CHAPTER VI
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THE experienced party-goer in Addison learnt very soon to know what to expect in the way of entertainment, and whether the seven or nine o’clock sight of Aggie Drumhead sitting among the other nurses in alien halls was likely to prove a welcome one or a fly in the ointment; learnt, too, to remember from year to year if the presents had to be fished for, hunted, competed for, just given you from the tree, dipped for in tubs or put by your place at table.
Some hostesses had ‘the touch’, others would never learn the secret of successful party-giving in this world.
At the head of the latter category were the Ackworth-Meads, who lived in that enormous pseudo-Gothic mansion in a rather characterless road which connected Addison with the outskirts of Kingsmarket. Here, once deposited in the vast and stone-flagged hall, small children were set upon by clouds of maids and footmen and later heavily escorted into a bogus banqueting-hall, the whimsy of a builder of 1870. And from that moment you were lost – literally, for in that crowd a familiar face was an event. No expense was spared and no pleasure accrued and the arrival of the nurses at the end of the party was bellowed by an auxiliary butler.
‘Miss Barbara Morant is called for!’ or
‘The Misses Field! The Misses Field!’
(It was at the Ackworth-Meads that I once mistook the son of the house for a hired waiter and addressed him, irretrievably, as such.)
Or there was Mrs. Jasperleigh, who was actually Mrs. Jasper Leigh, but considered that this telescoping was More Toney, as she confided to mother whom she adored. A wealthy widow, she possessed one precocious and overhandled daughter of my own age, Thelma, whose unpopularity from Addison to Kingsmarket, yea, down an entire reach of the Thames to Addison’s Villa, was an accepted thing and a general act of faith; and over the parties at ‘Broadacres’, which my mother with an appearance of inadvertence once alluded to as Broadmoor at an At Home, and whether the parties were of birthday, Christmas or Fifth of November, hung an authentic and dependable blight. For if the Ackworth-Mead assemblies remained chronically Institutional, the Jasperleigh gatherings were ungenial and flustered. Over the whole problem of Broadacres we Morants ponder still. For it was, visually, a promising house enough, countrified, though of no interesting age, and even Mrs. Jasperleigh’s success in damning its interior with chenille spiders couldn’t, we decided, be the determining factor, in that our own drawing-room at Evenfield was by no means devoid of contemporary aesthetic errors. As for the Jasperleigh grounds, any retired gas inspector could singlehanded have made a better job of it than she with all her gardeners. She hadn’t what is called ‘the Green Finger’. Things simply didn’t come up for her, or if they did were formalized out of all beauty, unapproachable, unpickable, unfriendly. Could it be, perhaps, that house or garden was haunted by some elemental? I have long entertained a vague suspicion of a certain shrubbery of Broadacres, but the case is dismissed as Not Proven. And then, too, she had a genius for spoiling her own effects. She stuck a pigeon-cote in the middle of the lawn, and suffered a privet clipped like a giant bee-hive to blot out the daylight from her own ground-floor boudoir. Mother called it The Bunion. And Mrs. Jasperleigh finally developed a passion for garden ornaments, preferably of maundering peasants in stone trousers and terra-cotta skirts, and sometimes sabots.
As for her parties: there again, it may have been the elemental (if any) or the house itself or Thelma or the unhappy hand that operated so persistently in the grounds, but I know that intimates of other nurseries – like ourselves and the Fields – viewed with lacklustre spirit the impending gala as we discussed it in the Park and wondered If Thelma Would Be Awful. For Thelma, at ten, mistook herself for a hostess of forty-five and imitated any locution or mannerism of her mother’s that suited her. But if you hit her she became her age at once, and whined, and then informed upon you. She occasionally mistook herself also for Adeline Génée and sometimes for Madame Patti, an opinion that was not shared by dancing or singing mistress, and of all the children of Addison who were least likely ever to be asked to perform in any capacity, Thelma Jasperleigh was the one.
One January party at Broadacres I remember clearly. Mell and I were standing about feeling draughty in our party dresses of Roman satin before we were scooped up by an elder for some laboured gaiety; my arms were bare and the Maltese silk mittens did little to relieve matters and left one’s fingertips chilly. I always turned cold if I were bored or worried. I do still. And then the little Fields came in and the great parquet-floor’d room was cosy at once: for in spite of the Dante readings, the children of dear Mrs. Field were our allies through thick and thin, and loved us and laboured faithfully for us by painting and drawing and needlework presents–they all embroidered beautifully, it seems to run in that family, and their shyness was never awkward, but only of the goodness of hearts too simple and sincere to parade or know their own value. We called them ‘the little Fields’, I don’t know why, for they were all taller than Mell and I, and even the youngest, Clover, was slightly older than myself, but ‘little’ remained as a prefix just as the Irmine child became fixed in our consciousness as ‘Baby’ Irmine until she must have been quite eleven.
It was Daisy Field who sacrificed her pocket-money for two whole weeks to send us sweets when we had chicken-pox: Primrose who escaped to Kingsmarket alone to buy us what we called real grapes, for we discounted the monkey-and-sawdust kind which was all that Addison’s greengrocers could produce; and poor little Clover who burst into shameful tears at school when she heard I was worse and ran out of the classroom and hid in a housemaid’s cupboard without permission (she the docile of the docile!); and all who pooled the cream of their toys and games – lend or keep, it was all the same to them.
The Fields weren’t well off but always looked nice in a velvety Libertyish way, and even cut-down clothes were transformed by the handworked silk flowers with which their frocks were sprayed and garlanded.
Thelma, I remember, was in pink plush – her mother’s taste in dress was what you might expect, and it accentuated her sallowness and dark, straight hair. Thelma looked critically at the advancing trio and said to us, ‘Here come our little three. How badly that Primrose holds herself’. Mell and I got up steam at once though we said nothing until Thelma remarked, ‘Muvver and I can never imagine why you and they are such pals’.
‘Oh?’ muttered Mell, ‘Well … we are fond of them.’
‘But Mr. Field! Only a music master!’
I don’t know if Mell meant to, but it was certainly I who got in first, for I slapped Thelma on the face and cried myself, and missed her cheek and hit her nose, and I’m glad, and it bled a little and I’m glad, and a spot or two spattered on to her pink plush and I’m glad. The little Fields hastened to us and Daisy, the eldest, put her arm round me and said, ‘Oh Ara!’ and mopped my eyes with a handkerchief (with a daisy worked in one corner) that she pulled out of the little yellow velvet bag that hung at her waist.
I suppose there was a scene of some kind and a lot of emotionalism from Thelma and Mrs. Jasperleigh, who excelled at tensions, and how it all ended I forget: but I do remember that a nice elderly man suddenly loomed and looked amused and vanished, and that dear auntie S (Mrs. Stortford) grinned fatly and delightedly at me later on, and nodded and privily made the gesture of nose-punching.
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The parties at Baby Irmine’s were so few and far between that I can only recall one; I have heard since that the Irmines were very badly off, and Baby was in point of years an after-thought, like myself, with a lot of grown-up sisters whom one never seemed to see at all.
Of the Irmine house, ‘Holly Lodge’, I can only see one room, far too small and rather dark, and full of birdcages and the droppings of their inmates, who frequently were allowed out and said ‘EEK’, to one from unexpected points like picture-frames, and the veranda which was littered with incredibly paintless chairs.
Auntie S gave good parties because the atmosphere radiate
d humour and the rooms were full of cats whom she named after coins: there were Penny and Farthing and Tizzy and Stiver, huge comfortable tabbies. But these gatherings were far more mother’s and Mell’s than my own, owing, again, to the age question and to Evelyn, the daughter of the house, who in my time was always tennis-playing and ‘out’ and so in a different world, though excellent fun and company if circumstances ever threw her my way. The Stortford garden was, indeed, sacrificed almost completely to net and balls, and the daily gardener, stooping in what was left over for vegetables, received many a crack on his behind from too vigorous a service, and once retaliated in exasperation with a small beetroot, as auntie S, grunting with delighted laughter (‘Haigh! haigh! haigh!’) related to mother.
The parties given at ‘Stamboul’ by Mrs. Martin for Janet were memorable for the cakes which that redoubtable Scotswoman (she was a Miss McIntyre) baked herself and which contained so much stout and even brandy that I wonder we weren’t all under the table.
Stamboul, over our garden wall by the apple-trees and facing our nursery, was a place of slippery floors and decorative conflict, for whereas Hubert Martin had served in an administrative capacity in India, his wife clung tenaciously to the symbols of Scotland, and the result was Benares brass, pedestal lamps ending in elephants’ feet, tigerskin rugs and plaid curtains of hunting McIntyre tartan, a notion which possibly derived from Balmoral, while our games were looked down upon, snarled at and grinned over by various gnashing trophies with horns, whiskers and beards.
Stamboul’s interior was never to mean much to us (I think in all our lives we only saw its drawing-, dining- and smoking-room). It was the grounds that were our stamping-ground: vast, and full of seakale under bell-glasses, an enormous fowl-run and marrows on hotbeds with a pleasant stuffy reek, and cucumbers in frames. It was by the rhubarb bed and the seakale pottings that we tended to converge, for there, by propping a small ladder against the wall, hoisting feet over the top and seizing a bough, we were back in our own garden, thus saving a détour down part of the Martin’s road and part of the length of our own.
In festivity, Janet was always put into a kilt, silk blouse and machicolated velvet jacket with cut-steel buttons, the whole embellished with a silver-mounted grouse-claw and a gargantuan safety-pin that I long believed to be a pantomime property, and always during a pause between games she was set by her mother to perform a reel or sword-dance. As her talents lay conspicuously in other directions we enjoyed it; also, the swords never ended up in the same place, and once Jan kicked them right into the hall and once (oh heavenly day) one of them struck the screen behind which the ventriloquist was preparing his act a resounding whang that felled screen and performer in one soul-satisfying wreck. He emerged – poor plucky wretch – blowing up his exiguous moustache and saying to Mrs. Martin, ‘Quite a come-down! No trouble, no trouble at all. The figure is undamaged’.
The show must go on! And go on it did. And I sometimes wonder where that ageing entertainer is to-day. He would, now, be quite seventy-five, and I picture him in a bed-sitting room in the backwashes of Pimlico (which smells of decline, architectural and personal) and ponder upon his fluttered joy if he could but know of the clarity with which I can still see his face and hair and waiter’s suit; he the outmoded one, passé for drawing-rooms, not good enough for the halls, he who has utterly failed to memorize my face – one of a line of well-brushed children who spelt his rent and food, yet, could he but know, that unremarked entity is still, oh enviable! in the movement with much of the future yet before her …
Ventriloquist, sleep soundly, you have earned it. You have kept with heaven knows what of shift and makeshift and evasion and contrivance and sacrifice your tiny banner of vaudeville flying in winds fair and foul, keeping faith with the great names of your profession.
The figure is undamaged.
Of her own performances, it could have been torment to poor Janet, paired as she would be with Mell when school term reopened, to know that she had made once more an exhibition of herself. But neither Janet nor Mell thought of the affair in that way I am certain; maternal edicts and even suggestions were carried out as a matter of course. On the other hand, the separation-by-wall alone did not invariably make for intimacy, for were not the Randolphs upon our right hand (by the rockery) and partitioned by a mere fence? And with that family we made no headway at all although the Randolph child came to our larger parties.
I knew their garden pretty well, thanks to the fence and the knotholes in it, or through precarious balancing upon clinkers where the Solomon’s Seal sprang up every year, but I never remember playing in it, wherefore I deduce that we and the Randolphs offered each other hospitality strictly pour la forme. Little Gladys Randolph was a Christmas tree doll of a child with all her goods in the shop window: her mother was exactly the same doll thirty-five years later and was rumoured, with breath distinctly bated, once to have been upon the stage, a fact that it was expected she had now lived down in that hot-looking house with its calceolaria-lobelia-begonia garden to which the gates of ‘Rose Glen’ gave access.
The Randolph parties were null affairs in which the iced cake of the tea-table made its ravaged reappearance at supper, a circumstance that I found depressing, for if you were faced with the same cake four hours later you lost all sense of time and couldn’t enjoy the fact of still being out of bed at nine o’clock, as the cake still leered at you that it was only four-thirty. No. That unshaded house was never to become familiar to us. Neither was ‘Tralee’, next us on the left, separated from ourselves by another fence and owning the silver birch behind which the red winter suns rose so engagingly.
Its garden was otherwise entirely given up to pines and old gravel paths, the house to old ladies whom Mell and I called ‘the Miss Cocksedgees’ and who were seldom glimpsed by ourselves, until that morning when Johnnie Lawnford, the doctor’s son (brother to the manure-throwing Chetwyn) and I suddenly got tired of the resources of our own garden and were mysteriously visited by a social urge that sent us calling. The occasion being a formal one, we laid our half-eaten apples upon the gate-post of Tralee and advanced up the gravel drive to that creeper-infested dwelling. Prior to that, I had found a packet of unused At Home cards in a dining-room drawer, and Johnnie and I consulted as to the sentiment to be written upon the couple that we filched. I marked mine ‘To Enquire’, and Johnnie his ‘P.P.C.’ We didn’t know what the letters stood for but dimly connected them with ceremony and the niceties. And then it came to me that a certain type of call necessitated one or some corners turned down, and in an all-or-nothing ecstasy of politeness I turned down all four corners of my own card – it looked like a small dining-table.
On the way out of Evenfield Johnnie said professionally, ‘I wonder if she’ll let me look at her tongue? Old people never will’. (By old people he meant and I understood perfectly any person of thirty or over, and I was struck with the truth of the remark. The aged were, now one came to think of it, a mass of reticences: they received with indulgent smiles and a turning of the topic one’s suggestions that one should sponge their backs; I had, now Johnnie mentioned it, never achieved the spectacle of an adult tongue fully extended, and even those of Addison’s elderly men to whom I had taken a passing fancy had consistently refused to share my bed for company.)
Johnnie added loudly, ‘I once just missed seeing a dead person in Dad’s surgery, and Dad of course has actually seen a corpse’.
The next thing that happened was that we were in the drive of the Misses Cocksedge and the maid, in a goffered cap like a jelly-mould and streamers down to her rump, was opening the front door. Yes, Miss Cocksedge was at home but Miss Clara was out. And the whole of the rest of that warm autumnal morning is a blank.
What did we talk about? Did Miss Cocksedge come in from some domestic supervisal? A book? A pre-luncheon nap? Was she astonished, peevish, amused? Did she (could she?) rise or sink to the occasion, remembering the sudden adult accesses to which children even in the middle of
play suitable to their age are so unaccountably prone?
And how did we come out of it? Not too discreditably, I imagine, for Johnnie was a frank and friendly soul while I by taste and circumstance was much in the company of adults. If it comes to that, I can only set the visit in autumn because of those half-eaten apples and the streams of small crimson creeper with which Tralee was festooned. It seems to flourish in the suburbs.
It never even occurred to me to ask Johnnie, or even to speculate upon, what were his interests and friends. When together we existed vitally: parted, all was a forgetting.
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The little Fields were intimates from the beginning, just as their mother was one of the half-dozen Addison residents to whom our mother opened her door and her affection. And fate has allowed me to remember a whole tract of the scene of my first visit to ‘Cumptons’, that red-brick, vaguely Tudor house of theirs which stood on a corner and thus commanded a vista of the endless road up and down which Mell and Janet tramped twice a day to the High School, and a view of a silly little cul-de-sac road that ended in gates which led to the Park, and which even then was aligned with small houses of the type that Dickens would have dismissed as Spoffish.
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