Enbury Heath
Stella Gibbons
Enbury Heath
CONTENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stella Gibbons was born in London in 1902. She went to the North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College London. She then worked for ten years on various papers, including the Evening Standard. Stella Gibbons is the author of twenty-five novels, three volumes of short stories, and four volumes of poetry. Her first novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932) was an immediate success and won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1933. Among her works are Nightingale Wood (1938), The Bachelor (1944), Westwood (1946), and Starlight (1967). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. Stella Gibbons died in 1989.
ALSO BY STELLA GIBBONS
Cold Comfort Farm
Bassett
Nightingale Wood
My American
Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm
The Rich House
Ticky
The Bachelor
Westwood
The Matchmaker
Conference at Cold Comfort Farm
Here Be Dragons
White Sand and Grey Sand
The Charmers
Starlight
To
Gerald and Lewis
The characters in this story are fictitious.
Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power which no subsequent connections can supply.
MANSFIELD PARK.
CHAPTER I
Hartley Garden had been a bad man but a good doctor, and he was much loved in Enbury Fields. A crowd half a mile long attended his funeral. It stopped the trams on their way up to Enbury Heath, and filled his youngest son, Francis, with a gloomy pride.
His only daughter, Sophia, sat looking out of the window of the first car behind the coffin, but she was not seeing the crowd; she was staring up at the pale blue sky over the Heath and the six delicate dark birch trees on the top of Minister Hill. The trees were bare, because it was January; and thin snow lay on the roofs.
Enbury Fields is in North London. A long ascent rises from Tottenham Court Road and soars until it ends in Minister Hill and in the little valleys and hillocks of Enbury Heath. The funeral was now crawling up this long hill on the way to the cemetery at Northgate; and the crowd pressed round the cars, staring at Francis and Sophia and wondering why Harry, the other brother, was not there.
‘Don’t show proper feelin’, does it, not turnin’ up for ’is dad’s funeral?’
‘Oh, all the young ones are the same nowadays. They don’t none of them show proper feelin’s, if you ask me. Look at ’er jumper. Pink. She might ’ave put on a black one; it wouldn’t ’ave killed ’er.’
Sophia, in fact, was thinking about her jumper. She was wondering whether she ought to have taken Uncle Preston’s advice, bestowed on her yesterday over the telephone, and bought something black. It was true that she had only five shillings in the world until Friday afternoon, and today was Wednesday, but she could have borrowed the money; anybody would have lent a person a pound to buy a black jumper to wear at their father’s funeral. That was just what had kept her from asking anyone; that, and the fact that she was not sorry her father was dead. Why should she wear mourning?
But she was miserable; so wretched that she was sick and frozen with misery; and at the same time she felt callous and flippant. She could not cry, even from shock.
This was the second funeral in six months, and funerals are shocking affairs. Their ritual, the blend of vivid nodding flowers and grand words, and the unbearable facts of loss and corruption, strikes on the nerves without mercy. Sophia knew the routine of a funeral by heart; and thought that never again could she bear to go to one, even if it had been the funeral of Harry or Francis.
The first funeral had been that of her mother, whom Sophia loved better than anyone in the world. Mrs Garden had died from a stroke, and the forces which brought it upon her had gathered during the twenty years of ceaseless worry, fear and unhappiness that had been her married life.
Sophia, whose character and upbringing combined to make her a merciless judge, considered that her father had murdered her mother as surely as if he had shot her through the heart; and that was why she was not sorry that he was dead.
‘Sophia … er … Sophia … !’
Uncle Preston, who was sitting opposite her, had been trying to attract her attention for nearly half a minute, but she refused to hear him. She did hear him with her small pretty ears, but she was not listening with her mind. She was longing to be walking alone over the Heath, kicking at the snow and staring up at the still, brown trees.
‘Uncle Preston is trying to tell you,’ suddenly said Francis in a loud, sarcastic, trembling voice, ‘that your petticoat’s showing.’
Sophia, trying in her turn to be as infuriating as she could, slowly moved her head round until she was staring at Uncle Preston’s prim, anxious face.
‘Your dress, Sophia. It seems to be caught up …’
Sophia slowly looked down at her legs, which were decently veiled in black lisle stockings at one and eleven pence a pair. The rather grubby hem of a white petticoat showed below her skirt. She slowly drew her dress over it, and turned away to the window once more.
Now they had left the crowd behind, and the three cars had stopped crawling; they were smoothly climbing Greenride Hill, and between gaps in the houses and trees London could be seen, dim in the winter haze of the valley. Sophia was glad to be getting near the Heath. She hated Enbury Fields, and never wanted to see it again.
She glanced at Francis. He looked as stony, grim, white and exhausted as she did. He was sixteen and a half, five years younger than she, but this afternoon he looked at once very young and very old, and frighteningly like his dead father. Darling Francis, she thought, he’s hating it. I expect he’ll be sick afterwards. Oh, I am so hungry. I wish I’d remembered to buy some breakfast last night.
She had been living alone for the six months since her mother died, in a room near the Heath on her salary of three pounds a week; and she had so many things to think about and to arrange that she often forgot to buy her breakfast. This failing infuriated her, for Sophia liked eating and looked forward to mealtimes.
She had left her father’s house two days after Mrs Garden’s funeral, and had not seen him from that time until the morning when she saw him in the coffin. Aunt Maxine and Uncle Preston, his sister and brother, thought this action of Sophia’s a shocking one. They would probably go for her about it after the funeral. They would also go for Francis, who had approved Sophia’s action, but who could not imitate it because he was still at school; and if Harry had been there they would have gone for Harry, too. Buoyed by a pleasing conviction that it was impossible for them to be in the wrong, they never hesitated to go for anyone.
Sophia thanked her stars that he was not there, because Harry, who was twenty, was a gentle, peace-loving, romantic sort of cuckoo, and not grim and slightly sardonic like Francis and herself.
Sophia stared out of one window; Francis stared out of the other. Aunt Maxine, who sat opposite Francis in her natty mourning suit, studied Sophia’s profile and wondered if she ever thought about boys, and if she was having a love affair with anybody? There’s no fun in her, thought Aunt Maxine regretfully; she would have liked Sophia to think a lot about boys and to be having a very exciting love affair which she would discuss in minute detail with her Aunt Maxine. Sophia was an unnatural sort of girl. Why, when Aunt Maxine was Sophia’s age, she was a regular little pepper pot; couldn’t keep her off the boys. And Sophia ought to be a pepper pot, lord knows, with poor Hartley for a father! As for Francis, he’d never break hearts with a nose that size, and Harry was a softie. The beauty of the family, but undoubtedly a muff. Why, at his age, most young Frenchmen were running several women.
But Uncle Preston, now that he had made Sophia pull her skirt modestly over the hem of her petticoat, had stopped thinking about poor Hartley’s children. He was a great one for modesty, even in times of family crisis; but now he was worried about the will.
Who would get what? Marriot, the family’s solicitor had kept very quiet about the will. No one knew anything. Everyone was pretending not to care a bit, but everyone was also teetering with excitement and trying to find out what everybody else knew, and this, added to a natural feeling of relief at Hartley’s death and a strong desire to interfere with any imprudent arrangements which might have been made on their own behalf by his three children, made the occasion as inwardly exciting as it was outwardly sedate. Certainly, Sophia and Francis were the only people present who felt sick with shock and frozen with the accumulated misery and memories of years.
The car stopped. They were in the cemetery; and Sophia and Francis, while getting out of the car under the eye of Uncle Preston, observed to their dismay a number of persons who were even more repulsive in appearance than Aunt Maxine, Uncle Preston and the cousins and sisters-in-law and things occupying the other cars. These were lurking uneasily among the tombstones.
Years of miserable family life had compelled Sophia, Harry and Francis to practise a method of communication which they fondly believed could not be observed by grown-up people.
It consisted in twisting the mouth as far on one side as it would go, and then talking through it. Harry said that this was how convicts talked to each other in prison; and Sophia’s comment had been that such a method was therefore peculiarly suited to use by the young Gardens.
It was this method which they now adopted, in discussing the tombstone lurkers.
‘My god,’ said Francis. ‘What are they? They look like troglodytes or something. Surely they can’t be relations?’
‘Must be. Or perhaps they’re patients? A lot of them sent wreaths. There was a lovely one from old Fanny.’
‘Oh well, she would. She’s been in love with Father for years. I saw her in the crowd round the surgery door when the coffin came out, roaring like a town bull. Oh lord, I’m so hungry.’
‘So am I. Never mind, darling; if we can get away together afterwards we’ll go off somewhere and have some food. I feel so queer; all unreal, as though I were looking at everything through a sheet of glass.’
‘That’s nerves,’ said Francis wisely. ‘My legs are trembling, and I feel sick.’
‘We are a pair, aren’t we? Never mind; we’ve got each other. I wish Harry were here.’
‘I don’t. He’d loathe it. He was fond of Father, you know.’
‘Shall we go to Celia’s party tonight? I know it seems awful to go to a party on the evening of your father’s funeral, but I’d rather like to; I feel so awful, and I want to forget about things and just not care about anything.’
‘I’ve got to get back to school. I’d rather – and besides, even if I stayed, Uncle Preston wouldn’t let me go to a party.’
‘Blast Uncle Preston.’
‘Shut up, he’s looking at us.’
Sophia stared at her prayer book during the ceremony in the little chapel, and did not look up until the great coffin was swaying out through the door on the shoulders of six men, and the mourners turned to follow it.
It held the body of a huge man, which had been full of a terrifying vitality and a pitiful weakness. It was buried in wreaths of dark red roses, violets, daffodils and carnations from a woman who had loved him and delicate stiff tulips. The sacrificial flowers at funerals are invariably called ‘beautiful flowers,’ as though flowers were not always beautiful, even on a coffin. But these flowers … Sophia fancied that their colours burned with triumphant life. They sprang from wreath, cross, spray, like transparent flames, as though drawing their strength from the great body in the coffin.
She followed with the others out into the fresh afternoon air, and saw it lowered into the grave.
Her mother lay there.
She forced her mind from the thought.
Rain began to fall before the clergyman had finished reading the service, and Uncle Preston put up an umbrella which he held over Sophia and Francis. Francis occupied himself, during the last few moments of the ceremony, by edging away from the umbrella until he stood bareheaded in the rain, his glasses misty with steam. He stared sternly into the distance with large pale blue eyes, and wished the beastly business were over. Once his hand went to his inner breast pocket. It was all right. What he had carried for three months was still there, safe and hidden.
The earth was sprinkled, the sexton moved forward and the crowd of relations broke up and turned away.
They stood in little groups under their umbrellas, peering at each other through the rain, hurrying forward to shake hands eagerly and to remind each other that the last time they had met was at poor Mildred’s funeral; that must have been a good eleven years ago.
Most of them began by looking critically and disapprovingly at Sophia and Francis, who stood a little apart, but soon they got so interested in exchanging gloomy reminiscences and telling each other that there were not many of us left now and wondering mournfully whose turn it would be next and asking how was Auntie Bessie’s catarrh and was poor May any better and what had become of poor Stanley, that they forgot to look carpingly at Sophia and Francis.
Sophia and Francis took the opportunity to stroll a few yards off and examine a tombstone.
‘What a crew,’ murmured Sophia, with her head on one side and a gentle, pensive expression on her face as she surveyed the stone. ‘Francis, I can’t help wishing we had just one decent relation. Suppose we’d come here today, and there had been an absolutely unknown first cousin, just back from Vienna – very tall, well dressed, with a sense of humour, knowing all about music and very well read. Think of it! The relief!’
‘He’d be only one more person to try and boss us about. There’re quite enough as it is.’
They were wandering slowly, aimlessly in the direction of the avenue leading to the gates. No one looked round at them.
Uncle Preston and Aunt Maxine were now haranguing the relations, and telling them that of course they must all come back to the surgery and have a little something. But the cousins and widowed sisters-in-law and distant connections hesitated; they did not wish to appear too eager to have a little something. They were coy; they must be persuaded.
Auntie Loo, Uncle Preston’s wife, saw Sophia and Francis escape. She saw Francis’s school overcoat and cap Sophia’s worn tweed suit and beret, fade among the weeping trees, the tombstones and the fine rain, but she did not want to pluck at anyone and raise the alarm. Poor little things, she thought, it’s hard on them. Let them run away, if they want to. And she looked placidly at Uncle Preston, and thought out a plan for dealing with his distress when he should discover the absence of Sophia and Francis.