Several incidents marked that, our initial visit to the old woman, the first domestic enough.
We filed down to the dining-room and to a wonderful luncheon – it began with Palestine soup and ended with hothouse fruit. As we had all, at mother’s instigation, fortified ourselves heavily in advance, with sandwiches, this was a set-back that made James shoot a glance of reproach at her as he reluctantly refused salmi of pheasant. She accepted his look with a tiny shrug and smile behind which lurked irony. Lady Vallant, sunk in her carved armchair, said, ‘I hope they are enjoying their food, Anne’, and mother answered, ‘It would be impossible not to, Mater’, and looked at her plate.
Quite soon after that, the footman, sidestepping to avoid Hutchins who was pouring wine for mother, nearly dropped a fork, but retrieved it deftly. Lady Vallant said, ‘You’ve spilt some gravy on the cloth’.
‘No, my lady.’
‘Don’t contradict me.’
My heart was beginning to thump and I shot a glance along our ranks. Mother’s lips were compressed but she mustered a warming smile for me. Lalage’s eyes were beginning to fill, and James’s face had flushed scarlet.
‘My lady, there is no gravy on the cloth.’
‘Leave the room.’
And then James (the man of party) slid off his chair and pattered up to the old woman, knuckles drumming on her chair-arm. There was luckily no time to consider what mother’s feelings must have been. It might have stopped him. It might …
‘Lady Vallant, it wasn’t his fault. And it was a clean fork, anyway,’ and James took the thing from the man’s hand and held it up. The old woman just looked at him and said plangently, ‘Go to your seat’. There was a faint flush on her cheek which we put down to temper. Then she swerved to mother. ‘Why do they call me Lady Vallant? Tell them I don’t like it.’
Mother met it, said adequate things about Lady Vallant being seen by us so seldom … didn’t quite realize … and that passed, except that when conversation was resumed, Lady Vallant steered it to servants and said ‘I keep them on board wages or else they eat their heads off’ – this, with Hutchins in the room, immobile at the sideboard.
It was our first experience of heartlessness.
As we were filing out of the dining-room, James said urgently, ‘Can we see the kitchen?’ Luckily Lady Vallant didn’t hear; as leader she was already halfway up the staircase. It was then, I suppose, that mother let us know that she had never seen the basement, either.
After this, it seemed to be a more or less understood thing that Vallant House was to be included in our London visits, slipped between shopping, calls at other large houses, on cousins, old friends of mother’s and Lalage’s godmother who lived in Sloane Street. We all cheerfully hated the Vallant House visits. It was about the liveliest and most wholesome emotion we were ever to feel for the old lady. It wasn’t only the behaving well, for that applied on any call, although at Vallant House we three deliberately threw in more of behaviour, unrelaxed and purposeful, than we attempted elsewhere; it was a watching of our grandmother’s face, a listening and preparation for her to say something hurtful to mother; it was, above all, the realization that in this house, of which one hour discomfited and oppressed our spirit, mother had lived for eighteen years.
As time went on it seemed that, of us three, I was to be odd man out. I didn’t register with Lady Vallant; it was upon James and Lalage that she concentrated, if you could call it that, for even we could sense that she didn’t understand children or value them.
We argued it out in the nursery: James, of course, as the only boy of the family, and Lalage, because she wasn’t in the least like either of us. It seemed a very neat and obvious arrangement.
And all those years she was clever with us, as clever as a woman can be who isn’t aware that she is pitted against antagonism and hasty, immature prejudice.
She began to give us money. At Christmas and after the visits we got into the habit of accepting five-shilling pieces and sovereigns. Apart from the fact that most children are mercenary little brutes we saw no way of refusing that wouldn’t recoil on mother. Also, the action seemed to humanize Lady Vallant. And mother would stand aside watching the delicately bony fingers doling out coins with a faintly sarcastic smile.
CHAPTER V
I
FATHER died two years later; he was run over by a train and killed instantly. Ironically enough he, who rather hated cats, lost his life trying to save a kitten which had bounded out of the waiting-room and jumped over the platform as the train drew in.
Father lay in his coffin in our billiard-room: we could see its shape from the hall as we went up and downstairs. Mother suggested, ‘Don’t you want to go in and see him?’ and we all said no. She thought it over. ‘Better try, learn to face everything’, then, with arms round us all, ‘he looks just the same’.
We filed in, James first, and stood in a row trying not to tremble and feel sick, but we made ourselves take a look, and a long one. The room was banked with wreaths and I have dreaded the smell of Madonna lilies ever since.
Even Lady Vallant had sent a wreath.
We came out and tried to avoid mother but she was waiting, indomitable, in her grotesque crapes and lawn (black-streamered bonnet for out of doors, stiff white cap for the house) that convention decreed, and James found his voice and of sheer embarrassment asked quite at random after the kitten. ‘He saved the little thing, Jamesey.’ It was, I am pretty sure, a loving lie; she excelled at them.
Mother, always reasonable where public opinion was concerned, still refused to take us to the funeral, defending her point of view to intimates with all the Vallant obstinacy and her own spirit. Colloquial, flippant, paining plenty of those good, real dears whom the curates called ‘sweet women’ (and who remained loyal and lovable in spite of it!).
‘Funerals are so dam’ bleak … no. Let ’em remember him as he was … Oh, one sends for the clergyman at these times as one would for any other tradesman … One’s body’s a great problem; one ought to disintegrate into the ether. I do think they’ve managed these things so badly.
Nor were we put into mourning. We all saw that if you have really been fond of anybody and if black clothes mean grief, then to come out of black at the end of a year is a betrayal. Mother bore the ugly brunt herself, and standing in front of the glass, exclaimed to us all, ‘I look exactly like Mrs. Nickleby!’ And so, we chaffed her and laughed together against closed blinds and in the sultry smell of lilies. Fathers have had worse passings.
Some woman friend, low-voiced, murmured to her, ‘If you could only cry’, and mother said, ‘That sort of thing gets one nowhere. I’ve been all through that’. She didn’t know I’d overheard. It haunted me for weeks. What she did know was that any tears from her would have knocked down our defences. And on the day of the funeral she sent us off to Kingston to a matinée, to see Miss Valli Valli in Alice in Wonderland. ‘If the servants or Bessie ask where you’ve been, tell them for a walk; they wouldn’t understand. And you’ll have to go into the pit or you may meet a lot of the kids from the village and their mothers Take care of ’em, Jamesey,’ and mother, very whitefaced and crape from head to foot, took up her Prayer Book in a black-gloved hand.
It was our first outing alone. In the road at the side entrance we were entertained by a man with a disc of black felt who said that he was Queen Victoria, a nun and Napoleon, and later on a quavering woman sang a song from The Country Girl and we joined in the chorus – it was one of my usual solos at parties, and the poor thing got the words wrong and muffed the time and took the final A an octave lower, and we thought it so awful that Lalage gave her her lucky threepenny bit. James bought the metal tokens and ran and found us good places, brandished us to them and said to a stout mother, ‘Will you move up just a little? I have my ladies with me.’
In the interval Lalage said quite suddenly, ‘Are we orphans, now?’ Altogether impossible not to swell with assorted importances.
Father’s
death left us very badly off, a fact mother circled round with us for a considerable time – she had her own bearings to get. It was the stoppage of the order for Liberty patterns of velvets for her gowns which first put me, personally, on the track of the situation. I kept it to myself for days, it seemed so unbelievable. From this to telling James and Lalage, and from that to assuming we were penniless was, for us, the work of a moment. It ended by James and me sneaking up to London to earn money. We left Lalage at home; we both felt that seamy sides weren’t for her, and it was essential not to frighten mother by a wholesale departure. Also, it was to be Lalage’s job to tell mother we were out for the afternoon planning a surprise for her.
There were four shillings in my money-box and one and six in James’s tin post-office that we were saving up for (me) a box of ‘chocolate bricks’ that I wanted because I liked the grouping of the words, and (James) for a lady’s hat covered with sequins which he’d seen in a second-hand shop we had passed on the afternoon walk. He would probably never have been allowed to keep it, but he craved for it with the unreasoning and mysterious urge of childhood.
We rehearsed at the end of the garden behind the apple trees, where in autumn we pulled delicious dowdy russets and found, half buried in dead leaves at the roots of the one nut bush, great acid-green ‘cookers’ which had thudded down during the night. Lalage and I had cut up an old hat we’d found in the boxroom, and tried for an hour to be nuns and Napoleon, but the results were awful – we couldn’t do it quickly enough and didn’t know the twists, and it has given us a respect for pavement performers that we have never lost. Lalage hung over a branch with her hair starred with apple blossom and was too envious and interested to laugh. Only once did we sight success and that was when I folded the felt into a shape that distinctly recalled the Princess of Wales’s bonnet, but when I tried to repeat it I found the bonnet was an accident, and I couldn’t. So we just fell back upon selections from our usual party programmes.
We managed to get to the station without any set-back. Sometimes when at a loose-end in the afternoons we would saunter down there to watch trains come in and put pennies in the slot machines and re-examine the coloured picture of hell that hung in the first class waiting-room – apparently second and third class passengers were considered to be saved, so that our casual appearance on the platform attracted no notice, and we even got a carriage to ourselves, and were so wrought-up by this and by nervousness that we forgot to look out of the window for such landmarks as ‘the Gregory’s garden’ and ‘Miss Puce’s cottage’, and for that moment when the line took such a curve that we could see the engine and half the train as well, and which we, for some still unfathomed reason, called ‘the race’.
At Waterloo we had enormous difficulty in finding our way to the theatre district; father and mother had seen to all that part for us at pantomime time, and we had to take a growler to the nearest pit queue, spending on it our return fare and trying not to think what would happen if we didn’t make it. There were of course ‘the relations’; there was as a last resort, Hutchins, about whom we both felt that he was capable of collusion … ‘Unless, of course,’ worried James, ‘it wouldn’t be fair to borrow it out of his board wages’. Board wages certainly sounded bleak, and for some time we all believed it meant sleeping on a plank.
At the first theatre we stopped at, the play began at two o’clock and the queue was already heaving and shuffling out of sight up the gallery stairs, but eventually we landed in the Haymarket, and we got out and paid the cabby and faced the line of theatregoers. We had long ago decided that, if nervous, we were to remember they were only people and not a race apart; that probably they, too, had emptied money-boxes to get there at all; that they couldn’t get at us because they were in line, whereas we could cut away at any minute, so James just hummed our key in my ear and we began, and nothing happened at all for what seemed like half an hour and was probably half a minute. The queue seemed shock-proof. Things came and sang and contorted and twisted at them and they just looked about and read the Pall Mall Gazette and the Girls’ Own Paper. And then, quite suddenly, individuals began to take us in and listen to a line, and speak to their companions, and stare and murmur, and so it spread. We had applause, which I have since had reason to believe unusual; on the other hand, we didn’t get half the money we could have collected, because of our clothes. There was a shyness, an uncertainty when we passed along the line with one of cook’s smaller pudding-basins. There were apologetic grins, and young men turning red, and one man gave me half a crown and took his hat off to me to be on the safe side.
We took eighteen shillings, and coming home we were both sick with excitement and fatigue out of different windows. I had glanced up at the theatre hoardings and saw the name of Cosmo Furnival and thought it had brought us luck. Mother and father had once gone to town to see him act, and it seemed to make the theatre and side street comforting. Mother must have stepped on the very pavement we had ourselves; in that building there were people father had spoken to for tickets and programmes. …
We poured our takings on to the table in front of mother and told her everything; we had agreed that, as this was to be the means by which we kept the family, it was useless to hedge. And then, of course, mother, hugging us both, explained how impossible it was, and having done that repaid us by going into the whole question of our future.
We were, it seemed, able to ‘scrub along’, which was unsatisfactory – we preferred sensational contrasts and could willingly have adopted Little Nellish rags where the coming reduction of pocket-money and other things was merely humdrum and exasperating. We left the dining room and sat round the drawing-room fire which a capricious spring wind was causing to smoke a little, and the incandescent burner to curtsy and whistle. Mother was forcing herself to tell us everything at one blow, shelving her natural reserve and that superimposed code by which Victorian parents concealed facts however vital or trivial from their children. Therefore she blurted:
‘I’m afraid that it’ll mean no Rugby or University for you, Jamesey. Will you mind … awfully?’
I don’t think she realized that it is useless to ask anyone whether the deprivation of an untested experience will disappoint them; again, in the Victorian manner, she was talking to the only male of her family from the point of view that ‘all the Vallants went to Rugby’. James understood at once that he was unable to do something that the world considered essential, and looked solemn for the sake of appearances, and to match mother’s tone of voice and then, answering the expression on her face, ‘Of course not. I don’t care’.
She said, ‘But of course you’ll have to go to school’.
‘Away?’
‘I’m ’fraid so. You see,’ and here mother came out with one of her indiscretions, ‘if one doesn’t go to a decent school, one’s apt to turn into a Bunthorne.’
He cocked an appreciative ear. ‘Howell and James?’ Lalage and I were concentrating solely on velvet coat and cap and floppy ties. Until quite twenty years old we failed to assimilate the implications of Bunthornism, just as it took Lalage twenty-five years to realize that the Mock-turtle wasn’t a rather dear beast created by Carroll, but an elaborate and mundane joke about soup. But mother pulled herself up. ‘I mean that it isn’t good for you, Jamesey, to live with three lorn females.’
‘But I like lorn females!’
‘Duckie, I know you do, bless you! but you’ll like to meet chaps of your own age.’
It was to be, we saw. And as we sat toasting our shins and accepting it, mother after a longish pause, said, ‘Would you three mind awfully if we left this place?’
That was brass tacks with a vengeance. We could find nothing to say. Mother hurriedly started upon reasons: house too large now – cutting down servants – garden too large – Sims’s wages – later, if James went to St. Paul’s School, saving of fares as he would be a day boy – It was all devilishly plausible. Protest, even argument, was silenced because we all knew that she hated the
house and the village – it was typical that she called house, garden and environs ‘this place’. I forget which one of us, struggling with catastrophe and embarrassment, faltered a query as to the future of Penny, to be instantly overwhelmed with reassurance. And later when we settled in London there were the cousins to make friends with. That meant ‘the Seagrave kids’, children of Sophia, mother’s elder sister, and ‘the Verdunes’, offspring of Aunt Emmeline, and why mother lined them up as an inducement I don’t know. I think she was too disoriented to be clever about everything, that night. We three assumed tragically and instantly that we were to leave home at the end of the week. Actually, we lived in our house for another year.
II
That summer holiday was memorable as being the last one we should pack for from home. Next summer, it seemed, we should not be able to afford a holiday owing to the expense of the move and James’s school fees. To us it meant that we were watching cook cutting sandwiches for the last time ever on that table in that kitchen. Future cooks and sandwich-cutting, we all felt, wouldn’t be the same to the table in a strange kitchen. And indeed I have often thought that the susceptibilities of furniture and china have never been sufficiently allowed for by families. Even a much-used saucepan must have its dreary little memories when put into the dustbin at last, and as for chairs! Is it inconceivable that, apart from their feeling for their room and their owners, the tree-life persists in them? Have not seeds buried with mummies for two thousand years sprouted under the very eye of the excavator? You cannot live with a thing and use it without humanizing it to a certain extent, and those men who bluffly announce that their pipe is their ‘friend’ have hit upon a truth more subtle than they know; and perhaps those women who (always contemptuously) get called ‘slaves to their household goods and chattels’ are only, in their turn, more unconsciously susceptible to the dormant life in oak, mahogany and walnut?
A Harp in Lowndes Square Page 5