‘James? Is he a brother?’
‘We’re twins.’
‘No! What great fun! Is he anything like you?’
‘Exactly like me!’
‘Then I shall fall into his arms at once. A male version of you, my dear, must be too much!’
‘You won’t have the slightest difficulty! He’s yours already.’
Cosmo was at the theatre, he had veto’d my joining him there in a note I found on my dressing-table. ‘Be happy here, and take it easy. C.’ By my bed was a photograph of him – as he used to be. Enid’s doing, from wifely pride? Or his from vanity? A mistake, either way. I wanted no popular young pain-killers in my bedroom. I moved it to the mantelpiece and saw, hours later, that Enid Furnival had noticed.
The new house was taking its usual toll of me, even though it was his, and his atmosphere and his wife’s after Vallant House was, that day, as psychically upsetting as is the physical change to Alpine height from stifling valley. And his arrival at night exhausted me, also I was fretting to know that all was well at the theatre. He said yes, gave me a rather searching look and began to choose at a built-in bookshelf.
‘Do you like poetry?’
‘Sorry. For some reason it eludes me. Embarrassing … you know. So out of the picture … isn’t it?’ I managed a sardonic smile.
‘Ah …’ He selected a volume, took an armchair and cocked an eye at me.
‘Sing God of Love and tell me in what dearth
Thrice-gifted Snevellicini came to earth …’
read Cosmo Furnival, and made beauty of it (which was hitting below the belt). It happened to be a portion I particularly liked, leading as it did to the Phenomenon, the sandals, the Benefit and the parasol down the grating, and a voice said, ‘She’s off’ and Cosmo picked me up and the next morning I was in bed, and outside spread his large garden, under frost and be-robin’d, like the type of Christmas card the bores tell me I ought to feel contempt, for, and plenty of it, and that I so love. Enid Furnival told me that they often had rehearsals there in the summer.
We had breakfast in the morning-room which took in another view of the garden: a stone bird-bath and a mass of michaelmas daisies, pink and mauve, fell to my share. ‘But you were to have had breakfast in bed in another hour!’ lamented Mrs. Furnival, more Gwynish than ever in a tightly fitting lace cap that tied under her chin.
‘Was I? I’m so sorry,’ and I thought instantly and guiltily of the upset I had probably caused, of de-laid tray and re-laid place at table.
Cosmo was waiting to pull my chair out for me. ‘Always punctual – and conscientious,’ he murmured reflectively, and moved to his place opposite mine. ‘Excuse me, but what do you weigh?’
‘Seven stone something.’
He shook his head. ‘Too little. I thought so, last night.’
‘Oh Lord!’ I gave it up. ‘I meant to have apologized about that. I seem to spend my time going to sleep at him, Mrs. Furnival.’
He turned to her also. ‘Isn’t it curious the way she’s always apologizing about something?’ then to me, ‘Sheer worry, in my opinion’. I had nothing to say, and he changed the subject. I enjoyed seeing him chipping an egg ‘just like a person’, as we used to say. He looked after both of us and when his wife wanted anything walked all round the table to give it to her. It was part of my cultivated defensive system that I was for some time unable to credit that this old-world mannerliness could be genuine. It was more helpful to assume it to be a set of charming actor’s tricks with one eye on the gallery; breakfast in some Sweet Lavenderish romance with everybody called Lydia and Vernon … or the brittle tea-cuppery of a Robertson comedy.
At this point a dry rustling caught my ear and a stout hedgehog handed itself into the room from the garden. ‘Come on Trotty. He wants his bread and milk,’ said Mrs. Furnival, ‘take him, Val, till I’ve made it. He will stick his spills – quills – ’
(‘Spines.’)
‘– into my lace.’ The creature laboriously crawled up Cosmo who looked austere and resigned and it sat on his shoulder with two minute and perfect pink hands clutching his collar. ‘Val dotes on him, but always pretends to hate him. Aren’t men oddments? He came in in a bad thunderstorm, once, and has boarded here ever since. He likes his Actor’s Orphanage, bless him! I must remember to tell cook to make him a custard … Val, I don’t think this child ought to do any work to-day.’
‘She’s not going to.’
‘Oh, but I must! I mean, what use am I unless –’
‘Oh dear, oh dear! Is it never permitted to any of us to be ornamental?’
I smiled at him. ‘Exceedingly so, sometimes’, and he cast down his eyes and said to the hedgehog, ‘Ah, she doesn’t mean it’. It was the merest whisper, but Cosmo’s whispers had the knack of being as penetrating as other people’s shouts. And – so soon – he was off to the theatre. His wife called out, ‘Don’t forget the footwarmer in the car’, and I said, ‘Or that Clarkson’s man is coming at eleven, not half-past’, and he shook his head at me and told me to go and rest.
‘Good-bye my dears, be good.’
‘Why, sire, we are always that’, I retorted, quoting my favourite Stuart biography.
‘Oddsfish! Would you disgrace the family traditions?’ he finished it, flooring me completely, and flipped me under the chin and swept off.
II
A week later came letters from mother and James. He was in the usual torn state of rage and worry over Lady Vallant and myself. ‘She’s like a curse. Is this sort of thing going on for ever? I often think I’d be doing a better job of work at home fending her off all of us than out here trying to do in Germans I don’t even hate.’ But the chief point was that he had got leave for Lalage’s wedding. ‘I mean to give her away, and tell mother to take a firm line with the uncles. I wish to God we didn’t have to have them there at all, but it’s their stamping-ground, after all, and the alternative of Vallant’s rooms makes one spit blood, I agree – and quite wrong for Lalage. I say, don’t you pity Hugh marrying into our lot? … I’m distinctly thrilled re Furnival. Have you ever told him about us and the queue and the pennies? My love to Enid! …’
But mother’s letter was another story. The Vallant part was a battleground of conflicting loyalties in which belief in myself and my action warred with her inability to justify me entirely by being explicit about her own mother. For the sheer look of the thing (that ‘thing’ we had spent our lives in preserving) she had to appear to think, with reference to my grandmother, that I had ‘rubbed her up the wrong way’, ‘got her back up’, and similar synonyms for the tactlessness of relative youth. Such a line had to be, as things were, for I, too, had taken my full share in the non-explicit game, and the cumulative tension of being able to speak of it all to nobody except James, who like myself was saturated to rotting point in the whole thing, gave me its moments of almost physical nausea.
Lady Vallant had written to mother at once, that was evident, and worried her in the old way, with promise of more to come, if I knew my grandmother; and the further business of keeping her away from the wedding wasn’t going to make for harmony. ‘Of course grannyma is most frightfully difficult and tiresome …’
It could not have been an easy letter to write; too honest to express amazement at the Lowndes Square scenes or to pretend that my grandmother’s behaviour was in any way unprecedented, poor mother had, at the same time, to withhold the ‘comfort’ she longed to give me in assurance that what I had endured from the old woman was not a circumstance to what she had herself. She fell – one sensed the almost wild relief – upon the topic of the Furnivals, doing the only possible thing of making Cosmo the scapegoat for Lady Vallant’s outbreak. For several lines mother thoroughly enjoyed the drawing of a picture in which a conventionally old-fashioned relative was outraged at the typical, loudspoken candour of a modern grandchild, complete with cigarette and lipstick … but for the rest of the letter she was herself again. ‘I’ve had a perfectly charming letter from
your Mrs. Furnival; she must be a great lamb and I love her nice actressy handwriting all rather large and loopy. She seems to be really fond you, and as for Cosmo – lead me to him! I shall go down like a ninepin before him. Gosh! how I lurved him in the old days, and father was so shocked (yours, of course Fool!). Lor! It’s like going back to Noah. Well, he ought to be safe by now! By the way, you’d better watch you step a bit in that direction; I’m certain his wife’s a dear but you don’t really know her, do you? and you don’t want that sort of scrapping-match. She’s probably got tongue warranted to blast the barnacles off a battleship and you’d be nowhere. I screeched over you, and her hair being blue at the roots, and think she took it amazingly well, but how naughty of Cosmo to tell her!
‘The uncles are being really quite decent, and I’m liking them. I was horribly afraid they’d be Vallantish about the wedding but they’re taking it wonderfully well and Julian has actually forked out £50!!! The church is a little pippit –so small and fairly rocking with old brasses and a marvellous Saxon door, and we’re hedging and ditching to make it pretty for Christmas and Lalage. The uncles have asked you to spend Christmas here. Come if you feel you can, darling. I really think you’d like it and we needn’t see too much of them, and I’ve wheeled the staff into line in heaps of ways. …’
III
That night at dinner I said, ‘My brother writes, “Give my love to Enid,”’ and she cried, ‘Oh, lovely!’ and clasped her misleadingly inefficient-looking little hands.
‘Doesn’t anybody send me their love?’ enquired Cosmo.
‘Well, mother said she adored you.’
‘Charming of her. When was that?’
‘When I was about six or seven.’
‘Ah!’ He lost all interest.
One of the few ways in which I could repay the Furnivals was to make myself as scarce as possible on all occasions; I was determined not to be the guest who had to be amused and kept in talk as her writing-table is in notepaper. Enid and Cosmo must live their lives as nearly as though I were not in the house. The good secretary learns the plausible exit, and I left them now, after coffee, and went into the library. Enid would be in the drawing-room and Cosmo in his study. I had done it before, and from the way neither attempted to deter me I guessed how right I was. Meanwhile in those seven days I learnt much about the Keans, Wilson Barrett, Toole (by whom I was probably quite unjustly bored), and Fechter (whose legs looked wrong for Hamlet), and dipped into books on period costume and production and wondered if I agreed with Gordon Craig and Reinhardt, and came to the conclusion that theories, however noble, were cold things for repellent audiences and that a theatre must ever remain a theatre and look like one unmistakably, even unto gilding and plush, and not resemble a Cornish cave or Valhalla during a spring cleaning. And could William Terriss ever have aged into anything as good as Cosmo, had they let him live? Had Barrett really been as handsome as his legend? To me he suggested overmuch the young Roman Emperor. Could one have loved Irving? Too aloof for me. …
‘And now we’ve let you rip for an entire week,’ said Cosmo at my elbow, ‘and suppose we talk about this Vallant business.’
I shook my head. ‘I want to forget her, here.’ It was typical of life as I knew it that the one person to whom talking with was always a joy should divert me from that particular relief by pull of his own attraction. ‘And it’s a long story, and I think it possible that it might occasionally “recur” with you and prey on your mind when we’ve got to keep you in fighting form for “Gladstone”.’
‘And you only come up to my shoulder! Or just a little higher than my heart – ’
‘–and that distance removed from it. What’s the new wig like, Cosmo?’
‘– and therefore it seems to point to the fact that what you can stand I can.’
‘It isn’t fair. You’re a happy person.’
‘And you aren’t, and so you want to keep me like a débutante. Good Gad! that ought to be amusing, but it isn’t.’ He turned on me, ‘Or have I got this all wrong as well’, he asked suavely, ‘and am I the silver-hair’d veteran – but beloved by all in his saintly feebleness whose faculties must be nursed over the first night lest he drop down dead in his dressing-room, still blessing all concerned?’
He was almost glaring at me and my burst of laughter had a slightly hysteric edge. ‘No, I honestly never thought of that. Cosmo, you’re really rather awful when you rend one.’
‘Good. When I rend you, my child, you’ll know what trouble really is. And now for your affairs. I’m going to do a mean thing … remember?’
I had said it to him at our first meeting, when (even then!) Lady Vallant’s name had crawled into our farewells. ‘You’ve not forgotten that?’ I marvelled.
‘It’s my business not to forget important lines. May I smoke?… Have you ever noticed that if anyone has a ingrowing toenail, say, he sends for the doctor to deal with it, and quite a nasty little business it can be, involving a minor operation. But if anyone has an ingrowing anxiety, he indulges it or ignores it or does anything under heaven with it except cure it … and there was, apropos some little remark of mine about overrating the importance of love, I don’t think you do. I ought to know. Now,’ he dropped his eyes to the signet on his finger, ‘who hasn’t been loving you enough?’
‘Cosmo, what about Enid?’
‘She rather agrees with me that this is probably not a three-cornered discussion. Fond of her?’
‘Love her.’
‘Good. “They litter the ground like paper bags”.’
‘Devil!’
‘Now can’t you get started? Just think of me as an old friend (in years, of course), or as – all right! all right! I very likely mightn’t have said it, anyway. Shall we make it a father?’
‘Yes. Let’s make it that.’
And to that aspect of him I told the story of Myra and Anne and Vallant House, and later went upstairs and slept as I had not slept for weeks.
IV
I had told it badly; one does, with harkings-back and wrong sequences and feelings for the right word, but Cosmo hadn’t spent half his life listening to incoherent playwrights stammering their scenarios to him for nothing, and he sorted out essentials and pinned down apparent contradictions and generally speaking ‘produced’ my account.
‘And, you see, I must go back; the job’s only half done. That foot on the stairs … Cosmo,’ I was imploring him now, ‘what do you think it sounds like?’
He hesitated, but only for a second. ‘I’m afraid I agree with you. These things and people are. I could explain the Victorian point of view to you. I’ve had some, you know, though my own experience, admitted, wasn’t as acute as yours. But I’ve at least shed what didn’t suit me All my people were black Dissenters and they very nearly succeeded in making me dislike God very much indeed. But I was determined they shouldn’t do me out of Him entirely, together with the other things they scamped me of in my boyhood, so I saved my soul alive by running away. I never went back, either, though I very nearly had to, once or twice. I wrote to my own mother for ten bob to pay my landlady, once, and she refused to send it – with a long homily about my sin, and my soul; it never occurred to her that she was making my landlady suffer for it. And then – this’ll show you – when I became a success, they were willing to overlook the past … no logic and reason aren’t in that generation.’
‘It does sound a bit Vallantish … did you ever consent to see them?’
‘No. It had bitten too deep. But I always feel I’ve been defrauded of something irreplaceable, even now, even in the position I am to throw my weight about.’
‘She’s spoilt my life, all right; hitting at me through other people … she wrote pious things as well …hymns.’
‘It often goes with cruelty. It can be a form of suppressed sex, you know. Old Lady Vallant is an ex-beauty.’
‘Oh … and you, too, think she minds?’
He looked at me swiftly, but answered the mantelpiece. ‘It
is very understandable to grieve over one’s looks going, if they’re what one has lived by.’
‘If they are.’ It was the only hint I dared give him that I had understood he wasn’t thinking of the case of Lady Vallant.
He sheered off that. ‘Of course when you go to Vallant House, I come, too.’
‘Never, Cosmo! You’d bring some of its atmosphere back to Enid and we can’t risk that … do you know, there’s never been anyone as kind as you in the world.’
He looked at his shoes. ‘That’s bad hearing.’ I could see his hand as it lay along the chair-arm. I prided myself then that I sat very still; I pride myself on it now, in spite of everything. I was thinking disgustedly, ‘I’ve the instincts of the worst type of kitchenmaid’, for Enid was upstairs, and I loved her too, and she had risked this interview with no second-rate qualms in a way that I could never have risen to, and I thought then that the successful marriage was the one in which its Enids took their Veres cleverly, philosophically, and could have wept then and there.
He was standing now, looking down on me. ‘And so, you’ve got “the sight” … it must be a mixed blessing. And your brother?’
‘He, too, and as far as I know, more focused than my own.’
‘Twins … you being one eye and he the other, perhaps? In that case I stand aside.’
I was overwhelmed at his penetration. Confusedly I had always schemed to go back with James to Lowndes Square, once, or as often more, as might be necessary, but rather to bolster up my personal courage with his presence than deliberately to exploit our joint psychic resources. The result would have been the same, but the lift to me was that Cosmo had seen it first, that I had found a confidante at last, above all that he believed me with his own brand of calm and had meant to be with me in that house. One is a woman, when all’s said.
‘And when you have got what you went for, what next?’
A Harp in Lowndes Square Page 26