The Bachelor Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Stella Gibbons

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter The Last

  Copyright

  About the Book

  In St Alberics, Hertfordshire, stands a newly built family home: Sunglades. Its seven rooms house Kenneth and Constance Fielding, middle-aged bachelor and spinster, along with Kenneth’s old flame, an industrious Balkan exile, a young economist and the Fieldings’ raffish father. Together they attempt to create a rural idyll precariously close to the remains of blitzed London.

  About the Author

  Stella Gibbons was born in London in 1902. She went to the North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College, London. She then spent ten years working for various newspapers, including the Evening Standard. Stella Gibbons is the author of twenty-five novels, three volumes of short stories and four volumes of poetry. Her first publication was a book of poems, The Mountain Beast (1930), and her first novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932) won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize in 1933. Amongst her works are Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm (1940), Westwood (1946), Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (1959) and Starlight (1967). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. In 1933 she married the actor and singer Allan Webb. They had one daughter. Stella Gibbons died in 1989.

  ALSO BY STELLA GIBBONS

  Cold Comfort Farm

  Bassett

  Enbury Heath

  Nightingale Wood

  My American

  Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm

  The Rich House

  Ticky

  Westwood

  The Matchmaker

  Conference at Cold Comfort Farm

  Here Be Dragons

  White Sand and Grey Sand

  The Charmers

  Starlight

  TO BRENDA BENNETT AND STELLA CROW

  1917

  1944

  STELLA GIBBONS

  The Bachelor

  ‘… and we have no right to cut people

  out for old bachelors’

  Leonora, Maria Edgeworth

  ‘An admirable German writer – you shall see,

  my dear, that I have no prejudices against good

  German writers … says that ‘Love is like the

  morning shadows, which diminish as the day

  advances; but friendship is like the shadows of

  evening, which increase even till the setting of the sun’

  Leonora, Maria Edgeworth

  CHAPTER 1

  IN SPRING, THE mountains that isolate the tiny country of Bairamia from the rest of Europe look down upon an expanse of rose-colour, ethereal and pale, that fills a wide valley. It seems too solid to be cloud, yet when there is a high wind it moves with a slow dreamy motion, disclosing narrow green paths winding through the delicate pink. A delicious smell, fresh yet luxurious, comes up on the wind to soften the brown rocks and brilliant little flowers of the heights, and the tourist says with satisfaction—That must be the blossom in the Vale of Apricots.

  The fruit farms in this valley are made of massive whitewashed stones with slits cut in them to take a rifle, and are built around a central courtyard. The inner walls are covered with espaliered peaches or apricots, for the Bairamians, whose only hobbies used to be fruit-growing and fighting, liked to have the one near at hand while they were engaged in the other, and in the old days they used to be buried in those courtyards, just as they fell, with the fruit blossom that had been shaken down in the battle scattered over their thick white linen clothes and fair heads.

  But after the First World War things gradually got quieter, even in a remote little country that has no communication with the rest of the world except through the mountain passes by which it sends fruit down into Turkey and Greece; and Bairamia began to progress. It bought some rolling-stock and other commodities from Great Britain, and shortly afterwards the most famous newspaper in the world patted it on the head in a second leader, recalling that its sons had ever espoused the cause of Liberty and quoting that stanza dubiously attributed to Lord Byron by the small part of the British public whose reaction to Bairamia was something more than “Apricots”:

  Farewell, Bairamia, land of smiling maids

  Shapely and small, Yet valiant as their sires,

  Farewell, ye snowy heights and fruitful glades

  Where Nature smiles on all Man’s soft desires!

  Fair Freedom lies in chains in wider lands

  But on thy rocks unconquered yet she stands.

  Far o’er the darkling wave though I may be

  Thy vales, Bairamia, keep some part of me!

  The leader reminded its readers that relations between Great Britain and Bairamia (population, 700,000) had never been interrupted by their going to war with each other, and that on more than one historic occasion Great Britain had been of some assistance to Bairamia when her national liberties were threatened. After a reference to the increased prosperity which the establishment of the British naval base on the island of Santa Cipriana had inevitably brought to the easterly mountain hamlets of Bairamia, the leader concluded by expressing the hope that relations between Great Britain and Bairamia would continue to be as happy in the future as they had been in the past. And Bairamia, for twenty years or so, continued to get better.

  But the worst of a rich little country getting better is that other countries, which are neither little nor rich and are getting worse, begin to notice it; and so it came about that on a fine morning in the late nineteen-thirties Bairamia, which had just concluded a most satisfactory trade agreement with the British Government, and had nearly decided to buy two more aeroplanes for its air force, and was making up its mind that this time it really would bring in a Bill making education both compulsory and free—Bairamia, before it had time to ask anyone for help, woke up one morning to find itself taken over.

  A lovely day was beginning in the Vale of Apricots, and the chickens were walking round the whitewashed walls of one of the biggest fruit farms, pecking the ground for grains and lamenting quietly to themselves. At first they had been frightened by the noise of the tanks and lorries full of soldiers going by, but they had got used to it after a while, and their breakfast had been scattered for them as usual, and a minute ago one of the girls had come out with the carpet and arranged it in the sunniest place, just as it was arranged every morning; and so, although the tanks were still grinding past (they used to be great fighters, these 700,000 Bairamians and you never knew) the chickens were comforted.

  Presently an old man came quickly and lightly out into the sunshine, and took off his shoes and knelt down on the carpet and lifted his face, with closed eyes, to t
he east. The sunlight warmed his brown skin and made his thin silver beard glitter and the red and blue and yellow embroideries on his white tunic glow again. He waited. The faint smell of dewy petals, mixed with the smell of hot petrol, blew into his nose. He was listening, trying to hear the sound of the prayer bell above the rattling of the tanks and the loud slow roaring of forty aeroplanes that were now crossing the valley at a great height in the white blue sky; but he could hear nothing save these sounds and, underneath them, the talking of the chickens, and after a little while he bowed towards the east, opened his eyes, and began to put on his shoes.

  At once there came an excited chattering, rather like that of the chickens but fiercer, from the gate of the farmhouse, and he turned quickly round.

  Seven or eight females, some of them hardly more than infants and others wearing the box-like linen hat of a Bairamian grandmother, were clustered just inside the massive stone gateway, peering at him. Their small slender bodies and white clothes sewn thickly with patterns in brilliant cotton, their little brown faces and ashen fair hair, gave them all a look of belonging to one family that was increased by their angry, excited expression. The smallest girl, aged about six, was clasping to her heart a tin labelled Carter’s Finest Home-grown Peas.

  “The prayer bell has not sounded!”

  “The dogs have shot the holy man!”

  “Shall we go to the mountains, father?”

  “Death to the Italian dogs!”

  “Where are the English?”

  The last question (which was to be asked a good many times in varying tones throughout the length and breadth of Europe during the next few years) was ignored by the old man, who got up from the mat and advanced upon his womenfolk.

  “No, we shall not go to the mountains. We shall stay here and work as usual. Thou, Yania, and Djura and Yilg, return into the house and spin and make the curd cakes, and you others, go out and slay the useless young buds on the peaches as though nothing had happened. And thou, granddaughter Medora, put away that thing with the sharp edges that may wound thine inexperienced hands. Have I not forbidden thee to take presents from the English sailors?”

  “I have taken no present from the English sailors, dear and venerable grandfather Gyges,” retorted Medora in a sturdy pipe, stepping out from the group in her full white trousers and little jacket sewn with yellow thread, “I bought this beautiful silver thing. I found it among the grass where English sailors had been making a feast, and I asked (I was alone, for thou and the dear and venerable grandmother Fayet were sleeping and Aunt Yania was, as ever, making a letter to Aunt Vartouhi) and I asked and said, ‘Brave and respected English sailors, is it permitted that I have this beautiful thing?’ and one of the sailors made signs” (she began to gabble, as the old man made an impatient movement as if to dismiss her) “that if I would kiss him I might have it. So, he having shown me a shiny picture of one of my own age and sex wearing the clothes of the English, I consented to kiss him and he gave me——”

  “Peace, peace. Thou hast done no wrong. Go with Yania now. Yilg, bring the pipe.”

  “—this beautiful thing, all stained with green, which I washed——” She had only time to make the bow that Bairamian children make to their elders with hands upon the heart, before Yania, a plump girl with plaited hair decorated with coins, whisked her away through the gate.

  A woman slowly detached herself from the group and came forward and seated herself upon the carpets, and presently the old man sat down beside her, resting his arm on one that had been rolled into a pillow.

  They watched the passing lorries in silence. One or two of the soldiers waved to them and they raised their hands in salute, smiling politely. Only when a truck went by full of soldiers who shouted and waved branches of peach blossom the old man clenched his hands and muttered.

  “Peace. They have worked in factories and they do not know,” said the woman calmly, but her eyes were not calm.

  “A kiss is not a present,” suddenly said Medora’s clear little voice from a window just above their heads; she was continuing the argument with her mother in the house. “And I hold the English sailors in my heart, as do all our people.”

  “Eat thy porridge and be silent, kisser of the English.”

  “Gyges, my husband, what will happen to our country now?” asked the woman presently. She had been beautiful, and now the severe national cap with its white embroidery seemed a part of her face (where beauty was changed, not destroyed), rather than an extraneous headdress.

  “The English will drive them out,” answered the old man, beginning to draw at the Turkish pipe the girl Yilg had arranged for him. “They came in 1742, and the English drove them out. They came in 1813, and the English drove them out. They did not come in 1914 because in those days they and the English were fighting on the same side, but now they have come again and, as it happened before, the English will drive them out.”

  “But the English are not at war with them.”

  “Who can tell what is in the heart of that strange race? Perhaps even now they prepare in secret. And as long as our country lies opposite to the great place of ships at Santa Cipriana, so long will the English smile upon us. That is not the kindness of their hearts, for, as I have said, who knows what is in the hearts of the English? No, it is geography, and geography, unlike the heart of man, does not change.”

  She nodded, and they continued to sit in silence, watching the sunlight growing in strength and radiance along the avenues of black trees with pink and white petals. The paths had tiny red anemones growing in their brilliant green grass.

  “We could poison the crop?” she suggested presently. “They did that in 1813.”

  He shook his head.

  “The enemy were not so strong in those days, and it was easier to take to the mountains and live there: there were no aeroplanes then to search out the smoke of our fires. No, we can do nothing until the English come.”

  The last of the tanks was grinding along the road to Ser, the capital town. Somewhere up among the mountains there was gunfire, and presently five aeroplanes raced across the sky towards the sound.

  The woman was muttering angrily.

  “I have five strong daughters, and one has married and become a coward, and one you have sent away, and you say ‘wait—wait till the English come’! In the old days I would have led them up into the mountains, the three who are left, and crept down at night to stab the Italian dogs. It was better in the old days.”

  “In the old days there was no music from Istanbul. Thou lovest thy music that dances along the air.”

  She nodded, smiling suddenly. Bairamians smile often and are the politest race in Europe.

  “Truly, I love that. It is like magic. I remember the Feast of the Fruit when I was a little maid, younger than Medora, and as thou knowest, there was magic at that time. But it was poor magic beside that music that dances along the air, like a witch set free from her peach stone and singing.”

  Three single heavy thuds came from the mountains, and the echoes rolled.

  The old man nodded. “Now, honoured queen of my bed and mother of my daughters, the heavy days are upon us and our country. We must smile, and work, and the Christian dog with the corrupt heart will take the fruit from our trees and the joy from our hearts. But God is good. Blessed be His Name. Will He not send the English at last to save us? and did He not put the thought in my heart, a moon ago, to send Vartouhi to England?”

  CHAPTER 2

  CHARITY BEGINS AT home, but it is often more convenient to exercise it upon foreigners.

  Miss Constance Fielding, of Sunglades, Treme, near St. Alberics, in Hertfordshire, found that it was one thing to keep open house for any educated and internationally minded Indian or European who might care to stay there before the Nazi War, but quite another thing to give hospitality to a mother and two little girls who had been bombed out of Hackney.

  “And I cannot do it again, Kenneth,” she said to her brother as they sat togethe
r at dinner on the first evening after the Rigbys (the raids on London having practically ceased) had gone back to Hackney. “It was a grave mistake ever to undertake it. I should have followed my intuition.”

  Kenneth Fielding, a tall red-faced man in the late forties wearing Home Guard uniform, instantly thought of somebody else who had an intuition, but he did not laugh, nor did he want to. It was as if jokes at his sister’s expense came up silently into his mind like that race of fishes which has lived for so long in the dark that it is blind. Up they came, met the barrier of his admiration for his sister, and down they sank again.

  “It was not a mere distaste for the task, which some short-sighted people might have called selfish,” pursued Miss Fielding, carefully packing a fork with Spam, lettuce, beetroot and watercress. “It was a definite warning; exactly the feeling I have when someone in the house is going to be ill.”

  “I thought at the time it would be too much for you, old girl, with all your other work and everything.”

  Miss Fielding finished packing the fork and insinuated it into her mouth before she answered, and then she said: “As it is, one thing and one thing only emerges clearly from the experiment. It must never happen again.”

  “We must see that it doesn’t,” he said vigorously. He smiled at her, then glanced round the room. “Gosh, isn’t it quiet!”

  Miss Fielding’s eyelids trembled, but she nodded. “Very pleasantly so.”

  It was quiet; and the room looked pretty, with the reflections of crystal glasses and jugs dancing on the ceiling, and the summer evening sunlight, and the sudden vividness of the reds and blues and feathery green in many vases of flowers. It had light green paint and yellow walls and the furniture was of pale oak. Miss Fielding would not have dark colours in the house, holding that they encouraged the Evil Principle and dust. There were some pictures on the walls of people swirling about in bluey-green draperies with circles of stars round their heads. The window at the end of the long room looked over a very large and perfectly kept lawn and some beds blazing with all the proper flowers for the time of year, which was late July.