A Villa in France

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘What about Somerville or LMH for you yourself, Penelope? What would your father say?’

  ‘He wouldn’t clamp down on it. But he’d like to think that the only floor-squatters permitted were the young nobility from Christ Church, or, at a pinch, scions of the authentic landed gentry from his own New College.’

  ‘Whereas they’d probably be boys like your Tommy, who’ve been smart enough to snap out of motor-bikes and into mortar-boards. I think I could like a young man of that sort. He’d have shown there was some stuffing to him.’ Dora produced this sentiment with conviction. ‘Don’t you agree?’

  ‘Well, yes – in theory. But I’d always be inclined to feel he was short of that bath.’

  Such a candid confession of prejudice on the part of Mr Rich’s daughter interested as well as amused Miss Quillinan, who recalled her friend as having made a speech of a strongly egalitarian persuasion at the school debating society. That had perhaps reflected the robust mind of Penelope’s former governess, of whose alliance with an engine-driver’s family she had been afforded the history. This immediate remark must be more a matter of paternal inheritance. Dora didn’t doubt that the hymn beginning All things bright and beautiful was regularly required to be sung with proper conviction in Mallows parish church. It was the one with the bit about the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate.

  ‘Then as you’re not serious in saying that your heart is touched by Tommy-over-the-hedge, just what sort of person is it really going to be that captures the citadel?’

  ‘What an odd conversation we’re having, Miss Quillinan! When I was small I used to say he was going to be a poet – or, failing that, a deep thinker about the ultimate mystery of things.’

  ‘Like this Caspar Ferneydale you were talking about?’

  ‘I wasn’t talking about him, but just mentioning him briefly. I’m sure that as a candidate he has never entered my head. But all that was childish nonsense. It’s difficult even to begin to think about the kind of man one could square up to marrying.’ Penelope sounded quite serious now. ‘One knows so little about how they come, anyway.’

  ‘One knows about immediate physical attraction. That’s said to be extremely important.’

  ‘Yes, of course. But I don’t believe it would stand up by itself for long.’

  ‘More lasting are the qualities of the mind.’

  ‘You can put it that way. I’d want a man who was spontaneous and uncomplicated.’ Penelope paused on these brief specifications, which had apparently bobbed up unexpectedly. ‘And innocent,’ she suddenly added.

  ‘Virginal, you mean? A young hero as yet unknown to woman?’

  ‘Not that at all. And what I do mean I don’t clearly know. Let me begin showing you my father’s most prized blooms. There’s one clematis in particular.’

  ‘That will be a delight. But we mustn’t rush things. Let’s just walk.’

  ‘Very well. We’ll give these flowers to Tommy to take back to the house, and then we’ll go round the park.’

  ‘Of Ferneydale Court, or whatever it’s called? That’s in order?’

  ‘Very much so. Mr Ferneydale is a great hand at being a good squire. He even keeps a whole cricket field in trim for the lads of the village. When they were younger his sons were required to organise matches agreeably mingling the classes of society.’

  ‘But they then rebelled?’

  ‘I think Caspar did. Fulke was rather fond of the hayseed youth. Daddy felt he had to disapprove of his introducing some of them to pub life as soon as they looked old enough for the publican and the local bobby not to feel uneasy. There’s some sort of law about the age at which boys can begin propping up the bar in the interval of playing darts.’

  Tommy Elbrow accepted his instructions with alacrity, although whether because his own heart was not untouched by Penelope it would have been hard to say. He may simply have felt that he had a career in the making, and that prompt obedience to commands must lead to advancement and a nearer prospect of the motorbike. The girls meanwhile crossed a stile and were on Ferneydale ground, with immediately before them a paddock given over in considerable number to aged and unshorn rams. These superannuated creatures tottered aimlessly around, seemingly alike overburdened by their dingy woolliness and the trailing enormousness of what it would have been absurd to call their private parts.

  ‘I’ve seen rams in small flocks like this before,’ Dora said. ‘It seems odd. One knows that a single bull goes a long way.’

  ‘If it isn’t too indelicate, you can ask Mr Ferneydale about it when you meet him. He has a great opinion of himself as a practical farmer, Daddy says, and likes to show that he knows all the answers. There’s the Hall, over on the left. You can see it more clearly lately, because they’ve had to cut down several trees. One chunk dates from the fifteenth century, and it has been put together in bits and pieces thereafter in the approved way. But I have a book on English country houses that calls the result “in this instance distinctly inharmonious”. Mr Ferneydale wouldn’t like that at all. We’ll go round on the right. I don’t care for the notion of being raked from its windows.’

  ‘By Messrs Fulke and Caspar?’

  ‘Oh, them! As I think I’ve told you, they’re hardly ever around nowadays. But Mrs Ferneydale would come out and do beckoning wavings.’

  This change of direction took them not round but across the park, with the result that in a few minutes they were dropping downhill towards the little lake.

  ‘I say – that’s nice! It looks as if you could swim in it.’ Dora had paused to admire this unexpected amenity.

  ‘Oh, yes. People do.’

  ‘So that must be a bathing hut.’ Dora was moving forward again at a quickened pace.

  ‘Yes. It’s something fairly recent.’

  ‘And the water must be quite deep, because there’s a diving board. Do they let you swim in it?’

  ‘The Ferneydales? I suppose they would. But I never have.’

  ‘Oh, look!’ They were now close to the water’s edge, and with these conveniences directly in front of them. But Dora’s exclamation had been occasioned by something more. They no longer had the scene to themselves. The door of the hut had opened and a young man had appeared in it, plainly prepared for a swim.

  ‘That’s Fulke,’ Penelope said. ‘And here we are, caught gaping. Bother!’

  Miss Quillinan saw no reason to be bothered, and said words to that effect. But Penelope wasn’t listening. She had recalled something with so sharp an awareness that she had to tell herself it was not now precisely as it had been long ago. Caspar Ferneydale was not present. And Fulke was not entirely naked, since he was wearing a bright red and very tight-fitting bathing slip. Penelope, who owned a certain frankness of imagination, found herself – most ludicrously – thinking of those rams. Only Fulke Ferneydale wasn’t decrepit. On the contrary he looked – at this middle-distance, at least – even younger than his years, which Penelope knew quite accurately to be twenty-seven. And now he had run down the little spring-board, taken a practised jump, and disappeared into the pool with scarcely a splash. It was only when he bobbed up again, the water streaming from his hair, that he became aware of his performance as having been observed.

  ‘Penelope,’ he shouted, ‘benvenuto! And just wait.’

  This had been cordial, but was a command – perhaps because Penelope Rich was, after all, still a kid. Fulke followed it by striking out across the pool, and within seconds he was scrambling out on the bank beside her. The spot was muddy, and trickles of muddy water ran down his thighs as he shook himself. There was a strand of duckweed in his hair. River gods, she thought, had probably looked like this: authentic divinities after a fashion, but with a touch of earthiness to them.

  ‘Hullo, Fulke,’ she said – taking the initiative, and now in a brisk tone of the most unbothered sort. ‘Dora, this is Mr Fulke Ferneydale. My friend Dora Quillinan, Fulke. Dora is staying with us at the vicarage.’

  ‘How d
o you do?’ It might have been said that Fulke spoke with a slight sense of fun at all this correctness. ‘I’ll have to save up the handshake, I’m afraid, until I can grab a towel. This pond is very much in a state of nature. And it can remain surprisingly chilly at least for most of the year. Very far from being a piscine acclimatisée, which is why we don’t use it for sociable splashings.’ Fulke glanced swiftly but easily at the girls in turn – starting with Dora. ‘But why don’t you both come and swim one day? It would be very nice if you did, and I don’t expect that either of you would mind a tadpole or two in your hair. You mayn’t have brought bathers with you, Miss Quillinan. But I’m sure Penelope has a whole stack of them in a drawer.’

  This oncomingness on the part of the successful playwright was momentarily felt as awkward by the girls. But ‘Miss Quillinan’ seemed to speak of an intention to treat them both as entirely grown-up. And if Fulke’s glance, having returned to Dora, was a little lingering on her, there was no sense of a take-it-for-granted boldness about his proposal, which had come with a pleasing undertone of tentativeness and lightness of air.

  ‘I think we might like to,’ Penelope said – briskly again, even if with a cautious reliance upon the conjectural mode. ‘Tadpoles are all right, but I’d jib at finding I was swallowing a frog. Is Caspar at home with you?’

  ‘Caspar has gone to Paris, to listen to some moribund sage delivering an éloge on one who’s definitely dead.’ It was now on Penelope that Fulke’s gaze lingered. ‘It must have been a long time since I’ve seen you,’ he said.

  ‘Not really all that long. Going by the calendar, that is. But my father keeps on telling me that time is a very rum affair.’ It was now Penelope who was taking a good look at Fulke. She decided she was noticing things she hadn’t noticed before, although they must have been progressively there for the remarking over a considerable period. At this closer view Fulke Ferneydale no longer looked younger than his years. In fact, he looked a good deal older than twenty-seven. There were lines – almost wrinkles – round his eyes, and surely something had happened, too, to his mouth. She hadn’t seen or read his plays, but understood them to be light-hearted affairs, only just tinged by a modish and undisturbing cynicism. She hadn’t heard much about him either. Except, of course, those dark hints concerning the roué business. And they, taking account of the sort of informants she had, might mean no more than that he had been sowing a few wild oats in his spare time. No doubt she ought to feel disapproval on that account. Only she didn’t. She recalled Dora’s piece of rubbish about a young hero as yet unknown to woman, and had to wonder whether what she did feel was a faint jealousy. She reminded herself that she was an unformed and uninformed schoolgirl, with no business to traffic in such notions. But when she had told Dora that she found Fulke Ferneydale attractive she had, she realised, stated an undoubted fact.

  ‘One could put up with time being rum,’ Fulke said, ‘if it wasn’t also invincible. Art is supposed to defy time. Absolute nonsense. The marble crumbles, the pigments flake, the languages die and their words shrivel. “But thy eternal beauty shall not fade.” Don’t believe it. We can’t even be sure whether Shakespeare is celebrating a girl or a boy. Caspar, incidentally, once had a conversation with your father about time. How is your father, Penelope?’

  The vicar’s daughter made a suitable reply, and added that her father would soon be awaiting his lunch, so that she and Dora had better return home. If Fulke took this as a hint he handled it in his own way – his interest in these all but adult schoolgirls being apparently far from exhausted.

  ‘I’ll walk with you as far as the stile,’ he said casually. ‘And dry out in the sun.’

  So this now happened – Fulke placing himself, as if for convenience of talk, between his companions as they set out. Dora took this in her stride, which the young man didn’t permit to be of more than a leisured sort. Penelope thought they must appear an odd trio to anybody glimpsing them from afar: two girls in their trim countrified clothes flanking this nearly naked (and agreeably bronzed) male. Fulke, she supposed, must now be an affluent and roving person, who had recently arrived home from some lavishly sun-bathing spot like Biarritz or Antibes.

  ‘Tell me about your school,’ Fulke said. ‘I don’t believe I even know its name.’

  Dora had to supply this want. Penelope had remained silent in some displeasure. Had Fulke said, ‘I’ve actually forgotten its name,’ the effect might have been a little cavalier, but otherwise unremarkable. He had made it sound, however, as if he never had known the name of her school, and this was impossible. So it somehow felt as if he had found himself short of a further topic of conversation with these schoolgirls, and had reached out for one in rather a random way. But now he became animated again at once.

  ‘What an extraordinary thing!’ he said. ‘I actually have an aunt who is one of your governors. I think she’s called a governor and not a governess – which would be more exact, in a way. She must be an old girl, I suppose. Her name is Dewar: Lady Dewar. Her husband is a great big grocer. Do you know her?’

  ‘We don’t know much about all that.’ This time it was Penelope who replied. ‘We’re an old-fashioned school, and don’t go in for pupil-representation, and that sort of thing.’ Penelope felt this to be faintly snubby as she said it, but was merely feeling that Lady Dewar the grocer’s wife didn’t sound a very promising pivot for further talk. ‘Do you think all boarding-schools should go co-educational?’ she asked.

  ‘I rather think I do.’ Fulke Ferneydale gave this answer with care, as if it were a question to which he had devoted thought without arriving at a definite conclusion. ‘And Oxford and Cambridge colleges, too – although that seems a very remote possibility indeed.’

  ‘Some people,’ Dora said, ‘judge that it would promote premature romance.’

  ‘Romance can’t be premature, Miss Quillinan. Laugh at them when they tell you that. What can be premature is signing on for a lifetime’s domesticity. So I’d make one proviso about being a co-ed. Don’t marry the boy, or girl, at the next desk. It’s even more risky than marrying your opposite number next door.’ Fulke paused on this, and Penelope – entirely to her pleasure – saw him flush unexpectedly. Fulke was aware, in fact, that he had stumbled upon a boorish remark. His discomfiture made her feel that he must own a decent sensibility in addition to his superabundant cleverness. And what he had said hadn’t really been so tactless, after all. Had he been eighteen, or thereabout, it would have been downright oafish. That he and she belonged to different generations (which was how she judged of their situation) rendered it no more than a kind of jocular and avuncular remark.

  ‘You see,’ Fulke went on, recovering himself, ‘the basis of true love is that a man’s mistress – I mean in the old-fashioned sense of the word – should be for quite some time up on a balcony or on the other side of a high wall.’

  ‘Juliet,’ Dora said, ‘didn’t stay that way for long.’

  ‘No – and her story wasn’t a happy one. She ought to have watched her step.’

  ‘You mustn’t be flippant to Dora about Juliet,’ Penelope said. ‘Dora was Juliet in our last year’s school play.’

  ‘And I wanted Penelope as my Romeo,’ Dora struck in. ‘But it was decided otherwise through some disgusting act of favouritism.’

  ‘Is your annual play an all-girl affair, then?’ Fulke asked. ‘Surely I’m right in thinking there’s a most reputable boys’ school almost over your own high wall. Why don’t you join up? You could do tremendous plays together. I’d turn up in the audience like a shot.’

  ‘We’re old-fashioned, as Penelope says. And our headmistress points out that Shakespeare’s plays were originally one-sex affairs. Nothing but men and boys. So why not nothing but girls?’

  ‘I think it a very poor argument.’ Fulke said this with decision. ‘What about this year’s play?’

  ‘Oh, things are looking up – although not in that direction. We’re going to do As You Like It – only Shake
speare is regarded as really safe – and Penelope is going to be Rosalind. She’ll be tiptop.’

  ‘Certainly she will. And book me in for the third row of the stalls – if you run to stalls, that is.’

  This time, it was Penelope who flushed. Fulke’s response had ended with a vague joke, but this didn’t detract from the air of spontaneous conviction with which it had begun. Penelope misdoubted her capacities as a Rosalind, who plainly hadn’t been a clergyman’s daughter. She would make, she believed, a better Isabella, or even Helena. But neither Measure for Measure nor All’s Well that Ends Well – although undoubtedly by Shakespeare – would have been regarded as at all a suitable play. In this estimate of her own endowments Penelope may, of course, have been entirely mistaken. And however this may have been, she was already in a state of some alarm over what lay before her. She didn’t doubt her capacity, although she may have doubted her inclination, to be a Head Girl. But the apex of Shakespearean comedy was another matter. So she became a shade withdrawn during the rest of the walk through the park. When they arrived at its boundary Fulke remarked that he hoped they might fix up something soon, and that meanwhile he would say good-bye. He refrained from the archaic courtesy of assisting the ladies over the stile. The girls failed to refrain, a minute or so later, from a backward glance. Fulke at a middle distance seemed more naked still. The little bathing-slip scarcely showed on his slim hips and compact bottom.

  ‘What did you think of him?’ Penelope asked as she and Dora neared the vicarage. ‘Is he nice?’

  ‘I don’t at all know. He was fun about the plays. But that earlier bit about time and art and beauty was a bit odd. It wasn’t exactly a showing-off, but more a buttering-up. Taking us for granted as thoughtful adults: something like that. But I can believe in him as a writer.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, I almost had a feeling he was automatically at work on us. Wondering about our possibilities – but not in the crude way you’re sometimes aware of men doing that, imagining you with your clothes off, and so on. Perhaps seeing us as contrasting types that he might drop into a play or something.’