‘Father Yockery thinks that we’re having the mildest January since the Armistice,’ shouted Mrs Crawford, spotting Richard in the drive. If he wants to be called that, let him! was her attitude.
Richard waved to show that he understood and made his way up to them. Where was Mary, he wondered.
‘No Quentin?’ asked the rector.
‘You know Quentin’s gone to London—I told you,’ Mrs Crawford said.
‘You did … you did!’ conceded Mr Yockery. A dim kindliness played over his face.
‘Stella’s gone off too, I hear,’ she added.
‘Yes, she left this morning,’ said Richard.
‘I understand Stella’s doing wonderfully well, wonderfully well!’ said Mr Yockery. He nodded in the direction of a leaden vase in incontrovertible harmony with all he said. Self-agreement elongated his jaw, drew down his nose, softened his gaze. He gathered in congratulatory bouquets from every source, from the winter heliotrope as it happened at that moment.
‘Why,’ he declared, sniffing soundly, ‘you’ve got some of this!’
‘It’s been out ever since Christmas,’ said Mrs Crawford.
‘Wonderful! Wonderful!’ said Mr Yockery.
‘You’ll never believe it,’ Mrs Crawford declared, gathering up her chains in a rich haul, ‘but when we mowed yesterday—last time, thank heaven—there were daisies out still.’
‘A daisy!’ reflected Mr Yockery. He stared ahead of him with the sweet inanity of a Holman Hunt apostle. ‘A daisy … the Eye of Day … fancy that, Richard!’
‘When my husband obtained his first captaincy …’ Mrs Crawford was commencing obscurely when a silvery jingle occupied the little cupola high up on the roof. ‘Luncheon,’ she said. At the too-gracious door she turned and speaking to nobody in particular, added, ‘I maintain that it’s still possible to keep up one’s standards if one has a mind to …’ She moved a hand vaguely in the direction of the dining-room.
At that moment Mary came through with Hibble, originally the parlourmaid, now everything. Mary, in spite of the effort she had made with her clothes, was too busy to look really pleasing. She wore a light blue woollen suit with some rather big milky-looking beads. They lay at her throat, cloudy, opaline; contrasting dully with her white, clear skin.
‘Ready at last!’ she announced, reserving a small private nod for Richard. ‘Sorry to keep everybody waiting.’
They ate slowly, the conversation anaemically attuned to Hibble’s despising presence—despising because of the presence of the rector. Hibble was Wee Free, or something of that sort. Helping Mr Yockery to sprouts was as bad as nourishing the Devil where she was concerned. She did so now, plobbing them sadly on to his plate, more and more—and still he was silent. At last his hand fluttered. I knew it! Hibble thought—he eats and eats, that one! She passed on, heavy with her hate, to Richard.
‘Now,’ said Mr Yockery, ‘let me hear all the news. Where shall we start? What is your news—eh, Mrs Crawford?
‘Mine? I’ve forgotten what it’s like to have news—I suppose that should indicate a wonderful contentment. I think you had better ask Richard. He’s bursting with news.’
‘We know Richard’s news, or the gist of it,’ said Mr Yockery.
‘There’s not much more to tell so far,’ said Richard. ‘I went to Copdock a week before they broke-up for Christmas—just to get the hang of the place and I start teaching as soon as they go back.’
‘What shall your subjects be?’ enquired Mr Yockery. A goatish glimmer made its way along the moist rims of his eyes.
‘English, I suppose.’
‘You suppose …?’
‘It’s a very small school and there’s not a lot of specialization. I shall be responsible for English and on a roster for practically everything else.’
Mr Yockery’s head sagged and his hands crawled over the tablecloth in search of mustard, pepper, the salt. ‘And what,’ he enquired with snuffling deliberation, ‘are the qualifications requisite for being on … a roster …?’
‘None—in my case,’ said Richard shortly. Old Yockers wasn’t going to bait him, even if he thought he was! An earlier detestation of that leaping Adam’s-apple returned to him in full force. If he’d known who was going to be present for lunch he would have found an excuse for not coming. Too late now, he would just have to keep a check on himself.
‘Do they make you comfortable?’ asked Mr Yockery, rather as though Copdock was an hotel.
‘It’s not bad.’
‘Tell me about Winsley. Is he well, would you say?’
‘Quite. But I didn’t realize you knew one another.’
Mr Yockery paused before he looked up. ‘There is no reason why you should have,’ he said. ‘We were young together, you might say.’
‘I must tell him that I have seen you,’ Richard said.
‘Must you?’ said Mr Yockery. ‘If you must, you must, I suppose …’
‘Well, not if you would rather I didn’t.’
Mr Yockery’s large, limp, too-scrubbed hands paused for a second from their pea-baiting, mutton-piling preoccupation. He was considering. His eyes did little sums of addition and subtraction. What should he lose; what might he gain, they indicated. He cleared his throat and gulping rather, said, ‘Second thoughts, do tell him. It is just possible that he might like to know.’ Turning to Mrs Crawford, he explained, ‘You knew that Cadman Winsley and myself were up at the House together, didn’t you, Florence?’
Richard was too surprised by the ‘Florence’ to take overmuch notice of the answer. He glanced at Mrs Crawford and then at Mary.
‘Quite true,’ insisted Mr Yockery with a fearsome playfulness. ‘You ask Winsley. He was going into the army, or so we all thought then. He even went to a crammer’s but nothing came of it. I wonder why … Or do I?’ he added maliciously.
Mrs Crawford’s rich bulk shook a little at this. Her fingers among the wine-glasses expressed a submerged glee. This was gossip as she adored it; tentative, cruel and shaded with a flimsy esotericism sufficient to stir the wits of the semi-informed and to fox the rank outsider. She looked first at Richard and then at Mary and was a trifle angry to see them unaffected and eating. If people were not going to rise a little to the implications of the game, they—Father Yockery and herself, might just as well be alone. She leant across and rang the bell with marked resentment.
Hibble arrived and lunged about the table with florid hands, collecting plates and tureens; dinging the servers together. Richard stopped breathing when she reached his place. A compelling fancy from his childhood forced him to believe that Hibble smelled. He was ashamed to believe this, and wrong too, as it happened. Hibble, in spite of her frumped skirts and screwed-up hair, maintained a sweet and distinct freshness. None the less, she took so long to clear the plates near himself that he thought he was going to burst. At last she moved away, to return with Mrs Crawford’s octagonal Bristol-Delft fruit-plates, which she scattered before them with a certain adroit recklessness.
‘Anything else?’ she demanded to know.
Mrs Crawford looked up, the hint of battle in her eye. She had a sneaking admiration for Hibble’s daring at times, but she wasn’t going to have it flaunted in front of guests.
‘Lovely, Hibble,’ said Mary quickly. ‘No, nothing more, thank you.’
Hibble left the dining-room rather sharply. The victory had been altogether too shadowy for her to be really sure of it.
‘I suppose that you think Copdock’s a pretty awful school?’ said Richard, taking a pear gingerly from the pyramid of fruit in the middle of the table.
‘I don’t—not a bit,’ denied Mr Yockery. He jabbed an elaborately engraved knife into the soft flesh of an orange. ‘And who am I that I should say anything which might reduce another’s sense of vocation …?’ He wiped his long limp fingers on his napkin. ‘I suppose you do feel it to be a vocation … I am sure I hope you do.’
‘It’s a job,’ said Richard shortly.
; ‘I like to think that life’s task is a little more than that,’ replied Mr Yockery sententiously. ‘Jobs always make me think of sculleries.’
‘A vocation …’ began Mary hesitantly, still in her role of appeaser.
‘Exactly, Miss Crawford,’ said Mr Yockery quickly, never doubting that she was on his side. But his formal use of her name was something a great deal more than mere politeness. He pronounced it to ensure her isolation from the charmed circle of his own and its adjacent generations. She was too young by far to enter that enjoyable and ever-reminiscent world he so assiduously cultivated. And in any case, she was a woman, and he didn’t care overmuch for women. Mrs Crawford was different. She was sixty, so that made her something more than just a woman. He liked women to be rising sixty, for by then they could shed their more deplorable femininity and could even be mildly clubbable. Florence Crawford was proving herself a godsend to him. Mr Yockery admired her most sincerely. Besides who would have thought that so much of their individual pasts had impinged and had so delicately collided across half a century! Hardly a day passed now without one more thing in common being added to their recollections.
Plumbing the well of experience they discovered Canon Huntington, Oberammergau in 1921—a common occasion, though severally enjoyed—Sinister Street and their tallying views on it, and most miraculous of all, Florence’s own discovery that they must be cousins of a sort. The last argument he had found hard to follow, but it was a fact that Tothills of the Bedford breed existed for both of them. Alliances of a more lasting kind had been founded on less things in common. And far beyond all this—Florence comforted him. He was tall and gaunt and grey; aspen with a natural asceticism that a lifetime of good feeding had not corrupted. One might say that he was one of Nature’s Savonarolas, whereas Mrs Crawford, without a doubt, was one of Cheltenham’s Helen Fourments. How often had not Mr Yockery longed for the symbolic comfort of that splendid breast! Marvellous and matriarchal she had always appeared to him. Only to see her, he considered, was sufficient to make the ethics of Delphi of Cnidus truly admirable. How wrong the reformers had been when they swept away the great mother-figure from English worship! In fact he wasn’t sure if this had not been the very worst thing which had happened to the nation, that is if one left out the 1870 Education Act. Talking of vocation, he wondered if Florence might marry him.
‘I would like to think that too,’ said Richard. ‘To be certain of one’s vocation must be the nicest kind of smugness.’
‘Aren’t you sure then?’ enquired Mr Yockery bleakly.
‘Not a bit, I’m afraid. I really want to write, so Copdock will have to go on being just a job.’
‘In the newspapers…?’
‘Oh, yes, in the newspapers—in anything.’
‘I knew a writer once,’ announced Mrs Crawford in her curiously noisy voice. ‘His family was terribly nice—you remember the Pawseys, Father?’
‘St Alban’s?’ said Mr Yockery quickly. This was wonderful! Another little bit of jigsaw past in place! He almost heard the click as he fitted it.
‘St Alban’s,’ confirmed Mrs Crawford. ‘In fact, I believe Mrs Pawsey’s still there, but he’s dead, of course.’
‘It must be Nicholas Pawsey—the son, I mean,’ said Richard. ‘He writes in the New Statesman.’
‘I suppose he has to live,’ said Mrs Crawford.
‘He writes awfully well …’
‘So he should,’ she retorted. ‘He was sent to Oxford.’
God! thought Richard. It just couldn’t go on. It was unendurable! How on earth did Mary stand it! He glanced across and saw her chipping away at a hard-looking sliver of apple with the pretty detachment of a squirrel that fancies itself alone. A crystal quiet surrounded her. This irritated him. How was he to be any kind of knight-errant and slay her immense boredom when she possessed sufficient weapons and courage of her own? To make things worse, her self-sufficiency was just enough to be exacting. It made him furious—until he remembered the long schooling she must have had to produce it. Then he forgave her. Doing so brought a new tenderness. He had a sudden desire to run his fingers through that fine rich hair, to touch her softly shadowed throat with his mouth. He would rescue her—crystal quiet, or no crystal quiet. He held his breath.
Hibble was splashing out the remains of the slightly sour hock. Her gesture was one of libation combined with an upstart pity. She poured too high and made it sound like the last drop. They were damned, she was thinking to herself, and everlasting night was waiting for them. In a little while … in the twinkling of an eye…. Then (for herself) the endless ease of Glory, the eternity with her feet up…. Blessed were the meek after all, she decided. Mr Yockery’s, at last barren, plate fell to her like a trophy.
‘No one really knows what is going to happen,’ Mary was saying. She spoke from her vantage place, from the half-amused platform of her detachment. The room, its glass and furniture and winter flowers and those who inhabited it were her whole existence, yet it was obvious that at that particular moment she found them expendable. The vicious little observations of the older people were of no more meaning or importance than the wisps of bog-cotton which blew about the same well-polished room in the summer-time. Now and then she glanced at her mother, not even askance any more at Mrs Crawford’s ostentatious sociability with its arid and accomplished ‘conversation’. It was only when Mrs Crawford began to throw out opinions which could be hurtful with that faint coarseness which comes to the elderly did Mary start. Then her tolerance lapped over into a stare of warning. She could only be snubbed now in certain permitted ways; not anywhere, anyhow, as she used to be.
‘Richard is right, I think,’ she went on, her eyes on the table so that all she could see of him was the urbane reflection of his hands in the shiny wood. ‘How can anyone say that ‘I shall do this’ or ‘I shall do that’ for the rest of their life—Surely the time has passed when a person calmly picked out a convenient niche in the world and calmly sat himself down in it….’
‘You think that?’ said Mr Yockery sardonically. He didn’t much like this kind of talk. He preferred to imagine that his own age carried with it its own privileged eminence; that its standards were still the criteria of taste and conduct, not picturesque, nor anachronistic. Besides, there was another reason for his uneasiness. Like Quentin, he dreaded war. He couldn’t face disturbance of any kind. To combat the newspapers and the present sort of talk, he cultivated a wan optimism, a tiny self-deception that was just sufficient to keep his contentment ticking over. ‘I trust, Miss Crawford, that you’re not yet another person who believes that there is going to be a war?’
‘Perhaps not,’ she replied vaguely. ‘In some miraculous—or dishonourable—way there may not be. Who can tell!’
Mrs Crawford didn’t trouble to hide her disappointment. For her, nineteen-sixteen had been the golden time. Might not equivalent perils reproduce it? She was sorry for the dead, of course. One should be. But did not even they gain a trifle in the golden sense? Their names would not be nearly so bright a colour had they lived. She recalled it all as surgingly glorious—and golden. People were improved by the most varying conditions and she had been at her best in a holocaust. Terror did not drain her; nor the usual fears. It was Lafney which did that; Lafney with its bleak calm and orderliness. If something didn’t break out soon she didn’t know what she would do. Anyway, wasn’t it good for the men? She seemed to remember being told something of the sort.
‘Well it’s much too pleasant an occasion to worry ourselves with such things!’ said Mr Yockery. ‘Thank you, my dear Florence.’ He gave a little bow which wasn’t quite a charade.
Mrs Crawford nodded and smiled and boosted the big, loose colourless knot of hair at the nape of her neck. ‘There’s coffee to come.’
Hibble brought the coffee in, but already doled out in thimbly cups, which was something more to irritate.
‘We’ll have the pot too, Hibble,’ said Mrs Crawford.
Instead of showi
ng her temper to the maid she turned swiftly to Mary. See—she’s done it again! flashed her heavy, accusing eyes. Suddenly she felt bored and angry. She thought that Mary was getting more out of these occasions than she did herself. Like endless other people—even those of the most harmonious kind—she had a sudden longing to have the house to herself. ‘What are you going to do this afternoon?’ she demanded, as if she couldn’t get them out of the place soon enough. It was a dismissal to make quite clear her own unshareable plans.
‘I hadn’t thought—What will you do, Richard?’
‘Me——? Pack, I suppose.’
‘Oh, yes, pack,’ she said rather miserably.
‘It won’t take me long,’ he said, retreating before her forlorn statement. He felt as she did, the immediate worthlessness of everything and beyond this the flutter of some unuttered invitation; a quality affecting the sound of her voice, and not what she was actually saying, which was exactly what he most enjoyed—the entrée to a ready-made situation. A confusion of trust, innocence and lassitude ruled out any real combative side to his nature. If and when something happened to him, it was because some accident or coincidence precipitated him in that particular direction. He rarely struggled towards the change of his own free will. Others generally set the scene he was to inhabit. Going to Copdock had been like that. An advertisement in The Times Educational Supplement would have had no effect whatsoever. It had to be Stella’s bank manager’s friend’s word-in-the-ear and the interview that wasn’t an interview, since the result existed before the examining. After that, the easing of himself out of Ipswich and into Stourfriston had been comparatively painless. Too painless perhaps—that was the danger of living other people’s plans. This is where he envied Quentin, because Quentin fought wildly for what he wanted. In fact, made himself nervous and ill with all his striving and perfecting. The miracle was, that with all Quentin’s effort and his own monumental insouciance, the two of them had, on the face of it, come out pretty level. The conditioning factor being, of course, ‘on the face of it’.
A Treasonable Growth Page 8
