Dear Hugo

by Molly Clavering

  *

  Hugo! The most extraordinary, the most amazing thing! (And I’m sorry if these underlinings make the page look like one taken from Queen Victoria’s correspondence, but really there is no other way in writing to convey this astounding happening.)

  It is the sort of thing one reads in a novel and at once dismisses as wildly improbable, but of course there is nothing so wildly improbable as real life! Just listen to this:

  Madge suddenly appeared yesterday afternoon as I was sitting in the garden writing to you. The moment I saw her I knew that something wonderful had happened, she looked—irradiated, somehow.

  All she said was: “He’s come back!” and at first I thought she was talking about her young man in the Forestry, and gaped at her in dumb stupidity.

  Then she began to cry quietly, enormous tears rolling down her pink cheeks and splashing on her white blouse. I realised suddenly that this could have nothing to do with a man she “liked well enough”.

  “Who?” I said quickly.

  “Wee Helen’s father. Jim Lewis,” said Madge, and brushed away her tears with one of her capable hard-working hands. “I’m sure I don’t know what I’m crying for,” she said shamefacedly. “It’s downright daft. It’s just—eh, Miss Monteith, I’m that glad! I had to come and tell you—”

  Trying to hurry Madge only reduces her to incoherence, so I made her sit down beside me on the wooden seat, and took her hand while she recovered her composure.

  It is a massive seat made out of ship’s teak, and there is something both soothing and reassuring about its solid comfort. I hoped it would have a good effect on Madge, and it had.

  She gave a gulp and a sniff, followed by a watery smile, which gradually broadened to a bashful grin.

  “A feather would’ve felled me!” she declared. I doubted it—Madge is built on generous lines—but naturally did not say so.

  She drew a deep breath and went on: “It was while I was putting away the dinner dishes. Wee Helen was away back to the school, and Aunt Nettie’s at Langtoun for the day to get a new hat, and there was a knock on the door, an’ when I opened it, there stood a MAN!” She paused to see how I would take this astonishing announcement; from her tone one would have supposed that she had found a tiger on the door-step.

  “Do go on, Madge!” I implored her, unable to bear the suspense.

  But Madge’s sense of the dramatic was too acute to let her spoil this moment, genuine though her emotion was.

  “A MAN!” she repeated. “A strange Man—and there was a stranger in my tea only this morning, too! ‘Madge?’ he says. ‘Madge, do you not know me?’ My heart fair turned over. ‘It’s Jim!’ I says. I couldna get another word out, I was that dumbfounded! And oh, Miss Monteith, he’s wanting to marry me! He’s got work on the railway, an’ we’ll can stay here in Ravenskirk. Och, I just can’t believe it! I had to come up an’ tell you!”

  I could understand the urge to rush and tell someone about her sudden joy, so compelling that she had spoken of it twice, and I liked the generous spirit which had kept her from uttering a word of reproach or blame; she had not even sounded reproachful. Madge wouldn’t, of course. She was taking her happiness as simply as she had taken her former grief and shame.

  But someone ought to point out to her that her lover’s behaviour had been extremely casual, to put it mildly, and since she had come to me, I must be that someone, though it seemed a shame to dim her radiant delight.

  “It has taken him a long time to come back and ask you to marry him, hasn’t it?” I said.

  The smile remained on Madge’s face, but it altered and became tenderly compassionate. “Ay, poor Jim. He’s been in a rare taking because of that,” she said softly, so softly that the plaintive voice of a wood-pigeon roo-coo-cooing in the big beech-tree at the far corner of Mrs. Kilmartin’s garden, sounded almost harsh. “But—he had a wife, you see—”

  “Had?” I asked rather sharply. “Is he divorced, then?”

  “Oh, no, Miss Monteith,” Madge answered in a shocked tone. “The poor soul’s dead. She was older than Jim and they never got on very well.”

  “Don’t you feel that Jim didn’t treat you very well, Madge?” I asked. “A married man—and you were so young—”

  “It was the War,” Madge turned her large calm brown eyes and looked at me gravely. “Folk felt different then—Jim wasn’t to know that he wouldn’t get killed, and—”

  I nodded. I could remember quite well how one felt during those years of living from hour to hour, and I thought that there was no need for me to say any more.

  “I’m sure I just hope Aunt Nettie’ll not take it badly. That’s all that bothers me now,” said Madge. “But seeing that, we’ll be here—we could all live together if she wants, Jim says it makes no difference to him—” her voice faded into silence, broken only by the wood-pigeon’s hoarse sweet cooing.

  “I expect Miss Marchbanks will be just as pleased as I am that things have tinned out right for you, Madge,” I assured her. “More because she’s your Aunt, and very fond of you.”

  “Well—” Madge got up from the seat and smoothed her skirt. “I’ll need to be getting back down the hill and make the tea for her and Wee Helen. Jim’ll be coming in to see us later, he said.” Already she sounded more confident, more mature, than I had ever known her. She smiled at me shyly.

  “You’ve been awful good to me, Miss Monteith,” she said.

  “I’d like to thank you—” And she turned and went away with her quick light steps, between the spires of blue and pink lupins. . . .

  Isn’t it rather wonderful, Hugo, to know that this tangled affair has straightened out for these two people? For four people, really, because Wee Helen and Aunt Nettie have lived under the shadow which has darkened Madge’s life for seven years. . . .

  I wonder what Miss Bonaly will say? Something about green bay-trees, I should think. But Miss Bonaly’s sting has lost its poison now that Madge is respectably engaged and about to be married.

  The weather is in sympathy with my mood of pleased content, for we are having beautiful days, sunny and hot. The lupins are at their splendid best, great clumps of delicate colour, especially two of “the common blue”, as superior people who only allow Russell lupins in their gardens call them. They are a glory when the sun shines on them, like patches of Italian sky, and nothing would induce me to dig them up and throw them out. There are big crimson peonies, and the pale silvery-pink ones which have such a delicate scent.

  The whole countryside was decked out in green and white and gold when I walked over to Templerig to have tea with the Curries. Under the flowering hawthorn hedges were drifts of greenish-white lady’s lace, and the gold was added by bushes of broom, and buttercups. There were other colours too, but the general effect was all white and gold, beautifully fresh among the new green of grass and leaves. Every bird that can sing was singing, and above me the sky was a great inverted saucer of pale blue.

  I took the short cut to the house through a little wood of scattered birches and self-sown stubby oaks, where the primroses had faded, leaving it all to the wild hyacinths. The air was sweet with their heady fragrance, and I leaned my back against a slender white birch trunk to enjoy it.

  “You look as if you were composing a poem,” said a voice, so unexpectedly that I jumped.

  Lawrence Whitburn and a strange young man were standing on the narrow path quite close to me.

  “If I had been, you would have frightened it out of my head!” I answered with indignation.

  Lawrence Whitburn has a talent almost amounting to genius for catching me in foolish situations. I sometimes wondered if he did it with everyone he knew, or only me.

  “But you weren’t, were you?” he asked with a smile. Provoking creature! “Unless you were thinking about Mrs. Currie’s dropped scones? They are a poem in themselves. This is a young cousin of mine, by the way—Alan Whitburn. Miss Monteith, Alan.”

  The strange young man, who was tall and f
air, shook hands silently.

  “Are you going to tea at Templerig?” I said, joining them on the path.

  “We are,” he said gravely. “Why do you sound so surprised?”

  “I always think of tea-parties as purely feminine functions.”

  “But this is Sylvia’s birthday party, and I have known her since she was in her perambulator. I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” said Major Whitburn. He produced a small neat parcel from his pocket. “I have even remembered a present. Have you?”

  “As it happens, I have,” I retorted, feeling a little ruffled by his teasing mood for some reason.

  Young Alan Whitburn looked at me and said, “He can’t help it, he gets like this sometimes. Don’t pay any attention to him.”

  It was more annoying to know that this young man had noticed my annoyance, but he meant to be kind, so I laughed and said it didn’t matter.

  We came out of the wood onto the wide gravelled sweep in front of Templerig’s sober, well-proportioned Georgian façade, to see a number of cars drawn up there.

  “Good heavens, it must be an enormous party!” I said, aghast. “Mrs. Currie said ‘one or two people are coming to tea’ when she rang me up and invited me!”

  “What difference does it make?” asked Lawrence Whitburn with real male density.

  “I’m not dressed for a party—” My grey linen dress was clean and unrumpled, but very plain, and I was wearing neither hat nor gloves.

  “You look very nice,” said both Whitburns consolingly, but I felt sure that if Miss Whitburn had been present she would have been in printed silk with a smart little straw hat. . . . This was the sort of party which would linger on until cocktail-time and after. And I had been expecting Elizabeth Drysdale and perhaps one other guest besides myself. However, one great advantage of growing older is that this sort of thing does not seem the appalling disaster it would to—well, to Sylvia Currie. No one would mind in the least what I was wearing, and the grey linen was cool and suited me. There is also the tremendous fillip, most appreciated by a lone woman, of arriving at any party escorted by two personable men. I took a hasty peep at my face in the mirror of my powder-compact, saw with relief that it was neither flushed nor shiny and that my hair was tidy, and decided that I would pass.

  The door stood wide open, and from the dim hall beyond came a pleasant mingling of flower-scents and beeswax. It was obvious that we were intended not to ring, but to walk in, and we did so in time to see the stealthy figure of the master of the house creeping forlornly away towards some haven—the stackyard, perhaps, or the barn. But he was not allowed to escape.

  “Hi, Matt! Where are you off to?” said Major Whitburn loudly and cheerfully, putting his hat on the table and advancing upon his unwilling host.

  “Tea-parties aren’t much in my line,” murmured Mr. Currie, with an anguished glance in the direction of the drawing-room, from which came a steady hum of voices mostly feminine.

  “You can’t sneak away from Sylvia’s birthday tea—you’ll be needed to blow out the candles,” was Lawrence Whitburn’s ruthless answer. “Come on, man! You know everybody—”

  Mr. Currie’s melancholy glance as he yielded and turned with us to join the party, seemed to say that he knew them only too well. He looked remarkably like one of his own bullocks just sold to a butcher.

  The noise which rose from a number of friends congratulating Sylvia as we entered the big room was tremendous, and fell with much the same effect on our unaccustomed ears as a large wave breaking over one’s head and leaving one breathless, speechless and slightly deaf.

  As I stood wondering if I should ever be able to plough through the crowd and wish the heroine of the occasion many happy returns of her birthday, I realised that I need not have had even a momentary worry about my dress. Not only would it never be noticed, but the costumes already in the room varied from tweed suits to the printed silks I had expected to see. What a foolish thing it is allow clothes to cause one agitation! “Still to be neat” ought to be enough, without being “drest, as you were going to a feast.”

  The doorway of a crowded room into which more people are pressing, is not a good place for philosophising. Later arrivals surged in and carried me forward so quickly that I was almost swept off my feet. Staggering a little, I regained my balance with the help of the nearest object, a stalwart arm in a grey tweed sleeve. But its owner, who was young Alan Whitburn, paid no attention to my apologetic thanks, if he even heard my voice, which I doubt. He was gazing at a tall slim girl with a bare head of bright brown curls.

  “Cath!” he said. “Cath! I didn’t know you were going to be here to-day! What a piece of luck!”

  The tone said more than the words, but Catherine Drysdale only replied with complete composure, “Hullo, Alan! How nice to see you. Yes, I’ve got a couple of days off, so I came over with the parents.” And in her voice I could hear nothing but calm friendliness. For some reason I felt suddenly rather sorry for Major Whitburn’s nephew.

  Then Sylvia caught sight of us and waved a hand, calling gaily: “Hullo, Miss Monteith! Oh, and Colonel and Mrs. Drysdale—and Catherine too, how lovely—”

  She moved adroitly between groups of guests until she reached us, full of excitement and pleasure, her cheeks brilliant, her eyes sparkling. Her arms were full of parcels, some half-unwrapped, and she thrust them all into Alan Whitburn’s arms while she shook hands with us.

  “Such fun, and such lots of presents!” she exclaimed as frankly as if it had been her eighth birthday rather than her eighteenth. “Oh, are these for me too? Oh, thanks awfully, Mrs. Drysdale, thanks awfully, Miss Monteith. I must open them now—”

  She was tearing paper and ribbons off her packages, and then exclaiming again over the little Florentine leather powder-compact I had brought her, and the books which were the Drysdales’ contribution.

  “And, oh, Catherine! Just look what Uncle Lawrence has given me! Aren’t they adorable?” She turned her head to show, clipped to her pretty ears, a pair of tiny silver filigree baskets set with flashing points of marcasite.

  Her appeal had been made, quite naturally, to the person nearest her in age, who might be expected most to share her admiration of the dainty trifles.

  Catherine said, “They are very pretty, Sylvia, and they look just right for you,” but she said it kindly rather than with the slightly envious enthusiasm which Sylvia obviously expected. As I looked at them and listened, I suddenly remembered what a gulf the six years between eighteen and twenty-four had been, how old to me on first leaving school twenty-four had seemed, and how callow when I reached that age myself, had appeared the fledgling of eighteen!

  Sylvia’s ingenuous face showed the droop of disappointment, the scarlet mouth so startling against her lovely young skin turned down at the corners like a child’s; but at that moment Mrs. Currie’s voice called over the bobbing mass of intervening heads, “Tea now, Sylvia darling! Will you all come to the dining-room?”

  As the drawing-room slowly began to empty, I found Sylvia’s arm linked confidingly in mine, and Sylvia’s voice whispering rather disconsolately in my ear, “How awfully—grown-up Catherine is being to-day, Miss Monteith.” and hastened to comfort her.

  “I expect she’s only a little tired, Sylvia. She works very hard, you know,” I said.

  “Oh, yes, of course! That’s what it is,” Sylvia said, instantly reassured, and by the time she had taken her seat at the head of the table, extended to its fullest length by the addition of all its leaves, she was talking and laughing as gaily—and I must say as loudly—as ever.

  It was a superb tea, and all produced in the Templerig kitchen, but what filled me with wondering awe was not the spread of scones and biscuits, little cakes and big cakes, jams and jellies, and the snowy birthday cake set with eighteen miniature candles which occupied the centre of the table, but the fact that Mrs. Currie could provide cups and saucers and plates for more than twenty persons!

  “Old family china,” said E
lizabeth Drysdale beside me. “Mrs. Currie has her own grandmother’s tea-set besides one that belonged to Mr. Currie’s mother. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t dare to use it if it were mine,” I answered, looking from the harlequin set in clear shades of pink and yellow and green to the rose-wreathed Worcester.

  “She washes and dries every bit of it herself. And anyhow, unless you are a museum, what’s the good of keeping china in a display cabinet and never using it?” said Elizabeth sensibly. “But I must say I wish I had even half a dozen cups and saucers like that to hand on to Cath—”

  I turned a quick surprised look on her.

  “Is Cath—I didn’t know—” I began.

  “Oh, no.” Elizabeth shook her head. “There’s no question of her getting married. I wish there were.”

  “She is young yet,” I said. “Give her time.”

  “She meets so few men, and the ones she does meet she seems to have no use for,” said Elizabeth. “And it isn’t as if she were plain and dull—”

  “Certainly not. No one could ever call her that.” I agreed quickly. “I don’t think you need worry.”

  “I expect I’m a fool, and worrying won’t do any good,” said Elizabeth with a sigh. “It’s only—some people just don’t seem to meet their proper match, and I am afraid at times that Catherine is one of them.”

  Then someone leant over the table and spoke to her, and we were swept up in the noisy chatter of the party. A little time later I caught sight of Catherine walking on the stone-flagged terrace under the west side of the house, deep in conversation with Alan Whitburn, the rays of the sun, long and level, glinting on the two bent heads, warm brown and blonde, and I felt that Elizabeth was worrying quite unnecessarily about her daughter.

  All the same, Hugo, don’t let me end this letter by giving you the impression that I think mothers have nothing to worry about. It must be the most anxious, as well as the most rewarding, thing in the world, to be a mother. Even I, a mere aunt-by-courtesy, have pangs of doubt and fear over Atty, and so I understand a little what parents must go through.