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  VIRAGO

  MODERN CLASSICS

  668

  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

  978-0-3490-0750-2

  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 1945

  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 PRESS

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DZ

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Miss Bunting

  Table of Contents

  Virago Modern Classics 668

  By Angela Thirkell

  COPYRIGHT

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  13

  1

  The great Duke of Omnium, as is well known, not only disliked railways but refused to acknowledge their existence. After the death of the old Duke’s successor, formerly Mr Plantagenet Palliser, the next Duke found it necessary to come into line with the times and even to sell land, but by this time the network of railway that connects the outlying parts of the far-flung county of Barset was finished, the contractors had made their fortunes, been knighted and died of drink, the Irish navvies had gone back to Ireland to die of drink themselves till their wages were spent, and Parliament was not interested in more railway bills. This state of things lasted into the new century, when a branch line was constructed which leaves the main line just outside High Rising, links the parts of Barsetshire that lie outside the Omnium estate and runs within five miles of the Castle. With Gatherum Castle itself we shall not be concerned and we are happy to say that the Duke and Duchess can still afford to live there and that although all three sons are in the Army they are so far safe and there are several grandsons, while Lady Glencora and Lady Arabella, who both married well, have flourishing nurseries, besides doing valiant work in the Red Cross and WVS.

  Among the villages or small towns on this line is Hallbury. It is on the Omnium property, but as the estate is now for the most part a limited company, it does not have with the Castle the friendly feudal relations of former days. Until the coming of the railway it had remained almost untouched by progress; a street of little dignified stone houses and equally dignified red brick, living its own life, viewing from the gentle eminence on which it stands mile upon mile of pasture land, a certain amount of arable and the downs in the distance. It was the rising land that saved it from the degrading suburbs that so often accompany the march of progress. The railway, with one angry look at the town, kept on its course across the level, avoiding the river Rising, here no more than a stream, and pursued its way to Silverbridge and so into foreign parts. In course of time some marshy land was drained and the local speculators began to build. Tradesmen and small business people from Barchester began to settle there, followed by people from London, who wanted to walk or fish at the weekend and were well served by the excellent trains before the war. The roads were prettily laid out and planted with flowering trees and shrubs, the architecture was just what we might expect, for Pattern and Son, the builder and estate agent, had what he called Ideas, which included every style of building from half-timbered and pebble-dash to Mixo-Totalitarian with semicircular ends and windows that rushed round corners. So far the foundations (not that there were any because Old Pattern, now succeeded by Son, said it stood to reason where you’d got a space under a house you got rats) had endured, and the present Mr Pattern was always ready to rehang a door that a warped jamb was causing to stick, or push a window-frame gradually extruded by the pressure of sagging brickwork back into place, or even to poke at a blocked waste-pipe with a mysterious upward bend.

  As may be imagined, the town on the hill did not mix with the town beyond the railway, and society fell tacitly into two groups: the Old Town, consisting of the original inhabitants of the stone houses and the aboriginal cottagers and work-people, and the New Town, the status of whose citizens was almost indefinable, but may be expressed in the words of Engineer-Admiral Palliser at Hallbury House who, inarticulately conscious of a house at least five hundred years old in parts, held by his family since the Commodore Palliser who did so well in the matter of prize-money under Lord Howe, remarked that those houses on the railway line were always changing hands, and so dismissed the whole affair.

  Admiral Palliser, a distant connection of the Duke of Omnium, was a widower. Deeply attached to the wife from whom the sea had separated him so often and so long, he sincerely mourned her and as sincerely believed that the best he could do for her, as she was now probably able to see from wherever she was exactly what he was doing and even know what he was thinking, was to carry on; to think as well of his neighbours as human nature would allow; to do all for them that a certain amount of money and a certain local influence could ensure. Both his sons were in the Navy, both daughters married to naval men. The elder daughter lived in Sussex and could rarely leave her young family. Lieutenant Francis Gresham, the husband of the younger daughter, had been missing since the loss of our battleships in the Far East, so Jane Gresham with her little boy Frank had come to live with her father. She would have liked to drown her sorrows in a factory or in the Wrens, but her father needed care, her little boy needed a m
other, and she probably felt, as inarticulately as her father, that her mother, being rather unfairly in a position to know all that was being done or thought, would like to see that Admiral Palliser was being properly looked after and the old servants kept up to the mark.

  It was not an amusing life for her. She loved her father and Hallbury, but all was changed. Her father was as often as not in Barchester where he was on the board of a large engineering works, or in London on business connected with it. Nearly all her contemporaries were away on various war jobs. The girls came home on leave from time to time, the young men more and more rarely as their duties called them overseas. The houses formerly of friendly leisure in the Old Town, were mostly servantless and packed with relatives or paying guests, there was no point in going to Barchester as there was nothing in the shops and it was impossible to get lunch anywhere unless before 11.30 or after 2.30, she did not like to go to London and leave her little Frank, and to take him with her would have been foolish. So she stayed in her father’s home, glad of its shelter, always waiting to get away, and blaming herself for feeling depressed. And deeper than all these griefs was the knowledge, for she did not willingly deceive even herself, that the longer Francis Gresham was missing the less she minded. It was not that she didn’t love him, or that the dull ache at the heart, the dreary waking from dream to real life every morning grew any less; but the whole thing seemed so infinitely far away, and the longer he was absent the more difficult it would be, she feared, to begin their life again – if ever he came back. Sometimes she almost prayed to hear that he was dead. Then she blamed herself bitterly and knew she would die of joy if the door suddenly opened and he were there. But of course none of these things happened, and she sank into an almost painless monotony of life and always thanked charmingly the people who asked if there was any news of her husband.

  ‘There’s something you could do for me, Jane,’ said her father at breakfast one morning. ‘You know Adams.’

  Jane Gresham had often heard of Mr Adams, founder and proprietor of the big rolling mills and engineering shops at Hogglestock. Her father took a great interest in his work on the board and usually told her what he was doing, for she liked to hear about what she called ‘real things’ and had even made one or two very intelligent suggestions, but she had never met the director.

  ‘It seems he wants a house outside Barchester for the summer holidays,’ said the Admiral, ‘not for himself, but his girl is going up to Cambridge in the autumn, and he wants a place where she can get some extra coaching. Apparently he has found a woman coach for her, but he says if she stays in Barchester she will be in and out of the works all day. He asked my advice so I said I would speak to you. He is a good enough fellow,’ said the Admiral, by which his daughter perfectly understood that Mr Adams was, not to put too fine a point upon it, by no means a gentleman, ‘and I’ve a great respect for his business methods. What do you think?’

  Jane Gresham thought and gave it as her opinion that there was not a house to be had in Hallbury, and probably not even room for any more paying guests, but that she would go to Pattern and inquire.

  ‘He will pay anything so long as he gets value for his money,’ said the Admiral, getting up and taking the Times with him to read in the train, which always irritated his daughter, because more often than not he forgot to bring it back with him. And then he kissed her and went down to the station.

  It was an unpleasant morning in July, though no more unpleasant than most, for Providence in its inscrutable incompetency had altogether given up the question of summer for the duration of the war. A winter of much wind and no rain had been succeeded by a windy and arid spring, followed in its turn by a chill summer of grey skies and drought, with the weary sound of wind still flapping aimlessly about. The rivers were low, many springs were dry; overworked and understaffed farms were having to water the cows and horses and sheep. At Grumper’s End over near Pomfret Madrigal water was being carted, and Sir Edmund Pridham, the local magnate, had had violent passages at arms with the Barsetshire County Council and the Water Company. No prayers had been offered for rain, for most people felt it was really safer not to interfere with Powers who had obviously let everything get out of their control. So gardens and fields lay cold and untidy, and everyone’s temper was daily exacerbated.

  But not the temper of Master Frank Gresham, aged eight and a half, who had a snub nose, a wide grin and the best opinion of himself and the world, so that whenever his mother looked at him she felt that things weren’t so bad after all, and what a good thing it was that he didn’t remember his father well enough to miss him; for four years is a long gap out of eight and a half. In the autumn he was to go to the preparatory school at Southbridge, and at present attended a small class at the Rectory every day, coming home for lunch.

  When she had done her share of the housework and talked with the elderly cook and parlourmaid, Jane Gresham took her shopping-basket and went out to do the shopping. No sooner had she closed the front door behind her and gone down the garden path into the street than a buffet of wind drove down on her, whirled her hair into confusion, tossed a few bits of paper and straw into her face and blustered itself away, thus setting the key for what she felt sure would be a difficult morning. Her one comfort was that she had admitted defeat at the very beginning of the day and put on a woollen skirt and cardigan instead of the washed-out summer frock that most of the other shoppers were wearing, so she would at least be warm.

  The fish was visited, also the grocer, the little linen-draper and all-sorts shop, and the stationer. The fish after some fifteen minutes’ wait produced an anonymous piece of stiff whitish slipperiness called fillets, the grocer at last had in stock a little washing soda for which she had been waiting three weeks, the linen-draper’s had just got in its quota of non-elastic elastic and was able to let her have a yard, the stationer had one copy of the month’s local bus and train guide.

  Her luck being for the moment in, she decided to begin her search for lodgings and went straight to the office of Pattern and Son.

  The late Mr Pattern, founder of the firm, had always been, or so he said, one for practising what he preached. As no one knew what he preached, the accuracy of his practice was a matter for speculation, but he undoubtedly built as he would be built by. His office, for which he had been designer and contractor, was erected on a corner where some very picturesque cottages had stood. The cottages, it is true, were below ground level, insanitary, a home for rats and bugs, the thatch a mass of decaying vegetation, and it was high time they went. But while the gentry were beginning to talk of doing something, Mr Pattern, who though not exactly on the Council had a good many friends there, had got in first, bought the cottages and erected a stately pleasure dome to his own heart’s desire. And when we say pleasure dome it is not poetical licence, for the crowning feature of his resurrection-pie architecture was a pepper-box turret, precariously attached to the corner of the building, with a small wooden dome which he caused to be painted to look like verdigris’d copper.

  Though the late Mr Pattern had built a great many houses in the New Town and owned many of them, he had never left the Old Town, preferring to live over the shop, thus earning the reputation of being one of the old school, though of what school no one quite knew. Young Mr Pattern, having married slightly above him into a bank manager’s family, preferred to live in the New Town and had let the upper part of the house at an excessive rent to various mid-European refugees who mysteriously always had plenty of money and got very good jobs, replacing local men and women who had been called up. Young Mr Pattern’s ambition was to build what are known to the trade as Californian bungalows on the banks of the Rising, and to make what is almost universally called a Lye-do, and it was only by the special intervention of the German Chancellor that his plan came to nothing. For in 1937, scenting trouble ahead, the Duke of Omnium’s agent Mr Fothergill had persuaded his employer to make over two miles of the River Rising with a wide strip of land on each si
de to the National Trust, and it was said that old Mr Pattern’s death was hastened by this deliberate waste of building land.

  Often had young Mr Pattern cast a longing eye upon Admiral Palliser’s property, comprising a large garden, a small paddock for horses, and a field beyond, usually let for grazing to a farmer. But the Admiral was pretty well off, had no occasion to sell and would probably have been very short with anyone who had suggested it. So Mr Pattern continued to regard him with admiration as an old buffer who knew his own mind and with contempt as one who kept good money locked up in land. He would also dearly have liked Mrs Francis Gresham to become acquainted with his wife, but though the war had mingled all races and creeds, it had not as yet mingled Old Town and New. Why the Old Town butcher’s wife, Mrs Wandle, should attend working parties and committees at Hallbury House and the Rectory, while Mrs Pattern (as he called his wife) was never invited, he could not understand. Nor will he ever understand. We perhaps may.