The Brontes Went to Woolworths (12 page)

‘You’re all happy together. One can see that. So few mothers and daughters seem to hit it off these days. It almost makes up for not having a girl of one’s own . . . to think of all the fights one’s escaped! Well, go on, tell me more.’

‘Well, Katrine – my other sister, is going into a revue and my father is dead and we’ve got a governess who cries into soup.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘Hah! I don’t mean she really does, but the poor toad is homesick, and she’s got three of the usual sisters and a retrenching father in Cheltenham. And she keeps a stiff upper lip. And you can’t imagine, Lady Mil – Lady Toddington, how people who keep that sort of thing get at one!’

She was listening like a child, sitting by me on the floor, her feet stuck straight out in front of her. ‘You see, I follow all her worries.’ I saw she made nothing of this.

‘Yes. I remember her. Came down for tea, didn’t she? Poor wretches . . . you’ve got a rather specially sympathetic nature, haven’t you?’

‘Not really, because half the time I don’t want to be.’

Lady Toddington laughed and lit a cigarette. ‘Well, go on. Tell me more about Herbert!’

There was a knock and she cried, ‘My Lord! and I haven’t begun to do anything! Come in.’

Toddy stood in the doorway, and I tried, for the mass of photographs on my lap, to scramble to my feet.

‘Well, Herbert – you remember Miss Carne?’

Miss Carne, clasping six of his heads to her bosom, shook hands with difficulty.

‘How do you do. Are you having a sale of jumble, Mildred?’

‘I know I’m not dressed and I know dinner is nearly ready and that the dressing-gong went ages ago.’

His eye – I saw, for I was watching for it – twinkled at his wife’s instant exposure of his rebuke, but she had already begun to go slightly to pieces, it seemed to me.

‘It’s my fault, Sir Herbert,’ I said. ‘I’m one of those doorsteppers who never seem to go.’

‘But, please! And let me relieve you of all those encumbrances.’

‘You’d better not, Herbert. Those are pictures of the one slip I made in my girlhood.’

‘What do you mean?’ He regarded her over his glasses so exactly as he does in Court that I laughed. Lady Toddington glanced at me. I am almost sure she thought I was going to be embarrassed and was ready, if so, to say something else which would put her wrong with him, but the answer I looked made her remark instead, ‘It’s all right, my dear. It’s Miss Carne’s boy-friend,’ and I shuffled the prints together, somehow, and she looked up at Toddy and said, as a baby might plead with its nurse, ‘Herb’, let’s don’t go out this evening. Can’t we all stay and have a nice cosy time at home?’

He looked down at her, considering. ‘That sounds very charming, but it’s the Slingsbys, if you remember. But can’t

Miss Carne stop to dinner, in any case? We needn’t leave until nine-thirty.’

‘Well, that’s an idea, too!’

Dinner was a nerve-racking affair for me. There was our Toddy within touch, and it was Mildred who kept us going. She – for a course or two I haggled over the impression – was pleased I was there? And then, with the entrée, it came. She was showing me off to him, like a mother. And I wanted to play up, but was handicapped by the outrageousness of having to be the little stranger to Toddy. And Lady Toddington, by this time, knew just enough to enjoy the whole business, and began, metaphorically, to dig me in the ribs, and treat her husband and myself like a newly married couple. If she’d had a bag of confetti I swear she would have thrown it . . . and Toddy went on making one face after the other that I knew, and being charming, and it took me all I knew to keep upsides with either of them.

One had got to get through to him sooner or later, so I said, ‘I like your Associate, Sir Herbert. He’s got an interesting face.’

‘Mathewson? Yes. He’s a very, very nice fellow. I should be quite lost without him. He told me once that he would have studied for the Bar, only – money, you know . . . ’ Well, that was being all right . . . though that part of it hadn’t occurred to us.

‘She adores the Law Courts,’ said Lady Toddington, getting ready for another dig.

His face broke into its fine network of lines. ‘It’s a fascinating place, isn’t it? And offering scope these days for you ladies.’ I laughed inwardly and answered, ‘But the present lot of women barristers will never make a living. Their children may.’

‘I’m afraid that’s true.’

‘Then, you’re in favour of them?’

‘Why not? The last word, you know!’ and the old wretch glanced at me with his sub-acid brown eye. ‘I must admit, though, that I think, perhaps, the Chancery Division offers more suitable
’ ‘Ah. You mean rude exhibits handed round on a plate,’ I said. And at that he shook all over.

‘Since you insist
’ ‘I believe you’d like to limit the ladies – God bless ’em – to droning about bressemers and hereditaments – by the way, what
is
a hereditament?’

‘It’s usually a waste of a good half-hour,’ responded Sir Herbert. ‘But, are you
interested
in them?’

‘Adore them! The last time I dropped in, you said hereditament five times, and I thought it a gorgeous word. I love words.’

‘So do I.’

And then we began,
via
his cases, to talk about murder, and he seemed pleased because I remembered that Seddon lived at 60 Tollington Park and Crippen’s number in Hilldrop Crescent. From murders we inevitably worked on to the flood of books on the subject, of which I had read many, and from these to books in general. And from that moment Mildred began to fade out. One felt her personality withdrawing itself, and though I threw her one lifeline after another, it was no real use. And Toddy wouldn’t help me. It was early days to expect it, but I was definitely cross with him, for all that. Engrossed, peremptory, he danced me off to his study to show me some first editions and I wasn’t at my best with them, because of Mildred upstairs, feeling out of it. But before long the book-spell told, and we were swapping prejudices and worships.

‘Whenever I happen to be alone for a meal, my book is
Vanity Fair
, and the parts I pick out to re-read are lunchy and dinnery. There’s a smear of tomato sauce over Becky casting the Dixonary into the garden, and gravy on, “And eh, Amelia my dear, I’ve brought in a pine for tiffin.” ’ He adjusted his pince-nez. ‘Ah. I’ve got chutney on, “When I stepped into the car’ge afther me mar’ge,” and tobacco burns right through the spontaneous combustion business.’

‘
Bleak House?
Can’t get through it.’

‘You must try again. As a matter of fact, I once discussed that episode with a doctor, and he says it is, medically speaking, impossible. I adduced the haystack, which ignites of its own fermenting poisons, but he said that while breath remains in the body that form of death is automatically debarred. But it’s a tremendous piece of writing, for all that.’ He selected a book from an upper shelf. ‘Are the Brontës beyond your interest?’

‘Only Anne, and honestly, Sir Herbert, I think she’s a perfectly crashing ass.’

He gave me a wintry smile. ‘I know what you mean. The Brontë family has been, like Switzerland, too much stamped over, and virtues have been discovered in all their work which I, personally, won’t admit it always possessed. But what a family! Even if they’d never written a line, what a story! Isn’t it artistically complete that there isn’t a quotable line recorded of Anne? Wasn’t there a sort of fate which ordained that she, of all the family, should be buried away from home, dying, meek, futile, on that Scarborough sofa . . . and Branwell, drugged and drunk, dying, erect, in his best suit, out of bravado? “My nerves! my nerves!” . . . I always wonder where that poor boy got his red hair from. It didn’t seem to break out in any of the sisters.’

‘You think they were degenerates?’

‘No more than I believe the lady who published a book trying to persuade us that Emily was spiritually hermaphroditic. The Brontës were, to me, the perfectly logical result of their environment, parentage and diet! . . . You’ve seen the museum?’

‘No. We were in Yorkshire in the summer, but we never thought of going over to Haworth. We were too busy being miserable.’

I looked at him, unreasonably hoping this would strike some chord, but then I remembered that Toddy had supervened wonderfully little, that fortnight, and as there was no telephone at the Inn he couldn’t ring us up daily. We like to be exact.

‘Miserable? Dear me. I am so sorry. I was at Sandwich.’

‘Yes. After the Bristol Assizes,’ I answered mechanically.

‘Yes. I was really enchanted by the parsonage. Emily’s desk as she had left it, with her housekeeping books . . . and that flower group on the wall over which Charlotte stippled her eyes away . . . and the pencil marks in the upper room recording their heights – the wallpaper had to be removed before those were found. Why one is so fascinated I can’t imagine. It’s such a little time ago, and yet, one is compelled to enchantment . . . when I was a barrister, I used to walk all over London finding addresses where Dickens’s characters lived, and I shall never forget the moment when I came down Kingsgate Street, High Holborn and found the bird fancier’s that Mrs Gamp lodged over.’

‘How heavenly! Do go on going on!’

And he did; delicately pacing, sweeping off his pince-nez, tapping with frail little claws on covers, until the door opened and Mildred, who was now much more Lady Toddington, came in, a daunting figure in her hard, sparkling gown.

‘Well, you book-worms! It’s past the half-hour, Herbert.’ His face set, but it wasn’t at her entrance, though I guessed she believed it to be, but at the epithet. Mildred, of course, isn’t a clever woman, but she can strike for her own. She was summing me up; offsetting me against previous experience. ‘
I don
’
t know many young girls
.’ She thought that handicapped her. And then there was my three-years-old unfair advantage . . .

I wanted, badly, to go to her – it seemed so natural – and put my arm through hers. I wanted to say, ‘Isn’t Toddy looking a dear!’ I wanted to tell them that mother sent her love and that they weren’t to forget they were having supper with us on Sunday sure of the instant response to which – I was so used: ‘
Good-night, dear child. That will be charming
.’ But there I stood, at a loss, and watched Lady Toddington.

‘The car is at the door, my lady.’

She turned and followed the maid. I gave my hand to Sir Herbert and then Toddy said, ‘You must come and see her again, if you will. She would enjoy having something young about the place.’

‘I wonder?’

He looked at me as he does at an overconfident barrister.

‘But I know.’ And then he gave me one of his lay smiles. I said, ‘You know, I’ve had a very wonderful evening.’ I’m glad I was able to lash myself into telling him that, and while he was folding his scarf and shrugging into his coat, I went to his wife in the hall, uncertain as to whom I should find there, and her first remark gave me no clue.

‘Well, how’s the idol?’

‘The idol’s a great treasure,’ I answered, ‘do you think it would ever come to see us?’

‘Ask him. You seem to have made a hit with him. He says I read nothing but Edgar Wallace. Is that considered to be very bad?’ She asked as she might have consulted with her milliner about the state of the fashions.

‘I’ll tell you one,’ I said, ‘he reads detective stories himself. I saw three on the bottom shelf.’

Lady Toddington laughed aloud and became suddenly Mildred. ‘Well I never! I’ll hold that over his head in future.’