The Forsyte Saga, Volume 3(73)
‘It is, Betty.’
‘I’m told she’s a fine young lady. And where’ll they be goin’ to live?’
‘Nobody knows yet; we have to wait for this case to be over. Perhaps down here, or perhaps he’ll get a post abroad. They’ll be very poor, of course.’
‘Dreadful; it never was like that in old days. The way they put upon the gentry now – oh, dear! I remember your great-grandfather, Miss Dinny, drivin’ four-in-hand when I was a little bit of a thing. Such a nice old gentleman – curtly, as you might say.’
Such references to the gentry never ceased to make Dinny feel uneasy, only too well aware that this old lady had been one of eight children brought up by a farm worker whose wages had been eleven shillings a week, and that she and her husband now existed on their Old Age pensions, after bringing up a family of seven.
‘Well, Betty dear, what can you digest, so that I can tell cook?’
‘Thank you kindly, Miss Dinny; a nice bit of lean pork do seem to lie quiet sometimes.’ Again her eyes grew dark and troubled. ‘I ’ave such dreadful pain; really sometimes I feel I’d be glad to go ’ome.’
‘Oh! no, Betty dear. With a little proper feeding I know you’re going to feel better.’
The old lady smiled below her eyes.
‘I’m wonderful for my age, so it’d never do to complain. And when are the bells goin’ to ring for you, Miss Dinny?’
‘Don’t mention them, Betty. They won’t ring of their own accord – that’s certain.’
‘Ah! People don’t marry young, and ’ave the families they did in my young days. My old Aunt ’ad eighteen an’ reared eleven.’
‘There doesn’t seem room or work for them now, does there?’
‘Aye! The country’s changed.’
‘Less down here than in most places, thank goodness.’ And Dinny’s eyes wandered over the room where these two old people had spent some fifty years of life; from brick floor to raftered ceiling it was scrupulously clean and had a look of homely habit.
‘Well, Betty, I must go. I’m staying in London just now with a friend, and have to get back there this evening. I’ll tell cook to send some little things that’ll be better for you than pork even. Don’t get up!’
But the little old woman was on her feet, her eyes looking out from her very soul.
‘I am that glad to ’ave seen you, Miss Dinny. God bless you! And I do ’ope the Captain won’t ’ave any trouble with those dreadful people.’
‘Good-bye, Betty dear, and remember me to Benjamin,’ and pressing the old lady’s hand Dinny went out to where the dogs were waiting for her on the flagged pathway. As always after such visits she felt humble and inclined to cry. Roots! That was what she missed in London, what she would miss in the ‘great open spaces’. She walked to the bottom of a narrow straggling beechwood, and entered it through a tattered gate that she did not even have to open. She mounted over the damp beech mast which smelled sweetly as of husks; to the left a grey-blue sky was rifted by the turning beeches, and to her right stretched fallow ground where a squatting hare turned and raced for the hedgerow; a pheasant rose squawking before one of the dogs and rocketed over the wood. She emerged from the trees at the top, and stood looking down at the house, long and stone-coloured, broken by magnolias and the trees on the lawn; smoke was rising from two chimneys, and the fantails speckled with white one gable. She breathed deeply, and for full ten minutes stood there, like a watered plant drawing up the food of its vitality. The scent was of leaves and turned earth and of rain not far away; the last time she had stood there had been at the end of May, and she had inhaled that scent of summer which is at once a memory and a promise, an aching and a draught of delight….
After an early tea she started back, in the now closed car, sitting beside Fleur.
‘I must say,’ said that shrewd young woman, ‘Condaford is the most peaceful place I was ever in. I should die of it, Dinny. The rurality of Lippinghall is nothing thereto.’
‘Old and mouldering, um?’
‘Well, I always tell Michael that your side of his family is one of the least expressed and most interesting phenomena left in England. You’re wholly unvocal, utterly out of the limelight. Too unsensational for the novelists, and yet you’re there, and go on being there, and I don’t quite know how. Every mortal thing’s against you, from Death Duties down to gramophones. But you persist generally at the ends of the earth, doing things that nobody knows or cares anything about. Most of your sort haven’t even got Condafords now to come home and die in; and yet you still have roots, and a sense of duty. I’ve got neither, you know, I suppose that comes of being half French. My father’s family – the Forsytes – may have roots, but they haven’t a sense of duty – not in the same way; or perhaps it’s a sense of service that I mean. I admire it, you know, Dinny, but it bores me stiff. It’s making you go and blight your young life over this Ferse business. Duty’s a disease, Dinny; an admirable disease.’