A Harp in Lowndes Square

by Rachel Ferguson

  ‘Now listen: this matters a lot to me. I’m going to sound extremely fatuous and deliver myself,’ here he smiled down at me, ‘bound into your dismayingly efficient hands. Are you what is described as in love with me, or do you just love me?’

  I attempted a shrug with my weighted shoulders. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think I do know the difference. In the last resort it seems to amount to the same thing, except that I rather fancy my kind wears better. I suppose the popular test is that I don’t feel that my life would be over if I didn’t get a week in Paris with you. You see, I know that life goes on and on – oh, how it goes on! and that it would be just a lie to say that when I don’t see you any more it will stop. I may wish it would, but it won’t. I can do without you.’

  It was true. I’ve gone without so much and weathered it, and knew for all time the terrible strength of engrained self-control and inherited reserve, aspects of my destined make-up which had never oppressed me before. Yet even in those minutes I couldn’t honestly regret any of my second-rate experiences. If they got home on me it was purely emotionally as the meaningless makeshifts that they were. ‘And yet,’ I meditated, ‘on the other hand – now I’m playing into yours – there’s no blinking the fact that I’ve had to give up going to concerts. …’

  ‘… because?’

  ‘Because you get in my way,’ I answered baldly, ‘particularly with my favourite composers. Dammit! I can only hear Chopin with relation to … look here, don’t you think we’d better pack up and go to our respective homes?’

  ‘So, you can’t hear music … and that’s about the most beautiful thing anyone has ever said to me. And I do nothing for you at all, except give you my love …’ He took my face in his hands and kissed it. ‘You dear!’ and kissed it again. ‘You’re about the only woman I’ve ever met who didn’t want things from me.’ He was striding about the room, his hand in mine. ‘You know, ever since I saw you asleep in my chair I thought, that child is – there’s no other word for it – hagridden. Now, what can I do about it? How am I going to look after you?’

  It warmed one’s heart so that answering was difficult. He was helping me, and I said so, by just being there. ‘And I may as well tell you that you’re about the only man who has ever thought of that particular thing.’

  ‘Is that really so? Well, we’re a worthless crew, my dear, and’ – here I caught a twinkle in his eye – ‘I don’t say that twenty years ago it might have been an aspect of you which I too might have ignored.’

  ‘Then how right we were only to meet now.’

  ‘Um … that rather brings us to the Paris week-end, doesn’t it? You’d hate it, of course?’

  ‘Not at all, Mr. Furnival,’ I answered, between chaff and earnest, and we laughed together. ‘And now I must bundle off to Vallant House.’

  ‘And now you are coming home with me.’

  ‘Me? Why?’

  ‘To meet Enid, of course.’

  ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘My wife.’

  I took my hand from his. ‘I wish you hadn’t said that. Don’t you see it’s impossible, now?’

  ‘And why now?’

  ‘I mean, since we have failed to keep –’

  ‘Our heads?’

  ‘No. They were never in any danger. I was going to say something on the ponderous and prim side, about having failed to keep the situation at the suitable level.’

  ‘And a very good line too. It never misses … only the word is “proper”. “The proper level”.’

  ‘Mr. Furnival, I’m not coming to your house.’ I was rude and bitter because Cosmo had hurt me badly. ‘I’ve had some. Wives! They litter the ground like paper bags!’

  ‘I don’t think Enid’s a paper bag,’ he considered, twirling the ribbon of his monocle, ‘and so you think that because I gave myself the pleasure of kissing you –’

  ‘Oh, I was in it too. That makes it worse.’

  ‘Yes. You were unmistakably “in it” too; one of the nicest things, for me … but to revert to my wife: don’t you want to meet her?’

  ‘Oh, want to, yes. In a way …’

  ‘You know, child, you distress me a lot. This darting defensiveness … and sudden flights out of one’s reach … it’s as though you’d never been fairly dealt with. And you should be having such happiness … Enid … yes.’ He moved towards the telephone.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Will you try trusting me, just for an experiment? Don’t be arrogant with me, Vere. If there’s any arrogance called for, I’ll supply it myself.’ He took up the receiver, then replaced it. ‘By the way, what is your idea of my wife?’

  ‘No you don’t, Cosmo!’

  ‘Oh, but please. I’m immensely interested. Now try and think you’re prophesying to a third party … no reflection on my taste, and so on.’

  Unwillingly I smiled; it was as if he had climbed into my very brain. ‘I – I really couldn’t. It would sound rude, whatever you say.’

  ‘But it’s not I who am saying it. Now!’

  I’d heard that ‘now!’ at rehearsals. It usually produced results.

  ‘Well,’ I began dubiously, ‘she has henna’d hair that’s blue at the parting, and is what used to be called a fine figure of a woman, and she dislikes girls and is clever at eliminating them, and she calls one darling with an eye like a stiletto and makes scenes … semi-public ones, you know.’

  ‘Thank you so much,’ responded Cosmo blandly, and lifted the receiver again. ‘I do admire you for that. I really mean it. It – Lenox 0717 … Mrs. Furnival … Oh, Niddy, I’ve got someone here for us. I think she loves me and I could knock a house down … no no no! company be damned! Don’t be an actress, Enid! … what? … getting on for thirty, she says. Yes, of course it’s the one … How like a woman you are, sometimes! … No she doesn’t think age matters, even if you do … oh yes, I’ve told her and it made no difference at all. Yes, and I’ve rather unsuccessfully been trying to come the heavy father over her … Certainly. Twice. And I want to bring her along. Let’s have some champagne for dinner. Of course it’ll kill me but you like it, like all the chorus … and you’re another! But seriously this needs celebrating … right, bless you.’

  He made to replace the receiver and put it to his ear again.

  ‘Oh, Niddy, just sing me one of the old crusteds, will you dear? Never mind why. Just do it.’ In the little pause he twitched me with eyebrow and finger to the telephone. ‘Listen’, he murmured, and put the receiver into my hand.

  From heaven knows where came a voice, silver-true as a bird’s but as a bird which has served an uncommonly knowing apprenticeship; only a light soprano, certainly, but full of that appeal which we seem to have lost in these overcrowded days: a voice which conveyed person and manner and which, to me, accounted so thoroughly for the forgotten days of hero-worship and pit-full notices and gallery boys and girls and autograph albums and picture postcards. No voice at all, academically speaking, but with intonations that told you beyond doubt when the singer was smiling and when immobile. And with it and through it came the tinkle of the Furnival piano in some unknown drawing-room.

  ‘A goldfish swam in a little glass bowl

  As dear little goldfish do …

  . . . . .

  And she said “It is bit-bit-bitter”. …

  and a little laugh at the end. She was singing for Cosmo; to me quite obviously flirting with her own husband.

  III

  Involuntarily I said, ‘Oh, thank you!’

  Cosmo had gone back to his dressing-table and was removing his partly-begun make-up. The things he didn’t say were positively noisy, but he caught my eye and looked arch and prim as he so often does when he’d scored off anybody. Whether he had this time remained to be seen. A man’s recommendation is seldom the right – or any – passport for another woman’s invasion of his home. Well, he ought to know, and on their own heads be it. At least he’d put me straight with Mrs. Furnival from the start, conventionally speaking, if s
he should decide to turn nasty later on. Yet one was hurt by it in deeper ways which didn’t bear investigation … and if one was going to be lured into becoming attached to Cosmo’s wife, the old unsolved query presented itself of whether it is, then, a worse disloyalty to love her husband. And then Cosmo disarmed me utterly, if temporarily, by catching up my hand as I passed his chair, looking at it and dropping a kiss on it before dealing with a smear of cold cream on his nose.

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful the way all novelists say he “washed the make-up off his face"?’ he chuckled. ‘I should prefer to try and clean the enamel off a yacht with a bottle of rosewater, personally. If ever … you do any amateur shows … never … use cocoa butter. It’s guaranteed to grow hair on a plank. There! Now we’ll get your Vallant House rung up.’ He pressed a bell. ‘Murton, ring up Lady Vallant, Lowndes Square, and say that Miss Buchan is dining with us and we’re sending her home in the car. And to-morrow get on to Clarkson and tell him the wig’s still too young. Too much hair on the temples, and he must stand by to make me another one, too. Five years elapse between Acts Two and Three and it’ll have to be whiter and thinner. Well, we’re going now.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  I was thinking how strange Lady Vallant’s name sounded, spoken by Cosmo, and that he had, after all, deprived me of the gesture of mentioning it first.

  IV

  Furnival tossed on a wideawake and pulled the rug over us. We drove to his house in absolute silence. My thoughts were upside down and I didn’t attempt to cope with any of them. I knew the address – had seen it on many a brown bundle of script packed for the post at our office. It was in one of those suburbs which pay back in gardens and space and carriage drive and house-room what they borrow in off-colour address and a tendency to redundant steps in black and white tiling.

  ‘In here. Enid!’ I heard a rushing step and Cosmo’s wife appeared.

  Nell Gwyn, thirty years later. Naturally curly hair, pale-gold in kindly light, silver by day, which giggled all round her head and matched her sudden laughter. Even her clothes suggested Lely, lacy and beribboned, and hinting at masked adventure at St. Bartholomew’s Fair. She came but little above Cosmo’s elbow and her blue eyes took me in as she gave me a small hand.

  In that moment it was I who felt the elder: worn and unsure and staled before this little thing from whom assurance – the security of mid-Victorianism, untroubled by wars and unpestered by our plague of introspection, fairly radiated.

  ‘This is so nice of you … my dear, your hair! It’d look quite heavenly from the front – and from the back, too,’ and she gave a tiny giggle. And Cosmo was watching both of us.

  ‘This, Enid, is the one girl in the world who loves me, and now I’ll leave you both … oh, by the way … she says you’ve got hair that’s blue at the roots.’

  ‘It isn’t, Val! I’ve let it grow grey absolutely naturally. Oh, you’re being funny.’

  ‘I’m not in the least funny. And you have an eye like a stiletto.’

  ‘But – didn’t you show her some of my photographs?’

  ‘No,’ I paid back Cosmo, ‘he showed me some of his.’

  ‘Wouldn’t he!’ and the blue eyes crinkled.

  Well – perhaps he was right. If that was the note he meant to strike … yet for all one’s tranquil conviction that one’s intentions were honest one was already indignant at the idea of ever so delicate a circumvention of Mrs. Furnival. …

  It is ironic that that storm-centre, the other woman, is by reason of her sex usually the penetrative and pitiful party, the perceiver of baseness however trivial and, more times than is admitted, its demonstrator to the man in the case. The other woman is the unscrupulous villainess of the piece, and the woman who is an ex-blonde and who giggles is brainless and a fool-cat. I had found one who was neither of these things, and she had found – but her case is a better one than mine, when all’s said.

  V

  She walked by my side down that Edwardian drawing-room, whose gilt and watercolours and chintzes reminded me of ours in our first suburban home except for the electric light and the gleaming grand piano, and pulled me down to a sofa by the fire and gave her head a little shake and smiled at me and complained ‘There’s such a lot to say, isn’t there?’

  I said, ‘Thank you for The Goldfish.’

  ‘Oh … aha! So that was his doing, was it?’

  ‘I thought, from the way you sang it, that you’d once played O Mimosa San.’

  ‘Oh, you are a nice person! My dear, think again! When The Geisha was going strong I was over forty! And though I don’t say it’s too old for the part if you’ve already got a name, the thing was that I hadn’t. In those days the unknowns and the only-slightly-knowns like me had to be as pretty as pinks or they got scrapped at once. Looks mattered far more than voices. Oh, I could have been rather good, you know, but the conditions then were very difficult, though we did far better work than is being turned out now. The musical composers, people like Sydney Jones and Adrian Ross, Caryll, Paul Reubens and Lehar seemed to write for the love of it … you can hear it. Nowadays the new lot write to make money or to fit some actress with type-songs, all hit-or-miss stuff, written with no unmistakable personal urge by men who have nothing particular to say and aren’t even very keen on saying it. Am I boring you? I’m afraid we old dears are very trying when we get started … and what’s the result? We have no musical comedy actresses now. Evelyn Laye, perhaps, though she seems to have deserted to the films, Vera Pearce, yes, but she’s more a character lead; Maisie Gay same thing, and there may be one or two more. Oh they all think they can do it! Have a pop at anything, you know, and the result is that musical comedy has fallen into bad odour and has simply faded out. But look at the names we had! Florence Smithson, Ada Reeve, Marie Studholme, Adrienne and Amy Augarde, Gabrielle Ray (no voice but a darling figure and face and a good dancer), and Ruth Vincent (did you see Amasis? Very poor book but she could sing), and Olive Moore and Evie Green and Jean Alwyn, Edna May and Ellaline Terriss. …

  ‘Oh, if you want to find old Enid on the programmes, you must go back further than that! As a matter of fact it was in one of ’em that I met Val. He was filling in – not his line a bit and he wasn’t much good; the new conditions and conventions bothered him and he made some quite killing mistakes but always saved his bacon somehow. And then, thank goodness, we fell in love with each other … he could have had anybody, if he’d waited a bit, you know. And so I more or less left the stage after a few more years of it. Oh they were good days. Such fun! Of course Val is fearfully well known now, but it isn’t the same, to him anyway. He misses the fussing and admiration, though he’s a far better actor to-day than he used to be. Luckily the public still likes us and I come in on the reflected glory.’

  She smiled and thought and went on, ‘There are two ways to keep real to the public; one is by having sensational rows that get into the papers, and the other is by never having any – like us! We’re the kind of couple who parents trust and ask advice on careers of. It make us feel awfully old, but it’s rather nice as well … dear me! what a good listener you are.’

  ‘You’ll never be old, Mrs. Furnival. You’re one of those people who wring the best out of every age. You make me not mind my own.’

  ‘I must tell Val that. And you mean it, too. No wonder he grabbed you.’

  ‘Well, I meant to mention that,’ I thought, as quickly as might be.

  ‘But, must you? The great point is that you’re here.’

  And that remark accounted to me for the entirely dignified youth of Enid Furnival; sincere, typical, directly happy-go-lucky, it was a point of view which the prolix, tortuous and nerve-wracked younger generation could never conceivably have either held or expressed, yet it piqued one to be so lightly dismissed … even if one’s common sense and decency told one that it was the best possible line to take. Whether it was a considered line or the fluke of natural kindheartedness did not, after all, matter; my work for Cosmo was nea
rly over and then I should withdraw into my family and the next job. And meanwhile I would allow myself the happiness of the moment; I would watch Cosmo quite openly, walking about his own drawing-room. It would pass as the look of a woman who to the Furnivals seemed to be still a girl, belatedly stage-struck: the fact of her puerile enthusiasm being quite a quarter of a century out of date probably wouldn’t occur to them, either … and yet Enid seemed to know. ‘He misses the fuss and the admiration.’ Meaning women and girls falling for him wholesale at long distance, and stacks of albums and postcards to sign ‘Yours v. truly, Cosmo Furnival.’

  And how one would have ignored him at the right and suitable age! The romantic actor, the bulk of whose admirers would inevitably put the accent on the first syllable – the adorers who, in his beautiful elderliness, had happily deserted him en bloc.

  ‘He misses the fussing … no wonder he grabbed you.’ H’m! So I was to be the peg on which Cosmo was hoping to hang the shreds of his personal vanity … oh, one could edge in a lot of fun with Cosmo! Delicately pull his nice long leg, like the urchin who tweaks the front-door bell and scampers away … and one was so sleepy that one could have dropped off then and there, over-stimulated by Enid Furnival, keyed up for Cosmo to come into the room.

  And then he did come in, in dinner jacket, the ribbon of his monocle making a loop of shadow on his soft shirt, and he gave us each an arm and we dined – quite perfectly by candlelight, the best light of all. I said so, and Cosmo said for Regency effects, yes, but for appearance give him gas light every time as it threw such wonderful shadows, and that the artificiality of the bulk of modern plays was directly traceable to their electric lighting which left one no illusions to stand up in.