Ngaio Marsh - A Surfeit of Lampreys

She had no idea, of course, that for Roberta the invitation broke like a fabulous rocket, that her mother, when Lady Charles Lamprey telephoned, was thrown into a frenzy of sewing that lasted until two o’clock in the morning, that Roberta’s father bicycled four miles before eight o’clock in order to leave at Te Moana a strange parcel, a letter of instruction on behaviour, and five shillings to give the housemaid. Frid always sympathized when Roberta said her people were poor, as though they were all in the same boat, but the poverty of the Lampreys, as Roberta was to discover, was a queer and baffling condition understood by nobody, not even their creditors, and certainly not by poor Lord Charles with his eyeglass, his smile, and his vagueness.

It was almost dark when the car arrived at Te Moana. Roberta was made shy by the discovery of Lady Charles in the front seat beside the chauffeur, and of Henry, dark and exquisite, in the back one. But the family charm was equal to more than the awkwardness of a child of fourteen. Roberta yielded to it in three minutes and it held her captive ever afterwards.

The thirty-mile drive up to the mountains was like a dream. Afterwards, Roberta remembered that they all sang an old song about building a stairway to Paradise, and that she felt as though she floated up the stairway as she sang. The surface of the road changed from tar to shingle, stones banged against the underneath of the car, the foothills came closer and salutary drifts of mountain air were blown in at the window. It was quite dark when they began to climb the winding outer drive of Deepacres. Roberta smelt native bush, cold mountain water and wet loam. The car stopped, and Henry, groaning, got out and opened the gate. That was to be Roberta’s clearest picture of Henry, struggling with the gate, screwing up his face in the glare of the headlights. The drive up to Deepacres seemed very long indeed. When at last they came out on a wide gravelled platform before the house, something of Roberta’s shyness returned.

Long after the Lampreys had gone to England Roberta would sometimes dream that she returned to Deepacres. It was always at night. In her dream the door stood open, the light streamed down the steps. Baskett was in the entrance with a young footman whose name Roberta, in her dreams, had forgotten. The smell of blue-gum fires, of the oil that Lady Charles burnt in the drawing-room, and of cabbage-tree bloom would come out through the open door to greet her. There, in the drawing-room, as on that first night, she would see the family. Patch and Mike had been allowed to stay up; the twins, Stephen and Colin, that week arrived from England, were collapsed in armchairs. Henry lay on the hearthrug with his shining head propped against his mother’s knee. Lord Charles would be gently amused at something he had been reading in a month-old Spectator . Always he put it down out of politeness to Roberta. The beginning of the dream never varied, or the feeling of enchantment.

The Lampreys appeared, on that first night, to scintillate with polish, and the most entrancing worldly-wisdom. Their family jokes seemed then the very quintessence of wit. When she grew up Roberta had still to remind herself that the Lampreys were funny but, with the exception of Henry, not witty. Perhaps they were too kind to be wits. Their jokes depended too much on the inconsequent family manner to survive quotation. But on that first night Roberta was rapturously uncritical. In retrospect she saw them as a very young family. Henry, the eldest, was eighteen. The twins, removed from Eton during the last crisis, were sixteen, Frid fourteen, Patricia ten, and little Michael was four. Lady Charles – Roberta never could remember when she first began to call her Charlot – was thirty-seven, and it was her birthday. Her husband had given her the wonderful dressing-case that appeared later, in the first financial crisis after Roberta met them. There were many parcels arrived that day from England, and Lady Charles opened them in a vague pleased manner, saying of each one that it was ‘great fun’, or ‘charming’, and exclaiming from time to time: ‘How kind of Aunt M.!’ ‘How kind of George!’ ‘How kind of the Gabriels!’ The Gabriels had sent her a bracelet and she looked up from the cards and said: ‘Charlie, it’s from both of them. They must have patched it up.’

‘The bracelet, darling?’ asked Henry.

‘No, the quarrel. Charlie, I suppose that, after all, Violet can’t be going to divorce him.’

‘They’ll have six odious sons, Imogen’ said Lord Charles, ‘and I shall never, never have any money. How she can put up with Gabriel! Of course she’s mad.’

‘I understand Gabriel had her locked up in a nursing-home last year, but evidently she’s loose again.’

‘Gabriel’s our uncle,’ explained Henry, smiling at Roberta. ‘He’s a revolting man.’

‘I don’t think he’s so bad,’ murmured Lady Charles, trying on the bracelet.

‘Mummy, he’s the End ,’ said Frid, and the twins groaned in unison from the sofa. ‘The End ,’ they said and Colin added: ‘Last, loathsomest, lousiest, execrable, apart.’

‘Doesn’t scan,’ said Frid.

‘Mummy,’ asked Patch who was under the piano with Mike, ‘who’s lousy? Is it Uncle Gabriel?’

‘Not really, darling,’ said Lady Charles, who had opened another parcel. ‘Oh, Charlie, look ! It’s from Auntie Kit. She’s knitted it herself, of course. What can it be?’

‘Dear Aunt Kit!’ said Henry. And to Roberta: ‘She wears buttoned-up boots and talks in a whisper.’

‘She’s Mummy’s second cousin and Daddy’s aunt. Mummy and Daddy are relations in a weird sort of way,’ said Frid.

‘Which may explain many things,’ added Henry, looking hard at Frid.

‘Once,’ said Colin, ‘Aunt Kit got locked up in a railway lavatory for sixteen hours because nobody could hear her whispering: “Let me out, if you please, let me out!”’

‘And of course she was too polite to hammer or kick,’ added Stephen.

Patch burst out laughing and Mike, too little to know why, broke into a charming baby’s laugh to keep her company.

‘It’s a hat,’ said Lady Charles and put it on the top of her head.

‘It’s a tea-cosy,’ said Frid. ‘How common of Auntie Kit.’

Nanny came in. She was the quintessence of all nannies, opinionated, faithful, illogical, exasperating, and admirable. She stood just inside the door and said:

‘Good evening, m’lady. Patricia, Michael. Come along.’

‘Oh Nanny,’ said Patch and Mike. ‘It’s not time. Oh Nanny !’

Lady Charles said: ‘Look what Lady Katherine has sent me, Nanny. It’s a hat.’

‘It’s a hot-water bottle cover, m’lady,’ said Nanny. ‘Patricia and Michael, say good night and come along.’

It was the first of many visits. Roberta spent the winter holidays at Deepacres and when the long summer holidays came she was there again. The affections of an only child of fourteen are as concentrated as they are vehement. All her life Roberta was to put her emotional eggs in one basket. At fourteen, with appalling simplicity, she gave her heart to the Lampreys. It was, however, not merely an attachment of adolescence. She never grew out of it, and though, when they met again after a long interval, she could look at them with detachment, she was unable to feel detached. She wanted no other friends. Their grandeur, and in their queer way the Lampreys were very grand for New Zealand, had little to do with their attraction for Roberta. If the crash that was so often averted had ever fallen upon them they would have carried their glamour into some tumbledown house in England or New Zealand, and Roberta would still have adored them.