A Harp in Lowndes Square

by Rachel Ferguson

  ‘All down the stairs, but there’s a lot on the landing –’ I stopped for a phrase to convey the impression I had received, ‘–people hating each other worse …’

  ‘We’ll camp here, outside the dining-room door.’

  ‘Chairs?’

  ‘Better not. We might have to move in a hurry.’

  Later, from the dial of his luminous watch, we found that we had sat there, crouched on the floor, for two hours. And nothing happened at all. It seemed as if, with the glimpse of that red-hair’d child, the house had exhausted itself for the night.

  James said, ‘Look here … about this time factor: we might be a year before the staircase affair came round again.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I’ve seen bits of it already and it would be too much of a coincidence if my short stay here had included the night it happened. It’s our affair, as Vallants, and that being so I suppose we have some extra link with it through our physical link with the people concerned. You see, I know those two who came down first were Emmeline and Sophia.’

  In the taxi he shifted and said, ‘That child … what’s your theory?’

  I answered, apologetically because for some reason the idea to me was the only incredible one of the whole business, and a dawning probability which had only reached me in the manner of a light ray much later during the wait in the hall, ‘Personally, I believe that it was mother’.

  Sleeplessness invariably leaves its mark on me. At breakfast, Cosmo murmured to his plate, ‘“A very considerable bend, gentlemen”,’ and I decided against time to take him up on that.

  ‘Yes. Late nights are apt to fly to the old face – no more bacon, I implore you, Enid.’ And later on I had to tell her that I should be in late again that night. I was fretting that she wouldn’t have been human if she hadn’t been hurt at what must appear to be the heartless action on our part in failing even to suggest that she come with us too, with me and ‘her’ James. But you can’t touch Vallant business without hurting somebody.

  II

  That night, we arrived in Lowndes Square a little earlier and had hardly taken up our places on the hall floor when the air became charged as it had once before when I was alone in that experience; it is the only word by which the sudden vibration, like the effect of an electric bell on the ear, can be described, and it was then that I saw that our positions were strategically wrong. By the time the hall had been reached, the picture was – must have been – already fading: the Chilcot letter supported this, and my own imperfect test.

  I said ‘Up the stairs, quick’, and we made for them blindly. How correct my theory was I found by the fact that, even so, we very nearly missed the thing in its entirety as I knew it; we were, for instance, too late for Sophia and only caught up on Emmeline whose entirely material, peevish apprehensions again passed through us as she went down the flight – this time far more strongly, as far as I was concerned. Whether the accident of sex operates in the matter of intensity of vicarious thought I don’t know; all I can say is that James has told me since that his own irritation which passed through him with Emmeline’s rapid descent of those stairs didn’t appear to have been equal in intensity to my own. But about the rest of it there was nothing unequal at all. Every sound was louder, including the blur of voices from the landing; we heard isolated words, even sentences.

  ‘You here! What are you doing here?’ and a pause in which we had apparently missed something. But we missed nothing of what followed, and the splitting crack and thud were to my ears life-size and set my heart beating lest the house be awakened, and for the first time I saw completely, and James as well. I whispered, ‘Down, two stairs down, quick’.

  We got there in time. The sweat was dropping off his face as he peered, flashing his torch.

  ‘Vere … it’s Lalage.’

  ‘No. Don’t you see? It’s Myra. They’re – they’re the same person.’

  And it was time for the next thing; you can’t skip that kind of sequence, and through the despair we both knew and for which I at least was prepared, James stammered to me – so naturally I was appalled until I remembered it was a voice dead for forty years and more – ‘There is no love. My life is over.’

  But his life wasn’t, and I gripped his arm. ‘The landing. They’ll be there, next.’

  It was as we trod upon the stairs where Myra lay that we both stopped, our faces twisted with pain.

  ‘What’s matter?’ James mumbled.

  ‘My back. Oh Jamesey …’ and then I saw that he was grasping the banisters.

  ‘Same … here. Sort of red-hot knife.’

  ‘Come up, come up! It’ll stop then. It’s only on those two steps … after it happened, to Myra, you see.’

  And on the landing we were plunged at once into that humming war of emotions that I knew so well. This time,the sense that they were battling for my possession was less acute: perhaps the presence of James was diverting their attention, or weakening their force? But one thing I had forgotten, and that was to allow for the passage through oneself of their violence, and I was horrified no less at the hates which poured into me than of the murderous look that James threw me.

  And here, too, was vision, patchy as at Hampton Court in our childhood, with this difference, that incomplete as it was on that night, at least our sight tallied on detail. We saw a face set and white with anger, the black, close-set eyes looking with that fixity which accompanies power and behind it, seen almost down to the waist where it faded abruptly against the passage wallpaper and dado, the red-hair’d child, her small face pinched and mature in its contempt and puny valliance. And we heard – this was new to me –

  ‘Oh God forgive you, what have you done now?’ and the tiny scream of a child so frightened it can hardly find even that relief.

  ‘Myra!’

  ‘Go back to bed, you!’ and hurrying steps.

  ‘Lady Vallant! What on earth has happened? Seymour, come here … I don’t know … carefully … he should be here in a few minutes.’

  ‘Take her upstairs.’

  And just as any material object will rock to a standstill so that scene ended, and the silence of the house settled about one with a lurch.

  The aftermath of shock takes unromantic forms, and for quite fifteen minutes James and I were occupied in futile efforts to control our jaw muscles, fending off nausea and yawning and yawning. …

  It was followed by a craving for sleep that a remnant of caution warned us must be dealt with and which dragged us just in time to our feet and kept us walking up and down the hall, then, because there was much to say, into the dining-room.

  ‘We shall have to run it through again.’

  I just nodded. I knew we must come back and re-see in more detail but I was beyond facing up to that at the moment.

  ‘“Seymour” would be one of the two men Vallant was entertaining … that Chilcot spoke of.’ This was talking for talking’s sake and I didn’t even nod. ‘Vere, it’s awful, that landing, you know. I swear I could have done you some dirty trick, for a few seconds. I didn’t even want not to. …’

  ‘One doesn’t. I’ve been all through that already, only with me it was Lalage and Hugh as well. But – I hoped you’d be killed in France.’

  He was propped against the sideboard now, staring at his feet. He looked up suddenly. ‘Exactly what d’you mean about Lalage and Myra being the same person?’

  ‘I believe that mother’s state over Myra and her life and death –’

  ‘Now then, stop that!’

  ‘Sorry … well then, isn’t it possible, isn’t it probable, in view of what we’ve always seen and known of Lalage, that mother’s mental condition over Myra affected her first child?’

  ‘Reincarnation?’

  I shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t go as far as that. Take it or leave it. But intensive brooding and thought leave their marks. Lalage is in the birth-mark category, only with her it’s a psychic one. Why, I tell you she even remembers part of life as it was here. I kno
w hate. I remember hate. She doesn’t, on detail, but she carried something over when she was born. And she’s like Myra too, even aunt Emmeline told the Verdunes so. That photographed well.’

  ‘And mother hating dances …’

  ‘Lord, James, I’d forgotten that … that coming of age ball in the village, and mother going white … you see? The dance Emmeline and Sophia were going to that night was a coming-out dance … and now, Lalage collapses because the War has brought a version of violence to her door with air-raids, and she associates conflict with the house.’

  James stood up. ‘That seems to cover the ground. We must slope. Come on.’

  III

  Back at the Furnivals, I was badly tempted for the first time to behave like a guest and to leave a note for Enid, asking that my breakfast might be brought up to my room. I mistrusted what my face might be doing in the morning. It was her concern against Cosmo’s observation, but in the end I elected to bluff it out. Even to my own eyes the rouge and lipstick I applied looked all wrong and amply justified the very slight lift of eyebrow with which Cosmo favoured me, and the fact that he said nothing consoled me not at all. I was beginning to know him too well for that. Later in the day there was Enid to be got over once more.

  ‘But my dear, again? You’re looking most terribly tired; can’t you take a night right off and go to bed early?’

  I decided hastily to throw James to the lions. ‘Oh, I wish I could! but James’s leave, you know; they want to pack all they can into the time –’

  It silenced her at once.

  That third night gave us what we wanted: it was almost as if the first two efforts at vision were the picture rehearsing itself and that now, at last, it was ready for us, or we for it?

  For the first time we saw the ball gowns of Emmeline and Sophia, mauve tarletan with sash waists of old rose, the wearers abundantly recognizable as the women we knew even allowing for the softening and rounding of the rolled back years. Then came two childish chuckles and a coppery head over the banisters, by its side another, smaller dark one – Lalage over again at the same age.

  ‘Hope she moves soon, I want to see,’ I murmured. She did, and even at that distance her uneven walk with its sideways jerk was plain enough.

  ‘We can’t watch everyone at once,’ James’s voice was strained with anxiety.

  ‘Never mind Sophia and Emmeline. They’ve gone.’

  ‘What happens next?’

  ‘Listen, I’m not sure.’

  ‘Wasn’t Emmy lovely!’ The opening of a door and a broad bar of light showing us everything: the still-young woman, brilliant in her elaborately draped yellow dress cut in a wide oval off her shoulders, the small figure curving at breast and hip in the fashion of the day with tiny waist two hands could have spanned, the short train rustling.

  Susan Vallant had been smiling, she bore the traces of it to the stair head. And then she saw the children.

  Never could I have believed that features could have so re-grouped themselves; in that moment she looked years older, a sardonic mask of fury, and yet a trace of pleasure in the close-set eyes at an opportunity …

  ‘You here! What are you doing here?’

  ‘It was my fault Mamma, I brought Myra downstairs.’

  ‘Who’s speaking to you? I’ll deal with you later. Isn’t it enough that I have to keep you at all that you must show yourself downstairs?’

  I whispered, for it seemed impossible to believe that I was not interrupting them, ‘Look out, keep your eye on her. See what she does with her hands.’

  There was no mistaking that. Violent temper often self-confessedly goes too far, and whether Lady Vallant intention was a definite one or the mechanics of sheer passion our eyes couldn’t tell us, they only showed ringed fingers wrenching at a child’s fragile shoulder, and the missed footing.

  ‘Myra!’

  ‘Go back to your bed, you!’ and the men’s voices, and figures hurrying from the drawing-room, and the set face of compassion of the one who knelt on the stair – I could have touched him: I should recognize him to-day if I met him in the street. And from a flight above ran yet another person, a thin and distraught young woman in a high necked gown.

  ‘Carefully … I don’t know … better get the doctor. He should be here in a few minutes.’

  ‘Take her upstairs, not in the drawing-room.’

  ‘Oh God forgive you, what have you done now?’ Even had the face baffled me I should still have recognized the voice of Alma Chilcot, and she and Lady Vallant stood there, eyes battling in scorn and loathing, temper and fear.

  ‘What is it, your ladyship?’ Another voice I knew, from the hall this time, and a young man in livery looking up white and scared. And the staircase rocked and blazed and the picture went out like a blown candle.

  When I could trust my voice I said, ‘You see? Mother knows. She saw it all. Hutchins got there too late. He never saw. And Miss Chilcot was never sure … and the aunts missed everything.’

  CHAPTER XXXI

  I

  I WAS in the Furnivals’ hall, stumbling into the dining-room; brandy and whisky, I seemed to remember, were always on the sideboard as nobody ever knew who would drop in. I poured myself a two-finger peg and drank it neat, and began pouring another.

  ‘Ah … I was rather expecting something of this kind,’ said Cosmo from the doorway.

  I looked up and saved the glass by some miracle. He was in his dressing-gown, hands sunk in the pockets. I surveyed him blearily, I felt nothing at all, even at seeing him.

  ‘You can have half that second go and no more.’

  ‘I – I – I –’

  ‘Three o’clock. H’m.’

  ‘That – sounds – awfully – fatherly.’

  ‘Fathers have their uses. Well … had a good time?’

  And it was only then that I began to cry, if one can so describe the uncontrollable torrent which poured down my cheeks without check or punctuation, glazing them. Both his arms were round me, I didn’t know or care from what impulse.

  ‘You do have awful fun with me, don’t you, Cosmo? The perfect secretary … when she isn’t sleeping at you or swiping your brandy she’s in floods of grief… never a dull moment.’

  ‘When are you ever going to stop hurting me?’

  It, if anything could, shocked me back to normal, and that wasn’t saying much, at the moment.

  ‘Hurting you … Cosmo?’

  His face was very close to mine. ‘Doesn’t it occur to you that I’ve almost a right by now to have been told you were out on this cursed business?’

  ‘Gladstone –’

  His face softened. ‘Oh God help the child. Toujours la politesse. But another time when you want to hoodwink me, don’t plaster an obviously white face with rouge. Come along.’ He got me upstairs to my room where I proceeded to do that which in our family we call ‘circling’ – taking off a bangle and putting it on again, throwing down a coat and looking for it, and hanging it up and moving it somewhere else, beginning a dozen things and finishing none.

  ‘Come along,’ and he rapidly unfastened my frock.

  ‘Cosmo, you oughtn’t to be doing this, ought you?’

  ‘Now we’re not going to be conceited and insulting, my child.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Certainly. You’re practically telling me that you believe your charms are such that I shall be unable to withstand them. But I daresay we shall find that you’re singularly like everybody else, with nothing on,’ and he eventually removed every rag I stood up in, before putting me into my pyjamas and throwing me occasional remarks. ‘What a boon these zip fasteners are,’ and ‘Why do you wear combinations? Enid doesn’t. She uses silk vests’.

  I suppose there ought to have been embarrassment, and plenty of it. I can only say there was not, either at the time in retrospect or at that tremendous test of overnight indiscretion, the breakfast table. And all through it, while I was answering his comments and even laughing at them a little, and lon
g after I was in bed, the tears continued. We tried everything we knew to stop it and at last had to give up and just accept the manifestation. Cosmo said, ‘Would it help things if you told me all about it, or shall we have a chat about something else?’ and I smiled at that too.

  ‘You must go to bed, my dear. It’s twenty minutes to four and matinée day to-morrow.’

  ‘Can’t you ever think of anything but my work?’

  ‘I think of you.’

  He sat down on the end of the bed. ‘I agree that the arrival of the early tea and can of hot water must be timed.’

  ‘Oh Cosmo! Nobody but you would think of that.’

  ‘Maids and cans of hot water represent what might be described as the eternal dilemma in cases to which our own bears a superficial resemblance (very superficial). Now then!’

  I lay and looked at him; nobody could say he hadn’t seen me at my worst, and he seemed to be weathering it. His presence was having its usual effect in pulling me together, and even that must only be just enough to help me through the Vallant story: invalids – and I was at the moment in that class – are traditionally to be humoured, but one mustn’t help oneself to overmuch incidental attention. …

  I have said he was a good listener: he was more, a singularly expressive one, so that it was helpful to watch his face, shadowed though it was, with sunken eyes and harsh lines, and you found that it was collaborating with your words and oddly spurring you on.

  ‘… it’s a thing one’s never going to forget. Suspecting, even knowing, isn’t the same as seeing. Cosmo, what she said to that lame child will be in my ears for life, and there’s such a lot of life ahead, perhaps. And she’s gone beyond one’s reach, to comfort and pet. Like a murder. Final. And what happened afterwards, all those months that Miss Chilcot wrote of… “Myra would weep at the sound of her step” … aren’t phrases terrible? the way they can haunt … and yet it’s old-fashioned wording. Hit or miss … oh damn this crying! And even going to see Lady Vallant won’t kill memory.’