Читать книгу Northbridge Rectory - Angela Margaret Thirkell - Страница 4

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On the following morning Mrs. Villars was doing her usual household shopping in the High Street, when at Scatcherd’s Stores, Est: 1824, she ran into Mrs. Turner who was lamenting the scarcity of soap-flakes.

“Well, madam,” said old Mr. Scatcherd, whose incredible mutton-chop whiskers caused many thoughtless people to take him for the original Scatcherd, “you see we have so many refugees we are quite sold out. If we was to have twice the amount we could sell it twice over.”

To this Mrs. Turner spiritedly made reply that the refugees would be gone some day, by which time the old customers would have changed their grocer, but as Mr. Scatcherd preserved the bland indifference of one who knows that he will always have as many customers as he wants, Mrs. Turner went away without ordering the olive oil, which in any case she could not have got, and taking Mrs. Villars with her.

“Come back with me and have a cup of tea,” said Mrs. Turner. “The girls always want something to drink in the middle of the morning when they have got the vegetables ready. You know,” she continued as the ladies walked towards The Hollies, “Scatcherd is simply doing a bit of war blackmail. There’s far too much about. If you go into a shop and the rich refugees have bought everything up and you complain, you are told there’s a war. Blackmail. If you go to a restaurant in town and get filthy food that I wouldn’t give my evacuees at the Communal Kitchen and complain, they tell you there’s a war on as if you were a Fifth Columnist. Blackmail again. Hullo, Derrick, where are you off to?” she said to a small boy with pink cheeks and rather thin arms and legs who was carrying a large hammer. “You remember Derrick, don’t you? He is my youngest evacuee. He was a dreadful little scarecrow a year ago, but we are getting some flesh onto him at last.”

“Please, Miss, I’m going to smash the tins,” said the little boy.

“That’s a good boy,” said Mrs. Turner.

Derrick scampered off to where, on a strip of rough grass in front of the almshouses, lay a large, unsightly heap of tins, their variegated labels making a splash of colour in the autumn sunlight. Two or three other small boys were tearing off the labels while an older boy was hammering the tins with the back of a meat chopper.

“I really do not know,” said Mrs. Villars, “why the Council take the trouble to ask people to wash their tins and flatten them before throwing them on the dump, as nobody does. Luckily my maids would far rather do anything than their own job, so they wash the tins and I think Corporal Jackson flattens them with our coal hammer while the maids giggle.”

“I did ask Mrs. Gibbs, Gibbs’s wife, you know,” said Mrs. Turner, “why she didn’t trouble to clean her tins as the Council asked us, and she said this was a free country.”

There appeared to be no answer to this, so the ladies in silence walked up the little gravel sweep and into The Hollies. Here they found Betty and the other niece drinking sherry.

“Have some, Mrs. Villars?” said Betty. “It’s ackcherly prewar.”

But Mrs. Villars preferred to have a cup of tea with her hostess, that was, she said mechanically, if they could spare it. Mrs. Turner said they were well up on the tea ration as the girls preferred to poison themselves with sherry, to which the other niece replied with great good humour that the more sherry they drank the more tea there would be for Auntie, which seemed to Mrs. Villars a fallacious argument though she was unable to put her finger on the fallacy. The girls then went back to the Communal Kitchen next door to put the potatoes on and Mrs. Villars hoped to have a few quiet moments with Mrs. Turner to ask her about one or two matters when Mrs. Paxon was seen coming up the drive on her bicycle.

If, as Mrs. Villars said later to Mr. Holden, she had known what the feminine of largo al factotum was, that was Mrs. Paxon. There was not a pie in Northbridge in which Mrs. Paxon had not one of her very capable fingers, and since the war her fingers appeared to have multiplied with the pies. She dealt with evacuees, refugees, air-raid precautions, auxiliary fire service, personal service; was a pillar of the Red Cross; housed by a miracle of congestion her husband’s two aunts and an evacuated mother with twins; collected National Savings; was billeting officer for the Plashington Road, and went to early service three days in the week. Small and wiry, she appeared incapable of fatigue and usually cooked Mr. Paxon’s supper herself when he got back from Barchester on the six-forty-three. To the attributes of Briareus she added those of Proteus, for in the course of her various activities she had collected almost as many uniforms, and as she was often a uniform behind-hand during a busy day it was rather difficult to know in what capacity she should be treated.

“Minnie Paxon is in her Red Cross things,” said Mrs. Turner. “I suppose that means she has come about the personal service wool, or it might be about moving Ernie Wheeler. Mrs. Gibbs might have to take her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law from Islington, and as she only has one bed, Ernie will have to move. I told Mrs. Paxon I would take him if she couldn’t find anywhere else. I could put the little camp-bed in the box-room, which is quite large and has a window, and Derrick Pumper, that is my elder evacuee, and it is extremely inconvenient that they are both called Derrick, can go in there and Ernie can have the other camp-bed in the attic-room with Derrick Farker, that is the little one we met going to smash the tins.”

“What a curious name Farker is,” said Mrs. Villars.

“Might be Farquhar come down a bit,” said Mrs. Turner, “but I dare say not. People do have extraordinary names. Good morning, Minnie. You do know Mrs. Villars? Is it about Ernie?”

“Yes and no,” said Mrs. Paxon laughing, which she did so frequently that we shall not often allude to it again. “I’m so glad to find Mrs. Villars, because it will save my seeing the Rector. But one thing after another. About Ernie ...”

The two ladies plunged into the intricacies of Mrs. Gibbs’s household and Mrs. Turner’s camp-beds, while Mrs. Villars sat idle and wondered if she ought to have brought some knitting. It seemed unfair that a war, besides wrecking everyone’s summer holidays and devastating their evenings and mornings with black-outs, should give one a serious guilt-complex if one did nothing for a few moments. However she had not brought her knitting, so she sat back in the wide window-seat and listened vaguely to the discussion. A war is apt to produce, except among the happy few who are doing whole-time jobs and believe that they are of supreme importance, a great deal of almost morbid heart-searching. Mrs. Villars considered Mrs. Paxon, not well-off, carrying so many burdens, yet always gay and competent and ready to flash her large violet eyes at anything in uniform. She considered Mrs. Turner who was certainly not poor, but devoting herself to what Mrs. Villars secretly considered those rather dull girls, though so worthy and good-humoured, and to almost as many activities as Mrs. Paxon, running the Communal Kitchen without respite and suffering evacuees gladly. And she wondered, as most women do about each other, why Mrs. Turner had not married again, and decided angrily that men in general were fools not to notice that agreeably ripe (she could think of no better adjective) figure, that pretty curling hair and that excellent temper. But if it came to that, what men were there in Northbridge? Quantities of nice dull husbands, one or two retired military or naval men well guarded by unmarried sisters, the curate, Mr. Harker, who was practically a celibate, and a few young men whose defective health or sight gave them the right to remain at home where they were very disagreeable in consequence. In fact, Mr. Downing seemed to be the only possibility in sight, and he could only reach, or be reached, across Miss Pemberton’s formidable body. As far as Mrs. Villars knew, all her elder billeted officers were married except Mr. Holden and somehow she did not approve that combination. In any case, Mr. Holden was far too young, for Mrs. Turner must be about her own age. So she gave it up and went into a rather moody consideration of herself, blaming herself for so often being contented with her lot when so many people were wrenched and wretched. A very nice husband who after being a successful schoolmaster had been presented to a very good living; an elder son who was a Professor of Engineering at an unusually early age and was required to stick to his job; a younger son in the Air Force entirely engaged on instruction; her house not too full of very quiet well-behaved officers. In fact, nothing to complain of, except that she felt wicked to be so peaceful. She came to the conclusion that to be contented was her cross, just as Mrs. Paxon, having thrashed out the question of Ernie and decided that no further step need be taken till it was known whether Mrs. Gibbs’s in-laws would go to her or to their other son’s wife in Surrey, who having two very young children and a baby imminent, was far less fitted to receive them, and would therefore probably be their choice, turned to Mrs. Villars and said:

“About spotting.”

“Oh ... yes ...” said Mrs. Villars, staring rather stupidly.

“Your husband said it would be all right, but he had to get permission about the telephone. And, do you know, I am not sure if we oughtn’t to have two people. I mean it’s a long way down if anything happened and so narrow on the inside edge.”

“Oh ... of course ...” said Mrs. Villars, trying with no success to look intelligent.

“Minnie means spotting on the church tower,” said Mrs. Turner in a low violent voice and making a face at Mrs. Villars, intended to convey to her that she really knew all about it if she would pull herself together. Unlike most faces, this was a success, and the fictitious intelligence in Mrs. Villars’s face, the false dawn as it were, was replaced by a dawn of real understanding.

“You do realize about the necessity for two people?” said Mrs. Paxon, who had been grabbling about in her bag and had missed Mrs. Turner’s prompting.

“You mean if one got ill on the top of the tower by oneself,” said Mrs. Villars.

“Or if you were alone and anyone came up,” said Mrs. Paxon, who believed that practically every man in England was, unless she knew him, a German in disguise, with the fellest designs on the honour of England’s womanhood. “There was an appalling man in the train last Saturday. He got in at Southbridge and asked if the train stopped at Northbridge, so of course I made no reply and he looked at me in a way I can’t describe. If he had made a movement towards me I would have opened the door and thrown myself down the embankment.”

Mrs. Villars wondered if it was her duty as the Rector’s wife to say that God’s hand was over us even in a railway carriage and decided it was not, so she asked what had happened.

“He never said another word,” said Mrs. Paxon. “He just lighted a cigarette.”

“How rude of him,” said Mrs. Villars sympathetically.

“I must say it was a smoking carriage,” said Mrs. Paxon very fairly. “And then he got out at Tidcombe Halt and went off in a most peculiar way. Not by the path that goes under the line and down the hill to Tidcombe, but quite in the other direction. Mrs. Copper got in there and I told her, quite in a laughing way of course, because I simply cannot help seeing the funny side of things. When I was in the South Wembley Amateur Choral Society we did Hiawatha, all in costume, and I did Minnehaha, and they all said the name quite suited me. I expect you thought my name was Minnie,” she said, turning to Mrs. Turner, “but it is only that it stuck to me. The conductor was a splendid fellow, but I never let him see me home. Musicians get a bit temperamental if you know what I mean, after rehearsal sometimes. But this man in the train was quite different; more sinister. I must say though I laugh when I think of it.”

Upon which she laughed a merry peal and said would they both put down their names to act as spotters. So they did and Mrs. Paxon mounted her bicycle and went away.

“It is no good saying No to Minnie Paxon,” said Mrs. Turner resignedly, “though what good spotters can do, don’t ask me. Have you any field-glasses?”

Mrs. Villars said no, but she had a pair of opera-glasses that had belonged to her mother, only they were mother-of-pearl, so they didn’t work very well.

“By the way,” she said as she left, “I meant to ask you something. Who is Effie Bunce’s aunt?”

Mrs. Turner looked curiously at her friend.

“Don’t you know?” she said.

Mrs. Villars said she was very sorry, but she had only been at Northbridge just over a year, and as her husband had mostly been a schoolmaster she hadn’t quite got into Rectory ways yet and thought she would never learn everyone’s name.

“You might as well know Effie’s aunt’s name,” said Mrs. Turner, “because she is your cook.”

“Not Mrs. Chapman!” said Mrs. Villars. “No wonder Effie is frightened of her. Even Corporal Jackson can’t get round her.”

“No one ever did,” said Mrs. Turner, “except Bob Chapman, but he ran away before they were married and has never been heard of again. Her boy is doing very well in the Merchant Navy.”

“Then she isn’t Mrs. Chapman, really,” said Mrs. Villars.

Mrs. Turner said all cooks were allowed to call themselves Mrs., and Mrs. Chapman thoroughly deserved it and she must fly to the Communal Kitchen now.

“Well, I am most grateful,” said Mrs. Villars, “for all your help.”

“That’s all right, Mrs. Villars,” said Mrs. Turner. “Do ask me anything you like. I’ve lived here for twenty years and I know pretty well all the ins and outs.”

“There is one thing I would like to ask you,” said Mrs. Villars, “and that is not to call me Mrs. Villars. I know Verena sounds a very affected name, but I am used to it.”

“Sintram?” said Mrs. Turner.

“Indirectly. Heir of Redclyffe,” said Mrs. Villars.

“The only trouble,” said Mrs. Turner, “is that my name is so awful: Poppy.”

“Well, whenever I say Poppy I shall think of you,” said Mrs. Villars, and apparently Mrs. Turner quite understood what she meant.

To make the catering and serving easier, Mrs. Villars had arranged that lunch should be the same for her husband and herself and the officers. This plan worked very well, as most of the guests had friends in the neighbourhood or went over to Barchester after office hours to the cinema and did not need much in the way of an evening meal. The Rectory dining-room seated ten very comfortably with the leaf in the table and to-day all eight officers were present. Captain Topham who had been to town for the night was a little late, and as soon as he arrived they sat down to lunch.

“And how was London?” said Mr. Villars, for whom as an ex-schoolmaster communal lunches had no terrors.

Captain Topham said it was a fearful nuisance that his club had all the windows broken and his tailor had a bomb in his stockroom and didn’t know how much he could save. The worst of it was, he said, that the Megatherium was taking his club in temporarily and they were such a highbrow lot and half of them had one foot in the grave.

“I can tell you, sir, it gave me a turn,” said the Captain to his host. “The first thing I saw when I got inside was an old gentleman being wheeled into the dining-room in a bathchair, and I’d hardly got half-way through my lunch when there was a kind of scuffle over by a window and some waiters brought a screen along and one of them told me an old gentleman had just had a fit. Pretty grim kind of place that,” said Captain Topham, whose pre-war interests had been largely connected with the turf and the stage. “Good port, though.”

“Talking of port,” said Colonel Passmore, a middle-aged solicitor whose Territorial enthusiasm had brought him back to the regiment in which he had served in 1914-18, “it will be a shocking thing when we can’t get any more good French stuff. I haven’t drunk any German stuff since I was in Cologne in ’nineteen, and hope never to drink any again.”

Lieutenant Hooper, who could not bear narrow-mindedness in his seniors, or indeed in anyone but himself, said we must remember that English wine-merchants had stocks of German wine honourably paid for, and to ban the drinking of German wine would mean ruin for them.

Captain Topham said a good lager was good enough for him and a good glass of port to finish up with.

Colonel Passmore shuddered and mentally marked the Captain as unfit for promotion.

Lieutenant Hooper asked with what he considered to be quiet irony whether lager was an English drink, to which Captain Topham, who was impervious to any kind of Fine Shades, said Barclays had a jolly good one, but he fancied the Danish himself.

“I once went over a large Danish brewery when I was in Denmark,” said Captain Powell-Jones.

As he was a taciturn man, used to sitting in his rooms at Bangor and frightening men who came to him to be coached in Cymric, everyone was interested in his entrance into the conversation and there was a respectful silence.

“It was very interesting,” said Captain Powell-Jones. “Yes, very interesting,” he added after a short pause for reflection. “Would you mind passing the cruet, Dutton.”

Lieutenant Dutton winced and passed the salt-cellar.

“Will you have wing or leg, Colonel?” said Mr. Villars from the sideboard where he was carving two fine chickens.

“The upper part of the leg if you don’t mind,” said the Colonel. “Much the best part of a fowl.”

At this Lieutenant Greaves, a jovial youth who was the life and soul of any party at which he found himself and would indeed have been sent down from Oxford for excessive joviality had he not gone straight into the army, was inspired to remark to Major Spender:

“Fowl, eh? I suppose we have you to thank, sir. Jolly good show.”

Major Spender, who was thin and sensitive and spent all his spare time writing to his wife and three children, went red all over on being thus addressed.

“Don’t be a fool, Tommy,” said Lieutenant Dutton coldly to Mr. Greaves. “The Major’s dog ate the whole bird, feathers and all.”

“Who ate a bird?” said Mr. Villars from the sideboard.

Regimental loyalty suddenly asserted itself and no one answered. The Rector turned and looked at his company with an expression which clearly said, “As none of you have sufficient sense of honour to own up to this extremely foolish and ungentlemanly prank, I shall keep the whole form in for an hour every afternoon till the boy who perpetrated it comes forward. This will of course include the afternoon of the match against Harbord’s Eleven.”

“I’m most awfully sorry, sir,” said Major Spender. “It was my dog.”

“I thought Mr. Greaves said a bird,” said Mr. Villars, handing a plate to Foster, the parlourmaid, and sitting down.

“He did, darling,” said Mrs. Villars. “Major Spender’s dog killed one of the fowls quite by mistake and ate it. But she was a bad layer and Mr. Holden says the poor dog was beaten.”

“Then it is not the fowl in question that we are eating?” said the Rector suspiciously.

“Nothing left of her, sir, except the claws and the feathers,” said Corporal Jackson, who was an admirable under-parlourmaid. “Quite a mangled affair, sir.”

“Ah well,” said the Rector, evidently letting his form off their punishment in consideration of an honourable if tardy confession. “Birds will be getting scarce.”

“Rara avis,” remarked Mr. Dutton negligently, but the Rector looked at him over his spectacles as if requesting the rest of the quotation and Mr. Dutton wished he hadn’t spoken.

“And think of all the partridges and pheasants flying about this autumn asking to be shot,” said Captain Topham mournfully, to which Mr. Hooper said quietly that the hospitals would be glad enough of food before long, but his quietness was so provocative that Captain Topham asked him what he meant, only just stopping himself in time from saying what the devil.

“Well,” said Mr. Hooper, “you may laugh at the talk of invasion,” and shut his mouth with what he meant to be a snap, though his younger friends hoped it was his teeth falling out as they had once done at the depôt.

Again there was a short silence, for the gentlemen present, none of whom except Major Spender were regular soldiers, were not sure whether mentioning invasion in mixed company was the same as mentioning a woman’s name at mess.

“That reminds me,” said Mrs. Villars to her husband, “that Mrs. Paxon was asking me about parachute-spotters on the church tower and I said I would be one. Is that all right?”

“If Hibberd has found the key I suppose it is,” said Mr. Villars, “but it has been missing for two days. It is most annoying, because I am responsible. I could swear I left it on its usual nail inside the vestry. Hibberd was away last night so I couldn’t ask him.”

“Is Hibberd the one with a Newgate frill in the churchyard, sir?” asked Mr. Greaves respectfully.

The Rector, recognizing this description of his sexton, said it was.

“Then I’m most awfully sorry, sir,” said Mr. Greaves, “but I’ve got the key. I’m awfully keen on old churches and things and I asked your man about the tower and he showed me where the key was and I forgot to put it back. It’s in my other tunic.”

“All is well that ends well,” said the Rector, who looked favourably on Mr. Greaves as a kind of Captain of the Eleven who had no brains but reflected a certain credit on the school.

“What was it like up there?” said Mrs. Villars. “I’m ashamed to say I’ve never been up.”

“Marvellous!” said Mr. Greaves. “One of those jolly corkscrew staircases, nearly pitch dark and awfully steep. I think there must be a lot of daws’ nests in the windows near the top because the steps are covered with dirt,” he said, quickly substituting this for the word muck in deference to the feelings of a lady. “And a topping view from the roof. That’s a splendid lead roof you have up there, sir,” he continued, addressing the Rector. “I climbed up and sat on the top of it, a sort of pyramid shape you know, and I could almost see over the battlements. And I’ve never seen so many dead flying beetles as there are round the gutter in my life. They absolutely crunch when you walk on them. I’ll put the key back at once, sir.”

The conversation now became general, each gentleman talking of the subject that interested him most, except Captain Powell-Jones who ate his food and thought but poorly of a place where no one had probably heard of Morgan ap Kerrig, or Crumlinwallinwer, or Mewlinwillinwodd. Under cover of the noise, Mrs. Villars thought with considerable repulsion of Mr. Greaves’s description of the tower and wished she had not let Mrs. Paxon hypnotize her into being a spotter, for twisting stairs and insects, dead or alive, were her greatest terrors, not to speak of a very bad head for heights. This she presently confided to Mr. Holden who happened to be sitting next to her that day, for the dining-room table was treated as a sort of club, each gentleman sitting where he liked as he came in. They made the interesting discovery that while Mrs. Villars was frightened of looking down from a roof or even a step-ladder, she was never seasick, while Mr. Holden, a keen rock-climber with a steady head, had almost forsworn the Dolomites before the war because he was not only seasick but airsick.

After lunch Major Spender lingered in the dining-room to make his personal apologies about the hen and inquire diffidently if he might pay for the damage. This his host of course declined, while thanking him for the suggestion, and offered him a cigar.

“About this invasion,” said the Rector. “Do you think spotters on the church tower would be likely to prevent it?”

Major Spender said that in his experience nothing prevents anything in particular, but roof-spotting might help the civilians to feel useful. It was, he said, hard luck on civilians, because they never knew where they were, whereas in the Army one did.

“By the way, sir,” he added, “you were at Coppin’s School, weren’t you? I was there from nineteen eight to nineteen twelve and my two boys are down for it. The eldest will be going next year. Though I say it, he has an unusual gift for writing and has done some awfully good little stories, quite short you know and illustrated them himself. Only child’s work of course,” said Major Spender, obviously meaning that it was equal to the work of Balzac and Michael Angelo rolled into one, “but one can always tell.”

Mr. Villars, who was hardened to parents, said sometimes one could and sometimes one couldn’t, which led to an account of the linguistic abilities of the second Master Spender and the ballerina-like gifts of Miss Clarissa Spender, aged three. At this point the Rector, who added to his other gifts that of being able to get rid of parents before they knew it, said, “Ah, well ha!” and so left Major Spender to find his way back to the office.

When Mrs. Villars came down about four o’clock, for she was obliged, much to her annoyance, to lie down after lunch to please her doctor, she found Mrs. Paxon in the drawing-room. That lady was wearing blue flannel trousers and a frilly short-sleeved blouse and had tied her head up in a kind of orange fish-net, which made Mrs. Villars guess that she had been at, or was going to, an A.R.P. gathering. Mrs. Paxon apologized for intruding, saving that she ought to have called on the Rectory months ago, but seemed to have got a bit behind-hand with the war and what not, so she thought she would just run in before the rehearsal and hoped Mrs. Villars would take the will for the deed, which Mrs. Villars was quite ready to do.

“What are you rehearsing?” she asked. “Is it in aid of something?”

“Oh, dear, no,” said Mrs. Paxon. “Our little dramatic ventures are quite a back number now. We are just having a casualty practice. A bomb is supposed to have exploded outside Scatcherd’s and the first-aid party are going to do first-aid. Several of us have volunteered as casualties and I am to be a hysteria case, but what I really came about,” said Mrs. Paxon, laughing at herself, “was the spotting. Do you think the Rector will object?”

Stopping herself with an effort from saying the old min was friendly, Mrs. Villars said that if Mr. Greaves had found the key she thought it would be all right, upon which Mrs. Paxon proceeded to develop her plan. The air-wardens had decided to call upon a number of patriotic ladies to spend two hours at a time on the roof in couples. Their duties would be to scan the horizon, also the spacious firmament above, and report anything suspicious that they saw falling. Any such object was to be reported at once to the Council Rooms. The Home Guard would then be mobilized and set out in small but determined squads for the probable locality where the falling had taken place. It was hoped that the garage would lend a large-scale map, on which the tower-watchers were to mark the direction the Home Guard should take.

“I have a splendid list already,” said Mrs. Paxon. “Yourself and the Rector, Mrs. Turner and her nieces, Miss Pemberton who is very keen and Mr. Downing, Miss Crowder and Miss Hopgood from Glycerine Cottage, Miss Hopgood’s aunt who has a telescope, Mrs. Dunsford and her daughter, only they cannot come on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays because they have lent the drawing-room at Hovis House for working parties and Mrs. Dunsford likes to keep an eye on them, Miss Talbot and her sister from the Aloes. And last, and least, there is my little self.”

Mrs. Villars said that it sounded splendid, but she thought it was all to be women. Mrs. Paxon said, Of course, because every man was needed at his post.

“But didn’t you mention Mr. Downing and my husband?” said Mrs. Villars.

Mrs. Paxon said they were different; a statement which Mrs. Villars very sensibly decided to take as well-meant, and began to pour out tea.

“No sugar, thank you,” said Mrs. Paxon. “War-time, you know, and we must all pull together. I couldn’t take yours; you have so many calls on you.”

With a laugh she fished out of her bag a small tin, once the home of Oxo cubes, opened it and took out a piece of sugar which she popped, for the phrase rises naturally to one’s mind in speaking of Minnie Paxon, into her tea.

“Oh, please!” said Mrs. Villars. “We really have heaps, and as Gregory and I don’t take it in tea or coffee we can easily spare it for our guests.”

But Mrs. Paxon said that many a mickle made a muckle, and being pressed to take a scone said, Not if there was butter on it, for she knew that Mrs. Villars with her big family must need every bit.

“But we have heaps,” said Mrs. Villars. “All the officers have their own rations and we do very well. Besides, this is only margarine, I’m afraid. Mrs. Chapman won’t let us use butter at teatime.”

“Margarine is just the same as butter in war-time,” said Mrs. Paxon. “But if I might scrape it off and just have a teeny-weeny bit of that delicious jam.”

However, her hostess managed to persuade her to do violence to her conscience and then Mr. Villars came in.

Mrs. Paxon said when the Rector came in at the door visitors must fly out of the window and made her good-byes with bright rapidity. At the door she paused.

“Oh, Mrs. Villars,” she said, “I meant to ask you. What about Father Fewling? He used to be a sailor. I know he isn’t exactly a woman, but as we are opening our net so wide we might include him. After all, who is more suitable for a roof-spotter than a High Churchman? My little joke. And if you don’t mind my asking the spotters to meet at the Rectory on Saturday at eleven-thirty, it would be most kind. I shall leave it to your gentle arts to persuade the Rector.”

And with a farewell laugh she went away.

“Tea, please, Verena,” said the Rector. “What’s all this about Fewling?”

Mrs. Villars briefly outlined to her husband the Air Wardens’ scheme for women spotters at the church and with some amusement broke the news to him that he and Mr. Downing had been provisionally enrolled.

“I suppose the clergy are looked upon as old women,” said he with a half sigh. “In the last war I was at the front. Well, well. Still it is my own church tower, so I suppose I have a right to go up if I want to. As for Fewling, he is a first-rate man, and though I don’t care for his form of worship, plenty of people here do. He can’t do much with his asthma and frets a lot. I think to sit on the roof and look for invaders will cheer him up as long as the warm weather lasts. As for Downing, poor fellow, one hardly knows what to say. I suppose Miss Pemberton will insist on his coming up the tower with her in case anyone should try to call on him while she is out. This is an amusing village, Verena.”

His wife agreed, but said that Coppin’s School had been funny too, and did he remember Mr. O’Brien who used to come to the School Entertainment in a saffron kilt because his ancestors had been Kings of Ireland. So they gossiped about old days till the Rector got up to go on to his next job.

“Then it’s all right about spotting, Gregory?” said his wife, “and having a meeting here?”

“They can do what they like,” said the Rector. “But you are not to overdo yourself. Remember that. If you look tired I shall put my foot down. I will not have you ill again.”