The Native Heath, page 8
“And if it’s a spur-of-the-moment invitation we can always plead a prior engagement,” Julia said to Dora, when they had got rid of Mrs. Minnis and were sitting down to their own tea.
“Not so easy in a village. Everyone knows whether you are at home or not.”
“Well, we could be truthfully not at home. We could drive over to see Francis.”
“Poor Francis! How disagreeable she made him sound.”
“It was pique,” Julia declared. “I understood her so well. He ignored her, and she resented it. One can tell from her appearance that she wants to be noticed. No one who didn’t crave to be noticed would dress like that.”
But this was lost on Dora, who never thought of clothes as a guide to character. For her, clothes were divided into two categories, ‘smart’, and ‘comfortable’, and she prided herself that her own were comfortable.
“Of course, he ought to have stopped and given her a lift,” she said. “I quite sympathized with her about that.”
“I expect he never saw her. Probably he was driving along in a brown study, thinking about his book,” argued Julia. Her own sympathies were wholly with Francis (or any man) as opposed to tiresome women like Mrs. Minnis.
Dora remarked that people who drove cars in a brown study were a danger to themselves and others. At this point, perhaps fortunately, they were joined by Robert, who had been out for a walk and was now ravenous for tea. While Julia plied him with scones and jam and Nanny’s little feather-cakes Dora told him about the recent caller. They both knew he went for walks in the afternoons in order to escape callers, but they put this down to his being shy.
“And she has a son,” said Dora. “About your age, I gathered. He’s working and lives in lodgings, but he comes home for weekends. You must get to know him.”
Robert said nothing.
“He’s called Charlton.”
“Or else Sonny,” said Julia. “I suppose he was Sonny in childhood, and she kept on forgetting and alluding to him as Sonny still.”
“Poor mutt,” said Robert. “But I believe he’s a bit of a joke, anyway. Could I have another cup of tea, Julia?”
By her own wish Julia had relinquished the title of aunt; she said it was ageing, and in any case she was Robert’s aunt only by marriage. But sometimes, as now, she wished Robert would not be so casual and off-hand; he ought to remember that she was in a sense his aunt, and that she was housing him and had paid for quite a lot of his education. Obviously, if he knew something about the Minnis family he must have made acquaintances in the village, and he should have mentioned it. She and Dora had supposed, all this time, that he was just taking Taffy for walks.
“Who told you about Charlton Minnis?” she asked.
“Harriet,” said Robert. Seeing that his hearers looked blank, he added, “Harriet Finch.”
“That funny little thing,” Dora said tolerantly, remembering Harriet Finch as the girl in the silly hat. Robert scowled, and Julia perceived that Dora was being tactless. Though she could not imagine what he saw in Harriet she leaned forward and asked sympathetically if he had met her out on a walk.
“Yes,” said Robert. Under the pressure of further sympathetic questions he said he had been to Urn Cottage, where the Finches lived. Yes, Harriet had asked him to go. Yes, it was quite a small house. Yes, Harriet lived there alone with her aunt. Yes, like him she was an orphan.
Julia had already returned Lady Finch’s call, but the Finches had been out and she had seen no more than the exterior of Urn Cottage. It had not impressed her.
“Mrs. Minnis said Lady Finch was mad,” Dora said.
To this Robert answered nothing at all. He did not care for Lady Finch, but he did not feel inclined to agree with Dora; usually they got on pretty well, but he could not immediately forgive her for speaking of Harriet as a funny little thing.
He had forgotten his own first impression of Harriet, for by this time they had had several meetings, and the more he saw of her the more he liked her. He remained sulkily silent, and presently, his own hunger satisfied, went off to give Taffy his dinner.
“What an odd boy Robert is,” Dora exclaimed, as soon as he had left them.
Julia sighed. At another time she might have defended Robert but it had been an exhausting afternoon and she was tired.
“I’m afraid he was rather surly, but he’s at a difficult age,” she said. It was the best she could manage; and in her heart she felt that he did not deserve even this extenuation.
“Anyway, it’s a good thing he has begun to make friends,” Dora said cheerfully. She stood up and shook herself, as she always did when she had been sitting still for an unusually long time, and announced that she was going out to do a bit more gardening before supper. It was a shame, she remarked, to waste a perfectly good evening like this lounging indoors.
Left alone, Julia dallied for a while with an old dream of retiring to some warm desert island or to a single-roomed stone cottage in the middle of a great forest. She fondly believed that she had the hermit’s temperament and could live without human companionship, drawing spiritual nourishment from the beauties of nature. At times like these—times when the smooth surface of her present life was ruffled by threatening breezes—the thought of this solitary life was very tempting.
But it could not be. She could not leave her world, because she was needed. She felt herself responsible for other people—for Robert, who was an orphan and dangerously good-looking and who had yet to be launched on a career; for Nanny, who was old and depended on her; for poor Dora, who had had such a hard time and who must be gently weaned from her bad habits of snorting and banging doors, because otherwise she would never be really popular. And these were not all; there was also Francis Heswald, who was simply wasting his life.
Julia had not liked Mrs. Minnis and had not believed all she said, but she could not help feeling that there was some truth in the things she said about Francis Heswald. Although, as his cousin and well-wisher, she would defend him in public, she privately agreed with Mrs. Minnis that he ought to take more part in local affairs and local society. That she should dream of a hermit’s life for herself and deplore it for Francis did not seem to her illogical; after all, she had not gone to her island, because the world needed her. It needed Francis, too, and he had now become another of her responsibilities.
The desert island, the forest-shrouded dwelling, had played their parts. Julia was ennobled by the vision of her simple unworldly life in these solitudes, and she could not fail to perceive that there was also a certain merit in abjuring her own wishes for the sake of others. The two sensations combined pleasurably; she decided—with a swift return to practical standards—that Belmont House suited her.
‘After all,’ she thought, going upstairs to relax in the pink bathroom and try the new bath-salts she had bought that morning—‘after all, it’s where I was meant to live. Uncle James realized that, though I didn’t. It’s my native heath.’
CHAPTER VII
“Come in,” said Miss Pope. “No, not in the church-room, Millicent. We’re having the meeting in the dining-room today, because it isn’t really a church matter. Alaric thinks it makes a clearer distinction in people’s minds if we have secular meetings in the dining-room.”
Mrs. Prentice turned away from the church-room—a large room built on at one side of the vicarage and linked to it, rather oddly, by a greenhouse-passage in the Gothic style—and crossed the hall to the dining-room. Miss Pope was already greeting another arrival, and Mrs. Prentice had lost the opportunity of asking whether Mrs. Dunstan and Miss Duckworth were to be at the meeting. She had meant to ask it straightaway; but then, if they were coming, how could she find an excuse for going home again? Her life, hitherto so simple and easy, was now complicated by her fear of meeting the newcomers on whom she had not called, and by the impossibility of explaining her reasons for not calling on them.
She peeped round the half-open door. The dining-room was empty except for Mr. Daglish and his sister, who were sitting side by side in a corner of the room. They appeared to be asleep. The room faced north-east and even on this hot summer afternoon retained the characteristic atmosphere of all the vicarage rooms, dampish, sanctified, and smelling faintly of cabbage.
‘But it can’t be cabbage at this time of year,’ Mrs. Prentice thought. She remembered that the vicarage was supposed to be haunted by an Evangelical ghost, the shade of an early incumbent who had practised plain living and high thinking, and she wondered if the cabbage smell also had a supernatural origin. Perhaps he had lived on cabbages. Pondering this problem, she trod on a loose, creaking board, and woke the Daglishes from their nap.
They woke with dignity, and greeted her as if no snores had passed their lips.
“We chose this corner for the view,” said Miss Daglish. “Come and sit here, you can see the hill.”
Doing as she was bid, Mrs. Prentice looked sideways through the narrow arched window; its borders were filled with stained glass, but through the central section she could see Goatstock Hill against a clear blue sky.
“Very nice,” she said.
Miss Daglish sighed. “It’s sad to think it may not be there much longer.”
“You mean, the New Town?”
Miss Daglish nodded. That was what the meeting was about: to consider the threat of the New Town, and what action, if any, could be taken by the inhabitants of Goatstock to avert this catastrophe. Mrs. Prentice, whose mind was slow but practical, thought that Miss Daglish was over-stating her case; for even if the New Town was here, surely Goatstock Hill would still be there, they could not take it away—or could they? Uncertain what modern planners could achieve, she said cautiously that it would mean great changes.
“Mabilla remembers Goatstock before they built the new road,” said Mr. Daglish. “There have been a lot of changes since then. Not all for the best.”
He was an elderly man, but younger than his sisters, of whom the last survivor was Mabilla—the Miss Daglish who sat beside him. The family had lived in Goatstock for a long time, and Mr. and Miss Daglish were therefore entitled to take an interest in its future, but Mrs. Prentice could not help feeling they were rather too obsessed by the past. She thought this because she knew that they looked on all the newer houses (of which her own was one) as horrible excrescences which ought never to have been built.
The room was filling up. Lady Finch was there, with Harriet, and Mr. and Mrs. Minnis, and Mrs. Wilmot with poor James sitting meekly beside her. Two late-comers hurried in, shepherded by a short, squat figure who announced that Miss Pope was just fetching Mr. Pope and would be with them in one moment, and would they please draw up and sit round the table. This squat figure was Miss Brigg, Miss Pope’s useful friend. She lived by herself in lodgings over the baker’s shop, but seemed to spend all her waking hours at the vicarage, or working for good causes sponsored by the church.
Mrs. Prentice felt happier; for the meeting was about to start, and Mrs. Dunstan and Miss Duckworth were not there. She moved her chair towards the table, and contrived to separate herself from the Daglishes and to find a place next to the vacant chair at the end, which would be occupied by Miss Pope. A moment later the vicar and his sister entered the room, and when everyone had wished Mr. Pope good afternoon, and all had been assured of his pleasure at seeing them there, they got down to business.
It was all quite informal, Miss Pope explained. Just a small private gathering, so that they could find out one another’s views and perhaps make a few plans of their own. After all, town-planners were not the only people who could make plans.
Several people laughed at this little joke, and Miss Pope paused to allow the laughter to die down. This was a mistake, for Mr. Minnis took advantage of the pause to begin a speech of his own. Mr. Minnis was a long-winded speaker, a man whom it was difficult to stop. In a great many words he asked if the meeting was really necessary, and if it was quite certain that Goatstock, that charming rural spot which they all had good reasons to love (and he listed the reasons in detail), was to become a New Town?
“Oh yes, I assure you it’s all settled,” Miss Pope said hurriedly. “Of course nothing has been announced yet—no public announcement, I mean. But Alaric heard it from the Bishop’s chaplain at least a month ago when he was lunching at the Palace. It was—when was it, Alaric?—yes, it was the week after Easter.”
Mr. Pope coughed uneasily. When he told his sister of the Bishop’s chaplain’s news he had not foreseen that she would spread the information all over Goatstock and publicly proclaim its origin at his own table. Still, it was true; though the chaplain had not said, in so many words, that it was all settled. He had said there was a strong probability of its happening.
“A strong probability,” Mr. Pope said aloud—but softly. He meant these words to be a qualification of his sister’s bold statement, but those who heard him supposed that he was upholding her, perhaps because it was usual for Mr. Pope to agree with his sister. A murmur of dismay, and disapproval, went up from the meeting; hitherto no one had quite believed in the New Town, but if the news came from a source so trustworthy as a Bishop’s chaplain it was obviously a thing to be taken seriously.
“My sister lived in a New Town in the south,” said Mrs. Wilmot. “But she had to move. She couldn’t put up with it.”
“But we can’t all move. Where should we go?” Mrs. Minnis cried despairingly.
Harriet suggested that they should found a New Village and emigrate to it en masse. “Like the Pilgrim Fathers when they were persecuted.”
“That’s what all those men with poles were up to,” said Miss Brigg, referring, not to the Pilgrim Fathers, but to the surveyors and their henchmen who had been observed, more than a year ago, wandering about the neighbourhood. “I knew they weren’t up to no good.”
“If they build new streets it will seriously interfere with our gardens,” said Lady Finch. “And gardens, properly cultivated, mean health. It’s a retrograde step.”
“Why should it interfere with the gardens?”
“Naturally, in a town, there must be streets. And they can’t build streets through our houses, so they will have to run them through the gardens.”
“Perhaps they’ll pull the houses down.”
Cries of protest, cries of wrath, rent the air. Miss Daglish said she would never give permission; if their house stood in the way of a street the street would have to encircle it, that was all. Mrs. Minnis said brightly there was a church in London like that, the Strand went round it on either side. Harriet said the New Town would look very funny.
Mrs. Wilmot, who through her sister’s experience could count herself an authority on New Towns, began to explain what town-planning meant. It wasn’t a case of giving one’s permission—they simply took what land they wanted, even when it was a brand-new orchard with a wall round it and valuable fruit trees inside, such as had belonged to her sister. She made it clear that the Daglish residence—which was well known to be in an advanced state of decay—would not stand a chance. It would be razed to the ground.
The meeting became rowdy. Everyone was talking at once, except Mrs. Prentice who was listening to Mr. Minnis telling her a long and improbable anecdote about storks. That they nested on houses she already knew, but she did not know how they had appeared on the hypothetical rooftops of New Goatstock. “Very remarkable instance of sagacity,” said Mr. Minnis. “If I hadn’t seen it for myself I shouldn’t have believed it.” Not having seen it for herself, Mrs. Prentice felt under no obligation to believe it, but charity forbade her to say so.
“But all this is beside the point,” Miss Pope cried loudly, rapping on the table to gain attention. “We are not here to discuss what we shall do if the New Town comes. We are here to prevent its coming!”
These were brave words, but they did not produce a brave response. “How can we stop it?” Lady Finch asked crossly. Mr. Minnis suggested that in due course, when the plans had been publicly announced, there would be an opportunity to raise objections.
Miss Pope retorted that it would then be too late. Once things had been publicly announced, she said, the Government was simply determined to carry them through, and objections would not get a fair hearing.
Unfortunately, Mr. Minnis’s suggestion was received with murmurs of approval, especially from those who felt that the meeting had lasted long enough. Everyone liked Miss Pope, but everyone knew that she was an enthusiast and that she would keep them sitting round the table for hours, arguing about plans, unless some reasonable way of escape could be found. The procrastinating phrase, ‘in due course’, offered such an escape; and it was eagerly applauded.
Mrs. Wilmot looked at her watch and said she must be going. Other people followed her example. The danger that threatened Goatstock was a serious matter, and required careful consideration, said Mr. Minnis, but they would do better to meet again, when they had had time to think things over. Probably they could get up a petition; but that, of course, would need a lot of organization.
The Daglishes, breathing tremulous defiance, left with the Wilmots. The others soon followed, until only Mrs. Prentice and the ever-faithful Miss Brigg remained as audience to Miss Pope. Miss Pope still had plenty to say, but the interruptions of leave-taking rather interfered with her eloquence.
“So disheartening!” she exclaimed, as the door closed behind the Finches. “I had counted on getting some really constructive support—but you see how it is. People simply aren’t prepared to co-operate!”
“Lady Finch was right, I reckon. There’s nowt to be done,” said Miss Brigg.
“But there must be something,” cried Miss Pope. “The trouble with Goatstock is that there is no one to give a lead. I don’t count. I haven’t the—the right personality.”
It was only on rare occasions, when things had gone wrong, that Miss Pope lost confidence in herself. Mrs. Prentice and Miss Brigg hastened to assure her that she had an excellent personality and that they didn’t know what the village would do without her. But Miss Pope refused to be comforted.
