In the house I went from room to room, thinking at one minute ‘You win!’, in the next ‘This has been my fault, not yours’. I found a certain amount of completely insensitive enjoyment in what local doings there were, fêtes, garden-parties, and so on, and had the Ackworth-Mead children much with me in the garden, and felt fifty when we were together and fifteen when they were gone.
I only once came partially to life and vulnerability when poor Couchman died. Dispassionately considered, his release from years of invalidism and monotony and the tax he must have known himself to be upon the family energy and purse was the best thing that could have happened, a matter of time in any case – he was seventy-four, they told me. But in the Couchman cottage, and looking down at my first dead face (to my surprise without shock or physical distress) the practical issues receded while Mrs. Couchman smoothed his hair as though he merely slept and said, ‘He is with the dear Saviour’. She was so sure, in faith as in love to me and mine, while I put my flowers by her husband’s side and considered what he had stood for in my life: a call with mother armed with tobacco, and sweets for Hope and Connie, the sight of him gardening in his little plot and the tell-tale fleck of colour even then upon his cheekbones, a little-known man who was to be my first sight of death, and I was glad, and told them so, that it was of the family of our oldest friends.
CHAPTER VII
1
I PASSED Chetwyn Lawnford one morning: he was out on his rounds but pulled up the car and stated without preamble, ‘You’re not looking too grand’. I responded as one does that I was all right and he drove on with a wave. But he slowed again by the Bank and signalled me. ‘Are you seeing too many people or not enough?’ I didn’t know, but was unprepared there on the pavement to present him with my rather recent dreads of being alone and my even stronger apathies towards remedying that condition.
Back in my quiet road I came to the conclusion that I shunned the idea of having friends too much with me lest at that very moment my familiars might choose to come back. One must be ready and available, and mother always hated tea-parties … increasingly, like a forgotten name on the tip of one’s tongue, they were at the back of my mind, on the verge of manifestation, mother and Mell, father and Aggie, so that I was never my own man. And once my eyes played me a strange trick. I was coming back the rather long walk from luncheon with the Ackworth-Meads, and even the fences of gardens in my road seemed sagging with the heat, yet on reaching the gates of Evenfield, the drive and lawn lay under a powdering of snow through which some crocuses were thrusting, as they used to. And as I quite torpidly became aware of this, the whole illusion slid aside and there was the grassplot dry as a bone under the August sun and the paint blistering on the porch.
It worried me a bit, but increased my expectancy. If things like that could happen. …
I began to stay in house and garden more than ever. This being the case, it was tiresome how chronically tired one was. I thought at last that lack of exercise might after all be what ailed me, and with an effort I went upstairs and put on my old ballet skirts and turned on the gramophone.
It occurred to me as I went through grands and petits battements, pliés and the centre practice of arabesques and développés, with a lack of verve that would have roused Hervet to his most caustic flights of sarcasm, that not once had a soul in Addison approached me for a solo item at any of the entertainments in the Parish Room, yet I could, and knew it, still dance them off the programme if I chose. I had to stop work and think it out, and was thankful for the rest.
Presumably, the Ackworth-Meads who ran the Dramatic Society didn’t realize, or had forgotten, that I was among other things a dancer. But Madame Fouqué and Léonore, who still, through Mayvale, contributed so heavily to local exhibition? I could only suppose that now I literally never occurred to them. As an Old Girl I was older history: Old Girls could be anything, including grandmothers, but no longer in the lists. Or was it a hangover of resentment on Madame’s part that I had flouted her offer of occupying Miss Anson’s shoes? And I supposed that Addison looked upon me as a householder, who engaged cooks.
The Addison children: was I already in that remote category which was Mummy’s-friend-who-comes-to-tea? Had I at nine, ten and eleven regarded the thirties as the shelf and decrepitude? I couldn’t remember.
A daurrling child. That was Madame, on the latest Ninetta Crummles at Mayvale. And between the lot of them, it seemed, I was to dance no more.
2
The gong rang for luncheon, and at the top of the stairs, where once I had slid upon my stomach down the broad banisters, raced by Mell on an iron tea-tray, I discovered that I couldn’t even walk down: neither will nor muscles responded when I tried.
I hung on to the banisters, hot with the first fear I had ever known, managed to say something about being late, and the stairs went on slanting dangerously to the foot of my own bed, where for some reason Mell stood looking across at me.
She said, ‘One two, and-sink-the-heels’, and handed me not beef tea but a brandy and soda, and took one herself.
‘Mell?’
‘My dear old thing, what have you bin a’doin’ of?’
I was instantly, hotly alarmed; perhaps after all she was crocuses and snow in August?
‘Have I –? Am I –?’
‘You’re all right; here’s Chetwyn’, and she produced him as one old friend does with another, to my content, and he had a drink too and we all looked at each other and were cheerful.
‘Nerves and badly run-down. Well, Mell, I must push off, now. I like your booze. Miss, here, keeps a good cellar. I’ll be along again soonish.’ Apprehension stirred in me once more, and he answered obliquely, ‘Nothing, I think, that Mell can’t cope with, now. I merely do the jug and bottle department’, and to Mell, ‘Keep her warm, and quiet if you can. She’s rather a Wiry Sal, you know’.
‘I know. Good-bye. Nice to see you again.’
4
Mell and her husband were home on eight months’ leave, and I worried a little about the necessity for having this unfamiliar brother-in-law at Evenfield, but Mell waved all that aside, stated that she had parked him at his Club and that he quite agreed with her that I came first, that Cuss would take him about and that he and she could district-visit each other easily any time by bus.
Over the weeks that I was still under the eye of the doctor Mell and I covered immense tracts of ground. I asked her hopefully if I had begun to be suburban and she said not in the least, and asked had she started to be bungaloid and like Mrs. Reiver? I answered not as far as I could see, and she remarked that modern station cats weren’t half as bad as they seem to have been in Kipling’s time, and that their worst failing was a mental provincialism which left Addison at the post.
She told me that it was Mabel who had got into touch with her via Cuss when I had to be put to bed, two weeks ago. Mell was then expected at aunt Caroline’s for a few nights before going into an hotel and deciding her own next move, if any. ‘Mabel seems to have done all the right things,’ said Mell.
‘What happened?’ I enquired as levelly as might be.
‘Oh, you didn’t come to lunch and she couldn’t think what was up, so she came upstairs at last because the cook was getting riled, and found you –’
‘What –?’
‘On the nursery landing, in what Mabel calls bally skirts.’
‘A faint?’ I hated that possibility, had never done so before, and if once one started that –.
‘I don’t think so. Chetwyn seems to think it was more nerves and debility. Has anyone been worrying you, by the way?’
I shook my head, and it ended in that real talk which sooner or later was inevitable.
‘I only wish it had been anything definite, Mell, like people being catty or slanderous, or edging one out of things; they were perfectly nice. But they don’t seem to be doing their stuff in the way they used to: there are no scandals or suicides or anybody wanting to play Hamlet in tights, or being grin
ned over in Addison. A good many of them are still there, but they’ve turned into just people one once knew getting older.’
‘Couldn’t you have attacked ’em all over again on that basis?’
‘I suppose I thought I was, but what I wanted was for them all to be the same.’
‘No can do, I’m afraid, old dear. After all, they’ve got a right to go on from being family jokes and “the little Fields”, just as you did.’
‘I didn’t! I was always the same, inside.’
‘How would you expect her to like it if someone came back to Addison counting upon finding you as you used to be, even if you were grown up, and then discovering that you’re really a Londoner-by-interest, have lived and made a name there and published waltzes that are on piano organs? D’you think that however much you got Evenfield back to the state it was when you left it it’d hoodwink anyone for a moment? They’d know at once that internally you’d moved on, however much you sat on a cosy corner and hung painted tambourines on the wall and The Flood on the staircase. Your only hope of enjoying the Addison crew is by walking with them, not pulling ’em back to you.’
‘But then it’s dull!’
‘Aha! Then you must leave Addison. Indeed, you’re going to.’
‘No.’
‘Yes. My dear, we’re all agreed on that, Cuss and Chetwyn and Clifford Barstowe, it seems. It’s a question of cutting your losses. If you stick on here, you may become meaningless, too, without getting any satisfaction out of the place, either. Mother kept on top gear by hating the place.’
And having said that, Mell cantered several times round the garden paths in the autumn twilight. I think, now, that she knew I was looking on from the spare-room window into which they had put me because of its better gas fire. And one wet afternoon we roasted chestnuts on the nursery bars; we even went into Kingsmarket and bought skipping-ropes (‘I’ve got rather a bust now’, said Mell, ‘so perhaps they’ll think it’s to amuse the children I haven’t got’), and with many a caution from her as to how we should both hate it, ran through all the exercises we could remember from Miss Anson’s classes. I gave up first, saying, ‘But I never did like skipping, so that doesn’t count’.
‘It’s not bad’, panted Mell hoarsely, her smart shingle flapping, ‘but I can’t do doubles again, yet.’
5
She went calling and pleased everyone, I think. Back at home we agreed that we liked Mrs. Jasperleigh, ‘and if we were staying on here I’d positively get to know her,’ said Mell.
It was so right, so utterly strange, to see Mell coming up and downstairs, sitting in drawing-room, loafing in garden, combing her hair at some oval swing-glass that I had pertinaciously haunted the London shops to reproduce … Most of the time I saw her as a married woman guest in my house, an Anglo-Indian being indulgent of my arrangements; but sometimes in rare flashes she fitted in, and was Mell, living at Evenfield, and then I didn’t know whether I was most happy or unhappy. And Cuss came down several times; he even stayed a week-end, of sheer concern, as he told me months later, and I had him put in his old box-room quarters.
Mell had very gently and kindly approached me about mother’s locked room, putting the question on housewifely grounds of airing and dusting and the state it must be in – Mabel had told her of the trunk from Switzerland, but I had my way there, and Mell, nonplussed, dropped the subject.
Cuss refused to look up anybody in Addison, but went for a Sunday prowl and came home with a splendid collection of confirmed hates and forgotten grievances and stridulous contempts which did far more to restore me than my tonic. Cuss, too, was faithful unto death in his own way … He even passed a certain tree in our road and something familiar about its boles reminded him that it was by that tree one morning that, accompanying father on a Sunday walk, they had met one of the curates, who innocently blew the gaff on Cuss by asking him how he had enjoyed the Gaiety show the previous Saturday afternoon, they having by the most malignant coincidence occupied adjacent seats in the pit; and then hell’s lid flew off and all, said Cuss, was Old Testament and Cursed Be The Man, and He Who Liveth Or Maketh A Lie –. And that, as I told him, was exactly what didn’t happen any longer in Addison; if people wanted to go to the Gaiety they went to it – only it was usually The Old Vic and tea at Lyons afterwards.
6
They worked over me with affectionate solicitude, that week-end, I don’t know whether wisely or not, for in his straightforward desire to earn his keep and entertain me, Cuss would play to us in the evenings from the old musical comedy scores on my Kingsmarket piano, and in bed I would go to sleep to
By the light of the sleepy canal
and
Under the deodar, lit by the evening star…
Once he played a favourite of mother’s, the Goldfish song from The Geisha, and in that moment I was back at home and all as it used to be, and leaving Evenfield incredible and impossible, and I’d fight them all to stay, so I remained with my own.
I got up, driven by impulse, and cautiously lest they hear me and be sensible and prohibitory, unlocked the door of mother’s room and opened her trunk.
The clothes meant little: I had forgotten most of them and the rest she had bought after our parting. It was such trifles as a box of her face powder – Peau d’espagne, whose scent returned to me so immediately, that brought her with it, and there was the puff she had used, perhaps, before setting out on that walk … and I despaired entirely in her room, chilly and unaired and soft with dust.
For a ladies’ maid must learn a bit
played Cuss in the drawing-room below.
There was the manuscript copy of Everybody Kept on Laughing, her writing-case that Mell and I had clubbed together to buy for her birthday from Cecil Roy in Gloucester Road, and inside its compartments what I had forgotten to expect – her unposted letters on flimsy hotel notepaper, and I fell on them greedily, eavesdropping though it might be. They were so like her! And I could at least make Mrs. Field happy by giving her hers, and I envied every one of the addressees as the sheets were tucked back into their envelopes. The fourth letter began, ‘Bless you, darling’. It was unfinished. And it was for me.
I read it so ravenously that I took in not one sentence, and locking door and trunk again went with it back to bed. The middle part of it had caught my eye for I saw the word ‘Addison’.
‘… I sometimes feel that if you ever got the chance you’d actually enjoy going back to Evenfield. You did love the awful old place so! heaven knows why, but you were always the easiest kid to please I ever met and a penny toy made you happy for the day, for which I liked you! And if when I hand in m’ cheques you ever should go back I should quite understand, though I’m afraid these things don’t work twice. I’ve sometimes hankered, and especially in Addison, for my old digs with Grandpa and Granny, and I daresay if it’d been possible I should have gone back to ’em, because I’ve a great notion of letting people feel their own mistakes. If one prevents ’em they only go on yearning – like Miss Dove over the vicar! Poor wretch. It’s much better to have your head and be disappointed, then you’re quit of the business. If I’d gone back to Portman Square I should have had many a facer, I warrant: new (and better) faces at balls, entertainment tapering off because of servant troubles and taxation, and so on. I had the cream of it, and I think you’d find you had, too … I used to sit mumchance in the drawing-room at Evenfield waiting for the blue mould to blossom on me. I could weather much, but nothing ever seemed to happen …’
So that was settled, and now I could go.
CHAPTER VIII
1
AND four months later I was out of it all, sitting writing at my top window in The Boltons and getting the whole thing off my chest. The window faces a little garden like a Beardsley illustration in an old Yellow Book and has a stone cupid whose nose has long been blurred by rain and seasons from Grecian to snub.
And I stick my pen behind my ear and wonder what they are all doing at this moment in Ad
dison, and sometimes a very faint sense of glamour comes over me.
Had it been worth while? I don’t know. I have had what I wanted, done what I meant to do, and how many people can say as much?
I left Evenfield fully furnished with three years of lease still to run. I couldn’t even then face the idea of letting it.
For months I couldn’t feel or see clearly about the house: I have experienced it under too many conditions. And this, I think, is the worst of my losses, that every impression is now superimposed on another, that they will not lay themselves out neatly and in sequence, so that for one instant of time I am in mother’s room tieing my first bow, resting before a party, and without transition Mrs. Willis is saying (in an empty night-nursery where I sit forlorn upon the floor with the house agent’s key), ‘I expect you find it very strange to see strangers in your old home’.
And, suppose I went back for the holidays, there is now another intruder to face – myself, in every room and deflated mood, waited upon by a long-departed Mabel, in the garden being calf-loved by a young man who has reached the stage of the platonic-facetious letter, and who, at time of writing, is heading towards a fix with a shopgirl in Cornmarket Street about which he tells me. Phil Ivor, at Oxford.
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