‘Not in the least. I used to live in that house.’ He indicated the gate outside which we had met.
‘Then you’re a small boy in a white felt hat with a nurse called Phillips, and I stoned you because I hated it,’ I ventured, not realizing that the man looking at me must be all of ten years my senior.
‘Try again. That was my brother John.’
‘You mean Jacky?’
‘Jacky … how he’d hate you for that!’
‘Then, you’re – why, you’re “Ha-Clifford”.’
‘I’m Clifford, but why Ha?’
‘Father … Royal processions … Queen Alexandra or some-body … and we lunched in his office.’
‘Yes, and you-had a cart-wheel muslin hat.’
‘Look here … who do we know?’
‘Practically everybody, at a guess.’
‘How heavenly!’
‘Not at all. I remember you as a Little Michu at some party in pink. We talked most of the afternoon.’
‘No! You weren’t Widow Twankey–a dear! at the Domrémy’s?’
‘I was, and a dull afternoon it was except for you.’
‘Was – er – your mother friends with Mrs. Jasperleigh?’ I couldn’t remember Mrs. Barstowe, or whether she came to our house, or was dead at the time, and I can’t now.
‘Oh, we knew them.’
‘Ha!’
He smiled, too. ‘Not the happy hand with parties. And, of course, the child, Thelma …’
‘Yes. Ah …’ We both laughed then. So we’d cleared that space round us, and Jasperleigh discussion was safe. But I had to remind myself that Clifford Barstowe was an Addisonian and probably committed by taste or family to one faction or another. He probed,
‘But you left Addison?’
‘Ages ago. And you?’
‘We cleared out about two years after the War.’
‘All of you?’
‘John’s in the Air Force, my mother died in twenty. We moved to Hampstead when we left Addison. I’ve chambers in Fountain Court now.’
‘Are you in the law?’
‘Barrister.’ (So I was right about that legal lip.) ‘I was duty-visiting my old aunt, she took over our house when we left, heaven knows why.’ The implied criticism of Addison made me refuge in saying that I didn’t think we knew Miss Ambrose.
‘You wouldn’t. She was long after your time,’ he answered (so like Mell!), authoritatively chaperoning my memory in a way that warmed my heart.
‘Can’t we have some tea somewhere? Or,’ he suddenly looked harassed, ‘you aren’t married and settled here, by any chance?’
‘No. Like you, down from London on a prowl. Look here: do we say “Mr. Barstowe” or what? There must come a point when one can’t go on you-ing people –’. He nodded abruptly. ‘I know what you mean. This antick leaping into Christian names is quite alien to my generation and even to yours. It has a suburban smack.’ He was talking like a barrister now, which amused me. ‘But in our case surnames would be ridiculous.’ So, here was a new friend for me, ready-made because he was an old one, a singularly pleasant state of affairs.
We went to tea at Peach’s and talked our heads off. At one point I asked, quite easily, ‘But Clifford, how well do we know each other? I can’t remember.’ To my infinite surprise he understood at once, without damping me.
‘Never very well. John came to some of your parties and I was sometimes asked in for clock-golf, and I suppose our mothers called and then there were, as you say, the Royal processions. But in a place like this it’s so easy to be on terms without intimacy. Children meeting at school, and so on, and parents having to know others for their sake. Actually, John was too young for you and I too old. But your nurse brought you to tea with us once.’
‘Did she?’
‘I came into the schoolroom and you suddenly called me “Master Barstowe”. I must have been quite seventeen then, and we had a stuffed carp in a glass case and you said it was just like the vicar.’
‘Well! …’
‘I thought what an extraordinarily intelligent child you were. It was like the vicar intoning; he intoned so flat that he had to go to Field for lessons in pitch.’
‘What!’
‘So the organist – what’s his name –’
‘Rammedge –’
‘– told my father.’
‘You don’t know the Fields?’
‘Only of them. Field was entirely wasted on Addison, even what’s his name –’
‘Rammedge! –’
‘– thought so.’
I thought, and blurted, ‘Whom do you know well? It’s going to be rather eggshelly and Agagish if I have to skirmish round everyone in Addison with you, and they’ve married so, and you wouldn’t believe how angry it seems to make them.’
‘I ought to, I’ve been in the Divorce Courts often enough.’
‘That’s different, that’s a clean smash. But Addison embroglios trickle on and on, and you never know when you’ve put your foot in it and it has to be explained how and why. Oh, it can be very funny, but I don’t want to fall foul of you … I’m safe, so you can say what you like, but what about your – your commitments?’
‘None, I think. I’m a Londoner too, you know.’
‘John?’
Clifford smiled. ‘Also quite neutral, by this time. He was at school and technical college and all that and didn’t have much time to become involved, though there was a time when I was rather anxious about him. He grew very good-looking at about twenty –’
‘Impossible!’ I exclaimed, forgetting that freckled, square-faced Jacky Barstowe was Clifford’s brother. Clifford shook. ‘We’re beginning early! But he did, and he had one or two very narrow squeaks with some of the local maidens, like Ackworth-Mead. He made a mess of things, poor chap, and such a good fellow, too.’ I nodded. ‘We’re in on that: no tact needed.’
I found that Clifford Barstowe’s Addisonian pattern was not the same as ours; but over many of the old crusteds, like Mrs. Markham, we could halt and swap anecdote, and grin, and I think our reluctance to leave Peach’s was mutual; we certainly stood outside the shop looking about us like trippers.
He said, ‘What a terrible place Addison is! Like an unfinished Main Street township: you almost expect to see open prairie down every side turning, and like the Middle West it’s veneer’d with sophistication and minus the mellowness of a market town or the rurality of a village, except in the badness of its shops. It never changes and yet its additions are damnable and the architect ought to be gaoled for a criminal assault against nature; for, essentially, the place has its points, it’s well-placed and surprisingly full of really delightful period houses and gardens.’
‘Like the Albany.’
‘Yes.’
Well… it was all true, and my eye had seen and my reason known it. But as you don’t abandon a loved face that has been pitted with smallpox, there’s no real reason why you should turn faithless upon a locality. I had left my youth in the place, and there it was.
3
I hankered to go to Aggie Drumhead and stay with her at her cottage in the country. We had always kept in touch, remembered each other at birthdays and Christmas, while every Easter she sent me the first spring flowers from her little garden with renewed hopes that I would one day come to her.
And at last I went, leaving London in the interval between mother’s bringing home of father to unpack and repack and start for Switzerland. I allowed myself only one week, during which I arranged as far as one ever can with servants for the comfort of Cuss who would, he said, dine a lot at the Savage, and men, take them all round, are more mentally concrete than we are and not very susceptible to atmospheres and emptiness and departure or nocturnal apprehension.
Aggie was what I needed; knowing me inside out, she would still remain basically uncritical. I was fixed in her mind as an affection, part of the life of her young womanhood, and the changes seen in me would be all superficial and (I hoped) for the better. Also, Steepe
d in Addison, deflated about Evenfield and full of my meeting with Clifford Barstowe, I wanted to ransack her memory. For the first time I should see Aggie’s home that was hitherto an address in roundhand on ruled paper, might touch those roots from which came ill-used boxes through the post full of violets, primroses and sometimes snowdrops, knowing at last a village which I had guy’d on paper in the nursery when perpetrating my novel about the imagined home life of the Drumheads (‘Well, there’s a cheek!’), examine her collection of souvenirs, Evenfield snapshots taken on the lawn by me, countless things mother and I had given and forgotten, so that I should feel I had roots in Aggie’s soil, should not come as one so often and so dreadfully does without my shadow to a new place that must be broken in and learned.
She didn’t fail me. Most nurses are hoarders, and her small, low rooms, comforting in themselves and full of stout dog and good sonsy cat with eyes of ginger-beer green, and a sooty-kettle perpetually ready for tea, were touched in so many nooks and crannies with our things, our presents, and an anecdote for all, were it only a bare sentence. Aggie did all her own work and wouldn’t hear of my helping, treating me like porcelain when I felt more like a kitchen basin, telling me to go and see the village, outlining walks and landmarks that should not be missed, asking me each morning over brown eggs if I had slept well, which I seldom had; it is mostly in fiction that the weary Londoner sinks into dreamless nine-hour sleep. Actually, the country with its weight of quiet must be trained for as the mountain climber does by walks of increasing length, or the dancer by limbering up. But it was authentic country, not a compromise like Addison, and it didn’t like me much because it saw through me, rejecting me as a possible lover or even admirer as it guessed my affections were pledged elsewhere and that until I had had my fling and seen the error of my ways we should never come to terms.
I liked my little walks, loved the village shops (so like the old row in Kingsmarket!), and I bought boiled sweets from glass bottles until Aggie cried out.
I liked coming back to her best and rediscovering her: hearing her calling a trough a troaf and the lichen on trees litchen, chaffing her once more about the way she ate oranges, sticking a lump of sugar into a hole in the rind and slooping, shooting the pips away with genteel th’ps. Mell and I always called it Thepping when Aggie got really started. She had changed wonderfully little in the twenty-one years since our parting.
In the lamp-lit evenings while the sky turned green and then a really magnificent cobalt, Aggie and I (still eating and drinking though supper was over: I do like a house where unscheduled snacks are always inviting you, even if you don’t want them!) talked over old times; she brought out photographs, clippings from The Surrey Comet of entertainments at which I had danced, the family album that once I had avidly coveted and even a programme of the Kings-market theatre (‘Y’mother let Beatrice and me go to the pantomine together and I sh’ll never forget how it snowed’, said Aggie, thereby presenting me with a brand-new vision with which to decorate the Martin’s road, of cook and nurse struggling down it through the iron-grey air of nineteen-hundred-and-two).
‘Oh Aggie, what were we doing in the nursery?’ I asked, insanely.
‘How should I know, my dear one?’
‘Did you like Beatrice?’ Somehow, that side of things, the Evenfield staff alliances or strifes, had never occurred to me before.
‘She was a very nice woman, y’mother liked her, too.’
‘Did we have any bad duds besides Amy?’ Amy, I knew from mother, had stolen the wine and had an affair with the butcher’s assistant. Slooping and thepping, Aggie dubiously exhumed one, Lotty, who stole a brooch of Mell’s and wore it shamelessly upon her bosom on her afternoons out, and a couple of friends who engaged as cook and houseparlourmaid and fought all over the kitchen and then right outside in the back yard.
‘What fun’, I said, ‘how nice and full-blooded and eighteen-ninetyish! I don’t believe maids have the enterprise, now; they just take it out in petty pilfering and complaints and demands and not knowing their job. D’you remember the Barstowes?’
‘Oh yes. Jacky had a nurse I didn’t seem to get on with. Very independent in her manner and didn’t speak to a person properly, not what I call properly.’
‘And Mr. Clifford?’
‘He’d be the elder brother, he was more of an age with Miss Mell, but he admired you. The nurse said he said you was the prettiest child in Addison.’ So I told her about our meeting and – I hadn’t meant to – about seeing Evenfield plus Mrs. Willis. You can more or less think aloud to people who have been your nurse; even their tracts of non-comprehension are restful and you on your part leave them plenty of grist to grind slowly and comfortably in their minds through the long winter evenings.
‘What good times they were!’ I finished.
(‘What a terrible place Addison is!’)
I’d half hoped that Aggie would support Clifford Barstowe’s denunciation, and Cuss’s and mother’s dislike and Mell’s indifference, and rescue me from my own state of mind. But Aggie said, ‘They was. I was very happy there. And do you hear from Miss Daisy and Miss Clover? I always thought they were the nicest of y’ friends.’ And never later than ten, Aggie would cease to yawn squarely and enormously (like an Edward Lear drawing) and apologizing the while, and say, ‘I’ll call in Bouncer and then if y’ ready for Bedfordsheer –’ Once as we creaked, still talking, upstairs, she said, ‘It’s funny how ready you are for bed these days, you used t’ be a Turk when I come down f’ you in the drawin’ room’.
‘Yes, I remember. There was so much going on and one didn’t want to miss anything … Aggie, wouldn’t it be fun to live at Evenfield again!’ Aggie’s smile, lit by the candle that she held, was a thought dubious. ‘I daresay you’d find changes, and, of course … being used t’ London b’ now …’
4
Two days before I was due to return to Kensington Gate I was strolling back down Aggie’s lane to midday dinner. She was leaning over her low flint wall ploddingly looking about her and had a telegram in her hand at sight of which my inside turned over, as forecasts of Mell’s boat being sunk, cook having walked out on Cuss and father collapsing on the journey home assailed me.
‘Better return everybody kept on laughing
going into new show rehearsing now Marcus’
For one liverish second Aggie’s cottage tilted sideways. When it became normal I told her, mistaking her relief at the absence of calamity for pleasure. She said, ‘Well I never, you was always a one for writing pieces. Would you be ready f’r dinner because it’s ready f’ you’, and preceded me up the hollyhock border.
I heard later that what we had eaten included one of my favourite dishes, Irish stew, but all my appreciation was concentrated in one spot, though there came one second when I do seem to remember seeing a huge and golden bread-and-butter pudding which I imagine I ate. I went upstairs afterwards and sat on the honeycomb quilt in the bedroom which smelt of syringa and plaster with a dash of the dog, Bouncer, and a faint whiff of Irish stew, and considered Fame in all its branches, known or imagined. I thought with fervent and sincere vulgarity of money, not that I had ever been allowed to lack it, but enough is so emphatically not as good as a feast, and it would be pleasant and preposterous to be in the class which can buy silk stockings by the dozen pairs at one blow; I thought philanthropically of how wonderful it would be to pay the Swiss bills for father’s cure: of building on that lean-to extra bedroom for Hope Couchman, a place of her own having once been revealed to me with many exclamation marks and in strict play in a long Christmas letter as her dream now that she and Connie were women grown, devoted though the sisters were: and of how I should enjoy giving Mr. Field a thumping cheque for the Salzburg Festival and heaping pretty dresses on the girls. I thought in vengeful sort of how it would fulfil me to swank to Broadacres and Mrs. Jasperleigh, and then to Thelma’s Lodge in a car twice the size of hers (if she had one) and of how she would respect me for it and how I should desp
ise her for that and enjoy doing so! And I thought, in the cosmic manner of causes to be supported and heartened, of animals and the elderly and lonely to be assuaged with comfort and security and attention. And I had a sharp bout with my lower nature in respect of packing and leaving Aggie at once; the disappointment of staying on would probably be good for me … prevent swelled head. And beneath all that I knew, because I’d often thought about it, how unforgivable it is to disappoint people, and that one must remember that one’s own peak-time of happiness or prosperity doesn’t commonly coincide with theirs. Aggie might have planned my dinners, with their surprises, for the whole week, and on the principle that most of us have at least once in our lives been the supreme interest and stimulant to somebody else, she might even be counting what days I had left with her: might, who knows? be keeping some trump card up her sleeve that through my desertion would remain unplayed for both our lives.
They were rehearsing my and Cuss’s song, were they?
Let ’em! Publish and be damned, as Mell had tipsily exclaimed to Aggie on that rum-and-milk morning at Evenfield. None of which considerations prevented my consuming impatience for my very first rehearsal.
CHAPTER IX
1
Cuss, as we dined alone, was in a state of sober pleasure – almost fatherly to me! I praised him for his cleverness in working off our song and he said that once every so often that kind of thing did happen and was so dead easy that you were left at a complete loss and began smelling rats everywhere until the curtain had actually risen, and sometimes for several days after it had. The whole thing, related Cuss, had been accomplished in that typical manner at once breathtaking and lackadaisical which could be such an integral part of theatric business.
He had dined with A, and afterwards gone with him to his flat, where later B, assistant to the great C, had rung up, making mingled complaint and enquiry as to the lack of a six-to-eight-minute production number for The Guvnor’s new show as D had turned in a thing C didn’t like. Upon which A told B that Morant had just played him what promised to be a winner, and B, catching at straws, came round to the flat and heard it, and was moved to such profound agreement and appreciation that he actually muttered that there might be something in it, and, annexing the manuscript sheet, said he would talk to C in the morning, or, failing him, to his producer, E.
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