The Ugly Sister
Page 1
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Contents
Winston Graham
BOOK ONE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
BOOK TWO
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
BOOK THREE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Winston Graham
The Ugly Sister
Winston Mawdsley Graham OBE was an English novelist, best known for the series of historical novels about the Poldarks. Graham was born in Manchester in 1908, but moved to Perranporth, Cornwall when he was seventeen. His first novel, The House with the Stained Glass Windows was published in 1933. His first ‘Poldark’ novel, Ross Poldark, was published in 1945, and was followed by eleven further titles, the last of which, Bella Poldark, came out in 2002. The novels were set in Cornwall, especially in and around Perranporth, where Graham spent much of his life, and were made into a BBC television series in the 1970s. It was so successful that vicars moved or cancelled church services rather than try to hold them when Poldark was showing.
Aside from the Poldark series, Graham’s most successful work was Marnie, a thriller which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1964. Hitchcock had originally hoped that Grace Kelly would return to films to play the lead and she had agreed in principle, but the plan failed when the principality of Monaco realised that the heroine was a thief and sexually repressed. The leads were eventually taken by Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery. Five of Graham’s other books were filmed, including The Walking Stick, Night Without Stars and Take My Life. Graham wrote a history of the Spanish Armadas and an historical novel, The Grove of Eagles, based in that period. He was also an accomplished writer of suspense novels. His autobiography, Memoirs of a Private Man, was published by Macmillan in 2003. He had completed work on it just weeks before he died. Graham was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1983 was honoured with the OBE.
BOOK ONE
Chapter One
I
I WAS born on 6 December 1812, the exact day, my uncle once told me, when the remnants of Napoleon’s Grand Army reached Vilna on its retreat from Moscow. I think of myself as Cornish but I was born in Devon, in the village of Clyst Honiton, off a stagecoach a few miles before we reached Exeter.
My mother was not Cornish but, my father having just died in a duel, she was coming to spend Christmas with his relatives at Place House, St Anthony. My name is Emma Spry and I have an elder sister, Thomasine, who was aged four at the time. My mother was heavily pregnant when we took the coach from the Angel Inn in Islington, but she did not expect the pains to start until at least the middle of January. In the event what she called ‘the accursed jolting’ was too much for her, and on the second day, right at the end of the second day, she found she could go no farther.
So we were put off near Clyst Honiton and taken in at a villainous dirty hostel called the Pig & Goat and a midwife sent for. My mother tells me it was terrible weather: rain and a gale of wind, and few folk were about, though darkness had only just closed on the wild afternoon. With Thomasine holding tight to her sweaty hand, she was led up a corkscrew staircase where the whiskery woman who kept the tavern was scraping flint on tinder to light a tallow candle. A low raftered room came into view with two trestle beds, torn hessian curtains, a pitcher and ewer on a stool, rain pattering on paper in the unlighted fire grate; a rustling in another corner where a brown rat was making his exit. There had been a remission of the pains while she disembarked, but they began again as the coach horses’ hooves clopped and slithered on the cobbles outside, partly drowned in the tantrum of the gale.
An hour later I was born. My mother knew there was a woman in the room and assumed it to be the midwife, but no one knows whether it was the innkeeper’s wife or this watery-eyed scrofulous newcomer who was responsible for the damage done to my face as I came into the world. There is no reason to suppose that there was anything peculiar about the birth, any let or hindrance which would have compelled a human agency to attempt to assist a normal presentation. The so-called midwife left in the middle of the following day and was not seen again, so it is likely it was her fault.
The fact remains that my looks were marred for life.
II
MY FATHER’S family was a landed and wealthy one. Place House – some say Place is an abbreviation of Palace – was originally a monastery, the residence of a prior and two black canons. At the Dissolution it passed after some vicissitudes into the hands of the Spry family, who had lived there ever since.
They had a naval tradition. In the side chapel of the church adjoining the house were memorials to one Spry after another who had been ‘Admiral of the Red’ or ‘ Rear Admiral of the White’. My father had gone against tradition and became a courtier. ‘ Equerry of the Queen’, my mother said, but I have come to take some of her statements with a pinch of salt. Details of the duel in which he died were never given to his daughters, but my uncle Davey, who could be crotchety on occasion, once muttered to me that my father had been ‘killed in a drunken brawl’.
Neither my uncle nor my aunt Anna quite approved of my mother, who was an actress. It became clear, though I do not think they ever said so openly, that they thought brother Aubrey had married beneath him in wedding someone ‘ on the stage’. Claudine Hall, to give her her maiden and stage name, was about thirty at the time of my birth, tall, sharp-nosed and elegant. She had a good presence and a good voice; but I do not quite know how we contrived to continue to live at Place House long after the first month had expired, and indeed eventually to consider it our true and only home. Possibly because it was so little inhabited. The house had a separate wing at the back which was not used, and we came to look on this as our own domain.
Admiral Davey Spry and his wife had four children of their own: their eldest daughter, Anna Maria, who was fifteen or sixteen and was at school in London; Mary, a year or so younger, who was quiet and simple-natured and had a governess in the house; then came a son, Samuel, who was ten and was at school at Dartmouth; and the youngest boy, Desmond, who was seven and would shortly be sent away to school.
Place House is on the Roseland Peninsula. It faces out to the tidal Percuil Creek, on the opposite side from St Mawes; so while St Mawes looks east and south, Place House looks north. It is sheltered from the winter gales, and the water that slides up the creek and laps against its lawns is usually as placid and as reflective as a lake. You could call it a big gentleman’s house, three-storeyed – the second floor being attics lit by dormer windows in the roof – with an unusual spire, or more properly a narrow pyramid above the central hall. The public rooms faced the lawns which ran down to the quay and the creek. Behind the
public rooms ran a narrow passage, used by the servants, so that they could attend to the needs of the family in any room without passing through the other rooms.
The wing we came to live in and almost count as our own ran backwards from the main hall, had four bedrooms, a parlour, a sewing room and a nursery. It had been unoccupied for some time and was in poor repair: rain dripped into the bedrooms, wallpaper peeled, carpets were threadbare, dry rot was settling in some of the floorboards.
But this condition was pristine compared to the condition of the church to which the house was joined. There were no other big houses nearby, and the congregation, such as it was, was made up of farmers and smallholders who lived in cottages and cultivated the fertile fields of that gentle peninsula; some fisherfolk who waited for the pilchards and trawled the shallow seas for lobster and crab – and the Sprys, who had direct access to the church by opening an oak door in the north drawing room and walking right in.
Much of the roof of the church had fallen in, the altar had been wrecked by a fallen beam during a winter gale, some of the bench ends had been looted, and when the parson came, the Reverend Arthur Miller from St Gerrans, who also had the cure of St Anthony and St Just, he read prayers and preached from the belfry, which had so far stood the assault of wind and weather and was reasonably sound.
When I was old enough to sum up the situation I used to wonder that a family of such considerable wealth should so neglect what was virtually a part of their house. Could it be that they were all unbelievers? From their conversation this seemed very unlikely.
In those earliest years there were few Sprys about. Even in the school holidays the children more often than not stayed at Tregolls in Truro, another big house that belonged to the family, from which base communication with their own kind was much easier than from the Roseland peninsula. This was particularly true at Christmas and Easter, when the Assembly Balls took place. My uncle Davey was the admiral in charge of Plymouth Dock, and his visits home were frequently cut short because he had bought and was rebuilding a third house in the county, just off the main coaching road between Falmouth and Truro. The reason for this did not become apparent until I was ten years of age and deemed old enough to be told.
The one constant was Aunt Anna. She had had her children late, and was ‘delicate’. She slept in the bedroom immediately above the north drawing room and therefore one of her walls was common to the church. When she was not well she lived most of her time in this room; when she was well she spent the day in a rocking chair in the south drawing room looking out over the creek. Her great pleasure was cards. When she was alone or with her companion, Elsie Whattle, she would play solitaire, bezique or sometimes backgammon, but when she could find companions she played whist. Hers was not a social snobbery, it was a card-playing snobbery. Only those who played well were invited and only those who could afford to play for the stakes she regularly played for. So whenever she was well some eight or a dozen of her friends were entertained in turn and one came to know them all by sight or by name.
My aunt was a stout woman with wispy hair, shortsighted friendly eyes and a perpetual sniff. There was frequently a hunt for her handkerchief, which she always sat on for luck when playing whist and thereafter lost. She was intensely superstitious in ways I was not to realize for a long time.
My uncle was a trimly built man – as spruce as his wife was untidy. He had a bright complexion, pink at all times but flushing scarlet in his brief tempers. One sometimes thought he might have a skin less than most people. He and my aunt frequently bickered and argued, and it was always easy to tell when he was in the house. A cause of constant disagreement between them was a shiny, muscular friendly black dog called Parish, whom my aunt adored and my uncle, for some reason, hated. When he was away Parish would romp around the house like a jolly schoolboy – though never far from his mistress. When the Admiral was home he was confined to his kennel, or, in the Admiral’s eye, should have been. In fact three-quarters of the time he spent in Aunt Anna’s bedroom, and when my uncle went in Parish knew his approaching footstep and cowered under the bed.
As a tiny child I crowed and toddled and fell down and cried and picked myself up again and played with my sister and the two bigger children and took everything for granted. I even took for granted my disfigurement, and when my mother shuddered sometimes when she picked me up I took this as a natural tremor on her part that had nothing to do with me. My sister too took my looks for granted: knowing her in later life, I cannot believe she refrained from mentioning them out of delicacy or compassion; they just did not impinge on her as worthy of comment. Perhaps my cousins – both of gentler natures – had been told not to speak of the matter. At least I do not think they ever spoke of it.
I suppose my mother was a very handsome and attractive woman and my sister was already showing hints of the beauty she was to become. Mary and Desmond were also good-looking. No doubt I would have been more acceptable in a family where everyone was plain.
I remember the first time I saw myself in a looking-glass and observed my face in a detached way.
III
THE BUTLER was called Slade. He had been a petty officer on board the last two ships the Admiral had commanded. He was a heavy man, light-footed as big men often are. His hair was jet black and tied in a pigtail. Tamsin got into great trouble when she was nine by stealing into a back scullery and surprising him dyeing it. It was a while before I noticed that he lacked the fingertips of his left hand: the half-length fingers ended in nail-less stubs.
He came from the south-east corner of Cornwall and was very prideful about it. ‘There’s been Slades in Polperro and Looe for centuries,’ he would growl, ‘long before ever there was Sprys in Place.’
He represented the Admiral when the Admiral was not there. When he was there he was useful after dinner in helping his master up the stairs to bed. Slade’s arms were tattooed with serpents; he had a plump dun-grey face – which hid a lot of malice – and walked with a stoop.
IV
UNCLE DAVEY came and went by coach and by sea, depending on his destination or where he had come from. So did most of the produce of the house. The roads were little more than cart ruts, narrow, hilly and winding. There was no town to the east of us nearer than St Austell. To reach Place House from Truro by road one had to follow the River Fal upstream and cross the ford at Tregony at low tide. King Harry Ferry was served by steep lanes usually slithering in mud. No one essayed these laborious ways when the growing port of Falmouth lay across a two-mile estuary of deep water – only unnavigable in times of storm.
We were self-contained for most things, seldom if ever needed meat or eggs or poultry or vegetables. And boats would call twice a week with fish, cooking spices, lobsters, soap, newspapers and miscellaneous luxuries, such as chocolate and China teas. Once a month a coal barge would sidle up at high tide until it grounded, when the bags would be loaded onto wheelbarrows and carried up to the house. The coalmen would usually wait then for the next tide to take them off.
It was on such an occasion that I had my disfigurement first pointed out to me. The quay, which was built at the lawn’s edge, had a small pebbly beach on either side of it. One day when the coal barge was unloading I walked down with Thomasine and a maid called Sally Fetch, and three ragged boys were on the right-hand beach watching and hoping for some spillage of the coal; they whistled at Tamsin, who already had a head of golden curls. Fetch took Tamsin’s hand and guided her away, but I stayed watching the unloading, finger in mouth. One of the boys shouted: ‘What’s wrong wi ’ee, maid? Been in a scuff, ’ave ’ee?’ The other urchins jeered us out of earshot, and then splashed away as fast as they could as Slade came ominously down the path.
Next morning – or maybe it was two or three mornings later – I carried a hand looking-glass over to the window in my mother’s room. I looked at the dark-haired round-faced fat little girl I knew to be myself. My unique self. Someone belonging to me alone, from whom I could never never e
scape.
I must have taken after my father, for my eyes were very dark; but the lid of the left eye was drawn down an inch or more and the eye was permanently bloodshot. Further down on the same side my cheek had a deep scar which might have come from a musket ball. And there was a stain on my neck, part hidden by the lace collar of my dress.
That I recognized was Emma Spry, and other children would laugh and point at her. And grown-ups too. I was an outcast.
V
MY MOTHER was absent for quite long periods continuing her stage career. She played at the Richmond Theatre, at Drury Lane, at the Haymarket, and sometimes went on tour. Once in a while she took the lead, more often lesser parts.
I remember a conversation when I followed her into Aunt Anna’s bedroom and heard my aunt say: ‘D’ye have to do that? It is showing your legs to the common people, and your name is in small print. Your children are growing up and you hardly see ’em.’
‘Thanks to you and Davey we have this lovely home,’ said my mother, ‘but I’m hard set to make ends meet. I pay Davey what little I can, but I need more just for the girls. And I shall get bonuses for extra performances.’
‘Well, yes,’ said Aunt Anna, sniffing and sucking her top teeth defensively, ‘ the Admiral is not without money, and I brought him a fat dowry; but he has many calls on his purse. There’s no depth to the soil around here and the farmers can hardly fetch enough out of it to pay their rents. When he retires he will certainly give up the house in Plymouth Dock. I was urging on him the other day the need for retrenchment.’
I looked up at my mother’s face and saw a shadow pass across it.
‘It means a deal to me,’ she said, ‘that Thomasine and Emma have a settled home so far away from the city. That I have to thank you for, Anna. Of course there is much warmth and friendship in the world of the theatre, but also much squalor. Aubrey, as you know, died in debt. He spent the allowance Davey sent him on drink and women, and I kept the family. It is no difference with him gone; I still have to work.’