3
The reactions of my first callers were amusing and a little disturbing, if you allowed them to be.
Mrs. Jasperleigh was dramatic. ‘But – Evenfield over again! My dear, a shock! Identical! Might never have gone! How – can – you – bear – it? I should be in tears. Floods!’
Auntie S came, saw, squeezed my arm and chuckled, ‘Ara, how dear and dreadful of you! What would Mrs. M say? How did you do it? How Evelyn will chortle! And the “cosy corner” you couldn’t stomach! Haigh! haigh! haigh! But we can go one better: I’ve still got a painted tambourine and a stool like almond hardbake that no dealer will take away even for nothing, so we just make pets of them. I call it all quite heavenly. Your mother always said we both ought to keep a boarding-house for decayed cats in Cliftonville.’
Mrs. Field, her susceptible eyes alternately filling with tears of mirth and sorrow, said low-voiced, ‘Oh chicky! … it does bring back the old days so, and what good times we had here. Your parties were always successful, you dear! … and that hat-rack! Well of course I can’t pretend I like it, but I’ve seen it so often with your dear father’s tophat hanging on it (‘It was Candida’s young man’s, last’, I interpolated), and I remember your mother once made a dummy and hung it among the hats and coats when your father was entertaining the Church Lads’ Brigade’, and Mrs. Field’s eyes filled with guilty amusement. Then, taking in the wicker chair, ‘I’ve seen her sitting there so often, bless her …’
I received one entirely self-contained tribute, from old eyes which, unhampered by the past, saw the drawing-room as a room.
Miss Ambrose called with card-case and kid gloves and was shown in to me. Clifford’s aunt and I had never become more than acquaintances, I had no time on my visits to Addison, but she had been very kind about the offer of stray meals when I was moving in. Now she looked about her with obvious pleasure, apologizing for discourtesy. ‘But you have made it so charming, so unlike the modern drawing-room, it’s a rest to the eye. I must confess when my nephew told me that so young a woman had taken Evenfield I was – well –’
‘I know. China satyrs heads on the wall and a red ceiling.’
‘Well, something of the sort, perhaps, but this is what I call really delightful. Indeed it reminds me (you’ll laugh) a little of our own drawing-room when I was a girl, though I fear we crowded furniture sadly. You have avoided that. Nothing heavy, yet all in such taste … this is what I call A Lady’s Room.’ I did laugh, then, as a vision of washable tiling, grubby basins, penny-in-the-slot machine and a nameless stench whisked before my eyes.
4
On Sunday, I went to occupy my sitting at St. Anselm’s, and discovered that I meant nothing to the verger: it wasn’t drink on his part; this man was new, at least to me, so I could only suppose that Sheppard had scoffed his Scotch by night once too often, poor old soul, and, as I knelt, made a mental note to write and let Mell know.
I’d been, after all, unable to locate our old seats, guessed that I hadn’t been exact when I realized I was too close to that banner of the star-encircled angel and too far from another familiar whose needlework feet tiptoe’d a writhing dragon in crimson silk … and it might or might not have been this miscalculation which caused me to fail to locate so many churchgoing regulars: or was it that they were unrecognizably aged, or dead? Or had the new vicar driven away the faithful? I was prepared for the new vicar, had heard for some years that ours had accepted a London living, but was faintly worried by the present one for all that; even the Fields had preferred St. Michael’s, in the old days. But as the tenant of Evenfield it would have been amusing and warming to bow … I think I would have actually inclined to Miss Dove had she been there, but I suddenly remembered that “Lucilla” was now by rumour in the borderline class, and a change of vicar doubtless meant a change of heart, and heaven knew before what alien altar she was now curtsying. Was it my duty to find her, draw her out, lay at her feet my contribution of anecdote and memory of our ex-minister? No, dammit! I couldn’t! Poor Lucilla must ever remain fixed in time as a family joke … and my set of contes mightn’t be her mark at all, for what solace to the emotionally wracked to know that her earthly god had once offered to kiss both me and my sister, even if we were only children, or that, that little matter adjusted, he had then had a set-to with my mother about Mrs. Oswald? (Her opinion against His!).
At the south door I loitered, expectant. Two people spoke to me. One, a woman, had a vaguely familiar face to which I was cordial: she asked me to come and see her and hoped she might call on me and I said yes to everything, and regarded her exit of dithering pleasure with indulgence. She was probably thinking that to get Love, Give Me More Memories in person into her house would be meat upon which to dine out for months to come.
The other, an old and kindly man, neat and withered, left me at a complete loss until he introduced himself, and even then he was only a known name to me, but I clutched at it eagerly as I tried to associate it with one single incident in this world.
‘I expect you don’t remember me,’ added Mr. Grimstone. (Grimstone?). And then a ray of light was vouchsafed me, thanks to mother. ‘Jordan water from the Holy Land,’ I said promptly, ‘and the silver crucifix for St. Anselm’s.’ He looked slightly taken aback but elected for amusement. ‘Is that all? Now, where do I live? You haven’t the faintest idea. D’you remember a house by the river called The Moorings?’
‘Oh, but yes!’ This was too bad, and a blow to my pride, because I did know the name and now he’d think I was the usual thickhead who’d left Addison and didn’t give a damn. I wavered unhappily until he said, ‘You even came to see us, once, with your pretty mother … and I suppose you’ve forgotten my yacht as well. You were my little hostess –’
‘So it was yours! I’d always wondered. You see, one or two other people had launches, and mother couldn’t remember. I had a cartwheel green hat and green sandals –’
‘No doubt, no doubt’, (one for me, this time!).
‘I do so hope I wasn’t a little beast,’ I submitted, making a possibly called-for apology overdue by about twenty-three years.
‘You were most excellent company.’
‘Well, thank goodness for that!’
‘And I shall always remember how you went for some child at a party and made her nose bleed.’
‘Thelma! So you were there!’
‘I’m her godfather –’
‘No?’ (This looked like possible rocks ahead.)
‘– but beyond that I really see very little of the Jasperleighs (ah!) and never could quite fathom why I was selected for that honour.’ (I could, you nice old innocent. You’re well-off and childless and influential and a gentleman.) ‘Now do tell me what brings you down to St. Anselm’s once more?’
‘I’ve leased Evenfield again.’
‘Indeed!’
I told him a little of what I felt about it and wondered whether one confided in a Grimstone, but knew just enough to rate him as one of a background of respectables, besides, I liked him for his own sake, and it ended by our replacing each other on our visiting-lists, ‘though I fear I have little to offer, these days; my yacht is given up and I’m getting old and since my wife died I have been out of touch with life in general … but tea on the lawn is still pleasant…’
Walking home to my luncheon of roast beef and apple tart – I loathe apple tart but felt that its smell and taste would bring round the dining-room to a deepened awareness of former Morant sabbaths, I suddenly realized with a start which made me cut the pastry crooked that the fulsome woman who had asked me to call on her must have been an Addisonian detrimental, one of mother’s Lord-Have-Mercy-On-Us horde, though her name had gone completely. Well … I could always be Not At Home if she turned out impossible, and I had to applaud a persistence, a magnificent pachydermatude which for a lifetime had waited, pounced, and gate-crashed Evenfield at last!
It was fun to be lunching in the dining-room: my first flurry of rediscovery over
I savoured every minute there, sat at the head of the table – father’s place for the look of the thing before the servants, but hankered for my old side position on mother’s right. From where I now sat she’d be facing me …
As there was nobody to talk to, I began our old game of pretending that father was somebody else, and as this was my inaugural Sunday luncheon, I allotted him Lord Chesterfield, and passed him sugar and cream. Courtesy without subservience …
5
The days were closing in. Already a mist hung over the lawn and turnip field, and any night now, I supposed, through novels I had read which were all agreed upon the subject, I might expect to see the dahlias ‘blackened’ overnight with frost, an affliction I don’t ever remember to have observed in our own or those of anybody else. It was probably going to be time for me to call in Stiles to do autumnal things.
My thirty-fourth birthday was drawing near, a dreadful age, neither fish, fowl nor herring. I must have a party or betray Evenfield for ever, but what would either of us think of a grown-up affair? We weren’t used to it, the house and I, only to nice mothers of many children dotted about the drawing-room … and I didn’t know one child in Addison. The offspring of my contemporaries must all be too old by now.
I sat by the nursery fire and considered. Evelyn Stortford (as I should probably continue to call her) had a son I’d never met: the Randolph child who I seem to remember had had two children, sex unknown, had moved on somewhere else, and an Ackworth-Mead daughter who (didn’t Mrs. Field tell me?) contributed one son to her husband, the Raymond boy, and goodness knew where she was by now. If Thelma had had a child I felt in my bones I’d have disliked it, and the rest of our circle didn’t seem to have ‘obliged’, except poor Janet Martin, whose baby had died outright.
There must be children to know?
I thought of Mayvale and the dancing-class. On the following Thursday I was dressing carefully for it.
6
I supposed as I went along that mile and a half to Mayvale that I ought to have called upon Madame Fouqué. But I should have to go in by the front door; no more skirtings of the house and pushing open of that back-door into the shrubbery and entry by the ante-room to where the classes were held, for I was now a grown-up, I must remember.
It was Léonore, stooped to the gilt sandals of some favourite pupil, who looked up, shrieked and sprang at me. ‘Oh, Barbara, but too wonderful! Have you seen mother? I think she is giving Miss Vansittart a dressing-up in the saloon.’ I happily hoped that Muddarm was being ‘offal’. ‘But why haven’t you looked us up before?’
‘I was settling in.’
‘That passes me! How you can envisage being without Mrs. Morant and Melisande … and, my dear, you’re exactly the same! Oh how I wish Irène was here! But she is so wound up in Dick and her family –’
‘Oh Léonore, how is everything! I had to see the dancing-class again! Who’s the star turn now?’
‘A marvellous child – not so sweet as you, but Miss Lamare is stunning with children, oh but infinitely better than Miss Anson!’ I was in the great classroom, seeing again the plaster casts which were dotted about on shelves when the drawing-mistress had left the arena, wondering whether Mell had struggled in her time with the plums or that Michelangelo hand of David, examining the parquet floor my own feet had polished so often … and then there was a stir and Madame Fouqué made entry looking not one day older, and it was in choler that I re-met her. ‘Miz Fancy Tart iz tou bàad!’ she exclaimed, when her brown eye assimilated my presence.
She took me over like a warder from a constable, had much to say, tappingly upon my arm, but I sensed a change, a lack of the old cordiality, the authentic warmth which broke through her ancient rages and decrees absolute. Of course, we had had a difference, but that was sixteen years ago, just a fact without feeling, to me, but perhaps in Addison they clung more to vendetta? I was bright and brittle (like mother?) and suitably deferential when it suited me, but for some reason I wasn’t going down with Muddarm in any capacity, whether as pupil, friend or Londoner. She seemed to me defensive (like Johnnie Lawnford?), on the alert to discover snobbisms or vanity or something, the injustice of which I felt without being able to counter it … little digs at me … or was I enlarging everything in my anxiety to slide back into my old place in her regard?
‘You are ver’ smart.’ (Compliment or censure?)
‘You are réussi, I hear.’ (Politeness or indifference?)
‘We hav’ a wonderful mistress now, a t’ousand time supérieure to Miz Ansonn. You shall see.’ (Information or snub?)
‘Our bes’ dancer is a daurrling.’ (Implicit detraction?) I saw. They put me among the watchful semicircle of parents and guardians, Madame at my side, as it were ‘producing’ my attentiveness like the maddening friend who has seen the play before and intends you to realize that fact with his superfluous pointers.
It didn’t take me five minutes to realize that the new dancing mistress was a compromise; well ahead of Miss Anson technically she was far behind Hervet, and instilling mere smatterings of the right stuff without the effective and effortless little flourishes which make amateurs pleasing to an amateur public; as a result the pupils didn’t appear to me to be either useful or ornamental performers. The Marvellous child was slightly below the junior standards of the London classrooms and her marvel, I supposed, consisted in a lot of pointe work for which she was as yet too young by quite three years, and I foresaw early bunions as I fulsomely agreed with every pronouncement of Madame’s and the exclamations of the semicircle. After that I devoted the time to mental selection of children for my birthday party.
Madame had rustled away, and a voice next my chair asked me, ‘Which of the little girls is yours, I wonder?’
I had one grin that afternoon during the ten minutes devoted to ballroom dancing when the pianist thumped out Love, Give Me More Memories, and nobody even glanced at me.
One two three, one two three … poor Mr. Field! Perfect time. Horrible. You’re not beating carpets.
Madame sent for me to come up to tea in the drawing-room. Healthily incensed I made my excuses and left. I wanted Evenfield, to find it unchanged, even were its present familiarity largely due to my own efforts.
Léonore would have been affectionate and eager and possibly understanding, but one must remember that she was Madame’s daughter and partner, and committed to loyalty.
In the drawing-room Clifford was waiting for me and I stumbled over the carpet as I hurried to him. ‘Oh Clifford, I am so glad to see you!’
‘I didn’t like to come, before.’ (But he didn’t look too happy at my welcome, or had I imagined that, as well?)
‘And I didn’t like to ask you. Addison’s a far cry from the Courts.’
‘Long Vacation. We’ve still three days to go to Michaelmas Term.’ He made no comment on the house; it may be that he’d forgotten what it used to look like, but he seemed to confine his topics to London and Cuss and old Miss Ambrose, with whom he said I had made a hit. She wasn’t from my point of view an Addisonian, but there are times when any approval is better than none.
7
He stayed to dinner and I think Mabel was sulky, and afterwards we walked in the garden which was delicious with tobacco plant and damp earth and celery. I took his arm, which, it occurred to me later, he hadn’t seemed to like, much, but I kept my arm in his because I liked him so very well, and because if he was being tightlaced and Addisonian it was quite heavenly of him and for me, or thinking that extra care must be observed towards an unprotected female, or just cautious (the Law Courts), which would have been even better! The real reason escaped me handsomely at the time, and with a whiff of a late-flowering rose I received a sensation that I was walking with father again, father being Not Amused about some cantrip of ours.
‘Clifford, I want a birthday party.’
‘Ah …’
‘I want a kids’ party like our old ones, and I find I don’t know any.’ He was rather a l
ong time answering that.
‘Mightn’t it perhaps be a better idea to have a party only for grown-ups?’
‘People I know, you mean?’
‘That too. But –’
Somehow, I didn’t want to ask him to finish his sentence; he got round it by saying, ‘Strange children would hardly be a pleasure to you, would they?’
When he had left me to take the last train to Waterloo I went back to the warm, bright drawing-room and tried to read, and couldn’t. My mind wanted and intended to go over birthdays of the past.
There was the year that we had the Rainbow party, with all the girls (by request) as fairies and all the boys as knights, elves, gnomes, or goblins; in one corner of the room (I turned my head to it) was a cave, terrific in painted cardboard and pot-plants, with Mell a sequinned monster at its entrance. The prize game was to rescue myself as the Rainbow Princess, and a password must be guessed, the winner to receive a sword, shield and stout sack of golden sovereigns made of chocolate, the losers to receive awards for reasons unspecified. And the year I, as Queen, in a serrated crown and mantle of red velvet, chose my King for the tea-table, being instructed beforehand which boys to refuse and which one to accept, and I forgot and turned down the lot! Or the year that Mell and Janet Martin as witches presided over a wonderful well down which wishes must be cast on twists of paper, when I, as Undine, emerged with the desired present in hand – an effect that cost mother weeks of research for data from the other mothers …
The curtains were hanging very still in the September night. I became alarmed by them at last, waiting as I used to do for them to part upon I knew not what, and turned off the lights and went to bed. Later (too late, probably) the servants creakingly followed me.
CHAPTER III
1
ONCE I had a caller who made me laugh aloud. The bell rang, the knocker was knocked, and Mabel ushered in – Cuss! Cuss blindingly smart, who stripped his lavender kid gloves (they were lavender, and kid), placed his silk hat upon the floor and draped his gloves across it, bowed, shook hands with me, twitched the knees of his trousers, contemplated his spats and sat down circumspectly.
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