Wild Strawberries: A Virago Modern Classic (VMC)

by Angela Thirkell

  The day for the visit to Agnes’s dressmaker and the lunch with John was fixed. After breakfast, Martin drew Mary mysteriously aside.

  ‘Can you do some shopping for me in town?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, of course. What do you want?’

  Martin gave her an unexpected commission to buy white and yellow satin for him, but would not explain why he wanted it.

  ‘It’s absolutely secret at present, Mary, but I’ll let you know before the dance. It is frightfully important that no one should know, so don’t tell Aunt Agnes.’

  Mary promised, amused and mystified, but coming to the conclusion that there was to be some sort of dressing up she thought no more about it. The visit to the dressmaker was eminently satisfactory. A number of exquisite nymphs slank about the room in rapturous creations. As Mary had never had an expensive evening dress before she found it difficult to choose among so many, but Agnes took command and made her have a soft flowery confection. Agnes herself was going to have a white lace dress. Mary immediately wanted to change her mind and have one like it; but Agnes was firm.

  ‘Don’t wear lace or velvet while you are young, Mary,’ she said earnestly. ‘Girls always want to, and it is so foolish. When Emmy comes out I shall have great fun dressing her, and darling Clarissa too. Clarissa will look well in greens and Emmy, I think, will be able to wear pink. It is a difficult shade, but she has just the right colouring. I shall make her wear a pink with a shade of orange in it.’

  To Mary’s deep and excited gratitude Agnes then bought her shoes and stockings such as she had never dreamed of having.

  ‘And now we will go to John,’ said Agnes.

  ‘Oh, Aunt Agnes, I have a little private shopping to do. Can I do that on the way?’

  So they stopped at a large shop where Mary did Martin’s shopping while Agnes sat in the car.

  ‘Where are we having lunch, Aunt Agnes?’ asked Mary, getting in again with her parcels. It might perhaps be the place where she lunched with David before, and David might be there.

  ‘At John’s flat. It is quieter than a restaurant and I can leave you there while I have my hair done, unless you want to go to a cinema.’

  John was waiting for them in his disgracefully comfortable fifth-floor flat with a view. Mary had not seen him since the memorable day at his office and was relieved to find how easy it was. She would have been surprised if she had known that John was sharing her feelings. He was glad to see that she looked well and pretty and was evidently not fretting for David. Probably, he thought, I was mistaken about it, and vaguely felt the happier for the thought.

  Agnes and John had a good deal to talk about at lunch, so Mary listened and enjoyed her food.

  ‘How much longer have you got the flat, John?’ his sister asked.

  ‘Only till the end of the year. Then I don’t know what I’ll do. My tenants are giving up the Chelsea house then, and I am inclined to sell it.’

  ‘John, you mustn’t sell that house. Couldn’t you live there again?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t lived there since Gay died, and I would rattle about like a pea in a pod.’

  Mary noticed with interest that he didn’t have at all what she called A Voice when speaking of his dead wife.

  ‘You wouldn’t get a man to share it with you, would you?’ Agnes went on. ‘I can’t bear to think of that lovely house going out of the family. I wish I could take it myself, only there wouldn’t be room for the children. We really need so many rooms now. A day nursery and a night nursery, and a room for James, and a room for Ivy. And when Emmy is a little bigger she will want a room for herself. And when I have some more babies it will mean another nursery as well.’

  John laughed and asked if Agnes didn’t find her household difficult.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said in surprise, ‘it is quite easy. And when I have some more babies I shall get a second nurse as well as Ivy. It is really no trouble.’

  Mary, who had been rehearsing the words for some time, now asked John how David was. To her own surprise, it was quite easy to mention him. John said he had been quite well when he last saw him.

  ‘I really wanted to talk to you about David, Agnes,’ he said. ‘It is no particular business of mine, but I am a bit worried. We’ll have coffee in here while I tell you.’

  ‘If you are bored, Mary, you’ll find heaps of books in the library,’ said Agnes, when coffee had been served.

  Mary, taking this as a hint, got up. John opened the door for her, saying:

  ‘It’s nothing private, Mary, so come back if you don’t like my books. Or there is the piano.’

  ‘Thank you, but I’ll be quite happy with the books,’ she said, and passed into the library. She wandered about the room for a few moments, looking at pictures and admiring the view. A pile of music on the piano attracted her attention and she began to turn it over. She picked up one sheet, looked at it, shrugged her shoulders, and laid it down. Then she took a book and sat down on the sofa near the window.

  Meanwhile Agnes and John were discussing the subject of David.

  ‘After all,’ said John, ‘David has a perfect right to live as he likes. He is quite independent and there is nothing wrong with him at all, except his endless frittering away of himself. I’m not sure that the bees are any better than the drones. I hold no brief for myself as a bee. It suits me to be one. If I lived as David does I’d go mad. Conversely, I dare say David might go mad if he worked regularly, but I don’t think so. He has discovered that in spite of his money and his charm – and I realise exactly how charming he is, Agnes – he can’t get a novel written, let alone published; he can’t get a broadcasting job because he won’t take it seriously; his experiments with films and plays have all come to nothing. If it didn’t make Father so unhappy I wouldn’t mind so much, but last time I was down at Rushworth he talked to me about it, and I promised to see if I could do anything. Can you suggest anything?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, John. You see, he won’t listen to any of us. Gay was the only person he ever listened to. He had a kind of respect for her that he hasn’t got for us. Of course, I could write and ask Robert.’

  ‘Do you think,’ asked John, ignoring his sister’s last remark, ‘that he could have that feeling for any other woman? If he really cared for a woman and respected her as well, he might pull up a bit.’

  ‘I don’t know, John. You see, I don’t know the kind of women he meets. The ones he has brought to Rushwater from time to time have been very charming, but not really what I would call the right sort. Robert would not have liked them at all.’

  ‘I know, I know. Of course he will marry whom he pleases, whenever he does marry, and of course Mother and Father will be angelic about it, whoever she is. He has been about lately with a Miss Stevenson. Do you know anything about her?’

  ‘Only that she is a friend of his. We heard about her from Mr Banister. Mr Banister has let the vicarage to some French people called Boulle, and David told him he knew a girl who would like to come as a paying-guest to study French. I believe she is something to do with broadcasting.’

  ‘I have seen her with him. She looks the usual rather hard-boiled sort. Quite attractive. You don’t think, Agnes,’ said John, looking hard at the tablecloth, ‘that David is at all attracted by Mary?’

  ‘Mary? Oh, no. Why?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, getting up and walking about. ‘I had an idea that they might care for each other.’

  ‘Oh, no, John. Mary certainly doesn’t think about David, and as for David, he hasn’t been down to Rushwater since the concert. Oh, John dear, I do wish I could get you two boys married.’

  ‘Agnes, you are insatiable. Just because you are rather fond of Robert you won’t be happy till you have married us all off, including Martin. Marry David, if you like – and if you can – but I have had my day, Agnes. I had Gay and I was lucky.’

  ‘John, come here and sit down again. David certainly doesn’t care for Mary. Do you at all?’
<
br />   John looked at her.

  ‘I wonder what is in your head, Agnes. I don’t know the answer to your question.’

  ‘Is Gay the answer?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. If I could care for anyone as I cared for Gay, I would risk it, with the little I have to offer. When I heard Mary sing at Rushwater I loved her for her voice. Then I thought that she and David cared for each other, never mind why. So I didn’t think much about her again. That’s your answer.’

  ‘If David and she don’t care for each other, would that change your answer?’

  ‘Oh, my God, don’t ask me,’ said John, getting up again impatiently.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ said Agnes in her gentle voice. ‘But next to Robert and the children you know you come, always. We will talk about it again when you come to Rushwater. Now I am going to leave Mary here for an hour while I have my hair done. She will be quite all right here if you are busy, and I’ll come and fetch her. Goodbye for the present.’

  After seeing Agnes out John went into the library. The afternoon was hot and sunny. The light filtered through John’s gay-striped outside blinds. The roar of London, at its lowest in August, was not disturbing, and the room was very quiet. Looking round, John saw Mary asleep with a book on the sofa. Her slumber was so light that the mere sense of his presence broke it, though he had made no sound. Momentarily bewildered she sat up, struggling with the unfamiliar surroundings. To John her abandonment in summer drowsiness, her short-lived perplexity on waking, her self-conscious return to reality seemed infinitely touching. He apologised for disturbing her. Mary said in a confused way that she was ashamed of herself.

  ‘Has Aunt Agnes gone?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. She told me to amuse you till she comes back. She said she would be about an hour.’

  ‘But is that all right? I mean, wouldn’t you rather be doing your work?’

  Again this childish humility before someone who, so she evidently thought, did real work. John remembered how, in the middle of her storm of grief in his office, she had offered to go and finish crying in the car if he had a business appointment.

  ‘This is Agnes’s day,’ he reassured her, ‘and yours. I kept it for you and now she has deserted me, so if you will help me pass the time that will be very kind.’

  ‘What a lot of music you have got,’ said Mary. ‘I was looking at it after lunch.’

  ‘Did you see one of your songs there?’

  ‘Yes, lots that I know. Which one specially?’

  ‘The Bach one.’

  ‘Oh, “Bist du bei mir”. Isn’t it a darling?’

  ‘I bought it after I had heard you sing it at Rushwater.’

  ‘But I never sang it when you were there.’

  ‘Yes, you did, truly. The evening David made up his spiritual about treacle and rum.’

  ‘But that was after dinner before the men came in. I was just singing for myself, so that Aunt Emily and Aunt Agnes could talk comfortably,’ said Mary, beginning to feel alarmed.

  ‘I came in before the others. The room was dark except for Mother’s reading-lamp and the fire. You were singing in a little pool of candlelight at the far end. It was the loveliest voice I had ever heard. It gave me the peace you were singing about. I went and sat with Mother and Agnes till you had finished. They understood.’

  ‘I would have stopped if I had known.’

  Mary’s distress and confusion were so painful that John felt almost sorry he had spoken.

  ‘I would apologise for eavesdropping,’ he said, ‘but I really can’t be sorry for hearing something so precious. You couldn’t possibly sing that song again, could you, Mary?’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘The music is here and no one will come in.’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t. Besides it is the wrong key.’

  ‘Perhaps I could transpose it,’ said John, sitting down at the piano.

  ‘Can you do that?’ asked Mary, interested.

  ‘I can do one semitone up and one tone up,’ said John gravely. ‘As for going down, that has me beat. What key do you want?’

  Mary mentioned a key.

  ‘Up, thank goodness,’ said John. He played a few bars. ‘Would that do?’

  ‘Oh, please, I couldn’t possibly,’ said Mary, backing behind an armchair in her agitation.

  ‘Well, if you can’t,’ said John, playing through the accompaniment as he spoke, ‘no one else will. Never mind. I heard you once. Perhaps I shall hear you again at Rushwater, after dinner, by candlelight. Three o’clock in the afternoon isn’t the most tactful moment to ask anyone to sing. I oughtn’t to ask for peace so soon after lunch. Death, of course, I don’t want. “… zum Sterben und zu meiner Ruh,”’ he sang, and shut the piano.

  ‘It isn’t rudeness,’ said Mary. ‘Honestly, it isn’t. It is only awful self-consciousness. I wouldn’t mind singing to Aunt Emily or Mr Leslie, but to you I couldn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You would listen.’

  John laughed.

  ‘By your way of arguing you could only sing to people who didn’t listen to you.’

  Mary nodded her head. ‘Yes. Or to people who I don’t know are there,’ she added in a half-voice, a remark which John pondered over afterwards. They talked about Rushwater, and Mary described the concert and made John laugh again.

  ‘And at supper,’ she said, ‘David gave me a huge basket of wild strawberries to make up for forgetting them. Wasn’t it nice of him?’

  ‘Delightful.’

  Then Agnes came back to pick up Mary. John gave them tea and they drove back to Rushwater. Even Agnes was a little tired by the heat and her exertions at the hairdresser’s, so they drove mostly in silence. Mary thought how silly she must seem to John, first crying in his office, then going to sleep in his flat and being too shy to sing. But somehow it didn’t matter what one did with John. He always made one feel safe and comfortable.

  When she got back, Mary gave the parcel of shopping to Martin, who thanked her warmly.

  ‘If you like,’ he said, rather diffidently, ‘I will tell you what it is for, only it is frightfully important, frightfully secret. You will have to swear not to tell anyone.’

  ‘It isn’t anything Aunt Emily would mind, is it?’

  ‘Oh, no. I am sure she would agree if she knew about it, but we aren’t sure about Grandfather.’

  ‘Does Madame Boulle know about it?’

  ‘She is terribly keen and so is the professor, but they don’t know about this special bit. We are doing this on our own and if it comes off it will have an enormous effect.’

  ‘What is it, Martin?’

  ‘I mustn’t tell you, Mary, or I would, honestly. But I’ll ask Pierre and the others, and if they say it’s all right I’ll let you in.’

  Mary couldn’t make head or tail of his mystery, but gave her faithful promise not to betray whatever it was to anybody. Martin disappeared after dinner, probably to the vicarage, for when Mary went to bed she found a tightly folded, rather dirty note on her dressing-table. At the head of it was what looked like the Boy Scouts’ badge and below was written in what was obviously Martin’s writing disguised:

  They agree. Three o’clock tomorrow at the Temple. Silence. Secrecy.

  The Temple was a monument which had been erected by Mr Leslie’s grandfather as a neat finish to the little hill on which it stood. In nature it partook of the pyramid, the pagoda and the mausoleum. It was built of a yellowish stone which flaked and crumbled with agreeable ease, as several generations of destructive children had found. Its lower storey was lighted by four enormous sash-windows which no human power had ever succeeded in opening. From the ground floor a wooden ladder staircase led through a trap-door to an upper chamber whose windows, of semi-circular shape, were on the level of the floor, having been designed more with a view to exterior proportion than to any possible convenience for people using it. The walls of this uncomfortable abode sloped inwards and the building was crowned by what ca
n only be described as a serrated peak. To all children it meant romance, not unmixed with terror. Every young Leslie had at one time been shut up in the top room by an elder brother or sister, and there shrieked itself into hysteria at the thought of dying forgotten among the spiders and daddy longlegs which infested it. Nearly every older Leslie had tried to climb the pinnacle and had to give it up. All grown-up Leslies took no interest in it at all, considering it, as indeed it was, stuffy, dirty and inconvenient. Therefore it was a safe place for mysteries.

  It was a blazing hot afternoon when Mary walked up the hill by winding paths under the beeches. At the top of the hill was a slight depression like an empty dew-pond, where the Temple stood. This again was a guarantee against spies and interfering grown-ups, as no one could cross the grassy hollow without being seen from one of the semi-circular windows.

  Mary found the Temple door shut, and knocked. There was no answer. She knocked again impatiently, for the sun was beating down on her back, and the paint of the door was hot to the touch. There was a scuffling noise inside, and Martin’s voice said in a hoarse whisper:

  ‘Would you mind knocking twice very loud, three times softly, and then once loud again.’

  Mary obligingly complied with this request, upon which the door was opened by Jean-Claude.

  ‘Hullo, Jean-Claude,’ said Mary. ‘What’s it all about?’

  ‘Password,’ said Jean-Claude, looking straight in front of him.

  ‘Orléans,’ whispered Martin.

  ‘Orléans,’ said Mary obediently.

  ‘It is well,’ said Jean-Claude. ‘Follow me.’

  He led the way up the ladder through the open trapdoor into the upper room. None of the semi-circular windows were made to open and the heat was stifling. Bluebottles buzzed in an angry perfunctory way in old spiders’ webs. The whitewashed walls were covered with the graffiti of the junior branches of the Leslie family. On one wall David had painted, when he was about fourteen, a romantic scene of a princess leaning out of a tower with a knight riding past. On another wall John, at some earlier epoch, had written in blue and red chalk the words: