Ladies of Lyndon

by Margaret Kennedy

  ‘Now, that’s a good bit of work!’ exulted Sir Thomas.

  ‘It’s very slow, isn’t it?’ observed his wife.

  ‘Slow! D’you call it slow? What! I’d like to see it done quicker. I’d-like-to-see-it. There’s not a man in England who’d have got that job through so quickly. But I’m not so bad at getting a thing done quickly when I want it. I said to Harvey I wanted the best man I could get. He said: “If you want the thing well done, Sir Thomas, Jacobs is your man. He’ll grow you a perfect lawn in half the time anybody else would, on this side the Atlantic,” he said. “Get him to do it and you’ll see the grass grow. Of course, he’ll cost you a pretty penny, but I take it, Sir Thomas, that you won’t mind that?” “No,” I said, “No! You’re right, Mr Harvey. I don’t mind. Get the thing done! Get a good man and damn the expense. But I must have something for my money. When I buy, I buy in the best market.” “Well,” he said …’

  ‘It looks very ugly now,’ interrupted Cynthia, who had heard this saga before.

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ Sir Thomas argued. ‘It’s a good bit of work, Cynthie. And a good bit of work is never ugly to my mind.’

  This aesthetic flight was lost on Cynthia. She sighed:

  ‘Lyndon has spoilt me a little for lawns, I suppose.’

  Though revelling daily and hourly in the countless things which Sir Thomas provided for her, she was obliged occasionally to bait him a little with reminders of those possessions which no money can buy. Sir Thomas, remembering the Lyndon turf, the fruit of several centuries of patient husbandry, grew a shade more purple.

  ‘Lawns aren’t everything,’ he contested, a little sulkily. ‘If I’d wanted nothing but a lawn I’d have bought that place, Aldstone Priory. But you said you didn’t like it. And you were quite right, I’m sure. By the time we’d put in central heating, and a few bathrooms, there wouldn’t have been a decent room in the house.’

  ‘I know,’ said Cynthia placatingly. ‘Let’s go and look at the peach house.’

  This was a line in which Lyndon could not compete. There were no glass-houses upon any private property in Great Britain which could compare with those of Braxhall. After an exhaustive tour, Sir Thomas suggested that it must be fully lunch-time, but was reminded that they could not eat until Lois and her mother had arrived.

  ‘Well, I hope they’ll come soon,’ he said. ‘I’m hungry.’

  They wandered round to the uppermost of the garden terraces, and looked down the valley. Upon the road, some three miles off, two cars were seen approaching. These, as they drew nearer, proved to be Braxhall belongings. The foremost, a pale blue limousine, was always sent to the station to meet visitors, while the other, if necessary, brought maids and luggage.

  ‘That’s them,’ observed Lady Bragge.

  Sir Thomas cheered up.

  ‘Just time for us to have a cocktail before lunch,’ he said. ‘It takes seven minutes to climb the road hill.’

  Cynthia nodded and they retired indoors for refreshment.

  Ten minutes later the bustle of arrival filled the marble spaciousness of the entrance hall. Marian Clewer, active and handsome in her tussore silk dust-coat, paused in the great doorway, glancing about her with appreciation. She loved coming to see Cynthia and could never visit Braxhall without a sense that all her toil as a mother had not been wasted. Lois, who followed her, cast glances which were less complacent and more critical. With a thrill of inward repulsion she beheld Cynthia and Sir Thomas descending the shallow stairs side by side. They evoked in her mind a medley of exotic images: a magnolia and a peony … a satyr and a naiad … a silver moon and a rubicund sun. She could never see them together without an invasion of contrasting ideas.

  They were very pleased to see Marian; her admiration for all their possessions endeared her to them. To Lois they were cordial, as befits kindred, but their geniality had a note of reserve in it. Despite their saving insensibility, they had perceived that Braxhall did not impress her as it should, and they distrusted her accordingly.

  Marian kissed her younger daughter gravely and tenderly, and, in a lower voice than usual, asked dear Tom after his gout. Cynthia was immediately aware of something odd in her manner; a little of her customary elasticity was gone. There was a hint of forced cheerfulness, of inner trouble bravely endured.

  ‘Something’s upsetting Mother,’ she told Sir Thomas, when she had sent her guests upstairs. ‘Did you notice?’

  ‘No! I noticed nothing. She seemed quite cheerful, I thought.’

  ‘Not a bit of it! That’s her smiling-but-resigned face. I know it.’

  ‘I wonder!’ exclaimed Sir Thomas in alarm. ‘I wonder if she got rid of those rubber shares when I told her to. I do hope …’

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t think it’s anything like that,’ said Cynthia decidedly. ‘I can’t imagine Mother losing money!’

  ‘Well, I’m sure I hope not,’ said Sir Thomas. ‘You must try and get it out of her.’

  ‘Oh, she’ll cough it up fast enough. She’s just longing to, I expect. But she wants to prepare us first by this graveside sort of cheerfulness …’

  ‘Well, pump her at the first opportunity.’

  When Marian and Lois reappeared they all took lunch in the panelled room used as a dining-room until the banquet hall should be ready.

  ‘I’m dying to see the frescoes,’ exclaimed Lois as she helped herself to stuffed olives. ‘Are they very lovely, Cynthia?’

  Cynthia was silent for a few seconds. Then she said: ‘Well … I wouldn’t call them lovely myself. I think they are perfectly hideous.’

  Sir Thomas looked unhappy, and protested:

  ‘Martineau saw the south wall when he was over here in the spring. And he said that they were the finest bit of work, of the kind, ever done in England.’

  ‘If only they stand the climate!’ observed Lois. ‘Hubert says …’

  ‘They’ll stand it all right,’ pronounced Sir Thomas. ‘You must remember this new central dry-heating I’ve put in. It’s guaranteed to remedy the defects of a damp climate. When you step into that hall, you step into the Sunny South. It might be Italy. If no mural frescoes ever stood the climate before, you’ve got to remember that there’s been no hall built exactly to suit them, like mine is. Of course, it’s cost me …’

  ‘If it’s never been done before, how do you know all this?’ asked Cynthia derisively.

  ‘Now, Cynthie! You know that when I once tried to explain the apparatus to you you went to sleep. You don’t want me to begin all over again?’

  ‘Mercy, no! I only mean that you’re trusting pretty much to the shop, or wherever it is you got it from, and they may be doing you.’

  ‘Oh, indeed! They’d be sharp customers if they could do that. No! I’ve been into the thing, I tell you, and …’

  ‘What is the subject?’ interrupted Marian.

  ‘The Rape of the Sabines,’ replied her daughter.

  ‘The …?’

  ‘The Rape of the Sabines.’

  ‘Oh, surely not?’ exclaimed Lois.

  ‘You’re making a mistake, Cynthie,’ said Sir Thomas. ‘It’s a Bacchanal. You’ve mixed it up with those tapestries we got.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Cynthia, ‘it’s all the same thing really. A lot of people prancing about with nothing on. I’m sure I wouldn’t know what it was meant for.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought a classical subject would suit James,’ said Lois. ‘What does he know about Bacchus?’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to criticize,’ said Marian, who liked nothing better. ‘And I do think it’s very nice of you and Tom, Cynthia dear, to give James this work. He must need it with all those little children. But I can’t help feeling it’s a pity, in your lovely dining-hall. I think you should have got somebody really first class.’

  ‘But, Mother,’ protested Lois, ‘you don’t understand. It’s not because they want to be nice to James that Tom and Cynthia are having the frescoes. At least …’—realizing the pa
inful candour of her statement—‘of course, it’s very nice for him. But, really and truly, Hubert says there is no one to touch him in these large decorative pieces….’

  ‘Well, I don’t understand it,’ said Marian. ‘I don’t see what Hubert has to go upon. James never painted any frescoes anywhere before that I’ve heard of. Sherry, please!’

  ‘Ervine knows what he’s talking about,’ asserted Sir Thomas. ‘If he says James Clewer is the best man, I’m content to take it that he is. Where I’m not qualified to judge, I’m content to take the opinion of an expert.’

  ‘But Hubert used not to admire James’s work,’ argued Marian.

  ‘James has improved a lot lately,’ explained Lois. ‘Besides, all the canons of artistic taste have changed so much lately. It’s the war, you know,’ she added vaguely. ‘Hubert says his experiences in the army have influenced his ideas of art a lot. He says he feels he needs something much more dynamic than he did before the war.’

  This sounded so impressive that everyone was silenced, and Marian concurred gravely with:

  ‘Of course, the war has changed us all very much.’

  The Bragges and their guests, munching their turbot, reflected for a while upon the extent to which they had been changed by the war. Marian at length observed that even poor James was a good deal altered. Perhaps she meant that he was more dynamic, but she said:

  ‘He’s improved a lot in looks. They made him hold himself so much better in the army.’

  James had joined the army with characteristic suddenness, while his relations were still very busy discussing some light form of war work which he could do. No feat of the imagination could transform him into a British officer, and yet, what else could he be? John and Hubert were already in training camps, and these deliberations had been carried on mainly by the Ladies of Lyndon. It was in the summer of 1914, before the rush for munition-making, and there really seemed nothing for it but to put him into the Red Cross as an orderly. Marian thought that he could carry stretchers, but Lois, who had got a First Aid Certificate and knew all about such things, maintained that he could not.

  Finally there came Dolly’s letter to Agatha with the news that James had enlisted in the Wessex Fusiliers, along with several Kell cousins. While he was at the Front Dolly let her house and went to live with her aunt in Devonshire, so that Lyndon had seen very little of her. Lois caught sight of her, briefly, in London about eighteen months later. She was standing upon a pile of milk cans in Victoria Station, a child in her arms, waving good-bye to a trainful of shouting, cheering men. Lois learnt that James was in the train, returning after six days’ leave. She realized that she had seen the trio entering the station some minutes before, and, though finding their appearance vaguely familiar, had failed to identify them. There were so many families who looked like that. It struck her that the singularity of these relations of hers lay in their absolute ordinariness, their embodiment of a type. James, in his greatcoat and with his bulky kit on his back, was no longer conspicuously uncouth. He looked like every soldier who ever returned to battle, and Dolly, his wife, in her undemonstrative fortitude, was like all the women who saw their men go.

  As she had nothing better to do, Lois took Dolly to a neighbouring tea-shop, where they ate tepid poached eggs and tried to be civil to each other. But they could not honestly feel that they had got very far. Young Henry, James’s son, did not interest Lois. He was rather plebeian looking, with scanty ginger hair; much too like all soldiers’ babies, she thought. There had been, subsequently, two others, a girl and a boy, also red-haired. Kell was evidently a dominant type.

  When James was invalided out of the army with a permanently crippled leg, he returned with Dolly to their cottage in Oxfordshire, and began to paint harder than ever. Nobody paid much attention to him until the echoes of war had subsided a little. Then it appeared that he was being talked about. Hubert went to a small exhibition of his work in some obscure place or other, and came home much disturbed. Hubert and Lois began to speak a little carefully of James. Before long they had almost managed to forget that they had ever spoken otherwise.

  Cynthia and Sir Thomas completed this renovation of the family attitude when they offered to James the work of decorating their banqueting hall. They did this upon Hubert’s recommendation. Having approved of the initial design they had departed for a long tour in the Riviera, leaving the artist to perform the work. He had lodged, in the greatest luxury, in the furnished part of Braxhall during the whole period, waited upon by an army of servants, and with permission to get down any number of models, if he wanted them, and quarter them upon Sir Thomas as long as he pleased. Even a car had been left for him.

  The work was finished and James gone before the owners returned from the Continent. It was to celebrate the opening of the hall for practical uses that Lois and Marian had been invited to Braxhall. They were the first of a family house-party collected for the occasion. A great luncheon, to which half the County had been invited, was to take place the following Thursday, when the hall was to be used for the first time and the frescoes generally exhibited. Reflecting upon this party, Marian asked anxiously whether James was to be present.

  ‘No,’ said Cynthia. ‘He can’t come, or won’t come, I don’t know which, unless Dolly comes too. And Dolly can’t come without the baby, for a very pressing reason.’

  Marian raised her eyebrows delicately.

  ‘How like Dolly!’ commented Lois.

  ‘I always did think her rather like a cow,’ said Cynthia.

  ‘Still, you know,’ said the hospitable owner of Braxhall, ‘they could all come if they liked.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ said Cynthia distastefully. ‘They look so like a family party at the Zoo.’

  Lois agreed. It was more than possible that the guests on Thursday might find the frescoes a little hard to swallow. To meet the artist and family, as well, might amaze them beyond recovery. It was really better that James should lurk mysteriously in the background. Lois had already begun to talk a little romantically about him and to hint at a ‘Bohemian marriage.’ She did not state, in so many words, that Mrs James Clewer had been a very capable housemaid, but people gathered that she had been beneath her husband in station. It was supposed that she might have been a model or a chorus girl. Lois did not enlarge upon Dolly’s extreme respectability.

  ‘Then who else is coming to stay here?’ inquired Marian.

  ‘John and Agatha and Mrs Cocks come tonight.’

  ‘And, by the way,’ put in Sir Thomas, ‘I’ve invited that cousin of the Cocks’s, that doctor, what’s his name? … The shell-shock man … Blair! I met him yesterday, coming out of the club, and told him about the frescoes. He seemed interested; said he’d always been interested in James and his work. So I told him to come here, and he’s coming tomorrow, Cynthie. That’s all right, isn’t it? I told him that the longer he stops the better pleased we shall be. There’s plenty of room here, luckily.’

  He paused, uneasily, for the three women had exchanged glances. They sat stubbornly silent, and he asked again:

  ‘That’s all right, isn’t it? A cousin of Agatha’s, and a good man at his job. Peterson was talking about him the other day. He says that there isn’t a man in Harley Street …’

  ‘Oh, yes, I daresay he’s an excellent doctor,’ said Cynthia coldly.

  Marian irradiated discretion and changed the subject. But it would have been obvious to the veriest dolt that she had been touched in a tender spot. She began to inquire after the garden with a slight accentuation of the gently martyred air which she had displayed on entering the house. She was, obviously, hiding a wounded heart. Sir Thomas, baffled as only a man among discreet women can be baffled, raised an eyebrow at his wife. But Cynthia would not look at him. Inspired by his bad angel, he followed up his first blunder by another and a worse.

  ‘And how’s John been keeping these days?’ he asked. ‘Heart not giving him much trouble, I hope?’

  This was, it appeared, a
perfectly disastrous inquiry. Marian turned pale, Lois crimson, and even Cynthia left off crumbling her bread and coloured a little.

  ‘You ain’t still anxious about it?’ demanded Sir Thomas. ‘You should make him see a specialist, a really crack man….’

  ‘He has seen a specialist,’ said Marian with reproving dignity.

  ‘Yes,’ persisted Sir Thomas. ‘But has he seen a good one?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Because you ought to be careful what you are doing, you know. Can’t play fast and loose with that sort of thing. I heard of a chap the other day, young Baines, son of my friend Baines, up in Liverpool. He got gassed, just like John, suffered with his heart, and what’s more he died of it. These poison cases are no joke, let me tell you.’

  Marian glanced appealingly at Cynthia as if demanding how much longer they were going to have to endure this sort of thing. Cynthia said:

  ‘Hush, Tom. We all know that,’

  ‘Well, the Baines’s didn’t. I mean they didn’t wake up to the seriousness of the thing until the poor chap collapsed. Of course, their doctor must have been grossly careless, but there it is. And you know, Marian, all these Talbots have rocky constitutions….’

  ‘Thank you,’ replied Marian, who had been sitting with compressed lips. ‘You need not instruct me as to John’s health. I happen to have brought him up.’

  ‘If you’ve finished your dessert,’ said Cynthia, ‘perhaps you’d like to come down to the hall and look at the dadoes … I mean the frescoes. I’ll have coffee brought there.’

  They passed through the entrance hall and proceeded down a corridor paved in black and white marble and panelled by long looking-glasses. Folding doors upon the right led into the hall, and opposite them hung a large portrait of Lady Bragge. It had been painted very recently by a fashionable artist who could be trusted to do credit to Cynthia’s gown. She wore her pearls, with a voluminous wrap of rose-pink brocade, slipping off her milky shoulders, and she carried an ostrich fan.