Ideally, these Bobbies and Darlings are sheathed in short frocks, the hems of which dangle about their knees like seaweed, the waistlines of which encircle their hips, loose and effortless, following the droop of shoulder and mouth. Ideally, the whole is upheld by a pair of shiny silk stockings of a bright hue known as, but not resembling, a peach.
But in reality it is only by the voice you can tell them. The voice harks back to days bright and young and unredeemable whence the involuntary echoes arise — Billie!… Goo!… heavenly!… divine! like the motto and crest which adorn the letter paper of a family whose silver is pawned and forgotten.
Daisy Overend, small, imperious, smart, was to my mind the flower and consummation of her kind, and this is not to discount the male of the species Daisy Overend, with his wee face, blue eyes, bad teeth and nerves. But if you have met Mrs Overend, you have as good as met him too, he is so unlike her, and yet so much her kind.
I met her, myself, in the prodigious and lovely summer of 1947. Very charming she was. A tubular skirt clung to her hips, a tiny cap to her hair, and her hair clung, bronzed and shingled, to her head, like the cup of a toy egg of which her face was the other half. Her face was a mere lobe. Her eyes were considered to be expressive and they expressed avarice in various forms; the pupils were round and watchful. Mrs Overend engaged me for three weeks to help her with some committee work. As you will see, we parted in three days.
I found that literature and politics took up most of Daisy’s days and many of her nights. She wrote a regular column in a small political paper and she belonged to all the literary societies. Thus, it was the literature of politics and the politics of literature which occupied Daisy, and thus she bamboozled many politicians who thought she was a writer, and writers who believed her to be a political theorist. But these activities failed to satisfy, that is to say, intoxicate her.
Now, she did not drink. I saw her sipping barley water while her guests drank her gin. But Daisy had danced the Charleston in her youth with a royal prince, and of this she assured me several times, speaking with swift greed while an alcoholic look came over her.
‘Those times were divine,’ she boozily concluded, ‘they were ripping.’ And I realized she was quite drunk with the idea. Normally as precise as a bird, she reached out blunderingly for the cigarettes, knocking the whole lot over. Literature and politics failed to affect her in this way, though she sat on many committees. Therefore she had taken — it is her expression — two lovers: one an expert, as she put it, on politics, and the other a poet.
The political expert, Lotti, was a fair Central European, an exiled man. The skin of his upper lip was drawn taut across his top jaw; this gave Lotti the appearance, together with his high cheekbones, of having had his face lifted. But it was not so; it was a natural defect which made his smile look like a baring of the teeth. He was perhaps the best of the lot that I met at Daisy Overend’s.
Lotti could name each member of every Western Cabinet which had sat since the Treaty of Versailles. Daisy found this invaluable for her monthly column. Never did Lotti speak of these men but with contempt. He was a member of three shadow cabinets.
On the Sunday which, as it turned out, was my last day with Daisy, she laid aside her library book and said to Lotti:
‘I’m bored with Cronin.
Lotti, to whom all statesmen were as the ash he was just then flicking to the floor, looked at her all amazed.
‘Daisy, mei gurl, you crazy?’ he said.
‘A Cronin!’ he said, handing me an armful of air to convey the full extent of his derision. ‘She is bored with a Cronin.’
At that moment, Daisy’s vexed misunderstood expression reminded me that her other lover, the poet Tom Pfeffer, had brought the same look to her face two days before. When, rushing into the flat as was her wont, she said, gasping, to Tom, ‘Things have been happening in the House.’ — Tom, who was reading the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, looked up. ‘Nothing’s been happening in the house,’ he assured her.
Tom Pfeffer is dead now. Mrs Overend told me the story of how she rescued him from lunacy, and I think Tom believed this. It is true she had prevented his being taken to a mental home for treatment.
The time came when Tom wanted, on an autumn morning, a ticket to Burton-on-Trent to visit a friend, and he wanted this more than he wanted a room in Mrs Overend’s flat and regular meals. In his own interests she refused, obliterating the last traces of insurrection by giving Lotti six pound notes, clean from the bank, in front of Tom.
How jealous Tom Pfeffer was of Lotti, how indifferent was Lotti to him! But on this last day that I spent with Mrs Overend, the poet was fairly calm, although there were signs of the awful neurotic dance of his facial muscles which were later to distort him utterly before he died insane.
Daisy was preparing for a party, the reason for my presence on a Sunday, and for the arrival at five o’clock of her secretary Miss Rilke, a displaced European, got cheap. When anyone said to Daisy ‘Is she related to the poet Rilke?’ Daisy replied, ‘Oh, I should think so,’ indignant almost, that it should be doubted.
‘Be an angel,’ said Daisy to Miss Rilke when she arrived, ‘run down to the cafe and get me two packets of twenty. Is it still raining? How priceless the weather is. Take my awning.’
‘Awning?’
‘Umbrella, umbrella, umbrella,’ said Daisy, jabbing her finger at it fractiously.
Like ping-pong, Miss Rilke’s glance met Lotti’s, and Lotti’s hers. She took the umbrella and went.
‘What are you looking at?’ Daisy said quickly to Lotti.
‘Nothing,’ said Tom Pfeffer, thinking he was being addressed and looking up from his book.
‘Not you,’ said Daisy.
‘Do you mean me?’ I said.
‘No,’ she said, and kept her peace.
Miss Rilke returned to say that the shop would give Mrs Overend no more credit.
‘This is the end,’ said Daisy as she shook out the money from her purse. ‘Tell them I’m livid.’
‘Yes,’ said Miss Rilke, looking at Lotti.
‘What are you looking at?’ Daisy demanded of her.
‘Looking at?’
‘Have you got the right money?’ Daisy said.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, go.’
‘I think,’ said Daisy when she had gone, ‘she’s a bit dotty owing to her awful experiences.’
Nobody replied.
‘Don’t you think so?’ she said to Lotti.
‘Could be,’ said Lotti.
Tom looked up suddenly. ‘She’s bats,’ he hastened to say, ‘the silly bitch is bats.’
As soon as Miss Rilke returned Daisy started becking and calling in preparation for her party. Her papers, which lay on every plane surface in the room, were moved into her bedroom in several piles.
The drawing-room was furnished in a style which in many ways anticipated the members’ room at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Mrs Overend had recently got rid of her black-and-orange striped divans, cushions and sofas. In their place were curiously cut slabs, polygons, and three-legged manifestations of Daisy Overend’s personality, done in El Greco’s colours. As Daisy kept on saying, no two pieces were alike, and each was a contemporary version of a traditional design.
In her attempt to create a Contemporary interior she was, I felt, successful, and I was quite dazzled by its period charm. ‘A rare old Contemporary piece,’ some curio dealer, not yet born, might one day aver of Daisy’s citrine settle or her blue glass-topped telephone table, adding in the same breath and pointing elsewhere, ‘A genuine brass-bracket gas-jet, nineteenth century…’ But I was dreaming, and Daisy was working, shifting things, blowing the powdery dust off things. She trotted and tripped amid the pretty jigsaw puzzle of her furniture, making a clean sweep of letters, bills, pamphlets, and all that suggested a past or a future, with one exception. This was the photograph of Daisy Overend, haughty and beplumed in presentation dress, queening it over th
e Contemporary prospect of the light-grey grand piano.
Sometimes, while placing glasses and plates now here, now there, Daisy stopped short to take in the effect; and at this sign we all of us did the same. I realized then how silently and well did Daisy induce people to humour her. I discovered that the place was charged on a high voltage with the constant menace of a scene.
‘I’ve put the papers on your bed,’ said Miss Rilke from the bedroom.
‘Is she saying something?’ said Daisy, as if it were the last straw.
‘Yes,’ said Miss Rilke in a loud voice.
‘They are not to go on my bed,’ replied Daisy, having heard her in the first place.
‘She’s off her head, my dear,’ said the poet to his mistress, ‘putting your papers on your bed.’
‘Go and see what she’s doing,’ said Daisy to me.
I went, and there found Miss Rilke moving the papers off the bed on to the floor. I was impressed by the pinkness of Daisy’s bedroom. Where on earth did she get her taste in pink? Now this was not in the Contemporary style, nor was it in the manner of Daisy’s heyday, the 1920s. The kidney-shaped dressing-table was tricked out with tulle, unhappy spoiled stuff which cold cream had long ago stained, cigarettes burned, and various jagged objects ripped. In among the folds the original colour had survived here and there, and this fervid pink reminded me of a colour I had seen before, a pink much loved and worn by the women of the Malay colony at Cape Town.
No, this was not a bedroom of the twenties; it belonged, surely, to the first ten years of the century: an Edwardian bedroom. But then, even then, it was hardly the sort of room Daisy would have inherited, since neither her mother nor her grandmother had kicked her height at the Gaiety. No, it was Daisy’s own inarticulate exacting instinct which had bestowed on this room its frilly bed, its frilly curtains, the silken and sorry roses on its mantelpiece, and its all-but-perished powder-puffs. And all in pink, and all in pink. I did not solve the mystery of Daisy’s taste in bedrooms, not then nor at any time. For, whenever I provide a category of time and place for her, the evidence is in default. A plant of the twenties, she is also the perpetrator of that vintage bedroom. A lingering limb of the old leisured class, she is also the author of that pink room.
I devoted the rest of the evening to the destruction of Daisy’s party, I regret to say, and the subversion of her purpose in giving it.
Her purpose was the usual thing. She had joined a new international guild, and wanted to sit on the committee. Several Members of Parliament, a director of a mineral-water factory, a Brigadier-General who was also an Earl, a retired Admiral, some wives, a few women journalists, were expected. In addition, she had asked some of her older friends, those who were summoned to all her parties and whom she called her ‘basics’; they were the walkers-on or the chorus of Daisy’s social drama. There was also a Mr Jamieson, who was not invited but who played an unseen part as the chairman of the committee. He did not want Mrs Overend to sit on his committee. We were therefore assembled, though few guessed it, to inaugurate a campaign to remove from office this Mr Jamieson, whose colleagues and acquaintances presently began to arrive.
Parted from the drawing-room by folding doors was an ante-room leading out of the flat. I was put in charge of this room where a buffet had been laid. Here Daisy had repaired, when dressing for the party, to change her stockings. It was her habit to dress in every room in the house, anxiously moving from place to place. Miss Rilke had been sent on a tour of the premises to collect the discarded clothes, the comb, the lipstick from the various stations of Daisy’s journey; but the secretary had overlooked, on a table in the centre of this ante-room, a pair of black satin garters a quarter of a century old, each bearing a very large grimy pink disintegrating rosette.
Just before the first guests began to arrive, Daisy Overend saw her garters lying there.
‘Put those away,’ she commanded Miss Rilke.
The Admiral came first. I opened the door, while with swift and practised skill Daisy and Lotti began a lively conversation, in the midst of which the Admiral was intended to come upon them. Behind the Admiral came a Member of Parliament. They had never been to the house before, not being among Daisy’s ‘basics.
‘Do come in,’ said Miss Rilke, holding open the folding doors.
‘This way,’ said Tom Pfeffer from the drawing-room.
The two guests stared at the table. Daisy’s garters were still there. The Admiral, I could see, was puzzled. Not knowing Daisy very well, he thought, no doubt, she was eccentric. He tried to smile. The political man took rather longer to decide on an attitude. He must have concluded that the garters were not Daisy’s, for next I saw him looking curiously at me.
‘They are not mine,’ I rapidly said, ‘those garters.’
‘Whose are they?’ said the Admiral, drawing near.
‘They are Mrs Overend’s garters,’ I said, ‘she changed her stockings in here.’
Now the garters had never really been serviceable; even now, with the help of safety pins, they did not so much keep Daisy’s stockings, as her spirits up, for she liked them. They were historic in the sense that they had at first, I suppose, looked merely naughty. In about five years they had entered their most interesting, their old-fashioned, their lewd period. A little while, and the rosettes had begun to fray: the decadence. And now, with the impurity of those to whom all things pertaining to themselves are pure, Daisy did not see them as junk, but as part of herself, as she had cause to tell me later.
The Admiral walked warily into the drawing-room, but the Member of Parliament lingered to examine a picture on the wall, one eye on the garters. I was, I must say, tempted to hide them somewhere out of sight. More people were arriving, and the garters were causing them to think. If only for this reason, it was perhaps inhospitable to leave them so prominently on the table.
I resisted the temptation. Miss Rilke had suddenly become very excited. She flew to open the door to each guest, and, copying my tone, exclaimed:
‘Please to excuse the garters. They are the garters of Mrs Overend. She changed her stockings in here.’
Daisy, Daisy Overend! I hope you have forgotten me. The party got out of hand. Lotti was not long in leaving the relatively sedative drawing-room in favour of the little room where Daisy’s old basics were foregathered. These erstwhile adherents to the Young Idea, arriving in twos and threes, were filled with a great joy on hearing Miss Rilke’s speech:
‘Please to excuse those garters which you see. They are the garters of Mrs Overend…’
But there was none more delighted than Lotti.
It was some minutes before the commotion was heard by Daisy in the drawing-room, where she was soliciting the bad will of a journalist against Mr Jamieson. Meanwhile, the ante-room party joined hands, clinked glasses and danced round Lotti who held the garters aloft with a pair of sugar tongs. Tom Pfeffer so far forgot himself as to curl up with mirth on a sofa.
I remember Daisy as she stood between the folding doors in her black party dress, like an infolded undernourished tulip. Behind her clustered her new friends, slightly offended, though prepared to join in the spirit of the thing, whatever it should be. Before her pranced the old, led by Lotti in a primitive mountain jig. The sugar tongs with the garters in their jaws Lotti held high in one hand, and with the other he plucked the knee of his trouser-leg as if it were a skirt.
‘Ai, Ai, Ai,’ chanted Lotti, ‘Daisy’s dirty old garters, Ai!’
‘Ai, Ai, Ai,’ responded the chorus, while Miss Rilke looked lovingly on, holding in one hand Lotti’s drink, in the other her own.
I remember Daisy as she stood there, not altogether without charm, beside herself. While laughter rebounded like plunging breakers from her mouth, she guided her eyes towards myself and trained on me the missiles of her fury. For a full three minutes Daisy’s mouth continued to laugh.
I am seldom in the West End of London. But sometimes I have to hurry across the Piccadilly end of Albemarle Str
eet where the buses crash past like giant orgulous parakeets, more thunderous and more hectic than the Household Cavalry. The shops are on my left and the Green Park lies on my right under the broad countenance of drowsy summer. It is then that, in my mind’s eye, Daisy Overend gads again, diminutive, charming, vicious, and tarted up to the nines.
By district messenger she sent me a note early on the morning after the party. I was to come no more. Herewith a cheque. The garters were part of herself and I would understand how she felt.
The cheque was a dud. I did not pursue the matter, and in fact I have forgotten the real name of Daisy Overend. I have forgotten her name but I shall remember it at the Bar of Judgement.
The House of the Famous Poet
In the summer of 1944, when it was nothing for trains from the provinces to be five or six hours late, I travelled to London on the night train from Edinburgh, which, at York, was already three hours late. There were ten people in the compartment, only two of whom I remember well, and for good reason.
I have the impression, looking back on it, of a row of people opposite me, dozing untidily with heads askew, and, as it often seems when we look at sleeping strangers, their features had assumed extra emphasis and individuality, sometimes disturbing to watch. It was as if they had rendered up their daytime talent for obliterating the outward traces of themselves in exchange for mental obliteration. In this way they resembled a twelfth-century fresco; there was a look of medieval unselfconsciousness about these people, all except one.
This was a private soldier who was awake to a greater degree than most people are when they are not sleeping. He was smoking cigarettes one after the other with long, calm puffs. I thought he looked excessively evil — an atavistic type. His forehead must have been less than two inches high above dark, thick eyebrows, which met. His jaw was not large, but it was apelike; so was his small nose and so were his deep, close-set eyes. I thought there must have been some consanguinity in the parents. He was quite a throwback.