The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (17 page)

“We want to do the best for everyone, madre,” said Celia, evidently ending quite a long speech and looking fixedly at Lucy, with her pale blue eyes that seemed to be analyzing the cost of her clothing down to her most intimate underwear.

“And we’ll put Gull Cottage in the hands of the agent at once,” said Cyril.

“What?” said Lucy, sitting bolt upright and coming back to reality with a jerk.

“We’ve been telling you, mother,” said Cyril patiently, “that we don’t think it right that you should live alone in that isolated house at Whitecliff—after all, dear, you aren’t as young as you were.”

“I’m scarcely fifty,” said Lucy.

“Of course that isn’t really old nowadays,” said Celia tactfully, “but too old, don’t you think, to live alone and do all your own work, especially if you are subject to these fainting attacks?”

“But I am not subject to fainting attacks,” declared Lucy. “I never fainted in my life.”

“Until this evening,” said Cyril.

“That was nothing,” said Lucy.

“It’s no use being too brave about it, madre,” said Celia.

“I’m not being brave,” said Lucy in exasperation, “I just had a—well a slight shock. Perhaps I had too much wine.”

“You only had one glass,” said Celia, “that wouldn’t account for it—no, dear madre, Cyril and I don’t think you are fit to live alone and we’ve made a plan. You are coming to live in Whitchester with us.”

“In your own old home that Father built for you,” added Cyril triumphantly.

“Yes,” said Celia, “it’s been such a secret. Daddy heard about a month ago that there was a curate needed at St. Swithins—you know, on the hill above your old house—and he asked me what I should like for a wedding present on the day that Cyril was appointed to St. Swithins, and we found
out that Ivybank was for sale and he bought it for me, and you are coming to live in it with us.”

“But Cyril won’t stay a curate at St. Swithins forever,” said Lucy, panic-stricken yet unable to quench completely the glow of altruistic virtue in their upturned faces.

“I should say not,” said Cyril, “but it will be lovely to feel that we have a settled home to come to.”

“With you in it, always ready to take the children whenever we want a little jaunt abroad,” said Celia.

“It’s very sweet of you to think of it, dears,” said Lucy, trying to put the fervent gratitude she was so far from feeling into her voice, “but it would never do—young people should have their own home.”

“But it would be our own home,” said Celia.

“Not with a mother-in-law in it,” said Lucy.

“But we would get on beautifully,” said Celia, “I know that we should——”

“You can’t possibly tell how you would get on with a person at breakfast, seven days a week, when you have only had dinner and lunch with them occasionally,” said Lucy.

“I’ll come and have breakfast with you in your room to-morrow and see how we get on.” Celia smiled.

Lucy shook her head. “No,” she said, “you are dutiful, kind children, but things are better as they are.”

“It isn’t duty, madre, we want you to come,” said Celia, pouting with lips that were too thin to pout. An only child, thought Lucy, and a spoiled one, always used to getting her own way.

“No,” she said more firmly still, “I am a selfish old woman, set in her own ways, and they are not the ways of this generation.”

“You would have your own sitting-room,” said Cyril.

“No,” said Lucy, “it is very very kind of you to think of it, but I will stay where I am, at Gull Cottage.”

“Your mother is tired, dear,” said Celia with some asperity. “We will talk of this another time—perhaps daddy will be able to persuade her that it is the right thing to do.”

“Perhaps he will,” said Lucy with no conviction in her voice as she raised her cheek for their good-night kisses, but I wouldn’t mind betting, she added to herself as they left the room, that it would take more than a bishop to change my mind.

In the turmoil of all the last minute preparations for a large wedding, Lucy hoped to escape the persuasions of Celia’s father and his advice as to the right thing to do.

She breakfasted in her bedroom and remained in seclusion till the booming of the gong called her to the cold luncheon spread in the Bishop’s study, since the dining-room was already prepared for the wedding feast. There she hid with a plate of cold tongue behind the bust of Milton, until she was sought out by cousin George with a dish of fruit salad and a flood of information concerning the marriage customs of the Bantus, which kept her effectively submerged until they left for the service in the cathedral.

It was a cool sunlit day in early October, and the sun’s rays striking down in dusty bars of gold and colour through the age-old stained glass windows lit up Celia and her train of white-clad attendants as if they, too, were transformed out of their clear-cut modernity into the gentler graciousness of the past, as if the ancient cathedral had enclosed part of the century of its building within its grey stone walls, with the magical power to translate all its occupants.

It was strange, thought Lucy, how much greater and
more lasting the work of man’s hands and mind was than man himself. Looking up at the exquisite tracery of the vaulted roof, listening to the majestic music pealing up to join it, she felt dwarfed and humble, yet raised up in spirit beyond her own little ant hill of living. And Captain Gregg had been right, there was something grand about the Bishop; at his own dinner table he might be a booming foghorn of a man, but here he fitted in, his voice taking up from the organ notes the resounding words of the medieval marriage service as he united his daughter in holy matrimony with her son.

She was reluctant to leave her pew after the ceremony was over, reluctant to join the chattering throng that clustered about the newly married pair, drinking to their happiness in champagne and scattering cake crumbs and feeble jests. It was too rapid a descent from the sublime, if not to the ridiculous at least to the banal. If only Anna were here, she would understand; but Anna, though Cyril had been persuaded to send her an invitation, had a matinée and could not be present.

As soon as she decently could, after the bridal pair had driven away to the station to catch the train to London on their way to Rome, Lucy crept upstairs to her own room, avoiding Eva under a palm tree in the hall, engrossed in telling cousin George all he did not want to hear about Morris dancing; avoiding Mrs. Winstanley waving a little blue handkerchief that she had meant Celia to wear at the wedding; above all avoiding the Bishop and his ideas on rightness. They had asked her to stay over the week-end but she had refused with difficulty. She must, she had said, get home; she had left her little dog with the gardener and was not sure how she would be treated, which was a gross libel on the kindly man, who came one half-day a week to dig and mow, and perhaps an even grosser libel on herself, marking her as
one of those besotted dog fanatics that could not be parted from her pet for more than twenty-four hours.

She was to be driven to the station to catch the local train to Whitecliff at a quarter to six, and it was after five when Lucy, having changed into her travelling clothes, had closed her suitcase. But if she thought she had evaded the Bishop’s conscience, she was mistaken, for presently a tap came at her door and the parlour-maid informed her that the Bishop was in his study and would be pleased if she could spare a few minutes to speak with him.

The study had been hastily swept back to normal; but as a spring tide will leave flotsam above the usual tide line, so the wedding had left jetsam lurking in odd corners; a champagne glass stood on the pedestal below Milton’s dark bronze image; a twist of silver ribbon ornamented a brass candlestick on the mantelshelf; a gardenia, bruised and browning, lay in the grate, its exotic scent mingling with the bookish smell of leather; and the wastepaper basket frothed with white tissue paper.

The Bishop, rising from his massive chair behind his massive desk, on which a pad of foolscap awaited to-morrow’s sermon, greeted her and waved her to the armchair nearest to him, and, seating himself again when she was settled, plunged without preamble into Celia’s ideas for the future.

If only, thought Lucy sitting meekly with folded hands in a crimson leather chair, if only bishops could remain enrobed in the aloof splendour of cathedrals, rather than gaitered in the everydayness of houses, how much more inspiring they would continue to be. And it was all such a waste of the poor man’s time, with his sermon crying out to be written on the blank pages before him. If only he would get on with his own affairs and leave her to mind hers! But obviously he felt, goaded on by Celia and no doubt by Eva, that Lucy, if
not a brand to be snatched from the burning, was at least a widow to be led from wandering—and did he use a button hook every time he put on those gaiters or did Mrs. Winstanley fasten them for him with her own fingers? And why did bishops wear gaiters? Lucy wondered. Was it some relic of the past when they were prepared to wade at any moment through storm and flood to rescue sheep strayed from the fold? She tried to picture the Bishop in such circumstances and realized it was not so difficult to picture him weathering any storm into which his conscience might lead him.

“—and I am sure, Mrs. Muir, that put in this way you will agree with me,” ended the Bishop. “They are putting your welfare first, they are not thinking of themselves at all.”

Lucy, bringing her mind back to the matter in hand, was not so sure of that. There had been that talk of babies left with her and jaunts abroad for Celia and Cyril, and while, of course, she would be delighted to be a grandmother, she had no intention of being a head nurse. But could she mention these as yet unborn infants to her co-parent-in-law of scarcely a few hours without shocking his Puritanical susceptibilities? Though he had unblushingly declaimed in the cathedral before a large congregation the church’s mediaeval ideas on marriage and the procreation of children, she doubted if the words would be quite as acceptable to him in the intimacy of his study.

“Celia and Cyril are very kind and thoughtful,” she murmured, “but I have no intention of being a burden on them.”

“But you would not be a burden, Mrs. Muir,” said the Bishop, “far less in fact than if you were living in that lonely house with your weak heart and——”

“My heart is perfectly strong,” said Lucy sharply, and added, “thank you,” for after all the poor man was doing his best.

“And, indeed, far from being a burden,” continued the Bishop, “you might be of great assistance to the young couple, for as St. Paul says in the second chapter of Titus, ‘The aged women likewise, that they be in behaviour as becometh holiness, not false accusers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things; that they may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed.’ ”

“Oh, but I couldn’t teach Celia any of that,” said Lucy. “I couldn’t teach her anything—I mean you have taught her so well yourself.”

“We have done our best,” said the Bishop simply, “but only children are at a disadvantage in marriage, for they have never had to share life intimately with their own generation, and sharing is a habit not easily acquired after childhood.”

Oh, dear, thought Lucy, this is a really good man; he makes me feel cheap and very small, for undoubtedly I am thinking of myself first in this matter. If I don’t get away very soon I shall be agreeing to everything he says and, selfish or not, I know it wouldn’t work and we would all be miserable. The trouble is this man-made measuring of time; he thinks of me as an aged woman, when really I am far younger in many ways than Celia and should have no more influence over her than an out-of-date gramophone record.

“Don’t come to any hurried decision,” said the Bishop kindly, “go away and think it over.”

“Oh, I will, I will,” said Lucy fervently. “I will think it over very carefully, and I would like to tell you——” She stopped abruptly. It was impossible to tell him that she was sorry that she had thought of him as a camel, and a pompous camel at that. “—I would like to tell you,” she ended, “how
much I appreciate all you have said, and how glad I am to know you better.”

In the new warmth of her feeling towards him, she was about to bring Anna into the conversation, in the hope that she too might be enveloped in this new cloak of understanding, but the butler appeared and informed her that the car was waiting at the door to take her to the station.

And perhaps it was as well that he had interrupted them, thought Lucy driving on her way, for St. Paul could have had no comforting texts for dancers, and the Bishop, in many ways, was very like St. Paul.

“I shall have a quiet rest till lunchtime,” thought Lucy on the following morning as she lay in bed with Miss Ming warming her feet. “There is nothing and no one to disturb me.”

But she was wrong, for even as she dozed a car stopped on the road outside her gate, and Anna’s voice came floating up to her through the open window.

“All right, darling,” she said, “come back at twelve and take us out to lunch.”

Who was darling? Lucy wondered. Anna had so many friends; but she wasn’t going to spy on her daughter from behind window curtains, and anyway, if darling was coming back at twelve, she would see him then. Anna had her own latchkey and would let herself in; but Lucy hastily slipped out of bed and, seating herself at her dressing table, began to smear on her clear skin some of the expensive night cream that Anna had brought her on her last visit. Deceitful, no doubt, she thought even as she smeared, but Anna would be hurt if she found the pot unopened.

“Mummy—mummy, where are you?” called Anna in the hall below.

“Upstairs, darling,” said Lucy, flinging her favourite
old quilted dressing-gown into the cupboard and enveloping herself in the handsome blue housecoat that Anna had given her on her last birthday.

She was back at the dressing table, brushing out her hair with her ivory hairbrush, when Anna burst into the room. She embraced her mother warmly and flung herself onto the bed and embraced the Pekinese, too.