The Brontes Went to Woolworths (6 page)

‘I can’t guarantee that you’ll get kissed much,’ I admitted, ‘and you’ll almost certainly not get “insulted” by the offer of a flat and diamonds, because there’s too much competition, so hardly anybody gets offered that any more, and there’s a perfect queue waiting to be insulted, and in any case, most chorus girls come from perfectly nice homes in South Kensington and behave like nuns, these days. But you’ll be called Kid and Dear by the other sort, and I once heard a producer telling a troupe to “dance it with debunnair.” ’

‘Hah!’

‘I know. Of course the language is rather awful, sometimes, but really it’s mostly old English, and Harrison Ainsworth is full of it. Even Queen Mary said “God’s death!” when Courtenay threw her over for Elizabeth. It’s awfully rum what you can get used to. I remember when I first heard a girl say “bloody” I really felt bad about it – quite in the “what is youth coming to?” vein, but we say it all day long ourselves now.’

Katrine was beginning to look more natural, so I drove the last nail home. ‘Keep young at heart, dear gurl, and – who knows? – your little lamp may illumine some Difficult Step for another.’

Katrine began to join in, showering advice on herself. ‘Smile it off! The Cloud will pass away. Always refuse dishonourable offers with politeness, Pansy. Courtesy costs nothing.’

But I saw that all this was only a flash in the pan, so, quite soon, I went up to the schoolroom again, dodging open bedroom doors in case somebody called out and wanted me to address labels, or haul at trunk straps, a job no woman ought to be asked to cope with. Even a holiday that is going to be a successful one should never be preceded by irritating and exhausting details. One should simply walk out of the house into a car, and be driven, coolly, to the station. And when one arrived, a maid would have unpacked. That’s how it happens in the Toddingtons’ house, and quite right too. The end of July certainly does search out the standing of a family, and our sort of departure is even apt to look all wrong, possibly because there are five of us, and all women. In the old days there was father, but we were living, then, in a ghastly house in Hampton Wick, and when I was a child and Sheil an infant, our departures to the seaside included a nurse in the cab and a bath on the roof, and that very nearly cancelled out father.

We certainly have two servants, but they don’t do their bit, and have Legs that have to be Remembered, and Hearts which have to be Considered, and I often groan for the Toddingtons’ faithful cook, Grania, and the aloof but efficient parlourmaid, Henderson. But of course Toddy is a big man, and his progresses about the country inevitably stately, and his adorable way with all of us only serves to emphasise it.

And I sat in Sheil’s chair and looked at a supplement of
Cherry Ripe
on the wall, and said for probably the fortieth time, ‘Oh, Toddy, I wish you were my father!’

After all, the post is vacant, and it is monstrous that anything should stand in the way. I’m sometimes certain that Toddy would like it, too. I’m often afraid he’s disappointed about having no children, and the riddle of whether Mildred ‘wouldn’t’ baffles me yet. I once woke up in the middle of the night being disappointed for Toddy.

He is going to Sandwich again, this year, for part of his holiday, and I suppose the autumnal end of it will be a series of house-parties, probably in Scotland.

I do hope his hotel in Bristol is comfortable, and that he has a private sitting-room. This time last year he was on the south-western circuit, and had to bundle off to Devonshire, and we think an old treasure of his age ought to be exempt, and just be in the Law Courts all the time. It’s like throwing a leading lady away on tours.

. . . Or perhaps we could get made his wards? I’d rather love to be a ward, and it needn’t be any trouble to Toddy. I suspect that Mildred might smell a rat, though, somewhere. I’m convinced she doesn’t appreciate Toddy; she’s too smart: one of those large, upholstered women who play a lot of Bridge and shop at Harrods (it is a definite type), and they’ve rather grown away from each other. And sometimes she says things that are clever and hurting and damnable, and Toddy goes away to his study and pines, and
Henderson brings him in his tea there.

It’s what a study ought to look like: one could do work in it and yet be happy. It has a coal fire and a gas one, too, for when he comes in a little damp from summer showers, and huge, rather ugly chairs that invite sleep, and one wall is books from floor to ceiling, though half of them are above the lay head, and under his desk is a fur-lined foot-muff. To give Mildred her due, she does see to his comforts.

I wonder what he’s doing, now? Sometimes the papers publish stingers he’s delivered in court to counsel or witnesses, and we can all ‘hear’ him saying them because he’s just the same in London, and I seldom come away from his Court without some titbit for the family. He never jokes for effect, as old Horatio Sparrow used to; he is very silent and grim, and suddenly sweeps off his pince-nez and gives a dry remark or an awful snub, and they are always apposite or deserved and make me grin. Once, there was a thunderstorm, and he looked up at the glass roof and said, ‘I wish they’d stop that noise,’ and when everybody laughed, his face instantly became a mask, and he very slowly took the assurance out of a barrister, and when he’d reduced the poor creature to deferent speechlessness, looked at him for a long time over his glasses, and then, very deliberately, went on making notes. We all long for a glimpse of that book of his. Sheil says she thinks he draws dragons in it and colours them in chalk afterwards with Nicholls, and Katrine once ventured that he was only putting down his washing.

When Sheil came in, I said, ‘Shall we be Toddy’s wards?’

‘Oh
yes
,’ beamed Sheil. ‘Does it mean dressing up?’

‘ ’Fraid not.’

‘Then let’s don’t. Deiry, we saw a duck on the Round Pond to-day, and he had such a Millicent sort of face – kind of bright and helpful and silly.’

I glanced at Miss Martin, but her face, for days now, has been a vague, happy blank. She is miles away, already. But I did the policeman act, for the look of the thing.

‘Don’t get whimsical on me, sweetheart. You’ll be telling us all that the flowers talked to you, next.’

The tactless little wretch roared with appreciation.

And then it was time for lunch, and we had one of those inexcusable scratch meals that servants always send in, if they dare, when a household is disorganised. And I sat there in absolute despair. As for mother, she spends the first week of any holiday recovering from the packing up, and was looking horribly white, and altogether the occasion was so appalling that afterwards I gave in, and told her about the publisher’s letter. I’d tried to keep it to myself . . . it’s somehow always been far more my business than Katrine’s to shield her from trouble . . . but one has got one’s breaking point. I can always forgive and understand it in other people, but never in myself. So I found myself saying, ‘Mother, the book’s been turned down,’ and mother dropped a pile of clothes and held out her arms.

I wish one could cry as readily as some seem to be able to. After all, one is a woman . . . I only know I can’t, before people, however healing it would be.

A little later, mother took her cheek from mine and said, ‘Toddy’s come from Bristol! It’s Saturday, and he’s got half
to-day and all Sunday.
Isn’t
he an old dear?’

I gasped, ‘Oh, Toddy, my pearl!’ He had evidently got past the clumsy doubts of the servant, and had come upstairs alone. He said that he would stay with us until Sunday night, and that Mitchell would drive him back to Bristol, and that he had telephoned Henderson to get his room ready. He took my hands and said, ‘Dear Miss Deirdre, this is indeed a crushing blow. Believe me, I feel it every bit as much as
you could.’

Mother said, ‘You wrote to him, then?’ and I answered, ‘Oh yes.’ I asked him if he’d told his wife, and he hemmed and hawed a bit, and plucked off his pince-nez and finally said no. And then he caught sight of the pile of camiknickers on the bed and asked mother, ‘What are these objects?’ and mother said, ‘You’d better not ask, Toddy. I might tell you,’ and Toddy said, ‘Tscha! Obscene!’ and mother told him to ‘run along home now, and come back to dinner,’ and he lectured her about the use of the verb and said that, if desired, he would
go
. And we told him not to be cross, and he kissed us both and promised to ‘wait on’ us at seven-thirty.

Altogether, I went to bed strangely cheered.

8

Mother has always adored moors, and the wilder, the more windswept and (from my point of view) generally morbid the prospect, the better she enjoys it.

This type of place should only be gone to when you are very happy indeed. Otherwise it is too poignant, its unfair power over you of scarred rock, rusty ling and buffeting wind, too tremendous.

We stayed at a village five miles from Keighley, and almost from the first, as I had foreseen, everything went wrong. I think Katrine guessed, too.

The heather came right up to the exiguous back garden of the Inn, and it seemed to me that the general tone of life, there, was one of siege. The villagers know it, deep down, and that is why they have adopted their protective dourness; and that is also at the root of their famed hospitality. It’s a gesture of defiance at the Unknown that crouches, and waits. The herding instinct that cattle know, in storms.

Sheil and I shared a room with an uneven floor, and the wind banged round it so that sleep was impossible until one grew accustomed to it; and when it dropped, which it did, suddenly, like a voice which cracks on the top note of fury, the stillness pounded in one’s ears. And then a fine, yellow sunlight, without warmth, bathed the moor.

Katrine and I went for long tramps. Sometimes we shouted to each other, but the sentences blew away in streamers over our shoulders. In the distance, we could occasionally sight mother, serene, at home, drinking it all in owning it.

‘Let’s go our favourite walk,’ I would say to Katrine, with bitter sarcasm, and this led us for two miles to a village where there was a tiny ‘circulating library’ at the back of the fancy goods.

Four miles for a book! We would bring back all we could manage at a time, but it was heavy work, and I thought, we shall exhaust it long before our time is up, at this rate. It certainly gave me an insight into the works of Mrs Henry Wood and Miss Braddon that I had never expected to acquire.

The place was so blatantly bracing that it was odd one didn’t feel the good of it. One was merely battered without anything to show for it, or wetted through by the fine, whimpering rain which would fall for half-days at a time. Katrine wasn’t looking well, but then trouble always flies to our faces, and Sheil caught a bad cold the first week and didn’t seem to shake it off as she usually does. Crellie revelled in every moment, and scoured the countryside for live meat. He had apparently unearthed a boon companion, a bigger, rather rough dog. Sheil had often seen them gambolling together, she told us, and Crellie’s friend is boisterous and snarls a lot, and even the best game usually hovered – on the verge of a fight, and frequently ended in one. We sometimes heard them at it in the distance when we were at meals in the parlour of the Inn, and asked the landlady if the dog was hers, and she said she hadn’t got one, and that ‘Curly’s’ friend probably belonged down at one of the miners’ cottages. I knew them. The mist hangs over them sometimes until midday, long after it is clear everywhere else.

I had brought my novel with me in the faint, hypocritical hope that I would find the spirit to send it elsewhere. I kept it open, so that I could suddenly read stray pages and try and find out what ailed it. Mother used to go to bed early, healthily tired, but Katrine and I, when we were alone in the parlour, would sit up late reading, or discussing the future, until the lamp often died right down.

‘Isn’t this being plain hell!’ Katrine would mutter, night after night. ‘You’ve got your writing
’

‘Only I can’t do it. One can’t do
anything
here but shake one’s fist. And the people depress me.’

‘The red-haired boy was frightfully squiffed again, last night.’

‘Which one?’

‘He comes into the bar. One can see him over the curtains, through our door. He’s rather plain, with a white face, – and talks a lot and looks as though he might be interesting. He doesn’t seem to go down a bit, though, and is always telling stories that nobody listens to, so they might be worth hearing. If one ever succeeded in amusing these clouts with a story I should know it wasn’t a good one,’ Katrine concluded venomously.

A sound came from overhead and she said, ‘Sheil’s started a cough now, poor toad.’ So we abandoned the parlour and went to bed. Sheil was asleep, and I lit the candle and sauntered over to my manuscript and began turning the pages. Publishers take too much licence. Let them return the typescript, but not embellished with pencil notes. There were not many, but the principle remains the same.