The ‘intimate’ dinner arranged by Mrs Collins in honour of her elder daughter promised to be a large one. Covers for twenty guests, at a table to hold eighteen, insured nevertheless a touch of welcome snugness. In the crepuscular double drawing-room, commanding the eternal moors,* county society, as it assembled, exchanged cheery greetings. It was indeed to all intents the Doncaster Meeting lot.
Discanting away from homely topics, Sir Harry Ortop had just seen a fox, it seemed, crossing Cockaway Common, while Miss Rosalba Roggers had passed a traction-engine in the Rectory lane. ‘Horrid thing; but the Scarboro’ road is really a disgrace,’ she pronounced, turning her attention to an angular beauty clad in sugary pink and a crown of birds’ feathers.
Holding forth in a quizzical, hoarse-sweet voice, she was arraigning her husband with indescribable archness: ‘He always gets into his carriage first, and then half shuts the door on you!’
Momentous in his butlerhood, Queen, supported by an extra footman, announced each new advent with an air of serene detachment.
Mr Napier Fairmile, Miss Nespole—
Entering on the heels of the former inamorato of the Countess sailed a mite of a woman enveloped fancifully in a fairy-hued cashmere shawl. The Cyclopean chatelaine of Cupingforth Castle, and one of the wealthiest women in the Riding, she was held, by local opinion, to be eccentric for preferring to live all alone, which may possibly have had its dangers for a person of her condition and sex; nevertheless, on occasion, to convince an intrusive stranger she had a male in the house, she would discharge a cartridge out of window, and knot her hair across her chin in front in a thick cascade to imitate a beard.
Lady Watercarriage, The Hon. Viola West-Wind, Captain Margaret-Baker—
Quite re-vitalized, performing her duties, Mrs Collins circulated smilingly here and there. Throwing a veil of glamour upon each guest, she had introduced Miss Dawkins twice as ‘The Great Traveller’.
‘I ain’t going back to Australia not yet awhile. That is so!’ Miss Dawkins declared, recognizing across the Rector’s shoulder in the damp-stained mezzotints upon the walls some views of popular thoroughfares her foot had trodden – Trafalgar Square, the Place de la Concorde, the Piazza Colonna, the Puerta del Sol. ‘If I don’t just spit at them!’ she commented, idly opening and closing her fan.
The Farquhar of Farquhar, Mrs Lampsacus of Gisborough Park—
Already a full quarter-of-an-hour late, they were yet not the last.
Masticating, chewing the air, Mr Collins appeared to have become involved against his will in the esoteric confidences of a pair of expansive matrons: ‘In York I saw some very pretty … I inquired the price … Would you believe … Need I say I bought them!’
Delivered from their effusive unbosoming by The Farquhar of Farquhar, Mr Collins turned away.
Advancing like some marvellous automaton, The Farquhar, known as ‘Lulu’ to all frequenters of the Turf, brought with him an atmosphere of one who had supplied a daughter, or at least a filly, to a Prince of the Blood. Excusing his wife Serafima (a woman for whom undergraduates had shot themselves), he inquired, with a leer, for ‘la petite Comtesse’.
She was looking summery and semi-Southern in an imaginative gown in every shade of white.
‘Precious darling! She’s only eight months; it’s a critical age,’ she was exclaiming; apropos, doubtless, of her child.
Chatting to a bottle-nosed dowager in garnets and goose-flesh, she appeared indeed even prettier than she was.
Descending on her, The Farquhar was circumvented by Miss Viola West-Wind, a young girl of the County with a little Tatlertainted face. She was supplying blocks of tickets, it seemed, for The League of Patriots ball … ‘Fancy dress! Everyone to go as animals.’
Dr Dee—
It was as much as to say dinner; but an announcement, breathed from Queen, was to fill Mrs Collins with apprehension.
‘There’s been a little catastrophe, ’m.’
‘What, not …? …! …? ?’
‘To a cinder, ’m.’
In the long low-ceiled dining-room, all in the robust mid-Victorian style, the failure of an entrée seemed a more or less trivial thing; in such an environment it is the haunch that matters, it is the loin that tells …
‘Even so,’ Mrs Collins heard herself murmuring (almost callously) as she gained a chair on The Farquhar’s arm – ‘Even so. The mornings begin to be frosty.’
A random word wafting the talk naturally to the subject of foxes.
‘Count Pastorelli is fond of hunting?’
But Mrs Collins presumed a prudent deafness.
Adorned with foreign spring flowers, smart jonquils and early tulips, the table-arrangements left nothing to be desired.
‘I could never go to Russia; I turn quite green in the snow,’ Miss Dawkins was telling Sir Harry Ortop of her Odyssey.
‘I take it you’ve tried clairvoyance?’ he asked.
‘Indeed. And palmistry, and phrenology, and cards, and sand …’
‘Well?’
‘Oh well …’ she replied, regarding a scar on his third blue chin; ‘I was warned I’d marry a septuagenarian within the forbidden degrees and never know it … Helios, Mene, Tetragrammaton!’
‘According to my experience, it’s a mistake to find people. I don’t want to find anybody …’
Miss Dawkins used her fan.
‘I’ve a presentiment they’re in India,’ she said. ‘Somehow I connect my mother’s fair hair with Bombay …’
Owing to the absence of a guest, it was agreeable to find the Countess in juxtaposition. With the Member for Bovon on her right, her tongue tripped heedlessly from Mussolini to Miss Arne: ‘Poor soul, she was interred in her lace, with a coin of Greece in her mouth, and a flask of Chalkis wine, and a tambourine.’
A version of the Salamis affair that was new to Miss Dawkins.
‘—!’ she cooed, lifting her eyes in protest to a painting of Mary Marchioness of Jamaica and Miss Elizabeth Cockduck, of the school of Sir Thomas Lawrence.
‘… just as in the Golden Age; and the moon that night was extra enormous,’ the Countess broke off her tale, arrested by a wail of distress from the direction of the nursery.
The notion that Daisy might be diverting herself at Bianca’s expense caused the Countess to rise.
‘Precious darling! C’est l’heure du berger for the child,’ she exclaimed, directing her steps towards the door.
Traversing the hall, she perceived Daisy in the morning-room examining the visitors’ wraps; lifting the fabrics to her nose (much as might a savage), she appeared to be voluptuously revelling in the human odours they exhaled.
‘Fie, girl! What are you up to?’ her sister asked.
‘The Farquhar of Farquhar’s muffler, Mabel, has such a funny smell, something between honey and flowers and new goloshes.’
‘Oh!’
‘And Lady Watercarriage’s cloak! I don’t know what it is, but it’s almost overpowering.’
‘Santo dio,’ the Countess breathed, lending an ear to the uproar above.
Daisy displayed indifference.
‘She’s overturned her little Tamara again, I suppose, that’s all! ! !’
In the shadowy nursery, bafflingly lit by the dancing stars, some romantic fancy, it seemed, had disquieted the child.
On beholding both Mother and Aunt with a radiant light, she crowed, she smiled.
‘Bianca … Mother’s heaven.’ The Countess hovered.
‘From the look in those endless eyes of hers I shouldn’t wonder if she hadn’t seen the Owl that lived in an Oak.
There was an owl lived in an oak –
Whiskey, waskey, weedle;
And every word he ever spoke
Was fiddle, faddle, feedle.’
‘Don’t, Daisy!’
‘Oh, she loves her little Buen Retiro (when it’s dry); her own private corner in Bedfordshire.’
‘Let her be,’ the Countess answered, availing herself of the opportunity to deck with fresh white and red her constantly piquant face.
‘Has anyone cast a doubt on your union, Mab, being legal?’ Daisy asked, surveying with the eyes of a retired bus-horse her sister’s comfortable back.
‘Don’t ask silly questions, Daisy, if you don’t want foolish answers,’ the Countess returned, following in the mirror her infant’s yearning glance towards a bespangled negro doll, Topolobampa, Queen of the Sunset Isles.
‘’Cos I s’pose you know that’s what Spicer’s been tellin’ George …’
‘George?’
‘The extra footman.’
‘Oh, good gracious!’
‘Naturally he’ll repeat it. It seems he goes all over Yorkshire waiting, but his home-proper is the Capital. Hull, he says, is a dreadful place. No season, and with the morals of Sodom. And, fancy, Mabsey, his brother is the boy from Willinghorse and Wheelits …’
‘He aspires to the concert hall, he says, on account of his voice. So we made him sing and I must say his rendering of “Early one morning before the sun was dawning” won all our hearts.’
The Countess shrugged.
‘She wants, I think, to take Topolobampa to bed!’ she irrelevantly exclaimed.
‘She’d rather take her old Aunt – eh, chubby?’
‘Madonna, what next!’
‘Her little body, Mab … it’s as soft as satin! Oh, it’s terrible!’
‘— …?’
‘How arch the puss looks in her little nainsook!’
‘Mind and don’t tease her, Daisy,’ the Countess enjoined as she frisked away.
An odour of meat, wine and flowers hung erotically upon the dining-room air.
‘I want my life to be purple— Never less,’ Miss Dawkins was assuring the Member for Bovon.
Curtailing their colloquy, the Countess resumed her place.
At a delicate advantage with her newly-geraniumed lips, she was in a mood to enjoy herself.
‘Look two to your right; who is she, Countess?’ Miss Dawkins asked.
‘An immense heiress! Miss Nespole of Cupingforth.’
‘My dear, she’s the most extraordinarily-looking woman that I ever set eyes on!’ Miss Dawkins serenely stated.
Taking umbrage from her stare, Miss Nespole (with the eccentricity permitted to wealth) put out her tongue at her and drew it slowly in again.
‘Oh, good gracious!’ the Countess exclaimed, shooting a glance towards her father.
Listening to a description of Gleneagles from Lady Watercarriage, he appeared almost to have grown into his chair.
‘And from there we went on to a ghastly hotel where all the bedclothes are grey,’ the peeress fluted, fingering the pearls on her forward-falling shoulders.
The Countess raised a discreet glass of Perrier to her lips.
But as course succeeded course The Farquhar was moved to beg his hostess to allow her younger daughter to join them for the sugared kickshaws at dessert.
A lover of young girls and with a cult for them, he was believed to harbour Satanesque inclinations towards the Age of Candour.
‘Just for a prune!’ he insidiously pressed, brushing a napkin to the spreading branches of his moustache.
Miss Dawkins, meanwhile, was becoming blandly Bacchic.
‘Oh, thank you, Member for Bovon, sweetest of men to me,’ she exclaimed, addressing him champagnishly across her friend.
It was towards the close of dessert, just as the ladies were about to withdraw, that Daisy, clasping Bianca, chose to present herself. ‘I brought Niece, too; I thought it would widen her little sphere,’ she chirruped, coming blithely forward into the room.
She had a coronet-brooch on a well trussed-out blouse, and a strip of deep green velvet tied sparkishly below the middle.
Cautioned by her sister’s eye, she turned towards the Rector, who was engaging to loan a stallion to a parishioner. ‘A thing I seldom do,’ he murmured, bestowing a frigid smile on the infant papist.
Refusing to wet her lips in some curaçoa, Daisy approached The Farquhar. Appreciating notice, his jolly ogle was a welcome stimulus.
A blood-orange? Grapes? … Preserve-of-ginger? She answered him whimsically by a little leap of the tongue.
‘She’s an amusette, Mrs Collins, your wee girl; a sweet piece; ah, these golden blondes! … these golden blondes!’
‘But why is that?’ Mrs Collins inattentively answered, watching her grandchild circulate, as might a fruit, from guest to guest along the table.
Flattered by The Farquhar’s interest, Daisy was demonstrating already her social acumen.
‘I’ve seen statues … often. Oh it’s terrible!’ she rapported, shooting back her hair.
‘Little deviless! Where?’ The Farquhar queried, stealing a surreptitious arm about her middle.
‘Often on lawns, and in gardens, too; oh it’s terrible!’
‘… Indeed,’ he murmured, alarmed by an ear-piercing shriek, attesting to Bianca’s aversion to the Rector.
It was a warning, it seemed, to adjourn. Laughing hectically as she rose, Miss Dawkins had lost her bearings.
‘Where ever was I last old October?’ she exclaimed, waving the long lyric feathers of her fan in Sir Harry Ortop’s face. ‘I’ll own I forget …’