From a View to a Death, page 8
‘Joanna Brandon?’
‘Yes.’
Mrs. Passenger thought for a long time as if she had never heard of anyone of that name. Mr. Petal and his views on pageant-economy hung above her like a grim shadow. She shook him off with an effort and said:
‘I think Joanna is a very nice girl in many ways and I don’t think she has a very good time. But I certainly shouldn’t call her pretty. I don’t want to be unkind but I should have thought that she was decidedly plain.’
Betty said: ‘Mother, what an absolutely extraordinary thing to say. Why, I know people who would go mad about her. There are men I’ve met who would jump into the fire for her.’
‘But, Betty, you always seem to know such strange people. Why should they want to jump into the fire?’
‘It’s such an amusing face.’
‘But there is no colour in it at all. She’s anæmic. I’m sure a tonic would do her good.’
‘I like that whiteness. And a lovely figure.’
‘My child, she is all skin and bone.’
‘Really, mother, I can’t understand you saying that,’ said Betty, who had become quite excited at the opposition to her views on Joanna’s looks. ‘What do you think, Mary?’ she said.
Mary was divided. She wanted terribly to have a modern taste in beauty. She said:
‘I think Joanna looks quite nice sometimes. This afternoon, for instance. But I think she is rather a tiresome girl, as I’ve often told you.’
Betty turned to Zouch.
‘Anyway you agree that she looks lovely?’ she said.
Zouch said: ‘You see it is rather difficult for me to give an opinion, being a painter. I think she might make a very interesting picture.’
He tried to make his face alter when he spoke of his art without at the same time betraying too keen an interest in Joanna. Betty said:
‘Well, you must be different from all the other painters I’ve ever met. And I’ve met a good few of them. They all held very definite views on female beauty.’
Zouch said: ‘But you know a genuine artist never looks at anyone he wants to paint with the same eyes with which he would look at a beautiful woman he might meet in everyday life and want to—to say, get engaged to. He sees only the purely formal beauty, like that of a still life or a sunset.’
And while he said this he really succeeded in dismissing from his mind the cavalcade of girls whom he had persuaded at one time or another to show him their appreciation of the drawings he had done of them. Mrs. Passenger raised her lorgnette. She said:
‘Do you know, Mr. Zouch, I never knew that? How interesting. You must tell me about being an artist. What a fascinating life it must be.’
4
MAJOR FOSDICK was cleaning his guns in the drawing-room because it was the most comfortable room in the house. While he did this he brooded. He enjoyed cleaning his guns and he enjoyed brooding so that the afternoon was passing pleasantly enough and its charm was disturbed only by the presence of his wife, who sat opposite him, mending a flannel undergarment and making disjointed conversation about subjects in which he was not interested. She talked about the neighbours; about the pageant; about their children; about all the things which he had decided to put for the time being from his mind. Major Fosdick tried not to hear what she was saying. He thought about his youth and the years he had spent in Burma. Those had, in fact, been the days. Mrs. Fosdick said:
‘Jasper has been doing well about his handicap.’
‘His handicap?’
‘It’s down again.’
‘It is?’
For a moment, in spite of himself, Major Fosdick thought about his elder son. A picture of Jasper appeared suddenly before him, looming up threateningly, like a figure in a nightmare. Jasper and his handicap. Jasper had so many handicaps that for the moment his father was unable to place which one it was to which his wife was referring. Mrs. Fosdick, all Hibernian, said:
‘And didn’t he go round yesterday in eighty-two?’
‘Did he, did he?’
‘That’s better, isn’t it?’
‘Much better.’
Thoughtfully, Major Fosdick dipped his rag into the oil again. Mentally, he compared himself as a young man to Jasper. Or as an old man, for that matter. Men like himself were not born any more now. But now there are none like him, his like we’ll never know. Somebody had written that about Nelson. Or was it Wellington? Anyway it didn’t make much odds. And then, Something, something, something, there were giants in the land. But there weren’t any longer. Young men were different now, he thought. Perhaps it was just as well. Major Fosdick laughed silently to himself.
‘Now what are you laughing at, George?’
‘Nothing.’
Mrs. Fosdick pursed her lips. She did not like her husband having jokes in which she had no share. It was a habit he was far too fond of. She had been disturbed lately, too, about his behaviour. He was getting even more secretive than he used to be. Just a little unbalanced, she thought. She said:
‘I often think it might be a good thing for Jasper to get married. It would settle him down.’
Major Fosdick polished away but did not answer. He thought, I’ll give her a crack over the head in a minute. Mrs. Fosdick said:
‘He’s wild. It’s the Irish strain in him. He’s a bit of a Paddy. He gets that from me.’
She smiled to herself, with pleasure and in retaliation. The setter, curled up on the turkey carpet, growled in his sleep, woke up suddenly, and began to turn round and round with violence, snorting at his tail.
‘Shut up!’ said Major Fosdick. ‘Shut up, you brute!’
He hoped that his wife would consider herself included in this injunction, but Mrs. Fosdick pursued her train of thought.
‘What do you think of Joanna Brandon?’ she said.
‘What do I think of her? What do you mean, what do I think of her? She seems a sensible sort of girl. Much like anyone else. What are you driving at? I wish you wouldn’t disturb me. This is a very tricky business.’
‘Do you think that she would make Jasper happy?’
Major Fosdick put down the rook-rifle and the oil and the rag and the toothpick, with which he had been getting some dirt from under the sights, and said:
‘What on earth do you mean, Veronica? Why should she make him happy? Isn’t he happy already? He always seems very happy to me. What possible business is it of hers? Besides I don’t know what you mean at all. It sounds to me a very funny way to talk.’
‘But don’t you know that they are secretly engaged? She adores him.’
Secretly engaged? Well of all the Major Fosdick took up his gun again. He said:
‘Don’t—talk—rot.’
‘Didn’t you see how they went off together after lunch when she came here some Sundays ago?’
Major Fosdick only growled. Mrs. Fosdick said:
‘There don’t seem to be many nice girls round here. There is Mary Passenger, of course, but she and Jasper never seem to get on very well together. And then I expect the Passengers would make all sorts of difficulties about money. The Braby girls are nice, but I know Jasper. He would want something more distinguished. He has such high ideals, you know. Of course it would be very nice for a lot of reasons if he did marry Mary Passenger.’
‘He might be able to ram some sense into that father of hers. Teach him not to be so selfish about his shooting.’
‘But it is quite out of the question I’m afraid. It would never be arranged. There are too many difficulties in the way.’
‘Passenger ought to have learnt some sense, some knowledge of the world, at his age.’
‘So that is why I was thinking of Joanna.’
Major Fosdick gave it up. His wife was impossible. What was the good of talking to someone like that? At this moment Torquil came into the room and became involved with his mother in a conversation about the pageant and Major Fosdick was left in peace. He engaged himself once more with his own thoughts. These became more and more wild as time wore on and at last his head seemed wholly filled with the phantoms he had conjured up and it buzzed fearfully with the sound of strange music. But all the time he polished his guns and smiled gently to himself as if he were thinking of nothing more startling than pig-sticking or quiet afternoons spent in North Copse.
Joanna sat in the garden and tried to read War and Peace, because she had seen somewhere, in some paper, that it was one of the great books of the world. But she did not make much headway reading it. She found difficulty in following the narrative and there were the accustomed distractions of reading in the open air, the flight of birds and distant noises in the town to which the stillness of afternoon gave some fugitive meaning. In a street near-by she could hear the Orphans playing their organ. And she thought a certain amount about Zouch and wondered what sort of a young man he really was. To this preoccupation were added the fitful appearances of Mrs. Dadds, who had embarked on a series of self-imposed excursions which took her backwards and forwards from the summer-house and within a few yards of Joanna’s chair. Mrs. Dadds’s attitude towards the problem of human relationships made it out of the question that she should pass this point without making at least one comment on current affairs or remark on life of more or less general application.
To hear Mrs. Dadds talk it would have been excusable to have supposed that she had been in the service of the Brandon family for several generations or alternatively that she had been employed by some ducal house for an immense number of years and had taken on her present situation merely as a favour to the Brandons. Her systematically dishevelled hair was against her, certainly, and also the irregularity of her front teeth, several of which were gone for good, but whatever conspicuous imperfections of this kind she might possess she made up for without effort by the assurance of her behaviour.
She had appeared some years before in answer to an advertisement in the local paper. Mrs. Brandon found difficulty in keeping servants and so in spite of her manifestly forged references and her appearance, which on her first entry into the Brandons’ house touched almost its highest peak of oddity, she was engaged. Later, she and Mrs. Brandon became great cronies and would talk to each other endlessly. Neither of them made any effort to listen to what the others was saying, so that often they would speak for hours together on two entirely different subjects. However, they respected each other’s egos according to their own lights and although Mrs. Brandon was in many ways an exigent mistress and Mrs. Dadds was congenitally lazy, it all worked pretty well. Mrs. Brandon was sometimes behindhand in paying wages and Mrs. Dadds was in the habit of appropriating any little odds and ends left lying about which happened to take her fancy. It was, in short, an effective compromise.
Standing in the middle of the lawn on this summer afternoon Mrs. Dadds was seen to the fullest advantage. Nothing was missing to complete the inelegance of her appearance. Her petticoat was coming down at the back and there was a smudge of lampblack on her forehead. When she stood still her body leant always a little to the right.
‘I wonder you don’t get tired of reading all day long, Miss Joanna.’
Joanna said: ‘I do.’
She implied by her tone that the tedium of reading was incomparably less than that of talking to Mrs. Dadds. The afternoon was warm and she wished that the print of her book was larger and the book itself less heavy to hold. Mrs. Dadds said:
‘My husband was a great reader. He’d read anything that came his way. I had no patience with him. I used to say to him, “If you don’t put that book down this minute, you’ll find me after you.”’
‘What did he say to that?’
‘What did he say?’ said Mrs. Dadds.
She paused in contemplation, savouring in her mind what her husband had said, like the remembrance of some rare and piquant taste that she would perhaps never have an opportunity of enjoying again. She said:
‘What did he say, Miss Joanna? If I told you some of the things he used to say to me, your mother would turn me out of the house. The foul-mouthed brute!’
‘What sort of things?’
Joanna wondered whether the end of the speech was intended to apply to her mother or to Mrs. Dadds’s husband. Anyway it did not much matter. She felt that this would be a good opportunity for learning about married life, as she was quite interested in this as a subject. But Mrs. Dadds only shook her head and said:
‘The filthy beast!’
On the other side of the house the bell, an old ship’s bell that hung on a bracket outside the front door, clanged. Mrs. Dadds started involuntarily, but she recovered herself almost at once and said:
‘Well, they say when you’re married your troubles begin, and when they say that they speak the truth. The men, they’re the same the whole lot of them. They just want one thing and when you’ve given them that they’re finished with you. All you’re good for is to slave and slave and slave, keeping them comfortable, wearing your flesh to the bone. I often used to tell that to that good-for-nothing husband of mine.’
‘Hadn’t you better see who that is at the front door?’
‘I used to say to him, “I suppose you expect to live in the lap of luxury while I wait on you hand and foot? You ought to go to India where you could sit in the sun all day long and be fanned by the blacks. That’s all you’re good for.”’
‘If it is Mr. Jasper Fosdick,’ said Joanna, ‘tell him I’m out.’
The bell pealed again and, unmooring herself from her subject, Mrs. Dadds moved off at her leisure in the direction of the house. Over her shoulder she said:
‘You’ll remember what I’ve said when the time comes for you to get married, Miss Joanna.’
Joanna went on with her reading. She sincerely wished that she was married. But not to Jasper. She felt that she would prefer to marry almost anyone to Jasper. She was confident that it was he who had come to pay a call. It was earlier in the afternoon than his usual time for calling but he had not been to see her for so long that he was due any day now and at any moment. She turned over the page, came to the end of a chapter and shut the book, leaning back in her chair and looking up towards the roofs on the other side of the garden wall above which some rooks were flying in circles. Mrs. Dadds advanced again from the direction of the house. She approached the deck-chair.
‘A young gentleman to see you, miss.’
‘Mr. Fosdick? Either of them?’
‘No, miss.’
‘Who is it?’
‘Never seen him before.’
‘What is his name?’
‘Couldn’t catch his name.’
‘But who can he be?’
‘He’s got a beard. He says you know him, Miss Joanna.’
‘Oh, he’s got a beard, has he?’ said Joanna. She dropped War and Peace on the ground beside her. ‘Was his name Zouch?’ she said.
‘Something like that.’
‘And he wants to see me?’
‘That’s what he said.’
‘Well bring him out here. And bring another deck-chair.’
Mrs. Dadds looked surprised. Hurt, almost. It was as if Joanna had let her down in some way by knowing the caller. It was like a breach of confidence. She said, rather resentfully:
‘Then you do know him, Miss Joanna?’
‘Yes. Of course I do. He is staying at Passenger. Go and show him in now. He mustn’t be kept waiting any longer.’
Mrs. Dadds went away to fetch Zouch, but with a lack of conviction. Joanna touched her hair and took up her book again and pretended to read. In a few seconds she felt that Zouch was coming towards her across the lawn. When she thought that he was fairly near she looked up and was intending to say something appropriate from her chair when she lost her head and, getting up again, went to meet him. She had meant to say something rather dignified like “How nice to see you unexpectedly like this,” or, “Fancy your remembering the name of our house,” but when it came to the point she said, a little breathlessly:
‘Do you want to see me?’
When he was a couple of yards off Zouch had stopped, and he stood there looking at her. Dramatically, he took hold of the end of his beard with his left hand and he stood looking at Joanna for quite a long time. He was dressed with great care and was feeling at the top of his form.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I want to see you.’
In the background Mrs. Dadds came staggering out of the house, carrying in the most difficult manner possible an open deck-chair. She dropped this at Zouch’s feet, by a curious sleight of hand contriving to turn it inside out. She closed with the chair, and half-falling on the ground, began to grapple with it.
‘Leave it,’ said Joanna. ‘We’ll put it right somehow.’
‘That always happens, miss, with these chairs.’
‘No, no. Leave it. We can do it.’
It took some time but in the end the chair was arranged for use, and reluctantly Mrs. Dadds left them together. Zouch sat down. He said:
‘I was passing through the town and I thought that I should very much like to see you again. I hope you don’t mind my calling on you suddenly like this?’
‘Of course not. It’s awfully nice of you to remember me.’
Zouch said: ‘I felt I absolutely must see you again. As soon as possible.’
Joanna laughed. She had begun to feel tremendously excited. Something was happening at last. She must keep her head.
‘But how nice of you to say so,’ she said.
She saw that he was excited too. She still held War and Peace in her hand. She was holding it so tightly that she knew that the red from its cover must be coming off on to her palm.
‘What are you reading?’ Zouch said.
He put his arm across one of hers and tipped up the book slightly so that he could see the chapter heading. The print was small and it was several seconds before he could read it and all the time he let his arm lie across hers and rest on her knee with some of his weight behind it so that Joanna felt herself trembling a little at the contact of her body with his.
