A Harp in Lowndes Square Read online

  And three days before we were born she took her last silvered walk. Father stood still in a field and said, ‘You know, they ought to be rather dotty. They’ve had three solid months of nothing but moonlight. It’ll be too much to expect them to be like other people.’ The thorough-paced tactlessness of the remark luckily amused mother, who hung on to a stile and laughed and laughed.

  II

  A few days later she was shown James and me and said to the nurse with faintish interest, ‘They don’t look a bit like lunatics, but like those little cheap celluloid dolls one bought in the Lowther Arcade,’ at which the nurse decided to be offended, and, I rather gather, left ‘before her month’. Mother says she can’t remember a thing about her except that her shoes (‘great boats’) squeaked, and that she had an infuriating habit of saying ‘b’pardon?’ when she didn’t hear you. But having twins wasn’t all laughing at father and celluloid dolls, and for months mother, slight and frail, was very ill indeed. And it was then that father said, ‘Anne, we’d better send for Lady Vallant – ah – your mother. She could keep an eye on things’; and mother (she has often admitted it in our lifetime) with a little twisted smile and in that tone of voice which commonly goes with a shrug, refused, weak as she was, her grey eyes anxious, but her tongue valiant and obstinate. Besides, the Mater would probably refuse to come.

  The Mater. It was the name of mother and the aunts, her sisters, for their mother. Even as a small child I sensed before I knew the meaning of the word or even guessed that it was Latin, a lack, a wanting, and James has since told me that he felt the same. One said nothing, then. Children take most things for granted. Mother, then, was desperately ill and recovered: it was suggested that her mother be sent for and the idea was downed without explanation. Anything that touched or worried mother affected James and me, and that small incident we have since elected never to re-see, as boy and girl, even as ageing man and woman. It was to be a straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel, but oh! the comfort of one’s gnats!

  III

  We lived in that large suburban village for thirteen years, and mother, London born, hated it steadily.

  Often to this day, James and I make pilgrimage by bus to revisit old stamping-grounds and we realize all she must have gone through. To this day, fusty cabs (no taxis) droop for custom outside the station, and the pollarded trees in those still avenues are unstirred by anything more noisy than a tradesman’s trap. In the spring, lilac hangs heavy in the air, red-purple and with a scent that only your bush with Victorian roots seems to possess, and in the winter the ice still forms on the Jubilee fountain outside ‘the Baxters’ house’. Guiltily we love it all, our grown-up sight registering only superficial contempt. You can’t kill a first love easily, and our sometimes incredulous realization of ugliness and ignominiously-planned homes is largely enhanced by seeing them through our mother’s eyes.

  And so over the bridge along the asphalt passage which to this day echoes one’s footsteps with a sound of ‘balc, balc’, and into our road, and we lean on the gate, and the almond tree has been cut down and a new pane of glass put into old Sims’s glory hole where he used to clean the knives and buzz a tune that later emerged into ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ (we broke the pane out of unforgivable, meaningless devilry in 1900), and really, those are all the innovations. And we hoist ourselves (no time for manners) on to our fence, and lo! the row of artichokes is still there, and the fowl-run that mother herself had had erected, and if one dug in that border, an earthy penny would come to light, dropped by me when I was seven.

  There is a motor bus now to take us back to London; it starts from the Station Hotel. We ignore the hotel. As children it had had nothing to do with us whatever, and so can have nothing now … My outer eye apologetically sees that it is probably the oldest house in the village, with a large ramshackle garden full of character, and of trees that were veterans when Pope roved the tow-path to his villa, and Pepys passed through on his way to Hampton Court. But in youth we were hustled past it by relays of nursemaids, because on Bank Holidays drink was drunk, and the red-coated soldiers in their pill-box hats were considered ‘ignorant’ by Bessie and ‘jumped-up dogs’ by Ethel.

  Our house we liked well, slightly haunted though it was, in that stupid knockabout way that usually means only the more harmless poltergeist with no interesting history at his back. Certainly the noises in the kitchen when ‘the servies’ had filed up to bed were something to remember, and occasional domestic ankles were clutched and windows tapped, and once James was jolted right out of his cot.

  Our point was the fusty, awkward roomy attics, and, above all, the garden. The temptation to enlarge upon every path and currant bush I am going to resist. I, too, have been bored to whimpering stage by others with reminiscent fish to fry, and oh! how they fry it! and with what exclamations and sizzling!

  But I have often, since those days, lamented that better gardens than ours, larger, and much more worth looking at and being in, should offer so much less absorbed occupation to you when you are grown up. It wasn’t that we attempted, as children, to ‘garden’, it was that, to a child, there is that fulfilment, that sense of endless interest, of ‘something going on’ and all-sufficing that I, for one, have lost for ever. When, now, I am invited by friends in the country to ‘spend’ the day or week-end, their gardens give me a sense of unrest. It is as if one occasionally visits a person with whom one used to live; all the features are there, but the sense of context is gone. The historic garden or house, of course, is another matter. That, in time, was to give James and me a different problem altogether. But this I swear: that lend enchantment to distance as you may, those summers were hotter, the afternoons longer, the winters more sparkling and the sun more red (a very toffee-ball) than ever they have been since, and all the flowers more sweet. I have since been supported in this belief by the elderly, who tap barometers and give one dreary weather statistics, and even by letters to the press from authorities, who know the Latin name for every plant and so miss all the fun, poor souls!

  IV

  There was very little illness in our childhood, except when I caught influenza and my cot was taken from the night-nursery and put in the spare room away from James. They tell me that on the night I nearly died, he, a passage removed, turned as cold as ice, and moaned in his crib. The doctor (he whose garden wall gave on to the Jubilee fountain) was quite apologetic about it. We know now that the whole affair was only a trivial manifestation of that odd psychic bond that unites twins and some humans not even related, and about which, certainly in those days, the world was not interesting itself.

  At about nine years old, onwards, we intermittently had the same dreams, tallying to the smallest detail. Nobody took any notice, and it couldn’t be helped, and who wants dreams described? The relation in detail of one’s dresses and dreams, together with plots of novels and plays one has read and seen should be made a penal offence, except perhaps to Mr. Henry James, to whom I would give the floor for a nightmare. Nobody else I can think of is qualified to touch that. It is a half-world, slipped between earth and heaven, and peopled with evil knowledge of all furtive, secret thought, and set to thin high winds from hell; winds that don’t blow, but undulate in layers. …

  No. Henry James, emphatically!

  Being ill was immensely worth while, as it involved lots of presents, and I shall always associate chicken-pox with a cylindrical kaleidoscope at the end of which were clashing fragments of coloured glass. ‘And how it is done,’ said James, aged seven. ‘I for one wash my hands of the whole business.’

  We were never given to pulling toys to pieces; we sensed that a mystery must ever remain one. Didn’t the very bread of our dear Maskelyne and Cook depend upon the preservation of secrets? We called the firm ‘Masculine and Cook’ in all good faith. It was probably this fascinated acquiescence in marvel that made us unable to be impressed by the miracles in the hang1ble, to the shocked disappointment of the governess. But on thinking it over I still belie
ve that we had a case. Are the loaves and fishes more wonderful than wireless, and hasn’t Mr. Masculine’s successor, Mr. David Devant, with his magic kettle, at least equalled the water into wine?

  Illness, too, meant visits from Penny, the kitchen tabby, who rather ignored us, in health, but out of whom affliction, as it does with so many people, brought ‘the best’. As James once said to the nurse, ‘Penny may be difficult, but he’s always been very good to me’. So with the first hint of trays below, Penny lumbered upstairs and put his great striped fiddledum head round the door. He learnt to hide right down the bed and only once gave himself away when I was peppering my lunch, and Penny said ‘Pig … WHIFF’ very loudly and put his bonnet-strings back flat to his head. If mother were there she would say ‘Oh let him stay, Ethel, they’re all enjoying themselves’. Mother was always the pleader for happiness. ‘He likes a party, bless him,’ and the nursemaid, content in absolute non-comprehension, had to give way.

  When we weren’t reading or dozing we played games of our own invention. One was ‘Shakespeare’, and it was calculated, if you weren’t very much on the spot, to raise temperatures. Quotation was forbidden, but the point was that you must speak to each other in an extempore Shakespearean scene; if you failed to respond in under ten quick seconds you lost a point. James, arms round knees, would say in that falsely hearty way that so many characters seem to keep for each other on the stage.

  My good lord Cardinal, the King is wholly grieved

  That … that in this matter of the Prince’s marriage

  The tide and the occasion do succumb

  and he would point a hortatory finger at me, adding, ‘ONE two three …’ Upon the third count I managed to shout:

  Oh what a martyr’d pestilence am I

  That these young lovers should become

  A cause of bawdiness and sneers in France

  ‘ONE two …’

  Poor Lalage was always late for the fair and would falter

  ‘Lord Abergavenny, God knows I never liked you much

  But if … oh lor … but if the nameless tide

  And … something … sea and bellying sail …’

  Here, mother’s voice came from the landing where she was putting away the linen. ‘Abergenny! Abergenny! You’ll be saying “Pytchley” and “Cholmondeley” next, and shaming me before the quality.’

  But father was our real family stickler and never could resist a grammatic tilt with anybody. When the cook quarrelled with the housemaid in the hall and said ‘Whatever made you do that, Ella?’ father, wholly uninterested in the cause of dispute, opened the billiard room door and shouted, ‘Don’t say “whatever!” “Ever” is quite superfluous in that sentence!’ which stopped the row in a twinkling.

  We compiled part of a Handbook Of Etiquette For All Occasions. Father had once harangued Lalage for ‘ejecting’ some gristle on to her plate and had said, ‘As soon should I expect to see a lady spit into the butter-dish’ so our first entry began with that.

  ‘If anything on her plate is not plesent after eating it she should ashore her host that it was very good but too jenerously rich and turn lightly to the wether.’ (Mother’s comment was, ‘perfectly Oriental politeness. I can’t rise to it!’)

  Another hint ran: ‘At a party where a lady may meet a gentleman nobody should say stomach or flea’, for a nurse had once said that to Lalage. But not all the entries were derivative, and one of James’s contributions was For The Wedding: ‘A bride should not bounce to the alter, but carry one glove in the hand.’

  V

  Every morning father went off to the City in a silk hat and carrying a rolled umbrella and a neat packet of sandwiches cut in the kitchen. We thought it a very grown up thing to do, but he was always more of a parent than mother. Mother really wasn’t a parent at all, and I think she knew it and was glad, and that that may have accounted for the way she threw herself into whatever we were doing. That was how we saw it, then. All the other mothers in the neighbourhood played games as a concession, and I can’t imagine that any of them would, as mother once did, look out of the larder window where she was consulting with cook about lunch, and say ‘Mince …’ then, under her breath, ‘Oh dammit, they’ve begun’, and rush out of the house to secure a good place.

  Curious how some people fill a room. Others can be there without being anything except dwarfed and possessed by their surroundings. Mother furnished any place she appeared in. I can’t, I think.

  There is one room in the house we live in now which, quite frankly, I couldn’t get on to terms with for five or six years. It had nothing for me, and began by disliking me, and James as well, in an aloof way. I felt that I was taking an unfair advantage by being in a position to make it serve me by using it. And then one day I began to write of her and of Cosmo Furnival in it, and it gave way. I can’t describe the process except that I felt it was flattered. It warmed at once.

  Everyone has these rooms if they’d only realize it. And the most important thing is to find out what a room’s trouble is. Usually, it is simply neglect, physical or social.

  And so mother furnished that suburban garden she detested, and so we played.

  CHAPTER II

  I

  THERE came a time when one of us asked her if she and her brothers and sisters played ‘our sort of games’, though I have forgotten the details of enquiry. But I remember he answer: ‘Oh, we had our games, of a kind.’ And I remember every detail of the scene of the question; a warm autumn evening with one blackbird fluting; James sitting on the garden roller, massaging Penny’s furry stomach to see him start bicycling and pedalling as cats do; I on the edge of the wheelbarrow, pressing open poppy pods to discover what coloured ‘ballet skirts’ came spreading out. Mother was watering the garden with Lalage following and being allowed to pinch off dead heads. James said: ‘How many of you were there, darling?’

  Mother showered the last of the water over a bit of rockery and said in that tone which, under cover of humour, was meant to put one off, ‘Oh, six or seven or eight or nine’.

  ‘No, but really?’

  Obtuseness (like Monmouth’s ‘melancholy’) was never James’s greatest fault, and I shot a look of surprise at him. Well – it was a fine evening, we’d had a successful circus, with Mother as Scintilletta, The Barest Back’d Rider in The World, skipping and drawing kisses from her mouth; we were already half an hour beyond our bedtime and were to have eggs for supper instead of bread and milk. I made allowances for him.

  Mother said, ‘There were Auntie Sophia and Emmeline and Uncle Stuart, Julian, James and me. Seven of us’. And her face was white.

  That night, James in bed said to me, ‘Did you hear? Mother said there were seven of them’.

  I was alert in an instant. I knew that tone in his voice; it always meant some stress. I said ‘Well?’ as briskly as might be.

  ‘There was Auntie Sophia and Emmeline and mother and three Uncles. That’s only six.’

  My heart began to thump, then Lalage remembered something.

  ‘She can’t do sums,’ she hissed hopefully. ‘You know what it is when she does the housebooks every Monday.’

  We didn’t even go through the form of suggesting that we tackle mother upon the subject. We knew that that would be one of the impossible things of the world, and Lalage caught the general atmosphere and followed our lead, senior though she was. What she contributed to us was that tendency to a comfortable common sense of her own which we subconsciously found healing. I see it more clearly now. Neither James nor I could have remembered and used the tradesmen’s books at that moment.

  II

  It would be misleading to say that from that evening we spied upon mother. It was, rather, as though James and I, fearfully and unwilling, were impelled to some discovery the nature of which we were ignorant, beyond the fact that instinct told us that it was unlovely and best left alone. The spying – childish attempts to trip mother into further discrepancies and statements which refused to tally �
�� was of course intermittent. Healthy children (and we were that) can’t sustain these things for long at a time, or the imaginative would go out of their mind. It was that James and I, quite plainly, were never able for an instant to believe in that particular inaccuracy of mother’s, in spite of her notorious arithmetic. On looking back, this seems to me rather odd. Tentatively, with much screwing up of courage, one or the other of us would add to our hoard of information.

  Grandmother – Lady Vallant – the Mater – lived at Vallant House in one of those large and pillar’d London squares. Vallant in Hampshire was her country place (‘Oh, it was a beautiful house enough. Queen Anne.’)

  That was anyone’s information. It is still the Vallant seat. The Vallant children, our aunts and uncles, were much there in their youth. That too. One had to wait for months, sometimes, for fresh items. Often they arose out of our own concerns, as when Lalage’s godmother sent her a doll for Christmas and mother told us, quite deliberately (no trapping) that she once had one herself ‘a horrid beast. A rag doll. Ugly’. We never asked her who sent it. It was, for us, a doll that came and went from the unknown, its only purpose as an item to be hoarded by us.

  ‘A horrid beast’.

  ‘But a toy,’ urged James. I knew what he meant. He was imploring comfort from me for that child who was our mother, in her London schoolroom. After all, as I told him, we knew from our own nursery reading that Victorian children didn’t have many books or pleasures.