeyed his conscience, to defend anyone whom he believed to be guilty. Constance said he should indeed defend such people, because if he did so they would probably be convicted as he thought they should be. Gerard and Finola lived on an income of about four thousand a year, most of which was a legacy from his father’s mother, Lady Anne Parnell.

  It was very quiet. They knew that rain was falling because the wheels of the occasional car could be heard spinning in the wet. Suddenly they were disturbed by a childish moan from upstairs, which was followed by footsteps.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Finola, looking up. ‘Do you suppose Eleanor’s fallen out of bed? I really think she’s too young not to sleep in a cot, whatever Nanny says.’

  ‘Nanny will know what to do,’ said Gerard. ‘Don’t worry, darling.’

  ‘I never worry about the children,’ she said, and smiled. ‘I didn’t know children could really be so normal.’

  ‘Darling.’ Gerard got up and put aside his papers, and went to sit beside her on the sofa, where he took hold of her hands. ‘You are very dear, you know.’ He touched her lips with his, and smoothed her forehead: these things always pleased her, and he loved to be gentle. Gerard liked his wife’s being almost plain, however charming; he had never been attracted by women as lovely as himself.

  The telephone rang and Finola leant across him to pick it up.

  ‘Knightsbridge 3054?’ she said, still stretching. ‘Constance – here, Gerard.’

  ‘Mother – yes, good evening. Oh my God – he’s not – no, of course not – yes, we were out to dinner – I don’t know if I can come down, do you need me? Does he? – No – I apologise, mother – But you did say there was no danger?’ He was pressing his hand to his tall forehead, and his voice was rising. Presently he put the telephone down, and told Finola who had gathered it already that Hugh had had another heart attack, a worse one than last time, but not fatal yet.

  *

  Hugh and Gerard had just finished discussing Darcy’s divorce. Two months ago the newspapers had made the court evidence sound more interesting than it was, and now it was nearly over, after all. Darcy was to receive his decree nisi in two or three weeks, and Gerard had been explaining this, for his father had been upset by the accounts in the press. Hugh had been angry and tired while Gerard was talking. ‘When is Darcy coming down?’ he finished.

  ‘Tomorrow I think, Father.’

  Hugh was in bed in his dark tidy dressing-room, with his arms placed outside the sheets and a metal trolley with medicines on it placed out of his reach. A nurse was looking after him.

  ‘Are you going to sell this place when I’m gone?’ he said, watching Gerard. He had asked this before, but not so directly.

  ‘No, of course not!’

  ‘Income tax, death duties, maintenance costs, it’s nothing but worry for a person like you.’

  ‘That is hardly the point, is it? I shall manage somehow.’

  ‘Why don’t you sell it?’ said Hugh, pushing back into his pillows and still looking at his son. ‘This is the modern world. You’ve hardly been here since you went up to Cambridge; you and Darcy both despise the country. The unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable. I know.’

  ‘That’s not true, Father.’ Gerard smiled. He was always pleased to discover that his father was intelligent.

  ‘Is it your Christian duty to keep the place up, then, Gerard?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I don’t see it myself. Can’t see what it has to do with Christ. But then I’ve never been religious.’

  ‘I wish – I know this is embarrassing – but you might find some comfort –’

  ‘I suppose you’ll sell the horses, anyway? No point in keeping them, you can’t ride.’ Gerard could ride, but he rode sedately.

  ‘I hadn’t thought – Father, surely we needn’t talk about this? We’ve been into it before – I know what you want me to do, I’ll do all I can!’

  ‘I always used to prefer you to your brother, the trouble is you should have been girls, both of you.’ Hugh had a vision of his two pretty daughters, who would be dressed in the bustles and Alexandra fringes of his childhood. They would sit over tambour frames in the drawing-room, listening with lowered eyes to their elders’ conversation. They would call their Father Papa, and cry when he reproved them, but smile most of the time. ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘You must not try to make me angry, Father,’ said Gerard, who had never been told before that he was preferred to Darcy, though he had suspected it.

  ‘Hm.’ Hugh said: ‘Why didn’t you bring Finola?’ Gerard had come down in the end on the day after his court case, and had been at Combe Chalcot for two days. He had been asked this before.

  ‘Mother asked me to come alone.’

  ‘So you said.’

  ‘We’ll both come next time.’

  Hugh paused, but decided not to say that he might be dead before then. ‘Sweet girl, Finola.’ This was another opinion which Hugh had not put into words in Gerard’s hearing before.

  ‘I’ve always rather wondered why you liked her so much,’ said Gerard, who was sometimes unconventionally courageous.

  ‘Wondered? Oh, I know why you’ve wondered. Like your mother.’ Suddenly the conversation became very agreeable. ‘No, I don’t mind her not being out of the top drawer. And her grandmother was as grand as anybody. Grander than Constance. Did I ever tell you I knew Diana Blentham, her grandmother that is? Before she ran off with the Fenian. One of the best scandals of the Jubilee year – no, before that, must have been, ’95 or ’96, I’d just come down from Oxford. She was a corker.’ He paused. He had only told this story to his wife. ‘Finola’s got a look of her, nice hair. Charlie Windlesham set Diana up somewhere in St John’s Wood, after the Fenian died I believe – splendid woman. Old Lady Blentham was a regular tartar, wouldn’t hear her daughter’s name mentioned, very old-fashioned she was even in those days. Where’s my snuff-box?’

  ‘Here, Father.’

  Hugh took a pinch and carried on, and some colour came back into his dull-veined face as he talked. ‘And then, I don’t think I’ve ever told you, but I knew your mother-in-law when she was living down here as a girl, with that clergyman uncle of hers she talks about. She can’t have been more than sixteen – seventeen – ugly little flapper, she hasn’t changed a bit.’

  His eyes closed, and he smiled. Gerard, who had been marvelling, suddenly noticed his father’s position: towards the end of Hugh’s talk he had been looking away, not at him. He hesitated, whispering, before he got up and bent over him. Gerard made sure that he had not died, then blushing, he
thanked God and left the room, and longed to be outside.

  *

  Gerard and the dogs went out for a walk, and returned at five o’clock. They had been through the small park as far as the Manor, an ugly Jacobean house where the Parnells had lived before 1879. Gerard’s grandfather, who had feared that he would be ruined by the agricultural depression, had sold it to a rich American with literary tastes, the grandfather of the present Lord Van Leyden, who was not nearly so rich as Hugh Parnell. Gerard’s grandfather had not been ruined by the depression in the end, but Gerard knew that he himself would be ruined one day. It was only his faith in Christ which kept him from believing all the time, instead of most of it, that in 1984 the world would be exactly as described in Orwell’s novel.

  The Cedar House where the family now lived had been built as a kind of folly in 1780 by a Parnell who had married an heiress and detested the Manor. It was built of warm grey stone, and had a front of five windows above and four windows and a pedimented door below. The ground-floor windows were long, and arched, and gave to the building the impression of an orangery, a well-proportioned miniature it would be delightful to live in. The house was set next to the old kitchen garden, and a continuation of the kitchen-garden wall quite surrounded it. This enclosure had been built when, during the Regency, the widowed mother of the Parnell of the time had had to have a keeper living with her, owing to her passion for running about the park with no clothes on.

  It was now late April, and in the shelter of the wall the daffodils and the red japonica were just past their best. Gerard paused in the garden, thinking as he had often done before that the wall which so spoilt the view of rich country ought to be knocked down. He imagined balls on iron chains, swinging at it and breaking it with noise, and crushed stone lying on the flowerbeds. Quickly he walked on, and entered the house by the gun-room door.

  The gun-room, which was always cold, seemed to him the most typical part of the house. There were rows of musty mackintoshes, and gumboots, and flower-vases in chipped yellow cupbords. On the darkest wall, where there were no guns, there hung a family tree which said that the Parnells had been settled in North Dorset since Edward the Confessor, but Gerard used to say that this was very doubtful.

  ‘Dirty paws, Trumpy, bad dog!’ he said, and patted him. ‘Wipe.’ Amelia had been a well-trained gun-dog in her youth, but Trumpy was gun-shy, and rather spoilt.

  He went to visit his mother in her sitting-room, and found her on the telephone, talking with Sir William Warren who had been in love with her for many years, though she had never encouraged him. When he rang she had been in the middle of attending to her photograph album, and Gerard sat down to look through it. It was very neat, and each photograph had a label such as ‘Self with Dogs in Garden’.

  Constance finished describing Hugh’s health, and rang off after agreeing to meet Sir William for luncheon in London next week, all things permitting. She turned round and considered reproving Gerard, who was inclined to be vague, for coming into the room just then. In the end she did not, but she thought of her husband dying as she looked at him.

  CHAPTER 4

  A PARTY IN CHELSEA

  Finola was rather glad when, after Gerard had been two days at Combe Chalcot, Darcy rang up from Cambridge and asked if he might come and impose on her at Egerton Gardens. She told him he was supposed to be going down to Dorset, but he said he had cancelled that as there was no emergency, and he wanted to visit the British Museum. Finola was feeling tired, because she thought so much about what was happening at Combe Chalcot while Gerard was there without her. She knew that Darcy would occupy her mind.

  It was possible to say indiscreet things to Darcy, because he never remembered them afterwards. ‘You know, I sometimes feel when he’s not actually with me, I haven’t got a husband at all. I expected to be so busy and – and grown up, when I was married.’ She looked across him at her evening-lit drawing room, messy with books. ‘Sometimes I think we don’t exist.’ Silly, she thought.

  ‘I know, I used to feel just the same about Isabel. Which was no wonder. These cakes are delicious.’

  ‘Yes, aren’t they. I think Carlotta gets things on the black market, in fact I know she does, but I never dare to ask. Gerard would be terribly upset if he realised.’ Finola enjoyed this domestic pause, ‘I’m so –’

  ‘Gerard is so tremendously upright.’

  ‘Don’t sneer at him, Darcy.’

  ‘My dear, you know I’m devoted to him. I never expected him to get married, you know,’ he said, leaning back in his chair. ‘He ought to have been me, this is the thing. He should have stayed at Cambridge, and become a don. I can just see him, living in College and getting older and churchier, and no wife to bring his grey hairs with sorrow to the grave.’ He sighed.

  ‘Are you going to live in College now, Darcy?’ said Finola coldly.

  ‘Oh, my dear, no no no. I simply couldn’t bear it all the time.’ Darcy had a rather feminine way of expressing himself, and he made this appear a sexual tease. ‘I’m keeping the house – I might have the children with me sometimes, when they’re older you know.’

  ‘You’re a very heartless man.’

  ‘Finola, how can you? They’re so exhausting at the moment.’ He had two boys and a girl, who were eight, seven and two. The last family drama had been over the third child, because she was a mistake, and probably not Darcy’s.

  ‘Well, never mind,’ said Finola, thinking of her own children. ‘I’m going to Mary Farrar’s cocktail party tonight – would you like to come instead of Gerard?’

  ‘Oh my dear, I don’t know – yes, I think so.’

  ‘Well, don’t say you’ve got a headache at the last minute. I’ll ring Mary now and tell her you’re coming.’

  Finola went out, and enjoyed being very sorry for Darcy of whom it was impossible, she thought, not to be fond. Later he made her feel very much his sister when he encouraged her to tick him off for despair over Isabel, who used for years to come regularly to his charming house in Trumpington Street, exactly like a mistress, but without the inconvenience.

  *

  The cocktail party was in Cheyne Walk, and Finola was acquainted with about a third of those present. Darcy knew only the hostess, and was bored, so he pretended to be taking notes for a tragic novel which he had intended to write for years. The french windows were open. Mrs Farrar tried to persuade her guests to go out into the windy garden, where there were eleven budding tulips, but most stayed by the empty fireplace, smoking cigarettes.

  Finola and Darcy had just finished listening to a civil servant who was helping to organise the Festival of Britain, when their hostess came up and said: ‘Finola – Darcy – so glad you could come – let me introduce you. Darling, this is Mrs Parnell, and Mr Parnell – this is Madame de Saint-Gaël. Who has flown from Paris today, can you imagine it?’

  ‘The world has changed, Mary. It’s positively commonplace to fly. How do you do? How do you do?’

  Madame de Saint-Gaël was a woman of forty, with thick brown hair in a French pleat, an aquiline nose, long hazel eyes and a heavy, well-shaped, crooked mouth.

  ‘But you’re Miranda,’ said Finola, and blushed.

  ‘Yes, but I don’t think –’ She frowned, and looked rather amused.

  ‘I’m Finola Molloy,’ said Finola, straightening her shoulders. ‘You might not recognise me, it’s twenty years after all.’

  ‘Finola – good God! Of course you are – I beg your pardon. And now you’re –’

  ‘I’m called Parnell, now.’ Miranda looked at Darcy, and smiled. ‘This isn’t my husband, it’s my brother-in-law.’

  ‘It really is more than twenty years, isn’t it?’ said Miranda, looking from one to the other.

  ‘So embarrassing, meeting people after a long time,’ said Darcy. ‘Especially, ghastly thought, if one was at school with them. Were you at school together?’

  Miranda, who had made Finola feel awkward when she was a girl, looked him up and down
. She has changed really, thought Finola. She was thin now, as thin as Alice, yet between fifteen and twenty-one she had had the figure of a beautiful, old-fashioned nude. Her skin was fine and creamy, with the same eight freckles across the bridge of the nose, but it was powdered now, taut across the cheekbones and loose beneath the chin. In 1927, her hair had been shingled, and she had the sense not to try to be slender.

  ‘No, we weren’t at school together, were we Finola?’

  ‘I can tell you all about Miranda afterwards, Darcy,’ said Finola, tilting her head and then sipping her White Lady.

  Miranda laughed. ‘Finola, tell me everything. When did you get married?’

  ‘Nearly seven years ago. I left it very late.’

  ‘Tell me, are you related to some Parnells who live in Dorset? I’ve got a friend who lives near Chalcot St Anne, you see, and some neighbours of hers …’

  ‘The same,’ said Darcy. ‘We are the Dorsetshire Parnells, you know.’

  Finola gave him a look. ‘Is Katie Van Leyden the one you know?’ she said to Miranda. ‘I suppose she must be.’

  ‘Yes, that’s her, fancy your guessing. Now she was at school with me, in Lausanne.’

  ‘It’s my parents-in-law who live practically next door to them.’

  ‘In that gorgeous house? Don’t tell me!’

  ‘Charming, isn’t it? A very good period,’ said Darcy, scratching in his pocket for some cigarettes, which he offered to Miranda after taking one himself.

  ‘May I have one, please, Darcy?’ said Finola when Miranda had lit hers.

  ‘Darling! Of course,’ he said, distracted. When she was at all on edge, Finola smoked without inhaling, and always left half the cigarette unfinished.

  ‘You didn’t used to smoke, Fin,’ said Miranda.