Never Too Late Page 16

  The Vicar followed her pointing finger to where Mr. Leslie in full country-gentleman panoply of check suiting, with knickerbockers, a cap to match, and gaiters, was seated in the front row not enjoying himself. A number of gentlemen and ladies wearing what, after being first fashionable, then grossly out of date, were now fine period clothes, were some seated, some standing behind them and some sitting cross-legged upon the ground, flanked by two keepers. Mr. Choyce expressed his admiration and asked who they all were.

  “Lady Emily of course I could recognize anywhere,” he said, “but I confess I cannot do the others.”

  “I thought you wouldn’t know me,” said Lady Graham, not without an air of proud satisfaction. “I was still in the schoolroom but allowed out for parties or if they were a man too many at dinner. How dreadful I was,” and indeed the plump girl with her hair obviously backcombed to frizz it out in front and a large bow tying it behind was more like Miss Hoyden than anything else. “But darling mamma had me properly groomed when I came out. I must see if there are some photographs of me in my first season,” and she turned over several pages. “Yes, there I am, looking too dreadful. That was the year I met my husband. We danced together a great deal. Did I ever tell you how he proposed to me, Mr. Choyce?”

  Mr. Choyce had heard more than once the enthralling story of how Colonel Graham, as he was then, had offered his hand to Miss Leslie, and indeed was rather tired of it, but from his hostess he was willing to hear it again if it gave her pleasure, in which he differed from Lady Graham’s sons and her brother John Leslie’s sons who shrieked, hooted, and whistled to express their disapproval. But not unkindly, and the scene always ended with laughter and a good deal of embracing.

  Mr. Choyce, torn between his total want of desire to hear the story again and his reverent affection for his Churchwarden’s wife, was trying to formulate words which while expressing both points of view would not very distinctly express either when a shadow passed over the photograph album. Lady Graham looked up.

  “Merry! how lovely!” she said. “Come and sit down. Mr. Choyce and I are looking at old photographs.”

  Miss Merriman, who had got to know Mr. Choyce very well when living with her beloved and trying employer Lady Emily Leslie at Holdings, during the war years, shook hands with a smile and sat down.

  “You know everything, Merry,” said Lady Graham. “Who is this extraordinary woman in the tailor made? I can’t place her. She looks as if she were saying ‘Ha, dirt! I will speak to thee this once.’”

  “I expect she was,” said Miss Merriman calmly. “It is Mrs. George Rivers.”

  “That dreadful Hermione Rivers?” said Lady Graham. “So it is. I can never think how cousin George came to marry her.”

  “They do, you know,” said Mr. Choyce, as one who while recognizing follies of this world was far above them.

  “I must say for Hermione,” said Lady Graham, “that though she writes those most improbable books about women of her age being fallen in love with by quite young men, I am sure she is excessively virtuous which,” said her ladyship with a learned air as of one who knew Jung and Krafft-Ebing inside out, “makes it all the more peculiar.”

  “I only read one of hers,” said Mr. Choyce, “an early one, I think, about a French nobleman who never travelled without his Steinway Upright Grand and met the heroine whose husband was a baronet and cold in manner at Angkor Wat.”

  “Was that all?” said Lady Graham.

  “Well, really it was,” said Mr. Choyce apologetically. “She did weaken a little when the Marquis dei Franchi—a deliberate crib from Dumas’ Corsican Brothers by the way— played the slow movements of Beethoven’s sonatas to her in the moonlight on the Steinway Upright Grand but Nothing Happened.”

  “So what happened then?” said Lady Graham, which was a more sensible question than it sounds.

  “Oh, she went back to Singapore and met her husband at his hotel. They had separate rooms, both opening onto the same balcony, and all lived happily ever after,” said Mr. Choyce. “I believe the marquis is still playing the slow movements aloud to himself somewhere” at which both ladies had to laugh, their laughter being considerably helped by their dislike of the gifted writer.

  “I wish I had met Mrs. George Rivers,” said Mr. Choyce, rather touchingly for so worthy and hardworking a priest.

  “I do not think you would have liked her, Mr. Choyce,” said Miss Merriman.

  “I have the greatest respect for your judgment, Miss Merriman,” said Mr. Choyce, “but I should like to try for myself,” which made everyone laugh and indeed, had they all been a little younger, one might have called it having the giggles. Then Lady Graham enquired after her Pomfret cousins.

  “Ludo is going on some special course later, something to do with Sandhurst,” said Miss Merriman, “but I am so afraid of saying the wrong thing that I shan’t try to say what it is. He will be alone at the Towers for some time, but I think he wants to work. I shall be there too, but I am hardly a companion for him.”

  “Dear boy,” said his cousin Agnes. “Couldn’t you both come over here for a week, Merry?”

  Miss Merriman, who had hardly ever spoken without thinking, was silent.

  “And don’t say, If you really want me.” said Lady Graham, which made Miss Merriman laugh and say that she would like it very much and would give Ludo Lady Graham’s message and was sure he would like it too.

  “I can’t tell you what Sandhurst has done for him,” she said. “When he first went he was so tall and thin and nervous that I think we all wondered if it was the sensible thing. I know Lord and Lady Pomfret were not at all happy about it. But evidently it suits him. Of course Giles will romp through. In fact no one would be surprised if he were expelled for high spirits. But we were all anxious about Ludo.”

  “So we all were about Gillie when he first came to the Towers” said Agnes. “I remember how dreadfully shy and quiet he was and then he somehow took command. I think you helped him a great deal, Merry.”

  “Yes, I did my best,” said Miss Merriman, in a rather absent voice, thinking perhaps of the day when the present Lord Pomfret who was then plain young Mr. Foster had proposed marriage to the estate agent’s sister, the present countess, and how sincerely she had congratulated him on what had been the best match from almost every point of view that his friends could wish for him. How she had passed the night after the announcement was, and always would be, like the rest of her private life, only her own affair.

  “You know,” said Lady Graham to Miss Merriman, “we have people in the Old Manor House now. Lord Crosse’s elder daughter and her husband, a Mr. Carter who turns out to be a cousin of the Headmaster of Southbridge School where my brother John’s boys were, so it is all in the family so to speak. I must take you over to Crosse Hall, Merry. Lord Crosse is most pleasant and a widower,” at which Mr. Choyce nearly laughed and then felt slightly displeased, but both feelings vanished as a nightmare vanishes once we really know we are awake and not merely mad.

  “Well now, that is really all settled,” said Lady Graham to Miss Merriman. “Thank goodness Conque is not coming here this summer,” for Lady Emily Leslie’s rude and graceless French maid had become almost a yearly institution at Holdings. “She is going to France to quarrel with all her relations about a field of beetroot that someone left to somebody. I am sure she will have a delightful time,” and to this day neither of her hearers have decided whether this was her own charming idiocy or a sudden outburst of sarcasm from a dove.

  “Miss Merriman,” said Mr. Choyce, “may I ask a great favour?”

  “Certainly,” said Miss Merriman, with her usual indefinable quiet aloofness and a kind of politeness which, as the Noel Mertons’ agent Mr. Wickham had once said, made one wonder what the hell she really thought about things, to which tribute he had added that he would dearly like to see her down two or three stiff ones and wait for what would come out. But we think that Miss Merriman even in her cups—if anyone could possibly ha
ve imagined her in that condition—would have still been the picture of perfect discretion.

  “It is our Mothers’ Union Annual Meeting,” said Mr. Choyce. “You may remember how kind Lady Emily was to them and came and gave a talk once,” which Miss Merriman said, with her usual composure, she very well remembered, as Lady Emily had wanted to paint one of her free arabesques of flowers and fishes on the wall where the Mothers’ Union Flag was hung and had with difficulty been headed off.

  “If you could, in a way, continue her kindness by speaking to them while you are at Holdings,” said Mr. Choyce, “it would give them the greatest pleasure.”

  Miss Merriman said she would be delighted to be of help.

  “Have you any particular subject on which you would like to speak?” said Mr. Choyce. “I don’t mean Biblical, though of course if you wished to say anything of that kind we should all appreciate it,” and then his sentence tailed away and he felt he had got everything as wrong as he possibly could.

  “How would it do,” said Miss Merriman, who with her mind and eye trained to watchfulness for those she cared for had noticed Mr. Choyce’s nervousness, “if I talked about the way the Towers was run in old Lord Pomfret’s time? I know some of the women here worked in good houses when they were young.”

  “Splendid, splendid,” said Mr. Choyce.

  “As it will presumably be in the afternoon and there cannot be lantern slides,” said Miss Merriman, “I could bring some large photographs of Pomfret Towers as it was in the late Lord Pomfret’s time, with the dining-room table laid for twenty-four and all the plate out. And if Lady Pomfret will allow me, I could bring one of old Lady Pomfret’s dinner gowns. It is purple velvet embroidered with black sequins and some very fine real lace at the neck and sleeves.”

  Mr. Choyce nearly said God bless you, Miss Merriman, but refrained. Not that he was afraid of testifying, but he felt that the words would somehow be unsuitable in the present surroundings, which is understandable if unreasonable.

  “And I think I could find a pair of purple velvet evening shoes and a purple ostrich-feather boa,” said Miss Merriman.

  “If only someone could wear them,” said Mr. Choyce wistfully, looking at the ladies as he spoke, but neither of them was as tall as the old Countess of Pomfret, nor did he think either of them would care to be mannequins.

  “Perhaps,” said Lady Graham who had been thinking— an act of which she was much more capable than most people would have believed—“we could get Mrs. Carter to dress up. She is tall and has a good figure.”

  “Admirable!” said Mr. Choyce. “That is,” he added, turning to Miss Merriman and speaking with a kind of apologetic courtesy to one who had made the suggestion, “if you feel it would be fitting.”

  “Darling mamma, how she would have loved to dress up,” said Lady Graham. “I remember when I was quite little she went to some big ball in London where everyone had to be their grandmother and looked superb in a crinoline that had belonged to a Countess of Pomfret. She had such a lovely neck and shoulders. So has Edith,” which words her ladyship spoke in a kind of reverie, almost forgetting the generations.

  “Then may I really count upon your help, Miss Merriman,” said Mr. Choyce. “I shall have to send the notices out and I am sure all our members will come.”

  Miss Merriman said yes very pleasantly and was we think glad to have the chance of making one of her former employer’s dresses useful, for her Lady Pomfret had the welfare of the people on the estate very much at heart and though her kindness was rather impersonal it was well organized and could be absolutely relied upon, as the agent and the clergyman of her day could have testified.

  Then Miss Merriman returned to her task of helping Lady

  Graham, who had embarked upon writing the names of the people in the old family albums beneath their photographs while the Vicar, who for once did not happen to have any pressing business and greatly enjoyed the society of two such delightful women, sat and watched them. Lady Graham had the advantage of remembering personally a good many of the originals but Miss Merriman, partly from her many family talks with her late employer Lady Emily Leslie, partly from other long talks with Mrs. Siddon the ex-housekeeper at Rushwater and partly from her own neat and almost scholarly mind where people were concerned, could fill in a good many gaps, though—as almost always happens with old family photograph albums—there were one or two people who appeared regularly in almost every group to whom neither lady had the faintest clue. One particularly plain woman who always wore a feather boa was provisionally identified by Lady Graham as a young version of Victoria Lady Norton, but a man in a check shooting suit with bicycle-handle moustaches remains unidentified to this day unless he was that man whose name no one could remember who wanted to sell someone an option on a sapphire mine in Burma and had been at Cambridge with the Honourable George Rivers’s uncle.

  Then with the Vicar’s help the ladies put all the books neatly back in their places and went back to the drawing-room where Lady Graham said they would not wait tea for the young people, but almost at once Edith and Mr. Crosse came in. Edith hugged Miss Merriman who took the hug sedately, though with an inner warmth of heart that the namesake of old Lady Pomfret and beloved grand-daughter of Lady Emily Leslie should still feel and show affection for her.

  “We went up as far as the hatches,” said Edith, “and saw two kingfishers. John-Arthur sculled up and I sculled down. I’m getting some splendid blisters” and she exhibited, not without legitimate pride, several quite unpleasant examples.

  “Run a needle and thread through each of them,” said Miss Merriman. “Then they will empty themselves.”

  “And don’t try to pick the scabs off, however tempting,” said Mr. Choyce. “I’ve done it myself and wished I hadn’t. Much better to get callouses if you really want to scull.”

  “But they will look horrid,” said Edith, examining her hands which were not so elegant as were her sister Clarissa Belton’s whose elegant tip-tilted fingers were the joy of all connoisseurs, but nice fingers all the same.

  “No one is going to look at the palms of your hands, my girl,” said Mr. Crosse with almost brotherly frankness and then both the scullers applied themselves to a hearty tea.

  Presently a knock was heard at the door, so unusual a sound in these days that everyone looked up, almost expecting a masked emissary from the Vehmgericht or the Camorra.

  “Come in,” said Lady Graham with a smile of apology to Mr. Crosse and in came Odeena with the words “It’s the lord my lady.” She then plunged back towards the kitchen, feeling she had done her duty by the visitor who was Lord Crosse.

  “May I come in?” said Lord Crosse, standing in the doorway slightly though amusedly embarrassed. “I am on my way back from High Rising. Mrs. Morland sent you her love, Edith, and says come again soon,” which pleased that young lady very much.

  “I cannot tell you, Lord Crosse,” said Lady Graham, “how pleased we are to have your young people here. They came to lunch today after church. I asked them to come to our pew as it was their first visit and then they are going to use the Old Manor House pew. It is a very nice one and only needs the cushions making over as they are full of knobs and it will seat the whole family,” and if any of her audience felt that it would be a long time, if ever, before Mrs. Carter’s two small children developed into the half dozen or more that the pew could easily take as well as the grown-ups, no one mentioned it.

  Lord Crosse looked gratified.

  “And now,” said Lady Graham, knowing that men would rather talk about what they have been doing, however dull, than hear what other people have been doing, however interesting, “do tell us all about Mrs. Morland.”

  “Not very much to tell,” said Lord Crosse, “but extraordinarily pleasant. I have never met a woman who seemed so entirely unconscious of herself. After all, she is a very famous writer, but no one would guess it.”

  Edith, rather impertinently her mother and Miss Merriman thought, said all
Mrs. Morland’s books were exactly the same because she had read them nearly all.

  “You need a course in logic, my girl,” said Mr. Crosse un-chivalrously. “Lucus a non lucendo or something of the sort. I can tell you that my mother, bless her, said that the reason she loved Mrs. Morland’s books was that although they were all the same they were all different. And she,” he added, “had read every one of them. Even the two Mrs. Morland wrote under another name. Hadn’t she, father?”

  “She was particularly proud of having those two,” said Lord Crosse, “because hardly anybody else knew about them. How she found out I don’t know. But she was so clever at everything,” and for a moment his face clouded and there was the slightest hold up, as it were, in the conversation.

  “I never knew that Mrs. Morland had written anonymous books” said Miss Merriman. “How very clever of her,” a remark with which we somehow agree, though at the same time fully perceiving its non-sequiturishness.

  “What were the books?” said Edith, who having stayed with Mrs. Morland felt that she was peculiarly constituted to be an authority on that lady and ought to know all about her.

  “I don’t think you would have heard of them,” said Lord Crosse, not unkindly. “One was a quite frivolous book about three Ladies of the Town in the early nineteenth century who were called Mrs. Bangs, Mrs. Patten, and Mrs. Pancras and lived in Covent Garden. It was all quite true and the ladies richly deserved their ultimate fates. The other was an experience of her own when she got mixed up during the war with an Anglo-Mixo-Lydian association. Of course she couldn’t write it under her own name because of libel, but it was extremely funny. She has the makings of an excellent reporter in her if only she could keep to the point.”