Bramton Wick

by Elizabeth Fair

  It was still possible to succeed. It was, she thought sometimes, almost alarmingly possible.

  For the weeks of separation had made a difference, and Laura was no longer so certain that it would be a good thing for her to marry Toby.

  She liked Toby; she had always liked him; nothing had changed. But that was just it. She could not say to herself that absence makes the heart grow fonder; in her it had had the reverse effect, for she had scarcely thought about him. She had thought about Lady Masters, about Endbury, about the alterations to the west wing and the bars on the nursery windows—about everything but Toby himself.

  Laura had never been seriously in love, and did not expect to be, but she felt there was something wrong here. She believed that she needed more time, an untroubled interval in which to examine her own mind. She hoped very much that Lady Masters would not be in too much of a hurry about finding a wife for Toby.

  Mrs. Cole, on the other hand, was waiting quite impatiently for her next invitation to Endbury. She had never liked Lady Masters, but for Laura’s sake she was prepared to make the best of her. A marriage between Laura and Toby would be the fulfilment of her long-cherished dream. Even thinking of it—and she thought of it a great deal—made Lady Masters seem more tolerable. As for Toby, she had always been fond of him; and from the worldly point of view it would be a very good marriage. She was not so mercenary as to wish her daughter to marry for money, but she could not avoid making the comparison between Endbury and Marly House, between Toby and Miles Corton.

  Mrs. Cole had been brought up in an extravagant world where everyone had enough money, and although she had long ago grown used to being poor she could not forget the agreeableness of being rich. Miles Corton was not rich, and never would be, and if Laura were to marry him she would have to live in that hideous house and scrimp and save to the end of her life. But if she were to marry Toby she would have the comfort and ease she deserved.

  Above all, she would have Endbury.

  In the watches of the night, when her daughters supposed her to be peacefully asleep, Mrs. Cole lay awake shaping and enlarging her dream. She had told herself so often, and so sincerely, that she was not a match-making mother, that she was quite surprised to discover in herself reserves of tact and cunning. They would be needed; for somehow, without alarming Laura or making Gillian suspicious, she must establish a friendship with Lady Masters. Mrs. Cole saw clearly that without her approval nothing could be done, but she saw no reason why Lady Masters should disapprove. She thought that Lady Masters, like herself, must often have played with the idea of such a marriage. It was so obvious, and so suitable.

  The more she thought of it, the easier it grew to persuade herself that Laura really wanted to marry Toby. Perhaps there was already an “understanding” between them; perhaps there was only Toby’s dependence on his mother that prevented an open engagement. This part of her wishful thinking was based entirely on Pussy’s words. Pussy had said that Laura had “other plans for her future,” and although she had no business to say it, and did not deserve to be listened to, she certainly had an uncanny way of knowing the very things people most wished to keep to themselves.

  Mrs. Cole could not disregard Pussy’s words. She did not want to disregard them. She lay awake, picturing Laura in white satin and her own Brussels lace, worrying over the problem of how Lady Masters was to be dislodged from Endbury and made to live elsewhere—for though the house was large it would be better for Laura to reign alone—and occasionally sparing a thought for Gillian, who would now have to be the prop and comfort of her old age.

  Towards the end of the week she received a note from Lady Masters asking them all to luncheon on Sunday. She read it to her daughters at breakfast, keeping a discreet watch on Laura to see if she appeared pleased.

  “Gracious,” said Laura. “All three of us?”

  “Perhaps she brought back a haunch of venison from Glen Bogle and finds it wants eating.”

  “Gillian, don’t be silly,” Mrs. Cole said gently. It was no use, her daughters were off at their old game of pretending that they never got enough to eat at Endbury. Laura said that venison would be a nice change from Snippets à la mode, and Gillian retorted that she never got snippets anyway—only snippet in the singular and a thin snippet at that.

  “Children, children!” said Mrs. Cole. “It’s kind of her to ask us, and I shall accept. I haven’t been to Endbury for a long time,” she added hastily, feeling that she must make some excuse for accepting an invitation without so much as asking them if they wanted to go.

  A little later, while they were making the beds, Gillian asked Laura if she had noticed anything peculiar about their mother at breakfast.

  “No, I didn’t. Had she got her dress on back to front?”

  “Not that sort of peculiar. She looked at us very oddly, especially at you. Rather furtive—as if she was up to something.”

  “Something for our good?”

  Gillian thought it over. “Yes,” she said, “it was like that. Something for our good, or perhaps more for your good than mine.”

  “Poor Mummy, we must cooperate if we can, but I hope she won’t go to a lot of trouble to get us something we shan’t like.” Gillian began to laugh. “I hope it’s not husbands,” she said. Both of them were so convinced that Mrs. Cole was not a matchmaking mother that Laura had no hesitation in laughing too. Gillian pointed out that this theory exactly explained the furtive look, directed more to Laura than to herself, for she had already had a husband and Laura had not.

  “You first, then me. If Mummy starts talking about a round of visits we shall know that’s it.”

  When Gillian left school she had been sent on a round of visits and she had never forgotten it. She had visited an aunt in Brighton, an aunt in North Wales, and some cousins in the Midlands. The aunts and cousins had proved dull company, but on the way home she had got into conversation with a young man who was anything but dull; this was William, whom she subsequently married.

  Mrs. Cole had been given to understand that Gillian met her beloved at her aunt’s house in North Wales; a round of visits might therefore appear to her a profitable enterprise. Her daughters amused themselves in elaborating this theory, but they did not discuss the possibility that Mrs. Cole might be looking for husbands nearer home. Laura wondered if her mother had considered Thomas Greenley as a candidate for Gillian. Gillian remembered that in addition to giving them furtive looks, Mrs. Cole had shown an odd determination to visit Endbury. But they kept these thoughts to themselves.

  It was Mrs. Trimmer’s day for “doing” the brasses and the kitchen floor. Mrs. Trimmer was niece to Lady Masters’s old parlourmaid and had cycled over to Endbury to see her the previous evening. She seldom visited her aunt, and when she did so it was only from a sense of duty; there was no enjoyment in it because enjoyment, for Mrs. Trimmer, meant a long cosy gossip, and her aunt disapproved of gossip.

  “Sit there till kingdom come, she would, and never utter,” Mrs. Trimmer would say. “Too fond of ’erself by ’alf, and looking down ’er nose at me for going out daily.”

  But this morning Mrs. Trimmer arrived brimming over with news. Yesterday evening old Mrs. Hesford had walked over from the almshouse, as she did about once a month, to have a look at the Endbury kitchen and irritate the reigning cook by talking of the old days. Mrs. Hesford might be irritating, but she was a privileged person, an ex-monarch who was entitled to a little gossip if she fancied it, so Mrs. Trimmer was able to congratulate herself on having chosen that evening for her own visit.

  The family had had bad weather at that Scotch place; it had rained all the time and her ladyship had caught a cold. “Scotland’s not the place for me any more,” she had said to Cook. “I shall never go back to Glen Bogle.” (“Like a Jacobite lament,” Gillian commented later.) Her ladyship’s sister, the one they had been staying with, had travelled back to London with them and was coming to Endbury for the weekend, and her ladyship said she was to have the
bedroom over the library because it had a fine view and her sister was very fond of views.

  “But that’s such a cold room,” said Mrs. Cole. “We only used it for bachelors.”

  “Yes, M’m, me aunt says to ’er ladyship it was a cold room. But ’er ladyship says that ’er sister liked cold rooms, she was used to them at Glen Bogle.”

  Mrs. Cole sighed, for the thought of cold rooms depressed her, and Glen Bogle must have been cold indeed if Lady Masters had noticed it.

  “And I hear Mr. Toby’s going to be a farmer!” said Mrs.

  Trimmer, who had been saving this up to the last. It fell rather flat, for Mrs. Cole’s conscience overcame her curiosity and she decided that she really could not discuss Toby’s career with Mrs. Trimmer. So she said that they would probably hear all about it on Sunday when they lunched at Endbury, and made an excuse for following Gillian and Laura into the sitting-room, leaving Mrs. Trimmer to work off her disappointment on the brasses.

  However, there was no reason for not discussing it with her daughters, and she promptly told them what Mrs. Trimmer had just said.

  “If that’s true he must be giving up the bookshop. How stupid!”

  “I don’t think he liked the bookshop much anyway.”

  “Yes, Laura, but just think of all the things Toby has tried and failed at since he came out of the Army. He’ll be running out of careers soon. It’s quite ridiculous.”

  “Poor Toby. It’s just that he can’t settle down.”

  “Poor Toby—bosh!” Gillian said unkindly. “He’s a poor little rich boy, that’s what’s the matter with him.”

  “Children, children!” said Mrs. Cole. But only one child really deserved the rebuke. The other, she was pleased to see, was sticking up for Toby.

  That afternoon Toby called at Woodside. He explained that he had to drive into Bramton and wondered if any of them would like to go too. No one wanted to go to Bramton, but Mrs. Cole remembered that there were some papers to go to the Misses Cleeve. “You could give Laura a lift to Box Cottage,” she suggested.

  “But he doesn’t go that way, Mummy. He always goes by Wick.”

  Toby protested that he could just as easily go by Marly House and Box Cottage, and Laura went off to fetch her coat, a little annoyed because she had planned to darn all her stockings that afternoon.

  Toby had left his car at the gate, and she noticed that he had turned it round.

  “I was quite right,” she said. “You meant to go by Wick.”

  “If you’re not in a hurry we can go that way. You can come into Bramton with me and then we’ll come back by Box Cottage.”

  Laura agreed to this. They drove back to the crossroads and along the old Bramton road, past Major Worthy’s house with its neat white gate, past Miss Bailey’s house with its high impenetrable hedge, till they reached the top of Gibbet Hill. Toby stopped the car.

  “This is why I like to come by Wick,” he said.

  Bramton lay below them. In the foreground was the New Bridge, mellow with age and of a pleasing design, and beyond it the houses were huddled together on rising ground, which had once been surrounded by marshes, with the square tower of the church dominating the picture. It was certainly very charming.

  “Do you come this way to look at the view?” Laura asked.

  “It’s pretty good, isn’t it? Pure eighteenth century. Nothing to remind one of the ghastly present.”

  “There’s the railway,” she objected. She understood what he meant, but she could not resist pointing out the railway.

  Toby said it hardly counted—it was as much a thing of the past as the water mill below the bridge. But Laura held stubbornly to the opinion that a railway was an anachronism in an eighteenth-century landscape. Toby started the car again and they drove on in a rather unsympathetic silence.

  While she waited for him in Bramton Laura’s kind heart began to get the better of her literal mind. She did not blame him for preferring the past, but it struck her that his attitude to the railway was like his mother’s attitude to anything which conflicted with her own opinions. Such tiresome intrusions went unobserved, or were said “not to count.” But Toby was not, like his mother, insensitive to criticism; on the contrary he was all too sensitive. His feelings were easily hurt, and she had hurt them that afternoon when she had laughed at his cherished view.

  By the time Toby got back to the car Laura had quite repented of her churlishness. He was still using his “hurt” voice, but it did not take long to persuade him that they were the best of friends. As soon as he felt sure of this he cheered up and took her to have ices at the Sunny Teashop.

  When they got there they were told that it was too late in the year for ices. Toby said they would have tea instead.

  “We ought to get back,” said Laura, sitting down at a table in the window. “Won’t Lady Masters be expecting you?”

  “Well, I can always eat another tea when I get home.” He looked at her and laughed. “I shall have to, too. You know how Mama feels about food being wasted.”

  “Yes,” said Laura. This was the second time that Toby, whom she had formerly thought of as a mother-worshipper, had criticised the author of his being. She propped her elbows on the table and said boldly:

  “Toby, you’re grown up. Don’t you think you ought to take a stronger line?”

  She half expected that instead of taking a stronger line he would take refuge in hurt feelings, but he answered her quite seriously.

  “How can I? Mama can be very difficult. And then, you see . . . well . . .”

  “Well—what?”

  “Well—she has the money.”

  She was perfectly aware of this, but it was a shock to hear him say it. It implied that criticism of Lady Masters could be carried to almost any lengths. But before she could reply, the waitress arrived with the tea.

  “Lovely, gaudy cakes,” said Toby, reverting to his ordinary manner. “Look, Laura, they’re like childhood’s dreams come true. I only know one place better than this for gaudy cakes, a café in Bramchester quite near the cathedral. I used to go and gorge there.”

  Bramchester reminded Laura of something else.

  “Is it true that you’re going to be a farmer?”

  “Perfectly true. Who told you?”

  “Mrs. Trimmer told Mummy.”

  “All those Trimmers could make their fortunes in spy rings—they have an absolute genius for sleuthing. They find out everything long, long before it’s made public.”

  Laura agreed. She could not say that she had known about the farming long, long before Mrs. Trimmer brought the news.

  “I think I shall like farming. Don’t look so guilty, Laura, I was only joking about Mrs. T. It’s all fixed up now, and I’ve finished with the bookshop. Have another cake?”

  It was clear that the bookshop had become a mere interlude in Toby’s past and that all his thoughts were centred on his new career. He began to talk of farming with great enthusiasm, and although Laura listened and laughed and encouraged him, she could not help remembering that he had been just as enthusiastic about his other careers.

  Miles Corton had also driven into Bramton that afternoon, to see the local builder about some repairs to a cottage. He had noticed Toby’s car parked near the Cleeve Monument, and now, on his way back to his own car, he happened to glance through the window of the Sunny Teashop and saw Laura and Toby laughing and talking within. He had already had a depressing interview with the builder, who had a hundred good excuses for not knowing when he would be able to start the job, and he did not care much for Toby Masters at the best of times. He paused, and gave him a disapproving look, a look which said: “Why aren’t you working in your idiotic bookshop?” But neither Toby nor Laura had a glance to spare for the passers-by in the street. Their heads were close together and they were engaged in animated conversation, as if they had something particularly pleasant to discuss.

  Miles walked on to his car. He looked up at the statue of Sir Alexander James Cl
eeve, then he looked at Toby’s car, so much newer and better kept than his own. He sighed, and drove out of Bramton at a speed which he would have found deplorable in another driver.

  Shortly afterwards Toby and Laura followed him, also driving rather too fast; they had not noticed the time and now it was late and they still had to call at Box Cottage.

  “You’ll be far too late to have tea when you get home,” said Laura.

  Toby grinned at her. “Never mind. Perhaps this is where I start taking a strong line.”

  Miss Pussy Cleeve was standing at the gate of Box Cottage, looking up and down the road with an air of casual indifference. She was lying in wait for Mrs. Epps, who had been into Bramworthy and might be expected back by the next bus, but the arrival of Toby Masters and Laura quite put Mrs. Epps in the shade. She seldom saw Toby, and it was a long time since she had had the pleasure of comparing him with his dossier.

  “Come in, come in,” she cried gaily. “Or are you too busy, Laura dear? I am sure Mr. Masters is not too busy. I hear he’s a man of leisure these days.”

  Toby was slightly nonplussed. Laura, faced with a choice of sympathies, chose to be sorry for Toby and said firmly that they could not come in.

  “We’ve been into Bramton,” she said, “and we were detained. We simply must get back.”

  Pussy deliberately looked puzzled, and indeed she might, for there was nothing to detain anyone in Bramton. Then her puzzled expression changed to one of all too intimate comprehension. “Well, well,” she said meaningly, “I won’t keep you. I’m sure you have better things to do than talk to three old women.”

  Both Laura and Toby became embarrassed; embarrassment or fury were the common reactions to conversation with Pussy. Laura leaned over the back of the seat to get the papers. Toby said in a voice rather louder than usual that he was not going to be idle for long—he was going to set up as a farmer.