B007TB5SP0 EBOK (13 page)

‘No, come in. Not in the least!’

‘I thought,’ Andrew said coldly to the intruder, ‘that you went to the Slade!’

‘Certainly; but not to-day! I shall run round later on, I dare say, for lunch at the British Mu-z …’

‘How fascinating!’

‘I want you to come upstairs,’ the young man said plaintively to Winsome, ‘and tell me what Titian would have done …’

‘Me?’ Winsome said.

‘Yes, do come.’

‘Knowing you,’ said Andrew, ‘I shall say that most likely he would have given her a richer background, and a more expensive silk.’

‘How can I,’ the young man queried, as he withdrew, ‘when the model has only a glove?’

‘Why will you appall him?’ Winsome asked. ‘He has the soul of a shepherd.’

‘Impossible.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘Nothing; but when I look at your landlady’s frieze,’ Andrew said limply, ‘I’ve a sort of Dickensey-feeling coming on. I get depressed, I—’

Winsome swallowed his coffee.

‘Then let’s go.’

‘Il tend à leurs baisers la paume de sa main,’ Andrew began to warble inconsequently as he escaped downstairs.

‘I wonder you aren’t ashamed, Sumph,’ Miss Compostella said to her maid, ‘to draw the blind up every morning on such a grey sky.’

‘Shall I draw it down again, miss?’

‘Yes, please do. No, please don’t. Come back to me again when I ring.’

‘And the shampoo?’

After the final performance of any play it was the maid’s duty to perform this office to precipitate from the mind a discarded part.

‘Washing-out-Desdemona,’ Sumph called it, dating the ceremony from then.

‘It’s hardly necessary,’ Julia said, ‘after such a light part. And, candidly, I don’t quite agree with this romance-exhorting haste. For five whole weeks, now, I’m only myself.’

‘Lord, may it keep fine,’ prayed the maid, lowering an inch the blind.

She was as stolid a mortal, it is probable, as ever graced a bedside or breathed at heaven a prayer.

‘A light part,’ she said, ‘becomes a load during fever. And none of us are so strong as my poor—’

‘But after Hermione,’ Julia objected, ‘I remained a week …’

‘After Hermione,’ the woman replied, ‘you could have gone ten days. After Hermione,’ she repeated loftily, ‘you could do as you pleased.’

Sumph, indeed, worshipped Shakespeare … Stratford, it appeared, was her ‘old home’. Consequently, she was scarcely able to endure her mistress to appear in those pieces – pamphlets,
or plays of domestic persecution – in which all that could be done was to waft, with one’s temperament, little puffs of rarefied air, now and again, across the footlights.

And yet it must be said that Sumph was a bad critic. It was just in these parts that her mistress most excelled.

Julia sat up and smiled.

Round the bed in which we surprise her hung a severe blue veil suspended from oblong wooden rings. Above it, a china angel upon a wire was suspended to complete the picture.

At the sight of her tired mistress set in bolsters the devoted woman was almost moved to tears.

‘Oh, be quiet,’ Julia exclaimed. ‘I know exactly … I remind you of Mrs So-and-so in some death scene …’

Sumph straightened her cap, a voluminous affair drawn together in front in a bewildering bow.

‘You do,’ she said, ‘miss. Of Mrs Paraguay or La Taxeira, as she was to become. She achieved fame in
Agrippina at Baias
, in a single night. Never will I forget her pale face or her white crinoline. She was marvellous. It was that first success, perhaps, that drove her to play only invalid parts. Ah miss, how lovely she looked with the treasures of half the Indies in her hair …’

‘Indeed?’ Julia observed. ‘You’re hurting my feet.’

The woman turned away from anything so brittle.

‘Tell me truthfully,’ Julia queried, ‘how am I looking?’

‘Beautifully weary, miss.’

Miss Compostella sank back.

Like some indignant Europa she saw herself being carried away by the years.

‘Sumph,’ she said feebly, ‘what do you think of Mr Harvester?’

‘As a poet, miss, or as a man?’

‘… As a poet.’

‘His poems are very cold and careful, miss; just what one would expect.’

Julia turned her face to the wall.

Since her mother’s death, caused, no doubt, by a flitting forth with an excursion ticket to Florence (Mrs Compostella had succumbed almost immediately in the train), Julia had
taken a charming house for herself in Sacred Gardens. The address alone, she hoped, would be a sufficient protection, and so spare her the irksomeness of a chaperon. And here, somewhat erratically, she lived with the invaluable Sumph, whom she ill-treated, and of whom, in her way, she was fond.

‘Mr Harvester came round last night, miss, just after you had gone,’ Sumph said; ‘and I’ll confess to you I flew at him. At the totally unexpected, as they say, it’s oneself that speaks.’

‘Indeed, it ought not to be.’

‘Surrounded as we are,’ said Sumph, ‘it’s best to be discreet.’

‘I’m afraid you were very rude to him!’

‘Oh, miss, why waste words on a married man? I’d sooner save my breath and live an extra day.’

‘Are you so
fond
of life?’ Miss Compostella painfully inquired, her face turned still towards the wall.

‘And an old gentleman, with the wickedest eye, called also, and asked if you was in.’

‘Did he give no name?’

‘He left no card, but he called himself a saint,’ Sumph answered slyly.

Mr Garsaint’s political satire,
The Leg of Chicken
, which was to be played in Byzantine costume, was to be given at the Artistic Theatre in the autumn; unless, indeed, Miss Compostella changed her plans, and produced
Titus Andronicus
, or
Marino Faliero
, or a wildly imprudent version of the
Curious Impertinent
at the last moment, instead. For if there was one thing that she preferred to a complete success, it was a real fiasco. And Mr Garsaint’s comedy would probably be a success! What British audience would be able to withstand the middle act, in which a couple of chaises-longues, drawn up like passing carriages, silhouetted the footlights from whence the Empress Irene Doukas (a wonderful study of Mrs A.) and Anna Comnena lay and smoked cigarettes and argued together – at ease. And even should Mr Garsaint’s dainty, fastidious prose pass unadmired, the world must bow to the costumes foreshadowing, as they did, the modes of the next century.

‘How tiresome to have missed him!’ Miss Compostella exclaimed, sitting up, and blinking a little at the light.

In the window hung a wicker cage of uncertain shape that held a stuffed canary. It had had a note sweeter than Chenal’s once … And there it was! Poor, sad thing.

‘Angel! Sweet! Pet! Pretty!’ Julia would sometimes say to it by mistake.

Through the vigilant bars of the cage she could admire a distant view of a cold stone church by Vanbrugh. The austere and heavy tower, however, did not depress her. On the contrary, she approved its solidity. Flushed at sunset, it suggested quite forcibly a middle-aged bachelor with possessions at Coutts. At times she could almost think of it as
James
…

‘And there are several hundred more letters waiting for you in the next room, miss,’ Sumph said.

To Julia’s inquiry for a man with ecstasy to stage-manage, she had received several thousand applications.

‘Go to the next room,’ Miss Compostella directed, ‘and choose me two with your eyes shut.’

It was in the ‘next room’ that Miss Compostella sometimes studied her parts; though for modern comedy rôles she usually went ‘upstairs’.

She sank back now and waited.

With five weeks at her disposal, with the exception of a complaisant visit to Stockingham for a race party, it was her intention to lie absolutely still, preferably at a short distance from London, and explore her heart.

For indeed the dread of Miss Compostella’s life was that she had not got one. Unless that sorrowful, soft, vague, yearning, aching, melting, kite-like, soaring emotion was a heart?

Could that be a heart?

From the mantelpiece came a sudden ‘whir’ from an unconcerned Sèvres shepherdess, a coquettish silence, followed by the florid chiming of a clock.

Noon; or very nearly – for as an object submits meekly to its surroundings, Julia’s timepiece, invariably, was a little in advance.

She held out long arms, driftingly.

It was noon! Sultry noon – somewhere in the world. In Cintra now …

She lay back impassively at the sound of Sumph’s Olympian tread.

A gesture might revive a ghost.

It was irritating to discover that one recalled Polly Whatmore in
The Vicar’s Vengeance
, or Mrs Giltspur in
The Lady of the Lake
.

The indispensable woman, holding the testimonials of the men of ecstasy, approached the bed.

‘And Mr Harvester is here, miss,’ she said sedately, lifting up her eyes towards the quivering angel. ‘Should I show him into the next room, or shall I take him
upstairs
?’

Julia reflected.

‘No,’ she murmured; ‘put him in the dining-room and shut the door.’

‘Yes, miss.’

‘And, Sumph … offer him a liqueur, and something to read – of his own.’

‘Yes, miss.’

‘And Sumph … I shall be getting up now in about half-an-hour.’

She waited – and recast her arms expressively.

‘Claud … ?’

But the worst of it was, she reflected, that with a chair upon Mount Parnassus (half-way up) he was somewhat inclined to
dictate
…

To Ashringford from Euston is really quite a journey. Only an inconvenient morning train, or a dissipated evening one – described in time-tables as the … Cathedral Express – ever attempt at concentration. Normal middle-day persons disliking these extremes must get out at Totterdown and wait.

As a stimulus to introspection, detention cannot be ignored.

Cardinal Pringle, in his Autobiography, confesses that the hour spent on Totterdown platform, seated in deep despondence upon his trunk, came as the turning-point in his career.

Introspection, however, is not to be enforced.

‘It will hardly take us until five o’clock, Violet,’ Mrs Shamefoot observed to her old crony, Mrs Barrow of Dawn, fumbling, as she spoke, with a basket, ‘to drink a small bottle of champagne. Is there nothing particular to see?’

She looked out at the world, through a veil open as a fishing net, mysteriously.

Where were the
sunburned sicklemen of August weary
? The
ryestraw hats
? Surely not many yards off.

Mrs Barrow put up her sunshade.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘a cousin of Oliver Cromwell is buried not far from here; and in the same graveyard there’s also the vault of a Cabinet Minister who died only the other day.’

Mrs Shamefoot produced with perfect sympathy a microscopic affair.

‘In this heat,’ she observed, ‘champagne is so much more refreshing than tea.’

Mrs Barrow accepted with gratitude.

It may be remembered from some exclamations of Lady
Listless that just lately she had ‘heard the Raven’. It was said, however, about Dawn, that whenever she wished to escape to town for a theatre or to shop she would manage to hear its croak.

‘I do hope,’ she exclaimed, ‘that Sartorious won’t be at Ashringford to meet me; it’s perfectly possible that he may.’

‘Well, there’s no good in singing a dirge over what can’t be helped; the connection’s gone.’

‘What tactless things trains are!’

Mrs Shamefoot shook a panoply of feathers.

‘What is that curious watch-tower,’ she asked diplomatically, ‘between the trees?’

Mrs Barrow began to unbend.

Life after all, seemed less raw after a glass of champagne.

‘I don’t know, dear,’ she said, ‘but I think the scenery’s so perfectly French.’

‘Isn’t there a hospital near here – for torn hearts, where love-sick persons can stay together in quarantine to enjoy their despair and help each other to forget?’

‘I don’t know, dear,’ Mrs Barrow said again, ‘but I believe there’s a sanatorium for nervous complaints … All the country round Totterdown belongs to Lord Brassknocker.’

‘Oh, he’s dreadful!’

‘And she’s such a thorough cat.’

‘And poor Lord Susan!’

‘Poor,
poor
Lord Susan!’

‘I can almost feel Ashringford Cathedral here,’ Mrs Shamefoot remarked. ‘Aren’t the hedges like the little low curtains of a rood-screen?’

‘Exactly!’

‘And aren’t the—’

‘My dear, what a dreadful amount of etceteras you appear to bring,’ Mrs Barrow replied with some aridity.

Mrs Shamefoot’s principal portmanteau was a rose-coloured chest, which, with its many foreign labels, exhaled an atmosphere of positive scandal. No nice maid would stand beside it.

A number of sagacious smaller cases clambered about it now into frantic streets, and sunny open piazzas, like a small town clustering about the walls of some lawless temple.

Mrs Barrow was appalled at so much luggage. She had been to the ends of the earth, it seemed, with only a basket.

Mrs Shamefoot re-helped herself to Clicquot.

She was looking to-day incomparably well, draped in a sort of sheet
à la
Puvis de Chavanne, with a large, lonely hat suggestive of
der Wanderer
.

‘The relief,’ she explained, ‘of getting somewhere where clothes don’t matter!’

‘But surely to obtain a window in the Cathedral
they will
. You’ll need an old Ascot frock, sha’n’t you, for the Bishop?’

‘Violet, I’m shocked! Can such trifles count?’

‘Well, I dare say, dear, they help to persuade.’

‘Bishop Pantry is quite unlike Bishop Henedge, isn’t he?’

‘Oh, quite. The present man’s a scholar! Those round shoulders. He will probably die in his library by rolling off the final seat of his portable steps.’

‘But not just yet!’

‘You have read his
Inner Garden
?’

‘Oh yes … And
Even-tide
, and
Night Thoughts
, and the sequel,
Beans
. But they’re so hard. How can it be good for the soul to sleep upon the floor, although it mayn’t be bad for the spine.’