Never Too Late Read online

  Never Too Late

  by

  Angela Thirkell

  CHAPTER 1

  “There are too many Friends of Everything about.”

  These words were spoken by the well-known novelist Mrs. Morland, in her comfortable but quite uninteresting house at High Rising, to Dr. Ford and the George Knoxes, the avant-garde as it were of a tea-party. Since we first met Mrs. Morland some twenty-odd years ago, that gifted creature had changed very little except that she was more vague and perhaps a little more uninterested in her clothes though with occasional spurts of buying a new suit or dress, then having to get a new pair of stays (as she firmly continued to call them, disdaining such words as corset, or belt) and so being led on to what she still called a petticoat (saying darkly that slips were not what respectable elderly widows had) and what she now rather dashingly called a brassiere, having been lately weaned by her old friend Mrs. George Knox, wife of the well-known writer of historical biographies, from saying petticoat-bodice.

  Mrs. Morland’s friends, who were accustomed to her gnomic or prophetic remarks, waited to hear what she meant.

  “Tony says—” began Mrs. Morland, who was far too apt to quote the obiter dicta of her grown-up sons, all married and happy fathers made; though most often of her youngest.

  “My dear Laura,” said George Knox, “forgive a friend, a very old friend I may say, though the oldness is far more on my side than on yours who are the spirit of eternal youth—”

  “No, George, I am not,” said Mrs. Morland indignantly.

  “You can’t call a woman who has four sons and ten grandchildren whose ages she can never remember young. Old Granny Morland, if you like.”

  “Look here, Laura,” said Mrs. George Knox, formerly Mrs. Morland’s secretary, Anne Todd, “you are overdoing it, and so is George. What does Tony say—if it is worth hearing” she added, having a lively though not unloving recollection of the small Tony’s gift of an uninteresting and often conceited flow of speech.

  Mrs. Morland looked wildly about her and pushed some hairpins further into her hair by the simple method of hitting her head with the palms of her hands.

  “I have completely forgotten. I can remember Nothing now,” she said proudly.

  “ ‘Je ne sais plus rien

  J’ai perdu mémoire

  Du mal et du bien

  O la triste histoire’ ”

  said George Knox, whose knowledge of French was wide, deep and loving, though the accents were those of a confirmed Anglophile.

  “Stop showing off, George,” said Mrs. Knox with wifely firmness. “And now, Laura, why are there too many friends about? I like friends myself.”

  “So do I,” said Mrs. Morland. “I mean real friends. Friends that are friends, I mean.”

  “ ‘Mere friends are we—well friends the merest

  Keep much that I resign’ ”

  said George Knox in a respectful quoting voice.

  Dr. Ford, beloved and trusted physician to most of West Barsetshire who cringed happily before his tongue and trusted him, literally, to the death, remarked “Browning,” but no one paid any attention to him.

  “And now, Laura dear,” said Mrs. Knox, who still looked upon her ex-employer as a well-meaning, kindly imbecile who, in the great words of the butcher to Tom Pinch about the beefsteak, must be humoured, not drove, “what were you going to say about there being too many friends of everything?”

  Mrs. Morland featured, very convincingly, complete ignorance being gradually illumined by the dawn of reason.

  “There are fifteen Friends of, or Friendships of, in the London Telephone Book” said Mrs. Knox, “because I had to look up the Quakers to ask them something George wanted to know and they were under Friends, Religious Society of.”

  “How seldom, my dear Anne,” George Knox burst in, “not excluding the rest of the party who are in their different ways—aye, many different ways though all perhaps leading towards the same end—how seldom—” and he stopped.

  “Carry on, Knox,” said Dr. Ford. “We are all married people here.”

  “But you aren’t, Dr. Ford,” said Mrs. Morland, “unless being a doctor makes you count as married—like clergymen.”

  “What are you talking about, Laura?” said George Knox, annoyed at this interruption to his flow of speech.

  “It is perfectly clear, George,” said Mrs. Morland, bravely concealing under these crushing words her total inability to pick up the thread of her very discursive thoughts. “Friends. There are far too many of them.”

  “If by Friends you mean the Quakers,” said George Knox, “I have but little acquaintance with them, though deeply admiring all they stand for. Nor can I think that there are too many of so admirable, so inoffensive a body.”

  “My old great-aunt, who was a kind of Wedgwood,” said Dr. Ford, thus raising in the minds of some of his hearers a picture of an aunt like a pale blue teapot with white raised designs of a classical nature on it, “never used You and Your. Always Thou and Thy.”

  “Ha! I have you there, Ford!” said George Knox. “It was Thee, not Thou. I know them.”

  “I know their tricks and their manners,” said Mrs. Morland aloud to herself, experiencing the Schadenfreude of the Dickens addict when other and less favoured human beings do not recognize his immortal word; or again, with Miss Fanny Squeers, pitying their ignorance and despising them. “But what I mean is, there are so many Friends Of in Barsetshire that it is quite muddling and also rather expensive. I mean a guinea a year or sometimes two.”

  “But let me remind you, Laura,” said George Knox, “not as advocatus diaboli, for heaven forbid that I should so stigmatize what are doubtless a very worthy set of men—”

  “Women too, I must regretfully remind you, Knox,” said Dr. Ford, who stuck firmly to the conditions before 1914 as a kind of Utopia. “Half the Civil Service are women now if it comes to that.”

  “Like that most unpleasant Miss Harvey,” said Mrs. Knox, who but rarely expressed a dislike for her fellow women, or even men.

  “Do you mean the sister of that impossible fellow, Harvey, of the Tape and Sealing Wax Office?” said Dr. Ford.

  “The same,” said Mrs. Knox, who because Dr. Ford had once cared for her quite deeply and she might have cared for him had not George Knox swiftly wooed and won her, liked occasionally to snub him in a kind way. Dr. Ford, whose love had long since evaporated into a not uncritical friendship, remarked aloud to himself: “Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love, But why did you kick me downstairs?”

  “Bear with me,” said George Knox in his most Johnsonian manner, “if for one moment I interrupt. What is the reference?”

  Mrs. Morland said To what? thus earning the lively gratitude of the rest of her party, who were already floundering about, well out of their depth.

  “Isaac Bickerstaffe,” said Dr. Ford. “And the reason I know it is that it was in the Times Cross-Word Puzzle last Friday and the clue was Not Dean, nor Drapier, nor Gulliver.”

  “I take you, Ford, I take you,” said George Knox, eager as always to know best just before anyone else could catch up with him.

  “No you don’t, Knox,” said Dr. Ford, unmoved by his friend’s enthusiasm. “One has an V at the end and the other hasn’t. Mine has,” he added, with an air of physicianly command that almost cowed his hearers. There were several seconds’ silence, broken by Mrs. Morland.

  “And that reminds me,” said that worthy creature, adding in a burst of confidence, “I really don’t know why—that Edith Graham is coming to stay with me for the weekend.”

  “Nice girl,” said Dr. Ford. “Good stock, well brought up. She had measles and chicken-pox and a nasty go of flu that year we all had it. But not mumps. Most of her brot
hers had it, but she didn’t.”

  “Mumps are, so I believe, far worse for males than for females,” said Mrs. Morland in her most Mrs. Siddons voice. “Not that I ever found it made any difference to my boys,” at which most of her hearers had to restrain themselves from a giggle or a guffaw.”

  “But be that as it may, Edith is coming to me and I know why I remembered it,” and she gazed at nothing with fine Sibylline abstraction.

  Mrs. George Knox asked why.

  “Oh, it was because of Friends of Everything,” said Mrs. Morland with a frankness which, her friends well knew, only meant that she had probably already forgotten what she meant to say. “We have a Friends of Rising Castle society now, which seems a little unnecessary to me as we all go there for nothing to see Lord Stoke, but now if we go as Friends we pay half-a-crown at the gate, only when Albert is on the gate he won’t let Lord Stake’s private friends pay,” which left her hearers convinced, if confused.

  “The name Albert, my dear Laura,” said George Knox, “does not rouse any echo in my mind—that strange unexplored region or hinterland of the human consciousness— any echo, I repeat, but that of a German minor royalty known once as Albert the Good and now—by the younger members of this nation who frequent the sadly depleted groves and pastures of Kensington Gardens—as The Albert Memorial.”

  “Groves I grant you, Knox,” said Dr. Ford. “But pastures, no.

  “Oh! but there were pastures,” said Mrs. Morland fervently. “Lots of sheep used to come to Kensington Gardens every summer to eat the grass down instead of mowing it and their fleeces were frightfully dirty. But that was when there were proper railings.”

  “Probably all their stomachs were black too,” said Mrs. Knox. “Then one could make them into black puddings.” This very logical remark brought the company back to a reasonable frame of mind and when Stoker, Mrs. Morland’s faithful and tyrannical maid, came to say should she wait tea for the young lady that was coming, she found them all comfortably talking about the best way to keep the croquet or tennis lawn from growing tufts of that peculiar grass that throws one spiky leg into the air, which leg bends gracefully to the mowing-machine and rises as gracefully to its former position. And, as Mrs. Knox so truly observed, one cannot go over a whole lawn with one’s scissors, because it spoils the blades.

  “I feel,” said Mrs. Morland, “that one could deal better with that kind of grass if one knew what it’s name was. Do you think it is called bent? Bent is a word, because it comes in poetry.”

  Dr. Ford said there was such a thing as poetic licence and what about couch-grass.

  “That is what I meant,” said Mrs. Morland gratefully.

  “Now Laura, you really couldn’t confuse bent and couch,” said Mrs. Knox.

  “I could,” said Mrs. Morland. “Because I do. Partly,” she added with an air of primitive wisdom, “because I never know if you really pronounce it cowch or cooch.”

  George Knox and Dr. Ford said, the one cooch, the other cowch, simultaneously. Mrs. Knox confused the issue and darkened counsel by saying suddenly Cooch Behar.

  “That’s all very well, Anne,” said Mrs. Morland, “but it is one of those places that you know its name but haven’t the faintest idea where it is, like all the names in the Far East where they are always fighting each other.”

  “I am now going to make the first sensible remark that anyone has made this afternoon,” said Dr. Ford. “Look it up in your atlas.”

  “No, you look it up, Dr. Ford,” said Mrs. Morland. “I can’t ever find things in an atlas because when you look them up in the index it says Page Forty-One, Fifty North and Forty West.”

  “Plagiarist,” said Dr. Ford. “You will be sued for royalties if you say things like that in public.”

  “Here it is,” said Mrs. Knox, who had with her old quiet efficiency been consulting the atlas. “Right up on top of Bengal.” But her audience had by now lost interest, though Mrs. Morland, feeling that as hostess it was incumbent upon her to say the right thing, did thank Mrs. George Knox warmly and said she had really been thinking of Poona all the time.

  “You shall, if you like, Laura,” said Mrs. Knox. “Poona is only right over at the other side of India, in Bombay,”

  “Oh, a suburb then,” said Mrs. Morland in a disappointed voice.

  “No, Laura,” said her ex-secretary, suddenly resuming the competent patience with which she had been used to treat her former employer. “Not in the town of Bombay. In the Presidency of Bombay.”

  Mrs. Morland said she didn’t know India had a President and was it Gandhi.

  At this point it seemed probable, even possible, that one of her guests would suffocate her with a sofa cushion, had not her maid Stoker, throwing open the door, blocked the doorway with her massive figure and said “It’s Miss Graham. I thought you’d like to know,” and standing aside she let Miss Graham, better known to us and to the county as Edith Graham, come in.

  “It is all right about being today, I hope, Mrs. Morland,” said Edith, advancing with a rather charming kind of shyness which meant nothing at all. “Even if I look a thing up twenty times I am never quite sure if I am right, but mother was away and I couldn’t find her engagement book.”

  Mrs. Morland, kissing her affectionately, said it was perfectly right and even if it hadn’t been, it was, which appeared to reassure Edith entirely. The George Knoxes had never met her and were both, as they later confessed to each other, delighted and surprised by the elegance and the pretty manners of Mrs. Morland’s guest. Dr. Ford greeted her as a kindof favourite niece by courtesy who had dutifully obliged by having chicken-pox and jaundice at the right age.

  We have not seen Edith since the wet and dismal summer of a year ago when she was very much a young lady, but still under her mother’s wing: though not without promise for the future. Since that summer she had spent two or three months in New York with her uncle David Leslie and his well-bred handsome wife, she who had been Rose Bingham, daughter of the redoubtable Lady Dorothy Bingham before whom every fox in her division of the county had quailed up till the day of her death. Rose Leslie had taken her husband’s young niece in hand as competently as she had done every job all through the war and afterwards. We think that the real Edith remained at heart the youngest child of the large Graham family, but she had acquired a most finished social veneer and had lapped up, like a cat with cream, all that our transatlantic cousins have to teach us of the elegances of life that two wars have almost destroyed in us, together with a pretty self-assurance that she had not previously possessed. She was wearing country clothes, most suitable to the cold, wet summer, a nylon shirt, or blouse as one prefers, of a cut and crispness foreign to these shores, sheerer nylons than most of us, shoes which though perfectly suitable to the country shrieked Italy at the tops of their voices and to crown all had an impertinent and very becoming hair-do—a horrid expression but it says what we mean.

  “Welcome, my dear,” said Mrs. Morland, kissing her in a very friendly way. “All these people know you—at least they all know about you and now they know you. This is Mrs. Knox and this is George Knox who is her husband—”

  “Not the George Knox,” said Edith. “I thought he was dead. I mean because of being so famous.”

  “He is not dead, he is here alive,” said George Knox, anxious to exculpate himself from the accusation of being a corpse, though flattered by Edith’s praise.

  “But not ready for me to be thy bride,” said Edith.

  George Knox said he failed to take her meaning.

  “I thought you knew English poetry, George,” said Mrs. Morland severely.

  “Nor were you mistaken,” said George Knox. “Few—and I say this not hastily nor in mere vanity—few, I repeat—”

  “He always does,” said his wife dispassionately. “But what he tells us three times is usually as true as what he says the first time. It was from The Bailiff’s Daughter you were quoting, wasn’t it, my dear?”

  “Yes,” said
Edith. “And I hope you didn’t mind. It wasn’t meant to be impertinent; only a kind of capping verses.”

  “I couldn’t possibly suspect you of being impertinent,” said Mrs. Knox kindly. “How did you come over from Little Misfit?”

  “Oh, John brought me and James in his car because Robert had taken James’s,” said Edith Graham. “My brothers, you know. Oh, and Ludo came too, to make four. And George Halliday and John-Arthur, that’s Mr. Crosse, came in George’s car.”

  This statement, much the same (allowing for difference of Christian names) that was going on all over England in the summer, would probably have been accepted with placid indifference by most of the company, who had a rough idea who everyone was; but George Knox, who for all his bombast had a scholarly mind, was determined to get things clear.

  “Then you have brought two brothers,” he said. “And two non-brothers.”

  “That is quite right,” said Edith approvingly. “At least not quite right, because there’s Ludo and he is my cousin more than my brother. I mean,” she added kindly, seeing George

  Knox’s eyes slowly glazing with the effort to disentangle her relations—an effect which the Leslie family en masse often had on outsiders—“he is my cousin, but we always look on him as one of us,” which speech, delivered with a prunes and prism precision of speech, made all the grown-ups laugh.

  “And John-Arthur is that nice young Mr. Crosse whom I met at your mother’s house, I suppose,” said Mrs. Morland. “I have met him again once or twice at the Deanery. His father is some kind of cousin of Mrs. Crawley’s I think.”

  “I think it is his mother, only she’s dead,” said Edith. “Because John-Arthur did say she was good West Barsetshire and his father is East Barsetshire.”

  Mrs. Morland, who had been vastly enjoying this county cross-talk, now took pity on George Knox and asked Edith if she would bring all her party in to tea.