Not for the moment in the mood for reading, she surveyed the large, tidy garden that was her husband’s pride, even though he never had a moment to work in it. Against high stone walls forsythia grew, and honeysuckle and little pear trees, and beneath them in rich, herbaceous borders the garden flowers of summer blossomed now in colourful variety. Four beech trees shaded patches of the lawn, and roses grew, and geraniums, in round beds symmetrically arranged. On either side of an archway in the wall ahead of Mrs Digby-Hunter were two yew trees and beyond the archway, in a wilder part, she could see the blooms of late rhododendrons. She could see as well, near one of the yew trees, the bent figure of Sergeant Wall, an ex-policeman employed on a part-time basis by her husband. He was weeding, his movements slow in the heat of that June afternoon, a stained white hat on his hairless head. It was pleasant to sit in the shade of a beech tree watching someone else working, having worked oneself all morning in a steamy kitchen. Although she always considered herself an easy-going woman, she had been very angry that morning because one of the girls had quite clearly omitted to make use of the deodorant she was at such pains to supply them with. She had accused each in turn and had got nowhere whatsoever, which didn’t entirely surprise her. Dympna was just fifteen and Barbara only a month or two older; hardly the age at which to expect responsibility and truthfulness. Yet it was her duty to train them, as it was her husband’s duty to train the boys. ‘You’ll strip wash, both of you,’ she’d commanded snappishly in the end, ‘immediately you’ve done the lunch dishes. From top to toe, please, every inch of you.’ They had both, naturally, turned sulky.
Mrs Digby-Hunter, wearing that day a blue cotton dress with a pattern of pinkish lupins on it, was fifty-one. She had married her husband twenty-nine years ago, at a time when he’d been at the beginning of a career in the army. Her father, well-to-do and stern, had given her away and she’d been quite happy about his gesture, for love had then possessed her fully. Determined at all costs to make a success of her marriage and to come up to scratch as a wife, she had pursued a policy of agreeableness: she smiled instead of making a fuss, in her easy-going way she accepted what there was to accept, placing her faith in her husband as she believed a good wife should. In her own opinion she was not a clever person, but at least she could offer loyalty and devotion, instead of nagging and arguing. In a bedroom of a Welsh hotel she had disguised, on her wedding night, her puzzled disappointment when her husband had abruptly left her side, having lain there for only a matter of minutes.
Thus a pattern began in their marriage and as a result of it Mrs Digby-Hunter had never borne children although she had, gradually and at an increasing rate, put on weight. At first she had minded about this and had attempted to diet. She had deprived herself of what she most enjoyed until it occurred to her that caring in this way was making her bad-tempered and miserable: it didn’t suit her, all the worrying about calories and extra ounces. She weighed now, although she didn’t know it, thirteen stone.
Her husband was leaner, a tall man with strong fingers and smooth black hair, and eyes that stared at other people’s eyes as if to imply shrewdness. He had a gaunt face and on it a well-kept though not extensive moustache. Shortly after their marriage he had abandoned his career in the army because, he said, he could see no future in it. Mrs Digby-Hunter was surprised but assumed that what was apparent to her husband was not apparent to her. She smiled and did not argue.
After the army her husband became involved with a firm that manufactured a new type of all-purpose, metal step-ladder. He explained to her the mechanism of this article, but it was complicated and she failed to understand: she smiled and nodded, murmuring that the ladder was indeed an ingenious one. Her husband, briskly businesslike in a herring-bone suit, became a director of the step-ladder company on the day before the company ran into financial difficulties and was obliged to cease all production.
‘Your father could help,’ he murmured, having imparted to her the unfortunate news, but her father, when invited to save the step-ladder firm, closed his eyes in boredom.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, rather miserably, feeling she had failed to come up to scratch as a wife. He said it didn’t matter, and a few days later he told her he’d become a vending-machine operator. He would have an area, he said, in which he would daily visit schools and swimming-pools, launderettes, factories, offices, wherever the company’s vending-machines were sited. He would examine the machines to see that they were in good trim and would fill them full of powdered coffee and powdered milk and a form of tea, and minerals and biscuits and chocolate. She thought the work odd for an ex-army officer, but she did not say so. Instead, she listened while he told her that there was an expanding market for vending-machines, and that in the end they would make a considerable amount of money. His voice went on, quoting percentages and conversion rates. She was knitting him a blue pullover at the time. He held his arms up while she fitted it about his chest; she nodded while he spoke.
Then her father died and left her a sum of money.
‘We could buy a country house,’ her husband said, ‘and open it up as a smart little hotel.’ She agreed that that would be nice. She felt that perhaps neither of them was qualified to run an hotel, but it didn’t seem worth making a fuss about that, especially since her husband had, without qualifications, joined a step-ladder firm and then, equally unskilled, had gone into the vending-machine business. In fact, their abilities as hoteliers were never put to the test because all of a sudden her husband had a better idea. Idling one evening in a saloon bar, he dropped into conversation with a man who was in a state of depression because his son appeared to be a dunce.
‘If I was starting again,’ said the man, ‘I’d go into the cramming business. My God, you could coin it.’ The man talked on, speaking of parents like himself who couldn’t hold their heads up because their children’s poor performances in the Common Entrance examination deprived them of an association with one of the great public schools of England. The next day Mrs Digby-Hunter’s husband scrutinized bound volumes of the Common Entrance examination papers.
‘A small boarding-school,’ he later said to her, ‘for temporarily backward boys; we might do quite nicely.’ Mrs Digby-Hunter, who did not immediately take to the notion of being surrounded day and night by temporarily backward boys, said that the idea sounded an interesting one. ‘There’s a place for sale in Gloucestershire,’ her husband said.
The school, begun as a small one, remained so because, as her husband explained, any school of this nature must be small. The turnover in boys was rapid, and it soon became part of the educational policy of Milton Grange to accept not more than twenty boys at any one time, the wisdom of which was reflected in results that parents and headmasters agreed were remarkable: the sons who had idled at the back of their preparatory school classrooms passed into the great public schools of England, and their parents paid the high fees of Milton Grange most gratefully.
At Milton Grange, part ivy-clad, turreted and baronial, Mrs Digby-Hunter was happy. She did not understand the ins and outs of the Common Entrance examination, for her province was the kitchen and the dormitories, but certainly life at Milton Grange as the headmaster’s wife was much more like it than occupying half the ground floor of a semi-detached villa in Croydon, as the wife of a vending-machine operator.