Miss Hargreaves

by Frank Baker

‘Yes–I see–it is a little after eight–’

  ‘The Canon’s been waiting up in the Innocents’ Chapel for nearly ten minutes.’

  ‘My dear Minor Canon,’ purred Miss Hargreaves briskly, ‘you are Minor, are you not? is there any reason why the Holy Communion should not be celebrated with organ accompaniment?’

  ‘Oh, do be quiet,’ I muttered.

  ‘Who is this–lady?’ snapped Blow.

  Miss Hargreaves pursed up her lips, took a small ivory-bound diary from her bag and made a rapid note in it. I could see danger in her eyes. ‘I am not accustomed to being spoken to in this manner,’ she said sharply. She went towards the door. ‘Kindly move, sir! Kindly move! Make way. I wish to descend.’

  ‘There’s no need to talk to me like that, Madam,’ began Blow. ‘People below are trying to say their prayers and–’

  Miss Hargreaves interrupted coldly.

  ‘I think your name is Blow, is it not?’

  ‘I don’t see what that has got to do with it,’ said Blow, feebly. But Miss Hargreaves had gone. Switching off the current, I hastily followed her down.

  ‘Wheel your bicycle, dear. Then we can walk back together.’

  ‘It’s too bad of you, Miss Hargreaves. I warned you I’m not allowed to take anybody up the loft. There’ll be an awful row.’

  ‘Oh, tut! Life is made up of such little troubles. I abominate fuss. I shall see the Dean and make it perfectly clear that I am to blame.’

  ‘No. I’d rather you didn’t do that.’

  ‘I most certainly shall, if only to report that wretched little clergyman. I am not accustomed to such insolence from a Minor Canon. Oh, dear, it is coming on to rain. Open my umbrella, will you?’

  As we came out into Canticle Alley thin rain started to fall. Balancing my bicycle with one arm, I opened out the umbrella and handed it ungraciously to Miss Hargreaves.

  ‘Oh, you hold it, dear! You hold it. I declare I am quite looking forward to breakfast, are not you? I ordered grilled sausages for two.’

  ‘I can’t have breakfast with you. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You are very cross about something. Is it the weather?’

  I was silent. I now loathed her.

  ‘I hope,’ she continued blithely, ‘this is only the first of many such happy mornings. I must bring you some of my own compositions, a few meagre little hymn tunes, and you shall play them. Why do you not give a recital, dear?’

  ‘Here’s the Swan,’ I said. I gave her the umbrella and leapt on my bicycle.

  ‘The sausages–’ she cried, ‘for two –’

  ‘Give my share to Sarah,’ I shouted. I rode on down the High Street savagely.

  Breakfast was a very trying meal. Mother and Jim were in their most maddening moods. They never made any direct reference to my failure to turn up at the Clovertree Dance; in fact, they hardly spoke to me at all, simply went on talking to each other all the time about Miss Hargreaves. Henry had, quite obviously, most shamefully let me down.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I began, ‘I didn’t turn up last night. ‘I–’

  Mother smiled sweetly. ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter, dear. We knew you were busy. Marjorie quite understood.’

  My mother is a devil sometimes. I can’t help saying it.

  ‘I had an awful time,’ I said. ‘I think you–’

  But mother was talking to Jim again. ‘Of course,’ she was saying, ‘I know we are not out of the top drawer. And these chintzes are hardly as good as you’d find in the best houses.’

  ‘You might hire a footman,’ suggested Jim, ‘and put a silver plate in the hall for cards.’

  ‘I’m afraid it wouldn’t ring true, my dear. People like us, very low, ill-bred people like us, we–’

  ‘Oh, stop it, mother!’ I said, miserably rearranging the bones in a kipper I had no interest in. I wasn’t at all sure it wouldn’t have been better to eat sausages with Miss Hargreaves. It was a rotten kipper, anyway.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, dear,’ said mother sweetly. ‘I was merely wondering how we could make the house fit to receive Lady Hargreaves.’

  ‘She’s not Lady Hargreaves.’

  ‘Countess Hargreaves, perhaps?’ suggested Jim.

  I lost my temper. ‘Why do you both get at me like this? I’ve worked like the devil to keep her away from you; she’d drive you mad in a minute. You ought to be grateful.’

  Father ambled in in his old green dressing-gown. He was eating a banana and reading The Times.

  ‘Why aren’t you using my new teapot?’ he asked crossly. He rang the bell for Janie.

  ‘I do wish,’ said mother, ‘you’d come down properly dressed in the mornings, Cornelius. It isn’t nice for Janie to have to see you in your dressing-gown. The girl was strictly brought up in Suffolk and they’re not used to such things.’

  ‘Perfectly good dressing-gown,’ mumbled father, dropping his banana peel in the coal-scuttle.

  ‘I dare say. I gave it to you myself. But that isn’t the point.’

  Janie came in with father’s breakfast. ‘Make some more tea in the pot I bought yesterday,’ ordered father. ‘Oh, and Janie there was a dead wasp in my shaving water this morning.–Look out for things like that. I might have swallowed it.’

  When Janie had gone out mother made a direct attack on me. Father was now muttering over the crossword.

  ‘Anyhow,’ said mother triumphantly, ‘we’ve at last got the truth out of Henry.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, yes! He admitted that you’d both made up that tale about meeting her in the hotel and picking up her stick. He confessed you were both lying.’

  I laughed bitterly. ‘The whole thing’s a lie from beginning to end. My God, if you only knew!’

  ‘Are you after her money?’ asked Jim. ‘Because if you are, just say so. Nobody cares so long as you tell the truth.’

  ‘Look here,’ I said, ‘you shall pay for this. I’ll bring the old devil round here this evening. Then you’ll see what I suffer.’

  ‘There are people in Suffolk,’ said father in sudden anger, ‘who’ve never even heard of a railway train. They’ve got to grow up; they’ve got to gain experience. It’s a perfectly good dressing-gown though I never did care for the colour. Give me a word in six letters meaning “this tree grows on paper”.’

  Mother, ignoring father as usual, came up to me, sat down by me and looked at me, quite kindly, yet searchingly, as though she were a sort of benevolent X-ray.

  ‘Norman,’ she said gently.

  ‘Yes, mother?’

  ‘It’s quite obvious you’re concealing something from us. We don’t want to be unkind, my dear. If you’ve done anything unwise–you’d much better tell us all about it.’

  I turned aside. It was so damned embarrassing.

  ‘Thank you, mother. But I don’t think you’d understand. I don’t myself. I’ve told father the truth. Ask him if you like.’

  ‘Well, Cornelius? What’s all this about?’

  ‘Eh? What do you want? Yes, I did put the orange peel there. What about it?’

  ‘I wasn’t talking about that. Norman says he’s told you the truth about this mysterious friend of his.’

  ‘Oh. Ah. Yes. H’m. Oh. Well–’ he scratched his head thoughtfully. ‘Yes. H’m. Something like that happened to me once. I was in Basingstoke and–’

  I groaned and went out of the room.

  Half an hour later I was going down the Avenue on my way to the Cathedral for Matins. There was a wind blowing now; it was pouring with rain. The lime trees were shedding their leaves and everything seemed very grey and dreary.

  I came down to the west porch and there, to my surprise, waiting under the porch, was old Henry, sucking away at his pipe, his hands shoved into his mackintosh pockets. He looked unusually thoughtful.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I asked. I felt about fed up with Henry.

  ‘Thought I’d catch you,’ he said. ‘Let’s go inside for a minute. I want to say I’m sorr
y, Norman, old boy. Felt I had to see you alone, at once.’

  ‘Can’t wait long. The last bell’s going.’

  We sat down on the bedesmen’s bench under the statue of Charles the First.

  ‘Well, I reckon you ought to be sorry,’ I said.

  ‘It just came over me, suddenly, in a flash. In bed last night. That damn bath. It stuck in my throat.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I really did think, Norman, that you had been playing a game on me. I don’t now. I felt furious with you on the station last night. It seemed to me that you must have known this old geyser. I was so angry with you that I didn’t have time to realize what that bath meant. I saw it on the luggage-truck, you see. And it wasn’t until I’d gone to bed and was thinking everything over, that it suddenly came home to me. See what I mean?’

  ‘I certainly don’t.’

  ‘Well, you fool–I made up the bath. Not you.’

  ‘Don’t be an ass, Henry. Of course I made it up–’

  ‘No, you idiot. I did. Last thing I shouted to you on Liverpool station. It stuck in my throat. To tell you the truth, Norman, Uncle Henry doesn’t like it.’

  ‘I’m glad somebody else doesn’t like it. I simply loathe it. If you knew what I’d suffered this morning,’ I told him.

  ‘Of course,’ mused Henry, ‘you might have put the bath into my head. But I don’t think you did.’

  ‘Don’t you feel rather–pleased?’

  ‘Pleased?’

  ‘Yes. I mean–about the bath. It coming true like that.’

  ‘I don’t know about being pleased.’

  ‘The trouble with you,’ I said, ‘is that you’re no artist.’

  The last bell had stopped. Archie Tallents, one of the lay-clerks, came in from the west door, shaking his wet umbrella.

  ‘Hullo, Norman!’ he cried. ‘When’re you going to put up the banns, dear?’

  If you know anything at all about cathedrals, you’ll realize that if there’s a story going round they’ll have the cream of it in the lay-clerks’ vestry. They talk about women gossiping. I don’t mind telling you quite openly that a sewing-bee is a model of discretion compared to a lay-clerks’ vestry. Take my advice: if you want to keep a secret, don’t tell a lay-clerk –be he alto, tenor, or bass.

  Not that I don’t like the lay-clerks; I do. Particularly Archie Tallents, one of the altos, a very remarkable chap altogether with a gaiety that’s almost goblin. Life’s one long minuet to Archie. He has an enormous head, tonsured like a monk; great, furry eyebrows and a droll way of singing which has been the downfall of more than one chorister and has even been known to make an honorary canon giggle. If you were to wander about in the clerestory you’d find Archie immortalized in stone five hundred years ago as a gargoyle. (This isn’t meant to be rude. Gargoyles may be ugly but they always have character.) When I say that Archie was also Jack Point and Lord Chancellor rolled into one, I give you him as nearly as I can. Everybody liked him. He ran a photographer’s business up by the Milk Cross.

  ‘Have you brought the harp, dear?’ he said, as I came into the vestry. I saw at once they’d all been talking about me and Miss Hargreaves.

  ‘What the devil are you talking about?’ I growled.

  Archie turned to Dyack, a jaundiced old bass who had been in the choir for centuries and still roared furiously through metallic moustaches. He was the world’s worst singer, but he could sit on bottom D as easily as go to bed. A wicked old sinner, very rich in his language.

  ‘Huntley’s studying the harp,’ said Archie, ‘from the niece of the Duke of Grosvenor. Aren’t you, dear?’

  ‘Where’s the Precentor put my bloody pitch-pipe?’ muttered Dyack. The pitch-pipe is a long thing he blows when the service is unaccompanied–gives the note, you see. He always loses it and always swears at it.

  Slesser, a smooth tenor–hair as smooth as voice–voice as smooth as silk–mewed from the cassock cupboard.

  ‘Oh, naughty, naughty! Old ladies! Tchu!’

  I drew Archie outside into the transept, and we sat on the monk’s seat, an immense oak bench which is always reserved for the use of the lay-clerks.

  ‘You’ve seen her, then, Archie? She’s not in Cath, is she?’

  ‘Who? The celebrated niece?’

  ‘Yes. Miss Hargreaves. I suppose that’s who you mean.’

  ‘I haven’t seen her. Charlie Stiles told me all about her. I happened to run into the Swan on my way here. She’s quite the rage of the town, dear. A crowd gathered on the landing last night, said Charlie, all listening to the Grosvenor harp. She played “The Bluebells of Scotland” three times. The cockatoo crooned a hymn. Very nice. I like a little bedtime music myself.’

  ‘I wasn’t there,’ I said, ‘I left before that.’

  ‘Where did you pick her up, my child?’

  ‘Oh, Archie!’ I groaned. ‘If you only knew!’

  ‘Rescue her from drowning?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Runaway horse?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Matrimonial Post?’

  ‘Don’t be a fool.’

  ‘All right, dear. Cheer up. The flowers that bloom in the spring have nothing to do with this case.’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  Meakins, the Dean’s verger, came up and tapped on the door with his wand. It was half a minute to ten. Under the tattered Crimean flags the boys were filing from their practice-room. The south door slammed and Dr Carless hurried in. Catching sight of me, he beckoned me over.

  ‘I’ve had a complaint from Canon Auty,’ he said. ‘It really is too bad, Huntley. It reflects on me, you know.’

  ‘I’m awfully sorry, Doctor.’

  ‘The Precentor tells me you had some eccentric old woman up there. You know it’s strictly against rules to take strangers up the loft.’

  ‘I honestly couldn’t help it. She came up of her own accord and–’

  ‘No excuse. You should lock the transept gate. In future you’re to confine yourself to the use of the Choir stops. I won’t have you showing off the organ to strangers like this–’

  ‘I wasn’t showing off the organ–’

  ‘You roar away on the full Great and imagine yourself to be an organist. Playing hymns–so the Precentor tells me! Haven’t you got beyond the hymn-stage by now?’

  Baker, that wretchedly supercilious solo-boy, was standing just inside the practice-room, adjusting his ruff in the mirror and listening to every word the Doctor said. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so mortified.

  The Doctor looked at his watch. ‘Meakins early as usual,’ he muttered, hurrying away moodily towards the transept gate.

  Everybody was lined up and I went to my place. I saw Baker whispering to young Hann. Devils, those boys are; absolute devils.

  The canons, like bees crawling out from a queenless hive–the Dean was absent–emerged from the Chapter Room. Old Canon Auty came last of all, fixing everybody–including old Bishop Creighton in his alabaster tomb–with a Mosaic stare and trundling his fist about in his enormous white beard.

  ‘The Lord is in His Holy Temple,’ intoned the Precentor.

  ‘Let all the earth keep silence before Him,’ answered we.

  ‘The Lord be with you.’

  ‘And with thy spirit.’

  ‘Let us pray. Wurra-wurra-wurra-wurra-wurra-wurra, world without end.’

  ‘A-men.’

  Slesser’s velvet tone rang the major third down the aisle. We wandered in–boys with hands clasped in front of them; men with hands clasped behind them; clergy with hands unclasped. The Doctor trailed a sinuous tune from the Choir Gamba. Meakins ostentatiously closed the gates. There was a shuffling of knees upon kneelers. Matins began.

  We had a busy morning at the shop. Father had bought up a large country-house library, very cheap, and we spent all day sorting the stuff out. The place was in the devil of a mess; no room to step anywhere.

  ‘Put up the back-in-twenty,’ ordered father.
‘We can’t have people coming in with wet boots and walking all over these books–not that most of them wouldn’t best serve as doormats.’

  Squeen demurred. He hates putting up that notice. I must say it’s not particularly good for business.

  ‘Do as I tell you, you withered jackanapes, you troll!’ bawled father. ‘And get some new strings for your violin, too. I’m arranging a concert. Back-in-twenty. Go on, you fool.’

  Squeen sighed, hung up the notice and locked the door. Outside, the rain was pouring down, the wind howling. Winter seemed to have come in a night. For the first time in the season we had a fire in the shop. Cosy it was. I liked it. I was sitting on the floor under a table going through a pile of Caroline homilies in yellow binding. Squeen was very active, slithering up and down steps quicker than a piece of soap, and trying to find room for some of the new stuff.

  ‘Alchemy,’ said father, lifting up a massive octavo, leather-bound volume, very old. ‘No,’ he said, ‘astrology. That’s head bumps, isn’t it? Catch, Squeen. Oh, you fool!’

  He hurled the book at Squeen who tottered on the steps and came crashing down.

  ‘My idea,’ said father, ‘is a quartet. Clarionet, two violins and piano. You’ll have to practise, Squeen. I’ll give you some time off.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Squeen is no violinist.’

  ‘I know that. But we can write an easy part for you. Don’t know any music for the combination. We might arrange that tune of mine. I’ve always wanted somebody who could play the clarionet.’

  ‘Who do you reckon is going to play it?’ I asked.

  ‘Now, here’s Paley’s Natural Laws; twelve volumes and leaves uncut. Might give it to Jim and Henry if they ever get married. They could use them as door-stops, I suppose. Clarionet? Miss Holway, of course.’

  ‘If you mean Hargreaves, she doesn’t play the clarionet.’

  ‘This woman you met in Wales, Squeen, polish up this Surtees with some Ronuk and put it in the window with a notice, “Rare Copy”. It’s no value, but some fool of an American’ll probably buy it.’

  ‘Mr Squeen would like to remark that a lady is trying to get into the shop.’

  ‘Pull the blind down then.’

  I heard the yapping of a dog. Father went himself and pulled the blind down, blowing cigarette smoke over the glass. I stayed under the table. There could be no doubt as to the identity of that dog; I knew perfectly well whose stick it was that tapped so impatiently on the pavement.