The Beautiful Visit (44 page)

After him, and a brief interlude with Mrs Pompey, who produced a small table, I did not speak to anyone for the rest of the day.

I cooked my supper, started the first page of my diary, and then, although it was only nine o’clock, went to bed. I could think of nothing else to do. The light was not strong enough for
copying, and I was disinclined to read. The bed had noisy springs, but was quite comfortable.

The next day I rose, made myself toast on the fire (which required an alarming number of pennies to keep it alight), and settled down to work. I was interrupted, however, by an old woman who
intended ‘doing’ my room. She was amiable, but so inquisitive that I fled, walking about the streets for nearly an hour, by which time I deemed my room should be clear of her. It was.
It was also clear of three shillings which I had left on the writing-table with the intention of getting them changed into pennies for the fire. I was somewhat discouraged by this, and searched
anxiously through my things to see whether anything else had disappeared. But she seemed to have the simple immediate kind of mind that takes only money.

I copied until a quarter to one, when an absurdly dignified gong rang. I ate stewed rabbit and semolina pudding in a room with seven tables and four other lunchers. They muttered occasionally to
each other, but they mostly ate, with gloomy concentration, the not very appetizing food. Then, one by one, they left in a portentously silent manner, as though they had something important to do
but the remainder of us must not be disturbed. After lunch I automatically went to my room. What should I do now? The thought of copying even more music was intolerable, as was the alternative of
darning my stockings. I wrote to my mother; and then, as an afterthought, to Lucy, asking for Elspeth’s London address.

Friends were essential to this sort of life. I wondered what they were doing at home. I could walk over and see them. I resisted this idea with some difficulty, and posted my letters
instead.

There were sausages again for supper. The bathroom geyser required a shilling, and took even longer than the one at home. I wrote the diary again, and was disappointed in the shortness of the
entry and its repetition of the day before.

A week passed, in which the only events were a self-conscious visit to my home, and a friendly but very short letter from Lucy containing Elspeth’s address.

Even after a week I realized that the money I made from part copying, and the money my mother had given me, were not going to be enough. The food, and most of all, the fire, raced through a
third as much again as I had calculated to spend on them.

I went to the newspaper shop and asked the proprietor to put a card in his window to the effect that a young lady would teach music on pupil’s own piano. We worded it together, and he told
me how much to charge. ‘Can’t be much in these parts,’ he said, shaking his head wisely. ‘You won’t get them to pay for it. I should say five bob a lesson is about the
mark, or maybe half a crown.’ We settled on three and six.

I wrote to Elspeth asking whether I might come and see her. There was no reply. I went every day to the newspaper shop, but nobody seemed to want piano lessons. Then one night after I had eaten
my bacon, and tried to write the listless monotonous diary, I broke down and simply wept. It did not seem to matter how hard I tried, life continued blank and impenetrable like the black brick wall
outside. I seemed to have no friends. Elspeth did not reply, and even Rupert seemed to have given me up. I had no talents and no money. I was not starving. I had what unsympathetic listeners would
call a good home. And a young man had asked me to marry him. I flipped through the pages of my diary with their sparse uninteresting information, tore the written sheets from the book and threw
them away in fragments. What was the use of writing the same thing day after day all through this thick book? Then I remembered the newspaper man telling me to come to him when I got to Vol.. Two.
If I had always kept a diary, there would have been Vol. Two by now, and after all, things had not always remained exactly the same. They had not, I remembered more sharply, as an engine whistled
at Paddington, and I recalled my first journey to the Lancings, to whom my father had seen me off. One could not keep a retrospective diary, however, and it was just my luck that I should choose
this moment to begin. Then I suddenly wanted to write about my first journey to the Lancings, diary or no diary.

And that was how I came to write this book.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

I wrote the book. I continued to live in my room in Paddington; to copy music, and to eat my lunch in the dim room on the ground floor, crowded with cruets, with sauce, and
with tables, in fact with anything but people. I bought food; collected shillings and pennies for the geyser and my fire respectively; went home to my mother once a week (she did not ask to see my
room, and I did not invite her); mended my clothes; and occasionally went for walks when I had music to return, as the concentrated confinement was making me more than usually pale. Every hour when
I was not occupied in the above employments, I wrote.

I began by writing about the first visit to the Lancings, and then realized the necessity of describing my home which provided such violent contrast. After the earlier part was completed, I
related every incident subsequent to the first visit, that seemed in the least worthy of narration. I found the whole business incredibly arduous, but I was no longer lonely or bored. I only
stopped to consider whether I had remembered the things that had mattered to me at the time; the right things, and enough of them. When I began, I found this difficult; but after one painful month
my past life consumed me, and I had no trouble in projecting myself back into each-experience as its turn came.

I told no one about my writing. Even Mr Williams, the newsagent, with whom I had become very friendly, when selling me a second fat exercise book, laughed about my ‘life’ because, of
course, he did not really believe in it. I began to write every afternoon except on the day that I went home; continuing until eleven or twelve at night, with a break for the inevitable sausages or
eggs or bacon. I ate them in rotation by now, but I had ceased to notice them very much; I had ceased to notice anything. It is only now that I realize how difficult it is to live, observe and
feel; and to write. Living and writing at once were almost impossible to me. For five months I did not live at all; that is to say, almost nothing happened to me, and when it did, I made no effort
to enjoy whatever it was, I hardly noticed it, and resented what I did notice. I simply wrote. It was a curious business. I had no very clear idea of why I was writing, or even, as the months went
by, how I was to end the whole thing. This last point became for some time a very real problem. Everything connected with the book had by then become real, and everything else a drab boarding-house
dream. The underlying problem in my life became the end of my book; the most immediate problem, my increasing lack of money.

Several weeks after I had begun writing, Mr Williams hailed me from his shop as I was passing (I had ceased asking him about the advertisement, which indeed I had forgotten).

‘Lidy with too many daughters wants you to call. Any afternoon this week. Here’s the address. ’Tisn’t far. What hoi looks as though yer luck’s turned,
hey?’

I agreed that it probably had, and hastened home for my music. Now I was faced with it, the prospect of teaching little girls the piano was rather appalling. I had lived without a piano for some
time, and had not practised seriously for years. Also, if there were a
great
many daughters, my writing time would be seriously depleted. However, I had paid for the advertisement, and I
needed money.

Having selected several pieces like Somervell’s Rhythmic Gradus, ‘The Harmonious Blacksmith’, a little very early Mozart, and some Czerny, I set off that afternoon to Mrs
Garth-Jackson’s house. It was, I discovered, another boarding-house, of the more genteel and expensive variety. It had a Chinese lantern in the hall, and an intricate piece of furniture
bracketed to the wall, which pigeon-holed all the inmates’ letters in alphabetical order. There was also a smell of soap and burnt rock cakes which assailed me the moment the door was opened
by a stolid young woman of about eighteen who conducted me to a room leading off the hall, and then abandoned me. There was a piano in it, an extraordinarily ancient Erard.

Mrs Garth-Jackson had an exceedingly thin stiff nose, like a placket jammed between two pale grey buttons which were her eyes. When she smiled, which she did all the while she was talking, she
displayed bulbous ingrown teeth, which were so large and so numerous that they seemed almost to be falling out of her mouth. She wore a hideous overall spattered with huge orange flowers, and over
this, to show, I suppose, that she wore real clothes underneath, a large lapis lazuli and mother-of-pearl cross on a silver chain.

‘I am Mrs Garth-Jackson,’ she began. ‘You must excuse my greeting you like this, but I have everything to do myself, and all my large family have home-made food. Today is my
baking day and you couldn’t have caught me at a worse moment, but never mind. Do sit down. Be at home. Now then. I have three daughters who all require lessons, but I’m afraid I cannot
run to the figure you are asking as I am a war widow.’

This did not seem a very promising start. However, I smiled, wanly sympathetic, and she continued: ‘One of the things I rescued from the Wreck, was the dear old piano which nobody has
played on since I can remember. So all we need is a nice sing-song in the evening with one of the girls officiating.’

I summoned enough courage to ask: ‘Have your daughters received no previous tuition?’

‘Dear me no. Of course I see that if you had been contemplating
advanced
tuition your price was perhaps not so . . . but these girls are right at the
beginning
, and only the
most elementary teaching is necessary. That
does
make a difference, doesn’t it?’ She smiled harder than ever.

Panic stricken, I attempted to consider the difference it made. But she allowed me no time for this.

‘You look very young to be a teacher of any kind. What are your qualifications?’

I explained, as impressively as possible, about my father. She seemed satisfied, but not impressed, and continued to talk about her daughters.

‘You will find them eager to learn, and not, I fancy, ungifted. Their great-uncle used to play the viola; so you see there is music in our family, too. They are available any afternoons
that you wish, but perhaps it would save your time and my money if you taught them together, shall we say for an hour and a half at the figure you mentioned?’

She was still smiling, with her eyes boring into my face as she exploded this last awful suggestion. I was about to grasp weakly at the only straw in sight, when she continued: ‘I see you
have brought music with you. Quite unnecessary, as a matter of fact. I have got something suitable for each of them.’

I found my voice. ‘Have they any knowledge of musical notation?’

Mrs Garth-Jackson laughed.

‘No idea of notes from A to Z. That is your job, isn’t it?’ Here is the music. I will fetch the girls while you peruse it.’ She laid three thin leaflets on my lap and
hurried purposefully out.

The leaflets contained three songs: ‘Tipperary’, ‘Roses in Picardy’, and one I had never heard of called ‘Moonlight on My Dreams’. I stared at them aghast. I
was still staring at them in a kind of petrified trance, when the three Miss Garth-Jacksons followed their mother into the room. The daughters were all alike, and exactly like their mother. The
first shock, however, was in respect of their age. They all looked, in spite of their girlish and identical clothes, considerably older than me. I realized by their expressions, that if Mrs
Garth-Jackson had not constantly smiled, she would have looked morose and stupid. On the whole, I still wished she would not smile. Meanwhile four sharp noses were directed at me, and three pairs
of pale grey eyes stared with expressionless intensity into mine.

‘This is Muriel; Mildred; and my youngest, Mabel. Now as I think we were agreed upon terms, supposing you begin now, and when I have finished my weary round of household duties, I shall be
able to join you, and I hope also profit.’

The next moment I was left facing the unprepossessing and silent trio. Divested of Mrs Garth-Jackson’s smile, the atmosphere became frankly gloomy, even desperate. Stiffening my sinews,
however, I began, with assumed confidence, which did not for one moment deceive any of us, to examine the extent of their knowledge. This was easy. They knew nothing, and, I felt, cared less. I
realized with horror that teaching them the names of the notes was going to be no easy task. Nevertheless, I began to attempt this.

I opened my book of Czerny and they shuffled up to the piano. The situation was made worse by the fact that some of the notes of the piano never sounded at all, many others were erratic, and all
of them were out of tune. With every minute I felt my pupils grow more bewildered and hostile. They never spoke to me, but muttered an occasional disparaging remark to each other. My position was
only relieved by their apparently despising each other more thoroughly even than me, although they clearly had no very good opinion of me. In half an hour I had made no progress at all. Their minds
did not exactly wander; quite simply they did not seem to have any minds. I endeavoured to remain bright and patient, but I was clearly very bad at teaching, I could not remember when I had learned
this particular aspect of the subject myself. I seemed always to have known it. So I dare say my methods were hopeless.

Mrs Garth-Jackson’s reappearance, which I had formerly been dreading, came as a relief.

‘What
have
you been doing? I haven’t heard a sound,’ she began.

‘We haven’t been learning the songs you said,’ announced, I think, Mildred, but I was so bemused by their noses that I am not very sure.