When Frank went through the hall with Juliet he saw Rosa and Pilar, singing softly as they polished and dusted. Telling himself that he was rejoicing aesthetically in the sight of rounded bosoms and smooth skins, he said, ‘Surely those girls don’t work all day?’
‘Fit it in when they like, seems. That old Sarah, she does try to make a kind of timetable, but Auntie don’t mind, so they do as they please.’
‘Doesn’t mind, dear.’
She just glanced at him; no coquettishness, no consciousness. ‘“Doesn’t mind”’, obediently.
‘Do you mind my correcting your grammar . . . and . . . calling you “dear”?’
She looked up at him and smiled, not her usual dutiful grin. Then she shook her head, and he opened the front door and they went out into the quiet golden afternoon.
‘That house is too dark and hot,’ he said.
‘I know. I’m always gaspin’ for a bit of air.’
‘But it isn’t depressing. The girls wouldn’t sing, if it were. That’s Aunt Addie, of course; she’s full of love and kindness, and it gets through the house.’
‘Bit too full of it, if you ask me. Gets you down.’
‘Aren’t you fond of her, Juliet? She loves you so much and she’s been very kind to you.’
‘S’pose so.’
Withdrawal, and the usual shrug.
But this afternoon he was not going to be put off by Juliet’s reserve; he meant to find out what she was. When they got back to Hightower, Clem and that old monster, her mother, would be there, and there would be fewer opportunities.
‘You don’t like people, do you?’ he asked.
‘They’re always on at you,’ sullenly.
‘That’s partly because you’re young. They’re always on at me, too, in a different way, because my views on life aren’t like theirs. We’ll turn down here, I want to show you my meadows.’
‘Where you’re goin’ to live?’
‘Yes.’
It was the usual Hertfordshire lane, a narrow passage, pot-holed with puddles reflecting the fading gold of the sky, hedges of ancient thorn where purple-red berries glowed, with shining ivy; humble pebbles large and small embedded in the mud, and scattering over all, like another light, the song now near, now far, of a robin. English earth, as it might be remembered in the future by human exiles on another planet, he thought.
He glanced at her and caught a listening expression on her face.
‘That’s a robin,’ he said.
‘I know. Used to feed one in that park where I met Auntie. Got quite tame, he did. Never would come onto me hand, though. Hours, I reckon I wasted on him, stoopin’ down holdin’ out bits of bread.’
‘They weren’t wasted.’
‘What d’you mean? He never came.’
‘But you looked at him. You got to know the look of him exactly. That “red” isn’t true red, it’s a kind of orange – you’d realized that, hadn’t you?’
After a little pause she nodded. The robin, drawn inevitably by the presence of man, was fluttering after them down the lane, and in a moment Frank stooped, picked up a length of stick and began to imitate the action of someone digging. Juliet stood still. The robin hopped nearer, skittered away, came back again, and alighted on a branch within three feet of the moving arm.
Frank began softly to repeat aloud the legend of the Crucifixion and the gift of the red breast, and Juliet listened, expressionless, her eyes fixed upon the tiny, breathing cluster of bone and feather that seemed, with tilted head and brilliant eye, to be listening too. But before the story was ended, the bird suddenly flung away into the air, dived heedlessly into a bank covered in ivy, and vanished.
‘Is it true?’ she asked in a moment, as they walked on, Frank smiling at the dramatic exit.
‘Oh Juliet, what a question! How can anyone possibly tell whether something that’s supposed to have happened two thousand years ago is true? Do you mind, if it isn’t?’
‘What’s the point, if it isn’t?’
‘There isn’t a “point”. It’s just a beautiful and moving legend connected with – another beautiful and moving legend. If it were true—’ He paused, and she glanced at him questioningly.
Talk with her was so difficult. Every sentence, almost every word, had to be pondered. Dammit, it’s like chatting with a dolphin, he thought.
‘If it were true,’ he said slowly at last, ‘I think it would be . . . overwhelming.’
A long pause. They had reached the end of the lane leading to Leete, and come out upon the wider one that would bring them to Wanby.
‘I don’t see that,’ she said at last, dodging a car with a miserable-looking driver.
‘Well . . . the contrast between the – the creaturely innocence of the bird, and what was happening on the cross – from a Christian point of view, I’m speaking now – and (our imaginations have to make an almost impossible leap to conceive this) if the feathers of the countless succeeding millions of robins were dyed red by a shock inherited from that one bird – it would . . . would imply more concern on the part of the Star Maker with the smallest of this creation than . . . than most people are able or prepared to accept.’ The sentence faded ineptly.
‘You religious then?’
Her tone was touched with contempt and distaste. He had been expecting such a reaction.
‘In a way, I suppose – yes.’
‘On about religion at the Comp, they were – that was another thing,’ she muttered. ‘Got me down.’
And, wondering whether he had said enough for one afternoon, he said no more.
But now he knew what he felt towards her: a teacher’s impulse. He wanted to fill the vast gaps in her mind with rich facts. Not what he thought of as the colourless facts of mathematics and other branches of science, but the nourishing facts that feed the senses; and, above all, to make her feel the beauty of Nature, which the old world before science came used to spell with the capital letter, bestowing femininity and deity on – on an abstraction? Yes, an abstraction that took a million forms.
Wanby was a village so pretty, so well kept, that passing motorists were apt to pause, with murmurs of admiration, looking around for somewhere providing luncheons.
There were none. So far as the grosser appetites were concerned, Wanby was fairy gold, a hollow mockery and a Barmecide feast.
For that same sour-reputationed nobleman, who owned the land where Hightower stood amidst its four acres, also owned Wanby, and all attempts to obtain licences for cafés or restaurants had been dismissed with urbane indifference. Nor did the occassional cottager display the consoling word Teas in the picturesque window, for in Wanby there were no cottagers. Long ago the last of them had thankfully fled to council houses and flats in Stevenham or St Alberics, for like Edith Cavell in another situation, they had felt, strongly, that views and elm trees were Not Enough.
Their former homes were grouped about a triangular village green, shaded at its verges by sturdy elms, with a picturesque dry old well in its centre. The houses were not marred by pastel front doors; a chaste scheme of brown, black and white was strictly kept to, under the eye of the Wanby Amenities Committee; and there was not (let the imagination ponder this, and let it sink in full horror into the soul) . . . there was not a garage in the place. When a retired company director or superannuated admiral had trouble with his car, he had to telephone to Stevenham fifteen miles away, or perhaps to St Alberics, which was five. The one Wanby public house, the Two Doves, permitted no coaches and ‘did’ nothing more solid in the way of eatables than the superior kind of biscuit containing no fat and little sugar. There were those, bicycling sullenly through Wanby on their way home from the few working farms left in the district, who bitterly referred to it as a bleeding museum ; but in ten minutes they could dismount outside the Green Man on the road to Stevenham, where the proprietors did ‘do’ lunches; ploughman’s, greasy sausages and limp chips. Coaches were permitted, and one could be companionably sick in the yard. The Green Man’s lights were visible, nay, even bursts of drunken song on Saturday evenings were audible, in autumn and winter, through leafless old thorn hedges surrounding Frank Pennecuick’s two meadows.
Frank now led Juliet past the immaculate cottages, and down through a thick clump of elder, hazel and thorn, which in a few moments opened out onto meadows: green, empty, still, in the fading light.
‘My house is in the other field, through the gate.’
When they were halfway across the meadow, she stopped, and stood as if listening.
‘That isn’t a robin?’ she said questioningly.
‘No, that’s a blackbird – better than the nightingale I always think – in spite of—’ He had been about to quote Arnold, but checked himself.
Only six months ago, ‘Eternal passion! Eternal pain!’ had run intolerably in his heart by night and by day. The line did not do so now. So much for ‘eternal’! Really, he thought, I am nearly thirty-two. Isn’t it time I stopped being adolescent?
‘There ’e is!’
Her exclamation cut across the silence as the blackbird, after the habit of its kind, darted out of its bower, low and away above the grass, and Juliet’s ‘h’ went with it.
Frank gave her a smile of approval and – yes, he felt that it was – affection as they walked on.
They went through the gate, which he carefully shut behind them, and then he turned and pointed across the second and larger meadow, with a group of fine oak trees at its far end, their sturdy branches black against the opal sky.
‘There – that’s my house,’ he said.
‘But it’s cowsheds,’ said Juliet flatly, after a stare.
‘I know. But it won’t be for long. See that board? “Abbot Bros – Conversions”. And it’s only one cowshed. There’s a tiny cottage as well, two rooms up and two down, where the herdsman used to live – see,’ pointing across the dim expanse of grass, ‘that white thing. It’s weatherboarded – I’m going to keep that – and in front of it there’s been a vegetable garden. The rest of the meadow I’ll plough up and grow wheat for my own bread.’
They were slowly approaching the group of low, shabby buildings. It was almost dark; the first quarter moon was rising through the oak boughs.
‘Can we get inside?’ she asked.
‘Not tonight – it’s too dark to see anything . . .’
‘But there’s electricity, isn’t there?’
‘No, I’m having oil lamps.’
‘You won’t half be living in a funny sort of way, won’t you?’
‘I’m expecting everyone will say so, yes. You see,’ he turned away from his property, after a long, possessive gaze, ‘I’ve got quite a lot of money for one chap, Juliet. My father left it to me and I’ve never known what sort of work I wanted to do until a couple of years ago. I do know now. My life’s work is going to be for the Earth.’
‘Don’t know what you mean.’
‘I can’t explain it all now. We must hurry or we’ll be late for dinner, and it’s a very complicated subject.’ He shut the gate behind them. ‘But – very briefly – I want to increase the world’s food supplies. I support a movement called the Association for the Investigation of Edible Grasses; and my ideal vision is of Man returning to a life lovingly linked with Nature.’
There was no response to this. It was now too dark to see her expression, but his words sounded to him inadequate, even foolish, spoken earnestly in the soft darkness. He also suspected that his companion had gone off into one of those reveries to which she was – a victim? Certainly she never seemed to try to resist them. The phrase maddening brat came, unexpectedly, into his mind.
‘Look, we really must hurry,’ he said sharply, as they came out onto Wanby village green.
She shot away from him, calling: ‘All right – race you?’ and was lost in the dimness.
But he had seen a car emerging slowly beside one of the pretty cottages, and set off running towards it, shouting, ‘Clem! Hi! Clem!’
At the same moment Juliet returned out of the dusk. ‘Thought you might get lost,’ she said, grinning her unattractive grin.
‘We’re lucky – here’s Miss Massey and her grandmother. They’ll give us a lift.’
The car stopped, and a young woman’s voice said enquiringly, ‘Frank?’
‘None other – and here’s Juliet. You can save us from Sarah’s scowls. In you get,’ to Juliet, as the driver opened the door next to herself. ‘No, on second thoughts, you get in the back. We’ve been looking at my house,’ he added, as he settled himself beside a pleasant-faced girl wearing a raincoat in a murderous shade of blue. ‘Oh, sorry, Dolly – this is Juliet Slater – Juliet, this is Mrs Massey, a very old friend of Aunt Addy’s. And this is Miss Massey.’
‘How do you do?’ said a deep voice from a large shape seated beside Juliet. It was swaddled in numerous shawls and rugs, on the summit of which one of the new ‘stableboy’ flat caps could be seen incongruously perching.
‘Oh – hullo,’ Juliet muttered, and the car moved off and Clemence Massey, catching a glimpse of silvery hair and youthful contours in the subdued light, thought despairingly, Oh God. Just his type.
‘I should have said “Hullo”. I beg your pardon,’ said the voice next to Juliet, awfully; and Clemence and Frank exchanged a glance with the corners of their lips lifting. Then no one said any more, as they went onwards.
And so young! Clemence was thinking. Oh, why does God or Something make it so difficult for me to have the one thing I want?
‘And what did you think of Mr Pennecuick’s dreadful little shacks?’ Mrs Massey demanded presently of Juliet. ‘Doesn’t it seem strange to you that anyone should wish to live in such a peculiar style? But I suppose, being young, you see nothing peculiar about it?’
‘We never went inside,’ was all Juliet could think of to say.
‘You haven’t missed a thing,’ said the deep voice triumphantly.
Clemence Massey was not a young woman of dramatic temperament; one of her strongest traits was common sense. But if anyone had quoted to her Thoreau’s verdict on the mass of mankind living lives of quiet desperaton, all her deepest longings would have cried: ‘Yes, oh yes – that’s me!’
She was twenty-seven.
Since early adolescence, her longing had been for a baby, a home, a husband: perhaps in that order. However, Nature had given her the type of ordinary, pleasant personality and appearance least likely – unless from an unusual stroke of luck – to attract men. And then, to add a stronger pain to the ever-present conviction that she was unlikely to marry, she had drifted gradually into love with her childhood friend Frank Pennecuick, the most unsuitable man possible.
A romantic, a solitary, an adolescent lover of girls who suggested mermaids or fairies, a conservationist. A Friend of the Earth. And, in many people’s eyes, a crank; his very name rhymed with the contemptuous word.
They were ‘best friends’. Frank had more than once said so. And sometimes she felt that it was not he whom she loved, but what he could give her: the baby (babies, rather, for Clemence wanted six) and the home.
She had also faced the fact that she wanted to change him. She wanted to see him put on a stone and a half in weight, eat ‘proper’ food, live more as other people did. And, in the unlikely event of his proposing to her, he was not going to like that aim at all.
So the days of quiet desperation marched on: ten o’clock until twelve at Dr Masters’s surgery as his receptionist; the drive home from St Alberics to lunch with Grandmamma in the pretty cottage in immaculate Wanby; the afternoon back at her desk and telephone; the drive home to Wanby at the end of the day through winter sleets, long fading summer sunsets, flying autumn leaves, the aching evenings of promising springs.
But at least he was coming to live at Wanby. In those awful converted cowsheds. The whole of Wanby would be good-naturedly amused. But he was coming.
And that mane of hair and that slender young body had come to live at Hightower, too, five miles away.
The car stopped at the gate of Hightower and Frank rang the bell.
‘I hope Sarah won’t come down; it’s got really cold,’ Clemence remarked, aware that lowered spirits, rather than the chill autumn evening, had caused her to shiver.
‘If Sarah likes to make a fool of herself that’s her business. Juliet, you may help me out.’
Juliet, a romantic figure in her hooded cape, advanced upon the capped bundle, and spent the next minutes supporting one cold, squarish paw as it crept from the car, and then, under sharp instructions, rewinding scarves and shawls about it.
The light above the gate showed delicate features sunk in smooth flesh of that tint suggesting a tea-rose. Narrow dark-grey eyes sparkled out from a massive old face.
‘Ha – Antonio – good,’ Mrs Massey observed, as after nearly ten minutes, the gates swung open. ‘Thank heaven for a man.’
‘Really, Grandmamma,’ Clemence said absently.
‘Good evening, Antonio – how are you? And the pretty fiancée? And the naughty Surprise?’ said her grandmother.
‘Grandmamma, don’t you want to go up by car?’
‘Antonio will give me his arm.’
Antonio courteously assenting, the procession set off.
‘Do you want to ride, Frank?’
‘Good heavens, Clem, a hundred yards won’t kill me—’
‘I only thought – if you’ve been chasing about all day.’ She guided the car within the gates, and braked.
‘You know I can walk fifty miles without tiring,’ and he turned back. ‘Juliet! Buck up – we’re late.’
I know you’re still thirteen, in some ways, and that’s one of the reasons I . . . feel about you as I do, Clemence thought, as she locked the car.
Frank waited impatiently until she had carefully done so, tested the result, and put the keys into her purse, then pulled her arm within his own, pulled in Juliet on the other side, and marched them both off.
‘I cannot stand that stuff your grandmother uses,’ he confided to his best friend; the scent of ‘French Almond’ was diffusing itself around the majestic progress of Mrs Massey and Antonio.
But Clemence felt too depressed for more than a wan smile. She already knew he disliked artificial scents; hadn’t she given up her own timid use of ‘April Violets’? Of course, he had not noticed.
‘Can he really? Dear little bambino,’ Mrs Massey was saying in response to Antonio’s confidences concerning the individual whom she called, playfully, the Surprise. (Mrs Massey, who disliked small children more often than not, regarded the Surprise as a naughty joke; the child’s hastily married parents had been full of shame, and had received a severe lecture from Father Beccio. Nor did Antonio relish the remarks of Senora Massey. He looked upon her as a rather disgraceful old woman.)
Now he nodded obediently. Yes, his little son could say ‘Papa’. It was for the boy, and in a lesser degree for Anna, back in Spain, that Antonio had bullied and argued and shouted his brother and sisters into coming to work in England. Now he would be glad when they reached the house.
Frank was aware of Juliet’s arm held firmly within his own, and it was bony. Not attractively fragile, not limp and clinging. Just bony. And his next thought was: Have to feed her up, poor little devil. A thought he had decidedly never had about any of the others.