Miss Bunting

by Angela Thirkell

‘I don’t mean that they aren’t fond of each other,’ said the Dean, ‘for anyone can see they are. But from what Dale said to me I think he would be happier alone. He is getting on and lives mostly in the past and his books and, as he said, Robin is really the age of a grandson to him. He has a very good housekeeper and if Robin were away I don’t think he would notice it much. To tell you the truth, Birkett, I believe the old man lives with the memory of his wife and as Robin can hardly remember her he is rather a third person.’

  ‘H’m,’ said Mr Birkett, though this time Anne was not there to admire. ‘Thank you, Crawley, I shan’t rush it, but I’ll keep what you said in mind. He must be a good age.’

  ‘If it comes to that, we are getting to a pretty good age ourselves,’ said the Dean. ‘I wonder that the people who try to write the Bible in modern language don’t alter the threescore years and ten.’

  Mr Birkett said that judging from the bits of Basic English he had seen, there would certainly be no word for threescore and probably not for ten. One and one and one would be the best they could do.’

  ‘Come, Birkett, be fair,’ said the Dean. ‘Even the Romans knew no better than to say ten-fifty when they meant forty. Or if they didn’t say it, they wrote it and carved it, which looks as if they meant it.’

  ‘And those dreadful French say four-twenty-thirteen for ninety-three,’ said Mr Birkett.

  ‘And look at the Germans, saying half-eight when they mean half-past seven,’ responded the Dean.

  ‘Or those foul Italians thinking that quattrocento means the fifteenth century,’ said Mr Birkett in antistrophe. ‘I wonder what Lord Stoke is saying to Ed Pollett. Let’s go and look.’

  The lunch at Hallbury House went off quietly. Lord and Lady Pomfret were pleasant guests, but Lord Pomfret never had very good health and his Countess, taking more than her share of all county activities, was always a little anxious about him. Their agent, Roddy Wicklow, the Countess’s brother, was also an excellent fellow, but not much given to speech, so when Jane had asked after Lord Mellings and Lady Emily and the Honourable Giles and Mr Wicklow’s wife and two children, there wouldn’t be much more to say.

  ‘Mellings is going to a day school in Nutfield now,’ said Lady Pomfret. ‘I wish Southbridge had a pre-preparatory house. He is going to the prep school when he is eight.’

  ‘Lady Pomfret,’ said Frank, ‘I’m going to Southbridge. If your little boy comes I’ll take care of him. I’m very good at taking care of people. Tom Watson wants to go to Southbridge when I do, mother. I told Mrs Watson I’d take care of him. Do you think he’ll go, mother?’

  Jane said she didn’t know and to hurry up with his dinner.

  ‘Where do you go to school?’ said Lord Pomfret to Frank, which was very kind of him, for he was frightened of children and would often have been frightened of his own only his wife wouldn’t let him.

  ‘With Mr Dale, sir,’ said Frank.

  ‘Any relation of the Allington Dales?’ said Lord Pomfret.

  ‘That old Miss Lily Dale was his great-aunt or something of the sort,’ said Admiral Palliser; but Lord Pomfret had never heard of her.

  ‘She was engaged to some man, then broke it off,’ said the Admiral, ‘and I gather she lived on the romance till she was well over eighty. A real Victorian heroine.’

  ‘I have heard Gillie’s aunt speak of her,’ said Lady Pomfret, who had become very good friends with her predecessor before old Lady Pomfret died. ‘The man married someone – one of the Gazebees, wasn’t it, and died abroad.’

  No one contradicted her; and so are history and memoirs written.

  ‘Is it a nice school?’ she continued, doubtless with Viscount Mellings’s pre-prep education in mind.

  ‘Very nice,’ said Jane. ‘The only trouble is that there are so few people here. When Frank and his lot have gone to boarding-school I really don’t know what Robin will do. There’s a kind of gap and the next lot won’t be ripe for two or three years.’

  As Lady Pomfret naturally did not take much further interest in what was apparently a moribund school, the conversation, such as it was, languished politely through dessert from the garden and coffee. Frank then brought his mother to shame by boasting of his horsemanship to Roddy Wicklow, who was quite well known in a quiet way as a gentleman rider before the war. Lady Pomfret, both seeing and feeling her hostess’s infanticidal feelings, broke across Frank’s talk by asking her brother what the name of that man was who was going to stand for the County Council.

  ‘Adams,’ said Roddy. ‘He has a works over at Hogglestock. One of the new men.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have heard of him, Admiral,’ said Lady Pomfret. ‘I did see him once, at the Hosiers’ Girls’ School prize-giving. Not very attractive.’

  The Admiral said he was on Mr Adams’s Board of Directors.

  ‘Sally always took her fences without looking,’ said Roddy. ‘What do you think of him, sir?’

  The Admiral said he didn’t know. Business, he said, was one thing and Adams was a remarkably good business man, and pleasure was another.

  ‘But probably,’ he added, ‘Jane could tell you more. She seems to have a way with her where he is concerned. He wanted, in all kindness, of course, to send down one of his accountants to help our Rector, Dr Dale – the father of the young man we were talking about – and it would have worried the old man into a fit. It was all very awkward, but Jane managed to make him see sense.’

  ‘Oh, he is all right,’ said Jane, suddenly attacked by that form of self-consciousness that makes us belittle someone we rather like; possibly just for the pleasure of talking about them. ‘Not quite what Hallbury is used to though. And he has a large, very plain girl called Heather who is going to Cambridge. But it’s only for the holidays, till whenever Cambridge begins. He will call her “my little Heth” and she weighs about twelve stone.’

  Lord Pomfret, who though as nice and hard-working as he could be had not much sense of humour, laughed politely at Jane’s rather unkind words and said seriously that what really mattered was how the fellow was going to vote. If he was the right sort they could do with a man like him on the County Council; someone who understood the growing class of industrial workers in and around Barchester, as well as old fogies like himself and Pridham, who thought more of the agricultural interest.

  ‘I think,’ said Jane, ‘he will be at the meeting this afternoon with his daughter. If I see him would you like to meet him?’

  Lord Pomfret said he would and then it was time to start for the Old Rectory. The Admiral escorted Lady Pomfret, and Frank, slipping his hand into Roddy Wicklow’s, told him all about the pony at Greshamsbury and how his cousin Roger was afraid to ride it. To which Roddy made answer that he’d met a lot of horses he was afraid to ride himself, and Frank though usually impervious to fine shades felt a little subdued. So Jane fell to Lord Pomfret, and as he had not much small talk and they knew each other well enough not to bother, she reflected upon the way Mr Adams seemed to crop up everywhere, and had an uncomfortable feeling that she had not been quite ladylike in making mock of him and his daughter before people who didn’t know them. But the scene which met their eyes as the Old Rectory banished all thoughts, except those of keeping the children of both sexes, both gentry and non-gentry, from falling down the well. Robin, who in his schoolmaster capacity felt rather responsible, had arranged with the verger for a relay of well-watchers to keep children out of the enclosure, while he volunteered to take not more than two children at a time, one in each hand, to see what was happening. Lord Stoke’s groom, the Rectory gardener and the elderly old man from the Omnium Arms were co-opted, Ed was warned, and everyone waited for the proceedings to begin.

  9

  It now became apparent that the Society’s President was lost. The Fieldings had not seen him as they were talking to the George Knoxes. Ed said he couldn’t rightly say nothing. His lordship was argying with Purse, he said, and then his lordship got up and went away and Ed hadn’t seen him anywheres
, no he hadn’t. Lord Pomfret said he might have fallen down the well, but this explanation, in view of the fact that Percy Bodger was down there all the time and must have noticed something, was poorly received, though the Admiral maintained that any Bodger was capable of ignoring entirely such an incident as an old gentleman falling down the well on to his head, having a rooted and feudal belief that the gentry were privileged and that it was not for the likes of them to ask.

  At this moment Lord and Lady Bond and the Middletons, who had been lunching at the Palace and come on by train, appeared in the field. To Lady Bond, as his half-sister, appeal was made. She had not yet seen him anywhere, but was not at all anxious.

  ‘It’s so like Stoke,’ said Lady Bond, who had a dashing way of mentioning her half-brother and her husband by their baronial names without any prefix, a habit which many of her friends envied but were too modest to copy. ‘Of course it’s a cow. Who farms here?’

  ‘Old Masters,’ said the Admiral. ‘He rents my field and has his milking-shed over there.’

  He pointed to the converted outbuildings of the Old Rectory some fifty yards away.

  ‘That’s where you’ll find him,’ said Lady Bond. ‘Here, Ed!’

  Ed Pollett came shambling up and took his cap off.

  ‘Go and see if his lordship is in the cowshed and bring him here,’ said Lady Bond.

  Ed looked frightened.

  ‘There’s that old Daisy in there. She dropped a fine little bull calf last night, she did, and they say it’s unlucky to go in more than one,’ said Ed. ‘Millie wouldn’t rightly like me to go, my lady.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Ed,’ said Lady Bond. ‘You needn’t go in. Just go to the door and tell his lordship to come at once.’

  Ed went off at his own slow countryman’s pace.

  ‘The ancient Norsemen,’ said Mr Tebben, who had been listening to the conversation with some interest, ‘had a very similar belief. I was reading the other day in Grettir Halfbone’s interesting twelfth-century gloss on the Laxdaela Saga that when the female salmon —’

  But what Mr Tebben in his gentle scholarly way was going to say we shall never know (nor in any case would we have cared), for at that moment the Watsons with Mr and Mrs George Knox came up and overheard the last words.

  ‘The Laxdaela Saga, my dear Tebben,’ said George Knox, burst into the conversation like a shell. ‘The Laxdaela Saga,’ he repeated, to give himself time to bludgeon all present into being an audience. ‘How I long to re-read it, no one knows. Even you do not know, Tebben. When I was a boy,’ said George Knox, raising his voice as he saw the Middletons approaching, ‘my days were not long enough for reading. Well,’ said George Knox, fixing the unfortunate Mr Tebben with his eyes till that Icelandic authority felt like the Wedding Guest, ‘well, I say, do I remember long summer days, lying on my stomach as little boys do,’ continued George Knox with a smile which his loving and unimpressed wife knew to be meant for a whimsical one, ‘in the long grass of an orchard, absorbing every word, every word, I say, of the great Sagas of the North: the Skyrikari, the Reaping of Magnus Trollbogi, Haelfdan Hogsister, the great lament for the burning of Gunnar Pedderdotterssen’s barley rick. You, Tebben,’ said George Knox, as one who condescendingly pats a well-meaning dog on the head, ‘will better know than I the true, the heroic pronunciation of these names, but let that pass,’ he said, though Mr Tebben had shown no symptom of taking up the challenge. ‘Even at that age the little boy among the orchard grass knew what was essential. Little did the names matter to him. It was the story he loved; ay, Tebben, and loves still. You scholars may burn the midnight oil, but we romantics know.’

  ‘When Richard, my son, was quite a little boy,’ said Mrs Tebben, breaking into George Knox’s speech with a mother’s pride, ‘he had the same difficulty with proper names that you have, Mr Knox. He had a book he was very fond of which he always called From Cursy to Agronaut. You will never guess what it really was,’ said Mrs Tebben looking proudly round her for support. Not getting any she added gaily, ‘It was From Crecy to Agincourt. It amused us so much and we have never forgotten it.’

  Several mothers present, headed by Mrs Morland, gave examples of similar mistakes, bearing the marks of genius, made by their own children, while George Knox stood champing and pawing the ground, occasionally taking a deep breath as if to continue his extempore lecture and then having to let it out again in a most mortifying way, owing to the total want of interest from his fickle audience. Just as he saw an opening Mr and Mrs Middleton joined the group.

  ‘Ha! Knox,’ said Mr Middleton, with a kind of crusading fervour for which there was no reason at all.

  Mrs Middleton greeted the company in general, and particularly Mrs George Knox, for there was a firm though undemonstrative friendship between these two ladies. Neither was young, neither had children, and both had a deep untiring affection for their rather overpowering husbands and not the faintest illusions about them.

  ‘George has been talking, I suppose,’ said Mrs Middleton.

  ‘He has,’ said Mrs Knox. ‘And what’s more he will again, at any moment.’

  ‘About anything particular?’ asked Mrs Middleton.

  ‘Sagas,’ said Mrs Knox. ‘And why I really don’t know, as it all began with a bit of folklore from Ed Pollett about not going into a cowshed more than one at a time. I mean one person at a time, not one cowshed. Sometimes I wonder why language was ever invented when I think of the extraordinary things it makes one say.’

  ‘I know,’ said Mrs Middleton sympathetically. Or so an acquaintance would have said; but the few whom she allowed to know her well, Anne Knox among them, sometimes felt that while her voice expressed deep interest, her eyes were always looking a little way from the point of discussion towards some distant object unknown to her friends, barely suspected by herself. Then Mr Middleton, having greeted the rest of the ladies with a touch of Versailles and the Grand Monarque, in his turn inquired what they had been discussing. Lady Fielding said that Mr Knox had been telling them about the old Norse sagas, upon which George Knox once more took a breath and began,

  ‘You, my dear Middleton, will bear me out —’

  ‘I will bear with you, Knox, but cannot promise to bear you out —’ said Mr Middleton.

  His wife said Jack was being Shakespearian.

  ‘— until I know what line you were taking up.’

  ‘You flatter me, Middleton,’ said George Knox rather irritably. ‘There is no question of a line, my dear fellow. I was merely sharing, or shall I more humbly say, trying to share with our friends the emotions roused in me as a boy by reading the great Norse stories, the Skyrikari, the Reaping of —’

  ‘Not again, George darling,’ said his wife.

  ‘AH,’ said Mr Middleton, leaping into the conversation like a salmon up a waterfall in his anxiety to get in ahead of George Knox, ‘the sagas. Wonderful tales of heroes and of men. How often, Anne,’ he continued, addressing his wife as a focus from which the whole company might be brought within his circle, ‘how often have I told you of my great walk over the country of Njal and Gunnar of Lithend, all through the long days of a sub-Arctic summer.’

  ‘I don’t know, Jack,’ said his wife impartially. ‘A great many times.’

  ‘Tramping alone and on foot,’ said Mr Middleton, to the intense annoyance of Mr Knox, who had never been to Iceland, ‘for these things, Bond,’ he said, suddenly addressing his landlord, who jumped and tried to look as if he were listening, ‘must be experienced alone; alone, I say; over the Snorrefell, down Hormundsdale, across Grimmswater – I give the English rendering of these names. I tell you, Bond, no one who has not seen that country in its majesty, imbued with the spirit of the Heroic Age, can begin to understand the saga.’

  He paused.

  ‘“Only those who brave its dangers,”

  “Comprehend its mystery”,’ said Anne Fielding in a small but distinct voice.

  ‘You remember Anne,’ said Lady Fielding to Mr Mid
dleton, glad of this excuse to break what threatened to be an interminable monologue. ‘The Marlings’ old governess, Miss Bunting, has been reading with her all this year. I think I see Lord Stoke coming back.’

  ‘Not Longfellow,’ said Mr Middleton, ‘an thou lovest me.’

  His wife said dispassionately that he must really stop thinking he was Shakespeare.

  ‘A poet, if you choose to call him such,’ said Mr Middleton, ‘who brought into the sagas an atmosphere of middle-class New England. Away with such a fellow from the earth.’

  ‘No, George, you are not the Pilgrim’s Progress,’ said Mrs Morland, who had been occupied in tucking some bits of hair under her hat and suddenly came to life.

  ‘I don’t agree with you, Middleton,’ said Mr Tebben in the mild voice of the scholar who will go to the stake for his self-formed convictions, the fruit of study and thought and not taken from the Press or a voice prancing with supercilious earnestness out of a box. ‘To my mind Longfellow gives the feeling of Norse literature as well as anyone, besides making it accessible to those who cannot read the language.’