A Long Time Ago

by Margaret Kennedy

  “She thinks it’s what?”

  “Er … too too. I think that was the expression she used.”

  Louise almost stamped.

  “Where does Maude pick it up? I should like to know. Do you suppose they talked like that in Penge, or wherever it is she comes from? And what does it mean?”

  “It is, I believe, a piece of antiquated slang. It expresses approval. I don’t know if it was ever used in Penge. But I think she’s rather proud of it. You see, she’s very anxious to live up to us. She knows that we think she isn’t out of the top drawer …”

  “Kerran! You’re as bad as …”

  “But she tries to show us that she, too, knows how smart women talk.”

  “But they don’t. I never …”

  “You never read The Lady’s Companion. She knows a great deal more about smart women than you do.”

  “It’s a wonder she doesn’t cultivate the Devonshire House drawl, like a provincial belle in the ’sixties.”

  “Oh!” Kerran settled down to the subject. “I’d never thought of that before. I’d often wondered why pretentious young women in Victorian novels always had to drawl. You suggest that it had percolated … that it took forty years for a fashion set by Caro Lamb to reach the solicitor’s daughter at Exeter?”

  “I can only suppose so. But it must have undergone modifications. I don’t suppose that Georgiana Reade, in Jane Eyre, talked like old Aunt Harriet. You remember? She called herself Hoyet!”

  “Hoyet!”

  “No. Not quite. More Howiett.”

  “Howiett!” practised Kerran. “Howiett! Howiett!”

  “Howiett took out her tarrier in a yaller chawiett.”

  There was a faint scuffling and fumbling at the far end of the room. Maude, with exaggerated diffidence, was peeping round the door.

  “Am I interrupting?” she asked.

  Kerran and Louise, surprised in the midst of their Howietts, felt uncomfortable. It was impossible to explain that they were practising the Devonshire House drawl. Louise, who never on principle explained anything to Maude, took absolutely no notice. She turned away and began to throw fresh pieces of turf on the fire. It was left to the kind-hearted Kerran to say sheepishly:

  “We were imitating our great-aunt Harriet.”

  Maude did not believe this for a moment. She repressed an inclination to sniff, as she always did when they dragged their great-aunt Harriet into the conversation. They never seemed able to forget their titled relations.

  “No, I won’t sit down,” she said, retreating from the chair which Kerran was pushing towards her. “I only just ran down to ask”—she cast a doubtful glance at Kerran—“if there’s any hope of a hot tub before dinner.”

  Louise straightened herself angrily and shook the peat ash from her skirts.

  “Dressed up to the nines,” thought Maude in dismay. “In the country, too! Whatever for? I wish I’d brought my foulard …”

  And then she made an effort to be more charitable.

  “Louise! What a perfectly sweet tea-gown! Liberty, isn’t it? I always think their things are so artistic. And just your style.”

  “Are they?” asked Louise unpromisingly.

  “Oh, yes. But I didn’t know you were going to dress up so much in the evening. I’m afraid I’ve only brought …”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” interrupted Louise. “Everyone is to wear what they like. I happen to like this, so I wear it. But you can come down in your nightgown if you like, Maude.”

  “Really!”

  Maude shot another arch look at Kerran and giggled faintly.

  “Or a dressy blouse,” added Louise with vicious sarcasm.

  A dressy blouse was just what Maude had been intending to wear. She looked happier. She pursued the subject of baths again, in a slightly hushed voice, as though she did not really like to mention such things in the drawing-room. Louise must be sure to say if it was inconvenient, but a hot tub would be just the thing to keep Barny from catching cold after his wet journey. He had been so naughty about the umbrella in the boat, just like a man …

  “Why on earth didn’t you bring an umbrella apiece?” snapped Louise.

  That, alas! had been Maude’s fault. Just as the luggage was being put on the cab she had discovered that her own umbrella had gone the way of all things. She must have left it in church. And what Barny’s mother would say to her she could not think. For she must write at once and tell Mrs. Annesley that they had arrived quite safely. She had always done that, ever since she married Barny. She felt that his mother appreciated it. It was one of the ways in which a daughter-in-law … but she had always felt that Mrs. Annesley was just like her own mother. Only it would be dreadful to have to confess that she had let poor Barny get so wet, all through a stupid mistake.

  “Because I implored him to take the umbrella in the boat. It doesn’t matter about me, I said, I like getting wet. It never does me any harm. But he was as obstinate as …”

  “But Barny’s very strong. A wetting wouldn’t hurt him …”

  “He’s not so strong as you all seem to think. He’s not nearly as tough as I am. But about baths … if there’s a shortage of hot water I could have one later, but I think that Barny … and, by the way, where is the bathroom?”

  “In the gate-house.”

  “The …?”

  “Just by the front door. I’m afraid you have to go out, across the court, to get to it. Personally, I find it’s better not to have baths when it rains.”

  “Oh!”

  Maude was taken aback and showed it.

  “But how killing,” she said. “I mean, how funny! Fancy! But what do we all do about it? I mean, do we all run about in our dressing-gowns, or what? Through the courtyard … I mean, in a large mixed party …”

  Kerran took flight. He could see that Louise was about to say something inexcusable and he always took care not to be present on occasions when she did this, so as to avoid being called in later as a witness. (I said nothing at all, did I, Kerran?) It was much better not to be there.

  This talk of hot baths had put a new idea into his head. He thought he would go and sit in one until dinner time. It was the only thing to do at Inishbar on a wet day, and the bath-house, once reached, was a pleasant haven. It was the warmest corner in the castle. Muffy kept a great furnace blazing under the copper, and there was always plenty of hot water. He had sat there, on the warm stone edge of the copper, for a long time that morning while Gordon took a bath. If this sort of weather continued, he foresaw that the place might become a kind of men’s club, where he and Gordon and Barny and Dick might go and wallow for hours, safe from feminine intrusion.

  So he dashed through the rain to the gate-house and was soon comforting his chilled body in water as near to boiling point as he could stand. He had hung his watch on a convenient nail in the wall and he did not mean to get out until it was time to dress for dinner.

  Louise, he reflected, was a fool, for all her cleverness. She had no respect for Barny’s loyalty to his tiresome wife: she did not see it as loyalty, she merely thought him stupid. She loved him dearly and felt bitterly that she had lost him, but she could not understand that continuous brutality to Maude was not the way to win him back. She recognised that the marriage was an inevitable disaster, and yet she could not let it alone.

  That it was a disaster, even the tolerant Kerran was obliged to admit. Barny had been caught on the rebound. His first love had refused him and he married Maude in an explosion of chivalrous compassion. He had known her for a long time, for she was the sister of a school friend with whose family he had spent a great many summer vacations. Nursing his broken heart, he went to join them at the seaside and discovered that Maude loved him. She was unhappy. Her health had given way under hospital training and she was obliged to live at home, doing the work of an unpaid housekeeper. Her father bullied her. The younger sisters cut her out. She had no future save that of penury and spinsterhood. Yet it was in Barny’s power
to make her the happiest woman on earth. He had a lively imagination coupled with a kind heart, and together they were too much for him. He married her.

  He did not love her, and she must have known it. But she tried to reward him for all his goodness by an extreme wifely solicitude, by asserting, in the face of all the Annesleys, that he was very delicate, and by refusing to take the umbrella when there was only one. Had he loved her, she would have been content to let him look after her, but, since he did not, it was she who must look after him. They lived in an atmosphere of continual restless fussing, which must have been, at times, an intolerable strain upon his nerves. Unfortunately, they had no children.

  Barny bore it all with exemplary patience, but, as time went on, he began to fade. There was no other word for it. He grew dimmer and gentler and more passive. He did what Maude told him, went where she took him, and seemed, every year, to have fewer wishes or opinions of his own to express. Kerran believed that he had grown, in his way, very fond of her: that an enduring affection had sprung up between them which might have its consoling rewards. But Louise would never hear of this. She insisted that Barny’s life was one long martyrdom, and the family ought to interfere. If only Maude could be crushed and snubbed into immobility they might get Barny back, as energetic and lively as he had been before he made his terrible mistake. And in any case, even if this had not been her view, she could never keep her temper with Maude. The sight of Barny’s acquiescent blink, as he went off in the morning to put on a thicker vest, because Maude thought the wind was cold, and again, in the afternoon, to put on a thinner one because the sun was hot, was always sufficient to break down Louise’s good resolutions.

  “If she goes on as she has begun,” thought Kerran, as he turned on a fresh spate of hot water, “this is the last time Maude and Barny will ever come to stay.”

  In spite of his comfortable situation, he began to feel depressed and to wonder why they had ever, any of them, given in to Louise over this ridiculous summer holiday. No good would come of it, he felt sure, and when next he wrote to his mother he would take her to task for having allowed them to do such a thing. She was well out of it, herself, at Harrogate.

  A rattling at the door-handle restored his satisfaction. He splashed about a little and sang a few bars of the Messiah to show that he was in possession. But the rattling went on and he heard Barny’s mild voice pleading outside.

  “Let me in, can’t you? I want a bath.”

  “You can’t have one. I’m having one.”

  “I know. Let me in. What did you lock the door for?”

  It was clear that Barny, too, regarded the bath-house as the men’s club. Kerran unselfishly hopped out and unlocked the door.

  “We’ll leave it unlocked,” he said, “in case Gordon cares to join us.”

  Barny flung off his mackintosh and jumped into the bath before his brother could interpose. He pointed out that there was room for both of them, which indeed there was, for the Nugents had furnished the room upon a generous scale. So they sat, very contentedly, facing one another. The bath water, coming from a peaty soil and thickened with soap-suds, was of a murky-brown colour, and their submerged bodies were scarcely visible beneath it. Above the steaming surface their two necks appeared, each crowned by a red and perspiring face. They were not very much alike. Kerran was fair and pink, like Ellen; Barny was dark and aquiline, like Louise.

  “Bloody place this seems to be,” observed Barny.

  “It is,” agreed Kerran. “Bloody. Not so bad here, though,” he added.

  “I’ll tell you what,” said Barny, stretching back voluptuously. “I should like to have some women to wash me. I should like to have a harem, you know. A beautiful slave or two to come in and scrub my back.”

  “Which reminds me,” said Kerran. “Have you heard about Elissa Koebel?”

  “Plenty. Anything new?”

  “Quite new. She’s our next-door neighbour.”

  Barny nearly jumped out of the bath. He was a connoisseur in stories about Elissa and passionately admired her singing.

  “But does Louise know?”

  “Oh, yes. Indeed she does. She wants to call.”

  Their laughter echoed through the steamy room. But when Kerran gave particulars of his conversation with Louise in the boat, Barny left off laughing.

  “She can’t,” he said very seriously. “She can’t possibly.”

  “So I told her. But you know what Louise is.”

  “She must be told that she can’t do it.”

  “Who’s to tell her?”

  “Gordon must. The woman’s notorious. I couldn’t possibly allow Maude to meet her.”

  Kerran did his best to keep a straight face and agreed that it would not do.

  “But for my own part I shouldn’t mind meeting her, should you, Barny?”

  “Not at all,” said Barny with a grin.

  Barny could be more fantastically indecent than anyone Kerran knew, but it was a long time now since he had had the spirits for bawdry. A hot bath was propitious. He began to recapitulate some of the major incidents in Elissa’s career, breaking away, from time to time, into panegyrics of her singing whither Kerran could not follow him.

  “We must tell Gordon.”

  “Yes, we must certainly tell Gordon.”

  The door was flung open and Muffy came in with a basket of logs. She ignored the expostulations of the bath club, kicked the door to behind her and began to stoke up the fire underneath the copper.

  “Really, Muffy! Really! Really!”

  “Women aren’t allowed in here. This is the thin end of the wedge.”

  “Don’t you worry. I can’t see nothing, not underneath that nasty black water that isn’t fit for a Christian to bath in, let alone a gentleman. Besides, haven’t I bathed the both of you in days gone by?”

  6

  THE name of Elissa Koebel came up again after dinner, and Kerran suddenly felt obliged to fling down a challenge. He declared roundly that she could not sing.

  “She has a beautiful voice,” he said. “There are lovely notes in it. She’s a superb actress. But she’s not really a very good singer.”

  There were squeaks of expostulation from Maude and Louise, and a disgusted grunt from Barny. Gordon put down his newspaper and peered over his spectacles at Kerran with a faint surprise.

  “She’s bamboozled you all.”

  “And all the critics?” asked Louise.

  “Not all the critics. But a surprising number of them, I must admit it. You see, she’s the only prima donna who can act.”

  “That is very likely,” observed Gordon. “It has always seemed to me that the level of acting in opera is exceedingly poor. Sometimes it is almost ludicrous. I remember in Bayreuth …”

  Nobody listened to him. They had all fallen upon Kerran, and Barny was saying:

  “Did you ever see her Senta?”

  “Exactly,” agreed Kerran. “Her Senta! What a piece of acting!”

  He was obliged to admit that he had been deeply impressed. From the moment the curtain went up on the second act, long before she began to sing, he had found himself intent upon her. Her stillness and her silence dominated all the clamour made by her fifty companions, bawling over their spinning wheels. She sat apart from them, a creature in a trance, caught away into another world, already doomed. She belonged to her fate and no power could ever bring her back to the commonplace safety of these girls. The spinning wheel was no mere property piece, planted down beside her. It was her spinning wheel.

  “Acting, not singing,” repeated Kerran. “She made us feel … all that she wished us to feel, before she’d sung a note. If you were to put the Waldstein and the Koebel side by side and tell ’em to sing Caro Nome …”

  “I wouldn’t ever tell anyone to sing Caro Nome,” interrupted Barny crossly.

  “Or even to sing up a scale …”

  “I’d rather hear the Koebel sing up a scale than hear anyone else sing through the whole Ring.”
/>
  “You’d rather see her sing a scale, you mean, Barny. If you were to shut her and the Waldstein up in a dark room and tell ’em to sing scales …”

  “One of them would come out with a black eye.”

  But Barny was annoyed with Kerran. He would have been ready enough to argue over the merits of any other musician, but, like most of Elissa’s admirers, he took any criticism in that quarter as a personal affront. Maude, perceiving his annoyance, hastened loyally to the rescue.

  “I’m bound to say I always think she sings ever so much better than Emmi Waldstein. I’ve heard them both in a lot of the same parts. In Faust, for instance, which is my favourite opera. She was perfectly wonderful in Faust; didn’t you think so, Louise?”

  “I don’t know,” said Louise yawning. “I’ve never heard Faust.”

  “Not heard Faust! Oh, but, Louise, you must. It’s a lovely opera. You’d love it.”

  “Should I?”

  There was a tiny pause. Gordon opened his mouth and shut it again. Perhaps he had better not remind Louise that she had heard Faust, at least once, in Paris. She must have forgotten and she would not like to be corrected in public.

  Maude looked round, suddenly at a loss. She had felt a little superior, just for one second, when she found that she had heard Faust and Louise had not. But now, quite inexplicably, she had been made to understand that Louise, in not having heard Faust, could claim to have scored a point. It was all very puzzling. Was there anything wrong with Faust? Surely it was good music?

  Barny hardened and withdrew himself a trifle, as he always did when Louise was unkind to Maude. The conversation wavered upon shipwreck, and it was left to the amiable Kerran to pull it together.

  “I heard her in Faust,” he said hastily. “She was extraordinary. I quite agree with Maude. She made one feel she was the only woman who has ever been seduced.”

  Maude gave a little start of protest. It was nice of Kerran to agree with her, but he need not have put it quite like that. Unaware of her discomfort, and anxious only to revive the conversation, he went on developing the point at quite unnecessary length.