“Then I don’t like being teased—not like that, anyway,” said Miss Burton, still distinctly and with downcast eyes, and smoothing her skirt.
“Oh, he must have been funning,” said Miss Fielding again. “Anyway—you think it safe, then, to tell Betty that she can come?”
Why are you asking me, since you wouldn’t have mentioned it at all if you hadn’t made up your mind to let her come? thought Miss Burton, suddenly irritable. And why do you take it for granted that I agree with you about Kenneth? I’m sorry for Kenneth. He and I have been in the same boat.
These little gusts of irritation and malice occasionally swept over Miss Burton, and when they did Someone Else looked for a second out of her eyes; a witty and imperious Usurper who got her own way and was not afraid of people. Miss Fielding did not like this Usurper, whose mocking gaze she met when Miss Burton glanced up.
“If Kenneth is such a confirmed old bachelor as you are always saying he is, Connie, it won’t hurt him to be exposed to Betty’s charms,” Miss Burton said, drawling the long sentence without stumbling. “And personally I’ve always thought that she’ll never marry again. Dick was one of the nicest men I’ve ever known and I think she’ll stay faithful to his memory.”
“So morbid, I’ve always thought. After all, there is no death.”
No death, isn’t there? thought Miss Burton, studying her as she again pushed back the spray of honeysuckle. What a donkey you can be, and how you do need taking down that peg or two.
“Well, I should ask her if I were you, Connie,” she said in a final tone, and standing up, “I suppose you’ll discuss it first with Kenneth?”
“Oh, not necessarily,” interrupted Miss Fielding airily, swinging the letter in time with one large foot, “We might just spring it on him as a surprise. I think it would be rather a lark.”
Ass, thought Miss Burton, feeling crosser every minute, but she only said, “Well, I suppose you’ll have to decide how much you’re going to ask, won’t you, and you’ll have to talk to Kenneth about that? I think I shall go to bed; I’m very tired after last night.”
“Yes, do; I will too, an early night will do us both good. I would have her for nothing, of course, only the cost of living has gone up so appallingly and I expect she would feel more comfortable if she paid something, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes, however small,” said Miss Burton.
Kenneth Fielding and his two sisters, children of a solicitor owning an old-established firm in St. Alberics, had inherited in 1920 a comfortable fortune, left to them by three very wealthy old aunts. It was invested in sound undertakings in the western parts of the British Empire, and since the war, despite crushing income tax, the Fieldings had not found themselves noticeably less comfortable. Kenneth continued to attend the offices and nominally direct the firm that his grandfather had founded but as the years went on he tended more and more to lead the life of a retired soldier of independent means, and to leave the active management of Fielding, Fielding and Gaunt to Mr. Gaunt, who was capable and ambitious.
Betty, or Mrs. Richard Kenway Marten, was at this time living in two rooms in Chelsea. She had a post as secretary to a women’s club in Woburn Square that brought her in four pounds a week and her lunches and teas. She had also the pension paid to her on behalf of her husband, Captain R. K. Marten, D.S.O. (posthumously awarded), who had been killed at Landrecies in 1918.
“Two and a half guineas a week?” called Miss Fielding over her shoulder as she strode into the kitchen to find Pony, the cat, and put him out. “Would you like some lemon and barley? I shall. I wonder how much she will be getting from the Ministry of Applications?”
“No, thank you. Yes, I should think that would be all right. Connie, I’m going up to bed; my shoulder is rather painful. You won’t trouble to black out, will you? I don’t know, I’m sure, what do they usually pay?”
“Oh, no, it isn’t dark until nearly twelve.” Miss Fielding blew some biscuit crumbs out of her mouth and then sucked some of them in again; she was standing at the kitchen window eating, staring out at the darkening garden, and enjoying the perfume of the tobacco flowers. “How delicious not to have to put up those symbolic black cloths at nightfall! Not very much, I believe, but she has Dick’s pension.”
“So she has, of course. Good night.”
“Good night. I hope we shall get a quiet night.”
“Oh, so do I. Goodnight.”
“Good night.”
As Miss Burton was going slowly upstairs Miss Fielding, crossing the hall with Pony under her arm, called up to her, “It will be quite pleasant having Betty in the house, you know, she is good company although she is so frivolous.”
Probably because of it, thought Miss Burton, but did not think it necessary to make any answer except “N-n-n” as she went slowly up the stairs. A bad bad woman, but good good companee, was the line that had come irrelevantly into her head. That was what that girl, Alicia Arkwright, who came to lunch had said, the one who had been mixed up in a divorce case and been away for months and had now come back to live at the house down the road. She had grinned as she said it. She had beautiful blue eyes, cool and tired, and a long pale face like—like a handsome young horse. (Miss Burton was pleased with this; it sounded modern. She would put it in her Journal with the bit about Love having a way, etc.)
Her rooms were on the top floor of the large pleasant house. She had had them converted into a self-contained flat as soon as she had made up her mind to spend the rest of her life with her cousins. She had her piano, and photographs of her friends, shelves of minor poetry and her favourite books, The Road Mender, The Wood Carver of ’Lympus, The Little Flowers of Saint Francis, and all the novels of “Ouida” and “Saki,” and a late Victorian writer named Mrs. Hungerford in whose stories of love in English and Irish society she took great pleasure.
She sat down by the open window, and gazed out into the evening.
The moon was rising above the gentle hills. The western sky was still light, and the elm trees were dark against the large pale field of oats, cultivated this summer for the first time, that Miss Burton loved to look at. Before the Nazi War it had been possible to see the lights of St. Alberics, four miles away, sparkling through a dip in the fields, and in the daytime the tower of the Cathedral could be seen rising out of the ploughed land. Miss Burton liked to imagine it there throughout the centuries that the town of St. Alberics, which had begun as a settlement of Christian monks under the Romans, had stood on the hillside. That tower, rising out of the dark fields, was the first glimpse of the town that travellers coming down from the North would see; centurions on leave from Hadrian’s Wall, monks on pilgrimage, knights on their way to join their feudal lord, ordinary country people out marketing, cavaliers, and highwaymen, and the coaches of Dickens’s day, and the cyclists of the early nineteen-hundreds, and now the American and Canadian soldiers rattling down the road in their tanks—and it was always the same fields and tower. That thought fascinated Miss Burton, she never grew tired of playing with it, but she never mentioned it to Miss Fielding, who would have said something about Old Souls and New Souls, which always made Miss Burton think of a card game and irritated her very much.
The world won’t be nearly such an interesting place when Connie and her sort have persuaded us all to love each other and Richard Marten and his sort have tidied us all up, thought Miss Burton. Thank God I shall be dead by then.
She got up and went to the piano.
The soft summer dusk was too far advanced for her to make out the notes on the single sheet of music that stood there, but she began to play.
The words were passionate and tragic—
My Love had a silver ring
Wrought by a jeweller in an Eastern land
A rare and a lovely thing,
Fit for an Empress’s white hand!
and the music followed them with a simple throbbing air in a minor key. Miss Burton had evidently been trained by good masters for she played accurat
ely and with feeling and her voice, though worn, was true and without mannerisms. The song rose to a thrilling climax—
Wasted like water in the desert sand!
then ended on some soft pseudo-Eastern chords, and Miss Burton dropped her hands onto her lap and sat for a moment thinking.
How strange it is—Reggie has been dead for twenty years and I suppose I’m the only person left alive who ever thinks of him now, and here’s the song I wrote because of him, all those years ago, still alive and still being played on the wireless and in the cinemas—and I suppose it will go on after I’m dead too. In a way it’s like our child.
My Love had a Silver Ring, Words and Music by Frances Burton, had been a firm favourite with the larger and simpler audiences all over Great Britain since 1908. The coming of the wireless had only widened its appeal; a day seldom passed without Until, I Hear you Calling Me, or My Love had a Silver Ring being heard over the air; and unlike many popular favourites composed at the end of the last century, the song had earned a small fortune for its writer and she was now living comfortably in the house of her cousins on the remains of it.
Except Reginald Farquharson and My Love had a Silver Ring, nothing had ever happened to Miss Burton. After the publication of My Love had a Silver Ring had made her famous in a small way, she had lived with her mother in Kensington, among a little circle of admiring and artistic friends and occasionally contributing some verses or a story to The Lady, The Queen and The Girl’s Own Paper, or going on a sketching holiday with a woman friend to Norway or Greece. No one else had ever proposed to her, because, in those years immediately after her jilting, it was The Usurper who was most often in command of her temper and tongue, and The Usurper did not have the luck to meet a man who was not afraid of her. And then the Other War came and after that the century began to race like a mad tank and Miss Burton had given up trying to keep pace with it. She drifted into a backwater and stayed there, a little affected or bitter sometimes, but usually moderately content with what she did and was. Sometimes she thought about her lost lover, but she only remembered her memories; they were no longer real.
She was not completely ineffectual and pathetic, and occasionally that Usurper who was both witty and self-willed looked out of her large fading brown eyes; and she had written My Love had a Silver Ring. If a person has created a song that has given pleasure for forty years to millions of people, she must have a little of what it takes, and it was this, doubtless, that sustained Miss Burton throughout her nights and days.
What a shame it is about Ken, she suddenly thought, as she got up from the piano with a yawn. Of course he’ll never marry now, he’s too comfortable and set in his habits, but Connie is too bad, keeping all the attractive women away from him and getting so worried if he ever looks at one. And Joan is as bad (Joan was the other Fielding sister, who lived in London). Poor Ken, why shouldn’t he enjoy a little flutter? I’m glad I advised her to let Betty come.
The Usurper looked out of her eyes for a moment in the summer dusk. And it may be rather amusing, thought The Usurper.
Downstairs in the blacked-out bathroom Miss Fielding was cleaning her excellent teeth and thinking: And I must get a refugee, too.
CHAPTER 4
ABOUT A FORTNIGHT later Alicia Arkwright was in the train returning to Treme after a day in London, and she was rather tight.
It was not easy to attain to this condition in London during the latter period of the Nazi War, when the West End is best described as Americans, Americans, everywhere, nor any drop to drink, but Alicia knew the barman who was waiting to be called up for the Navy at a little place at the back of the Green Park Hotel which still had two storeys standing, and she had run into some fighter-boys she knew who were on leave and between them they had managed to find something and had enjoyed a cheerful time, only Alicia had had to come away early because she was on a night shift.
Her head sang in time to the wheels of the train, and the hard core of anger and pain that was always inside her had dissolved, and although she knew it would come back again, it was grand to be without it for the time being. Before that affair with H. she used to get a kick out of things, and now she didn’t any more. So what?
Outside the window, rows of little houses and gardens went past, with occasionally one of those little ruins that may be seen all up and down the railway lines of Greater London since the autumn of 1940, and in the blue sky the balloon barrage was anchored low above the roofs and gleamed pure silver in the evening light. The train was just leaving the suburbs and the barrage and entering the unprotected country. Shame, thought Alicia, who, like many other people, was rather fond of the balloons; and she looked benevolently at other occupants of the carriage without seeing them.
In the Royal Ordnance factory where she worked, she wore on the arm of her overalls a device of two crossed shells above the motto Front Line Service, and she felt that this, the badge designed by Lord Beaverbrook for the workers who came into the munition factories immediately after Dunkirk, gave her certain privileges about clothes coupons. So this evening she had on a black suit from Simpson’s with a black jersey turban adorned by a yellow jewel and people on the platform in London had been staring at her shoes and stockings, and none of those clothes, with the exception of the jewel, were older than three weeks. In the factory she was one of the very few women who always wore the regulation cap, and she looked like one of those photographs printed by Vogue to show the rest of us the Smart Munition Worker, in clothes as stylized and correct and becoming as those for hunting.
There was someone else in the carriage wearing a black suit, only it was not a suit when seen beside what Alicia was wearing; it was a coat and skirt, and there is a difference. It was also shiny, and underneath the coat its wearer had on a white silk blouse fastened by a little gilt badge with some device upon it. The girl had no hat and the last rays of sunlight came through the window and made her milky-gold hair sparkle.
Alicia looked benevolently at them all; two men reading their evening papers, three prosperous women who had been shopping in town, the thin mother with three stout dirty little girls climbing over her and banging their gasmasks against each other, and the baby in her arms who was trying to push its fingers into the plaited coronet of hair wound round the head of the girl in the corner.
“Don’t, Sylvia,” muttered the mother tiredly in a minute. “Leave the young lady’s hair alone, can’t you?”
The baby strained away out of her arms and earnestly offered the girl in the corner a wet biscuit.
“Do give over, Sylvia,” the mother murmured once more, glancing at the girl with a faint smile.
It was at once politely returned, and the girl inclined her head towards the child so that her hair was within its reach. Soon the tiny fingers were moving experimentally about in her plaits, while the other three girls looked on, giggling.
Alicia watched for a little while; then turned away, bored, and looked out of the window. She did not find brats amusing, though she supposed it was different if they were your own. Presently, through the haze of alcohol that still pleasantly dulled her senses, she heard the mother say:
“Don’t let her worry you.”
“I am varry glad to please her,” answered a fresh young voice with a foreign accent that all the English people in the carriage found attractive, though not so attractive as they would have some years ago. “The other three children are girls too also?” it went on, with a respectful inflection.
“Oh yes, worse luck,” said the mother with a rueful smile. She seemed undecided what to call the girl and finally, with the new simplicity that has come to England since the war, went on talking without using any mode of address at all.
“I’d have liked a boy and so would Dad (he’s in Egypt, been there since this lot started, almost), but you don’t always get what you want in this world, do you?”
“Some do get it,” said the girl cheerfully. Little Sunshine, thought Alicia.
“You aren’t
English, are you?” the mother went on.
The girl shook her head and Alicia slowly turned to look at her again.
“Polish? There’s a lot of Poles up in Scotland where my sister is. Lovely dancers they are, she says.”
“My country is Bairamia,” said the girl, smilingly but with pride.
The woman stared, uncomprehending and not wanting to seem “ignorant” (which to her meant rude, not ill-informed).
“There’s such a lot of these places since the war,” she said at last in excuse.
“You will know if I say—Bairamia—Apricots!” said the girl, and laughed.
At once the woman laughed too and so did the three children, glad of the excuse.
“Of course! Eightpence a tin they used to be in the old days. Apricot Valley Brand—that was it.”
“Wish we could have some now, don’t you, Shirley?” said one of the little girls.
“I wish we could have a quarter of the fruit we used to,” said the mother reminiscently, letting the baby jump with bare brown feet on her faded dress, “Pineapple—quite turned up my nose at pineapple, I used to, anything less than peaches I wouldn’t touch. Sickening to think of those Nazis eating your apricots. I suppose it’s them, as usual?”
“It is the Italians.”
“Oh—the Eyeties! They’re a joke, my Dad says. Four-pence a packet they are out where he is. Are all your people still out there, then?”
The girl nodded.
“Must be awful for you. Do you hear from them regular?”
“Since more than a year I am not hearing.”
“Won’t the Nazis let them write?”
“The letters did come through Greece. Now the Germans have Greece so I am not hearing.”
“Fancy. Must be awful. Are you one of a big family?”
Can’t you pipe down, thought Alicia irritably; you must see she doesn’t want to talk about it. How these people do stew in horrors; and she leant forward and offered the mother her cigarette-case.
“Oh—that’s ever so kind of you, but sure you can spare it?”