Evenfield

by Ferguson,Rachel

  It may sound singular if I say that with Mr. Field, the expert, connoisseur-bully, the delightful and incalculable guesser, understander and appreciator, I was at my least shy; more, that I once played him a little bit of nonsense of my own composition (carried in my head and ear, I couldn’t have written it down for a thousand pounds). The thing itself was inspired by and dedicated to one of auntie S’s cats – old Stiver, if I remember, and Mr. Field was unconsciously at the back of whatever form it possessed as a solo: for here was a hint of that ‘silly music’ of Wagner’s peasants in cat-language, a little of its elementary obtuseness, and there an attempt at its sudden movement after bird or rustled-paper-game, and the motif was a somnolent, satisfied phrase as of much milk and a prospective place in the sun, which literally was composed by Stiver, for heaven knows I didn’t consciously make it: it was that the great striped old dear set up his own atmosphere which came through to me as do the personalities of people.

  In playing it to Arnold Field I was banking on his absentmindedness, his reassuring inattentions – even on a crushing snub in his assumption that I was making the usual hash of the work of a real composer. And he didn’t fail me: he walked about the room filling a pipe and cursing a mislaid matchbox most of the time, which was emboldening to a performer of my mental processes. And when I had finished, airy with relief and guilty, with a self-consciousness that drove my hands and nose into some of his Bach albums that I couldn’t read three bars of, he said, ‘Any more?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You make it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Quite pretty. Think you can remember it?’

  ‘Yes – no.’ Maladroitly I saw the trap, the possible future of playing in drawing-rooms.

  ‘Any object in view?’

  ‘Mrs. Stortford’s cat, Stiver, you know’.

  He thought and grinned. ‘Ah … pleased about something. You mean that Mur-ow-wow motif (you hurried that a bit; it’s a retrospective thing … looking back on a good gorge or mice, or something). Leggiero penseroso … “Mur-ow-wow –”’

  ‘It’s “Purr-purr-purr”,’ I objected.

  ‘Same thing. Don’t peck at it. Sostenuto, that’s what you’re after, or andante cantabile –’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Roughly, a singing kettle. Do that bit again.’

  Nervous at last, I bungled it handsomely.

  ‘No no no! Here’, he edged me off the stool. ‘By the way, it’s your piece, but I don’t like that chord. It’s too plainspoken. If you want to get your cat effect you’ve got to convey here and there a hint that its apparent stupidity isn’t more than top-dressing – get inside the skins of the things and people you’re writing about – and the only way you can arrive at that, musically speaking, is by making subtle a chord now and then. Now, leave your purrs alone, I like them. But in your fourth bar, when you’ve stated your theme, give us a surprise, and at the da capo, vary it.’ As I didn’t know what my fourth bar was or where in the Stiver-picture it occurred, we finally had to set the whole thing down on paper, I giggling, he peremptory and businesslike. And if I write the words here, it is not only a piece of self-indulgence as recalling a very illuminating morning, but to show how the expert sees a thing, the way the amateur attacks it, and, if it can be conveyed, how our versions varied when translated to the keyboard.

  My version:

  I’m Miss-es Stortford’s cat

  I’m lying in the sun

  My milk is done:

  I’m lying in the sun, and Miss-es Stortford’s cat.

  But suddenly my ears

  Perk up, oh what was that?

  My broad-striped fur that heaves with purr

  Is lying in the sun.

  Was it a rat, and is it worth

  The heaving up of all my girth?

  I do not care two straws

  My milk is done,

  With head sunk in my paws

  I’m lying in the sun

  My broad-striped fur still heaves with purr, purr…

  purr…

  I’m Miss--es Stortford’s cat.

  Mr. Field’s version:

  I’m Mrs. Stortford’s cat, I’m lying,

  Lying in the sun, my milk is done.

  I’m lying in the sun, and

  Mrs. Stortford’s cat.

  But suddenly my ears perk up

  Oh, what was that?

  (I’m Mrs. Stortford’s cat).

  My broad-striped fur that heaves

  That heaves with purr

  Is lying in the sun,

  Is lying in the sun.

  Was it a rat, and is it worth the heaving up

  Of all my girth?

  I do not care two straws, my milk is done,

  With head sunk in my paws I’m lying,

  Lying in the sun.

  My broad-striped fur still heaves

  With purr … purr … purr

  I’m Miss-es Stort---ford’s

  Cat.

  Over our versions I happily forgot my diffidence in argument. Mr. Field, chuckling, said that there was much to recommend both our efforts but that his was the more interesting. And then, going off at a tangent, he opened another door for me when he embarked upon musical phraseology and said what disservice the printed word nearly always did to the composer, and cited Shakespeare’s Orpheus with his lute, which I knew and had heard from the Shakespeare Readings, and laid down the law that whatever the setting used Shakespeare had done his best to ruin every effect they’d made for him. ‘Have you ever seen it written? It’s ghastly, unforgivable stuff.

  Orpheus with his lute made trees

  And the mountain tops that freeze

  Bow their heads when he did sing –

  Lord! And it took Sullivan and German to rescue him! They scored it so that it was transformed – that doggerel!

  Orpheus with his lute

  With his lute made trees, made trees

  And the mountain tops that freeze

  Bow their heads when he did sing - - g

  Bow their heads when he did sing …

  and so on … That’s German … lovely, plastic, swinging stuff, and it’s the same with even musical comedy. Most of their song hits are hits because of the orchestration. Take your beastly “Coo” song. Written down, it goes

  Hark to the sound of “Coo”, of “Coo”, of “Coo”

  Calling to me and you, to me and you,

  (It doesn’t even scan!). But consider the lyricist: he made it with those repeats and shakes.

  Hark to the sound of “Coo - - OO - oo”

  Of “Coo - OO - oo”, of Coo,

  Calling to me and you - OO - oo

  To me - EE - ee and you …

  Heaven help all musicians. They need it.’

  And thanks to that, even now I mentally transform the printed line into possible music. I started from that very lesson, and monstrously turned the Schubert march into a plausible waltz (Mr. Field said that for the first time he very nearly liked it!). And then he said a curiously prophetic thing.

  ‘One day you’ll probably do something that’ll rather disgrace us both, and make a lot of money out of it.’

  CHAPTER VIII

  1

  IN the summer, Addison officially came into its own; officially, because, summer or no, Addison stood upon a singularly depressing reach of the Thames, with an interminable towing-path to the landmark of Addison’s Villa, bordered with pollarded willows, alders and all the more riven and unfriendly of trees of the kind which in the catalogues of nursery gardeners get described as ‘this prostrate subject’, while the flora were represented by bulrushes, goldenrod, and tall, seedy magenta horrors that even marauding childhood rejected.

  If you would escape the towing-path and struck off to the right, you first of all fell into an overgrown ditch before achieving the dreary safety of the commonland over which, in autumn, brooded haunted-looking sunsets, while if you turned aside to the left you merely fell into the river. But i
n spite of all this lowering scenery and greenery the Thames is after all a river, and the river at their doors (and often under them in the winter), it followed that the modish Addisonian sailed it and boated on it in the hot months and even achieved Henley regatta from home moorings.

  2

  It may have been that we were inlanders – Evenfield was quite a mile from the river – that we never became river-lovers or boat-wise, or what we called bilgeworthy; to this day I am unable to tell which is upstream and which down, and the currents and shallows of our reach, together with the workings and even the purpose of the locks, remain a sealed book to me, explain the lock-principle to me who may. Sometimes I almost think I have grasped the reason why craft must be arbitrarily elevated and pent, or sunk, while parties in them wait like truth at the bottom of a well, and the next moment understanding escapes me – like the time-and-note question! For if the river flows flat, why pump it up and down? It isn’t as though there were submerged rocks or icebergs or atolls or reefs or Niagara waiting for one, and if –

  Oh bother! I’ve long given up asking for enlightenment in case somebody tells me, and I feel in my bones that the explanation will be tedious.

  And then, healthy Mell developed river sickness, poor toad, and invitations were a martyrdom to her until she had to come out with the reason for their refusal, which she called the upper retches of the Thames. One year she hopefully set out with the Fields to celebrate Daisy’s birthday with a picnic tea and supper at Sunbury in the punt of a dreadfully rowing and knowledgeable Field uncle, and was so ill at tea that when she began again at supper the uncle said with harassed humour, ‘All up? Then we’d better start for home’.

  If the river never meant anything much to me, the reason was partly geographic but mainly because mother disliked it (as part, I know now, of Addison), and because I have always been painfully susceptible to atmospheres (those sunsets over the commonland!). Also, the river was to gather about it fewer associations for me than almost any other known inch of the place, and without mental data I am always lost and uncertain.

  Father wasn’t much of a hand at it, either: I don’t remember ever once seeing him in a boat, but I do remember how he put us off the towing-path at family walks by a tendency to apposite quotation, and a brief excursion into the realms of what he called the study of Nature, which made Mell and me hot with vicarious shame.

  As for Marcus, he never had time for the river, his life at that period being alternately earmarked for school and seaside lodgings. It was, and such as it was, I who was most on the water in June and July; everybody who knew us was kind and they little guessed what a deadweight they had taken aboard in myself, or that, always interested in people, I went with them far more in hopes of seeing a known face gliding by under a scarlet sunshade, whether its possessor be loved or liked or family joke or prohibited person or detestee than for a share of my hosts’ favourite locks or reaches or views or moorings.

  River hospitality brought the strangest combinations of people together, with the disregarded individual coming out strong as an oarsman, the social aspirant prominent for three months by unsuspected ownership of laid-up dinghy or skiff, while the Addison prominents and leaders got laid up themselves until the gentle autumnal mists and rain should put them squarely back in their right place, the drawing-room, with its Progressive Games, Book Teas and whist. Meanwhile, for me, the afternoon was a success if I could be tied up by, or even glimpse, jolly Evelyn Stortford, who punted competently as became a recognized tennis addict, or if I could subduedly shout to Johnnie Lawnford catching minnows with a butterfly-net in the stern of the doctor’s boat. I once came home and swore that I’d seen Miss Dove madly pulling as she whizzed by but Mell said I’d imagined it, and that she’d be in St. Anselm’s curtseying at some special service.

  Mrs. Markham, on the other hand, was a feature of the river and dashingly could manage with hard ability any type of boat, as seemed fitting in one who was rumoured to smoke cigarettes and to want to read Shakespeare in costume. She owned an electric punt, and in a floral toque and hogskin gauntlets would manoeuvre it skilfully for incredible distances – our Bank manager once deposed that he had seen her at Southend, and although nobody quite believed it, it was felt (Hamlet in tights) that it was the sort of thing that Mrs. Markham would do. And as every river breeds gossip as it does pike and dace and all the unpalatable fish, there was little Mrs. Oswald, but when your hair is as auburn as hers it becomes a challenge to society to tie up anywhere, and every stone ginger-beer becomes automatically a bottle of champagne, and whether there was ever a grain of truth in the things which were said about her I don’t pretend to know; all I am quite sure about is that, to-day, her exploits would probably get her voted the stumer and Grundy of any average bright young people’s party! All this, of course, I heard many years later. And if you consider that it was all a storm in a tea-cup, I would remind you that the capacity of a cup for upset is several trillion times greater than the resistive power of the North Sea (or German Ocean). Not that Mrs. Oswald was apparently distressed at the Addisonian on dit: I think even if she had been, mother would have kept that side of things from us if for no higher reason than her own engrained contempt for mental vulgarity. All we knew was that Mrs. Oswald invited the knowing adult expression, just as we were aware that Mrs. Markham evoked another type of grin to which, somehow, it was permissible to allude and which could be laughed at and discussed without cautions and shooshings.

  Meanwhile, I was in love with our next-door neighbour, Mrs. Randolph, for quite a fortnight (that golden hair!), and was miserably discontented with my own wealth of curly brown thatch and with the whole of my appearance because it didn’t remotely resemble hers, a condition that was to descend upon me whenever I admired anybody and that I took about twenty-five years to slough off finally and completely.

  And just as Mrs. Randolph was beginning to take a real fancy to me – I went off her, in that instant and painless way that is only possible to children whose devotion has not been seriously involved, and found myself landed with a perfectly unwanted, full-sized lady, who would actually venture to come to her fence and call over it to me, driving me to cover in the thickets of artichokes further down the path.

  I committed a poem to her and her garden which thank God I have completely forgotten, except for some nonsense about ‘crevices and crags’ which rhymed with ‘yellow and purple flags’, and like nearly all juvenile verse it was insincere, uninteresting and unexpectedly deft. When I ceased to idealize Mrs. Randolph I wrote a comic song about her called ‘When Bertie Goes After The Girls’, that was one hundred per cent better, being full of authentic stuff! It dealt with a Piccadilly masher who specialized in ornamental (and blonde) girl friends who at last grew so numerous that individual outings with him became impossible unless the ladies walked crocodile – like the girls at Mayvale! (Mrs. Randolph in the last chorus figured at the very end of the queue.) Of this, I remember only isolated lines:

  When Bertie goes after the girls

  Two on his arm and six behind …

  and

  Just like a beautiful necklace,

  He is the diamond clasp, they the pearls,

  Ne’er such a sight was ever seen

  When Bertie goes after the girls.

  And I wonder how Mr. Field would have phrased that!

  For my Piccadilly masher I was indebted to – of all people – my father, partly through his fulminations over current musical comedy and its follies ‘if not worse than folly’, and to his entrancing hints about a place called The Burlington Arcade which, according to father, lived in some perpetual, disreputable twilight that no gentlewoman could penetrate without danger of something that we were left to invent for ourselves overtaking her, and where, quite incredibly, and surely irrelevantly?, it seemed that Honour Was Bartered: which gave me a vista of rows of people all sitting in an arcade and cheating at arithmetic when they weren’t using a Latin crib, until Mell said that if ever you
didn’t know what father was driving at, it was sure to be men and being kissed by the wrong people, which made everything sane and reasonable in a twinkling.

  Meanwhile, I seem to have drifted a long way from our reach of the Thames (as far as Mrs. Markham!).

  We once actually gave a picnic ourselves, but our parties, always so successful indoors, were not so in this element, for Mell of course wasn’t with us, preferring to nurse her stomach on the bank and meet us on our return to help in those deplorable aftermaths of cushion-toting and hamper-hauling; mother, trying to rise and pass the large bowl of salmon mayonnaise, caught her foot in a stretcher and flung the whole mayonnaise overboard to save herself, and our collapsible horn tumblers kept on telescoping while being filled and lost us quite three-quarters of our shandygaff. And then a steamer laden with trippers in pilot caps and straw hats and a harpist plonking away and pork pies and a ‘cold buffet’ in the saloon came by, and her wash rocked us until we were all quite maddened and mother said, ‘This party is evidently meant to be a failure, we’d best not fight it’, at which we all foundered in laughter, guests included, and Evelyn Stortford said, ‘I like a party where everything goes wrong, you know where you are with that sort. It’s when only one or two contretemps happen that it’s really frightful’, and some boy (who might have been Johnnie Lawnford’s brother, Chetwyn, or little Jacky Barstowe, or could it possibly have been Trevor Ackworth-Mead?) leant, rapt, over the side and gloated, ‘Isn’t it wonderful to think all that mayonnaise has gone down so far? If I had a landing-net, I do believe I could get some of it up, Mrs. Morant’.

  Mrs. Jasperleigh early found out that mother avoided and evaded the Thames, and being much under her influence no less from her devotion than her awareness of the Morant standing in Addison, took it into her head that mother considered river hospitality as socially beneath her, not realizing that mother’s dislike of the water was as pure and uncontaminated and self-contained as a siphon of soda. It was enough! Mrs. Jasperleigh and Thelma would shun it too. And she did, giving reasons, and making allusions to possible future yachting holidays at Cannes, which she pronounced as though that resort was a tin of fruit.