Evenfield

by Ferguson,Rachel

  And nostalgia doesn’t even stop there, for the person who suffers from it in its acutest forms can with the greatest ease be homesick for places he has never seen, suffer awareness of reigns he has never lived through, their pace and flavour, their slowness, colour and tediums, and know to his undoing the feel of life as it was lived in more spacious, gracious days in certain of London’s streets and squares.

  There is in Lowndes Square at least one mansion whose daily life, if I may put it so, I can imaginatively remember, both, oddly enough, as mistress and servant. I have certainly sensed some service in Bruton Street, and driven home down Arlington Street to a house which is now a club, while I cannot walk along Wilton Street without being instantly afflicted by a sensation of children’s Christmas parties, knowing to the last detail that lapping warmth and safety which was the Victorian epoch – did not those very trees, chained and glittering with goodness and the lavish, emanate from the sentiment of the lonely Royal widow?

  And for every party I have known and never seen, for every great house in which I have been ageing grande dame and cook (I hope I satisfied here!) one pays: pays for goods one has never handled nor owned, suffers vicarious longings for the unpossessed and unpossessable, and comes close to tears that are dismayingly of the present century.

  And I am pretty sure all this is not re-incarnation, or second sight, but nothing more complicated than some mental affinity, a facet of universal memory, perhaps, of which we, of the company so sadly, delightfully doomed, are heirs.

  But it is futile to continue. Those who know will eternally know and those who don’t will continue not to understand. Their minds are like a pavement under a noonday sun, heedless of the shadow that is past and the shadow that is to come.

  3

  I have usually found that to get a thing down on paper robs it of its force at once, and all my life I have made a list of present worries or pleasures to come and crossed them off as they settled themselves, as one does the card or calendar people on one’s Christmas list. When system comes in at the door depression flies out of the window, or so I have found. Sometimes I come across an old overlooked worry-list. The items on one ran:

  1 Row with A.

  2 No letter from C.

  3 Tooth.

  4 Look for green overall again.

  5 No ideas for magazine story.

  6 What D said last week (Wed: 7th).

  7 People I ought to be dining.

  And I am harassed this time by occasional total failure to remember who the ‘C’ of the missing letter was or what the deuce ‘D’ had ‘said’, which only shows that if you sit tight long enough nothing matters at all, while I know that this particular brand of philosophy is no good and never will be to people like myself. One must live. And worrying is probably a part of the business and a sign that one is still in the swim! It is rather the same thing with old letters that you re-read. Like a rude, whispering couple who exclude you from the conversation, they indulge in allusions you can’t trace, hint at emotions you can’t recall, and make infuriating plans of the outcome of which your mind is a complete blank. ‘Who is this stranger hissing in a corner?’ one despairingly thinks, and it is oneself, as little as five years ago. And as for the letters dating further back, you get well-nigh to the stage of begging the correspondence to let you in on the conversation, to give you at that moment a little of the love expressed for you in the letter of which you are dimly jealous! You almost whimper, ‘It’s Barbara asking my best friend, in those days’, and it’s no good at all. The Barbara of the note excludes the Barbara who holds it in her hand (though you feel she would be miserably remorseful, eagerly, tenderly explanatory, if you did meet again). Meanwhile, you are left hiding a secret from yourself, and a most extraordinary and forlorn sensation it is.

  CHAPTER II

  1

  I SOMETIMES wondered at what time of year we first moved in to Evenfield. Was it when crocuses appeared sparsely round the rose-trees that bordered the lawn of the gravel drive and even cropped up (more sparsely) at the foot of that contraption like a small pillar-box with a grille’d glass window whose purpose baffles me to this hour and about which I refuse to enquire on the grounds that as I didn’t know in my peak-time of happiness I will not know at all lest I am disillusioned? Or did we move in in high summer when dust begins to settle on the pollarded limes in the avenue facing a turnip-field opposite which Evenfield is set? Somehow, this hardly seems likely because of the seaside holidays. Autumn, then? The time of dripping dahlias in that border by the greenhouse, and of green ‘cookers’ that thumped overnight from the apple-trees aligned at the bottom of the garden, of tipsy swathes of michaelmas daisies, of the premonitory smell of fireworks, and of hot toast rising to the nursery from the drawing-room where mother sat with Mrs. Field, fortifying herself, bless her, against an approaching assault upon the classics lest she become as static as the turnips over the road.

  When I was seven they were, I remember, ‘doing’ The Inferno, and I remember that I was seven because our current cat died two days later and so remained my senior by what sounded like a year by the skin of his teeth. On the other hand, the purport of the murmurings from the two women side by side on the sofa did not reach me for quite twenty years, by which time I had acquired a smattering of Italian myself, and fluked quite unintentionally upon the spoken line quoted in a modern novel, and realized with a shock what they had been at, and wondered if they liked it and felt quite certain they didn’t, but were simply using Dante as a stick with which to beat the mongrel dog that was suburban existence.

  If we moved in in the winter, it could have been in one of those pea-soup fogs that crept up the Thames Valley and with which I shall eternally associate the real (dried) pea soup that appeared under the light of incandescents upon the dining-room luncheon table – a generous brew, redolent of bacon bones, studded with sippets and sprinkled with mint, and followed invariably on Mondays by the cold sirloin and a rather clammy, morbid combination of beetroot salad and hot baked potatoes in their jackets.

  And, on the day we moved in, what were those people doing whom we came to know so well? That again (like the old letters) is a for ever hidden secret. Was old Stiles, the jobbing gardener, going off to his midday dinner? Did he wonder as he stumped along what the Morants were going to be like as employers, if there were children, and if so whether they would trample his onion beds and pull his radishes untimely? Was dear Mrs. Field of the Dante readings returning to her house, Cumptons, from a morning’s shopping? What, if it came to that, was our cook preparing for us, and what her comments upon kitchen, larder, scullery and pantry? What her reactions to a coal-cellar the size of a room that opened off her sink, to her outside w.c. or to that appalling open wooden dustbin into which the men had to climb to remove the rubbish, which could never be cleaned out properly, and in the summer smelt to heaven? For not only can I never glean from family or friend the hour of our arrival, but not a soul could vouch for the time of year that the house became ours. This has always struck me as quite incredible of my family. The only consolation is that I could not possibly have appreciated the wet dahlias or the yellow fogs, the dusty lime-trees and the red suns (or red currants) whenever it was that the front gate opened for the very first time to admit us all, because I was a baby in arms – in whose arms I can’t discover. But I wonder if that house, viewing the procession advancing up the drive or (surely?) being conveyed in station flys, glanced with prophetic interest upon the probably angry bundle that was myself, sensing in the very mortar of its bricks that here, in point of fact, Came The Bride ...

  Two facts about the settling-in process are on record (two! out of thousands now lost for ever!). Item: (1) that the furniture vans were all behind schedule and the men still about the rooms when we got there and had to be regaled with tea out of mantelpiece vases, since the cups were still unwashed and largely unpacked, and (2) that Mrs. Stortford, another dear who was to be auntie S to us for the rest of her life, said t
o mother, ‘Let’s get baby’s chair into the nursery, then it’ll begin to look like home’.

  My poor little mother! To her, neither that river-town of Addison nor Evenfield ever became anything but a prolonged and abominable phase. For she was born to the life of the fashionable London square, the dinner party and the striped awning, the before-dinner pageant of Hyde Park, the chiffon sunshade and the house-party. And she sold out for a voice, a turn of phrase, a different mental outlook.

  The wreckage that attraction can achieve! She could have married an archbishop, an ambassador, a doctor who was Physician Extraordinary to Queen Victoria, and I often wonder, if she had, what difference it would have made to us. Should I have become a Deaconess in what Louisa Alcott described as ‘a mortified bonnet’, or a hospital Matron, a Continental vamp, or merely a successful London hostess who furthered the careers of promising young attachés? Or should I have, somehow, contrived to remain myself through all the hazard of maternal mating? For of course mother was the dominant partner in the final Morant marriage as women so often are, without being remotely aggressive in the process. And in living for our happiness at Evenfield, out of inverted apology for it, I think, now, that she lost touch with her own contempts and, in my case, succeeded so well in endearing the house and garden to me that she let me in unwittingly for all I was to endure later.

  2

  One begins to catch up with the life of a house at about nine years old; from then on, memory becomes roughly consecutive. I can’t mentally bridge the gap between complete illiteracy and being, overnight as it seemed, able to read: on the other hand I can capture two impressions of being in my perambulator and a fantastic one of being in a two-foot-by-one bath before the fire. And there was the afternoon on which one tied one’s first bow and struck one’s first match (both in mother’s room by the dressing-table), and the adventure that was taking one’s first bath alone – self-soaped, without the nurse!–while father, mother and sister dined a flight below. And an envious curiosity as to what they ate and did, and a hiding beneath the table while the gong (of brass, cheese-plate size, which, I was to discover later when cocktailing a musician friend, was in E above the treble clef) tintinnabulated the feasters from their bedrooms: and of how I lost the courage of my mild naughtiness at the very start and crawled out to be discovered and embraced and sent upstairs.

  CHAPTER III

  1

  MOST places go through cycles. What Addison had been before we knew it I don’t know. Even as it stood, my mother rejected half of it, primed as she was with London standards; for some people remain inexorably suburban wherever they settle. It is a state of mind, not geographic entirely, as the snobs believe. And then, too, the era was against her. We had, for instance, only just got round to trams by the time we left Addison: the motor-bus which bundles you comfortably to town in forty-five minutes was in the future, and so the Addison residents stewed in their own placid juice.

  It threw them upon their social resources and the place fairly burst with Progressive Whist for prizes of repoussé objects featuring The Angelic Choir, with badminton clubs in the Parish Room, with Shakespeare readings in drawing-rooms, Book Teas and The Afternoon Call. Tennis was still a game and not a dog-fight but was definitely left to the young women who had come out and who played on the grass courts of their own gardens. Golf was for the elderly and the business week-end, and the children bowled hoops in contentment in the Park, shaded in summer by the horse-chestnut avenue, nudged in autumn by the deer who ate the nuts from their hands when they weren’t locked in battle with each other and having to have their antlers sawn off by keepers.

  The ages of my brother, sister and me were all over the place. Marcus was ten years older than I, two years the senior of Melisande, which meant that Marcus was always at Winchester when I was in the nursery and that one met him mainly on the stairs or in seaside lodgings. I never thought of school terms and accepted his intermittent appearances among us as I did the atrocious pattern of the hall wall-paper which looked like a bad thunderstorm in a forest of fir-trees which grew pineapples.

  Poor Marcus hated his name and said it was like the sound that would be made by a crocodile eating sugar almonds, and father, turning purist as he so often did, took him up on this in a twinkling and said it was a far-fetched simile and that all similes should have a basis of probability, which so annoyed Marcus that he went out into the garden and broke the kitchen window playing golf with a walking-stick and a windfall pear. He was very morose, at sixteen, because he was in love with Ada Reeve, and in the Christmas holidays he climbed out of a back window to go up to town to see her in a musical comedy and came back in a fog and was sermonized and Old Testamented by father.

  My sister Melisande wasn’t too pleased with her own name, either, and it didn’t appease her in the least to know that she was named after one of those swoony and probably fated lovers that mother lapped up and enjoyed, and even went to the Coronet Theatre, Notting Hill Gate, to see portrayed by Sarah Bernhardt and Mrs. Patrick Campbell. So quite soon the family called my sister Mell and my brother Cuss, because he objected to Mark as being noble and Biblical and pi-jaw. I only wonder that I didn’t get called Beatrice in compliment to the Dante readings, which is a name that should be reserved for cooks and oil-stoves, but luckily I escaped with Barbara after a great friend of mother’s, and as nicknames rained on me from the start, I only realized in my ’teens that I was Barbara at all, and even to-day certain people retain the old names, so that whereas I am always Ara to the Fields, I am Babby to my old nurse, Babs to the relations, and Bunt or Buggins to the family. The gardener for some unearthly reason called me Miss Bobbin from the beginning, and stuck to it.

  Father, poor wretch, never achieved a nickname from any of us, and mother was somehow above all that kind of thing for very different reasons. We all found it quite impossible to take father seriously because he did all the taking there was, in advance, and I cannot express the prevalent feeling better than by mentioning that when I was about nine I went to mother and asked, ‘Is father your husband?’ and was quite unnerved to find that this indeed was the case as it seemed to put some barrier between her and ourselves that in all other matters was non-existent. She had, as we should say now, let down the side!

  In time, Cuss and Mell and I discovered that the only possible way to take father was to pretend he was somebody else, when sent for by him, or at table, or during the hazard of selection of a son or daughter for the Sunday walk after church. Whom he should figure as depended upon your general knowledge, tastes and reading, and the latter depended upon age. Thus, to Marcus, father was Lord Chesterfield and (when father’s homily had been unduly prolonged, or the bad temper induced by love-pangs for Ada Reeve or Ellaline Terriss unusually sharp) Charles Peace, and once, when father had boxed his ears, Jack The Ripper. To Mell, father was in turn Napoleon, Nero, Mr. d’Arcy and the Reverend Patrick Bronte. To me, he was ‘The Procession’, from Lord Mayor’s Day once seen by me on a jaunt to London, for father contrived to suggest pomp and circumstance no less in his conversation than in walk and manner, and our meal times were apt as a result of these conflicting creations to be a perfect maelstrom of cross-purposes, with all three of us acting our relative parts to the head of the house; Marcus being excessively polite and formal if father was at the moment Lord Chesterfield, and even calling him Sir, Mell being exaggeratedly gentle and solicitous about the salt and pepper when he was old Mr. Brontë, or bright and playful (Mr. d’Arcy), or anxious and browbeaten (Nero), while I stared, fascinated, every time father opened his mouth, seeing behind his chair two gorgeous flunkeys in aguillettes and plush, while mother, who knew our game, sat torn between apprehension and giggles at the foot of the table. Father sensed nothing, beyond the fact that we seemed to be behaving unusually well. Of course it was, between giggles, anxious work for mother, for we three were on thin ice with father and, as she said in going over old times in after years, she never knew when or if the thaw of paternal
perception would set in, and father, so to speak, be rendered unfit for skating!

  Father believed he was fond of us. Actually, in common with so many men of the period, he was merely cowed by the weight of that mid-Victorian sentimentality in which he himself had been reared, and had children for the look of the thing as he wore a top-hat and ate sausages for breakfast and roast beef for luncheon on Sunday, voted Conservative and paid a yearly visit to the Royal Academy before a month at the seaside. After all, what man in his senses could honestly want a schoolboy, a nurse and a baby as housemates, particularly the bookish kind of man that father was? But having been landed with them, he did the only possible thing, and got round a nasty corner by sheer self-deception. It’s no use deliberately setting to work to have people who will slam doors and give notice and cry in the night and be sick on your waistcoat if you’re going to waste half the rest of your life resenting them. But what a relief these fathers would have found in doing so! As it was; they were uniformly kind and misunderstanding and misunderstood, and deferred to and avoided and imposed on and indulged and managed. To their children they were Look Out! and Cavé! and Oh Lor! and to their wives If Only, Oh Dear Me, Why Can’t He See, They Didn’t Mean To, Henry, and Well, I’ll Speak To Cook About It.

  Father wrote essays and biographies, but as leaven to this regrettable eccentricity, this mental frivolity and high-kicking over the traces of convention, his real work was in the City, where he was a senior partner in the firm of Halliday, Morant and Fusting, solicitors. Of this occupation, all we knew was that he was suddenly not in Evenfield after breakfast and was as suddenly in the billiard room after tea, while the perquisites of office that came our way were foolscap sheets of a satisfying gloss eminently suited to noughts and crosses, the writing of plays and novels, the drawing of dragons and caricatures of nurse and cook and house-parlourmaid, plus bunches of pink tape, paper-clips and nibs. They really did understand waste in 1900! Beside them, our modern efforts pale and dim.