The Bachelor

by Stella Gibbons

  “Oh, no, Bairamians are great coffee drinkers, aren’t they, Vartouhi? Not coffee as we know it, Frankie, but thick as syrup and very sweet and black. I had to show Vartouhi how to make coffee in the English way.”

  Miss Burton thought this a pity but did not say so.

  “And one of the traditional duties of the eldest daughter is to prepare her father’s coffee at sunset, isn’t it, Vartouhi?”

  Vartouhi smiled and nodded.

  “I expect you often used to do that for your father, didn’t you? or perhaps you are not the eldest?” pursued Miss Fielding, who, to tell the truth, loved knowing everything about people and unconsciously used the Brotherhood of Man as a lever for prising their family skeletons out of foreigners’ cupboards.

  “I am not the oldest, no. I am the three.”

  “The three?” repeated Miss Burton, puzzled.

  “She means the third sister, I expect. You have two elder sisters, is that it, Vartouhi? Two older than you?”

  Vartouhi nodded. Her expression became if possible even more polite.

  “How nice.” Miss Fielding took a piece of cake. “I have only one sister, Joan. She is married and lives in London. Are any of your sisters married?”

  Vartouhi nodded.

  “Both of them, or only one?” Miss Fielding’s tone was playful, even as the elephant sports with the tree he is tearing down and eating.

  “One,” said Vartouhi.

  “How nice,” said Miss Fielding again. Miss Burton looked at her with respect. She herself was very interested in these facts about Vartouhi’s family but could never have persevered in the face of such silent, smiling, polite reluctance.

  “And has she any children?”

  “I have one nice,” said Vartouhi. “I may eat one of those small biscuit, please?”

  “What did you say, my dear?” demanded Miss Fielding, startled. “You have one——?”

  “One of the small biscuit, please?”

  “Yes, of course.” Miss Fielding confusedly held out the plate. Miss Burton was less surprised, for she was fairly sure that it would turn out to be another case of international misunderstanding due to differences in language and the next moment it did, for Miss Fielding suddenly nodded and said vehemently:

  “Oh, a niece, a little girl. Your married sister has a little girl and she is your niece (not nice).”

  Vartouhi nodded.

  “And what is her name?”

  “I am not remembering what is her name. Is three year since I am seeing her. Miss Fielding, I go and get more boiling water, I forget it, and now tea is almost cool and here is Mr. Fielding coming for tea.”

  She got up and bobbed her curtsy and went quickly out of the room just as Kenneth drove the car past the french windows on the way to the garage, with a wave of his hand for the occupants of the drawing-room as he went by.

  “How early Kenneth is! Really, he does less and less at the office every week,” said Miss Fielding discontentedly. Then, lowering her voice, “You noticed? She obviously doesn’t want to talk about her family. That’s quite absurd, saying she didn’t remember her niece’s name.”

  “Perhaps her sister lives miles away or something and they didn’t see much of each other,” said Miss Burton, who felt a little ashamed for them both. “I expect she just can’t bear to talk about them. After all, they may all be dead.”

  “Nonsense; even if they are, it never does any good to bottle things up. Morbid. Well, Kenneth,” as her brother came into the room smiling and rubbing his hands, “how very early you are! and what weather you’ve brought with you!”

  CHAPTER 8

  THE WET WEATHER lasted for a few more days and then it became fine more once and Kenneth could spend his evenings in the kitchen garden without getting soaked through.

  The kitchen garden at Sunglades was at the back of the house, and it was the most unusual one for miles around, for it had been for two hundred years the kitchen garden of Treme Hall. The Hall had been pulled down in 1924 but the wall surrounding the kitchen garden was still standing when the Fieldings, newly come into their money, had bought the plot of land backing onto it. The building company proposed that another house should be built upon the garden’s site, but Kenneth Fielding had taken such a fancy to the neglected, sheltered place that he had gone behind his sisters’ backs, in one of his fits of self-will, and bought the land on which it stood.

  Miss Constance Fielding had been much annoyed. Their old relations’ money was divided equally between herself, Kenneth, and her sister Joan, and she resented any independent financial actions by the other two because, in her eyes, such actions imperilled the whole monetary structure of the family. Where one could live in modest comfort, three could unite their incomes and live in considerable comfort, and for one of the three to spend a large sum on an old kitchen garden without consulting his co-heirs was, said Miss Fielding, as senseless as it was selfish. “But if I’d told you, Con, I’d never have got the place,” Kenneth had said sulkily. It was one of those retorts to which there is no answer; nevertheless, Miss Fielding lectured him on his action for weeks, and even after Sunglades was built and a handsome flower garden laid out to her own wishes she showed her displeasure by seldom visiting the kitchen garden and by publicly deprecating, as if it were a disreputable habit, Kenneth’s hobby of growing vegetables. Vegetables, to Miss Fielding, were commonplace and dull. She was not one of your natural green-fingers and even her own flower gardens never saw her grubbing on her knees, though she could wear a shady hat and cut roses into a trug with the best.

  Kenneth had told himself frequently at that time how sorry he was that Con had been rubbed up the wrong way, but somehow his sister’s anger did not impair the pleasure he took in his garden, which increased with every year.

  A door with a rounded top, once painted green and now much faded by weather, led through the wall into the garden, which covered nearly half an acre and had pear and apple and plum trees scattered up and down its length, as well as the vegetable beds. When once the door was shut, no one could come in unexpectedly to trouble Kenneth, for there was no other entrance.

  The high wall of dark red brick, worn with age, was by itself enough to make the place memorable, but inside it there were two other striking features.

  The first was an ancient greenhouse built of small elongated panes in the shape of a half-circle, that bulged like a huge, fragile, glittering bubble from the wall immediately facing the door. Seen across the sober brown of the vegetable beds and the unremarkable shapes and colours of their contents it had a fairylike charm, irresistible because entirely unexpected. Inside there was much confusion, with broken flowerpots and bundles of dried pea and bean supports and tangles of bast lying about, for the place was too dilapidated for Kenneth to entrust any seedlings to its care except in the windless days of high summer, and on every blowy night he would awaken at intervals throughout the dark hours and listen for the crash that should tell him the old greenhouse was down at last. But so far, sheltered by the wall, it had survived, and on cold days, if he had any small jobs that could be done under shelter, he would take them into the greenhouse and sit there in the hush and faint warmth of the winter sun, working and whistling softly to himself.

  The other wonder of the kitchen garden was its peaches, which were espaliered against the south wall and made in the height of summer a long, sumptuous trellis of dark leaves and dusky red fruit almost identical in colour with the bricks to which they clung. Visitors invariably exclaimed aloud on seeing these delicate things growing in such profusion; three hundred of them, in a good year, smouldering coolly among their leaves.

  Late one cloudy evening at the end of September, Kenneth had put in an hour or so’s digging and was finishing his work by making a bonfire of potato haulm and other rubbish at the far end of the garden. The light pearly smoke wavered up into the still air and spread out among the bronze-coloured pears and reddening apples, and all the rest of the garden was beginning to lose c
olour as dusk approached. The evening was so dim and Kenneth was so absorbed in the care of his fire, which must be extinguished before black-out, that he did not see the door in the wall open, and Betty coming along the path towards him, until she called:

  “Hallo, Ken, are you making a bonfire? What fun! I’ll come and help you.”

  “In that dress? Ha! ha! Do you mind sitting on this—it’s quite clean.” He spread a new sack on an upturned wheelbarrow, near enough to the fire to let the faint light fall on her face but not so near that the smoke would drift into her eyes, and she sat down. He was not in his talkative mood, and went on raking the fire and feeding it in the silence that he had preserved throughout dinner, and Betty watched the flames and thought how pleasant it was to get away from Connie and Frankie for a little while.

  All through dinner the two had argued about contemporary art. Miss Fielding had never seen any of Salvator Dali’s paintings but did not like the sound of him or them even though he was a foreigner, and Miss Burton had once seen a reproduction of a painting by him in Vogue and defended him, partly because she posed as a person knowledgeable in painting and partly out of perversity and the wish to annoy Miss Fielding, while the ignorance of both parties naturally reduced them to those generalizations which so easily become heated (not that an argument is necessarily less heated because the combatants are well informed on their subject). Miss Fielding enjoyed arguing, though she had a habit of suddenly ending the battle at its height by remembering the Good Principle and saying with a smile, “But of course, Truth is a jewel with a million facets, as the Jains say, so why dim those facets by arguing?” and leaving her opponent maddened but helpless.

  Betty, Kenneth and Vartouhi had played a passive part in the struggle by all three bolting their food in order to get away from the table as soon as possible.

  “That old thing!” said Betty suddenly, smiling, rousing herself and finding that she was moving her foot in time to the tune Kenneth was whistling.

  If you were the only girl in the world

  And I were the only boy—

  “It’s a good tune. This war hasn’t produced any good tunes so far, someone was saying in the Telegraph the other day,” said Kenneth.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Boum—why does my Heart go boum—do you remember? the last tune out of France. That was a good tune. And Run, Rabbit, Run.”

  “Not like the old ones, though. It’s a different kind of war.” He lifted a forkful of dried greenstuff and dropped it onto the low mound of glowing ashes, and the smoke and crackling noise and flames began again.

  “Perhaps,” said Betty, a little absently. She had almost broken herself of that habit of going off into memories, but the tune, and the quietness of the garden, and the witchlike flare and crackle of the flames among the slow rolling of the smoke, had made her thoughtful for a moment. However, she had made it a practice for over twenty years to banish painful thoughts by cheerful speech, so she continued immediately:

  “Nice smell of things burning. Kenneth, I had a letter from Richard this morning. He wondered if Con would mind if he stayed here from the twentieth to the twenty-seventh; he’s got a week out.”

  (Thus did Richard’s mother paraphrase Richard’s request, which had read, “I suppose the Fielding woman won’t object to my putting in a week with you if I pay her?”)

  “Of course; very pleased to have him. And how is Richard these days?”

  “Well, he always has his lung, you know, but he seems to like being with these Dove people. They’re more or less his sort.”

  “Bolshies and conchies,” said Kenneth as if to himself.

  “Richard isn’t a C.O. He would have fought in Spain if the doctors would have let him,” Betty said quickly. “But he doesn’t take quite the ordinary view of the war; he says it might never have happened if we’d all stood by Spain in the beginning—you know who I mean, the Republicans, wasn’t it?—and naturally he likes to be with people who have the same views as he has.”

  “And what does Richard’s mother think about it?”

  “Good heavens, Ken!” said Betty with her delightful laugh, “I haven’t any politics.”

  “Richard’s friends and their views, I meant.”

  “Oh, they’re all cranks, of course, but they’re all such infants too, and some of them are sweeties. I’m afraid I don’t take their views very seriously. They’re still going on about the Men of Munich and poor dear old Chamberlain and Non-intervention, and they’re all rather bitter, poor little things.”

  “How long ago all that seems. Yet it’s only three years.”

  “Doesn’t it? Absolutely another life.” She pulled her cardigan, which hung over her shoulders, closer about herself and went on gaily:

  “But I don’t see much of his crowd unless he asks me to lunch at the Arts Theatre Club to look over his girl friends.”

  “So he gets you to vet. his lady-loves, does he?”

  “He never says so; he’s a mighty independent young man, you know. But I’ve noticed I usually get invited to meet the latest.”

  “The latest! It’s like that, is it?”

  “Oh, very much so!” The elders laughed indulgently.

  “Doesn’t show any signs of wanting to settle down yet, eh?”

  “Far from it.”

  “And how do you feel about it?”

  “I really don’t know,” said Betty, after a pause. “He doesn’t look after himself properly when he’s not living with me and of course I can’t always be fussing round after him. A nice girl would be rather fun; I liked the last one, Marion Somebody, a little thing with yards of black hair. But he said she had a shocking temper.”

  Kenneth lifted another load of rubbish onto the fire and the flames lit up his large Fielding nose that was not quite Roman and his blue eyes and nondescript mouth. His features are much better than Richard’s, and yet Richard’s face is charming and no one could call Ken good-looking, thought Betty. But it is strange that he has never married; I wonder why. For she was not a vain woman and it did not seriously occur to her that he might still be pining after herself.

  “Oh, the pretty pretty bonfire!” cried Miss Burton’s voice at this moment, and down the path she came, wrapped in a Libertyish scarf and other draperies. “Look at the shadows on the trees. Truly fairylike! I should have been down here long ago if I had known you were having such fun,” and she sat down upon another seat which Kenneth had been silently assembling for her and glanced mischievously from him to Betty.

  “Trying to get all this stuff burnt before black-out,” said Kenneth.

  “Isn’t there rather a lot of green there?” suggested Miss Burton, “of course I don’t pretend to know anything about gardening but I always supposed that everything possible should go on to the compost heap, especially nowadays. But I expect I’m quite mistaken, I usually am about everything, as Constance pointed out to me at dinner this evening,” and her face became doleful.

  “It’s mostly potato tops,” said Kenneth after a slight awkward pause. “I do put most of the stuff onto the compost heap.”

  “Oh, that’s all right then, I only mentioned it, I thought you might not have noticed,” said Miss Burton and hurried on, “Kenneth, I don’t want to trouble you with my little worries, and I am sure Betty doesn’t want to hear anything about them—no, you don’t, my dear, of course not; why should you, you have your own life to live—but I just wondered if you could drop a hint to Constance about being a little less dictatorial and unkind. Really, she is unkind. She doesn’t seem to think that one has any feelings, and if I even so much as hint that she has upset me (which she often does, I assure you), she says I’m morbid.”

  “Oh, come now, Frankie, I don’t think she means it; her bark is worse than her bite, you know.”

  “That’s all very well, Kenneth, you are out all day and can get away from it.” Miss Burton had now brought out a little handkerchief. “You don’t know what she’s like sometimes when it’s raining and she hasn�
��t heard from that old Stocke of hers.”

  “Is he hers? I always thought there was a Mrs. Stocke,” said Betty, who was very willing to change the subject. “However long have he and Connie been writing to each other? It must be getting on for ten years.”

  “His wife died last year. Yes, nearly eleven years; eleven years this Christmas. After all, I have a perfect right to my opinions even if they aren’t the same as Constance’s. Why should I say I think Dali’s pictures are morbid if I don’t?”

  “Of course not, Frankie. But Connie doesn’t mean it, you know, she has a heart of gold, kindness itself——”

  “Oh, yes, to any foreigner who likes to turn up,” sniffed Miss Burton, “but she isn’t kind to her relations. She is not, Kenneth, nor to her servants.”

  “I say, it’s getting rather chilly, I think I’ll go in,” said Betty, at this point, but Miss Burton detained her with an outstretched hand.

  “No, you needn’t go away because of me, I’ve just finished and then I’ll cheer up and won’t say another word. Constance never could keep servants, Betty, as you know, because she bullied them and overworked them with all these parties for foreigners and the house always full of Indians and people who must have special food or their religion gets all upset. I don’t wonder they wouldn’t stand it. I wouldn’t have. Mother and I had our dear Emily for twenty-eight years and then she only left us to go into a Home for Incurables. Constance has never had an Emily!”

  “Frances!” called Miss Fielding, striding down the path through the dusk with her fur coat flying open, “are you there? Very silly of you, with your rheumatism. You’d better go in at once. You’ll never get all that stuff burnt before black-out, Kenneth; better damp it down and relight it to-morrow night. Frances, that sack is damp. Get up at once now, don’t be tiresome, there’s a dear woman, and go indoors. An early night would do you no harm; I’ve mixed your Horlicks.”

  “I am not going to bed for hours, Constance,” said Miss Burton with dignity but getting up from the sack. “It is kind of you to have mixed my Horlicks but you need not have troubled. I will heat it upstairs. Good night, Betty. Good night, Kenneth. I hope you are not offended at what I said about the bonfire; I admit I was in the wrong, I often am. Good night, Constance.”