In the Time of Greenbloom (53 page)

“My dears,” she said to Michael, “how dear of you to come!” And she seemed to include them all in her delight. “You must come upstairs and meet the girls, they've been so looking forward to seeing you.”

Introductions seemed hardly necessary. They felt that she had not only met both Greenbloom and Boscawen-Jones
before but even that she had long ago accepted them intimately and confided in them the untamed secrets of her heart.

Michael and John kissed her pale saffron-coloured cheek and Michael then presented Greenbloom and Jane. She touched their hands affectionately.

“And so we have a poet in Anglesey at last,” she said to Jane. “Did you know that poor Dickens once stayed at Llanallgo Rectory? We must take you over to see it—we'll have a picnic there. I don't think he liked it much—there are so many trees round the Church.”

Still talking quietly she led them across the hall and through a door to a staircase with Greenbloom and Michael on either side of her. In some way she managed to make each of them feel that she was alone with him and that everything she said was especially for his ears. John knew this because he experienced a touch of resentment at being relegated to the back of the procession with Boscawen-Jones and realised suddenly that he liked always when at Porth Newydd to be beside Lady Geraldine. But he followed with a good grace up the wide staircase.

“Don't you adore this house?” she said. “I'm so very fond of it. Clive is always threatening to leave it and move into one of the farms at Wern but I don't think I could bear that; I'd really rather starve and freeze in Porth Newydd than try and live away from all this. These are my cobras! Don't you think they're sweet?”

They all stopped by one of the wooden cobras which with extended hoods coiled round and crowned the pedestals at the beginning of each flight of stairs.

“Victorian Gothic! Charming examples,” said Jane, “and a little unusual too.”

“I'm so glad you think so. Oh how
sweet
of you to think so when you're so young. You see I
am
Victorian. Imagine, I was born in 1878 and I can't get away from it; I don't
want
to: it is home. Don't you think it's home, Mr Greenbloom? One leaves home, I know, at twenty wherever one is or whatever one does and ever since this century began
I've
been trying to return to the last one. That's really, I suppose, why I married Clive.”

“For his century!” asked Greenbloom. “You married a man for his century? Magnificent! Lady Geraldine I congratulate you.”

“Thank you,” she said with a dewy lower lip. “It's so amusing. When I was a young gel I used to think the choice of a husband was so important that I very nearly left it too late. But now I'm fifty I realise that it makes very little difference; they were all so sweet and so much
men
that I'd have been quite as happy with any one of them. After all, they were all Victorians though none of them was quite so Victorian as Clive poor dear—and then as I say there was the house. You must see all of it. Wander round anywhere you like: the Library, the Aviary, the Gun Room, the Gardens, the Lake, oh you must see the Lake and the Swimming Pool Mr Boscawen, it is charming. John will tell you all about it.”

Crossing the Landing with its marquetry cabinets and rubbed floral carpets she turned and smiled at them hazily.

“Clive's a little eccentric about the sea and though of course being on an island we're quite surrounded by it, he never goes near it if he can help it but insists on keeping his lake as a sort of Admiralty preserve—”

There was a thistledown of grievance in her pause and Greenbloom was quick to recognise it.

“Ah! an obsession, Lady Geraldine? That is good. One likes a man to have an obsession.”

“Then you would adore Clive,” she said without rancour. “Fortunately he doesn't often use his lake in the evening so I think it would be quite safe for you to”—she was gently emphatic—“but please don't touch his Barge, he's very funny about it.”

“He has a
Barge
?” Greenbloom's little head jerked up with delighted astonishment.

She laughed prettily; a cascade of sound fell from her lips as perfectly modulated as a garden water-fall.

“Oh dear,” she said. “Forgive me! We have this with everyone and I suppose I should have become accustomed to it—but I never have. It's not a real Barge, Mr Greenbloom, it's a punt; but Clive insists that it
is
his Barge—I'm afraid he's never got over having had one in his last years in the Navy and one simply daren't mention the other word. I've trained myself always to say Barge and never”—she whispered it—“
Punt
. But John will show you the Lake, he knows all about it.”

“I think,” said Greenbloom seriously, “I would rather be shown the Admiral; he sounds a most interesting man. Your description of him revives my faith in England. I shall come and live here again.”

“Oh no, Mr Greenbloom, I'm afraid that's the one thing I can't arrange. Clive never meets people nowadays. He's most unsociable and of course he's not really English, he's very Welsh.”

“Of
course
! That explains it. It is always the same: the Welsh, the Irish, the Scots—English history is founded on them.”

“Oh don't say that. There was always darling Nelson.” She moved over to the Drawing Room door. “Now please come in and rescue poor Sambo for me. He
will
be pleased to see you. He's been trying to entertain the girls ever since they arrived. Clive of course is more absent than ever when what he calls the ‘closed season' starts—he means my P.G.s—I often wonder where he hides. It's very unkind of him to leave it all to Sambo because as you know the darling can't talk about anything very much but Rugby Football and the girls never seem to be very interested in that.”

They did know about Sambo; all that there was to be known: that he was about forty-eight, drank, and had once played for the Army at Twickenham.

Michael opened the door and they followed her into the enormous room which on two sides overlooked the lawns and terraces. The parquet floor stretched ahead of them like a still buff-coloured lake on which sofas chairs a grand piano
china cabinets and vast cradles of flowers floated on their reflections.

“This,” went on Lady Geraldine, “is my favourite room. Don't you think it would be
your
favourite room?” She invited them to agreement with one of her loveliest smiles and then without awaiting an answer slid gently forward over the shining surface as though impelled by a soft and scented breeze of her own. They smelt her perfume floating back to them as she moved between flowers and furniture up the pale horizon of the floor in the direction of the marble fireplace.

They realised then that someone had been playing the piano in the far distance. The middle chords of
The Rustle of Spring
died on the air as a girl rose from behind the keyboard, and simultaneously, they became sensible of the presence of other people disposed and dispersed amongst the great spaces and solids of the room.

A middle-aged couple, distressingly well-groomed, detached themselves from a window-seat at the far end.

“The Merryweathers.” Lady Geraldine's voice floated back to them as though she had whispered. “They make safes and refrigerators in Birmingham—
so
interesting! You'll love them.”

John smiled to himself remembering how once he had overheard his own description from her lips, ‘
John
Blaydon, so sweet; such a
simple
boy. You will find him charming.'

In different parts of the room they saw that there were girls in summer frocks scarcely distinguishable from the covered chairs and sofas on which they were posed. One was writing a letter on her knee, two others were playing chess; but Lady Geraldine drew them after her towards Sambo who was standing stiffly before the empty fireplace, his black hair, thinning at the crown, reflected in the great rectangle of the glass above the chimney-piece.

His scarlet face, pinker than a huntsman's jacket, looked almost indecent against the diffuse pastels and pallors of the room. He had been talking to a platter-faced girl of about seventeen who for some reason was wearing Jodhpurs. She
looked bored in an uneasy way, as though she had no right to be bored, and kept glancing for approval in the direction of the Merryweathers. John thought at once that she must be their daughter and that she had been brought there to stay because of the title and at the same time equipped with very little else save Jodhpurs and the necessity for fresh gratitude to her parents.

When Lady Geraldine spoke and confirmed all of his surmise, a summary so rapid that until she spoke he did not realise that he had thought it, he knew the first moment of satisfaction he had been granted that day. It always pleased him when he proved to be right about things which he could not possibly have known.

“Now Sambo!” she said. “Here they are at last! I want you to introduce everyone to everyone while I go and see Wildbrown about the coffee and drinks in the Dining Room—Oh, and this Ursula dear is John Blaydon and his brother Michael and Mr Greenbloom and Mr Boscawen. Ursula's staying here with her parents the Merryweathers,” she waved over to them intimately and they both smiled with pleasure. “Ursula adores houses and horses and I'm arranging for her to finish near Paris at Boufflémont, aren't I Ursula dear?”

“Yes, Lady Geraldine.”

“And now I really must go. Poor Wildbrown is such a tyrant that I can never think of getting rid of her. Sambo! Perhaps you could organise ping-pong in the Billiard Room unless they'd rather dance to the gramophone or just talk. It's too dark for croquet but everyone is to do just what they want.” She turned to Michael. “If only your little Mother would come over more often! She's so wonderful at organising things, she'd have everyone acting in a play within ten minutes of her arrival; I know she would. But it's sweet of her to spare you, especially in the Summer when she has so many things to do. Now you'll find things to eat and drink downstairs and don't forget to go anywhere you like but please remember about the—
Barge
.”

With a last radiant, intimate, smile for them all no less than for Sambo she turned and left them gracefully with the same perfect composure with which she had greeted them; and at her going, the lights seemed perceptibly to dim the room to grow a trifle smaller and Sambo a little older, all the girls a little younger.

The Rustle of Spring
winnowed out into the air again carrying with it the ineffable tedium of a school Music Room, the two girls on the sofa resumed their chess, the Merryweathers their
Tatler
and Sambo his stiff upright redness in front of the looking glass.

Beside John Greenbloom murmured, “
Mon Dieu
!” and said to Sambo, “I believe you are interested in football?”

Sambo touched his moustache and without moving his lips eyebrows or any part of his scarlet face said:

“Ruggah.”

There was silence between them, only saved from proving unpleasant by the activity of the girl at the piano. Under the safe cover of the music John turned and inspected Ursula. Obviously she was the reason for
his
invitation. Her parents would live contentedly on the title and the address for a full fortnight; but for her, this would be very short commons. There were, he knew, no horses at Porth Newydd and this girl was quite obviously horse-mad. He wondered briefly why it was that girls who were fond of horses were always so brightly and separately put together, so hostile. Other girls, the horseless variety, had a softness about their features, one saw them as a whole; but girls like this were always lacking in homogeneity. They had fierce blue eyes, aggressively red cheeks, and harsh golden hair; they grew up to be women like Kay, Toad's wife at the Abbey. He wondered dully and with increasing depression if she were still alive.

“You live in Birmingham?”

“No. Outside it.”

“Have you just arrived?”

“We've been here three days.”

“It's a beautiful place, isn't it?”

“It's very cut off.”

“Yes, I suppose it is—” What did she mean, he wondered.

“What from? I mean what's it cut off from?”

Out of her square post-adolescent face she looked at him with hostility tinged with scorn.

“It's cut off, that's all.”

“Oh.”

“If you don't mind, I think my parents want me.”

“Not at all.”

He did not look over to them as she left him. He was not interested in knowing whether she were lying or not; she was the sort of girl he loathed and he felt suddenly furiously angry with Lady Geraldine for tricking him into his earlier excitement. What an appalling evening it was going to be. To eat of course there would be Miss Wildbrown's cucumber sandwiches, to drink her watered cider-cup with the cucumber-peel floating on the top.

The thought of this cheered him up; Greenbloom and Mick would be expecting a share of the whisky reserved for Sambo and the Admiral; but they would not get it. At the correct moment Sambo who was the only one in old Clive's confidence, sharing not only his board but, if the Welsh rumour were correct, his wife's most secret affections as well, would disappear into a concealed sanctum in the East Wing and leave them to the girls and their fate. There they would sit muttering in a study with scarlet wall-paper, furnished with naval bric-a-brac, drinking heavily, silently, and with the precious hostility which in fifteen years had become essential to their relationship.

But Mick, Greenbloom and Boscawen-Jones would be depending on the prospect of potent refreshment to lift the evening out of the chasm into which it had fallen. They had been so very sure of it that they had only stopped for a very ‘short one' at the Rhosybol Arms on the drive over, and John who alone had known of the increasing severity of Miss Wildbrown's reign at Port Newydd, had not bothered to warn them of the austerity they must expect. When they did
make the discovery they would leave promptly, he knew that; because the pubs in Wales closed at ten and already it must be nearly nine-thirty. So it would be a very short evening, and tomorrow, he remembered, was Sunday.