A Harp in Lowndes Square

by Rachel Ferguson

  ‘There was one year between Myra and Anne. Would you believe us if I told you what happened before Myra was born, at a date, therefore, when Anne could have known nothing? Do you remember a woman who loved herself to such an extent that she clung to admiration from any source right up to danger-point? It didn’t kill her. That was a pity. It only maimed a child. And she stood with her maid, very pleasantly, perhaps, and jokes about over-large families passing between them … or perhaps the maid protested, and she turned on her, gave her a taste of the Vallant temper. Tighter, you idiot. The gown still looks awkward …’ I found that my fist, shaking in her face, had unclenched, throwing my hand up in a gesture so foreign to me that I looked at it stupidly.

  It was hit-or-miss, but apparently I knew what I was about. …

  It had told. Upright always, consistent to herself, she did not buckle now, but her eyes were very dreadful, for in them even the light of malice had gone out. James had made a restraining gesture towards me but I hadn’t finished, for mingled with that possession of my speech was my own individuality of desperate fury.

  ‘And so you had a cripple, someone at whom you could laugh before the servants.’ I dropped my voice and the rest of what I had to say was pitched in a key that to any entering visitor was purely conversational. ‘I wonder who will be with you when you die. A handful of those servants? The doctor? Or will you set them to sending for the family? They’ll come. They always do the correct thing. And perhaps the hymns you composed will be a comfort to you then, especially the one you wrote after the Myra affair. But there won’t be a man or woman there who minds, or is pitiful to help you through. Even Myra had Anne …’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Vere …’

  I turned on him. ‘She’s crying at last,’ I shot at him thickly and avidly, ‘come and have a good look.’

  And I pointed like a guttersnipe.

  And even now I am not sure that those tears were of remorse and not, rather, of rage, fear and the sham of helplessness.

  We went out on to the landing and I rang the upstairs bell for Palmer. In the hall the menservants were bringing the tea-things and I thought quite grotesquely, ‘That’s a bad touch. Anti-climax. That incident ought to be cut right out’.

  II

  I went in search of Enid and found her in the drawing-room.

  ‘At last! Aren’t you dying for your tea, my dear? I’ve had mine but there are muffins in the fender. Oh why do they go out so soon? It’s so hidebound. It isn’t as if it were game that has to have close-times.’

  ‘Yes, I could do with some tea,’ I agreed, then, and very casually, ‘by the way, where’s Cosmo been all the afternoon?’

  ‘In the study. He had something he wanted to think out and didn’t want to be disturbed.’

  So, Cosmo? …

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  I

  AND that was nearly twenty years ago.

  The War is over, and Lady Vallant is over.

  But Cosmo is dead. Even to-day the temptation to indulge in cheap embittered cynicism is sometimes overwhelming.

  I never particularly hankered to be young with him: I wanted to grow old with him. All the Vallants have a kink. Perhaps he was mine. I hope so.

  Lady Vallant died nearly two years after our visit to Lowndes Square. She never changed much outwardly, at least she kept her shattered, lonely spirit hidden from us all, for which I applaud her. She had her points, and reserve and the high hand were two of them. There were several of the relatives with her at the end, aunt Sophia and aunt Emmeline within immediate call, the uncles standing by to clear up the business aftermaths of death. Mother came from Hampshire and stayed at Vallant House, the first to come to her, the last to leave her, and although I am pretty sure there was no deathbed repentance, no very perceptible softening during her last weeks, there was something, that a remark of mother’s put me on to: ‘I think she felt she hadn’t been quite what she might have to us all.’ I never learned or asked the exact phrasing, but it indicated at least one sentence which, for Lady Vallant, amounted to a stupendous admission.

  In our conventional mourning we all counted visually equal, and the uniform at least concealed the graded poignance of our individual thought. We went, of course, through no antics of bogus emotion, we just stood about,and foregathered, and knit up each other’s ravelled life as scattered families will.

  Later on we were to realize that power, even wrongly directed, can hold a clan together whether in the unity of a common rage or humour. Personality will out, and in a sense when Lady Vallant fell our family wavered, disintegrated into non-significant units. Tribally speaking dictators have their uses.

  And that is my tribute to Susan Vallant.

  Her grave in Brompton Cemetery is nowhere near that of Myra. I never ventured the enquiry as to whether this was due to accident or design and my suspicions I keep to myself.

  The house in Lowndes Square is not closed. Some of its rooms are occasionally occupied by those of the family who live in the country and Hutchins remained there for years as caretaker with a skeleton staff. The original idea that he should end his days and service at the Hampshire house the dear old man, incurably pavé, would not listen to. For him the lamp-posts of London, and in default of jingling hansom, the horn of taxi, the chimneypots and the autumnal muffin-bell. He was the best friend I ever had. Except one.

  Mother has made her home with Julian Vallant in the Hampshire house; he is now so nearly blind that the official explanation ‘he must have somebody with him’ has long been issued to the relations. I happen to believe that there is another, better reason. …

  As for uncle Stuart, cranky, grudging and farouche, he too has left his gap: eccentricity seems to be a wonderful stimulant to regret and very nearly a substitute for merit! and the individual who is all-good, all-worthy is apt to be forgotten sooner, which is a very shocking state of affairs, pointing to no moral that I can think of.

  Aunt Sophia, we Buchans agree, will indubitably live for ever and I hope she does. Complete good nature and low brain-power are powerful preservatives. She never had a vice to her back and I pity her. Emmeline Verdune on the other hand will always find fuel for her fire among the lot of us. Why did James and Vere give up the Campden Hill house and take that one in Phillimore Terrace? It’s just as small, even if Leigh Hunt and Baroness Orczy had lived there before them … wouldn’t it be better if James lived at the club or in Lowndes Square and Vere settled in Hampshire with Anne as she doesn’t seem to be going to marry? …

  Poor Emmeline! She reminds one so inevitably of that Bensonian character in Account Rendered who shut a window if she found it opened and opened it if she found it shut in the single-minded determination to impress her will upon existing conditions.

  II

  When uncle Julian dies, both Vallant and the house in Lowndes Square will pass to James. The town house is virtually his already as nobody seems to want it, but in spite of the fact that Lady Vallant’s death has made a tremendous difference financially to us all, and that James is doing well in his business, he is not, we both agree, doing as well as all that!

  Besides, there are other reasons. …

  We have had an offer for it from Hugh, and the prospect of Lalage and Hugh as tenants forced James and myself after much thought more or less to put our cards on the table with him.

  For by that time there was a child.

  The first child of Lalage and Hugh was a girl; that, I suppose, was the contribution of our side of the family which runs to daughters. In looks she is a Lyne, and I hope in deeper ways as well, and it was my business and James’s to steer her through her early years, so that we blocked all attempts of Anita’s parents to so much as let her see Vallant House from the inside. They wanted to call her Vere and I was against that too. Any link, even the most apparently irrelevant, that can be snapped must be. When she was older, tougher, grounded in love and secure in ways she understands she shall go over Vallant House at will, and be happy there.
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  That was the line we took and kept to from the first.

  As for Lalage, her marriage with Hugh has done that for her which we had hoped. It has not of course achieved everything; to her life’s end she will have her moments of abstraction, of involuntary brooding, withdrawal from the immediate scene, but the Myra-shadow is fading, very slowly if never entirely, and with her grandchildren it will become fainter until it has passed for ever.

  And I suppose I might as well admit that with Lady Vallant dead and Lalage married and a mother and the house at our disposal, I had seen a future in which Lalage and Hugh would live as our tenants in Lowndes Square and that with the first fearless laughter of their first child the light would come in to remain, and the darkness be driven out.

  Very pretty – and entirely mistaken. Things don’t happen like that. I know it. That house is stained with memories of unhappy things, and those of us who own blood kinship with the movers in that story may be peculiarly susceptible to what it still may do. That is why it is futile to destroy the staircase. Until that picture has worked itself out with time or the superimposition of a set of events serene and normal, and until the atmosphere has so been reconditioned, that picture will remain, ever re-enactable, eternally to be guarded against.

  Mother is immeasurably relieved by our attitude. She is happy and in her eyes there is a look of reprieve. She has said nothing at all to James or me; inarticulate and evasive as ever with each other where Lady Vallant is concerned, we have put our action over the Hugh and Lalage affair upon the flippant grounds of our humorous exasperation with our grandmother, and all that was hers.

  III

  I divide my time between our Kensington home, mother in Hampshire and work. Better off financially than I have ever been, I still have no talent for graceful idling, and began by buying a partnership in my office where, when the spirit moves me, I look in and see that the girls aren’t being overdriven and drink the horrible tea the good souls will offer me and even run off manuscripts occasionally on the machines myself. For some months, I believe, the staff speculated upon the curious refusal of Miss Buchan even to glance at dramatic scripts.

  I try not to live in the past and in the future. There is still my little, dear Enid to whom so much of my time is devoted entirely. It is incredible that she is over seventy and even as I write the words I sit back in amazement.

  Enid seventy-two. Enid! No, it can’t be done! For there is a type of woman to-day who, whatever her birthday certificate may have to say, remains persistently in the attractive young-middle-aged class which can still be made love to, and she is one of them, if her curly hair is undisguisedly silver.

  She gave me the sole use of Cosmo’s study. I often spend an hour or so there and Enid leaves me quite alone and goes whistling revue numbers about the house like the wise woman she is.

  On the desk is still a half-emptied bottle of ink, and a memorandum pad.

  Tell Murton change lights in d. room. New one over my l. glass before matinée.

  Rem: subs: to Garrick due. Write cheque.

  Between the leaves of blotting-paper is an unfinished letter.

  Dear Sir, I find after all that I shall not be available on the 29th and much regret –

  and I wonder who the sir could have been and what it was that Cosmo ‘regretted’, and sometimes the helplessness of this type of not knowing that can assail one at the smallest trifle and that death renders so inevitable sweeps over me and I have to go, or find Enid, or plunge into work – anything.

  He died at seventy-four. I had just six years of him. I was not always troublesome to him; there was an occasion when I was able to see him through one of his bad moments, a thing which I had first glimpsed in the foyer of his theatre through the criticism of a young, unknown girl. It was some time after the Gladstone premiere which, in the hazardous way that plays do, had established him once more as an actor to be reckoned with.

  He revived a costume piece, that very one the photographs of which he had shown me in his dressing-room. It was, I saw (I also read the script in advance) an excellent play of its kind, romantic, pictorial, full of action, humour and excitement plus that quality of suavity – that bland and polished over-reaching of the lesser characters – that was Cosmo Furnival’s hallmark. But, he was sixty nine, and the break from what to the younger generation of playgoers was a suitable synchronization of years with actor and rôle as previously offered them in the Victorian play was too sudden. They had no memory to carry forward to his current account. The older audience came again and again. The Press was affectionate, save for two newspapers who possessed critics with vision – I myself could not have said more! But inevitably there was the fool of the party who indulged in regrets at a wonted fire which would not realize its ashes. Just one paper, and what it did to Cosmo is probably beyond computation. He dramatized it of course out of all proportion to its real significance, saw in it the writing on the wall. Up to that time his career was still fluid, a potential adventure with the notion of the braving of which he yet might dally, and although he acted in a dozen plays after that, his motive power I think was gone, and for him the great game over.

  Why I was always able to range myself with the older generation I don’t understand; perhaps I should be happier if I had had the eyesight of my contemporaries which saw him merely as an elderly man in a young part. Be that as it may, I can only state that whenever I saw him in this rôle I saw him subjectively, with the intention of the past and the finished execution of the present in a perceptive appreciation which was undatable. It was a case of ‘simultaneous time’ over again, and indeed as regards the theatre absolute art can’t be confined to calendar, whether the type and quality of its medium is high or low. Enid herself told me that he was giving a far better performance now than ever he had done in his forties. And it was to be neutralized by an older, leaner face.

  She rang me up a week before the opening, told me she was worried about Cosmo and asked me to come to them.

  ‘Worried?’

  ‘My dear, he’s not being like himself – you know, not all over the place and going off the deep end. He’s silent and quiet and I don’t know what to do.’

  I stayed with them until his Press notices had come in.

  The day before production he came to me and said almost shyly (Cosmo shy, with me!) ‘You’ve got “the sight”. I’d like to know if the show’s going to go or not’, and he put his hands in his pockets and looked at his shoes.

  ‘I can’t see the future, only the past, and that capriciously.’

  ‘Ah … thanks, dear.’

  And it was my turn to go away and pray for him and his affairs.

  And then that newspaper came in … unimportant, second-rate, written by a critic who didn’t count for a public who preferred football scores and wouldn’t read it. And Cosmo shut himself up the whole morning in study and for the first time I saw Enid inadequate, and tears in her eyes.

  I went to my room, found a letter, knocked at the study door and went in. But he managed a smile for me. It was a heart-twisting affair. ‘Well, I’ve got my congé. Nice of you to come. There’s nobody else I could stand. Enid knows me too well … thinks too much on the same lines, bless her dear heart.’

  ‘For one newspaper, Cosmo?’

  ‘These things are apt to show which way the wind’s blowing. One can’t live on minorities. Well … I should have no complaint against the present verdict of the young. They’ve done me well enough in the past.’

  ‘Cosmo, you’re talking like a film-fan of nineteen. God, how I’d like to smack your head. Do you propose – an artist like you – to tell me that you’d rather be a matinée idol catering for the immature taste, appealing only to the adolescent emotions of girls who’ll forget you the moment they’ve got a young man of their own and a semi-detached villa at Pinner? I tell you, I’ve seen it happen.’

  ‘There’s a lot in that. But the point is that once there were relays, so to speak, and when your young
women had retired to – ah – Pinner, they instantly replaced themselves. Oh of course they were a confounded nuisance at times, and sometimes worse than a nuisance.’ He got up and began to pace the room. ‘But it was – life. I don’t suppose I can convey to you what fun it was. …’

  ‘I think I know what you’re getting at, but go on.’

  ‘It’s very good for one, all this. Searching test, and so on. But even now, Vere, I can’t believe it’s only vanity. It was a sustaining thing … creating that love-atmosphere … I don’t think I abused it unreasonably … and the kick one got out of making the quixotic gesture. …

  ‘Once or twice I was sent for by girls who were dying, or by their parents. It wasn’t always hysteria … many of those young women who didn’t know me, who’d never even met me, loved me, I swear. There was a quietness about them, a look in their eyes – oh kick me, I’m sorry!’

  ‘Go on, dear.’

  ‘– a look, incredulous and yet as though the dear friend of their life had come in unannounced, a fulfilled look, and peaceful. And how much more could I bring them now, with all I know … and they died happily. Can you understand that?’

  ‘Why not? A woman’s imagination can be a holy thing. It’s so often all she has to live by.’

  ‘I stayed with them always, until the doctor turned me away. It wasn’t only self. …’