Evenfield

by Ferguson,Rachel

  What father did in his office it never even occurred to us to enquire. To us, it existed only for London’s pageantry, seen from his windows, with a lavish luncheon laid out in the room at our back and the clerks’ quarters converted into cloakrooms for my frilled organdie sun-hat or Mell’s gaiters and sealskin cap, and mother’s odds and ends and fur, shoulder-length cape with its cauliflower collar which dished up her little face as a pâté in its terrine, or for the sailor hats and mufflers of our contemporary Addison cronies, according to the time of year. Father always did the thing well. Sometimes there was an invited sprinkling of the come-out young women, those, by us, seldom glimpsed persons who by rumour played tennis on their own lawns. Others lingered in my mind for an isolated sentence quoted in my family, as did Johnnie Lawnford, the Doctor’s son, who, questioned by father in the homegoing train from Waterloo about the eminents he had picked out in the procession, eagerly stuttered, ‘I saw Sir Michael Pig’s-Speech!’; and his elder brother, Chetwyn, who exists for me to this day by a rumour that he had once pelted the errand boys with manure from the top of his garden wall, and who, as a result, through all the years will be astride that wall, pelting. Or there was ‘Baby’ Irmine who lived at the end of our road, whose alleged ringworm penetrated our nursery from below stairs and who, for me, and because I heard about it at seven years old, will go through life with that complaint … other children existed, largely, through the shape of their front doors or the tested goodness or badness of their schoolroom teas and toys.

  Once, in father’s office, a male appeared whom father addressed as ‘Ha, Clifford!’, as we gazed down upon the teeming street, its good-natured hucksters selling red, white and blue souvenir handkerchiefs and coloured paper tiddlers. Ha-Clifford was comparatively stricken in years (he must have been quite nineteen), and turned out to be the elder brother of freckled Jacky Barstowe, at whom I once threw a stone in the Park because I was disgusted with the shape of his hat, which was a large, white, three-cornered felt with a rosette. We Morant children knew vaguely that the creature had brothers but they had for us no existence at all. And it wasn’t for nearly thirty years that I assimilated the fact that Ha-Clifford and I had once shared a Royal Progress.

  2

  In that large, scattered riverside town-village, with its roomy houses, comfortable gardens, its failures to be entirely sophisticated or completely rural, and its intermittent London accessibility, we in a way knew everybody without being intimate with the majority. Mother saw to that: hoping, as I now believe her always to have been, eternally for a final escape with us that we might not stagnate. Her social picksomeness together with an inevitable nodding-acquaintance put the whole place for us in our pockets.

  Sociably inclined and always interested in people of all ages, whether in children of sixty or adults of sixteen, I strayed to many a door marked Lord Have Mercy Upon Us, a habit which mother made no attempt to check, knowing that children, particularly in the summer, are licensed bandits, guessing no doubt that her cool smiles and dreadful politeness to detrimentals would act as deterrent to any attempts on the part of the naow-and-haow brigade to press to intimacy, as indeed proved to be the case. And as for the accent question, there was never any danger of any of us parroting a twang in a house like ours where father was ever in lurk, from the literary point of view, to put our sentences twice through the mincer before they were passed as fit for table.

  Woe to the daughter who stated that she had cut her bun in ‘Half’; curs’t be the son who asked ‘Can’ he go to the cricket match?; while the very sideboard groaned at a split infinitive, and once when Mell said, ‘What do you mean to infer?’ father’s lecture upon the misuse of the word, together with his astoundment at an illiteracy of such magnitude emanating from a member of his family, concluded, ‘As soon should I expect a daughter of mine to spit into the butter-dish’, at which Marcus unfortunately burst out laughing and was sent from the dining-room.

  Yet when father set out on a progress of facetiousness, we, like Queen Victoria, were unable to be amused. In the cold months he would ask one of us to ‘put a semi-coal-on’, and would sometimes pace the dining-room, declaiming:

  I would if I could

  If I couldn’t, how could I?

  I wouldn’t, unless I could,

  Could I? Could you?

  which for a period Mell and I thought was Shakespeare, and discarded in advance. On the other hand, his non-comprehension of children was so complete that he rounded the circle by treating us at times as if we were his own age, and would enter into details of the most harrowing illnesses of his friends, garnished with medical terms and revolting symptoms, or favour us with his vigorous views upon the decadence of French Courts and kings’ mistresses according to the biography he was in labour with at the time and during which he became positively Biblical in his outspokenness, giving me, at ten, the present of the word Strumpet, which for a long time I confused with muffins, by which I came to believe that King Louis consistently over-ate and knew I was right when father dismissed him as being ‘a fellow of gross appetites’. I liked food as well, and. went to find mother (who was in the pantry, washing some porcelain tea-cups that she never would trust to the servants, as the cups were sprinkled with hand-painted flowers and banded with English gold) and asked, ‘Would you say that I am a Strumpet?’

  She stopped and considered and looked slightly harassed, and was, if I know her, weighing the question of blame and the direction in which to cast it, upon kitchen or my too catholic visiting list? But the query enlarged upon, it was her turn to go out into the garden and yell, and the episode comfortably closed with the caution, ‘– but don’t say it at parties’.

  The words one must not say at parties included, according to one nurse, Stomach and Flea, and (the same mentor), No child must ever make open request for the lavatory but must ask ‘May I sit down?’ As one was frequently sitting down at table, conjuror, or Punch and Judy show or even musical chairs, the request too often ended in a hopeless impasse bred of misguided gentility and hospitable bewilderment. About the forbidden words, Mell made a verse which we recited in duet, marching round the nursery, fingertips on shoulders, and dipping deeply at the end of each alternate line:

  Strumpet and Stomach and Flea

  Went for a walk on Salisbury Plain

  Walking by three and by three

  And they never were seen again:

  Oh never, oh never again.

  When we quarrelled, we would hurl phrases at each other of no known origin but of a quality quite admirably enraging. We knew! Not for us the popular epithets of abuse; to be termed a duffer, fool, ass, pig, left us unmoved. But if Mell wanted to make me cry with impotent fury she would recite abstractedly,

  Drink in a Bournemouth cup

  With a hat like a bon-bon block!

  while Mell could be rendered purple in a moment if I retaliated in a quick-time march,

  They called her Thunder Of The Lord!

  or, with a rhythmic stamping of one foot upon the floor or any likely surface,

  Sweets, tea and sugar

  And large hunks of bread,

  Along came Melisande expecting to be fed!

  3

  But, allied again, we pooled our resources against the residents, by prose and verse.

  There was a certain Miss Dove, often seen by us in church, of a quite spectacular piety, who curtsyed when the congregation rose at the entry of the vicar and choir. Miss Dove lived heaven knows where and I don’t know now and she was to us a Sunday figure alone. Because she was so good and looked so plain with primness, we named her Lucilla, and Mell, at seventeen, committed her to paper.

  Who the world’s lusts has quite resigned

  And tulle round last year’s hat doth wind

  With starfish dead clapped on behind,

  Lucilla.

  Or there was Sheppard, a verger, who, father, horrified, confided to us had ‘too great a liking for the bottle’, and of whom we made a carol
based on When Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night, and which began,

  When Sheppard scoffed his Scotch by night

  Depleted was his pound,

  The angel of the rye came down

  And laid him on the ground.

  There must, in that large and High Church assembly, have been quite a number of those whose social cause the vicar professionally canvassed among the established residents on the grounds that they were ‘sweet little women’, a description which ruled them out from the start with a lot of us, the feeling being that clergymen, bound in charity to everybody, must broadly speaking lose sight of what was what, which was recognized and countered by the obdurate who saw that vicars, being out of their homes three-quarters of the time themselves, left the hospitable donkey-work to their females, and that, being a clergyman’s household, they had to recognize any caller in any case. For Lucilla, I hear, wasn’t the only adorant and remorseless penitential: there was something about the vicar’s direct ugliness which set a dozen of irretrievably respectable women to combing their scanty histories for some remembered sin that might be of interest to him, and the road wound uphill all the way, yes, to the very end, poor wretches. As well play tiddleywinks with Savonarola! Mell and I, having no emotional fish to fry, secured his friendship and attention from the start.

  But to offset his personal rigours, the services at St. Anselm’s were of a pageantry which had once caused me to whisper to mother as he toddled, stiff with brocade and embossments in gold thread, to the altar, ‘Is he the Fairy Prince?’ And I really believe that if a demon had sprung in red limelight and sequins from the pulpit we should not have been surprised. For on high days and festivals and saints’ days there were processions and banners and pairings-off and bowings and censers and red lamps and thunderous marches from the organ and even a string orchestra from among the personnel of the senior girls from the High School, among which, later on, Mell, concealed behind a pillar, played second violin with a stocking tied round her eye because her strings were always bursting. The choirboys were as well drilled as ballet girls and were forbidden to march in step round the church as foot rhythm was considered irreverent, or inartistic or secular, so they wavered and stumped and teetered behind a huge silver crucifix borne by the verger, which old Mr. Grimstone (who lived at The Moorings by the river) had presented, together with a bottle of Jordan water from a tour of the Holy Land. In Holy Week the church was steeped in purple and swathed in black like a rusée widow, and concluded with Tenebrae, about which I questioned mother, who answered, ‘Oh, they turn all the lights out one by one and you trip over your umbrella’.

  At Easter, the scent of the lilies made people faint in rows, especially those devotes who, like Lucilla, arrived on a systematically empty stomach. The banners when not in use were propped all down the church against the pillars, and I can see the needlework faces and robes of every single saint upon them to this day, far more clearly, indeed, than I can see the face of my mother as she was at that time. The clarity of the mind’s eye has apparently nothing to do with degree of affection, and it is the extraordinary and grievous truth that the faces of dozens of comparative strangers can rise up photographically before me while the best-loved heads are lost for ever.

  I’ve never understood this. On the other hand, more inexplicable still, I can pick up here and there, and over large gaps of time, objective glimpses of myself, seeing myself as a stranger would, even to the clothes and hat I was wearing and when no looking-glass was within miles. In Peter Ibbetson, du Maurier writes of the same thing, calling it ‘double sight’ and describing it as a mystery that Ibbetson discovered by slow degrees, as he developed the faculty of re-living the past.

  To re-live the past and one’s part in it was never to come my way though I believe it to be an absolute possibility. I set about the business in the wrong way, but at least I hurt no one in the process, and it is all over now. It is, indeed, just credible that the past is meant to be left behind you, in spite of what the time-experts say, and that I didn’t realize this fact. This must be why people who live in the present are so uniformly contented and easygoing. I see their point. Living is now, not turning your mind back, or impatiently straining forward into the future of mere ambition or boredom. Yet … I feel in my bones that I shall never be of that sane company.

  CHAPTER IV

  1

  AND so, at about seven years old, I, as it were, woke up for the second time in Evenfield and began to take my place in its life, to mingle with the persons and doings of Addison.

  The night-nursery that I shared with Mell and the nurse, until the latter’s more hygienic banishment to one of the four large box-rooms at the top of the house, faced the drive and the road and the turnip field over which mists hung in the autumn.

  It was one of the meaningless, do-little rooms of Evenfield, and didn’t attach itself to any of us, much, even then. Its light was partly taken away by the dressing-table, the wall-paper I have striven to remember and can’t, but the pictures on the walls were a caution, and all religious, bad art of a rather bad period that veered, for juvenile consumption, at any rate, from brightly coloured Bavarian Nativities and The Light Of The World to the photographic horrors of good-looking young men being larded like capons with arrows, and grisly Crucifixions. What sum-total of religious conclusion children were supposed to derive from these morbidities and placidities I can’t imagine. But parents in those days seemed to need a lot of educational properties’ to atone, perhaps, for their own inarticulateness and reticences upon matters Divine.

  Actually, the doyen, the Matron, guardian, familiar and friend of the room was not a saint or martyr, virgin, angel or admission-seeking Saviour, but a stove. It was portable, stood a yard high, had a shutter of ruby glass and cast through its elaborate ironwork reflections upon the ceiling which we called ‘skulls’; it smelt slightly of magic-lanterns, so that, as Mell and I agreed as we were undressed and groomed and reclad in festal silks and satins at improbable hours of dusky winter afternoons, one was almost at the party before starting to it.

  The night-nursery was essentially a winter room, and even then one missed odd weeks in it through bouts of chicken-pox and measles, which were convalesced through in the day-nursery across the landing or in the spare room next door: I don’t quite know why, unless the night-nursery fireplace was defective or –far more likely – the servants grumbled at too many grates to clean. There were only two gas fires in the whole house. Therefore we lay in ruby-glowing darkness or watching candle flickering upon those pious pictures when the nurse came up from her supper at ten and undressed with elephantine caution that could be heard as far away as the bathroom. She wore, I remember, the kind of stays for which, nowadays, actresses appearing in revivals of early Shavian plays and Trelawney of the Wells comb London in despair, for the corsets were black or slate-grey, with unexplained arrowheads in white stitching, moulded to the figure and giving the wearer a stomach and a bust and hips whether she had them by nature or not. One watched her, stupid with interest, – and the next second it was morning.

  When winter had really come and wrapped itself all round us we were brought up pre-breakfast tots of hot rum and milk, which we both hated, in willow-pattern cups. Poor Mell as the elder got the largest jorum, and once whoever mixed it mixed it too strong, and when she tried to say her prayers, got her petitions handsomely mixed up with an old tune on my musical-box and began, ‘Oh Lord, God bless the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo’. The nurse tumbled to the situation first (she had brothers of her own) and looked incredulous and then scandalized, and poddled off to inform, as she warned Mell, ‘y’mother or father’, and Mell shouted, ‘Publish and be damned!’, from one of father’s biographies, and the nurse exclaimed, ‘Well, there’s a sauce! Whatever next?’ Mother was rather reprehensibly entertained, and it was father who emerged with superbness from the incident, for he quite sincerely took the line that no daughter of his could conceivably be in such a monstrous dilem
ma, and that that being the case, the behaviour of Melisande was due to some other cause which was patently the business of the women of his house to deal with. And left the room, razor in hand.

  For the rest, the night-nursery is memorable for the pre- and post-dinner visits that mother paid me, for by that time Mell was dining below, eating the good smells that were sometimes wafted to me in bed, she being too old for nursery tray. I never even thought of asking her to bring me up tit-bits when she came to bed herself at nine o’clock. It was mother who ‘when a dinner-party was expected’, as I put it, could be counted upon to arrive, a silhouette against the landing gaslight, in cord-laced Liberty velvet gown of her own design, with a handful of those dessert sweets which, in silver baskets, centred the table and quite deliciously consisted of sugar almonds, nougatines, chocolate creams and a certain square jujube, rose-flavoured and of ravishing colour and hardness. I can smell the assortment now.

  Sitting on the bed, she would keep me posted on what was going on downstairs, describing dresses, imitating their wearers, always well and with the loving malice of Lady Teazle, or criticizing the courses as one housekeeper to another. (Had we not bought their ingredients that morning? Had I not, elbow on billiard table, pored with her over the list of the more rare delicacies ordered from ‘The Stores’, as Harrods was persistently called? These lists possibly included the sweets and indisputably the small tubs of anchovies which were constantly served and that I never could be induced to taste – nor can I now.)