by Mary Clive
Lionel advanced upon the plank.
‘What are you doing up there?’ said his mother through clenched teeth.
‘I’ll give you twenty questions and three guesses,’ said Lionel who, as you may have noticed, was very spoilt. He wobbled slightly.
‘Well, come down at once,’ said his mother in a strangled voice.
‘Am I to be punished?’
‘Come down.’
‘Not till you tell me whether I’m to be punished.’
‘Oh, do come down.’
Lionel saw he was winning. It was pure showing-off anyway, as he never was punished.
‘There are three things I might do. A, I might stay where I am. B, I might go back into the roof. C, I might dive through the glass into the billiard room.’ He put his hands above his head as though preparing to dive.
‘Don’t stand there blathering. Come down.’
‘Promise I’m not to be punished or even put into disgrace.’
‘And the rest of us, too,’ prompted Rosamund.
‘And the rest of them, too,’ said Lionel. ‘Otherwise I’m afraid it’s ye olde billiard room for me.’
‘Anything you like,’ said his mother desperately.
One by one we walked across the dreadful plank, a very draggled tribe of Indians. Mr O’Sullivan helped us to get on to the ladder, but even so, my knees were shaking so much that I could only just manage it. One by one we filed past the Savages’ mother.
When we were all out of the lumber room Mr O’Sullivan locked the door and put the key into his pocket.
The only one of us who was not in the least ashamed was Lionel.
‘I want you to read to me,’ he said calmly to his mother and went off with her.
The rest of us trooped silently to the nursery, sure of a scolding for having got so dirty and only cheered by a glimpse of Mr O’Sullivan disappearing into the back regions with the lumber-room key balanced on the end of his nose.
10. Lionel’s Play
Next day Lionel did indeed show me his Secret Place, which was in a hut in the wood which the children called the Little Trespassing House. It had a broken window-catch so that it was quite easy to get into it.
I admired it profusely, although there was nothing much to admire except sacks of pheasant food; however, Lionel lifted up an empty sack and revealed some Christmas cards which he and Peggy had removed from different mantelpieces, and also a jar half full of bull’s-eyes.
We sat on the sacks and ate the bull’s-eyes, and Lionel talked and I agreed with everything he said, sometimes before he had said it. Lionel liked my admiration. He talked faster and faster, until at last he suddenly stopped and said:
‘I think I’ll make you Berengaria.’
‘How lovely!’ I said at once. ‘Make me what?’
‘Berengaria. She’s the heroine of my play.’
‘But I thought Peggy was to be heroine.’
‘She was,’ said Lionel carelessly. ‘But I’ve changed my mind. Let’s go and tell Mamma. She may have to alter the clothes.’
We found his mother writing letters as usual, and he explained about Berengaria.
‘But won’t Peggy be very disappointed?’
‘Oh, I can easily write another part for her,’ said Lionel. ‘She can be one of the revellers-and-attendants and a captive maiden. And she can be killed in the battle at the end. We really do need more people to be the enemy. It should look as if I was fighting against overwhelming odds. Peggy will have three parts which will be better than just one. She ought to be pleased. So alter the clothes to fit Evelyn.’
‘Well, break it gently to Peggy,’ said his mother. ‘Perhaps I’d better come with you and help you to put it tactfully.’
After looking about the garden we found Peggy outside the potting shed giving sugar to the garden horse, Major. Major mowed the lawns in the summer, and in the winter pulled a cart about. He wore leather overshoes fastened on with straps and buckles, as Lord Tamerlane could not bear hoof-marks on the paths and, although past noticing anything very much, he could still detect a hoof-mark, however faint.
‘You’re not to be Berengaria,’ said Lionel abruptly without waiting for his mother to lead delicately up to the subject. ‘Evelyn’s to be it.’
‘But you are to have three other parts,’ Lionel’s mother hastened to put in, ‘and three changes of tunic.’
I expected to see Peggy go red and possibly cry, but she only said, ‘I’m glad. Berengaria had to say such awful things. Need I be in the play at all?’
‘Don’t you want to be?’ asked Lionel, appalled.
‘No,’ said Peggy. ‘(Dear old Major, good old Major. Don’t snatch, good boy.) It’s all so silly.’ She began to talk to the horse again, and we three slunk away feeling small.
‘I don’t think your play silly,’ I said to Lionel as we went back to the house.
‘It’s Peggy who’s silly,’ said Lionel crossly.
I strutted along feeling that success had come to me at last, and when I was shown the dress that Berengaria would wear, I was more pleased than ever that I was to be the heroine. The dress was pale blue with little gold stars on it and there was also a pink satin cloak which had once belonged to one of the aunts, and a gold paper crown and a spangled veil. I was much the same size as Peggy and the things fitted me without having to be altered. I also saw the piles of cloaks and tunics that had been got ready for the other children. They were mostly made of a shiny stuff called sateen, which sounded very grand and was very cheap. Lionel’s own cloak was a green velvet one, the pick of the acting box, always worn by the hero of every play.
‘You’d better learn your part,’ said Lionel, offering me a small washing book. I opened it and read:
‘6 bath-towels, 3 pillowslips …’
‘Further on, idiot,’ said Lionel.
I turned the pages and came to a lot of very faint pencil writing. ‘The Dragons’ was written quite clearly at the top and there was a picture of two dragons on their hind legs, but apart from that I couldn’t make out any of it. Each page was rather more scrawly than the one before, except the last which was suddenly legible as Lionel had written in block letters, ‘HERE AMIDST THE LOUD APPLAUSE OF THE AUDIENCE THE PLAY ENDS’.
‘I’m afraid I can’t read it, Lionel.’
Lionel snatched it from me, but after puzzling over it he had to admit that it was beyond him also.
‘But it doesn’t matter,’ he said, ‘I can make my part up as I go along, and you don’t have to say much anyway. It’s chiefly “Alas!” and “Woe!” and that sort of thing, and “Must I then die?” when they burn you at the stake.’
‘Do I really get burnt?’
‘No, I rescue you, but your toes have been burnt off so that you walk with a limp for the rest of your life.’
We had several rehearsals of the play. They took place in the drawing room, a room in which the gilt furniture was so stiff and forbidding that no one usually went into it. We must have been a very tiresome team of actors as the little ones had no idea what the play was supposed to be about, and they giggled and talked and stood on one leg and forgot when they were supposed to come on. Lionel used to get frantic and wave his arms and pull his own hair.
I was the only person who really tried, and I was trying my very hardest as I was so pleased to be heroine. I was looking forward to wearing the gorgeous clothes and I had a sort of feeling that I had a real gift for acting. Perhaps, I thought, I was what I had heard my governess describe as a ‘heaven-sent actress’. Perhaps the house party would be stunned by my beautiful appearance and overwhelmed by the pathos of my voice. Perhaps they would recognize me as a genius.
I could not quite imagine myself stunning Lady Tamerlane, or even the aunts, let alone the uncles, but I thought that among the audience there might be someone I had not noticed before. Perhaps that person would rise up and say, ‘This child is a genius. Let me take her away and train her and she will become a great actress. Indeed, she is
a great actress now.’
I was often so busy thinking of this sort of thing that I forgot to come in at the right place, and Lionel’s mother who was rehearsing us used to say, ‘Evelyn! Evelyn! Do pay attention.’
Actually it was not easy to recognize one’s cues as Lionel used to make his part up as he went along and only stop when his imagination ran out, and sometimes the things that I was supposed to say didn’t fit at all. However, it never seemed to matter very much, and the two big cousins, Malcolm and Alister, were very much worse than I was. Malcolm had been honoured with the part of the villain, Abun, but he had been roped in against his will and he thought the whole thing beneath his dignity and was not helpful at all.
When no one could stand any more rehearsals the play was acted in the library which, as I have said, was a very long room. Half of it was filled with chairs, and when all the visitors and servants were seated, there were supposed to be sixty people there. I don’t know who counted them, but we all agreed that we were performing in front of sixty people.
There was a window at one end and curtains were pulled across this, and we acted in front of the curtains. At the sides were screens for us to lurk behind.
Dressing us took a very long time. We put our fancy dresses over our ordinary clothes and our evening shoes stuck out at the bottom. The tunics had been made with very small holes for our heads, so each one had to be wrenched down by a grown-up. Of course that made the girls’ hair very untidy, and someone had to go and get all our hairbrushes down from our bedrooms.
Harry and Betty had the most amusing clothes as they were the Dragons. One wore a cardboard bulldog’s head, the other a bear’s. They had green tunics and green stockings and green gloves (white cotton ones dyed), and they wore bedroom slippers under their stockings in case they trod on a tin-tack. Their tails were long green bags fastened to their backs and stuffed with newspapers.
At last we were supposed to be ready, and the play started by Alister Glen giving the audience a tune on Nana Glen’s gramophone. Gramophones were a fairly new invention, and records, instead of being flat, were round like bits of drainpipe. Each one lived in a dear little box of its own, but they were a nuisance to carry about, and Alister had only brought down one to the library. It was called ‘The Galloping Major’ and I thought it was something to do with the garden pony. I could not understand it anyway, although Alister played it very slowly. It turned out that we were not really ready after all, and Alister had to play it four times before Lionel, green velvet cloak and all, walked in front of the curtains, held up his hand for silence, and announced ‘The Dragons’.
Lady Tamerlane clapped and everyone else did too. Lionel went out again and there was another long pause broken only by Tommy Howliboo saying in his piercing child’s voice, ‘Is it over? Can I go away now?’
I got behind one of the screens in a place from where I could see the audience. Lady Tamerlane was sitting in front with the aunts. Howliboos and the Savage baby were held on laps. Fathers and uncles were at the side, and there were quantities of servants behind. There were such a lot of people that they all looked rather a blur, and hidden away among the crowd might easily have been the stranger who was going to recognize me as a genius.
At last Lionel came on again and walked up and down in a most natural manner, exactly as he did in real life when something had annoyed him.
‘I’m in love! I’m in love!’ he said. ‘Oh, what a bore! Oh, what a bore!’
That was the signal for Malcolm Glen, alias Abun, to knock on the shutters and poke his head between the curtains. He knocked on the shutters with such force that the burglar bell that was fixed to them started to ring, and when his head appeared he made faces, squinting first outwards and then cross-eyed, so that everyone began to laugh.
Lionel waited, frowning, till the burglar bell ceased jangling and then said:
‘Who art thou?’
‘I am a bun,’ replied Abun.
‘Wretch, villain, traitor,’ shouted Lionel with real fury.
The whole play was less tragic than Lionel had intended. When it was my turn to enter I came in sideways, carefully facing the audience as I had been told to do, and incidentally looking out for my unknown admirer. But I quite forgot to look at Lionel who was proposing to me, as I was thinking of my crown and my veil and my pink cloak and my blue dress with the gold stars, and I was trying to see my reflection in the glass of one of the pictures.
‘Wilt thou be mine?’ asked Lionel.
‘Alas! I am betrothed to Malcolm, I mean a bun,’ I replied, smiling at Mr O’Sullivan whose eye I had just caught.
‘Do pay attention, Berengaria,’ said poor Lionel, but he could say no more, for at that moment he was attacked by violent hiccoughs.
‘Dost thou love me?’ I asked him.
‘Hic!’ answered Lionel.
‘Wilt thou show thy love by slaying my betrothed?’
‘Hic!’
Mr O’Sullivan now came out of the audience with a glass of water which Lionel drank, and the hiccoughs stopped enough for him to hiss ‘Dragons! Dragons! Come on, Dragons!’
The whisper came back:
‘Betty says her nose is bleeding.’
‘Stuff in a handkerchief and send her on instanter.’
Rosamund stuffed a handkerchief up the neck of the bulldog and the Dragons scuttled in on hands and knees.
Harry said afterwards that he couldn’t see as his mask had slipped, and Betty said that she could see Harry’s tail through one eye-hole and followed that. At any rate, they passed the hero and heroine at full tilt and rushed straight to the front row of the audience where they sat up and begged.
‘Capital! Capital!’ said Lady Tamerlane.
They really looked rather horrifying, specially the little green paws, and Tommy Howliboo burst into tears. The girl Howliboo was much braver and gave the bear a smart smack on the nose.
‘Dragons to heel!’ cried Lionel despairingly.
I don’t think any author can ever have had such tiresome performers. Even Rosamund let him down. She had to bring on some magic sandals and say, ‘Here are the sandals of Horsa,’ and instead she said, ‘Here are the handles of saucer,’ and then stopped and giggled. But nobody annoyed him so much as I did when we came to the part where I was to be burnt at the stake.
Some logs of wood were brought in from the basket in the hall and were piled round a fire-screen, the sort that is on a pole. I sat down as gracefully as I could on top of the logs and Peter tied me to the pole with a flimsy piece of string. Peter was not good at tying knots and he couldn’t get it to stay fastened.
‘Crumbs!’ he said at last and gave it up.
For once Lionel was not on the stage, and I was entirely the centre of interest and I felt entirely pleased with myself. My pink satin cloak billowed around me, and I pointed one of my bronze shoes elegantly and smiled sweetly on everyone.
Alister came up with a box of Bryant & May’s safety matches, and I tossed back my hair and smiled at him also. Alister struck a match, blew it out, pretended to light the logs with it, and said cheerfully:
‘See the flames leap round her. Now her feet are gone. Soon she will be a heap of ashes.’
From behind the screen came Lionel’s voice:
‘Stop smiling or I’ll kill you.’
The final scene was the grand battle which Lionel had to win against overwhelming odds. I stood waving a handkerchief on a chair, supposed to be a tower, from which I had a good view of the battlefield.
The first to fall was Peggy who, having in the course of the evening been pulled in and out of three tunics to show that she was three separate people, ran on looking extremely tousled, and collapsed thankfully under the bagatelle table. Betty was driven into the audience by Alister. He got her by the foot and she, yelling blue murder and quite forgetting that it was only a play, hung on to the chair on which her father was sitting.
Lionel was chased round and round by Abun waving a cardboard swor
d, but when all seemed lost Abun remembered that it was his duty to die and so, after giving Lionel one final stab, lay down flat on his back with his eyes shut.
‘So perish all traitors,’ said Lionel, turning hastily round and putting his foot on the corpse of his enemy. ‘Berengaria! My own!’
But at this point the heroine, craning her neck in one last long look for her admirer in the audience, overbalanced and fell off the chair on top of the remaining Dragon who was mauling Peter.
‘Oh, you fool!’ cried the hero.
After it was over everyone crowded round Lionel to congratulate him. I, thoroughly pleased with myself, came up with the others, expecting compliments as I felt I had performed very gracefully and remembered a good deal of my part, even if not all. But Lionel was extremely angry.
‘Smiling when you’re being burnt at the stake!’ he said, kicking a gilt chair. ‘Smiling! But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Next year I’ll write a play that will be something like a play. There will be a hero who will be me of course, and there won’t be a heroine at all. So there.’
11. The Grotto
The next day Lionel was still angry with me. He refused to answer my well-meant remarks and became very affable to his own family. He even spoke to Betty, a thing I had never seen him do before.
The whole Savage family (except the baby) had become suddenly possessed with the idea that they must write a magazine. I expect actually it was Lionel who started the idea – he generally did start their ideas – but they all became keen on it and said ‘magazine’ over and over again as though it were some sort of password. Betty didn’t know what a magazine was, but that didn’t stop her from talking about it.
After breakfast the Savages all lay down on their fronts in a corner of the nursery and began to write. Betty could not write but she drew picture puzzles. The Glens, who did not like writing, went down to the still room to talk to Mrs Peabody.
