Unclouded Summer (26 page)

“I'll just fix these flowers then I'll show you round,” she said.

On the windowsills behind the choir she set pots of hyacinth, concealing the earthenware with trailing tendrils of plumbago. She filled the vases on the altar with irises and daffodils. A tin cross fitted with water cups hung from the pulpit. She filled the cups with moss and primroses and stocks.

“I suppose I'm rather overdoing it for Lent but even in Lent, churches should look bright,” she said.

She filled the font with ferns and bracken; spreading across the lower windows branches that were just breaking into leaf.

It was like no church that he had ever seen before. “The little church round the corner” had something of this feeling, but that was a city church and that was different. No city church could have the feeling that a church in the country had, of being the center of the life grouped round it. He thought of the Episcopalian New England churches of his youth and boyhood contrasting their bareness and dignity, their height and light and graciousness of line with the dimness and mustiness of this Norman church, with its carved reredos before the choir; the Commandments lettered with gilt capitals in Old-English script, the faded murals on the insides of the thick walls beside the windows, the memorial urns and brasses, the hatchments and the effigies, the silver-stitched deep purple tapestry upon the altar, the ornate cross and candles. No two kinds of church could have been less
alike yet each in its own way was simple; the guardian and the symbol of a country faith.

“I want to show you our old pew,” she said.

It was behind the choir stalls. It was not a pew but a small room, with wooden sides seven feet high. In one corner was a fireplace.

“I suppose the idea was that the villagers shouldn't see the Lord of the Manor sleeping during the sermon.”

“You don't use it now?”

She shook her head.

“My uncle smuggled in a sheep dog once when my grandfather was away. My grandfather had a good nose. He noticed it during the evening service. We've sat in the front pew ever since.”

She took him round the church. The murals inside the window were very old, she said. She showed him the elaborate eighteenth-century testimonies to her relatives. Two effigies had been let into the recesses in the wall. The first wore a doublet and short hose. “He was killed at Basing by the Roundheads. Did you see the ruins as you came through?” she asked.

Francis read the inscription over it. “John Stuart Bolstone, killed fighting for his King at Basing. June 22,1643.”

“ ‘Basing?' I didn't notice it. It was raining hard.”

“I'll show you it in a day or two.”

The other effigy was of a woman with a ruff and a wide spreading skirt, a spaniel was sleeping at her feet.

“Marion Jane, beloved wife of John Gilbert Bolstone, First Baron Chidingfold,” he read. She pointed to a marble tablet, surmounted by a hatchment. “That's the end of it,” she said. “My great-grandfather.”

“John Stuart Bolstone, Fourth Baron Chidingfold,” he read.

“The title died with him,” she explained.

There was a pause; he looked round him at the brasses and the tablets, three-quarters of them had been put up to her relatives.

“Nothing to disgrace our name,” his father had adjured him. But what did the name Oliver mean to him, what did the name mean to any of the people that he moved among? -himself, his father and his grandfather. That was all. And he was exceptional in having had a grandfather whom people that he met could still remember. It was very different for Marion, who lived in the atmosphere of three hundred years, for whom an ancestor who had fought for King Charles was
still an influence in her life, someone who sat in judgment of her now, who was one of the members of the tribunal by which her value was assessed. To everyone in the village, to everyone who came to Charlton, Marion was part of a long tradition: to Marion the injunction “nothing to disgrace our name” could have, must have, a pertinent significance.

What could the injunction mean to him whose ancestors had traveled from one town, one village to another, in a country so vast that nearly every one of its forty-eight states was larger than this Whole country? For Marion during more than three hundred years her family had been a part of English history. What did he know about his family? His great-grandfather had come over to America, some time in the 1820's. he was an Englishman. But Francis had no idea from what part of England he had come; he had no idea from what kind of people he had come or why he had crossed the ocean. He did not know if he had intended to return. He had died young, and his story had died with him. His own grandfather had never known him. His great-grandmother had remarried, had moved to another state, had other children: that early romance with a stranger from across the seas had grown shadowy as the years and her responsibilities had increased.

“I could never find out much about my father,” his grandfather had said. “He left no books or papers. My mother was only married to him two years. They lived in Pittsburgh. He was a steel worker. He was killed in a fire at the factory. My mother went to stay with a cousin on the Eastern seaboard. That's where she met my stepfather.”

The stepfather had had to do with shipping, in a minor way, and it was up and down that coast that Francis' grandfather had spent his boyhood. There had been a home at New London; another at New Haven; for six years he had lived in Maine. Francis had a very clear recollection of his grandfather, a stern, bearded figure, in a blue peaked cap, sitting being a general hostess ing on the verandah, looking out over the river watching the tugs and barges chunk slowly past, talking of seas and ships.

Francis was exceptional in that he should be living still in the house that had been his grandfather's. But there was no real reason why his grandfather should have settled in East Haddam. He had no links with the neighborhood. Nor for that matter had he himself. It was only a few years ago that his father on his retirement had come to live there. His own boyhood had known four different homes, as his father had moved to take up new appointments. Aunts and grandparents
and cousins had been vague figures in the background, there had been presents and cards at Christmas, but he had hardly ever met them. He knew practically nothing of his mother's parents. What could the “family name” mean to him, in the way that it could to Marion?

And yet in the same way that there was a kinship between this dark, old church with its rich and prized possessions and the cool bare churches of his boyhood, both being the repository of the same kind of faith, so was he the product just as much as Marion was, of a deep-based tradition. In the same way that these brasses and these tablets, these effigies and hatchments, counseled and warned and guided Marion, saying to her at the separate crises of her life”If you do this, then you break faith with us,” had not for him the cool Northern air, and the sight of the elms and maples, the trim avenues, the white and green paint, the wooden houses, the slim church spires, the broad curving river, spoken on the day of his return in as clear, as mandatory a voice out of the long tradition of New England life, a tradition whose roots had taken hold two centuries before his own stock had been grafted there, a tradition, an inherited code not so much in this later day of conduct as of attitude, of which he was the heir, every bit as much as Marion was of hers.

“I suppose that all this means a good deal to you,” he said.

“It means so much that I want to break away from it.”

“What on earth am I to take that to mean?”

“Nothing so very startling. Just that it's all over, this; the whole way of life that it implies. The feudal system and all that went with it. It was a fine thing in its way and in its time, when the big house ran the neighborhood and had responsibilities towards the neighborhood. But it doesn't fit into modern life. Villagers are different, and the people who live in the big houses are different. They don't want the same things of life, either of them. They're too independent. Houses like Charlton are white elephants. What's going to happen to Charlton when Daddy dies? My brother won't want to be bothered with it. There'll be enormous death duties. If he decides to run Charlton as it should be run, he wouldn't have a penny to spare for London or for trips abroad. He wouldn't want that. And there's nothing more depressing than living in one wing. No, no, the day of the big house is over. That's why I want to leave it while the going's good. I don't want to have to see it crumble. I'd like to remember it the way it was. That's at the back of what I was trying to say to you last night, I want
to get into something different, but I don't quite know what.”

It was the kind of speech that he had heard from a number of his contemporaries in New York – a typical “poor little rich girl” speech, and yet in this instance it was not that. It was not the grumblings of a spoiled child resentful because she could not still feel hungry after she had gorged herself with sweets. Marion was not like that. She was a serious person, a serious courageous person who knew herself to be a little lost, who had not found her destiny. He remembered the glance that she had flashed at him across the lunch table, the smile that had recognized and accepted a confederacy of ill adjustment. They were in the same boat here, both feeling out of place, though for different reasons.

“Well,” she said, “I suppose that we should be going.”

He paused in the doorway, looking back.

“Will there be a family parade here tomorrow morning?”

She laughed. “Good heavens, no. Daddy and I usually come to back the rector up. Judy does now and then. The church is about half full.”

“What about early service?”

“I go myself most Sundays.”

“I think I'll come with you tomorrow.”

“Will you? I'd like that,” she said.

They returned to find Judy standing on the steps, in her fleece coat, pulling on a pair of motoring gloves. The gray-green Chevrolet was waiting for her in the drive. At the sight of it, his nerves contracted. Was it only six months ago that he had seen morning after morning that car swing down from the Corniche Road into the square?

Judy waved at them. “I'm just going into Basingstoke to meet the Forresters. Keep yourselves amused you two. I'm going to be so busy being a general hostess that I shan't have time to be a hostess to anybody in particular.”

It was the Monday morning, shortly after ten. The last suitcase was being stacked on the last car. Sir Henry had left already by an early train. Francis, from his bedroom window could see Judy on the porch waving to a long low Bentley as it swung slowly round out of the courtyard.

“Now,” he thought, “at last!”

He came down the stairs just as she was turning back into the hall. He smiled: he was resolved that nothing in his manner should suggest that he was harboring angry feelings.

“Your duties are over then?” he said.

“For the moment, yes.”

“Do they begin again that soon?”

She shrugged.

“They talk about a fifty-hour week. I think I put in a fifteen-hour day.”

She had paused at the sight of him on the stairs, but she was now once again on her way across the hall towards the drawing room.

“I haven't seen the papers yet,” she said.

She picked up
The Times
, seating herself beside the fire, so that the light should fall over her shoulder. It was a cloudy day; he could not read the expression on her face. She opened the paper in the center, folding it across and over, running her eye along the headlines, then down a column, then turning the sheet over.

“I'd have to live in this country years before I could find my way about
The Times
like that,” he said.

“Oh, one gets used to it.”

She was reading with concentration. He felt awkward, sitting there unoccupied.

There were a number of back copies of
Punch
upon the table. He brought over a pile of them.

“I don't get the half of these jokes,” he said.

“Nor do we with the
New Yorker “

A generous proportion of the jokes that he understood made fun of “the young idea” particularly of modern painting. In one picture two willowy young girls with hats pulled down low over their eyes were standing before a cubist picture. “But surely sometimes if you get a sitter who is really beautiful,” one of them was inquiring, “it must be hard to resist the temptation of painting a portrait.” Another cartoon carried the caption “And is this one meant to be anything in particular or is it quite optional?” It was easy to see why people like Lord Armitage found
Punch
congenial.

The political cartoons puzzled him even more than the social ones had done. He had not over the week end heard one reference to international complications. But the Empire's fate was apparently at stake in the Far East.

One cartoon showed a tub-thumping orator in Hyde Park
gesticulating before the placards: Moscow expects – Up the Reds – Hands off China. The caption read:

ANTI-BRITISH Leader on a platform, singing:

“But despite my aspirations

To belong to other nations

I remain an Englishman” (howls of humiliation)

Francis had no idea what it was all about.

“What is this trouble of yours in China?” he asked Judy.

“Trouble? China? I didn't know there was any.”

“Punch
seems to think there is.”

“Oh,
Punch
-they have to have a cartoon about something everywhere.”

As she turned over the page of
The Times
, he read a headline : “Crisis in China More Acute.”

“Your
Times
seems to have a lot about it.”

“They have to fill their columns too.”

It was the last kind of reply that he would have expected to hear from Judy. In the South of France it had been by, more than anything, the broadness of its interests that he had been attracted to her world. Its members had been concerned with, and informed about, nearly everything that was happening. But here at Charlton nobody seemed to talk about anything that happened farther than two villages away. What was Judy studying so carefully: racing results or the court circular?