Some Tame Gazelle, Page 2

  The curate coughed nervously and ventured a remark about the weather.

  ‘Yes, I love September,’ agreed Belinda, guilty at having let her thoughts wander from her guest. ‘Michaelmas daisies and blackberries and comforting things like fires in the evening again and knitting.’

  ‘Ah, knitting,’ he smiled, and Belinda could see him glancing round the room as if he already expected to see the beginnings of a pullover for himself. But all that Belinda’s cretonne work bag contained was a pink lacy-looking garment, a winter vest for herself. It was so annoying of Miss Jenner not to have any more ‘Perliknit’ left. She had had to buy a slightly thicker wool of a rather brighter pink to finish it off.

  Fortunately at this moment, for the conversational going was heavy, a firm step was heard on the stairs and Harriet came into the room, radiant in flowered voile. Tropical flowers rioted over her plump body. The background was the green of the jungle, the blossoms were crimson and mauve, of an unknown species. Harriet was still attractive in a fat Teutonic way. She did not wear her pince-nez when curates came to supper.

  The curate sprang up eagerly and seemed suddenly to lose some of his shyness

  ‘Good evening, Mr Donne,’ said Harriet, ‘I’m afraid I haven’t my sister’s punctual ways, but I’m sure she has been entertaining you better than I could have done. I had a classical education and it isn’t a very good training for scintillating conversation.’ She sat down rather heavily on the sofa beside him. ‘Now we must not forget that the name is pronounced Dunne,’ she declared roguishly.

  ‘Well, actually, as a matter of fact …’ the curate looked embarrassed, ‘I don’t pronounce it that way. I can’t imagine why the Archdeacon thought I did.’

  ‘He was of course thinking of the seventeenth-century poet of that name,’ said Belinda stoutly. The truth was, of course, that dear Henry could never resist a literary allusion and was delighted, in the way that children and scholars sometimes are, if it was one that the majority of his parishioners did not understand.

  ‘He will have to put a correction in the magazine next month,’ chortled Harriet. ‘I should like to see the Archdeacon having to climb down.’

  ‘It makes one feel quite odd to have one’s name mispronounced or misspelt,’ said Belinda evenly. ‘Almost like a different person.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ agreed Harriet, ‘like Gorringe’s catalogue.’

  The curate looked politely interested but puzzled.

  ‘You see,’ Harriet explained, ‘they once sent me a catalogue addressed to Miss Bode, and somehow I’m so lazy that I never bothered to correct it. So now I have a dual personality. I always feel Miss Bode is my dowdy self, rather a frumpish old thing.’

  ‘She must certainly be most unlike Miss Bede,’ blurted out Mr Donne with surprising gallantry.

  Harriet protested amid delighted giggles. Belinda felt rather left out and found her eyes fixed on the curate’s combinations, which still showed. Surely it was much too warm for such garments, unless perhaps he wore them all the year round?

  During the short silence which followed, the tinkling of a cowbell was heard. The sisters had brought it back from a holiday in Switzerland and it was now used as a gong.

  ‘Ah, dinner,’ said Harriet. ‘Come, Mr Donne, you shall take me in,’ she added with mock solemnity.

  Mr Donne was quite equal to the occasion, for he had all the qualifications of a typical curate. Indeed, his maternal grandfather had been a bishop.

  In the dining-room Harriet sat at one end of the table and Belinda at the other, with the curate in the middle. Harriet carved the boiled chicken smothered in white sauce very capably. She gave the curate all the best white meat.

  Were all new curates everywhere always given boiled chicken when they came to supper for the first time? Belinda wondered. It was certainly an established ritual at their house and it seemed somehow right for a new curate. The coldness, the whiteness, the muffling with sauce, perhaps even the sharpness added by the slices of lemon, there was something appropriate here, even if Belinda could not see exactly what it was.

  ‘I called at the vicarage on the way here,’ said the curate. ‘Mrs Hoccleve very kindly promised me some apples.’

  Harriet looked rather annoyed. ‘Their apples haven’t done at all well this year,’ she said, ‘and I always think those red ones are rather tasteless. You must take some of our Cox’s Oranges with you when you go.’

  The curate murmured grateful thanks.

  ‘How is Mrs Hoccleve’s rheumatism?’ asked Belinda.

  ‘Not very much better,’ he replied. ‘I hear she is going to Karlsbad in October. Apparently the waters there are very good.’

  ‘Nettles are an excellent thing, I believe,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Indeed?’ Mr Donne looked so interested that he must have found it quite a strain. ‘How should they be used?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t really know,’ Harriet beamed. ‘Just nettles. Boiled, perhaps. People will try all sorts of odd remedies,’ she added, with the complacency of one who is perfectly healthy.

  ‘Poor Agatha,’ murmured Belinda, although she could not really feel very sympathetic.

  There was a slight lapse in the conversation.

  ‘I hear you are a rowing man,’ said Belinda, with what she felt was rather forced enthusiasm.

  ‘Oh, how splendid!’ Harriet was of course delighted, as she would have been with any piece of information. ‘I can just imagine you stroking an eight.’

  ‘Well, actually, I haven’t done any for some time, but I used to be very keen.’ The curate looked down at his chicken bone as if he would like to take it up in his fingers and gnaw it. He was not very well fed at his lodgings and the evening meal was particularly scrappy.

  Harriet picked up her bone and began to eat it in her fingers. She beamed on Mr Donne and said brightly, ‘Like Queen Victoria, you know, so much more sensible and convenient.’

  He followed her example eagerly. Belinda looked on with some distaste. If only Harriet could see how foolish she looked. The white sauce was beginning to smear itself on her face.

  ‘I expect you are quite bewildered meeting so many new people,’ she said, leading the conversation back into suitable channels.

  ‘Yes, in a way I am, but I find it fairly easy to remember them so far. I came across Miss Liversidge this afternoon in the village and have persuaded her to address a meeting of the Mothers’ Union. She seems to have had a great many interesting experiences.’

  Belinda smiled. The idea of Edith Liversidge addressing the Mothers’ Union amused her. One never knew what she might say to them and she would hardly set them a good example of tidiness. Dear Edith, she was always such a mess.

  ‘She’s a kind of decayed gentlewoman,’ said Harriet comfortably, helping the curate to trifle.

  ‘Oh no, Harriet,’ Belinda protested. Nobody could call Edith decayed and sometimes one almost forgot that she was a gentlewoman, with her cropped grey hair, her shabby clothes which weren’t even the legendary ‘good tweeds’ of her kind and her blunt, almost rough, way of speaking. ‘Miss Liversidge is really splendid,’ she declared and then wondered why one always said that Edith was ‘splendid’. It was probably because she hadn’t very much money, was tough and wiry, dug vigorously in her garden and kept goats. Also, she had travelled abroad a good deal and had done some relief work after the 1914 war among refugees in the Balkans. Work of rather an unpleasant nature too, something to do with sanitation. Belinda hoped that Harriet wouldn’t mention it in front of Mr Donne. ‘Of course she has made a home for poor Miss Aspinall, who’s a kind of relation,’ she said hastily. ‘I always thinks it’s very unselfish to have a comparative stranger to live with you when you’ve been used to living alone.’

  ‘Ah, well, we ought to share what we have with others,’ said Mr Donne with rather disagreeable unctuousness.

  ‘Oh, Mr Donne, I can’t imagine you sharing your home with Connie Aspinall,’ Harriet burst out, ‘she’s so dreary.�€
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  Mr Donne smiled. ‘Well, perhaps I didn’t mean to be taken quite literally,’ he said.

  ‘Now she’s a decayed gentlewoman if you like,’ said Harriet. ‘She can talk of nothing but the days when she used to be companion to a lady in Belgrave Square who was a kind of relation of one of Queen Alexandra’s Ladies-in-Waiting.’

  ‘She plays the harp very beautifully,’ murmured Belinda weakly, for poor Connie was really rather uninteresting and it was hard to think of anything nice to say about her.

  ‘Let’s have coffee in the drawing-room,’ said Harriet rather grandly. At one time she had wanted to call it the lounge, but Belinda would not hear of it. She had finally won her point by reminding Harriet of how much their dear mother would have disliked it.

  In the drawing-room they arranged themselves as before, Harriet on the sofa with the curate and Belinda in one of the armchairs. Belinda took out her knitting and went on doing it rather self-consciously. It was beginning to look so very much like an undergarment for herself. The curate’s combinations must be ‘Meridian’, she thought. It was nice and warm for pyjamas, too, in fact Harriet herself wore it in the winter. The close fabric fitted her plump body like a woolly skin.

  While they were drinking their coffee, Harriet went to the little table by the window and took up the bowl of pears which Belinda had noticed earlier in the evening.

  ‘Now you must have a pear,’ she insisted. ‘Do you know, when we were children our mother used to say that we could never keep fruit on the sideboard.’

  Belinda would have liked to add that they couldn’t now, and that it was only because they had been having the curate to supper that there had been anything more than a withered apple or orange in the bowl this evening. Harriet’s appetite was just as rapacious in her fifties as it had been in her teens.

  The curate helped himself to a pear and began to peel it. He seemed to be getting rather sticky and there was some giggling and interchange of large handkerchiefs between him and Harriet.

  Belinda went on quietly with her knitting. The evening promised to be just like so many other evenings when other curates had come to supper. There was something almost frightening and at the same time comforting about the sameness of it all. It was odd that Harriet should always have been so fond of curates. They were so immature and always made the same kind of conversation. Now the Archdeacon was altogether different. One never knew what he might say, except that it was certain to be something unexpected and provocative. Besides, it was really more suitable to lavish one’s affection on somebody of a riper age, as it was obviously natural that one should lavish it on somebody. Indeed, one of Belinda’s favourite quotations, taken from the works of a minor English poet, was

  Some tame gazelle, or some gentle dove:

  Something to love, oh, something to love!

  Belinda, having loved the Archdeacon when she was twenty and not having found anyone to replace him since, had naturally got into the habit of loving him, though with the years her passion had mellowed into a comfortable feeling, more like the cosiness of a winter evening by the fire than the uncertain rapture of a spring morning.

  Harriet’s tittering laugh disturbed Belinda’s quiet thoughts. ‘Oh, Mr Donne, I’m not quite as stupid as you think! I used to know some Latin. Ah quotiens illum doluit properare Calypso,’ she retorted, flinging at him triumphantly the last remnants of her classical education.

  Can she be hinting at me to go? he wondered, but then decided that she had probably long ago forgotten the meaning of the line. All the same it was getting late. He mustn’t outstay his welcome and the elder Miss Bede had yawned once or twice, although she stifled it very politely.

  Despite protests from Harriet, they were soon in the hall and the curate was putting on his overcoat. Harriet was fussing round him like a motherly hen.

  ‘Why, of course, it’s the garden party tomorrow,’ said Belinda, suddenly feeling very tired. ‘There will be such a lot to do.’

  The curate sighed with an affectation of weariness. ‘I shall be almost glad when it is over,’ he said. ‘These functions are always very tiring for us.’

  Harriet smiled understandingly, as if including herself in the select brotherhood of the clergy. ‘Never mind,’ she said, ‘there will be the coconut shies. I always love them. And you’ll get a good tea. I am in charge of the tea garden.’

  ‘Oh, well, Miss Bede …’ the curate moved towards the front door and Belinda was able to slip quietly into the background. She went into the drawing-room and began to tidy it, plumping up the cushions and removing the remains of the pears they had eaten. She put her knitting into its cretonne bag and took the parish magazine to read in bed. There was a nice new serial in it, all about a drunken organist and a young bank clerk, who was also a lay reader and had been wrongfully accused of embezzlement. And of course the Archdeacon’s letter was always worth a second reading.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Although the Misses Bede had a maid they were both quite domesticated and helped her in various small ways, clearing away the breakfast things, dusting their own bedrooms and doing a little cooking when they felt like it. On this particular morning, however, which was the day of the vicarage garden party, Belinda decided that she could miss doing her room with a clear conscience, as there were so many more important things to be done. It was unlikely that Miss Liversidge would be visiting them and putting them to shame by writing ‘E. Liversidge’ with her finger, as she had once done when Emily had neglected to dust the piano. Typical of Edith, of course, going straight to the point with no beating about the bush. Not that she could talk either, with dog’s hairs all over the carpet and the washing-up left overnight.

  This morning, as she went about humming God moves in a mysterious way, Belinda wondered what to do first. She had to arrange for some deck-chairs they had promised to be taken over to the vicarage. The cake she had made to be raffled – the Archdeacon was broad-minded and didn’t disapprove of such things – must be finished off with its mauve paper frill. The seams of Harriet’s crêpe de Chine dress had to be let out, as Harriet seemed to have grown stouter since she had last worn it. Perhaps that was the most important thing of all, for Harriet intended to wear it that afternoon.

  While she was sewing, Belinda began to wonder what everyone would be wearing at the garden party. Agatha Hoccleve would of course wear a nice suitable dress, but nothing extreme or daring. As the wife of an archdeacon she always had very good clothes, which seemed somehow to emphasize the fact that her father had been a bishop. Then there was Edith Liversidge, who would look odd in the familiar old-fashioned grey costume, whose unfashionably narrow shoulders combined with Edith’s broad hips made her look rather like a lighthouse. Her relation, Miss Aspinall, would wear a fluttering blue or grey dress with a great many scarves and draperies, and she would, as always, carry that mysterious little beaded bag without which she was never seen anywhere. Undoubtedly the most magnificent person there would be Lady Clara Boulding, who was to perform the opening ceremony. It was of course fitting that this should be so, as she was the daughter of an earl and the widow of their former Member of Parliment, an excellent man in his way, although he had never been known to speak in the House except on one occasion, when he had asked if a window might be opened or shut.

  By now Belinda had tacked the seams of the dress and was fitting it on her sister, who twitched about impatiently, while Belinda ran round her with her mouth full of pins.

  Harriet was having one of her tirades against the Archdeacon.

  ‘All that nonsense in the parish magazine about him needing a holiday,’ she stormed. ‘If that’s so, why doesn’t he go to Karlsbad with Agatha? Unless she wants a holiday away from him – you could hardly blame her if she preferred to go alone. I certainly would.’

  ‘But surely Agatha isn’t going to Karlsbad alone?’ asked Belinda eagerly.

  ‘Well, their Florrie told Emily that she and cook aren’t looking forward to managing the Archdea
con by themselves, so it looks as if he isn’t going with her. I think it would be nicer if he went too, then we might have a good sermon for a change. I never heard anything so depressing in my life as that horrid thing he read last Sunday – all about worms, and such stilted language. Edith Liversidge walked out in the middle, and’ – Harriet chortled at the memory of it – ‘one of the churchwardens ran after her with a glass of water, thinking she felt faint or something.’

  ‘But Harriet,’ said Belinda gently, ‘Henry was reading a passage from Urn Burial, I thought he read it magnificently,’ she sighed. Of course the real truth of the matter was that poor Henry was too lazy to write sermons of his own and somehow one didn’t think of him as being clever in a theological kind of way. That is, no scholarly study of any of St Paul’s Epistles had as yet appeared under Archdeacon Hoccleve’s name, although he had once remarked to Belinda that he thought the Apocalyptic literature remarkably fine.

  Harriet continued her tirade. ‘If it weren’t so far to walk,’ she said, ‘I should certainly go to Edward Plowman’s church; he does at least preach good homely sermons that everyone can understand. He works systematically through the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes, I believe; much the most sensible thing to do. Besides, he’s such a nice man.’

  ‘But Harriet,’ said Belinda anxiously, ‘he is rather high. He wears a biretta and has incense in the church. It’s all so – well – Romish.’ Broad-minded as she was, Belinda was unable to keep a note of horror out of her voice.