Evenfield by Ferguson Rachel

Author:Ferguson,Rachel
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2016-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

2

Of course mother and Mell and I had intermittently talked over the Addison days and people, Mell and I because we liked to, mother only occasionally interested, acting more as referee to our statements about individuals or misstatements about the names of their houses. I found it immensely restful – a walnuts and port relaxation, or like reading history in secure knowledge of the outcome – but I had accumulated plenty of surprises in the process. We mostly fell into reminiscence or speculation when father was from home; I think we all felt that his contribution would be too cut and dried to repay hearing.

Mother’s well, when she felt like filling our cups, was inexhaustible, or seemed so. It was, for instance, not until I was quite nineteen that I heard that the eldest Irmine son had been frantically in love with golden-haired Mrs. Randolph and had been by his father forbidden to Call. Even I had not been forgotten, for it seemed that Chetwyn Lawnford had actually had a fight with the Raymond boy as to which of them should marry me. Chetwyn! Now, if it had been Johnnie … but his manure-throwing elder was completely outside my comprehension, and I rummaged memory for a single incident that might put me on the track and could find not one!

It made curious hearing, this item about that stranger-child that was myself, feeling still a backwash of responsibility for her behaviour, wondering what she had said and done in these incredible circumstances: sure, only, for good or ill in what she had not done, for I had married neither combatant!

Mell said Chetwyn often came into the garden at Evenfield and was rather a nuisance to the Cocksedges (though the Martins didn’t mind as Janet was with us all, too) on the relief of Mafeking and Ladysmith days, when he found a cornet from somewhere and blew it all over the lawn.

‘But Mell, was I there?’

‘Oh yes, I expect so. You bought a button of Baden-Powell in Kingsmarket on market day because you said he was the prettiest of the officers.’

‘I never did!’ But I knew Mell was right. She mayn’t have been a very good general noticer of trifles, but what she knew she knew in a most comfortingly reliable way.

‘Mafeking Night … what did we do?’

‘Nothing,’ said mother promptly. ‘Father wouldn’t take any of us up to town because he said the streets would be too rowdy. And I expect they were. It was kept up for two nights.’

‘But didn’t any of you do anything?’ I persisted, acquiescing in the fact that whatever happened I must have been in bed.

‘Oh, I suppose we decorated Evenfield–’

‘The Domrémys gave a party’, pronounced Mell, ‘and I went. They said they’d bought up all the bunting in Addison and had to send to London for more–’

(‘Oh Mell, what fun!’, I interpolated, for some reason with fervour.)

‘– and they had a wonderful spread–’

(‘Trust them for that’ said mother, with a bankrupt look in her eye.)

‘– in that bony dining-room of theirs, and I got rather squiffy for the first time.

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