Rhododendron Pie

By Margery Sharp

It was indeed very difficult for the Laventie children not to be a little priggish.

Ann Laventie, the youngest of three children in a long line of anti-social Sussex gentry, doesn't quite fit the mould of her intellectual, elegant, ultra-modern siblings Dick, an artist, and Elizabeth, a high-brow writer. Their father is scholarly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dean Street Press
• Release date: Jan 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781913527624

Margery Sharp

Margery Sharp is renowned for her sparkling wit and insight into human nature, both of which are liberally displayed in her critically acclaimed social comedies of class and manners. Born in Yorkshire, England, Sharp wrote pieces for Punch magazine after attending college and art school. In 1930, she published her first novel, Rhododendron Pie, and in 1938, married Maj. Geoffrey Castle. Sharp wrote twenty-six novels, three of which—Britannia Mews, Cluny Brown, and The Nutmeg Tree—were made into feature films, and fourteen children’s books, including The Rescuers, which was adapted into two Disney animated films.

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Introduction

Of the writing of her first novel, Rhododendron Pie (1930), Margery Sharp commented, with remarkable sang-froid, ‘I allowed myself a month for it because that seemed a suitable time to spend over a book’. She had determined from an early age to become a self-supporting author and over a period of about fifty years was to publish twenty-two novels for adults, thirteen stories for children, four plays, two mysteries, and numerous short stories, delighting readers old and young on both sides of the Atlantic.

Born with, as one interviewer testified, ‘wit and a profound common sense’, Clara Margery Melita Sharp (1905-1991) was the youngest of the three daughters of John Henry Sharp (1865-1953) and his wife, Clara Ellen (1866-1946). Both parents came from families of Sheffield artisans and romance had flourished, although it was only in 1890 that they married, after John Sharp had moved to London and passed the Civil Service entrance examination as a 2nd division clerk. The education he had received at Sheffield’s Brunswick Wesleyan School had enabled him to prevail against the competition, which, for such a desirable position, was fierce. Margery’s mother, to whom Rhododendron Pie is dedicated, was by the age of fifteen already working as a book-keeper, probably in her father’s silversmithing workshop. By 1901 John Sharp was clerking in the War Office, perhaps in a department dealing with Britain’s garrison in Malta, as this might explain why Margery was given the rather exotic third name of ‘Melita’ (the personification of Malta).

Malta became a reality for the Sharps when from 1912 to 1913 John was seconded to the island. His family accompanied him and while there Margery attended Sliema’s Chiswick House High School, a recently founded ‘establishment for Protestant young ladies’. Over 50 years later she set part of her novel Sun in Scorpio (1965) in Malta, rejoicing in the Mediterranean sunlight which made everything sparkle, contrasting it with the dull suburb to which her characters returned., where ‘everything dripped’.  In due course the Sharps, too, arrived back in suburban London, to the Streatham house in which Margery’s parents were to live for the rest of their lives. 

From 1914 to 1923 Margery received a good academic education at Streatham Hill High School (now Streatham and Clapham High School) although family financial difficulties meant she was unable to proceed to university and, instead, worked for a year as a shorthand-typist in the City of London, ‘with a firm that dealt with asphalt’. In a later interview (Daily Independent, 16 September 1937) she is quoted as saying, ‘I never regretted that year in business as it gave me a contact with the world of affairs’.  However, Margery had not given up hope of university and, with an improvement in the Sharps’ financial position, her former headmistress wrote to the principal of Bedford College, a woman-only college of the University of London, to promote her case, noting ‘She has very marked literary ability and when she left school two years ago I was most anxious she should get the benefit of university training’. Margery eventually graduated in 1928 with an Honours degree in French, the subject chosen ‘just because she liked going to France’. Indeed, no reader of Margery Sharp can fail to notice her Francophile tendency.

During her time at university Margery began writing verses and short stories and after graduation was selected to join two other young women on a debating tour of American universities. As a reporter commented, ‘Miss Sharp is apparently going to provide the light relief in the debates’, quoting her as saying, ‘I would rather tell a funny story than talk about statistics’. Articles she wrote from the US for the Evening Standard, describing her experiences on tour, doubtless helped defray the expenses of the coming year, her first as a full-time author.

For on her return, living at 25 Craven Road, Paddington, in a flat with friends, at least one of whom she had known from her student days, she began earning her living, writing numerous short stories for magazines such as the Windsor, the Royal, Nash’s, and the Graphic, and was able to devote herself to her first novel, published by Chatto and Windus in 1930.  Delightfully droll, Rhododendron Pie contrasts the two worlds of which Margery Sharp had experience. One the Times Literary Supplement (30 January 1930) described as belonging to ‘those inhabitants of the modern world who carry a magnificent undergraduate irresponsibility into the affairs of everyday life’; the other was the world of clerks, or, at least one particular clerk, for whom the heroine cannot but feel a regard, despite her intellectually bohemian upbringing. In this debut novel art did, in one small instance, imitate life for Margery places her heroine, when visiting London, in a flat the rooms of which stretch over an archway, just as did her own. It is, presumably, her own nightly experience she evokes as she describes how Ann Laventie is kept awake by ‘the continual coming and going of taxis under the bed’. Rhododendron Pie was a financial and critical success, selling 1500 copies and garnering good reviews. The comment in the Illustrated London News review (1 March 1930) that ‘her epigrams are excellent’ must surely have pleased the tyro author, who had polished them until worthy of Laventie lips, while the Yorkshire Post (22 January 1930) judged Rhododendron Pie ‘a first novel of quite unusual charm, pointedly and gracefully written, and whimsically human’. 

Margery continued living in the Paddington flat as her literary career developed, becoming a favourite on both sides of the Atlantic. Real life took a somewhat novelettish turn in April 1938 when she was cited as the co-respondent in the divorce of Geoffrey Lloyd Castle, an aeronautical engineer and, later, author of two works of science fiction. At that time publicity such as this could have been harmful, and she was out of the country when the news broke. Later in the year she spent some months in New York where she and Geoffrey were married, with the actor Robert Morley and Blanche Gregory, Margery’s US literary agent and lifelong friend, as witnesses. 

During the Second World War, with Geoffrey on active service, Margery worked in army education, while continuing to publish novels. The couple took a set of rooms (B6) in the Albany on Piccadilly, where they were tended by a live-in housekeeper, and from the early 1950s also had a Suffolk home, Observatory Cottage, on Crag Path, Aldeburgh. Of this writer Ronald Blythe later reminisced, ‘I would glance up at its little balcony late of an evening, and there she would be, elegant with her husband Major Castle and a glass of wine beside her, playing chess to the roar of the North Sea, framed in lamplight, secure in her publishers.’

Late in life Margery Sharp, while still producing adult novels, achieved considerable success as a children’s author, in 1977 receiving the accolade of the Disney treatment when several stories in her ‘Miss Bianca’ series  became the basis of the film The Rescuers. She ended her days in Aldeburgh, dying on 14 March 1991, just a year after Geoffrey.

Elizabeth Crawford

PROLOGUE

I

The Laventies’ garden was unusual in Sussex, being planted French-fashion with green-barked limes, eight rows of eight trees at a distance of six feet. The shady grass between them was dappled in due season with crocus, daffodil and wild hyacinth, but they had no successors. All the other flowers were in the lower garden, where Ann’s tenth birthday party was just drawing to a rapturous close.

The young Gayfords were even then being let out of the great gate in the west wall, a gate almost as wide as the garden itself and surviving from the days before the stables had gone to make way for rhododendrons. It was of iron, man-wrought, with a beautiful design of fruit and foliage, and Mr. Laventie used it as his back door.

With the departure of the guests a change came over the garden: the Laventie family settled back into itself with a breath of content. They had been exquisitely, lavishly hospitable; but when Dick pulled to the gate and leant back against it it was as though he barred out everything that could mar the perfection of the hour.

‘Now!’ said Elizabeth.

They were charming, the young Laventies: Dick with his Gainsborough head and arrogant slenderness, tall Elizabeth and dreamy brown-eyed Ann. She was much shorter than the others, though Dick was only three and Elizabeth five years older, and the fat pigtail hanging over each shoulder made her seem a very little girl indeed. These pigtails were a continual source of mortification, for since she had to pull them in front to plait they would never hang properly down her back: and she knew her sister considered her big enough to manage. It may have been this that gave Ann’s eyebrows their faint wistful curve and made her a little pale in the hot summer days. Just then, however, she was quite pink with excitement, for the great moment of her birthday was approaching.

‘Now!’ said Elizabeth.

Dick and his father, who could be heard moving about behind the rhododendrons, reappeared carrying a small table covered with a shining linen cloth, the centre of which was mysteriously upheaved by some large round object underneath. This was set down by Mrs. Laventie’s long chair, a white panel against her orange coverlet; for to her fell the high honour of removing the napery and revealing, in all its toothsome beauty—Ann’s Birthday Pie.

Now the Pie was a peculiarly Laventie custom, dating from the year when Elizabeth, aged six, had demanded a cherry pie for her birthday treat. A magnificent confection was accordingly prepared: but no sooner had she cut it than Elizabeth, to the dismay of her parents, had burst into angry tears: and when she was a little comforted it transpired that she had expected the pie to contain not cherries, but heliotropes. However the confusion had arisen in her infant mind, it was now firmly rooted. The fact that flowers were inedible did not concern her: Elizabeth was determined that her birthday pie should contain them or nothing. It was at such a moment that Mr. Laventie’s quality showed itself. With instant resource he swiftly removed the crust, disposed of the cherries in a convenient parterre, and crammed the dish with a mass of sweet-smelling heliotrope. His daughter was bidden try again, and this time true delight lay under the pie-crust. Elizabeth stared a moment in solemn rapture before burying her nose (already slightly aquiline) in their fragrance; then lifting her dark head exclaimed softly: Oh brave mirac’lous blue! She was, as has been remarked, only six years old at the time.

From Elizabeth the custom spread to the other two, and three times a year the flower pies appeared at Whitenights. Dick had cowslips in his, yellow and downy; and Ann—but Ann’s is just about to be cut.

The knife slips cleanly into the shortbread crust. Ann’s face above it is flushed and tense with excitement, for she more than any of them retains the pristine thrill of wonder and curiosity. The knife slides in again, and from the triangular opening a great bunch of pink rhododendron flowers surge out like coral foam.

Lovely! says Ann, scarcely above a breath.

She cuts four more slices, and the Laventies eat them daintily off little glass plates. Elizabeth lets her sugar fall on the grass purposely, it looks so pretty powdering the green.

II

When the sun had gone down behind the great gate, Mr. Laventie wheeled his wife indoors. Seven years before she had been thrown from her horse, and after eighteen months of operations, treatments and extreme pain it was officially recognised that she would never walk again.

During that period her hair had faded to a lifeless grey, so that at forty-one she looked years older than her husband. Richard Laventie’s thick brindled hair and fine profile were wearing remarkably well, there was no doubt of it, and if his shoulders drooped a little it was more to give an illusion of height than anything else. He had been much distressed by his wife’s misfortune, and from time to time presented her with a new coverlet. His taste was exquisite, and in after years the lovely things were to serve for Ann as a sort of calendar of her childhood. There was however a secondary meaning to them which that childhood ignored: only Mrs. Laventie knew what particular spot in her Richard’s conscience was salved by the present tangerine brocade.

At the edge of the lime garden Martha was waiting to help lift her mistress up the stone steps. She was a heavy, rather ugly women, and made to seem heavier and uglier than ever by contrast with Whitenights’ harmonious elegance; but her devotion to Mrs. Laventie amply compensated for any lack of poise as a parlourmaid. There was a curious bond, an alliance almost, between the two women, for which Mr. Laventie found it difficult to account. He puzzled over it now and again, seeking for their common element; it did not occur to him that they might both feel a little out of place.

As they entered his wife’s sitting-room he realised, for the hundredth time, how badly it needed redecorating. Twenty years of fastidious selection and adjustment had brought Whitenights to something very near perfection: it made no pretensions, of course, to being a show place, offering instead that individual beauty which sometimes results when half a dozen furniture-buying generations culminate in a man of taste. Such was Mr. Laventie; and he handled his motley legacy with sure intelligence, selling the Victorian and retaining the Queen Anne, retaining too the faded hangings and bad water-colours which made the character of the house. Only this room had defeated him. There were possibilities, too, in its three tall windows and deep alcove, but as things were one could hardly see the proportions for the furniture. The place was cumbered with small tables, corner cupboards, sofas and rocking-chairs; in the alcove stood—of all things!—a small organ; under each window a spindling plush-covered bench (the kind known as rout seats) gradually splayed beneath a pile of assorted rubbish. Where it all came from was a mystery. Even Martha, who knew that the room took twice as long to dust as any other in the house, could have offered no explanation.

‘This room,’ said Mr. Laventie apologetically, ‘could be made charming. It reproaches me.’

‘I like it like this,’ replied his wife.

‘You are too unselfish, my dear.’ His eye rested distastefully on a small sewing machine. ‘We might paper the walls in parchment colour keeping the woodwork cream as it is—and bring down some of the stuff from the top landing. It struck me only yesterday that the tallboy was wasted up there.’

Miss Laventie looked slowly round and shook her head.

‘I like it like this,’ she repeated. ‘After all, I have the rest of the house as well. And if we are going to spend the money . . . there are those rugs you wanted for the drawing-room.’

‘Oh, money!’ No one of his neighbours ever guessed that Mr. Laventie’s income was only just sufficient to permit of complete idleness. ‘The point is, whether we are to allow your sitting-room to remain the least attractive spot in the house.’

‘But it gets the sun all morning. And besides . . . if I don’t mind . . .’

To have accepted defeat gracefully is always a consolation, and that consolation was Richard Laventie’s as he closed the door gently behind him. In spite of his cultivated unpopularity, in spite even of a fifty thousand dowry, people often wondered what he could have seen in her.

It was a relief to be back among the pale walls and sparse furniture of the entrance hall. It had looked very different twenty-five years ago, when the death of his father had brought him posting back from Paris—from Sens, rather: it was like his family to have insisted on a provincial university . . . not that he’d wasted much time there. He recalled with a smile the round flushed face of his landlady’s daughter, come all the way to Paris to find him, the cable clutched in one sticky hand. She had saved him an infinity of trouble, had Marie-Clotilde: a good girl, considering he had stayed only a fortnight in that smug little town. He had been twenty-five, and was now fifty; but those four years of bright cafés and doubtful studios were far more vivid than anything that had happened since. He had travelled, of course, and sometimes amusingly; but the world was getting old.

Standing there in the warm shadow Mr. Laventie fell into a reverie that began on Montparnasse and ended somewhere even further from his Sussex heritage. . . . For the moment he had forgotten to stoop, and his slightly pointed ears and peaked eyebrows gave him an alert whimsical look very different from his customary nonchalance. He had an odd appearance of having strayed in from somewhere else, of being unfamiliar in this house which he had made almost with his hands; and Martha, coming downstairs with a lamp, took him for a stranger until he turned and asked for a fresh siphon of soda to be brought to the study.

III

Meanwhile Dick and Elizabeth were playing with Ann in the garden because it was her birthday. Games bored them, and they had already enjoyed an afternoon of French cricket with the Gayfords: which showed how very good their manners were to each other. Ann felt something of this and was soon tired.

‘It’s John’s birthday next week,’ remarked Dick gloomily, dropping on the grass. John was the second eldest Gayford, between Peggy and Nick.

‘How do you know?’

‘He told me. They’re going to have a picnic.’

‘I hate picnics,’ stated Elizabeth definitely. She was remarkably tall, angular and brown as a Norman page boy, and when she said she hated anything it was not a figure of speech.

‘Foul. It will be all over young Gayfords eating too much and then being sick. How many are there?’

‘Only five,’ said Ann.

‘Must be more than that. There are three in the Wolf Cubs.’

‘John isn’t, John’s a Scout. And there’s Peggy and Joyce. That makes five.’

‘Well, there always seem a lot more,’ persisted Dick. He