‘Any good at composition?’
‘None. I’m never sure enough that when I think for certain that I’ve made a really original tune it won’t turn out after all to be Old Black Joe. As for things like Destiny and some of The Geisha I’ve composed them so often that I’ve lost my nerve.’
Marcus really laughed at that, a thing I’d very seldom heard from him. He said, ‘I can compose a bit but it’s the lyrics that bosh me’.
‘Cuss, you wrote that tune, didn’t you?’
‘What put you on to that?’
‘Your face slipped. Well, three cheers for you. I think it’s excellent, and I’m practically sure it isn’t The Orchid or The Geisha or even Mendelssohn! Do play it again.’ He did, and I liked it as well as at the first hearing – always a test. I told him so and could see he was pleased. ‘It’s a pity something can’t be done with it’, I pondered.
‘Well, as a matter of fact I am going to show it to a chap at the Savage who does a lot of additional lyrics and stuff for musical shows.’
‘What fun men do have! Now, women’s clubs are all bridge and filleted plaice.’
‘Well, the Athenæum’s mostly bishops and chandeliers. That’s why I joined the Savage, which has a matey atmosphere and no side allowed, which is restful for those who, like myself, haven’t anything to be sidey about. At a distance we’re all equal in God’s sight. Besides, it seldom answers for fathers and sons to belong to the same club. They’re apt to meet in the cloakroom.’
‘“As soon should I expect a son of mine to spit into the butterdish”,’ I murmured. Marcus’s reminiscent grin was a broad one. ‘At over thirty I’m beginning to value father as a London museum piece; the result is that we’ve never got on better.’
I was sincerely glad, and said so, for now that I was seeing father more clearly as a person rather than as a curiously misfitted addition to our family party I had had my moments of concern for his possible feeling of isolation, and some of these I unloaded on to my brother who, after all, sees father as man to man in the same office every day. But Marcus shook his head. ‘He’s all right. Absolutely self-contained. I think his generation is extraordinarily complacent; it’s our lot that’s uncertain of itself.’ He began to play again, half speaking the chorus – Cuss, like myself, had no voice worth mentioning.
They’re all after Pott
They’re all after Pott,
The cutter, the schooner,
The collier, the yacht …
‘What’s that? I know it,’ I asked drowsily.
‘The Messenger Boy.’
‘Why Pott?’
‘It was a skit on the Captain Kettle yarns that were coming out at the time in one of the magazines. As a musical comedy it was a fine show. Pott – Kettle, you see.’
‘Thanks. I think I can manage that,’ I murmured. And so once more, after twelve years, I fell asleep to the sound of Cuss’s playing.
CHAPTER V
1
AND after that I got the habit of the den and of Marcus’s company.
We liked and rather suited each other, it gradually appeared, and even exchanged views and information about Life, with a capital L, and our own lives, with none.
Tired as I was (like Miss Withers at the drill at Madame’s!) I couldn’t get the sleep I was craving for on the night of Mell’s wedding and took it out in writing the rough draft of a lyric suggested by Cuss’s dance, tune, whose general shape I remembered distinctly. I called it Stammering and the words matched his rather eccentric rhythm, and even got out of bed to dance it to see if it were practicable from every point of view, which it appeared to be. I showed it to Marcus next day; he played it over, I sang it in my no-voice. We pushed the arm-chair aside and danced it together. He said, ‘That’s the kind of bunk I couldn’t write if you paid me. Sing it again’, and remarked upon my good dancing, a compliment which I couldn’t return. Now that I came to think of it, I never once remember seeing him go off to a dance, and never dreamed of asking him to partner me, relying upon my hostesses to look after me, and if they failed I never went to their houses again. There are limits, and sitting waiting to be chosen by creatures like the youth of my Limerick is unpleasantly like The Dogs’ Home. Sometimes I telephoned, or was rung up by, one of my Old Contemptibles, knowing that our evening would be more conversation than waltz, and on several occasions my escort was that Donald who lived opposite us, and who, while my attention was elsewhere, reappeared in my life as a long Second Lieutenant.
Marcus was blown and collapsed into the arm-chair. It was then that I asked him about dances and he said he’d never cared for them. Over the months, he told me that the Law bored him too, and that the Savage was the only real interest of his life, and going to the theatre, and odds and ends of musical composition, and that he’d like digs of his own, and could I see father’s face if he were ever able to afford to clear out?
I concealed the pang of premonitory disappointment as I agreed that I could see father’s face clearly. One mustn’t use personal influence to hamper men. I despise clinging-ivy women. And even had I lent myself to that sort of moral suasion I had no real idea of the extent of my hold over Marcus … I could only hope for the best. Our friendship was young, yet. I’m pretty good, usually, at poker-faces, but must have given something away that time. Luckily, I had what novelists (to father’s indignation and contempt) persistently allude to as ‘an alibi’, when they really mean that they have an alternative reason or excuse for any line of conduct, for Louis Hervet was dead, and that morning I had had a letter from his executor, saying that he had left me the colour print of the dancer, Fanny Elssler, that hung in the classroom and which I had always particularly admired. ‘You were one of his best students’, wrote Armand Hervet, who was now carrying on the Hervet tradition (he was a nephew, I gather); ‘he often said you could have done anything if you had cared to.’ That meant if I’d worked harder. It was curious, I thought, as I alluded to the letter and print and covertly watched Marcus, that only the material things of life are to be had through effort, but that once you become involved with human relationships your labour goes for nothing, half the time, especially if you are betrayed by your own good feeling.
To the Hervet-Elssler item Marcus found little to say. He had overlooked that tract of my life and probably thought I was out shopping and amusing myself all those years that I was fagging at barre and enchaînements. Instead (how incredible are families with each other!), he actually told me that one or two of his ‘things’ had been accepted and even used in various musical productions. This, I suppose, was tit for tat, except that my interest in his feats would have been instantly aroused and hadn’t been given the chance to be.
I quite saw how it had all happened. His life with Mell was inevitably over; father’s reactions to the theatre, meaning the actresses in them and their germ-carrying potentialities moral and physical, were well known, and I just hadn’t occurred to my brother. To tell mother would have involved her in difficulties, for, whatever anybody says, family life has got to hang together somehow, and a tacit plot against the nominal head of the house may make entertaining reading but is seldom amusing in real life, and mother had had her fill of our cantrips with father at the dining-table in the old days.
Cuss, I learnt with delighted and rather hurt incredulity, had done a certain amount of tinkering, devilling and transposing for various more or less established men who wrote additional lyrics for revue and musical comedy. It was quite badly paid, he said, and the chances were against himself ever getting anywhere particular, especially in revue, where numbers were so frequently changed or scrapped overnight – often before production – that the publicity department which did the bus and Tube and other posters were exceedingly chary of naming anybody except the dead certs like the principals, while even the numerous authors were in type so small that it took the eye of faith to perceive them, half the time, and for much the same reasons. Also, the business was largely clique. You were, Marcus stated,
either ‘in the set’ or not. And that again depended upon what clubs you belonged to and whom you could get to know sufficiently well to cocktail, lunch and dine.
This was depressing and fascinating hearing, and like all amateurs I only believed one half of it; I have a great natural affinity for fools’ paradises and to me the theatre had been a happy thing: a delirium of excitement ending in Dan Leno, a transition so swift that one second my eye was on the old rocking-horse in the nursery and the next fixed upon the velvet curtains and the footlights; the theatre then became early luncheon in Kensington Gate, running down the steps into a hot afternoon and Marie Studholme in a chiffon hat and fluffy, spangled skirt: it was beauty coming surely into its own and Lily Elsie in The Merry Widow: it was talent recognized and everything-in-the-right-niche. And if anybody failed upon the stage it was because they were victims of untypical bad luck or obviously bad actors. And it was my own brother who was hinting of the glue and battens that composed Ruritania, of Diana in difficulty with her landlady, of the Miltons whose tragedy was that they were constitutionally unable to remain mute …
‘Are you “in the set”, Cuss?’
‘I am and I’m not. That’s to say that whereas I’m about a thousand miles behind being Paul Rubens or Ivan Caryll or Lionel Monckton I’m now an accepted outsider. I’ve put in quite nine years at the game. In that time I’ve had one original number accepted and thrown out at the eleventh hour because the show was too long, four collaborations in duets and solos taken, and roughly seven jobs of bedevilling other men’s notions. And that’s good going. And even that all came in a bunch when I became an accepted nobody. For years I couldn’t place a thing.’
It ended by Marcus surprisingly announcing that he would take my lyric to his man. While I was waiting the result I amused myself by an old game of mine which consisted of attempts to circumvent fate by anticipating all possible outcomes.
The lyric was returned, but with some distinct words of praise and liking from vague but authoritative sources.
I was rather amused, touched a little that Marcus seemed to expect me to mind, solicitous before the probable outcries of this unknown quantity, his sister. I reassured him. ‘My dear soul, I’ve always done that sort of thing. Stammering is only unusual for me because it’s impersonal. Mell and I were always writing rhymes about people’, and I quoted all I could remember, including the Tired As I Am hymn. ‘And Mr. Field set it to music.’
‘Field? Well! … Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.’
‘I know. And Mell wrote a bit of a rather decent musical comedy once.’ Cuss had missed that. At school, I suppose; but he ransacked me for more souvenirs and we had a talk about the old days that lasted until it was too late to change for dinner and father was not amused.
‘She used to play the violin,’ Cuss kindly informed me.
‘Sausage! of course I know that. With a stocking round her eye.’
‘I remember. It was pretty awful, wasn’t it?’
‘Was it? I hated the violin, myself.’
‘Well, they told her at Mayvale she’d never be any good at it.’
‘Did they, Cuss? Did she mind? Who said so? What did mother say? Oh curse the gong!’
2
Of course mother and Mell and I had intermittently talked over the Addison days and people, Mell and I because we liked to, mother only occasionally interested, acting more as referee to our statements about individuals or misstatements about the names of their houses. I found it immensely restful – a walnuts and port relaxation, or like reading history in secure knowledge of the outcome – but I had accumulated plenty of surprises in the process. We mostly fell into reminiscence or speculation when father was from home; I think we all felt that his contribution would be too cut and dried to repay hearing.
Mother’s well, when she felt like filling our cups, was inexhaustible, or seemed so. It was, for instance, not until I was quite nineteen that I heard that the eldest Irmine son had been frantically in love with golden-haired Mrs. Randolph and had been by his father forbidden to Call. Even I had not been forgotten, for it seemed that Chetwyn Lawnford had actually had a fight with the Raymond boy as to which of them should marry me. Chetwyn! Now, if it had been Johnnie … but his manure-throwing elder was completely outside my comprehension, and I rummaged memory for a single incident that might put me on the track and could find not one!
It made curious hearing, this item about that stranger-child that was myself, feeling still a backwash of responsibility for her behaviour, wondering what she had said and done in these incredible circumstances: sure, only, for good or ill in what she had not done, for I had married neither combatant!
Mell said Chetwyn often came into the garden at Evenfield and was rather a nuisance to the Cocksedges (though the Martins didn’t mind as Janet was with us all, too) on the relief of Mafeking and Ladysmith days, when he found a cornet from somewhere and blew it all over the lawn.
‘But Mell, was I there?’
‘Oh yes, I expect so. You bought a button of Baden-Powell in Kingsmarket on market day because you said he was the prettiest of the officers.’
‘I never did!’ But I knew Mell was right. She mayn’t have been a very good general noticer of trifles, but what she knew she knew in a most comfortingly reliable way.
‘Mafeking Night … what did we do?’
‘Nothing,’ said mother promptly. ‘Father wouldn’t take any of us up to town because he said the streets would be too rowdy. And I expect they were. It was kept up for two nights.’
‘But didn’t any of you do anything?’ I persisted, acquiescing in the fact that whatever happened I must have been in bed.
‘Oh, I suppose we decorated Evenfield–’
‘The Domrémys gave a party’, pronounced Mell, ‘and I went. They said they’d bought up all the bunting in Addison and had to send to London for more–’
(‘Oh Mell, what fun!’, I interpolated, for some reason with fervour.)
‘– and they had a wonderful spread–’
(‘Trust them for that’ said mother, with a bankrupt look in her eye.)
‘– in that bony dining-room of theirs, and I got rather squiffy for the first time.’
‘No. The second,’ I cut in, ‘there was the rum-and-milk morning.’
‘Howdya mean?’ Mell’s oblivion was complete so I had to tell her, and felt quite important and in things again. What a bran pie is collective memory! Nobody remembering or forgetting the same details or, having jointly recollected incidents, viewing them from different angles. So might one clutch up a prize or something awful, at any moment. For – I suppose it must have been in the summer – I once said that I wondered what the river and the lock were looking like, and wouldn’t it be a lark, and cooling, to be in Mrs. Markham’s punt, to which mother inevitably responded ‘Heaven forbid!’, and said that that walk along the towing-path to Addison’s Villa was like one of the cycles of The Inferno, and that she could smell the scented rushes still, and it was no use concentrating upon Alice Through The Looking-Glass because it didn’t lighten th’ encircling gloom one bit, and never had, and no wonder poor little Mrs. Oswald had thrown herself into the weir.
‘What?’ I clamoured.
‘Yes, poor little wretch.’
‘I remember,’ said Mell. ‘The vicar preached about it, and said the human heart was desperately wicked–’
(‘Was he that kind of vicar?’, I asked. ‘That’s not even original nonsense’.)
‘– but that though she’d committed a sin against the Holy Ghost, God had actuated her for His own inscrutable purposes.’
‘He would,’ said mother, ‘he was always a oner for trying to square the circle. Oh! how angry he made me! We had our only real row about that.’
‘Did you?’ (So even Mell didn’t know everything.)
‘Mrs. Oswald …’ I was pondering, ‘was she the one who lived in that awful little row of villas by the buttercup field, an
d had two little fairhaired kids at the dancing-class?’
‘No. That was Mrs. Guinness. Mrs. Oswald lived – oh, somewhere. I dunno! – in one of those houses on the way to the river.’ ‘Riverdeep Road.’ But Mell’s prompting seemed to me to be more topographic than personal.
‘Why did she throw herself in the weir?’
It was mother who answered. ‘Gossip.’
‘Oh, that woman … with red hair.’
‘Yes.’
‘What did they say?’
‘Can’t you imagine it? She was supposed to vamp various husbands, and of course she was attractive, in that frightfully second-rate way. There was never anything serious against her except her appearance, which made everything she did suspect to some of the Addisonians of the kind who were just her sort. I was always rather sorry for her, but she was genuinely unpresentable; one just couldn’t ask people to meet her. What made me so sick was that these people didn’t even realize that aspect of her – too semi-demi themselves! – but just took it out in general snigger and taboo.’
So that was the meaning of the disturbing discussion I had overheard in the hall at Evenfield that evening when the question of a lease arose. I also suddenly remembered the book I was reading: Down The Snow Stairs, by Alice Corkran. I have it still. And it was the unknown Mrs. Oswald who had lost me my home.
The role of Gummidge is seldom a sympathetic one, yet even Dickens hinted at a grief in the past of that abysmal old party at only the results of which does he invite our derision, and whereas the statement ‘My neuralgia is troubling me today’ will always command respect, nothing is to be hoped for the announcement, ‘I am suffering from a return of my nostalgia’.
Mother was saying, ‘Still, that business gave me the courage to persuade father to up-sticks and away’. She added, ‘It was the Stortford’s gardener who found her, auntie S told me.’
I was confused by all the things that people had been doing and knowing at the time of the Oswald affair, yet my own movements were as eternally hidden from me as were those of the chief figures in my life, and it gave me a disembodied feeling as though I didn’t belong anywhere in the past or the present.
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