Читать книгу The Brandons - Angela Margaret Thirkell - Страница 3

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“I wonder who this is from,” said Mrs. Brandon, picking a letter out of the heap that lay by her plate and holding it at arm’s length upside down. “It is quite extraordinary how I can’t see without my spectacles. It makes me laugh sometimes because it is so ridiculous.”

In proof of this assertion she laughed very pleasantly. Her son and daughter, who were already eating their breakfast, exchanged pitying glances but said nothing.

“It doesn’t look like a handwriting that I know,” said Mrs. Brandon, putting her large horn-rimmed spectacles on and turning the letter the right way up. “More like a handwriting that I don’t know. The postmark is all smudgy so I can’t see where it comes from.”

“You might steam it open and see who it’s from,” said her son Francis, “and then shut it up again and guess.”

“But if I saw who it was from I’d know,” said Mrs. Brandon plaintively. “In France and places people write their name and address across the back of the envelope so that you know who it is.”

“And then you needn’t open it at all if you don’t like them,” said Francis, “though I believe they really only do it to put spies from other places off the scent. I mean if Aunt Sissie wanted to write to you she would put someone else’s name and address on the flap, and then you would open it instead of very rightly putting it straight into the waste-paper basket.”

“You don’t think it’s from Aunt Sissie, do you?” said Mrs. Brandon. “Whenever I get a letter I hope it isn’t from her; but mostly,” she added, reverting to her original grievance, “one knows at once by the handwriting who it’s from.”

“If it’s Aunt Sissie,” said her daughter Delia, “it will be all about being offended because we haven’t been to see her since Easter.”

“Well, we couldn’t,” said Mrs. Brandon. “Francis hasn’t had a holiday since Easter, and you were abroad and if I go alone she is only annoyed. Besides she is more your aunt than mine. She is no relation of mine at all. That she is a relation of yours you have to thank your father.”

Francis and Delia again exchanged glances. It was a habit of their mother’s to make them entirely responsible for any difficulties brought into the family by the late Mr. Brandon, saying the words “your father” in a voice that implied a sinister collaboration between that gentleman and the powers of darkness for which her children were somehow to blame. As for Mr. Brandon’s merits, which consisted chiefly in having been an uninterested husband and father for some six or seven years and then dying and leaving his widow quite well off, no one thought of them.

“Well, after all, mother, father was as much your father as ours,” said Francis, who while holding no brief for a parent whom he could barely remember, felt that men must stick together, “at least you brought him into the family, and that makes you really responsible for Aunt Sissie. And,” he hurriedly added, seeing in his mother’s eye what she was about to say, “it’s no good your saying father wouldn’t have liked to hear me speak to you like that, darling, because that’s just what we can’t tell. Can I have some more coffee?”

Mrs. Brandon, who had been collecting her forces to take rather belated offence at her son’s remarks, was so delighted to fuss over his coffee that she entirely forgot her husband’s possible views on how young men should address their mothers and saw herself very happily as a still not unattractive woman spoiling a handsome and devoted son. That Francis’s looks were inherited from his father was a fact she chose to ignore, except if his hair was more than usually untidy, when she was apt to say reproachfully, “Of course that is your father’s hair, Francis,” or even more loftily and annoyingly to no one in particular, “His father’s hair all over again.”

Peace being restored over the coffee, Mrs. Brandon ate her own breakfast and read her letters. Francis and Delia were discussing a plan for a picnic with some friends in the neighbourhood, when their mother interrupted them by remarking defiantly that she had said so.

A small confusion took place.

“No, no,” said Mrs. Brandon, “nothing to do with hard-boiled eggs or cucumber sandwiches. It is your Aunt Sissie.”

By the tone of the word “your” her children realised that they were about to be in disgrace for thinking of picnics at such an hour.

“Then it was Aunt Sissie,” said Delia. “What is the worst, mother? Does she want us to go over?”

“Wait,” said Mrs. Brandon. “It isn’t Aunt Sissie. At least not exactly. It is dictated. I will read it to you. And that,” said Mrs. Brandon laying the letter aside, “is why I couldn’t tell who it was from. It is written by someone called Ella Morris with Miss in brackets, so as none of the maids are called Morris it must be a new companion.”

“Heaven help her,” said Francis, “and that isn’t swearing, darling, and I am sure father would have said it too. Give me the letter or we shall never know what is in it. Delia, the blow has fallen. Ella Morris, Miss, writes at the wish of Miss Brandon to say that she, Miss Brandon, hereinafter to be known as Aunt Sissie, is at a loss to understand why all her relations have forsaken her and she is an ailing old woman and expects us all to come over on Wednesday to lunch or be cut out of her will. Mother, who gets Aunt Sissie’s money if she disinherits us?”

Mrs. Brandon said that was not the way to talk.

After half an hour’s detailed consideration of the question the Brandon family left the breakfast table, not that the subject was in any way exhausted, but Rose the parlourmaid had begun to hover in an unnerving and tyrannical way. Francis said he must write some letters, Delia went to do the telephoning which she and her friends found a necessary part of daily life, while Mrs. Brandon went into the garden to get fresh flowers, choosing with great cunning the moment when the gardener was having a mysterious second breakfast. Certainly anyone who had met her coming furtively and hurriedly but triumphantly in by the drawing-room window, her arms full of the gardener’s flowers, would entirely have agreed with her own opinion of herself and found her still not unattractive, or possibly felt that a woman with so enchanting an expression could not have been more charming even in her youth. Mrs. Brandon herself, in one of her moods of devastating truthfulness, had explained her own appearance as the result of a long and happy widowhood, and as, after a little sincere grief at the loss of a husband to whom she had become quite accustomed, she had had nothing of consequence to trouble her, it is probable that she was right. Her house and garden were pretty, comfortable, and of a manageable size, her servants stayed with her, Francis had been one of those lucky, even-tempered boys that go through school with the good-will of all, if with no special distinction, and then fallen straight into a good job. As for Delia, she combined unconcealed scorn for her mother with a genuine affection and an honest wish to improve her and bring her up to date. Mrs. Brandon thought her daughter a darling, and had gladly given up any attempt at control years ago. The only fault she could find with her children was that they didn’t laugh at the same jokes as she did, but finding that all their friends were equally humourless, she accepted it placidly, seeing herself as a spirit of laughter born out of its time.

But human nature cannot be content on a diet of honey and if there is nothing in one’s life that requires pity, one must invent it; for to go through life unpitied would be an unthinkable loss. Mrs. Brandon, quite unconsciously, had made of her uninteresting husband a mild bogey, allowing her friends, especially those who had not known him, to imagine a slightly sinister figure that had cast a becoming shadow over his charming widow’s life. Many of her acquaintances said sympathetically they really could not imagine why she had married such a man. To them Mrs. Brandon would reply wistfully that she had not been very happy as a girl and no one else had asked her, thus giving the impression that she had in her innocence seized an opportunity to escape from a loveless home to what proved a loveless marriage. The truth, ever so little twisted in the right direction by her ingenious mind, was that Mr. Brandon had proposed to her when she was not quite twenty. Being a kind-hearted girl who hated to say no, she had at once fallen in love, because if one’s heart is not otherwise engaged there seems to be nothing else to do. Her parents had made no difficulties, Mr. Brandon had made a very handsome will and taken his wife to Stories, his charming early Georgian house at Pomfret Madrigal in the Barchester country. Francis was born before she was twenty-one, a deed which filled her with secret pride, though no one else would have guessed it from her usual plaintive and ambiguous statement, “of course my first baby was born almost at once,” a statement which had made more than one of her hearers silently add the word Brute to Mr. Brandon’s epitaph.

Delia was born four years later, and Mrs. Brandon, wrapped up in her nursery, was only beginning to feel ruffled by her husband’s dullness when death with kindly care removed him through the agency of pneumonia. As it was a cold spring Mrs. Brandon was able to go into black, and the ensuing summer being a particularly hot one gave her an excuse for mourning in white, though she always wore a heavy necklace of old jet to show goodwill.

It was during that summer that Mr. Brandon’s Aunt Sissie, hitherto an almost mythical figure, had made her first terrifying appearance at Stories. Mrs. Brandon was sitting in the ex-library, now called her sitting-room, writing to her parents, when the largest Rolls Royce she had ever seen came circling round the gravel sweep. As it drew up she saw that there were two chauffeurs on the front seat. The man who was driving remained at his post to restrain the ardour of his machine, while the second got out and rang the front door bell. The bonnet was facing Mrs. Brandon and she could not see who was inside the car without making herself too visible at the window, so she had to wait till Rose, then only a young parlourmaid, but older than her mistress and already a budding tyrant, came in.

“Miss Brandon, madam,” she announced, “and I’ve put her in the drawing-room.”

“Miss Brandon?” said her mistress. “Oh, that must be Mr. Brandon’s aunt. What shall I do?”

“I’ve put her in the drawing-room, madam,” Rose repeated, speaking patiently as to a mental defective, “and she said the chauffeurs was to have some tea, madam, so cook is looking after them.”

“Then I suppose I must,” said Mrs. Brandon, and went into the drawing-room.

It was here that for the first and only time she felt a faint doubt as to the propriety of mourning in white, for her aunt by marriage was wearing such a panoply of black silk dress, black cashmere mantle, black ostrich feather boa and unbelievably a black bonnet trimmed with black velvet and black cherries, that Mrs. Brandon wondered giddily whether spinsters could be honorary widows.

“When once I have sat down I don’t get up again easily,” said Miss Brandon, holding out a black-gloved, podgy hand.

“Oh, please don’t,” said Mrs. Brandon vaguely, taking her aunt’s lifeless hand. “How do you do, Miss Brandon. Henry will be so sorry to miss you—I mean he was always talking about you and saying we must take the children to see you.”

“I had practically forbidden him the house for some years,” said Miss Brandon.

To this there appeared to be no answer except Why? a question Mrs. Brandon had not the courage to ask.

“But I would certainly have come to the funeral,” Miss Brandon continued, “had it not been my Day in Bed. I take one day a week in bed, an excellent plan at my age. Later I shall take two days, and probably spend the last years of my life entirely in bed. My grandfather, my mother and my elder half-sister were all bed-ridden for the last ten years of their lives and all lived to be over ninety.”

Again it was difficult to find an answer. Mrs. Brandon murmured something about how splendid and felt it was hardly adequate.

“But I went into mourning for my nephew Henry at once,” said Miss Brandon, ignoring her niece’s remark, “as you see. I have practically not been out of mourning for fifteen years, what with one death and another. A posthumous child?” she added with sudden interest, looking piercingly at her niece’s white dress.

“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Brandon. “Mamma and papa are still alive.”

“Tut, tut, not you,” said Miss Brandon. “What is your name?”

Mrs. Brandon said apologetically that it was Lavinia.

“A pretty name,” said Miss Brandon. “When last I saw your husband Henry Brandon, he mentioned you to me as Pet. It was before his marriage and he was spending a week-end with me. I had to say to him, ‘Henry Brandon, a man who can call his future wife Pet and speak of the Government as you have spoken can hardly make a good husband and is certainly not a good nephew.’ I suppose he made you suffer a good deal.”

Here if ever was an opportunity for Mrs. Brandon to indulge in an orgy of sentiment, but her underlying sense of fairness suddenly choked any complaint she could truthfully have made.

“No, I don’t think so,” she said, looking straight at her husband’s aunt. “He was very nice to the children when he noticed them, and he liked me to be nicely dressed, and we were always very comfortable. Would you like to see the children, Miss Brandon?”

She rang the bell and asked Rose to ask Nurse to bring the children down.

“I see you are determined not to give Henry away,” said Miss Brandon, not disapprovingly. “But when is it? I see no other reason for wearing white so soon.”

Her gaze was again so meaningly fixed upon her niece’s white dress that Mrs. Brandon began to blush violently.

“I don’t think I understand,” she faltered, “but if that is what you mean of course it isn’t. I just thought white was less depressing for the children.”

“I am glad to hear it. That I could not have forgiven Henry,” said the disconcerting Miss Brandon, and then the children were brought down, approved, and taken away again.

“Now you can ring for my second chauffeur, Lavinia,” said Miss Brandon. “He always comes with me to help me in and out of the car. I prefer to have the first chauffeur remain at the wheel, for one never knows.”

She then expounded to Mrs. Brandon in the hall, unmoved by the presence of her chauffeur and the parlourmaid, her plans for the disposal of her affairs. As far as Mrs. Brandon, shaken by Rose’s presence, could understand, Francis and Delia were to be the heirs of their aunt’s large fortune, unless she saw fit to leave it to a cousin whom she had never seen. She was then hoisted into her car, the second chauffeur got into his place, the first chauffeur put in the clutch and the equipage moved away. Mrs. Brandon, much the worse for her aunt’s visit, declined Rose’s suggestion of an early cup of tea and went up to the nursery for comfort. Here she found Francis and Delia already having tea. Francis was sitting on a nursery chair with a fat cushion on it. He was wearing a green linen suit with a green linen feeder tied round his neck, and was covered with apricot jam from his large smiling mouth to the roots of his yellow hair. Delia, in a yellow muslin frock with a feeder of yellow towelling, and a yellow ribbon in her brown curls was being fed with strips of bread and butter by Nurse.

“Don’t move, Nurse,” said Mrs. Brandon, as Nurse sketched the gesture of one who has no intention of getting up. “Can I have tea with you?”

“If we had known mummie was coming, we’d have had our clean pinny on,” said Nurse severely to Delia.

“Pinny,” said Delia.

“You’d hardly believe the words she picks up, madam,” said Nurse with quite unjustifiable pride considering how many times a day the words clean pinny were said by her. “We’ll get another cup and saucer out of the cupboard, won’t we, baby, a nice cup and saucer with a duck on it for mummie. Would you like the duck, madam, or the moo-cow?”

Mrs. Brandon expressed a preference for the moo-cow, on hearing which Delia, who was holding a mug of milk to her mouth with both hands, said “Moo-cow,” into it. The milk spluttered all over her face, Francis began to laugh and choked on a piece of bread and butter and jam, Nurse dashed with first aid from one to another, and Mrs. Brandon found herself laughing till suddenly she was crying and couldn’t stop. Her children, deeply interested, stopped choking to stare.

“I don’t know what’s the matter, Nurse,” said Mrs. Brandon through her sobs. “An aunt of Mr. Brandon’s came to call and it was very upsetting.”

“I don’t wonder, madam,” said Nurse, deeply approving her mistress’s show of feeling as suitable to a young widow. “Suppose you go and lie down and I’ll bring you the tea in your room. We’ll give mummie the nice moo-cow cup of tea, won’t we baby? Francis, wipe your mouth on your feeder and say your grace and get down and Nurse will come and wash your hands as soon as she has taken mummie some tea.”

Thanks to the tea and a rest Mrs. Brandon quite soon recovered from her mild hysterics, but the affair was not at an end. On Thursdays, which this day happened to be, the nursery maid had her half-day out; by a great oversight the kitchenmaid who took Nurse’s supper tray up when the nursery maid was out, had been given special leave to go and see her married sister who had had triplets. On any ordinary occasion Nurse would have gone supperless sooner than condescend to go downstairs, just as the second housemaid would sooner have lost her place than deputised for the kitchenmaid, but the urgent need of communicating gossip drove both sides into some semblance of humanity. As soon as Francis and Delia were asleep Nurse went down to the kitchen and there found the second housemaid talking to Rose.

“Well, Nurse,” said the second housemaid, “I was just going to take your tray up as Gladys is out.”

“Thanks, Grace,” said Nanny with the courtesy that a superior should always show to an inferior, “that is very obliging of you, but I hardly feel like touching a thing. Just the bread and butter and that bloater paste and a bit of cheese and a cup of tea.”

She assumed an interesting pallor and smiled faintly.

“Rose feels just like you do, Nurse,” said Grace. “It’s all that upset this afternoon.”

“Madam did mention that she was upset,” said Nurse, exploring the ground, but careful to give nothing away.

“I couldn’t hardly touch my own tea,” said Rose. “That Miss Brandon talking of making her will with Mr. Brandon only four months buried and all. No wonder madam didn’t fancy her tea after that.”

Cook, who had come in as Rose was speaking, said those chauffeurs were nice young fellers and the young one with the little moustache had worked in the works where her brother was, and there were twenty indoors and out at Miss Brandon’s place, and didn’t Nurse want a bit of that cold pork.

“Thanks, Cook, ever so,” said Nurse, “but it would go against my feelings. It gave me quite a turn seeing madam so upset. Seeing Master Francis and baby having their tea seemed to bring it all home as you might say. So I said to madam, If you was to have a nice lay down, madam, you’d feel much better.”

She paused.

“No wonder she was upset,” said Rose. “I knew she was reel upset because I said If you was to have a cup of tea, madam, now, it would do you good, because it was only half-past four and drawing-room tea isn’t till five.”

“My nursery kettle was just on the boil,” said Nurse airily, “so I took madam a cup of tea and she seemed ever so much better when she’d drunk it.”

This was an appalling piece of provocation on Nurse’s part, carefully led up to and deliberately uttered. Between her and Rose there was an unspoken rivalry for the possession of their mistress. Rose had been with Mrs. Brandon since her marriage and was therefore the senior, besides holding the important position of unofficial lady’s maid, but Nurse had through the children an unassailable hold over the household. Rose might be able to bully her mistress about the hour for tea, or the evening dress she should wear, but it was with Nurse that Mrs. Brandon spent an hour or two in the nursery or the garden every day, Nurse that she allowed to help her to get flowers for the church, or to finish the half-dozen hideous and badly cut flannelette nightgowns that were her forced contribution to a thing called Personal Service that levied blackmail on the gentry. Rose knew in her heart that if it came to a showdown Nurse would win, for Mrs. Brandon as a mother was as incapable as she was adoring, and this did not improve her feelings. Nurse, equally conscious of this vital fact, was more polite to Rose than anyone could be expected to bear. To-day she had made an incursion into the enemy’s territory that would not easily be forgiven. If Mrs. Brandon chose to demean herself to have tea in the nursery, Rose could but pity her, while admitting that she had a perfect right to have tea with her own children. But that her mistress should refuse the cup of tea she had so kindly offered and then accept the offering from Nurse, not even in the nursery but in her own room, sacred to Rose’s ministrations, that was an insult Rose would not readily forget, and for which she chose to put the entire blame on her rival. So she said, in a general way, that Indian tea wasn’t no good for the headache.

Nurse said in an equally general and equally offensive way that so long as tea was made with boiling water, it didn’t matter if it was Indian or China.

Cook said she found a good dose was the best thing for the headache, but it must be a good dose, to which both housemaids added a graphic description of the effect a good dose had on (a) a bed-ridden aunt, and (b) a cousin who had fits.

Rose said to Cook it was no wonder madam didn’t have no appetite for her dinner, poor thing, to which Nurse was just preparing a barbed reply when to everyone’s mingled disappointment and relief the kitchenmaid suddenly appeared, and by sitting down and bursting into tears at once became the centre of interest. Cook at once provided a cup of very strong tea and while drinking it the kitchenmaid explained with sobs and gulps that two of the triplets were dead and looked that beautiful that you wouldn’t credit it. Everyone applauded her display of feeling and a delightful conversation took place about similar events in everyone’s own family circle. Nurse, who only recognised the children of the gentry, circles in which triplets are for some obscure social or economic reason practically unknown, came off poorly in this contest and retired quietly with her tray.

But from that day the silent struggle for the soul of the unconscious Mrs. Brandon became the ruling passion in Nurse and Rose. If Nurse brushed and twisted Delia’s curls with absent-minded ferocity, or Rose cleaned the silver ornaments in the drawing-room till they were severely dented and had to go to Barchester to be repaired, they were not thinking of their respective charges, but of an enemy above and below stairs. When Francis went to school and Delia had a French governess, Rose’s hopes soared high. Mrs. Brandon had intended to give Nurse notice, with a huge tip and glowing recommendations, but from day to day she found that she dared not do it, from month to month Nurse’s position became stronger, and from year to year Nurse stayed on, partly as maid to Delia, partly as general utility, always in a state of armed neutrality towards Rose.

After this terrifying visit, nearly seventeen years ago, Miss Brandon had never visited Stories again, but from time to time had summoned her niece and her children to Brandon Abbey. These visits seemed to Mrs. Brandon to have been the inevitable occasion for some outburst from her offspring. It was here that Francis had fallen through a hot-house roof, where he had no business to be, cutting his leg to the bone and bringing down the best grape vine in his fall; here that he had laboriously baled all the water out of the small lily-pond with one of the best copper preserving pans, abstracted no one ever discovered how from the kitchen regions, leaving all the high-bred goldfish to die in the mud. Here it was that Delia, usually so good, had been found in Miss Brandon’s dressing-room, that Holy of Holies, peacocking before the glass in her great-aunt’s mantle and bonnet. Here it was that Francis, at a later age, had learnt to drive a car with the connivance of the second chauffeur and run over one of Miss Brandon’s peacocks, while on the same ill-omened visit Delia had broken the jug and basin in the best spare bedroom where she had been sent to wash her hands, and flooded the Turkey carpet.

Miss Brandon had made very little comment on these misfortunes, but her niece noticed that after each of them she had talked a good deal about the cousin she had never seen, the possible inheritor of her money. Mrs. Brandon, who did not care in the least what her aunt’s plans might be, but was genuinely sorry for the indomitable old lady, yearly becoming more bed-ridden as she had predicted, was at last goaded into a mild remonstrance, pointing out to Miss Brandon that if it had not been for her nephew Henry, the children would never have existed, to which Miss Brandon had replied cryptically that it took two to make a quarrel.

Thinking of all this and of her aunt’s letter, Mrs. Brandon carried her flowers into the little room known as the flower room, along one wall of which ran a long marble slab with four basins in it, relics of a former Brandon with four gardening daughters. She then fetched yesterday’s flowers from the hall and living-rooms, refilled the vases, and began to arrange her flowers. This she always called “my housekeeping”, adding that it took more time than all her other duties put together, but she couldn’t bear anyone else to do it, thus giving the impression of one who was a martyr to her feeling for beauty. As a matter of fact she spoke no more than the truth, for Cook arranged the menus, and Nurse looked after the linen and did all the sewing and darning, so that Mrs. Brandon would have been hard put to it to find anything useful to do.

Presently Delia’s voice at the telephone in the hall penetrated her consciousness, and she called her daughter’s name.

“Oh, bother,” said Delia’s voice to her unknown correspondent, “mummie’s yelling for me. Hang on a moment. What is it, mummie?” she inquired, looking into the flower room.

“It’s about Aunt Sissie, darling. She said Wednesday, so don’t arrange the picnic that day.”

“Oh, mother, any day would do for Aunt Sissie. We must have Wednesday for the picnic or the Morlands can’t come.”

“I can’t help it,” said Mrs. Brandon, massing sweet peas in a bowl. “We haven’t been for ages and she’s all alone, poor old thing.”

“Don’t be so mercenary, mother,” said Delia. “Here Francis, come here a moment.”

Francis, who was passing through the hall came to the flower room door and asked what the matter was.

“It’s mummie, going all horse-leechy,” said Delia. “Wednesday’s the only possible day for the picnic and now mummie says we must go and be dutiful to Aunt Sissie. I wish Aunt Sissie would give all her money to that cousin of hers straight away and leave us in peace. Oh, mummie, do be sensible.”

“I am,” said Mrs. Brandon, “and I don’t see why we shouldn’t be kind to poor Aunt Sissie even if she is rich. If I were very old and alone and spent most of my time in bed, I would be very glad when people visited me.”

At this both her children laughed loudly.

Nurse, on her way upstairs with an armful of sewing, stopped to interfere.

“Oh, Nurse—” said all three at once.

“I want you, Miss Delia, so I can try on your tennis frock,” said she. “Come up with me now.”

“Oh, Nurse, any time will do. I’m telephoning now. Be an angel and I’ll come up presently. Mummie wants us to go over to Aunt Sissie on Wednesday, and that’s the only good day for the picnic.”

“Nonsense, Miss Delia,” said Nurse. “There’s plenty of other days in the week. Now come straight up with me and try that dress on.”

Delia followed her old Nurse mutinously upstairs, making faces, till Nurse, who appeared to have, as she had often told the children when they were small thus frightening them horribly, eyes in the back of her head, said sharply that that was enough, and so they vanished.

“Francis, darling,” said Mrs. Brandon, who had collected another great bunch of sweet peas and was holding them thoughtfully to her face, “we must go to Aunt Sissie on Wednesday.”

“Yes, I think we must,” said Francis. “Anyone who didn’t know you would think you were mercenary, darling, but I know you haven’t the wits to concentrate. You’ve got a kind heart though, and anyone who looked at you sympathising with people would think you really cared. Give me a smell of those sweet peas.”

Mrs. Brandon held up the flowers and Francis sniffed them violently.

“There are few pleasures like really burrowing one’s nose into sweet peas,” he said, much refreshed. “You’re a bit like them, darling, all soft pinky-purply colours and a nice smell. Do you want your tall handsome son to help you to take the flowers to the church? It will look so well if we go together, and everyone will say what a comfort I am to you and what a wonderful mother you have been.”

Mrs. Brandon laughed with great good humour and gave Francis a long basket to fill with tall flowers. Then they walked across the garden, up a lane, past the Cow and Sickle, and so into the churchyard by the side gate.

Mrs. Brandon could never be thankful enough that her husband had died at Cannes and been decently buried in the English cemetery. If he had been buried in Pomfret Madrigal church she would have had to keep his grave and memory decorated with flowers. If she had undertaken this pious duty herself she would certainly have forgotten it and left the flowers, a wet mush of decay, to scandalise the village. If she had told Turpin the gardener to look after it, not only would the village have been scandalised, but he would have chosen the stiffest asters and dahlias like rosettes, bedded out begonias, even cultivated immortelles for the purpose, and given the little plot the air of a County Council Park. The only alternative Mrs. Brandon could imagine was to have what might be called an all-weather grave, sprinkled with chips from the stone-mason’s yard, or battened down under a granite slab, and to do this to the unconscious Mr. Brandon would have seemed to his widow a little unkind. So Mr. Brandon reposed at Cannes and a sum of money was paid yearly to keep his memory as green as the climate allowed, while a neat tablet in Pomfret Madrigal church bore witness in excellent lettering to the dates of his birth and death.

Pomfret Madrigal church was of great antiquity, being the remains of the former Abbey of that name. Part of it was supposed to date from the reign of King John, but as that particular part was considered by archaeologists to be buried in the thick chancel walls, everyone was at liberty to have his own opinion. A few years previously the Vicar, Mr. Miller, a newcomer and an ardent enthusiast for his new church, had discovered faint traces of colour in a very dark corner high up on the south wall. Mrs. Brandon, always pleased to give pleasure, had made a handsome contribution towards a fund for church restoration, a learned professor famed for extracting mural paintings from apparently blank walls had visited the church, and the work had been put in hand. After several months’ slow, careful, and to the Vicar maddeningly exciting work, Professor Lancelot had brought to light two square feet of what might have been a patterned border, and a figure, apparently standing on its head, which was variously identified as Lucifer, Fulke de Pomfret who had impounded some of the Abbey pigs in revenge for alleged depredations on his lady’s herb garden, and Bishop Wyckens who had made himself extremely unpopular with the Abbey about the matter of some waste land over at Starveacres. However, all these differences of opinion were drowned and forgotten in Professor Lancelot’s supreme discovery that the fragment of border might almost with certainty be attributed to Nicholas de Hogpen, an extremely prolific artist practically none of whose work was known. Others supported the view that the work should stand to the credit of an unknown monk whose work in Northumberland was described in an imperfect MS. which the owner, Mr. Amery P. Otis of Brookline, Mass., would not allow anyone to see. The correspondence on this subject, beginning in the Journal of the Society of Barsetshire Archaeologists, had overflowed into the Sunday Times and Observer, causing several correspondents to write to the Editor about yellow-backed tits who had nested near mural paintings, or the fact that their great-great-grandfather had as a child sat on the knee of a very old man whose grandfather said he remembered someone who said he had heard of the Reformation. The Vicar read every word of correspondence and pasted all the cuttings into an album, as also a photograph from the Daily Spectrum with the caption “Rector of Pomfret Madrigal says Mural Paintings unique,” and an inset called The Rev. Milker.

Since these eventful doings the paintings had gradually receded into the walls and were now invisible except to the eye of faith, which could often be found in the tourist season, guide book in hand, twisting itself almost upside down in its efforts to make out the inverted figure.

The July morning was now very hot. The little churchyard, on a slope facing the south, was shimmering with heat, and the flowers in the jam jars and Canadian salmon tins on the poorer graves were already wilting. In spite of her shady hat and her parasol of a most becoming shade of pink, Mrs. Brandon was glad to get into the coolness of the little church. She slipped into a pew, knelt for a moment, and then emerged, apparently spiritually much refreshed.

“What do you say, darling, when you do that?” asked Francis. “I’ve often wondered.”

Mrs. Brandon looked guilty.

“I never quite know,” she said. “I try to concentrate, but the only way I can concentrate is to hold my breath very hard, and that stops me thinking. And when I shut my eyes I see all sorts of spokes and fireworks. I always mean to ask to be nicer and kinder, but things like Rose wanting to change her afternoon out, or Aunt Sissie’s letter, come into my mind at once. But I did have one very good idea, which was that if Rose changes her afternoon we could have the picnic that day and kill two birds with one stone.”

“People have been excommunicated for less than that,” said Francis. “Pull yourself together, darling; here comes Mr. Miller.”

Mr. Miller, in the cassock and biretta that were the joy of his life and that no one grudged him, came up.

“Good morning, good morning,” he said, not so much in a spirit of vain repetition as in double greeting.

“I always feel I ought to ask you to bless me,” said Mrs. Brandon taking his hand and looking up at him.

“My dear lady!” said Mr. Miller, much embarrassed, and only just stopping himself saying “It is rather you who should bless me.”

“Come off it, mamma,” said Francis kindly but firmly. “Don’t you know my mamma well enough yet, Mr. Miller, to realise that she is a prey to saying what she thinks most effective?”

“I don’t think you ought to talk like that in church, Francis,” said his mother severely. “Come along, the altar is waiting for us.”

At this Francis exploded in a reverent guffaw and handed the basket of flowers to the Vicar, saying that he would fill the watering can at the tap in the churchyard and bring it in. So Mr. Miller found himself alone with Mrs. Brandon and an armful of flowers, and didn’t know if he ought to stay with her or visit the poor, who were always kind to him but at the same time gave him the impression that they had just stopped a deeply absorbing conversation, probably about himself, and were only waiting till his back was turned to continue it. Mr. Miller was about Mrs. Brandon’s age and having never met anyone that he felt like marrying had romantic views on celibacy. His richer parishioners liked him and he dined out a good deal, while the poorer part of his flock accepted him with good-humoured tolerance and always put off the christenings till he had come back from his yearly holiday. Funerals unfortunately could not so be postponed, though it was considered distinctly bad taste in Old Turpin, Mrs. Brandon’s gardener’s uncle, to have died four days before the Vicar’s return, in particularly hot weather. Weddings were also postponed so that the contracting parties could have the benefit of their own priest, but since the sexton’s daughter had produced a fine pair of twins owing to her insistence on waiting to celebrate the nuptials till Mr. Miller came back from Switzerland, he had been very firm on the subject.

As was inevitable, he was romantically in love with Mrs. Brandon, but luckily for his own peace of mind he did not recognise the symptoms which he mistook for respect and admiration, though why these respectable qualities should make one give at the knees and become damp in the hands, he did not inquire.

Now Francis came back with the watering can and the vestry waste-paper basket for the dead flowers, and Mrs. Brandon arranged sheaves of gladioli to her own satisfaction. All three walked down the church together and emerged blinking into the hot noonday glare. Mrs. Brandon slowly put up her parasol, looking so angelic that Francis felt obliged to ask his mother what she was thinking about.

“I was wondering,” said she, “if one ought to bring a watering can into the church. Wouldn’t it look better to bring the vases outside and fill them at the tap?”

“My mother is the most truthful woman I know,” said Francis to Mr. Miller, “except when she isn’t.”

Mr. Miller wanted to say that Mrs. Brandon’s touch would sanctify even a watering can and that Francis ought not to speak lightly of such a thing as Truth, but was overcome by nervousness and said nothing. Francis said, Well, they must be getting along, and Mr. Miller was inspired by desperation to ask them into the Vicarage to look at the new wall-paper in his study. Accordingly they walked through the little gate into the Vicarage garden and up by the yew hedge to the sixteenth-century stone Vicarage which was basking in the sun. The new wall-paper, which turned out to be that part of the wall where the damp patch used to be, freshly distempered, was duly admired.

“One does feel,” said Mrs. Brandon, sinking elegantly into a very comfortable leather armchair, “that this house needs a woman.”

Francis, alarmed by his mother’s fresh outburst of truthfulness, made gestures behind Mr. Miller’s back, designed to convey to his mother that the Vicar’s cassock and biretta made such a suggestion very unbecoming. Mr. Miller felt that if Mrs. Brandon were always sitting in that chair on a hot summer morning in the subdued light that filtered through the outside blinds, holding the broken head of a white gladiolus in her gloved hand, the parish would be much easier to manage.

“It really needs a good housekeeper,” said Mrs. Brandon, continuing the train of her own thoughts. “Turpin’s Hettie is a nice girl, but she is much too kind to insects. She has never killed a spider in her life. Look!”

And she pointed the gladiolus accusingly at a corner where a fat spider was dealing with a daddy-long-legs.

“Oh dear!” said Mr. Miller, in despair.

“I’ll hoick her down,” said Francis, looking round for something that would reach the ceiling. “Can I take one of your oars, Mr. Miller?”

Without waiting for permission he took down from the wall the oar with which Mr. Miller had stroked Lazarus to victory in Eights Week, and made a pat at the spider. The spider was dislodged, but with great presence of mind clung to the end of the blade with all her arms and legs.

“Get off,” said Francis, waving the oar. “Help, Mr. Miller, she is laying hold with her hands or whatever it says. It’s more in your line than mine.”

On hearing this suggestion of clerical interference the spider ran down the oar in a threatening way. Mr. Miller flapped feebly at her with his biretta, which caused her, or so Francis subsequently asserted, to bare her fangs and snarl. Mrs. Brandon got up and enveloped the spider in her handkerchief, which she then threw out of the window into the heliotrope.

“Thank you, darling,” said Francis, putting the oar back on the wall. “It takes a woman to fight a woman.”

“I wonder why spiders should be female?” said Mr. Miller, so overwrought by his narrow escape that he hardly knew what he was saying.

“I suppose it’s because they eat their husbands,” said Mrs. Brandon.

“Mamma darling, don’t,” said Francis, “not in the Vicarage,” thus completing Mr. Miller’s confusion.

“Please rescue my handkerchief, Francis,” said Mrs. Brandon, “only see that the spider has really gone.”

Francis leant his long form over the window sill, picked up the handkerchief, shook it and returned it to his mother. Mr. Miller, who had had a wild thought of keeping the handkerchief for himself, realised that his chance was lost.

“It smells so deliciously of heliotrope now,” said Mrs. Brandon, holding it to her face. This delightful gesture gave a little comfort to her host, who would be able to reflect that his flowers had furnished the scent that pleased his guest.

Just as the good-byes were getting under way, the study door opened and a dark young man of poetic and pale appearance came in, and seeing company began to back out.

“Wait a moment, Hilary,” said Mr. Miller. “Mrs. Brandon, this is Mr. Grant who is reading with me. He only arrived last night. And this is Francis Brandon, Hilary Grant.”

Further handshaking took place and it seemed that the visit had really come to an end, when on the doorstep Mrs. Brandon suddenly stopped.

“I was thinking,” she said, “that it would be so nice, Mr. Miller, if you would dine with us next Wednesday. It will only be a kind of cold meal, but if you care to come we’d love to have you. And would Mr. Grant perhaps come too?”

Mr. Miller accepted for himself and his pupil and the Brandons went away.

“Really, mamma,” Francis expostulated, “I didn’t think you had it in you to be so mean!”

“I know quite well what you are hinting,” said his mother, with distant dignity. “But it isn’t my fault if Rose changes her afternoon out, and I have been meaning to ask Mr. Miller for some time, and it isn’t as if being a clergyman made one not able to eat cold supper. And now I must answer Aunt Sissie’s letter. I cannot think how it is that one never has time to do anything.”

“Because you never have anything to do, darling,” said Francis. “You take yourself in, but you can’t take in your tall, handsome son. Come along or we shall be late for lunch and Rose will lower.”