The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [87]
“Oh, good! When?”
“He is bringing a farmer’s daughter to whom he is engaged—and the farmer. They want to come here.”
“I say, that’s rather a bore. Let’s tell them we’re having the boilers cleaned.”
“You don’t seem to realize that this is a serious matter, Gervase.”
“Oh, well, you fix things up. I dare say it would be all right if they came next month. We’ve got to have the Anchorages some time. We might get both over together.”
In the end it was decided that Gervase should meet the immigrants in London, vet them and report to his mother whether or no they were suitable fellow guests for the Anchorages. A week later, on his return to Tomb, his mother greeted him anxiously.
“Well? You never wrote?”
“Wrote, why should I? I never do. I say, I haven’t forgotten a birthday or anything, have I?”
“Don’t be absurd, Gervase. I mean, about your brother Tom’s unfortunate entanglement. Did you see the girl?”
“Oh, that. Yes, I went and had dinner with them. Tom’s done himself quite well. Fair, rather fat, saucer-eyed, good-tempered I should say by her looks.”
“Does she—does she speak with an Australian accent?” “Didn’t notice it.”
“And the father?”
“Pompous old boy.”
“Would he be all right with the Anchorages?”
“I should think he’d go down like a dinner. But they can’t come. They are staying with the Chasms.”
“Indeed! What an extraordinary thing. But, of course, Archie Chasm was Governor-General once. Still, it shows they must be fairly respectable. Where are they staying?”
“Claridges.”
“Then they must be quite rich, too. How very interesting. I will write this evening.”
XI
Three weeks later they arrived. Mr. MacDougal, the father, was a tall, lean man, with pince-nez and an interest in statistics. He was a territorial magnate to whom the Tomb estates appeared a cosy small-holding. He did not emphasize this in any boastful fashion, but in his statistical zeal gave Mrs. Kent-Cumberland some staggering figures. “Is Bessie your only child?” asked Mrs. Kent-Cumberland.
“My only child and heir,” he replied, coming down to brass tacks at once. “I dare say you have been wondering what sort of settlement I shall be able to make on her. Now that, I regret to say, is a question I cannot answer accurately. We have good years, Mrs. Kent-Cumberland, and we have bad years. It all depends.”
“But I dare say that even in bad years the income is quite considerable?”
“In a bad year,” said Mr. MacDougal, “in a very bad year such as the present, the net profits, after all deductions have been made for running expenses, insurance, taxation, and deterioration, amount to something between”—Mrs. Kent-Cumberland listened breathlessly—“fifty and fifty-two thousand pounds. I know that is a very vague statement, but it is impossible to be more accurate until the last returns are in.”
Bessie was bland and creamy. She admired everything. “It’s so antique,” she would remark with relish, whether the object of her attention was the Norman Church of Tomb, the Victorian panelling in the billiard room, or the central-heating system which Gervase had recently installed. Mrs. Kent-Cumberland took a great liking to the girl.
“Thoroughly Teachable,” she pronounced. “But I wonder whether she is really suited to Tom . . . I wonder . . .”
The MacDougals stayed for four days and, when they left, Mrs. Kent-Cumberland pressed them to return for a longer visit. Bessie had been enchanted with everything she saw.
“I wish we could live here,” she had said to Tom on her first evening, “in this dear, quaint old house.”
“Yes, darling, so do I. Of course it all belongs to Gervase, but I always look on it as my home.”
“Just as we Australians look on England.”
“Exactly.”
She had insisted on seeing everything; the old gabled manor, once the home of the family, relegated now to the function of dower house since the present mansion was built in the eighteenth century—the house of mean proportions and inconvenient offices where Mrs. Kent-Cumberland, in her moments of depression, pictured her own, declining years; the mill and the quarries;