Miss Bunting Read online

  ‘I’ve got three rabbits at home,’ he remarked.

  Mrs Morland said how lovely, and half of her thought with a pang how very nice little boys were with rather dirty hands and a bandage on one knee and wished her own four sons were still in that state of innocence; though she knew well with the other half that she could never go through it all again even if so doing would stop the war.

  Master Watson looked at her and said nothing.

  ‘What have you done to your knee?’ she inquired.

  ‘Fell off my bike,’ said Master Watson. ‘I’ll show you the place if you like.’

  Before Mrs Morland could pull herself together Master Watson had undone the not over-clean bandage and showed her the knee, which was at the least attractive stage of healing.

  ‘It’s ravelgash,’ said he proudly.

  ‘He means gravelrash,’ said Frank Gresham. ‘I had much worse gravelrash when I fell off the toolshed. Tom’s only just eight. I’m going to be nine in December. Would you like to see Tom’s rabbits? Come on, Tom.’

  He put his hand into Mrs Morland’s and began to pull, which proof of confidence so affected her as nearly to make her cry; but her better self again coming to the rescue and informing her that Jane Gresham’s little boy was being both presumptuous and patronizing, she regarded him for the moment with almost as cold a dislike as her own adored sons had frequently roused in her, and said she was very sorry she couldn’t see the rabbits, but she must get back to lunch at the Fieldings’. Although she said this with a courageous aspect she was secretly embarrassed by Master Gresham’s vice-like grip and wondered if she would have to go about with him attached to her for the rest of her life, when luckily Robin intervened, told the little boys to go home, and said he would walk down to Hall’s End with her if he might.

  ‘I’d love it,’ she said, ‘if you are sure you can.’

  ‘We don’t have lunch till a quarter past,’ said Robin.

  ‘But oughtn’t you to rest,’ said Mrs Morland, giving herself a kind of general shake with the intention of tidying her clothes, hat and hair, though with very poor results, ‘I mean put it up, or something.’

  Robin suddenly realized what her misplaced compassion was driving at. She looked so anxious – almost damp with worry Robin thought irreverently to himself – that he hastened to reassure her.

  ‘If you mean my stupid foot,’ he said, concealing very well the annoyance, unreasonable perhaps but inevitable, that such well-meant thoughtlessness always caused him, ‘it’s perfectly all right. I really hardly think about it at all now. We’ll go out by the stable door, shall we, and get round into the High Street by Little Gidding – nothing religious, only the name of a lane, pre-Domesday as far as my father knows.’

  They went out by a wooden door in a dark red brick wall ivy-grown, and came into the little cobbled lane which curled round and came into the High Street at Mr Pattern’s corner.

  ‘People do do wonders,’ said Mrs Morland.

  Robin said he was sure they did; in almost everything, he added, hoping to cover by this his complete ignorance of what his gifted companion was talking about.

  ‘There’s that man who played polo,’ said Mrs Morland. ‘And I believe there’s one who rows. And someone who used to climb mountains, though whether he really could afterwards, I am not quite sure. And I had an old friend whose leg stuck straight out in front of him when he sat down, and he had to hit it, and then it doubled up and no one would have noticed. And he had perfectly ordinary trousers.’

  Whether to take off his foot and kill the celebrated authoress with it, to shake the breath out of her body, to burst out laughing in her face, Robin was undecided. But being a level-headed young man in most things, pluming himself on an eighteenth-century delight in characters and oddities, and having, not without many bitter moments, decided that an artificial foot was something to be taken metaphorically in one’s stride, and that what people said really didn’t matter, he choked down his rising irritation.

  ‘All those fellows were splendid,’ he said generously, ‘but they had a great advantage over me. To lose a leg is on the grand scale. A mere foot is just rather ridiculous.’

  Mrs Morland said she was very sorry indeed. And by the way she said it Robin guessed that she was also sorry for her well-meant and quite idiotic way of expressing sympathy, and was furious with himself for having so far betrayed his feelings. So to make amends he asked after Tony Morland with whom, as we know, he had been at Southbridge School, though senior to him.

  Tony, Mrs Morland said, was quite well when last heard from, and wanted the most extraordinary things that no one in England had been able to get for ages, like fountain-pens, and wrist-watches, and razor blades and pretence gold safety-pins, to fasten his collar flaps down. Also he wanted a lot of extra underclothes, and as he was fighting he couldn’t get any coupons, so she had to spend all hers on his requirements, but she didn’t mind, as she had quite a good stock of clothes herself and if spending coupons would annoy the income tax people she was all for it.

  Robin said he hadn’t much hope of their minding anything, and then they talked about old Southbridge friends and Robin told Mrs Morland that Philip Winter, his predecessor as classics master, had just managed to marry Leslie Waring, the niece of the people at Beliers Priory, by the skin of his teeth on twenty-four hours’ leave, and was now somewhere in Holland.

  ‘Then I expect he will see Tony,’ said Mrs Morland, who evidently considered this the chief object of anyone under General Dempsey’s command.

  And then she told him that the Carters had another baby, called Noel, after Noel Merton who had married Mrs Carter’s sister Lydia; and he told her that the headmaster’s elder daughter, the lovely Rose Birkett who had thrown Philip over for Lieutenant, now Captain Fairweather, RN, an old Southbridgian, had also had another baby, her third he thought, and was in Portugal with all her children and her husband, who was on a mission there, and had made great havoc among the Portuguese with her exquisite English fairness.

  ‘Well, good-bye, and thank you very much for letting me see the school,’ said Mrs Morland, when they reached Hall’s End.

  ‘Oh, I thought I might as well look in for a moment,’ said Robin, opening the front door which was never locked in the daytime.

  ‘Hullo, my boy,’ said Sir Robert, emerging from his library in a very holiday frame of mind. ‘Come and have some sherry. We didn’t finish it last night. Will you join us, Laura?’

  ‘Oh, thanks most awfully, sir,’ said Robin, suddenly and surprisingly gauche.

  ‘We needn’t share it,’ said Sir Robert. ‘Dora can’t touch it, and Anne and Miss Bunting have gone to lunch with the Pallisers – with the Admiral and Jane I should say, though it’s difficult not to think of her as Jane Palliser with her husband missing so long, poor girl.’

  ‘Oh, thanks most awfully, sir,’ said Robin, ‘but I expect father will be wanting me. I didn’t know it was so late.’

  He ran off with very little perceptible limp towards the Rectory. The bell of St Hall Friars sounded one.

  ‘I thought the Rectory had lunch at a quarter past,’ said Sir Robert, thoughtfully. ‘Well, all the more for us, Laura. Come into the library.’

  After lunch Lady Fielding had to go to High Rising for a WVS meeting, so she and Mrs Morland went off together, and were able to have a delightful talk about Mrs Morland’s new novel, of which a number of intellectual pink young gentlemen who were mysteriously free from the galling chains of the fighting or industrial forces, had written in weeklies that Mrs Morland represented the effete snobbery of a capitalist society, comparing her unfavourably with the great mid-European woman writer, Gudold Legpul, whose last book (said to have been smuggled at the risk of patriots’ lives to England via Barcelona, but really composed in the comparative seclusion of her home in Willesden), I Bare my Breasts, had so courageously attacked the Fascist Government of our so-called Empire; while other and older men, who had long ago given up worryi
ng about politics on account of having to read twelve novels every week and write intelligently about them on Sundays, said Mrs Morland had again given us of her best, and retold the plot of her story slightly wrong. But as Mrs Morland knew nothing about reviews, having like the gentlemen just mentioned quite enough to do to earn her living honestly, unless friends were kind enough to tell her about the nasty ones, the world went on much as before.

  As was perhaps natural, their talk gradually shifted to their children. Here Mrs Morland showed great magnanimity in not deploying her four sons against Lady Fielding’s one daughter.

  ‘Of course it would have been very nice, Dora,’ she said to Lady Fielding, ‘if we could have married some of our children, but it doesn’t look like it.’

  ‘If you mean Robin Dale,’ said Lady Fielding, who had the good professional chairwoman’s habit of going as straight to the point as possible, ‘I think you are wrong. If he is attracted by anyone, it’s poor Jane Gresham – no harm in it, but they have known each other all their lives, and it’s easy to feel sorry for a girl in her position – she’s only four years older than he is.’

  ‘I daresay you are right,’ said Mrs Morland, reserving her own opinion.

  ‘Anyway, Anne is too young for us to worry yet,’ said Lady Fielding.

  ‘Of course,’ said Mrs Morland, going off on one of her usual snipe-flights, ‘my elder boys can’t marry anyone, because they are married.’

  ‘There are still Dick and Tony,’ said Lady Fielding not very seriously.

  ‘Dick is probably engaged by now,’ said Mrs Morland placidly. ‘He wants me to send him some of the old photographs of himself as a horrid little boy to Australia, which is where his ship is now, and there’s only one person in the world that could want to look at that sort of thing. As for Tony,’ said Mrs Morland letting down the window, for they were coming into High Rising, and it was the sort of railway carriage which can’t be opened from the inside, thus causing sufferers from claustrophobia and pyrophobia to go mad, ‘it would be delightful and nothing I’d like more, but I’m afraid Anne isn’t common enough for him.’

  The train stopped, Mrs Morland opened the door and they got out.

  ‘I do admire your way of looking straight at things more than I can say, Laura,’ said Lady Fielding. ‘I don’t know another woman who could say that. Come again soon.’

  Perplexed but gratified, Mrs Morland got out of the train and was at once pounced upon by her old friend and ex-secretary, Mrs George Knox, the WVS secretary, who had a little petrol when on official work and had come to meet Lady Fielding and was able to take Mrs Morland part of the way home.

  As Anne’s parents were taking a well-earned week’s holiday, except when one or other of them had to go into Barchester, which happened far too often, Miss Bunting had graciously waived the question of lessons for the time being. Some governesses would have been under these conditions a confounded nuisance to put it mildly, but Miss Bunting had not for nothing spent many years of her life avoiding being a nuisance to His Grace, or the Marquess, or his mere Lordship. Indeed among her most cherished recollections was the skill with which she, with the ladies Iris and Phyllis, then under her charge, kept out of the way of the Marquess of Bolton during the week when the Budget came out; though even this was perhaps eclipsed by the tact with which she had effaced herself, Lord Henry Palliser and the ladies Griselda and Glencora Palliser after the Derby when the Duke of Omnium’s Planty Pal was unplaced. Frequently had she told her various pupils that time should never hang heavy on their hands, as there was always plenty of work to be done, and conversely, that there was time enough to do everything if only you used method. This was no idle phrase-making, for her whole life had been founded on and still consisted in never being idle and never being hurried. She did permit herself a short and ladylike nap after lunch, it is true, but she had earned it by some fifty years of patient conscientious devotion to pupils, most of whose children and in many cases grandchildren were now caught up in the whirlwind of war.

  Anne spent the morning with her father, watching him trim a hedge and plant some more pea-sticks and do a bit of digging and talking to him in a very agreeable and intelligent way. Miss Bunting got out her much-worn writing-case and wrote a number of letters to old friends and pupils in her clear flowing hand, read the Times quietly from beginning to end, made up a bit of velvet ribbon into a new evening bow, heated her curling irons on the gas-ring upstairs and recurled her spare fringe, and finally gave Gradka an hour’s lesson in English humour. That industrious young woman had prepared a lunch, part of which was cooking itself in the oven while the rest was sitting in the refrigerator, and as she possessed the invaluable faculty of being able to concentrate on one thing at a time, they got through a lot of work. Byron’s satiric poems and the Ingoldsby Legends she had now mastered for all examination purposes and it merely remained to correlate the art of Sir William Schwenk Gilbert with that of Samuel Butler before writing her essay.

  Miss Bunting’s opinion of public examinations of any kind was so small as to be practically invisible, but she was quite aware that in the world as it is most of us have to conform, and will have increasingly to conform, so she determined to do her very best for Gradka, whose pertinacity she admired though she found the student herself and her complete self-satisfaction something of a trial. The Bab Ballads are not perhaps the book we would choose to try to explain to a foreign refugee with little knowledge of their historical and literary background, but Miss Bunting did not know the word impossible. Having explained to Gradka that the likeness between Gilbert and Butler must be sought in their great facility and ingenuity in finding rhymes rather than in their philosophical outlook (which gave Gradka a low opinion of Gilbert at once), she proceeded to take these poems which, in her almost infallible judgment, would be chosen as typical by the examiners, and gave Gradka a short lecture upon their meaning with explanations of various topical allusions. All of which Gradka took down in notes and appeared to understand, having the cleverness of book-educated foreigners at grasping the form of a joke combined with their total inability to laugh at it.

  ‘So; I thank you very much indeed,’ said Gradka at the end of Miss Bunting’s explanation. ‘There is one more poem which I shall ask you about, “Captain Reece”. It is a satire, is it not?’

  Miss Bunting said not exactly. It was, she said, more in the nature of a fantasy.

  ‘A fantastic poem I shall say then in my essay, yes?’ said Gradka.

  Miss Bunting said not quite. She would herself call it on the whole a humorous poem: light humour, she added.

  ‘I now pretty well understand oll the English humour,’ said Gradka, ‘but this poem, no. I read it as a satire upon your navy, which is pampered. It is ollso a satire upon democracy when the Captain marries the washerlady, yes? The humour is because she is a widow. Widow is very humorous in English, like mother-in-law or dronk man. But one thing is very admire-able, that is the duty-theme. In Mixo-Lydia we are all against duty, but here the duty-spirit is awfully popular.’

  Miss Bunting said doubtless Gradka meant that devotion to duty was an essential trait of the English character; popular, she added, did not have quite that meaning. To say that an actor, for instance, was popular meant that the people liked his acting: not that his acting was expressive of the people.

  ‘Aha!’ said Gradka, an exclamation into which she was able to put a wealth of whatever meaning she chose – usually a sinister one. ‘In Mixo-Lydia oll our actors are expressive of the people: they are ollso popular as you say it. I ollso note in “Captain Reece” the repetition-theme which drives the symbohlic nail to its home by the act of repeating. “It is their duty and they will,” followed by “It was their duty and they did.” It is the Nelson totch. It is very striking. I find it very English.’

  Miss Bunting was over seventy, but her well-trained brain, except in the hour after lunch, worked as well and swiftly as ever. For an instant she thought of trying to explain to Gr
adka that Gilbert was not really thinking of Nelson or duty or democracy, or indeed anything except amusing himself and his readers in light witty verse. Even as quickly she decided that this would be governess’s labour’s lost, and that the examiner would probably be much more in sympathy with Gradka’s attitude than with her own, which was incidentally that of the few widely educated people left. And here she was perfectly right, for it was Gradka’s ponderous exposition of these very points that turned the scale between a Beta plus and an Alpha minus, which was the mark she was finally awarded.

  So Miss Bunting folded her pince-nez and put them in their case, and Gradka collected her books.

  ‘One moment, there is something I shall ask you, Prodshkina Bunting,’ said Gradka. ‘You know a gentleman called Adams perhaps? An ironmonger, very, very rich, at Hogglestock.’

  ‘We do not use the word ironmonger for a person who employs labour on a large scale,’ said Miss Bunting. ‘We say ironmaster. Mr Govern who keeps the shop in the High Street is an ironmonger.’

  ‘I thank you,’ said Gradka, whose eager willingness to absorb information on any subject under the sun was one of her many less endearing qualities. ‘So; now I know Mr Govern is the ironmonger and I know he is the tinker for he tinks kettles. Do you know of the ironmaster Adams?’