Midsummer Night in the Workhouse

by Diana Athill

  MIDSUMMER NIGHT IN THE WORKHOUSE

  PLEASE DO NOT DETACH LUSTRES FROM THE CHANDELIER. This notice, in purple ink on white card, had not been on the board in the Chinese drawing-room when last Cecilia Mathers looked at it. Unlike many of the admonitions pinned up in Hetherston Hall it carried no explanatory clause such as THE DARK RINGS THEY LEAVE CANNOT BE REMOVED BY POLISHING . . . THOUGH SMALL IN THEMSELVES HAIRS ACCUMULATE AND CAUSE BLOCKAGE. Sometimes Mrs Lucas would address her guests in the third person: MRS LUCAS ASKS GUESTS TO REFRAIN FROM HANGING HATS ON THESE ANTLERS. THEY WERE MR LUCAS’S PRIDE.

  ‘Can he really have liked shooting deer?’ Cecilia had asked, shocked, on her first evening. It seemed incongruous in a man whose will had directed a large part of his fortune towards maintaining his house as an asylum for writers and painters.

  ‘People do,’ answered Philip Dunn, one of the painters. ‘I think he only came to fancy the arts because of the son who was killed. He wrote.’ Then, because Cecilia still looked distressed at the idea of owing her three months of repose to a blood-luster, he added: ‘Perhaps it was only this one. He may have valued it because it was so bizarre.’

  Of the six refugees from poverty or domesticity now at Hetherston, Philip was the only one whom Cecilia might have met elsewhere, by choice.

  Six was the maximum number of guests, there either by invitation or on application. Cecilia was among them because her publisher thought her pretty and was worried that she could afford to eat only baked beans. He had asked the trust to invite her, a poet veered unexpectedly from Hetherston to Majorca and she was in. But in, so she felt, under false pretences.

  For some months she had believed that she did not feel like beginning a second novel, or even a story, because she was so poor and harassed. Given peace and lamb chops for lunch . . . but now that she was given peace and not just lamb chops but roast chicken and asparagus, and summer pudding with cream, she could still find nothing to write. Most guests took full advantage of their time at Hetherston. From ten in the morning till five in the afternoon the silence was broken only by muffled bursts of typing from behind the doors of the big country-house bedrooms now converted into bed-sitting-rooms. Breakfast and dinner were sociable meals – or were supposed to be – but in the hours between no one was disturbed and no one was to speak. Each room had an electric ring and the makings of tea and coffee, while at midday they could help themselves from a buffet in the dining-room watched over gravely by Kerridge, the butler. He was there to see that they had all they wanted, not to enforce the rule of silence, but his presence made it impos- sible for even the most frivolous to break it. Forks clinked against gold-rimmed Minton china , someone’s jaw cracked as he chewed, and back they would drift to continue their work – all except Cecilia. Shut in her room, she would look at her typewriter with loathing and would sometimes almost cry.

  It was not for want of trying. She had now been there for five weeks and in that time she had painfully contrived a synopsis of a novel – a structure of cardboard and glue which would clearly fall to pieces if touched. She had also rewritten a story once scrapped and had seen why she had scrapped it. It was hard to sit idle in her pretty room day after day and she would wake each morning after a bad night thinking: No it is impossible, I must go back to London. But so far the food, the comfort, the beauty of the place and the distance between her and unsatisfactory love had prevailed. She wandered about the enormous garden, went for walks, talked to the men on the home farm. Guilt pounced less often out of doors than in. Now it had caught her again in the Chinese drawing-room – the common room – where she had come because it was raining and because it would soon be time for dinner.

  Lustres from the chandelier. Who would wish to detach them and how could it be done? The chandelier hung high from the centre of the ceiling. The sofa table stood under it. If you lifted one of the ladder-back Chippendale chairs onto the table and then climbed on that, it would be possible. Someone must have done it or there would have been no notice. Mrs Borrowdale? She weighed over twelve stone.

  Laura Preston rarely came into the drawing-room, her work had taken over so she said, damn her gooseberry eyes. Both the painters, Philip and the morose Norman Salviati, were physically capable of it but Philip was terrified of Mrs Lucas and Salviati would not even have noticed the existence of the chandelier. He must once have looked outwards – objects encountered in life were still sometimes recognisable in his canvases – but he never seemed to now. So it must have been Bouncer, thought Cecilia, though it was not easy to picture Charles Opie, smooth and rubbery behind his yellow waist- coat and carnation, balancing on a Chippendale chair to pluck crystal drops.

  Opie was there for his celebrity, not because of need. The trust liked a salting of names among its old boys and invited one a year. When Cecilia had arrived, she like the others was met by the handyman in his shirt sleeves driving the guests’ station wagon (Mrs Lucas had her Morris Minor). Opie had driven up in his own car, an ancient Alvis. He should have looked foolish, coming up the front drive which no one used. It wandered three-quarters of a mile through the park for the benefit of none but the herd of Ayrshire cows. Grass grew down the middle of it and the remaining gravel was potholed so that the Alvis lurched as it came. But Opie had said smugly that it was the more convenient approach for him, coming as he did from a weekend with Sir Thomas Gregg whose place lay in that direction. He had bustled straight through to the Wing to see Mrs Lucas, instead of waiting like everyone else for the ritual invitation to a glass of sherry before dinner on his first evening.

  If Cecilia had been working she would have enjoyed her encounters with their hostess: the first evening and coffee after dinner on Sundays. The trust’s London office handled the preliminaries but in the house itself the widow reigned. She had no secretary – it was she herself who wrote the notices. She always greeted guests with the same words:

  ‘Mr Lucas would have been very happy to see you here.’ It was devotion to her husband’s memory rather than to the arts which made her take so active an interest in the scheme. But by now she had developed a specialist’s knowledge of the creative process, as one who sees much of a market garden becomes informed on green-fly and rust. What these people produced she did not care to know, but the symptoms of production were familiar to her and she considered it her duty to ease them if she could.

  ‘So you are a writer,’ she had said to Cecilia. ‘Are you in the middle of something? No? A pity, that. They sometimes find it hard to start – the change of atmosphere, you know. It takes people different ways. Mr Doherty, the poet, used to find regular exercise very beneficial. He began two poems up in the rhododendron wood. But Miss – I forget her name – pretty red-haired girl – plays in verse, I think. She found the best thing was whisky. That was quite awkward. I don’t like to ask anyone to leave but in the end I had to. It kept Kerridge up so late – he had to wait until she had gone to sleep and then go in to see that she had not left a lighted cigarette in the bedclothes.’

  Philip Dunn’s fear of Mrs Lucas began when for the second time she found him asleep in what had once been the rose garden. She had leant on her stick shaking her head. ‘It is possible,’ she had said, ‘that you are one of those who are not suited by soft conditions. There are some like that – like chickens, you know. They need their ration of grit.’ Philip’s ration of grit at that time would have included nights on park benches. He was angling for the rare privilege of an exten- sion. Mrs Lucas had spoken clinically rather than critically, but he was a persuadable man. He dreaded she might conclude that he should not be there and advise him in so many words to leave. He had rarely been seen in the garden since the incident among the rampaging rose-bushes.

  All the flower garden was wild though many plants still won their battle with the weeds. It was beautiful but sad, haunted by its past perfection. Cecilia, knowing that Mr Lucas had been very rich, had expected grandeur. Small amounts of hard-earne
d money had not taught her how much could be done with large amounts of it. At first, on seeing the neglected flower garden and the small staff, she had been horrified to think that the old woman was compelled by a will to keep up something beyond her means. Now she was beginning to see the estate more clearly. The home farm, for instance, was a model; the kitchen garden was exquisitely run; in winter, they said, the central heating left nothing to be desired and there was the most modern deep-freeze unit in the kitchen to take care of the summer’s glut. Only money could nourish so sound a structure, even though there was not enough of it to maintain the elegancies of the past. That the two Italian housemaids got round to each bed-sitting- room no more than twice a week was not an indication of ruin but simply showed that Mrs Lucas knew how best to direct her spending. (And besides, YOU WILL FIND A DUSTER IN THE BOTTOM RIGHT-HAND DRAWER OF YOUR DESK. The widow was not a woman to waste anything, whether the scraps from their meat plates which Kerridge collected in an enamel basin for the dogs, or an artist’s occasional need to relax by indulging in some simple manual task.)

  Cecilia doubted whether Bouncer, as she and Philip called Charles Opie, ever dusted his desk. His relationship with Mrs Lucas was unlike that of the others. They had friends in common – more than that, the old woman read his books. Most people did, and most critics praised them though they should, Cecilia felt, have known better. He had been described as a budding Somerset Maugham and he had, indeed, learnt several useful tricks from Mr Maugham which he used with assurance to disguise his own vulgarity. The day his advent was announced was the only day since Cecilia’s arrival when the five already there had gathered in the Chinese drawing-room with no sign of reluctance or strain. Garrulous, they became, under the influence of resentment. Everyone knew that he had a private income and a perfectly good house in Hampstead; everyone knew that he could work eight hours a day without trouble wherever he was, for this he continually boasted in articles and interviews. Laura Preston knew, moreover, that his reason for accepting the invitation was a base one. His wife had just divorced him because of his affair with a television actress and although the actress loved him he, once free, had become bored with her and wished to escape her recriminations. ‘I’d like to know whether Mrs L knows that,’ said Laura, though none of them had reason to suppose Mrs Lucas interested in her guests’ love affairs. ‘He’s getting his portrait done by Annigoni,’ said Philip. ‘Monied people have no business here,’ said Salviati (but he thought they had no business anywhere, except when he needed to borrow some). Even Mrs Borrowdale, who rarely spoke of anything but the facts of daily life because her opinions were too steady to need discussion, was moved to speak critically. ‘I read one of his books,’ she said shyly and reluctantly. ‘I – er . . . well, it was shoddy stuff.’

  Cecilia had been sitting on the balustrade between the terraced lawn and the park when the Alvis came bumping up the drive. ‘Do you know where I should park the car?’ he had called, taking out his bags. She had gone over to him and he had smiled at her. His eyes, very dark and knowing, were eyes familiar to her – the eyes of a womaniser, saying without any particular intention, ‘You delicious thing, what I could do with you!’ Her one painless affair had been with a man called Max who had eyes like that, and it had given her a fondness for them. She, too, had smiled, with recognition and pleasure.

  At once she saw him notice it. It was as though he had said, ‘Aha! Here we go again.’ And although she had realised soon afterwards that she liked him no better than she liked his books she could never quite suppress the feeling, now, that they knew each other too well. The way he spoke to her, the lazy passes he made at her – unflattering passes: if they worked they worked, if not no matter – implied that he felt them to be of a kind. They were not, of that she was sure, but her coldness, her withdrawal, remained slightly vitiated by that exchange of looks. She could not quite be free of a man so like Max, when with Max . . . well, never mind.

  Alone in the drawing-room at half-past-six, Cecilia had put a record on the player. She was not listening. She was lying on the sofa thinking shall I go, shall I stay, when Charles Opie came in.

  ‘Hullo there,’ he said. ‘Alone and palely loitering?’ She grimaced a smile but did not answer.

  He went straight over to take off the record, assuming that she would prefer him to music.

  ‘I’m dining out this evening,’ he said, ‘with the Greggs. It’s a staggering house. I don’t suppose you know it.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Why not come? I’ll telephone them if you like – I know they wouldn’t mind.’

  He sat on the arm of the sofa and smiled with crinkled eyes. Opie has charm, see.

  ‘Thanks, but I’d rather stay in. I must work after dinner –

  it’s taken over, as Laura would say.’

  He made no answer to that, glancing at her obliquely under thick eyelids in a way that made her certain he saw through her.

  ‘Have you heard the latest?’ he asked. ‘Orgies in the dorm. Salviati had Rosa in his room last night – the fat Italian girl. Philip saw her come out.’

  ‘There’ll be notices on all the men’s dressing tables tomorrow,’ she said. ‘PLEASE DO NOT SLEEP WITH THE MAIDS. IT CAN CAUSE PREGNANCY.’

  He laughed and she felt annoyed with herself for making his kind of joke. It happened from time to time and always left her disliking him more.

  ‘There’s a new one on the board,’ she said, to change the subject.

  ‘The lustres, you mean? Yes, it was Laura.’

  ‘Nonsense, it can’t have been.’

  ‘It was, too, she told me. She’s got some monstrous child in her novel. Its besotted grandfather hoists it on his shoulders so that it can touch a chandelier and make it tinkle. Old Lolly wasn’t detaching them at all – she was trying out the tinkle to find the mot juste. There’s an artist for you, dear. Kerridge came in and caught her at it.’

  ‘Good God! I wish I had.’

  ‘What are you up to when you spend all day pottering in the kitchen garden? Trying to find the mot juste for the smell of organic manure?’

  ‘I must go and wash for dinner,’ said Cecilia, getting up. ‘Won’t you be late for your party?’ and she was out of the door before he finished telling her not to be silly, it was not yet seven o’clock.

  The kitchen garden was her weakness. It was enclosed within a magnificent serpentine wall stitched with espaliered fruit-trees. Worked by a dedicated man, Philby, it was the only part of the garden still exactly as it had been when the house was itself. Exuberant but controlled, vegetables made patterns against the soft black earth, and there was a smell of fruit, herbs and compost. Two or three times she had diffidently offered Philby her help and he, a thin silent man with kind grey eyes, had accepted it without (she thought) telling Mrs Lucas. While she picked strawberries into a punnet lined with a cabbage leaf, or hoed between rows of lettuces, she felt as though the rest of the garden, beyond the wall, lay about her as beautiful and orderly in its way as Philby’s domain still was. She forgot her frustrating struggle to find something to write and began to build up images of an unfamiliar kind of life. Smooth lawns, well-pruned roses, the floor of the Chinese drawing-room not simply clean but glowing again, and smelling of beeswax. The lovely stucco swags over the chimney pieces would not have dust-shadows in their mouldings. They would be flicked daily, as Kerridge had described, by housemaids with fresh feather dusters on long bamboo canes. Instead of queer fish out of water (or leeches, perhaps), there would be men and women who had lived there always – doing what? She would go in from these dreams in the kitchen garden more depressed than before. They gave her the discomfort under the ribs that she associated with the stirring of work, but they had no roots in anything she knew, they could come to nothing. She could feel in advance the falseness there would be in anything which came from her emotion over the beauty of this place.
But turning back to what she knew – the tangle of her loves, the ramifications of failure, the gritty details of kipper-smelling stairs, half- pints of milk on windowsills and gas-bills unopened because of fear, she knew that all that was too close, too painful and too boring to do more for her than it had done already.

  Supposing, she thought that evening, when she had left Charles and gone up to her room, supposing that I am never able to write anything again? It was frightening. She had long ago resigned herself to being inefficient at living. She could rarely find work that interested her and was bad at work that did not, growing hysterical between disinclination and obsessive scruples. Money ran through her hands as fast when there was more of it as when there was less, but never carelessly, always to an accompaniment of guilt and anxiety. She had never yet been able to love a man prepared to love her – unless he was one who, for some intractable reason, was unable to marry. Perhaps this had been by misfortune to begin with, but now it was made worse by her suspicion that it had become an addiction, that she equated love with pain and could no longer feel it good if it might give pleasure. When she had begun to write – stories at first, and then a novel which found a publisher at once – she had felt like the ugly duckling bending his neck for the first time to his own reflection. Here was her element, this she could do. The horror in wait at Hetherston, nearest in her room but present everywhere, even after dinner when she talked with the others or pub-crawled with Philip, came from the knowledge of how closely her work connected with her own experience and dread that everything of significance in that experience might have been used up.