“There!” exclaimed Miss Fielding, suddenly appearing in front of them and slamming down two parts on the sofa. “Alicia, you haven’t got much to do as Italy. Richard, you’ve got to do the Very Old Man, I’ve decided.”
“I shall have to sit down, Miss Fielding. I shan’t be well enough by Christmas to stand.”
“Oh, that will be all right, you can have a big chair and your Big Book on a table in front of you; it will be great fun!”
“Will it?” smiled Richard. “Very well. I will do the Very Old Man.”
You disagreeable so-and-so, thought Alicia. But I like you, all the same, and you must have got what it takes or you wouldn’t have known choosey little Marion “very well”! I particularly like the back of your neck.
“S’sh!” said Miss Burton, suddenly holding up one hand. “Listen.”
“It’s a car going up the hill,” said Miss Fielding.
But it was the familiar unpleasant sound.
“I had a feeling they’d come to-night,” said Miss Burton, discontentedly, huddling herself and her knitting together. “As soon as I saw that moon getting up.”
“What shall we do?” demanded Miss Fielding of Richard and Alicia, rising from her chair.
“Stay here, of course. May as well be blown up in comfort,” said Alicia, who had worked in the factory throughout the Battle of Britain without taking shelter. “It probably won’t be much.”
“Richard?” asked Miss Fielding, standing with Miss Burton, who was trembling, by the door.
“I can’t walk,” he said irritably, “so of course I’ll stay here.”
“I will settle Frances in the shelter,” announced Miss Fielding, going out of the door as the guns which defended the aerodrome three miles away went off deafeningly loudly in the country silence.
The ladies disappeared. Alicia so far forgot her role of a femme fatale as to glance across at Richard with a grin, but when she saw his expression, the grin vanished. Gosh, he’s scared, she thought disgustedly. Even the back of his neck doesn’t make up for that. As she stared at him, he glanced up and said still irritably, “It’s all right, I’m not frightened. I just happen to be gun-shy. I detest the hideous noise incidental to air attack.”
“Oh, well, let’s put on the wireless, shall we?” She could see by his eyes that he was telling the truth. She switched on the wireless but after a few moments during which a loud voice talked about bombs, the station went off the air. “Oh well, that’s that,” murmured Alicia. “Have they got the Warsaw Concerto? I’ll bet they haven’t,” and she wandered over to the gramophone.
“Yes, they have. Kenneth admires it greatly,” said Richard stiffly. “Do you really wish to hear it?”
“I adore it,” she said, and found it and put it on.
Richard was silent. The gunfire was heavy now and they could hear aeroplanes going over. Slowly the romantic strains of the Warsaw Concerto filled the room. Alicia sat staring into the fire and Richard endured the noise of the guns and sweated.
“Mind if we have it again?” she asked, after the final quick drum-beats had sounded.
“If you really desire it.”
“I do really desire it,” said Alicia, attending to the gramophone and not looking at him and feeling sorry for him. This dislike of heavy noise was the first weakness she had detected in him, and it was endearing, as a weakness often is.
“Do you hate it all that much?” she inquired, after the drum beats had sounded again.
“I’ve been gun-shy from birth.”
“The Concerto, I meant.”
“I don’t consider that I know the meaning, personally, of the word ‘hate.’ I dislike the Warsaw Concerto because it is an inadequate and falsely romantic piece of programme music professing to express the suffering of the Polish nation. As a piece of restaurant music—or so I am told by people who understand music—it is not without merit.”
“I went out last night with a lovely Pole,” murmured Alicia.
“What?”
She repeated the sentence, adding, “It’s all the girls ever talk about at my factory.”
To her pleasure, Richard gave a reluctant laugh. The gunfire was getting less frequent.
“Who’s your favourite composer?” she asked presently.
“Mozart. And I admire William Walton among the moderns.”
“I think Duke Ellington’s wizard, don’t you?”
“No.”
“I adore swing.”
Richard shook his head. “I can see its merits but it gives me no pleasure?”
“What does?” asked Alicia, getting up and coming over to the sofa.
“What gives me pleasure?” repeated Richard, looking up at the tall blue-eyed girl in the black siren suit. “Reading. Music. Astronomy.”
“Is that all?”
“And making love,” ended Richard, with a sudden smile. She smiled too.
“What do you like?” he asked.
“Oh—dancing and swing, and messy jobs and really divine shoes and drink and the other thing. What you said.”
He laughed again.
“You seem fairly pleased with life,” she said suddenly.
“If you mean that I seem happy, yes, I am.”
“That makes a nice change,” she said dryly.
“Because most people aren’t? I agree; but then, you see, my circumstances have been unusually fortunate.”
“Have they? From something Miss Fielding once said I thought you must have had a ropey time.”
“I agree that the situation does not sound propitious,” began Richard judicially, offering her his cigarette-case. “My father was killed in the First World War, and I am not strong; I have inherited what is called in our family the Barfield Lung. My mother has only my father’s pension and her own earnings to live on, and I am an only child; her sexual life ended with my father’s death, and in these circumstances you would expect her emotions to have centred morbidly upon myself.”
“No I shouldn’t,” interrupted Alicia. “That sort of thing only happens in highbrow books.”
“Indeed it doesn’t; it is quite a common situation, I assure you. But in my case there were other factors which more than counterbalanced the unfortunate ones. To begin with, my parents were passionately in love with one another, and they both wanted me. That was an admirable start. And my mother had always maintained friendly and affectionate relations with her own family, which is large and clever. After my father’s death she went to live with me at her old home in Devonshire, where the conditions for bringing up a delicate only child were perfect; a beautiful house built in 1680 surrounded by large gardens and paddocks and woods, streams to play in and ponies to fall off, and seven cousins of both sexes aged from eighteen months to ten years who constantly came to the house on long visits; some of them, indeed, lived there and provided me with all the companionship I needed. The only unmarried aunt’s sexual instincts had been sublimated with unusual success into gardening, so there was no unfortunate influence there, and finally there were my two clever uncles, both of whom were happily married, whose influence was strongly masculine and offset any tendency there might have been for my upbringing to become too influenced by my women relations. My grandparents were cheerful and healthy old people and I have most affectionate memories of them both. What amuses you?”
“You’ve got it all so beautifully taped, like a card index or something,” said Alicia, composing her face.
“You illustrate Bergson’s theory that we laugh when we see a living thing behaving like a mechanical one,” he retorted. “My uncles soon found that I was clever, and it was they who began, and afterwards supervised, my education. One of the valuable things I learned from them as a boy was the difference between shallow brilliance, mere intelligence, and that solid cleverness which achieves, and which varies little in quality from century to century. The example of my uncles led me to rule my life chiefly by reason, but the example of my mother led me to include tenderness as well.�
�� He paused, thinking, while she watched him curiously.
“I was unusually fortunate,” he went on at last, “the atmosphere of my childhood home was aristocratic rather than bourgeois.”
“It sounds swell,” she murmured, and indeed the picture he had painted attracted her very strongly. Her own childhood had been marred by the quarrelling of her parents, and she had always vaguely wanted a different kind of home.
“What are you going to do after the war?” she went on.
“Teach economics in South America, I hope.”
“Not in Russia?” she asked, smiling. The few intellectuals she had met had all had a thing about Russia and, so far as she classified Richard at all, she put him among the intellectuals.
“Not in Russia,” he answered, unsmiling. “And I shall marry and have four children, and live a life without the inessentials but with all the essentials.”
“Such as?”
“Bare beautiful rooms, a piece of ground to grow things on, music, hundreds of books—all the things I like.”
Alicia thought this over. Evidently love and a good time and interesting people and a car and a nice home and a steady income were not regarded by this odd young man as essentials.
“Where will you get the money from?” she asked.
“Earn it.”
“You’ll have to earn a whale of a lot if you want to educate four children decently.”
“I shan’t want to educate them ‘decently’; I shall only want to educate them. Most people who are ‘decently’ educated are not educated at all.”
“If you have boys it isn’t fair to make them into cranks,” said Alicia.
“I shan’t do that. I dislike cranks as much as I’m sure you do. I was at Radley, and enjoyed every minute I spent there. The fact that I didn’t emerge as a typical public-school specimen is due to the influence of my home. I shall send my sons and daughters to conventional schools and trust to the strong influences of home to keep them from turning into types.”
“They won’t do that!” she assured him, and then went on, “It’s odd to meet someone who’s got everything taped; most of the men I know are just keen on their job or want a good time or shoot a line about every girl they meet falling for them, but you seem to have worked out a—a—sort of blue-print for your whole future!”
“That’s an admirable simile,” he said with his charming smile. “If more educated people made blue-prints for their lives the world would be much tidier.”
She appeared to be considering this, but was actually thinking how silly and cheap now seemed the plans for his subjugation with which she had entered the drawing-room. It was not a pleasing reflection, and she gave expression to a little of her annoyance by exclaiming:
“I suppose feelings don’t come into your blue-print?”
“You mean love, I suppose. Naturally it does.”
“You sound very calm about it.”
“That is deceptive,” he answered coolly, but for the second time not meeting her eyes, “Actually, I am rather susceptible to certain combinations of line and colour, and I have to exert my reason to prevent their gaining more power over me than I like.”
“You mean you fall for people easily?”
There was a pause before he answered. There had been no gunfire now for some time.
“Sexually, yes; romantically, no; and I haven’t yet met any woman whom I would consider making my wife,” he said at last.
No woman could have listened to such a remark without irritation, and Alicia was more annoyed than ever that he showed no signs of being attracted to herself: she would have enjoyed taking her revenge.
“What sort of a person will you want?” she murmured, so lullingly that even the Mass Observer observed nothing in her voice but polite interest.
“I should require a strong maternal instinct of the best type and a well-developed capacity for friendship.”
“And must she be awfully highbrow?”
“Not necessarily. She must be completely without bad temper, jealousy, over-emotionalism and spite, of course.”
“Of course,” said Alicia, who was naturally checking off the enumerated qualities in herself and had arrived at the depressing conclusion that she possessed none of them. She stood up, and looked round the room. “How about some more gramophone?” Glancing down at him she found his grey eyes fixed upon the roll of dark hair that encircled her head.
“What’s the matter—am I coming to pieces?”
“I was thinking that your head is a good shape,” he said indifferently. “Will you see if you can find some Bach, please?”
CHAPTER 14
MEANWHILE, MISS FIELDING and Miss Burton were sitting on camp stools in the air-raid shelter.
This situation will be familiar to many of our readers, and those of them to whom it is not familiar and who desire a vivid pen-picture of people sitting on camp stools in an air-raid shelter can go elsewhere for it. Those who are surprised that anyone holding Miss Fielding’s opinions should have a shelter at all will hazard the guess, and rightly, that Kenneth had insisted upon getting one because Miss Burton was very afraid in the raids and felt slightly better when she was sitting in a thing prescribed by the Government for her protection. Kenneth could not endure the spectacle of an elderly lady, endeared to him by chivalry and family ties and habits, in a state of terror without wanting to strangle Germans by the score; he went out into the garden and swore foully in solitude after the first bombs had fallen near Sunglades, and as there were no Germans handy to strangle, he relieved his feelings by buying a shelter for Miss Burton and furnishing it with every luxury that a cheque book could provide and a shelter could contain.
Miss Fielding, of course, would have preferred to take no notice of the raids. She was without imagination and was not afraid of bombs. She thought of the Luftwaffe as Misguided, like the rest of the German nation, but felt no personal rancour towards it: she ignored it; she mentally brushed it aside like a tiresome fly and looked vaguely forward to the day when English and Germans alike would enjoy a hearty laugh together over the time when they were silly enough to bomb each other’s towns. Pending this happy occasion, she always accompanied Miss Burton into the shelter because it made Miss Burton less nervous to have her there and she was not without the milk of human kindness.
“There!” said Miss Fielding, banging herself down on the camp stool, “I don’t expect we shall be here for long. The stove will soon burn up. How foolish it all seems, doesn’t it? So senseless.”
Miss Burton, whose lugubrious small face looked out of her fur coat like a mouse in a muff, made a vague and dismal sound.
“I wonder where Betty and Vartouhi are,” pursued Miss Fielding, handing her cousin a packet of Maltesers and taking two herself. “I hope Vartouhi will have the sense to take cover.”
“And Ken—poor Ken—out in it!” put in Miss Burton, who felt so much better when large, kind Kenneth was there to pat her on the shoulder and make little jokes.
“Oh, he enjoys it,” said Kenneth’s sister at once. “I never waste any sympathy on Ken in a raid. When he was three he loved bangs, the bigger the better, and he’s just the same now.” She glanced discontentedly round the shelter and started whistling through her teeth, which she always did during raids. In a moment, Miss Burton knew from experience, she would begin to accuse people of things. Miss Burton had never fathomed why air-raids affected Miss Fielding in this way; she only knew that they did. Perhaps it was the confined atmosphere of the shelter, which made her feel like a conspirator fulminating against his Government in a cellar or perhaps she thus worked off her irritation at having her normal activities interrupted. Whatever it was, she began at once by announcing that Vartouhi smoked too much; it was very bad for her; she smoked seven or eight of those strong cigarettes a day and she, Miss Fielding, was going to speak to her about it for her own good. Vartouhi disposed of, Miss Fielding passed on to Betty and demanded if Miss Burton had not noticed that Betty’s manne
r with Kenneth was increasingly flirtatious and silly? Miss Burton truthfully replied that she had not. (She had, in fact, observed a change in the manner of one member of the household towards another, but she was not going to mention the matter to Miss Fielding.)
“And besides,” she went on, more frankly than usual as she knitted very fast and badly and the guns banged, “what does it matter if she is flirtatious? They’re old friends and there’s no harm in it.”
“I don’t want Betty getting ideas into her head,” said Miss Fielding sharply. “Kenneth is a very good match and Betty’s getting on. If she wants to settle herself comfortably for her old age she hasn’t much time left.”
Miss Burton, to whom the idea of marriage for any reason but love was actually horrible, knitted faster than ever and said that she was sure Such an idea had never entered Betty’s head.
“And besides,” she went on illogically, “why shouldn’t Kenneth marry if he wants to, Connie? Betty would make him a very good wife, I’m sure, and we know her, and I think it would be very—oh, my goodness, was that a bomb?”
“No, it’s that new gun near Cowater. Kenneth is not the type to make a good husband, Frances. You know as well as I do how many times I’ve stopped him making a fool of himself in that way. He’s so selfish and set in his habits, too. And besides … remember!”
“If you mean Uncle Eustace——”
Miss Fielding nodded meaningly and took three more Maltesers. “Kenneth has inherited all that. I look on it as a sacred trust, left to me by Our Mother, to see that Kenneth never marries.”
He would if he really wanted to, thought Miss Burton, dropping stitches madly. It isn’t you that’s kept him from marrying, it’s having been jilted by Betty when he was only a boy, and always being so henpecked by you and Joan and Aunt Eleanor, and being so comfortable here, and not being very attractive to girls, poor old Ken, they laugh at him. There are about six different reasons that have kept Ken from marrying, so far, but if he really wanted to, he would, and you couldn’t stop him. Oh dear, this knitting is in more of a muddle than ever.
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