I shall always love the Fields, Evelyn, the Stortfords, appreciate Madame Fouqué, like the old Martins, be cautious with Thelma and cordial to Miss Abernethy. But, save for my warm liking for old Mr. Grimstone, wasn’t this precisely the state of affairs when first we all left Addison?
Well, well! I had to laugh. And I still don’t know who Miss Spicer is, and nor do Aggie, Mell or Cuss!
2
Mell likes Clifford, and that is good: she even recognized him when he first came to see us in Cuss’s flat, which lent a kind of blessing to the affair and surprised me a lot, I can’t think why.
3
Mell at dinner one night said that she felt less well in the hills than she expected to, after Quetta, and I asked the reason.
‘Too high up, I suppose. Liver. It was something in the air’, and I had to leave the table in case I forgot it, and by bedtime had roughed out a new lyric, It was something in the air that made her do it, a Beatrice Lillie number, I think, sung with dispassionate understatement and almost no punctuation. I could see her mouth uptwisted at one side …
I discussed it with Cuss at breakfast and telephoned it to the Guv’nor, who was out, and I happily damned him, and the telephone rang and it was aunt Caroline wanting to come to tea, upon which I made a previous engagement with Clifford and meant to spend the evening after the Court rose in an atmosphere of wig-stands, Queen Anne brick and plane trees.
My heart suffers little pangs of pity for Evenfield, waiting patiently to be the whim of the next human. There are some of my dresses hanging up in one of the wardrobes.
THE END
About The Author
RACHEL ETHELREDA FERGUSON (1892-1957) was born in Hampton Wick, the youngest of three children. She was educated at home and then sent to a finishing school in Florence, Italy. By the age of 16 she was a fierce campaigner for women’s rights and considered herself a suffragette. She went on to become a leading member of the Women’s Social and Political Union.
In 1911 she became a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She began a career on the stage, which was cut short by the advent of World War I, whereupon Ferguson joined the Women’s Volunteer Reserve. She wrote for Punch, and was the drama critic for the Sunday Chronicle, writing under the name ‘Columbine’. In 1923 she published her first novel, False Goddesses, which was followed by eleven further novels including A Harp in Lowndes Square (1936), A Footman for the Peacock (1940) and Evenfield (1942), all three of which are now available as Furrowed Middlebrow books.
Rachel Ferguson died in Kensington, where she had lived most of her life.
Titles by Rachel Ferguson
NOVELS
False Goddesses (1923)
The Brontës Went to Woolworth’s (1931)
The Stag at Bay (1932)
Popularity’s Wife (1932)
A Child in the Theatre (1933)
A Harp in Lowndes Square (1936)
Alas Poor Lady (1937)
A Footman for the Peacock (1940)
Evenfield (1942)
The Late Widow Twankey (1943)
A Stroll Before Sunset (1946)
Sea Front (1954)
HUMOUR/SATIRE
Sara Skelton: The Autobiography of a Famous Actress (1929)
Victorian Bouquet: Lady X Looks On (1931)
Nymphs and Satires (1932)
Celebrated Sequels (1934)
DRAMA
Charlotte Brontë (1933)
MEMOIR
Passionate Kensington (1939)
Royal Borough (1950)
We Were Amused (1958)
BIOGRAPHY
Memoirs of a Fir-Tree: The Life of Elsa Tannenbaum (1946)
And Then He Danced: The Life of Espinosa by Himself (1948)
FURROWED MIDDLEBROW
FM1. A Footman for the Peacock (1940) ... RACHEL FERGUSON
FM2. Evenfield (1942) ... RACHEL FERGUSON
FM3. A Harp in Lowndes Square (1936) ... RACHEL FERGUSON
FM4. A Chelsea Concerto (1959) ... FRANCES FAVIELL
FM5. The Dancing Bear (1954) ... FRANCES FAVIELL
FM6. A House on the Rhine (1955) ... FRANCES FAVIELL
FM7. Thalia (1957) ... FRANCES FAVIELL
FM8. The Fledgeling (1958) ... FRANCES FAVIELL
FM9. Bewildering Cares (1940) ... WINIFRED PECK
Rachel Ferguson
A Harp in Lowndes Square
In the schoolroom in Lowndes Square, a child, in her ugly, unsuitable frock of plum-coloured satin, cut down when discarded from one of her mother’s, bent over the cutting out of a doll and its cardboard wardrobe, and shivered as she worked.
Hilarious, shocking, and heartbreaking in turn, A Harp in Lowndes Square is like no other Rachel Ferguson novel. Perhaps her most personal work – and the closest she ever came to a ghost story – it tells of Vere and James, twins gifted with ‘the sight,’ which allows them to see and even experience scenes from the past (including one, at Hampton Court, involving royalty).
The twins are already aware of their mother’s troubled relationship with her own mother, the formidable Lady Vallant, but the discovery of an Aunt Myra, who died young and of whom their mother has never spoken, leads them to uncover the family’s tragic past. Against the backdrop of World War I and Vere’s unexpected relationship with an aging actor (and his wife), and rife with Ferguson’s inimitable wit, the novel reaches a powerful and touching denouement when the twins relive the horrifying events of many years before …
A Harp in Lowndes Square was originally published in 1936. This new edition features an introduction by social historian Elizabeth Crawford.
‘It is only (now) that I realise how much … my work owes to the delicacy and variety of Rachel Ferguson’s exploration of the real and the dreamed of, or the made up, or desired.’ A.S. BYATT
FM3
A Harp in Lowndes Square – CHAPTER I
I
IT is on record that when mother found that she was going to have a baby she said to father, ‘Oh Austen, look what you’ve done now!’
I can see them, strolling along that quiet suburban road, as they discussed the coming upset to their life. Years later, I did see them, and found that, as was to be expected, the remark of mother’s was in that vein of humorous, tolerant resignation I was to know so well when it was my own turn to be born. No bad feeling and outcries and no false sentiment from her, mental attitudes which have always seemed to me to be the great blots upon the post-war and Victorian mothers respectively. I don’t know which is worse.
What Austen, my father, had ‘done now’ was Lalage, my elder sister. What, two years later, he did next was to be the last of his family, James and myself.
When mother knew that twins were upon her she cried that it was pig-like to have litters and refused point-blank, with all the Vallant obstinacy, to take exercise in the day-time. ‘I am a billowing scene, Austen,’ said the poor little thing, ‘and it’s all sufficiently vile and disgustin’, and I won’t inflict the spectacle on the village.’ And she didn’t. James and I were born in September, and all through those scorching days and sultry nights she lay low, coming out only after dinner to walk in the moonlight with Austen. ‘That blaring old brute,’ she called the moon.
And three days before we were born she took her last silvered walk. Father stood still in a field and said, ‘You know, they ought to be rather dotty. They’ve had three solid months of nothing but moonlight. It’ll be too much to expect them to be like other people.’ The thorough-paced tactlessness of the remark luckily amused mother, who hung on to a stile and laughed and laughed.
II
A few days later she was shown James and me and said to the nurse with faintish interest, ‘They don’t look a bit like lunatics, but like those little cheap celluloid dolls one bought in the Lowther Arcade,’ at which the nurse decided to be offended, and, I rather gather, left ‘before her month’. Mother says she can’t remember a thing about her except that her shoes (‘great boats’) s
queaked, and that she had an infuriating habit of saying ‘b’pardon?’ when she didn’t hear you. But having twins wasn’t all laughing at father and celluloid dolls, and for months mother, slight and frail, was very ill indeed. And it was then that father said, ‘Anne, we’d better send for Lady Vallant – ah – your mother. She could keep an eye on things’; and mother (she has often admitted it in our lifetime) with a little twisted smile and in that tone of voice which commonly goes with a shrug, refused, weak as she was, her grey eyes anxious, but her tongue valiant and obstinate. Besides, the Mater would probably refuse to come.
The Mater. It was the name of mother and the aunts, her sisters, for their mother. Even as a small child I sensed before I knew the meaning of the word or even guessed that it was Latin, a lack, a wanting, and James has since told me that he felt the same. One said nothing, then. Children take most things for granted. Mother, then, was desperately ill and recovered: it was suggested that her mother be sent for and the idea was downed without explanation. Anything that touched or worried mother affected James and me, and that small incident we have since elected never to re-see, as boy and girl, even as ageing man and woman. It was to be a straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel, but oh! the comfort of one’s gnats!
III
We lived in that large suburban village for thirteen years, and mother, London born, hated it steadily.
Often to this day, James and I make pilgrimage by bus to revisit old stamping-grounds and we realize all she must have gone through. To this day, fusty cabs (no taxis) droop for custom outside the station, and the pollarded trees in those still avenues are unstirred by anything more noisy than a tradesman’s trap. In the spring, lilac hangs heavy in the air, red-purple and with a scent that only your bush with Victorian roots seems to possess, and in the winter the ice still forms on the Jubilee fountain outside ‘the Baxters’ house’. Guiltily we love it all, our grown-up sight registering only superficial contempt. You can’t kill a first love easily, and our sometimes incredulous realization of ugliness and ignominiously-planned homes is largely enhanced by seeing them through our mother’s eyes.
And so over the bridge along the asphalt passage which to this day echoes one’s footsteps with a sound of ‘balc, balc’, and into our road, and we lean on the gate, and the almond tree has been cut down and a new pane of glass put into old Sims’s glory hole where he used to clean the knives and buzz a tune that later emerged into ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ (we broke the pane out of unforgivable, meaningless devilry in 1900), and really, those are all the innovations. And we hoist ourselves (no time for manners) on to our fence, and lo! the row of artichokes is still there, and the fowl-run that mother herself had had erected, and if one dug in that border, an earthy penny would come to light, dropped by me when I was seven.
There is a motor bus now to take us back to London; it starts from the Station Hotel. We ignore the hotel. As children it had had nothing to do with us whatever, and so can have nothing now … My outer eye apologetically sees that it is probably the oldest house in the village, with a large ramshackle garden full of character, and of trees that were veterans when Pope roved the tow-path to his villa, and Pepys passed through on his way to Hampton Court. But in youth we were hustled past it by relays of nursemaids, because on Bank Holidays drink was drunk, and the red-coated soldiers in their pill-box hats were considered ‘ignorant’ by Bessie and ‘jumped-up dogs’ by Ethel.
Our house we liked well, slightly haunted though it was, in that stupid knockabout way that usually means only the more harmless poltergeist with no interesting history at his back. Certainly the noises in the kitchen when ‘the servies’ had filed up to bed were something to remember, and occasional domestic ankles were clutched and windows tapped, and once James was jolted right out of his cot.
Our point was the fusty, awkward roomy attics, and, above all, the garden. The temptation to enlarge upon every path and currant bush I am going to resist. I, too, have been bored to whimpering stage by others with reminiscent fish to fry, and oh! how they fry it! and with what exclamations and sizzling!
But I have often, since those days, lamented that better gardens than ours, larger, and much more worth looking at and being in, should offer so much less absorbed occupation to you when you are grown up. It wasn’t that we attempted, as children, to ‘garden’, it was that, to a child, there is that fulfilment, that sense of endless interest, of ‘something going on’ and all-sufficing that I, for one, have lost for ever. When, now, I am invited by friends in the country to ‘spend’ the day or week-end, their gardens give me a sense of unrest. It is as if one occasionally visits a person with whom one used to live; all the features are there, but the sense of context is gone. The historic garden or house, of course, is another matter. That, in time, was to give James and me a different problem altogether. But this I swear: that lend enchantment to distance as you may, those summers were hotter, the afternoons longer, the winters more sparkling and the sun more red (a very toffee-ball) than ever they have been since, and all the flowers more sweet. I have since been supported in this belief by the elderly, who tap barometers and give one dreary weather statistics, and even by letters to the press from authorities, who know the Latin name for every plant and so miss all the fun, poor souls!
IV
There was very little illness in our childhood, except when I caught influenza and my cot was taken from the night-nursery and put in the spare room away from James. They tell me that on the night I nearly died, he, a passage removed, turned as cold as ice, and moaned in his crib. The doctor (he whose garden wall gave on to the Jubilee fountain) was quite apologetic about it. We know now that the whole affair was only a trivial manifestation of that odd psychic bond that unites twins and some humans not even related, and about which, certainly in those days, the world was not interesting itself.
At about nine years old, onwards, we intermittently had the same dreams, tallying to the smallest detail. Nobody took any notice, and it couldn’t be helped, and who wants dreams described? The relation in detail of one’s dresses and dreams, together with plots of novels and plays one has read and seen should be made a penal offence, except perhaps to Mr. Henry James, to whom I would give the floor for a nightmare. Nobody else I can think of is qualified to touch that. It is a half-world, slipped between earth and heaven, and peopled with evil knowledge of all furtive, secret thought, and set to thin high winds from hell; winds that don’t blow, but undulate in layers. …
No. Henry James, emphatically!
Being ill was immensely worth while, as it involved lots of presents, and I shall always associate chicken-pox with a cylindrical kaleidoscope at the end of which were clashing fragments of coloured glass. ‘And how it is done,’ said James, aged seven. ‘I for one wash my hands of the whole business.’
We were never given to pulling toys to pieces; we sensed that a mystery must ever remain one. Didn’t the very bread of our dear Maskelyne and Cook depend upon the preservation of secrets? We called the firm ‘Masculine and Cook’ in all good faith. It was probably this fascinated acquiescence in marvel that made us unable to be impressed by the miracles in the hang1ble, to the shocked disappointment of the governess. But on thinking it over I still believe that we had a case. Are the loaves and fishes more wonderful than wireless, and hasn’t Mr. Masculine’s successor, Mr. David Devant, with his magic kettle, at least equalled the water into wine?
Illness, too, meant visits from Penny, the kitchen tabby, who rather ignored us, in health, but out of whom affliction, as it does with so many people, brought ‘the best’. As James once said to the nurse, ‘Penny may be difficult, but he’s always been very good to me’. So with the first hint of trays below, Penny lumbered upstairs and put his great striped fiddledum head round the door. He learnt to hide right down the bed and only once gave himself away when I was peppering my lunch, and Penny said ‘Pig … WHIFF’ very loudly and put his bonnet-strings back flat to his head. If mother were there she would say �
�Oh let him stay, Ethel, they’re all enjoying themselves’. Mother was always the pleader for happiness. ‘He likes a party, bless him,’ and the nursemaid, content in absolute non-comprehension, had to give way.
When we weren’t reading or dozing we played games of our own invention. One was ‘Shakespeare’, and it was calculated, if you weren’t very much on the spot, to raise temperatures. Quotation was forbidden, but the point was that you must speak to each other in an extempore Shakespearean scene; if you failed to respond in under ten quick seconds you lost a point. James, arms round knees, would say in that falsely hearty way that so many characters seem to keep for each other on the stage.
My good lord Cardinal, the King is wholly grieved
That … that in this matter of the Prince’s marriage
The tide and the occasion do succumb
and he would point a hortatory finger at me, adding, ‘ONE two three …’ Upon the third count I managed to shout:
Oh what a martyr’d pestilence am I
That these young lovers should become
A cause of bawdiness and sneers in France
‘ONE two …’
Poor Lalage was always late for the fair and would falter
‘Lord Abergavenny, God knows I never liked you much
But if … oh lor … but if the nameless tide
Evenfield Page 29