Читать книгу Wild Strawberries - Angela Margaret Thirkell - Страница 4

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The Vicar of St. Mary’s, Rushwater, looked anxiously through the vestry window which commanded a view of the little gate in the churchyard wall. Through this gate the Leslie family had come to church with varying degrees of unpunctuality ever since the vicar had been at Rushwater, nor did it seem probable that they had been more punctual before his presentation to the living. It was a tribute to the personality of Lady Emily Leslie, the vicar reflected, that everyone who lived with her became a sharer in her unpunctuality, even to the week-end guests. When first the vicar came to St. Mary’s, the four Leslie children were still in the nursery. Every Sunday had been a nervous exasperation for him as the whole family poured in, half-way through the General Confession, Lady Emily dropping prayer books and scarves and planning in loud, loving whispers where everyone was to sit. During the War the eldest boy had been in France, John, the second boy, at sea, and Rushwater House was a convalescent home. But Lady Emily’s vitality was unabated and her attendance at morning service more annoying than ever to the harassed vicar, as she shepherded her convalescent patients into her pew, giving unnecessary help with crutches, changing the position of hassocks, putting shawls round grateful embarrassed men to protect them from imaginary draughts, talking in a penetrating whisper which distracted the vicar from his service, behaving altogether as if church was a friend’s house. There came a moment at which he felt it to be his duty for the sake of other worshippers to beg her to be a little more punctual and a little less managing. But before he had summoned up enough courage to speak, the news came that the eldest son had been killed. When the vicar saw, on the following Sunday, Lady Emily’s handsome face, white and ravaged, he vowed as he prayed that he would never let himself criticize her again. And although on that very Sunday she had so bestirred herself with cushions and hassocks for the comfort of her wounded soldiers that they heartily wished they were back in hospital, and though she had invented a system of silent communication with Holden, the sexton, about shutting a window, thus absorbing the attention of the entire congregation, the vicar had not then, nor ever since, faltered from his vow.

At her daughter Agnes’s wedding to Colonel Graham she had for once been in time, but her attempts to rearrange the order of the bridesmaids during the actual ceremony and her insistence on leaving her pew to provide the bridegroom’s mother with an unwanted hymn-book had been a spectacular part of the wedding. As for the confirmation of David, the youngest, the vicar still woke trembling in the small hours at the thought of the reception which Lady Emily had seen fit to hold in the chancel afterwards, though apparently without in the least offending the bishop.

Rushwater adored her. The vicar knew perfectly well that Holden deliberately prolonged his final bell-ringing to give Lady Emily every chance, but had never had the courage to charge him with it. Just then the gate clicked and the Leslie family entered the churchyard. The vicar, much relieved, turned from the window and made ready to go into the church.

It was a large family party that had come over from Rushwater House. Lady Emily, slightly crippled of late with arthritis, walked with a black crutch stick, holding her second son, John’s, arm. Her husband walked on her other side. Agnes Graham followed with two nannies and three children. Then came David with Martin, the Leslies’ eldest grandson, a schoolboy of about sixteen. It was his father who had been killed in the War.

Lady Emily halted her cavalcade in the porch.

“Now, Nannie,” she said, “wait a minute and we will see where everyone is to go. Now, who is having communion?”

Both the nurses looked away with refined expressions.

“Not you, Nannie, and not Ivy, I suppose,” said Lady Emily.

“Ivy can go to early communion any morning she wishes, my lady,” said Nannie, icily broadminded. “I’m chapel myself.”

Lady Emily’s face became distraught.

“Agnes,” she cried, laying her gloved hand on her daughter’s arm, “what have I done? I didn’t know Nannie was chapel. Could we arrange for one of the men to run her down to the village if it isn’t too late? I’m afraid it’s Weston’s day off, but I dare say one of the other men could drive the Ford. Or won’t it matter?”

Agnes Graham turned her lovely placid eyes on her mother.

“It’s quite all right, mamma,” she said in her soft, comfortable voice. “Nannie likes coming to church with the children, don’t you, Nannie? She doesn’t count it as religion.”

“I was always brought up to the saying Thy will not Mine, my lady,” said Nannie, suddenly importing a controversial tone into the conversation, “and know where my duty lies. Baby, don’t pull those gloves off, or granny won’t take you to the nice service.”

“For Heaven’s sake, Emily,” interrupted Mr. Leslie advancing, tall, fresh-faced, heavily-built, used to getting his own way except where his wife was concerned. “For Heaven’s sake don’t dawdle there talking. Poor old Banister is dancing in the pulpit and Holden has stopped ringing his passing bell. Come along.”

No one knew whether Mr. Leslie was as ignorant of ecclesiastical matters as he pretended to be, but he had taken up from his earliest years the attitude that one word was as good as another.

“But, Henry, the question of communion is truly important,” said Lady Emily earnestly. “The ones that wish to escape must sit on the outside edge of the pew and the ones that are staying must sit inside, to make less fuss. Only I must sit on the outside, because my knee gets so stiff if I sit inside, but if I go in the second pew with Nannie and Ivy and the children, they can all get past me quite well, can’t they, Nannie?”

“Yes, my lady.”

“Very well, then; you go in the front pew, Henry, with Agnes and David and Martin, and the rest of us will go behind. Only mind you put Agnes right inside against the wall, because she is staying for communion, and if she is outside you will have to walk over her and the boys too.”

“But Martin and I aren’t staying for communion,” said David.

“No, darling? Well, just as you like. It is disappointing, in a way, because the vicar does dearly love a good house—but what I meant was that if Agnes were outside, you and your father and Martin would all have to walk over her, not that he would have to walk over her and you.”

By this time Nannie, a young woman of strong character who was kind enough to tolerate her employers for the sake of the babies they provided, had taken her charges into the second pew and distributed Ivy and herself among them so that no two children should sit together. The rest of the party followed between the rows of the already kneeling congregation. Just as they came to the nursery pew, Lady Emily uttered a loud exclamation.

“John! I had forgotten about John. John, if you don’t want any communion you had better go in front with David and Martin and the others, only let your father have the corner seat.”

John helped his mother to settle into her pew, and then slipped into the pew behind. Lady Emily dropped her stick with a clatter into the aisle. John got up and handed it to his mother, who flashed a brilliant smile at him and said in an audible aside:

“I can’t kneel, you know, because of my stiff leg, but my spirit is on its knees.”

But before her spirit could settle to its devotions she leant forward and tapped her husband’s shoulder.

“Henry, are you reading the lessons?” she inquired.

“What’s that?” asked Mr. Leslie, through the Venite.

Lady Emily poked at Agnes with her stick.

“Darling,” she whispered loudly, “is your father reading the lessons?”

“Of course I am,” said Mr. Leslie. “Always read the lessons.”

“Then, what are they?” asked Lady Emily. “I want to find them in the Bible for the children.”

“I don’t know,” said Mr. Leslie, crossly. “Not my business.”

“But, Henry, you must know.”

Mr. Leslie turned his body round and glared at his wife.

“I don’t know,” he insisted, red in the face with his efforts to whisper gently, but angrily and audibly. “Holden marks the places for me. Look in your prayer book, Emily, you’ll find it all in the beginning—number of the Beast or something.”

With which piece of misinformation he turned round again and went on with his singing. As he announced the first lesson from the lectern, his wife repeated the book, chapter and verse aloud after him, adding, “Remember that, everyone.” She then began to hunt through the Bible. Agnes’s eldest child, James, who was just seven, looked at her efforts with some impatience.

“Just open it anywhere, granny,” he whispered.

But his grandmother insisted not only on finding the place, but on pointing it out to all the occupants of both pews. By the time the second lesson was reached she had mislaid her spectacles, so James undertook to find the place for her. While he was doing this she leaned over to Nannie and said:

“Do you have the lessons in chapel?”

But Nannie, knowing her place, pretended not to hear.

When the vicar began his good and uninteresting sermon, James snuggled up to his grandmother. She put an arm round him and they sat comfortably together, thinking their very different thoughts. Never did Emily Leslie sit in her pew without thinking of the beloved dead: her first-born buried in France, and John’s wife, Gay, who after one year of happiness had left him wifeless and childless. John had left the navy after the War, gone into business, and was doing well, but his mother often wondered if anyone or anything would ever have power to stir his heart again. Whenever he was off his guard his mother’s heart was torn by the hard, set lines of his face. Otherwise he seemed happy enough, prospered, was thinking of Parliament, helped his father with the estate, was a kind uncle to Martin and to Agnes’s children, went to dances, plays and concerts in London, rode and shot in the country. But Lady Emily sometimes felt that if she came up behind him quietly and suddenly she might see that he was nothing but a hollow mask.

Then there was Martin, so ridiculously like his dead father, and as happy as anyone of sixteen who knows he is really grown-up can expect to be. His mother had remarried, and though Martin was on excellent terms with his American stepfather, he made Rushwater his home, much to the secret joy of his grandparents. Inheritance and death duties were not words which troubled Martin much. He knew Rushwater would be his some day, but had the happy confidence of the young that their elders will live for ever. His most pressing thoughts at the moment were about the possible purchase of a motor bicycle on his seventeenth birthday, and his hopes that his mother would forget her plan of sending him to France for part of the summer holidays. It would be intolerable to have to go to that ghastly abroad when one might be at Rushwater and play for the village against neighbouring elevens. Also he wanted to be in England if David pulled off that job with the B.B.C.

David should by rights have been Uncle David, but though Martin dutifully gave his title to his Uncle John, he and David were on equal terms. David was only ten years older than he was, and not the sort of chap you could look on as an uncle. David was like an elder brother, only he didn’t sit on you as much as some chaps’ elder brothers did. David was the most perfect person one could imagine, and when one was older one would, with luck, be exactly like David. Like David one would dance divinely, play and sing all the latest jazz hits, be president of one’s university dramatic society, write a play which was once acted on a Sunday, produce a novel which only really understanding people read, and perhaps, though here Martin’s mind rather shied off the subject, have heaps of girls in love with one. But not for a long time.

It need hardly be said that the qualities which filled Martin with the pangs of hero-worship were not altogether those which David’s parents would have most desired. If he had had to earn his living, David would have been a serious problem. But, owing to the ill-judged partiality of an aunt, he had been independent for some years. So he lived in town and had hankerings for the stage and the cinema and broadcasting, and every now and then his looks and his easy manners and his independent income landed him in a job, though not for long. And, as Martin had dimly surmised, heaps of girls had been in love with him. When the Leslies wished that David would settle down to a job and stick to it, they never failed to remind each other that the house would not be the same if David were not there so often.

Mr. Leslie was thinking partly how well he had dodged a difficult name in the First Lesson, coughing and turning the page noisily as he came to it, and partly about a young bull whom he proposed to visit after lunch; and occasionally, why Emily couldn’t be like other people.

As for John, he looked at his mother with her arm round James in the pew in front of him and wished, with the ache that was never far from his heart, that there were anyone whom he could hold close to him, even for a moment, even in the coolest way, with no disloyalty to Gay, only not to feel that emptiness at one’s side, day and night.

“But I suppose one couldn’t do it in church,” he thought, and then, being his mother’s son, nearly laughed out aloud at his own thoughts and had to pretend it was a cold. Luckily the sermon came to an end at that moment, and among the shuffling of feet his voice was not conspicuous.

Just then his mother, loosening her hold of James, said in an anxious voice:

“This seems a good moment to escape.”

John leant over.

“We can’t yet, mother,” he whispered; “we must stay for the collection, you know.”

His mother nodded her head violently and asked James to find her bag. After a prolonged scuffle it was found under the hassock, just as the collecting-bag came round. Mr. Leslie stuffed some paper into it and passed it along the pew to Agnes, who handed it over the back of the pew to Nannie. The two younger children put their sixpences in, but James only smiled and showed empty hands.

“Here you are,” said John, passing sixpence over.

“Thank you, Uncle John,” said James, taking it, “but grandfather subscribes to the church, so we needn’t give anything.”

Short of wrenching the sixpence away from James by main force there was nothing to be done. The nursery party filed past Mrs. Leslie and left the church, followed by the men. Only Agnes remained with her mother.

John and his father strolled up and down in the sun, under the low churchyard wall, discussing the young bull.

“What have you called him, sir?” John asked.

The naming of Mr. Leslie’s bulls was a matter of great moment. All had the prænomen Rushwater, and each had a second name which had to begin with an R. Their owner, who bred them himself, attached great importance to this, trying to find names which would come easily to the tongues of the Argentine ranchers, by whom they were usually bought. But the supply of names which, in Mr. Leslie’s opinion, could be easily attuned to a Spanish tongue, was nearly exhausted, and a good deal of his time and conversation had been devoted to the subject of late.

“I had thought of Rackstraw, or Richmond,” said Mr. Leslie doubtfully. “But they don’t sound Spanish enough to me.”

“What does Macpherson say?”

Mr. Leslie made an angry noise.

“Macpherson may have been agent here for thirty years,” he said, “but he hasn’t any more sense than to suggest Rannoch. How does he think an Argentine is going to say Rushwater Rannoch?”

John admitted the difficulty, while mildly wondering why Argentines should be even less intelligent than other people.

“And now there’s this business of letting the vicarage,” said Mr. Leslie. “Banister will be away for August and wants to let. It’s a confounded nuisance.”

“But Banister’s tenants needn’t worry you, sir.”

“He said something about Foreigners,” said Mr. Leslie. “People he picked up somewhere abroad. One never seems to have any peace. Your mother will ask them all up to dinner here twice a week. I shall go abroad for August.”

“Lots of foreigners there,” said John.

“Yes, but they’re all right in their place. It’s here we don’t want them. Buy British, you know. If it weren’t for the foreigners we should be much better off.”

“Then you wouldn’t have any Argentines to buy your prize bulls.”

“Foreigners, I said. Germans and French and that lot,” said Mr. Leslie, who appeared to make a subtle distinction between the various branches of the non-English-speaking races.

“Aren’t Argentines foreigners, too?” asked John, rather unkindly.

“When I was a boy, foreigners meant French and Germans and Italians,” said Mr. Leslie with dignity.

At this moment Lady Emily came out of the church with Agnes. Her husband and son went to meet her.

She sat down on a bench in the porch and began to wind herself up in a long lavender-coloured scarf, talking all the while.

“Henry, I was thinking in church that if Agnes’s niece, at least she is really her husband’s niece, but Agnes is devoted to her, is coming to us for the summer, we might have a little dance for Martin’s birthday in August. Perhaps a cricket match first and then a dance. Agnes, dear, see if you can find the other end of my scarf and give it to me—no, not that end, I know about that one, the other one, darling. That’s right. It is so inconvenient having to take one’s gloves off for communion, because I nearly always forget and it keeps Mr. Banister waiting.”

By this time she had wound her head into an elaborate turban, very becoming to her handsome haggard face with its delicate aquiline nose, thin carved lips and bright dark eyes. With the help of John’s arm she got up.

“Now my stick, Henry, and you might put that shawl over my shoulders and I don’t think I shall put on my gloves just to walk home with. What have you and your father been talking about, John?”

“Bulls, mamma, and foreigners. Father says he will go abroad if Banister lets the vicarage to unsuitable tenants.”

“No, Henry,” exclaimed Lady Emily, stopping short and dropping her bag, “not really. Mr. Banister would feel it.”

“Well, my dear,” said her husband, picking up her bag, “he’s going abroad himself and I don’t see that it is any business of his where I go.”

“We must have a good talk about it,” said Lady Emily, continuing her progress through the churchyard gate and across her own rose garden, “thresh it out all together at lunch-time. It came to me, while we were having that awkward interval which happens while the people who don’t stay for communion are escaping, that if we can get the roof of the pavilion mended before the cricket really begins, it would be such a good thing. Henry, will you speak to Macpherson about it?”

“I did speak to him, Emily, last October, and it has been mended for the last six months.”

“Of course it has,” said Lady Emily, stopping to adjust her shawl, which was dragging on the ground. “I must have been thinking of that little shed away by the saw-mill, where David sometimes used to put his bicycle. Or was it something quite different? One’s thoughts get so confused in church.”

As no one seemed equal to discovering what she had really been thinking about, she resumed her way, leaving a trail of belongings behind her for her family to collect, and disappeared into the house.