Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (11 page)

'People will come where one draws them,' Mrs Portway said.

She had brought crowds to see her play Shaw's heroines in Sloane Square, she had brought crowds to hear her speak of women's rights in Norwich, she had brought crowds, more select, to hear her praise Mussolini's Italy in Knightsbridge and Mayfair drawing-rooms, she could bring crowds to listen to music from 'her' bandstand in a forgotten quarter of Merano any day she willed.

'Can't,' she said, 'is a word people use too easily today. It's the current cant,' and she laughed her wonderful high-comedy ripple. 'I don't think I ever heard my brother-in-law Reggie say "can't",' she said, and turned back upon her little companion as though daring her to deny this.

As Madame Houdet had only heard of Canon Portway through a very great deal too much hearsay, she could not deny it.

'My brother-in-law knew,' Mrs Portway continued, drawing her long, old-fashioned chinchilla coat around her, 'what had to be done, and it
was
done. He knew that the people must be given back their old services, the age-old services of beauty and dignity. There were protests, but the Sarum rite was sung in his church. He knew that Eorpwald's tomb would be found on our estate. He told them: "Dig!" They dug and they found nothing. Even the great Professor Stokesay lost heart. But my brother didn't. He said: "Dig again", and they found the famous Melpham tomb. And when I came to him and asked him to appear on
our
platforms, he knew at once where the Church's place was. Up there alongside Mary and Martha, yes, and Mary Magdalene. He stood with me beside Emmeline Pankhurst and he spoke for Women. The little hearts, the "can'ts", said his career in the Church was finished. I wonder how many of them remembered
that
when they read what
The Times
had to say of Canon Portway when he died - moral leader, outstanding antiquarian, lover of beauty, fearless fighter, great Churchman.'

Mrs Portway paused to wind the pale mauve tulle that hung from her chinchilla cap around her willowy neck. It was poor protection against the bitter wind, but, as she grew older, Lilian Portway dressed more eccentrically. Particularly she demanded 'a piece of lovely colour' about her, whatever the weather or place.

'Very few, I imagine,' she said with a bitter laugh. 'The "can'ts" of this world have small memories as well as small souls. - But I'll have no "can't" from the mayor about my bandstand.'

She strode forward impatiently, like some erect, silky-haired bear in the landscape of snow and dark evergreens.

Madame Houdet teetered precariously behind. She would have been more comfortable in her high-heeled patent-leather shoes than in the fur-topped boots that Lilian had bought for her. For all Lilian's striking appearance, it was Stéphanie Houdet who was the better-known figure in the Tyrolese Kurort. To the inhabitants, Austrian and Italian alike, Mrs Portway was just another rich English eccentric: but
la vedova francese
was something really extraordinary. With her chic black dresses, her flowing crêpe veil, her rouge and lipstick, she moved not a step from the garb of the old-fashioned Provincial French bourgeoise widow. In Poitiers or in Châlons-sur-Marne or in her own Lyons she would have passed unnoticed, but in the little medieval colonnaded town or on the picturesque hillside walks designed in such careful miniature Alpine style for the Austrian invalids of 1911, she was as odd as some macaw got loose among the autumn crocuses. Stéphanie Houdet knew that she was a local figure, but she did not guess the reason. She thought that she was feared because she saw through everyone,
'sales
boches'
and
'fous italiens'
alike. She thought she was respected because of her munificence to the poor, and here she was right, for she held Mrs Portway's purse-strings.

At her friend's return to the subject of the bandstand, she drew tight her scarlet lips and pulled down her plump little cheeks until the beads of rouge and powder showed in the creases. She had already vetoed this scheme in her own mind as
une grande folie,
but she never spoke precipitately. Madame Houdet had her own ideas of philanthropy, more nineteenth-century in form than Lilian's theatrical gestures. Crippled children and bent old women brought tears to her eyes and she liked to administer very small sums of her friend's money with lots of gossip and, at the end, a little talk about
le
petit
Jésus
and
Notre
Dame de la Charité.
In a foreign but Catholic community it was considered behaviour suitable to her age, but impertinent because of her alien origin. She always, however, got her own way in her schemes. Lilian's extravagant wishes, of which 'her' bandstand was typical, were considered quite absurd for her age but entirely suitable in a rich foreigner. They hardly ever came to anything. As to the origins of their surprising friendship, the common experience of concentration-camp horror that had brought them together in the hotel in Geneva after the war, these had been buried in oblivion in the Kurort, as they would have been elsewhere, with all the other boring details of recent history, never so boring as when they are connected with a war which people wish to forget.

Madame Houdet, then, avoided any comment on her friend's scheme. They had left the little gardens now and were ascending the hill. On each side loomed vast villas, once splendidly vulgar in their sentimental chalet style, now decayed and squalid beneath their covering of snow. Human habitation, however, set Madame Houdet's tongue on its natural, rapid course of scandal. The Weissblums' eldest son was bankrupt, the Schneiders could get no more credit; as for old Signorina Paccelli, former mistress of a silk magnate, it seemed that she was now completely paralysed down the right side. 'The good God,' said Madame Houdet, 'does not pay on Saturdays, he pays in his own time.'

It often irked Lilian Portway to be confined to such petty talk and she wondered that Stephanie could be so triumphant about the sins of others when her son behaved as he did, but a friendship that had begun in gratitude for kindness when she was fighting her war nightmares was now her only barrier against loneliness, and, in any case, Stéphanie was such a wonderful manager. It was not only that she managed all the money, but she also managed the present, and Lilian found increasingly irksome anything that cut her off from the past. As usual, she shut her mind to her friend's talk and wandered back in memories - to the Vanbrughs, like herself some of the first real ladies to win success on the stage; to the praises and rebukes of George Bernard Shaw; to Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst - dear Christabel, so sensible, had resisted all her enthusiasm for Fascist Italy; and, as so often nowadays, to Melpham. She remembered the shrubbery with its tangle of St John's wort and, cutting into her friend's gossip, she said, 'The Victorians did awful things to gardens. Melpham must have been so charming when it was simple parkland, and then my mother-in-law made formal beds and shrubberies, and such hideous ones - St John's wort and double begonias and horrors like that! You know, in a way, Stéphanie, I'm glad that I sold the place when Hugh was killed; it was only association that made it beautiful - being there with Reggie and when Hugh was a little boy. It was an ugly place in itself, and for an old woman on her own it would have been cruel as well as ugly.'

Madame Houdet gave Mrs Portway a sharp glance; she regarded any reminiscences that went back earlier than their own association as a sign of growing mental enfeeblement in her friend and her attitude to such decline was equivocal.

'Perhaps if you had lived at Melpham, Elvira would have come to live with you,' she said, looking inquisitive. With Madame Houdet curiosity was always malicious. 'It is sad to think of a young girl without a real home.'

Lilian Portway gave a throaty chuckle, 'Oh, my dear, how we differ,' she said. 'My advice to any girl would be: "Leave home! Break away! Take all the wonderful things that life has to offer while you can! The gods grow tired of showering their gifts on those who don't make use of them." You don't know the battle
I
fought, Stéphanie, to get away. I was like a canary released from a cage in those first days in London; I just sang and sang.' Mrs Portway's enthusiasm often carried her into such doubtful metaphors. 'And then came love and marriage. I hesitated, Stéphanie, I hated bondage. But the urge to motherhood, to creation was too great for me. Liberty and creation. Those are the things I have cherished. Little Hugh was born. I was a mother! I'm afraid, Stéphanie, that when soon after I became a widow, I was glad to get back my old freedom.
You
would think that was wicked, but
I
know that it was life speaking in me. The greatest was still to come -
Major Barbara, Candida, Mrs Hushabye,
and the little I could do for Women!'

Madame Houdet had heard it all so often before. In some, of course, it would have been wicked, but in Lilian Portway she preferred to think it was merely senile folly. She noted how her friend's head shook when she was excited. Soon all this senseless talk and pride would be broken, she would be like a little child and then she would need her friend as never before. Our Saviour had said Blessed are the meek, and, again, Blessed are the peacemakers, so she only said, 'You were a good mother, Lilian.'

'Perhaps,' said Mrs Portway, stopping as they reached the gate of their villa to pluck some evergreen for the house, 'perhaps. Yes, I was! I gave Hugh life! When he was only six, he knew the world. He was happy and at home in dressing-rooms and on public platforms as much as in his nursery at Melpham. That's why I shouldn't wish to have held Elvira, had she been ever so different to what she is. But, in any case, it wouldn't have done, Stéphanie. The girl has a common streak. Oh! I don't mean common as it's usually spoken. I have known fine people of simple origin - old Barker, for instance, our coachman; you've heard me speak of him.'

As he was one of the few people to whom Mrs Portway referred that fitted into Madame Houdet's category of'good' people, she said with relish, 'Ah! the poor, brave, paralysed man!'

Lilian Portway flashed her eyes in scorn. 'What does it matter if his body is paralysed?'  she said. 'You can't paralyse the souls of straight, honest, noble folk like that. Elvira has none of it. She's her mother's daughter. There's a core of cheapness there for all her clever Bohemian talk. People would say that I shouldn't speak of my daughter-in-law so because she is dead, perhaps particularly because she died in an air-raid.' She paused dramatically before the door. 'When that bomb fell on the Café de Paris,' she said, 'what mattered was not on whom it fell, this person or that. On my son who was somebody, or my daughter-in-law who could never be anybody. What mattered was that it destroyed vitality, happiness, and life.' She flung the door open as though showing the way to a world of such riches.

Had she believed this, she would have been incurably insane, for the drawing-room which they entered was a centrally heated mausoleum. Signed photographs were everywhere - of Shaw, of Wells, of Irene Vanbrugh and Mrs Pat, of Gordon Craig and Granville Barker, of darling Christabel and dear old Flora Drummond; the famous photograph of the Duce had been consigned to the dust-heap, but D'Annunzio still threatened Corfu with his poet's head to remind Mrs Portway of Italy's glorious past. The signed copies of Shaw's plays stood on a table separate from the bookcase, and with them a photograph of Canon Portway with his parishioners, all dressed in their costumes for the Coventry Mystery Play. It was the wonderful past so eagerly sought by Mrs Portway in her memory, but standing there to greet her in photographic form it petrified her world of living ghosts into the mummified dead of the tomb. The photographs of Madame Houdet's past were there, too - Yves luscious-eyed with the white communion band on his arm, Yves ostentatiously virile in his conscript's uniform, Yves with the smallest of bathing-trunks showing off with a medicine-ball on the beach at Cannes, Yves superb in the uniform of Free France. Stéphanie Houdet, however, had no eyes for these cherished images, for she had caught a glimpse of the boot of a Lagonda in the garage and she knew that the reality was asleep upstairs. Lilian Portway's much-vaunted 'life' filled the house for
her
at least.

The post lay scattered on the table where Yves had searched it eagerly for possible evidence of cheques. There were three letters with English postmarks. Madame Houdet opened the one that was hers. 'Oh, such an elegant card from Marie Hélène,' she cried; 'she has such good taste.'

Everything Marie Hélène did seemed to her unusually smart since she had shown such smartness of another sort in winning the lawsuit.

'It seems to me in very poor taste to write at all,' said Lilian, 'after the way she has behaved.'

But Madame Houdet did not hear this. She was overjoyed that Marie Hélène had invited Yves. She had feared lest her obvious desire for this invitation should be ignored. 'It is a very elegant house, I believe. Yves will be happy there,' she said.

'I have no doubt,' said Mrs Portway drily. 'All the same, I'm surprised you should want him to stay in
that
house.'

'They are cousins,' said Madame Houdet simply. Then she asked, 'Where do your cards come from?'  She longed to know whether there was one from Elvira.

Mrs Portway, realizing this, was mortified, but at least had the comfort of knowing that Stéphanie knew nothing of her own peace-offering, which had received no return.

'A wonderful rich, old-fashioned Christmas card from Barker,' she cried. 'All robins and holly! Exactly what one would wish him to send.' She hoped to imply a certain pretentiousness in such elegant cards as Marie Hélène sent. 'His daughter Alice Cressett must have chosen it. That splendid countrywoman! It seems strange to think of her living in London and married to a man whose name is in the papers.' The noble simplicity of Barker, of all the world of peasantry who were not 'common', seemed somehow out of joint when one of them should be mentioned in the news.

'And the other card?'  said Madame Houdet. Much of the pleasure of their isolated life together lay for her in the invasion of privacy.