The Decision (3 page)

Fashion fascinated her particularly: not just clothes, but the way they worked, how you could tell so much about a person from what they wore, how important they were to the picture you presented to the world. Her college had a tie-up with
Vogue
, and many of their girls got secretarial jobs there; maybe that would be something she might do. It would be a start anyway. A start to her career.

In spite of her decision, taken in such sumptuous circumstances, Eliza was still a virgin as the date for her dance approached. Lots of her friends claimed to have Done It, or rather implied they had – but she suspected most of them were lying. Everyone was petrified of getting pregnant, and it had been dinned into them by their mothers that girls with bad reputations were usually finished in the marriage market. Some boys were very badly behaved, of course, and there were lots of stories of girls being found in compromising situations in bedrooms and libraries and even wine cellars in country houses, but somehow, it just hadn’t happened to her; and she really didn’t want the occasion rushed through. She wanted it to take place in style.

Besides, she’d been terribly busy, had had a wonderfully successful time. She’d been to literally dozens of dances and cocktail parties; she’d had a starring role in the Berkeley Dress Show, that great annual opportunity for debs to be models for a day, and managed to catch the eye of the photographer from the
Evening Standard
and hit the front page, wearing a white evening dress by Hartnell. And at Queen Charlotte’s Ball – the Harlots’ Ball as the Debs’ Delights called it – she had been quite near the front in the line of girls pulling the giant cake into the ballroom: yet another photograph in the tabloids.

And then there was her own dance, so much discussed and planned – what should she wear, how many of the girls she ‘owed to’ had to be invited, even whether she should share with someone, which was the classic means of halving the cost – but she categorically refused. It was to be her night, and hers alone. It had passed far too quickly, a magical fairy-tale evening, when she’d felt like a story-book heroine, just drifted by without any clear memories of anything, except fragments: the perfect June night, the garden filled with roses, the white marquee so gorgeously dressed up, the crowds and crowds of friends, the band playing exactly what she wanted, the endless champagne, her father flushed with pride, her mother kissing her and telling her how proud of her they were. She’d danced and danced, literally till dawn, with an endless flow of charming young men and then fallen into bed, amazed that she wasn’t drunker, considering how much champagne she had consumed.

It was the crown on a wonderful summer; and she wished it need never end.

Her mother was pale but happy next morning, relieved at the success of the dance, relieved it was finally over. It had occupied her thoughts and fed her anxieties for almost a year; but it seemed to have been worth it.

Worth the bank loan Adrian had had to take out, the sleepless nights, the endless work. The expense hadn’t stopped at Eliza’s dance, of course, it was all the attendant expenditure: Eliza’s six dance dresses, two of them long for the grander dances, one white for Queen Charlotte’s Ball, her clothes for Ascot and Henley, Sarah’s own dresses, all the hats and shoes and gloves, the mums’ luncheons, the pre-dance dinners – but it was all an investment in Eliza’s future, and not even to be questioned.

Having her dance at home in the country, rather than in London, had saved a lot, and was so much nicer, everyone had (apparently genuinely) said and certainly numbers had not been in the least affected.

Eliza’s dress had been from Belville Sassoon again – but Sarah had had her own dress run up by her dressmaker and Adrian’s tailcoat being a little worn and slightly out of date was desirable rather than the reverse. Nothing more common than spanking-new evening clothes on the older generation; people might even think, heaven forbid, they’d been hired. Adrian had bought his coat soon after they had first met; she had invited him to a dance in the country and, seeing where Sarah Cunninghame’s infatuation with him could be leading, Adrian had considered it a sound investment for two weeks’ salary and twenty-five years later, it still looked superb – a tribute to his own unchanging shape as much as Messrs Hawes & Curtis’s skill.

And Charles of course, darling Charles, had looked brilliantly handsome as always; he had danced with her not once but twice, telling her how lovely she looked, how proud of her he was. Not many sons would do that.

All the young people had behaved pretty well; there had been the usual horsing around by some of the male element and a couple of the girls had been really rather drunk, especially the one doing striptease by the ladies’ loos, but it had all stayed good-natured and Eliza had clearly had a lovely time. And as a final coating of icing on the cake, both
Tatler
and
Queen
had sent photographers.

Sarah was a little anxious that so far into her Season, Eliza had clearly still not found anyone she considered special, but she was only seventeen, a bit too young perhaps to be thinking about marriage.

‘Hello, Mummy. Pleased with your night’s work?’

‘Oh, Charles, hello. Darling, you look tired. Sit down and I’ll get you some breakfast.’

‘No, I’m fine. Had some earlier. Well, it all went well, didn’t it? And Eliza looked jolly nice.’

‘Didn’t she? And seemed to enjoy herself.’

Sarah smiled at him: her firstborn and the great love of her life. After Adrian, of course. She could hardly believe he was twenty-one, and out in the world. Well, not quite; he’d have to do his National Service first before finally settling down to his career. He was hoping to go overseas: ‘Hong Kong, or maybe Gib. See a bit of the world before I have to buckle down in the City.’

‘Darling,’ she said, patting his shoulder affectionately, ‘I shall miss you.’

‘Oh, nonsense. Time’ll fly by. I’m looking forward to it actually. Some of the chaps are taking a short service commission, doing three years. I did wonder about that, get a bit more out of it.’

Sarah looked at him, slightly alarmed; she and Adrian had been looking forward to stopping Charles’s allowance, or at least cutting it drastically. Another year in the army would mean another year of expense.

‘But in the end I decided against it,’ he said. ‘I want to get on with the job, make a bit of dosh, that sort of thing.’

‘And you’ll be called up soon now you’ve left Oxford?’

‘Yes. Six weeks’ basic training in some Nissen hut and then Mons, hopefully, and the regiment. It should be fun.’

‘I believe it’s awfully tough.’

‘Can’t be worse than the first half-term at prep school.’

‘Charles! Were you really so unhappy?’

‘Well, a bit. I was homesick. And quite hungry, the food was awful. But it didn’t do me any harm, did it? God, I’ll certainly send my kids. The old place looked nice last night, didn’t it?’ he added.

‘Didn’t it? Your grandfather would have been so happy.’

The old place was an exquisite small Palladian villa, built at the top of a gentle rise, smiling graciously down on the village of Wellesley, a little to the south of Marlborough and looking just slightly – although beautifully – out of place there, like a fashionable woman wearing her couture clothes to walk down the village street. Built in 1755, it had a charming legend. A young but very well-born architect called Jonathan Becket was looking for work and was at a soirée one evening in Bath. He had actually studied with John Wood the Younger, who, with his father, was responsible for many of Bath’s architectural wonders. There he met and fell in love with the beautiful Lady Anne Cunninghame, and she with him; married to Sir Ralph Cunninghame, she was the young and dreadfully spoiled daughter of the eccentric Earl of Grasmere, used to having her own way in all things and not in the least in love with her middle-aged husband apart from his wealth.

Sir Ralph for his part was so afraid of losing her that he could refuse her nothing; and when she spoke longingly of a ‘fine house, created precisely for me’ young Becket got his commission and created a breathtaking place, not large, set against the grand houses of its day (a mere ten bedrooms, and only three receiving rooms), but very beautiful with its glorious south front ‘greeting the morning sun’ as Lady Anne described it in her journal, with its classical pillars, its gently curving steps, its wide terrace, its exquisite orangery, set some five hundred yards from the house; ‘It is just for me,’ she went on, ‘created to suit my beauty as my darling says.’

Her darling (presumably Jonathan Becket, rather than Sir Ralph) went on to serve her with a wonderful park behind the house and a small sloping grass sward to the front of it; most of the park had now been sold, leaving only ten acres for the present-day incumbents and as protection against the ever-present threat of building development in its immediate vicinity.

The house was christened Summer Court; it was to be largely a summer residence, for Sir Ralph liked the bustle of Bath for much of the time, and she saw herself holding her own small court there; the name was contracted to a single word by one of her more modest descendants.

It was hugely uncomfortable; always at least five decades behind with its modernisation, impossible to heat satisfactorily. When Eliza arrived for her first term as a boarder at Heathfield, she was astonished at the other girls’ complaints about the cold dormitories, the draughty study bedrooms, the ‘dribbly’ showers. It seemed the height of luxury to her, accustomed as she was to waking to ice on the inside of her windows and a four-inch bath deemed disgracefully wasteful. But she adored the house. It had stayed with the Cunninghames through ten generations; Sarah’s mother, the last Lady Cunninghame, had been the first in the line to fail to produce an heir. She had produced only one child, and that was Sarah.

Mercifully – as Sarah saw it – there were no other claimants to the house: no cousins, no male uncles even. And thus it was that Sarah’s father, the ninth baronet, had been forced, his signature dragging with dreadful reluctance across the paper, to entail it to her. Or rather, to her and her husband. It was better than selling it, which was the only other option. And Sarah did love it.

‘Never let it go’ had been his last words to her; and she promised. It was owned by a trust, and they were merely its tenants for life; it was slowly bankrupting them. But keeping it was what mattered and the children loved it as much as she did; Summercourt was their treasure and their home, it was where everything important happened.

Charles, brought up from his earliest years to regard it as his legacy, would roam its woods and fields as a child, pretending to be the son of Lady Anne; as he grew older, he took it very seriously, acquainting himself with such country pursuits as hunting and shooting, as befitted the heir to such a gem. The fact that the estate was far too small to support anything more than rabbit shooting and a few pheasants didn’t apparently trouble him; but Eliza once overheard two of the fellow undergraduates he’d invited down for a few days discussing ‘Charles’s Brideshead fantasies’ and that they’d expected something ten times its size, ‘Drives and lodges, that sort of thing.’

There was no proper drive even, only a rather pretty tree-lined avenue up from the village, and certainly no lodges. The house had no privacy from the front, which the family rather liked; it had been designed to stand as part of the village. But the charming stone cottages, pretty Norman church, medieval duck pond and seventeenth-century inn that had set the house off so prettily in 1755 and lain at its feet (another of Lady Anne’s fanciful phrases) had become extended by a sprawling growth of mock-Tudor bungalows to one side and to the left another of council houses – albeit for the most part with lovely gardens – a garage, a school (late Victorian, not beautiful), a bus shelter, a children’s playground and a shop.

But it was a proper village; it had a heart. The school was thriving, the church more than half-full most Sundays, and the inn (now the White Hart pub) busy; most people knew most people. And the Fullerton-Clark family were popular – the children had all gone to the village school for the first few years of their education, Sarah ran all sorts of local enterprises, opened the grounds several times a year – most famously for the Easter Egg Hunt, in which the whole village took part – and Adrian did his bit as he put it by drinking in the White Hart whenever he could. He also played for the village cricket team, where he was something of a liability and always sent in to bat last, but much appreciated for his good nature and his generosity in the bar afterwards.

The village had even been made to feel part of Eliza’s dance; the local band had played a set and the fireworks had been let off on the village green rather than at the back of the house.

Yes, Sarah thought, her father would have been very happy last night, happy with what she had managed to do.

And even forgiven her for marrying Adrian. Perhaps.

Someone was crying in the darkness. More than one, actually. Muffled, quite heavy sobs. God, it was like being back at prep school, Charles thought. And he hadn’t cried even then. It did bring it back, though, being eight years old, staring dry-eyed into the darkness, small fists clenched, fighting the homesickness and the fear …

But it was absurd, blubbing like that.

And this hadn’t been that bad a day. The next would probably be much worse.