Miss Bunting Page 11

  When Miss Bunting and Anne got to the station, the train from High Rising was not yet signalled and they were able to enjoy such familiar but always interesting sights as a lot of mysterious wooden boxes being put into a van in the little siding, several hens going mad in a crate, the village hunchback who sold newspapers, chocolates and cigarettes in a little booth creeping out of it by a flap under the counter rather like Alice when she had at last made herself the right size to open the tiny door, the stationmaster coming down to the station from his house in a bowler hat, going into his office and emerging in his gold-braided cap, the porter having a heavy Barsetshire flirtation with a Land Girl, two dogs tied up in the parcels office getting their leads entangled and a tabby cat walking about on the line, with that indefinably down at heels and slatternly air that cats have when out of their proper surroundings. So what with one thing and another the time passed very pleasantly till the train came in and Lady Fielding got out of it. The only other passengers for Hallbury were a short, vigorous rather roly-poly brisk woman and a large ungraceful girl.

  ‘Mummy!’ said Anne. ‘Do look. That’s Miss Holly.’

  ‘Do I know about her?’ said Lady Fielding in whom the name struck no chord.

  ‘Yes, mummy, I told you,’ said Anne eagerly. ‘Miss Sparling’s secretary, that was with Miss Pettinger and they hadn’t enough to eat. Oh, mummy, you do remember.’

  Lady Fielding dimly remembered something Anne had said about the headmistress of the Hosiers’ Girls’ Foundation School and her secretary being the guests for a time of the headmistress of Barchester High School who was famed for her chill hospitality, but the whole affair had very little interest for her, she did not want to stare at complete strangers, and moved towards the exit with Anne hanging on her arm.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said a voice to Miss Bunting, who was a little behind the Fieldings, ‘but aren’t you Miss Bunting? Dr Sparling, my chief, met you at Lady Graham’s and she told me you were staying at Hallbury. Holly is my name, Dr Sparling’s secretary.’

  Miss Bunting graciously acknowledged her identity. Each lady was secretly comparing the other with her description as given by a third person. Miss Bunting, remembering Anne’s definition of Miss Holly as rather like a plum pudding, only very quick, admitted its correctness. Miss Holly, to whom Dr Sparling had mentioned meeting an old governess who was exactly what a good ex-governess ought to look like, felt that she would have recognized the original anywhere, and that if the place of their chance meeting had been Timbuctoo, Miss Bunting would have been just the same, her skirt unfashionably long, her hat unfashionably high on her head, her withered throat encircled by a black ribbon, yet unmistakably a lady of birth, breeding and intellect.

  ‘This is Heather Adams,’ said Miss Holly. ‘Her father has engaged me to give her some coaching before she goes to Newton College for which she won a very good scholarship. He has taken rooms here for the holidays and wanted us to have a look at them.’

  The large girl shook hands with Miss Bunting, who congratulated her. By this time they were all at the gate and at such close quarters that it would not have been civil to ignore the newcomers, especially as Anne had claimed Miss Holly as an old acquaintance, so Miss Bunting introduced Miss Holly to Lady Fielding and then Heather Adams’s name was mentioned.

  ‘I think Heather’s father knows Sir Robert slightly,’ said Miss Holly. ‘Mr Adams who owns the Hogglestock works, you know. He did mention that he had had some correspondence about the Friends of Barchester Cathedral Fund.’

  Lady Fielding made a suitable and polite reply, feeling slightly annoyed with Miss Bunting and incidentally with her daughter Anne, for letting her in for acquaintance whom she did not think her husband particularly wanted.

  While they were speaking, the New Town taxi was seen coming up the ramp. It drew up and disgorged Mrs Merivale.

  ‘What will you think of me being so late?’ she said. ‘Miss Holly, isn’t it? And Heather Adams – how do you do, dear? I had ordered Packer’s taxi as soon as I got Mr Adams’s phone call saying you were coming to look at the rooms, and I told him to come round by Valimere and the time was going on and no sign of him and I felt quite upset, so I phoned up the garage and they had forgotten the order, just fancy! But most luckily Mr Packer was there himself and he was quite upset and said it was a mistake in the office because the young lady was out this afternoon, but he would come himself. So now, do get in and Mr Packer will drive us out to my house and wait to take you back to catch the Barchester train. Mr Adams liked my rooms and I thoroughly enjoyed our little talk and if you see anything you would like altering you must be sure to tell me.’

  In a flutter of kindly excitement she herded her guests into the taxi and they drove away.

  ‘Isn’t Miss Holly nice, mummy?’ said Anne, when they had crossed the footbridge and were mounting the High Street.

  Lady Fielding was rather tired by a troublesome meeting at High Rising where even Mrs George Knox’s tact had not been able to prevent Lady Bond putting several people’s backs up, for her ladyship, though Staple Park was let to a school and she and Lord Bond were living in a small house on their estate, had not abated one jot of her viceregal domineering. Also she saw with resigned despair that this chance encounter had the seed of an annoying amount of social intercourse in it and would more than likely lead to a nearer acquaintance with both Mr Adams and his not very prepossessing daughter. So she did not respond with her usual enthusiasm to her daughter’s artless remark, and then blamed herself and felt a beast.

  Miss Bunting, whose life as a highly valued governess had made her very sensible to fine shades, had a pretty good guess at what Lady Fielding was thinking, and was sorry for her. Her own conscience was clear; the most ordinary good manners had forced her to speak to Miss Holly and Heather Adams; and even to introduce Miss Holly to Lady Fielding. She could do no less. Miss Holly was a pleasant and capable woman, secretary to a woman of unusual distinction as teacher and organizer in the scholastic world, who was holder of an honorary degree at Oxbridge, and the only woman upon whom the freedom of the Hosiers’ Company had ever been bestowed. So far so good. But the introduction of Heather Adams was not so good. Miss Bunting knew what Sir Robert felt about her wealthy and rather pushing father without being told; just as she had known that the Marquess of Bolton would never allow the Marchioness to ask that dreadful Mr Holt to come and see the garden; just as she had known how the Duke and Duchess of Omnium, kind and easy-going people on the whole, would see to it that Sir Ogilvy Hibberd never got his foot within their doors, even before his shocking attempt to buy Pooker’s Piece for building land, and his discomfiture at the hands of old Lord Pomfret.

  However, it had been impossible to avoid the unexpected meeting, and as she was in no way to blame, she with her usual clear common sense did not blame herself. Lady Fielding’s spurt of ill-humour subsided before Anne had realized it was there, and it was a very happy party that sat down to dinner at Hall’s End.

  ‘Daddy, isn’t it lovely, we’ve still got to-night, and Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday,’ said Anne. ‘Everything has been lovely and long since yesterday. I do hope it will go on being long.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Sir Robert, smiling. ‘But not all Tuesday. We have to go back to Barchester on Tuesday.’

  ‘Oh, daddy!’ said Anne reproachfully. ‘You came on Wednesday and you said a week.’

  A complicated discussion then took place as to what a week really was. Lady Fielding said seven days might mean seven whole days with a day at each end for coming and going which would make it nine. Miss Bunting said if people invited one to come on Tuesday for a week, it was difficult to know whether they expected one to go on the following Tuesday, or on the Monday just preceding it. She herself, she said, always took care when she received similar invitations to have the days of the week in writing from her hostess. Sir Robert said he had always wondered why the French, who were supposed to be logical, called a week a semaine and a
fortnight a quinzaine, as no amount of logic could make twice seven be fifteen. It was, he said, just what you would expect from the French, and for his part he thought we ought to have Calais, which really belonged to us, and then there wouldn’t be so much nonsense. Lady Fielding then pleaded for Aquitaine and Normandy, and everyone fell into the delightful game of remaking the map of Europe on purely personal prejudices, without the faintest regard for history, geography, or (quite rightly) race, for as Gradka said, who came in at the end of dinner, put everything on to the trolley and wheeled it away with slightly scornful competence,

  ‘If it is of races you speak, Mixo-Lydia will never tolerate Slavo-Lydia. You have an English proverb which says “Blood is thicker than water”, but I shall tell you that Slavo-Lydians have pigs’ blood, un point c’est tout. Pouah!’

  ‘They must be dreadful people,’ said Lady Fielding, far too sympathetically. ‘Good night, Gradka.’

  ‘I shall tell you,’ said Gradka to Miss Bunting, pausing in the open door with the loaded trolley, ‘of sommthing very humorous.’

  ‘Very well, Gradka, but shut the door,’ said Miss Bunting. ‘These summer nights are so cold.’

  ‘You know, everybody,’ said Gradka, standing with one hip thrown out and an arm akimbo in a rather truculent way, ‘that I have stoddied English humour, as exemplified in Butler and Byron and the Ingoldsby Legends and W. S. Gilbert. But there is one very fonny thing which I shall tell the examiners. It is a piece of inconscious humour.’

  ‘Unconscious,’ said Miss Bunting.

  ‘So; thank you very much,’ said Gradka. ‘You know the names of Sir W. S. Gilbert, what they are. They are William Schwenk. And what is Schwenk?’

  ‘Probably a family name,’ said Sir Robert, who was bored.

  ‘Family! That would indeed be humorous. As well you might say Christian, for no English are truly Christian,’ said Gradka, crossing herself fervently in the Mixo-Lydian form, which Mrs Morland had once described as very upside-down and un-Christian. ‘No. I shall tell you Schwenk. It is what we call the Slavo-Lydians. It means a vermin which is died and becomm eaten by maggots. Ha-ha! That is what we call those pig Slavo-Lydians and it makes us laugh till we burst.’

  ‘That is enough, dear,’ said Miss Bunting. ‘Good night, Gradka.’

  Gradka recognized the voice of authority and withdrew to the kitchen where she washed up and then resumed her studies.

  ‘Foreigners,’ said Sir Robert in a kind of mild despair. ‘And to think that we have to study their feelings. Much study any of them give to ours.’

  4

  The rest of Sir Robert and Lady Fielding’s holiday was not so long as the first two days. This is a mathematical phenomenon so well known that no comment need be made, just as during a weekend Saturday teatime to Saturday bedtime is a pleasant eternity, and the whole of Sunday an express train. But a great many nice things happened, like Hallbury House coming to tea with Hall’s End, Hall’s End going to tea with Mrs Watson and there meeting Hallbury House, Mr and Mrs Watson and Master Watson going to tea and tennis at the Rectory and there meeting Hallbury House and Hall’s End. Tennis was not very serious, for though the Watsons and Jane Gresham played really well, there was no good fourth. Robin was still not quite sure enough of his foot and Anne was too coltish and not up to Mrs Watson’s slashing balls. But she was a promising player; and while they were having tea Jane Gresham, a county player for two seasons before the war, offered to give her some coaching, if they could get a court, for the Admiral’s court had been made over since the second year of the war to geese and rabbits, the theory being that they would keep the grass down and then prove a succulent addition to the larder. In practice their lawn-eating was of a sporadic nature, so that bare muddy patches alternated with thick tufts of Jacob’s ladder and clover, nor did they fatten much unless their diet was supplemented. But no one minded, for the Admiral had never been a player, his sons were married and away, and Jane too busy to get up parties; besides which, as we know, really good tennis players there were few within the wartime radius of Hallbury. As for the old gardener, he looked upon all tennis courts and indeed flower-beds, grass walks and pleasure lawns as a flying in the face of Nature, who intended them for vegetables.

  The Watsons, always ready to promote the pleasure of their young friends, at once offered to lend their court, and it only remained to settle the days. What with Anne’s daily routine and Jane’s camouflage work and other activities, not to speak of the times when the Watsons wanted the court themselves, it was not easy to arrange a time, but finally Tuesday after tea and Saturday morning were provisionally fixed.

  ‘You’d better come, Robin,’ said Jane to the Rector’s son. ‘It’ll be good practice for you.’

  Robin, chafing under his disability, for he had tried one set and not done well, was inclined to refuse. But Jane quite truthfully said that she was sure she could help him and Anne said three would be much more fun than one.

  ‘There, my child, you show your ignorance,’ said Robin. ‘Three-handed tennis is a poor game. If only we could get someone else, just about as rotten as I am, we might make a do of it.’

  Jane agreed that they ought to find a fourth, though certainly not a rotten one, and Robin was not to talk in that silly way.

  ‘Mummy,’ said Anne to her mother who was talking to Dr Dale, and in any case took little interest in tennis. ‘Oh, mummy, Miss Holly used to play tennis when she was at Miss Pettinger’s. She beat Cynthia Dandridge that was the captain of tennis in singles once.’

  ‘Did she, darling?’ said her mother. ‘You do look hot. Where is your cardigan? Put it on.’

  Anne loosened her cardigan which had been on her shoulders with the arms tied round her neck and put it on properly.

  ‘Couldn’t we ask her to come and play tennis, mummy?’ she said.

  Lady Fielding, who now remembered who Miss Holly was, and did not, as we know, much want to be implicated with that lady, or rather – for she had nothing against her personally – with her pupil Heather Adams and even more her pupil’s father, said something noncommittal. Anne, who was never good at asserting herself, looked a little disappointed and took refuge in a fruit cake sent by an old pupil of Dr Dale’s from Australia. Lady Fielding turned to Dr Dale, relieved to have got rid of the subject so easily, when Mrs Watson’s rather brisk voice was heard asking if that was Cicely Holly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Anne. ‘She used to teach a kind of very high-up arithmetic at the Hosiers’ Girls’ School, and she is Dr Sparling’s secretary.’

  ‘Stout woman, runs along the hockey field like winking?’ said Mrs Watson.

  Anne said some of the girls called her Roly-poly, but she did run very fast.

  ‘That’s old Cicely,’ said Mrs Watson, who was one of those jolly women that never forget old school friends and enjoy nothing more than the Annual Reunion of Old St Ethelburgians. ‘Well, wonders will never cease. I wonder if she remembers Molly Glover. Where is she now?’

  As Anne was suddenly taken shy, Lady Fielding, hoping to scotch the unwelcome subject, left her talk with Dr Dale and said to Mrs Watson that Miss Holly was still with the Hosiers’ Girls’ Foundation School, now at Harefield Park.

  ‘Harefield? Oh, bad luck!’ said Mrs Watson, sympathizing with herself. ‘Only eight miles, but what I say is without petrol it might as well be eighty. We’ll have to think again.’

  Lady Fielding drew a silent breath of relief. If, without telling a lie, or even really implying one, she could leave Mrs Watson under the impression that Miss Holly was at Harefield Park, all would be well, and thank goodness Anne was in her shy mood.

  But Lady Fielding had not allowed for the persistence of a girl, however retiring, who has a moth-like devotion for a schoolmistress.

  ‘Mummy,’ said Anne, reproachfully. ‘You know Miss Holly is going to be in the New Town in the holidays.’

  As Lady Fielding could not publicly kill her daughter, she smiled and said nothing.

/>   Mrs Watson, all agog for news of her old fellow-student, pounced upon Anne and elicited from her the information that Miss Holly was taking a holiday job to coach the daughter of that Mr Adams that gave all that money to the Friends of Barchester Cathedral Fund.

  Mr Watson said rather ponderously that, feeling a certain responsibility for his client Mrs Merivale whose rooms Mr Adams was engaging, he had made a few inquiries in Barchester about him.

  ‘They say he’s a hard nut,’ said Mr Watson, ‘but you get fair treatment if you stand up to him. I saw the daughter once – just like her father, reddish hair, heavy build, didn’t seem quite all there.’