Cheerfulness Breaks In Page 19

  ‘Miss, I don’t like rabbit. I want fish and chips.’

  Gradually the plaints subsided. Lydia went round the dining-room with the jug of water replenishing mugs. Already the tables were slopped with water, gravy, rabbit bones and splashings of potato. The smell of children and stew became thicker. The children themselves looked remarkably healthy and were well and warmly dressed. Lydia recognised some of the arted-up frocks from her working party and a couple of boys’ jerseys that had belonged to her brother Robert’s little boy Henry. The children filed back with their plates which the helpers rapidly emptied into the pig bucket. What with those who didn’t like rabbit and those who didn’t like potatoes and those who didn’t like gravy and those who had taken three pieces of bread and only messed it about, and those who had eaten so many sweets already, bought with postal orders sent to them by their starving parents, that they could not eat at all, the bucket did very well.

  The helpers now stationed themselves behind the serving table and dealt out stewed pears and custard, with a strip of cake to each. A number of children raised plaintive cries for or against these different articles of food, but the plaints, owing to fullness, were less violent. As soon as they had finished they rushed shrieking into the stable yard and so out into the street, and quiet fell.

  Mrs. Turner and her aides took off the stove the kettles and saucepans of water that had been boiling and did the wash-up. The lay helpers, by which we mean the dull and nameless ones, then said they were sorry they must go home, as their husbands didn’t like it if they were late. Mrs. Turner, Lydia, Betty and the other niece washed the tables, swept the floor and washed out all the drying cloths, which the other niece hung up in the yard to dry, after which they sat down and made their own lunch off some stew and potatoes that Mrs. Turner had kept back.

  ‘I wish it was summer and we were having a picnic at the Wishing Well,’ said Betty suddenly. ‘Ackcherly we couldn’t because they’ve got an anti-aircraft post up there, but I wish we could.’

  ‘If those kind of things really happened like what people write about, about everything really happening at the same time only nobody knows exactly what it is,’ said the younger niece, ‘we could, but I think that’s all rot.’

  A pensive silence fell, while the four helpers thought of Time.

  ‘I wonder,’ said Mrs. Turner, ‘how long it will take to get this place clean again when we stop, if we ever do.’

  ‘It took us days at home,’ said Lydia, ‘and that was only six children. And coats of whitewash.’

  ‘Why they all smell so much I can’t think,’ said Mrs. Turner. ‘They all get one bath a week and most of them get two, and we’ve dressed them from top to toe and from the inside to the outside. Peculiar. I suppose the whole of the Middle Ages smelt like that. Come along, girls, we’ll just wash up our own dishes and then we’ve done.’

  ‘Ackcherly,’ said Betty, ‘we ought to be at the A.R.P. practice now.’

  Lydia said they had better go and she would wash up with Mrs. Turner. She was just hanging up the saucepan lid on its nail when Noel Merton walked in, announcing that he had tracked her by the smell of rabbit stew from as far off as the Post Office.

  ‘It’s filthy,’ said Mrs. Turner, with great frankness, ‘but the children smell much worse, bless them. I believe the whole of England will smell of children and stew before we’ve done. Good-bye. I’ve got a Polish Relief working party at two.’

  She turned the gas off at the meter and went away.

  Lydia sat down on a wooden chair, while she folded her overall. For a moment her hands lay slack on the flowered bundle and she looked down. Then she raised her head and looked at Noel.

  ‘You’ve done it again, Noel,’ she said. ‘I knew there was something wrong with you the minute you came into the kitchen.’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ said Noel apologetically. ‘Being of a crabbed and studious disposition I did rather well in my exams and they made me a captain. I now have blood lust and would like to be a major. One crown is an agreeable badge.’

  ‘I suppose promotion means going abroad somewhere,’ said Lydia.

  ‘Not yet, so far as I know,’ said Noel, ‘but you shall be the very first person to know if I do. Oath of a captain.’

  Lydia got up and shook herself with her usual vigour.

  ‘I feel as if I’d never get this rabbit-evacuee smell off me,’ she said vehemently. ‘Come on.’

  She led the way down the flagged passage to where Noel’s car was standing by the kerb and got in. Noel went round and got in on the other side.

  ‘Look here, my girl,’ he said, ‘do you know what you did just now? You sat still with your hands in front of you. I’ve never seen you do that before. Is your mother worse?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Lydia. ‘Only up and down. Luckily we’ve got loads of coal, because she can’t stand the cold. I’m thinking of shutting up the drawing-room and using the library. Father and I do the estate work there, but that won’t worry Mother. Sometimes, Noel, one gets a bit down, if you know the feeling.’

  Noel said he did, and in his experience it always came right again, and where would Lydia like to go for a drive, as he had vast stores of petrol.

  ‘Do you know it’s a most extraordinary thing,’ said Lydia, ‘but I actually—oh bother that word, I didn’t mean to say it but Mrs. Turner’s niece says it all the time so I suppose I caught it from her—I mean as a matter of fact I don’t feel much like driving. You wouldn’t care to come for a walk down the water meadows, would you?’

  Noel said it was what he would like of all things and turned his car towards Northbridge Manor. When they got there Lydia said she would just hurl her overall into the house and wash some of the rabbit off her if Noel would wait, so he went out on to the little flagged terrace behind the house and sat on a white seat.

  Against this southern wall one could still bask in a mild way. The trees were dripping their golden autumn coats on to the grass and everything breathed an undisturbed peace. Noel thought of how many pleasant visits he had paid to the hospitable Keiths, beginning with the night he had to spend there unexpectedly, four or five years ago when Mr. Keith had made him miss a train. He smiled as he remembered the large, awkward, violent, good-humoured untidy schoolgirl that Lydia was then. Looking back on their early acquaintance he came to the conclusion that if he had not stood up to Lydia at once she would have knocked him down and trampled on him morally in her stride. By the greatest good fortune he had stood up to her bludgeoning and so earned her favour, and a highly unsentimental comradeship had sprung up between them. While Noel became more and more successful at the bar and was increasingly in demand among hostesses, he could always rely on Lydia to look piercingly through him with her alarmingly honest eyes and take him down a peg whenever she felt it necessary. In his mind he compared the Lydia he had first known and the Lydia he knew to-day and found very little change except for the good. True she did not appear at river picnics any longer in a shapeless garment with her bright red face, neck, arms and legs sticking out of it, but her mind still moved with a good deal of the brusqueness of those days and she was almost as ready to lay down the law as when she had preached about Horace and Shakespeare and Browning at sixteen.

  Now for the first time he was conscious that his ridiculous Lydia was in earnest. Only by chance references had he gathered from her all she was doing, but her father had spoken about her, and so had the Crawleys, and his admiration for her had grown. With her sister Kate away at Southbridge busy with her own children and the duties of a housemaster’s wife, and her special brother Colin in the army, Lydia had constituted herself the guardian of her father and her ailing mother, a lonely life when all her friends were enjoying themselves with hospitals and ambulances. Noel reflected upon his own job, an uprooting it is true, but in interesting places and among interesting people, and wondered idly if he could have done what Lydia was doing: a question that he didn’t like to press too far.

  A
nd now also he was conscious for the first time that his vital, tireless Lydia could feel fatigue or strain. When he came down the long flagged passage into the Communal Kitchen and saw her hanging up a saucepan lid, he had seen her as he always saw her, doing something. But when she sat so still for a moment, her hands idle on the folded overall in her lap, he had seen what he had never seen before, a Lydia putting down her burden before she shouldered it again. The remembrance pierced him. Then Lydia came out, announcing that if they were going down the water meadows they might as well tidy the boat-house, a fact which she evidently considered sufficient explanation for the very shapeless grey flannel skirt and untidy short-sleeved jumper she was wearing. Noel suddenly saw his old Lydia again and got up to accompany her.

  They walked down the lawn and through the little gate into the meadows, which had already been flooded once and gleamed greyly where the waters had remained standing. The winding course of the river was marked by a fringe of alders, willows, and mountain ashes, now almost leafless, while above it rose the line of the downs with the beech clump showing its tracery against the sky.

  ‘I do like all this,’ said Lydia, making a vigorous sweep with her right arm that Noel with difficulty avoided.

  She said no more till they got to the boat-house.

  Here she made Noel take off his tunic, though the old Lydia would not have stood over him while he folded it neatly and hung it over a fence, and for nearly an hour they worked hard. The boat and the canoe had to be emptied of the leaves that had blown in from the river bank, the oars were put into their winter quarters on the wall, the cushions and mats were heaped on a bench outside for one of the gardeners to bring up to the house. Lydia, with some solemnity, closed and locked the river doors. Then after taking a last look at the green gloom behind her she locked the outer door.

  ‘End of the boating season,’ she announced. ‘Colin usually does the Grand Closing with me, but last time he wrote he said he didn’t know when he’d be getting leave, so I’d better do it.’

  Noel put his tunic on again and they walked up to the house. There was a great deal that he wanted to say to her, but he couldn’t find the words or the occasion. To praise her would probably only earn her good-humoured scorn; to tell her that he was anxious for her with all her burdens might annoy her; to try to explain what had pierced him in her momentary lassitude might trouble her mind. So he left everything unsaid and discussed the question of buying more pigs for the farm, or rather listened to Lydia’s monologue on the subject.

  In the drawing-room they found Mrs. Keith, who was pleased to see Noel.

  ‘A friend of yours is coming to tea,’ she said, ‘Lavinia Brandon. She rang up after you had gone to the Kitchen, Lydia, and said she had a bit of petrol to spare and would like to come.’

  Lydia was glad her mother was to have so charming a visitor but her own heart unaccountably sank a little. She blamed herself inwardly for this feeling which she put down to the rabbit stew and the evacuees.

  ‘Oh, and Tommy said he wanted to come to tea, Mother,’ she said. ‘He’s doing something about a football match over here.’

  ‘These young people,’ said Mrs. Keith to Noel Merton, in what he felt to be an unnecessarily grown-up to grown-up kind of voice, ‘will not use surnames. Which Tommy is it, Lydia? Tommy Gresham, or that girl over at Little Misfit that has the bull terrier?’

  Lydia explained that it was the Dean’s secretary.

  ‘I can’t think,’ said Mrs. Keith with great dignity, ‘why the Bishop should have a chaplain and the Dean only a secretary. Considering how very Low Church the Bishop is I should have thought a secretary would be quite good enough for him. Whenever I hear of anyone having a chaplain I always think of the Ingoldsby Legends.’

  Neither her guest nor her daughter felt equal to coping with this particular thought. Noel vaguely wished that this Tommy were not coming and Lydia, who was not as a rule given to such delicacies, suddenly felt that Noel was dissatisfied, which increased her depression and made her concentrate on the rabbit stew as the cause of all evil.

  While Mrs. Keith was telling Noel about her elder son Robert’s children, Palmer announced Mrs. Brandon.

  ‘You had better do the black-out in the drawing-room now, Palmer,’ said Mrs. Keith.

  Palmer said she was sure she was sorry, but she had thought it was a pity to shut the light out so soon.

  Noel could see in Mrs. Keith’s eye that she was going to risk a domiciliary visit from the A.R.P. sooner than offend Palmer, but Lydia said, ‘Now please, Palmer,’ and Palmer grudgingly closed the shutters and drew the curtains.

  ‘How nice and cosy it is. Just like old days,’ said Mrs. Brandon, looking round at the room with its shaded lamps and its bright fire.

  It occurred to all three hearers that in the old days it had been pleasant to have the room lighted at tea-time on a late autumn afternoon, leave the curtains undrawn and watch the fading light across the water meadows: but this did not seem worth saying. Lydia poured out the tea with a combination of the ruthlessness of a Sunday School Treat and the kindness of a very good nurse on the invalid’s first day up. Mrs. Keith was able to begin the saga of Robert’s children all over again, to which Mrs. Brandon listened with not quite her usual deceptive appearance of attention. She was looking as charming as ever, but there was something new about her that the others could not quite place. She was dressed in black, with touches of some filmy purple at her neck and had an air of gently sad abstraction from this world and of mourning for beauty vanished which were most becoming, but rather perplexing. News travels fast in the country and Mrs. Keith read the Social columns of her Times very carefully every day, but from neither had she gathered that any loss had befallen the Brandon family. A question about Francis Brandon brought the assurance that he was very well and waiting with ardour for his class to be called up; if anything had been wrong with Delia it would have reached them from the hospital via the Crawleys or the Birketts. Even Noel, who did not take his charming friend too seriously, wondered if she was in black for a purpose and bravely hiding a wounded heart. At last Mrs. Keith could bear it no longer.

  ‘One gets so anxious in these sad times,’ she said, ‘and I can’t help being a little worried about you, Lavinia.’

  Mrs. Brandon very beautifully said that no one must worry about her.

  ‘Your black,’ said Mrs. Keith, touching Mrs. Brandon’s dress. ‘It isn’t for anyone, is it?’

  Mrs. Brandon with an exquisite air of discomposure said No, no; no one she knew was dead. No actual person at least.

  ‘Is it an animal?’ said Lydia. ‘I wore a black hat ribbon for a dormouse once when I was little.’

  Mrs. Brandon said she felt animals were so happy that one need not mourn for them. ‘At least,’ she added reflectively, ‘English animals. That very wearing woman, my cousin Hilary Grant’s mother, tells me that animals are still dreadfully treated in Italy, but then she is that kind of woman who would find them being badly treated anywhere. In fact she will not be happy in heaven unless she can find a horse with its ribs sticking out or a pig having its ears punched. Do you think, Mr. Merton, that heaven can really please everybody? Their tastes are all so different. And though we are told we shall see our friends again, there are several that I would so much rather not see, if it weren’t too difficult to manage.’

  Noel said the law didn’t make provision for that particular case, but the Dean’s secretary was coming and they might ask him. Upon which Mr. Needham very conveniently arrived, and finding himself in the same room with the most saint-like woman and the most delightful and touching girl he had lately met, became a prey to silence.

  ‘I know you can tell us, Mr. Needham,’ said Mrs. Brandon, looking devoutly at the Dean’s secretary, ‘Does one have to know people in heaven or not?’

  ‘Mrs. Brandon is a little exercised,’ Noel kindly explained, seeing Mr. Needham’s embarrassment, ‘because she is so kind to such of her friends as are a little dull
and boring, and wonders if she is likely to see much of them in heaven. The Inner Temple is not a good preparation for that kind of special knowledge, so we appeal to you.’

  Mr. Needham, after some embarrassing stutters, said he was sure no one could ever be dull with Mrs. Brandon.

  ‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ said Lydia. ‘You couldn’t be dull with her, but she could be dull with you.’

  ‘Oh, but I could,’ said Mrs. Brandon plaintively, ‘I could be dull with anyone.’

  ‘What Tommy meant,’ said Lydia, ‘was that no one could be dull with you. I mean there are two sorts of being dull with a person. One is when you are so dull that they feel dull, and the other when they are so dull that you feel dull; like Miss Pettinger,’ she added reflectively, ‘though with her it is really a kind of active horribleness as well.’

  Mrs. Brandon said she knew she was very stupid and gave a fleeting glance at her own black dress in a way that wrung Mr. Needham’s withers.

  ‘I hope—’ he stuttered again, looking at the black clothes which Mrs. Brandon was wearing like weeds.

  ‘It has been rather upsetting,’ said Mrs. Brandon, who had now got all her audience well in hand. ‘You see I saw that a steamer had been sunk and it was the same name as mine and though one doesn’t believe that things like that mean anything, it is a kind of shock.’

  ‘If I may say so,’ said Noel, ‘you take shocks more becomingly than anyone I have ever known.’

  Mrs. Brandon caught his eye, knew that he saw through her completely and couldn’t help laughing in a very pleasant way, for her illusions about herself were not really deep and it amused her when Noel pricked them. Mr. Needham, who did not know her well, thought that a woman who could laugh, almost in the face of death, was more like a saint than ever.

  Mrs. Brandon, having made her effect, suddenly became very businesslike with Mrs. Keith about some clothes that she was having made for her nursery school and borrowed some patterns of frocks and coats, promising in return to send Lydia a roll of material for Mrs. Keith’s working party.