The most contented woman I knew, my sister Victorine, gave birth to her second son in the new maternity hospital maintained by private charity and some small, none too willing, assistance from the Town Council. But which had actually come into being as a direct result of her husband’s campaign for conditions in which Bradeswick’s mothers might give birth without exposing themselves to even more disease, damp, and indifference than was to be encountered in their own homes. The struggle had been bitter and prolonged, Bradeswick’s middle-classes, on the whole, preferring to contribute to some charity such as war-widows or lifeboats which could be discussed openly in their drawing rooms, rather than Dr Rexford’s constant and somewhat delicate harping on about how many women were likely to die in childbirth in the mean streets behind Bradeswick’s tramsheds where registered midwives at twenty-one shillings a delivery simply did not practise, and the old woman who did was losing her eyesight. But finally, at a whisper from Miss Frances Grey, a committee had been formed, money made available, two tall old houses knocked into one and given the title St Winefrede’s Hospital for Women. The opening ceremony had been performed by a local countess and all had gone well until Victorine on her admittance had decided to take off her wedding ring and give her maiden name in protest at the policy, firmly insisted upon by the founders, that St Winefrede’s pristine facilities must be used only to deliver the babies of women of good character.
‘Are you a married woman?’ had enquired the matron, an astringent spinster whose main qualification for the position seemed to be that she was a second cousin to Bradeswick’s Lord Mayor.
‘I am a pregnant woman,’ Victorine had replied. ‘That should be quite enough for you.’ And it had taken the timely arrival of Andrew – bluff, proud, highly emotional – to smooth the ruffled feathers and get Victorine into bed.
‘This woman is my wife, matron.’
‘Then why did she not say so?’ And as Andrew began an impassioned explanation of the rights of man and the wrongs of women, the nature of the ideal brotherhood – and sisterhood – of humanity, the quality of the responsibility one human being should feel for another, Victorine had been left to get on with her labour alone.
But her point had been made and she had returned borne with her healthy new son in her arms in a state of mind that was decidedly triumphant and just a little smug.
‘How very unwise,’ said my mother. ‘Supposing they had turned you away?’
‘That is exactly the point I was making, mother,’ insisted Victorine, safely installed now inner own bed, a bouquet of red roses from her husband – a romantic in spite of all his good intentions – arranged beside her. ‘They did turn a girl away only a week ago who ended up having her baby in a toolshed in Commercial Street. It is girls like that who need St Winfrede’s. Girls who are neither paupers nor vagrants nor promiscuous either – just young and perhaps not too clever and who have been seduced by somebody old enough to know better. By some frock-coated, silk-hatted gentleman, often enough, like the ones who sit on the hospital committee.’
‘Well, at least he is a very pretty baby,’ said my mother who had given him no more than the briefest glance, exhibiting not the least desire to touch.
‘Very sweet,’ said Alys automatically, not looking at him either.
‘Very noisy,’ said Victorine proudly, ‘and much bigger than Matthew. Well – they say they get bigger every time but I shall only do it once again. In about two years I think I shall try for a girl and then no more.’
‘Your confidence,’ my mother murmured just a little wistfully, ‘amazes me. In my day, in such matters, a woman was simply in the lap of the gods. One learned to take what came.’
‘Nonsense, mother,’ Victorine declared robustly. ‘You had the choice between abstinence and abortion which are still the most widely used contraceptives – in many cases the only ones – available today.’
‘Victorine, dear – must you?’
‘Yes, mother for one must learn to call things by their proper names. Abortion is the only remedy most women – certainly most working women – know of, or are allowed to know of. And when they are desperate enough, when they simply cannot feed or clothe or house any more children without taking bread from the mouths of the children they already have, then they will use it. They will go to that old woman down St Saviour’s Passage who makes a tidy living out of infanticide. Or to the druggist in Bradeswick Place who sells lotions and potions at his back door that will poison the foetus and quite often the mother as well. But I have a few remedies of my own, of a much more scientific nature, and I am about to declare a war to the knife against those two charlatans when I am up and about again.’
‘My daughter – the witch of Corporation Square,’ murmured my mother faintly, her nostrils wrinkling with distaste.
‘How absolutely splendid, Victorine,’ said Alys, meaning it most sincerely, but not quite able to cover her embarrassment.
I looked down at the child curled in his wicker basket, their voices receding, just a shower of words washing against my ears, not touching my mind. His brother, Matthew, born so soon after Robin’s death, had barely moved me but my arms and my breasts were aching already for this one, my nostrils full of the warm powdery odours of the newborn, my ears delighted by the stirring and the snuffling of his apparently impenetrable slumber. Timothy Rexford, my nephew, a tiny marvel made up of secrets and surprises and potential, perfect in every detail except that his mother would have preferred him to be a girl.
I had never thought about daughters. I had regarded children as sons, miniature copies of Robin, little boys with his face, his whimsical, diffident humour, his wholesome, honest sweetness. Robin all over again, three, four, half a dozen times. Robin, not Max. But what of daughters? A copy of myself; or a little girl as appealing, as adorable, as Madelon had been? Could this miracle happen now? Why not? Oh heavens – please – why not? And the desire which I had believed to be dormant or burned out, like so much else, flooded over me without warning, overwhelmed me so that to my own surprise and alarm and considerable chagrin I burst into tears.
‘Pay no attention to me,’ I snapped.
‘I won’t,’ said Victorine with her accustomed bluntness. ‘If your sterility still bothers you then you should have a word with Andrew. It can sometimes be remedied.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that dear,’ my mother said lightly, archly, her tone and her quick glance at Victorine’s bountiful breasts and ample shoulders seeking to remind me of the unfortunate manner in which maternity affected the figure.
‘Oh, I see,’ said Alys, still looking slightly puzzled, ‘you want to have a baby.’ And although she was full of sympathy once the cause of my distress had been pointed out to her, I understood she would never have thought of it herself.
‘I should like to have a dozen,’ said Madelon, waking momentarily from the trance into which anything even remotely concerning love and marriage always threw her.
‘Would you really?’ said Alys.
‘Alys,’ said Victorine, remembering how bravely her cousin had attempted and failed to help with those lousy heads and runny noses behind the tramlines, ‘does not have maternity on her mind.’
‘Clever girl,’ said my mother.
But Alys’s mind was fully occupied in other directions for, a few days later, opening her cage door its first and vital fraction, she drew a certain sum of money from her bank and, without her mother’s chaperonage and most assuredly without her blessing, went first to Manchester to pay to Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst her shilling membership of the Women’s Social and Political Union and then to London where the movement had established its headquarters at Clement’s Inn.
Christabel Pankhurst, the young and undeniably beautiful young barrister, who had gone to prison for spitting in a policeman’s eye, was the principal organizer, the orator, the evangelist. Her sisters, Sylvia and Adela, played their subordinate and sometimes arduous roles to Christabel’s star performance. But the warrior queen, the Boadicea, the Joan of Arc of the Movement, rushing first into every battle with a flaming torch in her correctly kid-gloved hand, remained their mother, Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst herself.
‘Her tactics are perfectly, simple,’ Alys told me when I met her on one of my frequent shopping trips to London. ‘And what alarms everyone is her absolute singleness of mind. To Mrs Pankhurst the issue is Votes for Women and she sees nothing else. Perhaps that is what constitutes a great leader. The elected government of the day, which happens to be Liberal, has refused to help us and so she intends to bring the government down – just that – and the next one, and the one after until our demands are granted. And what is so extraordinary is that she is so very elegant and refined in her appearance, extremely concerned with matters of propriety and of dress. A lady, I suppose one calls it.’
‘I hear she does not always behave like a lady.’
‘Why, Olivia?’ Alys looked at me blandly, calmly. ‘Because she stands up in public, at political meetings and rallies, and in a perfectly proper manner asks whatever cabinet minister happens to be speaking if his government will grant votes for women? That is all she does, Olivia. That is all her supporters do. They ask one, polite question.
‘It is hardly Mrs Pankhurst’s fault that none of these eminent gentlemen – neither Mr Asquith nor Mr Lloyd George, nor Mr Winston Churchill – can bring themselves to answer. It is always the same. The ministers take their places on the platform and make their speeches. Some man jumps to his feet in the audience and puts a question about tariff reform or non-secular education or National Insurance Acts and the minister is graciously pleased to answer. Another man gets to his feet and contradicts the opinion of the first, and the minister just smiles and acts as a kind of avuncular referee.
‘The audience listens intently and no one so much as suggests that either of these men is causing a disturbance or attempting to obstruct the proceedings. But then a woman stands up and makes her enquiry about votes for women. Suddenly Mr Asquith or Mr Churchill has gone deaf. She asks again. No reply. The stewards appear, take hold of her by the elbows and start to drag her off. She resists. And you would be amazed, Olivia, how eagerly those respectable bank clerks and shopkeepers in the crowd set about her, how they pull her hair and pinch her and hurl abuse at her. When she lands on the pavement the police are usually waiting. Naturally they are accustomed to removing prostitutes or drunkards, women of low character who are accustomed to foul language and rough handling. When the Suffragette objects to it she is arrested for causing a breach of the peace.’
‘Alys,’ I said considerably shocked. ‘Surely you have not …?’
‘Not yet,’ she said, her face suddenly turning white at the thought of it. ‘So far I have been a spectator. But eventually one supposes … An acquaintance of mine was arrested last Tuesday and charged with assaulting a policeman.’
‘Heavens, Alys, I remember reading something about it in the press.’
She gave a pale, tight little smile.
‘Quite so. The truth is that the man, in the course of a scuffle, had deliberately ripped open her blouse and fondled her breasts. She was – well – considerably outraged and said so. His reply indicated his belief that this was the kind of thing she had been looking for and that her present behaviour was caused by the lack of it. She protested and went to prison for seven days.’
‘Alys!’ The cool tone of her voice, her prim, little phrases amused me, their content caused me a great deal of indignation and alarm.
‘Indeed. And, of course, at the Opening of Parliament this year, when it was learned that the issue of the women’s vote was not to be included in the King’s Speech, a positive army of mounted police were turned loose on the women who went, in a perfectly peaceful procession, to the House of Commons to protest. A great many were ridden down by the horses. A great many were punched and kicked and molested in a manner which – well, which could only be employed against a woman. And fifty-seven of us were arrested.’
Why so much violence?
Max, who had joined us by then, raised his elegant shoulders.
‘One could possibly put it down to weakness.’
‘Weakness?’ I would have called it brutality! But he smiled and shook his head, inviting us to observe that there was no sign of weaknes in him.
‘No – no. Weakness. For I have a notion that men who are really strong feel no need to be brutal with women. And as for these others, well perhaps they are just paying off old scores.
‘Because women can seem very powerful, you know, in childhood. Perhaps these poor chaps had a wicked nanny once, or a sarcastic mother, or a sister who was brighter and quicker and had no mercy when it came to making a fellow feel small. Perhaps, when they aim a blow at a Suffragette, they are remembering the girls they couldn’t get, or the girls who teased them and cost them money. Or the wives who have those convenient little headaches at bedtime. Or perhaps they are just afraid of the competition. Strong men, of course – clever men – have nothing to be afraid of.’
But, whatever the causes, a goodly proportion of the male population continued to react to Suffragism with violence, while there seemed no doubt that our senior statesmen, however charming they might be with ‘woman’in the singular and in private, had not the faintest notion how to cope with ‘women’enraged and en masse.
‘Woman’s place is in the home,’ declared the British Government, the Church, the Metropolitan Police, my Aunt Sibylla.
‘Rise up Women,’ invited Mrs Pankhurst, to which a rapidly increasing army of female voices flung back the ritual answer ‘Now.’
‘What stirring times are these,’ murmured Miss Frances Grey, who had not yet moved from her own elegant drawing room and perhaps would not do so until, the battle won, a cooler head and a more calculating mind than Mrs Pankhurst’s should be needed to dictate the peace.
‘My daughter is in London visiting friends,’ said Aunt Sibylla, very pinched about the mouth.
And when would she return, one wondered?
‘Shortly,’ declared my aunt, her faint air of surprise implying how could anyone doubt it.
She came, looking pale and strained and resolute, but was soon off again, returning throughout the spring and summer every three or four weeks for a day or so, just long enough for Aunt Sibylla to maintain the fiction that her daughter was still ‘marriageable’, still ‘a young lady at home’.
‘My daughter is becoming such a gadabout,’ said Aunt Sibylla superbly. ‘Quite the social butterfly, flitting here and there from one invitation to another. One must hope she will not wear herself out with her enjoyment …’
‘Are you all right, Alys?’ I asked her, speaking the words for Robin.
‘Oh – I don’t know about that. I’m doing what I should be doing, that’s quite certain.’
‘Good.’ Robin, I knew, would have been glad of that.
‘Intriguing,’ said Max. ‘One wonders just where and just how she will fly. One might even make a little excursion into suffrage circles every now and again to see.’
‘If she intends to bring down the Liberal Government,’ said Andrew Rexford, with his gruff humour, ‘I would be obliged if she would wait until they have introduced their Old Age Pensions Bill.’
‘I daresay we might all be over seventy by then and able to apply,’ said Victorine, up and about again, one sturdy child at her skirts, another strapped to her side, red-cheeked and sharp-tongued as she stirred her barley broth and her camomile tea.
‘Over seventy!’ said her mother, her expression as pained as Aunt Sibylla’s at the mention of sex or filial disobedience. ‘My dear – one would simply never admit it.’
The repairs to the Manor were gradually completed, a chauffeur-mechanic and his apprentice installed in the rooms above the garage, new grooms appointed – presumably to the delight and peril of our laundry-maids – to school and exercise the tall, nervous thoroughbreds with which Max soon populated the stables. Clarrow woods were re-stocked with pheasant, young birds to be hand-reared by a gamekeeper all spring and summer so that they might be driven in flocks before a walking line of guns every autumn, and shot down. Clarrow Moor was burned, much to the disgust of Lord Potterton who could not be convinced that old heather was an inadequate food for grouse, our new crop soon nourishing a multitude of birds, likewise destined to be slaughtered by that walking line of guns. We acquired dogs, retrievers, spaniels, terriers, a pair of fragile, fastidious greyhounds; and kennels in which to keep them, Max having no conception of animals as pets although I did allow the greyhounds inside from time to time when no one was looking, to lie on the fur rug before the fire in the hall.
At the same time we acquired a butler, as suave and disdainful as the head waiter of a grand hotel, a tiny haughty chef who was not quite so Parisian as he appeared, smart new parlour-maids, a lady’s maid who believed she knew far more about fashion and fabrics and the value of my jewellery than I knew myself. And when Mrs Long indicated to me her intention of ‘taking service with Mr Hird’ at Clarrow Bottom, I wished her well without expressing the slightest curiosity, disclaiming all knowledge of her true relationship as Amyas had asked me to do, and engaged a Mrs Charles, an efficient, anonymous woman who kept the maids in order and did not trouble me.
‘What did I tell you,’ chortled the ever malicious Mrs Timmins, when I called at the cottage I had found for her in Pasture Row. ‘Not that I ever thought to see even Maria Long run after a man so fast. Brazen, I call it. And he won’t marry her, you know.’
‘I know.’
‘Good heavens,’ murmured my mother across her whist table, ‘Amyas and Mrs Long! Should one be charitable do you think and assume that she is just his housekeeper?’
‘I fear one must assume the worst,’ declared my aunt, hoping – one supposed – that a scandal so close to home would obscure the London scandal of Alys.
And when Victorine called at the farm, not socially, of course, but to interest Amyas in her scheme to supply milk to the infants of St Saviour’s Passage – since he had a dairy herd after all and she believed he could always get a motor van from somewhere or other – Mrs Long’s possessive attitude towards Amyas appeared ample confirmation of everyone’s suspicions.
‘Amyas,’ I carefully enquired, ‘would it not be better to let people know the truth?’
‘But he shook his head and smiled.
‘How – without revealing that Maria’s mother bore an illegitimate child or that Max is my brother which could be awkward for us both? I see no gain and the possibility of harm in stirring up such an old scandal. Maria and I learned long ago bow to live with it. Please do the same Olivia.’
‘But you might want to be married one day – surely …?’, I blurted out, wishing desperately before the words were off my tongue that I had not said them.
‘I don’t suppose so.’
‘Don’t you? Then she, perhaps …?’
‘No. She was married once very briefly. Never again, she says. Olivia – what happened to our mother affected Maria very keenly. She is older than I. She remembers – not only the tragedy but the disgrace. And the fear, I suppose. One should not forget that for the first ten years of her life she must often have been afraid – of the workhouse for instance and the absolute insecurity of people who are not respectable. It has made her tense, and rigid of outlook, unbending, perhaps, and such people are far more likely to break than those of us who sway with the wind or keep out of it altogether. She prefers that the secret should be kept – as the Squire did – and I think you and I must abide by that.’
‘Yes, of course, Amyas.’
I had sold him Clarrow Bottom at the figure he had suggested, his life savings, I supposed, and my dairy herd at its exact market value. But I had also refused a very reasonable offer for the small farm at Tarn Brow whose fields bordered Amyas’s fields, knowing that in time and with good fortune he would want to purchase it.
‘Just a ramshackle old barn and a few scrubby acres,’ I told Max, ‘Who could possibly want it?’
‘Certainly not I, my pet.’ But he said nothing more and Tarn Brow was soon added to the list of my secret treasures, as neglected and outwardly unproductive as the grimy packing-cases stacked three and four high in the Gatehouse kitchen, yet capable – like them – of yielding me a ripe harvest of independence and security. And an opportunity to be generous.
Did Max know about my squirrel hoard? Very likely. Did he know that I had enquired the authenticity and the value of every piece of jewellery he had given me? I thought he very probably did, although it in no way discouraged him from buying me more: nor did it incline him to curb my own very favourite pastime of lavishing gifts on my nephews, my mother, and Madelon.
I paid my first visit to Esmeralda Naseby the week after my return from Madeira, arriving in the chauffeur-driven Mercedes, wearing a blue velvet hat adorned with ostrich feathers, a blue velvet coat-and-skirt with a pearl grey chinchilla collar, a high-necked blouse of fine Venetian lace, my diamond on one hand, a cluster of sapphires on the other, a smile of notable brilliance on my discreetly rouged lips.
‘Mrs Naseby – how very nice to see you again.’
‘Yes,’ she said nervously. ‘Quite so – Mrs de Haan, I suppose I must call you now.’
‘Perhaps you should call me Olivia.’
And giving her no time to drop some stinging little hint about the speed with which I appeared to change my name, I settled myself down in her slightly darkened drawing room – an indication that her nerves or her head were troubling her or that she expected them to do so – and took the reins of conversation in my own firm hands. For an hour I talked exclusively and deliberately of prestige and wealth, of the alterations we were making to the Manor, of Max’s property in Funchal and Lanzarote, the hats I had ordered for the Races at Ascot and Longchamps, the notion my husband had taken to play polo at Hurlingham, the decline of the Pottertons who were hard-pressed, one heard, to replace their ageing carriage-horses these days much less invest in polo ponies and those terrible long-legged thoroughbreds they had been so glad to sell to Max. Why yes. Had Mrs Naseby not heard? The Pottertons’ prize bays, their black mare and that spectacular chestnut stallion they had made so much fuss about were all in our stables now. And if Dottie hoped to hunt next season she would either have to borrow a decent mount from us or make do with whatever old Dobbin she had left. Sad, of course, and one could only presume the pack of foxhounds would go next since, the way things were, they could hardly support twenty couple hounds eating their heads off or pay the wages of a kennel man and huntsman for that matter. Yes, no doubt, Max would buy them and in that case, no doubt he would be invited to take over the mastership of the hunt in Georgie Potterton’s place. Such an appointment was of small interest to me, but Mrs Naseby, with her greater knowledge of country life, would understand – I felt certain – the nature of the prestige involved, the hunt balls at which I, not Dottie Potterton, would be forced – such a bore! – to preside; the position of first lady of local society which would be positively thrust – oh dear, how tedious! – upon me.
Good heavens! Dinners and dances and houseparties with people up from London and abroad, titled people some of them and all of them interesting and wealthy since Max only seemed to know that kind. No doubt I would rise to the occasion, and must certainly engage a secretary to write out those hundreds and hundreds of invitation cards. For what a social catastrophe it would be to anyone whose name should inadvertently be missed. And I reserved for the moment of my departure my single reference to her son.
‘Is Ivor keeping well?’
‘Oh no,’ she said sounding very much out of breath although she had barely spoken a word. ‘Not well at all. That boy grows more and more delicate. The lungs you see – the chest … Never strong. I believe I must send him off to Italy again.’
But he was no longer of an age to be sent anywhere and when she returned my call – curiosity and the safeguarding of her own social position proving stronger than maternal solicitude – he accompanied her, his presence causing her less anxiety than it might have done since I had let her know, through my maid who could be relied on to gossip to her maid, that Madelon would not be there. But, in my beloved attic, I had discovered a portrait of my mother, painted I supposed in the early days of her marriage to my father, when her beauty had possessed the same fragile, spun-glass quality as Madelon’s, her slender body the same air of untouched purity, false no doubt in her case but making her look in her freshly dusted frame on my drawing-room wall so like my sister that Ivor Naseby most gratifyingly lost all appetite for his tea.
‘Ivor dear you are unwell,’ his mother told him, visibly triumphant.
‘How are things in Bradeswick, Mrs de Haan?’ he said, not even looking at her. ‘Does that rum old girl still give her lectures about women’s rights and wrongs in Aireville Terrace? Strikes me I might look in on her this evening.’
He went, spent an hour whispering and giggling with Madelon in a corner – to the considerable annoyance of Miss Frances Grey – and thereafter, throughout the summer and the hazy approaches of autumn, they met regularly both in Bradeswick and at the Manor, Madelon never more enchanting in the tea gowns of white organdy and spotted Swiss muslin lace we had chosen together in London, or the evening gowns of floating, pastel chiffon which had sent her into a trance of delight.
‘Olivia – how beautiful. Can you really afford it?’
‘Yes. Take the blue as well. And then we will look at hats and a feather boa, I think, and something to put in your ears. Pearl drops? Or coral? Or both.’
‘Olivia. Do you know, I feel so spoiled and special and – well – I think I can put up with it very well.’
‘You are making her very vain,’ declared Victorine, having spent a day with Madelon during which she had talked exclusively of perfumes, silk stockings and romance; topics which, in Victorine’s opinion, might be pleasant enough but had few real practical purposes and were unlikely to endure.
‘I am giving her what she wants, Victorine.’
‘How do you know? You would have married me to Rodney Clough if I’d been so obliging as Madelon. And there’s no need to glare at me and set your jaw because I know quite well you mean everything for the best. But you should be careful with Madelon because – well, Olivia, you ought to know it – she hasn’t much character of her own. She reflects.’
‘Victorine – what are you saying?’
‘Just this – she is very sweet, our Madelon, very eager to please and very worried that she won’t please and so she reflects the person she happens to be with. She takes on other people’s characteristics, adapts to their values and requirements because she’s been too confused all her life – by mother’s flights of fancy mostly, I suppose – to work out any values of her own. And she’s far too timid to have requirements. So she’ll become exactly what her husband wants her to become – or what she thinks he wants. So – how well do you know Ivor Naseby?’
Well enough, I thought. And if I had a reservation at all it was that there seemed little enough to know. He was handsome, rich, spoiled, could be aroused to peevishness by his mother’s increasingly desperate cosseting. But I had seen him touch my sister’s hand as if it were made of a substance fine enough to shatter beneath his finger tips. I had sensed the private communication between them, the words silently conveyed from his mind to hers across a dinner table, penetrating noise and distance and the blundering insensitivity of their fellow guests. I had seen them stand inches apart and had realized that, even with his mother’s venom and everybody else’s eager curiosity between them, an almost physical contact had been made. I saw my sister give herself wholly to love and I believed myself privileged to watch it. I had myself once experienced a similar emotion, not with this entirety, not with so pure a heart and such total surrender of the mind, but I had come close enough to it, had held it just long enough to recognize the miracle I had missed. I wanted Madelon to have that miracle, to spend her life on the precious height from which I had so quickly descended. For what else could compare with it?
‘Nothing,’ sighed my mother mistily. ‘I have been in love like that so often.’
I very much doubted it.
‘What do you think of Ivor Naseby?’ I asked Max, knowing his judgment would not be charitable.
‘Ah yes – Esmeralda’s little angel. I imagine he must be every matchmaking mamma’s dream come true.’
Very well. I was no one’s mamma. But I had Madelon and if she wanted Ivor Naseby then his cloying, clinging mother must not be allowed to stand in their way. There must be an end to the sick headaches which prostrated her, the allegedly near fatal flutterings of the heart which occurred every time he slipped his lead and went to Bradeswick. The emotional blackmail, the deliberate arousal of his guilt and with it his temper, must cease.
I drove over to her house and told her so, finding – as I had rather expected – that, when faced with an adversary who cared not a fig for the state of her health, she became very healthy indeed.
‘You are an interfering woman,’ she hissed at me when I had made my requirements perfectly clear.
‘And you are a selfish woman.’
‘I do not want your son to marry the daughter of a woman who is little better than a whore.’
‘You do not want your son to marry anybody. And my mother is a better woman than you are, Mrs Naseby. Whatever else she may be she is not a cannibal. She does not try to eat her children alive, like you.’
More venom followed – a great deal of it in fact – as was only to be expected; but in the end I was able to convince her that if she persisted in her opposition – which apart from everything else was making my sister cough – she would lose two things, her social position which I personally and very effectively would destroy, and eventually her son.
‘I will never forgive you for this, Olivia Heron – or whatever your name is.’
‘Then don’t forgive me, Esmeralda Naseby. Just come to dinner tomorrow evening at eight o’clock and smile.’
She came, looking brave, an invalid sinking beneath the shadow of death and attempting to conceal it for good manners’sake, her smile very wan but at least a smile as she greeted my other guests, Victorine, my mother, my brother Luc on his winter holiday from Hexingham, her eyes sharp enough to notice that neither Aunt Sibylla nor Alys who had been expected home the day before, were present.
‘Dear Alys,’ she sighed, ‘I do so adore her. I had hoped at one time … Ah well!’
She had hoped no such thing.
‘Dear Alys – if I had had a daughter, I have often thought she may have looked like Alys.’
But no one was listening to her, our attention totally held by Madelon, a fairy princess in pearl-trimmed white tulle, an enraptured bride already in spirit so that when she disappeared for a while with Ivor and they came back hand in hand, two blissful, birthday party children coming to tell us, as if it were the greatest secret in the world, that they were in love, their engagement and marriage and ecstatic future were so firmly in our minds that the announcement might well have been made a year ago.
‘Well done,’ Max told me later, highly amused. ‘It strikes me that you might care to take a little holiday, to recover from your exertions? Monte Carlo, I always think, is pleasant at this season. And by the way – where was Alys? It is not like your aunt to cancel without explanation. But I expect you will be going down to the vicarage in the morning – won’t you? – to break the news about Madelon.’
I went, with no real news to break since Aunt Sibylla could have had no serious hopes of Ivor for Alys. But anxious nevertheless. She had certainly been expected last night at dinner. Something of a fairly grave nature must have occurred. But whatever it was, it did not appear to have affected the vicar who, walking up the garden path with his field-glasses around his neck and his picnic hamper in his hand, greeted me as always with an air of not quite remembering my name; clearly on his way out to enjoy a day of birdwatching and solitude.
Aunt Sibylla was in her kitchen giving instructions for the mammoth house-cleaning operations, the washing of walls and ceilings, the emptying, dusting and re-filling of cupboards, the re-lining of pantry shelves with which she always approached the Christmas season.
‘Oh Olivia – yes dear. I will be with you in a moment. I must just get them started on the linen. And the mending. And I believe I have a notion to whitewash the cellar.’
‘Aunt – I wanted to tell you that Madelon and Ivor …’
‘Oh good. A spring wedding then? Quite delightful. I suppose I need not remind you to be very specific in the marriage contract about the amount of pin-money she is to have? And a proper dress allowance, of course, and exactly what she would receive as a widow’s portion. But you know all that. Of course you do.’
‘Yes, Aunt.’
‘Well, then – since I have a loft full of apples to be made into pies … You will be busy too, I daresay – with all your great undertakings …?’
‘Yes Aunt.’
‘So – I will see you presently. And by the way dear, whatever plans you are making for an engagement party – a ball perhaps? – it might not be possible to include Alys.’
‘Oh – really?’
‘Indeed. For we had news yesterday that my daughter has been arrested and sentenced to three weeks in Holloway.’