"I'm sorry, Mike, that I didn't tell you," said Ellie firmly, "only I thought perhaps I'd better not."
"She came out of the kindness of her heart, she did," said my mother. "She's a good girl you've married, Mike, and a pretty one. Yes, a very pretty one." Then she added half audibly, "I am sorry."
"Sorry," said Ellie, faintly puzzled.
"Sorry for thinking the things I did," said my mother and added with a slight air of strain, "Well, as you say, mothers are like that. Always inclined to be suspicious of daughters-in-law. But when I saw you, I knew he'd been lucky. It seemed too good to be true to me, that it did."
"What impertinence," I said, but I smiled at her as I said it. "I always had excellent taste."
"You've always had expensive taste, that's what you mean," said my mother and looked at the brocade curtains.
"I'm not really the worse for being an expensive taste," said Ellie, smiling at her.
"You make him save a bit of money from time to time," said Mum, "it'll be good for his character."
"I refuse to have my character improved," I said. "The advantage of taking a wife is that the wife thinks everything you do is perfect. Isn't that so, Ellie?"
Ellie was looking happy again now. She laughed and said,
"You're above yourself, Mike! The conceit of you."
Greta came back then with the teapot. We'd been a little ill at ease and we were just getting over it. Somehow when Greta came back the strain came on again. My mother resisted all endeavours on Ellie's part to make her stay over and Ellie didn't insist after a short while. She and I walked down together with my mother along the winding drive through the trees and to the gateway.
"What do you call it?" my mother asked abruptly.
Ellie said, "Gipsy's Acre..."
"Ah," said my mother, "yes, you've got gipsies around here, haven't you?"
"How did you know that?" I asked.
"I saw one as I came up. She looked at me queer, she did."
"She's all right really," I said, "a little half baked, that's all."
"Why do you say she's half baked? She'd a funny look to her when she looked at me. She's got a grievance against you of some kind?"
"I don't think it's real," said Ellie. "I think she's imagined it all. That we've done her out of her land or something like that."
"I expect she wants money," said my mother. "Gipsies are like that. Make a big song and dance sometimes of how they've been done down one way or another. But they soon stop when they get some money in their itching palms."
"You don't like gipsies," said Ellie.
"They're a thieving lot. They don't work steady and they don't keep their hands off what doesn't belong to them."
"Oh well," Ellie said, "we - we don't worry any more now."
My mother said good-bye and then added, "Who's the young lady that lives with you?"
Ellie explained how Greta had been with her for three years before she married and how but for Greta she would have had a miserable life.
"Greta's done everything to help us. She's a wonderful person," said Ellie. "I wouldn't know how to - how to get on without her."
"She's living with you or on a visit?"
"Oh well," said Ellie. She avoided the question. "She - she's living with us at present because I sprained my ankle and had to have someone to look after me. But I'm all right again now."
"Married people do best alone together when they're starting," my mother said.
We stood by the gate watching my mother march away down the hill.
"She's got a very strong personality," said Ellie thoughtfully.
I was angry with Ellie, really very angry because she'd gone and found out my mother and visited her without telling me. But when she turned and stood looking at me with one eyebrow raised a little and the funny half-timid, half-satisfied little girl smile on her face, I couldn't help relent.
"What a deceitful little thing you are," I said.
"Well," said Ellie, "I've had to be sometimes, you know."
"That's like a Shakespeare play I once saw. They did it at a school I was at." I quoted rather self-consciously, "'She has deceiv'd her father and may thee'."
"What did you play - Othello?"
"No," I said, "I played the girl's father. That's why I remember that speech, I suppose. It's practically the only thing I had to say."
"'She has deceiv'd her father and may thee'," said Ellie thoughtfully. "I didn't ever deceive my father as far as I know. Perhaps I would have later."
"I don't suppose he would have taken very kindly to your marrying me," I said, "any more than your stepmother did."
"No," said Ellie, "I don't suppose he would. He was pretty conventional I think." Then she gave that funny little girl smile again, "so I suppose I'd have had to be like Desdemona and deceived my father and run away with you."
"Why did you want to see my mother so much, Ellie?" I asked curiously.
"It's not so much I wanted to see her" said Ellie, "but I felt terribly bad not doing anything about it. You haven't mentioned your mother very often but I did gather that she's always done everything she could for you. Come to the rescue about things and worked very hard to get: you extra schooling and things like that. And I thought it seemed so mean and purse-proud of me not to go near her."
"Well, it wouldn't have been your fault," I said, "it would have been mine."
"Yes," said Ellie. "I can understand that perhaps you didn't want me to go and see her."
"You think I've got an inferiority complex about my mother? That's not true at all, Ellie, I assure you it isn't. It wasn't that."
"No," said Ellie thoughtfully, "I know that now. It was because you didn't want her to do a lot of mother stuff."
"Mother stuff?" I queried.
"Well," said Ellie, "I can see that she's the kind of person who would know quite well what other people ought to do. I mean, she'd want you to go in for certain kinds of jobs."
"Quite right," I said. "Steady jobs. Settling down."
"It wouldn't have mattered very much now," said Ellie. "I dare say it was very good advice. But it wouldn't have been the right advice ever for you, Mike. You're not a settler down. You don't want to be steady. You want to go and see things and do things - be on top of the world."
"I want to stay here in this house with you," I said.
"For a while, perhaps... And I think you'll alway want to come back here. And so shall I. I think we shall come here every year and I think we shall be happier here than anywhere else. But you'll want to go places too. You'll want to travel and see things and buy things. Perhaps think up new plans for doing the garden here. Perhaps we'll go and look at Italian gardens, Japanese gardens, landscape gardens of all kinds."
"You make life seem very exciting, Ellie," I said. "I'm sorry I was cross."
"Oh, I don't mind your being cross," said Ellie. "I'm not afraid of you." Then she added, with a frown: "Your mother didn't like Greta."
"A lot of people don't like Greta," I said.
"Including you."
"Now look here, Ellie, you're always saying that. It's not true. I was just a bit jealous of her at first, that was all. We get on very well now." And I added, "I think perhaps she makes people get rather on the defensive."
"Mr. Lippincott doesn't like her either, does he? He thinks she's got too much influence over me," said Ellie.
"Has she?"
"I wonder why you should ask that. Yes, I think perhaps she has. It's only natural, she's rather a dominant personality and I had to have someone I could trust in and rely on. Someone who'd stand up for me."
"And see you got your own way?" I asked her, laughing.
We went into the house arm in arm. For some reason it seemed dark that afternoon. I suppose because the sun had just left the terrace and left a feeling of darkness behind it.
Ellie said, "What's the matter, Mike?"
"I don't know," I said. "Just suddenly I felt as though someone were walking over my grave."
"A goose is walking over your grave. That's the real saying, isn't it?" said Ellie.
Greta wasn't about anywhere. The servants said she'd gone out for a walk.
Now that my mother knew all about my marriage and had seen Ellie, I did what I had really wanted to do for some time. I sent her a large cheque. I told her to move into a better house and to buy herself any additional furniture she wanted. Things like that. I had doubts of course as to whether she would accept it or not. It wasn't money that I'd worked for and I couldn't honestly pretend it was. As I had expected, she sent the cheque back torn in two with a scrawled note. "I'll have naught to do with any of this," she wrote. "You'll never be different. I know that now. Heaven help you." I flung it down in front of Ellie.
"You see what my mother's like," I said. "I married a rich girl, and I'm living on my rich wife's money and the old battleaxe disapproves of it!"
"Don't worry," said Ellie. "Lots of people think that way. She'll get over it. She loves you very much, Mike," she added.
"Then why does she want to alter me all the time? Make me into her pattern. I'm myself. I'm not anybody else's pattern. I'm not my mother's little boy to be moulded the way she likes. I'm myself. I'm an adult. I'm me!"
"You're you," said Ellie, "and I love you."
And then, perhaps to distract me, she said something rather disquieting.
"What do you think," she said, "of this new manservant of ours?"
I hadn't thought about him. What was there to think? If anything I preferred him to our last one who had not troubled to conceal his low opinion of my social status.
"He's all right," I said. "Why?"
"I just wondered whether he might be a security man."
"A security man? What do you mean?"
"A detective. I thought Uncle Andrew might have arranged it."
"Why should he?"
"Well - possible kidnapping, I suppose. In the States, you know, we usually had guards - especially in the country."
Another of the disadvantages of having money that I hadn't known about!
"What a beastly idea!"
"Oh, I don't know... I suppose I'm used to it. What does it matter? One doesn't really notice."
"Is the wife in it, too?"
"She'd have to be, I think, though she cooks very well. I should think that Uncle Andrew, or perhaps Stanford Lloyd, whichever one of them thought of it, must have paid our last ones to leave, and had these two all lined up ready to take their place. It would have been quite easy."
"Without telling you?" I was still incredulous.
"They'd never dream of telling me. I might have kicked up a fuss. Anyway, I may be quite wrong about them."
She went on dreamily. "It's only that one gets a kind of feeling when one's been used to people of that kind always being around."
"Poor little rich girl," I said savagely.
Ellie did not mind at all.
"I suppose that does describe it rather well," she said.
"The things I'm learning about you all the time, Ellie," I said.
Chapter 17
What a mysterious thing sleep is. You go to bed worrying about gipsies and secret enemies, and detectives planted in your house and the possibilities of kidnapping and a hundred other things; and sleep whisks you away from it all. You travel very far and you don't know where you've been, but when you wake up, it's to a totally new world. No worries, no apprehensions. Instead, when I woke up on the 17th September I was in a mood of boisterous excitement.
'A wonderful day,' I said to myself with conviction. 'This is going to be a wonderful day.' I meant it. I was like those people in advertisements that offer to go anywhere and do anything. I went over plans in my head. I had arranged to meet Major Phillpot at a sale at a country house about fifteen miles away. They had some very nice stuff there and I'd already marked down two or three items in the catalogue. I was quite excited about the whole thing.
Phillpot was very knowledgeable about period furniture and silver and things of that kind, not because he was artistic - he was entirely a sporting man - but simply because he knew. His whole family was knowledgeable.
I looked over the catalogue at breakfast. Ellie had come down in a riding habit. She rode most mornings now - sometimes alone, sometimes with Claudia. She had the American habit of drinking coffee and a glass of orange juice and nothing much else for breakfast. My tastes now that I hadn't got to restrain them in any way, were very much those of a Victorian squire! I liked lots of hot dishes on the sideboard. I ate kidneys this morning and sausages and bacon as well. Delicious.
"What are you doing, Greta?" I asked.
Greta said she was meeting Claudia Hardcastle at the station at Market Chadwell and they were going up to London to a white sale. I asked what a white sale was.
"Does there really have to be white in it?" I asked.
Greta looked scornful and said that a white sale meant a sale of household linen and blankets and towels and sheets, etc. There were some very good bargains at a special shop in Bond Street of which she had been sent a catalogue.
I said to Ellie, "Well, if Greta is going to London for the day, why don't you drive in and meet us at the George in Bartington. The food there's very good, so old Phillpot said. He suggested you might come. One o'clock. You go through Market Chadwell and then you take a turning about three miles after that. It's sign-posted, I think."
