Never Too Late Read online

  By this time most of her audience, the younger members of which had not the faintest idea what she was talking about, were too stunned to make any comment; nor were the elder ones in much better plight.

  “So I brought him back to the School with me at once,” said Matron, “to see the match and I found Edward in quite a state because Haig Brown, the policeman here you know, who was to have umpired, had been called off on special duty and Edward didn’t know where to turn at such short notice so I said ‘Well, Edward,’ I said, ‘here is the answer to prayer.’ Not that any one had been praying if you see what I mean; I mean things weren’t as bad as that, but they say prayer is answered though not always in the way you expect, and luckily the other white coat was there, so we popped it on and there we are” and she pointed dramatically towards a pleasant-faced man who might have been any age between twenty-five and thirty-five and was talking in a friendly way with Edward. But not one of them had the faintest idea who the stranger might be, when most luckily Snow, the old school carpenter, came up to talk with the Leslies and John was able to ask him who the other umpire was.

  ‘Well, sir, you wouldn’t remember him,” said Snow. “It was in the beginning of the war before your young gentlemen come along here, and we had a London School evacuated, as they say, on us. We did have a time, sir. But some of them weren’t bad when you come to know them. There was one boy, ah, he had the makings of a carpenter in him, sir, and I let him come in my shop and learn a bit, but his people they left London and went to Wales for the duration. But he wrote me off and on and said he was getting on fine with his schooling and I spoke to Mr. Carter about him and Mr. Carter said to invite him to come here in his holidays whenever I liked.”

  “Never mind about that boy,” said John Leslie, quite kindly, but with the authority of a Churchwarden and a J.P. “Who is this umpire?”

  “That’s him, sir, I was telling you about,” said Snow. “And as nice a lad as you’d wish to see.”

  “Do you mean Manners,” said Matron, “that nice boy that helped us with the Christmas treat for the evacuees?”

  Snow, suppressing a strong desire to put Matron between two boards and saw her in half, said coldly that Manners was the name.

  “And that young fellow, sir,” he added, very pointedly not addressing Matron, “he got a good scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge or one of them colleges and now he’s teaching Replied Physic or some such nonsense at Redbrick University. Same place where Professor Hacker is. Perhaps you remember him too, sir. He was the one as kept a tame chameleon. He’s learning the young gentlemen Latin and Greek at Redbrick University. He’s another boy as might have made a good tradesman. Well, well.” And shaking his head over the vanity of human wishes, he went away.

  Matron then said she must hie her away to her little field hospital, for though it was under the pavilion stand it was quite light and a basin and a little Ascot heater in case. With which last words she descended the stairs backwards on account of the steepness and disappeared.

  By now the match was due to begin. The Rest won the toss, rather to Edith’s disappointment, and sent their two first men in, Colonel Crofts and Matron’s nephew. But though the Rest put up a gallant show, nine wickets had soon fallen for so small a score that we hesitate to invent it. The last hope of the side was now Mr. Traill and Mr. Feeder.

  For those who do not particularly enjoy watching other people play games, there is always conversation, and as none of the party were going to be really interested till the next innings, when the Leslie boys would be batting, they were I able to bring one another up to date with family news, while Mrs. Morland was able to tell Mrs. John Leslie exactly what had happened at Stoke Castle when the Barsetshire Archaeological found a hitherto undiscovered exit from Stokey Hole, an opening in the bank below the castle on the river side, popularly supposed to communicate by subterranean passages with Capes Castle ten miles off, a disused windmill on the hills beyond Southbridge and the Tower of London.

  “And what was there at the other end?” said Mrs. John Leslie.

  “Exactly what any sensible person would have expected,” said Mrs. Morland. “It went right under the castle and was really the old main drain. Of course that accounts for the smell in the butler’s pantry that no one could account for.”

  “How fascinating,” said Mrs. John Leslie. “John’s father always said there was a drain from the Pyramid—that monument on the top of the hill behind the house at Rushwater— to the Rushmere Brook, but as there was nothing to drain, no one ever knew. What’s that?”

  The That was a sound of clapping. Edith looked at the field and saw her cousin Major, looking rather like a Dalmatian on its hind legs so bemired were his white flannels, his right arm in the air and the ball clutched in it, while Mr. Traill and Mr. Feeder stood disconsolate. Which was the more disconsolate, we cannot say. True, it was Mr. Feeder who had sent that nice easy ball straight into Leslie Major’s hands, but Mr. Traill had the agony of watching him hitting the ball exactly as he should not and in the most dangerous direction and had stood paralysed, for which he afterwards generously blamed himself; not that he could have altered the course of the ball nor of Mr. Feeder’s destiny in any case, paralysis or no.

  “Good Lord!” said John Leslie, looking at the score board. “They’re all out for fifty-three. It ought to be a walk-over for the Old Boys—unless it rains which it obviously will. Come along or we shan’t get a seat,” and they all went over to the Squash Court where tea was prepared.

  Of all the places for tea and talk a squash court is perhaps the least suited, for it is apt to be taller than it is square (if our reader sees what we mean), is usually to a high degree unventilated and is hard on the feet. Luckily the spectators though enthusiastic were not very numerous on account of the horrible weather, so it might have been worse.

  The table with the tea-urn and the cups and saucers was presided over by Eileen of the Red Lion, now in private life Mrs. Bateman, the wife of Colonel Crofts’s ex-batman, gardener, and general utility. Her slightly overpowering charm had not been dimmed by time, nor had her brilliantly peroxided hair, and she remained as kind and capable as ever, enjoying nothing more than to dispense refreshment to a quantity of friends.

  “Nice to see you, Mrs. Leslie,” said Eileen, extending the hand of friendship to Mary. “And well, if it isn’t Mrs. Morland. It’s quite like old times to see you again, Mrs. Morland. Me and Matron we often say we wish the war was on again. Those were the days. It was your young gentleman won the match, Mrs. Leslie, wasn’t it? Ever so nice he looks in his flannels, but isn’t it shocking the mud he got on them. Don’t you try to wash them, Mrs. Leslie. Let them dry off nicely and then give them a good brush out in the garden. You’ll be surprised the way it comes off. Then you can wash them if it’s a nice day with a bit of a breeze.”

  Mary Leslie thanked her for the advice and asked if she could get tea for her party at one of the tables.

  “I kept two tables special, Mrs. Leslie,” said Eileen, “you’ll find them over there. You tell your young gentlemen to put them together and you’ll do nicely” and Mary thanked her, feeling with some amusement that she had practically been dismissed from the presence.

  What with the crowd and the reverberations of the squash court, talk was not easy. However most of Mary’s party had very hearty appetites and the boys argued in a brotherly way about the game, Leslie Minimus not omitting to tell Leslie Major that it was only a fluke.

  “Anyway,” said Edith, zealous in defence of her favourite cousin, “it was a whale’s fluke,” and she looked round with a little of the smugness she used to have when, as a small girl, she produced her impromptu poems to astonish visitors; who usually concealed their boredom very nicely.

  “I say, Edith,” said Minor, “you ought to make a poem about Major’s catch. And next year when I’m an Old Boy you can make one about me.”

  Edith, a young lady in the older phraseology, not a schoolgirl now, was less self-importa
nt than she used to be. She looked imploringly at Minor, but the look was entirely lost on him.

  “Fire away, Edith,” said her uncle John kindly though, as she was quick enough to realize, with an entire want of interest. But the blood of the Pomfrets did not run in her veins for nothing.

  “This is it,” she said.

  “Old Feeder hit the ball afar,

  It rose to heaven like a star

  And when at last it came to land,

  It was in Major’s mighty hand.

  That’s all,” she added.

  Mrs. Morland, who was amused by her guest’s success and delighted to be free of responsibility for the present, gave her a friendly smile.

  Her cousins applauded loudly. Her uncle and aunt laughed, but in a very kind way. Suddenly Edith wondered whether she had been rather babyish. It was fun to make poems, but her poems weren’t as good as they had been. Her poem about the fishes’ bell in the Palace pond for instance. Three verses of eight lines each, ending with the fine line, “And now the Bishop is in hell.” Perhaps she was too old now. People didn’t clap what one said, unless they thought one was rather a baby. For twopence she would have gone straight back to Holdings—to the safe, safe fold where the little lambs are, she thought, as a line from a song of her nursery days suddenly came into her mind—and for twopence she would have allowed the tears that were pricking her eyes to have their way. But just at that moment a kind of hubbub drew everyone’s attention away, which hubbub was caused by the arrival of Captain Fairweather, R.N., a near neighbour of the Leslies at Greshamsbury, and his lovely wife, she who had been Rose Birkett. There was a great surge of people to welcome her, under cover of which Edith was able to dry her eyes—not that she was crying, oh no— and resume her ordinary face.

  Rose was indeed an entrancing apparition in a dress of dusty-pink silk, a small hat of dusty-pink straw perched with a modest rakishness upon her beautifully set fair hair, her perfect legs sheathed in sheer nylons and her feet in the newest form of sandal whose price every woman in the place at once guessed and envied.

  “Oh, hullo Mrs. Morland. I remember when you were here in the war,” she said. “Oh, hullo Mrs. Leslie. What a marvellous catch Henry made. Too devastating for poor Mr. Feeder. Isn’t the rain too foully dispiriting for words. Hallo John and Clive,” which words made no sense to most of her hearers, for the Leslie boys had been Major, Minor, and Minimus ever since their prep, school and most people hardly knew that they had what our transatlantic cousins so prettily call given names.

  “Come and have tea at our table,” said Mary Leslie kindly. Major pulled up the other table, Minor offered his brother’s chair to Captain Fairweather and his own chair—with the air of laying a cloak before her sandalled feet—to Rose, while Minimus with great presence of mind went to Eileen and asked if they could have more tea and lots of cake.

  “I’m so sorry we missed the beginning of the game, Mrs. Leslie,” said Captain Fairweather. “I had an Admiralty call and had to write some letters to go to London before we could start. And now, I gather, that’s the end. Bad luck.”

  “Do you mean they aren’t going to play any more?” said Mrs. Morland.

  “Couldn’t,” said Captain Fairweather. “The pitch is practically flooded already. Listen to it,” and indeed, though in the noise of so many people eating and drinking and talking in a resonant place she had not noticed it, there was a steady drumming on the glass roof. “And what’s more, we’ll all be asphyxiated soon. Wouldn’t hurt some of us,” he added, cheerfully, with an expressive glance at some of the Old Boys, more particularly the financial genius who had done time and the Admiral of the Fleet; though what he knew against this last we cannot say, for our knowledge of the Senior Service is, alas, practically non-existent.

  “Excuse me, Miss Rose,” said a voice at Mrs. Fairweather’s elbow.

  “Hullo, Edward,” said Rose, looking up at the Headmaster’s butler whom she had known since he was the odd man and did the boots and knives at the Southbridge Prep. School and she was the small elder daughter of the Prep. School Headmaster, now,—so does time pass—the retired Headmaster of Southbridge School.

  “Excuse me, Miss Rose,” said Edward, “but there’s someone here as would like to see you if convenient.”

  Most of us on hearing such words would at once expect the worst—a creditor with a bailiff at his side, a hysterical message from next door to say Pussy had disappeared ever since last night and had we seen him, or even the daily (if we are lucky enough to have her) in whose hands the last of our grandmother’s real china tea-service has come to pieces. But Rose merely asked, with a serene countenance, what it was.

  “Well, miss,” said Edward, “I don’t know as you’d remember, but that first winter of the war when we had those schools here from London, there was a nice boy called Manners. In Mr. Bissell’s school he was and he helped to decorate the tree for the children’s tea-party in the gymnasium.”

  “I wasn’t at the party, because I was at Las Palombas where John was stationed,” said Rose. “But Geraldine wrote to me about it and she said it was marvellous and all the children were sick that evening or next day and there were London refugees who were awfully rich and came to the party all covered with silver foxes,” to which Edward, who did not quite follow what she was saying, said Yes, miss and Manners was here and would like to see her if convenient.

  “But of course,” said Rose, whose social memory was, in spite of her apparent silliness, extraordinarily accurate and had been of the greatest help to her husband when he was a Naval Attaché. “Mummy said his father was a greengrocer wasn’t he, and did furniture removing in the East End. Of course I’d love to see him. Why is he here?”

  “Well, miss,” said Edward, “I couldn’t rightly say. Matron found him in the Red Lion bar when she was getting the brandy for Mr. Brown’s Thermogene so she said Why not come up to the cricket match. And we was an umpire short, miss, seeing Haig Brown had been called off on special duty, so I said Why not umpire with me, Manners, like old Times. Not that he did umpire then—nor me neither if it comes to that because the groundsman wouldn’t have allowed neither of us on his cricket pitch. I’ll bring him along, miss,” so he went away and soon returned with Professor Manners.

  “How too marvellous to see you” said Rose, looking at Manners with an intensity which puzzled him, but was only caused by her struggles to correlate his face with that of an evacuated London schoolboy nearly fifteen years ago whom she had never seen. “Now I know who you are because Geraldine, that’s my sister, wrote to me about it. You helped with the tea-party for the evacuated children and you carried down a frightfully heavy roll of green baize that Matron wanted for the Christmas tree and you’d just got a scholarship for Cambridge. Is it nice?” and she turned her beautiful eyes on him and took out her lip-stick again.

  “No, my girl,” said her husband. “Put it away and give me your bag.”

  “All right, darling, but you are a bit damp-making,” said Rose and cheerfully did as she was told.

  Manners (or as it will be more polite to call him, Professor Manners), quite unperturbed by this domestic interlude, said it was extremely nice (for to choose a more suitable adjective would be wasted on Rose) and he had delightful rooms at Upping, which, he added hastily, seeing Rose’s face quite devoid of understanding, was the name of his college, and he taught history to undergraduates.

  “But that must be very nice for them,” said Rose earnestly, “because of course you saw it.”

  By this time Mrs. Morland, all three Leslie boys, and their parents were listening with acute interest to the conversation. Edith was also of the listeners, but did not hear, having too many thoughts in her head.

  “I wish I had noticed it more at the time,” said Manners, “but I was a bit young then. It would be so much easier to write about history if one had lived in it and remembered it. Otherwise it’s like seeing things in a looking-glass—probably all the wrong way round.”


  “But actually,” said Rose (and Professor Manners noted with approval that she did not say ackcherly, as did practically all his women students), “they are the right way round. It’s only because you are outside the looking-glass that they look wrong. If you got inside it—”

  “Your wife,” said Professor Manners to Captain Fairweather, “is a philosopher. I am going to think about what she said. I might manage to write something about it.”

  “A real book?” said Rose, with the simplicity of a savage.

  “Certainly,” said Professor Manners. “And if I may, rather unfairly perhaps, presume upon an old acquaintance with your parents—though one should not use the word old when you are in question—I would like to dedicate the book to you; if it ever gets written.”

  “A real book?” said Rose.

  “Yes, my girl,” said her husband. “Not a historical novel about the Venerable Bede’s love-life. A book for educated people to read.”

  “Oh, thank you, Manners,” said Rose, carried back by her enthusiasm to the Christmas of 1939, and then she blushed and her lovely eyes became misty. “Oh, dear, I am so sorry.”

  “But I like it, Mrs. Fairweather,” said Professor Manners, quite truthfully, but also with the very laudable object of relieving Rose’s too tender conscience. “Pray continue to call me Manners, especially when you come to lunch with me in my rooms at Upping, as I hope you and your husband will do some day,” and he bowed slightly to Captain Fairweather, who smiled back and sketched a kind of salute. “And now I must say good-bye, as I am due in Barchester for a lecture.”