Of course Margaret was instantly silenced. She smiled confusedly but could not find a word with which to begin. It was of her spiritual and mental future that she had wished to talk to Lady Challis, but how could such important subjects be discussed up a plum tree in a high wind?
‘You look happier than you did in the summer,’ began Lady Challis, helping her out. (‘Oh, just let them fall anywhere and Irene will collect them but don’t send down too many at a time or they’ll get lost in the grass.) Are you happier?’
‘Oh, yes, I am.’ This was a question that Margaret did not have to consider before answering.
‘Any special reason, or just – (whew! there’s a gust! – hang on tight – and there goes my handkerchief!’ as a large grey object sailed away across the trees), ‘just everything?’
‘No special reason,’ answered Margaret, colouring. She leant out along a bough and manœuvred with her stick for a plum half-hidden in leaves. ‘Nothing much has happened to me this last year, except getting to know all of you and seeing some pictures and hearing a lot of lovely music.’
‘Are you fond of music? (Claudia, get my handkerchief, will you, my dear?’ in a prolonged shout, ‘Look, there, on that bush.)’
‘I like it better than anything except poetry.’
‘Ah, poetry. I can’t enjoy that as I used to. You’ll find that, too, I expect, as you get old. I’ve heard other old people say so. This is what I like now.’ She put her hand upon the trunk of the tree and lifted her face into the wind. ‘Let’s rest a minute, shall we?’
She hooked her stick over a branch and Margaret did likewise. Lady Challis took out her cigarette-case, but put it away again, for no light could have lasted for an instant in that wind.
‘And I’ve been thinking a lot about the Past,’ Margaret continued, finding it easier to talk as she went on. ‘There’s an old hunting-lodge that belonged to Odo of Bayeux, the tradition goes, close to where I live in London – or rather, the site of it is quite close; there’s nothing left of it now but a low hill that you can see from the Underground railway station. I went specially to look at it. It was a sort of pilgrimage.’
‘All the horrors dimmed with age
Like demons in a missal page,’
said Lady Challis absently, linking her hands round a bough as if to enjoy the roughness of the bark. ‘I am not sure if a passion for the past is altogether satisfying. And sometimes it produces a horror of the present.’
‘That’s exactly what it is producing in me! I’m getting to hate everything contemporary. I expect you will say that the poor suffered horribly in the past; I know that, and I don’t care. It was all beautiful; that’s all that matters to me.’
‘I am glad to hear you speak with such feeling; it shows enjoyment. Nevertheless, a passion for the past is a form of yearning. It is doomed never to be satisfied, and therefore it can never be satisfying.’
‘I am used to not being satisfied.’ Margaret’s tone was a little tart, for it seemed to her that Lady Challis was easily placed for giving advice about satisfaction; she had been beautiful, had married, had borne a child, and now in old age possessed money to buy the objects and experiences which gave her delight. ‘I have to get my happiness out of wanting things.’
‘You are very young to realize that happiness can come from wanting things. I expect that God will get hold of you one of these days. By the way, has Hebe spoken to you yet?’
‘What about?’ Margaret’s tone was too startled to sound perfectly polite.
‘Perhaps I am being indiscreet, if she hasn’t, but she is thinking of asking you to go to her to look after the children.’
‘As a job, do you mean, Lady Challis?’
‘Yes. She thinks you are wonderful with them.’
Margaret was silent, employed in attending to her nose, which the wind had caused to become disagreeably active, with her handkerchief. A slight resentment mingled with her flattered surprise. They seem to take it for granted, she thought, that I would be only too pleased to give up teaching and accept a far lower salary just for the reward of living under the same roof with Nilands and getting occasional glimpses of Challises. Really, their arrogance – (relishing the word) – their arrogance is unbelievable! I suppose even she (darting a glance at Lady Challis, who had climbed a little way down her ladder to take the handkerchief from Claudia, who was delightedly climbing up) takes my saying ‘yes’ for granted.
‘Do you think it would be a good thing for me to do?’ she asked timidly in a moment, her mood suddenly humbled by a glimpse of Lady Challis’s beautiful head, silver and worn amidst the crowding leaves.
‘No.’ Lady Challis surprised her by decidedly replying. ‘You ought to get free of people for a time. If you go to Hebe, you will be swamped.’
‘That’s what I feel, too,’ murmured Margaret, ‘but it seems so ungrateful.’
‘Ungrateful! Nonsense. Hebe has always had a Faithful Dog Tray, and every now and then one dies or rebels or gets married and she has to find another. She has just lost poor Grantey and now she is after you.’
Margaret had such a clear conception of Hebe as the hunted rather than the huntress that this novel idea of her being ‘after’ herself left her for a moment with nothing to say.
‘Do you think she likes me at all?’ she burst out at last. ‘It isn’t that I’m so fond of her, if it comes to that, but no one likes to be thought of entirely as a convenience.’
‘She thinks that you would be overjoyed at the chance of living with the family and that it might possibly be doing you a good turn, too. Oh yes, she likes you up to a point, I expect. Hebe doesn’t like anyone much except Alex and the children and her mother. She will always be protected from life because she is not sensitive. You are. So, if I were you I would say, “No, thank you.” I don’t think there are any more plums up here, do you? Shall we go down?’
‘Oh, please do let’s stay up here a little longer,’ Margaret implored. ‘You’ll be making jam all to-morrow and I shan’t get a chance to talk to you.’
‘That’s true. Fifty pounds of it. I made all the grown-ups go without sugar in their tea for weeks. Well, what else is troubling you?’
‘You said I was sensitive. I am, I’m afraid. I don’t feel things quite as badly as I did when I first came to London, but I still feel them very much. Is there any cure for it? The headmistress at the first school I taught in said that I needed a tragedy to make me grow up and bring out the best in me, and people do seem to think – in Mr Challis’s plays – I mean, some people think that it’s silly and weak to want to be happy and that one ought to take the tragic view of life –’
Her words poured out eagerly and her eyes were fixed earnestly upon Lady Challis as she leant forward among the leaves with her hands locked together.
‘Not for you,’ Lady Challis interrupted her. ‘I don’t think that you are one of the people who need tragedy. You need what I call the Gentle Powers.’
‘Oh, please tell me what they are!’
‘Beauty, and Time, and the Past and Pity (their names sound like a band of angels, don’t they?) Laughter, too – you need calming and lifting into the light, not plunging into darkness and struggle.’
She began to dust her hands upon her hessian overall, which was belted in at the waist like the voluminous robe of a medieval nun. While she was uttering the vast tranquil names of her band of angels, Margaret’s imagination, by one of those flights which it sometimes sustained, seemed to see passing before her eyes the earthly shapes which those angels had worn for her during the past year; Westwood, music, Bishop Odo’s Lodge, Linda, the children and Alex Niland; and she realized how far she had already been ‘calmed and lifted into the light.’ The Gentle Powers! That is why I am happier, she thought.
‘Coming?’ Lady Challis began to descend the ladder. Irene had left her basket at the foot of the tree and gone to collect the fruit from another band of workers at the far end of the meadow. Some of the children had lit a bon
fire of withered weeds and prunings at the far end, and the azure smoke was blowing flat across the grass, racing away into the hedge, where some late honeysuckles lingered upon the sunlit summit.
‘Oh – just two questions more!’
Lady Challis paused, lifting a slightly smiling, slightly impatient face.
‘Do you think it likely that I shall marry?’ Margaret asked in a low hurried tone, coming down her own ladder.
‘Now what a thing to ask me! How should I know? I hope so, my dear, but if you don’t, the Gentle Powers will still help you to do the hardest thing in the world.’
‘What is that?’ asked Margaret. But she knew.
‘To live without earthly love.’
For a moment neither spoke. Lady Challis attempted to lift the basket of plums and, finding it beyond her strength, set it down again with a little sigh; Margaret stared, lost in a dream, down into the rich dark grass threaded with yellowing leaves. Lady Challis rested herself against a ladder and took out her cigarette-case.
‘You said,’ Margaret began again, suddenly looking up, ‘that God would probably get hold of me one day. What did you mean, please? I never go to church or think about God much – if there is one, that is. I’m not even sure of that.’
‘I think you look what a man I once knew called “a God-struggler.” I can’t tell you why I think it, but I do, and what you said about getting your satisfaction out of wanting things made me sure of it. You see, the only “thing” that a human being can go on wanting all their life, and be satisfied with just wanting, is God.’
‘I don’t like the idea of wanting God,’ said Margaret decidedly.
Lady Challis laughed.
‘My poor dear, that won’t help you or make any difference. Have you read The Hound of Heaven?’
‘Yes. To me it seems technically beautiful but emotionally it doesn’t mean a thing.’
‘I wouldn’t let that worry you. There’s plenty of time.’
‘I’m not letting it, Lady Challis. I wish,’ rebelliously, ‘I could make you see how I hate the idea of getting religious!’
Lady Challis only laughed again and stood upright. The wind blew the tip of her cigarette into a little fire which occasionally gave off minute sparks.
‘We shall have to get Maggie to carry this load in for us,’ she said, indicating the basket, ‘and there’s another one ready over there. I’ll go and ask Bertie to put the panniers on her,’ and before Margaret could offer to go in her stead, she walked rapidly away with the hands in the pockets of her nun-like robe.
Margaret stood in the shade of the sighing tree, watching the figures moving about the bonfire and gathering round the baskets piled high with pale red and golden and dark purple fruit, while the leaves drifted past them in showers:
From all the woods that autumn
Bereaves in all the world,
she thought. Bereaves; that’s a beautiful word. But the leaves do come back again in the spring, and there will be the wallflowers and the narcissus again, and the long evenings. I shall never tire of them; I shall love nature and art until I am an old, old woman, and the Gentle Powers too. But I will never love God, even if God exists. I am not naturally religious. I do not feel the need of God.
And she stood there, with the struggle that was to last for so many years already beginning in her heart.
A procession now made its way out from the stable near the hedge. It consisted of Bertie leading Maggie, Lady Challis walking at the cob’s head with a crown of honeysuckle upon her own, and Edna, Claudia, Frank, some other children, and finally the odd-job man bringing up the rear. They came through the blue smoke, that swirled low and straight about their knees.
‘We’ve just time to take a load up to the house before lunch,’ called Lady Challis, looking like a prophetess with the smoke floating about her and the wreath of honeysuckle on her hair, ‘Margaret, come and help.’
So Margaret left the shade of the tree and went out to meet the procession, and joined it, and helped.
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Copyright © Stella Gibbons 1946
Introduction copyright © Lynne Truss 2011
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ISBN 9780099528722
Stella Gibbons, Westwood
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