The Finishing Touch (2 page)

M
ISS
B
RAID
said:

‘Men are … coarse.’

Judging by the voice alone, you might have thought it a man who had spoken. It was a baritone, rather deeper than the average man’s voice; deeper, even, than the average frog’s voice.

Answering it by mistake, perhaps, the first frog of the evening called from the pool at the foot of the terraces.

‘You may say it’s a truism’, Miss Braid went on, as though the figure sitting by the open window were incapable of supplying its own part in the conversation,’ but it’s true. The note itself is … coarse.’

‘The note.’ Antonia let the words loose, as if they, too, constituted a note, in the soprano sense (middle of the register, with faintest, faintest undertones of alto). Exhausted as though she had sung a whole aria, she let her long, thin, firm, racé lips come together like the petals of
a flower closing for the night: a gesture of ultimate exhaustion which, at the close of this morning’s reading from Racine, had provoked little Miss Outre-Mer to bury her retroussé face in her arms and convulsively write ANTONIA MOUNT four times on her mauve blotting paper.

Outside, all the frogs began to creak at once, as though at a mad dinner party every guest had simultaneously seized on his pepper mill.

‘I thought for a moment you meant the note of the grenouilles.’

‘I mean——’ Miss Braid began in the stout voice of a sergeant-major; but Antonia held up her hand.

Miss Braid waited.

Antonia’s tall, fragile figure inclined a little forward towards the open window, revealing a little of the curious story narrated in tapestry on the high back of her chair.

The evening breeze rattled across the gardens with a sound of fans, bearing the last scent of the lemon blossom. There was a pause, as for a dying man’s breath. The southern night fell, like a fruit.

The frogs continued to creak in the dark.

‘Grenouille’,
Antonia murmured, ‘is surely the most beautiful word in any language.’ She leaned back. Too exhausted to relax, she seemed to require propping in an almost military
uprightness. ‘Unless, perhaps,
grenadier
.
Or
grenadine
.
Curious that I have never liked grenadine.’

‘This note which I intercepted—’ Miss Braid began again; ‘—Antonia dear, are you sure you’re not cold by that open window?’

‘Well, perhaps’, Antonia said. ‘Perhaps’—with a gesture towards the darkness of the room—‘a stole …’

Miss Braid rose, pulled out a drawer and began feeling inside it.

‘Perhaps the peacock one’, Antonia
murmured
, ‘would look interestingly strange, almost perverse, in this crépuscule. I suppose’, she added wearily, while Miss Braid spread the stole round her shoulders, ‘the note is from some sailor?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Of course, sea air’, said Antonia (
‘healthy climate of
the
Riviera’,
said the Prospectus) ‘is aphrodisiac.’

‘Really, my dear? Do you think so?’ said Miss Braid, sitting on the floor beside Antonia’s feet. After a moment she leaned her head against Antonia’s knee.

‘I’m sure of it …’ Antonia said, with a sigh.

They sat immobile.

‘Well’, said Miss Braid in her most grenouille voice, ‘this won’t get the chores done. The girl must be spoken to.’

‘To which girl was the note addressed?’

‘Sylvie Plash.’

‘Is that the pretty one?’ (
‘Personal attention and care of the joint head mistresses for each girl’,
said the Prospectus.)

‘No, that’s Eugénie.’

‘So pretty’, Antonia said. ‘Her hair has that faint smell of fragoline. One wonders if it would taste well alla marsala. Well, my dear, you must talk to Sylvie.’

‘Antonia? I was wondering if it wouldn’t come better from you?’

‘From me?’ The voice, perfect, issued from a faint pallor in the incipient moonlight, a pallor that flinched as though from pain.

‘No, no, my dear’, said Miss Braid quickly. ‘Of course I’ll do it. It’s just that I thought—coming from you—Sylvie adores you, you know.’

‘O.’ Antonia had cried out, wounded.

‘My dear? Are you all right? What is it?’

‘I can’t bear’—the voice fell from agony—‘being adored by ugly girls.’

‘There, there, my dear’—Miss Braid was on her knees beside the chair, half daring to rock its occupant in her arms—‘you shan’t be. My beautiful shan’t be …’

‘By the way’, said Antonia in a wholly matter of fact voice, ‘I forgot to tell you. Royalty
is
coming.’

In surprise Miss Braid let her go. ‘She
is
?’

‘I heard this morning.’

‘When does she arrive?’

‘Next Wednesday. They are so precipitate when they do make up their minds.’

‘My dear, I have so much to prepare. Where do we meet her? Nice airport?’

‘Worse than that’, Antonia said in a dying voice. ‘And when we have had so much trouble with sailors already … They’re sending a destroyer.’

‘Gosh’, Miss Braid said, like a precociously voice-broken schoolboy. ‘I mean’—she rose to her feet, as though for the national anthem—‘it
is
rather grand.’

‘The last flicker’, said Antonia in a last flicker of voice, ‘of gunboat diplomacy.’

‘I’ve so much to do.’ The grenouille voice was bustling already. ‘I’m giving her the rose suite, the one that the Lebanese princess …’

‘Make sure she’s left none of her
appurtenances
behind.’

‘I will
indeed.
And—Antonia? You must tell the girls. Or has it leaked out? You——’

‘I shall make a small announcement
tomorrow
. I shall beg for their discretion.’

‘I think that is very wise of you, Antonia.’

‘I think—I think I should be foolish not to. In my position.’

‘My dear.’ The grenouille voice was moved. ‘This means great things for the School.’

It would mean, Antonia thought, but without saying so, Dame Antonia Mount and Hetty Braid, M.V.O. It would obviously be that way round, even though the Prospectus affirmed the two Persons co-equal, co-eval, co-proprietors …

‘When I think’, said the moved voice, descending to bass, approaching, actually laying its arm about Antonia’s stole, ‘of our years together …’

‘Sylvie Plash’, said Antonia.

‘O yes.’ The hand dropped, the voice rose to its normal baritone. ‘I suppose I’d better get it over with.’

‘I suppose you had.’

‘I never know what to say on these occasions.’

‘Tell her men are coarse.’

‘Antonia, sometimes I feel that you——’

‘You’re wonderful; you spare me so much’, Antonia said. ‘Have a drink, to nerve you before you go.’

‘I never like to go to the girls’ rooms smelling of drink.’

‘I think you carry your scruples too far’, said Antonia’s faint voice in the dusk.

‘Do you?’

‘Too far … After all, their education … I mean, to a discreet extent … We are
supposed
to send them away
finished
. Though in some cases’—trailing; barely audible—‘I prefer to think I’ve sent them away just
begun
…’

‘I shall have a cup of tea afterwards’, said Miss Braid. ‘Can I get you a drink, dear, before I go?’

‘My dear, if you would. It’s a night, perhaps, for Chartreuse?’

‘Yellow or green?’ said Miss Braid’s voice from the darkness of a cupboard. ‘I can hardly see which is which.’

‘Then put out both, my dear, if you would … I shall be drinking to your success.’

‘You’re so considerate of me, Antonia.’

‘I am a person’, said Antonia, ‘who all her life long has been unable to decide whether she prefers green or yellow Chartreuse.’

 *

Twenty-six heads bent over the School’s
die-stamped
paper. Nineteen right hands, eight left hands (Miss Onike Rondjohns was ambidextrous) scurried along (slightly diagonal) lines. At least thirteen tongue tips protruded in concentration.

Scurrying pens on the paper made a noise like cicadas.

Outside, as the sun rose to zenith, cicadas made a noise like scurrying pens.

Looking down the table between the two rows of bent heads, Antonia reflected that this Sunday there was none of the usual search for
something
to write home, and noted that a girl half way down the table on the left had the prettiest pink tongue tip. The tips of the pens wrote:

‘… de Sa Majesté la reine …’

‘… Mittwoch …’

‘… discreet, especially with the Press and sailors.’

Girls whose parents were divorced were issued with
two
sheets of writing paper.

As often as she dared, Regina Outre-Mer glanced to the top of the table: to the beautiful, spare features, the refined flesh, the skin which seemed always to be seen by moonlight, even when the sun was at zenith …

Returning to the paper, Regina’s gaze fell on the words die-stamped at the left, in small
discreet
capitals:

It was
almost
a signature.

Stabbed by temptation, pierced by a sudden draught of lime scent from the french windows, Regina decided to tear out the sacred three words.

Stealthily, muffling what her right hand was doing with her left, tenth of an inch by tenth of an inch, she ripped the words free and dropped the little oblong of paper down the front of her dress. No one had noticed. The pens all round still grated like cicadas. She wondered what explanatory postscript she could add to her letter: but it came to her that, whatever excuse she made, her family must instantly guess the truth from that tell-tale little trou, that
speaking
wound. ‘Miss Mount?’

‘My dear?’

But she called everyone my dear. Some of the girls said it was because she could not
remember
their names.

‘Might I have another piece of paper?’

‘Your parents haven’t divorced, my dear?’ Such a world-fatigued tenderness in the voice.

‘No.’ (Regina had seen somewhere an
advertisement
which professed to cure blushing: it could hardly be efficacious in so extreme, so fevered, a case.) ‘I’ve spoilt my first piece.’

‘My dear.’ Wearily the white thin hands let one another loose from their presidential clasp on top of the mound of paper, picked a sheet, passed it to the girl on their right, who passed it on …

Regina received it, jealous of the hands which had contaminated it en route. How wise the
Roman rite, she thought, to practise its
communions
so
directly.

They’re pretty when they blush, white peonies tinged, through some error in ancestry, with crimson, Antonia thought. Yet all the same, she was weary.

She picked a piece of paper for herself, took up a pen; then paused, almost too weary to write.

This heat.

Her eyelids drooped over the paper’s heading. If she became Dame, they would need a new die-stamp.

She asserted her pen.

Perhaps if they got a new die-stamp she could prevail on Hetty to appear as Miss
Henrietta
rather than Miss H. The girls all knew her name, in any case. Antonia herself positively requested certain girls to call her by her first name, and she was persuaded Hetty did the same. Perhaps even, in some cases, with the same girls …

The thought enlivened her, and the tip of her own tongue protruded a touch as she scribbled:

She folded the note, reached for an envelope from the box in front of her and then paused. Re-opening the note, she added:

She put the note into its envelope and handed it to the girl sitting next to her. ‘My dear,
would
you seal that for me?’

The girl’s eyes sought Antonia’s over the girl’s tongue as it moistened the flap.

How essentially moist the girls were.

‘My dear,
would
you now take it to Miss Braid?’

‘Yes, Miss Mount.’

How willing, how essentially
offering
they were, how convinced that the offer of their little persons could salve …

‘I have a slight headache’, Antonia confessed when the girl was already at the door. ‘You will probably find Miss Braid doing something with the
bed
linen.
’

O my dear, thought Regina Outre-Mer, mentally echoing Miss Mount’s own inflexion, stabbed by pity for Miss Mount’s headache and her own heartache because Miss Mount was clearly sending for Miss Braid to take her place, o my dear, my dear (as if praying; as if a litany), 1 will never be indiscreet with the Press, or with sailors (as if promising a votive offering on
condition
of deliverance from storm at sea) or in any other way (forgive also those sins I have unknowingly committed or have forgotten to confess) … Rocking to and fro, as though tossing in storm at sea, Regina wriggled the die-stamped words in such a way as
surreptitiously
to caress them against the flesh of her bosom.

 *

‘The beast’, said Eugénie Plash to her plain sister Sylvie as they walked beneath the limes. ‘When?’

‘Well, last night. At least, that’s when she came to me. When she knocked, I thought it was Antonia.’

‘Ah, yes’, said Eugénie; ‘yes, I see …’

Veiled, veuve-like, behind the muslin Hetty
Braid had tacked across the open window (‘It’s no trouble and I’m taking no risks with that headache, dearest’), Antonia looked down on her girls accomplishing that stroll before
luncheon
on which Hetty insisted. Hetty believed the siesta after luncheon to be an unhealthy habit for girls if not forerun by exercise before. ‘It gives them an appetite.’