The New Moon with the Old (14 page)

The answer to his letter came by return of post. Guessing it might, he was careful to be in the hall when it arrived. The name on the envelope, if seen by anyone else, would have given rise to comment.

Miss Blanche Whitecliff wrote to say she would be at home on the following afternoon at three o’clock – ‘If you are sure you wish to come all this way to see me. From what you tell me, there is a great possibility you might prove suitable, and I very much admire your handwriting. Forgive the seeming illiteracy of my own owing to arthritis.’

He had written in his best italic script. He had mentioned having been temporary companion to several ladies who would, if required, supply references. (Surely his friendship with local old ladies amounted to temporary companionship?) He had touched on the fact that he had recently met Miss Jane Minton ‘who felt that the position might be right for me’. (Well, she’d almost said that.) He concluded by saying that he felt qualified to help with Miss Whitecliff’s family memoir as he had already done research on the Edwardian period, and he signed the letter ‘Evelyn A. Carrington’, a name he had every right to, having been christened Evelyn Andrew.

Naturally, Miss Whitecliff addressed him as ‘Miss’. Reading her gracious reply he was smitten by qualms of conscience. He had acted on an impulse born of his intense desire to see her house and talk to the woman who had preserved such a setting; so soon now it would be too late to catch an authentic glimpse of the golden era that fascinated him. But his letter, implying that he was a female, was rather like his letter to Cupid’s Corner – just ‘one of Drew’s jokes’, famous in the family; and he now saw it as an offensive joke. But surely he could prevent its being offensive? And in the unlikely event that she would accept him he would stay with her … yes, a whole month and be very, very kind to her. Anyway, conscience or no conscience, he just must see that Edwardian interior.

After breakfast he speedily packed a suitcase and, being determined not to tell anyone what he was up to, wrote a brief note to Richard saying: ‘Another bird has flown the nest in search of a job, but is liable to be back, jobless, within a couple of days. If not, I’ll write.’ Then, remembering Merry’s farewell letter, he added: ‘I promise not to go abroad with a troupe of dancers.’

He also wrote to Miss Whitecliff, confirming the appointment.

Getting out of the house unseen proved easy. Cook and Edith had gone for their first day at the Swan, Jane for her first day with Miss Willy. Choosing a moment when Clare was in the kitchen and Richard in his father’s study, he hurried down the drive and stood looking appealingly at approaching cars. Almost at once he got a lift to the station in time for an excellent train to London. There he changed stations, gazing at the crowded streets from the top of his bus on the off chance of seeing Merry, and ate an early lunch. He reached Whitesea, after a complicated journey, well on in the afternoon.

He was glad to find it was quite a small place. Indeed, ‘miniature’ was the word that occurred to him as he looked out of the window of the taxi he had taken at the station.
He felt himself to be in a miniature resort, complete with narrow shopping arcades, an ornate little theatre (now, alas, a cinema) and on the promenade a white bandstand which somehow suggested a toy merry-go-round. Everything was spick and span but old – no, old was the wrong word; this little town was … embalmed, preserved unchanged since its heyday, as if in order to present him with the perfect setting for his novel. And how fortunate he should have come here in the autumn, with the holiday season over! Even the shopping district was almost deserted and he saw not one soul on the promenade. The setting awaited the characters with which he would people it.

The sea was so calm that it scarcely seemed to move and so pale, under a high mist, that he wondered if the town had first been given its name on such an afternoon as this. There were no sands; only a stretch of shingle as pale as the sea.

He wished to stay in a hotel on the promenade; there were only three and the taxi-driver advised against two of them:

‘They’re not what you might call properly open out of the season. The Royal’s all right. They have all-the-year-round regulars there.’

The Royal was the largest but, even so, not very large. It was built of red and yellow bricks and Drew was about to consider it hideous when he noticed, picked out in yellow bricks, the date 1905. This placed it in ‘his’ period, so he decided to like it. The bedroom to which he was shown disappointed him by having no personality whatever, but he had glimpsed a
be-palmed
and be-wickered lounge which attracted him and he hurried down in time to be served with tea.

Here, obviously, were some of the ‘all-the-year-round regulars’: three very old ladies and one slightly less old. He soon decided that the less-old lady was a paid companion. She was sent upstairs for a forgotten book, asked to find out if the evening paper had come, told to go and see why the
waiter hadn’t answered a bell rung for more hot water. This thought Drew, is the kind of job you are applying for and you’re mad to think you could stick it a week, let alone a month. He had no desire to be kind to any of these old ladies, except the harassed companion, and even to her kindness would be more of a duty than a pleasure.

All these women had drab clothes, drab faces, drab hair, and peculiarly unattractive feet. When he went to tea with his village old ladies they usually wore mauve or powder blue, their skins were pink and their hair fluffily white; and their feet, though in one case plump, were neatly shod. Besides, all his village old ladies were spry. The women here looked infirm as well as ugly. Jane had described Miss Whitecliff as beautiful but the lady herself had mentioned her arthritis. Not without shame, he realized that, even for the sake of his book, he was only prepared to serve old age which was both decorative and healthy.

He finished his tea and went out for a walk, far from sure he would not go to London in the morning and then send a telegram calling his appointment off. He would anyway have this ideal background for his novel. The crones under the dusty palms had not destroyed his pleasure in the town; indeed, he now liked it even more than when seen from the taxi. Leaving the sea front he wandered past the shops, already closing, towards the residential district on the higher land at the back of the town.

Somewhere there, he guessed, was Miss Whitecliff’s house. He decided he would at least walk past it. He knew from her letter heading that White Turrets was in Chestnut Avenue. (He trusted the chestnuts were white.) A boy locking up a shop directed him.

It was the last of several avenues, reached after nearly a mile walking uphill. The houses on it were large, mainly imitation Tudor (his word for it was ‘Pseudor’) and not attractive. Most
of them had been turned into boarding houses and looked as if already closed for the winter. He passed more than half a dozen of them, with their extensive gardens, without finding White Turrets. Then he unmistakably spotted it, the last house in the avenue, separated from its nearest neighbour by a long stretch of downland. He quickened his pace.

It was built of rich red brick but with so much painted woodwork that the predominating note was white. He counted six white balconies, of different sizes and shapes. There were white wooden frames to bow windows and bay windows and to corner windows that formed three-quarters of a circle; white framed dormer windows in the roof and – joy of joys – four white turrets suggestive of dovecots. Higher even than these, in the middle of the roof, was what looked like a white-painted play-pen.

Nowhere was there a flat, undisturbed stretch of brick wall; always some jutting window or balcony broke the line. Here, as he delightedly told himself, was a supreme, perfectly preserved example of Edwardian Protuberant.

Already the curtains of the downstairs rooms were drawn; but as he gazed, entranced, a bedroom was brightly lit by electric bulbs scarcely dimmed by frosted glass shades. He saw a pale grey wall down which trailed sprays of wistaria. Then a maid in muslin cap (a mob cap – actually!) drew the curtains. He caught one gleam of dark pink satin (‘crushed strawberry’ he believed) reflecting the bright electric light, before he was faced with the blank drabness of the linings.

Now the house was closed against the night and him. But he would return tomorrow and get inside, even if Miss Whitecliff and her maids finally ejected him by main force. The maid he’d seen wouldn’t have much force to contribute; she appeared to be little more than four feet high. He remembered with pleasure that there had been a muslin cuff on her tight black sleeve.

The daylight was fading now. He gave one last loving look at White Turrets, then strode cheerfully along Chestnut Avenue and down the hill to the town.

After dinner (the crones returned his smiling ‘good evening’; the poor old things weren’t so bad) he went to the pictures, mainly to see the inside of the theatre. It was nearly empty and he learned that the gallery, upper circle and boxes were never used now. He enjoyed most the musical interlude – a piano selection from
Véronique
– though he could have played it better himself. He collected the scores of old musical comedies.

The next morning he explored the town further and had morning coffee at a café established in 1903. Gossiping with the elderly waitress he asked if the town was very different in the summer. She said it got pretty full in August, ‘but never what you could call rowdy. Well, it’s awkward to get to, isn’t it? And there are no sands for the children. We mostly get old people.’

He ate several cakes and decided to skip lunch. Treated as merely an outing to gain local colour, his trip to Whitesea was a colossal extravagance. And he felt more and more that nothing now lay ahead beyond an embarrassing interview – and, of course, a glimpse inside White Turrets.

At one minute to three he opened the wrought-iron gate. The garden was neat but contained little but grass, a few bushes and some stunted trees; it was extremely exposed. Feeling quite sick with nervousness, he rang the bell.

The door was opened by the maid he had seen drawing the curtains the previous evening. Though nearer to five feet than four she was still very small, and he saw why she had reminded Jane of a little black fly. The lines on her face were so deeply incised that they might have been made with a black lead pencil; her eyes were almost as dark as the small amount of hair (a wig, almost certainly) revealed by the
mob cap. He thought her black alpaca dress ugly but was enchanted by her spotted-muslin lace-trimmed apron.

Blushing, he asked if he might see Miss Whitecliff. ‘She’s expecting me. Mr Carrington.’

‘She’s expecting a
Miss
Carrington.’ The voice was childishly high but cracked with age.

‘I know. I’ve come to explain.’ Would that get him in?

It did. She said, ‘Very good, sir,’ with no hint of comment in her tone. But when she opened a door and announced him, she allowed herself a faintly satiric stress on ‘Mr’.

A tall, painfully thin woman rose from the fireside. He was astonished that Jane had considered her beautiful but he liked her floor-length, clinging grey dress; could it delightfully be a tea-gown? She looked at him in bewilderment, saying, ‘Oh, dear! Was Miss Evelyn Carrington unable to come?’

He said: ‘I’m Evelyn Carrington. I’m most terribly sorry I misled you.’

She gave a gasp of dismay and then, to his intense relief, began to laugh – a light, musical laugh, no doubt the rippling laughter performed by the heroines of so many old novels.

‘Good gracious, what an absurd mistake! And I’ve let you come all this way. But – do sit down, please – you see, I took it for granted that— Well, companions always are female, surely?’

‘But not secretaries, and I would so like to help you with your memoir. And I play the piano – and even sing a little. I was looking forward to trying your parents’ songs. And
I
think I could make you a really good companion.’ He found himself speaking with the utmost earnestness and gazing at her appealingly.

‘Do you mean you really want to work for me?’

He assured her he did and meant it. He had now realized that she was, indeed, beautiful. Her features, once one got used to thinness amounting to emaciation, were exquisite, the expression of her grey eyes flowerlike. She was certainly
no pink-cheeked, white-thatched old lady; her skin was ashen and her hair, worn parted down the middle and looped over a black velvet ribbon, was a faded brown. But she was far more appealing than any of his conventionally pretty old ladies and he knew, he absolutely knew, that she was as Edwardian as her room – not that he’d dared take time to look at it fully yet.

‘I can’t understand it,’ she said. ‘Why should a charming young man want such a dreary job? Being a companion is considered dreary – very few people have answered my advertisements, and no one at all nice has come to see me except Miss Jane Minton. How surprising she should think the work might suit you!’

It was then he decided to tell her the truth about himself. He described his background and the family’s present difficulties, even spoke frankly about his father’s troubles, for he felt that, if he did persuade her to let him work for her, he would have to be on an honest footing. She listened with great interest, frequently expressing sympathy. His father must, she insisted, simply have been unfortunate; no doubt his name would eventually be cleared.

‘And how I wish I could offer you work,’ she added. ‘But I do assure you, ladies don’t have gentlemen companions.’

‘Do you feel it wouldn’t be respectable?’

Again she laughed ripplingly. ‘My dear Mr Carrington, I’m seventy. It’s just that … well, it wouldn’t do.’

He said with resignation, ‘I understand. You couldn’t be at ease with me – as you would be with a woman.’

She considered this for a moment, then said in a faintly surprised tone, ‘I’m more at ease with you – already – than with my great-niece when she comes to see me. And I think I’m more at ease than I was with Miss Jane Minton – I was a bit in awe of her. Let me … try to get used to the idea of your coming here – while we talk of something else.’