The Matchmaker Read Free Page B

to belong to gentry, so I hear, but they got tired of it and the Hoadleys bought it. But I shan’t get in a hole; do I ever?”
    He smiled, and pulled her ear. No, she did not get into holes; nevertheless, he mistrusted her feminine rashness and enthusiasm, her passion for the open air and flowers and picnic meals and her impatient overlooking of such details as damp rooms and inconvenient sinks.
    “You won’t be completely isolated…” he muttered, turning away from the window and looking slowly round the walls, distempered an icy blue and stained with damp. “This really is a most depressing room, darling. Everything looks as if—as if——”
    “It’s been underground for weeks,” she said cheerfully. “But the beds are really good and in the spring these woods will be brimming with primroses; you just wait! And Mrs. Prewitt is going to let us have Use of Linen and Cutlery.”
    “Is that the owner? Who is she?”
    “She went to Ireland in 1939 and just hasn’t come back. She owns several houses round here.”
    “Are they all like this one?”
    “Pretty much,” Alda said carelessly, smoothing her hair in front of the misty mirror. She had been too charmed by the situation of the cottage and the promise of those woods to pay much attention to a certain expression upon the faces of the Sillingham tradespeople, and a note in the voices of the Friends at Pagets, when she announced that she had taken Pine Cottage.
    “Well,” Ronald said heavily, “I suppose we’d better be going. What are the children up to?”
    Alda went out on to the landing, where there was the sound of giggling, and he slowly followed.
    It added considerably to his depression that his family should have been victimised by a rentier . Naturally he did not share the Left view of rentiers as a class, but this specimen seemed to him to justify it. Pine Cottage had walls of single thickness and its doors and windows and fittings were cheap and mean. He thought of Pagets; built three hundred years ago, with an oak staircase solid as the decks of the ships upon which the original Friends had sailed for the New World; the house sunk deeply in its old, wide, sweet garden, and house and garden set secretly amidst the mild turnings of an ancient lane. He wondered (for his picture of the proletariat was Ruskinian rather than Marxian) that Mrs. Prewitt had been able to find Sussex workmen willing to throw her matchboarding and her bad bricks together, and he remembered how, when he looked out of a certain window at Pagets, his gaze travelled slowly up a massive, slabbed, sloping precipice, warmly grey as April clouds and fledged with emerald moss at the meeting of each slab and carrying little white flowers in spring; it was the roof of Horsham stone.
    “What is all this?” he demanded, beginning to laugh as he came out on to the landing and found his wife kneeling with her head close to those of her three daughters, and all in fits of laughter.
    “Meg says——” began Jenny, lifting a pink face.
    “Oh no, it’s rude!” from Louise.
    “——that when you sit on the seat in there ,” jerking her head towards an open door, “it——” she went off again and could not get a word out.
    “Come on, Jenny, we don’t want to be here all night,” commanded Alda, putting an arm round the two eldest. “You then, Meg. What does it do?”
    “F LIES up and smacks your botty!” shouted Meg, and off they all went again, the four fair heads close together and their laughter ringing through the house.
    Ronald laughed too, but he told Alda that she had “better have that seen to,” and the laurels in the front garden thinned, as well; it would make the living-room lighter and Mrs. Prewitt should be grateful. (Not that he wanted her gratitude, he added.)
    Meg was asleep on his shoulder as they walked home through the winter moonlight. The way from Pine Cottage to Pagets was even rougher than the way from Sillingham to Pine Cottage and it became