The Edwardians (23 page)

Poor Teresa. She tried to be so artful, and was really so artless. She did not know in the least which particular attributes in herself appealed to Sebastian, and which did not. She had no idea of how to treat Sebastian. When she finally appeared, very neatly dressed in the new tweed coat and skirt she had had made for the occasion, he came forward to greet her with a smile, but within an hour she had contrived to exasperate him beyond endurance. “What do you think of this snow, Mrs. Spedding?” he had said; and going over to the window, Teresa had replied that it looked just like a Christmas card. It was precisely the response he had expected from her, but he caught a look of amusement on Lady Templecombe's face, and in an access of irritation had offered to show Teresa over the house. It was the readiest means of escape he could devise. She was his friend; he was responsible for her; he must get her away from these people who made her nervous and drove her into making a fool of herself. So he took her upstairs, away into safety. They wandered through the state rooms together.

Hitherto she had been more or less her natural self with Sebastian; her attempts at affectation had been brief and unsuccessful; but for weeks now, in anticipation of the Christmas visit, she had been schooling herself to be on her guard. So it was not the Teresa he knew who went round the house with him. It was a sedate Teresa, determined at all costs to appear unimpressed. Secretly, she was overcome by this new revelation of the splendours of Sebastian's home; she imagined that she traced a family likeness to him in every one of the pictures; she gasped at the sumptuous velvets, at the extravagance of the silver sconces, the silver tables; she longed to ask whose were the coats-of-arms represented in the heraldic windows; she longed to ask a thousand questions, to pour forth her admiration, her bewilderment, her ignorance; but she allowed herself to do none of these things. Instead, she strolled nonchalant and lackadaisical by his side, making pert remarks; “Dear, dear!” she said, as they paused before a Titian of Diana and her nymphs surprised by Acteon, “aren't you glad that your ancestresses didn't carry on in that way?” Still more unfortunately, she tried to ape the fashionable jargon. “How you must love-are all these funny old rooms!” Sebastian clenched his fists in his pockets. He had not expected her to show any intelligent interest in the treasures of Chevron, but at least he had expected to enjoy the reaction of a naïf and unaccustomed mind; he had been prepared to laugh at her, fondly, affectionately, even though he knew that his motive in showing her his possessions was not a very estimable one. They were entirely at cross-purposes. Sebastian began to feel that this middle class caution was the last thing he could tolerate. He wished that Romola Cheyne were his companion, or Lady Templecombe, or Julia Levison; or, rushing to the other extreme, old Turnour, or Godden. They would have been incapable of such airs and graces. What folly had possessed him, he wondered, to invite Teresa to Chevron? His world and hers could never meet. Old Turnour was a different matter; he liked old Turnour for talking about the frost and the sprouts; he appreciated the enormous, the vital importance of sprouts to old Turnour ; he liked any reflection of a natural and practical nature, in character with the person who made it; thus he had liked Mrs. Tolputt for talking about the sales and the servants' sheets—but he remembered how Teresa had tried to interrupt her; he liked Lord Templecombe for saying at breakfast, “Damn this bloody snow, Sebastian, can't you do something about it? Spoiling all my huntin'.” What he could not endure was the hypocrisy of Teresa's gentility. He liked her when she was, frankly and crudely, a snob. He could not bear people who pretended to be something that they were not. He decided that Teresa was nothing—neither practical, nor cultured, nor raw—and he determined there and then to dismiss her from his life forever.

“Wacey,” he said, bursting into the schoolroom after this unfortunate expedition into the staterooms was over, “can I see the plan of the luncheon table, please?”

The harassed Wacey produced it.

“Sorry,” said Sebastian, “but this has got to be altered. I can't sit next to Mrs. Spedding. Be ingenious, Wacey. Shift everybody round.”

“But her Grace said . . . ,” Wacey began. “Never mind what she said. Shift them round. Put me next to Lady Templecombe. Or can I come and have my luncheon with you in here?”

Wacey gasped at him. Was he mad? Was he simply in high spirits, as he sometimes was, when he came and teased her? or had something gone seriously wrong?

“I would much rather have my luncheon with you, Wacey. And my dinner, too. Can't I? just you and me and Viola? Then we could laugh together at everybody sitting solemnly downstairs.”

Miss Wace found the suitable formula. “That would be very nice for me, but People in your Position have to Respect Appearances.”

“I seem to have heard that before,” said Sebastian, thinking of Sylvia. “Do we really? But why? Why are people so careful of appearances? Mr. Anquetil, you know, Wacey, wouldn't give a fig for appearances.”

“There was a bit about Mr. Anquetil in the
Daily Mail,”
said Miss Wace.

“No?” said Sebastian, greedily. “Was there? When? Show me.”

“I don't know that I've kept it,” said Miss Wace with caution.

“Nonsense, Wacey; you know you keep everything, even old newspapers in case they should come in handy for lighting the fire. You were born to hoard. Produce it.”

Wacey rose and unlocked an enormous cupboard, where indeed, as Sebastian had implied, lay a pile of newspapers neatly folded. From these she drew a two-days-old copy of the
Daily Mail.

“Adventurous Englishmen Missing,” he read.

“It is now three months since news has been received of a party which left Manaos in September in an attempt to discover the sources of the Upper Amazon. Mr. Leonard Anquetil, who will be remembered as a member of . . .”

Sebastian put the paper down. He looked out at the snow falling past the window.

“Will this snow prevent the children from coming to the Christmas tree?” he asked irrelevantly.

“Only those who live far out,” replied Miss Wace, immediately well informed and brisk.

“Poor little devils! What a disappointment for them.”

“But Mrs. Wickenden sees to it that they get their toys and crackers just the same.”

“That isn't the same at all, Wacey. They miss their tea and their games. Do you think they like coming?”

“Of course they like coming,” said Miss Wace, shocked. “It's the great treat of the year for them. They look forward to it, all the year through. So would you, if it was the only treat you had.”

“Yes,” said Sebastian, “I expect I should. As it is, I find that treats always turn out to be disappointments. And now some of them won't be able to come at all.” He stared out at the falling snow; for one reason or another, he had forgotten the plan of the luncheon table lying before him.

Matters went better between Teresa and Sebastian after luncheon. The morning is always an unpropitious time for emotional relationships. Lovers, or potential lovers, ought never to meet before the afternoon. Morning is bleak and unerotic. During luncheon, Sebastian had sat between Lady Templecombe and Mrs. Levison, and had been bored by their conversation, which was the replica of a conversation he had heard a thousand times before. Once or twice he had caught Teresa's eye, and had again imagined that a certain understanding ran between them—a fallacy readily credited by any person temporarily deluded by physical desire. Those airs and graces, he decided, were not the true Teresa; they were but defences that she put up, as much against the male in him as against the duke in him. He saw them in a new light now, and was as leniently touched and diverted by them as he had originally been by Teresa's anguished efforts to control Mrs. Tolputt. In this mellower mood, he perceived that Teresa's pretences were as much a part of her as was Turnour's anxiety about his sprouts.

Still, he remained uneasily solicitous on Teresa's behalf; he was disinclined to trust her for the rest of the afternoon with his mother, Lady Templecombe, and the others. He proposed that they should make a snowman in the garden. This suggestion was received with horror by all but Teresa herself and, unexpectedly, John; Teresa forgot herself and clapped her hands; John took his pipe out of his mouth and said he hadn't made a snowman since he was a boy, by Jove! he hadn't. Lucy was all too obviously relieved. She rapidly summed-up three bridge tables, and cast an approving look at Sebastian, who had thus solved the problem of amusing his two incongruous friends for the afternoon.

Snow had ceased to fall; it was freezing hard; the lying snow was in admirable condition. Sebastian, John, and Teresa went out in hearty spirits. Teresa, moreover, was looking deliciously pretty, dressed in a tight bolero of stamped velvet, a sealskin cap on her head, and her hands buried in a little sealskin muff. She tripped gaily between them, chattering, and turning her happy face from one to the other. This was better than London, she said; snow got so dreadfully dirty in London, and before you knew where you were it had all turned to slush. She chattered on, while John and Sebastian chose a site for their snowman. But before they engaged on their work they must have implements; so ambitious a snowman as they projected could not be built by the unaided human hand. Sebastian and Teresa left John stamping among the snow while they went off to find the necessary shovels. Wooden shovels they must be—Sebastian knew from boyish experience that snow stuck to ordinary steel shovels—but he must find the shovels for himself, for he knew that on Christmas Eve the men would have knocked off work early. The door of the gardeners' bothy, indeed, was locked when they reached it. The discipline of childhood was still strong in Sebastian; he hesitated for an instant before the locked door; he went back to the days when Chevron, although officially his, was not his to treat in such high-handed manner; then, taking up a mallet with sudden determination, he broke down the door, and Teresa exclaimed in mixed dismay and admiration. Sebastian, while pleased with himself for showing off his strength and his mastership before Teresa, could not escape a private sense of guilt, as though he were still a little boy. Plunging into the dark bothy, stumbling over benches and mowing machines in his search for the shovels he wanted, he remembered analogous defiances of law in years gone by, when no one but his mother and his nurse dared to reprove him; he remembered getting out of the house at five on summer mornings, climbing over the garden wall because he was not then allowed the master key that would unlock the wrought iron gates (he put his hand into his pocket now, and fingered the key buried there); he remembered running across the park to the kitchen garden; he remembered creeping under the nets to eat the full, fresh strawberries with the dews of dawn still on them; he remembered the way his fingers had got entangled in the meshes, and how he had deliberately held up the nets for the frightened thrushes to escape, having meanwhile an unpatriotic feeling about Chevron as he did it, for it was surely wrong to let the thieving thrushes go. He remembered having once stolen two peaches out of the hothouse. It was not quite so criminal to eat fruit that grew in the open air-homely fruit: but not hothouse fruit. He remembered how he had once met Diggs the head-gardener carrying a basket of grapes, and how he had begged for some grapes, but Diggs had drawn the basket aside, saying, “No, your Grace lied to me,” and how he had never understood, to this day, what Diggs had meant. He was sure that he had never lied—he hated lies; and even now, at the age of twenty-one, he cherished a resentment against Diggs, good servitor though Diggs undoubtedly was, all for that phrase spoken thirteen years ago. So he felt glad that he should have broken down the door of the bothy; it would annoy Diggs, but Diggs would not be in a position to complain, And Wickenden would have to mend it. His Grace could do what he liked with his own. Meanwhile, he had found the shovels.

It was not a snowman that they made, but a snow-lady. She was all complete, even to the buttons down the front of her bodice, and the bun at the back of her head, and the hat tilted over her nose, and two pebbles for eyes. They laughed a great deal over the making of her, while the sun that Sebastian had seen climb up over the trees in the morning sank slowly down into the trees on the opposite side of the lawn, the same red ball that it had been all day. Absolute stillness reigned, the stillness which comes with a heavy fall of snow, and which to Sebastian, the country-bred, seemed expected and in the right order; but which Teresa, the little Cockney, thought unnatural, and which, she maintained, could only portend a storm. Sebastian scoffed at her, but amiably, very different from his sulky monosyllables of the morning. “A storm! This snow, unless we get a sudden thaw, will lie for days; tomorrow you will see the whole village out, tobogganing in the park. Our snow-lady will have an icicle dripping from the end of her nose.” They worked on, putting the finishing touches in the fading daylight, all three of them in good humour, their shouts and their laughter ringing over the snow and echoing back from the walls of the house. Even the taciturn John expanded; he displayed himself as quite a competent sculptor, modelling the lady's bust and paring away the snow at her waist, till Sebastian cried out that if he made her any more like an hourglass she would snap in half; while Teresa arranged the lady's train on the ground, and scolloped the snow into flounces. Kneeling on the ground, her face glowing beneath her sealskin cap, she laughed up at Sebastian as she beat her hands together to shake the snow from her gloves; he thought only how pretty she was, how charming, and had no longer the slightest desire for the company of Mrs. Levison or Lady Templecombe.

“In a few moments we must go and give the children their presents,” said Lucy, after tea. “You will have to make up the bridge tables without me. I can cut in when I come back. What a nuisance these entertainments are, but I suppose one must put up with them.”