I Ordered a Table for Six

by Noel Streatfeild

  From that moment Meggie had been Miss Jones’s child, in a way no other pupil had been. For one thing, there was no competition. Adela was just coming out of mourning after losing her husband two years before. Although most of her income had always been Adela’s, it was obvious to Miss Jones that her husband had ruled the house. The Framleys belonged to the almost defunct squire class, but they had belonged to it for so many generations that though the class might be dying, the standards by which they had lived clung to those who remained, and made them not so much impervious to the changing standards around them as unconscious that other standards were possible. Miss Jones often wished she had met Richard Framley. It must have been an amusing struggle to have witnessed: Richard’s unshakable belief that this was done, and that was not done, and there were people one knew, and those one did not. Poor Adela, reared on piles of money made in one generation out of soap, must have often felt like a runner taking part in a race out of her class. Miss Jones surmised that during Richard’s lifetime Adela had put up a pretty good show; if she was breathless and confused she had at least accepted that she was appearing in a distinguished event. Over one person only, as far as Miss Jones could see, had she secretly had her own way, and that was Paul. Richard’s plans for Paul had been the preparatory and public schools at which he and his brother, and his father and his brothers, had been educated. It also included Oxford. Adela had accepted this outline for his education, but she had schemed from the beginning to make her son her boy. It was not that she did not wish him to grow up in the Framley pattern, but that where he was concerned she was possessive to the point almost of mania. She had wanted a son, and from the moment she had first held him in her arms she had known that she had been right to want one; possessing a son was to know the uttermost peak of satisfaction. She had gripped the tiny bundle and whispered:

  “You’re mine, mine.”

  Miss Jones had gleaned this story in part, and many more. “Paul was such a lovable child. His father didn’t believe in his having too many toys, so he and I had a little secret. I said to him: ‘Whatever you want you tell Mummie, and she’ll keep it in her cupboard and we’ll play with it together when Daddy’s out. It will be our very own secret.’” Paul had run away from his preparatory school. “My husband was very stern—you know how men are—and said he was to go straight to bed, and he would take him back in the morning, but the headmaster thought he had better change schools, and he was home for a whole week while my husband searched for another. Of course it was naughty of me, for he was supposed to be in disgrace, but we had the loveliest time. I let him do what he liked, and eat what he liked, and buy anything he wanted. Men don’t understand little boys, and I knew it must have been a horrid school or Paul would never have run away.”

  Miss Jones wondered whether even when Paul was ten some doubt about him had crept through Adela’s adoration. Was that why in the next year Meggie was born? One thing had been clear from the start, Adela did not want a daughter. She was perfectly frank about it. “You are used to girls, Miss Jones, and though of course I love little Meggie, I’m not really fond of girls. Of course she must ride and dance and learn nice manners and how to put on her clothes, but I’ll leave what else you teach her to you.”

  Paul, aged seventeen, was at home when Miss Jones first came to the house. Miss Jones wondered why he was home in the middle of the summer term but accepted a story of illness; but naturally the servants talked; and Meggie’s nannie, puzzled and frightened, needed a confidante. “The school won’t let him go there any more. He was brought home one day last term. A master brought him, and he was shut up a long while talking to Mrs. Framley, and when he had gone you could see she had been crying, and she’s not the crying sort. Nobody ever saw her cry when Mr. Framley went. It’s all along of Paul’s disobedience, I wouldn’t wonder. I did what I could, and so did his father, but his mother wouldn’t have a harsh word said to him, and of course he was sharp, and soon got on to knowing where to run when he was in trouble.”

  Old Nannie left soon after Miss Jones had arrived. Adela said Meggie was too old for a nurse, and would be better with a governess and a maid. Miss Jones’s pitying but discerning eyes read to the back of that statement. Adela would not admit there was need for anxiety about Paul. He was to go on being mother’s splendid, good-looking son, an attitude impossible to keep up with old Nannie’s obvious if unspoken worry always in front of her. There was nothing to worry about; a ludicrous fuss was being made about nothing.

  The fact that Paul had been expelled from school was kept at first from Fred Framley, Richard’s brother; then a chance meeting with the Head and he had the whole story. The Head had known the Framleys all his life and was glad of the opportunity of a talk with Fred. He had done his best at the time, driving the boy home in his own car and having a long, frank talk with Adela, but his conscience was not easy. Adela had not impressed him. She was not the person to handle a problem son.

  Uncle Fred Framley was a dreamer and an ascetic. His struggles to commune with God kept him from contact with the world. He was long and thin, and his clerical clothes hung on him in a suspended manner, with no suggestion that at any point they touched his body. His parishioners loved him in an awed way, but they kept the few scarlet sins committed amongst them from him. It was Aunt Jessie who heard the horrid details. “No need to be troublin’ Vicar,” the sinner or the sinner’s relatives would say. “He gets worritin’, and it do seem to set him contrary with God.” With this sentiment Aunt Jessie concurred. She knew just what the people meant. Sin, anybody’s sin, made Fred ashamed. It seemed to him that in mentioning it in his prayers he was repiercing the pierced side and crushing the thorns deeper into the scarred head. He loved his flock, but he could not blind himself to the fact that their sins, even their scarlet sins, sat very lightly on them. So, since someone must atone for sins, he took the burden on himself, fasting and praying until Aunt Jessie lost her temper and said: “That’s enough, Fred. Your bones will be cutting holes in your sheets!”

  Fred descended on Adela almost straight from his talk with Paul’s late headmaster. Richard had left a wish in his will that Fred should act with Adela as guardian of his children. Mindful of this, and with his head full of suggestions of Aunt Jessie and the headmaster, Fred was more practical than customary. Atonement there must be, of course. Knees must be worn thin with kneeling, and fasting, especially fasting away from Aunt Jessie, must be brought more or less to bread and water, but the atoning should be done by himself. “The boy’s got too much money,” the headmaster had said, “and he’s got a curious lack of any sense of responsibility. If he goes on the way he’s shaping now he’ll be a menace to society. Take my advice, cut out Oxford, get him a job, and see he sticks at it, and as far as possible lives on what he earns at it.” “He’s been spoilt,” said Aunt Jessie. “Richard was always worried about him, that’s why he wanted you to be his guardian. Now you must have a talk with Adela and make her promise not to give him any money. This getting drunk and all that nonsense would never have happened if he had been poor.” Uncle Fred could not dismiss a barmaid who belonged to the story as “all that nonsense,” but he had been, apart from food and knees, shown where his duty lay, and he arrived at Adela’s determined to carry it out.

  There followed a wretched autumn. Adela had but one son, and she had to worship a son. In many ways there was a lot for her to worship in Paul. He adored his mother, and together they were entirely happy. She wanted him with her, making his amusing cracks about life, jeering at the Framleys’ way of living, screamingly funny about their old-fashioned ideas, and serious about nothing. Except that his eyes were set too closely together, he was good-looking in a tall, fair, English way, and Adela glowed with new life, not only at owning so desirable a creature, but because, having strained up to the Framley standard for years, she was now able to relax and be not only herself but in some ways rather lower than herself. “Oh, Paul, we shouldn’t have anoth
er cocktail. You aren’t eighteen yet. You are a naughty boy.” “Oh, Paul, I don’t think I understand that story. You do think you’ve got a wicked mother.” She gave way to weaknesses in her own character more than at any other time in her life. She would accept anything rather than have Paul angry with her. “Darling boy, do ask me for money when you want it. I know you took those notes from my desk because I was out, but I’d put them there to pay a bill, and it was awkward. Don’t look sulky, darling. I’m not being a tiresome, grumpy woman, but do ask me for what you want.” “Darling, I hate to be a bullying woman when you are feeling so ill, but you are naughty, you know. What did you want to go out with those young men for? You know I like any friends of yours, but I don’t believe you are really fond of them, and they can’t be really fond of you, or they wouldn’t let a boy of your age have too much to drink. All right, darling, I’m not cross, I’m only worried, and you know they do let you pay all the bills.”

  Fred’s effect on this scented, steam-heated, unreal existence was that of a cold shower. He knew no fear, he was on God’s business, and it was right his tongue should lash. Stuff metaphorical fingers in her ears as Adela would, some of what Fred said reached her, enough to force her to face that other people saw Paul very differently from the way she saw him. She longed to back her own view by producing a string of admiring friends, but where were they? The effeminate, sleek young men who fetched Paul in their sports cars were not likely to create anything but a worse impression. Fred, like a bloodhound on a trail, would not be snubbed out of the house. He had to return to his parish, but week after week he was back, asking had this been done, and that letter written, in fact, when was Paul starting work? He caused a quarrel between Paul and Adela. “Why d’you let him come, sweet?” Paul raged. “He makes life hell. Let me kick him out.” But Adela had been a Framley too long to do quite that, and, finding himself for once crossed, Paul sulked and spent as little time as possible at home, and collected a batch of even more spurious-looking friends. Adela, seeing this, became further embittered and resentful of interference. “Her splendid boy, of course he’d work when the right job turned up, but nobody could expect somebody like him to go as an office boy, and none of the jobs so far offered were much better. It was a wicked shame; his relations were driving the boy into making undesirable friends.”

  All this Miss Jones’s sharp eyes and ears heard and saw, and what she missed hearing and seeing her intuition taught her, and she was horrified at such home conditions for Meggie; and mentally girded up her loins to fight for an existence in which the child could feel secure, and, if possible, proud of her relatives. When she saw her mother it should be a gracious, beautifully dressed woman, who looked forward on a busy day to snatched moments with her daughter. When she saw her brother it should be alone. She should not feel herself an unwanted third, and she should only see him at his best, not the dishevelled, red-eyed, frowsy object wandering about the house in a dressing-gown at twelve in the morning. It had been a struggle for Miss Jones. It had meant having the child with her always, and teaching her to rely on herself for her background. It had meant drawing for her an imaginary mother and brother. It had meant playing on the vanity of the mother and brother so that rather than blur the pictures of themselves they conformed to it when they were with Meggie.

  Miss Jones, sitting on the bottom step of the ladder, was remembering those days, and other days, which had produced the present Meggie. She could see Meggie at her dancing class, much the most energetic if least polished of the children, and hear her swaggering to another child: “My mother dances simply beautifully. My brother says he likes dancing with her more than anybody else.”

  Meggie sitting up in bed in a blue dressing-gown recovering from influenza, and herself coming in with an armload of parcels. Meggie’s enraptured cries as she unpacked them. “Oh, how lovely of Mummy! Fancy her choosing this. It’s just exactly what I wanted,” and herself showing so much surprise and admiration that she almost forgot the money she had fetched from an uninterested Adela, or Adela’s: “I do hope this influenza doesn’t run through the house. Give Meggie my love and tell her I’ll come and see her when she’s quite well.”

  Meggie riding her pony in the Row, talking fervently to the groom whose family’s life history she knew at the end of three lessons. Her animated face and delicious appearance in her jodhpurs, drawing the eyes of the onlookers, among whom were Paul and Adela. There had been no need then, Miss Jones recalled, still finding it hard to repress bitterness, to ask them to take an interest in Meggie. She was beckoned to come over to them, and teased and petted for everybody to see.

  There were pauses of rest for Miss Jones when she took Meggie to stay with her uncle and aunt. Perhaps because the straightforward, simple life in the vicarage was such a change after the strain, but Miss Jones found Fred and Jessie perfect. Meggie had always loved them, and was born for life in the country. Increasingly encouraged by Fred, Jessie, and Miss Jones, she had kept possessions in the Vicarage, and there were little occasions invented which she must not miss, which made it possible by degrees for quite a considerable portion of the year to be spent in the country. “Could Meggie come for a day or two? Her snowdrops are coming up.” “Could Meggie come for a visit? Her cat has had kittens and I know she will want to see them.” “May we have Meggie for a little? A blue tit has nested in her bird box.” “Could we have Meggie and Miss Jones to help with the lavender bags?” “Might we have Meggie? There is snow on the Vicarage slope and the children are tobogganing.”

  Fred, with Paul and Adela never far from his mind, had been for a short while inclined to treat Meggie’s visits as designed for discipline and reform, but Meggie’s earnest agreement and enthusiasm cured him. “Uncle Freddie says that it’s good to give up having things one likes, as it gives one self-control. He says it’s nice to eat sweets, but a person ought to be able not to eat one for a whole day at a time. I think Uncle Freddie’s simply perfect, so I shan’t eat any sweets all the time I’m here, just to please him.” “Uncle Freddie wants me to learn the Collect on Sundays. I’m not awfully fond of Collects, Jonesy, but if Uncle Freddie likes them I’ll learn dozens and dozens.” “Oh, Jonesy, it isn’t a bad cold, and Uncle Freddie will simply hate it if I don’t go to church. He’s had a much worse cold than me, and he’s gone to church all the time.” Jessie had shown Fred the error of his ways. “You must not encourage that child, Fred. She’s much too ready to sacrifice herself. We’ll have her ill with all this nonsense.”

  A delightful friendship followed between Fred and his niece. Miss Jones could see them in her mind’s eye. Meggie and her uncle walking round the parish visiting the people. Meggie often in such a state of enthusiasm or despair that Fred had to soothe her, and even hint that she must not take other people’s troubles and pleasures so much to heart. “Oh, Jonesy, Uncle Freddie and I saw Mrs. Endicott’s baby, and it looks terrible. Uncle Freddie says that if it dies it’s God’s will, but I can’t believe He’s thinking. Mrs. Endicott will miss that baby dreadfully. I’m going to say prayers all day long to remind God about it.” “Mrs. Mills’s daughter, the one that lives in London, is going to be married. Mrs. Mills wishes it wasn’t a London chap, but I said I didn’t see it mattered where he came from if her daughter’s pleased. Uncle Freddie says that the Mills are simple people and they’re afraid the husband won’t be their sort of person; but I said I thought that was simply awful; that every father and mother ought to be happy when their daughter’s happy. Mummy always is when I am.”

  If Miss Jones respected Fred for one quality more than another it was the way he built on to her dream creations of mother and brother. All that was lovable in them he talked of to Meggie, and all that was not he refashioned. It was his idea that Adela liked flowers picked by her daughter more than any bought in a shop, and whenever Meggie was at the Vicarage a box was sent to London every week. It was he who taught Meggie to write regularly to Paul, and to go on writing with
out expecting answers. “It’s giving that matters, Meggie, not receiving.”

  Jessie built the warm, solid home-life for Meggie that she thought every child’s birthright. Queer as her own appearance was, and unattractive as the Vicarage furnishings, which were the leavings of ancestors whose taste had been deplorable, she rose to great heights of imagination for Meggie. Originally Meggie and Miss Jones had shared the gaunt, large, spare bedroom, Miss Jones in the big double-bed and Meggie on a small one in the corner. The spare bedroom had a wallpaper of chrysanthemums, fly-walked engravings of the Apostles witnessing various of the miracles hung on the walls, and the furniture was enormous and of mahogany. Then during one visit Jessie told Miss Jones it was time Meggie had a little room of her own. Before Meggie came again Aunt Jessie ordered some women’s papers, such as had never before been in her hands. She found them by careful search on a railway bookstall. In one of the magazines was an account of the furniture of a young girl’s bedroom, and in another some descriptions of chintzes. When Meggie came next time the second spare room had suffered a complete change. It was honey-coloured in tone, and there was light-painted furniture and delicate, glazed chintz. Meggie was used to lovely rooms at home, and really adored the aged velvets and framed texts and clocks under glass cases which were to her the Vicarage, but she was far too sensitive to other people’s reactions to hint as much. She flung her arms round her aunt and told her it was adorable and that she was a baa-lamb, and only when alone with Miss Jones said regretfully: “It’s awfully nice, Jonesy, but the old room smelt vicaragey and I think that’s the heavenliest smell.” It was Aunt Jessie who gave Meggie her own garden and first gardening lessons. It was Aunt Jessie who said a new cat was wanted in the house, and purchased a grand and quite useless kitten and gave it to Meggie for her own.