A Harp in Lowndes Square Read online

  Rachel Ferguson

  A Harp in Lowndes Square

  In the schoolroom in Lowndes Square, a child, in her ugly, unsuitable frock of plum-coloured satin, cut down when discarded from one of her mother’s, bent over the cutting out of a doll and its cardboard wardrobe, and shivered as she worked.

  Hilarious, shocking, and heartbreaking in turn, A Harp in Lowndes Square is like no other Rachel Ferguson novel. Perhaps her most personal work – and the closest she ever came to a ghost story – it tells of Vere and James, twins gifted with ‘the sight,’ which allows them to see and even experience scenes from the past (including one, at Hampton Court, involving royalty).

  The twins are already aware of their mother’s troubled relationship with her own mother, the formidable Lady Vallant, but the discovery of an Aunt Myra, who died young and of whom their mother has never spoken, leads them to uncover the family’s tragic past. Against the backdrop of World War I and Vere’s unexpected relationship with an aging actor (and his wife), and rife with Ferguson’s inimitable wit, the novel reaches a powerful and touching denouement when the twins relive the horrifying events of many years before …

  A Harp in Lowndes Square was originally published in 1936. This new edition features an introduction by social historian Elizabeth Crawford.

  ‘It is only (now) that I realise how much … my work owes to the delicacy and variety of Rachel Ferguson’s exploration of the real and the dreamed of, or the made up, or desired.’ A.S. BYATT

  FM3

  It is too late! oh, nothing is too late

  Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.

  Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles

  Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides

  Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers

  When each had numbered more than fourscore years

  LONGFELLOW

  Table of Contents

  Cover.

  Title Page/About the Book

  Epigraph.

  Contents.

  Introduction by Elizabeth Crawford

  PRELUDE.

  CHAPTER I.

  CHAPTER II.

  CHAPTER III.

  CHAPTER IV.

  CHAPTER V.

  CHAPTER VI.

  CHAPTER VII.

  CHAPTER VIII.

  CHAPTER IX.

  CHAPTER X.

  CHAPTER XI.

  CHAPTER XII.

  CHAPTER XIII.

  CHAPTER XIV.

  CHAPTER XV.

  CHAPTER XVI.

  CHAPTER XVII.

  CHAPTER XVIII.

  CHAPTER XIX.

  CHAPTER XX.

  CHAPTER XXI.

  CHAPTER XXII.

  CHAPTER XXIII.

  CHAPTER XXIV.

  CHAPTER XXV.

  CHAPTER XXVI.

  CHAPTER XXVII.

  CHAPTER XXVIII.

  CHAPTER XXIX.

  CHAPTER XXX.

  CHAPTER XXXI.

  CHAPTER XXXII.

  CHAPTER XXXIII.

  About the Author.

  Also by Rachel Ferguson.

  Furrowed Middlebrow Titles.

  A Footman for the Peacock – Title Page.

  A Footman for the Peacock – Chapter I.

  Copyright.

  Landmarks

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  A FAMILY – a House – and – Time. These are the ingredients whipped by Rachel Ferguson (1892-1957) into three confections – A Harp in Lowndes Square (1936), A Footman for a Peacock (1940), and Evenfield (1942) – now all republished as Furrowed Middlebrow books. Her casts of individuals, many outrageous, and families, some wildly dysfunctional, dance the reader through the pages, revealing worlds now vanished and ones that even in their own time were the product of a very particular imagination. Equally important in each novel is the character of the House – the oppressive family home of Lady Vallant in A Harp in Lowndes Square, comfortable, suburban Evenfield, and Delaye, the seat of the Roundelays, a stately home but ‘not officially a show place’ (A Footman for a Peacock). Rachel Ferguson then mixes in Time – past, present, and future – to deliver three socially observant, nostalgic, mordant, yet deliciously amusing novels.

  In an aside, the Punch reviewer (1 April 1936) of A Harp in Lowndes Square remarked that ‘Miss Ferguson has evidently read her Dunne’, an assumption confirmed by the author in a throwaway line in We Were Amused (1958), her posthumously-published autobiography. J.W. Dunne’s Experiment with Time (1927) helped shape the imaginative climate in the inter-war years, influencing Rachel Ferguson no less than J.B. Priestley (An Inspector Calls), John Buchan (The Gap in the Curtain), C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien. In A Harp in Lowndes Square the heroine’s mother (‘half-educated herself by quarter-educated and impoverished gentlewomen’) explains the theory to her children: ‘… all time is one, past, present and future. It’s simultaneous … There’s a star I’ve heard of whose light takes so many thousands of years to reach our earth that it’s still only got as far along history as shining over the Legions of Julius Caesar. Yet that star which is seeing chariot races is outside our window now. You say Caesar is dead. The star says No, because the star’s seen him. It’s your word against his! Which of you is right? Both of you. It’s only a question of how long you take to see things.’ The concept of ‘simultaneous time’ explains why the young first-person narrator, Vere Buchan, and her twin brother James, possessing as they do ‘the sight’, are able to feel the evil that haunts their grandmother’s Lowndes Square house and uncover the full enormity of her wickedness. In A Footman for a Peacock a reincarnation, one of Time’s tricks, permits a story of past cruelty to be told (and expiated), while Evenfield’s heroine, Barbara Morant, grieving for her mother, takes matters into her own hands and moves back to the home of her childhood, the only place, she feels, ’where she [her mother] was likely to be recovered.’

  For 21st-century readers another layer of Time is superimposed on the text of the novels, now that nearly 80 years separates us from the words as they flowed from the author’s pen. However, thanks to We Were Amused, we know far more about Rachel Ferguson, her family, and her preoccupations than did her readers in the 1930s and early 1940s and can recognise that what seem whimsical drolleries in the novels are in fact real-life characters, places, and incidents transformed by the author’s eye for the comic or satirical.

  Like Barbara Morant, Rachel Ferguson was the youngest of three children. Her mother, Rose Cumberbatch (probably a distant relation to ‘Benedict’, the name ‘Carlton’ appearing in both families as a middle name) was 20 years old when she married Robert Ferguson, considerably older and a civil servant. She was warm, rather theatrical, and frivolous; he was not. They had a son, Ronald Torquil [Tor] and a daughter, Roma, and then, in 1892, after a gap of seven years, were surprised by Rachel’s arrival. When she was born the family was living in Hampton Wick but soon moved to 10 Cromwell Road, Teddington, a house renamed by Mrs Ferguson ‘Westover’. There they remained until Rose Ferguson was released from the suburban life she disliked by the sudden death of her husband, who was felled by a stroke or heart attack on Strawberry Hill golf course. Fathers in Rachel Ferguson’s novels are dispensable; it is mothers who are the centres of the universe. Rose Ferguson and her daughters escaped first to Italy and on their return settled in Kensington where Rachel spent the rest of her life.

  Of this trio of books, Evenfield, although the last published, is the novel that recreates Rachel Ferguson’s earliest years. Written as the Blitz rained down on London (although set in the inter
-war years) the novel plays with the idea of an escape back into the security of childhood, For, after the death of her parents, Barbara, the first-person narrator, hopes that by returning to the Thameside suburb of ‘Addison’ and the house of her childhood, long since given up, she can regain this land of lost content. The main section of the novel describes the Victorian childhood she had enjoyed while living in ‘Evenfield’, the idiosyncrasies of family and neighbours lovingly recalled. Incidentally, Barbara is able to finance this rather self-indulgent move because she has made a small fortune from writing lyrics for successful musical comedies, a very Rachel Ferguson touch. What might not have been clear to the novelist’s contemporaries but is to us, is that ‘Addison’ is Rachel Ferguson’s Teddington and that ‘Evenfield’, the Morant family home, is the Fergusons’ ‘Westover’. In We Were Amused Rachel Ferguson commented that since leaving Teddington ‘homesickness has nagged me with nostalgia ever since. I’ve even had wild thoughts of leasing or buying Westover until time showed me what a hideous mistake it would prove’. In writing Evenfield Rachel Ferguson laid that ghost to rest.

  But what of the ghost in A Harp in Lowndes Square? Vere senses the chill on the stairs. What is the family mystery? Once again Rachel Ferguson takes a fragment of her family story and spins from it what the reviewer in Punch referred to as ‘an intellectual ghost story’. The opening scene, in which a young girl up in the nursery hears happy voices downstairs, is rendered pathetically vivid by the description of her frock, cut down from one of her mother’s. ‘On her small chest, the overtrimming of jetted beads clashed …’. This humiliation, endured not because the family lacked funds, but because the child’s mother cared nothing for her, was, Rachel Ferguson casually mentions in We Were Amused, the very one that her own grandmother, Annie Cumberbatch, inflicted on her daughter Rose. ‘The picture which my Mother drew for me over my most impressionable years of her wretched youth is indelible and will smoulder in me till I die.’ Rachel Ferguson raised the bar by allotting Sarah Vallant a wickedness far greater than anything for which her grandmother was responsible, but it is clear that she drew her inspiration from stories heard at her own mother’s knee and that many of the fictional old lady’s petty nastinesses – and her peculiarly disturbing plangent tones – were ones that Rachel Ferguson had herself experienced when visiting 53 Cadogan Square.

  The Punch reviewer noted that in A Harp in Lowndes Square Rachel Ferguson demonstrated her ‘exceptional ability to interpret the humour of families and to make vivid the little intimate reactions of near relations. Children, old people, the personalities of houses, and the past glories of London, particularly of theatrical London, fascinate her.’ Rachel Ferguson’s delight in theatrical London is very much a feature of A Harp in Lowndes Square, in the course of which Vere Buchan finds solace in a chaste love for an elderly actor (and his wife) which proves an antidote to the wickedness lurking in Lowndes Square. As the reviewer mentioned, old people, too, were among Rachel Ferguson’s specialities, especially such impecunious gentlewomen as the Roundelay great-aunts in A Footman for a Peacock, who, as marriage, their only hope of escape, has passed them by have become marooned in the family home. Each wrapped in her own treasured foible, they live at Delaye, the house inherited by their nephew, Sir Edmund Roundelay. The family has standing, but little money. Now, in the early days of the Second World War, the old order is under attack. Housemaids are thinking of leaving to work in the factories and the Evacuation Officer is making demands. ‘You are down for fifteen children accompanied by two teachers, or ten mothers with babies, or twenty boys or girls.’ This is not a world for which the Roundelays are prepared. Moreover other forces are at work. Angela, the sensitive daughter of the family, watches as, on the night of a full moon, Delaye’s solitary peacock puts on a full display, tail feathers aglow, and has an overpowering feeling he is signalling to the German planes. What is the reason for the peacock’s malevolence? What is the meaning of the inscription written on the window of one of the rooms at the top of the house: ‘Heryn I dye, Thomas Picocke?’ In We Were Amused Rachel Ferguson revealed that while staying with friends at Bell Hall outside York ‘on the adjoining estate there really was a peacock that came over constantly and spent the day. He wasn’t an endearing creature and … sometimes had to be taken home under the arm of a footman, and to me the combination was irresistible.’ That was enough: out of this she conjured the Roundelays, a family whom the Punch reviewer (28 August 1940) assures us ‘are people to live with and laugh at and love’ and whom Margery Allingham, in a rather po-faced review (24 August 1940) in Time and Tide (an altogether more serious journal than Punch), describes as ‘singularly unattractive’. Well, of course, they are; that is the point.

  Incidentally Margery Allingham identified Delaye ‘in my mind with the Victoria and Albert’, whereas the 21st-century reader can look on the internet and see that Bell Hall is a neat 18th-century doll’s house, perhaps little changed since Rachel Ferguson stayed there. Teddington, however, is a different matter. The changes in Cromwell Road have been dramatic. But Time, while altering the landscape, has its benefits; thanks to Street View, we can follow Rachel Ferguson as, like Barbara Morant, she pays one of her nostalgic visits to ‘Evenfield’/’Westover’. It takes only a click of a mouse and a little imagination to see her coming down the steps of the bridge over the railway line and walking along Cromwell Road, wondering if changes will have been made since her previous visit and remembering when, as a child returning from the London pantomime, she followed this path. As Rachel Ferguson wrote in We Are Amused, ’I often wonder what houses think of the chances and changes inflicted on them, since there is life, in some degree, in everything. Does the country-quiet road from the station, with its one lamp-post, still contain [my mother’s] hurrying figure as she returned in the dark from London? … Oh yes, we’re all there. I’m certain of it. Nothing is lost.’

  Elizabeth Crawford

  PRELUDE

  IN the schoolroom in Lowndes Square, a child, in her ugly, unsuitable frock of plum-coloured satin, cut down when discarded from one of her mother’s, bent over the cutting out of a doll and its cardboard wardrobe, and shivered as she worked.

  Windows and doors in the upper regions of the five-storied house fitted ill: nobody ever attended to them. The nursemaid had ‘forgotten’ to bring another scuttle of coal up all those flights of stairs; nobody except Sir Frederick and Lady Vallant rang bells.

  It was past bedtime, a landmark easy to forget, for the Vallant children were given no supper, but the nurse was flights below at hers, the nursemaid out for the evening. Underneath the lilac sky the lamplighter had gone his rounds and the lights pricked the harness of passing, clopping hansoms into sparks.

  Anne was stiff with cold and concentration, and slid off her chair, a little, odd old-womanish figure in the ridiculous frock, that martyrdom which made heads turn when one went out with Mamma. On her small chest, the overtrimming of jetted beads clashed as she raised the doll’s profile dresses to the light. Myra would love it. If one could make her laugh for pleasure … meanwhile, doll and wardrobe must be hidden, and if suspected, denied, and if found, lied about, especially if one were fool enough to falter that it was for Myra.

  Matter of factly Anne hid the toy before putting herself to bed.

  As she lay in the darkness, voices sounded, two flights below – the drawing-room flight, that would be.

  But Mamma wasn’t giving a party?

  Young voices. …

  ‘Now for it, Jamesey.’

  She warmed to that voice.

  ‘Yes. This is the dam’ drawing-room.’ A young man’s voice.

  ‘Got the thermos?’

  What was a thermos?

  ‘Here. I wonder how long we shall have to wait for them to-night?’

  But Mamma and Papa weren’t out? The brougham hadn’t been ordered round? If Hutchins had made a muddle … even servants, menservants, weren’t safe from Mamma.

  Cautiously Anne
Vallant got up and pattered in her shrunk flannel nightgown to the stair-head and the young voices.

  But you couldn’t see down all those stairs.

  Simultaneous time … the past co-existing with the present and the future.

  ‘All time is one.’ It was Anne who, years later, said that to her own children, James and Vere, but it was they who were to prove it.

  It is often a shock to have one’s inner beliefs, delicate, improbable and personal, put to actual test. It leaves us speculating upon what Anne, the woman, would have made of that evening in Lowndes Square, when – still the younger Miss Vallant – she peered over those banisters and heard a young, unknown man and woman many flights below, and warmed to the voices of her son and daughter who were to be.

  CHAPTER I

  I

  IT is on record that when mother found that she was going to have a baby she said to father, ‘Oh Austen, look what you’ve done now!’

  I can see them, strolling along that quiet suburban road, as they discussed the coming upset to their life. Years later, I did see them, and found that, as was to be expected, the remark of mother’s was in that vein of humorous, tolerant resignation I was to know so well when it was my own turn to be born. No bad feeling and outcries and no false sentiment from her, mental attitudes which have always seemed to me to be the great blots upon the post-war and Victorian mothers respectively. I don’t know which is worse.

  What Austen, my father, had ‘done now’ was Lalage, my elder sister. What, two years later, he did next was to be the last of his family, James and myself.

  When mother knew that twins were upon her she cried that it was pig-like to have litters and refused point-blank, with all the Vallant obstinacy, to take exercise in the day-time. ‘I am a billowing scene, Austen,’ said the poor little thing, ‘and it’s all sufficiently vile and disgustin’, and I won’t inflict the spectacle on the village.’ And she didn’t. James and I were born in September, and all through those scorching days and sultry nights she lay low, coming out only after dinner to walk in the moonlight with Austen. ‘That blaring old brute,’ she called the moon.