I missed Mell quite dolefully. For the eight years between us had created a situation in which at seven and fifteen, at eight and sixteen, we hunted together, sometimes even dressed and hatted alike, a thing which becomes abruptly impossible at nine and seventeen, and from then on to my early twenties I had to watch Mell becoming a young woman, losing her until I myself was twenty and over, catching up with her for such a little while before marriage finally broke our alliance. Also, it gradually came over me that Mell, whom we had rather regarded as a casual onlooker, had for all her leisured manner and outlook at least done something with her life by marriage, which was a definite and tangible thing, satisfying the standards of society which in serene and practical vulgarity judged not by the turmoil of the mind or nagging aspiration, but by results.
And I had done nothing.
I found that extraordinarily enough it was I who at the formal function was far more shy than Mell, though I have often watched her groping for the suitable and friendly topic to servants, old women, hawkers and piano tuners – people who never gave me the slightest difficulty because they were individuals being quite obviously themselves. I suppose it was people in the mass who broke me, for they seemed to be being nothing but a noise or something that they put on for the evening, like a white tie. And if I say that I found the conversation of the dance floor was so staggeringly imbecile that it struck me speechless it is in no spirit of priggishness, but simply that my interest in partners as human beings with ideas and offices and prejudices and fears was always ready to be aroused and that it was invariably handed back to me on a salver, the idea apparently being that no girl could sincerely be looking beyond the matter in hand, or alert to anything more cogent than the debatable merits of Destiny and The Passing of Salome as waltzes. And indeed, from their point of view, I quite see that to be paired off with a young woman who wanted to ask, for instance, if they believed in dragons, or to enquire their opinion upon the possibility of making a parrot sing a ballad right through to piano accompaniment instead of learning only stray bits of it had its unnerving side. Nor I think would they have been pleased had they known that I was liable to sudden cravings to sit by the fire and roast chestnuts and kick off my satin slippers and read, or that I once solaced myself in the middle of a two-step with some popular Filbertian knut by composing a limerick to him.
This man is an anthropoid ape
In his gibus and trousers and cape;
Evolution’s a farce
If its sum is this ass
From whose arms I soon hope to escape.
(‘Yes, I do so agree about Gold and Silver–’)
And then a line from Dickens would quite devilishly slide into my head and make me laugh. ‘Don’t look at me, you nasty creature, don’t!’ And I felt much better for quite ten minutes.
One of the troubles about ball-rooms is their lack of scribbling-paper. Had a bunch of it been laid on every table in sitting-out places and hung on the walls I should have covered most of it during the evening with notions inspired by those present, and, slipping the notes into my bosom as they do in novels, have resembled Melba by the time I left.
But with the old and elderly men I got on well. Their initial incredulity broken down, we would drift together and explode with laughter at each other and the world, and talk our heads off. We knew where we were with each other. They wanted nothing of me or I of them, and our companionship was undeafened by the splutter of all that fish which gets fried by the young with the young at social fixtures or which is fried ‘off’ for them by matchmaking mothers or elaborately unobtrusive chaperones. No grandfather has ever been the worse for knowing me! And whatever anybody might say, and doubtless did, I can honestly state that, to me, one foot in the grave was nearly always better company than two on the drugget. And I think, and hope, that for all the oldsters did for me, in encouragement, advice, kindly chaff – even cautions about detrimentals, I repaid the debt in giving them back a taste for life, and that I moved were it only by a fraction that hollow feeling of neglect which can be the portion of the retired, who having given health and youth and brains and energy to country and family, sits back so often alone with nothing else to offer but himself and his philosophy.
And there it was. Meanwhile, I was already a last year’s débutante, for I had refused to emerge from the known territory of my home until nineteen, a year later than the statutory age, guessing that what I found outside it might not suit me, by which time I should be committed. I could dance far too well for an amateur and not quite well enough for professional stardom: I could play the piano too well by ear to receive credit for it, too badly by the score to be an asset, and not at all except for touch and phrasing from the professional point of view. I think I gave the social life, a reasonable trial and probably had quite as much of what aunt Caroline would term ‘attention’ as Mell, and even one or two proposals which I was quite unable to see as a part of life, but only as an adjunct, like the ball supper. I suspect that I had far more flirtations than Mell, and certainly, knowing them for what they were, sheer susceptibility, I fell in and out of love half a dozen times, which is always more fatal from the worldly point of view than is the conduct of the apparent iceberg who freezes men for just so long and then melts to a mush overnight for one particular man and marries him out of hand.
Finally, I discovered Marcus: found that he was a man and quite a nice one, and not just a brother you passed on the stairs, or saw flinging, school cap in hand, out of the seaside rooms.
1
I had lived on and off in the same houses with him for twenty years. I actually saw him for the first time one night when he opened the front door in Kensington Gate before dinner: a rather good-looking stranger to whom I had a right. And if I say that his face was at last and for ever memorable, it was because I had lost sight of him so long and so frequently that on his returns from school or university he never looked the same twice running.
I don’t suppose that Cuss thought anything unusual about me that evening, for all his life he’d seen me through the eyes of his ten years seniority; besides, he’d had Mell to sharpen his teeth on, and may, for all I knew, have simply thought of me as a kind of extension of her. (He told me afterwards that I gave him the nearest approach to a Glad Eye that he’d ever observed in me!) And there the matter ended for weeks save for my awareness of Marcus in the house. Brothers and sisters don’t alter towards each other overnight; but there certainly seemed to be an atmosphere of readiness for acquaintance which hadn’t been there before, unless it was my own interest misleading me. And in any case the house was beginning to be upside down with preparations for Mell’s wedding, a convivial, exhausting and essentially ridiculous bustle, for the displaying of wedding presents is, if you come to think of it, an amazing piece of vulgarity, for who cares or should care if you’ve been given a fish-slice or not? And if you admit the principle of this ostentatious materialism, why not exhibit lengths of all the wall-papers you propose to use, or a section of the lead piping that has been selected for the drains?
Mother thought it nonsense, Mell thought it nonsense, I thought it nonsense, as we hurried about in overalls, conforming to that nonsense to please the relations who were subscribing to that nonsense to please the Morants. As for hanging intimate, or indeed any, portions of your trousseau over chairs and screens to be handled by female friends and more relations, that struck me as being such crowning nonsense that I asked Mell to refrain, but she said she thought it was ‘expected’ and that anybody was welcome to her knickers so long as they didn’t grub them.
Presents came from Addison. Mrs Jasperleigh contributed a remarkably hideous Belique object which Mell thought must be a cuspidor and I a medieval bed-pan, and that gave us some bad moments in the composition of the letter of thanks, until mother said she thought it could only be for ferns, and that to write that ferns would look quite delightful in it would cover the ground. But Mrs. Jasperleigh’s accompanying note was well worth the space taken up
by the object, for she said with several underlinings that the first to go was always quite unspeakable and that her heart went out to her dearest Mrs. M as she, too, would have to learn to steel herself to the loss of Thelma.
The night before the wedding was hard to get through.
We had worked ourselves to a standstill, and in idleness the loss of Mell asserted itself, with all its little dreadful details pestering one for inspection, even to the moment when I should watch the car drive away and myself turn back into the house … that Mell in future would fantastically enough only enter as a visitor.
Could such a situation be? Apparently it could, which made one apprehensive of life, and I think that Mell realized what she had done, as she moved about more slowly, looking a little apologetic and bewildered herself. One thing I wouldn’t do, and that was to join in the extra-late family session after dinner that night. I went to bed at the usual hour, saying good-night to everybody including Mell in exactly the same manner as on normal occasions.
There was one consolation: I liked my brother-in-law, David Hamish. For months I had watched him, morally walking round him as a sculptor does his group, comforted only in my inherent reliance on Mell’s sense and taste and judgment. I think that to have disliked or mistrusted him would have been comparable only to those unthinkable cases of which one reads, wherein a family has to see a beloved relative die for want of proper food or care.
But routine-keeping or no, I got up towards two a.m. and rambled downstairs to the drawing-room, switching on a light and idling past the long tables of wedding presents, and then on impulse rearranging a few. With the Addison gifts I was especially unfair: pushing them into better places, giving the cheaper ones more prominence….
Among the stacks of still unopened letters was one for me. It was apparently written by a minor poet. But the signature was M. Couchman.
MY DEAR MISS BARBARA,
It was like you to write and tell us all the wonderful News about dear Miss Melisande, tho’ as Connie says, nobody could be good enough for her. He sounds a splendid gentleman and I pray for the happiness of both. You are never far from our thoughts and to hear from you cheers my day, as I can never forget the Old Days.
Miss Barbara when I read your letter and saw you had asked me to come to the wedding, I had to run next door and tell Mr. Stiles and could hardly wait until Connie and Hope came home from work and they thought I was having a game with them. But I shall have to content myself with knowing you asked me and picturing it all as I have my husband bad again with his chest and he doesn’t seem to take his Food when I am not their to give it to him. I did not trouble dear Miss Melisande with our troubles but am writing to you instead. How I wish it might be, but on the Day we are putting Miss Melisande’s photo she gave us on the table and cutting some flowers from the garden to set near it and Hope is doing a bit of overtime for Mrs. Markham to give us a special supper in honor of The Day and Mr. Stiles will have it with us, so we shall be so grand and proud! I am going to wear the dress that Mrs. Morant once gave me so I shall feel quite The Queen.
With love and respects to my dearest Madam and Miss Melisande in which all join from your affectionate servant,
M. COUCHMAN.
I knew that M stood for Matilda: mother told me so about four years ago when it had first occurred to me to ask….
Her letter didn’t make the rest of the night easier to get through and one must be at one’s best, for at weddings the daughter of the house is all things to all men, but I guessed that I was going to be suddenly and unsuitably assailed by the urge to cast down my bouquet and have a peep at the Couchman party and their gala-table, and if it were my wedding I should be looking out for people I was fond of all up the aisle, and wondering if their new hats were comfortable and where they’d bought them instead of fixing my eyes on the altar, and I’m perfectly certain that when my car had driven away honeymoon-stationwards I should want to stay behind with the fag-end of the reception and talk it all over and join my husband later, however much I loved him.
3
In church it occurred to me as I glimpsed Addison faces that it seemed my fate to meet them again when my mind was preoccupied and overlaid with distractions. There they were, all looking familiar, saying what you might expect of old and affectionate friends to whom, in my turn, I was being affectionate and adequate and we just didn’t get through to each other for one minute Mrs. Jasperleigh came nearest to reality by usurping the traditional privilege of the bride’s mother and flooding her pew with tears from the voluntary to Mendelssohn, and for that I was grateful (If Mendelssohn’s heirs and assigns could have drawn royalties on all the grafton voile and Matrons’ Hats created for his composition they’d all be multi-millionaires by now.) Aunt Caroline also helped me a little by saying, as she sank into a chair in a buffle of mauve ostrich plumes, or whatever that noun of assembly may be, refusing champagne and seeing me fill a glass for myself, that the young didn’t need stimulants, to which I answered as I hastily downed my portion that believe me they did, not remembering the probable years of auntery ahead of me in which, deflated, I should have to try to live down that riposte even if in the interim I’d long become a total abstainer.
It was over and Mell had driven away.
One of her last utterances to me as she put on her going away dress was that after she’d recovered from the excitement of being able to buy all the clothes she wanted at highty-tighty shops she would get so bored that she’d be reduced to cutting up the chair-covers for summer frocks.
The going upstairs alone to Mell’s empty room spared me nothing – indeed, it rather overdid its harrowing intention by making me completely numb.
Halfway up the staircase I heard Marcus playing the piano in his den; he had had an upright Brinsmead installed some years ago, but didn’t seem to use it much. The door was ajar and I stopped a second, partly of pure fatigue, partly of a necessity to distinguish what he was playing. It was a catchy tune I must have heard and even danced to: a one-or two-step, its name, if known, escaped me.
Cuss had removed his morning coat, his silk hat partnered by a bottle of Pilsener gleamed from the piano’s top.
‘Hullo, that you, Bunt?’
‘Just going up to change.’
‘’Strewth! Well that’s over.’ His tone of a shared martyrdom suggested that he wouldn’t actually object to a visitor and I went in, and even sank into the one arm-chair. I said, at random, ‘We’re feeding out to-night to save the servants.’
‘Where?’
‘That arty little bunghole in Gloucester Road. It’s the nearest. Father’s going to The United University.’ Women can always adapt themselves to poached eggs on seakale in domestic stress but the male stomach remains proud.
‘I shall dine at the Savage.’
‘Oh, Cuss, come along too! It’d – you know – take the edge off the situation for us. But if it’s just mother and me–’
‘Oh … all right.’
I sensed, then, that Marcus could think and feel. And he’d had eight more years of Mell than I. If one came to think of it, they’d had a little life together from which I was shut out for ever, about which I should never completely know in this world.
I asked, embarrassed with gratitude, what he had been playing, and his answer seemed to be involving him in some mental calculation, as though he were playing for time.
‘How did it strike you?’
‘I liked it, it’s hummable without being insipid.’
‘You learnt the piano with Field, didn’t you?’
‘Well’, I amended with a guilty grin, ‘I had lessons with him. He used to play classic bits and ask me what they suggested. It was fun.’
‘Well, what did the thing I was strumming suggest?’
‘No, that’s not fair, Cuss. You know where you are with people like Beethoven and Handel and Mendelssohn because their compositions were nearly always meant to be about something, whether it was woods or plane trees or moonlight; it’s
just up to you to guess right. And although I always did think that every Movement but the first one was less like moonlight than anything imaginable, I saw the point about the Athens wood and even the plane tree at once. Now what you were playing conveys nothing but modernity and a pretty girl, possibly, and certainly dancing, and I only get that because it’s in musical-comedy rhythm. If I’m talking nonsense it’s the champagne speaking, but if there’s anything in what I’m saying then it’s me being intelligent:’ I stopped, because my ear suddenly remembered some sentence which was composed in exactly that manner, and then it came to me that Mr. Field had said good-bye to me in the music-room in words scored, so to speak, in a similar way. ‘If you do anything clever it was I who taught you, but if you do something stupid you’ve never heard of me.’
‘Cuss, d’you remember the organ at Evenfield?’
‘“The ecclesiastical instrument”,’ he grinned, ‘and how father read the Riot Act over me for playing light music on it.’
‘I wonder where it is now.’
‘Mother sold it to that little secondhand dealer in Lower Addison.’
‘Outram? Did she? Why didn’t I know?’ I felt faintly affronted, but the organ had never meant much to any of us so I abandoned it, a chunk of my memory to be set up in the home of somebody else. Cuss said, ‘You play by ear?’
‘Yes, but not for family or friends.’
‘That’s comprehensive! I can only really play from the score–’ and I never could.’
Evenfield Page 14
