Unclouded Summer

by Alec Waugh

  He wanted to see the house. He had not had a chance of seeing it the day before. He had tried so often to imagine it, looking at the pictures that he had hung over the desk at Mougins, reading between the lines of Judy’s letters. It was not at all as he had expected. It was larger, less intimate. He stood in front of it, thirty or so yards away. Had he been brought here blindfolded, not knowing where he was being led, he did not know if he would have recognized it. It had a gray barrack look.

  “Admiring the mausoleum?” a voice said behind him. He started, turned, and there was Marion. She had come across the grass and he had not heard her. She was bareheaded. She was wearing a mackintosh. She was carrying an armful of ferns and branches.

  “What on earth’s all that for?”

  “The church. I do it up every Saturday. I’m just going to raid the greenhouses. Well, what do you think of Charlton?”

  She stood at his side, looking up at the gray expanse of stucco. He did not know how to answer her, he did not know what kind of an answer she expected. He was grateful to her for giving him the cue.

  “Daddy’s always making cracks about it, but then Daddy can’t feel personally about it in the way that I can.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “My grandmother was born here, the house had been in her family for five generations, even before that we’d lived here. It was her grandfather’s great-grandfather who built it. My grandmother was the heir to it. But Daddy wasn’t even born here. He didn’t come to live here, till his mother’s father died; he was fourteen then. The house isn’t bound up with him, in the way it is with me. Being a man he thinks of himself in terms of being a Marriott. It’s different for a girl who expects to change her name anyhow, if you follow me.”

  It was a complicated argument but he could follow it.

  “I think Daddy’s a little jealous of it really because he’s not bound up with it. He’s always making fun of its absurdities. But I don’t feel like that. I like to think that an eccentric great-great-grandfather of mine suddenly decided that he’d like to build a big bow-windowed room where he could entertain the Prince Regent with theatricals, and that another one went on a holiday to Spain and thought he’d like to have a gallery inside his hall and then suddenly changed the plans when they were halfway through, with the result you saw. It makes it all very personal and English.”

  “You mean to say that the Prince Regent actually acted in that drawing room?”

  “No. In the end he didn’t. But the room was built in the belief that he was going to and I think that’s fun. I think it’s much more fun to have a house like this, than a museum piece.”

  She paused. She looked fondly at it. “There it was, you see, two hundred and twenty years ago, a good straightforward Queen Anne house, red-bricked, rectangular, facing northeast, because at that time architects considered the sun unhealthy: it faded curtains and carpets and it bred disease, they said, which it probably did as they never opened windows. There are a hundred and one houses like that, scattered up and down the country but there’s no house quite like this. Of course it’s been spoiled with that absurd portico, and that stuccoed front and all those bays and bow windows at the back flung out to catch the sun, but it’s much more fun the way it is, and much, much cosier to live in. You could paint a whole series of pictures of it. I hope you will.”

  He told her about the picture he had planned that morning. She nodded as she listened.

  “That should be good. And there’s so much here that’ll be new for you. There’s the church for instance. Why not come over with me now?”

  “I’d love to.”

  “Fine: it won’t take long. Let’s plunder the greenhouses first.”

  The greenhouses were beyond the stables. They were heavy with heat and scent, and rich with color; brick-dark geranium, pale watery blue plumbago, hyacinth white and mauve and scarlet, begonia and Canterbury bells and bright-red fuchsia.

  “Do you mind carrying a pot or two? It isn’t far,” she said.

  It was a bare half-mile across the paddock. As they turned out of the garden he could see its square tower showing between the trees. To the right of it was the tiled roof of the rectory.

  “The village is just beyond,” she said, “you haven’t seen it yet. It’s very cosy, half a street and two public houses and one shop. They’re all people who work for us.”

  The Church was cosy too. It was small and Norman. It was rather dark with its low rounded stained-glass windows, but at the same time the brasses on the walls, the polished woodwork of the pews, the faded hatchments, the rich reds and purples of the windows, gave it a sense of color.

  “I’ll just fix these flowers then I’ll show you round,” she said.

  On the windowsills behind the choir she set pots of hyacinth, concealing the earthenware with trailing tendrils of plumbago. She filled the vases on the altar with irises and daffodils. A tin cross fitted with water cups hung from the pulpit. She filled the cups with moss and primroses and stocks.

  “I suppose I’m rather overdoing it for Lent but even in Lent, churches should look bright,” she said.

  She filled the font with ferns and bracken; spreading across the lower windows branches that were just breaking into leaf.

  It was like no church that he had ever seen before. “The little church round the corner” had something of this feeling, but that was a city church and that was different. No city church could have the feeling that a church in the country had, of being the center of the life grouped round it. He thought of the Episcopalian New England churches of his youth and boyhood contrasting their bareness and dignity, their height and light and graciousness of line with the dimness and mustiness of this Norman church, with its carved reredos before the choir; the Commandments lettered with gilt capitals in Old-English script, the faded murals on the insides of the thick walls beside the windows, the memorial urns and brasses, the hatchments and the effigies, the silver-stitched deep purple tapestry upon the altar, the ornate cross and candles. No two kinds of church could have been less alike yet each in its own way was simple; the guardian and the symbol of a country faith.

  “I want to show you our old pew,” she said.

  It was behind the choir stalls. It was not a pew but a small room, with wooden sides seven feet high. In one corner was a fireplace.

  “I suppose the idea was that the villagers shouldn’t see the Lord of the Manor sleeping during the sermon.”

  “You don’t use it now?”

  She shook her head.

  “My uncle smuggled in a sheep dog once when my grandfather was away. My grandfather had a good nose. He noticed it during the evening service. We’ve sat in the front pew ever since.”

  She took him round the church. The murals inside the window were very old, she said. She showed him the elaborate eighteenth-century testimonies to her relatives. Two effigies had been let into the recesses in the wall. The first wore a doublet and short hose. “He was killed at Basing by the Roundheads. Did you see the ruins as you came through?” she asked.

  Francis read the inscription over it. “John Stuart Bolstone, killed fighting for his King at Basing. June 22,1643.”

  “ ‘Basing?’ I didn’t notice it. It was raining hard.”

  “I’ll show you it in a day or two.”

  The other effigy was of a woman with a ruff and a wide spreading skirt, a spaniel was sleeping at her feet.

  “Marion Jane, beloved wife of John Gilbert Bolstone, First Baron Chidingfold,” he read. She pointed to a marble tablet, surmounted by a hatchment. “That’s the end of it,” she said. “My great-grandfather.”

  “John Stuart Bolstone, Fourth Baron Chidingfold,” he read.

  “The title died with him,” she explained.

  There was a pause; he looked round him at the brasses and the tablets, three-quarters of them had been put up to her relatives.

  “Nothing to disgrace our name,” his father had adjured him. But what did the name Oliver
mean to him, what did the name mean to any of the people that he moved among? -himself, his father and his grandfather. That was all. And he was exceptional in having had a grandfather whom people that he met could still remember. It was very different for Marion, who lived in the atmosphere of three hundred years, for whom an ancestor who had fought for King Charles was still an influence in her life, someone who sat in judgment of her now, who was one of the members of the tribunal by which her value was assessed. To everyone in the village, to everyone who came to Charlton, Marion was part of a long tradition: to Marion the injunction “nothing to disgrace our name” could have, must have, a pertinent significance.

  What could the injunction mean to him whose ancestors had traveled from one town, one village to another, in a country so vast that nearly every one of its forty-eight states was larger than this Whole country? For Marion during more than three hundred years her family had been a part of English history. What did he know about his family? His great-grandfather had come over to America, some time in the 1820’s. he was an Englishman. But Francis had no idea from what part of England he had come; he had no idea from what kind of people he had come or why he had crossed the ocean. He did not know if he had intended to return. He had died young, and his story had died with him. His own grandfather had never known him. His great-grandmother had remarried, had moved to another state, had other children: that early romance with a stranger from across the seas had grown shadowy as the years and her responsibilities had increased.

  “I could never find out much about my father,” his grandfather had said. “He left no books or papers. My mother was only married to him two years. They lived in Pittsburgh. He was a steel worker. He was killed in a fire at the factory. My mother went to stay with a cousin on the Eastern seaboard. That’s where she met my stepfather.”

  The stepfather had had to do with shipping, in a minor way, and it was up and down that coast that Francis’ grandfather had spent his boyhood. There had been a home at New London; another at New Haven; for six years he had lived in Maine. Francis had a very clear recollection of his grandfather, a stern, bearded figure, in a blue peaked cap, sitting being a general hostess ing on the verandah, looking out over the river watching the tugs and barges chunk slowly past, talking of seas and ships.

  Francis was exceptional in that he should be living still in the house that had been his grandfather’s. But there was no real reason why his grandfather should have settled in East Haddam. He had no links with the neighborhood. Nor for that matter had he himself. It was only a few years ago that his father on his retirement had come to live there. His own boyhood had known four different homes, as his father had moved to take up new appointments. Aunts and grandparents and cousins had been vague figures in the background, there had been presents and cards at Christmas, but he had hardly ever met them. He knew practically nothing of his mother’s parents. What could the “family name” mean to him, in the way that it could to Marion?

  And yet in the same way that there was a kinship between this dark, old church with its rich and prized possessions and the cool bare churches of his boyhood, both being the repository of the same kind of faith, so was he the product just as much as Marion was, of a deep-based tradition. In the same way that these brasses and these tablets, these effigies and hatchments, counseled and warned and guided Marion, saying to her at the separate crises of her life”If you do this, then you break faith with us,” had not for him the cool Northern air, and the sight of the elms and maples, the trim avenues, the white and green paint, the wooden houses, the slim church spires, the broad curving river, spoken on the day of his return in as clear, as mandatory a voice out of the long tradition of New England life, a tradition whose roots had taken hold two centuries before his own stock had been grafted there, a tradition, an inherited code not so much in this later day of conduct as of attitude, of which he was the heir, every bit as much as Marion was of hers.

  “I suppose that all this means a good deal to you,” he said.

  “It means so much that I want to break away from it.”

  “What on earth am I to take that to mean?”

  “Nothing so very startling. Just that it’s all over, this; the whole way of life that it implies. The feudal system and all that went with it. It was a fine thing in its way and in its time, when the big house ran the neighborhood and had responsibilities towards the neighborhood. But it doesn’t fit into modern life. Villagers are different, and the people who live in the big houses are different. They don’t want the same things of life, either of them. They’re too independent. Houses like Charlton are white elephants. What’s going to happen to Charlton when Daddy dies? My brother won’t want to be bothered with it. There’ll be enormous death duties. If he decides to run Charlton as it should be run, he wouldn’t have a penny to spare for London or for trips abroad. He wouldn’t want that. And there’s nothing more depressing than living in one wing. No, no, the day of the big house is over. That’s why I want to leave it while the going’s good. I don’t want to have to see it crumble. I’d like to remember it the way it was. That’s at the back of what I was trying to say to you last night, I want to get into something different, but I don’t quite know what.”

  It was the kind of speech that he had heard from a number of his contemporaries in New York – a typical “poor little rich girl” speech, and yet in this instance it was not that. It was not the grumblings of a spoiled child resentful because she could not still feel hungry after she had gorged herself with sweets. Marion was not like that. She was a serious person, a serious courageous person who knew herself to be a little lost, who had not found her destiny. He remembered the glance that she had flashed at him across the lunch table, the smile that had recognized and accepted a confederacy of ill adjustment. They were in the same boat here, both feeling out of place, though for different reasons.

  “Well,” she said, “I suppose that we should be going.”

  He paused in the doorway, looking back.

  “Will there be a family parade here tomorrow morning?”

  She laughed. “Good heavens, no. Daddy and I usually come to back the rector up. Judy does now and then. The church is about half full.”

  “What about early service?”

  “I go myself most Sundays.”

  “I think I’ll come with you tomorrow.”

  “Will you? I’d like that,” she said.

  They returned to find Judy standing on the steps, in her fleece coat, pulling on a pair of motoring gloves. The gray-green Chevrolet was waiting for her in the drive. At the sight of it, his nerves contracted. Was it only six months ago that he had seen morning after morning that car swing down from the Corniche Road into the square?

  Judy waved at them. “I’m just going into Basingstoke to meet the Forresters. Keep yourselves amused you two. I’m going to be so busy being a general hostess that I shan’t have time to be a hostess to anybody in particular.”

  Chapter Eleven

  It was the Monday morning, shortly after ten. The last suitcase was being stacked on the last car. Sir Henry had left already by an early train. Francis, from his bedroom window could see Judy on the porch waving to a long low Bentley as it swung slowly round out of the courtyard.

  “Now,” he thought, “at last!”

  He came down the stairs just as she was turning back into the hall. He smiled: he was resolved that nothing in his manner should suggest that he was harboring angry feelings.

  “Your duties are over then?” he said.

  “For the moment, yes.”

  “Do they begin again that soon?”

  She shrugged.

  “They talk about a fifty-hour week. I think I put in a fifteen-hour day.”

  She had paused at the sight of him on the stairs, but she was now once again on her way across the hall towards the drawing room.

  “I haven’t seen the papers yet,” she said.

  She picked up The Times, seating herself beside the fire, s
o that the light should fall over her shoulder. It was a cloudy day; he could not read the expression on her face. She opened the paper in the center, folding it across and over, running her eye along the headlines, then down a column, then turning the sheet over.

  “I’d have to live in this country years before I could find my way about The Times like that,” he said.

  “Oh, one gets used to it.”

  She was reading with concentration. He felt awkward, sitting there unoccupied.

  There were a number of back copies of Punch upon the table. He brought over a pile of them.

  “I don’t get the half of these jokes,” he said.

  “Nor do we with the New Yorker “

  A generous proportion of the jokes that he understood made fun of “the young idea” particularly of modern painting. In one picture two willowy young girls with hats pulled down low over their eyes were standing before a cubist picture. “But surely sometimes if you get a sitter who is really beautiful,” one of them was inquiring, “it must be hard to resist the temptation of painting a portrait.” Another cartoon carried the caption “And is this one meant to be anything in particular or is it quite optional?” It was easy to see why people like Lord Armitage found Punch congenial.

  The political cartoons puzzled him even more than the social ones had done. He had not over the week end heard one reference to international complications. But the Empire’s fate was apparently at stake in the Far East.