The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, Volume 1

by Philip Hensher

  William Thackeray

  A Little Dinner at Timmins’s

  I

  Mr and Mrs Fitzroy Timmins live in Lilliput Street, that neat little street which runs at right angles with the Park and Brobdingnag Gardens. It is a very genteel neighbourhood, and I need not say they are of a good family.

  Especially Mrs Timmins, as her mamma is always telling Mr T. They are Suffolk people, and distantly related to the Right Honourable the Earl of Bungay.

  Besides his house in Lilliput Street, Mr Timmins has Chambers in Fig-tree Court, Temple, and goes the Northern Circuit.

  The other day, when there was a slight difference about the payment of fees between the great Parliamentary Counsel and the Solicitors, Stoke and Pogers, of Great George Street, sent the papers of the Lough Foyle and Lough Corrib Junction Railway to Mr Fitzroy Timmins, who was so elated that he instantly purchased a couple of looking-glasses for his drawing-rooms (the front room is 16 by 12, and the back, a tight but elegant apartment, 10 ft 6 by 8 ft 4), a coral for the baby, two new dresses for Mrs Timmins, and a little rosewood desk, at the Pantechnicon, for which Rosa had long been sighing, with crumpled legs, emerald-green and gold morocco top, and drawers all over.

  Mrs Timmins is a very pretty poetess (her ‘Lines to a Faded Tulip’, and her ‘Plaint of Plinlimmon’, appeared in one of last year’s Keepsakes), and Fitzroy, as he impressed a kiss on the snowy forehead of his bride, pointed out to her, in one of the innumerable pockets of the desk, an elegant ruby-tipped pen, and six charming little gilt blank books, marked ‘My Books’, which Mrs Fitzroy might fill, he said, (he is an Oxford man, and very polite) ‘with the delightful productions of her Muse’. Besides these books, there was pink paper, paper with crimson edges, lace paper, all stamped with R. F. T. (Rosa Fitzroy Timmins), and the hand and battle-axe, the crest of the Timminses (and borne at Ascalon by Roaldus de Timmins, a crusader, who is now buried in the Temple Church, next to Serjeant Snooks), and yellow, pink, light-blue, and other scented sealing-waxes, at the service of Rosa when she chose to correspond with her friends.

  Rosa, you may be sure, jumped with joy at the sight of this sweet present; called her Charles (his first name is Samuel, but they have sunk that) the best of men! embraced him a great number of times, to the edification of her buttony little page, who stood at the landing; and as soon as he was gone to Chambers, took the new pen and a sweet sheet of paper, and began to compose a poem.

  ‘What shall it be about?’ was naturally her first thought. ‘What should be a young mother’s first inspiration?’ Her child lay on the sofa asleep, before her; and she began in her neatest hand –

  LINES

  ON MY SON, BUNGAY DE BRACY GASHLEIGH TYMMYNS, AGED TEN MONTHS.

  Tuesday.

  ‘How beautiful! how beautiful thou seemest,

  My boy, my precious one, my rosy babe!

  Kind angels hover round thee, as thou dreamest:

  Soft lashes hide thy beauteous azure eye which gleamest.’

  ‘Gleamest? thine eye which gleamest? Is that grammar?’ thought Rosa, who had puzzled her little brains for some time with this absurd question, when the baby woke; then the cook came up to ask about dinner; then Mrs Fundy slipped over from No. 27, (they are opposite neighbours, and made an acquaintance through Mrs Fundy’s macaw): and a thousand things happened. Finally there was no rhyme to babe except Tippo Saib (against whom Major Gashleigh, Rosa’s grandfather, had distinguished himself), and so she gave up the little poem about her De Bracy.

  Nevertheless, when Fitzroy returned from Chambers to take a walk with his wife in the Park, as he peeped through the rich tapestry hanging which divided the two drawing-rooms, he found his dear girl still seated at the desk, and writing, writing away with her ruby pen as fast as it could scribble.

  ‘What a genius that child has!’ he said; ‘why, she is a second Mrs Norton!’ and advanced smiling to peep over her shoulder and see what pretty thing Rosa was composing.

  It was not poetry, though, that she was writing, and Fitz read as follows: –

  LILLIPUT STREET, Tuesday, 22nd May.

  Mr and Mrs Fitzroy Tymmyns request the pleasure of Sir Thomas and Lady Kicklebury’s company at dinner on Wednesday, at 7½ o’clock.

  ‘My dear!’ exclaimed the barrister, pulling a long face.

  ‘Law, Fitzroy!’ cried the beloved of his bosom, ‘how you do startle one!’

  ‘Give a dinner party with our means!’ said he.

  ‘Ain’t you making a fortune, you miser?’ Rosa said. ‘Fifteen guineas a day is four thousand five hundred a year; I’ve calculated it.’ And, so saying, she rose and taking hold of his whiskers, (which are as fine as those of any man of his circuit,) she put her mouth close up against his and did something to his long face, which quite changed the expression of it: and which the little page heard outside the door.

  ‘Our dining-room won’t hold ten,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll only ask twenty,’ my love; ‘ten are sure to refuse in this season, when everybody is giving parties. Look, here is the list.’

  ‘Earl and Countess of Bungay, and Lady Barbara Saint Mary’s.’

  ‘You are dying to get a Lord into the house,’ Timmins said (he has not altered his name in Fig-tree Court yet, and therefore I am not so affected as to call him Tymmyns). ‘Law, my dear, they are our cousins, and must be asked,’ Rosa said.

  ‘Let us put down my sister and Tom Crowder, then.’

  ‘Blanche Crowder is really so very fat, Fitzroy,’ his wife said, ‘and our rooms are so very small.’

  Fitz laughed. ‘You little rogue,’ he said, ‘Lady Bungay weighs two of Blanche, even when she’s not in the f—’

  ‘Fiddlesticks!’ Rose cried out. ‘Doctor Crowder really cannot be admitted; he makes such a noise eating his soup, that it is really quite disagreeable;’ and she imitated the gurgling noise performed by the doctor while inhausting his soup, in such a funny way, that Fitz saw inviting him was out of the question.

  ‘Besides, we musn’t have too many relations,’ Rosa went on. ‘Mamma, of course, is coming. She doesn’t like to be asked in the evening; and she’ll bring her silver bread-basket, and her candlesticks, which are very rich and handsome.’

  ‘And you complain of Blanche for being too stout!’ groaned out Timmins.

  ‘Well, well, don’t be in a pet,’ said little Rosa. ‘The girls won’t come to dinner; but will bring their music afterwards.’ And she went on with the list.

  ‘Sir Thomas and Lady Kicklebury, 2. No saying no: we must ask them, Charles. They are rich people, and any room in their house in Brobdingnag Gardens would swallow up our humble cot. But to people in our position in society, they will be glad enough to come. The city people are glad to mix with the old families.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Fitz, with a sad face of assent – and Mrs Timmins went on reading her list.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Topham Sawyer, Belgravine Place.’

  ‘Mrs Sawyer hasn’t asked you all the season. She gives herself the airs of an empress; and when—’

  ‘One’s member, you know, my dear, one must have,’ Rosa replied, with much dignity; as if the presence of the representative of her native place would be a protection to her dinner; and a note was written and transported by the page early next morning to the mansion of the Sawyers, in Belgravine Place.

  The Topham Sawyers had just come down to breakfast, Mrs T. in her large dust-coloured morning dress and Madonna front (she looks rather scraggy of a morning, but I promise you her ringlets and figure will stun you of an evening); and having read the note, the following dialogue passed: –

  Mrs Topham Sawyer. ‘Well, upon my word, I don’t know where things will end. Mr Sawyer, the Timminses have asked us to dinner.’

  Mr Topham Sawyer. ‘Ask us to dinner! What d— impudence!’

  Mrs Topham Sawyer. ‘The most dangerous and insolent revolutionary principles are abroad, Mr Sawyer; and I shall write and hint as much to these persons.’

 
; Mr Topham Sawyer. ‘No, d— it, Joanna, they are my constituents, and we must go. Write a civil note, and say we will come to their party.’ (He resumes the perusal of the ‘Times,’ and Mrs Topham Sawyer writes) –

  MY DEAR ROSA,

  We shall have great pleasure in joining your little party. I do not reply in the third person, as we are old friends, you know, and country neighbours. I hope your mamma is well: present my kindest remembrances to her, and I hope we shall see much MORE of each other in the summer, when we go down to the Sawpits (for going abroad is out of the question in these dreadful times). With a hundred kisses to your dear little pet,

  Believe me your attached

  J. T. S.

  She said Pet, because she did not know whether Rosa’s child was a girl or boy: and Mrs Timmins was very much pleased with the kind and gracious nature of the reply to her invitation.

  II

  The next persons whom little Mrs Timmins was bent upon asking, were Mr and Mrs John Rowdy, of the firm of Stumpy, Rowdy, and Co., of Brobdingnag Gardens, of the Prairie, Putney, and of Lombard Street, City.

  Mrs Timmins and Mrs Rowdy had been brought up at the same school together, and there was always a little rivalry between them, from the day when they contended for the French prize at school, to last week, when each had a stall at the Fancy Fair for the benefit of the Daughters of Decayed Muffin-men; and when Mrs Timmins danced against Mrs Rowdy in the Scythe Mazurka at the Polish Ball, headed by Mrs Hugh Slasher. Rowdy took twenty-three pounds more than Timmins in the Muffin transaction (for she had possession of a kettle-holder worked by the hands of R–y–lty, which brought crowds to her stall); but in the Mazourk Rosa conquered; she has the prettiest little foot possible (which in a red boot and silver heel looked so lovely that even the Chinese ambassador remarked it), whereas Mrs Rowdy’s foot is no trifle, as Lord Cornbury acknowledged when it came down on his lordship’s boot tip as they danced together amongst the Scythes.

  ‘These people are ruining themselves,’ said Mrs John Rowdy to her husband, on receiving the pink note. It was carried round by that rogue of a buttony page in the evening, and he walked to Brobdingnag Gardens and in the Park afterwards, with a young lady who is kitchen-maid at 27, and who is not more than fourteen years older than little Buttons.

  ‘Those people are ruining themselves,’ said Mrs John to her husband. ‘Rosa says she has asked the Bungays.’

  ‘Bungays, indeed! Timmins was always a tuft-hunter,’ said Rowdy, who had been at college with the barrister, and who, for his own part, has no more objection to a lord than you or I have; and adding, ‘Hang him, what business has he to be giving parties?’ allowed Mrs Rowdy, nevertheless, to accept Rosa’s invitation.

  ‘When I go to business to-morrow, I will just have a look at Mr Fitz’s account,’ Mr Rowdy thought, ‘and if it is overdrawn, as it usually is, why’ … The announcement of Mrs Rowdy’s brougham here put an end to this agreeable train of thought, and the banker and his lady stepped into it to join a snug little family party of two-and-twenty, given by Mr and Mrs Secondchop, at their great house on the other side of the Park.

  ‘Rowdys 2, Bungays 3, ourselves and mamma 3, 2 Sawyers,’ calculated little Rosa.

  ‘General Gulpin,’ Rosa continued, ‘eats a great deal, and is very stupid, but he looks well at table, with his star and ribbon; let us put him down!’ and she noted down ‘Sir Thomas and Lady Gulpin, 2. Lord Castlenoodle, 1.’

  ‘You will make your party abominably genteel and stupid,’ groaned Timmins. ‘Why don’t you ask some of our old friends? Old Mrs Portman has asked us twenty times, I am sure, within the last two years.’

  ‘And the last time we went there, there was pea-soup for dinner!’ Mrs Timmins said, with a look of ineffable scorn.

  ‘Nobody can have been kinder than the Hodges have always been to us; and some sort of return we might make, I think.’

  ‘Return, indeed! A pretty sound it is on the staircase to hear Mr and Mrs Odge and Miss Odges, pronounced by Billiter, who always leaves his h’s out. No, no; see attornies at your chambers, my dear – but what could the poor creatures do in our society?’ And so, one by one, Timmins’s old friends were tried and eliminated by Mrs Timmins, just as if she had been an Irish attorney-general, and they so many Catholics on Mr Mitchel’s jury.

  Mrs Fitzroy insisted that the party should be of her very best company. Funnyman, the great wit, was asked, because of his jokes; and Mrs Butt, on whom he practises; and Potter, who is asked because everybody else asks him; and Mr Ranville Ranville of the Foreign Office, who might give some news of the Spanish squabble; and Botherby, who has suddenly sprung up into note because he is intimate with the French Revolution, and visits Ledru-Rollin and Lamartine. And these, with a couple more who are amis de la maison, made up the twenty, whom Mrs Timmins thought she might safely invite to her little dinner.

  But the deuce of it was, that when the answers to the invitations came back, everybody accepted! Here was a pretty quandary. How they were to get twenty into their dining-room, was a calculation which poor Timmins could not solve at all; and he paced up and down the little room in dismay.

  ‘Pooh!’ said Rosa with a laugh; ‘your sister Blanche looked very well in one of my dresses, last year; and you know how stout she is. We will find some means to accommodate them all, depend upon it.’

  Mrs John Rowdy’s note to dear Rosa, accepting the latter’s invitation, was a very gracious and kind one: and Mrs Fitz showed it to her husband when he came back from chambers. But there was another note which had arrived for him by this time from Mr Rowdy – or rather from the firm: and to the effect that Mr F. Timmins had overdrawn his account £28 18s. 6d., and was requested to pay that sum to his obedient servants, Stumpy, Rowdy, and Co.

  And Timmins did not like to tell his wife that the contending parties in the Lough Neagh and Lough Corrib Railroad had come to a settlement, and that the fifteen guineas a day had consequently determined. ‘I have had seven days of it, though,’ he thought; ‘and that will be enough to pay for the desk, the dinner, and the glasses, and make all right with Stumpy and Rowdy.’

  III

  The cards for dinner having been issued, it became the duty of Mrs Timmins to make further arrangements respecting the invitations to the tea-party which was to follow the more substantial meal.

  These arrangements are difficult, as any lady knows who is in the habit of entertaining her friends. There are –

  People who are offended if you ask them to tea whilst others have been asked to dinner –

  People who are offended if you ask them to tea at all; and cry out furiously, ‘Good Heavens! Jane, my love, why do these Timminses suppose that I am to leave my dinner-table to attend their —— soirée?’ (the dear reader my fill up the —— to any strength, according to his liking) – or, ‘Upon my word, William, my dear, it is too much to ask us to pay twelve shillings for a brougham, and to spend I don’t know how much in gloves, just to make our curtsies in Mrs Timmins’s little drawing-room.’ Mrs Moser made the latter remark about the Timmins affair, while the former was uttered by Mr Grumpley, barrister-at-law, to his lady, in Gloucester Place.

  That there are people who are offended if you don’t ask them at all, is a point which I suppose nobody will question. Timmins’s earliest friend in life was Simmins, whose wife and family have taken a cottage at Mortlake for the season.

  ‘We can’t ask them to come out of the country,’ Rosa said to her Fitzroy – (between ourselves, she was delighted that Mrs Simmins was out of the way, and was as jealous of her as every well-regulated woman should be of her husband’s female friends) – ‘we can’t ask them to come so far for the evening.’

  ‘Why no, certainly,’ said Fitzroy, who has himself no very great opinion of a tea-party; and so the Simminses were cut out of the list.

  And what was the consequence? The consequence was, that Simmins and Timmins cut when they meet at Westminster; that Mrs Simmins sent back all the books which she had borr
owed from Rosa, with a withering note of thanks; that Rosa goes about saying that Mrs Simmins squints; that Mrs S., on her side, declares that Rosa is crooked, and behaved shamefully to Captain Hicks, in marrying Fitzroy over him, though she was forced to do it by her mother, and prefers the captain to her husband to this day. If, in a word, these two men could be made to fight, I believe their wives would not be displeased; and the reason of all this misery, rage, and dissension, lies in a poor little twopenny dinner-party in Lilliput Street.

  Well, the guests, both for before and after meat, having been asked – old Mrs Gashleigh, Rosa’s mother – (and, by consequence, Fitzroy’s dear mother-in-law, though I promise you that ‘dear’ is particularly sarcastic) – Mrs Gashleigh of course was sent for, and came with Miss Eliza Gashleigh who plays on the guitar, and Emily, who limps a little, but plays sweetly on the concertina. They live close by – trust them for that. Your mother-in-law is always within hearing, thank our stars for the attention of the dear women. The Gashleighs, I say, live close by, and came early on the morning after Rosa’s notes had been issued for the dinner.

  When Fitzroy, who was in his little study, which opens into his little dining-room – one of those absurd little rooms which ought to be called a gentleman’s pantry, and is scarcely bigger than a shower-bath, or a state cabin in a ship – when Fitzroy heard his mother-in-law’s knock, and her well-known scuffling and chattering in the passage, in which she squeezed up young Buttons, the page, while she put questions to him regarding baby, and the cook’s health, and whether she had taken what Mrs Gashleigh had sent over night, and the housemaid’s health, and whether Mr Timmins had gone to chambers or not? and when, after this preliminary chatter, Buttons flung open the door, announcing – ‘Mrs Gashleigh and the young ladies,’ Fitzroy laid down his ‘Times’ newspaper with an expression that had best not be printed in a journal which young people read, and took his hat and walked away.