‘With the nursery nail scissors, madam, as quiet as you please,’ she said.
‘Oh, Diana, how could you be so naughty,’ said her mother, trying not to sound loving and making no success of it at all.
‘Like Uncle David,’ said Diana and shut her eyes tightly to show she had gone to sleep.
3
On Tuesday, as arranged, Miss Bunting stepped across the lawn to the lime walk. Nurse coming up at almost the same moment with her flock handed them over to Miss Bunting and retired, giving the little girls many injunctions to be good and not worry Miss Bunting and be sure to be back soon after four to get their hands washed for tea. Miss Bunting, who quite understood that the second part of nurse’s speech was in oratio obliqua for her own benefit, said she had her watch with her and they would be back by a quarter past at the very latest. They then had a delightful walk, chosen by Diana and Clare, to the manure heap, the back of the potting shed, the rubbish heap, the gardener’s pig, the barn cat which had six kittens as wild as itself and lay spitting and sparking in a nest of hay, the horrid yet exciting place in the kitchen garden where a rook dangled on a string to keep the birds away, the big rainwater tub with scum on the top of it and the little steps that led down to the furnace for the glass houses which could not now be heated. And all the time Diana asked questions or demanded stories of naughty children, and Miss Bunting gave the right answers and recounted the hair-raising deeds of her naughtiest pupils, and at four-fifteen precisely they mounted the steep stair to the nursery. Here Nurse, as temporary châtelaine, received the party graciously, made light of a stain on Diana’s frock and Clare’s very dirty hands, and took them off to wash. Miss Bunting, after washing her hands in Lettice’s bathroom, sat down by the nursery window and thought gratefully of the Marling family who had saved her from being a distressed gentlewoman. In the case of Mrs Marling her very real gratitude was necessarily mixed with the faint contempt that every good governess must feel for the provider of governess-fodder, unable themselves to educate their young, yet daring to meddle with the educator. For Mrs Marling’s children her feelings were varied. Bill being married and rarely at home was almost a stranger to her, Lucy was too settled in her rather overbearing ways of a spoilt younger child to meet with her approval, but in Oliver and Lettice she saw exactly what she would wish any pupil of hers to be and felt for them an equal devotion. Lettice, it is true, scored heavily by having two little girls, well brought up and amenable to her influence, but Oliver was a man and she had always liked boys best, partly because they had an affection for her that she never quite inspired in their sisters. Also Oliver had trouble with his eyes and reminded Miss Bunting of Lord Hugh Skeynes who had to stay away from Eton for a term and use his eyes as little as possible while she read book after book to him in the schoolroom. It seemed a good omen to her that he had grown up with almost normal eyesight and she cherished a deep faith that Oliver would emerge in a few years with an eagle’s vision.
Now Nurse came back with her charges all neat and clean and delivered them to Miss Bunting while she boiled the kettle for tea. The tea being made, Diana scrambled by herself on to a chair with a very fat cushion on it and Clare was lifted into the tall chair, though it was very obvious that it would not contain her buxom form much longer. Nurse tied on their feeders, begged Miss Bunting to sit down, and took her own place opposite.
‘Will this be too strong, miss,’ said Nurse as she poured the tea out of a comfortable brown teapot, ‘or shall I add just a little hot water?’
‘That will do very nicely, thank you, Nurse,’ said Miss Bunting. ‘A little milk, please. No sugar, thank you. I gave up sugar in the last war, though I used to take two lumps.’
‘It is quite remarkable the way we all get used to things,’ said Nurse. ‘Hand the bread and butter to Miss Bunting, Diana, and mind you hold it straight. That’s right. Now take a piece for yourself and fold it nicely in half. I used to be quite a one for sugar myself, but now I never miss it. I always say every lump you don’t take is one up against someone we won’t mention.’
While she was speaking Nurse doubled a piece of bread and butter, cut it into fingers and put it on Clare’s plate, and then helped herself.
‘It is the same with butter,’ said Miss Bunting. ‘I used to help myself quite recklessly, but now we have to be careful I find my ration is quite enough for the week.’
‘I’m sure I find exactly the same,’ said Nurse. ‘And when we think of our brave fighting men, really an ounce or so of butter seems quite a paltry affair. Don’t drink your milk too fast, Diana.’
‘I hope you have good news of your brother, Nurse,’ said Miss Bunting.
‘Sid’s got free stripes,’ said Diana.
‘She hears everything,’ said Nurse, looking proudly at Miss Bunting, who thought this was highly probable. ‘Yes, Sid has three stripes, hasn’t he? I must show you his photo after tea, miss. Diana, pass the cake to Miss Bunting. We get very nice cakes from Pulford in the village, much nicer than the cakes from Barchester.’
Diana took a small cake, rammed it into her mouth and handed the plate to Miss Bunting.
‘Diana, take that cake out of your mouth at once,’ said Nurse. ‘What will Miss Bunting say if you choke?’
Diana removed a rather unpleasant mass of cake from her mouth and smiled angelically.
‘Some little people,’ said Nurse, ‘are always overexcited when they see company.’
‘When I was with Lord Lundy,’ said Miss Bunting, ‘it was just the same. As soon as anyone came to tea in the schoolroom you would have thought the children were little savages.’
‘And that’s what they’d all be if Some People had their way,’ said Nurse. ‘I always say, miss, if someone we won’t name had been properly brought up we shouldn’t be having all this trouble. Clare, don’t blow into your milk, you know it’s not the way to drink.’
‘Quite right, Nurse,’ said Miss Bunting approvingly. ‘There’s nothing like the English nursery for making ladies and gentlemen of them.’
Nurse, taking this tribute as her right, said she always understood foreigners had no home life to speak of which really made one feel their goings on weren’t to be surprised at, but she was sure Miss Bunting was ready for another cup of tea. As she was pouring it out there was a knock on the door and in walked David Leslie.
‘Uncle David,’ said Diana with her mouth full.
Clare, who had her mug to her mouth, said what sounded like ‘Plum Duff’ and choked.
‘Now that’s enough,’ said Nurse, taking Clare’s mug away and wiping her milky moustache off with her feeder. ‘I don’t know what the gentleman will think.’
‘Bunny, my adored one!’ said David. ‘Good afternoon, Nurse. I suppose you haven’t got Mrs Watson anywhere about? They told me at the Hall she was down here.’
‘I’m afraid you’ve just missed her, sir,’ said nurse, who had not the faintest idea who David was, but recognising him with a nurse’s infallible instinct as a proper gentleman, knew it was all right. ‘She has gone up to tea at the Hall. She went by the walled garden and the flagged walk, I think.’
‘And I came down the drive in my car because I cannot walk, only fly,’ said David. ‘Bunny, pray present me.’
‘This is Mr David Leslie, Nurse,’ said Miss Bunting. ‘He is a distant connection of the family’s.’
‘Well, to be sure,’ said Nurse. ‘You’ll excuse my saying so, sir, but I was temporary nurse with Mrs Graham one summer, before I came to Mrs Watson, and we used to hear quite a lot about Uncle David in the nursery.’
‘I’m sure you did,’ said David, ‘and not at all to my credit.’
‘Oh no, sir, I’m sure,’ said Nurse with a superior though respectful smile.
‘Well, to make up for it, suppose you invite me to tea,’ said David. ‘That is, if Miss Bunting doesn’t object. Will I do, Bunny?’
He held out his hands, palms upwards.
‘And my nails, too,’ he added,
turning them over. ‘Clean as Nurse’s apron.’
‘It’s more than they used to be,’ said Miss Bunting, after looking at them through her pince-nez, while nurse bridled.
Without further ceremony David pulled up a chair between Miss Bunting and Clare. Nurse brought a clean cup, saucer, knife, spoon and plate. The little girls began to get excited. David asked for two lumps of sugar on the grounds that all birds liked sugar and birds flew and he flew, so he must have sugar. Nurse and Miss Bunting, those apostles of self-denial and fighting the blockade, were delighted by his extravagance, both holding secretly that laws were not for well-connected flying officers. Discipline melted. Diana got down from her chair and climbed with great firmness on to David’s knees, where she fondled the lapels of his coat with a loving though buttery hand and insisted on hanging her own feeder, by this time in a far from agreeable state, round his neck. Clare’s emotion took the form of drinking copious draughts of milk while looking at him over or round the side of her mug, so that most of her milk dribbled down her chin and Nurse had to get a cloth and wipe up the mess. But though at any other time such offences would have been punished with rigour, or nipped before they budded, Nurse looked on the scene of debauch with a lenient eye. Partly from a vague sentiment that we couldn’t do too much for our brave flying heroes, but far more from the feeling previously alluded to that the gentry, and more especially those with titled relatives, could do no ill.
While Nurse cleared away the tea things and washed the children’s hands and faces, David devoted himself to Miss Bunting, enquiring earnestly after her married sister who was a clergyman’s widow and her niece (daughter of the deceased clergyman) who was a deaconess at Wolverhampton: and though Miss Bunting knew that he had no interest at all in her relations (as indeed nor had she, nor had they any in her) and David knew that she knew, his old governess could not withstand his cajolery, and melted visibly in his careless beams.
Now the children returned, ravishingly clean, and it was Clare’s turn to sit on his knees, while Diana plied him with questions about why he couldn’t walk but only fly, and requested to be taken in his aeroplane. At this point David suddenly felt, as he so often had in various scenes of life, that the one thing he wanted was to be somewhere else. It was never in his scheme to thwart his own inclinations. Alleging that it would appear rude if he did not go and see Mrs Marling he bade farewell to his hostesses.
‘Say goodbye to Uncle David,’ said Nurse, who had entirely adopted him as one of the family, ‘and say we hope he’ll come again soon.’
Each little girl embraced one of his legs with fervour.
‘Goodbye, Bunny,’ said David to Miss Bunting, his efforts to approach her considerably hampered by his living leg-irons. ‘Have I been good?’
Miss Bunting looked piercingly at her ex-pupil.
‘You cannot fool all the people all the time, David,’ she said. ‘You will probably find Lettice and her mother in the village. They are showing some friends the Red House. Anyone will tell you where it is.’
Nurse then detached her two limpets from the visitor’s legs and David went down the steep stair, his lively nature feeling an unwonted deflation. But nothing had power over him for long, and in two minutes he had shaken off the faint depression caused by his old governess’s words and was driving rather too fast down the back drive and so into the village.
Marling Melicent is a pretty village, though not one of Barsetshire’s show places, with some good houses of gold-grey stone and some handsome red brick houses anything up to two hundred years old. Here and there an eyesore may be seen in the shape of an Edwardian villa, built indeed of red brick, but of how different a shade and texture from the older buildings. One particularly revolting specimen on the irregular-shaped green, two doors off the Marling Arms, caught David’s eye and he slowed down, the better to savour its horrors. Built of a hard purple-red brick with patterns of grey brick inlaid on it, the upper story painted with sham timbering, the side nearest the public house consisting chiefly of overlapping tiles of the same uncompromising red as the bricks, with scalloped edges, it had several gables of different sizes, leaded windows flush with the outer wall and a kind of Swiss chalet of a porch. The front door was bright blue. The front garden, to David’s reverential joy, had a winding path, a very small pond edged with synthetic rocks, three dwarfs and a toadstool, and a concrete rabbit. A large monkey puzzle blocked what looked like the dining-room window where David could see several coloured witch balls hanging. The further to enjoy this sight he stopped altogether, behind a car which was standing near the front gate. A tall man who had just finished locking the car looked round and saw David.
‘David,’ he said (and very well he said it David had to admit), and tossed back a lock of hair.
‘Hullo, Geoffrey,’ said David. ‘I didn’t know you lived here.’
‘My dear, I don’t yet,’ said Mr Harvey, leaning his arms negligently on the open window of David’s car. ‘My sister and I want a house. Mrs Marling and Lettice Watson think this would suit us. Do you know them?’
David felt unreasonably annoyed at this question.
‘The worst of a little car like mine,’ he said, ‘is that if you bend down to talk to anyone inside it you look so peculiar from behind.’
Mr Harvey straightened himself with a slightly hurried negligence.
‘The Marlings are cousins of mine,’ David continued. ‘I’m rather ashamed of the sort of house they expect you to live in.’
‘One does so understand that feeling,’ said Mr Harvey, ‘but the dwarfs alone are worth the rent the owner is asking. I don’t know what the inside’s like. Come in and see.’
He held the front gate open with what David was quite sure he knew to be feline grace. David locked his car and walked into the garden.
‘So perfectly wrong, don’t you think,’ said Mr Harvey, indicating the front door. He turned the handle and stood aside for David to pass. Inside the blue door was what house agents will call a lobby, about four feet square, and beyond it a wrought-iron grille, showing a narrow passage and a staircase painted a shiny green. The two men squeezed with difficulty past a very thin table with a top painted to imitate marble and twisted iron legs. Voices were heard on the right. Mr Harvey made for a door which had no handle, but a large, rather dirty-looking white tassel hanging on a cord that came through a hole where the handle ought to be.
‘Pull the bobbin and the latch will fly up,’ said David encouragingly.
Mr Harvey did so and pushed the door open. Before them was the drawing-room. Pale green shiny walls, tall gilt lamps, white upholstered chairs and sofa, a large reproduction of a picture of bright red horses, a marbled mantelpiece just wide enough for a match box to fall off, met their interested eyes. Near the window, below which a negro painted black and gold supported a small semi-circular table of substitute malachite, Mrs Marling and Lettice were talking to what was obviously Miss Harvey, a woman not quite young, as fair as her brother was dark, with a more determined expression.
‘Frances,’ said Mr Harvey, ‘we must have this house. Pure Sloane Square and really, my dear, too off-white.’
‘Oh, David!’ said Lettice. ‘How very nice of you to come. Mother, you remember David. I told you I saw him again the other day at the dancing class. Miss Harvey, this is my cousin, David Leslie. Where did you come from?’
David explained that he had missed her at the Hall, followed her to the stables and had tea with her offspring and Miss Bunting. Mrs Marling said if they had come to look at the house they had better get it over. Mr Harvey said the dwarfs had quite made up his mind for him, but Frances had better look at the bedrooms and the kitchens. So the whole party went into the neat, clean, tiled kitchen and scullery, looked at the dining-room which had a sham refectory table, a looking-glass with a grille over it all across the end opposite the window, and chairs with imitation vellum seats, and Mr Harvey kept up a continuous ecstatic murmur of ‘Off-white; pure, pure Sloane Square.’ Und
er Miss Harvey’s leadership they then went upstairs and inspected the bath with black glass surround before passing on to the best bedroom.
‘I always feel a certain delicacy, or indelicacy, about going into other people’s bedrooms,’ said David, ‘and there is something about beds that are very flat that says Sin to me.’
Mr Harvey said one so understood that feeling.
‘I can’t think why,’ said David, warming to his subject, ‘an almost square divan bed with only a hard bolster and a cover of shiny green and white striped chintz should call to my mind the word Debauchery. One would expect debauchery to mean red plush and electric lights with pink shades. By the way, Geoffrey, where do people with beds like that keep their pillows? You ought to know if you are going to live here.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Lettice, ‘people with DT aren’t allowed pillows. They might suffocate themselves.’
Miss Harvey, who had not spoken much but had made notes of things in a very businesslike way as she went over the house, said it all depended. With violent cases of dipsomania one had to strap them down, even if one had a male nurse, but she didn’t think she or Geoffrey would need it.
Marling Hall Page 6
