Sail Upon the Land (22 page)

The Season was no longer the preserve of gentry and aristocracy. The Royal Household didn’t police who could or couldn’t take part as it had in the strict old days of Drawing Rooms and Presentation to the monarch. The last trace of snooty exclusion left, like the whale’s hind leg, was applying for the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. It was money that counted for everything these days and the Season had been revivified by a healthy injection of cash and new blood after the nadir of the Seventies. Everyone grumbled that corporate entertaining was taking over the riverbanks at Henley and even Chelsea Flower Show. But for anyone who chose to be a deb, things went on much as they had before. The twins told their mother that they loved the debs’ tea parties, the inaugural events of any girl’s Season, and made lots of friends who were like themselves both in appearance and background. First generation private school so no need for elocution lessons. Margaret was not frightened of anything or anyone, but when she’d found out that Munty’s mother had worked in a shop and Melissa had been a doctor’s daughter, it certainly helped her social confidence.

Even so, after Munty had asked her to marry him one night in the Poule au Pot, Margaret had visited a discreet address in South Kensington to brush up on her vowel sounds. She still had refreshers regularly to make sure she kept control of a whole herd of brown cows.

She was exasperated to hear from the twins that Damson, who had tried one tea party, said it was boring and went back to her work experience at St Saviour’s Hospital.

Noonie and Clarrie were turning into the sensation of the Season. The newspapers loved them. They starred in the Berkeley Dress Show, dressed in the same styles in different colours. Damson was rejected as a model. She’d turned up to the audition late, looking a mess, and knew she was at least a size too big. Noonie and Clarrie had been ‘finished’ for a bit of polish after school, and had learned all kinds of useful stuff at Jilly Dupree’s establishment in Knightsbridge, from secretarial and modelling skills to deportment and grooming, even – using the frame of an old MG in the garden – how to get into and out of a sports car without showing their knickers. Damson had been studying for her Cambridge entrance exams down the road.

As for the Season itself, Margaret took her usual approach: educate herself thoroughly and get the best help and advice money could buy. She’d loved the preliminary mothers’ lunches. She’d been a bit worried that she wouldn’t be accepted by the others, but found in fact that a good half of them were not at all grand but just like her. Younger wives of rich husbands many of them – ex-models, ex-secretaries, second wives, nobody in particular – and impressed by her title and in-depth knowledge of the Season.

Marrying Munty had been well worth it, even if he was still in love with his perfect dead Melissa. She couldn’t help being irritated by her predecessor’s gravestone. Why wasn’t there something suitable from the Bible on it instead of that mawkish poetry? But she comforted her husband by talking about them all meeting up again in Heaven. Secretly she wondered to herself how she would deal with that situation socially but, ever practical, the second Lady Munty thought she’d cross that celestial bridge when she came to it. She could never quite envisage her Mullins among the company of angels but did make the effort in her prayers every night.

Her guidebook to bringing out the girls was an old copy of the Fifties classic, Petronella Portobello’s
How to Be a Deb’s
Mum
, which she kept in her capacious Hermès handbag and referred to at all times. She was better informed than many of the other mothers as a result, able to assume pole position and advise on everything from what to wear at Henley (skirts on the knee, certainly not above), to announcing dates for your dance well in advance to avoid clashes.

She knew that marriage was not the debutante’s goal in the Eighties, but if her twins had not befriended their way into valuable connections by August, she would eat her mink toque. The other girls had brothers after all, and wide social networks to which she herself didn’t have access. As for Damson, she despaired. She did her Christian duty by her stepdaughter, but Damson had always been cool towards her, appearing to grudge everything she did for her. She plainly believed herself to be above it all, superior because she was going to Cambridge. It annoyed her that Damson went to the parties at all. In fact Damson and her untouched room were the only dark spots in all the brightness, warmth and luxury of the renovated Castle Hey. The girl disconcerted her and sometimes made her furious. How dare Damson, with her mousy hair and untidy appearance, think she was better than Margaret’s own golden twins?

She didn’t want her own girls to have any particular career. They were not academic and she could see they would make good wives for rich men, and so with any luck wouldn’t have to work after marriage. But that was all later, maybe in their mid-twenties. She was looking forward already to planning their weddings, getting that nice man from
Society
magazine in to do the photography, with lovely Castle Hey in the background. She dreamt on, dismissing thoughts of Damson in her practical way.

The twins had chosen to have their dresses designed and made by Landy Lane, a new British couturier famous both for his sexy curvaceous evening dresses and his close ties with the more stylish bands. Margaret shook her head. It was a bit late now to start trying to control the twins’ choices, and everything was working out very well, so it didn’t seem necessary. But Landy Lane? He seemed a bit sophisticated for teenagers, and debutantes at that. She was hoping they would choose society designer Arabella Pollen for their coming-out dance, but no, it had to be Landy Lane and his artful wisps of fabric.

Margaret insisted on going with the twins to Lane’s Notting Hill studio. The designer was rumoured to be fitting a rock star’s muse in the inner sanctum, and was running very late. They flicked through
Modern Woman
and
Society
magazines, and chatted about what they would like to wear and whether it should be the same style in two different colours or the other way round.

Then Lane appeared, his yellow-white hair sticking up like a cockatoo’s crest, his measuring tape behind his neck. He was tall and extremely thin, wearing blue linen peg-top trousers tight around the calves and ending in pointed silver shoes, with a baggy white linen shirt only half tucked in. His loosened tie was also blue, and decorated with a picture of Donald Duck with a machine gun and cigar.

Margaret exclaimed: ‘Ah, Mr Lane. I wasn’t sure about using you, as the girls are only eighteen, but they adore your dresses and it is their special party.’ She tailed off as Lane ignored her and appraised the girls’ bodies. After all, the model on the latest cover of
Modern Woman
was wearing Lane, and perhaps the normal rules about manners did not apply.

‘Hello, lovelies,’ he said, grinning.

Their mother watched with pride as her twins blossomed from lanky limbs sprawled on the gilt chairs under the warmth of his smile.

‘Stand up, will you?’

They bounced to their feet and stood in front of him, both wearing tight pedal-pusher jeans, with braces and big men’s shirts, their blonde hair curling over their shoulders. Lane walked round them, while Clarrie said, ‘We really liked that album cover you did. With the angels, all in gold and silver. We’d like to look like that.’

‘Oh you would, would you? Not at all what I have in mind. Do I just measure one of you? Are you identical? Ha! Joke.’

And he set to work measuring every inch of them. Margaret knew his dresses were constructed with an artful internal geometry so that, externally, they appeared to be barely clinging to flesh, but in reality were fiercely structured and engineered. When he’d finished measuring, and his assistant had written everything down on quick sketches, he said: ‘Now, twins are a bit freaky.’ Margaret suppressed her reaction. ‘And I think dressing them identically is naff.’

Both twins winced this time.

‘We are going to do something completely different for each girl so they don’t look identical at all. Can one of you dye your hair silver?’ They glanced at each other as he went into the back room to fetch silk swatches of the kind of embossed, embroidered and painted fabrics that gave his dresses a three-dimensional quality.

Before they arrived, he had asked to see colour photographs of the house where the dance was being held. Margaret sent over a recent copy of
Historic Décor
magazine that featured the restoration of ‘forgotten Gothick jewel’ Castle Hey.

There were colour photographs of the south front, the linked drawing rooms, the single-colour garden borders in blue, pink, coral and green, and the reclaimed eighteenth-century fountain Margaret had had positioned in the shallows of the lake.

‘You, on the left. You’re gonna wear grey. And you, the other one, you’re gonna wear pink.’

They both began to protest.

Margaret hushed them and looked at the couturier. ‘It’s to do with your house. And not any old pink, the pink of those old bricks and the grey of the stone. I’m going to get the fabrics painted and embroidered to look like they have moss and lichen and stuff on them. The grey dress will be modelled on the statue in the fountain, classical drapery, and slit to the thigh. I’ll commission flat Greek sandals in silver for you. And the brick pink will be a strapless mermaid dress with a net fish tail embroidered with tiny crystal beads, like the mist coming off the lake.’

The girls looked dumbfounded. Margaret had taken them foraging in Aladdin’s Cave in Berwick Street and come back with gold and silver crystal organza samples, which were now destined to stay forever in their Fiorucci handbags.

He was sketching briskly as he talked,
Historic Décor
open on the desk beside his pad. Then he picked up the pieces of paper and handed one to each girl. He had captured them, and when they saw themselves in what he had designed, the little family realised his mastery and succumbed to it.

‘The toiles will be ready this time next week. You’ll need to come then for one hour-long fitting. Then the dresses will be made up, and you come in again for a final fitting. They’ll be finished and the embroidery done exactly one week before the party, so don’t put on any weight. You won’t need bras. I’ll also need to talk about your hair and make-up, as we don’t want you spoiling the designs with anything crap. I have people I can send to you.’

Margaret knew then they would outshine any other deb at their dance, including Damson, who appeared to show little or no real interest in what she wore or how she looked. No need to make allowances for her either. She couldn’t possibly remember or mourn her mother as Margaret did hers.

Miranda grabbed her arm. Damson welcomed the attention as she didn’t have anything much else to do apart from stand around in her blue taffeta waiting to be asked to dance. She had wanted so much to fit in to the Season as the twins did so effortlessly and at least to meet boys and have fun but sometimes it felt more like hard work.

The Season was decidedly separate from her ambitions to be a doctor. Secretly she wanted to reconnect with her ancestors, cut off from her by the random way in which her father had come into his inheritance. So she stubbornly persisted with the parties, however uncomfortable, as it felt important to do what vanished generations of Hayes women had done before her, even if she knew nothing whatever about them. She loved to please her grandmother too, who thoroughly approved, and enjoyed making her dresses and hearing about the people she met. She had a vague idea that her mother hadn’t taken to being a deb, and had disappointed Granny, although of course she had met Munty.

She let Margaret arrange everything – her Season was only a by-product of the twins’ anyway. Their confidence and superior networking abilities meant Clarrie and Noonie were invited to more, better and different parties. They had proper allowances from their mother too, which made everything easier for them. Margaret had rented a little flat in South Kensington for all three of them to stay in for the duration too. Munty was always strapped for cash, and gave her ‘handouts’ rather than a regular allowance.

She had made a few acquaintances and danced a bit, even kissed some boys. But none of it had stuck, and she was grateful that she was off to India, and then there was Cambridge at the end of it, so she did not have to be a ‘success’.

Miranda was beautiful and frightened Damson a little bit. She appeared to be living by a different set of rules and didn’t care what anyone thought. She had waving reddish hair and long slender freckled arms and legs.

‘Come with me,’ Miranda said, a gleam in her green eyes.

Damson let herself be led into the Ladies.

‘Here.’

A small bottle smelling a bit like nail polish remover was thrust under her nose.

‘Go on. Sniff hard.’

Damson sniffed obediently. Instantly her head began to lift off her neck, and her face seemed to boil. Her mouth dropped open, her body inside the tight taffeta dress pulsed with heat and her heart raced. Miranda tittered. Damson staggered over to the wall where there were some chairs and slumped down, her skirt billowing around her. Miranda wandered off to the basins and stared at herself in the mirror, licking a finger and stroking her eyebrows into place.

After a minute, Damson said, ‘What was that?’

‘Poppers. Do you want some more?’

Damson said, ‘And people do that for fun?’

‘Yup.’

‘Oh.’

When she had recovered, she went over to the basins herself and looked in the mirror. The bright red face she had dreaded wasn’t there. She took a compact out of her little gold bag and patted it over her face, adding a slick of strawberry-flavoured lip-gloss.

She knew what it was. As a future doctor she bloody well ought to. Amyl nitrite, or heart starter, great for angina. Also used as an antidote to cyanide. What was Miranda doing with it? Well, she’d done it now. She would never have to do it again.