Summer Pudding, page 2
“Sheila is! I’m sure she can’t be. Besides, she’s got enough to do with the cottage.”
The girl gave her a rather odd glance.
“Your mother’s an awfully energetic person, I should think.”
“She shouldn’t be.” Janet’s face took on a worried look. “As a matter of fact her heart’s not very strong. She doesn’t know it, nor does Sheila. I got her down to the country on a trick. I got the doctor to say Sheila ought to get away; she never would have gone except for that.”
“I expect it’s difficult for your sister.” The girl’s voice had lost its easy naturalness and sounded forced. “I know how difficult it is to keep Daddy in order. I say, I wish you’d come and see Daddy and me while you’re in Worsingfold. Our name’s Haines, Daddy’s a retired colonel, and I’m Barbara. It’s awful to have a retired colonel for a father; he knows just how the war ought to be run, and gets so angry when the Government doesn’t do things his way. You can hardly see our walls for maps, and they’re ruined with pin-holes where the flags have gone in.”
Janet laughed.
“I’d simply love to come. I suppose Sheila knows where you live?”
Barbara stared at her feet.
“Oh, yes. Yes, of course she does.” She looked up. “Anyway, you can’t miss it. It’s called Worsingfold House. That sounds awfully grand, but it isn’t really. It’s the only house in the village, everything else is cottages except for the vicarage, and the Old Oast House which belongs to the doctor, and, of course, the farm. Donald Sheldon has the biggest of those, but you know him, don’t you?”
“Me! No, I don’t know a soul in Worsingfold. My sister found the place and fixed the cottage and everything.”
“Did she?” Barbara gave her shoulders a faint shrug. “I can’t think why, but I thought it was through you. I mean I thought I’d heard it was through a sister of Sheila’s that you knew Donald, but I expect I’ve got muddled.”
“No, we knew nobody, the cottage was just to let and we took it.” Janet was looking at her watch so she did not see the puzzled expression on Barbara’s face. “We must be nearly there, aren’t we?”
Barbara looked out of the window.
“Not far off.” She stretched as much as the cramped conditions would let her. “I’ll be glad to get back.”
“Have you been away long?”
“No, only one night. The dentist.”
Janet’s grey eyes ran over her thoughtfully.
“I should have thought it would be fun for you to get away now and again.”
Barbara put on her gloves. Her voice lacked colour.
“Oh, it can be fun, of course, but just now it happens that everybody I know is overseas.”
Janet was moved by the naïveté of this. Barbara was very young in some ways; nobody could be deceived by her ‘everybody’. It was obvious that what she meant was ‘my special somebody’.
Barbara became conscious of how her words had sounded, for she turned pink and said hurriedly:
“You do promise to come and see us, don’t you?”
“Of course, it’s awfully nice of you. As a matter of fact I shan’t be in Worsingfold long. I shan’t take more than a week’s holiday before signing on.”
“Let’s hope they don’t call you up for a bit after you’ve joined, for I should think you need more than a week’s holiday.”
“A fortnight or three weeks would be nice, but I’d like to get down to real war work. It’s nice to feel free now to do it. My boss was awfully old, and though not past his work, found it a bit heavy once his nephew, who was his partner, was called up.” Janet had quick movements, she swept round now to Barbara. “I can’t get over what you said about Sheila teaching. Apart from having heaps to do with the housework, and shopping, she’s not the type to teach.” She sighed. “I can see part of my holiday will be spent putting my family straight. Sheila must be talked out of that idea.”
“But it’s a promise,” said Barbara bluntly. “You can’t make her let Donald down like that. Iris is eight and ought to be doing some lessons. Donald was frightfully pleased when she promised. He’s been very disappointed she hasn’t been strong enough to start yet. You see, his wife died two years ago, and though he’s got an awfully good housekeeper called Gladys Batten, she hasn’t much time for Iris, though she says she adores her.”
A smile flooded Janet’s face.
“You don’t like Gladys Batten.”
“I can see she’s a marvellous housekeeper, looks after the house awfully well and cooks and everything, but I don’t really like her. I can’t think why, for I’m sure she’s a very good woman, but you can’t like people just because they’re good, can you?” She got up. “We’re nearly there.” She stretched up to the rack for her case. “I am glad I met you. I’ve a feeling we’re going to be friends.”
Worsingfold was a halt not a station. Sheila was sitting on its only bench. She was a beauty and never forgot it for a second. Now on an empty station she was nicely posed for the edification of everybody on the train. She was wearing a blue linen frock the exact colour of her eyes. She had moved to the end of the bench where the sun caught the gold in her fair curls. On the seat beside her was a straw hat with a ribbon round it that matched her frock. Her face and bare legs were becomingly tanned.
She knew she looked like the cover of the summer number of a magazine, and felt it was a treat for the people on the train to have a look at her. She did not get up too quickly to spoil the effect, but sauntered over to Janet enjoying the male eyes that gazed admiringly out of every window.
“Hullo, Janet.” Then she saw Barbara and her voice changed. “Good afternoon, Miss Haines.”
Barbara nodded, and said a cheerful “Hullo”. It seemed normal enough, but Janet had one of those fleeting thoughts, that you can’t pin down, that something was not quite right; then even before the thought had taken shape she had forgotten it in her pleasure at seeing Sheila, and after months of loneliness being in touch once more with home.
“I’ve managed to get the taxi,” Sheila announced.
“I wish I’d known your sister was coming,” said Barbara. “I put my car in the station garage and I could have driven you home.”
Sheila did not look grateful.
“Thank you, but I was able to get the taxi all right, and even if people can scrounge plenty of petrol one doesn’t like to use it.”
Barbara flushed.
“I’ve no more petrol than anybody else, but it wouldn’t have been out of my way to drop you.” She turned to Janet. “Goodbye. I hope you enjoy your holiday, and don’t forget your promise to come and see us.”
Sheila stared after Barbara, scowling.
“I could have driven you home,” she minced.
A very ancient taxi was standing outside, with a grey-haired, bent old driver at the wheel. When he saw Janet carrying her suitcase he began to move preparatory to getting out. She stopped him with a smile.
“Don’t bother, I can lift it in.”
The driver shook his head.
“’Tisn’t right; my grandson what this taxi rightly belongs to, him that’s serving in the Navy, he says to me before he goes: ‘no need to tell you not to smash the taxi, grand-dad, ’cos at the speed what you can drive you couldn’t, and no need to tell you not to fiddle with ’er, but to take her to the garridge if she’s actin’ queer. All you got to do is just to treat ’er gentle same as if she was a ’oss, and if there’s any luggage lift it in. Folks don’t like payin’ for a taxi and liftin’ their stuff theirselves.’”
Janet laughed.
“I don’t mind lifting mine. Have you good news of your grandson?”
“Yes. ’Is wife ’eard only this week. He seems rarely pleased with the way the Navy’s doin’.”
Inside the taxi Sheila eyed Janet disapprovingly.
“You shouldn’t encourage people like him.”
“Why not? He’s an old pet.”
“He’s too familiar. They all are in this village. It’s just because we live in a cottage. They’re quite different to the Haines. They talk about Barbara Haines as if she was royalty, and there’s no difference between us except that she lives in a big house.”
Janet glanced anxiously at Sheila. She looked well, but of course that might be the sunburn. She did hope she wasn’t taking a dislike to Worsingfold. The cottage was so miraculously cheap, and it was so unlikely to be bombed, it would be a disaster if she wanted to move.
“She was awfully nice on the train.” Janet spoke cautiously, not wanting to annoy Sheila the moment she got home. “How’s Mum?”
“Oh, she’s all right.”
Janet felt that Sheila was on the offensive and could not imagine why.
“You look marvellously well.”
“I’m not. I still get terribly tired and my nerves are ghastly; they keep me awake at night. Do you know, sometimes I lie just shaking like a jelly about nothing at all. I was telling Mr. Sheldon, and he says he supposes it’s the awful time I went through, and I expect he’s right.”
Janet’s eyes opened.
“What awful time?”
Sheila flushed.
“Oh, the bombing and all that.”
“But you didn’t have much of it. The doctor ordered Mum away almost as soon as it started. The worst part was after you’d gone, thank goodness.”
“I’m very highly strung. Even a siren upsets me.”
Janet had heard this too often to want to start it all over again. “What’s Mr. Sheldon like? He’s our landlord, isn’t he?” Sheila lit up. She thought all men an engrossing topic of conversation.
“He’s rather good-looking in a he-mannish brown way. He’s a farmer, of course, so he’s not polished like the sort of men we’re used to, but . . .”
Janet was laughing.
“You are a scream. I didn’t mean what does he look like, I mean what’s he like as a person. And I like all that about the men we knew being polished. What polished men did we know?”
Sheila wriggled, a way she had when her bluff was being called. “The men in my office had lovely manners.”
“You always said you hated everybody in it.”
“That was after the men were called up; nobody could like being in an office with only women. Women are cats and not half as understanding as men. Anyway, I never ought to have been in an office, I ought to be in pictures, everybody says so.”
Janet shot away from this age-long argument.
“Miss Haines told me you were going as governess to Mr. Sheldon’s little girl.”
Sheila flinched as if something had hurt her. Janet saw there were tears in her eyes.
“I’m in an awful muddle about that. I did sort of say I would. You see, he was quite kind helping us to move in and all that, and then he’s a widower, and you feel you must be nice to them, don’t you? So I said I would teach Iris, but I never meant to, really. I couldn’t, my nerves wouldn’t stand it.”
“The housework wouldn’t, anyway. That’s a full-time job, isn’t it?”
Sheila wriggled again.
“Well, yes, of course it is; but he’s got so horrid about Iris, you’d think I’d promised, which, of course, I never did. It’s not my fault if he hasn’t the time or the petrol to take his kid into a town to school.” She turned her eyes to Janet. She had a trick of opening them wide with a look of childish candour. She did this now. “I expect truly he wants me in the house. You know how men are.”
Janet knew only too well how men were about Sheila. From the age of three she had captivated any of them that set eyes on her. Little boys in the kindergarten with her, later big boys and schoolmasters, then every errand boy and postman that came to the house and, of course, the office staff. Janet had always suspected that until the men were called up Sheila’s office life had been to sit around being worshipped and given presents while somebody did her work; it had not surprised her at all when the men had gone, and the elder women took charge, that they had delighted in making Sheila work, and that she had described them as cats. However, she was not going to judge her unknown landlord on Sheila’s word only; her mother would know if she really had offered to teach the child.
“We must settle that somehow,” she said lightly. “I dare say he sounds rougher than he means; it’s that lack of polish you say we’re not used to.”
“I wish you wouldn’t be sarcastic.”
Janet was looking out at the village, whose first cottages were coming into view.
“I don’t mean to be, but putting on side is silly. We’re very ordinary people, and we know very ordinary men.” Sheila’s voice rose.
“Oh, do we! Do you call Richard Trent ordinary?”
Janet gaped at her sister.
“Mr. Trent! But you’ve never seen him.” Something in Sheila’s face eluded her. “Or have you?”
Sheila stared at her toes.
“You know I haven’t.”
Janet turned back to the window. She saw a picture postcard village street. White cottages, each one covered in a patterned thatch. A square Norman church sitting in a grassy graveyard. A village shop, its small windows bulging with everything from boots to worm powders, an inn called ‘The Lamb’, its sign a pascal lamb with its pennon over its shoulder. She saw all this with her eyes, but her mind was back in London. She was looking at her bombed office, and her employer’s shattered flat above it. Poor old Horace Pringle, he must have died instantly. She was glad he had been spared the misery of knowing that his clients’ papers had been destroyed. A solicitor has such intimate papers belonging to other people, it would probably have worried him into his grave. If only she knew where Richard Trent was so that she could send him a cable. Of course, Horace Pringle had his address, but it was destroyed with everything else. If only she knew what regiment he was in. On leave he had always got into mufti to get comfortably down to the mass of work waiting for him. It had really been idiotic of her not to have had an address for him, but he hadn’t offered it, and she had not thought to ask for it. They were more than employer and employee, they were almost friends, but friends solely over business; she had never been interested in his private life nor he in hers, and so the question of his address had never crossed either of their minds.
“It’s quite a pretty village, isn’t it?” said Sheila. “Look out of this window; that’s the Haines’ house.”
Janet turned and saw a Georgian house behind high iron gates.
“It looks very grand. She asked me to go and see her, but I shouldn’t like to go there.”
Sheila swung her foot angrily. Janet was as tiresome as ever, she thought. Always saying things to make other people feel small. She did hope she wasn’t going round saying that sort of thing in Worsingfold. People were quick enough to look down their noses at you without you going about saying you weren’t used to big houses. It was sickening Janet had come at all; she was certain to grumble and make rows, she always did. It would be a help if she could think of something to put her into a good temper before she got to the cottage. Her methods for pleasing were the same for women as for men. Her face broke into a sweet, wistful smile.
“It’s simply lovely you’ve come. I feel awfully young to be looking after Mum and everything by myself.”
Janet refrained from pointing out that Sheila was nearly twenty, and that when she herself had been that age she had been daily breading, parting with every penny she earned to lift a little of the anxiety off her mother’s shoulders, and chief provider of luxuries for which a spoilt little sister of fourteen whined. She had a fear that the dismay which she often felt at Sheila’s ways and goings-on might not be inspired simply by her dislike of affectation and fecklessness, but have a root in jealousy. She never did feel jealous, but it seemed so peculiar that she didn’t, with, as she often told herself, me so plain and Sheila so lovely, that she tried to sift each aggravated thought that Sheila inspired, to find where its roots lay. She changed the subject.
“How far is it to the cottage?”
“We turn off in a moment up the lane to the farm. Our cottage is on a sort of track across some fields. The taxi can’t go up that bit.”
The words were scarcely out of her mouth when, with a violent jerk, the taxi came to a stop. With the careful slowness of an old person, less sure of the behaviour of their limbs than they were, the driver climbed out. He came to the open window. He looked anxiously at Sheila.
“Would it be too much for your sister to walk from here like? That time when I drove you and your mother up to the farm, when you just come, I had a terrible time gettin’ back. Reversin’ isn’t no different to goin’ forward, that’s what my grandson said, not when you understand it, but maybe I haven’t understood it.”
Sheila made an annoyed movement, but before she could speak Janet broke in.
“Of course we’ll get out here. My suitcase isn’t so terribly heavy. If it’s too much I’ll borrow a wheelbarrow.” She opened the taxi door. “How much?”
The old man said two shillings and eyed Janet while she found half a crown.
“You ain’t bred same as your sister. Put me in mind of my old setter. She had a litter of pups so different that you wouldn’t know they was come by same way.” He held out his hand. “Let me carry that case a bit of the way.”
Janet shook her head.
“Of course not, and when you next see your grandson you tell him that the women have got proud in this war, and won’t let you carry their luggage for them however often you ask them.”
The old man turned away, then struck by a thought he came back.
“We keep pigs, my wife and me. We got a right to kill one next month what hasn’t to go Lord Wooltonin’, but is for ourselves like. You step along down there and I’ll find you a nice pork chop. Reckon you can do with it after being bombed and that in Lunnon.”
Janet was charmed.
“I do think that’s kind of you, Mr. . . .”
“Jus’ Tom. Nobody don’t call me nothin’ different.”
“Well, Tom, I can’t tell you how nice I think you are, but I’m afraid I shan’t be here next month. I’m going to join the W.R.N.S.”
