My bedroom at Vallant House overlooked Lowndes Square. Too high to see the activities below, not high enough for view of roofs and chimney pots, it gave me little pleasure. There were no longer those jinglings of hansoms of night, midnight and early day of which mother had sometimes told us ‘I liked to listen to them, they were company’.
CHAPTER XXII
I
IT was, after all, quite easy for me to explore the schoolroom floor. Why I had expected the clever advance-move of locked doors, conflict and veto I don’t know. One flight above my own room and I was there, where my mother had lived, and Myra, for somehow the presence of my aunts Emmeline and Sophia had no mental meaning at all.
The stairs leading to that storey were covered with scuffed linoleum, a delicate reminder to me, who didn’t need it, that anything did for the children.
I had postponed the visit for days, partly in fear of the distress I knew was waiting for me in some form, partly in order to get the atmosphere of life in the lower part of the great house settled, one way or the other. The children’s floor, I knew, one must approach with mind unconfused.
And there I was at last, after all these years, receiving fact against guesswork.
There were four bedrooms and the schoolroom itself, the number of rooms accounted for by their smallness. Mentally I began a provisional allotment of the accommodation; this, possibly, Miss Chilcot’s bedroom, the second Emmeline and Sophia, third, mother and Myra, fourth; two uncles (and the third uncle, apparently, put into the room below). No den for the boys at all.
Here, from most of the windows, was the view which, to me, is London incarnate; of backs of houses, faintly tinted as in a colour print, with their occasional box balconies, the Georgian bow-windows of smoky brick, the glass dome of some dining-room on the leads below, a grimy bubble; a livery stable where grooms made ready the little equipages of the old dames round about (including that of my grandmother), and serrated black against the sky, chimneys, angular, contorted, cowls slowly turning – the outlook that thousands of nursemaids of the Jubilee, arriving in growlers to their Victorian situation, had looked out at.
Sally go round the stars,
Sally go round the moon,
Sally go round the chimneypots
On Sunday afternoon.
(Whoop!)
lines which I had first heard sung (to the tune of ‘Guy, Guy, Guy, stick him in the eye!’) by a chaperoned school treat, chanting it in a walking circle.
Sally … somehow one pictures her as persistently rakish, wearing check silk taffeta and a bustle; she is to me a capable, rortily chuckling daughter of joy, and was in her heyday in the early days of the Alhambra, when gloves and scent were sold at the back of the dress circle. She had, I fancy, a ‘combined’ room off Drury Lane and her favourite ‘perfumes’ were Jockey Club, Opoponax and White Rose. Not long ago, I actually found a bottle of patchouli behind the pills, cough cures and horse drenches of a country chemist, and instantly bought it for the sake of the old days I never knew in fact, but know so utterly in every other way!
And I stood in that back bedroom and gazed, and murmured the anthem of London Sally.
II
Emboldened, I made many visits to the top floor as the days passed, examining on my knees the poky little cup-boards, touching the rusty fireguard round which those children had clustered, and the mean and grudging grate – I even found the coal scuttle in one of the bedrooms. In the schoolroom, a broken-down wicker settee; from a chest of drawers more suitable to the servants’ quarters, I drew the red tablecloth, and know every inkstain by heart. I shook it out, folded, and replaced it. On a wall I found pencil marks:
E. 5ft. 3ins.
S. 5ft. 1ins.
A. 5ft.
M. 4ft. 8ins.
Myra. And another set of measurements of an obviously later date.
E. 5 ft. 5½ ins.
S. 5ft. 3ins.
A. 5 ft. 2 ins.
M. 4ft. 8ins.
Myra, who remained at four foot eight inches. And mother hadn’t made the progress of the aunts, either … I clenched my teeth.
Lady Vallant met me once on the landing. She saw where I had been, and I braced myself automatically. I really believe that if she had stood there, a fury, or eyed me inimically, or forbidden me the upper storey outright, I should have been happier.
She only glanced at me, said absently, ‘Ah, dear’, and flitted into her bedroom.
Subtly I felt robbed and a little defenceless. I wasn’t uneasy – she was no actress – therefore no plan was behind the greeting. It was the cool assurance of it – nothing to hide – my house is yours … mother had evidently soothed and convinced the old woman about us, either that, or the direct fear of air-raid had thrown Lady Vallant out of gear, or she liked me, after all, when tested as an inmate? That would be quite typical of Vallantry; letting one go to seed for the best years of one’s life, and suddenly, by hazard, taking to one, too late.
III
The schoolroom suite was neglected. It was left to me to air it, and gradually, whenever I had a spare moment, I got into the habit of cleaning and polishing it – I even put a little pot of flowers on my chimneypots window-ledge.
The rooms could make nothing of my presence there; their atmosphere reminded me of the person whom life has injured and rendered hopeless, it was as one feels when taking fruit and flowers to the doomed case in hospital; one received a languid gratitude and then apathy again. There was the hint that one had come too late … absurdly one was stung by the injustice.
Once, wrapped in my thickest coat, I spent an afternoon up there. I chose the least of the bedrooms and took a nap on the bed, but was thankful for waking. There was nothing definite about the dreams I had had, simply a sensation of misery. I awoke crying, as one sometimes does, with the difference that for quite five minutes after full consciousness, the tears continued to roll down my face. I was robust with myself about the business; dreams were beyond all reason, and so on. James and I once dreamed for two nights in succession of the same woman. She was quite unknown to us, but over the breakfast table we compared notes and our description tallied to the last detail, and I have dreamed of one or two people never seen by myself, and have subsequently met them in the street, or in buses, although we were never destined to know each other. I have often wondered, therefore, if the dream created the person, or the person the dream, and if the latter, what was our initial point of contact?
I made a point of ‘resting’ in that upper room, once more, and the same thing – the distress and crying – happened as before. And then I knew it had been Myra’s room.
IV
I left it with coward’s haste, prepared though I had been for something of the sort. And far downstairs the telephone was shrilling. Hutchins was at my side with annoying promptness. ‘A gentleman wishes to speak to you, Miss.’ I don’t know what the old man thought of my manner to himself, what he made of the way in which I turned my head from him – there were reasons – when I saw him, or indeed of my voice when I thanked him. At the best of times I am at sixes and sevens when torn from sleep, and such a sleep as I had fled from had left me tenfold more inadequate than usual. It was the cursed crying. This afternoon, for some reason, it wouldn’t stop, and my eyes enragingly filled and filled again as I lifted the receiver in my grandfather’s study off the hall.
‘This is Mr. Cosmo Furnival speaking. Would that be Miss Buchan?’
In spite of everything I was slightly thrilled. This was one of those preposterous moments which life occasionally holds; it was almost like a piece of one’s childhood being handed back to one, as though Hayden Coffin had sent one a postcard, or Alexander suddenly came to tea announcing that he ‘often dined with Sir Frederick and Lady Vallant in the old days in the Square’.
My silence while savouring all this must have lasted overlong.
‘Is that Miss Buchan? I’m Cosmo Furnival, perhaps you know my name?’
‘I was brought up on it
,’ I answered, ‘and I’m Miss Buchan.’ The laugh in my ear pleased me instantly. Just so, I feel certain, must Irving have reflectively chuckled when, as Iago, he sat upon that Lyceum table plotting, and eating raisins and spitting out the seeds.
‘Well, of course, it’s about this Gladstone business. Now, Miss Buchan, in confidence, I’ve acquired that play, the original option has lapsed – you have the script I believe?’
‘I’m working on it now.’
‘Thank you, yes. Well, I want to get ahead with production, and – do forgive my mentioning it – but I must ask for absolute secrecy, you understand? They tell me at the office that you are kindly undertaking the typewriting.’
‘We don’t give away clients’ business, Mr. Furnival.’
‘No, no, no. But you know, things leak out in the most disconcerting way. I assure you that if it was known that a Gladstone play was on the stocks we should have three rival versions in as many weeks, because unfortunately with the public it isn’t a matter of who’s written the best play on any subject, but of who gets in first with the idea … now, there’s a point or two I want altered. D’you remember the Sandringham bit?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I wonder if you’ll bring the script to the telephone? To begin with there’s quite a page got to come right out. The Censor. It appears that one mayn’t have the Queen on the stage. I think it’s ridiculous, but there you are.’
‘I remember. I don’t have to bring the script. You mean about the grants for the Prince of Wales’s children. “At such a time as this, Ma’am …”’
‘That’s it! “… the feeling of Parliament, of which I, an unworthy representative …”
‘“Mr. Gladstone, we would prefer your meaning quite unwrapped. Frankly, we do not recognize in you this diffident approach.”’ I replied.
‘“Ma’am, I have not deserved this …”.’
At this moment, the footman, hearing voices, passed through the hall and peered in at the door while we were Gladstoning and Ma’am-ing each other quite oblivious. I gave it up and emitted an hysteric scream of laughter. The man vanished like smoke. I bent again to the receiver. ‘It – it was my grandmother’s footman. He – he heard us.’
Again that soft snarl of amusement. ‘I hope he isn’t preparing a version belowstairs.’
‘He would call it “The Grand Old Man”, and it would inevitably be a success.’
‘And we, with just “Gladstone”, are going to antagonize all the expensive seats. I wonder if you could, perhaps, come to the theatre and go over the whole script with me?’
When the conversation was over an idea occurred to me, and I went round my grandfather’s bookshelves for the first time in my life. There was one biography of Gladstone; it looked dullish, but you never knew. I abstracted it without a with or by your leave. Lady Vallant was no bookworm. When one came to think of it, one had not an idea what her interests were, if any, beyond, of course, dress and chicanery. She thought she was fond of music, but her occasional performances at the still draped and littered piano made me wince, she played everything with the loud pedal, and never let wrong notes stand in her light. Crash, bang, out they came with an equal arrogance. It was all very typical of the woman.
V
The theatre was in Shaftesbury Avenue, a locality in which, for some reason, I have never been able to be happy; it always strikes me as being remorseless to young things, and if it were a woman, it would possess hard, drugged-looking eyes, and a cruel underbred snigger. Should any ill befall the daughter of the rectory, up for lunch, a little shopping and a matinee with Aunt Bertha, I think that Shaftesbury Avenue would take the pitiless line that she had only herself to blame. Leicester Square, perhaps first cousin to Shaftesbury Avenue in, as it were, social standing and visitor’s list, should affect one in a similar manner, but about the square there is a warm, stale geniality like that of a slightly tipsy serio of the ’nineties – no harm in her at all. Perhaps it is owing to the sense of space, and above all to the garden where children from the Soho courts play, and one receives an optical illusion of innocence.
Walking down Shaftesbury Avenue that morning and receiving the usual impression, I was remembering a game that in the first years of our settling in London James and I used to play, and have played, on and off, ever since. And it came into being through my dislike of certain local atmospheres, of which Shaftesbury Avenue was typical, and of the fact that from my later teens I had had to pursue my affairs very largely unescorted, and therefore extra vulnerable. James, when he knew that I was due in any street at a given date, would make a point of going up it himself in advance, and of leaving me a token. He would say casually, ‘Haymarket? I’ve thrown a halfpenny down the first grating past the Carlton’, or ‘Shaftesbury Avenue? You’ll find a pencil behind the pit placard outside the Lyric’, and, looking for the halfpenny or pencil, one forgot to be intimidated, and when one found it the entire street became, for a minute, changed and friendly. And he once twisted his theatre programme into a little cocked hat and poked it behind a restaurant mirror. I found it six weeks later when dining with somebody else, and the somebody else was, as usual, the wrong person, and the little hat saved the evening for me, and made me able to cope with everything. And now there was nothing. And I had had difficulty in getting away from Lady Vallant. She was extra nervous that morning, and as pessimistic as aunt Emmeline at her worst about the safety of ‘London’. She was feeding and housing me, but I must earn, and told her so point-blank. It silenced her. The obvious solution of giving me an allowance (which I should not have accepted) never appeared to occur to her, but, as always happens, one felt put in the wrong. Also, she would turn me out whenever it suited her. One had at times, when considering her objectively as a frail and close relation, lonely and a woman, to keep a grip on other aspects of her which were eternal, as against merely immediate and dramatic.
There was no place in my life for cheap appeals to the emotions.
VI
At the theatre, I made the usual novice’s error of enquiring for the manager in the foyer, and was sent into a back alley.
I was left after the sergeant had passed me in to find my own way, and my reward for posting along corridors was ultimately to discover that the room I was destined for overlooked the Avenue; its floor must, I calculated, be the very ceiling of the foyer from which I had been indulgently displaced. Then why not run a staircase to it direct? I found Furnival’s name on the door, knocked and waited, and knocked again. As I received no summons I did as I always do: assumed it to be the Enquiry office to the inner room, opened the door and found I was badly wrong.
Cosmo Furnival had fallen lightly asleep on a sofa.
I recognized him at once in spite of the fact that he was not in everyday clothes and yet not made up at all – a baffling combination of effects. Gradually I smiled as I looked. One ringed hand, the knuckles veiled in a ruffle of lace, hung down almost to the carpet, the other was snuggled into the flowered waistcoat, while a triangle of stiffened silk coat jutted beneath his elbow. On a near-by table were a rapier, a snuff-box and a handkerchief; on a wooden stand like a bedpost his queued peruke.
I stood there and frankly gloated at the spectacle, and admired his legs in oyster-grey silk which had that right and satisfying length from knee to ankle which is so uncommon, with the ankle-bones clear and sharp. He was subtly older than I had quite expected in spite of the calendar and of my flatulent words to poor little Gladys, whom I had forgotten until this moment. She had left the office quite inevitably to make munitions, which quite directly and simply to her meant extravagantly better pay and the dual opportunity for wearing trousers and collecting scalps from among the fitters. She had outgrown Furnival, if indeed she had ever ‘ingrown’ him. But so, it seemed, had everyone else. I thought of the mantelpiece in Palace Green, of my very father and mother going ‘up to town’ to see him. People didn’t run Furnival any more; his epoch and its emotions were as dead as Lewis Waller’
s. It positively dated a woman. One could appreciate that, just in the way that the world no longer sang ‘The Lily of Laguna’ or ‘You are queen of my heart to-night’, in spite of the fact that their charm and melodiousness remain the same as ever. …
Meanwhile a point of etiquette confronted one. I hesitated to sit there and wait for Furnival to wake, it seemed a sort of spying on him. I was even more unwilling to wake him myself. People asleep are in a no-man’s-land, between death and life, and I have always felt that to drag them back by a sudden noise, movement, or touch is, possibly, to endanger them, that such sharp translation must harm them in ways of which we know nothing. He must return in his own good time. I closed the door noiselessly and took a comfortable winged chair near him, I even took off my hat to fit more snugly into its depths and wedged the Gladstone biography down its side. One must chance startling him when he did awaken. There was plenty of time, it was still an hour and a half until luncheon which I must take with Lady Vallant as a peace offering. Warmed and relaxed I went on looking at Furnival. He certainly didn’t resemble Gladstone, with his fine Wellingtonian nose, also, Furnival’s mouth was too thin and humorous, his length too long and slender, the planes of his face too fine.
A Harp in Lowndes Square Page 20