Читать книгу Marling Hall - Angela Margaret Thirkell - Страница 5

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On Tuesday, as arranged, Miss Bunting stepped across the lawn to the lime walk. Nurse coming up at almost the same moment with her flock handed them over to Miss Bunting and retired, giving the little girls many injunctions to be good and not worry Miss Bunting and be sure to be back soon after four to get their hands washed for tea. Miss Bunting, who quite understood that the second part of nurse’s speech was in oratio obliqua for her own benefit, said she had her watch with her and they would be back by a quarter past at the very latest. They then had a delightful walk, chosen by Diana and Clare, to the manure heap, the back of the potting shed, the rubbish heap, the gardener’s pig, the barn cat which had six kittens as wild as itself and lay spitting and sparking in a nest of hay, the horrid yet exciting place in the kitchen garden where a rook dangled on a string to keep the birds away, and big rain water tub with scum on the top of it and the little steps that led down to the furnace for the glass houses which could not now be heated. And all the time Diana asked questions or demanded stories of naughty children, and Miss Bunting gave the right answers and recounted the hair-raising deeds of her naughtiest pupils, and at four-fifteen precisely they mounted the steep stair to the nursery. Here nurse, as temporary chatelaine, received the party graciously, made light of a stain on Diana’s frock and Clare’s very dirty hands, and took them off to wash. Miss Bunting, after washing her hands in Lettice’s bathroom, sat down by the nursery window and thought gratefully of the Marling family who had saved her from being a distressed gentlewoman. In the case of Mrs. Marling her very real gratitude was necessarily mixed with the faint contempt that every good governess must feel for the provider of governess-fodder, unable themselves to educate their young, yet daring to meddle with the educator. For Mrs. Marling’s children her feelings were varied. Bill being married and rarely at home was almost a stranger to her, Lucy was too settled in her rather overbearing ways of a spoilt younger child to meet with her approval, but in Oliver and Lettice she saw exactly what she would wish any pupil of hers to be and felt for them an equal devotion. Lettice, it is true, scored heavily by having two little girls, well brought up and amenable to her influence, but Oliver was a man and she had always liked boys best, partly because they had an affection for her that she never quite inspired in their sisters. Also Oliver had trouble with his eyes and reminded Miss Bunting of Lord Hugh Skeynes who had to stay away from Eton for a term and use his eyes as little as possible while she read book after book to him in the schoolroom. It seemed a good omen to her that he had grown up with almost normal eyesight and she cherished a deep faith that Oliver would emerge in a few years with an eagle’s vision.

Now nurse came back with her charges all neat and clean and delivered them to Miss Bunting while she boiled the kettle for tea. The tea being made Diana scrambled by herself onto a chair with a very fat cushion on it and Clare was lifted into the tall chair, though it was very obvious that it would not contain her buxom form much longer. Nurse tied on their feeders, begged Miss Bunting to sit down and took her own place opposite.

“Will this be too strong, miss,” said nurse as she poured the tea out of a comfortable brown teapot, “or shall I add just a little hot water?”

“That will do very nicely, thank you, nurse,” said Miss Bunting. “A little milk please. No sugar, thank you. I gave up sugar in the last war, though I used to take two lumps.”

“It is quite remarkable the way we all get used to things,” said nurse. “Hand the bread and butter to Miss Bunting, Diana, and mind you hold it straight That’s right. Now take a piece for yourself and fold it nicely in half. I used to be quite a one for sugar myself, but now I never miss it I always say every lump you don’t take is one up against someone we won’t mention.”

While she was speaking nurse doubled a piece of bread and butter, cut it into fingers and put it on Clare’s plate, and then helped herself.

“It is the same with butter,” said Miss Bunting. “I used to help myself quite recklessly, but now we have to be careful I find my ration is quite enough for the week.”

“I’m sure I find exactly the same,” said nurse. “And when we think of our brave fighting men, really an ounce or so of butter seems quite a paltry affair. Don’t drink your milk too fast, Diana.”

“I hope you have good news of your brother, nurse,” said Miss Bunting.

“Sid’s got free stripes,” said Diana.

“She hears everything,” said nurse, looking proudly at Miss Bunting, who thought this was highly probable. “Yes, Sid has three stripes, hasn’t he? I must show you his photo after tea, miss. Diana, pass the cake to Miss Bunting. We get very nice cakes from Pulford in the village, much nicer than the cakes from Barchester.”

Diana took a small cake, rammed it into her mouth and handed the plate to Miss Bunting.

“Diana, take that cake out of your mouth at once,” said nurse. “What will Miss Bunting say if you choke?”

Diana removed a rather unpleasant mass of cake from her mouth and smiled angelically.

“Some little people,” said nurse, “are always over excited when they see company.”

“When I was with Lord Lundy,” said Miss Bunting, “it was just the same. As soon as anyone came to tea in the schoolroom you would have thought the children were little savages.”

“And that’s what they’d all be if Some People had their way,” said nurse. “I always say, miss, if someone we won’t name had been properly brought up we shouldn’t be having all this trouble. Clare, don’t blow into your milk, you know it’s not the way to drink.”

“Quite right, nurse,” said Miss Bunting approvingly. “There’s nothing like the English nursery for making ladies and gentlemen of them.”

Nurse, taking this tribute as her right, said she always understood foreigners had no home life to speak of which really made one feel their goings on weren’t to be surprised at, but she was sure Miss Bunting was ready for another cup of tea. As she was pouring it out there was a knock on the door and in walked David Leslie.

“Uncle David,” said Diana with her mouth full.

Clare, who had her mug to her mouth, said what sounded like “Plum Duff” and choked.

“Now that’s enough,” said nurse, taking Clare’s mug away and wiping her milky moustache off with her feeder. “I don’t know what the gentleman will think.”

“Bunny, my adored one!” said David. “Good-afternoon, nurse. I suppose you haven’t got Mrs. Watson anywhere about? They told me at the Hall she was down here.”

“I’m afraid you’ve just missed her, sir,” said nurse, who had not the faintest idea who David was, but recognising him with a nurse’s infallible instinct as a proper gentleman, knew it was all right. “She has gone up to tea at the Hall. She went by the walled garden and the flagged walk I think.”

“And I came down the drive in my car because I cannot walk, only fly,” said David. “Bunny, pray present me.”

“This is Mr. David Leslie, nurse,” said Miss Bunting. “He’s a distant connection of the family’s.”

“Well, to be sure,” said nurse. “You’ll excuse my saying so, sir, but I was temporary nurse with Mrs. Graham one summer, before I came to Mrs. Watson, and we used to hear quite a lot about Uncle David in the nursery.”

“I’m sure you did,” said David, “and not at all to my credit.”

“Oh no, sir, I’m sure,” said nurse with a superior though respectful smile.

“Well, to make up for it, suppose you invite me to tea,” said David. “That is if Miss Bunting doesn’t object. Will I do, Bunny?”

He held out his hands, palms upwards.

“And my nails, too,” he added, turning them over. “Clean as nurse’s apron.”

“It’s more than they used to be,” said Miss Bunting, after looking at them through her pince-nez, while nurse bridled.

Without further ceremony David pulled up a chair between Miss Bunting and Clare. Nurse brought a clean cup, saucer, knife, spoon and plate. The little girls began to get excited. David asked for two lumps of sugar on the grounds that all birds liked sugar and birds flew and he flew, so he must have sugar. Nurse and Miss Bunting, those apostles of self-denial and fighting the blockade, were delighted by his extravagance, both holding secretly that laws were not for well-connected flying officers. Discipline melted. Diana got down from her chair and climbed with great firmness onto David’s knees where she fondled the lapels of his coat with a loving though buttery hand and insisted on hanging her own feeder, by this time in a far from agreeable state, round his neck. Clare’s emotion took the form of drinking copious draughts of milk while looking at him over or round the side of her mug, so that most of her milk dribbled down her chin and nurse had to get a cloth and wipe up the mess. But though at any other time such offences would have been punished with rigour, or nipped before they budded, nurse looked on the scene of debauch with a lenient eye. Partly from a vague sentiment that we couldn’t do too much for our brave flying heroes, but far more from the feeling, previously alluded to, that the gentry, and more especially those with titled relatives, could do no ill.

While nurse cleared away the tea-things and washed the children’s hands and faces, David devoted himself to Miss Bunting, enquiring earnestly after her married sister who was a clergyman’s widow and her niece (daughter of the deceased clergyman) who was a deaconess at Wolverhampton: and though Miss Bunting knew that he had no interest at all in her relations (as indeed, nor had she, nor had they any in her) and David knew that she knew, his old governess could not withstand his cajolery, and melted visibly in his careless beams.

Now the children returned, ravishingly clean, and it was Clare’s turn to sit on his knees, while Diana plied him with questions about why he couldn’t walk but only fly, and requested to be taken in his aeroplane. At this point David suddenly felt, as he so often had in various scenes of life, that the one thing he wanted was to be somewhere else. It was never in his scheme to thwart his own inclinations. Alleging that it would appear rude if he did not go and see Mrs. Marling he bade farewell to his hostesses.

“Say good-bye to Uncle David,” said nurse, who had entirely adopted him as one of the family, “and say we hope he’ll come again soon.”

Each little girl embraced one of his legs with fervour.

“Good-bye, Bunny,” said David to Miss Bunting, his efforts to approach her considerably hampered by his living leg-irons. “Have I been good?”

Miss Bunting looked piercingly at her ex-pupil.

“You cannot fool all the people all the time, David,” she said. “You will probably find Lettice and her mother in the village. They are showing some friends the Red House. Anyone will tell you where it is.”

Nurse then detached her two limpets from the visitor’s legs and David went down the steep stair, his lively nature feeling an unwonted deflation. But nothing had power over him for long, and in two minutes he had shaken off the faint depression caused by his old governess’s words and was driving rather too fast down the back drive and so into the village.

Marling Melicent is a pretty village, though not one of Barsetshire’s show places, with some good houses of gold-grey stone and some handsome red brick houses anything up to two hundred years old. Here and there an eyesore may be seen in the shape of an Edwardian villa, built indeed of red brick, but of how different a shade and texture from the older buildings. One particularly revolting specimen on the irregular shaped green, two doors off the Marling Arms, caught David’s eye and he slowed down, the better to savour its horrors. Built of a hard purple-red brick with patterns of grey brick inlaid on it, the upper story painted with sham timbering, the side nearest the public house consisting chiefly of overlapping tiles of the same uncompromising red as the bricks, with scalloped edges, it had several gables of different sizes, leaded windows flush with the outer wall and a kind of Swiss chalet of a porch. The front door was bright blue. The front garden, to David’s reverential joy, had a winding path, a very small pond edged with synthetic rocks, three dwarfs and a toadstool, and a concrete rabbit. A large monkey puzzle blocked what looked like the dining-room window where David could see several coloured witch balls hanging. The further to enjoy this sight he stopped altogether, behind a car which was standing near the front gate. A tall man who had just finished locking the car looked round and saw David.

“David,” he said (and very well he said it David had to admit) and tossed back a lock of hair.

“Hullo, Geoffrey,” said David. “I didn’t know you lived here.”

“My dear, I don’t yet,” said Mr. Harvey, leaning his arms negligently on the open window of David’s car. “My sister and I want a house. Mrs. Marling and Lettice Watson think this would suit us. Do you know them?”

David felt unreasonably annoyed at this question.

“The worst of a little car like mine,” he said, “is that if you bend down to talk to anyone inside it you look so peculiar from behind.”

Mr. Harvey straightened himself with a slightly hurried negligence.

“The Marlings are cousins of mine,” David continued. “I’m rather ashamed of the sort of house they expect you to live in.”

“One does so understand that feeling,” said Mr. Harvey, “but the dwarfs alone are worth the rent the owner is asking. I don’t know what the inside’s like. Come in and see.”

He held the front gate open with what David was quite sure he knew to be feline grace. David locked his car and walked into the garden.

“So perfectly wrong, don’t you think,” said Mr. Harvey, indicating the front door. He turned the handle and stood aside for David to pass. Inside the blue door was what house agents will call a lobby, about four feet square, and beyond it a wrought-iron grille, showing a narrow passage and a staircase painted a shiny green. The two men squeezed with difficulty past a very thin table with a top painted to imitate marble and twisted iron legs. Voices were heard on the right. Mr. Harvey made for a door which had no handle, but a large rather dirty looking white tassel hanging on a cord that came through a hole where the handle ought to be.

“Pull the bobbin and the latch will fly up,” said David encouragingly.

Mr. Harvey did so and pushed the door open. Before them was the drawing room. Pale green shiny walls, tall gilt lamps, white upholstered chairs and sofa, a large reproduction of a picture of bright red horses, marbled mantelpiece just wide enough for a matchbox to fall off, met their interested eyes. Near the window, below which a negro painted black and gold supported a small semi-circular table of substitute malachite, Mrs. Marling and Lettice were talking to what was obviously Miss Harvey, a woman not quite young, as fair as her brother was dark, with a more determined expression.

“Frances,” said Mr. Harvey, “we must have this house. Pure Sloane Square and really, my dear, too off-white.”

“Oh, David!” said Lettice. “How very nice of you to come. Mother, you remember David. I told you I saw him again the other day at the dancing class. Miss Harvey, this is my cousin, David Leslie. Where did you come from?”

David explained that he had missed her at the Hall, followed her to the stables and had tea with her offspring and Miss Bunting. Mrs. Marling said if they had come to look at the house they had better get it over. Mr. Harvey said the dwarfs had quite made up his mind for him, but Frances had better look at the bedrooms and the kitchens. So the whole party went into the neat, clean tiled kitchen and scullery, looked at the dining-room which had a sham refectory table, a looking-glass with a grille over it all across the end opposite the window, and chairs with imitation vellum seats, and Mr. Harvey kept up a continuous ecstatic murmur of “Off-white; pure, pure Sloane Square.” Under Miss Harvey’s leadership they then went upstairs and inspected the bath with black glass surround before passing on to the best bedroom.

“I always feel a certain delicacy, or indelicacy, about going into other people’s bedrooms,” said David, “and there is something about beds that are very flat that says Sin to me.”

Mr. Harvey said one so understood that feeling.

“I can’t think why,” said David warming to his subject, “an almost square divan bed with only a hard bolster and a cover of shiny green and white striped chintz should call to my mind the word Debauchery. One would expect debauchery to mean red plush and electric lights with pink shades. By the way, Geoffrey, where do people with beds like that keep their pillows? You ought to know if you are going to live here.”

“Perhaps,” said Lettice, “people with D.T. aren’t allowed pillows. They might suffocate themselves.”

Miss Harvey, who had not spoken much but had made notes of things in a very business-like way as she went over the house, said it all depended. With violent cases of dipsomania one had to strap them down, even if one had a male nurse, but she didn’t think she or Geoffrey would need it.

“What made you think of D.T., Mrs. Watson?” she asked.

Lettice hesitated and looked at Mr. Harvey. It had not occurred to her that his sister might not know about the late Mr. Smith’s death and she wished she had not spoken.

“I never told you, Frances, that the late occupant died of drink,” said Mr. Harvey. “So stupid of me.”

“It doesn’t matter in the least,” said his sister.

“I’ll sleep in this room if you like,” said Mr. Harvey, with just too much carelessness.

“Certainly not,” said his sister.

This brief passage gave Lettice a curious impression that the Harveys were quite independent of outsiders and would not really notice if they all vanished. Miss Harvey except for her fair hair and skin was not unlike her brother, and though her face was stronger she seemed to move with the same impulse. David thought her an uncommonly handsome woman for one who was not quite young, more of a gentleman than her brother and quite worth a little exploring while his leave lasted.

Mrs. Marling, untroubled by such musings, had been considering the matter of the pillows and suddenly saw light.

“Mrs. Smith will know where the pillows are,” she said. “She ought to be here now. She knew we were coming.”

David, who was near the window, reported that something that no one could mistake for anything but a widow was looking at the dwarfs, on hearing which Mr. Harvey, expressing a fear that she might want to take them away, thus ruining his future happiness, begged everyone to come downstairs. So back to the drawing-room they went, where Mr. Harvey stood at the window eyeing his future landlady malevolently while the rest of the party discussed the decoration and furnishing which happily combined Spanish and Jacobean with functional, or so at least Miss Harvey said, though which the sham vellum lamp shades with semi-transparent pseudo-Canalettos on them and ivory velvet ribbon were, she did not say.

“She is coming in,” said Mr. Harvey.

And in came a very thin woman in deep black who had obviously been good-looking once and still had fine eyes. Mrs. Marling and Lettice, who had known her slightly for many years and had no particular interest in her, introduced the possible tenants.

“Of course,” said Mrs. Smith, sitting down on the little off-white brocade sofa, its ends lashed to its back by thick oxidised silver ropes, “I would never have dreamt of letting the house while Mr. Smith was alive.”

Everyone felt very uncomfortable and at a distinct disadvantage. Everyone, that is, except Mrs. Marling, who having given up some of her valuable time to a deed of kindness for her son Oliver’s friend, and knowing that Mrs. Smith wanted to let the house, beat the devil’s tattoo impatiently on her bag.

“Miss Harvey and Mr. Harvey, Mrs. Smith,” she said.

“I’m sure I’m very pleased to meet you,” said Mrs. Smith. “Of course Mr. Smith always did the business and I find it very trying to be left alone like this. I really sleep so badly now that I must get away as soon as possible, and owing to Mr. Smith’s affairs being in such a bad way I must let our little nest as well as I can. You don’t know what it is to be a widow, Miss Harvey.”

Miss Harvey confessed that she didn’t, but unwilling to sink too low in her possible landlady’s estimation, said she hoped she would some day.

“You never will,” said Mrs. Smith. “There aren’t two like Mr. Smith in the whole world.”

“One does so understand that feeling,” said Mr. Harvey.

Mrs. Smith wiped her eyes.

“Pardon me,” she said, “but you can’t. Mr. Smith had the house beautifully decorated when he bought it a year ago, all to tone. I never thought I would have to let it. You only have to look round the drawing-room to see the sort of man Mr. Smith was.”

Lettice and David looked simultaneously at the wastepaper basket which was covered with green brocade and had a shiny coloured reproduction of the Sistine Madonna glued onto it with a dull gold edging.

“Four guineas a week, you said, Mrs. Smith,” said Mrs. Marling. “And what about plate and linen?”

Mrs. Smith said she would never have let her house if Mr. Smith were alive. “Mr. Smith always passed the remark,” said Mrs. Smith, addressing Mr. Harvey as the weakest opponent, “that the house would be a little gold mine to me if anything were to happen to him, and ‘Joyce,’ he said—Joyce is my name, you know—‘don’t take a penny less than four guineas, or five if you leave your silver and your linen.’ All the bed linen is in art colouring.”

“Very well, that’s settled,” said Mrs. Marling. “And my friends can come in almost at once. Who is your lawyer?”

“Mr. Smith was always his own lawyer,” said the widow. “You don’t know what it is to be alone.”

“Keith and Son of Barchester saw about his will, I think,” and Mrs. Marling, who had picked up this fact from the senior partner, Mr. Robert Keith, at the time. “So Miss Harvey and her brother will get their lawyer to communicate with them. Is that all right, Miss Harvey?”

Mrs. Smith then took her leave, bidding a farewell to her cottage that made the Harveys appear as oppressors of the poor and unprotected, but much to Mr. Harvey’s relief not mentioning the dwarfs. The Harveys thanked Mrs. Marling very much for her help, without which, Mr. Harvey said, they would probably have given the whole thing up in despair, or a least been hypnotised into asking Mrs. Smith to share the house with them till better times. They then went back to Norton Park.

Mrs. Marling and Lettice had walked down from the Hall and were quite ready to walk back, but David insisted on running them up in his little car, and as a matter of course came in for a drink. What he wanted, in so far as he ever really wanted anything, was to see something of his cousin Lettice and make an impression on her that would wipe out his stupid question about her husband. But Mrs. Marling, who had strong family feelings, instituted an exhaustive inquiry into the whole of the Leslie family, numbering at present some sixteen or eighteen, besides Martin Leslie’s mother and her second husband, an American, and her American children. So time slipped away till David said he must go.

Lettice, whose heart still smote her because she had not yet explained to David that he had not hurt her, had also hoped to have a few words with her cousin, but with her mother present it was impossible. She recognised, without rancour, that it always had been and always would be impossible to talk to her own friends when her masterful mother was present. For this reason, as we know, she had preferred to live in the flat over the stables where at least she had solitude when she needed it and could ask a friend to tea. Ever since she was a child she remembered her mother taking possession of all her own friends, not from any jealousy of them or any wish to attach them to herself, but because having been brought up as one of a large family with a great many county and public interests, she could hardly envisage any but a communal life. Anyone who came near Marling had to be drawn into her orbit. She felt no need for privacy herself. Her bedroom, her sitting-room, her interests, her time, were all public. Devoted to the service of others, full of abounding energy, it never occurred to her that other people might like to retire from the glare of family life from time to time. Lettice could think of more than one girl or young man, in the days when she lived at home, whom she would have liked as a friend, and would have cultivated in her own diffident way had not her mother, with the best intentions in the world, forcibly drawn the newcomers into the family vortex, absorbed them, and left Lettice a little in the shadow. One of the things that had made Lettice like her husband so very much, even before she loved him, was his total absence of fear where her mother was concerned. Having seen the girl he wanted to marry, he had gone straight to his goal, which was to see as much of her as he could and get her for his own. Mrs. Marling, always willing to please her children though she usually managed to spoil the pleasure, had asked him to stay and for the first time in her life had met someone who politely brushed all her plan-making aside and merely said, in answer to all suggestions of family picnics or other outings, that he would like to take Lettice for a walk, or a drive in his car, or in the canoe on the Rising. To none of these pleasures had Mrs. Marling any adequate objection, and being a sensible woman used to suffering fools on committees, she left the young people to their own devices. When they said they were engaged she was honestly delighted and expected to see them, having, as it were, got that trouble off their chests, rejoin the family circle. That they still preferred their own society was to her inexplicable.

To Lettice the inexplicable thing was that anyone could resist her mother, and, as we have said, part of her devotion to her husband may be attributed to her admiration of his courage. Her elder brother Bill and his wife were as family-minded as her mother, and her sister Lucy bade fair to be even more masterful. Her ally was her brother Oliver, only a little older than herself and equally diffident, though he had early developed a technique for melting away from his mother’s possessive influence which Lettice could not emulate. He had lived in London, she had married and left home. Now circumstances—the end, for the time being, of the firm in which he was a partner, her husband’s death—had brought them both back to their old home. Though Lettice had the independence that her income and her separate establishment over the stables gave her, her silent nature had fallen again under her mother’s sway. She knew it and had not the heart or the strength to resist. Sometimes she wished she had taken a house farther away and had vaguely set about looking for one. Then the impossibility of ever explaining to her mother why she should do so, her gratitude for all the love and kindness that accepted her as a child of the house again and did not probe her feelings, made her feel that she would be a devil to leave Marling. And she knew that her father would miss her. As for Lucy, she was extremely fond of that roistering young woman whom she humbly recognised to be thirty-six times as energetic and capable as she could ever be; and if Lucy’s fine egoism sometimes made her stop her ears mentally and shrink into herself, she showed no sign. Lucy had taken her place as Miss Marling and on this position she did not want to infringe, so she was more quiet than ever.

Oliver saw a good deal of this and it worried him. That Lettice should be near her old home at present was right and proper, but he realised that she was one of those natures that can only make a few real decisions in their lives. One such effort she had made when she married, an effort which had been amply justified in her great happiness and her two little girls. Whether she would ever exert herself again, Oliver not very hopefully wondered. If she did not, no one could do it for her, and as long as her parents lived she would remain a charming shadow about their house and estate. This Oliver would not be. He gave in to his parents with pleasant grace, but like a blob of quicksilver he was apt to split under their hands only to reunite as himself somewhere else. To remain at home was no part of his plan. After the war he intended to go back to London, where one could see one’s own oculist. For Oliver’s oculist had disappeared into the Army at the beginning of the war and he had chanced upon a very unlovable gentleman whose attitude towards his patients was that if his glasses did not suit them, something must be wrong with their eyes and it was entirely their own fault. Oliver, smarting under a large consultation fee and a very expensive pair of spectacles which made him feel rather sick and a good deal blinder than he was, had put the spectacles away and resigned himself to using his old ones and supporting his headaches till his own dear Mr. Pilman came back from wherever he was. Meanwhile he proposed to look after his sister Lettice whenever her gentle obstinacy would allow itself to be looked after.

On this day he happened to get back from Barchester at the moment when David, baulked for once by his cousin Amabel’s determination to follow the Leslies into their last ramifications, gave up the game and was preparing to go. The sight of a fellow man encouraged him not to go, and he and Oliver had a short but agreeable conversation about their prep school and Mr. Panton who had hairs growing out of his ears, over a gin and lime; for the lime, our readers will be glad to hear, had now come in at the grocer’s.

“Do you mind,” said David to Oliver, as he held his glass to be refilled, “if I talk to you out of the side of my mouth?”

Oliver said he would like it of all things.

“Then,” said David, proceeding to do so, “could you possibly call your mother off? I have been trying to say something to Lettice for seventy-five minutes quite in vain.”

He then put his face in order again.

“If your intentions are honourable I might do something,” said Oliver. “Mamma, dear!”

“Yes, Oliver,” said his mother.

“God bless you, kind gentleman,” said David, out of the other side of his mouth.

“How many bedrooms has Joyce got?” said Oliver.

His mother said the best bedroom where Mr. Smith had died, the dressing-room and the other little room. Why? she added. Because, said Oliver, the Harveys thought they might be having an old governess to stay with them, and if so, where would they put her? Mrs. Marling said of course she had forgotten there was that extra room that Mr. Smith added when he built the garage. It was true it only had a staircase from the kitchen, but if they put their maid there it would be all right, as there was a gas fire and running water. Then the governess could have the little room. It would be nice if she came, Mrs. Marling added, as she and Bunny could meet.

“Good God, mamma dear,” said Oliver. “You cannot throw old governesses together like that. There is measure in everything. They may be deadly enemies at sight. I’m sure the Harveys’ old lady hasn’t had as many highly-connected pupils as Bunny—nobody has—and there would be Feelings.”

Mrs. Marling, who appeared to have a disposition to put two of a suit together as if governesses were a poker hand, argued the question, led on by her undutiful son, which gave David his opening. He moved to Lettice and having got his opening didn’t know what to do with it, a state of things not at all normal to him which displeased him greatly. So he temporized and asked after the little girls.

Lettice said they were very well and looked distractedly at her empty glass.

“Let me get you another drink,” said David, taking the glass. “I know one ought to know people seven years to poke their fires, but I believe it’s less for cocktails. I don’t mean to poke them, of course.”

“No, thanks,” said Lettice, “though I do suppose being cousins and having known each other practically all our lives, though hardly ever meeting, you could poke a cocktail if you liked, though how one would do it I don’t know.”

“Then I’ll poke one at myself,” said David, picking up the shaker and filling his glass. “Lettice—”

But at the same moment his cousin said, “David.”

“Shakespeare—Browning,” said David briefly. “And now you carry on. Sorry.”

“It was only,” said Lettice, going rather pink, “that I wanted to say that it may sound horrid, but I don’t mind if people talk about Roger a bit. I don’t really mind even if mother does. In fact I like them to if they feel like it—but not if they don’t, of course. And I’m sure Roger would agree.”

David quite understood the courage behind his cousin’s jumbled remarks and admitted to himself, a person with whom he was upon very frank terms, that she was braver than he was.

“I wanted to mention that myself,” he said, “but I am a coward by nature. I hadn’t heard that Roger was killed until Bunny told me at the dancing class. There didn’t seem to be any way of apologising. I never met him except at your wedding, but I’m sure he was a frightfully good sort.”

“Thank you,” said Lettice. “That’s absolutely all right. Only I was afraid I’d been churlish and frightened you. So I am very glad I haven’t.”

The cousins looked at each other and felt much more comfortable. Mrs. Marling having demonstrated to Oliver that one touch of governessing made all ex-governesses kin and failed in the very least to convince him, turned to David, or rather turned on him, such was her vigour, and invited him to dinner the week after next if he was still on leave.

David accepted and finally said good-bye. As he was starting his car, another car drove up and a young woman and an officer got out.

“Hullo,” said the young woman. “Are you about the pig swill?”

“I wish I were,” said David regretfully. “Who ought I to be?”

“I thought you were from the aerodrome,” said the young woman. “Flight Commander Jackson said he’d send someone over to arrange about letting me have some. We could do with buckets. I’ll tell you what, if you are going to the aerodrome will you tell him that he simply must send that pig stuff over at once, because I can’t spare anyone to go. Lucy Marling.”

“O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz,” said David, adding, “The Bard.”

“What do you mean Kuz?” said Miss Marling. The light of intelligence then dawned in her and she seized David’s hand.

“Of course you’re David!” she cried. “Tom, this is David Leslie, he’s a kind of cousin of mine. This is Tom Barclay, I mean he’s a captain, and he’s going to let me see them explode the next bomb.”

Captain Barclay, a pleasant-faced man of about David’s age, shook hands and said he would certainly not let Miss Marling see any bombs exploded and would probably lose his stripes if he did.

“Oh rot,” said Lucy, “you promised me. I ought to know how to explode bombs, because you never know and if there was one here Daddy would fuss like anything. I suppose Ed could do it, he’s our sort of chauffeur, a bit mental but he’s a marvel with his hands. I’ll tell you what, next time you have a bomb I’ll bring Ed and then he can see what to do.”

“No promise ever passed these pure lips,” said Captain Barclay, quite unperturbed by Lucy’s insistence. “And no one, mental or otherwise, is coming.”

“And don’t say you will tell Captain Barclay what, Lucy, once more, for I cannot bear it,” said David. “Barclay, your speaking countenance is familiar to me. Was it New York?”

“I thought so,” said Captain Barclay. “It was.”

“And was it the party someone threw the night we all got back from a West Indian cruise?”

“It was,” said Captain Barclay. “And who the host was I never knew, but I remembered your face at once.”

“I think,” said David, “you and I were the last to pass out, such is the Bulldog Breed. We must meet again. I’m with my sister at Little Misfit. Good-bye, Lucy, I’m coming to dinner here the week after next and I’ll beat you at six-pack bézique afterwards. See you again, Barclay.”

He drove off down the drive.

“I’ll tell you what,” said Lucy to her escort, “come in and have a drink.”

Captain Barclay, seeing no reason against this, followed his companion up to the drawing-room and was introduced to Mrs. Marling, Lettice and Oliver. In Mrs. Marling he saw an authoritative woman in good, unostentatious county clothes, so like his county mother’s county friends that he felt at home at once, the more so as she discovered within three minutes that his mother was a distant cousin of Lord Stoke and thus vaguely connected, though by no means related, to her husband’s mother.

“If you had your way, mamma dear,” said Oliver, “everyone would be so related that the whole of Barsetshire would be within the forbidden degrees of affinity. Talking of which, Barclay, do you happen to be married?”

Captain Barclay said Good Lord, no.

“That’s all right,” said Oliver. “Not but what I am all in favour of matrimony, but it is well to know. We had several officers billeted here early in the war who practically got engaged to the doctors’ daughters and what not, till their wives came to visit them. It distinctly lowered one’s opinion of military men.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Lucy, who was tired of county relationships, “there ought to be a law to make men who are married wear rings.”

“Like Frenchmen,” said Captain Barclay.

Lettice said Or bulls, Oliver countered with pigs, and Lettice added that bright was the ring of words when the something or other sang them. Oliver cried out against bad puns, and Captain Barclay, who was used to that kind of silliness at home, smiled and said nothing and thought his sisters would like Mrs. Watson and her brother.

“Hullo, daddy,” said Lucy as her father came in. “This is Tom Barclay.”

“How de do, how de do,” said Mr. Marling, putting on to his older offsprings’ intense pleasure what they called his olde Englishe Squire manner. “Berkeley, eh? Used to be a feller called Berkeley who rode to hounds over Nutfield way. Never much liked the man. He was riding a nice little mare one day, I remember, in nineteen three or four, and all his false teeth came out when she jumped the big fence near Starveacres. Bad business, bad business.”

He shook his head mournfully and asked Oliver for a whisky and soda.

“What happened, sir?” said Captain Barclay.

“Shockin’ thing,” said Mr. Marling, throwing himself into his part with renewed vigour. “Mare put her off forefoot on them and galloped a field with ’em before she pulled up. Went dead lame. And old Berkeley tried to swear without a tooth in his head.”

“You’re all wrong, daddy,” said his daughter Lucy in the loud voice that she considered suitable for idiots and parents. “It’s Barclay, not Berkeley, and Tom’s people live in Yorkshire.”

“All right, all right, I said Berkeley,” said her father. “And you needn’t shout. I’m not deaf yet.”

“Lucy meant Bark, not Berk,” said Oliver.

“Like spelling it Derby and pronouncing it Darby,” said Lettice, to help him.

At the sudden introduction of Derby Mr. Marling lost his bearings completely and said if young people would do nothing but mumble they couldn’t expect anyone to understand and though he’d like to see Hitler in a concentration camp, it wouldn’t do people who mumbled any harm to have a taste of Hitler’s methods. He’d teach them to mumble, he added.

Captain Barclay, whose father lately dead had been much such another kind but ferocious gentleman, with a strong conviction that this war wasn’t like the last, felt sorry for his host and explained in just the right voice, as far from mumbling as it was from shouting, that he spelt his name Barclay and his mother had been Dora Stoke before her marriage. Having assimilated these facts Mr. Marling forgot his rage and said he remembered his mother quite well at the Hunt Ball at Rising Castle in ’ninety-seven. Mrs. Marling, grateful to the new guest, asked him if he would dine with them soon. Lucy stood ungracefully with her legs too wide apart and watched with complacence her captive’s progress in her parents’ good opinions; for though she considered most of their views entirely worthless, she still secretly attached a certain value to their reception of her friends.

Then Captain Barclay, looking at his watch, said he must go at once, so Lucy escorted him downstairs.

“Please say good-bye to your sister and your brother for me,” said Captain Barclay as he got into his car. “They disappeared while I was talking to your father. And thanks for the drink.”

“Well, don’t forget about the bombs,” said Lucy, who believed in the power of repetition. “And I’ll tell you what. If we get a bomb here, I’ll telephone to you at once, and then you can get it before the people at Southbridge get here, and then you can let me see you explode it.”

Captain Barclay refused to commit himself, saluted and drove away. In the drive he overtook Lettice who was on her way to her stables escorted by Oliver, and stopped to say good-bye.

“You were so good with father,” said Lettice. “He is a little deaf, but it is mostly wilful inattention.”

“He is secretly rather proud of not listening to what people say,” said Oliver. “A peculiar passion, but parents are peculiar.”

Captain Barclay said they were indeed, and his governor had been as peculiar as the best of them.

“But one is very proud of them for being peculiar,” said Lettice. “Anyone who is a character ought to have sixpence to encourage them. And as I’m a parent I hope to get peculiar myself in time.”

Then Captain Barclay drove on, much pleased by his afternoon. Lucy, who had annexed him a fortnight earlier at a sherry party, was not his ideal woman, but he found her an excellent sort of fellow. Of Mr. and Mrs. Marling we already know his opinion. Oliver Marling and that charming Mrs. Watson stirred his interest Their similarity in good looks, their private world of small jokes, the reticence that went with their friendliness, interested and attracted him. He hoped to see a good deal of the family during his stay in those parts.