‘Take me round the garden.’
They went down and out on to the terrace.
‘Oh!’ said Dinny, with dismay, ‘Glover has gone and beaten the leaves off the little mulberry. They were so lovely, shivering on the tree and coming off in a ring on the grass. Really gardeners have no sense of beauty.’
‘They don’t like sweepin’. Where’s the cedar I planted when I was five?’
They came on it round the corner of an old wall, a spreading youngster of nearly sixty, with flattening boughs gilded by the level sunlight.
‘I should like to be buried under it, Dinny. Only I suppose they won’t. There’ll be something stuffy.’
‘I mean to be burnt and scattered. Look at them ploughing in that field. I do love horses moving slowly against a skyline of trees.’
‘ “The lowin’ kine,” ’ said Lady Mont irrelevantly.
A faint clink came from a sheepfold to the East.
‘Listen, Auntie!’
Lady Mont thrust her arm within her niece’s.
‘I’ve often thought,’ she said, ‘that I should like to be a goat.’
‘Not in England, tied to a stake and grazing in a mangy little circle.’
‘No, with a bell on a mountain. A he-goat, I think, so as not to be milked.’
‘Come and see our new cutting bed, Auntie. There’s nothing now, of course, but dahlias, godetias, chrysanthemums, Michaelmas daisies, and a few pentstemons and cosmias.’
‘Dinny,’ said Lady Mont, from among the dahlias, ‘about Clare? They say divorce is very easy now.’
‘Until you try for it, I expect.’
‘There’s desertion and that.’
‘But you have to be deserted.’
‘Well, you said he made her.’
‘It’s not the same thing, dear.’
‘Lawyers are so fussy about the law. There was that magistrate with the long nose in Hubert’s extradition.’
‘Oh! but he turned out quite human.’
‘How was that?’
‘Telling the Home Secretary that Hubert was speaking the truth.’
‘A dreadful business,’ murmured Lady Mont, ‘but nice to remember.’
‘It had a happy ending,’ said Dinny quickly.
Lady Mont stood, ruefully regarding her.
And Dinny, staring at the flowers, said suddenly: ‘Aunt Em, somehow there must be a happy ending for Clare.’
Chapter Four
THE custom known as canvassing, more peculiar even than its name, was in full blast round Condaford. Every villager had been invited to observe how appropriate it would be if they voted for Dornford, and how equally appropriate it would be if they voted for Stringer. They had been exhorted publicly and vociferously, by ladies in cars, by ladies out of cars, and in the privacy of their homes by voices speaking out of trumpets. By newspaper and by leaflet they had been urged to perceive that they alone could save the country. They had been asked to vote early, and only just not asked to vote often. To their attention had been brought the startling dilemma that whichever way they voted the country would be saved. They had been exhorted by people who knew everything, it seemed, except how it would be saved. Neither the candidates nor their ladies, neither the mysterious disembodied voices, nor the still more incorporeal print, had made the faintest attempt to tell them that. It was better not; for, in the first place, no one knew. And, in the second place, why mention the particular when the general would serve? Why draw attention, even, to the fact that the general is made up of the particular; or to the political certainty that promise is never performance? Better, far better, to make large loose assertion, abuse the other side, and call the electors the sanest and soundest body of people in the world.
Dinny was not canvassing. She was ‘no good at it,’ she said; and, perhaps, secretly she perceived the peculiarity of the custom. Clare, if she noticed any irony about the business, was too anxious to be doing something to abstain. She was greatly helped by the way everybody took it. They had always been ‘canvassed,’ and they always would be. It was a harmless enough diversion to their ears, rather like the buzzing of gnats that did not bite. As to their votes, they would record them for quite other reasons – because their fathers had voted this or that before them, because of something connected with their occupation, because of their landlords, their churches, or their trades union s; because they wanted a change, while not expecting anything much from it; and not a few because of their common sense.
Clare, dreading questions, pattered as little as possible and came quickly to their babies or their health. She generally ended by asking what time they would like to be fetched. Noting the hour in a little book, she would come out not much the wiser. Being a Charwell – that is to say, no ‘foreigner’ – she was taken as a matter of course; and though not, like Dinny, personally known to them all, she was part of an institution, Condaford without Charwells being still almost inconceivable.