Peace Breaks Out

by Angela Thirkell

  “Oh, Uncle David, could I have paste clip-on earrings?” said Clarissa.

  “You shall,” said David, “and they shall be specially chosen to suit you, and if they don’t suit the other bridesmaids they will have to lump it.”

  Then the question of bridesmaids had to be considered and Miss Merriman made lists and was helpful, and there was a delightful, comfortable, simmering kind of excitement till Conque came in to help her mistress to her bedroom and Miss Merriman went away with them.

  “Oh dear, I had forgotten Emmy,” said Lady Graham. “She goes to bed early so I will ring her up to-morrow morning. Good-night, darling David; good-night, darling Rose. Come along, Clarissa darling.”

  Having offered her incredibly soft face to be kissed, she went off with Clarissa.

  “And bed for us too—in the more refined sense of the phrase,” said David, yawning. “Lord! how sleepy being engaged makes one. Are we really engaged, Rose?”

  “Really and always,” said Rose, “till marriage us do part.”

  They went upstairs. On the landing Nurse was lurking, apparently, as David afterwards said to Rose, with the laudable intention that they should not be alone till St. George’s, Hanover Square, should, on a date not yet settled, make them one, but really to offer congratulations.

  “Miss Conk brought up the good news, Mr. David,” said Nurse, “and I am sure I wish you and Miss Rose every happiness, and Edith will be quite excited when I tell her to-morrow morning, and we must write to James and Robert and Henry about their new auntie.”

  “Thanks awfully, Nurse,” said David. “I’m a very lucky man.”

  “I’m sure you are, sir,” said Nurse kindly. As David passed on to his bedroom she said to Rose, “You remember Ivy, Miss Rose, that was undernurse here so long? She took a place as single-handed nurse when the boys had all gone to school and there was only Edith except in the holidays, but she is thinking of giving notice because the lady she is with hasn’t heard from her husband in the Far East for four years and Ivy won’t stay if there isn’t another baby. So if you should be thinking about a nurse, miss, I think you would find Ivy a nice willing girl and can take them from the month.”

  Rose thanked Nurse warmly, and then scandalised that worthy creature by going to David’s room and telling him her suggestion, which made them both laugh immoderately. Much to Nurse’s relief, who had been hanging about in case summoned by the shriek of a woman in distress, David came to his door fully clothed except for his jacket and bade a final good-night to his betrothed.

  Miss Merriman, having settled her employer, left her to Conque’s administrations and went to her own room. Her thoughts went back to the day, three, four, five years ago—one lost count of time during a war—when Mrs. Marling and her daughter Lettice Watson had come over to see their cousin Emily, bringing with them the Leslies’ old governess, Miss Bunting; and how she and Miss Bunting had discussed, without mentioning a single name, the possibilities of marriage for Lettice and David. Lettice had re-married, happily. David was going to marry, a little late, but very well, very suitably, and she felt that Miss Bunting would have approved.

  As if their minds had moved together, David tapped at her door and came in.

  “As a gentleman I must apologise for being in my dressing-gown,” said David, “but I wanted to tell somebody how happy I am.”

  “That was very nice of you,” said Miss Merriman.

  “I have been thinking of old Bunny,” said David. “She told me I couldn’t fool all the people all the time. How right she was.”

  “She saw more than most people,” said Miss Merriman.

  “So do you, Merry,” said David. “Well, having said my say, I shall now go away again. I suppose I shall find I really am engaged to-morrow morning?” he added anxiously.

  Miss Merriman said he would, bade him good-night and kindly pushed him out of the room.

  Through the open window of her bedroom she could hear soft, steady rain. The summer was over.

  The rain continued all night, the temperature fell. Nature had got things in hand again and was doing her best to help the cross, exhausted people of England to enjoy the first summer of so-called peace. Emmy, coming down to breakfast as usual at eight o’clock, found Martin and Sylvia already at the table. They looked wet, dirty and very tired, and were having their breakfast in a very uncomfortable way, holding hands across the table and feeding themselves with their spare hands. As Emmy came in they unclasped and pretended to look like ordinary people.

  “Hullo,” said Emmy, whose pre-occupation with herself and cows made her not notice other people much unless they were doing something useful in a cowshed, garden or field. “What a nasty morning. It’s a good thing the Jersey didn’t calve last night.”

  “She did,” said Martin. “And I’ve got something to tell you, Emmy.”

  “The calf has two heads!” said Emmy, whose mind ran entirely on practical lines.

  “No, that’s all right,” said Martin. “It’s about Sylvia and me. We—”

  “But what do you mean she calved then?” said Emmy. “I told Herdman to wake me.”

  “He couldn’t,” said Martin, adding under his breath the word Darling which was not meant for Emmy.

  “What do you mean he couldn’t?” said Emmy, her mouth rather full of fish-cake. “I told him to shout under my window if he needed me.”

  “He did shout,” said Sylvia, “and I hadn’t gone to bed yet, because I was thinking about things—”

  “Angel!” said Martin, seizing a moment when his cousin Emmy was drinking her coffee in gulps.

  “—and I went into your room,” Sylvia continued, “but I couldn’t wake you, so I dressed again and came down and then Herdman saw a light in the Estate Office, so we found Martin.”

  “What time was it?” said Emmy suspiciously.

  “About one,” said Martin. “I hadn’t gone to bed yet, because I was worrying about some things—”

  “Poor lamb,” said Sylvia softly.

  “—and poor old Herdman’s lumbago was pretty bad, so I sent him home and we did the job.”

  “It was lovely,” said Sylvia, her eyes gleaming at the thought of her interesting vigil. “And when the Jersey—”

  “That’s enough at breakfast,” said Martin. “You are as bad as Emmy.

  Emmy said she would never forgive Herdman for not waking her.

  “You must, Emmy,” said Martin, “because Sylvia and I made such friends while we were sitting up with the Jersey that we got engaged.”

  Emmy stared, first incredulous, then half-convinced, and on the whole slightly contemptuous of people who could waste time on getting engaged while a cow and a calf were at stake. A sudden thought struck her.

  “A bull or a heifer?” she asked anxiously.

  “The finest little bull-calf I’ve ever seen,” said Martin. “Rushwater Romany would be a proud man if he had the faintest idea it was his child.”

  It was then that Emmy rose supremely to the occasion.

  “I say, Martin,” she said. “I think we ought to give the R a miss this time and call him Churchill. It might bring him luck,” she added, thinking not of the bull-calf but of a great Prime Minister whose party, so the omens foretold, would probably be swept from power by the millions of tired, impatient and mostly irresponsible people whom he had served.

  Martin thought. The tradition of the R had never been broken since his great-grandfather had bred the first great prize winner, Rushwater Ramper. But there are moments when loyalty and gratitude must come first.

  “Good girl, Emmy,” he said. “Rushwater Churchill it shall be, and I wish those election results were out.”

  “I say, what did you mean you’re engaged?” said Emmy, who had not forgotten Martin’s news, though more important things had for the moment obscured it. “Do you mean that you and Sylvia are going to get married?”

  Martin said that was what he intended to convey.

  Emmy, finding words ina
dequate, got up, gave each of them a violent kiss and then began to cry loudly.

  “It’s all right,” she mumbled, between her shrieks, her sniffs and her gulps, “I’m only so awfully pleased, and that beast Herdman not waking me and everything that I can’t help it. Can I be a bridesmaid?”

  “I’d love you to be a bridesmaid,” said Sylvia, “if you’ll promise me something.”

  “All right, I promise,” said Emmy, “unless it’s anything awful like my having my hair permed for the wedding.”

  “Will you go on living at Rushwater with us?” said Sylvia; and Martin felt deeply content with his bride.

  At this Emmy cried more loudly than ever till quite suddenly she stopped, gave her face a kind of polish with an oily duster from her overalls pocket, and said she must ring mummy up. As Lady Graham was at the same moment trying to ring her daughter up there was some confusion and delay, but luckily the girl at the exchange, who had heard about Flight-Lieutenant Leslie’s engagement from a friend at the Hatch End post office who had got it from the Grahams’ cowman, realised the importance of what was happening and got both lines clear.

  When Emmy came back Martin and Sylvia were still holding hands across the table, but this time they did not unclasp.

  “I say,” said Emmy, “what do you think, David is going to marry Rose and they want me to a bridesmaid but it’s to be in London and I don’t know if I ought to go, because of the cows if Herdman is going to be bad with lumbago again. And Rose wants Anne to be one too.”

  Martin suddenly went quite pale and haggard. He knew this happiness could not last. Sylvia, in the reaction from their night of stress with the Jersey, had said she would marry him. She meant to be kind, God bless her, and beauty dwells with kindness as we all know, but of course when she heard that David, who only yesterday was trying his arts—oh yes, Martin knew the charm his Uncle David had for women—on her was really intending to marry Rose all the time, her heart would be broken; and either she would annul their engagement, or else marry him, pine, and die within the year, leaving perhaps one puny babe, sole relic of his love.

  “Oh, Emmy! how splendid,” said Sylvia. “I do think Rose is so nice and so beautifully dressed and just the right age for David. Oh! everything is heavenly. Martin darling, what is the matter? Is it your leg?”

  Martin, suddenly transported from the dungeon of Giant Despair to the Delectable Mountains, said his leg was hurting a bit, but it was nothing, and of course Emmy must be a bridesmaid even if all the cows died.

  Anne, who had overslept herself after the long, happy day and the agitation of the evening, now came in, was informed by three people at once of the events of the night, and though still only half awake was delighted that so many of her friends were going to marry each other and was engaged as bridesmaid for both marriages. Then they all went to look at Rushwater Churchill and presently Martin had to go to Barchester in the Ford van and dropped Sylvia and Anne at their homes, and the happy Rushwater visit was over.

  CHAPTER 10

  EMMY had done her best for Mr. Churchill, but as the election results came tumbling in it became clear that six years of increasing danger and discomfort, for part of which time they had stood alone against a world of deadly enemies, cautious friends and swithering neutrals, had left the peculiar English so desirous for a change of any kind, so blindly making themselves believe in promises of everything for nothing (except even higher taxes and discomfort), that Mr. Churchill’s friends were swept away by huge majorities and the Brave and Revolting New World came into its own. Emmy, whose faith was of the bulldog kind, was however convinced that Rushwater Churchill had saved the ex-Prime Minister’s seat for him, though as Martin pointed out, it must have been pre-natal influence. A minister (without portfolio) who should have known better spoke of “my Government” instead of His Majesty’s Government without one protest being made, and England lurched on her way.

  In East Barsetshire Mr. Gresham got in with a good majority and Mr. Hibberd went back to the City and continued to ruin Mr. Scatcherd’s profession. In Barchester Sir Robert Fielding was beaten, partly because no power on earth could stop Mr. Adams getting in, but also because of a young man who had made over his estate to the National Trust on condition that he should live in it, he and his heirs, with no responsibilities for evermore, and suddenly burst into politics as a National Independent Crank, stating on no grounds at all that a vote given for him would be a vote given to Mr. Churchill, which quite took in a number of people who did not reflect that a vote given in Barchester would not have any effect in Woodford. This unpleasant young man forfeited his deposit, we are glad to say, but he had previously managed to unsettle a good many citizens who had thought of voting for Sir Robert. So Mr. Adams got in with a good thumping majority and he and Sir Robert shook hands with mutual respect.

  “Now that it’s over, I must say I am rather relieved,” said Sir Robert. “To be Member for Barchester is a fine thing and I am sure you will look after us, Adams.”

  “I may say there’s no one I’d sooner have been beaten by than you, Fielding,” said Mr. Adams, “but as I’m in I’ll do my best. And no one can say that my committee told more lies or made more promises than yours.”

  Sir Robert laughed.

  “We all promised free everything, except perhaps free love,” he said, “and we all knew we couldn’t give anything. It’s going to be hell for your lot, Adams, and I don’t envy you. But I think you’ll stay for five years. Everyone will be too tired and too busy scraping along somehow to want another General Election. How is Heather?”

  “Between you and I and the gate-post,” said Mr. Adams, “though it isn’t public yet, my little Heth’s gone and got herself engaged.”

  Sir Robert asked who the lucky man was, despising himself the while for deliberately speaking Mr. Adams’s language.

  “It’s young Ted Pilward,” said Mr. Adams. “He’s a good lad and my Heth and he have been good friends for some time. He’ll be out of the army by next year and going into his dad’s business. Old Pilward is a good customer of mine. Many’s the thousand pounds’ worth of castings and parts we’ve turned out for the brewery. Mother would have been pleased,” said Mr. Adams, who did not often speak of the wife who had died when Heather was a little girl. “Your Anne will be the next, I expect.”

  Sir Robert said he hoped not, as she was only nineteen, and went away. Mr. Adams then addressed his committee, thanked them for their support and said Sam Adams was a plain man and believed in plain speaking and knew a thing or two, and if they thought he was going into the lobby the way he was told they would have some surprises, and if everyone treated his employees fair, the way he did, there wouldn’t be any need, for all this labour unrest, and he only wished Mr. Churchill would take the leadership of the Labour Party and then England would get on all right. These very un-party words were eagerly taken down by the young man from the Barchester Chronicle who had got himself registered as doing work of national importance, and less eagerly by the elderly man who represented the Barchester Free Press and had no convictions or illusions about anything, and doubtless there would have been a fine commotion in Barchester next day, had not Councillor Budge of the Gas Works, a man of prompt action, taken them both to the Mitre, kept them there till closing time and seen them both not only home but into their beds.

  “Adams is a rum bird,” said Sir Robert to his wife. “I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if he turned up on the Opposition Benches one day. There’s nothing so conservative as a good Labour man. And now, that’s that. What do you and Anne think about it?”

  “Mixed, Robert,” said Lady Fielding. “It might have been fun. But I think this Parliament is going to be very tiring whichever side one is on, and you have quite enough work here, and London will be dreadful, all fuller than ever of foreigners. And something quite dreadful might have happened like your getting a peerage and having a title like Lord Aberinverglenboldover that nobody can remember and they don’t know who
you are. No, Robert; I am very sorry, dearest, but really I’m very glad.”

  “And what about Anne,” said Sir Robert.

  “I’m most dreadfully sorry, daddy, about you being disappointed,” said Anne, kissing the side of her father’s head in an affectionate if perfunctory way, “but I think Barchester is really nicer than London. I did love being at Rushwater so terrifically, and if we go to Hallbury Robin will be there for the school holidays and he is going to teach me Latin.”

  Sir Robin and his wife smiled at this natural if parochial view of politics and the talk passed to the two weddings, which were to be in September, and what the bridesmaids’ frocks would be like.

  The next really exciting thing that was to happen in Anne Fielding’s life was Lady Graham’s Bring and Buy Sale at Holdings, which was finally arranged for the third Wednesday in August. Anne was invited to stay at Holdings on the previous night so that she and Clarissa could have a comfortable talk about the dresses and what sort of stuff could be got without coupons and whether Madame Tomkins could be persuaded to give them priority. She was also to help Miss Merriman to arrange the many articles, pleasant and unpleasant, that had been contributed.

  A very horrid rumour of still more peace was floating about in Barchester and indeed about all England for a few days before Anne’s visit, filling everyone with deep misgivings about trains and more especially about the grocer and the bread. Public opinion was divided, some saying They would certainly have peace on a Tuesday so that one could get the rations done on Monday, others saying that they knew for certain that the King had asked for peace to happen on Friday, so that everyone could have a nice long week-end. Yet others, and these a very large class including all the housewives of England who had been working for sixteen or seventeen hours a day ever since the war began, looking after children and aged relatives, standing in queues, walking a mile to the bus and taking an hour to get to the nearest town only to find that the whelk oil or chuckerberry juice or whatever it was that they were told their children must have wasn’t in and it was two hours before the bus went back and anyway they had been given the wrong certificate, slaving at W.V.S. in their meagre spare time, suffering evacuees, taking in lodgers because their husband was only getting army pay now, cooking for everyone, fire-watching, being wardens, being mostly too tired to eat, seeing Italian and German prisoners of war riding happily about the country in motor lorries while they pounded along on bicycles against wind and rain or lugged heavy baskets on foot, seeing mountains of coal and coke at the prisoner of war camps while they were down to two hot baths a week and very little soap for the washing and the laundry only coming irregularly every three weeks, seeing Mixo-Lydian and other refugees throwing whole loaves into the pig-bin and getting the best cuts at the butcher’s, keeping their children nicely dressed while they got shabbier themselves every day, too driven to consider their looks, unable to have their houses properly cleaned and repaired, having to be servile to tradesmen and in many cases to tip them in money or kind, seeing one egg in eight weeks with luck, in a state of permanent tiredness varied by waves of complete exhaustion, yet never letting down anyone dependent on them; this great, valiant, unrecognised class, the stay of domestic England, all knew that THEY would burst peace on them whenever it was most inconvenient and went about their shopping listlessly, waiting for the tiger to spring.