The Seagrave girls received under the eye of Aunt Sophia. They wore pale, bright satin and gold tissue roses in the corsage, and Beryl had an unexpected wreath the size of a crumpet pinned above her frizzed fringe, and their matching satin shoes were very long and pointed and later in the evening turned up and grey, and when a new name was announced, they shouldered forward giving an unsupported impression of struggling through a hedgerow, and shook hands grippingly and with hoots of laughter. And there was a tray of programmes from which pink and blue pencils dangled, clashing, and the inevitable moment when they became hopelessly snarled and had to be rent asunder by the butler. And halfway through the evening the leads wore down to stubs and all future assignations were totally unreadable, which led to a great deal of disappointment, and occasionally to sighs of deliverance.
And then the Verdunes arrived and stood there surveying a, to them, familiar scene with sardonic grins before beginning to set about the organization of their evening, which they did with efficiency and humour and entire lack of scruple. There was no absence of finish about the Verdunes; they could ‘put on their clothes’, which had what the French describe as chien without laying themselves open to the tuttings of chaperons, and it is an undoubted fact that some people have what call ‘smart faces’. The Seagraves never succeeded in suggesting other than overgrown schoolgirls, and were Barbara said, guaranteed to make a four-guinea hat look like twelve-and-eleven.
II
We stood together, James and Lalage and I, and took it all in. James was in his first dinner jacket; I was in mauve chiffon, Greekishly cut, with golden sandals (from Burnett’s, in Chandos Street – our one extravagance), and Lalage in sheer white silk embroidered with silver leaves to her silver feet. Because we were, as usual, in no fashion at all, I suppose it succeeded. Also, we were a novelty to that room. Certainly I, personally, had a good time that night which was not, I found, to be counted upon at future family balls. James as an attractive young male of course made his way, and Lalage gravely didn’t care. Whether dancing or listening she contrived, I thought, to look like a soul in a roomful of bodies. …
Aunt Emmeline appeared and James said, ‘Who’s the Destroyer?’ and had to be reminded, and indeed she suggested one; handsome, business-like, in iron grey with graceful lines, and potentially lethal. She took, I saw, not the faintest notice of her daughters: she was just there. And then it occurred to me that mother was not; struck me, in spite of the fact that for days I had known she had not meant to come … we accepted it, as usual, took it on its face value as being yet another of her quiet intentions towards our independence and social sturdiness. Maids and chaperonage were financially ruled out, for us. So be it. It must be right or she couldn’t have acquiesced … we were poor relations. There could be, I suddenly realized, no ‘coming out’ or ‘season’ for Lalage and me. If we should achieve a coming out or coming of age ball it would be because the dates dovetailed with a Seagrave or Verdune début. I didn’t mind for myself, but for Lalage, who apparently didn’t care at all.
Luckily one can get through a lot of thinking in a very few seconds, for the habit of unsuitable reflection is, in me, ineradicable. I have never been able to lose myself entirely in the purely social scene, and am, moreover, liable to sudden desires to leave it if only for ten minutes. At that point I was, for some reason, mentally reviewing the Verdune’s schoolroom, and wondering if they had sat there discussing the dance that afternoon, and whether their shoes fitted, and if – a favourite speculation that has unaccountably pursued me through life – the fact of eating the same food at supper, at the identical minute, with complete strangers, created any bond, physical, psychic or psychologic – even chemical! – between them, and if so, whether, quite unaware, they took on ever so faintly any of each other’s characteristics? The thought of being united, mystically or materially to, say, Sir Henry Irving through a caviare sandwich or a cup of artichoke soup is not without its points!
And at this stage in my musings, Aunt Sophia swept by and droned, ‘Oh, you picturesque mite! Quite a Constable.’ She probably meant Reynolds or Greuze, but all Old Masters were the same Old Master to her; she had a knack of getting the shape of compliments, combined with complete inaccuracy of detail.
‘She means you look like three poplars and a puddle,’ hissed James, suffocating with laughter.
One thing at least I learnt at the dance, and it was that in any ballroom, the alliances of the schoolroom are blown into air, and even friendship between girls is in abeyance. It was not even smiled upon to talk to them about immediate topics, and as for resuming any interesting discussion …! The discovery daunted and depressed me it was, I knew, a social attitude that neither James, Lalage nor I was built for. We were eternally interested in people irrespective of social considerations or personal advantages. A fatal characteristic, it appeared. Later, we learnt to recognize, accept, and slough it.
I remember that at some dance where James early discovered ennui, he rambled down to the kitchen and helped the maids wipe glasses for half an hour, and talked, wrapt, with the cook about a play they had both admired, while many a time have Lalage and I sneaked upstairs to gossip with any old nurse the family retained. And it wasn’t empty programmes, either. The old women soothed us, and the reality of their overcrowded bed-sitting rooms was a very tangible thing. And we sat, huddled in our satins and silks, and had long, comfortable snobbish talks about the Royal family (and were pulled up uncommonly short if we made slips and muddled Tecks and Fifes, or confused, say, Chatsworth with Haddon Hall). And a brew of tea or cocoa followed, with toddlings to the cupboard and a setting out of a bright canister. Any fool can offer you champagne. But if you can win a lonely, diffident old woman, living in her memories, to give you of her tea, then and not till then have you triumphed.
Or James and I would edge away and get in a few turns at a music-hall and then return to the ballroom forty-five minutes later, humming ‘Wot cheer me ole brown son, ’OW ARE YER?’ and lose it in ‘The Passing of Salome’, and find the dance still wonderfully ‘as before’ and nobody one penny the wiser. Sometimes we would even mark off spaces in our programmes to remind each other of the time.
I still have a ball card inscribed:
10 Harry Champion
11 Marie Lloyd
12 Cinquevalli
But wonderfully soon Lalage and I ceased to be novelties to dance hostesses, and even James couldn’t always help us out.
The shynesses of the later teens are forgotten by most women and Lalage’s agony of embarrassment on being asked which dance she could spare and finding herself saying ‘Let’s have “A Hundred Thousand Kisses”,’ would now be merely comic. My shyness at first took the form of positive aphasia at the subjects men expected one to talk about. In those days it was draughts, the heat, the band and the dances of other hostesses. In these days it is perversion, cocktails, negro actors and adultery, and I’m open to conviction as to the relative monotony of either. But at least, to-day, if men and women go to dances, they go to dance and not to get themselves married.
Sometimes one got kissed behind screens or under palms. This usually meant that the fiery lover had temporarily exhausted the floor, the heat and the Eton and Harrow, and was obeying nature in her curious ‘abhorrence’ of a vacuum. When this happened, one of three courses was open to you. You either moved off, conscientiously wiping the kiss off your cheek (the Edwardian usually aimed badly) with your kid glove and wondering if you were a fallen woman who might be described as ‘who did’; or you were quite preposterously thrilled, and lived over the episode all night, until the morning revealed the fact that you not only did not remember the young man’s name but had never caught it at all; or you said ‘Shall we tell The Parents to-night?’ which was, according to the Verdunes, how the second Seagrave girl secured her husband. Good manners were his downfall. Polite to the last, he stood at the altar, unfailingly courteous he accompanied her for a month to Switzerland, chivalrous to the end became th
e father of three daughters.
I wonder how many dead melodies drift round those dusty chandeliers, setting them remotely tinkling in a thousand dismantled homes from which the daughters are married and gone, the last guest sped, and a To Let board lashed to the balcony … they have served their turn, and our gratitude cuts them up into ungainly maisonettes, by which, haply, a civil servant falls heir to the sewing-maid’s room and a resting actress sprawls and smokes in the sacrosanct study of one’s very uncle. And what the house must suffer one doesn’t like to think.
III
It was mother and James who were indignant when invitations to Lalage and myself began to taper off. For ourselves we didn’t care; I because I early saw the business for what it was, and was (and still am) liable to be overcome with laughter at that exact moment in sentiment, pseudo or actual, when the only permitted expression is seriousness, and Lalage because over-many outside contacts confused and distressed her. The triviality of social exchanges would never be of the stuff of life to her. It was said by exasperated matrons, in implied relation to the bouncing, vigorous but unmarried charms of their own daughters, that she lacked something, ‘I don’t know what’.
I did. It was not that Lalage lacked, but that she possessed some quality of the spirit which the thunder of dance bands drives out of the room. A Verdune dared to say to me, with the freemasonry of age, sex and what she took for granted to be a common aim, ‘Looking like a very beautiful lost soul at dances doesn’t go down very well, does it?’
Some man a little more perceptive, said to James, ‘Your elder sister is very difficult to stop looking at’.
James was interested and saw to it that the theme was elaborated. His friend added, ‘There’s something about her eyes. It’s as though she were remembering an injustice.’ And that man became my brother-in-law. And I can think of no one to whom I could more easily have entrusted Lalage. I started with a predisposition to liking ever since their conversation about her as reported by James; and Hugh had the sense to bide his time, to make no claims, and the courage to risk losing her altogether by self-doubt and dispassionate reviews as to his ability to make and keep her happy. I can even picture him doing it, long sensitive hands clasped, eyes which missed nothing, weighing a future with all the painstaking thoroughness with which he pleaded in Court, and face which would remain impassive to the world if the case of Hugh v. Lalage went against him.
We had met Hugh Lyne at the Verdunes. I happen, capriciously, to remember the very words that were used although my own perception was asleep, letting the social side have its turn. So many of the best things in life ultimately come to one through preliminaries utterly insignificant. The rule of the game seems to be that you must be unaware. If you enter it in a state of expectancy, with hope or dream or plan, it will not come to pass. What happiness if it were otherwise! Carroll knew, when he sent forth Alice to the rose-garden.
Dolly Verdune was being lively and daring with Hugh, which is to say that she lit a cigarette at him and said damn. I always dislike watching anybody bungling his work. Dolly’s dash and looks were authentic and appreciated by me to the full, we all make fools of ourselves at some time or another; but our foolishness should be original, and not fake. She was challenging him to invite her to the Law Courts and he consented – how refuse? – with the rider, ‘But of course, Dolly, it means no smoking, no talking, above all no snapshots, and don’t forget to rise when the judge enters’, and he turned and saw Lalage standing there. I think he imagined her to be a great deal younger than she was; also, she had an unfashionable way of listening, wrapt, like a child, for he smiled at her and she said, ‘Please, I’ve always wondered, but whose business is it to collect the farthings for damages, and where are they kept?’
He savoured the question, and suddenly laughed, and said he hadn’t the faintest idea, now she mentioned it. Years afterwards, he told me that it was probably the farthings that had made him really see her. ‘It was’, he said with a faint grin, ‘such a fairy-tale question.’
But Hugh had come too early. Life is ungenerous about dates, environments and circumstances; there is too often the loose screw somewhere in the machinery which keeps matters at a standstill, and as far as Lalage was concerned we all were to have some bad moments.
The mothers of beauty bear a double burden: that of impending and almost inevitable loss plus the knowledge that the enemy may appear from any and every quarter. One man kept right off drink for six weeks while he believed he had a chance with Lalage, and when amazedly, pitifully refused, naively drew her attention to the fact. He has made good that six weeks, since …
There were the men who coaxed interminably and pled; the men who tried to rush her against her better – or indeed any – judgment, into consent, and there were the men who threatened.
It taught me a lot. It demonstrated to me that at a pinch even the best of men when in love scrap as a matter of course that code of honour which they observe in business office or at the card table and to each other, and about which they are so entertainingly strong and silent, but that where women are concerned they are capable of conduct, cowardices and dishonesties that would get them kicked out of any decent club or service.
James and I must have been a great trial to them. I was suave and, cued by James, galled their kibes in a hundred ways, and sometimes got kissed myself, as the third party intervening in a dog fight is kicked by the owners by accident. James, as a man, had a freer hand, and saw a side of the game denied to me. When any of Lalage’s admirers seemed about to become serious, James would take them out to dinner. The minor resultant casualties were an undergraduate who, warmed by some bad claret, began to boast of barmaids; another, a man of thirty, took in James on most counts until he suddenly began to talk about being a gentleman. Major eliminations included a man whose collection of dirty stories turned out to be typical of his attitude to matrimony, and another who was up to the ears in debt and preened himself à la Rawdon Crawley on his agility with small tradesmen’s bills.
And the thought of Lalage as the official property of any of these men nearly made me ill.
IV
The strain on James was infinitely greater. He was only nineteen when all this began and the irony of it was that his guest-detrimentals thought they were showing him what that type calls Life.
James and the man of the moment would sit together at club and restaurant tables, looking like nephew and uncle and do his conscientious best by the boy, while James listened and egged him on and suppressed revulsions and rages and sometimes nauseas as well. James was so bent on missing nothing that might tell against the other and confirm home-made suspicions that his concentrated avidity passed for normal adolescence as understood by his companion of the evening, and James got all he bargained for and a bit over, I gather. He would come home drained, would dash his hat down upon the hall settle and creep up to me to avoid being heard by mother or Lalage. I would listen in bed as he slumped in my creaking little armchair by the gas fire I had lit.
‘He’s no go. Bullies waiters to show off. Oh lor, I’ve eaten so much too much!’
He looked worried. ‘Any girl may marry one of that kind without knowing. Some of these chaps are obvious, of course, but I’ve found out much more by accident. It can’t be much fun to be a woman.’
Or there was the night he came home, defeated.
The man was undesirable for Lalage in some way I have forgotten, but – he’d seen through James. It was forty against nineteen, and experience won. He chaffed James, and cleverly, and James could only follow suit to the extent of seeing himself caught out. The man sheered off Lalage, I’ll say that for him, but it shook James’s nerve. The climax had somehow been reached when the man paid for the dinner, tipped, and fairly took charge. The bill, it seemed, hadn’t even been proffered to James. And the wine list. ‘We must have a bottle of something light for you, young man.’
The perfect, apparent, uncle – except about the eyes. And at that time one co
uldn’t even take refuge in the thought ‘there are men like Hugh’. He was still ‘a man one met at the Palace Greeners’.
‘… and the deuce of it is that I’m always liable to be sent right out of London for the firm.’
‘I shall be here, Jamesey.’
‘But,’ he looked at me, dazed with fatigue. I guessed what he was going to say, knew I was right when he tailed off into, ‘It isn’t the same, with you’.
It wasn’t. I suspected that my own effect upon men, while attracting situations more immediately difficult to cope with, was of a safer type, while the aloofness and rather dreamlike quality of Lalage involuntarily challenged the worst specimens, those who could never rest until all reserves and secrets were torn out, and because her very existence was a taunt and a reproach; so that their resentful puzzled gropings towards any unity with her inevitably took the form of an attempt to drag her down to their level. It is not unpathetic. If she ever loved, she would probably be a one-man woman to the end, or be smashed and wasted. That was her danger, and that our job of work.
But James had too much on his mind with office routine and Lalage’s affairs to be burdened with my own. I hadn’t pictured matters as working out quite that way but if it had to be, well, so be it. I could look after myself had had to on many an occasion which I kept to myself. Laughter could cut both ways, and I was no woodland nymph with blue-black hair. I doubt if James even thought of me as female at all. We were James and Vere, so much the same person that I sometimes chaffed him while he was struggling with his evening shirt, and would say, ‘Don’t make me drink too much at dinner, Jamesey’ or, if I was off to a theatre with some man friend James would hold up a monitory finger and caution, ‘Remember woman, I will not kiss that fellow in the taxi!’
A Harp in Lowndes Square Page 8