CHAPTER FIVE
She took the job with the Leveson-Gowers. It was a beautiful daily walk along the lochside to Rosyth, with the Forth flashing silver through the trees. The path through the woods was fringed with wildflowers: blue cranesbill, pink campion, white stitchwort, herb Robert. Marion loved the expectant way they turned their faces up as she passed. She liked to pick them and put them in her hat.
“You’re working for the oppressors of the poor,” Valentine had sneered, predictably. “The aristocratic overlords. The capitalist running dogs.”
Marion rolled her eyes. “They’re not like that at all,” she insisted. The Leveson-Gowers, in fact, seemed to lead a simple life. Good manners were high on the agenda and she had never heard a haughty remark from any of them. Nor had she heard anyone swear. None of which could be said of Valentine.
“They’ve got no idea how most people live,” he blustered. Marion looked him sternly in the eye.
“Yes, they have.” In line with Miss Golspie’s exhortations, she took her new responsibilities seriously. Her new pupil, Lady Mary Leveson-Gower, was as a consequence fully appraised of recent scientific, political and social developments.
“Don’t you feel like a servant?” he taunted next.
She laughed. “Actually, the servants at Admiralty House don’t feel like servants.”
He stared. “What do you mean?”
“They’re far grander than the family.”
It was strange but true that those working for the Leveson-Gowers seemed to appropriate their employers’ status to themselves. The cook especially never missed an opportunity to trumpet the family’s grand connections. As Marion passed through the kitchen on her way in and out of the house, Cook regaled her with gossipy snippets. Did Marion know that Lady Rose Leveson-Gower’s sister was the Duchess of York? She did not. Did Marion know that Lady Rose called her sister “Buffy”? She did not care. Did Marion know that Lady Rose’s husband, the Hon. William Spencer Leveson-Gower, was “Wisp” to his friends? Actually, this was quite funny. “Wisp” suggested insubstantial, and the admiral was easily seventeen stone.
According to Cook, Lady Rose could have done even better than the Commanding Admiral at Rosyth. This was not hard to believe. Lady Rose was a lush, romantic beauty with a full, oval face and skin like thick cream. She had elegant dark brows, a slim, straight nose and shining blonde hair. Her eyes were especially extraordinary—a dewy violet.
“Oh yes!” Cook’s round eyes bulged with excitement. “They say Her Ladyship was proposed to more than twenty times! They say that she used to be admired by the Prince of Wales himself!”
“Gosh,” said Marion, knowing Cook would completely miss the irony.
Her mother, agog for details about aristocratic goings-on, loved all this, however. And so Marion told her as much as she could remember. After Mrs. Crawford’s despair at Peter’s departure—she had never known about the proposal, fortunately—it was a relief to see her basking in the warm sun of near-royal association. No friend, neighbor or butcher’s queue was ignorant of her daughter’s new proximity to the great and the good.
Her daughter’s new proximity to Valentine was rather less cause for celebration. Mrs. Crawford was not only impervious to his charm but resented his familiar manner. Peter would never have dreamed of breezing in without warning, addressing her as “Mrs. C” and helping himself to whatever was in the larder. Marion would listen to her complaints while thinking that there were many other things Valentine did that Peter would never have dreamed of, all of them entirely delightful.
She had still not given in to him, although by now it was virtually a technicality. As they kissed, his hand would find its way beneath her blouse or up her skirt almost without her realizing. She had never really believed in love before, not in the head-spinning, lightning-bolt sense of romantic novels. But now she wondered whether heart-thumping passion was real, after all. She would drift dreamily about the house, her mother’s grumbles having as little impact as water on the back of the proverbial duck.
“He talks all the time about the working classes but he’s never done a day’s work in his life.”
While Marion thought this exact same thing, she felt compelled to defend him. “He’s a student, Mother.”
“But what are his intentions?” demanded Mrs. Crawford.
The defeat of capitalism would obviously not be an acceptable answer. Marion turned to bluster instead. “Mother! This is 1932. Girls don’t need men with intentions. They have intentions of their own.”
But Valentine’s intentions were not of the sort Mrs. Crawford would approve of. The fact that she did not approve of him either drove the two of them for walks in the hills in all weathers. Here the intentions revealed themselves on sunny beds of heather, or in caves during sudden bursts of rain. Marion fended them off—with increasing reluctance, it had to be said.
One afternoon they had taken a picnic and were following a sandy path through scented heather and sun-warmed boulders. Their way wound up past silver birch trees and flaming yellow gorse. They stopped for lunch under cerulean skies, in which birds wheeled and a warm sun shone. Below them stretched the Firth of Forth, its surface wrinkled like blue silk and shuddering at the touch of the wind.
“I’ve got a present for you,” Valentine announced. She was surprised. She was the gift-giver, normally. Fresh shirts, a new pair of trousers, two secondhand chairs for his room.
He rummaged in his jacket pocket and produced a brown paper bag containing something hard and rectangular. “I hope you’ll find it useful.” His face was serious but he was obviously suppressing laughter.
Marion slid out a small book with a pale gray cover. The Complete Book of Etiquette.
“Now that you’re moving in such elevated circles, you need to know which class of butter knife to use with which class of bishop.”
She knew it was victory of a sort that he had lowered his attacks to jokes. And this was a good one. She turned a couple of pages and laughed. “A gentleman should never wear a lounge suit on the beach.”
“Only black tie.” Valentine snorted. “Complete with spats and a top hat.”
“And absolutely no jewelry on the dunes.”
“Perish the thought. Ever seen a tiara at Blackpool?”
“Ha ha!”
“Hee hee!”
“No one, unless they be a complete snob, will think the worse of you for inadvertently using the wrong fork at table.”
“That’s a relief. Give it here, my turn. Oh, here we go. To refer to someone as a gent or a bloke is very bad form. One should always strive to avoid the repetitive use of slang and meaningless ejaculations.” Valentine hooted. “Meaningless ejaculations!”
Marion had the book now. “Nearly everyone knows the story of the two men who spent twenty years on a desert island not speaking to each other because they had not been introduced.” She wiped her streaming eyes. “Do they?”
“Oh, absolutely.”
“Ha ha.”
Valentine was unpacking the picnic, laying it out on the rock. There were hard-boiled eggs and lemonade in the rucksack, and slices of cake swiped from the larder when her mother’s back was turned. Mrs. Crawford, who had regularly plied Peter with her baking, would never have allowed Valentine access to her Victoria sponge.
“On entering a restaurant, the senior man of the party will go in first so he can bespeak a table.”
Marion placed one of the sandwich packets on her head. “An erect carriage and dignified bearing are central to correct form.”
Valentine indicated the boulder. “Would madam like to be seated?”
“Why, thank you, kind sir!”
After lunch, they lay stretched out. The warm air was scented and heady as wine. When Valentine began to kiss her, she rolled away. She watched his face slump in disappointment then stiffen in surprise as she unbuttoned her dress and removed her underwear. She stood above him, stretching in the sunshine.
He stared up at her. “Are you sure?”
She nodded. Never had she been so sure about anything.
Afterward, they lay in the heather. Suddenly curious, she asked him about his childhood and he told her he had been to a succession of boarding schools, many of which had expelled him.
“Didn’t your mother mind?” She could hardly imagine what Mrs. Crawford would have said.
“She hardly noticed.” His tone was scornful. “Too busy running around Monte Carlo with her second husband.”
It sounded like a life from another world. She returned to the subject of most interest. “So why did the schools throw you out?”
He waved his cigarette in the air. “Let me count the ways. First we refused to join the Officers’ Training Corps. Then we painted a statue of the king with red paint.”
“We?”
“Me and Esmond,” he said, as if the name would immediately resonate with her.
“Esmond?”
“My cousin. We were at school together. One of the schools, anyway. He got me into Communism, in fact.” That he hero-worshipped this Esmond was obvious.
“On Armistice Day, we put anti-war leaflets in all the prayer books. They fluttered down during the Two Minutes’ Silence, causing a row of unimaginable proportions.”
“I can imagine. But why go to those extremes?”
“Because public schools perpetuate an evil and outdated class system” was the answer. His glib tone infuriated her. He seemed to have no awareness of his privilege.
“Slums do the same,” she snapped. “But unfortunately they’re not so easy to leave.”
Valentine propped himself up on his elbow. “Don’t be so pompous. You’re working for the Duchess of York’s sister.”
“Only for the summer. Some of us have to make money, you know. We don’t all have privilege handed to us on a plate.”
“Some of us are using our privilege to raise the consciousness of the workers. Not pretending to be egalitarian feminists whilst becoming lickspittles to the aristocracy.”
She gasped. “How dare you?”
His laughter was low, triumphant. “You’re beautiful when you’re angry.”
She glared at him, but felt herself melt. He was so absurdly handsome, and these arguments excited both of them. She rolled onto her back and only pretended to fend him off when he leaped on her.
“AND HOW ARE you getting along with Mary?” the much-admired Lady Rose inquired charmingly after a few weeks had gone by. It was the end of the day and she had called Marion into the sitting room, whose air pulsed with perfume from the vases on every shining surface. Lady Rose loved flowers, and there were roses in every size and shade of pink.
“Very well,” Marion said, and meant it. Mary was a delicate, fair-haired child who compensated for a lack of physical vigor with a powerful interest in her lessons. “She’s a clever girl,” she added.
“She tells me you’ve been teaching her about the suffragettes.” Lady Rose toyed with a long rope of huge pearls.
Marion looked at her. Was Lady Rose shocked? “Modern women need to know about the modern world,” she said firmly. “We were talking about the vote and I felt she should know that it was largely through the suffragettes that women eventually got it.”
The violet eyes twinkled. “Indeed. It appears you have quite fired her up. She has been sternly lecturing her father on the principle of equal rights.” Lady Rose gave one of her silvery laughs. “And, of course, she’s very taken with the specter stalking Europe. She’s done some simply terrifying drawings of it.”
Mary had indeed been struck by the opening of the Communist Manifesto, although her questions had been less about dialectical materialism than what the stalking specter looked like. Was it a skeleton?
“And she’s been telling me all about those clever boffins in Cambridge splitting the atom.”
“Cockroft and Walton, yes.” Mary, who had a scientific bent, had been fascinated by the sensational recent experiment’s power and speed. “Had you thought about sending Mary to school?” she asked. It seemed the obvious thing, once she herself had returned to college in the autumn.
But now it seemed she really had said something shocking. Lady Rose’s beautiful violet eyes widened in amazement. For a second, her lovely oval face went blank before it resumed its customary charming expression. “Goodness, Miss Crawford. I hardly think that is necessary, do you? When I was growing up my sisters and I only had a governess. And we all married well.” Lady Rose paused. “One of us very well,” she added, significantly.
Marion stared at Lady Rose. Had no one told her that marrying well, as she put it, was no longer the route to an interesting life? If indeed it ever had been. Women could take degrees now, have careers. Lady Rose was stuck in the Dark Ages.
A WEEK OR so later, Mary greeted her governess in the schoolroom full of excitement. “Great news, Miss Crawford! Aunt Peter is coming here tomorrow.”
This strange name suggested a mannish woman in a trouser suit and monocle. “Lovely,” she said. She picked up the slim volume on the table. “Now, are you sitting comfortably? Shall we see what Alan Breck and David Balfour do next?”
They were soon absorbed in Kidnapped. Would she have been a Jacobite? Mary asked her governess.
“Most definitely not. They were terribly misled.”
“I would have followed Bonnie Prince Charlie!” Mary said fervently.
“He let his people down,” Marion pointed out. “They gave him their hearts, but he betrayed them and went abroad. He never came back.”
Mary reflected gloomily on this poor example of royal behavior. “I’m glad princes don’t behave like that anymore.”
LATER, MARION PICKED up her hat for her walk back. The morning-gathered flowers lay limply over the brim. Lady Rose appeared, apparently about to go out. She wore a perfect pearl-gray cloche, trimmed with a matching feather. “Miss Crawford!” she exclaimed. “I’m so very glad to have caught you.”
Marion paused, cautiously. Had her uncompromising views on Charles Edward Stuart been transmitted? Some Scots, definitely, would find them controversial.
“We have visitors tomorrow,” said Lady Rose.
Marion nodded, the limp adornment on her hat brim nodding with her. “Mary mentioned Aunt Peter.”
To her surprise, Lady Rose burst out laughing. “Her real name is Elizabeth. The children couldn’t pronounce it so they called her Peter.”
Aunt Elizabeth. There was only one Aunt Elizabeth Marion could think of. The most famous Aunt Elizabeth on the planet.
Lady Rose’s blue eyes twinkled. “These days, of course, we must all call her Her Royal Highness the Duchess of York.”
Marion waited to be told that, as the family was dealing with royalty, her presence was not required. Well, good. She could use the time studying for the new term in autumn.
“I would like you to meet them,” Lady Rose concluded.