Captain Barclay, a pleasant-faced man of about David’s age, shook hands and said he would certainly not let Miss Marling see any bombs exploded and would probably lose his stripes if he did.
‘Oh rot,’ said Lucy, ‘you promised me. I ought to know how to explode bombs, because you never know and if there was one here Daddy would fuss like anything. I suppose Ed could do it, he’s our sort of chauffeur, a bit mental but he’s a marvel with his hands. I’ll tell you what, next time you have a bomb I’ll bring Ed and then he can see what to do.’
‘No promise ever passed these pure lips,’ said Captain Barclay, quite unperturbed by Lucy’s insistence. ‘And no one, mental or otherwise, is coming.’
‘And don’t say you will tell Captain Barclay what, Lucy, once more, for I cannot bear it,’ said David. ‘Barclay, your speaking countenance is familiar to me. Was it New York?’
‘I thought so,’ said Captain Barclay. ‘It was.’
‘And was it the party someone threw the night we all got back from a West Indian cruise?’
‘It was,’ said Captain Barclay. ‘And who the host was I never knew, but I remembered your face at once.’
‘I think,’ said David, ‘you and I were the last to pass out, such is the Bulldog Breed. We must meet again. I’m with my sister at Little Misfit. Goodbye, Lucy, I’m coming to dinner here the week after next and I’ll beat you at six-pack bézique afterwards. See you again, Barclay.’
He drove off down the drive.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Lucy to her escort, ‘come in and have a drink.’
Captain Barclay, seeing no reason against this, followed his companion up to the drawing-room and was introduced to Mrs Marling, Lettice and Oliver. In Mrs Marling he saw an authoritative woman in good, unostentatious county clothes, so like his county mother’s county friends that he felt at home at once, the more so as she discovered within three minutes that his mother was a distant cousin of Lord Stoke and thus vaguely connected, though by no means related, to her husband’s mother.
‘If you had your way, Mamma dear,’ said Oliver, ‘everyone would be so related that the whole of Barsetshire would be within the forbidden degrees of affinity. Talking of which, Barclay, do you happen to be married?’
Captain Barclay said, ‘Good Lord, no.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Oliver. ‘Not but what I am all in favour of matrimony, but it is as well to know. We had several officers billeted here early in the war who practically got engaged to the doctors’ daughters and whatnot, till their wives came to visit them. It distinctly lowered one’s opinion of military men.’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Lucy, who was tired of county relationships, ‘there ought to be a law to make men who are married wear rings.’
‘Like Frenchmen,’ said Captain Barclay.
Lettice said ‘Or bulls,’ Oliver countered with pigs, and Lettice added that bright was the ring of words when the something or other sang them. Oliver cried out against bad puns, and Captain Barclay, who was used to that kind of silliness at home, smiled and said nothing and thought his sisters would like Mrs Watson and her brother.
‘Hullo, Daddy,’ said Lucy as her father came in. ‘This is Tom Barclay.’
‘How de do, how de do,’ said Mr Marling, putting on to his older offsprings’ intense pleasure what they called his Olde Englishe Squire manner. ‘Berkeley, eh? Used to be a feller called Berkeley who rode to hounds over Nutfield way. Never much liked the man. He was riding a nice little mare one day, I remember, in nineteen three or four, and all his false teeth came out when she jumped the big fence near Starveacres. Bad business, bad business.’
He shook his head mournfully and asked Oliver for a whisky and soda.
‘What happened, sir?’ said Captain Barclay. ‘Shockin’ thing,’ said Mr Marling, throwing himself into his part with renewed vigour. ‘Mare put her off forefoot on them and galloped a field with ’em before she pulled up. Went dead lame. And old Berkeley tried to swear without a tooth in his head.’
‘You’re all wrong, Daddy,’ said his daughter Lucy in the loud voice that she considered suitable for idiots and parents. ‘It’s Barclay, not Berkeley, and Tom’s people live in Yorkshire.’
‘All right, all right, I said Berkeley,’ said her father. ‘And you needn’t shout. I’m not deaf yet.’
‘Lucy meant Bark, not Berk,’ said Oliver.
‘Like spelling it Derby and pronouncing it Darby,’ said Lettice, to help him.
At the sudden introduction of Derby Mr Marling lost his bearings completely and said if young people would do nothing but mumble they couldn’t expect anyone to understand and though he’d like to see Hitler in a concentration camp, it wouldn’t do people who mumbled any harm to have a taste of Hitler’s methods. He’d teach them to mumble, he added.
Captain Barclay, whose father lately dead had been much such another kind but ferocious gentleman, with a strong conviction that this war wasn’t like the last, felt sorry for his host and explained in just the right voice, as far from mumbling as it was from shouting, that he spelt his name Barclay and his mother had been Dora Stoke before her marriage. Having assimilated these facts Mr Marling forgot his rage and said he remembered his mother quite well at the Hunt Ball at Rising Castle in ’ninety-seven. Mrs Marling, grateful to the new guest, asked him if he would dine with them soon. Lucy stood ungracefully with her legs too wide apart and watched with complacence her captive’s progress in her parents’ good opinions; for though she considered most of their views entirely worthless, she still secretly attached a certain value to their reception of her friends.
Then Captain Barclay, looking at his watch, said he must go at once, so Lucy escorted him downstairs.
‘Please say goodbye to your sister and your brother for me,’ said Captain Barclay as he got into his car. ‘They disappeared while I was talking to your father. And thanks for the drink.’
‘Well, don’t forget about the bombs,’ said Lucy, who believed in the power of repetition. ‘And I’ll tell you what. If we get a bomb here, I’ll telephone to you at once, and then you can get it before the people at Southbridge get here, and then you can let me see you explode it.’
Captain Barclay refused to commit himself, saluted and drove away. In the drive he overtook Lettice who was on her way to her stables escorted by Oliver, and stopped to say goodbye.
‘You were so good with father,’ said Lettice. ‘He is a little deaf, but it is mostly wilful inattention.’
‘He is secretly rather proud of not listening to what people say,’ said Oliver. ‘A peculiar passion, but parents are peculiar.’
Captain Barclay said they were indeed, and his governor had been as peculiar as the best of them.
‘But one is very proud of them for being peculiar,’ said Lettice. ‘Anyone who is a character ought to have sixpence to encourage them. And as I’m a parent I hope to get peculiar myself in time.’
Then Captain Barclay drove on, much pleased by his afternoon. Lucy, who had annexed him a fortnight earlier at a sherry party, was not his ideal woman, but he found her an excellent sort of fellow. Of Mr and Mrs Marling we already know his opinion. Oliver Marling and that charming Mrs Watson stirred his interest. Their similarity in good looks, their private world of small jokes, the reticence that went with their friendliness, interested and attracted him. He hoped to see a good deal of the family during his stay in those parts.
4
Words cannot express how trying Mrs Smith was during the next three weeks. Her lawyers and the Harveys’ lawyers soon got to grips over the lease which was very simple, and as far as signing and sealing went all was well. But the more the lease was signed the more her passion for her own house grew, and that in a very disconcerting way. While the inventory was being made she haunted the house, removing small pieces of portable property with sentiments rooted in her past, or, even more annoying, of use for the immediate future, thus driving the elderly clerk who was doing the work nearly mad. At
first the Harveys laughed at the affair, saying that she would soon be going to Torquay and it must be very hard to be parted from one’s possessions, but as the days passed, Torquay became a kind of El Dorado, the unattainable goal of nebulous desires. It gradually became known that the mother with whom she was going to stay, far from being as people had supposed a dear old lady in a lace cap, was a very vigorous woman of seventy who lived with twelve cats and a slave friend of sixty-five. The enthusiasm which had brought mother and daughter together in the early days of Mrs Smith’s bereavement had as rapidly waned. The mother had reflected that Joyce and the slave friend never got on well, which upset the pussies. The daughter had reflected upon the horrors of being shut up with her mother and her companion and the cats, and having let her house at a good rent, decided to go as a lodger to Mrs Cox who had been a cook in good families and had a bedroom and sitting-room for gentlewomen.
‘And you see, Mr Harvey,’ said Mrs Smith, meeting that gentleman, much to his surprise, in what he was now legally entitled to call his dining-room, although he had not yet slept in the house, ‘I shall kill two birds with one stone. I shall save the fare to Torquay and I shall be able to keep an eye on my wee home. I have got my own latch key, so I shall just slip in and out if I want anything, like a fairy, and be no trouble to anyone. I just ran over to find the coal-tongs. Mrs Cox has mislaid hers.’
As she spoke she brandished a pair of modern machine-handwrought antique tongs or pincers which had been hanging by the fireplace.
‘I suppose there is another pair here,’ said Mr Harvey, very much wishing that his sister were with him. But she had gone to London the day before, leaving him with instructions to go over to Marling Melicent and see if the groceries and coal she had ordered had come in and was coming down in the afternoon with their maid.
‘You won’t need a fire in this room,’ said Mrs Smith. ‘It has the morning sun. Mr Smith never liked to have a fire because of the art fireplace. We always used the electric heater. We just switched it on, or rather the girl did, a few minutes before breakfast and quite enjoyed the heat it gave, and the moment breakfast was finished Mr Smith would switch it off with his own hands. I never thought then that I would be living in rooms.’
Mr Harvey at once felt so guilty that he nearly asked her to give up her rooms and live at the Red House, but, reflecting how much he would dislike it, he didn’t. He looked with great disfavour at his landlady who was wandering about and fingering some books that he had brought with him. His dislike for her increased, for his books were to him like parent, child and wife. What particularly annoyed him was that she had such fine eyes in her thin ravaged face. If all her features had been like her pursed-up discontented mouth he could have hated her wholeheartedly, but her eyes demanded his grudging admiration. Then he looked at the art fireplace where art was exemplified in rough variegated bricks with a few Swedish tiles inset, and vowed vindictively to himself that he would let coal fires roar up it as long as there was any coal in England.
‘I see you are quite a reader,’ said Mrs Smith, picking up a volume and looking at the title. ‘Mr Smith never had much time for it. He said human nature was like a book to him and an ever-open book. Strarkie. Is it a nice book?’
Mr Harvey, in despair, almost snatched Lytton Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex from her hand.
‘No, it’s not very nice,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you’d like it.’
‘Well, I’ll just take it back with me and see,’ said Mrs Smith. ‘You’ll find I’ll often be in and out to borrow a book. I gave up my library subscription when Mr Smith died, and I quite miss not having a book.’
‘I’m afraid that is my sister’s,’ said Mr Harvey, still clinging to his child. He then thought Mrs Smith would take offence, but she glided – for he could think of no other word to express the decency of her widow’s walk – from the room, and saying that now they were neighbours they would be seeing each other quite often, continued to glide down the serpentine walk, through the garden gate and away across the green.
If, Mr Harvey thought, this was what things were going to be like, he and his sister would have done better to stay at Norton Park, where at least there was the park between them and the world. He wondered if he could have the lock of the front door changed, but reflecting that one could also get into the house by the kitchen door, the verandah door at the back, and by the garage, he gave it up in despair, resolving that his sister should deal with it all when she came. With almost trembling fingers he put his books in the sideboard and locked it, though convinced that Mrs Smith would have a duplicate key of that as well as of the kitchen, verandah and garage doors, and was just going when a stalwart form walked across the grass, disdaining the serpentine walk, and disclosed itself as Lucy Marling carrying a large basket.
‘Hullo,’ said Lucy. ‘Mother thought you and your sister would like some peas and things as you’re moving in today. How’s Joyce?’
‘You don’t mean my sister, do you?’ said Mr Harvey. ‘She’s Frances.’
‘No, Joyce,’ said Lucy rather impatiently. ‘You know, the one this house belongs to.’
‘Oh, Mrs Smith,’ said Mr Harvey. ‘Is she a friend of yours? I wish you would ask her not to come and take things out of the house now we have taken it. She has got two saucepans and a reading lamp and she has just taken the dining-room tongs.’
‘Good old Joyce,’ said Lucy unsympathetically. ‘Oh, and mother said would you and your sister come to dinner next Tuesday at eight. David Leslie’s coming and Tom Barclay. And she wants the basket back. I’ll tell you what, you’d better put the veg and things in the wire basket in the scullery if Joyce hasn’t taken it. Come on.’
She strode into the scullery, tipped the contents of her basket into a kind of wire vegetable rack in three tiers, shelled a couple of pea pods and ate the contents, eyeing her host as she did so in a way that alarmed him very much.
‘You write things, don’t you?’ she said severely.
Mr Harvey said he had written a few poems.
‘I mean books,’ said Lucy patiently.
Mr Harvey said his novel about Pico della Mirandola had pleased some critics, and like a mettled though nervous steed flung back his lock of hair.
‘What I mean is you’re literary, aren’t you?’ said Lucy, breaking a young carrot in half and putting the thin end in her mouth. ‘I mean you know lots of people in London like Mrs Rivers and George Knox. I like their books awfully.’
Mr Harvey, who despised both these successful authors and disliked the first, said rather huffily that he found it more difficult to get a suitable subject than Mrs Rivers or Mr Knox, as his public was not content with meretricious work.
‘Well, I’ll tell you what,’ said Lucy. ‘If you can’t think of a good subject, you ought to do a book about Joyce. You’d hardly have to do anything but just write down what she says. I’ve often thought of writing a book about her myself, but I don’t know the right way to begin. You could make it awfully funny and I’d tell you lots of things about her.’
Mr Harvey smiled as agreeably as he could.
‘You ought to meet Mrs Morland,’ Lucy continued, almost pushing Mr Harvey before her along the narrow passage to the front door. ‘She’s the nicest literary person I know, not a bit like an author. I mean she is just like an ordinary person, not affected. I’ve written down some of the funny things Joyce said and I’ll let you have them if you like to make a book with. Don’t forget Tuesday at eight. Good Lord, it’s twelve and I’ve got an Allotments Committee. Goodbye.’
Mr Harvey, at last free of women, gave his hair a misogynistic toss, lit a cigarette and went back to the task of checking the groceries in which Mrs Smith had interrupted him. Women were insufferable! That wretched Mrs Smith filching fire-tongs and trying to filch books. That boorish Miss Marling who thought she could write a book and wanted him to meet Mrs Morland. At the thought of Mrs Morland he felt the scorn that only a writer who sells his work by the hundred can
feel for a writer who sells hers by the thousand. If life at the Red House were to be like that, he and Frances would be as dull as they were with the Nortons, though certainly more free. Then he thought of Tuesday and his spirits rose. A dinner party, even in war time, was a pleasant distraction. He would probably meet that attractive Mrs Watson again. Then he reflected that he might with equal probability sit next to that quite insupportable Miss Marling, at which thought he put a tick against the washing soda so violently that he broke his pencil. So he left the rest of the job for his sister and drove back to Norton Park to eat his last lunch, collect his luggage and meet his sister at Barchester.
On Tuesday evening David Leslie, the Harveys and Captain Barclay arrived punctually at eight. When we say evening, it was in the eyes of God, as David remarked to Miss Bunting, six o’clock on a fine summer’s afternoon.
‘You need not try to shock me, David,’ said Miss Bunting. ‘If Mr Churchill wishes us to have Double Summer Time, He knows best.’
Marling Hall Page 8
