by Jean Rhys
Outside in the hostile street we got into the hateful bus (always squashed up against perfect strangers – millions of perfect strangers in this horrible place). The bus wheels said ‘And when we say we’ve always won, and when they ask us how it’s done.’ (You wouldn’t dare say how you do it, not straight out you wouldn’t, it’s too damned mean the way you do it.)
At Cambridge I refused to say anything except ‘Oh yes, that’s very nice indeed. This bridge, that building. King’s College Chapel. Oh yes. Very nice.’
‘Is that all you can say about King’s College Chapel?’ said Miss Born disdainfully.
Privately I thought that a Protestant service was all wrong in King’s College Chapel, that it missed the smell of incense, splendid vestments, Latin prayers. ‘You’ve forgotten that you stole it from the Catholics but it hasn’t forgotten,’ I thought. Fortunately I didn’t say this.
‘They sang very nicely indeed.’
Well, I walked up and down the hockey field till I’d stopped crying then went back to the small dining-room where there was always a blazing fire, I will say. But I could not eat anything and Miss Rode sent me to bed.
‘I hear,’ she said, ‘that you feel the cold, so you’ll find extra blankets and Jarvis will bring you up a hot water bottle and hot milk.’
Lying in bed, warm and comfortable, I tried to argue my fears away. After all, it’s only for another eighteen months at the worst and though I don’t particularly want to go back, there it is, solid and safe, the street, the sandbox tree, the stone steps, the long gallery with the round table at the top. But I was astonished to discover how patchy, vague and uncertain my memory had become. I had forgotten so much so soon.
I remembered the stars, but not the moon. It was a different moon, but different in what way? I didn’t know. I remembered the shadows of trees more clearly than the trees, the sound of rain but not the sound of my mother’s voice. Not really. I remembered the smell of dust and heat, the coolness of ferns but not the scent of any of the flowers. As for the mountains, the hills and the sea, they were not only thousands of miles away, they were years away.
About three days before the holidays ended, Miss Rode handed me a letter from Switzerland. ‘But I don’t know anyone in Switzerland.’
‘Open it and find out,’ she said.
I put the letter under my pillow for a time, thinking it would be something to look forward to the next morning, but I was too curious to wait. I opened it – it was signed Myrtle. I was disappointed. What on earth had Myrtle, a girl I hardly knew, to write to me about? This was the letter which was to change my life.
Dear West Indies,
I have been thinking about you a lot since I came to Switzerland, perhaps because my mother is getting divorced. I see now what a silly lot of fools we were about everything that matters and I don’t think you are. It was all those words in The Winter’s Tale that Miss Born wanted to blue pencil, you rolled them out as though you knew what they meant. My mother said you made the other girls look like waxworks and when you dropped your cap you picked it up so naturally, like a born actress. She says that you ought to go on the stage and why don’t you? I like Switzerland all right. There are a lot of English here and my mother says what a pity! She can be very sarcastic. Let me hear from you soon. I felt I simply had to write this.
Yours ever,
Myrtle
I read this letter over and over again, then rolled about from side to side making up an answer. ‘Dear Myrtle, Thanks for letter. I did not know what the words meant, I just liked the sound of them. I thought your mother very pretty, but yes, a bit sarky.’
Then I stopped writing the imaginary letter to Myrtle for suddenly, like an illumination, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Next day I wrote to my father. I told him that I longed to be an actress and that I wanted to go to the Academy of Dramatic Art in Gower Street.
‘I am quite sure. Please think very seriously about it. I don’t mind this place and some of the mistresses are quite all right but it’s really a waste of money my being here . . .’
When the answer arrived it was yes and I was happier than I’d ever been in my life. Nothing could touch me, not praise, nor blame. Nor incredulous smiles. A new term had started but Myrtle hadn’t come back and Camilla was still away in Thaxted.
‘There is an entrance examination,’ they’d say. ‘You won’t pass it.’
‘Yes I will’, but really I was extremely nervous about this examination and surprised when I did pass. The judges had seemed so very bored. The place was not Royal then and was known colloquially as ‘Tree’s school’. It wasn’t so choosy then perhaps.
My aunt installed me in an Upper Bedford Place boarding-house and left me to it; she strongly disapproved of the whole business. However she soon came back to London and took a small flat near Baker Street to see for herself how I was getting on.
‘When you’re stabbed in the back you fall like this, and when you’re stabbed in the front you fall like this, but if you stab yourself you fall differently. Like this.’
‘Is that all you’ve learnt?’
‘No.’ I told her about fencing classes, ballet, elocution, gesture. And so on. ‘No plays?’ she wanted to know. ‘Yes of course. I was Celia in As You Like It and we did Paolo and Francesca once.’ And I was Francesca in the little dark sitting-room.
‘ “Now I am free and gay,
Light as a dancer when the strings begin
All ties that held me I cast off . . .” ’
‘You’ll find that very expensive,’ my aunt said.
I spent the vacation with relatives in Yorkshire and one morning early my uncle woke me with a cablegram of the news of my father’s sudden death. I was quite calm and he seemed surprised, but the truth was that I hadn’t taken it in, I didn’t believe him.
Harrogate was full of music that late summer. Concertinas, harpists, barrel organs, singers. One afternoon in an unfamiliar street, listening to a man singing ‘It may be for years and it may be for ever’, I burst into tears and once started I couldn’t stop.
Soon I was packed off to responsible Aunt Clare in Wales. ‘You cry without reticence,’ she told me the day after I arrived. ‘And you watch me without reticence,’ I thought.
There was a calm slow-moving river called the Afon that flowed at the bottom of my aunt’s garden. Walking up and down looking at the water she said that she could understand my grief. My father’s death meant that it was impossible to keep me in London at a theatrical school. ‘Quite out of the question.’ She had heard from my mother who wished me to return home at once. I said that I didn’t want to go, ‘not yet’. ‘But you’ll have to.’ ‘I won’t . . .’
Aunt Clare changed the subject. ‘What a lovely day. Straight from the lap of the gods’ (she talked like that). As her voice went on I was repeating to myself ‘Straight from the lap of the gods’.
At last we went up to London to do some shopping for hot weather clothes and one afternoon when she was visiting friends I went to Blackmore’s agency in the Strand and after some palaver was engaged as one of the chorus of a touring musical comedy. I was astonished when Aunt Clare told me that I’d behaved deceitfully, outrageously. A heated argument followed.
She said that my contract had no legal value at my age and threatened to stop me. I said that if she stopped me I’d marry a young man at the Academy whom I knew she detested. He’d been to tea at the Marylebone flat. ‘He may be a horrid boy but he’s got a lot of money.’ ‘How do you know that?’ said my aunt in a different voice, a sharp voice.
‘He showed me the letter from his trustees. He’s twenty-one. Besides at the Academy everyone knows who has money and who hasn’t. That’s one thing they do know.’
‘If this young man is well-off you ought to think very carefully before you answer him.’
‘I have answered him. I said no. But if you interfere with my contract I’ll marry him and be miserable. And it will be your fault.’
This we
nt on for a long time. Then Aunt Clare said that it was unfair to expect her to deal with me, that she’d write to my mother. ‘Perhaps we’ll be rehearsing before she answers,’ I said hopefully. But when my mother’s letter arrived it was very vague. She didn’t approve, neither did she altogether disapprove. It seemed as if what with her grief for my father and her worry about money she was relieved that I’d be earning my own living in England. ‘Not much of a living,’ said my aunt.
‘Some people manage. Why shouldn’t I?’
The company was playing a musical comedy called Our Miss Gibbs. We rehearsed at the National Sporting Club somewhere in the Leicester Square/Covent Garden area. A large room with a stage up one end. Sometimes boxers would pass through looking rather shy on their way to other rooms, I supposed. It was foggy. First a black fog then a yellow one. I didn’t feel well but I never missed a rehearsal. Once my aunt came with me and the girls approved of her so enthusiastically that I saw her in a new light. ‘Is that your auntie? Oh, isn’t she nice.’
She was a nice woman, I see that now. It was kind of her to take charge of me to please her favourite brother. But she wasn’t exactly demonstrative. Even pecks on the cheek were very rare. And I craved for affection and reassurance. By far my nicest Cambridge memory was of the day an undergraduate on a bicycle knocked me flat as I was crossing the road. I wasn’t hurt but he picked me up so carefully and apologized so profusely that I thought about him for a long time.
Talking to the other girls I realized that several of them dreaded the tour up North in the winter. We were going to Oldham, Bury, Leeds, Halifax, Huddersfield and so on. As for the boys, one of them showed me a sketch he’d done of a street in a northern town. He’d called it ‘Why we drink’. But none of this prevented me from being excited and happy.
The man who engaged me at the agent’s was at one rehearsal. He came up to me and said in a low voice: ‘Don’t tell the other girls that you were at Tree’s school. They mightn’t like it.’ I hadn’t any idea what he meant. But ‘No, I won’t tell anybody,’ I promised.
Before the Deluge
When I first met Daisie she was playing Lily Elsie’s part in the English stage version of the Count of Luxembourg (Lily was either ill or had gone on holiday). She was a very beautiful girl, perhaps the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. I think sometimes that while there are many more pretty and attractive girls now, there are fewer raving beauties.
There was another beauty in the chorus of the only pantomime I ever played in at the Lyceum Theatre. Her name was Kyrle and I was amused by the reactions of the Lyons waitresses to her. Instead of the sharp, appraising, flouncy glance that they’d give an ordinarily pretty girl, an amazed, humble expression would come into their faces, the way you’d look at Princess Graciosa or Sleeping Beauty just awakened, if you met her out for a walk.
Daisie was taller and more impressive than Kyrle. She had dark red hair, only shoulder length, but very thick and naturally wavy, huge blue eyes and long golden eyelashes which she never made up except for a little vaseline on the tips and on her eyelids. Sometimes she would add a touch of rouge if she thought she looked pale. She had classic features – not aquiline but Greek – a large, sweet mouth and white even teeth. She was rather tall for a musical comedy actress but slim and with a very good figure. I was quite surprised when I gradually learned how spiteful she was, though spiteful, I always felt, in an innocent way.
She gossiped in an ascending scale, exactly as the chorus gossiped. She would start comparatively mildly: ‘She’s a tart of course’, and end accusing the girl of every known and unknown vice. She seemed to get particularly annoyed if one of her friends married, especially if the man was rich or well-known. ‘She’s not the sort of woman who ought to get married at all, considering the life she’s led, and as for him, well everybody knows he’s rotten with it. What a pair! God help their children – if they have any,’ she’d end piously. All this didn’t prevent her from kissing the friend, when she next met her, and saying quite sincerely, often with tears in her eyes, ‘Darling, I hope you’ll be so very happy.’
She was really a very generous girl and could be impulsively kind. She was certainly kind to me in a rather patronizing way. Although I was so thin I used to wear long, tight whalebone stays. One expensive pair I had made my waist small and the large satin bow in front supplied the necessary curves, I hoped. Daisie rocked with laughter at this garment and soon persuaded me to throw it away and wear a suspender belt. She didn’t approve of my lace and ribboned underclothes either, which were out of fashion she told me. Soon I wore instead very close-fitting directoire knickers. Some of her suggestions were beyond me, I felt the cold too much, but it did sink in that the scantier my underclothes were the better. Then she supervised my buying a suit and thus fitted out I was taken to see George Edwardes, the impresario of the day.
I was rather disappointed in ‘The guv’nor’, as he was called, for I’d heard many lurid stories about him. He was a quiet man who gave me a cup of tea and some good advice – which of course I didn’t take. However, he suggested that I should be in the chorus of his number one touring company visiting all the big towns – Manchester, Dublin, Edinburgh, Liverpool – and if all went well and there were good reports of me he promised that I should be in the next show at Daly’s.
I was very pleased. It was decidedly a step up from working for the man who employed me then, who did everything on the cheap, even shipping us to Ireland on a cattle boat. We were all violently sick and as we trooped off at Cork I looked at the other girls and thought what a bedraggled lot we were. And no wonder.
Daisie and I got to know each other quite well and I was often at her flat near Marble Arch, which I chiefly remember for the artificial butterflies on the net at the windows and the curtains of her huge bed. Her battle-axe of a mother disliked me so I can’t say that I always enjoyed my visits there, and I felt like a page, walking behind her into smart restaurants holding the flowers that had been given to her after the show. ‘I think I’d like a devilled bone,’ she would say.
She gave her age as twenty-four and couldn’t have been much older, but she had been on the stage for years. She had started before she was ten as a pantomime fairy and gone on from there. She had worked in fit-ups (one night stands). Killing work, she said. She had been a music hall turn billed as the singing star and indeed she had a lovely soprano voice, fresh and true. She worked hard at her singing and still took lessons when I knew her. Her teacher, an Italian, had been a well-known opera singer and was very good, she said.
But it was no use. Her face, her voice, nothing seemed to get over the footlights. In Bond Street people would turn and stare at her admiringly. On stage she was just a very pretty girl among a lot of other pretty girls. Songs that would bring down the house when Lily Elsie sang them were only politely applauded. This puzzled Daisie and she thought about it. Of course she couldn’t act. She was always Daisie, the Manchester policeman’s daughter and not a Viennese opera star at all, or anything else she was trying to be.
When I first knew her she made fun of temperamental actresses and told me that after Lily Elsie’s big scene, she’d faint when she came off. Two of the stage hands were stationed in the wings to catch her when she fell. She – Daisie – thought that this was a fake, all put on and the most utter nonsense.
But gradually she changed her mind. She no longer jeered at temperament. On the contrary, she told me that now she often felt giddy and ill and realized it was a very great strain. One night she too had almost fainted. She said this with a certain amount of pride, as if she’d achieved something.
Soon Daisie’s near faints or faints were as much a matter of routine as ever Lily Elsie’s had been and unfortunately they weren’t confined to the theatre. More and more often if you argued with or even contradicted her she’d sigh, put her hand to her head and flop.
The butterflies vanished (I suppose someone had told her that they were sentimental). They were replaced by
huge spiders. I hated these things and looked nervously at them whenever I went into her flat for I was never quite sure that they weren’t real. They were too lifelike altogether, crawling up lampshades or wallpaper.
One day she asked me to call and see her about noon. She wanted to speak to me. Something important. I knew that twelve o’clock was very early for Daisie but got there punctually. She opened the door dressed for the street, greeted me shortly and coldly and when we reached the sitting-room began pacing up and down.
At last she said: ‘I hear you’ve been gossiping and telling lies about me all over the place. I think it’s rather beastly, after all I’ve done for you.’
I said I never gossiped and certainly not about her. Gossip didn’t interest me. ‘And who am I supposed to lie and gossip to?’ I spoke angrily because I was surprised and rather hurt. Instead of answering Daisie opened her eyes very wide, gave a little cry, and crashed to the floor bringing down a small table as she fell.
I was horrified. She seemed unconscious and I didn’t know what to do. I thought of putting a cushion under her head, then remembered that it wasn’t the right thing for every faint. Brandy? But I didn’t know where it was kept.
I was still dithering when the door opened and a man came into the room and stared accusingly at me. He must have been waiting to take her out to lunch. Then her mother appeared from the kitchen; one look at her and I knew I was in for a torrent of abuse. I didn’t feel that I could stand it and ran out of the flat into the street. As I left I heard him crooning: ‘My poor, darling little girl, what have they done to you, my poor little sweetheart.’
Very soon after this my life changed, everything changed and I never saw or heard of Daisie again.
On Not Shooting Sitting Birds
There is no control over memory. Quite soon you find yourself being vague about an event which seemed so important at the time that you thought you’d never forget it. Or unable to recall the face of someone whom you could have sworn was there for ever. On the other hand, trivial and meaningless memories may stay with you for life. I can still shut my eyes and see Victoria grinding coffee on the pantry steps, the glass bookcase and the books in it, my father’s pipe-rack, the leaves of the sandbox tree, the wallpaper of the bedroom in some shabby hotel, the hairdresser in Antibes. It’s in this way that I remember buying the pink milanese silk underclothes, the assistant who sold them to me and coming into the street holding the parcel.