‘Little swine,’ said Miss Stevenson, becoming quite human. ‘He and his gang are up against me because they want this office for themselves. Why did you say you had been turned down? I could easily have managed another chance for you. Do try again, David?’
But David answered that his nerve was too much shaken.
‘Besides,’ he said, ‘I should get an inferiority complex if I saw much more of Lionel. I can’t think how he does it. I suppose it’s partly the name. Lionel Harvest; it is quite perfect.’
‘He is a fine speaker, all the same,’ said Miss Stevenson, suddenly remembering to be loyal to a colleague. ‘He reads Coventry Patmore quite perfectly, and is very popular with our listeners.’
‘Well, you’d better have lunch with me one day,’ said David, who had lost interest in broadcasting.
‘I would love to, but you must let me pay for myself,’ said Miss Stevenson, who knew from her Oxford experiences the right way to treat men.
David was so enchanted by Miss Stevenson’s attitude to life that he made a point of taking her out several times to the most expensive restaurants he could find. When Miss Stevenson saw that even a single portion of one dish was not infrequently as much as five-and-sixpence, or, in the case of game, as much as twelve shillings, she kept her head remarkably well, and David had little difficulty in persuading her that as a fellow-artist, for so he widely interpreted her work in the office and his own lamentable fiasco with Milton, she could eat his food with no loss of prestige.
But in spite of the attraction of his new friend, and partly because he again had no particular work in prospect, David was at Rushwater a great deal more than usual during June and July. His weekends were more likely to be Friday to Tuesday than Saturday to Monday. His mother and sister were enchanted to see him, and it speaks much for Mr Leslie’s character that he did not more than once in every visit ask David why he didn’t get some work to do. To see a young man of twenty-seven doing nothing, doing it happily and without apparent moral injury to himself or anyone else, was beyond Mr Leslie’s comprehension. But having said what he felt it his duty to say, he always succumbed to David’s good humour and irresponsible charm. When David had explained to him that in taking a job he would be taking the bread from men who really needed it, his father could not but admit the justice of the plea. When his father suggested that he should give some of his time to the estate, he said very truly that it was Martin’s job to learn to take care of what would one day be his own, and that Macpherson had Mr Leslie and John working with him already and would not welcome a third and quite incompetent assistant. When Mr Leslie said he could do with a good agent in Buenos Aires to keep an eye on some land he had bought there, thinking to start breeding from his own stock, David became very sweet and affectionate and shortly melted from the room.
For Mary these weekends were an exciting joy. David kept her to her word about walks, and together they tramped all over the country within walking distance, David talking all the time, reading poetry to her when they stopped to eat their sandwiches and rest, amusing her with his account of his failure to get a broadcasting job.
One afternoon late they had been out on the hills all day and were coming back at a swinging pace down the long wooded slopes behind the village. A hillside where a copse had been cut down the year before was thick with wild strawberries. They stopped to eat them.
‘You get no satisfaction out of them though,’ said David. ‘One or two at a time are nothing and one hasn’t the self-restraint to gather quite a lot before one eats them, besides which I have nothing to put them in.’
‘Heroes always have a hat,’ said Mary. ‘They gather a few berries in it, or fill it with water at the rushing torrent.’
‘I’d like to see anyone filling my hat with water. It would all come out at the ventilation holes. I expect heroes went about in bowlers in those days. We used to have an old Heir of Redclyffe with pictures, and the hero always wore a bowler in the country. No, the only way to eat wild strawberries is to live somewhere like Switzerland where there is a poor but venal peasantry which picks enormous bowlfuls for your tea.’
‘I’d love to eat them like that.’
‘I’ll tell you what. I know a place in town that gets wild strawberries by air from the Tyrol or somewhere twice a week. Let’s go up to lunch one day.’
‘Oh, David.’
They pursued their way over the brow of the hill, down a sunken lane to the village, where they saw Mr Banister with his bicycle in front of the vicarage.
‘Evening, David, evening, Miss Preston,’ he called.
‘Do you want any help, sir?’ said David.
‘Yes, do get me a bucket of water from the garden tap to test my tyre. Sit down, Miss Preston.’
Mary sat down on a decayed garden chair while David got the bucket. The vicar slightly inflated his tyre and passed it through the water. Bubbles rose from two places. The vicar got out his mending outfit and began to patch.
‘I have settled everything with my tenants,’ he said. ‘They are taking the vicarage for the whole of August and will be glad to arrange for Martin to do French with them. I have been seeing your father about it, and Martin is to go every morning for lessons and stop to lunch for conversation, except when there is cricket.’
‘Martin will be very grateful to you,’ said Mary. ‘He hasn’t the faintest wish to go abroad.’
‘By the way, David, the Boulles would like a paying guest as well, some nice young man or woman who wants to study French seriously. So if you come across anyone, let me know. It would be an advantage to Martin to have someone to work with him.’
‘Judging by my own experiences at that beastly Swiss place I was at,’ said David, ‘if you once get two English pupils together it’s all up with learning French. However, I’ll remember.’
After a little more desultory conversation Mr Banister blew his tyre up again and put it into the water. One of the patches bulged. A column of bubbles rose from it and the patch floated up to the surface.
‘I expect I didn’t sandpaper it properly,’ said Mr Banister, rather disappointed.
‘Let me look,’ said David, rescuing the patch. ‘I should say you hadn’t put any solution on it, sir.’
‘No more I did. I remember now that I picked this patch up with sticky fingers after I had put the first one on. I suppose the stickiness somehow made me think I had put the solution on. Well, well, to work again,’ said the vicar, looking wistfully at David.
But David didn’t want to mend tyres, so he got up and said they were late and must fly. At dinner he told his mother, who always liked to hear village news, about the vicar’s quest for a paying guest for his tenants.
‘Now, I am sure we can find exactly the right person,’ said Lady Emily, who had as usual come in late without her spectacles and was trying to eat mutton and redcurrant jelly with a spoon and fork, apparently deluded by the jelly into thinking it was pudding.
‘Agnes, who was that nice girl we heard about that was going somewhere abroad and it didn’t come off?’
Agnes appeared to find the description perfectly clear, but could not be sure if it was a girl or a young man going in for diplomacy.
‘Because,’ she said, ‘it was the day I got the cable from Robert, and I remember I left my letters in the garden shelter and they blew out on to the lawn, and then it rained. I was never sure if I got them all again, and I believe, Mamma, that letter from whoever it was must have got lost, though I distinctly remember something about someone who was going abroad, but something had happened.’
As this conversation did not seem to be leading anywhere in particular, David changed it by telling everyone that he was taking Mary to lunch in town one day.
‘How nice,’ said his mother. ‘And then, Mary, you could go to Woolworth’s and get the extra cups and the presents for the children. Let me see, the village concert is on Tuesday next week, so you’ll have to go up this week.’
‘I’ll drive you
up on Tuesday, shall I?’ said David, ‘when I go, and you can come back by train. Or else, come up by train on Friday and I’ll drive you down.’
‘Now let me see,’ said Lady Emily, ‘if you go up with David you’ll have all the Woolworth parcels to carry to the station afterwards, so you had better go on Friday and then David can drive you and the parcels down. Gudgeon, what are the trains to London in the morning?’
‘Eleven-fifty from Rushwater is the best, my lady, arriving at two-ten.’
‘That wouldn’t get me up in time for lunch,’ said Mary.
‘There is the eight-fifteen, miss, arriving eleven-forty-five.’
‘There you are,’ said David. ‘That gives you an hour and a half to play at Woolworth’s, and then we’ll have lunch and a cinema and drive down together.’
‘But, David,’ said his mother, who had been counting on her fingers with an anxious face, ‘that is not a human train. It takes three hours and a half, and Mary can’t possibly catch a train at a quarter past eight.’
‘Can’t you, Mary?’ asked David, looking at her with disturbing appeal.
‘Oh, I can easily get it, Aunt Emily,’ she said. ‘If I could have the Ford I’d run myself down to Rushwater and perhaps someone could fetch it.’
Lady Emily, enchanted by the opportunity for further planning, then developed an elaborate arrangement by which the man who was going down to fetch a load of gravel from the station on Tuesday should drive the Ford as far as Mr Macpherson’s garage, while his gravel was being loaded, and Mr Macpherson should drive up to lunch in the Ford and have Weston take him home; or, better still, Mr Macpherson should drive the Ford up for lunch and Weston should walk down to the village at lunch-time and bring Mr Macpherson’s own car up; or even better, Weston should bicycle down and bring Mr Macpherson’s own car up, with the bicycle on the back seat. Having got so far, she was just wondering aloud whether it would not be better for the man who went to fetch the gravel to leave the car at Mr Banister’s, as he had said something about wanting to come up one morning, when Mr Leslie cut across her.
‘If Mary is going up to town for the day, Emily, and has to do your village shopping, Weston had better take her and bring her back. I don’t want him on Thursday. If you don’t, Mary can have him.’
‘That is much nicer,’ said Agnes. ‘David’s car is lovely, but it is so dusty. I don’t ever quite like an open car.’
Mary thanked Mr Leslie very much. She felt it would be too discourteous to refuse this offer, especially as he rarely lent the car. It was very disappointing in a way, because she had frightfully looked forward to a few hours with David. To be sitting by David in a very fast sports car would have been bliss, but one had to remember one’s manners and show proper gratitude. And in any case it would be very nice to motor both ways and not have to carry parcels about with one.
‘I remember now,’ said Agnes. ‘It was Dodo Bingham’s letter, and she said her nephew had been going to Munich to a family, but his people wouldn’t let him go because of the Nazis. Do you think he would be any use for Mr Banister’s tenants?’
David got up, and going round to Agnes dropped a kiss on the top of her head.
‘No, love,’ he said. ‘You are so kind and perfectly adorable, but German is not French, look at it whichever way you will.’
‘No, I suppose it isn’t,’ said Agnes. ‘But I knew it would come back to me. Do you know how sometimes you forget things and then you remember them again?’
David said he had occasionally had this peculiar experience, and so could fully appreciate her state of mind.
Mary lingered behind the others to thank Mr Leslie again for his kindness. The less grateful she felt for it, the more grateful she ought to feel.
‘That’s all right, my dear,’ said Mr Leslie. ‘David is bone selfish, always was. Expecting a girl to catch a slow train at eight-fifteen just to have lunch with him. But you girls will do it,’ he said, with unexpected insight, ‘and you make the young man worse than he is. John wouldn’t do such a thing, and as for his eldest brother, a more unselfish boy – well, have a good time in town. You’re a help to Emily. Like to hear you sing in the evenings. It sends me to sleep.’
Mary was touched and pleased by Mr Leslie’s words about Lady Emily, though she hadn’t felt there were adequate grounds for them. As for David being selfish, parents did not always see their children as they really were. And on Thursday she would have lunch in town with David.
7
Lunch for Three
The world very obligingly did not come to an end before Thurs day, and Weston drove Mary to London, where she did Lady Emily’s shopping and met David at a restaurant.
‘Cocktails first,’ he said, putting his arm through hers and leading her to a bar. ‘What do you like?’
Mary didn’t know, so David ordered two Snakes in the Grass which he warned her had gone straight to many a stronger head than hers. David looked towards the door from time to time as they drank.
‘Do you mind?’ he asked. ‘I’ve asked a friend of mine, Joan Stevenson. She is a highly educated female, but otherwise harmless.’
Mary instantaneously felt a raging jealousy of educated females, combined with hatred of David. Hateful of him to ask her to lunch as if it were to be a special treat for them both, and then ask an educated woman too. Hateful, selfish young man. In a moment she had thought of a dozen cruel and cutting things to say to him, but to her surprise her voice said:
‘I hope she isn’t too crushingly superior, David.’
‘Not a bit. As a matter of fact, she may be very useful to me, as I can keep in touch with broadcasting through her.’
‘But you told me they’d turned you down.’
‘One can always have another shot,’ said David, getting off his stool and going forward to meet Joan. He introduced the two girls. Mary’s presence was almost as annoying to Joan as Joan’s was to Mary, and each was conscious of angry and hopeless inferiority. In Mary, Joan saw one of those brainless society girls who have nothing to do but drink and dance and have a good time. A pretty creature if one liked that ordinary brown hair and blue eyes and that kind of rather generous figure. Probably she had an income of her own and never wore darned stockings. David had said a cousin of his, but that wasn’t what she meant by a cousin.
In Joan, Mary saw what anyone might call a good-looking girl if they liked that fair type with pale green-brown eyes and a hard sort of mouth. University women were always hard – unsympathetic and conceited as well. She might be useful to David, but that was no reason for her to have such a very well-tailored silk suit. But probably she earned a huge salary and had everything made to measure.
Mutual hatred passed between the girls in waves. Hatred for David also permeated the air, but to none of these currents did David appear to be attuned.
‘Cocktail, Joan?’ he asked.
‘No, thanks. I can’t work if I drink cocktails,’ said Joan looking at Mary’s glass.
‘One more before we go in to lunch, David,’ said Mary affectedly.
‘On your own head be it,’ said David, ordering one.
‘In my stomach, I hope,’ said Mary with an insane giggle caused by jealousy. The cocktail was brought and Mary, feeling that one was really quite enough, pretended to sip it, said in a bored voice that the second one never seemed so good as the first, and asked David if they were never to have lunch. David seized an arm of each to guide them to the lunch-room. He should have fallen a charred corpse, or stood convulsed, rooted to the ground, so strong were the angry waves that must have passed through him, instead of which he put his ladies at a table in a corner and seated himself between them.
Lunch was made even more uncomfortable for Mary and Joan than it need have been, as each made it a point of honour to pretend she could not touch anything that the other liked, so that neither got more than half of David’s delightful meal. The caviare which Mary ate with relish was only pecked at by Miss Stevenson, who said she had eate
n it fresh in Russia, where she had once been on a long vacation, and could never bear to eat it in any other way. It was almost impossible to find fault with the omelette of which both ladies greedily partook, but over the wine fresh difficulties arose. David inquired if they both liked white wine.
‘No, thanks, David, water only for me,’ said Mary in a pure and aloof way.
‘I’d love a Barsac or a Vouvray, David,’ said Joan. ‘Let me look.’
By this means she was able to spend two or three minutes over the wine list, her shoulder touching David’s, while they discussed names. The wine waiter, having condescended to let them amuse themselves, then brought hypnotic influence to bear, so that they ordered what he had always meant them to have.
‘Are you frightfully busy, Miss Stevenson?’ asked Mary graciously, while cutlets were being served. ‘I expect you are broadcasting every night.’
‘I am not an announcer,’ said Joan, helping herself to sautée potatoes. ‘I arrange the poetry readings.’
‘Oh, office work,’ said Mary. ‘No, no potatoes,’ she added, glancing at Joan’s plate.
‘Do you find them fattening?’ said Joan. ‘I am terribly lucky. I can eat whatever I like without having to worry.’
‘I expect some day I’ll get to that stage,’ said Mary. ‘Oh, David, James was too sweet this morning. He had Emmy and Clarissa in a little wooden cart we found in the old bicycle shed and was pushing them about. James is David’s little nephew,’ she explained to Joan, ‘and Emmy and Clarissa are his nieces. Such darlings, and we have the greatest fun together.’
‘You must come down and see them some day, Joan,’ said David.
Joan said she would love to, which made Mary fume at her bold-faced readiness to accept; but her weekends were always booked up months ahead, which made Mary equally furious at her want of enthusiasm; but she thought she could spare a weekend late in August when she would have her holiday, which smote a cold chill to Mary’s heart. Didn’t David remember that Martin’s birthday was late in August and they were to have a dance? He did, and told Joan she had chosen a perfect time, as they were to have a dance for his young nephew.
Wild Strawberries: A Virago Modern Classic (VMC) Page 9
