A Desirable Husband

by Frances Vernon

  One trouble became more agreeable when, the day after their walk in Kensington Gardens, Gerard wrote a letter full of grave kindness and compromise to Constance, a letter which Finola thought must be irresistible. She decided to deal with the next problem about which she could do something immediately, and speak to her housekeeper, Carlotta.

  Finola thought of ‘servants’ as people who could only have existed before the war but who still survived at Combe Chalcot. She blushed at the thought of referring to Carlotta, Nanny or Mrs Fiske, the daily, by that word, and she preferred them to the Cedar House staff who often made her nervous; but now she was obliged to suggest to her housekeeper that she would not care for life in the country. Carlotta was a very good cook, but she was Italian and something of a socialist, and she had taken the post with Finola only because she was not strong enough to work in a restaurant. She would not do for long at Combe Chalcot.

  When Finola offered to find her another situation, and explained about Combe Chalcot, Carlotta was very upset, and then angry. She accused her employer of giving her the sack, and that without reason, and spoke of trade unions. She also said that she wanted to see the English countryside, and Finola was taken aback.

  ‘But I don’t think you’d be happy, really I don’t, Carlotta.’

  ‘I may not see, Miss Parnell? I may not try?’

  Finola hesitated. She did not want to employ Mrs Daly, Constance’s rather fierce cook, and now that Carlotta was crying, she also felt that she could not face looking for another housekeeper, and getting used to her. She said in the end that she would be very grateful to Carlotta for coming, and begged her to wipe her eyes. Carlotta wiped her hands on her skirt and smiled, and said she would make sure that while she was at Combe Chalcot, everything went well.

  Finola had told Gerard her intention of not asking Carlotta to come with them, and he had quite agreed with her: but she thought he would understand. She would tell him that Nanny and Carlotta were both marvellous, but that they did regard their employers as slightly weak-minded children, and this was going to change.

  CHAPTER 7

  AT LADY VAN LEYDEN’S AND BENDICKS’ IN SLOANE STREET

  Darcy drove round the house to the stables, where he parked the car and turned off its lights. He had just seen Gerard at the estate office, and had taken him to catch the London train at Tisbury. He sat now looking out at the white fog which bathed the stable yard, and though he was wondering whether he had enough petrol to allow him to drive back to Cambridge tomorrow, the thought of his mother was at the back of his mind. Constance did not know that he had seen Gerard, and she would at this moment be in her sitting-room doing the crossword, which she always filled in straight after lunch, before taking the dogs for a walk. Darcy thought of joining her, and of her asking questions. He then thought of visiting the Manor instead.

  ‘You don’t find many men prepared to come down and chivvy their old mothers, chivvy them nicely I mean,’ Katie Van Leyden had told him three days ago. ‘I’ll tell you what, Darcy, come round any time, for dinner or something, if you feel like it. And tell Gerard that if he wants to stop the night here, he’s very welcome.’ She was beginning to be fairly intimate with the younger Parnells, because she had surprised them by taking a sympathetic interest in their difficulties with Constance, and she said they made quite a nice change from her county friends.

  Katie Van Leyden was a plump woman, whose features looked as though they had been chosen from a lucky dip and stuck into her face, and yet she often appeared attractive, for she had a very pretty voice and smile, little feet, and beautiful dark hair. She kept five papillons instead of the gun-dogs which might have been expected of her, ran the local Red Cross and entertained a good deal on four hundred a year and the salary her husband earned as land-agent for the owner of a large estate in Somerset. She was exactly the same age as her friend Miranda, who had reintroduced her one day in the autumn to Darcy Parnell. It was now December, and Miranda was staying with her at the Manor. Remembering Katie’s briskly admiring remarks about his comforting his mother Darcy felt rather guilty, almost as Gerard would have done. He smiled a little now.

  He decided to walk, not drive, to the Manor. He got out of the car and took a short cut through the garden, but he avoided the windows of the house as though the fog would not conceal his movements from his mother. He planned to entertain Miranda with an amusing version of Constance’s behaviour, and of the interview with Gerard in the estate office.

  Combe Chalcot Manor was nearly half a mile from the Cedar House, along the same lane which had once been a private drive. With its squat caryatids and huge chimneys, it was too ugly a house to decay romantically, though Lord Van Leyden was too poor to keep it in repair, and his wife and one daily woman could not keep it clean. As he came up to the house and saw its few dark yellow lights through the fog, Darcy began to feel that it was very important to tell Miranda. He reminded himself that Jack Van Leyden would be out, and that Katie might well leave him alone with her; but he thought perhaps Miranda might not even be there, she might have gone out for a walk or into Shaftesbury. Then he would have to go back to Constance.

  He rang the bell at the side door and for a while no one answered. Presently he heard the wheezy barks of the papillons, and the door was opened by Katie’s daily. ‘Boiler’s just down – why, Mr Darcy! I thought you must be the plumber. Her ladyship isn’t in, she’s got the Women’s Institute.’

  Darcy said happily: ‘Oh dear. Well, do tell me, Mrs James, is Madame de Saint-Gaël in the house?’

  ‘Putting her feet up in the lounge, if it is her you want to see, sir. You’ll know your way.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs James.’ Darcy walked along the passage and through two small dark rooms full of dried flowers and Victorian furniture.

  ‘Miranda,’ he said on the threshold of the main sitting-room, and then felt a little foolish. Three of Katie’s papillons were still yapping at his feet.

  ‘Oh, hell!’ she said, turning at the noise. ‘Oh it’s you, Darcy. Those dogs arc so ghastly – are you freezing? You look it.’

  ‘I’ve walked up from the house.’ There was a pause and he added: ‘Are you surprised to see me?’

  ‘Katie said you might drop in with your brother; she was awfully sorry not to be here, she remembered she had some W.I. meeting or other. In Sturminster Newton. How are you? Is your brother here? I’d like to meet him.’ Miranda had no shoes on, and she was wearing a cashmere overcoat. The house was very cold, though there were fires.

  ‘No, I put him on the train, he had to get back to London.’

  ‘Oh, I see. You must have had lunch with your mother?’ Miranda lowered herself into a chair. She had stood up when he first came in, for though they had taken walks together, they did not yet know each other exceedingly well.

  Darcy thought Miranda very clever and very like Isabel. Clasping his hands as he looked at her now, he thought he should have guessed that, when discovered in someone else’s room with her hair untidy and her feet in stockings, she would be perfectly charming, and interested in what he had to say.

  ‘My dear, that’s just it, we didn’t. I wanted to tell you the whole ghastly drama,’ he said.

  ‘Really? Nothing too frightful I hope?’ Miranda wanted to know whether Darcy used quite a different manner when he was alone with men, to that which he used with women.

  ‘We didn’t go home,’ said Darcy. ‘I met him in cognito in the estate office, because Mamma has absolutely refused to see him.’

  ‘Not really? But why?’

  ‘Oh, the whole wretched thing! I told you, didn’t I, that she’s buying a house in Bath at the moment? At least, she’s had an offer accepted, but you know one can back out of these things, and it all takes ages.’

  ‘Yes, you told me. I thought it meant she was, well, resigned.’ Miranda lit a cigarette. ‘The whole system in this country is really rather barbarous, why can’t she live with your brother and Finola?’

  Darcy lo
oked at her. ‘Miranda. You must see. Besides, she does have a very good jointure, you know.’ Hugh had also left his widow some of the pictures and furniture, but not the pieces she now said she wanted.

  She smiled and tried to look prim. ‘I don’t know your mother very well. Of course my old mother-in-law lived with us at Vauxvilliers till she died, but that was rather different.’ She meant that she had been fond of her mother-in-law, and that she had spent most of her own time in Paris.

  ‘Now don’t drag in irrelevancies, I’m sure your life is marvellously well organised but we just can’t compete.’

  ‘I was teasing. I’m sorry, I see you’re rather upset.’

  ‘No,’ said Darcy, rubbing his head. ‘No, I mustn’t be upset.’

  ‘Poor Darcy. Very brave of you to come down and deal with it.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense! I came because –’ usually, he would have been able to announce that he had come intending to seduce her, but somehow he could not just now. ‘It doesn’t matter. The thing is you see, that since she started buying this new house she’s become much worse, more obsessive, she’s building Gerard into a sort of ogre. It’s too ridiculous.’

  ‘I can’t imagine Finola marrying an ogre.’

  ‘Gerard,’ said Darcy, looking at the mantelpiece, ‘is the modern world’s only example of the Christian gentleman bound to service.’ He had made this remark before, but not to Miranda, and it comforted him a little. ‘When I told him how she was behaving he looked positively … You see, she’s claiming that all the nicest things in the house are her personal property, but that’s not really it. She simply can’t face the thought of actually leaving.’

  ‘I’m sorry for your brother.’

  ‘So am I! He wanted to see her – I had to dissuade him – it was quite ghastly. She spends all her time writing letters to him, which he can’t reply to, really abusive letters, Miranda, he’s shown them to me. I’m honestly beginning to think she’s getting – well, rather gaga shall we say.’

  ‘Not really gaga,’ said Miranda with a quick sigh. ‘How frightful for you.’

  ‘You see, Mamma has always been very – excitable, emotional you know, although I don’t think anyone outside the family has ever had the slightest idea of what she can be like. There were some ghastly rows when I was a child.’

  ‘I imagine she’s devoted to that house.’

  ‘Oh my dear, completely.’ He raised his face. ‘What did you think of her taste? As a decorator.’

  ‘Very good in its way,’ said Miranda, whom Darcy had brought back for an awkward and amusing tea at the Cedar House, two days before. ‘I mean that. It’s a perfect English country house and not overdone.’ She thought of how Finola, though she had no taste, must love it.

  They were quiet for a while. Outside the fog was lifting and the bare trees were visible, but it would soon be growing dark.

  ‘Gerard says that, if things go much further, he simply can’t force her out.’

  ‘No, it would be difficult.’

  ‘I think she would rather enjoy it,’ said Darcy, and Miranda turned. ‘It would provide her with the most marvellous topic of conversation for the whole of the rest of her life, you see.’

  ‘I do see,’ said Miranda.

  They smiled. Darcy then sighed and looked at the ceiling, and said, ‘One half of mankind tormenting the other, and being tormented themselves in tormenting.’ He discreetly quoted nothing at all before his academic colleagues, unless in serious argument, but his family and his London friends could recognise the voice he used for Richardson, though they never understood, and had never read his book, The Pride of Clarissa.

  ‘Divine Clarissa Harlowe,’ said Miranda, and pinched her lips together.

  ‘My dear! Have you actually read it? All eight gloomy dreadful volumes?’

  ‘No, but I’ve been reading your book, I borrowed it from your mother,’ she said. ‘You quoted that piece. You must think of some new ones to bring out in conversation, you know.’

  ‘Miranda, I am deeply touched. May I kiss you?’ said Darcy with dignity.

  She held out her hand, and he looked at it, and she thought of telling him that he did have a certain amount of sex appeal. Darcy picked it up and raised it to his lips, and Miranda grinned, for she saw Katie Van Leyden standing in the doorway, still in her headscarf and gumboots. Darcy, who had not seen, was suddenly happy and not very lustful: he was no longer worrying at all about Gerard and Constance as he thought of his book, and his heroine.

  ‘Couldn’t even get to Sturminster the fog was so awful,’ said Katie, twisting her keys and looking wide-eyed at Darcy, ‘and then there was black ice on the road.’

  *

  Gerard took a taxi from Waterloo station and was driven over the river, round Buckingham Palace and down the Brompton Road, where he could see lights and tinsel in the windows and late shoppers on the pavement. He paid attention to the view.

  When he reached Egerton Gardens, Finola was not in. Nanny told him that she had gone out quite suddenly to do her Christinas shopping: she also said that he seemed to be looking very worried, and offered to make Carlotta bring him a hot drink.

  ‘No, thank you, Nanny, I’ll wait for my wife.’ He went into the sitting-room, and closed the door.

  Gerard sat down. The room smelled of cigarette smoke and there was an ashtray full of very long stubs which meant that Finola, far away as she was, was concerned about him. He looked at them, and then his eyes went over to the bookshelves where, nearest to the floor, there were some huge law books in elegant bindings. He had left the Bar two weeks after his father’s death, and now he wondered how he could possibly go back.

  Gerard had never wanted to be a barrister. He had wanted long ago to be an academic like Darcy, though not a simple English don but a proper don of classics. While he was at Cambridge his father had told him repeatedly that this was an unsuitable profession for the elder son, who would one day have to abandon it, and it would be better for him to pursue some career which interested him less. Gerard had resolved gently to oppose his father, though he hated argument; but then in 1926, when his successful brother was still a little boy, he had taken a bad second in Part II of the Classical Tripos. He had worked hard ever since winning his scholarship, and he had taken a first in Part I.

  Gerard had known he would have to try for the Bar, and Hugh had been pleased when he admitted this. Afterwards, he had never made fun of his son’s pretensions to being a learned man, though Gerard had feared he would do so for years after his failure at Cambridge.

  He paced up and down now, as he remembered standing outside the Senate House in Cambridge just after he had learnt of his degree (which was not even a gentleman’s third and a clever alternative), looking at King’s Chapel and thinking so irrelevantly how lovely was the stone. He remembered Hugh’s saying, ‘Just as well, I daresay! At least you’ve done a damn sight better than I ever did,’ and his nodding, frowning, as his son told him that he thought perhaps the criminal law would be best. He had not a business mind for commercial law, and the Army and the Navy were out of the question, and he would never be good enough to enter the Church. Hugh would have hated to see his son a clergyman.

  Gerard had always been repelled by the idea of becoming what he thought of as an idle man of fashion. He had wanted to live quietly in a little flat in Kensington, or Bloomsbury, to do his own marketing, to complete his education by following a reading-list, to find a perfect woman, and to make visits in a spirit of humility to Cambridge. He tried to remember now that he had found the perfect woman, but he thought angrily instead of how he had always had more money than he needed, and of Hugh’s always saying that he really must not waste his time. He had thus spent nearly twenty years in his rather nice chambers in Lincoln’s Inn, where he had received occasional briefs.

  Gerard was now in tears. He was so poor an advocate that Constance had not even begun to think that his case might be just. She had responded angrily to all his attempts to persuade
her; and now he felt he could carry on no longer. He would have to be weak. He would allow her to remain at Combe Chalcot in triumph, and because Hugh would have disapproved of this weakness on his part, he would try to pacify his memory by at least remaining at the Bar. Gerard had expected to be free of his work as soon as he inherited: now he would have to wait for years before he could exchange it for the worry and tedium of becoming a properly out-of-date country squire.

  He knew that his wife would comfort him, and would say that he could very well just live in London and do no work at all.

  *

  Finola was in Truslove and Hanson, queueing at the desk, and wondering why she had been silly enough to choose Christmas shopping to distract her mind from Gerard. The shop was extremely busy, and in front of her there was a woman who was arguing about the price of fifteen books she wished to order and have sent to America. Finola wanted only to pay cash for two. She had chosen the new Georgette Heyer for Anatole, who adored romantic comedies and always cried at the end, and The Cruel Sea which she was buying for Constance, because it looked very realistic and nasty and full of action. Constance liked such novels.

  There was a cross and sad expression on Finola’s face as she tried to look through the window, past the piles of books and the Christmas tree. She wondered whether Gerard would be back yet: perhaps he would ring to say that he was spending the night at Combe Chalcot, either because of the bad patchy fog in the west of England, about which she had heard on the wireless, or because his mother had welcomed him. Finola could not believe this was possible, and she imagined him driving out into the fog, and hitting a tree, and being killed, and she told herself not to be so stupid when he had gone down by train. She was very hot, and tired, and she wanted to sit down but there was no empty chair in the shop.