Flint and Roses (18 page)

‘Yes, mamma.'

‘Excellent. And you need not be so cast down, for you will find much in France and Italy to distract you, We do not know each other very well, Faith dear, for I will confess that your father had but a poor opinion of me and obliged me to keep my distance from his children—fearing I would muddle your heads with my foolish notions. But I am really quite agreeable, you know, and will try to be a good companion. It is settled then? Of course it is. My goodness—will that confounded wedding-day never come?'

The Barforths gave Celia a magnificent Coatport dinner service; my mother gave furniture and carpets: Aunt Hannah, who could not be outdone on these occasions, gave the drawing-room sofa and chairs; Mr. Fielding, the occupant of my father's seat at Westminster, gave a silver salver for the placing of calling-cards; everyone else presented whatever seemed suitable. And, as Celia entered the parish church that brisk October morning on Uncle Joel's arm, I would not have believed she could ever look so beautiful.

She had always been a pretty girl, but somehow quite unremarkable, a face that did not linger in the memory, often ailing, often, in her own opinion, overlooked; but as she drifted down the aisle to her cool, pale Jonas, pure radiance transformed her, its aura lending her so delicate a loveliness that I could well understand why weddings were occasions for tears. Celia, in fact, was in a state of complete fulfilment, that rare feeling of total self-content where she believed everything she could ever want in life was to be hers. Jonas seemed well satisfied. My mother wept most gracefully throughout the service, and later, at the reception, became so misty with tears that it took several pairs of manly—if elderly—arms to console her. The bridesmaids were much admired, although, in the blue organdie of Celia's choosing, I did not feel my best and was not sorry that Nicholas, having been dispatched to London on his father's business, could not attend.

There was champagne and cake and cordiality, white horses to drive the bridal pair to the station; Celia still radiant—still beautiful—in her going-away dress of powder blue.

‘Well—God bless you, then!' Prudence said, more moved than she'd expected.

‘Kiss your new brother, girls.' Aunt Hannah bade us, and, when it was done and we had waved them away, my mother could not return fast enough to Blenheim Lane to pack her own boxes and mine, her eyes every bit as bright and excited as Celia's.

‘You are going to have so much fun. Faith darling,' she told me, and, since I was Morgan Aycliffe's daughter, trained to believe that even when one's heart was aching and one's hopes in ashes, one should have the good manners not to embarrass others by letting it show, I, answered, ‘Yes, mamma.'

And so, the next morning, we were separated for the first time, the Aycliffe girls who had spent their quiet lives identically together going now their separate ways, Celia most incredibly to Scarborough with Jonas, Prudence to Blenheim Lane and the chaperonage of Miss Mayfield which was no chaperonage at all, myself, quite simply, away from Nicholas.

‘Write to me. Prudence.'

‘Yes, at leasr once a week. To promise more would be foolish. Please remember to reply.'

‘I don't want to go.'

‘No. But when the time comes I expect you won't want to come back either.'

I had made up my mind to be miserable, but I was still only seventeen, and even the train to London, which I wished to find uncomfortable and tedious, became less wearisome after a mile or so—and then the novelty of a hotel bedchamber, a restaurant, my mother's light chatter, no longer mother to daughter but woman to woman, first diverting, then almost exciting.

‘We need clothes dear,' she said, ‘in Paris.' And so we had clothes, purchased from a tiny, irritable creature with the face of a beribboned terrier who caused us to wait his good pleasure, no humble seamstress this, but a man of authority who gave to the designing of women's clothes the same dedication and self-importance with which other men built bridges.

‘He will not dress you unless he likes you,' my mother murmured, surprisingly nervous. ‘And you may not say what you would like. He will tell you what you must have. Be careful, my dear, for when I was last here I saw him turn the wife of an ambassador, and a countess, away.'

A far cry, then, from the dressmakers of Cullingford who would come scurrying to attend us in our own homes, only too eager to dress anybody in anything they had a mind. But when Monsieur Albertini had prowled around me for a tense moment, wreathing me in the smoke from his continual cigar, the entire salon—where even his assistants had the hauteur of great ladies—hushed with the anticipation of his verdict, he came to an abrupt halt, clapped his hands together and, declaring my green crepe de Chine to be an abomination—London? Of course. What else one could expect?—announced that if I came back in a day or two, and if his inspiration had matured by then, he would create a toilette for which I would shed tears of gratitude.

Yet the one thing I did find—and fairly soon—was that this prancing little ballerina was in fact as shrewd a man of business as any I had met in Cullingford, his taste—and his tyranny—veering always to the expensive, the rare, the unattainable which he—by his genius, his magic—would obtain for ‘madame'at a price. And until he explained them to me, I had not fully understood the variety of my needs.

There were his peignoirs, delicate, foamy creations designed for the sipping of early morning tea, the opening of letters and invitations, to be worn in the luxurious, languid hours before one put on one's stays. There was his pelisser—on another plane entirely, from the pelisses I had known, and which he advised me to consign to the fire—still, a morning dress, but a little more substantial, more elaborate, in which one could receive one's callers. There was his elegant, superbly cut redingote for the afternoon, should madame decide to drive or stroll, in the park, the lavishly flounced and embroidered round-dress, should she decide to remain, just as splendidly, at home. There was, most decidedly, his evening dress, its bodice cut low, moulded to bosom and waist, a rich satin which, he assured me, was the exact pale blonde colour of my hair. And then there were the ‘little things', as he called them, lace-edged shawls from Cashmere, flowing soft-tinted and supple from shoulder to ankle, fans and reticules and pairs of gloves in their dozens, feather bonnets and frilled bonnets, a dashing military cap with gold tassels and bold plumage, ivory combs to put up my hair by night, tortoiseshell inlaid with mother of pearl by day.

‘You will think me extravagant—and somewhat frivolous,' my mother said, surveying our purchases, her own far exceeding mine. ‘And so I am. But this is
my
time, Faith—the only time in my life when I have been allowed to do as I pleased, to think what I like rather than what is expected of me—and it may not last for long. Something will force me back to Blenheim Lane, sooner or later—Jonas will set up a caterwauling that I am running through my money and there will be none left for Celia, and Joel will curb my spending. Something will happen to restrain me and restore me to respectability, and, even if it should not, then eventually I shall grow old. So you will be a good-hearted girl, dear, and will not grudge me my special time.'

We remained in France until mid-December, moving south as the winter sharpened to a villa on the outskirts of Rome, marble floors leading one to the other in swirling patterns of blue and purple, walls bright-painted with scenes of a voluptuous grape-harvest, crumbling stone steps leading to a formal garden of clipped box-hedges, stone basins and water-bearing cupids, where a gentleman who had called to renew his acquaintance with my mother kissed the palm of my hand and my wrist and was never seen by me again. We went to Naples to greet the spring time, then on to Monaco and back to Rome, where another gentleman, more appreciative of my mother's maturity, was waiting.

‘Do I shock you?' she asked me. ‘I suppose I do. I believe I shocked myself to begin with, but it is quite amazing how quickly one grows accustomed. I do not think I am entirely frivolous. It is just that I cannot nourish myself with ambition, like Aunt Hannah, and did not have the great good fortune to fall quite blissfully in love with my husband a dozen years after I had married him, like Aunt Verity. So I must do the best I can, dear, for as long as I can—surely?'

There were sudden departures in perilous coaches, the caprice of every butterfly moment, strange inns by the wayside—malarial, Aunt Hannah would have named them—beautiful houses placed freely, one supposed, at our disposal by my mother's last year's acquaintances. There were flowery hillsides at noon, with ourselves mounted on donkeys, and red wine and garlic-flavoured cheeses eaten carelessly on the sparse grass in view of a gold-speckled, slumbering sea. Perfumed rooms in the evening, candlelit frivolity, a rose-petal world where men with dark, supple faces—reminding me far more of Blaize than of Nicholas—whispered entertaining nonsense to my mother, and quite often to me.

‘It is a very small place, Cullingford, is it not?' she often asked me, and I don't know how it was that I knew—or exactly when I knew—that the suave, eternally good-humoured Signor Marchetti, who had so willingly lent us his Roman villa, was her lover, except that, without witnessing the slightest physical contact between them, I knew it, the realization coming so gradually that when the truth finally dawned it did not even surprise me.

‘Paris again,' she announced one morning, and at her restless, magical command there was an apartment built with its feet in the Seine, the soaring facade of Notre-Dame filling our windows, morning promenades shaded by frilled parasols and chestnut trees, a certain Monsieur Fauret escorting us most courteously to the opera, the ballet, to Versailles, offering us his carriage for our drives in the Bois de Boulogne, waiting most patiently as we made our purchases from the couturier, Monsieur Albertini, or from my mother's favourite perfumerie in the Rue Saint-Honore. He was a slightly built, middle-aged man, this Monsieur Fauret, scrupulously correct at all times in my presence, making his formal bow over my mother's hand.

‘Will you do me the honour of dining, madame—and mademoiselle?' But there were occasions when my mother, in her extravagant spangled black gauzes, would set out alone, returning late and oddly languorous, smiling and sighing over the flowers which would arrive the following day. And although she never spoke of love or passion or whatever name she had for it, I knew, and, forgetting such weighty matters as sin and the certain retribution I had been taught must follow, it intrigued me that a relationship between a man and a woman could be so light yet so obviously satisfying to them both.

Naturally, the rules she had chosen to live by—while her special time endured—could not apply to me. My own, virtue must remain, not merely intact, but utterly beyond reproach. Yet my fast-growing knowledge of life as a reality, rather than a nursery-tale designed to frighten me into obedience, caused me to examine each one of my girlhood prohibitions, to sort out as best I could the sense from the nonsense, the necessary from the purely repressive, so that I became older, at seventeen, and then at eighteen, than I might otherwise have been. I acquired, with a deliberate effort, a little poise—more than would be thought proper in Cullingford. I applied myself to the art of conversation, the art of listening, the art of making the best of what Nature had given me. I applied myself to the art of forgetting Nicholas Barforth, of reducing him to the provincial young man who had charmed me in the days when I had been a provincial young lady. And I pretended to succeed.

I heard news, erratically, from Caroline, to whom Paris, with the Battershaws, had been something of a disappointment. And although she referred often enough to the Floods, either Julian had made no definite proposal or she, somewhat inexplicably, was managing to keep him at bay. She had spent Christmas Eve at Cullingford Manor, she told me—a sure indication of intent—but then, instead of the announcement I had been expecting, her letter had altered course, recounting, that Blaize, as reluctant as ever to spend his time in the weaving sheds, had decided—and was attempting to convince his father—that his talents would be best employed in selling Barforth cloth abroad.

‘He means to wine and dine his way all over the world,' she wrote me ‘with snippets of cloth in his luggage, doing his selling in fancy hotels and restaurants instead of the Piece Hall and the Wool Exchange, like everybody else. Very pleasant for
him,
Nicholas says, although I believe father may be agreeable, for it is true that, unless we know what weight and what design of cloth will suit the tastes and climate of various parts of the world, we can hardly supply it. And Blaize, who, can be very pleasant when he likes, will give a good impression of us abroad, which is something to he considered now that so many newcomers are pushing into the textile trade as fast as they can get themselves fixed up with looms.'

Strange preoccupations, I thought, in a future baronet's lady, and although she told me that Nicholas, accepting Blaize's challenge, had declared himself ready and able to handle any shipping orders his brother sent home, she omitted to mention if he had danced with Amy Battershaw or Rebecca Mandelbaum at the Assembly Rooms Ball, or if—a dread possibility with which I sometimes scourged myself—he had encountered someone new, whose mysterious allure might tempt him from his cherished bachelorhood.

From my sister Celia I received a fortnightly catalogue of domestic trivia, the devastating effect of sunlight on her dining-room curtains, the inefficiency of Mr. Corey-Manning, whose affairs in Croppers Court had been left in such disorder that Jonas was obliged to spend most of his time putting them straight.

Prudence wrote to me dutifully, weekly, as she had promised, her elegant copperplate revealing not only her preoccupation with literature, liberty, and mathematics—her determination to acquire some real knowledge—but a concern my mother found amusing, amazing, for the foul condition of Cullingford's streets and the inadequacy of its water supply. She had made new acquaintances she told me, without describing their faces, giving me the impression that they were serious—I presumed elderly—people, who organised lectures at the Mechanics Institute on subjects designed to improve the minds and the prospects of the more responsible section of the working class; who raised money to re-equip Cullingford's inadequate infirmary, and spent their leisure hours discussing the desirability of cleaning up the Cullingford Canal, the foul vapours of which had been known to blacken silver, or of relieving the squalid overcrowding in Simon Street. And when Cullingford was at last granted its Charter, during my balmy Neapolitan springtime, with authority to elect a mayor, fourteen aldermen, and forty councillors—gentlemen who must be possessed of property valued at a minimum of a thousand pounds or rated at no less than thirty pounds per annum—Prudence filled many pages with her expectations.