The Brontes Went to Woolworths (13 page)

I hadn’t told her that the books in question were masterstrokes of their kind in which sleuthery was subordinated to style; I was counting on her being the type that would classify
The Two Magics
of Henry James as a ghost story. In any case Toddy must really try not to be a literary snob. I think that Mildred had taken the Edgar Wallace remark absolutely literally. It would be very characteristic.

She turned and put a huge envelope into my hand. ‘Don’t forget your young man.’ She had brought it down herself. Perhaps I looked what I felt, for she put her hand for a second upon my shoulder. ‘Come and see him again soon. I’ – she seemed to pause for a phrase, and then, I think, altered it – ‘I think he’d like it.’

‘And you, too?’

‘Me? Oh, I daresay you’ll find me putting down a saucer of milk for the cat! We’ll give you a lift, of course.’

So I sat in the familiar car that I didn’t know was theirs, or hired, and the man who might have been Mitchell drove us.

I couldn’t expect much sleep, that night, of course. I amused myself with turning over my albums of published work, and by dipping into my novel. I found that four years ago I had written three articles berating Mr Justice Toddington for sundry things he had said in Court. Evidently Binton had suggested the subjects. Heavens! How I had got home on Toddy! I compared him with my pet aversion, St Paul, and said that it was a pity that his biased private opinions should be aired in public. The affair appeared to be about the presence of women at murder trials. Mother heard me cackling, and came in in her dressing-gown. As she was leaving, she said, ‘By the way, aren’t I ever to be allowed to read your book?’

‘Oh mercy, darling! It’s all over advice and remarks from the last beast I sent it to. If you’ll give me time to rub ’em out . . . I remember which pages they were on.’

She agreed instantly, kissed me and left me. I hunted for an eraser and turned up the pages. The pencilled comments weren’t there.

Then I sat down and thought.

13

Katrine is rehearsing in a rather attractive pub in Maiden Lane; it is mid-Victorian and seasoned with beer smells and there is sawdust on the floor, and when you’ve walked through all that, upstairs is a large room with a piano so dreadful that it is funny, and girls dressed in jumpers and knickers, and some of them practise in bathing kit and look very boyish and gay. The piano has one note which is dumb, and I always wait for it not to function, and guess when it ought to be doing so. It is A above middle C, and I never knew how important A was until the accompanist got started.

I’m going (blank)
To dreamy Hono (blank) lu!

Katrine and Sheil and I always sing ‘blank’ now instead of the word or syllable when we practise the ensembles at home; and we did last Sunday, in church. We hardly ever go, because we believe in such a lot of things that aren’t in the official list, but we wanted to pray for the success of the revue, and however modern or sceptic or advanced one may be, there is something about a church more likely to make wishes come true than anywhere else.

Two years ago I went to St Bartholomew’s to beg St Rahere that Toddy mightn’t die on circuit before I saw him again, and that his sheets mightn’t be damp in his lodgings, and when father was ill I happened to be passing a Baptist Chapel and went in, and although I shall never know about the sheets, because Sir Herbert won’t remember, father certainly became better, temporarily. I’m sure God likes small attentions, and I’m going to be nicer to him in future because of Toddy and Mildred, and Katrine thinks she will be, too, because of Freddie Pipson. So we sang

Jesu, lov (blank) of my soul
Let me to (blank) bosom fly.

and we both think God would adore that piano, as we do. Katrine doesn’t know it yet, but she’s in for a hot time in the provincial dressing-rooms. I hadn’t been at the rehearsal five minutes before I picked out the company cats. I’ve never had much to do with them, but I’ve met more of them than Katrine has, and the type is rather prevalent and almost unmistakable. They are usually horse-faced blondes with rodent teeth, who tell all the dirtiest stories and generally have a grubby little pull with the management poor – brutes, and are always the first to go to pieces in a crisis. Pipson told me that in the air-raids that sort of girl used to lose her head entirely, and after saying God and Christ steadily upstairs, dropped down and prayed all over the stage when the bombs began to fall.

We didn’t see much of Pipson, of course. He is such a great man that he rehearses in theatres between the performances, with the principals. He’s got Katrine two wonderful lines to speak. One is, ‘I’ve never been so insulted in the whole of my life!’ which remark comes into every revue I’ve ever seen, and the other, ‘Well girls, come on, the bathing’s fine this morning!’ and we practise saying it in all the most frightful ways there are. Katrine wants to speak it in a Cockney accent, but mother and I are in favour of ‘Wehlgehls, come on, the bathing’s faine this morning!’ and mother once put on my béret and flung her evening cloak over one shoulder and whipped a walking-stick out of the folds, made a pass at Katrine, and said it like Hamlet, pacing with a Repertory stalk. But Katrine, thinking of the producer, said, ‘You want to soften that, dear, it’s altogether too strong.’ Mother sheathed her stick and declared, ‘It would be awful from the front, quite awful.’

Katrine is picking up the dances quite nicely and we practise them in the garden to the joy of the cook and the incredulity of the Colonel next door, who creeps into his bathroom to watch us, and gleams at us through his monocle, and seems completely astonished, like the man in the Bible. Katrine was very nervous when she first saw him sternly watching us, and missed a step, but the garden is the best and most unencumbered place to rehearse in, and our movements are perfectly decent, so we have invented a place in the scheme for the Colonel, to account for his being there, and we pretend he is a masher left over from the Empire promenade who is trying to seduce Katrine, and that his gleam is one of unbridled desire, and when we’d settled that, Katrine was much more at her ease, and the rehearsals went with a swing.

We took Miss Martin down one afternoon to watch, because we felt it would be good for her general education, and she said ‘But’ all the time she was steering round the barrels, and was rather stunned at the bare legs being directed by a man. I told her the truth: that the girls danced in their skin to save money on washing and darning tights, and that seemed to reassure her, economy being unassailably respectable. But for all that she sat against the wall expecting to be insulted, and appeared to be rather at a loss when nobody attempted to, and shrank when the girls came near her to rest, and talk, and examine the heels of their shoes, and went ‘hoo!’ when one of the cats said, ‘Honest, kid, that’s the second pair I’ve trod over in a week with these B
rehearsals.’ Some of the girls say worse things than that, and I have warned Katrine not to tell mother because she mustn’t be worried, and that she may have to say them herself on tour for peace and quiet, but that they aren’t for family use. Katrine is already depressed by the language alone.

Miss Martin took it absolutely sitting because she didn’t understand, and hoo’d solely as a tribute to the bad grammar going about. It has already leaked out that Katrine knows Pipson, and most of the girls assume that she is what they call his ‘friend,’ and have more or less divided, as a result, into two camps already, in which one side is awed envy and the other suppressed spite. We did tell mother about that because we thought she’d love it, and she did. Sheil has begged to see one rehearsal, but I won’t let mother allow her. The girls are nice, good creatures, with a few exceptions, and they would love her in that stridently demonstrative maternal way that the chorus does, but they are not for Sheil.

Katrine leaves us much sooner than we expected, as some dim managerial caprice has decided that final rehearsals are to take place in Bradford, where they open. Pipson has found her lodgings near his hotel, and walked round the question of fleas and bugs so delicately that we had to say them for him, which relieved him a lot, though he still calls the latter ‘what’s-her-names,’ but he has known Katrine’s rooms for years long before he arrived at his present status, – and though they will take nearly two-thirds of her salary he has advised her to engage them. Katrine would really have an easier time all round if she went into retreat in a convent, and far more chances of acquiring merit. She is too excited to feel leaving home, but she will be disappointed at being out of the fun on Hallowe’en. We have missed keeping it for years, since we left Hampton Wick, where we had parties on every imaginable anniversary, and having no proper garden now has made a difference, especially in the matter of guys on the fifth, which were what we called a
spécialité de la maison
, and famous all over the village for their size and drama.

But this year, Sheil is old enough to join in too and stay up late, at least, that is the official excuse. Actually, I am pining for an illuminated gourd-head with a jagged grin, and for the black cats and witches on the table, and I wanted to see if the young man in Miss Martin’s bedroom would crop up in the looking-glass rite, and how she would cope with him if he did. Being a thoroughly good woman, her mind is probably not very clean, so I expect she would look self-conscious, and think any woman awful who didn’t look the same way when eligible males were offered her by the spirits, who, I must admit, are apt to be rather heavyhanded in their ideas of humour. I often wonder if Miss Martin wants to be asked about him, and I would ask like anything if it would please her, though it would be terrible if she wanted to be all-girls-together with me about him, and I sometimes think there is an all-girls-together side of her, if one could get down to it. Katrine can’t imagine why I am interested in what she calls the Martin’s Rogues’ Gallery of portraits. She doesn’t see that, with people like Miss Martin, photographs take the place of speech and give the outsider clues to their lives. But then, Katrine can’t imagine what it must be like to be suppressed in any sort of way, whereas I can. She fell in love with our fishmonger when she was eleven, and made a hero of him, and one morning she happened to go into the shop when he was rating the cashier for a muddled order, and she came home quite pallid and said she had now got to the age when all desire shall cease, which was the last verse she had learnt, and mother would have shrieked, except for hurting her feelings.

Sometimes I look forward to that time, myself, as love goes on for ever, and the sex part is only an interlude, and, except for making babies, doesn’t really matter anything like as much as people pretend. It is merely expedient, while love has no fish to fry, which gives one persons in one’s life like Saffy and Toddy.

Katrine was so miserable at the idea of our having a Hallowe’en party without her that we promised we would give it up, and mother suggested one on the first of November, as it is All Souls’ Eve, which didn’t seem to us to be a legitimate excuse for pumpkins, so we gave up that idea too.

I wonder, if I were dead and allowed to return once a year, whether I should like best to look in at windows I knew and see the living having fun and playing games, or whether I should feel less forgotten if they were sitting there being sad about me? All Souls’ Eve should never have been put into November, because of the little chilly doubts in the hearts of the dead. They should have been allowed to come to us in high summer, when the air is still, and smelling of hot grass and sweet peas, and the moon is large and bland.

Father came back, once, but only once, and very naturally, so as not to frighten us. He was sitting all the evening in the library and was wearing one of his old lounge suits I had forgotten, but remembered at once because of the ink-stain on the sleeve that the cleaner couldn’t get out. It’s upstairs in a cupboard still. He looked up, very kind and pleased to see us when we took it in turns to peep in at the door, and we brought him our best toys and put them where he could enjoy them, and mother put us into our new party dresses for him to see, and told us to tell him everything we were doing, but not to mind if he didn’t answer.

We know now that what Miss Martin would call ‘ghosts’ can speak to one if they want to. Why father only came to see us once, I don’t know, but I expect that he knows we are always here, if wanted.

Katrine’s last days with us are passing, and yet they can’t seem to strike through to me, because of the Toddingtons. I told her so, and she understood at once. Lady Toddington has made her return invitation, and when It was imminent I was afraid. Once more the monstrous social occasion must be gone through – even for Sheil, with whom Austen Charles has long been a familiar, and if any hitch occurred, one couldn’t guess what would happen. We can’t afford another Saffyn death . . .