A Desirable Husband (13 page)

He forgot for a while that he would have to be chaste for the rest of his life, and he prayed not to be angry unjustly, and also not to show any just rage. When the thought of his future came back to him, he prayed for the courage to admit to Finola that in part she was right. He could not wholly love a woman who encouraged him to hate his mother, and had so little respect for his judgement that she would disregard his wishes.

Gerard began to cry, though he was only thinking now of the married woman who had seduced him thirty years ago and made him adore her, then had gradually disgusted him and made him fear her. She had been a most influential hostess, and she was still alive.

*

The next day, there was a dance at a house near Wimborne Minster. Dinner had to be eaten rather early, in full dress though they were alone, and then there was a long cold drive. Finola and Gerard might have declined the invitation
if Jenny Mackenzie had not been staying with them, and Jenny knew this well.

After dinner, Finola did not bother to go upstairs to make sure her face and her dress would do, but Gerard disappeared for a while and Jenny went to her room to stare at herself. Finola went into Constance’s sitting-room, did a little tapestry, and thought about dancing with Gerard. She imagined her niece’s looking on with sad hero-worship in her eyes. Last night she had thought for the first time that she would be really rather old to have another baby. She was thirty-six, though she looked younger, and Jenny made her feel aged, a worldly and a horrible person. Finola could not love her clumsy, grateful half-niece, known to all the family as ‘Little Jenny’. The girl had been named for Liza’s brilliant sister, who had died in Barcelona in 1938.

Jenny came into the sitting-room, blinking without her usual thick spectacles. She smiled at Finola and said: ‘Is my dress
really
all right, Aunt Finola?’

‘Yes of course, darling! Try not to call me aunt, Jenny, it’s
so
ageing.’

‘I’m so sorry, it must be, it’s just a habit. I mustn’t, I know!’ Jenny smiled and gazed at her, and allowed her eyes to fall.

She sat down, and her enormous skirt rose above her knees. She pushed it down, and stared at the high pointed heels of her shoes which Finola, who had bought all the clothes for her in London, was sure would catch in the hem of the net petticoat she wore. Jenny was eighteen and very shy, but sometimes she concealed her shyness by trying to flirt shockingly, or to be intellectual, and Finola hoped that she would do neither tonight. Jenny had had no formal education apart from a term spent at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, where she said she had nearly died of misery.

Finola, who had never been especially fond of her vague half-sister Liza, was very cross at the way she and her husband had neglected to prepare Jenny for ordinary life, by keeping her shut up in their draughty Victorian castle, and then trying to send her to a school which sounded like a
prison. It was all very much worse than her own upbringing. Finola thought of some tart remarks to make to Liza, rejected them because Liza would tell Jenny and Jenny would cry, and said: ‘You know, when I was a girl, clothes were so much more sensible, at least for the young.’ She remembered Miranda Pagett binding down her bosoms in 1926 or so, but continued: ‘Those petticoats must be awful, and as for some of the underwear one can get nowadays, it’s positively Victorian, plastic bones and all that. Don’t you think so?’

Finola herself was wearing a dark blue and silver dress, which was sufficiently fashionable, but the skirt was unsupported and her shoulders had straps. She washed her light, bobbed hair herself, because Gerard had once been rather pleased to have a wife who did not spend hours weekly in the hairdresser’s. Her shoes were low-heeled, and as she looked at her niece, who might one day be quite pretty, she thought they were rather too like Alice’s.

‘I suppose so,’ said Jenny. ‘Did you have an Eton crop, Finola?’

‘No, not quite that, but I did have a shingle, when I was about twelve.’

Gerard came in, holding his watch, and Finola thought he looked unsuitably noble, in his black and white, for a middle-aged man at a quiet little dance in the country.

‘Is everything ready?’ he said. ‘I think we ought to set off.’

Finola walked out of the sitting-room first, then Jenny, then Gerard. They put on their heaviest coats and left the house, and the women’s ankles froze as they clattered over the flagstones of the dark garden, to the gate where the car was waiting. They sat in silence, feeling rather tired and suddenly full of dinner, as Gerard started the motor and turned it cautiously into the road.

Finola sat at the back of the car, looking ahead at the pale shade of the headlights and the jerking shapes of trees, her nostrils aware of petrol and dog-hairs and Jenny’s new scent, and Gerard’s shaving-cream, and the other thing
which made up the warm male smell. Her eyes began to water for the first time since yesterday afternoon. Alone last night she had concluded that it was the lack of emotional restraint, the shallow hastiness which she saw in so many people, that puzzled and displeased her. She had at last shown the same qualities herself, and could not be forgiven, not when quietness had won her so much in the end, before. Gerard, in his dressing-room, had had much the same thoughts about himself and his desires.

It was a great pity, Finola thought, that Winston Lowell should be coming to stay just when she and Gerard were at odds; but she had made a grim and satisfying plan to marry him to Jenny, and so in her way she looked forward to his arrival. She thought that Jenny, who was close to being in love with Gerard and blushed whenever he spoke to her, would be much improved by a sensible, dominant, elderly husband.

Gerard had suggested a marriage between them to amuse Finola, when Jenny first came to stay at the end of October. He had said: ‘After all, when she loses her self-consciousness, she has something – something of
your own charm
, actually. I expect Lowell would like her, why not?’

Winston arrived at Combe Chalcot in time for lunch on the fifth of November, and his appearance gave Finola a slight shock. She had forgotten, when thinking about him and Jenny, that although he was so plain and dark, he gave an impression of coarse sex, which she found slightly repellent but which other women might not. For the first time she used the words ‘coarse sex’, and made herself blush. Katie Van Leyden, with whom they were to dine the next day, would be bound to flirt with him, and perhaps Jenny would do so too.

Just after Winston arrived, Jenny came downstairs to join them in Constance’s sitting-room. She was looking her best, and she seemed, Finola thought at lunch, to think him a safe man whom she did not need to impress. It would do very well: she was a good sweet girl and a baronet’s
daughter, and she would have about five thousand pounds one day which would be useful to him. Winston had no money of his own (Gerard had told Finola that this was because his father had worked in the Rolls-Royce factory in Derby) and he had gone up to King’s on a county scholarship. Winston had mentioned this one afternoon, chatting with Gerard in the London Library, and he had found Gerard’s polite interest, and faint guilt, quite satisfactory.

Finola remembered, listening to Winston at lunch, that Gerard had been much moved by his brief story, though he had remarked that Lowell seemed to be a happy man. She thought that Gerard could not possibly understand the mind of the social climber, especially one who displayed such casual success. She wondered if Winston was considered by his family to be a traitor to his class, and she thought she would question him with delicate interest later.

At lunch they ate cottage pie and bottled-cherry crumble, which Finola thought a modest meal and her cook thought disgusting. They talked about politics, which was considered almost a neutral topic by the Parnells, a cause of gentle and sometimes interesting difference of opinion. It was not something about which very fortunate people had a right to hold serious views, in public and without apology. In Hugh’s time, the position at Combe Chalcot had been quite different: he had enjoyed a fine, red-faced political argument.

‘What do you think?’ said Winston, turning to Jenny with a look of sincere interest. He had excellent manners.

‘Oh dear, I haven’t been following,’ she said, sitting up straight. ‘Who – who exactly
is
Dr Summerskill? I suppose I’m very stupid,’ she hurried on, ‘but my parents never have newspapers, you see, so I haven’t got into the habit of reading them. And I never know.’ Finola thought that Jenny sounded charmingly unaffected at last, and was glad that she herself had not been asked for her view. She had opinions, but she tended nowadays to think they sounded stupid when she voiced them. Her being noted for quiet good sense and feminine reason made it all the more
difficult, she thought as she signalled to Carlotta. She wondered why conversation was always a little slow and awkward, when even close friends first entered the house.

‘I’m afraid there isn’t much to
do
down here,’ said Gerard with a slight smile, when they had finished their coffee. ‘I’m rather busy this afternoon, but –’

‘There are lots of walks,’ said Finola, ‘if you’d like that?’

‘I should, very much,’ said Winston. ‘You must take me round.’

‘Jenny, darling, would you like to come with us?’ said Finola, turning.

‘No, thank you, Finola, I went out for a walk this morning.’

‘Oh.’ She thought briskly that she would take him through the back of the walled garden, over the hillock behind, through Sarey’s Copse and down to the village, and in a moment she envisaged every view they would come across.

*

‘Your niece seems to be a rather nice girl,’ said Winston, as they pushed through the overgrown grass at the back of the Cedar House.

‘Oh, I am glad you like her!’

‘Does she do anything?’

‘No, I’m afraid not. She didn’t go to school and the school authorities only found out when she was nearly fifteen, so she couldn’t really get much of a job if she wanted one. She’s not clever, of course, not disagreeably clever I mean – she’s got plenty of common sense and so on.’ She paused. ‘She’ll have to get married, I wish I could find someone – she
is
a sweet girl, just a bit nervous, anxious to please, you know.’ Finola gazed up at the cold sky. ‘
You
wouldn’t like to marry her, would you?’

He started, and laughed. Finola, very much confused, tripped over a tussock of grass, and Winston prevented her falling by grabbing her sleeve. He did not let go for a moment. ‘I didn’t realise you were so much your mother’s daughter!’ he said as she vigorously brushed down her
sheepskin coat. He had realised it, when he heard about her brisk confrontation with her mother-in-law.

‘Oh dear, you’re quite right, it’s
exactly
what Alice would have said. I didn’t mean it!’

Winston released her arm. ‘I’m far too old for her, surely?’ he said, smiling.

‘I think she would be better off with an older husband.’

‘What a funny person you are, Mrs Parnell.’ She opened her lips to say for the second time, ‘Do call me Finola’, but he continued: ‘All this wood is for sale, I suppose?’ There were two great piles of wet logs in a slight dip on the hill, some twenty yards away.

‘Some of it’s for the house, most of it actually. It’s only firewood. One of the beeches came down in a gale last February, it was rotten you see.’

‘Wonderful,’ murmured Winston suddenly. ‘I do think this place is rather marvellous.’

‘Yes, that’s what I think! Turn round,’ she said, ‘you can see down into the garden from up here, there’s the roof of the house, you see.’

‘Yes,’ he said, turning and drawing in the sharp air. ‘I should hate to live in the country.’

‘I find it
so
marvellous not to have to live with the smogs,’ said Finola, after a moment’s pause. ‘All that horrible, greasy dirt one can’t get out of anything. But I must say one misses it sometimes. We used to have country holidays when I was a little girl, going to stay with my great-aunt Caitlin, and I simply loved it there, but of course living permanently down here is rather different.’ She paused, plodding further up the slope with Winston two paces to the right, behind her. ‘Actually, you were right about moving bringing some difficulties, even though it
has
solved some others, you know.’

Winston looked at her tangled hair, which was clear ginger in the thin sunlight. He considered asking more about this, and directly referring to their having tea in Sloane Street, but said instead with grave friendliness: ‘Tell me about this great-aunt. Alice mentioned her once.’

Finola, surprised, said: ‘I was very fond of her, we all were – she lived to be over ninety, so I was twelve when she died. I don’t know if Alice told you she made a fortune, on the Stock Exchange. She used to collect things. Pictures, furniture, the lot, her house was absolutely crammed.’

‘Very unusual for a woman of her day, to make a large fortune.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Finola. ‘She was brilliant in her way, and apparently she was quite ravishing as well, when she was young, blue eyes put in with a smutty finger, and all that. Her first husband’s family was quite grand, Anglo-Irish, and they were horrified when he married her of course. She had great character.’ She added: ‘She was devoted to Alice, she adored my grandfather, you see.’

‘I see. And you used to stay with her.’

‘Yes, all of us used to go.’

‘I used to spend holidays in the country too, sometimes, when I was a child,’ said Winston.

‘Did you?’ Finola turned.

‘Yes, one of my father’s more prosperous brothers kept a pub near Ashbourne. We lived in Derby, you see, most of the time.’

‘Yes, Gerard did tell me … Were you happy as a child?’

They had come to Sarey’s Copse, and were looking down at a layer of dry leaves, which they turned over with their feet to show dark and pleasing rot.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes, I was very fortunate. I suppose because my parents were always proud of me.’

Finola grew a little nervous at this confidence which she had provoked. ‘Do you still see them?’

‘Every Christmas.’

‘Things must have been quite difficult, once,’ Finola suggested. ‘I hope you don’t mind my –’

‘Pretty bad in some ways, just about the time I went up to Cambridge. You
are
talking about class, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Finola. ‘But it’s entirely a question of manners, isn’t it, so why shouldn’t I mention it?’

‘Almost entirely a question of manners, Mrs Parnell.’

They walked on for a while, and Finola thought that his ‘Mrs Parnell’ sounded rather intimate. ‘Winston,’ she said, ‘are you ambitious? Do you think of yourself as ambitious?’

‘No. If I’d been ambitious as you call it, I’d have been in the Cabinet by now,’ he said.

‘You’re very confident!’ said Finola, who could not think that this remark was self-mockery, a very proper joke.

‘Thank you, Finola. Yes, I am confident, I suppose,’ he said, looking at her. ‘The thing is, I always wanted an – absorbing interest in life, and there’s nothing more fascinating than cultivating oneself.’

‘I see,’ she said. ‘Yes, I do see it must be fascinating, proving other people’s theories – their prejudices – proving them wrong.’

He was impressed by this, but said: ‘You make me sound a rather unattractive person, Finola.’

‘Well, I didn’t really mean to! That’s the village, over there, d’you mind if we go down to the shop? We’ve run out of cigarettes at the house, and I must get some.’

‘Not at all.’

Combe Chalcot was a moderate-sized village, built round a crossroads. It had a primary school and a pub as well as its shop, but the church was a mile away in Chalcot St Anne. The other village was a slightly larger place, and it was pretty enough to attract tourists, which Combe Chalcot was not.

On the way towards the shop, Finola answered Winston’s questions about the village, and the local school, and the two rather large, remote cottages which were grandly referred to as the West and East Lodges. The only Parnell with social ambitions had built a mansion with two lodges and a folly in 1731: the mansion had soon burnt down, and the stone had later been used to build the Cedar House, but the lodges had survived. Winston suggested this was a story with a moral, which Finola thought rather suspicious.

In the shop, which was a little bare of goods, but which already had a large box full of poppies for Armistice Day,
they met Katie Van Leyden. Finola introduced Winston to her.

‘Taking the children to the bonfire tonight?’ said Katie to Finola, when they had all finished making their purchases and were outside in the street again.

‘Oh yes, I think we ought to go, really,’ said Finola, with vague thoughts of Nanny. Katie, whose son was at prep school, had never employed a nanny.

‘I must say, I damn this new schoolmistress for putting the children up to it,’ said Katie quite cheerfully. ‘I gather it’s what she calls project work. Of course the cricket pitch’ll be ruined with half the village trampling over it, or so Mr Butterworth says, but it’s anything for a bit of excitement, in a place like this.’ They were gathered round Katie’s car, and no one seemed to be in earshot.

‘It should be rather fun for the children all the same,’ said Winston mildly. ‘Shouldn’t it?’

‘They’ll get over-excited and make themselves sick with toffee-apples,’ said Katie. ‘Still, I must hope
you
enjoy it, Mr Lowell.’ They blinked at each other.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it,’ said Finola. ‘You don’t need to go – do stay at home with a nice whisky and soda, if you want to!’

‘I should rather like to come,’ said Winston.

She wondered why he always said so little, and she thought of the returning walk ahead of them.

‘Let me take you back up,’ said Katie, opening the door.

Finola drew breath, for this possibility truly had not occurred to her.

‘How sweet of you, Katie – Winston, would you mind if we drove back?’

‘Not at all,’ he said, just as she was thinking it was stupid to consult him.

‘You’ll have to squeeze in,’ said Katie. ‘Push all that junk on the floor, Finola.’

It was a very small, smelly and noisy car, and Winston took up a great deal of space.

*

At six o’clock Finola stood gazing at the bonfire, which was not quite as large as the schoolmistress had hoped, and was burning at present only on one side. The fireworks had not yet begun, and the sky was perfectly black. A few people had brought electric torches, and one group of children had come with a jam-jar lantern on a stick, but the only other light was the fire itself. The cold soaked up through the gumboots of those watching.

Eleanor was with Nanny, who had said she wanted to see the sights, but Richard was not with the family. He had spoken to none of them since their party reached the cricket pitch. He was poking the bonfire with some other little boys, yelling and giggling and having conker fights.

‘At least Richard’s enjoying himself,’ said Katie Van Leyden beside Finola. She added: ‘You’d think Edward would be dying to come, as there’s precious little else to do at half-term, but no. He and Jack are glued to the television screen – I thought that television was a disgraceful waste of money, but I must say it keeps ’em both out of my hair like nothing else.’