Evenfield

by Ferguson,Rachel

  Sometimes when things looked too black, Léonore and Irène Fouqué, whom everyone liked, stole privily from Mayvale and rushed in different directions about Addison, picking up the pieces, before dropping in, carked with care, to Evenfield and mother’s laughter and sympathy.

  ‘But, Mrs. Morant, what to do? Mother’s being too, too ridiculously insupportable! And it’s always the same thing over these expositions. Even poor Miss Anson – a wreck! Mais enfin, it’s forgotten for us’, from the histrionic Irène.

  And Léonore: ‘A terrific rrow with Mrs. Culver over Dorotée and her shoes. It’s offal. And I know the Culvers haven’t a sou to jingle on a tombstone, as I told Maman. But if you say one word she is blessed!’

  Of my kimono as originally conceived by Muddarm, all I need say is that my hair was stuck as full of miniature fans as a porcupine with quills, while my obi was tied in front in a large bow – a joke I was not allowed to share for many years! but which gaffe mother blew to auntie S and Mrs. Field, who laughed until they cried (‘So Buggins becomes a harlot at nine years old, but I suppose you can’t learn the business too early’). To which sally auntie S responded, shaking, ‘Haigh! haigh! haigh! It’s no use, auntie M, I shan’t be able to go near the show now because of exploding.’

  The display was held in the Jubilee Hall in a part of Addison which began to become another suburb and that we hardly knew; Madame’s plushy drawing-room was not large enough for audience or performers. It was a deplorable hall, bare and comfortless and created, I should think, for Methodist whist-drives or Salvationist testimony. Miss Anson hated it because its acoustics were unfavourable to the hearing of commands, and we never shook down in it because it was to us an annual fatigue made slightly alarming by the sprinkling of those theatrical children imported by Miss Anson for effect, who kept the show waiting while their hair was frizzed by a hairdresser. I, more used to them from my extratuition in their own classes, was never badly awed, and the creatures were harmless enough, if stagily dressed with a tendency to tulle and semi-concealed artificial flowers about their draperies and to call one Darling in a businesslike way before putting themselves in the front row as a matter of course.

  As for the floral Fête, on the strength of the Whiff an’ Strey it was crowded affair held in some field which I’ve never since been able to locate.

  3

  And then, as when a curtain is lowered, Evenfield, the garden and all our friends were suddenly hidden from sight. The seaside holidays had come round again, Cuss reappeared on the stairs, father ceased to catch the train to Waterloo, and we left in two cabs for the usual places, and left, it seems to me, without a parting word or backward glance.

  Barmouth was caddying for father on the links, a miner’s cottage facing the mountains that were full of small and unbalanced black bulls and huge mushrooms, terrifying thunderstorms, bannocks and milk for supper, Aggie reading Kim on a minute landing, and myself being given a penny by the greengrocer, who liked the look of me, and spending it in a slot-machine at the station featuring photographs of the kind known in certain circles as Art Studies (When Bertie Goes After The Girls, in short!). But the highlight of Barmouth was a beach concert party whom everybody blindly and doggedly called The Niggers, for they neither blacked their British faces nor rattled bones, but were straw-hatted and blazered and could be edifyingly sentimental, especially the pianist, who played the organ in church on Sundays, and owing to the smallness of their platform had to stand up behind his piano to sing a lugubrious ditty whose burden was,

  Oh, lucky Jim, how I en - vy him!

  Jim, if I remember, had by his superior attractions stolen the heart of his bosom friend’s, the singer’s, fiancée, which accounted for refrain number one, leaving the rejected lover so mourning that when Jim predeceased him refrain number two was accentuated and the gentleman was duly interred

  In a churchyard (pause) by the sea.

  As against this, there was a delightful red-faced comedian with very blue eyes who sang a song about a disarmingly unpunctual fireman and his outmoded equipment, the chorus of which has always, when sometimes I murmur it now, struck me as being quite admirable stuff, for, Editorially speaking, it was snappy, factual, and wasted no time on side-issues or excuses. It was in point of fact hot news!

  I was late. I was late,

  The engine it had rusted and the boiler it had busted.

  I was late,

  And when I came

  They’d started the new buildings

  I was late, late again.

  Nor did The Niggers overlook that clean British fun which thrives upon domestic catastrophe and that is first cousin to the lodger and the mother-in-law as a laugh-raiser. Two lines of this chronique douleureuse – it happened at night but the nature of it escapes me – ran (prestissimo),

  There was Pa, he was half undressed

  Sitting in the gutter with the mangle on his chest …

  It comes back to me that the lodger was not forgotten, for was there not another song which (unconventionally, surely?) praised him?

  Our lodger’s such a nice young man

  And a nice young man is he,

  So good, so kind to all the compan - ee …

  And there was a chorus:

  OH, what do you think of Mary?

  Hi, hi! where d’you think she’s gone?

  With a dandy coloured coon on a Sunday afternoon

  Hi, hi! that’s where Mary’s gone.

  The phrasing (thank you, Mr. Field!) of the singer was ‘a dandy-coloured coon’ and it was years before I realized that there should have been a vocal comma after ‘dandy’; as it was, I, thinking in terms of dandelions, pictured the coon as of their tint – a not bad guess, America containing such a goodly proportion of what they call ‘high yellows’ in a population that Mr. Sinclair Lewis has described as ‘one hundred per cent mongrel!’

  Shanklyn was a charming two-storeyed white lodge with an orchard and the landlady’s twins for me to play with, and terrific heat, large iridescent shells to be bought in the Chine, and falling in love with that most charming of all pierrots, Mr. Clifford Essex (whose altar was a very crowded one indeed: one was lost behind all those adult backs!).

  Bembridge was a ghostly and constant feeling of depression, an avenue, and a sea that came right up to the brambles, also a deserted house on the cliff through the windows of which pictures still hung askew on the peeling walls. Dreadful!

  Ramsgate was heatwaves and fish, viscous nougat, French sailors unloading and a stout lighthouse whose beams swept our bedrooms on The Paragon, and huge buoys in rows on the harbour, an all-pervasive smell of hot asphalt, and a pierrot called Uncle Arthur in a little boy’s linen sunhat who had my heart for a few weeks but never displaced Mr. Essex.

  Tenby was flat scones called Batchcakes, gloomy lodgings, inconvenient bathing and learning to bicycle, with mother rushing after my vanishing machine from which I hadn’t learnt to dismount.

  Swanage was the whole of a furnished house on the cliff with a shadeless garden and a clientèle of thirsty dogs that pots and pans must be filled for.

  Sheringham was unclean farm-house lodgings and mother quoting things about The Garden of Sleep, and exquisite shells for the picking up on a lone, lorn and distant bay that would have suited Emily Bronte down to the ground. Damnable!

  We went away a lot, in those years (mother’s dislike of Addison?), for not many Easter holidays passed without another exodus, though not always with father and Cuss. A birthday at the sea was a real misfortune that only overtook mother, who incredibly didn’t mind, and poor Mell, who did, what with posts arriving late and no further delivery after tea and friends ungettatable and presents at the mercy of the local shops and the cake beyond the skill of the baker and no treat procurable, unless you were the kind of person who is satisfied by looking at a field of cowslips or bluebells in a wood and coming home uplifted and purified and, generally speaking, full of emptiness.

  Lee, in Devonshire, was a goth
ic, flint cottage, and mother’s first attempt at bread-making that was heavy, heavy, damned heavy, like Jingle’s luggage. And in our little churchly parlour I was suddenly free’d of diffidence and reluctance by one of those unpredictable flashes which occasionally allowed me to enjoy the dancing-class, and staged an entire variety act of song and dance for mother and Mell, after which, appalled and deflated, embarrassment gripped me as usual, a condition in which I remained indefinitely.

  I tracked down and bought an Easter egg for the Vicar (why?) but ate it myself.

  Lee was, finally, an endless cliff walk to Ilfracombe but the discovery in a shop in the arcade of a ‘hand-painted’ post card of Ada Reeve as San Toy (which really should have been Toy San: what was the librettist thinking of?), and coveting it with deep, determined avidity, and pricing it and finding it was fourpence (fourpence!), but I got it at last, then suddenly lost it, and suspect Marcus to this hour, for he was still a martyr to that lady, whereas I was merely attracted by her tunic and tights.

  CHAPTER X

  1

  GOING away was corner seats and Comic Cuts out of which Aggie, low-voiced, would read me the jokes: tunnels that smelt of gunpowder, sulphur and soot, hardboiled eggs that tasted of tunnels, while at every major station glass swing-doors were engraved with the names of Spiers and Pond.

  The return journeys are all a blank and the next thing of which one was aware the garden, with globules of dew on the dahlias and a scent of trodden leaves, and finding the trees in full apple, the pears now grown from peg-tops to stewing size, and Stiles trudging about with a damp sack over his shoulders. One year I gave him a mug with ‘J’ on it in forget-me-nots, for I had early drawn from him that his name was James and that he lived in Nutts Lane. He assured me that it should have a good place on the mantel next a vawse he won at a Band-and-Fête and (on the other side) a red First Prize card for the best potato entered in the Cottage Garden Class at a flower-show outside Kingsmarket in 1888 before he come to live at Addison or I was born or thought of – a misty reminiscence which left me feeling outside the pale, and incredulous into the bargain; for if Stiles was doing things and having fun before I could join in too then everybody else must have been also, and I’d missed something, but over which I can’t have dwelt long, for, as in an irrelevant dream-sequence where everything at the time seems ordered and reasonable, there was suddenly at the end of the kitchen garden bordering the road a large fowl-run that wasn’t there before, and in it hens smelling richly and sourly and a handsome rooster with auburn feathers the colour of Mrs. Oswald’s hair that Stiles referred to as ‘that Dung ‘ill’, and a black hen with a face that immediately recalled aunt Caroline, one of father’s sisters, a discovery that I went into the house to announce to mother, who tried to look disapproving and ruined it all by full agreement – she couldn’t bear aunt Caroline, who thought and said that my skirts were too short and my necks too low. She lived in what I have since learnt was Onslow Square and gave one luncheons consisting chiefly of massive silver dish-covers and a phalanx of unfriendly, starched maids who seemed to sense the tension-in-law. Her mother, old Mrs. Morant, had tricksily cornered what humour her family possessed and had a tongue which if translated to the theatre could easily have been trimmed into epigrams, but being merely a gentlewoman of the old school she got no laughs at all except from our mother. ‘M’mm …’ she dismissed aunt Caroline’s stricture, ‘it takes a good woman to have a really nasty mind, and if a child with uncommonly pretty legs can’t show them it’s a pity. But Caroline’s prudish, you know. She was born unmarried, even if she is a widow … I always did think your two most satisfactory, Halcyon – Melisande and Babs, I mean, not your limbs, though it’s from you they got ’em. The Morants run to bedposts though I kept my ankles until I was nearly seventy.’

  And just in the same way that we never even by accident seemed to hit on the same holiday places as our friends, so it never, I think, even occurred to us over hoops in the Park to ask each other what sort of a time we had had. Real life to us was Addison, and the annual departure a whim entirely of the grown-up mind, like paper patterns and no-sweets-before-breakfast, and so glad were we to be home that we fell back on semi-serious quarrels, even with the Fields, and would separate for luncheon with a ‘Good-bye, enemy’. And October being my month, and I alive as in no other, as I am to-day, I even contrived a pompous row with the gardener and wrote him a note (it began ‘My Good Stiles’). Fired by father’s feats, I began a Life of a French Countess called Hélène de Gruyère who was a confidante of what monarchs I could remember and put a fact to, including Louis the Fourteenth and Henry the Eighth, whose faces when bested by her tongue became ‘infected with collar’ – as indeed they probably were. But I soon scrapped her, for wasn’t my birthday coming near, and, better still, the Fifth of November and a large party at Evenfield beginning with tea and a mask beside every plate and progressing to a dusky lawn, with Aggie distributing the smaller fireworks from her bulging apron, and ending with a gargantuan bonfire topped with its Guy? A night that was ravishingly heilige and anything but stille, what with the distant poppings and ploopings and rockets going up in gardens and backyards all over the neighbourhood, and the sky shimmering and vibrating with lurid glares and glows and percussive flashes. We did the thing properly in Addison, and for days beforehand stuffed dummies, idiotically gazing like paralytics, were wheeled about in handcarts and prams and numbers which would satisfy even those strongholds of Guydom, Lingfield and Lewes.

  Over our own, which were sometimes groups of current villains including Kruger and a murderess whose name I’ve forgotten, mother and Mell worked for days, so that the midday break from lessons and escape to the garden became more of an urgency than ever.

  On the Fifth, people were invited to Evenfield to whom mother wanted to give special treats and pleasure.

  Mother, unlike dear Mrs. Field, wasn’t temperamentally a Good Worksy person: all her kindness was of amateur status. Mother was no hand at raising the fallen, or Bible readings, young people’s clubs, Christian young women or any praiseworthy endeavour which has official notepaper. Her affection for the humble was undiluted by conscientious considerations; it was possible to her to make of those who served her warm and personal and lifelong friends in a real way that many who use the expression as a Christian or snob flourish never truly achieve. Breaches of faith and confidence, all forms of disloyalty, pettiness and dishonesty mental or material were the only barriers. It was a highish standard that she set, but if you think it over, a profound compliment, as it was, au fond, a sincere and classless assumption of shared human virtues. Hit or miss: unlike Mrs. Field who, when domestically or philanthropically betrayed by her protégées and finds, forgave them on principle, while mother, on being let down, took it as hardly as she would an unkindness from Mrs. Field herself. A vulnerable mistress for all her outward show, the bad servants traded on that side of her nature and the good respected it and her.

  Cooks and houseparlourmaids came and went, and I suppose did all the things which they do to this hour, except that even the worst of them cooked better and all knew at least the rudiments of her job, and through chance and change Aggie remained, though even she had had predecessors, stop-gap young women who, to me, came from the unknown and vanished into the same.

  When a kitchen crisis occurred Mrs. Couchman was sent for, and she came, fair-hair’d and beaming, and unpacked her Japanese hamper containing apron and house-shoes as if she had reached her haven and home, though she actually lived in Nutts Lane near Stiles.

  ‘Oh Madam, isn’t it lovely to see Miss Barbara’s sun-hat hanging up again!’ this apparent orphan would murmur, although she had two children who fully shared her feelings about us, and a husband as well. She was of the type which if a friend attempted murder would apologize below-breath, ‘Of course it was very wicked, but she looked a perfect picture with the knife in her hand’, and was one of the few devoted mothers in the world who could admire the children of
other women above her own. With her, Mell and I enjoyed The Divine Right, and as for myself, if I can’t pretend that at that period of our lives I felt for her as other than an intermittently pleasant part of the landscape, I see now how deep was her place in my regard.

  For with Mrs. Couchman my sense of security was so entire that to her I would give, and so confide, all that I had to offer. To her I could read verse and plays finished or half-written: for her I would dance and sing the last musical comedy I’d seen in Kingsmarket: for her (oh ultimate concession!) I could even play the piano if the drawing-room were empty, and about this social facility I was at times bewildered and unhappy, for wasn’t it a disloyalty to my family? And if she was an audience too perfect for the good of any performer, I can honestly say that her uncritical, wrapt attention and laughter did me no harm at all, for while it lasted I was absorbed in the job of entertainment, while she peeled potatoes, her sleeves rolled above comfortable and I am sure comforting arms. Perhaps it was that I instinctively counted upon her unsophistication and its accompanying ignorance of how far short of the model or ideal I was actually falling. I only know that for our dear morning help I danced better than ever I had (save in flashes) for Miss Anson and the watching mothers, played with more freedom and expression than ever I had for Mr. Field. Authorship alone suffered no sea changes. You can’t improve or ruin the written word at nine and ten and eleven years old …