There had been, she felt, something a little undignified in throwing a ring at a person, especially when it didn’t hit him, and although the episode itself had given her a very dashing feeling at the time, she was a little ashamed on looking back, and decided that she must redeem her character in Philip’s eyes. Thank goodness she wasn’t engaged to him any more, but he might as well have a good opinion of her, because that made one feel better.
Thinking of a precedent to follow, the name of Ophelia naturally suggested itself. It was true that Ophelia had an unsympathetic father who ordered her to give up Hamlet, and that she was in any case on the verge of going mad, but Ophelia was a heroine and everyone was sorry for her, and this Rose thought a pleasant combination. She could not quite persuade herself that her father and mother had persecuted her, and she didn’t feel at all mad, but one thing she could do was to give Philip back the letters he had written to her while she was on the Algerian cruise, letters into which poor Philip had poured everything that would least interest his beloved.
She now therefore from the bosom of her dress, thus explaining a rather lumpy appearance for which Philip had been unable to account, pulled a small packet which she handed to her former lover. It was tied up with a piece of blue ribbon stamped at intervals with the name of a well-known chocolate shop, and endorsed: Phillips letters.
‘I thought you’d better have them back,’ said Rose.
These were not exactly Ophelia’s words, but beautiful as Rose felt these words to be, she could never quite memorise them and this was after all their sense.
Philip, uncomfortably conscious that he had not kept the three postcards she had sent him from the cruise, and so had nothing to give her in exchange, thanked her.
‘You could burn them now,’ said Rose, who had in some ways a practical outlook.
Philip thought the advice good. As he dropped the letters one by one into the smouldering garden stuff in the incinerator, he thought of the mixture of love and politics he had inflicted on Rose, the contented egoism which had thought the highest compliment he could pay was to write at great length about himself. The more he considered this, the more he realised that his feeling for her had not been the pure and unselfish passion he had imagined. He had treated her too much as an audience, had not made enough allowance for her extreme youth and her childish mind. It seemed to him in this access of self-examination that Rose might have found her bonds as galling as he found his. If so, she had had courage for them both when she broke the engagement, a step he would not himself have had the courage to take, or even to suggest.
‘I can’t tell you how nice it is not being engaged,’ said Rose with deep satisfaction.
The words so chimed with what Philip had been thinking that he felt a pang of remorse for the inexplicable puzzle that her engagement to him must have been to her.
‘I don’t know how it is,’ Rose continued, wrinkling her forehead in the effort to reduce her rambling thoughts to some kind of order and explain them to Philip, ‘but I always seem to get engaged. People will ask one. It isn’t that I mind being engaged,’ she said, evidently feeling that this made everything clear, ‘but being engaged seems to make people so dull. Mr Smalley at Miss Pettinger’s was so dull, talking about old masters and things and Herr Lob at Munich got awfully dull when he had proposed, and talked about nothing but orchestras, and as for Lieutenant von Storck, he talked so much about what he was going to do when he retired from the army and went to live on his father’s estate somewhere or other, that I was awfully glad when Mummy sent for me to come home.’
This, the longest consecutive sentence that Philip had ever heard Rose utter, made him feel even more guilty than before. He could hardly fathom the depths of boredom that this pretty creature, who lived entirely on pleasure and was so suited for it, must have experienced with her various admirers. How much more fitting it was that she should racket with the Fairweathers.
‘I suppose I was dull too,’ he said.
‘Ghastly,’ said Rose. ‘It isn’t because I don’t like you, Philip. I think you’re marvellous, but being engaged was so awful that I think this is much better. If only you could have got a job, but being a master in Daddy’s school and all about Greek and Latin is too sickening.’
‘Yes, I was dull,’ said Philip, ‘and I hope you’ll forgive me. And I’d like to say thank you very much for having been engaged to me, and for being brave enough to stop being engaged. I couldn’t have done it. And now, don’t get engaged to anyone else for a bit unless you are really sure he isn’t dull.’
‘I’ll say No, whoever it is,’ said Rose emphatically. ‘It’ll be marvellous practice, and if he is really keen he can always ask me again. If it was anyone as dull as Mr Merton I’d say No at once. He thinks he’s amusing, but he hasn’t seen anything, not even Passion in the Purple, that one about Cardinals that we saw last night, and if a film gets to Barchester it means it’s been released for simply months. Let’s see if the paper has come.’
As he accompanied her back to the house, Philip wondered how he could ever have been so silly as to think he was jealous of Noel Merton.
The post had arrived when they got back. Philip saw one rather dull-looking letter for him with a typewritten address and opened it without enthusiasm, thinking it was a bill or a receipt. He read it once, looked perplexed, and read it again.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said to Mr Birkett, who was opening his letters at a tremendous rate, and tossing them into piles, saying as he did so, ‘Parent, Governor, bill, Governor, staff, parent, female parent blast her, guardian, bill…’
‘Stop playing tinker, tailor for a moment, dear,’ said Mrs Birkett, ‘Philip wants to speak to you.’
‘Well?’ said Mr Birkett. ‘I do wish, Amy, that Holinshed’s father would keep his advice for his own parish. The mere fact of his having taken orders at an unusually late period of his life does not make him an authority on the running of a large school. What is it, Philip?’
‘Would you mind reading this letter, sir?’ said Philip.
Mr Birkett glanced through it.
‘Very satisfactory,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think they’d offer you anything myself. I thought they’d want you to pay. Ten pounds in advance on royalties is a nice little sum. Congratulations.’
‘Is it true?’ asked Philip, his eyes sparkling.
‘Well, I should think so,’ said Mr Birkett. ‘It’s the Oxbridge Press notepaper. I don’t suppose anyone would go to the trouble of forging it. Now, where did I put Gibbs and Hudson’s letter about the boiler?’
‘But do they really mean they’ll publish it?’ said Philip, sticking to his point.
‘Nothing less,’ said Mr Birkett. ‘You’ll never make another penny out of it, of course. It’s a pity you didn’t make it a bit less scholarly; we might have got it onto the school book list then. Never mind, it will be quite a good advertisement if you want a job in another school. Amy, I’m going to write letters in the study. I won’t see anyone before lunch.’
He collected his correspondence and went off. Mrs Birkett asked what it all was, and when Philip showed her the letter in which the Oxbridge University Press announced their pleasure in accepting a book of fifty thousand words on the Epistles of Horace by Philip Winter, with an advance on royalties of ten pounds, and no mention of American rights, she was as pleased and enthusiastic as even Philip could have wished. Rose, grasping the fact that something marvellous had happened, almost as good as a job, was also loud in congratulation, and flinging her arms round Philip’s neck, kissed him with delightful want of affection and a general desire to be agreeable.
The Messrs Fairweather, arriving at this moment, were suitably shocked.
‘I say, I say,’ said Fairweather Senior, ‘this is a bit hard on us poor bachelors.’
‘Don’t be sickening, Geoff,’ said Rose. ‘Philip and I got unengaged yesterday, didn’t I tell you? And he’s an author.’
‘Oh, I say!’ said the Fairweathers,
in tones expressing sympathy about the engagement and respectful admiration of an author.
‘It is really the greatest relief to us both,’ said Philip, ‘and no one need be sorry. Rose was simply splendid about it, and we were just saying goodbye.’
Fairweather Junior remarked gallantly that he wished Rose would say goodbye like that to him, and did she want to see the otter hunt at Plumstead. With shrieks of joy Rose said she did, and even the inclusion of Geraldine in the party did not dim the pleasure. As they crowded out to the racing car, Rose turned back and caught at Philip’s hand.
‘You’ve been really marvellous,’ she said, and fled from the room. Philip felt that he cared more truly for her as she left him than he had ever done before, and that the joy of losing her and having his book accepted was almost more than he could bear.
Fairweather Senior came back into the room holding a telegram.
‘So sorry, I forgot this, Mrs Birkett,’ he said. ‘We met the post-woman with this telegram for Mr Birkett, so we took it to save her walking. She said it seemed important, so she hadn’t telephoned it in case there was any mistake.’
‘Thank you, Geoff,’ said Mrs Birkett. ‘I’ll take it to him now.’
‘Oh, Mrs Birkett,’ said Philip, ‘could you wait one moment? Do you think the proofs will come soon?’
Mrs Birkett looked kindly at him, thinking, as she sometimes did, what fun it would have been to have a son, and how one could guide and help him; a sentiment of whose underlying fallacy she was quite unconscious.
‘Not for quite a long time, probably,’ she said. ‘They are very busy, and you have to take your turn.’
‘Oh, of course,’ said Philip, ‘but I thought it would be a pity if I went to Russia and the proofs came while I was away.’
‘You can be quite certain they won’t do that,’ said Mrs Birkett, and went into the study. Philip was, on the whole, disappointed, but bore it bravely. And after all Mrs Birkett had never had a book accepted and published by a University Press, and couldn’t understand. Pleasant if vague visions of printers’ devils waiting day and night outside his door, glowing notices in The Times and the Classical Review, money pouring into his account, these were filling his mind when Mrs Birkett came in, looking perturbed, and said her husband wanted to see him at once in the study.
On Monday morning Mrs Twicker, who never let public holidays interfere with her pleasures, had the washing in soak by six o’clock. By half-past six her three lodgers were down, anxious to be allowed to get in her way. Though Mrs Twicker still held to it that the wash-house was no place for young gentlemen, she could not resist the thought of having the boys all to herself for a whole morning, and gave in. Twicker undertook to leave a message at the kitchen door that they were breakfasting at the cottage, and the boys then chopped wood for the copper fire, and lighted it with a ruinous expenditure of matches and paper which shocked and yet pleased Mrs Twicker, as showing that the gentry still possessed the combined incompetence and wastefulness which she so much admired.
‘If you had joined the School Scouts, as Holy Joe asked you to,’ said Swan to Morland, ‘this wouldn’t have happened.’
‘I’ll tell you what would have happened,’ said Morland, ‘we wouldn’t have had a fire at all. Do you remember the time Holy Joe tried to light a camp fire with three matches, and they were the three that some fool had used and put back in the box, and what the troop told us about his Biblical language? What do we do now, Nanny?’
‘Breakfast, sir,’ said Mrs Twicker. ‘It’s fried eggs and bacon, and some of my bread you like, and my new strawberry jam.’
‘Lydia’ll be sorry she’s missing this,’ said Swan with his mouth full.
Mrs Twicker said cryptically that Miss Lydia wasn’t behind the door when teeth were given out, and she’d manage all right.
‘Nanny,’ said Morland, ‘there was a boy at my prep school called Donk, and he used to eat eggs like this: watch!’
He carefully sliced the white off his egg and lifted the untouched yolk on his fork. Just as he opened his mouth, the yolk slipped sideways off the fork and fell onto the table-cloth.
‘Letting down the Honour of the School,’ said Swan indignantly.
‘Never mind, Mr Tony,’ said Mrs Twicker. ‘I’ll fry you another, and we’ll pop the table-cloth in the wash-tub and then give it a nice boil, and it’ll come up as white as snow.’
Then Twicker came in for his breakfast, bringing with him three peaches, warm from the glass-house, for his guests. He had been a little shy of them at first, but after a hunt by candle-light in his little garden, in which the boys had found one hundred and thirty-five snails and forty-one large slugs and put them all into a basin of brine ‘to make snail soup’, Swan said, amid horrified exclamations from Mrs Twicker, the gardener had accepted them as friends, and even allowed them to carve their initials on the next largest marrow that he wasn’t keeping for the Flower Show.
After an uproarious breakfast, during which Mr Twicker, undeterred by his wife’s remonstrances, convulsed his audience by imitating the village drunkard at closing time, he went back to his work and the boys to theirs. Never had Mrs Twicker enjoyed a morning’s washing so much. All three boys became clowns for her benefit, and not till Morland, turning the mangle wildly, had caught the short-sighted Hacker on the elbow with the handle, did they stop laughing. So what with this and the hearty meal of tea and jam tarts they had at eleven, the morning passed like lightning, and as Mr Twicker was going to turn a pig he had put in brine after his dinner, they sent up their excuses to the Manor, and so missed most of the interesting things that happened that day.
Lydia got the boys’ message before breakfast, but decided not to join them. Her interests were literary rather than domestic, and though she wanted to talk to someone, to almost anyone in fact, about Browning, she felt the boys would not understand, though here she was wrong, for Swan rather specialised on the Victorian poets. Browning had suddenly come into her life the night before, because the literature mistress had set a holiday essay on ‘My favourite Browning poem, and my reasons for preferring it’. Lydia, to whom the poet was unknown, had contemptuously taken the volume of Dramatic Lyrics to bed with her, and fallen head over heels into it. Seeing Everard, Noel and Kate sitting under the tulip tree after breakfast, this seemed a good opportunity for a symposium on the subject that was filling her mind.
‘I think,’ she announced loudly, as she sat down on the swing chair and began to rock herself to and fro, ‘everyone ought to read Browning.’
‘Quite a lot of them do,’ said Noel.
‘Oh, well, of course they read him in English literature,’ said Lydia, ‘but I mean really reading him. I think his understanding of human nature is wonderful. It’s just like Shakespeare and Horace, you feel you are everyone in his poems.’
‘I hope you don’t,’ said Noel.
‘Well, anyway all the beautiful ones and the noble ones,’ said Lydia truthfully.
She then, having an excellent verbal memory, quoted from the poet’s works at such length that her hearers could hardly bear it.
‘Need you rock all the time, Lydia?’ said Kate. ‘It makes me feel so sick.’
‘Did you say you’d play a single with me, Kate?’ said Noel, getting up.
Kate knew she hadn’t, but sensing an appeal for help, she got up too and went away with him to the tennis-court.
‘And what was marvellous,’ continued Lydia, fixing Everard with her eye and taking no notice of the others’ departure, ‘was his own life. Do you know he ran away with his wife when she was an invalid, and never stopped adoring her his whole life. There is something,’ said Lydia, gazing into the distance, ‘about happy married life that is even more beautiful than being in love with people. What do you think about it?’
‘Well, I’m not married,’ said Everard, ‘so I can’t very well judge.’
‘Of course you’re not,’ said Lydia, ‘but you must have some ideas. Don’t you ever think
about things?’
Everard said he sometimes did.
‘Noel does,’ said Lydia. ‘I had a very interesting conversation with him on Saturday about marriage.’
Everard said nothing, feeling that Noel’s views on marriage, presumably to Kate, would be highly distasteful to him.
Summer Half: A Virago Modern Classic (VMC) Page 24
