The Brontes Went to Woolworths (3 page)

From that moment, I think, he owned, occupied and paid taxes on our imagination.

The obvious first move was
Who’s Who
, and here I came in useful, for I filched a copy from one of my newspaper offices.

Born 1858. (
A blow, because it gave him less time to go on living
.) Clubs: The Athenæum and the Garrick. (
Why the Garrick?
It’s full of actors
.)

Married (
aha!
) in 1884.

Her name was Mildred Ethelreda Brockley. (
Lor!
)

Two addresses. A riverside and town one. (
What sends him
to the river?
)

A list of costly and conventional hobbies. Golf. (
The lamb!
What a pet he must look in plus-fours!
)

A digest of a typical, suitable and expensive education. Two inches of spectacular legal achievement. (
Clever
boy!)

Since then, we must have walked past his house a dozen times. It didn’t tell one much. I kept tally of when his window-boxes were renewed, and wished that he (or Mildred) hadn’t such a passion for privet and calceolarias, but through the dining-room window I could see a very decent oak dresser, and the warming-pan on the wall looked well polished.

Photographs of him were, of course, easy to come by (two of my editors gave me three), and the family generally assumes another print on the way whenever the postman scrabbles and ends by having to ring the bell and knock twice.

The next hunt was for somebody who knew Toddington. One of my friends has a husband who ‘used to see a lot of him’; the husband (need I say it?) was entrenched in Kenya, growing coffee, and several other times I came similarly near the verge. My professional work I knew couldn’t help. I am not a reporter. I am that rather unclassifiable creature which Fleet Street sometimes chooses to write descriptive signed articles on people and ‘movements.’ Thus I have sat for a whole afternoon upon the bed of a notorious Mormon bishop, in Tottenham, and in the Abbey on Princess Mary’s wedding day. But for all that, when next in the office I suggested to my editor that something might be done.

‘But why, why?’ he fretted, ‘you can’t report the cases –
Henderson and Cato do those, and R. E. Corder of the
Mail
has covered all the personal stuff about the judges.’

‘Well, I
want
to meet Toddington,’ I said.

‘D’you
like
him?’

‘I adore him,’ I shouted. For I discovered years ago that the best way to put people right off the scent is to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. It acts like a charm.

My editor grinned, and ran his hand through his hair.

‘Well, I’m awfully sorry, but I don’t see what we can do.’

‘Beast! Pig!’ I answered (for I am sincerely fond of him).

‘By the way, I’d like you to do us something bright on, “Is the Bank Holiday Girl Naughty?” About a thousand.’

‘All right. I’ll go in next door and write it now, if you’ll lend me a pencil, paper, and a rather large basin,’ I agreed.

‘And don’t come down too hard on Brighton. The guvnor’s going there in August.’

It was close on one o’clock before I had written my copy. Binton called me in, pointed to his desk. ‘There. You can have that. I’ll get another print done for the library.’ He bent over the photograph of Toddington. ‘Ugly little beggar he is.’

‘Very plain,’ I agreed placidly, ‘and thank you awfully.’ I have discovered that it is hopeless to praise one man to another; they are up in arms in a minute, and as jealous and watchful as a crowd of catty débutantes. Binton is supposed to be very good-looking, his typist tells me, and I’ve often caught sight of him arranging his profile at the society women who come in hoping for free publicity, but his looks don’t amuse me a bit, and never will. As far as looks go, I honestly prefer Jelks, his sub, who is definitely plain, and scatters his h’s thick as leaves in Vallombrosa, and says ‘arver’ when he means ‘however’, and calls
Who’s Who
‘Oozoo’, as though it were some kind of witch-doctor or black magic rite in Central Africa. But they are both great dears.

When I got home the gong had just sounded for lunch. Meals, in our family, are usually eaten amid a cloud of witnesses, unless there are visitors. Dion Saffyn cannot, of course, often get away from his office, but he talks to us down the telephone while we eat, and so does Pauline. Infinitely more rare intrusions come from Ironface, who has, by now, more or less dwindled to a faint and mannered ‘
Tra la! mes enfants!
’ in the ether. We sometimes admit quite openly that she is a bore. Katrine’s advent at the Dramatic School has brought her actor friend about us, rather, and we all hope he won’t begin to try and borrow money from us. Mother once reduced him to reciting
To Be Or Not To Be
to the queue outside the Gaiety, but we soon rescued him from that predicament, and in his gratitude, he took to flirting with us all for a bit, turn and turn about, and calling mother, ‘Arrrr, dearrrr lady!’ and greeting poor Sheil as ‘Sweet chiiiild, and how is my little maid?’ with a vibrato in his voice studiously copied from the throat effects of George Alexander. But we don’t make a whole lot of use of him, and Katrine, to whom he belongs if he belongs to anybody, is becoming definitely aloof. I am going to miss her horribly, but I suppose I know the reason. My theory is that at the Dramatic School students are encouraged to make-believe all day long, and, indeed, the atmosphere there is the most unreal and artificial one I have ever breathed, even when classes aren’t in progress. And this has the effect of sending the girls home spent with pretence, and with nothing for their families but themselves to offer.

This morning, I took my place at table in the middle of an argument between Toddy and Henry Nicholls, his associate, as to what he should have sent in from Simpsons for his lunch. Toddy is terribly particular about his food, and always wants a double portion of oysters in his steak pudding when he goes to the Cheshire Cheese, and Sheil says that ‘he weaves in his pudding with his little hands to pick the oysters out first.’ Nicholls is devoted to him, and they have, lately, taken to having rounds of golf together on Saturdays, unless Toddy is down to be Chambers Judge in the morning. Whenever I spend a spare afternoon in Toddy’s Court and see the associate sitting beneath him, and swearing witnesses or mounting to confer with Toddy (who pretends hardly to know him on these occasions), I smother a grin to think of what happened, say, a fortnight ago, or yesterday. And when the court rises, it is really dreadful to have to turn out with the rest of the casuals into the Strand, and not to run up (as we had arranged) to see Toddy in his private room.

His outfit keeps us in perennial suspense. Judges have the most amazing trousseau. Whenever I think I have got to the bottom of Toddy’s trunk, he whips out something else and puts it on.

Sometimes he wears black, with a red band, or red with a black one; on other occasions he appears in black with an ermine tippet and cuffs, and looks like Lewis Sydney in the Follies, and I have caught him in black tastefully lined and relieved with beige silk and a hood tied up with bows, and when I’d recovered from that, he toddled in next time in a very
chic
effect in pink shot silk. But I admit that his cufflinks are always the same – plain, oval, and gold. Mother says she is only waiting for him to bound in in a ballet skirt and rosebuds, and then perhaps we shall work round again to the black-and-red gown. And after that, we went upstairs and had a charity
matinée
(for the Browbeaten Barristers’ Benevolent Fund) in which our star doll played in a drama called
Perjured Oaths
.

Being Saturday, Katrine was at lunch too, and, suddenly, as I began to eat, deadly depression engulfed me. It sometimes does, and often quite irrationally, and one drifts with it, because fighting it is no good. Father used to be the same, and would often say how he started a day meaning to love every minute of it, but in a moment ‘along comes this cursèd black pudding out of the blue, and destroys me root and branch.’

I looked round the table, at Katrine, at my mother and my Sheil, at poor Miss Martin, and I thought, what the deuce are we all here for? Is mother satisfied? Am I worth tuppence? Will Sheil grow away from me and marry some cast-iron dolt? Is it conceivable that Katrine will ever get three lines to speak on the stage? And why must we have the Martin with us, the tragic, blasted wretch? And why isn’t Toddington here? Katrine, too, seemed rather less than usual.

‘Toddy is coming to dinner to-night,’ piped Sheil, ‘and we’ve got him lamb cutlets, which he wholly adores. And isn’t it about time that we had Mildred too, mother?’

Miss Martin looked bright. It is the last shot in her locker. ‘And who, may one ask, is “Toddy”?’ she enquired.

‘Toddington,’ answered Sheil crisply.

Mother looked self-conscious, and I began to think in the Shakespearean manner. It is always soothing.

‘Out, damned she,
And from this riven house
Get wholly hence.’

What a foul place the world was when one stripped it bare. How remorseless and stingy, how essentially tooth-for-a-toothish.

After lunch I inveigled Katrine into the Middle Temple, for I thought I might as well profit by her mood, and she was so depressed that she strode like Mrs Crummles, and I was so rasped with life that I hit Goldsmith’s tomb with my umbrella. I said, ‘I’d give five pounds if somebody’d come along and tell us both how clever we are.’

‘I’d give the dustman half a crown if he’d take me away with the rest of the filth.’

‘I bet he wouldn’t do it under three bob,’ I sympathised.

Then by way of cheering me up she snarled, ‘And we’re going to Yorkshire, this summer,’ and we groped into a cinema because they are the most depressing places in the world, and we both believe in the principle of homoeopathy.

That night I sat up late, reading. I have never met a more sympathetic library than that which father assembled. Thanks to him I discovered
The Martian and Peter Ibbetson,
Wuthering Heights
, and
My Two Kings
, by Mrs Evan Nepean, who, when she went to the National Portrait Gallery and saw Kneller’s portrait of dead Monmouth, suddenly remembered that it had once belonged to her; suddenly knew her former life at the court of Charles the Second, and wrote it, in the War, and so inflamed me that I, too, have stood before the lovely, worthless James Scott, and found it one of the beautiful pictures of the world – and could remember nothing!

These faces! How they fasten on one! I was safe, for some reason, from the fated fribble, but there are others . . . all pressing their past, their claims, all reaching out, very, very quietly, to draw one in . . . they cease to be flat surfaces and become little stages on to which one could squeeze oneself . . .

And that scarred canvas, dismissed as ‘a dreadful daub’ by the biographers: Emily Brontë, in stormy profile. I am no art critic, I only value in pictures that which lies beyond them. Emily managed to hurt me. She is, I am certain, harassed at her place in Trafalgar Square. When first I saw her I said, ‘My dear, I can’t do anything about it.’

I discovered Rabelais, and thought him an obscure and limited bore. I’m quite certain that if I wanted to be indecent I could be more original than that, and mother and Katrine say they could, too. And, just as I was skimming
The Wind in
the Willows
, and had got to ‘
Handsome
Mr Toad!’ (who really has much in common with Ironface, and even with Crellie in his Mafeking moments), I got a twinge, and began to be quite certain that Miss Martin wasn’t being happy. I tried to exorcise her with James’s
A Warning to the Curious
, but it wasn’t any real good, and I cursed, and turned out the lights, and went upstairs. And I stood outside her door and listened. She would be crying for Cheltenham and the Captain. There is, possibly, a desk special to her use, and a bedroom whose every creak she knows . . . I stood outside her door and listened: surprised at myself, I knocked. And again.

‘I – thought I heard you moving about,’ I faltered, to the unalluring figure in its seemly bedgown. And I was right. Her eyes were pink.

‘Oh . . . no. How kind of you . . . no.’

Oh well . . . heaven knows I didn’t want a set piece with her on the landing.

5

In the morning I woke determined to be as miserable as I was the day before, and so work through it that way, and get it all cleared up, but I found myself perfectly cheerful. I began to try and account for it, and came to the conclusion that it was because it was mother’s birthday to-morrow, and Katrine’s term-end show in a fortnight.

Perhaps it is because we get so few outside presents that we make such an occasion of our own. We used to get far more when father was alive, possibly because we were much younger, probably because men do bring people about the house, just as a tom cat will always attract others. Mother won’t entertain alone, although she bears very nobly with what she calls ‘the drunks’ that Katrine and I bring in, meaning young writers and students of both sexes. At Christmas and on birthdays we fairly shower presents on each other, and that, again, is another reason against having guests, because an alien shower would come too expensive. And, thinking of mother’s birthday, I thumped on the wall and Katrine came in half-dressed.

‘Look here, old chap,’ I said, ‘about mother’s birthday.’

‘The Martin?’ guessed Katrine.

‘Good woman! Katrine, I can’t and won’t have the things by mother’s place at breakfast. D’you get me?’