‘I’m not surprised. She appears to have entirely lost her head. The last time I called upon her, the cards In and Out, on the hall table, were both equally in evidence.’
‘It’s safer to keep away from her,’ Mrs Wookie murmured. ‘I’ve maintained it all along.’
‘No doubt, in our time, most of us have flirted with Rome,’ Mrs Pontypool remarked, ‘but, poor dear, she never knew where to stop.’
Lady Anne accepted a conferential cigarette from Mrs Barrow of Dawn.
‘Since the affair appears a decided deadlock,’ she pronounced, ‘I move that we adjourn.’
Miss Valley manoeuvred, slightly, her chair.
‘I’m so eager to examine those Mortlake tapestries of Mrs Cresswell,’ she said, ‘if they’re not away on loan.’
‘They’re on the Ponte di Sospiri,’ Lady Anne replied, ‘that connects us to the cloisters. But at night, I fear, it’s usually rather dark.’
‘Impressions I adore. And there’s quite a useful little moon.’
Aurelia appeared amused.
‘Even with a young moon,’ she said, ‘like a broken banana, and Lady Anne’s crown, and my carved celluloid combs, and all the phosphorescent beetles there may be (and there are), trooping in beastly battalions through the corridors of the Palace, and the fireflies in the garden and the flickerings in the cemetery, and, indeed, the entire infinity of stars besides, without a little artificial light of our own, one might just as well stop here.’
Lady Anne looked at her:
‘Don’t be so ridiculous, my dear, but lead the way!’
‘If the electric isn’t in repair I refuse to stir.’
‘I’m taking the Historian to inspect some curtains,’ Lady Anne announced, ‘if anyone would care to come.’
‘Historian? …’
Mrs Pontypool revealed her Orders.
Quite perceptibly she became the patroness of seven hospitals, two convalescent homes, with shares in a maison de santé.
‘We must have a little chat,’ she exclaimed, ‘together you and I! All my own family had talent. Only, money, alas, came between them and it.’
‘My dear, don’t!’
‘Indeed, it was getting on for genius. And even still my brother (her uncle), will sometimes sit down and write the most unwinking lies. Of course, novels—’
Miss Wardle fastened her cape.
‘I should hate to prostitute myself,’ she remarked, ‘for six shillings.’
‘Or for four and sixpence cash …’
‘Some people publish their works at a guinea,’ Miss Valley fluted, as she followed Lady Anne towards the door.
The Ponte di Sospiri, whither Lady Anne advanced – built by a previous bishop, to symbolize a perpetual rainbow – broke, quite unexpectedly, from the stairs with all the freedom of a polonaise.
Behind their hostess the ladies trooped, as if Miss Pantry’s timely warning had made it imperative to wade. The concern, indeed, of Mrs Barrow was such that it caused a blushing butler to retreat.
‘My dear Violet!’ Lady Anne began, ‘the only time, I believe, I ever—’
But Mrs Wookie intervened.
‘There is somebody,’ she remarked, ‘thumping at the gate.’
‘It is probably only the post.’
And turning to the tapestries Lady Anne commenced the inspection, starting instinctively at the end. And the end, as she pointed out, was simply Bacchanals. After (à rebours), came the Martyrdom, spoken often of as ‘I’ve had such a busy morning!’, the saint’s final word. A model, in every particular, of what a martyrdom should be. And indeed nothing could have been simpler, quieter, or better done. There was no squeezing, fainting, crushing or trampling. No prodding … The spectators, provided, each, with a couch and a cup of chocolate, were there by invitation alone. Although, in the market-place (as one might see), tickets were being disposed of at a price. And in the centre of all, stood Mrs Cresswell, leaning with indifference upon a crosier, inset with a humorous and a somewhat scathing eye.
And so, in the dim light, the fourteen panels ran: growing, as they receded, less and less serene, until, at the opening scene, the atmosphere was one of positive gloom.
‘It was the “Marriage”.’
‘What do people marry for?’ Miss Wardle said. ‘I’ve sometimes wondered.’
‘My dear, don’t ask me.’
‘One marries for latitude, I suppose.’
‘Or to become a widow.’
‘I’d give such worlds to be a widow,’ Miss Pontypool declared.
‘It’s a difficult thing to be,’ Mrs Barrow assured her.
‘I’m that disgusted with love,’ Miss Valley volunteered in her chastest Cockney voice.
‘I find it dreadfully disappointing,’ Lady Anne supported her.
Mrs Wookie sighed.
‘Mine,’ she said, ‘is a nature that cries for more ethereal things.’
‘Banal passions,’ Miss Wardle whispered faintly, ‘fail to stir me.’
‘ “I’m that disgusted with love,” ’ the ladies chanted charmingly all together.
‘If that is Mr Cresswell,’ Mrs Barrow remarked, ‘I’m certainly not surprised.’
‘Define Belief,’ Aurelia unsteadily quavered.
‘Intuition!’
‘And who would this be?’ Miss Valley queried, trailing towards an easel with the little quick glide.
‘That!’ Lady Anne said. ‘I suppose it was Walter once.’
‘Were I being painted,’ Mrs Pontypool intensely remarked opening and closing her fan, ‘I’d be inclined to favour Roy Quilimane. He doesn’t reject beauty. And he reveals the sitter’s soul.’
Miss Chimney showed some sensitiveness.
‘Anything nude,’ she said, ‘revolts me somehow so. I’m sure in the winter, when the trees show their branches – well, I go, when I can, to the South.’
But the appearance of the Miss Chalfonts upon the stairs, closely entwined, their eyes astream, their bodies racked by laughter, a single superb boa shared more or less between them, caused a commotion.
‘We rang and rang,’ Miss Clara said.
‘I’m so sorry. But, at all events, you’ve dined?’
Miss Blanche quite collapsed. ‘Why, no!’ she said.
‘Do you abominate almonds?’ Mrs Wookie asked.
Miss Constantia placed a hand before her eyes.
‘If there’s anything on this earth,’ she said, ‘I’ve a horror of, or an aversion for, it’s that.’
And her gesture seemed to make vibrate all those other objections latent in her too. All those other antipathies, less the almonds, that were hereditary, perhaps. She began suddenly to droop. She stood there, dreaming.
‘Unwind, can’t you,’ her sister said, ‘and let me out.’
Miss Chalfont commenced to turn.
‘It’s not from coquetry,’ she confessed gaily, ‘that we’re last. But the nearer one lives, somehow, the later one’s sure to be.’
Lady Anne fetched a breath.
‘To be frank,’ she said dryly, ‘you might be stopping in the house.’
They were free …
Their garments, the ladies noted, were white and sparkling streaked with green.
Never, Miss Valley affirmed, had she encountered so many hectic ideas. Even at a Poet’s dinner.
‘We were getting rather nervous about the vote,’ Miss Clara said, ‘so we decided to bring it ourselves. It’s the first engagement we’ve kept for I don’t know how long!’
‘And which way is it?’
Miss Clara indicated the Cathedral.
‘I would read them my essay on Self-Control,’ Miss Hospice murmured, ‘if you thought it would have any effect.’
‘It would probably make them infinitely worse. It might even kill them outright. And then it would be murder,’ Miss Valley said.
Miss Hospice smiled sedately.
‘My publisher, at any rate, could be found,’ she said, ‘for I’ve had the same o
ne always!’
To which Miss Valley answered:
‘… Pouf!’
But the Miss Chalfonts were becoming increasingly unstrung.
‘Oh, hold me!’ Miss Blanche sighed, sinking, slowly, like the Sienese Santa of the frescoes, to the floor. Miss Clara and Miss Constantia made a movement, which, although a miracle of rhythm, was ineffectual upon the whole.
With quiet complacence Mrs Wookie took a chair.
‘They’re off!’ she said.
‘If Lord Chesterfield could only see them now!’
‘Don’t!’
‘By birth they may be County,’ Mrs Pontypool murmured. ‘But by manners—’
‘Indeed by manners—’
‘By manners! …’
‘Crazy creatures,’ Mrs Wookie crooned, ‘crazy-crazies!’
Mrs Barrow agreed.
‘Because a certain Signor Calixfontus,’ she said, ‘followed St Augustine over here and married a savage – and ran through his life before most people would have cared to be seen about at all, is no excuse for his descendants to behave like perfect idiots.’
‘Or to drape themselves in those loose misfits.’
‘Lampshades!’
‘It’s Vienna!’
‘Teheran! !’
‘Vienna or Teheran,’ Mrs Pontypool said, ‘or the Edgware Road, I’ve never seen such a riddle!’
But Lady Anne was looking bewildered. ‘When Saul was troubled,’ she said, ‘David played to him. Didn’t he?’
Miss Valley nodded.
‘There’s a Rembrandt,’ she said, ‘about it at The Hague. I remember it so well! Chiefly because of David, who is tucked away in a remote corner of the canvas, almost as if he were the signature.’
‘And has he got a golden September-skin like Hendrickje Stoffels?’ Aurelia asked.
‘Yes; and a smile like sad music.’
‘Oh, but I know it!’
‘Well, won’t somebody go to the piano?’
‘Miss Wookie,’ her mother said, ‘will. Won’t you, Kate? And perhaps, sing some little song besides. She knows such shoals. What was that one, my dear, that despairing dismal one, about the heliotrope? When Heliotropes Turn Black. It’s the true story of a sailor. Or he might have been a coastguard. And he goes away. And he comes back. And of course, he finds her dead.’
‘A fugue and a breath of air,’ Lady Anne said, ‘should be quite enough. Come into the drawing-room and the Miss Chalfonts can have some supper there while we play cards. A little fruit, a little wine … Poor Miss Blanche is simply sinking.’
Miss Wardle disappeared altogether into her point d’espagne.
‘O heavens!’ she said.
Lady Anne’s drawing-room, that had belonged, upon a time, to Mrs Henedge, who had ‘rescued’ it from Mrs Goodfellow, who had come by it from Mrs Archer, who had whipped it from Lady Lawrence, who had seized it from Mrs Jones, of whose various ‘improvements’ (even to distant pretty little Saxon Ethel), the room bore some faint chronological trace, was picking up, as well as might be expected, to be a trifle Lady Anne’s. Although there were moments even still in the grey glint of morning, when the room had the agitated, stricken appearance of a person who had changed his creed a thousand times, sighed, stretched himself, turned a complete somersault, sat up, smiled, lay down, turned up his toes and died of doubts. But this aspect was reserved exclusively for the housemaids and the translucent threads of dawn.
It appeared quite otherwise now.
Upon an oval table that gleamed beneath a substantial chandelier, a solitary specimen of Lady Anne’s fabled Dresden was set out, equivalent, in intention, to an Oriental iris, or blossoming branch of plum.
It was her most cherished Rape.
With as many variations of the theme in her cabinets as the keys in which a virtuoso will fiddle a gipsy dance, it reveals the asceticism of her mind in refraining from exhibiting them all. So situated, it is certain that Mrs Henedge would have exposed the lot.
Eyes beseeching, arms imploring, fingers straining, raiments blowing, an abduction, of necessity, must be as orthodox as a wedding with a Bishop to babble it off.
Mrs Wookie wished.
‘That’s precisely my fear for Kate,’ she said, ‘when she runs out to take a motor number. Somebody, some impulsive foreigner, perhaps, visiting the Cathedral, might stop the car and capture her, and carry her away, possibly as far as Ringsea-Ashes, before she could resist. And there, I should hope, Mr Walsh would marry them before they went on.’
‘She’ll have a million, I dare say, before that occurs,’ Miss Wardle observed. ‘People aren’t handcuffed, seized, gagged and pinioned. Are they?’
‘Still, foreigners visit the Cathedral – even blacks. While I was watering my garden to-night I saw a Moor looking at me through the fence.’
Mrs Pontypool sighed.
‘Ashringford’s getting too discovered,’ she said. ‘It’s becoming spoilt. Mrs Fulleylove was telling me at the Dean’s that Lolla’s to finish abroad. “And what will she gain by it?” I said. She could pick up quite enough languages from the tourists in the Close.’
‘All that would be good for her.’
Miss Chimney looked fiendish. ‘I detest all foreigners,’ she said.
But, from a withdrawing room, Miss Wookie was being borne rapidly away upon the wings of a perfectly hysterical song.
‘Can nobody stop her?’ Mrs Barrow asked. The human voice, in music, she considered far too explanatory. And what did it matter what the heliotropes did, so long as they were suppressed.
‘Her coloratura,’ Mrs Wookie observed, ‘most surely improves. Although, to vibrate like Fräulein Schuster isn’t done in a day.’
Notwithstanding, upon the verandah, Miss Valley and Aurelia were sketching out a valse. Gently, with gowns grasped, through the moonlit spaces they twirled. The Historian gazing up abstractedly at the Cathedral towers.
‘I lay you ten to one she gets it!’ she cried.
‘Of course, if she persists she’ll prevail.’
‘I wish she were dead.’
‘Surely the world is large enough for us all.’
‘But I need a Life.’
Aurelia glanced about her timidly. The solemnity of their shadows startled her.
‘Though, indeed, when my investigations are over in these parts, I hope never to set foot in Ashringford again. Never, Never, Never, Never, Never, Never!’
‘Some of the Spanish saints were so splendid, weren’t they?’
‘Oh, Aurelia – not another.’
‘But try a man this time.’
‘Man, or woman!’ Miss Valley said.
‘Or edit letters. Those of King Bomba to the Queen of Snowland require revision badly.’
‘And drown the text in the notes!’
‘Make an anthology.’
‘Euh, that’s so messy!’
Aurelia reversed. ‘Mrs Shamefoot won’t die,’ she said, ‘unless we kill her.’
‘Luckily, there’s the climate. The air here has been called a moist caress.’
‘It’s a poor prospect anyway.’
‘How I wish she were dead!’
‘She’s like some heavy incense, don’t you think?’
Miss Valley became visionary.
‘At the back of her mind,’ she said, ‘in some strange way, she’s convinced her spirit will be caught in colour, and remain merged in it, as long as the glass endures.’
‘Has she said so?’
‘Certainly not. But in our profession, naturally one knows … And my intuition tells me that if an atom of her, a teeny weeny particle, isn’t woven into a window, she’ll be very cruelly chagrined.’
Aurelia blinked, uncertain.
‘And when would one know?’ she inquired.
‘Not, of course, until after she were dead.’
‘I call it really rather disgraceful.’
‘Why … ?’
‘Because, by the time she’ll have done, St Dorothy w
ill be too disturbed to be nice. Nobody would go into it unless they were obliged. All the tranquillity would be gone. I’d never enjoy a quiet minute there again.’
‘My dear, that’s selfish. Besides, you’re scarcely two months in the year here ever, are you?’
‘I should still think it horrid.’
‘Nonsense. Beyond a little vanity, it’s hard to explain exactly what the idea indicates. But I’m sure it points to something.’
‘Earthiness. The extremes of it. Earth spirit!’
‘Oh, more. And even if it did not, Mrs Shamefoot can furnish an opera-box as very few others can. And if one can furnish an opera-box, one should be able to fill in a window.’
‘I can imagine her asleep in a rather boring Louis XVI bedroom with a window on Sloane Square.’
‘Why not in Sloane Street? Over the shop. Though, if you troubled to get a directory, you’d see she doesn’t live that end of town at all.’
But Miss Pontypool was singing now!
‘Paris! Paris! Paris! Paris! O Paris! Cité de joie! Cité d’amour …’
‘It’s the arietta of Louise.’
‘I knew it couldn’t be David.’
Like a riband flung in carnival the voice trailed away across the night.
‘Poor girl. If her lines are cast in Ashringford … For an instant she brought almost into this ghastly garden the glamour of the Rue de la Paix.’
‘Is it policy? The Miss Chalfonts will be on the floor.’
‘What does it matter, if they are?’
But peeping through the window, Aurelia was unprepared to find the Miss Chalfonts listening intently while the tears were streaming from their eyes.
XV
The municipal museum in Ghost Street was rarely, if ever, thronged, especially after noon.
‘You can have the key,’ the wife of the custodian said, ‘if you want it. But there’s nothing whatever inside.’
And the assertion, sometimes, would spare her husband the weariness of struggling into a pair of black and silver trousers, and vague historic tunic, that was practically a tea. For in Ashringford, the Corporation, like a diver in a tank, was continually plunging back into the past.
‘Since it pleases visitors to catch a last glimpse of this vanishing England,’ the Mayor had said, ‘and if Stratford can; why … !’
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