Christmas at High Rising: A Virago Modern Classic (VMC)

by Thirkell, Angela

  ‘Oh Mother!’ interrupted Tony, who had been listening with glistening eyes to this village tragedy. ‘Oh Mother, can I skate? I greased my skates when I put them away. Oh Mother, can I? I’ve never skated on real ice, only on a rink. Mother, I bet I’d simply whoosh round the Mere.’

  ‘Do you want to fall in and be drowned like Sid Brown?’ asked his mother, rather hoping to dissuade him from this treat.

  ‘Take more than that to drown Sid, nor Master Tony neither,’ said Stoker. ‘Ice is bearing all right today. Mrs Mallow tells me Dr Ford was all over the Mere after tea. Shouldn’t wonder if I went on the slide myself. Worlsing on the ice is what I like. My cousin, the one that got knocked down by the car the day her husband came out of the hospital, was a lovely worlser. Hazeline her name was. Master Tony won’t come to no harm.’

  Laura as usual could not resist and said that Tony might skate, provided Dr Ford said it was safe, and Rose and Dora went with him. What with skates and Valentines, Tony’s conversation became so intolerable that his mother packed him off to bed at half-past eight. At half-past nine he was still in his bath. At ten o’clock his mother shouted up to him to be quiet, and five minutes later, when she went up herself, she found him heavily asleep, his skating boots with well-Vaselined skates tucked under his pillow. She withdrew them, observing with some disfavour the mingled stains of blacking and Vaseline on the sheets, kissed her son’s warm pink cheek and went to bed.

  After telephoning to Dr Ford and Mrs Gould the Vicar’s wife, skating was arranged for two o’clock on Saturday afternoon. Mrs Gould said that Rose and Dora had a French girl staying with them till Monday, a pupil at the school where her elder daughter was games mistress, and she hoped Tony would come back to tea. On hearing of a French girl, Tony became remote, and retired upstairs with his red paper and golden ink, all the cardboard Laura and Stoker could find, a pot of Stickphast and Laura’s large scissors. With these Laura found him still busily engaged at lunch-time.

  ‘Oh Mother,’ he cried reproachfully, ‘You’ve looked.’

  ‘I really didn’t, Tony. I only saw something red.’

  ‘That’s Stoker’s Valentine. I drew a picture of her and I cut out a lot of red hearts and stuck them all over her and wrote “Valentine, Cook Divine” under it. Do you think she’ll like it, Mother?’

  ‘I’m sure she will. Now wipe some of that paste off your hands and face and come down to lunch.’

  In the highest spirits, only slightly damped by his mother’s heartless insistence that he should wear his overcoat, Tony set out for Rising Mere, a little lake made by a low dam across the Rising, with a weir at one side. The lake was known to be shallow, except near the weir, a fact which just enabled Laura to bear up against her usual premonitions of evil and Stoker’s prophecy of a third disaster. The vicarage party were already on the bank.

  ‘This is Françoise, Tony,’ said Mrs Gould. ‘She is fourteen, just older than Rose, and she skates beautifully.’

  ‘Hullo, Tony,’ said Dora. ‘Françoise talks English, so you needn’t be afraid.’

  A more tactless introduction could hardly have been made. Tony scowled heavily at Dora and stuck out a hand at Françoise, who instantly wrung it so hard as to enforce Tony’s unwilling admiration.

  ‘She’s got a jolly good grip anyway,’ said he to Rose and Dora, feeling it safer not to address Françoise personally.

  ‘What does he say I have?’ asked Françoise.

  The confusion between grip and grippe having been cleared up, the three elder children began to put on their skates. Tony’s idea of a French girl, founded on his early and unwilling studies of Les Malheurs de Sophie, was of a dark, frizzly-haired little being in wide skirts and pantalettes. He was therefore considerably relieved to find Françoise a perfectly ordinary girl of about his own size, in dress and appearance quite like Rose and Dora. He was further relieved to hear her talking perfectly good English, and his unspoken fear that he might have so far to disgrace himself as to say something in French vanished.

  ‘I say, those are decent boots of yours,’ said Tony, looking at Françoise’s high, beautifully cut skating boots.

  ‘All the best skaters at St Moritz have these boots,’ said Françoise. ‘I skate at St Moritz every winter. You should have boots like these. They have beaucoup de chic.’

  ‘So has Tony,’ said Dora, ‘beaucoup de cheek.’

  This ill-timed levity fell flat. Tony looked witheringly, and Rose reprovingly, at Dora, who, not a whit abashed, jumped up and down in a very annoying way. The three elder children then went on to the ice and Tony fell down.

  ‘Hullo, my boy,’ said Dr Ford, swooping down on them. ‘Don’t do that. I’m taking an afternoon off. No broken legs or arms today, because I shan’t mend them. Here, Françoise, come round with me.’

  He swung Françoise off to the middle of the Mere, where they gave a brilliant exhibition of fancy skating.

  ‘I expect you’d like to go round the edge,’ said Tony to Rose as he picked himself up. ‘I daresay you’re a bit out of practice. I don’t know how it is, but I don’t get out of practice. I suppose it’s a kind of gift that I have.’

  As he spoke, he propelled himself laboriously along the edge of the Mere, his body curiously bent, his arms flourishing. Rose skated quietly by his side, while Dora went off to the slides, where such village children as had escaped their mothers’ annoying way of finding Saturday afternoon jobs for them were rushing about with loud screams.

  ‘It’s all a question of balance,’ said Tony. ‘You see, people have something in their ears that makes them balance, and if they haven’t got it, they can’t balance at all. I have a kind of balance without taking any trouble. Can you do edges?’

  ‘A little,’ said Rose.

  ‘There’s a chap at school,’ said Tony, clutching at Rose to steady himself, ‘who does edges. I went to the rink with him and he did edges like anything, and the instructor told him to get out the middle and not be a silly young ass.’

  ‘Oh Tony,’ said Rose, admiringly.

  The short winter afternoon passed quickly. Françoise and Dr Ford amused themselves together. Tony, accompanied by Rose, who could have easily deserted him for more skilful companions, plodded steadily about near the bank. The slide was patronised by Dora, and later by Stoker, who, with loud coy shrieks, was pushed and pulled along by Sid Brown, miraculously well enough to be on the ice, and Mr Reid of the shop. Upon them, Dr Ford suddenly descended and ordered Sid Brown to go home.

  ‘Off you go,’ he shouted, taking off his boots, ‘or you’ll get me in trouble with the B.M.A. Tony, Rose, come off the ice. I’m going to drive you all home. Come here, Dora. Get your boots off, Françoise. My God, I’m stiff.’

  ‘I’m never stiff, sir,’ said Tony politely. ‘I suppose I have a kind of natural unstiffness. Some of the chaps get awfully stiff when they start gym after the holidays, but I don’t. You ought to keep your muscles well exercised, sir. If you did muscle exercises —’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Dr Ford.

  ‘Hurry up, all of you,’ said Mrs Gould as she opened the Vicarage door. ‘Daddy is waiting for his tea. Wash as fast as you can.’

  The girls were soon back, but Tony lingered unaccountably. When he entered the dining-room his hair was wetly plastered to his head and dripping gently on to his jacket.

  ‘Sit down, Tony. What have you been doing?’ asked Mrs Gould. The Vicar, never a friend of Tony’s, looked unkindly at him.

  ‘I had to do my hair, Mrs Gould,’ said Tony, ‘and Mr Gould doesn’t have any brilliantine. I suppose it really isn’t much use for him, so I had to put water on my hair. You ought to get some Floral Solidified Brilliantine, sir,’ said Tony, passing a plate of scones to the Vicar so crookedly that they all slid off on to the table. ‘You can get it for threepence at Woolworth’s. I always use it, it’s awfully good. There’s a master at school called Mr Prothero, and he’s getting bald and he uses it.’

  ‘Am I to say grace or no
t, Dorothea?’ asked the Vicar of his wife in a voice of priestly irritation.

  ‘Yes, dear,’ replied Mrs Gould. ‘Dora, pick those scones up and scrape that butter off the tablecloth with your knife. No, a clean knife; and use it flat, Dora; FLAT, I said.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ said Tony, leaning across Dora. ‘You ought to have a palette knife. Mr Atkins, who teaches drawing at school, has a palette knife, and when Pidloe upset all the jam at tea, Mr Atkins scraped it all off with his palette knife and it hardly showed at all.’

  The Vicar pushed back his chair and left the room.

  ‘Rose,’ said Mrs Gould, quite unperturbed, ‘take Daddy a cup of tea in his study. Tony, go on with your tea. Dora, don’t giggle. Françoise, some more cake?’

  ‘And what did you do this afternoon, Tony?’ asked Françoise, evidently feeling that she ought to help to slur over a discreditable episode. ‘I did not see you. Dr Ford skates with beaucoup de chic.’

  ‘So does Tony,’ said Dora.

  Tony glowered at Dora.

  ‘I was doing edges,’ he said with some truth. ‘Dora was only sliding.’

  ‘Ah, edges,’ said Françoise. ‘Have you been to France?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tony, ‘I went to Dieppe for the day with Mr and Mrs Knox and we were all sick and I went to a French cinema and had some wine.’

  ‘And what film did you see?’ pursued Françoise, perhaps a shade condescendingly.

  ‘Mickey Mouse and the Three Little Pigs.’

  ‘The Three Little Pigs is English,’ said Dora.

  Tony, with a fine effort of courage – for to quell Dora might at the same time disgrace him in the eyes of Françoise, who wore long boots and skated at St Moritz – fixed Dora with a coldly hostile eye, and remarked with a very passable accent, ‘Qui craint le grand méchant loup?’

  ‘Ah, but he speaks French perfectly, your friend,’ said Françoise.

  Tony, his position thus established, rapidly formed a bosom friendship with Françoise, which consisted chiefly in giggling together and snubbing Rose and Dora, but Dora the irrepressible skirmished round them and harassed their conversation, till Tony, intoxicated with social success, again hazarded his reputation.

  ‘Elle est mal élevée,’ he remarked with as careless an air as he could assume.

  ‘Ah, quant à mal élevée, je ne dis pas ça,’ said Françoise, looking expressively at Mrs Gould. ‘Elle est plutôt enfantine. Quand je vous dis, Tony —’ And to Tony’s horror she burst into a cascade of rapid French. He would undoubtedly have been exposed, had not the Vicar come in.

  ‘Who left the tap on in the cloakroom?’ he enquired.

  ‘The tap, sir? Oh, the tap. Well, sir, I didn’t leave it running, but I turned it on again to get my comb wet so that I could do my hair, and it must have stayed on.’

  Mrs Gould then sent Tony home.

  At supper his mother found him strangely silent, and his behaviour under the strain of being read aloud to was irreproachable. Laura, going up to kiss him in bed, found him studying a French grammar.

  ‘Would you say I could talk decent French, Mother?’ he asked.

  ‘School French. If you went abroad you’d soon talk. Did you talk French to Françoise at all?’

  ‘A bit,’ said Tony, going bright scarlet, which his mother, folding his suit, did not see. ‘Mother, I’ve made a Valentine for Françoise. Would you like to see it?’

  From under his pillow he pulled a card covered with red hearts, gold paint, paste and dirty finger marks. Under the hearts was written the legend Valentine, Reine des Patines.

  ‘It’s a poem,’ said Tony. ‘Will she understand it, do you think?’

  ‘Well, Tony, patines doesn’t exactly mean skates, of course.’

  ‘I know. But I expect she has enough sense to know it’s a poem.’

  On Sunday afternoon the children met again at the Mere. While Françoise was moving to join Dr Ford, Tony, fired with love and ambition, approached her, followed by Dora.

  ‘I bet I can waltz,’ he said to Françoise. ‘Come on and try. I’ve made a lovely Valentine specially for you. It’s in my pocket and you can have it when we go back to tea.’

  ‘I bet you can’t waltz,’ said Dora, giving him a hard shove.

  Tony threw up his arms, slid wildly across the ice, and crashed into Françoise as she was pirouetting. Both children came heavily down in a windmill of arms and legs.

  ‘I only lost my balance for a moment,’ said Tony, sitting up.

  ‘Clumsy English pig,’ cried Françoise. She then burst into tears and smacked his face.

  ‘That’s enough, Françoise,’ said Dr Ford, removing her with an iron hand.

  Tony went back to the bank in perfect silence and took off his boots. Rose and Dora, shocked witnesses of the scene, stood in sympathetic silence.

  ‘Here, Rose and Dora,’ said Tony with an effort, ‘I’ve made these Valentines for you. You are the only people except Stoker and Mother that I bothered to make them for.’

  The girls were profuse in admiration and thanks. Tony’s seared spirits began to revive, and his cure was completed by a rowdy half-hour on the slides with his village friends. Dr Ford, who had to visit a patient at some distance, offered to take Tony back to school, an offer which Laura gratefully accepted.

  ‘Goodbye, darling,’ said his mother. ‘Did you have a nice French talk with Françoise?’

  ‘She isn’t much use,’ said Tony loftily. ‘I shouldn’t think she knows any really important things in French. I asked her what gauge the French railways were, and she didn’t know.’

  Laura, a little puzzled by Tony’s sudden want of interest in the French girl, went up to his play-room to tidy it, and incidentally to look for her large scissors. After a prolonged search she discovered them in the waste-paper basket. Among fragments of red paper and cardboard, looking suspiciously like a Valentine, the draft of an unfinished letter in Tony’s hand caught her eye.

  ‘Chère Françoise,’ she read, ‘vous êtes un sot —’

  It appeared to Laura that her son’s first love affair was over.

  First published in Harper’s Bazaar, February 1936

  High Voltage at Low Rising

  One fine morning in April, George Knox, the celebrated biographer, was working in his library at Low Rising. The well-known author was dressed for the part in a blue flannel shirt, bedroom slippers, and a very peculiar suit consisting of loose trousers, wide at the ankle like a sailor’s, and a braided pea-jacket, both made of a material not unlike the fur of a Teddy Bear. Several pipes lay on the table. He held between his clenched teeth another pipe, very large and of rugged appearance, which he was vainly endeavouring to light. Vainly, because however many matches a celebrated writer strikes, it is impossible to relight a pipe that has no tobacco in it. George Knox’s sparse hair, which needed cutting, was all standing on end owing to the number of times he had run his pencil through it, and the knobs on his forehead were glistening with literary effort. Before him lay sheets of paper covered with his beautiful flowing handwriting, and with so many alterations and erasures that they had more the look of an arabesque than of a manuscript.

  A knock at the door made him call out, ‘Come in,’ in a voice of patient irritation. His wife Anne half opened the door and, standing in the doorway, said, ‘George, Laura is coming up the drive. Do you want to see her?’

  George Knox stared at his wife, as at an unknown object several hundred miles away. Gradually his gaze focused itself, the light of reason returned to his eyes, and his pipe fell out of his mouth. He stooped to pick it up, but it had fallen under the table and he was obliged to contort his large frame in an alarming way to reach it.

  ‘My dear Anne,’ said his voice from under the table, while a leg and a left arm flourished in the air in his effort to balance, ‘come in and shut the door. How often have I begged, nay, implored you to consider the title of that delightful chef d’oeuvre of the romantic, and yet it hardly falls under the categor
y of romantic, yet still less under that of classical school, though heaven knows the life of the author, persecuted and badgered as he was by that male impersonator, that trousered virago, George Sand, a devourer of men if ever there was one, a female, if she may be called, repellent in every sense, yet not, my dear Anne,’ said George Knox, his face, red but satisfied, appearing again above the table, while his right hand grasped the pipe, ‘not without genius, if it were only for the incredible length of her works, the life of the author, I say, was in a way the epitome of the romance, though how one is to distinguish between Elle et Lui and Lui et Elle, I have never yet discovered —’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, George,’ said Anne. ‘All I want to know at present is if you want to see Laura or not.’

  ‘Laura? But what has she to do with the subject we, or rather, I, were or was discussing? I was merely, when my pipe, with that devilish liveliness peculiar to inanimate and senseless objects, chose to leap from me and caused me to grovel in a way unbecoming to my age, besides making all the blood fly to my head, I was, as I say, begging you, my dear Anne, nay, imploring you to remember, to bear in mind while memory holds a seat in this distracted globe, not that your head, my dear, is globular, on the contrary it is a very pretty oval shape, omne vivum ex ovo, and indeed I may say well that all my happiness, all my health, any slight game that I may have won, comes from you, to remember, I say, the title of the little chef d’oeuvre by the author of Fantasio, whose name even now trembles on my lips, do not interrupt me, Anne, for well do I know to whom I refer, though my ageing and palsied mind refuses to respond as once it did and no longer can I bend the bow of Odysseus – you know very well whom I mean, Anne,’ said George Knox angrily.