Belinda was not sure why they had been asked, but it seemed as if Agatha had decided to dispose of several people to whom she owed invitations, for the company included, besides themselves, the Bishop, Father Plowman, Mr Donne and Miss Aspinall, who had been asked at the last minute instead of Lady Clara Boulding, who had suddenly decided to spend Christmas in Switzerland with her married daughter. Miss Aspinall was radiant, or as near it as she could be, glittering with beads and chains and agreeing rapturously with everything that everybody said. This was rather difficult with four clergymen present, as, with the exception of the curate who hardly ventured an opinion on anything, they tended to disagree with each other wherever they could.
It was such a pity, Belinda reflected, that clergymen were so apt to bring out the worst in each other, especially with the season of Peace and Goodwill so near. As a species they did not get on and being in a small country village made things even more difficult. These embarrassments would not arise in London where the clergy kept themselves to themselves in their own little sets, High, Broad and Low, as it were. It was so odd to hear Father Plowman calling the curate Father Donne, though the curate himself did not appear to think it so. On the contrary, he had that evening preached a most successful sermon in Father Plowman’s church on the text We heard of the same at Ephrata and found it in the wood, and had been very much impressed by the elaborate service. He would discuss it with Olivia Berridge some time; she was always so sensible and would be sure to give him good advice. He would be seeing her in the New Year as he had been invited to stay for a few days with the chaplain of his old college, in whose rowing he still took a very keen interest. When there was a suitable pause in the conversation, he ventured to mention this visit.
‘Oh, if you should see Mr Mold, do give him my very kindest regards,’ said Harriet, fingering her long rope of cultured pearls.
‘Do you think that is wise?’ said the Archdeacon. ‘Even kindest regards are a poor substitute for the deeper feelings. I hear that the poor fellow is in quite a bad way as it is.’
The Bishop looked a little alarmed and Agatha, frowning at her husband, hastened to turn the conversation to Olivia, and how glad she would be to see Mr Donne. ‘She is generally up during the vacation, you know,’ she explained. ‘She does a good deal of reading then.’
Mr Donne looked rather embarrassed. ‘Oh, yes, it will be jolly to see Olivia again,’ he said heartily. ‘I expect we shall go for some walks together. She’s very keen on walking.’
‘Has she made you any more socks?’ asked Belinda innocently.
‘Yes, indeed, and a pullover too,’ said Mr Donne. ‘She’s really awfully good.’
‘Well, I hope she knows how to graft a toe by now,’ said Harriet bluntly. ‘Belinda could show her.’
‘Olivia is a very clever girl,’ said Agatha. ‘I’m sure she is quite equal to it.’
‘I should hardly call her a girl,’ said the Archdeacon spitefully. ‘But I suppose women like to think of themselves as girls long after they are thirty.’
‘Oh, Olivia is only thirty-one or two,’ said Agatha impatiently, ‘and her work on The Owl and the Nightingale has really been a most substantial contribution to Middle English studies.’
‘All the same, it is important to know how to graft a toe,’ persisted Harriet. ‘What is it, Belinda, knit and slip off, then purl and keep on? I never can remember.’
Just as Belinda was thinking of a tactful answer, the Bishop broke in, saying with a reminiscent sigh, ‘Ah, the socks I had knitted for me when I was a curate!’
‘I know,’ agreed Father Plowman, ‘some small, some large, some short, some long, but all acceptable because of the goodwill that inspired the knitters.’
‘I should have thought a sock was very little use unless it was the right size,’ said the Archdeacon sourly.
When she heard this, Belinda was thankful that she had decided against knitting him a pullover and went cold with horror at the thought of what she had escaped. For there would surely have been something wrong with it. She attended to her soup, straight out of a tin with no subtle additions, she decided. Perhaps only one tin among so many, watered down or with potato water added. It certainly had very little taste.
‘What delicious soup, Mrs Hoccleve,’ said Miss Aspinall timidly. ‘Such a delicate flavour.’
‘It reminds me of our native fermented porridge,’ said the Bishop. ‘The flavour is somewhat similar.’
‘Oh, how interesting,’ said Connie. ‘How is it made?’
‘My dear Bishop, I hope you will remember that we are at the dinner table and spare us a detailed description,’ broke in the Archdeacon.
‘Yes, I suppose these natives are very disgusting,’ said Harriet complacently. ‘It is better not to know too much about them.’
‘Many of them will be celebrating the festival of Christmas on Tuesday, just as we shall be doing,’ said the Bishop on a faint note of reproach. ‘Perhaps it will not be exactly the same in detail, but their feelings will be as ours.’
‘I suppose it is because of your work there that they will be able to,’ said the curate.
The Bishop smiled and was about to answer when the Archdeacon gave a short bark of laughter and exclaimed, ‘Ah, no, that’s where you’re wrong. The Romans were there first. Father Vigilio of the Padua Fathers, I believe.’
‘Yes, certainly, but I had the honour of starting the first Church of England Mission among the Mbawawa,’ said the Bishop, ‘though the Roman Catholics were there before me.’
‘What a shame,’ said Harriet indignantly, but Belinda felt that her wrath was directed not so much towards the Church of Rome as the rather dry-looking rissoles, cabbage and boiled potatoes which were now set before them. Rissoles! Belinda could imagine her sister’s disgusted comments later. At least one would have expected a bird of some kind, especially when there was a bishop present, when indeed all the gentlemen were in Holy Orders.
‘I suppose the African’s leaning towards ritual would make him a ready convert to Roman Catholicism,’ Belinda ventured. ‘I mean, one knows their love of bright, gaudy things,’ she added rather unfortunately. ‘The Church of England might seem rather plain to them.’
‘Bright and gaudy?’ said Father Plowman, on a pained note. ‘Oh, Miss Bede, surely you cannot mean that?’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Belinda, in confusion, ‘naturally I didn’t mean to imply…’
‘Well, Plowman is still with us, you know,’ said the Archdeacon almost jovially. ‘I don’t think he need take your remarks so personally.’
Belinda chewed her stringy cabbage and listened gratefully to dear Henry talking about Frazer and The Golden Bough, which he thought remarkably fine.
‘At one time I had the idea of giving a course of sermons based on it,’ he said, ‘but I came to the conclusion, regretfully I must admit, that with a congregation of limited intelligence it would be too dangerous.’
Belinda liked the sound of this and could almost have imagined them all back in Victorian days, when a father might forbid a book ‘inimical to the faith of the day’ to be read in his house.
‘How debased anthropology has become since Frazer’s day,’ sighed the Bishop, ‘a mere matter of genealogies, meaningless definitions and jargon, words, words, words, as Hamlet has it; lineage, sib, kindred, extended family, ramage – one doesn’t know where one is. Even the good old term clan is suspect.’
‘What is a sib?’ asked Harriet. ‘It sounds a nice, friendly kind of thing, or it might be something to eat, a biscuit, perhaps.’
The Bishop shook his head and said nothing, either because he did not deign to be associated with present-day anthropological terminology or because he did not really know what a sib was.
The Archdeacon recalled the Anglo-Saxon meaning of the word, and talked for some minutes about the double meaning of peace and relationship, but Harriet had lost interest and soon they were all in the drawing-room, drinking coffee made with coffee essence.
When the gentlemen joined them it was suggested that Harriet should play the piano and she gave a showy performance of Manuel de Falla’s Pantomime. Then the Bishop sang an unaccompanied Mbawawa Christmas carol, which everyone agreed was very moving. When he had finished, Father Plowman suggested with admirable good manners that the Archdeacon should read aloud to them.
The Archdeacon was so surprised at this that for some minutes he could not even think of anything to read.
‘Let it be something that all can understand,’ suggested Father Plowman, thinking of an occasion when the Archdeacon had insisted on reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales with an attempt at the original pronunciation.
There was a pause, nobody liking or perhaps wishing to make any suggestion, until Miss Aspinall timidly ventured the observation that Keats had written some very lovely poems. She was, of course, remembering Lady Grudge’s ‘evenings’ in Belgrave Square, when Canon Kendrick used to read aloud to them.
‘Ah, yes, we will have Hyperion,’ said the Archdeacon. ‘Remarkably fine.’
There was a murmur of assent, during which Harriet could be heard asking the curate if Hyperion were a very long poem; she had quite forgotten.
Belinda turned to the Bishop and made a chatty remark about always having liked the lines about Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self.
The Bishop nodded and gave her what Belinda thought was rather an intimate smile. ‘I am sure that any poem you admire must be very fine,’ he said in a low voice.
Belinda was so startled that she wondered whether she could have heard correctly. ‘I’m afraid I like what I remember from my student days,’ she said. ‘I hardly ever read anything new.’ Hyperion had no memories for her, as the Archdeacon had never read it to her then, so that she was able to listen to it quite dispassionately and join with the polite murmurs that followed his performance.
‘And yet I think I prefer the earlier Keats,’ she said rather boldly, ‘I was always very fond of Isabella when I was a young girl.’
The Archdeacon smiled indulgently and Agatha said quite kindly, ‘Well, of course, Isabella is rather a young girl’s poem, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, yes, completely,’ agreed Belinda. ‘It is many years since I read it.’ It would indeed be an ominous sign if she felt drawn to it at her time of life, she felt.
‘What a fine poem Young’s Night Thoughts is,’ said the Bishop. ‘I have been reading it every night myself. I have a most interesting collection of books in my room,’ he went on. ‘There is an Icelandic grammar among them and I have been comparing that language with the Mbawawa.’
‘But do you find any similarity?’ asked Agatha doubtfully.
‘Oh, none whatever,’ said the Bishop almost gaily, ‘but it is a fascinating study, fascinating …’ his voice trailed off on a bleating note.
‘I am surprised and gratified that you find the books interesting,’ said the Archdeacon. ‘I made the selection myself, but I had no idea of your tastes.’
The evening ended with a song from the curate. Harriet, who accompanied him, was anxious that he should try an Elizabethan love song, and after a rather faltering beginning he sang quite charmingly, Belinda thought, but without much conviction.
Love is a fancie,
Love is a frenzie,
Let not a toy then breed thee such annoy …
Perhaps there was no frenzy in his feeling for Miss Berridge, and love was hardly a toy. Surely Count Bianco’s affection for Harriet could not be so described, or Belinda’s for the Archdeacon? And yet tonight she had the feeling that there might be some truth in what the poet said. It was excellent advice to those of riper years, especially when the imagination became too active. That intimate note in the Bishop’s voice, for example, and the way he had seemed to look at her during the reading of the poem. It might just as easily have been Connie Aspinall he was looking at. Belinda had been forced to mention the fact that the chrysanthemums he had sent her were still lasting very well. She almost wished that they might die, and noticed with relief when she got home that some of the foliage was tinged with brown. Suddenly she took them out of their vase and, although it was dark, went out with them to the dustbin. They were dead really and one did not like to feel that flowers from the wrong person might be everlasting.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
‘I must go and see Ricardo,’ declared Belinda, one morning early in the New Year. ‘Edith tells me that he has a slight attack of gout which keeps him in the house. It’s rather difficult to know what to take him, though.’
‘Yes, you have to be very careful with gout,’ said Harriet. ‘No beef or strawberries or port wine. Do you think I ought to go as well?’
‘That would certainly do him more good than anything, but you mustn’t come with me. I’m sure he’d prefer to see you alone.’
‘Yes, I really will go,’ said Harriet. ‘You may tell him to expect me,’ she added graciously.
Now that Harriet’s plans about the Bishop were clearly not likely to come to anything, Belinda was determined to bring Count Bianco and her sister together as much as possible. She felt this to be her duty, and although she was not particularly anxious that Harriet should marry and leave her alone, she thought that if a marriage had been arranged in heaven she would prefer Ricardo to be the happy man. He was devoted to Harriet and they had many tastes in common: he came of an ancient Italian family and was very comfortable financially. The only thing that might possibly be against him was that he was not in the Church, but even this was not as great a drawback as might at first appear, for would there not always be tender curates in need of sympathetic attention and perfectly baked cakes?
So Belinda reasoned within herself as she walked up the drive to Ricardo’s house. She walked slowly, for she was thinking rather sentimentally of how Ricardo had loved her sister well and faithfully for many years. Surely he deserved some reward for his constancy? She herself had loved the Archdeacon even longer, but naturally there was no hope of any reward for her now, at least not in this world, she reflected piously, and we are given to understand that we shall be purged of all earthly passions in that other life.
The Count was in and would be delighted to see her. Belinda had been careful to announce herself as Miss Belinda Bede, with special emphasis on the Christian name, for she did not want Ricardo to expect Harriet and then be disappointed.
He was in the library, reading a little here and there in his many books. His gouty foot was bound up and rested on a low stool. Beside him on a little table was a pile of letters, which Belinda guessed to be those of his friend, the late John Akenside. There was also a Serbo-Croatian dictionary and the works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
The Count greeted Belinda with a sad smile. ‘It is indeed kind of you to call,’ he said, attempting to get up, but Belinda put her hand on his arm and said how sorry she had been to hear about his gout.
‘It is an inconvenience,’ he said, ‘but I am accustomed to it.’
Touched by his patience and resignation, Belinda wondered how she could show her sympathy. She found it a little difficult to make conversation with Ricardo at the best of times, and could do no more than touch on various matters of general interest. It was inevitable that they should find themselves talking about the Bishop, who showed no signs of moving from the vicarage, where he had now been for nearly two months.
‘I hear that he is to be married soon,’ said Ricardo, in a calm, patient tone.
‘Oh, surely not!’ exclaimed Belinda, wondering how it was possible that Ricardo should come out with a piece of news that she and Harriet knew nothing of. ‘We haven’t heard anything, and I can’t really imagine that anybody would want to marry him.’
‘I heard that your sister was to marry him,’ said Ricardo pathetically.
Belinda now laughed aloud for joy, all the more because it might so nearly have happened. In fact, she told herself soberly, there was still time; but she could at least reassure Ricardo.
‘It certainly isn’t tr
ue at the moment,’ she said, ‘and I think it most unlikely that it ever will be. Wherever did you hear such a thing?’
Ricardo could not remember exactly; perhaps his manservant had heard it somewhere, or it may have been the Archdeacon who had told him when he called a few days ago. Yes, he was sure now that it must have been the Archdeacon. He had seemed quite certain that he was not misinformed.
The wicked liar, thought Belinda angrily. An archdeacon making mischief and spreading false rumours, that was what it amounted to. Although, she told herself hastily, it was possible that Ricardo had misunderstood him, had read too much into a hint or taken a joke too seriously.
‘There is no truth in it whatever,’ she declared positively, hoping as she did so that the Bishop was not at this moment in their drawing-room asking Harriet to be his wife. ‘Harriet does not really care for him at all,’ she went on boldly.
Ricardo smiled and looked almost happy, but then his face clouded as he asked if the Bishop were still at the vicarage?
‘Yes, he is still there,’ said Belinda, ‘but I do not think he will stay much longer. He will have to be getting back to his diocese.’
‘Then there is still time,’ said Ricardo despondently. ‘Even now he may be asking her.’
Belinda shifted uneasily in her chair. Of course one never knew for certain what Harriet might be up to, or the Bishop, for that matter. She was grateful when Ricardo’s manservant appeared with sherry and biscuits on a silver tray.
‘Have you been working on the letters this morning?’ she asked, indicating the pile on the table.
‘Yes, I have been reading them before you came. How wise he was! He knew what would happen there; no man understood the Balkan mind as he did.’