The Brandons: A Virago Modern Classic (VMC) Read online

  VIRAGO

  MODERN CLASSICS

  598

  Angela Thirkell

  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 Press

  978-1-4055-2839-9

  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 © the Estate of Angela Thirkell 1939

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  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

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  The Brandons

  Table of Contents

  VIRAGO MODERN CLASSICS 598

  By Angela Thirkell

  COPYRIGHT

  1: Breakfast at Stories

  2: Brandon Abbey

  3: Under the Spanish Chestnut

  4: A Visit to the Wishing Well

  5: Reading Aloud

  6: Brandon Abbey Again

  7: Bad News at Stories

  8: The Last of Brandon Abbey

  9: Miss Morris Relents

  10: The Vicarage Fête

  11: The Vicarage Fête

  12: Mr Merton Explains

  13: Miss Morris’s Legacy

  14: Mrs Brandon at Home

  1

  Breakfast at Stories

  ‘I wonder who this is from,’ said Mrs Brandon, picking a letter out of the heap that lay by her plate and holding it at arm’s length upside down. ‘It is quite extraordinary how I can’t see without my spectacles. It makes me laugh sometimes because it is so ridiculous.’

  In proof of this assertion she laughed very pleasantly. Her son and daughter, who were already eating their breakfast, exchanged pitying glances but said nothing.

  ‘It doesn’t look like a handwriting that I know,’ said Mrs Brandon, putting her large horn-rimmed spectacles on and turning the letter the right way up. ‘More like a handwriting that I don’t know. The postmark is all smudgy so I can’t see where it comes from.’

  ‘You might steam it open and see who it’s from,’ said her son Francis, ‘and then shut it up again and guess.’

  ‘But if I saw who it was from I’d know,’ said Mrs Brandon plaintively. ‘In France and places people write their name and address across the back of the envelope so that you know who it is.’

  ‘And then you needn’t open it at all if you don’t like them,’ said Francis, ‘though I believe they really only do it to put spies from other places off the scent. I mean if Aunt Sissie wanted to write to you she would put someone else’s name and address on the flap, and then you would open it instead of very rightly putting it straight into the waste-paper basket.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s from Aunt Sissie, do you?’ said Mrs Brandon. ‘Whenever I get a letter I hope it isn’t from her; but mostly,’ she added, reverting to her original grievance, ‘one knows at once by the handwriting who it’s from.’

  ‘If it’s Aunt Sissie,’ said her daughter Delia, ‘it will be all about being offended because we haven’t been to see her since Easter.’

  ‘Well, we couldn’t,’ said Mrs Brandon. ‘Francis hasn’t had a holiday since Easter, and you were abroad and if I go alone she is only annoyed. Besides she is more your aunt than mine. She is no relation of mine at all. That she is a relation of yours you have to thank your father.

  Francis and Delia again exchanged glances. It was a habit of their mother’s to make them entirely responsible for any difficulties brought into the family by the late Mr Brandon, saying the words ‘your father’ in a voice that implied a sinister collaboration between that gentleman and the powers of darkness for which her children were somehow to blame. As for Mr Brandon’s merits, which consisted chiefly in having been an uninterested husband and father for some six or seven years and then dying and leaving his widow quite well off, no one thought of them.

  ‘Well, after all, Mother, Father was as much your father as ours,’ said Francis, who while holding no brief for a parent whom he could barely remember, felt that men must stick together, ‘at least you brought him into the family, and that makes you really responsible for Aunt Sissie. And,’ he hurriedly added, seeing in his mother’s eye what she was about to say, ‘it’s no good your saying Father wouldn’t have liked to hear me speak to you like that, darling, because that’s just what we can’t tell. Can I have some more coffee?’

  Mrs Brandon, who had been collecting her forces to take rather belated offence at her son’s remarks, was so delighted to fuss over his coffee that she entirely forgot her husband’s possible views on how young men should address their mothers and saw herself very happily as a still not unattractive woman spoiling a handsome and devoted son. That Francis’s looks were inherited from his father was a fact she chose to ignore, except if his hair was more than usually untidy, when she was apt to say reproachfully, ‘Of course that is your father’s hair, Francis,’ or even more loftily and annoyingly to no one in particular, ‘His father’s hair all over again.’

  Peace being restored over the coffee, Mrs Brandon ate her own breakfast and read her letters. Francis and Delia were discussing a plan for a picnic with some friends in the neighbourhood, when their mother interrupted them by remarking defiantly that she had said so.

  A small confusion took place.

  ‘No, no,’ said Mrs Brandon, ‘nothing to do with hard-boiled eggs or cucumber sandwiches. It is your
Aunt Sissie.’

  By the tone of the word ‘your’ her children realised that they were about to be in disgrace for thinking of picnics at such an hour.

  ‘Then it was Aunt Sissie,’ said Delia. ‘What is the worst, Mother? Does she want us to go over?’

  ‘Wait,’ said Mrs Brandon. ‘It isn’t Aunt Sissie. At least not exactly. It is dictated. I will read it to you. And that,’ said Mrs Brandon laying the letter aside, ‘is why I couldn’t tell who it was from. It is written by someone called Ella Morris with Miss in brackets, so as none of the maids are called Morris it must be a new companion.’

  ‘Heaven help her,’ said Francis, ‘and that isn’t swearing, darling, and I am sure Father would have said it too. Give me the letter or we shall never know what is in it. Delia, the blow has fallen. Ella Morris, Miss, writes at the wish of Miss Brandon to say that she, Miss Brandon, hereinafter to be known as Aunt Sissie, is at a loss to understand why all her relations have forsaken her and she is an ailing old woman and expects us all to come over on Wednesday to lunch or be cut out of her will. Mother, who gets Aunt Sissie’s money if she disinherits us?’

  Mrs Brandon said that was not the way to talk.

  After half an hour’s detailed consideration of the question the Brandon family left the breakfast table, not that the subject was in any way exhausted, but Rose the parlour-maid had begun to hover in an unnerving and tyrannical way. Francis said he must write some letters, Delia went to do the telephoning which she and her friends found a necessary part of daily life, while Mrs Brandon went into the garden to get fresh flowers, choosing with great cunning the moment when the gardener was having a mysterious second breakfast. Certainly anyone who had met her coming furtively and hurriedly but triumphantly in by the drawing-room window, her arms full of the gardener’s flowers, would entirely have agreed with her own opinion of herself and found her still not unattractive, or possibly felt that a woman with so enchanting an expression could not have been more charming even in her youth. Mrs Brandon herself, in one of her moods of devastating truthfulness, had explained her own appearance as the result of a long and happy widowhood, and as, after a little sincere grief at the loss of a husband to whom she had become quite accustomed, she had had nothing of consequence to trouble her, it is probable that she was right. Her house and garden were pretty, comfortable, and of a manageable size, her servants stayed with her, Francis had been one of those lucky, even-tempered boys that go through school with the goodwill of all, if with no special distinction, and then fallen straight into a good job. As for Delia, she combined unconcealed scorn for her mother with a genuine affection and an honest wish to improve her and bring her up to date. Mrs Brandon thought her daughter a darling, and had gladly given up any attempt at control years ago. The only fault she could find with her children was that they didn’t laugh at the same jokes as she did, but finding that all their friends were equally humourless, she accepted it placidly, seeing herself as a spirit of laughter born out of its time.

  But human nature cannot be content on a diet of honey and if there is nothing in one’s life that requires pity, one must invent it; for to go through life unpitied would be an unthinkable loss. Mrs Brandon, quite unconsciously, had made of her uninteresting husband a mild bogey, allowing her friends, especially those who had not known him, to imagine a slightly sinister figure that had cast a becoming shadow over his charming widow’s life. Many of her acquaintances said sympathetically they really could not imagine why she had married such a man. To them Mrs Brandon would reply wistfully that she had not been very happy as a girl and no one else had asked her, thus giving the impression that she had in her innocence seized an opportunity to escape from loveless home to what proved a loveless marriage. The truth, ever so little twisted in the right direction by her ingenious mind, was that Mr Brandon had proposed to her when she was not quite twenty. Being a kind-hearted girl who hated to say no, she had at once fallen in love, because if one’s heart is not otherwise engaged there seems to be nothing else to do. Her parents had made no difficulties, Mr Brandon had made a very handsome will and taken his wife to Stories, his charming early Georgian house at Pomfret Madrigal in the Barchester country. Francis was born before she was twenty-one, a deed which filled her with secret pride, though no one else would have guessed it from her usual plaintive and ambiguous statement, ‘of course my first baby was born almost at once,’ a statement which had made more than one of her hearers silently add the word Brute to Mr Brandon’s epitaph.

  Delia was born four years later, and Mrs Brandon, wrapped up in her nursery, was only beginning to feel ruffled by her husband’s dullness when death with kindly care removed him through the agency of pneumonia. As it was a cold spring Mrs Brandon was able to go into black, and the ensuing summer being a particularly hot one gave her an excuse for mourning in white, though she always wore a heavy necklace of old jet to show goodwill.

  It was during that summer that Mr Brandon’s Aunt Sissie, hitherto an almost mythical figure, had made her first terrifying appearance at Stories. Mrs Brandon was sitting in the ex-library, now called her sitting-room, writing to her parents, when the largest Rolls Royce she had ever seen came circling round the gravel sweep. As it drew up she saw that there were two chauffeurs on the front seat. The man who was driving remained at his post to restrain the ardour of his machine, while the second got out and rang the front door bell. The bonnet was facing Mrs Brandon and she could not see who was inside the car without making herself too visible at the window, so she had to wait till Rose, then only a young parlour-maid, but older than her mistress and already a budding tyrant, came in.

  ‘Miss Brandon, madam,’ she announced, ‘and I’ve put her in the drawing-room.’

  ‘Miss Brandon?’ said her mistress. ‘Oh, that must be Mr Brandon’s aunt. What shall I do?’

  ‘I’ve put her in the drawing-room, madam,’ Rose repeated, speaking patiently as to a mental defective, ‘and she said the chauffeurs was to have some tea, madam, so Cook is looking after them.’

  ‘Then I suppose I must,’ said Mrs Brandon, and went into the drawing-room.

  It was here that for the first and only time she felt a faint doubt as to the propriety of mourning in white, for her aunt by marriage was wearing such a panoply of black silk dress, black cashmere mantle, black ostrich feather boa and unbelievably a black bonnet trimmed with black velvet and black cherries, that Mrs Brandon wondered giddily whether spinsters could be honorary widows.

  ‘When once I have sat down I don’t get up again easily,’ said Miss Brandon, holding out a black-gloved, podgy hand.

  ‘Oh, please don’t,’ said Mrs Brandon vaguely, taking her aunt’s lifeless hand. ‘How do you do, Miss Brandon. Henry will be so sorry to miss you – I mean he was always talking about you and saying we must take the children to see you.’

  ‘I had practically forbidden him the house for some years,’ said Miss Brandon.

  To this there appeared to be no answer except Why? A question Mrs Brandon had not the courage to ask.

  ‘But I would certainly have come to the funeral,’ Miss Brandon continued, ‘had it not been my Day in Bed. I take one day a week in bed, an excellent plan at my age. Later I shall take two days, and probably spend the last years of my life entirely in bed. My grandfather, my mother and my elder half-sister were all bed-ridden for the last ten years of their lives and all lived to be over ninety.’

  Again it was difficult to find an answer. Mrs Brandon murmured something about how splendid and felt it was hardly adequate.

  ‘But I went into mourning for my nephew Henry at once,’ said Miss Brandon, ignoring her niece’s remark, ‘as you see. I have practically not been out of mourning for fifteen years, what with one death and another. A posthumous child?’ she added with sudden interest, looking piercingly at her niece’s white dress.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Mrs Brandon. ‘Mamma and Papa are still alive.’

  ‘Tut, tut, not you,’ said Miss Brandon. ‘What is y
our name?’

  Mrs Brandon said apologetically that it was Lavinia.

  ‘A pretty name,’ said Miss Brandon. ‘When last I saw your husband Henry Brandon, he mentioned you to me as Pet. It was before his marriage and he was spending a weekend with me. I had to say to him, “Henry Brandon, a man who can call his future wife Pet and speak of the Government as you have spoken can hardly make a good husband and is certainly not a good nephew.” I suppose he made you suffer a good deal.’

  Here if ever was an opportunity for Mrs Brandon to indulge in an orgy of sentiment, but her underlying sense of fairness suddenly choked any complaint she could truthfully have made.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said, looking straight at her husband’s aunt. ‘He was very nice to the children when he noticed them, and he liked me to be nicely dressed, and we were always very comfortable. Would you like to see the children, Miss Brandon?’