The Term came quietly to an end. Several of the dons, in saying good-bye to me, asked if I thought I had got a First. I replied modestly that I was afraid I hadn’t.
A week later, the tutor’s expected telegram arrived: ‘Essential I should see you as soon as possible please return.’
I travelled back to Cambridge that afternoon. The interview which followed wasn’t, in any sense of the word, a success. The tutor spoke his language: I had shown ingratitude to the college and to those who had taught me, I had betrayed my responsibilities as a scholar, I had told a deliberate lie. I sat silent. What was there to say? My act now seemed more than ever unreal to me: failing the Tripos had merely been a kind of extension of dream-action on to the plane of reality. How was I to tell the tutor that we had often plotted to blow him sky-high with a bomb? How was I to tell him anything? The tutor wasn’t the tutor: he was a kindly but aggrieved middle-aged gentleman with whom I now sat face to face for the first time in my life. How could I talk to this perfect stranger about Mortmere and Hynd and Starn and the Dürers and Laily and the willows by Garret Hostel Bridge? He was asking me whether the trouble had been money. Oh, no, sir. Had it anything to do with a woman? No, sir. Nothing. Was it—any other kind of trouble? No, Sir. No trouble at all.
Very well … All possible allowances had been made. The tutor sighed as he relit his pipe. I felt very apologetic. I should hardly have blamed him if he had given me a good smacking. Admirably controlling his temper, he told me that I might be required to leave—he couldn’t tell what the authorities would decide—but that, if I voluntarily withdrew my name from the college books before next Monday: well, he made no promises, but he’d see what could be done. In other words, I wasn’t to be disgraced. I thanked him. He wished me luck. We shook hands (I omitted to tell Chalmers this, in describing the scene to him later). It was all over. The door shut. I hurried downstairs, across the court, out at the gate. I called a taxi. I was free.
Years afterwards, someone told me that Mr Holmes had got possession, by intrigue or theft, of my Tripos papers; and kept them, ever since, in a locked drawer. I hope this is true. It would be just like him.
4
On my twenty-first birthday, I found that a hundred and fifty pounds had accumulated to my account at the Post Office Savings Bank. I decided, at once, to buy a second-hand car.
My choice, expertly guided by two brilliantly talkative gentlemen from a neighbouring garage landed upon an enormous old olive-green Renault—a five-seater which could hold seven—with great brass headlamps, a gate-change gear and black leather upholstery like a cab. Driven downhill, at top speed, she was capable of doing close to forty.
Unlike my motor-bicycle, the Renault had no connection whatever with ‘The Test.’ She represented, indeed, a mood of complete irresponsibility: I could hardly have found a more absurd way of spending my money. I had no use whatever for any kind of car—much less this miniature motor-bus. On my tiny allowance, I could barely afford the ordinary running costs; as for the garage and any large repairs, they would have to be paid for out of the remaining forty pounds—the car had cost a hundred and ten. So my days as a motorist were obviously numbered. But, for the moment, I didn’t care. I was extraordinarily happy. Cambridge was over for ever. And I had returned from a romantic holiday by the sea. Something wonderful, I felt certain, was just about to happen. That I hadn’t written a word for months; that my film prospects, after a discouraging interview with Stolls, had disappeared, didn’t worry me in the least.
A moral millionaire, I was lavish with my invitations: the Renault was kept going from morning to night. I had no longer any reason to be afraid of the London traffic. My enormous vehicle was certain to get the better of any collision, short of an omnibus or a tram. I bent several mudguards, buffers and wings: twice I had to pay. The Renault, much dinted, began to look her age. But Philip, always chivalrous, still declared her to be the most comfortable car in town.
Philip loved motoring. Seated beside me, in his smart blue overcoat, with the silk handkerchief just showing from the breast pocket, he fairly beamed with satisfaction and proprietory pleasure. His presence invested the Renault with a certain air of careless, if faded, luxury: I felt as though I were his chauffeur and the car a Rolls-Royce.
One afternoon in the middle of September, a friend who had come to lunch with me talked enthusiastically about the charming Anglo-Belgian family he had met on holiday in a Breton village. The husband, Monsieur Cheuret, was a well-known violinist, the leader of a string quartette. He had been living in London for the last fifteen years. His wife was an Englishwoman. They had two boys. One of the boys, Edouard, had cut his knee very badly and had been laid up, now, for several weeks. We might go and visit them that afternoon, my friend suggested; and wouldn’t I, perhaps, offer to take Edouard out in the car to Richmond Park? Needless to say, this was exactly what he himself had already proposed to the Cheurets; so I could only agree.
They lived in Chelsea, in a mews just off the King’s Road. As we drove up, all the doors and windows were standing open, so that you could see right into the downstair room; and the whole place with its gay check curtains and steep miniature staircase looked like a big doll’s house. In the bright sunshine its appearance was so disarmingly cheerful that I felt myself, after the first glance, already quite charmed. And now the doll’s house effect was heightened by the appearance, on a tiny balcony above the front door, of a real live Dutch doll, with plump, red dimpled cheeks, who shouted to my friend: ‘Hullo, Eric! Quite a stranger, aren’t you?’ and disappeared. ‘That’s Rose,’ my friend explained. ‘She’s their cook.’
Next, M. Cheuret himself looked out, leaning on the half-door which opened directly into the ground-floor. He was a thin youthful-looking man of about forty, with plentiful greyish hair brushed back from his lined sunburnt face, and a pleasant rather sleepy smile: ‘So it’s you, Eric,’ he said. ‘Please come inside.’ He spoke gently, with a slight foreign accent, and seemed tired.
Later, I was introduced to the rest of the family. Edouard, with his bandaged knee, lay on the sofa; a pale dark-haired boy of eleven. Jean, his elder brother, was a year older: he seemed livelier, less intelligent, more English. Madame Cheuret herself, dark and elegant, a cigarette between her sharply-coloured lips, was rather my idea of a Russian woman out of a Tchekhov story. This is how real human people live, I thought, as my eyes wandered over the comfortable untidiness of the large room; the music stacked on the grand piano; the pencil, pipe, orange and block of resin beside the keyboard; the violin on the chair next to the tennis-racket; the fishing-rods in the corner; the photographs with scrawled inscriptions; the Japanese prints on the whitewashed brick walls; the Breton cupboard crammed with music-stands, pictures, books, clothes. People living together, busy, friendly, intent upon their work, had created the atmosphere in this house: nothing was planned, forced, formal, consciously quaint. Mentally, I compared it with my own, with Philip’s home: it was difficult to realize, even, that we were all inhabiting the same city. This was another world.
During tea, Cheuret himself began to talk to me. He asked me about myself. His curiously soft, direct approach, his almost feminine air of attentiveness, broke down the last of my shyness in a moment: I began telling him about Cambridge and the Tripos. He nodded. He seemed to find what I had done perfectly natural: there was no need whatever for the semi-defensive explanations I had so often rehearsed. Here was a man old enough to be my father, to whom I could talk openly as if to a friend of my own age:
‘Yes,’ he repeated, ‘I understand, of course … It was impossible for you to remain any longer.’ He passed his hand, with a tired, soothing gesture, through his hair: ‘And what shall you do now?’
‘Well—I want to get on with my writing, of course. And I’m looking out for a job.’
‘Aha!’ Cheuret seemed amused. He smiled his sleepy, rather sardonic smile. ‘What kind of job, may I ask?’
‘I thought perhaps I could get w
ork as somebody’s secretary. I can’t do shorthand, though. I can type a little; I’d soon learn that. I know I wouldn’t be much good in an office …’
‘Vous parlez Français?’
‘Un peu. Mais je peux comprendre très bien.’
‘Splendid!’ Cheuret laughed. ‘Now let me tell you something. Since some time, I have been looking for a person like yourself. Will you be my secretary, Mr Isherwood?’
‘Yes … Of course … Thank you very much …’
And so it was settled.
At first, I could hardly believe in my astounding good luck. That I should be allowed to come to this house every day; to have a part, however insignificant, in the life of the Cheuret family, seemed too wonderful to be true. All my friends, when they heard of the new job, were consumed with envy; Philip was so excited and upset that he nearly ran away from the medical school, there and then. Even my relatives were intrigued—though they didn’t fail to point out that this was probably only an interim occupation, that it ‘led’ nowhere, that it wasn’t very well paid. (For the first fortnight I was to come on trial free; after that, Cheuret promised me a pound a week.) Officially, I worked only in the mornings, from ten to twelve: but it was understood that I would sometimes stay on longer, if necessary, subject to our mutual convenience.
Two days later, I presented myself for duty at the mews, carrying the brand new portable typewriter which, in the first flush of enthusiasm, I had insisted on buying—despite Cheuret’s assurance that a machine could easily be borrowed. Rose, the cook, opened the door to me. ‘Oh, it’s you, is it?’ was her welcome. ‘Thought it was the butcher.’ She grinned, showing her absurd dimples, and shouted upstairs: ‘Secretary’s here!’
Cheuret hadn’t exaggerated when he told me that he needed a secretary. Indeed, he could have done with two, and a book-keeper as well. For the last five years he had dealt with all his own correspondence, both business and private, in both languages—and this despite the fact that he had to rehearse, play at concerts, transpose music, make researches at the British Museum, run a music society and spend two days a week out of town altogether, giving violin lessons to the pupils of various large schools. He wrote English easily but incorrectly; while Madame Cheuret, who helped him a great deal, was incapable of spelling any but the simplest words. We laughed a lot while they told me all this. Cheuret dragged out an immense suitcase from beneath one of the beds: it was full of letters. ‘These,’ he told me, ‘are extremely urgent.’ He opened a cupboard: letters poured out in an avalanche: ‘These are not so urgent: we ought to answer them by Christmas.’
But letter-answering was to be only a part of my duties. Cheuret had great, almost visionary schemes for the future. So far, he said, the quartette had worked without method: they had given concerts here and there, where they were already known or had happened to be invited. That was all wrong. Often, they had had to take an isolated engagement in a distant town, and their travelling expenses had, in consequence, been very high. What they needed was someone to plan for them. Tours must be worked out; schools and provincial music societies must be written to in advance; alternative dates must be offered and alternative programmes; a book ought to be prepared stating exactly which items had been performed at which concerts, to avoid unnecessary repetition. (Here Cheuret casually indicated a large washing-basket, stuffed full of old concert programmes: ‘You’ll find all details in there,’ he added.) And then there was the B.B.C. And the question of gramophone-recording. ‘When you have spare time, you may look through some catalogues and try to think of some suggestions for new records.’ I nodded, trying to be as brisk and businesslike as possible; but I couldn’t help thinking that that ‘spare time’ would be long in coming.
Certainly, Cheuret could scarcely have found a less efficient employee than myself; and yet I doubt if anyone, however highly trained, could have done much better. The ideal secretary-manager of whom he dreamed would have been compelled to keep away from the house altogether; otherwise, Cheuret would never have left him alone. The truth was that, like most very energetic men, he couldn’t bear to see anybody else working. And although he was for ever complaining that he hadn’t enough time to give to his music because of these wretched letters, letter-writing seemed to have a fatal fascination for him. Suppose a lady had written to ask whether the quartette would be free to come down to her club and give a concert during the month of January; Cheuret would never merely tell me to write ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ He would compose a complete answer, half-French, half-English, in pencil, on the back of the original letter. This answer I would translate, correct, type out and bring to him to sign. He would read it through, smile encouragingly, murmur: ‘Good … Good … Very good … Excellent …’ and then began to scribble further notes in the margin. Another, revised copy would be typed. And there would be more approbation, more notes. I was lucky if this didn’t happen three or four times in succession.
Letters, and copies of answers, had, of course, to be filed. We had bought a very handsome file, dull grey in colour, which opened like a concertina—it was known, always, as ‘The Mud-Coloured File.’ This file gave me more trouble than any other inanimate object I have ever encountered, before or since. How often, on arrival, I would be greeted by Rose or Jean or Edouard from the top of the staircase with the news: ‘The Mud-Coloured File’s lost again! Have you seen it? The Governor’s been hunting for hours!’ And then, at last, it would be discovered, lying innocently unnoticed on a chair, toning perfectly with dull grey shadows of a late autumn morning and, from the distance of a few yards, nearly invisible. Not only could the mud-coloured file uncannily disappear: its roomy pockets seemed to swallow letters like a conjurer’s vanishing-box. Cheuret’s conception of filing differed radically from my own: if he put a paper away under the letter P, then I was sure to hunt for it in M, N, O, Q and R—and vice versa. At last, by tacit consent, we stopped using the file altogether; except for correspondence which was no longer important. Urgent letters were popped into the suitcase, slipped between sheets of music or left lying on the sitting-room mantelpiece, as in the days before my arrival.
But, if our interior organization still left a good deal to be desired, we became, outwardly, at least, very official. Cheuret had some new business notepaper printed which was headed not only with the address, telephone number and names of the quartette, but also with my own name. ‘Secretary: Christopher Isherwood’—with what furtive pride I read and reread those three words! They were my passport to the great outer world, the world beyond the schoolroom windows, which I had waited so long and so impatiently to enter. Never again should I blush or stammer or feel awkward when ladies at tea-parties asked me what I ‘did.’ I had my answer ready.
And not merely was I now a humble member of the enormous musical community; I had my colleagues, my equals. Over the telephone, at any rate, one secretary was as good as another. We knew each other’s names; we said good morning and chatted politely for a few moments before stating our business. True, I could hardly echo the words of Miss Gibson, of the B.B.C., whose invariable formula was: ‘I’ll just call down to the porter’s lodge and find out if Mr So-and-So’s still in the building.’ But I did try to convey the illusion that Cheuret had to be hunted for through a whole suite of rooms; and, even when he was sitting in the opposite chair, I liked to keep the enquirer waiting for at least a couple of minutes. My particular friend was Mr Hardy, of the Gramophone Society. We had never met, but our politeness was excessive. Picturing a dynamic middle-aged man seated amidst a subservient staff of stenographers, I was, nevertheless, determined not to be outdone. ‘Very well, Mr Hardy,’ I would rattle briskly into the mouthpiece, ‘I’ll have that typed out and sent round to you tonight … oh, splendid, thanks … Rather busy, you know … Yes, certainly, Mr Hardy; I’ll take the matter up with Monsieur Cheuret at once … Good morning …’ Nearly a year later, we met at a concert and were introduced. Mr Hardy proved to be a mild, agreeable, literary young man of my own age. H
e told me that he had always supposed me to be forty, at least.
Although Cheuret had lived in England for so long, had married an English wife, wore English clothes, played English games, he remained a Belgian to the marrow; I think this was really the secret of his great personal charm. He made none of those ridiculous, touching and irritating attempts, so common to expatriates, to ape the manners and peculiarities of his adopted country. Amongst Englishmen, he was frankly a foreigner, and therefore perfectly natural. An artist, born in a country where art has a respected social status, he nevertheless contrived to adapt himself to a way of life founded upon a denial that the artist (unless commercially successful) has any right to exist. I never heard him say a word against England. And, indeed, it might be argued that England had made him the man he was. Had he remained in Paris or Brussels—like one or two of his now famous fellow students whom I was later to meet—he would still, no doubt, have been charming, considerate, kind; but he would also have been inescapably ‘le maître.’ In London, he wasn’t ‘le maître’—except to a small clique of society snobs; and they, even, didn’t pay him half the homage they reserved for a stranger of inferior talent from Amsterdam, Barcelona or Berlin. In London, he was Mister Shuray, who played tennis and the violin, both well. Many of Cheuret’s best friends—sincere lovers of music in their way—valued him chiefly as a keen fisherman.
Cheuret’s career was a salutary object-lesson to ‘Isherwood the Artist.’ Here was a man who had spent the best years of his life performing other people’s music—and trying to perform it, not according to some showy personal interpretation, but as the composer himself would have liked to hear it played. This was his whole aim as a musician: a faithful anonymous performance. To this aim he had sacrificed all prospects of stardom and big material success—had sacrificed them as a matter of course, without any complaint, or posing, or fuss. He wasn’t jealous of the great solo musicians; on the contrary, he admired them, both personally and collectively—provided that they could really play. He recognized their importance and the function they performed. He laughed, of course, at the hysterical demonstrations they provoked from pseudo-admirers; never at the men themselves. Talent, in others, excused every affection and oddity. He was quite shocked when I hinted that oddity had helped to earn that seventy-guinea fee for an evening’s concert, at which Cheuret himself had received five.
Lions and Shadows Page 11
