The Headmistress

CHAPTER I-4

“It’s locked and I’ve got the key,” said Mr. Belton. “I’ve got a duplicate. You can have it. No one else wants to go in. I don’t believe any of the children can read at all.”

Mr. Carton expressed his thanks, would have liked to say God bless you, but as Mr. Oriel had said it already, he felt it would be poaching on his clerical preserves. So he went off, carrying Mr. Oriel with him.

Wheeler than came to take away the tea-things.

“I knew you would be having callers,” she said, looking with gratification on the dirty cups. “If anyone else comes I’ll send them away. You need a lay down, madam, and if you want your bath the water’s nice and hot any time. Cook says it’s a lovely little boiler and now she can do it herself the water will be properly hot, not like that boiler up at the Park eating the coal all the time and old Humble too lazy to stoke it up properly at night. Oh, and there’s a big tin of biscuits come from Lady Norton, madam. One of the soldiers that’s billeted at Norton Park brought it over on his motor bike and she says if you want any more to let her know.”

When Wheeler had gone Mr. and Mrs. Belton sat quietly by the fire. Mrs. Belton was very tired and blamed herself for the feeling. A woman in her middle fifties, she said angrily to herself, had no business to be tired. At that age one ought to be full of horrible energy, dashing about in old but well-cut tweeds organizing everything, a jolly elder sister to one’s children, or at least a very competent grandmother romping with the grandchildren while their parents were on war work or abroad. At any rate there weren’t any grandchildren, so that was that. All three children ought to have married years ago, but they never seemed to want to. Nor did they want a jolly elder sister. All they wanted was a purveyor of beds, fires, food, such drink as there was, cigarettes; someone who could take all telephone messages accurately, never ask where they were going or had been, tireless, self-effacing. All of which she had tried to be and she knew that her husband had too, but at the end of each leave, whether it was Freddy from his ship, Elsa from her hush-hush job, or Charles from the army, she felt she had not given satisfaction. As for her tweeds, they were certainly old, but not particularly well cut, for the children’s allowances and the expenses of the house and estate did not leave much margin for a good tailor now, and her Mr. Levine in Bruton Street, who cut coats like an angel and skirts like a genius had gone up in four years from twelve guineas to thirty. What she would really like, she thought, would be to throw every single thing in her wardrobe out of the window and have everything new and to stop feeling tired and looking her age and go somewhere warm, if there was any warm place left in this horrible world now, and exercise allure, and be admired. All this made her laugh at herself, and her husband looked up, pleased to see that Lucy was happy, for much as he hated leaving his home he had dreaded the change even more for his wife.

“Dr. Perry was quite right,” said Mrs. Belton, stroking her husband’s tweed sleeve. “It is the nicest house in Harefield, and it is lovely to think we shan’t be cold this winter.”

Mr. Belton said nothing, but his heart gave a leap of thankfulness that Lucy was settling down so quickly. And everyone had been so kind. People sending presents of food—even old Lady Norton who had frightened him ever since he could remember her. The nice things Oriel and Carton had said, and Perry; and that nice little Sally Pomfret, who didn’t have too easy a time herself with her great barrack of Pomfret Towers and every committee in the county and three small children.

“I’m glad you’re pleased, my dear,” he said. “A little peace and quiet will do you good. And when you have got things straight, perhaps you’ll do something about that Miss Starling.”

“Sparling, darling. Of course I will,” said his wife. “Perhaps Mr. Oriel might marry her. Anyway I’ll go and call on her. Or ought I to write and ask if I may? A headmistress seems rather glorious. Oh, what a lovely little room this is and so extraordinarily peaceful.”

Little perhaps it was after the great rooms at Harefield Park with their finely decorated ceilings and furlongs of carpet and curtains, but large in its proportions and Mrs. Admiral Ellangowan-Hornby’s taste, breathing an ordered peace which was infinitely soothing to the shipwrecked voyagers in their temporary harbour.

This pleasant warm content was suddenly broken by a shattering noise outside the house and a violent ringing of the telephone from across the hall. Wheeler could be heard answering the telephone, the shattering noise continued, diversified by voices trying to outshout it, and after a moment the front door bell pealed through the house, followed at a very short interval by another peal equally violent. They now heard Wheeler hurrying to the front door and the well-known voice of their younger son Charles.

His parents, though they would have died rather than admit it to any outsider, to each other, or even to their secret selves, experienced a peculiar sinking of the heart, or rather of the spirits at this sound. Not but that either of them would cheerfully have gone to the scaffold for Charles, or given him the best bed, all the butter ration and the most comfortable chair; but they knew from fatal experience that whatever they did would be just wrong. They also each knew, though they had never come within miles of discussing the subject, that Charles really had much the same feelings himself; that he always came home full of the best intentions, prepared to walk round the place with his father, or accompany his mother to tea at the Perrys’, or even to discuss his own future; that even as he entered the house all those sincere feelings were overlaid by a nervousness and irritation which caused him to be on the whole selfish, graceless, cross if questioned about himself and resentful if he wasn’t. And it was much the same with Freddy and Elsa, though Freddy at twenty-nine was approximating to something human in his parents’ house. Mrs. Belton often wondered if all the other parents felt the same. It was not apparent that they did. Hermione Rivers for instance, Lord Pomfret’s cousin who wrote all those successful novels, was always boasting about her boy Julian and his painting; Mrs. Tebben at Worsted was more than boring about the devotion of her Richard; that dreadful Mrs. Grant who was some connection of Mrs. Brandon’s used to speak far too frequently of her son Hilary’s complete oneness with his madre amata. Mrs. Belton had sometimes wished she could have sons like that. But yet some inner freemasonry of mothers told her that much of this was wilful self-delusion, façade, whatever one liked to call it, even perhaps a gallant making the best of things. She had seen Mrs. Rivers, usually so arrogant and overbearing, go white and silent under one of Julian’s rebuffs; she had seen Mrs. Tebben turn her face away for a moment at some careless or exasperated stab from Richard. Mrs. Grant, it is true, had never been seen to blench, but then Hilary, at any rate till his mother was finally stranded in Calabria and he married his cousin Delia Brandon, had been rather milk-and-water. And Freddy, Elsa and Charles, thank goodness, were not milk-and-water at all. And then, with a mental shrug of her shoulders, she realized that in thanking goodness for her children being not milk-and-water she was only being exactly like all the other mothers. There seemed to be no way out.

An echo of all these thoughts may have run through Mrs. Belton’s mind while the echoes of the front door bell died away. Then the pressing present moment returned in full force as several loud bumps as of heavy parcels being thrown onto the floor sounded from the hall and Charles appeared, wearing a gigantic and dirty raincoat with a storm collar over his uniform and a very tight pale green béret.

“Twenty-four hours,” said Charles, “but a man had a motor-bike so it’ll be thirty-six. We did about seventy most of the way.”

Then catching sight of himself in a pillared and gilded mirror over the fireplace he strode up to it, settled the béret more tightly on his head and admired it.

“How do you like it?” said Charles carelessly.

Now if Mr. Belton had been a real parent, he would have said, “Take that thing off at once, my boy, and kiss your mother, and don’t let me see you wearing a hat or whatever you call it in the house again.” And if Mrs. Belton had been a truthful mother she would have said, “What a hideous colour, darling, and your face looks just like a pudding boiled in a cloth under it.”

But neither courage nor truth was uppermost in Mr. and Mrs. Belton at the moment. Mr. Belton said, “Queer colour, isn’t it,” in what he hoped was a man-of-the-world voice, while Mrs. Belton said, “It’s very nice, darling, but you look even nicer with your peaked cap.” They then realized at once that they had probably blighted the whole of Charles’s leave, if not for him, at least entirely for themselves and wished they were dead. But they were also very glad to see that Charles looked even broader, redder in the face and generally healthier, if possible, than on his previous leave.

“Do you want tea, darling?” said his mother. “Wheeler will get it in a minute.”

“No, thanks. I’ll be going round to the Nabob presently,” said Charles. “Copper and I had one coming down the street and we told them we’d look in again. So this is where we are to live, is it?”

Mr. Belton rashly asked who Copper was. In normal times Charles would have got up and walked out of the room on less provocation than this, but so tolerant had army life made him that he merely answered, “A man. The one with the bike. It’s not his name really,” after which his father knew better than to ask what his name really was.

“I’ll tell you a funny thing—where do the cigarettes live, father? Oh, never mind, I’ve got one here. I quite forgot,” he continued, extracting a battered cigarette from the bottom of a pocket, together with some cotton waste which he threw at the fender, just missing it, “that it was the last day in the old home and all that and I told Copper to take me to the Park. I got the shock of my life when I walked into the hall and found a lot of girls. My word, what a set! Talk of legs!”

“Pretty, eh?” said his father, trying to affect a roguishness quite out of keeping with his nature.

“Hideous,” said Charles briefly. “There may have been a nice pair hidden away somewhere, but most of them looked like our A.T.S. corporal, beef to the instep. And all wearing gym tunics. And then a kind of mistress came out and said did I want anything. So I said no, and it was all a mistake and my father and mother used to live there, and my name was Belton, and I suppose she thought I was dippy; she said she was sorry. So I yelled to Copper and luckily he hadn’t been able to start up the bike, so he brought me down here. I say, mother, where do I live?”