I said at random that I didn’t remember the Stortford’s gardener. Mell responded, ‘You wouldn’t, you were too small to be there much. He was the one who said that tennis was only fit for fiends to play, when somebody hit him with the ball’.
‘He was the world’s worst gardener’, amplified mother, ‘so the Stortfords told me, and used to sell their fruit. Not that there was much. Old Stiles could be quite maddening, but he never took anything.’
(So Stiles wasn’t a fairy-storyteller and giver of sugar pictures; but just an honest gardener. And the vicar was a bromide and not an affectionate beneficence with beautiful manners.)
Mell, on the whole, was an excellent guide to Addison; authoritative as a nurse she would decide for me, ‘Yes, you do remember’, or, ‘No, you wouldn’t know them, they were rather before your time’, and ‘Oh no. A horrid kid. You’re mixing her up with so-and-so’. It was one of the reasons that made me miss her when she married: a source of supply removed to places like Hounslow and Salisbury where, as a soldier’s wife, she must trek at insufficient notice, and, as she said, feeling like a very superior camp follower at whom the regiment was probably grinning behind its hand.
Mother was, of course, commonly sound on facts, but I had to be ever on the alert to decide how much of opinion was tinged by retrospective distaste; Marcus was gappy and scrappy, although his denunciations and dislikes of Addison and Evenfield were as vivid as mother’s and far more violent, influenced as they were by his ructions with father. With even my own memories I was dissatisfied in the light of the items which were so constantly cast to me. Had I, in point of fact, appreciated everything to the full at the time? Enjoyed myself gratefully enough? If so, how had I forgotten, say, the Mafeking bits, or Chetwyn with his cornet?
CHAPTER VI
1
WE went down to Addison several times over long periods; it was still a journey taking most of the afternoon. Two calls were almost impossible to fit in comfortably and owing to all this we never even saw Evenfield for many years, though within, to me, tantalizing reach of the house.
We had news of it – the Fields were actually acquainted with the tenants, but ‘Oh, Mrs. M, darling, it will never be the same to us’, one of them would cry over an opulent tea in their unchanged William Morris drawing-room.
I was shy with them. They were so tall, so tall! Young women, looming over me who never seemed to grow, they were still embroidered and artistic and soft as I stood about the room in what people were electing to wear in London. It made me brittle and nervous and superficial for what seemed like ages, until the day when I realized for good that during those years our only mutual understanding as individuals was hardy-perennial love, and that we hardly knew each other. Whether this also struck them I don’t know. It would be more like them to see us through the haze of the past, and their unreasoning confidence in us may also have included a belief as unquestioned in their comprehension of all we really were.
2
On the afternoon that I went to see Evenfield and nothing and nobody else I went alone. And once in Addison I was so excited that I almost ran all the way.
Addison was looking so like itself that I felt nothing in particular as I steamed along, though I received one surprise, which only shows how unobservant children can be – unless it is visual selectiveness governed by routine. The railway hotel, of elaborate early Victorian stucco, was still called The Duke of Albany; I never went inside it in the old days and was never likely to now, which was as it should be. I noticed with incredulity and pleasure that the fence bordering its garden was in exactly the same state of disrepair as it used to be in our time. What I had failed to take in was that the rather neglected garden itself was large, matured, and full of ancient trees (I was to discover that Addison is in Domesday Book, and that innumerable unnoticed gardens of unknown residents were tracts of primeval forest).
A hitherto unperceived wing of The Duke of Albany was of earlier date than the main building – early Georgian, at a guess – and extended the length of the garden, and pleased me with its long windows that reached to the very turf, and suggested an Assembly room for the quality, spreading satin, and the sipping of frothed chocolate. Since then, I have several times been seized with a faint and insane idea of taking a room in the hotel, becoming known to that garden, and sitting for do-nothing hours looking out upon the Victorian scene in front which took in the Lawnford’s wall and our remarkably hideous Jubilee fountain, which consists of a trough containing a cone decorated with a stone soup-plate enclosing a bas-relief of our late dear Queen. And if I have deprived myself of the pleasure of the uncertain shades in the Albany garden, it is because one must conform to the Addison pattern. No innovations … it kept its secrets and memories then, and so must to the end. Addison might be going to be confusing enough without superimpositions.
But outside the station still waited the musty flys and victorias – not a taxi in sight! Every horse drooping inside his nosebag as I remembered him. The station was the same, too, but looking very much at a loose end, as stations do in the middle of summer afternoons.
The only change in our road was that the letter-box in a wall was now a pillar-box on the path, and I smacked it for its presumption, for was there one single extra house there since our day? No. Therefore more letters couldn’t be being posted. I looked at the bricked-up wall, and thought how many hundreds of letters to relations, ‘The Stores’ and Leicester Square for my dancing frocks and shoes had gone through it in the past, to say nothing of that box of glacé fruit shot in fury through the slit by Cuss, that winter night!
And then came a hot blast of scarlet brick, geraniums and red-hot pokers, and I was passing Rose Glen, the Randolphs’ house. I neither knew nor cared if they had left or not, for their railings were beginning to become our grey fence, and then I was outside Evenfield and leaning over the gate which was the same chocolate-colour, and if anyone came out into the drive and looked civil and offended I meant to turn on my social taps and tell him that I used to swing on it.
But there wasn’t one head at any window. The occupants, or their predecessors?, had cut down our almond tree (which was cheek, and philistine) and I couldn’t find the lilac bush; the pane of glass I’d broken in the glory-hole had been replaced and the tradesmen’s door was closed, so I couldn’t see the monstrous dustbin. On the other hand, I gave them full marks for having relatively decent curtains at the dining-room windows. Ours were of beads, yellow and blue, like a Margate tea-shop, and if you wanted to say anything to anybody in a hurry as he left you were bound to be hit on the cheek by about twelve strands. But I missed the rose-trees whose circular plots were apparently filled in: they had never looked particularly pretty, but on frosty mornings it was to them that mother and I went with a steaming slop-bowl of toast and water for the birds, and they just supported half coco-nuts for the tits.
In those years I never dreamed of ringing the bell, declaring myself, adducing the Fields as reference or asking for an imaginary person in order to get a good look at the hall. It was enough that Evenfield was there and looking exactly the same – even the knocker had been allowed to remain. Just to knock and run away would have given me much material, for the timbre of that horseshoe of brass would awake its own set of associations, and I should see more clearly that cauliflower fur cape of mother’s (had it one button or two?), re-smell the veil of dotted net which covered incredibly her face, re-feel the coldness of her cheek chilled by the fog of London, and remember more of the fairings without which she seldom returned.
I moved away to the fence bordering the kitchen garden. Under the door in it through the dog days of July I had poked cinder parcels attractively wrapped for the fooling of whomsoever might pass – one had to wait interminably sometimes, and would, still. What a quiet road it was! Like an avenue which has lost the courage of its convictions at the last moment. I climbed the fence, and there, empty but still standing, was the fowl-run and a squint-eye’d view of one end of
the artichoke bed. A good view of the kitchen garden from that fence was never possible, although I had forgotten the reason for it, which was a remarkably meaningless privet bush. I wondered how many generations of our artichokes had made soup for the house since our occupation. I felt like the last person left on earth, and wanted my tea; the fact that boundless opportunity was all round me prevented my taking it – a richness of choice! I tried to calculate what Evenfield and I would have been doing on such a day and time and time of year. Tea on the veranda, perhaps, with mother? Or out at a garden party? If I loitered behind a lime-tree should I see us coming back from it? See what mother was wearing and if, judged by the present fashions, she looked ridiculous and like a revival of some passé comedy?
And I went back to the shops and had a horrid, pretentious tea at the successors to Peach’s, and smoked, and thought ‘Lor!’ and ‘Well …’, and was quite glad to be getting back to London, its stir and ostentatious air of boundless opportunity.
3
‘See anyone we know?’ asked mother, at dinner.
‘Didn’t try to. I just did Evenfield.’
‘I suppose it was looking exactly the same.’ Mother’s tone was humorously resigned.
‘Exactly the same.’
‘Where did you have tea?’
‘Peach’s, only the shop’s quite different now, and I forget the name of it. Foul cakes, all buttery cream. Winter has gone too, but they’ve kept the shop absolutely as it used to be and it’s still a baker’s.’
‘He made very bad bread. Papery and doughy,’ said mother; ‘I only kept him on for the kitchen and general emergency.’
‘Then where did our loaves come from?’
‘Oh, a van came from Kingsmarket, I expect. They had a very decent place at the foot of the bridge where I got most of our party cakes.’
I remembered. (So Winter, my familiar shop, wasn’t an excitement, and glass bottles of sweets and Jingoist cakes iced with the name of Buller and French, but just a bad baker.)
‘Not’, said mother, ‘that Peach was very much better, though I liked old Miss Peach, so ordered what I could from them. But not soon shall I forget the ineffable mess Peach made over one of Mell’s birthday cakes.’
‘I remember.’ Mell and I said it together, this time. Although it was only mid-May there was a heat wave and we had celebrated, panting in sun hats, in the garden. It was Mell’s sixteenth birthday, and mother, with the vaulting ambition carried over from Gunter and Buszard, had ordered a cake with a sugar rose-tree on it, the tree to sport sixteen roses. When the thing came home, it resembled a brown nightlight on a footstool, for Peach, out of his depth from the start, had contrived merely the stump of a tree, but faithful unto death had fixed sixteen sugar buds to it. But in spite of that, Peach’s to me would always be luxury and opulent chocolates after the dentist, which was mother’s lovable but singular manner of appeasing my ordeal, and Easter eggs lozenged with colour and tied with silk ribbon, special friends to tea and a smell of good things. And I still stick to it that Peach’s was a rather nice confectioners and looked as period as Fortnum and Mason, until both shops most unwisely scrapped their arched entrance and windows of William and Mary green in favour of straight plate glass that any shop could rise to.
Why do they do it? When will old-established firms realize that for every uneven step they level, for every pillar and arch they improve away, curve and bow they align: for every black canister marked Macaroons that they replace with doiley and cake-tongs, and every dimly-gilt scrollwork of name or trade sign which they abolish in favour of Neon lights, they lose and for ever innumerable customers? The customer is always right, but the past is always wrong. Mother herself thought it a pity and said so, and this was praise that I clung to.
CHAPTER VII
1
AFTER Mell’s marriage the next few years seem to have been lived all round father’s illness. He had in the interests of professional punctilio neglected a cold which, from never seeming to leave him, settled on his lungs. Even then, when faced with a definite ultimatum of the Either-Or nature, he fought against the upheaval involved by a foreign cure. All he would at first tolerate was prolonged summer holidays during which mother and I took it in turns to hold the fort in Kensington Gate and try with what intelligence we could to comprehend his legal cases and the subjects of his current biography. I never crammed so much history in my life! But at least my turns at housekeeping threw Marcus and me more than ever into each other’s society.
Sometimes we would go to look up Mell and her husband at Hounslow or Shorncliffe, or wherever the vagaries of army life set her down, and I think that Cuss and I were both glad to be home again. Mell had her own interests-by-marriage which cut off brother and sister at the source, and that may have been a good thing for I can’t guess how she would have taken the change-over of Marcus from herself to me. And by this time our joint memories were all at sixes and sevens, and allusions of any date made by one of us must inevitably leave the third party out in the cold; even contes of Addison upon which Mell, from her immunity, pounced avidly, excluded Marcus, who quite straightforwardly wanted to forget the place and that he had ever lived there.
It made me feel immature and lonely. For to be the sole member of a family to stand out for even an old affection means mental isolation, and the others were so invulnerable in their various ways! I envied, even while I deplored. My feeling for our old home became at once an escape and a burden. Also I was missing mother, and full of unhappy guilt that I wasn’t doing the same by father; futilely remorseful for the love I’d never quite been able to give him and of pity for the fact that he didn’t even know it. Yet when Mell’s husband’s regiment was ordered to India it seemed to be about my last straw. Even Grannie Morant lapsed with age into her own generation once more by falling into the mechanical habit of wondering to me why I wasn’t getting married. When I knew her better we had baited each other very companionably in the past, if father wasn’t there; before him, we both recognized that appearances must be kept up.
When first the old dame began to tell me that I ought to be thinking of marriage I stymied her completely by just asking ‘Why?’ This is a question that her generation doesn’t expect and for it has prepared no answer, its mind being a woolly mass of assumptions none of which has been clearly thought out. She once did assemble the wits to tell me that I wanted children, and I told her quite truthfully and in that tone of voice which in a man is sometimes accompanied by the screwing of a monocle into the eye that if I had closed with some of the offers I’d had, I should by this time be nicely stocked with infancy unblessed by the church, and that she’d have been the first to round on me for it; and she laughed and had some sherry and said there was at least one thing about me: that I had inherited the Morant sense of humour. Actually, the Morants have a sense of wit, like father, but mother’s side have a feeling for humour, which is not the same thing.
Poor Grannie Morant, having discovered me in the family heap, rather hankered to adopt or annex me, aunt Caroline having been no good to her in any way. ‘How she came to be a daughter of mine –’ she would sometimes say with regretful self-complacency. ‘Well, nobody knows if you don’t, old dear. Perhaps he had his hat on at the time, like the man in the story.’ And of course that rude and ancient jape passed right over my grandmother’s head as so often happens with the changing tempo in chaff of one epoch and another. She could cope with the tortuous advances upon verbal felicity of Oscar Wilde, nobody more so, but the quickfire of a Robey must eternally catch her napping. She was always too proud to ask for enlightenment – which could be a mercy – and covered it by ringing bells for servants or fluking into successful rebuke on general principles.
But if I gave as good as I got over the question of my own future it was partly automatic bluff, and while I was perfectly sincere in wishing to remain as I was, without disturbing innovation (like the Fields), her sort of attitude does undermine one. Nor could I mentally laugh her off.
Too suggestible to outside opinion, I suppose. I wanted happiness quite consciously but it must be on my own terms, and my grandmother’s downright, outdated pronouncements succeeded up to a point in deepening my sense of insecurity. And having done this for me, plus having become a small part of my life, Grannie Morant was failing, with mother and father away and no-upset-by-doctor’s orders, and Mell was already on the way to India.
It was Cuss, helped subordinately by myself, who made all the funeral arrangements, and there again I had to readjust myself to the novel idea of Marcus as head of the house. Even aunt Caroline deferred to him during that period.
I think I was conscientious for the good of our home; I had unexpectedly little trouble with the servants as I came fresh to handling them and, unlike mother, was not already committed and involved by knowing too much about them and to a certain standard of indulgence. Nearer their age on the whole than she was, I expected and usually received a nearer approach to fair play and consideration. Mother had long given up except in extreme and flagrant instances thinking that she had any rights as an employer. I didn’t, and didn’t intend to. If domestically let down I was hurt, indignant, disgusted and aggrieved, and showed it, and it seemed to cut the ground from under the maids’ feet. I began to see to what an extent they try it on with mistresses where a little honest-to-God emotion on your part pulled them up in a jiffy or reduced them to sulky amendment of ways. The art, it appeared, was to get your scene in first. It jolted them into astonished realization that you are a human being and not an insensate aloofness, one part oppressor and three-parts gull.
Evenfield Page 16
