CHAPTER IV
1
IT was the time of drawn curtains, fireworks, muffins, celery, performances in the Parish Room, and evening parties.
Death sometimes demands that you be untrue to your real self no less than to the deceased, and I must be decorous and mourn in convention’s manner, not my own or mother’s, to satisfy the sticklers who expect twelve months black shading thence to mauve, and no nonsense about it. And if on the night of the Fifth I stole into the garden to listen, see and haply smell the smoke and gunpowder of others, at least I went unseen, though not alone, for many people were round me in the dark.
‘I’m not afraid! I’m a Briton!’
The Couchman children crouched, squealing, by the gooseberry bushes.
‘We’ve still got three more of the Jack-in-the-boxes, M’m.’ Aggie, her apron bunched with fireworks.
I began on that chill, still night to feel suffocated and went back into the drawing-room. After dinner I played The Messenger Boy, San Toy and The Geisha until I couldn’t bear that either, and stopped. I’d probably shocked the servants beyond remedy. Who cares?
2
I went calling. There had been no time before and now I had all the time.
I began, suppressing a desire to climb over the wall, with Stamboul, to find, as I had expected, that the house without Janet was largely meaningless. Her father and mother were wonderfully like themselves still though Mr. Martin was certainly deaf, which made my souvenistic enquiries sound more than usually worthless. He had always seemed an old man to me in spite of his spare agility. About Janet’s in-laws I dared not ask owing to an inability to remember which was the eldest Irmine who had fallen so heavily for, though I am sure never with, that gold-hair’d charmer, Mrs. Randolph.
I went home reasonably satisfied with my afternoon, for Stamboul had never meant much to us and it was allowable that it still should not … and one thing I had extracted from the visit – two, indeed: for, talking over the old days, Mr. Martin, of all people, turned up trumps and told me that we had left Addison in the spring, and when I spoke to him about the friends on the platform he contradicted me most hearteningly about young Ackworth-Mead having arrived with Mrs. Markham, a combination which even then had seemed improbable. He was there but had arrived with a Domrémy son whom I didn’t even remember. ‘Young Domrémy had a great admiration for your father. I mind that the three of them would come heere for chess,’ Mrs. Martin told me, ‘but I nivir could thole his father, the puir feckless fule. It was freely take this, and freely take that, an’ in the end the creditors freely took him.’ Mr. and Mrs. Randolph had left Addison five years ago and I weathered that with phlegm; theirs was a null abode, blaze as it might with red-hot brick and flowers, and had meant for me disappointing parties. I asked Mrs. Martin if Janet ever saw Gladys, the Christmas tree doll Randolph child, her sister-in-law, and Mrs. Martin said Nivir, and knitted a sock the colour of Aberdeen granite.
Greatly daring, for I think we never knew them, I turned in next door to Tralee, one afternoon, to investigate ‘the Miss Cocksedgees’, as one day I shall inevitably call them before the wrong audience. The door was opened by a woman who might have been a nurse and I stood there explaining myself. When I had done, she told me reprovingly that Miss Cocksedge had died eleven years ago and that Miss Clara was very feeble now. This was a set-back, as I couldn’t remember which of the old sisters Johnnie Lawnford and I had called upon, and had hoped as it were to identify the remains and even to glean from the memory of age, always of greater clarity about things past than with the contemporary scene, some inkling, however small, of what we had talked about, but I wasn’t invited in, and that, I told myself, was reasonable as I left the house festooned with its stripped creepers. It was a horrid house, architecturally almost the twin of Evenfield, which I hadn’t realized before.
With a distinct effort I made a toilette and went to see the Johnnie Lawnfords, as they were locally and abominably termed. Here, I guessed in advance, I should be straightforwardly bored, for if Johnnie had grown up to be no use to me his wife never had been, my link with her had at no period consisted of much more than the shared French verb in Madame Fouqué’s study once a week plus glimpses of her among the crowd at her own parties, and if Johnnie did take me on all over again that would probably be all wrong, too! For Estelle (née Raymond), though sticking firmly to the colds of her childhood, might prove to be any kind of young woman.
She was. Also still pale and delicate and amiable and unredy, and the tea-party seemed to resolve itself into a grisly sort of tennis match – I the ball – in which she struck me repeatedly to Johnnie who attempted to return me to her. Conversationally we clung to Mayvale, Kingsmarket and Johnnie’s bank there with an unhappy excursion (the amende honorable) into the realms of compliment about my musical composition which in sheer nervous sympathy for them I belittled even below its merits. And it was during that call that I dropped the best brick I was ever to let fall, a man-sized one and heavy, for, inveigled in spite of myself into discussion of what friends in common we did possess and honestly thinking the Lawnfords hors concours in that direction, I alluded to the Fields’ sweetness in making the elder Irmine girl’s trousseau, and there was a vacuum … (You will not remember any more than I did that the Irmine daughter was now related to my hostess through that Ackworth-Mead who had married my hostess’s elder brother.) Johnnie said quite disagreeably, ‘The Fields evidently don’t believe in hiding their light under any blooming bushel’. After that I left as soon as decency permitted. The whole afternoon was also confusing through the Lawnfords’ house being now a portion of what had once been the Domrémys’, and that whereas in the old days I had never seen the top floors, that afternoon I saw nothing else, being debarred the rooms I did dimly remember through their occupancy by another flatful of tenants. The façade alone was faithful, with its stucco towers that gave the house its name, and it was through those gates that mother and Mell must have passed quite often, to dinner or dance, or (all three of us) to those inordinate Christmas parties.
I came home irritated and depressed, damned Addison, the Lawn-fords and Irmines and myself and felt slightly better, even amused, as a Londoner, until I remembered that I was now an Addison resident.
But there were still prospects: I even had Miss Abernethy on my list. One’s governess would remember much; pleasant or unflattering, it was all one to my present mood.
The telephone rang and it was Evelyn’s son, Phil, wanting to drive over after dinner; Evelyn would certainly be just what I wanted; I was delighted and asked when to expect him and his mother, but the tiresome youth hemmed something incoherent and I gathered was arriving alone. Well, I’d give him as good a time as possible, for her sake. I must have, for he stayed until eleven-thirty.
3
In between my social rounds the detrimental came to tea. She arrived at the unprincipled hour of four and her name was Miss Spicer, which meant nothing to me whatsoever. She was eager and a little subservient and had teeth, but as she was of the type which has an ailing mother needing Burgundy on straitened means I did my best for her; I’ve never been good at permissible frostiness, which is an art, like the mot juste, and enjoy scallywags with the best if they’re amusing, consciously or otherwise, or pathetic, or frustrated, or what an author friend of father’s once termed ‘anything bookable’.
But the Spicer (how was it I had come to recognize her outside St. Anselm’s? Was she the result of juvenile trespass to forbidden doors?) saved me a great deal of brainwork, for she informed me that my mother was such a sweet little woman, that she and her family always thought of me as a little Queen and called me Queenie if I’d pardon her, that I should prefer the new vicar to our old one, that she was a Cub Mistress of the local Scouts and that it seemed ever so strange, if I knew what she meant, to think of a gurl like me living alone at dear old Evenfield. In an unobtrusive way her eyes were taking in great gorging mouthsful of the drawing-room furnishings.
I never wanted to see this bore again.
I would like to go to her house and find out if it and her family conveyed anything to me at all.
I don’t quite know why, but I mentally presented the whole episode to mother on a plate, without comment.
4
My excuses to the Spicer were partly true: I was intermittently tallying with new songs, regarding them at first as a stopgap, gradually working longer at them and oftener.
I discovered that I had a bent for comic songs, and in those weeks, when the garden was frost-bound and the house so quiet with not even a visiting night moth to thud softly about the lamps, or darting bat whose entry (into my hair, of all the termini in the drawing-room) to fear, I wrote Well, it’s Something to Know You Can Buy Them, They All Get an Answer from Me, I Began as I Meant to Go On, I Can Get it Much Cheaper Than That and You’d Never Think I was a Lady. They were what I called ‘build-up’ numbers in which the verses from innocuousness grew progressively more blue, if your mind elected to take them that way. I sold two outright to a well-known low comedian (only six months ago I heard one of them still going strong in a suburban music-hall, and couldn’t listen properly for seeing the Evenfield wall-paper and a Turner which caught my eye every time I glanced up while I was in the throes of scansion and snap). Nor had London interests forgotten me and I was rung up by the Guv’nor himself about a new lyric for his next show, spoke to him in the hall, (he would have been about forty-five at the time I was standing there with Mell, waiting to take the train to Waterloo and Drury Lane).
These London calls fretted me for some time. I didn’t want them. They were out of the picture. I grew to accept them, become interested in them, expectant, harassed if they didn’t manifest, bored with the drawing-room as is a man with a too exigeante wife. The room’s argument was that I had dressed it up in costume and it wanted to be noticed: my riposte was that I’d given it the best, knew exactly what it looked like, was perfectly satisfied but didn’t want to be disturbed now as I had a bit of business to think out. No, nothing that would interest you I’m afraid, my dear …
But you always said you wanted to sit with me.
I did and I do. I am sitting with you!
Oh of course, if it’s going to be a duty –
Oh damn it, woman, be quiet!
When he left for Switzerland, Cuss had put me in touch with his Savage Club friend, telling me he would see to the business end of our musical affairs and handle all scripts not directly sent to the Guv’nor.
Sometimes, things which I realized to be definite disappointments were announced over the line and then I would flounce back into the drawing-room or run up to the nursery and either have another falling-out with the rooms or a penitent, affectionate reconciliation with my gratitude and assurance of love thrown in.
They were a loyal, unchanging refuge from an unkind world.
Having admitted that, what were we all going to do next?
They didn’t know; they’d done their part and the rest was my affair. But I wouldn’t go up to London lest I become engulfed.
I went calling again.
5
When Major and Mrs. Abernethy died and their sons and daughters married or set up careers elsewhere, my Miss Abernethy moved to a small new house, one of a row, in a part of Addison I didn’t seem to know. It was evidently built by that architect who now apparently had tracts of the whole place in his pocket and whose idea of home creation consisted of two-storeyed houselets covered with pebbles, mean windows that opened on iron rods, exposed half-inch beams of chocolate and a name-plate swung on chains over the built-in porch. These houses inevitably attract families whose ideas upon curtains begin and end at blue casement cloth, and at ‘Ickleton’ lived Miss Abernethy, who had been reared in a home of twenty rooms and a sun-lounge. Marriage capriciously had passed her by, as she was, Mell told me, exactly like every one of her sisters.
I wondered as I pressed her nasty little bell, which went off in my ear instead of the hinterlands of the house, what awaited me. Would she be scholastic and bright, unrecognizable with years, or pink-nosed with sentiment? But when we met, I rapidly reconstructed her face and passed it, perceiving that this was my governess who had merely had a few alterations made upon her face rather than a stranger masquerading unsuccessfully as Miss Abernethy: I also realized that she couldn’t even now be much over fifty-four. Her own look of doubt and enquiry gave place quite reasonably soon to astonished welcome. She had answered my ring herself.
She had done her best with the sitting-room: it was Botticelli’d and della Robbia’d and her curtains were burnt umber satin. The isolated pieces of good furniture in that cramped space were refreshing but incongruous.
I quite soon found that either my hostess wasn’t my governess or that my governess wasn’t Miss Abernethy. She was shy. Of me. And obviously. This was so dreadfully wrong that I began to be brittle (like mother) and to sling my remarks all over the place of sheer dismay. She found me harmless, in time, and becoming more herself told me that I must miss my father and mother, that so many people had left Addison, that it had changed for the worse and that I should not care for the present vicar as I did for our old one and that her work for The League of Nations took much of her time, and then, of course, her little house –
I could match her there, and did, have never found domestic conversation dull, and suddenly Miss Abernethy became herself, showing me for the first time that she was not something you dodged or scamped and didn’t think of as quite human and hated to touch, but is a rather likeable woman who, as only gentlepeople do, spoke of her poverty quite openly. ‘And even now, with the taxes what they are, I sometimes dread the future a little.’
I left, pressing her sincerely, warmly, and rashly to drop in whenever she liked, full of new respect, even of the stirrings of affection, for her, while a portion of my brain hoped that The League of Nations wouldn’t allow of her coming too often. I was remorseful that I couldn’t ask after a single one of her sisters, but I’d long forgotten, if I ever knew, the name of one of them. Later, it occurred to me that beyond a few general enquiries Miss Abernethy had had nothing to say about any of us. It was a novel experience, possibly pointing to the fact that I was just the child she taught in an Addison family, the beginnings of her eye to the future that was to secure her an Ickleton in which to end her days.
I wonder what mother paid her?
6
Tradition did not fail me and the ice held, that winter, while morning mist hung on the lawn and the red sun loomed through the silver birch in the garden of Miss (Clara) Cocksedge.
As skating was an exercise I hoped that my joining in would not be accounted unto me for heartlessness at family bereavement and went joyfully off to my Carolean canal bordered with its stark chestnut trees with my new and expensive skates clashing in my hand. Astonished, I found, as I trust others have done before me, that the little knowledge had turned into a dangerous thing and that the old knack I counted upon had almost entirely left me. That came of moving to London I thought, exasperated, as I shaved falling for the third time in ten minutes; it wasn’t until the end of the afternoon under a yellow sky that I got my balance back and a certain measure of confidence. I came home and spent most of the evening telephoning prospects. Evelyn said sh
e’d adore to skate with me and so would Phil until he went up to Oxford, that she hadn’t done it for ages and had never really been good and had put on weight and was terrified of falling (‘You must remember I’m nearly fifty, Ara!’), Daisy Field (‘Didn’t I remember, Ara darling?’) had weak ankles and had never been allowed on the ice, Clover and Primrose hadn’t any skates and could anyway only come with me on Saturdays because of their work, Léonore thought it too far away but recommended several possible skaters none of whom I knew, Johnnie Lawnford I was displeased with and he, too, would be only available at week-ends, Estelle would be fearful of catching cold and the doughty Mr. Martin was eighty or over. Illogically and unjustly I dismissed the lot of them as stick-in-the-muds.
In my bedroom, it suddenly came back to me that Mell used to christen some of the Abemethys from an Edward Lear story, ‘Violet, Slingsby, Guy and Lionel’.
I thought, ‘Mell, who was Miss Spicer?’
But there was no Mell plaiting her hair into a door-knocker by the window dressing-table.
The gong sounded for my dinner.
7
It was when I was returning one fine, chill evening from the ice that I thought it would be pleasant to look up the younger Ackworth-Meads who, as we were never on intimate terms, came low upon my list. Their immense house being nearer Kingsmarket than Addison was conveniently close to my skating stretch; whatever they proved to be like they would give me warmth and a good tea, and if they didn’t like my outfit, which was brief and furred, I didn’t seem to mind in the least.
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