The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories by Penelope Lively

Author:Penelope Lively
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-04-10T12:21:23+00:00

Mrs. Bennet

In deepest Devon, in 1947, Mrs. Bennet lived on. Not as such, you understand, fictional or otherwise, but in the person of a Mrs. Landon, Frances Landon, who was married to a man of deficient means, and had three daughters, now of marriageable age.

The Landons had moved from Berkshire to Devon when the youngest daughter, Imogen, left school at sixteen. Pamela—now twenty—and Clare, eighteen, had also left at that age. They all had a taste for country life. Ted Landon’s best attempts at successful work had been rural-based. Berkshire was edging toward suburbia, and, crucially, was without the sort of real country gentry that it would be promising for the girls to meet. You needed deep country, the shires. They would have to move.

A nice house was found, eventually, on the edge of a village in Devon, foothills of Exmoor. Pretty little nineteenth-century house with outbuildings, good garden, paddock, and an extension that could do for Ted’s study or office.

Ted Landon drank a bit. Well, more than a bit. He had had a quiet war, tucked away in the War Office in some menial position, and had perhaps picked up the habit then, whiling away solitary evenings when his wife and the girls were safely away from the bombs. He was supposed, now, in Devon, to be helping out a local land agent, but little helping got done. The land agent had picked up, early on, that Ted was not likely to be sparking on all cylinders after his lunchtime break in the Red Lion, and called on him less and less. Before the war, Ted had tried apple farming, and chickens, and cattle feed salesman, but none of these had seemed to be quite his métier.

He was fifteen years older than Frances. She had married him in a panic, when twenty-four, with no one else in sight and spinsterhood staring her in the face, she felt. Dread word, not yet at its last gasp, nowhere near, indeed, bouncing ominously back in the wake of the Great War. Men were at a premium; young, marriageable men were gold dust, sought after, fought over. The debutante dances of the early 1920s were red in tooth and claw, and Frances had not made a kill. She saw contemporaries succeed, and sail off into the sunset with a ring on their finger, or fail, and fade away to help Mummy in the garden, or do good works. In the circles in which Frances moved the Pankhursts had been referred to with shock and disapproval; a nice finishing school was all a girl needed—a course at a Constance Spry place. Which Frances had done; she could arrange flowers, bake a cake, whisk up a soufflé, cook sole meunière. She could smock a baby’s dress, knit a sock, iron a shirt. Groomed for homemaking, she was. And then there were no men. Except for Ted Landon.

It had not been a bad marriage. Not too bad. The girls had been the great thing, arriving in

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