The Matchmaker (5 page)

“Ready?” asked Emilio, hunching himself into his coat. “Hullo, what do you want?” It was the hound-puppy, his tan and white coat looking very distinct in the soft, clear light preceding dusk, who came up to greet them.

“He got his rabbit-leg after all,” said Fabrio, pinching the supple dewlap while the dog stood still to be caressed, looking from one to another with wise eyes. “Didn’t you see him just now?”

“He can come back to the farm with us,” said Emilio as they began to climb the slope towards the woods.

“Be careful; the old——will think we’re trying to steal his
dog
,” said Fabrio roughly. “Better not get too friendly with him. There! go home, can’t you? We don’t want you,” and he motioned with his boot, but the puppy made a polite movement of avoidance and in a moment was back at his side. Fabrio’s sore, homesick heart was comforted by his friendliness.

“
HOW LONG WILL
it take us to get to Pine Cottage?” asked Jenny, who inherited her mother’s forward-looking temperament.

“I don’t know. Perhaps Mr. Bolliver does,” and Alda leant forward to attract the attention of Mr. Bolliver, whose car she had hired to transport herself, her daughters, and no less than fourteen pieces of luggage, to their new home.

“About twenty minutes,” smiled Mr. Bolliver, slightly turning his head. The winding lane that led down into Pagets was now far behind them, and the car was travelling along the main road to Sillingham, with the chicken farm and orchards on the right, and on the left the meadows and woods rolling southward to Christ’s Hospital, whose tower soared forth from the purple forest ten miles away. The sky was lowering and throughout the morning everybody had been hoping that it would not rain.

“Jenny! Your spear!” Louise sat upright and gazed distressfully at her sister. “Oh, we’ve left it
behind
!”

“No, we haven’t. Mr. Bolliver kindly put it in the back with my big case,” soothed Alda.

“And the eggs and my jar with the beetles in and my Alison Uttley books?”

“All safely in, darling. Do not
flap
.”

“Now we’re going to Pingcottage,” announced Meg, who was sitting on her mother’s lap and gazing first at Jenny, then
at
Louise and then at Mr. Bolliver’s back; she wore the shabby siren-suit in which Louise had gone through the first air attacks on Ironborough, and a Norwegian bonnet of white wool printed with huge crimson roses. Alda always contrived to find some brilliant jersey or pair of red boots or fur mittens to relieve the shabbiness of her children’s clothes, which were even more worn than those belonging to most families of garment-sharing sisters because of the roving life led by the Lucie-Brownes for the past few years. Their outfits thus possessed originality and distinction, and the three were often taken for “artists’ children”—to the shame of Jenny, whose conventional nature vaguely felt the expression as derogatory. Alda herself dressed the year round in old tweeds or faded cotton, and expended most of the coupons and money on her daughters; she had never found that her looks and her charm needed setting off by clothes.

“Oh Mother!
Did
you put in my Christmas cards?”

“
Yes
, lovey. Do not
flap
.”

Alda’s spirits began to sink as they left behind the extended, straggling village street that was Sillingham and passed the railway bridge and the ugly new cottages on the road leading to Froggatt. She thought of Pagets, encircled by a barrier of bushy bronze oaks whose green trunks enclosed mysterious shadows. There was a feeling of protection there, yet a sense of light, of freedom and movement, too, of air blowing through widely spaced branches; but here, all was low and damp. She was extremely susceptible to dreary surroundings and bad weather, but she seldom realised what was depressing her spirits, and her only method of raising them was to seize upon whatever could be delighted in and delight in it slightly more than was natural. “All Alda’s geese are swans,” her sisters said indulgently, and her husband sometimes called her The Golden Goose. She was now preparing to delight in the view from Pine Cottage.

Their arrival was made more cheerful than she had anticipated by Mr. Bolliver’s good nature in carrying all the luggage, including
Jenny’s
Masai spear, across to the cottage for them, the children joyfully expanding the small jokes which arose every other minute and assisting him to deposit the heavier cases upstairs. While he was thus employed Alda hurried out to the cellar and saw with relief that the coal had arrived. There was also a pile of freshly-chopped wood. How kind of someone, she thought, and hastily filled a scuttle with coal and her skirt with billets and went into the parlour.

“Mother, the groceries have come. All our rations and a lot of lovely soap. The tradespeople seem very
reliable
round here,” called Jenny from the back door.

“Digestive biscuits. Goody!” from Louise.

“Meg doesn’t want a biksit.”

“Charmed, I’m sure. All the more for us.”

“That’s the lot,” smiled Mr. Bolliver at the parlour door, thinking that this was the nicest lot he had so far delivered at Pine Cottage. How many he had set down at that gate full of hope and strength! and how many he had called for three months later! broken in mind and body and cursing their landlady as he drove them away.

When he had been paid and had driven off, Alda knelt before the fire, now burning strongly but heatlessly in the cold air, and gazed with unwonted pensiveness into the flames. Overhead, the children could be heard dragging their possessions out of the suitcases and putting them away in carefully chosen places from which she would afterwards have to remove and rearrange them.

She glanced round the room. Dim grey light came in between the scanty curtains and showed a grubby pink cushion, a row of tattered paper novels and other books in such dirty covers that she decided then and there to lock them out of the children’s reach, a steel engraving of a mythological figure weeping in a grove. The air smelled of staleness and old carpets. Save for the distant sound made by the children and the fluttering of the fire, all was silent.

Alda had been homeless for so long that she had almost ceased to grieve (or so she told herself) for the elegant yet homely double-fronted house in the old quarter of Ironborough which she and Ronald had been carefully, lovingly filling with furniture and books. Home, for her, was now wherever Ronald and the children and she herself could gather together in front of a fire or about a table, and sometimes she congratulated herself that she was not tied to a house, a routine and a neighbourhood as her married sisters were, but whenever circumstance compelled the family to pull up its shallow roots and move on, she felt their homelessness keenly for a week or so, until those roots had re-established themselves. At Pagets they had struck into deeper and richer soil than any they had so far discovered, and this afternoon Alda was not cheerful.

She jumped up and ran to the children, leaving the fire beginning to warm the room. I’ll soon have
you
down and packed away in a cupboard, she vowed, grimacing in passing at a print, executed in strong reds and browns, of four bald old men smoking churchwarden pipes amidst some hounds in an inn parlour. Ruskin himself, in the chapter on Late Venetian Grotesque, never in his worst nightmares imagined art sinking to such bathos. Yet beside it hung a Victorian water-colour of an Italian lake surrounded by mountains, painted in harmless clear blues and framed in broad gold, that she liked and resolved should stay there. Her fancy leaned towards whatever was pretty and immediately enjoyable, and some years previously Ronald had quietly, with amusement, abandoned his attempts to alter his Golden Goose’s taste.

“It’s raining,” announced Jenny, glancing up from the confusion of possessions spread about the floor in the biggest bedroom, and Alda looked out of the window and saw some distant wooden structures already half-hidden in weeping mist.

“Those are chickens’ houses,” said Louise, who had followed her to the window and stood looking out with an arm about her
mother’s
waist. “Look, you can see the chickens walking about.”

“A man in a sack did come and gib them their tea,” put in Meg, who was busy untidying a box of hair ribbons. “Meg did see him.”

“When can we have our tea, Mother?” sighed Louise. “I
could
peck a bit.”

“Could you peck a bit, my lovey? Well, you shall. Let’s just put some of these things away and then we’ll have tea. Toasted buns and butter!”

They worked until the light failed, filling drawers with shabby little clothes and rolling mattresses down the stairs, with shouts of laughter, to air by the parlour fire. Jenny was really helpful, for she inherited her mother’s impatient energy tempered by an organising capacity handed down from her paternal grandmother; Louise dropped things and went off into daydreams, and Meg bustled off on explorations, returning at intervals with reports, usually of an alarming nature, about the house and its contents.

“
May
we have it in front of the fire, Mums darling?” asked Jenny, lifting a crimson face from toasting the buns.

“Of course. Oh dear, if only father were here … never mind. The time will soon pass. Come along, Meg; Louise, come and warm those frog-hands. There! now let’s be cosy.”

Firelight, and curtains drawn against the rain and deepening twilight, and four laughing faces, framed in hair as palely golden as the flames. The mean, tastelessly furnished room is hidden in kind shadows; they play over the ceiling and bow and waver as if dancing an accompaniment to the story Alda reads aloud. Five hundred miles away, the father driving through a dark, sighing forest of pines in Oldenburg imagines that group gathered about the fire, as he has so often seen it, and amidst the black night and the dreary confusion of the journey, he smiles.

(… The mighty George Eliot once commented with acerbity upon those readers who “demand adultery, murder and ermine
tippets
on every page,” and we ourselves, confronted whenever we open a volume of contemporary fiction by explosions, lust, perversion and despair in every line, join our feeble voice to hers. Though often tempted to show that we, too, know all about That—yes,
and
That, to say nothing of the Anglo-Saxon Words (all nine of them) we refuse to be bounced into writing what we do not enjoy writing. Our themes are gentle, it is true, but

We do but sing because we must

And pipe but as the linnets do,

and our final decision is that enough is going on everywhere without our starting in.)

After a game of Rush Hour, and baths which were necessarily scanty because of the short commons in fuel, Alda put her family to bed in the chilly, unfamiliar rooms and left them to fall asleep as quickly as excitement would permit, while she herself went round the house looking for tramps, burglars and lunatics (of escaped prisoners from the German camp six miles away, or deserters from the American Army still lurking in the woods, she did not think until later that evening).

She opened cupboards, glanced into the large cold pantry, and shone her torch into a closet filled with chipped crockery and yellow newspapers by the kitchen door: then, satisfied that nobody lurked there and smiling to herself, she went into the now comfortably warm parlour and sat down beside the fire prepared to enjoy a peaceful hour or so before going to bed.

It was almost eight. She had wound the ugly little clock on the mantelpiece and its loud hasty tick—a vulgar sound if ever there were one—now filled the silence. She could hear the rain falling steadily outside, and occasionally a car going past on the Froggatt road. As she picked up the knitting which she preferred to reading, she glanced round the room for the second time that day and decided that when she had packed away quite half of the pictures and ornaments, those dull pink walls and that
threadbare
carpet would look less offensive; but oh! if only the room had had clean white matting and apricot distemper!

The fire settled itself lower into the tiny basket grate, the clock ticked sharply, quickly. Alda’s needles flew skilfully in the intricacies of a jumper for Louise and her thoughts flew to Germany. She had been working and dreaming for perhaps half an hour, when there sounded a loud, single knock at the front door.

She stopped knitting, and turned her head in the direction of the summons, and her eyes opened a little wider. She was not a nervous woman, but at that moment she did realise that she was alone with three children in a cottage a quarter of a mile across the fields from the nearest house, and that if she opened the front door to that knock, there was no reason why—whoever was there—should not come in.

She waited, her knitting resting in her lap. Rain drove against the window, the fire gave forth its faint sounds. The knock was not repeated.

But she did not find this reassuring. Was the intruder waiting at the door? or, worse still, prowling noiselessly about the house—perhaps even now peering into the room through that gap in the curtains? She forced herself to glance at the window and of course nothing was there; no white face half-revealed, no hand pressed menacingly against the pane.

Suddenly she got up, dropped her work on the chair, and hurried down the passage. She did listen, it must be admitted, just for a moment before she actually turned the catch of the front door, but when she did so it was without hesitation.