Joy and Josephine (42 page)

After that, there was no reason for not accepting him. If Billy could marry someone else, so could she, and Uncle Rodney hankered after this, so at least someone would be happy. Archie did not ask her until he had formally approached Rodney, who appeared in Joy’s cabin like a gleeful Cupid. ‘Why couldn’t he
have asked me first?’ she grumbled, although she did not really mind.

‘Archie’s so
Korrekt,’
said Rodney approvingly. ‘It should have have been port and nuts and chairs turned sideways after the ladies had left the dining-room, but whisky and potato crisps and swivel chairs in the smoking-room made quite a passable
décor.’

‘I hope you said you’d rather see me dead in my grave,’ said Joy.

‘But naturally. Now Poppet, to-night I should wear that black frock with the chaste skirt and the indecorous bodice, and those endearing lace mittens. I’ll skip down to the florist and get you some gardenias for your hair; or should it be the downier purity of a camellia, perhaps?’

‘I don’t see that it matters,’ said Joy, ‘if the thing’s already in the bag.’

‘Oh, but it’s a question of taste, don’t you see? The artistry of the thing. If he’s going to propose, it might as well be under the most lyrical circumstances possible; something to tell your grandchildren. We’ll have champagne at dinner – no we won’t, we’ll have that later in the evening, when you come running rosily to stammer out your glad news, and old man Drake and I will get maudlin together. When the dancing starts after dinner, go and wait wistfully in a bit of moonlight, with a trailing bit of chiffon somewhere about you if possible; that’s always effective. Bless you.’ His face felt like a smooth rubber cushion against her cheek. He did not often kiss her, for he disliked touching people, but he was stirred now by the gratification of knowing his gosling a fully-fledged swan.

Joy dressed as she was told, but she would not go as far as waving chiffon in the moonlight. She hoped that Archie would not say that he loved her, for she did not think this true, and it might look rude if she could not say that she loved him.

‘A marriage had been arranged – ’ so after dinner, Joy tackled Archie squarely in the most unromantic place she could find, a corridor where they had to keep flattening themselves against the wall to let people pass.

‘Uncle Rodney say you want to marry me,’ she said baldly.
‘Well, I do,’ he said, not at all disconcerted, ‘though I had meant to break it to you myself. I beg your pardon, sir. Please go through.’

‘Ill marry you then, Archie, if you really want it.’ Joy realized in dismay as she said it that this was supposed to be the moment a girl dreamed of all her life.

‘My darling – Excuse me.’ Archie stepped back to let a steward go by with a tray of glasses. ‘Let’s get the hell out of this,’ he said and led her out to the deck, where Joy thought she saw Rodney flit from among the shadows, satisfied, going in search of champagne.

Mrs Abinger was more than satisfied. She was ecstatic. She swanked shamelessly about the engagement, and had pictures of Joy and Archie pinned all over the wall in her corner by the fire. Mr Abinger was unenthusiastic, but his brain, which was sluggish these days, stirred at the sound of the Drake heritage, and the maggot of future benefits quickened in the ooze. Violet’s eyes narrowed with miserable greed when she saw Joy’s engagement ring. Why should all this have happened to Jokie who had never lifted a finger to deserve it? She had blundered through her life in fact, making a hash of almost everything she did, while Violet, scheming and concentrating and watching her opportunities had never got within smelling distance of luck like Jo’s. Violet still did not believe that she was really was Joy Stretton. There had been some funny business somewhere, and someone ought to tell this Archie Drake. Her mind was dark with thoughts of blackmail.

Kitty Baines was all fuss and flutter over Joy. She said it was just like a love tale in a book and offered to lend Joy a blue garter to wear on her wedding day. One day, after Joy had driven away in the new car which was Rodney’s reward to her, Kitty stopped making goo-goo eyes and made sharp ones.

‘It’s a funny thing she never brings him down here, I must say,’ she told Mrs Abinger. ‘Always making excuses about he’s busy or in the country and that. It looks to little me as if she was ashamed of her old home.’

‘Oh
no,
Kitty! Don’t pass such spiteful remarks.’

‘Abbie – ’ Kitty made her eyes water as she turned them to him.

‘Spiteful yourself,’ he said obediently to Ellie. ‘Why always pick on poor little Kitten?’

Mrs Abinger was longing to see Archie, but she kept silent, since Joy did not suggest it. The wedding approached, and Joy still had not brought him, nor mentioned an invitation. It seemed that Mrs Abinger had brought that new dress from the outsize shop in Edgware Road all for nothing.

She would wear it just the same; she would go in it to stand in the crowd outside the church, just as she had once dreamed of doing, all those years ago. How it had all come true, everything that she had imagined for Joy when she was a baby in the train! She had even imagined a man like this. True, he was not a Lord, but he was handsome and rich and in the Society limelight. Mrs Abinger had seen many magazine pictures of house parties at Astwick Hall and of Archie at dances and sporting occasions. Now she was seeing pictures of him and Joy together, their profiles arranged like heads on a coin, hers pert and expressive, his graver, blunter, with the somewhat pugilistic jaw that was a family feature.

His sister had it in a degree too marked for beauty, and in his mother, a hooked nose came down to meet it with a clamped, didactic mouth between. Joy had heard her spoken of as ‘the Ogress of Oxfordshire’, and when she first met her she quite understood why Rodney had begged her not to reveal her early history before she was safely married. Places like the Portobello Road simply did not exist for Mrs Drake. She must have passed its northern end many times in the train for Oxfordshire, but she never looked out of the window until Maidenhead at least, for fear of seeing a surburb.

This was why Joy could not take Archie to the flat over the Corner Stores. She could not tell him that she had once been Jo Abinger, because he would have told his mother. She had to be told everything, like the bees, and like them, she did not always answer. She sat in her chair, for she was a cripple, and absorbed information from all quarters, turning it over in her mind for a while before suddenly rapping out a damning
judgement which might knock the bottom out of some cherished scheme, or eliminate an under-housemaid.

Joy hated her first visit to Astwick Hall. Now that they were officially engaged, Archie had dropped his solicitude. He made scarcely more fuss of her than if she were already his wife. He was courteous and affectionate, and provided abundantly for her physical needs, but lacked the imagination to cherish her spirit. He had inherited from his mother a total lack of fear or diffidence, so could not understand them in anyone else. When he thought of Joy, it was in terms of himself. What he liked, she must like. If he were enjoying himself, she must be too. Astwick Hall was his home, so Joy must presumably feel at home there without any effort from him.

She had met all his family and been accepted; what more could any girl want? His mother had delivered no spoken judgement, but silence with her could be taken for approval, since she seldom opened her mouth except in dispraise.

The trout were rising in the stream that fed the lake, so Archie and his father spent most of the day fishing. They had to come in to lunch, for no one could miss meals at Astwick, even if they were not hungry. Sandwiches and flasks were only allowed in the hunting season. You could, at a pinch, miss tea, although Mrs Drake, witchlike over the spirit kettle and silver teapot, did not like it. She would tick it off against you in her mental debit column (some said that she actually kept a note book about guests like the recording angel) and you might not be asked for the week-end again.

Joy soon got bored with sitting on the bank watching Archie’s expert casts. He made it look so easy that she thought she could do it, but he would not let her try. The Drake women only fished in the salmon season, when the family migrated to Scotland. She walked about the Park and a deer ran at her. She walked in a coppice and a keeper told her she was disturbing the young grouse. She went up to the stables and was bitten by the evil-eyed pony that pulled Mrs Drake’s invalid carriage.

She would have liked to find Archie’s two elder sisters and make friends with them. They were twins of forty, known as The Girls, with bustless, aristocratic figures and long feet that
turned outwards. They had nothing else in common, for Mavis was a home girl and Freda was a jolly girl. Mavis was always bottling fruit or salting down beans or rushing about in passages with armfuls of sheets. She wore no make-up, drew all her hair above her head in the mornings, then let it flop and pinned it like a lopsided ice bag.

Freda wore layers of make-up and hair like an overpermed wig. She rushed too, but not in corridors: all over the countryside, in and out of pubs and stables and kennels with M.F.H.s and Viscounts and horse copers, for all men liked her, though not often as a woman. Sensing this, she grabbed gratefully at an affair with any man however unsavoury, remaining deathlessly jolly when it came to an end; coarse-tongued, immodest, and tough as old boots. Her mother did not seem to mind about her affairs, though all the neighbours bandied them. There had always been one immoral girl in every generation of Drakes. It was quite in order, so long as she did not come down late to breakfast.

Joy would have liked to find Archie’s younger brother, who had talked to her quite kindly last night about butterflies. Mrs Drake had kept him home from Eton this term because she said he was ailing. Joy thought there was nothing wrong with him except obesity, which Mrs Drake fostered with chocolates and cakes and egg nogs, for young Dennis, miraculously born after she was crippled, was her fondling. He was the only one who could do as he pleased with her. He had developed a horrible sickly whine for doing it, although with other people he talked quite nicely, with the same reedy voice at the back of his nose which Rodney had acquired at Eton forty years ago.

Joy could find neither Dennis nor his sisters. The place was too vast. She was afraid to go into the house, because she did not know how to get to any of the rooms except through the great hall, where Mrs Drake sat among the armour with a crested rug over her knees, brooding perhaps, on how she was going to eliminate Joy.

If marrying Archie had meant living at the Hall, Joy would have been quite glad to be eliminated. However, they were going to live at the Dower House at the bottom of the Park, a
creepered mellow house, built in a sunny hollow much later than the battlemented hall on the wind-swept hill above. It was the nicest house Joy had ever seen, full of uneven polished floors and flowers and dazzling brass, and inhabited at the moment by the nicest of all the myriad Drake relations who had raised eyebrows or monocles or lorgnettes or ear trumpets at her. Aunt Lily did not raise anything. She was a mild lady, who had picked up a comfortable Oxfordshire burr from her nurse and never been far enough away to lose it. She admired Joy’s hair and gave her a cameo brooch and let her talk about herself. She had a fire because it was chilly, although up at the Hall they never had fires until October. Mrs Drake’s legs were always cold, so it did not matter if everyone else’s were too.

After Joy had seen the Dower House, she viewed her married future more equably and did not need to run back often to the Portobello Road for reassurance that she was making a good match. She was growing quite fond of Archie, and when she had had a few drinks, she almost believed she could love him. He took her out a lot in London, and they were invited to dinners and dances and house parties by his many friends. She wondered that his mother had not cramped his popularity more.

‘Aren’t people a bit afraid of her,’ she asked, ‘when they come to Astwick?’

‘Good Lord no.’ He laughed. ‘Everyone loves her. You do, too, don’t you, darling?’ She had to agree because, surprisingly, he loved his mother himself and glorified her, quoting her beastlier remarks with great pride. More surprising still was that outsiders did indeed seem quite fond of her, as one might be of the Albert Memorial. She was a monstrosity, a holy terror, the pride of the county. She was a great old character; a very remarkable woman. Joy did not think so.

When she did not have to go to Astwick, she enjoyed the summer of her engagement. It was fun meeting her married girl friends almost as an equal, and buying clothes and things for the house, although most of the things she would have to use were the Drake property with which it was already equipped. Rodney, pleased with the achievement which he regarded
as his own, was sunny. He bought her many presents and allowed her more latitude, for she had graduated now by passing into a family like the Drakes. He was having a happy time designing a medieval bridal dress for her, and she would wear the family veil, which – horrid thought – the Ogress of Oxfordshire had once worn over her Medusa locks. The wedding was to be at the end of September (the same time as Billy’s!) so that they could get the honeymoon over before the opening meet.

‘Will Alexander announce the guests at my wedding?’ Joy asked Rodney, ‘or would he like to be a guest himself, do you think?’

‘Don’t be silly, my dear. He’d be hideously embarrassed.’

‘He wouldn’t, you know,’ Joy murmured, but Rodney went on: ‘In any case, he’ll probably refuse to come. He’s got a holy horror of Astwick. He swears he saw a ghost there when I took him with me one week-end.’

‘Probably my future mother-in-law,’ Joy said, getting up.

‘Where are you going? I wish you wouldn’t fidget about so after meals. No wonder I have indigestion.’

‘I’m going to ask him about the ghost.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t go so much to the kitchen,’ grumbled Rodney, who was jealous of Joy’s intimacy with Alexander. ‘You won’t be able to do that when you’re married, or your servants will have no respect for you and diddle you right and left. You’ve got a lot to learn yet, my poppet.’