Miss Bunting

by Angela Thirkell

  This fact she had lamented, though with her usual detachment, till two or three years before the date of this story, when she became for the first time in her life conscious of her eyes. Oliver Marling, whose mother had supplied Miss Bunting, had strongly recommended his dear Mr Pilman, lately released from the RAMC to look after the neglected civilian population. Mrs Morland had visited Mr Pilman, read as far as TUSLPZ quite easily, boggled over XEFQRM and failed hopelessly at FRGSBA. She had then been quite unable to make up her mind whether the left or right arm of a St Andrew’s cross looked darker or lighter, furthermore insisting that even an X cross couldn’t have a left or right because each arm went right through, if Mr Pilman could understand, and what he really meant was the north-west to south-east arm, or the north-east to south-west, and he oughtn’t to say: ‘The right arm is darker than the left, isn’t it?’ because that was a leading question. A busy oculist might have been excused for losing his temper at this point, but Mr Pilman not only had great patience, partly natural, partly acquired, but was a devoted reader of Mrs Morland’s books. So disentangling with great skill what she said from what she meant, he had finished the examination and written her a prescription for spectacles.

  ‘I believe,’ said Mrs Morland, after pinning up a good deal of her hair which the putting on and off of spectacles had considerably loosened, ‘that when it is a specialist one puts it in an envelope on the mantelpiece. But as I don’t know how much, I can’t. Besides, it might fall into the fire. But I did bring a cheque-book and if my fountain pen is working, or you would lend me yours, I could write it now. Unless, of course, you’d rather have pound notes because of avoiding the income tax, though I’m afraid I haven’t quite enough if it is five guineas which Oliver said.’

  ‘Will you let me say, Mrs Morland,’ said Mr Pilman, ‘that I have had such pleasure from your books that I could not think of charging you for this consultation?’

  Upon which Mrs Morland, who never thought of herself as being a real author, let alone a pretty well-known one by now, was so much surprised that she sat goggling at her oculist while her face got pinker and pinker and a hairpin fell to the floor.

  ‘But that doesn’t seem fair,’ said Mrs Morland at last.

  Mr Pilman, both gratified and embarrassed by the effect of his words, picked up her tortoiseshell pin and handed it to her.

  ‘I shall be more than satisfied,’ said Mr Pilman. ‘Especially,’ he added, ‘if you will give me one of your books with your autograph in it.’

  ‘Of course I will,’ said Mrs Morland. ‘Only I’m afraid they are all exactly alike. You see I wrote my first book by mistake, I mean I didn’t know how to write a book so I just wrote it, and then all the others seemed to come out the same. But if I gave you the last one, would it do? My publisher, who is really very nice and not a bit like what you would expect a publisher to be,’ said Mrs Morland, ‘I mean he is an ordinary person, not like a publisher I once met who simply sat in a room and depressed one, says I could afford to write a few bad books by now, but I think this would be a bad thing because someone who hadn’t read any of my books might think they were all bad, and not read any more. Not,’ Mrs Morland continued, standing up and clutching various pieces of portable property to her in preparation for her departure, ‘that I would really mind, only I do earn my living by them.’

  At this point Mr Pilman who, much as he enjoyed his new patient’s spiral conversation, had his own living to earn, managed, by a species of stage management perfected by him over a number of years, to waft her out of the room and into the arms of his secretary and so into the street. Her latest book was duly sent to him and since then she had revisited him once or twice, always on the same very friendly footing.

  Now writing is a rum trade and eyes are rum things, and what is all right one day is all wrong the next. Mrs Morland’s sight was affected as most people’s is by health, weather, heat, cold, lighting, added years, and by the sapping strain of some six years’ totalitarian war. She was impatient with her eyes as most people are who have always had very good sight and nearly went mad with rage while accustoming herself to the bifocal glasses Mr Pilman had ordered on her second visit. Finally she had collected four pairs of spectacles of varying power, from a rather dashing little semicircular lens for reading only, through the hated bifocals to which use had more or less reconciled her and an owl-like plain pair for cards (which she never played) and music (which she had almost entirely dropped), to a much stronger pair now really necessary for close work. To these she had added what she quite correctly called her face-à-main, feeling a pleasant inward disdain for her friends who said lorgnon or lorgnette. And what with mislaying all four pairs in every possible permutation and combination and catching the ribbon of her face-à-main in her clothes and the furniture, or bending it double by stooping suddenly, she hardly ever had the pair she needed. But the gods are just and of our pleasant vices do occasionally make something quite amusing, and we must say that Mrs Morland got an infinite amount of innocent pleasure out of her armoury of glasses, and as she never expected people to listen to her she maundered on about them with considerable satisfaction to herself.

  What Mrs Morland would have liked to do was to raise her face-à-main to her eyes, examine Anne with the air of a grande dame (to which phrase she attached really no meaning at all) and then dropping it greet her warmly and say how exactly like one of her parents she was. But the red dress she was wearing had red buttons down its front, and the red ribbon (to match, for this also gave her much innocent pleasure) had got entangled in the buttons, so she had to give it up as a bad job, and being really a simple creature at heart she embraced Anne very affectionately.

  ‘Tony always says that I fly at people and kiss them in a kind of higher carelessness,’ she said. ‘But I do assure you I never kiss people I don’t like. If I did begin to kiss the Bishop’s wife, even by mistake, something would stop me.’

  ‘I only met her once,’ said Anne, finding it, to her own great surprise, quite easy to talk to someone as celebrated as Mrs Morland, ‘at a prize-giving at the Barchester High School and she said prizes really meant nothing, so all the girls who got prizes hated her. If I’d had a prize I’d have hated her too. But I hated her anyway because she had a horrid hat.’

  Mrs Morland looked approvingly at a girl who had such sound instincts, and then Miss Bunting came in, preceding Admiral Palliser, Jane Gresham and the Dales, who had all walked up together, enjoying what afterwards turned out to be the one warm evening of a very nasty summer. The newcomers were all acquainted with Mrs Morland, so there were no introductions to be made. Sherry was offered, talk was general. The sound of a gong was heard.

  ‘Oh, mummy,’ said Anne, ‘that’s to say dinner is ready because Gradka doesn’t want anyone to see her yet, so will you come in, and Robin and I will do the clearing away.’

  Accordingly the party went across the stone hall into the dining-room. Here Gradka had draped vine leaves and tendrils most elegantly if a trifle embarrassingly on the shining mahogany round table, among the shining glasses and silver. Steaming soup was already on the table in Chinese bowls. Mrs Morland was loud in her admiration of the exquisite way in which everything was kept, much to the pleasure of her host who had inherited beautiful things and added to his possessions with great taste.

  A slight poke on her left shoulder made Mrs Morland look up. Robin was standing beside her holding a bowl of tiny cubes of bread fried to a perfect, even, golden brown.

  ‘Excuse my manners,’ he said, ‘I’m only here on liking.’

  ‘One moment,’ said Mrs Morland putting up her glasses. ‘Oh, croûtons! Heavenly. But I must find my spectacles. I can’t hold these things up and help myself at the same time.’

  She routed about in her bag, found a red spectacle case and put the spectacles on.

  ‘It is so stupid not to see,’ she said in a voice of great satisfaction as she helped herself. ‘Thank you Robin. What is so boring,’ she continued,
turning to Dr Dale on her right, ‘is that though I can see my soup – what divine soup it is – with these glasses, I can’t see faces across the table. Mrs Gresham and Anne look almost the same. To see them I need this pair.’

  She grabbled about in her bag again and drew out a blue spectacle case, exchanged the glasses and announced with pride that she could see both ladies quite well and how nice they looked.

  ‘But for my soup, I must return to the first pair,’ she said, taking the second pair off and putting it away.

  ‘Do you know that you put the spectacles you have just taken off into the red case?’ said Dr Dale. ‘I don’t want to interfere, but I think you took them out of the blue case.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, I am always doing that,’ said Mrs Morland. ‘And sometimes I get so mixed that I don’t know which pair is which until I suddenly can’t see.’

  ‘Why not have different-coloured frames?’ said Dr Dale.

  Mrs Morland laid down her spoon, took off the spectacles she was wearing and looked with deep admiration at her neighbour.

  ‘That,’ she said, ‘comes of having a good classical education. Now a person that only knew economics or things of that sort would never think of a really sensible thing like that.’

  Dr Dale looked flattered: though more on behalf of the classics than himself, for he was a modest man as well as a good scholar.

  ‘Next time I break the legs of one of them, which I’m always doing,’ said Mrs Morland, ‘I’ll have a new frame the same colour as the case and then I’ll know.’

  ‘But suppose you break the glass and not the frame,’ said Dr Dale.

  ‘I expect I shall,’ said Mrs Morland resignedly. ‘And that is a great nuisance, because it takes at least three or four months now to get new lenses and by the time you’ve got them you may be squinting in quite another direction. I did ask my oculist if he couldn’t give me a prescription for the kind of glasses I’d probably be wanting six months later, but he thought not. I don’t see why not myself, because my eyes just go on gently going bad, so surely he would know how bad they ought to be by October.’

  Dr Dale said his sympathies were on both sides and then, the conversation now being well sustained all round the table, Mrs Morland asked him about Robin, which she had not liked to do before in case he felt he was being discussed. Dr Dale, who realized her sympathy, was able to give her a good account of Robin’s progress and said the difficulty now was to decide whether he should go back to Southbridge where they wanted him for classics or keep on his pre-preparatory class for little boys and make it his profession. Mrs Morland, who had known Robin since his own schooldays at Southbridge, where he was a couple of years senior to her youngest boy Tony, was very much interested in these plans and forgetting her spectacles managed to eat a large helping of an excellent chicken pilaf with a wreath of young vegetables of all kinds surrounding it.

  Meanwhile Lady Fielding was having much the same conversation with Admiral Palliser, inquiring about Jane and whether she still hoped for news of her husband, to which the Admiral replied that the whole position was very trying and they had stopped discussing it.

  ‘We are used to losing our men in naval families,’ he said. ‘Jane knew what the chances were when she married Francis, just as my sons’ wives did – one is a brother Admiral’s daughter you know, and the other the granddaughter of the captain of my father’s first ship. But it’s different now. Killed in action is bad: but you do know. This Japanese business is as black as midnight,’ said the Admiral, his face darkening. ‘She behaves excellently, but what kind of life is it? It may be months and years of uncertainty. She may never know. And she is young.’

  His face softened again and Lady Fielding guessed what he was thinking.

  ‘Young and very charming,’ she said. ‘And all among older people. It is going to be very hard for these young wives, half widows.’

  ‘One may as well say, straight out,’ said the Admiral quietly, after glancing at his daughter who was deep in the kind of middle-aged flirtation that Sir Robert enjoyed, ‘that if any of them fall in love with a man on the spot, one won’t feel able to blame them. My Jane is a good girl and it’s going to be far more difficult for the good girls than the easy-going ones. But no good looking for trouble. Your Polish girl is a wonderful cook.’

  ‘She would probably run a knife into you for that,’ said Lady Fielding. ‘She’s a Mixo-Lydian.’

  The Admiral began to laugh.

  ‘I met the Admiral of the Mixo-Lydian fleet once,’ he said. ‘The fleet is an old Margate paddle-steamer that patrols the River Patsch where it forms the eastern boundary of Mixo-Lydia. She came round by the Mediterranean and up the Danube under her own power, I believe, about 1856 when Mixo-Lydia broke away from Slavo-Lydia. He was a smuggler and gave me some very good brandy.’

  A good deal of noise now stopped their talk. The noise was Robin and Anne taking away the pilaf with its accompaniments and bringing in the sour-milk pudding, Gradka’s masterpiece. A piece of exquisitely flaky pastry, about the size and shape of a huge omelette, lay on a large china dish. It was encrusted with some kind of delicious nutty-sugary confection, and when cut was found to contain a species of ambrosial cheese-cake. With it was served a bowl of hot sauce of which we can only say that if everyone will think of the supreme sweet sauce and add to it an unknown and ravishing flavour, it will but feebly explain its silken ecstasy. Conversation was stilled while sheer greed took its place.

  ‘Well,’ said Robin reverently, ‘I never thought much of Hitler, but as he made the Mixo-Lydians be refugees, I suppose we must give the devil his due.’

  Anne industriously scraped the last flakes from the dish and handed him the spoon.

  ‘God bless you for that kind act,’ said Robin. ‘One more mouthful of that pudding and I feel my foot would grow again.’

  His father looked at him, half in distress, half in pride.

  ‘And two more mouthfuls and I’d be sick,’ he added thoughtfully.

  ‘Oh, please, everybody,’ said Anne’s light voice.

  The table was silent, everyone looking at her.

  ‘Oh, it’s only,’ said Anne, blushing furiously and pleating her table napkin with agitated fingers, ‘that Gradka will come in now. Please, daddy, say something nice to her. She will bring the coffee in. Come on, Robin, and get the table ready.’

  While she and Robin tidied the table and put fruit from the garden and glasshouse upon it and took the pudding-dish away, Sir Robert went to the sideboard.

  ‘Only Empire port, I fear,’ he said. ‘But we must drink Gradka’s health. I wonder if it would be etiquette in Mixo-Lydia to offer her a glass.’

  As he spoke he was walking round the table, filling glasses.

  ‘Put an extra glass beside me, Fielding,’ said the Admiral. ‘I think I know what Gradka likes.’

  Surprised, but willing, Sir Robert did as the Admiral asked and returned to his seat. Robin and Anne came back, shutting the door behind them and sat down.

  ‘It’s all right, daddy,’ said Anne. ‘She has to knock at the door, and you must say —’

  But before she could finish, there was a loud single knock or rather bang on the door. Everyone felt nervous, for the capability for taking offence among Mixo-Lydian refugees is well known to have no bounds, and it was probable that whatever they did would be wrong.

  ‘Oh, daddy!’ said Anne in an agonized whisper, ‘say —’

  But the Admiral, who had been looking on with some amusement, uttered a loud and barbarous monosyllable, the door was opened and Gradka came in. Seldom had she looked less attractive than at this moment, her large face and the plaits encircling her head damp with the heat of cooking, her lumpish figure enveloped in a checked apron.

  The Admiral handed the spare glass to her, raised his own, and uttering some more barbarous words, drank the contents. Gradka replied in her native tongue, drank her wine and raised the empty glass shoulder high. The Admiral, with a peculiar express
ion which Mrs Morland, sitting directly opposite him with her right spectacles on for once, thought unaccountably amused, spoke once more. Gradka shrugged her shoulders, put the glass on the table, said a few words to the Admiral and left the room, shutting the door quietly behind her.