Evenfield

by Ferguson,Rachel

  She supposed I’d heard from Thelma. I hadn’t.

  ‘Well, I’m not surprised. You’ve known her all your life. But she’s so utterly different, dear … changed person.’ (If Thelma’s being awful there’s no change, but I merely said ‘Oh?’ with sympathetic interest and devouring curiosity.) ‘Of course, it was a disastrous marriage –’

  ‘Would you quite say that?’ I temporized, with my ears on stalks.

  ‘She could have married anybody –’

  (Bosh!).

  ‘– one or two men – county, title, money – quite wild about her – wouldn’t look at ’em’ (Rats!) ‘and then – a country doctor! Of course Chetwyn adaws her …’

  ‘Well, that’s something, anyway.’

  ‘Of course,’ added poor Mrs. Jasperleigh, ‘she’s a marvellous hostess … friend of mine – very high up in the I.C.S. – says the perfect manager, and her house, well, you must see it, that’s all! See it. Very big noise in the War Office and his wife dined there not long ago and he said to me afterwards, “Mrs. Jasperleigh, this – is – the – perfect house”.’ I supposed as I breathed civilly into the receiver that that meant six chromium operating tables and chairs from Tottenham Court Road and one witch-ball full of daisies and lilies made of fish-bones and collar studs. ‘But reelly, darling, I don’t know what to do. When she comes to see me it’s like a visitor … and when one’s bin so close … of course I adaw Broadacres … got everything as I want it and people are always saying to me: “Mrs. Jasperleigh, this is a home as well as a beauty-spot”. But I get so lonely sometimes I think I’ll get right out. In any case, there’s nobody to know any more, your dear mother always felt that …’

  I answered rather austerely that we’d never found that difficulty, rather the contrary, if anything, and managed to ring off quite soon afterwards. I was sincerely sorry for Mrs. Jasperleigh and meant in my own time to size up her daughter, but didn’t propose to go on collywobbling at the telephone indefinitely. It would be odd if one became sympathetically fond of her, a factor one hadn’t reckoned with …

  The next call came from dear auntie S, to whom I retailed Mrs. Jasperleigh’s dictum while her delighted ‘Haigh! haigh! haighs!’ of appreciation once more and so pleasantly assailed my ears. ‘Now I really feel a Morant is back’, she said (‘Let’s get baby’s chair into the nursery and then it’ll begin to look like home’). She added that she hated to think of my solitary struggles to get settled in, and on impulse I reminded her of her decision about my chair when we all first arrived at Evenfield, and although she haigh’d again with relish she’d forgotten it completely, which gave me a small pang, even if she remembered a lot of titbits that I fell upon. Here was a mine I would quarry at leisure … one’s elders are so beautifully sure of their facts.

  Had she, I asked, beginning minor excavations at once, got the same gardener?

  ‘Which one?’

  It was well over twenty years ago, of course … one must remember.

  ‘The one,’ I said, ‘who was hit on the behind by tennis balls and found Mrs. Oswald in the weir.’

  ‘Oh, Pegler. No, my dear, he left before Evelyn married. We’ve had two since then, rat them! Who are you having for the garden?’

  ‘Old Stiles if I can find him. The Couchmans will put me on to him.’

  ‘My child! he’ll be over seventy by now! Think again.’

  ‘Well … um … when do gardens stop being able to look after themselves and want a gardener?’

  ‘All the time! Who did the former tenants employ?’

  ‘I dunno, and I’m sure I should hate him.’

  ‘Well, shall I speak to my Sims?’

  (Of course, if he came steeped in the Stortford earth there must be virtue in him.) ‘You are a dear, but I’d rather try for Stiles first –’.

  ‘And what about provisions? You remember the shops your mother used to deal with, I suppose?’

  ‘Whadyermean! Remember them!’

  ‘Haigh! haigh! haigh!’

  (Actually, I found that I wasn’t entirely correct, and that I didn’t know and never had known where we used to get, for instance, such miscellanea as brooms, dusters, garden hose, notepaper and eggs, essentials which had never occurred to me in London, when going over old times.) Often in the following days I rang up auntie S to act referee to my uncertainty: it was our leading grocer, Comfort, from whom mother got the eggs, of course? And auntie S: ‘Lord no, never! She and I went to that dairy much higher up. We used to meet there every Monday when she paid the book. She always said Comfort sold Election eggs.’

  ‘Then I’ll go to the Dairy too: and where did she get so-and-so and so-and-so?’ And quite suddenly, auntie S went dead on me and didn’t remember, or never knew – like myself, after all, like myself … and it seemed to me so important to be right on detail, that, only so, could I successfully reconstruct the old life.

  The third call was a male voice which told me (too truly) that I wouldn’t know it and turned out to be, of all people, Johnnie Lawnford. I had last heard his voice when I was eleven. It was, he said, good to hear me, and, ‘You know my wife, of course?’

  ‘That depends upon whom you married,’ I replied, secure in our old association.

  ‘Well – hang it!’ That sounded like the ghost of the beginnings of offence and I did some quick thinking and more or less fluked into a correct pairing of him off; but it was, I knew, bad timing, theatrically speaking, and I doubt if a woman would have passed it. ‘Of course I know! That was my silly jape. It was Estelle Raymond and she and I had French with Madame when she wasn’t having colds.’

  ‘She’s got one at this moment –’

  ‘Hurray! You know what I mean: it sounds like old times.’

  ‘My respected ma-in-law kept her in cotton-wool, I always said so.’

  ‘Never in my hearing, Johnnie! My dear, are you a stockbroker in checks and a golf handicap, or an Army man silent and bronzed, or a gentle giant with a trowel who forgets to weed and writes sonnets in the summerhouse?’

  ‘I’m head cashier in a Kingsmarket bank.’

  ‘Lor … I wish I could cash cheques with you, but I’m sealed unto our old one.’

  ‘When are you coming to see us? Estelle would have ’phoned but for her cold.’

  ‘Fearfully soon. Where do you live?’

  ‘We’ve got part of the Domrémy’s old house. It’s flats now.’

  ‘No! What a pity! I don’t suppose I mean that, either, politely speaking, but it was a fine house of its kind.’

  ‘Much too big. It sank old Dommy.’

  ‘Anything would have done that. Remember their parties and the stream of presents?’

  ‘No.’ (Did or did not the Lawnford-Domrémy mothers ‘call’?). ‘Oh, by the way, haven’t we got to congratulate you on a tune or something you wrote?’

  ‘D’you mean Love, Give Me More Memories, or Everybody Kept on Laughing?’

  ‘Never heard of that one. No, the other. Lord, how they plug it! You must have made a fortune. I said to Estelle only last night if they play that thing once more I shall switch off the wireless.’

  ‘How heavenly and tactless and Addison of you!’

  He was instantly and unnervingly overcome with confusion and involved, insincere apologies.

  4

  What with the impact of arrival and all these dear people I was, after all, unable to enjoy my first dinner as mistress of Evenfield; emotionally, it was Aggie and her Irish stew all over again.

  And I don’t know to this hour if Mabel waited well and now never shall, since that will eternally depend upon my memory alone. She was London-engaged and so no doubt would be leaving me very shortly! The cook I secured from Kingsmarket via an advertisement in The Surrey Comet, for which paper I had given an advance standing order to the station bookstall, though not quite prepared to give up my Daily Telegraph. I felt so certain that our papers came from the platform in the old days that I had asked nobody about it, could remember isolat
ed scurryings to it over the bridge if Little Folks was late …

  My initial disappointment at not getting local servants was soon overcome by the consideration that, if I had, my position would prevent me from drawing them out on the subject of Addison and people; the kitchen, in short, was no longer a place in which one danced solos or begged for toffee ingredients, but a room in which inexorably adult dialogues took place, and I must remember that.

  That evening, at the back of all my congestion of excitement, I was remotely nagged by the telephone calls, and as I cracked walnuts and enjoyed port (I failed to continue to: had been unable to get our brand in Addison, and after the songs were produced we did go rather gorgeous, better even than father’s old-slow-and-sure) I pondered the Lawnford exchange.

  He’d misunderstood me so basically; I had left as a result a heaven-really-only-knows-what impression. Was I now rated as a Jasperleigh snob? If so, that label would stick with him and, less adhesively, with his circle, when all I’d longed for was that he should love and laugh at Addisonianism with me. Yet Johnnie was ever so slightly up in arms in defence of Addison. But I loved it at least as well as he did. Then why can’t he take it as I do?

  5

  I couldn’t stop to rest after dinner before I toured the house, and opening door after door forgot the outside world as the results of my infinite labour and searching filled my eye.

  It had been a work ranging from the tedious to the farcical, like an overlong rehearsal, and comprising something of the hazards and responsibility of the antiquary, the curio-hunter, the period costumier and the staved castellan. For I had determined that no lapse of anybody’s memory or of mine should be marked off as dead loss except in the last resort, when plausible invention would take its place. There were deliberate exceptions; the billiard-table which I failed to replace, being wholly unable to master a game which looked despondently boring, anyhow, though woe betide the person who omitted to allude to the room as the billiard room. It was now my lounge, leather arm-chair’d and what somebody once described as a man’s den without the pipe-racks and disorder. All I saw was that it was comfortable, and in the drawing-room there was no replica of that ornate organ or the deplorable ‘cosy corner’; this, I felt, was going too far. The wall-paper, on the other hand, was an example of research: Mell said that it had been a cream satin-stripe with a dado of moss rosebuds, and I got an approximate imitation from our Kensington builder who exhumed sufficient pieces from a limbo of what Potash and Perlmutter would term ‘the stickers’, pretty mementoes of a more sentimental day. The piano I had hired from Kingsmarket was an upright though I hankered for a baby grand, and on its lid I heaped old scores of The Greek Slave, The Circus Girl, San Toy and The Geisha (the assembling of these tuneful relics took me two whole afternoons in Charing Cross Road and they cost an amount which astonished me. One shopman offered me two dozen copies of San Toy and asked if I were ‘taking out the show’, and I wished I’d had a circular feather boa to twitch at him, or a chiffon dustpan hat to nod roguishly; instead, I shook my shingle with regret, and anyway it took Marie Studholme and Gabrielle Ray to carry off those effects!).

  Nor in the drawing-room could I quite tolerate that heavy embroidered drape over the piano’s back, its absence must rank with the telephone and the electric light as an innovation, but I had the white wicker arm-chair that mother used at Evenfield and into which in Kensington Gate Mell had so often after matinée or dance creakingly cast herself in her bedroom, and here it was once more, by the brass firescreen … The huge curtains over the french windows leading into the garden through which Mell and I had burst as dragons and rainbow fairies were back in place: by electric light they looked more than a little shabby against the inevitable newness. The gilt-framed Turners I so heartily disliked were re-hung and on the hall staircase there was The Flood, facing a nice dreadful hat-rack which I bought in a secondhand shop in Fulham Road: it had, said the salesman, once been hired by a manager for a tour of Candida, which I could well believe.

  I think the day-nursery gave me more trouble than any other room. Of all the old wall-papers, that was the one I remembered most vividly, and the one most difficult to match, with its pink apple boughs and pastelle blue ground; and then the question of what to do with the room presented itself; it must be a playroom, yet even I saw that at over thirty you can’t go back to dolls, their house, and a rocking-horse … Evenfield wasn’t to be a museum-piece, but a home. I got over the question by filling it with copies of all the books that we did read and that I could collect from dealers, Alcotts, Meades, Sharps, Wetheralls, and by having tables covered with paint-boxes, pencils and drawing-blocks for the caricatures I still perpetrated, and Patience cards, Snakes and Ladders, which I enjoy, plus a quantity of jigsaw puzzles – excellent for diverting the mind from anger or worry if you haven’t a temperature to start with. I even put a barre along one wall to practise my dancing by and limber up and was always being surprised by how little I’d forgotten, whenever the mood took me to do pliés and battements to the gramophone.

  But in every room I entered my memory and that of my family, scrappily augmented by old friends (the Fields came out very strong over certain items) had served me better than I knew, and it wasn’t so much a case of Love, give me more memories, as a dizzying, cumulative collision with the past … Even the nursery milk-jug was back in the landing cupboard.

  I went to bed in the night-nursery. At not too much after ten o’clock the servants creaked upstairs as well.

  It was astonishingly quiet. Strain my ears as I might there was nothing in house or garden to hear.

  CHAPTER II

  I

  AFTER all, I didn’t have my first breakfast in bed, my impatience to see the rooms in morning light was too raging. It ended by Mabel’s entrance with the tray and my eating and drinking all over the place – a sausage in the spare room, tea in the day-nursery, toast and marmalade in mother’s room. Officially that was to remain a bedroom, but no guest, I determined, should ever occupy it … I believe I even began an apple by the french windows downstairs as I looked at the garden in my pyjamas (how could it be in my pyjamas? Quite, quite. I said that on purpose, because at the moment of writing I was being sorry about father and wanted an imaginary syntaxical set-to with him). The garden was doing me proud so that was all right, and I went upstairs again.

  The day-nursery was, as always, pleasant (why couldn’t I hire Miss Abernethy to sit in it at two-and-six an hour? What is a schoolroom without a governess? Or Aggie at the same terms, to sew in her grey stuff skirt and buckram belt? It was really preposterous that from breakfast to lunch time I should be free of that room, with nobody to spring at me with dates and kings and sums, or catch me as I dodged and hold materials against me for pinning).

  This morning I was going to play at being grown-up and do my shopping with a basket; I hadn’t arranged to meet Mrs. Field or auntie S or anybody at the shops for that wasn’t playing fair; the essence of the thing was that they should occur, take their chance, and nothing forced. To-day I needn’t tour the larder because I had stocked it to repletion in advance, and even as I went back to my room the boy was bringing the bread – to my delight in the old way, assorted loaves in a huge basket for cook to choose from, a lavish gesture which pleased me for its own sake! The boy was whistling Love, Give Me More Memories, flat, and omitting two grace-notes. I leant out of the window.

  ‘Hi! It’s, “tra-la la-la la twiddley-um–te tar”, not “Tra la lar la-la lar lar-lar lah”’, I shouted and sang.

  The boy looked offended. ‘I ought t’ know that b’ now, ’way it’s played all over’, he said.

  ‘You ought, but you don’t, and I ought to know. I wrote it.’

  ‘Go on?’ goggled the boy, bafflingly, and disappeared into the back yard. So now I was probably the local notability or the village idiot who must be humoured, as well as a possible Jasperleigh snob. Not bad going for the inside of two days, but I cannot bear incorrect whistling or humm
ing for which, as there are no printed notes, there can be no excuse.

  2

  That morning, I was glanced at, paused at, incredulously recognized, as you decipher a difficult handwriting, by residents with whom I was in much the same mental state; served as a stranger in shops whose appearance was mainly as unaltered and unalterable as the pyramids (those shops which had displaced the ones I knew I was prepared for by my intermittent Addison prowlings from London, but to enter Comfort’s ungreeted by anybody was a minor shock). Nor, that first morning, did I meet one intimate. The high-water mark was reached when I myself glanced at, paused and incredulously recognized our ‘Lucilla’, Miss Dove. There she was, once you had identified her, unmistakable, in her quenched hat and bright porcelain smile which heaven knows how many times she had unsuccessfully played upon the vicar. Speak to her? I restrained myself. Even one word might precipitate a social avalanche for which I might not be prepared. Evenfield must of course be Godfearing but not if I could help it churchy! Passing on, it occurred to me that we’d never known her, that she was a familiar only as a family joke.

  The bank, where I cashed an unnecessary cheque to see if the place was smelling the same, was highly satisfactory; it had the old floor of stone mosaic and its smell I can still only indicate as being of cash, or rather what that word suggests when you read it, gently metallic and a little smoky. Metal shovels, perhaps?

  In the toyshop window sat a cobbler mending a boot. This outrage had been perpetrated while my back was turned: the toys had certainly been there up to two years ago.

  That afternoon, after a luncheon of some of our old standbys including liquid chocolate with sponge fingers, I found that the time of year precluded a hammock under the apple-trees, and lay on the drawing-room sofa. After a while, my London ear began to cock, waiting for the telephone to ring.