Cluny Brown

by Margery Sharp

  Andrew picked up an iris and began to bite the stalk.

  “Cluny Brown wants a dog, and from something she said I believe the Colonel would give her one of Roderick’s puppies. Should you mind?”

  “Of course not. Don’t eat that, dear, it may be poisonous. But Mrs. Maile would. She doesn’t like dogs or cats.”

  “My dear Mother, you give orders here, not Mrs. Maile.”

  “Perhaps I do,” admitted Lady Carmel—though not as though she were very sure of it. “All the same, Mrs. Maile has been with us thirty years, and puppies do so chew things. When did Brown tell you all this?”

  “I met her out with Roddy. The Colonel lets her take him on her afternoon off.”

  “And did you go a walk with her?” murmured Lady Carmel absently.

  “No, darling. She bolted. I do wish you’d reason with Mailey.”

  Lady Carmel stepped back to look at her finished jar. All through the conversation her clever hands had moved quietly and deftly, leading their own sensible life, and now they had something to show for themselves.

  “I once,” she said thoughtfully, “many years ago, knew of a butler who hunted.”

  “Good for him,” said Andrew.

  “No, dear, it wasn’t good for him. He broke his neck trying to follow a young man in the Hussars over a bullfinch.”

  Lady Carmel sounded quite upset—though whether over the long-ago fate of the hunting butler, or the dogless state of her new parlour-maid, Andrew could not be sure. At any rate, she was upset.

  IV

  When not going on walks with Lady Carmel the Professor spent a good deal of time in the stables. On the morning after his arrival, as soon as they had seen John start like a rocket back for London, Andrew led the way through the pleasant yard and up a steep outside stair to a small hayloft. It was a hayloft no longer: under the freshly-cleaned window stood a table, before it a chair; there were also a book-shelf, a waste-paper-basket and a camp-bed.

  “The oil-stove’s coming to-morrow,” explained Andrew.

  Mr. Belinski gazed thoughtfully round. It didn’t look quite like a study, nor yet quite like a prison: what it most strongly suggested was a hide-out. Reading his young companion’s mind with great accuracy, Belinski saw himself leaning from that window pulling up provisions on the end of a string.

  “My very dear friend,” he said gently, “I assure you this is not necessary.”

  Andrew looked unnaturally stupid.

  “I thought you might like to work here sometimes. I know my mother says no one uses the library, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t in and out half the morning doing flowers.”

  “But that is not what you had in mind when you arranged me this little room. You thought, this is where he will hide, when they come after him!”

  Andrew flushed.

  “All right, I’m a well-meaning ass. Wash it out.”

  He looked so crest-fallen, however, that Belinski said he would certainly use the loft to work in, so long as Andrew did not sit outside with a shot-gun on his knee; and on these terms the loft was a success. As time went on Belinski used it more and more, until he spent a great part of the day there—engaged, it was believed, on a new book. He never actually said so, but that was the general impression, work on a new book being considered a suitable occupation for him; and a great comfort it was to Lady Carmel to know in the first place where he was, and in the second, what he was doing there. Within the house Belinski found another occupation, that of bringing up to date the library catalogue. This had not been properly kept since the days of Sir Henry’s father; Sir Henry was no bookman, but on his accession, with filial piety, he lodged an order in Exeter for new works to the tune of fifty pounds a year. They had been accumulating ever since—all good solid stuff, biography, travel, memoirs—in complete disorder, so that the Professor’s offer to sort them was a perfect godsend.

  “I like the feller,” said Sir Henry. “Wherever Andrew picked him up, I like him.” He came up behind his wife (they had both just finished dressing for dinner) and stared at her through the glass. “Allie,” said Sir Henry, “doesn’t it strike you there’s something wrong?”

  “Wrong with what, dear?”

  “With all these places abroad. Here’s the Professor, as nice a young feller as you could wish to meet, clever and all that as well, and Andrew tells me he can’t go home because of some political dog fight. There’s something wrong somewhere.”

  “Andrew,” said Lady Carmel, adjusting a diamond star, “says everything’s wrong, all over Europe. He says we ought never to have supported Franco. Dear, who was Franco?”

  “Spanish feller,” said Sir Henry. “Did Andrew say that?”

  Lady Carmel nodded through the glass.

  “He says we’re going to have another war.… Harry.”

  In the glass, their old eyes met. They were an old couple to have so young a son; Lady Carmel, over thirty at his birth, had now reached the point where her appearance was stabilized for the next twenty years. Sir Henry was seventy. He could remember the Zulu wars, and the Boer War, and the Great War; and they had hardly affected him. In 1914 he had offered his services, and been told to grow wheat. But if another war came, it would take Andrew. He looked at his wife through the mirror and gave her the only advice he knew.

  “No use thinking of it till it comes,” said Sir Henry.

  “I try not to, dear.”

  “But I tell you one thing,” said Sir Henry stoutly. “I remember in ’14 there was a fuss about the Colonel’s governess, poor creature, because she was German. If it should happen again, which God forbid, I won’t have the Professor hounded.”

  V

  So the grain of sand was received into the oyster, and the oyster got to work. Within a few weeks the Professor’s writing had become as much an accepted feature of life at Friars Carmel as her ladyship’s flowers: Mrs. Maile and Mr. Syrett referred to it with respect, feeling it did the house credit; even Ernest Beer the groom, after watching the Professor’s comings and goings with deep suspicion, admitted him to be a wonderful hard toiler.

  In point of fact, Mr. Belinski was not yet actually toiling at all. He was preparing to toil. Every day he spread out a quantity of paper, saw that his pen was filled, and then settled down to read a book. Or to draw elaborate pictures of castles. Or simply to sit, staring out at the sky, promising himself that when such a cloud had passed, or such a shadow touched the sill, he would take up his pen and begin. This state of affairs was as familiar as it was odious to him, but so far as he knew he could do nothing about it. He had to wait until his hand moved of its own accord and the words began to come out of the pen. In the meantime, any distraction was welcome, and he was very pleased, one afternoon about three o’clock, to see Cluny Brown walk slowly across the yard.

  Cluny had discovered the stables soon after her arrival, and been chased out by Ernest Beer, who nursed a secret resentment against all the indoor staff, thinking that if he’d been Sir Henry he’d have sacked the lot and bought horses. For there was only one horse left, the old hunter Golden Boy. The names above half a dozen empty stalls—GALGA and COQUETTE, NUTMEG, LADY MAB, DANDY and BROWN PETER—were but sad reminders of a better day, upon which Ernest Beer liked to brood undisturbed. On this occasion, however, Cluny had seen him stumping off to the village, and the coast was clear.

  Believing herself to be alone, therefore, she was considerably startled when Mr. Belinski addressed her. He was leaning out of his window, his body in shadow, his head projecting like a gargoyle and in Cluny’s opinion just about as ugly.

  “Hi!” said Mr. Belinski. “What is your name?”

  “Cluny Brown,” said Cluny.

  “Come up and see my room, Cluny Brown.”

  But Cluny stood where she was at the bottom of the steps, gazing up at him. In her black stuff dress, still lacking apron and collar, she looked curiously timeless; she might have been any girl in any century—or all the young girls who in all centuries have stood,
looking up, at the sound of a man’s voice. She summed them, as a figure in a ballet sums religion, or knighthood, or fear, or love.

  “Come up, you black cat,” said Adam Belinski.

  Cluny shook her head.

  “Why not? Are you afraid of me?”

  “Ought I to be?” asked Cluny interestedly.

  “That depends on what you consider the object of existence. What is your object of existence?”

  Cluny considered; for this was a subject on which every one else seemed to have so much more definite opinions than she did herself. Mrs. Maile and Aunt Addie Trumper and Mr. Porritt, for instance, were all unanimous: in their view the object of her existence was to become a well-trained parlourmaid. Mr. Ames thought she ought to go to parties. A gentleman in a ’bus had once advised her to become a model. But Cluny herself was still uncertain.

  “I want something to happen,” she said vaguely. “I want things happening all the time.…”

  “Then make them happen. Why not?”

  “You don’t know my Uncle Arn,” said Cluny sombrely. “The minute anything happens, he stops it. I dare say it’s on account of being a plumber. The way he goes on, I might be a burst pipe.”

  Mr. Belinski, who was finding this conversation interesting but obscure, said he would like to make Uncle Arn’s acquaintance.

  “You can’t,” said Cluny regretfully. “He’s in London. I’m from London too, I don’t really belong here.” She sighed. “As a matter of fact, I didn’t seem to belong there either. I don’t seem to belong anywhere.”

  “Like me,” said Mr. Belinski. “The situation has its advantages.” He met Cluny’s surprised look and nodded. “For instance, if one belongs nowhere, if one is not already rooted, one has choice. One can regard the countries of the world as a man regards a house-agent’s list. That is not quite true for me, because there are several countries where I should be very uncomfortable indeed. But for you, I imagine, the whole universe is to let.”

  Cluny listened to him as she had once, at a church concert, listened to a poem about people who ate lotus (which she imagined as some sort of melon). She couldn’t make head or tail of it, but it sounded lovely. Now she had the same, to her very rare, feeling of mental excitement, the sensation of being on the verge of a great discovery.

  “Say that again,” she ordered sharply. “That last bit.”

  “For you, I imagine, the whole universe is to let,” repeated Mr. Belinski obligingly. “Now come up here.”

  But Cluny was no longer interested in Mr. Belinski, only in his words. She wanted to take that magic phrase away with her and examine it carefully, by herself. Without even another upward look she just said, “No, thanks,” and walked off.

  Chapter 9

  I

  At the moment Cluny’s universe was the smallest she had ever known.

  This fact, when she came to contemplate it, surprised her, for she had not been aware of any narrowing of interest. In a world containing and contained by no more than Friars Carmel and its demesne, the ten minutes’ run to the Duff-Grahams’ and a couple of square miles explored with Roddy, Cluny had lived as usual at full stretch. Her Devonshire world might be small, but it was new—and also full of house work. Her life was a good deal busier than had been her life in London, and certainly less lonely. And—again when she came to consider it—was her Paddington patch in town really larger than her Friars Carmel patch in the country? Had she not, like most Londoners, lived as much in a village as any born villager? “I didn’t get about enough,” thought Cluny, mourning her lost opportunities.…

  Yet she had tried. She had got to the Ritz. She had got as far as Chelsea—put her nose, so to speak, to a couple of doors—and each time been pulled back by Uncle Arn, or Aunt Addie, people who knew what was best for her, only their idea of the best was being shut up in a box—in a series of smaller and smaller boxes until you were safe at last in the smallest box of all, with a nice tombstone on top. Cluny of course exaggerated; but meditating on Mr. Belinski’s words she did most bitterly regret the life she and Mr. Porritt might have, but hadn’t led. Well-off as he was, Mr. Porritt could have gone anywhere. He could have taken her, Cluny, anywhere. “He could have bought an opera-hat,” thought Cluny Brown.

  Preyed upon by such wild imaginings, Cluny’s reason did not exactly totter, but she passed a day or two in a very surly frame of mind, her resentment on the point of crystallizing into a grievance, her temper in danger of being spoiled by Mr. Porritt’s cloth caps. But a fortunate circumstance supervened: Mrs. Maile developed a cough which caught her in the chest, and this had the effect of enlarging Cluny’s universe to take in the village of Friars Carmel, in which, though it lay only a mile off, she had thitherto never set foot. (“Just shows you!” thought Cluny obscurely.) There is always something stimulating about being dispatched post-haste to a chemist’s, especially on an early-closing day—it was Thursday—when the chemist has to be summoned from his private life. “Ring the bell,” directed Mrs. Maile, “and tell Mr. Wilson you’re from me”; armed with which countersign Cluny set off at top speed, and feeling almost as important as a plumber.

  II

  It was a mixed sort of afternoon, now bright, now dull, with a wind blowing down the valley. This meant rain, but Cluny wore her mackintosh simply because it was the only outdoor garment she possessed apart from her best black coat. It was the first time she had been to the village, but as Mrs. Maile said, she couldn’t possibly miss it, since it lay across the main road to Carmel. To the main road Cluny therefore kept, but with a speculative eye to the lanes which ran up on her right and down on her left: one of the former particularly attracted her, it was so deep and narrow, like a gorge between cliffs of red earth. She determined to come back and explore it with Roddy. A little farther on a runnel of water no thicker than her wrist fell out of the hedge into a rough stone basin: a good place to give Roddy a drink. (Cluny would have had a drink herself, for the sheer romance of it, but she still mistrusted all water that didn’t come out of a tap.) At every step almost there was something to look at, something to come back to; and with an unusual flight of her town-bred imagination Cluny suddenly thought that if she came back this time next year, everything would be more interesting still, because she would remember this walk, and all the changes that had come between. She had a glimmering, in fact, of the true pleasure of country life, which is not to be enjoyed merely at a summer week-end; the word continuity was not in her vocabulary, but she groped for it; and in her shaken-up frame of mind these new ideas’ struck home with extraordinary force. Because if there was space, there was also depth: you could unroll all the countries of the world, thin as maps, or dig down among the roots of your own patch. “Or dig down for a grave,” thought Cluny. She was thinking almost too much, she was getting muddled; but swift motion in the open air saved her from the worst consequences. After half a mile Cluny stopped thinking altogether and simply enjoyed her walk at her normal level of consciousness—which (when taking outdoor exercise) was about the same as Roddy’s.

  The village of Friars Carmel is large enough to give the name of Lesser Friars to an outlying hamlet, and to support three public houses—the Lion, the Artichoke, and the Load of Hay; it is also far enough (five miles) from Carmel to need half a dozen shops of its own. All these, when Cluny passed outside, had their shutters up, but she at once identified the chemist’s by the three coloured jars appearing in the top part of the window. Above them a very neat fascia displayed the name of T. WILSON in black letters on a white ground; the blind drawn behind the door repeated it in white on red. It was by far the sprucest shop in Friars Carmel.

  Cluny rang the bell and waited, though with fading hopes: it was inconceivable to her that any one should voluntarily spend such an afternoon indoors. But this was what the whole population seemed to be doing: not a soul was in sight. The street was deserted, and so still that Cluny distinctly smelt her own mackintosh.

  The sun went in and came out again.
Cluny was just about to ring for the second time when the door was opened by a tall, youngish–middle-aged man who stood looking at her through horn-rimmed glasses.

  “I’m sorry to trouble you,” said Cluny politely. “Are you the chemist?”

  He nodded.

  “I’ve come for Mrs. Maile’s cough medicine. She’s sorry to trouble you on a Thursday, but it’s taking her in the chest.”

  “Come in,” said Mr. Wilson.

  He stepped back and Cluny followed him into the shop. She could see at once that it was very high-class. There were glass counters on each side, running up to a glass door at the back, curtained on the inside: the familiar names of PEAR’S, POND’S, VINOLIA, ODORONO and COTY met the eye on every hand. There was an upright weighing-machine, and one with a basket, for infants. A boxed-off corner accommodated various scientific-looking appliances on a white enamel shelf.

  “What a lovely shop!” exclaimed Cluny impulsively.

  “I try to keep up-to-date,” said Mr. Wilson.

  He spoke with a certain sternness, as though implying that other people didn’t. He had a very faint Scots accent.

  “It’s just like London,” went on Cluny—giving the Cockney’s compliment.

  “There’ll be finer shops there by far.”

  “Well, of course they’re bigger. Some of them have libraries.”

  “I consider libraries no part of a chemist’s business,” said Mr. Wilson.

  But he looked pleased. After a moment or two, while he was putting up Mrs. Maile’s bottle, and Cluny stood about examining things, he observed thoughtfully:—

  “So you come from London? That’s a long way to be from home.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t home really,” said Cluny; and paused, for the truth was much too complex for any such simple expression. In one sense London, Paddington, was of course her home; she had lived there for eighteen years, and on the whole been quite happy; it was her home as much as anywhere. But it wasn’t home inevitably; it hadn’t the power that draws a grown person back to the scene of even an unhappy childhood. It made no claim on her. To Mr. Wilson, waiting with an earnest expression, Cluny added hastily, “I hadn’t any mother or father, not since I was a baby.”