He was writing in his study.
‘Please don’t get up. I just came to see if there was anything I could do for you.’
He began to sketch noughts and crosses on the blotting paper.
‘So you don’t cast me off entirely?’
‘I never did; that was your idea.’
He threw down his pen. ‘That’s good. But I’ll make you say more than that, one day.’
And so he did, so he did – when it was very nearly too late. And there was peace between us, or quite enough to satisfy Enid, and always after that Cosmo kissed me good night as naturally as he did her, and if I have imagined that he sometimes shaved this side of the fatherly we let it go at that. Even for the other aspect I could not have lost the safer one happily.
III
And then the Press descended on us, and Enid put away her knitting and turned on another side of herself and became the hostess, seeing that the young men had whiskies and sandwiches and cigarettes, and directing the servants where to move furniture when the camera man wanted to photograph Cosmo in various rooms or called for screens and sheets as photographers nearly always and unaccountably do, she told me, ‘like plumbers only with them it’s ladders and candles’, and she smiled at them all and sympathized when anything collapsed and insisted on Trotty being ‘done’ with her husband and told the immediate young man how hedgehogs should be fed, and laughed at me for being so interested in it all and protested against being corralled and photographed too. They even included me in one shot and for the first time I became that sub-human ‘and friend’. (‘She’s Vere Buchan and no friend of mine’ murmured Cosmo for my ears, and with a face completely impassive for the camera he poked me in the ribs and I hacked him on the heel and we managed between us to get off a delicate assortment of stingers behind our teeth – I hadn’t forgotten my ventriloquial tricks.
‘They said, “Who is that handsome man?”’
‘“It’s Mr. Toad,”’ I purred.
‘Your princess slip’s coming down. Half an inch below your skirt. I detest ramshackle women.’
‘What d’ you know about slips?’
‘I could tell you every stitch you’ve got on, and in its proper order.’ All this with fixed and pleasant smiles.
After that, the scene of battle shifted to the theatre where I didn’t follow it, for photographs from the stage of sets and the principals, and of Cosmo in his Gladstone make-up, and Enid went back to her household affairs and I to the library to paste in the advance notices and answer letters and the suddenly almost incessant telephone; over that job Enid frankly said she hadn’t got the touch and ‘had never been much use that way to Val. I get too interested in the poor souls who want things from him, whether they’re firms asking for testimonials for shaving-creams or actors out of a shop, and that does confuse life so.’ I didn’t let it, and for all that week I became a hard-boiled office executive and if I did occasionally permit the use of his name to the boosting of some toilet preparation at least I scuttled up to the bathroom or his dressing-room first to find out if he used it or called down to his wife, in the last resort. ‘Enid! What toothpaste does Cosmo use?’ and a faint scream of ‘Kolynos’ came from the unknown.
‘That settles it, then he mustn’t give his name to the one on the telephone.’ And then the first night was upon us and Cosmo passed into his final phase and became himself again – he seemed to realize that all that could be done and foreseen had been, and just waited on results; he even played a round of golf with us in the morning with walking sticks and tennis balls, and broke the kitchen window and said what a wonderful shape the pane has splintered into and tried to do it again while Enid faintly shrieked that he would ‘hurt cook’, and Cosmo, addressing the ball, said that that would be unfortunate as she was the only one they’d ever had who understood quenelle (Fore!) and sent the second missile after the first.
Days before, Enid had offered me a seat in her box, and I refused it; it was her night and Cosmo’s, and I told her so. ‘James and I are going to sit in the pit and pay Cosmo half a crown and suck oranges.’
She thought it over and let it pass. Actually, of course James and I had booked our seats weeks ago, in the upper circle. I had no time for standing in queues. Also, as I had been careful to tell the Press when the Furnival weren’t listening, I was Mr. Furnival’s secretary. I had taken far too much from them, always, and had had a set-to with Cosmo already into which we had imported Enid as referee over the question of his paying me a salary. It was ridiculous and I told him so; my work at his house had been intermittent and only really concentrated in the pre-Gladstonian fortnight … I was taking a vulgar line over it … also I hurt him … I mightn’t think it but I was worth it to him, and anyway he was using my time … now as a favour to him … don’t hit below the belt Cosmo … well then, would Enid let you go? Couldn’t you consider her for just five minutes? … did Vere seriously consider that two miserable pounds a week was adequate payment for her companionship?
And Enid ruled in my favour, but told me plainly that she thought I ought to get a clear two pounds because of the commission to my office. And I stayed, and took Cosmo’s two pounds four shillings a week.
A minor reason for my refusal to appear in the Furnival box was the clothes question; on such nights he must have his womenfolk do him credit and a bit over. It wouldn’t do him any good to be mixed up with démodés who are so much more fatal than the noticeably shabby, who might be duchesses (and very often are). At his six o’clock dinner I sat with him in my ordinary house frock and if he thought I was going upstairs to change into splendours, let him. Enid and I were dining together later; at present we kept him company over his omelette and sauterne and put our elbows on the table and were all rather silent and I suppressed the yawn-after-yawn of nerves. Enid said, ‘I hope you’ll like my dress, Val’, and I held my breath. Dress, at a moment like this! … but probably she knew …
‘So long as it doesn’t put my eye out, dear. What colour is it?’
‘There’s a new powder-blue and a silver lace.’
He considered, peeling a peach. ‘The powder-blue. The silver … those highlights glancing off that material do distract one so.’
I had sent him my telegram to the theatre and was careful to omit my surname lest in the dog-days of the run members of his company, remembering me, came to his room and read it. Mother had sent him a wire as well, and later on I enjoyed thanking her in the third person on Mr. Furnival’s behalf.
And then we three were in the hall; I could see the outline of the waiting car and its headlights through the window, and Enid said, ‘Well, God bless you, my dear old boy’, and put her arms round his neck, and he hugged us both and I wished him all the good in the world and told him I was jealous of every last woman in the company which seemed to please him immensely.
And then it was lights, and a huge arch of red curtain and a theatre filling and the orchestra (which I had forgotten to allow for, in the scale of mental strains), and wondered what personal belongings were thrown on to that armchair in Cosmo’s dressing-room that I had slept in, and quite soon there was a glint of silvery-gold hair and James said, ‘There’s Enid’; a mist of blue tulle, and I saw what Cosmo meant; it blended into the shadows of the box. She was sitting well back so that the stage lighting shouldn’t pick out her head and ‘put his eye out’.
The house-lights dimmed down leaving a glow on the curtains, and I sent up a hasty prayer, and found that James’s hand was in mine, gripping it.
A built-in set – the study in Gladstone’s house – maid moving about and Wraxe appearing and saying four lines, and a door opening casually and Cosmo’s casual entrance, walk to his desk and absorption in correspondence and a cup of tea.
I saw then how dangerous what is called ‘natural acting’ can be to an actor who must capture audiences against time and a house which unknowingly expects a star to throw his weight about from the word go. How dangerous, lay in the fact that for severa
l seconds it timed him wrong with them, and their recognizing burst of applause cut in on his opening lines. Du Maurier was wrestling faithfully with the public; since then, George Arliss has taught them something of theatric values, his beautiful restraint enormously aided by his accessibility to the wider public of the screen, whose audience is mercifully dumb, but in the early weeks of 1916 naturalism was still a risky game. Also, one sensed the danger to the actor of a too-faithful make-up. Cosmo had scrapped everything in him which took the eye, every mannerism I knew had gone by the board since the earlier rehearsals, and in the last resort average playgoers want to see Gladstone as Cosmo Furnival, rather than the other way about, lest they be forced to concentrate upon history and the statesman, which will probably bore them. If Cosmo had pandered to them just the little more, been a little less self-denying; if he had given them as makeweight the Furnival laugh or eyebrow, the ‘ah?’ and the caught breath, that play might have had a longer run.
‘Interesting but stuffy,’ a voice in the foyer was saying in the interval.
‘I give it a month.’
‘But – what’s he done to himself? I didn’t know who it was until some woman called him William.’
‘Mother says he was simply adorable about ninety years ago, and made me come. Aren’t one’s parents grim?’
One’s fingers were clenching at one’s side; this wasn’t one girl speaking, but several million.
And the final curtain at last, to rousing cheers!
And home to the Furnivals, and finding yet another facet of Enid; no italics and adulations here, but a woman very much on the spot, so keenly interested she had no need to show it.
‘Tell Wraxe he mustn’t come on so soon on his cue, Val. It looks like a fire, from the front, or as if he’d been listening outside the door.
‘And I don’t like that scene of yours with Mrs. G. played with you standing at the back of her chair. That speech is a bit on the dull side already and more movement wouldn’t do it any harm. Besides, she masks you.
‘Oh, and those trousers of yours … I’m afraid we’ll have to get a smaller pattern after all. Yes, my dear, I know they’re correct and shepherd’s plaid and so on, but you want an effect, not a photo. You’ve got some terribly important lines in that scene and they’re going to be very nearly dished on that pattern. I wonder what it is about even a suspicion of plaid that’s funny? … low comedians I suppose … Vere darling, be an angel and ring up Sackville Street and tell them – and much more neutral and quick!’
They taught me so much! Cosmo told me once that it was first-rate material; heaven knows I had the best teacher. I suppose it was the business of my inner ear over again which, baulking at the drudgery of crotchets and shying away from all the grammar of music, yet had its instinct for the ultimate rights and wrongs of harmony that operated over Cosmo’s profession, and made me immediate, if inarticulate, to sense a theatric danger or false note, and instant in knowledge of the rare and perfect thing.
IV
The ‘and friend’ photograph which appeared in sepia and one of the shilling weeklies had the unforeseen effect of bringing up my relations once more, those – I realized it with a shock – dim and half-remembered people who were my uncles, aunts and cousins. The magazine had evidently gone the rounds.
Aunt Emmeline, via Evelyn Verdune, seemed to be cynically accepting some unspecified downfall on my part which, if vague, was strong through my grandmother over this – they all took the line that if Lady Vallant had anything to contribute the matter must be worth attention – Dolly herself actually wrote to me. It seemed (but of course Vallybags has got it all wrong) that I had been practically turned out of Vallant House: ‘Grannyma says she couldn’t keep you. I ask you! Naturally I don’t believe a word she says, but do tell me.’
The loyalty of contemporaries tinged with incurable Verdune curiosity; colloquial lenience in the air because Dolly herself had made what uncle Bertram called a mess of things. And I was the current family mess. Meanwhile, they asked me for free passes for Gladstone. Aunt Sophia, always sublime, thought that I was living with a Mr. Furnace, and it was bound to happen – such a quaint mite – with poor little Anne away. And, in short, if I hadn’t exactly taken the wrong turning I had sidestepped into an uncommonly fishy one.
The unmarried Seagraves more or less frankly gaped and when I met them again would stare at me with that mixture of suppressed virginal repulsion for the soiled plus the spinster’s fascinated curiosity, and Flora, still watering horses, expected in a note that my Mr. Cosmo Furnival could be worked to recite at a drawing-room concert in Emperor’s Gate ‘lent by the parents’ for the benefit of the Blue Cross, impressing me matter-of-factly into the business of giving an actor the chance to serve a Seagrave and a Buchan. The poor farouche lamp-post probably hadn’t meant it that way, but it was my mood, and at times anything which will feed one’s fury is a gift from above. I enjoyed answering that. I read, and said at breakfast, ‘Cosmo, I seem to be living in sin with a Mr. Furnace. It’s all rather baffling.’
‘It would be. But are there, as it were, no marks, or signs of a struggle?’
‘I don’t know … wait a minute … no … I seem to have gone quietly.’
‘Let’s have Mr. Furnace to dinner,’ said Enid.
‘It’s no good. He’s here,’ and I resignedly tilted my head at her husband.
‘Oh no, oh no! Oh how lovely!’
‘Mr. Furnace …’ Cosmo took a piece of toast. ‘He would, I think, have sideburns and be a stickler for the conventions, and probably a solicitor who never handles divorce … yes … the Dickensian unattached extra who fills in at Christmas parties. Well! I’m sorry to hear he’s gone wrong, too, but we all do it.’
But beneath all our laughter I was frayed. I showed the letters to James who said, ‘Blast them! It’s the damned cheek of it … doing nothing on Gawd’s earth for one and then reserving the right to criticize.’ Heads together, we pointed each other out the plums.
‘Taking one’s character away quite cheerfully on no evidence and then trying to make a bit on it …’
‘“Drinking champagne that she sends us, but we never can forgive –”’
‘Oh, distinctly Vallantish.’
Dolly’s letter had at least one effect, of bracing my spirit to cope with Vallant House. Cosmo was now settled into his run: he had weathered the Press notices with a calm and common sense that surprised me, James’s leave was drawing to an end and there was no longer a shred of excuse for delay. Tell Cosmo? But it might worry him. Actors seem to have so many apple-carts whose delicate adjustment a tap will upset. At the same time he had a right to know; James and I argued it back and forth. Finally, I was against telling him, and we arranged that we would go back to Campden Hill to sleep.
But the Furnivals would expect to know why.
Tell Enid, then, that we were going to a dance.
But she’d see me leaving the house, not in evening dress.
‘Then tell her we’ve gone out on the tiles and you’ll be late back, and I’ll slope off to the club.’ And we made it so.
James was prowling up and down my bedroom, occasionally looking at me out of the corner of his eye.
‘Go on, Jamesey, say it, say it!’
‘Does Enid know about this business?’
‘I don’t think so. Cosmo and I rather agreed that it wasn’t an Enidish thing –’
‘Furnival was definitely worried about you and Vallant?’
I looked out of the window. ‘He was … concerned,’ I assented.
Then it came. ‘Vere, is he in love with you?’
I could have taken it from no one else on earth.
‘I hope not. I don’t think so.’
We managed fairly smoothly. James took the thermos that Lalage had given me and had it filled with coffee at his club – I shied at stealing Enid’s! – and from the same source awaited me in Lowndes Square with a packet of sandwiches. And I sat with the Furnivals at Cosmo’s
early dinner, and do what I would it was hard to be natural, and the contemptible instinct to cling to them both had to be dealt with as well. I even followed Cosmo into the hall and said good-bye, and patted his arm, which seemed to take him aback.
And Enid: ‘Au ’voir, ducky, have a good time.’
CHAPTER XXX
I
WE arrived at Vallant House at a few minutes past eleven. James went upstairs to sleuth out bars of light under doors, and found none – it was evidently one of our grandmother’s early nights.
In the hall I found a note from Hutchins, confirming this, and I called up softly, ‘Now for it, Jamesey’.
‘Yes. This is the dam’ drawing-room.’
‘Got the thermos?’
‘Here.’
‘I wonder how long we shall have to wait for them to-night.’
He rejoined me, padding soundlessly.
‘Vere … who’s a red-hair’d child on the top landing?
‘Oh God, Jamesey, I don’t know!’
‘In a nightdress … I think. I only got the meres glimpse. She was looking down. …’
We went into the dining-room, and after all, Hutchins had put out food and drink for us.
‘Good chap,’ James stammered.
‘One of the best.’ I was pleased with the way that remark had come out. A memory returned to me. ‘By the way, Jamesey, if I should disgrace myself would you mind twisting my arm – here, like this?’
He nodded brusquely. We fell to eating sandwiches, and presently James said, ‘What are we doing this for? I don’t want ’em … and we’ve cleared the dish.’ He looked ridiculously astonished.
The pillar’d clock on the mantelpiece ticked on comfortably, as one who had marked off the seconds that led to the approach of a thousand many-coursed Victorian meals. The belly-god of the house. We went into the hall and James said, ‘Where does it happen most?’
A Harp in Lowndes Square Page 29