Consider the Lily (25 page)

The clouds shifted and sunlight cut through the trees. In the silence an animal scuffled in the undergrowth. The light spread over the garden turning it from dim green to gold. The rusty scream of a jay broke the peace, followed by a flutter of wood pigeons.

‘I’m quite sure, Mrs Kit,’ said Ned Sheppey.

By the last week in March, Rupert’s progress was pronounced steady and both Kit and Matty felt they could leave him to his nurses. Tyson drove Matty, Flora and an excited Ivy up to London where they moved into Bryanston Court in preparation for the luncheons, teas, dinners and balls that would fill the next few months before, exhausted, Society decamped to the country for the summer.

Flora was not happy. ‘What do I dratted well want to come out for?’ she said from the sofa at Bryanston Court, and added, ‘For God’s sake!’

‘Flora!’ Matty was not so much taken aback by the language as by Flora’s vehemence. ‘But you’re going to have such a wonderful time. I wish I’d done it.’ Matty wished nothing of the sort, but she had always imagined that it was only she who considered the business an ordeal.

‘No, you don’t,’ said Flora shrewdly. ‘You have far too much sense. Own up, Matty.’

‘No, I don’t,’ admitted Matty, who had watched Daisy sail through her Season in a haze of floral tributes and Chanel No. 5 and thanked God the doctor had put his foot down. ‘But it’s different for you.’

‘Sooty boots, Matty.’

‘Sooty boots?’

‘Miss Glossop said fibbers get struck by lightning.’ Flora enjoyed her own joke but then the smile was wiped from her face. ‘I’m almost too old. To come out I mean.’

‘Nonsense. Nineteen isn’t too old.’

‘At least you’re only being presented as the new Mrs Dysart and don’t have any of the anguish of trying to be a success.’

‘At least,’ agreed Matty drily, for that was bad enough.

She poured out the tea and handed the cup to her sister-in-law. Flora picked up a copy of
The Times
that lay open at the social column. ‘Ye gods,’ she said. ‘Fifteen dances. All that preening, and I don’t have nearly enough dresses.’

She could have added that she was terrified – at the prospect of looking lumpy in made-over dresses, of tight white gloves that had to be kept clean, of gilt chairs laid out by the mile, of halting conversations with bored men, of chaperones watching like lynxes from balconies. Of thinking that this expensive and vulgar performance was all nonsense.

Of failing to make a success of it.

Flora was squeezed in a paradox: she despised the business (she said) and yet she wanted desperately not to make a pig’s ear of it and to be pointed out as the Girl Who Didn’t Take.

‘Flora...’ Matty balanced her saucer on her hand and twiddled the cup around. ‘If it’s dresses that are the problem, I am sure we can do something.’

Two pairs of eyes met over the gold-rimmed cups. ‘Sweet of you,’ said Flora. ‘But no.’

‘I didn’t mean—’

‘That’s all right,’ said Flora brightly. ‘It’s just I don’t think you should pay for my dresses.’

‘No. No. Of course not.’

There was a small but significant pause.

‘Well,’ said Matty, extracting her notebook from her handbag, ‘we should decide on some details.’

Flora heaved herself to her feet and went over to the window, where she twitched moodily at the chintz. London didn’t suit her, she decided. It was for thin, fizzy people who could hold a cigarette at the correct angle and had frightfully amusing things to say. The prospect of the next three tiring and expensive months filled her with bile and gloom – and butterflies in the stomach that woke her with a jolt in the early hours.

‘Claridge’s?’ Matty pressed on. ‘Or Stanhope Gate?’

‘Aren’t we too late to make a booking?’ said Flora hopefully. She did not want to hold a cocktail party or a fork luncheon party – or any party, for that matter. But, backed by Robbie, a dangerously agitated Rupert insisted from his sick bed that plans should go forward so she could damn well get married – and to someone suitable.

‘I’ve provisionally booked both,’ Matty persisted, who was finding that, as the rich Mrs Dysart, she was able to effect things.

Flora gave in. She dropped the curtain and turned round. ‘The trouble with you, Matty, is that you’re too efficient. Look at Hinton. The place runs like clockwork now.’

Matty turned pink with pleasure. ‘Really?’

Flora recollected the old Hinton Dysart – the dust and dispirited paintwork, lukewarm baths and inefficient lavatories and the cold that, in winter, blew in from Siberia. ‘Oh, yes. Really. You’ve done wonders. You’ve no idea how dot and carry one we were. Pipes held together by tape and the curtains by pins and that sort of thing.’

‘Flora.’ Matty busied herself with teacups, milk jug and slop bowl. ‘You’re not teasing, are you? I haven’t upset you with all the changes or made you feel pushed out of your own home?’

‘Good Lord, no,’ said Flora inspecting a run in one of her stockings. ‘I admit I was expecting the worst.’ She looked up. ‘I wasn’t very kind to you, Matty, was I? When you first came. I thought you would take Kit away, or import a form of Susan Chudleighism or... I don’t know what I thought.’

Matty struggled to reply. ‘Flora…’

Flora sent her plait flying over her shoulder. ‘I am sorry to be rude, but you have to admit your aunt is terrible.’

‘She’s only an aunt by marriage.’ Matty poured the remains of her tea into the slop bowl. ‘I’ll tell you something, Flora,’ she said. ‘I hate her.’ Long overdue, the confession was liberating, exhilarating even.

Flora drank her tea and returned to the social pages and Matty returned to the agenda.

‘Lunch then, at the Honourable Mrs Charles Turner’s, Christiana Bellamy’s dance, Charlotte Souter’s luncheon party...’

Swinging kid gloves by the fingers, Kit breezed in and tossed his trilby onto a chair. ‘Tea? Good.’ He accepted a cup and sat down by Flora. ‘Ordeal by cocktail party?’

‘Fork luncheon,’ she replied gloomily.

Kit peered at his sister. ‘Stage fright?’

Flora nudged
The Times.
‘Isn’t it all rather stupid? I know everyone is supposed to do it, and Mother wanted—’ She stopped abruptly and Matty froze in the act of pouring out milk.

‘I wish Mother—’ said Flora with an anger that made Matty gasp. ‘I wish—’ And then, as if frightened by her own outburst, she bent over to attend to the errant stocking.

‘All right, sis.’ Kit rubbed his hand up and down her back. ‘It’s all right.’

Flora grabbed his other hand and held it. Her stormy expression cleared. ‘Sorry.’

‘More tea?’ asked Matty.

With an abrupt change of mood Flora said, ‘I should warn you, Lady F.’s on the war path.’

‘My dear Flora,’ said Kit, whose imitation of Lady Foxton was a popular family setpiece, ‘can I be hearing this? Not want to do the Season?’

It wasn’t that funny, but brother and sister collapsed against the Colefax-and-Fowlered sofa and shook with laughter while Matty smiled politely and poured more tea.

It hadn’t been
too
bad, Flora considered three weeks later as she trudged up Upper Street in Islington, map under one arm, a bulky parcel under the other. Yet.

‘
Islington!
’ cried Matty when Flora informed her of her plan to walk to Miss Glossop’s.
‘Nobody
walks, not to Islington. It might be dangerous.’

But Flora decided she needed the exercise and would only agree to let Tyson drop her at the Angel. She had promised Robbie to deliver a patchwork quilt to Miss Glossop – ‘A token,’ said Robbie, making a to-do of brown paper and string, ‘of our friendship when she was here.’ Flora wondered how Miss Glossop felt about the friendship, but she could not deny that Robbie had taken months to make the quilt.

There was no denying either that it was a relief to escape overheated rooms and endless plates of salmon and peas. Walking in London was an adventure of a sort and, at the very least, it would provide a topic of conversation at the next function.

Not that Flora’s wits had deserted her: she had danced and chatted quite as she had been instructed by Lady F. (and woken up with headaches from too much champagne). She had even attracted one or two titled but, let it be said, spotty men who sent bouquets every other day. Never mind, it confirmed her rating in the Season’s hierarchy and sharpened the interest of inquisitorial mothers and their uniformly permed daughters, with whom, she was assured by the former, she would wish to make friends.

Flora swung north up the street. London spread out around her, a territory of secrets and labyrinths, of mysteries and shadows, beauty and squalor.

At the Angel, she passed the pawnbrokers on her left and a little further on the patch of grass known as Islington Green and the old music hall on her right. Had she but known it, Flora was skirting one of Victorian London’s most notorious rookeries: a no-go area to police into which fugitives could and did vanish for ever. Traces of that colourful, often violent past, remained and were evident when she turned into St Peter’s Street.

Once elegant, the terrace had decayed and on doorsteps sat children who had never tasted salmon and peas in their lives. She passed one house where the windowpanes were all broken. A woman screamed inside and Flora halted. That proved a mistake, for the children immediately made a beeline for her, scenting a victim. They pulled at her clothes, commenting in accents she did not understand. Panicked, Flora pulled away, fumbled in her handbag and found a couple of threepenny bits. She thrust them at the children, and hurried on, hugging her parcel.

Miss Glossop lived in a late Georgian house split into lodgings. There was no running water, and an odoriferous closet on the first floor indicated little in the way of sanitation. Less solid than Flora recollected, Miss Glossop’s mouth shaped into an ‘o’ when she saw her former pupil. She was clearly embarrassed because she had no tea or biscuits to offer. They sat conversing about old times in a room that managed to be both stuffy and cold – and Flora burned at her thoughtlessness in arriving unannounced.

As she performed the rituals of another world, the memory of that episode remained with Flora: the shabby street and silent children, the screaming woman, the bareness of Miss Glossop’s room and the manner in which the governess’s mittened fingers patted, explored and held tight to the quilt. ‘So thick, so warm, so practical. Thank you a thousand times, Flora.’

Nevertheless, Flora was being pressed into a mould. How could she fail to be? Days slid past, skewered together by telephone calls, dress fittings, scrutinies of address books and diaries, exchanges of: ‘Is he on
The List,
darling?’ ‘Is he safe in taxis?’, and a couple of lectures from front-line Lady F.

‘My dear Flora, you must talk. Talk about anything, it doesn’t matter what. Chatter, my girl. Chatter. To be silent at dinner or at dance will be a black mark against you. Don’t be clever either. Nobody likes clever women.’

‘But I am not clever, Lady F.’

‘No, dear, but you sometimes look it.’

‘Dear Flora,’ said Matty, ticking off a pile of invitations. ‘I would never forgive myself if we didn’t do this properly. I am sure your mother—’

Flora cut across her. ‘Let me tell you this, Matty. My mother didn’t care, so please don’t worry yourself on that account.’ With that revealing snippet, Flora marched straight out to the nearest hairdresser and ordered him to cut off her plait.

On the afternoon of her presentation at Court, she and Matty sat in the car in the Mall, taking pains not to tangle Prince of Wales ostrich feathers and long white trains.

‘I feel like a Christmas tree,’ said Flora.

It was May and, typically, pouring with rain. Traffic in the Mall was at a standstill and pedestrians peered in at the windows as if Matty and Flora were a pair of waxworks.

‘Curtsy to one Majesty,’ muttered Flora. ‘Sink to your very ankles, no “bobbity-boo stuff”. Madame Vacani was very emphatic about that. Retrieve balance. Get up. Walk one and half steps. Curtsy to the other Majesty. Sink hard. Get up. Pray to the patron of lost causes. Walk backwards out of the room. Kick train as you do so. Do not fall flat.’

‘Will you be quiet, Flora.’ Matty was trembling inside her oyster satin.

‘Photographs at Lafayette’s afterwards.’ Flora sounded almost demented. ‘Why on earth do we do this?’

As nervous as Flora, Matty’s palms were wet and the leather stuck to her skin. ‘Pinch me, Flora. You are about to come out, and I am about to be presented as the new Mrs Dysart.’

On impulse, they grasped each other’s hand hard. The Verral diamonds winked.

‘Good luck.’

‘Good luck.’

The car eased its way through the gates of Buckingham Palace. Looking back, all Flora remembered was a blur of white walls picked out in gold, a mosaic of medals and dress uniforms, circles of sweat spreading under her arms, rain-distorted faces gawping through the car window and bulging fishy eyes reminiscent of a pair she had once seen in the window of a joke shop.

On the night of Lady Londonderry’s ball, Ivy drew the bath and built up the fire in the bedroom. Later, she helped a newly permed Flora into a copy of a Madeleine Vionnet dress which Mrs Snell had run up from a basement in Brown Street, and dusted powder over the broad white shoulders.

Flora stood back and surveyed herself: a pale green satin debutante with Lady F.’s diamond clips and flat shoes. (‘Nobody will see them, Flora, and you don’t want to be too tall.’ ‘Are you trying to say I’m a giant, Matty?’ ‘No, Flora. Not a
giant
exactly.’) Released from the plait, Flora’s hair had taken on new life and, to her disappointment, the perm had encouraged it in all sorts of liberties. It curled around her head in a flaxen nimbus with a singularity that, admittedly, was not fashionable, but made her both attractive and interesting. Flora did not see it that way, clucked at the mirror, pulling at strands and discarding combs, and made a face at the result. She had wanted to achieve the ‘look’ for the Season, but had failed – and who would want to dance with a Medusa-headed giantess?

She sat down on the stool and scrutinized her reflection further. Perhaps she had not grown into herself yet? She rather hoped that was the case and that she wasn’t stuck in the awkward mould for ever. Nevertheless, her duty was plain: to meet a suitable man, preferably a rich one, and marry him. Since she was used to thinking of herself as a child, the notion felt odd. Common sense also told Flora that she was an acquired taste.