Authors: Stella Gibbons
Having made these arrangements, Flora hopped cheerfully back into the buggy and settled herself into her own black-and-green plaid rug at Seth’s side. Elfine tucked her in. (By this time Elfine was quite devoted to her, and divided the time between devising schemes for Flora’s comfort and looking with delight at the picture of her own altered head in the shop windows which they passed.)
‘Are you looking forward to it, Seth?’ asked Flora.
‘Ay,’ he drawled softly, in his warm voice, ‘’twill be th’ first time I’ve ever been to a dance wheer all the women wasn’t after me. Happen I can enjoy meself a bit, fer a change.’
Flora doubted whether he really would, for the county would probably fall for Seth as inevitably as did the villages. But there was no point in alarming him beforehand.
‘But I thought you liked having girls after you?’
‘Nay. I only likes the talkies. I don’t mind takin’ a girl out if she will let me be, but many’s the girl I’ve niver seen again because she worrited me in the middle of a talkie. Ay, they’re all the same. They must have yer blood and yer breath and ivery bit of yer time and yer thoughts. But I’m not like that. I just likes the talkies.’
Flora reflected, as they drove home through the lanes, that Seth’s problem was the next one to tackle. She thought of a
letter in her handbag. It was from Mr Earl P. Neck, and it said that he would be motoring down within the next few days to see some friends who lived at Brighton, and he proposed to motor over and see her, too. She was going to introduce Seth to him.
*
It was five o’clock on the afternoon of the next day. The weather had favoured the cousins. Flora had pessimistically presumed that it would be pelting with rain, but it was not. It was a mild, rosy spring evening in which blackbirds sang on the budding boughs of the elms and the air smelled of leaves and freshness.
The cousins were having a fiendish business getting themselves dressed.
The intelligent and sensitive reader will doubtless have wondered at intervals throughout this narrative as to how Flora managed about a bathroom. The answer is simple. At Cold Comfort there was no bathroom. And when Flora had asked Adam how the family themselves managed for baths, he had replied, coldly: ‘We manages wi’out’, and the vision of dabbings and chillinesses and inadequacies thus conjured had so repelled Flora that she had pursued her enquiries no further.
She had discovered, however, that that refreshing woman, Mrs Beetle, owned a hip-bath, in which she would permit Flora to bathe every other evening at eight o’clock for a small weekly sum, and this Flora did, and the curtailment of her seven weekly baths to four was by far the most unpleasant experience she had so far had to endure at the farm.
But this evening, just when baths were needed, baths were impossible. So Flora put two enormous noggins of water on the stove in the kitchen to get hot, and hoped for the best.
Her absence from the farm with Elfine had not been commented upon. She doubted if they had noticed it. What with the bull getting out, and Meriam, the hired girl, having so far got through the spring without entering upon her annual interesting condition, and the beginning of the carrot harvest which was even longer and more difficult to do than the swede harvest, the Starkadders had enough to absorb them without noticing where a couple of girls had got to. Besides, it was
their habit to avoid seeing each other for days at a time, and the absence of Flora and Elfine seemed fortunately to have coincided with one of these hibernations on the part of the family.
But Aunt Ada – did she know? Elfine said she knew everything. She shuddered as she spoke. If Aunt Ada found out that they were going to the ball …
‘She had best not pull any Cinderella stuff on me,’ said Flora, coldly, peering into the nearest noggin to see if the water were done.
‘It is just possible that she may come downstairs one of these evenings,’ said Elfine, timidly. ‘She sometimes does, in the spring.’
Flora said that she hoped it kept fine for her.
But she did rather wonder why the kitchen was decorated with a wreath of deadly nightshade round the mantelpiece and large bunches of the evil-smelling pussy’s dinner arranged in jam-jars on the mantelpiece. And round the dim, ancient portrait of Fig Starkadder, which hung above the fireplace, was a wreath of a flower which was unfamiliar to Flora. It had dark green leaves and long, pink, tightly-closed buds. She asked Elfine what it was.
‘That’s the sukebind,’ said Elfine, fearfully. ‘Oh, Flora, is the water done?’
‘Just on, my dove. Here, you take one,’ and she handed it to Elfine. ‘So that’s sukebind, is it? I suppose when it opens all the trouble begins?’
But Elfine was already away with the hot water to Flora’s room, where her dress lay upon the bed, and Flora must follow her.
Perhaps something, some pregnant quality, in the mildly restless air of the spring evening, had infused itself into the room where old Mrs Starkadder sat before the huge bed of glowing cinders in the grate. For she struck suddenly, fiercely, upon the little bell that stood ever at her elbow (at least, it was at her elbow whenever she sat in that particular chair).
A plan which she had been pondering for days, and had even hinted at to Seth, had suddenly matured. The shrill sound leapt through the tepid air of the room. It roused Judith, who was standing at the window looking with sodden eyes at the inexorable fecundity of the advancing spring.
‘I mun go downstairs,’ said the old woman.
‘Mother … you’re mistaken. ’Tes not the first o’ May nor the seventeenth o’ October. You’d better bide here,’ protested her daughter.
‘I tell you I mun go downstairs. I mun feel you all about me – all of you: Micah, Urk, Ezra, Harkaway, Caraway, Amos, Reuben and Seth. Ay, and Mark and Luke. None of you mun ever leave me. Give me my liberty bodice, girl.’
Silently Judith gave it her.
The old house was silent. The dying light lay quietly upon its walls, and the sound of the blackbird’s song came into the still, empty rooms. Aunt Ada’s thoughts spun like Catherine wheels as she laboriously dressed herself.
Once … when you were a little girl … you had seen something nasty in the woodshed. Now you were old, and could not move easily. You leaned heavily on Judith’s shoulder as she
pressed her foot into the small of your back to lace your corsets.
Flora drew the curtains and lit the lamp. Elfine’s dress lay on the bed, a lovely miracle, and Elfine must be dressed before Flora could begin to think of her own toilet.
It took an hour to dress Elfine. Flora washed her young cheeks with scalding water until they burned with angry roses, and brushed back the wings of hair, slipped the foam of the petticoat over her head and brushed again, stood on a chair to drop the dress over her head, and then brushed again. Then she put on the stockings and shoes, and wrapped Elfine in the white coat, put the fan and bag into her waiting hands, and made her sit on the bed, out of dust and danger.
‘Oh, Flora … do I look nice?’
‘You look extremely beautiful,’ returned Flora, solemnly, looking up at her. ‘Mind you behave properly.’
But to herself she was thinking, in the words of the Abbé Fausse-Maigre, ‘Condole with the Ugly Duckling’s mother. She has fathomed the pit of amazement.’
Flora’s own dress was in harmonious tones of pale and dark green. She wore no jewels, and her long coat was of viridian velvet. She would not permit Elfine to wear jewels, either, though Elfine begged for at least her little string of pearls.
Now they were ready. It was only half-past six. There was a whole hour to wait before they could creep down to the waiting car. In order to calm their nerves, Flora seated herself upon the bed and read aloud from the Pensées:
‘Never arrive at a house at a quarter past three. It is a dreadful hour; too early for tea and too late for luncheon …’
‘Can we be sure that an elephant’s real name is elephant? Only mankind presumes to name God’s creatures; God Himself is silent upon the matter.’
Yet the Pensées failed to have their usual calming effect. Flora was a little agitated. Would the car arrive safely? Would Claud Hart-Harris miss the train? (He usually did!) How would Seth look in a dinner-jacket? Above all, would Richard Hawk-Monitor propose to Elfine? Even Flora did not dare to imagine what would happen if they returned from the ball and he had
not spoken. He
must
speak! She conjured the god of love by the spring evening, by the blackbird’s song, by the triumphant beauty of Elfine.
(Now you were putting on your elastic-sided boots. You had not worn them since Fig died. Fig … a prickly beard, a smell of flannel, a fumbling, urgent voice in the larder. Your boots smelled nasty. Where was the lavender water? You made Judith sprinkle some, inside and out. So. Now your first petticoat.)
‘Flora,’ said Elfine, ‘I am afraid I feel sick.’
Flora looked sternly at her and read aloud: ‘Vanity can rule the queasiest stomach.’
Suddenly there was a tap at the door. Elfine looked at Flora in terror, and Flora noted how her eyes became dark blue when she was moved. It was a good line.
‘Shall I open it?’ whispered Elfine.
‘I expect it’s only Seth.’
Flora got off the bed and tiptoed to the door, which she opened an eighth of an inch. Indeed, it was Seth in a ready-made dinner-jacket which in no way destroyed his animal grace; he merely looked like a panther in evening dress. He whispered to Flora that a car was coming up the hill, and that perhaps they had best come downstairs.
‘Is Urk anywhere about?’ asked Flora, for she knew that if he could mess things up he would.
‘I saw ’un hanging over th’ well up at Ticklepenny’s, talkin’ to th’ water-voles an hour ago,’ replied Seth.
‘Oh, then he is safe for another half-hour at least,’ said Flora. ‘I think we might go down, then. Elfine, are you ready? Now, not a sound! Come along.’
By the light of a candle which Seth carried they made their way safely down into the kitchen, which was deserted. The door leading into the yard was open, and they saw a big car, just visible in the twilight, drawn up outside the gate at the other end of the yard. The chauffeur was just getting down to open the gate, and Flora saw, much to her relief, that another person, who must be Claud, was peering out of the car window. She waved reassuringly to him, and caught the words ‘
too
barbarous’ floating across the still evening air. She motioned frantically to him not to make a noise.
‘I’ll carry Elfine. She mustn’t spoil them shoes,’ whispered Seth, with unexpected thoughtfulness, and picked his sister up and strode off with her across the yard. He made a second journey for Flora, and she hardly had time to decide whether or not he was holding her unnecessarily tightly when she found herself safely popped into the car, and squeezing the outstretched hands of Claud, with Elfine smiling prettily in the corner.
‘My dear, why all this Fall-of-the-House-of-Usher stuff?’ enquired Claud. ‘I mean, this is too good to be true. Where do we go from here?’
Seth was giving the chauffeur his instructions, and in this pause just before their adventure really began, Flora gazed up searchingly at the windows of the farmhouse. ***They were dead as the eyes of fishes, reflecting the dim, pallid blue of the fading west. The crenellated line of the roof thrust blind ledges against a sky into which the infusion of the darkness was already beginning to seep. The livid silver tongues of the early stars leaped between the shapes of the chimney-pots, backwards and forwards, like idiot children dancing to a forgotten tune. As Flora watched, a dim light flowered slowly behind a drawn blind in the window of a room immediately above the kitchen, and she saw a shadow move hesitatingly, as though it had lost a bootlace and was searching dumbly for it, across the blind. The light was like the waxing and waning of the eye in the head of a dying beast. The house seemed to settle deeper into the yard as darkness came. Not a sound broke its quiescence. But the light, strangely naked and innocent, burned waveringly on in the deepening gloom.
The car moved forward, and Flora, for one, was immensely bucked to be off.
‘Well, Flora, you look extremely nice,’ said Claud, studying her. ‘That dress is quite charming. As for your protégée,’ he added, in a lower tone, ‘she is beautiful. Now tell me all about it.’
So, also lowering her voice, Flora told him. He was amused
and interested, but a little discontented with his own role. ‘I feel,’ he complained, ‘like a minor character out of “Cinderella”.’
Flora soothed him by telling him that this excursion into the hinterland of Sussex should afford him a pleasant change from the excessive urbanity of those circles in which he habitually moved, and the rest of their journey passed pleasantly enough. Seth was inclined to swagger, as he was nervous of Claud’s tail coat and white waistcoat and irritated by his casual voice, but he was too excited and looking forward too much to the dance to make himself really disagreeable.
The Assembly Rooms at Godmere were reached by the party without mishap. The High Street was crowded with traffic, for most of the guests had come in from outlying villages and houses in their cars, and a big crowd had come in by bus, from miles round, to gather outside the doors in the Market Place to see the guests going in.
The party from Cold Comfort was fortunate in being in the hands of a competent chauffeur. He actually found a site in a narrow cul-de-sac just round a turning close to the Rooms where he parked their car. Flora instructed him to return at twelve o’clock, when the ball was over, and enquired how he proposed to spend the rest of his evening.
‘I shall go to the talkies, madam,’ he replied, respectfully.
‘Ay, there’s Marie Rambeau in “Red Heels” at th’ Orpheum,’ broke in Seth, eagerly.
‘Yes, well, that will do very well,’ said Flora, graciously, frowning slightly at Seth; and she slipped her fingers within the arm of Claud, and they moved slowly off through the crowd to the Rooms.
A red carpet had been placed down the flight of steps leading up to the entrance and along the pavement as far as the kerb. On either side of this carpet was assembled a large crowd of sightseers, whose interested and admiring faces were illumined by two flambeaux which burned at either side of the entrance.