Читать книгу Cheerfulness Breaks In: A Barsetshire War Survey - Angela Margaret Thirkell - Страница 4

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If it was inevitable that Rose Birkett should marry a naval man, it was equally inevitable that the day of her wedding should be the most perfect day of unclouded sun tempered by a breeze not powerful enough to disarrange her hair or her veil. Mrs. Birkett, going into her elder daughter’s bedroom at half-past nine o’clock, found her in bed with two large, loose-jointed, depraved-looking dolls and a rather dirty plush giant panda, the wireless turned on at its loudest to an enchanting programme from Radio Luxembourg sponsored by the makers of a famous corn cure, eating an enormous breakfast off a tray balanced on her knees and blowing melancholy blasts on her ocarina between mouthfuls.

‘Hullo, Mummy,’ said Rose, ‘they’re doing Lips of Desire at the Barchester Odeon, you know, the film about the Brownings, the ones that were poets, and Glamora Tudor is Mrs. Browning and to-day’s the last performance. It’s too dispiriting for words.’

Mrs. Birkett, wondering in an exhausted way if Rose would rather go to the cinema than be married, turned the wireless down, for the noise made it very difficult to converse.

‘Don’t, Mummy,’ shrieked Rose, spilling a good deal of tepid coffee into her bed as she reached towards the wireless and turned it on again. ‘I’d nearly got “Hebe’s got the jeebies” right on Radio Luxembourg. Mummy, the first house is at twelve o’clock. Couldn’t I and John go? We’d easily get back in time for the wedding.’

Mrs. Birkett, praying to keep her temper for the few hours during which Rose was yet under her wing, said, Certainly not.

‘If I rang up Noel Merton, he’s staying at the Deanery, could I go with him then?’ said Rose.

Mrs. Birkett said with some severity that Rose did not seem to understand that a wedding was a wedding and that until she was married she was not going to leave the house. Rose clasped the giant panda and her lovely eyes filled with tears.

There was a knock at the door and Mr. Birkett came in.

‘Good morning, Rose,’ he said. ‘Everything all right? I was just looking for you, Amy.’

‘Oh, Daddy,’ said Rose, gulping. ‘It’s too foully dispiriting. It’s the last performance of Lips of Desire and Mummy won’t let me go.’

‘Now, be sensible, there’s a good girl,’ said Mr. Birkett giving his daughter’s shoulder a nervous but well-meant pat. ‘Amy, the Dean has just rung up to say his car is out of order, and his secretary is going to drive him over.’

‘Then if I went to Lips of Desire at the 12 o’clock session the Dean could drive me back,’ said Rose, throwing the panda on the floor, jumping out of bed and slipping on a flowered dressing-gown in which she looked like Botticelli’s Flora, except that intelligent mischief was an expression entirely beyond her powers. ‘Oh, Mummy! Oh, Daddy! Could I?’

Mrs. Birkett snapped at Mr. Birkett for bringing such a foolish message. If the Dean were coming in any case, she said, it was quite immaterial how, and she only hoped all the buttons would fly off his gaiters, and Rose had better go and have her bath and see about finishing her packing. Rose picked up the panda again and clutching it to her bosom began to cry. Mr. Birkett, considerably alarmed by the storm he had innocently helped to raise, was trying to get away unseen when Geraldine came in, followed by Lydia Keith.

‘I thought you and Daddy wouldn’t have much grip to-day,’ said Geraldine, speaking with the kind firmness of a District Visitor to the Deserving Poor, ‘so I brought Lydia along to help. The man from Barchester about the extra glasses and things is here, Mummy, and there’s a man called a name I couldn’t hear like Gristle it sounded that wants you on a trunk call, Daddy.’

The distracted parents, only too glad of the excuse, left the room.

‘Who can Gristle be?’ said Mrs. Birkett to her husband, who replied that he hadn’t the faintest idea.

Rose, left alone with her unsympathetic bridesmaids, at once became her normal self and taking a box of chocolate creams out of her stocking drawer shared the contents with Geraldine and Lydia. Geraldine, as a sister and an intellectual, objected to the number of chocolates Rose had bitten into to see if they were soft, but Lydia, who liked hard ones, said it would save her biting them herself, and Rose and Geraldine could have all the soft ones. The head housemaid, sent by Mrs. Birkett to assist with the packing, was dismissed by Lydia who having seen an elder sister into matrimony was an authority on trousseaux. What with packing, trying some of Rose’s face creams, listening to the wireless, playing swing records on the gramophone, discussing the probable cast for a film about Building the Pyramids in which Rose hoped that the Marx Brothers would be Totems or whatever it was (which Geraldine was able to explain by saying Rose meant hieroglyphics and even then it wasn’t sense), getting Rose by degrees bathed, partly dressed and made-up, the morning passed as swiftly as lightning. At half-past twelve Mrs. Birkett, feeling that she would rather not see Rose again for the present, sent up cold lunch on a tray and all three young ladies made a hearty meal. Over the depraved dolls and the plush panda there was a slight difference of opinion, Geraldine maintaining that they ought to be sent to the Barchester Hospital, Lydia that they would be invaluable for her mother’s Jumble Sale, and Rose, who after all was their mistress, declaring that nothing would part her from them and anyway the panda zipped up the back and made a splendid bag for her ocarina.

Then Mrs. Birkett, bearing her courage in both hands, came in with the head housemaid and Rose was dressed in her bridal robes. The head housemaid said Miss Rose looked just like her name and everyone saw what she meant. To Mrs. Birkett’s intense relief, not only had Rose entirely forgotten and forgiven the scene she had made earlier in the morning, but so far did her forgiveness extend that she actually kissed her mother and said it was rotten not seeing Lips of Desire but perhaps they’d have it at Las Palombas and she supposed there would be an Odeon or whatever people called it out there.

Geraldine and Lydia, who had brought her bridesmaid’s dress over from the Carters’ House in a suitcase for the occasion, suddenly thought they had better get dressed too and at a quarter to two they escorted Rose to the drawing-room where the other bridesmaids, Delia Brandon and Octavia Crawley, were waiting.

‘Hullo, Rose,’ said Delia Brandon, ‘you do look gorgeous. I wish I could have a wedding dress like that.’

Rose said she thought white satin was a bit dispiriting, but Mummy would have it.

‘And anyway,’ she said with great simplicity, ‘if there was a war or anything and John got killed or something, I could have it dyed black.’

Octavia Crawley, who did not look her best in blue, or indeed in any other colour, nice girl though she was, said if there was a war or anything she would drive an ambulance and then she needn’t go to dinner parties in the Close, but she knew there would be no such luck.

Rose said it would be just like her luck to be at Las Palombas if there was a war and too foully dispiriting.

‘If there did happen to be a war, not that there will,’ said Delia Brandon, ‘I shall go to Barchester General Hospital as a V.A.D. I’ve done all my exams. In the War they had some perfectly ghastly face wounds there,’ said Delia, her kind heart aglow with hopeful excitement. ‘I’d like to see Sir Abel Fillgrave operate more than anything in the world.’

Rose thought it sounded a bit dispiriting.

When Mrs. Birkett got downstairs from Rose’s room, she found Mr. Tozer, the representative of Messrs. Scatcherd and Tozer, Caterers, of Barchester (described by Geraldine as the man about the extra glasses and things) waiting for her in the dining-room. Already trestle tables had been set up and spread with what in fiction used to be known as fair white cloths, though rather badly ironed by the Barchester Sanitary Laundry. Two skilled underlings disguised as waiters were setting out glasses, cups, saucers and plates, and erecting the giant urns or samovars from which Messrs. Scatcherd and Tozer dispensed tea and coffee. A large cylindrical object in a corner promised ices, and the sandwiches and cakes were stacked in cardboard boxes. In the middle of the largest table graceful folds of butter muslin kept the wedding cake from contamination.

Mrs. Birkett took this all in with the well-trained eye of a Headmaster’s wife, used to entertaining on a large scale. Everything appeared to be in order. Messrs. Scatcherd’s representatives had often worked for her before and knew what was required, but there was a feeling of silent enmity about that froze Mrs. Birkett to the marrow.

‘Mr. Birkett said you wanted to speak to me, Mr. Tozer,’ said Mrs. Birkett. ‘Is everything all right?’

Mr. Tozer coughed behind his hand and said it was always a pleasure to do the arrangements at Southbridge School. Always a pleasure, he added.

‘I haven’t much time,’ said Mrs. Birkett.

‘It is like this, madam,’ said Mr. Tozer, who really despised anyone not in orders and had particularly strong feelings about lay Headmasters, though he spoke of Mrs. Birkett as a lady that understood how things should be done, ‘there is a slight hiatus about tumblers. Your order was for three hundred guests. We had fully assumed that we could meet any calls upon us, but owing to the militia camp at Plumstead having co-opted us to assist with their catering, we are short on the small tumblers.’

‘I suppose you can make up with large wine-glasses,’ said Mrs. Birkett. ‘They would do quite well for lemonade.’

‘That is precisely what I was going to suggest, madam,’ said Mr. Tozer. ‘We have plenty of large wine-glasses; not the champagne size, for they would be required for champagne, but the largest size of non-champagne if I make myself clear. Though of course lemonade should never be drunk except from small tumblers,’ said Mr. Tozer with a slight shudder.

‘Well, the wine-glasses will do nicely,’ said Mrs. Birkett.

‘We shall be lucky if we have them this time next year with the Hun creating the way he is,’ said Mr. Tozer whose military vocabulary belonged to the years 1914-18 during which he had been a mess waiter on Salisbury Plain. ‘Some say it will all blow over, madam, but I say to talk like that is tempting Providence. Expect the worst and then it can’t get you down is what I say.’

As Mr. Tozer was well known for never leaving off talking, Mrs. Birkett was accustomed to drift away from him, leaving him to finish his periods to the circumambient air, but the feeling of silent enmity that had approached her at her first entrance was now just behind her right shoulder and turning slightly she saw her butler, Simnet, holding the champagne-nippers in his hand in a very threatening way.

‘What is it, Simnet?’ said Mrs. Birkett.

‘I was merely waiting, madam, till Mr. Tozer had finished,’ said Simnet with icy politeness, ‘to inquire who is to open the champagne.’

Mr. Tozer, speaking to an unseen audience, said that when he arranged the reception at the Palace for the colonial bishops, he had personally opened every bottle himself and His Lordship had said everything couldn’t have gone off better.

Simnet, by saying nothing, managed to convey that he had planted, pruned and watered the vines, picked the grapes, personally trodden them in the wine press, bottled and labelled every pint of the wine, superintended its shipping to England, retailed it to Mr. Birkett and (which was indeed true) fetched it up from the cellar that morning with his own hands.

To the outer world he merely remarked in a distant way that he understood His Lordship to have allowed one bottle to every ten guests, but perhaps that was as well, being as some of them were black.

Mr. Tozer, whose feelings about people in orders included a conviction that a coloured bishop was a contradiction in terms, found his position considerably weakened. To say that a tenth of a bottle was enough for a dusky prelate would have been a betrayal of the whole Established Church; to say it was not enough would have reflected upon the Bishop of Barchester’s celebrated want of hospitality. So he said nothing and the battle hung suspended in a chill silence.

But Mrs. Birkett, who though she never tried to organise the school had to order practically everything else for her husband, and was used to composing quarrels between matrons, head housemaids, parlourmaids and cooks, was, except where her daughter Rose was concerned, a woman of practical decision.

‘If you are announcing the guests, you can’t open the champagne, Simnet,’ she said. ‘Mr. Tozer will be good enough to open it and I dare say he has brought his own champagne nippers.’

Only the genius of a born organiser could have prompted Mrs. Birkett to say this. Some sixth sense told her that the champagne nippers were to Simnet a mysterious badge of authority which he would sooner die, or at any rate be very disagreeable about, than give up.

Mr. Tozer without a word produced two pairs of champagne nippers from behind the wedding cake. Simnet said that he had put four dozen bottles on the table by the service door and if Mr. Tozer would give him the word, he had several dozen more on ice in his pantry.

As more than half an hour had been wasted Mrs. Birkett after an anxious look at her watch went to dress. She and Mr. Birkett were to have a sandwich lunch in his study and she hoped to get a few moments’ peace with him and ask who Mr. Gristle was, but so late was he that the Dean of Barchester and his secretary arrived on his heels and Simnet severely removed the rest of the sandwiches as partaking of blasphemy.

The Dean took Mrs. Birkett’s hand.

‘As it is neither morning nor afternoon, I must say good-day,’ he announced. ‘And a good day in every sense of the word it is. Ha, Birkett,’ he said to the Headmaster.

‘Ha, Crawley,’ said Mr. Birkett, who had been at Oxford with the Dean, though Dr. Crawley, being in his earlier years a young and penniless clergyman, had naturally married much sooner than Mr. Birkett and had a much larger family.

‘You know my secretary, Thomas Needham,’ said the Dean, presenting a young clergyman with a pink cheerful face. ‘He has driven me over like Jehu.’

‘We only touched sixty once, sir,’ said Mr. Needham deprecatingly.

‘And so Rose is going to be married,’ said the Dean. ‘Ah.’

As the whole of Barchester had known this for some weeks and the Dean was about to perform the ceremony, assisted by the School Chaplain, Mr. Smith, there seemed to be no real answer. Mrs. Birkett told Simnet, who was tidying away the last remains of lunch, to tell Mr. Smith that the Dean was here.

Young Mr. Needham, who had been looking round the walls, suddenly exclaimed, ‘By Jove, there’s my uncle!’

‘Where?’ said the Dean.

Mr. Needham pointed to a photograph of fifteen boys in jerseys, shorts and football boots with a blurred background of school buildings.

‘Your uncle?’ said Mr. Birkett. ‘I thought I knew every name, but I don’t remember a Needham.’

‘My mother’s brother, sir,’ said Mr. Needham, ‘Oldmeadow is the name. That’s him with his legs crossed, in the middle. Good old Uncle Tom.’

‘Tom Oldmeadow?’ said Mr. Birkett. ‘Of course I remember Tom. He was Captain of Games in his last year. You remember Oldmeadow, Amy?’

‘Of course I do,’ said Mrs. Birkett. ‘He had measles twice running in one term. Where is he now?’

‘I think he’s in Switzerland,’ said Mr. Needham, ‘mountaineering, but he’s in the Reserve of Officers, so he might have to come back any time if there’s a row. It makes me a bit sick that I didn’t go into the Army now, but I might get out as a stretcher-bearer with luck.’

He then went bright red with confusion and looked at his employer to see if he had given offence. The Dean said it was laid upon us to love our enemies but one might be allowed to distinguish between enemies and devils, and then in his turn wondered if he had gone too far. But the School Chaplain cut short the conversation by coming in with a cordial greeting and the remark that the nuptial hour drew on apace and would the Dean like to be preparing himself. The Dean looked at his secretary, who said the doings, he begged his pardon, the robes, were in the suitcase outside and should he bring them in. Mrs. Birkett, feeling that she might be consumed with fire if she profaned these mysteries, said she would go and see about Rose. The School Chaplain said this parting was well made and he would himself conduct the Dean to the School Chapel and see that Mr. Needham was suitably placed among the congregation.

‘You know, Smith, that Oldmeadow is Needham’s uncle,’ said Mr. Birkett as he too left the room.

The Chaplain, who had played for Cambridge as a young man, was so enchanted to find that the Dean’s secretary was a relation of the best football player the School had ever produced that he took Mr. Needham under his wing, extracted from him that he had played for a well-known club and discussed with such ardour the chances of the Universities for the autumn that the Dean was metaphorically and almost literally elbowed into a corner and had to get on with his robing as best he could.

As it was now time for the ceremony the School Chaplain led the way by the private passage from the Headmaster’s study to the little vestry or anteroom of the Chapel.

At Mr. Carter’s House, Everard, Kate and Philip Winter marvelled as they watched Lieutenant Fairweather eat through fish, eggs and bacon, cold ham, scones, toast, butter and marmalade, and drink two large cups of coffee, that love could have so little effect on the human appetite. Lydia, who it is true was not going to be married, ate neck to neck with him over the whole course till they got into the straight when with no visible effort she came in first by a large piece of toast thickly spread with butter and potted ham.

‘It’s a pity,’ she said reflectively, ‘that bridesmaids don’t still go on the honeymoon like Miss Squeers with Mr. and Mrs. Browdie. I’d love to come to Las Palombas.’

‘Come and visit us,’ said Lieutenant Fairweather, ‘and stay as long as you like.’

‘I do wish I could,’ said Lydia, ‘but Mother has a heart and I rather look after things for her, and Father seems to need me a bit. I know it sounds awfully priggish,’ she added apologetically.

Kate looked at her younger sister with admiring affection. Everard and Philip felt, as they often did, what an extraordinarily good fellow Lydia was.

‘Well, we shall be there for two years,’ said Lieutenant Fairweather, ‘unless there’s a scrap and they want me back, so come along any time.’

‘Thanks most awfully,’ said Lydia. ‘Old Bunce, you know, at the Northbridge Ferry, says he knows there’s going to be a war this autumn because he knows the signs, but he won’t say what the signs are and anyway no one believes him.’

Philip said from his brief experience of Old Bunce, the summer he stayed at Northbridge with the Birketts, the signs must be several extra pints of old and bitter at the Ferryman’s Arms. Lydia went over to the Headmaster’s House with her suitcase and peace reigned until eleven o’clock when Captain Geoffrey Fairweather of the Barsetshire Regiment arrived in a roaring little car to be best man to his brother. The two brothers and the two schoolmasters sat in the garden and kept an eye on Master Bobbie Carter who was imprisoned in a kind of square sheepfold on the lawn and surprised himself very much by standing up and falling down from time to time. The conversation was chiefly about the Fairweathers’ days in the junior school, and a great deal of news was exchanged about Old Boys and the fate of various masters.

‘I don’t know if you remember Johnson,’ said Everard. ‘He did quite well at Oxford in Modern Greats, though it is a falling-between-two-stools school that I personally deplore, and is coming here next term as a master in the Junior School for a bit, unless——’

He stopped, sacrificing the end of his sentence to a craven wish to propitiate any deity that might be about.

‘Johnson was a bit junior to me,’ said Lieutenant Fairweather. ‘He had a bottle of hair fixative in the Junior School and we all used it. Hard luck.’

What Everard and Philip felt about the hard luck, to give it no harder name, that might tear all their ex-pupils (for they could not help looking at the situation from their own schoolmastering point of view and especially from the point of view of their own school) from their various avocations and pitchfork them into the paths of glory which may lead but to the grave, was so mixed that neither of them could quite have put it into words. When you have done your best for your pupils, you hope to have fitted them in some measure for the conduct of life, but you always envisaged a life that is to go on, not a life that is very possibly to take its place in a living rampart and so be given up. You sicken at the thought of the waste, yet you cannot call it waste. You are thankful for those who can remain undisturbed, yet you cannot altogether be glad for them. There seems to be no end to the warring loyalties in your mind, except the certainty that the end is appointed.

‘Yes, it’s jolly hard luck on those youngsters,’ said Captain Fairweather from his twenty-five years and the immense tolerant kindness of the real professional for the amateurs. ‘Still, even if there is a scrap I dare say it’ll be over before most of them get out. You can’t make an army in three weeks.’

‘I must say I’ll be sick if there is a show and I’m at Las Palombas,’ said Lieutenant Fairweather. ‘You blighters have all the luck, Geoff. What do they say at your shop?’

Captain Fairweather said the Lord alone knew, but apart from a certain stickiness about leave the Brass Hats hadn’t given tongue, and as far as he was concerned his leave was due in the middle of August and he was going to Scotland to have a shot at a grouse. He then applied himself to the entertainment of Master Bobbie Carter whose language he at once understood and they enjoyed themselves very much together till Nurse came out and said Baby must thank the soldier for playing with him so nicely and come along and have his din-din.

‘I suppose I am a soldier,’ said Captain Fairweather, straightening himself and looking vengefully after Nurse, ‘but she needn’t rub it in. That chap of yours is very intelligent, sir,’ he said to Everard. ‘He got the hang of my moustache almost at once. By Jove, I thought he’d have it out by the roots.’

If a Housemaster can simper, Everard almost simpered.

‘He is a bit intelligent,’ he admitted. ‘You should see him in his bath. If he wants his celluloid fish and Nurse gives him his duck, he begins to howl at once.’

Captain Fairweather said it was certainly jolly good to know a fish from a duck at that age and he’d like to see him in his bath if there was time before he went back to Sparrowhill Camp. Lieutenant Fairweather expressed sincere regrets that the fact of getting married and starting on his honeymoon would deprive him of this treat and said that talking of getting married he supposed he had better put his uniform on before lunch. So they all went in.