Growing Up

by Angela Thirkell

  “Bless you, my girl,” said Philip, laughing in spite of his depression. “If Colin and Noel are all right I believe you don’t care for anything else. Look here, will you do something for me?”

  “Of course I will,” said Lydia. “When do you go?”

  “To-morrow morning,” said Philip. “Black Monday. The Dower House is sending me to Winter Overcotes in a car to get the London train. Why this waste of petrol when I could just as well get the through train at Worsted or Lambton I don’t know, but the Dower House is like that. You remember our compact, Lydia?”

  “Do you mean about the ring?” said Lydia.

  “I do. Here it is,” said Philip, taking it out of a pocket. “And in accordance with my vow I give it to you in token that I love Leslie quite distractedly and if she isn’t married when I come back I shall ask her at once. Perhaps she won’t hate me so much when I come back with one arm and one leg and one eye.”

  “Why don’t you ask her now?” said Lydia, slipping the ring on to her finger.

  “Because she doesn’t want me to. She as good as turned me down at the station yesterday and I’m not going to make a nuisance of myself. Also I’d look like a fortune-hunter. If anything happens to her brother, which God forbid, she will be an heiress, for what that’s worth nowadays. Oh, how could I ever have thought I loved Rose?”

  “You didn’t think, you did love her,” said Lydia. “People get different when they get older. I’ve often noticed it and we’re all growing up. We can’t help it.”

  “Well, thank God, you’ve got Noel,” said Philip. “I must fly, for I’ve a deuce of a lot of work to do before I leave the Dower House. Our telephone’s still out of order, blast it. Good-bye, my precious Lydia. I’ll write to you and tell you all about Colin, and if you can ever tell me anything about Leslie that you think would cheer me up, please do. If we are growing up, you are one of the nicest grown-ups I know.”

  They embraced heartily. Lydia stood watching Philip till he was round a turn in the lane and then walked homewards, meditating upon the sad story of her friend’s passion. The more she thought of it all the sillier it seemed that Philip should not rush over to the Priory, batter Leslie into sub-mission and, though this Lydia admitted was not very probable, get Mr. Needham to marry them at midnight with a curtain ring. These thoughts made her slightly pensive at lunch. Noel looked at her once or twice, wondering what had made her so quiet, but seeing that her excellent appetite was unimpaired he did not worry.

  After lunch Leslie and Lydia took Crumpet out to collect wood for the house. Lydia remembered their first drive, the day after she and Noel had come to the Priory, and thought how different Leslie looked. The nervous, exhausted young woman was now obviously fit to command any number of subordinates, take responsibilities, and probably emerge from the war with at least a D.B.E. if she wanted to take it. That she had suddenly looked so peaky in the last few days was a pity, but the peakiness appeared to be in her looks, not in her general health, for she collected and piled wood, filled the little cart and walked beside Crumpet with no sign of fatigue. Of course to be worrying about a brother was enough to make anyone look haggard, thought Lydia, and then blamed herself severely for not looking haggard about Colin. She thought of him a great deal, she looked eagerly for the post twice a day and rather disliked Sundays, but she ate and slept with her usual equanimity. Examining these facts in her mind she came to the very obvious conclusion that having a husband whom she loved very much made it easier to bear anxiety. If Noel went abroad, when Noel went abroad if one was to face things squarely, it would all be more difficult, but Lydia knew in her heart, as she had known after Dunkirk, that alive or dead Noel would keep her sane and in her own way happy. She didn’t think anyone but herself would really understand this, except perhaps Philip. And now Philip was unhappy and so was Leslie, who so needed someone to steady her in her too feminine career; and Lydia was for once completely at a loss as to how she could help them. So she very wisely decided to wait upon events and given them a shove in the right direction if occasion offered.

  As the cart was now heaped with firewood they walked, at Crumpet’s pace, for any other would have been impossible, by much the same way they had followed on their first outing. Golden Valley was waking to life. A delusion of green mistiness hung above the bare trees, there were early wild flowers everywhere. The purling brook swollen by the rains had overflowed its banks and in places the road was so deep in water that they had to lead Crumpet round over last year’s fern and the newly springing brambles to get to dry land.

  From the chimney of Jasper’s cottage the thin blue smoke rose straight towards the tree-tops, but the front door was shut.

  “Of course the garden is flooded as usual,” said Leslie, “and I expect it is all over the kitchen floor. I can’t tell you what a mess it is. I went in last year about this time and everything was swimming about the kitchen and the smell quite dreadful. I can’t think how he doesn’t die of rheumatism. No place for Selina. I hope all that nonsense is over.”

  Lydia said she didn’t know, but as Private Jenks seemed to have made Selina an unsuccessful offer, she probably wasn’t thinking of matrimony at all.

  “Go on, Crumpet,” said Leslie, giving the pony a hearty whack with a bit of stick, for he had taken advantage of their conversation to stop and assuage the pangs of hunger with a few young shoots. Crumpet shook his head and ambled forward, so that his companions had to run to keep up with him till the rise of the road checked his course. At the top of the hill they turned and looked back at the little valley, so safe, so untouched, among the wooded hills. The sound of a gun broke the silence, echoed from the hanger and was lost.

  “Jasper mending Private Jenks’s broken heart, I expect,” said Leslie. “I believe he has ordered Uncle Harry to tell Lord Pomfret that Tom Jenks is to succeed his father as head keeper after the war. Come on, Crumpet.”

  “Noel and I shall simply hate leaving here,” said Lydia, thinking this as good a moment as any other to tell Leslie their plans. “But we can get my old home back, and then we’ll be near my sister at Southbridge School and I can go to the Barchester General.”

  Leslie said she would be very sorry when they went, but of course she understood how much Lydia wanted to be in her old home.

  “I think I would die if I couldn’t live here,” she said. “My job is all very well, but this is more and more the real thing. And if Cecil agrees, we can turn the Priory into something really useful some day.”

  “Like a school for boys going into the Navy, I mean what Philip was talking about,” said Lydia.

  She said this with no deeper meaning, merely considering the possibilities of the Priory, but Leslie suddenly stopped and looked at Lydia as if appealing for help. Crumpet stopped too, jerked his head away from Leslie and made another attempt to sustain languid nature by cropping the roadside grass.

  “It’s no good,” she said. “Philip hates me. He said he wanted to tell me something yesterday at the station and I wouldn’t listen.”

  “Did you know what it was?” asked Lydia.

  “I suppose I did,” said Leslie, looking away. “But it’s no use now, so it doesn’t matter.”

  “He told me what it was,” said Lydia.

  For a woman who is in love to hear from another woman that the adored object has confided his passion to her is enough to wreck most friendships, but so much did Leslie like and respect Lydia, and so great was her need of help, that she was in no way offended. She looked at Lydia, mutely questioning.

  “It’s rather horrid,” said Lydia compassionately, “but he is going to-morrow and that’s all he may say. He wanted to tell you because of saying good-bye.”

  On hearing this, the competent and self-possessed head of an important organization put her arms round Crumpet’s neck and began to cry into his mane.

  “I say, don’t,” said Lydia, alarmed.

  “I’m not crying about Philip. I’m crying about Cecil. I’m crying becau
se I want to cry,” said Leslie; in proof of which she put her face into Crumpet’s mane once more.

  “Look here, Leslie, you can’t. Jasper or anyone might come,” said Lydia.

  A choked voice remarked that it didn’t care.

  “Oh, well then,” said Lydia, “if you won’t be sensible I’ll have to tell you, even if it’s dishonourable. Look!”

  Leslie obediently stood up straight and looked at the gloveless hand that Lydia stretched towards her.

  “That’s the ring he got engaged to Rose Birkett with,” said Lydia, “and he said he would send it to me whenever he really fell in love again. He gave it me this morning after church when he told me he was ordered abroad. It’s yours if you want it.”

  She took it off and laid it on the palm of her hand.

  Any young woman of spirit, if offered by a third person the ring which had celebrated the engagement of the beloved object to another young woman, would dash it to the ground. But so unhappy was Leslie that she picked it up and held it as if she had found a lost treasure.

  “You see,” said Lydia, determined now to make a job of it, “he thought you being rather well off and the Priory and everything, he might seem as if he wanted to marry you for money, and anyway he thought you’d turned him down on the platform, so he said he’d ask you to marry him when he comes back. All this is very private,” she added, “so that’s why I’m telling you.”

  “I must see him,” was all Leslie said.

  “I don’t see how you can,” said Lydia compassionately. “The telephone’s still down at the Dower House and he is going to London to-morrow morning. Unless of course you like to go to Winter Overcotes and take your chance. Like when I went to see Colin off.”

  “Do you think I can wear the ring?” said Leslie.

  “Of course you can,” said Lydia a little impatiently, “unless it doesn’t fit you. That’s why I gave it you.”

  Still showing no resentment at this peculiar form of proxy for an absent wooer, Leslie put the ring on her third finger, noted with a certain satisfaction that her finger was slimmer than that of Miss Birkett, and jerked Crumpet’s head up again. They soon reached home and took Crumpet round to the stable where they stacked the wood.

  In the yard they found Nannie Allen, who had walked up from the village to have tea with the kitchen and was enjoying the afternoon sun in a sheltered corner. On her hands she held a skein of wool which Selina was winding.

  “Hullo, Nannie,” said Leslie. “Is that for the troops?”

  “Of course not, Miss Leslie,” said Nannie. “It’s for poor Mr. Needham. His socks are in a shocking state and it’s a shame to give coupons for them, so I’m knitting him some. I had a nice lot of wool put away. Where’s Mr. Cecil now?”

  Leslie said she didn’t know, but Lydia noted with approval that though she spoke sadly, her face did not suddenly become as small as a kitten’s, from which she augured the best.

  Sergeant Hopkins, who had been loitering about the yard gate, now came in with Winston at his heels. Nannie received him with great condescension and inquired after his mother. Selina picked up the kitten, who arranged himself comfortably in her arms and began to purr. Lydia and Leslie spoke to the kitten and were just going in when Jasper appeared. Nannie gave a loud disapproving sniff which had no effect upon him at all.

  “Good afternoon, ladies all,” said Jasper, at the same time sketching a salute to Sergeant Hopkins. “I’ve got old granny at last.”

  They all looked at him. Lydia and Leslie thought of the gunshot, Lydia remembered her silver button. A horrid pang assailed her and she wished she had never been hypnotized by the visit to Jasper’s cottage into being so silly and school-girlish.

  “Some say you need a silver button to shoot a witch,” said Jasper, “but I hadn’t no time for old silver buttons. There was old granny cleaning her whiskers on Copshot Bank, and I got her first shot. That’ll learn her to lay quiet in her grave.”

  “Do you mean you killed the black hare?” said Selina in a trembling voice.

  “Hare or old granny, it’s all one,” said Jasper.

  “Don’t talk like that,” said Nannie sharply. “It’s not Christian. Before the young ladies, too. I never did!”

  “You didn’t kill the poor hare!” said Selina, crystal drops falling on to Winston’s fur. “Oh dear, I was never so upset.”

  “What you need’s a bit of comforting, my lass,” said Jasper.

  Leslie, representing her uncle, felt that things had gone quite far enough, but so unusual were the circumstances that she hardly knew how to begin. She had no wish to offend her uncle’s excellent keeper, but she saw that she would have to intervene. Heartily wishing she and Lydia had gone indoors before Jasper’s arrival, she opened her mouth to speak, when to her intense relief Sergeant Hopkins stepped forward.

  “If there’s any comforting to be done, I’m the man,” he said. “Mrs. Crockett and me’s engaged to be married. Aren’t we, Mrs. Allen?” he demanded, as his affianced appeared to be dissolving in grief and Winston had twice angrily shaken his head as her tears fell on it.

  “Of course she is,” said Nannie, taking up her cue with incredible dexterity. “And going to be married as soon as the Sergeant is out of the Army. So I’ll thank you to leave her alone, Jasper Margett.”

  Jasper looked slowly round the circle. Although he was entirely in the wrong, having killed his grandmother and offered wedlock, or at any rate comfort, to a respectable widow about to make a second marriage, everyone felt a distinct disinclination to meet his eye, or his mysterious smile.

  “But thank you kindly all the same, mum,” he said, advancing to Lydia, who really felt alarmed for a moment. “I’m much obliged, but I don’t need no old silver button now.”

  He gave the button to Lydia, disconcerted the whole party by another of his sidelong looks, and went off on his own business.

  “Well, of all the impudence,” said Nannie. “Put that cat down, Selina, and finish winding my wool.”

  Sergeant Hopkins with great gallantry said Winston was much too happy where he was to be disturbed, and offered to wind the wool himself. The skein was nearly wound, and as Lydia and Leslie turned to go into the kitchen passage, they saw the sergeant hand the ball to his future mother-in-law and kiss her. Glancing through the open kitchen door as they passed, Leslie saw Cook and Baker looking out of the window and felt that the sooner she and Lydia were on the other side of the green baize door the better.

  When they got to the drawing-room they were laughing so much that they could not properly tell the Warings and Noel what had happened, but as the story was unfolded even Lady Waring had to join in the laughter, and said she was extremely glad it was settled, as Selina was becoming almost a menace.

  “But I’m afraid, my dear, it means you’ll lose her,” said Sir Harry, at once thinking of his wife. “Hopkins lives at Northbridge.”

  “Then she can come and do things for Lydia in her spare time,” said Leslie.

  “But not if she is at Northbridge,” said Lady Waring, puzzled.

  Leslie, realizing now that her aunt had not heard of the Mertons’ new plans, managed to change the subject to Mr. Needham, which put Sir Harry in high good humour. Presently he went out to see Jasper and if possible get his account of the afternoon’s event. Noel and Leslie withdrew to the dining-room to do some work and Lydia was left alone with her hostess.

  She then told Lady Waring that owing to her brother Robert’s willingness to sell her old home, and the bailiff’s house being empty at present, it would be possible for her and Noel to go and live there, as she had always wanted to do. She thanked Lady Waring again and again for all her kindness and said they would hate leaving the Priory and hoped they hadn’t been a bother. Lady Waring was genuinely sorry to hear that her guests would be leaving her, but loving her own home as she did she could understand Lydia’s longing to go back to Northbridge Manor.

  “In any case,” she said, “I hope it will not be
at once, for Harry and I have grown very fond of you, my dear. And we have liked your husband so much too. I don’t want to interfere, but you must stay here just as long or as short a time as suits you. You and Major Merton have been such delightful guests and friends that we shall not want to have anyone else, even if Captain Hooper recommends them.”

  This approach to a joke made Lydia feel that there was no shadow between Lady Waring and herself, so in the gratitude of her heart she got up and kissed her. Lady Waring looked surprised, then pleased, and kissed Lydia very kindly in return.

  “So that is why Selina will be able to help you in her spare time,” said Lady Waring, smiling. And then they had a very pleasant conversation about plans and how the old housemaid could be got and how Mrs. Twitcher would come in and cook and how Lydia would be free to nurse at the Barchester General. Lydia thought Lady Waring seemed slightly dashed by the mention of the hospital, but gave the matter no further thought.

  Dinner passed without incident except that Selina dropped and broke two of the good plates and Sir Harry said he supposed she was thinking of Sergeant Hopkins, which drove her in a wild mixture of tears and giggles from the room, with a most becoming colour and wildly wreathing hair.

  Everyone was sleepy after dinner. Sir Harry wrote a few letters to old country friends to boast about the excellent Vicar he had secured, and then said he was going to bed.

  “Are you going to town to-morrow, Uncle Harry?” said Leslie.

  “Only to Winter Overcotes,” said Sir Harry. “Do you want anything? I’m going by the 8.25.”

  “Nothing you could do, thank you, Uncle Harry,” said Leslie, “but I’ll come in with you if you don’t mind.”

  “All right, young woman. Breakfast quarter to eight sharp,” said Sir Harry. “I can’t wait for you.”

  Then they all went to bed. Lydia for once did not tell her Noel all that had happened to her during the day, but he did not notice. After reading some Gibbon, she turned off her light and lay awake thinking of Leslie and Philip. It suddenly occurred to her that Leslie, whom she had always looked upon as someone really grown-up, who had committees and ordered people about and probably even knew about income tax, was only an ordinary person who could be very unhappy and need help, apparently regarding herself, Lydia Merton, as a real grown-up person who understood the world and could give advice. The idea struck her as so peculiar, though fascinating, that she was impelled to share it.