She looked dazed. ‘Hullo, Silverman,’ said Thomas. ‘You must meet the young Mrs Pagett, you know.’
Flora looked round at the butler and then looked down.
‘Good afternoon, Mr Thomas. Good afternoon, madam. I am sure I speak for all the staff when I say we are delighted to make your acquaintance. I trust you had a good journey?’
‘Oh – oh, yes, thank you, indeed. I’m sure I’m delighted to make your acquaintance – Silverman.’
‘He’s been with the family since the year dot,’ said Thomas, as they were walking along behind him towards the library, arm in arm.
When they were announced Nicholas laid down his book, looked up and smiled at the shy figures who were standing some paces in front of the doorway. He began to wheel towards them and they walked towards him. ‘Hullo, Father. I’ve brought Flora to see you.’
‘I’m pleased to meet you, Mr Pagett,’ said Flora loudly, holding out her hand, which he enclosed.
‘Sit down, Flo,’ said her husband gently.
‘Yes, sit down, my dear. What a pretty little thing you are, I must say. You had a good journey, I trust?’
‘Oh, yes, indeed we did, Mr Pagett. And we saw lots of English countryside. I mean I did,’ said Flora, blushing, and Thomas patted her hand while his father looked on.
‘Ah,’ said Nicholas. ‘Different from the United States, eh?’
‘Oh, yes, Mr Pagett.’ Flora knew how to talk about the difference between England and America, the whole of America, although she had only once left Louisiana to pay a visit to her mother’s family in Chicago.
‘And what strikes you most about England, my dear?’ said Nicholas.
Thomas sat back and smiled at his wife.
‘Oh, the servants. I mean being white, not negroes. You don’t have white servants in New Orleans, or anywhere in the South.’
‘Yes, you’re very pretty indeed, my dear,’ said Nicholas, without wanting to annoy and puzzle Thomas and Flora, or make them uncomfortable.
*
Two days later, Nicholas asked Flora to push him up and down the terrace when it was time for his nurse to do so.
‘Oh, you mustn’t put yourself to the trouble, Mrs Pagett,’ said the nurse. ‘The bathchair will be too heavy for you. I’ll take old Mr Pagett, as usual.’
‘I can manage,’ mumbled Flora.
‘Young Mrs Pagett is wheeling me today, nurse. You might mix me a nice cup of beef tea, I think.’ When they were out on the South Front Nicholas said, ‘Nursery routine, that’s what I’m subjected to.’
‘Oh, but you’ll soon be better, Mr Pagett.’
‘Not I. When one gets to my age, my dear, one’s bones don’t knit. I shall be in a bathchair till I’m in my coffin.’
‘Oh no, Mr Pagett,’ she said. Her own chairbound great-uncle spoke in such a way.
‘We’re having an Indian summer, I do believe,’ sighed Nicholas.
‘The last few days have been awfully fine, I do agree with you,’ stammered Flora.
Flora, straining a little, pushed him along. He listened to her skirts dragging over the flagstones, and to her breathing. Someone, probably Susan, had told him that Flora had an autumnal loveliness, and had mentioned her eyes the colour of woodsmoke, her russet hair, and her warm skin with deep brown freckles under the eyes. Nicholas had never thought of autumn as plump and ripe, like Flora. He wondered whether she loved Thomas, and it occurred to him that it was five years or more since he had seen a girl of Flora’s age, although it was true that his lanky, bookish grandaughter, Charlotte, was almost the same age. He sighed again, deeply, and Flora looked worried. Nicholas wished that he could turn round and see her, walking along the terrace, but she would think it odd if he turned his head.
‘I oughtn’t to have been a recluse,’ said Nicholas.
‘Were you – I mean are you, Mr Pagett?’ said Flora.
‘I was and I am, my dear. And I always will be. I wasn’t when I was young, though.’
‘Oh well – it’s – it’s difficult for a young person to be a recluse.’
‘It is if he’s a fortune to make.’
‘A fortune to make?’ They paused, reached the end. of the terrace, and slowly turned round.
‘Didn’t Thomas tell you I’m a self-made man? A tradesman? Didn’t he now?’
‘No, sir. He – he said you lived in Cheshire, and – and Mrs Pagett comes from one of the oldest families in England. But Mr Pagett, it’s really nothing to – to – I mean, my ma – she’s from Chicago – she always says a man should make his money, not just be born to it.’
‘Augusta does come from one of the oldest families in England, my dear, that’s quite true.’ He sighed again, and wondered briefly whether Flora had flushed. As they moved back across the terrace he polished his spectacles and looked down into the garden.
At the bottom the pond was olive green in the shade of the trees. Nicholas was long-sighted and could see the bursting bulrushes, and the yellow willow leaves, washed into an inlet of the lake. It occurred to him that only once or twice since he had come to Lynmore had he been as far as the water’s edge. He brought to mind a picture, which was not a memory, of Octavius, Susan and Sophia playing croquet on the rough, daisy-spotted lawn above, in the year 1880. He thought that Sophia had had the same quality of skin as Flora, but he remembered his youngest daughter’s features as little and sharp. Nicholas had not seen her for nine years.
He lost interest. The rest of the garden was the same as always at this season, with straggling autumn flowers and brown, untidy shrubs grouped between slipped yew hedges and trimmed banks of grey lavender. Nicholas turned his head towards the house and he could feel Flora’s eyes on his profile, although her lids were dropped. As she pushed him along the South Front he gazed at the passing yellow brick and red tiles, the crimson Virginia creeper and the coloured glass in some of the windows, green and blue and red, winking white in the sun.
‘Do you like it, my dear?’
‘Yes, indeed, Mr Pagett.’
‘I built it, you know. I expect you did know that. I wanted it colourful.’
‘It’s a lovely house, truly, Mr Pagett. I like a colourful house, too.’
‘The inside isn’t quite as colourful as the outside, is it?’
‘No, I don’t think it is.’
‘I always liked the outside. It’s cheerful, isn’t it? A spot of colour. Vulgar, of course.’ At last he turned his head right round and saw her.
‘Oh, Mr Pagett, what nonsense!’
‘You’ve got spirit, my dear.’ He patted her hand. ‘I want you to like it, Flora, and your children, too, because when I’m gone you’re going to be Mrs Pagett. How do you like the idea?’
‘Very much indeed, sir,’ said Flora, pushing ahead.
Very gently he said, ‘Now you’re talking like what my wife might call a bread-and-butter miss.’ Augusta had called Flora that. ‘You’ve got to love the old place, my dear, I’m relying on you. You remember that.’
‘Thomas loves it, sir. And I just know I shall come to love it too,’ she said, very shyly.
‘Don’t you call me sir, Flora. I won’t have it.’ He stretched and squeezed her left hand, closed about the handle of his chair, with his right.
‘It’s getting chilly, Mr Pagett. Shall we go in?’
‘Are you cold, my dear?’
‘A little, sir.’
When they were in the library once more, Nicholas said, ‘I do hate to be old, Flora.’
‘Now, Mr Pagett, you’re not really old.’ He saw her blush. ‘You know, I believe you’re like my Great Uncle Brett: you’re hoaxing. You’re pretending to be old.’
‘You’re an impertinent minx, my dear.’
He pinched her cheek this time, and his grip was not feeble, and his fingertips were horny. Flora was used to being pinched and cuddled and teased by old gentlemen who said that they wished they were young. She knew they never could be, and she was not obliged to flirt with them, a
lthough, had she not found Thomas, she might have had to marry one, had he been an earl or a duke. She left Nicholas, went out alone, and on her walk, she sometimes imagined her fiercely handsome husband at her side.
*
Nicholas did not talk about Flora when he was alone with Thomas, until that evening. Then he praised her, and said that she was unlike any woman he had ever met. He begged Thomas to look after her and make her happy as though Thomas, who was very much in love although he did not tell his father so, did not intend to do so. While Nicholas spoke of Flora he said nothing, but gazed into his port, red in the face although everything his father said about his wife was true.
Augusta had angered Thomas by calling Flora insipid and praising her fortune, and her tractability. Nicholas suddenly asked whether Augusta, besides insulting Flora as he knew she had done, which he said was to be expected because Thomas was her only son, had objected to his marrying a girl hardly out of the schoolroom, when he himself was young for marriage and a full establishment of his own.
Neither of Thomas’s parents had made much comment, when he first told them of his intentions, on his marrying, of occupying the house in Bryanston Square, standing for Parliament and planning a complete London life like that of his sisters, when he was not quite twenty-four and the youngest of the children.
CHAPTER 23
GENTLEMAN OF THIS PARISH
When Nicholas died, a few days before the celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, Thomas found out that in his will he had left considerable legacies, besides those to Augusta, who had her marriage settlement, and to himself, to whom the bulk of Nicholas’s fortune naturally passed. Sarah, Susan and Sophia were to have five thousand pounds apiece, Flora was bequeathed ten thousand pounds, and twenty thousand pounds were left to a Mrs Ruby Baldock of St Catherine’s Street, Congleton. There were no intimate bequests.
*
It was thought wise to bury Nicholas quickly, because of the extreme heat, and so he was interred on the day the village people celebrated the Jubilee with a large picnic, and dancing afterwards, organized by Susan and the Parish Council and held in a fallow field just beyond the park.
The Pagetts passed through the village on the way to church, quite early in the morning when everyone was only preparing for festivities. The street was hung with greenery and paper streamers, and the family all reflected that, had Augusta been going through to her burial, the village would not have hung out carnival colours, but only Union Jacks and portraits of the Queen.
At the graveyard gates Octavius met the carriages and the hearse. The coffin was unloaded and Octavius and the clerks chanted as they walked towards the church: ‘We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out … blessed be the name of the Lord.’ The mourners followed in file.
Inside the church it was not cool, but cold: dark grey as usual because trees clustered too thickly outside for much light to enter, with the candlesticks and altar rails and banner of the Virgin Mary gleaming dimly. The church doors were left open and a thick shaft of bright and dusty light fell behind the family, seated in the front of the nave.
‘I held my tongue, and spake nothing: I kept silence, yea, even from good words, but it was pain and grief to me.’
Emily Templecombe was weeping and sneezing with hay-fever, and Susan leant over and gave her another handkerchief, but said nothing and sat with her hands folded beneath her lowered chin. She glanced at Augusta, who was staring straight ahead, directly at the coffin. Thomas sat next to his mother, and on his other side there was Flora, who was crying quietly. Her nose was very red.
‘Deliver me from all mine offences: and make me not a rebuke unto the foolish.’
Behind Susan, Laurence and Lavinia Sacheverell were bickering over the prayer book they were sharing and both their parents were trying to silence them. Susan’s daughters were looking at Mrs Baldock, who had asked Augusta’s permission to come to the funeral and was sitting apart from the family. Gwendoline and Christina were neither whispering nor giggling, but they looked puzzled and cross. Susan herself studied the woman: she was a blonde, mildly pretty, well-preserved widow of fifty, carefully dressed in mourning. Her face was puffy with tears and she averted her eyes from the coffin.
‘Comfort us again now after the time that thou hast plagued us: and for the years wherein we have suffered adversity.’
It had been agreed to tell the children that Mrs Baldock was a distant cousin of Nicholas’s whom he had helped when she was in difficulties.
The lesson was read and afterwards the coffin was borne from the church, and everyone followed, and shuffled round the grave.
The sky was turquoise and the sun was white. Nicholas’s grave was next to a holly tree but at the moment this cast no shade and the family stood in the glare, brushed by long daisies, branching buttercups, and powdery flowering grasses, which distressed Susan, who also suffered from hay fever.
Earth was thrown upon the coffin and the pebbles in it rattled on the lid. ‘… our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change our vile body, that it may be like unto his glorious body …’ The first foot of soil was pale brown with drought but, beneath, it was rich and damp. Suddenly a worm wriggled out of the earth above the coffin and Sarah, the only one to see it, gasped aloud, and murmured the quotation she knew: ‘men have died, and worms have eaten them, but not for love’. Edwin and Sophia glanced at one another and Edwin pinched his sister-in-law. Sarah believed all that was said about the vile and glorious body. She herself had grown almost fat in the last two years: she was not flabby, but her flesh was thick and swollen with food and drink.
Flora had jumped when she heard Sarah, for whenever she had been with Flora, Sarah had said nothing which was not calm, polite, brief and obvious, although Thomas had told her that his eldest half-sister was quite otherwise, and had mentioned the scene which Sarah had enacted at the ball two and a half years before, adding that Sophia had thought it funny. Flora had met these two only a few times: she was better acquainted with Susan, who had spent a month with them at Bryanston Square. She thought the tall, slender, gay Sophia the most elegant of women, and wondered whether she had been any different when she was young. Susan had said that Sophia had been awkward, pert and eager to cover up her shyness, which had been almost as bad as Flora’s, and that she had not had the comfort of a husband until she was into her twenties. Susan, who was very kind to everyone, had been warmly joking with Flora.
Flora had just been told that she might be pregnant and she felt sick, terrified of miscarrying, whenever she thought of a manicule growing, cells multiplying very rapidly, as Edwin Sacheverell had explained to her yesterday, inside her damp little womb. None of the other women round the grave had a chance of being with child. Susan saw Flora’s pink, worried face lose colour, and thought she saw her sway. She darted round to the other side of the grave, making Thomas look angry and Octavius stumble, drew Flora aside and made her sit down on a gravestone in the shade. Flora started to cry, noisily, and Susan kept an arm round her for some time. ‘… That it may please thee, of thy gracious goodness, shortly to accomplish the number of thine elect, and to hasten thy kingdom …’ Susan knew the order of burial, and she whispered to Flora that there was now only the Collect to get through.
*
A cold luncheon, which all the mourners except Mrs Baldock were to eat, was to be served at half-past twelve. The collation did not immediately follow the funeral, because Augusta said it was disgusting to feed over the remains of the dead; so when the family returned to the Hall there were several hours to wait, and the children were sent out into the garden. Everyone else went into different rooms. In each room the mirrors were veiled and the blinds lowered, as was the custom. The blinds had always been kept down in summertime, in order to prevent the fading of the carpets and hangings, and so only the mirrors now looked strange. The interior was almost exactly as it had been in 1875.
The cold collation ordered by Augusta was very go
od: there was iced asparagus soup, salmon trout, cold beef, chicken and tongue, potato salad and cold curried eggs, vanilla cake, raspberries and a Stilton cheese. Augusta ate something of everything, as Sarah also did, and drank something different with each dish, which Sarah did not. Susan was reminded of the luncheon they had eaten when they first came to be presented to Augusta; she wondered whether the others also remembered.
‘We ought really to have had that woman back for luncheon,’ said Augusta. It was the first thing she had said to anyone since breakfast, when she and Thomas had talked about their own burials in harsh voices; for Thomas, who had left the Catholic Church for the Protestant religion when he was at Oxford, was not to be buried with the Fitzwilliams beneath the chapel. As Augusta spoke, everyone over eighteen years old looked down at his plate, and everyone under looked up.
‘For heaven’s sake, mother!’ said Thomas. ‘Carrying Christian charity a bit too far, don’t you think?’ he added in a bored voice.
‘No,’ said Augusta, watching him. ‘The woman was obviously devoted to my husband, and if she made him happy in the last fifteen years I owe her something, because it meant he did not plague me. I ought to have invited her to luncheon. I doubt very much she would have accepted, don’t you? Not brassy at all, I thought And you’re a sentimental, hypocritical, middle-class snob, Thomas.’
‘You said, mother,’ said Thomas a moment later, ‘that you had no idea father had – that this cousin, whoever she is, existed – when I told you about … I see you knew all about everything,’ he finished, red in the face.
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