“And I have told your mother again and again,” said Sir Robert, who had the curious perverted habit peculiar to parents of blaming Anne by implication for her other parent’s existence, “that the flowers must be cut in the morning and left up to the neck in water, or they won’t last.”
“Well, daddy,” said Anne, nobly sharing the guilt, “mummy had to go to her Red Cross directly after breakfast and anyway nothing had properly come out then, because of Double Summer Time.”
Sir Robert said he hoped the late Mr. William Willett would have to spend the rest of eternity in cold, grey Double Summer Time and serve him right.
“Besides,” said Anne, “it’s much nicer to pick flowers without a gardener looking at one. Tomkins always despises one whatever one does.”
Sir Robert agreed, and they cut the flowers and Anne put them in water and then it was time to change for dinner, for though to change was no more than taking off one old summer dress and putting on another, Lady Fielding was very firm about it, and quite right too. To Sir Robert, as head of the family and a very hard-working man, the concession was made that he might slip off his coat and slip on a velvet plum-coloured smoking-jacket, relic of more prosperous days; the word slip being ingeniously used to make it all sound easier. But though outwardly a concession it was really a law, and Lady Fielding, so easy-going a wife in most ways, was adamant about the smoking-jacket, saying very truly that if that went Everything would go. For so it has been in every household. Whatever slipshod degradation the Germans have brought us to, each person and each household has a small flag which flies from the very top of the mast even until the vessel is being sucked into the whirlpool; Sir Robert’s jacket being one.
To-night was also a more ceremonial affair, for Mr. Birkett the Headmaster of Southbridge School was coming with his wife and Robin Dale, his junior classical master, whom the Fieldings had come to know well and like during a summer spent at Hallbury, where his father was Rector. Very luckily the School was just within the limit for which a taxi could be hired, and Mr. Brown of the Red Lion had been bespoken for the last ten days to carry the Birketts and Robin Dale to Barchester and back, a deed which had only been made possible by Mr. Brown’s Masonic Lodge having a meeting on that same evening. Accordingly at a quarter past seven the dinner party was decanted at the door of Number Seventeen, with strict orders to be ready for the return journey the moment Mr. Brown appeared, as he thought something had gone wrong with his rear light.
“If,” said Mr. Birkett, when they had taken their places at the dinner-table, “it is a choice between bicycling to Barchester and back or submitting to Brown’s exorbitant charges, I prefer the latter on the whole. But I still hope to tell him what I think of him before I die.”
“Another way would be to come by train,” said Sir Robert.
“We did think of that,” said Mrs. Birkett, “but it would mean getting to Barchester Central at 6.45 and having to catch the 8.3 back if we wanted to sleep in our own beds. And the bus is no good, because it is always full of people from the aeroplane works going in to the cinema by the time it passes us. So Brown it must be.”
Sir Robert said the thought of telling people, at some vague future date, exactly what one thought of them, was about the only thing that kept one going through the war. And if, he said, Peace didn’t break out soon, he would forestall that threatening event by telling that fool Aberfordbury who sat on a tribunal with him exactly what he thought of him and more.
“Who on earth is Aberfordbury, Robert,” said his wife.
Sir Robert said she knew quite well.
“But I don’t,” said Mrs. Birkett. “I don’t think it’s a name at all.”
“None of the new peers’ names are real names,” said Sir Robert angrily. “God knows how they find them. If I were offered a peerage, which really might happen to anyone now while he was shaving, I would be Baron Fielding of the Close. It would at least make it easier for one’s friends to know who one was.”
“You wouldn’t, Robert,” said his wife, “I wouldn’t allow it. You would be Lord Fielding, but I would only be Lady Fielding, just as I am now. You will have to invent a silly name for yourself.”
An agreeable game was then played thinking of all the very unconvincing titles adopted by recent peers and inventing even less convincing ones; though Robin Dale said this was impossible. When this topic petered out, Lady Fielding said she still wanted to know who Lord Aberfordbury was.
“That pestilential fool Sir Ogilvy Hibberd,” said her husband. “Lord Aberfordbury of Wopford in the county of Loamshire. Bah!”
Mrs. Birkett, a staunch party woman, said it served him right for being a Liberal and a general discussion took place as to what Liberals were for, Robin Dale obtaining top marks by saying they were invented to split votes. And then the talk, as usual, meandered into food.
“The person I would most like to tell what I think of him,” said Lady Fielding, “is the butcher. He has a horrid foxy look and wraps up one’s disgusting bit of meat before one can see what it is. Pollett says that the Palace give him ten shillings under the counter and I can quite believe it. So no wonder he despises Number Seventeen.”
“Is it grey pork with water oozing out of it this week?” said Mrs. Birkett with animation.
“I almost wish it were,” said Lady Fielding. “It is a small cube of magenta beef, very hard, with all the fat cut off.”
“Mrs. Carter,” said Robin, who lived with Everard Carter the Senior Housemaster, “got what everyone thought was very nasty mutton, till it turned out to be uneatable veal. When I think of heaven I think of a very thick piece of bleeding steak, well grilled on the outside.”
“Oh, Robin!” said Anne, raising her large dark eyes to his in a kind of reverent ecstasy.
“Kidneys, with a little pool of their own gravy in their cupped hands,” said Mr. Birkett, whom no one had thought capable of such a sustained poetic flight.
“The conversation does somehow always get round to food,” said Lady Fielding, “and I feel one oughtn’t to.”
Anne said she wondered if people talked about food in heaven. Sir Robert, returning to his original grievance, said he hoped that in heaven he would have the chance of telling everyone he didn’t like exactly what he thought of him; or her, he added.
“Yes, one would have to include the Bishop’s wife,” said Lady Fielding. “But perhaps she wants the same heaven, and it would be annoying if she got in first. Still, she has so often told me what she thought of me, or at any rate implied it, that it wouldn’t make much difference. But it will be lovely to get milk and honey without ration books.”
The talk, having reverted to food, got the upper hand of the party till Mr. Birkett began to discuss the chances of the war coming to an end. And as no one could possibly know, and all arguments were based on complete ignorance or fine crusted prejudice, the conversation was highly profitable.
“I have only two demands to make when the peace terms are settled,” said Mrs. Birkett. “One is that we shall have Calais because it really belongs to us and the other that we shan’t be noble and give all our food to other people, because if we fall down dead, as most of us undoubtedly will as soon as the moral support of the war is withdrawn, we shan’t be much use. And we must have more butter, even if everyone else goes without.”
“As a public servant in a small way, I must deprecate your remarks,” said Sir Robert, “though I agree as a friend. My own suggestion for peace when it attacks us is that children should at once be forced to give up all their ill-gotten and unappreciated extra rations to the grown-ups.”
“I saw a whole windowful of oranges going mouldy in Northbridge,” said Robin Dale, “because the grown-ups mightn’t buy them. And the ones that the children did have they were selling at sixpence each outside the Barchester Odeon.”
A determined attempt was then made by the whole party to talk of books, or pictures, or music, but it was a complete failure. Books boiled down to cookery boo
ks; pictures appeared to be associated in most people’s minds with a vast canvas of a ham, a lobster, a brace of teal, a flask of wine, a cheese with lifelike grubs on it, fresh strawberries with a giant ladybird, and a dead stag thrown carelessly across the lot, while the thought of a small French masterpiece of two œufs sur le plat produced a reverent hush. As for music, Anne said boldly that music always made her hungry.
By this time the short meal was over and the company went into the drawing-room, flooded with sunshine from the tall sash windows in front, while at its further end the tall sash windows to the east framed the great cedar at the far side of the lawn. Although it was May, it was too chill to go out, and a wood fire was not unwelcome. County news was discussed. Lady Fielding enquired of Mrs. Birkett whether the Mixo-Lydian refugees had gone home yet, and learnt that they were mostly displaying a stubborn resistance to repatriation coupled with a hearty and frequently expressed scorn for the country which had for six weary years fed and sheltered them. Mr. Birkett, who was popularly supposed to talk about the school in his sleep, tried to discuss the Classical Fourth with Robin, but was headed off by Sir Robert who as a Governor of Southbridge School had a faint claim to Mr. Birkett’s attention. So Robin sat by Anne and asked if the Deanery tea-party had been nice.
Anne said it had been quite nice. Lady Graham, she said, had asked her to lunch and was going to take her to Rushwater, and Sylvia and George Halliday were coming too.
“I think it will be a good treat,” she said thoughtfully. “Only I do wish Martin Leslie didn’t live at Rushwater, because I don’t know him.”
“Well, all the people you don’t know must live somewhere,” said Robin, quite sensibly. “I think I heard of Martin in Italy. Blast the Italians. I don’t see why they wanted a bit of me.”
And Robin looked with bored distaste at the artificial foot whose existence so few people noticed.
“Do you always hate it?” said Anne. Not sentimentally, not with any morbid curiosity, but with a friendly yet bracing interest which Robin found very helpful. And indeed Anne Fielding had been in the last year or so as helpful to him as he had been to her. Time, during the leaden age of the war, had never seemed to move, yet at the same time it seemed to him hundreds of years ago that Robin Dale, crippled out of the army as he bitterly put it to himself, had met the Fieldings and their callow daughter, had liked her, had stood by her at a sad moment in her life and had laughed a good deal with her since, finding when once her young shyness was overcome a most ready response to his own turn of mind. To Anne, only child, for many years a delicate one, Robin’s companionship and his deeper if not wider knowledge of books had been an unexpected delight in her rather retired life, and she still turned to Robin for sympathy and interest in most of what she thought, and confided to him various small fears and anxieties that she instinctively kept from her affectionate but very busy mother.
“That,” said Anne gravely, “is a great relief. I was rather afraid of Martin.”
Robin asked why.
Anne looked at him, giving serious consideration to her motives. Robin thought, as more than one of Lady Fielding’s friends had thought of late, how fine a bloom, if one might be botanical, the fragile plant that used to be Anne had produced. The school-room child he had first met at Hallbury in her parents’ summer residence, all eyes and beak and very few feathers, was becoming a girl that one would look at twice, in the running to be a real beauty. Not the knock-you-down type, but a beauty with the right bones, the right poise, the right manners; a lamp shining through alabaster said Robin to himself, rather pleased with the comparison but doubtful as to whether alabaster was really translucent.
“I expect,” said Anne at last, “it was because he is going to breed bulls at Rushwater. I expect he will have a red face and a moustache and be jovial.”
Robin said one must make allowances.
“Lady Graham said her eldest daughter wanted to breed bulls with Martin,” said Anne. “Oh, and do you know Lady Graham’s brother? He was at the Deanery.”
“A very nice fellow but uncommon dull,” said Robin. “So is his wife.”
Anne looked up and Robin suddenly realised that when novelists compared a girl’s surprised glance to a startled fawn they were not writing clichés but expressing a stern fact. Not that he had ever startled a fawn in his life, having very little acquaintance with those elegant-legged people; but Anne’s expression reminded him very strongly of the day he had met a deer, or ought he to say hind, in Bushey Park with her child, and how he had offered to the child a piece of a sandwich, and how, just as it had decided to nibble a little, it had discovered that he was a man, turned swiftly upon its little hoofs and nimbled away, followed by its mamma. So had Anne just discovered something that surprised or alarmed her; he could not say which. And as he felt guiltless, he decided not to enquire.
Meanwhile the talk among the elder people had become so animated as to be almost noisy, the cause being Mr. Birkett’s rather brilliant description of a farewell party given by Miss Hampton and Miss Bent at Adeline Cottage for Mr. Bissett, headmaster of the Hosiers’ Boys’ Foundation School, and his wife.
“Dale,” said Mr. Birkett across the room. “How many guests did Miss Hampton tell you they had. Was it seventy or eighty?”
Robin got up and joined the group round the fire, followed by Anne. Robin, pulling a chair up for her, wondered what was in her mind now. This was a favourite speculation of his and as a rule he could make a pretty good guess, but this time he was completely baffled. She did not seem to be unhappy, but there was a curious atmosphere about her. Like a sleep-walker said Robin to himself, and then told himself not to be silly as he had never seen anyone sleep-walking and couldn’t tell what it looked like. But all this came and went in a flash and he had begun to answer Mr. Birkett before anyone could have noticed the gap.
“There were fifty invitations, sir,” he said, sitting down by Mrs. Birkett, “and eighty-five people came, first and last. Brown can tell you how many bottles of gin they had, not counting what some of the Hosiers’ people brought.”
“The Hosiers’ people have learnt a good deal in the last six years,” said Mr. Birkett thoughtfully.
“And you from them?” asked Sir Robert, with slight malice.
That, said Mrs. Birkett with good-humoured indignation, was not a fair question.
Sir Robert said Exactly; and that was why he had asked it.
“I should think nobody ever really learns much,” said Anne.
The company looked at her with interest, waiting for a dissertation on this theme. But Anne, having said her say, appeared incapable of further explanation, merely adding, “You know what I mean, Robin.”
“In that case, Dale, will you explain this interesting and superficially profound contribution,” said Mr. Birkett.
Mrs. Birkett said her husband ought to learn one thing and that was not to talk like a schoolmaster. Sir Robert at the same instant applauded the expression ‘superficially profound’. Lady Fielding, speaking simultaneously with them but in a more authoritative voice, said how very nice it was to hear Mr. Birkett call his junior classical master Dale.
“I quite agree with you,” said Robin. “When I visit other schools and hear Christian names being bandied between headmasters and ordinary masters, or which is even more sinister between housemasters and prefects, I feel that the Head is probably saving civilisation.”
Lady Fielding said it was just as bad at the Universities. Owing, she said, to her youngest nephew being on Christian name terms with practically every member of Lazarus College, she had not only taken his tutor for a particularly uncouth undergraduate, but had treated him as such.
At this point Sir Robert, his legal mind shocked by the want of sequence in the foregoing chatter, said he would, if no one had any objection, repeat his question and ask Mr. Birkett if he in particular or Southbridge School in general had learnt anything from the Hosiers’ Boys’ Foundation School during the last six years.
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Mr. Birkett said that Mr. Bissett, the Headmaster of the evacuated Hosiers’ Boys, was one of the most upright, unselfish characters he had ever met.
“I daresay,” said Sir Robert. “But you haven’t answered me. Did you learn anything from him, or, to give the question a wider scope, did he learn anything from you?”
After a short but obviously painful internal struggle, Mr. Birkett said, “No.”
“And what a relief it is to say that, I cannot tell you,” he continued. “The fact is we spent six years in making allowances for each other and did it very well. Now that it looks as if the war might finish, the Hosiers’ School governors are planning to move them back to London. As soon as the mess is cleared up and we have got our own buildings to ourselves again, we shall forget them with joy and thankfulness, and doubtless they will forget us. It can’t be done, Fielding; it can’t be done. That’s all. And the relief it has been to say it I cannot express.”
“That’s all I wanted,” said Sir Robert and there was a short silence while each member of the party reflected according to his or her light that East and West, day and night, salt and sugar were immutably different and so were the accidents or traditions, however one liked to put it, of birth and class; and that however earnestly well-intentioned gumphs might believe in mixing or levelling all ranks, it would never do.
This silence was broken by a nasty grinding, jarring noise outside, diagnosed by Mr. Birkett as Brown’s taxi, which diagnosis was almost immediately confirmed by Pollett who came in to say it was Mr. Brown and he couldn’t wait because of his rear light. So good-byes were quickly said and the South-bridge party got into the taxi and were jarred and clanked back to the School.
“Thanks, Brown,” said Mr. Birkett. “I hear Miss Hampton’s party went off very well.”
A slow Barsetshire smile spread over Mr. Brown’s face. He had heard, he said, in the bar, that the party went off with a bang, as you might say. A dozen gin, a dozen sherry, four Scotch and two Cointreau he knew to his certain knowledge, and they did say some of the gentlemen from the School brought their bottles with them.
Peace Breaks Out Page 6
