by Ursula Bloom
He turned out of Sussex Place, and on into Onslow Square where the central gardens were wearing the tattered dress of the coming autumn. Some children were playing on the lawn, whilst nurses, grouped together on an uncomfortable seat, were discussing the latest crisis news. Three removal vans were anchored at different doors, where the owners, shattered by the prospect of imminent bombardment of the capital, were making a get-away. It struck Hugo that the big old houses, with their large porticoes and columns, and their long straight windows, were looking lonely.
As he walked along, he remembered that he had been born at number thirty-six. It was on the far side of the square, facing the sunshine, and he walked round to it. When he got there he saw that it was empty. A broken Venetian blind was tapping at the window, he could hear it as he approached, and it sounded much like someone tapping to beckon him in. It was quite ghostly.
He saw that a charwoman was sweeping down the steps. She was a queer figure, bunched up into strange clothes with a toque on top, and a funny little pair of black button boots on her feet. She must have seen him, because as he came to a standstill, eyeing the house, she turned from her work and looked at him in a friendly way, the tin ear-rings in her ears clicking invitingly.
She said, ‘It’s a big old house, isn’t it? One of them awkward houses, all steps and that. Make a lot of work, them houses! People won’t have them these days, you can’t get rid of them nohow. Half the square’s to let.’
Hugo agreed. ‘I was looking at it because it happens to be the house that I was born in,’ he remarked.
That interested her. Layings-out and lyings-in were very close to her heart.
‘There now, fancy that! Born in this house! Oh well, we all change a lot, I suppose, don’t we?’
‘I suppose we do.’
She leaned confidentially on her broom. ‘Would you like to slip inside and have a quick look round? I’ve got the key and I shan’t tell on you. I’ll be sweeping up here for the next ten minutes, and maybe you’d like to see the room as you was born in for old times’ sake?’
‘I would like it very much.’
It was a large key, the kind of key that usually opens a church door, which she pulled out of a capacious pocket amongst the folds of her bunched-up dress.
‘Thank you so much,’ he said.
He knew directly he opened the door that the house had not been lived in for some time, because, although the day was warm with the mature September heat, the house itself struck cold. The hall was tessellated marble, black and white in a dazzle pattern, passing through an arch to where the steps beyond led down to the basement, and other stairs, far more ostentatious and fanciful, twisted upwards. There was an old-fashioned oriel of nice proportions at the corner, and the stairs, still climbing, curled onwards.
He went up them.
Suddenly he thought that once Marguerite had walked up these stairs, that here she must have pirouetted, and danced. She had lived here, she had loved here. He thought of her alert little feet, her laughter and her childishness. It seemed to him to become warmer as he went higher; as though, with the opening of the big old front door, summer had slipped into the place with him.
He turned the corner, and now he could see the landing, with a finely carved cornice, and the pale marks on the walls with their dirty surround, where big oil paintings had once hung.
As he stepped from the top stair on to the landing he had the sudden impression of laughter. As though a young girl laughed lightly. The impression went with him into the bedroom beyond.
He opened the door, which had stuck a little from disuse, and he saw that it was a big room, with shadowy corners, and a handsome carved marble mantelpiece. The dust showed up the carving as though in bas relief.
He could hear the sound of the Venetian blind tapping against the window frame, only now it was much louder, and sounded like a clock ticking, a big old clock of the kind they used in Victorian days. He thought that he must be growing fanciful, and wanted to draw a rein on himself, but his thoughts refused to be reined, and took on the impression that the laughter had come much nearer.
Suddenly he knew that a girl was here. She must have followed him indoors, and up the stairs, and have come into the room with him.
He turned. Marguerite was exactly as he had thought she would be. Not very tall, and slimly proportioned with the childish slenderness of the teens. Her hands were clasped before her as she stood, a little ghost of a girl, with her hair plaited round her head, and blue eyes that laughed at his seriousness. He liked the pale pink print of her frock, with its crisp cream ruffles. She looked at him.
‘I’m sorry if I frightened you,’ she said.
‘Not at all. I thought that the house was empty.’
Shelaughed quite happily.‘You never thought that really. You know you didn’t.’
‘The charwoman let me in. I was born here and thought that I’d like to see it. I was born here twenty-three years ago.’
‘I know. Of course I know. You were born in this room.’
He thought that it must be a dream; if it were, it was a pleasant one. The hot September sun must have turned him drowsy, and imagination had run away with him. The man waiting for him in Thurloe Square could go on waiting, he told himself, and now he did not care if he outstayed the ten minutes which had been prescribed by the charwoman in her little black button boots.
‘You’re Marguerite, aren’t you?’ he said.
She nodded emphatically, like a child. ‘I’ve waited so long. Sometimes I thought that you’d forget about me, and never come here at all. The people who lived here afterwards were not very nice people. I didn’t like them. But I kept remembering that I’d got to stay here to wait for you. I’d got to explain something. One day you’d come, oh, I am so glad that it is to-day.’
‘You waited for me?’ he asked, and he knew that this was most certainly the most curious experience of his whole life. Yet so natural. Quite ordinary. That was perhaps the most curious part of it.
‘Yes, didn’t you know?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I didn’t know.’
She began talking quickly. ‘There isn’t much time, and there’s such a lot that I want to show you. It all happened here in this room. I came here when we were first married. Quickly. We’ll see it all.’
She put out a hand and touched him; he was surprised to find that her touch was softly warm; she pulled him into a corner, and when he glanced from the window again, it was no longer an empty bare room, but furnished. The furniture might be ostentatious and clumsily ugly, not at all the sort of thing that he would have expected, but he saw that it was a bedroom with a double bed, and an ottoman sofa, and big easy chairs standing either side of the fire on an over-patterned carpet.
‘Good heavens!’ he said.
‘Look! Look quickly!’ she directed him.
The door opened and he saw her coming in, with quick, impetuous little steps; she wore a brown travelling suit with a funny little hat crammed on to her head. She pirouetted before a man, whom he hardly recognised as being his father. James Blair was so much younger, so much more erect, but he had the same sullen eyes, and the same fleshy mouth.
He was saying, ‘Let the servants bring up the luggage, Marguerite.’
‘But my bag? The little bag that Aunt Emily gave me. I want to carry my little bag myself, because it’s got all my treasures in it.’
James Blair’s voice was quite harsh. Hugo knew that tone too well. ‘Nonsense, Marguerite, don’t be silly. It looks so bad to keep servants and do the carrying yourself. Put it down at once. You can’t bring country manners to London, you’ve got to learn how to behave, coming from that God-forsaken hole.’
He was just the same. He had not altered one atom with the years; Jessie Minch had been quite right. Hugo heard the girl give a gasp, then she spoke again.
‘I thought that my room was to be pale pink? At the rectory it was pale pink; I loved it so much.’
And again he hea
rd the harsh voice. ‘Naturally, but now that you’re married pale pink is unsuitable. Married women don’t have pale pink bedrooms.’
She made a little sound, rather like a gasp, and he knew that there were tears behind it.
‘Marguerite, don’t be ridiculous. Even if you are only eighteen, you are married now. For heaven’s sake be grown up. Here’s Janet with your luggage.’
It seemed that the impression of a shadow crossed the threshold; it was not a lovely shadow like Marguerite’s, but buxom and stout. How absurd the large white apron looked tied over the tight black dress! How idiotic the high perched cap! This is a play, thought Hugo suddenly. He had the feeling that he had been precipitated into something entirely unreal, something that he could never have imagined.
This was no dream. It was a series of impressions that she had been waiting to show him. His own world had faded back into the unreal, and that which he believed to be unreal had suddenly become fantastically real.
‘He frightened me so much,’ said Marguerite beside him, and her voice was strained. ‘He was always so important, so hard, and I suppose I’d been spoilt, but nobody had ever been hard on me before.’
Hugo remembered the rectory at Sandingford, and old Mr. Hancock who could never have been hard on anyone. He had been so gentle that the contrast between this house and the rectory must have been horrible to the girl.
There came a little squeak from the girl sitting on the ottoman, and looking for all the world like a character in a play.
‘Janet’s brought the tea up here. Look, there’s an angel cake! I do so love angel cake.’ Then Janet’s voice. ‘Cook said as how she’d never known a young lady who didn’t like angel cake. That’s what cook said.’
Then the door closing again.
He saw that his father was alone with her, and that she was glancing at him shyly, and that her voice had become afraid. ‘Now I’ve made you angry. I don’t know what I do, but you always get angry with me. I’m sorry.’
‘I’m an old-fashioned man, Marguerite, and my house runs in an old-fashioned manner. I’m never familiar with my servants, they only take advantage of it. In future you’ll understand that.’
And her reply, in a voice with a wobble in it. ‘Very well, James.’
She called him James!
It struck Hugo as being so queer that anyone should call his father James. He turned, and the room seemed to be empty again, bare and ghostly, with the tapping blind, and the sunlight streaking through the slats that sagged with age.
‘He was so hard,’ said the girl beside him.
‘Why did you ever marry him?’
‘I don’t know. It’s all so long ago, and so difficult to look back and see the truth. Daddy was a dreadful muddler, the poor lamb! It was terrible seeing him always so worried, and at that time the tradespeople were being beastly to us. He couldn’t sleep. James was very kind, he said that he’d put Daddy’s affairs in order, and he did. He put everything in order for us. We had a lovely wedding too, and I wore sprigged muslin. They said that there had never been a bride in sprigged muslin before. It was so pretty,’ and she laughed again.
She would never grow up of course. Life had never given her the chance to outstrip the teens, she was the teens for ever.
Hugo could not analyse what she really was. Ghost or memory? Wife or mother?
‘What are you?’ he asked.
‘I? I’m just something that waited for you. You’re part of me, and I’m part of you. Otherwise we couldn’t have been talking this way, because I’m not really of your world. If it weren’t for that strong tie we couldn’t be together, and you wouldn’t see the pictures I’ve wanted you to see.’
‘I’m glad that you waited for me.’
She had fast hold of his hand.
‘Listen, Hugo, because we have not got too much time. Something happened. James went away, there was trouble in the tea plantations in Ceylon, and they wanted a firm man, someone who believed in discipline, to go out there. James went.’ She began to giggle infectiously. ‘He was the very man of course, yet he was so angry when I laughed. He sailed in the March of 1914.’
‘You went to your father at Sandingford?’
‘No. Oh no. I couldn’t go to him. He had come up here to see me, but James wouldn’t have him in. He sent him away. He thought that there was something horrid about the rectory, and he did not want me to see Daddy again. It was horrible. I had the feeling that perhaps Daddy understood, that perhaps he didn’t let it hurt him like … like it hurt me …’
‘What did you do by yourself when my father was away?’ asked Hugo.
‘He came to me,’ she said gently.
‘He came to you?’
‘Yes, his name was Richard.’
Light lit the room again, and suddenly it was furnished, it looked gayer, there were flowers in it, bright flowers, and he could smell the heady scent of expensive perfume. The light of the July day was very gold, and he saw her going towards the balcony, and knew that she started. A man spoke to her.
‘I beg your pardon.’ It was a pleasant voice, resonant and deep, and although it spoke commandingly it did not command.
‘You startled me,’ she said, ‘I didn’t see that you were there.’
‘I wanted to speak to you yesterday.’
‘I know,’ and then the laugh that was so much part of her. ‘I did know really. I just pretended.’
‘I don’t suppose that I really startled you?’ he suggested.
She coloured and said, ‘No, perhaps not.’ They were coming into the room together, and Hugo could see that the man was about his own height, tall and dark. They were very much alike, he and this man; they had the same hair that curled, the same long head and finely intelligent eyes, the same movement of the hands. He stared as though he could not believe that someone so much like himself could walk into the room. Her fingers on his wrist held him back.
The two were talking. They were making arrangements to go riding in the park. He saw that she was laughing excitedly, rising and falling on the tips of her toes. A girl who appeared to be so much younger than himself, a girl obviously captivating to the man before her.
The voice at his elbow spoke again.
‘It was all very wrong; it ought never to have happened, and I know it now. But somehow I’d been loved so much at the rectory, I’d been so happy there, and in this house I wasn’t loved, and I wasn’t happy. When I married James, I thought he’d understand me, but he didn’t. Everything had gone wrong. Then Richard came.’
‘Richard?’
‘He was a naval officer. On leave, you know, his people lived next door and our balconies met.’
A snatch of conversation came to Hugo from across the room and he knew that the two were both sitting together on the ottoman sofa, and he could hear their voices.
‘You know that I love you,’ Richard was saying.
‘Please don’t let’s be serious. Life is always so serious, and I’m tired of it.’
‘Not serious, but we’ve got to be sensible. Darling, you are so sweet, and I have the feeling that you’d hate a divorce?’
Just as though chill came into the room. The first hint of a September frost, cut clear and white across the vivid green of summer.
‘Oh, I would hate a divorce. It would be wicked.’
‘But, my sweet, marriage like this is wicked.’
‘Yes, Richard, I know, but I’m frightened. You won’t leave me, will you? I’m terrified that your ship may send for you. Sometimes I wish that you weren’t a sailor.’
‘But I wouldn’t be anything else for all the world. I’ve always loved the sea. I loved it as a little boy. Do you know that I used to lie under a tree in the garden and imagine that it was a ship? Funny, wasn’t it?’
The voices dimmed. Hugo turned to the girl and she had hold of his hands, she held them firmly.
‘Yes, I know,’ she said quickly. ‘You did the same thing. Sometimes they let me see you. I could always
get close to you when you were lying under the tree, because then you were so like him. I could always feel the real you, and try to soothe you. That was, when they would let me.’
‘They?’ he said. ‘Who are they?’
She put her finger to her lips to invoke silence, and she giggled like a naughty child. ‘I mustn’t tell you. They wouldn’t like it. Listen to this. He had to go away after all, it was that other war, you know.’
‘That’s the only war we’ve had in my lifetime.’
‘I know, but living as I do, just a shadow, I see things before and behind. His ship sent for him just before James came back. He never saw James and wasn’t able to arrange anything about my future; he said that the war was just a silly scare, and that there would be time later on. Later on, you know. And there’s never time later on.’
The room dimmed for a moment, and he saw the man coming across the balcony. Now he was in uniform, dark blue, with a couple of gold hoops round his wrists; he came into the room as though he possessed it, and he took her into his arms, as though she were really his.
‘I love you so much, darling. I adore you. I’ll come back, I promise.’
‘If there is a war, Richard, there won’t be of course, but if there is ‒’
‘It’ll be all over by Christmas. I promise you that I’ll be back to fix things up the moment that I can. The very first moment.’
Then suddenly her voice aged. Autumn touched it. She saw ahead a future that was stripped and stark, and she was tragic. ‘You mean that this is the end?’
‘No, darling, of course I don’t. It’s the beginning. Oh, I wish to God that it hadn’t happened this way. But you mustn’t forget that I love you. Don’t forget that I’ll be coming back.’
Now the room was real. It was no longer something fairy-like and phantom. Pain had come into it. The street noises were the only ones that filled it; a cart rolling away round the corner into Sussex Place, a newsboy calling.
‘So,’ she said, and she wasn’t laughing.
The boy’s voice came crudely into the room. ‘H.M.S. Cressy sunk. H.M.S. Cressy down.’
Slowly she spoke. ‘It was his ship. No, he never came back again. James came, and he knew that there was something wrong with me. I’d altered so much. Then, one day I fainted, it was just over there, and when I came to I was lying on the bed, and he was standing over me.’