Late and Soon (3 page)

“That happened more than twenty-five years ago,” added Valentine gently.

“Mummie! Were you mixed up in it?”

“Yes. I was younger than you are now.”

Jess gave her mother an affectionate, amused, incredulous look, before dropping on the floor beside her dog.

“Fancy you being mixed up in any very silly business!” she ejaculated.

Leaving them in the hall Valentine went up the steep, curving staircase with its worn carpet, almost threadbare, to her bedroom, shivering as she moved out of the range of the fire.

The stairs, the large circular-railed landing above and the bedrooms were all unheated, and their temperature seemed lower than that of the wet, mild January afternoon out of doors.

Valentine's room was a large, high one with two big windows that looked over the drive and the front of the park.

The furniture was shabby, of mixed periods, and there was not very much of it in proportion to the size of the room.

The walnut double-bed had already been in place, facing the windows, when Humphrey Arbell's mother had come to Coombe as a bride.

Valentine slowly changed her shoes, looked at her face and hair in the looking-glass without much attention and automatically pushed the loose silvery wave over her forehead into position.

She felt faintly disturbed.

It was not that she was afraid of meeting Rory Lonergan — if it should be Rory Lonergan.

On the contrary, she'd be disappointed if it
wasn't
Rory Lonergan. The idea of seeing him again brought with it a curious emotional excitement, partly amused and partly sentimental.

Her perturbation, Valentine found, arose from a faint sense of remorse that she had, by implication, accepted her brother's trivial estimate of the “very silly business” of twenty-five years earlier.

Reggie would necessarily see it like that — would have seen it like that even if he'd known far more about it than he ever had known.

But Valentine was clearly aware that what had happened that week in Rome in the spring of nineteen hundred and fourteen had held for her a reality that she had never found since.

The evening meal at Coombe was still called dinner. It was announced, in a breathless and inaudible manner, by a fifteen-year-old parlour-maid.

The General nightly struggled into a patched and faded smoking-jacket of maroon velvet. Valentine Arbell — shuddering with cold — put on a three-year-old black chiffon afternoon dress and a thick Chinese shawl of embroidered silk of which the fringes caught in every available piece of furniture whenever she moved.

Jess, under violent protest, still obeyed the rule that compelled her to exchange warm and comfortable breeches or a tweed skirt and wool jumper for an outgrown silk or cotton frock from the previous summer.

“But once I've gone into uniform, mummie, never again,” she said.

Valentine believed her.

As it was, she was always rather surprised that Jess should still do as she was told about changing for dinner when Primrose, at an earlier age, had flatly refused to do so.

“Come on, aunt Sophy,” cried Jess hilariously as the mongrel rushed, falling over its own paws, at the young parlour-maid standing in the doorway.

Jess dashed at aunt Sophy, picked her up and allowed her face to be licked all over.

“Don't!” said Valentine involuntarily.

“Put the thing down, Jess,” commanded the General. “Carting it about like that!”

Jess ignored them both, without ill-will but from sheer absorption in her dog and her own preoccupations.

Valentine sometimes wondered what those preoccupations were. Jess appeared so artless, so outspoken — yet never did she give one the slightest clue as to what her inmost thoughts might be.

She stood back now, politely, to let her mother precede her into the dining-room. The General shuffled along at his own pace with Sally, the spaniel, morosely crawling at his heels. She was old and fat, and hated leaving the fire in the hall for the unwarmed dining-room.

It was another large room and although shutters protected the three French windows behind their faded blue brocade curtains, a piercing draught always came from beneath the service door at the far end of the room.

It was impossible not to shudder, at the temperature of the dining-room.

The General made his nightly observation:

“This room is like an ice-house.”

The oval walnut table, looking not unlike a desert island in the middle of an arctic sea, was laid with wineglasses that were scarcely ever used, silver that required daily polishing, and a centrepiece of a Paul Lamerie silver rose-bowl.

Valentine disentangled the fringe of her, shawl from the arm of her chair and sat down at the head of the table, and General Levallois placed himself at the other end.

Jess shrieked directions to the dogs, knocked over a glass, laughed, and took her place facing the windows.

The conversation, which consisted of isolated observations and uninspired rejoinders, was spaced across long intervals of silence, and the first word was uttered by the General after Ivy, the maid, had left the room.

“These plates are stone-cold, as usual.”

“I've told her, Reggie, but you know it's only Mrs.
Ditchley. It's not as though she was a proper cook.”

“Shall we ever have a proper cook again, mummie?”

“I don't think so, darling. It seems extremely unlikely that anybody will have one, at least until the war's over.”

“And then we'll all be Communists, under Stalin, and there'll
be
no servants,” said Jess. She glanced at her uncle out of the corners of her eyes.

“I'm not going to rise, Jessica.”

Jess and Valentine both laughed, and the General looked pleased with himself.

When the few spoonfuls of thin potato soup were finished, Jess got up, pretended to fall over aunt Sophy and played with her for a moment, and then went and jerked the old-fashioned china bell-handle, painted with roses and pansies, at the side of the empty fireplace.

The harsh, metallic clanging that ensued could be heard in the distance.

Jess sat down again.

She talked to the dogs in an undertone. The General put on his glasses and read the little white menu-card, in its silver holder, that he always expected to find on the table in front of him in the evenings, and that Valentine always wrote out for him.

He inspected it without exhilaration, and pushed it away again.

Ivy came in again, changed the plates, and handed round first a silver entrée dish, and then two vegetable dishes.

“Do we
have
to have baked cod every single day?” Jess asked plaintively.

“It was all I could get.”

Much later on, General Levallois addressed his sister.

“I thought we'd agreed not to have the potatoes boiled every time they appear.”

“I don't suppose Mrs. Ditchley has many ideas beyond boiling them. And it's not easy to spare any fat
for frying them or doing anything amusing. I'll speak to her to-morrow.”

Valentine made these rejoinders almost as she might have spoken them in her sleep, so familiar were they.

She knew that the food was uninteresting, ill-prepared, and lacking in variety, and she regretted it, mildly, on her brother's account, rather more on Jessica's.

Both Primrose and Jess had taken a Domestic Science course at school: on Primrose it had apparently made no impression whatever. Jess had acquired some skill at laundry-work and sometimes washed and ironed her own clothes. She said that she hated cooking, house-work and sewing, and never intended to do any of them.

Valentine rather wonderingly remembered her own education, in the various capitals of Europe into which her father's diplomatic career had taken him.

She had learnt two languages besides her own, and knew the rules of precedence at a dinner-party, and” she had been a beautiful ballroom dancer and had had a good seat on a horse.

She could think of nothing else that she had ever acquired.

Certainly not the art of housekeeping in England on an inadequate income. She had never done it well, even in Humphrey's lifetime.

Contrary to what a good many people had repeatedly told her, Valentine did not really believe that she could have learned. She disliked everything that she did know about housekeeping and could not persuade herself that it was of sufficiently intrinsic importance to justify the expenditure of time, money and nervous energy that it seemed to require.

“Mummie, d'you think those officers will really be billeted here, this time?”

“They might be, Jess. But we never heard any more of the other ones who said they were coming.”

“Still, a
Colonel.
They can't go chopping and changing
about with
him.
I hope he'll come and I hope Buster'll be the other one.”

“Buster?”

“Lieutenant Banks is always called Buster. He told me so himself. I thought he was divine. Mummie! d'you mean to say we're having a savoury
again,
instead of a sweet?”

Jess picked up, and then threw down, the small knife and fork that had led her to this deduction.

“My dear, it's almost impossible to get anything to make a sweet of, nowadays. And you know, we did have a pudding at lunch.”

“Well, God help this poor Colonel person, that's all, if he comes here expecting to be fed.”

Jessica's lamentations were seldom meant to be taken seriously.

When Ivy handed round the dish where sardines lay upon dark and brittle fragments of toast, it was not Jess but General Levallois who complained.

“I thought we'd just been eating fish, Val?”

“I know we have. Really and truly, Reggie, we've got to take what we can get nowadays.”

“Certainly we have. But I don't think this woman has much idea of what's what.
Surely
she can arrange things so that we don't have two fish courses one on top of the other.”

“She can't, but I suppose I could,” said Valentine. “I must try and manage better another time.”

The gentle politeness of this phrase, in return for a stricture that she thought both graceless and unreasonable, was quite automatic.

For more than twenty years now Valentine had been answering with gentle and polite phrases that meant nothing at all, most of the remarks addressed to her. She had been trained from babyhood to think politeness of the utmost importance, and she had never outgrown, nor sought to outgrow, the habit of it. But she was sometimes
conscious that her own good manners afforded her a sense of superiority and of that she was slightly ashamed.

She knew that it had annoyed Humphrey, for the Arbell tradition was the blunter, more outspoken one of the British squirearchy. He had once accused her of never losing her temper.

Valentine could not remember what reply she had made to that.

The true answer, she thought, was that it had never been worth while.

“There's another sardine left, mummie. Do have it.”

“No thank you, darling.”

“Uncle Reggie? Aren't you going to have it?”

“It doesn't sound as though I were, Jess.”

“No truly —
please
do.”

“Go on. Take it. I don't want it.”

“It would be quite possible to have another tin of sardines opened,” said Valentine. “We've really got plenty of those in the store cupboard.”

“I'm glad we're not reduced to splitting the last sardine,” Jess declared. “Well, if nobody wants it—”

She got up and helped herself from the dish left on the sideboard.

“Shall I ring, now I'm up? I'll have finished long before she gets here.”

Ivy's final appearance was for the purpose of clearing everything off the table, sweeping up the crumbs onto a silver salver, and then putting down three Wedgwood dessert plates each with its glass finger-bowl, a decanter with a very little port in it before the General, and a dish of small red apples.

Jess ate one of the apples and the General made his customary gesture of passing round the decanter, from which no one — not even himself — ever poured out a drink.

“You know,” said Jess, “I often think this house is a bit like a madhouse. The way we sit here, and let Ivy
wait on us, and all that business of clearing away for dessert when there isn't any dessert — honestly, it's bats, isn't it?”

“Must behave like civilized beings,” suggested General Levallois, rather wearily and without much conviction.

“Nobody else does. Really and truly. I mean the people at school's houses that I've stayed at, everybody waits on themselves, and it's practically always supper, not dinner, and nobody
dreams
of changing their clothes. And at Rockingham, which is the only grand place I ever go to, there's a butler and a proper dinner. I don't mean that we don't get proper food here, mummie, but it isn't exactly dinner, is it? I mean, not compared to aunt Venetia's.”

“Your aunt Venetia's husband is a rich man — or at least he was once. He won't be now,” said the General, not without an underlying note of satisfaction.

“I bet you, however poor they get, aunt Venetia and uncle Charlie will go on having salmon and roast duck and pheasants and things. Isn't it awful how one never thinks about anything except food nowadays? Come on, dogs! It's time you thought about food, too.”

Jess went out, preceded by the dogs, to feed them in the lobby.

Valentine and the General followed, Valentine disentangling the fringes of her shawl from a chair-back.

In the hall she threw another log on the fire, shook up the cushions and emptied an ash-tray. General Levallois remarked, as she had known that he would:

“Can't the housemaid or one of 'em do that while we're in the dining-room?”

“I could tell her about it.”

The child of fourteen who, with Ivy and the cook, completed the indoor staff at Coombe had plenty to do already, and did it sufficiently badly. It would be useless to impose fresh duties on her.