Britannia Mews Page 25

  “Sonia!”

  Nothing happened. Dodo glanced over her shoulder at the young man below; he was sleeping so soundly, she didn’t want to disturb him; on the other hand—and here, oddly enough, it was her mother’s careful training that again came into play—one simply couldn’t run off without a word to one’s hostess.… Dodo slightly opened the door and applied her lips to the crack.

  “Sonia! Are you awake?”

  This produced results. A bed-spring twanged, and Sonia’s husky, sleepy voice replied.

  “Who the hell’s that?”

  “It’s me, Dodo.”

  “Good God, are you still here?”

  “Well, you said I could stay,” Dodo pointed out; and giggled. “As a matter of fact, some one else has stayed too.… I don’t know who he is.”

  “Good God!” said Sonia again. “Am I never to have the place to myself?”

  Dodo did not consider this rude, but merely frightfully amusing. She said tactfully:—

  “As a matter of fact, I’m just going out to get breakfast. Shall I come back?”

  “Do whatever you damn well like,” said Miss Trent.

  Dodo closed the door. She had been conscious throughout of someone besides Sonia on the other side of it; of vague muffled stirrings, not caused by Sonia. Some people no doubt would have been shocked—and in the early days of their friendship Dodo herself had looked askance at Robin’s pyjamas in the laundry-basket. “Are you going to marry him?” she asked naïvely. “Hell, no!” yawned Sonia. “But I don’t mean to be sexually repressed.” Since then, of course, Dodo had learned to fear sexual repression as her mother feared scarlet fever; and to conceal the fact of her own virginity as though it were some sort of preliminary rash.

  She picked up her bag and stepped out. The fresh air tasted delicious; a leaf or two from the lime tree crunched underfoot, and from the chimney of the Cock a thread of smoke rose against the clear October sky like the smoke from a bonfire. Dodo sniffed appreciatively, just as she had sniffed up the smell of stale gin—and at the same moment observed someone else also taking the morning air. At the door of the Puppet Theatre stood a very tall, very upright old woman with a face like ivory under a crown of white hair.

  Dodo instinctively paused. She knew who this person was; everyone who frequented the Mews knew Mrs. Lambert; she was the object at once of their derision and their awe. “Darling,” they said, “she’s too Victorian and stuffy for words—but the Puppet Theatre is an artistic achievement, you can’t get away from it, Diaghilev has been there himself!” So they put up with Mrs. Lambert—having really no alternative, for when she complained about noise the landlord always took her side, she’d had poor Drogo actually turned out of Number 10 for giving the tiniest cocaine-party—and told themselves they didn’t want to upset the old girl because after all the Theatre was an artistic achievement. All this flashed through Dodo’s mind as she stood staring across the Mews, and she hastily assumed an expression of supercilious amusement.

  Mrs. Lambert glanced back at her. Dodo’s expression changed. Mrs. Lambert raised her hand. Dodo at once advanced and stood waiting to be spoken to.

  “I wish,” said Mrs. Lambert, “to see Miss Trent.”

  “Well, I’m afraid you can’t,” said Dodo, speaking as airily as possible.

  “Thank you,” said Mrs. Lambert.

  Dodo at once felt a lout. She added hurriedly:—

  “I mean, she isn’t up. We were all rather late last night. As a matter of fact, I’ve only just got up myself.”

  Mrs. Lambert merely withdrew into the foyer and sat down at the desk before a large account-book. Seen in profile, she was beautiful: the delicate strong lines of brow and nose and chin had the precision of a fine drawing. Her perfectly white hair was pinned with tortoise shell; a net collar, boned to the ears, covered her throat; and these touches of handsomeness looked neither out of date (as they were) nor ridiculous (as Dodo would have expected) but simply appropriate.

  Dodo took another step forward. She belonged, and consciously, to a generation that plumed itself on its assurance—a generation unabashed before its elders, because its elders had made such a mess of things. It was a point of dogma that in any encounter with the old, the young always came off best. But there had to be an encounter.… She said hopefully:—

  “I suppose you think we’re awful!”

  “No, only ill-bred,” said Mrs. Lambert.

  Her pen moved swiftly down a column of figures, paused, and filled in the total. She turned the page. Dodo hung about a few moments longer, and turned away. She was still within the Mews, however, when a door opened on the Theatre balcony and there stepped forth Gilbert Lambert himself—insubstantial as a puppet, thin as paper in his shepherd’s plaid suit, a flower in his buttonhole and a monocle in his eye. At the same moment—she must have had very sharp hearing—Mrs. Lambert called quietly:—

  “Yes, dear, what is it?”

  “I want you, dear. Will you come up or shall I come down?”

  “I’ll come up, dear.”

  Mrs. Lambert emerged from the foyer and mounted the outside stair, her husband waiting above. Dodo saw him hold the door open for her, saw them pass in with some indistinguishable exchange of words—some joke apparently, for they both smiled; then the door closed on them, and Dodo went on through the archway. The incident left her thoughtful, and slightly puzzled, because everyone knew that the Victorians were sexually repressed; and everyone knew what that did to you; and it was inconceivable that these established propositions could be shaken by a momentary glimpse of two old people on a balcony.…

  They must have sublimated it, thought Dodo uneasily—and of course the Theatre is an artistic achievement—Diaghilev went there himself.…

  CHAPTER II

  1

  Walking slowly from Surbiton station—for she was never anxious to return to her comfortable home—Dodo was overtaken by a young man named Tommy Hitchcock who had been on the same train. He was always on that train, as he was always on the 8:15 in the morning. All his habits were regular, and all good.

  “Dodo!” he called. “Have you just come from town? Why didn’t I see you?”

  Dodo said she hadn’t the faintest.

  “But didn’t you see me?”

  “Obviously not,” said Dodo.

  In spite of her brusqueness they fell into step and walked on with the ease, the indifference, almost, of complete intimacy. They were in fact engaged to each other; and sometimes, particularly when she had just left the company of Sonia Trent, Dodo wondered how on earth this had come about. Tommy on his side was perfectly clear: he had fallen in love with the prettiest girl in Surbiton, and a long wooing confirmed him in the habit. They were to marry in the spring, and he thought it only natural that meanwhile Dodo should want to run up to town and see her friends as much as possible—the implicit corollary being that after marriage, she should stay put.

  “Been shopping?” he asked amiably.

  “No,” said Dodo. “At least, I looked in windows. I’m sorry I didn’t see you, old thing, I must have been thinking of something else.”

  “Darling, I don’t expect to occupy every moment of your thoughts,” said Tommy cheerfully.

  Dodo looked at him.

  “And of course I don’t occupy every moment of yours …”

  “Well, hardly, old thing. I should soon be in a nice mess at the office if you did.”

  “I wonder where Mr. Vaneck is?” said Dodo.

  The remark was by no means irrelevant, and they both smiled. For two years earlier the Bakers had been going to Mr. Vaneck’s garden-party; even after the Culvers left Farnham, a carte blanche invitation continued to arrive every year, and Alice, not unaware of Tommy’s interest in her daughter, had suggested that he should accompany them. The day was a Thursday; he regretfully refused. He was then a newly fledged chartered accountant, his firm had a big audit on hand, and to take Thursday off would be the equivalent, he told Dodo, of cutting his p
rofessional throat. Dodo looked even prettier than usual, and said she quite understood. But when on Thursday the Bakers reached Surbiton station, there stood Tommy, immaculately attired, a first-class ticket to Farnham in one hand and a spray of orchids in the other. He looked desperate but exalted. All through the afternoon he stuck close to Dodo’s side, and Dodo, wearing his orchids, could not help feeling fond of him. They wandered through Mr. Vaneck’s beautiful gardens, played to by a string quartet; nothing was lacking to make the occasion romantic—not even peril, for at one terrific moment Tommy actually perceived, strolling towards them, the head of his own firm: Mr. Humphreys too had taken the day off. Tommy seized Dodo by the hand and drew her rapidly away, through a box hedge, past a tennis-court, into a kitchen-garden; and there they hid, eating raspberries off the bushes, till the danger was past. And when he got home, Tommy deliberately threw himself down a flight of stairs, in order to turn up at the office with a convincing bruise.…

  That was two years ago; Mr. Vaneck had given no more parties, he was said to be abroad; and Tommy committed no more such follies. His calm nature, it seemed, had boiled over once for all; he had succeeded in fixing Dodo’s attention; a course of earnest, unremitting devotion did the rest.… But how sad it is, thought Dodo (walking beside him, two years later, along the station road), that all that’s in the past! Sonia would adore the bit about the raspberries, it was all very sweet and pastoral—but is that all I’m to have, ever, in the way of love and peril and despair?

  “I don’t know how I had the nerve!” said Tommy, in genuine astonishment.

  At the end of the road their ways parted, they separated without difficulty, and Dodo went on home. Her mother was waiting for her in a state of great mental agitation; and no wonder.

  “There you are!” cried Alice. “Darling, who ever do you think is coming to stay with us? Your Uncle Treff!”

  2

  Alice Baker was a great believer in coincidences, and a great discoverer of them; but they never failed to excite her. Scarcely had she got over the shock of finding that her daughter was in Britannia Mews (a remarkable coincidence in itself) when a letter arrived from Italy. She was thinking about Adelaide, when she heard from Treff. It was as though one cousin reached out of the past, the other across a continent, to pluck her by the sleeve; a movement of dismay was countered by a movement of pleasure; for Treff confidently announced his intention of coming to pay her a visit.

  Alice was delighted. She had never liked the Italian scheme, which defrauded her of two close relations; when Mrs. Culver died Alice didn’t know a thing about it till long after the funeral; and Treff was a very bad correspondent, writing solely to draw attention to occasional articles, signed TREFUSIS CULVER, in the Connoisseur or the World of Art. They were usually about painters Alice had never heard of, but she cut them all out and kept them in her bureau drawer, and referred to her cousin, “the writer.” “You don’t mean to say he lives by writing?” Freddy Baker once asked; and even Alice’s loyalty had to admit that it seemed unlikely. How then did Treff live, after Mrs. Culver had departed, and her annuity with her? The truth was that Treff had solved all economic problems by a simple extension of his original plan; he had become a resident art-expert, attached to a wealthy American widow whose æsthetic and maternal instincts he equally gratified.

  It was hardly to be expected, however, that Dodo, who hated all relations on principle, should share her mother’s enthusiasm at the prospect of this visit. She merely said, “Oh,” and “When?” and “Won’t that be nice for you, darling?” and prepared to mount the stairs.

  “Just imagine,” cried Alice—almost imploringly—“we haven’t seen him for almost thirty years!”

  “I’ve never seen him at all,” observed Dodo.

  “Then I should have thought you’d be all the more interested. He’s one of your closest relations!”

  Dodo shrugged indifferently, and went on upstairs.

  The relations between mother and daughter were often thus unsatisfactory, and it was hard to tell which of them was to blame. Dodo, arriving belatedly in 1897, when Alice was thirty-four, sometimes felt that her mother might be her grandmother; and Alice, hopelessly trying to share her daughter’s life, sometimes felt as though she were imposing herself upon a stranger. Her hungry heart, still mourning for her son Archy and her son Raymond, both killed in the war, longed to receive as well as to give affection; whereas Dodo’s grief for her brothers too often merged into what could only be called resentment. They had left her to bear the burden of too much love. Dodo could remember a family circle in which Raymond and Archy, Uncle James and John, Grandpa and Grandma Hambro, all played parts far more important than her own; she ran about amongst them all, petted and spoiled; but as often ignored, unconsciously happy, unconsciously content to take a third share in her mother’s affection. Then, suddenly, all was changed; Dodo could not well recollect the sequence of events; but she did remember that on her mother’s fifty-fifth birthday there sat down to dinner only her father and herself and her Aunt Ellen:

  Alice was rather emotional, at that birthday dinner; and Dodo went to bed with a great feeling of responsibility. She had all a twenty-one-year-old’s appetite for self-sacrifice; she was prepared to devote her entire life to her mother. It was her father who suggested her going up to Oxford; Dodo scouted the idea indignantly. A year later she was clamouring to go to an art school. She went to the Slade. There, having no talent, she naturally drifted into the company of the idlers; met Sonia Trent; acquired a taste for cocktail parties, an interest in free love, and a contempt for Surbiton. At twenty-five she was in some ways still childish, in others sophisticated; without direction (in spite of her engagement); and unhappy.

  3

  Alice naturally had to carry her news round to the Cedars, and she went that same afternoon, taking Dodo with her. “You know how Aunt Ellen loves to see you!” she said reproachfully, when Dodo hung back; and presently they were following the familiar route along Oakley Road. “We used to come along here every Sunday, with the babies,” said Alice reminiscently. “You don’t remember, darling …” “I wasn’t born,” said Dodo. But she had a dim recollection of being pushed herself in a go-cart, with her big brothers walking alongside; and then there was Grandma, and Grandpa, and aunts and uncles, and a mug of milk on the grass, and overhead a confusion of grown-up noise.…

  There was no noise, now, at the Cedars: Aunt Ellen lived there alone. The house was far too big for her, but she refused to move; it was her own property, left to her as the only unmarried daughter, and she was fond of referring to it as “the old home.” Alice and Dodo as a matter of course ignored the front-door and walked round to the back, where on any fine day the long drawing-room windows always stood open. Cedars are tidy trees: the stretch of lawn was not melancholy with fallen leaves; Michaelmas daisies filled the borders; but it was very quiet. It was all quiet: when Alice walked through the untenanted drawing-room and called up the stairway, her voice echoed as though in an empty house.

  “Are you there, Ellen? Are you coming down?”

  “You come up!” called Aunt Ellen.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Things for the Jumble Sale!”

  “Then we’ll wait!” shouted Dodo. She was half a Hambro; it was natural for her to call up and down stairs.

  “No, come up and help!” shrilled Aunt Ellen.

  “Come down!” cried Alice.

  For a moment the hall, the house, came to life; then in the pause that followed the grandfather clock struck three, and the big booming strokes when they died away left a deeper silence behind. “I believe that stag’s head has moth,” said Alice.

  Somewhere above a drawer was slammed shut, and Miss Hambro appeared on the landing. She had never been pretty like her sisters, and in middle age was rather ugly, with a tight, sallow skin, a little blotched about the forehead, yellow-grey hair, and pale lashes. She was devoted to Dodo, who did not return her affection.

&
nbsp; “We’ve only popped in for a moment,” said Alice, “to tell you we’re going to have a visitor. I’ll give you three guesses.”

  “One of the Somerset lot.”

  “Wrong.”

  “Then it’s Milly.”

  “Wrong again.”

  Dodo, fidgeting against the banisters, marvelled at her elders’ foolishness. At that age, she thought, at that age! They were behaving like a couple of children. She said impatiently:—

  “It’s Uncle Treff, Aunt. He’s coming—”

  “Next week,” put in Alice quickly. “Just think, my dear, after almost thirty years! You can’t have been more than ten—”

  “I was eleven and a half—”

  “Of course in Kensington we were always in and out—”

  “I also remember at Farnham …”

  Dodo, bored by this highly allusive exchange, strolled back into the drawing-room. She was already impatient to be gone; though the house had none but festive memories for her—of summer teas and Christmas parties—now that she was grown-up she always felt oppressed in it. It was too full of furniture: Miss Hambro, with a single maid, was known to spend three hours each morning dusting. The furniture, in fact, kept two maids.…

  Dodo giggled at the thought and automatically glanced about for a gramophone, remembered that there wasn’t one, and began to wander round the room examining the innumerable family photographs which Aunt Ellen persistently collected. They were all, thought Dodo, quite sickening, but she mastered her nausea until she found what she was looking for—the fading likeness of a slim young man with a high collar and a lock of hair a-droop over his forehead. When had she been told that this was her Uncle Treff? Dodo couldn’t remember; she knew indeed very little about him beyond the fact that he was her mother’s cousin—and so not really an uncle at all. But he lived in Italy. He had left Farnham and gone to live in Florence; which for a Culver was surely very enterprising. Dodo knew little about the Culvers either, but all she heard left a general impression of Victorian stuffiness, from which Uncle Treff had somehow broken loose. He had been a rebel, and a successful one. Dodo began to feel quite an interest in him. Experience had taught her that her mother could be influenced only by members of her own elder generation; however benevolently disposed towards the young—and no one could be kinder than Alice over picnics or amateur dramatics—she never allowed them the possession of common sense. It would not have done the slightest good, for example, to bring Sonia Trent to Surbiton to plead for the London flat on which Dodo’s hopes were just then pinned—indeed a sound instinct had led Dodo to keep Sonia away from Surbiton altogether; but if Uncle Treff could be induced to take her part, there might be a chance of success. “Just for six months!” thought Dodo—already rehearsing her arguments. “Just till I get married!” But in her heart of hearts she believed that once she got away she would never come back to Surbiton and never marry Tommy Hitchcock, because someone else, far wealthier and more interesting, would ask her to marry him instead, unless someone else, wealthier still, wanted to make her into a film star.…