After the Armistice Ball (3 page)

I sat forward eagerly as we swept through the gates, preparing to be diverted in spite of my exhaustion. Most places in this part of the world are at their best in the spring, before the midges awake and begin their savagery, but at Croys the soft uncurling leaf and the peeping primrose are drowned out by a display of vulgarity unequalled in Christendom. Daisy’s gardener, you see, the redoubtable McSween, has made it his life’s work to perpetrate upon the bank opposite the front of the house, in splendid view of all of the best rooms, a three-ring circus of rhododendrons and azaleas in every shade, but with a particular nod towards coral and magenta. They jostle like can-can dancers in the breeze off the moor and can make people laugh out loud.

‘Your rhodies are a picture,’ I murmured to Daisy as she came to the door to meet us. Most hospitably, I thought, since the dressing bell must have gone. Daisy rolled her eyes at me.

‘I shall tell McSween to give you some cuttings, darling,’ she said. ‘If you’re not good.’

Grant, my maid, had come sensibly on the train with Hugh’s valet and most of the luggage (the dickey of the two-seater being full of fishing rods) and so, refreshed first by a pleasant journey and further no doubt by a leisurely tea, she had my evening clothes ready and was on her marks. De-hatted, hastily washed and wrapped in a dressing gown, I sat in front of the glass and surrendered myself to her. She frowned lightly (my hair is a great disappointment) and got to work.

I find it best to try to detach myself while Grant is busy about my scalp with hot tongs and rose-flower water. Any shrinking away or wincing unfailingly brings the irons near enough to scald. Accidental, I am almost sure, but still to be avoided if one can manage it. So I sat there quite docile until she was done and then plied the brushes and puffs myself as usual, guided by her small shakes of the head and sighs, until having hovered with the rouge brush for longer than I could afford I delivered myself into her hands again.

‘Only not too much,’ I said, as I always do. Grant comes from a theatrical family and having spent the first fifteen years of her life turning her parents and elder siblings into monarchs, gypsies and the like with a smear of greasepaint and a blob of white in the inner corners, her face-painting still tends towards the dramatic. I, unfortunately for her and me both, do not have a face which easily absorbs her efforts. At rest, I must say, I have cheekbones to reckon with and a little rouge dabbed on in the fashionable place works wonders, but when I smile my cheeks make egg shapes, the pointed ends reaching almost to my hated dimples, and then the rouge is quite wrong, its position curiously unrelated to the face underneath. However if I put it, unfashionably, where my cheeks will be when I
start
to smile, then until I
do
smile, I look like a doll. Don’t smile then, is Grant’s solution, which is hardly helpful. She explained once what is wrong with my face in this respect and even fixed it for me with strips of highlight and shade which looked wonderful, but only at twenty paces.

Still, the moss green dress is something we agree on. Most flattering in shape, although it takes stitching on to my petticoat straps, and with a miraculous effect on my complexion, which can be shadowy around the eyes if I am not careful. And tomato red lipstick to finish. Grant had to get quite fierce with me over this shade of lipstick, but she was right. Blue-ish red makes one’s teeth look yellow, she explained, whereas a yellow-ish red turns them white. For the same reason, diamonds near the face are best surrounded by pearls, very few ladies of diamond-wearing age having the teeth to stand up to them otherwise. Grant and I think it a pity that more ladies do not grin at themselves in the glass before they go downstairs with pink lips and diamond clips, but I had never once smiled at my own reflection until the first time she told me to and I do not suppose it occurs to many others.

‘Uncommonly pretty frock, that,’ said Hugh, entering. Grant bowed her head in discreet acknowledgement of the praise. Hugh would never dream that I had done any
more
than put on a frock in the time he had spent bathing and shaving, and I mused, not for the first time, that if men believed a frock could do what had happened to me from the neck up in the last half-hour, their world must seem a magical place indeed.

People were standing around in the gloom of the great hall waiting for their cocktails as we came down the last sweep of the stairs. Twelve or fifteen people as well as the Esslemonts: the four Duffys whom I knew, and a lot more I did not, the men splendidly anonymous in their dinner jackets but with wives who were undoubtedly the wives of bankers. Hugh blinked around for a bit then took himself off to speak to Silas and I approached Mrs Duffy like an old friend.

She was a fair woman, slight except for an almost too splendid bosom, the type of woman one assumes must have been rather fine in her youth, but now getting raddled and colourless for want of flesh. Tonight she was dressed unbecomingly in grey silk, cut very low, drawing attention to the plain gold locket around her neck.

‘Simply wonderful, Lena,’ I said, kissing her. ‘Such a long time.’

‘What a delightful surprise,’ she cooed back.

For want of anything as definite as a topic to converse upon, I admired the girls to her and, as I had hoped, she launched into an exposition on the coming wedding of her younger daughter.

The Duffy girls, both of them, had rather more to recommend them in the way of looks than their mama, although they were each quite unlike the other: Clemence, the elder, tall, languid and fair, with a sharp chin and high, wide cheeks (which seemed, I could not help but notice, perfectly rouged no matter what her expression); her face overall, then, reminiscent in shape of an heraldic shield, making her almost Slavic-looking what with this and with that peculiar habit of giving an upward pinch to her full lower eyelids. Even in the dimness of Daisy’s candelabra, she looked as though she were squinting against light coming from below, as one does wading at noon in the bright sea.

Then Cara, the younger, smaller by half a head; she had always made me think of a woodland creature, a changeling. Not a goblin exactly – she was a pretty thing, after all – but certainly nothing so pink-and-white as ‘fairy’ or ‘pixie’ suggests; a velvety little elf perhaps, for although her hair too was fair her general complexion was dark and her brown eyes had a soft twinkle which echoed the upward curl of her lips. Hers was an expression which brought an answering grin from anyone who saw it, having about it none of that insolence which in life or in oils can sometimes make a permanent smile look so very smug and annoying. There was, I thought, something almost simian about this smile. The upper lip had a downy softness to it, as did indeed the whole of her face so that her dark brows seemed merely an intensification, rather than looking like the two worms painted on to the fashionable nakedness of her sister’s skin or, I feared, my own. Was she pretty? I think so, but it is hard to know where looks stopped and personality began. Cara Duffy, you see, was what disapproving matrons used to call a hoyden, which is to say she was always in the highest of spirits, burbling over with jokes and giggles and seeming, even when just sitting quietly, to be surging with fun like a child’s balloon tugging harmlessly at its string. So perhaps this is where one’s pleasure in her sprang from, since on paper, I must admit, a furry little creature with velvety eyes does not sound half so alluring as an alabaster vision such as Clemence. Even tonight, though, when Cara seemed unnaturally subdued, standing beside her father and not speaking, one knew where one would rather rest one’s eyes. And she
was
subdued, poor thing; marriage and womanhood looming, I supposed, and hoydenish girlhood almost gone. Such a pity it has to come to that.

I brought my attention back to Lena Duffy’s voice.

‘. . . should have opened Dunelgar if home was too far, but her father was fully determined on St George’s or St Giles’, and there was nothing I could do to change his mind. Anyway, now, under the circumstances
-'
She broke off and stared at me, fingering her necklace chain and apparently waiting for some response. ‘Under the circumstances, none of us has the heart for a lot of fuss and commotion, so she will be married at home as she should be. Not much of a silver lining though, is it?’

Lena Duffy’s purr had coarsened. To be honest it always had something else in it besides the comfortable chuckle that was its main ingredient, something more rasping, as though a single crow had got into a chorus of pigeons. Now though there was a note of real spitefulness. I have already touched on the subject of my feminine intuition. At this moment it stretched just far enough to tell me I was supposed to understand something here, but it went no further.

‘I don’t think I’ve met the young man,’ I said, making what I hoped was a harmlessly general remark, ‘although Hugh tells me he was once in a coxless eight with a brother.’

‘Elder brother,’ said Mrs Duffy. ‘But he died at Arras.’ One thinks one is tired of the euphemisms and casual endearments, but this bald statement in place of the ‘lost at Arras, poor sweet’ was shocking. It was only too clear, even to me, that it was meant to convey not even the mildest of honours to a hero, nor a warning that there was a dead brother to be tiptoed around should I find myself in conversation with the young man later. It was quite simply a point of information: Mrs Duffy had done nothing so lax as let her daughter become engaged to a second son without any prospects. The brother was dead and thus the engagement was a triumph. I turned away slightly to hide the expression I could not bring under control and wished that someone might come up and save me replying.

‘So a younger son for your younger daughter,’ I said at last, no saviour having appeared. This was inane even for me, but I was surprised to see from the corner of my eye a sour kind of twist wrench at the woman’s mouth. My mind raced. Did it sound as though I was putting a gypsy curse on her other daughter? This was surely too fanciful. Should I not have made such outright reference to his changed status? Why on earth did I not learn simply to keep my mouth shut? Or if it was too late now for such a wholesale transformation, at least drink a little more and talk a little less.

Daisy’s butler was circling with two trays balanced on his fingers like a waiter in a Paris restaurant. Sherry glasses on one and cocktail glasses on the other, he swooped amongst the guests proffering a tray to each and seeming always to guess which one was wanted where. I muttered an excuse to Lena and bore down on him, not caring how unseemly I appeared so long as I escaped her. The butler, who knew me of old, held out the cocktail tray, but from sheer perversity and temper I reached for sherry. His face fell, and we parted, he a disappointed man who feels he is losing his touch, and I a disappointed woman who fears she is becoming curmudgeonly with age and has only a quarter pint (it seemed) of nasty, oily sherry for comfort.

I scanned the room for an empty perch, but apart from Lena sitting alone on a sofa large enough for two and staring at me coldly, all I could see in every direction were settled clumps of people chatting amicably and sipping huge drinks. Daisy’s drinks before dinner always go on for an age.

Just then Daisy herself peeled off from the group around a stout dowager ploughing through a long story and ignoring the fidgets of her listeners the way old ladies do.

‘What on earth were you saying to the hag?’ Daisy whispered. I was unable to answer; I did not know. ‘Talk about sucking on a lemon,’ she went on. ‘And have you seen what she’s wearing? How could you not? She’s twirling it like an old man with a new watch chain. A gold locket! I’ll bet she had to borrow it from her parlour maid. How I have managed not to kick all of their bottoms, I cannot tell you. Even one of the Mrs Bankers is wondering aloud.’ I said nothing (for the usual reason) and Daisy rejoined the circle of listeners just in time to join in with gales of relieved laughter as the dowager’s saga wound to its close.

I drifted, trying to look self-contained, if not quite inscrutable.

‘You look heavenly, Dan,’ breathed Clemence Duffy as I passed her, her face more mask-like than ever and her eyes blinking sleepily as she glanced down at herself waiting, I supposed, for the return of the compliment. Despite the fact that there is nothing so very dignified about the name Dandy I dislike being called Dan by girls fifteen years my junior, and I bristled just slightly, before looking her up and down for something to praise. She was dressed in a black shift, chiffon over a plain slip, and wore a small cameo on a black velvet ribbon around her neck, which looked as all cameos always do as though it might have come from Woolworth’s. Just then I noticed that her ear-lobes were bare of any decoration. They were pierced for earrings and the little naked clefts looked hardly decent against her painted face. She arched her brows at me, staring hard at my choker.

‘But you look heavenly,’ she said again. ‘Beautiful emeralds. Very loyal, I must say.’ She turned away, and I caught sight of Mrs Duffy fingering her locket chain again. At last light began to dawn on me and I took a few steps and craned to look at Cara Duffy. Dressed in a shimmer of pale blue silk, she wore a gold cross on a fine chain around her neck, slim hoops in her ears and nothing on her wrists at all, only her engagement ring to show that she was not just wearing rather an odd frock to a tennis party. All three of them on parade, ostentatiously bare of jewels, screaming that they dare not wear anything but trinkets here. How dared they! They certainly did need a kick on their insolent bottoms, and I was ready to oblige. I caught Daisy’s eye and saw that she had been watching my realization. She mimed my stupidity briefly, eyes crossed and tongue lolling out, thankfully unseen.

Mrs Duffy still sat alone on her sofa. Very well, then. I should employ the tactics for which Daisy had sought me – the Cuthbert Dougall strategy, one might call it – of discussing loud and plain what everyone else is thinking about but dare not mention. I marched back over to Lena and sat beside her.