The Ugly Sister (2 page)

My aunt was a stout woman with wispy hair, shortsighted friendly eyes and a perpetual sniff. There was frequently a hunt for her handkerchief, which she always sat on for luck when playing whist and thereafter lost. She was intensely superstitious in ways I was not to realize for a long time.

My uncle was a trimly built man – as spruce as his wife was untidy. He had a bright complexion, pink at all times but flushing scarlet in his brief tempers. One sometimes thought he might have a skin less than most people. He and my aunt frequently bickered and argued, and it was always easy to tell when he was in the house. A cause of constant disagreement between them was a shiny, muscular friendly black dog called Parish, whom my aunt adored and my uncle, for some reason, hated. When he was away Parish would romp around the house like a jolly schoolboy – though never far from his mistress. When the Admiral was home he was confined to his kennel, or, in the Admiral's eye, should have been. In fact three-quarters of the time he spent in Aunt Anna's bedroom, and when my uncle went in Parish knew his approaching footstep and cowered under the bed.

As a tiny child I crowed and toddled and fell down and cried and picked myself up again and played with my sister and the two bigger children and took everything for granted. I even took for granted my disfigurement, and when my mother shuddered sometimes when she picked me up I took this as a natural tremor on her part that had nothing to do with me. My sister too took my looks for granted: knowing her in later life, I cannot believe she refrained from mentioning them out of delicacy or compassion; they just did not impinge on her as worthy of comment. Perhaps my cousins – both of gentler natures – had been told not to speak of the matter. At least I do not think they ever spoke of it.

I suppose my mother was a very handsome and attractive woman and my sister was already showing hints of the beauty she was to become. Mary and Desmond were also good-looking. No doubt I would have been more acceptable in a family where everyone was plain.

I remember the first time I saw myself in a looking-glass and observed my face in a detached way.

T
HE BUTLER
was called Slade. He had been a petty officer on board the last two ships the Admiral had commanded. He was a heavy man, light-footed as big men often are. His hair was jet black and tied in a pigtail. Tamsin got into great trouble when she was nine by stealing into a back scullery and surprising him dyeing it. It was a while before I noticed that he lacked the fingertips of his left hand: the half-length fingers ended in nail-less stubs.

He came from the south-east corner of Cornwall and was very prideful about it. ‘There's been Slades in Polperro and Looe for centuries,' he would growl, ‘long before ever there was Sprys in Place.'

He represented the Admiral when the Admiral was not there. When he
was
there he was useful after dinner in helping his master up the stairs to bed. Slade's arms were tattooed with serpents; he had a plump dun-grey face – which hid a lot of malice – and walked with a stoop.

U
NCLE
D
AVEY
came and went by coach and by sea, depending on his destination or where he had come from. So did most of the produce of the house. The roads were little more than cart ruts, narrow, hilly and winding. There was no town to the east of us nearer than St Austell. To reach Place House from Truro by road one had to follow the River Fal upstream and cross the ford at Tregony at low tide. King Harry Ferry was served by steep lanes usually slithering in mud. No one essayed these laborious ways when the growing port of Falmouth lay across a two-mile estuary of deep water – only unnavigable in times of storm.

We were self-contained for most things, seldom if ever needed meat or eggs or poultry or vegetables. And boats would call twice a week with fish, cooking spices, lobsters, soap, newspapers and miscellaneous luxuries, such as chocolate and China teas. Once a month a coal barge would sidle up at high tide until it grounded, when the bags would be loaded onto wheelbarrows and carried up to the house. The coalmen would usually wait then for the next tide to take them off.

It was on such an occasion that I had my disfigurement first pointed out to me. The quay, which was built at the lawn's edge, had a small pebbly beach on either side of it. One day when the coal barge was unloading I walked down with Thomasine and a maid called Sally Fetch, and three ragged boys were on the right-hand beach watching and hoping for some spillage of the coal; they whistled at Tamsin, who already had a head of golden curls. Fetch took Tamsin's hand and guided her away, but I stayed watching the unloading, finger in mouth. One of the boys shouted: ‘What's wrong wi 'ee, maid? Been in a scuff, 'ave 'ee?' The other urchins jeered us out of earshot, and then splashed away as fast as they could as Slade came ominously down the path.

Next morning – or maybe it was two or three mornings later – I carried a hand looking-glass over to the window in my mother's room. I looked at the dark-haired round-faced fat little girl I knew to be myself. My unique self. Someone belonging to me alone, from whom I could never never escape.

I must have taken after my father, for my eyes were very dark; but the lid of the left eye was drawn down an inch or more and the eye was permanently bloodshot. Further down on the same side my cheek had a deep scar which might have come from a musket ball. And there was a stain on my neck, part hidden by the lace collar of my dress.

That I recognized was Emma Spry, and other children would laugh and point at her. And grown-ups too. I was an outcast.

M
Y MOTHER
was absent for quite long periods continuing her stage career. She played at the Richmond Theatre, at Drury Lane, at the Haymarket, and sometimes went on tour. Once in a while she took the lead, more often lesser parts.

I remember a conversation when I followed her into Aunt Anna's bedroom and heard my aunt say: ‘D'ye have to do that? It is showing your legs to the common people,
and
your name is in small print. Your children are growing up and you hardly see 'em.'

‘Thanks to you and Davey we have this lovely home,' said my mother, ‘but I'm hard set to make ends meet. I pay Davey what little I can, but I need more just for the girls. And I shall get bonuses for extra performances.'

‘Well, yes,' said Aunt Anna, sniffing and sucking her top teeth defensively, ‘ the Admiral is not without money, and I brought him a fat dowry; but he has many calls on his purse. There's no depth to the soil around here and the farmers can hardly fetch enough out of it to pay their rents. When he retires he will certainly give up the house in Plymouth Dock. I was urging on him the other day the need for retrenchment.'

I looked up at my mother's face and saw a shadow pass across it.

‘It means a deal to me,' she said, ‘that Thomasine and Emma have a settled home so far away from the city. That I have to thank you for, Anna. Of course there is much warmth and friendship in the world of the theatre, but also much squalor. Aubrey, as you know, died in debt. He spent the allowance Davey sent him on drink and women, and I kept the family. It is no difference with him gone; I still have to work.'

‘A pity you have had no time to learn whist,' said Aunt Anna.

‘Do you never persuade the Admiral to take a hand?'

‘Oh,' with a sniff ‘the Admiral cannot concentrate. Put him in a chair before a card table and he will grunt and wriggle his posterior as if he had the worms, and frown and grunt again and trump his partner's ace. I do not know how he controls men when he cannot even control himself.'

Place was never exactly quiet: with four children growing up in it and eight indoor servants supervised by the saturnine Slade, there was constant movement and activity, but when Aunt Anna was having one of her illnesses, the noise was muted. Parish, who had clearly been trained as a puppy that barking was forbidden, still snuffled and snorted as he padded up and down corridors or wriggled his way through a door that had been left ajar. Only when Uncle Davey arrived did he make himself scarce.

Sometimes the head of the house would come in in a bad mood; he would shout at the servants, swear at Slade, quarrel with Aunt Anna, saying the house was like a jakes, the walled garden neglected, the lawns a disgrace; and everyone would tremble. But at other times, especially if he brought one of his elder children with him (particularly Anna Maria, the eldest and favourite), he would have half the house laughing. His own laughter, Aunt Anna said, would no doubt be taken as a signal for sending out the pilchard boats from St Mawes.

‘Beware of him,' Aunt Anna whispered to me once, ‘he's a great practical joker. D'ye know what happened on our honeymoon? He put honey in my evening shoes!'

All the time we were growing up Mama would be here for a week or two, then gone off to London or Scotland or Bath. She would seldom tell me when she was going, but kiss me goodnight and the next morning be gone. As she seldom showed me much affection (she doted on Tamsin) I became accustomed to her absences and transferred most of my affection to Sally Fetch, who seemed to show less aversion than most adults for my battered face. In no time, it often seemed to me, Mama would be back again smelling of new perfumes and fresh clothes – for in spite of her protestations she earned good money and freely spent it. She usually travelled by sea, sailing in a ‘tin boat', and left the same way. Possibly her experience of coach travel when she was carrying me had put her off land travel when another choice was available. Aunt Anna constantly warned her of the danger of French or Algerian pirates, showing an unbecoming lack of confidence in her husband's ability to keep them out of the Channel.

Not that this was an unwarranted apprehension. The St Anthony in Roseland promontory was specially vulnerable to a raider, as in fact was all of Falmouth. During the war, which ended while I was still a child, the defence of Pendennis Castle overlooking the great harbour had depended solely on the threat of three field cannon which dated from Blenheim; and St Mawes on the other headland had been commanded by a seventy-year-old captain of artillery, with two crippled soldiers and a range of antique musketry to support him. There had also been a battery mounted near Zone Point; but through the last years of the Napoleonic Wars the Sprys had paid for two marines to keep watch for their own defence, since Place House was the only substantial property on this promontory. In time of war a landing there would have proved a considerable embarrassment – most particularly to the Sprys themselves – and however short-lived the occupation, it was likely to have outlived the inhabitants of the house.

Even in peace it was a succulent morsel for corsairs – a place to sack and steal from before vanishing into the night – and the end of the war proper had not pacified everyone. There were plenty of discarded, out-of-work soldiers and dispossessed sailors from a number of countries for the hazard to exist. But I do not remember the two marines, and the only guard we had when I was growing up was the lookout who manned the signal station at the head of the promontory about half a mile from the house.

Once when I was about ten Mama came home for Christmas and stayed on well into the New Year. There was no doubt that she had for some time looked ambitiously at Cornish society, for she must have seen that it would be much more likely to be open to her than London society would ever be. A beautiful woman who knew her manners and brought with her an air of metropolitan sophistication and with Place House as a springboard, Mrs Aubrey Spry would be quickly welcome almost everywhere. But the fact that she was an actress, which had a raffish not quite respectable implication – quite different had she been just a singer – her frequent and haphazard absences, the peculiar unwelcoming circumstances of the house in which she lived, together with her own chronic shortage of money, put a brake on what she had so far been able to do.

But now, evidently better off than usual, she began to go about. Taking the bit between her teeth, she went uninvited to Tregolls in Truro, to meet some of the rest of the Spry family. On her way home she called at the new house, Killiganoon, and discovered why Uncle Davey had bought and rebuilt it.

She invited herself or contrived to get invited to a number of the great houses flanking the River Fal, and the new houses – not so great but large and substantial – being put up along the coast between Falmouth and the Helford River, mainly by the Foxes, a large Quaker family who had settled in the district in recent decades and were making fortunes from the shipping and ancillary trades of that prosperous town.

Possibly too by this time she was beginning to have thoughts for the future of her daughters – or at least one of them – who were growing up and who in the course of time she would want to see launched and favourably married. So whenever she could she took us with her, and we met young Foxes, young Boscawens, young Warleggans, young Carclews. Parties were held in the vicinity of Falmouth and Truro, but for me these largely tailed off. During that winter I overheard two of the Carclew boys discussing a party they were going to hold. One said: ‘ What about the Sprys? Tammy is excellently beautiful.' The other said: ‘ Oh yes and jolly too. But do we have to have the fat little one? She's so exceeding disfigured and monumentally dull.' ‘ I'll see what my mother says. Maybe we could have one of 'em without t'other.'

When the invitation came it was for both of us, but at the last minute I developed a severe toothache and could not go.

A succession of ailments began to plague me when other invitations were about to be accepted. Of course Mama soon saw through the deception, but what was she to do – take a miserable daughter with tears of pain streaming down her cheeks? Perhaps, I thought, when I was thankfully alone with Sally Fetch, that Mama and Tamsin were also thankful – to be rid of me and my ugliness while they went to enjoy their party.