Miss Bunting

by Angela Thirkell

  Miss Bunting, as we know, had not felt equal to the Bring and Buy Sale, and as the week went on she felt on the whole less equal to anything and spent a good deal of the day in her room, while Gradka waited upon her and asked such supplementary questions about the English language and literature as occurred to her active mind. Anne spent a good deal of time at the Cottage Hospital with Frank and Master Watson, in whose company she drove about the immediate neighbourhood in the goat-carriage (by kind permission of Sister Chiffinch). Heather was not seen in the Old Town, being a good deal occupied with the New Town Tennis Tournament in aid of the Red Cross, in which tournament, to her own surprise and her father’s intense pride, she got into the semi-finals, partnered by young Ted Pilward who had been given extended leave on account of an impacted wisdom tooth and was to go on a course the following Monday.

  Ever since Sister Chiffinch’s kind offer of keeping an eye on his venerable father, Robin had felt much easier in his mind about leaving him; but to be on the safe side he asked Dr Ford from High Rising, an old family friend, if he would drop in to lunch one day and give a report of his father off the ration as it were. Dr Ford, who did not fear any British Medical Association dead or alive, said he would certainly look in on Saturday round about lunch time, but what Robin meant was off the record. Robin said he hated to be disagreeable, but what he meant when he said off the ration was off the ration. So Dr Ford drove himself over to Hallbury in his clanking old car on Saturday, called at the Rectory, was invited to stay to lunch by the Rector, accepted with just the right amount of unwillingness and remained till about three o’clock, talking with his old friend.

  ‘Your father is remarkably fit,’ he said to Robin, who was lying in wait for him by the clanking car. ‘In fact I see no reason why he shouldn’t live for ever. Do you ever think he is going mad?’

  Robin said he sometimes did, but really he didn’t.

  ‘Not a chance of it,’ said Dr Ford, apparently deprecating this diehard attitude in his old friend. ‘You’ll find he’s a bit woolly at times and sometimes he’ll be woolly on purpose, like a child, but it doesn’t mean anything. Who looks after him?’

  Robin said Dr Shepherd.

  ‘Old woman,’ said Dr Ford, in defiance of all medical etiquette. ‘But he won’t do your father any harm.’

  Robin then mentioned Sister Chiffinch’s kind offer to look in from time to time.

  ‘Not Nurse Chiffinch!’ said Dr Ford. ‘Bless that woman. She is a pearl. I’ll never forget the way she handled young Tony Morland and his schoolfriend who never opened his mouth – Wesendonck, that was the name – when she was looking after George Knox’s daughter Mrs Coates and her first baby. Lord! how Tony did talk. And now he’s in Burma. Four sons Mrs Morland has and all abroad somewhere. And you’ve got a gammy foot, haven’t you,’ said Dr Ford who had an insatiable curiosity about everyone. ‘Mrs Morland said you had.’

  Robin offered to show it to Dr Ford who was delighted, and after a pleasant ten minutes’ talk drove down to visit Sister Chiffinch, while Robin went off to Hall’s End. Here he found Anne on the terrace with her father and mother who asked him to stay to tea, and they sat there talking while Sir Robert looked at a quantity of popular illustrated papers smelling of bad acid drops and as he flung each aside said what scandalous waste of paper the whole thing was.

  ‘Go and get tea, Anne darling,’ said Lady Fielding presently. ‘Gradka is in a fervour of jam-making with our last raspberries before she goes, and I don’t like to disturb her for tea. She doesn’t mind Anne. What has happened to those Adams people, Robin?’

  Robin said he hadn’t seen them since the sale, but he thought from what Jane said that they were leaving tomorrow.

  ‘Just as well,’ said Lady Fielding, dismissing people called Adams from her mind. ‘I was sorry for the girl. She seemed harmless enough, but Robert doesn’t want us to get involved. Thank you, darling,’ she said, as Anne appeared at the french window with the tea-trolley. ‘Robin will give you a hand.’

  Robin helped Anne to lift the trolley over the low sill and Lady Fielding told Anne to go and tell Miss Bunting tea was ready and ask if she would rather have it upstairs.

  ‘Anne told me Miss Bunting had not been feeling well,’ said Lady Fielding, ‘and I thought she didn’t look very fit when I came down. This cold windy summer has done no good to anyone. I expect she will be happier at Lady Graham’s where they are all old friends. Tea, Robert?’

  Sir Robert threw down the last of the illustrated papers and said he couldn’t think why people bought them.

  ‘To look at, darling, I expect,’ said his wife. ‘Is Miss Bunting coming, Anne?’

  ‘Mother!’ said Anne.

  Robin turned quickly to look at her, for her voice was urgent.

  ‘I think she’s ill or something,’ said Anne. ‘She was sitting in her chair having her kind of rest that she has, but she wouldn’t answer me.’

  ‘You pour out Daddy’s tea then,’ said Lady Fielding getting up, ‘and I’ll go and see. I dare say she was asleep.’

  She left the terrace with the unruffled air that carried her through all her committees and various good works. Anne, already reassured by her mother’s calm and confidence, poured out tea and asked Robin to admire her pearl necklace, worn in honour of her parents’ visit. Robin thought what fun it would be to give Anne a really good present, not just a sponge, and determined to create a small sinking fund to be appropriated to her twenty-first birthday. So they talked away and Sir Robert joined in from time to time, and though they were all aware of Lady Fielding telephoning in the hall, they pretended she wasn’t.

  ‘Robert,’ said Lady Fielding from the french window. ‘Miss Bunting isn’t at all well. I’ve just rung up Dr Shepherd’s house, but he is out and his assistant is away. It is a nuisance. I wonder what I had better do next.’

  ‘Oh, Lady Fielding,’ said Robin getting up. ‘Dr Ford is down at the Cottage Hospital with Sister Chiffinch, I think.’

  ‘Thank goodness for a real doctor,’ said Lady Fielding, who had no more opinion than Dr Ford of the Hallbury doctor. ‘I’ll ring up at once.’

  This time there was no pretence of not listening from the party on the terrace. It was soon clear that Dr Ford was coming at once and that Sister Chiffinch was mobilizing in case of need. Lady Fielding went upstairs again and the others sat rather subdued till Dr Ford’s car was heard. Gradka opened the front door and he went upstairs.

  ‘Do you think Miss Bunting is going to die?’ said Anne anxiously.

  ‘I couldn’t say, my dear,’ said her father. ‘I hope not, I don’t know why she should. Dr Ford will tell your mother what it is. Where’s that new book of Mrs Morland’s, Anne? I cannot imagine how she goes on writing a book a year and all exactly alike. Thank you, dear.’

  And Sir Robert took the book which Anne had brought from the drawing-room. Then Dr Ford was heard at the telephone and then he went upstairs again and Lady Fielding came down.

  ‘Oh, mummy, is Miss Bunting going to die?’ said Anne.

  ‘I hope not, darling,’ said her mother a little too cheerfully. ‘Dr Ford is with her and the ambulance is coming to take her to the Cottage Hospital, Robert. He thinks she will be better looked after there. It’s a slight stroke, he says.’

  Robin and Anne, feeling very young and useless, went for a walk in the garden.

  ‘It’s like Angela,’ said Anne after a long silence.

  ‘Angela who?’ said Robin, who had also been immersed in his own thoughts.

  ‘Keats. You know,’ said Anne.

  ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t know her,’ said Robin.

  ‘But you must,’ said Anne rather impatiently. ‘The Eve of St Agnes.

  “Angela the old

  Died palsy-twitched with meagre face deform.”’

  ‘So she did,’ said Robin. ‘But that doesn’t mean that other people will.’

  ‘Besides, her name is Maud, she told me so herself,’ said Anne proudly. ‘I
think hardly anyone else knows.’

  Robin said it was funny that some people never had a Christian name; at least one never heard it. Though he had known Miss Hampton and Miss Bent ever since he was in the Fifth Form at Southbridge School, he said, he hadn’t the faintest idea what their other names were. Anne said she could not imagine Sister Chiffinch having a Christian name and was sure all her friends called her Chiffy; in which she spoke more truly than she knew, for ever since that excellent woman had begun her training she had never been called anything but Chiffy, even by her pals Wardy and Heathy that she shared the flat with.

  But in spite of light conversation they continued to feel young and useless, and also rather frightened and, in Anne’s case, to feel rather cold. So cold in fact that she shivered as they stood looking at nothing in particular in the kitchen garden. Robin asked if anything was wrong.

  ‘Only being cold,’ said Anne, looking at him with a mute appeal for help.

  ‘Poor old silly, why didn’t you put a coat on?’ said Robin. ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do. Go into the drawing-room and light the fire. I’m sure your mother won’t mind.’

  This excellent and practical idea made Anne cheer up like anything. Even as they were going back to the house a few cold spattering drops of rain were blown into their faces from a cold grey sky, and Robin said it was bound to do that after the way the Minister of Agriculture had said it would be a bumper harvest, and probably they would die of cold and starvation, while any food there was would be going to Mixo-Lydia; also any decent clothes and all the coal, he said rather crossly, for he did not like to see Anne shiver and was himself considerably disturbed by Miss Bunting’s illness. For we are all apt to look upon our elders as permanent and to resent any sign on their part of derogating from this state; probably because it brings the thought of mortality too close to our own dear selves. But by the time they had shut the french windows and lighted the fire they both felt happier, and though the cold rain was pelting down on the terrace, it seemed much more probable that Miss Bunting would soon be better.

  Robin, considering with quite fatherly care that Anne might be frightened when the ambulance came, began to talk to her about Southbridge and its glories, and drew so lively and pleasant a picture of a schoolmaster’s life there, the bed-sitting-room he would have, the extreme niceness of the senior housemaster Everard Carter and his wife, the strong probability that he would himself be a housemaster some day that although the ambulance with its good St John attendants, all Hallbury men, came to the door, steps went quietly upstairs and came slowly and heavily downstairs, and quiet voices talked in the hall, Anne felt much warmer and happier and was sure Miss Bunting would be quite well almost at once.

  ‘You’ll need a wife, won’t you, if you are a housemaster?’ said Anne, after considering the whole affair.

  Robin said he supposed he would. One could be a bachelor housemaster, but then one might take to secret drinking or marry one’s matron. And he happened to know, he said, that Mr Birkett preferred married men, because they were less apt to want to move on.

  ‘“High hopes faint on a warm hearthstone,”’ said Anne thoughtfully. ‘I think Kipling’s marvellous, Robin, don’t you?’

  Robin said on the whole he did. And then they had a silly conversation about wives for Robin, and Robin said he would marry Heather Adams and have six little boys exactly like their maternal grandfather, called Sam, Ham, Jam, Lamb, Pram and Ram, and Mr Adams would give so much money to the school that they would make him headmaster. All of which silly conversation made Anne laugh so much that she stopped feeling cold. And when Lady Fielding came in, she said how sensible to light the fire and she was going to have done it herself, and Miss Bunting looked very comfortable in the ambulance and would Robin stay to supper. Robin said he would love to, but he thought he had better go back to the Rectory as his father was expecting him, and Lady Fielding said she was sorry, but he was quite right.

  So Robin said goodbye, and after supper Sir Robert read aloud from Bleak House and Anne felt safe and warm. Sister Chiffinch telephoned about ten o’clock and said Miss Bunting was very comfortable and not to worry, and she would ring up again next morning. So Anne went to bed in quite good spirits.

  If Anne had been a little older, she would have known that the expression ‘very comfortable’ as applied to an ill person, means exactly what the relations, friends, or nurse in charge would like it to mean. From the patient’s point of view it means more often than not a night of considerable pain, several bad nightmares, being woken when you least wish it and not knowing where you are when you wake up, so that you feel quite mad. Miss Bunting lay quietly enough at the Cottage Hospital. It was strangely difficult to speak, so she was silent. Her right arm felt unaccountably heavy, so she did not attempt to use it. Her self-control, learnt through a long lifetime, was unimpaired and Sister Chiffinch was entirely right in saying what she said about the Miss Bunting whom she could see.

  But Miss Bunting was also living another life of which Sister Chiffinch knew nothing, of which even Miss Bunting’s nearest friends were ignorant. For five or six years the old governess, so many of whose pupils had fallen in the last war, so many of whose older pupils’ children were falling and would yet fall in this war, had had from time to time a dream that she flew – not in an aeroplane but with invisible wings – to Germany, and alighting in Hitler’s dining-room just as he was beginning his lunch, stood in front of him and said, ‘Kill me, but don’t kill my pupils, because I can’t bear it.’ The dream had always tailed off into incoherence, but it came again and again, and Miss Bunting had a sneaking feeling, which she condemned firmly as superstitious and even prayed against on Sundays, though with no real fervour, that if only she could keep asleep till Hitler answered, the war would somehow come to an end. But so far she had always woken too soon.

  During the night, lying very still in her bed at the Cottage Hospital, unobtrusively but vigilantly watched first by Sister Chiffinch and then by the night-nurse, Miss Bunting for the last time rose on invisible wings and flew over to Germany. Alighting in Hitler’s dining-room just as he was beginning his lunch, she stood in front of him and said, ‘Kill me, but don’t kill my pupils, because I can’t bear it,’ adding the words, ‘and if you touch David Leslie, my favourite pupil, I shall kill you.’ With an immense effort she remained asleep just long enough to be certain that she had won. Then Hitler swelled and swelled till the whole room and the whole world was full of him and burst, and all Miss Bunting’s old pupils came running up to her. Her heart was so full of joy that it stopped beating, and kind Sister Chiffinch rang Lady Fielding up at half-past seven on Sunday morning to break the news.

  The Fieldings were not altogether surprised, but truly distressed, for they had grown to respect and value the old governess during the year she had spent with Anne. There was very little to do. Dr Ford and Sister Chiffinch were at hand, Mrs Marling and Lady Graham were told on the telephone, and Lady Graham’s mother Lady Emily Leslie sent word that if Mrs Marling agreed, she would like the old governess to be buried in Rushwater churchyard, as David had always been so fond of her.

  ‘I think,’ said Agnes Graham’s cooing voice to Lady Fielding, ‘that darling mamma is going to design a tombstone with doves on it. Darling Emmy and James and Clarissa remember her quite well of course, so does darling John, but I think darling Robert and Edith are too small. We were all so fond of dear Bunny. Darling David will be dreadfully unhappy when he hears, and my husband will be quite unhappy too,’ though whether Major-General Sir Robert Graham, KGB, would have subscribed to this statement, we do not know. Probably not.

  But though all was arranged and no one was truly unhappy about Miss Bunting, a shadow of sadness hung over Hall’s End. Not only was Miss Bunting’s death the last of an excellent and faithful governess and companion, but with her, so the Fieldings and many other friends of the old governess felt, one of the remaining links with the old world of an ordered society had snapped. Nearly
everything for which Miss Bunting had stood was disintegrating in the great upheaval of civilization.

  ‘It almost makes me envy the Adamses of this world,’ said Lady Fielding to her husband.

  ‘No need to, my dear,’ said her husband dryly.

  ‘You know what I mean, Robert,’ said his wife. ‘They are on the top now and they don’t miss what is gone, because they never knew it, and they are going to make a horrible new world just as they like it, with no room for us. We are nearly as dead as poor Miss Bunting.’

  ‘I don’t altogether agree with you,’ said Sir Robert. ‘Adams is very wealthy and has a good deal of pull. But it will be quite a long time before he and his lot can do without us and our lot. He won’t turn that girl of his into a lady.’

  Lady Fielding said she was rather glad that Anne had not seen so much of Heather lately, and then the subject dropped as it was time to go to church, and Lady Fielding said she had wondered about slight mourning, but as it was summer she thought it wouldn’t matter. This may sound unreasonable, but all those readers who know how much easier it is to mourn in a fur coat which covers everything and a black hat, than in a summer frock, will understand. So Anne, who had fallen head over heels into a volume of Poe’s poetry which she had taken to bed on the preceding night, was wrenched from her literary pursuits and accompanied her parents to St Hall Friars, all in their ordinary clothes.