Part 5

They condoned this extravagance, yet they mistrusted it. Time justified them in their mistrust. Like many stupid people, they possessed acute instincts. ‘He that is unfaithful in little things ...’ Caroline would say when the children forgot to wind up their watches. Their instinct told them that the same truth applies to extravagance in little things. They were wiser than they knew. When Laura’s extravagance in great things came it staggered them so completely that they forgot how judiciously they had suspected it beforehand.

It befell in the winter of 1921. The war was safely over, so was their silver wedding, so was Marion’s first confinement. Titus was in his third year at Oxford, Sibyl was at last going grey, Henry might be made a judge at any moment. The Trade Returns and the Stock Exchange were not all that they should be, and there was always the influenza. But Henry was doing well enough to be lenient to his investments, and Aunt Lucilla and her fortune had been mercifully released. In the coming spring Caroline proposed to have the house thoroughly done up. The lesser renovations she was getting over beforehand, and that was why Laura had gone out before the shops shut to show Mr. Bunting a pair of massy candlesticks and to inquire how much he would charge for re-plating them. His estimate was high, too high to be accepted upon her own responsibility. She decided to carry the candlesticks back and consult Caroline.

Mr. Bunting lived in the Earls Court Road, rather a long way off for such a family friend. But she had plenty of time for walking back, and for diversion she thought she would take a circuitous route, including the two foxes who guard the forsaken approach in Holland Park and the lane beside the Bayswater Synagogue. It was in Moscow Road that she began to be extravagant. But when she walked into the little shop she had no particular intention of extravagance, for Caroline’s parcel hung remindingly upon her arm, and the shop itself, half florist and half greengrocer, had a simple appearance.

There were several other customers, and while she stood waiting to be served she looked about her. The aspect of the shop pleased her greatly. It was small and homely. Fruit and flowers and vegetables were crowded together in countrified disorder. On the sloping shelf in the window, among apples and rough-skinned cooking pears and trays of walnuts, chestnuts, and filberts, was a basket of eggs, smooth and brown, like some larger kind of nut. At one side of the room was a wooden staging. On this stood jars of home-made jam and bottled fruits. It was as though the remnants of summer had come into the little shop for shelter. On the floor lay a heap of earthy turnips.

Laura looked at the bottled fruits, the sliced pears in syrup, the glistening red plums, the greengages. She thought of the woman who had filled those jars and fastened on the bladders. Perhaps the greengrocer’s mother lived in the country. A solitary old woman picking fruit in a darkening orchard, rubbing her rough fingertips over the smooth-skinned plums, a lean wiry old woman, standing with upstretched arms among her fruit trees as though she were a tree herself, growing out of the long grass, with arms stretched up like branches. It grew darker and darker; still she worked on, methodically stripping the quivering taut boughs one after the other.

As Laura stood waiting she felt a great longing. It weighed upon her like the load of ripened fruit upon a tree. She forgot the shop, the other customers, her own errand. She forgot the winter air outside, the people going by on the wet pavements. She forgot that she was in London, she forgot the whole of her London life. She seemed to be standing alone in a darkening orchard, her feet in the grass, her arms stretched up to the pattern of leaves and fruit, her fingers seeking the rounded ovals of the fruit among the pointed ovals of the leaves. The air about her was cool and moist. There was no sound, for the birds had left off singing and the owls had not yet begun to hoot. No sound, except sometimes the soft thud of a ripe plum falling into the grass, to lie there a compact shadow among shadows. The back of her neck ached a little with the strain of holding up her arms. Her fingers searched among the leaves.

She started as the man of the shop came up to her and asked her what she wished for. Her eyes blinked, she looked with surprise at the gloves upon her hands.

‘I want one of those large chrysanthemums,’ she said, and turned towards the window where they stood in a brown jar. There were the apples and pears, the eggs, the disordered nuts overflowing from their compartments. There on the floor were the earthy turnips, and close at hand were the jams and bottled fruits. If she was behaving foolishly, if she looked like a woman roused out of a fond dream, these were kindly things to waken to. The man of the shop also had a kind face. He wore a gardener’s apron, and his hands were brown and dry as if he had been handling earth.

‘Which one would you like, ma’am?’ he asked, turning the bunch of chrysanthemums about that she might choose for herself. She looked at the large mop-headed blossoms. Their curled petals were deep garnet colour within and tawny yellow without. As the light fell on their sleek flesh the garnet colour glowed, the tawny yellow paled as if it were thinly washed with silver. She longed for the moment when she might stroke her hand over those mop heads.

‘I think I will take them all,’ she said.

‘They’re lovely blooms,’ said the man.

He was pleased. He did not expect such a good customer at this late hour.

When he brought her the change from her pound-note and the chrysanthemums pinned up in sheets of white paper, he brought also several sprays of beech leaves. These, he explained, were thrown in with her purchase. Laura took them into her arms. The great fans of orange tracery seemed to her even more beautiful than the chrysanthemums, for they had been given to her, they were a surprise. She sniffed. They smelt of woods, of dark rustling woods like the wood to whose edge she came so often in the country of her autumn imagination. She stood very still to make quite sure of her sensations. Then: ‘Where do they come from?’ she asked.

‘From near Chenies, ma’am, in Buckinghamshire. I have a sister living there, and every Sunday I go out to see her, and bring back a load of foliage with me.’

There was no need to ask now who made the jams and tied on the bladders. Laura knew all that she wanted to know. Her course lay clear before her. Holding the sprays of beech as though she were marching on Dunsinane, she went to a bookseller’s. There she bought a small guide-book to the Chilterns and inquired for a map of that district. It must, she explained, be very detailed, and give as many names and footpaths as possible. Her eyes were so bright and her demands so earnest that the bookseller, though he had not that kind of map, was sympathetic, and directed her to another shop where she could find what she wanted. It was only a little way off, but closing-time was at hand, so she took a taxi. Having bought the map she took another taxi home. But at the top of Apsley Terrace she had one of her impulses of secrecy and told the driver that she would walk the rest of the way.

There was rather a narrow squeak in the hall, for Caroline’s parcel became entangled in the gong stand, and she heard Henry coming up from the wine cellar. If she alarmed the gong Henry would quicken his steps. She had no time to waste on Henry just then for she had a great deal to think of before dinner. She ran up to her room, arranged the chrysanthemums and the beech leaves, and began to read the guide-book. It was just what she wanted, for it was extremely plain and unperturbed. Beginning as early as possible with Geology, it passed to Flora and Fauna, Watersheds, Ecclesiastical Foundations and Local Government. After that came a list of all the towns and villages, shortly described in alphabetical order. Lamb’s End had three hundred inhabitants and a perpendicular font. At Walpole St. Dennis was the country seat of the Bartlet family, faced with stucco and situated upon an eminence. The almshouses at Semple, built in 1703 by Bethia Hood, had a fine pair of wrought-iron gates. It was dark as she pressed her nose against the scrolls and rivets. Bats flickered in the little courtyard, and shadows moved across the yellow blinds. Had she been born a deserving widow, life would have been simplified.

She wasted no time over this regret, for now at last she was simplifying life for herself. She unfolded the map. The woods were coloured green and the main roads red. There was a great deal of green. She looked at the beech leaves. As she looked a leaf detached itself and fell slowly. She remembered squirrels.

The stairs creaked under the tread of Dunlop with the hot-water can. Dunlop entered, glancing neither at Laura curled askew on the bed nor at the chrysanthemums ennobling the dressing-table. She was a perfectly trained servant. Before she left the room she took a deep breath, stooped down, and picked up the beech leaf.

Quarter of an hour afterwards Laura exclaimed: ‘Oh! a windmill!’ She took up the guide-book again, and began to read intently.

She was roused by an unaccustomed clash of affable voices in the hall. She remembered, leapt off the bed, and dressed rapidly for the family dinner-party. They were all there when she reached the drawing-room. Sibyl and Titus, Fancy and her Mr. Wolf-Saunders, Marion with the latest news from Sprat, who, being in the Soudan, could not dine out with his wife. Sprat had had another boil on his neck, but it had yielded to treatment. ‘Ah, poor fellow,’ said Henry. He seemed to be saying: ‘The price of Empire.’

During dinner Laura looked at her relations. She felt as though she had awoken, unchanged, from a twenty-years slumber, to find them almost unrecognisable. She surveyed them, one after the other. Even Henry and Caroline, whom she saw every day, were half hidden under their accumulations--accumulations of prosperity, authority, daily experience. They were carpeted with experience. No new event could set jarring foot on them but they would absorb and muffle the impact. If the boiler burst, if a policeman climbed in at the window waving a sword, Henry and Caroline would bring the situation to heel by their massive experience of normal boilers and normal policemen.

She turned her eyes to Sibyl. How strange it was that Sibyl should have exchanged her former look of a pretty ferret for this refined and waxen mask. Only when she was silent, though, as now she was, listening to Henry with her eyes cast down to her empty plate: when she spoke the ferret look came back. But Sibyl in her house at Hampstead must have spent many long afternoons in silence, learning this unexpected beauty, preparing her face for the last look of death. What had been her thoughts? Why was she so different when she spoke? Which, what, was the real Sibyl: the greedy, agile little ferret or this memorial urn?

Fancy’s Mr. Wolf-Saunders had eaten all his bread and was at a loss. Laura turned to him and asked after her great-nephew, who was just then determined to be a bus-conductor. ‘He probably will be,’ said his father gloomily, ‘if things go on as they are at present.’

Great-nephews and great-nieces suggested nephews and nieces. Resuming her scrutiny of the table she looked at Fancy, Marion, and Titus. They had grown up as surprisingly as trees since she first knew them, and yet it did not seem to her that they were so much changed as their elders. Titus, in particular, was easily recognisable. She caught his eye, and he smiled back at her, just as he had smiled back when he was a baby. Now he was long and slim, and his hay-coloured hair was brushed smoothly back instead of standing up in a crest. But one lock had fallen forward when he laughed, and hung over his left eye, and this gave him a pleasing, rustic look. She was glad still to be friends with Titus. He might very usefully abet her, and though she felt in no need of allies, a little sympathy would do no harm. Certainly the rustic forelock made Titus look particularly congenial. And how greedily he was eating that apple, and with what disparagement of imported fruit he had waved away the Californian plums! It was nice to feel sure of his understanding and approval, since at this moment he was looking the greatest Willowes of them all.

Most of the family attention was focussed on Titus that evening. No sooner had coffee been served than Sibyl began about his career. Had Caroline ever heard of anything more ridiculous? Titus still declared that he meant to manage the family brewery. After all his success at Oxford and his popularity, could anything be more absurd than to bury himself in Somerset?

His own name was the first thing that Titus heard as he entered the drawing-room. He greeted it with an approving smile, and sat down by Laura, carefully crossing his long legs.

‘She spurns at the brewery, and wants me to take a studio in Hampstead and model bustos,’ he explained.

Titus had a soft voice. His speech was gentle and sedate. He chose his words with extreme care, but escaped the charge of affectation by pronouncing them in a hesitating manner.

‘I’m sure sculpture is his _métier_,’ said Sibyl. ‘Or perhaps poetry. Anyhow, not brewing. I wish you could have seen that little model he made of the grocer at Arcachon.’

Marion said: ‘I thought bustos always had wigs.’

‘My dear, you’ve hit it. In fact, that is my objection to this plan for making me a sculptor. Revive the wig, and I object no more. The head is the noblest part of man’s anatomy. Therefore enlarge it with a wig.’

Henry thought the conversation was taking a foolish turn. But as host it was his duty to take part in it.

‘What about the Elgin Marbles?’ he inquired. ‘No wigs there.’

The Peruke and its Functions in Attic Drama, thought Titus, would be a pretty fancy. But it would not do for his uncle. Agreeably he admitted that there were no wigs in the Elgin Marbles.

They fell into silence. At an ordinary dinner party Caroline would have felt this silence to be a token that the dinner party was a failure. But this was a family affair, there was no disgrace in having nothing to say. They were all Willoweses and the silence was a seemly Willowes silence. She could even emphasise it by counting her stitches aloud.

All the chairs and sofas were comfortable. The fire burnt brightly, the curtains hung in solemn folds; they looked almost as solemn as organ pipes. Lolly had gone off into one of her day dreams, just her way, she would never trouble to give a party the least prod. Only Sibyl fidgeted, twisting her heel about in her satin slipper.

‘What pretty buckles, Sibyl! Have I seen them before?’

Sibyl had bought them second-hand for next to nothing. They came from Arles, and the old lady who had sold them to her had been such a character. She repeated the characteristic remarks of the old lady in a very competent French accent. Her feet were as slim as ever, and she could stretch them out very prettily. Even in doing so she remembered to ask Caroline where they were going for the Easter holidays.

‘Oh, to Blythe, I expect,’ said Caroline. ‘We know it.’

‘When I have evicted my tenants and brewed a large butt of family ale, I shall invite you all down to Lady Place,’ said Titus.

‘But before then,’ said Laura, speaking rather fast, ‘I hope you will all come to visit me at Great Mop.’

Every one turned to stare at her in bewilderment.

‘Of course, it won’t be as comfortable as Lady Place. And I don’t suppose there will be room for more than one of you at a time. But I’m sure you’ll think it delightful.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Caroline. ‘What is this place, Lolly?’

‘Great Mop. It’s not really Great. It’s in the Chilterns.’

‘But why should we go there?’

‘To visit me. I’m going to live there.’

‘Live there? My dear Lolly!’

‘Live there, Aunt Lolly?’

‘This is very sudden. Is there really a place called ...?’

‘Lolly, you are mystifying us.’

They all spoke at once, but Henry spoke loudest, so Laura replied to him.

‘No, Henry, I’m not mystifying you. Great Mop is a village in the Chilterns, and I am going to live there, and perhaps keep a donkey. And you must all come on visits.’

‘I’ve never even heard of the place!’ said Henry conclusively.

‘But you’ll love it. “A secluded hamlet in the heart of the Chilterns, Great Mop is situated twelve miles from Wickendon in a hilly district with many beech-woods. The parish church has a fine Norman tower and a squint. The population is 227.” And quite close by on a hill there is a ruined windmill, and the nearest railway station is twelve miles off, and there is a farm called Scramble Through the Hedge....’

Henry thought it time to interrupt. ‘I suppose you don’t expect us to believe all this.’

‘I know. It does seem almost too good to be true. But it is. I’ve read it in a guide-book, and seen it on a map.’

‘Well, all I can say is....’

‘Henry! Henry!’ said Caroline warningly. Henry did not say it. He threw the cushion out of his chair, glared at Laura, and turned away his head.

For some time Titus’s attempts at speech had hovered above the tumult, like one holy appeasing dove loosed after the other. The last dove was luckier. It settled on Laura.

‘How nice of you to have a donkey. Will it be a grey donkey, like Madam?’

‘Do you remember dear Madam, then?’

‘Of course I remember dear Madam. I can remember everything that happened to me when I was four. I rode in one pannier, and you, Marion, rode in the other. And we went to have tea in Potts’s Dingle.’

‘With sponge cakes and raspberry jam, do you remember?’

‘Yes. And milk surging in a whisky bottle. Will you have thatch or slate, Aunt Lolly? Slate is very practical.’

‘Thatch is more motherly. Anyhow, I shall have a pump.’

‘Will it be an indoor or an outdoor pump? I ask, for I hope to pump on it quite often.’

‘_You_ will come to stay with me, won’t you, Titus?’

Laura was a little cast-down. It did not look, just then, as if any one else wanted to come and stay with her at Great Mop. But Titus was as sympathetic as she had hoped. They spent the rest of the evening telling each other how she would live. By half-past ten their conjectures had become so fantastic that the rest of the family thought the whole scheme was nothing more than one of Lolly’s odd jokes that nobody was ever amused by. Henry took heart. He rallied Laura, supposing that when she lived at Great Mop she would start hunting for catnip again, and become the village witch.

‘How lovely!’ said Laura.

Henry was satisfied. Obviously Laura could not be in earnest.

When the guests had gone, and Henry had bolted and chained the door, and put out the hall light, Laura hung about a little, thinking that he or Caroline might wish to ask her more. But they asked nothing and went upstairs to bed. Soon after, Laura followed them. As she passed their bedroom door she heard their voices within, the comfortable fragmentary talk of a husband and wife with complete confidence in each other and nothing particular to say.

Laura decided to tackle Henry on the morrow. She observed him during breakfast and saw with satisfaction that he seemed to be in a particularly benign mood. He had drunk three cups of coffee, and said ‘Ah! poor fellow!’ when a wandering cornet-player began to play on the pavement opposite. Laura took heart from these good omens, and, breakfast being over, and her brother and the _Times_ retired to the study, she followed them thither.

‘Henry,’ she said. ‘I have come for a talk with you.’

Henry looked up. ‘Talk away, Lolly,’ he said, and smiled at her.

‘A business talk,’ she continued.

Henry folded the _Times_ and laid it aside. He also (if the expression may be allowed) folded and laid aside his smile.

‘Now, Lolly, what is it?’

His voice was kind, but business-like. Laura took a deep breath, twisted the garnet ring round her little finger, and began.

‘It has just occurred to me, Henry, that I am forty-seven.’

She paused.

‘Go on!’ said Henry.

‘And that both the girls are married. I don’t mean that that has just occurred to me too, but it’s part of it. You know, really I’m not much use to you now.’

‘My dear Lolly!’ remonstrated her brother. ‘You are extremely useful. Besides, I have never considered our relationship in that light.’

‘So I have been thinking. And I have decided that I should like to go and live at Great Mop. You know, that place I was talking about last night.’

Henry was silent. His face was completely blank. Should she recall Great Mop to him by once more repeating the description out of the guide-book?

‘In the Chilterns,’ she murmured. ‘Pop. 227.’

Henry’s silence was unnerving her.

‘Really, I think it would be a good plan. I should like to live alone in the country. And in my heart I think I have always meant to, one day. But one day is so like another, it’s almost impossible to throw salt on its tail. If I don’t go soon, I never shall. So if you don’t mind, I should like to start as soon as possible.’

There was another long pause. She could not make out Henry at all. It was not like him to say nothing when he was annoyed. She had expected thunders and tramplings, and those she could have weathered. But thus becalmed under a lowering sky she was beginning to lose her head.

At last he spoke.

‘I hardly know what to say.’

‘I’m sorry if the idea annoys you, Henry.’

‘I am not annoyed. I am grieved. Grieved and astonished. For twenty years you have lived under my roof. I have always thought--I may be wrong, but I have always thought--that you were happy here.’

‘Quite happy,’ said Laura.

‘Caroline and I have done all we could to make you so. The children--_all_ the children--look on you as a second mother. We are all devoted to you. And now, without a word of warning, you propose to leave us and go and live at a place called Great Mop. Lolly! I must ask you to put this ridiculous idea out of your head.’

‘I never expected you to be so upset, Henry. Perhaps I should have told you more gradually. I should be sorry to hurt you.’

‘You have hurt me, I admit,’ said he, firmly seizing on this advantage. ‘Still, let that pass. Say you won’t leave us, Lolly.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t quite do that.’

‘But Lolly, what you want is absurd.’

‘It’s only my own way, Henry.’

‘If you would like a change, take one by all means. Go away for a fortnight. Go away for a month! Take a little trip abroad if you like. But come back to us at the end of it.’

‘No, Henry. I love you all, but I feel I have lived here long enough.’

‘But why? But why? What has come over you?’

Laura shook her head.

‘Surely you must have some reasons.’

‘I have told you my reasons.’

‘Lolly! I cannot allow this. You are my sister. I consider you my charge. I must ask you, once for all to drop this idea. It is not sensible. Or suitable.’

‘I have reminded you that I am forty-seven. If I am not old enough now to know what is sensible and suitable, I never shall be.’

‘Apparently not.’

This was more like Henry’s old form. But though he had scored her off, it did not seem to have encouraged him as much as scoring off generally did. He began again, almost as a suppliant.

‘Be guided by me, Lolly. At least, take a few days to think it over.’

‘No, Henry. I don’t feel inclined to; I’d much rather get it over now. Besides, if you are going to disapprove as violently as this, the sooner I pack up and start the better.’

‘You are mad. You talk of packing up and starting when you have never even set eyes on the place.’

‘I was thinking of going there to-day, to make arrangements.’

‘Well, then, you will do nothing of the kind. I’m sorry to seem harsh, Lolly. But you must put all this out of your mind.’

‘Why?’

‘It is impracticable.’