The Matchmaker (7 page)

“‘Working’ isn’t quite the word. They eat all they can get and do as little as they dare.”

Alda nodded sympathetically. At Pagets she had heard that many of the prisoners were hard-working and expert in hedging, ditching and other country crafts, but she was far too expert
herself
at getting on well with men to intrude a controversial statement into a pleasant conversation.

In a moment Mr. Hoadley added grudgingly:

“As a matter of fact, Fabrio (that’s the red-headed one) is a first-rate carpenter but he’s bone lazy. They aren’t much use to me; I’ve often thought about applying for a Land Girl.”

Alda made some suitable reply, and then inquired if she also had to thank him for the books left upon the doorstep?

“No, that wasn’t me. I’ve no time for reading; never have cared for it much, either. That would be Mr. Waite, I expect. He lives round the back of you. He’s got some books.”

“Has he a farm, too?”

“A sort of a farm. It’s a chicken farm.”

“Oh yes; we can see the little houses from our back windows.”

“Yes. Two hundred fowls he’s got up there. Nasty, dirty, heartbreaking work it is, too,” ended Mr. Hoadley feelingly, and Alda now recalled seeing a distant form; a sexless, sack-draped, booted shape, moving slowly among the fowl houses and wire enclosures early that morning. Naturally, she had not connected it with
In Touch with the Transcendent
.

“This gate needs a drop of oil; I’ll see to that for you,” said Mr. Hoadley, marching up to the front door and setting down the cans in the porch, and Alda followed, thinking that life at Pine Cottage must certainly be pleasanter for the fact that this giant, whose burred Sussex “r”s were comforting as the scent of hay, was their neighbour.

The dog Ruffler, who had followed him, now came up to her and leant his fore-paws upon her skirt, gazing up into her face.

“You’re a very handsome, fascinating boy,” she said to him softly, caressing his ears, while Meg, who had been set down in the porch beside the milk, now transferred her gaze from the farmer to the dog. “Will he behave himself among all those chickens, Mr. Hoadley?”

“He’d better,” said Mr. Hoadley, giving Ruffler a severe
look
. “That’s why I take him up there with me, to teach him. [’m ‘walking’ him, you see, for Mr. Mead down at Rush House; he’s come up to stay with me for a bit and learn how to follow and fetch and do what he’s told. Training him, it is.”

He said “Good morning,” smiled at Meg (who gratified Alda by smiling broadly in return), touched his hat and went off into the rain followed by the dog. Alda went into the house to read her letters.

Ronald’s contained more about politics and economics than she really liked; having pursued the Liberal Cause through Greece, North Africa and Italy, on all types of Service stationery stamped with prohibitions in many different languages, Alda was still blithely indifferent to the Liberals (and the Conservatives and the Socialists and the Communists too) unless one of them happened to be ill or hard up under her nose. Then she helped generously, ignoring the sufferer’s political views. Her husband, never ceasing to marvel at her lack of interest in theoretical politics, found her practical charities endearing.

However, there were loving sentences at the end of both letters, and some jokes about German cats for the children, and he was in a house which had a roof, and the work was “tremendously interesting,” so his letters were, from all points of view, satisfactory.

The next one was not satisfactory from any point of view except that of the writer.

It was from the successful and efficient being known to Jenny and Louise as Father’s-Only-Sister-Marion. She was thus distinguished from Mother’s Sisters (who were five in number and naturally known as Auntie Marjorie, Auntie Peggy, Auntie Gwen, Auntie Brenda and Auntie Betty), and was called Marion at her own request. There was some reason, which Alda had never precisely fathomed, why she preferred her own sons and Alda’s daughters to use her Christian name; it prevented complexes being set up or gave a sense of comradeship or something. Her letters were known among Alda’s unmarried sisters as
Getting
on the Blower or Beefing Again; the married ones with young families viewed her activities more indulgently, for they did not extend to themselves.

She was busily getting through her second husband; from her first she had parted by amiable mutual consent, and he had left her the custody of two clever little boys. By the second one she had had two more clever little boys and all four (the youngest was six) were doing outstandingly well at school.

Her chief interest in life was politics, and she had ambitions to play an active part in the political life of Ironborough, but she would also have liked a daughter to mould and influence.

The spectacle of Alda’s three girls—unconventionally dressed, scholastically backward, and wholly charming—moved her several times a year to sit down and dash off a letter full of suggestions to Ronald or Alda.

This time, she suggested (after listing the latest triumphs gained by her sons) that Jenny and Louise should be sent to a first-class boarding school with help from herself towards the fees, while Meg was farmed out at a progressive nursery school run by a friend of her own.

Alda could get a job to help provide the money for these schemes.

Alda folded up the letter with some irritation. She never attempted to argue with Marion, either verbally or on paper, and took refuge from her attacks in laughter, but it certainly was kind of her to offer to help with fees, and it gave her more right to be listened to.

For some time Alda herself had known that Ronald was becoming increasingly uneasy about the lack of regular schooling for Jenny and Louise, but circumstances and sheer lack of money had conspired to prevent the laying and carrying out of desirable plans. Alda’s main object, strongly felt rather than thought out, had been to keep the three children with her, among a few cherished possessions that should mean to them Home, and this she had succeeded in doing. She told herself that it had
not
been possible, until now, to do more. Attendance at a village school for three months here, or a class for six children in some vicarage schoolroom there, was all the education that Louise and Jenny had received since leaving Ironborough.

She herself was no believer in highly-educated women and she took pleasure in her children’s quaint, original ways. She feared that school might make little pattern-girls of them. Victorian women (her own family boasted a matriarch or so in every generation) had never been highly educated, and no one could accuse them of lacking character and energy!

As for Meg, she was quite progressive enough.

However, this time she had an answer for Marion. She could write that in January Louise and Jenny would begin attending the school attached to the nearby Convent—
where the education is excellent, as it
always
is at convents
.

No doubt Marion, who was a robust T.C.P. (or Twentieth Century Pagan) would deplore the religious atmosphere in which her nieces were to be steeped, but she must just deplore.

Then Alda turned to the last letter, which was written in a backward-sloping hand.

Darling Alda,

I expect you are settled in the new house by now. I am down at
Worthing
for a few days (br-r-r! in this weather!) to see Aunt Alice who has been ill again, and it would be lovely if you could meet me for tea at Horsham on my way home. Do write
at once
and fix an Olde Tea Shoppe or somewhere where we can meet. I have got a doll’s coatee for Jenny and a book for Louise and some sweets for Meggy. Kiss them all for me.
It
’
s all off, I
’
m afraid
. All news when we meet.

Loads of love

from

Jean.

“Who’s that from?” inquired Jenny, looking over her mother’s shoulder.

“Jean.” (The young Lucie-Brownes had so many true aunts
that
the courtesy “auntie” of an earlier generation was never applied to their mother’s friends.)

“What’s ‘all off’?” Jenny went on. “Isn’t she going to marry Mr. Potter?”

“Who said she was going to?” said Alda, putting the letter away.

“You did. I heard you. When we were at Lyle Villas.”

“And before that you said she was going to marry Captain Roberts.” Louise was nibbling the end of a paint-brush and staring at Alda with huge pensive eyes.

“Dear me!” exclaimed her mother sarcastically. “What was
Mr. Parker
called in the bosom of his family?”

“Nosey!” they cried together.

“No-sey!” crowed Meg, and rushed round the room shaking her head and screwing up her eyes and muttering, “Nosey—nosey—nosey—nosey—nosey!”

“No, but you did say she was going to. Truly, Mother.”

“Well, she isn’t now. Clear those things off the table, please, and then you can set the lunch for me.”

“
Why
doesn’t she marry someone, Mother?” asked Louise, obediently beginning to pack up her paint-box.

“She hasn’t found anyone she likes, I expect. Hurry up, now.”

“AND THEN NOT
another word for three weeks! Not even a tinkle to ask if my cold was better! I didn’t know quite what to do——”

“Oh Jean, you didn’t telephone him?”

“Of course not, darling. I remembered your advice and was
firm
with myself. But I did just send him a book by Peter Cheyney.”

“Good heavens! Sent it to him as a
present
?”

“Of course not; only lent it to him. He’d been dying to read it and couldn’t get it anywhere. I just put in a casual, friendly little note with it. And then, believe it or not, another long silence! And still I didn’t ring him up. Wasn’t I good?”

“You did all the right things—or nearly all,” admitted Alda.

“Oh yes, I did all the right things,” said Jean Hardcastle, without irony. “At last, on October the seventeenth, the book came back with a letter. He apologised for not having given me a tinkle before, but his firm had put him on another back-room job (it all came out in the papers the other day, Operation Achilles it was called, I expect you saw it) and he’d been fearfully busy. He said we must meet again soon, and signed himself
Yours ever Oliver Potter
. Now, darling, what do you make of that?”

She paused and hastily ate some cake, keeping her eyes fixed pleadingly upon her friend’s face.

A smart hat sat surprisingly upon her innocent brow but it made no difference: everything recommended by the experts in the women’s magazines to make a woman noticeable and desirable had been done to her, but still it made no difference. The exotic perfume, the careful grooming, the paint, the hair gilded and dressed like that of a page boy in the fifteenth century—all these had been imposed upon a personality ordinary and gentle as a green leaf, and all without leading to that result for which she had longed since she was seventeen: marriage. She was now thirty-two years old, and she had never even been engaged.

“So what do you think I ought to do now?” she went on, not waiting for the answer to her first question but directing upon Alda a look of utter confidence and trust.

“You can’t do a thing,” retorted Alda firmly. “He’s let you see very plainly that he doesn’t mean business and you’ll just have to write it off.”

“Oh, do you really think so, darling? He
was
so sweet in
the
summer. I don’t see how anyone can be so sweet, and then a few months later be quite different.”

You ought to see it by now, if anyone ever did, thought Alda, looking at her with mingled affection and impatience.

“Well, people—men—can,” she said. “But I think he behaved very badly, I must say. (More tea?) Did he kiss

you?”

“(Yes, please.) Once or twice. Well—rather a lot, in fact, darling. But of course,” hastily, “I didn’t think
that
meant anything. I’m not quite a fool.”

“Jean, are you absolutely sure you didn’t let him see you cared about him?”

“Oh, I think so, Alda. Yes, I’m fairly sure about that. I did try hard not to. And anyway——”

She paused, and took a cigarette from a handsome case and lit it from a gold lighter. Alda, who did not smoke, watched her slim hands, unroughened by housework, manipulating the small luxurious objects while four tinkling, surprisingly unfashionable silver bracelets slid about on her wrist. Alda’s own hands were coarsened by housework and cooking in spite of her casual attempts to protect them, but during the war Jean had worked as secretary to her mother, an energetic and vital
charmeuse
who had run a hostel for Allied soldiers. The work had been exacting, but not rough, and Jean’s looks, such as they were, had not suffered.

“‘
And anyway
’ what?”

“ Oh—I don’t know.” Jean blew out smoke and stared down at the table while she played with a knife. She had suddenly realised how many of these sessions she had had with Alda, and the realisation had given her a little shock. They had sometimes joked about her eagerness to confide and Alda’s readiness in advising, but never before to-day had she fully taken in the fact that this same conversation (with Captain Ottley or the Farebrother boy or Michael Powers in place of Mr. Oliver Potter) had been going on for fifteen years. She had been
momentarily
silenced by wondering whether it would go on for another fifteen. That, possibility was enough to silence any woman.