The garden at least was to his taste; reflected his taste, indeed, since he had taken a good deal of care with it. It was under control without being in a suburban fashion tidy and trim, as if here nature could be trusted on a loose rein. Sometimes, when the Old Berks drew the nearer coverts, the pack would come yelping and lolloping across the lawns and even through the flower-beds, while the field waited, strategically poised here and there on the open land beyond. And the damage would be only so much as one could chuckle over or moderately swear about at the end of the day’s last run.
Bounding the garden to the south was a stream, and beyond the stream lay the glebe. But just short of this was a flat expanse of turf supposed to have been at one time a bowling green, but now for long resigned to the obscure activities of moles. Mr Rich had been assured that this area was sufficiently elevated above the water, and sufficiently susceptible of enlargement, to admit of the construction of a tennis court on its site. For some minutes he paced up and down in verification of this – moving briskly, since it was a February day of bright sunshine and hard frost. The sun was important; one had to consider how it would be behaving on those late afternoons in summer when play was most likely to be taking place. And then there were the moles: how were they to be eradicated, or at least humanely moved on? Formerly there had been a professional mole-catcher in the village, but when he died nobody had inherited the job. A great many things had changed during and since the war, and now close ahead was the dip into the second half of the twentieth century. Mr Rich – particularly if a little off-colour – was given to reflecting on the unimaginable touch of time – blunting the lion’s paws and burning the long-liv’d phoenix in her blood. He occasionally referred sombrely to these effects (and incomprehensibly to the rural mind) in his sermons.
But unless we believe, with some weird sects, that the Grand Combustion lies just round the corner, we have to plan ahead intelligently, despite the fact that an everlasting stream is busy bearing us all away. Mr Rich himself had the duty in particular of so planning ahead for Penelope. He was conscious that he had not always borne financial considerations sufficiently in mind when endeavouring to do this. His manner of life – apart, perhaps, from those two hunters, which were certainly unexampled among the clergy of the diocese – appeared to him in no way inappropriate to a man in his position who was not wholly without private means. The private means, however, were something of a headache. They had been diminishing steadily, and it was even possible to feel that they might one day evaporate altogether amid the disorders of the times. What if his daughter failed to marry – or, what would almost be worse, married some totally penniless person? It was true that a small income was secured to her under a family trust, but it was no more than might decently stand in for a dowry. It would certainly not support her in single life. If that were to be her fate, she would actually have to earn the better part of her living. In an office, it was to be supposed, and as a typewriter. That a Rich might have to become a typewriter was a dire possibility indeed.
Perhaps because from this corner of the vicarage grounds the roof of Mallows Hall was clearly visible, the vicar found his mind turning again to Fulke and Caspar Ferneydale. He was far from clear as to whether or not he regretted their being respectively ten and nine years older than his daughter. Penelope hadn’t yet gone to school; these boys were already liberated from it and in their first year at Oxford. That they had gone up to the university in the same term didn’t necessarily mean that Caspar was brighter or more precocious than his elder brother. One boy might hang on at a public school even beyond his nineteenth birthday in order to enjoy coveted power and status as a prefect or the like, while another might want to be quit of the place as quickly as he could. This had perhaps been how it stood with the Ferneydales; it chimed in with the vicar’s sense – based on only casual association – of the difference between them. Penelope was clearly in the condition of vastly admiring them both indifferently. But the situation was such that she would never be put to the trouble of significantly preferring one to the other.
In a general way one would like one’s child to be of an age with what might be thought of as potentially eligible neighbours. But on the whole Mr Rich was well content that Fulke and Caspar would in all probability be married men before Penelope came out. No doubt acceptable and remunerative careers lay ahead of them, and he had no positive reason to suppose that their characters were other than unexceptionable. Nevertheless his approval of them was accompanied by reservations. They weren’t exactly – or not so far as he knew – rebels against the accepted order of things as that order was conceived of by people like himself. But at the same time, if in an indefinable way, they didn’t quite fit in.
At this point in his ruminations the vicar left his own property through a small gate giving directly on the park of Mallows Hall. James Ferneydale was very insistent that this territory should be regarded by his neighbours, whether gentle or simple, as available to them to walk abroad in and recreate themselves. He made it known that he would wish even his gardens to be similarly accessible. Nobody treated this second wish as other than a somewhat excessive expression of courtesy, indicative of at least a residual sense of social insecurity. But the park was a different matter, and Mr Rich took a short turn in it on most fine days, since this was agreeable in itself and moreover furthered good informal relations with its owner.
His favourite route was round an artificial expanse of water, just large enough to be known as the lake, which lay in a hollow near the centre of the park. It was stocked with water-fowl of an ornamental sort, and in the summer holidays the Ferneydale boys had been accustomed to make it their bathing place. Circling it now, the vicar recalled how, four or five years before, he had come upon them thus engaged – with a very small Penelope sitting on the bank, clasping a doll and seriously regarding them. Diving, swimming, spread-eagled on the grass, the brothers afforded a pleasant spectacle, and Mr Rich had felt no strong prompting to consider it as marred by the fact that they were entirely naked. The young Ferneydales were in a secluded part of their own property, and moreover, as he happened to know, merely maintaining a convention that obtained in the open air swimming pool at their public school. Had Penelope possessed brothers, he would have been far from insisting that their state of nature should invariably be concealed from her – although he might, somewhat illogically, have entertained doubts about the propriety of nudity exhibited the other way on.
He had felt a certain uneasiness upon that occasion, nevertheless. Fulke and Caspar were already far from being small boys. They were tall youths, with the signs of their adolescence apparent upon them. And anybody – some neighbour’s maidservant, say, straying aside a little when on an errand to the Hall – might come upon this spectacle unawares. What would the young Ferneydales do then? Would they dive headlong and remain submerged to the chin until the indecorous moment passed, or would they continue capering and showing off? Even as it was, ought they not perhaps to have responded a little more sensitively to the appearance on the bank of a gazing small girl? Mr Rich had known perfectly well that these questions were silly, and he even accused himself of bearing in the matter something very like a prurient mind. But they did betray the fact that in some obscure fashion he slightly distrusted Fulke and Caspar Ferneydale. Later he was to ask himself more than once whether Penelope’s continued lively interest in the young males at the Hall had its origin in an incident which, probably enough, was no longer within her conscious memory.
Having rounded the deserted lake on the present occasion, Mr Rich returned home without lingering. The air was chilly still, and moreover it was the day of the week upon which he commonly took a cup of mid-morning coffee with Mrs Martin, and perhaps received from her some account of Penelope’s progress. Mrs Martin would not have gone down at all well as any sort of dependant at Mansfield Park; quite as much as Henry Rich she had been brought up on horseback; and although now the impoverished widow of an unsuccessful barriste
r she had no notion that a governess’s place in society is of a lowly and inconsiderable sort. Mr Rich (who shared a good many ideas with Sir Thomas Bertram) had been a little put off by her at first, but had taken to her as soon as he discovered that she got on with her pupil particularly well. Lately he had felt bound to acknowledge that it was sometimes from Mrs Martin that he learnt things about Penelope which, had he been a more talented parent, he would have found out for himself. He was even coming to regret the fact that with the child booked to go off to boarding-school so soon the connection with Mrs Martin must be terminated. Might it not be better that his daughter should continue to be educated at home in the old-fashioned way? Mrs Martin appeared to have a good command of French and German, and he himself could manage Latin and – if such erudition seemed desirable – a little New Testament Greek. There was something pleasant and edifying in the thought of taking Penelope through one of the Gospels in that way.
So over the coffee-cups in the schoolroom, and with the child despatched to attend to her pony, Mr Rich made a cautious approach to these possibilities. Mrs Martin had never evinced any design to set her cap at him, but he had become habitually on his guard against embarrassing misapprehension where eligible ladies were concerned. It would be very dreadful if he appeared merely to be seeking a pretext for securing the governess’s continued presence at the vicarage. As it was, Mrs Martin listened to him patiently, and then gave short shrift to his observations.
‘There is little to be said, Mr Rich, for preparing a child to live in the manner of its grandparents. Penelope will have to make her way in totally different circumstances.’
‘Surely it is young men, Mrs Martin, who have to “make their way” in that sense? When a girl marries—’
‘Not all girls marry.’
‘That, of course, is true.’ Mr Rich had to admit to himself that the possibility of this misfortune befalling his daughter had lately been in his own head.
‘Many girls brought up in households like your own are obliged to earn their living, and some are determined to do so, whether they have to or not. Your daughter may turn out to be in one or other of these categories – which may indeed be called the coming thing. And she would be handicapped if she had been denied the companionship, and the stimulus and spirit of emulation and competition, fostered in a good school. Again, she may well want to go to one of the universities.’
‘Good heavens!’ The vicar was at once intrigued and alarmed by this conjecture. ‘You don’t mean she’s going to be an intellectual?’
‘At least she is going to have a clear head. As for Oxford or Cambridge, a girl almost as much as a boy is at a disadvantage if simply privately coached or crammed for entrance to a college.’ Having thus spoken with severity, Mrs Martin felt it judicious to let Mr Rich a little off the hook. ‘I consider that your existing proposals for Penelope are thoroughly sound.’
‘I am glad to hear that. I value your opinion highly, as you must be aware.’ The vicar actually contrived a small formal bow over his cup and saucer as he said this – rather with the effect of an eighteenth-century gentleman ‘taking wine’ with a meritorious fellow-diner. ‘But I have a further point in mind. Even at good schools now I gather that one is likely to find a very mixed crowd. For a boy it may be neither here nor there. Indeed, the minor public schools, Rugby and Radley and Repton and Rossall and such places – what one may call the littera canina crowd – were developed largely as melting-pots.’ Mr Rich paused for a moment, perhaps to allow Mrs Martin to catch up with his small learned joke about the doggy letter. ‘They gave the right cast of mind, you know, to the sons of newly prosperous persons. But it is rather different, surely, in the case of a girl. If she makes school-friends outside her own sort of people, undesirable consequences may obviously follow. Their brothers may turn up. That sort of thing.’
‘Certainly brothers have everywhere the habit of turning up.’ Mrs Martin briefly paused on this, glancing at Mr Rich much in the manner of a naturalist considering whether some small fossilised creature merits preservation under glass. ‘You wouldn’t care for the idea of Penelope marrying outside what you call her own sort of people?’
‘Decidedly not. And surely you agree with me?’
‘I have some reason for not doing so, Mr Rich. My father, as you may possibly have heard, was a respectable figure in the county: its Lord Lieutenant, in fact. My husband’s father was an engine-driver. Neither Jack nor I found the fact of a discrepant parenthood either here or there.’
‘How very interesting!’ The vicar uttered this exclamation only in the most feeble fashion. He was appalled at the enormity of his faux pas. It was the more unforgivable in that he could now dimly recall having heard some account of Mrs Martin’s distressing history. Charitably, he reflected that with such a mésalliance behind her she had done remarkably well.
‘I don’t know that I’d call it particularly interesting,’ Mrs Martin said. ‘But it has appealed to Penelope.’
‘To Penelope!’ The vicar was startled. Indeed, he gave an actual small jump, as he might have done at the appearance of a mouse in his pulpit. ‘You have told Penelope the—um—story of your marriage?’
‘Dear me, yes. We have had several conversations about marriage, and husbands and wives, and how babies arrive, and that sort of thing.’
Mr Rich almost said ‘How very interesting!’ again. It was disconcerting thus to discover that Mrs Martin took so broad a view of her pedagogic function, and that had he himself got round to the facts of life with his daughter in the manner he had recently been envisaging, it would have been to find that this somewhat commanding lady had been there before him. He might even have embarked on the subject, been tempted to soften one or two of its odder aspects, and suffered correction by a Penelope who knew just what went where. The thought of this grossness rendering him in fact speechless, he simply waited for what more Mrs Martin had to say.
‘Penelope happens to have a romantic view of engine-drivers, and when I told her about Jack’s father I went up in her estimation at once. I was reminded of a cousin of mine who took jobs as a private tutor in Vienna between the wars. Several of his pupils were utterly insufferable until he happened to tell them that he knew Edgar Wallace. It was a slight exaggeration, since he’d merely watched the great writer drink a bottle of whisky while holding forth to some undergraduate society. But he declared himself to have been personlich bekannt to this greatest of living Englishmen, and he was regarded with positive awe from then on.’
‘I hope Penelope was not insufferable until enlightened about your father-in-law, dear lady.’ The vicar found himself saying this with so much recovered good humour and courtly aplomb that he realised anew that he and Mrs Martin got on very well together. Her employment was humble, but she was out of the right stable and you knew where you were with her.
‘Penelope was delightful from the start: impetuous at times, but quick to acknowledge a mistake once she became aware of it as that. And I can at least assure you that she doesn’t intend to marry into engine-driving circles. She has quite other ideas.’
‘God bless my soul! The child loses no time in looking ahead. To an MFH, perhaps? Or a tennis champion or a polar explorer?’
‘Penelope intends to marry a poet.’
‘A poet!’
‘Or a deep philosopher. I think she has quite a lively idea of what a poet is. And there is a deep philosopher in one of her comic picture- books. He sits in a room full of enormous tomes, and is alone except for a cat. I don’t feel we need be disturbed over the deep philosopher. But the poet, of course, is another matter. I think he will probably be rather like Shelley.’
Mr Rich saw that he was being made gentle fun of. It seemed to him that – in a harmless way – it was unfairly. He would have acknowledged that he was a man of somewhat conventional mind, and that he had just exhibited a commonplace view of what might be in a young girl’s head. But it wasn’t true that he would prefer a polar explorer to a poet,
or even a tennis champion to a deep philosopher, in the character of a son-in-law. He read a little poetry every day, and also believed that if he ever committed anything to the press it would be an unassuming treatise of a philosophical nature – for wasn’t he, after all, much interested in that most intractable of metaphysical conundrums, the Problem of Time?
‘What you are really telling me,’ he said, ‘is something that a parent is no doubt prone to forget, and so I am grateful. A daughter, like a son, has a mind of her own, and a right to such a mind. To oppose any rationally defensible inclination to which it may come is a step to be taken only after the most anxious thought. I invariably make the point when, as sometimes happens, I am consulted in such a situation by parishioners. And I hope I’d stick to it myself. Were Penelope indeed resolved at some future time to go up to one of the ladies’ colleges at Oxford I don’t doubt that I should eventually concur in the plan – although I might endeavour to recommend Cambridge, where the women have pitched their camps not quite so close to the men. But marriage is a little different.’
‘It is a different branch of education, I suppose.’
‘Quite so.’ Mr Rich had been uncertain whether this remark was intended as a witticism. There had been an educational aspect to his own marriage, but he had thought of it as consisting in schooling his wife in the consequence of the Riches and the sound conservative views proper to be held in the household of a beneficed clergyman of the Church of England. ‘I must confess again,’ he now said, ‘that I should be unhappy were Penelope to marry other than into our settled and traditional country society.’
‘But there is little left either settled or traditional about it, Mr Rich – at least if by “country” you mean “county”, as you almost certainly do.’ Mrs Martin, a sensible woman but not without her hobbyhorses, seemed suddenly to have decided there were things the Vicar of Mallows ought to hear. ‘My father talked about the “county” without the slightest self-consciousness. But now it’s a word like “gentleman” – which is what you are when you enter a public lavatory. There’s a Cambridge don – male, you’ll be glad to know – at Trinity, who has coined the phrase “the gentry of aspiration”. They go back quite a long way, of course. Both Nimrod and Surtees knew them on your hunting-field. But now there are far more of them than there are of your relations, or mine. They are probably the people who are tough enough to take England through what is coming to us. But I suppose we have our prejudices, all the same. Some of them say “the county” so that you curl your toes.’
A Villa in France Page 2
