Flint and Roses (4 page)

She had as always a dozen schemes afoot. There was her plan to educate orphan girls for domestic service and then to ‘place' them in the houses of her friends; her longstanding efforts to provide blankets and good advice for such poor families as she deemed worthy; her determination that our local manufacturers should open their hearts and their bank accounts to Cullingford's need for a concert hall—since Bradford had one—and that it should be named after my father. But most of all that winter her mind was occupied by the proposal that Parliament should be petitioned to grant Cullingford its Charter of Incorporation, with the right to elect our own mayor and town council—not one felt, because she was really troubled by the inefficiency of our present parochial system of local government which had failed to pave the streets or provide an adequate water suppy—in some cases no water supply at all—to the poorer sections of the town, but because she intended her husband, Mr. Ira Agbrigg, to be our first mayor and herself his mayoress.

Mr. Agbrigg could not bring her riches, but he could, at her prompting, offer her prestige; and since there were others who felt they had a greater claim to civic honour, it suited her, when Mrs. Hobhouse of Nethercoats Mill and Mrs. Rawnsley, the banker's wife, came to call, to remind them that her nieces were the daughters of the late Morgan Aycliffe M. P., her brother Mr. Joel Barforth himself.

‘Naturally my brother is most anxious for the Charter to be granted,' she would throw casually into the pool of conversation, her keen eyes assessing the ripples she had created. ‘He feels local government to be altogether essential—since who better to ascertain our needs than ourselves—although he was telling me the other day that the office of mayor will really be most arduous.' And here she would smile directly at Mrs. Hobhouse, whose husband was not noted for his energy.

‘And of course the mayoress will have her duties to perform,' she would murmur, glancing sidelong at Mrs. Mandelbaum, the wool-merchant's wife, who was of a retiring disposition, hated crowds, and, when she was nervous did not speak good English.

‘But will your brother not wish to take office himself?' Mrs. Rawnsley, the banker's wife, once asked her.

‘Ah, no,' Aunt Hannah replied, ‘his time is too fully occupied; but he will certainly put forward his nominee.'

And since Mr. Rawnsley's bank would have been hard-pressed to support the withdrawal of Barforth favour, his wife had no more to say than ‘Oh, yes—quite so. Assuredly Mr. Barforth's views will be listened to.'

‘Naturally,' Aunt Hannah told her kindly, enjoying her moment of power as hugely as if she had already instructed Uncle Joel to transfer his funds, as if she really believed he would obey her. ‘I could not say at this stage just who that nominee may be. But I think we can all agree on the soundness of my brother's judgment and his desire to serve the best interests of the community. Now then, ladies, if we could turn our attention to this little matter of a concert hall—'.

And having reminded them—humble manager's wife that she was—of her grand connections, the intricate financial web which bound most of them to her brother, the extreme eligibility of her sister's daughters, which was a matter of some importance to those with marriageable sons—she would without once mentioning her husband's name, pass on to other things.

We had not of course expected to be pampered in Aunt Hannah's house, for although her husbands salary was known to be ample—my Uncle Joel being generous to those who gave him value for money—her charitable and social activities, her insistence on living, at least on the surface as a Barforth rather than an Agbrigg, proved an evident financial strain. The future mayoress of Cullingford could not refuse to contribute substantially to the charitable foundations she had herself brought into being could not, in fact, give less than the women she had bullied into giving anything at all. She could not refuse invitations to dine from ladies of substance whose husbands she intended to cajole into supporting Mr. Agbrigg's candidature, and, having accepted, she was obliged to invite them in return. When she did, her table must have its share of crystal and silver, and no one must be allowed to suspect that she had herself prepared the sauces and deserts which were far beyond the skills of the ageing kitchenmaid she called her cook. But in the more private areas of her home she could keep a watchful eye on coals and candles, could employ her own half-trained charity children as maids, reserving just one presentable parlourmaid for the serving of drawings-room tea. ‘Ah—what have we here, I wonder?' she would ask at the appearance of her tea-tray, her smile half-amused, half-sarcastic as she served, with immense composure, the gingerbread and chocolate cake, the apple-curd tarts and cheese muffins she had baked herself only a few hours before.

Yet from the start of our visit, although Celia and I were obliged as usual to do our own mending and keep our own rooms in order, thus freeing her servants for the downstairs dusting and polishing that would
‘show',
she extended such leniency to Prudence that Celia, who was easily offended, soon began to complain.

‘She wants you to marry Jonas,' she said, her face sharpening as it always did when there was a marriage in the offing. ‘Well, that's what comes of being father's favourite and getting all the porcelain. But I suppose it's only right you should get married first, you being the eldest—and they say Jonas is very clever.'

And when Prudence, seriously annoyed, declared that marriage was not greatly on her mind, Celia, who feared nothing in the world so much as being left on the shelf, calmly replied. ‘That's nonsense. Prudence. Of course you're thinking about marriage. It's the one thing every body thinks about—and you should be quick about it, so faith and I can have our chances.'

I had been acquainted with Jonas Agbrigg all my life, or for as much of it as I could remember, yet all I really knew about him was the much-vaunted fact of his academic brilliance. He had, it seemed, shown from the very first a flair for learning far in advance of his years and his relatively humble station. At the grammar school, long before Aunt Hannah's marriage to his father had given him a degree of social standing, he had easily out distanced the sons of the local ‘millocracy' on whose generosity the school depended and had been something of an embarrassment even to certain schoolmasters who had found themselves hard-pressed to keep up with him. He had shown himself, indeed, to be so universally gifted that Aunt Hannah, whose pride in him was boundless, had been unable to decide just where those gifts could be best employed. She had to begin with planned to make a churchman of him, dreaming perhaps of bishoprics, archbishoprics—of herself installed as hostess in some ecclesiastical palace—until a certain tartness in his manner, a decided lack of saintliness, had inclined her to consider the law. And now having returned from the University of Cambridge, an opportunity had been purchased for him, with the help of Uncle Joel, in the legal practice of Mr. Corey-Manning, a neighbour of ours in Blenheim Lane, who was—according to Aunt Hannah—exceedingly fortunate and immensely grateful to have obtained his services.

Jonas was a young man of twenty-four, pale and expressionless, a taller, better-nourished version of his father, although he had not inherited Mr. Agbrigg's stooping shoulders and big-knuckled, work-scarred, hands. Jonas's hands, on the contrary, were long and lean and perfectly smooth, with never so much as an ink-stain on his carefully—by Cullingford's standards almost effeminately— manicured fingers, and, although he dressed plainly, he was at all times immaculate, and far too conscious of it for my comfort.

I could, if I put my mind to it, understand that we had not always been kind to Jonas. During our early childhood, when the boys and girls of the family had been allowed to play together, my Uncle Joel's sons, Blaize and Nicholas Barforth, had mocked him quite mercilessly for the care he took of his clothes, being completely careless of the damage they inflicted on their own. Their sister, my cousin Caroline, possessing from birth a fine appreciation of the social order in which a mill-manager's son had no more importance than a groom, had often snubbed him and encouraged us to do the same.

‘Oh, it's only the Agbrigg boy,' Caroline would announce. ‘He won't want to play.'

And Jonas, his long, uptilted eyes scowling, would walk off, making us somehow aware that in his view our games were infantile and each one of us a bore.

Even now, although he was always scrupulously polite, he was not a comfortable young man, his return home each evening bringing a certain tension, which stemmed in part from the surprising coolness between him and his father, a circumstance of which Aunt Hannah herself seemed unaware.

‘Good evening, sir,' Jonas would say.

‘Evening, lad,' he would receive in reply; and, brought upon Aunt Hannah's extravagant hopes for her stepson's future, it astonished me that his own father should have no more to say to him than that. Yet Mr. Agbrigg, his thin face quite haggard in the lamplight, a faint odour of raw wool often discernible about his clothing, would eat his supper in silence every evening, his shrewd, narrow eyes registering nothing as Aunt Hannah requested Jonas to give us his opinion of the day's news, expressing no opinions of his own and then, folding his napkin with those big, work-hard hands, would say simply, ‘I'll be off back to the mill, then, to see the night-shift come on.'

My Aunt's ambitions for Jonas, of course, were of a far higher order than those she entertained for his father Mr. Agbrigg, self-educated but unpolished, his speech still retaining the broadness of the West Riding, could be pushed just so far and no farther. He was without doubt exceedingly well-respected in Cullingford's Piece Hall, where men were more concerned with cash than with culture, and would be a popular mayor with our town's largely unlettered population. But Jonas, with his academic distinction, his neutral accent, his chilly determination to succeed, could do Aunt Hannah credit in the eyes not only of Cullingford but of the world.

She knew exactly what she wanted for him. To begin with, when his childless employer, Mr. Corey-Manning, decided to retire, Jonas must be in a position to take over the business. Then, with a well-established legal practice behind him, a year or two's experience as a town councillor, a member of this committee and that, the way to Westminster, my father's old seat on the Whig back-benches, a Cabinet appointment—Whig or Tory mattered little to Aunt Hannah—would be open.

But even Jonas's talent, even his genius, could not hope to succeed without the cash in hand to buy Mr. Corey-Manning out when the time came, without a sufficient income not only to fight a decent election campaign but to maintain himself in office when he succeeded; and, since Aunt Hannah had no money to give him and Uncle Joel could not be relied on forever, the only course open to him was to marry someone who could.

Naturally he would leave the choice of a wife to his stepmother, and she had selected Prudence for a number of reasons: largely, of course, for the dowry and the porcelain, partly because Prudence herself was exactly the kind of efficient, energetic girl who would help a man to go forward, rather than hold him back; but also because her alternatives were limited to the three of us. Jonas, she well knew, would never be permitted to approach a Miss Mandelbaum or a Miss Rawnsley, whose fathers—like ours—required something a little more solid in a son-in-law than ambition, self-confidence and a university degree, which in their experience had never been an essential ingredient in the making of fortunes. But my father was dead, and, having only my mother, her own younger sister, to contend with—in Aunt Hannah's view no contest at all—she began her campaign with vigour and a lack, of scruple which enabled her to drop the most transparent hints to Mrs. Hobhouse of Nethercoats Mill, who had ten sons of her own, that Prudence was spoken for.

But Mrs. Hobhouse, who had clearly informed herself how much my father's porcelain would be likely to fetch at auction, was as fond a mother as my aunt, and the next time we called at Nethercoats, Prudence found herself burdened with another suitor in the hearty, heavy shape of Freddy Hobhouse, the eldest of the ten equally heavy Hobhouse sons.

‘Prudence is such a dear girl,' Mrs. Hobhouse enthused, beaming as she saw how obediently Freddy was plying my sister with tea and muffins; while Aunt Hannah, knowing that Freddy, who should have been at the mill at this hour, had been specifically summoned to his mother's drawing-room for the purposes of seduction, sat straight-backed, her mouth very hard.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘As you know, she is a great favourite of mine. A parent must be impartial, but I think an aunt is entitled to her preferences.' And later, as we drove home, Freddy, a warmer man than Jonas, having spent longer than necessary in arranging my sister's portion of the carriage-rug. Aunt Hannah enquired tartly if in view of her recent bereavement Prudence thought it proper to pass her time in flirting. To which my sister, with a cold fury equal to her father's, her fastidious nostrils quivering in exact imitation of his replied that she did not understand Aunt Hannah's meaning; and that if she had understood it, she felt certain it would have given her much offence.

‘The Hobhouses,' Aunt Hannah announced at dinner that evening, speaking directly to her husband, ‘are in a sorry state indeed. It saddens me, every time I go over there, to see the worsening of their affairs—for they are worsening. Mr. Agbrigg, are they not? My word, when I think of Nethercoats as it used to be, in old Mr. Hobhouse's day—And when Bradley Hobhouse took it over from his father it seemed as solid as a rock. Certainly Emma-Jane Rawnsley, as she was then, thought so or she would hardly have married him. But Bradley has never been a man of affairs, too easiful, too apt to leave it all to others. I have heard my brother say so many a time, and although Emma-Jane is a good soul, she is not a strong character either. Well, as to how Nethercoats may provide a living for those ten boys, and dowries for those four girls, I haven't a notion. And neither has Emma-Jane. They have made room for Freddy and Adolphus, but the younger boys will be forced to take employment elsewhere, which is a great pity, don't you agree, Mr. Agbrigg? Really, one can only tremble for their future.'