Britannia Mews

by Margery Sharp

  In one corner of this stony heart, however, there lodged a small plant of gratitude. She never forgot how Mrs. Lambert had washed her hair. From that moment, and rightly, she judged her success to have been born: to Mrs. Lambert’s labours with the rinsing-water she owed her first engagement, half a dozen rôles as First Fairy, an adolescent success as Queen of the Moonbeams, and then the steady glories of Daly’s. On every picture postcard—and she was photographed by Downey’s, twice a month—her extraordinary, abundant ash-blonde tresses flowed in undulant, incredible waves. They were what she was famous for. At some point in the third act of each of her musical comedies, her hair came down. If it hadn’t, patrons would have asked for their money back. So she felt she owed Mrs. Lambert much; and every now and then came to pay a visit in the Mews, her brougham waiting outside, her lace petticoats held delicately from contact with the cobbles, indubitably with a sense of going slumming, but nevertheless, as has been said, from a feeling of genuine gratitude. One of these visits occurred just as the workmen were out of the Puppet Theatre, leaving Gilbert slightly at a loss how to proceed next; Miss O’Keefe took the situation in at a glance, promised her patronage, and personally saw to procuring the licence. She was at that moment rehearsing only; her evenings were free; on the opening night the minute auditorium was so packed with her personal friends that patrons from the Mews had to stand at the back.

  That first night was undoubtedly Iris OKeefe’s. She had a new dress by Worth, and looked partly like a sheaf of white roses and partly like a moonbeam; but the brain behind the roses and moonbeams invented the idea of selling tickets by the set of six; invented, in fact, the idea of the Theatre Club. Moreover one of her followers, an unsuccessful poet, stayed behind to offer ideas for a modern pastoral, and an attaché from the French Embassy asked for a closer view of the figures from Molière. These had been shown only in tableaux; but some time later the attaché returned with an elderly, witty Frenchwoman, a diseuse, who had a little idea for a little divertissement at the Embassy itself. This took place, again with success, and led to an odd incident.

  Adelaide, accompanying Gilbert and the radiant Mr. Bly (his wild, early prophecy come true), was presented with them, after the performance, to His Excellency. She had a new evening gown, the midnight-blue velvet of her dreams; if she had no diamond star, she wore tuberoses at her breast; and the Ambassador, after one split second of surprise, bowed over her hand in the most complimentary way. He praised the puppets, praised the performance, but in a manner which put them, so to speak, outside their personal relation; it was obvious that he couldn’t place Mrs. Lambert in the milieu of paid entertainers. He asked her if she knew Paris; she replied composedly that she did not—though her aunt, Mrs. Burnett, had lived there for many years.

  At once His Excellency’s face expressed the most lively interest. He regretted extremely that Mrs. Burnett had left London. Did Mrs. Lambert ever hear from Vienna? No, said Adelaide, her aunt did not write; and then she added sincerely—thinking not of their last meeting but of their first:—

  “But I always remember her as the loveliest and kindest person I ever knew.”

  The old man smiled at her so brightly and fixedly that, if he had been a woman, Adelaide would have thought he was trying to keep back tears. He said nothing more; but several times after, that winter, Le Guignol de Molière was seen at the French Embassy; and fashion carried the Puppet Theatre along through two highly successful seasons.

  Fashion dropped it again. For the next few years Gilbert was back at the agency, though with enhanced prestige. He found a new opening: the witty Frenchwoman, condescending to a finishing school in Wigmore Street, introduced the French puppets to a whole series of such establishments. Molière was undoubtedly educational—if properly presented; and it was edifying to see how Madame Dulac threw away, before a schoolgirl audience, points so wickedly made at the Embassy. She became a sort of partner, and it was she who introduced Yvette Guilbert, who with the greatest amusement and good humour offered not only her own songs, but her own person, to the puppet world.

  The unsuccessful poet also joined them, developing a talent for burlesque and also spending more time than the Lamberts could spare talking about Iris O’Keefe. Adelaide sometimes thought it fortunate that that beauty had so little use for him: her image remained garlanded and intact. This young man, whose name was Amos Jackson, but who wrote under the pseudonym and wished to be known as “Plantagenet Desmond,” occupied rather the position that had belonged to Old Bert. (The Old ’Un was long dead; the Lamberts went to his funeral. It was paid for out of the three pounds fifteen found under the current Dog Toby’s bed. The Dog Toby had to be destroyed.) Neither Mr. Bly nor Gilbert paid much attention to Plantagenet, but Adelaide had a liking for him. He was simple, trusting, and worked for a firm of insurance agents. Unlike Madame Dulac, he never made disconcerting or improper remarks. “You and your ’usband do not sleep together,” Madame had once observed. “Why?” This was in English. The other remarks were in French, and Adelaide could only suspect their impropriety; but her suspicions were very strong.

  So the Puppet Theatre, now flourishing in fashion, now modestly paying its way, took root and grew. Between 1914 and 1918 it closed altogether, while Gilbert worked in the Ministry of Pensions and Adelaide sewed at the Red Cross. Plantagenet Desmond went to France, behaved with unexpected heroism, and came back with a row of ribbons to write a rather different kind of poetry under his own name. Madame Dulac died at Verdun—in spirit, if not in flesh. And then, in the ’twenties, a new spirit of gaiety flared over London as the rockets had flared over the trenches, and the Puppet Theatre, along with bottle-parties, night clubs, short hair, short skirts, and the saxophone, again caught the mode.

  So did the Mews. By 1922, for the first time in its history, Britannia Mews was a fashionable address.

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER I

  1

  There had always been this quality about Britannia Mews, that to step into it from Albion Alley was like stepping into a self-contained and separate small world. Its character might change, its Dark Ages alternate, so to speak, with its Christian Eras, but always it retained this strong individuality. No one who passed under the archway ever had any doubt as to what sort of place he was entering—in 1865, model stables; in 1880, a slum; in 1900, a respectable working-class court. Thus, when an address in a mews came to imply a high degree of fashion, Britannia Mews was unmistakably smart.

  To step under the archway, in 1922, was like stepping into a toy village—a very expensive toy from Hamley’s or Harrods.: with a touch of the Russian Ballet about it, as though at any moment a door might fly open upon Petroushka or the Doll, for the colours of the doors, like the colours of the window-curtains, were unusually bright and varied: green, yellow, orange. Outside them stood tubs of begonias, or little clipped bushes. The five dwarf houses facing west were two-storey, with large downstairs rooms converted from old coach-houses: opposite four stables had been thrown into one to make the Puppet Theatre. The Theatre thus dominated the scene, but with a certain sobriety: its paintwork was a dark olive, the sign above the entrance a straightforward piece of lettering, programmes were displayed in plain oak frames which somehow suggested church notice-boards: it was the village church, completing the toy village, as the Cock, with its new bright signboard, was the village inn.

  People often said that the Theatre had made the Mews. This was only partly true: the post-war passion for living in cramped quarters, the Back-to-a-Cottage-in-Mayfair movement, would certainly have found out Britannia Mews sooner or later; the Theatre simply made it more quickly known. No time was lost; the new settlers hurried in, and the cocktail bar in Number 8 (where once the Blazer’s Iris shivered on the step) was the first cocktail bar in all London to be installed in an ex-stable. The bottle-parties at Number 6 (once the humble lair of Old Bert) were almost historic. Indeed, the new denizens drank almost as heavily as the old, and had the same taste for gin. (Anoth
er minor but curious parallel was that at Number 9 a lady of title unwittingly followed in the footsteps of her predecessor Mrs. Mounsey by selling her own and her friends’ cast-off clothes.) Their standard of sexual and financial morality was about the same, but their standard of cleanliness far higher. They put in bathrooms recklessly. They were also better-educated, and generally artistic; no more industrious, but better-tempered, owing to their easier circumstances—for several were wealthy, and the rest ran up bills.

  The most damaging criticism of these new-comers was voiced by Iris O’Keefe. In her forties Miss O’Keefe was still a popular favourite: with her customary good sense she had ceased to let down her hair and usually played Queens, Empresses, Czarinas—rôles undemanding but spectacular—in which she wore her own diamonds. Miss O’Keefe surveyed the new inhabitants of Britannia Mews and said that they lacked style.

  “It may be the war,” said Miss O’Keefe to an old friend of hers, “or it may be this free love, but whatever the cause I cannot admire the result. For what is the result? That men nowadays can hardly distinguish between one woman and another, and I dare say the reverse applies as well. I have been called hard, and cold,” said Miss O’Keefe reflectively, “and it’s true I never lost my head about a man; but I always had style, dear, which was far more to the point. I don’t think you ever saw my bedroom?”

  The friend said she had not.

  “Pale blue brocade. The bed-curtains, all the upholstery; and the sheets and pillows pale blue silk. To show up my hair, you know. I’m told,” said Miss O’Keefe impersonally, “that the effect was quite breath-taking. Let’s be frank, dear: I know it was. Poor Charlie used to fall on his knees. But what I mean to say is, in those days there was a glamour and romance about it all; one didn’t just push the overcoats off the divan.”

  2

  Number 7 was occupied by Miss Sonia Trent, a young lady of independent means. She had many friends, but only one who lived in Surbiton. This was Dodo, or Dorothy, Baker; and after a party at Sonia’s Dodo usually contrived to spend the night in Britannia Mews.

  In Miss Trent’s sitting-room, at about nine o’clock of an October morning in the year 1922, Dodo awoke.

  As she yawned and stretched her right hand encountered parquet, her left sheepskin; for her bed was on the floor. Through the orange curtains enough light filtered to show looming over her head the end of a glass-topped table; and staring up through the glass she saw gin bottles, glasses, ash trays, some one’s evening bag, all vaguely distorted like objects seen through water. The air was still heavy with cigarette smoke, and the fainter smell of unfinished drinks.

  This, thought Dodo joyfully, is life.

  She was twenty-five, but in many ways young for her age, and she lived at Surbiton. Propping herself on her elbow, gazing appreciatively about, she next perceived that she was not alone. Beyond the table, under an overcoat on the divan, slumbered a perfectly strange young man.

  This, thought Dodo, is heaven!

  She exaggerated a little, however, in her thoughts. The young man was not an absolute stranger, she remembered seeing him come in the night before—very late, and rather intoxicated. But she didn’t know his name. She had to all intents and purposes spent the night in the same room with a perfectly strange man.

  At this moment the telephone rang. Dodo knelt up and grabbed the receiver, for she knew how Sonia hated to be disturbed, and heard—how incongruous, how unwelcome!—her mother’s voice.

  “Hello?” said Alice Baker sharply. She was always rather sharp on the telephone, hoping thus to disguise an ineradicable mistrust of the instrument. “Hello, hello, who’s that?”

  “Hello, darling.”

  “Is that you, Dodo?”

  “Yes, darling.”

  “I’ve been expecting you to ring up,” complained Alice;

  Dodo remembered that she had promised to do so; had promised anything, the night before, when explaining that she was going to stay in town. She said softly:—

  “It’s only just nine, darling …”

  “I can’t hear you!” shouted Alice.

  “I said, it’s only just nine.”

  The young man stirred. Dodo, kneeling up in her cami-knickers, could not repress a giggle. The contrast between the scene at one end of the line—her father had probably just issued, bowler-hatted, from the front door—and the scene at the other was really priceless.

  “When are you coming back?” demanded Alice. “It’s Saturday, your father will be home to lunch. You can catch the 10:15.… “What did you say?”

  “I said, Don’t fuss.”

  “I’m not fussing.” Alice’s voice rose a little. “I don’t even know where you are, Dodo. Where is Bayswater 0716?”

  “It’s in Britannia Mews, darling.”

  There was so long a silence that Dodo, believing her mother to have rung off, thankfully did so too.

  3

  At the other end of the line Alice Baker sat in her pleasant, well-dusted morning-room, and for ten minutes never stirred: the name Britannia Mews, dropped so insouciantly by her daughter—chucked as a child chucks a pebble into a pool—set such memory-ripples widening that she could only sit and think, and think and sit, with the receiver still in her hand.…

  She hadn’t seen Adelaide for nearly thirty years; not in fact since the day of Mr. Culver’s funeral; and though the sadness of that occasion had momentarily drawn them together, Alice never took any step toward a, further meeting. A whole complex of emotions prevented her: the break after all had been so complete, and Freddy so stubbornly disapproving, and Adelaide so uncommonly stiff-necked—and moreover, why didn’t Adelaide take any further step herself? “She knows where I live,” Alice used to argue; “if she wants to, she can come and see me!”—and once or twice, at the sight of a tall woman walking briskly in Oakley Road, had hurried forward, imagining it to be Adelaide. It never was Adelaide; it was generally the new headmistress at the High School, who indeed had so much of Adelaide’s imperious bearing that even after she ceased to be new, Alice was sometimes deceived. But it never was Adelaide; nor did a letter ever arrive, or the telephone ring. “She knows where I live,” thought Alice stubbornly.

  Poor soul! She could ill spare a first cousin. The war, robbing her of both sons, also robbed her, indirectly, of two brothers, for in 1914 the twins insinuated themselves into the A.S.C. as privates, rose to the rank of quartermaster-sergeants, and at the conclusion of hostilities departed to British Columbia. “But I should have thought you’d be so glad to get home!” wailed Alice. The twins looked at each other, said nothing, and went to British Columbia. Milly and Sybil, the two little girls who had sat up in bed to admire Alice’s party frocks, both married Yorkshire parsons. (This was not a coincidence, but a natural sequence of events: Milly married first, and had Sybil to stay with her.) Alice saw so little of them that she sometimes complained she might as well have no sisters at all—momentarily forgetting her youngest sister, Ellen, still unmarried, still inhabiting the Cedars, all alone there since the elder Hambros’ deaths. As for the Bakers in Somerset, they had formed the habit of staying in Somerset, and not asking one to visit them.

  Poor Alice! It was indeed hard on one so devoted to family life that all the rich potentialities of Hambros, Culvers, and Bakers had thus dwindled off; no wonder she sometimes thought longingly of Adelaide. But as Dodo grew up—and grew up virtually an only child—another element entered into the one-sided argument. Alice’s love for her pretty daughter became so possessive as to raise bogies where none could be. She saw Adelaide, the flouter of family ties, as a potentially bad influence; and in time, by following this line of thought with resentful persistence, arrived at the conclusion that it was entirely for Dodo’s sake that she had given up Adelaide.

  “I give up everything for my daughter!” said Alice aloud—and suddenly wondered whether Adelaide had any children. She thought not: and she thought that Adelaide’s husband was probably dead, and that Adelaide lived somewhere
in a boarding-house, and had grown very bitter and disagreeable. Alice did not exactly hope that this was her cousin’s fate; she just felt it was the fate appropriate to all undutiful daughters.

  4

  Dodo meanwhile had slipped into the rest of her clothes as quietly and swiftly as possible. Her body had its own modesty, partly innate, partly the result of a training too thorough to be quickly cast off: it still disliked the casual bold caresses which in Sonia Trent’s circle the sexes almost automatically exchanged; it did not now wish to be observed half in and half out of a suspender-belt. The strange young man, however, never stirred. Above, too, all was quiet; and presently Dodo hesitated at the foot of the tiny stair wondering whether Sonia were yet awake. Probably not. And if she was, she probably wasn’t alone, since her lover Robin had been at the party. Dodo savoured this situation to the full. She thought it would be frightfully amusing to make some tea and take it up to them. But in the end she didn’t. (She often had these second thoughts, and they often led to arguments with young men in taxis.) Moreover, she was hungry: Sonia’s lavish hospitality was largely alcoholic—never taking breakfast herself, she didn’t expect anyone else to. After a moment’s thought Dodo ran up the narrow stairs and tapped discreetly at the narrow door.