B007TB5SP0 EBOK (12 page)

‘Poor thing!’ Mrs Shamefoot murmured; ‘send her a lovely spray, and tell Jordan to be there by eight.’

Jordan lately had been imported from the country, only to exclaim, the first time it rained: ‘It’s too-wet-for-to-go-far!’

It had been very disheartening.

Mrs Shamefoot considered her lyre; in its way, it was going to be as wonderful as the anchor of peonies she had made for the late Lord Mayor.

‘Do you remember it, dear?’ she said, beginning to laugh. ‘It was so
huge
, so perfectly huge, that it had to be tilted sideways to get it out of the shop.’

But Mrs Henedge was considering an amazingly elegant landaulette; a landaulette that seemed to her to positively whistle with smartness.

‘Here come Lady Georgia, now,’ she exclaimed, ‘and Mrs Mountjulian, “Emily”, is with her—’

‘Oh, she’s getting sinister and
passée
.’

‘Perhaps; but only sometimes! It’s not so long ago that she was tinting her toes with blackberries to be a nymph! You’d never credit it, dear, but we were the same age once!’

‘I shall hide behind the counter,’ Mrs Shamefoot said, ‘if she comes in.’

‘For the love of heaven, mind the lyre!’ Mrs Henedge screamed as Mrs Mountjulian entered.

Mrs Mountjulian was long and slender, like an Imari vase, with a pretty, lingering manner which many thought tiresome.

As Miss Emma Harris the world had found her distinctly aloof. As the Duchess of Overcares, however, she had been very simple indeed; it had been a new form, perhaps of pride. And now, as Mrs Mountjulian, she was becoming ‘aloof’ again. To add a dash of picturesqueness to her career, her husband, it was said, was doing his utmost to get rid of her, and, although she had been in an aeroplane disaster, a fatal gala performance, two railway accidents and a shipwreck, she always came back – smiling.

‘We’ve come to rifle you of your nicest flowers,’ Mrs Mountjulian said.

‘Oh, I need nothing,’ Atalanta explained. ‘Only to smooth my hair.’

In a muslin frock with a broad blue sash, and a bridesmaid’s bouquet of honeysuckle and meadowsweet, she was looking engagingly pronounced. Indeed she needed only a mop and a pail to be altogether delightful.

‘Isn’t she
voyou
?’ Lady Georgia said nervously. ‘I’m really afraid to be seen with her.’

‘My dear, you look a dove!’ Mrs Henedge murmured.

‘Properly managed, nothing need ever clash,’ Mrs Mountjulian assured Dina, singling out for herself a savage, multi-coloured leaf.

But Lady Georgia appeared transfixed.

‘For whom,’ she asked, ‘is that heavenly lyre?’

‘ “For Time sleeps not, but ever passes like the wind …” ’ Mrs Shamefoot replied vaguely.

‘St Catherine!’

‘To the Queen of … Naples.’

They smiled.

‘Oh, do choose,’ Atalanta said, glueing down her hair inventively, with a perfect sense of style.

‘There’s sure to be a struggle at the church. And Isolde will have a
crise des nerfs
, or something if we aren’t there soon. Besides, Viola’s getting impatient: I can see her dangling a long leg from the car into the street.’

‘It was too bad really of Mrs Fox foisting her on to us,’ Lady Georgia said. ‘Prevent her, do, from getting out.’

She was looking, perhaps, annoyed in arsenic green with a hat full of wan white flowers.

‘Victor insists that you come to us for the Ashringford races,’ she said to Mrs Shamefoot, as she said good-bye, ‘and stay at Stockingham for as long as you can.’

‘How sweet you are! If only to lie in the garden, I’ll come.’

‘At present I’m revolving a Tragic Garden,’ Lady Georgia told her, ‘with cypress trees, and flights of stairs.’

‘I’m admiring your pictures,’ Mrs Mountjulian said, dawdling. ‘Those clouds – so stationary – surely are Cézanne? And the Monticelli … ! And that alluring Nicholson … Only last night I was talking to Sir Valerian Hanway; you know whom I mean! And he said … “It’s an anxiety for a poor man to own beautiful things. Where would be the pleasure of possessing a Velasquez, and having to hold a pocket handkerchief all the time to the roof to keep out the rain?” ’

‘If she thought to embarrass me,’ Mrs Shamefoot said, as soon as they were gone, ‘I’m afraid she failed!’

‘Poor woman!’ Mrs Henedge considered it diplomatic to say. ‘Either she is growing old, or her maid is getting clumsy …’

‘I should imagine both,’ Mrs Shamefoot observed, returning to her lyre.

‘I’m delighted at any rate,’ Mrs Henedge rose remarking, ‘that we shall see something of each other in Ashringford, when we must contrive to conquer all difficulties to gain possession of a window.’

‘Otherwise,’ Mrs Shamefoot said, ‘I shall try Overcares!’

‘It’s not so
obvious
, of course!’

‘And the Bishop, I know, is not unfavourably disposed … But somehow, dear, a manufacturing town is
not
the same.’

‘Indeed it isn’t!’

‘Besides, there were so many sickening stipulations—’

‘The Bishop of Overcares is the most paralysing man I know,’ Mrs Henedge said, ‘and she … Mrs Whooper—’

‘A terror!’

‘And
might
a tiny nosegay be left for Mr Brookes? Lilies he likes … Just five or six; I’m making, unavoidably, in the opposite direction, or I’d drop them on his doorstep myself.’

Mrs Shamefoot stood a moment pensively watching Dina remove the dark hearts that stained from Winsome’s lilies before continuing her wreath.

It would be quite too extravagant, she feared, when finished, for the penniless young man for whom her débutante had died: he could never afford to buy it.

What should be done?

Remove a few of the orchids? No!

Allow the father it? Certainly not.

Die, and use it herself? Soco was so dilatory …

She remained dreaming.

‘Be so good,’ she called to Dina presently, ‘as to fetch me the scissors.’

And, shaking her head sadly, under her heavy hat, she cut a string to the lyre.

13, Silvery Place was the address of Mrs Henedge’s latest genius.

‘A young boy,’ it was her custom to describe him.

With a few simple words she could usually create an interest.

The young boy, gentle reader, was Winsome Brookes.

Standing at his window, hairbrush in hand, we find him humming some bars of Cimarosa, whilst staring up at a far-off Fugi of clouds. The attitude was essentially characteristic. When not exercising those talents of his, Winsome Brookes would spend whole hours together grooming fitfully his hair.

‘Don’t mind me,’ his gracious lady often said to him, ‘if you care to calm your hair. I know,
with you
, that it takes the place of a cigarette.’ And at Chesham Place, sometimes, she would supply the needful weapons.

Just now, however, with two invitations for the same afternoon, he was looking pestered …

‘Will you not make, Andrew, that appalling noise,’ he murmured distractedly, without turning round. ‘You make me shudder.’

‘It’s extraordinary,’ Andrew answered blandly, waving as he spoke, a file, ‘it’s extraordinary, but ever since that Arabian ball, the paint clings to my finger-tips as if to the cornice of a temple!’

Winsome removed an eye from the street:

‘Well, need you point at me like a fingerpost?’ he irritably inquired.

‘I consider your friend to be half a minion, and half an
intellectual,’ Mrs Henedge, who had never taken to Andrew in the least, had said once to Winsome Brookes. ‘That violet muffler, and the no collar …’ was the official reason, but, in reality, a lurid sketch of herself leaning upon the arm of an Archbishop of Canterbury whilst smiling across her shoulder into the eyes of Monsignor Parr accounted for the antipathy. She had come upon the trifle altogether suddenly at the Grafton Gallery and had decided at first it must be a Forain.

‘I wish your breakfast would come,’ Andrew exclaimed disinterestedly, stretching himself out upon the floor – a
nature morte
.

‘And so do I,’ Winsome complained. ‘But what is one to do! I order an egg, I wait an hour for it, and in the end most probably they’ll bring me some fearful thing that looks like an auk’s.’

‘A hawk’s?’

‘Oh, my dear friend … An auk’s. The great auk!’ Winsome rolled his eyes.

Let us follow these bright ornaments.

The rooms of their occupants are sometimes interesting.

Taking for granted the large, unwieldy furniture, the mournful carpet, the low-spirited draperies, the brown paper of the wall, the frieze, in which Windsor Castle appeared again, and again, and again, and which a patriotic landlady (a woman like a faded Giotto) would not consent to hide lest it might seem to be disloyal, let us confine our observations to the book, the candlestick, the hour-glass or the skull.

In a litter upon the mantelpiece – some concert fixtures, a sketch of Charlie Campfire the barman (of Lower Bottom Street, Park Lane), an early photograph of Andrew in a surplice, a caricature of Bronx White the Negro champion, an impression of Lionel Maymauve singing ‘Women, those deceiving Cats’ might be seen, whilst immediately above, usually quite awry, was suspended a passionate engraving of two very thin figures wandering before a retreating sea. Winsome, indeed, to Andrew’s amusement, cared only for quite independent landscapes of disquieting colour. He found beauty in those long, straight roads bounded by telegraph poles, between
which some market cart would trundle through the pale midday.

Upon the piano, swathed in a scintillating shawl, rose up a modern figurine with a weary gesture, which, upon examination, was not lacking in signs that the original must almost certainly have possessed the proverbial kind heart of a black sheep. Beside it, against a stack of music, was propped a mask of Beethoven in imitation bronze, which, during the more strenuous efforts of the player, would invariably slip, giving, often, the signal for applause, while, (for the room held many wonders), in a corner, intriguing the eye, reposed a quantity of boards: polished yellow planks, the planks of Winsome’s coffin. These, in the event of a party, could be coaxed to extend the dinner-table: ‘If you’re going to be ten for supper to-night,’ his landlady would say, ‘you’ll need your coffin boards stretched out.’

But, as much as he was able, Winsome sauntered out to dine.

In her cooking, he found his landlady scarcely solicitous enough about his figure … So manifest, of course, at concerts. And the question of concerts was occupying largely his thoughts just now.

Continually he was turning over in his mind the advisability of changing his usual name to Rose de Tivoli. For musical purposes it sounded so much more promising, he considered, than Winsome Brookes … Two persons would come to hear Rose, whereas only one, and perhaps not even one …

But if Winsome Brookes had talent, Rose de Tivoli had genius!

Could he possibly be Rose?

Mrs Henedge was inclined to think so. She had been, indeed, most hopeful:

‘I’ll take the Aeolian Hall, one afternoon,’ she had said, ‘and you can give the concert—’

To be – or not to be Rose! It was one of the things that was troubling him most.

‘Ah! here comes breakfast now,’ Andrew observed, as Mrs Henedge’s floral gift was ushered in upon a tray.

‘ “I offer ye these violets,

Lilies and lesser pets,

These roses here pell-mell –

These red and splendid roses

Buds which to-day uncloses

These
orchids dear
as well.” ’

‘ “These opening pinks as well,” ’ Winsome corrected. And, returning impassively to the window, he leaned out.

Everywhere, between the houses (those old and dingy houses, whose windows would catch the sunrise with untold splendour) showed plots of garden, like snatches of song. Sometimes of a summer morning, leaning from his window, it would not have astonished him greatly to have surprised the Simonetta of Boccaccio at the end of the shady place leaping lightly, with uplifted arms, between the trees, pursued by Guido de gli Anastagi and his pack of hounds … Nor were visions all. Across the street the Artistic Theatre, a brilliantly frescoed, Asian-looking affair, aspired publicly heavenwards every day. It was the adornment and the scandal of the place. Too late, now, to protest about the frescoes; they were there!

Winsome sighed. At that moment his gracious lady bored him badly.

For just as the bee has a finer nature than the wasp, so had Andrew the advantage of Winsome Brookes.

By nature mercenary, and, perhaps, a trifle mean, a handful of flowers suggested to him nothing very exactly …

‘ “
The court-yard clock had numbered seven

When first I came; but when eleven

Struck on my ears, as mute I sate,

It sounded like the knell of Fate.
” ’

Winsome turned.

Nothing diverted Andrew more than to investigate Winsome’s books.

With a
Beauty and the Beast
he was almost happy.

The entrance, fortunately, of breakfast put an end to the recitation.

Whilst Winsome breakfasted Andrew indulged himself by venting his indignation on Miss Compostella’s poster for the
Dance of Death
at the theatre over the way.

‘It’s enough to make me cart the Magdalen back home!’ he exclaimed.

‘Perhaps some day,’ Winsome said, ‘I may go for curiosity to New York, but until then—!’

For Andrew frequently would model strange, unusual figures, that were ostensibly Church pieces had they been more subdued … His Mary Magdalen, for instance, might be seen in the foyer of the Artistic Theatre, where,
even there
, it was usually abused …

‘The Eros looks at least sixty!’ he observed, criticizing the poster. ‘And Death in that small toque’s absurd: surely Death required a terrific Lewis, and a Romney-hoop to conceal the scythe.’

‘But Death isn’t a woman!’ Winsome objected, cracking the top of his egg.

‘Indeed? Death is very often a bore.’

‘Only for Adonis,’ Winsome murmured absently.

‘… Do I disturb you?’ The door opening gently was followed by the entry of a handsome, though harassed, head.