Parlour Four Page 16

  NAPIER INTO FFINCH

  ‘An extraordinary thing,’ Mrs Danbury said to her husband as he came in from walking the dogs. ‘The Napiers have changed their name, and have sent round a kind of circular to let everybody know. There it is on the hall table. See for yourself. And such a silly name, too.’

  Colonel Danbury picked up the square of pasteboard.

  ‘It does seem a shade odd,’ he said.

  ‘Whereas “Napier” means something.’

  ‘Well, yes. There have been plenty of distinguished Napiers. Eminent soldiers and sailors galore – and with the man who invented logarithms thrown in. But the original associations of the name are not all that grand. It’s the kind of name that is taken from a fellow’s job. And originally French, I think. It merely means the man who looks after the table linen.’

  Since leaving the army, Colonel Danbury had devoted a good deal of time to picking up information in one casually elected field or another, and had even amused his friends by gaining a degree from the Open University. Mrs Danbury was not wholly in sympathy with these activities, and the fact showed itself now.

  ‘No doubt everything can be traced back to Noah’s Ark,’ she said. ‘But whatever the occupation of the first Napier, the name doesn’t sound simply silly, like this one. “Dicky-bird” would be no more ridiculous. And those two little effs. It’s like a stammer.’

  ‘Perhaps so, my dear, ffinch does look a trifle out of the way. But I seem to have come across something about it somewhere. Just let me think.’ And Colonel Danbury briefly thought – rather to the effect of a computer when it declares itself to be ‘searching’. ‘I have it!’ he then declared. ‘It goes back to mediaeval chappies in monasteries and places. Working on manuscripts in their scriptoriums or cells. They often indicated a capital letter by using two little ones, ffinch must originally have gained currency after some such fashion. It’s pedantic, you may say, rather than pretentious. A mere typographical oddity. But it looks as if somebody has written it into his will.’

  ‘You mean that the unfortunate Napiers have been constrained to change their name to ffinch because it has been made a condition of their coming into property?’

  ‘Almost certainly that kind of thing, I’d say. Old families do tend to get quirky about such matters.’

  ‘I never heard, Charles, of an old family of the name of ffinch.’

  ‘Fair enough. But the ffinches may have had nothing notable about them for centuries except substantial wealth. Sometimes, you know, the change required is merely an affair of adding one name to another, so that you get that double-barrelled effect – or even three or four names on a string. I was at school with a boy called Cave-Browne-Cave. Old families there, all right. But we used to call him Home-Sweet-Home. Bad form, of course, making a joke of a fellow’s name. But boys will be boys – or even louts at times.’

  ‘But here,’ Mrs Danbury said, ‘it’s a matter of people being required to change their name – and to something that looks extremely foolish.’

  ‘Just that, almost without a doubt. Probably they haven’t much relished it, but have decided the game is worth the candle.’

  ‘Property will be involved?’ Mrs Danbury’s interest sharpened as she returned to this question.

  ‘Quite a dollop, at a guess. It would take a pretty penny to make me go about as a ffinch.’ Charles Danbury paused to laugh robustly at this notion. ‘But no doubt every man has his price, as the adage tells us.’

  ‘But doesn’t the law have something to say about such ridiculous goings on?’

  ‘I think not. There’s nothing against the public interest in making such a stipulation in a will. If the chap affected wants to do things in a formal way, he makes the change by something called deed-poll. But if he just wants to call himself something else as a matter of mere whim, there’s nothing to prevent him from doing it on the nail. Or so I’ve rather gathered.’

  ‘It seems to me, Charles, an awkward kind of thing, any way on. But perhaps the modern habit of being on Christian-name terms with almost everybody may make it less so. Just how widely, I wonder, have the Napiers sent round those little chits? To the entire county for a start, I suppose. And to the parsons and doctors and dentists and people like that, no doubt. But what about the cottagers, and the man and his wife in the pub? The Napiers have them all to that annual bun-fight in the park, and so must be considered as among their acquaintance. But “ffinch” will be a great puzzle to all those worthy people.’ Mrs Danbury paused, and then went off on another tack. ‘Everybody knows that the Napiers, in spite of their broad acres and so on, are dreadfully impoverished.’

  ‘Just like ourselves,’ Colonel Danbury said, and again laughed heartily. His own poverty was a topic on which he liked to discourse at large – and particularly when regaling friends to a substantial dinner. He was a wretchedly premature half-pay man, he would declare, with nothing to look forward to but an Old Age Pension in the middle distance.

  ‘So perhaps’—Mrs Danbury went on—’the wealth of the ffinches has come as a godsend to the Napiers, whether they like it or not.’

  ‘I’m sure I hope so, my dear – but it may be rather a ticklish affair at some deep level of the mind.’ Colonel Danbury was again ‘searching’. ‘In primitive societies there can be an obscure magic about one’s name, the anthropologists say. You don’t willingly grant your enemies access to it, because the knowledge would give them some power over you. Curious idea.’

  ‘I wonder just how much is involved?’ Mrs Danbury was uninterested in the anthropologists. ‘Is there any way of finding out?’

  ‘You might ring up the Hall, I suppose, remembering to ask for Mrs ffinch, and when Bella comes to the phone put the question to her straight.’

  ‘I hope that it will at least be enough to provide handsomely for their daughter.’ Mrs Danbury must have regarded her husband’s humorous suggestion as so feeble that it should be ignored. ‘Particularly as poor Jane Napier is, unhappily, so unattractive a young woman. So far as looks go, that is. She may be clever, or good at croquet, or something of that sort. We seldom see much of her.’

  ‘Jane ffinch, you ought to call her. I rather think the change of name will henceforth apply to the whole of the family. But I agree that Jane’s chance of a suitable husband will be much enhanced if there’s a substantial sum to settle on her. How like we still are to those people in what’s-his-name’s novels.’ Yet once again, Colonel Danbury had set his private computer to work. ‘Trollope,’ he said. ‘Anthony Trollope.’

  ‘Bother Trollope! And do you know, Charles? I’m rather wondering whether we ought at once to tell Nicholas about this new state of affairs at the Hall.’ Nicholas was the Danburys’ only son.

  ‘Why ever should we do that?’

  ‘Nicholas and Jane both live in London, although I think it’s without meeting very often. But there are always parties. It might embarrass both the young people if Nicholas were led up to Jane and told he was being introduced to Miss ffinch.’

  ‘I don’t quite see the force of that.’ Colonel Danbury cast a glance of what was something like suspicion at his wife. ‘The two of them know each other well enough. Here at home they’ve played tennis and so forth from time to time. They’d simply tell their hostess or whoever that they knew one another already. And then the girl would explain to the boy why she was now Jane ffinch. No embarrassment about it at all.’

  ‘I don’t know why you should go on calling Nicholas a boy, Charles. He’s a grown man, surely, although not a very successful one so far. Has it ever occurred to you that it’s high time he got married?’

  ‘Married! In our day, Dorothy, it was still felt that a young man ought not to propose marriage to a young woman until it was clear that he could provide an establishment for her. Very Victorian, and all that. But sound sense in it, all the same.’

  ‘Jane, just like Nicholas, is an only child. And we are agreed, I think, that the Napiers have made this idiotic change of name onl
y because doing so brings them some very large fortune.’

  ‘I don’t know that we are agreed on that “very large”. But let that be. The fact is that you see yourself in the role of a successfully scheming mama. You want to give Nicholas a head start in what may be called the ffinch stakes. Jane is due to come into money in a big way sooner or later. When that becomes generally known there will be no end of young men after her. And Nicholas, who hasn’t earned a penny for several years so far as we know, must get ahead of them. He pretty well has a duty that way. What’s-his-name again.’

  ‘Trollope.’

  ‘Yes, damn it, Trollope.’ It was almost in a bad temper that Colonel Danbury acknowledged this. But he regained equanimity at once. ‘Very well. Write and tell the boy. I’ve nothing against my own son – unless it’s his reluctance to have his hair cut. And success will come to him rapidly when it does come. I’ve seen it often enough on my own cabbage-patch. You run into an impudent subaltern, and the next day there he is on the General Staff. Whether he has married an heiress or not.’

  On this firm note Colonel Danbury – as he frequently did – gave way to his wife, and Nicholas was informed by letter of the new state of affairs at Hinton Hall. Hinton Hall was quite an imposing country house, and Napiers had lived in it for several generations, buying a little more land from time to time, and so coming to enjoy a kind of squirarchal status. This added to the oddity of their suddenly becoming ffinches. There was soon general agreement in the neighbourhood with the Danburys’ persuasion that some very considerable fortune must have been involved.

  Nicholas Danbury had been a reliable if not particularly studious schoolboy, who had gained coveted prestige by playing for the First Eleven in three successive summer terms. But on going up to Cambridge he had stopped playing cricket, and, perhaps as a consequence, had taken a surprisingly good degree. This properly gratified his father – who in his heart, however, would have preferred to see him scoring a century in the Varsity Match. Then Nicholas did something wholly unexpected and rather upsetting. He announced that he was ‘going to knock around for a bit’; made sure that his father would until further notice pay a monthly sum into his bank; and thereafter simply disappeared. Over a period of several years his parents received no more than occasional picture-postcards: some of them from Paris and others from New York. He then turned up again, and announced that he had become a painter.

  Mrs Danbury hadn’t at all known what to make of this, but was thankful to have her son restored to her on any terms. The colonel, although no very pronounced devotee of the arts, stood up for his son. Nicholas, he declared, was entitled to go his own way – and his own way proved to include a few longish periods in the family home: this, perhaps, at times when he was particularly hard up. (It was thus that he came to play tennis, or otherwise disport himself, with Jane Napier and other of the local girls.)

  Nicholas never painted during these fallow weeks, so that his parents had to make occasional journeys to London in order to glimpse the fruits of his labour. They were perplexing fruits. Whenever a human figure appeared in one of their son’s paintings it was either floating horizontally in space, like somebody in an elaborate conjuring trick, or else it was simply upside down. If Nicholas occasionally sold a picture he kept dark about it, and his parents came to believe that nothing of the sort ever happened. But again his father refused to admit himself as altogether disheartened by this lack of commercial success.

  ‘Remember,’ he asked his wife, ‘that affair I took on Art and National Culture? There was a bit in it about a johnny called Cézanne. French, of course. He made no impact at all on the picture market for quite some years, but he kept at it. He said that he reckoned to be the Primitive of a New Movement – and that was exactly how it turned out. You couldn’t buy a sizeable Cézanne now without something like a million pounds in your pocket. Perhaps Nicholas is the Primitive of a New Movement too.’

  ‘I expect he had money,’ Mrs Danbury said. ‘That Cézanne, I mean.’

  ‘I rather think he did inherit considerable wealth from his father.’

  ‘So there you are! Nicholas certainly won’t do that.’

  With this Colonel Danbury had to agree, although he didn’t at all relish having to do so. He liked to speak of himself as ‘keeping up with things’, but in fact there were numerous territories over which his mind moved only in a thoroughly old-fashioned way. It was grievous to him that an only son should have no expectation of at least some modest inheritance one day turning up on him.

  ‘This Jane Napier or ffinch,’ he said to his wife, ‘seems a clean-run girl enough. But I really know very little about her. What does she do with herself in London?’

  ‘I understand she’s the secretary to some magnate in a big business way, and thoroughly efficient at her job.’

  ‘A nine-to-five sort of person then. With a typewriter and so on.’

  ‘I believe it’s rather more elastic than that, so far as the hours go. And that she’s something of a power behind the scenes.’

  ‘I don’t much care for the sound of that, somehow. One has to think of compatibility, you know. On the one hand you have Nicholas, who’s an artist and good luck to him – but a bit vague about other things. And on the other you have a career-oriented girl who we think is due to come into considerable wealth in her own right. It all seems to me rather the wrong way round.’ Colonel Danbury paused for a moment before this somewhat elusive point. ‘You might get them to fall in love with each other, and all that. But they’d almost certainly develop a lifestyle that made Nicholas dependent on his wife pretty well for every five-pound note. For you couldn’t reasonably expect the flinches to make a settlement on our son, could you? It would be a completely topsy-turvy kind of thing. Rather like the way Nicholas is fond of painting people.’

  Producing this stroke of wit put Colonel Danbury in good humour, and he was content to rest on it. But he decided on some man-to-man chat with Nicholas when next the boy came home. His wife, he knew, would go to work circuitously and by dint of veiled hints and petty manoeuvres; she had said ‘Bother!’ (a thoroughly Trollopeian ejaculation) when he had mentioned Trollope, but it would be exactly in the manner of Trollope’s scheming mamas that she would attempt to nudge her son into what she had decided would be an advantageous marriage. The colonel himself had concluded after some reflection that it was indeed high time that Nicholas, despite his impecuniosity, got married, and he would advance the proposition to his son in a general way. But if Jane Napier’s name bobbed up as a result, he would not fail to say a word about the domestic pitfalls into which a young man might precipitate himself as a consequence of marrying into money. Of one thing he could be reasonably sure. A few years before, he had accidentally come upon his son kissing and tumbling a village girl in a barn. Withdrawing unobserved, he had experienced great relief at this solid evidence that there was nothing out of the way about the lad. Nicholas, within hail of thirty as he now was, could safely be presumed to possess some first-hand knowledge of the satisfactions to be obtained by getting between the sheets with a woman. That could be tacitly taken for granted in the man-to-man talk.

  ‘That was an odd piece of gossip you sent me about the Napiers,’ Nicholas Danbury said to his mother. Nicholas had come home at short notice for what he called a long week-end, and he produced this remark entirely casually as he sat down to his first dinner at the parental board.

  ‘Not exactly gossip, Nicholas. I don’t think that when I write to you I bore you by recounting anything like mere idle talk.’ As she said this, Mrs Danbury reflected that she had got rather out of the way of writing to her son at all frequently – perhaps because, when she did write, her letter seldom prompted a reply. And she was conscious that, in the letter she had written only a few days before, she had wrapped up her vital news about the Napiers in a certain amount of local chit-chat by way of what might be called camouflage. It wouldn’t do, she had felt, too hastily to disclose what she had in mind for
Nicholas. ‘There’s a certain mystery about the thing which it might amuse you to set about solving,’ she went on. ‘It’s your father’s guess that the Napiers have had to change their name in order to receive some rather large family bequest. But that’s pure speculation – and, of course, we can’t ourselves very well broach the subject with the senior Napiers. Rupert and Bella Napier may explain the matter in their own good time. But it has occurred to us that you might receive an explanation from Jane.’

  ‘From Jane,’ Nicholas repeated blankly. ‘Oh, Jane! Jane Jane tall as a crane.’

  ‘Whatever does that mean?’

  ‘It means nothing at all. It’s in a poem. Yes, I suppose Jane Napier must know what this change of names is about, ffinch, did you say? I’ll ask her if I happen to run into her. I do – from time to time.’

  ‘Clean-run girl,’ Colonel Danbury said, almost automatically. The expression, obscurely connected with salmon fishing, was a favourite with him and highly commendatory. ‘Jane hasn’t, I suppose, changed her name off her own bat?’

  ‘By getting married, you mean? I don’t at all know, but I think it’s unlikely. I saw her at a party the other day, and she didn’t seem to be hugging any lord and master. Come to think of it, she had that positively virgo intacta look. A ffinch, you might say, not yet fully fledged.’