A Footman for the Peacock

by Ferguson,Rachel

  2

  At Delaye, the staff is at present up to strength, the housemaids’ impulse to profit and patriotism having been flung back in their teeth by a government which, inconsiderately, was more prepared for war than they had bargained for.

  Miss Jessie has founded a working party in the village, and having done so, is finding an extreme difficulty in getting herself to the meetings which cannot be timed to suit everybody, a circumstance which she bears without complaint.

  Nursie is one year older. But the Roundelays’ intermittent, secret impulses to strangle her are tempered by recollections of the unconscious part she played in keeping their home free of evacuees.

  Stacey Roundelay, like the housemaids of Delaye, is finding his intention of assisting the war very politely obstructed in all directions, and the army a thought more difficult of membership than the Athenaeum; he is too old, and, simultaneously, not old enough to fight. Relieved, puzzled, incredulous, he is, in this waning spring of 1940, resentfully and happily working with his father the land that, if all goes well, will one day be his.

  Major Dunston’s concern for his railway dividends and a possible and unthinkable necessity to reduce his weekly payments to his cousin was after all unnecessary: but the mental torment he went through has resulted in a canvas of the coach-house-studio itself (for the execution of which he actually moved outside), which, such was his worry and anxiety, is easily the best bit of work he has ever done.

  And that’s not saying much.

  Contrary to local expectation, the Reverend Basil Winchcombe has not yet proposed to Miss Angela Roundelay. They are warm and trusted allies, their affection a glowing thing, but Winchcombe still considers that her mother is the pick of that basket, as, still waiting to go out to France, he patrols his Norminster bridge at night. Sometimes he hopes he is glad, in the Christian manner, that Evelyn Roundelay loves her husband.

  The family misses the peacock but little, though the face of Sue Privett is overcast as, even now, she runs to door and window, forgetting he is gone. The flowers upon his little grave are bright and gaudy: Miss Angela, as they plant and water them, has told the kitchenmaid that he would like that kind the best. It is as far as she permits herself to go with Sue Privett . . . Angela and Winchcombe have agreed that Evelyn must be told the whole story. Her relief and interest were enormous, and she senses a new serenity in her younger daughter, to-day. The diary of Marguerite Roundelay is in The Lacquer Room under a glass case.

  On a certain morning, the war news has not been so good, and Musgrave ponders it as he polishes his silver.

  Upon the steps of Delaye, three hours later, stood a solitary figure scanning the avenue with nervous, restless glances. Some bad tidings, the observer might diagnose, that she alone is singled out to bear or break.

  But the observer would be wrong. For the hired cab from Jamieson arrives, after all, to time, and Miss Sapphire Roundelay descends the flight, card-case in hand, to make her calls and keep in touch with the County.

  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

  Evenfield

  This book was written for those who wish to forget the war and for those who don’t despise children’s parties, Edwardian actresses, dancing classes and the scent of lilac over sun-warmed fences.

  Barbara Morant spent a crucial part of her childhood in the unremarkable suburban house which lends this novel its name. For her siblings, it’s merely a place to live; for her mother, it’s a symbol of the provincial drudgery of suburban living. But for Barbara, the house and the routines of those years are invested with a halo of happiness, and she yearns for them long after the family’s return to London.

  Her obsessive nostalgia, the pursuit of her childhood joys, lead her to attempt a recreation of the past. She leases the house, undoes the changes made in the intervening years, and moves in, only to find the past irretrievably changed and changed by her later knowledge and experiences.

  Lushly packed with domestic detail and references to popular culture, household products, advertisements, songs, décor, and pastimes, Evenfield provides us with a hilarious but surprisingly profound exploration of childhood and the way it’s remembered (and misremembered) by adults, and of the vanity of searching for lost time. Rachel Ferguson – known for earlier classics The Brontës Went to Woolworth’s, Alas, Poor Lady, and A Footman for the Peacock – gives us here her own utterly unique variation on Proust.

  ‘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

  FM2

  Evenfield – CHAPTER I

  1

  OF all of us Morants I was to be the one who fell in love with our house: lived with it, was separated from it, re-united to it and finally parted from it by mutual consent. There was no legal separation, let alone a public divorce; we just discovered mutual incompatibility and it was, I see now, my fault from beginning to end. Certainly the house as my senior by over fifty years should have had sense for the two of us; on the other hand I, as the woman in the case, was the mental senior by probably as many years more as women so persistently are where wisdom is in question, and my affair with Evenfield was a boy-and-girl one, a
childhood affection that should have turned out well since we knew the best and the worst of each other by the time that matters reached their climax.

  My grievance against Evenfield was that it failed, at the last, to give me what I expected of it; its grievance against me was that I was too clinging, too romantic-idealist (which I knew already and spend my life fighting against in vain) and too fond of the sentimental scene for its own sake, when all that Evenfield probably wanted was to get on to the next change, to take things and families as they came and not to be confused with a castle in Spain when it made no pretensions to anything but mid-Victorian brick and slates and a reasonable amount of comfort.

  Mother, in a burst of sub-acid facetiousness, once exclaimed to Mrs. Stortford, ‘“Evenfield”! I call it an uncommonly hard row to hoe!’; Marcus, my brother, apostrophized it as a ‘dog-hole’ when fresh from a wigging from father, while the servants complained that it was haunted and that their ankles were gripped when they filed up to the top floor to bed.

  We made use of the house, and were robust with it, and it was left to me to enmesh it later in a net of nostalgic aspiration, pestering it with my solicitude and reminiscence which led in time to disillusion and discords and the end. I must have been aggravating to a decent house which only asked to settle at leisure on its foundations.

  We shall, I think, never forget each other, but I feel at last, instead of merely considering, that we are better apart.

  2

  If Doctor James, who knows his bogeys so well, had written this book he would have called it A Warning To Nostalgics, and if it should prove a deterrent to even one human being’s making the mistake that I did it will probably be a good thing, except that where that twilit condition of the mind, nostalgia, is concerned people won’t be ‘said’ and prefer to die of it in their own way than to be cured by common sense. There ought to be a Nostalgics Club. The condition of entry would be a capacity for retrospective hankering, for your true nostalgic (fated wretch!) can be steeped in melancholia at a moment’s notice for the price of a spray of lilac. Does not hot asphalt conjure up the whole of Ramsgate? And there is a turret staircase in Carisbrooke Castle smelling roughly of soapsuds, pipeclay and cold stone, yet climbing it I am back at one blow at school; once more I am twelve years old and drilling to battered operatic airs jingled out by a mistress at the piano.

  If it comes to that, I was to discover, on first becoming a Londoner, that a box-room at Evenfield smelt of the Albert Hall, with the result that when I returned, grown-up, to the box-room I was irresistibly impelled to hum airs from The Messiah all the time I remained in it, while at the Albert Hall I missed whole tracts of the Oratorio through a sharp sensation of old trunks, and mentally tallying up their contents.

  And nostalgia doesn’t even stop there, for the person who suffers from it in its acutest forms can with the greatest ease be homesick for places he has never seen, suffer awareness of reigns he has never lived through, their pace and flavour, their slowness, colour and tediums, and know to his undoing the feel of life as it was lived in more spacious, gracious days in certain of London’s streets and squares.

  There is in Lowndes Square at least one mansion whose daily life, if I may put it so, I can imaginatively remember, both, oddly enough, as mistress and servant. I have certainly sensed some service in Bruton Street, and driven home down Arlington Street to a house which is now a club, while I cannot walk along Wilton Street without being instantly afflicted by a sensation of children’s Christmas parties, knowing to the last detail that lapping warmth and safety which was the Victorian epoch – did not those very trees, chained and glittering with goodness and the lavish, emanate from the sentiment of the lonely Royal widow?

  And for every party I have known and never seen, for every great house in which I have been ageing grande dame and cook (I hope I satisfied here!) one pays: pays for goods one has never handled nor owned, suffers vicarious longings for the unpossessed and unpossessable, and comes close to tears that are dismayingly of the present century.

  And I am pretty sure all this is not re-incarnation, or second sight, but nothing more complicated than some mental affinity, a facet of universal memory, perhaps, of which we, of the company so sadly, delightfully doomed, are heirs.

  But it is futile to continue. Those who know will eternally know and those who don’t will continue not to understand. Their minds are like a pavement under a noonday sun, heedless of the shadow that is past and the shadow that is to come.

  3

  I have usually found that to get a thing down on paper robs it of its force at once, and all my life I have made a list of present worries or pleasures to come and crossed them off as they settled themselves, as one does the card or calendar people on one’s Christmas list. When system comes in at the door depression flies out of the window, or so I have found. Sometimes I come across an old overlooked worry-list. The items on one ran:

  1 Row with A.

  2 No letter from C.

  3 Tooth.

  4 Look for green overall again.

  5 No ideas for magazine story.

  6 What D said last week (Wed: 7th).

  7 People I ought to be dining.

  And I am harassed this time by occasional total failure to remember who the ‘C’ of the missing letter was or what the deuce ‘D’ had ‘said’, which only shows that if you sit tight long enough nothing matters at all, while I know that this particular brand of philosophy is no good and never will be to people like myself. One must live. And worrying is probably a part of the business and a sign that one is still in the swim! It is rather the same thing with old letters that you re-read. Like a rude, whispering couple who exclude you from the conversation, they indulge in allusions you can’t trace, hint at emotions you can’t recall, and make infuriating plans of the outcome of which your mind is a complete blank. ‘Who is this stranger hissing in a corner?’ one despairingly thinks, and it is oneself, as little as five years ago. And as for the letters dating further back, you get well-nigh to the stage of begging the correspondence to let you in on the conversation, to give you at that moment a little of the love expressed for you in the letter of which you are dimly jealous! You almost whimper, ‘It’s Barbara asking my best friend, in those days’, and it’s no good at all. The Barbara of the note excludes the Barbara who holds it in her hand (though you feel she would be miserably remorseful, eagerly, tenderly explanatory, if you did meet again). Meanwhile, you are left hiding a secret from yourself, and a most extraordinary and forlorn sensation it is.

  A Furrowed Middlebrow Book

  FM1

  Published by Dean Street Press 2016

  Copyright © 1940 Rachel Ferguson

  Introduction copyright © 2016 Elizabeth Crawford

  All Rights Reserved

  The right of Rachel Ferguson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her estate in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 1940 by Jonathan Cape

  Cover by DSP

  Cover shows detail from a woodcut engraving by G.W. Dijsselhof

  ISBN 978 1 911413 72 1

  www.deanstreetpress.co.uk