Peace Breaks Out

by Angela Thirkell

  “So you have come at last,” said David.

  The remark was addressed to Anne round whom his thoughts had been roving, but both girls stopped short, surprised to find a stranger in the room, for David’s back was to the light and the afternoon sunlight slanted across the room into their eyes. In a fraction of a second they realised who it was.

  “David,” said Anne.

  “Hullo, David,” said Sylvia, “I thought you were in Paris.”

  “Bless your heart, no,” said David. “Believe it or not I am here. My mamma is upstairs doing a tour of the bedrooms.”

  Anne, the slanting afternoon sunlight flecking her view with golden dust and golden glamour, welcomed David and wondered if she ought to ask him if he would have some sherry, for it was nearly six o’clock. So bathed was she in the sunlight that her flush of excitment hardly showed and David merely thought how very nice the Fielding girl was looking. Really she would do one credit anywhere. And how handsome the golden Halliday girl was. How happy in fact could one be with either; not if ’tother dear charmer were away, but if one could have both. And, as an afterthought, Rose Bingham too. It was all rather difficult and David preferred to step aside from difficulties.

  “Would you like some sherry,” said Anne. “I know daddy would like you to have some and so would mummy.”

  David said he would like it of all things, so Anne went down to the dining-room and while she was there the front door bell rang again. Through the open dining-room door she saw Martin and Emmy and called to them, for one did not have to feel shy with Martin. He was more like Robin.

  “Are we a nuisance?” said Martin. “Gran was coming here and we said we would pick her up. At least she asked us to pick her up. Something about David and a car.”

  Anne said his grandmother was upstairs with her mother looking at the servants’ bedrooms and David was in the drawing-room with Sylvia. On hearing this name Emmy, who had been from her earliest years a young woman of great determination, at once went upstairs, leaving Martin to carry the sherry glasses for Anne, who insisted on bringing the decanter herself, because she said it would be awful if she broke it, but much awfuller for anyone else who did. As they got to the drawing-room door Lady Emily and Lady Fielding came down from the upper regions and they all went into the room together. Lady Emily was glad to sit down, but refused sherry and called David away from talking with Sylvia.

  “It is quite easy to understand now,” said Lady Emily to David. “There are not so many rooms on the top floor because of one of them being so large. There are shelves in the other room, so I think Canon Robarts must have kept some of his books upstairs and all his servants slept together in the big room. There is one small room with no shelves, so perhaps the cook had it, but one can’t really tell. I wish one could, it is so interesting. I wonder if the Canon had a man-servant.”

  “My mamma was born to bring me to shame,” said David to Sylvia, who smiled like a goddess, but as David fully realised, did not quite catch his meaning, which on reflection he thought just as well.

  “I can tell you all about that Lady Emily,” said Lady Fielding. “He had a kind of valet-attendant, who slept in a nasty little room in the basement. When my husband and I took the house, we shut up the basement and made the kitchens at the back of the house.”

  So interested was Lady Emily by these domestic items that she at once asked to inspect the kitchens, but her son David said there was a dinner party that night and she could not possibly go on interfering and in any case ought to be starting for home if she was to have her rest before dinner.

  “But you are taking me home, David,” said his mother.

  Anne heard the news and felt as if she had been given a violent blow. David was going back with Lady Emily. He had avoided the dangers of Paris only to forget the engagement at Number Seventeen. She looked in wild appeal at her mother but Lady Fielding did not notice.

  “Now listen mamma darling,” said David. “Well do you know that I am staying to dinner here and that Martin and Emmy are dropping you at Holdings on their way back. But I will take you down to the front door.”

  Anne’s heart soared to heaven in gratitude and also hoped that it would be forgiven for having presumed to doubt his faith.

  While the foregoing desultory talk had been taking place Emmy had attached herself to Sylvia with the embarrassing devotion of a young woman of her age and given her a long circumstantial account of the Grade A dairy herd at Rushwater and a pressing invitation to come and stay as soon as possible, holding out as a special inducement the approaching birth of a Jersey calf from whom much was expected. Martin, rather bored by his cousin Emmy’s singleness of mind, for though he was a keen and hard-working cattle breeder he found other things to interest him in life, tried once or twice to talk to Sylvia himself, but unable to stand up against Emmy’s cow-mindedness contented himself with admiring Sylvia in silence. His grandmother now summoned him to drive her home, so he said good-bye to Sylvia and added his invitation to Emmy’s.

  “I’d love to come,” said Sylvia. “I’ll let you know as soon as I get my next leave. Will David be there?”

  “Uncle David doesn’t care for cattle a bit,” said Emmy scornfully.

  “And here he stands unto this day, to witness that you lie, my girl,” said David who had overheard her last remark. “Your uncle David went to the Argentine on big-bull business for a whole year while you were an extremely stout little girl, and beat the Argentines at their own game. It was he that raised them to four thousand pounds for Rushwater Rambler, and has practically never been able to look a cocktail in the face since. And let that be a lesson to you against careless talk.”

  “Did you really, uncle David,” asked Emmy incredulous.

  “Ask Macpherson,” said David. “I’ll come over to Rushwater while Sylvia is there and show you how much I know.”

  “If you say when you are coming, I’ll manage to get leave,” said Sylvia.

  David laughed and said if he knew in time he would ring her up, with which she had to be content. Martin, who had been listening seriously to this conversation and wishing he had David’s way with girls, then said good-bye, collected Emmy and his grandmother and drove away. It was now nearly half past six and Lady Fielding said she simply must be quiet for a bit, so Anne took David and Sylvia into the garden till it was time to dress for dinner.

  Anne had fully intended to be dressed early and ready to meet Robin, who had promised to be very punctual, but the charm of giggling with Sylvia while they dressed made her forget the time, and when she got down to the drawing-room she found David and Robin talking war shop and though pleased to see her, more than ready to go on with their men’s talk. So she sat in the window seat sometimes listening, sometimes thinking her own thoughts, till her mother came down, and then Mrs. Brandon came fluffling into the room, thinner than she used to be, but wearing remarkably well.

  “We are waiting for Bishop Joram and my husband,” said Lady Fielding. “I think you know everyone here, Mrs. Brandon.”

  Mrs. Brandon was more or less acquainted with everyone in a vague county way, and the party settled very comfortably to desultory talk, till Bishop Joram came.

  That susceptible cleric at once fell in love with Sylvia Halliday whom he had never met before, a proceeding watched by Mrs. Brandon with mischievous amusement.

  “The Bishop did fall in love with me once,” she said to Robin Dale. “It was at the Deanery, years and years ago when there wasn’t any of this trouble about peace.”

  “I am sure he did,” said Robin. “We all do. Did I ever tell you about our Aunt Sally?”

  Mrs. Brandon shook her head gently, a gesture which she managed to make extremely attractive.

  “A real Aunt Sally, or really an aunt?” she enquired.

  “A real Aunt Sally,” said Robin gravely. “She had lived in the old stables for hundreds of years and not even the Cottage Hospital Bring and Buy Sale would take her, but Joram said she reminded him of
an African idol and nearly cried. So my father gave them his blessing and he took her back to his lodgings.”

  “I wonder what his landlady thought,” said Mrs. Brandon.

  “She is a French dressmaker called Madame Tomkins in Barley Street,” said Robin. “Anne says she is pretty tough.”

  “If she made Anne’s dress she must be very clever,” said Mrs. Brandon admiringly. “She looks so charming. And how is your father?”

  Robin said his venerable Pa was pretty well. A little woolly in the intellect sometimes, but the servants were good to him and that kind Sister Chiffinch at the Cottage Hospital kept a friendly eye on him, and he usually went over to visit him from Southbridge once a week.

  “A very nice woman,” said Mrs. Brandon. “She nursed Delia with her first baby. You know she is going to have another one in August.”

  Their talk babbled gently on. David amused himself by a private game with Sylvia; not a very kind game as the whole point was for him to say things that he thought she wouldn’t quite understand and keep a mental score of his hits or misses. Lady Fielding talked to the Colonial Bishop and Anne sat looking very nice, sometimes wishing she were as beautiful as Mrs. Brandon, sometimes looking at the back of David’s head as he teased Sylvia and feeling how very different it was from the back of other people’s heads and sometimes exchanging a smile with Robin; which was perhaps the most satisfactory of her occupations. But all the time Lady Fielding was talking to Bishop Joram she had her eye on the clock and her ear on the front door wondering how long she ought to wait dinner for her husband. The hands of the clock moved on and she was just beginning to decide that they must start dinner without him, when in he came with an apology but no explanation.

  “You know everyone here, Robert,” said his wife.

  Sir Robert said Yes indeed and greeted his guests.

  “I never heard you come in, Robert,” said Lady Fielding.

  Sir Robert said that young Needham was having trouble with his car in the Close and the Day of Judgment couldn’t have made itself heard while his engine was running.

  “Is that the Dean’s secretary who married Octavia Crawley?” said Mrs. Brandon. “He came to lunch with me once and lost an arm.”

  “What an extraordinary effect for lunch to have,” said David.

  The golden Sylvia looked puzzled, then began to laugh.

  “Mrs. Brandon didn’t mean he lost the arm at lunch,” she explained kindly. “He got it shot off in North Africa. He’s the clergyman at Beliers and awfully nice.”

  David thanked her with old-fashioned courtesy for her explanation and then Lady Fielding herded them downstairs and got them seated. From where she sat at the oval table she was as nearly opposite her husband as is possible with a party of eight and so in a good position to catch his eye. This she ardently wished to do, for it had been impossible to ask him about the result of the Conservative Association’s meeting and as the next years of their life might hang on that evening’s decision, she wished to know the best or the worst: though which was which she could not at the moment say.

  Sir Robert was equally anxious to communicate with his wife, but courtesy compelled him to be as dashing a cavalier as possible for Mrs. Brandon, and compelled his wife to be all attention to the Colonial Bishop. Suddenly such an ear-splitting noise burst out in the Close that everyone turned to look out of the window. In that instant Lady Fielding telegraphed to her husband. “Are you going to stand?” and he, by a masterly piece of pantomime with his eyebrows and his lawyer’s rather grim straight mouth, managed to convey to his wife that he was now the officially adopted candidate for the forthcoming election and that he really didn’t know if he was pleased or not but there it was and he would do his best.

  Lady Fielding didn’t know if she was pleased or not either, but thank heaven it was now decided and she could plan the next months or weeks or whatever it was going to be accordingly.

  “That was Tommy Needham’s car again,” said Sylvia who had the best view of the Close. “He’s started it now.”

  “A very fine fellow, young Needham,” said the Colonial Bishop. “He reminds me of a young native chief in Mngangaland who was a splendid professing Christian.”

  He paused to help himself to some fish.

  “I think it is wonderful of natives to be Christians,” said Mrs. Brandon. Robin looked at Anne, who looked gravely at him. If a young woman with large dark eyes could wink without moving a muscle of her face that, Robin thought with some pride in his young friend, was what Anne was doing.

  “You are so right, Mrs. Brandon,” said Bishop Joram, talking across the table in his zeal. “And this young chief was one of our staunchest churchwardens. He had had both legs bitten off by a lion—that is of course where the parallel between him and young Needham comes in—but his faith never failed and he was carried to church every Sunday and all non-attendants were fined a half bottle of gin.”

  “And who got the gin?” asked David, losing all sense of dinner table politeness in his unfeigned interest in the Bishop’s narrative and talking across the table.

  “The Exchequer,” said Bishop Joram. “Mpumpo—that was the chief’s name, at least his public name, for of course no one was allowed to know his real name—kept the key of it.”

  “And what was his real name?” said David, his blood well up.

  “Melba,” said Bishop Joram. “His father, who was one of my earlier converts, had a record of Melba in Faust and liked it so much that he gave the name to his eldest son. In fact all his sons, seventy-five I think it was or eighty-five, were called Melba in private, but of course each had a public name as well. Lady Fielding,” he continued, turning to his hostess and lowering his voice, “I have a message for you from my kind hostess, Madame Tomkins. She asked me to let you know that a friend of hers back from Germany had brought her several dress lengths of silk and she thought you might care to look at them.”

  Lady Fielding thanked the Bishop and said she would call on Madame Tomkins as soon as possible and then they talked about the row between the head verger and the sub-organist and other Close matters.

  “And now,” said Robin to Anne, “tell me all about the Palace Sale.”

  “It was Horrid,” said Anne loyally.

  “I wish the Crawleys could hear you,” said Robin. “The Dean looks so tired sometimes with the Deanery always full of grandchildren, and your words would be as good as a tonic. How exactly was it horrid?”

  “Well, I don’t know how to explain quite,” said Anne, “but it was a mean kind of feeling. Rather meagre. Would that explain it?” she added anxiously.

  “It would,” said Robin. “But I want more details. What was the tea like?”

  “Ghastly,” said Anne with fervour. “Great horrible buns with pale yellow tops all soggy, and sandwiches with peanut butter in them which is horrid anyway, but even if you did like it there was hardly any there. And a lot of mousy biscuits.”

  “Mousy?” said Robin. “Do you mean with mice in them, like fly-biscuits?”

  Anne said no, tasting of mouse she meant, and Octavia Needham who was there told her that the Sunflower Tea Room had made a big batch with some bad flour that had nasty vitamins in it a month ago and nobody would eat them and she was sure the Bishop’s wife had bought them all cheap.

  “And the Bishop brought a man into the dining-room,” Anne continued, “and Octavia thinks it was a man from the B.B.C. because he sounded like that and they had tea with us to be condescending instead of in his wife’s sitting-room, but Octavia saw the man putting his biscuit behind the big clock on the mantelpiece and she says the Bishop saw him too but he didn’t dare to say anything.”

  “Why not,” said Robin, amused by the way his young friend was coming out.

  “Well, Octavia thinks the Bishop was to do a broadcast in that ‘Episcopal Episodes’ series,” said Anne, “but she thinks the B.B.C. man hated the tea so much that the Bishop won’t have a chance. And she heard the B.B.C. man say ‘No
sherry?’ to a waitress that she knows, because she used to be a kitchen maid at the Deanery, and the waitress told her the B.B.C. man said ‘Hell it’s even worse than they told me’ and then he went away.”

  “I am sorry to be ill-mannered,” said David Leslie from Anne’s other side, “but Mrs. Brandon is making such eyes at Sir Robert that I have no one to talk to, which is most unfair of her because it puts the whole table out. So may I listen till we get straight again? I adore hearing nasty things about the Palace and I shall repeat them all to my mamma and Agnes.”

  Anne’s heart gave a delightful though disturbing thump. Here she was with Robin whom she was so fond of on one side and David on the other, and both talking to her, as if she were a real grown-up fascinating person like Mrs. Brandon. Then, remembering her duties as a deputy hostess in a way Miss Bunting would have strongly approved, she looked across the table and saw Sylvia deserted, Sir Robert on one side of her in Mrs. Brandon’s toils and the Colonial Bishop on the other telling Lady Fielding how comfortable Madame Tomkin’s lodgings were. Sylvia was behaving very well, looking neither bored nor resentful and smiled across at Anne.

  “Oh, Robin,” said Anne softly, “Sylvia has got left out. Could you possibly make mummy talk to you, and then Bishop Joram would have to talk to Sylvia. She’s all alone.”

  Robin was sorry to leave Anne, but she was right, and so he turned towards Lady Fielding and managed so to insinuate himself into the conversation that the Colonial Bishop transferred himself to Sylvia and all was peace again. Lady Fielding wanted news of friends at Hallbury where Robin’s father, Dr. Dale, was Rector and particularly of Jane Gresham, whose husband, Captain Francis Gresham, R.N., had so long been missing in the Far East.

  “We have hardly been at Hallbury at all in the last year,” said Lady Fielding, “except an occasional week-end. Life gets fuller and fuller here and we went to friends in Devon for Robert’s short holiday.”

  Robin was able to report that Francis Gresham was quite fit again and had a shore job at Plymouth where his wife had joined him, as little Frank Gresham was now a boarder at Southbridge School. But they intended to make their permanent home at Hallbury, he said, and would live with Jane’s father, Admiral Palliser.