Peace Breaks Out

by Angela Thirkell

  Whether the vicar really wanted a newly-married young couple to come and live with him and eat his food we shall never know, for he already knew Emmy well enough to realise that like her respected and autocratic great uncle, the late Earl of Pomfret, she always did what she meant to do, or made other people do it for her.

  “And Mrs. Brown can have her sister from Rushmere Parva to live with her,” said Emmy, “so that’s settled. Mummy, did Gran like the picture I drew for her of Rushwater Romany in the paddock?”

  Mother and daughter fell into a murmured conversation about the family, so the vicar, being forced to absent himself from felicity awhile, turned to Anne and said he thought she knew Canon Banister, his predecessor, or it might be more correct to say his ante-predecessor, at Rushmere. Anne said Oh yes, she did know Canon Banister and he was very nice and went about everywhere on a bicycle. And, said the vicar, if he were not mistaken she was the daughter of the Diocesan Chancellor, Anne, after a mental gasp, remembered her father’s office and said she was. They had a little mild gossip about the Close and so by easy degrees came round to the Palace, about whose female ruler the vicar knew a highly discreditable story which Anne treasured to take back to her parents.

  “Oh, Mr. Bostock, did she really do that with you and the Archdeacon?” she asked.

  “She did,” said the vicar. “He was there on Monday night and I was there on Tuesday night, and the housemaid said she was so sorry there was an inkspot on the sheet, but it was the Archdeacon who did it so perhaps I wouldn’t mind.”

  “Oh, how lovely,” said Anne. “I must tell mummy and daddy.”

  “And I can tell you something else,” the vicar began, but at the same moment David said to Anne, “You haven’t said one word to me since we began lunch.”

  “Oh, I am dreadfully sorry,” said Anne, going crimson. A young woman with any self-respect, with any knowledge of the ways of society would, she knew, have said, “Well, you haven’t said much to me either,” or even more dashing, though perhaps a trifle pert, “Why should I?” But poor Anne could only say what her silly, slightly dazzled heart put into her mouth.

  “And what do you think of Rushwater?” said David.

  “Oh, I love it,” said Anne. “I simply adore it. Only such a lot of things happen all the time that one gets rather muddled. I mean cows and hens and cottages and kitchenmaids and horses and midges and everything. But I have been frightfully happy.”

  “How well you put it,” said David. “I adore Rushwater too. But three days of life at twenty cow-power tension drive me back to the comparative calm of London or Paris.”

  “Do you think everyone feels like that?” asked Anne.

  “Not the right ones,” said David. “People like Martin and Emmy and the Hallidays and my Marling cousins don’t notice that anything is happening. They just do their job and get on to the next job. Heredity a good deal. Then you get someone that runs off the track, like myself or Rose. Rose is the toughest woman I know, but a week of Rushwater and she’d even stop making up her face from sheer exhaustion. Wouldn’t you, Rose?” he said across the table.

  “Wouldn’t I what?” said Rose.

  “Die if you lived in the country,” said David.

  “Of course I would,” said Rose. “Life is too terrific in the country. Give me Paris, or London, or even Lisbon or Rome, and I’ll put my feet up and relax.”

  “I know someone that was in Lisbon,” said Anne, plunging into society.

  “Do you?” said Rose, in a much softer voice than she had used to David; a kinder voice, Anne thought. “Who is he?”

  “It’s only a girl,” said Anne apologetically. “At least she is married. Her name is Rose Fairweather.”

  “Is she a great friend of yours?” said Rose.

  “No, not really,” said Anne, wishing she had let Society alone. “But her father is the Headmaster of Southbridge School and a great friend of mine is a master there and we went to the sports and Rose came in the middle of lunch and I thought she was so lovely.”

  Having made this uninteresting, gauche and schoolgirlish speech, she wished she were dead.

  “I know the girl you mean,” said Rose. “Her husband dances terrifically well. She doesn’t. She has plenty of glamour and she’s as beautiful as she’s dumb. The Portuguese called us Rose of the Night and Rose of the Day. I saw a good deal of her at official parties, but that was all.”

  She then resumed her conversation with her cousin Clarissa.

  Anne felt tears of shame stinging her. It served her right for talking across the table, an action always strongly deprecated by Miss Bunting. Her eyes were suddenly opened to the fact that the lovely Rose Fairweather was not only a nitwit, but second-rate. Not that Rose Bingham had meant to be unkind, but it was abundantly clear that to the Rose Binghams of this world the Rose Fairweathers hardly existed, spinning like fretful midges, as one of her favourite poets, D. G. Rossetti, had written. But no one seemed to have noticed her shame and there was by now a good deal of general talk across the table in every direction. David had turned his attention to Sylvia, the vicar was telling lady Graham that he was using the little room with the skylight to keep his cricket things and his squash rackets in, but could easily put them somewhere else if she or Lady Emily thought it advisable. George was boring Rose a good deal by telling her about some shooting he had had while in billets in Norfolk, to which Rose listened with an air of interest that did not deceive her cousin David. And then the party gradually drifted back to the terrace to drink coffee and wait for the Southbridge contingent.

  “Did I hear you mention squash?” said David to Mr. Bostock. “We might have a game. Not directly after all this lunch, but before tea. Miss Halliday plays a good game and so does her brother, and we could get my elder nephew when he comes. Sylvia,” he continued, staying a little apart from the others while he spoke, “don’t forget we are to look at the Temple. When we have had our coffee, do you think? Anne,” he said, moving to where she sat, “we must make our pilgrimage to Miss Bunting’s memorial or my mamma will never forgive me. Would you come?”

  Anne said she would love to.

  “Emmy, my precious,” said David, “if you can stop confiding in your mother for one moment, your Uncle David would like to see Rushwater Romany. And this is Real,” he added, “because I do know a bit about bulls.”

  “Rather!” said Emmy. “Oh, and Uncle David, the Jersey may calve at any moment.”

  “Then we shall not visit the Jersey,” said David. “What’s sport to her is death to me. Rose, what are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” said Rose simply. “I shall go and see Siddy some time and tell her about Hermione’s children and she will say what a pity it is I don’t find a nice husband, and I shall have that delightful impression that I have lived it all before in one of my past lives.”

  “And darling Agnes,” said David affectionately, “will catch old Bertha and go over all the bedrooms and nurseries and cry when she sees the rocking-horse. Lord! when I think that I used to be invited to see Clarissa in her bath, it makes me feel how old I am.”

  His niece Clarissa looked at him in rather a bored way and said something to her cousin Rose that made her laugh.

  “I have made a very unpleasant discovery lately,” said David to his nephew Martin.

  Martin asked what it was.

  “Sit down and I’ll tell you,” said David, who had noticed that Martin’s limp was having one of its bad days. “I have discovered that I am a back number. Clarissa, whom I knew very well in her bath some baker’s dozen of years ago, has become someone to reckon with. She has no respect for me at all and will break several hearts before she gets married and probably afterwards.”

  “Good lord!” said Martin.

  “It’s no use good-lording,” said David, almost pettishly. “Clarissa has very neatly put me in my place more than once and this very moment is saying something to my disadvantage which is making Rose laugh.”

  “You might g
et married,” said Martin, at once making a kind plan for David. “Then your wife could scratch Clarissa’s eyes out.”

  David said it was a good idea, but he didn’t feel like it. He must have a wife, he said, who would do him great credit and never bore him. And come to that, he said, it was high time his dear nephew got married. He expected an indignant disclaimer of any such idea, but to his surprise Martin said, rather wistfully, that he would like it very much; so long, he added, as it was someone who would get on with Emmy, as she had obviously made up her mind to live at Rushwater for ever like the Ladies of Llangollen.

  “I see what you mean,” said David, “though nobody else would. Well, we’ll see what we can do and have a double wedding at Rushwater and Agnes can cry while Merry does all the work and mamma interferes.”

  Then he got up and walked towards Sylvia, wondering what his nephew Martin had in his mind, or rather whom. Was he by any chance in love with the little Fielding girl? If he were, David would certainly not spoil his chances, but as he was not supposed to know anything he would pass some of the afternoon in making the Fielding girl come out of her shell; always an amusing occupation.

  Then Robin and the boys arrived, having borrowed a car from the same obliging junior master back from the wars who had lent it for the Fieldings’ dinner-party. Leslie major and minor greeted all their relations affectionately, the Hallidays as equals, the vicar as one of the permanent duties of life, and asked if they could go on the roof.

  “Only in tennis shoes,” said Martin, “and you are not to walk round the parapet on the outside because it makes me feel sick. And we’ll be wanting you for some squash before tea.”

  The boys asked if anyone would like to come with them and George Halliday at once volunteered.

  “Have you got a good head, sir?” said Leslie major. “Emmy got stuck once on the bit we call Great Gable and began to cry and we had to rope her to get her down.”

  “Well, I don’t want to come, anyway,” said Emmy, overhearing this aspersion on her character. “And I didn’t cry. And anyway I’ve got to be about because of the Jersey.”

  “Emmy prefers child welfare to adventure,” said Leslie minor in a pitying way. “Come on, sir.”

  “I say, don’t call me sir,” said George. “My name’s Halliday, or George.”

  “Excuse me, George,” said Leslie major with a sudden and surprising deference, “but are you any relation of the Halliday who was at St. Jude’s?”

  “Well, I was at St. Jude’s for a year before the army caught me,” said George.

  “Then you are The One,” said Leslie minor suddenly.

  “My brother isn’t very bright,” said Leslie major apologetically, which made his junior hit him and be hit back, with incredible rapidity and no ill-feeling. “What he means is there is a master who got invalided out of the army who was at St. Jude’s and he used to do a lot of climbing and he said there was a fresher called Halliday who climbed right round the quad on the first floor.”

  George looked sheepish but pleased.

  “It was rather a good rag,” he said, accepting the Leslie boys as fellow-craftsmen and ignoring the rest of the company completely. “I hired some black tights and a cloak and got all the way round. The windows are pretty close together and there’s a good ledge about five inches wide and a fair amount of drainpipes. The worst part was getting past the Master’s study, because he was sitting up late that night working and his curtains weren’t drawn because of that awful Double Summer Time. I think he saw something, but by the time he had taken his reading spectacles off and put his long-distance ones on I was outside the Bursar’s rooms and he always draws his curtains at six o’clock all the year round.”

  “Why did you have tights and a cloak, sir?” said Leslie minor.

  “Shut up! Didn’t you hear him tell us not to say’ sir’?” said Leslie major in a loud aside. “But why did you, sir?” he added.

  “So that if anyone saw me they’d think I was Dracula,” said George Halliday, which eminently reasonable explanation satisfied the Leslie boys, who joyfully dragged him away to show him the glories of Great Gable.

  “David, darling,” said Lady Graham, “you will be quite happy, won’t you? I must go and have a little talk with Siddon and then I am going over the house with Bertha, so I shan’t see you till tea-time. I will tell Siddon you are coming to visit her, Rose darling.”

  And Lady Graham went into the house.

  “How I do adore that woman,” said her brother David to Sylvia. “If I ever meet anyone as divinely silly, I’ll marry her. Sylvia, we had a plan to visit the Temple, hadn’t we?”

  Robin was talking to the vicar, who knew his father. Rose and Clarissa were pursuing their endless conversation. Martin seeing that Anne looked deserted pulled a chair over to her. Anne was grateful, for the sight of Sylvia and David walking together in the chequered shade made her gently sad, though she would not for a moment have deprived Sylvia of the treat. So she asked Martin, with whom she always felt safe, to explain the Leslies to her from the very beginning, which he did with such success that she said, “Then I suppose if you don’t get married, Leslie major will have Rushwater.”

  Far from being offended by this anticipation, Martin felt rather proud of his pupil and said he would very much like to get married himself and cut his cousin out, only he didn’t know if anyone would care to marry him, limping about like a beggar all the time.

  “Oh, don’t say that,” said Anne, much distressed. “I promise you it hardly shows a bit and anyway if a person was in love with a person they wouldn’t care what they looked like.”

  Martin smiled, rather touched by her earnestness, and said she had cheered him up a good deal, and if anyone did care to marry him he would tell her at once.

  “First?” said Anne, incredulous of the honour offered to her.

  “Absolutely first,” said Martin, giving her hand a comfortable squeeze, and then they talked about books. And of course, just as would happen in a novel, Robin heard through his talk with the vicar disjointed fragments of this conversation and wondered if Anne had begun to discover that she had a heart. He would have a deep affection for her heart, whithersoever it led her and if it did lead her to Martin, she might do far worse, and Martin was a thoroughly good fellow, and a better match for Sir Robert Fielding’s daughter than a schoolmaster. And then he gave himself a good deal of unnecessary pain, talking pleasantly the while, by reflecting how unsuited Anne with her city upbringing and her delicate health, though thank goodness that was really a thing of the past, would be to the grinding life of what was really a farmer’s wife with all the responsibilities of the wife of a land-owner.

  So the two conversations went on and then the four talked together till Martin, the conscientious host, said they must collect some people for squash, or there wouldn’t be time before tea.

  “You are playing, Bostock,” he said, “and the Hallidays and one of my young cousins. They are on the roof. Someone will have to fetch them.

  “I will,” said Anne. “I’ll go up to the old nursery and shout. They’ll be sure to hear me. I think David took Sylvia to the Temple.”

  “I’ll go and find them,” said Martin. “I’ll leave you with Dale, vicar, You might as well go to the squash court and then I’ll know where to find you. On any other occasion.” he added vengefully, “my young cousins would be hanging head downwards from a crocket, but of course just when I want them they are invisible. Don’t go on the roof, Anne. Only shout.”

  Anne said she would be far too frightened to go on the roof, a confidence which Robin heard, and which most unreasonably added to his depression. But he put a good face on it and went off towards the squash court, discussing the advantages and disadvantages of having a young married couple living in the vicarage.

  David and Sylvia walked slowly up the winding track in the beechen shade towards the Temple, talking of radio-location. Sylvia supplied most of the information while David asked intelligent q
uestions and thought that a life on the farm and among cows had made her if possible more golden in her beauty than before. Her face, her arms, seemed to be powdered with golden dust over a darker shade of gold; her hair rippled in golden waves. Her legs, on which David was pleased to see silk stockings, were as finely shaped as the rest of her. Altogether, he decided with the eye of a connoisseur, she was a perfect beauty, and if her face expressed a healthy satisfaction with life in general more than intellectual longings, well, that was all right for a hot July day with nothing particular to be intellectual about.

  Presently they emerged from the trees and onto the sun-baked hollow where the Temple stood. David tried to open the door, but it resisted firmly.

  “I’ll do it,” said Sylvia, and taking an Amazon’s grip of the tarnished door-handle, turned it with such force that it came off in her hand.

  “Well, you have done it,” said David. “Now we’ll have to tell Martin. Thank God there is still an estate carpenter. We’ll have a go at the windows.”

  The ground floor of the Temple was lighted by four enormous sash windows of such weight that no one had ever been able to open them, and if opened by the carpenter it was impossible for human power to shut them. But on examination David found that some panes had been broken, together with their woodwork, and loosely boarded over. A couple of kicks and a wrench removed the boards and he was able to creep in, followed by Sylvia.

  “It’s extraordinarily dull, isn’t it?” said David, dusting himself. “And extraordinarily hot.”

  “I expect it’s because of the sun shining so hard on all that glass and the windows not being open,” said Sylvia.

  David said he thought it very probable and was assailed, as he so often was, by a wish to be somewhere else and with somebody else. But politeness forbade him, though even politeness did not always have this effect, to leave his guest, so he offered to show her the upper storey, which could only be reached by a ladder leading to a trap-door.

  “I’ll go first,” he said, “because the trap-door has probably stuck. And look out, Sylvia. The third step is missing, like Kidnapped.”