Celia stayed for a year in Paris. She enjoyed the time there very much. She liked the other girls, though none of them seemed very real to her. Maisie Payne might have done so, but she left the Easter after Celia arrived. Her best friend was a big fat girl called Bessie West who had the next room to hers. Bessie was a great talker, and Celia was a good listener, and they both indulged in a passion for eating apples. Bessie told long tales of her escapades and adventures between bites of apple – the stories always ending ‘and then my hair came down’.
‘I like you, Celia,’ she said one day. ‘You’re sensible.’
‘Sensible?’
‘You’re not always going on about boys and things. People like Mabel and Pamela get on my nerves. Every time I have a violin lesson they giggle and snigger and pretend I’m sweet on old Franz or he’s sweet on me. I call that sort of thing common. I like a rag with the boys as well as anyone, but not all this idiotic sniggering business about the music masters.’
Celia, who had outgrown her passion for the Bishop of London, was now in the throes of one for Mr Gerald du Maurier ever since she had seen him in Alias Jimmy Valentine. But it was a secret passion of which she never spoke.
The other girl she liked was one whom Bessie usually referred to as ‘the Moron’.
Sybil Swinton was nineteen, a big girl with beautiful brown eyes and a mass of chestnut hair. She was extremely amiable and extremely stupid. She had to have everything explained to her twice. The piano was her great cross. She was bad at reading music, and she had no ear to hear when she played wrong notes. Celia would sit patiently beside her for an hour saying, ‘No, Sybil, a sharp – your left hand’s wrong now – D natural now. Oh, Sybil, can’t you hear?’ But Sybil couldn’t. Her people were anxious for her to ‘play the piano’ like other girls, and Sybil did her best, but music lessons were a nightmare – incidentally they were a nightmare for the teacher also. Madame LeBrun, who was one of the two teachers who visited, was a little old woman with white hair and claw-like hands. She sat very close to you when you played so that your right arm was slightly impeded. She was very keen on sight-reading and used to produce big books of duets à quatre mains. Alternately you played the treble or the bass, and Madame LeBrun played the other. Things went most happily when Madame LeBrun was at the treble end of the piano. So immersed was she in her own performance that it would be some time before she discovered that her pupil was playing the accompanying bass some bars in front or behind herself. Then there would be an outcry ‘Mais qu’est-ce que vous jouez là, ma petite? C’est affreux – c’est tout ce qu’il y a de plus affreux!’
Nevertheless, Celia enjoyed her lessons. She enjoyed them still more when she was transferred to M. Kochter. M. Kochter took only those girls who showed talent. He was delighted with Celia. Seizing her hands and pulling the fingers mercilessly apart he would cry, ‘You see the stretch here? This is the hand of a pianist. Nature is in your favour, Mademoiselle Celia. Now let us see what you can do to assist her.’ M. Kochter himself played beautifully. He gave a concert twice a year in London, so he told Celia. Chopin, Beethoven, and Brahms were his favourite masters. He would usually give Celia a choice as to what she learnt. He inspired her with such enthusiasm that she willingly practised the six hours a day he required. Practising was no real fatigue to her. She loved the piano. It had been her friend always.
For singing lessons Celia went to M. Barré – an ex-operatic singer. She had a very high, clear soprano voice.
‘Your high notes are excellent,’ said M. Barré. ‘They could not be better produced. That is the voix de tête. The low notes, the chest notes, they are too weak but not bad. It is the médium that we must improve. The médium, mademoiselle, comes from the roof of the mouth.’
He produced a tape measure.
‘Let us now test the diaphragm. Breathe in – hold it – hold it now let the breath expire suddenly. Capital – capital. You have the breath of a singer.’
He handed her a pencil.
‘Place that between the teeth – so – in the corner of the mouth. And do not let it fall out when you sing. You can pronounce every word and retain the pencil. Do not say that it is impossible.’
On the whole M. Barré was satisfied with her.
‘But your French, it puzzles me. It is not the usual French with the English accent – ah, how I have suffered from that – Mon Dieu! nobody knows! No, it is, one would swear, an accent méridional that you have. Where did you learn French?’
Celia told him.
‘Oh, and your maid she came from the South of France? That explains it. Well, well, we will soon get out of that.’
Celia worked hard at her singing. On the whole she pleased him, but occasionally he would rail at her English face.
‘You are like all the rest of the English, you think that to sing is to open the mouth as wide as possible and let the voice come out! Not at all – there is the skin – the skin of the face – all round the mouth. You are not a little choir boy – you are singing the Habanera of Carmen which, by the way, you have brought me in the wrong key. This is transposed for soprano – an operatic song should always be sung in its original key – anything else is an abomination and an insult to the composer – remember that. I particularly want you to learn a mezzo song. Now then, you are Carmen, you have a rose in your mouth, not a pencil, you are singing a song that is meant to allure this young man. Your face – your face – do not let your face be of wood.’
The lesson ended with Celia in tears. Barré was kind.
‘There, there – it is not your song. No, I see it is not your song. You shall sing the “Jerusalem” of Gounod. The “Alléluia” from the Cid. Some day we will return to Carmen.’
Music occupied the time of most of the girls. There was an hour’s French every morning, that was all. Celia, who could speak much more fluent and idiomatic French than any of the others, was always horribly humiliated at French. In dictation, while the other girls had two, three, or at most five faults, she would have twenty-five or thirty. In spite of reading innumerable French books, she had no idea of the spelling. Also she wrote much slower than the others. Dictation was a nightmare to her.
Madame would say:
‘But it is impossible – impossible – that you should have so many faults, Celia! Do you not even know what a past participle is?’
Alas, that was exactly what Celia did not know.
Twice a week she and Sybil went to their painting lesson. Celia grudged the time taken from the piano. She hated drawing, and painting even worse. Flower painting was what the two girls were learning.
Oh, miserable bunch of violets in a glass of water!
‘The shadows, Celia, put in the shadows first.’
But Celia could never see the shadows. Her best hope was surreptitiously to look at Sybil’s painting and try to make hers look like it.
‘You seem to see where these beastly shadows are, Sybil. I don’t – I never do. It’s just a blob of lovely purple.’
Sybil was not particularly talented, but certainly at painting it was Celia who was ‘the Moron’.
Something deep down in her hated this copying business – this tearing the secrets out of flowers and scratching and blobbing it down on paper. Violets should be left to grow in gardens or arranged droopingly in glasses. This making something out of something else – it went against her.
‘I don’t see why you’ve got to draw things,’ she said to Sybil one day. ‘They’re there already.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know quite how to say it, but why make things that are like other things? It’s such a waste. If one could draw a flower that didn’t exist – imagine one – then it might be worth while.’
‘You mean make up a flower out of your head?’
‘Yes, but even then it wouldn’t be right. I mean it would still be a flower, and you wouldn’t have made a flower – you’d have made a thing on paper.’
‘But, Celia, pictures, real pictures, art – they’re very beautiful.’
‘Yes, of course – at least –’ She stopped. ‘Are they?’
‘Celia!’ cried Sybil, aghast at such heresy.
Had they not been taken to the Louvre to look at old masters only yesterday?
Celia felt she had been too heretical. Everybody spoke reverently of Art.
‘I expect I’d had too much chocolate to drink,’ she said. ‘That’s why I thought them stuffy. All those saints looking exactly alike. Of course, I don’t mean it,’ she added. ‘They’re wonderful, really.’
But her voice sounded a little unconvinced.
‘You must be fond of art, Celia, you’re so fond of music.’
‘Music’s different. Music’s itself. It’s not copy cat. You take an instrument – the violin, or the piano, or the ’cello, and you make sounds – lovely sounds all woven together. You haven’t got to get it like anything else. It’s just itself.’
‘Well,’ said Sybil, ‘I think music is just a lot of nasty noises. And very often when I’m playing the wrong notes it sounds to me better than when I play the right ones.’
Celia gazed despairingly at her friend.
‘You can’t be able to hear at all.’
‘Well, from the way you were painting those violets this morning nobody would think you were able to see.’
Celia stopped dead – thereby blocking the path of the little femme de chambre who accompanied them and who chattered angrily.
‘Do you know, Sybil,’ said Celia, ‘I believe you’re right. I don’t think I do see things – not see them. That’s why I can’t spell. And that’s why I don’t really know what anything is like.’
‘You always walk straight through puddles,’ said Sybil. Celia was reflecting.
‘I don’t see that it matters – not really – except spelling, I suppose. I mean, it’s the feeling a thing gives you that matters – not just its shape and how it happens to be made.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, take a rose.’ Celia nodded towards a flower-seller they were passing. ‘What does it matter how many petals it has and exactly what the shape of them is – it’s just the oh, sort of whole thing that matters – the velvetyness and the smell.’
‘You couldn’t draw a rose without knowing its shape.’
‘Sybil, you great ass, haven’t I told you I don’t want to draw? I don’t like roses on paper. I like them real.’
She stopped in front of the flower woman and for a few sous bought a bunch of drooping dark-red roses.
‘Smell,’ she said, thrusting them in front of Sybil’s nose. ‘Now, doesn’t that give you a heavenly sort of pain just here?’
‘You’ve been eating too many apples again.’
‘I haven’t. Oh, Sybil, don’t be so literal. Isn’t it a heavenly smell?’
‘Yes, it is. But it doesn’t give me a pain. I don’t see why one should want it to.’
‘Mummy and I tried to do botany once,’ said Celia. ‘But we threw the book away, I hated it so. Knowing all the different kinds of flowers and classifying them – and pistils and stamens – horrid, like undressing the poor things. I think it’s disgusting. It’s – it’s indelicate.’
‘Do you know, Celia, that if you go to a convent, the nuns make you have your bath with a chemise on. My cousin told me.’
‘Do they? Why?’
‘They don’t think it’s nice to look at your own body.’
‘Oh.’ Celia thought a minute. ‘How do you manage with the soap? You wouldn’t get awfully clean if you soaped yourself through a chemise.’
The girls at the Pensionnat were taken to the opera, and to the Comédie Francaise, and to skate at the Palais de Glace in winter. Celia enjoyed it all, but it was the music that really filled her life. She wrote to her mother that she wanted to take up the piano professionally.
At the end of the term Miss Schofield gave a party, at which the more advanced of the girls played and sang. Celia was to do both. The singing went off quite all right, but over playing she broke down and stumbled badly through the first movement of Beethoven’s Sonate Pathétique.
Miriam came over to Paris to fetch her daughter, and at Celia’s wish she asked M. Kochter to tea. She was not at all anxious for Celia to take up music professionally, but she thought she might as well hear what M. Kochter had to say on the matter. Celia was not in the room when she asked him about it.
‘I will tell you the truth, madame. She has the ability – the technique – the feeling. She is the most promising pupil I have. But I do not think she has the temperament.’
‘You mean she has not the temperament to play in public?’
‘That is exactly what I do mean, madame. To be an artist one must be able to shut out the world – if you feel it there listening to you, then you must feel it as a stimulus. But Mademoiselle Celia, she will give of her best to an audience of one – of two people – and she will play best of all to herself with the door closed.’
‘Will you tell her what you have told me, M. Kochter?’
‘If you wish, madame.’
Celia was bitterly disappointed. She fell back on the idea of singing.
‘Though it won’t be the same thing.’
‘You don’t love singing as you love your piano?’
‘Oh, no.’
‘Perhaps that’s why you’re not nervous when you sing?’
‘Perhaps it is. A voice seems somehow something apart from one’s self – I mean, it isn’t you doing it – like it is with your fingers on the piano. Do you understand, Mummy?’
They had a serious discussion with M. Barré.
‘She has the ability and the voice, yes. Also the temperament. She has as yet very little expression in her singing – it is the voice of a boy, not a woman. That’– he smiled – ‘will come. But the voice is charming – pure – steady – and her breathing is good. She can be a singer, yes. A singer for the concert stage – her voice is not strong enough for opera.’
When they were back in England, Celia said:
‘I’ve thought about it, Mummy. If I can’t sing in opera, I don’t want to sing at all. I mean, not professionally.’
Then she laughed.
‘You didn’t want me to, did you, Mummy?’
‘No, I certainly didn’t want you to become a professional singer.’
‘But you’d have let me? Would you let me do anything I wanted to if I wanted it enough?’
‘Not anything,’ said Miriam with spirit.
‘But nearly anything?’
Her mother smiled at her.
‘I want you to be happy, my pet.’
‘I’m sure I shall always be happy,’ said Celia with great confidence.
Celia wrote to her mother that autumn that she wanted to be a hospital nurse. Bessie was going to be one, and she wanted to be one too. Her letters had been very full of Bessie lately.
Miriam did not reply directly, but towards the end of the term she wrote and told Celia that the doctor had said it would be a good thing for her to winter abroad. She was going to Egypt, and Celia was coming with her.
Celia arrived back from Paris to find her mother staying with Grannie and in the full bustle of departure. Grannie was not at all pleased at the Egyptian idea. Celia heard her talking about it to Cousin Lottie, who had come in to lunch.
‘I can’t understand Miriam. Left as badly off as she is. The idea of rushing off to Egypt – Egypt – about the most expensive place she could go to! That’s Miriam all over – no idea of money. And Egypt was one of the last places she went to with poor John. It seems most unfeeling.’
Celia thought her mother looked both defiant and excited. She took Celia to shop and bought her three evening dresses.
‘The child’s not out. You’re absurd, Miriam,’ said Grannie.
‘It wouldn’t be a bad idea for her to come out there. It’s not as though she could have a London season – we can’t afford it.’
‘She’s only sixteen.’
‘Nearly seventeen. My mother was married before she was seventeen.’
‘I don’t suppose you want Celia to marry before she’s seventeen.’
‘No, I don’t, but I want her to have her young girl’s time.’
The evening dresses were very exciting – though they emphasized the one crumpled roseleaf in Celia’s life. Alas, the figure that Celia had never ceased to look forward to so eagerly had never materialized. No swelling mounds for Celia to encase in a striped shirt. Her disappointment was bitter and acute. She had wanted ‘a chest’ so badly. Poor Celia – had she only been born twenty years later – how admired her shape would have been! No slimming exercises necessary for that slender yet well-covered frame.
As it was, ‘plumpers’ were introduced into the bodices of Celia’s evening dresses – delicate ruchings of net.
Celia longed for a black evening dress, but Miriam said No, not until she was older. She bought her a white taffeta gown, a dress of pale green net with lots of little ribbons running across it and a pale pink satin with rosebuds on the shoulder.
Then Grannie unearthed from one of the bottom mahogany drawers a piece of brilliant turquoise blue taffeta with suggestions that Poor Miss Bennett should try her hand at it. Miriam managed to suggest tactfully that perhaps Poor Miss Bennett would find a fashionable evening dress a little beyond her. The blue taffeta was made up elsewhere. Then Celia was taken to a hairdresser and given a few lessons in the art of putting up her own hair – a somewhat elaborate process, since it was trained over a ‘hair frame’ in front and arranged in masses of curls behind. Not an easy style for anyone who had, like Celia, long thick hair falling far below her waist.
It was all very exciting, and it never occurred to Celia that her mother seemed rather better than worse in health than usual.
It did not escape Grannie.
‘But there,’ she said, ‘Miriam’s got a bee in her bonnet over this business.’
It was many years later that Celia realized exactly what her mother’s feelings were at the time. She had had a dull girlhood herself – she was passionately eager that her darling should have all the gaieties and excitements that a young girl’s life could hold. And it was going to be difficult for Celia to have a ‘good time’ living buried in the country with few young people of her own age around.
Hence, Egypt – where Miriam had many friends from the time when she and her husband had been there together. To obtain the necessary funds she did not hesitate to sell out some of the few stocks and shares she possessed. Celia was not to be envious of other girls having ‘good times’ which she had never had.
Also, so she confided some years later to Celia, she had been afraid of her friendship for Bessie West.
‘I’ve seen so many girls get interested in another girl and refuse to go out or take any interest in men. It’s unnatural – and not right.’
‘Bessie? But I was never very fond of Bessie.’
‘I know that now. But I didn’t know it then. I was afraid. And all that hospital nurse nonsense. I wanted you to have a good time and pretty clothes and enjoy yourself in a young, natural way.’
‘Well,’ said Celia, ‘I did.’