Lady Patience Wyndowe – ‘Patty’ in the family – nowadays frequently found herself wondering how Swithin Gore had come by his not very common Christian name. His father, she had gathered, had been Ammon Gore. ‘Ammon’, although not very common either, had apparently at one time enjoyed a certain rustic currency, whereas the only other Swithin she had ever come across was in a novel. The fictitious Swithin hadn’t been a gardener’s boy (which was the real Swithin’s condition) but he had belonged roughly to that class of society – although there had been, at the same time, some gentle component to him the explanation of which now escaped Patty’s memory. Sometimes it was possible to feel that a similar suggestion attached to Swithin Gore. The suggestion chiefly connected up with the way he looked at her when receiving this or that horticultural instruction. Swithin (who wasn’t really a boy, and must indeed be within a year or two of her own age) owned a very direct glance. It wasn’t impudent, or in any manner bold in the slightest degree. But it was direct, and at the same time distinguishably wondering. Wondering rather than admiring – and this had the happy effect of rendering it wholly unembarrassing. Patty felt that she was getting to know Swithin, with whom she had much to do, quite well. At least enough to realize, for instance, that he was an intelligent young man. It wasn’t, however, well enough to ask him about his name. Or at least so Patty thought until she suddenly found that she was doing so.
‘Swithin,’ she said, ‘what made them call you Swithin?’
Swithin straightened up – rather fast – from the flower bed over which he had been bending. Physically, Swithin was undeniably attractive. He was this all over. Even in the posture he had just abandoned, and when thus viewed from behind, this held of him – although its normal association for Patty would have been with vulgar postcards glimpsed at the seaside. But now Swithin was facing her, and he looked very well indeed.
‘The 15th of July,’ Swithin said, a shade shortly. ‘My birthday.’ And he added, after the slightest pause, ‘M’lady.’
‘Yes, of course. How stupid of me.’ Patty wasn’t going to show that she had been justly snubbed. And it had been stupid of her. Because of what it tells of the coming weather, St Swithin’s Day is a landmark in the English rural mind, and it had been natural and even edifying for Ammon Gore to call his infant after the saint. It had been like naming as Noel a boy born at Christmas. And now, having been a little venturesome with her assistant, Patty went further. ‘So how old are you now, Swithin?’
‘Twenty. Did you say six inches?’ This question, briskly uttered, referred to the dibbling operation in progress at the moment.
‘Yes, I think so. And not too deep. We’re not in a turnip field.’
‘It would be a queer way to behave with turnips,’ Swithin said matter-of-factly, and bent again to his task. He performed it from the waist and without bending his knees. This, muscularly, was the economical and professional thing. And, again, it was attractive in itself. ‘How old are you?’ Swithin asked, his nose close to the ground.
The comeback was unexpected, and Patty found it disconcerting as well. Or rather she found disconcerting the fact that her spontaneous reaction to Swithin’s echoing her own question had been, if ever so faintly, disapproving. If she asked a young man his age why on earth shouldn’t he ask her hers? Her father, she knew, would judge the garden boy’s reciprocal curiosity to be entirely civilized and in order. Indeed, Swithin’s tossing the ball briskly back had been much nicer in him than that snubby ‘M’lady’ he had started off with.
‘Twenty-one,’ she said, suddenly pleased and laughing. ‘So we’re both getting on. Do you like it here, Swithin?’
‘I’ve been here always, haven’t I?’ Erect again, Swithin Gore made this reply with what appeared to be no enigmatical intention. But was that very straight glance faintly mocking as well? Lady Patience Wyndowe found herself, for reasons that were obscure to her, rather hoping that it was.
‘Yes, I suppose you have,’ she said. ‘And I have too – except for going away to school. I didn’t much care for that.’
‘But Lady Lucy does.’ Lady Lucy was Patty’s younger sister Boosie. ‘She has told me about some high old times.’
‘Has she, now?’ Patty was astonished by this information – and abruptly jealous of Boosie, whom she wouldn’t have supposed ever to have held any conversation with Swithin at all. Perhaps Boosie was planning to convert Swithin to Euro-communism, or whatever it was that she at present believed in. ‘My sister bosses her school, Swithin, and that’s why she enjoys it. Did you boss yours?’
‘Yes, I did.’
This had flashed out from Swithin in a surprising way. Patty had only a vague notion of the kind of school a garden boy came from, but supposed it to begin with toddlers in snot-covered smocks and end up with beefy louts and larking hoydens largely beyond anybody’s control. The mere fact that he was alert and clever must have made Swithin something of an odd boy out. If he had really come out on top it was necessary to conclude that he had something. And this was becoming Patty’s impression anyway.
But Swithin had returned to his work on the biennials, planting out with mathematical precision the wallflowers and polyanthus that would fill this one large bed in one of the several small gardens lying outside the moat of Mullion Castle. Patty was just deciding that it would be judicious (after this curious breakthrough) to leave him to it when Swithin spoke again.
‘The poor man’s flower,’ Swithin said.
‘What’s that, Swithin?’
‘The polyanthus. It’s in a poem as that. “Or polyanthus, edged with golden wire, the poor man’s flower.” It’s just like that, isn’t it?’
‘Yes – and how very interesting.’ What Patty meant was that Swithin was very interesting. He was becoming rather alarming as well.
‘Or did you ever hear,’ Swithin asked, ‘of something being described as smart as a gardener’s dog with a polyanthus in his mouth?’
‘I don’t think I ever did.’
‘Then you ought to have, m’lady. Because, you see, it’s in The Water-Babies. And it must have been in your nursery, I’d be thinking, that book.’
‘I suppose so. In fact, I’m sure it was.’ Patty found herself not resenting the measure of reproof in Swithin’s observation. She had also become conscious that Swithin, although he didn’t talk in the refined manner of, say, Savine, her father’s butler, didn’t quite have the accents of a gardener’s boy either. It was odd that her ear had never detected this now perfectly patent fact. As ears go, Swithin’s must be better than hers. And he must have employed it, whether consciously or not, during such opportunities as he had of listening to the conversation of what Great-aunt Camilla would call his betters. Perhaps he had notions of improving himself, which would be sensible enough. More probably – since the result was so far from disagreeable – it was something that had just happened. But now a new line of inquiry had presented itself. And Patty, being a straightforward young woman, went ahead with it. ‘Do you read a lot?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’ This was the rather abrupt Swithin again. Patty recalled how the Vicar of Mullion, an old man given to antique usages, sometimes described himself as having been ‘villaging’ – by which he meant going round the cottagers and chatting them up. It wouldn’t do to turn on a villaging act with this twenty-year-old young man. On the other hand, having once taken him on, as now, not as a hind but as a human being, why funk it? Patty again went ahead. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked. ‘Stop on here? I suppose you might become my brother’s head gardener one day. If there continue to be such people, that is. But perhaps it would really come down to the turnips – and to the two of you tugging them out and mashing them up together. That’s my sister’s vision of the future.’
‘She might have a worse one.’
Much as if she had been a turnip herself, this pulled Patty up.
‘It would be to chuck a lot on the scrap heap,’ she said.
‘Obviously. But I don’t reckon there’s any cause for alarm. Lady Lucy’s fine, but just a bit doctrinaire. She’s very young, of course.’
This was a moment of perfect agreement between these two mature persons. Boosie (at eighteen) was demonstrably very young. As for Swithin, he was rapidly becoming increasingly puzzling. But he was rapidly (although Patty didn’t clearly formulate just how) becoming something else as well. It was with an entire lack of awkwardness that, in the interest of this sustained conversation, he had now desisted from his labours. He had been working hard, and there were tiny beads of perspiration on his forehead. He had an agreeable and slightly disturbing smell. His shirt-sleeves were rolled up to the armpit, and on the bronzed skin thus revealed glinted a fine powdering of golden hairs. These ought not to have suggested anything in particular to Lady Patience Wyndowe. But in fact they did. Had this encounter – she suddenly realized – ended only some moments ago she might have returned to the castle and blithely remarked to her mother that she had been flirting with Swithin Gore. It was something she would not now do.
‘I might manage to get to a polytechnic,’ Swithin said prosaically.
Patty’s wild thought that she was perhaps falling in love with Swithin was far from rendered the less disconcerting by this announcement. Swithin as less garden boy than garden god was one thing; Swithin as hopeful postulant for some gruesome form of further education was quite another.
‘Oh, Swithin,’ Patty said, ‘that would be perfectly splendid!’ There was a small silence. It marked, on Swithin’s part, a remorseless registering that she had, for the first time, said something stupid and insensitive; had, in fact, started villaging.
‘It wouldn’t exactly be high life,’ Swithin said dryly. ‘But it might he a foot in the door.’
‘I meant something like that, Swithin. And I didn’t mean to gush.’
Swithin, who had momentarily withdrawn tautly within himself, relaxed again. The effect, although not designed as extravagant, was rather that of a young Olympian in sudden effulgence. His glance, however, was less that of a divinity upon a mortal than of one operating the other way on. It was the wondering glance, more frankly accented this time than hitherto.
‘That was very nice of you, Lady Patience,’ he said.
‘We must plan for it,’ Patty said soberly. ‘And my father would be interested, I know. Perhaps he isn’t very informed about such things himself. But he’s certain to know the people who are. Shall I–’
‘Then I may speak to his lordship,’ Swithin said calmly. ‘If you think it a good idea, that is.’ He paused. ‘And now I’d better be getting on with the wallflowers. Perhaps you’ll come and look at the effect later, m’lady.’
For a moment Patty felt that she had been abruptly dismissed. Then she realized that this wasn’t the state of the case at all. She had known – clearly although through some bewilderment – that it was high time to bring this encounter to a close. And Swithin Gore, if he hadn’t agreed, had understood. She hadn’t been dismissed. She had been – for today she had been – let off.