Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (2 page)

The little lie turns into what Laura Palfrey would call a ‘whopper’ when, in an inspired moment, she persuades her rescuer, Ludo, to pose as Desmond. She invites him to dinner at the Claremont, where he disposes of the ghastly three courses with a rapidity she finds both touching and disconcerting. He has charm and good manners, despite the fact that the sole on one of his shoes is loose and makes a flapping sound on the carpet when he enters the dining room. He seems to meet – she is relieved to observe – with the approval, however reluctant, of Arbuthnot, Burton,
et al.
Laura begins to enjoy her wickedness – for such, given her stern moral code, it seems to her.

The residents of the Claremont are drawn by Elizabeth Taylor with a sympathy that is strengthened, not diminished, by her beady-eyed detachment from them. Her peculiar gift is for noticing the casual cruelty that people use to protect themselves from the not always casual cruelty of others. Her ear for insult is, every so often, on a par with Jane Austen’s. Mrs Taylor was happily aware that the English upper classes are blessed with a talent for making a put-down sound like a compliment: the secret lies in the tone of voice. In novel after novel, she has her characters saying what should have been unspeakable things with the utmost graciousness.

Lady Swayne, who honours the Claremont once a year with an all too brief visit, is the epitome of a certain kind of awful graciousness: she’s the spiritual sister of Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Mrs Elton. Her way with a
prejudice is to apologise for giving it expression:

… all of her most bigoted or self-congratulatory statements she prefaced with ‘I’m afraid’. I’m afraid I don’t smoke. I’m afraid I’m just common-or-garden Church of England. (Someone had mentioned Brompton Oratory.) I’m afraid I’d like to see the Prime Minister hanged, drawned and quartered. I’m afraid I think the fox revels in it. I’m afraid I don’t think that’s awfully funny.

Mrs Taylor is no less observant with Mrs de Salis, who succeeds in not becoming an inmate at the Claremont. It’s a brilliant touch that the only photograph of her son (‘My beautiful Willie’) that she has in her possession shows a pretty and passé chorus boy of a bygone age. The Willie Mrs Palfrey, Mr Osmond, Mrs Burton and Mrs Post encounter at a memorably ghastly party that is one of the most hilarious scenes in the book is an altogether different specimen, with a pouchy face and receding hair. Willie swathes each bottle of cheap plonk with a napkin, as if he were pouring champagne.

Elizabeth Taylor, whose political views were leftish, did artistic justice to those whose opinions she almost certainly despised. The people in her novels and in her incomparable short stories are, mostly, well off: they attend gymkhanas, they travel, they collect antiques. She rescues them from easy satire and shows them becoming aware of the bleakness of life, and its pain. The old people in
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont
are, I suppose, familiar types, but not in Mrs Taylor’s hands. Hers is a brave art,
for all the smallness of its scale – it invites one to look afresh at human beings those of us of a liberal persuasion tend to dismiss as ridiculous and reactionary. Because of its subject matter, her delicate and subtle art was not treated in her last years with the seriousness it deserved. Such a blinkered view is no longer defensible – if, in fact, it ever was. Her reports from the chintz-bedecked battlefields are of lasting value, for the simple reason that they are exquisitely written. And, anyway, life is still life, whether it’s viewed from a seat at the point-to-point or a stone by the slag heap.

Let me end as I began, with a personal reminiscence. In August 1973, I wrote a long article on Elizabeth Taylor’s work for the
New Statesman.
A few days after its appearance, I received a letter from her. In it she wrote:

I feel, after a time, that my books have dropped into a pit, and must lie there for ever and ever. And there they were, brought to the light of day once more, and by someone who had truly
read
them.

I continue to read them, as I read the books I have come to love – for pleasure, for edification. I envy those readers who are coming to her work for the first time. Theirs will be an unexpected pleasure, and they will – if they read her as she wanted to be read – learn much that will surprise them.

Paul Bailey, London 1982

M
RS PALFREY first came to the Claremont Hotel on a Sunday afternoon in January. Rain had closed in over London, and her taxi sloshed along the almost deserted Cromwell Road, past one cavernous porch after another, the driver going slowly and poking his head out into the wet, for the hotel was not known to him. This discovery, that he did not know, had a little disconcerted Mrs Palfrey, for she did not know it either, and began to wonder what she was coming to. She tried to banish terror from her heart. She was alarmed at the threat of her own depression.

If it’s not nice, I needn’t stay, she promised herself, her lips slightly moving, as she leaned forward in the taxi, looking from side to side of the wide, frightening road, almost dreading to read the name Claremont over one of those porches. There were so many hotels, one after the other along this street, all looking much the same.

She had simply chanced on an advertisement in a Sunday newspaper while staying in Scotland with her daughter Elizabeth. Reduced winter rates. Excellent cuisine. We can take
that
with a pinch of salt, she had thought at the time.

At last the cab slowed down. ‘Claremont Hotel’ she read, as clear as could be, in large letters across what
must be two – even, perhaps, three – large houses made into one. She felt relieved. The porch pillars had been recently painted; there were spotted laurels in the window-boxes; clean curtains – a front of emphatic respectability.

She hauled herself out of the taxi and, leaning on her rubber-tipped walking-stick, crossed the pavement and climbed a few steps. Her varicose veins pained her today.

She was a tall woman with big bones and a noble face, dark eyebrows and a neatly folded jowl. She would have made a distinguished-looking man and, sometimes, wearing evening dress, looked like some famous general in drag.

Followed by the driver and her luggage (for the hotel gave no sign of life), she battled with revolving doors and almost lurched into the hushed vestibule. The receptionist was coldly kind, as if she were working in a nursing-home, and one for deranged patients at that. ‘
What
a day!’ she said. The taxi-driver, lumbering in with the suitcases, seemed alien in this muffled place, and was at once taken over by the porter. Mrs Palfrey opened her handbag and carefully picked out coins. Everything she did was unhurried, almost authoritative. She had always known how to behave. Even as a bride, in strange, alarming conditions in Burma, she had been magnificent, calm – when (for instance) she was rowed across floods to her new home; unruffled, finding it more than damp, with a snake wound round the banisters to greet her. She had straightened her back and
given herself a good talking-to, as she had this afternoon in the train.

In spite of long practice, she found that resolution was more difficult these days. When she was young, she had had an image of herself to present to her new husband, whom she admired; then to herself, thirdly to the natives (I am an Englishwoman). Now, no one reflected the image of herself, and it seemed diminished: it had lost two-thirds of its erstwhile value (no husband, no natives).

When the porter had put down her suitcases and gone, she thought that prisoners must feel as she did now, the first time they are left in their cell, first turning to the window, then facing about to stare at the closed door: after that, counting the paces from wall to wall. She envisaged this briskly.

From the window she could see – could see only – a white brick wall down which dirty rain slithered, and a cast-iron fire-escape, which was rather graceful. She tried to see that it was graceful. The outlook – especially on this darkening afternoon – was daunting; but the backs of hotels, which are kept for indigent ladies, can’t be expected to provide a view, she knew. The best is kept for honeymooners, though God alone knew why they should require it.

The bed looked rather high, and the carpet was worn, but not threadbare. Roses could be made out. A corner fireplace was boarded up, but still had a hearth before it of peacock-blue tiles. The radiator gave off a dry, scorched smell and subdued noises. Heavy
wooden knobs to the drawers of the chest, she noted. It was more like a maid’s bedroom.

She took off her hat and pushed her hair about. It was short and grey and regularly waved, as if a hand had been spread over it and then squeezed.

The silence was strange – a Sunday-afternoon silence and strangeness; and for the moment her heart lurched, staggered in appalled despair, as it had done once before when she had suddenly realised, or suddenly could no longer
not
realise that her husband at death’s door was surely going through it. Against all hope, in the face of all her prayers.

To steady herself now she sat down on the edge of the bed and breathed deeply, put up her chin as if she were setting a good example.

The lift, far off, whined. Soon, she heard its gate clashed to, and there was a scattering of sound, of footsteps, of conversation, people coming nearer, turning from one corridor into another. Two polite voices at last went by her door. She was grateful for them.

Her black mood had passed and she began to unpack. She hung up her clothes, and thought of erstwhile homes; but gratefully, not heart-brokenly any more. Everything she now touched was familiar – pills rattled familiarly in their bottles as she set them out on the bedside table. Her short fur cape she hung over a chair. It smelled of camphor and animal, as it always had. She decided to wear it down to dinner to create a decisive first impression. On whom, would be discovered, or not discovered. Beside her bed she put Palgrave’s
Golden Treasury,
and her Bible, though she was not religious.

When she had unpacked – and she made it last as long as she could, so that later might seem sooner – she took her sponge-bag and went along the corridor to what was labelled on the door ‘Ladies Bathroom’.

Her table was in a corner of the dining-room. It had a single white chrysanthemum and a sprig of greenery in a silvery vase. Soon it would have her own packet of crispbread and, at breakfast, her own Allbran and superior make of marmalade. She did not care for hotel marmalade.

At other tables sat a few other elderly ladies looking, to Mrs Palfrey, as if they had been sitting there for years. They were waiting patiently for the celery soup, hands folded in laps and eyes dreamy. There were one or two married couples who occasionally made observations across the table for appearance’s sake, recalled to one another momentarily from a vague staring around or nibbling at bread. These seemed more in transit than the old ladies. The waitresses moved silently about on the thick carpet, as if assisting at a ritual. Many tables were empty.

After pasty celery soup, there was a choice of roast Surrey fowl or cold Norfolk turkey. Then the trolley was wheeled round with its load of wobbling red jellies, slopping fruit salad (mostly, Mrs Palfrey noted, sliced apples and bananas). Coffee was served in the lounge.
It was all rather quickly over, with no conversation to eke out the time. Eight-fifteen.

In the lounge, knitting was brought out. There was even a little desultory conversation. Mrs Palfrey knew that in such hotels as this residents had special chairs and, in her usual way of being sure how to behave, on this first evening she sat down in a rather dark place by the door and in a draught, settled her cape about her shoulders and opened her Agatha Christie.

At nine o’clock, she noticed that people were on the move. Knitting-needles were jabbed into balls of wool (she would get some knitting for herself tomorrow, she decided), books were closed thankfully, as if they had been only intermission things, and stiff bodies got up with a fuss from easy chairs.

Mrs Palfrey alone read on, and was puzzled until an elderly woman, slower than the others, bent with arthritis and walking with two sticks, stopped her slow progress to the door by Mrs Palfrey’s chair. ‘Aren’t you coming to watch the serial?’ she asked, and she looked as if she might have smiled if she had not been in so much pain.

Mrs Palfrey got up quickly, and she blushed a little as if she were a new girl at school addressed for the first time by a prefect.