Music at Long Verney (7 page)

“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 senile.”

“– 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.

Georgina retired. When she came back with the tray, they were reclining from their labours on the hearthrug. The Girl Guide had ash on her nose, the Boy Scout was wheezing.

“What will you drink, children? Whisky, vodka? Some orange juice for you, Antonia?”

“But where is my hot milk? You promised me hot milk, Georgina.”

Affronted by this unchivalrous reminder, Georgina contented herself by suavely supposing Antonia would like hot milk, too.

“I'd love some. Let me make it!” She half rose, thought better of it, sank down again; as Georgina left the room, she heard
Antonia say, “But why don't you try iodine? Sailors never catch cold.”

The kitchen was warm and exclusive. With leisurely movements, Georgina took a bottle of milk from the refrigerator, selected two suitable mugs, opened the lid of the Aga stove, and took down a heavy saucepan. For one does not spend a lifetime enjoying English literature without being made aware of the nature and capabilities of milk. Milk, proverbially mild, is a devil when roused by boiling, and in a moment will writhe out of the pan and spread itself all over the place – waiting with fiendish malice till your back is turned before doing so. Profiting by the strenuously acquired wisdom of novelists and essayists, Georgina did not intend to be caught like this. She put the saucepan on the hot plate and emptied the bottle of milk into it. Half the amount would have been quite enough, but she had enjoyed the gesture of emptying, a gesture at once lavish and contemptuous. They would just have to wait rather longer – what of that? Besides, presumably the skin would be all that much thicker. Words rose in her mind: “If you want to have proper skin on your boiled milk, it's hopeless to use less than a pint.” Other words floated in from the sitting room – soothing, diagnosing words from Antonia to George, who liberally as to a midwife was declaring the state of his bronchial tubes. George would be all right if he didn't eat so much – but Antonia didn't raise this issue. Meanwhile, the milk lay quietly in its saucepan.

An hour ago, heads had been rolling, and Canon Toller, pierced in a dozen places, had been tossed aside, the sawdust trickling from his reputation as an apostle to youth. Now George was maundering on the hearthrug and she was in the kitchen – alone, ageing, disregarded, haggard with fatigue, still not over her influenza but expected to be as strong as a horse, with the garden full of apples and the sink full of dirty plates and dishes – waiting for milk to come to the boil. The voices
had become lower, more confidential – bunions, probably; the milk was unchanged except that from time to time a vague, sneering frown seemed to cross its smooth brow. Antonia said something not perfectly audible about it perhaps getting worse if you lived alone. George, perfectly audible, replied, “The truth is, Georgina's totally selfish.” And at the same moment the milk exploded and spread itself all over the top of the Aga.

Georgina filled the two mugs and carried them into the sitting room and set them down without a word, sincerely hoping her guests would scald themselves. They did not. Antonia sipped, and said how delicious. George sipped, and asked if he could have some sugar in his.

“Oh, do you take sugar in yours?” Antonia said, plainly making a note of it.

“And with porridge. But there I like it brown,” said George, as plainly expecting a note to be made.

And when they had emptied their mugs they thanked her and went away – musingly, and slightly flushed.

She heard their diminishing voices, and their lingering farewells. She heard George cough, and Antonia deplore. She heard them start their cars and drive away. Presently they would set out on an entirely novel way of life, hyphenated into George-and-Antonia – one of those late marriages that at first seem so surprising and soon after seem so natural that one can't imagine why they did not happen earlier. And she would go on pretty much as usual – an aunt to Antonia, to George an old acquaintance, a headless phantom. They would always treat her with kindness, and Antonia would unfailingly remember her birthday and ask her to lunch.

“
NO. THERE'S NO
telephone,” said the long-legged young woman. “It seemed more important to have drains, so we chose drains. We couldn't afford both at once.”

“Far better to have drains,” said Dinnie.

“Yes, that was what we felt. You see, it needed so much doing to it. It was a farm cottage once, but no-one had lived in it for years. But we fell in love with it, we felt we must rescue it. We did think of calling it Cinderella Cottage, but Jim said it would be whimsical.”

“I like Meadow Cottage much better.” Dinnie looked out of the window at the calm Cambridgeshire landscape, cows under elm trees, shorn midsummer fields dotted with trusses of hay. It wasn't in the least what they were looking for, this rather self-conscious Meadow Cottage – but perhaps as a pro tem? It smelled of wood smoke . . . Wood smoke always makes one sentimental.

“It will be sad for you to leave it, when you've made it so charming – even if it's only for a couple of years.”

“Nothing would make us, if it weren't for Jim having to go to Rhode Island to print
The Anatomy of Melancholy
.”

A queer reversal, thought Avery. Twenty years ago, young couples were writing arresting new books. Now they were all typographers, doing limited editions of classics. Twenty years ago,
too, young couples used to be approximately the same height.

“What rent –” began Dinnie. Avery broke in; he could see she was dangerously drawn towards Meadow Cottage. “Which press?” he asked.

At the same moment a door opened, a coffee tray was put down with a clatter, and the short stout young man said, “I hope you'll excuse me, but the house is on fire.”

He darted away, leaving the door open behind him. The young woman hurried after him. A waft of flame came down the wide chimney like a goblin, flared, vanished. Avery shut the door and the window opening on the calm landscape.