Christmas at High Rising: A Virago Modern Classic (VMC)

by Thirkell, Angela

  With one impulse William and Amelia left Sir Dighton to struggle as courteously as possible with his obvious ignorance of Popetty.

  ‘Do you mean,’ said William, ‘that you don’t mind my being here?’

  ‘Mind?’ said Amelia, ‘Oh, William!’

  ‘Here I am, Amelia dear,’ said a cheerful, rather common voice. Starting nervously, Amelia looked round and saw her cousin Olivia, of whom she was slightly ashamed in public.

  ‘It was sweet of you to ask me, dear,’ said Cousin Olivia, ‘and to send me a card for two. This is your cousin, Freddie. I don’t think you’ve ever met.’

  Cousin Freddie, a grey-faced, spare elderly man with a thin moustache, nodded his head morosely.

  ‘He’s the dyspeptic one,’ said Cousin Olivia. ‘His wife has left him, you know, dear,’ she continued in a sepulchral voice, ‘but perhaps it was for the best. I always say we can’t judge others. We’re going to have a little tea now, and then a good look at Charles’s pictures, quite old familiar faces, and then we shall come back and have another little chat with you, dear.’

  She moved briskly off, followed by the deserted Cousin Freddie, but it was too late for Amelia to catch William, who had been again engulfed by Lady Buzzard and forced to give her tea.

  Amelia began to despair. There seemed to be no chance of talking to William without being rude to someone, and Miss Brown had deserted her. The rooms were crowded and the Private View was obviously going to be the success of the season, but it would be no success for Amelia if William went away without an explanation. The rooms were getting hotter and hotter, the roar of grown-up people having tea was getting louder and louder, and Amelia felt her wits deserting her and her throat becoming hoarse and soundless. She fervently wished, not for the first time, that she were one of those courageous pushing women like Lady Buzzard or Mrs Hunt, or even a brave pathetic little woman like Popetty. But if one was a nice ordinary polite woman one couldn’t push, and it didn’t do any good if one did. Full of bitter thoughts, occasionally catching a glimpse of William’s anguished face beyond Lady Buzzard’s toque, Amelia stood deserted at her own party, almost crying with fatigue and mortification. With fatal clarity she saw what was about to happen. Cousin Olivia, Cousin Freddie and Popetty were detaching themselves from the crowd and bearing down upon her from different directions. In a moment she would be enveloped and overpowered, and forced in a fit of nervous hospitality to ask them all to lunch the next day. With the courage of despair she opened the nearest door, which happened to be Mr Phelps’s office, shut it behind her and, sitting down, burst into silent but bitter tears. At this moment, the Goddess of Boredom, passing in disguise through the galleries, though really there was but little need for disguise where everyone so obviously wore her form and face, saw with her questing eye the approach of three of her disciples, and caused Popetty to drop a bag made of coloured raffia just in front of Cousin Freddie, who gallantly stooped to pick it up.

  ‘Oh, thanks so much,’ said Popetty. ‘Too careless of me, really,’ and she became suitably confused.

  ‘Why,’ said Olivia, beaming, ‘it’s never Popetty.’

  ‘Why, it’s Olivia,’ cried Popetty. ‘Well, of all the coincidences! And this isn’t Jack, is it?’

  ‘How curious that you should say it is Jack, because we were talking of poor Jack only yesterday, the anniversary of the day on which he passed away. This is Freddie.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ said Popetty. ‘My dear, this is too wonderful to see you here. Do you remember how Freddie took me for poor Charles’s sister-in-law at poor Jack’s funeral, and how we all laughed?’

  Olivia did indeed remember, and she and Popetty laughed very heartily.

  First published in Cornhill Magazine, November 1934

  Shakespeare Did Not Dine Out

  Shakespeare did not dine out. It is a pity, because he could have learned a great deal. By nature, he belonged to the race of guests (as classified by Mr Max Beerbohm) and his sympathies were all on their side. If his friends and patrons had asked him out a little more he would have been the ideal guest, pleased by everything and ready to be amused by anything, and incidentally, he would have picked up several quite useful hints on party-giving. But it was not to be. I do not know if history has any light to throw on the subject, but every jot of internal evidence in the plays supports the statement: Shakespeare did not dine out.

  Take, for example, the party given by Old Capulet. One must allow that it was largely his own fault that the evening was not a success. To begin with, he sent out invitations for at least twenty-five people by a servant who could not read the addresses. By pure luck the letters reached their destinations, but it seems that no hour was named, for when the guests arrived the hostess and her daughter were not down and the servants, who lost their heads on the slightest provocation, set the party down to supper and spend the rest of the evening getting in each other’s way. The course of the evening is a little obscure, but the Capulets must at length have joined their guests at the table, for after some unseemly skirmishing among various servants who would never have been allowed further than the scullery in any well-run establishment, the whole company got as far as the hall, where Old Capulet made jokes in very questionable taste to set things going. After this, the party went fairly well, as a dance is always arranged to fill out the scene, but the guests were disheartened and when the slight excitement of a row between two young men had subsided, they said that they must go. It appears that one went to Capulet’s house prepared to accept anything, or else Romeo, who is usually the only one in fancy dress, would have attracted more notice. But the suppers must have had a rather sinister reputation. The host only had to announce more refreshments for the guests to leave in a body.

  This one would think enough to damp a host; but no: the devoted Capulet only a few days later decided to give another party, and as everyone was in mourning he thought it suitable to make all the preparations at night. (Why the servants ever stayed in that house is a mystery. Or perhaps they didn’t, as it may be noted that one of them didn’t know who his master’s daughter was when questioned by a guest.) From sunset till three in the morning was spent baking and making pastry, with perpetual interference from the master of the house, while Lady Capulet, otherwise a woman of some character, gave up any attempt to control the household and contented herself with a few acid words to her husband about leaving the maids alone.

  And that is supposed to be the normal way of entertaining among aristocratic families. Are we to conclude from this that Southampton and Essex did their own housekeeping and made such a fiasco of their parties that the guests left? Rather let us deduce that Shakespeare did not dine out and had very little notion of how parties are organised. No self-respecting host would allow his servants to get the upper hand so completely as Shakespeare does.

  Again, what is the percentage of parties in good society which are broken up by the arrival of an uninvited ghost? Or how often are private theatricals interrupted by the host starting up with a loud groan and leaving the room?

  The good breeding of the guests is, in these cases, markedly superior to that of the hosts. When the late Banquo came to Macbeth’s dinner-party and would disappear and reappear like the Cheshire cat, none of the guests turned a hair, but continued to drink wine from pasteboard. It would have been disconcerting to any ordinary guests, because, as a rule, the lights go out (with the exception of two torches carried by male impersonators in kilts) and a great ray from above lights on Banquo; or in more ambitious productions a transparency in the dining-room wall is illuminated. But these guests were of different metal: unshaken by the peculiar remarks of their host and the obvious ill-temper of their hostess, they continued their Barmecide feat till the hostess turned them out, when, still unmoved, they retired with a Scoto-Roman salute.

  The same Japanese stoicism is found in the guests at King Claudius’ party. They cannot have had a comfortable evening because they always sit on a long bench sl
anting away from the stage with their backs half turned to the players. The King and Queen have their throne in an equally uncomfortable position, and really could not have seen much of the play without wringing their own necks. The only person whose seat commands a good view is Hamlet, only he will lie on the floor, which is such a truly wretched position to see anything acted on a platform. And when the audience do try to hear the play, Hamlet will talk all the time. One feels it a great pity that Cressida could not have been at the party, as he would have then met his match in back-chat. But for the patient guests it is enough to be at a party at all, and they enjoy every moment of it until the King, revolted by this Grand Guignol rubbish, has all the lights turned up and rushes out of the room. Then only do the guests get up and go with a Dano-Roman salute.

  Now, can we suppose that any of Shakespeare’s patrons would have given such outrageously improbable parties? No! Shakespeare was not invited to good parties, and knew nothing of the duties of a host. In fact he disliked hosts. He despised them. Remember Timon’s second dinner-party. It cannot be called good form to give your guests plates of warm water and then throw it in their faces – though doubtless great fun. Timon had lived far beyond his income, assisted by a most incompetent butler who confesses that his only effort to check the household expenditure was to retire him to a wasteful cock and set his eyes at flow. Did Timon try to retrench? He only tried to borrow large sums of money at five minutes’ notice and then, in spite at his failure, maltreated his guests. But the good guests remained almost unmoved. Not until he threw the dishes at them in a final transport of rage would they leave the table, and almost immediately they were back again, but uttering no unmanly complaints. One of them did indeed bemoan the loss of his cap, but it was quickly found again, and when one reflects how attached elderly foreigners are to their little black skull-caps, one does not blame him.

  Only once does Shakespeare betray any real sympathy with the difficulties of a host. All hosts – and most guests – know how impossible it is to remember one’s friends’ names, not to mention their faces. Poor King Claudius, harassed by an intermittently buried brother, a well-meaning but stupid wife, a really trying nephew, and guns going off every time he drank, could not remember faces. Two courtiers had audience of him, young men of fashion much alike in type, and when he had asked them to look after Hamlet he dismissed them with the words —

  ‘Thanks, Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern.’

  Of course, he had given the wrong names to the wrong owners, but they would not have minded. It is something to have one’s name remembered by a king even if he gives it to someone else. But the queen, so kind and so wanting in tact, had to correct him with a marked emphasis:

  ‘Thanks, Guildenstern and gentle Rosencrantz.’

  Of course, they were equally delighted that the queen should remember their real names; but it was very uncomfortable for Claudius.

  If any further proof is needed of Shakespeare’s unfortunate ignorance of the customs of decent society, one need only turn to the dinner-party in Cymbeline, perhaps one of the most embarrassing of the many manqué parties in the plays.

  A Roman gentleman, Philario, invited a few friends to dine: a Frenchman, a Dutchman, a Spaniard and another Roman. The fifth guest, an Englishman called Posthumus, was late, and to pass the time the company discussed him rather disparagingly. Philario, who had lost control of his party at an early stage, was very uncomfortable about it, especially as Posthumus was just arriving and likely to overhear the conversation. So he said, ‘Here he comes,’ in a loud whisper, and in came Posthumus rather showily dressed in a sort of kilt with his shirt very low in the neck, red hair, and a large solitaire diamond. I cannot think why Philario invited five people, each speaking a different language, on the same evening. He may have been a Rotarian and hoped that getting together would promote international friendship, but if so he was doomed to failure. In the first place, the Dutchman and the Spaniard never once opened their mouths in the course of the evening and must have had a wretchedly dull time, forgotten by their author and ignored by the rest of the party. Posthumus and the Frenchman did enter into conversation, but their language is so peculiar that one is forced to conclude they were both speaking Italian out of compliment to their host and neither of them speaking it very well. As for the host, it was in vain that he invited his party to recline in a Roman manner at his ill-spread board. He and the Frenchman were immediately elbowed out of the conversation, while Posthumus and Iachimo, the Roman guest, got up an argument respecting Posthumus’ wife and whether she was likely to be any better than she should be. Philario tried to stop them and was ignored. They made a bet on the matter, and Philario with more goodwill than elegance said he would have it no lay, but his guests talked him down and left the supper together without so much as draining an empty goblet and all the table laid for nothing.

  While it is true that I have no means (short of hiding in the clock-case) of knowing how gentlemen do talk at men’s dinner-parties, I imagine that their ordinary talk is more seemly though probably quite as dull.

  The only excuse that can be made for these unsuccessful parties is that they are all given by foreigners. And foreigners are peculiar and un-English and perhaps on the whole it does them credit that their parties should be peculiar and un-English too. But at the Boar’s Head, or at Justice Shallow’s house in Gloucestershire, they knew how to enjoy themselves. A depressing doubt creeps in that we might not have enjoyed ourselves as much as they did. We might have felt rather priggish and out of place and been inclined to put down Falstaff and Shallow – those chosen companions of our refined minds – as coarse and boring; in which, indeed, we should have been perfectly right. But there is no doubt that they were extremely competent at running their own parties.

  It is not till we reach the last of the historical plays that we find another party at which host and guests enjoyed themselves equally: Wolsey’s entertainment for Henry VIII. Of course, Mr Edward German’s delightful music was a great help, and a feeling of security was given by the presence of the old original guests whom we find seated at long tables, only too pleased to be invited and thoroughly appreciating the conversation of the smart set. There was no trouble with the servants; a large party came on in fancy dress and gave a most creditable dancing display; and finally an excellent hot supper was served. I think this must be a reminiscence of the one really good party to which Shakespeare was invited. But perhaps, shrewd reader, you will remark that Beaumont or Fletcher wrote that scene. To this I will merely reply with a verse of the Swan of Avon which is doubtless familiar to you:

  ‘Tut, that’s a foolish observation.’

  First published in Cornhill Magazine, August 1928

  The Great Art of Riding

  One afternoon at the beginning of the summer holidays, Mrs Morland was writing in the drawing-room of her house at High Rising. Her youngest son Tony was engaged in making model battleships out of pieces of firewood in a corner of the room, talking aloud to himself as he did so. Laura Morland by long practice could dissociate herself entirely from her son’s flow of talk, and while he recited aloud page after page of Jane’s Fighting Ships, she was able to grapple with her latest serial story of Madame Koska. She had just, to her own great satisfaction, invented a new kind of villain who under the disguise of a traveller in silk was trying to introduce violently flammable material into the best dressmaking houses, so that Westminster Abbey and everyone in it should be burnt to cinders on the occasion of a Royal wedding, when she became conscious of a more than usually urgent note in her son’s voice.

  She looked up, pushing her hair back with her pencil, and stared at Tony as at some entirely unfamiliar object.

  ‘Mother,’ said Tony, ‘would you paint the Adrian black or grey?’

  ‘Paint Adrian?’ asked Laura, still in the trance-like state to which literary composition always reduced her, and wondering why her publisher, Adrian Coates, should be painted at all.

  ‘Moth
er,’ said Tony reproachfully, ‘I thought you knew my new cruiser was called the Adrian. It belongs to the A class, Mother. Look, Mother, there is the Adrian after Mr Coates, and the Anne after Mrs Knox, and the Annie after Annie at Low Rising, and the Amy after Mrs Birkett, and the Anabasis because of Xenophon, and the Armadillo. Don’t you think Armadillo is a good name, Mother? Mother, look at them.’

  Hypnotised as always by her son’s courteous persistence, Laura got up and went over to Tony’s corner. On the floor were five little ships, exquisitely carved, and guns no thicker than a needle. How Tony made them with a blunt pocket-knife was his own secret. The sixth ship, the Adrian, he held up for his mother’s inspection.

  Laura, who had not craftsman’s hands, was deeply impressed by these enchanting models, and was about to say something in their praise when her son saved her the trouble.

  ‘Mother, isn’t the Adrian splendid?’ he said earnestly. ‘Isn’t she just like a real ship? Mother, I bet if you were small enough the Adrian would look like the Hood. Do you think I ought to paint her black or grey, Mother?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Laura feebly, adding mentally, ‘and I don’t care.’

  ‘Oh Mother, you must know. Would you like black?’

  ‘Black would be very nice.’

  ‘But, Mother, warships aren’t really black, they are grey. Mother, shall I paint the Adrian grey? Dr Ford,’ he pursued, addressing their old friend who came in at that moment, ‘would you paint the Adrian black or grey? Of course, black is the wrong colour, but I’ve got some black enamel paint. Or should I get some grey and paint her grey? She would look splendid in grey and —’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Dr Ford. ‘I want to talk to your mother.’

  Tony subsided into mutterings about people who didn’t understand about warships, while Dr Ford continued to Laura, ‘I want your help, Mrs Morland. There’s a very decent little chap I know, used to be a groom at Rising Castle, who has had a rough spin. His wife is ill and there are two children and they are in difficulties. Lord Stoke has lent him a horse, and Knox has lent him the money to buy a pony and he wants to give lessons to children. Mrs Gould is going to let Rose and Dora ride. He’s very cheap. Would you let Tony join?’