‘No, never that. It isn’t from fear or religious scruples or any truck of that kind, with me. It’s just that I’m certain that’s not the way. It’s cheating. We’ve got to sit out the show, and then! … You mayn’t be allowed to come back, or perhaps not at first, but if you want to enough –’
‘If I want to! … I wonder if it would frighten Enid? Frightening Enid … what a very preposterous notion.’
‘I don’t know. You’d better come to me first and I’ll find out and tell you. Some people can’t stand it, remember. It’s nothing to do with how much they’ve cared for you.’
‘And you think one has a freer hand that way?’
‘Certainly, it’s in a different class to the Vallant House thing which was purely photographic, with no freewill at all.’
‘And now tell me this: will you be able to come along with me and see me, at about forty-two say, in my best plays?’
‘Ah, ah, ah! you’re at the millennium again! I wasn’t there, you see. Oh, if it could be! … as things are, with you going and leaving me, I don’t fancy we can rise to that. If you could have lived, and we could get the place and the right conditions – that means the actual theatre when it’s empty, and absolute silence, you might see and hear again and help me to by dint of concentration on the past. But by myself I should be like a mountaineer without his guide. No. Where I come in on your plays is only about seventeen years ago at a show called The Tulip Tree, at the Coronet Theatre. I saw it with a most dear old lady who told me you were ‘a very good-living man’.
‘Hah!’
‘I know!’
‘Did she know me?’
‘Well, naturally not!’ And Enid came in and wanted to be told what we were ‘sillifying about’.
III
He died the following night, alone with Enid. But before then, I had him to myself for over an hour. It was she who sent me to him. And just as he had found that the nearness of death gave him a sense of ‘boundless privilege’, so I too discovered that it could break down the reserve of a lifetime, and with my arms round him I told him all I’d ever thought of him, all I’d ever felt for him and always would.
Enid guesses, and James knows, and Cosmo, and nobody else in the world.
I suppose minds of the Verdune and Seagrave type would look upon him as the ‘tragedy’ of my life. If I could ever conceivably so regard him it would be simply because his death has brought me a volume of grief to which officially I have no right at all.
What he saw in me heaven only knows.
I’ve had my time with him, and in that hour he said things to me which have made the rest of life not only endurable but even happy. Half father, quarter friend and quarter lover – and if I have got it in its wrong sequence and proportions I don’t know, or very greatly care.
IV
Meanwhile James and I have slowly humanized Vallant House. I think it will be ready very soon now for Lalage and Hugh. Sometimes, returning from one of my Lowndes Square parties, I still see fragments of that story playing itself over as I turn off the lights, but I think, I am almost sure, that the figures grow fainter. There is a mist-like quality about them to-day, and – a great point, the picture is dispersing into episodes in their wrong sequence, meaningless to the uninitiate. I think that to-day it would take all of my concentration and James’s, and much time, plus our special faculty of seeing, to recreate the thing in all its force. And that is well.
Two rooms in the house are mine entirely, the schoolroom and Myra’s bedroom. I’m not quite sure of them even now – luckily, nobody gives them a thought, up all those stairs, and so poky … In Myra’s bedroom I succumbed to cowardice and cleared out every stick of furniture. It was cheap enough. The room is repapered, too, and on the mantelpiece is a statuette of Cosmo Furnival by a sculptor friend of his.
Already we have let Lalage’s daughter see the house. She was greatly struck with the size of the drawing-room and there was a gramophone-and-rolled-carpet look in her eye, and she has her dances there. But she doesn’t have it all her own way, and there are many nights when I am the hostess to my friends and let in no relatives at all.
House-warming … I’m warming Vallant House in my own way, and incidentally myself as well. To these gatherings come the elderly and the old and I let them do what they like, cards, talk or dance, gossip or glad eye! I loathe gramophones, they are all wrong for those evenings and we have the piano instead, and if there is an itinerant harpist in the square, James brings him in and the difference that golden strings, however weatherbeaten, make to any dance is unbelievable. We practise the Lancers and discover that I have forgotten the figures and that there is nobody in the room who can remember quadrilles except one or two who won’t date themselves by admitting it!
Cosmo’s friends are often there: all of them sometimes and two of them very often. They are my friends now and what I should do without them I don’t know. Together we three go down into that labyrinthine basement and make small-hour snacks for whoever may be still upstairs. Sometimes I treat myself to one or two old retired actors and actresses; Enid finds them for me and comes herself in her prettiest clothes, for we very soon abandoned the tactful ‘don’t dress’ clause finding that the old people loved the chance to exhume their sequinned finery and put it all on. They have, these veterans of the stage, the most beautiful manners in the world but their notions of caste, I was to discover, leave Debrett at the post, and not soon shall I forget the night I introduced an extragedienne of the ’sixties to a low comedian. I didn’t (very kindly) hear the last of it for weeks.
Sometimes I comb the highways and by-ways for lonely gentlewomen; one is careful of them, they need, at first, the treatment you give to eggshell china, but if once, by cup of coffee, by joke, by tactful placing and partnering you’ve won them, they are yours. I’ve got three Alma Chilcots already and hope for more. They are pitifully easy to find. Standish, who admires one of my Almas and her life and her pluck, kissed her hand once, and I saw, quite accidentally, and I can only say that that faded little woman, pinched of graciousness all her life, was transfigured. Life had, at last, a meaning, a past and a future. …
One of my old actresses, in the way that some women of the stage unaccountably do, believes that she can ‘tell hands’ and has fallen more than once upon my own (she is the one who always rejects our sherry and wants cup after cup of strong tea with – oh God! – cherry brandy in it). On the first occasion she seized my fingers I said, ‘Now then, Mrs. V—, you’re going to tell me that “two children mark my hand”, so get it over.’
She looked at me. ‘But dearie, they do.’
She was as insistent as all the mercenaries have ever been. I’ve joked her out of that (my age), but sometimes James and I talk it over. We have reduced the possibilities slowly: for years I saw what conclusion he drew, and I suppose, when all’s said, his now discarded theory was no more fantastic than my own. For I have come to the unswerving conviction that, somehow and somewhy, those children in my hand are Myra and Anne.
Why not? They are the only children with whom I have had intimate dealing. They have accompanied me nearly all my life long. And I shall be fifty on my next birthday.
And the parties go on. If the action flags, we take everyone downstairs and give them supper and play charades and are silly, or Enid sings to us all.
I have had my failures, of course; three of my theatre veterans have had to be eliminated owing to feats with the bottle, and one of them told the wrong story (which exploded me with giggles) to the very, very wrong woman indeed. It was Enid who got us out of that fix, staging a charming little scene of outraged purity before rushing on to the landing to cry with laughter on James’s shoulder. And poor Miss W—went back to her bed-sitting-room in Pimlico convinced that the world was not only a sad place, which she knew already, but a nasty one into the bargain, and I never saw her again!
And once my host came himself.
V
I wasn’t unprepared. Although it was over a ye
ar since his death I was always waiting, consciously or subconsciously.
He was suddenly there, in that room he had never entered in life. He went straight over to Enid who was laughing with Standish and she never glanced up. And then he looked about and found me.
I went next day to Enid’s home and told her, careful to be matter-of-fact and she took it as I had hoped, and if her attitude was a little doubtful, it was that over this side of me she had ever been uncertain; it is about the only matter upon which we aren’t in mental accord. It was the child-side of her, I think, which shrank quite normally from the unknown. She asked me what he looked like and I told her he was an outline, faint but unmistakable.
Since then I have seen him constantly. He seems, as far as I with my limited physical opportunities of tracing his movements can discover, to prefer his own house and garden. And every time I see him his outline is more distinct.
On the second occasion he was sauntering down the path with a natural air of possession that delighted me. I hurried indoors to bring out Enid and we went to look for him.
‘There!’ and I pointed.
She could see nothing at all and said so. My heart stopped for the way she might be going to take it, but she added, ‘I’m not really sorry or disappointed. I don’t think I like to think of him like that’.
‘But you’re not frightened?’ I shot at her.
‘No, oh no …’
She wanted her Val in flesh and blood; unlike myself she could take no comfort in the second best. Some people are unable to see at all, and there it is. It is possible that by this time Cosmo knew all that himself.
And now that weight is lifted from my mind I can give myself up to looking. Incidentally, it is fun, for I never know how Cosmo will be dressed. I have twice seen him in garden and study wearing the oyster-grey court suit, and the band of brilliants below his knee which is in my jewel-case upstairs. At our second meeting I was wearing it on my wrist and the sun impartially struck sparks from both our ornaments, which seemed to amuse him.
Sometimes, but less often, we have succeeded in running through again pieces of our old life together. Once more I have seen his house for the first time and with him hummed Miss Hook of Holland in the dressing-room, but apart from the fact that Enid can share with us those scenes in which she had her part I have found this form of reunion on the whole a disappointing affair. For while it is happening there is no memory of the future with which to savour and anticipate. Switched back in time, we are condemned to our set lines and to the exact progress in intimacy at which we had then arrived (I have, for instance, in certain episodes to call Enid ‘Mrs. Furnival’). The price one pays for re-living the past means also no possibility of modifying, no hope of avoiding old mistakes and misunderstandings. Out they all come – like Lady Vallant’s discords and mischords on the piano!
Often in my daily life I have sworn that, next time, Enid and Cosmo and I must overcome this; that on my waking in his chair Cosmo should say ‘Ah my dear, I thought you were never going to wake up and talk to me. Now tell me …’
Not a bit of it. I wake in his chair and he is standing by me with a glass of brown sherry, and his words to me for all time are, ‘Now try and forgive me. Dear! what tired people we are! Why does one go on?’
And so it is with everything else. And that is why I prefer that he should get through to me in the other way, for it is continuity, always with the element of surprise, as in life.
I talk to him and tell him the news (and am careful to keep a poker face if we should pass the gardener, or if we happen to stop outside the kitchen window, because of what Cosmo would call the ‘eternal dilemma’ presented by the domestics in ‘our case’).
James has promised me that when Enid dies the Furnival house and garden shall be ours by hook or by crook, if we have to sell all we have – and not give to the poor! For Cosmo is so clear to me at last that I have to remember hard that he is not as I am. And once an amusing thing happened.
He came back as he was at that ‘forty-two or so’ upon which he and Enid used to dwell so fixedly, and for ten minutes I was two years older than him! I suspected it must be one of Cosmo’s pranks because, to put it baldly, the spectacle of a young man in a very familiar garden, clad in officers’ uniform of 1815, at eleven-thirty in the morning is at least unusual. Anyway, I advanced upon it and walked all round it and surveyed it from every angle before I spoke. Yes, there was a look of him, reminders … more in the manner, perhaps. Eyes and height unmistakable but mouth too indeterminate and face too smooth and well-covered. Dark brown hair and more of it and not a white thread, let alone a whole streak, in sight. H’m. …
‘Very nice indeed, Cosmo, I should think, for most people. I quite see the point of view. A Waterloo play, I suppose.’
I never told Enid, fearing to distress her at being unable to share in that particular phase with me, but I sorted dozens of photographs until I found the right one and frankly asked her about it.
‘Oh, that! it was one of his big hits, a romantic comedy called The Queen’s Own, at the Avenue.’
Next time we met, I told him what I felt about the personal futility of that form of approach. For Enid, yes, but for me – never.
And, I hardly dare believe it, but I rather think that with time, and as Cosmo becomes ever more tangible to me, we shall arrive at exchanged speech. Such things have been, and why not for us? What makes me think so is that once or twice already when I have spoken to him the sense of an answer has streamed into me, rather in the way in which the thoughts of Sophia and Emmeline passed through me on that staircase. As yet it is no more than a yea or nay emotion, a feeling of confirmation or rejection of anything I myself have said to him, but that, too, will take more solid form. Patience. One must be terribly patient. There should be many years yet for me.
Or it may come any day.
THE END
About The Author
RACHEL ETHELREDA FERGUSON (1892-1957) was born in Hampton Wick, the youngest of three children. She was educated at home and then sent to a finishing school in Florence, Italy. By the age of 16 she was a fierce campaigner for women’s rights and considered herself a suffragette. She went on to become a leading member of the Women’s Social and Political Union.
In 1911 she became a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She began a career on the stage, which was cut short by the advent of World War I, whereupon Ferguson joined the Women’s Volunteer Reserve. She wrote for Punch, and was the drama critic for the Sunday Chronicle, writing under the name ‘Columbine’. In 1923 she published her first novel, False Goddesses, which was followed by eleven further novels including A Harp in Lowndes Square (1936), A Footman for the Peacock (1940) and Evenfield (1942), all three of which are now available as Furrowed Middlebrow books.
Rachel Ferguson died in Kensington, where she had lived most of her life.
Titles by Rachel Ferguson
NOVELS
False Goddesses (1923)
The Brontës Went to Woolworth’s (1931)
The Stag at Bay (1932)
Popularity’s Wife (1932)
A Child in the Theatre (1933)
A Harp in Lowndes Square (1936)
Alas Poor Lady (1937)
A Footman for the Peacock (1940)
Evenfield (1942)
The Late Widow Twankey (1943)
A Stroll Before Sunset (1946)
Sea Front (1954)
HUMOUR/SATIRE
Sara Skelton: The Autobiography of a Famous Actress (1929)
Victorian Bouquet: Lady X Looks On (1931)
Nymphs and Satires (1932)
Celebrated Sequels (1934)
DRAMA
Charlotte Brontë (1933)
MEMOIR
Passionate Kensington (1939)
Royal Borough (1950)
We Were Amused (1958)
BIOGRAPHY
Memoirs of a Fir-Tree: The Life of Elsa Tannenbaum (1946)
And Then He Danced: Th
e Life of Espinosa by Himself (1948)
FURROWED MIDDLEBROW
FM1. A Footman for the Peacock (1940) ... RACHEL FERGUSON
FM2. Evenfield (1942) ... RACHEL FERGUSON
FM3. A Harp in Lowndes Square (1936) ... RACHEL FERGUSON
FM4. A Chelsea Concerto (1959) ... FRANCES FAVIELL
FM5. The Dancing Bear (1954) ... FRANCES FAVIELL
FM6. A House on the Rhine (1955) ... FRANCES FAVIELL
FM7. Thalia (1957) ... FRANCES FAVIELL
FM8. The Fledgeling (1958) ... FRANCES FAVIELL
FM9. Bewildering Cares (1940) ... WINIFRED PECK
Rachel Ferguson
A Footman for the Peacock
The peacock displayed himself and paraded the lawn, sometimes pausing to look up at the sky.
Waiting? Listening? Guiding. No. Signalling.
Controversial when first published in the early days of World War II, due to its treatment of a loathsome upper-crust family dodging wartime responsibility, A Footman for the Peacock can now be enjoyed as a scathing satire of class abuses, a comic masterpiece falling somewhere between Barbara Pym and Monty Python.
Sir Edmund and Lady Evelyn Roundelay live surrounded by a menagerie of relations and retainers. The Roundelays’ history of callous cruelty is literally etched on a window of the servants’ quarters with the words “Heryn I dye, Thomas Picocke. 1792”. Sir Edmund reflects cheerfully on the running footmen who have ‘died off like flies’ in the family’s service.
But now—amidst digressions on everything from family history and servant woes to the villagers’ linguistic peculiarities and a song immortalizing the footman’s plight—war threatens the Roundelays’ smug superiority. What’s more, it appears that the estate’s peacock is a reincarnation of Thomas Picocke, and may be aiding the Nazi cause … By turns giddy and incisive, hilarious and heartbreaking, A Footman for the Peacock is Rachel Ferguson at her very best. This new edition features an introduction by Elizabeth Crawford.
A Harp in Lowndes Square Page 34