Miss Bunting

by Angela Thirkell

  ‘It’s all right,’ said the Admiral to the gaping party. ‘The proper thing is to break the glass, and I thought you had rather not. She says I am her grandfather now: but it doesn’t mean anything. My smuggler-friend was her uncle.’

  ‘I have always said,’ said Miss Bunting, who according to her own peculiar habit had sat almost silent through dinner, observing and making her own reflections, ‘that we should thank God for the British Navy.’

  Everyone except Miss Bunting felt slightly uncomfortable, and when a second loud knock was heard Lady Fielding almost jumped. But it was only a warning that the coffee was there, and Robin fetched the dinner-wagon from outside with the coffee equipage on it and the talk fell into more familiar channels again as Miss Bunting asked Dr Dale about the next meeting of the Barsetshire Archaeological Society, of which he was a vice-president.

  ‘I saw in the Barchester Chronicle,’ said she, ‘that it was to be held here. If there is any part of the proceedings to which the general public is admitted I should very much like to be there, and bring Anne.’

  Dr Dale said there would be, if the weather permitted, a visit to the churchyard to inspect the ruins of the earlier Rectory and the disused well, over which a controversy had been raging: some saying that there were traces of Roman brickwork in the well, others again that there were not.

  ‘That,’ said Miss Bunting, ‘would be very nice for Anne. Any educational excursion of that kind is good for her and she responds to it.’

  ‘May I say, Miss Bunting, how much your pupil has improved under your care,’ said Dr Dale. ‘It is rare to find a girl who can enjoy her work so intelligently. And she looks so much better.’

  ‘That is partly Gradka’s excellent food,’ said Miss Bunting. ‘As for Anne’s education, I was lucky in finding almost virgin soil to work upon.’

  Dr Dale said he thought Anne had been at Barchester High School.

  ‘That,’ said Miss Bunting, ‘is precisely what I mean. School Certificate and Honour of the School. All very well for the daughters of Barchester tradesmen, but most unsuitable for Anne. When she came into my care she was in a pitiable state of nerves over this examination which any girl of average intelligence can pass. You only have to look at them to realize how little real education it means.’

  Dr Dale was delighted by these reactionary sentiments and Sir Robert moved to a chair near them the better to take part in the discussion, Mrs Morland and Jane Gresham who had been talking across him about the boys for some time hardly noticing his absence.

  ‘Tell us, Miss Bunting,’ said Sir Robert, ‘what your idea of a really good education for a girl would be.’

  ‘In the first place,’ said Miss Bunting kindly but firmly, ‘it is much better, I might say almost essential, to have a large family.’

  Both gentlemen felt there was nothing for it but an apology. Each had an only child and it was far too late to do anything about it. And neither had felt so convicted of guilt since the crimes of boyhood.

  ‘But I recognize,’ said Miss Bunting, straightening the little black velvet bow she wore at her neck, ‘that there are small families as well as large.’ Both gentlemen breathed again.

  In spite of an uneasy feeling that they were in Eton suits with inky collars and dirty finger-nails, the gentlemen much enjoyed their talk with Miss Bunting. Both believed in standards now almost submerged and both would uphold them to the end though their faith was often sorely tried. In Miss Bunting they recognized an unwavering faith and a habit of looking facts in the face unflinchingly and very often staring them down, which they found comforting and refreshing.

  The party then drifted to the drawing-room, still lit by the sunset. Robin and Anne cleared the dining-room table and washed up the glass and silver in the pantry (Gradka being now locked into the kitchen grappling with the Ingoldsby Legends) and Robin told Anne a good deal about what a fool he felt when one thought one’s foot was there and it really wasn’t; to which Anne listened as usual with sympathetic interest, saying little, but in her mind drawing not unfavourable comparisons between Robin and such mutilated heroes as Benbow directing the sea battle with his shattered leg in a cradle, or Witherington with both legs shot away fighting upon his stumps, or even Long John Silver. But this last comparison she recognized to be a poor one and resolutely ignored it.

  Jane Gresham would have liked to be in the pantry too; nor, we must say, would Robin or Anne have minded a third person in the least, and if it were Jane they would have welcomed her. But she had gradually slipped into a quite unnecessary feeling that she was not much wanted by what she rather conceitedly called young people. The foolish creature was only four years older than Robin, and even if thirteen years lay between her and Anne, those years were bridged by so many things: by Anne’s rather invalid life which had in some ways marked her, by their common friends and interests in Hallbury, by Anne’s very friendly nature when once the barrier of her timidity was down. But Jane, otherwise a sensible young woman, had invented for herself a theory that people who didn’t know if their husbands were alive or dead and sometimes forgot about them for hours and even days at a stretch, who had to plan everyday life as if their husbands would for ever be wanderers in Stygian shades, their words unheard, their thoughts unshared; that such people were on the whole not wanted. In which she was undoubtedly silly, for she was both wanted and needed by a quantity of people, beginning with her father and her son and including quite a number of people in Hallbury and the neighbourhood of Barchester. But the heart does not always quite know its own folly, especially when it lets an overwrought mind interfere.

  So Jane, looking elegant and unruffled, drifted to the drawing-room with the rest, and continued her conversation with Mrs Morland about little boys, on whom that gifted authoress was something of an authority, having had four whom she liked very much and never pretended to understand. To do her justice she rarely spoke of them unasked and never made a nuisance of herself by motherly pride, but if encouraged in a friendly way was quite ready to talk.

  The least egoistic of us like occasionally to dramatize ourselves. Mrs Morland’s trump card in this direction was the grandchildren she had never seen, as her two eldest boys had married shortly before the war, one in Canada, one in South Africa, and had never been able to bring their families home.

  ‘You see,’ she said to Jane, ‘things are never so bad as you might hope, and I do really get the greatest pleasure out of my grandchildren, because it is lovely not to have them all living with me as I probably would have to if they were in England, and I can be as sentimental about them as I like without any fear of having to honour my bill, if that is what I mean. And when I think I have three grandchildren I feel so splendidly snobbish. And I sometimes hope that people will be surprised, for though I know I look quite fifty-four, which is what I am,’ said Mrs Morland, pushing her hair off one side of her face with her face-à-main, ‘I don’t think people expect a person who writes books to be a grandmother. Oh dear, I am all entangled.’

  Jane, skilfully extricating the face-à-main from the Rapunzel net in which it had become involved, asked why writers shouldn’t be grandmothers.

  ‘I can’t imagine,’ said Mrs Morland with an air of great candour, ‘for if they have grandchildren it stands to reason they must be grandmothers. But people will write to me as Miss Morland, a thing I never was, and probably if they know I have grandchildren they think they are illegitimate. But there is one very good thing,’ she added, earnestly, putting on the spectacles from the red case as she spoke, ‘which is that Henry, my husband you know, died such a long time ago, because I do not think he would have understood my grandchildren in the least. He did not really understand his own boys – not that I do either, but that is so different – and I used to think it would really have been far better if he had died before the boys were born instead of after, because it would have simplified everything.’

  Jane said that if Mr Morland had died before his boys were born, he might not h
ave had any.

  Mrs Morland took off her spectacles, closed them and put them into their case, the whole with one hand.

  ‘I know one ought to take them off with alternate hands,’ she said, ‘just to keep the balance and prevent their warping, but whenever I think of it it is too late. Yes, I expect you are right about Henry. The fact is that though I have not and never have had anything against him at all, I never think of him. And I must say when he was alive I didn’t think much about him either.’

  So rare was it for Mrs Morland to allude to the husband whom old Mrs Knox had described as excessivement nul, that Jane was taken aback. In common with most of Mrs Morland’s friends she had come to look upon the young Morlands as somehow the peculiar and unaided product of their mother. So much surprised that she took courage and said:

  ‘Didn’t you feel wicked when you didn’t think about your husband, Mrs Morland?’

  ‘Never,’ said Mrs Morland firmly. ‘And if you don’t always think about Francis, my dear,’ she added, toying with the blue spectacle case as she spoke and looking earnestly at the middle distance, ‘it isn’t wicked in the least. People cannot help being what they are like, and if it is a choice between being miserable and anxious all the time, or being fairly happy and having such a very nice happy little boy, and not depressing people, your attitude is very reasonable. And natural,’ said Mrs Morland putting on her spectacles. ‘And right. Now which pair have I got on? If I look at something about as far off as playing a game of patience I shall know if they are the ones I can see with. I mean that I can see that distance with.’

  She looked wildly round and not seeing any card game at hand became depressed, but as quickly brightened. ‘For,’ she explained, ‘if I can see your face clearly where you are sitting, then they are the ones I can see people’s faces in a railway carriage with. Yes, they are the ones,’ she continued. ‘But don’t look so unhappy, Jane.’

  ‘One might be unhappy if one thought less and less about someone one did love very much,’ said Jane looking straight in front of her.

  And then, luckily for Mrs Morland who had no further help to offer from her own experiences and hated to see Jane so distressed, Robin and Anne came in from the pantry. Anne was carrying Mrs Morland’s last novel and as she approached her parents’ famous guest, began to show such signs of confusion as kicking her own feet, going pink in the face and opening and shutting her mouth without producing any sound.

  Mrs Morland, who was used to this behaviour among her younger admirers, asked if that was a book she had.

  Anne, not finding the question at all peculiar, said it was. Then summoning her courage she said pushing the book desperately towards its author:

  ‘Oh, Mrs Morland, would you please mind very much writing your name in this? I bought it with my own money because I adore your books, and think Madame Koska is the most wonderful person. I called a dog I had that died Koska.’

  Mrs Morland who, in spite of a large circulation on both sides of the Atlantic was not in the least blasée about appreciation of her books, to which we may say, she attached no great literary value herself, said of course she would love to. A small table was handy, Robin produced a fountain pen and Mrs Morland made a suitable inscription. Anne, pinker than ever with pleasure, was about to clutch the book to her bosom when Robin interrupted.

  ‘Hi, Anne!’ he exclaimed. ‘You’ll blot it. Wait a minute.’

  He took the book to a writing-table, blotted it and returned.

  ‘Good gracious!’ said Mrs Morland. ‘I wrote that without either of my spectacles! I must be going blind.’

  At this Robin, for all his endeavours, burst into a fit of laughter, followed by Anne, though she did not quite understand the joke. Jane smiled and went to talk to Lady Fielding.

  ‘I suppose I am silly,’ said Mrs Morland laughing herself. ‘But Robin, and Anne, I want to have a conspiracy with you,’ she added, leading her young friends out on to the stone path above which the highest tendrils of the vine caught the sun’s dying glow. ‘Jane seems very unhappy because she can’t worry about her husband as much as she ought to. What can be done?’

  ‘It’s a rotten position,’ said Robin. ‘She might hear he was dead, or he might walk in to-morrow. No, that’s a bit too dramatic for this regimented war. But she might hear he was in a Swedish ship being repatriated and that he would be at a delousing camp in Stornaway till further notice and no questions to be asked. I beg your pardon, Miss Bunting,’ he added as that lady stepped out of the french window.

  ‘If you mean for the use of the word delousing, I was familiar with it in the last war,’ said Miss Bunting.

  She did not add ‘before you were born,’ but the effect was equally crushing.

  ‘We were talking about Jane Gresham, Miss Bunting,’ said Mrs Morland, feeling that in this elderly spinster with the little black velvet bow at her neck lay a far better and wiser knowledge of the world than she would ever have. ‘It seems so dreadfully unhappy to have this long uncertainty.’

  They were all silent for a moment, oppressed by the thought of a grief that no one could cure.

  Anne was the first to speak.

  ‘“Said heart of neither maid nor wife

  To heart of neither wife nor maid,”’

  she remarked with a kind of sad pride in having found the mot juste.

  If Miss Bunting felt a shock at her literature-besotted pupil’s highly inapt quotation, she was not the woman to show it.

  ‘There is nothing that you can do,’ she said, looking round at a promising class. ‘You are doing all you can. The rest she will have to do for herself. I have seen it again and again in two wars. Come in now, Anne, it is getting chilly.’

  The one warm day of that summer was over. They all went back to the drawing-room, where Jane was describing with kind malice her visit to Mrs Merivale at Valimere.

  ‘Have you seen Mr Adams about it yet, father?’ she said to the Admiral.

  The Admiral said he had spoken to Adams at the club, and he was coming out to see the lodgings.

  ‘Oh, it was you who put Adams on to those rooms, Palliser,’ said Sir Robert. ‘He is like a clam – loves to make secrets about things. He was on the Silverbridge train with Dora and myself this afternoon, but he didn’t say what he was up to. Mrs Merivale’s husband was in our office. Quite a good clerk, but would never have gone very far, even if he had lived. The sort of man who doesn’t want responsibility.’

  ‘Adams? Adams? Now where have I heard that name?’ said Dr Dale.

  No one offered an opinion.

  ‘I have it!’ said Dr Dale. ‘He is a member of the Barsetshire Archaeological Society, though why I cannot think, for he has no tincture of learning or any kind of letters. But he sent a handsome donation to our President Lord Pomfret’s appeal for the excavations in that field on Lord Stoke’s property where Vikings are supposed to be buried – Bloody Meadow. I believe Tebben, the Icelandic man over at Worsted, thought highly of some bones they found.’

  ‘Tebben,’ said Jane. ‘That’s the man you said was offered a job at Adams’s works, wasn’t it, Laura?’

  ‘Not the Icelandic one,’ said Mrs Morland. ‘That’s the father. It’s the son, Richard, that Mrs Tebben was talking about.’

  ‘Dr Madeleine Sparling, the headmistress of the Hosiers’ Girls’ Foundation School,’ said Miss Bunting, while a reverent hush fell on the room, ‘with whom I have the pleasure of being slightly acquainted, told me, when we met at Lady Graham’s one day, that she had under her charge a girl called Heather Adams, whose father was self-made and owned a large engineering works. This girl, she said, though with no particular background, had what amounted to a distinct talent for the higher form of mathematics, and was sitting for a scholarship at Newton College.’

  Miss Bunting’s rolling periods, while received with the respect that was her due, rather flattened general conversation.

  ‘I remember Miss Sparling,’ said Anne suddenly.

  �
��Doctor now,’ said Miss Bunting. ‘She was given an honorary D.Litt. at Oxbridge last year. One should remember these things, both for politeness and for accuracy.’

  ‘Doctor, then,’ said Anne, taking the correction in good part, much to her parents’ admiration. ‘She was living with Miss Pettinger at the High School for a bit, and the boarders said how ghastly the Pettinger was and how Miss, I mean Dr Sparling’s secretary had to make her cups of tea and find bits of food for her, because the Pettinger was so stingy. The secretary was called Miss Holly. She was rather like a plum-pudding – only very quick.’

  Anne was indeed coming out with a vengeance, thought her parents again. A few months ago she would have sat silent all evening, let alone talking in a quite interesting way.

  ‘“Plum-pudding Flea,

  Plum-pudding Flea,

  Wherever you be,

  O come to our Tree,

  And listen, O listen, O

  listen to me,”’