The Ladies of Missalonghi (5 page)

“I believe that,” said Drusilla dryly, taking the last fairy cake from the plate.

At which point Alicia Marshall came into the room. Her mother beamed at her proudly and her aunt gave her a wry little smile. Why oh why couldn’t Missy have been like Alicia?

A truly exquisite creature, Alicia Marshall. Very tall and built on voluptuous yet disciplined lines, she was angelically fair of skin and hair and eyes, with beautiful hands and feet, and a swanlike neck. As always, she was dressed in perfect taste, and wore her ice-blue silk gown (eyelet embroidered, its shorter overskirt fashionably pointed) with incomparable flair and grace. One of her own hats, a tumbled mass of ice-blue tulle and ice-green silk roses, adorned her profusion of palest gold hair. Miraculous, that her brows and lashes were a definite, visible brown! For naturally Alicia did not tell the world that she darkened brows and lashes any more than Una did.

“Your Aunt Drusilla would be happy to provide your household linens, Alicia,” announced Aurelia triumphantly.

Alicia removed her hat and stripped off her long ice-blue kid gloves carefully, unable to answer while she concentrated on these enormously important tasks. Only when she had placed the shed articles on a table well out of harm’s way and seated herself nearby did she activate her disappointingly flat and unmusical voice.

“How very kind of you, Aunt,” she said.

“Kindness does not enter into it, my dear niece, since your mother is determined to pay me,” said Drusilla stiffly. “You had better come to Missalonghi next Saturday morning and pick out whatever you want. I shall host morning tea.”

“Thank you, Aunt.”

“Shall I order some fresh tea for you?” Aurelia asked Alicia anxiously; she was just a little bit afraid of her big, capable, ambitious and driving daughter.

“No, thank you, Mother. I really came in to see what if anything you’ve discovered about the stranger in our midst, as Willie insists upon calling him.” Her lovely lip curled.

So the news was given again and discussed again, after which Drusilla rose to go.

“Next Saturday morning at Missalonghi,” she adjured her relatives, giving herself into the butler’s custody.

All the way home she mentally catalogued the contents of the spare room and various cupboards, terrified that the amount and variety were not going to prove sufficient for the honest sale of one hundred pounds. One hundred pounds! What a lovely windfall! Of course it must not be
spent
. It must go into the bank and begin to accrue its minuscule interest, there to reside until disaster struck. Just what disaster, Drusilla did not know; but every blind corner on life’s road concealed a disaster – illnesses, property damages and repairs, increased rates and taxes, deaths. Part of it would have to pay for the new roof, certainly, but at least they would not have to sell the Jersey heifer now to pay for that; stretched into the future with numerous as yet unconceived offspring to her credit, the Jersey heifer was worth a lot more than fifty pounds to the ladies of Missalonghi. Percival Hurlingford, a kind man with a kind wife, had always allowed them the services of his very valuable Jersey bull without charge, and had besides been responsible for the gift of their original Jersey cow.

Yes, it was most satisfactory! Perhaps Alicia, a notable trend-setter, would start a fashion among the girls of the Hurlingford connection; perhaps in future other brides-to-be would come to the ladies of Missalonghi to buy their household linens. This would be condoned as an acceptably ladylike form of business venture, where simple dressmaking would never be condoned, for that would have exposed them to the whims of anyone and everyone rather than the whims of the family.

“So, Octavia,” said Drusilla to her crippled sister that night in the kitchen after they had settled to their handwork while Missy buried her head in a book, “we had better spend next week really going through everything we have, to make sure it’s fit for Aurelia and Alicia to see. Missy, you will have to cope with the house and garden and animals on your own, and since you have the lightest hand with flour, you will have to make the refreshments for morning tea. We’ll have pikelets with jam and cream, a sponge, some little butterfly cakes, and a sour-apple tart cooked with cloves.”

This sorted out to Drusilla’s satisfaction, she then passed to a spicier topic, the advent of John Smith. For once the conversation attracted Missy more than her book did, though she pretended to continue reading, and when she went to bed she carried this additional information with her to integrate and correlate among what Una had told her.

Why shouldn’t his real name be John Smith? Of course the real basis for so much Hurlingford mistrust and suspicion was his acquisition of the valley. Well, John Smith, good for you! thought Missy. It’s high time someone took up the Hurlingfords. She fell asleep smiling.

The fuss of preparation which preceded the visit of the two Marshall ladies was largely futile, a fact of which all three Missalonghi ladies were well aware. However, none of them minded the change of pace, for it had the virtues of novelty and misrule. Only the housebound Missy felt any pangs of regret, and her pangs were due to a combination of booklessness and fear that Una would think she had defected upon payment for the novel taken out last Friday.

The delicacies Missy had taken such pains to prepare were not eaten by the ladies for whom they were intended; Alicia “watched her figure”, as she phrased it, and so too these days did her mother, who wanted to cut a figure of high fashion at her daughter’s wedding. However, the goodies were not wasted upon the pigs, for later on Drusilla and Octavia gobbled them up. Though they both adored sweet things, they rarely ate them because of the additional expense.

The amount of linen displayed for Aurelia and Alicia staggered them, and after a pleasant hour spent discussing the final choices, Aurelia pressed not one but two hundred pounds into Drusilla’s reluctant hand.

“No arguments, if you please!” she said, at her most imperious. “Alicia is getting a bargain.”

“I think, Octavia,” said Drusilla later, after the visitors had driven off in their chauffeured motorcar, “that now we can all afford new dresses for Alicia’s wedding. A lilac crêpe for me, with a beaded bodice and beaded tassels around the overskirt – I have just the right beads put by! Do you remember the ones our dear mother bought to sew onto her new best half-mourning gown just before she passed away? Ideal! And I think you might purchase that powder-blue silk you so admired in Herbert’s material department, don’t you? Missy could tat up some lace insertions for the neck and sleeves – very smart!” Drusilla stopped to ponder, brow furrowed, looking at her dusky daughter. “You’re the really difficult one, Missy. You’re too dark for pale colours, so I think it will have to be...”

Oh, let it not be brown! prayed Missy. I want a
scarlet
dress! A lace dress in the sort of red that makes your eyes swim when you look at it, that’s what I want!

“...brown,” Drusilla finished at last, and sighed. “I understand how disappointing this must be, but the truth of the matter is, Missy, that no other colour
becomes
you half so well as brown! In pastels you look sick, in black you look jaundiced, in navy you are at death’s door, and the autumn tones turn you into a Red Indian.”

Missy said not a word, the logic of this being inarguable, and not knowing how much her docility pained Drusilla, who would have welcomed a suggestion at least – though of course scarlet would not have been countenanced under any circumstances. It was the colour of tarts and trollops, fully as much as brown was the colour of the respectable poor.

However, nothing could keep Drusilla’s spirits oppressed for long tonight, so she cheered up again rapidly. “In fact,” she said happily, “I think we can all have new boots as well. Oh, what a dash we’re going to cut at the wedding!”

“Shoes,” said Missy suddenly.

Drusilla looked blank. “
Shoes?
”

“Not boots, Mother, please! Let us have shoes, pretty dainty shoes with Louis heels and bows on the front.”

It is possible that Drusilla may have considered the idea, but Missy’s cry from the heart was smothered immediately by Octavia, who, in her invalidish way, did quite a lot of the ruling at the house called Missalonghi.

“Living all the way out at the end of Gordon Road?” Octavia snorted. “You’re not right in the head, girl! Just how long do you think shoes would last in the dust and the mud? Boots are what we must have, good sturdy boots with good sturdy laces and good sturdy thick heels on them. Boots
last
! Shoes are not for those who must go on Shank’s pony.”

And that was that.

By the Monday following the visit of Aurelia and Alicia Marshall, life had returned to normal at Missalonghi, so Missy was allowed to take her habitual walk to the lending library in Byron. Of course it wasn’t all selfish pleasure; she went armed with two large shopping bags, one for either hand to balance the load, and she did the week’s marketing as well.

Quiescent for the week she had stayed at home, the stitch in Missy’s side came back in full force. Odd, that it only seemed to bother her on long walks. And it was painful, so wretchedly painful!

Today her own purse had joined company with her mother’s, and her mother’s purse was unusually fat, for Missy had been commissioned to buy the lilac crêpe and the powder-blue silk and her own brown satin at Herbert Hurlingford’s clothing emporium.

Of all the shops in Byron, Missy hated Uncle Herbert’s the most, for he staffed it exclusively with young men, sons or grandsons naturally; even if one were purchasing stays or under-drawers, one had to suffer the attentions of a sniggering cad who found his task exquisitely funny and his customer the embarrassed butt of his jokes. However, this sort of treatment was not meted out to everyone, only to those whose means were sufficiently pinched to make shopping in Katoomba or – God forbid! – Sydney an impossibility; it was also chiefly reserved for Hurlingford women who had no men to exact retribution. Old maids and indigent widows of the clan were uniformly regarded as fair game.

As she stood watching James Hurlingford bring down the bolts she indicated, Missy wondered what he would have done had her own brown satin been a request for scarlet lace. Not that the clothing emporium stocked such a fabric; the only reds it offered were cheap and vulgar artificial silks kept for the denizens of Caroline Lamb Place. So along with the lilac crêpe and the powder-blue silk, Missy bought a length of very beautiful delustred satin in the shade known as snuff. Had the material been any other colour she would have loved it, but since it was brown, it may as well have been jute sacking. Every dress Missy had ever owned had been brown; it was such a serviceable colour. Never showed the dirt, never went in or out of fashion, never faded, never looked cheap or common or trollopy.

“New dresses for the wedding?” asked James archly.

“Yes,” said Missy, wondering why it was that James always succeeded in making her feel so uncomfortable; perhaps it was his exaggeratedly womanish manner?

“Let’s see, now,” burbled James, “how about a weeny game of guessies? The crêpe is for Auntie Drusie, and the silk is for Aunti Octie, and the satin – the
brown
satin – must therefore be for little brown Cousin Missy!”

Her brain must still have been filled with the image of that impossible scarlet lace dress, for quite suddenly Missy saw nothing but scarlet, and out of the recesses of her memory she dredged the only insulting phrase she knew.

“Oh, go bite your bum, James!” she snapped.

He would not have been so shocked had his wooden dress dummy come to life and kissed him, and he measured and he cut with a hitherto unknown alacrity, thereby unintentionally giving each lady an extra yard of fabric, and he couldn’t get Missy out of the shop fast enough. The pity was that he knew he couldn’t confide his dreadful experience to any of his brothers or nephews, because they would probably echo Missy’s words, the bastards.

The library was only two doors down, so when Missy went in she was still flying the flags of her anger in her cheeks, and she banged the door after her.

Una looked up, startled, and began to laugh. “Darling, you look absolutely splendid! In a paddy, are we?”

Missy took a couple of deep breaths to calm down. “Oh, just my cousin James Hurlingford. I told him to go bite his bum.”

“Good for you! Time someone told him.” Una giggled. “Though I imagine he’d much rather someone else bit it for him – preferably someone masculine.”

This sailed straight over Missy’s head, but Una’s burst of merriment did the trick, and Missy found herself able to laugh too. “Dear oh dear, it wasn’t very ladylike of me, was it?” she asked, sounding more surprised than horrified. “I don’t know what came over me!”

The radiant face turned up to her looked suddenly sly, not the slyness of dishonesty but the slyness of someone fey, away with the fairies. “Straws and camels,” intoned Una in a singsong voice, “eyes of needles and days of dogs, revolving worms and well reaped whirlwinds. There’s a lot in you, Missy Wright, that you don’t even know is there.” She sat back and hummed like a gleeful naughty child. “But it’s started now, and it can’t be stopped.”

Out came the story of the scarlet lace dress, the terrible longing to wear something other than brown, the defeat of having to admit no other colour than brown suited her, so that on this glorious day when she might actually have attained a dress in some other colour, still she must wear brown. Her feyness quite vanished, Una listened sympathetically, and when Missy had got it all out of her system, she looked her up and down deliberately.

“Scarlet
would
suit you beautifully,” she said. “Oh, what a pity! Still, never mind, never mind.” And she changed the subject. “I’ve saved another new novel for you – two pages into it, and I promise you won’t even remember your red dress. It’s all about a drab young woman who is utterly downtrodden by her family until the day she finds out she’s dying of heart trouble. There’s this chap she’s been in love with for years, only of course he’s engaged to someone else. So she takes the letter from the heart specialist telling her she’s going to die to this young man, and she begs him to marry her rather than the other girl, because she’s only got six months to live and after she’s dead he can marry the other girl anyway. He’s a bit of a wastrel, but he’s just waiting for someone to reform him, only he doesn’t know that, naturally. Anyway, he agrees to marry her. And they have six heavenly months together. He finds out that under her drab exterior she’s an entrancing person, and her love for him reforms him completely. Then one day when the sun is shining and the birds are singing, she dies in his arms – I love books where people die in each other’s arms, don’t you? – and his old fiancée comes round to see him after the funeral because she got a letter from his dead wife explaining why he jilted her. And his old fiancée says she forgives him and she’ll marry him the minute he’s out of mourning. But he jumps up, wild with grief, rushes to the river and throws himself in, calling out his dead wife’s name. And then his old fiancée throws herself in the river, calling out his name. Oh, Missy, it’s so sad! I cried for days.”