Miss Bunting

by Angela Thirkell

  Miss Holly had just been trying to explain to Heather, who was getting sulkier and sulkier, Widdowson’s Law of Inverse Relations, about which she was not quite sure herself, not having paid much attention to it when she took her degree. She looked up with a rather strained patience and said, ‘What about them?’

  ‘Oh, I big your pardon,’ said Mrs Merivale, with the alarming refinement that occasionally overtook her. ‘You are busy, Miss Holly.’

  ‘Not really,’ said Miss Holly, who was fond of their kind, silly hostess in her own practical way and did not at all wish to seem brusque, or in Mrs Merivale’s phrase to upset her: ‘Tell me what’s the matter.’

  ‘It’s the guest towels, Miss Holly,’ said Mrs Merivale, twisting a duster that she was carrying into a kind of rope. ‘I would like to have everything nice in the bathroom if Mrs Gresham wants to wash her hands, and I was wondering if she’d like the real Irish linen towel, only it’s getting so thin, or the little fancy towel with the ducklings in couch stitch. She has got lovely ones at Hallbury House I expect, and I’d like to give her the best.’

  ‘The Irish linen one,’ said Heather, who had not hitherto taken any part in these discussions.

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ said Mrs Merivale, and went away.

  ‘And she wouldn’t care which one really,’ said Heather, barely waiting for the door to close behind their hostess.

  ‘People like that don’t have guest towels. Mrs Belton didn’t. Lady Fielding doesn’t. It’s like fussing about doylies and things. Proper people just don’t. Mrs Gresham wouldn’t notice anything. All she thinks of is being kind to people.’

  And the unhappy Heather flushed deeply.

  Miss Holly continued her exposition of Widdowson, up to his famous ‘Friction of Constants’, which Heather at once seized and mastered. On what had just occurred Miss Holly made no comment, for it had for some time been plain to her practised schoolmistress’s eye that Heather was in for a bad attack of heroine-worship. They all had to have it, and it had to run its course. But Miss Holly did devoutly wish that Heather Adams had contracted this form of mental measles while still at school, where it would not have given much trouble, instead of saving it up till the vacation before she began college life. Still, a good attack now might inoculate her against much further trouble, and Mrs Gresham was a far more suitable object for adoration than a female don of any age, in Miss Holly’s opinion. She felt sorry for Mrs Gresham if this heavy devotion was to be hung about her neck, but that was really no business of hers, so they did some exercises on the ‘Friction of Constants’ and the ‘Laws of Relations’ and then it was time for lunch. And after lunch they had a few sets of tennis on the New Town courts and came back to get tidy for tea.

  Miss Holly, with calm and fatal prescience that her charge was going to give trouble, had taken the precaution of asking Mrs Merivale if she would join them at tea, saying, most untruthfully, that she knew Mrs Gresham would like it. Mrs Merivale, after objecting that her hair needed washing, that she was sure they didn’t really want her, that she did want to keep an eye on the cakes, that she wouldn’t know what to say to Mrs Gresham and would be so upset if Mrs Gresham noticed anything, though what kind of thing she did not particularize, ended by accepting and thereupon falling into a frenzy of cake and scone-making, for which she was famous even with rationing, and so was upstairs putting on her best afternoon frock when Jane rang the front-door bell and was admitted by Heather. The result of this was that after the three ladies and Frank had sat in the drawing-room, or lounge as Mrs Merivale preferred to say, for a few moments, she herself opened the door, showed a pale and streaky face and saying, ‘Your tea’s all ready, Miss Holly,’ vanished.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Mrs Gresham, who guessed that something was wrong.

  ‘I think it’s because Heather opened the front door to you,’ said Miss Holly. ‘Mrs Merivale may think it was meant as a slight, because we didn’t think she was good enough to open the door, or a reproach because she wasn’t down then. You never know.’

  Jane very sensibly said the best thing would be to go into the dining-room and hope for the best. So they went to the dining-room where tea was to be laid, trying to pretend that all was well, but as far as Jane and Miss Holly were concerned, slightly nervous. For to those who do not live in a world where to take offence is almost a social duty, the atmosphere can be very frightening.

  However by great luck Mrs Merivale came out of the kitchen with a very special silver jam spoon she had forgotten, and before she could retreat Jane Gresham had greeted her warmly and shaken her hand and said how glad she was that Mrs Merivale was in, otherwise she wouldn’t have seen her. An idiotic, nay a fatuous remark; but it served its turn, for Mrs Merivale, who had a very high sense of duty towards lodgers, couldn’t possibly leave them without the special jam spoon. So, without quite knowing how, she found herself seated at the table and Miss Holly, with a kind of apology for being hostess in Mrs Merivale’s own dining-room, was asking her how she took her tea.

  ‘Oh, after Mrs Gresham, please,’ said Mrs Merivale, unfolding the green linen doyley with the hemstitch, and at once making a cocked hat of it.

  So Jane with great composure accepted the first cup, while Heather sat and gently glowered; which was her way of expressing her admiration of her idol’s social gifts. Frank behaved with exquisite politeness, passing cake and sandwiches to everyone with ceaseless courtesy of a fatiguing nature. In front of Mrs Merivale and Frank and Heather, the great subject of Mr Adams’s offer of an accountant could not be approached, so Jane and Miss Holly worked very hard at finding topics of conversation, a task which was not made easier by Mrs Merivale’s abnegation, not to say self-abasement, before every subject that was introduced. If it was a concert she said she wasn’t really musical like Mrs Gresham; if it was a novel she said she couldn’t read highbrow books like Miss Holly; if the Royal Family (an almost sure card in most cases), she said she hadn’t been to Court like Mrs Gresham, which drove Jane, who had not been presented, and though full of loyalty had never particularly wanted to be, into a kind of inverted snobbism; if a film, she said she could never seem to have the time to go to the pictures now, as she was glad to get to bed as soon as she had washed up the supper things, thus making Jane and Miss Holly feel like Legree. And all this with such writhings and twistings of her fingers and hugging of her elbows and, as Miss Holly well knew, twistings of her legs under the table as made her friends almost as sorry for her as they were for themselves.

  Frank, having by special invitation eaten the last of everything as Mrs Merivale said it upset her to see anything left in case it was nasty, now turned his powerful mind upon his hostess.

  ‘Do you live here alone, Mrs Merivale?’ he asked. ‘It’s a very nice house.’

  Mrs Merivale coloured most becomingly.

  ‘I’ve got four little girls,’ she said, suddenly becoming quite human. ‘Annie and Elsie —’

  ‘And Tilly and Lacey,’ said Frank, giggling at his own wit.

  His mother sat aghast, praying that Mrs Merivale would not take it as an insult.

  ‘No, Evie and Peggie,’ said Mrs Merivale, adding, ‘but they don’t live in a treacle well.’

  The answer was so unexpected, so out of keeping with Valimere, that Miss Holly and Jane were left speechless and ashamed of themselves for having snobbishly underestimated their hostess. On comparing notes afterwards they found they had both expected her choice in fairy stories to be the nauseous and popular series of Hobo-Gobo and the fairy Joybell. And all the time Mrs Merivale had been a highly educated woman.

  ‘Do they wash up?’ said Frank.

  Mrs Merivale said they did when they were at home, but they were all away now in the ATS and WAAF and WRNS, or in America.

  ‘Shall I help you to wash up?’ said Frank. ‘I help Cook and Freeman, and Cook says I polish the glasses like a real butler.’

  Mrs Merivale seemed delighted by this proposal, and after a purely formal protest a
gainst visitors giving a hand, she lost interest in the grown-ups and dismissed them to the sitting-room, while she and Frank piled the tea things onto a trolley and wheeled them away. Heather then said she was going to walk up to the station and come back with her father, so Jane and Miss Holly were left alone, when, casting delicacy to the winds, Jane asked Miss Holly if she could give her any help. Mr Adams, she said, had been so extraordinarily kind, and it was going to be very difficult, she feared, to refuse his kindness without hurting his feelings. What did Miss Holly think?

  Miss Holly, who thought Jane Gresham a very sensible young woman, expounded her views of her employer’s character, formed during the last year or two.

  ‘Like most of us,’ said Miss Holly, ‘he has changed a good deal as the war went on. If that silly Heather hadn’t fallen into the pond and been pulled out by Commander Belton, we would never have heard of him except as a parent. He was quite content in his own station. I say this without feeling,’ said Miss Holly, ‘for I haven’t any particular station myself except what I can make. But he formed a kind of reverent attachment for the Belton family – I really don’t know how to put it otherwise – and has paid great attention to Mrs Belton. He isn’t a fool socially and if he wants to get on that way he will learn. So will Heather up to a point. But whether they’ll be happier or unhappier for having immortal longings in them, I couldn’t say. He admires you, because you are Mrs Belton’s sort. So does Heather. And what you say will probably carry weight. But if he did take it the wrong way he can be nasty. I don’t think he will, though.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Jane. ‘But I must save dear Dr Dale from an accountant. He might have a stroke, or go mad if anyone came and interfered, poor darling. Someone has got to do it.’

  ‘Well, my money’s on you,’ said Miss Holly, in an unexpectedly dashing way. ‘I do quite a lot of betting through the Harefield butcher,’ she explained calmly, seeing the surprise that her guest could not quite conceal. ‘Only in half-crowns. But it’s my vice, and a great comfort to me.’

  Jane was much interested in this sidelight on a distinguished mathematical scholar and would have liked to pursue the subject but for delicacy; and also from a slight fear that she might find that Dr Sparling was implicated in the Black Market and Mrs Belton a secret drinker. So she thanked Miss Holly for her advice and they went into the once pretty, now overgrown garden and pulled up some weeds, though nothing short of a motor-plough would have made any real impression, and talked of other things, and Jane tried not to feel frightened of the impending interview. Then Heather came back with her father, clinging affectionately and heavily to his arm, as Frank was accustomed to cling to his mother’s; but the arm was a very massive one and its owner did not appear to feel his daughter’s weight an encumbrance.

  Having brought her two idols together, Heather Adams was quite prepared to stay and watch them, but Miss Holly on some adequate pretext drew her into the house and Jane felt slightly sick. A rickety garden seat stood in the sun against a little glasshouse and here it seemed warm enough to sit down, which Jane gladly did. For though the daughter of a long naval line, she could have wished that her knees felt less like cotton-wool.

  With all the tact she could muster she spoke of Heather and how proud her father must be of her, a tribute which Mr Adams accepted with great complacency not untinged with pride. She then spoke of Mrs Merivale and how glad she was that Mr Adams had such a pleasant hostess for his daughter and how nice it was for Mrs Merivale to have such pleasant guests: all of which Mr Adams again accepted as his due.

  ‘Though mind you, Mrs Gresham,’ he said, ‘it’s all your doing that we came here and that’s a thing I can’t thank you for enough.’

  Jane disclaimed any responsibility beyond having been to Mr Pattern and sent details of the house to Mr Adams by her father.

  ‘That’s what I say,’ said Mr Adams. ‘You put yourself out, Mrs Gresham, for people you didn’t know. And it’s just the sort of thing you would do,’ he added with a kind of friendly ferocity which Jane did not quite know how to take. So she reverted to Mrs Merivale, her charms and her domestic virtues.

  Mr Adams agreed. But he was just as glad that Miss Holly was with his little Heth, he said, as she was a very sensible woman and wouldn’t let Heth go too far. Not but what Mrs Merivale was very nice, said Mr Adams, and a wonderful cook, and the house so clean it was a treat, but after all it was only for a couple of months and it was just as well all Mrs Merivale’s girls were away.

  ‘You mean they might distract Heather from her work,’ said Jane.

  ‘Well, I do and I don’t,’ said Mr Adams. ‘My Heth knows she’s got to work hard, and do well at her college, and it takes a lot to turn my Heth when her mind’s made up; like her dad. But what I was thinking of was Heth’s future. She’s going to go much farther than her dad. It was all very well for me, Mrs Gresham, starting at five shillings a week as I did, to hobnob with every Tom, Dick and Harry. But Heth is starting from where I’ve got to and I shall see that she doesn’t forget it.’

  Jane produced a few commonplaces from her social armoury and heard Mr Adams’s voice going on, but what he was saying she really did not know, so stunned was she by the implication of his last words. It appeared, not to put too fine a point upon it, that to Mr Adams’s mind Mrs Merivale and her daughters were not quite good enough for his daughter. The terrifying and to her almost unexplored hierarchy of the great mass of English people rose before her with all its gins and snares. Belonging as she did to a level upon which the Duke of Omnium at one end and, say, Robin Dale, the crippled schoolmaster, at the other, were in essentials equal, being, though a duke was always a duke, gentlemen, she had never really troubled to conceive the gradations, far greater than those between peer and private gentleman, which seamed and rent the sub-middle classes. Evidently Mr Adams, while not wishing to conceal his humble beginnings, considered himself and even more his daughter, a good deal above Mrs Merivale and her daughters. What Mrs Merivale and her girls, all with good high-school education and all doing good war jobs, would think of the wealthy manufacturer and his girl with little background and few graces, she couldn’t guess. That is to say, she had a pretty shrewd idea of what Mrs Merivale would feel; though as for the younger generation, probably its easy, perhaps too easy tolerance, its war experience of all sorts and conditions of women, would make Elsie and the rest of them accept Heather good-humouredly as one of themselves. But the Merivale girls would far more likely marry well than Heather Adams, for all her brains and her father’s money, and that Mrs Merivale would, if unconsciously, realize. Mr Adams, she felt, could not realize it, and she would be sorry for the person who tried to explain it to him. And this brought her back with an unpleasant jerk to the fact that she had somehow to explain to Mr Adams that his kind offer of an accountant for Dr Dale could not be accepted, and she heartily wished that she had shown less temerity and her father and the Rector more courage. But a daughter of the Royal Navy has courage in her blood and Jane gave herself a mental shake and began to listen to her companion.

  ‘That’s a fine youngster of yours, Mrs Gresham,’ said Mr Adams. ‘What’s he going to do?’

  Jane said he was going into the Navy, rather surprised that anyone should ask the question.

  ‘My father was chief engineer in Admiral Hornby’s ship,’ said Mr Adams. ‘The father that was of Captain Hornby that married Miss Belton. Quite a coincidence.’

  Jane said, with idiotic fervour, that indeed it was, though not till later did the thought strike her that Mr Adams had evidently considered this as a kind of blood-bond between them.

  ‘Both my brothers are sailors,’ said Jane, maundering nervously on, ‘and so are their wives; I mean naval families. My people have always been Navy. They used to live in what is now the Rectory, where Dr Dale lives.’

  Having got so far as the name of Dr Dale, her throat became constricted and her mouth unpleasantly dry.

  ‘Fine old gentleman he is,’ said Mr A
dams, while Jane prayed that he might continue the subject. But as he appeared to have said his say, she plucked up her courage which was at the moment running out of the heels of her boots, and asked Mr Adams if he had been in earnest when he suggested helping Dr Dale with the Church accounts.

  Mr Adams said Sam Adams’s word was as good as his bond, a statement which custom did not stale for him.

  ‘My best man’s up in the North at the moment,’ he continued, ‘but I’ve got a man in the costing department who is up to all the tricks. Hundreds of pounds he’s saved me one way and another. I’ll make it worth his while to come over on Saturday afternoon every quarter or so and get things straight. Then the old gentleman can sit back and take things easy.’

  This was getting worse and worse.

  ‘He rather likes muddling about with his accounts,’ said Jane weakly.

  ‘He’s a fine old gentleman,’ said Mr Adams, as if this were an entirely new idea, ‘but muddling the accounts doesn’t make them balance, Mrs Gresham. I wouldn’t be worth – well I won’t say what, but what I am now – if there’d been any muddling with my accounts. Two and two makes four, and you can’t get away from it; not nohow.’