Westwood (29 page)

‘Why not? Why does Mr Churchill say I mustn’t?’

‘Because if some liddle boys and girls buy all der sweets there no more are for der others. You all do haf a share each.’

‘Well, does he mind if I buy all
mine
this afternoon?’

‘Of course he does not mind, but I
say
to you dot
if
you buy dem all
now
, there no more will be
until three week
.’

Mr Challis, conscious that the time was drawing nearer to four o’clock, attempted gently to make his way past Emma, who, interrupted in the act of cautiously placing one foot into the void below the stair on which she stood, glanced up at him in dignified amazement.

‘Let me pass, please, I must telephone to Greatgranny,’ he appealed to the party at large.

Immediately they all burst into cries of ‘Poor Grandpa! Let Grandpa go by, then, Barnabas, get out of the way Emma, come to Granny and let poor Grandpa –’ in the midst of which uproar Mr Challis waved hastily to them and hurried away towards the sanctuary of his study. It was just five minutes to four.

He gave a number near a village in Bedfordshire and soon there was a click at the other end of the line and he heard a number of confused sounds which suggested that much activity was going on in the room where the telephone was; he could hear a piano going, and people were singing shrilly, and there was also a sustained whirring noise. Mr Challis winced.

‘’Ullo?’ said a young voice suddenly. ‘Sorry – Martlefield 3 here. Who’s that?’

‘I want to speak to Lady Challis.’

‘All right, I’ll go and get her. She’s in the garden.’

Mr Challis sighed. When was his mother not in the garden?’

‘Who’s speaking, please?’

‘Mr Gerard Challis.’

‘’Old on, please.’

The voice then went away, and Mr Challis held on patiently and presently footsteps were heard approaching, accompanied by the barking of more than one dog, and then a clear old voice said cheerfully: ‘Gerry? Is that you, dear? Good. We’re all going to the Red Cross Concert to-night and just going to have high tea. Now about your all coming down in May. The fourteenth would
suit me. The hawthorn’s sure to be out by then.’

‘That will suit us, I expect. I will get Seraphina to telephone you to-morrow and confirm it. How are you, Mother?’

‘Very well, thank you. There are a hundred and fifty daffodils out in the orchard.’

Mr Challis made a congratulatory sound.

‘And my parrot tulips are going to be a
spectacle
.’

Mr Challis repeated the sound in a higher key.

‘And those wild pansies we picked in Patt’s Wood last year have taken, and they’re coming up in an absolute carpet.’

Mr Challis, who had an engagement in town, glanced at his watch.

‘How are you all?’ went on Lady Challis.

‘We are all well, I think. The child had a slight cold some days ago, but seems to be better now.’

‘Which child?’

‘The baby.’

‘Good. And how is my dear Grantey?’

‘Oh – she hasn’t been well, I believe; I seem to remember Seraphina saying something about it.’

‘What’s the matter with her?’

‘I really don’t know. She was complaining of breathlessness, I believe.’

‘Make her see a doctor at once,’ said Lady Challis firmly. ‘I don’t like the sound of it.’

‘Really, my dear Mother –’

‘You none of you realize what a treasure she is.’

‘I will suggest to Seraphina that she should see a doctor. You must forgive me if I go now, Mother, I have an appointment –’

‘And you’d all be in no end of a hole if anything happened to her.’

‘I am sure there is no need to worry. I really must go now, Mother. Good-bye – I will ask Seraphina to telephone to you to-morrow.’

‘Not before lunch, then; I’m going to distemper the scullery.’

Mr Challis was late for his appointment.

Zita and Margaret spent a pleasant hour before dinner in sewing and talking, and then Zita went downstairs to lay the table while Margaret prepared to go home.

While she was putting away her work she heard voices outside in the corridor. Evidently someone had paused at the large cupboard opposite the Little Room door.

‘He was holding forth to Struggles,’ said Hebe’s unmistakable voice.

There was a laugh.

‘Darling,
need
you call her that?’ said Seraphina’s voice. ‘It’s
too
perfect, but is it
kind
?’

This time it was Hebe who laughed.

‘I wish you could have seen her. She looked like a dog waiting for “Paid for!”’

‘Sweetie, she has
very
nice manners, much prettier than yours,’ said her mother. ‘
Here
it is, I knew it must be
somewhere
,’ and voices and footsteps receded.

Margaret was very angry and her admiration for Hebe was now definitely replaced by dislike. But how sweet Mrs Challis had been! how kind! And what a comfort it was to hear that her manners were approved! All the same, her cheeks were burning as she walked home.

I needn’t let it make any difference to me, she thought. Hebe doesn’t live at Westwood and I hardly ever see her and she wouldn’t take the trouble to set her father and mother against me; she wouldn’t think it worth while. But how cruel she is! She has everything and I have nothing, and she only thinks I’m funny. She doesn’t appreciate what she’s got, and she encourages men to be in love with her, and she neglects her children. I hate her.

In the walled garden at Westwood a tulip tree was in bud. The olive leaves and the petals flushed with purple looked over the wall, and every evening Margaret strolled up to gaze at it and give herself refreshment before she slept. The grass of the oval lawn was growing so rapidly that it had to be clipped every two or three days by Cortway. He was frequently there when she walked past about eight o’clock, moving the mower to and fro over the lawn in long hurrying sweeps, keeping his head down and never looking up.

The gardens were as old as the house, and in course of time their shrubs had thickened and spread and become sturdy tufted tyrants, casting a dense shade and discouraging the growth of flowers; there were Portugal laurel, myrtle, rhododendron and bay. The common laurels were kept closely cut, but their leaves looked as strong as veined green marble, and there was more than one pine and monkey-puzzler to add to the garden’s darkness. Scattered among these sombre, scanty-flowered bushes were beds shaped like diamonds or hearts or ovals filled in season with yellow and scarlet and blue flowers; but during the winter, when all the flowers were absent, the garden seemed most truly itself; as if its dark, grave spirit were released. The picture which it made was park-like and curiously lacking in the refreshing power of most gardens; the combination of darkness and brilliance was hard. When Margaret walked out one still, sunny evening with Zita and saw hundreds of large daffodils standing in yellow sunlight below the thick dark shrubs, she found the contrast almost unpleasant. But then she caught a waft of budding box from the tiny clipped hedges bordering the paths, and for a moment a feeling came to her as if she had encountered something very old; and of course she had; it was the idea of a garden that had belonged to an older England; the clipped bushes, the herbs and shrubs, and a few flowers of stiff and cultivated beauty. The garden’s darkness was increased by its lying in a hollow, and as only the low sparkling rays of evening or dawn sunlight pierced directly through the branches, it was most often illuminated by those strange transforming lights, its thick shrubberies protecting it from the glare of noon. It was an unusual garden, oppressive and quiet, but as the months passed and there were crimson roses under the glossy bushes of bay, she came to love it.

The front gardens were less formal. The small one on the left of the gates, where the tulip tree grew, had honeysuckle climbing over its walls, and Cortway kept the beds filled with pheasant’s eye narcissus, tulips, wallflowers, nasturtiums and all the familiar glories. But beside the path that led to the side entrance of the house grew the feathery fern of the wild carrot, and all up one wall ran a tangle of the little pink convolvulus that has the scent of vanilla. Cortway never bothered himself with this part of the garden, for visitors were not supposed to see it and if it liked to grow weeds he did not care, but Margaret looked forward to going down the pebbled, narrow, mossy path in the lengthening twilight two or three times a week, and noticing what new tendrils and mats of flower and green were coming up as the tide of spring rolled forward over Europe.

Meanwhile, the Steggles’s own garden had been transformed by hard work, and now had a lawn which, though still patchy, was green and healthy, and neat beds which would look less bare when the late summer flowers came, while there was a large bush of white lilac in full blossom under which Mrs Steggles sometimes sat. Dick Fletcher still came up on most Saturday afternoons, and on the last occasion had been rewarded with a large bunch of lilac, the first-fruits (Mrs Steggles told him) of his labours; later on there would be radishes and lettuces and runner-beans. He wrapped the lilac carefully in brown paper, showing none of the embarrassment men usually display at carrying flowers, and Margaret wondered if he would take it to his own flat or to the girl he went to see on Sundays.

The slight awkwardness there had been between them at first had disappeared by now, and she took him for granted as he seemed to take her, never thinking about him when he was not there. He fitted in well with the household’s ways, seldom discussing any subject save those of general domestic interest and never arguing or holding forth. Sometimes he was silent or touchy, but the Steggleses were used to moods, and accepted them without comment. He seemed to like coming to the house, and Mrs Steggles kept to her decision to make him welcome whenever he did.

Margaret was so used to taking him for granted that she was surprised to see a new side of him one afternoon when Hilda came to tea. He began by being unusually silent and watching Hilda sulkily as she sparkled away, but soon he was laughing, and said one or two charming things to her, flattering and absurd.

‘I like your dad’s friend,’ said Hilda, while she and Margaret were upstairs.

‘He isn’t usually silly like that,’ answered Margaret, feeling ashamed for him.

‘Who said he was silly? He’s a dear.’

Margaret said no more, but she continued to think that compliments coming from Dick Fletcher were slightly undignified. She had yet to learn the plain woman’s lesson; that a pretty woman will always make men lose their dignity willingly and with pleasure.

The weeks sped on pleasantly, for the long dull days of teaching were replaced by the holidays, with music, lingering light and flowers, and chance encounters with the delightful inhabitants of Westwood. She and Zita were now close, if not firm, friends; and they had made mutual plans that extended far into the summer and included a week’s holiday to be spent together in learning the beauties of Salisbury Cathedral and listening to its music. This was to be in August, and Margaret longed for August to come.

It was at the beginning of the May term that she first realized that she was unconsciously looking forward to a time when she would no longer have to teach. For weeks during the winter term she had been preparing her work mechanically, and hurrying through the corrections of exercises in order that she might keep an evening appointment with Zita, and the end of the Easter holidays, during which she had been free to haunt Westwood as much as she liked and to make her own arrangements for pleasure during the day, came to her with a shock. The return to school was really hateful to her; the children seemed plain, uninteresting and stupid, and her colleagues prejudiced, uncultured and narrow, while her senses, fed richly on the beauty of Westwood, recoiled from the ugliness of the school buildings.

She began to be afraid of the long years ahead in which she would have to go on earning her living by work which was growing increasingly distasteful. She had made one or two attempts to convey to her classes the more easily understood of her enthusiasms, but she had been irritated by the slowness of the girls’ understanding and had given up the idea; she had also suspected that some of the older pupils found her raptures ridiculous, and as she felt too deeply about them to adopt a cooler tone, she preferred to abandon the attempt altogether. She was still conscientious enough to attempt to pass on the joys which she had discovered to her pupils, who were less intelligent and fortunate than herself, but what could you do (she asked herself) with girls who remembered the tiniest detail about any film star, and could not be persuaded to show genuine interest in any other subject? She thought of their young minds as surfeited with a glutinous, oversweet fare and yet eager for more; fed on foam; growing up without a single quality making for solid contentment or one pleasure that would last them throughout their lives. She did not
realize that theirs were still the imaginations of children, which do not see the real thing or the thing that adults see, but something beglamoured by that imagination, dazzling, dreamy and more satisfying than any solid mental food.