III
The next morning I went half an hour late (for the first time) to my office, where by now I was rather a star turn among the students and fifteen-year-old beginners.
James and I had sat up late in my bedroom talking; we were guying the palmist and I overslept.
My teacher, Miss Royal, put a pile of manuscript by my place.
‘Miss Buchan, I am so sorry, but you’ve just missed some work, a rush order came through at nine-thirty and I didn’t dare wait for you. It would have been good for you and – er – paying, you know.’ Even now she couldn’t quite treat me as she did the rest and would often offer me tea from her pot in the private room. A pity, I thought. Heaven knew I was no money’d amateur filling in for an amusing whim between luncheon party and dance. It is better to know life’s worst, stripped of all misconception. …
‘Yes, there was a play wanting typing. Parts. It was Cosmo Furnival.’
‘Good Lord!’ I said cheerfully, ‘he must be a thousand years old.’
I was inwardly riled to pieces at losing the money. …
IV
In the little room where we hung our hats and coats I stumbled over the small, dejected figure of our pupil-teacher, whose duties included the reading aloud of newspaper extracts to the Intermediate and Advanced shorthand students. For quite a minute I struggled against the conviction that she was crying, then succumbed.
‘Anything I can do, Gladys?’ (unless, of course, it was money).
‘Nothing, thank you ever so, Miss Buchan.’
‘Ah, but perhaps there is. Well, I’m here if you feel like it,’ and I deliberately turned my back on her. A longish pause.
‘It’s only … ooh, you’ll think me so silly …’
As I probably should, I said nothing, foreseeing a young man with a pompadour or a tiff with My Gurl Friend.
‘It … it’s Mr. Cosmo Furnival.’
‘What?’
‘Oh Miss Buchan, I did so want to be the one t’be sent to his house!’
Well, whatever my faults, I never find confession ridiculous, however fantastic or foredoomed. Here, I could remember so well the old Martin Harvey-Hayden Coffin days; indeed, I was rather pleased to find still burning a spark of the Edwardian flame!
‘I see,’ I answered, ‘but Gladys, you know he must be quite sixty-five by now.’
‘Oh … not sixty-five, Miss Buchan!’
Already the idol was tottering.
‘Fact, I remember …’
‘Oh, do tell, Miss Buchan!’
I racked my brains for the little I knew. Since my schooldays I had taken scant stock of the theatre world – too busy in other directions.
‘Well, when I was a small child, my mother and father once went up to London to see him act, and my cousins had a postcard of him on their mantelpiece …’
The sudden, incredulously-recollected memory of James and myself singing for money outside Furnival’s stage door I had (unwillingly!) to suppress.
‘Cheer up, my dear. There’s sure to be another chance soon.’
‘D’you reely think so?’
‘Why not? It’s happened once, it can happen again, if he’s pleased with us; careful, prompt and accurate; dramatic work a speciality,’ I quoted from our prospectus.
She was off on another tack. ‘But, can he reely be that old?’
I leant upon the wash basin. ‘Gladys, somebody (forget who) once wrote “love is not love that alters where it alteration finds”. I hope I’ve got it right. It simply means that if your Cosmo Furnival had a disfiguring illness to-morrow, or lost his sight or his legs or his income and his theatre, you’d round on him … throw him over. I think there’s more to it than collecting pleasing picture-postcards … if your Mr. Furnival is worth your affection, you’ve got to return the compliment by qualifying for him, as you do for your shorthand.’
‘But … he’s married, Miss Buchan!’
‘My dear, if you love anybody or anything, must it always be with an eye to grabbing it for yourself? Can’t you go to the National Portrait gallery without fretting because you can’t own the Kneller Monmouth? … I don’t mean that you’ve got to take a pious, noble pleasure in the thought that the picture is giving pleasure to others, but that you should appreciate it for its own sake.’
She patently couldn’t. Her tests were eligibility and a good profile. Goods, undamaged. In fresh condition and right side up with care. It’s a good concrete viewpoint with which to face life, I suppose; almost enviable in its vulgar, direct simplicity.
And so Satan rebuked sin and was fifteen minutes late for luncheon. Not one of my lucky days.
CHAPTER XIV
I
AND that afternoon I was due at Vallant House with James – one of our duty calls, slightly increased in number since his refusal to make his home there.
I had a suspicion that the old woman disliked our arrival in pairs or groups. Always ungenial to me, her dissatisfaction seemed to be invariably more marked when the couple was James and myself than it was over any other combination. … This, at least, isn’t being wise after the event; I sensed it often, in those days.
The visit followed the customary routine of ministrations by Hutchins and footman, caustic order and reprimand from their mistress, sharp comment from those small thin lips and the close-set eyes which sardonically summed and appraised, and on our side, strained politeness and absolute unreality. One hour with our hostess, even in a good mood, was an ordeal. What a week, a year, many years must be, and have been!
She said, ‘I wish you would telephone in advance when you mean to come here’.
I was a little surprised, not of course at the crudeness of the remark so much as that we had always been urged by mother to make these calls, and she ought to know the rights of the old woman’s mental processes. And then I understood, for the parchment-coloured claw decked with diamonds was fluttering down the silken dress. Lady Vallant had been taken by surprise, and not in her favourite gown. And James was the visitor.
I apologized for us both aloofly, and just as we had bogged down into a review of Dolly Verdune and Arthur – the old lady knew very little and I held my tongue – James rose and stood with that expression of polite expectancy, that slight stooping of the shoulders, with which men prepare to meet an introduction.
At first I didn’t understand: looked at the clock whose hands still indicated that at least another twenty minutes must be filled before our release, and remembered that in any case it was my business to give the signal and not his.
He seemed to be standing there interminably waiting, a faint astonishment in his eyes; even the old lady noticed it and said sharply, ‘Sit down, sit down!’
He obeyed.
‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘I … thought that lady was staying for tea.’
‘Which lady?’
‘I think she said “Chilcot”.’
We both froze at the look in Lady Vallant’s eyes. If she had raved at him one could have borne it better; it was the combination of those eyes with the collected, almost conversational, tone, that was somehow so awful.
‘You are drunk. Ring the bell and leave me.’
II
Outside the door I murmured to James, ‘I’m going to collar Hutchins’.
‘What for?’
I smiled wryly. ‘I “gossip with the servants”, you know. Well, now I’m going to.’
‘Right.’
In the hall I said, ‘Hutchins, can the shutting of the front door be heard in the drawing-room when you let visitors out?’
‘No, Miss.’
‘Very well. Then we needn’t go through the business of shutting it. Will you come and speak to us in the dining-room for a minute?’
He followed us in, closing the door.
‘Hutchins, who was Miss Chilcot?’
I was keyed up for practically anything, as far as anyone can know whose breaking-point has never been tested, and his answer, banal
and sane, almost made me sigh with relief.
‘Governess to the young ladies, Miss.’
‘Oh yes …’
‘And she left?’ this from James.
‘Yes, Mr. James.’
‘Did you like her?’
‘Very much. She, if I may say so, was quite the most,’ he hesitated for a split second and found a word that I felt pretty sure was a substitute, – ‘satisfactory of any of the ladies.’
‘How long did she stay?’
The old man was looking a little harassed. ‘About six months.’
‘Was that a shorter or longer time than the others?’
‘Shorter, sir,’ he hesitated again, ‘very much shorter.’
He plunged. ‘Forgive me, Mr. James, but why do you ask?’
‘Oh, that’s all right, Hutchins. Miss Chilcot’s name happened to come up in conversation this afternoon.’
I said, ‘Would there be a photograph of her?’
‘I should hardly think so, Miss Vere. There might be in the boxes upstairs; the top floor has never really been cleared up since all the young ladies married. Her ladyship never goes up there, and she was never one to go in for photos.’
‘Except her own,’ snapped James. He shouldn’t have said it, of course, but I sympathized.
‘Hutchins, could you go up and have a look, and if you find one, send it to my brother’s office, not to Campden Hill?’
‘Yes, certainly Miss.’
‘Thank you. By the way, what age was Miss Chilcot?’
‘Not a very young lady; must have been thirty or over when she came here.’
‘That’d make her over seventy now. H’m … I suppose you haven’t her address?’
‘The address she engaged from I remember, being accustomed to collect the outgoing letters for the evening post. It was (he gave the number) Rosary Gardens, South Kensington.’
‘But … if she was a Londoner, why didn’t she go home every evening?’
‘Her ladyship always engaged resident governesses, Miss. She … was out such a lot herself … and the entertaining here, and all …’
I compressed my lips. James said abruptly:
‘Do you know why this Miss Chilcot left so soon?’
It took both his hearers aback. I hadn’t had time to decide the putting of that question, and as for Hutchins, there was clearly some internal conflict or confusion in process.
‘I really couldn’t tell you, Sir.’
At that, the fat being in the fire, hoping as well that the old man meant nothing more or less than his reply, we could afford to look expectant and slightly incredulous. He gave up (or did he?).
‘There was, I understand, some disagreement with her ladyship, the nature of which naturally never became public in the servants’ hall.’
We had to leave it at that.
Where we walked to on leaving Vallant House I don’t really know to this day. We found, I remember, a bus of unfamiliar number that eventually put us down in Sloane Square after a vague journeying along streets hot, dusty and depressing.
James, half voluble, half silent, and overstrung (we were both the latter) relived the afternoon for me.
‘… well then, the door opened and this woman came in, in out-door clothes, so of course I thought she’d come to tea … and she stood there behind Vallant and Vallant went on talking all through what the woman said, and yet I heard both voices separately … like in an orchestra, you know. …’
‘What did she say?’
‘“It’s Miss Chilcot. I’ve come to say good-bye.”’
‘Anything else?’
‘Yes. “I wish to God I could have stayed”.’ He broke off, thinking, ‘and yet, Vere, she was dying to leave’.
‘Then?’
‘Well, I thought in a muddled way, it was rather rum for anyone to come in and then go at once … until I saw her clothes, and then I noticed they were utterly out of date, like those old bound volumes of The Quiver that we used to hoot over when we were kids. So then I knew she was a goner.’
‘Ah … but perhaps she isn’t.’
IV
The photograph – very yellow and faded – arrived four days later. James brought it to me, late at night, for safety.
‘It’s Chilcot, all right. And with the aunts. Plain woman … good eyes … fighting chin … That’s Sophia looking like a bantam’s egg. That might be mother … no, it’s aunt Emmeline. She’s got the family nose already.’ We turned over the oblong of cardboard:
Ryman
High Street
Vallant
Hampshire.
‘The village Bassano evidently. I bet it was the Chilcot who took the kids to be done. Vallant’d never have troubled, damn her.’
‘Give me the Rosary Gardens address.’
I bent once more over the photograph.
‘Mother isn’t there.’ I pored over the ungainly group.
‘No, my dear. And neither is Myra.’
And three days later the War broke out.
CHAPTER XV
I
JAMES joined up at once although the office tried to get him earmarked as indispensable. He hated the whole business and was too old to be able to regard it as a cross between a house-match and Arthurian quest. He believed that the War, together with all panic, was more or less brought about by newspapers, that if war wasn’t assumed months in advance in the public press, it would probably never happen; and that the catastrophic idea gets into the air, like a poison gas.
‘If you believe in the power of thought, you’ve got to take the rough with the smooth. “When two or three are gathered together in Thy name Thou wilt grant their requests” we all believe. But what price two or three million people gathered together and concentrating on the wrong things? It’s mass thought that does it, not which side’s running the show.’
He paid a round of farewell family visits, including one to Vallant House. I went with him, I was beyond counting the possible future cost. He was my brother, it was his war and he was the only available Vallant on active service.
Our grandmother, practically ignoring me, rang the bell, assembled the entire staff of nine and conducted a long, emotionalized prayer-meeting, partly extempore – she dwelt, I observed, upon the more destructive aspects of warfare and there was a lot about ‘the wicked man’ and ‘proud stomachs’. It ought to have been dreadfully funny, judged by almost any standard of humour including that of the cartoonist, who would, I think, have appreciated the row of decorous, print-clad female backs, the polite resignation of the young footman, the pop-eye’d incredulity of the knife-boy and the contours of butler and cook.
It failed to amuse me; for in spite of the fact that the old lady kissed James’s forehead and even blessed him, I received two impressions, as fantastic as disagreeable.
One was that Lady Vallant enjoyed the thought of war.
And the other was that she was glad that James was in for it. What she didn’t know was that as she blessed him, he had quickly crossed himself over his heart.
And when the blasphemous farce was over, Hutchins took us downstairs.
‘I wish you every possible good luck, Mr. James, and my affectionate respects to Mrs. Buchan.’
‘Thanks awfully, Hutchins. Will you write to me? I’d value that a lot. And as for this business, I’m going to France on the principle that one takes quinine to fend off a fever, but that isn’t to say that quinine is exactly my favourite tipple.’ He threw an arm round the old man. ‘So long, dear old chap.’
II
All the way home I was debating this latest piece of Vallantism. Rightly or wrongly I came to the unshakable conclusion that she had annexed James in the first instance to fan the embers of her vanity, had wished him to live with her to gratify an undying acquisitiveness or to hurt us, and that, refused, she had merely turned savage.
She was relieved to be getting him out of the way. In plain English, we were now three women with no man in the house. And one of thos
e women was her own daughter, drilled into diffidence and still nervous, for all her acquired sophistication.
III
Six months’ training at Tidworth and James was off. His hands were on my shoulders.
‘I feel a swine for leaving you to it, Vere. Keep me posted about Vallant, and look after them. …’
And not once, I think, did I ever have to support, among others, the burden of fear for James. I knew he would come back.
IV
It was for Hugh Lyne that I had the only qualms; with him I had no inner bond and for him therefore no secret wisdom. He missed much of the War through his age, and went out in that intermediate period between the calling up of the elder men and the final desperate drive of conscription; and he went fortified by what is called ‘an understanding’ with Lalage. Marry her before the War was over he would not, and although I theoretically applauded the point of view, I couldn’t help thinking that this exaggerated highmindedness about the possible loss of limb or sense was about on a par with the chorus-girl conviction, held by a certain type of woman, that a first grey hair and a crowsfoot will lose her for ever the allegiance of her husband or her lover. Apart from that, I had hoped they would marry soon. I was uneasy at the effect of the War upon Lalage. She was paler than ever and seemed to be losing weight. For months I was sidetracked, believing that James and Hugh were the cause, until something she said to me made me aware that no such sad normality was there. She was possessed by a sickness of the soul.
It was at the time when jokes were in circulation about The Hymn of Hate. For some reason this seemed to strike at her more directly than air-raid or reported atrocity.
We were standing by her window and watching the searchlights, and she suddenly began shaking, and said, ‘Anything but the hate. I remember hate’.
I asked, as casually as might be, ‘What hate?’
‘I can’t say. I would if I could. It’s something I just know that I know.’
I could get nothing more.
A Harp in Lowndes Square Page 12