A Christmas Proposal

They drove on presently into Buckinghamshire, still keeping to the country roads. It was obvious that the doctor knew where he was going. Bertha stopped herself from asking him; it might spoil whatever surprise he had in store for them.

It was almost noon when they came upon a small village—a compact gathering of Tudor cottages with a church overlooking them from the brow of a low hill.

Bertha peered and said, ‘Oh, this is delightful. Where are we?’

‘This is Wing—’

‘Isn’t there a hotel?’ asked Clare. ‘We’re not going to stop here, are we?’ She had spoken sharply. ‘It’s a bit primitive, isn’t it?’ She saw his lifted eyebrows. ‘Well, no, not primitive, perhaps, but you know what I mean, Oliver. Or is there one of those country-house restaurants tucked away out of sight?’

He only smiled and turned the car through an open wrought-iron gate. The drive was short, and at its end was a house—not a grand house, one might call it a gentleman’s residence—sitting squarely amidst trees and shrubs with a wide lawn before it edged by flowerbeds. Bertha, examining it from the car, thought that it must be Georgian, with its Palladian door with a pediment above, its many paned windows and tall chimneystacks.

It wasn’t just a lovely old house, it was a home; there were long windows, tubs of japonica on either side of the door, the bare branches of Virginia creeper rioting over its walls and, watching them from a wrought-iron sill above a hooded bay window, a majestic cat with a thick orange coat. Bertha saw all this as Clare got out, the latter happy now at the sight of a house worthy of her attention and intent on making up for her pettishness.

‘I suppose we are to lunch here?’ she asked as the doctor opened Bertha’s door and she and Freddie tumbled out.

His ‘yes’ was noncommittal.

‘It isn’t a hotel, is it?’ asked Bertha. ‘It’s someone’s home. It’s quite beautiful.’

‘I’m glad you like it, Bertha. It is my home. My mother will be delighted to have you both as her guests for lunch.’

‘Yours?’ queried Clare eagerly. ‘As well as your flat in town? I suppose your mother will live here until you want it for yourself—when you marry?’ She gave him one of her most charming smiles, which he ignored.

‘Your mother doesn’t mind?’ asked Bertha. ‘If we are unexpected…’

‘You’re not. I phoned her yesterday. She is glad to welcome you—she is sometimes a little lonely since my father died.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ Bertha’s plain face was full of sympathy.

‘Thank you. Shall we go indoors?’

The house door opened under his hand and he ushered them into the wide hall with its oak floor and marble-topped console table flanked by cane and walnut chairs. There was a leather-covered armchair in one corner too, the repository of a variety of coats, jackets, walking sticks, dog leads and old straw hats, giving the rather austere grandeur of the hall a pleasantly lived-in look. The doctor led the way past the oak staircase with its wrought-iron balustrade at the back of the hall and opened a small door.

‘Mother will be in the garden,’ he observed. ‘We can go through the kitchen.’

The kitchen was large with a vast dresser loaded with china against one wall, an Aga stove and a scrubbed table ringed by Windsor chairs at its centre. Two women looked up as they went in.

‘Master Oliver, good morning to you, sir—and the two young ladies.’

The speaker was short and stout and wrapped around by a very white apron. The doctor crossed the room and kissed her cheek.

‘Meg, how nice to see you again.’ He looked across at the second woman, who was a little younger and had a severe expression. ‘And Dora—you’re both well? Good. Clare, Bertha—this is Meg, our cook, and Dora, who runs the house.’

Clare nodded and said, ‘hello,’ but Bertha smiled and shook hands.

‘What a heavenly kitchen.’ Her lovely eyes were sparkling with pleasure. ‘It’s a kind of haven…’ She blushed because she had said something silly, but Meg and Dora were smiling.

‘That it is, miss—specially now in the winter of an evening. Many a time Mr Oliver’s popped in here to beg a slice of dripping toast.’

He smiled. ‘Meg, you are making my mouth water. We had better go and find my mother. We’ll see you before we go.’

Clare had stood apart, tapping a foot impatiently, but as they went through the door into the garden beyond she slipped an arm through the doctor’s.

‘I love your home,’ she told him, ‘and your lovely old-fashioned servants.’

‘They are our friends as well, Clare. They have been with us for as long as I can remember.’

The garden behind the house was large and rambling, with narrow paths between the flowerbeds and flowering shrubs. Freddie rushed ahead, and they heard his barking echoed by a shrill yapping.

‘My mother will be in the greenhouses.’ The doctor had disengaged his arm from Clare’s in order to lead the way, and presently they went through a ram-shackle door in a high brick wall and saw the greenhouses to one side of the kitchen garden.

Bertha, lingering here and there to look at neatly tended borders and shrubs, saw that Clare’s high heels were making heavy weather of the earth paths. Her clothes were exquisite, but here, in this country garden, they didn’t look right. Bertha glanced down at her own person and had to admit that her own outfit didn’t look right either. She hoped that the doctor’s mother wasn’t a follower of fashion like her stepmother.

She had no need to worry; the lady who came to meet them as the doctor opened the greenhouse door was wearing a fine wool skirt stained with earth and with bits of greenery caught up in it, and her blouse, pure silk and beautifully made, was almost covered by a misshapen cardigan of beige cashmere as stained as the skirt. She was wearing wellies and thick gardening gloves and looked, thought Bertha, exactly as the doctor’s mother should look.

She wasn’t quite sure what she meant by this, it was something that she couldn’t put into words, but she knew instinctively that this elderly lady with her plain face and sweet expression was all that she would have wanted if her own mother had lived.

‘My dear.’ Mrs Hay-Smythe lifted up her face for her son’s kiss. ‘How lovely to see you—and these are the girls who had such an unpleasant experience the other day?’

She held out a hand, the glove pulled off. ‘I’m delighted to meet you. You must tell me all about it, presently—I live such a quiet life here that I’m all agog to hear the details.’

‘Oh, it was nothing, Mrs Hay-Smythe,’ said Clare. ‘I’m sure there are many more people braver than I. It is so kind of Oliver to bring us; I had no idea that he had such a beautiful home.’

Mrs Hay-Smythe looked a little taken aback, but she smiled and said, ‘Well, yes, we’re very happy to live here.’

She turned to Bertha. ‘And you are Bertha?’ Her smile widened and her blue eyes smiled too, never once so much as glancing at the yellow jersey. ‘Forgive me that I am so untidy, but there is always work to do in the greenhouse. We’ll go indoors and have a drink. Oliver will look after you while I tidy myself.’

They wandered back to the house—Clare ahead with the doctor, his mother coming slowly with Bertha, stopping to describe the bushes and flowers that would bloom in the spring as they went, Freddie and her small border terrier beside them.

‘You are fond of gardening?’ she wanted to know.

‘Well, we live in a townhouse, you know. There’s a gardener, and he comes once a week to see to the garden—but he doesn’t grow things, just comes and digs up whatever’s there and then plants the next lot. That’s not really gardening. I’d love to have a packet of seeds and grow flowers, but I—I don’t have much time.’

Mrs Hay-Smythe, who knew all about Bertha, nodded sympathetically. ‘I expect one day you’ll get the opportunity—when you marry, you know.’

‘I don’t really expect to marry,’ said Bertha matter-of-factly. ‘I don’t meet many people and I’m plain.’ She sounded quite cheerful and her hostess smiled.

‘Well, as to that, I’m plain, my dear, and I was a middle daughter of six living in a remote vicarage. And that, I may tell you, was quite a handicap.’

They both laughed and Clare, standing waiting for them with the doctor, frowned. Just like Bertha to worm her way into their hostess’s good books, she thought. Well, she would soon see about that.

As they went into the house she edged her way towards Mrs Hay-Smythe. ‘This is such a lovely house. I do hope there will be time for you to take me round before we go back.’ She remembered that that would leave Bertha with Oliver, which would never do. ‘Bertha too, of course…’

Mrs Hay-Smythe had manners as beautiful as her son’s. ‘I shall be delighted. But now I must go and change. Oliver, give the girls a drink, will you? I’ll be ten minutes or so. We mustn’t keep Meg waiting.’

It seemed to Bertha that the doctor was perfectly content to listen to Clare’s chatter as she drank her gin and lime, and his well-mannered attempts to draw her into the conversation merely increased her shyness. So silly, she reflected, sipping her sherry, because when I’m with him and there’s no one else there I’m perfectly normal.

Mrs Hay-Smythe came back presently, wearing a black and white dress, which, while being elegant, suited her age. A pity, thought Bertha, still wrapped in thought, that her stepmother didn’t dress in a similar manner, instead of forcing herself into clothes more suitable to a woman of half her age. She was getting very mean and unkind, she reflected.

Lunch eaten in a lovely panelled room with an oval table and a massive sideboard of mahogany, matching shield-back chairs and a number of portraits in heavy gilt frames on its walls, was simple but beautifully cooked: miniature onion tarts decorated with olives and strips of anchovy, grilled trout with a pepper sauce and a green salad, followed by orange cream soufflés.

Bertha ate with unselfconscious pleasure and a good appetite and listened resignedly to Clare tell her hostess as she picked daintily at her food that she adored French cooking.

‘We have a chef who cooks the most delicious food.’ She gave one of her little laughs. ‘I’m so fussy, I’m afraid. But I adore lobster, don’t you? And those little tartlets with caviare…’

Mrs Hay-Smythe smiled and offered Bertha a second helping. Bertha, pink with embarrassment, accepted. So did the doctor and his mother, so that Clare was left to sit and look at her plate while the three of them ate unhurriedly.

They had coffee in the conservatory and soon the doctor said, ‘We have a family pet at the bottom of the garden. Nellie the donkey. She enjoys visitors and Freddie is devoted to her. Shall we stroll down to see her?’

He smiled at Bertha’s eager face and Freddie was already on his feet when Clare said quickly, ‘Oh, but we are to see the house. I’m longing to go all over it.’

‘In that case,’ said Mrs Hay-Smythe in a decisive voice, ‘you go on ahead to Nellie, Oliver, and take Bertha with you, and I’ll take Clare to see a little of the house.’ When Clare would have protested that perhaps, after all, she would rather see the donkey, Mrs Hay-Smythe said crisply, ‘No, no, I mustn’t disappoint you. We can join the others very shortly.’

She whisked Clare indoors and the doctor stood up. ‘Come along, Bertha. We’ll go to the kitchen and get a carrot…’

Meg and Dora were loading the dishwasher, and the gentle clatter of crockery made a pleasant background for the loud tick-tock of the kitchen clock and the faint strains of the radio. There was a tabby cat before the Aga, and the cat with the orange coat was sitting on the window-sill.

‘Carrots?’ said Meg. ‘For that donkey of yours, Master Oliver? Pampered, that’s what she is.’ She smiled broadly at Bertha. ‘Not but what she’s an old pet, when all’s said and done.’

Dora had gone to fetch the carrots and the doctor was sitting on the kitchen table eating a slice of the cake that was presumably for tea.

‘I enjoyed my lunch,’ said Bertha awkwardly. ‘You must be a marvellous cook, Meg.’

‘Lor’ bless you, miss, anyone can cook who puts their mind to it.’ But Meg looked pleased all the same.

The donkey was in a small orchard at the bottom of the large garden. She was an elderly beast who was pleased to see them; she ate the carrots and then trotted around a bit in a dignified way with a delighted Freddie.

The doctor, leaning on the gate to the orchard, looked sideways at Bertha. She was happy, her face full of contentment. She was happily oblivious of her startling outfit too—which was even more startling in the gentle surroundings.

Conscious that he was looking at her, she turned her head and their eyes met.

Good gracious, thought Bertha, I feel as if I’ve known him all my life, that I’ve been waiting for him…

Clare’s voice broke the fragile thread which had been spun between them. ‘There you are. Is this the donkey? Oliver, you do have a lovely house—your really ought to marry and share it with someone.’

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