At Lady Molly's (16 page)

Would it be too explicit, too exaggerated, to say that when I set eyes on Isobel Tolland, I knew at once that I should marry her? Something like that is the truth; certainly nearer the truth than merely to record those vague, inchoate sentiments of interest of which I was so immediately conscious. It was as if I had known her for many years already; enjoyed happiness with her and suffered sadness. I was conscious of that, as of another life, nostalgically remembered. Then, at that moment, to be compelled to go through all the paraphernalia of introduction, of ‘getting to know’ one another by means of the normal formalities of social life, seemed hardly worth while. We knew one another already; the future was determinate. But what—it may reasonably be asked—what about the fact that only a short time before I had been desperately in love with Jean Duport; was still, indeed, not sure that I had been wholly cured? Were the delights and agonies of all that to be tied up with ribbon, so to speak, and thrown into a drawer to be forgotten? What about the girls with whom I seemed to stand nighdy in cinema queues? What, indeed?

‘Aren’t we going to be told who everyone is?’ said Susan, looking round the room and smiling.

Although her smile was friendly, charming, there could be no doubt that, like her sister, Norah, Susan was capable of making herself disagreeable if she chose.

‘Oh, sorry,’ said Erridge. ‘What am I thinking of? I am not used to having so many people in this room.’

He mumbled our names. Isobel seemed to take them in; Susan, less certainly. Both girls were excited about something, apparently about some piece of news they had to impart.

‘Have you come from far?’ asked Quiggin.

He spoke in an unexpectedly amiable tone, so much muting the harshness of his vowels that these sounded almost like the ingratiating speech of his associate, Howard Craggs, the publisher. Quiggin had previously named Erridge’s family in such disparaging terms that I had almost supposed he would give some outward sign of the disapproval he felt for the kind of life they lived. He would have been capable of that; or at least withholding from them any mark of cordiality. Now, on the contrary, he had wrung the girls’ hands heartily, grinning with pleasure, as if delighted by this opportunity of meeting them both. Mona, on the other hand, did not trouble to conceal traces of annoyance, or at least disappointment, at all this additional feminine competition put into the field against her so suddenly and without warning.

‘Yes, we’ve come rather miles,’ said Susan Tolland, who was evidently very pleased about something. ‘The car made the most extraordinary sounds at one point. Isobel said it was like a woman wailing for her demon lover. I thought it sounded more like the demon lover himself.’

‘Anyway, here you are in “sunny domes and caves of ice”,’ said Quiggin. ‘You know I get more and more interested in Coleridge for some reason.’

‘Do you—do you want anything to eat, either of you?’ Erridge enquired, uneasily.

He pointed quite despairingly at the table, as if he hoped the food we had just consumed would, by some occult processs, be restored there once more; as if we were indeed living in the realm of poetic enchantment adumbrated by Quiggin.

‘We had a bite at the Tolland Arms,’ said Isobel, taking a banana from the dish and beginning to peel it. ‘And very disgusting the food was there, too. We didn’t know you would be entertaining on a huge scale, Erry. In fact we were not even certain you were in residence. We thought you might be away on one of your jaunts.’

She cast a glance at us from under her eyelashes to indicate that she was not laughing openly at her brother, but, at the same time, we must realise that the rest of the family considered his goings-on pretty strange. Quiggin caught her eye, and, with decided disloyalty to Erridge, smiled silently back at her: implying that he too shared to the fullest extent the marrow of that particular joke. Isobel threw herself haphazard into an armchair, her long legs stretched out in front of her.

‘Where have you come from?’ asked Erridge.

He spoke formally, almost severely, as if forcing himself to take an interest in his sisters’ behaviour, however extraordinary; behaviour which, owing to the fortunate dispensations of circumstance, could never affect him personally to the smallest degree. Indeed, he spoke as if utter remoteness from his own manner of life, for that very reason, made a subject otherwise unexciting, even distasteful, possess aspects impossible for him to disregard. It was as if his sisters, in themselves, represented customs so strange and incalculable that even the most detached person could not fail to allow his attention to be caught for a second or two by such startling oddness.

‘We’ve been at the Alfords’,’ said Isobel, discarding the banana skin into the waste-paper basket. ‘Throw me an orange, Susy. Susan had an adventure there.’

‘Not an adventure exactly,’ said her sister. ‘And, anyway, it’s my story, not yours, Isobel. Hardly an adventure. Unless you call getting married an adventure. I suppose some people might.’ ‘Why, have you got married, Susan?’ asked Erridge.

He showed no surprise whatever, and very little interest, at the presentation of this possibility: merely mild, on the whole benevolent, approval.

‘I haven’t yet,’ said Susan, suddenly blushing deeply. ‘But I am going to.’

She was, I think, suddenly overwhelmed at the thought of marriage and all it implied. The announcement of her engagement, planned with great dash, had not been entirely carried off with the required air of indifference. I even wondered for a moment whether she was not going to cry. However, she mastered herself immediately. At the sight of her sister’s face, Isobel began to blush violently too.

‘To whom?’ asked Erridge, still completely calm. ‘I am so glad to hear the news.’

‘Roddy Cutts.’

The name clearly conveyed nothing whatever to her brother, who still smiled amiably, unable to think of anything to say.

‘There was a Lady Augusta Cutts who used to give dances when I was a young man,’ he said, at last.

He spoke as if he were at least as old as General Conyers. No doubt the days when he had occasionally gone to dances seemed by then infinitely distant: indeed, much further off, and no less historic, than the General’s cavalry charge.

‘Lady Augusta is his mother.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘She is rather a terror.’

There was a pause.

‘What does he do?’ asked Erridge, as if conscious that it might seem bad-mannered to drop the subject altogether, however much he himself hoped to move on to something more interesting.

‘I can’t tell you exactly,’ said Susan. ‘But he has something he does. I mean he doesn’t absolutely beg his bread from door to door. He looks into the Conservative Central Office once in a way too.’

Erridge’s face fell at the mention of this last establishment. Quiggin, however, came to the rescue.

‘Much as I hate the Tories,’ he said, ‘I’ve heard that Cutts is one of their few promising young men.’

Everyone, including Susan Tolland herself, was surprised by this sudden avowal on the part of Quiggin, who was showing at least as much enthusiasm on the subject of the engagement as might have been expected from Erridge himself.

‘I grant it may not be my place to say so,’ Quiggin went on, switching at the same time to a somewhat rougher delivery. ‘But you know, Alf, you really ought to celebrate rightly in a bottle of champagne. Now, don’t you think there is some bubbly left in that cellar of yours?’

This speech astonished me, not because there was anything surprising in Quiggin’s desire for champagne, but on account of a changed attitude towards his host. Erridge’s essentially ascetic type of idealism, concerned with the mass rather than the individual, and reinforced by an aristocratic, quite legitimate desire to avoid vulgar display, had no doubt moved imperceptibly into that particular sphere of parsimony defined by Lovell as ‘upper-class stinginess’. To demand champagne was deliberately to inflame such responses in Erridge. Possibly Quiggin, seeing unequivocal signs of returning sulkiness in Mona, hoped to avert that mood by this daring manoeuvre: equally, as a sheer exercise of will, he may have decided at that moment to display his power over his patron. Neither motive would be out of keeping with his character. Finally, he might have hoped merely to ingratiate himself with Susan Tolland—certainly a pretty girl—whom he possibly cast for some at present unrevealed role in his future plans. Whatever his reason, he received a very encouraging smile from her after making this proposal.

‘What a jolly good idea,’ she said. ‘As a matter of fact I was waiting for Erry to suggest it.’

Erridge was undoubtedly taken aback, although not, I think, on the ground that the suggestion came from Quiggin. Erridge did not traffic in individual psychology. It was an idea that was important to him, not its originator. The whole notion of drinking champagne because your sister was engaged was, in itself, obviously alien to him; alien both to his temperament and ideals. Champagne no doubt represented to his mind a world he had fled. Now the wine was presented as a form of rite or observance, almost, indeed, as a restorative or tonic after hearing dangerously exciting news, he seemed primarily concerned with the question whether or not any champagne remained in the house. The fact that Quiggin had put forward the proposal must at least have disposed of any fears as to whether in this manner a coarse display of his own riches might be symbolised. However, even faced with this utterly unforeseen problem, Erridge was by no means thrown off his guard. I could not help admiring the innate caution with which he seasoned his own eccentricity. Even in Erridge, some trace of that ‘realism’ was observable of which Chipps Lovell used to speak; among the rest of the Tollands, as I discovered later, a characteristic strongly developed.

‘I really cannot reply to that question offhand,’ Erridge said—and one caught a faint murmur of ancestral voices answering for the Government some awkward question raised by the Opposition—’As you know I hardly ever drink anything myself, except an occasional glass of beer—certainly never champagne. To tell the truth, I hate the stuff. We’d better ask Smith.’

Smith, as it happened, appeared at that moment with coffee. Already he showed signs of being nervously disturbed by the arrival of the girls, his hands shaking visibly as he held the tray; so much so that some of the liquid spilled from the pot.

‘Smith, is there any champagne left in the cellar?’

Erridge’s voice admitted the exceptional nature of the enquiry. He asked almost apologetically. Even so, the shock was terrific. Smith started so violently that the coffee cups rattled on the tray. It was evident that we were now concerned with some far more serious matter than the earlier pursuit of sherry. Recovering himself with an effort, Smith directed a stare of hatred at Quiggin, at once revealed by some butler’s instinct as the ultimate cause of this unprecedented demand. The colourless, unhealthy skin of his querulous face, stretched like a pale rubber mask over the bones of his features, twitched a little.

‘Champagne, m’lord?’

‘Have we got any? One bottle would do. Even a half-bottle.’

Smith’s face puckered, as if manfully attempting to force his mind to grapple with a mathematical or philosophical problem of extraordinary complexity. His bearing suggested that he had certainly before heard the word ‘champagne’ used, if only in some distant, outlandish context; that devotion to his master alone gave him some apprehension of what this question—these ravings, almost—might mean. Nothing good could come of it. This was a disastrous way to talk. That was his unspoken message so far as champagne was concerned. After a long pause, he at last shook his head.

‘I doubt if there is any champagne left, m’lord.’

‘Oh, I’m sure there is, Smith, if you go and look,’ said Susan. ‘You see it is to celebrate my engagement, Smith. I’m going to get married.’

Another twitch passed quickly, almost like a flash of lightning, over Smith’s face. I had by no means taken a fancy to him, either here or at the Jeavonses’, but it was impossible not to feel some sympathy for his predicament: forced at short notice to adapt himself to the whims of his different employers; for it was unlikely that his Thrubworth routine was anything like that at the Jeavonses’.

‘Very pleased to hear the news, m’lady,’ he said. ‘Wish you the best of luck. I expect it will be Lady Isobel’s turn soon.’

These felicitations were handsome on Smith’s part, although Isobel, in spite of being several years younger than her sister, evidently had no wish for comparison between them to be drawn in a manner which made her, by representing, as it were, those girls not yet engaged, seem to come out second best. However, if Smith hoped by drawing attention to engagements in general to dispose of the question of champagne, he was disappointed.

‘Anyway, Smith, do go and have a look,’ said Isobel. ‘My throat is absolutely parched.’

Erridge might have no wish to drink champagne, even if available, but he had also clearly decided that things had gone too far for the idea to be abandoned without loss of face on his own part. Smith, too, must finally have realised that, for he now set down the coffee tray and abandoned the room in full retreat, moving like a man without either enthusiasm or hope.

‘Smith doesn’t seem to get any soberer,’ said Susan, when he had shut the door.

‘As a matter of fact, Smith hasn’t had one of his real bouts for a long time,’ said Erridge.

He spoke reprovingly.

‘So drink is Smith’s trouble, is it?’ said Quiggin, with great geniality. ‘You never told me that. I often thought he might be one over the eight. That explains a lot.’

‘Smith sometimes takes a glass too much,’ said Erridge, shortly, perhaps beginning to notice, and resent, the change in Quiggin’s manner since the arrival of the girls. ‘I usually pretend not to notice. It must be an awful job to be a butler anyway. I don’t really approve of having indoor men-servants, but it is hard to run a house this size without them, even when you live, like me, in only a small part of it. I can’t get rid of the place, because it is entailed—so there it is.’