March 1936
Spring came slowly to Blackwood Park.
Each day, on Alice’s afternoon walk there were tiny changes, little signs that winter’s grip was loosening. The parkland began to lose its bleak, barren look as the blackthorn blossomed and lambs appeared in the fields, beneath a sky that turned gradually from bleached bone white to soft blue. When Alice went to the drawing room for her weekly interview with Grandmama one Sunday afternoon in early March, there was a bowl of paperwhite daffodils on the table by her armchair. Their delicate perfume was fresh in a room that smelled of stopped clocks and old paper.
There was nothing warm about Lady Lennox. The spring hadn’t melted the ice in her eyes or softened her voice. She was wearing a steel-blue dress and her hair was set over her ears in rigid iron waves, which matched her rigid iron expression. Noticing that she was holding a piece of paper, Alice felt pins and needles all over at the horrifying thought that she had somehow found out about her secret correspondence with Mama.
‘Miss Lovelock passed on your letter…’ As Lady Lennox unfolded it her tone gave nothing away, beyond a general resigned disappointment. ‘If one can call it that, when one side of the paper is taken up with a drawing. You’re old enough to undertake a proper correspondence now, Alice. Also, I noticed that you had addressed it to your Mama only.’ She looked up, with an expression of cool enquiry. ‘That seems rather unfair on your Papa, do you not think?’
Relief washed through Alice’s body; a hot tide that made her feel weak all over, and glad that she’d gone to the WC when she’d come in from her walk. The letter in Grandmama’s hands was the one she’d written with Miss Lovelock, not Polly. It took a moment to remember that Grandmama had asked a question, and appeared to be waiting for an answer.
She struggled to think of how to give one without sounding rude. Without contradicting Grandmama and saying it was fair, because Papa hadn’t written to her, like Mama had. She hadn’t expected him to. Even at home he barely spoke to her, except to reprimand or rebuke, never to tell her interesting news or ask about her day, her life. Grandmama, apparently tired of waiting, folded Alice’s pen and ink drawing of a clump of primroses and put it down beside the daffodils. ‘Now. I’ll get a new sheet of writing paper from the library and you can write a proper letter.’
Left alone, Alice allowed herself a private smile. Grandmama didn’t know that she had written a proper letter only two days ago; three luxurious pages in reply to the wonderful letter Mama had sent from Bombay. (Polly never fussed about correct spelling, or making the writing neat and keeping it brief because of the cost of sending it abroad.) She had told her about the new lambs in the fields and grumbled about having tapioca for lunch. It all seemed very dreary compared to the sights and sounds of India, but she knew that Mama would sympathize about that. Once, when Alice was quite small, Mama had come into the nursery at Onslow Square and found her sitting at the table with a bowl of cold tapioca that Nanny had said she must finish. Mama had tipped it out of the window and taken Alice out for an ice in Kensington Gardens.
Her gaze found its way to the grand piano, on top of which a collection of photographs stood in silver frames. The largest of these was a studio portrait of Aunt Miranda looking regal and triumphant in her wedding dress. Beautiful too, though dislike and loyalty made Alice reluctant to admit this; to her, Mama was a thousand times lovelier. Her eyes moved to the next frame, which held a photograph of the day itself, of Aunt Miranda and Uncle Lionel standing in a drift of confetti outside a London church (Alice didn’t recognize it), arms linked, smiles fixed. Mama stood a little behind Aunt Miranda, not looking at the camera, but somewhere just to the right, her face a little blurred but her smile luminous. Her hair had swung across her cheek, giving the impression that she had just turned her head.
Alice stepped closer, looking harder, wondering what she had seen to make her smile like that; what, or whom. It couldn’t be Papa because he was standing beside Uncle Lionel, his face grave as he looked directly into the camera. Alice gave an involuntary shiver as her eyes met his, and she looked away quickly.
Their wedding photograph – his and Mama’s – was further back, behind one of Cousin Archie as a baby in layers of frilly lace. She looked past him, finding Mama, feeling a tiny jolt as she registered the contrast between the first photograph and the second. The broad, bright smile was gone and Mama was thinner, but it wasn’t just that. Alice had seen the photograph lots of times before, but for the first time she noticed that Mama’s eyes, gazing out of the frame, were heavy-lidded and puffy and there were dark smudges beneath them. Not enough to notice ordinarily, but next to the other picture …
By the time another Season rolled around everything had changed, in ways we couldn’t have imagined.
‘Don’t touch the piano, Alice. Now, let’s try again.’
Alice hadn’t heard Grandmama come in and her voice made her jump. She followed her over to the bureau in the window’s bay and sat obediently, picking up the fountain pen and examining its inky nib, silently willing Grandmama to move away. It made her nervous, knowing she was watching. She pressed her pen to the paper too hard, making a puddle of ink. Blotting it quickly, she tried again.
Dear Mama
‘And Papa,’ Grandmama said smoothly. ‘Don’t forget.’ She leaned over Alice’s shoulder to make sure she wrote it. ‘Never forget, Alice, how good your Papa has been to you. And to your Mama.’
The clock ticked on. Grandmama went back to her chair beside the fire. Alice’s knuckles were white as she gripped the pen too hard, making the words spiky with anger.
I hope you are well
Grandmama was wrong. Papa wasn’t good to Mama, not really, no matter what Mama said about how lucky they were to have the beautiful house in Onslow Square and all their lovely servants; how kind he was to give her such expensive jewels, such a generous allowance, and to pay for Alice to go to Miss Ellwood’s school. Alice saw how things were, even if no one else did. She saw how cold he was, when Mama was so warm and loving, how disapproving when she tried to make things interesting and fun. At Christmas they had gone to a party at Lady Londonderry’s and Mama had worn a red satin dress and Grandmother Carew’s ruby choker, fixed across her forehead as a headband. She had been dazzling, but Papa had frowned and said she looked like a circus showgirl. He told her to take the choker off and wear it properly.
That night, much, much later, Alice had woken and heard Mama crying –
Grandmama’s voice was as sharp as a ruler across her knuckles. ‘Staring out of the window isn’t going to get your letter written.’
Alice blinked. She hadn’t been aware that she was staring out of the window. The ghost of Uncle Howard in his soldier’s khaki hung in front of her, reflected palely in the glass.
‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Then you must think. Correspondence requires consideration, thinking of others before oneself. The art of letter writing lies in putting oneself in the position of the recipient and knowing what he or she would be interested to hear, whether they might want to be informed or amused or diverted. So. Your Mama and Papa will receive your letter when the ship docks in Bombay. What do you think they might like to read about home?’
Bombay? The lines of Mama’s last letter leapt across Alice’s mind; images of the street vendors and donkey carts flickering vividly to life. For a moment she was confused, but then realization dawned. Of course. Grandmama didn’t know about the secret correspondence between her and Mama. She didn’t know that the ship had already docked in Bombay and was now on the final stretch of the voyage, because Mama must have written to Alice more recently. Alice hugged the special insight to her, congratulating herself for not giving it away.
In the glass in front of her Uncle Howard’s faint smile was conspiratorial. She bent her head and began, laboriously, to write.
The second letter was hardly an improvement on the first. It began with Dear Mama and Papa at least, but the writing was still an abomination and its few lines were littered with spelling mistakes. They snagged Lady Lennox’s attention as her eyes skimmed over the page, like little thorns in her flesh.
How apt.
The child’s intelligence was clearly limited. Selina had said that she struggled with writing and spelling, but was bright as a button. Lady Lennox was of the opinion that the first statement rather disproved the second. Salt in the wound for Rupert, who had been such a distinguished scholar at both Eton and Cambridge (Howard had joked about bribing him to write papers. At least she thought he had been joking …) Thank goodness the child was a girl – which wasn’t a sentiment Lady Lennox had ever expected to feel about one of her own grandchildren – and Rupert would be spared the expense and embarrassment of putting her through a proper school.
Small mercies.
If one tried to be dispassionate about it (and she did try, for the sake of her own sanity) one could see that she was pretty enough, though not in any way that Lady Lennox recognized. Alone in the drawing room after she had sent Alice back to the nursery, she went over to the piano (wiping the child’s fingerprints off its polished lid with her handkerchief) and looked at the photographs that she had caught her studying. She wondered if the contrast was as marked to Selina’s dark, gypsy-eyed daughter as it was to everyone else. Even in black and white, the golden Anglo-Saxon colouring of the Lennoxes was striking.
Her hand went to her own hair, faded now to silver, as her gaze moved over the images of her children, and came to rest – uneasily – on Selina. Hesitantly she reached out and picked up the photograph of her as bridesmaid on Miranda’s wedding day, frozen in that moment when she’d turned her head and smiled.
Her fingers tightened on the frame. Time had taught her that anger was an easier emotion to manage than sorrow, and she reached instinctively for it now. The bobbed hair, swinging across Selina’s face … Such a silly fashion, and so unbecoming – unlike the elegant waves pinned beneath Miranda’s veil. There was something shameless about the exposed curve of Selina’s neck and shoulder that Lady Lennox found provoking, even all these years later.
That was Selina all over. Shameless. Defiant. It was how she had been from the start, as a wild little tomboy in the nursery who had far more in common with her brother than her sister, but had never grasped that qualities that were admirable in a boy were quite the opposite in a girl. Lady Lennox had wondered whether Selina might grow up to be one of those sexless women who enjoyed gardening and bred spaniels: confirmed spinsters. The reality had turned out to be far worse. A predilection for dahlias and dogs wouldn’t have resulted in the ignominy of the changeling grandchild or the burden of looking after her.
Robert said she should have been firmer with their youngest daughter. She’d tried, of course … but Selina had always been dismissive of rules and disdainful of discipline. Howard’s death had snuffed out any sense of propriety she might once have had, as if she was thumbing her nose at the figures of authority whom she held responsible. She had always behaved as if his loss had hurt her more than anyone else – more even than it had hurt his mother.
They had both loved him so very much. In the aftermath of his death grief should have united them, but instead it had driven them further apart. Lady Lennox sensed the unspoken accusation behind Selina’s casual defiance, the implication that it was her fault. She had failed as a mother because she had let him go – encouraged him, even. As if she’d had any choice but to offer her fine, strong, healthy son up to serve.
The fact that she blamed herself didn’t make her daughter’s censure any easier to bear. It widened the cracks between them into a chasm. It made it difficult to view Selina’s behaviour – the drinking and partying and getting up to high jinks – as anything other than acts of personal revenge, of which the child had apparently been the ultimate.
With a sigh Lady Lennox set the photograph back amongst the others, but her eyes stayed fixed to her daughter’s face. Things had come to a head that summer, the year that Miranda had got married. It was a long time after Howard’s death, years after the end of the war but, covered up and hidden from view the wound of their mutual grief had festered rather than healed. Looking back she remembered how tired she had been in the run up to the wedding, how exhausted by the preparations and the pressure for perfection, by the need to keep going and hold back the great weight of her sadness. She had lacked the energy to deal with her wayward daughter and the patience to understand her.
Time had given her perspective and made her able to be kinder to herself. Her fingers went to her throat now, fumbling for the gold cross that hung there; banished to the depths of her jewellery box when Howard died but unearthed again a few years ago, when the asphyxiating cloud of grief began to lift. Those had been dark and difficult years, but gradually her belief in a God of mercy rather than cruelty had begun to reassert itself. Surely the failings of a grieving mother might be forgiven?
It was unfortunate that her granddaughter’s presence – her very existence, in fact – meant they could never quite be forgotten