The Gazebo

THREE

MRS GRAHAM WAS able to enjoy her tea-party and the bridge which followed it. The Sungleam had done all and more than she had hoped, and really she had to admit that Thea had a talent for doing hair. The soft gold waves in front and the curls at the back were quite delightful. Now if she were to take as much trouble over her own! It had been a very pretty golden brown when she first grew up, and a natural wave is such a useful thing to have. It was a pity that she had got into such a dull uninteresting way of dressing – quite ageing. She really must be roused into taking more interest. Looking as she did now, no one would take her for under thirty. Ridiculous to suppose that she could have a daughter over thirty!

Mrs Graham’s bridge circle did not rule out conversation. Mr Harrison was a quietly depressed little man who was apt to revoke. Mr Snead was dry and grey. Mrs Harrison combined showy good looks with a vivacious manner. She regarded bridge as a convenient means of getting three people round a table who would be more or less obliged to listen to her. Althea wondered how any of them could bear it, but.her cakes had been appreciated and they appeared to be enjoying themselves. She was on the point of taking out the tea-tray, when Mrs Harrison said,

‘Nicholas Carey? Yes, I told you. Here, Thea – wasn’t he a friend of yours way back in the dark ages before we came to Grove Hill? Benighted place it must have been! But I’m sure somebody told me he used to be a pal of yours. Heartless the way they go off and leave us, isn’t it? However, lots of good fish in the sea is what I say. I was telling your mother she ought to take you off on a cruise.’

Althea pushed open the door and went out with her tray, but when she came back for the cake-stand they were still talking about Nicholas. She heard her mother say,

‘I always thought he was wild.’

Mrs Harrison laughed.

‘Most young men are. Or else just dull. Of course I only met him once, quite a long time ago, but his aunt Emmy Lester is a sort of cousin of Jack’s. I used to say he ought to have married her – didn’t I, Jack?’

Mr Harrison said, ‘Yes.’ No one could have told that he was filled with a burning resentment.

‘They’d have suited each other to a T,’ said Mrs Harrison brightly. ‘A pity about me, but I couldn’t very well die to oblige them – now could I? And after all, Jack and I are very well as we are. We took the house over from Emmy, you know. She had a lot of Nicholas’s things there up in the attic, and she asked if she could leave them, so I expect he will be coming down to sort them out. You’ll have to come up and meet him, Thea.’

Every time Mrs Harrison came to the house Althea was convinced all over again that she was the most blatant woman she had ever met. She removed the cakestand and took as long as she could over washing-up.

In the drawing-room Mr Harrison had misdealt and the cards had to be shuffled again. Mrs Graham dropped her voice and said in a sweetly confidential tone that Nicholas had behaved very badly and she didn’t think Thea would care to meet him again.

‘Just a boy and girl affair, you know – nothing in it all. But I don’t think she would care to be reminded of it, Ella. She was quite ridiculously young.’

Mrs Harrison said tolerantly that she had broken her heart at least six times before she was fifteen, and they picked up their cards and began to play.

It was the following morning that Mr Martin had a telephone call from Mrs Graham. He recognized her high fluting voice as soon as he picked up the receiver.

‘Oh, Mr. Martin, is that you? I am so glad, because I really did want to speak to you… Yes, about the house. I believe you spoke to my daughter about it yesterday, and I am afraid she may have misled you. Not intentionally of course, but it is really so easy to give a false impression without meaning to. And when she told me about her conversation with you I was afraid that was just what she had done. Of course the house is a very nice one and we should want a very good price for it.’

Mr Martin diagnosed a difference of opinion in the family circle. He said in a soothing voice,

‘Oh, yes, Mrs Graham, I quite understand. I believe Mr Blount would be prepared to make a very reasonable offer. He seems to have taken a fancy to the house, and so has his wife.’

Her voice sharpened a little.

‘I didn’t understand that anyone had actually made a proposal.’

Mr Martin continued to soothe.

‘Well, it hardly amounted to that. Mr Blount said they had walked down Belview Road, and that he and his wife were particularly taken with The Lodge. They liked its being a corner house and they were greatly taken with what they could see of the garden. There was no actual offer made, but I formed the impression that they would be willing to pay a good price.’

‘And what would you call a good price, Mr Martin?’

‘Well, No. 12 fetched five thousand and five hundred, but that was some years ago, and there has been a considerable drop in prices since then.’

Mrs Graham gave a high, sweet laugh.

‘Oh, but, Mr Martin No. 12! It doesn’t compare in any way!’

‘Ah, yes, but the Forster estate hadn’t been opened up then. Those modern labour-saving houses have made a lot of difference to what the older ones will fetch.’

‘Everyone says they are jerry-built.’

‘Now, now, Mrs Graham, that is really quite a mistake, if you will allow me to say so. There has been very good work put into them, I can assure you.’

Mrs Graham was not in the least interested in the Forster estate, which had been thrown on the market by an impoverished peer. She said quite tartly,

‘How much would Mr Blount pay? If he doesn’t make an offer, how am I to know whether it would pay us to accept it or not? We might go away on a cruise, but we should have to get something to live in when we came back. My daughter doesn’t think I am business like, but I have thought about that! And I think that a cruise would be very good for us both. A little change, you know – fresh people – not just seeing the same dull faces every day. I’m sure I get quite tired of seeing them go by!’

Mr Martin being one of the people who passed by her windows every day, he could hardly escape the implication. It occurred to him, and not for the first time, that Althea Graham must have a trying time of it, and that it would be good for her to get away for a change, though what she really needed was to get away from her mother.

Mrs Graham’s voice was fluting again.

‘So perhaps you will just find out what he is prepared to offer.’ A click at her end of the line informed him that she had rung off.

Althea was out when this conversation took place, but she was at home at two o’clock when Mr and Mrs Blount arrived with an order to view the house. She was not pleased, and perhaps her manner showed it.

‘I am sorry,’ she said, ‘but I told Mr Martin yesterday that we are not thinking of selling.’

Mr Blount was a heavily built, ruddy man with a well-to-do kind of air about him. He put a hand under the elbow of his flabby, drooping wife and guided her past Althea into the hall. Without absolute rudeness it would not have been possible to keep them out. Mr Blount’s voice was resonant and good-humoured. He said,

‘Well, well – what a pity. I certainly understood from the house-agent… You are Mrs Graham?’

‘I am Miss Graham.’

He beamed.

‘Ah, then there is some little misunderstanding. Mr Martin said it was Mrs Graham he had been talking to. Perhaps we might see her…’

‘My mother is resting.’

‘Now isn’t that a pity! We certainly understood that she might be disposed to consider a favourable offer. Perhaps as we are here we might just have a look round. The fact is my wife has taken a wonderful fancy to the neighbourhood. Up and down and all over the place we’ve been, looking for somewhere to settle down now I’m retiring, and there’s been something wrong with all of them. Either the water or the soil, or too high or too low down – there’s always been something that didn’t suit. And what all the doctors say is, “Let her do as she wants, Mr Blount. Don’t push her, or you’ll be sorry for it.” Very interested in her case the doctors are. And what they say wrapped up in the doctor’s language, which I’m no good at and I don’t suppose you are either – well, it amounts to this, if there’s anything she wants, get it for her, and if she wants it badly get it for her quick. Now this house, we’ve been walking past and looking at it and she’s taken the biggest kind of fancy for it – haven’t you, Milly?’

Mrs Blount had sunk down upon one of the hall chairs. She had a limp discouraged look, from her stringy sandy hair to her toed-in feet. She drooped on the upright chair and looked past Althea with pale watery eyes. She didn’t seem capable of having a violent enthusiasm about anything. She opened the lips which hardly showed in the general pallor of her face and said,

‘Oh, yes.’

Althea found herself saying in the voice she would have used to a child, ‘I’m sorry, but we really don’t intend to sell,’ and with that the drawing-room door opened and Mrs Graham stood there. There could have been no greater contrast to the sagging Mrs Blount. Mrs. Graham wore her invalidism in a very finished and elegant manner, from her beautifully arranged hair to the grey suède shoes which matched her dress. It is true that she wore a shawl, but it was a cloudy affair of pink and blue and lavender which threw up the delicate tints of her face and complimented the blue of her eyes.

‘Darling, I heard voices. Oh…’ she broke off.

Mr Blount advanced with his hand out.

‘Mrs Graham, permit me – I am Mr Blount, and this is Mrs Blount. We have an order to view, but there seems to be a misunderstanding. Miss Graham…’

Mrs Graham smiled graciously.

‘Oh, yes. I had a little chat with Mr Martin this morning, Thea darling. I ought to have told you, but it slipped my memory. I didn’t think he would be able to arrange anything so soon. Perhaps you will take them over the house.’ She turned a deprecating look upon Mr Blount. ‘I am not allowed to do the stairs more than once a day.’

Impossible to have a scene in front of two strangers. Althea took them over the house, Mr Blount talking all the time and Mrs Blount repeating in every room the same two words – ‘Very nice.’ When she had said it in four bedrooms, a bathroom, the dining-room, the drawing-room, and the kitchen, they went into the garden, where two bright borders and a strip of grass led up to a shrubbery and a summerhouse. The slope was really quite a steep one, so much so that Mrs Graham considered it beyond her. Althea’s conscience took her to task for the feeling of gratitude which this induced and she had no defence against it. The place was a refuge, and the house afforded her none. There was no room in it where she could turn a deaf ear to the sound of her mother’s high, sweet voice calling her, or to the tinkle of her summoning bell.

Mr Blount looked at everything. He obviously didn’t know a delphinium from a phlox, or a carnation from a marigold, but he admired them all. He admired the old summerhouse, which was really, as Mr Martin could have told him, what used to be called a gazebo and was a good deal older than the house. In the days when Grove Hill was really a hill with wooded slopes it had been contrived to afford an agreeable view of fields going down to the river. Since it held some of Althea’s most deeply hidden memories, she was glad to find that Mr Blount was not interested in it, passing it over with the remark that summerhouses were draughty, and that Mrs Blount had to be very careful about draughts.

When they were gone she went back up the garden and sat down in the gazebo.