Evenfield

by Ferguson,Rachel

  ‘And there you have it’, said Marcus. ‘If I hadn’t been at the club that night, or A hadn’t blown in and B hadn’t telephoned, or had, and we hadn’t gone to the flat … if and if and if … that’s the way things get done and don’t you forget it. And for this one schemes and swots nine years when it might have happened in the first week of the first one. But of course I’m clashed glad you’re in on this. It’s beginner’s luck, and don’t forget that either. Oh … there’s one thing: they’re rather keen on your idea for the final chorus – tragedian, comedian, and all the rest of it. They’ll probably rename it “The Laughing Song” and get someone to jam in extra verses without a with-your-leave, but that’ll be letting you down lightly. I’ve seen only the idea of a lyric and music retained, just enough to dish the author without doing him any good.’

  ‘Don’t damp me too much.’

  ‘One couldn’t, in this game! Only don’t expect too much, and don’t take anything too seriously. You are rather that way, you know.’ (So Cuss had noticed?) ‘Oh, and by the way, Barstowe rang up. I told him you’d be back this evening and he’ll ring again.’

  ‘He’s such a nice chap, Cuss.’

  ‘Yes. One never knew him very well; father and he used to go up on the same train to Waterloo when Barstowe was studying law.’ So there was another picture for me, of father top-hatted and umbrella’d, leaving for the City and being Ha-Clifford on our platform through the fog-signals of December that I could hear from my bed and the wilting heat of summer when the chocolate went blue on you in the automatic machine.

  2

  To watch anything your brain and hand have evolved in the quiet and indulgence of your own house being translated, pruned, subedited, adjusted and adapted for that huge house, the theatre, where every effect must be ‘more so’ and magnified three times to secure normal vision, is an education. It can be an education in dismays, disgust and disillusion, or in appreciation and admiration according to your nature, perception and producer.

  Those to whom I was introduced were immensely kind and affairé, and absentminded and unimpressed and fulsome with me, and when they got started upon Everybody Kept On Laughing I might have been one of the cleaners for all the court I attracted, with the difference that experienced theatre cleaners are essential and authors aren’t, there are too many of them.

  I had sensed instinctively when writing it that ‘Everybody’, as our number was known by behind the scenes, must have pace and movement and exact timing, but to watch exact timing being arrived at is an anxious and fascinating and laborious affair. It necessitates, in brief, that on the second your last word is sung, the last bit of ‘business’ worked, your entire chorus (unless the finale is a tableau) must be cleared off the stage, which is to say that if, when the orchestra stops, even one chorus girl is seen to be still vanishing into the wings though all that remains of her is one ankle, the effect is ragged, under-rehearsed and spoilt. Absolute smoothness for eye and ear is essential, and the incidental obstacles to an effect I had lazily watched in other theatres a hundred times and taken for granted gave me a wholesome respect for producers that I have never lost.

  To me quite unexpectedly, the ha-ha-ha’s of the laughing lines gave the producer trouble; half-sung and half-laughed he pronounced the effect patchy and muddled: rhythmically laughed by the chorus in unison he swore was artificial and unoriginal and perfectly flat and a little bloody. Painfully and eventually it was threshed out and tried out and finally confirmed that the chorus should only laugh in rhythm on the first line and disintegrate into laughter on the second: that on the repeat, the conductor should be allowed a fractional pause in which to join in, and be followed by the whole orchestra who would cease to play but be privily timed by the first violin who would signal them to resume. This exact calculation took about a day on and off to get smooth.

  As against this, the little scene-within-a-scene was astonishingly effective and quite beautifully timed from the first; the tragedian didn’t make the mistake of over-acting, but looked gloomy and futile and unappreciated, and the low comedian replacing him seemed to have every music-hall trick at his fingers’ ends, so that even I who had knocked up the song and Marcus who had scored it and knew every minim by its Christian name were surprised into giggles. And I may as well say that I have watched that number night after night from all parts of the house and seen the audience whether stalled or shawled gradually warming from chuckles to genuine roars of amusement, so contagious is laughter to the mass mind if it is well done. I think it was that touch in which the orchestra gave it up and joined in too that finished off the audience.

  The show ran for seven months and netted me a nice little sum. It was nothing approaching what I had headily expected, and, consulting Cuss as to selling the number outright in case it was suddenly withdrawn or the show a failure, he reminded me that at present I was in no position to make terms or enemies and that a royalty system was always safer in theory, as the show might not only run but sidelines must always be safeguarded.

  Meanwhile I sat about waiting to be famous and singularly little happened. We’d had an excellent Press in only one of which critiques was my name mentioned and in two Marcus’s, on the programmes we figured in an unappetizing miscellany of names in minute type at the end of all the interesting data, and on the first night it looked as though everybody in the theatre, including the cat, the commissionaire and the firemen, would receive a curtain call but ourselves. Not one soul approached me with offers of much gold for the loan of the song even to sing in his bath, although I was interviewed for a women’s paper which alluded to me as ‘the composer’ which gave us some happy and caustic moments. I was making weekly an amount which, while not perhaps in the grandiloquent income class, was overwhelming pocket money and didn’t spend it wildly because it might cease to be at a week’s notice, like the cook. The excitement died down, I found my greatest stimulus in taking friends to see the show. On the last night The Guv’nor himself said to me, ‘Don’t forget us, and give me the first option on your next number, I can always use the best’, which Cuss declared was not only wholly untrue because he didn’t, half the time, but was encouragement for which most people would give their eyes.

  3

  During the seven months’ run of that show normal life reasserted itself, alternated only with the light and shade of my friendship with Clifford and father’s increasing weakness as reported by mother from Switzerland. I was maddened to go out to her, but her answers, don’t, don’t, don’t, were lovingly final, carrying me back to nursery days in which, looking beyond veto, one sensed trustfully that one was being wisely protected from alarm or upset. Marcus girded at his own inability to stand by her but he had the business to keep warm: father was worrying a lot about it and it wasn’t only the fret of invalidism, he’d always been inclined that way. And he was writing a Life of Anne Boleyn which struck me as quite immensely pathetic in the circumstances. My one consolation was that mother had heard our laughing song and was greatly taken with it, and wrote that she often caught herself humming it in the Swiss hotel, and that a chambermaid liked it too and begged to know what it was, and mother’s struggles to translate it into even Ollendorf French tickled Cuss and me tremendously.

  Tout le monde est ri-ri-riant

  Jusqu’ j’ pense qu’ils cessent jamais,

  À bas le grand tragedien!

  Et vive le bon comedien!

  Encore! et Bis! les gens sont criant

  À ce blagueur vif et gai,

  Avec Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

  Et puis Ha ha ha-ha ha ha ha-ha

  Tout le monde est ri-ri-riant

  Jusqu’j’ pense qu’ils succombaient!

  Father, she reported, was inclined to be ‘more than a little concerned and sniffy’ at our connection with the theatre, and this Cuss and I found heartening: it was a flash of the patriarchal spirit … a breath of old times … an effort at authority that we were both sincerely glad he had the strength to make. She had
kept from father the fact of Cuss’s years-old association with the lighter stage (‘It isn’t always best to tell them everything’, wrote mother as though she was father’s child as well: ‘What an uncommonly decent sort she is!’, exclaimed Cuss). We had both been distressed during father’s brief stay before the journey to Switzerland, and our solicitude for his comfort and wishes, though very genuine, made for self-consciousness, thanks to family reserve. Cuss and I saw ourselves that suddenly to heap attentions upon somebody whom you’ve spent much of life civilly evading, circumventing and being amused by, gave a hypocritic effect, but we agreed that father didn’t appear to see beyond our intentions, which was a relief.

  One thing charmed me about our recent success: it just didn’t exist for Addison. Our friends there, incapable of a deliberate ignoring, were still faithfully stewing in their own juice, and if told by myself, would be quite magnificently uncomprehending of the relative size of the feat.

  There was one exception. I had sent a copy of Everybody Kept On Laughing to Mr. Field. His answer was grateful, ungrudgingly affectionate, starkly honest and immutable, which delighted me.

  … ‘I sensed that one day you’d do something of this sort. It seems to be a very catchy thing and what the public would be apt to enjoy. Marcus has served you well in his scoring, the descending octaves of the laughter-lines are admirable (were they your harmonies or his?). I suppose that this means that you have found your métier and will stick to it … No, I think you are quite safe as to the ‘unconscious plagiarism’ that you always complained of in your compositions; it was all a part of your sensitiveness and suggestibility that very nearly made you so satisfactory to teach, but of course could be highly dangerous, but your song quite emphatically does not smack of either Schubert, Quilter or even Edward German, or of Ta-ra-ra-Boum-de-ay, Pop goes the Weazle or The Washington Post! It is, as far as I know, original, but I am as far as appreciation goes out of my depth, being a bit of a prig and a purist as are so many of our poor submerged brotherhood (which is doubtless why we are submerged by worthless butterflies like you), but at least my interest and affection are always at your disposal. I shall hope to be honoured by another lyric soon: shall be a better judge of serious toshery – like the younger Strauss and Gipsy Love, for instance. But toshical toshery is, as I say, rather beyond my scope …’

  The day that mother and father left was so unreal and horrible that Cuss quite off his own bat recklessly posted our one-step Stammering, to The Guv’nor, and I went down to take my mind off, in Addison and asked Clifford to dine with us that night.

  Mother and I had stood on the steps while the taxi-driver and Cuss dealt with the luggage, father, wrapped in rugs, waited inside the cab and the servants ghoulishly hovered in the hall, and it wasn’t for days afterwards that I remembered even something of what she and I had found to say to each other.

  I told her that I was going to Addison and she said, ‘You are a rum ’un! Well, enjoy yourself and give my love to the Fields’. I muttered because of the publicity and the listening ears, ‘Will you hate Switzerland?’

  ‘Oh no. It’s full of what Aggie used to call “Pretty Bits”.’

  ‘That was about the Chine and the Old Village at Shanklin,’ I put in.

  ‘And I shall prowl a lot, and I love mountains.’

  ‘Well, don’t overdo it, ducky.’

  Mother disclaimed at once as she always did, and no words of mine would stop her, or ever had. She had always been more adventurous than Mell or I and the picnics of childhood were for us apt to degenerate into alarming walking-tours when all we wanted was to digest our tea because of mother’s urge to ‘see what was round the corner’, as though she expected to find a branch of The Home and Colonial on the top of Cader Idris instead of, as I once protested, just more corner. She had let us in for that frightful ordeal at Barmouth – it concerned those odious little black mountain bulls and getting lost and darkness coming on, and I reminded her of that evening as we stood there, and then the taxi was ready and Cuss holding the door, and what were mother’s last words to me or mine to her I don’t know.

  4

  I would ‘do’ the river, this time, follow that lugubrious towpath towards Addison’s Villa which had been the bane of all of us when accompanying father on Sundays. It would doubtless feed my remorse.

  To get there involved passing Evenfield, but strictly speaking that wasn’t my fault, was it? I had leant on the gate and that was over. Very well, then.

  Leaning on the gate I noticed this time that the superior Willis curtains were not visible. Looking about me I found a post driver into the border by the further gate: in white lettering on the board it gave notice that This Desirable Detached Residence, fourteen rooms, bath and usual Offices, garden of three-quarters of an acre was to be Let or Sold. The house-agent was a local firm.

  Compelling myself to stick to the programme I seethed along the towpath, and Evenfield did this for me, in putting father and even for the time, mother, clean out of my head. That To Let board at once depressed and allured me; it was a chance in a thousand that you must snatch at and a taunting of you to make good on much otherwise wasted emotion. Here was my old home available and a Morant – the only loyalist – ready and willing, and Evenfield waiting for its Morant.

  Emotion I think has its burdensome side: I feel that this is an aspect of things that engaged couples sense; longing, irretrievably pledged to each other, there must come flashes of objective sight in which their mutual compulsion to see it through lies heavily upon them, though bliss be round the comer; intervals in which they view with resentment the loss of dignity to which their transports and jealousies commit them, plus glimpses of the bondage that is being publicly affichés to each other, consciousness of the greedily facetious eye of society boring into so frail a thing as their shared idealism. And to lose you must first possess, while failure to possess is unthinkable. It is a vicious circle.

  I was to go faithfully through all these phases over Evenfield.

  5

  But at least I could now see the house alone, and empty of Willis possessions, I was thinking that night as I sat facing Marcus at our dining-table with Clifford on my right. I was tired, and soothed by the company of these nice men of mine who were so fond of me, whom I so valued. I told them about Evenfield and Marcus said, ‘Oh my God’, very kindly, but I was suddenly acutely aware of Clifford, and found that his glance at me was faintly harassed. I am pretty sure he guessed even then what was in my mind, equally certain that Marcus hadn’t the remotest suspicion.

  6

  I stood once more in the hall of Evenfield alone with the echoes of my own footsteps, my only links with the world the key and my London-bought hand-bag.

  The house-agent, roused from doldrums, was delighted to see me and as usual tried to conceal his state. His eulogies of the house would have been entertaining had not all my senses been humming with impatience to be off.

  ‘And why did the Willises leave?’ I asked of real curiosity which he characteristically mistook for smelt rats and advance disparagement.

  ‘Mr. Willis was a bit of an invalid’, (shade of my father! How can an invalid be ‘a bit’ of one?), ‘rheumatic trouble, I understand, and wasn’t quite prepared to face another winter.’ Actually he corrected himself, ‘This is a very healthy part; there are occasional floods of course, but only if you live by the river, but Evenfield is exceptionally well-placed. There are sometimes winter and autumn fogs, of course, that is inevitable in the Thames Valley.’ (I thought, if you’d had as many plates of pea-soup as I’ve eaten in yellow fogs in Addison they’d be enough to float a battleship.)

  His version of my old home was amusing; the drawing-room was Spacious, there was Ample Cupboard space (which hadn’t occurred to me), Absolute Quiet (which I knew already), a Handsome billiard room (which it wasn’t), Good Larder, scullery and butler’s pantry (and I saw once more the butler – mother – washing teacups while I asked her, ‘Would you say that I am
a strumpet?’ I very nearly repeated the query to my eager young house-agent!). Abovestairs were exceptionally Commodious dressing- and staff-rooms (four, my lad, and one of ’em had no fireplace, and a door’d and dark recess in which for some years family trunks were wedged). The garden was Well-planned (by mother, or her predecessor or Mrs. Willis?). There was a Convenient tank for watering the vegetables (oh shut up, you ass!).

  I studied the house-agent’s office which I think had been a shop, and couldn’t quite place it: it was near the Fields’ end of Addison and might have been a small greengrocer who left when I was about seven, or that stationer where Mell and I bought picture post-cards of actresses.

  It was quite ostentatiously still in the hall, and I was glad. Evenfield was mine for an hour and the question was where to resume our long-interrupted conversation.

  The billiard room we’d none of us cared for much, and it now smote me in all its bareness and still smelt vaguely and unaccountably of chalk. The dining-room, only slightly smaller than I’d imagined, was rather civil to me, having seen me and been re-introduced by Mrs. Willis. We were at a loss with each other until I opened the china cupboard, remembering those Fairy cakes of eleven o’clock lunch. The cupboard and I recognized each other instantly, but our sudden meeting made for awkwardness.

  I passed through to the kitchen. It had new panes in the window (would or would not that be accounted for by Mrs. Willis, or Cuss’s exasperated golfing feats with pears and a walking-stick?). It would be just about here that I had danced to Mrs. Couchman … the walls had been distempered blue which was chilly and Italianate and displeased me, especially when I saw that the graduated line of ovals where our plated dish-covers hung was now no longer visible.