“We’ll never play again,” said Barbara happily.
But, alas, it was not so simple as that. The Abbotts were involved with their friends in a series of gaieties; they had half a dozen engagements booked, and more rolling in daily. The Abbotts were a popular couple. Mr. Abbott played a good hand of bridge, and Barbara was pronounced to be “really very sweet.” Her bridge was poor, of course, and completely lacking in character—you never knew where you were with Barbara Abbott as your partner. Sometimes she played quite reasonably for a hand or two, and then her eyes would stray round the room, and she would fall into a kind of trance and have to be told to play and would wake up and ask what was trumps. It says a good deal for Barbara’s personality and her friends’ charity that, in spite of such glaring faults, they liked her, but like her they did—everybody thought that Arthur Abbott had done well for himself when he married her. They had given him up for a confirmed bachelor years ago, and they were amazed when he took a holiday in the height of the publishing season and returned to Sunnydene with a wife. “It just showed,” they said.
They all called, of course, and some of the more curious tried to find out where the new Mrs. Abbott had come from and who she was before Arthur married her. But after a few not very searching questions, they gave it up—it didn’t really matter who she was. They liked her, and she was obviously a lady and obviously had money of her own. She dressed well, with a simplicity that they knew was expensive, and she had a small car she was learning to drive herself—what did it matter who or what she was; it was none of their business.1
Thus the Abbotts had been accepted, had become popular, and had been involved in a social round of engagements from which they were now trying to extricate themselves. How was it to be done? That was the question. What excuse had they? The truth was too fantastic to be admitted openly—they would look such fools…
Barbara produced her engagement book and they pored over it while they drank their tea, and Barbara consumed crumpets in vast quantities, and Arthur nibbled toast.
“I don’t see how we can get out of the Smiths’,” Barbara said, “or the Gorings’ either, for that matter. And Sybil Beauchamp will never speak to me again if we let her down on the 9th.”
“We must make a clean sweep,” Arthur declared.
“But how?” objected Barbara. “What excuse can we make? Tonight’s easy, of course,” she continued. “There’s your headache—but I had better go and ring her up now, so that she can make up her tables.”
She bolted the last crumpet and wiped her buttery fingers on
her handkerchief. “You can be thinking of something while I’m away,” she added hopefully.
Mrs. Copthorne was exceedingly annoyed when she heard about Mr. Abbott’s headache, for now she was left with six—an inconvenient number for bridge—and it was too late to get anyone else (except, perhaps, the curate, and even that only made seven).
Barbara soothed her and rang off feeling rather frightened. If everybody was going to be as difficult as Mrs. Copthorne they would never escape—never. It was a ghastly thought.
She went slowly into the back premises to find the Rasts (the married couple who cooked and buttled so impeccably for Arthur and herself), and here more difficulties materialized, difficulties requiring just as much tact and patience as the egregious Mrs. Copthorne. There was nobody in the kitchen but Dorcas (Barbara’s own personal maid), and Dorcas was ironing.
“Lawks, what a turn you gave me, Miss Bar—Mrs. Abbott, I mean,” Dorcas exclaimed, “creeping in so silent like that. I put out your black lace tonight (you don’t want to mess up your best at old Mrs. Copthorne’s) and I’m giving your velvet a press while Mrs. Rast is out. Her face is enough to turn the milk sour.”
“Where are they?” Barbara inquired, looking round the kitchen vaguely as if she expected Rast and Mrs. Rast to appear from behind the dresser or out of the stove. “Where are they, Dorcas?”
“Who? The Rasts? Out,” said Dorcas, dumping down her iron with a bang. “Both of them’s out—gone to the pictures. They’re on speaking terms for a wonder.”
“Oh dear, what a bother!” Barbara said.
“Good riddance, I think,” replied Dorcas. “But you better go and start dressing, or you’ll be late, madame.”
Barbara smiled. When Dorcas called her “madame” or spoke of her as “Mrs. Abbott,” she invariably said it in inverted commas, as if that were not Barbara’s name at all, but only a sort of secret which she and Barbara shared to the exclusion of everybody else. Dorcas had been with her all her life; first as her nurse, and then as her maid and general factotum in the little house at Silverstream, so it was difficult for Dorcas to realize that Barbara was now not only grown up, but actually married.
Barbara felt the same about herself. She still felt that she had to grow up. Sometimes in the middle of a party, she would suddenly be overwhelmed by the conviction that she was not really grown up—not like other people. Surely other people of her age had not got all the queer childish ideas and inhibitions that she had; were not beset by shyness at awkward moments; were not burdened by a total inability to express themselves in decent English, as Barbara was. The queer thing was that Barbara could write decent English, had, in fact, written two novels which had sold like hotcakes, and, like hotcakes, had given quite a number of innocent people a good deal of pain; but, when it came to talking, Barbara was lost.
No, she was not like other people. Other people took grown-up things as a matter of course—things like late dinner, and wine, driving cars and going to the theater; things like marriage and housekeeping and ordering commodities from the shops; whereas she was just playing at it all the time, pretending to be grown up, when, really and truly all the time, she was just Barbara—a plain, gawky child. She had the same body (bigger now, but indubitably the same, even to the rather intriguing brown mark, shaped like a little mouse, on her right thigh. Nobody ever saw it, of course—except herself, and even then, only in her bath—but it was still there—a visual testimony to the fact that she was still the same as she had always been, Barbara Buncle and no other). She still had the same, rather unsatisfactory hair (though its poverty was now somewhat mitigated by a permanent wave), and she was still frightened of “bright” people, and of thunder, and big dogs, and dentists, and still had the same courage to bear her fears without a sound. Last, but not least, she still enjoyed the same things—ice cream, and sweet cakes, and crumpets with the butter oozing out of them—and she still loved being out at night when the stars were shining, and going late to bed, and having breakfast in bed. Someday, she was convinced, somebody would find out that she was an imposter in the adult world.
“You’d better go and get dressed, madame,” said Dorcas again. “You haven’t too much time, and your hair’s all over the place. I’ll come and do you up when I’ve finished this.”
“But we’re not going,” said Barbara. “That’s what I came in to see Mrs. Rast about. Mr. Abbott’s got a headache.”
“There now!” exclaimed Dorcas, “there now—and the Rasts out! What a to-do!—not but what I can cook something for your suppers just as nice as her.”
“Of course you can, Dorcas,” agreed Barbara diplomatically.
“Yes,” said Dorcas complacently, “we managed all right at Tanglewood Cottage, didn’t we, Miss Barbara—Mrs. Abbott I mean—but Mrs. Rast will go clean dotty when she hears I’ve been poking round her larder.”
“Well, you’ll have to,” said Barbara, “I don’t see how she can be more disagreeable than she always is, and Mr. Abbott will want something to eat.”
“He’ll get it, don’t you worry,” Dorcas promised. “I’m not afraid of that old cat. I can stand up for myself, I hope.”
“I wonder what there is!” Barbara said, moving vaguely in the direction of the larder.
“Never you mind what there is, mad
ame,” Dorcas told her, “I’ll see you get something tasty. Off you go back to the poor gentleman, and leave it to me.”
She turned off the iron as she spoke, and bustled away to see what she could find, leaving Barbara to return to her suffering husband.
Thus it was that the Abbotts had a very comfortable little meal together, and spent a quiet evening by the fire. It was extraordinarily pleasant and peaceful despite the problem that vexed their minds. The problem was so absurd that they could not help laughing over it, but it was a very real problem all the same.
“I don’t see what we’re to do,” said Barbara, for perhaps the twentieth time. “You can’t have a headache every night, can you?”
Arthur agreed that he couldn’t. “It’s gone now, anyhow,” he admitted.
“How angry Mrs. Copthorne would be!” Barbara exclaimed, with a little gurgle of delight.
No solution to the problem was arrived at that night, but the following morning at breakfast Arthur hit on the one and only way out of their dilemma. It came to him quite suddenly in the middle of reading Messrs. Faction & Whiting’s advertising announcements, it came to him as a ray of light, a veritable inspiration straight from heaven—they would move.
1. Mrs. Abbott’s “past” may be discovered in Miss Buncle’s Book by the same author.
Chapter Three
A Bloodless Victory
There straightaway ensued a strenuous period for Barbara Abbott—it was she, of course, who was to find the perfect house (obviously Arthur could not be expected to range the Home Counties looking at houses—he had his work to do). Barbara flung herself into her task with all her energy—she really enjoyed it, for she was of an adventurous spirit. She visited house agents; she answered advertisements; she advertised in the papers and waded through the replies. She ranged the countryside daily in her small car—which she could now drive with a fair degree of competence—Kent and Surrey, Essex and Bucks became familiar country to Barbara. She visited big houses and small houses, old houses and new houses; houses with no water at all and houses that stood ankle deep in water. She visited houses buried in trees, dark and gloomy as the tomb, and houses set upon hilltops where the four winds blew through the flimsy masonry and the doors banged all day long, but she saw nothing that pleased her, nothing that satisfied her. The truth was Barbara had a picture of the ideal house in her mind’s eye. It had arisen, all unsought, that first morning when Arthur had said, “A nice house, further out of town, with a nice garden—trees and things.” The picture in Barbara’s mind was a concrete picture, quite incapable of alteration, and nothing she saw approximated to the picture, so nothing she saw would do.
Every night when Barbara returned to Sunnydene, worn out and bedraggled with her fruitless search, Arthur would inquire, “Well, any luck today? Seen anything?” and Barbara would reply with invariable truthfulness, “I’ve seen five houses (or nine or three, as occasion demanded) but none of them are any good.” And she would add, hopefully, “But I’m going to Farnham tomorrow (or it might be Hatfìeld). The agents have told me about a house there which sounds as if it might do.”
As week succeeded week Arthur began to despair. “Surely you’ve seen something that might suit us!” he would say; and Barbara would reply, somewhat wearily, but still firmly and hopefully, “Not yet.”
In one way their original problem was solved, for Barbara now possessed a splendid excuse for shirking the little dinners and the bridge. She was far too tired when she returned from house-hunting, far too tired out to go to parties, and Arthur was so devoted that nothing would induce him to go out and leave her alone. One or two hostesses were so misguided as to insist on the Abbotts accepting their hospitality, but they did not repeat their mistake. Barbara was genuinely tired after her long days in the open air, and her bridge was so deplorable that even her best friends were annoyed. At Mrs. Copthorne’s she actually fell asleep in a corner of the sofa before the gentlemen had finished their port, and, as her husband forbade anyone to waken her, she slumbered peacefully the whole evening, while one table was obliged to play “cutthroat,” and everyone talked in whispers. It really was not good enough, and now that those charming Fitz-Georges had taken Oak Lodge, there were plenty of people to make up two—or even three tables—without bothering about the Abbotts.
So the Abbotts were left in peace, and, gradually, they drifted out of the social whirl and were partially forgotten; and people felt (as people do, when they know that their friends are leaving the neighborhood) that it was really not much good bothering about the Abbotts anymore.
So the weeks passed and April came, and the tiny garden of Sunnydene was full of yellow daffodils, blowing gaily in the breeze; and one fine Saturday morning Mr. Abbott came down to breakfast wearing his golfing shoes and a brand new suit of plus-fours which became him mightily.
Barbara looked up from the letter she was reading and said, “Oh! You’re wearing it today! I like it awfully; it makes you look so nice and big.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Abbott, well satisfied with his wife’s praise. “Yes, I thought I would. I’m playing with John,” and he sat down to his breakfast, feeling at peace with the world.
“Where are you going today, Barbara?” he inquired, for it was now an established custom in the Abbott household that Barbara should sally forth early every day and return late. Arthur would have been surprised at any deviation from this fixed routine. He would have been even more surprised (by this time) if the truly Herculean efforts of his wife had produced a suitable house for his inspection, so inured to disappointment had he become.
“It’s a place called Wandlebury,” Barbara replied. “The agents told me about it yesterday—The Archway House, Wandlebury—I may as well look at it, I suppose.”
“By all means,” agreed Mr. Abbott with cheerful hopelessness.
“It seems awfully difficult to get just exactly what we want,” complained Barbara, a trifle wearily.
“Yes it does, doesn’t it?” he agreed again. “As a matter of fact, you know, there’s no real need for us to leave here. It’s very convenient for town, and it’s really very peaceful now that we don’t have to go out at night.”
“But it’s only because I’m house-hunting that we don’t have to,” Barbara reminded him. “It would all start again if I stopped being out all day.”
This was true, of course, so there was nothing more to be said.
Barbara glanced at the clock, and saw with dismay that it was nine-thirty. It was the hour at which she repaired to the kitchen to interview Mrs. Rast about the food. She rose reluctantly; not only did she actively dislike Mrs. Rast, but she always felt that nine-thirty was a bad hour at which to order food—the worst hour in the day for that arduous and uncongenial task. At nine-thirty Barbara was glutted with bacon and eggs and drugged with coffee, and invariably felt as if she never wanted another mouthful of food in her life. She knew, of course (academically), that by lunchtime she would feel quite differently about the matter, and would welcome a succulent meal cooked to perfection by Mrs. Rast—nay, she would even be annoyed if it were not forthcoming—but she could not really and truly believe it.
Barbara had never done any housekeeping before she was married. In the old days at Tanglewood Cottage she had left the food question entirely to Dorcas. Dorcas had ordered what was required, and had fed Barbara on boiled neck-of-mutton or stew, and milk puddings, with an occasional pie to vary the monotony, and Barbara had eaten it meekly. Food did not interest her in the least; it was a necessity, not a pleasure (indeed it was not until she was married that Barbara realized it was possible to be interested in what you ate), but Arthur, though by no means a glutton, liked his food, and liked it to be of good quality, well cooked, and of reasonable variety. Barbara found it difficult.
It was impossible to continue to leave the food question to Dorcas—for Dorcas had now become a maid—and, as
such, had nothing whatever to do with food—Mrs. Rast would not have stood it, and Arthur would never have eaten such meals as Dorcas chose. This being so, Barbara was forced to take an interest in food and, moreover, forced to take an interest in food at nine-thirty a.m., when she was full to the brim with a solid mass of breakfast, and in no condition to exercise her selective faculties.
Mrs. Rast was no help; she took a delight in being no help to Barbara. For years Mrs. Rast had run the house, ordered everything, and fed Mr. Abbott as a gentleman should be fed, but now that he had gotten married she knew her place. (Let the new wife arrange the meals—he’d soon see the difference—said Mrs. Rast darkly.) Every morning she stood and looked at Barbara with her head on one side and her arms folded across her thin chest and said, “Yes, madame,” “No, madame,” or “I really couldn’t say, madame. Just as you like, of course,” while Barbara gazed at her, and tried vainly and desperately to think of something that Arthur would like to eat, and wondered whether Mrs. Rast knew how disagreeable she looked, and whether it was any pleasure to her to look like that.
It was not only to her new mistress that Mrs. Rast was disagreeable; she was disagreeable to everyone. She quarreled with everyone; she fought with her husband week in and week out. Sometimes for days at a time this extraordinary couple was not on speaking terms with each other, and, when this happened, they communicated with each other by writing. Barbara had come across the slate which they used during hostilities, and had read the curt message written upon it in Rast’s niggling hand “She Wants Tea at Four.” Arthur was aware of all this; he had had the Rasts for years and had found them excellent servants. He laughed at their peculiarities—but Barbara couldn’t laugh. To Barbara there was something very horrible about it, and she felt that the bad feelings harbored by the Rasts lay like a cloud upon the house. (It was the only cloud that marred the clear sky of her married life.) She would look at Rast, as he handed her the vegetables, and mark his tight lips, the streaks of ill-temper engraved from nose to chin, and the deep wrinkle between his narrow-placed eyes, and she would think, with a little shudder: there’s hatred in that man, and deceit and cruelty—all sorts of slimy things—and Mrs. Rast is worse. Sometimes she felt as if the Rasts had filled the house with a miasma of wickedness, and would be impelled to rush to the windows and throw them wide open to let in the fresh air.
Miss Buncle Married Page 2
