Late Call Read online

  ANGUS WILSON’S BOOKS

  The Wrong Set

  Such Darling Dodos

  Hemlock and After

  Emile Zola: An Introductory

  Study of His Novels

  The Mulberry Bush: A Play

  Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

  A Bit Off the Map

  The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot

  The Old Men at the Zoo

  Late Call

  Angus Wilson

  NEW YORK • THE VIKING PRESS

  Copyright © 1964 by Angus Wilson

  All rights reserved

  Published in 1965 by The Viking Press, Inc.

  625 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022

  Library of Congress catalog card number: 65-11631

  Printed in U.S.A. by Halliday Lithograph Corp.

  For Jean and Martin Corke

  CONTENTS

  Prologue The Hot Summer of 1911 7

  1 Leavetaking 34

  2 Trees Without Leaves 63

  3 Settling In 109

  4 New Year New Town New Life 135

  5 New Leaves 169

  6 Wanderings Abroad 201

  7 A Wonderful Summer 234

  8 Harvest 289

  Late Call

  PROLOGUE

  The Hot Summer of 1911

  EVERYWHERE the clayey soil was baked as hard as rock, even in the farmyard and the pigsties where normally the least shower of rain kept the usual thick seas of mud churning. Great cracks had appeared in the flower bed that faced the front door of the farmhouse—an oval filled with bedded-out pansies and small pink begonias. Even the short stretch of gravelled drive that led to the cart track that in turn led to the roadway was fissured as though the many creatures beneath the earth’s surface had at once decided to break their way through to the air above them. The dust pervaded everything: it was scratched up by the speckled and buff hens and raised into clouds as the sows rolled on their backs; it was puffed into brown, gritty smoke plumes as the disconsolate white ducks twisted their beaks in the almost dried-up pool, grubbing for deeply hidden worms; it filled the whole air as Derek Longmore sailed round and round the flower bed, doing bumpy wonders on his new bicycle.

  Mrs. Longmore, who, on their farm holiday, liked to dress peculiarly sensibly and simply, had nevertheless put on a white net veil to protect her face from the dusty air. In a large white straw cartwheel hat and a white linen dress with only a cluster of large pink roses as ornament (this very summer had at last come that end of the hour-glass waist, an end of the dangerous whalebone tyranny over Woman, that her good sense had so long wished for), she carried a green-lined unbleached linen parasol with a green bone handle curved like a parrot’s head. Skirts were more sensible this year, too, at last, just above the ankles, so that they fell—thank Heaven—short of the dusty ground; yet her equally sensible white shoes, with square toes and a square bone buckle, toppled and cockscrewed in the most precarious fashion, despite their low heels, over the high, hard dried ridges left by the farm carts’ wheels. It was like miniature mountain climbers, she thought imaginatively, and most disagreeable. She hoped that she looked cooler than she felt, for she was a great believer in the influence of Mind. If others thought her looking cool, then she would soon feel cooler.

  But what others were there to think? Derek was absorbed in his new bicycle as, boy-like, he should be. Mr. Tuffield, who thought no further than his cows and his wheat (or, at any rate, any other thoughts he might have were best not pondered upon), was away with the farm hand among the wheat, whose unseasonable dryness so agitated him. As to Mrs. Tuffield, she thought only of doing the house and making tarts—which was a comfort as far as boarding at the farm was concerned (although another gooseberry tart in this hot weather and one might scream), but she provided no interested observer. Indeed Mrs. Tuffield’s eyes were at this very moment directed upon and through one, as she leaned out from an upstairs window, competing ineffectually with nature by launching small clouds of dust from mats that she beat against the outer windowsill. Pleased that her thoughts should be ordered with a certain elegance, even on holiday, even in this heat and dust (the thermometer had touched 100 last week), Mrs. Longmore yet felt the need of an audience. Her own little Myra at seven years was rather young (or was it inattentive? For really a girl cannot have a dress sense, in proportion of course, too early). As to the Tuffield children, that brood of straying, whining indis-tinguishables that one met on the stairs like the farm’s many cats and kittens, or at some unexpected corner of the farmyard or the orchard like the innumerable hens or ducks which scattered before one’s coming with the most startling suddenness, if they had some comment to make it would be as incomprehensible as the clucking or quacking of poultry, so broad was their dialect. But they certainly had none, indeed very little speech at all, so cowed were they.

  Mrs. Longmore very much hoped they were not ruled by fear (her own childhood had been a nightmare for that very reason). But nice though it was to think of country children as rosy cheeked, and skipping and hopping in innocent play, the truth was that the Tuffield brood were pink cheeked, yes, but sad and listless, and neglected. Their mother was too occupied with the house and the chapel, their father too occupied with the farm and Heaven knew what, for his eyes had sometimes a quite horrid look. Ignorant and old-fashioned, in fact; Mrs. Longmore could hardly bear to think what horrors of Bible reading and canes those children might be ruled by. She only hoped that it was all right for Myra to play with them all day—but such were the penalties of farm holidays, penalties outbalanced by plenty of fresh air and fresh eggs and pints of healthy milk straight, almost steaming, from the cow. And then there was the eldest little Tuffield girl. In her hands Myra would be all right; old head on young shoulders, poor little thing, everything was left to her. She had to be mother to the whole brood—not more than twelve years old and responsible for heaven knew how many little indistinguishables. She made a very good job of it. And she was surprisingly bright and intelligent; she had a sense of beauty, of wonder, yes, that was it, of wonder; how excited she was when one put on a new shawl or a new hat, or one evening, absurdly, just to feel nice, a crimson watered-silk Liberty tea gown with a little broderie anglaise coat. Yes, she was a child who noticed. She seemed so pleased to be made a fuss of. She clearly lacked love, as Mrs. Longmore could tell, when, once or twice, she had kissed or hugged her and called her, “a funny little dumpling.” Mrs. Longmore set out to find her.

  But seek where she would—and in this intense heat she wouldn’t very widely—the little Tuffield girl was nowhere to be found. Nor indeed was her own Myra. There were little Tuffield indistinguishables all over the place, chewing twigs from the plum trees or sucking stones that had fallen from the dilapidated old flint barn, pressed on the ground on their stomachs, grubby knickers upwards, teasing kittens, or bent over the dried-up water butts pushing snails with stalks of grass backwards into terrible headlong falls. One child had tears running from her eyes down her cheeks, and another mucus running from his nostrils down on to his lips. From none could Mrs. Longmore learn the whereabouts of their eldest sister or of her own little girl. Some were too young to use words and those who were old enough spoke words that she could not understand. Exhausted and a little out of temper, she almost called her son Derek to her aid, but boys of thirteen must be left to themselves in the holidays; instead she went into the little parlour that was their rented sitting room, took Maeterlinck’s Life of the Bee from the dresser where it was propped against the cruet, and finally settled herself in a rocking chair, specially put out for her by Mr. Tuffield under an old apple tree in the orchard. There she read a few pages of that stimulating book and then fell asleep.

  It had taken a lot of persuading on the part of Myra Longmore to get the
little Tuffield girl to leave her charges, her brothers and sisters, and to wander away, not only out of the farmyard and the orchard, but right out of the farm into one of Knapp’s meadows—somewhere, indeed, where she had never been, for it lay on quite the other side of the farm to either the village or the church, and neither Mother nor Father were friendly with the Knapps. But Myra was used to getting her own way; with either Mummy or Derek it was only a question of asking for long enough; and so it had proved with the little Tuffield girl. She had gone on repeating, “Let’s go away from the others. Let’s play on our own”; and in the end, the little Tuffield girl had given way. For all that Mummy called her little, she seemed really more like a grown-up person, like a nanny only small.

  If Myra had but known, it was not only her persistence that had overcome the little Tuffield girl’s sense of duty, her long training in obedience and her fear of the consequences of doing wrong. It was much more something to do with all the Long-mores, and especially with Mrs. Longmore and the effect she had. They had only been staying at the farm ten days, but from the very first the little girl had felt her influence. Mrs. Longmore had somehow singled her out, and, in doing so, had given faint yet definite outlines to her personality for the first time in her ten and a half years. The very fact that the grand and beautiful lady could not tell Bertie from Ted, or Rosie from Violet, made her singling out and talking to the eldest little girl something quite special. It was true that some of the things she said were the usual remarks of visitors, pats on the head that spread a crimson of embarrassment from the little girl’s already rosy cheeks right down her neck—”Quite the little mother”, or “Such an old head on young shoulders”. This was the stuff that Mr. Bentall, the minister, addressed at her, or the governess who came with the Easter lodgers, or Mrs. Clark, the rector’s wife from London, who had come with her family each summer until this year and who, indeed, had this year sent instead Mrs. Longmore herself. But Mrs. Longmore had said a lot more to the girl than these public embarrassments; she had shown books to her and asked her to hook up her dresses at the back; she had given her a cherry silk ribbon for her hair; she had asked her the name of some birds in an apple tree and, when she did not know, they had looked together in a picture book and found that they were warblers; she had told her how to say some words properly like “down” and “pot”, and also not to say “little old”. Above all, she had asked for her to play in the parlour with Derek and Myra at “Happy Families” or building Meccano; and though Mother hadn’t liked it because six o’clock was Violet and Ted’s bedtime and half past six was bedtime for Bertie and Rosie, she’d had to let her go in there at least on the Wednesday and the Saturday, for Mrs. Longmore had said that every good nanny had her evenings off. But it was above all the things Mrs. Longmore said in the parlour as they played at their games—”Don’t bother with it if you don’t like it”, “Take off your shoes and be comfortable”, “Never mind if it is marked. We can always get another table, but you’ll never be ten years old again in a cool room in the hottest summer England’s known for half a century”, and especially, “Of course you must have it, it suits you. It makes you look quite beautiful.” And Mrs. Longmore had said, “Doing something different is the thing. Not all the time, of course, because then it wouldn’t really be different. But every now and again, when people least expect it.”

  It couldn’t be said that Mother and Father would have least expected her to leave the others and go off with Myra right out of the farm on this morning more than any other; they just wouldn’t expect such a thing at all. But perhaps it could be said that leaving the others to play and wander at will, and leaving the washing in a pile on the dairy floor instead of hanging it on the clothes lines, was a double negligence that her Mother in her wildest nightmare would hardly have dreamt of. The little girl had thought of all this; and yet, from the moment she and Myra had slid down the dusty bank of the ditch that divided the farm from Knapp’s meadow and, grasping each in turn an old oak tree root, had hauled themselves up on to the other side, she had ceased to give any thought to her wickedness or its consequences. She began to do all the things that she had wanted to do for years— things for which there was never time because there were so many duties in the day, or things she could never do for herself alone but had always to do to amuse and quieten her brothers and sisters. And she did them straightaway as though they had all been waiting in a line ready to be done for years—things, many of them, that yet seemed to occur to her for the first time.

  In the meadow she didn’t have to pick any buttercups or daisies just to split their stalks with her nails and thread them together as a necklace for Violet; she didn’t have to hold the golden flower-heads under Bertie’s chin to see if he liked butter; she didn’t have to watch for fear that Rosie might eat the minute toadstools that sprouted here and there in the grass; she didn’t have to stop Ted from making mud pies with the huge dried cowpats. She lay flat on her back and stared at the cloudless, harshly blue sky; and, when the sun’s glare became too blinding, she turned over and lay on her stomach, pressing her face close among the daisies so that her eyes could follow almost at its own level a reddish ant that seemed to her as it hurried through the grass to trot like the pony in Doctor Osborne’s children’s cart.

  Myra was busy picking daisies.

  “I shall only pick the ones with lots of red on the petals”, she announced. She always spoke like that. When they played games in the parlour, at halma, she said, “I’ll have the yellow men”, and, at “Happy Families”, “I shan’t collect the Bungs or the Bones. You can have them.” Sometimes Derek would complain,

  “Myra’s getting too uppish, Mater. She’ll jolly well have to be squashed”, and then Mrs. Longmore would say, “Glorious Myra! She knows her own mind.”

  Now Myra said, “You can collect all the white daisies. And the buttercups too. Yellow wouldn’t match at all with the reddy coloured daisies I’m collecting,”

  Usually in the parlour, Myra’s tones, backed by Mrs. Long-more’s approval, impressed the little Tuffield girl greatly, but now she felt Myra’s presence only as a bother. But not a serious bother, for Myra, after all, was no part of her duties. She got up from the ground very slowly and then deliberately began to pick not daisies or buttercups but minute pieces of snail shell that lay scattered on the hard earth beneath the tufted grass. She sorted them very carefully into greyish-coloured pieces and brownish-coloured pieces and put each separately into the two pockets of her pinafore. As she did so, she knew that when she searched in her pockets at the end of the day and found them, she would perhaps be surprised, but certainly she would throw them away, scatter them in the farmyard. Yet that didn’t seem to matter; for the moment she was collecting some things that she had never noticed before, that probably nobody would have noticed, some things that were almost part of this meadow where she felt so free. So free that suddenly she began to dance, although she had no very clear idea of dancing, having only read of it and heard Auntie Beatie, who had been in service, describe a ball. She held up the sides of the skirt of her washed-out blue cotton dress so that the black cotton stockings showed to above her knees. Her dance was a sort of glide followed by a hop. Myra paused in her daisy search.

  “Oh, that’s not how to do it!” she cried, “Look. First position, heel to toe”. And she demonstrated her dancing class exercises. “And you must smile when you’re dancing”, she added, showing her even little white teeth. (Mrs. Longmore believed that teeth and bowels and fresh air and self-expression were the four primary considerations with children.) The little Tuffield girl’s square-jawed, rather heavy-cheeked face remained set and solemn. She stopped her dance as soon as Myra spoke; she walked on across the meadow towards the ditch and the beech hedge that separated them from another meadow where she could see that cows had collected around what the summer’s constant sun had left of a stagnant pool.

  Ordinarily she hated the sight of cows, those lumbering, barrel-shaped, ill-smelling ca
uses, with their erratic milk yield, of some of her father’s worst rages, the objects of some of her own most frost-nipped, numbed early morning winter chores. With their dismal liquid eyes and henna-coloured dung-caked flanks, the cows before her now exactly recalled her Father’s, as they flipped their great heads to ward off the tormenting flies. But they were not Father’s cows, they were part of a whole new adventure; and at once she wanted to explore the plashy meadow and even beyond. She could hear Myra behind her, out of breath, out of patience now with her unwanted dance, cry.

  “Stop! Stop! Oh, why don’t you watch me? Don’t you want to learn?”

  The little girl knew that she was learning without Myra’s help. Once more she scrambled across another dusty ditch and through the tight beech hedge without a scratch or tear. Although neat, she was a stocky little girl and not usually lissome or agile, but her mood seemed to lighten her small, heavy body. Arrived in the meadow, she sat down in a flat, clay-chalked hollow that had until this summer, perhaps, been a never empty puddle. The grass around was coarse and there were clumps of spiky miniature bullrushes, but to the small girl, as she lay on her back, the harsher feel seemed no less delightful than the softer buttercup meadow—just a new and delightful delight.

  But the exploration was proving no delight for poor Myra. Getting no answer to her cries, she had ceased her little dainty pirouettes and followed carefully her companion’s path. Too carefully, for the slope where the little Tuffield girl had slid across the ditch was now cleared of dust to expose a slippery tree root. Myra fell heavily on her bottom, tearing a long strip of the lace hem away from the skirt of her dress and laddering one of her white cotton stockings. She was near to tears when she reached her friend. For a moment the little Tuffield girl was recalled from her new happiness; but then she thought of what Mrs. Longmore would have said. The day was more important than a skirt.