B007TB5SP0 EBOK (16 page)

‘Since you’ve climbed so far,’ Lady Georgia said, ‘I shall repeat to you a somewhat saturnine little song of Mrs Cresswell.’

And opening her fan, she said:

‘I am disgusted with Love.

I find it exceedingly disappointing,

Mine is a nature that cries for more ethereal things,

Banal passions fail to stir me.

I am disgusted with Love.’

‘How heavenly she is!’

‘Such an amusing rhythm—’

‘I do so enjoy the by-paths,’ Mrs Shamefoot said, ‘of poetry. Isn’t there any more?’

‘No. I believe that’s all.’

‘Of course her words condemn her.’

‘But, still, that she should have arrived at a state of repugnance, possibly, is something.’

‘Isn’t it unkind,’ Lady Castleyard interrupted, advancing towards them, ‘to recite up here all alone?’

‘Dearest Dirce, how silently you came!—’

‘Like a cook we had on the Nile,’ Lady Georgia observed, ‘who startled me once more than I can ever say by breaking suddenly out of the moon-mist so noiselessly that he might have been treading on a cloud.’

‘Well, won’t you come down? A stage, and nobody on it is shockingly dull.’

‘This evening, I really don’t feel equal to Euripides,’ Lady Georgia murmured, ‘although I might manage the
Hound
.’

‘
The Hound of Heaven
? My dear, what could be more divine?’

Mrs Shamefoot looked away.

Star beyond star, the sky was covered. The clouds, she observed, too, appeared to be preparing for an Assumption.

When Aurelia left Lady Anne she set a straw hat harmlessly upon her head, powdered her neck at a tarnished mirror with crystal nails, selected a violet parasol, profoundly flounced, slipped a small volume of Yogi Philosophy into her wallet, took up, put down, and finally took up the cornflour pudding, gave a tearful final glance at her reflection, put out her tongue for no remarkable reason, and walked out into the street.

Oh, these little expeditions through the town …!

Hypolita habitually got over them by horse when, in a bewildering amazon, she would swoop away like a valkyrie late for a sabbat.

‘One can only hope that heaven will wash,’ Aurelia murmured meekly, as she prepared to trudge. Which optimism, notwithstanding the perfect stillness of the day, fluttered her aside like a leaf.

It was disgraceful the way her linen came home – torn.

‘Torn, torn, torn,’ she breathed, twirling her sunshade with short, sharp twirls that implied the click of the revolver.

But to reach the laundry she was obliged to pass the Asz – that river spoken of, by vulgar persons, often, as
the Ass
.

Between solemn stone embankments and an array of bridges spaced out with effigies of fluminal deities, a sadly spent river coiled reluctant through the town. Sensitive townsfolk felt intensely this absence of water, which, in many minds, amounted almost to a disgrace. Before the Cathedral, just where, artistically, it was needed most, there was scarcely a trickle.

As a rule Aurelia was too completely preoccupied with her own sensations to observe particularly her whereabouts, but,
instinctively, as her foot touched the bridge, she would assume the tiresome, supercilious smile of a visitor.

This morning, however, she paused to lean an arm upon the parapet to rest her pudding.

Has not Mrs Cresswell (in a trance) described heaven as
another
grim reality? Aurelia stood, and remained to drum a tune.

‘Oh, I could dance for ever,’ she exclaimed, ‘to the valse from
Love Fifteen
!’ And she lingered to hum, by way of something more, Priscilla’s air from
Th’ Erechtheum Miss
. How giddy it was! What abandon there was in it. Happy Priscilla, hardworking little thing; from her part song with Bill, love, manifestly, was sometimes simple and satisfactory.

Aurelia peered down.

The creak of oars whispered up to her with wizardry.

There was often a barge to be towed along. Here came one now, lifted over the sun-splashed water with a mast, long and slightly bent, like the quill of an ostrich feather. The stubby willows, that mirrored their cloudy shadows from the bank, sobbed pathetically, though too well bred to weep.

‘It gets emptier and emptier,’ she mused. ‘I suppose the weeds absorb the water!’

‘Oh, beware of freckles!’

Aurelia turned:

‘Who could have foreseen,’ she said, ‘that our intercession for fine weather would produce all this heat?’

‘If two of the churches, in future, were to apply, I consider it should amply suffice.’ And Mrs Henedge, leaning leisurely upon the arm of Winsome Brookes, and sharing the weight of half a mysterious basket with Monsignor Parr, nodded and was gone.

With her streaming strings and veils she suggested, from behind, the Goddess Hathor as a sacred cow.

‘I’d rather go naked than wear some of the things she wears,’ Aurelia murmured critically, as she watched her out of sight.

But a ripple of laughter from some persons at the toll made Miss Pantry fix her eyes perseveringly into space.

The peals of laughter of the Miss Chalfonts were as much a
part of Ashringford as the Cathedral bells. Constantly they were laughing. And nobody knew why. Along the crooked High Street they were often to be seen, almost speechless with merriment, peering in at the shop windows, a trio interlaced, or standing before the announcements of the Lilliputian Opera House, where came never anything more extraordinarily exhilarating than ‘Moody-Manners’, or Mrs D’Oyley Carte. Tourists avoided their collision. And even the delicate-looking policeman in the market-place, when he became aware of their approach, would invariably disappear.

Rossetti, long ago, had painted them, very pale, in bunched-up dresses, playing cat’s-cradle in a grey primeval waste. And the reaction, it was politely supposed, had completely turned their brains.

‘They will laugh themselves to death,’ Aurelia murmured, as she wandered on.

The scent of the bushes of sweetbriar from innumerable gardens followed her along the sentimental esplanade that faced the Asz as far as the gates of Miss Chimney’s school for backward boys. Here Vane Street, with its model workhouse, began, the admiration of all. Debt, disaster, held few terrors, while gazing at this winter palace … With a chequered pavement below, and an awning above, a man (trusting to philanthropy) might reasonably aspire to lounge away what remained to him of life, inhaling the suavest of cigarettes.

Deferring her errand there until her return, Aurelia wound up Looking Glass Street towards the laundry. With its houses, that seemed to have been squeezed from tubes of multi-tinted paint, it was not unlike, she had often heard, a street in one of Goldoni’s plays.

Choosing her way along it, she perceived, midway, a lady with a pair of scissors, who, in an abstracted attitude, was inducing a yew-tree peacock to behave.

‘Good-morning,’ the lady with the scissors cried, ‘I am so glad … I was just coming round to inquire.’

Miss Wookie was always
just going
somewhere. At all hours one would find her in a hat.

‘To inquire?’ Aurelia halted.

The lady leaned classically against her bird. In its rather dishevelled state, it resembled a degenerate swan.

‘People are circulating such dreadful stories,’ she said.

‘Indeed!’

‘Such shocking stories. Poor mamma! This morning she seems quite pulled down.’

‘Some new nervousness, no doubt.’

‘She has sent me out to tidy this. As if I were in a condition for gardening!’

‘To fulfill a ritual, if one isn’t quite one’s self, does often only harm.’

Miss Wookie considered her work. ‘I clip the thing,’ she said, ‘in the wrong places … In profile it has almost the look of a turkey. So unnatural!’

‘Whatever happens, it could always be a blue bird.’

‘We hear you’re going to pull down half of the Cathedral,’ Miss Wookie said tragically, ‘and put in an indelicate modern window. Is it
true
?’

Aurelia appeared astonished.

‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it,’ she exclaimed.

‘The Palace, of course, always is the last to hear of anything,’ Miss Wookie said, ‘but I assure you all Ashringford’s talking. And,
oh, Miss Pantry
, Mr Pet has been saying the most frightful things about us. About me, and about mamma.’

‘He’s a horrid, conceited boy,’ Aurelia comforted her.

‘Come in, won’t you? I’d like you to hear the truth.’

Aurelia blinked. ‘It’s very kind,’ she said, ‘but with this nasty, sticky dish—’

‘Never mind the dish,’ Miss Wookie murmured, unlatching the gate.

‘Sycamores’, the shelter of Mrs Wookie, the widow of Brigadier Percy Wookie of the Ashringford Volunteers, was a bleak brick cottage, with ‘1839’ scrawled above the door. A short path bordered by mild, cow’s-breath-scented phlox, led up to the porticoed entrance, where a tree, like a stout cook waiting for orders, did its best to shut out the view.

‘Poor, poor, poor,
poor
mamma!’ Miss Wookie repeated rhythmically, as she led the way in.

Mrs Wookie was usually to be found reclining upon a sofa, agitating a phial of medicine, or embroidering martyrdoms imaginatively upon a stole. Interrupted, in any way, she would become as flurried as a canary when a hand is thrust into its cage.

But to-day, because she was unwell, her daughter had given her, by way of distraction, a party frock to pull to pieces, and now the invalid was aggrandizing perceptibly the aperture to an evening gown in a posture rather more at ease than that of Whistler’s Mother.

The morning-room at the Sycamores, mid-Victorian, and in the Saracen style, would most likely have impressed a visitor as an act of faith throughout. Upon the mantel-shelf, however, between much that was purely emigrant, stood two strange bottles.

Being in the City-of-Random-Kisses to receive a legacy, and by proxy (alas) a blessing; and caught in a shower of perhaps pre-determined rain, Miss Wookie and her guardian angels – handsome rural creatures – had sought shelter beneath the nearest arch.

It was noon. All three were completely wet.

‘Christie’s …’ Miss Wookie observed the name, whilst the angels shook the water from their hair, and flapped the moisture sparkling from their wings. And reassured by the six first letters, she had gone inside.

‘What else?’ she can recall remarking, prepared for a waiter to pounce out upon her from the top of the stairs.

And then, instead of the prosaic bone, as afterwards she explained, and the glass of lemonade, and the quiet rest, and the meditation on the unexpected behaviour of poor Aunt Nettie … Miss Wookie had found herself calling out in a sort of dream for the vases, until, for the life of her, it would have been impossible to stop. And when, ultimately, she reappeared in Ashringford, the legacy all gone, it never occurred to Mrs Wookie to part with her
famille rose
again.

‘Family Rose’ the bottles had become to her – and accordingly, as dear.

‘I see that bodices are getting more and more scamped,
Kate,’ Mrs Wookie remarked, as her daughter came in, ‘and so, my dear, I hope I’ve done what’s right.’

Miss Wookie stood still. ‘Oh, Tatty,’ she said.

‘With the morsels removed,’ Mrs Wookie announced, ‘I shall make, if I’m spared, something rather choice for the League of Patriots bazaar.’

‘I didn’t know how selfish you could be.’

‘Don’t be absurd, Kate. You may be sure I’d not allow you to appear in anything unbecoming. And if you go out, my child, to-night, don’t forget, like last time, to order yourself
a fly
.’

‘I’m so glad,’ Aurelia murmured, coming forward, ‘you’re able to sew.’

With her needle suspended in the air, Mrs Wookie fluttered off to a favourite perch.

‘I was very poorly first thing,’ she said, ‘Kate tried to persuade me to send for a physician. But I wouldn’t let her.’

‘Luckily an attack is quickly gone.’

Mrs Wookie began to twitter. ‘And one of these days,’ she observed, ‘I’ll go with it. I hardly expect to survive the fall of the leaf; I don’t see how I can … Shall you ever forget last year, Kate? Round Ashringford, there’re so many trees.’

‘Possibly all you need’s a change of scene. Freeport, or somewhere—’

Mrs Wookie floated to the floor. ‘A few minutes more or less on earth,’ she said dejectedly, ‘what does it matter? And packing upsets me so. Besides, I wish to die here, beneath my own roof.’

‘But what pleasure would it give you?’

‘None, Miss Pantry. But I wish to die there.’

‘You may be right,’ Aurelia assented; ‘the strained atmosphere of tuberose and trunks of a health resort in autumn is often a little sad.’

‘And Ashringford in autumn,’ Miss Wookie said, ‘isn’t so bad.
Of course the leaves come down.
The worst of it is, one can get no grapes; I can get no grapes.’

Mrs Wookie looked pathetic. ‘If I could only see Kate married,’ she complained. ‘It comes, of course, of living in a cathedral town.
Curates are such triflers.
’

‘One little wedding, Mrs Wookie, oughtn’t to be so difficult. Consider, with five or six daughters to dispose of, how much more tiresome it would have been!’

At such a notion Mrs Wookie’s nose grew almost long.

‘In the ’sixties,’ she crooned, ‘we were always dropping our things, and we fainted more. Of course, in the country, there are many ways still. One can send a girl out with a landscape figure, sketching. That always works … Alice, Grace, Pamela and Teresa, my nieces, all went that way.’

‘Oh, Tatty, Teresa married a menial. She went away with a chauffeur.’

‘How very disgraceful!’ Aurelia remarked.

‘I suppose it was. Particularly as he wasn’t their own.’

‘Be quiet, my dear; we live too near the laundry as it is.’

‘Besides,’ Miss Wookie said, striking her chord, ‘I don’t intend to marry. I should be sorry to let myself in for so many miseries … An habitual husband would, also, bore me to death.’

‘Hush, Kate. It’s just those infantine reflections that circulate and get twisted, till they arrive, goodness knows how, to the ears of that dreadful Mr Pet.’