The Brontes Went to Woolworths (8 page)

Oh well, there’s always work.

9

I was returning from Kensington Gardens, the aquatic Crellie, wringing, beaming, and full of pond-water and tiddlers, lumbering on ahead. I adore the autumn and all its smells, and the schoolroom would soon be dark enough to be lit for tea. This October was doing and being all the right things: warm as a June night, and full of subdued colour.

When I got home, mother leaned over the banisters and said, ‘Mr Binton’s been ringing you up. He wants you to telephone him.’

It probably meant nine hundred words on ‘Should Widows Re-Marry?’ (‘Have you seen the
Express
this morning, Miss Carne? There’s a paragraph on page 7, column 5. I’ll read it to you.’) A journalist is always supposed to be able to give the casting vote on these questions, and the fact that she is neither wife, widow, nor what-not, is worried about by nobody.

‘Hullo?’

‘That you, Miss Carne? Didn’t you tell me a while ago that you’d like to meet Toddington . . . ? Well, there’s a bazaar next week at the Albert Hall for a Legal charity, and Lady Toddington is taking a stall. That any good to you?’

I stammered, ‘You’re an angel,’ and heard Binton giggling. The moment I had rung off the whole thing flew to my knees, but I got it told to the family, somehow. ‘And Binton said “Lady Toddington,” mother, so Toddy must be a knight.’

‘Bless him!’ said mother.

We didn’t know that judges automatically became knights. It’s a perquisite of office, like the bowls of dripping the cook sells to the rag-and-bone man. And to think my own familiar Binton had known it all these years . . .

‘Oh Toddy,’ I exclaimed, ‘you will be pleased to see me,
won’t
you?’

‘I shall be delighted, my dear,’ answered Sir Herbert. ‘I cannot hope to be with you and Mildred before five, but I trust you will let me give you tea.’

‘Are you going to have to spend an awful lot, my darling?’ asked Sheil.

‘Well . . . you know . . . these affairs . . . I think a fivepound note should cause me to emerge without a stain on my character.’

‘Well, I think that’s handsome,’ I said.

‘It is expected,’ answered Toddy, with that note of finality he always uses when we have overstepped the mark. ‘It’s in aid of the Browbeaten Barristers!’ Sheil gasped. Sheil, that week, was my safety-valve. At lunch she would shrill, ‘It’s only three days now before Deir’ meets Toddy!’

Miss Martin, of course, didn’t seem in the least excited . . . her
sotto voce
comments seemed to convey an attitude of well-what-about-it? that had the usual sedative effect.

‘But – she’s going to
meet
him!’ glared Sheil.

‘Yes, dear. There’s nothing so very unusual in that, is there?’

At the eleventh second, mother managed, ‘It’s rather an occasion, you know,’ to which, Miss Martin, patently at a loss, responded, ‘Oh, of course,’ then more happily, ‘these huge bazaars are very fashionable affairs sometimes, aren’t they?’

‘He mayn’t be there at all,’ I cut in, robustly facing the situation. But this was treachery, and Sheil cried out, ‘He
told
you he would. He gave Mildred a cheque for some Lalique to give her stall kick. You said so, mother!’

‘Do you know Lalique, Miss Martin?’ Mother smiled with her eyes at Sheil. ‘It’s a rather wonderful sort of glass . . . no two designs alike . . . Frenchman . . . factory pieces . . . less costly . . . Sloane Street . . . ’

(Miss Martin thought it sounded very quaint.)

And, as if life wasn’t doing enough for one, it shot a letter on to the mat at tea-time that made all four of us do our special dance – the famous ‘Pas de Quatre,’ to the hummed music of Meyer Lutz. We only know one of the original steps from theatrical memoirs, but for the time we are all old Gaiety stars, and mother sometimes joins in too, very lightly and neatly.

I knew the letter was going to be an interesting one because the envelope was square and thin, and the writing unfamiliar. Probably one of my readers, who got me out of the telephone book. We are always howling over their poems, and I picture the writers in their shirt sleeves, sitting on Sundays in the kitchen, breathing heavily over their penny bottle of ink. The unintelligentsia seem to be prolific letter-writers, and I am long used to being asked to meet cycle-makers outside the Coliseum, and to walk out with widower plumbers who write to me on their trade paper, with pictures of lavatory basins on it. Mother once bought a basin from one of my flames, but got no reduction on the price.

The letter was written quite badly enough to qualify for the plumbing stakes. I looked first at the signature. It was from Pipson.

‘MY DEAR MISS CARNE,

‘I beleive you mentioned that your sister was hopeing to go on the stage, and I am wondering if I havent something that might suit her. The fact is that I’m booked for revue for six months and if your sister would consider joining the chorus I havent a doubt my reccommendation would get it. It would be tour most of the time and salary low, but you never know. Now my dear Miss Carne you and sister must overlook anything in my suggestion but I know how difficult it is for a lady to get a start. If I may say so, I could put her up to tips as to digs, etc. Above is my PA.

‘With compliments to all
‘Yours very sincerely

‘F. PIPSON.’

I tore upstairs to the drawing-room where tea was going on, and when Katrine and mother had got the gist of Pipson’s letter, we shouted up the next flight, ‘Sheil! Pas de Quatre!’ Sounds of protest, and a flurry of small, delighted female. Forming in line we kicked our fill. When we’d finished and were having fourth cups of tea, Sheil asked what the dance was for, this time, and she sat by mother and ate cakes that were slightly forbidden, and Crellie stole a macaroon and didn’t get smacked because of Pipson’s letter. And when Miss Martin was discovered in the doorway with resigned complaint in her eye, Crellie belched at her, and mother began to laugh and said, ‘I’m so – sorry, ha ha! – Miss Martin. Yes, go now, darling, oh, ha, ha, har!’

‘The stately an’ memorable progress of this ’owly man to the Vatican,’ began Katrine, ‘was only slightly marred by a passing indisposition
’

‘What
is
a “PA”?’ said mother.

‘Permanent address,’ answered Katrine.

‘My darling, how truly awful! There’ll be two plaster lions on the gate-posts and a stone cauliflower on the lawn with a red-hot geranium in it that never gets watered. PA . . . it’s subtly worse than a “villa residence.”’ Then, with a look at me I knew: ‘Is Pipson all right?’ Her look brushed aside Katrine’s protests and testimonials.

I just nodded. Her face relaxed instantly.

‘We’ll go for a perch this evening, after dinner,’ rejoiced Katrine, and I think we all began to look forward to it. We love walking at night: one feels so light and fresh, and passing faces are shadowed and can’t tire one, or sadden, or set one thinking. And we go hatless, with walking-sticks, and wear what we like, which is restful, and find ourselves in strange streets and squares, and sometimes they abruptly conduct one to eminent localities, as in a dream, and I once found myself outside Buckingham Palace in my dressing slippers. We call these walks ‘gutter-perchings’ and they are wonderful, if you are happy.

‘And now I suppose La Martin is offended,’ remembered mother.

‘She made a rather heavenly face when Crellie went into liquidation,’ said Katrine.

Dinner was a priceless affair, with mother at the top of her form. She had just helped herself to a wing of chicken and suddenly began to imitate her French mistress at the school where she was educated, and then she burst quite extempore into a parody of the poetry they were made to learn – all optimistic and no base thoughts of men entertained.

(Attention, mes enfants!)
‘C’était un beau jour d’Avril,
Les fleuves ruisselaient,
Les oiseaux piroquaient,
Et sur le gazon tendre et vert

Les belles têtes émaillées des fleurs apparaissaient.’

(Une marque de désordre!) Then, to herself, ‘That’s really
dam’
good!’

‘If it’s Victor Hugo it’s much better than him,’ I agreed. We know by repute all of mother’s ex-mistresses, and imitate them nearly as well as she does, and once when we were reading our old exam papers we found two of ours and three of mother’s, and she said, ‘May 1874 . . . would those be yours or mine?’

We set out at nine-thirty.

‘I suppose Mildred took all her stuff down in the car yesterday,’ mother said.

‘Yes. She had a tea the other day to show the Lalique, and sold quite a lot in advance.’

‘We’d better ask her to dinner afterwards, and tell her she must come just as she is, and can go when she likes.’

‘Better not,’ answered mother, ‘she’ll be dead tired and will want to go straight home.’

‘I wonder if Nicholls will be there?’

‘I’m certain he won’t. He couldn’t afford the prices.’

‘Oh,
poor
lamb!’

‘Toddy can tell him all about it,’ consoled mother, ‘I expect he’ll take him out to lunch.’

Henry Nicholls is a dear, and Toddy is becoming increasingly fond of and dependent upon him. He has left him £250 in his Will. Nicholls does a hundred jobs for Toddy that don’t come within his duties, and seldom rushes off to snatch his own lunch before he has seen to it that Toddy is served with what he enjoys, and last summer when Toddy gave a lunch-party in his private room at the Law Courts and Mildred came to hostess it, Nicholls must have had only about ten minutes to himself, as he volunteer’d to shepherd us all and wait by us in the hall until we were all assembled when Toddy could come down the stairs to lead us up without loss of time and being gaped at. And Toddy said, ‘Are all my ladies here?’ and mother, who overheard, said, ‘Yes, all waiting for you to crack the snail for them,’ for we are always trying to wean him from alluding to us in the rooster manner. It’s purely old-world, but we find it dreadfully hen-coopy.

When we had walked another half-mile mother said, ‘Well – to-morrow you’ll see Mildred. I’m longing to know what she’s really like.’

‘But, darling, come too – and buy some Lalique!’

‘Not much! This is your show. But you must tell me every mortal thing.’

‘She’ll probably be a crone in a bugled dolman,’ said Katrine, coming out of her Pipson trance.

‘Oh no,’ answered mother and I. After that we talked about revue.

That was a wonderful day. One never guesses in the morning when one gets up that some days are going to be like that.

10

The Albert Hall bazaar was no sort of a job, professionally speaking, and one not a bit in my line. With that fact I tried to steady my nerves all through lunch, while Sheil stared at me with passionate concentration. To her, I knew, I had already taken on the quality of dream. I was merging into the saga, and she, fascinated, bewildered, was watching me fade . . .

I didn’t feel any too real, myself, and Katrine and mother had caught it a little, as well, and we were all rather silent.

On that occasion, Miss Martin was our safety-valve: our responses to her remarks came briskly. One heard them being admirably apposite.

When I looked back, mother, as I knew, would be at the drawing-room window, watching me down the street. She called out, ‘My love to Mildred!’ At my feet fell a bunch of violets tied with cotton. The schoolroom window framed Sheil, her russet wig starting.

Her shriek, ‘For darling Toddy,’ was half drowned by a passing motor.

Inside the hall I was pestered in the usual manner by women who seem to think that a hideous cushion is pretty if it is sold for charity. I suppose my trouble is that I haven’t got ‘Press’ written all over me, or a clever way with nuisances. Somebody loomed up and I said, ‘Is Mildred here?’ and then I heard what I’d done and felt rather ill, and stammered, ‘I mean Lady Toddington.’

I found myself being led in the direction of her stall.

‘That is Lady Toddington. In blue.’

She was very much as I had expected, only smarter and a trifle younger. Her hair, instead of being dyed, as we had all arranged, was anybody’s brown rapidly growing grey. And she was business-like, which put me out of action, for a bit . . .

I handed over my Press card. Somebody was explaining me. And then, I found myself let in for one of those hopeless conversations which are inevitable where one party has a lot to do and the other nothing. But that was only the stupid, obvious difficulty. The main trouble lay in the fact that I came to Lady Toddington aware: primed with a thousand delicate, secret knowledges and intuitions, whereas to her I was, I suppose, merely so much cubic girl, so to speak. I felt at once at an everlasting disadvantage and as though I was taking her friendliness under false pretences. A sort of Judas at the keyhole.

How could I tell her that I had lunched with her and helped her dress her stall, yesterday afternoon, and that Toddy had come in after the Courts rose and given us both a cocktail? How convey the two years I had spoken to them both every day of my life? How blurt her own life to her, her daily round of dressmaker, telephone, at homes, and tiffs with Toddy. How describe to her her own secret difficulties: that she is privily aware that she is not his mental equal? That in the past there have been days when she would almost have welcomed his tangible infidelity as being a thing she could roundly, capably decide about, and no brains needed? That she has long ceased to love and notice him?