Before Lunch

by Angela Thirkell

  ‘I regret it,’ said Mr Middleton gravely. ‘And the more so as I have just remembered that I have that book upstairs in my room. Shall I go and get it, tired as I am? I will, I will, and I will read you the passage in question.’

  He made as if to go up by his little staircase, but with such a bowed gait and almost shuffling step, as of a man grown old in the service of his country and now unjustly thrown aside, that his wife went upstairs, found the book and brought it to him before he had finished his noble and vacillating journey from the bookcase to the door.

  ‘There you are, Jack,’ said Mrs Middleton. ‘And now I am going to bed. Good night, Alister.’

  ‘Bear with me for one moment, Catherine,’ said the persecuted veteran. ‘I must read the account of Laverings to you and Cameron. I had promised myself the pleasure of reading it aloud, and though Lilian and her young have left us, a promise is a promise. I feel I shall not sleep if a promise is not fulfilled.’

  Mrs Middleton sat down and smiled at him.

  He read aloud for some ten minutes an account, extraordinarily dull to anyone who was not interested, of the manor of Gorwulf-Steadings and its appurtenances, while his wife sat apparently thinking of nothing and his partner smoked a pipe. On coming to the end of the extract he shut the book with some violence, and looked round.

  ‘Bed, bed!’ he cried. ‘It is far too late for us, Cameron. We have to work to-morrow and I shall take you over to Pooker’s Piece, where we shall talk to old Margett, who is wise with the wisdom of his ancestors. He knows me well and will talk to me when he would be silent with another man. And you, my Catherine, should have been in bed an hour ago.’

  So saying he went upstairs.

  ‘Good night, Catherine,’ said Mr Cameron. ‘You look tired.’

  ‘You said Jack never forgot anything,’ said Mrs Middleton rather vaguely.

  ‘You mean the whereabouts of that book,’ said Mr Cameron.

  ‘Yes, I suppose I do,’ said Mrs Middleton with what might have been a sigh but was probably, Mr Cameron thought, a yawn, and she went away, asking her guest to shut the French window before he went to bed. Before he shut it he took a turn on the flagged path outside and saw the light still shining through the trees at the White House. He thought it might be that amusing girl, Daphne Stonor, whose routing of Lady Bond filled him with awed admiration. As a matter of fact it was the light from Denis’s room, who was too tired to go to sleep. He was thinking about the evening at Laverings and how he had let himself in for playing Lord Bond’s locked piano and having to refuse his excellent port. Mr Cameron’s story of his chief’s visit to Prasvoda had been very amusing. Then he remembered how Mr Cameron had said that Mr Middleton never forgot anything. Mrs Middleton’s non-committal answer came back to his mind. She had not seemed quite sure if Uncle Jack remembered everything and Denis felt a dawning certainty that the one thing Uncle Jack regularly and unconsciously forgot was his wife. This thought appeared to him so worthy of attention that he turned out his light, the better to consider it. From Laverings Mr Cameron saw the light go out, shut the window and went up to bed.

  4

  Staple Park

  Mrs Middleton and Mr Cameron were alone on Sunday morning, for Mr Middleton preferred as usual to breakfast in his own room. Sun poured into the dining-room and Mr Cameron imprisoned two wasps in a glass jam-pot which, as he said, was all very well, but he wished he had taken a second helping before they found their way in.

  ‘I suppose you aren’t going to church, Alister,’ said Mrs Middleton. ‘Oh, look, one of your wasps is getting out at the spoon hole.’

  ‘You ought to have spoons with fatter handles,’ said Mr Cameron. He took a small piece of the soft inside of his toast, moulded it in his fingers and stopped up the hole. The wasp, who had twice got his head and shoulders out, fell down again discouraged and lay kicking among the raspberry seeds. ‘No, Catherine, I am not going to church. I should like to come and sing out of the same hymn book as you, but my employer will probably want to talk with me this morning, or rather to use me as a talking horse, if the expression may be allowed. And apart from the great pleasure of sharing a hymn book with you, I find the so-called music extremely trying. Why are all hymns and psalms so high that one can’t get there? And if one sings, as I do, an octave lower, one’s voice makes no noise at all.’

  ‘Perhaps it is all for the best,’ said Mrs Middleton. ‘I always pretend that the print is too small for me to see the words and don’t sing at all and try to look as if I were meditating. I don’t suppose it really counts, but one must go or there would be no one in the Laverings pew and the Rector would be unhappy. Alister, would you very kindly go over to the White House and see if any of them would care to come with me. It is so nice if one can make a good show for the Rector and even three in a pew, if one spaces them out, are a help. Church is at eleven.’

  ‘Then I’d better go now,’ said Mr Cameron, looking at the clock. ‘It’s after ten. Shall I let my wasp out? He might bite Ethel.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ said his hostess. ‘Ethel likes dealing with insects. She has never forgotten or forgiven an earwig that got away from her last summer by what she considered unfair means. She was just going to stamp on it when Flora ate it, so she is getting her own back on wasps this year.’

  ‘That decides me,’ said Mr Cameron. ‘I always was one for cruelty to animals, but unfairness I cannot abide. If Ethel wants to kill earwigs, well and good, but to punish a wasp for the crime of another is beyond the limits.’

  He took his bread stopper out of the jam-pot. The wasp elbowed its way out indignantly and Ethel, who had come in a moment too soon, gave Mr Cameron a glance of cold disapproval.

  ‘I will go over to the White House now,’ he said. ‘What a delightful sister-in-law you have, Catherine. Why haven’t I seen more of her? I never met anyone whose rather irrelevant flow of conversation covered such real heart.’

  ‘It was clever of you to see that,’ said Mrs Middleton. ‘Most people don’t get beyond the talk. I think she was so unhappy when her husband died that she took to talking as a kind of defence. Not but what talking runs in the family. How Jack and Lilian ever manage to tell each other anything, I don’t know, as neither of them ever listens.’

  ‘Yes, but you know what my employer is,’ said Mr Cameron. ‘He talks to you all the time, but six weeks afterwards you find he knows exactly what it was that his flow of words wouldn’t let you say to him.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Mrs Middleton. ‘It may be the same with Lilian, though I don’t know her well enough to be sure. She certainly understands Denis and Daphne, if anyone can ever be said to understand anyone.’

  ‘I like Daphne,’ said Mr Cameron. ‘I wish we could have a secretary like her in the office. The young lady we have now is a refined product of the London School of Economics. I wouldn’t mind her trying to run her pink politics down my throat, for that is a malady most incident to youth, though I never see why being a Communist should make one abhor washing and have bad manners, but she thinks she knows how to run the office so much better than I do that it leads to unpleasantness.’

  ‘Daphne does want a job,’ said Mrs Middleton, ‘but perhaps Jack’s office —’

  ‘Yes, you are right,’ said Mr Cameron. ‘My employer has always been against nepotism and though one’s sister’s stepdaughter is hardly a relation, I don’t think it would do. And here am I standing talking with the best of them, while the fate of the Laverings pew hangs in the balance.’

  He went across to the White House, found the Stonors still at breakfast and was hospitably pressed to join them.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t say no to toast and honey,’ said Mr Cameron, ‘because a wasp got into the jam-pot and I couldn’t have a second helping. But what I really came for, Mrs Stonor, was to say from Catherine that she wants volunteers for church.’

  There was an immediate and gratifying response to this appeal. Mrs Stonor said she always went to church in the cou
ntry, though never in town, because church never seemed quite church in London, if Mr Cameron saw what she meant, and they had services at such ordinary times at Westminster Abbey. Daphne said she wanted to see what Lady Bond’s Sunday hat was like and if the village idiot was still quite well, while Denis said that he would go anywhere if there was a chance of hearing ‘Jerusalem the Golden’, which he liked better than any tune in the world, especially where it went up so high that one had to squeak or stop singing altogether. This led to a very interesting discussion between him and Mr Cameron on Russian basses which so prolonged itself that Mrs Stonor and Daphne went over to Laverings to collect Mrs Middleton, leaving the men to follow them.

  As Mr Cameron and Denis, still deep in argument, were about to separate in front of Laverings, the one to be talked at by his employer, the other to go across the field to the church, Mr Middleton appeared at the garden door with a furrowed brow. It was, he said, after a perfunctory greeting to his visitors, one of the great griefs of a life now nearing its close that every Sunday brought with it duties that made it impossible for him to go to church. This very morning he had intended to accompany his wife and his sister and refresh himself in that spring of living waters the English Liturgy. But, he continued, after a rapid sketch of the development of the Book of Common Prayer, a cursory survey of the Salisbury Rule and a bird’s-eye view of the Reformation and its effect on the English language, his wish was not to be fulfilled. There was work waiting for him, Work, he added.

  ‘Will you want me?’ said Mr Cameron, who had a sudden wish, that he didn’t trouble to analyse, to go to church himself.

  All his life, Mr Middleton said reverently, he had played a Lone Hand. Others had wives, children, devoted friends, but he had borne the heat and burden of the day alone. Alone.

  Denis thought secretly that though Mr Middleton might not have had wives, he had a wife, but didn’t like to say so. Mr Cameron, who through long practice knew exactly the value to attach to his partner’s words, said very well, he would go to church, and strode off.

  ‘Didn’t he want you?’ asked Denis as soon as they were out of earshot.

  ‘Not a bit,’ said Mr Cameron. ‘What he wanted was to smoke a very large cigar and go down and talk to Pucken about the cows and the hay. Which is much better for him than sitting indoors talking to me about Vitruvius. Come on, that’s the last bell.’

  They got into church just ahead of the Rector and went into the Laverings pew, which was right up in front with an excellent view of the Bonds’ pew in the chancel. Lady Bond’s hat was all that Daphne had hoped. A massive erection of brown velvet crowned with the produce of field, flood and grove, it was perched high on its wearer’s head with fine disregard of fashion. Lady Bond, whose mother was Scotch, had been brought up in the best tradition of Edinburgh hats, a tradition which dies hard and still dazzles the rash beholder’s eye at afternoon concerts in the Usher Hall, and always got her hats from the same shop in Prince’s Street. Mrs Middleton maintained that she had identified on Lady Bond’s Coronation year hat a lobster, two hare’s claws, a pineapple, a large bunch of parma violets and a fox’s mask and though no one believed her, everyone admitted that she had the root of the matter in her. With Lady Bond were her husband, a female friend, and a young man, unknown to the Stonors. Mr Cameron had the pleasure of sharing a hymn book with Mrs Middleton, but as it was one of those hymn books with double columns and Brilliant type, and both worshippers were long sighted, neither was able to join in the singing, though in any case they would not have done so. To Denis’s great satisfaction ‘Jerusalem the Golden’ was the second hymn, and he exercised himself very happily in singing in various octaves as the tune soared or sank. Mr Cameron greatly admired the way in which Daphne, who had a pleasant voice and no diffidence, forged gallantly through everything, when everyone but the choir (four rebellious little boys and two farmer’s daughters) had failed.

  ‘I say,’ said Daphne accusingly to Mr Cameron as they came out of church. ‘Why didn’t you sing?’

  Mr Cameron answered that no one could sing if they couldn’t see the words.

  ‘Well,’ said Daphne, ‘why didn’t you put your spectacles on? People ought to sing. That’s what one goes to church for.’

  Mr Cameron felt unequal to this religious argument and contented himself with saying that if his spectacles were double million gas microscopes of extra power he might be able to read double-columned Brilliant. Daphne looked at him tolerantly, said that was out of Scott or someone wasn’t it, and let the subject drop. Mr Cameron felt that he was somehow hopelessly in the wrong: first as a shirker, then as a highbrow and pretentious quoter, and though reason told him that Daphne’s opinion was of little value, he had an inexplicable desire to make a better impression on her.

  As the Laverings party and the Staple Park party coalesced in the churchyard, some introducing took place.

  ‘I want you,’ said Lady Bond to Mrs Middleton, ‘to know my friend, Miss Starter. It is so annoying. Miss Starter is on a diet and has to have a special bread called Kornog, which is practically starch-free. She brought part of a loaf with her –’

  ‘It was what I hadn’t finished from the loaf I got on Thursday,’ said Miss Starter, a thin middle-aged lady in black, with a faint air of royalty about her and a high black net collar. ‘I usually get one on Monday and one on Thursday, which last me for a week, as I only have two slices, or at the most three, for my breakfast, very crisply toasted.’

  ‘– and,’ continued Lady Bond, looking with some pride at her exhibit, ‘Miss Starter unfortunately did not bring an extra loaf, thinking she could get one here, but we find that they do not keep it at Skeynes. My cook has telephoned to Higgins with whom we usually deal and to Foxham, the other baker, but they say there is no demand for Kornog.’

  ‘Have you tried Mopsall at Winter Overcotes?’ said Mrs Middleton. ‘When Jack was on a diet two years ago we used to get a special bread from him. It wasn’t Kornog, but I’m sure he would get it. I think ours was called Pepso.’

  ‘Pepso is only starch-reduced,’ said Miss Starter earnestly. ‘Sir Barclay did think of it for me, but he came to the conclusion that Kornog was more what I needed.’

  ‘Miss Starter has been attended by Sir Barclay Milvin for some time,’ said Lady Bond. ‘He specializes in diets, as you doubtless know. I shall certainly try Winter Overcotes. And I do hope you will come up to tea this afternoon and bring your sister-in-law and her young people. I have my son at home for a few weeks before he goes back to New York. He is doing very well there. C.W.,’ she called to the young man who had been hanging back during the discussion of starch-free bread, ‘come and meet Mrs Stonor, and Miss Stonor and Mr Stonor.’

  This formal introduction so paralysed all concerned that they shook hands in silence, and in silence followed Lady Bond to the lychgate, till Daphne said to Lady Bond’s son.

  ‘I say, what’s your name? Your mother said C.W., but that’s only initials. Haven’t you got a real name?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lady Bond’s son simply, ‘but I’m rather ashamed of it. My people have always called me C.W., and somehow it stuck. I think they must have been a bit ashamed of it themselves.’

  ‘What is it then?’ asked Daphne.

  ‘Well,’ said Lady Bond’s son rather nervously, ‘you know my father is called Alured and there’s a sort of superstition that he is a bit Anglo-Saxon or something of the sort, some kind of descendant of King Alfred, only there’s a gap of about eight hundred years unaccounted for, so one can’t be sure. But anyway Mother thought they ought to keep up the spirit of the thing so they called me Cedric Weyland.’

  ‘Good Lord,’ said Denis sympathetically. ‘I thought my name was bad enough – it’s Denis – but yours must be a perfect curse.’

  ‘There’s only one thing to be thankful for,’ said young Mr Bond, ‘and that is that schools aren’t what they were. In my father’s time a boy with a name like that would have been persecuted till he hanged himsel
f or was taken away and sent to an agricultural college, but no one minded it a bit at Hocker’s. They thought it was pretty foul of my people and I was always called C.W. And of course at Eton nothing matters.’

  ‘Were you at Hocker’s?’ said Denis, interested. ‘I was there for two years till I got sent abroad for a bit. Do you remember Miss Hocker’s parrot?’

  The two young men fell headlong into prep. school reminiscences and would gladly have gone on till lunchtime, but Lady Bond after condescending to the Rector’s wife had rescued Lord Bond from the senior churchwarden and called to her son to get into the car.

  ‘We’re all coming up to tea,’ said Daphne, ‘so you and Denis can have a good talk then. Would you like us to call you Cedric or C.W.?’

  ‘Whichever you like,’ said young Mr Bond, getting in beside the chauffeur. ‘No one I liked ever called me Cedric, only governesses and awful things like that.’

  ‘All right, we’ll take the hoodoo off and say Cedric,’ said Daphne. ‘If I’m coming to do secretary stuff for your mother I’ll have to call you something.’