Marling Hall

by Angela Thirkell

  ‘By Jove, yes,’ said Captain Barclay, at which moment Turk rose from a lair on the far side of the road and abased himself at their feet.

  ‘Go home, Turk,’ said Lettice, but so little faith was in her voice that Turk, putting on an idiot’s face, pretended he didn’t know where he was and set off towards the village just too fast for them to overtake him without loss of dignity.

  ‘That’s that,’ said Captain Barclay, ‘and really one can’t say much else about anything just at present.’

  United by dislike of Turk they walked on to the Red House and went to the back door. Hilda was pegging out the clorths (her expression, not ours) and greeted them.

  ‘We’ve brought some grain for the fowls, Hilda,’ said Lettice. ‘How are they doing?’

  Hilda said, with the ill-concealed pleasure of her class in bad news, that there was one of them had laid a double-yolked egg twice in a week and it was well known it strained them and they wouldn’t find her laying eggs much longer and the best layer’s comb wasn’t as red as it should be and one of them seemed lame this morning.

  ‘You know Mr Geoffrey and Miss Frances aren’t in,’ she said. ‘I’d ask you in the drawing-room, but me and Millie’s giving it a proper turn-out today.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Lettice. ‘We’ll put the grain in the shed and have a look at the fowls. Can I have the keys?’

  Accordingly she and Captain Barclay put the sack into a lock-up shed with a concrete floor, supposed to be immune to mice, and continued their walk to the hen-run. Lettice undid the padlock and went in with a handful of grain which she threw down. The best layer certainly had a very pale comb and it was evident that she was going off laying for the present.

  ‘I’ll tell Frances she ought to give her some Chicko Tonic,’ said Lettice. ‘Oh, Tom, hold Turk!’

  But too late did she speak. Turk, overcome by a sudden access of love for Lettice, burst into the run and leapt upon her with loving, dirty paws, barking loudly.

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Turk. Get down!’ said Lettice angrily.

  The hens rushed together into a group to defend their lives and honour, then despairing of either rushed wildly shrieking through the wire door into the garden where with innate strategy they scattered and fled in all directions. Turk, pleased at this new game, bounded after them, waking the echoes. Round and round went chickens and dog while Captain Barclay laughed so much that he couldn’t help. At last five or six made a bolt into Colonel Propert’s garden and a few were got home and began to eat the grain, with the well-founded hope of finishing it before their friends arrived. Turk bounded faster than ever, there was a scuffle, and a hen lay upon the ground. Turk sat down on the grass with his tongue hanging out and panted.

  ‘Good Lord!’ said Captain Barclay.

  Lettice, who had the presence of mind to shut the homing hens in, joined him.

  ‘You’d better get some string from Hilda and put it through Turk’s collar,’ she said.

  Captain Barclay did as he was told and returned with the string and Hilda.

  ‘I’m afraid she’s dead,’ said Lettice, pale with the reaction.

  ‘She’s dead all right,’ said Hilda cheerfully. ‘Fright: that’s what done it. My sister lost a dozen pullets like that one year when Sir George Burchell’s spaniel chased them, but he paid up like a gentleman.’

  ‘Of course, I must pay Miss Harvey,’ said Lettice. ‘How much do you think she’s worth?’

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ said an annoyingly familiar voice behind them. ‘Poor chookie, let me look at her. I was just coming out of my gate with my basket to go to the shop for my week’s rations when I saw you and Captain Barclay, Mrs Watson, going into my house. Pardon me, but the habit of calling the Red House my house is so strong, even though I cannot afford to live in it. So I thought, Well, I wonder now. And having time to spare I just popped over to see.’

  ‘It was that dreadful Turk,’ said Lettice. ‘He’s killed her.’

  Mrs Smith bent over the victim, looked attentively at her expressionless face and picked her up.

  ‘She’s not dead,’ said Mrs Smith. ‘It is shock. If there were a little brandy, Mrs Watson —’

  She led the way to the back door and went in. The kitchen was empty.

  ‘Of course,’ said Mrs Smith. ‘Millie did happen to pass the remark to her aunt this morning that they were going to turn out the drawing-room.’

  Followed by Hilda, Lettice and Captain Barclay, who now had the unrepentant Turk on a stout bit of string, she went up the passage.

  ‘Pardon me,’ said Mrs Smith, opening the door of the drawing-room where Millie was making a surprising amount of dust, ‘but I have an invalid here.’

  ‘It’s that Turk,’ said Hilda. ‘I knew he’d kill one of them. Didn’t I say so, Millie?’

  ‘Yes, Hilda, you did,’ said Millie, who thought it safer to be untruthful than to contradict her tyrant.

  ‘She isn’t killed,’ said Mrs Smith. ‘It’s only shock. Is there any brandy?’

  Hilda, sensible of the importance of the occasion, took them all into the dining-room, which was bitterly cold as a fire had not yet been lighted, got out the brandy and provided a spoon.

  ‘And a small glass, please Hilda,’ said Mrs Smith. ‘Please pour it out, nearly full, that’s right, and now take the poor chookie.’

  Hilda took the fair burden and pinched her throat. She opened one eye and her beak and uttered a dying squawk, upon which Mrs Smith, with prompt skill, put a teaspoonful of brandy down her gullet. The hen appeared to be vastly surprised, but not ungrateful.

  ‘Just another teaspoon and she’ll do,’ said Mrs Smith. ‘The glass is a wee bit too full, so I’ll just drink a little.’

  Accordingly, before the fascinated gaze of her audience, she drank off the rest of the glass except for a driblet at the bottom which she poured into the teaspoon and gave to the hen. Hilda with great promptitude gave the hen to Millie and locked up the brandy.

  ‘She’ll do now,’ said Mrs Smith, ‘but she needs care. I will take her across to Mrs Cox’s, Hilda. There is an old coop in the garden in a nice warm corner near the kitchen and I’ll just keep her there for a day and bring her in at night as it is so cold. She’ll be quite herself by tomorrow. You carry her over, Millie, and I’ll come and see about the coop. Poor dumb animal,’ she added pensively. ‘Good morning, Mrs Watson, and Captain Barclay too. He was a naughty Turk, wasn’t he. Good morning, Hilda.’

  With a graceful inclination she left the room followed by Millie.

  ‘Nerve!’ said Hilda.

  Lettice apologised deeply for Turk’s behaviour, said she would ring up Miss Harvey that evening, and got away as fast as she could, for she was really afraid that Hilda might scold her. But most luckily the voice of Colonel Propert was heard bellowing over the hedge and Hilda rushed out to do battle with him and reclaim the six escaped hens who, so he said, had eaten every green leaf in his garden.

  ‘You know, Tom, what will happen,’ said Lettice as they walked back, ‘is that Joyce will keep that hen. In fact I shouldn’t wonder if she means to get them all, one at a time. What will Frances say?’

  Captain Barclay, showing a sad want of heart, began to laugh and Lettice, after vainly trying to be shocked, had to laugh with him.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘it is nice to laugh, Tom. I haven’t laughed so much for ages.’

  ‘Good,’ said Captain Barclay. ‘And I may add that to hear you laugh is one of the greatest pleasures this war has afforded.’

  ‘Tom!’ said Lettice, laughing and expostulating. Then, looking at his face, she said more faintly, ‘Oh – Tom.’

  ‘I assure you I can’t help it,’ said Captain Barclay. ‘It has been getting the upper hand of me for some time.’

  ‘Tom!’ said Lettice again, but with such a change in her voice that Captain Barclay was alarmed.

  ‘What is it?’ he said anxiously, and carefully refraining from taking her hand.

  ‘I do
n’t know how to explain,’ said Lettice.

  ‘If you could try to tell me,’ said Captain Barclay, walking on, just apart from her. ‘I won’t interrupt.’

  ‘Please,’ said Lettice, a remark which when uttered in a pleading voice is somehow highly infuriating to the male sex.

  ‘I’ll do anything in the world for you,’ said Captain Barclay stopping dead halfway up the drive and turning to Lettice, ‘only don’t say “please” as if I were a murderer.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Lettice. ‘Don’t be angry, Tom.’

  This remark is perhaps even more exasperating than the word “please” and Captain Barclay only by a great effort of willpower and affection suppressed a blasphemous exclamation.

  ‘I’m not angry,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t be. But what have I done?’

  Lettice remained perfectly silent. Contending moods and words were so working in her bosom, not to speak of her head and mouth, that she found articulation very difficult.

  ‘Tom,’ she gasped at last. ‘We can’t. You know we can’t.’

  ‘Why the dickens can’t we?’ said Captain Barclay, adding illogically, ‘and anyway I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘It was all last night,’ said Lettice, clutching his coat sleeve to make her reasoning clearer. ‘Lucy was a perfect angel, as she always is, but I feel I couldn’t ever do anything to make her unhappy. You do understand, don’t you?’

  ‘I am sorry,’ said Captain Barclay, making most praiseworthy efforts to command his temper, ‘but I don’t. I am very fond of Lucy and I certainly don’t want her to be unhappy, but I don’t see where she comes in.’

  ‘But you were her friend, Tom,’ said Lettice. ‘She brought you here. It wouldn’t be fair. Oh, you do see, don’t you?’

  ‘Do you mean,’ said Captain Barclay, ‘that —’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lettice in a dying voice. ‘At least, I suppose I mean what you think I mean.’

  ‘As far as I can make out,’ said Captain Barclay with an almost brutal desperation, ‘you mean that Lucy likes me enough to feel unhappy if I liked you better. And that’s a nice fatuous thing to say,’ he added bitterly.

  ‘You do see now, don’t you,’ said Lettice.

  If Captain Barclay had followed his own inclination he would have said, in a very loving voice, ‘You great fool,’ and taken Lettice in his arms right in the middle of the drive with the grocer’s van passing, instead of which he pretended to be looking at the beauties of nature till the van had gone round the corner and then said, ‘Perhaps I had better not come back to tea at the Hall.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mean that,’ said Lettice, so exhausted by her effort of nobility that she hardly knew what she was saying.

  ‘You can’t have it both ways,’ said Captain Barclay. ‘I love you quite abominably. If you don’t want me to, I can’t stop, but I can keep away. I don’t want to hurt Lucy any more than you do, but I don’t love her and that’s flat.’

  ‘You can’t suddenly not come to tea,’ Lettice objected.

  ‘Oh, can’t I,’ said Captain Barclay ferociously. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he added in a milder tone, ‘I am coming to tea whatever happens. But to please you – and for no other reason – I won’t talk about this again; not until you ask me to. And I may say that there isn’t anyone else in the world I’d do that for. Come on, Turk.’

  He gave a tug at the string and walked on, Lettice beside him in a turmoil of emotions of which the uppermost at the moment was pure delight in the words, ‘I love you quite abominably,’ the most romantic words she had ever heard. But nonetheless she was faithful to her plan for Lucy’s happiness and determined that such words should never be said to her by Captain Barclay again. Lucy must be fairly treated and Lettice was prepared to bear a great deal of unhappiness to this end.

  The walk would have been quite unbearable if Turk had not seen Lucy in the distance and broken his string, thereby nearly cutting two of Captain Barclay’s fingers off, which enabled that officer to relieve his feelings by swearing. Lucy had been organising salvage dumps all afternoon, and in breeches, a dirty mackintosh, her hands blue and her nose red with cold, looked singularly unattractive. Nor was she much more attractive at tea, during which meal she ate, talked, interrupted and told people what in a very overbearing way. Lettice, though not critical by nature, heartily wished that her younger sister for whom she had just made so great a sacrifice would behave in a manner more worthy of the offering, while Captain Barclay, though always fond of Lucy, felt that to be tied to her for life would be a thing he could not abide. Resentment swelled in him against Lettice for unnecessary, useless, female quixotism. He almost began to dislike Lucy as with increasing symptoms of a streaming cold in the head she bored everyone dreadfully about paper, tins, bottles, bones and all the subdivisions of salvage. He found himself in an odious dilemma. He felt certain that Lucy’s feelings towards him were as untender as his for her, but he could hardly ask her outright what they were. He knew his own feelings for Lettice and allowed himself to guess what hers were for him, or what they would be if allowed to run their free course, but how could he tell her again what she had so firmly refused to hear? It would have given him great pleasure at the moment to throttle Lucy and carry Lettice off on his steed, but neither course being possible he had to resign himself and let things take their course. Mrs Marling and Miss Bunting talked Red Cross shop steadily, and if Miss Bunting looked once or twice at Lettice she kept her thoughts to herself.

  It was just like things that David Leslie, back at his sister’s for a few weeks while he went to a course near Barchester, should have come in unannounced and confident of a friendly reception. Lettice, who was really behaving very foolishly though never remarkable for intelligence, looked madly at Captain Barclay for help. If he had not just asked for a second cup of tea and taken a very large slice of dull but wholesome cake he would have got up, kicked his chair over and left the party to their fate.

  ‘And how are Diana and Clare?’ said David, seating himself by Lettice after the tumult of greetings had subsided.

  This again was unfortunate. David, as we know, though he liked the little girls, neither remembered nor cared what their names were, an oversight which outrages any mother, but today as fate would have it he had been talking with his sister who had mentioned four times that Diana was just a little older than Robert and Clare just a little older than Edith, so their names were indelibly and temporarily marked on the tablets of his memory. The bait, though quite unconsciously dangled, was more than Lettice could resist and she at once fell into David’s circling charm and talked with such animation that no one would have guessed her heart was broken. Captain Barclay discussed the forthcoming marriage of Lady Griselda Palliser with Miss Bunting. Mrs Marling told Lucy she had far better go to bed if she was feeling like that, and Lucy, her ‘m’s and ‘n’s rapidly blurring to ‘b’s, said she hadn’t got a cold if that was what her mother meant and anyway she had promised to go down to the stables and see Clare being a fish in her bath.

  ‘But Lucy darling,’ said Lettice, her mother’s ear attuned to sounds of illness, ‘if you are going to have a cold I really think you had better not come. Clare hasn’t had a cold all this autumn and Nurse would be so much annoyed if she got one.’

  ‘It isn’t a cold,’ said Lucy with a loud sneeze, it’s only because I was standing about outside Dr March’s house because he said he’d be out in a moment and he wasn’t.’

  Again Lettice glanced madly round for help, but Captain Barclay was still deep in conversation with Miss Bunting and it was David’s eye that met hers.

  ‘By precious wud,’ he said earnestly to Lucy, ‘you are wud bass of idfectious gerbs, and I absolutely forbid you to go to the stables and so does Miss Bunting. I myself will see Clare being a fish in her bath and I may add that such is the natural depravity of female nature from the earliest age that she will find Uncle David’s company far more stimulating than Aunt Lucy’s. And what is more, as blood i
s nipt and ways be foul, not to speak of the blackout, I propose that I should take Lettice back in my little car at once. Cousin Amabel, you will forgive my haste, but if I am late at Holdings Agnes will have to coo to me at least seven times how very naughty I am to keep the servants waiting, and though she means nothing by it, bless her, it might pall. Come and dine, Barclay. My mother and sister would love to see you.’

  Captain Barclay said he was going to town on a job and would be away for some time, otherwise he would have been delighted. Lettice tried to express a thousand things in one look and signally failed, so she went out with David, feeling that all was shallow mockery. As she left the room Miss Bunting remarked that Lucy had better go to bed at once, and she would come up in a few minutes with some small camphor pills which the marchioness always had in the house for the treatment of colds.

  ‘Oh well, I suppose I’d better,’ said Lucy, secretly rather relieved at the thought of bed, ‘and Tom can come up and sit on my bed and talk to me.’