He wondered why she needed to bother him with this information. One day it was the trees, the next the chimneys. And when he was working!
‘I am writing a poem about Wessex,’ he announced.
If he had entertained the hope that she would be pleased, he must have been disappointed, for her expression remained quite fixed and rigid. ‘Is it going well?’
‘I am not sure. Probably not.’
‘Well, I shall leave you to it. But we do need the chimneys swept. There is no point in having one or two swept. We must have them all swept, including this chimney.’
She withdrew, and he returned to the poem, shifting lines here and there, changing words and making other improvements. Outside the fog lightened and thinned, but showed no inclination to remove itself in its entirety.
The old man’s study was located in a part of the house above the kitchen, and as the morning advanced he was aware of occasional noises emanating from that quarter, among them the clanking of pans, the bang of the oven door and the shrill whistle of the kettle, denoting considerable activity in the cause of luncheon. Mrs. Simmons was the latest in a series of cooks, none staying for very long, possibly out of an aversion to the house’s isolated situation. The old man had only ever spoken to her a few times; as convention decreed, the business of managing domestic affairs was primarily his wife’s concern.
A different sound, that of Wessex’s loud barks, eventually penetrated his ears, and no more than a minute later one of the maids knocked on the door. ‘Mr. Harrison and Professor Cockerell have arrived, sir.’ – ‘Mrs. Bugler?’ – ‘No, sir, not yet, sir.’ – ‘Thank you, Nellie,’ he said, only to recall, after she had gone, that it might have been Elsie.
He descended the stairs slowly. A suitcase stood on the hall’s wooden floor, and the air smelt agreeably of roast lamb. The grandfather clock gave the time as nearly half past one, somewhat later than he had expected.
A gust of laughter blew out of the drawing room, where Harrison and Cockerell were in excellent spirits. Their train journey from London had been delayed on account of the fog, but they had been greatly diverted by something that had happened within their compartment. They had already told Florence, but it was such a good story that both wanted to tell it again. An elderly lady, wrapped in furs – ‘a veritable dragon!’ declared Cockerell, flinging out an arm in a theatrical manner – had fallen asleep and begun to snore, with her mouth wide open. As the snores grew louder and more hoarse, her husband nudged her awake and told her that she was snoring. She had denied it, vehemently. ‘I was not snoring!’ she said. ‘I do not snore!’ – ‘My dear, you were snoring,’ said the husband. – ‘I was not snoring,’ she retorted. ‘I have never snored in my life!’ The husband did not persist but exchanged covert glances with Harrison and Cockerell, who in order to conceal their amusement had been obliged to retreat behind their newspapers.
The old man was amused, too, more at their amusement than at the story itself. Cockerell was always good company, full of lively anecdotes like this.
Florence, who was seated on the sofa, told the two men in a severe voice that it had been very ungentlemanly of them to take pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. Cockerell replied that it was perfectly right for her to defend her sex. But for the presence of the husband, he would have been very much tempted to have put a peppermint on her tongue.
‘One wonders what their marriage is like,’ he remarked. ‘What do they say to each other when they are alone in each other’s company?’
Harrison replied that they were probably at each other’s throats all the time. ‘If we hadn’t been in the compartment, they would have argued on and on.’
‘How old were they?’ the old man inquired.
‘Fifty or sixty.’
‘Thirty years ago, I am sure they were deep in love.’
‘I very much doubt it!’ Cockerell retorted. ‘Impossible! In love! If you had only seen them –’ and he gave an imitation snore.
Florence, who was in a miraculously good mood, said: ‘Sydney, that’s a pig grunting!’
‘Well, that’s exactly what she sounded like!’ Cockerell replied; at which moment the laughter was interrupted by the front door-bell.
Florence, as the hostess, went out of the room and came back with Gertie. She was wearing a gold cardigan over a black dress, with a long string of doubled pearls. Her cheeks were flushed, and droplets of mist speckled the strands of her hair. What a fine creature she was, the old man thought.
She shook hands with them all. ‘I am so sorry; the fog is terrible. It has taken such a long time to get here. I hate being late. I have kept you all waiting.’
Cockerell reassured her. ‘Not in the least. We were late too, Harrison and I; we’ve only just arrived. The train crawled along. We didn’t think we’d ever arrive!’
A bottle of champagne stood on a side table, and at Florence’s request Harrison dealt with it efficiently. Cockerell took round the tray of glasses. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘now we are gathered together, a toast seems to be in order. To London, and to “Tess”!’
Echoing these sentiments, they raised their glasses and drank.
It had been already agreed that rehearsals at the Haymarket should begin on March the eighth, with the first performance to be a month later on April the eighth. The run would be a month long and would consist entirely of matinée performances, on Wednesday and Friday afternoons. The old man had been less than pleased by this arrangement, because he suspected that the critics would pay less heed to a matinée production, but Harrison took the view that it was best to begin cautiously.
‘One knows fairly soon, with experience, how a play is likely to do,’ he said. ‘After a couple of performances, one can sense it. If the reviews are favourable, and if there is sufficient demand for seats – as I am sure there will be, with proper publicity – the run can be extended. There is no problem there.’
The old man was only partly mollified. ‘And evening performances?’
‘Without a doubt. If it is sufficiently successful, as I am sure it will be.’
‘Why, everyone knows that it will be a great success,’ Cockerell declared. ‘Mrs. Bugler, you will be the talk of the town, and it is only what you deserve – is that not so, Thomas?’
The old man muttered his agreement.
Gertie smiled. ‘I only hope that I don’t suffer from stage-fright!’
Harrison said: ‘Believe me, Mrs. Bugler; I am an expert in these matters; you are not the nervous type. You have never suffered from stage-fright before, have you?’
‘I have never played on a London stage before.’
‘You’ll be perfect,’ said the old man, very sincerely. ‘And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I very much intend to be there to see it.’
‘O!’ she exclaimed. ‘But not too near the front row, please. You will put me off my lines!’
He promised to sit near the back, or to hide behind a pillar, or to go in disguise, wearing a false beard and a broad-brimmed black hat, a remark which seemed to amuse everyone a little, although Cockerell said that if he did so he would be instantly recognisable and probably arrested as a Bolshevik revolutionary.
The maid – Elsie or Nellie, one or the other – came in to say that luncheon was served, and the party moved across the hall to the dining room, where a saddle of lamb with roast potatoes and mint sauce awaited. The old man sat at the head of the table, with Gertie by his right hand and Wessex at his feet.
Cockerell carved energetically. ‘So you live at Beaminster?’ he asked Gertie, pronouncing it as it was written.
‘Sydney, you know, it is supposed to be Bemster,’ Florence corrected him from the other end of the table.
‘Bemster?’
‘Yes. Bemster.’
‘Not Bemsturrr?’ he asked, putting on a comic Wessex brogue.
‘No, plain Bemster.’
Cockerell laughed. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘whatever it is called, do you like living there?�
�
She said that she did, yet there was a certain catch in her voice.
‘O?’
‘It is very quiet,’ she said with a gentle smile. ‘Not a great deal happens in Beaminster.’
Her pronunciation of the town’s name was subtly different to Florence’s. Cockerell was delighted. ‘Bemister!’ he proclaimed. ‘Is that right?’
‘Nearly.’
‘But not quite – Mrs. Bugler, where am I wrong? Bemisster?’
‘Very nearly. But I am not a native – I am not really qualified.’
The old man listened attentively. William Barnes, that great Wessex poet, had rendered the vocalisation of the town as ‘Sweet Be’mi’ster!’ – but Barnes, too, had not come from the west of the county. ‘There are several ways in which it may be pronounced, none of them worse or better than the other,’ he said, ‘but sometimes it is perhaps more like Bemestur.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that is how my husband pronounces it,’ and she turned her eyes on him in such a way that made him feel – what? Merely that he should like to kiss her. To put an arm round her waist, and kiss those soft lips … the thought made his mind swoon.
‘I always think it is such a shame that the town has no railway connection,’ Florence complained.
‘Why is that?’ Harrison politely wondered.
‘Frederick, I have no idea. They have been talking about extending the line for years and years, but they never seem to get any further!’
From Florence’s tone, one might have concluded that no one knew why Beaminster lacked a railway line, but the reason was obvious to anyone with an understanding of local topography. Being surrounded by steep hills, the town was situated in a kind of basin, and the costs of constructing a railway line were prohibitive. Economics, as so often, had the final word on the matter. The old man did not bother to say this, and instead chose to point out that, while Beaminster might have no railway line, it did possess a fifteenth-century church, in honey-coloured ham-stone, with a magnificent tower – perhaps the most magnificent church tower in the entire county.
He spoke to Gertie. ‘Is your cottage near the church?’
‘Not far away,’ she said. ‘A little way down the hill.’
He wondered what her cottage was like. The postal address, Riverside Cottage, helped but little, if only because Beaminster’s river, the Brit, was not much more substantial than a large stream. As for cottages, they varied greatly. Since the War there had been a considerable fashion among urban dwellers for cottage living, albeit on a weekend or holiday basis, and many such cottages had been modernised to provide comfortable accommodation. Others remained as they had been for centuries, dank and cramped, with mud floors, rotten plaster and mouldy thatch.
Once they had settled to eat, the conversation turned to the subject of where Gertie should stay in London. Some actresses stayed in diggings, but Harrison recommended several very good, respectable hotels, close enough to the Haymarket, which he said were not too expensive. To the old man’s irritation, Florence then started to say what a lonely place London could be if one was by oneself, and how hard it would be for Gertie to leave her baby: ‘I would find it impossible, I think.’
Sometimes he wished that Florence could hold her tongue. He shot a look of sharp disapproval down the table, but she seemed not to notice.
Gertie said that she hoped she would not be lonely; her sister would be staying with her in London, and she would be able to go back home at weekends to see Diana: ‘It will give my husband the chance to get to know her so much better. Fathers so often are remote figures nowadays. And it is only for a month.’
‘But what if the run is extended?’
‘Everything will work out well,’ the old man told her, and he passed a small piece of lamb to Wessex, who had been whining in a polite manner. ‘Gently, gently. Where are your manners? Now, now.’
Florence reproached him. ‘Thomas, he will get fat.’
‘Nonsense – he is too old to get fat’ – and he defiantly lifted the dog to the level of the table and allowed him to lick the side of the plate.
‘He even likes mint sauce,’ said Gertie.
‘He likes everything. There; spotless.’
An excellent apple pie, thick-crusted, spiced with cinnamon, and eaten with cream – as was his wont, his hand holding the cream jug shook and allowed him to pour an excessive quantity into his bowl – completed the luncheon; after which, they again went to the drawing room. The fire was smouldering, and while Cockerell jabbed the poker into the coals the old man seated himself in a low chair beside Gertrude.
A conversation about the history of the Haymarket had begun, with Harrison warning Gertrude to keep an eye open for the resident ghost. This was supposedly the ghost of John Baldwin Buckstone, one of Harrison’s eminent predecessors as theatre manager. Harrison maintained that it had been sighted by dozens of actors and actresses, often during the course of a performance, though he had never seen it himself. ‘It’s slightly disappointing,’ he said. ‘Why should ghosts appear to some people and not to others?’
Cockerell said: ‘I once saw a cat, which I believed was a ghost. It was on the back stairs, in Cambridge. It ran up and disappeared. We searched for it, but never found it.’
‘It was probably just an ordinary cat,’ Harrison suggested.
‘I’m sure it wasn’t!’ Florence declared. ‘I’m certain that ghosts exist – I’ve seen one! Two Christmases ago, I woke in the night and it was by my bed.’
‘How frightening!’ Cockerell was entertained. ‘My dear Florence! Was it Scrooge?’
‘It was shaking its head at me.’
‘Was it? Hmmm! What – like Hamlet’s father? And then what?’
‘Nothing. It vanished. You remember, Thomas? I told you about it. It was very frightening. I couldn’t sleep for hours.’
The old man nodded, though in truth he did not remember at all. ‘The trouble with ghosts is that they always vanish,’ he remarked.
‘Did it have a long white beard?’ asked Cockerell.
‘No, it was a young man, or fairly young.’
‘Ah! An old flame! Did you recognise him?’
‘No, but you are right, Sydney, he was extremely handsome!’
The merriment continued. Harrison said that, when his time was up, he fully intended to do a little amateur ghosting; he would join forces with Buckstone and haunt the Haymarket. Cockerell said that the best course of action, when encountering a ghost, was to run it through with a rapier, and if he met Harrison’s ghost he would do just that. Florence said, but surely, since a ghost had no substance, to run it through with a rapier would be entirely useless. Cockerell cheerfully conceded that this was probably true: ‘I may have misunderstood something. But, you know, it may be not Harrison’s ghost but Harrison pretending to be a ghost. By stabbing it with a rapier, at least I would know that I’d got the real thing.’
Gertie spoke here. She said that very near where she lived in Beaminster there was a big stone house, dating from the Elizabethan period, which contained a ghostly lady in a blue dress. At night her shoes could be heard tapping on the stone floors as she walked round the house, and one particular room always felt chilly, even in high summer.
‘This entire house feels chilly,’ said Florence.
Cockerell made protesting noises.
‘I assure you, Sydney, it is one of the coldest houses anywhere! The only truly warm room is the kitchen, and I am not allowed to go in it! The servants stay warm, and we perish! I am cold here now! Do we know who this mysterious lady in blue was?’
‘No,’ said Gertie, ‘although she has been photographed.’
‘How extraordinary! That is extraordinary! Is it a good photograph?’
‘I haven’t seen it, but those who have say that you can see her quite distinctly, and that she looks very unhappy.’
‘It must be a trick,’ said Cockerell. ‘It must be. Ghosts do not exist. One may as well believe in fairies and elves.�
��
The phenomenon of ghosts interested the old man greatly, and when Gertie turned to ask him if he had ever seen a ghost he was ready with an answer: that he saw one each morning, upon looking in the glass. It was perhaps the dry tone with which he gave this answer, as much as the answer itself, that provoked such laughter; whatever the cause, it particularly pleased him that Gertie laughed so freely, and that, as she laughed, she was looking at him. It was as if he and she were the only two people in the room. Her eyes were bright, the curving string of pearls around her neck shone with a faintly pink light against the translucence of her skin, and her right hand, with its flawless nails and slender wrist, was a mere three feet away. In a single movement he could have reached out and taken it in his own.
Her physical presence dazed him so much that he lost track of the subsequent conversation, although vaguely he began to ponder whether he might contrive some pretext that would allow him to be alone with her. None sprang to mind. Had it been spring or summer, he might have given her a tour of the garden – but it was a cold winter’s afternoon, already turning to dusk. Soon the curtains would need to be drawn against the dark.
A jet of blue flame issued hissing from one of the coals on the fire.
‘Ah!’ Cockerell exclaimed. ‘Isn’t that meant to signify something? I’ve read about it! A stranger!’
This was true; it was an old country superstition that such irruptions foretold the approach of a stranger. The old man explained it to Harrison, who smiled.
‘How quaint. People still believe that?’
‘O, we are still in the Dark Ages down here,’ Florence told him. ‘Sometimes we hear wolves!’
‘Any moment now the door-bell will ring,’ predicted Cockerell. ‘Hark! Hist!’
They listened. The flare continued to burn with its fierce blue light, while the hiss developed into a loud sibilance.
He sat mute, scarcely daring to look in her direction, but entirely taken up with her nearness. She seemed so fond of him – she was fond of him, he was sure of it. When he glanced up and caught the flash of her eyes – those eloquent, dark eyes, shining in the fire-light – he felt that he knew her thoughts as well as his own. How easy it should have been to take her hand, and how impossible! Would that he and she were alone!
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