Voyage of Innocence
Elizabeth Edmondson
From the author of THE FROZEN LAKE comes an enthralling novel of love, betrayal and idealism, as three very different young women go up to Oxford in the years immediately before World War Two.Vee – the clergyman’s daughter. Boyish, alluring, she plans to use her time at Oxford to put right everything that went wrong in her loveless childhood. Her friendship with Alfred introduces her to politics and the subversive attractions of secret societies; it will lead to her career as a secret agent, but at what cost to old loyalties and her true feelings?Claudia, radiant, intense, aristocratic, is equally drawn to the secret society and one member in particular; his dazzling influence will see her travel to Berlin and come under the spell of Fascism as war looms.And Lally, glamorous daughter of an Irish-American senator, is sceptical of the society and the arguments from both sides. Her own choices will bring her into Vee’s new life, with all its dangers and betrayals. As the world becomes embroiled in the events of war, what price personal values, losses and loves?
ELIZABETH EDMONDSON
Voyage of Innocence
Copyright (#ulink_556638db-7eb4-5f58-ad11-afa49c5a56c6)
This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
A Paperback Original 2006
Copyright © A.E. Books Ltd 2006
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014.
Cover illustration © John Harris. Cover images © Shutterstock.com (border).
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Physical Edition: 9780007184880
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2011 ISBN: 9780007438280
Version: 2018-05-08
CONTENTS
Cover (#ua6a0ef5d-213c-5a2b-8204-0551661055ba)
Title Page (#u56a8a42f-2ef0-522b-a898-9a004bac64cd)
Copyright (#u855c889d-f59d-577e-b85e-2e641b804c9a)
PROLOGUE: OCTOBER 1938 (#u933b3857-0643-58ce-8099-ef7505089920)
PART ONE (#u6369bd63-13ce-561a-b71d-fcc9d863870f)
SEPTEMBER 1938 (#u6cfb5249-9e81-5962-b320-168fadbab6fc)
ONE (#uf2bf44fc-132f-5db0-8fce-b14db5adedfb)
TWO (#u5d7bee78-34cb-5742-a94c-a29863d1c490)
FOUR (#u7bf1616b-ebea-5778-aa8a-45edd12bf3e2)
FIVE (#u4406a625-7f43-5091-be56-08d6ea8a1105)
SIX (#u3d7b9391-095c-512e-a480-fab0d4a3361b)
SEVEN (#u69b282e5-7faa-587e-a3e6-1186981752a2)
EIGHT (#u0d7fd2a2-d986-521c-af36-2d9b00fdd778)
PART TWO (#udcc33ee5-a7d2-5c70-ab36-4bae4c7b230a)
1932 (#u1571dc3e-9ec8-5360-8df5-6f647b1f44bb)
ONE (#u5e1b77d1-6887-50b9-afc5-6e2025beaf3d)
TWO (#ud037089d-3e5d-5739-90be-3753aaa08502)
THREE (#u384efc6e-aa31-5b1e-ab12-3e91280842fd)
FOUR (#u572331ba-bead-5d49-85bf-70ddd2af387c)
FIVE (#u1daf2090-16b3-53ee-955c-dac66931f6ca)
SIX (#u3722d6f6-7581-5970-a480-1f877923ffd9)
SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
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1933 (#litres_trial_promo)
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1935 (#litres_trial_promo)
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1936 (#litres_trial_promo)
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SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
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1937 (#litres_trial_promo)
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FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
1938 (#litres_trial_promo)
ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
PART THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
1938 (#litres_trial_promo)
ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
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SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the same author (#litres_trial_promo)
AFTERMATH (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
For Jean Buchanan
a friend indeed
PROLOGUE (#ulink_371da967-533e-5786-8c8f-884ca9637e83)
OCTOBER 1938
‘Sir, it’s an emergency.’
The officer of the watch tried again, speaking more loudly and urgently. ‘Sir, Captain, sir, please wake up. It’s an emergency.’
Reginald Sherston, Captain of the SS Gloriana, passenger vessel bound for India, lifted his grizzled head from his starched white pillow.
His eyes opened, the faded blue eyes of a man who had been at sea since he was a boy of fourteen. They looked at the first officer, a capable man, not given to fuss, and across to where his steward was hovering, his uniform in his hand.
‘Tell me about it, Mr Longbourne.’
Minutes later, Captain Sherston was on the bridge.
The officers in their white uniforms went quietly about their duties, the man at the wheel, locked on its course, was alert. They were all intent on what the first officer and captain were saying.
The ship sailed on through the waters of the Red Sea. Above them the sky blazed with the brilliant stars that were the gift of ocean travel, and were reflected in the inky, gentle swell. The throb of the engines was steady, reassuring.
‘This Mrs Hotspur, a passenger to Bombay, she went ashore at Port Said?’
‘Yes, sir. For the day.’
‘Did she go on one of the tours? To the pyramids?’
‘No, sir. She went ashore with friends.’
‘But came back on board.’
‘As far as we know, sir. Her re-embarkation card was handed in.’
‘And her stewardess says her bed wasn’t slept in last night? Who is the stewardess?’
‘Pigeon, sir.’
‘She didn’t report it?’
‘It happens, sir, that a woman might …’ the first officer looked at Captain Sherston’s Presbyterian face, and he swallowed, ‘… spend the night elsewhere, sir.’
‘The dining room stewards say she didn’t take breakfast, lunch or dinner today?’
‘That’s correct sir.’
‘And this ten-year-old boy, Peter Messenger, says he saw her standing by the rail on C-deck at about nine o’clock, one hour and ten minutes after we sailed from Port Said?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Tell me about Mrs Hotspur.’
The first officer consulted his notes. ‘Mrs Verity Hotspur. A widow, I understand. A very charming lady, and a cousin of Lady Claudia Vere, who is also aboard – she joined at Lisbon. It was Lady Claudia who raised the alarm.’
‘Lady Claudia Vere. So this missing passenger, Lady Claudia’s cousin, will turn out to be connected to all kinds of important people?’
‘Bound to be, sir.’
Captain Sherston let out a long sigh. ‘Emergency procedures for man overboard, Mr Longbourne.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Then when the orders had been given, the first officer asked, ‘Not much chance for her, is there?’
‘None whatever. If she missed the propellers, the sharks will have got her. If not, she’ll have drowned.’
PART ONE (#ulink_c3baac8a-8423-5a23-9bf3-183d84892b6f)
SEPTEMBER 1938 (#ulink_e39ed3aa-856b-5496-8a63-ebef19e7f1ca)
ONE (#ulink_0f69422a-cae8-584e-b833-6009e07a6982)
Verity came out on deck into one of those pale autumn days that hovers between rain and sunshine; a breath of wind rippling the still waters of the harbour warned that summer was yielding to autumn.
Despite the light wool jacket she wore, she shivered, both from the chill in the air which heralded the approach of winter, and from an inner cold of fear. Fear for the times, with the shadow of war looming over the country she was leaving; fear for herself. She was no longer afraid of war itself, since there was nothing she could do to prevent or prepare for that. What made her afraid? Her nightmares? Klaus, and his successor, that flat-faced man with no discernible personality? Her future, her brother’s fate?
All of those.
Gulls drifted in the sky above her and bobbed on the oily waters far below, their eerie mews a counterpoint to the whistles and hoots of tugs and the flotilla of other vessels going to and fro in the busy harbour. Vee sniffed the salty air, the dockland tang of tar and sea and smoke, and it brought a bitter taste to her mouth. The vast area of Tilbury Docks, alive with the bustle and activity of one of the busiest ports in the world, held no appeal for her; she longed for the boat to leave, for the line of water between the ship and the quay to widen and become an arm’s length, a fifty-yard gap, for the land to fade into the distance, for there to be nothing but green-grey waves and foam and sky.
By some trick of the breeze, voices floated up to her from the quayside, the words reaching her ears with extraordinary clarity. A cheerful woman’s voice: ‘I say, isn’t that Mrs Verity Hotspur up there? Looking fearfully smart? In the red hat!’
‘Who’s Mrs Hotspur when she’s at home?
‘She’s a society lady, a widow, her husband …’ the words were lost on the wind, then were clear again. ‘I expect she’s off to Egypt, for the winter.’
‘Running away somewhere safe, more like,’ said a morose nasal voice. ‘Wish I could do the same.’
‘Come on, Jimmie,’ said the cheerful voice, ‘got to fight for your country, you know. Anyhow, who says there’s going to be a war? Let’s look on the bright side.’
‘They’re all running away. One law for the rich and another for the rest of us.’
Running away. Dear God, if only they knew what she was running away from. War? It was laughable. Inevitable, but irrelevant and nothing to do with why she was standing on the top deck of the SS Gloriana, soon – not soon enough – to be setting off on a voyage to India.
She rested her arms on the teak rail. On board ship was an orderly world, where wood and brass were polished to a gleaming, reflective finish. It was a world run by bells and routine and people who knew their duty. Where lascars rose before dawn to scrub down and dry the decks to immaculate perfection before foot of passenger or officer stepped on them. Where meals were provided on the dot of the appointed hour, where the distance travelled was noted at precisely twelve o’clock each day.
It was, nonetheless, a more changeable world than the one she was leaving. As the Gloriana made her steady way across the sea, the stars would move imperceptibly out of their customary places, until, one day, they would be different stars, the stars of the southern skies, and the ship would have sailed out of Europe and into the Indian Ocean.
New skies, a new country, but an old life. She wished that this voyage marked a clean break in her life, one of those turning points when the door shut on the old and you stepped out into the beginning of something completely new.
How often in life did that happen? When you were born, of course. When you learned to walk, although no one ever remembered, at least not consciously, what a difference that made to a life: the first steps, the first taste of independence. School, perhaps, was another new start; for her, going away to boarding school had marked the end of her childhood. And the biggest step – no, stride – of all, when she’d taken the train from Yorkshire to university.
Where, even while she was still an undergraduate, a new, adult life had begun. Like a nun hearing the call of God and taking up her vocation, that was how she had seen it. How wrong she had been, how dewy-eyed and naive and angry and full of herself and so sure of what was right.
And because of listening to that deceitful inner voice and giving in to her anger, she was here now. On board the SS Gloriana, sailing at another’s bidding, full of fear and hatred, uncertain whether she could possibly do what was asked of her, knowing that she didn’t want to. And the price of failure?
A life.
She looked down the steep sides of the great liner, down over three more railings and decks and then rows of portholes, down to the quay, where the wind stirred scraps of paper and litter on the quayside. Down there, pieces on a chessboard, people were milling around as the moment of sailing drew near.
The last few passengers hurried out of the customs house, checking passports and boarding cards. Porters with trolleys laden to improbable heights with towers of luggage, each suitcase and box and trunk labelled with stickers: P & O; SS Gloriana; initials, a large capital letter in a circle, B for Brown, J for Jones, S for Smith; destination labels for Lisbon, Port Said, Bombay; Wanted on Voyage. The Not-Wanted-on-Voyage luggage had all been taken away to the hold, to sit in staid rows until the port of disembarkation; she wished she could wrap herself up and pass the time among the lumber in the darkness of the hold. That was where she belonged, among the rats and the detritus, not here in the comfort and luxury of first class.
‘Rats leaving the sinking ship, that’s what they are,’ said the nasal voice. Vee looked towards the great hawsers stretching to the capstans on the quay, holding the vessel tightly in place; she had heard that rats did indeed know when a ship was going to founder, when something was amiss, and would be seen streaming down the ropes and on to land. No, there were no rats. She was the rat, in that man’s eyes. She and all the other passengers.
‘Watch out for Sam and don’t be so uncharitable.’
That was the cheerful-sounding woman who had recognized her; who had no doubt seen her photo in Tatler, or in the more scurrilous papers when … No, she wasn’t going to think about that.
Vee narrowed her eyes, trying to identify who, of all those standing so far down there, had called her a rat. It was that man in the shabby mac, with a hat that had seen better days. Beside him stood a perky young woman, wearing a coat too thin even for this weather. She had a look of dogged good humour on her face; her hair, escaping from a velvet hat that had been brushed to raise a fading pile, was blonde and brassy. She wore too much lipstick, but she had a personality, a confidence about her. Vee envied her. She felt that whoever she was, Miss Velvet Hat had a better, less complicated life than her own. She probably slept soundly and dreamlessly at night, and woke with a curiosity and excitement about the day to come, even though she no doubt had to work hard for a meagre living, never had quite enough to eat and little hope of a better future.
‘Sam’s not running away, Jimmie. He’s got a job to do out there, same as you and me have here.’
‘I didn’t say Sam was running away, and I don’t suppose the rest of them going tourist class are either. Ordinary people they are, like Sam and you and me. No,’ with a contemptuous gesture up at the deck where Vee was standing, ‘it’s that lot up there get my goat. All those first-class passengers, hoity-toity, not lifting a finger to do anything for themselves. Seven-course meals and dancing every night, and not a care in the world, and get out of England, quick, before the Nazi bombs come raining down and they might get hurt.’
‘Like I said, maybe there isn’t going to be a war.’
‘Like the sun isn’t going to rise tomorrow. Those toffs all know there’s going to be a war. If they can’t scarper to America, then they think they can hide away in some warm spot where life isn’t going to change, and they can have their servants and their whiskies and let other people be blown to pieces. It makes me sick.’
‘Everything makes you sick, Jimmie.’
‘I know who that Mrs Hotspur is.’ Jimmie’s voice was indignant. ‘It was all in the paper when her husband died, fishy business, that, if you ask me.’
Vee was following the swooping, soaring flight of a gull with her eyes, but she saw nothing. She was looking inwards, at another scene, a bloodstained study. Klaus’s words, from that day in Paris, came creeping into her mind, ‘We have arranged for certain things to happen.’
Certain things? No, it was impossible. Why should they have done that? And then, if they were responsible, then how safe was she? In London, here, anywhere? Words drifted into her head. Don’t put a foot wrong, always do as they say, they’ve no forgiveness in their souls. You don’t want to come to a gory end …
There was a smell of fish in her nostrils, fish and seaweed, the smell of the beach when the tide turns and goes out, revealing the debris that lies beneath the sea.
‘Look, there’s Sam waving.’ Her face beaming, the young woman in the velvet hat pulled off the red scarf she was wearing round her throat and flapped it towards the other end of the ship, where the tourist-class passengers were coming out on deck to wave their goodbyes and watch their native land fade into the distance.
She was looking up at Vee again and, for a moment, their eyes met. Then the woman turned back to the man in the shabby mac. Once again the words reached Vee. ‘Scandal wherever she goes, she’s often in Tatler, and her cousin, Lady Claudia Vere, oh, she’s lovely, blonde hair and huge blue eyes. Her picture’s always in the society magazines.’
‘Yes, and she’s got a noble brother who’s stark staring bonkers and will swing from the nearest lamp-post come the revolution.’
‘Oh, you and your revolution. I tell you, there isn’t going to be any Bolshevik revolution, and the sooner you realize it, the happier you’ll be. Then you can get on with life instead of moaning about it.’
Vee turned away, dismayed as the girl’s words struck home. She pitied Jimmie and his illusions. Probably, even before the year was out, he would be in uniform, at close quarters with his brothers to a degree that would make him long for less comradeship, and without a minute in the day to ponder on the rights of men or the oppression of the workers.
There was a greater sense of urgency on the quay below; a car arrived and its doors flung open even before the brakes were on, three men got out, a porter came hurrying to unstrap cases from the boot, an official with a clipboard and a frown ushered them towards the customs shed, pulling out a watch as he did so.
Vee stiffened, her eyes fixed on a tall, dark man in a grey suit standing beside a wicker basket. She couldn’t put a name to him, she had never been introduced to him, but she had seen him before, several times, always as a shadowy, lurking figure. A watcher. In the park, when she and Klaus … And outside her flat. A man with a bony face. Not distinctive, and yet his features were etched on her mind. He wore the kind of clothes that would never stand out in a crowd, he was a blender.
Panic set in. If he were coming on board, it could mean only one thing.
She must get off. This was a hideous mistake. She would get off the boat right now, this very minute, never mind her luggage, never mind anything. She would take the train to London, and then to Scotland, to Ireland, anywhere …
She couldn’t. Despair swept over her.
But was he embarking for the voyage? He was making no move towards the ship. Instead, his eyes were scanning the decks, resolutely and systematically. She stepped back and tucked herself behind a metal buttress. The watcher’s eyes paused, moved on, came back. Only his eyes weren’t on her. His hand rose in casual acknowledgement, then he turned abruptly, and was lost in the crowd of onlookers.
He hadn’t been looking for her. Who then? Someone on the deck below, over to the left. She hung over the rail; all she could see were hats; everyone was looking down at the quay or over to where the tugs were manoeuvring into position.
She ran along the deck, pushing past other passengers, and almost tumbled down the steep gangway to the deck below. It was teeming with people, some sombre, tearful, even; others cheerful. Which of them had the man been looking for? She caught a glimpse of a man who looked just like Joel. It couldn’t be, of course, Joel was the last man to leave his college and set sail just before the start of term.
Some of her fellow passengers recognized her, there were whispers and curious glances. But not one of them was the right kind of person; none of them could be an associate of the man on the quay.
A cheer went up from the quayside, paper streamers rained down from the decks and the gangways were trundled aside. Answering cries and shouts floated down from the decks, there was a burst of steam, a whistle and then a blast from the SS Gloriana’s funnel, an oddly lightweight sound in comparison to the bass notes of the tugs. A band was playing, bunting flapped and a strand fell loose, swooping down into the sea.
Inch by inch, the boat glided away from her mooring. There was a foot of murky water, a yard, fifty yards. Then the Gloriana, attended by her acolyte tugs, was sailing serenely down the grey stretches of the Thames, moving slowly past warehouses and wharves. People in small boats waved, more hooters and horns and whistles sounded; the voyage had begun.
Vee stayed at her post, watching without attention as they sailed past cargo boats, unkempt and tubby and rusty, holds gaping, crates and laden nets being swung down into their bowels on winches. Business, purpose, activity.
Lucky, lucky people.
Unlucky her?
The moment of self-pity passed before it had begun. It wasn’t a question of luck. It was a matter of taking the wrong decisions, in acting out of anger and temper and folly, and of one disastrous mistake, a well-meaning mistake, leading to another and another and another until here she was, where she had no wish to be, acting and living like a puppet, with strings pulled by a puppet master who had no more interest in her or her rage or wretchedness than if she had indeed been a painted marionette.
If only …
The if only’s went back a long way, she knew that. If only her sister Daisy hadn’t died. If only Grandfather hadn’t been such a tyrant. If only …
Her life might have taken a very different path. If she could have those years back, be given a magical chance to live them again, the one place she wouldn’t be was here, on this boat.
There they were again, the terrible thoughts that rattled round and round in her head. She’d need a sleeping tablet tonight, to bring her at least an hour or two of the heavy and dreamless sleep that she craved. For that brief space of time, no dreams broke through the pharmaceutical veil of her white tablets: take one at bedtime.
She was profoundly grateful to a medical friend for prescribing them.
‘You’re a fool, Vee,’ he’d said. ‘They aren’t any kind of an answer, and if your own doctor won’t give them to you, he’s probably right.’
‘Darling, he’s simply too old-fashioned. The only reason I sleep badly, according to him, is because I’m a young woman without husband or children, not fulfilling my raison d’être, do you see?’
‘He can’t blame you for being a widow.’
‘He can blame me for being a well-off young widow who, after a decent interval, hasn’t remarried. That’s an affront to the natural order of things, almost as bad as someone like Cynthia Lovelace going off to live in a cottage in Wales with her burly woman friend who teaches PE at Grandpont, or the unfeminine types who choose to go to university and have a career instead of sacrificing their virginity and independence on Hymen’s altar to an eligible and suitable young man. So, no, he won’t give me sleeping pills.’
Vee’s thoughts flitted to Cousin Mildred, who had her own means of dealing with the strains and stresses of life, ‘Do try some, dear child, there’s nothing like it.’
There were bound to be people she knew on board, several of them with Mildred’s habit. Most of them from the ranks of the idle rich, not people going out to do a job of work like the unknown Sam with his friends Jimmie and Velvet Hat waving him goodbye from the quayside. Egypt? India? Their week’s holiday would be spent hiking in Wales or at a b. & b. in Weymouth; they wouldn’t have the luxury of weeks and months of leisurely travel in warmer climates, with expensive substances to change their spirits and mood if they felt the need.
Oh, yes, there would be friends and acquaintances on the Gloriana, people going to winter in the Egyptian sun, and it was the time of year when mamas with daughters who hadn’t taken during the season, or during several seasons, chose to go on pilgrimage, to set off for foreign shores where the heat and the inward-looking British communities might produce the elusive mate not found in the ballrooms of Mayfair or the country houses of Shropshire and Gloucestershire.
Vee went slowly down the wide, mirrored staircase that linked the upper and lower decks. She attracted a good deal of attention; the junior officer on his way to the radio room with a sheaf of telegrams; the florist going the other way with an armful of flowers; the lady’s maid hurrying to the beauty salon to acquire some essential forgotten item; passengers, anxious to find their cabins; all of them noticed to some degree the particular allure that Vee had. Some noticed with only a fraction of their attention, some admired, some envied.
Vee herself was oblivious both to her surroundings and her fellow human beings. Her ability to attract the attention – and the affections and desires, it had to be said – of those around her was an old story, and one that no longer interested her.
A stewardess was hovering at the end of her corridor. ‘Mrs Hotspur? Cabin sixty-seven? It’s on the left, I’ll show you. Are you travelling with your maid?’
She was not. A smile, a douceur, and this ungainly but kindly-looking woman would be her slave for the voyage. A maid! That was the last person she needed on this journey.
It was a single cabin, spacious for a liner, with a dressing table and neatly fitted cupboards and drawers, an outside cabin, with a rectangular window looking out on to a secluded deck. No strollers or nosy-joes were allowed along this stretch of deck, this was a reserved area for the lucky occupants of cabins sixty-five to seventy-seven. Her luggage was already in the cabin, strapped and labelled with a large round H for Hotspur, First Class passenger to Bombay.
She sat down at the dressing table, and took off her scarlet hat, laying it carelessly down on the glass top. The stewardess, hovering in the doorway, came forward and took it. Vee smiled at her. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Pigeon, madam.’
‘Thank you, Pigeon.’
‘Shall I unpack for you now, madam?’
‘Later, if you don’t mind.’
Still Pigeon lingered. ‘We were expecting a Mr Howard to have this cabin.’
‘Mine was a late booking, a cancellation.’
It had been a risk, leaving it so late, but the clerk at the shipping line had murmured confidentially that there was usually a cabin available at the last minute. It didn’t trouble the company, because there was always a waiting list, especially for a vessel like the SS Gloriana, and at this time of year.
A smile, a note, and Mrs Hotspur moved to the top of the waiting list. What had happened to Mr Howard? she wondered for an idle moment. An elderly gentleman, struck down with apoplexy? A prosperous businessman with urgent business to attend to, that prevented him from sailing? A man of substance, undoubtedly, to travel in this type of cabin. A young man in disgrace, being sent out to the East by a distressed family? Did young men still get sent out to India to keep them out of harm’s way? What if her parents had sent Hugh out to India? No, she wasn’t going to think about Hugh. The list of people and things she didn’t want to think about was alarmingly long. Back to Mr Howard. ‘I dare say he was a family man, escaping to a new life,’ she said out loud.
‘I beg your pardon, madam?’ said a startled Pigeon.
Vee laughed. ‘Oh, nothing. I was just thinking aloud.’ She got up, smoothing out the wrinkles from her slim-fitting skirt. ‘I’m going to look around, so you can see to my things while I’m gone. There’s a wine-coloured dress in that big suitcase, the one on its side. That’ll do for this evening.’
‘Best go and see the purser about your place in the dining room, madam,’ said Pigeon as she made a dive for the suitcase. ‘You’ll want to be at a good table at the second sitting.’
One look at Mrs Hotspur, a fashionable woman and a real lady, you could see that at a glance, thought Pigeon as she held out her hands for the keys, and the purser would be delighted for her to sit wherever she wanted. Which wouldn’t be at the captain’s table, if she, Pigeon were any judge of a passenger. Too dull for such a smart and lively lady. She was sure she’d seen her picture in the Tatler more than once. It pleased her, she much preferred upper-class passengers to some of the riff-raff you got on board these days.
TWO (#ulink_7fe3743a-f541-53b4-9b12-15940c59427e)
Peter Messenger loved ocean liners with all the enthusiasm of his ten years. He loved catching the boat train and arriving at the docks where the great sleek white liners were moored with unbelievably huge cables stretching far up into the bows. He loved the oily briny smell and the gulls and the gloomy customs shed and the piles of trunks, all labelled and waiting to be trundled up into the ship, some to disappear into the hold, that mysterious place where the Not Wanted on Voyage went, or to appear in your cabin, waiting to be unpacked and then stowed away by the baggage steward until the end of the voyage, three weeks in the future.
The first time he’d been on a boat, he’d been overwhelmed by the size of it, by the notion that anything that big could sail without sinking. This time, he’d led the way up the gangway with jaunty steps, ahead of his stepmother, Lally, with that Miss Tyrell bringing up the rear.
Miss Tyrell was the one blot on his happiness. What had possessed his mother to bring her?
‘Darling, I’m not bringing her. She’s on her way out to India in any case, to look after her brother and her nephews and nieces. Her sister-in-law died recently, so sad, a tropical disease she said.’
Peter wished Miss Tyrell could be struck down by a tropical disease, right now, before they were even on board. ‘She’s a nanny.’
‘Not any more, and she’s coming to look after me as much as you. My clothes and so on. I shan’t be taking a maid, your father says an English maid is always a nuisance in India, they don’t adapt. Miss Tyrell will be very helpful, and you’ll grow to like her.’
‘I’m far too old for a nanny.’
‘You’re not too old to need some extra looking after, you’ve been so ill, darling. It’ll make me feel much happier when I’m not there to know that Miss Tyrell has you under her eye.’
‘Why won’t you be there?’
‘Well, there’s a social life on board ship, you know that. Bridge and games, and then dancing and so on in the evenings. I don’t want to have to worry about you all the time.’
‘I can look after myself.’
‘Of course you can. You’re the man of the family while Daddy isn’t here, but even so, we’ll be glad of Miss Tyrell. I don’t think she’s a fusser. She seems very practical and down-to-earth.’
Lally kept her own doubts to herself. Miss Tyrell had, although she wouldn’t say so to Peter, been wished on her. Claudia’s sister-in-law had telephoned her.
‘Mrs Messenger? My name is Monica Sake. We met once, in London, when you were staying with Claudia, but I don’t expect you to remember me.’
‘Oh, of course …’
‘I hear from Agnes that you’re going out to India.’
Lally’s heart sank, as it always did when her mother-in-law was mentioned.
‘On the Gloriana.’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I’d like you to take our old nanny with you.’
Visions of some decrepit family retainer sprang to Lally’s astonished mind. ‘Oh, no, really, I don’t think –’ And why was their old nanny going out to India in any case?
‘We’re desolated to lose her, she’s the best nanny imaginable, been with the family since she was a nursery maid, she was my husband’s nanny. And Claudia’s of course, she was nanny to all of them.’
Monica Sake was Lucius’s wife, that was it; she was the Countess of Sake. And the nanny Lady Sake wanted to foist on her had looked after Claudia, and Lucius, whom Claudia and Vee said was – what was the word they used? Bonkers.
Monica’s voice was quacking away. ‘We’ve tried to persuade her to stay. However, her brother’s wife died a little while ago, some foreign illness, and Nanny Tyrell feels she owes it to her brother to go and keep house for him. It isn’t a particularly convenient time for us, she was due to go to Henrietta and take care of the baby. But I suppose she must be allowed to do what she thinks best.’
Lally began to warm towards this unknown Miss Tyrell.
‘She wants to work her passage out. She’s a thrifty soul. I heard you’d be taking your stepson – sickly, isn’t he, and so not yet up to school? She’ll be perfect, she can take the boy off your hands. You won’t want to be bothered with a boy that age when you’re on board. Or are you taking your own nanny?’
‘Well, no.’
‘Or your maid?’
‘No.’
‘She can do that for you as well. She’s extremely competent, she’ll be a great help to you. That’s settled then.’
And it was, to Lally’s dismay. She still hadn’t told Henry that she was bringing Peter with her, and she hoped that news about the sickly boy didn’t reach her husband through the letters that his officious family wrote to him whenever they had an idle moment. Fortunately, Henry rarely read private letters; she suspected the only ones he looked at with any attention were the ones from her, and she took care to keep them brief.
‘Official correspondence is enough for any man,’ he would say, opening a long screed from his mother, flicking through the pages and crumpling the letter into a ball before tossing it into the waste-paper basket.
This wasn’t Miss Tyrell’s first voyage. She’d crossed the Atlantic more than once, had accompanied the Veres out to Hong Kong – now, there was a strange country – and had spent six months in Bombay. She liked India. She liked the heat and the people and the energy, although the shocking poverty and the skinny animals made her uncomfortable.
She was pleased for the chance to work her passage rather than pay for it herself. For one thing, it meant she would be travelling first class, which was what she was accustomed to. If she’d had to pay, it would have been tourist class, and a shared cabin down in the bowels of the ship, and not at all the kind of company she was used to. She wasn’t sure about this Mrs Messenger, though. Lady Sake had spoken of her in the pitying tone her employers used about half-wits, cripples and social outsiders.
‘Of course Harry is absolutely one of us, the Messengers go back for ever, but Lally, as they call her, I believe her name is actually Lavender, is not. She’s American, well that’s another world, don’t you think? Headstrong, I’d say, by the look of her, but then you’d need strength of character to cope with Harry, I never knew a man with so much energy. Her father’s a politician, from Chicago of all places. He was a doctor before he went into the Senate, Irish, of course, her name was Fitzpatrick. And she’s Catholic. Will that bother you, Nanny?’
Having no religious convictions of her own, merely subscribing to the conventional Anglicanism of her employers, Miss Tyrell said no, in the tone of voice that made Lady Sake feel for a moment that she had committed a solecism by even mentioning religion.
‘I do hope you don’t suffer from seasickness, Miss Tyrell. It can be very bad in the Bay of Biscay at that time of year.’
Seasick? Not her. As the SS Gloriana sailed into what her crew called a dirty night, her stomach was perfectly in order. She gave Peter a dose of tonic, though, just in case there should be any inclination to collywobbles, as she called any kind of stomach upset, and it would help to keep him regular, so important when a child was convalescent. Peter was the nervy sort, you could see that, although that might be due to his having been so ill. And Mrs Messenger? Miss Tyrell felt sorry for her. She didn’t care to see a young woman with those tired eyes and that look of haunted care to her. The child had been in danger, yes, but he was better now, and he was a stepson, not one of her own. Perhaps that was the problem. But here she was, on her way back to India, to be reunited with her husband. This was a time for happiness, not for fretting.
And not a good sailor by the look of her.
‘Run along, Peter, Mummy’s not feeling very well and isn’t in the mood for your chatter.’
‘I was only telling her about some people she knows on board, that’s all.’ It wasn’t for Miss Tyrell to keep him away from his mother. Then he understood. ‘She’s seasick,’ he said with scorn.
THREE (#ulink_7fe3743a-f541-53b4-9b12-15940c59427e)
Perdita Richardson looked around her narrow cabin. She liked the round porthole, it had a distinctly nautical air that was pleasing; if you were going to be shunted off on a sea voyage, then you might as well feel you were on board a ship, and not merely in some floating hotel. She’d seen her friend Tish and her new husband off last year after their wedding. They’d had a stateroom on the Queen Mary – they’d been going to spend their honeymoon with her husband’s family in New England – and Perdita had been disappointed to see how ordinary it was. Plush, but it could have been a hotel anywhere.
This, however, was unquestionably shipshape; fitted lockers beneath the bunk, everything in its place. She took off the shapeless brown felt hat she’d crammed on her head for want of anything better being immediately to hand, and gave her hair a vigorous ruffle. Curly and unmanageable, she kept it in place when she could be bothered with a fearsome array of pins and fixative. Usually, she left it in its natural state; that was one good thing about being a student of music, appearances went for very little. Most of her fellow students at the Royal Academy of Music were young and hard-up and had minds above mundane items of clothing or the nice arrangement of hair.
She’d tried cutting her thick curls short, but in her opinion it made her look like one of the woolly sheep that chewed the grass around her home in Westmoreland, and there was some hope of elegance, just every now and then, if you had hair long enough to be pinned up. She rummaged in her bag for a hairbrush and tugged it through the disorder. It made little difference to her appearance, but she felt she had made an effort.
Not evening dress the first night out, everyone knew that. So she’d wear – what? Despite the small cabin and the untidy hair, Perdita was far from being a poor student, or a poor anything. Her family were wealthy and she had money of her own; she could buy all the clothes she wanted, but found it difficult to find much ready-made that fitted her tall, rangy frame, and had a dislike of the fussing around at the dressmakers, as she put it. So her clothes were an odd collection of what she’d found that fitted her, including some pairs of men’s slacks, which she found comfortable and which fitted her long legs. No one made anything of them at college, but now, throwing open the lid of her suitcase, she did wonder whether they were quite right for a sea voyage.
I expect lots of people will be frightfully posh, she said to herself. Well, they’ll have to be satisfied with their own poshness, how I look can’t affect them at all. She took out a favourite green dress, gave it a shake, and opened the narrow cupboard to find a coat hanger.
A woman in uniform appeared at the door as though by magic. Small and shrewish, she cast a disapproving look at Perdita’s open suitcase and stepped inside the cabin, making Perdita retreat until she had her back against the washbasin, the green dress held in front of her like a shield.
‘I’ll unpack for you, miss. I’m your stewardess. My name’s Merkin.’
‘Oh, thank you. Only, I can do it myself.’
Merkin paid no attention. ‘You go along to the dining room and put your name down for the second sitting. Not the first, mind, that’s for kiddies and people who don’t care for the social side. My passengers always take the second sitting.’
Such was Merkin’s moral force that Perdita found herself outside her cabin and following the arrows guiding her to G-deck.
‘Boat drill half an hour after we sail, miss,’ Merkin called after her. ‘You’re muster station twenty-three, and you’ll need to have your life-jacket with you.’
Boat drill? Lifejacket? This was Perdita’s first voyage, and she was mystified. Not to worry, someone would explain it to her, and say where she had to be and what she had to do. People always were keen to put you on the right path, especially when it came to anything as institutional-sounding as boat drill. Like fire drill at school, only not shinning down ladders in the dead of night and usually in the rain, it was to be hoped.
A sudden tiredness swept over her, irritating her with her weakness. She was completely well, they all said she was fully recovered, only needed time to get her strength back. Hence the voyage, a round trip to India, with a month or so staying with friends in Delhi; it would do her the world of good, the doctors had assured her. She hadn’t been interested, wasn’t interested in going on a voyage, had never wanted to go to India, they were her grandfather’s friends in Delhi, not her friends, she didn’t want to stay with a lot of strangers, and in what she knew would be a very strange country.
Only Grandpapa had been so keen on the idea, and he hadn’t been well himself, and she hated to disappoint him; it would be churlish and unkind to refuse his generous offer of a ticket and all expenses paid.
Not for the first time, she wondered if he was so urgent for her to go, not because of her recent illness, but because of the coming war. If war broke out soon, she could be stuck for the duration in India. Which might suit Grandpapa, but didn’t suit her at all. What music was there for her in India? Besides, if there was a war, she wanted to be where she belonged, in England, not away from all the bombs and terror on some distant verandah. The last war had gone on for four years; she couldn’t imagine not seeing Westmoreland for four whole years.
No, to be fair, Grandpapa would have sent her to America if he were concerned for her safety and wanted her out of England in time of war. He must think that the war he was so sure was on its way wasn’t going to start for a few months yet.
Her friends weren’t much interested in talk of war, but those who talked about it mostly reckoned that it was necessary to do something about Hitler and the Nazis. Others, cynical arrivals from Austria and Germany, Jewish refugees with music in their souls that made the English students sigh and give up hope, said that Britain and France wouldn’t fight for Czechoslovakia or for anyone else, it was all just words. Hitler got what he wanted, always would get what he wanted, and what he didn’t want was to fight England.
Perdita’s mind turned to the here and now, and to her music. The first thing she had to do was find a piano. There were several on board; that was one thing she had insisted on. ‘Grandpapa, I can’t go if I can’t work. I’m hopelessly out of practice, and more weeks with no playing will just be a disaster. If I can work on the voyages out and back, and if your friends have a piano, something at least halfway decent, I’ll be able to practise there.’ Weren’t things like pianos liable to be eaten by giant ants or inclined to warp and go out of tune for ever in the moist heat of the unimaginable east?
The friends did indeed have a piano, a good one, they had assured her in a courteous letter. So possibly not yet eaten by ants. And Grandpapa had spoken to the chairman of the shipping line, an old chum, needless to say, and had been assured that Perdita would be able to practise in one of the lounges whenever she wanted.
Perdita knew about practice and doing it whenever you wanted. That meant, when no one else was around; well, that was all right with her. She was an early waker, distressingly so since she’d been ill, so if she could get a couple of hours in first thing, no one would be about to bother her or to be bothered by an hour of scales and arpeggios. The dining room forgotten, she set off on a piano hunt.
FOUR (#ulink_78f00c15-c212-5f63-9259-dbbbaa533c53)
Vee held the white, round box in her hand, hesitating. She lifted the lid, and shook two pills on to her palm.
Recently, these pills had begun to have a strange effect on her, in some mysterious way causing her to relive, in the utmost clarity, scenes from her life. Not truly dreams, for there was nothing in the sequences that rolled through her mind that hadn’t happened. The past was simply playing over again, as though she were watching a film.
When she woke, tired and thick-headed, for she always had alcohol to help the sleeping pills work, she could remember only a little of these waking dreams, the re-enactments of her former life, but the memories and images they left in her mind disturbed her profoundly throughout the ensuing day, until the evening came, and her mind cleared, and she could numb herself once more with a drink and companionship. She never drank to excess. She couldn’t risk losing control, the alcohol was merely a crutch, not a wiper-out of the emotions and dilemmas she longed to be free of.
She had been tempted, over the last few months, to try some of Mildred’s remedy for keeping the world at bay, but it wasn’t for her, she didn’t want a sense of heightened excitement, she had that on her own account. What she wanted was the cessation of feeling, then she could be happy.
Better to relive scenes of her past than to be caught in more nightmares.
She sat down and brushed her hair, long firm strokes to soothe her fears away. Then she climbed into bed, between stiff sheets, smelling of ironing and starch. She left the light on, a glowing blue night-light. Like on a train, she thought drowsily, as the pills began to take effect. Sweet dreams, she muttered to herself, as her eyelids closed. Sweet dreams, or bitter dreams, to match her thoughts.
Tonight, she was back in the Deanery. She was eighteen years old, she knew that, because there was a birthday just past, and a card on the fireplace of her room, wishing her a happy birthday from Hugh. He’d drawn a caricature of her and her cat, a brilliant sketch, both the cat and the chair it was on decorated with bows. Hugh was as gifted with his pen as he was with words.
She was sure that it wasn’t going to work. It was worth a try, it was always worth a try, but she, and the mistresses at school, and Hugh, who had been as encouraging as he knew how, had all known that Grandfather would forbid her to go to university.
‘No chance of a scholarship, Vee, I suppose?’ Hugh asked her as they sat, legs outstretched, on the white window seat in their sitting room on the top floor. The window was open, although the day was cold, since they were enjoying an illicit cigarette. Smoking, like alcohol, was banned in the Deanery.
‘There’s a chap I know at the House, he gets two hundred and fifty a year. Twice what his father earns, actually.’
‘What does his father do?’ Vee asked.
‘He’s a carpenter, I think.’
‘Only Daddy isn’t a carpenter, unfortunately, so I doubt if I count as a deserving case.’
‘Should have had Jesus for a father,’ said Hugh irreverently. ‘After all, God the Father, one substance with the Son, so … All right, I’m not really being frivolous, I’m trying to help.’
‘Irreligious rather than frivolous, don’t you think?’ She tapped the ash from the end of her cigarette carefully on to the outside ledge of the window. ‘Women’s colleges aren’t rich, and the scholarship girls are all poor.’
‘You’ll be poor, if Daddy and Grandfather cut off your allowance.’
‘It isn’t the same. Besides, you have to be brilliant to get a major scholarship, as well as being deserving, and I’m neither.’
‘True. Joel Ibbotson is brilliant, no doubt about it.’
It was all very well for Hugh, but however compassionate he was, his was a different situation. He was a man, he didn’t have to earn or justify or sweat for his place at university. It was the next natural thing for him.
‘Whereas for me, the next natural thing is getting married and starting a family.’
‘I pity the poor husband,’ said Hugh, tossing the butt of cigarette out of the window.
‘You are an ass, Hugh, now we’ll have to go down and find it before the gardener does.’
The gardener, a dour ancient of even more puritanical inclinations than the Dean, deeply disapproved of smoking, and had been known to harangue tourists with a stream of Old Testament prophecy about where those who smoked would end up.
Hugh slid to his feet. ‘Lord, yes, what a bore, but anything not to get a lecture about going from one smoking pit to another.’
Vee got up and linked arms with him. ‘Or Daddy being distressed and asking himself where he went wrong with us.’
Hugh looked at Vee with affection. He was barely half a head taller than her, short for a man. They were very alike, obviously brother and sister in physique and colouring, and with the same direct gaze in their dark eyes.
‘He did go wrong, in a very big way, I fear, but smoking is the least of it.’
Hugh wasn’t there when their grandfather arrived to discuss Vee’s future. ‘Lucky for me I’ll be back in Oxford when he comes,’ he’d said. ‘You know how scenes upset me.’
Unfortunately, scenes didn’t upset Grandfather.
With the easy movement of dreams, she was no longer in her austere, bare-floored bedroom, but in the drawing room, large and sombre; Victorian in furniture and colour, and even smell.
It was a Monday. Family conferences always happened on a Monday. Grandfather never came to the Deanery at the weekend, because on the Saturday the Dean would be polishing his sermon, and on Sunday, Grandfather’s absence from divine service would be noticed.
Unlike many a child of the clergy, Vee never longed to escape Sunday services. The time spent in the great gloomy, chilly Minster: Matins and Evensong, and sometimes Holy Communion as well, gave her hours of peace. Sometimes she thought it was a God-given peace, could almost feel herself wrapped in the arms of a loving God; at other times a harsher realism told her it was simply that it was possible to be alone in church in a way that you couldn’t at home. The Dean never questioned his children’s faith. Even though he had lost all his trust in a beneficent and watchful God, he hoped by one means or another that his beliefs would return, and, meanwhile, his remaining children were going to be brought up in godly ways.
They were both a disappointment to him, Vee knew that perfectly well. Hugh was an aesthete from birth, a fey, babbling infant who had grown into a brilliant twister and spinner of words. His time at school had not been celebrated, as the Dean’s had, by success at sport, and the grim establishment he was sent to at thirteen, his father’s old school, had neither time nor liking for any boy who was different, who wasn’t obsessed with sport, who was in any way unchristian.
Hugh had survived, as Vee had survived her own bleak, northern boarding school. In fact, for most of the time, she was happier at school than at home, although in the holidays there had always been Hugh to escape with, to share jokes and enjoy the excitement of a modern world beckoning from outside the Deanery walls.
Grandfather, when he arrived late on Sunday evening, was in one of his jolly moods. Vee’s heart sank as she gave him a dutiful kiss, allowed him to pinch her cheek – how she hated that, and put his stick in the hall stand.
Grandfather in a jolly mood meant he had a scheme, something that pleased him, and she had a presentiment that it was to do with her – that was why he had come, she was sure of it, from the hints her mother had let drop, clothes for her, now that she was growing up, not much scope for a young lady in York …
She had already broached the subject of What next? with her father. When she told him her plans, striving to sound natural even while her hands were held so tightly together that her nails dug into her skin, he’d simply looked through her in that way he had.
‘Oh, I doubt if that will be possible, my dear. Your mother would hardly like it.’
The truth was, her mother wouldn’t care what she did, as long as she did it somewhere else. Vee knew that her mother was dreading her leaving school and spending days and weeks and months at the Deanery. Almost as much as she herself was dreading it.
‘Besides,’ her father went on, ‘there is the question of money.’
‘Hugh’s paid for.’
Which was a stupid thing to say. Hugh was a man, it was different for Hugh.
‘Your grandfather’s paying for Hugh at Oxford, not me. You’ll have to ask him.’
She knew what the answer would be.
Now they were all in the drawing room. Grandfather, his large and magnificent head under a mane of splendid white hair, sitting erect in the Dean’s chair. The Dean standing awkwardly by the fireplace, not looking at Vee, and Mummy, sitting on a slender upright chair, her tapestry in her hand, fingers searching among her wools for a colour match. Like one of the fates at work, Vee thought with a sudden feeling of resentment. Spinning and weaving and cutting, and what choice or say did any of the lives represented by those slender threads have in their fates?
Vee perched herself on the edge of the heavy-footed sofa.
‘Eighteen, now,’ said her grandfather genially. ‘A grown-up lass. Time to go out into the world. You’re looking forward to leaving school, I feel sure.’
Vee said nothing.
‘So we need to settle what you’re going to do next. You can’t hang around at home, getting under your mother’s feet and taking up with some stiff-necked young curate, that would never do.’
The Dean stirred uneasily and gave the fire an unnecessary stir with the poker.
Vee took a deep breath. ‘I know what I want to do when I leave school, Grandfather.’
‘You do?’ His face became more watchful. ‘Out with it, then.’
‘I want to go to university. I sat the exams, at school, and I’ve been accepted. At Oxford.’ She swallowed, and ploughed on. ‘For the new academic year that starts in October.’
The silence was palpable. The Dean looked down at the floor, her mother stitched resolutely on. Grandfather’s face was reddening alarmingly.
‘And I thought that perhaps I could spend six months abroad before I went up. I’m going to study modern languages, you see, and I’d like—’
Vee moved her head from side to side in a vain attempt to avert the explosion of wrath, the deadly missiles of her grandfather’s anger as they rained about her. She always hated to be shouted at, and even her mother’s cold reserve and chilly indifference was a thousand times better than this terrible rage.
Alarmed, the Dean rang for the maid, ordered a brandy, and the maid, after a frightened glance at the thunderous countenance of the bellowing Jacob Trenchard, scuttled away for the restorative.
It would take more than a brandy to soothe Grandfather. His contempt poured over Vee in an abusive torrent, the stupidity of all women, the wickedness of any university to open its doors to women, the incredible folly and wilfulness she had shown in going about her selfish, pointless schemes with no thought for family or her place in the world.
‘Have you wasted my money on education, so that you can turn into some dreadful bluestocking? Why, they won’t even give women degrees at Cambridge, because they know the whole thing’s a sham. Women’s brains aren’t designed for academic study, just as they aren’t designed for business or politics or any of the other spheres they try to meddle in these days.’
Her grandfather’s hatred and fear of women streamed out of him. Even Vee’s mother looked up from her needlework with a doubtful glance, but she wasn’t going to defend her daughter.
He hated educated women? Dear God, if only he knew how much she hated and despised him. ‘Daddy, please,’ said Vee desperately.
She should have known better than to expect any support from that direction.
‘My dear, it’s folly, and the school should never have encouraged you or allowed you to think of such a thing. I shall have something very sharp to say to your headmistress there, in fact, I shall write to the governors. They have no right to put such notions into an impressionable young head. Your grandfather and your mother and I will decide what’s best for you, and you should know that.’
‘What’s best for you, not what’s best for me.’
Vee had prayed she wouldn’t cry, she mustn’t show any weakness in front of Grandfather. Now she was white hot with rage of her own, and she had no tears to shed.
Grandfather sipped his brandy, calmed down, and proceeded as though she had never spoken, as though he hadn’t said the terrible things about her, about women.
‘Your mother’s place is here, a man in your father’s position needs a wife to help him. So we can’t ask her to go to London with you.’
‘I don’t want to go to London.’
He went on as though she hadn’t spoken. ‘Her sister, your Aunt Lettice, is bringing out Claudia this next season, and she’s agreed that you shall do the season together.’
Vee stared at him. ‘Do the season? In London? Me? Are you mad?’
Not all her arguments or pleading could avert her doom. Grandfather held the purse strings, and her father was too weak and too poor to stand up against his domineering sire – why should he, over this, when he hadn’t gone against the paternal wishes ever in his whole life? As for her mother, London was a long way away, and Vee would be out of her sight, which was all she cared about. She had suggested a year – two years, even – in Switzerland, for Vee to work up her languages and that kind of thing, but she had been overruled.
‘Waste of time and money,’ Grandfather had said. ‘Let her be a debutante, then she’ll meet the right kind of young man and marry. Young women can’t marry too young these days, it’s the only thing that keeps them out of mischief. Let Vee find a husband a bit older than herself, that works best. Mind you, I don’t want her getting attached to any layabout young aristocrat. I don’t have any time for that kind of thing, and I shan’t part with a penny unless I approve of the man. She can pick someone who’s got a career ahead of him, of good family, she is your daughter, Anne, and the cousin of an earl, she’s no reason to go feeling grateful for any fly-by-night who grabs her in a taxi and wants to whisk her to the altar four weeks later.’
‘You’re to go to London and do the season and be grateful for it,’ were her grandfather’s parting words.
He was gothic, as gothic as the Minster, as gothic as Daddy’s encrusted beliefs.
‘I’m very displeased at the way you’ve behaved, Vee. I shan’t forget it.’
And I, vowed Vee, shan’t ever forget the way you’ve behaved, and one of these days I’ll get my own back.
She was a modern, and they could make her go to London, but they couldn’t make her marry any man against her will. Which meant, any man at all, for the last thing Vee wanted was to move from the authority of her grandfather to be under the thumb of a husband.
‘Ring for the maid, Vee, your grandfather …’
* * *
Vee wrenched herself awake, to find herself bathed in sweat and hardly able to breathe. There was a tap at the door and Pigeon peered round it. ‘You rang, madam. Are you ill?’
‘I didn’t ring,’ Vee said, but knew that she had no idea what she might or might not have done in the grip of that haunting memory.
Pigeon advanced into the room. She was wearing her uniform; did she sleep in it? Vee wondered.
‘Is it seasickness, madam? Shall I fetch a basin?’
‘No, I’m not sick. It was a bad dream, a nightmare.’
‘If you’re sure. That’s why I’m up, so many of my ladies have succumbed.’
‘Go away!’ Vee said, under her breath.
‘Can I fetch you anything?’ Pigeon asked.
‘No, thank you,’ said Vee, with an attempt at a smile. ‘I’ll be fine now. I’ll just have a drink of water, please.’
Pigeon poured out half a glass from the carafe that had been sliding up and down on the shelf beside the bed. The water slopped to and fro, mimicking the roll of the liner, Vee timed her swallows and gulped it down. ‘Thank you, Pigeon. I hope you manage to get some sleep yourself.’
Typical, Vee thought wearily. Pigeon was a working woman, who probably put in a twelve-hour day, and she had to stay up to pander to the needs of the wealthy passengers who’d probably never done a day’s, let alone a night’s work in their pampered lives. It was all so unfair, she’d always said it wasn’t fair. It was that nursery cry of ‘It isn’t fair’ that had, in the end, brought all her troubles upon her.
FIVE (#ulink_f7ad482c-6394-5e22-b2d9-67938771c04e)
The next morning, the passengers on board the Gloriaría awoke to lowering grey skies and an increasing wind. The waves were dark and menacing, with foam from their breaking crests sent whipping across the surface by the angry wind.
‘In for a bit of a blow,’ a cheerful young officer with a cherubic face remarked to Vee as he met her at the door to the dining saloon. ‘Won’t be too full in there, I don’t expect.’
He was right. Even allowing for those passengers who were having breakfast trays brought to their rooms, there was only a thin scattering of people in the huge dining room. Down in the bowels of G-deck, it had brilliant cut mirrors mimicking windows; the bronze-flecked pillars and rows and rows of empty tables, set with white napery, were reflected and multiplied, giving the room a vast and surreal appearance.
Vee, after a restless, unhappy night, didn’t feel like eating anything; she stared at the menu printed on crisp white card. Juice, porridge, eggs, bacon, sausages, mushrooms, omelette … the list went on and on.
She ordered coffee.
‘Aren’t you going to eat anything?’ asked the other occupant of the table. ‘Are you feeling queasy because of the boat? It’s amazing how it rolls, one minute there’s nothing but sky to be seen, and then it’s down, down, and walls of grey sea. Dramatic, I call it.’
Vee had hardly noticed her fellow diners the previous evening. Overcome with tiredness and despair, she had gone through the motions of meeting and greeting the strangers at the table, the men and women with whom she would share all her meals for the next two and a half weeks, without noticing much about them; thankful that the watcher on the quay wasn’t there. After all, he could have boarded at the last minute, when she’d been down in her cabin.
This child, for she was hardly more, must have been one of them. Bony, lanky, gawky, a young lady who had still to stretch her wings. Yet, now Vee was paying attention, an interesting face. She would be a beauty one day. And, come to think of it, where had she seen her before? It wasn’t a face you’d forget.
‘I’m having the lot,’ the girl said. The waiter arrived with a heaped plateful of bacon, eggs, sausage, two little triangles of fried bread, a tomato, mushrooms and a ring of apple. ‘Perfect. And then lashings of toast and butter and marmalade. Heaven. I haven’t been hungry for ages, and I can’t believe I suddenly just want to eat and eat. It’s the sea air. I say, there aren’t many people about this morning.’
Vee sat back as the steward poured her a cup of coffee.
‘They’re affected by the motion of the ship, miss,’ the steward said, with a grin. ‘We won’t see most of them until we’ve passed through the Bay.’
Perdita swallowed a mouthful of sausage. ‘Bay?’
‘Bay of Biscay, miss. Terrible place for storms, especially this time of the year, and the equinoctial gales are severe this year. Even some of the old hands among the passengers are complaining. Still, things are tricky back home and I reckon a storm or two will seem like nothing compared to what’s coming, so they’re better off where they are.’
Perdita watched him go. ‘Awfully clever the way he keeps his balance. I suppose, if there are going to be real storms, that’s why they’ve put up these little wooden things around the table. To stop everything sliding to the floor. Do you suffer from seasickness? I don’t think I can do, not feeling as hungry as I am. I’ve never been on this kind of a voyage before, only sailing boats and steam yachts, that kind of thing. It’s been blowy, and it never bothered me, so I suppose I’ll be all right.’
‘York Minster,’ Vee said suddenly.
‘What?’ Perdita looked up from her plate. ‘What about York Minster?’
‘That’s where I’ve seen you before. Just before Christmas, 1936. The carol service, for the Yorkshire Ladies’ College. It was held in the cathedral every year.’
* * *
‘Don’t forget you’re due in the Minster at twelve-thirty for the rehearsal,’ Mummy called after Vee.
‘I won’t.’ She wrapped a muffler tightly about her throat, and pulled on fur-lined leather gloves. Under her warm tweed coat she was wearing a woollen suit over vest and jumper; how cold it was in Yorkshire, and it would be icy, as usual, inside the cathedral. No power of God or man could warm that cavernous interior.
She crossed the yard where two stonemasons were surveying a large block of limestone with ropes looped round it, ready to be hoisted up to some distant place above one of the great flying buttresses. Keeping the cathedral in a state of even moderate repair was a year-round task. The masons recognised her, the Dean’s daughter, and touched their caps as she went past.
Vee pushed open the door and went in. Mary Becket and Mrs Lancaster were in the flower room, snipping and cutting and sorting a pile of Christmas foliage. They looked up and called out a greeting; they had known her since she was a little girl, running in and out of the cathedral and the stone yard, fascinated by the Minster’s immense size, the glowing colours of the windows, the stone statues of the kings of England, the carvings and effigies on the silent tombs, the memorial slabs underfoot, the crypt, with the stream running far below. How odd to build over a stream, she always thought. One of the masons, bent from years of labour, told her that it was because streams were sacred for the old folk, and that was where they put shrines, and then, when the Christians came, they built their churches in the same places.
She’d told her father about that, and he’d frowned and said that was pagan nonsense and she shouldn’t gossip with the masons, they had a job to do.
She believed the mason, though. It was obvious the building went back a long time – there were Roman walls under there as well, the vergers had told her, in answer to her questions. And once, they said, the whole cathedral would have been painted and gilded in reds and golds and blues. It was hard to believe, when you saw the austere Protestant stone soaring up into the tower and along the great nave.
‘Idolatrous,’ her father said, dismissively, when she said how wonderful it must have looked, glowing with colour. With the cynical eyes of her grown-up self, she saw it all as part of a centuries-long endeavour – a very successful one – to dazzle and oppress the lower classes; to keep them in awe of their betters, fearful of this life and doubtful of the next, to allow them a glimpse of a more glorious world while teaching them their place in this one.
The sound of a choir reached her ears. ‘Are the boys practising?’ she asked Mary Becket, who came past with an armful of greenery.
‘They aren’t the choristers,’ said Mary Becket scornfully. ‘It’s girls, an end of term service.’ She gave a sniff, and went back to beating a stiff sprig of holly into submission.
Vee slipped into the side aisle of the choir and walked towards the transept, treading softly because of the service in progress. She caught a glimpse of a sea of grey hats, familiar hats, with the purple initials – YLC – embroidered above a purple grosgrain riband. A uniform that was utterly familiar to her. This was her old school, Yorkshire Ladies’ College, in its habitual act of carols and collective worship at the end of the Christmas term.
A senior girl was reading the lesson. ‘And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child …’
The carol service came to an end with the thundering chords of ‘Hark the Herald Angels’. The congregation knelt for final prayers, and Vee noticed a tall man in a tweed coat who had ignored this ritual and was edging his way along the row of seats. Eager to escape, probably. No, he was heading up towards the choir, engulfed in a swelling crowd of schoolgirls in their grey uniforms, he was searching for someone. There, he’d spotted her, a lanky girl coming out of the choir, a surplice draped over her arm.
‘Perdita,’ he called out. She was his sister, that was evident; with those bones, she’d grow out of her plainness and be a beauty by her twenties.
The habitual sound of the upper classes let out of church sang about Vee’s ears: greetings, enquiries, exclamations, farewells. The congregation moved like a sluggish river out of the great west doors, until only a few lingerers were left: a girl, the choir prefect, checking the hampers containing the choir gowns, a chubby, pink-cheeked girl dashing back in to retrieve a glove, a mistress stopping to talk to a verger.
‘You were in the choir, and a young man had come to meet you.’
‘That’s right. Goodness, how clever of you to remember me, I don’t have a very distinctive face. That was my brother Edwin.’
‘I was at Yorkshire Ladies’,’ Vee said, helping herself to more coffee and reaching out, without thinking, for a piece of toast. ‘You’re Perdita Richardson. I was Verity Trenchard then, and when I was in the sixth form, you were a first-former, all round cheeks and pigtails.’
‘Not round cheeks,’ said Perdita. ‘I’ve never had round cheeks. I grant you the pigtails, though. What a coincidence. Did you hate it there? Lots of people did.’
‘Did you?’
‘Not really, home was pretty ghastly a lot of the time, and so I didn’t mind too much.’
Vee laughed. ‘Snap! I couldn’t wait to get back to school after the holidays. Although it was rather awful there. I minded the cold most, in winter, that window open five inches rule.’
‘I took the nail out of the window in my bit of the dorm,’ Perdita said. ‘Or rather, loosened it, so matron wouldn’t find out. Then after lights out, I’d close it. Only I had to wake up before she came clumping round and whip it up again.’
‘Did you never get caught?’
‘No, never,’ said Perdita with pride. ‘With my family, you had to do things for yourself and do them discreetly. I had – well, have, only I don’t see her any more – a ferocious grandmother. More or less everything I did was wrong, so I learned cunning.’
Vee took another piece of toast. Cunning? No, she hadn’t learned cunning from her family, she had simply learned to be self-contained, to pretend that all was well, that she was a member of a normal loving family. Reserve was natural and native to her parents’ generation and class, no one need ever know that the reserve and cool well-bredness was more than skin deep, that beneath the unruffled surface there were no depths of affection or feeling of any kind: nothing but indifference and dislike, at least for their daughter.
Perdita finished her substantial breakfast, wiped her mouth, gave a satisfied sigh and stood up. ‘That was wonderful,’ she said to the hovering steward. ‘Goodbye for now, Mrs … I say, I am sorry, I don’t know your name. It isn’t Trenchard any more, is it?’
‘Hotspur. I’m Mrs Hotspur.’
‘I’m glad we’re at the same table, Mrs Hotspur. Anyhow, I must push off, I’ve got to practise.’
‘Nice to see a young lady enjoying her food,’ said the steward. ‘Is there anything else I can get for you, madam?’
‘No, thank you,’ said Vee. She lit a cigarette and sat there, gazing out over the almost empty dining room, a field of white linen and silver cutlery, flowers at every table – where did they get flowers when they were further out at sea? She had no idea, she realized, of how a ship like this functioned. She knew it had a gymnasium, and a swimming pool – that was a joke in this weather – and a beauty salon and library. And the crew and several hundred passengers, all having to be fed and laundered for days on end. She watched the smoke from her cigarette drifting away. It must be interesting, working on board. She asked the steward.
‘I love it, madam. Wouldn’t consider any other job. I’ve always worked the lines, every since I was a nipper and took my first voyage as a page. My dad’s in the business, too, he’s on the Liverpool-New York run, White Star. He’s in the engine room, he never did stewarding. He wanted me to sign on with White Star, but I said, No, it’s the old Peninsular and Orient Line for me, Dad. I prefer the East, you see, I always had a yen for the East.’
He deftly collected the coffee pot and her empty plate, swaying with a dancer’s ease as the ship began another of its wallowing rolls. ‘Course, it’ll all change if there’s war. They used the liners for troop carriers in the last war. My dad served in a mine sweeper, four years, and never a scratch. Then the first day he was back on the liners, a bolt worked loose and broke his toe. Isn’t that typical of life?’ He went on his nimble way, and Vee, getting up, discovered that she was a good deal less steady on her feet than when she had come into the dining room. Presumably the blow was getting stronger. She would go to the library, she decided. Find a book, something to while away the hours and take her mind off Hugh, and the man with the bony face, and everything else – the many many things that haunted her waking and sleeping hours and which she longed to drive out of her head, if only for a few merciful moments.
Vee walked along endless corridors, down steep flights of stairs, past linen rooms, the sweet smell of fresh linen wafting out. She met no one on her way, bar a hurrying steward. It was eerie, the emptiness of the ship. She reached the corridor where her cabin was and walked past the row of shut doors, counting them off, fifty-nine, sixty, sixty-one. She stopped abruptly outside number sixty-two, a few yards from her own cabin, number sixty-seven.
The door to sixty-seven was slightly ajar, and someone was in there.
The corridor stretched away, deserted, no cleaners to be seen. Who was in her cabin?
Vee, her nerves tingling, made herself walk silently to the door. Then, with sudden vigour, she pulled the door wide open. ‘What …?’ she began.
Pigeon looked round, surprise on her face. ‘I’m just tidying away your things from last night,’ she said, shutting a cupboard door with a neat click. ‘I can’t linger, I’ve got that many of my ladies poorly.’
‘Thank you,’ Vee said, her back to the door.
‘I’ve left the passenger list on the table, madam,’ the stewardess said. ‘I expect you’ll want to look through and see if you’ve friends on board. My ladies are always surprised, it never fails, there are always people they know on board, and didn’t expect to see. “Oh, look,” they say, “I had no idea that the so-and-sos were going out to Egypt.” It always makes me laugh, how amazed they are.’
She whisked out of the cabin, and Vee sat down in the armchair, her heart still thudding. She was irked by the fright Pigeon had given her, irked by feeling so jumpy, constantly looking over her shoulder and starting at shadows. She should have guessed at once that it would be the stewardess in her cabin, about her duties.
She took her cigarette case from her handbag. She was smoking too many cigarettes in an attempt to soothe her nerves. She took one out, lit it, then picked up the typewritten list. There was Perdita Richardson’s name. An unusual girl. Might prove a bore, but she didn’t think so. How old was she? Probably seventeen or eighteen, if she’d left school, but no more.
Vee closed her eyes, overcome with a sudden terrible longing to be seventeen again. At seventeen, she’d been uneasy, perpetually hurt by her mother’s dislike of her, but still full of hope, with life a white and shining canvas, a tablet of possibilities. A daubed and messy canvas now; what part of her life had she not made a mess of, whom of her family and friends had she not in some way hurt or distressed or betrayed, or even, God help her, destroyed?
She wondered for a moment if she were going mad, for this bizarre image to float into her mind, but decided, regretfully almost, that there was no escape that way. She turned her attention back to the list.
The name jumped out at her, as though it had been printed in bright red letters.
Messenger, Mrs Henry, and beneath that, Messenger, Peter.
For a moment, pure joy flooded through her. Lally was on the boat. Lally, her incomparable friend. And she’d brought Peter. Had Harry relented? Had the boy had a relapse, was he not well enough to go back to school? She must find Lally immediately, what was the number of her cabin?
Then reality struck, and her sense of pleasure and excitement evaporated.
Lally, her friend. Yes, that was exactly what Lally was, but she, Vee, was no friend of Lally’s. Not after what she had done, what she was planning to do. If Lally knew, or even suspected … How could she ever face Lally again?
Lally didn’t know, surely she couldn’t have kept so calm and serene, if she’d had the least idea.
No, Lally didn’t know, and for Vee, it must remain one of those grim secrets that couldn’t be told. Even though at times she felt that to confess to Lally, to tell her friend what she had done, would be such a relief.
But, even if Lally didn’t know – and Vee had tried desperately to be discreet, flaunting instead her other liaisons before a scandalized world – then how could it be kept a secret from her in Delhi?
Had Klaus known that Lally was going out to India on the Gloriana? It was so obvious, so natural, after all, that she would go out to join her husband. She would have gone with him when he was first posted to Delhi, if Peter hadn’t still been ill.
No, Klaus hadn’t known. He’d told Vee that Lally was staying in England until the boy was safely settled back at school, that she would wait until after Christmas before going out to India.
Lally herself, in the one, unsatisfactory conversation they’d had – a hurried phone call, with Vee pretending she was in a rush, would telephone her back – had said nothing about sailing to India. Vee hadn’t telephoned again, of course, what could she possibly say to Lally, one of her closest friends, whom she had so utterly betrayed?
What could she say to her now, face to face?
Her eyes skittered on down the list.
Joel Ibbotson.
So it had been Joel she’d seen on deck. Joel, for heaven’s sake! What could he be doing on board the Gloriana? Had the watching man been on the lookout for Joel? Impossible, the very idea of Joel getting mixed up with that lot brought a smile to her lips. She’d be fascinated to find out why Joel, wrapped up in mathematics and college life, should be going to India. When had she last seen him? Berlin, 1936. And of course, Yorkshire last year, for the funeral. Another blink, another memory to be refused admittance to her mind. Keep to the present, keep to the here and now.
Another name leaped out at her: M. Q. Sebert, Esq.
Marcus, on board? How odd, had the BBC come to its collective senses and sacked him?
It was a ghost ship, that day. Peter was everywhere, exploring, questioning, bothering the staff, who took it in patient good humour, with so few passengers about, they had time to listen to his endless questions. Only the cabin stewards and stewardesses and the doctor and nursing sister who staffed the tiny hospital were kept busy as the dark grey of sky and sea turned imperceptibly to twilight and night.
Vee spent most of the day in the library, alone and undisturbed, reading War and Peace, grateful for the chance to spend some hours in a different world entirely, her own problems shut out by the far away and long ago world of Napoleon and Imperial Russia. History, however complicated, seemed to make sense in a way that the contemporary world – at least, her contemporary world – didn’t.
A waiter brought her coffee, she went to the cafe for a light lunch, taking Tolstoy with her, then back to the library, soft lights lit over the desks, the potted plants somehow fixed in position, how did they keep upright with the incessant roll of the ship? It was only a momentary thought, then she was once again in Moscow, in the thick of war, following in Pierre’s questioning footsteps, caught up in the sweep of history.
Would some profound novelist in years to come pen an epic of her time in a book like War and Peace, a novelist with a brooding mind and a sense of the power of history, writing about Hitler and the Czechoslovakia that wasn’t worth a war, and Stalin and weak, unworthy Chamberlain, and an island people who clutched at any straw of peace, but who would fight like terriers when war came knocking uninvited at the door?
SIX (#ulink_030fb86a-402a-5a1b-bc01-0328e2a8d5a4)
The Gloriana hummed and throbbed as it ploughed its way through the storm. On the bridge, the duty officers were relaxed, quiet in the dog hours, used to the sea and her wild ways.
In their cabins, passengers slept soundly or tossed and turned, or clutched stomachs agonized by spasms of seasickness. In the great kitchens, the first staff were coming on duty, the bakers ready to bake the bread and rolls and brioches for breakfast.
‘Half as much as usual,’ the head baker said. ‘Most of this lot won’t be eating anything for the next day or so.’
‘They’ll make up for it when the sea calms down and they get their appetites back.’
Perdita was awake, relaxed but wide awake. She was still prone to sudden bursts of heat, a relic of her days of fever, the doctors had told her, and they always woke her. Soon, she would drop off to sleep again, and those last two or three hours of sleep were the best she had. In her mind, her fingers played Bach, the intricate patterns soothing her brain in time to the sound of the ship’s engines.
On D-deck, Marcus Sebert came to and eased himself groggily out of his bunk. The floor came up to meet him, and he passed out, contentedly, on the linoleum floor of his cabin.
The chill roused him an hour later, and he staggered to his feet, imagining for a moment he was in the studio at the BBC; why was everything sliding up and down, had war broken out and the Germans bombed Broadcasting House, had there been an earthquake?
This wasn’t the BBC, he wasn’t at work, he was at sea, on a goddamned liner. Was he staggering, or was it the damned boat? It didn’t matter. His eyes fell on one of the bottles of champagne he had brought with him. Champagne was good for seasickness, not that he was prone to seasickness, but you couldn’t be too careful. He eased the cork out of the bottle, and cursed as the wine frothed over him, spattering his shirt. A glass? He looked around his untidy cabin, then decided, as he slid across the floor, that a glass was unnecessary. He carefully climbed back into his berth, dribbling the wine into his mouth from the bottle.
Let the wind roar and the waves lash against the boat. ‘And we jolly sailor boys were up and up aloft,’ he sang to himself. Jolly sailor boys, jolly good idea. He could go and find one right now, ‘Below, below, below. Bugger the landlubbers!’
Perhaps he couldn’t. Perhaps he’d just have another drink and wait for the storm to blow itself out. How many days to Lisbon? Another two, three? That wasn’t a problem, he’d stayed drunk for a week at a time before now. Alcohol and sleep, the cure for all life’s little difficulties. Blot it out, sink into oblivion, no need to worry about anything in the world.
One deck up, Joel Ibbotson sat glumly looking into the bowl the steward had thoughtfully provided and wishing he were back in the tranquil surroundings of his Oxford college.
‘There’s running hot and cold in the basin, sir. I’ll be back to see if there’s anything you need.’
‘I suppose these liners don’t generally sink?’
The steward was shocked. ‘They do not.’
‘Titanic did.’
‘That was in the past, sir. And she hit an iceberg.’
‘Any icebergs out there now?’
‘Hardly, sir.’
‘Pity,’ said Joel, his face growing rapidly paler. ‘A great pity. I just want the ship to sink to the bottom of the sea as quickly as possible, so we can get it all over with.’
‘I see you like your little joke, sir.’
SEVEN (#ulink_e22eb1e6-ebd2-54da-81e5-60292189c8db)
Lally lay in her bunk, wishing she’d never set foot on the Gloriana, that Harry had never been posted to India, that she’d never been born.
Peter offered advice, before being shooed away by Miss Tyrell. ‘Look at the horizon, and then you won’t feel sick any more.’
There was no horizon to look at.
None of her transatlantic voyages, stormy though some of them had been, had prepared her for the Bay of Biscay in this kind of weather.
Pigeon was kindly, but brisk, she’d seen it all before.
‘Have you ever been seasick, Pigeon?’ Lally asked, reluctantly sipping from a glass of ginger water that the stewardess had brought her.
‘It’s not my place to be seasick. If you can keep a little of this down, you’ll feel much better.’
Liar, Lally said to herself, as nausea swept over her. A few minutes later, she began to think that Pigeon might be right.
‘You try and get some sleep now, madam,’ Pigeon said. ‘Don’t worry about the little boy, Miss Tyrell is looking after him.’
Thank God for Monica, thank God for Miss Tyrell. It would be much worse to lie there, helpless, if she knew that Peter was running free about the ship. Miss Tyrell would keep an eye on him, and she didn’t seem so authoritarian as to drive him to rebellious folly.
Lally didn’t sleep, but she dropped into a drowsy state, eyes closed, trying not to anticipate any of the sudden lurches that were even worse than the steady heaving and rolling of the ship.
Claudia was never seasick, Miss Tyrell had told her. She’d had Claudia from a month old, wild as a monkey, that girl, determined to do things her way even before she could utter a word. Never wanted a vest on, like catching an eel with your bare hands, trying to pull a vest over her head. Headstrong then, and headstrong to this day, from all she heard. Yet at bottom there wasn’t much wrong with her that a few shocks and a bit of growing up wouldn’t put right. Independent-minded, that was Lady Claudia.
Lally wasn’t so sure; to her Claudia’s political views smacked of more than mere wildness and a determination to hold contrary views. And independent-minded? Miss Tyrell wouldn’t say that if she’d seen Claudia hanging on Petrus’s every word.
‘Ah, that John Petrus, now, there’s a wily fellow.’
Surely Miss Tyrell hadn’t been nanny to him as well.
‘No, and I’m thankful for it. But when you’re a nanny in London, you get to know the other nannies, and their charges. Mr Petrus and Lady Geraldine, she’s the eldest of the Vere sisters, they’re much of an age. We use to wheel the prams together in the park, and then the children went to the same parties. Mind you, Mr Petrus wasn’t the same background as the Veres. His father was very rich, some kind of a financier. He had a good nanny, though, in Nanny Fortan. We were old friends.’
Lally wondered where Peter was.
‘Upstairs, drawing, a Miss Richardson, as nice a young lady as you could hope to meet, although I don’t care for the way she dresses, is keeping an eye on him. He likes her, and she won’t let him get into any mischief. I said I wanted to see how you were, and she at once offered to stay with him.’
‘Drawing? With the boat doing these wild plunges?’
‘He’s seeing which way the crayons go. Abstract art, Miss Richardson said. It’s making them laugh. I like to hear youngsters laugh. You didn’t hear Mr Petrus, who we were speaking of just now, you didn’t often hear him laughing. Hé was a serious, self-centred child. Ready smile, and a lot of charm, I don’t care for a child with charm. Still, it got him what he wanted, most of the time. I always felt you couldn’t trust that boy. Now, of course, he’s an important man, advises the government, so Lady Sake tells me, Ministers of the Crown hang on his every word.’
She paused, and Lally opened her eyes for a brief moment, watched a towel on its hook sway through a hundred and eighty degrees and shut them quickly.
‘More fool, they,’ Miss Tyrell finished. ‘The child is father to the man, I’ve always believed that. I’ve seen enough of my charges and their friends grow up to know I’m right about that. There are those you can trust, and those you’d be unwise to believe a word they say, five or fifty.’
‘You’d trust Claudia.’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Not Mr Petrus, though.’
‘Never trust a man who looks you straight in the eyes. Either he’s hiding something, or he wants you to believe he’s sincere and interested in you. Either way, take care. Now, I’ll just take this glass away, you don’t want it sliding about.’
The door shut behind her with a soft click. She lifted a hand to push away a strand of hair from her face. Peter said she looked green; well, she felt green.
Claudia didn’t suffer from seasickness, Miss Tyrell said.
Lucky Claudia.
Wild as a monkey? Lally’s mind wandered back through the tossing of the boat, to the day she first met Claudia. Maybe remembering times when she was on dry land would make her less aware of the endless rise and fall of the ship, and the constant sound, creaking and shifting and the crash of waves breaking against the sides.
Oxford, 1932, and the motion of the ship seemed to alter into the steady rhythm of an English train. Tuppence three farthings, tuppence three farthings. American trains, how did they sound? She couldn’t remember, it was quite a while since she’d travelled on a train in her native land. Nothing as old world and romantic as tuppence three farthings, though.
English money was still a mystery to her in those days, fresh from America, used to the simplicity of a hundred cents to the dollar. A pound divided by twenty shillings and each shilling divided into twelve pennies, and then each in half for a ha’penny, which she had wanted to call a halfpenny, and fourths for a farthing. There was a ship on the copper ha’penny coin, no, she wasn’t going to think about ships. The farthing, concentrate on the farthing, with that cute little bird on it. What was it, a wren?
She’d pitied the kids in school when she first wrestled with change. However did they learn to do any math except adding and subtracting and dividing their odd currency?
The train journey hadn’t taken long, from Paddington, London, to Oxford. An hour and ten minutes. The train had been full. Mostly with students, just to see them milling about the platform had given her a thrill. There’d been another woman in her compartment, a young woman in spectacles, who’d opened a fat and serious-looking book even before the train had started.
Lally squinted at the spine. P. Vergili Maronis Opera. Latin. Unquestionably a student.
Pale eyes looked at Lally through the round spectacles. She held the book up so that Lally could see it more clearly.
Lally laughed. ‘I was snooping, I guess. I’m always curious to see what people are reading. Vergil’s impressive.’
A long, considering stare. ‘You’re American?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tourist, I suppose.’
‘No, I’m going to college in Oxford.’
‘College? Do you mean the university?’
‘Yes, Grace College.’
That earned her a longer, more appraising look. ‘I’m at LMH.’
LMH? What was that?
‘Lady Margaret Hall. Another women’s college.’ The pale eyes swivelled up to the luggage rack. ‘Is that a musical instrument?’
Lally nodded. ‘I play French horn.’
That got a look of pure astonishment. ‘The French horn? A brass instrument?’
‘Yes. Is that so strange?’
‘It is in England. Women don’t generally play brass instruments in England. Piano, violin, cello, harp, flute. Not the French horn.’
‘Then they’ll welcome me into the college orchestra.’
The young woman gave a kind of harrumph and returned ostentatiously to her text.
Lally sat back and gazed out of the window, loving the still green countryside that was sliding past: villages with churches, a big house on a hillside, hedged fields, a line of elms on a ridge … The train gave a shriek and dived into a tunnel, smoke drifting past the darkened window, then out into the sunshine.
‘Did England look like this in Jane Austen’s day?’ Lally asked the Latinist opposite her.
‘I don’t read novels.’
‘Your loss,’ Lally said equably. Now they were on the outskirts of a town, rattling past streets of identical terraced houses, built of red brick. Some of the houses were so close to the line you could see into the windows. A woman ironing, a boy on a swing in a tiny garden, a man sitting in a chair, reading a newspaper.
‘Is this Oxford?’
‘Reading.’
‘What’s that building that looks like a fortress?’
A quick flick of the pale eyes from the page to the scene outside the window.
‘Reading Gaol.’
‘Reading Gaol!’ Entranced, Lally twisted to try to catch a better view. ‘Where Oscar Wilde wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Did they really imprison him in there?’
‘I don’t read poetry.’
‘Vergil is poetry.’
‘I don’t read English poetry.’
Lally was of too sanguine a temperament to feel dampened by this contempt for England’s great writers. She’d just landed up in the company of a dull girl, the students wouldn’t all be like her. Or maybe they would at – what was it? LMH – but not at Grace.
Lally looked at her wristwatch. Not so long now. Wasn’t Oxford the next station?
This time there was no doubt about it. There were the spires, the dreaming spires, unmistakable, serene against the cloudless blue sky.
‘I don’t suppose you read Matthew Arnold,’ she said to her fellow passenger, who had got up from her seat and was pulling down a battered canvas suitcase with brown leather corners. ‘“Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!” That’s what he said about Oxford.’
‘No.’
Lally was tempted to say a quick prayer to St Jude for this woman, who was so clearly a lost cause, but the train was slowing down and she had her luggage to think about.
Then it was down on to the platform, even more full of jostling people than Paddington. Lally stood wide-eyed, holding her French horn in one hand and a suitcase in the other. She must go to the baggage van, make sure her trunk was taken off.
‘Porter, miss?’
She pointed out her trunk and boxes in the van.
‘You go over the footbridge, miss, I’ll bring this lot across.’
So many of these people seemed to know each other, they were calling out greetings and news. Even the girl from LMH had joined up with an acquaintance and was engaged in earnest conversation a few feet in front of her. Then out into the crowded station forecourt. There was her porter.
‘A taxi, miss?’
‘Yes, please. I guess I’ll have to wait a while.’
‘This lot will soon be gone,’ the porter said comfortably, leaning on the handle of his trolley.
Out of the corner of her eye, Lally saw a gleaming automobile draw up. A blonde got out and came towards her, very assured, very well dressed, followed by a slighter, darker girl in a tweed coat.
‘Are you for Grace?’
And that, thought Lally, rolling over and reaching out for a basin, was Claudia. And there, behind her cousin, was Vee, looking faintly surprised. There was no question in her mind as to whose the car was. Elegant, expensively-dressed Claudia, in that cloud of scent she always wore, was clearly at home in the sleek Daimler. Whereas Vee, all eyes and her hair caught in a scrawny bun at the back of her unflattering felt hat, looked rather as though she’d been kidnapped. With English Oxfords on her feet, brogues, very well polished, you could tell she came from a good home; such sensible shoes, so worthy and practical compared to Claudia’s crocodile high heels.
Even then, Vee gave nothing away. She watched, and listened, but what was going on behind those intelligent eyes? That was for Vee to know, although Lally had come to wonder just how well Vee did know herself. Did any of them? Did anyone, ever? Probably not, which might be one of God’s mercies when you came to think about it. Yet she’d got to know Claudia and Vee, and they her, better than she could possibly have imagined at that first meeting.
The workings of fate, that had brought them together, at that place, at that time. There they were, the three Graces.
She slept for a while, then woke feeling more seasick than ever. She could feel her hair damp and clammy at the side of her face; would this dreadful rolling and plunging never stop?
It was worse with her eyes open, and she closed them again. The stewardess came in, and persuaded her to sip more ginger cordial. Lally hated the taste of ginger, but Pigeon was right, it did soothe her stomach, if only a little.
Why were those early days at Grace so much on her mind?
She was back in the quad, the biggest open space inside the college. There was a single tree, in the centre, a plane tree, and the square grassed area, in which the tree was set, was intersected by diagonal tarmac paths.
Claudia was there, on her bicycle. Or, more accurately, off her bicycle. She’d decided to buy a bicycle and learn to ride it that very afternoon.
‘It’ll take more time than that,’ Miss Harbottle said, in her most authoritative voice. ‘Your sort always thinks you can do anything at once.’
‘My sort usually can,’ said Claudia, picking herself up and launching herself off again.
‘And the quad isn’t the place to learn,’ Harbottle shouted after her. ‘Bicycles aren’t allowed, as you very well know.’
‘It’s the perfect place to learn,’ Vee said. ‘Only think of the chaos she’d cause if she went on a road.’
Alfred Gore appeared through the arch at the south side of the quad, tall and lanky and amused. You could tell, even then, that he had eyes for no one but Vee, until a loud yell from Claudia, who had ridden with wild abandon into the tree, distracted him. He sauntered over and hauled her to her feet, then righted the cycle.
‘Good thing you hadn’t got up any speed,’ he said. ‘I’ll hold on to the back of the saddle, and you concentrate on getting your balance. OK?’
Claudia nodded, and they were off, Alfred running beside her, holding the bicycle steady.
Claudia was right, her sort usually could. Instinct, balance and confidence were what made her so different from Miss Harbottle. And Vee, watching and laughing? Observant, self-controlled, quite different from her cousin.
Lally half opened her eyes. Were they so different, after all? Hadn’t they both thrown themselves, heart and soul, into causes? In both cases, with disastrous results, and with who knew what repercussions to come?
Vee was blessed with a clear mind, but hadn’t used it. Claudia had the gift of intuition, but was blind about herself.
Moderation in all things, Lally said aloud.
‘You’re fretting,’ said Miss Tyrell. ‘I have a sleeping draught for you. You will feel better for a sleep.’
‘I’ve been dreaming. Of the past,’ Lally said, not wanting to swallow what Miss Tyrell was holding to her mouth.
‘This will put a stop to that,’ Miss Tyrell said, with unassailable nursery authority.
Lally doubted if the draught would stay down long enough to do any good, but she was too weak to resist.
‘I remember the last Commem,’ she said in a thread of a voice. ‘At Christ Church. The grandest of all the balls that summer. I didn’t know what a Commem Ball was when I started at Oxford. It has a language all its own. They have May Balls in Cambridge and Commemoration Balls at Oxford. Only they don’t hold them in May, I always thought that was kind of strange.’
She stopped talking, holding her breath so that her stomach would settle. Keep talking, don’t think about the boat or the queasiness. ‘That was where I met my husband. At a ball. No, at a dinner party before the ball. At the Oronsays. Do you know the Oronsays, Miss Tyrell? They have a big house in Oxford, set in spectacular grounds. It was June, you know, and the French windows were open, and the scents and sounds of summer came drifting in above the smoke and the talk. The smell of newly mown grass and jasmine, and bees, buzzing in a tub of snapdragons just outside the windows. And a woodpecker, tap, tap, tap. Midsummer, with a huge full moon. Magic in the air, and music, and love. Just like a movie.
‘They were all there, all my Oxford friends. I was going back to America, as soon as term was over. My passage was already booked. On the Normandie. So I wanted a chance to say goodbye to the friends I’d made while I was at Oxford.
‘I didn’t tell Vee or Claudia, but just set about persuading the ones who had gone down to come back for the ball. Alfred, have you come across the Gores?’
‘That’ll be Almeric Gore’s younger son. He was at Eton with one of Claudia’s brothers, always stirring up trouble, a hothead, but no harm in him. He writes for the papers, now.’
‘Yes, so there was Alfred, and Giles and Hugh, Verity’s brother, who’d gone down the previous year. He was the tricky one to get hold of, given that he was wandering about Europe, but friends at the American Embassy tracked him down for me and delivered the invitation. People who were still at Oxford, like Joel and Marcus, weren’t a problem. And I asked Sarah Blumenthal, from Grace, for although she and Claudia didn’t get along too well, I liked her, and we’d played a lot of music together.’
Another silence. ‘I wonder where Sarah is now. We’ve rather lost touch, she married and went to Germany. I don’t think Germany is a good place for her.’
‘Not with a name like that, not these days, not with the way those Nazis are carrying on,’ Miss Tyrell said. She pronounced it ‘Nasties.’
‘Sarah married, I don’t remember her married name. Then Ruth Oronsay got wind of my plans, and invited my party to dinner before the ball at their Oxford house. Sir Iain had been at the House, you see. That’s another one of those Oxford things you have to learn, like Brasenose being BNC, and Teddy Hall, not St Edmund Hall. Aedes Christi, Christ’s House, that’s why they call Christ Church college the House. Sir Iain had made up a party of his own contemporaries, so Ruth said, Let’s all dine and go to the ball together.’
The memories flashed before Lally’s eyes, like stills from a film.
Vee’s face full of delight when she saw Alfred was there. What was it with the two of them? Everyone else could see they were crazy about each other, but seemingly they couldn’t.
Alfred in tails, looking completely at ease in the Oronsays’ magnificent drawing room, Vee teasing him about it: ‘Where did you get those, do you own a set, now you’ve joined the world of the grownups? They’re hardly the ones you borrowed from your tutor, he wouldn’t be so unwise as to lend them again, surely.’
Alfred looking down at himself without enthusiasm: ‘They belong to my elder brother. I always forget how damned uncomfortable this kit is, I feel as though I’m being throttled.’
Vee smiling at him: ‘You look very good in them. You and your brother must be much of a size.’
Claudia, drifting past in a haze of blue, champagne glass in her hand: ‘Does he know you’ve borrowed them?’
Alfred, laughing, asking if that was guesswork or the famous Vere insight. ‘As it happens, I thought it easier not to ask.’
‘What if he has a dance tonight?’
‘I dare say he has a spare set. Or he can take a leaf out of my book, and go in flannels.’
Marcus, in an outrageous gold-threaded waistcoat, sliding through the guests, giving Alfred a kiss: ‘Lovely to see you.’
‘Don’t kiss me, Marcus, it’s bad for my reputation as a hard-hitting journalist. The reason for the tails, Vee, is that Ruth issued an ultimatum re dressing, and I rather wanted to come. I need a little frivolity in my hectic and serious life.’
A heavy sweetness and brilliance from the roses massed in silver bowls around the room. More colour from the women’s long dresses, set off by the austerity of the men’s evening clothes. Sir Iain and a nephew flamboyant in their tartan kilts. An army officer in black and red.
Marcus noticing the officer: ‘Who’s the handsome soldier?’
Henry Messenger, darling Harry, dashing and full of life. Joel, watching him watching me, his face stricken, then glowering.
John Petrus, appearing suddenly, like the demon in the pantomime. Complimenting Claudia and Vee on their looks. A blue glance from Claudia at him, then her eyes fixed on her shoes; how did Petrus so often manage to wipe out Claudia’s gaiety and sense of humour, just by being there?
Vee seeing Hugh across the room, her face lighting up: ‘Hugh! Oh, Hugh, I’d no idea you were coming! I didn’t know you were back in England.’
Hugh, almost gaunt, looking rather tense, accepting a glass of champagne from a hovering footman: ‘Couldn’t miss this, not after a three-line whip from Lally. I only got back this morning, and I’ve been a bit rushed.’
‘You’re looking frightfully thin.’
‘Got a tummy bug that laid me low for a while. Thought my number was up, actually, but a local witch woman looked after me and fed me on foul messes and herby brews; I had to get better, simply to get away from her. Ah, Alfred, good to see you.’
The dinner table, gleaming and glittering with silver and crystal and white and gold porcelain. Shimmering reflections of faces and jewels in the silver epergnes filled with more flowers.
Wonderful food, the buzz of conversation, a sense of pleasure almost tangible.
Ruth Oronsay, addressing her younger guests with sudden seriousness: ‘Youth is a precious time, which vanishes quickly and absolutely. And for your generation, going out into a difficult world, it is doubly precious. You may be called upon to bear terrible responsibilities, just as your fathers were, and then you will look back to this evening and remember the joy of dancing a June night away. Memories of music and light and laughter stay with us all the days of our life; they are the gift that youth bestows upon maturity.’
Prescient, Lally said to herself now. A touch of the Claudias.
Sir Iain on his feet, glass in hand, footmen stepping forward to fill glasses, the guests pushing back their chairs and rising to their feet, the younger people light-hearted and amused by the touch of solemnity.
Sir Iain lifting his glass for the King. Adding another toast, with a smile for his wife. ‘Youth.’
Ruth Oronsay collecting up the ladies and leading the way to the drawing room. No one lingering over coffee and exquisite hand-made chocolates. Guests streaming out of the house and into the waiting motors, the women sweeping their long skirts out of the way of the men’s gleaming patent shoes. The cars setting off through the wrought iron gates on the way to the ball.
Lally dozed, then accepted some more ginger cordial, it did seem to be working, then slept, and woke feeling almost human.
Miss Tyrell was in the cabin, folding clothes.
‘I hope I didn’t wake you, Mrs Messenger. You’re a better colour, that’s a good sign.’
‘I’m feeling better.’ Lally yawned and stretched. ‘Perhaps you can run me a bath. I don’t suppose they have showers on board, do they?’
No, they didn’t, of course not. And maybe the bath could wait a little while, it was soothing just to lie there.
‘So you were up at Oxford with Mrs Hotspur, were you?’ Miss Tyrell said. ‘Peter was talking about her, but I didn’t pay much attention, what a talker that boy is! Miss Trenchard as was, Verity Trenchard, but they always called her Vee.’
‘Do you know her? Oh, you would, of course, I was forgetting she’s Lady Claudia’s cousin.’
‘As it happens, I had charge of her for a brief while. I was nanny at the Deanery the summer of 1926.’ She wrapped a piece of tissue paper around a cashmere jumper and tucked in the edges with deft hands. ‘My word, that was a bad time for the family.’
‘So you looked after Vee – Mrs Hotspur?’
Miss Tyrell had the remote look of one gazing into the past. ‘There were three Trenchard children.’
‘Three? But I thought …’
‘There was the boy, Hugh, he was away at his public school at the time. Then there was Verity, who was twelve, too old to need a nanny. My charge was little Daisy, five years old, and the apple of her parents’ eye. They adored her, and they were heartbroken when she died.’
‘Died?’ Lally was appalled. ‘I had no idea! I never knew that Vee had a sister.’
‘Diphtheria, there was a lot of it about that year. They blamed Verity for it; they said Daisy must have caught it from her, but since both girls went down with it within days of one another, I had my doubts. There were several cases in the city, Daisy might have picked it up anywhere. Verity was very ill, hers was the life they despaired of, not the little one, but then Daisy took a turn for the worse and died, while Verity recovered. Mrs Trenchard had what you might call a breakdown. Nerves.’
‘I’m not surprised.’ Lally closed her eyes, remembering the frightening days of Peter’s illness. ‘How dreadful for her.’
‘The one I pitied was Verity. She was the one who suffered most in my opinion. Oh yes, her parents grieved, how do you ever get over such a loss? But to my way of thinking they had two other young lives left to them, and those were the ones who mattered. There was Verity, still very weak after her illness, and then Hugh came home from school, once the whole place had been cleaned and disinfected.’
‘It must have been a terrible shock to him, to lose his sister.’
‘It was, of course, but he had a head on him, that boy. All the servants went on and on about Daisy, saying she was an angelic child, too good for this world and all that kind of sentimental nonsense. I had my own opinion of her, you get to know about children when you do my job, and you watch them grow up. I heard Hugh say to Vee, as they called her, that it was sad about Daisy, but he reckoned that she’d have grown up to be an unpleasant person; if you were sly and deceitful at five, he said, what hope was there of your growing up into a decent human being?’
‘Hugh said that?’ Lally wasn’t surprised. ‘Yes, I can believe it. Hugh never goes in for self-deception, he is the most clear-headed man.’
‘Of course, not being a very nice child has nothing to do with the gift of life, and if we only survived on our deserts, then where would most of us be? However, to the parents, to the Dean and his wife, Daisy was their lodestar; perfection itself. A tragedy like that can work in two ways, it pulls a family together or splits them apart. There was no question which it was in that household. The family was already divided, and if I hadn’t known it from the moment I stepped inside the front door, I’d have known it when I heard with my own ears Mrs Trenchard say that she wished Verity had been the one to go, why had Daisy been taken from her, and Verity left behind.’
Lally stared at Miss Tyrell. ‘She said that, about her own daughter?’
Miss Tyrell nodded. ‘I’ll put away these warmer clothes, you won’t be wanting them now.’ She opened a cupboard door. ‘What’s more,’ she went on, ‘she said it in Verity’s hearing, and that’s a thing I could never forgive her for. She had no time for that girl, none at all, and Verity thin and wretched after being so ill, and so distressed about Daisy.’
‘What about Vee’s father?’
‘The Dean was too troubled in his conscience to take any notice of what was going on around him. He lost his faith, you see, the night that Daisy died. For all the rest of the time I was there, he’d walk up and down, up and down, in his study at night, talking out loud. I thought he was writing his sermon, or talking to someone else. Then I thought he might be talking to God. Praying. Only he wasn’t. He was arguing with himself. Wrestling with darkness. And the darkness won. It usually does.’
‘Did he think to give up his position, leave the church?’
‘You’re Catholic, aren’t you? Yes, I heard it said that Mr Henry had married a Roman Catholic. So perhaps you don’t understand about the Church of England. Most of the clergy don’t believe in what they teach or say to start with, or if they do, the gloss soon wears off. Now, Dean Trenchard was different. He was truly a religious man, a man of faith. That’s why it was so terrible when he lost his faith. It was the centre of his life, well, Daisy and God were. He lost one and then the other. But he went on, did his job at the cathedral same as before. No one noticed any difference, I shouldn’t think.’
Lally was shaking her head. ‘Oh, poor Verity. What an appalling thing to happen to her. And at that age, when a girl’s so vulnerable. I had no idea, she’s never spoken about it. Did her father really not care about her?’
‘No, I don’t think he ever gave her a thought.’ Miss Tyrell shook out a twill skirt. ‘This with a light jumper will be just right for when you’re up and about and want to go on deck.’
‘What happened in the Deanery after that?’
‘I stayed on for a few weeks, helping to care for Mrs Trenchard and for Verity. Then I left in the autumn. They were sending Verity away to school, Mrs Trenchard didn’t want her in the house, if you ask me.’
‘I can’t believe it,’ Lally said. ‘How could a mother treat her daughter in such a cruel way? And why did Vee never say a word about Daisy? Nor Hugh, if it comes to that.’
‘Being an American, perhaps you don’t understand that English people like the Trenchards are brought up not to talk about their personal problems and griefs. Mr Messenger must be just the same. It’s not considered good manners to do so, although in my opinion, bottling things up can go too far, and it can lead to a lot of trouble that would never come about if people had opened their mouths and said how they felt about this or that.’
Miss Tyrell was right about that; it was squeezing blood out of a stone to get Harry to talk about anything to do with his emotions – or anyone else’s.
‘And, looking back,’ Miss Tyrell said, ‘I don’t think it was just Daisy. I don’t believe Mrs Trenchard ever liked Verity. Sometimes that happens. Mrs Trenchard herself is a reserved woman, cold you could say, but who knows, perhaps her own mother didn’t have much time for her when she was a little girl. It wasn’t the same with Hugh, she was quite different with Hugh.’
‘That must have made it even worse for Vee.’
‘I thought, when she was getting better, that Verity was as cold as her mother, that she didn’t feel anything very strongly. Some children are like that, they live on the surface and take life as it comes.’
‘Oh, that isn’t true of Vee!’
‘No. It was her way of defending herself, shutting it all away inside, so no one thought she cared as much as she did, not about Daisy, nor how much her mother disliked her. Heartless, the servants said she was. But she did care. She felt Daisy’s death keenly, and she was devastated by her mother’s remark. I know, because I saw her face before the shutters came down.’
‘Did Hugh know about what his mother said?’
‘Perhaps Verity told him; they were very close, those two. I think Daisy’s death and the way their parents reacted to it had a long-lasting effect on both Hugh and Verity. It wasn’t a secret, it wasn’t hushed up or anything, everyone in the family knew about it, but Hugh and Verity entered into what you might call a conspiracy of silence.’
‘Claudia knew about Daisy, then. And she never said a word.’
‘Why should she? It happened a while ago, and the two families don’t see much of each other. I doubt if Claudia ever thinks about it. If Hugh and Verity don’t talk about it, why should she?’
EIGHT (#ulink_645914f7-5156-5ccf-be56-3bebeb17669b)
Vee hesitated that night. If she took her pills, then the night brought the past back to her, memories she didn’t want. If she didn’t take the pills, then the dark hours of the night were a torment, an endless hour of the wolf with beasties and ghoulies coming out of the woodwork to fill her tired mind.
Exhausted in mind, body and spirit, she decided not to take her customary pills, trusting to the roll of the boat and her fatigue to bring her sleep. In an odd way, she found the huge motions of the vessel soothing, like being rocked in an immense cradle. Lulled, she slept for a few hours.
Until the nightmare began. It wasn’t a nightmare at first, in fact it was a gentle dream, of a summer’s afternoon, a memory of a drive, with Lally and Piers Forster. Kind, clever Piers, who had wanted to marry her; but this was before he proposed. They were going to Stratford, to see a Shakespeare play. Lally, the passionate Shakespearean, was sitting beside Piers, talking about Macbeth, they were going to see Macbeth. Some rational part of her mind, still wakeful, told her that was odd, reminding her that she had never seen Macbeth at Stratford, not with Piers or Lally.
The tranquil summer landscape blurred and dissolved, and they were in the theatre, taking their seats. The clarity and detail of the dream was extraordinary, the numbers on the velvet seats, the shape and feel of the programme, Piers’s head tilted towards Lally as she made a comment on one of the actors, with the smile she remembered so well.
The house lights dimmed, the curtain rose, the theatre vanished, and Vee was standing on the upper steps of a stone spiral staircase in a Scottish castle, with the wind howling and whistling through the tower. A huge raven perched on the wide ledge of an arrow slit, its cold eye fixed on her. Pressed against the wall was Macbeth, blood dripping from his hands, his face, the dagger in his hand. Words whirled about her head, desperate words of violence and torment and pain.
Macbeth had murdered Duncan, whom had she murdered? She had a bloody dagger in her hand as well, and she was overwhelmed with anguish, with the knowledge that she had struck a fatal blow and sent a soul into eternity, irretrievably lost, beyond her reach, a deed that could never be undone, guilt that couldn’t be assuaged or borne.
She struggled into wakefulness, overwhelmed by fear and panic and remorse, and unsure for a while where she was, in the darkness, with the creaking of the boat and the swaying motion and the sound of the sea. She switched on the light above her bunk, heavy-eyed and tired, but with no intention of letting herself go back to sleep, not until grey dawn sent its half-light filtering into the cabin, and the day brought its sense of normality and relief.
She didn’t feel sleepy, anyhow. Her mind was clear and sharp, all sleep driven away by the anguish of her dream.
Had Pigeon locked the door behind her? It appeared to be slightly open. An invitation to anyone walking by … Vee wasn’t thinking of visitors with amorous intent, she was afraid of quite a different kind of caller. She slid out of bed, and, holding on to the table as the ship paused for a moment at the height of a roll before plunging back the other way, reached out for the door and locked it. She had been wearing an eye-mask, which had ridden up on to her forehead; now she pulled it off and tossed it on to the bed.
Where had Pigeon put the notebook that Claudia had given her?
‘Voyages can be a most dreadful bore, Vee, plenty of time to write the story of your life.’
Vee had thanked her and had dutifully packed the journal together with a bottle of ink and her fountain pen. She had done so mechanically, with no intention of writing a word. Now she was desperate to find them, they must be there somewhere.
Here they were, in a drawer with her hankies, stowed away in a stupid place by Pigeon.
She cleared the table in front of the mirror of books, packets of cigarettes, magazines and a jar of cream and took out the bottle of ink and the leather-backed notebook, and sat down. Then she unscrewed the barrel of the fountain pen and dunked it in the pot of ink, squeezing the filler and watching the dark liquid being drawn up; she’d loved fountain pens ever since she was a girl.
It was a good pen, it suited the paper. Now all she had to do was to write.
My life, she said to herself, doodling the figure of an angel on the receipt for the ink. Who was she writing this for? For posterity? For her family? For Henry? To explain herself to an astonished world?
Or for protection. No diaries, no written records, never commit anything to paper, no letters, nothing that anyone could ever find that would reveal a scrap of information about your private life, that was the rule. Only, if she put it down in writing, with all the details, then if anything did happen to her—
She winced as she thought of the great propellers and the foaming water around them, and that ghoulish little boy of Henry’s, so like his father to look at, telling her with enthusiasm how anything that got in the way of propellers would be sliced up and the ship would barely register a judder in its deepest workings, nothing that anyone would ever notice.
‘Even if you managed to keep clear of the propellers, if you went overboard, then you still wouldn’t drown,’ he’d added. ‘It’s the sharks who get you first, long before you drown.’
She wasn’t going to think about it. She was deliberately keeping clear of the decks, of the rails, where once her delight on board ship was to stand for hours at the rails, looking down into the shifting colours and movement of the sea, green and foaming, or darkest blue, or even, as so often in the Atlantic, grey and forbidding.
‘Mummy will die one day,’ he’d said, his face suddenly troubled. ‘Everybody will. They get old, like people do, and then they’re gone. That’s everyone, even Mummy and Daddy.’
She’d consoled him. ‘Mummy and Daddy won’t die for years and years, not until you’re grown up and have children of your own to worry about.’
‘If there’s a war, and Daddy goes to fight the Germans, then he could be killed.’
What could you say to that, except that it was the truth?
‘Sometimes, very important soldiers, like your daddy, don’t get sent out to fight. They’re too valuable to lose, so they stay at Headquarters and make sure things are done properly.’
‘Not Daddy. He isn’t a coward, he won’t want a desk job, not if there’s a real war.’
Probably not.
She was writing it for herself. So that, if anything happened to her – and she thought again of those great, relentless propellers – someone might read it, and say: ‘I understand.’
Perhaps Alfred was in her mind at that moment, although she wouldn’t admit it to herself. Of all the people she knew who deserved an explanation, Alfred was the one whose opinion she most cared about. Although she hoped that Lally, if she ever came to read it, might think of her with compassion rather than hatred. It would take a saint to be so forgiving, but then Lally was a remarkable woman.
And Claudia? Claudia was out of the same mould as herself, although their fanaticism had taken different directions, it was, at root, the same. A burning desire for a cause greater than oneself. Perhaps her cousin Lucius’s madness came from his mother’s side, after all, and not from those generations of lunatic earls, perhaps folly was in her blood, and in Claudia’s.
There was no excuse there for what she had done.
Well, she would write it down. As her dream had shown her, her life over the last few years would come pouring out in a wave of painfully sharp memories, given half the chance. Those would fill her mind, while her pen could trace the mere bones of her life during those eventful and mistaken years.
PART TWO (#ulink_6e636d50-b284-59ce-9c31-e9157915d5e1)
1932 (#ulink_92fe19df-44c4-5fba-8964-92e3432066be)
ONE (#ulink_36b3ab7c-d6ca-5226-8a9a-b617d9faea1c)
Vee hadn’t seen Claudia for five or six years. In those days, her cousin had been a fair, chubby, awkward creature with a mouthful of ironwork and protuberant pug-dog eyes – although those were of an intense and dazzling blue that caused pangs of envy in Vee’s breast. In comparison, she felt that her own almost black eyes, an inheritance from her French grandmother, were dull and commonplace.
Vee’s train from York had got into Oxford railway station half an hour ago, and she had crossed from the up platform to the other side, to wait for the train from London. The down platform at three o’clock on that bright October afternoon was almost deserted. A porter leaned against his trolley, squinting into the slanting sunlight as he watched for the arrival of the 1.49 express from London. The station cat was sunning itself in feline abandon on the meagre flowerbed at the end of the platform. A passenger in a trilby and a green mackintosh waited beside a battered suitcase.
She walked along the platform to the chocolate machine and put in a penny for a Nestlé bar. She unwrapped it, took a bite, then put the remains of the chocolate into her coat pocket. She wasn’t hungry. What she was, she realized, feeling the butterflies in her tummy, was nervous. Nervous about coming to Oxford, nervous about meeting new people, nervous about the work, fearing that everyone else would turn out to be much cleverer than she was. They, and her tutors, would despise such stupidity and wonder how she had ever managed to get a place at the university.
And what a miracle it seemed that she was here at all, after the flat refusal of her grandfather to let her go to university. It was thanks to Claudia that she was here, it was Claudia who had announced to her own astonished and disapproving family that no, she wasn’t going to become a debutante, she wasn’t going to stay in London and do the season.
The day that the letter from Aunt Lettice breaking this piece of news came had been a red-letter day for Vee, if a wretched disappointment for her parents.
‘I don’t know what your grandfather will say,’ her father said,
Vee knew exactly what he would say, and she didn’t care. If she weren’t going to London, then, she said, she’d just have to hang around at home. No, thank you, Mummy, no Swiss finishing school for her, she’d feel out of place with all those rich girls.
‘You must speak to your father,’ Mrs Trenchard said to her husband. ‘Perhaps, in the circumstances, a year or two at university …’
He must let me go, Vee said to herself. She went to the Minster and knelt and prayed and prayed, feeling that it was somehow wrong to pray so desperately for oneself, but if God didn’t help her, who would?
‘In the end, she should do what she wants,’ she overheard her mother say to her father. ‘It isn’t as if she were a beauty, or had any special talent. A season would have done her good, she might have caught some young man’s eye, but I can’t ask Lettice to present her if Claudia isn’t going to be a debutante. We both have daughters who are a disappointment to us. Only Lettice is fortunate, she has the other girls.’
Daisy hung in the air.
Vee didn’t care about her mother’s dismissal of her looks and gifts. Let them think there was no better alternative. Claudia wrote to her. ‘What a lark that we both want to do the same thing. I’ve talked Mummy round, so it’s going to be all right, I can go. And I should think that once your old snob of a grandfather knows you can’t do the season, he’ll have to let you go to Oxford.’
Not without a tremendous argument and more dreadful scenes, he hadn’t. In the end, he washed his hands of her, furious that his daughter-in-law’s grand connections should have come to nothing. ‘She’d better stay in York with you, Anne, there’ll be dances and so on here. You must know everybody who matters.’
‘I think you’d better go to Oxford,’ her mother said to her.
‘I can’t. I can’t afford it on my allowance. Not the fees and everything.’
‘I’ll pay.’
‘You?’
‘I have a little money of my own. And don’t feel you have to come back home for all the holidays,’ she went on. ‘You young people like to spend time abroad. Or with your friends. Like Hugh does.’
‘Hugh has a generous allowance.’
‘I’m sure Grandfather will come round in the end. Now he knows the season isn’t a possibility. After all, most of the young men who go to all the London parties and dances are at one of the universities. You’ll meet plenty of eligible men at Oxford, I’m sure.’ She paused, searching for words. ‘I gather Claudia is very smart and extravagant. When your grandfather finds out, he won’t want you to be short of money and not be able to keep up with her.’
Which seemed pretty unlikely to Vee, since smart and Yorkshire school and Deanery hardly went together.
‘Of course, he won’t give you as much as he gives Hugh, young men are always more expensive at university.’
Her mother agreed to pay her first term’s fees, and Hugh made Daddy give her a small allowance.
‘Mummy’s right,’ he said. ‘Grandfather will see sense in the end. If Oxford’s OK for Claudia, why should it be so wrong for Vee? I’ll drop a few hints when next I see him.’
Vee was too warm in her thick winter coat. When she’d left York that morning there had been frost on the tracks, and she was grateful for her wool coat and gloves and scarf. Now they seemed out of place and uncomfortable.
A bell clanged, and the signal at the far end of the platform clattered down. The porter stood up and straightened his cap. More porters began to trundle their trolleys across the line. Even the station cat woke up and flicked her tail round herself.
The track hummed, then Vee heard the train, the shrill sound of a whistle, a cloud of smoke in the distance. With a roar and a grinding of brakes, the engine was alongside her, then past, coming to a snorting, squealing halt almost at the end of the platform.
Gone was the tranquil peace of a few minutes before. Heads appeared at windows all along the train, doors were flung open, people poured on to the platform.
She felt a sudden panic. Would she recognize Claudia – or would Claudia recognize her? When they last saw one another, they’d been schoolgirls, clumsy and at that awkward age, neither children nor adults. Pupae, in fact. Had Claudia turned into a radiant butterfly, or a dreary moth? Had she grown much? She’d been shorter than Vee then, and Vee had always been small for her age.
Her eyes darted here and there among the faces in the sea of humanity. Youthful humanity, she noticed, which lifted her spirits; young men and women of her own age. More men than women, which she supposed was only natural – inevitable, if they had parents and a grandfather like hers. The men were casually dressed in tweeds and flannels, and had an astonishing array of bags and suitcases and golf clubs hung over shoulders and held in masculine hands. They greeted one another with loud good humour and waves and claps on the back. A group of them clustered around the luggage van as bicycles were wheeled down the ramp.
However would she find Claudia in this throng? She heard a shriek in her ear and whipped around to come face to face with her cousin.
It was as well Vee hadn’t changed that much in the intervening years, for she would never have recognized her. How could this willowy, exquisitely groomed creature be her dumpy, toothy cousin? Her smile was immaculate now, and those blue eyes were huge and ravishing.
‘Good gracious,’ Vee said. ‘I’d never have known you.’
‘Well, I’d have known you, with that discontented look on your face and that air that northerners have when they come south.’
‘Air? What do you mean?’
‘Oh, a tinge of hay bales and beer and clogs, you know.’ Claudia glanced down at Vee’s overnight case. ‘Is this all you’ve got? What a mêlée! Are they all university people?’
‘My trunk came on ahead. I was looking out for you, I never saw you get off the train.’
‘I wasn’t on it. I came in the motor car, I had too much luggage to come on the train.’
‘I didn’t have any choice. Can you imagine anyone offering to drive me from York?’
‘Doesn’t Hugh have a car?’
‘He can’t even drive.’
Claudia glanced up and down the platform. ‘You didn’t travel down together on the train, though, not unless he’s got the gift of invisibility.’
‘He came up last week. Some work to catch up on, he said, but I think he just wanted to get away from the Deanery.’
‘Could be an advantage having a brother up at the same time as you. He’ll have heaps of men friends for you to meet.’
That made Vee laugh. ‘You’ll get to meet all the men you want, I feel sure.’
‘No, it’s going to be like a convent, being at a women’s college, don’t you think so? We go this way, the car’s over at the other side of the station. Oh, Vee, aren’t you happy? Aren’t you just brimming over with being here?’
Vee thought about it as they went up the steps and across the footbridge. ‘I don’t feel it’s real yet.’
‘I know what you mean. Pinch yourself, and you’ll wake up in the usual old bed. I’ve been saying to myself all the way here, I’ve made it, I’ve done it, it’s happening, and nobody can stop me now.’
They went down the steps to the other platform, and out on the north side, where a gleaming motorcar was waiting, a liveried chauffeur in attendance. Vee had forgotten just how rich her Vere cousins were.
‘Do you remember Jenks?’ Claudia said with a wave of her hand towards the chauffeur. ‘My ally, aren’t you Jenks?’ and she gave him an enormous wink before pushing Vee into the car.
Vee sat down on the sumptuous leather seat and stared at Claudia, who had produced a ridiculously long cigarette holder and was fixing a cigarette into it. ‘I shan’t offer you one, coz, because I know that coming as you do from the Deanery, you won’t touch drink or tobacco.’
‘I do smoke, as it happens, and I’d love a cigarette.’
‘We’ll have to get you a holder, nothing less chic than stubs with lipstick all over them.’
‘I’m not wearing any lipstick.’
‘That’s too obvious, but you’ll have to start. I’m not going to become known as the one with the dowdy cousin, I assure you.’
The car purred down to the Botley Road and turned under the railway bridge. The main entrance to the station was thronged with students and taxis and porters and luggage.
‘Stop, Jenks,’ Claudia said suddenly, and even before the car halted, she had the door open and was hurtling through the crowd towards the taxi rank.
What was she up to? Vee dived out of the car after her cousin, who had gone up to where an astonishingly beautiful girl was standing amid a helpful crowd of young men.
‘Are you for Grace?’ Claudia asked.
‘Why, yes, as it happens, but how …’ She spoke with an accent. American, Vee thought.
‘Is this your luggage?’ Claudia was asking.
‘Yes, it is.’
‘We can’t take the trunk, but that doesn’t matter.’ Claudia beckoned to a porter. ‘This trunk needs to be delivered.’
‘Of course, miss. Where to?’
‘Grace College. When will that be?’
‘Later this afternoon.’
‘That’s all right, but don’t make it too late.’
‘Name, miss?’ the porter asked the American girl.
‘Fitzpatrick.’
He brought out a stub of chalk and scrawled her name and the word Grace on the trunk. He called out to a colleague standing nearby, ‘Joe, this is for one of the hen houses. Grace.’
Claudia pushed Miss Fitzpatrick towards the car, which was causing something of a traffic jam. ‘Hop in, before a policeman arrives to harangue Jenks.’
Vee got in after them, knocking her shin against a strangely-shaped black case.
‘I’m sorry, that’s in the way,’ the American said, leaning down to move it.
‘What on earth is it?’ asked Vee.
‘My French horn. Why did that guy back there say my trunk was for one of the hen houses?’ said Miss Fitzpatrick.
‘It must be what they call the women’s colleges,’ Claudia said. ‘A lot of people haven’t got used to having women at the university.’
Miss Fitzpatrick held out a hand. She was wearing exquisite kid gloves, Vee noticed. ‘I’m Lavender Fitzpatrick, only I get called Lally.’
‘If you say Lavender, no one will call you anything else,’ Claudia said. ‘I’m Claudia Vere, and this is my cousin Verity Trenchard. Known as Vee.’
‘I prefer Lally. It’ll make me feel more at home. Say, how did you know I was going to Grace? Are you freshmen there, too?’
‘Intuition,’ said Claudia. ‘One of my more useful talents. I think they call us Freshers at Oxford, at least they do the men. Where are you from, what are you reading?’
Lally looked puzzled, Vee could see she was about to reach into her bag for a book or magazine.
‘She means, what are you studying?’ Vee said.
‘Oh, what course am I taking? English Language and Literature. And I’m from Chicago.’
‘Where the gangsters are?’ Vee asked.
‘Yes, but we try to avoid them as much as possible. What are you taking … reading, I mean?’
‘Modern Languages,’ Vee said. ‘French as my main language.’
‘I’m reading Greats,’ Claudia said. ‘Greek and Latin. It’s a four-year course, you see, so more annoying to my family.’
‘Annoying?’ Lally said.
‘Even now, my dear brother is stamping up and down in his ancestral hall, incensed that I’ve made it to the university. He doesn’t approve of education for women.’
‘My father isn’t too keen on the idea, either,’ said Lally.
‘And Vee’s grandfather, who rules the roost in her family, will never forgive me for turning my back on being a debutante and coming to Oxford. You see, he’d planned for Vee to do the season with me. Only when it turned out I was coming here, he more or less had to let Vee come too.’
Lally laughed. ‘My grandmother was at Oxford, she was one of the first girls at Grace College, back in the nineties. So she wanted me to come, and so did I, and in the end Pa agreed, although he still thinks a good American women’s college would have been much better. We had quite a few arguments about it, before Grandma and I got our way.’
Vee’s own battle had been such a bitter one, she’d imagined, for no good reason, that other people didn’t have to fight so hard for what they wanted. Yet here were Claudia and Lally agreeing that their families didn’t want them to be at Oxford.
‘I may switch to another school, though,’ Claudia was saying. ‘Greats is hard work.’
Vee was looking out of the window. There was a clarity to the air that day, a clarity that she later came to realize was unusual in Oxford. Perhaps it was in her eyes, and not outside at all, but everything seemed sharply delineated: the cobbled streets, the newspaper vendor on a corner shouting out the headlines, a college servant in a bowler hat stepping through the wide open doors of an ancient college.
The motor drew up in front of the arched gateway into Grace College, causing various vans and cars to brake abruptly and a man pushing a handcart to call out a few unsavoury epithets as Jenks got out of the car and came round to open the rear door.
The lodge was chilly and brightly lit. A gnome of a man stood behind a polished wooden counter as the three of them came in. He flicked his eyes up from the ledger in front of him. Names? Trenchard, Vere, Fitzpatrick. He made three careful ticks on a list and turned round to where a row of keys hung on numbered hooks. ‘Quite a coincidence you arriving together, since your rooms are next to one another. Sign here, please, Miss Trenchard. Now you, Miss Fitzpatrick. Miss Vere.’
Claudia took the book and signed it with a flourish. ‘It’s Lady Claudia, actually. Where do we go?’
That earned her a sharp look and a sniff. ‘A scout will show you to your rooms. Do you have any luggage with you? Big luggage. A trunk, for instance, I have no record of any trunk under your name, Miss Fitzpatrick,’ he said, emphasizing the ‘miss’.
‘It’s coming up from the station.’
‘It makes more work for us when you young ladies don’t send your boxes and trunks on in advance.’
‘That would be difficult, since it came across the Atlantic on the boat with me.’
‘Young ladies from abroad always cause problems for us.’
They started with Claudia’s room, number seventy-three, on the second floor. Lally was seventy-four, just across the corridor, and Vee was seventy-five, next door to Claudia.
Claudia unlocked the varnished wooden door. A card with her name on it was already slotted into a little brass holder: Lady Claudia Vere. She opened the door and Vee and Lally peered past her into the room. Claudia put down her crocodile handbag on the top of the bookcase, edged round the trunk that took up most of the available space in the centre of the room and surveyed her new domain.
A narrow bed, a small chest of drawers, a wardrobe, and a desk made up the furniture. There was a tiny grate in the fireplace in one corner, with a gas ring set beside it on green tiles.
‘I’d call this a cell, myself. Lord knows how I’ll fit everything in.’ She turned to the scout who had come with them to show them the way. ‘Are all the rooms this size?’
‘First years are put in the smaller rooms, miss.’
‘Are your rooms the same?’ she said to Vee and Lally. She bounded across the corridor to inspect them. ‘Yes, they are.’
‘Kind of cosy,’ said Lally.
‘Kind of cramped,’ said Claudia.
Vee didn’t care. ‘They can put me in a broom cupboard, if they like. I’m here. And that’s a miracle, and nothing can spoil it.’
Claudia was dangling her keys on one finger. ‘The scout’s vanished,’ she said, irritated. ‘Where do we ring for her?’
‘I don’t think we do,’ Vee said.
‘I need her to unpack my trunk.’
There was a pause, and then Lally said, ‘I’m not sure it works like that. I guess we do our own unpacking.’
Claudia stared at her. ‘How? Bowler packed it for me, it’ll take me hours to get everything out, and then what do I do with it?’
‘Bowler?’ Vee said.
‘My maid.’
‘Didn’t you unpack your trunk at school?’
‘No, of course not. Matron and the school maids saw to all that.’
‘We had to do our own at Yorkshire Ladies’.’
‘Pass over those keys,’ said Lally, kneeling beside the trunk. ‘Vee and I will show you what to do.’
TWO (#ulink_493396d7-7ba8-5bd0-bacd-2ed6b7410a66)
Vee would never forget the first night in hall, for Freshers’ Dinner. It was a handsome panelled room with the high table for the dons set on a raised area at one end and three long tables in the main part of the hall for the undergraduates.
The noise of all those women’s voices startled Lally; Claudia and Vee were used to it.
‘Just like school,’ remarked Claudia, raising her voice to be heard above the din.
A tall girl in a scholar’s gown stood and said a Latin grace, and the maids rushed to and fro serving the food. Claudia said it was dreadful; Vee would have eaten a plate of raw turnips that evening, and not noticed it.
When the plates were cleared away and coffee had been served, a wiry woman, grey hair pulled back in a severe bun, rose from her seat. She waited for the buzz of conversation to die down, and said a few more words in Latin. Then she swept sharp eyes over the assembled undergraduates.
‘The Mistress of Grace,’ Vee’s neighbour hissed in her ear. ‘Dr Margerison, the biologist.’
‘This picture that hangs behind me is a striking portrait of our founder, Dame Eleanor Grace,’ Dr Margerison began.
‘Grim old party,’ Claudia said, sotto voce.
Actually, she looked to Vee as though she had a twinkle in her eye, unlike the rest of the biddies pinned on the wall around the hall. Was that what brains and education did to you, turned you austere and disapproving and thin-lipped? The fact that most of them were dressed in the clothes of the last century didn’t help, of course, high-necked, sombre clothes, or academic dress. Dame Eleanor, in her portrait, appeared to be wearing a pith helmet.
‘Why the camel?’ Lally whispered to Claudia. She shrugged, but Dr Margerison soon enlightened her.
‘Dame Eleanor was a pioneer. She was eminent in her field of Egyptology and all her life had a passion for the education of women. That is why, when she came into a fortune, after the untimely death of her only brother, she used her inheritance to found and endow this college.
‘You who are here today, starting out on a new life as members of this great university, are the cream of your generation. Gifted with intelligence and the capacity for hard work, you have become part of a centuries-old tradition of learning and scholarship.
‘Here at Grace, we expect the young women who come to us to display the same characteristics as our founder: intelligence, diligence, intrepidity, persistence in the face of adversity, combined with a sense of duty, honour and love of country. And to this love of country, we hope that you add love of this university and of this college and that none of you throughout your lives will do anything to bring the institutions that have nourished you into disrepute.
‘We live in restless, difficult times. Young people today are keenly aware of the world they live in, and the rights and wrongs existing within our society. We encourage compassion and concern for those less privileged than ourselves; you will find many ways in which you can contribute to the good of others while you are here.
‘We expect, however, that your energies will be first and foremost directed to your studies, the raison d’être of your presence here, so that when you go down, neither you nor your tutors feel that you have wasted your time here.
‘We are a college founded on Christian principles, and Evening Prayers, held at six p.m. in the chapel, are compulsory for all undergraduates; this is an opportunity for us to come together as a community and the time when notices concerning the college are given out.’
She paused for a moment, her cool eyes sweeping over the faces looking up at her.
‘I and the Fellows of our college welcome you to Grace. We hope, and expect, that you will make the best possible use of your time here, and go forth into the world more complete human beings as a result of what you will learn and experience at this university.’
Vee pulled back the sheets and got into bed. The mattress was lumpy and the sheets were starched into discomfort; she’d had worse at school. Goodbye Verity, the Dean’s daughter, she said to herself as she pummelled her pillow into submission. Hello Miss Trenchard, undergraduate of the University of Oxford.
There was a volley of knocks on the wall and Claudia’s voice came through, muffled but comprehensible. ‘For God’s sake, I think they’ve stuffed my mattress with a dead donkey.’
‘Goodnight,’ Vee called back. And from the other side of the corridor came an echoing goodnight from Lally.
THREE (#ulink_4cabfd1b-f13a-5114-bfdc-c688a1f7eaa7)
They had a mentor at Grace, the three of them. She was a second-year scientist, called Miss Harbottle. Big-boned and with dark eyebrows that gave her a brooding appearance, she informed Claudia, almost before she’d introduced herself, that she was a Socialist and didn’t believe in titles, nor in any aspect of the aristocracy. The sooner the House of Lords was abolished, the better, she added, giving Claudia a frosty look.
Presumably Miss Harbottle didn’t know about Claudia’s brother, Lucius, but Vee thought he certainly made a strong case for immediate abolition of the Lords. Claudia took no offence at Miss Harbottle’s hectoring manner, merely saying that she knew many people who felt the same way.
‘But while we’re waiting for the revolution, can you tell us all those things we need to know?’
Miss Harbottle sniffed. ‘There’s a notice in your room with all the college rules. About signing out and in and all that kind of thing. What you’ll be fined for, or sent down if it’s bad enough. Men.’ She said the word as though she were speaking of black beetles. ‘There are strict rules about men in the college. You may never entertain a man privately in your rooms, for instance.’
‘It would be difficult, given the size of the rooms and the bed,’ Claudia said with a straight face.
Lally was laughing; Miss Harbottle looked vexed.
Lally quelled her laughter. ‘Tell us about this Freshers’ Fair.’
‘That’s tomorrow afternoon. It’s where you join University clubs and societies, or sign up for sporting activities. Only, please remember that we at Grace prefer to concentrate first and foremost on our academic work. Most first years go, though. It’s held in Schools.’
‘Schools?’ Lally asked. ‘What are they?’
‘Schools is the building in the High, on the corner of Merton Street. Lectures are held there, and it’s where you’ll take all your exams.’
Lally had a map of Oxford in her hand. ‘Here?’
‘Yes. In the morning, there’s Matriculation. There’s another notice about that.’
‘I read it,’ said Lally. ‘Subfusc clothing? Dark skirt and boots, white shirt and tie and cap and gown? Are the boots obligatory?’
‘It means shoes as well. And for dark, read black, please, including stockings. The Dean likes the women from Grace to look well-turned out and all the same.’
Their purchase of gowns and caps took place amid much hilarity. Lally was surprised to find she didn’t get to wear a mortarboard. She looked doubtfully at the soft, square-topped cap that she was handed.
‘It’s mediaeval, miss,’ the assistant said.
‘I believe you,’ said Claudia, perching hers on top of her blonde waves and peering at herself in the tiny mirror that was all the shop afforded. ‘It suits you best, Vee, I think you have the right kind of face for it. Like that portrait of Richard III, dark and introspective and waiting for the Renaissance to come along and liven things up a bit.’
Freshers’ Fair was awash with noisy masculinity. Men talking in loud voices, men on the stands shouting to be heard, male bodies pressing against one another and thrusting to get through the knot of undergraduates clustered round the popular stands. There was only a sprinkling of women, and most of them looked rather alarmed to find themselves among so many men.
‘There’s a peculiar smell in here,’ Lally said, wrinkling her elegant nose.
‘Men,’ Claudia said instantly. ‘I bet Hugh’s school smelt like this, didn’t it, Vee? It’s when they’re all together, there’s always a pong. And some of them here don’t wash that much, if you ask me. Don’t worry, you’ll get accustomed to it.’
Vee wasn’t worrying about the smell. Her eyes were scanning the tables and placards and banners proclaiming various activities: some sporting, some erudite, some absurd, like the Tiddlywinks Soc. ‘I’m sure most of these clubs and societies don’t welcome women,’ she said to Lally, who had her startled look again.
‘Too right,’ said a man wearing cricketing flannels and blazer, who was sitting at a nearby table. ‘This is what the university’s all about, sport and having a good time, and you female undergraduates come butting in, wanting to work and take life seriously, it’s a crashing bore.’
‘I play baseball back home,’ Lally said, ignoring the cricketing fan. ‘Do you suppose there’s a baseball club?’
A burst of song rose from the other side of the room.
Lally cupped her hand to her ear. ‘That sounds fun. I like to sing.’
‘Gilbert and Sullivan, and I bet they don’t take women members, either,’ said Claudia. ‘They’ll get singers for the female roles up from London.’
Lally went over to investigate a stand where they were singing madrigals and came back to report that was men only, too. ‘Imagine, they have men singing alto and soprano, did you ever hear anything like it? When there are women around.’
‘They think it’s traditional, I expect,’ Vee said. Her attention had been caught by a lanky individual in a faded pair of flannel trousers, held up at the waist by a frayed tie. On his top half, he wore a grubby fawn jumper. ‘Join now, join now, equal shares for everyone, that’s our motto,’ he was bellowing through a megaphone, drowning out the frail sound of the madrigal group.
He was an arresting figure, with dark hair that fell forward from an untidy parting to be pushed back with an impatient hand, a hand with long, muscular fingers, a strong hand. He radiated energy, but there was a quirkiness to his mouth that suggested the intensity was alleviated by a sense of humour.
‘R-A-P-M-O-C,’ Claudia read out the sign propped on the table. ‘Rapmoc? What on earth’s that?’
The young man lowered his megaphone. ‘Rational and Political Men Only Club.’
‘There you are,’ Vee said. ‘You asked, and he’s told you, if you’re any the wiser for knowing.’
‘Good Lord, it’s Alfred Gore, isn’t it?’ said Claudia. ‘My mother’s your godmother, only you never come to see her, so perhaps you aren’t aware of it. You were at Eton with my brother Jerry. Stop brandishing that megaphone and tell us why you don’t want women in your club.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Claudia Vere.’
‘I suppose you are,’ he said, after giving her a hard stare. ‘You’ve got Jerry’s eyes, all you Veres have those very blue eyes. Anyhow, don’t take any notice of the club name, we welcome people of all sexes. Or none. Come along and drink beer and talk serious politics. Thursday evening in the Arnold Room at Balliol.’
‘What a bore that sounds,’ Claudia said.
Vee had seen Hugh on the other side of the room. ‘Hello, Hugh!’ she called out, standing on tiptoe, and waving a handful of leaflets. ‘Over here.’
Hugh surged through the crowd, followed by a tall, fair man with a handsome face. ‘Vee, this is Giles Hotspur, we were at Repton together, and we share a set. My sister Verity, only we call her Vee. Hello, Alfred, no good shouting your wares, however much you yell and make a noise, it won’t add up to a sensible argument. Don’t go near that organization, Vee,’ he said, waving towards Alfred, who had started work again with his megaphone.
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s the Communist outfit. They aren’t allowed to be the Communist Society or club or whatever, the proctors won’t have it. You’ll be in deep trouble with your Dean if you attend a meeting and get busted. Red faces, never mind red politics. That’s why they call themselves that idiotic name. It’s Com Par backwards, you see. Bags, there, is a Marxist.’
‘Bags?’ said Claudia.
‘It’s all he wears. Hasn’t got a suit as far as anyone knows. Always goes about in disreputable bags and a ghastly pullover.’
‘Is he very hard up?’ Vee asked. ‘Surely, if he went to Eton …’
‘His people have got plenty of money, but since he took up the Cause, he likes to identify with the working masses who don’t have many changes of clothes. Solidarity, you see.’
Vee only had a vague idea of what a Marxist was. Both at school and at home, it was a word that wasn’t mentioned, and when she’d asked a question at either place, she had quickly been silenced. ‘Are all Communists Marxists?’
‘The most extreme are, and since they’re all extreme, yes, you could say Marxists and Communists are one and the same. However, we’ll all be Communists and Marxists soon, it’s quite the coming fashion. I bet membership of RAPMOC is growing fast.’
Vee was shocked; where she came from, at school and at the Deanery, Communists were Bolshevists, and there was no question but that Bolshevism was the work of the devil.
Alfred was looking at Vee with a quizzical expression in his eyes. ‘Do you know that nearly a quarter of the working population are unemployed? Do you have any idea how difficult it is for an unemployed worker to keep body and soul together, let alone his family fed and housed? The working man can’t take much more, and when he rises up to throw off the chains of capitalism, then you’ll see what the word revolution means.’
‘Is Communism really the answer?’ asked Lally. ‘Matters are pretty dire in the States, but I don’t think anyone’s predicting a blood-red revolution. I guess if Roosevelt gets elected, he’ll do his best for the working man.’
‘With the Depression you’ve got over there? You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Alfred waved his megaphone in the air. ‘Come to our next meeting, then you might begin to understand what politics really is, all you women have your heads in the sand.’
‘Thank you for the kind invitation,’ said Lally, ‘but I think I’ll pass.’ And to Claudia and Vee: ‘I’m going to go sign up for the Bach Choir. They surely have to have women in that.’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Claudia. ‘They probably prefer little boys.’
A thought occurred to Vee. ‘Hugh, what are you doing here? You aren’t a Fresher.’
‘I’m manning the Poetry Society stand. Better hop back to it, in fact. Care to join?’
‘Are women allowed to be members?’
‘Of course you are,’ he said, suddenly cross. ‘All these misogynist groups here, they’re out of touch with the times.’
She put her name down, although she didn’t think she’d go to any of the meetings or readings. She’d leave the poetry to Hugh. She signed up for the Literary Society and the French Club, avoided the blandishments of the Women’s Hockey squad – she’d had enough hockey at school to last a lifetime – and looked around for the others. Lally was chatting to compatriots at the Anglo-American Society stand, and Vee went over to join her.
‘Isn’t your pop standing in November?’ said a rangy, clean-cut man who looked as though he, at least, took a bath every day.
‘He is.’
‘Come on over on election night. There’ll be a party for all us Americans, there’s quite a crowd of us here at the moment, and we shall get the results by wireless as they come in.’
‘Sounds fun,’ said Lally.
‘Standing?’ said Claudia, who’d appeared beside them.
‘For the Senate,’ said Lally.
‘I thought you said your father was a doctor,’ Vee said.
‘Yes, but he’s very politically minded. Hates what’s happening in our country with the Depression and everything. He’s running for office so that he can make a difference.’
Vee became aware that someone was hovering behind them. She turned round and came face to face with a man who looked like a cherub. He was gazing at Lally.
‘What a lovely, lovely woman,’ he breathed. He laid a hand on her arm. ‘I say, may I paint you? Oh, please say yes. Everyone loves to be painted by me.’
Alfred, who had abandoned his megaphone for a moment, paused on his way back to the RAPMOC stand; he was carrying a glass of water in his hand. Yelling about the injustices of society gave you a thirst, Vee supposed.
‘This is Marcus,’ he said, waving his free hand towards the cherub. ‘A Balliol man, an artist.’
‘Can you study art at Oxford?’ Lally asked.
‘Law,’ said Marcus, in his soft voice. ‘I’m reading law because I have to, but I paint because I love to. What beauty!’ he went on, looking at Lally again. ‘That exquisite colour of hair – it is natural, I do hope?’ he added, anxiously.
‘Perfectly,’ said Lally, who seemed happy to take Marcus in her stride.
‘Neither red nor brown, and together with a cream complexion, not a freckle in sight, so fortunate, because often that colouring is so sadly marred by freckles, the effect is ravishing. Slightly aquiline nose, hazel eyes, no, golden eyes, long neck, slim as a willow. I shall paint you as Artemis, with a bow in your hand. Please say you’ll come. Not to my room, if that offends your maidenly sensibilities. It can be at the Ruskin, if you prefer, I work there as well. And bring your friends, bring a chaperone. Not that you aren’t perfectly safe, I never touch women, Alfred will vouch for me.’
‘Oh, pipe down, Marcus, and leave the girl alone,’ said Alfred. He drank his water and dumped the glass on the nearest stand. He gave Vee a direct look. ‘Give RAPMOC a go, Miss Trenchard. It might change your life.’
‘Are you a Christian?’ boomed a voice from across the way. ‘Join OICCU, and spend worthwhile time in the company of your fellow Christians.’
‘One for you, Vee,’ said Claudia.
‘Perhaps,’ she said, feeling suddenly guilty that she was so disinclined to have anything to do with the Christian Union.
Why, Vee wondered, as they left Schools clutching handfuls of leaflets, did Christians dress so badly? Why was she so dowdy in comparison to the dashing Claudia and stylish Lally? It was partly a matter of money, but even so …
‘It’s interesting, the way the men dress,’ she said, as they set off down the High.
‘Several distinct groups,’ agreed Claudia. ‘Tweedy squire-ish ones.’
‘Fops,’ Vee said. ‘Did you see that one in a floppy bow tie and that big hat?’
‘He looked kind of cute,’ Lally said.
‘Better than those grubby ones in duffel coats,’ said Claudia. ‘What is it about duffel coats?’
‘Then there are the don’t-cares, like your friend Alfred Gore,’ Vee said.
‘Don’t you believe it,’ said Claudia. ‘I’m a cynic when it comes to people who look as though they have minds above clothes. I think Alfred’s outfit is just as artfully put together as the bow tie and the hat. Men!’ she added with affectionate scorn.
Alfred took a few minutes’ break from his megaphoning and wandered over to talk to Hugh. ‘Which college is your sister at?’
‘Grace,’ said Hugh, scribbling on a card and filing it away. ‘So’s Claudia, but you know her. She’s a cousin of ours. Don’t know anything about the American one. My word, she’s a looker.’
Alfred raised his eyebrows. ‘Giles might hear you.’
‘Anyone may hear my opinion, she’s quite lovely. Claudia’s grown into a minx, by the look of her.’
‘The Veres are all mad,’ said Alfred. ‘Lovely eyes.’
‘Claudia? A bit intense for me.’
‘No, Vee has lovely dark eyes.’
Hugh considered this. ‘Does she? I’ve never thought about it.’
Alfred went back to his stand and his megaphone.
FOUR (#ulink_b777e3f1-38bf-5dab-aa06-b4a39cf2523d)
A few days later, Vee found a note from Hugh in her pigeonhole in the Lodge. ‘Hugh’s invited us to tea,’ she said, flourishing a sketch of the three of them.
Claudia was sifting through a handful of her own letters. She had more post than anyone else in their year, most of which she tossed into the bin without a second glance. She twitched the note out of Vee’s hand, looked at it, and laughed. ‘Wicked likenesses, what a devil the man is! Four o’clock at Christ Church. Peckwater 3.4. Do you suppose the divine Giles will be there? If so, I’m definitely on. What about you, Lally?’
‘Does he mean for all of us to go?’ asked Lally.
‘The picture tells its own story,’ Vee said, ‘and, besides, it’s addressed to the three of us.’ She handed Lally the envelope, addressed in Hugh’s elegant script: The Three Graces, c/o Miss V Trenchard.
‘He should be more specific, and name names,’ said Claudia. ‘He might get any three, such as Miss Harbottle, or that girl in the third year who’s so passionate about Moral Rearmament.’
‘It’s what he and Giles call us,’ Vee said.
‘I take it as a compliment.’
‘It might suit you and Lally, but hardly me,’ Vee said, feeling that with her dull Yorkshire clothes, and washed-out winter face, the soubriquet could only count as a courtesy. It irked her, the difference between how Lally and she looked. Lally wore no make-up, but her wonderful colouring and complexion put her in another league from Vee. As for Claudia, she never went out without make-up, which earned her the disapproval of quite half the college.
‘God prefers us to look the way He made us,’ one sanctimonious second-year told her in Hall.
‘Did He tell you so? Then why does He allow make-up to be made or sold?’
‘Make-up is the work of Satan.’
‘I’ll look out for the name when next I buy a lipstick,’ Claudia promised.
‘I’ll meet you at Christ Church, but it won’t be until a little later,’ said Lally, ‘I’ve got a choir rehearsal until four.’
‘We’ll stop off and buy a cake,’ Claudia said as she and Vee set off at a quarter to four. ‘Just to be sure of our welcome.’
They went into Fullers, busy with women in hats having tea. ‘I hope Hugh hasn’t invited that dreary man from the next staircase up,’ Vee said ‘What kind of cake shall we buy?’
‘Walnut, I think,’ said Claudia. ‘All men love walnut cake.’
They watched the cake being put in a box. The assistant made a loop with the ribbon and passed it to Vee while Claudia paid. ‘No, put your purse away, Vee, this is my treat.’
Claudia was well aware that her cousin had to watch every penny, and she managed to be generous in a casually kind way that made it impossible to refuse.
‘Which dreary man?’ she asked as they went out of the shop and into Cornmarket.
‘Jonathan somebody. Short and pink and hates women.’
‘A Repton man, what do you expect from your northern wastelands? You’re all years behind the times there. Anyhow, most of the men here hate women, haven’t you noticed?’
‘No, I haven’t. I know a lot wish women had never been admitted to the university, but that’s simply unthinking prejudice. Why should they hate us?’
‘It’s what men do, when women trespass on their territory. Except for those that are queer, some of them get on quite well with women.’
‘Queer? Odd, you mean, men who are eccentric?’
Claudia stopped and turned to look at her companion. ‘Vee! Queer. You know, men who go to bed with other men. Like at their schools.’
Vee was taken aback. ‘Men who go to bed with men?’
‘Yes, of course.’ She gave Vee a quick, concerned look. ‘Do you mean you didn’t know? What did you think they do at school, all those boys cooped up together? They get the habit there, and when they come on here, or go to Cambridge, they just carry on.’
‘Well, there’s nothing wrong with sharing a bed.’
‘My pet, when I say go to bed together, I don’t mean they doss down for a sound night’s sleep. It’s for sex, for heaven’s sake.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
Vee’s upbringing had been sheltered, but she still felt she had a reasonable grasp of the facts of life. Books, a chatty maid and earnest discussions with her more sophisticated friends at school had sorted it out for her – or so she thought. Of course, it was a taboo subject for her parents, as it was for most of their generation. More out of embarrassment than principle, she thought.
‘I expect your mother was going to tell you about men on the eve of your wedding,’ said Claudia. ‘And she wouldn’t think to mention about men’s other tastes. Perhaps she doesn’t know, I’m sure my mother’s a terrific innocent about that kind of thing.’
What about Hugh? He’d been to public school. Only Hugh never talked about sex or love or anything like that.
‘Maybe there are men like that, but Hugh isn’t, what did you call it? Queer. He’s perfectly normal.’
‘My pet, of course he’s queer, everyone knows that. He’s had a tremendous thing going with Giles, why do you think they share a set?’
‘Most of the men share sets. It’s how they room at men’s colleges. They’re old friends, from school.’
‘Yes, and some are friends, and then there are those for whom two bedrooms aren’t really necessary.’ Claudia took Vee’s arm, and drew her out of the way of an angry student on a bicycle. He swept past them, ringing his bell in violent disdain. ‘You can’t tell me you didn’t know.’
Vee felt as though the world had just opened and spat her out. Hugh in bed with another man, for sex? It was inconceivable. ‘And disgusting, I don’t know how you can say such things, Claudia.’
‘They don’t find it disgusting at all, they like it, or they wouldn’t go to bed together.’
‘I don’t know how you can bring yourself to say such things.’ Vee broke away from Claudia, desperate to escape from these awful revelations, and plunged into the traffic, causing a delivery van to stop with a squeal of brakes and a stout woman cyclist to swerve and nearly come off.
‘Vee, I’m sorry,’ Claudia called after her. ‘Honestly, I’d never have said anything if I thought you didn’t know about Hugh and Giles. I mean it’s as obvious as the nose on your face.’
Tears were pricking Vee’s eyes as she whirled round to shout at Claudia. ‘Not to me it isn’t.’
Claudia caught up with her. ‘That’s because you’ve led such a sheltered life in the Deanery, didn’t the girls at school talk about it?’
Vee had bitten her lip in her agitation, so hard that she’d drawn blood. She dabbed at her mouth with the back of her glove.
Claudia put a hand out to touch her cousin’s stiff shoulders, but Vee shrugged her roughly off.
‘Well, it’s as well I’ve enlightened you. You’d have found out sooner or later. Ignorance and innocence aren’t the same, and ignorance can get you into terrible scrapes.’
The glory had gone out of the day, and Vee stalked through the lodge at Christ Church with her head held high and her stomach churning. She walked unseeing past the Custodians in their habitual bowler hats, and almost ran across Tom Quad, wanting to get away from Claudia. Past the great Wren Library, unnoticed, even in the beauty of the reflected late-afternoon light. She dashed over to Staircase Three, but there she stopped.
She didn’t want to see Hugh. Not after what Claudia had said. To do that – what exactly – with Giles? No, Claudia was making it up. It was one of these fancies she’d picked up from her strange London life. Her brother was potty, who was to say that Claudia didn’t have a loony streak as well? Vee wasn’t going to believe her, and that was that.
The outer door, that they had learned to call an oak, was open. Inside, Hugh was stretched out on a sofa in front of the blazing fire, a pipe in his mouth, fanning himself with a copy of the Spectator. He leaped to his feet, and came over to give Vee a hug.
She shrank away from him, hating herself for doing so. This was Hugh, her brother, not some monster conjured up by Claudia, damn her.
‘What’s up, old thing?’ he said. ‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost. If you thought you did, don’t worry, it’s probably just Bartlett, my tutor, he’s been dead for centuries, only no one’s noticed yet. Giles, buck up over there and yell for Tewson to bring tea.’
Tall, exquisite Giles. She stared at him, her mind still unable to cope with Claudia’s bombshell.
No, Claudia had got it all wrong, at least about her brother. Perhaps one or two men might be like that; all right, she could accept that. Although she hadn’t said so to Claudia, there had been talk at school about Oscar Wilde. And what did men do, two of them? She drew back from these uncomfortable anatomical thoughts and went over to the window.
The quad outside was half in shadow, half glowing in the autumn sunlight. That was like her, she thought, she’d been walking in the sun, and now the shadows had caught up with her. Unreal shadows, things of the darkness of the night and restless dreams, and no more substance in them than such phantasms had. Curse Claudia, for even suggesting such a thing.
Giles came over to her with a cup of tea, and as he went back to the table, Vee saw him touch Hugh lightly on the shoulder. Hugh turned and smiled at him, a smile of such sweetness and affection that there could be no doubt at all about the intimacy that existed between the two men.
The cup and saucer slipped through her fingers; the delicate porcelain smashed in pink and white chips on the dark wooden floor, tea splashed on to the carpet.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said mechanically. ‘How clumsy of me.’
‘The Dresden is wasted on you, Vee,’ said Hugh. ‘It’ll be an enamel mug next time. Tewson, we’ve had a spillage, come and see to it, would you? Giles, pour out another cup for Vee, and this time, for heaven’s sake hold on to it. Have a biscuit, that’ll soothe your nerves, I never saw you so on edge. That’s what education does to a girl, I see how right all the misogynists are.’
This Hugh was almost a stranger to her. The brother she’d grown up with at the Deanery seemed to have vanished, to be replaced by this new person, a person she knew nothing about. Was this the brother she had confided in, moaned about their parents to, shared jokes with, laughed with when he did his merciless drawings of York notables, the brother who laughed when she did an imitation of the senior clergy wresting the tall palms from each other’s grasp on Palm Sunday, in an effort not to have to carry the small and weedy ones?
The memories crowded into her head, a jumble of images and voices.
That was the brother of her childhood, of the Deanery, of times that had gone. Here, in front of her was the man, with his own life, his own feelings – and his own attachments. To Giles.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, putting down the fresh cup with a bang. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
‘Not in here,’ said Giles. ‘Down the stairs, turn right before you get to the door. Claudia, do you want to go with her, to hold her head?’
‘No,’ said Claudia. ‘Leave her alone, she’s just had a bit of a shock, that’s all,’
‘Oh?’ said Hugh, enquiringly.
‘Nothing you two need to know about,’ said Claudia.
As Vee stumbled down the stairs towards the lavatory she heard Claudia talking.
‘Are you going to cut the cake? Is anyone else coming to tea? I feel like meeting some new people.’
‘I hope John Petrus may drop in,’ Hugh said. ‘Brilliant man, Fellow of Balliol, and …’
Vee heard nothing more.
FIVE (#ulink_e5223341-b6cb-5d67-8e1f-af623dddf179)
Vee was having tutorials that term with Dr Nettleton at Christ Church. She never knew whether he’d be there or not, as he was apt to take off for weekends in France and not get back until Tuesday morning; her tutorial was at eleven-thirty on Mondays. His rooms were in Canterbury quad, and that Monday she climbed the three flights of stairs to discover a note on the door. He was away, would Miss Trenchard please come on Thursday at five.
Which left her with time to kill, and official permission to be in Christ Church before the witching hour of one o’clock. She wandered into Peck and was hailed from the window by Hugh. ‘Hi, intruder,’ he called down. ‘Your nose is pink, is it cold? Who let you in?’
‘I’d a tutorial with Nettleton, but he’s away.’
Giles joined him at the window. ‘Rogering his French mistress, I expect,’ Vee heard him say. ‘Come on up,’ he called down to her.
Rogering? What did that mean? Vee went up to Hugh’s room, to find a man in a black jacket barring her way. ‘You can’t come in here, miss,’ he said in a lugubrious voice. ‘No visitors to the college before one p.m., and certainly no members of the female sex on my staircase.’
‘Give over, Tewson,’ Hugh called out. ‘That’s not a member of the female sex, it’s my sister. Turn your mind to more important matters.’ He flapped a book towards the windows, where dust motes were dancing in the beams of sunlight. ‘Dust, Tewson, look at that. You need to dust, not fuss about my sister.’
‘Dust is in the air, I can’t deal with dust until it hits the ground or the table and how can I dust a room that’s in the state you two young gentlemen leave it, with piles of papers and books everywhere? Of course there’s going to be dust.’
‘Books go with the life of an undergraduate, Tewson,’ said Giles, heaving himself up on to the window seat and stretching out his grey flannelled legs. He had a small telescope in one hand, and he lifted it to his left eye and gazed out over the quad.
‘I’ll be with you in two ticks,’ said Hugh, from his desk. ‘Just let me finish this article.’
‘Hillier is still asleep,’ Giles reported. ‘Leaves his curtains pulled back so that the light wakes him, but there he is, fast asleep.’
‘That Mr Hillier, his scout can’t do anything with him, sleeps like he’s the proverbial log,’ Tewson said. ‘Mr Hotchkiss, as has that staircase, he bangs on the door, but to no purpose. Mr Hillier may leave his curtains open, like you say, sir, but the oak’s shut, nothing gets through to him. Mr Hotchkiss has complained to the Censor again and again, how can he do his job and wake someone up who doesn’t want to wake? It’s hard enough clearing up after some of you young gents; if you carry on like this at home, I can’t think that you’ve got any staff left.’
He hitched up his grey striped trousers and gave a sniff. ‘Not but what at least you have staff at home, not like that Mr Ibbotson, you can tell his family doesn’t keep anyone above a tweeny.’
‘Mr Ibbotson’s father is a carpenter,’ said Hugh. He threw down a copy of the New Statesman. ‘God, what rubbish these fellows write. And don’t you think the less of him for that, Tewson, you dreadful old snob. Joel is brilliant, far brainier than any of us, he’ll probably end up Chancellor of the Exchequer.’
‘Time was when nobody who wasn’t a gentleman came to the House,’ said Tewson.
‘Ah, just you wait,’ said Hugh, tapping his magazine with his fingers. ‘Soon, come the revolution, all the aristos will be swinging from that lamp-post out there, and you’ll have to change your view, too, Tewson, pretty smartly, or you’ll be had up for being a member of the petty bourgeoisie. It’s the workers who’ll call the tune in the years to come.’
‘Workers! What do you know about workers?’ Tewson flipped his duster at the motes and stalked out, bearing the tray of dirty crocks in front of him like a trophy. He shut the door with a defiant click.
‘You shouldn’t tease him,’ Giles said. ‘Look, the Angelus must be about to ring, there’s old Horsley just coming out of the library. Punctual to the minute, off to his rooms for the first port of the day.’
‘He has one at breakfast,’ Hugh said.
‘Port? At breakfast? Surely not.’
‘Whisky. Gives him stamina, he says. Sets him up for the day, purely medicinal. Do you remember, Vee, one of the vergers at the Minster had the same habit, only it was the communion wine? He helped himself to a snifter every morning when he opened up. Passed out in evensong while the choir was singing Wachet auf one Sunday afternoon. Flat on his face.’
Vee did remember, how could she forget such a glorious event?
‘Let’s drive out into the country, find a place to have lunch, Vee,’ Hugh suggested.
Did that include Giles? Vee wondered. Then, ‘You can’t drive.’
‘Oh, but I can.’
‘You don’t have a car.’
‘I use Bungy’s. I do his prose compositions, he lends me his car. A perfect quid pro quo.’
‘When did you learn to drive? How?’
‘Last year, and there’s nothing to it. You get in the car, screech a few gears, and you’re away.’
Giles put his telescope down. ‘Don’t, Vee, is my advice. Hugh turns into a fiend behind the wheel, and he’s the worst driver I know.’
‘I can’t lunch, anyhow. I must get back to Grace. Claudia’s bought a bicycle, and we’re going to teach her how to ride it.’
‘Good God. Will it be a private affair, or will spectators be admitted?’
‘Only helpers, and you aren’t that. You merely want to laugh.’
‘I should like to see our cousin at a disadvantage for once.’
Vee and Lally had both acquired bicycles in the first week of term, Vee an ancient black boneshaker from the pound, and Lally a rather more respectable model from a third-year who’d broken her leg and said she was never getting on a bike again.
Claudia was at first scornful of this primitive means of transport, and then envious. ‘Can I have a go?’ she asked Lally.
‘Can you ride a bike?’
‘I never have, but it looks easy enough.’ Claudia hauled herself into the saddle and thirty seconds later, she and the bike were in the lily pond in the centre of the quad.
‘Easy, huh?’ said Lally, looking resignedly at her twisted wheel. ‘Get your own bike, and we’ll teach you how to ride it.’
Claudia had continued to walk everywhere, and then had given in. ‘A man from the bicycle shop is bringing it around this afternoon,’ she’d announced at breakfast.
It was new and shiny, and Lally shook her head when she saw it. ‘It’ll get stolen, the first time you leave it propped up against a lamppost.’
‘I’ll put a spell on it,’ Claudia said. ‘Anyhow, it isn’t going to get pinched. I see Jenks strapping it on the back of the car when we come down for the last time.’
SIX (#ulink_a745b369-243d-5abe-b353-9ef2a66a85c0)
They didn’t take their bicycles when they went to Balliol for John Petrus’s party, not in those clothes.
Vee was surprised to get an invitation. ‘I’ve never met him.’
‘He’s a don at Balliol,’ Claudia said, her voice careless, her face alert. ‘Fearfully clever, and very good-looking. He knows Hugh quite well, and he wants to meet you and Lally.’
Vee returned to the invitation. What did one wear to a don’s cocktail party?
‘Not tweeds,’ Lally and Claudia said together. Vee’s bristly Yorkshire tweeds, built to last, were a standing joke. Practical and warm they might be, but they were no more than a distant relation to the lovely American tweed that Lally wore, or Claudia’s even prettier and much softer ones, and Vee knew which she preferred.
‘Petrus is the most terrific dandy, frightfully dashing for a university fellow,’ Claudia said. ‘Such a shame that we don’t fit into each other’s clothes, Vee, and Lally’s far too tall for hers to be any use to you.’
‘I wouldn’t mind being able to wear your clothes, but I don’t think you’d want to borrow any of mine, even if you could fit into them,’ Vee said. ‘Not your style.’ She minded very much about how old-fashioned and frumpish most of her wardrobe was, but she wasn’t going to let Claudia know that.
‘No, I wouldn’t, although those tweeds do have a certain bizarre character to them.’
In the end, Vee wore her green moiré frock for Petrus’s party. She’d thought it very elegant when she bought it in Leeds, but she knew she’d win no prizes for smartness with Claudia and Lally there. It shrieked ‘provincial’ beside their clothes: from Paris in Claudia’s case, and New York in Lally’s.
Claudia wore a grey silk dress, cut on the bias, which made her look like a Norse goddess out for a good time. Lally’s frock was a cocktail in apricot silk, a demanding colour that suited her hair and eyes.
They set off to Balliol, Vee feeling countrified and dowdy in her thick coat. Claudia had a fur wrap, needless to say, and looked fearfully glamorous.
They arrived at the lodge at the same moment as Alfred Gore. His vitality swept over them as he waved the porter aside. ‘I’ll take the ladies up to Mr Petrus’s rooms,’ he said, and set off across the quad, brandishing a large black umbrella.
He guided them to a dark entrance and up three stone steps. Inside, it was dark, with a kind of stuffy dampness in the air and a strong smell of urine.
‘It is a bit whiffy,’ said Alfred. ‘All the same, these Balliol men, they don’t know the meaning of the word drains, they’re far too clever to bother their heads about details like properly functioning lavs. We’re on the third floor, I’m afraid,’ he went on, bounding ahead up the stairs, then waiting on the landing for them to catch up. ‘In we go.’
Vee was used to crushes, since the York clergy liked to gather together in small spaces with their wives and families, but her first impression was that she had never seen so many people crammed into one room. It was a large room, with three sash windows set in bays, a large fireplace, and a closed door, which must lead to a bedroom. There was a huge rolltop desk, pushed into a corner and stacked with papers. A grand piano took up a lot of space at the end of the room; its lid was down and it was draped in green baize, which was just as well, given the glasses set down on it.
Alfred eased his way through the mass of chattering, smoking people until he came within reach of Petrus. Being taller than most of those there, he could look over their heads and catch the attention of their host. ‘Petrus!’ he cried. ‘Refugees from Grace.’
‘Hello,’ said Claudia, fixing Petrus with her most dazzling blue look.
He was a slender man, quite tall, with very pale fair hair combed back from his forehead. He had a mouth that Vee found slightly disturbing, but the most remarkable thing about him were his dark grey eyes, watchful, clever, penetrating eyes.
‘Claudia, my dear, how lovely to see you.’ He gave her a brushing kiss on one cheek and then on the other, and made a little bow to Lally. ‘Our American visitor, I assume. Miss Fitzpatrick, isn’t it? I had the pleasure of meeting your father when last I was in Chicago. I’m sure he will win a seat in the Senate, and then we may expect great things from him.’ His eyes moved to Vee. ‘Ah, the Yorkshire cousin. Hugh Trenchard’s sister, I believe. Good evening Miss Trenchard. You honour us this evening.’
Vee could feel a flush creeping over her face. Was he being ironic? She was infuriated to find herself both flustered and overwhelmed by this man. He wasn’t handsome in any film-star kind of way, but he made the other men around look diminished. Except for Alfred, who had his own energetic personality wrapped around him like a cloak.
As for clothes, the two men couldn’t have looked more different. Alfred was wearing an appalling pair of grey flannel trousers, held up with an Eton tie, she noticed, and his usual shabby pullover. Petrus, in contrast, was wearing an immaculately tailored suit and a dashingly embroidered waistcoat.
‘Call her Vee, everybody does,’ said Claudia, manoeuvring so that she stood beside her host. ‘This looks as though it’s going to be a lively party.’
Vee had no desire to stand there with Petrus’s sardonic eye upon her, so she edged backwards and slid towards the window.
At first glance, although much more eccentric or dowdy or casual in their dress, she would have said the guests were the same as at any other party; people who knew one another extremely well and probably met each other every day, and who therefore had lots to talk and gossip about.
Then her ears tuned in to the conversation. No, this wasn’t the desultory chitchat of York parties. Arguments were raging all about her; people were giving their opinions with an intensity and at a volume that was never found in the drawing rooms of Yorkshire. They were discussing politics. Or international trade. Or the rights of the workers.
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