Miss Bunting

by Angela Thirkell

  The sponge, now swollen by bath water and conceit to four times its original size, was much admired, as were the little volume of Keats and the silver clasp; which last was praised loudly whenever Gradka was about, to propitiate her. As for the scent, face powder, powder-puff and bath salts, Lady Fielding said how kind of Mr Adams and reflected that the rather immoral smell of the last-mentioned was thank goodness in the bathroom Anne and Miss Bunting used, not in hers and her husband’s. The orchid, which had been cleared away by the gardener who didn’t hold with pot-plants not unless he knew where they came from, was hardly mentioned.

  The unkind chilly August was succeeded by a worse September which made even the most determinedly seasonally minded people go back into coats and skirts and wonder if it would be worth while having their summer frocks cleaned before they put them away as they had worn them so little, though of course we might have an Indian summer. Or St Martin’s summer, said Robin after some Sunday afternoon tennis when he and Jane Gresham and Anne had stopped on to tea with the Watsons.

  ‘Though why Saint, I do not know,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘To give a person half a cloak shows an entire want of common sense, or any real charity. I’ve often thought about it. Even if it was one of those huge cloaks like the ones Italian cavalry officers used to wear, whichever way you cut it in half what was left wouldn’t be much use and so triangular.’

  Jane said it would be as bad as those paper patterns for dresses that show you so carefully how to fit all the bits of pattern into the stuff that you go mad.

  ‘I always say,’ said Mrs Watson, ‘that a lot of saints seem to be a bit subnormal. I dare say it’s thinking of Other Things.’

  ‘Why do saints only read the Times?’ said Mr Watson.

  His wife laughed loudly and said Charlie was very deep.

  ‘I know what Charlie means,’ said Jane. ‘People only thank St Jude for things in the Times. At least I’ve never seen it anywhere else.’

  Mrs Watson said thoughtfully that she supposed saints would read the Times.

  ‘But,’ said Anne, her kind heart at once touched, ‘there must be millions of people who don’t take in the Times, Mrs Watson, and then they can’t thank St Jude or anyone, so he would never know how to tell them he was pleased because they thanked him.’

  Mr Watson darkened counsel considerably by saying one could always have a box number.

  ‘There’s something in what Anne says,’ said Robin. ‘I don’t know much about saints, but one doesn’t quite see them with the Daily Express. I should have thought monthlies were more in their line than daily papers, anyway.’

  Jane said why.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Robin. ‘I have no grounds for this belief. Direct inspiration if you ask me.’

  ‘What I always say,’ said Mrs Watson, ‘is that there are a lot of things we don’t understand. And talking of one thing and another, I suppose you know there is a Bring and Buy Sale in the New Town next Tuesday and I’m supposed to be collecting things for them here. Anybody got anything?’

  Jane said the last one, the one for the Barsetshire Regiment Comforts Fund, had pretty well cleaned her out, but she would look round. What was it for, she said.

  ‘I really don’t know,’ said Mrs Watson. ‘They’ve done the Blind and Cancer and Tuberculosis and the Red Cross and all the Allied Nations and Unmarried Mothers and the usual. Oh, I know, it’s the Cottage Hospital.’

  It was unanimously agreed that to give things for one’s own Cottage Hospital was quite different and Jane said she was pretty sure she could rout out something. Robin said he didn’t suppose some of his father’s old sermons would be any good, which made Mrs Watson laugh uproariously.

  Anne began to speak, thought better of it and went pink.

  ‘Out with it, Anne,’ said Robin. ‘Have you got half an earring, or a nasty bit of Oriental embroidery?’

  ‘I was only thinking,’ said Anne, ‘about those bath salts and things that Heather gave me. I did just open them, but they smelt funny. Do you think I could give them to the sale, or would Heather see them? It was dreadfully kind of her, but they do smell horrid, all except the powder puff. I do like it, because I’ve never had a big one.’

  This was a poser and as such was seriously considered by the whole company. After a great deal of chatter, during which Anne had some difficulty in making her friends stick to the point, Mrs Watson hit upon the brilliant idea of putting the bath salts into old coffee tins of which she had a few waiting for some useful occasion, and selling them at famine prices. Mr Watson said he would paint the tins different colours as he had a lot of odds and ends of paint in his workroom. As for the scent, Jane said the chemist wouldn’t take back empty bottles now, so there were heaps at Hallbury House, and offered to stick fresh labels onto some and paint the words ‘Pre-War Scent’ with Frank’s paintbox, and then Anne could put the scent in them.

  ‘Oh, thank you, Jane,’ said Anne, so much uplifted by this solution of her difficulties and everyone’s kindness that she said ‘Jane’ quite naturally, which Jane noticed with amusement, though she made no comment.

  ‘By Jove!’ said Robin suddenly. ‘No, I won’t tell you why,’ he added, ‘but I have had a massive and original idea. I must speak to my father and then I’ll tell you, Mrs Watson. I believe for the Cottage Hospital he’d do it, though he certainly wouldn’t for anything else.’

  Then the conversation took another turn and presently Anne went home, accompanied by Robin as far as the door.

  ‘I did want to ask you something, Robin,’ said Anne, one hand on the large brass door handle and holding out the other. ‘You don’t mind about my having your mother’s ring, do you?’

  ‘Even if I did I wouldn’t tell you,’ said Robin, ‘because the old man simply loved giving it to you and it looks very nice. As a matter of fact I can’t sentimentalize about my mother, because I only just remember her. I get a kind of rush of sentiment to the heart occasionally when I think I’ve been half an orphan nearly all my life, but it doesn’t mean anything. So that’s that, and we will now proceed to the next subject on the agenda. Yes; very nice indeed.’

  Saying which he took Anne’s gloveless, ringed left hand, raised it, deposited a light kiss on it, and went away, with a backward glance of approval.

  Excitinger and excitinger, Anne felt inclined to say. Twice had her hand been kissed since she had turned seventeen. True, no one had yet fallen in love with her, but that would doubtless occur in due course, perhaps when she was eighteen. And still the excitement grew, for her parents had a quite grown-up consultation with her after supper. As Gradka thought she could get a permit to return to Mixo-Lydia in October, said Lady Fielding, and Miss Bunting was to go to Lady Graham about the middle of September and then back to Marling Hall, she had decided to shut the house for the winter as soon as the old governess had gone. Anne would come back to Barchester and go to classes and help her mother in various duties, and the post-girl’s mother, sister-in-law to the Admiral’s cook, would as usual come in as caretaker, sleep in Gradka’s room and keep things aired for them when they came down for week-ends, but this, at any rate during the winter, would not be very often. Anne agreed whole-heartedly with all these plans, as indeed she mostly did with anything her parents suggested. She was a little sorry to be leaving Jane and Dr Dale and Robin, but the thought of being grown-up in Barchester was too exciting for her regrets to be serious. The scheme of disguising the bath salts and scent was laid before her mother, who considered it and on the whole approved, provided the plan were so carried out that the Adamses had no suspicions; and on this matter the arrangements appeared to be sound enough. If Lady Fielding were to be truthful with herself, as she usually was, another reason for shutting up the house so early was to break off, without appearing to do so, the intercourse between Anne and Heather. It had been all right for these holiday weeks, but there was no reason why it should go on in Barchester. Heather would be at Cambridge before long and making fresh friends,
so it was no unkindness to remove Anne. What Lady Fielding did not know, and would rather have liked to know, was Miss Holly’s next move. Presumably she would have to go back to the Hosiers’ Girls’ School at the beginning of term and Heather would go home till the University term began. But if Miss Holly did arrange an extension of leave to remain at Hallbury and coach Heather after school had begun, well all the more reason to take Anne back. Lady Fielding did not dislike Mr Adams and found Heather inoffensive, but the feeling of wealth, the extravagant presents, made her uneasy; it was a design for living too far removed from her own quiet standards for her to feel comfortable.

  When Robin left Anne he went back to St Hall Friars where the last bell for the evening service was ringing, and settled himself in the Rectory pew, from which place of safety he admired his father’s appearance and voice and thought of many things while his tongue said its accustomed words. There were two important things to discuss with his father and he could not for the life of him guess how his father would take them. The first, in point of view of time, was the Bring and Buy Sale in the New Town for which he proposed to ask his father to sacrifice a small goat-carriage, a relic of Robin’s childhood, which was still in tolerable condition and never used. The second and really important subject was whether his father thought he ought to keep on his little school. The numbers would dwindle to three, or four at the most, by the New Year and Southbridge School gaped for him, but if his father was going to miss him, Southbridge should gape till it was black in the face. One could probably get pupils to coach even if the supply of little boys ran short. Only pupils would have to live in the house, and how his father would hate boys at his quiet mealtimes and the inevitable slackening of the household discipline, Robin could well foretell. Still, one thing at a time, and the goat-carriage came first.

  The service reached its appointed close. The Rector, as was his custom at the end of each Sunday, stood inside the church porch and said a word of farewell to all his flock. Then Robin walked home with his father, taking the back way by the near end of Little Gidding and entering the garden through the door in the stable-yard wall.

  ‘It used to be very different when I first came here,’ said the Rector. ‘I still had horses then.’

  This remark was dedicated to Sundays, for on other days the Rector accepted the present times as a necessary evil which there was no need to discuss.

  ‘What fun it must have been,’ said Robin. ‘I’d love to have a dog-cart with rubber tyres and a fiery horse.’

  ‘Yes; I had the dog-cart, and a brougham for evenings and wet weather,’ said the Rector. ‘I got my first car in nineteen-eight, I think, but I kept the horses till they died, and my old coachman. That was all before your time and before I met your mother.’

  He stopped by the mounting-block and sat down in the sun to look at the quiet yard, with no sound of champing and jingling and hissing; no smell of horses and leather and oats and straw.

  ‘The only carriage I ever had was the goat-carriage,’ said Robin. ‘What happened to the goat, father?’

  ‘We sold him to Lady Emily Leslie,’ said Dr Dale. ‘She wanted a goat to go well in harness for one of her elder grandchildren, Martin Leslie, I think, the one who will come into the place. It was touch and go while he was in Africa, but he is at the War Office now. Dear, dear.’

  ‘Why didn’t she have the goat-carriage too?’ said Robin. ‘It seems awful waste to have it mouldering here when we haven’t got a goat.’

  ‘Is it really mouldering?’ asked the Rector anxiously.

  Robin said not yet, and he had got the garage, which represented what was left of the blacksmith and wheelwright, to overhaul it not long ago and it was in quite good shape. As his father made no comment, he continued rather nervously.

  ‘I suppose you wouldn’t care to give it for a Bring and Buy Sale, father? They are having one in the New Town next week.’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said the Rector. ‘You might as well ask me to give the old croquet set away, or your mother’s Aunt Sally.’

  He got up and straightened himself.

  Robin was not surprised by this outburst. One never knew when one’s dear father, so heedless of possessions as a rule, would suddenly become suspicious and set a high value upon an old razor, or a worthless book, or a piece of furniture that had become not only shabby but dangerous.

  ‘All right, father,’ he said good-humouredly. ‘They can stay where they are. I only asked you because Mrs Watson is collecting gifts. It’s for the New Town Cottage Hospital.’

  His father said, ‘Oh’ in a far from encouraging way and expressed a general opinion that the New Town did not need such luxuries. There wasn’t a Cottage Hospital, he said, when he first came to Hallbury. And as for a New Town, no one had ever thought of such a thing. There used to be some of the best rough shooting in the neighbourhood down on that marshy land before the old Duke’s agent began to meddle.

  So Robin said no more and they supped peacefully, and after their meal went to the study. Here after the labours of Sunday the Rector liked, when not supping with Admiral Palliser, to take his ease and read the various learned periodicals which had come during the week; for he was a corresponding member of more than one society dealing with Bible research (especially the later prophets) and antiquarian matters. On such evenings he liked Robin to be at hand though he paid no attention to him, and Robin, while secretly reserving the right to do as he pleased, scrupulously kept these Sundays for his father, explaining to his Hallbury friends that they had better ask him when his father was at Hallbury House. For although his father was extraordinarily well and keen-minded for his years he had of late often fallen into a muse upon the past from which he emerged rather uncertain as to who or where he was, and slightly indignant that Robin was a grown-up man and not a schoolboy.

  Not that the Rector had anything particular to say to Robin, but he had a kind of patriarchal feeling that it was fitting for the son of his loins (for to Robin’s ill-concealed shame his father used this scriptural phrase without any self-consciousness) should be with him in his old age on such Sundays as he was supping at home. Every now and then it did occur to Dr Dale that he and Robin had little to talk about and how nice it would be to read in solitude, but his conscience told him, in the unnecessarily scrupulous way consciences have, that here was his only child, with an artificial foot, and what was he going to do about it.

  On this evening, perhaps a little sorry for his fierceness about the goat-carriage, he felt more than ever that he must show a father’s interest in Robin’s affairs which, to his old mind, really seemed on the whole unimportant things. So he put down the Journal of Prophetic Studies and said to Robin,

  ‘Well, Robin, how is the school to go next term? New pupils?’

  Robin looked up from a letter he was writing and said that two of them were going to boarding-school this term and two more, besides Frank Gresham, after Christmas, so the prospects were not very good at the moment.

  ‘I am very sorry,’ said Dr Dale. ‘You hadn’t told me that, my boy.’

  Robin said, quite kindly, that there it was, and no good grumbling and he hadn’t wanted to bother his father.

  Dr Dale asked rather indignantly what a father was for.

  ‘I really don’t know, sir,’ said Robin. ‘But whatever it is, you do it very satisfactorily. Still, it’s what Rose Fairweather used to call foully dispiriting, I must admit.’

  ‘But there will be other boys,’ said Dr Dale. ‘I have christened a number of small children this year. More than usual; which people tell me is somehow connected with wartime.’

  Robin said people would tell one anything, but the children his father had christened this year wouldn’t be ripe until 1952 or so, and he doubted if he could wait till then. The intermediate vintages, he added, appeared to be very small and of poor quality.

  ‘I believe,’ said Dr Dale, looking rather troubled, ‘that you were offered a post at Southbridge School.’

 
; ‘Oh, don’t worry about that, father,’ said Robin, miraculously keeping all trace of irritation from his voice. ‘Mr Birkett did ask me, but I expect he has found someone else now.’

  ‘But why should he find someone else?’ said Dr Dale indignantly. ‘I see no reason for him to pass you over and seek further. If my son, with the degree he has taken and his war experience is not good enough for the headmaster of Southbridge School, the world is in a pretty bad way.’

  Robin’s heart leapt to a glimpse of freedom, but he had himself well in hand where his father was concerned. He could not think of the right reply, so he said nothing.

  ‘I shall ring him up and speak to him myself,’ said Dr Dale, rising majestically from his chair.

  At this statement Robin nearly jumped. His father had always hated the telephone which he had only installed to please Robin’s mother, and had never relented towards it. It was kept in the back passage where the servants, by shutting the green baize door, could gossip with their friends or the tradesmen without disturbing their master. This was annoying for Robin, whose conversations were all open to the kitchen if it cared to listen; but to do it justice it was usually talking so loudly in its own quarters, with the wireless on and the door shut, that he could have arranged to elope with Mrs Watson or murder the Admiral without anyone being the wiser.