A Harp in Lowndes Square

by Rachel Ferguson

  ‘What? Oh, this? Lord, now … I had it in a preposterous Russian drama in – what? – 1908.’

  ‘And there was a vamp called Sonia.’

  ‘No, a beautiful Vera.’

  ‘With green eyes and a tigerskin you raped her on.’

  ‘Now now! I don’t like that. Keep it for your cocktail teas.’

  ‘My –? Well, I like that! And me the dullest of the pure.’

  ‘And I learnt four Russian words during the run: two I frankly never knew the meaning of, the third was inevitably samovar and the fourth I should call you now if I dared.’

  We walked on. From a shrubbery, Trotty scraped and rustled to meet us and put up his little face at Cosmo for notice. I said, ‘Aren’t Trotty’s hands exactly like Enid’s?’ and Cosmo stooped to the hedgehog and put Trotty’s little hand on his finger and said he saw what I meant, and straightened and turned on me.

  ‘I may be going to be rather a trial during the next week or so. Production isn’t all interviews and applause, you know. This isn’t only a question, as it used to be even twenty years ago, of first-night nerves, because one could pick oneself up then after a fall and go ahead; it’s a case of theatric innovation, to begin with, and new wine in an old bottle to crown all.’

  ‘If Enid can stand it –’ I smiled.

  ‘Enid and I have practically grown up together. She knows me.’ So true. And I deserved it, even if I hadn’t meant to sound arrogant.

  ‘I’m ready.’

  ‘I wonder … You’ve seen, shall I say? the more presentable side of me all this time (and even that’s apparently gone bad on you).’

  ‘You asked me to stay, Cosmo, and weather you over it.’

  ‘That was a piece of self-indulgence. I’ve been thinking …’

  He hitched at his cloak. ‘There’s a side of you that doesn’t seem to me to grow up at all, and a side of me that’s curiously reluctant to disillusion it. Now’s your chance to emerge with false impressions intact,’ and the lines round his eyes were sardonic.

  ‘But, I don’t want to emerge … Cosmo, do you really think I’m just a stage-struck flapper?’

  ‘Can you honestly tell me that glamour isn’t half the battle?’

  ‘It has its place, no doubt,’ I agreed reasonably, ‘or there’d be no more theatre, but it doesn’t happen to apply here.’

  ‘I think, then, you’d better stay … and finish up for good.’

  I was so dismayed that I refuged in laughter – it sounded like a hyena. ‘If this is a scene, Cosmo, I don’t know my cues or my lines.’

  He stopped in the middle of the path. I have often read of a voice of ice and dismissed it as an effective but unreal flourish. It is no joke when you run into it, and it is combined with height and the strength of eyes.

  ‘Can you never take me seriously? I’m getting rather tired of this, you know.’

  Well … if this was a sample of Cosmo as he really was I would learn it. Yet it wasn’t his fault that one was so shattered, shattered but eternally interested. The words as words were nothing at all; I thought ‘If he can do this to me on an ineffective sentence, what cannot he do to an audience on a good one?’ and would console myself with that later. And I stood waiting for him to stride away or do something showy and obvious, and he turned quite quietly with me and walked me back to the house, and later (as we were both to do in time) we ended at Enid, heading to her for comfort.

  And if this was part of knowing him, then it must have its place, hurt and all.

  I went up to my room and found I was sitting at the writing-table with an opened letter in my hand. Gradually isolated sentences sprang at me from the pages, and it was Claude asking me to marry him. I struck my hand on the desk top. ‘Well, God damn it all …’

  Oh, my dear Claude, whom I so like! with whom I have laughed so long and fooled so happily always! And it was all so cursedly suitable on the face of it; Claude, who would be mine entirely without bar, and the pleasant, healthy father of our children. And for ever impossible, even had one hankered for matrimony and offspring, because of a pacing, looming old wretch downstairs with crowsfeet and acidulated eyes, my pacing, looming old wretch who gave me what sheer youth could never rise to in brief, intolerable glimpses of understanding and affection.

  Claude would give me love and plenty of it, and laughter and nothing else at all. And it wasn’t enough. I was no young girl to bask in admiration and deference to my whims and opinions; I needed a reasonable amount of opposition backed by experience, and above all was it essential that it should come from one who not only maturely appreciated me, but who had a good, considered opinion of himself as well and no self-deprecations at all.

  Claude in between his work would want the things that young men call good times, in which the newest cabaret is a lark, and getting raided by the police and your name on the society black-list at Vine Street, an adventure and a joke and a titbit you dined out on; I wanted to be steered away from the wrong places and people which never had amused me.

  Claude and I would live and learn together, and make our mistakes, and that was no good to me at all, who wanted one who had learnt and could point to where my own feet should tread, and who had long made his representative selection of mistakes and got the worst of them over. Also, I discovered I enjoyed ups and down and unforeseen fiascos and success that the slow, certain advances of army life could never offer. If I married Claude we should end up at Tidworth or Farnborough and I should become a ‘mother’ to the junior officers or ‘that cat’ to the tea-parties, and in time (oh glory!) should be heavily flirted with by majors with stomachs.

  And if the still-young marry each other, they have to watch the creeping on of age with all its small physical humiliations. Cosmo had not been young when first I met him, nor should I have looked at him twice when he was. I could wane in his sight and was doing it, heaven knew! but he never in my own.

  And finally, James must have known of Claude’s letter, that day in the Hampshire lane … the way his step had slowed. …

  One couldn’t even pack a suit-case and escape from the Furnival’s house. One doesn’t. It is a social impossibility, involving explanations even more impossible to one’s hostess. To Enid, in short.

  There were just two ways to answer Claude: one by telling him I didn’t care for him, which wasn’t true, and the other by telling him openly that there was someone else. Slang has its uses. I used plenty of it. And I let him go with a considerable pang and no doubts whatever, and dressed for dinner and went down to meet whatever might be waiting for me.

  Enid, I remember, was looking particularly charming that night. Whenever I think of her the word ‘adorable’ springs to my mind, and after dinner we had coffee in the drawing-room and I said ‘Play to me’. She dawdled to the piano in her mist-coloured chiffon, cigarette in hand, and turned to us where we sat side by side on the sofa, and tilted a silvery-gold head. ‘Are we sentimental to-night, or lively, or just plain cussed?’ and her lip curled back over her little teeth.

  ‘Just plain cussed.’ Cosmo and I said it together.

  ‘Ah well …’ and she sat at the piano and turned off a light and thought, and twiddled a screw in the piano stool – and sang a song of Marie Lloyd’s.

  Oh Enid! It was so exactly like you, when one had been keyed for Schumann, Beethoven, or even ‘Star of my soul!’

  ‘I’m one of the ruins Cromwell knocked about a bit …’

  It is a splendid ditty, fruity and lilting and with minor modulations that Wagner himself would have relished! Coming from Enid and not the dear rorty originator it was funnier still, but she followed it with German ‘The way that he looked at me’, ‘Dream o’ Day Jill’, and was well into ‘All for a green ribbon’ when Cosmo put down his cup and leant over to me.

  ‘Can’t we forget it?’

  ‘Yes, but it was my first evening at home.’

  ‘At home … you have the devil’s knack of saying the beautiful thing – and not meaning it at
all.’

  And I was happy again, as happy as I expected to be, or probably deserve.

  CHAPTER XXIX

  I

  Gladstone was a succès d’estime for statesman and actor which is to say that James Agate whipped and scorpioned the public not to miss it and some of them obliged, backed by an intelligent minority whose opinion, socially, did not count, and further supported by what remained of the Old Guard of Cosmo Furnival’s following. The paying public to whom the theatre was a place of entertainment treated the play in the manner in which the confirmed convivial eyes the bottle of limejuice on the sideboard, and murmuring praise at the interesting and instructive nature of the experiment went off to a Charlot revue. But it ran, with nursing, for three and a half months and the important thing about it was that it replaced Cosmo on the map, lined him up with contemporary stage evolution, put him among the moderns who are paid the compliment of controversy, rather than affectionately accepting him in his own line for the sake of old times with an indulgent pat on the peruke.

  In his home, I watched it all, vicariously stimulated, flustered, despondent and nervy, while Enid Furnival sat in the drawing-room and plunged into a large and nameless piece of knitting.

  I looked upon her work and saw that it was good, so to speak, and even started a piece of gros point myself, and the strange, sticky puckered object lay about and was cast down anywhere at the call of the crisis of the moment. I don’t know, after his caution, what I had expected from Cosmo himself, and for days I didn’t see that the fact that I got nothing at all was part of the business. He would look right through me if he met me about the house, or was terse and abstracted, and once when I was in his way he lifted me by the elbows and put me somewhere else as if I were a chair.

  Gradually I grew to expect it, saw that this concentration was right, knew I wouldn’t have it otherwise, guessed that this was one of the ways by which creators get results. And just as I was settling down to that, another phase set in and put me at sixes and sevens; Cosmo on the semi-suppressed rampage, with the back of the work broken and the trifles crowding on him. And Enid knitted through it all.

  ‘What? Val? Oh he’s all right. It’s always like this. Darling, pick up that ball like an angel. No, it’s under the table.’

  ‘Enid! Where in heaven’s that registered letter?’

  ‘Niddy! If Clara’s moved that book I shall go out of my mind.’

  ‘The eggs are hard-boiled, you know I hate them like that.’

  Oddly enough it was over the hard-boiled egg side of it all that I wavered. There were moments when, losing all sense of context, one saw Cosmo objectively as any husband being tiresome over trifles, and try as one would the knowledge that this was only offshoot of overstrain and miles away from Cosmo as he could be and nearly always was didn’t immediately reassert itself, and one thought ‘This is him as he is’. I know now that it was of just that petty side of him that he warned me in the garden, and why. Oh, but he knew! He was clever. Retrospectively I revel still in his mind. For during those moments it was impossible to recapture him, almost incredible that this was the man whose eyes and mouth had ever said the lovely thing to one, in whom one had found the exactly right listener, to whom one had entrusted the story of Myra. My sole excuse is that myself was pitched in a pretty high key at that time worked up for two, upset over Claude’s letter, and watching the days drawing me nearer to Vallant House that would upset me more.

  Sometimes James dropped in in the evenings. He was always careful to telephone first for permission as I could never count from day to day upon Cosmo’s mood, and wouldn’t have him overtired, even for James, as I told Enid. And the result of that was that on James’s next visit Cosmo blandly scooped him off to the library and left us both lamenting!

  I took myself right off. When or if Cosmo wanted me I was there. Meanwhile I gave as good as I got, when we did speak!

  And next day, Enid, needles flashing in the firelight, laid down her wool and said, ‘Vere ducky, I do wish you’d be nicer to Val.’

  II

  It was the unexpectedness of it that drove me to just stammering.

  ‘My dear Enid …!’

  ‘Keep him petted. Make a fuss of him. He’s dying for notice. He wants heaps of affection, you know, and more these days than ever. Don’t I know him! And I thought you loved him.’

  ‘I do. That’s the whole difficulty. D’you mind going on knitting?’

  ‘Well then, go and tell him so. He’d adore it. He thinks more of you than I’ve ever seen him do of any girl. He used to come back full of you – called you “my girl” and “my dear little friend” and “my nice child”. He says you’re the only one who wants nothing for herself from him, and that’s true – even I wanted to marry him! And (if I’m being impertinent, stop me), there was a young man at the theatre –’

  ‘Wraxe,’ I said mechanically.

  ‘My dear, Val was jealous of him! I saw that fast enough. I’ve been it too often myself to mistake the symptoms! Oh, I’m so thankful that’s all over! You know, I’m sorry for all you young things. It seems to me that the men you get a chance at now aren’t a patch on our lot … and their manners! There’s James, of course, but I don’t believe he’s typical, any more than you are … so do be nice to Val. There he is, putting on his most becoming ties for you and you crush the poor thing off the earth!’

  ‘Well, is he fair to me, Enid? Is it necessary?’

  She did put her work aside at that. ‘Well! I did think you had brains, oh, but heaps more than me! But my dearie child, he thinks you’re bored with him – off him – disappointed. – ’

  ‘He doesn’t?’

  ‘He does! I’ve watched you muffing him three or four times when a ha’porth of sense would have kept him happy.’

  ‘That’s all very fine, Enid, but these things are apt to get a bit above and beyond, you know.’

  ‘Oh, I see. You mean you’re afraid he’ll touch you and flirt with you and give you the glad eye?’

  ‘Now we are down to brass tacks, I’ve had my moments in which I’ve been much more afraid that he wouldn’t!’

  She giggled delightedly. ‘One is, isn’t one? Oh, I’ve been all through that! It was touch and go once or twice, I can tell you, in the old days, and I only had my face to carry me along.’

  ‘No, it could never have been only that, Enid, he’s not that sort of a fool. You’re the one right person for him.’

  She leant to me, hands round knees like a schoolgirl. ‘No! Do you really think so?’

  ‘Yes. What a haven of refuge you must be to him – after me!’

  We both laughed at that. ‘Oh, we have our uses,’ assented Enid Furnival, ‘my present one is to keep him quiet by keeping quiet myself.’

  I thought. ‘Enid …’

  ‘M’m?’

  ‘I’ve meditated once or twice walking out on you, and if I’m not doing it, it’s because there’s nothing to walk out for, or ever will be … on the other hand, being human (and the heart desperately wicked and so on), I can’t promise for always and all the time not to break down here and there, though I’m pretty steady on my feet, I will say that for myself.’

  ‘More than anyone I’ve ever seen. You scrupulous honourable people do have the nastiest time! I couldn’t have done it, I tell you flat … so go and play with Val, my dear. You’ve got to remember that every time anybody fails him they’re undermining him, at his age … he was so lovely! And you’ve hidden away the very photograph in your bedroom – ’

  ‘– because I prefer him as he is.’

  ‘Tell him that. You must!’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘At the theatre.’

  ‘Oh … that accounts for it. He probably had inches of grease-paint on his face and thought it was that you were admiring. You know, it’s terrible for them when everything they’ve lived by and for begins to go.’

  It surprised me, the stress she laid upon physical beaut
y it seemed, with her generation, altogether to overshadow the subtler matter of charm, where we with our more tortuous and sophisticated minds can at least appreciate that and rate it at its true value. I answered, ‘Of course, if that’s all he sees, or thinks other people do … he who lives by the sword must perish by the sword.’

  ‘Is that the hang1ble?’

  ‘Probably. It usually is when it isn’t Shakespeare.’

  And it ended by Cosmo’s wife virtually comforting me. ‘I did so want you two to be happy! It seems such hard luck … well, go and make friends with Val, and save something for me, too!’

  I went to her and put my arms round her. ‘Enid, there are times when upon my soul I don’t know which I love the most, you or Cosmo!’

  She smiled up at me. ‘I do.’

  ‘Isn’t it curious that nobody ever admits that it’s possible to love the wife in the case? At the cocktail teas which your good husband assures me I frequent there is a notion – pay attention, Enid, this is serious, and contemporary thought and bulky things like that – that if you hate a woman and say so you are a cat, and if you care for her and show it you’re a pervert. Don’t we have great fun among the Bright Young People?’ and I went down to Cosmo with Enid’s kiss on my mouth.

  Even then I doubted a little if she understood. As for myself, it seemed to me at that moment that I had no real place in her home in spite of everything. Enid in her youth had risked what Cosmo might be going to turn into, even unto the obese professional failure, whereas I had skipped his early, problematic future and come in on what, to me, was the crest of the wave. It made one feel extraordinarily humble, unworthy and brittle. It made me plague myself with questions as to my ability to have grown up with him as she had dared to do … those other women … or his own demands upon one … the conventional and rather meaningless demands of young manhood. As things stood, he at his age and I at mine, we were temperamentally nearer than we should be at and other period, for if I was at concert pitch, his tempo was slowing down, and granting the relative force of emotions between man and woman we had, in point of time, drawn about level.