A Desirable Husband (10 page)

‘Do try to control yourself, Finola.’

‘I have perfect self-control. I wouldn’t have married Gerard if I hadn’t. Anyway, anyway – tell me this. Do you
really
mean to stay here when you know it’s not what Hugh intended and everybody else knows it’s not, too? You’ve won, haven’t you, isn’t that enough? You’ve won just by forcing him to write that stupid letter.’

‘I really don’t see the point of this conversation.’

‘Yes you do, Constance. You do. We’re not going to just let things slide, let you have your own way.’ She paused, felt exhausted and pointless, and was then revived by a thought. ‘If you have any’ – she could not say honour, that would be too much – ‘any decency and, and proper moral pride, Christian pride, you’ll write to Gerard and say he’s very kind but on second thoughts you really ought to let us have the house. Then you’ll get lots of credit for generosity as well as everything else. Won’t it be marvellous? Gerard will be
overcome
.’

‘I dare say,’ said Constance. She was breathing hard: Finola thought perhaps she would have a heart attack, like Hugh, and then Gerard would divorce her.

‘I have fought for this house, Finola. I have lived here since before you were born and why should I go? Why should I?’

‘Because you’ve got to and you know it. I quite agree it’s a great pity we aren’t fabulously rich so that Gerard could have a – a secondary seat or something, but that’s the way it is!’

‘You are not going to run this place until I’m dead.’

‘Oh, stop being melodramatic. Gerard’s already running it, from London, and it’s bloody inconvenient too.’

‘Running it as far as he’s capable of running anything!’

‘Gerard is going to look after the estate exactly as Hugh would have wished.’

‘Of course Hugh
would
have wished him to sell High Manor Farm, and Six-Acre, and the little coppice!’

‘Actually,’ said Finola, ‘he left a letter with the Will, and he said that, as they’re not part of the rest of the estate, it would be best to sell them to help with the death duties.’

Constance let out her breath. ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘But he did, actually.’

‘All right. Very well.’

Finola was surprised to see how much Constance was affected by her information, and began to feel a little guilty. There was quiet for a while, and they listened to the spitting of the fire. Finola tried hard to think of something more to say: the memory of her childishness and fear was coming back, and she could not think of those.

‘I always thought Gerard was a coward,’ Constance remarked. ‘Why didn’t he come himself? Why did he send you?’

‘Finola collected herself. ‘He doesn’t know I’m here.’

‘Oh, in that case I’m going to tell him. Do you think he’ll be pleased?’

Finola was pale. ‘I am going to tell him,’ she said.

They waited. ‘I’ve always wondered why on earth he didn’t marry Marjorie Pelham-Colville. She would have made him
such
a good wife.’ Constance was swinging the pendant round her neck.

‘You know she turned him down,’ said Finola calmly.
‘That’s why.’

‘And so he took you on the rebound.’

‘On the rebound, ten years later or whatever it was?’

Constance got up and Finola was repelled. She did not leave her place behind the big armchair, and she did not take her eyes from her mother-in-law: she had been told that like her parents, she had, when she wanted, a most formidable stare.

‘I don’t care,’ said Constance. ‘I don’t care, you shouldn’t have married him, and you know it. Just to get this place.’ She was standing very upright, like Finola, and she looked very like Gerard in spite of her figure, when out of the harsh yellow light.

‘I married him because I loved him,’ said Finola, quite gently. ‘And you know that. And I wouldn’t really care for living here if it wasn’t what Gerard wanted, underneath. You should think of him, Constance.’

‘The real thing is, you want to make me suffer.’ Constance was crying now.

‘No, no I don’t. But you’ve got to see, Constance! It can’t be like this, it just can’t.’

‘You don’t understand,’ said Constance. ‘You just don’t understand. Do you ever think of anything but yourself? How do you think I
could
live somewhere else? Do you know when I came here, 1902?’ She paused. ‘When Hugh brought me here …’ Finola did not drop her eyes in shame, but she thought as she had not before.

She was glad Constance could not express herself better. She could see alone, well enough, the stays and dragging skirts and frock-coats, the nine indoor servants in impractical uniform, the calling-cards and eight-course dinners, the victoria and the pony-trap, and the icy candle-lit corridors. The changes in everyday life since those days seemed all to be sensible, comfortable changes, inside the garden wall of the Cedar House. Outside, to Constance, they would not seem so, though it was most unlikely she would ever see very modern people, or a shockingly post-war place.

‘It must be awful almost to – to go out into the world. That’s it, isn’t it?’

‘So frightfully perceptive of you, I must say.’

‘But you don’t even have to leave the estate! Why don’t you go and live in the West Lodge? Or there’s Rectory Cottage, or …’

‘No. Either here or nowhere. I will not live with you.’

‘Well then. But it’s not as though you’re poor, Constance. You’re quite rich, you know you are. You could buy a very nice place somewhere, you’d have Mrs Daly with you, it’s still possible to get help, especially for someone who’s good with staff like you are – you could go and live in Derbyshire near Sedley Warren, wouldn’t that be nice? There’s no need to go to Bath.’

‘Not a very attractive thing to say, Finola,’ said Constance. Her voice rose for the first time. ‘You mean to
insinuate
…’

‘No, I don’t!’ said Finola. She was taken aback.

‘Oh, but I think you do and you know it. Do you know, I often wonder if you’re quite faithful to Gerard –’

‘Oh, do be quiet,’ said Finola blushing.

Constance was very close to her now. ‘You’ve always hated me, so has Gerard.’ This was the sort of thing about which Darcy had told Finola. So was her accusation of infidelity.

‘Don’t loom over me, please Constance. Oh, go away. You’ve been the worst possible mother to Gerard
and
Darcy – undermining all his confidence – how you ever came to produce such a son – don’t you ever feel guilty? Don’t you see what you’ve done?’

They stopped, both rather dazed by having flared with miserable rage at precisely the same moment. Finola suddenly thought it was mad for them to loathe each other, and terrible for them to speak so loudly. It was as though Gerard could hear them.

‘Constance, I’m sorry, do let’s –’

‘You’re sorry! Sorry!’

‘Yes. You’re crying. You know you’re in the wrong. I don’t say it’s right for me to talk to you like this but you’re
more
wrong.’ Constance had not gone back to her chair, and Finola began to feel that this was an advantage.

‘What absolute nonsense.’

‘Do you love Gerard? Do you care anything for him?’

‘He’s my son, naturally I care for him!’

‘Then why don’t you let him have what’s his, without a fuss? You
know
he isn’t all those things you’ve called him. You
know
he’s good and – and dutiful and he’d let you have practically anything you wanted – God, I almost wish Hugh
had
left you this place for your lifetime! Constance you
know
you can’t take advantage of him in this way.’ It was working, she saw it was working, it must be what Darcy called her steady grey gaze. ‘Be – be charitable, can’t you? Don’t make it all bitter – spoil it for us all – you won’t be happy here, queening it over him, not when everyone knows. We’ll do all we can to help you – but you must write and say you’ve had second thoughts. You must. And I’m sorry I’ve been so beastly to you.’

‘I simply don’t understand,’ said Constance. ‘And I really do –
rather
dislike you from the bottom of my heart.’ She thought how full her heart was: like her sons, she had revelations sometimes of what a cruel stupid person she was. Finola did not know this.

‘I’m sorry.’

Constance brushed past her.

‘But you’ll write, won’t you? You will write? I know you will.’

Her mother-in-law did not answer as she went out, without closing the door. Finola stood for a few moments with her mouth open, then went to get herself a drink. She remembered suddenly that she had cigarettes with her, and she lit one in a hurry shaking and trying not to smile. Soon she would have to go to Katie’s, and she could tell Katie, tell her about everything except what she now felt, that she had allowed the perverse Mr Lowell to persuade her to behave like this, and not regret it.

It was a late afternoon in July. Concentrated sunlight fell on the warm west front of the house, on the Gloire de Dijon roses and dark wistaria; but there were quick chill gusts of wind blowing, and these had made tea on the terrace less pleasant than it should have been. Gerard, who was sitting over the remains of iced coffee and biscuits with a book in front of him, did not go indoors in spite of the breeze, but raised his eyes from time to time to the group playing croquet on the lawn near the gateway, under the cedars.

‘Men against women, that will be fair,’ said Anatole.

‘No, no, I insist on playing either with you or Richard – Alice is such a hopeless player!’ said Finola.

‘I like that!’

‘I shall play with Grandanatole,’ said Richard.

‘We allow you to decide,’ said Finola.

Richard kicked one of the balls, and the game began.

Anatole was an excellent player in spite of his twisted leg and ill-balanced body, and Richard, who used a child’s mallet, was a better one than his grandmother: she had to be told where to aim by her opponents, then always hit too strongly in the wrong direction. Finola was competent, and she thought that croquet was a perfect game for bored people after tea.

Two balls knocked together and then Anatole, limping round the lawn, had several shots. ‘Red to play,’ he said at last.

Finola walked forward, hit her ball through a hoop, took another shot and then thought with longing of taking in the
tea-things. She was always saving Mainwaring, whose presence she often thought unnecessary, little bits of work. I’m unhappy, she thought, I’m really terribly unhappy; and it’s too cold out and I haven’t enough clothes on.

The game was quick, quicker than Finola had anticipated. Anatole won. ‘Well, that was nice,’ she said. ‘I must clear up the tea now. Richard, aren’t you cold?’

‘No, Mummy.’

‘I’ll help you, Fin,’ said Alice.

‘No, don’t bother. It’s all right.’ She walked towards the house, where Gerard was still reading by the steps of the open front door.

Since moving to Combe Chalcot, the Parnells had taken to playing bézique when they were alone after dinner. They played with polite excitement for money, and at present Finola owed her husband nearly ten shillings. She was surprised to find a ten-shilling note in her pocket when she paused to search for a handkerchief in the middle of the lawn, and as she picked up the dirty cups and glasses she gave it to Gerard. He looked up, shocked.

‘My gambling debts,’ she said.

He smiled, then laughed. ‘Thank you! Of course.’

She finished tidying away the tea in warmer silence, and took a tray-load into the grey of the house, down the passage to the kitchen where Carlotta was grumbling over a ragout of vegetables. The housekeeper disliked Combe Chalcot, just as Finola had expected, and she called it feudal, which everyone else thought most unfair.

*

The Parnells had moved down to Dorset in April, after Constance had finally bought an ugly
cottage
orné
in Oxfordshire, and since the move little sadnesses had swept though Finola and out again, quick and pointless as showers of rain. There were also spurts of gaiety which were difficult to conceal, but she took care to maintain in front of others the gentle, even temper which everyone but Alice had always admired. In doing this she often made it real again even to herself, and she thought she would like to see Mr Lowell once
more and tell him how wrong he had been about her disliking the country once she was there. She loved it as Constance had done, and she decided at dinner that night that she also loved both her parents more than she had ever suspected, and loved to have them with her.

Finola had decided to introduce them to some local people, friends of Constance and Hugh, and not to conceal them as she believed Gerard now suspected she was going to do. Finola had a horror of being thought a social climber. She invited to dinner no one who she knew would despise Alice and Anatole for obvious reasons, but she asked the Van Leydens (though Jack Van Leyden was extremely conventional, and drank too much), an old lady called Mrs Maitland who she told her parents was a sort of
grande
dame,
and a former Guards officer who was also quite a good painter.

‘I have suffered my life long from a wife who is tone deaf but who likes to sing in the bath,’ Anatole was saying to Katie Van Leyden, who found him wonderfully attractive, as several women had done. Others did not think of him as a man at all, and he knew it. ‘It is like this you see: “Spe-ad bonny
bo-at
like a ba-iird on the
wing,
O-anward
the se-alors
cro-oi
”– you will imagine how intolerable.’

Finola saw that Gerard was as much amused as Katie. ‘Anatole, I’m sure you’re doing her an injustice!’ he said. She met her husband’s eye.

‘He is unjust,’ said Alice across the table, and then she turned back. ‘No, Lord Van Leyden, you’re perfectly right, London’s not what it was before the war. And if you could see some of the new buildings they’re putting up – I prefer it bombed, myself.’

Finola reflected that, since the war, wine had seemed to have a lowering effect on Alice. Her old evening dress showed too much poking shoulder, and her chignon was beginning untidily to slip, but she was pale-faced and grave and seemed no longer to enjoy tipsy argument or to respond to her husband’s provocations, which were something new. Finola suddenly wanted to apologise to her mother for having expected her to be a rowdy influence, to kiss her for
being so sweet and old-fashioned yet so much herself.

‘Madam, Mrs Gerard,’ whispered Mainwaring in her ear, and Finola jumped.

‘Yes, Mainwaring?’

‘I’m afraid I must tell you that Signora Goldoni has burnt the caramel sauce. It has gone up in flames, madam, in the kitchen.’

‘I’m surprised she didn’t make it earlier.’

‘It was going to be hot caramel sauce, madam.’

‘Well, we’ll have to have the raspberries now instead of for lunch tomorrow. Oh dear, and I suppose we can’t get more sugar till next week.’

There had been no other setback all evening, and Finola had done nothing but approve Carlotta’s menu; it was almost as though Constance were still running the house. At Egerton Gardens there had always been crises about lost plates and glasses, or insufficient room at table, or timing the start of dinner when everyone was late, and there never would have been raspberries when the caramel sauce was burnt. Though she no longer had to worry about these things, Finola still thought that having a butler must surely be rather too much. In April she had expected management of the Cedar House to be a constant worry laced with disasters – a punishment for her treatment of Constance, though Gerard had said nothing at all.

When the women had retired to the big drawing-room, Mrs Maitland asked Finola a direct question. She smoothed the sequins on her turquoise dress, and frowned at her. ‘Tell me, how are you settlin’ in?’

‘Oh, quite well, I think. It must seem odd to you, coming here and seeing just us, not Constance and Hugh.’

‘It’s the natural course of events,’ said Mrs Maitland. ‘Do you mean to do anything, now you’re down here? Or are you happy just potterin’?’

‘Do you mean in the way of the W.I. or the parish council, or something? I haven’t thought yet.’

‘Plenty of time. You don’t ride, do you? I can’t stand ridin’, myself.’

‘Of course she means to,’ said Katie Van Leyden, startling Finola. ‘I mean to get her to take over the white elephant stall at the church fête for a start. Mrs Bates is in quarantine for measles thanks to those awful brats of hers. Can you, Finola?’

‘I should like to do that,’ said Finola. ‘It’s next week, isn’t it?’

‘Good girl!’

Alice, Finola noticed, was studying the ceiling with a smile on her face. It was a lightly moulded, oval-patterned ceiling and in the centre was a painting of the rape of the Sabine women, all round bosoms and impossibly crumpled draperies and faces of painless, pretty surprise. Darcy had told Finola that as a boy he had spent hours staring at it; it had helped him to understand the facts of life which he had learnt at Winchester.

*

The next day, when Gerard was in the estate office and Alice had gone for a walk, Finola found her father looking at the pictures in the hall. The entrance hall at the Cedar House was larger than the drawing-room, and it opened at either end into the garden. It was stone-floored and dim-lit, for the only window was the great glass door facing to the east, and it was furnished with an enormous table and a few chairs against the wall, beneath the pictures. Big dinner parties were held here, for the dining-room could seat no more than eight.

‘These are all the ancestors, of course?’ said Anatole, smiling at his daughter.

‘Most of them are. I think that one is Queen Caroline, though – a copy – I don’t know who bought it.’

Anatole turned away from it and blinked out into the garden, playing with his spectacles. ‘It’s all very perfect. Not at all what one expects a big country house to be in modern times.’

‘I know. I do think cobwebs and old retainers are rather passé, except in films, I suppose,’ said Finola, and her father
laughed. ‘But at least you can have people coming round in batches and having Olde Englyshe Teas. Katie says she wishes she could do that, only she can’t as the Manor’s been absolutely wrecked inside. Nobody would want to see it.’

‘Of course this is a little house in comparison with those showplaces one hears about. Perhaps that is why you have been able to keep it.’

‘I suppose so.’ She added: ‘It was too small to be of any use to one of the Ministries or a hospital or anything in the war, you see, but I must have told you we did have a couple of refugee families living in that part of the house.’ She waved her hand towards the kitchen, the gun-room and the library.

‘It’s strange that both you and Liza should have married this sort of place.’

‘Now Liza
really
fits in with the modern ideal,’ said Finola. ‘Not that she could have people to see that monstrosity, but at least the whole place is falling down and it’s
gigantic.
They’re so out of touch.’ Liza’s husband, Sir George Mackenzie, survived by selling bits of his estate. He had no heir, but Gerard and Finola disapproved all the same.

‘Yes, they are fossils, like the ones he keeps. But she is happy, poor Liza.’

‘I must have Little Jenny to stay,’ said Finola. Little Jenny was her niece, Liza’s daughter. Liza herself would never come to Dorset, she had not been outside her barren Yorkshire garden since the war.

‘Yes, you must. Find her a nice young man.’

‘They walked round the other side of the great table, looking solemnly at the bad portraits, against their background of rather institutional cream paint.

Finola said: ‘Anatole,
je
voudrais
bien
te
demander
une
question assez
difficile
.’ She spoke French quickly, with her father’s Gascon accent overlaid by English tones.

‘You may ask, Fin, but I may not be able to answer.’ He looked at her and she could see he was worried.

‘Do you
love
Alice?’

‘Why do you ask that?’

‘I hope you do. I was thinking last night, she’s changed – she’s sort of
frozen
– preserved just as she was when I was a child, but not the same!’

‘I know.’ Anatole supposed that Finola most loved her mother, who was only eighteen years older than herself, when she thought of her as an aunt. ‘It’s the war, Fin. The last war she did not mind, she thought it was cruel and senseless and that was that. But she feels the world is very different now, more evil, which I do not, but then I’m old,’ said Anatole. Finola said nothing. ‘She has nothing to hold to, except me, and that apartment of ours. Which I don’t like.’

‘Don’t you?’ She was surprised.

Anatole waved his hand. ‘It is too orderly – she’s trying to make it almost a place like this. Pieces of the past, things in their place, everything most discreet – at Bramham Gardens I felt we could always just
go.
Though I never did. But now we could never leave that place, and I must look after her. Yes, I do love her, but I have always thought of her as a young sister not a wife, not like the twins’ mother.’ Finola, who remembered even her parents’ quarrels as a form of sensual indulgence, tried not to look disrespectful. ‘You have noticed that nowadays she always does as I say?’ he continued.

‘Yes.’

‘That makes it easier, you see.’

‘Oh, Anatole.’ Finola paused. ‘Did I tell you – did I tell you I met Miranda again, the other day?’

‘I think you did.’

Finola hurried on, confessing. ‘I suggested that she should come down here and visit us, meet you again. I didn’t think she would come, but I asked her.’

‘And put her in a difficult position.’

‘Yes. She said no, as I expected.’

‘No, she would not wish to meet us. And it wouldn’t be good for your mother to see her, Fin, though I suppose she would want to. I ask you not to mention her to Alice.’

‘No, I promise I won’t. She’s becoming very friendly with Darcy, you know. Miranda, I mean.’

‘Is she? They should be well-matched. No, Fin, I dislike Miranda. I do not scruple to say that, I’m sure you know it already.’

‘She hurt Alice, didn’t she?’ Finola was enjoying this conversation. Talking with Anatole, she decided that she preferred a man to be as much like a woman as possible: unreserved, unconventional, and interested chiefly in intimate things.

Anatole suddenly changed back to English. ‘She hurt us all, Fin, and it was a long long time ago. Don’t let’s talk about her now, I want to see the rest of this house and the tombs in the church. You have lots of family tombs I suppose?’ He smiled, and so did she.

‘Not very
old
ones here, I’m afraid, the oldest are over at Sturminster,’ said Finola primly, with her head on one side. ‘Sir Hugh de Pernel that Gerard was telling you about, he’s buried there.’ Her thoughts went back to Miranda, Alice, and Bramham Gardens.