The Matchmaker (24 page)

Not the faintest smile, not even a lurking echo of a teasing note, showed on her face or sounded in her voice, as she discussed the prospect of a fresh girl of eighteen and a comely man of twenty-three spending twenty minutes alone together every day. Blessed are the cold in heart, for at least they do not put ideas into other people’s heads.

“He needs brightening up a bit,” said Sylvia meditatively, biting at a hunk of bread. “They’re a low type, those Italian peasants. It’s lack of civilisation and education, isn’t it? Do you know, Mrs. Hoadley”—and she leant across the table and her chicory-blue eyes looked wide and shocked—“Fabrio
smells
!”

“A good many people do,” said Mrs. Hoadley resignedly, “but you shouldn’t say that, Sylvia, it’s vulgar. It can’t be very bad, I haven’t noticed it, and I should have.”

“Oh, it isn’t so bad as all that, it’s only sort of earthy, and his clothes aren’t very clean.”

“Poor man, I expect he doesn’t get much chance to wash himself or his clothes either in that camp. When the weather gets a little better and Mr. Hoadley’s grandmother at the Wild Brooks sends us another batch of her soap, I’ll tell him he can wash his clothes here.”

“Yes, do!” cried Sylvia, putting a potato into her mouth and talking through it. “We’ll soon civilise him, won’t we, between us!”

“What a lot you do eat, Sylvia,” said Mrs. Hoadley—adding
hastily
in answer to a surprised and reproachful glance, “I don’t grudge it you, but I don’t know how you
can
. Half a slice, and I’m done.”

“Oo, I love eating. Food—I could go on for ever!”

“You’ll get fat,” said the farmer’s wife, with a not unkind smile.

“Oo, I’m fat now,” glancing down at her shirt, “they said at the School I’d have to lose a stone if I wanted to look right on the stage.”

“I like a nice slim figure myself,” said Mrs. Hoadley, stroking her sides. “It shows off your clothes.”

“I want to wash a few things this evening, could you let me have a loan of your soap powder?”

“I will, but you use such a
lot
, Sylvia, and we’re a bit short until next month’s ration comes along. Can’t you use old Mrs. Hoadley’s soap?”

“Doesn’t lather like the powder. Whatever’s it made of, anyway?”

“Wood ash and pig fat—I don’t know half what she puts in it.”

“Ugh! The first time I heard you talking about her sending you some soap I thought she kept a shop or was in with the Black Market.”

“There’s nothing like that goes on here, as you know,” said Mrs. Hoadley sharply. “The old lady and her husband keep pigs on their bit of land just outside Amberley—Amberley God Knows, as they call it round here—and she can always manage to get hold of a bit of fat, in spite of the Pig Board, to mix up with her wood ash. They’ve got a regular wilderness all round them too, hazels and willow and all that stuff that grows so quickly and the old chap cuts that down and burns it for the ash. You seem to have eaten all the pudding, it’s just as well I’ve put Mr. Hoadley’s by. Come on, there’s just time for our tea before we start again,” and a faint note of satisfaction came into her voice with the words.

“That’s nice,” she said, when she had drunk some tea, and she sighed.

“I’ll have to get it a bit earlier for you to-morrow, if I’ve got to be there by twenty to one.”

“You needn’t trouble, Sylvia, I don’t want it hustled,” said Mrs. Hoadley, decisively. “If I can’t drink it in peace and quiet I don’t enjoy it.”

Sylvia sucked up her own tea and looked apprehensively over the top of the cup.

“I could manage to get it before I go, really I could.”

“It’s kind of you, but I’d rather not. I don’t want you banging and clattering about like a young elephant getting the tea.”

“Young elephant! Thank you!” The last drop of tea went down, and Sylvia set her cup on the saucer.

“Don’t bang it down like that, you’ll break it, next thing.”

“Sorry. Well,” she stood up, “I must get cracking. Thanks for a smashing lunch.” She slowly stretched her arms out, straining the coarse shirt over her bosom, then vigorously twisted her hair into a knot and secured it with two large black hairpins. Over this she tied a faded scarf.

“The way
I
like your hair done is low on your neck,” said Mrs. Hoadley, poking the fire.

Sylvia made a face. “It makes me look so
corny
.”

“Don’t be silly, it’s a refined style and it shows up your eyes, that side parting.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” said Sylvia, pleased, and she strode away whistling, thinking that perhaps she would dress her hair like that when she met Fabrio.

PART OF JEAN’S
nature belonged to a sentimental slave. Had it grown to the power over her whole character which it had threatened in her early youth it would have made of her a different person; morbidly, helplessly wandering in that labyrinth which ensnares those who are both timid and chaste yet longing for love, and from which few find their way out into the fresh air, for the lamp they carry has long ago been quenched and become a tear-bottle. But she was saved by her sturdier qualities and the varied nature of the novels she read; had they been only love-stories, all the voices in her nature (laughing or sharp or ironical) might have been muted in sighs and tears. But from the age of fifteen, when she found
Tom Jones
and
Three Men in a Boat
and
Quo Vadis
in the attics at Alda’s home, love in novels was to her only one of the novelists’ themes, and not the most absorbing; and although that
sick, true-hearted slave
in her soul continued to run forward to meet and recognise Love before Love had made any movement towards her, side by side with the slave dwelt her other selves, who took a different view of life, and who had lately taken to criticising the slave’s habits.

During the days that followed her first meeting with Mr. Waite, she thought her usual thoughts about a new man; his figure was good, his eyes were handsome, that severe manner was exciting, and so forth, but the incantation refused to work, the fumes did not rise, and the slave remained sober. I am not thrilled with him; he isn’t quite my type, decided Jean.

She and Alda had not discussed their new acquaintance as exhaustively as they might have done, because their attention was at this time fully engaged with the children and the convent.

The first weeks there were so unhappy that Alda seriously
thought
of taking them away, and as she knew that if she wrote her intention to Ronald he would certainly forbid her to do so, she was almost as miserable as her daughters. In listening to Jenny’s shuddering accounts of the unappetising lunches and the severity of the nuns, she had no previous experience in disentangling such tales to help her to distinguish truth from the exaggeration due to violent distaste, for, until now, she had always known the backgrounds against which Jenny and Louise had moved. She did not realise (though she might have, from remembering her own years at a boarding school) that children always grumble about school food, just as they always praise food served in the shoddiest restaurant or tea-shop; and she did not understand that, to little girls brought up in a home where virtue was assumed unless wrongdoing had been proved, the system of assuming wrongdoing, and not believing even in the
desire
to do right, appeared terrible in its harshness and injustice.

Day after day Jenny came home with those marks of tears upon her face or flushed and defiant with the recent recollection of some conflict with authority; yet, when Alda caught a glimpse of Sister Benedict in the mornings when she waited for the children in the hushed, gleaming, flower-decorated little room with the statue in blue cloak and white robe, and they were ushered in to her by a nun whose businesslike manner did not prevent her from smiling, it did seem difficult, indeed, it was not possible, to reconcile this clean, peaceful orderliness and these calm pink faces with Jenny’s tales of uneatable meals and those same faces purple and snapping with fury.

“That’s only their cleverness,” Jenny assured her, sitting up in bed in shabby pyjamas which were a hand-on from her cousin Richard. “They always put that on when the mothers are there. Egg says so.”

“
Who
says so?”

“Egg Peers. Her real name’s Eglantine. She lives at that enormous house just outside the village. Her people are awfully rich. She’s got a pony.” And Jenny sighed. The clarity of her
expression
had already been destroyed: at one time it had been so clear as to suggest that nothing went on behind her eyes that was not spoken by her lips. It had gone, and it would not come again, but mothers must make up their minds to see that expression “fade into the light of common day.”

So Eglantine had a pony, had she? Well, thought Alda, at least I can do something about that. The moment was certainly ripe.

“Jenny, would you like to have riding lessons?”

“Oh Mother! Super! But—we can’t afford it, can we?”

“Marion sent the money to pay for twelve lessons for you just after Christmas. I’ve been keeping it for a surprise.”

“Oh Mother! How lovely! Oh, it’s something to look
forward
to,” and Jenny slid beneath the bedclothes and ecstatically danced her feet. “I’ve always wanted them,” her voice came up, muffled by blankets, “only I pretended I didn’t because I thought we couldn’t afford it.” She emerged, with ruffled hair and a joyful face. “Where shall I go for them? Carina Smith——”

“
Who
, Jenny?”

“Carina Smith. She’s in my form.”

“What perfectly extraordinary names they do have there—Damaris, Eglantine, Carina!”

“Their parents like them to be different, Carina says. She doesn’t think Jenny’s an unusual name at all. I suppose you wouldn’t let me call myself Janina?”

“I would not, and neither would your father. I’ve been talking to Mr. Hoadley about riding lessons and he thinks Mr. Mead down at Rush House would be the best person to go to. He says those people who run the school at Burlham are more expensive and not so good.”

“Egg goes to Burlham.”

“I daresay.”

“Mother darling, will you come out with me?”

“I will the first two or three times perhaps, then Jean can go
out
with you. She’s going to treat Weez to some lessons, too,” she added.

“Oh good.” Jenny was her mother’s daughter and it did not occur to her that anyone could be afraid of a horse.

Communications were accordingly opened with Mr. Mead and Jenny’s first lesson was arranged for the following week, which was the third in February.

The children had been at the convent for nearly a month and as the days went on, with their undiminished catalogues of misfortunes from Jenny, Alda began to notice a slight change in Louise. She had never been so passionate as her sister in her complaints of the convent discipline and Alda had always known, from the reports of the children’s various haphazard instructors and from Ronald himself, that she was the cleverer of the two. These qualities now began to work for her greater comfort, for although the Sisters never praised those patient efforts to improve the spider-writing, it did begin to improve; it straightened, the blots dwindled and finally, like the last flying drops of a rain shower, ceased altogether; the simple verbs and tables and dates, at first stumblingly repeated under a fire of sarcastic comment gradually became fluent and accurate and were received in silence but with full marks and, above all, the submission and obedience with which Louise received every reproof or irksome instruction earned the affectionate approval of those among the nuns who loved children and cherished in their souls the image of that heavenly Child whom they believed that human children should aspire to imitate.

In these mornings of earliest spring, which were gradually growing brighter as the sun came up earlier across the fields and sent low rays between swelling willow buds and catkins, Fabrio would see the group of children setting out for school as the prisoners’ lorry paused at the crossroads to set down Emilio and himself, and sometimes, if he did not feel morose, he would wave to them. Should Sister Benedict happen to arrive in the
car
while the lorry was there, all the prisoners would shout “Good morning!” to her and receive in response a smile and a movement of the lips which those of them who were Christians knew meant
God bless you
.

Fabrio drew from the presence of the convent among its spinneys that same sense of familiarity and home which dwelt, for him, among the rafters and sacks of the granary, and sometimes as he worked his mind would vaguely dwell upon a picture of the Sisters, at prayer before the altar or moving amidst flowers and holy images. On Sundays he went to early Mass with a few other prisoners, and once a week he went to Confession but there, to him, it was an awesome, confused impression of words muttered in an unfamiliar tongue whose sound had yet been familiar to him almost from babyhood, the severe colourless face of Father Francesco above the shining curve of the Cup, the scent of burned-out incense steeping the air, the glow of flower colours and the glimmer of stars upon Our Lady’s mantle; and these, though they were dear to him and he would have missed them strongly if they had been taken away from him, were less dear than that sense of home breathed out by the granary and inspired in him by the sight of the Sisters’ black robes.