I went upstairs to find James, and couldn’t, and in the hall saw the family slate which got inscribed with messages strange and many.
‘Gone to Mudie’s.’
‘Barbara rang up.’
‘Sandwiches in dining-room,’ or
‘Penny in garden, try get him in.’
This evening the writing was James’s.
‘Collared by Vallant. Back about midnightish.’
CHAPTER X
I
I HAD found enough work on the salary of which to dress myself and pay fares and sundries. You had, I saw, to have money and a background to be a successful female loafer; if you could keep open house, every time you descended the staircase from your sitting-room and opened the drawing-room door it was ‘a party’, while the unfilled hours between luncheon and tea, so infinitely dreaded by the unmarried daughters of the house, could be converted into an engagement by ordering round the carriage. But in a home life like ours, the drawing-room door opened on to nothing more social than Lalage darning stockings, and our carriage was the rather extravagant taxi or the bus. Evening dress was the heaviest item, for it was then that one pursued the affairs of James or Lalage – sometimes even of one’s own.
Occasionally we all four went out together for a cheap jaunt, and really enjoyed ourselves, with no fish to fry or wet blanketing to be done. James and I would choose the restaurant, for the settings that we could weather weren’t always right for mother and Lalage, except for the feeling I always had that their very presence in any room, of associations however sordid, cleansed it.
My odd-jobs were part time; I wouldn’t allow myself to be spared too long from the family. My employment was not distinguished, and in the space I allowed myself between selection and decision, I sized up the current situation. It misliked me strangely.
Unless you could attack a profession with long preparation and study and the academic brain which can cram facts and pass examinations, you were, I saw, even now between the devil of Miss Matty’s tea and sweetshop and the deep sea of hobbies and idleness. Education involved capital, and I knew the intellectual life was not for me. I can only use my brain for people.
Or you could hang about the house and wait to be married, as the Seagraves did quite guilelessly, and the Verdunes, behind a barrage of chaff and rather bowdlerized rakishness. You were domestically assisted, if you were a Seagrave, by a mother who trumpeted girlhood’s points in the very hall and fairly stunned men into becoming husbands, like a genial butcher crying beef-skirt on Saturday night.
If you were a Verdune, you took the aloof, rather splendid and half-true line that ‘girls marry themselves’. You did not forbid banns, but you certainly didn’t forward matters.
If you were a Stonor, you apparently lurked with walking-sticks, and turned the suitor out of the house, if family history was to be believed, or married out of the school-room, as mother had, to escape the older-generation Vallant atmosphere for ever.
What line mother took about our futures we neither knew nor dreamed of asking. The Verdunes passed to us the story of Aunt Emmeline at table pronouncing that ‘Your aunt Anne isn’t giving Vere and Lalage a chance’. The Seagraves on the other hand were instructed by Aunt Sophia that we went out far too much.
Theodora Seagrave had, it seems, eagerly explained away our suspectedly dashing successes to her family.
‘It’s always easier if you’ve got a brother.’
What nobody knew was that ‘your Aunt Anne’, looking like a Florentine madonna, had once said to me:
‘Have a good time. Try not to acquire a baby because we can’t run to its keep, but if you should get swept off your feet, see he’s sound in wind and limb … and really I think that’s about all.’
From old Lady Vallant we expected nothing, at a time when even an extra hundred would have made all the difference. To her we were a sort of family shop to which she sent for what she wanted (it was usually James), and on sale or return at that, as he complained.
II
And so I took my first post, and valeted an old lady in Church Street, Kensington, and read The Times to her and the lives of Generals, and it was then that Aunt Emmeline decided that I was being scamped by mother, a criticism that made Lalage’s eyes darken with anger. I was merely amused. Also, I love age in man or woman; it can be so kind, so restful. And then I have an incurable avidity for trifles. I’m told (and how often I’ve read it!) that the existence of a hired companion is monotonous. I never found it so. How can it be while there are three meals a day to order (and shop), the arrivals of friends with their different clothes and faces and all their lives to guess at, and above all, the coming of the postman with more news, bringing quarrels, misunderstandings, invitations and suggestions together with stray births, deaths and marriages, items any one of which shifted the pattern of our kaleidoscope for the entire morning (and sometimes for the day), and gave rise to a whole new set of discussions and activities, from setting out ‘the fringed napkins’ from the linen cupboard to ordering a wreath from the florist in Notting Hill Gate, and subsequently sharing indignation when ‘the tribute’ was tardily acknowledged by the bereaved (‘and those daffodils with the mauve tulips … quite the prettiest in the cemetery, my dear. It’s inexcusable of poor Caroline’).
And then, the day I was really taken into the old lady’s life, as distinct from just serving her, and confided in about My Son In Bombay, whom I pictured as a Jos Sedley, all shirtfrill, liver and curry, and was disappointed to find, from a faded photograph, was hatchet-faced, mild and moustached. We sometimes served him up at my own family board, and mother would say, ‘My son in Bombay would hate this rice’, of James, surveying the underdone mutton: ‘They do these things better in Boggley-Wallah. My God! I wish my son in Bombay would bring home a pine for tiffin.’
And it was somehow fun to pass our house when out on my old lady’s errands, and to know I couldn’t run in because that would be ‘defrauding my employer of my time’. It made me feel two persons in one; and sometimes mother or Lalage was actually at one of the windows and would see me and wave, or call out, and then I would look oppressed and give them a bitten-off nod.
Above all it was fun to dress the part in frocks almost theatrically severe, and muslin collars and cuffs and a sham gold chain with a rolled gold locket on the end that I had found in a pawnbroker’s, and which had the name ‘Lottie’ engraved on the reverse.
Poor Lottie, who couldn’t redeem her pledge! She must be very dead by now.
Sometimes the old lady and I had a treat, and toddled off together to the cinematograph at the Polytechnic, or to Maskelyne and Cook, and lo! it was now Maskelyne and Devant, and one felt that half a dynasty had fallen, and most unfairly resented the adroit and chatty newcomer, in spite of his Magic Kettle, which object gave me and my old lady grist for discussion for the whole of next morning.
And once we walked (starting in good time because her pace was slow) to the Coronet Theatre and saw a very bad play called The Tulip Tree with an indifferent cast headed by Cosmo Furnival, who gave the only real performance. My old lady adored it all and whispered, ‘I’ve heard he’s a very good-living man’, to which I, answering in character, replied, ‘I’m afraid all actors are sad dogs’; and when our tea-tray was clinkingly placed upon my lap, she asked the attendant how many spoonfuls had ‘gone to the pot’ and shook her head at the first sip. And then home, after leaving her comfortably settled (for the Evening Standard had come in while we were out).
Sometimes I would take a hatless after-dinner stroll, often with mother or Lalage, and we would go slowly past her house, and if the drawing-room was still lit up I knew all about that – whist with the old Misses Venner who lived round the corner in Brunswick Gardens – and at ten-thirty they would break off and nibble the cakes I had bought at Barker’s that morning.
And so my mornings were cuffed and cosy and my nights were deceptively smart hats and fencing with ineligibles – a cloud by day and a pillar of fi
re by night!
III
I came in one morning with a knife-like headache and my old lady was all aspirins and cologne and concern and offered me hot milk, which I managed to refuse as I contrived, somehow, to get through The Times and the china-washing (she wouldn’t let me go out), and suddenly she stopped the reading and turned her skirt over her petticoat and said, ‘My dear, you should be so happy. I often think looking after an old woman is no life for you’, then shyly, because she had been drilled from her cradle that ‘personal remarks were in the worst of taste’, and bravely because she was fond of me, ‘I wish you could marry some good man’.
Part of me was grimly amused as I thought of the night behind me. One of my miscalculations. I had had supper with him after a play and found out too late it was me he had his eye on, and not Lalage; that he was the type which has no mercy at all upon any woman-thing if he finds her amusing, and who everlastingly confuses even the smallest amount of worldly wisdom she betrays with a willingness to go to any lengths. It is as though he were saying ‘Oh, so you do know that veuve cliquot isn’t burgundy, and can take up an allusion. Then you deserve all you get’.
With this type only the Miss blatantly fresh from a convent school is immune, and that only because to injure genuine ignorance is bad form. And – he’d done his best to make me tipsy (and very nearly succeeded). As he stood giving directions to the taxi-man I opened the further door and got out.
I said to my old lady, ‘Let’s get this straight. I came to you in the beginning because I needed the money … I still do, but I’d stay on on half what you pay me, because I’m happy and you’re so sweet’.
She flushed (the prettiest pink!) and shook her head from the colossal depths of her experience that was one nice old gentleman with sidewhiskers, dead these forty years, whose portrait hung in the dining-room, and because I was so dreadfully afraid she would soon be arch with me, or put me on that crystal pedestal upon which so many old people delight to enshrine the young in years, I changed the subject in a hurry.
And just as we had settled down together, just as I knew all her ways, and she allowed for those of mine that were fit for her to see, she died. And I began to realize, dimly and for the first time, why it is unsafe for one generation to become attached to another.
It should have warned me.
CHAPTER XI
I
I WAS out of work but had little leisure to worry over that; I had enough on my hands at the moment.
This time it was old Lady Vallant.
Our move to London had not improved our relations with her, it had during the years only heightened and elaborated our original impressions and sustained the tradition.
The popular, or discussable, grounds for complaint among Lalage, James and myself included her high-handedness and parsimony. ‘Not a funeral note’, as once said with a wry grin to the other two. And we resented being sent for. That, too, could be talked over, also the fact that the Seagrave and Verdune girls didn’t seem, as by hints infinitely cautious we had found out, to be subjected to similar levies upon their liberty. They just paid regular calls with the aunts in Lowndes Square.
Lalage came out with the suggestion, at first hearing brilliant, that our grandmother was flaunting us in the family face as an example of her own indifference to money, but this on consideration was abandoned, for if Lady Vallant had really been sufficiently aware of our poverty to take such a line, why did she never help us? And she did know, and if not, there were her own daughters, Sophia and Emmeline, to carry the matter.
That alone hardly made for love; but for her James could have gone to Rugby and university, Lalage could have had her fill of concerts and theatres and a coming-out ball of her very own, and mother – but why go on? We saw in time that it couldn’t be easy to be the poorest three of sisters all living wellnigh within bowshot.
One of the Vallant-things which we couldn’t discuss freely was the pressure of the old woman on our mother; the fact that we had always sensed it made it none the less painful. Once or twice James had hurried back from the City, impelled by some urgency, to find her returned, tired out, from Vallant House; at least twice I had done the same, cutting off my dear old employer almost in midsentence, to find, beyond the fact that mother had been with Lady Vallant and was but recently returned, there was nothing to do for her and very little to hear. For I am pretty certain now that at that time Lady Vallant was giving nothing away, or even had any particular devilfish to fry, and that the visits were ‘calls’ and nothing more. That the sessions devitalized our mother we, even then, could attribute to the influence of the house itself, in the light of what we’d pieced together for nearly all our years.
It was when James left school and went into father’s business that Vallant, as he called her to us, emerged. He was the victim, at nineteen. We made quite a joke of it. He would come back at night and describe her dresses to us – she even rented a box at the opera for the Italian season, one year, the amenities of which were never offered to us. And that amused us too; a distinctly Vallantish touch. We actually had our moments of believing that the old creature was in freakish process of merging into a normal person; the grande dame (she could be that) with her handsome grandson … showing him the world of fashion … a miniature version of The Grand Tour. …
And then, when these outings went on and on I became uneasy. This wasn’t in the Vallant vein. Wasn’t James being made a fool of? Were people – those whose money herded them into the same public places every season – beginning to notice the old woman and the young man? Would enough of them know the relationship to be appeased? And even if they did, does it ever do a boy any good to be in such constant attendance on a veteran?
If Lady Vallant had dressed the part it might have passed along; there is something peculiarly reassuring about lavender silks. But according to James, ‘Vallant goes all the bundle on her kit on our jaunts, tiara on Melba nights and all. And I think she rouges’.
Well – she’d been a beauty, we’d all had that bit of information doled out to us; it was sometimes the only tale upon which mother seemed able to fall back.
I for one definitely didn’t like it. I remembered the £10 tip before he went to his boarding-school, and in another flash James’s hot flush and his little-boy revolt against his grandmother’s kiss. The little-boy disgust I’d taken in my stride – who wouldn’t? – at the time; now I began to wonder.
And mother’s remark tossed off one night was not reassuring.
‘I’ve never known the Mater darken the doors of the opera. She’s practically tone-deaf.’
Lalage said with a trace of resentment – she’d temporarily lost her way about the situation and was just genuinely disappointed.
‘She might ask us, sometimes.’
Mother’s answer – she, too, had lost grip of things – was prompted impulsively by the unhappiness, however trivial, of any of us.
‘It’s just like her. I’m afraid imagination isn’t Grannyma’s strong point.’
II
And then Lady Vallant asked James to make his home with her and was of course refused, and this led to a family row which was, to me, a positive relief. Here at last was a tangible thing, a normal family fracas, endlessly discussable with anybody and from any point of view you cared to take. Also, it was our first actual collision, and a contemporary one, every incident of which we could check and verify. It upset mother, as did all scenes, and I took good care during the weeks of bad feeling never to let her be alone with the old woman at Vallant House. It wasn’t easy, and I lost a post through it.
In time, our grandmother saw my game, thought nothing of requesting me out of our own drawing-room, and I went for the sake of peace. And once, at Vallant House, when I entered behind mother, she looked at me – just that – out of her black, close-set eyes and said, ‘Oh, it’s you’. And the next time, ‘You will prefer to have your tea in the dining-room’. And the dining-room it was, but I would have fed in the coal-cella
r sooner than leave.
The footman served me, never Hutchins. In time, I gave up even being announced and would turn automatically into my dining-room, and then Hutchins would come padding in, ‘Hoping I had everything I wanted, Miss Vere’, I was cold and said so, and he hesitated and lit the fire, and there was a row about that, I heard. The fire, it seemed, was never lit except when her ladyship was giving a dinner party, or, on off days, between definite hours.
‘Very high-handed.’ That came back to me, too. And I had been gossiping with the servants.
I was enraged, and wrote the old woman what James called a civil stinker; I showed the draft to mother and she begged me, for her sake, not to send it. I had to give in, but the injustice of the vulgar accusation would rush over me at night, doing me out of hours of sleep. And mother’s attitude to the injustice aspect was hardly calculated to soothe.
‘Justice … she never had much idea of that for any of us.’
It was small episodes like these which made the old woman inscrutable. While she confused the issues with general eccentricity you could, I saw, never absolutely distinguish between that which in her conduct was just innate perversity and that which might be a clue of ultimate significance. All the Vallants were farouche; was could tally that up through the enforced reunions of family weddings. The uncles, Lady Vallant’s sons, elderly, grizzled, speechless with shyness and taking it out in brusquerie which in a family less socially authentic would have been classed as the bad manners that it was.
‘Move up’ (this to Lalage, in church).
‘Well, Anne …’ and the top-hat of elderly block unlifted. This, in the church porch.
A Harp in Lowndes Square Page 10