Sir Pompey And Madame Juno

by Martin Armstrong

  One day Martha told them that Nanny had a baby. David thought it rather funny of her to go in for a baby when she already had himself and Janet; but then it had also been rather strange of her to marry Robert when she was so happy with them at home. The baby was called Joseph. It lay in its cot with large, clear eyes like little pools, and it had two funny little round holes for a nose. David and Janet were rather embarrassed by it, and it was a nuisance, too, the way it occupied so much of Nanny’s attention when they went to see her.

  But Janet soon discovered that a baby was almost as good as a doll, and by watching carefully what Nanny did to Joseph it was possible, she found, to get all sorts of ideas about the way to treat Ida and Blackie, the two dolls which Mother had given her last birthday. As for David, he took refuge more and more in the harmonium. Always now, soon after their arrival at Number Twenty-Nine, as they sat talking in the bright kitchen, he would become aware of a hunger somewhere in the pit of his stomach which would soon define itself as a burning desire for the cold, inhuman atmosphere which in his mind signified the sitting-room: and then this impression again would clear and focus itself suddenly on the harmonium. He was being irresistibly drawn towards the harmonium. Then, when he thought no one was looking, he would sneak out of the room, close the door softly with a delicious feeling of escape and, blind and deaf to everything else, make straight for the harmonium. Feverishly and impatiently he folded back the lid; then, pulling out the stops and paddling with his feet, he floated away, released at last, into the ecstatic world of his desire. Nothing but the news that tea was ready could prevail to call David back. ‘That boy’s going to be a church organist, I’ll be bound!’ said Nanny.

  *

  In course of time, as Joseph began to scramble about and become more of a little boy and less of a baby, David got accustomed to him, though he never really liked him; but that was because he was so much younger than himself. After all, both David and Janet could now read and write, and David was getting on so well on the piano that he could play real hymns off by heart on Nanny’s harmonium.

  One morning, when Martha took them over to Number Twenty-Nine, they found that Joseph had been put into knickerbockers. They made him look smaller instead of bigger, but he was very proud of them and spent all his time climbing up and down stairs, although the knickerbockers were so tight that he had to lift his legs sideways instead of straight up like other people. With his big curly head and his tiny body he looked like the British Lion. Nanny took them into the kitchen and offered them ginger wine. She set wineglasses on the table and then went into the larder to get the bottle. Joseph took up one of the empty glasses and pretended to drink out of it. After that, he blew into it, making strange spluttering noises as though he was blowing a trumpet. Then he smiled slyly at David and Janet. But David and Janet did not smile back: they looked away disapprovingly, and Joseph put the glass back beside the others. David drew one of the glasses nearer to him; he wanted to make sure that he didn’t get the one that Joseph had spluttered into. Nanny came back with a plate of biscuits and the bottle of ginger wine. She filled the glasses. The glass that Joseph had spluttered into went to Janet. Joseph ate biscuits and then drank with a crumby mouth, so that crumbs came off into his glass. Then he tried to rake them out with one finger. ‘Fishes!’ he muttered pensively. ‘Joseph! Joseph! Give over!’ said Nanny.

  *

  That was the last time they saw Nanny. Soon after that, David and Janet went for a long visit to Granny. Granny lived in a beautiful house near the sea. In the fine weather they used to play all day on the sands. One glorious day Father came to help, and they made a castle so huge that Father and David and Janet could all stand upon it at once. They stayed upon it till the waves actually dashed against it and ate away the walls, and it seemed so dangerous that David and Janet yelled with delighted fear. And when at last they simply had to abandon it, they seemed to be right out in the middle of the sea, and on their headlong flight to the shore David’s knickerbockers were soaked through and Janet fell down four times and was drenched to the skin.

  On wet days they played in the big nursery, where there was a full-sized rocking-horse that Father used to ride when he was a little boy, and a drawer full of toys. There was a funny-looking doll among the toys, with a sweet, rather horrible smell, which they called The Trooper, because they had once heard Father say that somebody or something smelt like a trooper, by which he seemed to mean very much indeed. David’s favourite game in the nursery was to play at going a journey. A particular feeling of delight used to come over him when he played it, much the same as when he played the harmonium. The game consisted in taking all the toys out of the toy-drawer and packing them on to the rocking-horse, and then David and Janet sat astride on the rockers at each end of the horse and the long, monotonous journey began. Miles upon miles they travelled, and all the time they sang a curious song of their own invention which went in time to the rocking, and when they spoke it was in a strange tongue which they alone could understand. Janet was always the first to tire, but David generally succeeded in forcing her to remount and undertake a few more stages of the journey. Then, quite suddenly, he would tire of it himself. The excitement, the ecstasy inside him, would suddenly go out as if someone had turned out the gas. Weariness and disillusion descended upon him and he found himself faced by the unendurable confusion of toys heaped upon the rocking-horse. Then he and Janet would sneak out of the nursery, abandoning everything. But infallibly, not long afterwards, the terrible voice of Nurse would be heard in the house. ‘Master David! Master David!’ she shouted, with an upward lift on the last syllable: ‘Come up at once, both of you, and put away the toys!’ Then in the blackness of disgust they would slink back into the nursery and the desolating process of putting-away would begin. Angrily and despairingly they heaped the toys pell-mell into the drawer, careless of order and method: and then, invariably, the drawer refused to shut. David struggled till he was red in the face, then he kicked the drawer viciously and attempted a halfhearted rearrangement of the obstructing toys. At the second try the drawer would stick again, but David, with a desperate shove, would overcome the obstruction and leave the nursery with a sigh of relief, secretly aware that some toy – The Trooper or the tin rainbow-striped humming-top – had been broken or bent in the process.

  In the evening, before they went to bed, they went for an hour to the drawing-room where Granny, who was small and fat and comfortable like a cottage-loaf, and wore a little white lace cap on her head, would read them entrancing stories in a soft, quiet voice that seemed always to be telling exciting secrets. And then they would be roused by the opening of the door and the presence of Nurse would be discovered standing in the doorway, like a bad fairy. The hateful hour for bed had arrived. ‘Not yet! Not yet!’ wailed David and Janet in chorus. ‘One moment, Nurse! One moment!’ Granny would say in her gentle voice: ‘we’re just finishing.’

  *

  When at last they returned home, years and years seemed to have passed, so that when, one day at lunch soon after their return, Mother told them that while they were away Nanny had died, they hardly realized what it meant. And not many months after that, when Martha came back from one of her Sundays-out she brought them the news that Robert had married again. ‘Married again?’ said Mother indignantly. ‘And I’ve been sympathizing with him all this time!’ ‘Well’m,’ said Martha, ‘I think he can be excused. You see, there was no one to look after Joseph.’ But that didn’t seem to console Mother. She gave a little angry snort. ‘And to think,’ she repeated, ‘that I’ve been sympathizing with him all this time!’

  The Novice

  The tea-time rush was over. Only a few people remained in the teashop. A fat, red-faced man with a watch-chain and a bowler-hat that looked slightly too small for him, sat at a table in a corner in earnest conversation with a monumental lady wearing too large a hat, too large a coat, and too many rings, who seemed never to lose consciousness of the gold-and-crimson vanity-bag wh
ich hung from her wrist. A forlorn-looking man with a bony face, drooping moustache and cold, lean fingers, plodded sadly through a bath-bun while he read a creased and faded newspaper long out of date; and at a table near the fire two young women kept up a breathless, hissing, secretive chatter from which emerged endlessly recurring phrases: ‘“Well, my dear,” she sez to me, she sez … But-now, I arsk you-what can you expect … “And of course,” I sez, “if I was you,” I sez … ‘

  The twilight outside pressed like soft violet wool against the glass of the windows and door behind which the drift of people and traffic moved monotonously – a blurred, endlessly revolving scene, always changing and always the same. It had been snowing listlessly all afternoon: a compound of mud and melted snow had gravitated to the edge of the kerbs and settled there in long, irregular pools; the air was sharp and raw, and when the teashop door swung open to admit a tall figure in hat and coat from the blue street, a chill draught slid like a ghost into the warmth within.

  The young man paused uncertainly and then slunk to an empty table in the remotest corner of the shop. All, except the forlorn individual, watched him: the fat man listlessly; the monumental lady with a hard curiosity; and the two young women, suddenly ceasing their chatter, with an arch, professional interest. The removal of his hat revealed a neat golden head, smooth as a close-fitting cap, with a faultless parting and crisp ripples above the little ears; a small-featured, pink, boyish, and very sulky face, and eyes that looked once round the shop half timidly, half defiantly, and then, as he sat down, plunged at once into a book which he had taken from his pocket. He read intently and angrily as though he had been set to re-learn a lesson in which he had failed. A waitress, with an alacrity reserved for attractive males, stalked forward, amused and indulgent, to take his order. As he looked up she took a little dip into his eyes, but the gaze that met hers was severely neutral, and so was his request for a cup of tea. ‘Ain’t ’e a peach?’ she remarked to one of the waitresses who stood idle at the marble counter beside the steaming hot-water urns. ‘And blue eyes … oo, my dear!’ she whispered over her shoulder, pressing a humorous hand to her heart. ‘Go and have a look at them. Here’s’is cup of tea!’

  The other waitress accepted the opportunity and the rest looked on with little, suppressed giggles.

  Miles had left the office in a thoroughly bad temper, so bad that he could not possibly, he felt, go home. The thought of having to talk to anybody was appalling. Yet what was he to do? Walk? The thought of a lonely walk was equally appalling. Sometimes, when his temper was good, and he felt, as he generally did, pleased with life, he would walk the three or four miles from the office to his home in Kensington for the mere pleasure of moving in a crowd past enticing shop-windows and along the brink of the roaring stream of traffic. At such times the life and movement, the endlessly changing scene and his own youthful well-being roused him to such an ecstasy that he would break out into song, taking care, of course, that the song did not emerge from the general roar of the street, and hardly moving his lips for fear he might be thought to be talking to himself: still, making the whole thing real enough to surprise himself occasionally by the fine tone and dramatic quality of his rendering of a Hans Sachs passage – better, surely, than many a performance one might hear at the Opera! But to-day the monotony of walking home along the same dreary course was not to be faced: besides, he did not want to go home, and he had turned into the tea-shop simply to escape from himself and everything else.

  And Miles, as he sat there apparently devouring page after page of his book and occasionally emerging to rediscover – surprised and slightly offended, it seemed – the cup of tea before him, was taking-in nothing whatever from his reading. His mind was busy with his grievance, a grievance somewhat difficult to define and for which no one was really to blame. It had nothing to do with home or the office: it arose finally from the fact that he had accepted an invitation to dine with the Ravens that night. Miles was an absurdly shy person: a prospective party might well have been sufficient to upset him throughout the day. But the thing, in the present instance, was much more complicated. It revolved about Elinor Trenchard, the already famous young pianist, whom Miles had met at a large party at the Fieldings a fortnight ago. He had faced that party simply in order to meet the wonderful Elinor, though the prospect of meeting such a creature had been extremely alarming. Everybody talked of Elinor, of her marvellous playing and of her lofty insistence on playing only what and where she chose. She had refused, they said, to play the Emperor Concerto at one of the British Symphony concerts because, she said, Coates did not know how to conduct Beethoven: she would have nothing to do with Prokofiev’s new Pianoforte Concerto, with the composer himself come all the way from Russia to conduct it, because, in her opinion, the music was uninteresting. One heard, too, of her extraordinary intelligence, of her brilliant conversation, and of her high-handed behaviour at social functions when she would select from the crowd the man or woman on whom her fancy happened to light and allow the rest no more than a transitory phrase accompanied by her delightful smile.

  During the two or three hours before he set off for that party, Miles had sunk to the depths of disillusionment. What was the good, he asked himself, of meeting brilliant and famous persons? One had the opportunity, it is true, of seeing them and watching them, but the actual meeting was merely an embarrassed How-do-you-do, a moment’s panic, an escape, and that was the end of it. Had he not feared the surprised curiosity of his parents, he would certainly, in his despair, have cut the party. However, he had gone, and the result had been incredible – a most disquieting, but a most rapturous evening. For Elinor’s selection, that evening, had been Miles himself. He had begun with an uncomfortable and embarrassed hour. For the first half of it he had stood alone, very pink and unhappy, with eyes that shot furtively from the floor to the crowd of faces and quickly back to the floor: the rest he had spent in awkward conversation with a curious old lady in a brown-and-yellow dress, whose neck was enclosed – Miles would never forget it – in a railing of cameos and gold chains, and whose head was crowned with the strangest roll of hair like a horse-collar. Then Mrs. Fielding had swept down on him. ‘Come along, Miles,’ she had said; ‘Miss Trenchard wants me to introduce you to her’: and she had carried him off, so officially, so cold-bloodedly, that the thing seemed more like a business transaction. Miles, feeling horribly conspicuous, followed her through the crowd, meek and obedient, like a little dog on a chain.

  His embarrassment drowned all consciousness of the introduction. Whether he himself had said anything, he could not remember, but he must have fixed his eyes, in his foolish way, on the ground, because it was not until Mrs. Fielding had vanished that he saw Elinor for the first time. She was talking to him. ‘Let us go and sit in that corner,’ she was saying; ‘I hate crowds, don’t you?’ But Miles was now so occupied with Elinor herself that, as it seemed to him afterwards, he simply stared at her without reply, like a gaping schoolboy. She was so different, so startlingly and dazzlingly different, from her photographs. As in her photographs, she was exquisite, refined, like a little Dresden figure, but it was her colour that so took one by surprise. Her bright, clear complexion, the warm auburn of her hair, the inescapable blue of her eyes, came upon Miles with a shock such as he had never felt before, which flushed his face and clutched his throat and chest in a sudden breathlessness. It was Elinor, wonderful creature that she was, who saved the situation; for Miles, so far from being emboldened by her attractiveness, was only the more bewildered. But Elinor left him no space for embarrassment. As soon as she had got him to that sofa in the corner, she broke into the most delightful talk. What it was all about, Miles had not the faintest recollection: all he remembered was that he had suddenly felt completely self-possessed, had discovered that he was exchanging talk with a friend – frank, fresh, gay talk; amusing discoveries of shared sympathies and antipathies; downright disagreements, charmingly humorous, which made them even more intimate, somehow, t
han their agreements. This dazzling, famous person was actually treating him as an equal, frankly and modestly confessing to him her feelings and experiences, and questioning him, with obviously genuine interest, about his own, for all the world as if he were as important a person as herself.

  Miles was enchanted, intoxicated: his colour rose, his eyes shone, every one in the world except Elinor had ceased to exist for him. It was only when people came and spoke to her, or when, waking for a moment and turning his attention outside their magic circle, he saw that inquisitive glances kept hovering about them, that his cursed bashfulness overcame him again, and he felt as though he were being towed in Elinor’s triumphant wake, a timid and pitiable object, on to the platform of some packed concert-hall.