Miss Bunting

by Angela Thirkell

  Here, to leave the field clearer for their staff’s activities, Miss Bunting and Anne ate a frugal but sufficient lunch of a nice bit of cold fat bacon, salad from the garden, baked potatoes with marge (an underbred word, but it has come to stay) and some very good cold pudding left over from the night before. While they ate they talked of the party, and Miss Bunting watched complacently her pupil’s happy anticipation of what a year ago would have made her so nervous that she would probably have run a temperature.

  Owing largely to her poor health, Anne was still immature compared with most of her contemporaries. At present her nose was a little too aquiline for her young face, her hands and feet though well-shaped too apt to dangle like a marionette’s and her body seemed to consist largely of shoulder blades. But Miss Bunting’s Eye, in its great experience and wisdom, knew that if things went well her pupil would, at nineteen or twenty, be a very much improved creature; that her face would fill out and her nose appear in scale, her hands and feet would be brought into obedience and co-ordination, and her figure be very elegant. In fact, she would be a handsome young woman, very like her father, though Sir Robert’s leonine head was rather large for his body; and that Anne’s head would not be, said Miss Bunting to herself, defying any unseen power to contradict her.

  ‘Miss Bunting,’ said Anne after a silence, during which the governess had been thinking the thoughts we have just described. ‘Do you know who I think you are like?’

  Miss Bunting ran rapidly through, in her mind, a few famous governesses: Madame de Maintenon, Madame de Genlis, Madame de la Rougierre, Miss Weston, the Good French Governess, Jane Eyre: but to none of these characters could she flatter herself that she had the least resemblance. So she said she could not guess.

  ‘I think,’ said Anne, her large grey eyes lighting as she spoke, ‘that you are like the Abbé Faria.’

  Even Miss Bunting, the imperturbable, the omniscient, was taken aback. For the life of her she could not place the Abbé. Meredith’s Farina dashed wildly across her mind, but she dismissed it coldly. No, think as she would, the right echo could not sound.

  ‘Because,’ continued Anne, pursuing her own train of thought, ‘I really was a kind of prisoner and getting so stupid and you did rescue me in a sort of way. I mean telling me about books and about how to write to Lady Pomfret or the Dean if I had to – oh and heaps of things. I don’t mean making a tunnel really of course.’

  Light dawned upon Miss Bunting. Finding that Anne’s book French was pretty good she had turned her loose on the immortal works of Dumas père: that is to say, on about ten per cent of his inexhaustible and uneven output. And this was the result of Monte Cristo.

  ‘What would you do if you were really in a dungeon, Miss Bunting?’ said Anne, who was evidently examining the whole subject seriously.

  ‘I should use my intelligence,’ said Miss Bunting, and there is no doubt that she meant this.

  ‘I expect you’d unravel your stockings and make a rope and strangle the jailer and dress up in his clothes,’ said Anne, gazing with reverent confidence at her governess.

  Miss Bunting did not in the least regret having led her young charge into the enchanted world of fiction, but she certainly had not bargained for this very personal application of the life story of Edmond Dantes and found herself – a thing which had very rarely occurred in her life – quite at a loss. So she said Anne had better finish her lunch so that Gradka could get on with her work.

  The beginning of Anne’s exciting party was to go down to the station to meet her parents who were coming by the one good afternoon train which runs from Barchester to Silverbridge on Wednesdays only, getting to Hallbury in time for tea. As Wednesday is early closing in Barchester, it is useless for shoppers besides being too early for business people. We can only account for this by guessing it to be the remains of the system by which the railway companies had got their own back on such parts of England as had stood out against their coming.

  This expedition she was to undertake alone, as Miss Bunting always disappeared from two to four, when according to the belief of all her friends, though they had no ocular proof of it, she took out her teeth, removed her false front and reposed upon her bed with a hot-water bottle to her respected toes. Anne also was supposed to rest after lunch, but Miss Bunting in her wisdom had relaxed this rule as the year advanced, and her charge’s health had improved. Accordingly Anne, too excited to try to rest, betook herself to the kitchen where she was allowed to help Gradka by reading the Ingoldsby Legends aloud to her while she got the vegetables ready, Gradka interrupting from time to time with questions of an intelligent stupidity which Anne found rather difficult to answer.

  ‘There is overheadly,’ said Gradka, ‘something that I should like to understand, which is namely the lines,

  In vain did St Dunstan exclaim, “Vade retro

  Smallbeerum! discede a layfratre Petro,”

  which to me is incorrect. Or perhaps it is doggish-Latin, yes?’

  Anne, who was laughing so much that she had hardly been able to communicate the words of St Dunstan, said she thought it was meant to be funny: a kind of parody of the kind of Latin the monks spoke, she supposed.

  ‘Aha! parody!’ said Gradka. ‘Then do I understand perfectly. The author wishes to make a laughable imitation of the monkish Latin, and smallbeerum is the accusative of a jocular form of small beer. That is highly amusing. Please go on, Prodshkina Anna,’ for, as our readers have quite forgotten, Prodshk and Prodshka are the Mixo-Lydian names for Mr and Mrs (or possibly Count and Countess, for nobody knows or cares), and thus Prodshkina is probably equivalent to Mademoiselle; or so Mrs Perry said, whether anyone was listening or not.

  So Anne, impeded by giggles, read to the end of that moral work and then went down to the station. In her anxiety to miss nothing of the treat she arrived a quarter of an hour too early, so she went up the stairs onto the footbridge and had a good look up and down the line, which here runs in a dead straight line through a cutting for two miles in the Silverbridge direction, finally vanishing into a tunnel, and is often used for testing engines. In the far distance a puff of dirty smoke appeared, followed at a short interval by a distant rumble, and a very long goods train came out of the tunnel and clanked towards her. There is to all ages a fearful fascination in standing on a bridge while a train goes under it. The poor quality of war-time coal has considerably lessened this attraction for those of riper years, but to Anne the sulphurous stench, the choking thick smoke were still romantic. Just as the engine was nearly under her, a voice remarked:

  ‘Rum, how those Yank engines keep all their machinery outside, like Puffing Billy.’

  Anne looked round and saw Robin Dale.

  ‘Hullo, Robin,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know it was American.’

  Robin began to explain that our allies were lending us railway engines, but the noise of engine, trucks and ear-splitting whistle made it impossible to hear, so Anne shook her head violently. When the train had got through the station she turned to Robin and said: ‘I love watching trains come under the bridge. It makes me feel like Lady Godiva.’

  ‘And might one ask why?’ said Robin, ‘especially in view of an almost total wacancy of the kind of hair needed for the part?’

  Anne’s grey eyes gleamed in appreciation of Robin’s Dickens phraseology and she said, seriously, ‘I mean the beginning;

  “I waited for the train at Coventry.”’

  ‘Well, I always thought that half my intellect had gone with my foot,’ said Robin, ‘and now I know it.’

  ‘It’s Tennyson,’ said Anne, with an anxious look at him, fearing that she had said something silly.

  ‘Then I must read him,’ said Robin.

  ‘Haven’t you ever?’ said Anne, incredulous. ‘Oh Robin, you must.’

  ‘Well, I have and I haven’t,’ said Robin. ‘When you are as old as I am you will despise him: and when I am twenty years older I shall read him again like anything and love a lot of him as mu
ch as you do. I promise you that. I’ve got a nasty bit of ground to get over – disillusionment and so on – but I’ll meet you again on the other side.’

  Robin was talking half to himself, finding Anne as he often had in the past years a help to self-examination. Sometimes he told himself that he was a selfish beast to use that Fielding child (for as such his lofty twenty-six years looked on her) as a safety-valve. But having thus made confession to himself he considered the account squared and again made her the occasional awestruck recipient of his reflections on life.

  ‘Well, I must go and see about a parcel from Barchester that hasn’t turned up,’ said Robin. ‘Are you coming down?’

  ‘Not your side,’ said Anne. ‘I’m meeting mummy and daddy’s train.’

  ‘Goodbye then till this evening,’ said Robin and went downstairs again towards the parcels office.

  Shortly after this the Silverbridge train was signalled, and after what seemed to Anne an endless wait, came puffing round the curve and into the station. Whenever Anne met a train she wondered if the people she was meeting would really come by it. So far they always had and to-day was no exception for out of it came her father and mother, delighted to see her, ready to hug and be hugged. In happy pre-war days the footbridge at Hallbury had been within the platform railings, though open to all, but so much cheating had there been that the authorities had been obliged to put a new railing and gate to make it impossible for people to get into a train without a ticket. At the gate a little crowd was waiting for Godwin the porter, who was always doing something on the up platform when the down train came in, to come and let them loose. Anne noticed a large heavily built man in a suit which looked too new and too expensive, who was steadily squeezing his way to the front. The man saw her parents, sketched a kind of greeting, gave up his ticket and got into a waiting taxi. The Fieldings then gave Godwin their tickets and went out of the gate and over the bridge.

  ‘Who was that man that knew you, daddy?’ said Anne, as they walked up the hill. ‘That rather enormous one.’

  ‘A man called Adams,’ said Sir Robert. ‘He owns those big engineering works at Hogglestock. I came across him last year when he insisted on being a benefactor to the Cathedral.’

  ‘But you like benefactors, don’t you?’ said Anne.

  ‘Within measure, within measure,’ said Sir Robert. ‘But he gave so large a sum that even the Dean was a little embarrassed. He fears that Adams will want to put up a window to his wife and that would not do at all.’

  Anne asked why.

  ‘It is rather difficult to explain these things,’ said Sir Robert, who though he thoroughly believed in class distinctions to a certain extent, felt he ought not to influence his daughter.

  ‘I suppose it might be rather an awful window,’ said Anne thoughtfully. ‘Oh, mummy! Gradka is making a perfectly lovely pudding with sour milk, and Miss Bunting and I had our lunch under the vine to-day, and Miss Bunting had a letter from one of her old pupils called David Leslie and he says it is very wet where he is.’

  Sir Robert and his wife heaved a silent sigh of relief. That any window given by Mr Adams would be quite out of place in the Cathedral they had no doubt, even as they had no doubt that his benefactions were his protest against EPT; but chiefly did they wish not to become socially embroiled with that gentleman who, finding that they had an only daughter, had talked a good deal of his own, now in her last term at the Hosiers’ Girls’ Foundation School, temporarily housed at Harefield Park.

  ‘I’ll carry your suitcase, mummy,’ said Anne, gently but forcibly wresting it from her mother’s grasp. It was only a small affair, for the Fieldings kept at Hall’s End such clothes as would be useful and only brought a few extras with them when they came.

  ‘Carefully then,’ said Lady Fielding. ‘There’s something in it for you,’ which made Anne flush with pleasure.

  When they got to Hall’s End they found Miss Bunting in the drawing-room and tea spread.

  ‘Anne, dear,’ said Miss Bunting, ‘will you get the teapot from the kitchen and the hot-water jug. Gradka,’ she explained to her employers, ‘does not wish to be seen till after dinner, when she says she will come in and receive the compliments of your guests before she begins her evening studies. It is, I understand, a Mixo-Lydian custom.’

  ‘I can’t say that I’ll miss her,’ said Sir Robert, who liked those about him to be pleasant to the eye. ‘I’ve never been in Mixo-Lydia, and if they are all like that I hope never to go.’

  ‘Robert!’ said his wife anxiously, for she had an amiable though often embarrassing weakness for oppressed nationalities and was afraid that Gradka, busy in the kitchen at the other end of the house, might hear her husband’s words and give notice. Then Anne came back with the teapot and hot-water jug on a tray and they talked comfortably. Presently Lady Fielding went up to her room with Anne and there unpacked her little suitcase and showed her daughter a charming flowery silk dress exquisitely folded in pre-war tissue paper.

  ‘Oh, mummy!’ said Anne, ‘for me? Oh, how did you do it?’

  ‘I found this silk in the cupboard in the sewing-room,’ said Lady Fielding. ‘I had quite forgotten it. So I took it to Madame Tomkins and asked her if she had your measurements and she looked at me with great contempt and said: “Je connais par cœur le corps de Mademoiselle Anne,” which frightened me so much that I went away.’

  ‘She wouldn’t have taken any notice of you if you’d stayed, mummy,’ said Anne. ‘Mummy, do you think that Madame Tomkins is really French? It doesn’t sound French.’

  But Lady Fielding said she knew she was, because she remembered how Tomkins, the boot and knife man at the Palace, had brought back his French wife after the last war and had shortly afterwards disappeared.

  ‘Had she murdered him, mummy?’ said Anne, hopefully.

  Lady Fielding said: Oh no, but she had a frightful temper and Tomkins had gone to New Zealand and was doing very well there and sent Madame Tomkins a card with a kiwi on it every Christmas.

  ‘And now I think you had better rest before dinner, darling,’ said Lady Fielding, with solicitous care for her daughter.

  ‘Oh, mummy, I hardly ever rest now except after lunch,’ said Anne, and she looked so well and seemed so happy, her mother agreed.

  The next two excitements of the day for Anne were rather badly timed, for if she went to the station to meet Mrs Morland, which she had very daringly thought of doing, she would have to hurry to put her new frock on afterwards: and if she put her new frock on first she could not go and meet Mrs Morland. From this dilemma, which had made her quite pale with agitation, she was rescued by her father calling her to walk round the garden with him. So they walked, and then sat in the evening sun, while Anne prattled about her work and her reading, and was altogether such an alive and eager creature that her father felt very grateful to Miss Bunting, the author of the improvement. So pleasant in fact a time did they have, that when Sir Robert looked at his watch and said it was seven o’clock, both were surprised. Anne fled upstairs to put on her new dress, and so much enjoyed herself peacocking before her mother’s long mirror that when at last she went downstairs, Mrs Morland had already arrived and was having a gentlemanly glass of pre-war sherry with Sir Robert and Lady Fielding.

  What Anne expected a well-known female novelist to look like, we cannot say. Nor could she have said; for any preconceived notion that may have been in her head was for ever wiped out by the sight of the novelist herself, her unfashionably long hair as usual on the verge of coming down, dressed in a deep red frock which bore unmistakable traces of having been badly packed.

  ‘You haven’t seen Anne since she was quite small, I think, Laura,’ said Lady Fielding to her distinguished guest.

  ‘No, I don’t think I have,’ said Mrs Morland, shaking hands with Anne very kindly. ‘At least one never knows, because you do see people in church or at concerts or all sorts of places without much thinking about them, and if you aren’t thinking about people yo
u don’t really see them, at least not in a recognizing kind of way. And I’m getting so blind,’ said Mrs Morland, proudly, ‘that I shall soon recognize nobody at all.’

  Had any of Mrs Morland’s four sons been there, and more especially her youngest son Tony, now in the Low Countries with the artillery of the Barsetshire Yeomanry, any one of them would unhesitatingly and correctly have accused his mother of being a spectacle snob. For Mrs Morland, who had never taken herself or her successful novels seriously, had, in her middle fifties, suddenly made the interesting discovery that she was really grown-up. This day comes to us all, at different times, in different ways. It may be the death of one of our parents which puts us at once into the front line; it may be the death or removal of a husband; it may be some responsibility thrust on us; in the case of Mrs Turner at Northbridge orphan nieces; in the case of the present Earl and Countess of Pomfret the succession to wealth and estates. But Mrs Morland’s parents and also her husband had died before she was, as she herself expressed it, ripe for grown-upness, and with her four boys she had felt increasingly and very affectionately incompetent and silly, which indeed they, with equal affection, would have admitted, so she had found no real reason to be grown-up.