The Finishing Touch (4 page)

(‘I shan’t hand mine in’, Sylvie Plash was confiding behind the asparagus fern, the family pout which so became her sister’s face
disfiguring
hers,’ to that old beast.’)

A lizard ran over Regina Outre-Mer’s wrist. Antonia, long-sighted to the point of talent, leaned forward to admire. Such a svelte, mince little wrist-bone, a rounded, perfected little knob, machine-turned, like the smallest and most accurate of gold wristlet watches.

At last the bell, thrilling through the
expectant
heat.

Girls rose, girls made haste, girls almost jostled … It was as though someone was madly throwing flowers across the gardens.

(‘It’s bound to be Braid at lunch’, whispered Sylvie Plash as they hurried.’ Antonia will lunch in her room, since she has a headache. I expect she’ll have the melon water-ice.’)

Only Regina Outre-Mer made no haste. Last, most pensive, prettiest (Antonia was becoming persuaded) … Antonia watched her … until the garden was empty.

Sighing, Antonia shook open the pages of
Paris-Semaine,
amazingly with the gesture of an old French paysan in a third-class carriage (a thing Antonia had never been in in her life). Briefly she looked through the advertisements
to see if there was one about armpits which could be shewn to the Badessa. (
Paris-Semaine
in its entirety was never shewn, nor even left where the girls might come on it, but burnt, in its entirety, by Hetty.) But the advertisements were all
seins
and
poitrine: ‘
C’est
votre
poitrine
qui
fascine
le
regard
des
hommes!’
: the whole of this week’s issue seemed given over, seemed obsessed, seemed fetichist …

If Hetty
brought
the melon water-ice, Antonia would accept; would, indeed, pour a little absinthe over it …

‘Raffermissez votre poitrine …’

Really, thought Antonia, looking down, I don’t think I need to. And it was true—if
surprising
in so lean a woman: ‘
une
vraie
poitrine
de
vraie
femme
’, as the advertisement expressed it.
And
in the right place, Antonia thought; what matter, je me demande, whether the heart is, providing …

T
WENTY-SIX
girls received replies by return of post (girls who had written two letters receiving two replies).

The replies coming from such a diaspora of corners of the known world, it seemed
inconceivable
that
return
of
post
should mean in all cases the identical moment: yet by some miracles of contrivance, influence or even
perhaps
divine intervention (more than one prayer had ascended, more than one candle been lit, to Saint Christopher—or, with greater
sophistication
, to the apostle Paul himself, patron presumptive of epistles), it
did
… Like
multi-various
petals awaiting pounding into a pot pourri, the envelopes lay on the silver tray; the envelopes themselves petal-like, flimsy nautical blue, fibrous pale pink, crisp yellow, waxed white, each one stamped not merely with the normal timbres of its country of origin (though up to triple or quadruple the usual impoundage) but also stuck all over, like the vitrine of a shop
threatened with bankruptcy, with wild, hoping streamers—‘Special Delivery’, ‘Express’, ‘Par Avion—Double’. Three or four had come in Diplomatic Bags, one or two had been delivered by hand by friends who happened to be flying … one had been transmitted by closed-circuit television … Distributed at breakfast by Miss Braid (Miss Mount took breakfast in her room), the envelopes yielded up their import at the same moment that the coffee pots liberated their morning aroma, and coffee fumes crept into the curled, the young, the faintly and in some cases quite naturally—they
were
young—scented meshes of twenty-six coiffures bent to déchiffrer the instructions from home.

 *

‘What do you think of the letter from home?’ Sylvie Plash asked Eugénie.

‘Antonia has asked for our
absolute 
discre
tion
.
That is enough.’

‘Ah, Antonia …’, said Sylvie.

 *

‘No, my dear Hetty’, Antonia murmured, giving the very faintest of shoves to her
breakfast
tray (Hetty’s pineapple and passionfruit conserve was positively not as good this year as it had been last), ‘you are
not
to wear your floral silk. One may smell but must not look like a suburban garden.’ (Though for Antonia’s own
part she preferred scents less al fresco, more d’artifice …)

‘My darling’, replied the deep factotum voice (abustle these three hours, abustle, now, in Antonia’s very bedroom) ‘what I shall
wear
is the least of my worries.’

‘Really? It was my first consideration … Your poor worries’, Antonia frailly added, while Hetty picked up the tray. ‘You make me feel so—impuissante.’

‘No, no.’ Hetty set down the tray and knelt at Antonia’s side. ‘I didn’t mean … My darling’s not to …’

‘Have you’, Antonia exhaustedly enquired, ‘had another parcel of instructions from the Palace?’

‘I have, my dear. Such impossible things they seem to require. Their mind seems to run on lavatories.’

‘What’, asked Antonia, ‘from the Keeper of the Privy this and Privy that, can one
expect
…?’

‘And I don’t know
how
to fix a standard to the front of the car. And the rose suite’, Hetty pursued. ‘I’ve aired it all night, yet I swear you can still smell incense.’

‘But surely only faintly’, whispered Antonia, ‘amidst the Egyptian tobacco and the
sandalwood
…’ (delicious).

‘And the walls’, Hetty said, ‘are
splashed
.’

‘
Splashed?
’

‘Ineradicably, it seems—with some strange pale liquid.’

‘No doubt she
bubbled
things through it’, Antonia said.

‘I should be glad if that was all. And the
bed
——’

‘My dear, you make me feel a touch——’

‘O, my darling mustn’t … What a brute I am to my darling … My poor darling …’

‘Hetty, I won’t—I positively insist—I
won’t
keep you from your work. You have so many worries …’

Looking in, later in the day—she had decided on her own costume, jusqu’au bout des ongles (pale pink with the faintest, she had
determined
, overtone of mauve)—at the rose suite, Antonia surprised Hetty scrubbing at the
skirting
board (such a
frou-frou
phrase, commented Antonia’s thoughts), dress tucked-up in,
presumably
(but fortunately, as she knelt, it was not clear), her
bloomers,
hair tucked-up in a turban—which, though that is of course the last impression one wishes to give,
does,
commented Antonia withdrawing, put one in mind of a seraglio …

 *

‘Braid’s still at it.’

‘She’ll be up half the night.’

‘She’ll be looking her worst, then, for
Tomorrow
.’

‘Ah, but Antonia won’t.’

‘Well of course
Antonia
won’t.’

‘She retired two hours ago.’

‘With what book?’

‘I couldn’t glimpse.’

‘I recognised the binding.’

‘What, then?’

‘
Mademoiselle
de
Maupin.
Again.’

‘It always is’, Eugénie Plash commented, affectionately, and slightly boasting of her knowledge, ‘the night before an Occasion.’

A
STONISHING
, ran Antonia’s train of thought as her eye took what would be, for the time being, its last glance at the back of Hetty’s neck (Hetty was just bringing the car to a halt on the quayside), that women who chose to dress like men always chose for their model the most careless, the most thorn-torn, the most ash-(or was it dandruff-?) spattered type of man … The drive would have been so much less fatiguing had Hetty modelled herself on some really sprucely, though not, of course, flashily, uniformed chauffeur.

Impossible, ran Hetty’s train of thought as she made sure of the handbrake, climbed out and hastened to open the rear door, for an
unprejudiced
observer to be sure which gave and which received honour, which came in and which was visited by state, which, in short,
was
the princess …

And that, of course, was just the impression, just the doubt, Antonia had dressed to provoke.

Leaning, as a frond might for a moment lean, on the arm extended, stepping beneath the shade of the parasol already erected and held in Hetty’s other hand, she left upon the very currents of the air she displaced an impress such that air itself seemed to have sunk in obeisance about her passage and then, finding her passed, to have been set buzzing, eddying, spinning, intoxicated by the presence in it of a few volatile atoms of her unplaceable scent—which had already
misled
half a dozen lavender butterflies to follow the car, like a princesse lointaine, all the way down the Corniche into the saltier environs of the harbour, in which for them too gross
atmosphere
they were doomed to die …

For a second Antonia paused, unable to step further——

(Was it a Tiepolo Cleopatra, come to what rendez-vous at what stately harbour, fainting away—bosom an inch exposed behind harbour-breeze-ruffled ruff—into attendant arms?)

‘The drive … so fatiguing …’

‘My beloved! … But bear up, bear up …’

‘They might have spared us so much trouble’, murmured Antonia before stepping boldly
forward
(was it now a Tiepolo greyhound straining the leash?) ‘by sending her in the Diplomatic Bag. Come, to the landing-stage …’

‘Gosh! Don’t the boats look pretty? I
suppose
that’s what they call “dressed overall”’ (dozens of tiny coloured triangles, flapping).

‘A trifle
over
dressed, admettons’, said Antonia, stepping …

She herself—
of
course
she herself …

She herself (o admirable reproach to the
undisciplined
, the merely jolly fantasies of the yacht club) did not, as a matter of fact, disdain to borrow from masculine clothes but did so not in Hetty’s fashion—not, indeed, in any
contemporary
fashion: it was hussars (or was it lancers?), it was a hint of mess jackets (or
walking-out
dress?
) which she conjured to mind with the sketched allusion she made to—was it frogging? or an epaulette here, a high collar there? or merely a straight, a darkening line of braid? (though not, one could feel sure, in honour of
Miss
Braid) … Somehow, at least, somehow, in giving indulgence to the dandy in her soul (was it, then, the hint of a
stock?
) she achieved a firm definition, a distinction, of
upright
outline. And yet, having borrowed from the masculine (or perhaps from the travesty: was there not, in the palimpsest of associations she impressed on the vision, a moment’s
reference
to Vesta Tilley?), she made it foil to the (thus the
Paris-Semaine
advertisement) vraie femme whose waist more than one pair of hands had proved could be spanned by a pair of hands, whose rib cage might have housed—might have
empalaced—the most delicate of mechanical singing birds, whose vraie poitrine was
calibrated
with the architectural perfection, the touch of the glacial and yet the tender suspicion of the meltingness and (last, most poignant suggestion of all) the very ephemerality of twin domes of water-ice …

All this, the hint of uniform, the material shiny and
ribbed,
its colour—what colour? dark … a changing colour, colour of a moody sea, the wine-moody sea—all this not merely offset; it actually, it openly, it all but blatantly revealed. For somehow, somewhere, the top was actually (the principle of all works of art:-excise)
cut
away
(mess jackets, cut-aways …) And yet it
was
only
all
but
blatantly, for what was revealed was by the same art withdrawn: bosom, throat, hair (‘I, at least, shall not flap in the breeze’), the lovely face itself … all lurked behind—not
a
veil but veiling, veiling without end and without beginning, mystic symbol of eternity …

How, then, to tell, as she stepped, head and shoulders swathed in her veiling and her scent,
which
was royal? (Antonia affected even the royal dislike of carrying money and doing one’s own paying: her handbag followed after in Hetty’s hands—
handbag,
one said; it was the merest little gold sack of netting, just deep enough to encompass the small lavender-suede
portefeuille; delicate—in the square, slightly embarrassed hands—almost to the point of évanouissement.) Antonia did not fall short even in entourage. The car which had followed (Hetty glanced back, through the nimbus of Antonia’s scent, to make sure it was keeping to its schedule) bore three, as it were, maids of honour. ‘They shall be my nosegay’, Antonia had said, ‘my sweet-smelling orange stuck with cloves’—and, to make her promise good, had, before leaving the School, touched each girl behind the ears with a benison of—whatever it was; each girl had guessed at the scent; each guess had been wrong.

Hetty had assumed the three girls would be selected according to precedence, after
consulting
the Almanach de Gotha; but Antonia had employed some other principle; the three were Eugénie Plash, Regina Outre-Mer and the
President’s
daughter of the black (the damson-blue) republic.

(‘My dear, are you sure?’ Hetty had
murmured
about the last choice.

‘My dear, surely she’s used to it—from the
Commonwealth
?’)

Hetty glanced back again, to make sure the girls were following. Antonia had no need. She recognised her scent.

She stepped …

She stepped
up
… Up, on to the floating
landing-stage, which was got-up (dressed overall, no doubt) for the occasion: more triangles
flapping
, some effort towards cushioning the slatted benches and, at the other—the
waterside
—entrance, where SHE would presently appear, two pots of hydrangeas, which lurched with the landing-stage. ‘One can’t help feeling
safe
’, Hetty cheerfully said, ‘with the Navy’.

The Navy—a sous-officier, in tropical kit—saluted.

‘Commander Curl presents his compliments.’

At least, Antonia reflected, if I get my
damehood
, it will be without strings.

(Apparently the sous-officier had meant Commander Curl was coming. Qu’il vienne, then.)

They cannot expect me to attend a
Garden-Party
. No party could—surely?—be the
better
for being held in a garden? But of course it was not meant to be. The institution was merely a British perversity (almost a sexual perversity), a flirting with the climate they did not possess, just as certain women who did not possess the figure for trousers felt compelled …

Commander Curl.

O dreadful, dreadful tropical kit, the white socks long and the white trousers short (men as well as women might not possess … and for them, no choice), uniform one would expect
to see directing the traffic from a white tub in Morocco …

Two fingers, two fingers only, to him … ‘You had a pleasant voyage, I hope?’

‘O—great fun.’

‘Fun?’

‘Lots of jolly deck games.’

‘How fatiguing. Do sit down.’

How curious of him to appear disconcerted, to merely mumble there was hardly time, the royal launch …

And yet in a way, when he blushed (
reminding
one of little Miss Outre-Mer), there was a charm … A charm, even, in the absurd uniform, in revealing the knees (could they be made to blush?) Pleasure could be derived from these northern complexions (so easily blushing for one thing) which took so ruddily to southern sun … Had one been unfair? too long expatriate? would one, in effect, rather welcome the complexion, the dewiness, of an English rose …?

The royal launch: in sight: hove to: tying up …

Now heaven send the Commander was delivering up his cargo as he had received her (
did
one feel safe with the Navy?) …

She.

(Of course he was. That was perfectly obvious.)

She was not an English rose.

But she—her—not dress: covering—
rioted
with them.

A long, long tremor, a shuddering, a rigor passed through Antonia into Hetty’s arm. ‘My beloved … my beautiful … you’ve borne up so bravely … don’t fail now …’

(Remember to bid Hetty, when occupied with affairs of ménage, to look for the label: C & …)

‘Smashing trip! Smashing to see you! Smashing …’

But it was one of the hydrangea pots … smashed indeed … its fragments
irrecoverable
as the treasure ships of Phoenicians and Greeks beneath the wine-moody surface of the Mediterranean Sea …

 *

‘Smashing place you’ve got here. Smashing grounds. Smashing
view
.’

‘A touch, I fear’, Antonia murmured, ‘banal.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Colour photography has spoilt so many pleasures. Sometimes I wish for days together
they would invent spectacles that corrected the vision to black and white.’

For royalty Antonia herself must conduct the tour of the gardens. How long since she had actually set foot in them? But then what need, when she had her talent of long sight?

But now—for royalty—What a clamber it was to the top of the terracing: and to be
rewarded
by the merely banal view. And from royalty, she supposed, one could not even expect an arm.

Girls, it seemed to Antonia, were with them, though not accompanying them; all round them, though not visible to them: girls scuttling like lizards (and as prettily) across the path one was about to take, girls hovering like humming birds in the grove one had just left: girls naturally eager, no doubt, to catch their first glimpse of their new, their royal, companion …

Or was it to see Miss Mount that they lurked?, Miss Mount so unaccustomedly, so actually
in
the gardens? Well no doubt that, too, and equally naturally, had created its furore: Miss Mount displaying the grenouillère (royal joke about frogs), Miss Mount disclosing the nectarine wall (royal knowledgeableness about pruning), Miss Mount holding erect her own parasol (for Hetty, of course, was unpacking the thirty-one pieces of royal baggage, each one yielding up, no doubt—Antonia suffered a moment’s return
of her quayside rigor—its own Horror of Glamis) and remembering from time to time to correct its angle so that a little of the shade from its fringes dripped over royalty’s head …

But though one might not expect an arm
from
royalty one might tactfully touch one’s own hand to royalty’s elbow and divert the gaze which had been on the point of penetrating the hibiscus and lighting on the statue of Pan. (
That
Hetty had not been able—or had not dared—to have corrected.)

(But was it not down that very avenue—and not inappropriately—that Antonia glimpsed a flicker of orange and bacchic purple, strong tropical contrast that could only denote the
sundress
of the President’s daughter? …)

‘But I say——’

(There: that jewelled flicker in the ilex leaves: was that not Regina Outre-Mer?)

‘——where are the playing fields?’

‘The playing fields?’

‘For games, you know.’

‘O, as for games, the gardens are admirably adapted to them. So many secluded corners, sunken spots, grottoes one would never guess were there …’ Antonia replied, wondering, rather, that the royal child could not see as much for herself.

‘Yes, but I mean to say. For rounders, you know, you need a flat bit.’

‘A flat bit’, Antonia echoed. ‘There is—’ she sighed, beginning to lead royalty there, ‘—a small plot which my colleague has attempted to engazonner.’

Wearying, Antonia thought (having again the sense of girls scuttling from sight before the royal advance), this impression it makes on me of being cut off, as though the shadow of this parasol (remember to lend a little of it to royalty) were an impalpable cage, keeping me from my girls …

‘There’, Antonia said. ‘Miss Braid’s pelouse.’

A flat bit, her thoughts echoed again. It seemed to express.

‘O, I say.’ Royalty giggled. ‘Sorry—but it is a bit of a pocket handkerchief, isn’t it?’

‘But one’s pocket handkerchief’, Antonia said, fatigued, ‘
is
lawn.’

I am tired, Antonia thought; I am repeating my jokes; tired …

With a premonition of headache she decided to accord royalty no more shade but to keep it all for her own incipiently pained head …

 *

‘My beloved must be so tired.’

‘It is always tiring when one fails to discern a single charm.’

‘I must admit she isn’t in the least——’ Rarely, rarely did Hetty fail to complete a
sentence
: so sturdy, so reliable she was. If Hetty becomes depressed, thought Antonia, I shall simply give up; the School must close …

‘—pretty’, completed Hetty. The School might continue …

‘Her face is a touch—no, it is quite
distinctly
’, Antonia pronounced, almost with vigour, ‘—oxyrhinque. Indeed, she all too
indomitably
does’, Antonia added, ‘
keep
her
pecker
up
.’

And after dinner (even the melon water-ice was failing now):

‘My poor tired beloved must go straight to——’

‘I have my Report to write first.’ (They
expected
one a day. But this task could fairly soon, Antonia thought, be passed to Hetty.)