“Sometimes she does (it’s an old lady—or was, before she was taken ill a month ago) but most days we have to ride down to Burlham for them.”
She paused, obviously waiting for Alda to thank her, and go away; her manner was perfectly civil and equally perfectly designed to keep Alda at a distance.
“I see. That won’t always be convenient for us,” said Alda, who sometimes did not notice when people intended to keep her at a distance. “What a nuisance.”
“Yes, it is. Mr. Hoadley or one of the men has to go down there every day, never mind the weather or the work.” She did not add an offer to let one of them bring Alda’s letters.
“You are going to let us have our milk, aren’t you?” Alda went on, eager to get the details of their new life into working order.
“Yes.” Here Mrs. Hoadley’s eyes strayed to Meg.
She was sitting on the low brick wall supporting the wooden porch and kicking her boots and trousered legs against it, and such looks as she had were not improved by wet tails of hair hanging out of her pixie hood on either side of her fat pale cheeks. Her attitude and manner, which were detached to indifference, were not attractive unless the beholder happened to like children.
“Don’t kick holes in the wall, please, it’s bad enough now,” said Mrs. Hoadley with a cross smile.
Meg stopped kicking and gazed up at her with interest. Then (for she was not accustomed to a tone lacking in affection) she turned inquiring eyes upon her mother.
“Perhaps you’d better take the milk now, it’ll save one of us a journey later,” went on Mrs. Hoadley. “I won’t ask you in, it’s so wet and children make such a mess, don’t they? I’ll go and get it.”
She turned back into the house, leaving the door open, and with one impulse Alda and Meg peered into the hall to see what this cross lady’s house was like.
All was in noticeably good taste; grey-papered walls, an etching of a cathedral, a grandfather clock with J. F. Cole, Horsham painted upon his face in a wreath of flowers, and on the floor a grey drugget. How boring, thought Alda, whose taste certainly did run to the Christmas Supplement in Colours. I would have white paper all over red grapes and green leaves, a brick floor, apple-green paint——
“Here you are,” said Mrs. Hoadley, reappearing, and she handed her two open zinc cans filled with milk.
“Thank you, but I’m afraid I can’t take them now; I’ve got Meg to carry and I can’t manage both,” said Alda decisively, putting them down on the brick coping. “I’ll come back for them later.”
Mrs. Hoadley was plainly preparing to open her compressed lips with something hasty when a man came up the path, saying, “Letters from Ironborough, Molly,” at the same time putting a packet into her eager hand; and when she did speak all that came out was:
“Here is Mr. Hoadley; he may have some letters for you.”
“Yes, I have. We saw your lights last night and knew you must be in,” smiled Mr. Hoadley and handed Alda a bundle which included two from Germany. Her face lit up.
“Oh, thank you. How kind,” she said.
“Somebody has to go down anyway (there’s always a pile of forms for me to fill up by every post) so we may as well save you the journey. Is this your milk?”
Mrs. Hoadley, apparently losing interest in the proceedings, had hurried with her letters into the house.
“Yes. I was coming back for it later. I’ve got this to carry,” giving a little shake to Meg, who was now on her back, “and I can’t manage both.”
“I’ll take the milk for you, I’m going up that way,” and he picked up the cans. “Gone up to see Mr. Waite if anyone wants me, Molly; shan’t be long,” he called to his wife, who was standing by the window reading her letters. She nodded impatiently without looking up.
“Now you can say I’ve been watering the milk,” he remarked with his friendly smile, when they were walking through the rain, which was now slightly less heavy, towards the cottage. A hound-puppy whom Mr. Hoadley addressed as Ruffler had joined them and walked at his heels.
“It’s delicious creamy milk; we had some for tea yesterday didn’t we, Meg?”
“Meg hab milk?” said Meg questioningly; she had never taken her eyes from the farmer since he joined them, and by the way he looked at her, though he said nothing, Alda knew that he liked children. She thought that he had none of his own, or Mrs. would not have made that remark about children making a mess. She’s too right, thought Alda, they do; and if you don’t like them that’s your first thought about them; mess, and a noise.
“Was it you who kindly left some chopped wood for us?” she went on. “I was so pleased when I found it yesterday.”
“Well, I thought you might be glad of some, it was such a nasty raw day, you’d want to get a fire going. I had one of the Italians chop it and take it up,” he answered, a little awkwardly.
“You have two of them, haven’t you? Meg and I met them in the woods the other day and they told us they were working here.”
“‘Working’ isn’t quite the word. They eat all they can get and do as little as they dare.”
Alda nodded sympathetically. At Pagets she had heard that many of the prisoners were hard-working and expert in hedging, ditching and other country crafts, but she was far too expert herself at getting on well with men to intrude a controversial statement into a pleasant conversation.
In a moment Mr. Hoadley added grudgingly:
“As a matter of fact, Fabrio (that’s the red-headed one) is a first-rate carpenter but he’s bone lazy. They aren’t much use to me; I’ve often thought about applying for a Land Girl.”
Alda made some suitable reply, and then inquired if she also had to thank him for the books left upon the doorstep?
“No, that wasn’t me. I’ve no time for reading; never have cared for it much, either. That would be Mr. Waite, I expect. He lives round the back of you. He’s got some books.”
“Has he a farm, too?”
“A sort of a farm. It’s a chicken farm.”
“Oh yes; we can see the little houses from our back windows.”
“Yes. Two hundred fowls he’s got up there. Nasty, dirty, heartbreaking work it is, too,” ended Mr. Hoadley feelingly, and Alda now recalled seeing a distant form; a sexless, sack-draped, booted shape, moving slowly among the fowl houses and wire enclosures early that morning. Naturally, she had not connected it with In Touch with the Transcendent.
“This gate needs a drop of oil; I’ll see to that for you,” said Mr. Hoadley, marching up to the front door and setting down the cans in the porch, and Alda followed, thinking that life at Pine Cottage must certainly be pleasanter for the fact that this giant, whose burred Sussex “r”s were comforting as the scent of hay, was their neighbour.
The dog Ruffler, who had followed him, now came up to her and leant his fore-paws upon her skirt, gazing up into her face.
“You’re a very handsome, fascinating boy,” she said to him softly, caressing his ears, while Meg, who had been set down in the porch beside the milk, now transferred her gaze from the farmer to the dog. “Will he behave himself among all those chickens, Mr. Hoadley?”
“He’d better,” said Mr. Hoadley, giving Ruffler a severe look. “That’s why I take him up there with me, to teach him. [’m ‘walking’ him, you see, for Mr. Mead down at Rush House; he’s come up to stay with me for a bit and learn how to follow and fetch and do what he’s told. Training him, it is.”
He said “Good morning,” smiled at Meg (who gratified Alda by smiling broadly in return), touched his hat and went off into the rain followed by the dog. Alda went into the house to read her letters.
Ronald’s contained more about politics and economics than she really liked; having pursued the Liberal Cause through Greece, North Africa and Italy, on all types of Service stationery stamped with prohibitions in many different languages, Alda was still blithely indifferent to the Liberals (and the Conservatives and the Socialists and the Communists too) unless one of them hap
pened to be ill or hard up under her nose. Then she helped generously, ignoring the sufferer’s political views. Her husband, never ceasing to marvel at her lack of interest in theoretical politics, found her practical charities endearing.
However, there were loving sentences at the end of both letters, and some jokes about German cats for the children, and he was in a house which had a roof, and the work was “tremendously interesting,” so his letters were, from all points of view, satisfactory.
The next one was not satisfactory from any point of view except that of the writer.
It was from the successful and efficient being known to Jenny and Louise as Father’s-Only-Sister-Marion. She was thus distinguished from Mother’s Sisters (who were five in number and naturally known as Auntie Marjorie, Auntie Peggy, Auntie Gwen, Auntie Brenda and Auntie Betty), and was called Marion at her own request. There was some reason, which Alda had never precisely fathomed, why she preferred her own sons and Alda’s daughters to use her Christian name; it prevented complexes being set up or gave a sense of comradeship or something. Her letters were known among Alda’s unmarried sisters as Getting on the Blower or Beefing Again; the married ones with young families viewed her activities more indulgently, for they did not extend to themselves.
She was busily getting through her second husband; from her first she had parted by amiable mutual consent, and he had left her the custody of two clever little boys. By the second one she had had two more clever little boys and all four (the youngest was six) were doing outstandingly well at school.
Her chief interest in life was politics, and she had ambitions to play an active part in the political life of Ironborough, but she would also have liked a daughter to mould and influence.
The spectacle of Alda’s three girls—unconventionally dressed, scholastically backward, and wholly charming—moved her several times a year to sit down and dash off a letter full of suggestions to Ronald or Alda.
This time, she suggested (after listing the latest triumphs gained by her sons) that Jenny and Louise should be sent to a first-class boarding school with help from herself towards the fees, while Meg was farmed out at a progressive nursery school run by a friend of her own.
Alda could get a job to help provide the money for these schemes.
Alda folded up the letter with some irritation. She never attempted to argue with Marion, either verbally or on paper, and took refuge from her attacks in laughter, but it certainly was kind of her to offer to help with fees, and it gave her more right to be listened to.
For some time Alda herself had known that Ronald was becoming increasingly uneasy about the lack of regular schooling for Jenny and Louise, but circumstances and sheer lack of money had conspired to prevent the laying and carrying out of desirable plans. Alda’s main object, strongly felt rather than thought out, had been to keep the three children with her, among a few cherished possessions that should mean to them Home, and this she had succeeded in doing. She told herself that it had not been possible, until now, to do more. Attendance at a village school for three months here, or a class for six children in some vicarage schoolroom there, was all the education that Louise and Jenny had received since leaving Ironborough.
She herself was no believer in highly-educated women and she took pleasure in her children’s quaint, original ways. She feared that school might make little pattern-girls of them. Victorian women (her own family boasted a matriarch or so in every generation) had never been highly educated, and no one could accuse them of lacking character and energy!
As for Meg, she was quite progressive enough.
However, this time she had an answer for Marion. She could write that in January Louise and Jenny would begin attending the school attached to the nearby Convent—where the education is excellent, as it always is at convents.
No doubt Marion, who was a robust T.C.P. (or Twentieth Century Pagan) would deplore the religious atmosphere in which her nieces were to be steeped, but she must just deplore.
Then Alda turned to the last letter, which was written in a backward-sloping hand.
Darling Alda,
I expect you are settled in the new house by now. I am down at Worthing for a few days (br-r-r! in this weather!) to see Aunt Alice who has been ill again, and it would be lovely if you could meet me for tea at Horsham on my way home. Do write at once and fix an Olde Tea Shoppe or somewhere where we can meet. I have got a doll’s coatee for Jenny and a book for Louise and some sweets for Meggy. Kiss them all for me. It’s all off, I’m afraid. All news when we meet.
Loads of love
from
Jean.
“Who’s that from?” inquired Jenny, looking over her mother’s shoulder.
“Jean.” (The young Lucie-Brownes had so many true aunts that the courtesy “auntie” of an earlier generation was never applied to their mother’s friends.)
“What’s ‘all off’?” Jenny went on. “Isn’t she going to marry Mr. Potter?”
“Who said she was going to?” said Alda, putting the letter away.
“You did. I heard you. When we were at Lyle Villas.”
“And before that you said she was going to marry Captain Roberts.” Louise was nibbling the end of a paint-brush and staring at Alda with huge pensive eyes.
“Dear me!” exclaimed her mother sarcastically. “What was Mr. Parker called in the bosom of his family?”
“Nosey!” they cried together.
“No-sey!” crowed Meg, and rushed round the room shaking her head and screwing up her eyes and muttering, “Nosey—nosey—nosey—nosey—nosey!”
“No, but you did say she was going to. Truly, Mother.”
“Well, she isn’t now. Clear those things off the table, please, and then you can set the lunch for me.”
“Why doesn’t she marry someone, Mother?” asked Louise, obediently beginning to pack up her paint-box.
“She hasn’t found anyone she likes, I expect. Hurry up, now.”
5
“AND THEN NOT another word for three weeks! Not even a tinkle to ask if my cold was better! I didn’t know quite what to do——”
“Oh Jean, you didn’t telephone him?”
“Of course not, darling. I remembered your advice and was firm with myself. But I did just send him a book by Peter Cheyney.”
“Good heavens! Sent it to him as a present?”
“Of course not; only lent it to him. He’d been dying to read it and couldn’t get it anywhere. I just put in a casual, friendly little note with it. And then, believe it or not, another long silence! And still I didn’t ring him up. Wasn’t I good?”
“You did all the right things—or nearly all,” admitted Alda.
“Oh yes, I did all the right things,” said Jean Hardcastle, without irony. “At last, on October the seventeenth, the book came back with a letter. He apologised for not having given me a tinkle before, but his firm had put him on another back-room job (it all came out in the papers the other day, Operation Achilles it was called, I expect you saw it) and he’d been fearfully busy. He said we must meet again soon, and signed himself Yours ever Oliver Potter. Now, darling, what do you make of that?”
She paused and hastily ate some cake, keeping her eyes fixed pleadingly upon her friend’s face.
A smart hat sat surprisingly upon her innocent brow but it made no difference: everything recommended by the experts in the women’s magazines to make a woman noticeable and desirable had been done to her, but still it made no difference. The exotic perfume, the careful grooming, the paint, the hair gilded and dressed like that of a page boy in the fifteenth century—all these had been imposed upon a personality ordinary and gentle as a green leaf, and all without leading to that result for which she had longed since she was seventeen: marriage. She was now thirty-two years old, and she had never even been engaged.
“So what do you think I ought to do now?” she went on, not waiting for the answer to her first question but directing upon Alda a look of utter confidence and tr
ust.
“You can’t do a thing,” retorted Alda firmly. “He’s let you see very plainly that he doesn’t mean business and you’ll just have to write it off.”
“Oh, do you really think so, darling? He was so sweet in the summer. I don’t see how anyone can be so sweet, and then a few months later be quite different.”
You ought to see it by now, if anyone ever did, thought Alda, looking at her with mingled affection and impatience.
“Well, people—men—can,” she said. “But I think he behaved very badly, I must say. (More tea?) Did he kiss
you?”
“(Yes, please.) Once or twice. Well—rather a lot, in fact, darling. But of course,” hastily, “I didn’t think that meant anything. I’m not quite a fool.”
“Jean, are you absolutely sure you didn’t let him see you cared about him?”
“Oh, I think so, Alda. Yes, I’m fairly sure about that. I did try hard not to. And anyway——”
She paused, and took a cigarette from a handsome case and lit it from a gold lighter. Alda, who did not smoke, watched her slim hands, unroughened by housework, manipulating the small luxurious objects while four tinkling, surprisingly unfashionable silver bracelets slid about on her wrist. Alda’s own hands were coarsened by housework and cooking in spite of her casual attempts to protect them, but during the war Jean had worked as secretary to her mother, an energetic and vital charmeuse who had run a hostel for Allied soldiers. The work had been exacting, but not rough, and Jean’s looks, such as they were, had not suffered.
“‘And anyway’ what?”
“ Oh—I don’t know.” Jean blew out smoke and stared down at the table while she played with a knife. She had suddenly realised how many of these sessions she had had with Alda, and the realisation had given her a little shock. They had sometimes joked about her eagerness to confide and Alda’s readiness in advising, but never before to-day had she fully taken in the fact that this same conversation (with Captain Ottley or the Farebrother boy or Michael Powers in place of Mr. Oliver Potter) had been going on for fifteen years. She had been momentarily silenced by wondering whether it would go on for another fifteen. That, possibility was enough to silence any woman.