Marling Hall Read online

  VIRAGO

  MODERN CLASSICS

  666

  Angela Thirkell (1890–1961) was the eldest daughter of John William Mackail, a Scottish classical scholar and civil servant, and Margaret Burne-Jones. Her relatives included the pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin, and her godfather was J. M. Barrie. She was educated in London and Paris, and began publishing articles and stories in the 1920s. In 1931 she brought out her first book, a memoir entitled Three Houses, and in 1933 her comic novel High Rising – set in the fictional county of Barsetshire, borrowed from Trollope – met with great success. She went on to write nearly thirty Barsetshire novels, as well as several further works of fiction and non-fiction. She was twice married, and had four children.

  By Angela Thirkell

  Barsetshire novels

  High Rising

  Wild Strawberries

  The Demon in the House

  August Folly

  Summer Half

  Pomfret Towers

  The Brandons

  Before Lunch

  Cheerfulness Breaks In

  Northbridge Rectory

  Marling Hall

  Growing Up

  The Headmistress

  Miss Bunting

  Peace Breaks Out

  Private Enterprise

  Love Among the Ruins

  The Old Bank House

  County Chronicle

  The Duke’s Daughter

  Happy Returns

  Jutland Cottage

  What Did it Mean?

  Enter Sir Robert

  Never Too Late

  A Double Affair

  Close Quarters

  Love at All Ages

  Three Score and Ten

  Non-fiction

  Three Houses

  Collected Stories

  Christmas at High Rising

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Virago

  978-0-3490-0745-8

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © Angela Thirkell 1942

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Copyright © The Beneficiaries of Angela Thirkell 1961

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  VIRAGO

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DZ

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Marling Hall

  Table of Contents

  Virago Modern Classics 666

  By Angela Thirkell

  COPYRIGHT

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  1

  Marling Hall stands on a little eminence among what would in more golden days have been called well-wooded parkland. Owing to death duties and other ameliorative influences a number of its fine oaks and elms have been at various times cut down and sold. Those that remain are dying from the head downwards in a disconcerting way for want of woodmen, though even Dean Swift did not have large gaunt leafless branches sticking out on the top of his head like a nightmare of Actaeon. Behind the house meanders the little stream of Rising which after it has flowed through the Risings (High and Low), joins the river near Barchester. Of the fishing, all that can be said is that there is here and there a grayling, but mostly there isn’t. The small home farm, which has been for generations a source of great pride, pleasure and financial loss to the Marling squires, is on its last legs, silent victim of a war which has drained it of its labourers and oppressed it with bureaucracy. All this is little pleasure to its present owner, William Marling, who in late middle age sees his small and much loved world crumbling beneath his feet during his life and a fair probability that his family will never be able to live in Marling Hall after his death. In fact if it were not for his wife he would have lost heart altogether by now.

  Mrs Marling, who disliked her name, Amabel, but had never seen her way to do anything about it, was an Honourable, as anyone may see who cares to look her up in Debrett, and connected with most of Barsetshire. She had the tradition of service, the energy, capacity for taking pains and, let us frankly say, the splendid insensitiveness and the self-confidence that make the aristocracy of the county what it is. Her father, Lord Nutfield, was a highly undistinguished peer unknown outside Barsetshire, whose later days were seriously embittered by the arrival in the House of Lords of a new creation, indistinguishable from his own four-hundred-year-old barony except by one letter, and on this subject he was sometimes moved to speech, though otherwise a silent man.

  Very properly the Marlings had two sons and two daughters. The elder son, Bill, who was a professional soldier and had a wife and family, had not as yet been sent abroad. The younger son, Oliver, who was not married, had been in a business firm in London. At the outbreak of war he had made frantic efforts to get into the army but had been turned down as being over age and having bad eyesight. After some waiting he got into the Regional Commissioner’s Office in Barchester, living at home and going into Barchester by train. His working hours varied from night duty to day duty, interspersed with a kind of dog watch that made his father say one never knew where Oliver was and, as a rider, that this war wasn’t like the last.

  The elder daughter, Lettice, whose husband was killed at Dunkirk, was living with her two children in the stables which Mrs Marling with great foresight had converted into a self-contained flat in the autumn of 1939. The younger daughter, Lucy, lived at home and stood no nonsense from anyone.

  Mr and Mrs Marling would willingly have taken their widowed daughter and her young children into their own home, but Lettice Watson, much as she loved her parents, felt that any personality her husband’s death had left her would be battered to death by her mother’s efficiency and her younger sister’s hearty contempt for anything that did not agree with her own standards, and preferred to make her home in the stables, though her old bedroom was kept for her at the Hall and she often spent a night there.

  On the night previous to the opening of this story she had slept at the Hall to see as much as possible of her brother Bill, who was spending a short leave at his old home because he had not time to go to the North of England where his wife was living with her parents and children. Whenever Lettice Watson slept in her old bedroom she woke up in a dream, half believing that she was still a girl at home, yet oppressed with a foreboding that all was not well. As the echoes of her dreams died away she remembered, each time with a fresh pang, all that had happened in the last six years, her very happy marriage, her two little girls, her husband rejoining his ship, the sickening silence and suspense of that week in May and the news, confirmed by a friend and eye-witness, of her husband’s death while taking the retreating soldiers on board. With her inheritance of a practical point of view she admitted that many women were far worse off. Her husband had left her wealthy for her needs, her children were satisfactory, she had her parents and her old home as a background, and to be perfectly frank with herself she also admitted that time was dulling her sense of loss.

  ‘But there one is, alone,’ she remarked to her reflection in the mirror, eyeing her
morning face with some displeasure, ‘and it seems so silly to be a widow; the sort of thing other people are, not oneself. Oh, dear. Well, there it is,’ with which philosophy she went down to breakfast.

  But if you had known Marling Hall before the war you would have wondered, for instead of going through the gallery and down the large staircase in the wing which was added about 1780, she turned to her left and going through a swinging door, threaded a maze of small passages and rather dark back stairs till she emerged near the door into the kitchen yard. Then opening a door on the right she walked into the room where her parents were already breakfasting. This room had been the servants’ hall, but when the war began Mrs Marling, seeing that servants would be increasingly difficult to get, had dismantled all the large rooms on the ground floor, made the pantry into a sitting room for the diminished staff and turned the old servants’ hall into a dining room with the advantage of being near the kitchen, which had naturally been built as far from the old dining room as possible.

  As the servants’ hall overlooked part of the garden, the original builder had put the window at a height which prevented any one looking out. During the nineteenth century the very reasonable idea of treating servants like blackbeetles had led Mr Marling’s grandfather to plant a thick laurel hedge directly in front of the window, to keep the kitchen in its place. This Mrs Marling, who believed in fresh air, had cut down. To alter the window would have been too expensive, nor in truth did she greatly care if she could see out of it or not, having the very sane idea that a dining room was meant to eat in and one could look out of windows all the rest of the day if one wanted to. Her husband, who never meddled in the house, accepted the change with equanimity and apart from once saying that he felt as if he were in a loose box ate his meals contentedly. But Lettice, though she blamed herself for it, hated the tempered gloom and once complained to her sister Lucy that she felt as if she were in an aquarium, to which Lucy very truly replied that aquariums were full of water.

  ‘Well, a lions’ den,’ said Lettice, thinking of an engraving in the old nursery where Daniel with an unprepossessing white fringe at the back of his head and a long dressing-gown stood eyeing several lions who were cringing till their spines were bent nearly double.

  ‘You couldn’t keep lions in the servants’ hall,’ said Lucy kindly. ‘It’s only panelled with matchboarding and they’d rip it out in no time. Who do you think I saw in Barchester yesterday? Old Alec Potter. He says he’s got a cow in calf and the vet thinks she’ll have a bad time, so he’s going to ring me up and I’ll go and give a hand. Cows usually have a pretty easy time, but this one hasn’t enough stomachs or something, so it’s a marvellous chance. And his housekeeper makes the best parsnip wine I’ve ever tasted and I promised to give her that bit of sugar I saved off not having it in my coffee since the war.’

  And Lucy went off on her own avocations leaving her sister, who had never before heard of old Alec Potter or his housekeeper, bewildered though full of affectionate if rather exhausted admiration for her omniscient younger sister.

  But on this morning Lucy had either had her breakfast or had not yet come down, so Lettice kissed her parents and went to the sideboard to get her breakfast. Sometimes she wished she needn’t kiss them; not that she disliked them, but one does not always feel demonstrative at breakfast-time. But on the occasions when she had omitted this ritual, silent anxiety and blame flowed out in such waves that she at once had a guilt complex which lasted her for the rest of the day. So she made a dab at the top of each respected head and poured out her coffee.

  ‘Shall I give you some more, father?’ she asked.

  Her father said half a cup, and when she put it down by him looked suspiciously at it and then glanced with a resigned look at his wife.

  ‘I know,’ said Mrs Marling, returning his look with a sympathetic moral shrug of her shoulders.

  ‘It disgusts me to have a whole cup when I say a half,’ said Mr Marling, and drank it to the dregs.

  ‘Sorry, father,’ said Lettice, who had no particular feeling herself about halves or wholes and at once felt that she was seven years old and in disgrace. Her parents exuded patience and resignation while Lettice felt, as she had so often feft, that it was quite useless to be grown up, the mother of two children, ‘and one that has had losses’, she said inside herself with a bitter amusement at the aptness of her quotation, if one was made to feel like a naughty little girl at nine o’clock in the morning. From past experience she knew that to speak or to be silent would meet with equal disapproval after the affair of the coffee, so she thought she might as well speak. But her mother, who to do her justice had thought no more of the affair, having shot her bolt, began to speak at the same time, so Lettice stopped suddenly in whatever she was going to say.

  ‘You and Bill were very late going to bed last night,’ said Mrs Marling. ‘I heard the bath water.’

  This was a favourite complaint of Mrs Marling’s, who had developed a sixth sense for hearing any bath being filled or emptied and suffering the pangs of insomnia in consequence, by which means she scored heavily over her children.

  ‘I had my bath before dinner, Mother,’ said Lettice, involuntarily defending herself. ‘And I think Bill did too.’

  ‘Then I do not know who it could have been,’ said Mrs Marling, ‘but whoever it was I do wish they would be a little more considerate, for the noise of the water running off always wakes me. You heard it, didn’t you, William?’

  ‘Heard what?’ said Mr Marling. ‘The bath? Oh, the bath. Can’t say I did. What was it doing?’

  Mrs Marling transferred her look of resignation and her moral shrug of the shoulders to her daughter, implying rather than actually breathing the words, ‘Your father!’

  ‘Bill and I were talking about the children,’ said Lettice apologetically. ‘We did sit up a bit late because he had to go early this morning. Did you see him off, Mother?’

  ‘No sense in seeing people off,’ said Mr Marling, bursting into the conversation. ‘Get up early, don’t know how to fill in the time till breakfast. It isn’t as if he were on embarkation leave. I did happen to be up a bit before my usual time, but he had gone. He didn’t want anyone to see him off. Any coffee left, Lettice?’

  His daughter took his cup and filled it carefully to a certain flower on the inside supposed to represent an Imperial Half Coffee-cup. Her heart suddenly felt heavy as she thought of the morning she had seen her husband off for the last time, but she discouraged the feeling and came back to the table.

  ‘That all the coffee?’ said her father. ‘Amabel, you might tell the cook to give us enough coffee. Not rationed yet as far as I know. Well, well, so no one saw Bill off. I remember my mater getting up at five o’clock to see me off in ’fourteen, freezing it was too, and —’

  But an end was put to what promised to be a very dull story by the arrival of his younger daughter who opened the door in a shattering kind of way and stood there letting a roaring draught blow in from the passage.

  ‘Do you know what I did this morning?’ she said to no one in particular. ‘I saw Job Harrison going across the four acre, so I yelled to him to wait and Turk and I caught him up at the sluices and his wife is much better and the other twin’s going to live. Goodness, it was cold down at the sluices, not a bit like May.’

  ‘“Don’t cast a clout till May is out” my old pater used to say,’ remarked Mr Marling. ‘Sensible, those old sayings. People didn’t go about with nothing on in my young days.’

  ‘And Turk got a young rabbit,’ said Lucy. ‘Turk, Turk!’

  At her call a large shaggy dog rushed into the room and began to bark.

  ‘Lucy dear, shut the door,’ said Mrs Marling, ‘and have your breakfast. Down, Turk, down.’

  Encouraged by these words Turk walked round the table and pushed his large face at everyone, an attention from which Lettice shrank.

  ‘Lie down, Turk lie down,’ cried Lucy with the perfunctory voice of the dog lover who neit
her expects nor desires obedience from her four-footed owner. ‘The other twin, I mean the one that died, is to be buried tomorrow,’ she continued, as she poked about among the breakfast dishes. ‘Thank goodness the hens are laying now. Anyone want this egg? Job doesn’t know what to put on its tombstone because it only lived five days, but I said, “Well, it must have had a name,” so Job said it was christened Rezzervah. Sugar please, Mother.’

  ‘I thought you had given it up,’ said her mother.

  ‘So I have, Mother,’ said Lucy, whose mouth was very full of scrambled egg and toast, ‘but I collect it for old Alec Potter’s housekeeper, one lump for every cup.’

  ‘Rezzervah isn’t a name,’ said Mr Marling, who had been thinking over the subject. ‘Where did he get it? In the Bible, eh? Don’t remember it there.’