To our firework parties the Couchman children, Hope and Connie, were always invited, while their mother, busy with the washing-up, would be fetched by one of us to see the fun; their faces, mother once told me, were absolutely bored with excitement and ecstasy, so unutterable was their enjoyment as Stiles moved about in the dark touching off the more expensively alarming of the effects – those which are suggestively marked ‘Light the blue touch-paper and then stand aside’ (they were run very close in cost and hinted catastrophe by those others labelled ‘Tie to an upright post. Not to be held in the hand’). So awed with bliss were the Couchmans (and I) that I only remember once that we all laughed aloud and interminably when mother aimed a ‘starlight’ at the guy and it lodged in his mouth like a cigarette. She said, ‘I couldn’t do that again if you paid me a hundred pounds’, at which Hope and Connie looked at her, the guy, and each other, and suddenly emitted aching squeal after squeal and respectfully hurried away, doubled up, to get over it behind the gooseberry bushes.
It was on the cinder path by the rhubarb that Evelyn Stortford lit a giant Chinese cracker with horrified bravado, shouting for all her twenty-five years, ‘I’ll do it! I’m a Briton!’, and on the other side by the rockery that the manure-throwing Chetwyn Lawnford laid two rockets, lit, and stood on them to ‘see if they’ll carry me right over the fence’. And for me the party wasn’t even over the next morning, for there were deliciously-smelling aftermaths to be found all over the garden: charred rumps of Roman candles, iridescent circles on tree-trunks where Catherine wheels had spun: the bonfire a mass of still warm ash …
And a voice, suddenly and without transition, is declaiming ‘Lead me to my chamber!’, and it is another evening in the warm and curtained drawing-room, and mother in laced Liberty velvet being armed towards the french windows, as Cleopatra, to a round of applause from the evening-dressed assembly. In flannel dressing-gown, I struck the only unmodish note as I watched and listened for a treat in the abominable Cosy Corner. Cleopatra had been giving somebody a hot time and has threatened to have him ‘whipped with wire’ (unless I’ve dreamed that line?), and I must have got out of the room somehow because the next minute I was on insecure skates of shiny yellow wood careering round a railed-off enclosure marked DANGEROUS, and being frantically pursued by old Mr. Martin, Janet’s father, and rescued by that bold veteran and brought back to the main pond where the ice was holding, and people even curling.
We had skating every winter under the red sun that smouldered above the silver birch in the ‘Miss Cocksedgees’’ garden.
And just before we all dug in for the winter, before the yellow fogs descended upon us and the pea-soup came round again, the little hump-backed Italian with a hurdy-gurdy ceased coming round the drive of our house and playing ghostly operatic clichés to us as he hopefully smiled up by the old lilac bush. He always came on Thursdays at the unnatural and eccentric hour of five p.m. when the road was more deathly quiet than ever, and Thursday was dancing-class day, which meant that at the very moment that he wheezed out Che farò, or whatever it was, I was always being pulled out of billows of shaded chiffon and received my first impacts with Verdi, Offenbach and Puccini through smothers of that pleasant fabric; and although I never knew his name, that hurdy-gurdyist, again, is a face which is more photographically clear and distinct to me now than many a one I would and should be seeing in my mind’s eye.
2
I was sitting reading in the hall one evening and expecting the arrival from the passage of the maid to rattle at the little brass gong which would signal family dinner and my bedtime. Mother and father were talking in the billiard room, and my ear suddenly became aware that something was amiss. It didn’t appear to be so much what they were saying which gave me this impression as my intimate familiarity with parental tones that recognized the key in which any discussion was pitched; and if I stopped reading and listened it was partly because I considered that nobody had any conversation with father that couldn’t be heard by everybody, but chiefly because, if mother were being worried, I must be ready to spring. Had they mentioned any names I should have gone away, because in my vague code that would have been eavesdropping. But if it all sounded respectable enough, wrapped in a decent cloth of anonymity, my instinct remained wary.
‘It could only have happened here!’ exclaimed mother in her voice of low, sarcastic resignation, which, however, covered so many trivia that one discounted the indictment and waited.
‘Oh, Halcy, Halcy … come, come! It might have happened anywhere.’
‘It’s the lack of common charity that I can’t stand. I could have found it easier to forgive if the Addisonians had really meant it and taken concerted action with something to go on, or made a stand against something definite however narrowminded, but not they! It was the result of pure unmitigated idleness and irresponsibility. Petty persecution or a badminton match – it’s all one to them.’
‘Yes, yes … but, well, she and you – ’
‘You mean I didn’t “call” on her? No. I didn’t. Frankly I didn’t think she was up to sample, poor wretch. One must draw the line somewhere for the children’s sake, and I consider that I’ve a right to reasonable elimination. But there’s a pretty wide gulf between what’s happened and not calling! It’s the whole atmosphere of the place … suburbia incarnate at its worst – ’
Father was sharp and at his ‘Oh, nonsense!’ I bristled on mother’s account. Father was a good man and a generous, and of course terribly clever and knew dates, but he must not speak to her in any but a soft and even tone (andante cantabile, as it were!).
‘– and suburbanness is a state of mind, not where one lives.’
‘I see that point’. (Father was being fair and reasonable: he was, after all, a solicitor.)
‘Not that it isn’t possible to combine the two in one egregious whole’, finished mother, sticking to her guns, whatever they were.
‘Well … if you really feel that way –’
‘Oh I do, my dear. This business has about been my Waterloo.’ I knew that expression so didn’t make the mistake of confusing it with the station that for me led eternally to Drury Lane, Royal processions and chicken mayonnaise.
‘– there’s nothing for it but to refrain from renewing the lease. Luckily it has only a year and a bit to run.’
That gave me ajar and stopped any wish for further enlightenment; mother had got what she wanted, whatever that might be, so needed no further protection from me. But I harassed myself over the matter for an eternity – quite two half-nights – and her pokerfaces (I knew them all) though disturbing were soon forgotten; for time went on and nothing happened at all: and therefore nothing would.
CHAPTER XI
1
AND ‘a year and a bit’ went by and we were leaving Evenfield and Addison and I have no remembrance of grief … not one, unless you can count the only scene that I recall, of saying good-bye to Aggie Drumhead outside the bathroom door. She was crying. I was off to the Fields where mother and I were to spend the last dismantling days, father slept in London at his mother’s house in Sloane Street and Mell was taken in by the Stortfords. Mrs. Jasperleigh had emotionally offered to house us all but it was felt that that would be asking a bit too much, and of course Broadacres was still Broad-acres, and Thelma still being Thelma, a decision that suited Mell and me, though I really don’t believe that mother was affected by what walls enclosed her last residential hours in the place. Marcus was by that time up at Oxford and so as usual out of everything.
I walked alone to the Fields at a time when I should have been Abernethy’d with lessons in the day-nursery before shopping or paying the tradesmen’s books with mother. I suppose I said goodbye to Stiles, but that’s gone, too. I’m being at least honest, and not retrospectively attributing to myself sensations that must have been there in view of what I did later, and I do believe that it was. Mell who did what crying there was in our family: Mell who having been uprooted from Addison never expresse
d even one faint wish to be replanted there, either then or thereafter.
The human heart may be desperately wicked, but it is beyond question cranky!
I see Mr. Field looking down on me in the music room at Cumptons as he said, ‘Well, we’re going to miss each other in spite of everything, aren’t we? If you do anything clever it was I who taught you, but if you’re stupid you’ve never heard of me. Is that a bargain?’ He is instantly replaced by Miss Anson, to whom with the downcast head of acute shyness induced by the strange nature of the occasion I present a white kid handbag, and for a briefer moment when I give to Miss Abernethy a muff-chain of a truly shocking design that got itself called Art Nouveau.
The little Fields made us all toilet bags embroidered with circles enclosing daisies, primroses and clover-leaf. Their mother hadn’t allowed them to be told the time our train left for Waterloo but sent them off to school as usual. ‘It seems so unkind, but it’s all for the best’, she said, her eyes brimming with tears that this time were not of copious, guilty mirth at mother’s quips.
Mrs. Jasperleigh gave us all gold bangles rattling with charms, and declaring that to part at the station would be quite beyond her powers of control, went to bed with hysterics, or so auntie S declared in a letter.
Of the platform scene I’ve no remembrance at all of the time of day or type of weather as we slid past the row of familiar cottages whose gardens faced the line. But I do recall the enormous cake that Mrs. Martin put on the seat beside Mell: that rather incredibly old Mr. Martin appeared late and capering with haste with an even larger box of chocolates, and that most improbably the elder Ackworth-Mead son whom I’d once mistaken for a hired waiter was seen by me with Mrs. Markham who had four dogs on a lead. (This is ridiculous. They must have arrived separately!)
2
We were going to live in London, and before the new home was ready to be distributed, alarmingly, among relations. Mother bagged old Mrs. Morant for herself and me: father fell heir to his sister, aunt Caroline, and Mell stayed with cousins in Kensington who were of ages up to twenty-three and went out a lot, and could be generally counted upon to cause a cousin from the wilds to forget her origins and make another start, mother said, referring to the move from Addison and its possible marks left upon a daughter of nineteen as though Mell had had an illegitimate baby and was in the fallen woman class until socially reinstated. Actually, Mell would have gone her own way and settled down wherever she went, for unlike me she was more dispassionate in her approaches to life and people, an onlooker who settles back in his fauteuil, whereas my sort is perpetually on and off the stage itself, like a wrought-up producer who only slumps into his stall when things are running smoothly or total despair with the cast has set in.
Marcus’s comment from Magdalen was, ‘Well, thank heaven we’re out of that doghole’.
And every night for quite a year I included in my prayers, ‘– and God bless Evenfield’.
PART TWO
CHAPTER I
1
MELL was to be dropped into a new life ready-made for her, mother to settle back into her old world, father to know little change in a life which was largely spent in London in any case, and Marcus, who like all sons lived from his cradle up in acquiescence of mobility in the interests of any career, even became a junior member of father’s firm without one single scene that I know of, so hypnotic is family intention.
It was I who had to start all over again, in houses without gardens, gardeners, garden parties or bonfires, with all of magic contained in a bundle from the greengrocer and glasshouse compressed into a punnet, a new school to shake down at and friends to break in from their beginnings: people without context …
Our bicycles were sold for a song (it must have been a lugubrious one) to the Raymonds because we were unused to traffic, and I at least must never go out alone further than the corner pillar-box because of nobody-explained-what, I to whom a three-mile radius in every direction was as familiar as my mother’s face, I to whom every sixth door was available at most times of day. In town, you either called because you were relations or upon calling terms or not at all (no impromptu impulses and half-eaten apples laid on the gatepost). Conversation with shop people went largely by the board as well, for in houses like Granny Morant’s the food arrived at the area door via a chain of domestic conference with cook or (wine) the butler, while the park-keepers and chairmen in Kensington Gardens were too numerous and busy to remember one in summer, in winter one didn’t want their chairs, and they confined themselves to scolding people off the Round Pond if the ice seemed to be holding. For skating there were Prince’s and (roller) Olympia, a sorry exchange that Mell and I soon gave up in contempt, for hadn’t we had a clear half-mile of forest-bordered lake in which Charles the Second had fished while Nell Gwyn fixed a red herring to his line, and the Addison ponds on which one was taken round by friends and rescued by Mr. Martin and picked up by Evelyn Stortford when crashingly one fell?
It was things like Prince’s which broke the healing skin on that cut which was leaving Evenfield. For of course the cut was healing. I defy anybody of any age not to become one of London’s lovers if given what the law calls ‘reasonable access’ to her.
2
I became one of Louis Hervet’s slaves, and for the first time ceased to be a Ninetta Crummles, learnt how little I knew, and really began to dance. On and off, I was under his hands for six years, until I was past eighteen.
Hervet, like Madame Fouqué, was a character and one of the few dynastic ballet masters left in London. Equally master of piano or violin, he may have been a first-rate dancer in his youth, but I think his heart was always with music. And just as Mr. Field could do nothing with me beyond a certain point, just so did I bring to Hervet all my potentialities and defects, and although I went further in the technique of classic ballet than ever I had on Mr. Field’s piano with the printed score, so Hervet to his nervous despair could get me no further. I could damnably please, he once fumed: I could dance any current musical comedy actress off the stage (which of course wasn’t dancing at all): I could do a travelling arabesque sur la pointe, then why the blazes did I let my other leg drop as I moved when it should be extended at waist level? My entrechats were like a faulty electric current, twinkling but gone wrong: with me an entrechat quatre turned into a dishonest entrechat trois.
‘Why can’t you do four pirouettes?’
‘Because I fall down’, I answered.
‘But good God, when I was studying at the Conservatoire I spent my time on the floor!’ and,
‘Do you need the whole of Kensington Gardens to do déboullés in?’ I said apologetically that in doing those spins round the room on the half-point I lost all sense of direction.
‘I know you do. You’d crash into Buckingham Palace from the courtyard, because you never remember the first principle of all forms of the pirouette which is to turn your head sharply halfright with every spin, or half-left according to your direction. Your grand jété en tournant is very pretty, but you don’t get that hovering effect of hanging in space that Nijinsky does because you forget to stiffen your muscles when you’re in the air. There’s no secret about it that’s his property alone, in spite of the nonsense they talk about him.’ For Hervet was at all times as ready to dethrone the established past and present as he was to pull me to pieces in the interests of the dance. Taglioni’s arms were too long and she had to learn from her father to cross them over her head to minimize this defect: on the other hand, she practised until nausea set in as her father believed that every day must show some definite improvement, however slight. Pavlova was a perfect machine but would never achieve greatness except with the mob because she danced from the waist down and couldn’t make use of her face – a heartless performer … no warmth. Genée, now, was all warmth but lacked the Grand Manner because of that element of gaminerie which made her so delicious. Nijinsky was a third-generation dancer, and these children were reputed to be born with bird-bones – ho
llow – which gave them their spring and ability to bound to astonishing heights. Nijinsky-could jump a clear four feet into the air with no take-off at all. About the début of Maud Allan who was drawing fashionable, artistic and political London to the Palace Theatre Hervet had least to say. Elongating his already long and mournfully humorous face he pronounced,
‘Looking down a well … pointing up at the moon and falling in a heap on the floor … Now! Battements …’
Sometimes the world would be too much with him right in the middle of a lesson and he would sit at the piano playing fragments of ballet and murmuring ‘Narcisse … Narcisse’. I learnt to play them all as well – the fragmentary method suited me, too – often without the slightest idea of the ballet or composer I was memorizing and would re-hear it with astonished pleasure in Rimsky-Korsakov and Schéhérezade, Cleopatra and Hungaria. Cleopatra was an appallingly dull affair, but I forgive it all for that motif where the mummy is slowly unwound, and which consists merely of a few repeated bars on four notes, for strings; it seemed to me, and still does, to contain the very spirit of that Egypt I have never seen, but which as a sheer word suggests a sombre ebony thick inlaid with patines of bright gold… Boïto did the same service in his Mefistofele, in a passage (for brass) about heaven, which I have never seen either!
Unlike the majority of Hervet’s students I didn’t expect to become a professional dancer or teacher, and so was free to enjoy him as a human being without pestering myself as to rate of progress or his own quality as an instructor. I found him exasperating and lovable, funny and impersonal. And I liked his classroom (a converted drawing-room) which was high-ceiling’d and hung with prints of famous ballerinas dating back to La Camargo, and full of an atmosphere of the past and Georgian tea-parties, while you had but to look out of his long window to be switched two reigns ahead, and sense the fog, the hansom cab, and in the house opposite a lean silhouette in a dressing-gown smoking a pipe of shag while Doctor Watson sits by the fire being A Little Nettled by This Want Of Confidence …
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