‘What made you think of DT, Mrs Watson?’ she asked.
Lettice hesitated and looked at Mr Harvey. It had not occurred to her that his sister might not know about the late Mr Smith’s death and she wished she had not spoken.
‘I never told you, Frances, that the late occupant died of drink,’ said Mr Harvey. ‘So stupid of me.’
‘It doesn’t matter in the least,’ said his sister.
‘I’ll sleep in this room if you like,’ said Mr Harvey, with just too much carelessness.
‘Certainly not,’ said his sister.
This brief passage gave Lettice a curious impression that the Harveys were quite independent of outsiders and would not really notice if they all vanished. Miss Harvey except for her fair hair and skin was not unlike her brother, and though her face was stronger she seemed to move with the same impulse. David thought her an uncommonly handsome woman for one who was not quite young, more of a gentleman than her brother and quite worth a little exploring while his leave lasted.
Mrs Marling, untroubled by such musings, had been considering the matter of the pillows and suddenly saw light.
‘Mrs Smith will know where the pillows are,’ she said. ‘She ought to be here now. She knew we were coming.’
David, who was near the window, reported that something that no one could mistake for anything but a widow was looking at the dwarfs, on hearing which Mr Harvey, expressing a fear that she might want to take them away, thus ruining his future happiness, begged everyone to come downstairs. So back to the drawing-room they went, where Mr Harvey stood at the window eyeing his future landlady malevolently while the rest of the party discussed the decoration and furnishing which happily combined Spanish and Jacobean with functional, or so at least Miss Harvey said, though which the sham vellum lampshades with semi-transparent pseudo-Canalettos on them and ivory velvet ribbon were, she did not say.
‘She is coming in,’ said Mr Harvey.
And in came a very thin woman in deep black who had obviously been good-looking once and still had fine eyes. Mrs Marling and Lettice, who had known her slightly for many years and had no particular interest in her, introduced the possible tenants.
‘Of course,’ said Mrs Smith, sitting down on the little off-white brocade sofa, its ends lashed to its back by thick oxidised silver ropes, ‘I would never have dreamt of letting the house while Mr Smith was alive.’
Everyone felt very uncomfortable and at a distinct disadvantage. Everyone, that is, except Mrs Marling, who having given up some of her valuable time to a deed of kindness for her son Oliver’s friend, and knowing that Mrs Smith wanted to let the house, beat the devil’s tattoo impatiently on her bag.
‘Miss Harvey and Mr Harvey, Mrs Smith,’ she said.
‘I’m sure I’m very pleased to meet you,’ said Mrs Smith. ‘Of course Mr Smith always did the business and I find it very trying to be left alone like this. I really sleep so badly now that I must get away as soon as possible, and owing to Mr Smith’s affairs being in such a bad way I must let our little nest as well as I can. You don’t know what it is to be a widow, Miss Harvey.’
Miss Harvey confessed that she didn’t, but unwilling to sink too low in her possible landlady’s estimation, said she hoped she would some day.
‘You never will,’ said Mrs Smith. ‘There aren’t two like Mr Smith in the whole world.’
‘One does so understand that feeling,’ said Mr Harvey.
Mrs Smith wiped her eyes.
‘Pardon me,’ she said, ‘but you can’t. Mr Smith had the house beautifully decorated when he bought it a year ago, all to tone. I never thought I would have to let it. You only have to look round the drawing-room to see the sort of man Mr Smith was.’
Lettice and David looked simultaneously at the wastepaper basket which was covered with green brocade and had a shiny coloured reproduction of the Sistine Madonna glued on to it with a dull gold edging.
‘Four guineas a week, you said, Mrs Smith,’ said Mrs Marling. ‘And what about plate and linen?’
Mrs Smith said she would never have let her house if Mr Smith were alive. ‘Mr Smith always passed the remark,’ said Mrs Smith, addressing Mr Harvey as the weakest opponent, ‘that the house would be a little gold mine to me if anything were to happen to him, and “Joyce,” he said – Joyce is my name, you know – “don’t take a penny less than four guineas, or five if you leave your silver and your linen.” All the bed linen is in art colouring.’
‘Very well, that’s settled,’ said Mrs Marling. ‘And my friends can come in almost at once. Who is your lawyer?’
‘Mr Smith was always his own lawyer,’ said the widow. ‘You don’t know what it is to be alone.’
‘Keith and Son of Barchester saw about his will, I think,’ said Mrs Marling, who had picked up this fact from the senior partner, Mr Robert Keith, at the time. ‘So Miss Harvey and her brother will get their lawyer to communicate with them. Is that all right, Miss Harvey?’
Mrs Smith then took her leave, bidding a farewell to her cottage that made the Harveys appear as oppressors of the poor and unprotected, but much to Mr Harvey’s relief not mentioning the dwarfs. The Harveys thanked Mrs Marling very much for her help, without which, Mr Harvey said, they would probably have given the whole thing up in despair, or at least been hypnotised into asking Mrs Smith to share the house with them till better times. They then went back to Norton Park.
Mrs Marling and Lettice had walked down from the Hall and were quite ready to walk back, but David insisted on running them up in his little car, and as a matter of course came in for a drink. What he wanted, in so far as he ever really wanted anything, was to see something of his cousin Lettice and make an impression on her that would wipe out his stupid question about her husband. But Mrs Marling, who had strong family feelings, instituted an exhaustive inquiry into the whole of the Leslie family, numbering at present some sixteen or eighteen, besides Martin Leslie’s mother and her second husband, an American, and her American children. So time slipped away till David said he must go.
Lettice, whose heart still smote her because she had not yet explained to David that he had not hurt her, had also hoped to have a few words with her cousin, but with her mother present it was impossible. She recognised, without rancour, that it always had been and always would be impossible to talk to her own friends when her masterful mother was present. For this reason, as we know, she had preferred to live in the flat over the stables where at least she had solitude when she needed it and could ask a friend to tea. Ever since she was a child she remembered her mother taking possession of all her own friends, not from any jealousy of them or any wish to attach them to herself, but because having been brought up as one of a large family with a great many county and public interests, she could hardly envisage any but a communal life. Anyone who came near Marling had to be drawn into her orbit. She felt no need for privacy herself. Her bedroom, her sitting-room, her interests, her time, were all public. Devoted to the service of others, full of abounding energy, it never occurred to her that other people might like to retire from the glare of family life from time to time. Lettice could think of more than one girl or young man, in the days when she lived at home, whom she would have liked as a friend, and would have cultivated in her own diffident way had not her mother, with the best intentions in the world, forcibly drawn the newcomers into the family vortex, absorbed them, and left Lettice a little in the shadow. One of the things that had made Lettice like her husband so very much, even before she loved him, was his total absence of fear where her mother was concerned. Having seen the girl he wanted to marry, he had gone straight to his goal, which was to see as much of her as he could and get her for his own. Mrs Marling, always willing to please her children though she usually managed to spoil the pleasure, had asked him to stay and for the first time in her life had met someone who politely brushed all her plan-making aside and merely said, in answer to all suggestions of family picnics or other outings, that he would like to take L
ettice for a walk, or a drive in his car, or in the canoe on the Rising. To none of these pleasures had Mrs Marling any adequate objection, and being a sensible woman used to suffering fools on committees, she left the young people to their own devices. When they said they were engaged she was honestly delighted and expected to see them, having, as it were, got that trouble off their chests, rejoin the family circle. That they still preferred their own society was to her inexplicable.
To Lettice the inexplicable thing was that anyone could resist her mother, and, as we have said, part of her devotion to her husband may be attributed to her admiration of his courage. Her elder brother Bill and his wife were as family-minded as her mother, and her sister Lucy bade fair to be even more masterful. Her ally was her brother Oliver, only a little older than herself and equally diffident, though he had early developed a technique for melting away from his mother’s possessive influence which Lettice could not emulate. He had lived in London, she had married and left home. Now circumstances – the end, for the time being, of the firm in which he was a partner, her husband’s death – had brought them both back to their old home. Though Lettice had the independence that her income and her separate establishment over the stables gave her, her silent nature had fallen again under her mother’s sway. She knew it and had not the heart or the strength to resist. Sometimes she wished she had taken a house farther away and had vaguely set about looking for one. Then the impossibility of ever explaining to her mother why she should do so, her gratitude for all the love and kindness that accepted her as a child of the house again and did not probe her feelings, made her feel that she would be a devil to leave Marling. And she knew that her father would miss her. As for Lucy, she was extremely fond of that roistering young woman whom she humbly recognised to be thirty-six times as energetic and capable as she could ever be; and if Lucy’s fine egoism sometimes made her stop her ears mentally and shrink into herself, she showed no sign. Lucy had taken her place as Miss Marling and on this position she did not want to infringe, so she was more quiet than ever.
Oliver saw a good deal of this and it worried him. That Lettice should be near her old home at present was right and proper, but he realised that she was one of those natures that can only make a few real decisions in their lives. One such effort she had made when she married, an effort which had been amply justified in her great happiness and her two little girls. Whether she would ever exert herself again, Oliver not very hopefully wondered. If she did not, no one could do it for her, and as long as her parents lived she would remain a charming shadow about their house and estate. This Oliver would not be. He gave in to his parents with pleasant grace, but like a blob of quicksilver he was apt to split under their hands only to reunite as himself somewhere else. To remain at home was no part of his plan. After the war he intended to go back to London, where one could see one’s own oculist. For Oliver’s oculist had disappeared into the army at the beginning of the war and he had chanced upon a very unlovable gentleman whose attitude towards his patients was that if his glasses did not suit them, something must be wrong with their eyes and it was entirely their own fault. Oliver, smarting under a large consultation fee and a very expensive pair of spectacles which made him feel rather sick and a good deal blinder than he was, had put the spectacles away and resigned himself to using his old ones and supporting his headaches till his own dear Mr Pilman came back from wherever he was. Meanwhile he proposed to look after his sister Lettice whenever her gentle obstinacy would allow itself to be looked after.
On this day he happened to get back from Barchester at the moment when David, baulked for once by his cousin Amabel’s determination to follow the Leslies into their last ramifications, gave up the game and was preparing to go. The sight of a fellow man encouraged him not to go, and he and Oliver had a short but agreeable conversation about their prep school and Mr Panton who had hairs growing out of his ears, over a gin and lime; for the lime, our readers will be glad to hear, had now come in at the grocer’s.
‘Do you mind,’ said David to Oliver, as he held his glass to be refilled, ‘if I talk to you out of the side of my mouth?’
Oliver said he would like it of all things.
‘Then,’ said David, proceeding to do so, ‘could you possibly call your mother off? I have been trying to say something to Lettice for seventy-five minutes quite in vain.’
He then put his face in order again.
‘If your intentions are honourable I might do something,’ said Oliver. ‘Mamma, dear!’
‘Yes, Oliver,’ said his mother.
‘God bless you, kind gentleman,’ said David, out of the other side of his mouth.
‘How many bedrooms has Joyce got?’ said Oliver.
His mother said the best bedroom where Mr Smith had died, the dressing-room and the other little room. Why? she added. Because, said Oliver, the Harveys thought they might be having an old governess to stay with them, and if so, where would they put her? Mrs Marling said of course she had forgotten there was that extra room that Mr Smith added when he built the garage. It was true it only had a staircase from the kitchen, but if they put their maid there it would be all right, as there was a gas fire and running water. Then the governess could have the little room. It would be nice if she came, Mrs Marling added, as she and Bunny could meet.
‘Good God, Mamma dear,’ said Oliver. ‘You cannot throw old governesses together like that. There is measure in everything. They may be deadly enemies at sight. I’m sure the Harveys’ old lady hasn’t had as many highly connected pupils as Bunny – nobody has – and there would be Feelings.’
Mrs Marling, who appeared to have a disposition to put two of a suit together as if governesses were a poker hand, argued the question, led on by her undutiful son, which gave David his opening. He moved to Lettice and having got his opening didn’t know what to do with it, a state of things not at all normal to him which displeased him greatly. So he temporised and asked after the little girls.
Lettice said they were very well and looked distractedly at her empty glass.
‘Let me get you another drink,’ said David, taking the glass. ‘I know one ought to know people seven years to poke their fires, but I believe it’s less for cocktails. I don’t mean to poke them, of course.’
‘No, thanks,’ said Lettice, ‘though I do suppose being cousins and having known each other practically all our lives, though hardly ever meeting, you could poke a cocktail if you liked, though how one would do it I don’t know.’
‘Then I’ll poke one at myself,’ said David, picking up the shaker and filling his glass. ‘Lettice —’
But at the same moment his cousin said, ‘David.’
‘Shakespeare – Browning,’ said David briefly. ‘And now you carry on. Sorry.’
‘It was only,’ said Lettice, going rather pink, ‘that I wanted to say that it may sound horrid, but I don’t mind if people talk about Roger a bit. I don’t really mind even if Mother does. In fact I like them to if they feel like it – but not if they don’t, of course. And I’m sure Roger would agree.’
David quite understood the courage behind his cousin’s jumbled remarks and admitted to himself, a person with whom he was upon very frank terms, that she was braver than he was.
‘I wanted to mention that myself,’ he said, ‘but I am a coward by nature. I hadn’t heard that Roger was killed until Bunny told me at the dancing class. There didn’t seem to be any way of apologising. I never met him except at your wedding, but I’m sure he was a frightfully good sort.’
‘Thank you,’ said Lettice. ‘That’s absolutely all right. Only I was afraid I’d been churlish and frightened you. So I am very glad I haven’t.’
The cousins looked at each other and felt much more comfortable. Mrs Marling having demonstrated to Oliver that one touch of governessing made all ex-governesses kin and failed in the very least to convince him, turned to David, or rather turned on him, such was her vigour, and invited him to dinner the week after next if he wa
s still on leave.
David accepted and finally said goodbye. As he was starting his car, another car drove up and a young woman and an officer got out.
‘Hullo,’ said the young woman. ‘Are you about the pig swill?’
‘I wish I were,’ said David regretfully. ‘Who ought I to be?’
‘I thought you were from the aerodrome,’ said the young woman. ‘Flight Commander Jackson said he’d send someone over to arrange about letting me have some. We could do with buckets. I’ll tell you what, if you are going to the aerodrome will you tell him that he simply must send that pig stuff over at once, because I can’t spare anyone to go. Lucy Marling.’
‘O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz,’ said David, adding, ‘the Bard.’
‘What do you mean Kuz?’ said Miss Marling. The light of intelligence then dawned in her and she seized David’s hand.
‘Of course you’re David!’ she cried. ‘Tom, this is David Leslie, he’s a kind of cousin of mine. This is Tom Barclay, I mean he’s a captain, and he’s going to let me see them explode the next bomb.’
Marling Hall Page 7
