by Frank Baker
At that sacred moment, Lady Hargreaves appeared upon the dais.
Limping across the dais she reached the gates as Meakins was on the point of closing them. She did not hurry, neither did she linger; obviously, it never crossed her mind that Meakins might close the gates upon her, as he had been known to do upon many a bishop’s wife. A thousand eyes that had, a second before, been fixed upon the Judge, now swivelled to her. It was seen that she was carrying a miniature posy of autumn rosebuds, exquisitely woven together with white silk ribbon. ‘Too bad of me–too bad of me!’ we heard her murmur to Meakins. For the first time in his life, and I dare say the last, he admitted a person into the Choir at the precise moment when the wicked man, via the Precentor, was about to turn away from his wickedness and direct his attention to Morning Prayer–and that on a Sunday morning when His Majesty’s Justice was present. Never in the history of Cornford Cathedral had tradition been so gracefully violated.
But what did she do with her posy? What thunderbolt descended upon her as, stopping under the Judge’s stall, she curtsied slightly and reaching up to the desk placed the rosebuds gently upon the embroidered desk-cushion?
No thunderbolt descended. Not one single eyebrow flickered its displeasure. In other words, she got away with it. The lady who had been accused of conspiring with anarchists had made what all silently interpreted as a declaration of her innocence. Almost imperceptibly, Mr Justice Hurlstone was seen to smile; taking the rosebuds he raised them towards his nose, then laid them down a little to one side of the massive Prayer Book before him. Enough. Justice had smiled; openly, the Dean smiled; the Suffragan Bishop of Maidenhead whispered something to the Archdeacon of Wycombe; both smiled and nodded. The lay-clerks grinned; an unfortunate probationer giggled, and was frowned upon by Baker. The Precentor, instead of turning the wicked man away, dared to bid God not to enter into judgment with His servant. Lady Hargreaves, her mission accomplished, walked peacefully to her stall, pausing for a moment to lift a page of an anthem book which had fluttered down upon King John’s tomb. ‘Your anthem, I imagine?’ she murmured to Baker, at the top of Decani. Baker took the page from her, flushing crimson. ‘Thank you, Lady Hargreaves,’ he said, making a gallant attempt to show his juniors that he was accustomed to the society of the great ones of the earth.
The Lord Justice, his sallow face again a mask, sank to his knees. Lady Hargreaves took off her gloves, glanced round her, adjusted her horn spectacles, and opened her white ivory Prayer Book. A thousand knees nested on five hundred hassocks. Matins began.
I watched her, half proudly, half uneasily, during the singing of Stanford’s Te Deum in B flat. ‘We praise thee, O Hargreaves!’ I sang to myself. To-morrow night, after the concert, I proposed to travel to Lusk. Could I hope to do anything? Did I want to do anything? Pride flooded up in me. Who else in the world had been able to create an old lady with the courage to present roses to the Judge on Assize Sunday?
My eyes turned to the wrinkled little Judge. Would he one day apply the black cap for my benefit, supposing that . . .
‘Well, dear,’ said Archie in the vestry afterwards, ‘did she ever offer you posies?’
‘Serve her bloody well right,’ growled Dyack, ‘if they turned out to be full of green-fly.’
‘She seems to have h-lost all interest in you, Huntley,’ said Wadge. ‘I hoped we’d hear the banns h-read out by Christmas.’
‘Why do judges wear all that false hair?’ asked Peaty. ‘Bald, or what?’
‘Black cap sits better on a wig,’ remarked Slesser.
I shivered. ‘Suppose,’ I asked him suddenly, ‘they can’t find the body? Can they prosecute you for murder?’
‘Why, dear? Are you thinking of cutting your countess up?’
I shivered again and hung up my cassock.
‘That chap,’ said Dyack, ‘could hang a spider on his own web. Who put my bloody ’at up there? I’ve got enemies ’ere, I know. Things ain’t what they was. Roses!’
‘Did anybody notice that woman putting something on the Judge’s Prayer Book?’ purred Pussy Coltsfoot.
‘Posy,’ hummed Peaty in his ear.
‘That’s just what I thought,’ said Pussy. ‘Very nosy. It shouldn’t be allowed.’
I walked out into the Close with Archie. By the side door to the Deanery we came upon a little group, chatting amiably. The Dean, Archdeacon Cutler, Lady Hargreaves and Mr Justice Hurlstone.
‘You must positively command it always to be done,’ Lady Hargreaves was saying to the Judge. ‘It should, of course, have been presented to you at the moment of your entry into the Cathedral, but a minor domestic catastrophe delayed me, just as I was leaving my house. I trust, I do indeed trust, that I was not importunate?’
The Judge smiled gravely. ‘Perhaps you will have established a precedent, Lady Hargreaves. Who knows?’
I paused, with Archie, some yards away, and listened. None of them had seen me yet.
‘What’s this–ah–catastrophe?’ the Archdeacon was asking. ‘Nothing serious, I hope?’
‘Oh, no! Perhaps you remember that tiresome cockatoo of mine? Yes? I keep him in the kitchen solely to amuse the staff. Well, I am sorry to say that he escaped this morning and, driven by some avian instinct which we are powerless to comprehend, made a quite ferocious attack upon my poor little dog, Sarah.’
‘I hope the dog was not badly hurt?’ said the Dean.
‘On the contrary. Dr Pepusch–that is the fanciful name some stupid friend of mine gave to the bird–perished as a result of the encounter. I cannot say I am at all sorry.’
Here Archie said something to me. Hearing him, Lady Hargreaves turned round, glanced at us for a moment, frowned, and quite deliberately waited until we had passed before she went on with the conversation. As we turned under the Northgate I was able to hear her say, ‘Judge, what particular medicine do you reserve for tiresome young men who pester harmless old ladies like myself? Have you–’
I heard no more.
‘It’s no good worrying, mother. I’ve made up my mind to go away. The Dean said I could.’
‘But if you’re really ill, why don’t you see a doctor?’
‘It’s a change I want. I’m run down.’
‘Well, if doing nothing can run you down, you ought to be dead by now,’ said Jim.
‘Ireland!’ exclaimed mother. ‘What on earth do you want to go to Ireland for? I’m absolutely positive this wretched Lady Hargreaves is behind it all.’
‘No, mother,’ I said. ‘I’m behind her.’
Father was struggling with a skewer in the sirloin.
‘Can’t go till after the concert,’ he said. ‘Nobody understands my tune like you do.’
‘I shan’t miss that. We’re catching the night train to Heysham to-morrow.’
‘We? Who’s “we”?’ asked Jim.
‘Henry. He’s coming too.’
Mother planked a roast potato on my plate. She looked at me searchingly, holding a fork in her hand.
‘Now, just what monkey-trick are you two up to?’ she demanded.
‘Wish you’d see to the gravy,’ mumbled father. ‘I can’t be expected to carve and do the gravy, can I? Wonder whether those roses came out of her own garden?’
‘I’m just sick to death,’ cried mother, ‘of this story of the Judge and the roses! If you’ve told it once you’ve told it a dozen times since you came in. I’m sick to death of everything to do with Lady Hargreaves! As for you, Cornelius, I’m tired of you. You make no attempt to get the truth out of Norman. What am I going to say to everybody? Norman’s gone away Why? they will ask.’
‘Simply say he’s gone dotty,’ said Jim.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’ll do. Pass the horseradish sauce.’
‘I’d give anything to see you settle down,’ sighed mother.
‘Talking about judges,’ remarked father, ‘I once saw, at the Chelsea Flower Show, Mr Justice Dearest. Bending over some peonies, he was; just bending over them like you or me. A fellow cam
e up and said, “Excuse me, but you mustn’t bend over the peonies like that”. Well beans, please–this fellow later came up for murder before Mr Justice What’s-his-name, and in summing up he said to the jury, “In considering this case you must, as an old Spanish saying goes, bend over the peonies”. Jury returned a verdict of not guilty. Wish Janie would skim the gravy more. One day, ’bout a year later, Mr Justice Whatever-he-is meets the fellow on top of a bus, carrying a large bunch of heleniums. They were going down the Tottenham Court Road, just past the Y.M.C.A.—or is it the Y.M.C.A.? Of course, there’s good and bad in these C.A.’s –good and bad. You’d better complain to the butcher, Dorothy; this meat’s like leather.’
‘Monday, October the 31st. Vigil of the Feast of All the Saints. Is C. H. soon to join them?’
My diary recalls a memorable evening.
Father, wearing a velvet dinner-jacket, prowled up and down the room, impatiently twirling his moustaches and fussing his tie.
‘Give me another glass of that claret,’ he said, ‘and a cigarette. Funny thing, I’m nervous. Why the devil can’t we start? I expect Grinling Gibbons used this room to work in. Fine writer!’
‘He didn’t write,’ I said, pouring some claret from a Georgian decanter and straining to hear the chatter of the company from the adjoining room. ‘He carved–pews and things.’
‘I wonder whether this concert’s on the air? I see they’ve got the telephone here. Find the Radio Times.’
‘Of course it’s not on the air.’
‘Everything’s on the air, boy. Wish you wouldn’t wear those made-up bows; anyone can see you didn’t tie it yourself.’
‘I wish you’d shut up, father. I did tie it myself, anyway.’
‘Well, tie it more carelessly next time. You don’t understand these things, my boy. Give me A.’ He drew his bow over the A string. ‘Suppose that’s in tune. Do you think they’d like my story about the spinach? When will that archdeacon stop talking? I’ve never found an archdeacon yet who could stop talking. Give me one of those cream-cheese things. What have you done with my mute, you devil?’
For some time we had been waiting in a small parlour which Lady Hargreaves used as a writing-room. It had a small upright piano in it. The grand, a Bechstein, was in the adjoining room, the drawing-room. Through the open double doors I could see the guests, some standing, some seated, far at the other end. The Dean, Canon and Mrs Auty, Archdeacon and Mrs Cutler, Colonel Temperley and Miss Linkinghorne. Austen and the Irish maid were offering round drinks and refreshments. A little apart from the others in a high, episcopal-looking oak chair, sat the hostess, her two sticks resting on either arm. Wearing a black silk dress with a high white lace collar and one green-stoned ring on her left hand, it seemed to me that she was at the height of her glory. All the appendages, such as whistle, pencil-on-chain, lorgnettes, with which I had first endowed her, had long ago been discarded. There was something sweetly ascetic about her; I could no longer feel she was my creation. It made me sad.
The Archdeacon was trumpeting on foreign policy. What we needed, according to him, was a firm hand. He declared it was essential.
‘No doubt about it, Lady Hargreaves. We English were born to govern. What did Blake say? Build Jerusalem here. Well, there’s still time.’
‘I trust it will not be jerry-built,’ said Lady Hargreaves rather sharply. Then she smiled at him graciously, with an air of patronage that completely escaped him. ‘But, no doubt,’ she said, ‘if the archidiaconal trowel is applied to the mortar, we need not fear the city will collapse. Canon–you are not eating anything. Take one of these Strasbourg pâtés, I beg you.’
‘This is so nice,’ murmured Miss Linkinghorne. She was wearing white in honour of the saints. ‘So nice. So much more interesting than a mere dinner.’
‘Time and place for everything,’ remarked the Colonel, doggedly engaging himself with a recalcitrant siphon in a corner by the fire. ‘No armchairs in Persia. They sit on the floor.’
‘This delightful informality,’ continued Miss Linkinghorne, ‘puts me in mind of the East, somehow. The Archdeacon mentioning the Holy City brought it all so vividly before me. Have you ever been there, Lady Hargreaves?’
‘Probably. I have been almost everywhere. Mrs Auty, I can see you are positively stifling. Take this little rush seat here. It comes from Norway and was once the property of Grieg.’
‘And you really composed all these verses yourself! Well!’ Mrs Auty, moving to the Grieg chair, had pounced on a copy of Wayside Bundle lying conveniently at hand on an occasional table.
‘Oh, dear!’ cried Lady Hargreaves. ‘How did you come by that? Where did you find it? These stupid servants! They will not put things away.’
‘Oh, let me look at it! Do let me look at it. I think poetry is so important.’
Miss Linkinghorne reached out for the volume, but Mrs Auty had already claimed it. She was a very large woman, Mrs Auty, whose great ambition in life was to run Cornford. Mrs Cutler had always been her Waterloo. Canon Auty, it was said, had first met his wife on a mountain in Switzerland, where he found her presiding over an impending avalanche. The choristers called her Excelsior.
But she was not to be allowed to preside over poetry. Firmly, yet gently, Lady Hargreaves took the book from her.
‘It should never have been left lying about.’ She spoke almost angrily. Then, idly, she opened it. ‘Tch-tch!’ she murmured. ‘“Cleft in the narrow gulf of gusty grief . . . ” What a line!’ She snapped the book to contemptuously and threw it aside on the table, well within Mrs Auty’s reach.
‘For pure beauty, take Shelley,’ said the Colonel. ‘Eh, Dean?’
Mrs Cutler, a thin female with eyes that could have drawn the past life out of a paper-weight, snatched the volume a second before Mrs Auty could again take it. Lady Hargreaves, murmuring something to Austen, did not notice.
‘Archer–Archer?’ Mrs Cutler screwed up her eyes, boring her gimlet nose deep into the pages. ‘Archdeacon, didn’t we know a clergyman called Archer–Philip Archer?’
‘Archer? H’m. Yes. I was up at Cambridge with a Philip Archer. He rowed in the Cambridge boat in ’81. Fine athlete.’
Lady Hargreaves, the moment she heard the name, rose and walked slowly towards the Archdeacon.
‘You knew Archer?’ she cried.
‘Think it must be the same man. Years since I saw him, of course. I heard he was married and had five daughters–’
‘The same–the same!’ Lady Hargreaves returned to her chair, closed her eyes and bent her head into her hands as a person does suddenly overcome by memories of the past. A respectful and slightly embarrassed silence fell over the company. The Archdeacon cocked his head towards the Dean inquiringly. Meanwhile, Mrs Cutler was rushing through Wayside Bundle in search of plums from the Archer tree.
‘When the hell are we going to start this music?’ said father, brutally breaking the silence.
All eyes turned on us. Lady Hargreaves, rousing herself from her reverie, sighed deeply and smiled a sad, far-away, reminiscent smile.
‘Forgive me, my friends,’ she murmured, ‘I trust that I am usually in control of my feelings. But I admit that the name Archer still has power to affect me.’
‘No good trying to hide feelings,’ mumbled the Colonel. ‘Never could myself. Don’t believe in it.’
‘Mr Archer,’ continued Lady Hargreaves, ‘many years ago–oh, so many years ago!–was my dearest friend. I still treasure a hip-bath that he once gave me–Oh, no!’ Her hand shot up imperiously as though to check at once any possibility of innuendo. Mrs Cutler worried Wayside Bundle from page to page. ‘Oh, no! It is not a story I can repeat except to the very, very closest friend.’
She glanced at the Dean.
‘Oh, quite, quite!’ he murmured.
‘I knew him,’ she went on, ‘at the University. Mad young things–wild young things! What days! Do the young people of to-day have so good a time, I wonder!’
‘There’s a
lot of looseness about,’ said Mrs Cutler. ‘A terrible lot of looseness. Eh, Archdeacon?’
The Archdeacon tightened himself up, worried his coat buttons and nodded irritably.
‘Oh, I don’t agree,’ said Mrs Auty, who would rather die than agree with Mrs Cutler. ‘Let young people have a good time, that’s what I say. I always had a good time. People ought to have a good time. The Canon agrees, don’t you, Edward?’
Canon Auty, who had sat silent most of the evening, stroked his beard reflectively as though there, and only there, could a good time be found. ‘A good time,’ he said. ‘Yes. A good time. Let people enjoy themselves provided there is no–horseplay.’
‘Archer and I,’ remarked Lady Hargreaves, ‘were precisely of that opinion. As for horseplay, I have never favoured it and I never will. Is not that light a little trying for your eyes, Mrs Cutler? Take this seat, I beg you. My poor little book seems to entertain you. Yes,’ she continued in a reminiscent tone, ‘they were halcyon days–“halcyon days, wrapped in high summer’s indigenous haze . . . ” I quote from one of those youthful and yet perhaps spirited indiscretions in Wayside Bundle. No, my good Miss Linkinghorne, put the book down — I positively insist! Yes, dear–Archer was my afflatus in those happy days.’
‘Really?’ said the Colonel, peering over his glass. ‘Afflatus, eh?’ He suddenly winked at the Dean.
‘Halcyon days–!’ echoed Miss Linkinghorne. ‘How lovely! But how unusually lovely! There is something of the eternal abandon of the East in those words.’
‘Too much abandon about, eh, Archdeacon?’
‘I do think,’ remarked the Dean sleepily, ‘that our hostess ought to read us some of her verses. We all know she is a far more accomplished poet than her modesty allows her to admit. Come now, Lady Hargreaves!’
‘Oh, but I could not I could not! Oh, no! Do not tempt me. I abominate fuss!’
(Did I imagine it, or was something of the old Miss Hargreaves creeping into her voice?)
‘Please–please, Lady Hargreaves,’ purred the Linkinghorne. ‘I am so very fond of poetry.’
