‘No.’
‘It isn’t so much what she did, even if it were deliberate. It’s the state of mind that made it possible. …’
‘It was a fairly large family?’
‘Seven.’
‘M’m. Well of course even in those days there may have been married rebels … especially in the case of a woman who valued her appearance and the social life a marked degree. Resentment at another baby and all that. Bearing grudges isn’t only a figure of speech. Unfortunately.’
‘Mother made Myra a family of paper dolls, I’ve got them still –’
‘And you’re going to give Lady Vallant the pleasure of spoiling another life as well as your mother’s and Myra’s.’
‘One is as one is.’
He shifted his position and I said, ‘You look dreadfully uncomfortable’.
‘I am, and I’m not used to it. Mind if I put my feet up … That’s better.’ I threw him a spare pillow and he settled it under his shoulders. ‘I wonder if I’m going to risk your friendship by telling you how it would help us best to get over this affair? My angle isn’t yours, of course, it’s the professional one, and that’s where I’m going to risk you, but it’s an idea as well. Now, first of all, you’ve got to hold on to the fact that you’re grieving over an event which happened before you were born.’
‘I’ve tried that and it’s no good.’
‘No? Then you’ve got to hunt for something else, and my something else would be to encourage myself deliberately to get the whole story in detail, and that means scene, motives, character, psychology – even speeches and dress.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘I mean, think of it as a play you have got to put on. Don’t evade anything. All this time you’ve been dramatizing it just enough to make yourself miserably unhappy; you have brooded over Lady Vallant until she’s acquired a power over you that you’ll have to fight against. She’s a rather bad woman, I don’t doubt, but not the goblin damned you’ve made her, all-powerful and all-malignant. All she is is a hard, selfish and repellent Victorian type with a bad temper, and the fact that your parents have given you nothing but affection has made you mentally extra-vulnerable. I’ve told you about my boyhood and its lack of softness and charity, and the result is that your grandmother doesn’t dismay me to anything like the extent she does yourself. And so I suggest that you use what is past instead of letting it use you. We come by our reliefs in strange ways. Try this one. And don’t be pestered by the idea that you’re being callous or doing a thing in execrable taste. In any case that would be my fault, but I won’t plead guilty because I’m convinced that Myra’s death was her best solution. As an ending one shrinks from it, but have you considered what the alternative was bound to have been? Not yet sixteen, which means two years more of life in that house as she knew it, even if she made an early marriage. But would she have? With her disability? We men are pretty brutal, you know, and can afford to pick the sound and perfect thing and damned few of us look further than the physical, and would this poor child have ever been given a reasonable chance of marriage? On what we know already isn’t it more likely she would have been kept in the shade, kept short of pretty clothes that might have turned the trick, relegated to her own suite except perhaps for meals, at which Lady Vallant would have plenty of opportunities for rallying her about her husbandless fate and its reason … why Myra might be there now – and you’re looking as stricken as if it were all happening, which only goes to prove my contention that your sense of proportion is all over the place and your imagination undisciplined. Now, have you been able to go with me so far?’
‘Oh God yes, Cosmo.’
‘Be quite sure. You mean you believe with me that Myra’s better out of it all?’
‘Yes.’ And I did, for the first time. Until that moment I had not been able to look beyond the short life and its termination, far less explore all round it.
‘Bravo. If you concede that you’ve nothing much else to fear; all that’s left is the shrinking from the incident which led to her release, and that’s where I want you to ride over everything, to see it all as actors, walking. First of all, cast it, humanize it to yourself by associating this player and that with your people in your mind’s eye, never forgetting that Lady Vallant is your principal interest; she’s, theatrically speaking, an illegitimate one but in the right hands she’d be tremendous. You’ll find the fascination of it will grow on you, and there’ll come a time when your play and cast will be so much more telling that they’ve gone one ahead on the sheer facts. I could find you at least one actress who’d play your real Lady Vallant right off the stage and out of your mind and almost send you off to Lowndes Square for comfort. And why? Because she has the technique of unease and evil at her fingers’ ends, and your old woman’s a bungling amateur. It’s all in the sight. You’ve just admitted so much yourself.’
He broke off, glanced at me and continued. ‘And on with your play. We should have to begin earlier than your trouble. I should show Lady Vallant –’
‘Susan Stonor –’
‘No no no! We must show her as a young married woman, carrying over with her into the Lowndes Square house every fault she had as a girl: vanity, love of finery, of power, and her awakening delight in acquiring more and more people to exercize it on, beginning with servants, admirers and her husband to whom she is faithful because she is conventional, not big or warm hearted enough to throw her cap over any windmill. There are no children in Act I. It’s what the French call the scène obligatoire, a necessary building of character, a preparation for the future. And this, plus just one small incident of callousness, to give a hint … and one flash of temper, only one, and slight, as another hint, but less than half-strength because we shall need all her thunder later.
Then we come to the children, and here the technical difficulties begin. In the first place, real children ruin any adult play by side-tracking the audience, hanging everything up while the surplus matinee woman goes maternal over them; therefore we must show them all at the age where you saw them, and that means a lot of poignance lost. One can’t indicate neglect extending over a period of years except by retrospective dialogue. I’m not pretending to have got it all cut and dried, I’m just trying to suggest the lines along which I want you to think in future. We’ll assume that apparently insuperable difficulties have been overcome – the problem of playing out your principal scene on a staircase isn’t the least of them, and of an excess of sets that must include the schoolroom. Very well. From then on you get the unequal and foredoomed conflict between Anne, Myra and their mother … you hear through that schoolroom doorway the sound of music and of guests arriving and talking and laughing, while in the room itself Lady Vallant, brilliantly dressed, is rating two miserable girls in shabby nightdresses. And Myra pretends to fetch something from a table and move away — d’you see the value of that?’
‘Go on.’
‘The way that move will be made will tell your audience all she has, and has had, to fear from her mother. Nothing marked or melodramatic. Just an instinctive recoil glossed over by petty deception. To suggest present emotion is fairly easy: but to convey arrears of feeling is no small thing. Laurence Irving did it in Typhoon … and as she moves, she shows that she is lame. Why was Myra lame, by the way?’
I was sitting up now, staring. ‘I don’t know. I never thought of that. I just accepted it, as the final touch that would be reserved for her –’
‘Exactly. That’s what I complain of. You accepted it but it won’t do for an audience. It means that earlier in the scene we must put our cards on the table, and make some character tell another what caused it. Sophia and Emmeline won’t do, it’s too sophisticated a scene for them and they’d have been too young at the time of Myra’s birth to speak with authority. I suggest Lady Vallant’s personal maid to the nurserymaid who brings up the trays and this gives us scope for another development of Lady Vallant’s nature. This is, of course a scene that cannot be shown. I doubt if any aud
ience is up to it; they’d see nothing of the macabre in it, only cause for laughter – confound them, but those lines are macabre, all the more so because they are spoken matter-of-factly … or jocosely, that’s worse … by an undramatic woman. It’s of course the vanity point operating. Now, which shall we have: Lady Vallant riding and dancing, or drugging — your “Seymour” might be a doctor, you know, an infatuated, unprincipled admirer — to prevent that child getting born, and that would be an effective touch where he picked Myra up from the stairs fifteen years later. …
‘Or shall we make it, “Well, what can you expect? She tightlaced right up to the last moment although the doctor warned her”. Something like that? …’
I hardly heard his concluding words. I was seeing again that tiny figure in waspish yellow with its waspish waist, and the regrouping of feature as the ex-smiling face caught sight of the children on the landing.
‘… and the rest is up to you. And if you are ever in danger of making a fetish of your memories come to me and I’ll find a set of situations for you far more harrowing than anything you ever thought of! And when you go and see Lady Vallant next and find yourself trending towards the old slavery to her manner or expression or words, say to yourself “Furnival knows an elderly actress who’d do this sort of thing far better”. Artificializing … the veil of illusion … it’s a very healing thing. If it comes to that, the only real difference between the theatre and life is that our everyday speeches are extempore. You’ve got a part to play at Vallant House. Play it well. And tell me – this time – when you are going there, and for what it’s worth I shall be backing you up, and envying you the opportunity!’
He rose and came over to me. ‘And it may surprise you to know that the crying stopped’ (he glanced at the clock) ‘one hour and ten minutes ago.’
I took his hand and put my cheek against it. The circumstances, as the Verdunes would say, would surely pass it along?
Through the curtains another day was beginning and in the trees the tentative, long-spaced ‘chip’ of birds.
CHAPTER XXXII
I
I ALLOWED myself all the following day, fixed up two appointments for Cosmo with a photographer and for a stray interview, and the rest of the time was spent in strolling round the garden, sleeping the entire afternoon and playing silly games with Enid – I remember that over Snakes and Ladders we both, for some reason, became almost hysterical when three times running she was sent bundling down the longest ladder pointing the sternest moral of all when within one throw from home. And the next day I went to Lowndes Square. James and I chose our own time, immediately after luncheon, as I told Cosmo. The excuse was to be the termination of James’s leave, and that a pretext was necessary the face of Hutchins as he opened the door was ample proof.
‘I am afraid her ladyship won’t see you, Miss Vere. I don’t advise –’
‘All right, Hutchins, she’s in the drawing-room, I suppose? I’ll be sure to let her know this is my fault. Don’t announce us.’ And we went upstairs, both careful to walk heedlessly over certain of the treads. …
She was sitting in front of the fire doing nothing at all, an old-fashioned handscreen of peacock’s feathers and gold thread shielding her face. She looked round casually at our steps and the opening door – it was as though a start of surprise was reserved for the less assured, that she knew no domestic situation could presume to challenge her into discomfiture.
‘Ah, dear boy … what is your sister here for?’
‘To see you. We made Hutchins let us in,’ and James uninvited drew a chair for me and one for himself and sat down without shaking hands. ‘There’s a fug in this room. You ought to have more fresh air.’
And she was utterly unaware, encased in traditional security.
‘I told Hutchins I would not receive your sister. Ring the bell.’
I said, ‘Don’t be silly, Lady Vallant, and don’t talk at me.’
That penetrated, but she was still half-credulous. ‘Hold your tongue. You’ (to James) ‘ring the bell.’
‘No.’
‘You are very insolent. I don’t wish to talk. Go away.’ He shook his head. ‘Then what is it? Do you want money?’
His answering look was one of such sick disgust that she almost wavered.
I took over for him. ‘You’ve tried that once before, haven’t you, Lady Vallant? The nice-looking grandson being taken up by you, overpaid even as a child of thirteen to be on your side because you were afraid of what he might have heard about you. Or have I got it wrong and was it through a shortage of admirers – like Seymour, for instance?’
She seemed, with a certain fineness, to accept by this time that she was in for something, and the plangent voice was very much as usual when she turned to me. ‘Seymour?’
‘One of the two men who lifted Myra off the stairs that night. Do you want any more names? Alma Chilcot, for instance? “Oh God help you, what have you done now?” Remember?’
‘Miss Chilcot is gone.’ I had never until now seen signs of her age as evidenced by mental confusion in Lady Vallant.
‘She died last year in a workhouse, of starvation, my dear grandmother, but she has never left this house. She is here now, and so is Myra.’
‘Are you mad?’
‘You don’t like that idea, do you?’ James said. ‘It upsets your comfortable luncheon and deprives you of your nap to think that Myra – that comical encumbrance – should have the presumption to come back and lie where you pushed her, down the staircase.’
‘“Not in the drawing-room”,’ I cut in, ‘that would never have done. How right you were. There might have been something that would have stained one of your rugs. As it was, there was nothing, nothing at all except an injury to her spine.’
‘Your mother shall hear of this.’
‘No.’ James looked at her squarely. ‘You’ve bullied her enough. She’s never given you away – God knows why, but it wasn’t out of love or respect, make no mistake about that. Love! Does anyone love you? Even at best you’re a wry-mouthed joke to the entire family except ourselves, and that’s because we know about Myra. The rest of ’em have been fobbed off with the usual story about declines and weak backs. You’re a lucky woman, but the luck’s out.’
On looking back, I don’t know now which of us, dispassionately considered, came out of that interview worse; James who within a couple of hours outraged every known law of chivalry to age and sex, using as incidental weapon all he had ever learned about bullying at school with that dazing rain of repetitive questions, or myself, who took full advantage of the different method open to the worst type of woman, in betrayal and detraction of a fellow woman before a man, plus that terrible memory for detail always more thorough than his. Also, it was two to one.
James was saying, ‘You must understand that if we find out that you’ve been worrying and nagging and rendering Anne’s life a burden as only you know how to do because of some notion that she has told us, we shall know at once by her face. There’s a look which comes on your daughters’ faces that is unmistakable, after any interview with you; we’ve both seen it on Myra’s as well. And that will be our time to tell the family, who at present merely see you as an over-dressed, narrow-minded bad-mannered old woman–’
‘– who can’t even drop to pieces decently,’ I added. ‘She has enough cosmetics on her dressing-table to set up a leading lady, James. Rouge on half-dead skin isn’t pretty … and those dresses in the wardrobe; more than Myra and Anne-ever had, evidently, when it comes to the governess – the paid dependant, I’m sorry – having to renovate your cast-offs for them because their appearance made her “ashamed”, and to bring them invalid food when they were ill. Food, you devil …’
‘You’ve forgotten, she doesn’t know that,’ said James quietly.
‘She knows now.’
‘Leave me. You are making me ill.’
‘Aren’t we justified?’
‘Aren’t we justified?’
&nbs
p; ‘Aren’t we justified?’
‘Nothing would justify this scene.’
‘Making you ill … it might be a stroke, you know, and strokes have a tiresome habit of distorting the mouth in an unattractive way that will give your maid a lot of trouble … they’re apt to fly to the speech, too, and make it difficult for people, like Anne, for instance, to hear you when you’re struggling to say something hurtful.’
‘Stop this ranting. I can see your mother’s hand in all this, deny it as you may.’
‘You’re wrong.’
‘She was always troublesome, always daring with me. I had great work to subdue her.’ I sickened as James was retorting ‘She hated you, no doubt, and for the best of reasons. What sort of a keeper were you? Of a home? Or of a menagerie for wild beasts? And as for telling us about Myra, we saw what really happened, I tell you, just as I saw Miss Chilcot at your elbow that afternoon.’
‘Did your mother tell you to say this?’
And I might as well say first as last that up to that point there was no shaking her conviction, biased and materialistic, nor at any stage could we wrest the slightest admission from her. She had fineness, of a kind. They say that finely tempered steel cannot break, though it may bend and bend and ache for the relief of snapping which its very quality denies. Her entirely human certainty of human tattling was her safeguard. James, again:
‘You think it was Anne who told us what you did? You have been remarkably anxious all these years to keep something dark.’
She faced him, looking him up and down. ‘Your aunt Myra, led on by your mother, was grossly disobedient, and in defying me, met with a severe punishment, poor child, which I sometimes feel to have been excessive on the part of God.’
‘Faugh!’ We were both so utterly shocked that for a second there was an absolute silence. And then, explain it how you may, something stirred in my brain, independent of all my private thoughts and feelings, something which began to work through me, using me, so that as with the practised pianist and his hands I was able, as it were, to sit back and listen to what I myself was getting accomplished. For an instant I couldn’t accept such possession, even fought it with my own words. I was about to say, ‘Would that, supposing it were true, cover what came afterwards …’, only the sentence was swamped by sudden, absolute conviction which, translated into words, would have said Get down to it. Cut out that line. Close with her now. And stand up. This is what you must say. And I succumbed and stood and spoke.
A Harp in Lowndes Square Page 31