“Oh, no, those filthy Italians,” said Martin. “They were supposed to be being liberated by us, but they jolly well took care to show an independent spirit. But I’m glad to say my men blew that machine-gunner up.”
“Where was that?” Robin asked.
“Anzio,” said Martin. “Nasty place.”
“Good Lord!” said Robin. “Were you there?”
Martin said he was, and did Robin know the beach.
“I should think so,” said Robin. “I’ve got a foot buried somewhere there—what was left of it, anyway.”
Upon which they fell into a delightful conversation about the war and discovered a number of common friends and common hatreds, the chief link in this latter category being Sir Ogilvy Hibberd (at that time not yet raised to the peerage) who had come out at no personal inconvenience at all to tell the troops that the Italians were simple children who had been misled by their leaders and that practically all Germans were really domestic peace-loving Christians. Absorbed in their conversation they walked down the drive, crossed the little Rushmere Brook, and so by the side of Rushwater House in all its complacent comfortable ugliness to the terrace outside the drawing-room windows, where they paced up and down, still talking.
“If you didn’t think it sinful pride,” said Robin presently, “shall we sit down? If we are going to play tennis I like to pamper myself.”
Martin said he felt much the same himself, so they sat on a bench against the wall between two of the long windows and continued their army talk. Suddenly round the side of the house appeared a girl in Land Army dress, perhaps a little on the stout side for breeches, but with a pleasant face and a mop of tawny hair.
“I say,” said the girl, addressing Martin, “have you got Stock Breeders’ Gazette? I can’t find it in the office.”
“Good God, my girl, don’t you know Sunday when you see it,” said Martin, “and before visitors too. This is my cousin Emmy, that I told you about. Emmy, this is Robin Dale. He brought the boys over from Southbridge.”
“Hullo,” said Emmy, standing straddle-legged before Robin with her hands in her pockets and looking him up and down in a way that made him feel he was an exhibit at a cattle show and ought to have a rosette pinned onto him somewhere. “How do you do,” she added, thrusting a hand at him and evidently satisfied by her scrutiny. “Don’t be an ass, Martin. Cows don’t take any notice of Sunday and I want to find the date of that show at Nutfield.”
“Emmy,” said Martin reprovingly, “you are lowering my status before strangers and I haven’t the faintest idea where the Gazette is. I expect Macpherson has got it. Are you going to play tennis?”
“Are you good?” said Emmy to Robin.
Robin, rightly interpreting this as an enquiry about his tennis form rather than a general Sabbatical enquiry into his moral condition, said he was fair to moderate.
“That’s all right,” said Emmy, obviously relieved. “I’ll play if I don’t have to change, Martin, because Rushwater Romany has torn his leg a bit on that barbed wire down the long meadow and I must have a look at it. I told Macpherson we ought to get that wire cleared.”
“That’s the Home Guard,” said Martin. “They would make what they called a strong point there and Lord knows when we’ll get it unstrong again. There’s Agnes’s car.”
As he spoke a car stopped at the end of the terrace. Martin and Emmy hurried to meet it, while Robin followed more slowly feeling a little shy of this rising of tide of Leslies. David Leslie, the Hallidays and Lady Graham came pouring out of it and then there was a pause while Lady Emily was assisted to alight with such a confusion of rugs, scarves, bags, sticks, other scarves and other bags as gave her ladyship rather the appearance of a conjuror bringing portable property out of the Infinite. Her grandson Martin and her grand-daughter Emmy embraced her very affectionately and the whole party began to move along the terrace, when Robin, who was still lingering a little apart, saw yet another passenger get out of the car and look round in a rather frightened way.
“Robin!” said the last passenger in tones of relief and pleased surprise.
“Anne!” said Robin, hurrying forward to extricate her from another of Lady Emily’s spare scarves which had got itself wound about her feet. “I didn’t know you were coming.”
“Nor did I,” said Anne. “At least I mean I knew I was coming but I didn’t know you’d be here. Oh, I am so glad, Robin, because they are all so large, and the ones that came to meet us are rather large too.”
Robin laughed. Anne looked at him with slight anxiety.
“All right,” he said. “I quite agree. I suppose being fairly large myself it hadn’t occurred to me. Come along.”
They followed the others onto the terrace where Agnes made Anne known to Martin and Emmy. Robin, surveying the scene, thought that Anne looked almost like a creature of another breed, so slight and elegant she was against the handsome stalwart Hallidays, tall David Leslie and his tall nephew Martin, Agnes Graham’s maternal opulence of figure, and Emmy’s stout form well outlined by jersey and breeches. He was a good height himself too, if it came to that. Even Lady Emily, though rather bowed by age, was rendered so impressive a figure by the number of shawls and cloaks draped about her person and her slightly eccentric hat that beside her Anne looked almost frail. Poor little Anne thought Robin to himself and determined to see that she had a happy afternoon and was not trodden underfoot by the Brobdingnagians.
“Now,” said Lady Emily, rearranging a scarf round her face and flashing a smile onto the company, “we will make a tour of the house and Martin shall show us everything he has altered. I know, darling Martin, that you have put the nursery rocking-horse into one of the attics.”
“I haven’t, Gran,” said Martin indignantly. “As a matter of fact I had a ride on it only the other day, but both my feet touched the ground, so it wasn’t very successful.”
“Well, we will all go and look,” said Lady Emily.
“Mother darling,” said Lady Graham, “you know you ought to rest first. You promised you would lie down before you began exploring.”
“But what is so sad,” said Lady Emily, deliberately not hearing her daughter’s words, “is that the nurseries are empty now. Your grandfather would have hated to see them empty, Martin.”
“It’s not my fault, Gran,” said Martin. “I’m not married and I’ve never seen anyone I wanted to marry. David can get married and I’ll have his children here if you like.”
David said he saw no reason to have a lot of children just because Martin shirked his obligations as a landowner. What really was sad, he added, was that before the war he and Martin would have had a friendly fight after the words that had just passed, and now they both felt too old to scuffle in public.
“But,” continued Lady Emily, “I have just thought of a very good plan for altering the furniture in the night nursery, and if you come too, David, we can do it at once.”
“I say, Gran,” said Emmy, advancing like a corps of Amazons upon her grandmother, “Merry said you were to rest so you’d better come to the morning-room. I’ve got the sofa ready for you and a hot bottle. Come on.”
So surprised was Lady Emily at the suddenness of this attack that she picked up some of her trailing weeds and taking Emmy’s arm affectionately went with her into the house.
“Good Lord!” said David. “Agnes, that girl of yours is most remarkable. Not in all my thirty-seven or so years have I seen mother pay the faintest attention to what anyone said. Except to Merry of course.”
“I think,” said Agnes, gratified by any allusion to her offspring, “that darling Emmy is very like grandpa Pomfret. He always bullied everyone dreadfully at the Towers and used to swear at the footmen. I can just remember him when I was a little girl, with eyes like a pig and rather red hair except for being bald.”
“Well, love, you have altered since then,” said David, at which Martin burst into a loud guffaw, quite unlike his melancholy face, and Agnes looked faintly p
erplexed.
As so often happened when members of the Leslie family got together, they quite unconsciously became a compact body, taking little or no notice of outsiders. Martin, who though less quick-witted than his uncle David had a much kinder nature, became aware of an outer circle of guests and hastened to make plans for tennis.
“Six,” he said, looking round. “And Emmy makes seven. And the boys nine. Lord! where are those boys. I’d forgotten all about them. They’ve probably broken the car by now and their own necks as well. Emmy!” he shouted to his cousin who came out by the drawing-room onto the terrace as he was speaking, “have you seen the boys?”
“Yes,” shouted Emmy. “They wanted to stay with Gran and tell her how they’d driven backwards all up the drive and round the stable-yard, so I told them to go to the tennis court. Come on, everyone.”
The whole party straggled through the kitchen garden in the middle of which was a small pond where a few decayed goldfish still lived.
“Ornamental water,” said David to Sylvia Halliday, as they walked past it, “celebrated by having been fallen into by Emmy at a tender age. I wasn’t there, but Agnes told me about it so often that I can almost see it happening.”
“It was quite dreadful,” said Agnes to George Halliday in her sweet unruffled voice. “She might have been drowned if the water had been deep enough.”
“I wish I’d been there,” said George. “I’d have got her out for you.”
“How good of you,” said Agnes, her maternal feeling much gratified. “But luckily there was a charming young Frenchman who rescued her. The legs of his tennis trousers got quite wet, so I said, ‘Do go in and change your trousers or you will catch cold, monsieur’—what was his name, David?”
“Duval, Durand—something quite ordinary,” said David. “Anyway I hate all foreigners. I used to like quite a lot of them, but having all these gallant allies gives one a fair sickener.”
“I hate them too; they’re always showing off,” said George Halliday, with a fervour that surprised his sister Sylvia, who could not know that jealousy of Duval or Durand who had got his trouser legs wet while rescuing Lady Graham’s infant daughter, was inspiring these xenophobic sentiments.
“I quite agree with you, George,” said Lady Graham, “especially Russians. My husband was on a military mission to Russia before the war and he said he did not like them very much.”
“Robert is always so right,” said David. “Except the Russian ballet.”
His sister smiled at him with a wealth of loving if addlepated sympathy in her soft eyes, but otherwise his comment passed unnoticed and David reflected rather sadly that of all the company present he and Agnes and possibly Martin were the only remains of a society that had enjoyed the last gleams of a murdered civilization; that all the pleasant, honourable, well-bred young people round them had been brought up on English-Speaking Ballet and—luckily for themselves perhaps—had not immortal longings in them for what was gone beyond recall.
To them opera and ballet would mean the great joy of standing in queues with millions of their fellow-citizens, of huddled high teas before an opera, of audiences in every variety of sloppiness; men in pullovers with wild hair and far too often wild beards, women in trousers or barelegged and in any case with dirty toes and scarlet toe-nails sticking out of sandals, all smoking, all enjoying being in a crowd, having trays of tea on their laps, accepting whatever entertainment was offered to them with equal enthusiasm, applauding to the echo the bad with the good, and always just before the last note of the music had died away.
“I wish I could have seen proper ballet and opera before the war,” said a voice at his side.
David turned, and looked down on the Fielding girl.
“And what do you know about them?” he said, speaking kindly as to a child.
“Oh, I don’t really know much,” said Anne, “but my old governess used to tell me about Covent Garden in the season and the first Russian ballet and I wished dreadfully that I could have been there. People with jewels and tiaras and opera hats and white gloves. And she knew a man who always took two stalls, one for himself and one for his hat and his opera cloak. It must have been heavenly.” She stopped abruptly, rather alarmed by her own temerity.
“Stout fellow,” said David approvingly. “I wish I’d thought of that. If ever we have a decent opera season again, which I think highly improbable having no opinion whatever of the present or future state of the world, I shall always buy three stalls, so that I needn’t sit next to anyone. I do hate people who bulge onto one sideways.”
“Or,” said Anne, suddenly feeling braver, “one might get a seat in front and behind as well, because people in front are usually tall, or they have very large heads, and people behind nearly always talk.”
David looked down at her with approval. Something in the Fielding girl, perhaps.
“Yes indeed,” he said. “There one would sit, in the middle of a quincunx which I believe is the correct description of the seats you suggest, like God, holding one’s own form of creed but tolerating none, if you will excuse the misquotation.”
“I adore Tennyson,” said Anne and then went pink, feeling that she had been too forward.
The party had now come to the tennis court and David was rattling the rather stiff handle of the wire door, and did not reply. To tell the truth he was not sorry for the excuse to break off the conversation, for he was slightly ashamed of himself. He had misquoted Tennyson for his own amusement with, he must admit it, a faint air of superciliousness, assuming that the Fielding girl would not take the allusion. She had taken it at once, and he wondered uneasily whether she had detected the condescension. But there was no time for these fine shades as the whole tennis party surged into the court, where Leslie major and minor were having a knock-up.
“We have managed eleven balls,” said Martin rather proudly. “They nearly all bounce. Mother sent me some from America, but they got stolen on the way. She’s going to send me some more when she finds somebody flying.”
David enquired politely after the health of Martin’s mother and her American husband, and began to arrange the games with his nephew.
“Oh, Lady Graham,” said Anne, who felt safer with her hostess than with all the other tall Leslies, “is Martin Leslie American?”
“No,” said Lady Graham. “His father, my eldest brother, was killed in the last war and his mother married a very nice American, but Martin was at school in England, because he was to inherit Rushwater when Papa died, so of course he had to live here or the people on the place wouldn’t have known him. He has been a great deal in America too, of course, and he only just got back in time when this war began. He is such a darling and adores motors.”
Having given this short character sketch of her nephew, Agnes fell silent and sat looking with benign vacancy at the tennis players.
Sylvia and Martin were playing David and Emmy. Sylvia who had noticed Martin’s limp, offered to do most of the running about, an offer which Martin cheerfully accepted. On the other side of the net David, very fond of his niece Emmy but under no illusions as to the quality of her play, ordered her when in doubt to leave the ball to him, which Emmy, conscious of her shortcomings as a tennis player, though supremely confident in her abilities in most other departments especially livestock, was quite glad to do. So the game resolved itself into a kind of duel between David and Sylvia who were pretty evenly matched. Sylvia was perhaps the better player, having besides pretty style almost alarming strength, but David made up in cunning and experience what he lacked in youth and kept Sylvia on the rush till her colour rose to a most becoming extent and her golden hair fell into great disorder. The set ended after a spectacular rally which made even Agnes pay a little attention and the players left the court, while Leslie major and minor meticulously tested the height of the net and removed a few sticky chestnut sheaths that had fallen from a flowering tree.
“Winged Victory,” said David to Sylvia, looking with admiratio
n at her admirable figure in a white tennis frock, her handsome flushed face and her helmet of rippling gold.
“We wouldn’t have won if you hadn’t served those two faults in the last set,” said Sylvia. “I expect you were tired.”
“Tired!” said David. “Sylvia, whatever I am, I am not your grandfather. I was playing badly. Also I was showing off and cheating Emmy of her birthright. It’s a lesson to me.”
“What of?” said Sylvia.
“I haven’t the least idea,” said David. “And let this be a lesson to you, my girl, never to ask people what they mean, for they usually don’t know themselves. And I shall now tell you that your playing was as superb as your appearance.”
“Rot,” said the Winged Victory, twiddling her racquet.
“And I’ll tell you what, as my cousin Lucy Marling says,” said David. “Compliments that I pay in the boudoir, the morning-room, the ballroom, leaning on the railings of Rotten Row or reining up my foam-flecked steed—also in Rotten Row—on its haunches to salute a fair equestrienne, are but idle flattery. But the compliments I pay on the field of mimic battle are from the heart; and very well turned too as a rule,” he added sententiously.
The Winged Victory became even redder in the face than before, though very becomingly, gave David a searching look from her speedwell eyes, murmured, “Oh, well,” and sat down by her brother.
Meanwhile Martin, a quiet but attentive host, had suggested a men’s four of Robin, George and the two Leslie boys. The combination, though well-deserving, was somehow so dull that the audience entirely lost interest and conversed among themselves. Only Anne took no part, overcome by a sudden fit of shyness, while Martin and Emmy returned to the subject of Rushwater Romany’s torn leg and Agnes gently bored her adored brother David.
“Are you tired?” said Sylvia to Anne, for whom she felt a certain responsibility as their week-end guest.
“No thank you,” said Anne. “I was only wishing I could have been a land girl or a Waaf.”
“Bad luck,” said Sylvia kindly. “And if the war’s going to stop you won’t have much chance.”
Peace Breaks Out Page 11
