Mabel, I don’t know why, had become conspicuously ample in her person. She was not, her neighbours fancied, very happy in her marriage; and her temperament did not match her appearance. Her figure was of the build called ‘comfortable’, the figure that goes with a bright eye and a bustling cheerful manner. But Mabel, if she bustled at all, bustled drearily; her eyes were tired; and though she rarely uttered a word of complaint, having better uses for such energy as was left to her, her voice was always complaining. She had become, by reason of her altered appearance and diminishing appetite for quarrelling, even more of a stranger to her father than she had been during her mother’s lifetime. He could hardly, poor man, believe that he and no other had begotten her. The sight of her invariably saddened and humiliated him by quickening his sense of having, as a father, failed her. In her infancy he had been too ready to regard her as merely an appendage to Carrie and another potential cause of disagreement in the house, and that Carrie had consistently forced this attitude upon him was insufficient now to secure him an acquittal from his own tender conscience. He sometimes shamefacedly slipped half a sovereign into Mabe’s hand at parting, for he guessed that she was kept short of money by her tippling husband; and he would have given a substantial sum, ill as he could spare it, had he had any confidence in its power to redeem her house from the squalid odour that filled it—an odour, pungent and nauseating, that floated across the threshold to meet him the moment Mabel, drearily hushing her children as she shuffled up the passage to admit him, opened the door six inches and vigilantly inserted her large nose in the narrow aperture. But Mr Pandervil was notoriously a bit of a crank about fresh air, being one of those eccentric bodies who even in winter, and with no medical journalists to prompt them, slept with their bedroom windows visibly open. He was ashamed of so profoundly disliking the smell of his daughter’s house; and, indeed, it was probably no worse than that of the others in her row.
‘Why, it’s Father! Come in, do.’ A faint suggestion of pleasure tinged Mabe’s colourless voice. And with a gallant attempt at brightness she added, mournfully: ‘Quite a stranger!’
‘Well, my dear.’ Leaning awkwardly towards each other across the doorstep, father and daughter exchanged their customary peck. Then, with the unmistakable air of being glad the ritual was over, Egg entered the house hat in hand, driving—as it seemed—Mabel before him; for as he moved forward, eyeing the hat pegs desirously, she was forced back, there being not room enough for him to pass her. She was slow, as usual, and he in his nervousness was afflicted with a spasm of impatience, so that he trod on her toe and nearly stumbled.
‘Beg pardon,’ said Mabel, like a well-drilled child. ‘Did I hurt you, Father?’
‘Sorry!’ said Egg. ‘My fault.’
‘Are you sure I dint hurt you, Father?’
‘No, no. Not a bit. What about your toe?’
‘Oh, granted, I’m sure!’ retorted Mabel politely. ‘Let me take your ’at, Father.’ The hat changed hands and was hung on a peg. It fell down and was hung up again. The third time it seemed likely to remain, but it was nervous work edging past the hall-stand, which shook dangerously if you bumped into it. The best way was to stand with your back pressed firmly against the opposite wall and slide along keeping your stomach contracted until the danger-point was passed. ‘This is a narrow ’all!’ admitted Mabel, with a sigh. ‘ ’Ardly worth calling an ’all, I always tell Dan. But it’s nice for the children, isn’t it?’
‘Nice for the children?’
‘A sort of cricket pitch for ’em,’ explained Mabel. ‘Dan says it don’t do the paint any good. But I say let ’im ’ave the children to look after day in day out and ’e won’t be so nice about a bit of paint.’
‘Well it’s not such a tight squeeze as it used to be anyhow,’ ventured Egg, wishing that Mabe would move out of the way and let him sit down somewhere. ‘When the pram used to be here,’ he explained. As, at last, she backed into the parlour, and the journey’s end was in sight, he recalled how that perambulator had had to be pushed back into the kitchen every time a visitor appeared. A stupid arrangement he had always thought it, and so like poor Mabe.
‘No, we’ve done with prams for a bit, thank ’eaven!’ As though surprised by the feeling in her tone Mabel added apologetically: ‘Though I dint ought to swear about it like that, did I? Come and sit down, do, Father. You must be tired, I’m sure, and you at your age.’
‘Not a bit tired!’ declared Egg. He sat down and began mopping his brow. ‘Well, how’s Daniel and the children, my dear?’
‘Oh, mustn’t grumble, time of the year,’ said Mabel, sinking slowly into a chair. ‘How’s yourself, Father? I do ’ope,’ she added plaintively, ‘I do ’ope I dint ’urt you, Father, when I sort of tripped you up just now in the ’all.’
Egg approached his subject by way of Harold. ‘Well, we shall be losing Harold soon now, I suppose.’
‘Eh?’ said Mabe. ‘Has he been sickening?’
‘Sickening for marriage,’ said Egg curtly. ‘Him and Lily’s made up their minds at last, it seems.’
‘A bit ’eadstrong, isn’t it?’ ventured Mabe. ‘I never did ’old with doing things all in a flurry. Not a thing like getting married anyhow.’
‘That’s right enough.’ Egg could not but approve the sentiment, though he was aware that Mabe was being ridiculous. ‘Still, two years is long enough for most folks to make up their minds in. And they’ve had nigh three, to my reckoning.’
‘Well, I only ’ope it’ll turn out for the best, I’m sure,’ said Mabe, in her mortuary manner. ‘But is ‘Arold earning enough to get married on, Father?’
‘I’m paying him enough, if that’s what you mean.’ In spite of his kindly intentions Egg was allowing his daughter’s dismal airs to nettle him. ‘He’s got a head on his shoulders where business is concerned, that boy has. I never thought I’d live to say that of him, but fair’s fair, as your poor mother used to say. He’s brightened the shop up quite a deal, what with this and that.’
‘Ah, you’ll be sorry to lose ’im then.’ Here, Mabe seemed to imply, here surely is a fit occasion for melancholy.
‘Well, when I said lose him,’ admitted Egg, confused, ‘it was only a manner of speaking. Because of course he’ll stay on where he is and keep the shop going for me. I’m not so young as I was, and I’ll praps take things a bit quieter.’
‘So you ought to, Father. I was saying to Dan only the other day: If anything was to happen to Father, I said—’
‘Now see here, my girl!’ Egg spoke with unwonted decision. ‘Nothing’s going to happen to me, so you can put that out of your mind. Nothing’s going to happen to me except what happens to everybody sooner or later. If you mean die say die and have done with it—I never set up to be immortal, as I knows of.’ First Harold, now Mabe, he thought angrily. Treat me like a child they do, with their silly hints. ‘What I was wondering,’ he went on, looking a little sheepish after his outburst, ‘was whether you couldn’t do with a bit of help about the house here.’
‘No offence meant, I’m sure,’ said Mabe, stiffly. ‘I’m only too glad to ’ear you’re all so prosperous. Only too glad, as any right-feeling person would be. Only one does ’ave to think a bit a’ead, and if Lily was to have any family, so to speak—’ Mabe broke off self-consciously, and added after a moment’s silence: ‘Praps I dint ought to be talking like this, but plain speaking’s my way, I’m afraid, and always was.’
Egg was on the point of saying that young people seemed to pick and choose a bit nowadays in this matter of parenthood; but one cannot discuss such matters with one’s daughter, can one?— even though she is past forty and has five children. So he remarked instead: ‘What I mean to say is, there’ll be Sleena to spare now if you could do with her. She’d be a help to you, wouldn’t she?’
Mabe agreed, but without enthusiasm, that Sleena would be a help.
‘Of course,’ Egg said hastily, reading her mind, ‘you wouldn’t have to worry about pay
ing her. We could see to that between us, somehow. Now Nicky’s premium’s paid things’ll be getting easier year by year. Y’r Uncle Algy’s bin very good. Nicky’ll be earning his keep before long, and a bit over.’
‘I don’t ’ardly know what Dan’ll say about it,’ said Mabe. ‘We don’t always see eye to eye, and there’s no use pretending we do. And besides …’
‘Besides what?’ Egg was anxious and rather irritable.
Mabe, having stared at what was in her mind for fifteen seconds, appeared to dismiss it with a shrug. ‘Oh well, I daresay Sleena can look after ’erself. ‘Tisn’t as if she wasn’t a good girl.’
Egg met her eye unflinchingly. ‘Jusso!’
‘It isn’t,’ insisted Mabe, ‘as if Sleena wasn’t a girl of good character, I mean.’
‘So do I,’ replied Egg shortly. ‘She’d be all right that way.’ He believed what he said, but the need for equivocation made him almost blush.
‘But then,’ said Mabe, dolefully, ‘I don’t suppose she’d care about coming to ’elp me. It’s no picnic, she’d better know that.’
‘Set your mind easy.’ Egg contrived to look at his daughter in an exceedingly knowing fashion.
‘You think she’d like it …?’
‘Well,’ admitted Egg, ‘she dint say in so many words she wanted to come to you. But I know pretty well what’s in her mind.’
Egg’s false exuberance got to his head; seeing success so near, he almost winked at Mabe. And when, that same evening, he set about executing the more difficult part of his plot he was armed not only with courage but with this new cunning that nature, as it seemed, had so unexpectedly and belatedly endowed him with.
He hovered about the scullery where Sleena was washing dishes. He knew from experience that this was the best place for conversation with Sleena. Elsewhere she would find endless occasion for jumping up and putting something or other ‘to rights’: here, engaged in washing up, she was spiritually tethered to her sink.
‘My daughter Mrs Finch,’ said Egg, chattily, ‘she’s not keeping up her strength the way I’d like to see.’
‘Reelly, Mr Pandervil? Selina made a sympathetic grimace, and her eyes shone with a compassion that was greedy for nourishing details of the distemper. ‘Nothing serious, I ’ope.’ Within her limitations Selina was a good-hearted young woman, and she wished Mrs Finch no harm. Yet there’s something about a bad illness, isn’t there?— it sort of makes a bit of a change and it’s something new to talk about. It was self-denying of Selina to hope as she did.
‘Yes, I’m very worried about it, Sleena; between ourselves, mind. She’s too much to do, that’s the fact of the matter. Rushed off her feet with those five children.’ He spoke with feeling now as well as with calculation. Time had wrought an unconscious change in his point of view. Five children, in his young manhood, would have seemed to him a very moderate family indeed: now, in 1907, it seemed excessive for such folks as Mabe and Dan. ‘It’s too much work for one woman,’ he concluded, cocking a meaning eye at his audience. ‘She was saying to me yesterday what a comfort it’d be to have someone to give a hand—someone she knew and could depend on. It’d be a bit of company too. Now if only, she said, our Sleena could be spared—those were her very words.’
Selina, red with pleasure, could only say: ‘Reelly, Mr Pandervil?’
‘Yes,’ said Egg, in an off-hand way, ‘she thinks very highly of you, does my daughter Mrs Finch. I don’t know if you know it, but there it is.’
By a triumph of self-control he refrained from mentioning Harold’s marriage. But, with these golden eggs laid, he could no longer resist taking private joy in the brood of happiness that time, he believed, must hatch from them. And, deacon though he was, and a constant if inaccurate bass in the Ebenezer Choir, he felt not the least compunction about having practised deception on these two women. Mabe, after all, would be the better for Selina’s company and help; Harold and Lily would be the happier for her absence; and Selina herself would have been not unkindly disposed of. He had the happiness of all these folks genuinely at heart; but now he no longer disguised from himself the main motive of his scheming. That motive became more and more apparent as the weeks went by. These obstacles surmounted, he began to count the days to the wedding. So, too, we must suppose, did Harold; and so, we must hope, did Lily. These days of waiting were something of an ordeal for all three. Harold dreamed of Lily, and Lily of Harold; while Egg, with mounting excitement, kept telling himself that soon, if only for a few hours, he would be seeing Nicky again.
3
For her daughter’s wedding party Mrs Colebrook—for the first time since her husband’s funeral — unlocked the folding doors between parlour and drawing-room, and wound, not very hopefully, the large gilt ormolu clock that had been rich Uncle Eustace’s wedding gift to herself half a lifetime ago. A fantastic thing she thought the clock, and she never ceased to reflect that the price of it would have paid for Lily’s education. For twenty years, no less, it had stood silent on the drawing-room mantelpiece; but now, responding to her ministrations, it began ticking in a hearty, an almost nasal voice: a voice that to Mrs Colebrook’s fancy, as she stood listening with the key of the clock in her hand, somehow suggested that of Uncle Eustace himself. It was a husky resonant throat-clearing note—tick tock, I’m a rich clock— and it conjured up so vivid a picture of red whiskers and bulging eyes and a vast striped waistcoat that Mrs Colebrook could not but believe for a moment that Uncle Eustace was alive again and standing in this very room with her. She had been both fond and afraid of Uncle Eustace: fond because he was good to her and because it was her nature to be fond, yet afraid, sometimes, of the greedy light that shone in his little eyes when he looked as though he wanted to make a meal of her. She had never quite liked his clock; never since his death had she touched it, except with a duster, until now. It had stopped ticking soon after Uncle Eustace’s heart had stopped beating, and now that it had started again she half-believed that he too had a new lease of life. Well Alice! And how’s my little niece this morning? I’ve brought some butterscotch for you, ducky. Mrs Colebrook listened with eager horror to the voice issuing in her mind from the red whiskers; and she cast down her eyes, shuddering, lest she should meet the glance of a ghost; for Uncle Eustace was now so much more alive to her than was the alert young petty officer, her late husband, whose portrait smirked upon her from the drawing-room wall. ‘Stuff and rubbidge!’ said Mrs Colebrook, employing her favourite oath. She shook herself free of her fancies, and glancing up at George, as she moved to the window to let in some fresh air, she encountered a thought that had never presented itself before: that, whereas she always saw herself as a little younger than her husband, and a generation younger than Uncle Eustace, she was in fact at this moment a quarter of a century older than George had been when he died. Old enough to be his mother, she muttered to herself, and she suddenly felt sick and weary and afraid of life. The clock in the drawing-room ticked with unction; the clock in the parlour ticked with discretion; and time went on, taking account of neither.
Here, in this double room, the wedding party assembled after the ceremony. It was a triumph for Mrs Colebrook that with so large a gathering there were yet seats for all but one. The party might have been designed as an illustration of the Church’s Tables of Consanguinity; for everybody, it seemed, was in some degree or another everybody else’s uncle, cousin, or aunt, or so Mrs Colebrook persuaded herself when she learned that Harold’s grandfather, Richard Noom, had had an Uncle and Aunty Bunce; for Lily, too, had an Uncle and Aunty Bunce, ‘and seeing it’s the same name, Mr Pandervil, there must be some relationship somewhere, though it’s not as if Bunce was what you’d call an uncommon name, and of course, it’s not as if Uncle Bunce was her real uncle, though real enough since he married Dinah Colebrook, my own sister-in-law, who was with me, more’s the mercy, when George was taken. And if Harold’s grandfather’s uncle should turn out to be no other than Lily’s Uncle Bunce’s grandfather, then
Lily’s Uncle Bunce would be your very own cousin, Mr. Pandervil; by marriage I mean, since you would have married Uncle Bunce’s grandfather’s niece’s daughter.’ This conclusion seemed to afford the greatest possible satisfaction to Mrs Colebrook: she declared that it was an omen; and the guests, pausing in their coterie conversations, listened so attentively that at length the silence embarrassed her and she looked up in confusion, her glance falling finally on the youngest of all the Bunces, a fair-haired pimply young man who hovered uneasily near the piano hoping that nobody would notice there was no seat for him. ‘Why Sonny! Can’t you find a chair, poor boy!’ Mrs Colebrook’s distress, and Sonny’s gallant avowal that he’d rather stand, set all the men in the room in a state of perturbation. ‘You sit here, young man, and let me have a stand for a bit!’ The business of eating and drinking was seriously interrupted by this competition in courtesy. But it was Sonny’s cousin Daise Hopper who put an end to the situation, and provoked approving laughter, by jumping up from the piano-stool and planting herself in her father’s lap. There followed a further dispute, and by the time Sonny Bunce was prevailed upon to sit down the temperature of the room had risen so high that he was emboldened to say, with an arch grin: ‘Needn’t go over there, Daise. What’s my knee done?’ The remark was a great success, and fully five minutes was occupied in enjoying it, those who had heard it repeating it for the benefit of those who hadn’t, and being corrected, in their turn, by those who thought they had heard it more precisely. Several small arguments sprang up: Sonny Bunce saw himself already the subject of a legend; and finally, when a working agreement had been reached, and the text more or less established, the whole story had to be retailed, very slowly, into the ear of Aunty Bee, his mother, who suffered from deafness and had watched the excitement in a frenzy of impatience to be told what it was all about. After this, the serious business of the day began. Uncle Hopper proposed the health of the bride; Uncle Bunce proposed the health of the bridegroom; Uncle Albert proposed the health of the bride’s mother. And then it was time for the Best Man to make a few remarks, but the Best Man, Nicky, was absent, and his deputy was shy. The speechmaking came to an end.
The Pandervils Page 29
