‘So … um …’, and Cuss began to draw staves and musical notes on the scribbling block. ‘You wouldn’t – care to come to Switzerland with me?’
‘Couldn’t, my dear.’ Mother had never had the slightest feeling for graves, far less than I, therefore she would not be there for me. Some day, perhaps … I had one instinct alone, to go back to Evenfield where she was most likely to be recovered: it was a necessity, now, against a whim. You can’t say things like that to anybody, but the bald scheme I put before my brother then and there as he stared and considered, looking responsible. And to my infinite surprise and relief he thought it on the whole the best plan as I should have friends within hail; he didn’t waste time damning house or neighbourhood.
‘And you, Cuss?’
‘Well, I’ve always wanted a place of my own, you know. I suppose one oughtn’t to say so –’
‘I know, don’t apologize, it’s quite natural.’
‘Well, thanks. I could shake down with you, Bunt, but after a certain age the parental-roof business becomes slightly ridiculous – not that there’s any of that to fear any more, poor chap … look here, I shall be abroad indefinitely, old thing. If you get into any sort of a hat, send for Clifford.’
‘Yes.’
‘Or if there’s any business about Evenfield you can’t cope with – it’s the deuce that Evenfield’s not on the phone –’
‘It is, now.’
‘Oh? Good. We’re all right for money, that’s one blessing – there’s such a lot to see to one doesn’t know where to begin … get Florence to call me at seven and bring my trunk down; I shall have to be out first thing rounding up my passport and going to Cook’s … and phone the office that they must carry on. We’d better be making a move, it must be getting late.’
The clock’s hands pointed to five. For a second, Cuss’s hand was on my arm. ‘Well, sleep if you can.’
‘And you.’
4
And a week later the letters began to arrive and the enquiries, the terrible sympathy and loving offers of help and hospitality.
Would I go to Cumptons? Of course I must stay at Broadacres, make it my home if I liked, and Mrs. Jasperleigh felt that in a sense her life was over, but I was past even astonishment. Thelma’s letter at any other time might have surprised me: it was perfectly normal and adequate, whereas at all times it was difficult to remember she was a woman with a life of her own. It was, I think, the first sight of her handwriting I’d ever had.
The Stortfords were arranging for a memorial service at St. Anselm’s, but auntie S advised me not to come down for it: ‘your mother would so hate you to be upset’. That nearly snapped me. Janet Martin wrote affectionately from an address in Hampshire that conveyed nothing to me at all and only deepened the confusion: she outlined her own life of rural activity and chicken farming with her Irmine husband. Mrs. Couchman wrote:
‘… We can’t believe it my dearest Miss Barbara, yet I sometimes think She is lying where she would wish to, she was always one for the hills and the mountains and the beautiful flowers will be All round her in The Spring and I like to think that Help comes from the hills as we are told … I can’t bring myself to pass Evenfield and go round another way when out … We are all going to the Service. I hope you will not think it presuming …’
Madame Fouqué practically ordered me to stay at Mayvale:
‘You are no longer young girl but it is not convenable for that you shall live alone, your Mother would not wish it. Later when the Affaires have arranged you shall return yourself to your brother.’
Léonore was italicized and explosive with emotion, and what had possessed ‘the darling’ to venture out unguided?
Evelyn Stortford, it seemed, wrote very much as she spoke:
‘… Mother told me: I missed it in The Telegraph and we don’t take The Times. Oh Ara, how too frightful … it seems only yesterday that Mrs. M was on the river with us …’
The address, near Kingsmarket, was unfamiliar.
And it all meant nothing at all: nothing would, until Cuss wrote, and Mell, and I dreaded their letters as much as I craved for them.
Clifford telephoned every day, it was a routine support I learnt to depend upon. It was to Clifford that Cuss sent the second wire asking him to tell me in person that father was gone. And later came the letter:
‘… I saw mother, my dear, and she was looking wonderfully like herself (I’m not lying to ease things, it’s true). She’d left the hotel, they told me, to try a new hike she’d heard some people talking of – it wasn’t a real climb, of course, but, I gather, no place for the novice, and she got into difficulties … it wasn’t a long drop, but the light was beginning to go, and she never had much eye for detail, as you know, when she was set on a thing. It used to give Mell some bad moments, in the old days … it was a spinal injury and the Doc says she couldn’t have suffered, and that if she had lived she’d have been paralysed. So let’s thank the powers that be for what we can. He said these cases are mostly numbed from the moment of impact –’
I broke off there because I had to. At the back of my mind, mercifully overworked, had, with a crowd of others, lain the thought of her alone and conscious and cold – not frightened (one was never afraid of that where she was concerned), but cold, wanting her comforts, a hot drink, her eiderdown. She hated the cold so.
Oh, my God.
‘… I’m giving a fiver to the chambermaid on mother’s floor; she’s been extraordinarily decent and seemed really fond of her, and is doing all her packing up. I’m letting the manager have all father’s clothes, rugs, and so on. He’s been decent, too.
‘About father: they’d had to tell him before I got round to the Sanatorium. I had a long jaw with his Doc and he said it was Impossible to keep it from him as they couldn’t know when or if one of us was arriving to take over. He said the shock accelerated matters to a man in father’s state, though it was only a matter of time in any case, which we practically knew already. Actually, he did linger on a day. What I feel quite frankly is that as things are it’s the best thing that could have happened. I’m giving the Doc father’s signet ring and gold links, he’s really a surprisingly nice old fellow, and knows his job, as Germans do … all mother’s things are being forwarded as soon as possible.
‘The cemetery here is really lovely, there’s an informality about it that our beastly British cold storages seem to lack, in my experience. Mother’s plot is –’
I folded up the letter, at that point. Later, perhaps … It was Mell who, saying nothing, said most:
‘… I’m not going to write about it, my dear, until much later. You know I’d give anything to be with you and help, and can’t, and there it is. I’m not going to suggest your coming out to us here because I know you won’t, and I don’t think I would, either. I expect you’re sick to the soul of answering difficult letters as it is, and aren’t they awful to write? I never could rise to a really good one; somehow all one’s sympathy and feeling evaporated the moment one put pen to paper.
‘How incredible you should hanker for Addison! I don’t believe you’ll like it, you know, so many of the old gang have left and you may have servant difficulties, but won’t the Fields be thrilled! Tell me everything when you have a moment. I’m afraid you and Cuss are absolutely wallowing in work … of course Ken Gate will have to go. It was a nice house and I liked it … I’m at the moment conducting a row with one of the regimental cats. “It was like this”, as one of the Evenfield cooks used to say when she’d smashed something. (N.B. Have just remembered her name was Carrie, and mother loathed her …)’
5
The house was put into the agent’s hands: the lease hadn’t much longer to run – rather under three years, but none of us wanted it, a fact of which it became very soon aware, as houses do. Some of the furniture was sold, some aunt Caroline housed for Marcus; the old Evenfield stuff, furniture, pictures, curtains and china, went to a warehouse the Fields told me of, in Kingsmarket.
I was glad of the dusty, tiring work, of sweating and a whisky and soda. As I sorted and packed, there was suddenly a sensation of lack, and I had to stop and find out about it. It was that from now onwards there was nobody to tell me I looked tired and must stop. I had absolute freedom, and it is one of the most horrible sensations I know.
6
When I had cleared up in Kensington Gate I went to and from Addison to keep appointments with plasterers and paperhangers and all that platoon of labour which stands between nearly everybody and his new home.
Old friends were helpful, ecstatic, curious, exclamatory, and it didn’t get through to me for one moment, and wouldn’t until the fuss was over and I myself settled in Evenfield with mother.
Meanwhile, Evenfield was standing there being just a house filled with packing-cases and the front door perpetually open.
And then Clifford had his turn with me.
I had found it singularly difficult to discuss my plan with him ever since his harassed glance that night he dined with us, though the reasons at work behind it weren’t clear. Doubts from the family were understandable: they knew me and Evenfield inside out, but Clifford Barstowe, a comparative stranger, would surely?, be robust and tangible and objective, and from the kindest of motives put a logical finger unerringly upon the flaws in my defence, as he must have done a dozen times in Court. How mistaken I was I discovered on the afternoon that he and I first went to Addison to interview the house-agent.
What I now wanted was to buy Evenfield and this I hadn’t dared tell anybody but Clifford who wouldn’t beat me down with solicitudes and apprehensions, and I had my first surprise when he negatived the idea outright. I gave in, a little deflated and sulky, before his experienced arguments as to possible difficulty of re-sale, size of house in these days of small families, cost of repairs, and so on, and he was obviously relieved but still, I sensed, dissatisfied. He said quite unexpectedly, ‘I wonder if Addison will understand your affairs being handled by an – um – outsider. Of course, I am also an old resident, which may make for righteousness, but still –’.
We had turned in at the Park gates. It was early autumn, my time of year, when there are chestnuts to grind out of their green burrs with your heel and the smell of wood smoke drifting from where the men were burning dead leaves and bracken, and clashes like a distant medieval battle which was the stags having at each other, clattering away as mechanically antagonistic as ever, bless them, while the does followed on pointed feet and nudged and dunted us for opened nuts that their wet, tender noses might avoid pricks.
Out of the blue Clifford said, ‘I wish you weren’t set on this idea’. Coming from him it was a bad shock to my hopeful state of mind, and I could find nothing to say. I think I was afraid that he would come out with something else and increase the burden. He looked away down the avenue as he added, ‘I’d thought of something so very different for you – for us’.
Of course I knew what he meant and of course I’d guessed it for some time; even poker faces and reserve aren’t sufficient guards to the suggestible and between the mutually sympathetic.
‘I thought perhaps that might be it, my dear.’
He looked at me, then. ‘But if you think that my own personal feelings are standing in the way of approval of your taking this house you’re wrong, believe me. It’s more than that. I want your happiness. I hope I rate it above my own, but one never knows. What’s actively worrying me is that you appear to be illusioned. Oh, I’m not attacking Addison, it’s probably no worse than similar places and lots better than some. But I’ve made quite a study of you, you know, and I’m afraid I see what may happen to you if you go back to live alone at Evenfield.’
I literally dared not say a thing.
‘Two things may happen, rather: you will either see Addison and Evenfield as they really are, suburban and a little dull, and be badly disappointed, or you’ll continue to be blinded, and that house’ll be so chockful of ghosts of the past that you’ll be miserable.’.
7
When Evenfield was ready to the final tintack and saucer, and the London house, save for my bed, bare as a bone, I went from room to room, the switches snapping loudly in that emptiness, and unexpectedly found myself succumbing to sentiment.
So I was, after all, one of those clinging-ivys I’d always tried to avoid being? For I saw that although the pulls and claims of the Kensington house were infinitely feebler than those of my old home they were unmistakably in the same class … I even wondered why I didn’t mind leaving this house more. Hadn’t mother eaten here, rested there? Wasn’t there still the mark on a panel where she had once tried to beat out a smouldering kettleholder that caught fire at teatime? And in Mell’s room a splash of ink on the wall-paper from her fountain pen? And all the notable things of life had happened here: growing up and long skirts, first flirtation and proposal, dances and the beginnings of selectiveness and criticism, finding Cuss and coming round to father. And yet the sum-total was and remained a newspaper against a picture-book.
And then it occurred to me that from this house my entire family had left me.
PART THREE
CHAPTER I
1
I WAS in my station fly: it smelt as of old, of mustiness, battered straps and damp hay, and those free-and-easy breaths of it that I was at leisure to take suddenly presented me with another whiff: of Maltese silk mittens and shawl. (‘I wonder if there’ll be ices, Mell?’), and I remembered for the first time since childhood a party treat, oranges quartered and filled with stiff red and yellow jelly, delicious after heating games.
This was beginning my adventure in style …
I would go to bed early after a dinner cooked by my servants: I would have breakfast in bed and if they didn’t like it they could go: I would listen to the great-great-grandbirds of those mother and I had fed with warm sopped toast – surely they’d sing better for that background of ancestral good living! And if they woke me too early I would unpoetically shout Shut UP! at them with none to hear; I’m no Elizabeth in her German garden.
And then I planned my first day in Addison.
There was too much, a plethora of choice: the garden to go over in detail, luncheon to order in the kitchen of which I was mistress … or should I be high-handed and old-world and summon Cook into the dining-room, like Grannie Morant? But mother used to tour the larder every day; I knew that because, now in full spate of Evenfield memory, I recalled that all our cooks used to keep wedges of suet in the flour tub, and the coolness of rummaging it, and that we’d had a huge stone filter with a tap, from which nobody ever seemed to drink; and there was a thing called a Thermogene, a vast, cottage-loaf-shaped siphon covered with wire netting, into which metallic bullets were inserted, the result quite often being fresh seltzer water.
I peered out of the fly. It was creaking past the Randolphs’ red-hot house. It had turned in at our drive.
2
I used the knocker as mother did, her signal to me that it was she and none other returned from London to me waiting in the hall or lurking on the landing.
It was a mistake; had given me for an instant a sense of dual personality. Which of us was this knocking? Why was that child outside the front door?
The houseparlourmaid opened to me, conventionally smiling. I said, ‘Ah, Mabel’ (‘Ha-Clifford’, in short!), and found the ejaculation, as father no doubt had done, a most useful one, combining as it did non-committal geniality with absolute meaninglessness.
There were flowers in the hall, from the Fields with a loving message of welcome, a bunch of dahlias from the Couchmans hoping I wouldn’t take them amiss, and full of the lean-to bedroom and of how Hope didn’t know if she was on her head or heels with delight and would soon be too grand to speak to the family, but of course that was only my joke, dear Miss Barbara, and the men were so good and the foreman so kind and always with a Joke that sets us up for the day, and it was such an interest to Mr. Couchman and they wheeled his chair out
into the garden every fine morning so that he could see the men at work as it made A Change, and yesterday they give him some tobacco …
There was a telegram. ‘My wishes for your happiness when settled in will come if invited Clifford.’
3
I have never understood those people who are slaves to immediate unpacking: I want to enjoy the moment of arrival and unless one’s trunk contains something indispensable I wish to forget it indefinitely. Unfortunately, leisure, even liberty, is an art you must learn, and Evenfield, I thought, must teach me as I fought down my automatic impulse to throw back the lid and grovel. As it was, between arrival and dinner the telephone rang three times. I had retained this Willis trace, for if moving with the times means a telephone I suppose we equally moved with them when incandescent finally superseded those flounced standard lamps in the drawing-room; besides, there were Cuss and the theatre with whom to keep in touch, and London friends, perhaps.
The first call was from Broadacres and Mrs. Jasperleigh, very home-sweet-home and heart-bowed-down and even a little tearful as her voice meandered up and down the sociable scale of welcome, and of course I must lunch with her next day as I should feel (vibrato) quite lost all alone, and of course I warmly declined (allegretto vivace) and of course nobody but Mrs. Jasperleigh could conceivably have entertained such a notion for a moment and I must write to Mell and tell her. And just as I was enjoying it all and hoping for more material for the family, even for Clifford, who in a punctilious and well-bred manner saw the point about the Jasperleighs almost as well as we did, as his half-finished sentences and unwilling smiles betrayed, Mrs. Jasperleigh smote me down in my very hall.
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