Westwood (44 page)

‘This is Margaret; I’m afraid I only know her as Margaret, but she is a friend of Zita’s and has nobly offered to help Hebe with the children this week-end. Margaret, this is my mother.’ The kind tone, and his use of her name (which she only now discovered that he even knew), coming immediately after what she had said, proved too much for Margaret’s overladen feelings; and to her unbearable shame, as she climbed out of the governess-cart murmuring, ‘How do you do, Lady Challis,’ her eyes were brimming with tears.

‘How do you do,’ replied Lady Challis. ‘Gerry, go in and wash if you want to wash, and I’ll look after Margaret. Then you go into supper; everybody’s there and I won’t be a minute. Bertie, turn Maggie into the paddock and then come in.’

Margaret, who was feeling for her handkerchief while Lady Challis turned away to give these instructions, did not see either Mr Challis or Bertie and Maggie go; and it was only while she was blowing her nose that she became aware how quiet everything had become all at once; with the pleasant sound of voices and laughter subdued by distance coming from the houses, and the soft movement of the evening breeze in the apple trees making the stillness seem more still.

‘Would you like your supper upstairs in the attic? There’s a sofa and plenty of books. Do you like cold rabbit pie? Good,’ said Lady Challis, standing by her side and eating cherries.

Margaret answered in a muffled voice:

‘Oh, thank you very much, but I ought to be with the children; isn’t it time they were in bed?’

‘It isn’t seven yet, and the older ones always sit up to supper down here, so don’t worry about them. Do you like beer or cider?’

‘Cider, please,’ answered Margaret, who was now following her down a path of narrow red bricks whose crevices were filled with bright green moss.

They were approaching a front door which stood open, revealing a long, low room which apparently ran the length of the five cottages and was used as a combined living- and dining-room, for as they entered Margaret heard a burst of laughter, and Seraphina’s voice called, ‘There she is, poor sweet!’ Glancing confusedly towards the sound, she saw a large party (quite fifteen people, she thought) gathered about a supper-table at the far end of the hall. She could see Hebe seated between Emma and Jeremy, and then the sight of Gerard Challis’s profile, gravely intent above a spoonful of something he was just raising to his lips, caused her to turn her eyes hastily away again, but not before she had noticed that there seemed to be a great many children of all ages in the party and a number of pretty young women who presumably were their mothers.

‘This way. Mind your head!’ said Lady Challis, and opened a door painted yellow, which led straight up a steep narrow staircase. Margaret’s impression of the dining-hall had been pleasant, for the apartment had a wooden floor painted the same soft yellow as the door, and windows hung with glossy white material patterned by scarlet strawberries and their green leaves, and there must (she thought) have been literally thousands of books on shelves set high on the walls; but she was glad to be shown into a bathroom, which was not luxurious but whose appointments were solid and comfortable, and to bathe her eyes.

When she came out, Lady Challis was sitting at the head of the stairs, with a tray laden with food beside her, absorbed in a book. Margaret could see its title; it was Eddington’s
The Nature of the Physical World
.

‘Oh dear, I have been laughing so over this!’ she exclaimed, putting the book into her overall pocket. ‘It makes me think of what Raphael says to Adam in
Paradise Lost
:

He His fabric of the heavens

Hath left to their disputes; perhaps to move

His laughter at their quaint opinions wide

Hereafter …

‘Are you ready?’

‘There!’ she said at last. (They had now climbed another perilous staircase.) ‘You’ll be all right here, won’t you?’ and she pulled out a table and set it near a window that looked across the orchard to some meadows.

‘You are kind!’ exclaimed Margaret fervently, putting the tray down on the table, and glancing round the large airy room with its sloping roof and shelves filled with worn, friendly-looking books.

‘Not kind; selfish,’ said Lady Challis oracularly, tucking a piece of silver hair into the coil at the back of her head. ‘Good-bye; I’ll see you later,’ and she nodded and smiled and went out of the room.

As Margaret ate, she was thinking about nothing but her hostess, and trying to grasp the fact that she was Gerard Challis’s mother; she, who was so completely, so utterly unlike what Margaret would have expected his mother to be. The worn loveliness of her features, certainly, was like her son’s, and her faded blue eyes must once have had the depth and colour of his, but whereas (Margaret groped for words to express her impression) – he has made the best of his
personality so that it is all in his face, she takes no notice of hers. She could have been strikingly beautiful, I should think, but she ignores her own beauty. Her hair is done anyhow and she hasn’t even a pretty overall, and her hands are rough with gardening, and yet, all the same, she is beautiful. Oh, I do like her so much! I wish I could talk to her; I’m sure she could help me.

Lady Challis meanwhile wandered downstairs, still reading
The Nature of the Physical World
, and when she reached the head of the main staircase once more, which provided such a convenient seat, she was just absently sitting down to continue reading when a small voice cried warningly:

‘Lady Challis! You’re reading again and your supper will be beastly and cold,’ and a little girl appeared at the bottom of the staircase, busily eating a mouthful of her own supper and gazing up at her.

‘Thank you, Jane, I’m sorry,’ murmured Lady Challis, and got up and continued her journey, slipping her hand into that of Jane as she reached the foot of the stairs, and going on reading. ‘Did mother send you to find me?’ she went on absently.

‘No. Mr Challis, your son. He said, “Little girl” (I’ve
told
him my name when he was here before but he never
can
remember it), he said, “you go and look for Lady Challis and tell her to stop reading and come and eat her supper.”’

‘And so you did. Well, thank you very much, and now you run along and eat yours, or that will be beastly and cold too.’

The shadows of the apple trees were long upon the grass when Margaret at last decided that she must go down and find the children. She was now completely in command of herself, and could have wished that Lady Challis had let her go in to supper with the others, for she thought that everybody must have noticed her absence and commented upon it, but that the wish seemed ungrateful after such delicate kindness. It seemed strange not to be busily cooking an evening meal at this hour, so used had she become to going to Westwood-at-Brockdale, and in spite of the novelty and interest of this new household in which she temporarily found herself, she missed Dick and Linda.
There
she was needed;
there
her opinion was valued and her presence was indispensable to the comfort of the family, while
here
, though she had carelessly been called sweet and an angel for her pains, she was only being used as a convenience. She thought with real affection of the clumsy clasp of Linda’s hand and of Dick’s brief appreciation of the suppers she cooked, and returned again and again to the hope that Mrs Coates (whose large, slightly pop-eyes and loose mouth suggested a weakness for dramatic behaviour) would not make an unexpected return during the week-end.

I shall miss looking after them, she thought, as she stood by the window gazing out across the apple trees and the cooling meadows; and then she thought (poor Margaret),
if only I had someone who belonged only to
me,
and didn’t always have to go into other people’s homes and share with them; I want someone for my very own
. She had at first dreamt of letting her ideal love for Gerard Challis so fill her life with selfless beauty that it should transform all her ways of
feeling and thinking, but she had found, on a closer acquaintance with him, that her devotion did not blossom and enrich her existence as she had hoped. Now, at this moment, exactly eight months to a day since she had first spoken to him in the hall of Westwood, when she was to spend three nights under the same roof with him in his mother’s home, she could not truthfully say that he meant as much to her as he had done on that first evening, when she had looked up into the eyes ‘blue and meditative as the eyes of the Roman Augustus,’ and felt that the greatest moment of her life had come.

‘Margaret, are you dead or something?’ exclaimed Hebe crossly, bursting into the room and startling her. ‘Can you come down and cope with the brats? We want to go to the local.’

‘Of course, I’m awfully sorry,’ replied Margaret guiltily. ‘I was just coming down, only I thought you wouldn’t have finished supper yet.’ She picked up her own supper-tray and followed Hebe out of the room.

Her tone seemed to have mollified Hebe slightly, for as they followed each other down the perilous staircase she said:

‘I’m afraid it’ll be a rigid bind for you, three days of it. It’s angelic of you to do it, really; I’m blowed if I would.’

This was the pleasantest remark Margaret had received from Hebe since that first day at Lamb Cottage, when she had been charming and polite, with a manner modelled upon that of her mother, because she had wanted something; and it recalled to Margaret the fascinating creature who had sat on the sofa knitting and smiling at Earl’s ingenuousness; the poetic figure gracing the stalls at the first night of
Kattë
; a personality so different from the sulky girl in the cotton frock she was used to seeing at Westwood that it was possible to show her something of one’s feelings.

‘I love the children, only I’m scared of them,’ she answered simply. ‘I’m not much good with kiddies, I’m afraid. And besides, I’m glad to be here because I wanted to be with all of you.’

Few people can resist a declaration of love which embraces their family and home and milieu and yet does not threaten to involve them in an embarrassing personal devotion. Hebe only said ‘Blimey!’ but the backward glance which she gave Margaret was almost good-humoured, and the latter was encouraged by it to continue eagerly:

‘Isn’t your grandmother – Lady Challis, I mean – absolutely
fascinating
?’

‘Yes, she gets me down, though,’ answered Hebe in one breath.

‘
Does
she? I can’t imagine her getting
anyone
down.’

‘She’s a saint, and saints do get you down. She makes me understand why the Romans were always giving the Early Christians the works.’

Margaret longed to hear more, but did not like to speak.

‘If you’d known Grandpapa Challis, you’d see why my papa is like he is,’ Hebe went on suddenly, pausing at a window to look out into the garden, where the children were playing in the evening light. ‘Papa isn’t a bit like Granny Challis, of course.’

‘No,’ murmured Margaret, enthralled.

‘He
is
just like Grandpapa Challis was, though. He was Sir Edwin Challis, the physicist, you know. All he cared about was atoms. He had a house and a lot of land near here and Granny’s pa looked after it for him. She must have been marvellous to look at – though I bet her hair never would keep up, even then. Grandpapa fell for her one morning when he saw her hanging out the washing; she was seventeen.’

‘It’s like a
fairy
story!’

‘Not to notice it,’ answered Hebe dryly. ‘I don’t think Granny had much fun and games after they were married. She always wanted swarms of brats (like me) and she only had my papa.’

Margaret was silent, fearing to break the spell.

‘Grandpapa only died five years ago. He was eighty-seven and absolutely terrifying. He’d been so mad on atoms for years he was hardly there at all by that time, if you get me. The minute he’d had it, Granny rushed off and bought these cottages. They were going to be pulled down, but she had them all altered and made into one.’

‘I
love
it here. It isn’t a bit like anywhere else I’ve ever been.’

Hebe made one of her faces, and saying, ‘Well, we’d better go down, I suppose,’ moved away from the window.

‘And all these young-marrieds hopping about the place are the granddaughters of her old friends,’ she went on. ‘She asks them all here with their brats and so she always has the house full of children. She likes children and books better than anything.’

‘I noticed the books. There must be thousands.’

‘Oh, she buys a book every time she goes out, and has done for years. I don’t get it myself; I don’t like all this reading; but if she’s got a book in one hand and a brat hanging on to the other, she’s all right. Coming!’ she called suddenly, in response to a distant shout of ‘Hebe!’ ‘Look, I must fly,’ she said, turning to Margaret with a charming smile. ‘It is angelic of you. You’ll find them in the garden and mind you don’t stand any nonsense from them,’ and she ran off.

Margaret was in time to see the party leaving for the local, consisting of several young men in uniform (presumably the husbands of the pretty young women) and the young women themselves, looking weary at the end of a day spent in chasing their children, but cheerful and ready for the pleasures of the evening.