And that brought us all back – they included me without apology, almost, so to speak, snatched me from each other’s jaws – to the Lyceum, the Adelphi and the Haymarket, and ‘the floats’, candles set as footlights on little rafts of wood in saucers of water. ‘And,’ declaimed Cosmo, ‘I defy any company however experienced to play melodrama wholeheartedly as it should be played in a light you can control by switch and depend upon. And surely everything that is tended by hands has a greater meaning because, willy-nilly, more thought has gone to it, and thought breeds affection, if it’s only for a lamp you must keep trimmed? But to-day our effects are so slick and labour-saving there’s no love left.’ He leant back in his chair and looked mockingly at me, ‘But then, I over rate the importance of love, no doubt’.
‘I don’t think you do,’ I answered, ‘I ought to know … machines v. personal service is all the difference between tinned peas and the kind from a Georgian kitchen garden, or between a Hepplewhite chair and something on the instalment plan from Tottenham Court Road, or between a service flat and, say, your home here.’
His eyes lit, but he said nothing to that. It was his wife who exclaimed ‘But you oughtn’t to understand that at your age! You ought to be all for modernity’.
‘Only, for some reason, I’m not – except in one respect: the treatment of children by their parents’ … I broke off and tried to change the subject and couldn’t. Cosmo saw, and gave me some more champagne and Mrs Furnival smiled at us both, suggesting to me a happy woman glad to share with her guest the protectiveness of her husband. And in spite of everything it was the happiest evening of my life, therefore it couldn’t endure.
From some other room the telephone shrilled. The maid came in and murmured with a side-glance at me that it was for the young lady (‘that rules me out’, sighed Cosmo’s wife, with a wink).
It was Hutchins, apologetically thinking that I had better come home.
CHAPTER XXVI
I
THAT meant that Lady Vallant was raising Cain among the staff and that Hutchins wanted to break my fall for me, guessing I should say nothing to her. As ever there was tacit conspiracy between the old man and myself.
I returned to the drawing-room. I had not meant to say anything at all about the message, also I was desperately unwilling to carry over the Vallant atmosphere into the Furnival’s home; it had even disturbed me that Cosmo had been put into the position of ever having had so much as to mention her name, and I hastily told Mrs. Furnival that I must go, thanked her – and Cosmo, as though I had not spoken, walked over to me and said, ‘Who is this person who troubles you?’
‘It sounds pretty comic, but it’s Lady Vallant, my grandmother.’
‘Cannot you tell her to go to – bed?’ insinuated Cosmo, his elbow on the mantelpiece.
‘I’m going to do more than that. I’m going to leave her.’
‘Where are you going to?’ It was for all the world like a suspicious father, indignant about latchkeys, and delighted me.
‘To our house on Campden Hill.’
‘Alone?’
‘A servant is there.’ The second girl had walked out on me, days before, as I discovered on calling at the house. She had, I suppose, left to make her pile ‘at munitions’ and it was no doubt only a matter of days before the other followed suit, a fact I had deliberately kept from mother as I knew it would bring her posting back to town and undo, in worry and indignation, all the good of Hampshire.
‘… who’ll come in at all hours and waste the food and steal the wine and feed the postman and lose her head in any emergency,’ remarked Mrs. Furnival.
‘And what if you were taken ill? It won’t do, Vere. I don’t like it,’ decided Cosmo.
‘But of course she must come to us, Val!’
I suppose I knew, then, how much I had subconsciously longed for her to suggest just that; the fact that as a wish it had never become active was due to its essential improbability.
And this, my temporary parting, was enlivened by Enid Furnival’s plea, head on one side: ‘You don’t still think my hair’s blue at the roots?’
Cosmo put me into his car and his arms over the door.
‘I don’t like you harassed … quite unnecessary, you know. We will go into this business later. Enid will write to your mother to-night, of course … now, one more thing: would you like me to come with you?’
I shook my head. ‘Bless you for that, but I can manage Vallant.’
‘– and it’s telling on you, my child. Why not try being managed, for a change?’ He looked at me, tapped me lightly on the cheek and the car drove off.
II
Night at Vallant House seems peculiarly suited to anger and scenes, even if I had not felt it myself there was the Chilcot letter to remind me. …
Hutchins was waiting up when I returned and we seemed to gravitate instinctively to the dining-room.
‘Am I in disgrace, Hutchins?’
He permitted himself the nearest approach to a shrug that I had ever seen in him. ‘Nothing that I should take notice of, Miss Vere, but I thought I would let you know. It isn’t right –’ he hesitated, found himself committed, and went on – ‘that young ladies should have to come back from a pleasant evening to this sort of thing.’
I thought, ‘to him I’m a Sophia or an Emmeline, even perhaps an Anne. He’s remembering’. ‘The young ladies.’ And now, a generation later, here was another young lady to steer through the current storm.
‘I hope you have had a very pleasant evening, Miss.’
‘I have, a singularly pleasant one.’ His gratified look fairly showered rice and confetti upon me as proxy for decorous tongue. ‘Please sit down a minute – no, please, I really mean it.’ He took a chair quietly, facing me across the immense mahogany table, hands folded upon the red cloth. ‘Look here, I’m leaving, Hutchins, but I’m coming back without letting – I mean, would it be possible to get in quietly at night, say?’ It was on the face of it a preposterous question to pose to the house’s official warden, and I hoped that he would regard it as test of friendship.
Whatever his sensations were, it was a test I had passed.
‘I would see to that, Miss.’
‘I give you my word that it is nothing you oughtn’t to allow. It’s some – family business I can’t do during the daytime.’
He thought a moment. ‘If you would tell me the date I will let you have my own key.’
‘You’re always my standby, Hutchins. I promise to turn off all the lights when I go, and don’t wait up for me. I mean it. It would – you know – fidget me to have to think of that kind of thing.’
‘Very good, Miss Vere.’
‘Well, good-night, and thank you for all your kindness.’
III
Lady Vallant was in the drawing-room – but Victorian walls are thick, its doors well-fitting and its floors solid; no murmur – hadn’t I tested it? – of conversation could be heard from the dining-room below; the double curtain were drawn and the Furnival car a silent affair.
‘You are very late,’ the plangent voice was possessive, authoritative, but from her it gave one no pleasure. My grandmother was merely trying to make out a case against me in which I had ‘kept her from her rest’, which was ridiculous, as she went upstairs whenever it suited her, but logic was ever jettisoned when Vallants were annoyed. ‘I have been alone all the evening’.
‘I’m sorry. It was a final pressure of work,’ I lied civilly. Her disbelief was partly automatic and was, no doubt of it, her method with her own daughters. One felt quite sorry for her for what she must have gone through all these years in enforced suppression of her nature through sheer lack of victims … except for Anne … Anne the vulnerable and the most available.
‘You are making yourself conspicuous with this man. Are you supposed to be in love with him?’
‘Certainly. Why not?’ I answered, deliberately baiting her, for I thought I saw what the matter was. Quite plainly, Lady Vallant had co
nvicted me of a private happiness, and happiness was suspect … meant underground contrivings against herself … was almost insubordination as in the old days any snatch at it must have been … something to be exposed like a nerve and with jeers before people where the maximum of hurt shame could be exhibited. She had made a joke of Myra’s lameness before the servants. Who was I to mind this enfeebled version of old tyranny, I with my whole body and background of sane home and laughter? Yet she could still inspire fear, encourage awkwardness and confusion of speech, and touch up any tendency to innate self deprecation … it was her damned assurance, and as with the uncles, her sons, one met it with obstinacy, drive and bogus frivolity.
‘You were always troublesome,’ she said levelly, and for the moment made me believe it, ‘you are making yourself undignified. That is no doubt why you have never found any man to marry you. Look at you now! Grinning all over your face.’ This was her version of my facial attempts to get upsides with her, or was the atmosphere of Cosmo and Enid Furnival still so thick about me?
‘You would rather I cried?’ I suggested. It was quite a nasty one, and a line, as Cosmo would call it, that the audience could take in two ways: one, as superficial impertinence, the other as a hint at past things. Her look of open suspicion satisfied me entirely. But one wouldn’t go too far. Time for that, later.
‘Don’t be insolent. Go to your room.’
With an effort absurdly great I stayed where I was; I believed that all my backers, James, Cosmo, Enid and Miss Chilcot, would approve.
‘I’m not a servant, you know.’
‘While you are in my house you will do what I tell you, or go.’
‘Only in reason, and I came to tell you that I must go. The arrangement isn’t answering, is it?’
‘If I had had the bringing of you up, I’d have made you sing a different tune.’
It was that which drove me to the door, with shaking knees, not on my own account, but for her poise in retrospective power over two children some forty years ago.
My manner obviously strengthened her; if one could say of that sardonic face that it was charmed. …
‘Come here.’
I could hear the wrong quality in the voice with which I answered her: thin, without body, produced from the head – what Cosmo at rehearsal once called ‘that silly white tone’.
‘I’m going to bed, Lady Vallant.’
‘Don’t call me that. Say, “I’m going to bed, granny”, or “grandmother”.’
‘If you prefer it so – grandmother.’
‘You are going to this actor, I presume?’
‘And his wife, yes.’
‘Reduced to that already!’ The wrinkles rayed on her face at the taunt. ‘You will never come here again, except for your sister’s wedding reception. I shall have to admit you for that, I suppose.’
I left her in mid-scene. It was no matter of bravado, simply that I was in tatters. I can only suppose that in this action I was a pioneer, that in all her years of cowing a peace-at-any-price husband, trembling children and fainthearted governesses, not one had attempted that solution. The effect was possibly more enraging than I had quite realized or intended, for – and somehow it was, to me, the most unnerving item in a wracked evening – the old woman followed me, skimming up the stairs on tiny feet with incredible lightness and speed. It should have been a profoundly humorous sight. I can only say that it was beastly, for I knew in my heart that this furious pursuit wasn’t the first; that once there were those who ran before her as I was running, and one who could not run so fast … what she had done then I don’t ever wish to know, and try not to think of. What she did now – and the futility of it must have been a torment to her – was to hammer on my door with her stick. I had no time to lock my door, I merely pressed her out with my weight. Physical strength can at no period have been her weapon, and my defensive action was tribute to her sheer atmosphere.
The house was roused in that gradual, decorous way of the large mansion; the maid evidently came out of Lady Vallant’s bedroom and stood there. I heard, ‘Since you are there, open that door’, and nothing happened at all, by which I judged that Palmer was suddenly robbed of all initiative or (more likely) had no intention of becoming embroiled with another, and stronger, of the Vallant clan. The heavier step ascending the stairs I thought I recognized, and my grandmother said – and it was part of the revulsion which she inspired that she never raised her voice: plangent and sibilant, she seared her world in tones almost conversational:
‘Get that woman out of there,’ and at the crack she dealt my door the wood of her stick splintered.
Lady Vallant, in short, wished to continue the conversation.
‘Go to bed, your ladyship, the young lady needs her rest.’
I wasn’t going to be outdone by Hutchins and opened the door. He stood his ground. Together we waited for the mistress of the house to move.
I wrote letters to James and mother and packed for the rest of the night and am not ashamed to admit that I locked the door. Later, I was to feel a twisted pity for the old woman, for the night she must have spent and for her knowledge of waning powers of dominating her scenes that, to-day, had no climax and fizzled out into ineffectiveness. The loss of her first beauty must have rendered half of life meaningless to her, the loss of power to inflict damage to bodies and susceptibilities, the other. Unlike Cosmo, she had no second appeal of age, no lovely autumn-life, so far more full of meaning than its spring and summer. Her good times were long gone and for ever. She had failed even to flatter the youth of James, had never been clever enough, as the ex-beauty is seldom clever enough, to put by for the future in the way of attracting and securing members of her own sex, those traditional enemies. In all my life, I think, I never heard her laughter.
I wondered what sort of exit would be mine in the morning, even dallied with the notion of bread and water on a tray, and – such was my debility – welcomed the thought as being a communion bread associating me with the children. But nothing happened. Lady Vallant did not appear at all, and Hutchins looked after my wants as usual. I was fretted by the streak in me that actually felt regrets at leaving my uncomfortable bedroom, but there it was; live in any room if only for a few weeks, and you begin to throw out shoots which bind it to you. There among that plethora of Empire mirrors and ponderous furniture I had typed Gladstone, there read my mother’s nursery books (The Robey Family and Anna Ross were still on the table by my bed; heaven knew when or if a spasm of orderliness would ever seize the underhousemaid and relegate them to the schoolroom once more from their first outing for well over a quarter of a century!’)
‘Hutchins, you won’t forget to water my plants? They’re on the schoolroom windowsill?’
‘I’ll see that is done, Miss Vere.’
I thanked him, then (it was bound to get said sooner or later), ‘Why do you stay on here?’
He spoke more freely now, thanks to the night before. ‘Well, you know what it is, one gets set in one’s ways, and I shouldn’t like, after all these years, to lose touch with the family.’
‘But you needn’t. There’s Miss Lalage, going to be married, she’d adore to have you. I only wish we could.’
‘Thank you, Miss Vere, but the fact is I’m used to the large house. I could never shake down in a small one, or a flat. Here, I’ve got my staff and things as I like them … in spite of all.’ I admired that: there was no pseudo-sentiment about Hutchins, no tearful family retainer stuff, swearing à la Belvawney to live and die in the service of everybody: he would stand by you to a finish while keeping a placid eye on his and your own creature comforts – a reassuring combination. ‘But I can’t say how I shall miss you, it makes one almost wish you’d never come here, Miss Vere. The house has been a different place –’
I was so touched I could say nothing in thanks. I told him where I was going and he looked slightly bewildered and said ‘Not the Cosmo Furnival? the actor? … well there now! I remember him, it must have been in
1882, as quite a young man. I saw him many a time since. A very fine artist, we want more like him.’
‘I’ll tell him you said so, Hutchins, he’ll love it. You two must meet. I like to share my friends when I know they’ll make a hit with each other … well, it’s about time I left.’
‘If I might suggest … I should like to tell Miss Palmer and Henry, Miss. They wish to say good-bye to you.’
‘Don’t let’s disturb them. Might I come down to them?’
He led me down to the rooms I had never seen. I asked to see the kitchen and was shown it. The warren of sitting-rooms and pantrys was small and freakishly ventilated; some of them, including the larders, had no windows at all and gas light burnt there all the year round, they told me. Furniture obviously taken from the upper floors made the staff comfortable enough and I saw that the dining table of the upper servants, still covered with breakfast things, sported an imposing array of our family silver. The cook was drinking a jorum of tea out of a cup that looked uncommonly like Crown Derby. And said nothing: neither did Hutchins, for which I respected him. If you appropriate, do it in the grand manner. And that underworld of men and women, the majority of whom had so far only materialized to me as a row of decorous behinds at dining-room prayers, emerged as human beings, and I think we pleased each other reason ably well. Their laws of precedence, I knew, were tricksy, but I managed to make only two mistakes: confused the upper with the under housemaid and ‘spoke’ to the kitchenmaid who is, socially, dumb.
CHAPTER XXVII
I
ENID told me months later that my appearance positively shocked her. She was ‘doing the books’ when I arrived, told me she was a perfect devil at them and had got the habit ever since her days of theatrical landladies and their extras, and indeed her domestic accounts seemed to be models of efficient balance which mother could never rise to, as I told her. Lalage, now, used to be arithmetically sound, but James and myself –
A Harp in Lowndes Square Page 25