I had never quite faced up to that in words, only in emotions, and I answered slowly, ‘To be quite brutal, I want my pound of flesh and so does James. I want to make her suffer. One isn’t half a Vallant for nothing I suppose.’ My voice cracked. ‘Do you blame me? … when you think of Myra and the trays … “she wouldn’t have her in the drawing-room …”’
It was then that he came over to me – and almost casually twisted my arm until I winced.
‘You’ll have to try and forgive me for that, later. But hysteria, you know … never any help. I slapped my leading woman in the face, once, on a first night, and she thanked me. Blame you? No, Vere. As a piece of fatherly advice I might have recommended that you stay your hand if the affair had stopped at the damage to Myra’s body. As it is –’
‘– as it is?’
‘– it’s the damage to your mind which I find so unforgivable.’
V
And after that one had to be more careful than even about Cosmo. As the Americans say, I had got him where I wanted him, and there our relations must stick. Sometimes he seemed to me to be unfairly trying to bring all the batteries of his charm to bear upon me; began to arrange, his profile at me and even wore the ties that in a careless moment I had said I liked, and generally speaking made me feel like a demented flapper at the stage door. I quelled him with chaff, looked pointedly at the ties and said nothing at all and remarked to the profile, ‘It’s all right, Cosmo, I saw it the first time!’ I thought ‘after all, he’s like all the rest of ’em’, yet every moment with him one wanted to spend in bracing him about Gladstone, and one’s concern must be everlastingly edited lest it be construed as philandering.
We got on best together when he openly bossed me, told me what was the matter with my dress and why, sent me upstairs to remove ‘just one layer’ of excess lipstick and altogether treated me as a cross between a daughter and a super, to my great and concealed delight. I once called upstairs to Enid: ‘It’s an awful bore, but I’ve got to go over to our house this morning for letters.’ Cosmo was reading the Telegraph in the hall, threw it aside and remarked, ‘Isn’t it marvellous! And what, my dear, my sweet and my own, is “a nawful baw?” Enid!’
‘Coming!’
‘Enid, we are to lose Vere.’
‘No! If that’s going to be a joke, Val, I’m too busy, dear.’
‘Fact, I assure you. Vere has discovered a nawful baw and has gotter go over to our house for lettahs. Now!’ He stood and barred my exit.
‘Cosmo, you beast!’
‘Now: “It’s an – awful bore – O-R-E, but I’ve got (mind your t’s) to go” – and so on.’ And he made me repeat it three times.
I leaned on the banisters and laughed at him. ‘Honestly, I’ve a most correct aunt who lives in Palace Green and says “baw”. Lots of our family do too.’
‘Then I suggest that they all need lessons in diction, and throwing the voice. There’s never any need to shout to make yourself heard – no no no! It doesn’t disturb me, there’s a great deal about your voice that I like, but don’t forget that.’
‘Oh Val, do leave off bullying her!’
‘Don’t mind me, Enid. Darling Cosmo (I repaid him for that sarcastic endearment) is just giving us a cameo study of the celebrity at home; “nor will Cosmo Furnival permit slipshod speech in his own home, and will take the greatest pains to secure that tonal harmony …”’
But he had gone, and I went too.
He sometimes took me out in the evenings when Enid wanted to stay at home or to go to her own friends, and usually veto’d every suggestion I made as to our after dinner destination.
I remember one particular night. We were in the car alone; I was, I suppose, trying to match up to him, throwing all the London lore I had ever scratched together into his lap. He said after a long pause, ‘Is that the kind of place you like?’
‘No, not particularly.’
‘Then, why?’
‘Oh, just because I’ve been there, you know.’
‘With whom? Tell me.’
‘Oh, this and that.’
Another silence. ‘Vere, I do trust you’re not one of those girls who don’t know a gentleman when she sees one. I’m right out of this … my dear child, we’re none of us gentlemen!’ At that I laughed aloud and (I really couldn’t help it) buried my face in his coat. He was apparently too fretted to notice. ‘This night club, d’you mean to say you were taken there?’
‘Yes, and got ditched into the bargain for a lady of colour.’
‘But of course, of course. Didn’t your man know it’s got a rather nasty reputation?’
‘It’d adore you for that, Cosmo! I saw nothing but bad fizz, black jazz, tired waiters and bored people.’
‘What I’m trying to convey is that it isn’t what goes on inside as much as the wrong set it gets you into. You don’t want people going round saying, “Oh yes, I saw Vere Buchan at the so-and-so, she’s always there”, or “she’s often there”. It places you at once. Not that any woman is ever safe anywhere, in the last resort,’ he added whimsically, ‘nature sees to that, and don’t you forget it. But one can help the set one heads towards, and remember, I don’t like it, and while you are in my care I won’t have it.’
‘Cosmo, I do like you.’
‘Thank you, my dear, but you don’t love me any more.’
I answered, and the politeness of it pleased my conscience, ‘You’re perfectly wrong, I do very much’.
‘It’s a test, of course, living together in a house and colliding in the bathroom – ’
‘But I like colliding in bathrooms! And I like your dressing-gown.’
‘Which one? I’ve got seven.’
‘You would! It’s the coffee-coloured silk.’
‘King Edward gave me that.’
‘My dear, what a nice ending! I must start a bedjacket knitted for me by Queen Alexandra.’
‘Now look here, Vere; can you promise me that if ever you contemplate – ah – falling in love, you’ll give me the opportunity of sizing up the fellow first? I’m not a bad judge, you know.’
‘Yes. I can promise you that, Cosmo.’
Incidentally, I had girded myself for the battle over the question of paying for my own outings, and Cosmo just stared through me and settled the bills. He seemed unable to understand the point of view (and indeed as applied to him by myself it was ironic enough), or deliberately turned into a Chesterfieldian museum piece and made me feel cheap and nasty.
And once he played me a low trick, and I found myself with him in a box at the Albert Hall, and there was Chopin on the programme. And I could say nothing at all, and he knew it.
CHAPTER XXVIII
I
JAMES was in London again, was to pick me up, meet the Furnivals and go with me to Hampshire. He stayed at his club; I mistrusted the Campden Hill ménage and the solitary servant who might take advantage of the situation – I quite saw that he was an opportunity not to be missed. Enid had suggested that he should come to her home, but James and I agreed, and kept to our decision, that there were limits beyond which hospitality should not be taxed.
His meeting with Cosmo’s wife gave me another pang. He stood in the doorway and beamed all over his face at her, and she at him.
‘Hullo, James!’
‘Hullo, Enid!’
It was all to be so happy for them, and they fell from the beginning into one of those easy relationships which are eternally possible between the elderly woman and the young man of the right sort. He would kiss her quite openly before Cosmo; they sang duets and solos by the hour – what Cosmo called the good old crusteds, and indeed James’s repertoire was almost as long as hers, if slightly and inevitably more modern, and where there was laughter in the house there were Enid and James gathered together. And Cosmo and I looked on like indulgent grandparents.
It accounted to me for my own failures in the past when my self-imposed maternal cossetings of my young men had broken down. In the last resort
I had been a girl, and they knew it, something to which you could switch over at any moment. But Enid Furnival was the real thing, secure in her charming late middle-age, and when James invested her with a youth non-existent in all but spirit it was a pretty joke between them, holding no complication.
He told her about the pit queue and the pennies and she poised on the edge of laughter, blue eyes widening. ‘But James! you poor midgets! Why didn’t you come up and see us – oh, but you didn’t know us then, how silly! I wasn’t in that show and you’d have probably found me darning stockings in Val’s dressing-room. Val! do you hear that? Vere! come and sing the exact song with James. I want–’
But I had gone, and so apparently had Cosmo. We met in the hall.
‘Our young people too noisy for you?’ he suggested sweetly.
‘No, I’m just sulky.’
‘So am I. Can’t we go and get over it together somewhere?’
‘I’m busy, Cosmo dear.’
I was. I had to finish packing and fussing with my Christmas presents.
‘You’re coming back to weather me over Gladstone.’
‘May I?’ I thought a moment. ‘There are lots of things I could do, you know. Pasting in press cuttings, and so on.’
And next day Enid was on the top of a step ladder, decorating hall and drawing-room with holly and mistletoe.
I had filled stockings for them both; in Enid’s, a mass of tiny sparkling silliments including a celluloid goldfish in a talc ball and a doll’s tin grand piano; in Cosmo’s, a property monocle of window glass to which I had attached six yards of watered silk ribbon, and a tiny booklet I had made and written, containing a tragedy in verse called Seneca, which consisted largely of the direction, Another and more expensive part of the Forum: Enter Cosmo Furnival as Seneca, and whose concluding lines ran:
Bleed, wrist! and free my spirit from its chains,
Rome take my blood that gushes from these veins.
(His later comment on it was ‘A promising subject, from what I could read of it with my ribboned monocle; action perhaps a shade too swift; very costly production and not a box-office draw, as entire piece plays two minutes and one quarter. I think the public would want to see even me for longer than that.’)
And I went up into his bedroom and tied it to a chair: ‘From Vere and Trotty.’
On my last morning Enid picked her way off her current ladder and hugged me good-bye and was plucked from me by James, and Cosmo resignedly waved his hand at the mistletoe and we kissed each other, the traditionally facetious caress permitted annually.
II
Those ten days at Vallant were a disturbing Christmas to me, at least. Faced with the immediate loss of Lalage, meeting Hugh in lanes where London friends are apt to look so crude and strange, breaking in an unfamiliar house, seeing my own mother for the first time since my association with Cosmo, and weathering the uncles as my hosts. Here at least I found that mother had worked improvements; already they spoke to her at table with a passable imitation of that freedom which prevails among acquaintances and the unrelated, but that their worm died not entirely was evidenced by the set-back of my own arrival, and for nearly the whole of my stay my mother’s brothers addressed the bulk of their conversation with me through her, and answered my remarks with averted head. Away from the table, one received the impression that they meant well, but that a substratum of confusion lingered still in their mind as to my precise identity. With Stuart and Julian Vallant, Hugh and James made the most headway by virtue of representing the law and the war, and James, blazing with secret grins, would form plans of campaign with salt-cellars, spoons, forks and napkin-rings upon the table cloth, while mother looked pink and apprehensive. He even developed an atrocious knack of inventing French villages for his maps, of which ‘Passyle-Poivre’ and ‘La Soularde’ stick in my memory, and which the uncles, fated wretches! took au grand serieux. And once again my ears and James’s heard references to ‘the Mater’. It was typical of the family that not one of them paused to speculate about the Christmas Day Lady Vallant was spending. Only James and I gave her a thought, who hated her more actively than anybody.
But when, from my window, I saw mother walking in the splendid neglected old garden with Uncle Julian (she even took his arm and laughed at some joke), I looked upon my work and saw that it was good.
That at least I can lay to my credit.
We Buchans tacitly accepted the fact that a Vallant Christmas would be a joyless affair, but the presence of James, as representing the less resigned and adaptable sex, redeemed it in some measure. It began by the uncles not giving anybody anything but embarrassed breakfast greetings, heavily facetious lest sentiment be suspected, followed by a bad ten minutes which convicted us of tactlessness while they unhappily unfastened our own conventional and stultified offerings and hurried them behind toast-racks and silver entrée dishes on the principle of least said soonest mended (uncle Stuart, we realized later, had quite cleverly contrived to say nothing at all. It was in mother’s room that we did our heavy giving, a James called it, and could laugh as much as we wanted to, and be silly. After all, as mother said, the uncles were feeding and roofing us, ‘and I’ve seen to it that there an enough crackers. If I’d left it to the housekeeper there’d have been one each, or none.’
At dinner, which was excellent, I said to nobody is particular, ‘Isn’t it rum that if it hadn’t been for Susan Vallant, none of us would be here, except Hugh?’ and James, rising as though for a toast, raised his glass and announced genially, ‘And has it been worth her trouble? No!’ and tossed off his burgundy at one blow, and even the uncles cackled.
That morning James had come to my bedroom with two boxes. ‘The Furnivals gave me these for you,’ and he left me alone with them. Enid’s box held a dozen pairs of sheer silk stockings. Cosmo’s a coffee-coloured silk dressing-gown ‘with love from Queen Alexandra and that much more uninteresting person, Cosmo Furnival’.
Oh my dear Cosmo! It must have cost you quite three guineas (a fortune!) – and I would so much have preferred one of your old wraps!
I had headed him off giving me things, even trifles, always; it was partly my engrained outlook on life, but more that I wanted nothing of him at all. He could give me nothing that I could ever take, and he didn’t even want to: I had already given him what he mustn’t accept. I had hurt and plagued him a dozen times by my bright grateful refusals, but in the last resort he stayed his hand and I had deprived him of a small pleasure, rightly, wrongly, how do I know? One can only act hurriedly according to one’s lights, and life is short.
Wrapped in his dressing-gown I sat down to write to them. My first letters.
‘Cosmo dear. …’
And, ‘Darling Enid’.
That at least was no understatement. She was dear to me then and is to this day, after all the years.
III
In the lanes whose hedges creaked with frost James and I discussed the Vallant business ahead of us. We would get it over during this leave of his, but if possible not before the Furnival première. I didn’t know how Cosmo reacted to nerves: he had asked me to be there with him on the day and that was enough for me; he was evidently of the type which needs companionship in crisis, where James and I gravitate instinctively towards the lone furrow, and if we were together over the Vallant matter it was that we were so very nearly one person. And then I told James about our talk in the library.
‘One does like him, doesn’t one?’ stated James.
‘Yes.’
He looked at me, a direct question.
‘Yes, Jamesey.’
‘Oh Vere, my dear! Well, well … and yet I’m not surprised, you know.’ But there seemed to be something on his mind, extra to anything I had disclosed. I had too much to say and let it go and we trudged another quarter-mile. ‘You must write to Hutchins for the key’, he said dully, and I wondered why his pace was beginning to flag.
And on New Year’s Day Lalage was married to Hugh at the church
‘rocking with old brasses’, and what there is of good in me was glad to see her go, for even then she moved down the tiny aisle beside Hugh like one half-awakened from a very bad dream indeed as they passed out through a line of kindly, curious villagers into a white world.
IV
James and I travelled up to London together, he to the club and I to the Furnivals. All the long journey home, I was thinking that I was one of those semi-courageous people so much more unsatisfactory than the open coward too fine by a hair’s breadth to swerve from the line I had laid down myself in Enid’s home, not fine enough to keep away from it altogether.
On the hall table was a letter for me in a hand I knew and I was childishly warmed by the postal identification of myself with that home. It could wait. Claude was one of those intensely amusing people who seem unable to give full measure on paper; endless reminders of how amusing they were are dotted all over their rare epistle and their letters are invariably far too short. With the envelope in my hand I went in search of Enid. She was writing letters and murmured ‘Ah, that’s nice’, and gave me a hand to hold as she bit her pen and asked about the wedding and ‘her’ James, and quite soon told me I looked tired and sent me to get warm and called to me – she was great at last-minute messages – ‘I don’t know where Val is but do go and find out.’
I went, and found him in the garden, in the bright chill. He had huddled a cloak round him and cocked an astrakhan cap on his head – anyhow, and crooked, and perfectly right, as usual.
‘Aha Tovarish!’ I called, and he turned and came to me and I surveyed him from head to heel and kept my greeting at chaff-level.
‘Cosmo, I’ve yet to meet the hat that didn’t suit you. I believe you’d get away with even a bowler. Tell me about that cap.’
‘Little fool, I’m very glad to see you.’
‘And I to see you. Please go on.’
A Harp in Lowndes Square Page 27