Dolly (12 page)

‘If anything happens to me John will look after your affairs,’ he told my mother.

‘But nothing is going to happen to you,’ she said lovingly.

‘No, of course not,’ he replied.

Perhaps because she sensed disapproval of Dolly’s visits (and the reason for those visits) she took to sending me over to Dolly’s flat, with a discreet envelope and some of Miss Lawlor’s biscuits.

‘You needn’t stay,’ she said. ‘Just ask her how she is. You can walk there,’ she added encouragingly. ‘You know you love your walk.’

The Edgware Road was not as attractive to me as the Wallace Collection, but in the winter the Wallace Collection had lost some of its charm. The blue of the Bouchers had faded into the surrounding darkness and I began to dislike the silence. I was quite glad to exchange the museum for the animation of the streets. Nevertheless I timed my visits to
Dolly at unusual hours so that she would not detain me. I was due to leave school the following June; my penultimate Christmas holiday seemed then a harbinger of better holidays to come, of vacations, in fact, when I could devote myself to the business of reading. Dolly seemed to me of minor importance, indeed of no importance at all.

‘She might ask you to lunch,’ said my mother. ‘You know how busy she is in the afternoons.’

Indeed, Dolly was invariably busy. I thought the late morning the best time to catch her: certainly it would leave me free for the more important business of the day. So I turned up at about eleven, only to be informed by Annie,
‘Madame fait sa toilette.’

Annie’s attitude towards me was one of uncompromising intransigence, as if I were an importunate creditor, or an employee from the Gas Board come to read the meter. I have reason to believe that she behaved like this all the time, although as she was generally silent she was thought to be a good and loyal servant: certainly she officiated at the afternoon bridge parties graciously enough and was appreciated by the guests; Dolly was envied for having a live-in maid, rare at that date, and certainly in those circumstances, although nobody was quite sure of the exact nature of those circumstances. Annie’s taciturnity was otherwise charmless and her physique was unpleasing: she had a grim unadorned face framed in dry faded brown hair, a short stocky body, and the powerful forearms of a much larger woman. The surprising thing about Annie, which I was to learn much later, at a time when Dolly released more of the truth about their lives, was that she was a married woman, or rather a widow,
like Dolly herself; she had been abandoned by her husband, from whom she had never heard again, just as Fanny Schiff had lost sight of her own husband after his departure for Colmar. But unlike Dolly, Annie had had a child, a daughter, now living on the outskirts of Ostend with a husband and children of her own. At moments of high mutual antagonism Annie would declare her intention of abandoning Dolly and going back to Belgium. These disagreements were uninhibited, and were pursued with liberal amounts of criticism on both sides. Both had the gift of losing their tempers without actually inconveniencing themselves, so that having any kind of argument was something of a recreation for them, a therapeutic airing of views, rather like a party political broadcast, which is meant to be taken seriously but so rarely is. Annie’s attitude to Dolly was tight-lipped; she both approved and disapproved, admired and grudged. Too genuinely shy and misanthropic to have friends of her own, she enjoyed the bridge parties, where some small tribute generally came her way (‘Your lovely sandwiches—you spoil us, Annie’), but deplored the fact that life behind the scenes was frankly unimpressive, in a rented flat, with saucepans and linen of a left-over nature, with a Hoover that failed to work, and no decent shops near at hand.

Dolly appreciated her for her solidarity, for the reliability of her general duties—the bath run, the morning coffee brought to her in bed, the generally excellent service in the drawing-room—but also because Annie was in a way her only intimate friend. In this she was quite different from Dolly’s other friends, who were also her enemies, and whose misdeeds and treacheries she complacently recounted to my
mother, without ever explaining how their perpetrators had ever come back again into favour. Or if she did explain it was with a large-hearted gesture of emotional superiority: ‘But I’m like that, Etty, I can’t stand pettiness. I could have taken offence but life’s too short. Besides, I hope I’m big enough to forgive and forget. As to my real opinion of her, well, that’s my business. I’m sure I don’t have to explain myself to all and sundry. If I feel a little hurt I just rise above it.’ Singing and dancing again, I said to myself, for I was present at this explanation, which was one of many: Dolly fell out with her friends on a regular basis. I had the choice between two admonitions, if my expression, over which I usually had excellent control, veered towards hilarity. If she caught the tail-end of an agonised twitch of the muscle she chose to believe that it expressed concern of a more general nature. But though obtuse where I was concerned, as she was with anyone young, she was quick to sense criticism. So it was either her recommendation of singing and dancing that was on offer, or, more usually, ‘Charm, Jane, charm!’

I also believe that Dolly appreciated Annie because with her she managed to reconstruct the atmosphere of her mother’s workroom, and with it the unthinking acceptance of female company. Dolly, whose relations with the world were of a confrontational nature, whose plans were devised in secret, whose strategies were masked by a smile of affability, needed comfort, although she seemed to need it rather less than anyone else, certainly less than any of her acquaintances, for I do not think she looked on them as friends. Dolly and Annie did not keep one another company except for one brief moment in the middle of the day, nor would
either of them ever dream of confiding in the other. But they shared the same opinions, and that may be a more significant similarity. They held exactly the same views on the people who came to the house, so that Annie always knew and accepted Dolly’s passing antagonisms, and more often than not expressed her own, however briefly.
‘Celle-là!’
she would say, with a dismissive pursing of the lips. None of this prevented her from being utterly impassive while she was on duty. Like a butler in a grander establishment she took a pride in her most expressionless efficiency. Serving the coffee, returning each fur coat correctly to its owner, bidding each guest a muted farewell, she was the epitome of dutiful discretion.

I found her arguably more human than Dolly, who always impressed me as a sort of mutant, not quite a real person. In this I did her an injustice, but I had been brought up in an atmosphere of simplicity and found it hard to credit the deviousness of Dolly’s behaviour, if indeed it was devious: with the benefit of hindsight I now see that it was remarkably, even transparently straightforward. But one has to grow into an understanding of such matters, and at the time of those visits to the flat off the Edgware Road, where, like an emissary, I handed over my envelope, tactfully accompanied by Miss Lawlor’s biscuits, I was too young and also too inexperienced to read Dolly’s admirably disguised signals. Her set of assumptions was so radically different from the ones I accepted as natural that she generally contrived to surprise me every time. My mother, in her naïvety, imagined that my visits would be welcomed, that interest would be shown in me, that a certain goodwill might prevail. In fact I was tolerated, as was indicated by Annie’s absence of any
sort of conventional greeting, and by the appearance of Dolly only some minutes after I had been seated in the drawing-room and left to read a magazine, for all the world as if I had an appointment with a doctor or a dentist. This did not worry me: I preferred reading anyway. In this fashion I failed to be insulted by Dolly, although I recognised that the potential was always there.

The invitation to lunch did not materialise. Nevertheless I was invited to sit down and watch Dolly eating her own lunch, which took place early, sometimes just before midday. Annie made her delicious and unfamiliar food, which she ate rapidly and cleanly, as if picking the bones of an animal, in itself an animal procedure. I remember a leek tart; I remember a plate of
langue de chat
biscuits with a little Bordeaux poured over them. I often assisted at these lunches with a lingering sense of fascination. To me they were pure spectacle, for I could see that Annie was jealous and would only cook food for one. These lunches were workmanlike, refueling stops before the business of the afternoon, which was usually bridge, either at home or in someone else’s house. Once the food was eaten I was permitted to join Dolly in a cup of strong black coffee. Annie too was present; this was their moment of intimacy, after which she went back to the kitchen and tidied up. I can still see their fine teeth closing identically over the lumps of sugar dipped in the staggeringly strong brew. As if to demonstrate their physical imperviousness to the stimulant properties of the coffee, which set my own heart beating, both then retired to their rooms to take a brief rest. Annie’s rest was more sombre and more prolonged, after which she would rise and change
out of her overall into her black dress and prepare for the afternoon’s entertainment. Often she accompanied Dolly to other people’s houses to lend a hand. This she never minded doing. My feeling is that she hated to be left out.

If I called when Dolly was engaged in more active preparation for her role I was not always treated with the appropriate formality.
‘Madame fait sa toilette,’
said Annie, and a voice from the bathroom would call, ‘In here, Jane.’ Once I caught her towelling herself after a bath and blushed red with embarrassment. She gave a mocking laugh at such puerility, but the mockery held a jeer with little indulgence in it. The jeer was not only for myself, a pale English schoolgirl, whose adolescent body was still that of a child, but for herself, for the widened hips, the coarse dark pubic hair, and the no longer buoyant breasts. Indifferent to my confusion, or even made provocative by it, she lifted one leg, rested her foot on the rim of the bath, and towelled the inside of her thigh. Then she sighed and said, ‘I want to get dressed. Go and wait for me.’ I was dismissed. If she had hoped for confidences, either given or received, she was disappointed. I felt the weight of her disappointment, which would soon turn into disapprobation. I sat in the ugly drawing-room and waited for her, although I had nothing to say. I felt she needed some sort of consolation for what I thought of as the awful state of her body. But when she bustled in, in her black and white silk ‘afternoon’ dress, she was the aunt again, impatient for sensation, hungry for action, myself forgotten.

Two pointers here to the state of her affairs, though not fit, I thought, for my mother’s ears. The scent she used was powerful, though agreeable; it did not smell inexpensive. I
inhaled it appreciatively, for I have always been sensitive to fine odours. This apparently met with her approval. ‘I always use it,’ she confided. ‘I always have. People know me by it. “We shall know what to give you for Christmas, Dolly,” they say. I have quite a stock of it. I’d rather go hungry than go without scent. Remember, Jane, it is so important not to lower one’s standards. I have never lowered mine, I’m glad to say.’ She turned complacently to one of the many mirrors and patted her hair. Her image of herself once again relegated me to the periphery: I never, during the years of my adolescence and young womanhood, managed to impose my presence on Dolly. I was the equivalent of those donor figures in religious paintings who look clumsy and out of place and whose presence seems barely justified, beside the saints and the madonna, except for the consideration of spot cash.

Another indication of Dolly’s resourcefulness: one day as Annie was setting out the tea trolley I admired the cups and saucers, which were exquisitely thin and adorned with painted birds. Dolly, always responsive to admiration, said, Those cups are by Porthault, my dear,
c’est la fin du fin
. They belonged to Adèle Rougier. She knew how much I loved them. I always remarked on them when I had tea with her, poor dear. In the end she said, “If you like them so much you’d better have them.” So I asked her maid to parcel them up and send them over. They are pretty, aren’t they?’ They were pretty, and so were the plates, and the silver teaspoons, which presumably were her own, and the fragile cargo of appetisers—tiny rounds of black bread topped with a mousse of smoked salmon, glazed fruit tartlets small enough to disappear in a single mouthful—which Dolly would serve
with tea before the main business of the afternoon got under way. Dolly’s guests were greedy: she never underestimated their appetites. In this way she was an excellent hostess.

‘And how was Dolly?’ my mother would ask, when I got home, oddly flattered to have been offered a cup of strong black coffee, if nothing else. ‘How did she look?’ For she took a wistful but utterly selfless interest in Dolly’s health and appearance. Both were in excellent shape, as far as I could see. Dolly’s health was robust and pleasingly apparent in her clear dark eyes, the red flush under the olive skin, the pouter pigeon bosom, of which she was clearly proud, and the fine unspoilt hands on which she wore Hugo’s diamond ring and her platinum wedding ring. She had an agreeable faith in herself and in her attractions. So confident was she of what she would have called her charm that she refused to wear any make-up other than a thin and glistening thread of lipstick or to dye her hair which was rapidly going grey: the grey in fact softened the black and framed a face which contrived to look on the world with an eager and expectant expression. Once or twice I caught a hint of what she must have looked like as a girl, and I commended her silently for not clinging on to a semblance of youth. In fact, although Dolly claimed to have said goodbye to ‘all that’, she was still interested in men, but interested in them as consorts rather than as lovers. Though a robustly physical woman she still had something virginal about her; with a little encouragement, that of her mother, perhaps, she would have set out once again to have a good time. My own mother perceived this, and felt all the pathos of which Dolly seemed unaware. For this reason she played her part as an admirer, an adherent,
without once demonstrating anything less than perfect good faith.