Miss Hargreaves (14 page)

‘Oh, you hold it, dear! You hold it. I declare I am quite looking forward to breakfast, are not you? I ordered grilled sausages for two.’

‘I can’t have breakfast with you. I’m sorry.’

‘You are very cross about something. Is it the weather?’

I was silent. I now loathed her.

‘I hope,’ she continued blithely, ‘this is only the first of many such happy mornings. I must bring you some of my own compositions, a few meagre little hymn tunes, and you shall play them. Why do you not give a recital, dear?’

‘Here’s the Swan,’ I said. I gave her the umbrella and leapt on my bicycle.

‘The sausages–’ she cried, ‘for
two
–’

‘Give my share to Sarah,’ I shouted. I rode on down the High Street savagely.

Breakfast was a very trying meal. Mother and Jim were in their most maddening moods. They never made any direct reference to my failure to turn up at the Clovertree Dance; in fact, they hardly spoke to me at all, simply went on talking to each other all the time about Miss Hargreaves. Henry had, quite obviously, most shamefully let me down.

‘I’m sorry,’ I began, ‘I didn’t turn up last night. ‘I–’

Mother smiled sweetly. ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter, dear. We knew you were busy. Marjorie
quite
understood.’

My mother is a devil sometimes. I can’t help saying it.

‘I had an awful time,’ I said. ‘I think you–’

But mother was talking to Jim again. ‘Of course,’ she was saying, ‘I know we are not out of the top drawer. And these chintzes are hardly as good as you’d find in the best houses.’

‘You might hire a footman,’ suggested Jim, ‘and put a silver plate in the hall for cards.’

‘I’m afraid it wouldn’t ring true, my dear. People like us, very low, ill-bred people like us, we–’

‘Oh, stop it, mother!’ I said, miserably rearranging the bones in a kipper I had no interest in. I wasn’t at all sure it wouldn’t have been better to eat sausages with Miss Hargreaves. It was a rotten kipper, anyway.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, dear,’ said mother sweetly. ‘I was merely wondering how we could make the house fit to receive Lady Hargreaves.’

‘She’s not Lady Hargreaves.’

‘Countess Hargreaves, perhaps?’ suggested Jim.

I lost my temper. ‘Why do you both get at me like this? I’ve worked like the devil to keep her away from you; she’d drive you mad in a minute. You ought to be grateful.’

Father ambled in in his old green dressing-gown. He was eating a banana and reading
The Times
.

‘Why aren’t you using my new teapot?’ he asked crossly. He rang the bell for Janie.

‘I do wish,’ said mother, ‘you’d come down properly dressed in the mornings, Cornelius. It isn’t nice for Janie to have to see you in your dressing-gown. The girl was strictly brought up in Suffolk and they’re not used to such things.’

‘Perfectly good dressing-gown,’ mumbled father, dropping his banana peel in the coal-scuttle.

‘I dare say. I gave it to you myself. But that isn’t the point.’

Janie came in with father’s breakfast. ‘Make some more tea in the pot I bought yesterday,’ ordered father. ‘Oh, and Janie there was a dead wasp in my shaving water this morning.–Look out for things like that. I might have swallowed it.’

When Janie had gone out mother made a direct attack on me. Father was now muttering over the crossword.

‘Anyhow,’ said mother triumphantly, ‘we’ve at last got the truth out of Henry.’

‘What?’

‘Oh, yes! He admitted that you’d both made up that tale about meeting her in the hotel and picking up her stick. He confessed you were both lying.’

I laughed bitterly. ‘The whole thing’s a lie from beginning to end. My God, if you only knew!’

‘Are you after her money?’ asked Jim. ‘Because if you are, just say so. Nobody cares so long as you tell the truth.’

‘Look here,’ I said, ‘you shall pay for this. I’ll bring the old devil round here this evening. Then you’ll see what I suffer.’

‘There are people in Suffolk,’ said father in sudden anger, ‘who’ve never even heard of a railway train. They’ve got to grow up; they’ve got to gain experience. It’s a perfectly good dressing-gown though I never did care for the colour. Give me a word in six letters meaning “this tree grows on paper”.’

Mother, ignoring father as usual, came up to me, sat down by me and looked at me, quite kindly, yet searchingly, as though she were a sort of benevolent X-ray.

‘Norman,’ she said gently.

‘Yes, mother?’

‘It’s quite obvious you’re concealing something from us. We don’t want to be unkind, my dear. If you’ve done anything unwise–you’d much better tell us all about it.’

I turned aside. It was so damned embarrassing.

‘Thank you, mother. But I don’t think you’d understand. I don’t myself. I’ve told father the truth. Ask him if you like.’

‘Well, Cornelius? What’s all this about?’

‘Eh? What do you want? Yes, I
did
put the orange peel there. What about it?’

‘I wasn’t talking about that. Norman says he’s told you the truth about this mysterious friend of his.’

‘Oh. Ah. Yes. H’m. Oh. Well–’ he scratched his head thoughtfully. ‘Yes. H’m. Something like that happened to me once. I was in Basingstoke and–’

I groaned and went out of the room.

Half an hour later I was going down the Avenue on my way to the Cathedral for Matins. There was a wind blowing now; it was pouring with rain. The lime trees were shedding their leaves and everything seemed very grey and dreary.

I came down to the west porch and there, to my surprise, waiting under the porch, was old Henry, sucking away at his pipe, his hands shoved into his mackintosh pockets. He looked unusually thoughtful.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I asked. I felt about fed up with Henry.

‘Thought I’d catch you,’ he said. ‘Let’s go inside for a minute. I want to say I’m sorry, Norman, old boy. Felt I had to see you alone, at once.’

‘Can’t wait long. The last bell’s going.’

We sat down on the bedesmen’s bench under the statue of Charles the First.

‘Well, I reckon you ought to be sorry,’ I said.

‘It just came over me, suddenly, in a flash. In bed last night. That damn bath. It stuck in my throat.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I really did think, Norman, that you had been playing a game on me. I don’t now. I felt furious with you on the station last night. It seemed to me that you
must
have known this old geyser. I was so angry with you that I didn’t have time to realize what that bath meant. I saw it on the luggage-truck, you see. And it wasn’t until I’d gone to bed and was thinking everything over, that it suddenly came home to me. See what I mean?’

‘I certainly don’t.’

‘Well, you fool–
I
made up the bath. Not you.’

‘Don’t be an ass, Henry. Of course I made it up–’

‘No, you idiot. I did. Last thing I shouted to you on Liverpool station. It stuck in my throat. To tell you the truth, Norman, Uncle Henry doesn’t like it.’

‘I’m glad somebody else doesn’t like it. I simply loathe it. If you knew what I’d suffered this morning,’ I told him.

‘Of course,’ mused Henry, ‘you might have put the bath into my head. But I don’t think you did.’

‘Don’t you feel rather–pleased?’

‘Pleased?’

‘Yes. I mean–about the bath. It coming true like that.’

‘I don’t know about being pleased.’

‘The trouble with you,’ I said, ‘is that you’re no artist.’

The last bell had stopped. Archie Tallents, one of the lay-clerks, came in from the west door, shaking his wet umbrella.

‘Hullo, Norman!’ he cried. ‘When’re you going to put up the banns, dear?’

If you know anything at all about cathedrals, you’ll realize that if there’s a story going round they’ll have the cream of it in the lay-clerks’ vestry. They talk about women gossiping. I don’t mind telling you quite openly that a sewing-bee is a model of discretion compared to a lay-clerks’ vestry. Take my advice: if you want to keep a secret, don’t tell a lay-clerk –be he alto, tenor, or bass.

Not that I don’t like the lay-clerks; I do. Particularly Archie Tallents, one of the altos, a very remarkable chap altogether with a gaiety that’s almost goblin. Life’s one long minuet to Archie. He has an enormous head, tonsured like a monk; great, furry eyebrows and a droll way of singing which has been the downfall of more than one chorister and has even been known to make an honorary canon giggle. If you were to wander about in the clerestory you’d find Archie immortalized in stone five hundred years ago as a gargoyle. (This isn’t meant to be rude. Gargoyles may be ugly but they always have character.) When I say that Archie was also Jack Point and Lord Chancellor rolled into one, I give you him as nearly as I can. Everybody liked him. He ran a photographer’s business up by the Milk Cross.

‘Have you brought the harp, dear?’ he said, as I came into the vestry. I saw at once they’d all been talking about me and Miss Hargreaves.

‘What the devil are you talking about?’ I growled.

Archie turned to Dyack, a jaundiced old bass who had been in the choir for centuries and still roared furiously through metallic moustaches. He was the world’s worst singer, but he could sit on bottom D as easily as go to bed. A wicked old sinner, very rich in his language.

‘Huntley’s studying the harp,’ said Archie, ‘from the niece of the Duke of Grosvenor. Aren’t you, dear?’

‘Where’s the Precentor put my bloody pitch-pipe?’ muttered Dyack. The pitch-pipe is a long thing he blows when the service is unaccompanied–gives the note, you see. He always loses it and always swears at it.

Slesser, a smooth tenor–hair as smooth as voice–voice as smooth as silk–mewed from the cassock cupboard.

‘Oh, naughty, naughty! Old ladies! Tchu!’

I drew Archie outside into the transept, and we sat on the monk’s seat, an immense oak bench which is always reserved for the use of the lay-clerks.

‘You’ve seen her, then, Archie? She’s not in Cath, is she?’

‘Who? The celebrated niece?’

‘Yes. Miss Hargreaves. I suppose that’s who you mean.’

‘I haven’t seen her. Charlie Stiles told me all about her. I happened to run into the Swan on my way here. She’s quite the rage of the town, dear. A crowd gathered on the landing last night, said Charlie, all listening to the Grosvenor harp. She played “The Bluebells of Scotland” three times. The cockatoo crooned a hymn. Very nice. I like a little bedtime music myself.’