Peace Breaks Out

by Angela Thirkell

  “Would you like to drive?” said Emmy to Anne.

  Anne said she would love it if the pony didn’t mind.

  Emmy said old Bramble never minded anything, the reins were put into Anne’s hands and old Bramble, who knew his own mind and never paid the faintest attention to anyone who rode or drove him, went off at the brisk cheerful trot that he reserved for going home.

  “I hope she won’t calve to-morrow morning,” said Emmy after a short silence.

  Anne, rather thoughtlessly, asked why.

  “Church,” said Emmy briefly. “Of course it would be a Sunday the day she chose to calve. I know what I’ll do. If she’s all right to-night I’ll go to early service and then I’ll be ready if anything happens. I don’t want to have to go out in the middle of morning service, because Mr. Bostock hasn’t been here long and he comes from a potato country where there isn’t much dairy-farming, so he wouldn’t understand. Mr. Banister that used to be here understood cows properly and so did Bishop Joram. I’ll have to get the new vicar a bit cow-minded.”

  Anne had not realised that her parents’ friends, Canon Banister and Bishop Joram, used to be vicars of Rushwater and this made an interesting subject for conversation between herself and Emmy, who had a plan for taking the vicar round the cowsheds every Sunday after morning church, even if it meant keeping him to lunch, so that cow-mindedness might gradually sink into his being.

  “And if she doesn’t calve to-morrow morning, I hope to goodness she’ll leave it alone till the evening,” Emmy continued, “because David and Rose are coming, oh and your friend Robin and the boys, and I don’t want to miss Rose. She’s quite uneducated about cows, but she’s awfully amusing. Do you know her?”

  Anne, whose inner mind was suddenly like a green plum-pudding with spikes of yellow and purple coming out of it, said she didn’t.

  “Could you explain who she is?” she added. “Everyone says Rose, but I don’t know if she is Mrs. or Miss or what.”

  “She’s our cousin of course,” said Emmy. “At least mother’s cousin though I think it’s a kind of second cousin. Her mother is a kind of cousin of Gran’s.”

  “Who is her mother?” asked Anne desperately.

  “Aunt Dorothy,” said Emmy, at the same time giving a tug to the right hand rein. “Don’t be an idiot, Bramble. Stable yard, not front door.”

  Bramble tossed his head as one who scorned his employers but was willing to humour them, trotted into the stable yard and stood still with such violence that he nearly knocked their front teeth out against the bar the reins go over.

  In the dark kitchen passage Anne met Siddon, the housekeeper.

  “Dinner’s not till eight, miss,” she said, “because Mr. Martin has to go to a Parish meeting and Miss Halliday is going with him. He had forgotten to mention it, miss, so he rang up. I expect you’ll be glad to have a rest before dinner, miss.”

  “I’m really not tired, thank you,” said Anne. “But if you aren’t too busy, Mrs. Siddon, may I see your room? I’ve never seen a proper housekeeper’s room.”

  These artless words gave a grim pleasure to Siddon who then took Anne along another dark passage, expatiating as they went upon the number of beetles and cockroaches that used to live there in the good old days.

  “Mr. David and Mr. Martin used to have beetle-hunts at night, miss,” said Siddon pausing, “when the servants had all gone to bed, and I can tell you, miss, I was one to be particular about that, and so was Mr. Gudgeon, that was our butler then but he lives with his sister now at Bovey Tracey, the young gentlemen used to come down in their shooting boots and turn on the lights all of a sudden, and the passages were like—well, like the sea at Margate only black, miss, if you take my meaning. And the young gentlemen used to trample on them, really quite unpleasant I should have thought, and they’d lift this matting, this very coconut matting we’re standing on now, miss, and sweep all the beetles out with housemaids’ brooms, and walk on them too. And then they’d go and have a glass of beer with Gudgeon in his pantry.”

  “But what happened to the dead beetles?” said Anne.

  “I couldn’t say, miss. They was all swept up before I came down in the morning, that’s all I can say, because someone would have heard about it if they hadn’t been. Excuse me, miss.”

  She passed in front of Anne, opened a door and stood aside for Anne to pass.

  The housekeeper’s room was long, with a window at one end looking upon the stable yard and a large bow window at the side commanding an uninteresting shrubbery. A large table spoke silently of stately lunches and suppers when Rushmere House was full of visitors with valets and maids. Photographs of Leslies of all generations hung on the walls, from old Mr. Leslie as a young man in a Norfolk jacket and breeches and gaiters to Edith attending a meet of the Rising Otterhounds in her perambulator. Anne admired them heartily.

  “I’d like to show you my special album, miss, if you have the time,” said Siddon, who had taken a fancy to that quiet little Miss Fielding with such nice manners. “It’s the one I keep for the Family Groups.”

  From the top of a cupboard she took a gigantic album bound in purple plush with open-work brass hinges, and laid it on the table.

  “Will you sit down, miss?” she said. “You’ll see it better. And I’ll sit down too, if you will excuse me, miss, for I’m not as young as I was. Now, here we begin with the photo of the staff soon after I first came, on the occasion of young Mr. Leslie’s marriage, that is, Mr. Martin’s father that was, who was killed in the last war. You wouldn’t know that for me, I daresay.”

  Anne had to admit that she would not have recognised in the round-faced, stiff-collared, long-skirted, heavily be-aproned young woman with coils of dark hair and a round face, the thin, imposing housekeeper who was beside her.

  “I’d defy anyone to know it was me, miss,” said Siddon rather proudly. “I’ve lost a lot of flesh since those days. My family were terrible ones for losing flesh. Mother was a fine, stout young woman, but at the end she was no more than a bag of bones. Now, here’s the Family on the terrace the day the Prince of Wales, that is King Edward the Seventh that was, came to shoot.”

  And she continued to turn over the pages while Anne, not knowing most of the guests or celebrities, amused herself by picking out David at every stage, from a kind of picture frock and Gainsborough hat onwards, noticing that he always looked different from everyone else: as, thank heaven, most of us do, or life would be even more difficult than it is.

  “Here’s one you’ll like, miss,” said Siddon. “Mr. Martin’s seventeenth birthday party. That was the year Mr. John became engaged to Miss Preston, a very nice young lady. You know their two young gentlemen at Southbridge School, miss, don’t you?”

  Anne said she did, and thought how very nice David looked.

  “And there’s her ladyship,” said Mrs. Siddon. “She always photographed beautifully. And Mr. Leslie, and Mr. David with Miss Rose and Miss Hermione. We did think, miss, there might be something between Mr. David and Miss Rose, but you never can tell with these things.”

  Anne, a sudden sick pain for which she could not at once account gripping her stomach, asked who Miss Rose was exactly.

  “Lady Dorothy’s twin daughter, miss,” said Siddon. “Miss Hermione married Lord Tadpole just before this war and they have what I am given to understand is a very nice place, Tadpole Hall, near Tadcaster. But Miss Rose hasn’t married as yet, though they do say she had several very good offers. Such a nice young lady and always a cheerful word for everyone. And dresses so nicely. Her maid used to say it was a pleasure to look after a young lady that did her so much credit as Miss Rose.

  Anne listened politely. Her outer self heard what Siddon was saying; it also looked at the photographs and could not but admit that Rose Bingham, even in the fashions of those days, was an extremely good-looking girl and worthy to be photographed next to David. As for her inner self, it was behaving so badly that she pretended it was not there.

 
; “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Siddon,” she said, as the housekeeper turned to the next page, “but would you explain who the Binghams are. You see, I don’t really know the Leslies very well, at least I hardly knew them at all till I came here that Sunday, but Miss Bunting used to talk about them.”

  If Anne had hoped to improve her position by mentioning Miss Bunting she was mistaken, for the housekeeper had the natural contempt of the staff for any governess that happened to be about, looking upon them as necessary drawbacks of life. But she understood and approved Miss Fielding’s interest in family ramifications and hastened to make them clear.

  “You’ll remember the Duke of Towers, miss,” she said. “Lady Dorothy was his second daughter. There were no sons, which was a great mistake, and the title went to a nephew. The duchess was a Miss Foster, a cousin of Lord Pomfret, who was Lady Emily’s father, so Lady Dorothy and her ladyship were cousins, and Miss Rose and Miss Hermione, who were as like as two peas except that Miss Rose is dark and Miss Hermione is fair, were quite part of the family. I hear that Miss Rose has done wonders in the war, being in the Foreign Office. You’ll like her, miss.”

  Anne knew that she would hate her. And with this agreeable thought in her mind found it extremely difficult to look at the photographs with the interest that politeness demands. Mrs. Siddon noticed that she was flagging and attributed it to fatigue.

  “There, I’ve been keeping you too long, miss,” she said. “You’re tired out and no wonder. Mr. Macpherson and Miss Emmy don’t know what it is to be tired and they don’t expect anyone else to feel different. Now you go and have a nice bath, miss, and lie down before dinner and you’ll feel quite yourself again.”

  So Anne went upstairs, had a bath, and curled up on the chaise-longue at the foot of her bed with the first volume of A Step Too Far, the novel written by Lady Emily’s mother which had shocked Mr. Gladstone, and looked at the sunlight upon the cedars and the great tulip tree beyond the terrace, and her thoughts became more confused and less bitter till she slid into a gentle sleep, from which she was roused by Sylvia coming in at ten minutes to eight looking so handsome, so tanned, so golden, so glowing, that Anne felt here at least the horrible Rose Bingham would meet her match.

  “I’ve got to change,” said Sylvia. “I’m so hot in these breeches,” saying which she flung everything onto the floor of her room, splashed rapidly in and out of the bath, combed her hair vehemently, shook herself into a chintz house-frock and said she was ready.

  Martin and Emmy had also got into a kind of semi-evening attire, and Martin had routed a bottle of white wine out of the cellar. The talk at dinner was still mostly about cows, though Martin firmly suppressed his cousin Emmy’s desire to discuss the less interesting technicalities of contagious abortion; and though Anne could not feel really at home in it, the fragrant wine made her very tolerant. After dinner they sat as usual on the terrace. Moonlight mixing with twilight; warmth, scent, drowsiness. All Anne’s anxieties were lulled, as the ceaseless tides of cow-talk lapped idly above her head, varied occasionally by an allusion to the meeting Martin and Sylvia had been to, and some very pertinent suggestions from Sylvia, to which Martin listened with interest.

  So, thought Anne, life should always be. Warm, peaceful, cow-minded. Only it would be nice, said her inner self, to have someone to talk to about books and poetry; also someone who really understood what one was saying without one’s having to explain it. Someone like Robin. In fact, if Robin were here it would be perfect. And to-morrow he would be coming. And if that horrible Rose Bingham were coming too, she would want to see Martin and Emmy, and one would perhaps have a walk with David. Various passages from her favourite poet, Lord Tennyson, floated through her mind, all enlarging upon the beauty of an English summer; the hay, the corn, the trees, the warm air, the flowers, the exquisite peacefulness of high summer, its transiency. In fact an idyllic life, whatever idyllic might mean. The talk went on in the long twilight lit by the moon, no breath stirred, it was the magic hour; and in it Anne knew that no other life was possible—if only David were there, and of course always Robin.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Martin,” said a voice behind him, “but that Daisy’s broken through the fence again and got into the vegetable garden. That great danged fool, sorry ladies I’m sure, Ted Poulter didn’t shut the kitchen garden gate properly and he’s gone off to Barchester on his bike, so I thought I’d better tell you, sir.”

  “Oh, all right,” said Martin, getting up. “You get a couple of sticks, Brown, and I’ll come along. And may heaven blast Ted,” he added in a gentle voice. “I’ll be back soon.”

  “Ted will have to marry,” said Emmy, “then he wouldn’t be out at all hours like this. I’ll speak to his mother about it. He’s been walking out with Lily Brown quite long enough.”

  “What about a cottage?” said Sylvia, who seemed to know all about the Poulter and Brown families.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said Emmy. “Old Brown died last November and Mrs. Brown always said she’d go to her sister at Rushwater Parva if Lily married. Of course she won’t want to when it really happens, but I’ll see that she does.”

  Of this dragooning method Sylvia highly approved, adducing the sad example of Mrs. Hubback at The Shop who still had a bed-ridden and distinctly half-witted mother in the best double-bed upstairs, although she was a grandmother herself. Cows, said Emmy, embarking upon an entirely new subject, had more sense. No one ever heard of a grandmother cow living with its old mother, at any rate not in the same stall. Which led, not unnaturally, to an exposition of the gravid Jersey’s pedigree, about which Sylvia seemed to be almost as well informed as Emmy.

  “How do you know all that?” said Anne admiringly.

  Sylvia said you could always know things if they were interesting enough. She knew radio-location all right because it was interesting, and she remembered the cow’s pedigree because it was even more interesting than radio-location. And crops were awfully interesting, too, and fertilisers and tractors and things like bottling vegetables and laying down eggs and winter feed for the stock. In fact her list of things to be interested in might have gone on for ever, if a very frightened little girl in a faded pink cotton frock had not approached the terrace with a kind of desperate courage.

  “Please, Miss Emmy,” said the little girl, and then stopped, obviously about to burst into tears.

  “Hullo, Aggie,” said Emmy. “Come along and tell me what’s the matter and stop crying. She’s called Agnes after mother,” she added to her guests. “Nearly all the cottages have one of our names and it gets a bit confusing. They always ask Martin first if they may. There’s a Martina at the post-office, she’s five, and a Davida and a Davidette at Hacker’s Corner, they’re twins. Well, Aggie, what is it?”

  “Please, Miss Emmy,” said Aggie, rubbing her face on her sleeve, “mum said to come up and tell you, miss, because there’s been an awful accident.”

  Anne could see the light of First-Aid Lust burn in her friends’ eyes and felt very incompetent and hoped earnestly that she would not have to hear the details.

  “It’s DREADFUL, miss,” said Aggie, beginning to cheer up as she unfolded her tidings of dismay. “All the blood and all, and mum said please would you come quick, miss, because she can’t abear to see blood. Nor can I, miss,” said Aggie proudly.

  “Well, where is the accident?” said Emmy, with a coolness that Anne much admired.

  “Please miss, down our garden,” said Aggie. “It was a big stone dad put on the top of the coop to keep it down in the wind and when mum was moving the coop it fell right down on her, miss, and she was shrieking dreadful and mum can’t abear to touch anything that’s in pain, miss, so she said to come up and tell you.”

  Emmy stood up.

  “Now who did the stone fall on?” she said. “And hurry up. There are three younger than Aggie, though I can’t think how her mother managed it even if one is an illegitimate child of a sergeant at Brandon Abbas,” said Emmy in a rapid parenthes
is to her two friends.

  “The broody, miss,” said Aggie, beginning to cry again. “Mum only let her out just to have a little run like and the stone fell on her and her inside looks all nasty. I couldn’t touch it, miss, not if you was to ask me, nor couldn’t mum.”

  “Sacré tas d’imbéciles,” said Emmy, whose French, owing to long conversations with her grandmother’s maid Conque was very fluent if not academic. “All right, Aggie. I’ll be down in a moment. Run and tell mother. Lord!” she continued, as the tear-stained Aggie sped homewards, “those women are fools. First they put a large stone on the broody-coop because they are too lazy to nail a few boards on. Then they try to move the coop with the stone on the roof, and then they haven’t the sense to wring the hen’s neck when it falls on her, or even cut off her head with the chopper. They’re the ones that are going to put in a Labour Government. I shan’t be long.”

  Emmy went away and was seen a moment later bicycling to the village with a face that boded no good to Aggie’s mother.

  “She’s a stupid woman,” said Sylvia. “Oh, bother; the midges are biting my legs. She’s as near half-witted as possible and her husband is, too. He’s labourer and one of the best hedge-layers in the country.”

  Anne, much impressed by Sylvia’s knowledge of these details, asked her how she knew.

  “Oh, I dont know,” said Sylvia. “One just does know. After all, father has farmed all his life and it’s much the same here, only bigger. But Martin’s a much better farmer than father. I don’t mean only being more up-to-date and being better off, but—well, I can’t explain it, but he simply is a farmer and all the things that go with it.”

  Anne could not quite understand this explanation, nor perhaps could Sylvia, but it sufficed. The long daylight was at last fading, the midges became more persistent. The two girls sat silent, their thoughts running over their happy visit to Rushwater and the amusements of the morrow and the visitors that were coming.