He watched her advance towards him, sweeping through the pallid tulles and chiffons in her devil-may-care brown silk, like a kestrel through a flock of peewits. The way the gown contained her, or very nearly failed to do so, was a blatant challenge to any male imagination; and absolutely typical, Ned thought, of Meriel Llewellen. Although he had to grin at her outrageous daring – even knowing that she he had him in her sights, as on she came with both soft barrels levelled at his solar plexus. He was a sitting duck!
‘Why Ashby, all alone? Allow me to present my sister Vicky, and her fiancé Reggie Baxter.’
‘Delighted,’ he said gravely, shaking both their hands. The sister was good looking in a doll-faced kind of way. But the fellow was so much a type, with his slick hair and eyeglass, that Ned was forced to smile again for all of the wrong reasons.
‘Well now?’ Meriel flicked up a dance programme and came briskly to the point. ‘Which engagements can we put you down for?’ And there was no escape. Before Ned knew it she had marked him down for three dances before, and three following the dinner interval, then whisked him off onto the dance floor in a grip of steel.
‘Delightful floor don’t you think, Ashby?’
‘Yes delightful, quite.’
‘But listen… isn’t this the Valse Bleu? Oh yes it is, I love this tune!’
At which she’d stooped to slip the loop sewn to her train over her wrist – and at the same time to give Ned an open view of what he’d so far only glimpsed obliquely.
‘Oh, naughty man, you’re looking down my dress!’
She giggled archly; and while he muttered an apology, Ned prayed for a convenient thunderbolt to reduce the girl, her man-trap of a neckline, and all the mansions in the crescent to a smoking heap of ruins!
He’d smiled when he first saw her. She loved the way he smiled; the way it broadened his strong face and crinkled up his eyes. They’d danced together just as she had planned it – and then she’d had to go and spoil it all by being too provocative. By trying too hard to attract him! She saw now there was nothing she could do to make him feel as she felt – to love her as she so totally loved him! Her splendid gown, her hair, her breasts, all left him cold. Or still worse, embarrassed him. The thing was hopeless, absolutely!
As they walked back across the polished floor, Meriel became irritably aware of the people round her; dapper little men in penguin suits and scarlet uniforms, dwarfed by their partners’ plumes and overborne by their loud voices. The cream of London society; they looked down their snooty noses at colonial girls, she knew they did, whilst they could only talk of Cowes and Ascot and the wretched Season, in a jargon that absurdly tacked Italian endings onto English words. ‘Lovelare, darling! Marvellissimo! Fantisticamente!’ they shrilled, waving madly at each other with their outsized ostrich feather fans.
Meriel could cheerfully have throttled the lot of them.
To Ned, and now his partner, the Grosvenor Crescent ballroom was an alien environment with nothing in it to help bridge the gulf between them. But then life, as it has often been observed, can be full of surprises.
Like most old-fashioned town houses with miles of wainscoting and no more than the odd cat to patrol it, the mansion had a chronic rodent problem. There were mice in cavities beneath the ballroom floor and above its crystal chandeliers, mice behind the gilded plasterwork of the dining room – with at that moment three or four of them busy foraging beneath the starched cloth of the running buffet. The clatter of porcelain and clink of silver overhead were a commonplace to these experienced rodents, and Reggie Baxter’s plummy voice no more disturbing to their peace of mind than a housemaid’s broom colliding with the wainscot.
‘Decent prog, what? Frightfully!’ Reggie’s foot was quite another matter. The polished toe of his giant pump, as he reached forward for the ices, surprised them with the sudden force of a torpedo; and mice decamped in all directions. Only one, the youngest mouse, was rash enough to leave the shelter of the buffet for the open floor, and rather than remain there took refuge in a lady’s chiffon train that happened to be passing, and which in another minute dragged him through the door into the ballroom. The Contes d’Hoffman had just ended; and presented with the choice of a fast train or a slow one, the mouse dashed from the chiffon to the Hon. Aurora Gorrel-Smythe’s cream taffeta. Next moment, in a wild commotion of piercing shrieks and flapping frou-frou, that refuge yielded to another, equally unstable – and in seconds, the dance floor was cleared of dancers; officers in uniform hard on the heels of their defenceless partners. To leave the mouse in sole possession for the two-step.
Meriel didn’t stop to think. Whenever a carpet python or a tarantula had appeared inside the house at Ipswich, it was always she who’d had to cope with it if Da or Garry weren’t at hand – and clearly things in England were no different. As soon as she saw the creature scurrying towards her, she’d calmly walked onto the floor to meet it. There was no question naturally of bending at the waist in the diagonal-seam corset she was wearing. But she could curtsy well enough, and with a quick sweep of her arm snatched up the mouse before it saw her coming. It bit her thumb quite sharply through her glove. But as she straightened up and turned back to her partner, Meriel’s face contained the look of modest virtue she’d so often tried and failed to imitate before. ‘Up Australia!’ she thought, and gave the mouse a fatally hard squeeze. The well-bred girls had squawked and flapped all right. But it had been the colonial who took control. And this time – this time she’d got it right. She knew she had, because she saw it in the look of undiluted admiration in her lovely Ashby’s bright blue eyes.
Smiling demurely, she hailed a lackey with an empty salver, and deposited the twitching corpse on it, face up. ‘Horriblino,’ someone drawled in an exaggerated accent, and next thing everyone was laughing.
Meriel had been the heroine of the hour, no doubt of that. Suddenly everyone wanted to talk to her, to hear the old tales of Australia and the Pacific. The men swarmed round her like bees around a honeypot – and best, oh best of all, Ned not only claimed all the dances she’d marked on his card, but demanded all the Extras too. They danced waltzes, polkas, two-steps and lancers; they danced to La Mattiche, ‘the most wonderful tune in the world’. At three in the morning they joined in the furious John Peel gallop that finished up the ball, and then spurned Reggie’s carriage to walk home unchaperoned beneath a silver moon. Meriel had danced her hair down. Her feet ached like the very devil. The shape of her tight corset remained imprinted on her skin her long after Vicky had released her from it. But who cared!
She pulled back the curtains to sprawl barefoot on the window seat; to watch the sky fray into a long ribbon of peach-coloured light above the sooty chimneys. With one hand on her stomach and the other twisted in her hair, she re-lived every word Ashby had spoken. Every glance of his blue eyes.
‘Look, can I call you Ned?’ she asked him over tea at Simmie’s the next afternoon, and then rushed on before he could agree to a still more important question. ‘You’ve simply got to ask your Grannie to invite me down for a weekend at The Bury as soon as ever I can come.’ (Left to his own devices he might take half the summer getting round to it, and that kind of patience she didn’t have!) ‘Simmie will come with me as chaperon – won’t you, Simmie? She adored our cycling trip in Sussex, and this one will be forty thousand times more fun!’
‘Oh no dear. Sweet of you to think of me,’ said Simmie hastily, ‘but I couldn’t possibly leave Gussie for a whole weekend.’
‘That’s right.’ Ned was nodding hard. ‘Much better if your mother came, and frightfully bad form not to ask.’
‘Oh very well, invite the Mater if you must. But don’t blame me if you live to regret it.’ Meriel felt altogether too pleased to be cross with either of them, even if they were being awkward.
‘Simmie, do you mind if I open a window? I’m sure that we’re all stifling to death in here. Honestly, you two have gone red as turkey cocks, you should see yourselves!’
Ned met them at the station in a funny little red and yellow governess-cart drawn by the portly bay that Meriel had first seen in the Bury stables.
‘It’s the best thing for the long hill up from Cuckmere,’ he explained. ‘Sorry if it’s a squash.’ And he politely pretended not to notice how the shafts had jerked up when he handed Meriel’s mother in.
He was informal in cap and plaid necktie, tanned from long hours in the hayfields and more alive than Meriel had ever seen him. In Harpur Street, in Simmie’s parlour, he habitually stood tensely with both hands in his pockets and his heels up on the fender. Or sat staring at the carpet while she talked. But here he was a different man. His head was up, his hands firm on the reins; and he smiled and chatted to the Mater as if he’d known her all his life. ‘The gap in the chalk cliffs over there – d’ye see, Mrs Llewellen? That’s Cuckmere Haven, where the old ‘Fair Traders’ landed their French contraband in exchange for the wool that my rascally ancestors smuggled out. It used to be big business once here in Sussex.’
‘Smugglers, and in your own family, Mr Ashby? How simply thrilling!’
‘And have you noticed how the thorn trees down here all lean in one direction? There’s nothing between here and France to turn the wind you see. They get the full force through the gap – and look up there. Look, do you see the speckles on the hillside? They’re our Southdown sheep. And on the top, that’s where the gibbet stood when…’
‘I’ll have a go now if you don’t mind,’ Meriel interrupted, and reached across to take the reins. ‘I always drove the wagonette to fetch Da home from Brisbane; I know what I am doing.’
‘Now Meriel,’ her mother’s voice was squeaky with alarm. ‘You always drove that wagonette too fast… Good Lord, you’re doing it already! Don’t let her, Mr Ashby, she’ll have us in the ditch. And look at her, she isn’t even wearing the right gloves!’
‘From the way she was complaining you’d think it was the Mater, and not us, who had to get out on the hill.’
Sitting on the beach that afternoon, Meriel entertained Ned’s sister, Helen, with the story of their journey to the farm. ‘Are you sure the door’s safe, Mr Ashby? Oh no, it’s too steep, I can’t bear it! I’m going to fall, I’m going to fall….’ Her imitation of her mother’s looming bulk and clutching hands was quite hilarious; and between nervous glances up the beach to where her grandmother was sitting, Helen giggled uncontrollably. She’d never dreamed that anyone could be so critical about a parent, and thought that Meriel was the last word!
‘A Gap day, definitely,’ their hostess had decreed at lunch. ‘In this climate of ours you have to take your chances where you find them, Mrs Llewellen; and take my word for it, a day without wind is a rare and wonderful thing in Sellington. We’ll go at half past three and take a picnic shall we?’
The ‘shall we?’ was for form’s sake only, for no one in their right mind would have argued. And Mrs Ashby had been right. It wasn’t a day to be missed. The governess-cart with the same old cob between the shafts had creaked and rattled down the track towards the sea, piled up with deck chairs and camp stools and all the business of a full scale Bury picnic. Mrs Ashby drove herself, with the house-parlourmaid behind her and Harriet squeezed in opposite them beneath a large striped gig umbrella, while Ned and the two girls walked. The track ended in a five-bar gate between a pair of lime-washed coastguard cottages. Beyond it, a delapidated bathing machine had been drawn up above the tidemark, with chalk cliffs rising sheer on either side to form the Gap itself.
‘Last one in’s a giddy-goat!’
She saved the chant it until she’d almost reached the water, but he still beat her to it. Meriel couldn’t dive in her new bathing cap. But Ned could, whooping past her in the shallows to fling himself into the sea with an almighty splash.
He was out there now amongst the gulls and the skimming swallows, while she sat on a rock beside his sister waiting for him to come back in. Seeing him in nothing but his bathing costume had made her to think of men without their clothes; men generally with thick arms like the Queensland drover and sprouting ginger chest hair like The Bury groom. But chiefly Ned of course – how he’d look rising from the water in his red and navy worsted costume, with his fair hair darkened, everything about him wet and shiny – like a lovely stripey Neptune, but without the straggly beard.
From the water Ned’s view of the Gap was reduced to bands of colour pressed between the different blues of sea and sky: grey for the beach, white for the cliffs, green and gold for the downs and cornfields in between. On the beach he could see Gran and Mrs Llewellen settled in their deck chairs and Bridget at the spirit stove, busy brewing tea. Helen sat nearer to the water with Meriel perched on a rock beside her like a siren, waving a slim arm to pull him back to shore.
Margaret Ashby watched her grandson swimming to the girl, and vaulting up onto the rock beside her with as fine a show of exhibitionism as she’d yet to see in the young dunderhead.
‘You’re makin’ a regular fool of yerself over that colonial gel, d’ye know that, boy?’
She’d waited for the Llewellens to retire that evening after dinner, then summoned him up to her bedroom. ‘No background there worth mentionin’, I’ve heard it from the mother. Great-grandfather a Taffy who made his way in coal; grandfather married a French maid; father a ne’er-do-well an’ Mrs L a nincompoop of the first water! Rag, tag an’ bobtail, Ned. That’s what they are.’
‘You’ve absolutely no right to make that kind of judgement, Gran; no right at all! And anyway I’m twenty-two and old enough to choose the company I like.’
‘Old enough to choose a doxy, maybe,’ Margaret Ashby snorted, ‘but clearly not a wife. Because that girl’s unstable, Ned, an’ socially impossible; sticks out a mile. And just remember this, boy, you’ll be choosin’ for your heirs and for The Bury when you marry, not just to please yourself.’