Music, as far as he personally was concerned, meant chamber music, performed by a string quartette. The quartette, he was never tired of saying, consisted of four equal instrumental voices, and not a solo violin accompanied by three subsidiary instruments. His only bitter criticisms were reserved for first violins who ‘led’ their quartettes egotistically, dictatorially, to the overthrow of balance in the music. Cheuret wanted a musical democracy of four persons. I remember his jokes about a celebrated central European quartette in which, he said, the leader had absolute power over his three colleagues; even their wives had to obey him! So strong, indeed, was his antipathy to any form of imposed authority that he refused absolutely to call his quartette ‘The Cheuret,’ even when its three other members wished him to do so.
And yet, for all his self-dedication, his material sacrifice, his quality of unworldly simplicity, Cheuret wasn’t and didn’t in the least feel himself to be ‘exiled’ from the world. My conception of ‘Isherwood the Artist,’ the lonely, excluded, monastic figure, was something he could never have understood. He never asked for or expected any kind of preferential treatment—either from strangers or members of his own family—on the strength of his ‘perceptions’ or ‘temperament’ or ‘nerves.’ If he wanted to be alone, to concentrate on some difficult piece of work, he didn’t ask us to leave the room: he retired, as a matter of course, to the bathroom or the coal-hole under the stairs. He seemed to be able to start and stop working instantly, at will: when we were all together, he took his full share of the conversation—there were no moody self-conscious creative silences. To think private thoughts in public he would probably have considered rude—as, indeed, it is. Once, when I was trying to write a poem in my head during a party, Cheuret said mockingly: ‘Christopher, you look like some deep thing that hasn’t got its instrument.’
He and Madame Cheuret were admirable parents: their relations with Jean and Edouard astonished me—they were so easy, so natural, so entirely unlike anything I had ever seen before. There was something very youthful about Cheuret, despite his grey hair and thin, lined face; one saw it most clearly when he was talking to Edouard about fishing or arguing with Jean as to who should take the better tennis-racket. Sometimes he got angry, and shouted; he was never cold and biting, and he didn’t try and trap his sons into promises, obligations, confessions. If somebody said something subtle and cutting, he was curiously helpless: he couldn’t speak that language. There were moments when the two boys seemed infinitely more sophisticated, more adroit, more canny than their father.
Yet they were charming, too, in their different ways: Jean, already at his preparatory school, so very much the English schoolboy, yet a bit unsure of himself, conscious of a difference, his foreign blood showing itself in the way he moved his head, laughed, told a funny story: Edouard, dark, pale, squarely built, like the child of a warmer climate, riper and more self-possessed than his age, clever at making little drawings and writing verses. Cheuret gave both of them violin lessons during the holidays, but neither had any special musical talent. This must have been a great disappointment to him, yet he never twisted it into a reproach against them, even when he had lost his temper.
I made friends with Madame Cheuret more slowly. At first, I was shy of her: she seemed so elegant, so collected, and always, though she was kindness itself, just a little aloof. Later, she told me that I had embarrassed her dreadfully, during my first weeks at the house, by my politeness, always jumping to my feet when she came into the room and hurrying to hold the door open as she went out. These Kensington manners had, it seemed, also seriously worried Cheuret himself: he had begun to try to live up to them—though I must say that I never noticed this. When the shyness had worn off, I discovered that Madame Cheuret was one of the most placid people I had ever known. She had a genius for making herself comfortable: if there were five minutes to spare after lunch or before a concert, she would sink, with a sigh of pleasure, into the nearest chair, and, if possible, put her feet up. If Cheuret lived perpetually wound up, like a spring, she was always uncoiling, gently relaxing—and we all, to some extent, relaxed with her. In that agitated household, with its continual coming and going, its flurry and excitement, she radiated ease and calm—and contrived, nevertheless, to get through as much work as any two of us put together.
Last of all, after a long period of probation, I was accepted by Rose. Rose, despite her dimples and plump smiles, was a merciless critic: if she didn’t like you, she didn’t. Nobody’s recommendation counted with her. She came from Suffolk.
She had been with the Cheurets for ten years, and had given them notice at least a hundred times during that period. Cheuret she called ‘The Governor’ or ‘The Boss’; Madame Cheuret was ‘Madam’; Edouard was ‘Tiggy’; Jean was ‘His Lordship’—this last a term of disapprobation. Jean had ‘got in wrong’ with her shortly before my arrival, and she didn’t really forgive him for two and a half years. Edouard she squabbled with intermittently; usually because he had interfered in the cooking (he himself was already an accomplished cook): ‘Get out of my kitchen, will you?’ she would suddenly exclaim. ‘I’m all bloody behind, this morning, as it is!’ Edouard loved these rows. He danced round her, slapping her ample bottom, embracing her, pinching her, shouting: ‘Rose is all behind! Rose is all behind!’ until she picked up the soup-ladle or the rolling-pin and chased him downstairs.
Rose called me ‘Christopher,’ and spoke of me to the others as ‘Secretary.’ ‘Hullo, Christopher,’ she would greet me. ‘How’s life?’ If I spoke first, and said, ‘Hullo, Rose,’ she would answer: ‘Hullo yourself’—but this only if she happened to be in a particularly good humour. When something had annoyed her, which was about three times a week, she would only give me a very curt, ‘Hullo,’ and disappear at once into the music-room, because, on that tiny staircase, it was otherwise quite impossible for me to get past. If I followed her and asked what was the matter, she snorted, ‘Fed up—that’s what I am,’ or merely didn’t reply. But generally, in this case, as I was going up the stairs, I would hear a loud, instantly suppressed snigger. One evening I invited her to come with me to the cinema. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was being shown. I had seen it, long before, three or four times already, and, towards the end, I fell asleep. Rose was delighted. And, when the bombardment began and I woke up with a violent start, her fat hearty laugh rang out, louder than all the guns. Afterwards, she told Madame Cheuret that Secretary was ‘ever so nice to go out with.’
As for myself, I had long since fallen in love with the entire family. My attitude towards them became violently possessive. I was jealous of their friends. Looking enviously through old photograph albums of past holidays and concert tours, I hated to think of all the years of their company I had missed. I wanted, in some vague daydream manner, to help and protect them against the outside world that seemed to menace their gaiety and their curious quality of innocence: and I wanted also, contradictorily, to be taken under their wing, to be acknowledged by them as elder brother and son. On weekdays, I invented work, so as to be able to return to the house in the afternoons: often I stayed on until ten or eleven o’clock at night. On Sundays, when I had no excuse whatever for seeing them, I felt lonely and terribly bored.
Kurella, the second violin, was of Polish extraction. He was a pale, heavy-lidded young man, with arched sensitive nostrils and big, well-formed sensual lips. He was always well dressed, in smart city suits, with silk handkerchief, gloves and spats: he might have been an exceptionally intelligent stockbroker, if you hadn’t noticed his hands. When he played, he leaned forward persuasively in his chair, his shoulders hunched together, as though he were dancing; his whole attitude diffident, persuasive, discreetly erotic. If a string quartette can be regarded as a kind of conversation, Kurella seemed to me to be stating a case for the smooth discreet life of the world; hinting, in his playing, that everything is all right, is perfect, so long as you’re careful, so long as you aren’t found out. But all this with a ce
rtain wistfulness, a certain nostalgia for romance. Yes, he was really very romantic, in his up-to-date, understated fashion: he represented romance in 1925—a wistful little half-question, refined away to the faintest innuendo. He had a sensitive profile, fine-drawn, melancholy, impassive, which ladies in the audience often admired.
Tommy Braddock was the baby of the quartette, not yet twenty years old. He was large and hefty and nice-looking, with black eyes and hair and dazzlingly white teeth. Later, he would run to fat. Everybody liked Tommy—including Rose. He used to clown about in the kitchen, stuffing himself with anything sweet he could lay his hands on, and giving her wet, smacking kisses. He could play almost every known instrument including the saxophone and the ukulele; and already he had had offers from one of the most successful jazz-bands in London. Cheuret wouldn’t be able to keep him much longer. They both realized this: Tommy was apologetic and rather guilty; Cheuret reasonable but secretly pained—in his heart of hearts, he couldn’t understand how anybody of Tommy’s talent could abandon classical music. Tommy, himself, didn’t look at things in that way at all. If he felt guilty it was only because he was fond of the Cheurets: Beethoven and Mozart claimed no more and no less of his loyalty than the composer of the latest ‘hot’ rhythm. At the moment, he was playing jazz in his spare time: once he confessed to me that he had sat up most of the night with his saxophone: ‘You see, Chris,’ he added, very seriously, ‘Jazz isn’t like classical music. It needs a lot of rehearsing.’ He wore horn-rimmed spectacles, double-breasted waistcoats, bell-bottomed trousers, gaudy ties. When he played the viola, he was deadly serious. The tip of his tongue appeared between his lips as he worked his way through a tricky passage; then, when the difficulty was safely past, his big mouth opened into a broad grin, deeply satisfied and a trifle surprised, as though he had unexpectedly won some money at cards.
Forno, the ’cellist, was Anglo-Italian. He was small, dapper and dark, with lustrous passionate eyes and a short prominent imperious nose—very much the musician, in his choice of broad-brimmed black hats and floppy ties: his temperament was consciously operatic, he burlesqued it to conceal a charming, touching shyness—every woman was to him, secretly, a princess. He held the ’cello as though a very beautiful young girl had fainted in his arms. When he played his eyes were closed; he seemed to swoon, to drown in a sombre passionate dream. Certain notes vibrated visibly through his whole body, making him shudder in the very marrow of his bones; his eyelids clenched more tightly and his lips parted, as if in extreme pain. But he could be jolly, also, when the quartette rehearsed its lighter pieces, the arrangement of Scotch airs and Goossens’ Jack o’ Lantern: then his ’cello ceased to be a girl and became an Italian barrel-organ, to which he sang, at rehearsals, with a pipe in the corner of his mouth.
Early in October, Cheuret had arranged four concerts, at schools and music societies in Kent and Sussex. He suggested that we should take the Renault and combine business with a three days’ motoring trip.
My memories of this remarkable journey are vivid but confused. There was a girls’ school in the middle of a forest—an immense Georgian house with terraced gardens, circular flower-beds, fountains and box hedges, at which King Edward the Seventh had once stayed: we arrived there very late at night. Tea was brought while the quartette tuned up in front of a roaring fire. Forno lay flat on his back on a couch, plucking his ’cello-strings. Cheuret wandered restlessly round the room scraping out improvised airs. All four of them played like this during the intervals: if I wanted to say anything to them, I had to go up close and shout into their ears. I remember the faintly tittering hush as the quartette took their places; the moment’s pause of silence: then the sudden vivid shock of sound, as the opening bars of the Haydn B Flat poured out into the stillness of the crowded room. The four ringing voices of the instruments, so clear, so fearless, so alive, were like a challenge—from the four men on the platform to the three hundred girls and women seated below. Their plain, vibrant statement seemed, at that moment, so absurd in its frankness that I began to smile. Surely, this wouldn’t be allowed? Surely, in that first instant, something had been exploded for ever; blown into millions of pieces which could never again be collected and put together—the elegant demure vase-like form of artificially virginal life in that palatial cloistered house? Surely some girl would jump to her feet and scream the J’en appelle? But no, apparently not. Perhaps I was merely a trifle drunk: we had all had whiskies at the pub to keep out the cold. The faces around me were pleased, appreciative, quite placid: this was evidently just another concert—classical, Haydn, most suitable. As the quartette continued to explore the variations of the air, my own senses dulled into normality: the audience was quite right; this, after all, was only chamber music: before the end of the last movement, I had nearly fallen asleep.
The big school near Brighton was built chiefly of glass. Windswept, ruthlessly modern, it seemed to receive us into an atmosphere of Amazonian mockery: only the highest efficiency could excuse our male presence here. The concert was held in a vast magnificent hall. Told by Cheuret to arrange the music on the stands, I emerged timidly from a small door on to what seemed to be a full-sized theatrical stage. We were already rather late and the audience was restless: my appearance was greeted by half-ironical, half-genuinely mistaken applause. Thoroughly rattled, I distributed the parts at random, amidst just inaudible comments. A mistress showed me my seat, in the front row, between two girls. I glanced furtively at one of them: she turned her head away and gave a loud scornful snigger. Then the quartette appeared and took their places. There was clapping and an expectant hush; but the music didn’t begin—Cheuret and Kurella were hastily exchanging sheets, Tommy’s were in the wrong order and Forno’s were upside down. More sniggering. Cheuret wagged his finger at me in comic reproof. I wished the earth would swallow me whole. But worse was to follow. During the Ravel, I became gradually aware that I was the centre of some kind of violent disturbance: the girls on either side of me made nervous movements, the air was full of suppressed giggling and, just behind me, someone was having hysterics into a handkerchief. Presently the excitement spread to the quartette itself. Cheuret couldn’t see me, but Tommy, who could, was broadly grinning, and Kurella kept making signs with his eyebrows and head. I felt my cheeks burning like hot coals, but I didn’t dare look round. When it was all over, and I could rejoin the others, I found them nearly as hysterical as the girls themselves. ‘You mean to say you didn’t know?’ gasped Tommy: ‘Why, there was a mouse—sitting right under your chair!’
That evening, we started back towards London. It was fearfully cold, and the Downs were wrapped in fog. The farther we went, the thicker it got, until, at last, we decided to muffle the headlamps. We stopped, at the bottom of a little hill: this was the highest and loneliest part of the road. Cheuret, who was sitting next to me, got out of the car with a couple of scarves. As he did so, five men suddenly appeared out of the surrounding fog. It was difficult to say where they had come from; but they certainly seemed to have been waiting for us. They stood round the car in a casual, vaguely threatening semi-circle, without speaking. Kurella and Tommy, in the back, were alarmed. Forno called to Cheuret to hurry up. Only Cheuret himself, bending over the lamp, seemed quite unconcerned. I saw one of the men turn to another, as if asking a question. The other shrugged his shoulders slightly. Then, without a word, they all turned and disappeared; dispersing, apparently, along the sides of the road. Nothing happened. We drove on.
The lights began to fail. I had had trouble with them before: something was wrong with the battery. Now they slowly faded out altogether. We followed the tail-lights of other cars or simply crawled along in the dark, as best I could, going now and then into the ditch but never actually colliding with anything or getting stuck. It was long after midnight when we drove up to the door of Cheuret’s house.
This was the Renault’s last and longest voyage. I sold her soon afterwards. I only got forty pounds; and she had ruined me for many
months to come. I never want to own a car again. But I bore her no ill-will. She had served her purpose. She had got me my job.
On Sundays, I used sometimes to take the train from Liverpool Street Station to the little suburban Essex town where Chalmers lived. I always enjoyed these journeys. They were deeply tinged, in my imagination, with the pigments of the Hynd and Starn stories. First came the glimpses of the river, at the bottom of slum streets; the gas-works; the funnels of steamers; then the rows of little houses, with their close-drawn curtains and sharp-leaved shrubs, jealously guarding the secrets of a sinister provincialism. Murders were committed here, with coal-hammer or weed-killer, to obtain small amounts of petty cash or a few shares in a South American company, discovered, too late, to be already bankrupt. And there was the Little Hotel itself, standing at the verge of the sooty fields, amidst a litter of building materials. Moxon’s delicate white hand drew down the blind as my train rolled past.
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