Evenfield

by Ferguson,Rachel

  It was a summer’s evening and old Caspar’s work was done: that is, it was warm July between tea and my bedtime that mother and I strolled the three-quarters of a mile from Evenfield to Cumptons, and I can see us all on their lawn; mother in a floppy hat swathed with mauve tulle, and the fair head of Mrs. Field as she bent to me, her large-featured face beaming, and the stuffy smell of sun-heated grass and evening primroses closing, the sunset glaring on window-panes and the glimpse of Mr. Field at a lower window reading The Surrey Comet in a velvet smoking-jacket and looking remarkably like Beethoven as he did so, an unrehearsed effect, though he was a music master. And running from the kitchen garden came Daisy and Primrose in overalls embroidered by Mrs. Field; Daisy dark-hair’d as her father, Primrose fairer than her mother, and one of them dropped to her knees as she put her arms round my waist and the other said, ‘Oh, you darling!’

  They spoilt me always, and do still, and I can squarely state that it never did me any harm.

  But the third little Field was missing, it appeared, and on mother’s enquiry the face of Mrs. Field fell, and she began in that low, shocked voice that we were in time to know so well in social calamity and local scandal or illness, to tell us that ‘Poor little Clovy’ had been sent to bed for taking a dessert pear from the dining-room dish. And that particular visit ended (my hostesses the shy ones) in games of ‘Steps’ and ‘Statues’, at the latter of which undignified pastime we all cheated uproariously and as a matter of course (it is a game that fairly shouts for illegitimate embellishment).

  Presently a third smock was visible at an upper window and the tear-sodden face (a swamp! a quagmire!) of the youngest Field looked out at us. The Fields were always heartbroken and stricken at their mild naughtiness and at any temporary loss of favour with their mother as Mell and I were, too, over ours, with the difference that in the Field family loving disgraces were more numerous and of greater variety since so many of them had their roots in financial stress in which a strawberry stain on a best frock became a betrayal of the budget.

  Yet it was the Fields who gave the happiest parties, or so we thought. To begin with, we were always made insidiously to feel the guests of honour: my tastes in toys, sweets and games were minutely remembered and catered for, and the gentle chaser ‘That’s Ara’s place’ to some seated and bright-eyed expectant before the conjuror’s paraphernalia was no uncommon thing. Also, at the Fields, one met the cream of one’s friends and mother was always invited, and went, because she enjoyed the Cumptons atmosphere as much as we did, and there was always something special for her in the treasure-hunts, to find which she was privily smuggled into another room in case the other mothers should be hurt and offended. One year, her trove was a china castle with bastions and portcullis, hollow inside for the nightlight that would shine through the barred windows. I have it still.

  And the food was always wonderful. The Fields had a cook who really was faithful and devoted, a thing that usually only happens in novels, and her richly-iced cakes were as good as the Martins’ and took the eye far more, and even if you went to ordinary tea or stray lunches you were offered, on leaving, lemonade that was strong and really cold, or Stowers’ lime-juice, and could be sure of a huge, crisply brown fowl on the dining-table, which always was our idea of high wassail.

  The Domrémys lived about a quarter of a mile beyond the Fields in a huge bastard building with two square towers and distributed such incredible quantities of presents from a fifteen-foot-high tree in their otherwise gloomy billiard room that guests were positively embarrassed, and lived in luxury all the rest of the year, cheerfully outrunning the constable until he caught up with them and they ultimately went bankrupt, so I heard, and left ‘The Towers’ for ever.

  Or there were the Raymonds who lived in our quiet road, just missing the turnip-field but falling heir to a meadow as frontispiece, who, one Christmas, packed their eleven-year-old son dressed as Santa Claus into a monstrous cotton-wool snowball glittering with that powder called ‘Jack Frost’, who, at a sign from the ring of children, rose from its inn’ards; a scene – it took place in the hall of ‘Meadhurst’ – which is fixed in my memory partly for its own sake and partly through the description of us invoking the gift-bringer as retailed by the Raymonds’ nurse to Aggie (‘An’ then they all called out, “Father Christmas, come HUP!”’).

  And to these houses must be added the generous sprinkling of those who never became intimates, but upon the visiting-list of whom, for this reason or that, Mell and I were fixtures, and I can ‘feel back’ now the sensation of attractive strangeness that descended upon me during those journeys by hired brougham to localities I couldn’t recognize, in a darkness relieved by but a stray lamp-post, and in which I lost my bearings completely, and to this day I don’t know how far we drove from home – or how near, and the only familiar thing fined down to the faint smell of the Shetland lace shawl in which I was wrapped.

  When the party was at the Raymonds, two gardens off, the affair was simplified to a rush with Aggie on foot lest I catch cold, with a velvet shoe-bag containing my slippers. On cold nights my frocks culminated grotesquely in rubber boots, mother being the first parent to introduce Wellingtons to a startled Addison.

  I don’t know what general opinion prevailed about those parties, but personally I am still convinced that they were far more fun, infinitely more original than anything offered to children to-day. Mothers probably spent about half the money, but at least they were prepared to take time and thought and didn’t lean exclusively upon the hireling and the big shop, and if we had our local failures they were failures of temperament (the Jasperleighs) or the result of mass thinking and production (the Ackworth-Meads). Who but Mrs. Field would have thought of putting an individual iced cake inscribed in pink with its owner’s name by every place at table? How many mothers to-day would import, as did auntie S, a real automatic-machine into her drawing-room from which, with supplied pennies, we drew scent, chocolate and coco-nut ice? Who to-day would, as did Mrs. Raymond, invite a ten-year-old Barbara Morant as sole guest to luncheon and let her choose in advance any dishes she liked? (I plumped for roast chicken and cherry pie.) Or give for her daughter, son, and myself a dolls’ dinner-party (at night! Positively from seven-thirty to nine) at which we sat down at a small table of white enamelled wood and were served with a real miniature jelly and a roast partridge, dished on the dolls’ dinner-service. Poor little Bertie Raymond, breathing heavily, carved the bird, once on to the linoleum and once into the fender, until the nurse stopped bathing the baby in another corner of the nursery and very kindly took over while the host’s eyes brimmed with mortified tears, but cheered up at dessert and smoked a chocolate cigar … and how enchanting it all was. And going home, I was so uplifted with grandeur that the escort of Aggie was suddenly intolerable to a woman diner-out and I sent her on ahead to walk the fifty yards to our gates.

  CHAPTER VII

  1

  INTO the planning of our own parties at Evenfield mother threw all she had of liking of the thing for its own sake, of love for Mell and me, affection for the majority of the guests, plus, who knows? a substratum of remorse towards the large number of those present whose ways were not her own and never could be, whether she acknowledged them by the formal call or not.

  Our drawing-room was a large one adjoining the billiard room and on the ground floor facing the garden. It was, as I have hinted, by no means devoid of aesthetic error, but then nor were the drawing-rooms of anybody else, except that with some people bad taste goes on for ever despite what current fads may prevail.

  Of our decorative scheme, a fair estimate is that, conventions being what they were, it might have been very considerably worse, but that, judged by red-hot stop-press standards, the drawing-room was pretty far gone.

  By the large french windows there was for two or three years a ‘cosy corner’ with a canopy, which contrivance was neither cosy nor a corner, being set at a left-angle to the fireplace. At a considerably earlier p
eriod there stood in line with the door an organ, something smaller than those in churches but startlingly large for a private room. My impression of it is that it was here to-day and gone to-morrow and for it I never formed the remotest affection. It was, of all people, Marcus who seemed to use it most. Cuss was never particularly encouraged as a musician but talent will out, and he could play with considerable effectiveness by ear and even better from the score, which has always struck me as being the more remarkable feat, possibly because one always disparages that which one can do oneself, for in time I could play the better by ear, but boggled eternally at the printed note. Ledger lines! As soon would I cope with a cloud of gnats!

  The organ was another source of tilt between Cuss and father, who once caught his son playing airs from The Messenger Boy upon what father described as ‘an ecclesiastic instrument’, and Marcus’s amusement overrode his exasperation once more, and after that he resorted to the upright Bechstein at the further end of the room. And on many a night when Mell was reading or doing preparation before her bedtime, and mother and father dining out or attending a Shakespeare Reading, I have fallen asleep to The Greek Slave, The Geisha, San Toy and

  ‘Oh, listen to the band!’

  of which the first line runs

  ‘Where’s the music that is half so sweet?’ …

  Where, indeed?

  The piano back, suffering the taste of the day that even mother made no fight against, was draped with a black cloth stiffly embroidered in gold thread curlicues enclosing circles of iridescent glass, but at least no photographs in silver frames littered its top.

  On more than one occasion I got out of bed and went into the drawing-room to dance to the music. As the years passed, these extempore posturings took form, and gradually entire solos remembered from matinées seen in Kingsmarket became the only desirable things to perform. Sometimes Mell joined in too and we took turns at being the entire chorus and would put the brass fender into the middle of the room for footlights, and on anniversary occasions would throw each other bouquets out of the drawing-room vases.

  Mell’s age protected her, but I sensed even then that to let these performances extend beyond her and a few capriciously selected cronies – who kept their mouths shut: they probably could also do things which must never come downstairs to the At Home day, and look at poor old Janet – might let me in for something that would wipe all humour and enjoyment from the business. And to a child a grown-up person is the public, no more and no less intimidating than fifty or five hundred, a feeling which I’ve carried over from the nursery all my life, which leaves me completely unable to understand the entertainer’s point of view when he denies nervousness on the grounds that his concert was ‘only a small affair’ or just in a village hall’. But to me, people at small affairs and in village halls remain eternally people, as alarming as a packed audience at the Albert Hall, and my discomfort and shame at playing the piano to Miss Myra Hess or our dear Mrs. Stortford (who is almost tone-deaf) would have been of exactly the same quality and volume, then, as it would be to-day.

  It cuts both ways, because I was never less or more nervous at executing pas seuls before large Addison audiences than I was to, say, the little Fields. For of course I was found out (my downfall occurred over an imitation of the will-o’-the-wisp’s dance in Bluebell in Fairyland), and of course I became in dreadful demand at once and the local Ninetta Crummles for years. To explain one’s unwillingness was impossible when one didn’t know the reason, and this fact was eternally beyond the scope of parental understanding which spends the other half of its time in cautions against ‘showing off’.

  This, to me, was one of those baffling troubles of which, later on, I was to collect so many samples: the woe to which one isn’t officially entitled. For, on the face of it, what more could a child desire? Lovely little sparkling frocks, and the centre of the stage …

  I hadn’t even the urge to commit the business to paper in some caustic verse or tale in which the oppressors came to humiliating ends. I was probably afraid that that pleasure would go overboard as well!

  And yet, thanks to stray London shows and the constant source that was the annual Kingsmarket pantomime, I wanted to go on the stage and dance.

  My governess misunderstood this best of all. Through the pince-nez which clipped her chilly nose she looked her kind bewilderment as, a little arch and bright, she protested, ‘But, you don’t like dancing, Barbara’. Barbara, hopelessly involved in her mind, stammered out, ‘It–it isn’t the same’, and I know now what she meant: that an audience of the public is tolerable because it comes to you fresh and doesn’t know, for instance, that you once ate too much Christmas cake and were sick, or stole a Fairy cake out of the dining-room cupboard, or had said you thought the Bible a silly book, and dull, or when. (It was after that morning reading, conducted apparently at complete haphazard by Miss Abernethy, which had landed me with Joshua – if it were he – making the sun stand still. As I didn’t know that the sun moved this seemed unremarkable, and, explained, quite pointless, by a governess eager to find wonder in everything and religion in all.)

  Father’s attitude to my performances would have seemed the last word in inconsistency to anybody but his children, who expected little from him at any time but the incalculable, for it never occurred to him for one second that having turned my feet danceward and to publicity, might turn my mind to the theatre. He enjoyed the entertainments at Parish Room, Town Hall and High School quite unmistakably, and became positively sentimental over me afterwards while the cab waited for our party in the night air and you could hardly get into it for congratulatory friends and kisses from heaven knows whom; but he read the Riot Act over me when I told him I wanted to be in the next Kings-market pantomime. It was one of those homilies that began, ‘As soon should I –’, and somewhere about the middle, his polished periods became peopled with harlots and whores who, as it were, came in by every comma, except one Scarlet Woman who entered after a full-stop. I thought she sounded immensely attractive, and never for a moment associated the adjective with her face, red with anger as Cook’s sometimes became, but with a picturesque gown, square-cut in the neck, with sleeves that wrinkled to her delicate knuckles. (Years later I was to see a poster of Jean Stirling Mackinlay in just such a robe de style and the exact colour of my imagining!)

  Meanwhile, I continued to Crummles and was the delight of Addison’s chief dancing mistress, a neat golden-hair’d and tailor-made person who came down from London once a week, and whom everybody liked, in spite of her hair, because she knew her job, was just, was universally suspected of a strong bias against Thelma Jasperleigh and openly convicted of removing that acidulated aspirant from the front row where she had placed herself to the last row but one, where (in mustard-coloured satin or billiard-green moiré) she could nothing common do, or mean, upon that memorable scene …

  For the dancing-classes were weekly ‘occasions’: the standards weren’t exacting but the dress-standard was, and the mothers, including mine, sat in a large semi-circle of chairs to watch and get together and have some delicate scandal or criticism, or exchange warm praise and affection, or, haply, to hope they would ‘see’ Mrs. Morant at their next Progressive Whist.

  ‘Neat your feet, Nellie!’ and (with approbation)

  ‘Nellie! … Nellie!’

  ‘Daisy, spring!’

  And Daisy Field, her nice face like an eager terrier, vigorously sprang, or, as I was to find out years later when under the hands of a famous ballet master, executed some échappés. Dear Miss Anson didn’t know one correct term in dancing, but she got her effects. To her, a pas de basque was eternally, ‘Rise. Pass’, while a tir-bouchon was a ‘twist’ and a coupé ‘cut and up’. Into what terms she would have translated a grand jété en tournant God only knows. The pirouette was, of course, a ‘turn’. Years later I met Miss Anson at Brighton, and pulled her, I am certain, neat leg – for we never saw it above the ankle when she raised her skirt to sketch a demonstra
tion – and after affectionate greetings I told her that George Robey was doing a pirouette at the local Hippodrome, to which Miss Anson interestedly stated that ‘some of these comedians are excellent dancers’, which floored me on the spot.

  ‘Thelma! where are your elbows? What are you thinking of? Pay attention. Watch Nellie.’

  ‘Stand! … now Barbara is going to show you a new dance. Come along, Barbara,’ and (bending to me and sotto voce) ‘You’re not nervous are you, dear?’

  I didn’t like it, except in gorgeous, unpredictable flashes, but I don’t think I ever let her down.

  As for the new dances which I was to ‘show’, sometimes after only one lesson, I also attended once a week Miss Anson’s packed and infinitely more advanced class, which included professional stage children, very curled and overdressed and even rouged, at a town two stations down the line.

  At four o’clock, after a march-past that was surely superfluous, we formed into two lines, curtsyed deeply (‘Why do you curtsy like a Gaiety girl?’ my ballet master once exploded at me), dispersed to the changing-room or (the Elect) upstairs to tea with the school Principal and her daughters, or down the road to tea with the Fields, or sometimes, for our sins, to Thelma’s nursery, which was characterless and boxlike.

  2

  The High School wasn’t really a High School in our time: its title persisted from a former epoch before Addison became the spread-eagle suburb, part-town, part-village, that it was as we knew it, in which the typically substantial villa nudged a buttercup field, as like as not.

  It must have been the family men like my father, originally Londoners and still City-bound, to whom the Waterloo train service and an increasingly fashionable liking for semi-country life and its attendant fresher air, were responsible for the selectiveness which was to creep in and which eventually ended in the old High School packing up and moving to a sulky and defunct-looking mansion standing in its own laurelly grounds in a road near the Stortfords, and gave Madame Fouqué her chance to acquire Mayvale House and run it as a large private school.