Miss Bunting

by Angela Thirkell

  He began to hoist Aunt Sally up, to carry her away.

  ‘Wait a minute, Robin,’ said Dr Dale, gazing earnestly at that lady’s black face and almost obliterated features, with a streak of dirty white or red here and there to show that she was human, a scrap of dirty muslin, once a bonnet, clinging to a nail in her head, and an old broken pipe stem sticking out of one ear.

  ‘It makes me think of your mother, Robin,’ said Dr Dale at length, with a sigh. ‘All right; put it away.’ And he continued his walk round the garden remembering school teas and mothers’ meetings and Robin’s young mother presiding.

  Robin laid Aunt Sally in her box, thinking with amused wistfulness that she appeared to be his only link with a mother he could hardly remember. Then he collected the mallets, but decided that the loose head had better be secured and if possible a band put round the chipped end before they were used again. So he took them up to the house, regretting that he was too tall to swing along between them as he would have done some twenty years ago. Then he thought of Jane’s sudden anger when the little boys wanted to play at what they called crutching. Not like Jane to have such an outburst. And suddenly he went hot with shame as the thought struck him that she had been angry on his account, that she had thought the little boys’ crutching might remind him of his foot, that he might resent it, feel hurt, or unhappy. Women all over. You try to explain to them till you are black in the face that you don’t really mind having an artificial foot, and then they work themselves up into thinking that you do. Good old Jane: but too many women about everywhere. Perhaps he would do better to accept Mr Birkett’s suggestion and go to Southbridge. But even there he believed they had a science mistress and a junior classical mistress. Probably even monasteries had some unattractive female monks now to keep up their numbers. Even the army couldn’t escape them. Only the lucky, lucky ones in the real fighting line. Robin had done his best to school himself against his fighter’s longing to be in the forefront of the battle, but bitterness would still break in.

  He put the mallets in the hall and set himself to work at his classics till supper-time.

  The rest of the exciting week ran quickly away. Sir Robert and Lady Fielding went back to Barchester and Anne was left to Miss Bunting and the routine of lessons. Lady Fielding before she went had a short conversation with Miss Bunting on the subject of Mrs Merivale’s lodger.

  ‘I don’t want to be too snobbish,’ she said. ‘At least, to be truthful I really do, and though I am sure Mr Adams is a much more useful member of society than I am – or at least I don’t honestly think that, but I suppose I ought to think it – I don’t frightfully want to be implicated. It all sounds so horrid, but with Anne I expect you see what I mean.’

  Miss Bunting, who was freer from illusions than most people, took no notice at all of her employer’s foolish and well-meant efforts towards democracy.

  ‘Certainly Heather Adams,’ said Miss Bunting, snapping her pince-nez shut and letting their cord run up into the fascinating little spool which she wore pinned to her attire (for the vagueness of this word seems suitable to her dignity), ‘certainly Heather Adams is probably not a suitable companion for Anne. The Hosiers’ Girls, though the school has an excellent record of scholarships, are not quite what one would wish.’

  Lady Fielding might have thought that her daughter’s governess had stopped short before the end of her sentence, as indeed occasionally happened owing to difficulty with her uppers, but she didn’t; appreciating the fine shade conveyed by the lacuna.

  ‘So many people aren’t,’ said Lady Fielding, piteously. ‘And I know one oughtn’t to be stuffy about it, but Anne is so easily impressed by people and her father doesn’t really want to meet Mr Adams much apart from business. And now Mrs Watson is going to ask the girl and her schoolmistress to tea and wants Anne to go. One can’t very well refuse in a small place like this. Oh dear, it’s very awkward.’

  ‘We must move with the times,’ said Miss Bunting, to Lady Fielding’s great surprise. ‘When I first went out as a governess, no girl was allowed to walk out alone, not even round Belgrave Square. But the whole world has changed. I find Anne has a very kind nature and, I think, good principles. It would take more than a Hosiers’ girl to harm her.’

  She did not add: ‘And stop being silly and leave it to me,’ but Lady Fielding could almost hear the words, and took heart and told herself that Miss Bunting was right, and it was only because Anne had been an invalid that she worried so much. And, to be logical, why should a delicate girl be more easily influenced for bad than a robustious type? And then she got into such a muddle of confused maternal hopes and fears that she decided to leave everything to Miss Bunting and Anne; which was probably the wisest thing she could have done.

  Mrs Watson was as good as her word, as indeed she always was, which was one of the reasons for her success as a local organizer, and rang up Miss Holly at Valimere. Miss Holly remembered Molly Glover quite well and was glad to hear of a friend in the neighbourhood. Her tennis was rather rusty now, she said, and Heather Adams was not very good, but they would love to come up to tea. Saturday week was fixed with tea at half-past four and tennis afterwards, so that Mr Watson could join them.

  Miss Holly then reported the invitation to Heather Adams’ while they were having coffee after supper in what Mrs Merivale called the lounge, and Miss Holly, with equal determination and possibly more reason, the sitting-room. During the few days that she and her charge had been at Valimere, a friendly feeling had sprung up in them both towards their kind, pretty, cheerful, worn hostess. They had begged her to drink her coffee with them after the evening meal, an invitation which Mrs Merivale, after twisting her hands in agony, had accepted with pleasure, making the stipulation that this was only to be when Mr Adams was not there. Heather, rather a lonely only child who had never made friends at school till her last year, was much interested by the lives and careers of the Misses Merivale, and though too apt to appraise every other young woman by her scholastic achievements, was genuinely impressed by the excellent positions Mrs Merivale’s daughters, with nothing but the Barchester High School behind them, had achieved.

  ‘That call,’ said Miss Holly coming back from the telephone, which was clearly audible in every corner of the jerry-built house, ‘was from a Mrs Watson in Hallbury. We were at school together. Do you know her, Mrs Merivale?’

  ‘Well, I really haven’t had much time to know anybody,’ said Mrs Merivale, ‘what with Mr Merivale dying and the girls to educate and the lodgers to cater for; especially in the Old Town. It’s really much further than you’d think at the end of a day’s work and you have to push your bike all the way up the hill. But I had a very nice friend of Mrs Watson’s here for a month once, and then Mrs Watson came down to see her and had a really lovely fox fur. The girls always say they’ll give me a fox fur, but I say: ‘Put the money on your legs, girls, not round my neck,’ for you know how all these young people go through their stockings and it’s bad enough with no coupons without having to pay for them as well.’

  Miss Holly saw, from the look in her pupil’s eye, that she might be about to give Mrs Merivale a short lecture on economics and the total want of connection between coupons and cash payments, so she hastily said that Mrs Watson had asked them to tea on Saturday week and tennis afterwards. Mrs Merivale was much gratified, for Mrs Watson was a well-known local character and what was called ‘respected’ in Mrs Merivale’s circle, and she liked her lodgers to go to the right houses because it did them, and her, credit, though she was not in the least ambitious socially for herself, reserving her real interest for the various friends her daughters brought home for holidays or on leave.

  Heather, without any great enthusiasm, but with a mild willingness to oblige which had only come upon her in the past year, said then daddy had better bring down her tennis things when he came at the weekend, and he could bring Miss Holly’s too; and so it was arranged.

  Those who knew Heather Adams in the early da
ys of her career at the Hosiers’ Girls’ Foundation School, were amazed and pleased by the way she had improved. When she first came to the school she had been as nearly unpopular as a girl who is not actively unpleasant or malicious can be. Her ungainly shape, her scanty reddish hair, her total want of interest in games or the honour of the school, her real affection for all forms of mathematical study (a thing obviously against nature), her incapability of making friends, nay, her evident desire not to make any, her general lumpishness and her scorn of everybody and everything, were so boring to the other girls that they all gave up trying to make friends and left her to her own life; which was exactly what she wanted. Miss Sparling (for she had not then got her D.Litt.), the admirable headmistress, had devoted a good deal of anxious thought to her uncouth pupil, only child of a very wealthy self-made manufacturer, motherless, without any background at all as far as Miss Sparling could see. Then at the beginning of the first winter after the school had moved to Harefield Park, Heather’s sluggish nature had had two very salutary shocks. The first was that she fell in love with Lieutenant Charles Belton, RA, during church on Sunday, and remained violently in love with him till five-thirty p.m. on the same afternoon, at which hour he, by deliberately backing out when she was offered to him as a partner at a small informal gramophone dance at the school, turned her love to gall, wormwood, hatred and the fury of a woman scorned. The second shock was that even as her love for Lieutenant Belton died, a greater, deeper and purer love for his elder brother, Commander Belton, RN, who had gallantly taken pity and danced with her, was born. This secret passion, with its outward concomitants of contempt for her fellow pupils and the sulks in general, was nourished on nothing for a term and a half, and then as suddenly, it passed away. But not in hatred; far otherwise. It died because Commander Belton fished her out of the lake where she had deliberately skated over the place marked DANGER, made her run as fast as she could to his parents’ house in Harefield where she was dried and put to bed, and then, having discovered to his annoyance that he was her ideal, had with considerable courage and unselfishness told her that his true love, a Wren, had been killed in an air-raid. Upon which Heather, overcome by the pitiful romance, proud of sharing a secret only known to himself and his mother, at once stopped being in love and became a much nicer girl.

  This change was apparent to everyone. Her mistresses attributed it each to the particular activity in which Heather came under her charge. Her father told several friends at the County Club (to which it had become quite impossible not to elect him), in the iron and steel world, and on the Bench, that there was nothing like a good school, whatever the expense, for a motherless girl like his little Heth, and would have defrayed a large part of the cost of the school’s new site (on the Beltons’ land, along the Southbridge Road) had not the Hosiers’ Company stopped him. Mrs Belton, partly because she was sorry for so unattractive a girl with so much money, partly because anyone who had been cared for in her house had a claim on her kindness, partly because she suspected Heather’s calf-love for her elder son and knew its hopelessness, had gone on taking an interest in her and letting her come to Arcot House on half-holidays instead of nature walks or a visit in a motor-bus to the Barchester Museum; and at Arcot House Heather observed a gracious manner of life still surviving among wreckage, and what is more, observed that there was something in it.

  We do not wish to imply by this retrospect that Heather Adams suddenly became handsome, slim, attractive, unselfish, an ornament to Society and the Home all in a breath. Far from it, even in a great many breaths. But that she tried very hard to be nicer there is no doubt at all; and this effort happening to synchronize with a turn for the good in her circulation, complexion and health in general (for which Dr Perry was largely responsible, and to which his female assistant Dr Morgan made absolutely no contribution at all), she also found herself very much happier and almost liked by the larger part of the school. Finally she had won the best open mathematical scholarship for Newton College, beating all other candidates in Duodenal Sections and Impacted Roots by several marks, and this success, as often happens in the case of a being convinced by circumstances of its own deep inferiority, gave her an assurance hitherto lacking and a pleasant feeling that though Love was not for her, Fame and the Common-room of Newton were. So that when Mr Adams, incited thereto by Dr Sparling though he never knew it, nervously suggested the holiday coaching, Dr Sparling’s efficient secretary and trusted friend, Miss Holly, had no objection to taking on the job of duenna-coach for the holidays.

  ‘I hope you won’t find it too dull,’ Dr Sparling had said while the question of terms was still under consideration; the consideration being chiefly how to beat down Mr Adams, who was prepared to pay Miss Holly about twenty pounds a week and was distinctly dejected when less than half that sum was proposed as a maximum.

  ‘Not a bit,’ said Miss Holly. ‘I like Heather and it’s a pleasure to teach a girl with a clear head. And it’s pretty country. I might say that I hope you won’t find it dull at Bognor,’ for Dr Sparling was going to spend a month of the summer holiday with the mother of her great friend, Mr Carton. Old Mrs Carton had seen and approved the lady her son so greatly admired, and this visit was a token that whenever Dr Sparling felt her duties to the Hosiers’ Company would allow her to retire to the decent obscurity of being Mrs Sidney Carton, the door of ‘Enitharmon’, Blake Close, Bognor Regis, would be as open to her as the door of Assaye House, Harefield, which was where Mr Carton lived when not in his rooms at Paul’s.

  Practically the whole of the New Town did its going about on bicycles. As nearly all the bicyclists were women, who do not believe that any machine needs cleaning, oiling, or any attention whatsoever; or children who had never been taught to do anything for themselves and took their bicycles to the garage to have a tyre mended or pumped up, there was outside the shops, the church (very high), the nasty little cinema, the Council Chambers, the WVS room and all other places of congregation as fine an assortment of what looked like Lord Nuffield’s backyard at Morris Cowley Station as one would wish to see.

  To this higher carelessness Mrs Merivale and her family were no exception and when she kindly offered Miss Holly the use of any of the girls’ bicycles during their stay, Heather was appalled by the state they were in. She wasted no time in regrets or expostulation, but quietly and determinedly overhauled each bicycle, cleaning, oiling, noting what spare parts were urgently needed. Mrs Merivale luckily did not take this high-handed action as a reproach, but did say she was very upset that Heather should clean the girls’ bikes as well as paying for her board and lodging. Heather, who had a passion for machinery, not altogether approved by her father, who though proud of her interest in his works did not want her to be in and out of the fitters’ shops all the time, took no notice at all and continued her salvage work, being a very good amateur mechanic.

  ‘There,’ said Heather, wiping her hands professionally on a bit of old bath towel that Mrs Merivale had given her. ‘And if you oil them a bit and don’t bang them about so much, and remember to pump up the tyres and put them tidily in the shed, they’ll do very nicely for a long time.’

  ‘Thank you very, very much,’ said Mrs Merivale, who was constitutionally incapable of putting anything back in its place, except things like her boarders’ toilet articles or laundry, over which she showed meticulous care. ‘You really oughtn’t to do all that work. I don’t know what your father would say.’

  ‘He’d do it much better than I do,’ said Heather enviously. ‘He was always in the works ever since he was a boy, and I only get in at odd times because I’m a girl. It’s too bad.’

  But Mrs Merivale felt the obligation with all the strength of her upright, generous, obstinate little mind and even the phlegmatic Heather wondered if the subject would ever be dropped, till she had the good idea of asking if she and Miss Holly could borrow two bicycles that very Saturday for Mrs Watson’s tennis party. At the thought of doing a kindness Mrs Merivale brightened at
once, only regretting, at really very boring length, that the enamel on all the bicycles was so scratched.

  ‘It’s because you don’t have a proper stand for them,’ said Heather, to which Mrs Merivale answered, possibly with truth, that they’d take up more room in a stand than they would in a heap.

  ‘So what I’ll do,’ said Heather to Miss Holly later, ‘is to ask daddy to get them to make a frame at the works, and he can bring it out on Saturday.’

  ‘A very good idea,’ said Miss Holly, ‘but you know what will happen.’

  ‘She won’t use it,’ said Heather, with a perception that the pre-Belton Heather did not possess.

  5

  Saturday dawned bright and fair, but observing that it was still Double Summer Time, took offence and relapsed into chill greyness. As no inhabitant of the British Isles has ever got used to the odious and so-called summer weather which has always been their portion, and far less to the vagaries of D.S.T., there was a good deal of grumbling everywhere, which grumbling was gradually diverted to the less eternal grievances of the fish, the daily woman, that girl at the Food Office, the Government, that noise all night like a mouse just at the head of my bed, and I must set a trap as pussy doesn’t seem much good at it, the way the laundry has ironed that nice tablecloth, and other daily food of human nature. At Valimere the ladies behaved with great restraint. Mrs Merivale, who never bore a grudge, said no wonder the weather was like that with all the noise there was everywhere; Miss Holly was too busy with some Hosiers’ business to notice the outside world; while Heather was absorbed in a delightful little book called Indifferential Relations, with a table of Kindred Affinities and graphs of Nepotic Constants.