Peace Breaks Out Page 5

  “A great friend of mine called Robin Dale was in the Barset-shires,” said Anne. “But his foot came off in Italy, so he is teaching classics at Southbridge.”

  George had been at Southbridge, so the ice was now broken and they talked very comfortably about nothing in particular till George suggested tea and they went down the noble square staircase to the dining-room where a passable imitation of tea was set out and the noise was deafening. George was at once pounced upon by quantities of old, or rather, young friends, who would willingly have pounced on Sylvia. But Sylvia suddenly felt a strong protective instinct towards Anne Fielding who was nearly nineteen and could not be an ambulance driver, so she pushed Anne into a seat in one of the high deep-embrasured windows, ordered her to stay there, reached over several people’s heads for tea and such cake as there was, and installed herself by Anne, with cups and plates on the window seat between them. Here again Sylvia was surprised by the grown-up-ness of her new friend. For not only did Anne know who most of the people in the room were, but she seemed to have some private clue to them and spoke with a kind of tolerance of their various characteristics, more than once making Sylvia laugh. Most admirable of all was her repulse of Miss Pettinger. That almost universally disliked headmistress of the Barchester High School, who was by many of the guests present considered to be no better than an agent from the Palace come to spy out the fatness of the land, or in other words to try to poach some of the Deanery guests for the bishop’s wife’s tea-parties, seeing two young women having tea considered them as her lawful prey, and approaching them with the smile that girls who really had the Honour of the School at heart thought so perfectly sweet, said How nice it was to see Anne, and Celia Halliday wasn’t it, and she must hear all about what they were doing. At this point Sylvia would have weakly said, “Oh, do come and sit with us, Miss Pettinger, there’s oceans of room and I’ll get you some tea,” and then repented at leisure. What was her astonishment when Anne who was nearly nineteen got up, stepped forward, shook hands with Miss Pettinger and said “How do you do, Miss Pettinger. This is Sylvia Halliday. Did you see Lady Graham? I think she was looking for you,” upon which Miss Pettinger had at once made her adieux and gone to throw herself before Lady Graham, who was letting the Precentor tell her about his delightful week-end at the School of Church Music, while gazing at him with the rapt attention which deceived even herself.

  “Tiresome woman,” said Anne Fielding in a very grown-up way as she sat down again.

  “Anne, how could you?” said Sylvia, half admiring, half shocked. “Lady Graham didn’t really want her, did she?”

  “I don’t know,” said Anne, meeting Sylvia’s searching look with a limpid and innocent countenance. “I shouldn’t think she did. Nobody could. I thought she was quite horrid when I was at the High School for a few terms.”

  “She is a foul beast,” said Sylvia dispassionately, “and I loathe her. But I couldn’t have been brave enough to—” She paused.

  “It was a social lie,” said Anne, filling up the gap. “I have noticed that mummy is very good at them, and my great friend Robin Dale says they are very important and only people who have no sense would boggle at using them.”

  Sylvia almost gaped at her new friend’s casuistry.

  “But don’t you feel horrid afterwards?” she said.

  “No,” said Anne, with a thoughtful, questioning inflexion peculiar to her. “No; I don’t. But if I had let Miss Pettinger sit in the window seat I would have felt extremely horrid.”

  “I know. Contaminated,” said Sylvia.

  “Like mustard-gas or lepers,” said Anne, suddenly a young girl again, and they giggled in a very normal way over such county characters as Sir Edmund Pridham fighting his County Council battles over again to the tired and courteous Lord Pomfret, or Miss Pemberton from Northbridge with her mushroom hat and large raffia bag keeping a firm eye on her distinguished lodger Mr. Downing, till Mrs. Halliday came up to collect Sylvia, followed by George.

  “Father hasn’t turned up,” she said to Sylvia, “which is a triumph of experience over hope, and Lady Graham can take us back, which is so much better than the bus. George is staying to supper with the Crawleys. And your mother is looking for you, Anne. She is in the hall.”

  And in the hall they found Lady Fielding, who was talking to Lady Graham about the Bring and Buy Sale at Little Misfit.

  “And that somehow makes me think of Rushwater,” said Lady Graham. “I daresay it is because we used to have a Village Concert in the racquet court every year when darling Papa was alive. You know my nephew Martin Leslie owns it now. He was rather wounded in Italy, so he was allowed to come home and look after the place. He is so nice and I am longing for him to get married,” said her ladyship, gazing piercingly at Sylvia and Anne. “I am taking darling Mamma over on Sunday for the day. Do come with us, Sylvia, and Anne Fielding too. Martin will adore you both. We will have a nice talk about it on the way back. You must both come to lunch first and we will make a plan about how Anne is to get home. Luckily David seems to have a lot of petrol, I cannot think why, so we shall manage beautifully.”

  A stranger would have given the whole affair up and gone mad long before this, but Lady Fielding and Mrs. Halliday knew from experience that under Lady Graham’s vague and endearing idiocy there lay a very practical streak; and Mrs. Halliday knew that Miss Merriman would quietly squash all impracticable plans and see that everything was neatly arranged. The invitation was gratefully accepted.

  “And now,” said Lady Graham, “where is David? He brought me here, so he will have to take me back. He is so naughty and forgets what time it is.”

  Her ladyship, having spoken these despairing words in accents of soft, unruffled calm, sat down on a hall chair and looked with gentle appeal at everyone. The elder ladies had every confidence that Lady Graham would not be deserted by Providence, but in George’s heart a thousand swords at once sprang from their scabbards to rescue beauty and kindness in distress.

  “I’ll find him, Lady Graham,” he said. “At least I mean if you could tell me what he is like.”

  “David?” said Lady Graham. “Darling David. He has been in the Air Force all the time though he never flew, at least not driving the aeroplane himself, though of course he had to fly to a great many places, but always with someone else turning the handles. The children adore him.”

  George felt that Lady Graham’s words had a deeply affecting, nay sacred quality, but at the same time gave him no help at all.

  “I mean, is he in uniform or anything?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Lady Graham thoughtfully. “In Air Force uniform, with half a wing on him.”

  George sped zealously away. Lady Graham, who had the art of appearing at home and extremely comfortable wherever she was, settled herself upon the uncompromising wooden hall chair and relapsed into her customary abstraction, thinking of nothing at all unless the perfection of one or other of her family crossed her mind. Mrs. Halliday, getting rather impatient, looked at the hall clock, saw that they would have missed the six o’clock bus in any case, and resigned herself. Lady Fielding, a very busy woman, called to Anne that they must be going.

  “Can we wait just one moment, mummy,” said Anne, casting a quick look towards the stairs. “Sylvia and I are just making a plan to go to the Sale of Work at the Palace because we both have some horrid things we think we could get rid of. Don’t you think, Mummy, I could give them that hideous silver buckle that Gradka gave me last year? I have been trying to like it for a long time, but I simply can’t. Gradka,” she explained, turning to Sylvia, “was a Mixo-Lydian maid we had, who cooked divinely, but we found her a little exhausting, because she was so anxious to get information about literature.”

  Again Sylvia had the sensation, unformulated, that Anne was of an older generation, of a more civilised age, but Lady Fielding, who appeared to look upon her daughter as a child, said it was an excellent plan and she would look through the drawer where she put every
thing she bought at sales, except things like home-made jam or tomato chutney, and see what she could spare. And now, she said, they must really go.

  And even as she spoke George came into the hall, accompanied by David Leslie.

  “Oh; Lady Graham,” said George, and became dumb.

  “Darling David,” said Lady Graham, with mild and placid reproach (such reproach as Angels might give, George considered) in her gentle voice. “I have been waiting for you for quite a long time. George was so kind and went to find you.”

  “Oh rot!” said George, going bright red and knocking three hats and an umbrella off an oak chest. “I mean anyone would have found—would have found—him for you,” he finished lamely, and then fell into Stygian depths of gloom, realising that by his grossly culpable ignorance of David Leslie’s rank, he had forfeited Lady Graham’s esteem for ever; which drove him to the nearest equivalent of suicide he could think of at the moment, namely to grovel on the floor collecting the hats and umbrella.

  “Flight-Lieutenant they call me,” said David, at once grasping the situation and carelessly willing to help an obliging young man. “But it means nothing. They just gave it to me so that I could go for drives in aeroplanes without getting into trouble with the police. Everyone calls me David. Darling Agnes, now that I am here you might as well get up from that chair where you look so nice and come with me to find the car, else darling Mamma and darling Merry and any of your darling children who are allowed to stay up for dinner will think we have been abducted.”

  Agnes, across whose soft mind an idea had flitted that darling David was making fun of her, smiled tolerantly, rose, adjusted her fox fur in a way that made everyone feel she was wearing at least ten thousand pounds’ worth of the richest Imperial black sables, and said good-bye to the Fieldings and Hallidays. David said good-bye to the Hallidays and Lady Fielding.

  “And this is Anne,” said Lady Fielding. “I don’t think you know her.”

  “But I shall, if you will permit me,” said David, looking down in a benevolent way upon a girl whose elegant figure at once met with his approval. Her face he could not well see, for in spite of Double Summer Time the panelled hall was dim.

  “May I come and call upon you and Sir Robert while I am here?” he said to Lady Fielding.

  “Of course you may,” said Lady Fielding. “I merely make the reservation that you know perfectly well you won’t.”

  “Alas! how well you know me,” said David. “But beware the Double-Crosser. I shall come though hell itself should garp.”

  Lady Fielding looked enquiringly at him.

  “Though why the Old School of Shakespearean actors say it like that instead of gape, I cannot tell,” said David. “Any more than I can tell why Abraham becomes Arbraham at one point in the Service. Forgive me, but I see that my sister Agnes is talking to Mr. Downing, and if she does that Miss Pemberton will walk over from Northbridge to Little Misfit with a raffia hat and a homespun cloak and kill her. Good-bye.”

  He then dexterously cut out Mr. Downing, hustled—if as he said to his mother after dinner one could really be said to hustle anything so like a soft, warm jelly-fish—his sister Agnes into the car and drove her away.

  In spite of Double Summer Time the panelled hall seemed to have become suddenly more dim; perhaps the sun had got behind the tall elms in the Close. Or so Anne Fielding felt, so that she was quite glad to leave the party with her mother and go home, which was only to the opposite side of the most beautiful Close in England. The house where the Fieldings lived had for some years been tenanted by old Canon Robarts who had got gently madder and madder till he died. His last recorded act and remark, namely a feeble blow upon the bedclothes and the words, which his nurse had to bend over him to catch, “I’ve got him now,” were by the lower orders of the Cathedral, the verger, under-verger, bell-ringer, choristers and so forth, not to speak of old Tomkins, Madame Tomkins’s father-in-law and jobbing gardener to most of the Close, who still mowed the level lawns with a scythe, taken as referring to the devil, whom Canon Robarts was supposed to have finally squashed in the person of a large blow-fly. But to the higher orders it was abundantly clear that the Canon was referring to the Bishop and had died happy under the impression that he had got the Bishop removed by a special Act of Parliament.

  Number Seventeen (for it was a peculiarity of the Close that every house had a number and no house except the Deanery, and that only a courtesy title as it were, a name) was one of the most handsome houses where all were handsome, three stories high, built of red brick with large sash windows. Over the front door, which was reached by three wide curved stone steps, was an elegant shell projection to keep visitors from being rained upon, and along the top of the house ran a stone balustrade with urns at regular intervals. At the back of the wide, flagged hall the most exquisite spiral staircase in the county wound upwards with harmonious curve of treads, landings and banisters, lighted from a flattened glass dome like a Chinese umbrella. For more than six years a black roller blind had been drawn nightly across this skylight and on two occasions during the war had the blind, imperfectly fastened, sprung back with a jump, letting the light stream to heaven and advertise the whereabouts of Number Seventeen The Close to Whom it might concern. By great good luck both nights had been wet and windy and the A.R.P. patrol had been too much occupied in holding their heads down against the wind and trying to keep their coats done up to notice what was happening, and on both occasions Lady Fielding, warned by the housewife’s sixth sense of something wrong in the house, had discovered the mistake, rushed upstairs and re-drawn the blind. Next day, with a courage which the rest of the Close had admired but would never have dared to emulate with its own servants, if any, she had spoken severely about it to her elderly housemaid whom, together with the elderly parlourmaid and elderly cook, she had taken on from old Canon Robarts’s nieces, who thankfully went to live in a Private Hotel in Bournemouth. The housemaid had said it had come into her mind, like, just while she was having a nice cup of tea with Cook, that there was something like a noise she heard when she come downstairs after doing the blackout and she had had half a mind to pop up and see if that blind was all right, but Pollett had said Care killed the cat and anyway with a night like that old Hitler wouldn’t be over, so she hadn’t given it a thought till her ladyship mentioned it. This from a servant was the equivalent of a shamefaced apology from an equal, so Lady Fielding remained content with her victory, merely causing a very long cord to be attached to the blind, so that she could herself pull it across the skylight from just outside her bedroom door, and Pollett the parlourmaid need not do violence to her code by going up to the top floor on the housemaid’s afternoon off.

  To-day that worthy creature had in a fit of supererogatory zeal drawn the blind directly after lunch on the specious grounds that what with her time off in the afternoon and people to dinner, how to do everything at once she did not rightly know; and as the Double Summer daylight would linger long after most hard-working people were in bed, the effect in the hall was depressing in the extreme.

  “Please pull the blind back, Anne,” said Lady Fielding. “It makes one feel like a corpse in the house.”

  Anne ran upstairs, unfastened the cord and pulled the blind back. Hard uninteresting light flooded the staircase, but anything was better than the gloom of which there would be quite enough next winter without Pollett’s ingenious attempts to meet trouble halfway. Anne stood on the landing and gazed at the upward curve of the stairs, which she had often tried to draw, though she had never obtained a result to her own liking. From her nursery days the barley-sugar curve of the staircase had held a secret romance for her. Up and down it had passed in her mind every fairy prince, mythological hero, long-locked Cavalier, dashing and heartless rake, romantic ne’er-do-well, scholar, poet, lover, of her omnivorous appetite for reading, a passion born of a solitary childhood, quickened and fostered by the elderly governess Miss Bunting who had crowned her life’s work by implanting in Anne
Fielding some of her own uncompromising rectitude and love of literature. Each figure had kissed her hand, bowed low with a sweep of a plumed hat, held a sword aloft in salute, cast a look of dark adoration from the mantle enshrouding his face; and more than once had a gallant (period unspecified) ridden up the front door steps, down the flagged hall to the foot of the stairs, and reined in his foam-flecked steed at the foot of the staircase. Sometimes he had swung her to his saddle and ridden away with her (the Close having conveniently turned into an immense forest); sometimes, the blood welling from between the fingers pressed to his side, he had fallen dead at her feet in a most attractive way. As she grew older, and during the last year or two she felt she had grown very much older, these visions had faded. But there still remained a secret hope that a figure, embodying in himself every attribute of romance, would one day be at the foot of the stairs. As she reached the bottom step, he would take her hand, raise it respectfully to his lips and look darkly into her eyes. But at this point the imagination of Miss Anne Fielding, nearly nineteen, gave way and beyond a vague feeling that all would be gas and gaiters she left the rest to Providence.

  So far the romantic stranger had had no recognisable face. Whether he had a name we cannot exactly say. If he had a name this, like so many other things, was part of the heritage Miss Bunting had left to her last pupil.

  The front door banged, which was Sir Robert coming back from work, so Anne ran down to meet him and the vision fled. Sir Robert, an enthusiastic war gardener, had acquired the habit of doing various rather meddlesome and often destructive jobs in his garden before dinner during the summer months and liked his daughter Anne to help him, which she did very pleasantly, though with less zeal and even less knowledge. The job for that evening, or rather as Sir Robert bitterly said, for what was really tea-time if it hadn’t been for the Germans, was to cut flowers for the dinner table.