Sophia wore the blue-green chiffon from Madame Lanvin for the party. She was afraid it might look out of date, or not fit: it was so long since she’d been to a party.
‘I’m going to be out this evening, with Laura,’ she told her parents. ‘She’s having a few people to dinner.’ Mamma said she hoped she wouldn’t be late back, what with the raids and those wild American soldiers.
Sophia put her hair up, twisting it round her head and pinning it with an arrow pin from her mother’s jewellery case, leaving her neck (which was long and, she’d been told, fetching ) naked. Naked, that is, except for the emerald earrings that Andrew had given her ages ago. She then thrust a mackintosh cap onto her head, and wrapped herself in a gabardine of her father’s.
It was raining hard, but she felt exhilarated. She was first going to Laura’s house, to meet Laura’s friends. She’d left home early because there were very few cabs, the Underground might not be working, the buses were always packed. But the Underground was punctual even though the platforms were crowded with people sheltering from possible air raids, and she soon reached Sloane Square. It was raining harder than ever. It struck her how private London was on a dark autumn evening, no lights anywhere except when a door opened or the lowered lamps of a hansom cab shone on the road. Slithery black pavements, water sloshing from the road, a few people scuttling by. Occasionally from a public house you heard voices, but you could hardly see individual buildings. Nothing could be more depressing than the streets leading to Chester Square: dull little house after dull little house with dark doors and black window frames.
Laura’s front door led to a different, softly inviting world. ‘Miss Laura would like you to join her upstairs, miss,’ said the parlourmaid.
Laura, fresh and delicious in a fluffy negligée, was sitting at the dressing table in her pink and white bedroom, surrounded by piles of clothes. When she saw Sophia, she looked impressed. ‘Another lovely dress, darling, divine colour, and that rose-coloured sash, where on earth did you find it? You’re so clever, you’re a nurse in those ghastly hospitals and yet you have hundreds of clothes. . . The shoes, not completely right but I can help you there, it’s so lucky we have the same size feet. . . And I’m going to do something about your hair. . .’ She’d been organising Sophia ever since they’d first met aged thirteen. ‘Perfect. But, darling, you’ve not made yourself up, even one bit.’
‘I don’t have any cosmetics, I know it’s feeble. . .’
‘Sophia, you’re entering a new world, where girls enhance their natural loveliness with the help of little jars. Not crudely of course, we don’t want to look like tarts, not too much anyway. . . Sit down, I’m going to be your instructor. We’ll see what a little powder can do for you, and the tiniest bit of lipstick. Your colouring is beautiful, you hardly need anything, but the boys do like a bit of ooh lah lah – stop wriggling about – and we want to please the dear boys before they go back, don’t we?’
Sophia looked in the mirror and was shaken to see a vamp with reddened cheeks and lips and hair primped. It was like going onstage in costume – one felt self-conscious but also self-confident.
The drawing room was lit by electric lamps and warmed by a great wood fire. On a table stood plates of sandwiches, and decanters. It was much more inviting than Evelyn Gardens.
‘It’s so warm here,’ said Sophia. ‘Delicious.’
‘Yes,’ said Laura, ‘the wood’s from our country place. What will you drink, darling? I’m sorry there’s no wine, it’s hard to get anything drinkable. But Papa doesn’t mind me drinking his whisky, he gets gallons of the stuff from Scotland. Then there’s gin – the parents think it’s awfully common, but Bevan hides the bottle for me in the piano. No one ever plays, it’s a very good place. I think gin is rather nice, will you have some?’
‘Are your parents away?’ asked Sophia.
‘They’re dining with the Churchills. I wouldn’t be able to offer you a drink if they were here, they think it’s vulgar to drink before a meal. But when they’re out, I generally have a drinkie, it keeps the devils away. Fortunately they’re always out, though Papa says these days you hardly get anything to eat at dinner parties. He’s used to six or seven courses, now it’s down to three, served by the parlourmaid, because the butler’s gone. It’s so odd. . .’ she mixed the gin with something sticky and green, ‘how some people go on living just as they did before the war. We’ll have a revolution ourselves before very long, don’t you think?’ She tasted her drink. ‘Mm, delicious. Will we be shot, or shall we become lady commissars? Would I look good in a peaked cap? Don’t look shocked, darling, I know how serious things are. Try this – gin and lime, just what a girl needs. So when Mamma says, “Darling, d’you think you should be going out so much?”, I reply, “What about you? Does the war effort really require you to stay in a house party every weekend?”’
‘What a lovely drink. Gin seems an awfully good idea to me.’
Laura peered meditatively into her glass. ‘Have fun while we can, that’s my principle. After all, after this fighting there may be no one left to marry, unless we marry a blind man, as those selfless women offer to do in the newspapers, though they always want an officer – no matter no eyes, as long as he’s a gent. How would you like to go to the altar on the arm of a hero with no legs? Harder I suppose, if he had no arms. . .’ She stared into the fire.
This depressed Sophia. Coming back to England, she’d thought she could forget the war.
‘Don’t look so miz. We’ll cheer you up. My friends and I, we have a creed. “Let’s give our brave boys a good time. They do everything they can for us – we’ll do everything we can for them.”’
‘What d’you mean?’ said Sophia. ‘D’you mean, you. . .’
‘Some of us do, some of us don’t. It may be the last chance, darling. Of course there’s the boys’ class of 1918 coming up, but we’re getting a bit long in the tooth for them. Soon I won’t stand a chance beside my little sister. She’d be coming out now, if anyone did come out any more.’ The doorbell rang and a moment later in came three girls.
For a moment Sophia felt small and nervous. They were all spiffed up, though not as their mothers might have wished. They exuded a blithe self-confidence that might well alarm anyone not from their world of high birth.
But Clarissa, Harriet and Virginia were as friendly as could be. They were enchanted to meet Sophia, bombarded her with questions, scarcely waited for the answer before hurrying on to the next question. They had to know everything, immediately, about her and her family and about nursing in France. The leader was evidently Clarissa, whose father was a peer. She was delighted that the war meant she’d not had to be a debutante but could try other things. Her father had forbidden her to be a bus conductress, so she had a job in the Admiralty. ‘I’m paid thirty shillings a week, it’s lovely earning your own money and being useful. We four, we’re a little club. . .’
‘Pathetic isn’t it really, like being back at school?’ said Virginia.
‘What can you do when there are no men around for more than five minutes? But now we’re going to be five, which is much more fun. How brilliant of you, Laura, to find such a nice new friend.’ With all this friendly attention and another gin and lime, Sophia felt much more cheerful.
When all the sandwiches had been eaten, Clarissa announced, ‘Time to go, girls. We’ve got a car. It’s Harriet’s father’s official car, with Harriet’s father’s official chauffeur. He seriously shouldn’t be doing it, but since her papa’s away, he said he would, isn’t that darling of him? And we’re using official petrol too, so naughty.’
‘I told him we’re doing our own war work, entertaining the boys back from the front,’ said Harriet, ‘and he quite saw the point. Only he won’t stay to take us home, we may have to stay till the morning, isn’t that too worrying. . .’
‘Some people think we’re bad girls,’ said Laura. ‘They talk about our Dance of Death parties, because of the poor soldier boys who go off the next day to be killed. But in my opinion they’re just jealous.’
The party was in Charles Street in Mayfair. The shutters were closed, you could hear nothing from outside. But when you went in, you realised that the house was full of people, all young, more girls perhaps than men, though the men were numerous and almost all in uniform. Sophia, who knew more than she wanted about military insignia, saw they were mostly Guards officers. They talked uproariously, they flirted, they disappeared amorously, they helped themselves to drinks from the apparently endless bottles that appeared on the sideboard under the eye of an amiable young man in a dinner jacket, who turned out to be the son of the house. It was the first time Sophia had been to a party with no servants, unless you counted Christmas gatherings at the hospital, which were hardly parties.
Above all, they danced. They tried the foxtrot, they tripped up in the tango. They laughed loudly when a group of dancers fell to the floor and stayed there in a playful heap of warm young limbs. Sophia turned away, she did not like heaps of limbs. At one point someone said, ‘Zepps, I think I hear Zepps,’ and they quietened down till another voice cried, ‘To hell with Zepps, this is a party, who cares if we’re bombed?’ and, ‘Turn up the music, they make such a bally noise.’ There was a roaring nearby, but they ignored it. Then a pause, and, very close, an explosion. ‘They’ve probably got the Ritz,’ said someone, and they cheered. The dancing never stopped.
Sophia thought, these young men, half of them will be dead in a year, and we girls, we’ll be half-dead too. But who cares? Who bloody cares? And she had another drink.
It was a well-mannered party, because these were high-bred young people who’d had good nannies. Laura and Clarissa introduced Sophia to a great many people. She had another drink, she enjoyed it less. She danced with a man with fair hair in the Coldstream Guards who said the war would be over next year, and a short man who’d been wounded but was going back quite soon and who said the Germans were exhausted, and (briefly) a man with bad breath and sticky hands who pushed himself hard against her. She bumped into Clarissa, who said, ‘Don’t drink too much, it’s beastly being ill,’ but she ignored this and began to feel extremely gay and seized hold of a shy boy, probably no more than eighteen, and pulled him into the dancing, and soon found herself with a tall man with sandy-coloured hair, she liked him very much but could not quite make out his face because he had four eyes and two noses but he held her close and she felt she was sinking into him as though her legs did not belong to her and suddenly she was not in control of herself and put her hands over her mouth and he shouted to people to get out of the way and carried her out of the room and she was aware of being very, very sick on the stairs and wishing, in some remote part of her mind, that there was no stair carpet because it was going to be so horrid to clear up the mess.
When she woke up it was daylight and she had just dreamt that a patient was ringing the bell in the hospital, but no, it was someone knocking at the door. She felt worse than she’d ever felt in her life. She had no idea where she was. Only when someone came in holding a cup of tea did she begin to remember. She was lying on a bed, fully clothed, with a coverlet over her, and that nice son of the house was grinning at her. ‘It’s noon,’ he said, ‘I think you’d better get up. Laura telephoned, she’s told your mother you’re staying with her because of the air raids, but she thinks you ought to go home now. Cup of tea?’
‘No, I think I’m going to die.’
‘I don’t think so.’ He was very nice, she thought blurrily. ‘But you should be getting home.’
‘I don’t think I can, I feel too ill.’
‘I’d love you to stay of course, but it’s a little difficult – sorry to be a rotter. . . By the way, there’s a note for you from David, the chap you were dancing with before you. . . had to go to bed.’ He laughed. ‘He called round, hoped to see you, but then he had to go out to lunch. He liked you, even though you were sick all over his jacket.’
‘Oh God, how awful.’
‘Just have a little wash, perhaps take off that make-up, which is a bit smudged. The Underground should be running. Remember, you’ve been staying with Laura. I gather your mamma’s a bit batey, there may be a Zeppelin raid on the home front.’
He was right, there was a lot of noise at Evelyn Gardens. Mamma had not slept all night, thought Sophia had been killed by a Zeppelin, would never allow her out on her own again, London was so dangerous, why hadn’t she telephoned? Sophia apologised, pursed her lips, toyed with her lunch. But all this was bearable because the little note that she had put in a special place in her handbag said that David had very much enjoyed meeting her, and would love to see her again, and was not going back to France for ten days. That afternoon he telephoned and asked if he might call, he knew this was rather prompt but in wartime you had to be. He came to tea that same day, and dazzled Lady Benson (she was grateful, when meeting someone titled, to be titled herself, it made her much more confident). When he’d gone, she said he was perfectly charming, such beautiful manners, so intelligent, so handsome. Sophia agreed.