Music at Long Verney Read online

  “How do you do?” said Mr Finch. “Excuse me for being in this filthy state. I had to put out a fire extinguisher.”

  “Oh, have you actually found it?” Mrs Finch said. “Where was it, Henry? I hope the poor thing’s all right.”

  “I should say it was in the pink of condition, my dear,” Mr Finch replied. “Some obliging house mover had put it in my briefcase. The briefcase was on the top shelf of the hall closet. I began to pull it down, and as it wasn’t properly closed, a great many things began to drop out. The extinguisher just missed my head but fell on its own, and came promptly into action. I think I have killed some of the roses – I had to aim the beastly stuff somewhere – but your extinguisher is none the worse, I believe. I must go and wash. Do sit down, Mr Weatherby. It’s all over now.”

  “Henry!” Mrs Finch called after him as he left the room. “Was the corkscrew – Oh, well, he will tell me later. Now, if I could find my list, I could scratch off the extinguisher and the briefcase in one blow. It’s a comfort to find that extinguishers work so efficiently, isn’t it? Though for the moment I suppose this one has nothing left to work with. Do you often move from one house to another, Mr Weatherby? It’s a very strange experience, but I think if I fell into the way of it, I should enjoy it. It is so enlarging to the mind.”

  Having got to his feet, Mr Weatherby had remained there, and now said he really must be going. Mrs Finch, preceding him into the hall, uttered a glad cry. “Can that be Mr Harley’s hat? And look at this! Isn’t this odd?” She pointed to a framed and illuminated text, propped against the legs of a chair. The words of the text were “It is good for me that I have been in trouble.”

  “Unless Henry had it in college – he had some very queer things then, but of course he has changed a great deal since – I can’t account for it,” Mrs Finch said. “Perhaps it was in the house when we came, like the two rag dolls we found in the wine cellar, looking exactly like Sin and Death in Paradise Unbound. Is it your hat, Mr Weatherby? I do hope it’s none the worse for being extinguished. Goodbye. I am so sorry Cordelia was out. You must come again.”

  At a safe interval after the door had closed, Cordelia Finch appeared carrying a teapot. “I thought I’d make some fresh tea,” she said to her mother, “and I’ve got some more sandwiches. I thought you might need reviving. My gratitude no words can express, but perhaps a few deeds – What has Father been doing?”

  The new tea was just being poured out when Mr Finch came in, smelling of soap, and asked, “Is that freshly made tea or that fellow’s leavings?” Cordelia explained that the tea was freshly made. “Thank God!” Mr Finch said, and then, turning to his wife, he said, “Well, Elinor, what have you been doing all the afternoon?”

  “First, I rearranged the poetry shelves,” Mrs Finch said, “and then I had Cordelia’s Mr Weatherby. Cordelia, darling, when you met him, could he talk of anything but his aunt?”

  “I don’t think he mentioned his aunt.”

  “Oh, well, no doubt she’s died since. That would account for his depression,” Mrs Finch said. “She must have meant a great deal to him. It was impossible to get him to talk about anything else.”

  An Ageing Head

  “GOODBYE, AUNT GEORGIE. Ring me up if you feel the slightest need for me. And anyhow, promise to ring me up this evening, to say how you are.”

  “I promise.”

  “Or earlier, if you feel inclined to go to bed after tea. Really, it would be wiser to go to bed after tea. In fact, I’m sure you should. So ring me up at Mary’s – Barham 257 – if it’s between three and five. Barham 257. I’d better write it down.”

  “No, don’t bother. She’s in the book. And anyhow, I shan’t want to go to bed. I’m up now for good and all. Thanks to your nursing, my child.” How many more times must I thank you? thought Georgina. And will you never be gone? But the Devil tweaked her tongue and she said, “What will you be doing at Mary’s?”

  “It’s their Friends of the Cathedral evening, you know. So I go in the afternoon to help cut sandwiches.”

  “I hope you eat some. The labourer is worthy of his hire. Well, I mustn’t keep you. Have you got everything?”

  “Suitcase, Burberry, bronchitis kettle . . . yes, everything. Goodbye, and take care of yourself. Stay indoors.”

  “I’m coming to wave you goodbye.”

  “Oh no, you shouldn’t. There was such a heavy dew last night, you’ll get your feet wet. You are so reckless, I really don’t like leaving you alone. Sometimes I wish you’d give up Box Cottage and move to Barham, where I could keep an eye on you. I heard of such a delightful flat in Nelson Place, only a stone’s throw from the Close. I suppose you wouldn’t –”

  Georgina shook her head.

  “Well, please take care of yourself. Don’t go and have a relapse.” Antonia got into her car, started it. Leaning from the window she cried, “Remember hot milk!”

  The car vanished round the bend of the lane. With a luxuriating sigh of relief Georgina turned back to her solitude. A breeze shook down a fan of chestnut leaves. The air was full of morning mist and autumnal sun. An unsupervised day extended before her, full of unsupervised activities. There was the kitchen, to be released from Antonia’s rearrangements. There was the extra milk to be counter-ordered. There was the lawnmower to be oiled. There was – but she would begin by throwing away that soup.

  She began instead by walking round the garden. Though she had only been in bed for a week, at least a month’s work seemed to have gathered in the time. Antonia, filling every hour with trays, with improvements, with stratagems for prolonging the lives of pillowcases and using up stale bread, hadn’t done a hand’s turn in the garden – and nature, in a last fling of fertility, had been doing a great deal. Now it seemed twice its real size and in process of becoming someone else’s garden. Here, however, tilted against the wall to catch the maximum of sun, was the tortoise. She picked him up and delicately scratched his neck. He began to swim dreamily. “I ought to weigh you. If I were Gilbert White, I would certainly weigh you,” she said, and put him down again. Her legs felt weak, her remark to the tortoise rang in her head with the unreal loudness of a voice raised in an empty room; but like the tortoise she swam dreamily in satisfaction. She was well again, and alone again, and the sun warmed her skin and presently would warm her vitals.

  Something fell with a plop. An apple, of course. She had forgotten the apples. They, too, would have to be dealt with – picked, sorted, stored; even if she only gave them away to the village children, they would have to be picked. Why had she not drawn Antonia’s attention to the apples? Apples would have appealed to her; she could have made apple jelly and sold it for much to the poor. Withdrawing her attention from the apples, Georgina fetched her hand fork and settled down to a happy delirium of weeding. Weeding in September is probably a great waste of time, but it stimulates projects for another year. These blocks of snowdrop bulbs she unearthed, for instance, all needing to be broken up and replanted – why not move them to among the hellebores, where they would fill the interval of time between niger and corsicus? The double lavender primroses, now summering near the water butt, could replace them, unless . . . But one always lays one’s plans for spring and early summer, and leaves the months after July to be sprawled over by annuals already past their best; really, what was needed here was a complete reformation, bold strokes with hollyhocks . . . Or what about some very dark dahlias and that swarthy, smoky fennel?

  When she got up, the weight of the basket with the snowdrop bulbs in it made her stagger. The warmth of the sun had no strength left; she was cold with fatigue as though she had been sluiced with icy water. Somehow she dragged herself as far as the hellebores; somehow she bundled the snowdrops into the ground. The soil was in perfect condition, warmed with summer, moist with those dews Antonia had talked about. Perhaps this was the last perfect gardening day of the year – and here she was, so weakened with Antonia’s invalid cookery that she had not the strength to use it. Cur
sing and defeated, she went indoors. There in the kitchen was Antonia’s soup, left ready in a saucepan – ready to be thrown away. She poured it into a bowl and drank it off cold, too tired to get a spoon, too tired even to sit down. Languishing and famishing, she roamed into the larder to see if she could find any more of Antonia’s leavings. A card propped against a tray of covered dishes said, “For Your Lunch”. Steamed fish, cold in death, watercress, stewed plums, junket . . . She ate even the junket. There was also coffee in a thermos. Georgina was now sufficiently restored to pour this down the sink and make a new brew. Carrying it into the sitting room, she found another card, saying, “Do Lie Down After Lunch.” If it had not been for this, she might have done so.

  And it was still only one-fifteen.

  Three hours later, Georgina’s desolate rambles in search of some congenial occupation that didn’t make her back ache brought her face to face with her image in a looking glass. Staring at it, she presently saw that the object confronting her was on the brink of tears. She turned away with a toss of her head. Tea, forsooth! What she needed was red meat and male society; and as a visit to the butcher would not be enough, she would try Eustace Leigh. She had lifted the telephone receiver before she realised that Eustace wouldn’t be enough, either. He would twitter about Greece and tell amusing stories of people he knew, and she knew only by name. No, she would try old George, dear old familiar, solid, manly, chop-house George. He had no gallantry, and his car was a whirlwind of draughts. But he was faithful and admiring and in the past had often asked her to marry him. She would ring him up at his office and tell him how ill she had been, how depleted she felt, how badly she needed a little fun and kindness. Her hand was on the receiver when she paused, and thought again. No, that approach wouldn’t do. The days were gone when she could hurl herself on George’s faithful heart and be sure of its selfless attention. Rearranging her tactics, rearranging her face – since that is the surest way of rearranging one’s voice – she dialled his number and was put through by his clerk.

  “George, this is Georgina.”

  “Hullo, Georgina.”

  “George, I apologise for ringing you up when you’re certain to be busy adding on codicils – but I suddenly felt I must. I’ve been so worried about you. Are you all right?”

  “All right? As far as I know, I’m perfectly all right. Why shouldn’t I be, my dear?”

  “It’s so long since I’ve seen you. I began to think you might be ill. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Never better in my life. I had a bit of a cold last week, but –”

  “Exactly! I knew in my bones there was something wrong. What are you doing about it? Are you taking proper care of yourself? Have you seen a doctor?”

  “Good God, no! It was just an ordinary cold. It came, and it went.”

  “A cold in autumn is never just an ordinary cold. Are you sure it wasn’t influenza?”

  “Oh, no, I don’t for a moment think it was influenza. I only had a temperature for a day – and under a hundred.”

  “You had a temperature? What else did you have? Did you have a cough?”

  “Oh, a bit of a cough.” She heard him cough.

  “Then I know exactly what you’ve had. You’ve had this influenza. Because I’ve had it myself.”

  “I say, I’m so sorry. My poor Georgina! As a matter of fact, I thought you sounded rather husky. Did it go to your chest? And did you have that very odd feeling, rather as if you’d swallowed a large piece of cooking apple and it had stuck halfway down?”

  Identity of symptoms pointed to the conclusion that what they both needed was rational conversation and underdone steak.

  “But, I say, Georgina! Are you sure that you’re up to coming out?”

  “Oh, yes! Fresh air will do me good.”

  Whistling “Dalla sua pace”, Georgina went to turn on a bath. By the time George arrived she was a renovated Georgina, gay as a kitten with its first mouse.

  “Georgina, darling!”

  “George, my sweet!”

  They embraced with the ease of long habit. When she remembered to hold herself erect, she was the taller of the two. She was now.

  “Georgina, I must say, you’re marvellous. No-one would think you’d had influenza. By the way, did anyone look after you?”

  She laughed. “Antonia arrived with the family bronchitis kettle.”

  During the drive to Barham she told him of Antonia’s meatless ministrations and how the very starlings, after their first swoop, had turned away from the grated carrot she had thrown out of the window.

  “So what did you do with the next lot?”

  “I was brought so low – I ate it.”

  “My poor carnivore! Never mind, it’s all over now. I told Dino we’d begin with oysters.”

  It occurred to her that she had omitted to ask who had looked after George. However, it was now too late for this; it wouldn’t sound spontaneous. They would talk of other things than influenza.

  George, in fact, seemed a trifle obsessed with his, referred to it several times, and remarked that when one isn’t as young as one was these affairs were a bit of a jolt. But the dinner was admirable, and with the second glass of burgundy he settled down to his responsibilities as a host and began to reinforce the provision of red meat with that other thing she had known she needed – male society. They were both committed gossips, and as most of the people they gossiped about had been known to them for years, it called for a high standard of technique to find more to say and to say it more entertainingly. Exercising the give-and-take of practised duet players, they knew when to let the other shine forth, when to follow a lead, when to take it. Georgina had more wit, more ingenuity, and a wider range; there was no-one she couldn’t be amusing about. George’s professional honour impeded his universality, but when a death unlocked his silent throat the absurdities and atrocities he could relate and the bland cantabile of his relating was so far beyond anything she could do that she felt all the pleasures of modesty, as well as the pleasures of vanity, when after one of her bravura passages George, in a voice between a choke and a squeal, exclaimed, “My dear Georgina! My dear Georgina! I don’t believe a word of it.” But this was not the only nourishment, nor the most invigorating, that George’s male society afforded; the thing she essentially craved for and fed upon was the contrast between George’s mind and her own. Where she was brilliant and malicious, he was placidly savage. Where she went to work with a dancing, prancing stiletto, George would aim one accurate condemnation and chop a head off. Several heads fell that evening, some of them heads she esteemed or had a weakness for or would have saved up for a finer examination of the evidence; but seeing them roll, she thrilled with the realisation that George, in his stupid infallible way, was right. She was enjoying herself so much, and doing so well with her womanly stiletto, that it was a shock to be told that she was looking tired and should be taken home. “You mustn’t go and have a relapse.” The injunction had a familiar ring. Who else had . . . Of course, Antonia.

  “George, do you like hot milk?”

  “It’s one of my passions. Didn’t you know? Especially with skin on it.”

  “So do Tartars. I expect you’re a Tartar at heart. Well, when we’re back I’ll make you a brimming blue-and-white mug of hot milk – with a skin as tough as Pamela Hathaway’s.”

  There was not much conversation during the drive back. George was not a conversing driver. As they rounded the bend of the lane, they saw a car drawn up at Georgina’s gate. It was empty. As they walked up the path, they saw someone come from the porch and run towards them.

  “Aunt Georgie! Oh, thank God! What happened? Are you all right?”

  “George has been giving me dinner at Nicolino’s, and now he’s brought me back. George, you know Antonia, don’t you?”

  “I was so worried when you didn’t ring me up – because you’d promised you would, you know –”

  “It went clean out of my head. I must be growing quite s
enile.”

  “– and when there was no answer when I tried to ring you, I decided the only thing to do was to come. And then I found I couldn’t get in. And I had just decided I must break a window when I saw a car stop and heard you coming up the path. Oh, Aunt Georgie, I’m so thankful, so thankful!”

  “Well, now we’ll go in by the door. George has a horrible cough, he oughtn’t to be standing about.”

  “It’s Antonia who has been standing about,” remarked George. “She’s shivering. I’m going to light your fire.”

  The fire had been laid several days before. It was slow to kindle, appearing to partake in the general feeling of constraint.

  “One’s glad of a fire in the evening now,” said Antonia.

  “Yes, isn’t one?” replied George.

  They knelt before it side by side, Antonia tempting its appetite with twigs, George puffing with the bellows.

  “I think perhaps if we made a hole here with the poker . . .”

  “Good idea!”

  A Boy Scout, a Girl Guide – it was not the end to her evening that Georgina had intended. She went out to get glasses and bottles. Where on earth had Antonia put the vodka? – for on inspection the bottle she picked up proved to be rennet. From the sitting room came sounds of encouragement, of growing confidence, of disillusionment. Then silence. Then a roar. They were doing the newspaper trick, and would set fire to the chimney. “Remember my thatch,” she said, glancing in.

  George looked round. “It’s perfectly all right, Georgina. I know how to manage it.” At the same moment the newspaper burst into flame. George leaped up and trampled on it. Then came a smell of singeing; Antonia began to pat the top of her head. “Good Lord, have I set fire to your hair?” he exclaimed.

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” Antonia said. “Frizzy hair like mine catches fire so easily.”

  “I suppose it does.” George himself was bald, so there was even less reason why he should speak in the tone of one pondering a new light on the universe.