A Harp in Lowndes Square

by Rachel Ferguson

  ‘Now then Mrs. Tuke, don’t be gutsy.

  “You’re here and I’m here,

  So what do we care?

  Li ta ta tar dee-dee dee. …”

  and then a sudden thump on to a chair and a stethoscope produced, and (without punctuation), ‘You’ve had a quick one Sally you old fool I can smell it I don’t mind if you don’t but you’ll have that pain till you stop no you can have half a pint with your dinner and bottled if you can run to it Oh I’ll make it all right with Sister. What? It’s absolute rotgut makes you see two of everything this wood alcohol.’

  I would talk to him myself about Miss Chilcot. Also, this would give me an excuse for occupying my refuge, the chair, for a little longer.

  He came out grasping leather gauntlets and newspaper and I hauled myself to my feet. ‘May I speak to you a moment?’

  ‘Certainly. In here,’ and he crowded me into a small room opposite. ‘Now then?’

  ‘It’s about Miss Chilcot.’

  ‘Friend of yours?’

  ‘My mother’s old governess.’

  He leant against a table, fluttering his eyelids in assent, a little personal trick that, somehow, reassured as to his attentiveness.

  ‘I only discovered her existence by accident.’

  ‘Yes, I know how it is. I may as well tell you she may go off any day now. It’s a tragic story, these distressed gentlewomen are a great problem. Won’t ask for help until it’s too late to do anything.’

  A wave of nausea swept over me. ‘She was – starving?’

  Again his eyelids fluttered assent. ‘We’ve done all that’s possible. These debility cases at her age are practically hopeless, and her people are no good. In the same boat themselves, I gather. I have an address to write to when she goes.’

  ‘I wish to God we could have her with us, but I can’t have my mother upset.’

  ‘She’s all right here, my wife often comes to see her, the old lady enjoys that. Trouble with this place is that there’s hardly anyone of her class. The women aren’t half bad sorts, most of ’em, but of course their language is a bit thick sometimes.’

  ‘Is there anything at all I can do, or bring?’

  ‘Just keep her petted. She might be glad of some books. Well …’ The interview was evidently at an end. His eye fell on me.

  ‘You look as though a little attention wouldn’t do you any harm. Like me to give you a look?’

  ‘It’s awfully good of you, but you see if there wasn’t anything the matter it would waste your time, and if there was I haven’t time to cope with it.’

  ‘Hah! What a refreshing point of view … doing War work?’

  ‘Nothing to speak of, I’m a sort of typist-cum-secretary thing.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ He was scribbling in a note-book. ‘Might get that made up, take it three times a day after meals. It won’t do you any good of course, but it’ll buck you up.’

  ‘I will indeed, and …?’ Why is it that this utterly artificial diffidence about fees is ever present, even when the man deals in them for his livelihood, and the woman lives by very shillings?

  ‘Oh that’s my treat,’ he smiled at me, ‘it ought to be a sort of greenish-yellow colour and taste foul; I always hate remembering prescriptions.’

  I was entertained. ‘Then perhaps you can tell me why doctors flip the backs of their knuckles on one’s Collarbone?’

  ‘There’s a capital reason for that that’ll come back to me one day. Meanwhile it looks well and does no harm at all. Oh well, I must be off. By the way my name’s Filson.’

  ‘Mine’s Buchan, and thank you so very much.’

  ‘Not ’tall. Good-bye.’

  He was gone and I was sorry; I wanted him to stay and fool and perhaps tell me about his wife of whom I liked the sound, who must in point of fact be a jolly woman to have had the sense to marry him, and who was visionary enough to befriend Miss Chilcot. And who was I to expect it or anything?

  I wondered suddenly what his version of Lady Vallant would be. Probably obtusely breezy, or treating her as a Freudian subject, only G.P.s probably didn’t accept Freud, and indeed he must be an unprofitable line, compared with pills.

  Meanwhile there was home to be got to and a long letter to James to be written, part of which asked, ‘Can one throw Chilcot in Vallant’s teeth?’

  His answer: ‘It wouldn’t do much good and Vallant wouldn’t care a damn. She wasn’t compelled in any way to look after a gov’s future, though I bet C. was sent packing for nothing in the first instance. …’

  CHAPTER XVII

  I

  ON the morning after my visit to the workhouse Lady Vallant sent for mother, and for the moment I was shaken. It looked too like coincidence to please me. I even canvassed the possibility of Miss Chilcot having written to her, isolate, out of touch with the situation and full of misplaced Christian forbearance and Victorian sentiment; yet I remembered her face when I flung our grandmother into our talk, her voice, her silences. The Chilcot texture was of all time, and not to be pinned down to an epoch.

  I said, ‘I’ll go, it’s about my turn and a bit over,’ and mother’s expression was what I had foreseen, relieved, grateful and apprehensive.

  As I turned into the square I planned, if necessary, to use Miss Chilcot, and then saw how impossible it was, in that Lady Vallant would take it out in oppressing mother, and so both of us. Miss Chilcot was evidently an unpopular subject in Lowndes Square. Never had the old woman more nearly given herself away before us than on that afternoon the governess had returned to say good-bye. Somehow, it must be a tussle between the three of us: James, the old woman and myself, a fight so obviously concentrated that no eccentric flight of even Vallant injustice could divert the blame to Lady Vallant’s daughter.

  II

  And after all the old creature was only afraid of air-raids. She became positively human in her apprehensions. The effect on me would normally have been acquiescent, were I not fortified by mistrust. Also, I was antagonized and honestly surprised by her cowardice until a later sentence gave me the key to her uncharacteristic fears.

  ‘One has read of these raids nearer the coast and of the deaths they have caused. But they do not always kill, but disfigure.’ And even then I couldn’t be sorry for her, for her vanity and loneliness and unloved existence. I tried to see her objectively, as a strikingly handsome old lady, a ‘character’, as all those things which (including age) I so admire. And it was no good at all.

  She said, ‘There is always prayer. Never forget that’, which did not help matters along, with me. She added, with that arrogant oblivion of generations common to so many old people, ‘Anne was always neglectful of religion’.

  ‘Of set prayers, perhaps,’ I answered sharply.

  ‘Don’t take me up like that. With your aunt Emmeline and with Sophia I had no trouble at all. …’

  She asked after James, and I said he was down for leave, which did not seem to gratify her.

  ‘And your sister, Lalage?’

  ‘She isn’t very strong; the war seems to upset her more than most people.’

  ‘A weak nature, probably over-indulged. Your mother was always too indulgent … Lalage ought to marry and have half a dozen children, that would knock the nonsense out of her.’

  ‘She is going to marry,’ I said, trying to keep my temper and not show in my face what I felt about the briskly sadistic attitude to marriage. Our grandmother had had all her own children without anaesthetics, that was family history. But – was chloroform established in her own youth? And even if it were, wasn’t her denial of it from social convention which was stronger than her vanity, or just from pointless, ignoble Vallant obstinacy? The woman who suffers unnecessary pain I have always thought abnormal. It might account for much, in my grandmother. …

  ‘Ah yes, the barrister … And you? I hope you’re not fast?’

  I could have laughed aloud.

  ‘I aim to please,’ I answered. She was attacking me and so no riposte
mattered.

  ‘To please, of course; you should learn to manage men. I hope Anne is seeing that you meet suitable people.’

  I did crack at that. ‘Would you say that on our income and in our house much entertaining was possible?’

  ‘Not so loud! It worries me. You should be married, too. You are getting on, looking worn, and I dislike your hat, dear … Our class needs children.’

  I was getting tired of the old woman. This was just unprofitable babble; it would take a Doctor Filson to cope with her in this commonplace, betwixt-and-between mood (‘Now then, Susan old dear, we’ve had about enough of you, what?’). I said, almost without glancing at it, ‘What a beautiful satin that is’, and struck a chord at once.

  ‘It is one of Grainger’s, of South Molton Street. They are reliable, they have always made for me. Your grandfather admired their cut,’ she rose slowly. ‘Come to my room and we shall see if you have taste in dress. I am giving a dinner-party to-night.’

  I smiled as I followed the little toiling figure upstairs. Very Vallantish, that item of news, softened by no half-apology for our own exclusion from the feast, decorated with no further explanation.

  Her bedroom – the only room apart from dining- and drawing-room into which I had ever been shown, brought back memories of old luncheons and of us three children removing coats, hats and gaiters.

  It was the same as ever: as mother had once said, like a hotel room. Dead. One wondered which of the aunts had been born in that large brass bed, and spared a passing pang for the little thing that was our mother first seeing the light in the meaningless square of space. The furniture, good, even fine, could achieve no effect, being placed with no regard for its period whatsoever, a mental attitude that brought a splendid mahogany cupboard, ripe and beaded, as neighbour to a Victorian table of Tonbridge ware, like a mosaic brooch a thousand times enlarged; the walnut tallboy was scarred all down one side. Upon it the maid (I had seen it) struck matches. Coals were shovelled from a Cromwellian cellarette. ‘No taste, and no feeling for beautiful things. She never had,’ mother had once told us. ‘She used to twist up Baxter prints to light the gas with; they were stacked anyhow in an old portfolio and we used to paste them on to the nursery screen.’

  But the press containing Lady Vallant’s dresses occupied an entire wall space; it was polished and properly kept. The shrine. Its doors, opened by the maid, revealed serried lines of velvet, lace and silk, cloaks and furs. Many of the gowns seemed to me to be hung in strata of various periods. My grandmother was evidently a hoarder. I even caught sight of a tiny fringed and jointed parasol at the back.

  My eye turned to the dressing-table. Modern stuff, very modern, and new since my own childhood, with triple mirror. The pots and jars dotted all over it would have done credit to an actress, and all rendered futile by the raucous cross-lights from the never-superceded incandescents which cast a greenish tinge upon our faces as in an aquarium, and probably accounted for the maid’s heavy hand in maquillage. The one electric bulb in my own bedroom had, heaven knew, given me similar difficulties!

  Meanwhile, the maid was looking at me with respectful, tentative curiosity and Lady Vallant threw her a ‘Stand aside’, and to me, ‘Now!’

  It was part of the hit-or-miss of life that our rapprochement should take place over clothes, a factor with which it had never occurred to me to reckon. There was nothing seriously the matter with my own taste except perhaps for a rather engrained tendency to dwell upon the softnesses of Liberty, and I had no objection to a temporary armistice with Lady Vallant over anything which kept her off the family’s bones. My opportunities had been scanty, as the odd man out of us three Buchan grandchildren I had until now remained outside her interest, which James commanded as an eye-taking male, and that curiosity, furtive and baffling, which fell to Lalage’s share, and which as the years passed appeared to be degenerating into an assured sort of contempt, easy to confuse with that mild insolence that prevails among close relations, but upon which I had ever kept watch. …

  I would tell Lady Vallant exactly what I thought, whatever the upshot. On the whole it is safer to be yourself in all circumstances; one loses by it often but the gains are incalculable. I have so often noticed when tempted to shout with the immediate crowd that if you can refrain, your character – the sum of your outlook – as it were ‘comes round’ again, like fashions, and then you are entirely right with yourself and the world as well.

  As for the clothes, I couldn’t help being interested in them for their colour and texture and their atmosphere.

  I touched, rejected and criticized, giving reasons for and against, seeing them always in relation to Lady Vallant, foreseeing her effect in them upon her guests. I carefully handled frills of lace any one of which would have paid three times over for everything I myself would wear that night. I was dining with Raymond Owen and must assemble my best. And my grandmother watched me, almost human, yet ever on the alert to reprove an imagined carelessness. She offered me nothing from the loot of cupboard or jewel-boxes and I didn’t expect it. Between whiles I was intensely conscious of her, of the misleadingly intimate nature of our surroundings; thinking intermittently how easy it would be to say something personal to her, some near-friendly appreciation of her features, and how for ever impossible! Impossible because she was set in her ways, I in my mind towards her, and the room in its past. Also, the visit was passing off well, unusually so, and no unconsidered remark must be let fall.

  And so I gowned her with tongue and eye and received in exchange considerably more than I had mentally bargained for. She suggested – it was, rather, in the nature of a statement – that I should come and stay with her ‘if these air-raids are worse’. And under all the arrogance and self, I seemed to sense for the first time a trace of human dismay, a touch of family feeling however belated and against which I should probably harden my heart.

  Going home I reconsidered this. It might be to the good that I got into Vallant House as an inmate, unless, of course, the house was too far gone to appreciate it, in which case the conflict between us would be a to-the-finish affair, inimical and mutually pitiless.

  III

  That night I was wearing a dress which had at least given us a lot of fun in the making. I had had the idea for it on emerging from a prolonged wallowing in the Elizabethan period, when the notabilities seemed to specialize (particularly for State processions) in costumes ‘pounced’ and ‘powdered’ with fleurs-de-lis. No dress-making journal had anything at all to say about powdering, and there was a conspiracy of silence upon the subject of the pounce. Mother, Lalage and I put on designs whenever we felt like it (and I once found that Lalage had included in a fold a tiny cat’s head with ‘Penny’ on the collar).

  I had long ago given up trying to be smart and current in my dress, and modern hats have a way of making me look conspicuously absurd.

  But Owen would like my appearance. I was at that stage in his regard when nearly everything I did was right. It would be restful, after Lady Vallant, to be approved.

  I suppose it was that I was satisfied with my dress, self-satisfied with my management of the afternoon with the old lady and with my Chilcot prospects that, quite suddenly, I told Owen about the affair. I expected a comment of method and downrightness, with its edges rounded off because the speaker cared for me personally. I wondered that this source of help hadn’t occurred to me before, but the business of becoming attracted had taken time, and the healing of being liked I had enjoyed as long as possible – one is only human. But I judged that by now we had arrived at that comfortable middle stage, after glamour and before ennui, which would permit confidence.

  With an automatic remnant of caution I shot a glance at myself in the nearest mirror. Hair all right so far, face – in spite of Lady Vallant – not looking its age to-night, and I had just arrived at the problem of Lalage when Owen said quite kindly, ‘Can’t you forget your blessed family for one evening?’

  IV

  I answered �
��Of course’ very cheerfully, and I believe I laughed. I certainly remembered that his money would pay for the dinner, wine and tips, and knew that it should be for the last time. If I had consistently paid for myself, I might have also bought the right to a little plain English as well. …

  He said, ‘Hullo, there’s old Cosmo Furnival over there. How he does go on and on’.

  I followed his look with a backwash of schoolgirl curiosity. Raking the large room, my eye again caught my reflection in the mirror and I saw that between my attempt at confidence and its reception effects had been produced which would have justified my grandmother’s criticism. I was quite pleased about it; enjoyed with perverse jauntiness the fact that my light and careful make-up now looked patchy and haggard and that my dress suddenly resembled something left over from the greenery-yallery epoch of peacock’s feather and Passionate Brompton.

  I recognized Furnival at once, after all the years. I have a knack of penetrating disguises, and this time his was the more tricky one of everyday life and evening dress. He was in a corner with a party of unidentifiable people; tall, I could see his iron head above the rest as he listened and took his coffee and detached his monocle to polish it on his handkerchief. I wondered where poor little Gladys was, and wished most heartily she could be in my place – Cosmo Furnival looked up then and over towards our table and I was sourly amused that if indeed he saw me, he was seeing me at my worst.

  I murmured ‘Posing old fathead’ quite meaninglessly, because I was hurt with Owen.

  ‘He often comes here. Like to meet him?’ Owen was already raising an eyebrow at our waiter for the bill.