For the last seaside time we left Penny’s money for fish and milk, chose dolls and books and went all round the garden, knowing that when we returned at the end of September it would be entirely different because for two months it had lost touch with us, and had been pushing on its own private affairs unwatched. The garden always took two or three days to ‘come round’, and show us the alterations.
We went to picturesque, hideous, dear old Ramsgate and found it as usual smelling of hot asphalt, tar and fish, and I fell in love with a beach singer – one of six in sullied white, and one morning he gave me a kiss and James smacked his face, and ‘Uncle Tony’ said ‘Now then, sonny, who’re you pushing?’ which disgusted me, and we fled. We scuffed along in silence halfway towards Broadstairs and James once muttered ‘It’s abominable!’, and I, even then unable to jettison the adored, said ‘I liked it’, which was rather a lie, as nobody could possibly enjoy being kissed on a crowded beach littered with paper bags and lumps of gnawed nougat, and I knew that to save our Uncle Tony’s kiss I should first have to switch it over to surroundings of my own contrivance – say, the Marina Gardens at night. But James was desperately upset at the remark; he was, in that second, amply paid back for the pink satin episode which had so undermined me! And I think that it was at that exact moment in our green jerseys and sandshoes, within sight of Dumpton Gap and with a heat haze buzzing, that we realized that, when all was said, he bore a label called ‘boy’ and I another marked ‘girl’, and all it might be going to mean if we allowed it to. The impending school life contributed, for about things like that there is no free will, and the older you grow the more adhesively does the world expect you to fix your label to you, until a man and a woman can’t see each other for sex, and until, as a result, premiums are put upon those men and women who can produce the greatest amount of it. And the danger of all boys’ schools is that they can cause the young male thing to lose sight of the kind of person he was originally meant to be. He must scoff at all forms of beauty which are not of muscular origin: conceal any love of music (except for facetious instruments like the bassoon) together with any love of verse other than limericks, and above all hide any natural appreciation for colour and scent, and learn that one is soppy and the other a stink. He must read no book which has a woman in it because it is orientally assumed that his thoughts about her will be unclean, and his very great reward for conformity is the stunning yarn which grips and rattles and is chiefly occupied with revolvers and violence. He must remember never to allude to mother or sisters other than slightingly, and be prepared, if he should commit the sin of love for another boy, to be expelled.
I wonder if any school will ever have the courage to grant the small change of affection to the bewildered cravers of ten, eleven, twelve and thirteen, and to allow for the real necessity of superficial sentiment in the very young? But no! A kiss is beyond the pale. Better the other thing. Let it come to a head and then expel the lad.
Later, tension is relaxed at the University, and he makes a belated effort to scramble back into his personality, which perhaps accounts for the number of available sets; the brawn set, the swot set, the religious, Swinburne or womanist set. But I suppose that (like British justice) the system is for the greatest good of the greatest number, and there is no getting over the fact that the present-day scoffers at the Old School Tie are, on the whole, detrimentals of one kind or another, sitting on a very vat of sour grapes; people you could not count on in a national crisis, or wholly smile upon your daughter marrying. …
James had always disliked cricket but played it with assiduity and I am glad to remember that, if any point of herd-etiquette arose which found him unprepared, he had the sense to write home at once for hints (mother had not had brothers of her own for nothing) and that Lalage and I backed her up and could nearly always be counted on to be brusque and caustic and common sense with him.
CHAPTER VI
I
I CAN remember to this day our last hours in our old home, and the almost unendurable unhappiness we went through. In the case of James and myself, we were not only coping with obvious grief at leaving the house and garden, but with that oversensitized notion of our betrayal of inanimate things that we had always shared. It is the same emotion in reverse that, all our lives, we have experienced when visiting any historic castle or old country house; the feeling that the past is so close to us and is holding its scenes and secrets from us. It’s maddening! It also gives one a feeling of mental suffocation for which, I suppose, the reason is that the past of the rooms and grounds is so photographed on the ether that one’s own personality is blurred, like the operator’s hand when some awkward gesture sends it across the magic-lantern picture.
I only know that James and I have had to crawl back, defeated, over the grass of many a ducal park to the waiting motor coach leaving the rest of the party giggling and exclaiming in the halls and galleries of the house, and once, James caught sight of a famous seat over the low, flint park wall and said ‘That’s no good. I can’t go in’. The mansion, quite kindly, had conveyed that he and it had no point of contact. So he sat and smoked in the coach and told the party he had hurt his foot.
On the last morning in our home we all scattered to have a final private view of every room and every landmark in the garden. The idea was unfortunately common to all three, and when we encountered each other we were cross and made ludicrous excuses. I met Lalage suddenly round the lilac bush on the drive and she said ‘I thought I’d dropped a pencil’, and when James knocked against me in the box-room he announced angrily that he ‘came up for something he’d forgotten, and to avoid tripping over the trunks’.
Sims, instead of bending over radishes, had come in his best clothes to say good-bye, and stood in the hall ‘like a person’, which was intolerable, and in the kitchen a row of graduated ovals across the wall under the house-bells marked the place where hung the great plated dish-covers. In the bare drawing-room which had held so many lamplit Shakespeare readings I went, and declaimed:
‘Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death
The memory be green …’
because I wanted to leave the room something to be going on with.
We were all astonished at the send-off we were given at the station. Everyone we knew seemed to be there: the contemporaries of a dozen nurseries, ‘the little Fishers’ (who always had a monster cracker at their Christmas parties), the spindling Kanes from the house in the avenue down which they would presently stroll back to lunch (that was a pang), and numerous others who, to us, represented their surroundings far more than themselves, and whose names I can’t repeat even now without visions of hoops in Bushey Park, skates on the gravel pits, Morris curtains and hand-painted door-panels, dancing class and Easter-egg hunts with their glitter of silver foil among the daffodils. And among the mothers stood all those women with whom our mother, appreciative and affectionate always, had never quite succeeded in establishing that intimacy – of ‘running in’ and domestic confidence, that they wistfully desired. Most of the husbands, bar the City men, were there as well, except those who had gone off earlier to golf at Sudbrook Park. Even a curate appeared (Marcellus), and when he caught sight of mother, he wheeled in a perverse agony of shyness and began to examine the tin advertisements of the Owl and Waverley pen, Owbridge’s Lung Tonic and a monster pod of Carter’s peas, and when mother took his hand, he began to cry, and his nose, Lalage said, ‘turned the most lovely shade of mauve’.
Poor Marcellus! He’d loved her and we never guessed. Had mother? It would be like her to know, to pity, and to continue to imitate his sermons, which indeed were pretty fatuous.
And then the vicar came on the platform, looking, as usual, like Savonarola in a top-hat a size too large, and put his hand on her shoulder, and said, ‘I should like us to say a little prayer,’ and mother said, ‘Oh Mr. Royce, please don’t let’s!’ and he laughed with grim affection and said she was always an undisciplined person, and blessed us all.
And then Lalage and I seemed to be being kissed by the most unlikely people, who apparently felt that a final and imminent departure would shield them from reprisals, as a mob loots the ruins after a fire. Little Freddie Hayter burst into tears as he tiptoed to reach Lalage’s face and asked her to marry him, and Lalage, suddenly affected, began to cry as well and sniffed that she ‘hadn’t time to’. Another worm i’th’ bud! Poor freckled Freddie, who, all those years, was to us but a covert coat, gaiters, picking up chestnuts, feeding the deer and a nurse with a cleft palate; and here he was, ‘a person’ for a matter of minutes.
Everyone gave us presents; you would have thought we were going on a voyage instead of forty minutes down the line to London. To crowd to the train window and see them all left on the platform, to hear the jingle of harness from one of Harkness’s flys, to glide past the book-stall from where so many numbers of Little Folks had been put aside for us was so painful on the grand scale that we had no sensation left, and were able to behave like ordinary passengers.
James had put a penny in the slot of the revolving gipsy, and she leered and whirled and stopped at a section marked ‘Riches and wealth’, which galled him, but he had spent the penny because, so he told us, he meant to come back in a year, and if her finger was still at Riches and Wealth he would know that nobody had used the machine since himself. The idea was comforting; we felt we still had a stake in the station.
II
And the next thing we knew was that James went off to school at Eastbourne, and that Mother, Lalage and I were settled in a little house just off Campden Hill.
Before he left, one thing happened which none of us had foreseen. Lady Vallant sent for James. We had forgotten all about her for months, and now the Vallant feeling washed over us again like a wave. On the face of it, it was a reasonable request, and a proper one, but our grandmother had a knack of selecting only those moments of social fitness which happened to suit her private book, and of skipping any sort of continuity of family feeling or obligation. She had not advised, commented upon or helped with the move: she had sent no line of welcome to await us in our new little hall, and now she was coolly commandeering James, whose very hours with us were numbered.
He refused to go, truculently and with indignation. Mother, wasting no time, asked him to as a favour to herself, which of course settled it. I offered to accompany him, and was dissuaded. Lady Vallant, it seemed, detested uninvited guests, and had even been known (here was a new item) to refuse to ring for more hot water if bidden guest arrived at five instead of four-thirty when the hostess had had her own cup of tea; had often refused her own daughters, ‘parched with shopping’ as Mother put it, the dregs of the teapot as it stood.
‘But, Mater, I don’t mind if it is off the boil.’
‘No, no, dear. Leave the pot alone. It is stewed.’
‘I don’t mind that, either.’
‘Leave it alone.’
Mother, sub-acidly imitating the scene.
‘Well, I think she’s mad,’ said James daringly, for which Lalage and I were grateful to him.
‘Oh no, she’s not.’ (After all, mother was, incredibly, her daughter.) Then, side-tracking James, ‘She’ll be quite nice to you’. And, with a little, bitter smile, ‘Granny likes men’.
And so the man, in his first bowler hat and new over coat, went to call at Vallant House.
I was uneasy. I hung about to waylay him, and where he came home at six o’clock, I saw how right I had been. His eyes were too bright and his face was anxious. He threw his bowler on to the settle and shovelled me into the dining-room, shutting the door.
‘That’s a beastly house,’ he began.
‘How … specially, I mean?’ I seemed to know that he hated it quite apart from the fact that it was the home of Lady Vallant. He was at a loss: plunging about for reasons.
‘I can’t stand the stairs. They’re beastly cold. I said so to Hutchins. He said he hadn’t noticed it, but he looked pretty pasty himself.’
It was no use to expect any sort of coherent story; James was too busy sorting impressions, and when he’d come out with them, discovering that putting them into words rendered them capable of other interpretations, so about the staircase, he added, ‘I suppose he was cold, too’. He brooded morosely, and then dived a hand into his pocket and threw a wad of bank notes on to the table.
‘Ten pounds. She gave it me. I didn’t know how to refuse.’
‘No.’ After all, we’d all taken money from her in our time and under mother’s eye, at that. But – ten pounds!
He wove his neck in his collar. ‘She kissed me’, and looked out of the window and turned scarlet. ‘She asked if I liked her dress, and of course I had to say yes, and then she showed me photographs of herself and said I should have seen her twenty years ago … and then she began about all of us. She seems to take rather a special interest in Lalage, for some reason, and wanted to know if she was what she called “robust”, and began to talk about her being so unlike us. And then she started on mother.’ Here James broke off, listening. I said, ‘It’s all right, she’s upstairs, reading. Go on and be quick.’
‘She said she supposed that we were all terrified of her, and that mother had made us hate her. …’
‘What?’ I almost shrieked.
‘Shut up! She’ll hear. And I said we weren’t, and she hadn’t and that mother very seldom spoke of her … she seemed a bit flummoxed at that.’
‘Jamesey, that was clever of you!’
He shook his head. ‘Wasn’t. I mean, I didn’t mean, to score off her. I was just doing the polite and it came out that way.’
‘And then what?’
He frowned. ‘She began to talk pi-jaw.’
‘Pi-jaw? Lady Vallant!’
‘It was a bit thick, from her. You see, she doesn’t know we know a bit about her already.’ That was a point, and we sat savouring it. ‘She showed me a book of hymns she’d written in eighteen-seventy-something.’
‘Hymns!’ Somehow it didn’t fit in, to us, even then I added at random, ‘What were they like?’
‘Awful. One didn’t go right when you said it, and the rhymes were “save” and “love” … you know. There was one about
“The evil that we do, O Lord,
Shall be washed white as snow.”’
He thought again. ‘And she asked me if I didn’t think so too, and of course I said I didn’t know, and she said she knew I should be ‘very good’ and talked about “Gawd”.
‘I know that,’ I chipped in. ‘Mother always told us, she did. She called fivepence “fippence”, too.’
‘And then Hutchins and the footman came in to clear tea and draw the curtains, and she was nice to them.’
This human gleam had evidently made an impression on James. Not a pleasant one.
‘How?’ I asked.
‘Oh, she asked for her handscreen and grinned at Hutchins and said she was a trouble, and she was sure I’d show myself out to save him coming up the basement stairs.’
‘Was Hutchins pleased?’
James looked at me, his ruddy little poll shorn like an orange against the impending school. ‘I think he hated it.’ His eyes widened. ‘You see, he knew she was showing off. She’d forgotten about lunch … that day.’
‘And did you show yourself out?’
‘No fear! I would have, but Hutchins was waiting in the hall. He “hoped I’d had a pleasant time” and sent messages to mother.’
There was nothing else to tell or to hear. We should chew on James’s visit at our leisure. And then we remembered the money. James said ‘We’ll tear it up’. I said, ‘You can’t do that. You’d better keep back one pound in case mother asks you if she gave you a tip,’ and, resentful of being robbed of even a portion of his gesture, he had to agree. It was early September but there was a fire in the grate, more because mother, on no evidence, mistrusted the former tenants and wanted to ‘air’ the rooms, and we tossed the whole wad of notes on to the flames. It was impo
ssible not to be thrilled. …
At dinner, mother didn’t even allude to money in connection with James’s visit. He told her what he chose, shooting glances at me for guidance. He selected what I myself would have: Lady Vallant’s photographs, her dress, Hutchins’s messages, and the hymns. It was passing off very successfully, I was thinking, until I happened to look at mother when James had got to the hymn book. She took a sip or two of water and the glass was shaking in her hand. It was too late even to kick James’s shin under the table; and then I saw he hadn’t noticed. He sat eating his roast mutton and elaborating the awfulness of our grandmother’s verse.
III
Lalage and I went to a small private school on Campden Hill. We were happy there and never overworked, and my memory of it will always be bound up with lilac, may trees, laburnum, syringa and the plays of Euripides in an eternal warmth and impossible summer. The headmistress, a gentle, uncertificated woman with a flexible nose and a bun, had a passion for school plays, and selected the Greek drama as being the most respectable, whereby we spent a large portion of nearly every term declaiming about curious and bloody vengeances, morbid elopements with a wordy fellow called Death, and singularly uncivil passages between sons and aged fathers.
A Harp in Lowndes Square Page 6