Miss Bunting

by Angela Thirkell

  A hum of agreement confirmed her views.

  ‘You are perfectly right,’ said Gradka. ‘To say Bog is silly. Oll that the Russians say is silly. So is oll the Poles say, and the Czechs and all that bondle of rubbish. But I shall now tell you about the one o’clock radio. The government of Mixo-Lydia is overthrewn —’

  ‘Overthrown, Gradka,’ said Miss Bunting.

  ‘So; I thank you,’ said Gradka. ‘It is overthrown and we have no longer a President which was a man entirely of no value, but we have a Krasnik. Oll Mixo-Lydia will be in a fermented state to-night.’

  This epoch-making news was received with a poor show of enthusiasm. Few of the company knew who had been a President, and none cared.

  ‘Dear, dear,’ said Sir Robert, feeling vaguely responsible. ‘And what is a Krasnik?’

  ‘What you coll a president,’ said Gradka. ‘Aha, I olready see you will object: Then why coll him a Krasnik? You would not understand.’

  ‘Was there anything else in the news?’ said Mr Tebben.

  ‘Olso, there is a revolution in Slavo-Lydia,’ said Gradka. ‘And now Mixo-Lydia is free from the Germans we will march into Slavo-Lydia and kill oll the men and seduce oll the women. And oll the children shall work for us and live on the food of pigs and cows. So oll shall rejoice that Peace is at last come, and be grateful to the Russians which bring us that heaven’s gift and then we shall say to them, “Ol right, Mister Russians, you can now make yourselves scarce.” And oll those that linger on the road, our Mixo-Lydian plastroz, which is what you call militia or guerrilleros, will slit their necks. God wills it so.’

  At this remarkable picture of the millennium no one quite knew what to say. Gradka, looking like Charlotte Corday and the Vengeance rolled into one, stood with a hand on her hip, surveying in her mind’s eye a distant and delightful scene of unrepressed carnage, till Lord Stoke, whose ear had been caught by a word familiar and dear to him, thought he recognized a kindred spirit and asked her what kind of cows they had in her parts.

  Lady Fielding felt she could bear no more and thanking Gradka warmly for the excellent lunch and the good news, withdrew her company, while Anne helped Gradka to clear away. Sir Robert was then able to talk to Mr Tebben, who looked as if he needed cheering up, about the excavations near Brandon Abbey, while Mr Birkett cornered Mrs Morland to talk about Southbridge School and various old boys; which, as he lived, breathed, slept and ate school, not to speak of organizing and still doing a good deal of teaching in the upper forms, was a very pleasant relaxation for him.

  ‘And how is Tony?’ he asked, for Mrs Morland’s youngest son had been right through Southbridge from the day when he arrived at the preparatory branch, with a bowler rather too large for him and an apprehensive expression, to the day when he had left in a cloud of evanescent glory as a prefect, the Captain of Boating and holder of a formaship, pronounced formayship (as being supposedly sued for in forma pauperis) or scholarship to Paul’s College, Oxford.

  ‘I cannot say,’ said Mrs Morland, angrily pushing her hair and her hat off her face simultaneously in a very unbecoming way, ‘how furious we both are. There he was, perfectly happy, though of course they never tell me if they are happy or not, and perhaps happy is not quite the word, but at any rate he was killing Germans with great satisfaction; though I must say,’ said Mrs Morland, making an obvious effort to be broad-minded, ‘that to mow Germans down with very large guns in tanks is not quite the same as killing them; and then what must the War Office do but send for him in an aeroplane, by which means he had to leave nearly all his kit behind and arrived quite unexpectedly at High Rising to say he was going to India at once, with two bottles of champagne which were bought, not stolen, and a bundle of perfectly filthy clothes to be washed and mended.’

  ‘I presume,’ said Mr Birkett, ‘that it was a kind of compliment to send him to India. They don’t pick one subaltern out like that for fun.’

  ‘Compliment or no compliment,’ said Mrs Morland, pointing her remarks with her face-à-main which she had suddenly remembered that she was wearing, ‘to India he went, in a bomber, in thirty flying hours: though whether flying hours are longer or shorter than other hours I do not know, any more than which weighs most, a pound of lead or a pound of feathers.’

  Mr Birkett said he thought it was the number of hours during which you were actually in the air; not refuelling, or coming down somewhere to have lunch with a friend.

  ‘And that,’ said Mrs Morland, ignoring his explanation, ‘is what I cannot abide. Why send him to India in thirty hours when it will probably take him weeks and weeks to get back? Unreasonable, I call it, and if I were the Peace Conference I’d stop people flying at once. It only makes people nervous, just like the wireless.’

  ‘I quite agree with you,’ said Mr Birkett. ‘The reason we all had such good nerves during the Napoleonic wars and Miss Austen was able totally to ignore current events was that communications were slow. A corvette with dispatches from Spain, which had probably had to beat out as far as the West Indies and then run up the Channel and round the coast like the Armada and make her landfall at Grimsby, left people, except those personally affected, singularly unmoved. It’s a devil’s age, Laura, and it is, I can assure you, no pleasure to me to have to send my boys out into it. But I wish Tony the best of luck.’

  ‘I hear from him quite often,’ said Mrs Morland. ‘In fact he writes as much as he did from D-Day and France and Belgium and Holland and Germany, and about exactly the same things.’

  ‘His guns and his men, I suppose,’ said Mr Birkett.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Mrs Morland. ‘Asking me to find something that is at the bottom of one of his drawers or trunks, he doesn’t know which, and send it to him: or to buy him something that simply doesn’t exist, like a wrist watch or a fountain pen. But it seems to make him feel a bit nearer,’ she added with a touch of melancholy which she would never have shown but to so old a friend.

  And then she asked about friends at the school, and Matron, and the Edward Carters and their brood, and the Birketts’ daughters Rose and Geraldine, and Kate Carter’s sister, Lydia Merton and her small Lavinia: and so they ran pleasantly through the gamut of common friends till Lady Fielding said they ought to be starting, as the proceedings were to begin at two-thirty.

  Miss Bunting then bade a formal farewell to the guests, showing no favour, and went upstairs for her rest, and there was a great collecting of impedimenta by Mrs Tebben and in a lesser degree by Mrs Morland and the whole party set out for the meeting, though in no violent hurry, for as they had Lord Stoke the President with them, nothing could happen till he came.

  The well which was to be the scene of the proceedings was, as may be remembered, in the cellar of the Old Rectory destroyed by fire some two hundred years ago. By degrees its stones had been taken for building; the farmer nearby had converted some of its outhouses into waggon sheds and stabling, but the foundations of part of the house still remained, just outside the churchyard. They were by now in most places level with the ground, or so covered with earth and weeds as to be unrecognizable, being a kind of No-Man’s Land over which various people interested, such as the Duke of Omnium, the Cathedral Chapter, and the Court of Haphazard litigated at intervals in a meaningless way. This last was a very old ecclesiastical tribunal over whose derivation antiquaries had long and fruitlessly squabbled, some saying that it was old Norman-French, though what it meant they could not precisely explain; others that it was a corruption of Ampersand (itself a corruption, so that, as the Dean had wittily said, it was a case of corruptio corruptionis pessima), meaning perhaps that the church was per se the possessor of anything it could get hold of; and yet others that it had been called that in Gramfer’s time and what was good enough for him was good enough for anyone else as he’d a been a hundred and forty-two if he’d a lived till the war and that was more than old Hitler could say.

  The well had of course been bricked up for safety long ago, but owing to some very necessary
repairs to Hallbury’s water supply it had been temporarily reopened and the Barsetshire Archaeological Society had taken advantage of this to apply for permission to hold their summer meeting at Hallbury and investigate the brickwork before the well was filled in and lost. A strong fence within which ten or twelve persons could move about had been erected round the mouth of the well, and by courtesy of the contractors and the prospect of some heavy tipping to come, a workman had been down the well on the end of a rope most of the previous day, cutting out specimens of brickwork at different levels. And as there was a chance of some difficulty with a deep spring in the event of filling in the well the contractors, a local firm who at bottom believed more firmly in unseen forces than in any amount of boring and surveying, had obtained the services of Ed Pollett. This character, a half-wit or a natural genius, as you may choose to look upon him, was the illegitimate son of a virago of a mother and one of Lord Pomfret’s keepers and had begun his career as under-porter at Worsted Station. From this he had gone, having as some may remember a genius for mechanics without knowing what they were, as temporary chauffeur to Lord and Lady Bond one summer. When motors were put down for the war he had been transferred to Marling Hall where he managed the tractor and did odd jobs, and a year or two previously had married Millie Poulter, niece to Mrs Cox at Marling who let rooms. As Millie was nearly as half-witted as Ed, though without any of his genius, they led a very happy, skittish life and had already had a couple of nice healthy children, decidedly wanting. Now one of Ed Pollett’s many gifts was a water-sense. With or without a hazel-twig Ed could always feel water and after the epidemic of measles at Grumper’s End the summer old Miss Brandon died, he had successfully diagnosed a forgotten cesspool in the Thatchers’ backyard that no one had ever suspected.

  As the party from Hall’s End arrived on the scene of the excavations, Ed was standing on the edge of the well talking to the labourer at the end of the rope and, we are glad to say, both being local men resistant in the highest degree to so-called education, their talk, consisting of short remarks exchanged at long intervals and about nothing in particular, would probably have been quite comprehensible to Gurth or even Hereward the Wake.

  At the sight of Ed Pollett Lord Stoke, with no apology, broke from his party and went over to the well. For ever since Sir Edmund Pridham had saved Ed from the conscription which would certainly have driven him really mad within a month, besides the chance of his running amuck and using his idiot’s great strength against his fellows, and had told the story to Lord Stoke, that nobleman had taken Ed so to speak under his baronial wing, and enjoyed nothing more than a chat with him.

  ‘Afternoon, Ed,’ said Lord Stoke.

  Ed turned slowly, saw his patron, grinned and pulled his forelock, a piece of atavism which Lord Stoke said was well worth fifty guineas.

  ‘Well, Ed, looking at the well, eh?’ said Lord Stoke.

  Ed smiled again seraphically.

  ‘Who’s down there?’ said his lordship, whose curiosity in all local matters was unbounded. ‘One of the Duke’s men?’

  Ed looked doubtful.

  ‘It’s Purse,’ he said at length.

  ‘Percy who?’ said Lord Stoke. ‘One of Dudden’s boys?’

  Ed said he didn’t rightly know. Purse it was, and Purse was going to stand him one at the Omnium Arms afterwards.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Lord Stoke. ‘Children all right, Ed?’

  Ed smiled broadly.

  ‘Millie’s expecting again,’ he said. ‘March.’

  As it was now mid-August this artless remark might have shocked a peer less wide-minded than Lord Stoke. But his lordship, who conserved a good eighteenth-century flavour, poked Ed with his stick to the intense pleasure of the onlookers, and said he’d be a grandfather before he could turn round.

  He then approached the well, squatted on the edge, called down it and asked who was there. A voice from the depths said it was Percy Bodger my lord.

  ‘Is that old Bodger’s grandson; old Bodger over at Harefield?’ said Lord Stoke.

  The voice said it was, my lord.

  ‘Fine old fellow your grandfather,’ said Lord Stoke. ‘Got rid of all my rats for me the year the river came up in the Castle cellar. Tell him I asked after him.’

  The voice said it thanked his lordship and grandfather would be main pleased.

  ‘Getting some bricks for us, eh?’ said Lord Stoke.

  The voice said yes, my lord.

  ‘Much water down there?’ asked his lordship.

  The voice said maybe two feet and a stinking dead cat if his lordship didn’t mind, and went on with his chipping.

  By this time a crowd of twenty or thirty people had collected and were looking at the well with the faith of the people who looked through Mr Nupkins’s back gate, hoping perhaps to have sight of Percy Bodger rising from its curb, or see Lord Stoke fall down it. As neither of these delightful occurrences took place, it began gently to melt again and look for its friends.

  At the Rectory Dr Dale and his guest the Dean had had a very pleasant conversation, chiefly on ecclesiastical affairs, while Robin spoke when he was spoken to and wondered what old Birkett wanted to say to him, for the headmaster had taken the precaution of ringing up and saying he hoped to see him during the afternoon. They touched lightly on the affair of the Precentor’s extra petrol, the Dean giving it as his opinion that though the Precentor was quite in the wrong, if not actually breaking the laws, yet the mere fact of the Bishop’s reprobation made him, as it were, guiltless in the eye of heaven; with which Dr Dale heartily agreed. The Rector then inquired after Dr Crawley’s very large family of children and grandchildren and was glad to hear that they all were well and Octavia’s husband now had an excellent artificial arm and the baby was a fine little fellow. Dr Crawley then asked the Rector how Haggai was getting on and was delighted to hear that he was well into the second chapter. Dr Dale said he was getting old and the grasshopper was becoming a burden.

  ‘Never mind, Dale,’ said the Dean, who was fond of the old man and did not like to see him cast down. ‘It is a great thing that you have Robin with you.’

  ‘It is,’ said Dr Dale, looking affectionately at his son. ‘Don’t wait for me, Robin, if you want to go down to the Old Rectory.’

  Robin thanked his father and said that as all his young scholars were going, with the firm determination of falling down the well, he thought he would be more usefully employed in helping to keep them away from this innocent occupation.

  The Dean said they would meet again at Philippi and dismissed Robin with a kind of decanal salute, and Robin went off, quite understanding why the Dean’s family sometimes felt that their father was going it more than they could bear. After a silence his host said,

  ‘I know I am lucky to have Robin with me, Crawley, but in the good Scotch phrase, I am apt to sin my mercies. When you are as old as I am you will know what it is to want to be quiet. I can be alone in my study with my books for days quite happily, and my housekeeper brings me meals on a tray. Robin is a good son and a brave and hardworking boy, but there are so many years between us. My wife, as you know, was thirty years my junior. Robin can hardly remember his mother. He should have been my grandson. I get very tired, Crawley, very tired, and it’s dull for him.’

  Although the Dean was not very sensitive to fine shades, he quite sympathized with the Rector’s point of view. Much as he loved his many daughters and his two sons, now all married, all with children, he sometimes, and especially at Christmas and during school holidays when his wife’s exuberant grandmotherhood filled the Deanery with children and nurses and odd parents, echoed from his heart the cry, ‘Oh, for an hour of Herod.’ While the grandchildren were all young it had been bad enough, but at least the evenings were free. Now, with half of them sitting up to the evening meal and the eldest using his study as if it were a sitting-room, he often thought enviously of anchorites and people who – in a better climate – lived on the top of a pillar. So he quite sympath
ized with Dr Dale in his secret wish to be alone with his books and his memories, and was about to say so when he saw that his host had fallen asleep, upright in his chair, sleeping lightly as old men do, but rapt away from the world. So he got up quietly, told the housekeeper he was going down to the Old Rectory and left the Rector to his dreams.

  As he approached the scene of the meeting he ran into the Fieldings and the Birketts, all old friends, and they had the story of the Precentor’s extra petrol all over again, with such additions as their fancy suggested. Mrs Birkett asked after the Rector, for she remembered every parent that had ever been through her hands and Dr Dale was a not undistinguished parent. The Dean said he had fallen asleep after lunch so he had left him and come down to the Old Rectory.

  ‘And how is Robin?’ said Mr Birkett. ‘I wish we could get him for Southbridge, but I suppose he will feel he ought to stay with his father.’

  ‘To tell you the truth, Birkett,’ said the Dean, falling behind a little with the headmaster, ‘I don’t think his father much wants him.’

  Mr Birkett looked interested.