A Desirable Husband

by Frances Vernon

  Finola walked forward, hit her ball through a hoop, took another shot and then thought with longing of taking in the tea-things. She was always saving Mainwaring, whose presence she often thought unnecessary, little bits of work. I’m unhappy, she thought, I’m really terribly unhappy; and it’s too cold out and I haven’t enough clothes on.

  The game was quick, quicker than Finola had anticipated. Anatole won. ‘Well, that was nice,’ she said. ‘I must clear up the tea now. Richard, aren’t you cold?’

  ‘No, Mummy.’

  ‘I’ll help you, Fin,’ said Alice.

  ‘No, don’t bother. It’s all right.’ She walked towards the house, where Gerard was still reading by the steps of the open front door.

  Since moving to Combe Chalcot, the Parnells had taken to playing bézique when they were alone after dinner. They played with polite excitement for money, and at present Finola owed her husband nearly ten shillings. She was surprised to find a ten-shilling note in her pocket when she paused to search for a handkerchief in the middle of the lawn, and as she picked up the dirty cups and glasses she gave it to Gerard. He looked up, shocked.

  ‘My gambling debts,’ she said.

  He smiled, then laughed. ‘Thank you! Of course.’

  She finished tidying away the tea in warmer silence, and took a tray-load into the grey of the house, down the passage to the kitchen where Carlotta was grumbling over a ragout of vegetables. The housekeeper disliked Combe Chalcot, just as Finola had expected, and she called it feudal, which everyone else thought most unfair.

  *

  The Parnells had moved down to Dorset in April, after Constance had finally bought an ugly cottage orné in Oxfordshire, and since the move little sadnesses had swept though Finola and out again, quick and pointless as showers of rain. There were also spurts of gaiety which were difficult to conceal, but she took care to maintain in front of others the gentle, even temper which everyone but Alice had always admired. In doing this she often made it real again even to herself, and she thought she would like to see Mr Lowell once more and tell him how wrong he had been about her disliking the country once she was there. She loved it as Constance had done, and she decided at dinner that night that she also loved both her parents more than she had ever suspected, and loved to have them with her.

  Finola had decided to introduce them to some local people, friends of Constance and Hugh, and not to conceal them as she believed Gerard now suspected she was going to do. Finola had a horror of being thought a social climber. She invited to dinner no one who she knew would despise Alice and Anatole for obvious reasons, but she asked the Van Leydens (though Jack Van Leyden was extremely conventional, and drank too much), an old lady called Mrs Maitland who she told her parents was a sort of grande dame, and a former Guards officer who was also quite a good painter.

  ‘I have suffered my life long from a wife who is tone deaf but who likes to sing in the bath,’ Anatole was saying to Katie Van Leyden, who found him wonderfully attractive, as several women had done. Others did not think of him as a man at all, and he knew it. ‘It is like this you see: “Spe-ad bonny bo-at like a ba-iird on the wing, O-anward the se-alors cro-oi”– you will imagine how intolerable.’

  Finola saw that Gerard was as much amused as Katie. ‘Anatole, I’m sure you’re doing her an injustice!’ he said. She met her husband’s eye.

  ‘He is unjust,’ said Alice across the table, and then she turned back. ‘No, Lord Van Leyden, you’re perfectly right, London’s not what it was before the war. And if you could see some of the new buildings they’re putting up – I prefer it bombed, myself.’

  Finola reflected that, since the war, wine had seemed to have a lowering effect on Alice. Her old evening dress showed too much poking shoulder, and her chignon was beginning untidily to slip, but she was pale-faced and grave and seemed no longer to enjoy tipsy argument or to respond to her husband’s provocations, which were something new. Finola suddenly wanted to apologise to her mother for having expected her to be a rowdy influence, to kiss her for being so sweet and old-fashioned yet so much herself.

  ‘Madam, Mrs Gerard,’ whispered Mainwaring in her ear, and Finola jumped.

  ‘Yes, Mainwaring?’

  ‘I’m afraid I must tell you that Signora Goldoni has burnt the caramel sauce. It has gone up in flames, madam, in the kitchen.’

  ‘I’m surprised she didn’t make it earlier.’

  ‘It was going to be hot caramel sauce, madam.’

  ‘Well, we’ll have to have the raspberries now instead of for lunch tomorrow. Oh dear, and I suppose we can’t get more sugar till next week.’

  There had been no other setback all evening, and Finola had done nothing but approve Carlotta’s menu; it was almost as though Constance were still running the house. At Egerton Gardens there had always been crises about lost plates and glasses, or insufficient room at table, or timing the start of dinner when everyone was late, and there never would have been raspberries when the caramel sauce was burnt. Though she no longer had to worry about these things, Finola still thought that having a butler must surely be rather too much. In April she had expected management of the Cedar House to be a constant worry laced with disasters – a punishment for her treatment of Constance, though Gerard had said nothing at all.

  When the women had retired to the big drawing-room, Mrs Maitland asked Finola a direct question. She smoothed the sequins on her turquoise dress, and frowned at her. ‘Tell me, how are you settlin’ in?’

  ‘Oh, quite well, I think. It must seem odd to you, coming here and seeing just us, not Constance and Hugh.’

  ‘It’s the natural course of events,’ said Mrs Maitland. ‘Do you mean to do anything, now you’re down here? Or are you happy just potterin’?’

  ‘Do you mean in the way of the W.I. or the parish council, or something? I haven’t thought yet.’

  ‘Plenty of time. You don’t ride, do you? I can’t stand ridin’, myself.’

  ‘Of course she means to,’ said Katie Van Leyden, startling Finola. ‘I mean to get her to take over the white elephant stall at the church fête for a start. Mrs Bates is in quarantine for measles thanks to those awful brats of hers. Can you, Finola?’

  ‘I should like to do that,’ said Finola. ‘It’s next week, isn’t it?’

  ‘Good girl!’

  Alice, Finola noticed, was studying the ceiling with a smile on her face. It was a lightly moulded, oval-patterned ceiling and in the centre was a painting of the rape of the Sabine women, all round bosoms and impossibly crumpled draperies and faces of painless, pretty surprise. Darcy had told Finola that as a boy he had spent hours staring at it; it had helped him to understand the facts of life which he had learnt at Winchester.

  *

  The next day, when Gerard was in the estate office and Alice had gone for a walk, Finola found her father looking at the pictures in the hall. The entrance hall at the Cedar House was larger than the drawing-room, and it opened at either end into the garden. It was stone-floored and dim-lit, for the only window was the great glass door facing to the east, and it was furnished with an enormous table and a few chairs against the wall, beneath the pictures. Big dinner parties were held here, for the dining-room could seat no more than eight.

  ‘These are all the ancestors, of course?’ said Anatole, smiling at his daughter.

  ‘Most of them are. I think that one is Queen Caroline, though – a copy – I don’t know who bought it.’

  Anatole turned away from it and blinked out into the garden, playing with his spectacles. ‘It’s all very perfect. Not at all what one expects a big country house to be in modern times.’

  ‘I know. I do think cobwebs and old retainers are rather passé, except in films, I suppose,’ said Finola, and her father laughed. ‘But at least you can have people coming round in batches and having Olde Englyshe Teas. Katie says she wishes she could do that, only she can’t as the Manor’s been absolutely wrecked inside. Nobody would want to see it.’

&
nbsp; ‘Of course this is a little house in comparison with those showplaces one hears about. Perhaps that is why you have been able to keep it.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ She added: ‘It was too small to be of any use to one of the Ministries or a hospital or anything in the war, you see, but I must have told you we did have a couple of refugee families living in that part of the house.’ She waved her hand towards the kitchen, the gun-room and the library.

  ‘It’s strange that both you and Liza should have married this sort of place.’

  ‘Now Liza really fits in with the modern ideal,’ said Finola. ‘Not that she could have people to see that monstrosity, but at least the whole place is falling down and it’s gigantic. They’re so out of touch.’ Liza’s husband, Sir George Mackenzie, survived by selling bits of his estate. He had no heir, but Gerard and Finola disapproved all the same.

  ‘Yes, they are fossils, like the ones he keeps. But she is happy, poor Liza.’

  ‘I must have Little Jenny to stay,’ said Finola. Little Jenny was her niece, Liza’s daughter. Liza herself would never come to Dorset, she had not been outside her barren Yorkshire garden since the war.

  ‘Yes, you must. Find her a nice young man.’

  ‘They walked round the other side of the great table, looking solemnly at the bad portraits, against their background of rather institutional cream paint.

  Finola said: ‘Anatole, je voudrais bien te demander une question assez difficile.’ She spoke French quickly, with her father’s Gascon accent overlaid by English tones.

  ‘You may ask, Fin, but I may not be able to answer.’ He looked at her and she could see he was worried.

  ‘Do you love Alice?’

  ‘Why do you ask that?’

  ‘I hope you do. I was thinking last night, she’s changed – she’s sort of frozen – preserved just as she was when I was a child, but not the same!’

  ‘I know.’ Anatole supposed that Finola most loved her mother, who was only eighteen years older than herself, when she thought of her as an aunt. ‘It’s the war, Fin. The last war she did not mind, she thought it was cruel and senseless and that was that. But she feels the world is very different now, more evil, which I do not, but then I’m old,’ said Anatole. Finola said nothing. ‘She has nothing to hold to, except me, and that apartment of ours. Which I don’t like.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ She was surprised.

  Anatole waved his hand. ‘It is too orderly – she’s trying to make it almost a place like this. Pieces of the past, things in their place, everything most discreet – at Bramham Gardens I felt we could always just go. Though I never did. But now we could never leave that place, and I must look after her. Yes, I do love her, but I have always thought of her as a young sister not a wife, not like the twins’ mother.’ Finola, who remembered even her parents’ quarrels as a form of sensual indulgence, tried not to look disrespectful. ‘You have noticed that nowadays she always does as I say?’ he continued.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That makes it easier, you see.’

  ‘Oh, Anatole.’ Finola paused. ‘Did I tell you – did I tell you I met Miranda again, the other day?’

  ‘I think you did.’

  Finola hurried on, confessing. ‘I suggested that she should come down here and visit us, meet you again. I didn’t think she would come, but I asked her.’

  ‘And put her in a difficult position.’

  ‘Yes. She said no, as I expected.’

  ‘No, she would not wish to meet us. And it wouldn’t be good for your mother to see her, Fin, though I suppose she would want to. I ask you not to mention her to Alice.’

  ‘No, I promise I won’t. She’s becoming very friendly with Darcy, you know. Miranda, I mean.’

  ‘Is she? They should be well-matched. No, Fin, I dislike Miranda. I do not scruple to say that, I’m sure you know it already.’

  ‘She hurt Alice, didn’t she?’ Finola was enjoying this conversation. Talking with Anatole, she decided that she preferred a man to be as much like a woman as possible: unreserved, unconventional, and interested chiefly in intimate things.

  Anatole suddenly changed back to English. ‘She hurt us all, Fin, and it was a long long time ago. Don’t let’s talk about her now, I want to see the rest of this house and the tombs in the church. You have lots of family tombs I suppose?’ He smiled, and so did she.

  ‘Not very old ones here, I’m afraid, the oldest are over at Sturminster,’ said Finola primly, with her head on one side. ‘Sir Hugh de Pernel that Gerard was telling you about, he’s buried there.’ Her thoughts went back to Miranda, Alice, and Bramham Gardens.

  As they walked out into the garden through the east door, Anatole said: ‘Fin, I’ve been worried about you. Are you quite happy?’

  ‘Oh, you mustn’t worry, I’m fine! But you must come down often, Anatole. Gerard’s awfully fond of you both. So you will come often, won’t you?’

  He took her arm and patted it. ‘Yes, I will. We both will, if that’s what you want.’

  CHAPTER 10

  YOUTHFULNESS IN CAMBRIDGE

  When Miranda entered Darcy’s house on Trumpington Street, she was surprised to find it chaotic. She knew that he had money, and that his former wife, like his mother and herself, had been a competent woman of taste.

  Isabel’s decoration of the house she found too modern and too cold, but elegant. It was spoiled by the mess, which lacked any unworldly charm: the dust and the piles of magazines, and discarded clothes. There were dead flowers and dirty ashtrays in the sitting-room, and the sofa looked as though five people had sat on it a month before, and no one had touched it since. She wondered what his bedroom looked like, but he did not take her upstairs directly.

  ‘Darcy, don’t you have a daily woman or something?’ Miranda was a little tired by the delays of her journey by train, and the chatter they had both made coming from the station.

  ‘No. We did have a char and a cook who came in every day, but I’m afraid since Isabel left neither of them cares to carry on working for me.’

  ‘Do you cook for yourself?’ she said, thinking that Isabel must have paid all the bills.

  ‘When I don’t eat in college.’

  ‘Dear me. You do need the love of a good woman, don’t you?’

  ‘I know. It’s a pity you’re married.’ They smiled a little and looked away. This was the first visit Miranda had ever made to Cambridge; they had met before in London or, the one time, at Combe Chalcot Manor. ‘I rather thought you’d like a little touch of squalor. A contrast to your glamorous existence,’ said Darcy.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I thought it might remind you of your bohemian youth.’

  Miranda had spoken to Darcy with teasing affection of the two years she had spent with Finola’s parents, and of the little Finola Molloy.

  ‘Oh, no. I don’t know that I really want to be reminded. And besides, that wasn’t like this, that house was lived in.’

  Darcy had never seen the house in Bramham Gardens, but he thought he could imagine, and said so.

  A soft white light of fine September lay in a streak across the dirty carpet, and illuminated Miranda.

  ‘Well,’ said Darcy, after a moment’s studying her profile, and feeling that they could not make love after all, ‘what are we going to do now, Miranda?’

  She turned, with one hand on the fat pleat of her hair. ‘You’re going to take me in a punt, darling, because I’ve never been in a punt even at Oxford, it was always pouring for some reason when I went up to see people when I was young.’ Darcy’s mouth opened, and she carried on, smiling. ‘And then you’re going to show me King’s Chapel, and the Mathematical Bridge, and anything else one ought to see, and –’

  He responded: ‘Darling, absolutely not! No, do have pity, Miranda. I absolutely draw the line at King’s Chapel.’

  ‘It’s not term time. There won’t be any undergraduates.’

  ‘You never know who may be up. I can’t be seen alone in a punt wit
h a fascinating young creature at my age, really I can’t. Everyone would think I was trying to show off and you were really my niece or something frightful. No, Miranda, I’ll show you my rooms in college, that’ll be quite enough.’

  ‘Your flattery is really very crude, Darcy,’ she said, holding out her hand. She liked being four years his elder.

  He took her by the arm and pushed up her chin and kissed her, to make everything seem even more suddenly delightful.

  *

  Miranda ran her fingers through the water of the Cam as Darcy, who punted quite well but without great pleasure, pushed them under a tree. The water there was olive-brown and dusty and looked warmer than it was.

  ‘We’re going to have a rest,’ he said. ‘And darling I am not taking you to Grantchester.’

  ‘Is-there-honey-still-for-tea?’ said Miranda, who was lying back on one uncomfortable cushion with a pleased look on her face. ‘No, I suppose there’ll be too many tourists.’

  A rowing boat splashed past them, full of young men in college scarves making a noise. Miranda observed, before Darcy could say anything acid about quoting such a commonplace, that she had always been glad in many ways that she had never tried to go to university.

  ‘You decided to devote your life to Fashion instead, didn’t you?’ said Darcy in a serious voice.

  ‘Chic, not fashion,’ said Miranda, opening her eyes.

  ‘The pursuit of elegance, tolerance and wit.’

  She closed her eyes again: she did not want to talk.

  Darcy made the punt rock as he sat down on its floor and looked at her, and thought of how she did not care that, when lying on her back, she displayed a neat double chin. Though her face was strong, the face of a handsome, well-kept woman of forty, its colouring and expression reminded Darcy of a miniature picture of a delicate young girl with fair hair dressed in the style of the eighties, which he had seen on a table at Sedley Warren. In a sentimental moment when there had been nothing much to say, he had mentioned this and she had laughed, enchanted. She had said that the portrait must have been that of her Aunt Sophie, whom all the family said had been on the point of marrying Sir Francis Warren when she ran away with a doctor. Miranda had told him that her aunt had had a reputation for being a most hardened flirt and careless of affection: ‘Very, very like me.’