The Balliols Page 13

  The word “ILEX” was set on the front gate early in October. Before the November rains had turned the unseeded lawn into a morass, a row of vans had blocked the south side of the North End Road. For half a week a team of white-overalled workmen had staggered beneath beds, tables, chairs, pictures, carpets. During the holidays there was to be a house-warming, I was told; with a children’s party on New Year’s Eve.

  For several reasons that party has stood out very clearly in my memory. It was the first time that I had seen from the inside the house that had employed so much of my curiosity. It was the first time that I had seen the Balliols as a family; instead of as isolated units, come from Easton Square to inspect the progress of the house. And since I had sprained my ankle and was unable to dance, I was a spectator through the whole proceedings.

  There were a hundred children there in all. There were Hugh’s friends and there were Francis’s; they were of all ages from sixteen to six. It was the kind of party that was given for children in those days. There was dancing, there was a conjuror, there were competitions, there was a Santa Claus. No child was allowed to win more than one prize; there were so many prizes that it was difficult for any child to avoid winning something. The party wandered over two floors, and through three rooms. There was the large downstairs room, which ran the entire length of the house, and whose measurements I had so excitedly stepped out in the preceding spring. It was a high, half-panelled room; a large imitation Adam fireplace in the centre; on either side of the fireplace bookshelves ran to the ceiling; an oval portrait of an eighteenth-century ancestor hung above the mantelpiece. On the opposite walls were four further portraits, in dull gold frames: dark, sombre pictures of young bare-shouldered women with ringlets hanging low upon their necks. From the ceiling hung two vast cut-glass candelabra. At the far end of the room were French windows, opening on to a balconied veranda. Red damask curtains fell from the ceiling in heaving glittering folds. Under the windows that faced the road was a low window seat.

  It was here that, for my ankle’s sake, I rested during the little time that I was in this room. The older children were here for the most part. It was the ballroom. Carpets had been swept away; along the mantelpiece a row of programmes dangled their pencils on green and scarlet tassels. There was a variety of dances. There were polkas, valses, lancers, Highland schottisches, the barn dance, with Sir Roger de Coverley last upon the list.

  Lucy was in supervision of this room. She had invited none of her friends, and insisted on being classed as a grown-up. She had lengthened her skirt, and had tried to persuade her mother to let her put her hair up. This had not been permitted. She had, however, been allowed to put pads above her forehead, and the puffed appearance that they gave her, separated her far more than a “bun” would have done from the dapper young preparatory-school men in Eton jackets and white waistcoats, their hair carefully brushed back off damp foreheads, who revolved clumsily, boisterously, stiffly, as their spirit moved them, round the uncouthly plump maidens whose ribboned pigtails flapped against wide silk sashes. As Lucy looked after the children who were without partners, and checked those who were dancing too obstreperously, her face wore a serious graciousness that set her apart from the carefree revel she directed.

  On the right of the hall opposite the large dancing-room, was the dining-room, where the tea was spread. For children between six and ten the tea is the chief incident in a party. Intense curiosity was felt as to the exact nature of the preparations that we could hear proceeding behind the door. Would there, or would there not be ices? It was winter, but even in the winter one had ices sometimes. There was much whispering and mutual daring among the brighter of the younger spirits. “I dare you to go down there and look!” “Fains I going to see!” One child did have the temerity to open the door, but Lucy from the ballroom had observed him. “No, Johnnie, that’s the tea-room. We’ll be going in there afterwards. I expect you’re looking for the nursery: that’s upstairs.”

  He wasn’t. But he went.

  The rooms to which he was consigned were Francis’s nursery, and the girls’ room: a smallish boudoir kind of place where Ruth and Lucy kept their books and photographs; where they read, wrote their letters, prepared their homework, exchanged confidences. It had a cosy air; with its two large arm-chairs, its chesterfield, the patchwork screen on which in childhood they had plastered the odd assortment of pictures, newspaper headlines, photographs of soldiers, actors, royalties that represented their varying and maturing tastes; the high bookshelves in which such early favourites as the story of Brer Rabbit, the Violet Fairy Book, the Child’s History of England, were jumbled side by side with school primers, French and German readers and the novels of Florence Barclay. It was a time when embellished quotation, when scriptural and poetic admonitions were fashionable. Over the mantelpiece on a tall gilt-edged card was engraved the passage that on a distant, long to be remembered day I was to read inscribed on the statue to Stevenson in San Francisco:

  “To be honest, to be kind, to earn a little more than he spends, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not to be embittered, to have a few friends, but these without capitulation, above all, in the same conditions, to keep friends with himself, here is a task for all a man has of fortitude and delicacy. In his own life a man is not to expect happiness, only to profit by it, gladly, when it shall arrive. He is on duty here, he knows not how or why, and does not need to know, he knows not for what hire and must not ask—somehow or other though he does not know what goodness is, he must be good; somehow or other though he cannot tell what will do it, he must try to give happiness to others.”

  It was an intimate kind of room, in mauve and grey, the carpet fawn-coloured; the kind of room to which you could imagine yourself retiring when you were sad or tired; when you wished to be alone with happy thoughts.

  It filled, in the atmosphere of the party, the same function that it filled in the life of the house. It was the place that you went to when you needed to recover your energy; where parents and elder sisters took the small children who were dissolved in tears. There were a few casual refreshments on the desk: a jug of lemonade, a bowl of fruit. Part of the competition which consisted in a search for clues was set there.

  Each guest on his arrival was given a card that stated the name of some object hidden, yet at the same time placed in full view, whose discovery did not entail the moving of crockery or picture frames. On the pink binding of the Red Fairy Book a penny stamp was stuck. A sheet of paper was wrapped round a candle. A halfpenny lay on the mantelpiece under the wooden pedestal of a clock. Those who were seriously competing were to be seen slowly and pensively examining walls, shelves, picture-frames and mantelpiece. But just as the main party for the elder children was concentrated in the one long living-room, so for the younger ones the nursery was the core.

  To me the nursery was like something out of a book. It was the first modern nursery that I had seen. It had a ceiling blue-papered like the sky, with large silver stars and a vast crescent moon. The wallpaper was a figured fairy-tale, across which passed in fantastic cavalcade King Arthur, Little Red Riding Hood, The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, Simple Simon, Bluebeard, goblins, fairies, hags on sticks. The furniture was of unpolished, unvarnished oak. There were large cupboards, the doors decorated like illustrations. The floor was covered with a plain cork linoleum. It seemed the perfect playground. It was here that Jane Balliol arranged a series of children’s games:—Blind Man’s Buff, Hunt the Slipper, Oranges and Lemons; while one or two of the parents from the long cushioned window-seat watched their charges with a justifiable apprehension.

  In these games Francis himself, though he was actually the host of the nursery, took no part whatever. He went away into a corner with three other little boys, set out the railway system that had been his father’s Christmas present, with its innumerable accessories of signals, points, tunnels, station, porters, luggage, passengers, and played train
s the entire afternoon. He had an engine that ran by steam. Since this involved the flame of methylated spirit and boiling water, he was undisturbed by the smaller, admiring infants. Nurses and mothers shooed them away. “No, no, darling, that’s not safe. Come and play Blind Man’s Buff. Marjorie’s He” Once or twice Jane tried to induce Francis to join the party.

  “Darling boy, you can play trains any time.”

  “I like to play trains all the time,” he answered; and continued his game just as though there were no party, as though his three special cronies had come to spend the afternoon with him.

  He resented the interruption the conjuror necessitated. He wanted to go on playing trains.

  “I’ll only need that corner of the room.”

  But his father was firm.

  “There’ll be little enough spare room as it is. Clear away the rails and see that your friends have a good place to watch from.”

  Balliol was probably sorry afterwards that he had not allowed Francis to behave as he had wished. The conjuror was not particularly swift-fingered, his skill as a ventriloquist was slight. But he would have been more effective had not Francis from the front row explained how he did each trick, and called attention to the vibrations of his larynx while he conducted a duologue with a doll. He did his best, poor fellow, but he grew more and more conscious of the small, keen-eyed, sailor-suited boy who leant forward, his chin rested on his fist, waiting watchfully to announce “That card came from his hip pocket,” and then, having detected the trick, to sit back as though the remainder of the proceedings did not interest him; to resume his watchful pose the instant that a new trick was started.

  I have a very clear memory of Francis as he was at that first party: a characteristic picture, too. Right through childhood, through school-days, now in manhood, he has remained the child who has wanted to play trains by himself instead of joining the general party; who has done what he has been told, not with an ill grace, but, as it were, with the framing of a mental reservation, as though he were saying, “I’ll do what they want, but I’ll do it in my own way.” He has reserved the right to criticize a party that he never wished to join.

  My pictures of Hugh and Ruth are no less clear. In its way my first picture of Ruth is as characteristic as my first sight of Francis. It was a dramatic incident, as Ruth was herself dramatic. In keeping with the tenets of Greek drama, it happened “off.”

  Guests as soon as they arrived were taken straight through the hall, the boys into Balliol’s study, the girls past the door that divided the kitchen premises from the living part and led by a back stairs to the bedroom immediately above Balliol’s study that Lucy and Ruth shared.

  I was tidying my hair when I heard a splintering sound above me and saw reflected in the mirror a crack in the white surface of the ceiling. The crack lengthened and widened. I turned round to see a shower of plaster and the toes of a stockinged foot. There was a gasp, a cry of “Ruth, what are you doing!” A giggle; the exclamation of “Oh, heavens!” Then the explanation. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to see how strong it really was.”

  There was a loose board, apparently, in the floor above. Ruth had taken it up to show her friends. The sight of the laths and plaster underneath had tempted her to try their strength. It was a characteristic episode; because Ruth was the kind of person who chose the wrong moments for her experiments; because whereas a great many women toe dangerous ground to see just how much weight it will stand, Ruth was one of the very few who want to know just how much it won’t stand: who say not, “I wonder how much of my weight I can put on this and not go through,” but “I wonder how much weight this would need before I do go through.”

  I looked for her with curiosity when I limped through into the drawing-room. She was what from the sound of her voice I had expected: bright, brave-eyed, eager; with a reckless look and a sense of hardness that was prepared to accept the consequences of recklessness.

  I was interested by my first real sight of Lucy, Ruth and Francis, but it was by Hugh that I was impressed. In my eyes he was a very glorious creature. I was at the start of my first year at a preparatory school. He was a third yearer at a public school. He lived in a world remote from mine to which one day I should attain. The awe I felt for him was untouched by envy. What a man he looked! He wore, it is true, a wide Eton collar, but instead of an Eton suit he wore a silk-faced coat, cut low like a dinner jacket. His waistcoat was held by three buttons at the waist. It was cut in a semicircle, showing a wide triple-studded expanse of shirt-front. He wore a white bow tie; little and neat and tightly waisted, his trousers were black and braided. It was his clothes and manner that I watched. If anyone had asked me what he was like, the only personal feature that I should have been in a position to describe would have been his hair; and that, after all, was a sartorial effect. Parted at the side, heavily brilliantined, it lay back from his forehead in a sleek, thick curve. I contrasted it with the tufted brush at the back of my own crown that no amount of water could flatten.

  My eyes followed him, awed and fascinated. Perhaps he became conscious of this tribute; perhaps he became aware of me because, owing to my sprained ankle, my appearances were static. I was usually, that is to say, in the same place for prolonged periods. “There’s a chap without much to do,” he must have thought. At any rate at the end of the party when the conjuror’s performance was at an end, when dancing had been resumed downstairs and Blind Man’s Buff upstairs, it was me that he entrusted with a mission.

  I saw him looking at me as though he were trying to make his mind up about something. I felt worried. Was I doing anything wrong, I wondered? At last he came across.

  “Look here, would you like to be a sport?”

  I flushed proudly. “Rather!”

  “Well, do you see that girl over there with the green sash: the pretty one? Right! I’m dancing the next dance with her. Now, do you see that big vase in the hall? Well, above that, right in the corner of the wall, there’s an electric light switch that turns the lights out through the whole house. You watch me when I dance. When you see me stop dancing and go out and sit on the stairs, I want you to go out into the hall, and turn that switch off. Do you understand?”

  “Rather!”

  “You won’t sneak?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I’ll give you sixpence, if you’ll do it.”

  I was on the point of saying that I would do it just to please him, but when one is nine, sixpence is a large sum.

  “All right.”

  I felt very proud, very excited. The music began again. Hugh walked over to the girl with the green sash. She must have been about his age. Her chin was on a level with his shoulder. They danced with a smooth, easy rhythm. He whispered to her as they danced. The music stopped. There was clapping; a pause. Then the music began again. He said something to her. She looked up, hesitated, then nodded. They walked out of the drawing-room towards the staircase. It was my moment.

  I was fearfully afraid. I had to climb on a chair. The vase was tall and perched insecurely on a hat cupboard. I could not think how I should explain my presence there if I were seen and questioned. For a moment I pretended to examine the vase while I gauged the exact distance of the switch. “I’ll put out my hand, then pull. It’ll be dark. I’ve got to get away quickly, but not so quickly that I’ll knock the vase over getting down. Then I must bolt as far away as possible. I’ll count ten to myself, then pull. One, two, three…” But I was too nervous, too impatient to count till ten. At seven I put up my hand and pulled.

  I had never before, and I am not sure that I have ever since, achieved so complete and general a sensation. There was darkness where there had been light; silence where there had been sound and music. Then a moment later, where there had been order, an outbreak of pandemonium. Everyone seemed to be shouting; and for different things. An infant somewhere began to cry. Matches were struck and flickered feebly. There were calls for candles, a reactionary growl complained that you didn’t have
troubles of this kind in the days of lamps. Mothers were calling out to unseen charges. “Now, don’t move, Christopher. Keep quite quiet.” For a full minute it went on like that, while I crept farther and farther from the scene of my misdeed. For a full minute. Then I heard Hugh’s voice: cheerful and self-confident. “I wonder if some silly ass has turned the light off at the main switch?” In another minute there was a blaze of light and a lot of laughter. “You’re a real sport,” Hugh was whispering. “I’ve made it a shilling instead of sixpence.” I looked towards the girl in the green sash. She was smiling, flushed, happy. I did not know which of them I envied more.

  One other memory is linked up with that first party at Ilex. I had returned from my first term at school with a rough but inquisitive knowledge of the facts of life. Looking at Jane Balliol I could not help wondering whether there was not some connection between her changed appearance and the information that had been whispered into my ear at school. I had never seen a woman in that condition; but that surely was how a woman would look if she were to be in that condition.

  The party was ended by half-past seven. By ten o’clock Edward Balliol was seated, with the house quiet, in the small room that his wife used as her boudoir. The children had gone to bed at nine. Jane had followed them half an hour later. Himself, he was resolved to see the New Year in. The porters at Golders Green Tube Station were going to let off every syren they possessed. He was not going to bed, he said, to be woken within half an hour of going to sleep. That was the excuse he gave. But actually he enjoyed a calm, reflective, solitary hour at the year’s end.

  In the rush of preparing for the party he had had little time that morning to read more than the headlines and the principal leader of his paper. He settled down now to read The Times’ review of the year that in a couple of hours would be ended.