But, this apart, everything was to be the essence of good taste and high fashion, an obedient procession waiting to shake their host and hostess by the hand and to murmur a word of congratulation to Caroline herself, her smooth shoulders rising, strong-boned, amber-tinted, from a tight bodice of white, embroidered silk-brocade, no demurely shrinking young miss but a hostess full-fledged, a triple strand of birthday pearls wound proudly around her throat, diamond and pearl drops in her ears, each ebony ringlet secured with a knot of silver ribbon and a pearl-headed pin.
It was, of course, too much. The pearls were too fine and too numerous, the diamonds inappropriate in a girl of eighteen. The silk brocade with its cobwebbing of silver thread was certainly extravagant, or so it would seem to Lady Winter ton, whose pearls had been eaten up long ago by the mortgage on her land, whose capable horsewoman’s hands bore nothing now but a single antique ring: and to Lady Annabel Flood—the guest of honour, a social triumph for the Barforths—her own jewels and her dowry-having fallen early victim to the extravagance of her father-in-law, that old Regency buck, our manorial lord, who even now could not deny himself the purchase of a thoroughbred horse or an enticing woman.
Yet both these ladies arrived most flatteringly early Lady Winterton—for Lady Annabel’s benefit—making a great show of friendship to that tradesman’s wife, Aunt Verity; Lady Annabel, who apart from her connection with the Floods was herself an earl’s daughter, a person of consequence in her own right greeting my aunt very warmly, forgetting, it seemed, that she had never before condescended to accept anything from the Barforths but an occasional invitation to take tea.
But now—sacrificing themselves in this vulgar company as English gentle women have always sacrificed themselves in the interests of their class and their clan—both these ladies were affability itself, having clearly decided after much heart-searching to hazard their sons in the marriage-stakes: Francis Winterton, placid disinterested biddable; Julian Flood already possessed at twenty-two of his grandfather’s rake-hellish quality, which would make him unpredictable and expensive.
And behind them came the Mandelbaums with their musical, dark-eyed Jacob, Mrs. Battershaw with her hopeful Benjamin. Mrs. Hobhouse of ailing Nethercoats Mill with her Freddy and Adolphus and James, her eyes so dazzled by Caroline’s diamonds that my twenty thousand pounds, without the porcelain, grew very pale.
‘Good evening.’ Caroline said to everyone, ‘how do you do?’, her smile never wavering, its degree of brightness identical for Mandelbaums and Wintertons alike, extending to Lady Annabel Flood, whose ancestors had arrived with William the Conqueror, no more and no less warmth than to Mrs. Hobhouse, who had no ancestors worth speaking of at all.
‘Good evening,’ to each Hobhouse boy in turn, with nothing in her career-hostess’s manner to indicate she had ever met them before, much less boxed the ears of all three, soundly and more than once, in childhood.
‘Good evening,’ too to Julian Flood, who was indeed almost a stranger, glimpsed only occasionally in church or as he drove his grandfather’s curricle at breakneck, arrogant speed through what he still considered to be his grandfather’s town, her very refusal to single him out telling me that she was really very flattered—very excited—indeed.
‘Good evening,’ she said to me, too intent on her own appearance to notice mine. ‘I shall pass my partners on to you, Faith, and if they have anything to say about me you can let me know.’
The orchestra, brought over from Manchester at the recommendation of the Mandelbaums was already playing in preparation for the dance, installed on a raised platform at the end of the long, white and gold ballroom where not too many years ago Caroline and I had run races, our skirts clutched high around our knees. Refreshments, of course were instantly on hand and would be served throughout the evening, claret and champagne and a tantalizing—possibly unnecessary—variety of cakes being set out in the small dining-room, accompanied by sorbets and ices, an endless flow of tea and coffee, to refresh the dancers and sustain the chaperones until supper-time.
But my mother, unlike the Ladies Winterton and Flood, who had evidently forgotten to eat their dinner, would take nothing but a glass of wine, satisfying her own appetite, I suspected, on the shocked, even hostile stares of Cullingford’s matrons, and the stares of quite another order drawn from the widower, Mr. Oldroyd of Fieldhead and a series of other—in my eyes quite elderly—gentlemen as she passed them by.
‘By God, can that be Elinor Barforth?’ I heard Mr Hobhouse demand of his comfortable wife forgetting she had been Mrs. Aycliffe these twenty years. And his astonishment could not surprise me, for, although she had always been a pretty woman, Cullingford had grown accustomed to see her following demurely in my father’s shadow, a tender dove eating passively from his hand, with no hint of the flaunting, diamond sparkle she was exhibiting tonight. And if that sparkle was indecent in a woman just six months a widow, few could deny its allure.
‘We will not go into the ballroom until the dancing begins,’ she told us ‘for although no one may dance with, me—poor little widow-woman that I am—I have no mind to sit among the wallflowers. We will wander around a little first and see what we can see, never mind the crowd. And if you are feeling faint already, Celia, then Caroline’s nanny will be pleased to take care of you, for I am sure I cannot I have your sisters to chaperone, after all, and I must not fails in my duty. So run along upstairs, dear, if you feel you must.’
But even Celia, clearly disliking my mother’s boldness, believing as she did that no lady should ever put herself forward, should shrink from attention rather than set out to attract it, would not be confined to the nursery on such a night and soon swallowed her complaints.
‘Good evening,’ my mother said to all and sundry in quite a different tone from Caroline, her twinkling, dimpling smile, her nodding plumage, her artfully exposed bosom telling anyone who cared to look: ‘Yes, here I am. Elinor Aycliffe whom you thought to see crushed and helpless without her husband. Yes, here I am, bubbling to the surface of myself, and loving it—oh yes, loving it.’
And watching her, understanding each gesture, each nuance of her face from the part of myself which was, indeed, like her. I came near to loving her too.
The ball was opened by Caroline, my Uncle Joel taking her a turn or two around the floor, his eyes very well satisfied but straying from time to time to Aunt Verity, who danced first with Sir Charles Winterton, as the senior representative of the landed gentry, and then with Mr. Mandelbaum, reputedly the most prosperous of our merchants. Uncle Joel, abandoning Caroline to the multitude of her admirers, then danced with Lady Annabel Flood; and while these formalities were being observed my heart quickened, as surely the heart of every other girl must have quickened, sitting on those long rows of gilt-legged, velvet-covered chairs, as even Prudence’s heart must have skipped a beat at the possibility before us all of disaster, or success.
Yet this was not the first dance I had attended and I knew by the unwritten laws governing such occasions that, even without my white rose and my vast, swan-like dress, without my audacious white velvet ribbon and the air of pity I was trying so hard to cultivate for such females who had failed to grow at least five inches taller than the fashion, I would not lack for partners. Girls who had neither beauty nor expectations might be condemned to spend the evening on that terrible row of chairs, counting the candles and the petals on the flowers, the lace flounces on the skirts of other girls as they danced by, hoping Aunt Verity would notice their plight and conjure up a man—any man—to relieve it. But a Miss Aycliffe, with twenty thousand cash down and the firm promise of more to come, need have no such fears.
Naturally every man present must first offer his attentions to his hostess and her daughter. Naturally Blaize and Nicholas would have been provided with a long list of females—which would not include cousins—to whom courtesy was due. Uncle Joel, his duty dances done, would have time for no one but his wife. But there would be partners to spare, a
great many of them, and, as I sat between Celia, who was eager to dance with anyone, and Prudence who was eager to dance with anyone but Jonas, I was forced to admit that the deeper layers of my mind, the ones I could not really control, were entirely occupied with Nicholas.
My preoccupation was not a happy one. I had gorged myself, for a day or two after the incident of the train, on thoughts of him, indulged myself by building and rebuilding in my mind the dark, determined lines of his face, the slight cleft in his chin, the unexpected humour of his smile when it managed to chase his ill-temper away. And, indulging myself still further. I had relived the whole of our encounter, repeated our conversation over and over again, added to it, including the things I had wanted to say or had only thought of much later, as if they had actually been spoken. Yet in the end I had been forced, quite abruptly, to leave the comforting realm of fantasy and to consider, more precisely than ever before, my exact situation and what, if anything, I could reasonably, logically, hope to achieve.
Not even my father’s scrupulously contrived efforts to raise his daughters in total innocence had concealed from me that there were various categories of womenkind, for which men had many and equally varied uses. There was the category ‘lady’, to which I belonged, whose duty it was to be pure of heart and delicate of constitution, designed to arouse the protective, possessive instinct in man; to be kept in luxurious idleness in exchange for the devotion and self-sacrifice with which she would hazard herself—sometimes annually—in the perilous task of childbirth. There was the category ‘maidservant’, so much stronger and more enduring than the lady that it was difficult to class them as members of the same species, a tireless variety of woman intended for the scrubbing of floors, the laying of grates, the carrying of water and the mangling of linen, her reproductive functions being so little encouraged that she would be dismissed the moment it was suspected they had been put to use. There was the category ‘mill-hand’, even hardier, capable of fourteen hours a day hard labour in the agonizing heat and noise of a weaving shed, and then another five with wash-tub and scrubbing board at home. And just as gentlemen turned to these tough plants for the practical, daily needs their little orchid-house wives could not supply, so too there was the category ‘mistress’, a wild jungle-weed, coarse-fibred enough to glory in the rough handling no orchid could be expected to endure.
And I knew, quite simply, that none of this concerned me. No one would ever be likely to ask me to lay a grate or tend a fire, or expose me to the heat and promiscuity of the sheds. I was, most definitely, a lady, created not to be loved but to be married, and even if by some miracle Nicholas could be induced into thoughts of matrimony, his family—which was partly my own family too—would not approve of me.
I may be considered a good match for a Hobhouse or a Mandelbaum, a brilliant one for Jonas Agbrigg, but the Barforths would require some stupendous alliance for all three of their children, and had I been a little older than seventeen, possessed of a greater share of Prudence’s common sense, I would perhaps have smiled more convincingly at Jacob Mandelbaum, who liked me, at jovial Freddy Hobhouse, who seemed willing to like anyone, and shut my thoughts of Nicholas away.
‘Enjoy yourselves,’ my mother commanded, smiling as Jonas Agbrigg bowed stiffly to Prudence, the Battershaw boy first to me and then to Celia, since Freddy Hobhouse had claimed me first. ‘Enjoy yourselves, while Aunt Hannah and I sit and tell each other how much better things were in our day.’ And, although my appetite for enjoyment was less acute now that its fulfilment depended so largely on Nicholas. I made up my mind to obey.
I was not certain what I hoped for, since I could not hope for Nicholas, except that it was not Freddy Hobhouse, hot-handed, heavy-footed, hugging me in a cheerful polka, nor even Jacob Mandelbaum, serious and supple, who would rather have been playing the violins than dancing. Certainly it was not Francis Winterton, holding me a yard away, talking languidly about Caroline; nor Julian Flood who, having come here to marry one young lady, was reckless and arrogant enough to make himself gallant to another, escorting me to the refreshment-room where his mother, whose financial commitments my twenty thousand pounds could hardly satisfy, put herself instantly between us, walking back with us to the ballroom to make sure we went there, and that I was duly returned to my relations.
It was a dance, the most thrilling of all events permitted to young ladies, fraught with great hopes and great agonies, the making or missing of marriages and reputations, no different from the dozen or so others I had attended, except that it was more splendid. And for the first hour or so everything was just as it should have been. The three immense chandeliers suspended from the high, gold-painted ceiling shimmered and sparkled, the dozen long windows open to the terrace offered a breath of garden-spiced air as one danced by. The violins played their polkas and quadrilles and country-dances, their waltzes, every bit as tunefully as had been promised. The young ladies danced, or most of them did, at least once, provided with partners by Aunt Verity, who, gracefully, tirelessly, circled the room making her introductions. ‘Miss Smith, allow me to present Mr. Brown who is quite an expert at the polka. Why, Miss White, do not say you are too exhausted to dance, for here is Mr. Jones, who would be delighted—’
The older men, having seen their wives and daughters suitably catered for, retired to refreshment-room and smoking-room, the chaperones drew their chairs closer together, sharp-eyed and anxious, some of them, others heavy-lidded with fatigue and the boredom of so eternally discussing the splendid prospects of my cousin Caroline. Aunt Hannah had placed herself firmly beside Mr. Fielding, our new Member of Parliament, who was certainly unaware that she intended, eventually, to obtain his office for Jonas. And, while keeping up a steady flow of question and answer, demanding to know the progress of Cullingford’s Charter of Incorporation, and when she could expect her husband to be elected mayor, her restless eyes never ceased to check the movements of her adored, adopted son, noting who danced with him and who did not, noting who dared to trespass on his preserves by dancing with Prudence. And her chaperonage, it seemed, extended also to my mother, so that when she returned, not for the first time, from the refreshment-room where the widower, Mr. Oldroyd of Fieldhead Mills, had been plying her with champagne, Aunt Hannah leaned forward and snapped, in the exact tone she had used often enough to me and Celia, ‘Elinor—do behave.’
Enjoyment was not lacking, but no greater than I had experienced before, nothing I would spend tomorrow in silence remembering. Neither Nicholas nor Blaize would have time to dance with me—although Blaize did smile at me once or twice behind his partner’s head, letting me know, by a sweeping glance, that my dress and my hair had won his approval—and gradually the evening began to settle down, to acquire the same bland flavour of everyday, to be entirely predictable, until, having taken a second glass of lemonade with Jacob Mandlebaum and returning to the ballroom, Jacob a step or two behind me, I found myself entangled, just inside the doorway, with Nicholas and Caroline, drawing back as I heard her hiss at him, ‘Nicholas, for heaven’s sake, you have not yet danced with Amy Battershaw, and she most particularly wishes for it.’
‘I daresay. But I have danced with all your other tedious friends, and I think you may allow me a moment—’
‘Nicholas,’ she said, her voice rising in a way that proved her composure to be less than it seemed. ‘Please oblige me in this, for you know quite well Amy Battershaw and I are to travel to Paris together, and, if she should take the huff and decide not to go, then I shall be saddled with some dreary paid companion.’
‘Or father will forbid you to go at all.’
‘No, he will not. And it is quite odious of you to provoke me tonight when you know quite well how important—Oh, Nicky, for once please do as I ask, for she is sitting there, the silly goose, waiting, and I do believe she has turned someone else away.’
But Aunt Verity, as usual, was at hand; and, flowing between her warring children like cool water, drawing me with her for support,
or distraction, she murmured. ‘Faith dear, how well you look tonight! That dress becomes you perfectly—don’t you think so, Caroline? And Nicky darling, do go and dance with Miss Battershaw—a bore, I admit, but only five minutes of your time—not worth the fuss.’
And he would have gone at once, I think, the corners of his mouth already tilting with a wry, affectionate smile, had not Uncle Joel abruptly intervened.
‘What’s all this?’ he demanded and instantly Caroline—his favourite child, the apple of his powerful, vengeful eye—spun round to him, certain of his support.
‘It is Nicholas turning stubborn again, and saying he will not dance with Amy Battershaw.’
‘Oh, but he will,’ my uncle said, the familiar snap of temper in his eyes. ‘He will—and before he’s ten minutes older.’
‘Dearest—’ Aunt Verity murmured, her endearment addressed, I think, to them both, and, not wishing to endure again the backlash of my uncle’s anger, I had begun to move away when Nicholas, unable as always to back down, but willing perhaps to offer his mother a compromise, said crisply, ‘Of course I’ll dance with Miss Battershaw—there was never any doubt about it—but you’ll have to extend your ten minutes. I’m afraid, since I am promised to dance first with Faith.’
Instantly—or so it seemed to me—a row of Barforth eyes were riveted to my face, my uncle’s hard and suspicious, he thought behind them: ‘Ah yes, so it’s the Aycliffe girl again, turning out as flighty as her mother’; Caroline’s warning me she did not expect her friends to turn traitor and would make short work of any who did; Aunt Verity’s alone showing that she retained a sense of proportion and understood that I could only aggravate the matter by a refusal. ‘Ah well,’ she said lightly. ‘I doubt if Miss Battershaw will die of the suspense’; and there was nothing for me to do but give him my hand and wait for the music to begin.
I had longed for this dance, and now—as often happens with the things one longs for in life—it was an embarrassment, an ordeal, a bitter disappointment. I had thought of him so often, not only with the excitement of budding, emotion, but with anxiety too, had defended him when Caroline, and Celia, accused him of moodiness and malice, had worried about his stormy relations with his father, remembering all the times I had seen him take his punishment with a stubborn pride that made my uncle’s tongue harsher, his hand heavier. Yet now I hoped with unashamed ferocity that Uncle Joel would thrash him and batter him at the end of every disagreement, wished, in fact, that he had broken his back and his spirit long ago.
Flint and Roses Page 9
