Heart of War (53 page)

‘Well, then I must have a new dress and hat. I don't have a thing to wear … and I must get my hair done that morning.'

‘Wot the hell,' he began; then, ‘Oh, all right. Go to Jonas and Johnson and get yourself a nice dress an' hat and gloves and all the rest.'

Ruth said, ‘I am not going to wear anything from Hedlington. I am going to London … to Barker's.'

Hoggin stared at her – ‘Barker's in Kensington? Why, that'll cost you…'

‘You can afford it,' she said. ‘I'll go tomorrow so that I'll have time to alter the dress a bit if it isn't a perfect fit. I shall need twenty-five pounds.'

‘Twenty-five pounds! Why …!'

She waited, and at last he opened his wallet and gave her the money, secretly proud of her. He liked people who stood up to him.

She turned to go but he said, ‘'Arf a mo' … how's Launcelot? I haven't seen him for a week.'

She said, ‘Well, he's still asleep when you get up in the morning, and he's been put to bed when you finish work. He's all right … a bit thin …'

‘I hear him crying a lot, don't I?'

‘He's teething,' she said. ‘He only has two more to come in, but they're giving him trouble. Come up and talk to him now, Bill. You really should.'

Miss Meiklejohn marched in – ‘Mr Hawke is waiting, sir.'

Hoggin growled, ‘Let him wait … Tell him I'm going to spend ten minutes with my baby son … No, tell him I'm having a shit, crap, whatever you want to call it, and he's welcome to join me if he doesn't want to wait.'

‘Really, sir,' Miss Meiklejohn stammered, and ‘Bill!' Ruth cried, but Hoggin was out of the door, calling over his shoulder, ‘Come on, Ruthie, I don't have all day.'

Bill and Ruth Hoggin stood in the window of the drawing room of The Yews, watching the snow fall with mixed emotions. Ruth was wearing her new dress, floor length, soft purple, of pure silk, with a high collar and a sash of a lighter shade of purple, almost heliotrope, and a hat of purple felt, with an ostrich feather dyed the same heliotrope as the organdy sash. Her gloves, halfway up her forearms, were of the same heliotrope. ‘They won't come,' she muttered, half to herself. ‘It's snowing too hard, even if they ever meant to.'

If they didn't come, all her work, all the extra cleaning and polishing in the house, the arranging and rearranging of furniture, would have gone for nothing. But, if they didn't come, she would not have to face the ordeal of entertaining them, knowing she would do something wrong – everything wrong. Why, oh why, did Bill have to invite them?

Hoggin, standing with hands clasped behind his back, his belly pushing out in front with the gold watch chain curving across it, suffered from no such dichotomy; he hoped that the earl and countess would brave the snow and come. If they didn't, he would ask them another day; for he was
determined to let Hedlington and the world know that he was an intimate of that most noble family.

At a quarter past four Ruth said, ‘They're not coming. I wonder they didn't telephone …'

Hoggin grunted, and at eighteen minutes past four the maroon-painted Humber with the earl's coronet on the door swept slowly in through the opened gates, and Hoggin and his wife hurried out into the hall, to stand five paces back from the front door, where Harbinger the butler waited. The moment the bell rang Harbinger swung open both doors, admitting a whistling wind and a flurry of snow that stippled the first ten feet of the hall with white dots and flakes.

Harbinger turned and announced: ‘The Right Honourable the Earl of Swanwick and the Countess of Swanwick.'

The Hoggins went forward together, Ruth's knees shaking. She found herself dropping a curtsy before the gaze of the Countess, while Hoggin bowed from the waist. Harbinger had already taken Lady Swanwick's fur coat and was helping the earl out of his overcoat. The earl gave the butler his hat and rubbed his hands together – ‘Damned cold out there, Hoggin!'

‘It's so kind of you … to come,' Ruth stammered. ‘I didn't think, we didn't think … with the snow … and all …'

Lady Swanwick said pointedly, ‘The wind seems to come right through the door doesn't it?'

‘What? Oh yes, of course … This way.' Ruth led back into the drawing room, where a huge coal fire burned in the grate. Lady Swanwick sat down, her eyes wandering round the room – large oil portraits of ‘ancestors' obviously bought at antique dealers … landscapes … fox hunting … heavy gilt frames … Louis XV furniture, second hand … didn't all match … They'd have done better to choose some less ornate style and carry through with it. The room was a hodgepodge of opulence, like poor Mrs Hoggin's dress … that hat! Looked like Barker's at its worst. The poor woman was so nervous.

The earl, warming his hands in front of the fire, said, ‘Did you read what that blighter's done now, Hoggin?'

Hoggin was puzzled, ‘What blighter, me lord?'

‘Lloyd George. He's released a lot of Sinn Feiners who were taken in arms against us during the Easter Rising.'

‘Why would he do that?' Hoggin asked.

‘To please the bloody Yanks,' the earl said.

The countess intervened, ‘Now, Roger, we didn't come here to talk about such unpleasant subjects … Don't you have a little boy, Mrs Hoggin?'

‘Oh yes, m'lady… Launcelot.'

‘How old is he?'

‘A year and ten months, m'lady. I was going to have Nanny bring him down for a minute, when we've had our tea.'

‘That would be nice.'

Ruth drew a deep breath and said, ‘He's going to Eton College, m'lady. After that, I suppose it'll be up to him, then, to decide what he wants to be. Once he's been at Eton College, he can be anything.'

The earl had heard and broke in, speaking to Hoggin, ‘What's that? Your boy going to Eton?'

Hoggin said, ‘Ruthie's got her heart set on it.'

The earl said, ‘Have you entered him? Written to the school, telling them you have a son and you want him to enter in such and such a half?'

Hoggin said, ‘No, my lord, we haven't done that yet. It can wait till he's a bit older, can't it?'

‘Good God, no,' the earl said. ‘He'd start in the summer of 1928, but he should have been entered within a day or two of birth. There'll be no place for him. You might have afforded to wait a year if you had family connections, but …'

‘'Course not!' Hoggin said. ‘This ain't none of
my
doing. It's Ruthie. He'll be like a fish out of water there, if you ask me.'

Ruth said sharply, ‘Launcelot's going to Eton College, Bill! And he's going to speak proper, so the boys won't laugh at him!'

The countess listened, fascinated: a war in the family – Hoggin wanting to stay in his own class, though apparently seeking a K, but with money to do what he liked: concomitantly, accepting none of the upper classes' duties and obligations – catch
him
leading a platoon over the top! … while the little mousey wife wanted their son to rise, knowing that if he did, she'd lose him, and he would accept the responsibilities his father was avoiding … fascinating!

Lord Swanwick said, ‘I don't think you have a hope of getting him into Eton now.'

The countess thought, that little woman deserves help.
She said, ‘There is one chance. Tell them about Collegers, Roger.'

The earl looked doubtful – ‘Is he clever? Got to be damn clever to be a Colleger … a real inky swot.'

‘We don't know how clever he is,' Hoggin said. ‘He hasn't made any speeches yet.'

Swanwick said, ‘Oh? Yes, quite … Well, a certain number of boys are admitted to Eton every year, free, as a result of winning scholarships – by open competition. They're called Collegers because they live in the college buildings. There are about a hundred of them at school at any one time, as far as I can remember. All the other boys, about a thousand of them, are called Oppidans, and live in various houses in the town round Eton –
Oppidum
, Latin for town. Each house has its own housemaster. You call him ‘m'tutor.' If your boy – what's his name?'

‘Launcelot,' Hoggin said, glowering at his wife.

‘Launcelot – wants to go to Eton, he must win an open scholarship. Then they cannot refuse him. He'll be a Colleger, a scholar.'

Hoggin said, ‘An' I won't be paying them a penny, though by then I'll be able to buy the plurry place, beg pardon, Your Ladyship. It's enough to make a cat laugh.'

Ruth Hoggin said, ‘He will win the scholarship, my lord…Can you tell us the name of a good school where he can go first? So that he will be sure to win the scholarship. Or do you think it would be better if we hired tutors here?'

The earl said heartily, ‘Send him to school, Mrs Hoggin…dozens of such prep schools – private schools, we called them at Eton – all over the place … get his little bottom whacked and his face pushed in the mud, do him a world of good!' Ruth Hoggin paled. The countess murmured aside, ‘It doesn't have to be as brutal as that,' while the earl barked, ‘Just make sure that none of the beaks are, well, you know,
those
… see that they don't starve the little beasts … Lot of those places serve potatoes till the boys are full, then a piece of meat not big enough for a good dinner for a mouse. The boys can't eat even that, so the school takes it back and makes mince out of it for tomorrow.' He pulled out his watch and Ruth started ‘Oh, shall we serve tea, m'lady?'

‘Certainly,' the countess said. ‘We built up quite an appetite on the drive here …'

The tea had been served and eaten and the ruins removed. Nanny Hopgood had brought Launcelot downstairs and led him into the drawing room, curtsying to the earl and countess as she came in. She was fifty and had served two generations in a noble house in Ireland, but now the nurseries were empty and would not be filled again in her lifetime, for the boys who would soon have become fathers were instead manuring the soil of Picardy, Flanders, and Artois. Ruth was humble before Nanny Hopgood's knowledge of society and how to raise small sprigs of the aristocracy; but Nanny Hopgood had sensed the little woman's fierce devotion to Launcelot, and was careful never to dictate to her employer where the little boy's well-being was directly concerned: only in such matters as where she herself was to eat, her wages, her relationship with the rest of the staff …

Launcelot shook hands with the earl and countess, bowing jerkily before each. He was wearing a royal blue velvet jacket over a white shirt with a wide Byronic blue tie, and royal blue velvet shorts over long black silk stockings. There were pearl buttons on the sides of his shorts, and silver buckles on his shoes.

Nanny Hopgood led him out. As soon as she was sure he could not hear, the countess said, ‘A nice, little boy … Such fine eyes – like yours, Mrs Hoggin.' The young should never be complimented to their faces.

Ruth blushed with pleasure, wishing Launcelot could have heard what Her Ladyship had said. Really, it hadn't been so bad after all … with Harbinger and Mrs Bowes to arrange things, it had gone off very well.

The earl settled back in his chair, stretching out his hands toward the fire – ‘What do you think of Mr Wilson's latest proposal, Hoggin?'

‘What proposal, my lord?'

The earl realized that Hoggin read nothing in the papers except what he saw as connected with or concerning him and his business – which was making money, not war. He said, ‘Mr Wilson – the American president – has invited all the belligerents to state their war aims. He thinks, he says, that they may not prove irreconcilable.'

Hoggin scratched his head and said, ‘Well, our war aim is to beat the 'Uns, right?'

‘That's what
I'd
tell him,' the earl said. ‘The country won't swallow anything less.'

‘An' the war might be over in a couple of weeks or months,' Hoggin said; and that would be a bloody disaster, he was about to add, but caught the countess's cold look, and remembered that her younger son was rotting in the slime somewhere over there. He said instead, ‘I mean, we've got to teach the swine a lesson, don't we?'

‘That's what I say,' Swanwick said.

The countess said, ‘It's time we went home, Roger, before the roads become impassable.'

Ruth jumped to her feet, nearly falling over the hem of her gown – ‘Certainly, m'lady … It's been so nice seeing you … and thank you ever so for telling us about Eton College and the private schools.'

‘We'll give you some introductions, for the schools,' the countess said. ‘Then you should go and look at a few for yourself and decide which one would be best for Launcelot. Then enter his name – the good private schools have waiting lists, too.'

Hoggin was on his feet, bowing. ‘It's been an honour, Your Lordship … Your Ladyship.'

When Swanwick's car had swept round the drive, and disappeared, and the front door of The Yews been closed, Ruth turned to her husband, ‘What did Lord Swanwick mean when he said we were to make sure the schoolmasters weren't
those?
'

Bill patted her head, and said, ‘He meant to look out for like them scoutmasters what teach little boys what their cocks is for, and parsons what bumfuck the choirboys behind the altar.'

‘Bill!'

‘Cheer up, Ruthie. Worse things 'appen at sea, and Christmas is coming.'

He stopped in the middle of the hall, flung up one hand, and declaimed: