Evenfield

by Ferguson,Rachel

  ‘Cuss, you fool!’

  ‘A whiff of the old days. I had to comb Burlington Arcade for the props.’

  ‘Oh Cuss, you blazing ass and how I like you! How’s the Savage?’

  ‘Hush, my dear, we talk about the Royal Academy first. This fellow, Dicksee –’

  ‘No. That’s in the Season!’

  ‘Then let’s have tea and plenty of it. D’you keep a good table? God’s teeth! what a room!’

  2

  I went to see Stiles. The garden was beginning to sag and look tipsy and was too large anyway for my amateur tieings (when is a rose sucker that must be clipped a shoot that mustn’t? And why will the garden-minded allude to things being ‘cut back’ when they mean cut down? You can’t cut an upright backwards). But I had gathered my apples happily and with wet ankles, raindrops down my spine and heaven knows what falling on to my hair. The green cookers were still going and growing strong but I missed our russet tree (damn the Willises? or had it failed or died?). My pleasure was unabated by reason of the fact that I could no longer rise to eating the raw green fruit and that I detest all forms of apple, cooked.

  Stiles was at home in his four-room cottage hear the Couchmans, in Nutts Lane. I think, I’m afraid, I recognized him first, yet he was more than a little changed, stouter, and his sturdy autumn tints gone rusty like the October leaves I have seen him sweep so often. Once he had taken in who I was, he came to a semblance of his old self with nothing essentially dimmed but the physical, as is the way of gardeners, who are apt to remain authoritative and dauntless to the end, whether in humble or ducal service. I reminded him of the Frog Fairy stories, begged his memory about those sugar-framed Christmas pictures, and he was non-committal, even if he chuckled. I asked him in my rôle of householder to come to me to work at Evenfield, and here I found longwinded definiteness: he might look in every so often but now his knees and back forbade regular or heavy work. If he heard tell of a likely man –

  But I didn’t want a man however likely. I wanted Stiles and so did the garden.

  On his crowded mantelpiece was a mug, withits ‘J’ initial of forget-me-nots, but I had forgotten it, and it took Stiles to remind me of that seaside souvenir presented how many autumns ago? by myself. And going home, that seemed to me subtly wrong; if I was to lose Stiles, the break should have been final and no sentimental traces … it was my first visit to his home in all the years, and that too was out of step. Stiles came to us, not we to Stiles, and at such a time of day, and I’d upset that by my visit … Now, for my life, I should see him, save for brief and telescopic peeps at him bent over our celery trenches, as an old man past his work. It would have to be auntie S’s Sims, and that would further tend to weaken the garden’s hold on me. For I found that there wasn’t so much to do in it as I’d imagined, except for paid experts: saw it sometimes as Just a large-ish garden that I knew in which I wasn’t able to be lost to the world, discovered that to pull a radish and eat it on the spot was pleasant but just evaded fascination, especially when an impulse which had nothing to do with the business drove me to the tap to wash the earth off first.

  3

  Returning from my shopping one morning I passed a woman talking to a young man at the wheel of a battered four-seater.

  ‘Ara!’

  My response was only a fraction short of simultaneous.

  ‘Evelyn!’

  It may have been that the car and the young man (or old boy) put my eye out, for really Evelyn Stortford, whom I am not going to attempt to allude to as Mrs. Ivor, was looking very like a larger version of herself or a younger edition of auntie S (she had, which you won’t for one second recollect, and it takes me some time to, married the unknown nephew of the dashing Mrs. Markham, but her voice and teeth and laugh were warmingly Stortford).

  ‘What fun to meet you! Phil and I have just come from mother’s. He’s eighteen, can you believe it? Oy! Phil! Come and see Barbara Morant.’ He came at once, his face lightening, and wasn’t Fair-Isle and sandalled and superior but friendly in frousty pullover, and probably like his father plus the Stortford geniality. ‘Mother told me you’d come back to Addison,’ he said, ‘we can’t think why.’ I liked that ‘we’ of implicit adoption as I answered, ‘Because I’m spongey and probably a fool. What are you doing in my shops? You won’t get much because either I’ve bought it already or they’re out of it, which means they never stocked it anyway.’

  ‘They must seem pretty one-horse after London,’ he suggested.

  ‘They’re themselves and much as I remember them.’ But I must admit that they were tiresome, becoming second-rate-standardized, and slowed up housekeeping unless one telephoned to Kingsmatket. Of course mother had dealt considerably with Harrods, and I now began to see why; and I suddenly remembered that she used one morning a week to ‘put out the stores’ from that Flemish cupboard in the hall, delving, weighing tea and sugar for half an hour in the dining-room impeded by myself as I thrust my arms into the stone jars, and that the cupboard was now in the drawing-room, full of old photographs and dust-sheets.

  Evelyn told me that she lived two miles outside Kingsmarket where her husband was engineering consultant to a large aircraft works. ‘And it’s quite ridiculous you’ve never met him, Ara. He’s quite kind and I think you’ll like him. I had my eye on Harold Barstowe – d’you remember Clifford and Jacky? – for about a year after you left, and we used to sneak off and have tea in Kingsmarket and play badminton in the Parish Room, and then I met Stanley (yes, it’s the world’s most frightful name, I just call him Ivor) at whist at Mrs. Markham’s one night and the thing was done.’

  ‘Lor!’

  ‘I know! I know! I often wonder who I’d’ve married if we’d left Addison when you did: I mean, I do see that we’re rather like haystacks that catch fire because they’re too tightly packed. Poor Harold was killed in the war.’ I was to discover that Evelyn’s outspokenness, if quite dismaying, was at all times as ready to be directed against herself and all that was hers.

  ‘Well, if it comes to that, Chetwyn fought the Raymond boy about me, once,’ I contributed.

  ‘I know! And Mrs. Raymond was fearfully shocked. She told mother, and mother said she’d said that no normal boy of that age thought about little girls in that way.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Ha ha ha! That one.’ She turned to her son. ‘Oh Phil, what you’ve missed!’

  ‘I dunno. I think it all sounds pretty far gone.’

  ‘And – Mrs. Markham?’ I asked with caution, but I needn’t have worried, for Evelyn’s face broke once more into bright grins.

  ‘Very like herself but we all think a bit dotty, don’t we, Phil?’

  ‘Oh I should say, definitely.’

  ‘D’you remember the floral toques? She wears ’em still.’

  ‘And is she still at – I never could remember the name of her house?’

  ‘Oh no, she moved to Aylesbury years ago.’

  ‘Why, i’ gad’s name?’

  ‘She has relations there: Mr. Markham died and I think she was rather bored and Ivor lived with her for a bit and when we married she cleared right out.’

  ‘I’ m sorry. ’

  ‘Why, Ara?’

  ‘Oh, you know … one more jape gone.’

  We had talked for twenty minutes. Evelyn said she was ravening to see lots of me but we agreed that the distance she now lived made a big difference except, perhaps, in the summer. She’d never learnt to drive the car and I sympathized for both of us; to be unenterprising about machinery and repairs seems to afflict women of her generation and even a little those of my own. And there was so much to say! If auntie S was a quarry, Evelyn promised to be a diamond mine, and already October was upon us with its darkening, anti-social evenings … it reminded me of my birthday party and I mentioned it and Evelyn said she’d come were it in a wheelbarrow, and ‘Phil’ (or did I imagine it?) looked alert. I apologized that it would probably consist of nothing but veterans (remembering not t
o say grown-ups by an eleventh split second), but he brushed that aside. ‘I say! Might I really come? I’m quite good with curate’s aids and I can help them into their dolmans and pelerines afterwards.’

  ‘Well, thanks a lot! And while you’re on the job you can ease me into my carpet slippers.’

  ‘Carpet slippers!’ he raked my feet. ‘You must spend a fortune on your shoes.’ Evelyn was eager. ‘May he really come? He’d love it. Really. He’s been on at me for ages to get to know you and is frightfully set up when they play your waltz at dances. I say, Ara, you have got on! You’re the only girl in Addison who’s ever done anything interesting.’

  Back in the dining-room at Evenfield I savoured that meeting with my luncheon. It had been jolly indeed to meet Evelyn again after all this time, but as with Stiles, quite wrong that she should be motoring away from Addison to a husband instead of going home to luncheon at the Stortfords prior to an afternoon of tennis. It confused me … and ‘Phil’. Such a dear soul, but quite out of the picture. Would nobody stand still in time? Of all the people I could think of it seemed to be only myself who was unchanged, untouched, willing and available, a lonely sensation. And then, as a small bonus, the dining-room presented me with a totally forgotten item, about father this time: father in contempt and sarcasm at Nonconformist hymns, and his quotation of one line (or was it an exasperated parody?) in a brisk and irreverent quicktime:

  God be with us all as we walk along the Path!

  and of how I misheard it as ‘Glory be to Saul’, until Mell exhumed it quite seventeen years later! And then I remembered that father sugared his soup, a Scottish trick. He said it improved the flavour. And having remembered that, I tried it myself and found he had said a true thing and did it ever after! (It is especially excellent with thick pea soup.) And after luncheon I think I wondered for only a little while what to do with the afternoon, settled in the drawing-room and sketched out two lyrics. They came along rather well and teatime was upon me in a flash.

  4

  My birthday party was immensely enjoyable of its kind, although it didn’t seem to begin until the afternoon when my guests arrived. Cuss came down for it, sanely clothed this time! and was rather at a loss before Stortfords, Fields and the rest, which I hadn’t bargained for until I realized how much less well he knew them than I. The party was a small one. I didn’t want to leave out Mrs. Jasperleigh as she was one of the regulars in the old days, but asking her would have involved having Thelma as well; I wanted Léonore but wasn’t prepared for a backhander from Muddarm and it ended by filling gaps with others I liked but who, as birthday people, were all wrong for the occasion; these included nice old Mr. Grimstone who sat on the sofa, kind and gratified, and Mr. Field whom I persuaded hard as musically sympathetic to Cuss. The party balanced pretty well, but Clifford had pleaded the Courts as an excuse … he had sent me a ring which once belonged to Mrs. Siddons, and a note that ought to have made most women happy for the day, but which, once I had grasped the situation, only had the effect of filling me with those remorses that I had gone through over Donald, if, this time, a thousandfold more acutely. ‘Wear this at least for your birthday … whatever happens, you need never fear that I shall be tiresome to you …’

  Well, my very dear Clifford, I’m sure I don’t know if I’m what is called ‘worthy’ of you, but at least I was quite certain that I didn’t want that kind of commitment yet. I must first have my fill of Evenfield …

  I think my tea-table, traditionally in the dining-room, would almost have done credit to mother, except the centrepiece: my birthday cake I had ordered in Kingsmarket, which wasn’t in the same street with her whimsies. One year, my cake had been a maypole made of a stout, ribbon-bound sugarstick, the rim encircled with little dancing girls of coloured sugar each holding her streamer – heaven knows where she got them and anyway one seldom takes as much thought for and by oneself. And then – at midday on the very morning came a boy with a box, and it was a cake made by the Fields’ cook, larger than mine, showered with silver brights and candles and comfits and crystallized cherries and I could have hugged it. I had a cake! (My own purchase, with a gesture wholly injudicious, I sent into the kitchen.) ‘From all four and Cookie, with fondest love to dear Ara. We couldn’t let you be without one!’

  I wanted silly games, but would everybody enjoy them except to please me? I just didn’t know, after all these years … Meanwhile it looked as though Cuss was succeeding in propelling Mr. Field to my piano; that probably meant Bach, and I curdled. My esteem for that composer is unabated but strictly long-distance, and Bach! at Evenfield, on a Morant birthday! And Cuss won, damn and blast him, but I needn’t have feared, for with a semi-sardonic glance at me, Arnold Field sat down and played my waltz song, and so beautifully! with rich embellishments and variations of his own, and I sat in a corner with my eyes filling with ridiculous and quite unaccountable tears no noble fugue could have evoked, and didn’t know why.

  Philip Ivor said to me, ‘I say, will you sing it?’

  ‘I can’t, my dear. No voice.’

  ‘Then the other thing.’

  ‘Ask my brother.’ And he did, and Marcus with an apologetic look at Mr. Field played, and well, Everybody Kept on Laughing. Emboldened by Cuss, we sang it together and Mr. Grimstone beat time thoughtfully and said that that was what he called a tune, while auntie S haigh-haigh’d appreciation.

  Evelyn was the last to leave me: her son seemed to be persuading her to stay, and finally she said that go she must or walk four miles on her flat feet, and he had to give in.

  As I was seeing them off a van drew up at the gate, and I looked at it expectantly; an unlooked-for present would indeed be a good ending to the day – Mell’s had arrived days too soon and Aggie’s flowers were already drooping in the warm drawing-room.

  It was a large box, taking two men to carry it, and then I saw initials on the lid as it was brought into the hall. It was mother’s trunk from Switzerland.

  I told the men to take it to her bedroom, and when they had left I went upstairs and locked the door.

  5

  I began to look for a flat for Cuss, and dawdled about London feeling lost. But I went to Harrods for things I didn’t really want just to be able to tell the assistants to send the stuff to Evenfield. Mother must sometimes have done that, too, and I tried hard to be bored and matter of fact, as she must have been. The Kensington Gate house I avoided: I was afraid that, let or empty, it might make some pathetic gesture towards me as I passed it, loitering.

  I had no idea of the sort of home that Cuss wanted, and he was vague, beyond the fact that it must be a flat. Men aren’t homemakers, they just use their rooms; it’s their great strength and weakness. Flats have their strong points, they are labour-saving and easy to leave and, take them all round, more burglar-proof than is the house, large or small, but as homes flats silence and fail to convince: I think you have to be violently twentieth-century really to settle down in them and of the mentality which on sighting a caller rattles the cocktail-shaker as a Salvationist her tambourine in testimony to good-will. At the same time, there certainly was one roomy flat that suggested possibilities apart from utilitarianism, in The Boltons, very quiet, an old house converted, its point to me being that it was near that detached and now abandoned house standing back in its walled garden where once Jenny Lind made her home. I liked to think of her returning down that bygone backwater in a brougham from the lights and shouts and bravas of the Opera, depositing bouquets in the hall, treading those now un-whitened steps and probably enjoying a glass of Guinness prior to unlacing her stays! Her influence might help Cuss with his lyrics and how handsomely she would despise them! I said so to Clifford with whom I frequently lunched, meeting him on the steps of the Law Courts, and Clifford assented that atmosphere counted for much and that the Law, being a notoriously leisured process, had annexed all the best and drowsiest bits of old London where time was not, and took me down a narrow alley through a door studded with square nails
and, turning left, we were in an enchanted courtyard, its rose-brick sound asleep, its stillness only broken by the swift passing of stray Clerks and Associates upon the flagstones. ‘Atmosphere with quiet and comfort,’ he suggested suavely, and pointed to a row of Queen Anne windows. ‘Those are my Chambers.’

  ‘Oh, Clifford! Bardell v. Pickwick! It’s heavenly. One can’t conceive profaning that with revue lyrics.’

  ‘Why not? The greater includes the less.’ His smile was sardonic.

  ‘Beast. And Rudesby.’

  ‘I’m serious. The centuries must learn to shake down together. There is a powdering closet, I keep my papers in it, and a cupboard where I found an eighteenth-century wigstand when I moved in.’

  ‘It’s too much!’

  ‘It’s bribery and corruption, if not undue influence,’ he answered sadly.

  6

  There were now no flowers in the hall to welcome my returns from London, for I was an Addison resident, and although that was as it should be I did sometimes feel that Evenfield no less than myself was thinking, ‘Well, you’ve done it, this time!’ And sometimes, on those November nights as I hurried home from the station past the capriciously-spaced Victorian lamp-posts which lighted a portion of your way and left you plunged in darkness for the rest, I would ring the bell, and on Mabel’s admitting me, would lose sight of my own personality: in that instant of time I was mother in a sealskin cape, alert for me in a muslin pinafore.

  As I settled into the house I also found that the dining- and billiard room were most aware of my father’s death, most able to make me feel that I was not the real householder. I suppose it was that with those two rooms he was chiefly associated in my mind. The house’s feeling for mother, I thought, was of regret for one with whom it had never succeeded in being on terms deeper than business, and that, accepting this, it had let her go in an adult way that I myself couldn’t achieve. In that respect if in no other, Evenfield kept me a child still, out of the conferences of grown-ups …