Evenfield

by Ferguson,Rachel

  In the six years to come, I think that Hervet realized that as I had no fish to fry I was to be regarded at once as personal friend and one without status in his rooms, and I do believe that when intermittently I used to drop in for a little barre or centre practice if life’s action slowed down elsewhere we would put in far more conversation, fulmination and criticism than work. He wasn’t to live long after our final drifting apart, and my admiration for his tolerant refusal to belittle English dancers because they weren’t Russian remains as bright as ever. He never saw the rise of British ballet, unless you could count the Empire and Alhambra stock company which commonly supported Continental Assolutas, and would have taken it matter of factly if he had, paying it the true compliment of satire and constructive criticism, as he did to Maud Allan, whose ingenuous art was to be killed by plagiarism and a franker era broken to the brassière and the cache-sexe, and who was to relapse at last into a very full-dress Mother Superior in Cochran’s revival of The Miracle; to Genée whom I was to watch through her retirement, Phyllis Bedells through hers, Pavlova slapping Mordkin, severing the partnership and dying, and Nijinsky living on, his mind haunted by the ghost of a rose, his bird-bones soaring no more, a faun resting in the afternoon of his career …

  CHAPTER II

  1

  IF my memory of our move into and out of Evenfield is a blank and gaps, every detail of our entrance into our London house is catalogue’d. It was the business of remembrance-of-faces over again, with the principals dim and the auxiliaries unwantedly clear.

  It was in spring, our convergence by taxi from the relations’ houses to our own, and there were the usual inartistic and improbable contrasts of apple and cherry blossom going on against the background of grey sky and chilly winds, while in the eiderdown’d nights lambs were dropped by perplexed ewes in Kensington Gardens (Oh, what a DAM’ fool nature is! If she’s a mother, I wonder what bemused dolt ever married the creature).

  Father and Cuss of course were and remained out of the worst of the scrum, and father would merely pass down the road by a new and more convenient route to the City, remarking as he did so that whatever Halcy decided he must have an ‘adequate’ study, a stipulation he would have made, I think, had our new home been a mansion in Park Lane or the sort of Holborn attic in which Chatterton breathed his last. It was mother and Mell who really settled everything, I who just dropped into a bedroom and shared den which sprang up overnight from bare walls and packing-cases.

  It was my very first unshared bedroom, and any initial awkwardness or doubts the room and I might have had of each other were swallowed up in my elation and pride. And by the time I was taking sole possession for granted, we had become so mutually accustomed that we could no longer see straight about each other, and didn’t try to.

  It was a pleasant house in Kensington Gate, a cul-de-sac which gave me a fractionally greater freedom, and the small, oblong garden open to the residents was at least a place where things grew, though nearly everything which children crave to do in open spaces was forbidden in the same disheartening spirit which discouraged street musicians and hawkers at area gates. It was, even for the garden of a London square, quite dreadfully overlooked by the pillar’d houses and more in the nature of a rural gesture than a place where you could laze in deck chairs or secretly build your January snow man. The nurses liked it for that reason, for they had but to put head out of upper window and ejaculate in the extraordinarily elliptic manner of their kind, ‘Now then Esmé, what did Nanny say?’ to earn their gaoler’s wages and save a walk down three flights of stairs. The things that Nanny apparently once said, translated into the language of reason, logic and sanity, boiled down to prohibitions in which shoes must not be scuffed on gravel, hats hung by their elastic on the boughs of trees because of ‘the soots’, and what seats there were avoided if in white sailor suits ‘because you never knew with the pigeons’. Insane to the end, the nurses would thus pass the English language triumphantly through the mangle.

  I once mentioned it all to father, for my ear perceived that all was not well, and he, as so often happened, forgetting that I was thirteen and not thirty and an L.L.B., laid down his pen (he was engaged upon a Life of an incredible old party called Madame de Brinvilliers for a pocket series of ‘Prominent Poisoners of History’ who ate two raw eggs she had ordered while being tortured) and said, ‘It must be remembered that the domestic class is in a rather unhappy state of transition: centuries ahead of complete illiteracy, they are at the same time many more centuries behind an even elementary scholarship’. He went on to say that since the industrial revolution of the ’fifties the social hierarchy admitted to no peasant class as it did in France, Italy and other countries of Europe, but was mistakenly causing a pressure, wholly artificial, of the peasant in esse into a state of living, spending and calling (or occupation) which in point of fact it was by no means yet fitted to fill. Moreover –

  I unconsciously beat time to these rolling periods with a paper-knife. But we did arrive at the point when father decreed that ‘soot’ had no plural, a disability it shared with cannon and salmon.

  Soot, cannon and salmon,

  They don’t have a plural at all,

  So it won’t be a hap’orth of use

  To make it a sorry excuse

  When handing your flitches and gammons

  To hungry-faced beggars who call

  That as there’s no plural of salmons

  There ain’t any salmon at all.

  I hummed and composed, willy-nilly, as I opened the gate of the Square garden, and was pestered by the chorus, with full orchestra on the repeat, for the rest of the afternoon.

  2

  Now that Aggie Drumhead had left us and gone via a holiday at her home in the country to a post at the sea, as she wrote to mother when asking for a testimonial, I had with much help from mother and Mell to look after myself; there wasn’t room for a successor to Aggie, and this lone-wolf state made an impression upon the children who lived near and opposite us, who regarded me as something set apart in that no cautionary head was ever at window calling down obscure nonsense to my intention, and was the reason, I suppose, why a small deputation after much over-shoulder peeping at me and conference straggled up and let the spokesman (a girl, of course) ask, ‘I say, are you very good?’

  ‘I don’t think so’, I stammered.

  ‘Oh, I say … thank you. It wasn’t that you looked it, you know, specially, I mean’, the spokesman apologized.

  Silly with nervousness I said, ‘Father writes books about Courtesans’ and a boy of about fourteen assured me that there were rows of them in the Tower of London and that Beefeaters carried them with tassels on state occasions. And after that we played our first game together and I became one of them, and in due season the mothers called and all was Second Thursdays and iced coffee in the summer, and bridge or a little, a very little, music in the winter. Progressive Games seemed to have vanished overnight, whist was now in the Lotto class and the Book Tea was no more.

  Our house had no name, only a number; there was what London house-agents call a garden, a laurel-bordered square about the size of the kitchen yard at Evenfield with a colour-scheme of black and bice green.

  The house was soon lightened with gilt-framed watercolours, glazed chintz and here and there a remembered piece of furniture. Watts was off and Turner still on: Hope was relegated to box-rooms but The Fighting Téméraire stayed the course.

  What prompted mother’s choice of Kensington Gate I assumed to be that South Kensington in one direction was full of aunts and Emperor’s Gate a bowshot away concealed a great-uncle, a handsome, ferocious old person who sat half under the table at dinner, his shirt-front an inexorable arch in which his beard was buried, and who must have looked quite extraordinarily tipsy until you guessed that he was only bored, for if he came to tea he frequently fell asleep in your face for brief and baffling periods, his shoulder-blades almost on the seat of his chair, his beard pointing to the ceiling.<
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  My own selection of a house would have been, and still is, governed by the conviction as to whether it looked the kind of place outside which friends could assemble for the Derby: if it had the sort of steps down which a wedding or any party could come and look happy, with a conveyed assurance that they hadn’t gone out of the life of the house or of mine: whether I could visualize the heads of people I loved or liked at any window from the street, be convinced of the comfort of a pet cat on the plinth of a gate-post, and what sort of setting the house would offer for good-byes after a summer evening at the theatre. Houses, to me, must have their exterior possibilities and amenities; their aura positively mustn’t begin and end inside the front door.

  There are houses all over London that possess façades which are unmistakably for the sports car and sweaters as others are earmarked for Daimlers or broughams; others are beyond question for children, nurses and flowered wall-papers: some for lonely note-writing, bewildered great-nieces and butlers: plenty crying out for débutantes and Press photographers – all this quite apart from the old or historic mansion which keeps its own staff of ghosts and visions. It wouldn’t, for instance, be fair to sense crinolines in Bruton Street, sedan chairs in Arlington Street, exquisites in St. James’s or Caroleans in Pall Mall, because that sensing is wisdom-after-the-event, and cheating.

  3

  Quite soon I was going to school unattended. Even then I was seldom alone upon the walk, for a few of the Kensington Gate children usually joined me at some point, and for nearly a year I walked down part of Gloucester Road with that youth who had had the mishap about courtesans and Beefeaters: he was a pupil at Gibbs’ preparatory school in Sloane Street and his name was Donald. Those in his favour were All Right, those out of it were Wet. He would cascade down his own steps opposite our house and hang about for me to appear. To call for me vocally or in person of course was not to be thought of, and he got round that by loudly addressing a non-committal remark to an imaginary individual.

  ‘It’s all right, I’ve seen to that’, or

  ‘No, I shan’t be late’.

  Mother, chipping an egg as she glanced over the Square, would say, ‘There’s your gentleman friend, better not keep him waiting’. He learnt Latin, which to me was a stopper to unfettered speech for several days as there seemed no suitable remark in the universe to make about it, and had, I remember, just reached an exercise which stated ‘Marcus has a large head and a small mind’ that broke the ice because of my brother. I took it home to Cuss and he said he remembered it well and that they’d roasted him about it at Winchester. School itself, besides having a smell of new varnish, was permeated with the odour of scrubbed stone and pipeclay, a blend which seems to lend itself to youthful association and general high jinks, for the hinterlands of theatres smell of it too with the addition of gas, drains and oranges. (Why doesn’t some parfumier bottle it and call it Soirée au Théâtre? For a shilling, and two sniffs, one could get an entire outing; and I’d like one called Vaudeville as well, consisting of more and stronger oranges, peppermint, smoke and beer. Its stopper would be a small glass figure of a red-nosed comedian.)

  I liked the feeling of possession given me by my armful of shiny new exercise books, and, shyness and getting lost on the way to classrooms once over, I felt important at having so many doors upstairs and down passages at which to call. I never got into any serious rows at school, but as most mistresses like to be able to tie a label to everybody, I was early given to understand that talkativeness was my worst fault.

  School was a prolonged and pleasant phase, where I made no great or lasting friendships, although quite inevitably one makes the mistake of assuming one’s love for school-fellows on the grounds of the years one has known them, waking up at twenty-five, thirty – even forty – to the lorn discovery that in point of fact we have nothing whatsoever in common and don’t even like each other much and probably never have, though in the holidays we are still Dearest Barbara or Constance on the hotel notepaper!

  Because of father it was expected that I should excel above all at history and English composition. Actually, though I rather liked history, mild, unseasoned dish though it was, like a school luncheon, after paternal revelations and purple patches, composition was easily one of my worst subjects, consisting as it did of set essays upon chaste abstractions like Loyalty. Even father said that this literary form ‘would tax the resources of an experienced pen’, and, smiling grimly, tried to write one himself, and made quite a hash of it too, and if it was ninety per cent neater than my own I swear it was as dull. History’s textual references to that ever-simmering pot, the Continent of Europe, were grudging and scrappy and at all times tedious, with the limelight reserved for the British Isles, and geography preferred allusion to exports and volcanoes than to the illuminating hint that climate might conceivably have helped to make Philip of Spain the sensualist that he was, or that an admixture of Spanish and Welsh blood contributed heavily to the fierceness, bigotry and pride of Mary Tudor. But if Spain was admittedly hot in the textbooks it was ‘because it grew onions and oranges and grapes, while Mary Tudor sat about in England being merely Bloody, an adjective commendable in the history lesson but inviting expulsion in English composition, and if the Infanta of Castile was allowed to walk on in the procession nobody dreamed of telling us that this title was one day to become The Elephant and Castle, Kennington, thus prisoning the creature in our minds for ever.

  Apart from the smell of school and the feeling of ownership of new books, the sensations inseparable from written examinations are my keenest memory. It began with apprehension and a conviction that the classroom and presiding mistress would look different, and somehow alarming and foggy, proceeding to a certainty that the paper of questions would bear no relation to the subject I had been swotting up; all, in short, would be misty and mysterious, time unmarked, and the very thought of returning home to luncheon possible, but highly improbable. Then came the discovery that the classroom and the mistress were perfectly tangible, that the view from a window was visible and even included a passing dog, that most of the questions upon the sheet of abominably blurred typescript were on the whole answerable, even if they were posed in a circuitous and superior manner, and that, above all, every one of the ruses, images, analogies and tricks one had invented at home overnight to assist memory came back without the least difficulty, so that quite unflustered one could even visualize the page on which the fact or date was printed and remember that the battle of Naseby was top right and the Suppression of the Monasteries middle left (Mell must have felt like that about her German turnips and carrots in skirts and trousers!). The ordeal, in short, was an almost equally shocking discovery of normality to one who had braced herself for goblins damned.

  CHAPTER III

  1

  IN quite a few years we were to discover that our house for all its pleasant and promising façade was too small for us. London servants were beginning to want a bedroom apiece, and I don’t blame them if they were half as unaccommodating to each other as they were to their employers, and in the name of domestic peace the mere family suffered. It meant for all its simple sounding a reshuffle of almost half the existing arrangements above stairs in which the den allotted to Mell and myself had to be given up to Cuss because father wouldn’t share his study except by invitation, and a transplantation one flight downstairs of poor Mell to what we had hoped would prove to be a guest room in order that the houseparlourmaid might occupy what had been Mell’s room at the top of the house. The loss of the den must have been a blow to Mell who was in the thick of what in wealthier families would have been the boudoir age in which fellow débutantes could be tea’d and where scalps and invitations could be compared and past assemblies criticized, and she had to become a drawing-room daughter at those times when Cuss returned with a legal portfolio and the evening paper under his arm. For myself, I didn’t care much where I talked, for if drawing-rooms were familiar ground from my earliest years kitchens and bedrooms
were no less so, my preparation could be done at the table in my room and all my meals I had long eaten with the family. If she’s the right sort, like Mrs. Couchman, and you take her the direct way of being interested in her private life, as good an après déjeuner can be spent in the cook’s company as in that of old Mr. Justice Farsight of the High Courts, who was a friend of father’s and did occasionally grace our table. On the other hand there are inevitably more dull cooks than dull lawyers. But circumstance that could easily have created some arid patches for the lag-behind of a family of adults was seldom allowed for myself. Mother having regained her London life was perfectly prepared to cast it away on my entertainment and didn’t go out half as much as she could, or probably, in father’s interests, should have. Mell was always placidly ready to keep me company in the evenings, even in the season (she was once twenty minutes late for a theatre through becoming interested in a game of Snakes and Ladders). She went out rather a lot, and said that girls of our sort were really the beginnings of adventuresses as they lived on their wits in the matter of clothes and making two new evening dresses seem like three and a dance frock. Mell could do that sort of thing and has often gone out in the same frock put on back to front and made a perfectly new impression in it, and the things she could do with a hat had to be seen to be believed – here the back-to-front ruse was only the kindergarten of the business! One of her last-minute successes was a large circular ornament set at the side of a brown velvet tricorne she had nothing else for, but felt needed a bit more dash, made of a ginger-nut that she gilded in zig-zags, and once when she had to go to a rather smart wedding and her allowance had run out she made herself a really fascinating buttonhole from a cluster of radishes she carved with a pen-knife, a notion picked up at a fork luncheon given by some woman who had a Swedish cook who was an artist in that line. Mell said that one could get away with effects in London that one couldn’t hope to in the suburbs, and nobody, I think, would ever guess that when she sailed into private house or subscription dance at the Empress Rooms the gown that covered her had a quarter of an hour before been twitched, reeking, from the sewing-machine. She was the first girl in London to discover and appear in a white robe de style of American cloth: it cost sixpence-three-farthings a yard and looked wonderful, like Dresden china, but being completely dense material its action was that of a Turkish bath and had, Mell said, to be reserved for the Stately occasion. When it got smears on it she just sponged it down with soap and water, and when she thought its day was over she made two mats of it for the cat to eat his fish on.