Evenfield

by Ferguson,Rachel

  We got a lot of fun out of the attitude to ourselves of some of the relations, particularly aunt Caroline, who sat about waiting for Mell, and later me, to commit solecisms and reveal the cloven hoof of Addison, and, always willing to oblige, Mell would sometimes throw her a sop, as she did on that occasion when aunt Caroline over the tea-cups asked her niece if she had yet been to the Academy, and Mell gave her a nervous wriggle and answered, ‘Oh yes, it was ever so nice and I thought some of the pictures sweetly pretty’.

  But if Mell fulfilled aunt Caroline’s lugubrious expectations by not marrying until the comparatively stricken age of twenty-eight it was not through lack, but through amplitude, of opportunity, where other young women in their social alarm were taking the first offer and marrying, as Cuss once said, anything that didn’t actually smell, and so condemning themselves to a life of respectable incompatibility and a nullity unimaginable, successful mainly in that they never actually entered the divorce courts. Mell said that the best chance of a happy marriage was to live your normal life not caring twopence if you married or not, until and unless the obviously right person for you turned up. I said, ‘But how can you be sure that it is the right person for you?’ ‘You can’t’, she answered promptly, ‘you’ve got to take a reasonable amount of risk or nobody’d marry at all; even with care the most promising things sometimes go to pot through some detail they’ve overlooked – like murderers who plan a perfect crime and then get hanged for forgetting to rinse the second tumbler or leaving a Hinde’s curler in the cellar.’

  If this was depressing, the realism of it suited me. I liked to face facts. Or I thought I did.

  2

  Occasionally, friends from Addison came to luncheon or tea, and as with the examination papers and the classroom, put my eye out by looking exactly like themselves and being exactly the same. Auntie S came the oftenest but Mrs. Jasperleigh was the most frequent applicant for mother’s society, and dear Mrs. Field couldn’t make the journey half as often as she would have loved to.

  But by that time I was a Londoner, full of school, under the thumb of Hervet, drawn into Kensington Gate games, squabbles and parties, and although I was always pleased to see the familiar faces, I saw them, as it were, in the flat, people with whose context I was out of touch, isolated figures set down in the drawing-room, even a little embarrassing at times as they saw changes in myself inseparable from eleven to the ’teens, which, especially in the case of Mrs. Jasperleigh, were sometimes voiced quite openly and before me, as on that occasion when, loosening her furs, she half closed her eyes, looked ineffable, and said, ‘Of course she’s turned from a child to a gurl’. Thelma, it seemed, was plunging from one bilious attack into another, so that, as we all said when Mrs. Jasperleigh had left, even Thelma’s food found it difficult to agree with her.

  I even went down to Addison twice: once to a charity fête where I sold flowers in the itinerant manner in a huge garden I can’t place to this day, and to one of their fancy-dress dances given by the Ackworth-Meads, and if it was impersonally Institutional as ever and I recognized hardly anybody, at least I dressed and lunched first with the Fields and went to it with them in a station fly, though every detail is vague, except that Primrose was Cinderella – Cinderella as she probably really was, in golden hair and shyness, where of course the Cinders of pantomime, while seldom shy except when she remembers to register that disability, is advantaged at all points by silken destitution from the pick of the theatrical costumiers at a sum which no doubt covers her entire ball gown.

  My own costume, a moth, all grey marabout, silk tights, chiffon wings pastelled by Mell and a close-fitting velvet cap with antenni, had won two First prizes in London, and was, in the true Ackworth-Mead manner, submerged by and outvoted in favour of a boy who appeared as the darkie on the Stowers’ Lime Juice advertisements whose portrait on enamelled tin no railway station avoided from Addison to Waterloo. Mother’s reception of my failure was, ‘Never mind, darling: fifteen you may be, but you have kept your looks and figure’.

  For the rest, we and our Addison friends saw little of each other. There were school terms to keep, then holidays which would have separated us in any case, and once grown up there were outside interests and livings to earn, or bees in bonnets to be dealt with, while those young women of Mell’s age were playing a lot of games which by no means ended at badminton, bridge and tennis, as bit by bit I was to find out.

  3

  In time, I was to have a tilt with – of all people – Madame Fouqué. She was one of our old entourage who had let us go with regret but with whom no correspondence was exchanged, and I was content it should be so, for surrounded by authority, hedged about with majesty and disorder marks and plush, was she not living and being truer to type and memory than if, like dear auntie S and Mrs. Jasperleigh and one or two of the others, she had burst into our London drawing-room? But that we lived in her memory was tangibly evidenced by a letter to mother which stated in her spidery continental handwriting, that I recognized from sundry ‘Bien’ and ‘Très Bien’ which had in red ink decorated my exercise books, that Miss Anson was leaving and that ‘notre chère Barbara’ should come and conduct the dancing-class (to my delight they were still Thursday fixtures).

  The delight was incidental and submerged in a healthy exasperation at Madame’s (Muddarm, in short) having approached mother and not myself. I was eighteen! Even to-day I think she was wrong and mother was inclined to agree with me: ‘But I suppose she still looks on you as only a kid’. It never occurred to mother (or to me, either, for my life is infuriatingly paved with ripostes manqués and esprits d’escalier) that if Muddarm regarded me as a child I was not fit to teach my contemporaries. Still simmering, I pondered the suggestion for days. My final refusal was based upon the undeniable fact that I not only had no strictly amateur class routine with which to fill one and a half hours of blameless dance, but that I was now steeped in the realities of the Hervet technique which, slowly and sweatingly, taught you your job while achieving no showy results likely to appeal to Addison mothers.

  Deep down, I knew that my reason was an obstacle insuperable, a protective state of mind. It wasn’t so much that I had been particularly blissful at the dancing-class. But I guessed that whether I succeeded or failed as Miss Anson’s successor the past would be irremediably blurred, for there’s no getting over the fact that for better for worse the latest impression has the pull. It can sometimes be a good thing that this is so, and one deliberately exploits it. I have often rushed to buy a frock I didn’t want if worried by temporary financial stress, while as for the personal side, I have on many occasions been impelled to the telephone to talk to people I love if the day before they had ever so trivially disappointed me in response, simply because their latest set of remarks – even their inflexions – would quite illogically be for me the true ones. Which points to the fact that some of us need constantly renewed reassurance that all is well and that we are holding the emotional fort. Trilby, I remember, suffered from this malaise, too. The religious-cum-churchly call it lack of faith, and modern complex-hunters a sense of insecurity.

  Anyway, the result of my final refusal of Madame Fouqué’s offer was a coolness, and of all the well-known Addisonians I think she was the one of whom I saw the least; certainly none of us seemed to drop into Mayvale when prowling old stamping-grounds. But the breach wasn’t entirely to lose us Léonore, who, I am pretty sure, would have seen at least a portion of my point of view, though Irène, it afterwards appeared, was losing herself to us in a certain degree by marriage.

  Addison was becoming matrimonially minded.

  God! how they married! And an unforeseen feature of the business, leading over the next twenty years to sundry complication, vendetta and consequent treading on eggshells and pulverizing of the same by the unwary Londoner, was that they all seemed to be marrying each other.

  How many times have I gone down to tea and gossip at Addison, brimming with affection, good-will and, generally spea
king, the ringing of old bellses, to return mired to the hocks with the way I had put my foot in it; even mother with some cordial Tally-ho would cut a voluntary now and then. The subsidiary faux pas one could commit were and are so endless that a listed attempt is impossible: the principal gaffes one could, and still does, commit are very roughly threefold.

  One alludes to some man to one old friend, only to discover probably years later through a third party that she had for some considerable period expected to marry him herself and didn’t because he became engaged to somebody else who was apt to be yet another friend in common.

  Or one’s memory, clogged by numbers, resurrected in some familiar drawing-room a detrimental souvenir about another man, which memento, whether correct or fixed to the wrong person, was equally fatal in that he was now the brother-in-law or even husband of the person to whom one was speaking.

  Or, secure in one’s neutrality, one either spoke with warm affection about somebody who, by marriage, was now in vendetta with the friend addressed, or delicately hinted at a timeless dislike of somebody else who by in-law relationship was now automatically sacrosanct.

  Sometimes I, and occasionally mother as well, would return to London hardly knowing whether to groan with futile remorse or cry with laughter at the unwitting stir-up we had given the suburban stew.

  4

  If this were a story about Jews there would be at the beginning a long family tree to which the reader, dazed with the offspring of uncle Fritzi and attributing them to aunt Naomi when they were actually the fruit of Gertrud and Otto, is invited to refer. As I am one of those to whom genealogical tables mean nothing whatsoever I won’t attempt the Addisonian embroglio in that manner, for here we can only hope to survive by the lighter colloquialism. But it came to this:

  Irène Fouqué commanded our thanks from the first by marrying right out of the neighbourhood, and somebody that none of us knew; her husband had an estate in the real country and we are on the whole totally unable to remember either his Christian or surname. All that can and does happen about this is that Madame, now a proud landgravine once removed, will sometimes, and apropos nothing, burst into eulogies of one Dique, until by a process of elimination, assisted by the introduction of Irène’s name into the sentence, we gather that Dique is not only Richard but her son-in-law, at which the civil, attentive bedazement fades from one’s face until next time. Dique is virtue’s pattern: he is ‘Och! (lozenge) a veritable Engliss spor’. He is inferentially the son who might have been expected had Gilbert Frankau married Ethel M. Dell, though whether he beats his relations with a horsewhip is doubtful. And when I think of Dique I picture him as being completely bronzed and strong and absolutely silent, with a jaw that becomes squarer and squarer with integrity and loyalty and breeding and chivalrously suppressed passion: he goes up to bed on horseback and wears pink pearl studs at regimental dinners …

  Léonore obliged us even further by not marrying, and becoming second in command at Mayvale, where she was immensely popular with the girls. And there, for the moment, straightforwardness ends.

  For Janet Martin married one of the Irmine sons, and Mrs. Randolph’s Christmas-tree doll of a daughter married another, so that they became sisters-in-law, though I don’t fancy that the mothers were ever on calling terms in the old days, and Mrs. Martin was prevented from openly deploring the match to quite half her world because an Irmine daughter (not ‘Baby’) married a Domrémy whose sister became engaged to the Ackworth-Mead son whose sister rather incredibly married the elder Raymond boy (who smoked the chocolate cigar).

  Evelyn Stortford also did her stuff by wedding a nephew of the dashing Mrs. Markham, and all might have been well, as few of us had ever grasped his existence, but we rather felt that it closed Mrs. Markham to us as a source of facetious reminiscence now that she was officially Evelyn’s aunt.

  Here comes a breathing space of peace and relative calm. For none of the Fields married (I suspected them of liking their parents too deeply for innovation), so that their home stood for us as one of the few remaining strongholds of neutrality, a clearing-house for speculation, comment, inside information, criticism, laughter and the shaken head and whispered theory (Mrs. Field contributed this in the old way, as was to be expected). Thus we learnt over scones dripping with butter and sometimes to a fugue of Bach from Mr. Field in the music room, which made our gaping interest in gossip seem more reprehensible and squalid, but didn’t stop us, that Miss Dove’s devotion to the vicar, her fastings and loneliness, had made her very queer, poor soul, and she took to locking herself into the church all night when the keys were entrusted to her by that verger who drank and to whom Mell and I had composed a carol: that the Irmine-Domrémy marriage was very much resented by the Domrémys, who contributed birth and debts to inferior birth and no money at all, so that Mrs. Field and the girls had themselves set to and made the bride’s trousseau (‘She had nothing, it was shameful’, dear Mrs. Field confessed, low-voiced as ever in catastrophe): that the Ackworth-Mead-Domrémy romance was in point of fact a misunderstanding (here mother and I laughed aloud, and Mrs. Field hesitated and, apologetically, eyes guiltily streaming, joined in too in the well remembered way).

  It happened, related Mrs. Field, wiping her eyes, at an evening picnic on the river from which the party had returned late. Further, it was known that the second Domrémy girl (Flossie) had long been much admired by Trevor Ackworth-Mead, but that he had actually come back engaged to her sister, Flora, and it was believed by their friends (‘Oh Ara, you are a bad chicky! You always were, weren’t you, darling?’) that the darkness had caused the mistake. (Here mother joined her shrieks to mine, before we fell to in genuine sympathy over the tragedy –for young Ackworth-Mead was standing by his guns, and it was a nice point as to whether in fairness to his bride and her sister he should not have frankly owned up, but as mother said, gentlemen always pay for it and think nothing of wrecking three lives for the look of the thing.)

  Thelma Jasperleigh, for whom her mother postulated the Duke of Norfolk at the highest estimate and a non-Addisonian at the lowest, out of the blue married not only a resident but Chetwyn Lawnford, and we all sat round and said, ‘Lor!’ at regular intervals. Chetwyn, it seemed, was now a doctor, and would in a few reasonable years take over his father’s practice. Meanwhile, the couple would live in a Lodge near the Park gates.

  This looked as though Thelma, at a complete loss for ruction-by-intermarriage, she being an only child, might steer into placid waters, and merely take it out in setting the friends and patients of the rival doctors by the ears. But fate, resourceful to the end, suddenly discovered that Johnnie Lawnford was still on the market and not doing his duty by the cradle and the State, and impelled him into the arms of that frail lily, the Raymond child, my stable-companion in the French class, which at one blow gave Thelma the Ackworth-Mead daughter (who had married a Raymond), together with the Domrémys through the Ackworth-Meads and the Ackworth-Meads themselves plus the Raymonds with whom to embroil herself. Indeed, if one could work it out, Thelma must have done the best of anyone in the way of potential rumpus: what she set her hand to she did well, and although we have all long given up trying to work out her relationship to anybody, she certainly succeeded in alienating at least two families, and I believe that even Mrs. Jasperleigh, when out paying calls, frequently had to turn back on recollecting that through her daughter she was not any longer on knocking terms with that particular door. ‘And that’, said mother to Mell and me, ‘is what I rescued all of you from. Can you wonder I hated the place?’

  Once when at tea with the Fields and knee-deep in intermarriages and warfares, I said in high irony to Mrs. Field that I supposed that little Jacky Barstowe (he whom I had stoned in the Park because I hated his white felt hat) was now a family man. But it seemed that the Fields had never known the Barstowes, which rather surprised me until I remembered what a sprawling place Addison was. Primrose vaguely recalled that the Barstowes lived in the Martins’ road near us, a
nd she rather thought they had left some years ago.

  CHAPTER IV

  1

  I WAS twenty when Mell became engaged, and that and the preceding year or so was a period of discovery.

  I found that for all my gregariousness, which all our lives had been far more marked in myself than in Mell, the social life was not necessarily sociable and was on the whole not my line of country; that the social path was a lonely following in Mell’s wake; that this business of coming out involved a basic insensitiveness to people and surroundings which I just couldn’t achieve. The garden party may be a lovesome thing, God wot, but to assemble together in the hope of enjoyment struck me as going about the business in the entirely wrong way – like Mrs. Jasperleigh! My kind of party gets together because it knows it is going to enjoy its component parts in tested liking or love.