Read Music at Long Verney Online

Authors: Sylvia Townsend Warner

Music at Long Verney (6 page)

BOOK: Music at Long Verney
5.82Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

There was a pause. Mrs Finch broke it. “In Russia, when there is one of these awkward silences, people account for it by saying that a fool has been born.”

There was another pause. Mr Weatherby broke it. “Will your daughter hunt?” (Mr Weatherby, who had recently put on weight, had a horse to dispose of.)

“I assure you, Mr Weatherby, any hunting in this family will be done by me. I spend my life hunting. At this moment, I am hunting for –” Mrs Finch broke off and rummaged among the sofa cushions. “I had the list but I seem to have mislaid it,” she said. “But I remember it began with a black bishop – do you play chess? – and Mr Harley's hat. Do you know Mr Harley? He tunes pianos. Such a nice, sombre man. If you met him in a
pink dressing gown, you wouldn't know him from an El Greco, and it was so unfortunate that he lost his hat somewhere about the place. And then there was my husband's briefcase. It had a corkscrew in it and some other things. And the last thing on the list was the fire extinguisher. It's one of those clever chemical ones – you give them a smart blow and they burst into spray. Are you afraid of fire? Fire breaking out in a lunatic asylum is one of my terrors. I wonder if you are sitting on it. No, no, please don't trouble. It will be none the worse, and anyhow by the time I find it, it will be out of date. Do you think this tea was made with boiling water? I don't.”

Looking wistfully towards the window, Mr Weatherby said, “I suppose you garden quite a lot.”

“I've got a little watering pot. But whenever I find time to use it, it's always raining. Are you good at gardening?”

“Well, no,” Mr Weatherby said. “I spud up daisies sometimes. But my mother's frightfully keen on gardening. So was my old aunt. She gardened right up to the end.”

Mrs Finch nodded sympathetically. “I'm always alarmed when I see people plunge into gardening. Still, if your mother enjoys it . . . Besides, there is the Fifth Commandment. I read right through the Ten Commandments the other day, and I was surprised to find how many of them I agreed with. But it would have saved a lot of talk, as well as being much lighter to carry, if Moses had just boiled them down to one compact little commandment – ‘Thou shalt not interfere.' I knew a Mrs Prothero who was perfectly devoted to gardening, and one day when she was being shown around a friend's garden she saw a weed and tried to pull it up. It happened to be a tight-rooted wolfsbane, and while she was tussling with it, something snapped and she went blind in one eye. Could you have a plainer warning against meddling?”

While Mrs Finch was relating this story, noises, strongly
suggestive of the dangers of meddling, had broken out in the front hall – a crash, an urgent sizzling, angry words, and hurried footsteps. These were now followed by a steady swishing sound, apparently proceeding from the neighbourhood of the doorstep.

“I say –” said Mr Weatherby. Mrs Finch looked at him devoutly, as though the lightest word from him meant more to her than any of the noises, indoors and out.

“I say!” he repeated. From where he sat, Mr Weatherby could see a jet of high-pressured spray sweeping across the lawn.

The noises died away. A strong chemical smell remained, and grew stronger.

“I always feel so sorry for Angelo Domodossola,” Mrs Finch said. She had given up waiting for Mr Weatherby's communication. “He, of course, was born blind, so he got about quite easily. One day, he went to see a friend. He walked right in and called, and as there was no answer, he sat down to wait. It was midwinter, and that bitter Neapolitan cold – you know how it gets into one's bones. At last, he decided to wait no longer. He put down his hand to grope for his hat and gloves and felt something clammy. It was a pool of blood. The friend had been there all the time. He had cut his throat half an hour or so before. I've never felt easy going to call on anyone since, for it is absurd to say that these coincidences never happen twice, and though I am not blind, I am very inattentive. I am sure I could sit in a room with a corpse for hours before I noticed anything was wrong.”

Mr Weatherby saw that where the spray had fallen, the grass was turning yellow.

“I suppose if one were really observant,” Mrs Finch said, “one would constantly notice that something or other was a little wrong.”

“‘Where ignorance' –” Mr Weatherby began.

The door opened and a voice said, “Of all the damned,
confounded places to put the damned thing in! Elinor!” Mr Weatherby rose to his feet as Mr Finch burst into the room.

“Sit down, sit down, Mr Weatherby,” Mrs Finch commanded. “An old man's curse will do you no harm. Henry, this is Mr Weatherby.”

“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. Cursing 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.

BOOK: Music at Long Verney
5.82Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

On A White Horse by Katharine Sadler
Shots in the Dark by Allyson K Abbott
Corpsing by Toby Litt
Gone Country by James, Lorelei
Careless In Red by George, Elizabeth
State of Alliance by Summer Lane
Dead If I Do by Tate Hallaway
Lesson of the Fire by Eric Zawadzki
Neq the Sword by Piers Anthony