One does, as one’s life unfolds, collect acquaintance and connections pretty much willy-nilly and no one can hope for a social circle peopled solely by those individuals so jolly that one invites them to stay for a week and forms parties effortlessly around them simply by sticking pins in one’s address book. On the contrary, it is inevitable that there must be at least a few so dull that dinner cannot be borne, let alone an overnight visit, and even although only luncheon is offered, no one else can be invited to dilute the tedium because the only acquaintance who would not be bored into months of sulks are those so cripplingly boring themselves that they would only add to the gloom. Of course, intimates can be taken into one’s confidence and begged to help. Alec could have been leaned on today, for instance, but I have never approved of this use of intimates and so I try whenever I can to shoulder the burden myself and not inflict it upon others.
This morning, however, as I had fumbled with the scores of silk-covered buttons on my modish new sailor blouse, fingers clumsy in the October chill, I had begun to think I had bitten off considerably more than I could chew, for a descending scale of guests arranged in order of entertainment and diversion for their hostess runs out long, long before one gets to retired chaplains from one’s husband’s old school.
‘Damn these things,’ I said. ‘Grant, there are so many buttons there’s hardly space between them to get one’s fingers in and do them up. And it’s freezing in here.’
‘Yes, no chance of it gaping,’ said Grant. ‘Madam. Such a clever idea. Nothing worse than gaping. And you’re right. It’s wonderfully fresh this morning. You look quite youthful.’
I squeezed the last silk button through its loop at last and looked up to check my reflection in the glass. My cheeks were rosy for once and my eyes clear.
‘Hmph,’ I said. ‘That’s not fresh air. That’s a muck sweat from wrestling into my clothes.’ But I could not help noticing that, for some reason which I admit might have been the weight of the buttons all down the middle, my front was beautifully flat in the new blouse, no billows, no puffs. I did not go so far as to smile at Grant – one cannot prostrate oneself – but I gave her a kind of hard stare and she knows what it means.
Grant duly unbent a little herself.
‘I’m sure it will soon go past,’ she said. ‘And besides, Margaret always says that he’s quite a card in his own way. Said that last year Mr Gilver and he were shaking with laughter in the library after luncheon. And Mrs Tilling’s got some lovely treats in store too.’
I could quite believe that Hugh and the chaplain would laugh hard and long about the japes and scrapes of schooldays. That was the problem. And I had no doubt either that Mrs Tilling, quite savagely devout in her way and keen to impress a minister of the kirk, would be scouring her Good Housekeeping scrapbook, fried fronds of Florence fennel just a dusting of cornflour away.
Even I could not have foreseen the mutton, but I had been quite wrong about Mr Tait too, who turned out to be neither damp nor dour – not like a minister at all – but rather a comfortable figure in country tweeds and with a grey bib to his dog collar. He had a little round nose like a potato and when he smiled, which was often, his eyes were crescent-shaped above his cheeks. The high, bald dome of his forehead lent some gravitas and the slow burr of his Scotch accent, conversing calmly but with great good humour on whatever topic arose, rounded him off to perfection. So, before we had even finished our sherry, I had moved him out of the mental category of duty-inspired bore and entered him onto my list of spare men. Not that I often gave the kind of formal dinner which demanded a balance of the sexes and could be thrown into confusion by a missed train or attack of influenza, but if such a crisis ever did arise I would far rather send to Fife for Mr Tait and park him next to some difficult dowager than trawl round my immediate neighbourhood for the best that it had to offer.
For Mr Tait, I had learned from Hugh, was a widower. He had married rather late in life for a minister, at around forty, and it had been this marriage which had occasioned his giving up the chaplaincy at Kingoldrum Boys’ College and taking a parish where his wife would have a manse to call her own. The young Mrs Tait, however, must barely have had time to inter-line her curtains against the east coast haar before she was carried off to the graveyard, leaving Mr Tait with a baby daughter and a pack of attentive female parishioners clambering over one another to take care of him. That is to say, the parishioners were my own conjecture, but I was sure that Mr Tait did not get those cushiony cheeks and that air of great ease from whisking up powdered soup over a gas ring and my theory was only strengthened when after a mouthful of the mutton mousse, he exclaimed: ‘Delicious!’ and smacked his lips. I considered what a useful talent it was for a minister, and a widowed one especially, to be able to consume this gelatinous filth with such convincing relish. It would never do, after all, if he blanched at the baked offering of one of his less talented parish ladies, a peripheral matter in other sects, perhaps, but the Church of Scotland, make no mistake, gets by on a little doctrine and a lot of scones.
‘How kind of you,’ I murmured. ‘I’m afraid we don’t – Hugh and I – always appreciate our kitchen staff’s forays into the latest cuisine. I shouldn’t have believed how set in my ways I had become, until these odd concoctions from below showed me.’
‘Oh, but Mrs Gilver,’ exclaimed Mr Tait, ‘you must keep up to date, my dear. We must encourage and applaud enterprise wherever we find it. We must not be suspicious of the new, but embrace it in all its forms. This is something I’ve had cause to think about a great deal just recently at home in the parish.’
I looked at him with expectant interest – clearly there was a story coming – but before he could start, Hugh weighed in.
‘Men are suspicious,’ he said. ‘And prone to discontent.’
I stared at him, speechless. Hugh does not usually go in for that quelling habit of dropping quotations into the conversation and I am glad, since I never know what to do when it happens. Should one simply laugh in appreciative admiration of the other’s knowledge of the great writers – but how could one laugh at such a quotation as that? – or should one try to cap it? Or simply agree with what has been said? It must, I concluded, be the presence of Mr Tait and the resulting echo of Hugh’s schooldays which prompted his unusual outburst and so I left it to Mr Tait to find an answer. This he managed with aplomb.
‘Ha, ha,’ he cried in happy recognition. ‘Herrick, yes indeed. Robert Herrick. A man of the cloth, like myself, you know. But not… my goodness me no, not at all… And it goes right to the heart of my recent troubles, as it happens. Men are suspicious. They certainly are prone to discontent at Luckenlaw these days.’
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.
‘Have you ever heard, I wonder, of the SWRI?’ said Mr Tait. Hugh and I each frantically tried to assign the initials to something sensible.
‘Scottish?’ I began. A safe bet.
‘Workers’ Rights?’ ventured Hugh, incredulously. It was a topic he had never thought to have brought to his luncheon table.
Mr Tait threw back his head and laughed.
‘Women’s Rural Institute,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it hasn’t come to Gilverton yet.’ I shrugged. As far as I knew, there was the Women’s Guild, exclusively the preserve of the minister’s wife and therefore nothing to do with me, the Brownies and Guides and Scouts and Cubs, for which there was never any shortage of hearty volunteers, and that was it. I had heard of the new Women’s Institute, of course, but had thought it confined to England and had thankfully embraced the belief that, to quote the wife of our tenant farmer at Gilverton Mains on the topic of Clara Bow’s rising hemline, it was all very well down there but it would never do up here with our weather.