A Desirable Husband (6 page)

‘Honestly. Doesn’t it sound silly? I thought it was all too glamorous for words.’ She looked back to Miranda’s stay at Bramham Gardens, and did not think that she, Finola, had been much more perverse than other children. ‘And as for me
hating
her, I admired her enormously, and didn’t
want
to admire her, that was it.’

Darcy was gazing at the invitations on the mantelpiece, wondering how to get in touch discreetly and delicately with Madame de Saint-Gaël. Finola’s information was interesting, and he intended to ask her more, but he was sure that the story of the French marriage would be even more fascinating, and Miranda alone could tell him, and make it lead to other things.

‘Dear old sex,’ said Darcy, closing his eyes.

In August 1951, Darcy received his decree absolute, and he met Miranda by accident at another party in London, and had from her an invitation to a third party when she should be back from Paris. The summer passed rather quietly for Gerard and Finola, and Alice and Anatole, and Hugh’s death in September was something of a shock to them all.

*

Ten minutes before his last, violent heart attack, Hugh was upsetting himself over Russian spies in the top civil service, and income tax at 9s 6d in the pound, and the family thought he was so much better and so normal that there was nothing to be feared from his private rage. Finola and Gerard were at Combe Chalcot when he died, but they were not in the study with him when he suffered the heart attack. His wife was there.

When she saw her husband collapse, Constance was at first speechless. A moment later she shouted at him, then breathlessly she opened the door and called to the staff. ‘Mr Parnell has had another attack – he must be moved – go and fetch Mr Gerard.’ Mainwaring, the butler, and his wife stared at each other. ‘A doctor. We ought to have a doctor,’ said Constance.

‘You go for Mr Gerard, Sarah,’ said Mainwaring. His wife obeyed him, shaking her head.

‘Madam, we can’t move him upstairs, we must get him onto the settee, me and Mr Gerard that is.’ He paused, and said in a stricken way: ‘He’s in a bad way, madam. I’m afraid –’

‘I am aware of that!’ said Constance. ‘Where on earth
have you been, Gerard? Help Mainwaring to move your father – really Finola, what can
you
do?’ She was crying now from shock and anger, and Finola took her arm and said: ‘Hush, Constance.’

Hugh was still just breathing, and he did not seem to be at peace. Mainwaring and Gerard laid him clumsily on the uncomfortable sofa, and then Gerard felt his heart. There went through his mind the words of the Litany – ‘from battle and murder and from sudden death, Good Lord deliver us’, but they did not seem very important.

‘Don’t die, Father,’ he said. The others were a little shocked.

‘Brandy,’ murmured Hugh. ‘Good dog.’

Five minutes later when he was quite dead, everyone felt less useless. It had been impossible to leave the room for a moment when he was so obviously and so suddenly dying: Constance, Gerard and Finola had moved only to take chairs. Mainwaring and Sarah, unnoticed by the door, had felt it would look callous to leave the family, though they knew that Mrs Daly the cook was still unaware of what was happening.

All waited some seconds after Hugh first lay perfectly still, as though he might move again. Then Gerard, sorrowfully embarrassed, turned and said to Mainwaring, who he thought should have left them: ‘We must get a doctor. Mainwaring, please ring Dr Dovey.’ He looked at Finola, who thought of death certificates and the undertaker.

‘Get out, all of you,’ said Constance to their surprise. ‘Leave me.’ A doctor, she thought.

Finola and Gerard hovered for a moment, avoiding each other’s eyes, but they did as she said when they remembered she was a widow. Constance watched them go, and exchanged a look with Finola just as she closed the door. She knew they wanted to sedate her.

After a little ticking silence, in which she listened to the clock on the mantelpiece and the murmurs in the hall, she remembered a phrase she had read somewhere: ‘Her husband’s corpse’.

She soon made herself ill with crying.

*

The doctor, the undertaker and the vicar of the parish all came up to the Cedar House during the afternoon. Nothing was said between Gerard and the vicar about Hugh’s disregard for religion or the wish he had sometimes expressed to be buried in the woods where his pheasants were bred, just by the gamekeeper’s cottage. Gerard knew that he would not seriously have wanted something which would have puzzled and upset the local people. He wished, when he was talking with the clergyman, that he were not the eldest son and responsible, so that he might have time to appreciate the true nature of death, and every man’s losing his father. If he had been in London when Hugh died, he would have been able to use his thoughts properly. Yet he must be glad that he had been present, though he could not think he had behaved as he ought: something of this he implied to the vicar. Later he reproached himself for such small hints, which were designed, he thought, to attract attention to himself and not to Hugh.

The vicar and the family compromised as to where Hugh was to be buried. They decided that he should have a simple private grave in the churchyard, which would be closer to his own idea than the burial in the family crypt which Constance thought proper. She wanted to be buried in the crypt herself.

At five o’clock, when Gerard was with the undertaker and Constance was in bed, dosed with veronal by the doctor, Finola began to telephone the rest of the family. It had seemed right to leave two or three hours between Hugh’s death and this task, the only one given her by Gerard. She tried first to reach Darcy and she rang several times in half an hour, as though it was of immediate and frustrating importance. He was constantly engaged. When she did get through, a female voice told her he was giving a supervision in college, and would not be back till late. Finola swore when she heard this.

A little later, when her distress was still divided between
the body on the study sofa and the need to telephone Darcy, Finola tried to reach her parents. When she dialled Great Queen Street, the London telephone was raised and at once slammed down. This happened twice and the third time she shouted very angrily: ‘It’s
Finola
!’

‘Fin? Oh, I’m sorry, I thought it was the Inland Revenue,’ said Alice, lifting the telephone to her ear. ‘They’ve been a bloody nuisance lately, Anatole filled in some form wrong.’

‘Well then why don’t you take the telephone off the hook?’ She thought of the stupidity of Alice.

‘It goes wrong if I do that. You sound in a dreadful state, Fin, is everything all right?’

Finola took a deep breath. ‘I was just trying to ring, to tell you that Gerard’s father’s just died. I think you ought to know.’ Tears began to slip down her face, and she sat down. She had not cried before.

‘Oh Fin. I thought you said he was better?’

‘He was! But he had a
sudden
attack, just this afternoon – it was only ten minutes, I promise you, practically instantaneous and it was so
horrible.
’

‘You were there?’

‘Yes, yes I was.’

‘Oh, Finola.’ Alice paused. ‘And I don’t think you’ve ever seen anyone die before, have you, not even in the war?’

‘No. I’ve seen corpses, dead people. Well, it’s no good talking! I just thought you ought to know.’

‘How is that woman, Constance I mean, how is she taking it? And Gerard?’

‘I don’t know yet. I must go, Alice, I must try and ring Darcy.’

‘Would you like Anatole to ring, later?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I would. Thank you, Alice.’

Finola put down the telephone, ashamed of having cried in front of her mother.

A short while afterwards, Gerard came in. It was now past six o’clock, he saw, the hour at which Hugh had considered it permissible to start drinking whisky.

‘Has the undertaker gone?’ said Finola, pushing her hair off her forehead. She had tried to sew quietly, since talking to Alice.

‘Yes, just now. You’ve been crying.’

‘Yes. Does that surprise you?’

‘My dear. No.’ He sat down beside her and put his head in his hands.

‘Constance is still in bed?’

‘I think so.’

‘Gerard, what will happen now?’

‘Oh Finola, I don’t know.’ They had been warned many times by Hugh about death duties, and valuations, and difficulties with Constance. Gerard began to cry and Finola put her arm round him. She had never been embarrassed by emotional men; one of her earliest memories was of Anatole in tears, of trying to comfort him in her shabby back bedroom at Bramham Gardens, when she was three years old.

‘Dearest, you’re so different,’ said Gerard.

‘You are silly. Oh dear, you and Darcy are very much alike, you know!’ She added: ‘I couldn’t get through to him.’

‘No, we’re not,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry you couldn’t get hold of him.’ At last, he was thinking of Hugh’s soul. He wanted to go up to his room to pray properly, but he knew he must comfort Finola first. Gravely he disengaged himself from her arm and picked up her hand, his favourite caress. He wondered what he could say to her. ‘We’ve been happy, Finola, haven’t we?’ he said, as though she were his mistress of whom he was still quite fond, but whom it was his pleasant duty to leave.

*

Next day at ten o’clock, Constance was still in bed. She would see neither Gerard nor Finola, and she knew they would be wandering about on the ground floor of the house, wearing their soberest tweeds, and talking about her. She did not intend to leave her bedroom until the funeral tomorrow, when she would wear the black coat and
skirt she had ordered years ago for her brother Colonel Charles Winter’s memorial service. Constance had decided to wear for the next eighteen months only grey, beige and white. She had often said she regretted that full mourning had gone out since the Great War, but she possessed only the one black suit, and could not go against the custom of the times she disliked in buying more.

Constance was sitting upright in bed, drinking tea which Sarah had brought her. She was fiddling with a packet of
cachets
faivres,
although she had not taken one in spite of having a headache. She disapproved of taking medicines except in emergency, when ordered by the doctor, and had never allowed her sons to be ill unnecessarily.

She could see herself in the handsome mirror opposite her bed. She made a large, white and dignified figure whose full age was not apparent at a distance of twenty feet even when her grey hair was plaited for the night. The glass showed also her coral-pink pillows, the Adam green, faint-striped wallpaper, and the dark painting of fruit and flowers above the bed which, like many things at Combe Chalcot, was a quietly noticeable variation on conventional good taste. She rather despised those who had watery old flower-prints on their bedroom walls.

Constance had seen to the redecoration of the house in 1935, and since then everything had been kept perfectly. The rooms had sometimes had to be repainted, but the appearance of the whole had never been changed. In the garden, however, she sometimes introduced new plants, and she allowed herself really to experiment with her roses. Constance’s efficiency, resolution and talent for management was celebrated in Dorsetshire, as was her excellent riding.

She looked out of the window, over the garden wall to the cedar trees and the grass which was pale in the rain, and as she took notice of the view she thought of going out on her favourite mare, which was impossible in the circumstances. Constance had often admitted that Hugh would have made an excellent groom, and it was because of
this that they had been able to keep three horses even during the war. He used to speak of mucking out the stables, and growing cabbages, as his war-work. Constance wrinkled up her eyes against tears, and her nose twitched. Her own display of emotion yesterday had amazed her, and she did not mean to cry again.

Throwing aside the eiderdown, she got out of bed, and padded over to her little writing-table, where she was glad to see that there was as usual, plenty of paper and ink. She would not then have to surprise and trouble Sarah by asking for more. Constance put on a grey bed-jacket and slippers, and sat down to write to Darcy.

She began, after she had dated the letter: ‘Dearest Darcy, I know the dreadful news of your father’s death will have reached you before you receive this letter. I expect Gerard telephoned yesterday.’ This she wrote easily, though usually she found letters rather difficult, frowning a little. ‘I have not seen him since it happened, I’m afraid.’

‘I am writing to
you,
darling, because you
may
be able to understand my feelings on being widowed so unexpectedly. Your papa’s death was very, very sudden.

‘Naturally I’m reconciled to God’s will, however inconvenient it may be, but there
are
things that must be discussed, and I can only approach
you.
(I suppose you must think it’s awfully Victorian to talk about God’s will, but I refuse to apologise for the facts, darling!)’ – She paused, thinking that she knew Darcy very well.

Darcy, unlike Gerard, had had no emotional storms as a child; all that had come later, when he was half-way through Winchester and a tall, handsome young man. Then Hugh had begun to dislike him. Darcy had never, since he was tiny, considered his mother to be a stupid woman, even though she was not at all bookish. He had always admired her common sense, taste, musical talent and ability to do
The
Times
crossword, which he and Gerard found quite impossible. Constance thought of all this as she sat over her letter, and she wiped away a tear which she did not find unsuited to the occasion.

‘As you know of course, this house and everything else now belongs to Gerard. What I want you to do, darling (when we are rather more over the shock of your papa’s death), is to make him understand that I can’t leave
at
once
as I have
nowhere
to go.
I do really think he will listen to reason, from you, you’ve always been rather fond of each other, haven’t you? You know I used to say I would like to live in Bath –’ Constance put down her pen. She was shaking and in tears again, and the paper she crushed was spoilt.

At lunchtime, Constance refused the food which was brought up to her room on a tray, and left her bed a second time to write a letter to Sir William Warren. She had been thinking of this letter since she first recovered from her sedated sleep, at dinner time yesterday: she had decided now not to try to write to Darcy again until after she had written to William. It would calm her to wait.

‘My dear William,

‘Perhaps, by the time this reaches you, you will already have heard about Hugh’s death. It was a very great shock to us all, as I need hardly tell you, and I am really very much upset. It was
extremely
sudden. One moment we were making plans (not that we were agreeing) about going over to Ireland for the cubbing, and the next there he was, pale as death and actually in convulsions.’ She meant to make an impression on him.