“A trolley?” ejaculated Nadine. “A trolley, at Damerosehay?”
“Yes, dear,” said Grandmother. “While dear Ellen lived I always had afternoon tea brought in properly on the tea tray, which was then placed upon my tea table. But now that dear Ellen is dead Margaret brings in tea, and she’s gone and got this trolley thing. She picked it up cheap at a sale without telling me; she—but there, dear, what’s the use, one can’t hear oneself think.”
The rattle and bang of the trolley approaching over the uneven stone flags of the hall were indeed shattering sounds, even through the closed door. Lucilla shivered dramatically, Nadine tensed a little, and Hilary moved to open the door with a twinkle of amusement in his eye.
Margaret entered, deprecating, shy, aware that Lucilla hated the trolley (though she never said so), aware that Nadine thought she really ought to try to do something about her clothes and hair (though she’d never said so), unhappy because of their disapproval, yet obstinately determined to stick both to the trolley and to the style of dress and hairdress to which she was accustomed. A gentle yielding to the wishes of others was of the essence of Margaret, yet, very rarely, she would launch out on her own in the most startling way, as witness that sudden departure one afternoon (without telling Lucilla) to a sale, the having her fancy caught by a particularly hideous trolley, the standing up all by her shy self and bidding for it, the wheeling of it home through the lanes (she who so dreaded to be thought absurd), and the subsequent using of it in the teeth of Lucilla’s unspoken disapproval. Lucilla could not understand these outbreaks of Margaret’s . . . nor could Margaret. . . . Hilary could. She had been a slave all her life long to Damerosehay and the Eliots, but in these little startling outbreaks, and in the glory of the garden that she had made, she went free. He set the door wide and smiled reassuringly at his sister. Lucilla was the great love of his life, but after her came Margaret. For besides his reverence for her selflessness, with its complete freedom from the least taint of bitterness or self-pity, his delight in her sudden flashes of independence, he had for her a deep fellow feeling. She, as well as he, was one of the homely Eliots.
Margaret was now sixty-three, though she did not look more than fifty. Like all keen gardeners she had become weatherbeaten at an early age, so that when she got to fifty she could not well become more so than she was, and it merely remained for the coming years to keep her young with the joy in flowers and sunshine and good earth that grew increasingly day by day. She was tall, but bony and awkward in her movements, not soft and graceful like Lucilla. Her thick, rough gray hair was cut short in a desperate effort to keep it tidy, yet it never was tidy. She wore heather-colored tweeds, faded by the sun and pulled out of shape by wind and rain, and a jumper that had been badly knitted by herself in a shade of bright yellow that was all wrong with her tweeds. She liked knitting, though she did not do it very well, and she loved bright colors, though she was without discrimination in their use. Her woolen stockings were much darned and her thick shoes made almost as much noise as the trolley.
“Hilary,” said Lucilla, “help Margaret lift that trolley over the rugs. It has such silly little wheels, and they catch, and then the milk spills on the tray cloth, and if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a stained tray cloth.”
She spoke with deep apprehension, as though yet another international disaster threatened, and Margaret’s face, bent in agonized concentration over the trolley, might have been that of a surgeon absorbed in a task of life or death. Hilary’s eyes twinkled again; he lifted his end of the trolley too high and sent a cascade of little buns falling to the floor. Lucilla opened her mouth to tell Hilary that he hadn’t been paying attention to what he was doing, and to remind Margaret of how many, many times in the past she had told her not to pile the plates too full, remembered just in time that her children were grown-up now, both in their sixties, and said nothing. . . . It was strange, very strange, to be the mother of old people . . . because she herself felt so much younger than they were.
“How are you, Margaret?” asked Nadine.
Margaret started and flushed scarlet, because she had been so absorbed in the trolley that she had entirely forgotten to greet Nadine.
“I’m quite well, dear,” she said in her soft gentle voice, a very young voice, oddly touching in contrast with her elderly appearance. “And you? You look tired out. And the children? Is London agreeing with them?”
“Perfectly,” said Nadine.
“George, when he wrote, said something about Ben having a cough,” put in Lucilla softly.
“Just the remains of a cold. The children are splendid,” said Nadine decisively, giving Margaret a dutiful kiss. “And if I look tired it’s not London but the splendidness of the children.”
Margaret shrank a little from the kiss, not from lack of affection, but because she hesitated to touch the exquisite flower-like face of her sister-in-law with her own weather-beaten cheek. She adored Nadine’s beauty, even as she adored the beauty of the flowers in the garden. Nadine, misunderstanding the shrinking, was saddened by it. Though she regarded Margaret as an ancient museum piece beyond her comprehension, she yet reverenced her. She would have been glad if they could have achieved real friendship. But she knew they never would.
Margaret poured the tea into Lucilla’s delicate Worcester cups, slopping it into the saucers a little as she did so, Hilary retrieved the buns from the floor, and they settled down to their tea with the dogs at their feet. Lucilla nibbled at one of Margaret’s rather thick pieces of bread and butter, surreptitiously gave her bun bit by bit to the Bastard because somehow she could never fancy food that had been on the floor, and tried not to remember how dainty the teas had been when dear Ellen was alive. Margaret worked so very hard, with only intermittent assistance from Big Village to help her, and was so desperately anxious to please always that it did not seem loyal to her to hanker after the old days. . . . But it was hard not to when one’s tea was slopped over into the saucer. . . .
Wrenching her mind away from the longing for Ellen that was always with her, like a persistent toothache, she tried to pay attention to what the others were saying. But they were talking about the deplorable state of the world, about that terrible bomb, about famine and inflation and chaos and death, and her mind shied away from their talk like a terrified horse. She couldn’t do anything about it now, at eighty-six, except pray, and in between her prayers, now that the war was over, she wished they would let her forget sometimes that things had not turned out as well as one had hoped, and enjoy the things that were left: the spring sunshine slanting into the quiet room and lighting up the flowers, the lovely ripe corn color of Pooh-Bah’s coat, the hot tea, the log fire burning on the hearth, whispering and fragrant, the feel of the dear old Bastard’s chin resting on her shoe, the sound of the sea coming in the pauses of their talk.
“Don’t!” she cried to them suddenly. “It’s this that matters—this!”
“What, Mother?” asked Margaret, who never could follow the working of another’s mind unless it was explained to her very carefully and at great length.
“Beauty is truth?” asked Hilary, coming a little nearer.
But Nadine, without words, stretched out a hand and gently touched her mother-in-law’s. They had both been married and borne children. Lucilla knew always, and Nadine knew in her more domesticated moments, that it was homemaking that mattered. Every home was a brick in the great wall of decent living that men erected over and over again as a bulwark against the perpetual flooding in of evil. But women made the bricks, and the durableness of each civilization depended upon their quality, and it was no good weakening oneself for the brick-making by thinking too much about the flood.
“You’d scarcely recognize the twins now, they’ve grown so much,” said Nadine, watching for the little light of happiness that always sprang into Lucilla’s eyes at any mention of her beloved grandchildren.
The flame leaped, then died. “It’s been such a long time since I’ve seen them! Or Ben or Tommy or Caroline, either,” mourned Lucilla.
“Why, Grandmother, George brought the older children to stay with you three months ago!” said Nadine.
“Four months,” corrected Lucilla. “And that’s a very long time, and he did not bring the twins.”
“Only because they had chicken pox, Grandmother.”
“George and the children ought to have come down with you,” said Margaret.
“I thought it would be best to interview Jill by myself,” said Nadine. “Also, I wanted a rest from George and the children.”
Margaret, who had lost the lover of her girlhood in the First World War and had idealized marriage ever since, looked shocked, but Lucilla agreed placidly. “One does.”
“Who’s looking after George and the children?” asked Hilary.
“My cousin Pamela Lyson is coping. She loves it for a few days, but not longer. She’s elderly. She goes to pieces on the evening of the fourth day, but I’ll be back then.”
“I’m so glad you’re going to have Jill, dear,” said Lucilla.
“But I don’t know that I am, Grandmother. I’m only going to interview her.”
“As soon as I saw your advertisement in the paper, dear—and it was lucky that I did see it, for you never told me that you were inserting it—I went over at once to see Jill. Hilary drove me over. I remembered her as a sweet girl, but I was afraid the war might have changed her. But it hasn’t. She’s just the same, and exactly the influence the children need. I showed her your advertisement and told her to answer it, and you should have seen her joy at the idea of being with her dear Ben and Tommy and Caroline again. The only difficulty, dear, is that being a country-bred girl I do not know whether she will want to take a permanent post in Town. She was in London for a time during the war and it doesn’t agree with her, she says, and I’m sure I don’t wonder. So noisy and dirty now. Not like it used to be in the old days. But I told her I did not think it would be long now before you were all settled in the country.”
Nadine flushed a faint and lovely pink—she had the rare gift of looking really beautiful when angry—and gripped her hands tightly together on her lap. Her feeling for her mother-in-law swung always between reverence and exasperation, according as the selflessness of Grandmother’s autocracy or the autocracy of her selflessness was uppermost.
“But Grandmother,” she said slowly and evenly, “our living in the country is quite out of the question. George has this job at the War Office.”
“I know you dislike the country, dear,” said Lucilla, “but I think you should consider George and the children. Town life is always bad for children, and after all he has been through in the war George would have better health in good air. He could resign his War Office appointment.”
“No, Grandmother. He couldn’t afford to. We have the children’s education to think about.”
“My son George, dear, though a stupid man in many ways, has always had a clear head in practical matters. He would find ways of augmenting your income in the country. And you know, dear, you would have quite a nice little income to augment. You would have George’s pension, and your legacy from your aunt Anne. You did not tell me that your aunt had died, dear—and after all, why should you, for she was unknown to me—but I saw the announcement in the Times, and I saw her will, too, in the Times.”
“There’s not as much as you’d think, Grandmother. Not with income tax.”
“Income tax,” murmured Lucilla meditatively, “comes in very useful. When people could quite well afford to do something they ought to do but don’t want to do they always plead income tax. The war flour is useful, too. When cakes don’t rise there’s a scapegoat handy.” And she secretly gave the Bastard the last bit of her bun.
No one’s feelings were hurt. There were times nowadays when Lucilla uttered aloud the sentiments that she thought she was only thinking. This was obviously one of those times.
“Yes, dear,” she said more loudly, with intention to be heard, “I’ve arranged about your interview with Jill. She’s coming to see you this evening.”
“But Grandmother,” pleaded Nadine, “I had thought I would go and see her. When one is interviewing anyone as important as a nanny it is rather nice to see the sort of home they have.”
“It isn’t her home, dear; it’s her aunt’s.”
“I know, but she’s been there for some time and it’s her present setting. I should know much more about her seeing her there.”
“It’s too far for you to walk, dear, and the village taxi has broken down.”
“I know, Grandmother, but I thought Hilary would be so kind as to take me.”
“Certainly,” said Hilary cheerfully.
“No, dear,” said Lucilla firmly. “We can’t take Hilary away from his parish duties and use him as a taxi two days running; it wouldn’t be right.” Suddenly she looked no longer firm, but pathetic and pleading. “I’ve arranged it all so nicely, dear. Jill is to come over with the Bread and go back with the Meat. Our tradesmen are always so kind and obliging. That’s one of the good things the war has done—made us all more friendly together. I’d arranged it all so nicely.”
Nadine yielded. “That’s all right, Grandmother,” she said gently. “I’ll see Jill here. It was sweet of you to arrange that for me.”
Lucilla’s lovely blue eyes were alight with love as she smiled upon her obedient daughter-in-law. That horrid tight feeling that came about her heart when people opposed her eased a little. It was a nasty feeling, and people would never oppose her if they knew how nasty it was.
“If we’ve finished I’ll clear,” said Margaret.
“I’ll help you wash up,” said Nadine, with that too-bright willingness of the guest who is weary of domesticity and hopes to goodness her noble offer will be refused.
“Don’t bother, dear,” said Margaret, making the answer that had now become codified in the Eliot family. “Not your first evening. Tomorrow you shall help me.”
“Hilary,” said Lucilla, “help Margaret lift the trolley over the rucks in the rugs that you made when you brought it in.”
“Yes, Mother,” said Hilary.
A bell rang.
“That’s Jill,” said Lucilla. “I have arranged, Nadine, that you shall see her in the dining room.”
“Yes, Grandmother,” said Nadine.
— 3 —
The Damerosehay dining room, in spite of its beautiful paneling, lacked the charm of the drawing room, and was detested by all the Eliots except Lucilla, Hilary, and Margaret. It was a chill yet stuffy room, and after one had eaten fish or onions in it one knew that one had for a very long time afterwards. It had been Ellen’s special pride, and because she had loved it so much Lucilla would not let it be altered in any way. It remained what Ellen had made it, a shrine of Victorian respectability. It had heavy mahogany furniture, heavy crimson curtains and carpet, heavy silver upon the sideboard. A massive portrait of Grandfather in his legal wig and robes hung over the mantelpiece and his heavy kindly face looked out with approval over the room that Ellen had created to his memory. Ellen had deeply respected Sir James Eliot, and it was largely owing to her that Lucilla, who had not loved him in the early days of their marriage, nor the children that she had borne him either, had become in the end a pattern wife and mother and had created that tradition of faithfulness in an accepted task, faithfulness at whatever cost, which was now the special tradition of the Eliots and Damerosehay.
Nadine knew the story of Lucilla’s youth and indeed it had been her story more than anything else that had reunited her to George. The influence of Ellen, maid and nanny to the Eliots for a lifetime, had been, and was, deep and strong even to the third generation, and it struck Nadine almost like a blow in the face, when she entered the detested dining room, to see Jill standin
g there almost like another Ellen, straight and stiff beneath the portrait of her father-in-law, looking an integral part of the room.
She felt suddenly caught. When, compelled by the Damerosehay tradition, she had broken with the man she loved and come back again to her unloved husband, it had been with a scarcely recognized inner reservation. While David, who loved her and whom she so desperately loved, was alive and free in the world, still loving and desiring her, the door was not shut. If it did not work with George, if it once more became utterly impossible, David was still there. She had never said this to herself in so many words, but the thought of that secret stair of escape was always with her. It was the rock to which she clung when it seemed as though her unhappiness would overwhelm her. And now, looking at Jill, it was as though the door to the stair, always ajar, began to close a little. For this was a woman without reservations. Jill made her afraid even as Hilary made her afraid. From Hilary’s challenge she could escape, because she saw so little of him, but from Jill’s she would not be able to escape. They would be together always, mother and nanny, even as Lucilla and Ellen had been together always, with Jill’s single-mindedness a perpetual danger to her own lack of it. She paused for a moment, not knowing what to say, at a loss for perhaps the first time in her self-possessed life. It was Jill who spoke first.
“Good afternoon, madam,” said Jill. Her voice was timid and soft, and at the sound of it Nadine suddenly lost that ridiculous feeling of panic and was herself again, a beautiful, well-dressed, self-possessed woman of the world interviewing a rather scared, dowdy little country woman who had applied to her for the post of nanny to her children. . . . Jill, after all, was not in the least like Ellen. It had been just a fancy of hers.
“Good afternoon, Jill,” said Nadine, shaking hands graciously. “It’s nice to see you again. Do sit down.”
“Thank you, madam,” whispered Jill, and perched herself stiff as a ramrod upon the extreme edge of one of the hard dining-room chairs. Nadine sat upon another and found that she also had to hold herself stiff as a ramrod. She had forgotten how uncomfortable they were. She was sure they had been chosen originally by Grandfather Eliot to teach deportment to the Eliot young. Sighing, and fitting her back as comfortably as she could against the panel of wood behind her, she resigned herself to looking like a seated pharaoh, back rigid, feet together, and studied Jill.