Lalage was small-boned, black-hair’d – the black which has blueish lights, with soft brown eyes and a slight air of fragility, and indeed she was never so strong as ourselves and, without succumbing to definite illnesses, was always the child who had to be guarded and to have precautions taken for her. It gave mother much anxiety, how much we didn’t guess. By our nursery standards, the eldest should not only be first in treats and precedence, but the strongest, the boldest, the handsomest and the most clever, and we honestly admired Lalage and thought her much more attractive than ourselves – a Rackham princess, alone and palely loitering in an impossible forest of tangled roses and writhing branches. James, years later, once said, ‘Any fool can think us good looking, but it takes real taste to tumble to Lalage’.
We all believed that the invitations were traceable to mother. We took it for granted that any hostess would want her, as indeed most of them did, but partisanship apart, I think, now, that the reason may have been that mother held aloof, sweetly, incurably, and to father, rather enragingly, shy. A womanly withdrawal he could have understood, but when it was combined with sudden criticisms, blinding-shrewd and always funny, or decorated with dreadfully accurate and observed imitations of everyone, it daunted.
The result was inevitable: more invitations because to get Mrs. Buchan was something in the nature of an achievement. And having got her, it was, somehow, her party from the moment she came in at the door. There was no trick about it; it was all the more effective in that she made no attempt at assertion.
For years we strove to break down her odd initial apathies, her gentle unwillingness to appear. It was Lalage who said to James and me, ‘I know! She’s seen better days.’ We promptly filed into the house to find out if they had been and mother laughed and said, ‘Of course they were, ducklingtons!’ until she caught James’s eye and stopped chaffing us. And then she said one of her things that silenced without convincing. ‘Don’t we have good times together?’ and, hitting below the belt because it was an appeal to our chivalry and to abandonment of the subject, ‘You’re all I want, my ancients’.
I was in the billiard-room with mother and father (no James to support me) when the invitation to the County ball arrived. I had never been present, formerly, at mother’s opening of the envelope though we all accepted it that she never went, except father, who (I suppose he did it every year) began to urge her to go, and she began to hedge and be flippant (‘I can’t flatter m’self the ball will be abandoned because I’m not there’). By the time she had got as far as that I was almost impatient with her myself.
‘But Anne, love, you are so fond of dancing.’
So she was, if her performances at our parties in the back drawing-room and conservatory, or with ourselves on sudden, private occasions, were anything to go by. Tiny flattered boys, carefully pattering round her in stubby buckskin shoes: curates flushed and admiring: old Doctor Baxter: father, very correctly achieving his share of the steps, all were fish to her net when the music began.
‘I know. But I don’t think I’ll go.’ A finality I recognized though he failed to immediately. And she turned white and began to roll red balls along the cloth, and after a while I ran to the nursery to find the others.
James was making out a list of people who might expected to send wreaths to his funeral, and called out Lalage, ‘Well, I make it twenty-nine, if you count the servants’, and Lalage, pasting scraps into a book, said ‘You can’t count four more in; they might club together and I don’t really count Sims because he’ll probably get them out of the garden and that isn’t the same as a shop wreath’.
‘The onlookers won’t know that,’ argued James, but they stopped at once, because James saw my face, and Lalage took her cue from him.
‘What else did they say?’ Lalage asked practically.
‘Father said, “It isn’t as if it were going to be like the ordinary local affairs, but everyone will be there”,’ I answered, carefully quoting like a constable in the police court, ‘and then he said “I hear that the Lawrence girl’s coming out at it. She’d be eighteen, now, I suppose”.’
‘And mother still wouldn’t go?’
‘It was then that she wouldn’t more than ever,’ I said, unaware I had registered that impression at the time.
‘Perhaps she hasn’t got a frock fit to go in?’
The suggestion was so puerile that we merely looked Lalage. Mother was never what was called a ‘dress woman’, her conversation never full of clothes, but she always looked charming and unlike every other woman in the place. More or less heedless of fashion, her evening gowns were usually one-piece Liberty velvets, square-necked, laced with cord from shoulder to hem, and the other mothers sensibly never attempted imitation.
‘Well, it’s just like her, you know,’ said James, his hands in his pockets, and except that we were all upset over the look on her face and the way she rolled billiard balls, there we had to leave it. The Lawrence girl could obviously have nothing to do with mother – the Lawrence girl was short and plump with round brown eyes and a ‘bright’ manner with men and was thought to be extremely pretty and ‘fetching’, and the seal of success was set upon her when people began to say that she would marry early. Mother called her ‘the Boarding-house Belle’ and said her social manner was Marble Arch.
And then we stopped arguing because Bessie put her head round the door to tell us that the baker had told cook there was skating on the Long Water, and we set off with a great clashing for Bushey Park.
‘Suppose we all got drowned,’ remarked Lalage, ‘how awful it would be for mother.’ She was probably following out a train of thought beginning with the wreath game and ending with mother and the County ball.
‘Puff!’ said James. ‘People don’t get drowned three at a time except at sea.’ But all the same we tossed up for one of us to remain on the path while the others were on the ice and I lost, and watched James and Lalage being precariously fitted to their wooden skates (it involved a nail being hammered through the heel and there was a tremendous to-do with straps) by one of that small crowd of shabby loafers who sprang up from nowhere when the ice held, and the moment James and Lalage had sailed away they became extremely witty and polite to each other, so I knew that they were being Charles II and Nell Gwyn, and had to console myself with being Rochester guying the scene on paper. Just as I had begun the first line (‘Oh damn these empty pleasures’) which I thought very strong, a kindly woman came up and asked me my name, and I said ‘Rochester’ – I didn’t mean to be impertinent, but I was getting interested – and what I was writing, and I said ‘A scurrilous lampoon upon the foibles of the age’, which was a line I had memorized from a large Stuart biography, and just then Charles II came a heavy purler on his behind and I hurried up to get a better view, while the woman, moving off, said to her companion, ‘That little Rochester girl’s nurse ought to be spoken to’.
And always in those winters there were parties to get ready for.
The nursery, too, was a good place to which to come back. It was haphazard, comfortable in no taste or style at all, and therefore a room to be used to the full. And on the walls were framed Christmas supplements, sentimental and largely Bavarian: warming, friendly, bad art that I have liked ever since!
CHAPTER IV
I
MY first glimpse of personal tragedy happened at a party, and was over James becoming, out of the blue, enamoured of a smaller child in golden curls and pink satin.
We had come in late, as usual, Lalage and I in leaf-green Liberty silk bound with gold cord and golden sandals on our feet. We were always beautifully clad, I remember, and the mothers were always trying to copy. James was in black velvet with a jacketless silk shirt, and looked like a small maître de ballet. Queer, how one remembers all one’s life details of place or dress or food if they were passed by, worn or eaten when something vital to oneself was happening. I can remember the sweets I was sucking when told of my father’s death: that we were walking under a sc
affolding in Sloane Square when mother first told us how babies were born; that on Mafeking night there were sponge cakes and ‘liquid chocolate’ for supper, and that it was just outside the Piccadilly tube that mother said to Lalage, ‘You really must try to like going to parties, lovie’.
The game (Oranges and Lemons) was held up while we were passed round, and quite soon we were having partners brought up for us to choose from. And James chose the pink satin and sat out a dance with her and was by her side for tea, and avoided my eye. And my heart stopped.
Nine sees trouble as a whole picture; it can’t be expected to warm to the knowledge of the perishable nature of pink satin, nor does it at nineteen; even at twenty-nine, I think,the bone and the hank of hair bulk larger than that final blow, the mental affinity.
I dramatized the future (which was, of course, to prevail unremittently). James leaving me … James no longer even liking me … James despising me. I left him no leg to stand on! One must face things. …
I sat about and snubbed the boys. I retreated to the hall and was ignominiously rescued by a daughter of the house and ‘taken upstairs’; she, at twenty, of no occupation, already taking refuge, poor wretch! in ‘having a way with children’, especially before the trickle of male guests, City friends of her father, a fact perfectly sensed by me, as children, all unsuspected, do. And after supper (orange and red jelly in real hollowed orange skins), the hostess and the daughter hunting us, and cries of ‘James, sing!’ and ‘Vere, dance!’ And we had to perform long duets from San Toy that, in an unguarded moment at home, we, with our retentive memories, had come out with after only having seen the play once, and listened twice to the score. And James, quite good in a Huntley Wright song (‘Scotchee man a great success, wears his legs in evening dress’), and myself in ‘La Belle Parisienne’ and the ladies’ maid song from The Country Girl (‘You must let her read a little or she’ll want to read a lot’), and the usual storm of applause and squeals of excitement, all of which had no significance for us whatsoever, except that we rather shrank from it than otherwise – we were so used to it, and did our turns with the accuracy of professionals.
And driving home in the cab, Lalage was buffer between James and me. We huddled back in our wraps as sulkily as opera stars. And after all, he had forgotten pink satin in a week, which enraged me for the waste of good emotion!
Lalage had no parlour tricks, and I don’t know when this fact first penetrated our understanding. We took it for granted that she was never called on to ‘do’ anything, and rather envied her for years. But I do remember (again!) every detail of the occasion when James and I first knew that she was unhappy about it.
The party was at the Kanes in their shrubbery’d house in an avenue and was a birthday affair to celebrate the appearance upon earth of Estelle, one of the spindling little girls, whose mother was determined that at least we should have no limelight that afternoon, and removed a sticky scarf crusted with discs of glass and six photograph frames and a lamp from the piano that Estelle might have music for her step dance. (What, by the way, is a step dance? Or what, rather, is a dance without steps?) In Estelle’s case it was a tying of a length of silk round her hips and a rushing into every corner in the room, there to bend and posture to the accompaniment of a vast deal of rattling and banging of a tambourine with a hand-painted picture of Vesuvius in eruption upon its face. By the time she had been at it for three minutes James was nearly hysterical, and I was pretty far gone. The audience of children passed via apathy and restlessness to spasmodic conversation, and a small boy in a green linen smock said loudly, ‘I mean to be a plumber’, and quite suddenly some tactless Miss piped ‘James! Vere!’ and they were all in an uproar at once, while our hostess, biting her lips, said how nice that would be.
It was while we were starting the ‘Alphabet Duet’ (‘Oh my lover you are clever, but you’ve never taught me yet’) that I missed Lalage from the massed circle of children on the floor, and managed to give James a special look. He broke off at once, said ‘Excuse me,’ and we ran into the hall.
She was crying, quite quietly, and wiping her eyes with her raspberry chiffon frock. We sat on either side of her, and I said, ‘Is it tummy or lavatory, or didn’t you get what you wanted at tea?’ And as she shook her head and hid her face deeper, I said, because I guessed in a flash, ‘Jamesey, she minds … about our performing, you know’, and James turned very red and almost shouted because he was so sorry, ‘Then we mustn’t do it any more’.
That was not to be always possible. Also, I think I knew that the declaration was no good to Lalage. She wasn’t out for sacrifice from us, but for a share of life for herself.
It was an uneasy cabful that turned in at our drive. This James and I agreed, was a case for mother, and when we had disposed of Lalage, we went to look for her.
She was dressing in pale amethyst velvet for the Shakespeare Reading at which she was to figure as Ophelia. The Readings were held once a month at the members’ houses in turn, and when the station cabs and Harkness’s flys gave out, the members often had to wait for their cab to ‘drop’ someone else before returning for themselves, and mother has sometimes picked up hair ornaments and pins and handkerchiefs (and once a bottle of heartburn tablets) off the fly’s musty floor, items that she would redistribute to their owners on arrival. Luckily, this evening it was the turn of our house to receive, and James and I started about Lalage at once, and had a long talk. Mother hugged us tight, and said, ‘She’s shy, like me’. And as we were leaving to go to supper, ‘I’m glad you realize about Lalage, and it’s sweet of you. She’s not a bit like you two, and … well, help her out all you can’.
She was making much of the business. The significance of that escaped us as we were making much of it ourselves. Proudly – we felt like positive parents – we strutted to the nursery.
After supper and bath we hung over the banisters and listened. The curates were awful as Horatio and Marcellus, and once some man lost his place, and we prompted him loudly. Mother was very sweet and appealing and true in the songs, though her voice was a mere thread. She, too, had no parlour tricks.
II
In November – it must have been early in the first week, as we had been busy all the morning in the garden after lessons supervising Sims making our guy – mother, hatless, in a fur jacket, came out, and there was something in the way in which she walked round the guy that prepared me for news slightly unwelcome. Half-heartedness and inattention wasn’t like her. Our parties on the Fifth were always events, ‘and what we spend on fireworks, worms wouldn’t believe’, mother used to say.
‘Mother! Come and sniff! He smells delicious, of potting-sheds and Sims’s trousers,’ shouted Lalage.
And then Penny rushed out sideways and was up the guy in a flash and crouched, glaring with pleasure and wearing his teeth outside, like a walrus.
‘Oh pick him off!’ Lalage shrieked, ‘if he learns to do that he’ll do it on the night and get his dear stripings singed.’
‘Well, he’ll flog up to town and order another pair,’ answered mother, ‘he’s a dressy beast, aren’t you, my stout?’ She picked him down, adding, ‘and to-morrow we’re all going to London to see grannyma.’
It was probably owing to the guy and Sims and Penny and mother being out with us there in the patchy frost in the garden, and that to-morrow was always a long way off, for James called out cheerfully, ‘Is that all?’ and Lalage asked what we should have for lunch. Mother answered, with apparent irrelevance, ‘We’ll have sandwigs before we start’, and, ‘afterwards we’ll go to Hamley’s and buy ourselves fairings’.
It was a wrench to leave the garden, next day, and we were all predisposed to resentment, a state of mind which mother made no attempt to soften. She just assumed we wouldn’t let her down and let it go at that.
III
We had had Vallant House described for us so often that our only sensation upon seeing it was one of surprise that it should be so familiar. Mother’s talent fo
r mimicry held good also over description and her pungent phrases one sentence would sometimes account for a whole room had engrained the house far more upon our imagination than would the most accurate inventory.
The hall: Raked by the Pater’s study … flights of beastly china cockatoos up the stairs.
The drawing-room: Oh, it could have been a beautiful room only the Mater ran to knick-knacks and china-cupboards and things one was always falling over or skidding on or knocking against.
The Mater’s bedroom: Dead. Just a bedroom. A hotel room.
The schoolroom: A draughty cupboard at the top of the house.
Or the unfinished phrase: I never saw the servants’ quarters at all in all the years I lived there … drainage bad … nobody seemed to mind. …
The butler admitted us, and mother’s face softened as she shook hands with him.
‘How are you, Hutchins?’ And the old man flushed and murmured and called her Miss Anne and then corrected himself, and his eye fell on us. It was a searching glance for all its brevity – it concentrated most upon Lalage – but we, or something else, seemed to have passed a test. Mother said, ‘Here they all are’, named us and told us ‘Hutchins is a very old friend of mine’, and James and Lalage and I put our hands into his – it held them all. And then began the ascent to the first floor past all those china cockatoos.
Mother asked, ‘How is her ladyship?’ and Hutchins suddenly and momentarily became another person and grimmed his lips and said that she ‘kept excellent health’, and we were shown into the drawing-room.
Lady Vallant certainly looked extremely well as she sat, erect, in her rich silks, the lace veil on her head falling to her shoulders, diamonds gleaming at neck and fingers. Perhaps the silk of her gown was a shade too bright – a deep rose colour, which her contained and tormented expression lightened sometimes by the curiously satyr-like look of faintly malicious amusement, didn’t seem to match. I can see her still so clearly as she was that afternoon, and I still think the key to her outward appearance lay in the word ‘sardonic’. As for the room she sat in, it was exactly to mother’s description except for an easel that she had forgotten to mention upon which was propped a woolly watercolour suggesting some talent-at-bay resorted to by a still unmarried great-aunt, and which to the nervous or maladroit constituted the greatest pitfall in the room. And Lady Vallant had a knack of inspiring nerves. …
A Harp in Lowndes Square Page 4