Читать книгу Both Your Houses - Philip Gibbs - Страница 10

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Pamela looked round her father’s study for a moment with smiling eyes. She had not been in this room since going to Germany, which seemed a lifetime ago because of all that had happened. She had changed since then. Her love for Julian had changed her, revealing a passion she had never known until then, and was frightened almost to find it in her own nature.

As a child she had been warned off this room by nurses and governesses. She had been hushed down if she made a noise too near the door. Her father was always working in there with Very Important People—silly old people she had thought them when she had peeped through the banisters from the landing which led to her nursery. Some of them had bald heads which shone under the candelabra in the hall. Some of them had white beards like Rumpelstiltskin in her fairy-tale book. There were loud-voiced gentlemen who called her father ‘Bramley’ or ‘Old Man’ though he wasn’t very old, she thought. But some of them called him ‘my lord’ as Meggs and the other servants did. Inside this room they sat talking, talking, talking, and she used to wonder what they found to talk about, for such a long time. “Politics, my dear,” said Nurse Fanny. Pam imagined ‘Politics’ to be something very unpleasant like arithmetic or spelling, but even more beastly.

It was Politics which prevented her father from telling her stories at bedtime which he always did if he could—wonderful stories of foreign lands, and princesses, and knights, and treasure islands, always with something funny in them which made her laugh. He acted all the parts in different voices and made them come to life. He didn’t mind her coming into his study whoever was there unless he was in a bad temper with his visitors. Several times she had slipped out of her bed and crept downstairs—the candelabra made little dancing colours on the walls—and tapped at her father’s door before opening it and going in. Always he had called out: “Hullo, Pam! Time you were asleep, young woman.”

“I want you to tell me a story, Daddy.”

“Not tonight, old girl. Better go back to bed before you catch your death of cold. I’ll ring for Nanny.”

But sometimes he introduced her to his visitors. She remembered one of them who took her on his knees and said, “I’ll tell you a story, little lady.” It was a Welsh fairy story with an old witch in it. It was a very good story and the old gentleman’s name was Lloyd George.

Pamela saw the ghost of herself in this room, the ghost of the little girl in pyjamas asking for a story. On the wall by the fireplace was a crayon drawing of her by Orpen. He had drawn her in pyjamas curled up in the big chair over there with wide-open eyes as though listening to an exciting story by her father. She glanced sideways into the mirror over the mantelpiece and saw herself as a grown-up woman and gave a little sigh as she looked into her own eyes. She had had some strange adventures during the past few years. The strangest one was waiting for her.

She turned away from the mirror quickly at the sound of footsteps outside the door. A young man came in with a worried look and a sheaf of papers. He was a pale young man with black hair, rather delicate looking. It was her father’s private secretary, Robin Melville, who had succeeded the long-suffering Mr. Skinner, now pensioned off. He looked startled at the sight of her.

“Oh, I’m sorry! I thought the room was empty.”

“How do you do?” asked Pamela, holding out her hand. She had met him a few times before going to Germany. “How are you bearing up under Father’s irascibility?”

He laughed rather nervously.

“I’m afraid I get on his nerves, sometimes, especially when I mis-spell words like ‘irascibility’! I’m not very good at spelling. Still, there’s always Webster which I keep close at hand.”

“I expect he’s working you to death,” said Pamela.

Robin Melville laughed again, not quite at his ease in the presence of Pamela.

“He has the constitution of a lion and insists on working late at night. I’m afraid the younger generation can’t keep pace with that kind of thing. We haven’t the same stamina. Perhaps we didn’t get properly fed at school in the First World War.”

“Well, don’t let him wear you out,” said Pamela. “See you later, I hope.”

She raised a hand with a friendly salute to a shy young man and left the room. She walked upstairs with a sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach, as they say. In a few moments she would have to face her mother. She felt like King Edward VII when, as Prince of Wales, he was summoned to the presence of Queen Victoria.

She tapped at her mother’s door, and heard her mother’s voice call out, “Come!”

Pamela moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue, opened the door and went in.

Lady Bramley was sitting at a big deal table on which was a pile of socks. She had just poked her finger through a big hole in one of them. By her side, sewing up the holes in a sheet, was Henriette, the little French wife of Pamela’s brother Nigel who had been crippled rather badly after many raids over Berlin in the R.A.F. With her curly dark hair and her dimpled face and black liquid eyes swept by long lashes, she looked like a portrait by Vigée le Brun, or one of Lely’s little ladies of the Stuart Court.

“Hullo, Mother!” cried Pamela with forced cheerfulness. “Hullo, Henriette!”

“Aren’t you rather late?” asked Lady Bramley coldly.

“No, the train was punctual, Mother. I took a taxi from the station.”

She went round the table and kissed her mother’s cheek. It was like kissing a marble mantelpiece, so cold and unresponsive.

“Pam!” cried Henriette, greatly excited. “Quelle joie de te revoir.”

“That will do, Henriette,” said Lady Bramley. “We all understand French but we prefer to speak English.”

“French is more beautiful,” said Henriette, with a little sulky pout. “French is more expressive.”

“You two look very busy,” said Pamela. “Are those Father’s socks? They look as though they ought to be thrown away. My word, what a hole!”

She put a finger into one of those holes and wraggled it. But she was not feeling humorous. By the expression on her mother’s face, by this maternal coldness, she knew that a storm was brewing. It would break over her head presently. There would be forked lightning.

“Thrown away?” exclaimed Lady Bramley. “Don’t you know that the Labour Government threatens to reduce the clothing ration still more? In any case we’re all in rags and tatters. Your father’s underclothing is a disgrace. So is mine. I’m like one of those wretched old women who used to sleep on the Embankment, tied up with bits of string. That’s what Labour has brought us to after a victorious war. Rags and tatters! National bankruptcy, while they whine like beggars for American aid. I would willingly strangle the whole crowd of them with my own hands.”

Pamela laughed uneasily. Her future father-in-law was a Labour Member of Parliament. He would be included in her mother’s list of those to be strangled.

“Some of them are tough old chickens, Mother. Hard to wring their necks!”

“I’d like to see them hanging on the lamp-posts in Whitehall with their tongues hanging out!” said Lady Bramley, ignoring this little jest.

“Mother!” cried Pamela. “You’re always so violent in your way of putting things. You don’t really mean what you say.”

“Every word of it!” answered her mother with a stab of her needle through an old sock. “Those men are betraying their country. They keep on handing away the British Empire. Now they’re breaking up the British Navy for scrap iron at a time when Russia is threatening a new war. They want to abolish the House of Lords. They’re reducing this country to a fifth-class Power, and presently we shall all be starving to death.”

“It is very true!” said Henriette. “But it is worse in France. Only General de Gaulle can save my poor France from the horrors of Communism.”

“After Germany England seems wonderful,” said Pamela. “Everybody looks happy and well fed.”

It was an incautious remark which irritated her mother.

“Don’t talk to me like that, child,” she said, angrily. “I dare say in Germany you were living on the fat of the land at the tax-payers’ expense. Ask Henriette if she is happy and well fed. Ask old Meggs. Ask anyone in Church Hampden.”

“I am not happy and I am not well fed,” cried Henriette. “English food is terrible. It is always shepherd’s pie or stewed rabbit. Life in England is not amusing. Socks, rags, rain, fog, boiled fish or stewed rabbit! It is perhaps less amusing in France, though there is always the Black Market for those who can afford it. That is a better system for those who can afford it. In England everything is reduced to the same level of misery. I find that very annoying. Très démoralisant!”

“I decline to be demoralized,” said Lady Bramley firmly. “I am only filled with suppressed rage and high blood pressure. We must push out that dreadful Labour Party or the nation will perish. I hope you agree, Pam. I hope your experiences in Germany have not weakened your loyalties—your loyalties to your father and your country.”

She looked at her daughter with searching and challenging eyes. It was getting very near to the danger point which Pamela wished to avoid.

“My dear Mother,” she cried, “don’t look at me as though I were about to commit high treason. I haven’t gone either Labour or Communist.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Lady Bramley, grimly, “I’m very glad to hear it.”

Pam changed the subject hurriedly. Now was not the time to talk about Julian or family loyalties.

“How’s Nigel?” she asked Henriette.

Henriette gave a little sigh.

“He works always at his weaving, poor boy. It amuses him. He is in his work-room upstairs.”

“I’ll go and see him,” said Pamela. “By the way, Mother, the Bishop of Ashleigh is downstairs. Father has asked him to dinner.”

“Drat the man!” cried Lady Bramley in a voice of anguish. “Your father has no sense in his head. He asks everybody to dinner when there’s no food in the larder.”

“Perhaps bishops don’t want much to eat,” suggested Pamela, glad that the conversation had switched to a less dangerous topic.

Lady Bramley laughed bitterly.

“That’s where you make a mistake, child. As the daughter of a Canon of Westminster I know all about bishops. They have excellent appetites. I must go and talk to Meggs.”

“I’ll go and see Nigel,” said Pamela. She slipped out of the room and drew a deep breath. So far so good! Julian’s name had not been mentioned but it was only a reprieve. She would have to have it out with her mother. She would need all her courage.