‘Has your mummy gone to the local too?’ inquired Margaret, giving Jane a hand (which Jane ignored) to help her out of the shelter.
‘No, she’s gone to say good-bye to my daddy,’ answered Claudia, looking suddenly grave. ‘He’s going Abroad.’
‘My daddy’s Abroad,’ said Edna, who was a cheerful little thing with bobbed hair and a missing front tooth, ‘in Italy.’
‘I’ll give you a hand, Claudia,’ said Margaret, wondering what time she herself would get to bed and if there would be any of the evening left after ‘all were safely gathered in.’ ‘If you’d like me to, that is?’
‘Thank you very much, if you would kindly plait my hair, I can’t manage it yet,’ said Claudia, shaking back her mane.
The next hour was occupied in supervising the washing of faces, and hearing prayers and tucking people up and dealing firmly with Claudia, who tried to start a conversation on the difference between a Tory and a Conservative which was evidently intended to keep Margaret by her bed until Margaret’s own hour for bed arrived. The latter found that her bedroom was in the middle of a nest of rooms where all the children slept, and as she tucked the last lot of bedclothes round the last child (who instantly thrust its feet out of bed, remarking, ‘My feet are simply burning’) she resigned herself to being aroused very early in the morning. As she came downstairs into the dining-hall an hour later, she was yawning, and wondering at what hour the household retired.
The hall was deserted and peaceful; the front door stood open, and through it there was a breath-taking glimpse of the orchard in the clear blue twilight, each tree spreading its white clouds of bloom above the dim green-blue grass, and all glimmering ethereally away in walks and dells wet with dew. There was not a sound; not a thrush singing, nor the last call of a blackbird, not even a cricket chirrupping; and into the hall was stealing that chill, soaked in the scent of hidden dew, that comes on May evenings, and is the very touch of Spring’s young hand.
There was a faint smell of burnt jam issuing from the kitchen, but of the weedy young man, Irene, Lady Challis, and the rest, there was no sign. Margaret went over to the fireplace and saw that the mass of delicate ashes in it masked a red glow, and as she was shivering, she ventured to put on some forest-wood that was stacked in the hearth, and soon the flames were playing prettily.
While she was warming herself, lonely and content, she became aware of distant voices making remarks which suggested that someone was about to set out on a bicycle for Cambridge, and presently the sounds mounted to a crescendo of farewells, then died away. There was a brief silence; then out of the jamperfumed passage Lady Challis appeared, dressed in an old house-coat, and came slowly across the hall towards the fire. Margaret’s heart beat faster. Would the wonderful talk now take place? But somehow she only wanted Lady Challis to rest, because she looked so tired.
‘That’s right, I’m glad you put some wood on, it gets so cold in the evenings,’ remarked Lady Challis absently, pulling up a chair and sitting down with a sigh. ‘I’ve just been seeing him off to Cambridge, poor dear.’
After a respectful pause Margaret said:
‘I hope he hasn’t had bad news?’ (The weedy young man, she presumed.)
‘Oh, no. No worse than usual. There’s always his father, of course – but we won’t go into that. No, when I said poor dear, I only meant I was sorry for him as one is for a beetle, don’t you know?’
Margaret said nothing, and Lady Challis leant back and shut her eyes. The twilight slowly deepened and the firelight began to throw shadows on the ceiling. Not a sound came from outside, and the house was still. Now and then Margaret quietly put a fresh stick on the fire and the fragrance of wood-smoke crept out on the air like the spirit of the house taking its evening walk. She hoped very much that Lady Challis was resting, and then became so lost in her own vague dreams that she was startled when Lady Challis remarked from behind the fingers that were shading her face:
‘In the five years that I have lived here, only two people of your age have sat in silence with me, and not started talking about themselves. One of them is you.’
Margaret glowed, and murmured something.
‘And I know you’ve got lots to say,’ went on Lady Challis sleepily, ‘haven’t you?’
‘Masses!’ answered Margaret, quietly but emphatically.
‘Well, some day you shall. Not this time, I expect, because you’ll be busy with the children, but you must come down by yourself one week-end later on, and then you shall talk and I will listen and try to help you.’
‘Oh –!’ breathed Margaret. ‘Thank you.’
‘I mean it. You telephone one Friday and say you’re coming, and I will be ready to listen. Now I don’t expect I shall say another word to you while you’re here, what with one thing and another, but don’t go and get all hurt and disappointed, because I always keep my word; you ask the children. Ah, here are the others.’
And she sat up, looking like an ageless spirit that had chosen to live in a wrinkled skin under silver hair; and the rest of the party came in from the local, ready to crowd round the fire and remark on its pleasantness. Among them Margaret was surprised to see Gerard Challis; surely he had not been to the local too? But it transpired that he had, and had caused some respectful mirth among his juniors by bringing out a volume of Plato and reading it at a solitary table while he drank his one beer. He now lingered by the open door, apart from the gay group round the fire, gazing out into the orchard where it was almost dark, and the spell of his personal beauty so enchanted her that she found it difficult to keep from watching him.
At that moment he shut the door on the sweet darkness outside, and came over to the group beside the fire, where two of the more sophisticated young mothers made room for him, the ingenuous ones being too much in awe of his reputation to indicate that he should sit beside them. The rest of the evening passed pleasantly in gossip and laughter, and the drinking of tea, and Margaret was able to feel herself at home at least with one or two members of the party; but her only hope, so far as he was concerned, was a fervent one that he would not notice her any more during the week-end.
Mr Challis, as he sat nursing his teacup next to a reasonably intelligent and attractive young woman, was congratulating himself that the first evening was nearly over and that to-morrow morning he could shut himself up on the plea of work. He always found the active, cheerful atmosphere of his mother’s home insipid, and the presence of so many young children, and of ungainly women who were about to have more children, affronted his aesthetic sense. There was never time at Yates Row for a leisurely conversation or for the development of subtle relationships, for every moment of the day seemed taken up with the toilet of the hordes of children and the preparation of the large, simple, commonplace meals; and in the winter there was wood to be hunted for and rehearsals for a play which always entertained the huge Christmas house-party, and Christmas presents to be made and reading aloud and sing-songs round the piano; and in the summer there was fruit-picking and picnics and haymaking and The Walk to be taken, and swimming excursions to the Martlet and tea in the garden; while in the autumn there was fruit-bottling and jam-making and nut-hunting; and in the spring everybody insanely gardened from morning till night, and looked forward to the summer. No one seemed to take any interest in those questions, both eternal and temporary, which are the proper study of Man, and which mark him off, by his restless pursuit of them, from the beasts that perish.
The sight of his wife and daughter and grandchildren gathered about him under the matriarchal roof made him feel as involved in family life as a Chinese and he longed to be back in London, occupied with adult interests and dissatisfactions, while Hilda’s face and form floated always before him with a faint, sweet pain.
Late that night Margaret went up to bed, making her way cautiously to her room through the other rooms where children lay asleep in varying stages of untidiness or cosy envelopment in the bedclothes. She paused to cover Jane’s fat legs, which were bare almo
st to what would one day be her waist, and to smile at Robert, who was slumbering, with his long eyelashes sweeping his pale cheeks, in as neat a position as when she had tucked him in three hours ago.
It was strange to stand at her window and look out across the orchard, where the apple trees glimmered in the starlight and Mars flashed low and red upon the horizon, to feel herself surrounded by that sleeping childish loveliness, and to realize that far out across the meadows and little woods and darkened cities of England, beyond the calm spring sea, men were fighting; that the game the children had played in the garden was a pantomime of the horror in Europe and Asia. Half the world, she thought, is fighting to-night; and yet there are still people who are going to bed peacefully, with children asleep near them and candlelight making shadows on the walls and their beds looking comforting and quiet. And suddenly, for the first time in her life, she felt that she loved both the good and the wicked; she loved all her fellow-men.
25
She was awakened at six o’clock by Jane climbing into her bed and demanding to be made ‘warmdy,’ as her legs were cold; and in no time, it seemed, they were all seated at the breakfast-table, and spooning cereal and milk into their mouths. There was abundance of milk, for Lady Challis had a beautiful Jersey cow named Blossom, which was the admiration of all the babies, living in the paddock at the end of the garden, as well as a goat which was not quite so popular, and both were milked every morning and evening by Bertie. (There was some coffee for Mr Challis, which put him into a slightly better temper.)
Hebe looked even more placid than usual as she sat beside Emma and persistently directed the spoon, which the child was just learning to use, into her mouth. Although she professed to be bored in her grandmother’s house and to long for the pleasures of London, the atmosphere suited her, especially when there were other young people staying there with whom she could go off to the local in the evening and be her age. As her children were her chief interest, this house where the routine revolved about children was the natural place for her to be, and she only occasionally became bored with a diet of Irish stew, macaroni cheese and semolina pudding, and a conversation consisting of riddles asked and answered, ancient jokes of which no one ever wearied, questions, and shrieks of laughter.
But she was still angry with Alex and resented his inability to be satisfied with the life that satisfied her. She had had a postcard, apparently from Dunster, saying, Hope you are all quite well. I am quite well. Love from Alex, but that had been a fortnight ago and that had been all. The Shrapnel Hunters had been called for and taken away in an ancient car by two of his painter friends, and by that she supposed that he was going to finish it in the friends’ studio, and would not be home for some time, for it was only half-done. She had therefore decided that as soon as she got back to London she must try to find somewhere for them all to live. I’ve got all that money saved, she thought (for she was thrifty and had a good head for business) and that’ll start us off comfortably, and this time I’ll see that the house is big enough for all of us, blast him. She missed Alex every now and then, in painful bursts of feeling, but it is surprising how pain can be controlled if the sufferer refuses to give way to it and feels angry instead, and just now she was enjoying a relaxation from the cares of motherhood, while Margaret and the other women took some of her duties off her shoulders.
After her confidences to Margaret on the previous evening, she had decided that her debt had been paid and had said no more. Struggles adored hearing about Grandpapa and Granny, with a bit about Pops thrown in, she told her mother, I thought it would do instead of thanking her, and I call it a cheap round. She did not regard her family as sacrosanct, while poor old Struggles’s earnest passion for Pops amused her. It was bad enough having to love somebody when they made you, let alone having a crush on somebody who didn’t even try to make you, she thought, but Granny was always saying People are so different, Hebe, and she was too right.
Most of the day was spent by Margaret in the garden.
Her duties consisted chiefly in keeping an eye on the two babies who could just walk and carrying them off to ‘see Blossom’ when their interference with the games of the older ones became a nuisance. ‘Will you babies get out of the way!’ in an exasperated shout was the signal for her to drop her book and go to the rescue. After a noisy and cheerful high tea in the paddock, she got her charges earlier to bed than on the previous night, and passed the remainder of the evening peacefully with a book by the dining-hall fire, now reading half a page and then looking up to exchange a smiling word with anyone who happened to come in from the garden.
The young people had again gone down to the local but this evening Mr Challis had not accompanied them, and Margaret had declined (for fear of being odd man out) an invitation which she afterwards wished she had accepted; for it was just a little dull in the hall with a book, when her spirits were exalted by the beauty of the spring weather and the change of scene and the society of new and interesting people. Already Linda and Dick Fletcher and the house at Brockdale seemed very far away. She now had Lady Challis’s promise to think about, and its fulfilment to look forward to, and she watched her hostess admiringly as she moved lightly about, usually with a book, a gardening implement or a child in one hand, and marvelled that the mother should now mean as much to her as did the son, although they were such very different spirits. But it was the warmth of a tender heart and a loving nature that attracted her in Lady Challis, and she was already jealously sure that this spring, could she have the opportunity to drink from it, would never fail her.
She must give devotion to somebody, and as she was ashamed to indulge in those tender feelings for Gerard Challis’s person which she had so readily given to his spirit and his work, she resolutely tried not to look at him and looked at his mother instead.
Sunday, the day on which the party was to go home, dawned not quite so fair as the previous two days, but it was judged sufficiently fine for Margaret to take Emma, Claudia, Dickon, Edna and Barnabas for The Walk.
This walk was so particularized because there was only one true walk at Martlefield (as there usually is at any remote country place), and sooner or later everyone who stayed at Yates Row went on it, and surveyed the surrounding countryside from the fifty-foot hill, surmounted by a fine old oak tree, in which it terminated.
Meanwhile, in Highgate, Zita and Cortway were passing an alarming week-end.
On the Friday evening Grantey had seemed much as she had been for the last five weeks; maintaining a slow but steady improvement. The nurse no longer slept in the house, but came in every day, so that Zita and Cortway had no professional help when the latter was aroused in the small hours of Saturday morning by the prolonged ringing of the bell in his sister’s room. Putting on his dressing-gown as he went, he hurried in to her, and found her blue and gasping and pointing to the tablets which had been left her to meet just such an emergency as this. While he was crushing them under her nostrils and observing with deep thankfulness that they were beginning to relieve her, Zita came stumbling upstairs, half awake and very alarmed, and loudly lamenting. Her anxiety and grief were genuine, but she was not of much practical use, as all she did was to hover distractedly round the bed exclaiming, ‘Ach! mein Gott!’ and make occasional dashes downstairs to fill a hot-water-bottle or brew some coffee to help Cortway through the watch he insisted on keeping, and then, forgetting what she had gone down for, return to the bedroom to see how Grantey was.
Cortway at last impatiently packed her back to bed, and sat grimly wakeful by his sister’s side, trying to hear her breathing, and watching the darkness at the window slowly turn to the summer dawn. Every now and again he glanced at his sister’s face. It looked very old amid the grey hair scattered on the pillow and yet in it he saw the likeness of the little girl who was one of his earliest memories.
Always together, he and Allie had been, and why she had ever wanted to marry that so-and-so Wally Grant beat him. That had all turned out wrong, and Al
lie had gone back into service again with the Braddons, where he himself was chauffeur; and that had been twenty years ago; and here she was, very bad, you could see that; and perhaps going for good this time.
His head nodded forward, and he dozed off, and when Zita came upstairs with a cup of tea at half-past seven he was asleep by his sister’s side.
While Grantey was still dozing, they held a conference and discussed whether they should telephone to Mrs Challis, but as she seemed better and her colour was more normal, they decided to wait until they had heard what the doctor said.
When he came about nine o’clock, he told them that there was no more cause for alarm than there had been for the last five weeks, although he thought that they had better let Mrs Challis know how matters stood, and they decided to telephone when Grantey finally awoke. But when she did, she was apparently so much better that their fears receded, and after she had had some tea and bread and butter and nurse had come in and washed her and made a lot of jokes, they decided not to let Mrs Challis know just yet, as there was no point in alarming her unnecessarily. Grantey asked for the Daily Mirror and her knitting, and Cortway left her with them and went downstairs. It was a beautiful day and the house was full of sunlight and rang with music played by the wireless for Zita’s entertainment. Grantey gently beat time with her spectacles, as she glanced through the pictures in the Mirror. Somehow she did not fancy putting them on this morning; they seemed to weigh kind of heavy on her face.
We must now return to Bedfordshire.
Jeremy had been added to Margaret’s party, so that meant borrowing the big pram belonging to William, who would spend the afternoon crawling about the garden, and putting Emma and Jeremy at opposite ends. Thus burdened, and declining the offers of Barnabas and Edna to assist with the pushing, Margaret set out after lunch down the long lane which was the opening stage of The Walk. Claudia ranged so far ahead that she had to be called to, in the first five minutes, not to get out of sight; while Dickon, who had his own ideas about walks, speedily fell behind. Edna and Barnabas kept so close to the pram that they had to be told not to get in the way, and only Jeremy was in repose, full of milk and peaceful, and Emma actually sang to herself as they went along.