BEA GLANCES AT THE CARRIAGE CLOCK BESIDE HER bed. Not much after six thirty, no wonder it feels like the middle of the night. Her head is pounding. My God, it must have been three before she put her book down. Serves her right for picking it up when she came in, but it was sitting there, all navy and gilt, waiting for her as she reached for the light. Though you can hardly switch to sleep straight from the gramophone screeching and being flung around a drawing room. The chairs and sofas had been pushed to the side but, even then, it was too small for the crowd. They were all having a go at the foxtrot, which promises, if you get it right, to be a good deal more elegant than the turkey trot or the grizzly. And Bea likes to get it right, she likes the way she draws attention when she dances well. She knows that the men’s gazes are with her as she moves around the room, and she’s learnt to sashay as she walks, hips swinging, shoulders back and chest out. She’s good at biting her lips, too, to make them pink and slightly swollen. If she can still draw men, she reckons, she can withstand any hail of arrows.
Three and a half hours’ sleep, however, is not enough. Bea closes her eyes again. She should not have said yes to tea. She had said yes, in that way of simply accepting something because it is the easiest thing to do without properly considering whether you want it. Bea resolves, equally weakly, not to do it again.
Poor girl, all pale mob cap and cotton frills wavering in front of those curtains that really belong in a theatre. Although perhaps not a girl, for eyes all dark and eyebrows slightly too thick for a slip of a chin, and she had a curiously steady gaze for someone in the first week of a new job. It was a rather striking combination, or could be. ‘Unrealised’ looks, that’s the phrase. Maybe Bea would take her under her wing, and stir things up a little by making a swan of a maid. Funny accent, though, and her body’s tiny. But that’s not strange. ‘Lack of nutrition’ Mother proclaimed. ‘Appalling, but all that ends when they come to my house.’ Then she complains at the bill for food in the servants’ hall. At some stage in life, thinks Bea, you seem to be able hold completely contradictory opinions.
Grace – all the way from Carlisle and her inevitable half-dozen siblings crammed into a small terraced house. Bea had scared her; damn, she hadn’t meant to do that. She shouldn’t have spoken to her. Bea can imagine all too clearly Clemmie’s reprimand in her profoundly irksome older-sister way. ‘They’re trying not to be noticed, Bea.’
Bea’s head still hurts. Yesterday evening did not begin well. Mother insisted on accompanying her over to Edie’s. Rather a fuss, and a waste of time on everybody’s part as Bea is almost twenty-one, coming up for her fourth season, for God’s sake, and she quite wanted to drive herself. There is something about the thrill of a throttle that would have set her up for the evening. Though as Edie’s is barely a few hundred yards away, Bea would have had to pound up and down Park Lane a couple of times to pick up a decent speed. The side streets at night need to be taken at rather a snail’s pace, for people seem to step out in front of her at random. She could swear that there are more people crossing the street in the evenings, and that they do so far more carelessly than at other times of day.
She had met Edie on the black and white tiled steps of Miss Wolffe’s, about to be ‘finished’ and coached in the art of debutanteship. The languorous Edie, half-opened eyes and full lips, had cracked a line about being readied for market, and Bea had fallen for her on the spot.
Until then Bea had spent most of her childhood being governessed down at Beauhurst with its cacophony of garish red-brick towers. Edward, her darling just younger brother Edward, was her only companion, while Clemmie looked down upon them from her self-aggrandised position of eldest. Bea and Edward were allowed to run around the beech woods, crawling inside the rhododendron bushes to sit in the tangle of their branches, from where they held council of their secret societies. They were always running: chasing each other through the bamboo maze and down the gravel paths of the high-walled nursery garden. When it rained they plucked the vast rhubarb leaves and used them as umbrellas as they rushed back to the house, where they chased each other yet more, along the endless yards of passageways.
The only other people of Bea’s own age she had met were Mother’s friends’ offspring and by the end of the first week at Miss Wolffe’s, Bea felt she had known Edie all her life. However, at a party the very evening after they had both been presented at Court, the floppy-haired Tony de Clancy asked Edie to dance. He placed his pale cheek next to hers and Edie was gone – for a while. Then slightly to Bea’s surprise, Tony had drifted back to his clubs and Edie to Bea. However, it is, quite frankly, jolly convenient, for, being married, Edie counts as a chaperone.
Still, there was the question of reaching Edie’s, and last night Mother argued, or rather pronounced, for arguing suggests allowing room for another person’s opinion, that going about alone in the daytime is one thing, but alone when dressed up for the evening is quite another.
Thus, the small tidal wave that is Mother rushed into the car beside Bea, bearing the flotsam and jetsam of enough jewellery for a duchess’s ball.
‘You must look happy, Beatrice.’
‘I am happy, Mother.’ Bea’s fingers dug into the cushioned leather.
‘Well, you don’t look it.’
‘I will when we arrive.’
‘I would be lying to you if I didn’t say that you will be being’ – Mother hesitated – ‘observed. If you appear to be moping, people might think you will never recover and marry.’
You can’t say I didn’t try, Bea thought. Good God, even after a lifetime, Mother’s hypocrisies don’t fail to irritate her. ‘What about the beliefs of your suffrage cause, that women should be independent?’
‘Our suffrage cause. And independence is relative, Beatrice. Once you have a husband, you are at least independent of the need to find one.’
‘Yes, Mother,’ Bea said, failing to muster any enthusiasm. However much she wanted to declare that she was now jolly well going to lead an independent life, agreeing was the swiftest way to put an end to this conversation.
‘And, Beatrice, marrying is the only way in which you will escape me.’
Bea bit her tongue to stifle its reply. She kept it bitten until, after ten eternal minutes in Edie’s drawing room, during which Edie assured Mother that she, personally, would drive Bea home at the end of the evening, Mother at last left, near jangling her way down the stairs even though she had not admitted to any plans other than returning to dine alone. But Mother is an evangelist for keeping up an appearance.
Bea wraps around her a silk dressing gown as thick as her curtains and pads barefoot over to the windows where she heaves down on the curtain pull. The shutters, too, might as well be lead. The bar’s low enough, but it’s only because she’s learnt how to swing them open that she can push them out.
Outside it’s still pigeon grey, even over the park, but people are already standing on the top of the omnibuses that float up the avenue between Bea and the trees and grass beyond. Bea presses her cheek against the glass; it is cold. Pulling her hair back from her eyes, she wonders whether ‘Grace’ could do her hair for her, but it’s not a good time of day to waylay the servants. They’ll bob and smile in the passage but still be bursting to get to wherever they’re taking their broom, or whatever they’re carrying. Damn, she really should not have said yes to the tea.
Look, a taxi, they’re all but invisible at this hour, nearly all of those who can afford to take them are asleep. The delight of a curving street, however, is that she can see almost the length of it from inside the house. It’s stopping at Bleasdale House, home to a pair of eligible young men towards whom Bea is too often thrust. Now, that’s not an elegant exit from either of them. Her mind races as to where they might have been. Damned unfair sometimes, being a girl. Not that she’d want to do any of that, but being stuck in people’s drawing rooms is so, well, limiting.
Bea walks back to the side of the bed, slips her feet into a pair of velvet slippers and, tightening her dressing gown, walks out into the gallery; she will have the tea when she returns. Light is beginning to come in through the glass dome at the top of the atrium and she leans out over the balustrades. Two floors, forty foot below, a pale cotton and mob-capped figure scuttles noiselessly across the marble floor. Bea treads carefully on the thick carpet, quite deliberately like a servant. It is not ‘done’ to worry about being heard and she enjoys this oh-so-silent rebellion against convention. Looking down from her perfectly pinned and willowy height, her elder sister Clemmie, chin as ever raised, tells Bea that it is common to behave in this manner. But we are common, Clemmie, Bea teases back, all that railway money, however little may be left, is ‘trade’. This is the twentieth century, Clem, things are about to change.
Bea tiptoes on through an archway and down a set of stairs hidden in a gap in the wall of gilded bedroom doors. Looking down the wide carpeted steps she feels a wave of temptation to clatter down them and swing around the corner like her eight-year-old self. But she resists, and descends noiselessly.
At the back of the first-floor gallery is a pair of doors taller than the windows in Bea’s bedroom. Bea takes a breath, stiffens her stomach and pushes them open to enter a room far higher than it is wide. The ceiling is two storeys above her and the shuttered windows on either side are sixty foot tall. The room is dark. There’s not yet enough light outside to make its way through the shutters, and it’s the only room in the house with no electricity, though you’d’ve thought it was the one that needed it most. When there’s a crush in here, there are more silk stoles flapping about below the candles than in a flock of, of … seagulls.
It reeks of beeswax, as if the next dance were tonight, not more than a month away. Bea’s twenty-first birthday that isn’t her twenty-first birthday because one hardly wants, says Mother, to draw attention to the fact. Would look like we’ve given up on you having a wedding – it’s a little unfortunate that your birthday is such an appropriate date to have a dance. Before Easter, before the Season, it’s not just the fashionable crowd, Mother pointed out, but more interesting people are likely to come. But there’s only one thing Mother means by interesting: the people who can make things happen, so that she can tell them what to change. Someone, she says, has to bring this country up to date.
At the far side of the room is another pair of double doors. Bea glides across the waxed floor towards them and swings them open to stand in semi-darkness, surrounded by barely gleaming ghosts of marble faces and torsos. She walks to the side of the room and runs her fingers across the panels to find a curtain cord and then pulls down with all her weight. A box of daylight appears above her head, brightening the walls and revealing a large table of topographical lumps and bumps in the middle of the room. She pulls down again and winds the cord around a thick brass double hook then puts her hands on her hips and breathes in deeply. Seven more blinds to go. Must be as good as an exercise machine.
The museum is awake. Aristotle, Plato, a Venus or two stare from the tops of their wooden pillars. Spreading along the walls, each one a good three or four yards long, oil panoramas of cactus-strewn deserts, bubbling swamps and mountain ranges, are all waking up. Tiny figures of men bent double with pickaxes, or over ladders of iron being laid on to the ground, wriggling into life just in time. For in every case an engine, steam puffing, is somewhat improbably tearing in from the edge of the frame.
Above the fireplace is a portrait of a bushy-eyed man towards the end of his life, a half-smile on his lips. He’s a listener who never frowns or butts in but sits there patiently until Bea has talked herself to conclusion. On the table in the centre sits a map of his world, covering Australia to the Arctic Circle, but the mountains have always been Bea’s favourites. It’s a close call as to which she likes the most. Really it should be the Rockies or the Andes, for those are the ones she can at least reach to run her fingers over, but Bea likes the Carpathians. Not just because they’re out of reach, but because people so often forget them.
Might she have gone there with John? John and his dreaming porcelain face had offered Bea a life beyond the drawing-room limits. No prison of a rural manor – that was his elder brother’s – no ties to anywhere at all. She and John had talked of life among artists and writers, and of travel. Not just of Paris and Venice, Vienna and Prague, but the vast open spaces of North America, Africa, Siberia even. They would climb mountains and camp. He would draw animals rarely seen, she would write accounts of their travels and become a new Isabella Bird. However, they had not gone. Or rather, Bea hadn’t gone.
She wonders for a minute whether it is these thoughts that are giving her a headache, rather than the lateness of last night. She turns back to the map, and runs her fingers over the lines that cross it, the lines that make it different to any other map. Thick, black, they are so out of scale that the width of each single one swallows whole cities in its path. They cross swamp and desert, tunnel through mountains and cross vast countries. Australia, America, India and even China, there is not a continent left across which her great-grandfather, the man looking down from the fireplace, did not build a railway. And then he, William Masters, came to London, and built this mansion in which his dynasty would live according to the social rules of the wealthy – whom he had joined. It is curious, Bea often thinks, that he founded an empire by breaking great boundaries of nature, then came here and willingly let his family be bound by a set of small-minded conventions – from which it does not appear very easy to escape.