The Fox in the Attic (6 page)

Grown-ups were ex officio Enemy to all these children, to be out-smarted on every occasion: so, their scores rose. But even if Polly had been old enough and clever enough properly to understand the Rule (she was not, in fact, particularly intelligent), she could never even have made a beginning. For Polly's own grown-ups were not “Enemy,” that was the rub: they were infinitely kind, they made little pretense of not adoring Polly and it never occurred to Polly to make any pretense at all of not loving them back. Loving, indeed, was the one thing she was really good at: how then could she ever bring herself to “knock a Man down”?

Mr. Corbett, for example: the head gardener at Mellton Chase, and indeed the greatest potentate on earth: the massive sloping buttress of his front—his gold watch-chain marked the halfway line of the ascent—held him upright like a tower, and nowadays his hands never deigned to touch fork or spade except to weed Miss Polly's little garden for her; or to pick fruit, except when he saw Miss Polly coming ...

It was unthinkable to inflict on Mr. Corbett the indignity of falling!

Or even on dear Gusting (her uncle Augustine, that was). Of course he was a lesser dignitary in the world's eyes than Mr. Corbett; but she loved him even more. Admired and loved him with every burning cockle of her heart!

There was magic in Gusting's very smell, his voice.

“Time you got undressed, Miss Polly,” said Nanny. Slowly Polly wandered across to have her jersey peeled off.

“Skin-a-rabbit,” said Nanny, mechanically, as she always did.

“Ow!” said Polly, as she always did (for the neck of her jersey was too tight), and wandered off again nursing her damaged ears. Nanny just had time to undo the three large bone buttons on her back before she was out of reach, and as she walked away the blue serge kilt with its white cotton “top” fell off around her feet.

The rest of her undressing Polly could do herself, given time and her whole attention. It was chiefly button work: she wore a “liberty bodice,” a White-Knight sort of under-garment to which everything nether was buttoned or otherwise attached (constricting elastic being bad for you). But tonight her fingers fumbled feebly and uselessly, fainting at the very first button; for her attention was all elsewhere.

Gusting had a game which only he played, the Jeremy Fisher Game. A little mat was a waterlily leaf and Gusting sat on it cross-legged, fishing with a long carriage-whip, while Polly swam round him on the polished floor on her stomach, being a fish ... Polly began now to make embryonic swimming movements with her hands.

“Stop dawdling,” said Nanny, but without much hope. Polly made a brief effort: something else fell off her, and she stepped out of it where it lay. “Pick it up, dear,” said Nanny, again without much hope.

“Ninjun!” said Polly indignantly (Augustine had once said her wandering manner of undressing and scattering her clothes was like a Red Indian blazing his trail, and that had hallowed it).

Minutes passed ...

“Wake up, Miss Polly: stop dawdling,” said Nanny.

Another brief effort, and so it went on till at last Polly had on nothing but a clinging woolen vest as she stood at the window, her chin reaching just above the sill, looking out through the watery glass.

In the street far below people were still scurrying past. There seemed no end to them. That was what was wrong with London: “If only there were fewer people in the world how much nicer it would be for we animals,” Polly told herself ...

“We animals!”—Polly could think a rabbit's kind of thoughts much easier than a grown-up's kind, for her “thinking” like an animal's was still more than nine parts emotion. Except for Augustine it was only with animals she could form friendships on at all equal terms; for she had no child-friends of her own age, and her love for most grown-ups was necessarily more like a dog's for a man than something between members of the same species. All the most interesting hours of the day still tended to be spent on all fours, and even in bodily size she was nearer to her father's spaniel than she was to her father. The dog weighed more than the child, as the see-saw had shown ...

“Wake up!” said Nanny—still without much hope. “Vest!” A final effort and the vest too lay on the floor. Nanny made stirring sounds in the bath: “Come on,” said Nanny, “or the water'll be half cold.”

“I'm busy!” said Polly indignantly. She had found a cake-currant on the floor and was trying to fix it in her navel, but it wouldn't stay there. “If only I had some honey,” she thought ... but at that moment felt herself lifted in the air, carried—her feet weakly kicking—and plumped down in the middle of the large shallow bath. Nanny's patience was exhausted.

Polly seized her celluloid frog Jeremy, and once more her thoughts were away: so far this time they were not even fully recalled when Nanny dragged off her hands and soaped her protesting ears.

“Now!” said Nanny, holding up the huge turkey towel she had been warming on the fender: “Or I'll have to count Three!”

But Polly was loth to move.

“
One
...”

“
Two
...”

Then the nursery door opened and in walked Augustine.

Dropping into a chair, Augustine just had time to snatch the towel from Nanny to cover himself as Polly sprang squealing straight from the water into his lap—with half the bath following her, it seemed.

Well!
Bursting in like that without knocking! Nanny pursed her lips, for she didn't at all approve. Nanny was a Catholic and believed it is never too young to start teaching little girls Shame. They ought to
mind
men—even uncles—seeing them in their baths, not go bouncing onto their laps without a stitch. But she knew it was as much as her place was worth to breathe a word to the child, for Mrs. Wadamy was Modern, Mrs. Wadamy had Views.

Meanwhile Polly, lonely no longer, was in the seventh heaven of delight. She tore open Augustine's waistcoat to nuzzle her damp head inside it against his shirt, where she could breathe nothing but his magic smell, listen to the thumping of his heart.

Reluctant at first to let his still-tainted hands themselves even touch the sacred child, he dabbed with a bunch of towel tenderly at the steaming, flower-petal skin. But with her head inside his waistcoat she grabbed his hand tyrannically to her and pressed its hard hollow palm tight over her outside cheek and temple and little curly ear, so that her lucky head should be quite entirely squeezed between
him
and
him
. But that very moment he heard Mary's voice from the stairs, calling him: he must come at once.

Augustine was wanted on the telephone: it was a trunk call.

This was the dead child asserting precedence over the living one; for the untimely call was from the police at Penrys Cross. But it was only to say the inquest was put off till Friday as the coroner was indisposed.

Flemton Banquet had ended as usual—in a fight. This year the occasion had been the final torchlight procession: it had fired some of the street decorations, and Danny George declared the burning of his best trousers had been deliberate. Flemton had been happy to divide on the point, and in the fracas Dr. Brinley's old pony took fright and galloped him off home in the rocking trap, splashing across the sands through the skim of ebb that still glistened there in the moonlight. He had been properly scared and shaken. Thus he had missed the Tuesday and Wednesday Meets after all, taking to his bed with a bottle instead.

The experienced Blodwen had been firm with them: Friday was the earliest the Coroner could be fit for duty.

The next day, Wednesday, Mary was taking Polly back to Dorset. The extra day just gave Augustine time to go with them and spend one night there before having to be back in Wales.

The weather had cleared, and Augustine and Polly wanted to travel together, in the Bentley; but Nanny objected. She said it was crazy in any weather to let a child with a cold travel in a thing like that; for Augustine's 3-liter Bentley was an open two-seater—very open indeed, with a small draughty windscreen and with even the handbrake outside. Mary Wadamy, on the other hand, was rather in favor. A big wind, she argued, must blow germs
away
. And it would soon be over; whereas in the stuffy family Daimler, with the luggage and Nanny and Mary's maid Fitton and Mary herself, the journey would take the best part of the day.

Trivett, their old chauffeur, was carriage-trained and had no liking for speed. But even at twenty miles an hour he drove dangerously enough for the most exacting: “Best anyway not put all your eggs in one basket when the basket is driven by Trivett!” said Augustine grimly.

As for Polly, speech was so inadequate to express her longing that she was silently dancing it, her tongue stuck out as if in exile for its uselessness. That decided Mary: “Being happy's the only cold-cure worth a farthing,” she said to herself, and gave her consent.

So Nanny, her face full of omens, wrapped the child into a woolen ball where only the eyes showed, and set it on the leather seat beside Augustine.

Augustine was a brilliant driver of the youthful passionate kind which wholly identifies itself with the car. Thus once his hands were on the wheel this morning he forgot Polly entirely. Yet this didn't matter to Polly. She too knew how to merge herself utterly in dear Bentley (another of her loves): the moment the engine broke into its purring, organ-like roar she uncovered her mouth and began singing treble to Bentley's bass, and for two hours Bentley and she did not for a moment stop singing, through Staines and Basingstoke, Stockbridge, Salisbury, out on the bare downs.

On the tops of those empty high downs, above the hanging woods of ancient yews clinging to their chalky sides, there was only a thin skin of rabbit-nibbled turf that was more thyme than grass and a sky full of larks. Polly had got her arms free now and waved to the larks, inviting their descant to make a trio of it.

Mellton lay in a deep river-valley folded into these bare chalk downs. In the flat bottom land as they neared the house there were noble woods of beech and sweet-chestnut, green pasture, deep lanes that Bentley almost filled, little hidden hamlets of mingled flint and brick with steep thatched roofs. Bentley and Polly sang together for them as they passed.

As Bentley rounded through the ever-open wrought-iron gates and purred his careful way on the last lap through the park, Polly was now entirely free of her cocoon and standing bolt upright against the dashboard, using both arms to conduct the whole chorus of nature. “Home!” she was chanting on every note she could compass, “Home! Home! Home!” And to Polly's ears everything round her intoned the answer “
Home!
”

Then at the front door of Mellton Chase Augustine switched off the engine and Polly and Bentley both fell silent together.

Augustine wiped her nose and lifted her out.

Mellton was large, nearly as large as Augustine's lonely hermitage Newton Llantony. It was all an Elizabethan house, entirely faced and mullioned with stone and with a little half-naïve classical ornament. It had originally been built as a hollow square on the four sides of a central quadrangle, like a college. In the middle of the façade there was still a great vaulted archway like a college gate: once, you could have ridden on horseback under it right into the quadrangle without dismounting, but now the arch was blocked and a modern front door had been constructed in it.

The well-known music of Augustine's Bentley could be heard afar, and the butler was standing waiting for them outside this front door when they arrived. Wantage was his name.

Wantage was a thin man, prematurely gray: his eyes stood out rather, for he had thyroid trouble.

Polly greeted Mr. Wantage warmly but politely (he was
Mr
. Wantage to her, by her mother's fiat). Once inside the door she sat herself expectantly on the end of a certain long Bokhara rug: for as usual on first getting home she wanted to set out at once for the North Pole drawn on her sledge by a yelping team of Mr. Wantage across the frozen wastes of ballroom parquet.

For no longer was there any open quadrangle here at Mellton that all the business of the house had to criss-cross, wet or fine. A Victorian Wadamy had arisen who disliked so draughty a way of living. Fired by the example of the new London railway-stations and of Paxton's Crystal Palace, he had roofed the entire thing over with a dome of steel and glass. So now in the middle of the house there was nearly an acre of parquet dotted with eastern rugs, instead of the former lawn and flagged paths. What now stood waiting at the far side by the old mounting-block with its tethering-ring, at the foot of the stone steps leading up to the State Rooms and the Solar, was a grand piano.

The quadrangle was now called the Ballroom. Few mansions in the county had ballrooms half its size: tradition said that on one Victorian occasion two thousand couples had danced there, watched by the Prince and Princess of Wales. But this vast “room” was still lit by the glazed sky above. Its walls of weathered stone were still unplastered. Windows and even balconies still looked down into it. Yet alternating with these windows and balconies steel armored fore-arms now projected from the walls gripping outsize electric light bulbs in their gauntletted fists; for this had been one of the very first houses in Britain to adopt the new lighting, with current generated by its own watermill.

Polly and Wantage may have been looking for the North Pole, but what they found at the far side of all this was Minta the under-nurse. She carried Polly off at once, and Polly went with her readily enough because Polly was always docile when she was happy and at the moment she was full of happiness—full as an egg.

As soon as Polly was gone with Minta and Augustine was washing his hands, Wantage vanished rather nervously into the dining-room. He wanted to assure himself that the cold sideboard carried everything it should for Mr. Augustine's solitary luncheon. Wantage knew of old that Mr. Augustine preferred not to be waited on yet objected strongly to having to ring for something which had been forgotten. If he was like this by twenty-three, Wantage often wondered, what would he be like at fifty-three? “A holy terror and no mistake!” was Mrs. Winter's forecast—unless he got married, of course.