Summer Half: A Virago Modern Classic (VMC)

by Angela Thirkell

  ‘Whatever will your mother say?’ said Nanny. ‘And it’s nearly breakfast-time. You young gentlemen had better come back and get yourselves nice for breakfast, and your mother will be looking for you, Miss Geraldine.’

  Such is the power of Nannies, even when out of office, that Geraldine went home without a murmur, while the three boys went back to the cottage to wash and change, the frog in his bowl being left in a shady spot to wait for them.

  Mrs Keith came down to breakfast with a letter that Lydia at once recognised as her school report, which must have come by the previous night’s post. Mrs Keith, who never took any particular interest in her children’s education in term time, considering it the affair of their teachers, always fell into a paroxysm of flurry and worry when the reports arrived. Robert and Colin had always done brilliantly, so that she had a very high standard. Kate had not been very clever at school, but so sweet-tempered and obliging that her mistresses had filled up her reports with such remarks as ‘Kate has a very good influence in the Lower Fifth’; ‘Science not very good, but Kate is a conscientious worker’.

  But Lydia, a frank rebel, was apt to earn such unfavourable commentary as ‘Could do far better if she tried or paid attention’, ‘I would like to see Lydia show a more constructive spirit of leadership’, remarks which made Mrs Keith feel that Lydia would never get married, though on what grounds she based this argument, no one knew.

  ‘Your report came last night, Lydia,’ said her mother, next to whom Lydia was unluckily sitting. ‘Father and I are really worried about it. You must do better.’

  ‘Can I see it?’ said Lydia.

  ‘I think better not,’ said Mrs Keith, who believed, in common with many parents, that reports are not only true, but sacred.

  ‘Mother,’ said Colin, ‘did you know that Cousin Eleanor is engaged?’

  This red herring was perfectly successful for a time, leading Mrs Keith into an elaborate analysis of the Purvis family, into which her Aunt Marian, the third daughter of her grandfather’s second marriage, had married. Colin also bore with excellent good-humour his mother’s searching inquisition into the family and personal characteristics of Mr Norris, whom Colin had known fairly well for two terms at Oxford, and never seen again. But like many rather rambling people, she had a way of disconcerting her hearers by suddenly pouncing back upon the subject she had originally started.

  ‘Well, I suppose we’ll have to send Eleanor a present,’ she said. ‘Something out of the silver chest that we don’t want would do nicely. But, Lydia, I cannot see why you only do well in Literature. It seems to be the only subject you got more than sixty marks for. You really must make a great effort next year,’ said Mrs Keith, looking distractedly round the room as if an effort might suddenly materialise before her eyes.

  Before Lydia could speak her father came in from the garden in a state of explosion, to ask who had put all that mess on the lawn. Whoever it was, he said, must tidy it away and get the pond properly cleaned and refilled before they did anything else; did they hear, anything. Mrs Keith asked, ‘What mess?’

  ‘It’s only the pond, Mrs Keith,’ said Morland, who was on her other side. ‘We got most of the weeds out before breakfast, and we shall have it clean by the afternoon.’

  Mr Keith could not scold his guests, for that was against his nature, but he spoke so sharply to Lydia that everyone knew exactly whom he meant, and Noel said in a low voice to Everard that this was one of those conversations so much more embarrassing to the guest than the host. Mrs Keith, while agreeing in principle with her husband, raised the question of church. Mr Keith said church was all very well, and if he didn’t read the lessons there was no one else to do it at this time of year, but the lawn was like a pigsty, and had they heard what he said about tidying it up. Lydia said she had, and suggested to her fellow-workers that they should at once resume their labours. Accordingly the four pond-cleaners went back to their brooms and brushes, with the pleasant certainty that church was now entirely out of the question.

  The rest of the party went suitably to church, some walking, some in the car. After a good deal of shuffling, due to Mrs Keith wishing to sit next to three people at once, Everard and Kate, who had hardly spoken that morning, found themselves side by side, and what was worse, obliged to share, owing to a shortage of prayer books. Each, of course, knew the routine part of the service by heart, and luckily most of the hymns were trusted Ancient and Modern friends, but the psalms they could not pretend to know. Kate, gloved, had great difficulty in turning over the India paper pages of the book, all sticky with gold along the edges, and was already two verses late. Everard felt it his duty as a gentleman to help her, but if he took the book he would have to touch her, and he didn’t know whether she would like it or not. Also, if he did touch her he thought he might go mad, and as he was right at the end of the pew farthest from the door, that would have been uncomfortable for everyone. Kate had by now found the page and held half the book at him, which he gingerly took, but, paper being notoriously unconductive, was able to survive. Neither of them had any singing voice, and each was ashamed of making before the other the humble noise which represented their usual attempt at worshipping with song. Also, no one knows how many words of any given verse of a psalm are to be gobbled together onto one or two notes, and whatever one does is wrong. Kate listened enviously to Edith’s clear, assured voice on her other side, and took refuge in moving her lips to the words. Everard made some ill-advised attempts to follow the choir, lost heart, and knew Kate must be despising him. As the psalms finished they both let go of the book, which balanced for a second on the edge of the empty pew in front, and fell over onto the floor. During the sermon both had ample leisure to reflect upon the astounding beauty of emotion as roused by the involuntary contact of elbows, and left the church very little better than they came in.

  Colin and the universal uncle said they would go for a walk before lunch, so the Keiths, senior and junior, drove home, leaving Kate and Everard to walk, which they did in a state of confusion, affection, silence and stuttering despair. The sight of the honeysuckle above the garden gate gave Everard an idea which appealed strongly to the romantic side of his nature.

  ‘I kept it,’ he said to Kate, in an unnatural voice.

  ‘What?’ said Kate, shying.

  ‘I kept it.’

  ‘Did you?’ said Kate with an air of great interest. ‘Oh, kept what?’

  For answer Everard put his hand into his coat pocket, rummaged, and withdrew it empty. Annoyed but determined, he plunged into his other pocket, pulled out a handkerchief, a tobacco pouch and three bus tickets. Even more annoyed he felt again and pulled the pocket inside out. Out fell some biscuit crumbs and a piece of dead vegetation. Everard picked it up. It certainly looked horrid after a night spent among tobacco and crumbs.

  ‘Oh,’ said Kate, awe-struck, ‘you kept it!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Everard. ‘I – I kept it. I thought it wouldn’t matter.’

  Kate said in a very small voice, ‘But it does matter,’ and walked quickly into the house.

  Everard now realised that he had wantonly offended Kate as deeply as a woman can be offended. If one cared for a man very much, so much that one let him put his arm round one, one could not like another man to keep a bit of honeysuckle one had given him from the overflowing charity of one’s happiness. In fact, a man who kept a bit of honeysuckle under such conditions was a cad and a bounder. Having faced this fact with gloomy relish, he put the honeysuckle back into his pocket and went in to lunch.

  As the afternoon was so hot, Mrs Keith finally decided on tea in the garden room. This pleasant room had been added to the house in about 1820 and was approached by a glass door from the library. Its walls were white, with columns painted on them, and it was lighted by an immense French window opening on to the terrace, and an equally large sash window which looked over the lawn. Palmer resented it so much, considering that a room onto the garden was not a parlour-maid’s legitimate
province, that Mrs Keith had put a service hatch from the kitchen passage, but she might as well have spent her money on something else, as Palmer preferred to carry trays through the library with a sense of injury. Mrs Keith had then bought an excellent tea-trolley with rubber wheels and ball bearings. This Palmer occasionally consented to push before her as if it were a dust-cart that she unfortunately found herself obliged to drive. However, with nine in the house, apart from Robert’s children, and a party coming from the Rectory, and Miss Pettinger, Mrs Keith felt that an informal tea with tennis players coming and going would best meet the case, and Palmer said, ‘Very well, if you wish, madam,’ in a voice of ice.

  Lydia, Swan and Morland, after snatching a hasty lunch of salmon mayonnaise, roast beef, potatoes, peas, French beans, salad, chocolate soufflé, charlotte russe, cream cheese, Bath Oliver biscuits, raspberries and cream, begged to be excused coffee and returned to the scene of their labours, promising that the pond would be ready by tea-time. Hacker basely deserted them to spend his afternoon with Henry and Catherine pretending to fish for whales with bulrushes in the rainwater-tank in the kitchen garden, with the frog in his bowl to keep them company.

  Soon after three Edith’s brothers roared up in the sports car, prepared for tennis, and were warmly greeted by Mrs Keith who hadn’t seen them since their return to England, and loved to have young people about. Edith was just going to take them off to the tennis-court when the Rectory party arrived. Geraldine, much to her annoyance, had been forced by her mother to put on a fresh afternoon frock and accompany her elders. However, Mrs Birkett had accepted Geraldine’s quite truthful statement that the frock she had worn that morning had got torn and had pronounced it only fit for the rag-bag, so Geraldine was not altogether ill-content.

  Rose, in white muslin with a blue sash that matched her blue eyes, at once claimed the Fairweathers as her own, and said they could take her on the river.

  ‘Not on your sweet life, my girl,’ said Fairweather Senior, with great want of gallantry. ‘Tennis for us. The muscles are getting flabby with evil living. You’re coming out with us tonight. Come on, John.’

  ‘Oughtn’t one of you to stay with Rose?’ asked Edith, as she walked with her brothers to the court.

  ‘Why?’ said Fairweather Junior. ‘We took her out last night, and we’re taking her out tonight. Besides, it’s time she paid a little attention to Winter. After all, the chap’s engaged to her and he doesn’t seem to get much of a show. Gosh, if the girl I was engaged to went off with two handsome young fellows like me and Geoff, I’d have a word to say. But I suppose schoolmasters are hardly human, poor fish. Who is playing?’

  ‘Robert and me to start with,’ said Edith. ‘Mr Merton and Kate as extras. We can get more if we want them. Mr Carter is good, so is Colin.’

  Rose was for once utterly disconcerted when her devoted cavaliers left her without even a backward glance, and got rid of some of her mortification by snubbing Philip severely. Everard, who was not intending to play till after tea, tried to intervene but did more harm than good. He wished he could get Noel to come, whose pleasant, easy way of talking might placate Rose and draw the lightning from the unfortunate Philip. But Noel was playing tennis, and in any case it would be another act of caddish bounderism to get the man that the girl one worshipped was very fond of to break her heart by paying attention to a flibbertigibbet. So he did nothing, and Rose relapsed into sulky silence. To the Keiths and the Birketts sitting under a shady tulip tree on the lawn, with Palmer bringing tea into the garden room and happy sounds coming from the tennis-court, everything seemed very delightful. Little did they think that to the three people sitting with them the sky was black, the earth a desert. Everard admired Philip’s restraint under Rose’s pinpricks and wondered how long he would remain patient under such treatment. Philip was wondering exactly the same thing. He felt that as long as he stayed at the Rectory he must repay the Birketts’ hospitality and forbearance by courtesy to Rose, and at least the show of a fidelity which, he could not but admit, his heart no longer felt. To his unhappy situation he saw no outlet which honour could allow, and hoped vaguely that on his Russian visit he might somehow turn into someone else, or even get sent to Siberia by mistake.

  Palmer now came across the lawn, followed by Miss Pettinger, and handed her over to Mrs Keith as one who renounced all responsibility for misfortune. Miss Pettinger, who held the mistaken belief that when off duty she was almost as others, though better educated and more important, was in dark blue flowered chiffon with a large hat, and many of her pupils would have agreed that she had overdone it a bit.

  But nothing could surpass her graciousness to Mr Birkett as a Fellow Worker and almost an equal, or the nicely graded difference in her greeting to Everard, whose position as a housemaster gave him a status that she could not deny. To Philip, though but an assistant master, she bowed, for one owes a duty to oneself, and noblesse oblige. Rose, who was lolling in a deck chair, suddenly had an extraordinary experience. Her year of freedom, her four engagements, were annihilated. She suddenly felt, and much resented the feeling, that she was Rose Birkett of the Fifth Form, and that she had again failed in her Matric. Unwillingly she rose to her feet, unwillingly she came forward. Miss Pettinger disentangled her pince-nez from her scarf, adjusted it, and looked at her ex-pupil.

  ‘Oh, it’s Rose Birkett,’ she said. ‘How are you, dear?’

  To Rose’s horror and everlasting shame, an unseen power caused her to take Miss Pettinger’s proffered hand and drop a slight curtsy as she said, ‘Quite well, thank you, Miss Pettinger.’

  Miss Pettinger said graciously that she was glad Rose had not forgotten the rule of courtesy inculcated at the High School. Mrs Birkett silently thanked heaven that Rose was behaving nicely, and Rose retired to her seat, her bosom torn with rage and mortification. Presently Palmer announced tea. Mrs Keith asked her to ring the outside bell so that the tennis players could hear, which she did with resentment in every line of her body. Mrs Keith and her guests went up to the garden room and the tennis players came dropping in by ones and twos till the whole party was assembled except Hacker and the pond-cleaners.

  Mr and Mrs Birkett could not think why the afternoon was so unexpectedly pleasant, and if the thought occurred to them separately that they rarely attended a social gathering with their elder daughter at which she did not monopolise the attention of the whole company, and through sheer want of personality bring the talk to her own level, the thought was loyally suppressed. What increased Rose’s indignation was that Edith Keith, whom she had dismissed in her mind as a negligible grown-up, was the heroine of the moment. With her two brothers, to whom she was devoted, as they to her, she made the centre of a group of cheerful if not very intellectual talk. Miss Pettinger, though she had regretted Edith Fairweather’s lack of ambition for a university career, now looked benignly on her former Captain of Hockey, Captain of Cricket and, for Miss Pettinger disapproved of a too slavish adherence to the methods of the Public Schools and liked to invent some of her own titles, her former Girl of Honour, for such was Miss Pettinger’s beautiful interpretation of the more prosaic Captain of the School. Edith had then made a very suitable marriage and produced two well-behaved children, a career which Miss Pettinger, no bigot though herself a virgin, found worthy of her approval. To Edith she unbent and condescended to remember how the School had beaten the Hosiers’ Girls’ Foundation School by one run, Edith carrying her bat. To her Edith showed the sprightly reverence which Miss Pettinger found so sadly lacking in the modern girl. Miss Pettinger then broke in upon a quiet talk that Everard was having with Mr Birkett about the Lower Fourth, and drew them both into the conversation with the easy tact of a university woman.

  Presently Edith’s children came into view on the lawn, still accompanied by Hacker and the frog. Edith called her offspring and asked Hacker what they were going to do with the frog. Henry, who had taken Hacker under his protection, answered for him that Aunt Lydia was going to fill the pon
d and they were going to put froggie in the water. Mr Keith, roused by the mention of the pond, said Twicker had no business to let Lydia make all that mess, and he must speak to him.

  It was just about at this moment that Lydia came in. She had changed her pond clothes for more civilised attire, and seemed in excellent spirits.

  ‘Hullo, Miss Pettinger,’ she said, shaking hands with the warmth of a generous and forgiving nature, and quite forgetting to curtsy. ‘I say, we’ve got the pond clean. We’re going to have a Grand Opening and turn the water on. You can all come as soon as you’ve had your tea. The goldfish were there all the time. I mean Twicker had taken them out because he thought we might hurt them, and he’s got them in a bucket and we’re going to put them back as soon as the water’s in. I say, Geoff, what about you and John giving me a hand with the top sluice? It’s got stuck a bit, and Tony and Eric can’t move it. They’ve gone to clean up for the Opening, and Geraldine’s keeping guard.’

  The Fairweathers rose as one man.

  ‘You can come too, Philip,’ said Lydia. ‘It’ll cheer you up. Come on. We’ll get the gong out of the hall and take it down with us. You can all come down as soon as you hear it.’

  Swept away by her enthusiasm, the three young men followed in her tempestuous wake through the library to the hall, where they collected the gong, and so on to the pond. John had the good idea of taking the extra horn off his car and bringing it too, a suggestion that met with Lydia’s full approval.