‘What? Oh good, distinctly good. ’Smatter of fact the chaps the parents hired were better turned out. The Pater used to have economy-waves sometimes, and once, my God, bought me a dinner jacket in Kingsmarket.’ His Domrémy wife chimed in. ‘My father never suffered that way. He just went bust.’
‘Yes, yes. I call that definitely thorough,’ assented Trevor, pounding the bulldog.
And they have two quite nice children to whom I am now auntie Babs, so that I have, after all, my roots in the local soil whatever happens.
5
An event which should also have made me happy was that Hope Couchman got married to that foreman who oversaw the erection of the lean-to bedroom I had given her. But I felt a dangerous matchmaker, darting in to alter lives, and although the marriage has been an exceptionally happy one a selfish portion of me regrets a change for which I am almost entirely responsible in the partial disintegration of a family from the group to which I was and wanted to remain accustomed, on which my mind’s eye could rest at will. But there it was. And although Hope and her husband live in Addison and even near Nutts Lane, she had moved on.
I went to the wedding, and back in the Couchman cottage and by urgent request, proposed the health of the bride, ruddy and shining in the dress and hat which were my present to her, and we were even herded out into the alley for a wedding group by a local photographer (which hung in his window for four months and scorched me with shame whenever I passed it). But home at Evenfield I banged my beautiful pearl gloves together and one of them split.
‘Damn the creatures! It’s as though the people in a family album suddenly got up and walked out of their mounts.’
6
And harassment came from a quarter where I had counted upon security. Whether it was a large or small concern depends upon the point of view; most women of my age (I must learn to put it that way and try to feel it as well) would have laughed it off, but as each case is considered by me on its merits regardless of age I have never been successful at generalized flippancy. I had known it in a way almost ever since I met Phil Ivor, but any real feeling behind it had been obscured for me in my gladness to be back at Evenfield and gratification at being accepted and actually liked by the younger generation, a circumstance which, again, could be traceable to my musical successes.
He had dined with me one warm night of early May and was his companionable self, chaffing me, putting me right, and being very fluent and positive and incoherent about everything until challenged, when he went to pieces as they always do, and making elaborate jokes which left me guessing and being at all times difficult to hear, as they always are at that age, until Mabel brought in coffee and left us. And from that moment he became a very shy young man instead of a very fearless old boy, and was subdued and deferent and long-leggedly agile with doors and more difficult to hear than ever, and generally speaking would not let the winds of heaven visit my face too roughly. But as it had only just finished being April I wore a fur which he adjusted – rather often and most uncomfortably, poor child, and when at the third attempt I felt that knobby wrist of his taking its time on the job and a bit more, I understood, pitied the mental conflict that must have preceded his daring in putting his arm through mine. A milestone passed! The first hurdle leaped! And I thought of another arm in mine, a thicker one without qualms (which hadn’t seemed to like the proximity!) on another night out here among my rose-trees, and it wasn’t Clifford being affronted at an unprotected female being forthcoming but Clifford meticulous lest he become it himself. And how well he would have forthcome! with what instinctive smoothness and acrid touches all his own – like a Chopin Impromptu … and here I was in the scented dusk with a Polka Mazurka. And the unhappy mass of incoherences whose saner components were Phil Ivor stopped with a jolt and said more inaudibly than ever, ‘I do love you, you know.’ Of course I was pleased and sorry and flattered and amused as any decent woman is at these moments, but that hurdle leapt without damage, my amusement was wiped out as Phil began to have a great deal to say that misgave me. It amounted to the fact that Addison and Kingsmarket, his home and college and father and mother and everything that was his, had sufficed him until I came on the scene, that because of me and all I suggested he now perceived his feminine contemporaries to be inadequate, limited, suburban, off-colour, what you will. And he was glad he’d seen it in time, and it was all rather frightful, wasn’t it? when one had got to live in a place …
And he asked me to kiss him and I did, as his mother might have, and felt elderly and responsible and uncertain and probably a bad influence as well out there in the garden where I had always been the youngest, where I had meant to be so happy.
CHAPTER VI
1
I GAVE a party a few weeks later, and I made it a Book Tea for the sake of old times. My guests would probably want the bridge I had never learnt to play – let ’em!, or come to me to ask how one played my game, and I didn’t care. Except for Primrose and Clover Field who were unable to come because of their work (that was wrong: Fields just aren’t unable to come to Morant parties) I invited everybody I knew including Miss Abernethy and dear old Miss Ambrose (who, bless her démodé soul, crept in on that warm afternoon swathed in a woollen scarf and white with the heat as If Winter Comes), and I filled the drawing-room with an overflowing into the billiard room; there was tea on the veranda and lawn and a Kingsmarket band whose conductor I exhorted not to play any of my lyrics.
To my surprise the party was a success: as Thelma put it, ‘These things are so ancient I suppose they’ve come round again and everybody’ll be Book Tea-ing soon.’
It was when the majority of the guests had dispersed up and down the road and only a residue of intimates remained that I realized that a crowd is protective, stifling perception by sheer weight of numbers. For, looking round at all these faces familiar to me from my earliest years, I suddenly ceased to be able to merge myself in them or to take my old place in their lives and regard; as in those first weeks in Kensington Gate when they came to London to look us up, I saw them once more as just people in the flat, and could find no margin of sentiment anywhere that could save them for me. I felt in that moment an absolute rancour against the lot of them for the stresses and emotions which they had caused me, that some glamour which was an aura about them all had gone completely, that we were in the last resort simply a handful of women in a suburban drawing-room – I really believe that their age was the only thing I didn’t lay up against them! And it was all quite extraordinarily painful. And when they had gone I sat in the nursery and played an abstracted game of Snakes and Ladders with plenty of cheating, and cried a little.
2
I went next day after tea to see the Fields, being rather badly in need of general consolation, and only Daisy was in to welcome me. But this was no London visit with one eye on the clock: I now had all the time there was for Fields or anybody else in Addison. Yet Daisy said the others would be disappointed at missing me, and suddenly, ‘You know, I can’t believe you’re back here, Ara. Every time you get up to leave I think you’re going back to town with Mrs. M …’, and then very soberly, ‘You don’t look a bit well, darling, mother’s very worried about you. We hate to think of you all alone at Evenfield.’
I found myself at the window, looking out at the Cumptons fence and some singularly repellent semi-detached houses opposite which my eye had always known and my mind never.
‘But – one never is alone, Daisy.’
‘You mean? … do you ever see your mother?’
‘No, my dear.’
She was picking at the peacock-blue ball-fringe of the mantelpiece.
‘Would you like to?’
‘I don’t know, Daisy. She’d know what one could stand –’
‘Yes, wouldn’t she! But you always make me feel you could face anything.’
At least I was definite about that. ‘No. Too breakable. There was something about her that was –’, I couldn’t select the word, and stopped, for
‘tempered’ sounded affected, ‘– flexible, unbeatable, perhaps. Your mother has it too, I think, that quality. Our lot is still on the grope and goes to pieces before things like reality. Perhaps they kept us young too long? Were too fond of us? D’you know what I mean?’ But I was startled by the fervour of her agreement. ‘I’ve so often felt that about us. Ara, when mother and father go I literally don’t know what’ll happen to me. I can’t see any future apart from them. And I can’t make up my mind whether you did the best thing in coming back here. I even hoped for your sake at the time that you’d only lease Evenfield for the holidays, as you first planned to.’ I seemed to be sitting at the piano, this time, and even playing a few bars. ‘Daisy, I’ve just discovered that the opening chorus of The Mikado is practically The Athanasian Creed. Listen:
Who-so-ever would be sav-éd
(We are gentlemen of Japan):
but her shocked appreciation wasn’t as instant as usual. She smiled at me, but went on, ‘I’ve always advised Primrose and Clover to get work as far away as possible. It’s so important to change the atmosphere, but every job is so jolly specialized, now’.
I looked at Daisy, seeing no longer the eldest of ‘the little Fields’, but a woman with opinions, hinting at things from which I shrank.
3
It bothered me for days, and I took it to Evelyn, into whose house I could now enter without qualms, Phil being up at Oxford again. Cumptons had been my rock of ages and rocks must have no vulnerable surfaces. Evelyn would be normal and direct and emollient – she knew the Fields.
‘Daisy wasn’t for one second complaining, Evelyn, and of course it is important to change atmospheres, as she says, but in the old days one never used to think about things like that. One just lived and enjoyed everything.’
‘Yes, but I don’t think they ever had the good times you and Mell did. There never was much money in music –’
‘But dammit, Evelyn, money isn’t everything – I don’t want to sound like a novelette and I shall be saying that Love Is All next, but money isn’t.’
‘It matters an awful lot in a place like Addison, Ara; why even here in Kingsmarket I’m feeling better for the change already.’ We both laughed, and she went on, ‘I don’t think the Fields ever really got over the business about Clover.’
‘What?’
‘Didn’t you know, Ara? But how incredible! But of course it was long after you left.’
I waited.
‘Didn’t mother ever tell you or Mrs. M about it? That’s like mother. And the Fields never said a word to you? Well, I am blowed. But that’s like them, too. Clover – well, d’you remember the Irmine boy, Richard, the one they called Rikky?’
‘Not in the least.’
‘No, I suppose you were always too young, he’d be my age now, or over. Well he had a frightful crush on Mrs. Randolph – d’you remember her?’
‘Pull yourself together, Evelyn!’
‘Oh, of course she lived next door to you –’
‘– golden hair and rumoured to have been on the stage.’
‘That’s it. But of course she never was. Well, Rikky Irmine was practically engaged to Clover Field, anyway she wore a ring, I used to meet them at dances and badminton, and she was frightfully in love with him. He was a pal of the Barstowes, by the way.’
I had to listen. If Clifford had been involved in this, or even his brother, John … he grew very good-looking … and something about John having a narrow squeak with one of the local maidens … If a Barstowe had hurt a Field …
But Evelyn was saying things, and my ear told me that all was well – for me.
‘– and then Rikky quite suddenly got bowled over by Mrs. Randolph, we never could make out why as he’d lived three hundred yards from her all his life, but it was one of those overtakements that do happen when people are all bottled up together and she was very pretty in that sort of way and knew how to make the most of herself as young girls never do, and dressed well and so on, though your mother did call her “The Chiffonier” –’
‘And he chucked Clover?’
‘No, he wasn’t all that cad, he must have just made it impossible for her to go on with it (I’m not sure that’s not worse). We all saw it, I mean it was too obvious (mother gave Rikky hell, by the way; she could do things like that, you know)’. I didn’t, but I stared at Evelyn as I muttered ‘Good for her’.
‘I’m so glad that poor old Phil fell into your hands, Ara. He’s absolutely crippled with infatuation, and when he’s got over you he’ll probably have a real affair with a shopgirl and then simmer down until he marries.’
4
And after this, and all that summer, I found I could no longer see anything or anybody clearly, objectively, even retrospectively; I felt alone and fixed in a time of my own which had no past, present or future. I was no longer a real resident, was too committed and versed to be a visitor, that which I had thought familiar was overlaid by facts hurled at me too late for sane assimilation. I even lost my critical bearings, saw Thelma Lawnford at one moment as a discontented matrimonial cheat, at the next as a pitiful woman with a genuine case against her spoilt life, Chetwyn as a trojan of quiet loyal endurance and decency and as a henpecked weakling, Johnnie Lawnford as a suburban bounder and a harmless nonentity to whom I’d been tactless, Evelyn as reassuring friend and prize example of indiscretion, myself as a very damned specimen of unreasonableness, subtly defrauded, yet suffering a grief to which I was not officially entitled.
I saw Addison as a growing tentacle of Outer London, a bus-route full of flavourless, ordinary people whom circumstances had happened to make me know and as a large village with a meadow studded with buttercups, ringed about with laughter and event and love, the most significant place on earth.
5
And then Evenfield started upon me and it chose its moment well, counting upon our lifelong knowledge of each other in its choice of tactics and playing upon my weakest spots – or, I sometimes hoped, the house was so sorry that it used deprecatory arguments to show me it realized inability to keep my pace and satisfy me. It even ceased to be a refuge, for upon my returns to it from shopping or skating and tea-parties I could no longer count upon my own feelings; on one day I saw it as just a large and meaningless house in which I happened to live, and on the next as my devoted home, incredibly minus mother cutting out a gilt cardboard crown in the day-nursery, Mell charging round the asphalt paths, Aggie doggedly removing soaked copies of Little Folks that I had left overnight in the hammock, and even father debating with me by the billiard-room fire the merits of Christmas cards bought that morning in Kingsmarket. He had his moments …
Surely when mother made her own returns to Evenfield the whole house sprang to light and life? For me, the light goes up only when I press the switch …
I thought of stripping the place of all reminiscent furnishings, and actually did dismantle and redecorate the dining-room, which promptly became nothing at all but a room for which I was now solely responsible, and only deepened my conviction of personal inadequacy, so that I began to believe that even Mrs. Jasperleigh or the unknown Miss Spicer would have filled the stage better than I, have dominated the drawing-room, mastered the garden and quelled the kitchen to more purpose.
Evenfield and I had a hard time with each other through that hot summer when the dust lay on the lime-trees and the lawn turned brown no matter where Sims moved the sprinkler. For every room I settled or ate in had something to say, and it took the disconcerting form of unerring presentation to my memory of innumerable small items calculated to put me out of conceit with my old home (the dining-room was particularly adept at this). I would sit at table, relieved to be back in comparative coolness, anxious to be happy there, and was insidiously assailed by a row between Cuss and father, an irate man mismanaging a sulky boy, unwisely tactless from exasperation, while mother looked harassed, and for the first time feeling that row, as shell-shock will strike years later; a moment (had it happened? Was this
subconscious memory stored by a Barbara Morant newly promoted to family luncheon, or merely Evenfield urging me, edging me out?) when mother exclaimed that she could not stand this sort of thing and for heaven’s sake let’s have peace at meal-times … Mell dismally crying over her German by candlelight … mother taken ill at tea one winter evening and having to give up and go to bed, gasping that it was ‘these accursed river fogs’ and that ‘the place’ never had agreed with her, and of my inarticulate fury at anyone just letting her go upstairs while father merely said that her chest was never her strongest point, and of the empty misery the house became until she was down once more: of old Doctor Lawnford refusing to let me into her room and of my kicking him on the shins and screaming so that I woke mother from her needed sleep.
The nursery, telescoping time, made me aware of the long tracts of doldrums in which I sat there becalmed playing Solitaire where once Mell had faced me across the table and drawn pages of dragons for my entertainment, and of finding tea-time with Aggie presiding a boring business of bread and butter and distaste for Mell’s avidity over jam after her school luncheons (Drink in a Bournemouth cup, in fact!). And wasn’t the hall much too narrow for the size of the house and now permeated for ever with my knowledge of suicide in the weir?
I really do believe that the spare-room came best out of the business: it knew I had never cared for it, bore no malice, and had nothing with which to flail me beyond innocuous reminiscence of a gas fire that stifled one and the room’s occupancy by a few duty-visitors including the inevitable aunt Caroline. But were my nursery guests always welcomed graciously by an Ara who hated to see her toys handled by other children, and mustn’t they sometimes have gone home thinking she was a little beast, thinking it to this day when recalling those times as men and women, not too late for me to put it right, perhaps, but eternally too late in the room where I had been a little beast, where the impression of little-beastliness was photographed upon the air for ever? … Wasn’t I standing on the very strip of floor whose right to practise Indian clubs and dancing steps upon Mell and I disputed so endlessly and even unto blows … and what was it that had left the garden for ever, so that while looking exactly the same it was all entirely different and lacking in incident, and walking in it one was now never oblivious of time and business and the outside world?
Evenfield Page 27
