Pomfret Towers

CHAPTER ONE INVITATION TO THE TOWERS-3

‘Well, I’ll just bring Wuffy in,’ said Sally.

‘No, don’t,’ said Alice, dreading another outburst of barking. ‘I’ll go and see. I’m sure they are all right.’

She slipped out of the room. At first the dimly-lighted hall seemed empty and she thought Horton had taken Sally’s dogs away with Penny. Then she saw Sally’s three dogs lying as neatly as if they were on tombstones, perfectly silent, each with ears c****d and eyes lovingly turned in the same direction. Alice, following their gaze, saw in the darkest corner of the hall under the staircase a kind of heaving mountain which she at once recognised as Roddy Wicklow taking off his coat.

‘Hullo,’ said Roddy, advancing towards the light. ‘Those dogs of Sally’s were giving Horton hell in the pantry, when I got here. Did they bother you?’

‘Only in the drawing-room,’ said Alice, holding out her hand.

‘I really oughtn’t to shake hands,’ said Roddy. ‘It’s freezing like blinking outside and I hadn’t my gloves on. By jove, your hand’s as cold as mine. Have you been out on a day like this?’

He towered over and almost enveloped Alice with his great height and breadth and his loose shabby tweeds, but Alice found it comfortable and reassuring.

‘I’m always cold,’ she said.

‘You look a bit peaked, I must say,’ said Roddy. ‘Anything up?’

‘Oh, a most awful thing,’ said Alice, suddenly remembering the week-end. ‘Something mother wants me to do, and I don’t want to, and I know it’s silly of me, but I think I’ll die if I do, and I oughtn’t to tell you about it, but I couldn’t help it.’

To her great mortification her voice failed and she had to sniff.

‘Well, that’s all right,’ said Roddy in his matter-of-fact way. ‘One doesn’t die of doing things one doesn’t want to. Cheer up and blow your nose. I’d wipe your eyes for you only my handkerchief’s too dirty. I had to tie up a dog’s foot in it and forgot to change it. Do you think Horton could raise an egg if your mother doesn’t mind? I’ve had no lunch. Now, you dogs, quiet till I come back, or you’ll hear of it.’

‘Oh,’ breathed Alice, horrified, and forgetting her own troubles again she dragged Roddy into the drawing-room. ‘Could Roddy have an egg?’ she asked.

Mrs. Barton rang the bell and gave the order.

‘Thanks awfully. And now,’ said Roddy, who never beat about the bush, ‘what’s the matter with Alice? She says there’s something awful she’s got to do and she’ll die if she does it.’

‘She never told me,’ said Sally indignantly. ‘And what’s more no one thought of getting me an egg.’

‘Well, what is it?’ said Roddy, taking no notice of his sister’s interjection, and toasting his back as he stood in front of the fire, thus cutting off all warmth from his hostess.

‘You are like the great San Philip that of something thousand tons,’ said Mrs. Barton, to Roddy’s great mystification, but she put him at his ease again by asking him not to keep all the fire off everyone.

‘I am sorry,’ said Roddy. ‘Oh, good man,’ he added as Horton came in with three eggs on a tray. ‘Three eggs! I could do with them.’

‘Excuse me, sir, but one is for Miss Sally,’ said Horton. ‘I understood that she had not lunched, neether.’

Sally snatched at an egg, and after a friendly struggle with her brother, they both set to at their meal. Mrs. Barton regarded them with tolerance and a vague feeling that so would the Medici have fed their retainers when they returned late from some expedition. Alice made herself as small as possible in a corner by the fire and hoped that Roddy would not ask what the matter was again. She knew her mother wanted her to go, and she very much wanted to please her mother, and perhaps Roddy was right when he said one didn’t die of doing things one didn’t like, and oh, if only she hadn’t told Roddy about it in the hall, but perhaps he would forget.

The conversation was kept up antiphonally by the Wicklows, who gave an account of how they had been to Thatcher’s End about the cottages, and over to Pomfret Madrigal about the draining, and down to Little Misfit about the lambs, and Alice felt quite safe again.

Just as they had got to the sad story of the ewe who, having unlike her fellows a faint glimmering of sense, had deduced that the lamb supplied to her in a great coat made of her own dead lamb’s skin was not one of the family, and had trampled it to death, sounds were heard in the hall, and Horton, in a voice that would have done credit to a toast master and really deserved a better audience, announced, ‘Lord Pomfret, madam.’

His lordship stopped on the threshold and glared suspiciously about him, annoyed to find that Mrs. Barton was not alone. He was a tall elderly man with a soldierly carriage. His head was almost bald and his eyebrows very bushy. He had a heavy, old-fashioned moustache of a pale sandy colour. His eyes were small and often looked very angry. It was so long since his only son, Lord Mellings, had been killed in a frontier skirmish and his wife had decided to be an invalid, that very few people remembered what he used to be like. On the rare occasions when he chose to behave well, no one could be more charming, but these occasions grew rarer every year. His heir was a cousin whom he had seldom seen, and had expressed the hope never to set eyes on again till he, Lord Pomfret, was screwed down in his coffin.

The young Wicklows, as an employee and employee’s sister, stood up when he came in. Alice looked despairingly at Roddy and remained rooted to her seat.

‘Sit down, sit down,’ said his lordship impatiently. ‘How de do, Mrs. Barton. What’s that there? Your girl, eh? Consumptive or something, isn’t she?’

He shook hands with his hostess, took no notice of the rest of the party, and sat down in the seat nearest Mrs. Barton, whom he secretly rather admired. Her fine figure, the pleasant air of attention which veiled her wandering thoughts, and her occasional peremptory manner, reminded him of some of the great ladies he had known before motors came in. As for Mrs. Barton, she was neither frightened nor impressed by Lord Pomfret, and spiked his guns by ignoring his breaches of good manners. The Catholic branch of his family had lived in Italy since 1689, and it was owing to his connections that she had had access to historical papers that she could not otherwise have seen. She was always pleased to see him, and it is probable that Lord Pomfret was more at his ease with her than anywhere else outside his own house.

‘Can’t you send all those people away?’ he said to his hostess, in a voice that could have been and was heard by Horton, who came back with the whisky and soda that was his lordship’s usual drink at tea-time.

‘Certainly not,’ said Mrs. Barton. ‘Certainly not. Roddy and Sally have been riding about all day doing your business. Did you know they were having to deepen the drain at Pomfret Madrigal?’

‘Of course I didn’t,’ said Lord Pomfret. ‘The fools never tell me anything. If they deepen the drain they’ll flood Starveacres, that’s all.’

‘I don’t think so, sir,’ said Roddy. ‘If you remember, we changed those sluices at Starveacres Hatches last year, and the water escapes above the end of the drain.’

‘That’s young Pickford in Hoare’s office, isn’t it?’ said Lord Pomfret to his hostess, after bestowing a baleful stare on the unperturbed Roddy.

‘It is Mr. Wicklow, if that is what you mean,’ said Mrs. Barton severely.

Lord Pomfret made a hideous noise with which it was his habit to hold up conversation till he was ready to plunge into it again.

‘Well, Wickford,’ he began.

‘Mr. Wicklow,’ said Mrs. Barton.

‘Oh well, Wicklow if you like,’ said Lord Pomfret. ‘There’s a fellow called Wickfield in Dickens, stoopid sort of fellow that can’t manage his own affairs. Must have been thinking of that. Well, Wicklow, or whatever your name is, what’s that you said about the sluices?’

Roddy, with perfect patience and good-humour, repeated what he had previously said. Lord Pomfret, who knew every inch of his estates even better than Mr. Hoare the old agent, listened attentively.

‘Well, you young men know everything,’ he remarked. ‘I shall be at the office at nine to-morrow and we’ll ride over. You’ll have to get up early for once. That your wife, eh?’ he added, looking ferociously at Sally, who was having great difficulty in suppressing her feelings while her brother was badgered.

‘No, sir, my sister,’ said Roddy.

‘Same thing,’ said his lordship.

‘No, Lord Pomfret, it is not,’ put in Mrs. Barton. ‘This is not Ancient Egypt.’

At this his lordship suddenly laughed in a disconcerting way. He then got up and Alice, who had been holding her breath all the time, saw safety ahead and relaxed a little, when to her horror he turned to her mother and said,

‘Are your young people coming to us on the twenty-third, Mrs. Barton? My wife isn’t often here, and I would like her to have the pleasure of getting to know your children.’

Mrs. Barton, always touched when Lord Pomfret allowed his innate courtesy to get the better of the unprepossessing manner which had become second nature, took his hand.

‘They would love to,’ she said. ‘And I hope I shall see your wife while she is here. She was very kind to me in Florence, years ago.’

Alice could bear this no longer. For half an hour she had been frightened out of her wits by Lord Pomfret and now her mother was throwing her alive into his jaws. Despair lent her courage. She stood up and said timidly, ‘Oh, mother. . . .’

Lord Pomfret looked in the direction of the sound and saw what he mentally described as a scraggy little piece of goods looking as if he were going to wring her neck. But he was not a stupid man.

‘Your girl doesn’t want to come, eh?’ he said to Mrs. Barton. ‘Shy, and that sort of thing? Tell her to do what she likes. Here,’ he added turning to Roddy, ‘you’d better come and bring your sister with you. I’ll tell my wife to send you a proper invitation.’

Roddy thanked his employer and said they would love to come. Mrs. Barton, who with real kindness had not sent a reproachful look, and hardly even a reproachful thought in her daughter’s direction, asked if it was to be a big party.

‘Twenty or thirty. I don’t know,’ said Lord Pomfret. ‘I hope my wife will enjoy it. I shan’t. She has asked that woman that married my poor cousin.’

‘Do you mean Mrs. Rivers?’ said Mrs. Barton, who had often been favoured with a list of the relatives by blood or marriage that his lordship particularly disliked.

‘I do,’ said the earl, ‘and I wish I didn’t. She’s driven poor George nearly demented with her airs. Can’t talk about anything but her books. Won’t stay with George in Herefordshire. Always gadding about being literary. George is thankful to be rid of her, I think. He’d pay anything to get a little peace. I can’t stand those literary women. Now you’re not literary, and that’s what I like about you. You don’t plague a man by gabbling about books as Hermione Rivers does. Glad to have seen you. Don’t forget, Wicklow, you and your sister, Friday to Monday.’

While this conversation had been going on, Alice had had time to form a resolution. She was ashamed of her childish outcry, she knew that her mother would be disappointed, she remembered that Guy would like to have her with him. When Lord Pomfret had invited the Wicklows, everything was made easy. Sally, who feared nothing, would strengthen her against housemaids, and if Roddy were there everything must be all right. If anything so awful as dancing or games took place, Roddy would surely protect her. Without waiting for her resolution to cool, she very bravely came forward and holding out her hand said, ‘Thank you very much, Lord Pomfret, and I’d like to come very much indeed.’

‘What’s that?’ said his lordship, who was rapidly reverting to his usual mood. ‘Oh, yes, come along, you and your brother. Don’t blame me if you don’t enjoy yourself.’

He then allowed Horton to help him on with his coat, asked if that filthy dog had been killed yet, repeated his prediction that the whole household would be burnt to death one night, and went away.

The Wicklows also took their departure, and shortly afterwards Mr. Barton and Guy came home. As Alice’s father and brother had both taken it for granted that she would really be sensible and go to the Towers, the subject was hardly mentioned again. Mrs. Barton refrained from any comment upon her daughter’s behaviour and retired into her own world, while Alice spent the evening partly in regretting that she had accepted, partly in telling herself that if Roddy and Sally were there it would be all right.