A Harp in Lowndes Square

by Rachel Ferguson

  ‘And once,’ cut in Lalage valiantly, ‘Granny gave them a queen-cake for a “pretend” tea-party.’

  I often wonder what pastrycook made that fabulous queen-cake which was to be the future mental solace of a nursery of three children.

  Lady Vallant was ‘a beauty in her day’. We instantly collected to consider this and to find a photograph of her, a yellowed cabinet with Lady Vallant set in an oval. ‘I think she’s got a face like an egg’, said Lalage.

  We didn’t. It wasn’t, of course, a face calculated to appeal to a child’s elementary standards; it had too much drive and purpose; aquiline nose, strong dark brows, thin lips and dark eyes, too small and set too close together – points which naturally escaped us. This was the person who had given the queen-cake, who must have known about that doll, but who also had the power to bring that suppressed look to mother’s face and a strained, hesitant tone to her voice when she mentioned ‘the Mater’.

  Poring over the photograph, we tried to wrest more knowledge from it, to read into it understanding of what we already possessed. Every time something fresh came to hand, more grist to our mill, we dug out the photograph again.

  Susan Vallant.

  ‘Oh, the Mater didn’t understand children’ … ‘I remember seeing the hall stacked with game that people sent them. Of course we never got any’ … ‘No ice was ever sent up to the schoolroom and the butter always went rancid’ … ‘Raging at the servants. It was awful’. And once (it smote us) ‘We never had any Christmas or birthday presents’. All this tossed to us intermittently in mother’s guarded way with that twisted smile the Mater teemed to evoke. And yet, on the other hand:

  ‘They gave wonderful parties, we all got invited … oh, they lived just across the square’ … ‘Our coming out dresses …’ Cheerful, normal, presentable items like that, that we clung to before dispersing to piece things together. I think we took the line ‘no home can be completely – wrong (we shied off any other definition) that has cakes for dolls’ tea-parties, and coming out dresses and good parties across the square’.

  It was entirely characteristic of us to assume disaster and then mitigate it with consolations rather than to take happiness for granted and be appalled by hints that all was not well. You can think any person or thing into a bogey if you concentrate enough, and give it strength and power by your tribute of apprehension into the bargain and that ‘perfect love casteth out fear’ is half a lie I have always known, for the greater the love the more the dread.

  III

  It was, to me, an actual relief to meet Lady Vallant face to face in our own garden. My passion of protectiveness towards mother knew that it might be literally a coming out into the open. Mother broke the news of her visit to us quite matter of factly (‘she’s never seen the house, you know’). We accepted the grandmotherly whim as we did the fact that she never sent us presents or tips or letters, or came to be with mother when we were born, but dwelt aloof and cussèd in Lowndes Square. ‘The Vallants are rather rum that way’, mother had often said, ‘Aunt Emmeline and the uncles are a bit Vallantish too’.

  It came to be a cheerful term of reproach amongst us.

  ‘Don’t be a Vallant.’

  James and I chose Lalage to watch for Lady Vallant’s arrival along the road, because Lalage is plucky and stolid and wouldn’t muff things, and is, of course, the eldest, and poor Lalage turned crimson but trotted to her post all the same.

  Our grandmother had hired a station fly, had even made the journey to the village in that casual train from Waterloo which we knew so well from the yearly visits to Drury Lane pantomime. Lalage says that she told the cabby ‘Wait here’, with no softenings of ‘please’, or explanation. It upset her, she said, as mother was always as considerately polite to those who served her as she was to her friends. Lalage went forward, held out her hand and said, ‘How do you do? I’m Lalage’, and led her through the kitchen garden door to the lawn.

  What happened next was that as Lady Vallant glided forward on tiny feet James looked up and suddenly screamed, mother came running and saw the little group.

  Have I imagined it through prejudice, or did mother, on reaching us, make to spread out her arms and pen us in behind her? There is certainly no doubt but that we, too, had the same idea simultaneously. And we won. We stood, all three, in a row in front of her and held our ground.

  Mother with ‘the old lady’ (our grandmother couldn’t have been then more than fifty-odd, but was of an age when young women wore caps at thirty) was quiet, attentive, and all her sparkle and fun was in abeyance. Of course, Lady Vallant was a visitor … She spoke in a plangent, penetrating voice for all she never seemed to raise it.

  Oh, she was handsome, though. Devilishly so.

  She was perfectly civil to us children – I don’t know why this baffled us except that it, as it were, left us weaponless without being disarmed, and all her attention, if you could call it that, was for mother. They discussed the family like a pair of strangers. Only once did Lady Vallant seem to turn into a real person when James, unprompted, stolidly offered her cake.

  ‘He is well grown.’

  And it was after this that James and I began, vaguely at first, and intermittently, to develop what the Scots call ‘the sight’. It was, I imagine, always latent as it is in most people, and emotional disturbance had woken it from sleep.

  IV

  The first intimation happened in the middle of a winter walk with Bessie, a stupid stop-gap nursemaid. The whole episode was rather tripperish and obvious and I shouldn’t dwell on it at all but for what mother said about it when James told her, for it was upon James that the mixed blessing fell first, at Hampton Court.

  I was in another apartment at the time, for what that is worth, and Bessie and Lalage comfortably bundling up and down the Haunted Gallery.

  James, it seems, had gone through my apartment furnished only with its tester bed of encrusted embroideries, had found a door and opened it. The room was handsomely furnished with tapestry and chairs (he had since told me that toys were littered about the floor). He took this fact ‘quite sitting’ and wasn’t in the leas surprised, ‘because, at seven, one doesn’t know enough to be surprised with’. In a high chair was ‘a small, pasty looking kid in velvet’; the man staring out of the window he recognized at once. That flat feathered cap on the table … that golden beard … that girth. What seems to have struck James most was that he was eating an apple. I suppose a child seldom associates historic people with homely acts; he isn’t encouraged to, where all are Bills of Attainder, executions and the puttings away of what for nursery use, is called ‘favourites’.

  Henry said, ‘No more tennis for me. This cursed leg of mine,’ and little Edward VI, according to James, ‘just hunched his shoulders and looked cross’.

  As far as we can make out, James hung about the door, watching and quite accepting everything, until Henry spoke and began eating the apple. If Henry had caught sight of him and bluffly guffawed and shouted ‘by my halidom, a likely knave!’ or any similar costume-novel toshery: if even he had downed a flagon of sack, I think James would have held his ground and seen and heard more. The loss to the world! As it was, King Henry ate an apple and talked like a person, and this seems to have unnerved James, who fled to find me. He was upset and excited enough to tell Bessie, who said, ‘Why what an impudence! Telling me a big story!’ (oh, Board schools!) and James turned very red and hesitated a moment and kicked her.

  And when that had been smoothed over by mother, when, quite inevitably, the next history lesson touched upon Henry VIII, James looked up and said to Miss Johnson, ‘He wasn’t like that really, you know. I’ve seen him.’

  This ended in a disorder mark for impertinence. (Oh, gentility and colleges!) So once more the matter was referred to mother.

  It couldn’t have been an easy interview, with James to soothe as well as an agitated and indignant woman. Mother, eventually, plumped for James, knowing the misery of a small boy at being i
n any way set apart from his fellows, and the end of that was the resignation of Miss Johnson.

  And then mother tackled James, passionately interested in the thing for its own sake, but shelving that, for his.

  ‘I see … yes. Not being booksy. Yes, I think I should have felt the same. But after all you know, Jamesey, they were people just like you and me.’

  He looked at her, worried. ‘But … they’re dead.’

  And then mother, half-educated herself by quarter-educated and impoverished gentlewomen, began to speak, humble before her own deficiencies, gappy, probably inaccurate, virgin of any science, talking to us both like a shy schoolgirl, backed by heaven knows what of secret conviction and therefore succeeding entirely (I reproduce it in the light of wider knowledge on our part, and short of her explanations of difficult words).

  ‘Look here … all time is one, past, present and future. It’s simultaneous.’ Then (she could never resist analogy however wide of the mark), ‘Think of your phonograph record of Dan Leno’s monologue on Eggs. You don’t know Dan, but somebody has discovered how to capture his voice for just you in the nursery. You’ve a little bit of him upstairs, just as you got a little bit of Henry at Hampton Court. …

  ‘There’s a star I’ve heard of whose light takes so many thousands of years to reach our earth that it’s still only got as far along history as shining over the Legions of Julius Caesar. Yet that star which is seeing chariot races is outside our window now. You say Caesar is dead. The star says No, because the star’s seen him. It’s your word against his! Which of you is right? Both of you. It’s only a question of how long you take to see things. That’s what I mean by time being simultaneous. Look here,’ and she took a sheet of paper and a pencil and drew a big circle. Inside the top she sketched two manikins (‘That’s you and Vere, just born.’) She drew a dotted line clockwise round the circle. ‘This is both of you growing up and getting older and older the further you move away from the manikins; but the more you get away from them, the nearer you come to them, and when you touch again, that’s so-called death, but it’s birth as well.’

  James liked the tangibility of that circle. So did I. It stuck in the memory. He said, ‘Would that Edward kid like a toy?’ Mother considered. ‘There you have me! You see, that toy’s not in history, and one must stick to the rules of the game. Probably if you gave him one now it would go right through him and fall on to the floor. But we might try.’

  So we put on our hats and walked along the roads and lanes to Kingston to buy a fairing for Edward VI.

  V

  We chose, after an argument (in which mother, who adored silliments, took her full share) one of those little chubby two-inch books of photographs which, when whirled back by the thumb, gave a most enthralling Illusion of motion. I’ve never found one since. Those booklets were the forerunners of the cinema, and ah! how much more glamorous! The thing came (of course) from ‘Pilborough’s, that two-steps-down, bow-window’d moss-roof’d shop of all joys, cheap, imaginative, and glittering.

  In the Palace, James, after a little misguidance, found his door and we took deep breaths all round and opened it.

  From the result, I now deduce that all psychic sight is not of equal strength. Mother, for instance, saw the room as it is, bare and polished, but sensed a recent domestic occupation. I saw defectively, in patches; that is to say that whereas the one wall was bare, the other was hung with tapestry, very indistinctly seen, and of the nursery chair I could see no higher than the arms. It was my first experience of ‘simultaneous time’.

  James (confound him) saw the complete scene as he had before, and pointed, and shouted ‘There they are!’, and the noise rang all down the corridor and brought up an official in no time, so that we had no chance to do anything but throw in Edward’s toy in a hurry, and it fell prosaically on to the floor.

  In time, James and I were to focus with exactly equal distinctness, and my theory about the way we all saw that morning is that, except for the sight of James, which seems, for some quirk, to have matured earlier than my own, we had with that Tudor glimpse no family tie or blood relationship backed by urgent personal emotion. I throw the suggestion out tentatively in view of what occurred years later.

  The morning ended, because nobody had been particularly good and it was nobody’s birthday, in ices and lemonade at ‘the Miss Burtons’ in Market Square.

  CHAPTER III

  I

  WHEN poor Miss Johnson, pinkly resentful, had gone (‘Johnson, passenger to Harrogate’), Mother filled in the hiatus and taught us herself. We rummaged for all we could find about Edward VI, and he seems to have been a nasty, precocious little swot who wouldn’t have improved on acquaintance. Mother sensibly threw in her hand about arithmetic and it ended by Lalage teaching her. (‘Mother! When will you remember to pay back twelve for the shilling column? You must pay back, you know. It isn’t like you not to.’) And Mother, bent over her sum, looked up and said it had never struck her in that light, and what fools mistresses were, and that she’d never learnt so much before. I can quite believe it. The governesses chosen (if she did choose them) by the Mater seem to have been a woeful lot of incompetents. ‘But then, no one cared.’

  I shot a look at James and he shook his head; he was quite simply enjoying lessons and didn’t want to be upset by Vallantry. Lalage cocked her head at us both for a cue and we signalled negatives across the red cloth.

  We learned to read out of books we liked, and my first light of words as distinct from isolated letters was that Edward Lear limerick on the subject of the old man of Spithead who opened his window and said, and mother suddenly laughed aloud and said it was exactly like Mary of Scots’ Latin prayer. We used to chant the two interchangeably:

  There was once an old man of Spithead

  Who opened his window and said

  ‘Languendo, gemendo

  Et genu flectendo’,

  That doubtful old man of Spithead.

  I suppose we all failed completely over grammar because it appealed to no literary or dramatic instinct, or to anything at all. Even mother could do nothing to englamour it for us. We tried everything; we even got down to being Grand Inquisitors with heretics who would get put into the Iron Maiden if they couldn’t answer satisfactorily about extensions of predicate, or whatever it is, but as James said, ‘It’s no good, darling. The Maiden’s full up again’. Even music was rather a penance. Mother taught us our notes by making them into sentences. ‘God Bad, David Fell Ananias’ (‘It was Goliath, my dear,’ from Lalage), and ‘Egg Good, Breakfast Delightfully Fresh.’ Practising could only be endured by making it a concert at Queen’s Hall, and we had to go into Kingston to buy James a false moustache at the hairdresser’s before he would seriously settle down to scales and became Holstein – no Signor or Heinrich nonsense, he was too big a name for that. Just Holstein. If he was tiresome about getting started mother would say loudly and casually to Lalage of me ‘They all tell me that Holstein’s going off’, and James who combined a knowledge that he was James Reid Buchan together with an inner consideration that perhaps he might be going one day to be Holstein and a famous pianist, buckled to at once.

  But in the confusing and pointless way things happen to families, it was Lalage, quite unmusical au fond, where played the best, on condition that the music was propped in front of her.

  James and I, for some reason, were supersensitized to sound, without ever really mastering the rudiments of music. We knew at once if a modulation was incorrect or chord however complicated wrong by so much as one note and had what I can only describe as ‘double hearing’, which we could use, turn about, at will. It was quite good fun. One inner ear was the comfortable concert-goer’s which hears, say, the overture to Act III of Die Meistersinger as a whole; the other heard the overture as separate parts. Our ‘second ear’ thus heard each individual instrument in the orchestra and could follow it unfalteringly right through the score. Years later we mentioned this to a conductor, and he said he
had never known anybody who could hear more than two instruments properly, and that the least trifle broke the ‘aural sequence’. He himself had once heard three: oboe, ’cello and second violin for about a minute and a half, and then lost them again in the orchestra. He said quite seriously, ‘This ear faculty of yours and your brother’s may be part of the business of being twins … mutually “borrowed” hearing of which we know nothing.’ And then he laughed at the way we floundered over describing our feelings towards the Wagnerian motif, and especially when we alluded to that recurrent passage of brass in Die Meistersinger that we called the ‘Where did you get that hat?’ one. And then he made me play to him, and I managed to remember a vile little tune called ‘Childhood Days’ (it has six chords and is in the key of C), and he sat rocking and crying with laughter and mopping and apologizing, and when I’d done (Tum – tah!) he said, ‘That’s grand stuff. There’s something positively dignified in such consistent vulgarity … oh, ha ha ha!’, and James said thoughtfully, ‘I suppose it’s better to be perfectly anything than absolutely nothing. You’re a “perfectly” A.1 conductor, sir. My sister and I are just “perfectly” awful’.

  Sir A— said, ‘What interests me about you two is that you have the absolute XYZ of music without a vestige of the ABC. Well, well …’ And as we left, he strolled along the hall, humming. The tune was ‘Childhood Days’.

  II

  I don’t really suppose that our suburban village is gayer and more hospitable than any other, but we seemed to live in a warming surge of pleasures and could afford be thoroughly selective about people and parties. Mother hinted it was because of us, carefully putting it so that we shouldn’t be vain … a needless precaution, she learnt in time, as we never thought of our faces, and just accepted it that our hair was a rather unusual shade of copper and our eyes, like father’s, an unmistakable Highland blue.