But it could be and was occasionally wearing.
Also, I had my own difficulties. For the boy across the way (he of the verbal contretemps with courtesans, who had long become an even longer soldier) had, it seemed, decided to marry me, and I hadn’t realized, in spite, or perhaps because of, my wide assorted reading how curiously hard it is to refuse a perfectly nice and decent man gracefully, kindly and plausibly. For such glib and facile dissectors of human relationships, novelists are amazingly crass: and just as nearly all of them will make it perfectly easy for lovers to spend week-ends with each other without one word said about their families, servants or the total hold-up of the week-end shopping or the cats to feed, so they are apt to be blind to the embarrassment caused by inflicting profound disappointment upon the rejected suitor. If writers deal with this set-back they express it in terms of theatric despair or total rebound, whereas in real life you have to stand at the window and watch an individual who is also a well liked friend crawling home as forlorn as a child through your action, tongue and point of view. Proposals, in short, have their social side which must be dealt with as competently and are as inescapable as in the paraphernalia of the tea-table; enormous issues are involved in surroundings not of heroic size and far-reaching results must be groped to through clipped colloquialisms.
And so I refused Donald, and so felt guilty and inadequate apologetic and unhappy. I believe that at one point I fell back upon that cliché of hoping that we remain friends, but after all, aren’t all clichés what they are because in constant use, and in constant us because they express what we mean? I did hope to remain his friend and it seemed unfair to me that I should not merely because of all inequality in emotion between us. But for once, Donald, of hurt disappointment, lost temper and manners and almost shouted at me that he didn’t want to be friends with, but to marry me, which sounded more like a threat than a compliment, for if friendship in to be ruled out in favour of a state of tension which must have it peak and then decline, what was there left for either of us? We had insufficient shared memories to fill the gap, and although I knew that my decision was right for me, it distressed me and brought me to the point when I felt that every move I made was liable to be mistaken one, and filled me with longing for something familiar and known and kind.
But Marcus was out so much in the evenings after his work.
2
During this time I was taking my mind off things by writing a lot of verse and even lyrics; as usual, most of it was satiric. I was as a matter of fact drifting into a habit of thinking in terms of possible song titles ever since Cuss and I composed Stammering, and it is a regrettable truth that on returning from my grandmother’s funeral, sheer reaction and regret for the old lady gave me one of the most effective lyrics I ever wrote, for which Cuss unknowingly supplied a title by telling me, when I lamented that in church I was totally unable to feel anything, that death ceremonies took people in the strangest ways, and that he had heard of a woman who, when burying the husband to whom she was devoted, saw a pall-bearer trip over the webbing at the graveside, and was overcome with hopeless and unstoppable mirth.
I went upstairs and wrote Everybody Kept on Laughing. I even composed the music for it which Marcus scored. Actually, it composed itself; it was one of those sudden notions of which one gets a full-length view from the beginning, and no doubts at all. It was a laughing song in which the entire orchestra joined in vocally on the penultimate line. The chorus ran:
Everybody kept on laughing Till I thought they’d never stop:
They boo’d the great tragedian,
They cheered the great comedian,
He was such a one for chaffing
That he got them on the hop With a Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha,
Ha-ha ha ha ha ha ha-ha ha-ha Everybody kept on laughing
Till I thought that they would drop.
And on that, the production side, as I saw it, showed a small stage-within-a-stage upon which, while the chorus ran its course, appeared a typical black-clad tragedian with raven locks whom half the chorus boo’d while the remainder kept up the melody and who in dumb-show orated, only to give despairing place to a carrot-wigged red-nosed singer who, in dumb-show, sang his comic song while half the chorus cheered and laughed and the remainder and orchestra joined in the laughter.
Cuss was immensely on the spot over his share in it, and scored the final da capo choruses in a lower key before reverting to the original which, he explained, not only gave contrast and a sense of climax, but got the full value out of any chorus whose voices happened to be in the middle and not the top register, a professional point which would never have occurred to me but which I learnt and saw was intensely right. Also the theatric psychology of that change of key interested me for its own sake.
Having temporarily written myself out, I had an uncontrollable urge to see and have a word with Evenfield again, and went to Addison for the afternoon.
3
I had made up my mind that in no way would I trade upon the situation and constitute myself a drag upon Marcus’s freedom. He would, I think, have stayed at home with me on many nights when I myself had no engagement and was feeling depressed, but I valued him by now too much to be ranked as a duty, and the life and aims he was pursuing were older than our friendship by far.
As things turned out, it was to Cuss that I owed a number of jaunts and a sight of a world hitherto closed yet somehow instinctively familiar. And what a world it was! I enjoyed it enormously but couldn’t live with it. It is no small thing to be at a party where the room is full of men and women handpicked for their looks or talent or both, and I found that the only possible way to weather the ordeal was to arrive in the simplest dress I had, no jewellery, and, as one of father’s Restoration biographies had it, ‘the head worn plain’. Even charm needs contrast and I supplied it, and Cuss said it was clever of me. Having achieved this silverpoint effect one could let go on one’s manner, and I did to the best of my wits and adaptability, and as far as it is ever possible to the outsider, I succeeded, on the principle that if you sit about looking like a distinctly rusé edition of Emily Brontë and then smash the effect by a catchword or gag, you bludgeon the company into curiosity and interest.
And what a company! Never in my life had I seen the pleasantest insincerity brought to a higher pitch, or dreamed that such a percentage of words in one lorn sentence could be only conveyed if in manuscript by italics. That actors were infinitely samaritan in trouble I could well believe and had always accepted as an axiom, but unless you could go about placarded ‘In Extremis’ I guessed that the stage world had its other aspects. I had one authentic surprise; had thought that the theatre stars and satellites were remote and chilling but that if ever you got past this you were in with them for good, only to discover that the reverse was the case, and that once vouched for by even such frail reeds as my brother, they were immediately and confusingly accessible to chaff, even unto discussion of abstractions and the outline of world events; but that should you even ghostlily hint at a business deal, their geniality, while abating no whit, privately went bad on you, and you were actually out in the street again. They were, in short, magnificent encouragers so long as somebody else could be found to whom to pass on you and all your works. Their readiness to read scenes, plays, lyrics and sketches was generous and flattering, immediate and optimistic, until you took them at their word, when all was evasion and excuse and procrastination, and I began to see Marcus’s difficulties, man though he was, and to be sorry for them with the real sympathy that comes with one ounce of experience. But having no fish to fry, I could and did relish them all with gusto, nor can I ever forget the famous serio-comedienne with whom I actually exchanged five sentences who announced, ‘Well, I do know the right knives and forks to use so nobody can call me illiterate’: or the three-hundred-pounds-a-week low comedian who exclaimed quite violently, ‘No, I will not send my son to Oxford!’: nor did I fail to crepitate with inner amusement at that army of stage men,
comedians and others, whose fancy it was to speak facetiously and to mutual laughter in exaggerated imitation of the cockney accents they were born with. And how over-whelming was their tact to the small fry! You could tread on it, smell it, feel it, and in this all-brothers-together mood the social air was thick as a Witney blanket – and indeed I think that some of them sincerely felt quite one-third of it. And how elaborate was their solicitude, did one walk with them: what skipping manœuvres were undertaken to occupy the fatal, dangerous place nearest the pavement’sedge: what apology-preceded hands under one’s elbow at crossings, and sweepings off of homburg hats in lifts, and pluckings off of one glove to shake one by the hand! Should they propose to telephone to you, they Gave You A Tinkle, and they never left but Must Be Toddling, saying as they did so Bye-Bye.
And how unmistakably amusing and alert they were, whether in praise or fulmination, with a sort of transatlantic verve all their own and which made for the time the men and women of one’s own world seem dense and stuffed.
CHAPTER VIII
1
ONCE again I stood outside the gates of Evenfield on a summer afternoon.
The turnip field opposite was, I had heard, now the playing ground of some club but at least assured the quiet of the house. As I looked about me my general sensations were the same as upon former visits but overlaid with nagging worries I had brought with me from London. Father was, so mother wrote, ‘losing ground, I’m afraid, quite obviously’, and had been ordered to Switzerland, and no nonsense about it. And mother would go with him. Whether to keep on our Kensington Gate house was a question that would depend upon father’s progress and the expense of his treatment (‘one of those places’, wrote mother, as ever recklessly gallant in reverse, ‘where the miserable invalids cough in open-air beds and costly draughts from the Scheidegg and the Friedegg and the Dorfegg and the Badegg. I wish you could come out to us, darling, but fear you’d be bored stiff and I suppose someone ought to be at K. G. to look after poor old Cuss and the servants, and you’ve managed quite wonderfully, bless you. N.B. – Florence is always enraging about her supper and you were quite right not to let her have the ragôut to finish. Get her things like kippers and sardines, it’s all they really expect, but I surmise they were trying it on a bit with you. Give Cuss my love and I’m longing to hear his and your new “work”. How funny you should have both discovered you can do that sort of thing, but you were a quite amazingly musical baby and would oblige any passer-by from your pram with any comic song they asked for. Cuss used to play quite a lot at one time…’).
I looked again at the front of Evenfield. So, down this backwater a pram had bowled with me in it, singing like Ophelia snatches of old songs (very old ones, by now!), and I wondered what they could have been. That baby, I felt, was still living somewhere, self-contained and not a day older, and I was only a dim relation, full-grown and full of stale perplexities.
My desire to get inside Evenfield was now a growth: it was preposterous that of all the Addison houses re-entered over all these years and years my old home remained socially closed to me.
Climb the kitchen-garden fence? It was too high. Always had been. Besides, the successor of old Stiles might be hoeing or weeding, not that I couldn’t hide from him in the artichoke bed as I had from poor Mrs. Randolph!
With dismayed self-admiration I found that I was through the gates and walking up the drive.
I rang the bell, though I didn’t quite dare use mother’s knocker, it would sound too peremptory and businesslike, and I had no business. A maid opened the door and I was too occupied with incoherently trying to make out a plausible case for myself and hoping I looked respectable to be able to see the hall properly. Also it was on the cards that my feet might take me off again in mid-sentence.
I faltered that I had once lived here for eleven years and would the lady of the house, I had stupidly forgotten her name but understood she knew the Fields, very old friends of mine, allow me to see over it? A few minutes only… happened to be passing …
The maid listened, dubious and uninterested with a face that by now my more practised eye recognized as domestic resentment at any slight extra-routine work. She went into the dining-room (why the dining-room?: the drawing-room was on the left of the hall), and murmurings (they had repapered the hall and I must say it was an improvement) gave way to the emergence of the mistress. Her name it appeared was Mrs. Willis.
A dragon I might have coped with, a frosty eye sympathized with, mistrustful cross-examination I could even have welcomed. But she was cordial. How dreadfully so I was to discover as she showed me into our dining-room and entered quite shockingly into my feelings, flaying me with outraged embarrassment at every word as she crashed into what she assumed were my emotions with assurances that she could understand them perfectly. Our progress developed into a monologue interleaved with pungent mental ripostes from myself. For at the supreme test of sympathy she broke down.
She showed me over Evenfield herself. She was at my elbow, or ahead and demonstrating, in every room.
‘And this, of course, is the bathroom.’ (How could it be anything else, you crass old beast?)
Hadn’t I stood on the w.c. lid a hundred times to watch Mell cantering in the garden at dusk? Wasn’t it on the rim of this bath that night after night I had deployed a flotilla of china and celluloid birds and fish which, when, Aggie Drumhead pulled out the plug, were raced to the bath’s end? Or wasn’t it? Perhaps this was a new bath which knew me not. I asked Mrs. Willis, very lightly and as if in self-derision at my sentiment, but she said it was the same, as, old fashioned though it was (cheek!) her husband who had arthritis found it more convenient than the up-to-date kind to get in and out of. I noted that all the incandescents and gas-globes had been superseded by electric light but decided that this was allowable.
‘This, I expect, would have been your nursery?’
‘No, the spare room.’ I hoped that my voice wasn’t stony. (Why should you ‘expect’?)
At the door of mother’s bedroom (thank heaven it was shut) I gave up, glancing at my wrist-watch with overdone exclamation at the hour and my non-existent appointment for tea. ‘It’s been more than kind of you’ (you unmitigated Chesterfield sofa of damnable stuffed obtuseness!), ‘I’ve always rather wanted to see the house again’ (you unforgivable monster of imperceptive and blasted insensitiveness: you blind halfwitted poopjack!).
‘Not at all. I expect you find it very strange to see strangers in your old home.’
‘Well… perhaps, a little’ (Damn you, you hellish old bromide. And don’t say strange and strangers in the same sentence). As we were suspended in mutual inanity at the front door a spaniel scuttered through the hall and she stooped to rumple his ears. (You’d better send him away. Father would never have a dog at Evenfield. Their barking bothered him when he was writing.)
2
I hurried away, turning at random into the Martins’ road to cool off on their gate. It would be kind to me for the sake of old times and I had never known it intimately, our entrances to Janet’s house being largely over the garden wall. Good friends, there was a soothingly platonic element in my feeling for Stamboul, which was looking exactly as usual and as large, its gilt weathercock at rest in the sunlight.
I had been inside Evenfield for roughly twenty minutes; in that time I had seen exactly six rooms, having avoided mother’s and leaving the whole top floor and kitchen quarters unvisited. Only ‘seen’ was not the word. For on combing my memory I discovered that circumstances had rendered me practically blind to what rooms I had been shown, like the nervous deafness which actors know and dread when they dry up and literally can’t take a prompt. The dining-room now a morning-room, the billiard-room where now the Willises dined, and even the drawing-room meant nothing whatsoever. The day nursery was, if I remembered, a bedroom, and all had been repapered, had different furniture, putting one’s associative eye out at every turn. That, given a chance, I could have overcome: common reason sh
owed me that it was inevitable. It was kind Mrs. Willis (devil burn her) who had made the whole twenty minutes null and void, the impact of her presence, her atmosphere at every door, so that all my perceptions were atrophied, all my memories overlaid and blurred. Would it last? Or would the polish return with time? Had she robbed me temporarily or for ever? Even the closed book that Evenfield had been, the ultimate belief in refuge, come chance come change anywhere else in Addison, was now taken from me. For the first time I should look back on it without confidence.
I loitered from Stamboul and prowled the row of houses opposite searching for familiar doors, and couldn’t find one and got into a mild panic until I deduced that the builders had been at work and that those houses which once were detached were now partnered by others. It spoilt the effect and looked suburban and I hadn’t noticed it all this time because this was one of the roads leading to Kings-market that I’d never had time to explore. Nobody we had cared for very much had lived there. But I could still resent innovation.
The door facing me opened and a man came down the gravel path. I sheered off in confusion and made some vague apology as I caught his eye.
‘Excuse me, are you lost? Can I direct you? Miss Ambrose is in, if you wanted –’
(Miss Ambrose?) I said ‘Oh, thanks very much. No. I was only looking about. I used to live in Addison’. Here our polite glances became hopelessly entangled. His face was faintly familiar, or rather as if a stranger had contrived to suggest somebody whom I did know. As a face I liked it: he had a legal lip, slight crows-feet and a clever eye, all of which now came into action as he said, ‘I thought I couldn’t be mistaken. You’re Barbara Morant, and we knew each other’.
‘Ohhh … are you – Trevor Ackworth-Mead?’
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