“That’s for her to decide, isn’t it?” Claire asked.
“Not entirely. That’s to say, if she had any specific objections to marrying him, nobody would have any grounds for asking her to think it over. But she likes him. She knows he’s there, which is a wonder, when you consider her complete unawareness of most people. Paul likes him, and he’s fond of Paul. There’s the farm, with lashings of space for Paul’s animals and Lotty’s pictures; there’s Ronnie, who’d love and look after them both.”
“If she doesn’t want to—”
“Ever since Geoff Summerhill died, she’s been nursing this idea of going back to France. What would she do over there? I’ll tell you what she’d do: she’d get herself into what she’d call an artistic circle in Paris, and paint worthless pictures and spend her yearly income before the first quarter was over. Lotty and money don’t stay long together; Geoff knew it, and that was one of his reasons for staying in a place where there’s nothing to spend money on. What she needs is a base, an anchor. You wouldn’t think it to look at Ronnie, but he’ll make a good anchor.”
“It must be the French side of you.”
“What must?”
“Arranging a marriage on the basis of security and good sense.”
“Perhaps. But in Lotty’s case, Ronnie and his farm represent everything she and Paul could want. If she were turning it down for any good reason, I’d have nothing to say—but she’s simply marking time in the hope that I’ll take her over to France.”
“She might meet someone she loved better than Ronnie.”
“She might. But you’ve seen enough of her to know that she lives away off in a dream world of her own—and something tells me there aren’t any men in it. I don’t think, myself, she’ll ever fall—fall really deeply—in love again. One man brought her to life—and died. I wouldn’t be canvassing for Ronnie if he were a full-blooded type who’d pester her—but he isn’t. But you still think it’s a bad idea?”
“I think Lotty must decide.”
He rested puzzled eyes on her.
“Must nobody ever make decisions for anybody else?”
She hesitated.
“Once people are grown up…”
“But growing up is something quite apart from being over twenty-one,” he pointed out. “I know men and women of forty and over who think — and behave—like teenagers.”
“I think that what I think,” she said hesitantly, “is that advice by itself is in order. You can tell people what you think they ought to do, but you can’t go further than that. You have to leave them to do what they decide to do. Anyway, trying to run other people’s lives is something I wouldn’t like to risk.”
“If you weren’t of that opinion,” he pointed out, “you and Grant would have been married by now. You would have arranged to give Mrs. Peel the pension she deserves, and you would have seen to it that Lotty understood that her term of residence was over. After that you would have left her and Ronnie together at every possible opportunity, and my guess is that—faced with packing up and leaving—she’d decide to move across to the farm. You wouldn’t be standing on a windy hill talking to me; you’d be down there making a bonfire of all the clutter and junk, and re-furnishing this, or some other house, for yourself and Grant.”
She did not answer. She had heard a distant shout; looking down, they saw Grant waving, and they turned and started down the hill, breaking after a while into a run. Richard put out a hand and caught one of hers to steady her, and they reached the bottom breathless and dishevelled.
“That was nice,” gasped Claire.
Grant kissed her and put strands of her hair back into place.
“Breakfast,” he said.
“I bet she only takes coffee,” Richard said.
“Not today. I’m hungry,” Claire said, leading the way to the dining-room.
Mrs. Peel greeted them with something less than yesterday’s good humour.
“Sorry it’s late,” she said. “A rat got at the breakfast I’d prepared. You’ll find kidneys there, Claire, and good, nourishing bacon. I hope you’re going to eat something.”
“Isn’t Lotty down?” Claire asked.
“Lotty doesn’t breakfast, except at week-ends, when Paul’s here. The other days, I take her coffee in on a tray; I found it was easier than letting the things hang about until the middle of the morning.”
After breakfast, Grant and Richard went round to the garage to see Richard’s car, and Claire helped to take the breakfast things to the kitchen. Mrs. Peel seemed abstracted, but when they reached the kitchen, she closed the door and began to speak in a worried voice.
“Claire, I think I ought to tell you…I had a talk last night with Grant. I met him on his way to his bedroom, and asked him to come in and chat to me, as I hadn’t had a minute with him all day. Well, he came in and I was just going to talk to him about household expenses when he suddenly said he was thinking of giving up the house.” There was a pause.
“Did he,” Claire asked, “say it definitely?”
“He said it as definitely as he ever says anything.” She picked up a tea towel and twisted it into a tight ball. “If you’d told me that he would ever think of giving up this place, I would have told you you were out of your mind. Have you any idea how much he loves it?”
“Yes.”
“It was the one thing—perhaps the only thing—he and his mother had in common: they loved this house and the land round it. And you may think it ugly, but every bit of it is sound; every part of the house, inside and out, has been well — and lovingly — cared for. It’ll outlast all your pretty white villas and pseudo cottages. And Grant loves it. And now he talks of giving it up. Had he ever said, or hinted such a thing to you?”
“We never got down to anything that you could call discussion.”
Mrs. Peel spoke in a dazed voice.
“To think he’s ... I can’t believe it. Grant out of this house, for . . . for good? The Will was wicked, but it did leave him the thing he loved and wanted most—the house. How can he talk of giving it up?”
She pulled out a chair and sat heavily on it, staring unseeingly at the large trestle table.
“I’m a fool,” she said at last. “I’m nothing but an old fool, but I did think that I … I did hope that he’d . . .” She raised her head and addressed Claire with sudden frankness. “Well, you can see for yourself: it’s a big house, and servants aren’t easy to find, and I’d run the place for over twenty-seven years and I hoped that he and you would come and live here and ask me to go on running it—for you and for your children, as long as my strength held out. I tried to hint as much to Grant before he left the house after the Will was read, but I don’t think he took anything in then. All he did was offer us all whatever we would have got in the previous Will. And then he went away, and I suppose I should have known—knowing Grant as I do—that he’d had a shock and couldn’t be expected to sit down and think things out quietly—but . . . but this!” She rose and tied on an apron with a resolute air. “Well, I’m not going to brood. What comes, comes. I know he’ll provide for me—but that isn’t what I wanted. I wanted to stay on here and work for him, for you both, for his children. Oh well . . . Anyway, Lotty’ll be all right. She’ll marry Ronnie and be well looked after.”
Claire thought of saying that Lotty wouldn’t, but said nothing; she did not think Richard had wanted her to keep the information to herself, but Mrs. Peel had enough on her mind.
She went out of the kitchen and wandered into the garden. Richard was dragging a long chair into the sun; Grant was walking towards the kitchen gardens, and she joined him. He led her to the shed in which Pierre was working; a small, wizened man with small black eyes and a sullen expression. He took off a black beret, returned Claire’s greeting in heavily accented English and waved his hand angrily towards the box he was making.
“For another animal,” he said. “We ’ave already a zoo. There is a dog, a bigger dog, a marmoset, a ferret, ther
e are ducks and now I make a cage for a squirrel. This garden is not big enough. If Mr. Pierce has animals to give, he should keep them over there, where there is more room. All the time I make cages, I feed animals, I let them out, I put them in. This is not gardening.”
Grant, agreeing that it wasn’t, showed Claire the menagerie.
“All Paul’s,” he said. “But I see Pierre’s point.”
“And I hear,” she said, “that there’s no chance of their being taken back to Ronnie’s farm.”
“Richard told you?”
“Yes.”
They walked slowly back to the lawn, and Richard, stretched comfortably on his chair, called to them as they approached.
“Like summer,” he said. “You can’t have this chair, Claire—it’s the only one that fits me. Grant’ll get two more.”
“One more,” Grant said, bringing it and walking away again. “I’m going to do some accounts with Mrs. Peel.”
“And I,” Richard said, “am going to close my eyes and try to forget Lotty’s painting. Did you see them?” he asked Claire.
“Yes. I suppose you told her you didn’t like them.”
“Wrong. You have to be careful nowadays; you may think you’re looking at something a child did when it was in bed getting over the measles, but it’s dangerous to say so; you learn it’s so-and-so’s latest masterpiece. It’s cubist, or abstract, or primitive, or symbolic and if you’re not burning to hang it on your walls you’re hopelessly out of touch. So I didn’t tell Lotty to desist. I gave her marks for industry and I’ve just sent her over to the farm to collect the eggs—and, in my honour, some cream. If Ronnie’s as sensible as I think he is, in spite of his misleading appearance and manner, he’ll get her into a quiet corner of the dairy and propose again. This time, perhaps with more success.”
She glanced at him.
“Just because you advised her to marry him?”
“Just because I made her see that France wasn’t the place for her or for Paul. Which reminds me that I said I’d go and fetch him home. Coming?”
“I might.”
She was frowning, and he sent her a lazy glance. “Thinking of—?”
“Lotty,” she said. “She’s twenty-six. You don’t feel it’s rather a heavy responsibility, arranging other people’s lives in the way you do?”
He ignored the sarcasm in her voice.
“I take that kind of responsibility very lightly. Lotty turned Ronnie down because she’d got her head full of dreams in which the Left Bank figured prominently. I explained that the Left Bank isn’t what it was, if it ever was, and I also reminded her that there was a slight—I didn’t say how slight—chance of my staying over here. Then I sent her for the eggs.”
“She’s twenty-six. She can choose for herself.”
“You keep saying that. But choosing means thinking of two things, and that’s asking twice too much of Lotty. What’s more, there are twenty-sixes and twenty-sixes. Take you, for example; twenty-six, cool as they come, with what my father, who hadn’t one, used to call a good grip on life. There was never a man,” he added musingly, “who knew so much about the theory of life, and so little about its practice. Heredity’s a deadly thing, I always think; he passed on to Lotty all the qualities he’d succeeded in hiding, or partially overcoming, during his lifetime. It’s odd that Grant’s mother should have liked them so much in Lotty and—in the end—so little in him.”
“Perhaps they’re womanly qualities.”
“Of course they are,” he agreed readily, “but Mrs. Tennant would never have married a manly man. Don’t they say there’s only one pair of trousers between man and wife, and whoever puts them on first, keeps them on?”
“If she was as unattractive as you make her out, why did your father marry her?”
“Now that,” he said, “has a very simple answer. He fell in love with her. You’ve seen that portrait of her in the library? Well, it was painted when she was in her twenties, but she’d kept, all those years, a good deal of that beauty. Lovely skin, lovely teeth, even lovely hair—quite white, but soft and pretty. Good figure—by which I mean no figure; lean and straight, beautifully dressed. My father could probably have held out against all that. But what bowled him over was the thing you’ve got—that fair, clean, fresh, essentially English look. It went straight to his heart, because for nearly twenty years, he’d been missing England and the English. He left them because my mother couldn’t stand them. When she died, he went on living abroad because he’d got the habit, and also because Lotty and I, like our mother, wanted to stay abroad. And then, on a lovely day in Paris, he met a still-beautiful Englishwoman who recalled all the things he’d missed. Little as I liked her from the first, I could see her from his point of view; she brought to mind neatly-clipped hedges, trim lawns, the Vicar-to-tea and copies of Country Life and the Sphere in the drawing-room.”
“His first look at this house must have dispelled most of that.”
“By the time he came down here, he was committed; to his credit, I think he merely felt that he and she together could make the place lighter and brighter. He learned, of course, that nothing could be changed. The decor remained mustard and donkey-brown; the rooms retained their Victorian clutter. I’ve always known why he married her; what I never quite worked out was why she married him.”
“Could you have been jealous?”
“You mean resentful because I didn’t fit into the new set-up? I don’t think I ever felt resentful. I did, once or twice, feel frightened.”
“Frightened of what?”
“Of this atmosphere. Of her influence.”
“She’s dead,” Claire reminded him. “Can’t you forget her? It’s over.”
“Over?” He turned to stare at her, speaking in a voice of amazement. “Over? Nothing’s over. Can you look at Grant and say that it’s over? How could you have let him get into the state he’s in?”
Claire, fighting back a surge of anger, spoke when she had her voice under control.
“There must be some point,” she said, “when even you feel you’re going too far.”
He looked surprised.
“Angry? There’s nothing to be angry about. You love Grant; I’m fond of Grant. He wrote and asked me to come, and—”
“—and you came this time, because it suited you to come.”
“I didn’t come before because—this’ll surprise you—I felt that it was up to you to help him, if he needed help. Not me any more. I came this time not only to settle one or two of my affairs, and Lotty’s, but to find out why you and he weren’t happily married by now. After five minutes with him after breakfast this morning, I found he was in a . . . in a sort of trough. I asked you how you had let him get into it because it seemed to me that you must, by now, know that he has a strong tendency to brood, and if you’re going to marry a fellow, you ought to know how to handle moods that encourage the tendency. If you let him go on glooming, the thing becomes pathological—and so it has. I hadn’t said two sentences to him this morning before I realized he had a sick mind. He’s always been quiet and self-contained and inside himself, but he was never like this. It’s such a hell of a waste. Here he is with a large income, a large house he’s fond of, an attractive woman who loves him, and no trouble in the world except a temporary difficulty in smoothing out the rough edges left by his mother’s Will.”
“Do you think I haven’t been trying to get him out of what you call his…his trough?”
“Well, now we’re back to where we started,” he pointed out. “Where we began was at the top of the hill before breakfast, disagreeing about the exact nature of the help you can offer people who need it. I think you’ve done everything that a nicely-brought-up, sheltered young woman would do to suggest, without seeming too eager, that it’s time he snapped out of it and married you and smiled again. Whereas what was needed…”
“Well, what?”
“What I keep forgetting, of course, is that you never met his mother. You nev
er knew her blighting influence, never understood what a wonderful fellow Grant must be to have turned out as decent and fine as he is after all those years of…of this. It’s a pity you couldn’t have fixed a wedding date and got him through it; married, he’d have been under one less strain. You would have been there, by night as well as by day, to keep him from brooding. What’s more, marriage would have shifted his perspective—made him look into the future instead of peering into the past.”
“This morning, didn’t he talk to you at all?”
“Only about the car. He seemed keen to keep off personalities, so I gave him a detailed description of its points.”
“He’s thinking of giving up the house. He told Mrs. Peel last night.”
He spoke slowly after a pause.
“Poor old Mrs. Peel; that must have hit her hard. Is that all he said?”
“He didn’t seem to have mentioned Canada to her, but I think that’s his idea.”
“It seems a long way to run. But the house isn’t all he’s running away from. The whole thing is a mess. Perhaps she’s enjoying it, wherever she is.”
“Why,” she turned to him to ask, “did she say, on that last morning, that they were all in it?”
He sent her an incredulous glance.
“She said that? When?”
“In the lawyer’s office. In both the lawyers’ offices. It was all she did say, but she said it in a terrible rage and she said it more than once. Didn’t anybody tell you?”
“No. Vital details of that kind bypass Lotty. Her letters were about her paintings, and about coming to Paris. One way and another,” he said slowly, “you’re not having the good time an engaged girl has every right to expect, are you?”
Claire made no reply. They sat in silence, and presently Grant came out of the house with a chair and sat beside Claire.
“Why,” Richard asked him, “did you advise Lotty to take up painting seriously?”
Letter To My Love Page 7
