(11/13) Celebrations at Thrush Green (16 page)

'It's going to be
published,
my dear,' cried Dotty. 'Isn't that wonderful?'

'Wonderful!' echoed Winnie. 'Who has taken it?'

'The county magazine. You know, that thing that comes out monthly. It was Harold who suggested it. They are running a series called "Local Men of Influence", and the editor rang me himself.'

'But isn't it rather long for an article in a magazine?' queried Winnie.

'Yes, it is,' admitted Dotty, 'but he is going to suggest some cuts, and there will be a photograph of Father, and one of me at the top. The photographer came last week and spent
hours
snapping away at me in the garden. So exciting!' Dotty beamed like a child at the pantomime.

'Well, I'm absolutely delighted, Dotty. You've worked so hard, it deserves to be printed.'

'Such a nice young man, the photographer,' continued Dotty as they walked away from the church. 'No tie, of course, but he had one gold earring. I suppose he had lost the other, but when I expressed concern he only laughed. I gave him a pot of my strawberry preserve.'

'Oh, that couldn't hurt him,' said Winnie, and then thought that that involuntary cry of relief might seem a little tactless in the circumstances. However, she decided, as she walked alone towards her home, Dotty's present state of euphoria would protect her from taking umbrage.

At the school everything was ready for the influx of parents and friends. It was an Open Day from now on, and a number of local people came straight over from St Andrew's to enjoy the spectacle of a Victorian school.

The staff and children had achieved a wonderful transformation, largely by removing the colourful friezes and the other bright objects of modern education.

A blackboard propped on an easel bore the precepts, written in Alan Lester's best copperplate hand-writing:

Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Do the work which is to hand.
Obedience is a child's first duty.
God watcheth over all.

The bigger children were copying this work into lined exercise books using wooden pen holders with steel nibs. The younger ones were squeaking slate pencils on slate boards, or using sticks of chalk on individual blackboards about a foot square. These relics of the past had been lent by local museums and interested elderly friends who had dug them out of attics or dusty toy boxes, but one slate board, it was claimed by its owner, was still in regular use, propped in her porch, as a means of communicating with the tradesmen when she was not at home.

At twelve o'clock work stopped and the children took out the lunches they had brought from home. These they ate in the playground to save crumbs in the classroom, for only in very severe weather were the Victorian pupils allowed into the lobby during dinner hour. A pail of drinking water and an enamel mug by it stood on the lobby floor to supply drinks, for there was no piped water at Thrush Green at that time.

During the afternoon, friends of the school watched the infants creating a long chain of bright chrysanthemum flowers intended to hang around the neck of Nathaniel Patten's bronze statue outside on the green.

This was being created amidst great excitement (and some frustration by those rebelling against their constricting Victorian clothes), like a giant daisy-chain, and was the children's own idea of paying tribute to the man who had loved children both in Thrush Green and Africa. Many a local garden had been raided for this garland, and the effect was stunning.

On a side table were displayed some of the toys which Harold Shoosmith had seen in the Lovelocks' loft. Some were Edwardian, such as the Russian egg brought back by Octavius, but there were two beautiful Victorian dolls which the sisters had inherited, a clockwork mouse and a child's wooden wheelbarrow. The Lovelocks' own dolls' house had also been sent up, for although it was not Victorian, it was in the fine tradition of 'baby houses' and a joy for the children and their parents to behold.

It was Harold who had mentioned the many trunks in the loft to Alan Lester. Would they hold untold treasures of Victorian clothes? A young and nimble friend of the sisters had been sent up to investigate for the school children, but there was nothing among the mouldering remains fit to wear, except a black straw bonnet, trimmed with jet, which none of the Thrush Green school girls could be persuaded to wear.

Along one wall were pinned the letters of the alphabet in capitals and small type, painstakingly executed by Miss Robinson over many an evening. This sight was greeted with much enthusiasm by the onlookers, which surprised the teacher, until she heard one mother remark to another:

'My schooldays coincided with a complete ban on teaching the alphabet, and I have a terrible time finding anything in the telephone directory.'

'I reckon the Victorians could teach us a thing or two about the three Rs,' agreed her friend.

While the school children ate their bread and cheese, or bread and cold bacon at Thrush Green school (supplemented, luckily, by a real school dinner soon after), there was a much more festive occasion being enjoyed at Lulling vicarage.

The same people who had been at the first meeting earlier, when Dulcie and Robert had been introduced to the Shoosmiths and Henstocks, had been invited to lunch after the service at St Andrew's. In addition, Dorothy and Agnes would be at this Sunday lunch.

The sun had emerged but the air was chilly with a hint of autumn on the way.

'But you must have a look at the garden,' Charles had said when drinks were over, and Dimity had departed to the kitchen to see about the dishing-up of lunch.

Obediently, the guests followed Charles into the garden, and indeed the flower borders were in fine form with dahlias, Japanese anemones, late marigolds, hardy fuchsias and Michaelmas daisies making a riot of mixed colours and attracting plenty of butterflies into the bargain.

'Now look, Agnes,' commanded Dorothy, stopping by a low rose bush, 'this is exactly what we need under the front windows.'

The company stopped to admire the plant, and various suggestions were exchanged about its name.

'Charles!' called Harold, but the vicar had hurried ahead with Dulcie and Robert to the greenhouse at the end of the garden. Speculation continued among the group left behind.

'My geraniums have been quite outstanding this year,' said Charles to his guests, when they were in the welcome shelter of the greenhouse. 'I came across a wonderful pelargonium called Aztec, and I've taken lots of cuttings, and I have put aside half a dozen for you.'

'How nice of you,' said Dulcie.

'You will need to keep them under cover through the winter,' said Charles, busy with pots. 'I know the Lake District can be very cold.'

'I have a small conservatory,' said Robert.

'And have you?' asked Charles of Dulcie.

'Well, no, but I shall cherish them on my windowsill.'

'In fact,' said Robert firmly, 'Dulcie will keep them in
my
conservatory.'

'Indeed?' said Charles, puzzled, as he looked from face to face, a flower pot in each hand.

'We are getting married in December,' said Robert, taking Dulcie's hand.

'Oh, my dears!' cried Charles, his chubby face growing pink. 'What news! What wonderful news!'

His hands were trembling with excitement, and Dulcie removed the flower pots from him and replaced them on the slatted bench. It was the same competent manner in which he remembered her dealing with a cabbage she was cutting up, as a child long ago, in her mother's kitchen in Wales.

'We became engaged last week,' Dulcie said, 'and first of all we thought of telephoning you, but it seemed so much nicer to tell you ourselves.'

'We owe so much to you,' said Robert. 'We met here first, you remember.'

'And we wondered,' went on Dulcie, 'if you would be willing to take part in the marriage service. It will be in my parish church, but our vicar is most enthusiastic about your taking part.'

'I should count it a great honour,' Charles told them. 'In December, you say?'

'I wish it could be next week,' Robert told him, 'but Dulcie has to go with her boss to a business conference in Boston, Massachusetts, at the end of November. Also she will be training her junior to take over her duties at the office, so I've simply got to be patient.'

'How I wish I could marry you here at my church in Lulling,' cried Charles.

'It would have been lovely,' agreed Dulcie, 'but you see Tom Evans, our vicar, has been so kind to me, and was marvellous with my mother all though her last illness and of course it is right that I should go to my own parish church—'

'Of course, of course,' Charles hastened to agree. 'And I shall look forward very much to taking part in the ceremony.'

At this point, his other guests arrived, agog with enquiries about the name of the rose which Dorothy admired. At the same time, there was the sound of a hand bell being energetically swung by Dimity who was awaiting her visitors.

'May I tell them?' whispered Charles to Robert and Dulcie, as they all trooped back to the house.

'Of course,' smiled Dulcie.

Dimity had prepared a lunch which needed little last-minute attention. She had made a chicken and asparagus quiche for the main course, with a side dish of sliced home-cooked gammon and hard-boiled eggs, and a vast salad. Late raspberries and cream were to follow, and she had also made a plum crumble which had cooked alongside the quiche.

The evening before, when the cold rain lashed Lulling and Thrush Green, Dimity had become concerned about her proposed meal. Wasn't it a little
bleak?

She departed to the kitchen, leaving Charles to watch a television programme about inter-planetary warfare which might have appealed to prep-school boys, Dimity supposed, but which she deplored. Charles seemed to be entirely engrossed, and she left him while she made enough chicken soup for a dozen, let alone the eight guests expected, and later went to bed content with the knowledge that tomorrow's first course could stand up to any Cotswold cold which the day might bring.

It was while she was dispensing this nourishment that the vicar said:

'Before you take up your spoons, I must tell you of another cause we have today for celebration.'

The Shoosmiths and their guests looked at him hopefully. Dimity, too, looked expectant. Dulcie and Robert studied their steaming soup.

'You've remembered the name of that rose,' guessed Dorothy.

'You've had another wonderful donation for the mission school,' guessed Dimity.

'Better than that,' smiled Charles. 'Our dear friends here are to be married.'

A hubbub of congratulations broke out, and Dimity was beginning to wonder if the soup should be returned to the stove when Robert took charge and said:

'Thank you on behalf of us both. You can guess how much it means to us to meet again here and to give you the news.'

'Do you want to make a speech?' asked Dimity anxiously. 'I can easily reheat the soup.'

'He can make one when we toast them in my best claret during the next course,' Charles told her. 'I suppose we should really have champagne, but we don't have such a thing here.'

'I'm so glad,' said Agnes. 'The only time I had champagne it went straight to my forehead in an icy lump. I had to have a cup of tea to thaw it.'

But Agnes's sole experience of champagne created little interest in the face of this stupendous news of the coming wedding, and the rest of the meal passed in happy conversation about the couple's future plans.

Later, Charles took Robert aside to show him the letter which he had received from Frederick Fennel.

'Oh, this is Miss Fothergill's good work,' he said, studying the immaculate typing.

'Miss Fothergill? His secretary?' guessed Charles.

'Secretary, house-keeper and nurse, all rolled into one,' Robert told him. 'She's looked after him for years. I think he has left her everything in his will, and quite right, too.'

He gave a sudden start, and dropped the letter. His face was pink as he fumbled in his breast pocket and drew out an envelope which he handed to Charles.

'I almost forgot among all our excitement. Frederick asked me to deliver this personally.'

He bent to retrieve the dropped letter from the floor while the rector opened the envelope. There was silence while Charles studied the enclosure.

He looked up at last, and spoke huskily. 'He has sent a donation. An overwhelmingly generous one. For five thousand pounds. I can scarcely believe it. It will be such a relief to Harold. I know he has been grieving about the small sum we have been able to collect here.'

'Wonderful!' said Robert. 'But it doesn't really surprise me. He took such a great interest in hearing about the mission school and our celebrations. Miss Fothergill told me that he was so cheered by all that was happening.'

The rector looked suddenly diffident. 'I hope this won't make any difference to Miss Fothergill's future?'

Robert laughed. 'No difference at all. Frederick Fennel is an exceptionally rich man, and whatever he leaves Miss Fothergill will support her in the greatest comfort for the rest of her life.'