Bell Timson Read online

  She was a wonderful woman. Considering her family and the domestic help she had — or hadn’t — she kept her home beautifully.

  She said people had no business to live in a good house and not respect it. It had belonged to a rich old maiden lady, when when Father bought it some of the snobs were shocked. Mother set out to show them that a vet knew as much about living in a house like the Cedars as old Lady Sophy Gibbs. We hadn’t a butler to open the door, but the village girl that Mother sometimes forgot and called the housemaid (her people had kept servants) did not do badly. We had a cook too, but she was only rough, and when there was company Mother did the cooking. There were so many rooms we could keep a couple more or less presentable, and we children could make our mess and litter over the rest; and of course there was always a homesick bitch or a delicate puppy or two that Mother rescued from the kennels because she said they needed special coddling. Her love extended to every sort of living creature, and Father often called in her unprofessional help over a difficult patient. And in spite of all this old Lady Sophy wouldn’t have grieved for her paint work or her parquets if she could have seen them while we lived there.

  I don’t suppose Father ever realized the burden he laid on Mother by his hospitable habits. He was always asking people to stop to midday dinner or supper, and he would often not be there himself because he had been called away, so Mother would have to entertain them: which was not easy, as they were generally men she hardly knew at all, and as they were expected to stop until Father came in, she would have them on her hands, sometimes, for half a day. Then Father would arrive and shout for his meal and insist on their sitting down again and sharing it with him — which meant they all settled down to drink whisky, for naturally people — even farmers — who have just had a good three-course lunch did not feel like starting all over again. And it would be time to lay supper before the table had been cleared, so the servant was in a temper, which was a thing that Father, being a man, never considered. Yet I never once saw Mother ruffled, and she never took it out in sharpness with us, as many a mother would have done. And we were a handful, believe me. Mother was just a natural lady; I never met one since, titled or otherwise, who was fit to clean her shoes. I’ve done my best to remember her, with Kathleen and Jo; but you have to have something special ...

  We were very happy children. I don’t think we quarreled much, although Stan, who was the eldest, was the difficult one. I once heard Mother say to Father that he hadn’t a loving heart, like the others, and God knows time has shown she was right. Laura and I used to feel guilty about Stan, because it seemed wicked that we should not care about him the way we did about our other brothers. I remember once finding Laura kneeling beside her little bed, her stiff pigtail sticking out with a blue ribbon on the end of it, praying: “Please, God, do make me love Stanley, even if I can’t like him!” He had a kind of sneaking, sneering way with him that frightened the younger ones, and he was cruel to animals. Father once nearly took the hide off him because he caught Stan tormenting a cat of ours that was going to have kittens; but I’m afraid it made no difference, except that he was careful not to be caught again. You could feel cruelty oozing out of him, even when he was a boy. I don’t blame Nora ... except for marrying him.

  I was next to Stan, then Laura, then Alfred and Ozzy; a year between each of us, then two years to Oswald. We younger four were good friends, though Laura and I, being girls perhaps, were closest. We had our ponies — three of them between five of us; the one I called mine was Snowberry, a little white Exmoor that I shared with Ozzy, because he was thin and light, and I didn’t like to see Snowberry weighed down by Laura’s fat body or Alfie’s straddling limbs. If Stan had laid a finger on her I think I would have taken my cosh to him.

  Nobody but Stanley rode his cob; there was something shifty about it, that we blamed on Stan, not on the pony. Laura and Alfie shared the piebald, Prince, who had come from a circus and was much the best, as well as the cleverest, of the three. But I loved my Snowberry, and our greatest treat was when Father took a couple of us riding out with him to the farms, where they made a fuss of us because we were Lambtons, and gave us farmhouse pie and curds and whey.

  I don’t suppose every day was picnics and parties: apple gatherings, strawberries and cream in the hayfields, Fifth of November bonfires, and dressing up the Christmas tree. But, looking back, those are the things that come to my mind, and I realize that Mother never let us miss one of those treats which make up the total of a happy childhood. I didn’t live in the country for years after my marriage, so Kathleen and Jo never knew what it was to cut turnips into lanterns, to look in the hedges for Easter eggs, to bob for apples, or make up plaits and rosettes for the ponies to wear in the May Day processions. I wonder how many children still do these things — or what children of today would make of our games with conkers; of Laura and me sitting for hours, lining walnut shells with bits of velvet to keep our thimbles in, making dolls’- house goblets out of acorn cups or stringing beech husks for necklaces? It seems to me that the only things children care about nowadays are things that come out of shops, imitations of grown-up things, ready-made ideas, instead of things of their own invention.

  Mother took great pains with Laura and me. When we were quite small we were sent away to boarding school, for she said we were getting too rough and tomboyish with our brothers. We had quite a good time, when we got used to it, although we were both dunces, and always at the bottom of the class — which amused Father and upset Mother, because she had a great respect for education and wanted us to be brought up like ladies. However, we were both popular, because, I suppose, we had learned plenty of give and take from the boys. Laura was fairly good at drawing and brought home some pencil copies of the art masters landscapes, which Mother, poor dear, had framed for the parlor; and at the end of five years I could more or less play a piano setting of “In the Gloaming, Oh, My Darling,” and vamp to Fathers country songs. So I suppose they thought the money was not wasted.

  In the holidays Mother started to be very particular about our friends and arranged tea parties for us, which I am afraid she enjoyed more than we did, for we thought most of the neighbors’ girls were a dull set. The surgery and kennels had always been strictly forbidden to us children, except by special permission, although as Alfie grew older he was sometimes allowed to help the kennel lads, and he was supposed to be going into the business after he had passed his examinations and got his diploma — which, of course, never happened: but that comes later.

  We never heard any of the coarse conversation that went on between Father and some of the rougher customers, and, extraordinary as it may seem, although Laura and I were daughters of a vet, neither of us knew anything about how babies were born until — I was going to say, until we were grown up; but Laura did not live to grow up, and it never struck me until many years later that she died all in what people call the beauty of innocence. Sweet, pretty Laura — this story would be a different one if she were with us today.

  But what I was about to say was that, contrary to what people tell you, children do not associate the antics of animals with anything that happens between human beings. We kept rabbits and guinea pigs, and understood that when the buck climbed on top of the doe we might shortly get the breeding boxes ready; but we never applied our knowledge to our own race, and when Martha, our “housemaid,” surprisingly began to swell in front and was most obviously going to litter, we were baffled: first because she had no husband, and second because we could not imagine how she ever got into this state. And when Mother got rid of Martha, as a respectable lady was supposed to do in those days, we were even more mystified, and discussed it together, although we were much too self-conscious to mention the matter to Mother.

  Of course she wouldn’t have told us if we had. Mother’s generation never did; they sent their daughters to the marriage bed without a word of explanation or warning, because that was what the husbands expected. I have never understood why Mother, who
was so frank and so natural about a whelping bitch, took refuge in disapproving silence (at least in her daughters’ presence) at the slightest reference to a natural human process. But it taught me my lesson, and I saw that Kathleen and Jo were informed when they were still quite small.

  If, however, Mother failed us over this, it was her only weakness. Many a time, for the girls’ sake as well as my own, I have wished she was alive: to hold her two little granddaughters on her knee, teaching them their “Gentle Jesus” and humming them off to sleep with “Abide with Me” — the old tune, not Clara Butt’s fancy version. “Sleep Softly in This Quiet Room,” “Golden Slumbers,” “Poor Shepherd Boy, ’Tis Time to Leave the Mountain” — all the sweet old lullabies that were woven into the pattern of our childhood; it used to grieve me sometimes that Kathleen and Jo were missing them all. I taught them “Our Father,” and told them always to say it before they went to sleep, but somehow it wasn’t the got that quality of Mother s, that simple goodness and reverence, that brought the spirit of God into the room when she came to bid us good night. Yet I never remember her talking religion to us, and I sometimes think it wasn’t the prayers she taught us or the hymns she sang, but the way she held us in her arms, so that loving God and loving Mother were part of the same thing. She never let us go to bed miserable or angry, and whatever trouble there had been during the day, we always knew, when it was getting near bedtime, that it would straighten out, and Gentle Jesus and Mother between them would take it over and leave us happy to drop off to sleep.

  We all went to church on Sundays, and took our bunches of flowers to the children’s service, and perhaps in the evening she would read us a Bible story — just to make a difference between Sunday and the other days of the week. The only time she ever did anything which seemed “religious” was when we were confirmed — Stan and Laura and I at the same time — when she called us into her bedroom and, looking almost as shy as we felt, said she would like us all to say a prayer before going to church. I wish I could remember that prayer, but girls of fifteen are heedless, and I am afraid I was thinking more of my white dress and my long net veil than of the solemn occasion.

  Mother must really have loved and believed in God. I say it with wonder today, but I think I did too, up to the time of my marriage, but, I suppose, just in the rather light and thoughtless way of a girl of that age. I wish I had had this to give Kathleen and Jo, because I think it’s good for little children; it makes them feel safe. Well, I’ve tried to make up in other ways.

  I have written all this because it shows the kind of life I wanted for the girls. Perhaps you might not think it, from the way things have turned out, but these were the things at the back of my mind when I got rid of Harry. I wanted to get them away from the sordid kind of life we were obliged to live, and I had begged and implored him to help me, but it seemed as if he just couldn’t make the effort. Although, give him his due, he was very fond of Jo. But not fond enough to stick to his job and give up his bad habits and make a decent home for us. I had actually begun to be frightened of losing my own standards, such as they were; it’s terrible how soon you can slip into another person’s ways, at first without noticing and then because it’s too much trouble to stand out for your own. But when Harrys example started to show in Kathleen, who had been as true and honest a little girl as Laura when she was tiny, and when Jo picked up some expressions that would have killed her grandmother if she had heard them, I knew I must not shilly-shally any longer, and I told Harry I was going to see the lawyer.

  Here I am breaking off one part of my tale and starting on another before I have finished. I want to get the Crowle part out of the way before I start on the real story, and I will do it as shortly as possible, because it hasn’t, like the first part, got much to do with the girls.

  As everyone knows, big Victorian houses and ponies and school fees run away with plenty of money. When I was seventeen Stan was still hanging around, unable to make up his mind about his career; Laura and I were young ladies with admirers of our own, which meant smart frocks. Mother would, I think, have been economical, but Father, who was now very proud of us, would not have us stinted, and I expect we had plenty of criticism from people who thought the Lambton girls were ridiculously overdressed. Laura was lovely, with her bright pink cheeks and bright chestnut hair, and nothing delighted Father more than to have her beside him when he went his rounds in the dog cart. He could never have enough compliments about “that stunning daughter” of his. He usually let her do the driving, for she handled the ribbons beautifully, and this gave him all the more chance of leaning back and basking in her glory. Young as we were, we both had several proposals, but most of Laura’s admirers were out for lighthearted flirtation, while mine already showed that trying tendency I have mentioned — to get down to serious business from the start. It was beginning to make me nervous of encouraging any new young men.

  Alfred and Oswald were still at school, and doing rather better, fortunately, than their sisters. Their bite out of the family budget was a relatively small one; what actually ate up the funds was Father’s increasing extravagance at home.

  He was certainly, at that time, in a very good position for a man in his profession, but no veterinary’s fees could have covered the standard on which he now insisted on our living. When Mother protested he teased her jovially by saying he would get it all back in a couple of wealthy sons-in-law. In actual fact he was so popular, for his good looks and his good manner, as well as for his skill in his profession, that several people who would ordinarily have looked down on a vet, and kept him in his place, went out of their way to court his society. Nothing would do for Father but inviting them to the house, and although Mother demurred and said he was inviting a snub, he pooh-poohed her and said that while he had three beautiful women to run his home there was no risk of snubs! And so it appeared, for nobody refused our invitations, although I dare say a few smiled on the quiet and said that Lambton was ‘getting too big for his boots.”

  And all this, of course, meant extra work and responsibility for Mother, although Father had insisted upon engaging a proper cook and “doing things in style.” He had style on his brain, for it was about this time that he started dropping in at sales and picking up anything which took his fancy and would look well (to his ideas) in the hall or dining room. Once it was a three-tiered epergne in gold plate, that made the table silver look so shabby that he had, of course, to go off and buy a two-hundred-piece canteen that had been in Westrupp’s shop as long as any of us could remember; and once, believe it or not, it was a great stuffed bear, standing on his hind legs and holding out a brass tray for visiting cards. As if any of our friends left visiting cards. However, there was a party for the epergne and another for the bear, and of course we girls had the time of our lives. In one respect only it was like the old days: when a mare is in premature delivery she does not stop to inquire if the vet is having a dinner party. So off Father would go, and Laura and I would carry on with “In the Gloaming” and “Clementine” and the rest of our little repertory! It seems very quaint and simple now, but we thought we were living in a whirl of gaiety. Mother used sometimes to say that unless Father took care people would start saying that Lambton didn’t take his work seriously; but I don’t think she was right, for no matter what fun was on-hunt ball, farmers’ dinner, or a party at home — he never neglected a call, and Bert, the head kennel lad, who was on duty when Father was out, had strict orders to saddle the mare and bring him every message, however trivial; and I have known him leave a gathering half a dozen times in an evening just to keep an eye on some patient whose condition did not satisfy him.

  Of course this mixture of work and play, and the hours he kept — for even when he did not go to bed until three or four he was in the office by seven, getting the reports, inspecting quarters, and planning out work for the day — in time took toll of his constitution, and for some time now he had been a very heavy drinker. It was Father’s misfortune that he had a he
ad like a rock; nobody ever saw him the worse for drink, and I have since been told that on the top of a drinking bout that would have laid anyone else under the table he would pick up one of his instruments and perform a piece of surgery as skillfully and delicately as if he had never tasted anything stronger than a glass of beer in his life. But for three or four years he must have been burning himself out; his skin had lost that clear, healthy glow, sometimes he was the color of an overripe plum, and he had put on weight round the middle that, in a man of his age and habit, ‘means liver. We heard afterward that Dr. Lever had given him many warnings, but you don’t catch a man intent on enjoying life to the top of his bent, like Father, accepting warnings.

  It was Laura’s death that finished Father — and, in a way, finished us all.

  When he said he was going to buy her a new horse, even I protested. Heedless as we were, I think we had both begun to suspect, that things were getting — well, not desperate, because nothing was ever desperate with Father; but perhaps Mother’s troubled look and her oft-repeated warning that we would soon have to “draw in” frightened us a little. And, nice and polite as the tradespeople were, Laura and I, who now did most of the shopping, could not help being aware of a coolness. One morning Mr. Harding, the butcher, followed us out to the trap to say, “Excuse me, Miss Bell — but you didn’t happen to forget that envelope for your mamma the other day, did you?”