Debutantes (2 page)

Violet and Rose were already sitting at one side of the large table in the dining room and the twins slid into their places opposite. Their father sat at the head of the table, frowning heavily over a letter that the butler had just handed him – another one of those bills, thought Daisy – and Great-Aunt Lizzie, a trim, upright figure, sat at the bottom and looked with disfavour at Poppy’s untidy hair and Daisy’s chemical-stained hands.

The dining room at Beech Grove Manor was gloomy at this time of day. Four of its seven windows faced west and the other three faced north, and not even the looking glasses that were hung on the walls opposite the windows brightened it up much. The battered old furniture was dull from lack of polish, the silver on the sideboard was sparse and bore marks of heavy wear, and the original red velvet curtains had faded to a threadbare pink. The place depressed Michael Derrington and mealtimes were never cheerful. It might have been jollier, thought Daisy, if they all just served themselves, or even fetched the food from the kitchen, but Great-Aunt Lizzie would never permit what she called a lowering of standards. Following the tradition of the past thirty years, the elderly butler accepted the dishes from the hands of a young parlourmaid and shuffled around the table trying to give an air of formality to shepherd’s pie, turnips and boiled potatoes.

‘I’ve had a letter from Cousin Fanny,’ announced Great-Aunt Lizzie once the meal had been served. Five pairs of uninterested eyes looked at her and four pairs then looked away again. Only their father continued to look at the elderly lady.

‘Drink your milk, Rose. Yes, Aunt. You were saying?’

Rose made a face. The girls’ mother had died of tuberculosis and because Rose was so skinny, her father continually forced pints of milk on her in the belief that it would strengthen her. ‘
Delicate Child Force-fed Milk by Brutal Relations. Earl’s Mansion Hides Broken Heart
,’ murmured Rose, who kept a scrapbook full of lurid headlines cut out from newspapers. She sipped a half-teaspoon of milk and curled her lip.

‘I was saying, Michael,’ Great-Aunt Lizzie’s voice rose to its shrill, well-bred heights, ‘that Cousin Fanny has written to me. She enquires whether Violet is to be presented at court this spring.’ She waited until Rose had swallowed a gulp of her milk and then continued. ‘She suggests that Violet’s godmother the Duchess of Denton may consider presenting her – she was such a great friend of dear Mary’s – and would perhaps allow her to share in her daughter Catherine’s coming-out party. We would, of course, have to take a house in London – at least for a month or so – and get the girl some decent clothes.’

Violet jerked her head away from the window and looked at her great-aunt; her eyes were blazing with excitement. Daisy stretched out and linked her little finger with Poppy’s under the table. They knew how much this meant to their sister – to be a deb one needed to be presented at court by someone who had been presented themselves, and their mother’s death had meant they didn’t have many options in that department. Great-Aunt Lizzie was too fragile and Cousin Fanny had her own daughter to present.

‘Impossible! You know that perfectly well. I can’t afford anything of the sort.’ The Earl avoided his daughter’s eyes. ‘Maybe next year, if times are better,’ he added. Bateman the butler looked distressed and poured a little extra water into his master’s glass, perhaps wishing that it was wine as in the affluent days. Michael Derrington swallowed it down and glared angrily around the table.

‘Next year I will be too old, Father!’ wailed Violet.

‘Hollywood,’ mimed Daisy, but it was no good. Violet got up from the table and went out, slamming the door behind her. Rose took advantage of the disturbance to tip the rest of her milk into a low bowl of spring flowers, but failed to avoid Great-Aunt Lizzie’s eagle eye or a lecture about deceit and wastefulness, and Poppy absentmindedly tapped a rhythm on the table. Michael Derrington made the sound of a man who is driven to madness by his unreasonable family.

‘Great-Aunt Lizzie is so stupid. Why talk to Father about hiring a house? She knows he won’t do it,’ remarked Poppy in an undertone as they left the dining room together after the disastrous lunch.

‘Stupid is the last thing she is,’ said Daisy with a chuckle. ‘She never does things without thinking about them. I bet that business about Cousin Fanny was all carefully calculated. Now, if she manages to get the Duchess to offer to present Violet and to invite her to share the coming-out ball with her daughter, Father will be so relieved that he doesn’t have to pay for it he will say yes straight away.’

‘Gee, man, you sure do have some brains!’ said Poppy appreciatively, trying to put an American twang into her voice.

‘She’s probably in the drawing room at this moment sitting in front of her desk and writing a letter to the Duchess,’ said Daisy confidently. She thought for a moment and then added, ‘I wonder if it would be better if Violet wrote – perhaps just to tell her that her eighteenth birthday is next week. What do you think, Poppy? Would it work?’ Daisy wasn’t sure. Could Violet write the sort of letter that asked for something without really spelling it out? Violet wrote a lot of poetry, but poetry was probably not the best way to get to the Duchess’s heart. ‘I suppose that it might sound like she wants a present,’ she finished.

‘I’ve got it,’ she said suddenly. ‘I’ll take a photo of her and it can be a birthday portrait. She send it to the Duchess. Nothing wrong about that, is there? It’s the other way round: Vi is sending the Duchess a present, not asking for one.’

‘I suppose it’s an idea,’ said Poppy indifferently.

‘It’s brilliant!’ Without another word to Poppy, Daisy turned and ran into the hall, opening the door to the drawing room quietly and closing it gently after her.

She had been almost right. Great-Aunt Lizzie was in the drawing room and she was sitting in front of her desk. The drawer filled with sheets of stiff white writing paper was open and the inkstand was pulled forward, but she wasn’t writing. Her gaze was fixed on the magnificent portrait of the girls’ mother which hung over one of the two fireplaces in the room.

Mary Derrington had been a beauty. Her colouring had been the same as Poppy’s – red hair and amber eyes – yet her face and figure were more like Violet’s, with perhaps a look of Rose about the slightly hooded eyes. This portrait had been painted when she was first married and she looked so young and so happy that Daisy could hardly bear to look at it.

‘I was wondering, Great-Aunt Lizzie, whether if I took a photograph – a sort of portrait – of Violet to celebrate her eighteenth birthday,’ began Daisy and then, as she saw a slightly impatient look come into the elderly woman’s eyes, she rushed ahead. ‘I thought it might make a nice gift for Violet to send to her godmother,’ she ended demurely, trying to sound innocent of any scheme.

‘What a good idea!’ Great-Aunt Lizzie’s troubled face cleared after a moment’s thought. ‘Yes, Daisy, I think that would be a very good idea. I don’t think Her Grace has seen Violet since she was about twelve or thirteen years old.’

‘I’ll get Morgan to rub down a thin piece of wood and I’ll stick the photograph to it and Violet can do some of her fancy lettering underneath . . .’ It would be useless, she knew, to ask for the photograph to be properly framed.

‘Lady Violet Derrington on Her Eighteenth Birthday.’ Great-Aunt Lizzie was nodding energetically.

‘I’ll make it look really professional,’ said Daisy earnestly. ‘At least, I’ll try.’ Suddenly she knew this was the moment to ask for something that she had wanted for quite some time. ‘The trouble is that I need plenty of space to develop and print a big picture like that. It’s a bit difficult developing things in that cupboard in our dressing room,’ she went on. ‘Do you think that I could use the old dairy pantry?’

Her aunt opened her mouth as though to say no – her usual response to making any changes in the house – but then thought of the portrait and shut it again. ‘I don’t see why not, but have a word with Mrs Pearson,’ she said after a moment.

‘Yes, Great-Aunt,’ said Daisy politely and edged her way out of the room before any more could be said. Mrs Pearson, the housekeeper, was an amiable woman, far too old to run the household with half the number of staff needed for a house of the size of Beech Grove Manor, but, like the elderly butler, still bravely struggling on in a poverty-stricken environment for which they were both quite untrained. She wouldn’t care what Daisy did as long as it didn’t make more work for her and the maids. In fact, she was snoring loudly as Daisy passed the housekeeper’s room on the way down to the basement. Daisy decided to leave her in peace and get on with her plans.

There was a labyrinth of rooms in the basement of Beech Grove Manor House. There had been a time in the last century when all food eaten by the large household had been processed down there, but now many of the rooms had been shut up. The dairy pantry which Daisy had her eye on had not been used for years. It had originally been the place where surplus milk was turned into huge round cheeses and left to mature on the shelves for a few months. The large wooden casks and paddles for stirring the milk and the enormous sieves for separating the curds from the whey, the cheese moulds and the wire cheese cutters were still stored there, but nowadays there was not much surplus milk and what cheese was needed for household use was usually made in the back kitchen.

The room had a tiny window looking out on a small sunken area. The light that came through the window could be shut off with the wooden shutter to which Daisy reckoned she could nail a piece of black cloth to cover any cracks . It had a sink with running water which would be invaluable for rinsing the negatives. An ancient covered lantern with a shutter stood on top of the draining board – that might be useful if she just wanted a little light. There was a handy shelf for her chemicals and an array of old dishes and cheese moulds which would be good for developing the films, and there were hooks underneath the shelf which could be used to hold a small line with pegs for hanging up the film to dry. In the middle of the room was a rough pine table and a stool. The room was perfect except for one thing – all of its walls were whitewashed, the worst possible background for developing films.

Without wasting a moment, Daisy went out through the back door towards the stables. Whenever anything needed to be done there was one man everyone turned to and that was Morgan the chauffeur.

Morgan’s actual job was to drive the ancient Humber car and to keep it in good running order. In return for that he got a very small salary and the free use of an ancient cottage in the woods. And that cottage was the reason why a talented man like Morgan stayed in a badly paid job where he had little to do. A jazz player with a set of drums would not be tolerated in most jobs, but in the depths of the beech woods he disturbed no one and made a headquarters for the jazz-mad local young people, including Poppy. While not playing jazz or attending to his duties as a chauffeur, Morgan did everything else that he could turn his hand to, from felling the odd tree for firewood to mending the roof or painting walls. Moreover, since he had been in the Corps of Royal Engineers during the last year of the war, the skills he had learned then were now employed in servicing the ancient generator in the woods and keeping in working order the pump that brought water from the lake to the house as well as overhauling the twenty-year-old Humber car.

When Daisy went in search of him Morgan was vigorously cleaning out a disused stable. There was now only one man employed at the stables and he, like most of the staff, was fairly elderly and his time was taken up with looking after the Earl’s stallion and the girls’ ponies. Without Morgan’s work the stables would crumble away.

‘You wouldn’t do me a big favour, would you, Morgan?’ Daisy knew that he would. He was very interested in her ambition to make a film. ‘Might go off to Hollywood myself one day,’ he often said. She explained about the dairy pantry, her need for a proper developing room and the snowy-white walls, and he nodded. ‘Let me just finish off this job and then I think I know where there’s an old pot of brown paint. That should do you.’ While he was talking he was busy clearing out the feeding trough, handily set just inside the open window hatch so that the horse could feed from the outside as well as when it was indoors.

‘This stable hasn’t been used for about twenty years – apparently it was for guests’ horses in your grandfather’s day,’ he said, pulling out handfuls of dried leaves and twigs and clumps of mud and stuffing them into a sack. ‘Too good for a workshop, but at least I’ll keep it clean and tidy. Hold that sack open for me, would you? There’s just some solid stuff at the very bottom of the trough.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Daisy curiously as she caught a glimpse of a wooden box amid the black compost.

‘Dunno – some sort of cigar box, I’d say. Here you are – have a look.’ The box had broken in his hand and he took out an old envelope and gave it to her. Daisy looked at the water-stained envelope carefully. There was a smear of ink as if once there had been something written on it – a person’s name and address, no doubt – but now it was unreadable. She gave him the sack, pulled up the flap of the envelope and took out a sheet of paper.

Morgan had lost interest. ‘I’ll just burn this stuff and then I’ll be with you in five minutes.’

‘I’ll wait in the dairy,’ said Daisy, making an effort to sound her usual self. She was glad that he hadn’t wanted to see the letter. Somehow she would have been embarrassed to show it to him.

Poppy was coming down the back avenue when Daisy came out from the stables. She was running a race with her dog, an overgrown harrier puppy called Satchmo, and Daisy went across to her.