Miss Bunting

by Angela Thirkell

  ‘But he can’t see me,’ said Frank, ‘because the beastly Japs won’t let him come home.’

  Jane could have killed her son; though, being a mother, one felt grateful and in an unreasonable way almost proud that Frank could speak without a shadow of his mythical father. Most luckily her father, whose sympathy, loving though it was, she shunned above all, was angrily wrenching at the pram tyre and had not heard.

  ‘Mrs Gresham!’ said Mr Adams, shocked. ‘You’ll excuse me. I hadn’t an idea. I wouldn’t for worlds —’

  ‘You couldn’t know,’ said Jane, summoning her smile and speaking fast and low. ‘I’ve heard nothing for four years. No good speaking of it.’ And she looked towards Frank.

  Sam Adams, as he would have said of himself, could take a hint with any man, once he knew where he was.

  ‘I take you, Mrs Gresham,’ he said, ‘Heather, come along, we mustn’t keep Mrs Merivale’s supper waiting.’

  They went to the front gate.

  ‘Goodbye, Heather,’ said Jane. ‘We must have some tennis again soon. I’ll get Robin and Anne.’

  ‘Mr Dale isn’t very keen, is he?’ said Heather. ‘He wouldn’t even go up a tree to get his tennis shoe.’

  ‘Poor Robin,’ said Jane, not much noticing the dislike in Heather’s voice. ‘His foot is still a trouble.’

  ‘Did he hurt it?’ asked Heather, disturbed.

  ‘Oh, it was blown to bits at Anzio,’ said Jane. ‘He manages very well with his artificial one. Goodbye, Mr Adams.’

  She stood at the gate till the taxi had gone. Then, shutting her mind more firmly than ever against remembrance or hope, she went to see that her son gave himself more than a surface wash.

  The taxi journey to Valimere did not take ten minutes, but into that time the Adams family packed a great deal of useless regret for spilt milk.

  ‘Oh, daddy!’ said Heather. ‘It’s too awful. I was beastly about Mr Dale because I thought he was lazy and stupid, and all the time it was an artificial foot. And Mrs Gresham will hate me for being so beastly.’

  ‘She’d be more in her rights to hate your old dad for making such a fool of himself about her husband,’ said Mr Adams ruefully. ‘I suppose I had ought to have known, but the old Admiral never said anything, and it stands to reason you don’t know these family affairs by instink. Well, well. Don’t you worry, girlie. She’s a fine woman and what you say isn’t going to worry her one way or the other.’

  ‘Nor what you say neither, dad,’ said Heather gratefully. ‘Do you like her, dad?’

  Mr Adams said he’d like anyone who was good to his little Heth, if it was Hitler himself, though in saying that he thought he was pretty safe. And then Mr Packer drew up at Valimere and received certain instructions about a spang-rod, with a tip which staggered even his views, nourished by subalterns on leave and Barchester magnates in a hurry, on that subject.

  6

  On Sunday morning Heather, who had not slept for thinking of Jane Gresham; or rather, had thought of her quite often when she was not asleep, which is not exactly the same thing, would fain have persuaded her father to take her to the parish church in the Old Town. But this he would not consider for a moment and indeed spoke to his dearly loved child very strongly on the subject of not getting above herself and thinking what was good enough for her dad and his mother before him, for the old man was never a one for going to any kind of service, not holding with being preached at not by Mr Gladstone himself, wasn’t good enough for her. If Heather had burst into tears and said: ‘But dad, I want to see Mrs Gresham,’ it is possible, though not probable, that he would have yielded, for he also felt that it would not be unpleasant to see that lady again. But he had his own plans for Sunday.

  Mrs Merivale, like many New Town dwellers, would have liked to go to the parish church, but after a week of housework and cooking and queues, and mostly lodgers and children as well, they felt they simply could not go more than a mile uphill either on foot or a bicycle, especially in one’s Sunday clothes. So some of them said they would go next Sunday if it didn’t rain, or at any rate on Christmas Day; some went to the New Town place of worship, which was so High that whenever it saw the words ‘Anglo-Catholic’ it crossed out the ‘Anglo’, and owing to lack of funds was a Petra-like temple, all front and practically no back, where they sat in gloomy disrelish of the clergyman’s long cassock and peculiar ways, so gaining merit: and some again stayed in bed or mowed the lawn or pottered about in the little glasshouse or took the motor-bike down.

  If Mrs Merivale was alone, her habit was to make herself a cup of tea and go back to bed, unless she had a daughter on leave who wanted a proper breakfast, though we must say for the girls that they were very good about putting the alarm clock forward an hour and taking a tray up to her for a surprise. But when she had lodgers she behaved just as if it were a weekday, so she gave Mr Adams and Heather and Miss Holly a large filling breakfast, after which Miss Holly mounted her bicycle and rode away to Harefield to spend the day with a friend in the village, and have a talk with the caretaker at the school, while her employer and his daughter partook of the ministrations of the Reverend (by courtesy) Enoch Arden in a small red brick edifice with Anglo-Saxon dog-tooth moulding in yellow brick round the top of its front door, called Ebenezer.

  In the Old Town, which had been there in some kind of form when the New Town was a wolf-infested swamp, there was not this variety of religious experience. You went to church or you didn’t. Mostly you did, for the Old Town as a whole was fond of its Rector. There were many points in his favour. He was old, he had been there for thirty years and become part of the landscape; his young wife, so much younger than he, had died and he had with much propriety remained a widower, though as a matter of fact, if he had seen anyone he liked enough he would not have felt bound by his late wife’s memory, deeply as he had loved her. And perhaps more than all these claims on his parishioners’ love and respect, he had stuck to the old forms, so that everyone knew where they were. The Dearly Beloved Brethren was rehearsed at length; the marriage service said what it has always said, without mealy-mouthed circumlocutions; the proper psalms for the day were sung; and Hymns Ancient and Modern were used, from a reasonable-sized book, without the additions that have more than all the demerits of the older hymns and none of their warm familiarity. He also had the organist, who was the Hallbury stationer and lived with a half-witted brother, well under his thumb. There had been a terrible week, before the memory of the younger generation of Hallburians, when the organist, flown with three days at one of the Three Choir Festivals and the lordly talk of cathedral organists, knights too, some of them, had begun to intromit, as the Rector very alarmingly put it, with the simple chants to which the congregation were accustomed. He had furthermore essayed to give an extra touch of holiness to some of the sung responses by dragging their slow length along as unconscionably as Charles II’s death, so that the congregation’s breath ran out. The Rector, sorely displeased, had yet bided his time, till on the twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity the organist had surpassed himself in slowness on the response And take not Thy Holy Spirit from us. Several of the congregation looked about them with troubled faces, saw no help, and stopped singing in despair; while the Admiral, who was senior churchwarden and had a powerful voice, sang it at the pace at which he considered it should be sung, and then looked round with contempt on those timeservers who were bursting themselves over semibreves.

  After the service the Rector had spoken his mind to the organist, smiting him with blasting and with mildew and with hail in all the labours of his hands, after the manner of his favourite prophet, winding up by accusing the unfortunate stationer, in Haggai’s own words, of earning wages to put them into a bag with holes. It was easy enough for the organist to demolish the Rector’s arguments over his supper, telling his half-wit brother that a bag with holes in wasn’t no argument at all, and all his savings went into the post-office savings bank, but in face of his Rector he was dumb. Next Sunday t
he Rector preached a very powerful sermon about the wrath of Moses when he came down from Mount Sinai and found the Israelites worshipping the golden calf; and though the exact application of the sermon was not evident, it was felt that the Rector had scored a point. The responses were played after the old manner, the Rector invited his organist to come in and have a glass of excellent sherry, and when two days later the half-wit brother tried to throw himself out of the window, it was the Rector who sat with him till doctors and police could come and take him away to the County Asylum. Since that day there had been no further rebellions or innovations at St Hall Friars.

  On this Sunday morning Dr Dale awoke with the calm and happy anticipation that Sunday never failed to bring him. From seven o’clock on this summer morning to after seven o’clock in the evening, he would be constantly in his beloved church, saying alone or in communion with his flock the words he loved, in charity with all men. All through the early service he moved and spoke in this golden mood, rejoicing in such of his flock as came, full of compassion rather than reprobation for those who did not. Among these was his son Robin who, more tired than he liked to admit by the tennis party, had passed a restless night till the early morning, when he had fallen into a deep sleep which his father had not disturbed. Waking at eight o’clock he had come down full of remorse, to find his father breakfasting alone.

  ‘I’m very sorry, father,’ said Robin. ‘I just didn’t wake up.’

  ‘I am very glad you didn’t,’ said Dr Dale. ‘It would have been a good thing if you had slept all morning.’

  He then groaned.

  ‘It’s all right, father,’ said Robin, though in a very general way, as he had not the faintest idea what his father was groaning about.

  The Rector said he was an old man.

  Robin, still in darkness and feeling his way carefully, said no one was old now.

  ‘Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth,’ said Dr Dale. ‘But if it were His will to chasten us in ways we could understand, it would make life very much easier. I cannot, with all reverent submission, feel I have deserved this.’

  Robin, who was by now well into the excellent breakfast which the Rectory cook, ably seconded by the Rectory hens, had supplied, said with some indignation that his father didn’t deserve anything; not anything, he said; and anyway what was it.

  ‘I know,’ said the Rector, ‘that my lines are laid in pleasant places, but at times one is apt to forget. I had forgotten, I am ashamed to say, till Freeman reminded me this morning.’

  Robin, who knew that the verger was a walking church calendar, asked what Freeman had reminded him of.

  ‘It was his duty,’ said the Rector. ‘Marmalade, please, Robin.’

  ‘And he did,’ said Robin, pushing the marmalade towards his revered and rather wearing sire. ‘Have you forgotten to marry someone, sir?’

  ‘I hope not,’ said the Rector, anxiously. ‘I don’t think Freeman would allow that. No. It is the Mothers’ Union service this afternoon.’

  ‘Shall I write a sermon for you, father,’ said Robin, who had partly for fun and most sincerely with a wish to help his father, dabbled from time to time in occasional sermons, not unsuccessfully.

  ‘Thank you, Robin,’ said his father. ‘Thank you, my boy. It is very kind of you. The address is all right. I was correcting it only last night. It is that banner, Robin. I cannot away with it. In my church. In St Hall Friars. An abomination of desolation. A greenery-yallery abomination. When I was a young man,’ he continued, talking half to himself as he often did, ‘I thought of an old church with regimental colours in the nave. Old colours with tattered ends and honourable scars. The gods are just and of our pleasant vices Make whips to scourge us. The old church was granted to me; and the banner. A just reward for presumption doubtless. I am glad your mother never saw it.’

  Robin, who though he sometimes wished he had a mother and then again after seeing Mrs Tebben at Worsted or Mrs Rivers at Pomfret Towers, to which the Earl and Countess found it impossible not to invite her, was quite glad he had not, was not sentimental about it, said it was a jolly good thing mother never saw it and he was sure she would have loathed it. Anyway, he said, to make a person a saint because they’d let the pigs starve in Lent, didn’t seem fair.

  ‘Roast pork and crackling,’ said the Rector, gazing into space. ‘Yorkshire hams. Trotters. Pig’s face and young greens. Gammon rashers. Everything.’

  Father and son were silent for a moment in contemplation of these raptures.

  ‘And pork pies with lots of jelly,’ said Robin in a low voice. ‘No, father, be a man. Think of Spam.’

  ‘Anathema maranatha,’ said the Rector without heat. ‘You are quite right, Robin. We must face facts. And I must not be selfish. The Mothers’ Union almost worship that banner. When I say worship,’ he added, hastily, ‘I do not mean it in any derogatory sense. They are all good church-women. Perhaps “venerate” is the word I should have used.’

  ‘I wouldn’t, father,’ said Robin. ‘I don’t think the Venerable Bede would like it. They just think it is a lovely banner and such artistic colouring,’ at which the Rector looked perplexed and Robin felt a little ashamed and told himself for the hundredth time that he must remember his father was of an older generation and might with luck and an earlier marriage have been his grandfather. So he got up, patted his father’s shoulder reassuringly and went off to his own affairs. Dr Dale then opened the Sunday paper which had just come and fell forthwith into such a transport of fury over the week’s religious article which, hoping to reach the general public who never read that particular organ, made a so very unconvincing comparison between the Kingdom of Heaven and Big Business, with a hierarchy of managers, secretaries and accountants, some faithful in great things, some in small, as quite drove St Ælla’s banner out of his mind.

  Morning service passed off peacefully. The Rector, fortified partly by prayer, partly by a very good Sunday lunch and a glass of port from one of a half-dozen given to him at Christmas by his old friend Lord Stoke, President of the Barsetshire Archaeological Association, addressed the Mothers’ Union with kindness and sympathy, even going so far as to sketch a kind of blessing over St Ælla’s banner, which though carefully wrapped in blackout material was beginning to tarnish, thus adding a sickly browny green to the general effect. The Mothers’ Union all said the Rector was a lovely man and went back to a tea-party at Mrs Freeman’s cottage, each one bringing her own milk and sugar, the hostess supplying the tea and cakes. All of which Mr Freeman duly reported to the Barchester Chronicle, where it appeared next Friday. By a careless mistake of the compositor, aged seventeen and a half, and with an eye on a reserved occupation, the names of the host and hostess appeared as Trueman. This led to unpleasantness, Mr Freeman saying he wrote it plain enough for anyone as had learned his alphabet, the compositor maintaining that if people didn’t give their ‘F’s’ a proper tail nor take the trouble to write clear, it was a pity there wasn’t evening classes for adults at Hallbury, and didn’t he know there was a war on. To which Mr Freeman replied he’d thank the compositor not to talk like that to a man who was in the Mons Retreat long before his (the compositor’s) father had to marry his mother, and he’d find there was a war on soon enough himself when the next call-up came round.

  To turn to more peaceful scenes, Dr Dale and his son then went to tea with Admiral Palliser. As Master Gresham was spending the afternoon with Master Watson and his rabbits, there was no interruption to a pleasant interlude. The weather was, as usual, too chilly to sit about outside, but after tea they strolled comfortably in the garden, the Rector and the Admiral discussing local matters, while Jane and Robin picked gooseberries in a desultory way.

  ‘I went up to town last week to see old Thing,’ said Robin, apropos of nothing; thus irreverently alluding to the brilliant young orthopaedic surgeon, Mr Omicron Pie, whose grandfather Sir Omicron Pie had been a well-known consultant, often called in by Barchester doctors.

  ‘Had he anyt
hing to say?’ asked Jane.

  ‘Not much,’ said Robin. ‘Blast those red gooseberries, they go off like a bomb at you.’

  ‘Tom Watson told Frank that people’s feet grew again if they weren’t too old,’ said Jane who, hard with herself, was sometimes deliberately hard to others. Not from unkindness. Perhaps from a feeling that it might brace them, as it sometimes braced her.

  ‘He would,’ said Robin, not noticeably flinching. ‘Old Thing didn’t say that. He said I was a very creditable case and not to overdo it.’

  ‘I suppose that’s why you played tennis yesterday,’ said Jane.

  ‘I suppose it is,’ said Robin. ‘But if it’s any pleasure to you, I had a rotten night.’

  ‘I don’t know that it’s a pleasure,’ said Jane. ‘But it may teach you sense.’

  Robin said he didn’t think so. Nothing, he added, taught one sense, not the kind of sense that meant not overdoing things, except getting so old that one jolly well couldn’t. He then blasted another gooseberry and Jane said if he put more in the basket and ate less, that wouldn’t happen. She then went on picking up the row while Robin picked down it, and not till they had got to the end and started on the next row did they meet again.