Marriages are Made in Bond Street

by Penrose Halson

  In a panic, Mary telephoned the ever-practical Heather, who was sympathetic but crisp: ‘I am staggered that you should have fallen for Miss Bud and her dubious bust bodices. She must be a first-class conwoman! Try lying in the bath to soak the little blighters off. Let me know what happens – but not this evening, I’m off to dinner with Hugo – he’s so pressing. Must dash. Toodle pip!’

  Mortified and dispirited, Mary put down the receiver. She always conscientiously bathed in only a few inches of water, and refused even to try lying face down in the tub. She slathered her breasts with Pond’s cold cream, confident it would do the trick. When that proved useless, she mixed a handful of Lux soap flakes into a large bowl of warm water, placed it on a table, leaned forward and lowered her breasts into the bowl while gripping the top of a chair for balance. Ten minutes of this tricky pose made her twitch with such disabling cramp that the bowl overturned.

  In desperation, over the next few days Mary tried every remedy she could think of, anointing herself with vinegar (horribly smelly), gin (awful waste), sewing machine oil (begged from the furrier below the Bureau), Brylcreem and even moustache wax, provided by a mystified boy-friend to whom Mary flatly refused to explain her request. As a last resort she spent an hour swimming up and down a nearby public pool. The plasters clung on.

  Only weeks later did the valiant bust bodice give up the fight and, one evening, quietly fall to the floor. Wrapped in her dressing gown, weak with relief, Mary picked up the plasters and consigned them to the wastepaper basket, muttering, ‘So much for “innocent delight” and “perfect husbands” and “enchanting brides”! As for “refulgent genius”, “simple idiocy” is more like it!’

  12

  A Sideline and Two Triumphs

  When, in May 1941, Hitler stopped blitzing London to concentrate on invading Russia, nobody imagined that the end of the war was in sight. But the relief felt at not being under constant attack was profound. Mary and Heather, together with the population of London and other cities, started to recoup their strength. By the summer, the match-makers were getting more sleep, feeling more buoyant and widening their horizons. But they were still working extremely hard to keep up with the steady flow of clients: the nervous and the brash, the self-effacing and the arrogant, the domineering and the domineered, the delightful and the frankly ghastly. Heather often took clients’ registration forms and the Black Book home with her, as her godmother discovered when she apologized for telephoning at nearly midnight and was reassured by a cheerful, ‘Oh, don’t worry, I’m in bed doing my mating!’

  Wherever she lived, Heather always transformed her rooms. She was as concerned to live in a stylish environment as she was to look elegant, in clothes that perfectly suited her colouring, height and carriage. She had an instinct for shapes and colours and proportions, an unerring ability to create a harmonious room which was as aesthetically pleasing as it was comfortable. She was also an exceptionally efficient administrator, so it was a natural progression from finding the right spouse to helping to choose the bride’s trousseau, organizing the couple’s wedding, even arranging the honeymoon and, finally, furnishing the house of those lucky enough to have their own establishment in which to embark on married life.

  ‘I do wish you’d been there, dear Mary!’ yawned Heather as she dropped her handbag on her office desk one Monday morning. ‘That wedding was exhausting. I certainly earned my fee.’

  Heather had organized the wedding of Winifred, a wealthy girl of twenty-four whose grim-faced mother had frog-marched her only child to the Bureau, insistent that she should find a husband. Mrs Pinkerton-Hobbs had done her utmost to launch her unwilling and unprepossessing daughter into society, disbursing large sums to present her at Court and to ensure that she went to all the right deb dances, where she would surely meet and soon marry a suitable young man.

  Far from grateful, Winifred had grown increasingly intransigent about being so overtly up for sale in the marriage market, and had been downright rude to several effete and penniless young ‘debs’ delights’ who would have forgiven her plainness and lack of femininity for the sake of the fortune that she would inherit. Mrs Pinkerton-Hobbs drew even nearer to her wits’ end when Winifred greeted the outbreak of war as a glorious opportunity to be something more than a tradeable commodity, joined the Women’s Land Army, and was sent off to a run-down farm in distant Yorkshire.

  For the first time in her life Winifred had a purpose. She hummed happily as, dressed in regulation fawn drill milking coat and dungarees, thick woollen socks and canvas gaiters, she obeyed the farmer’s curt instructions: ‘There’s the bucket, there’s the stool, there’s the cow. Sit down and pull!’

  Ignoring the dull ache in her arms and the blisters on her hands, Winifred learned fast. She went on duty at 6 a.m., did the morning milking, then cleaned out the milking shed, pushed clumsy wooden wheelbarrows of dung to the pile, milked again, and was usually sunk in a heap in bed by 7.30 in the evening. She also learned to drive, not through lessons, but by trial and error. There was nobody to transport the milk to the local town, so Winifred was detailed to take the wheel of the small lorry.

  ‘That’s the brake and that’s the accelerator,’ grunted the farmer, a man of very few words, most of them orders. ‘Now, drive!’

  Weaving downhill, with the milk sloshing around in the churns, altering the balance at every bump in the rough road, fearless Winifred was exhilarated as never before. She had always loathed sipping cocktails with urban sophisticates in tastefully decorated drawing rooms, but was at glorious ease in the company of her fellow Land Girls – a very mixed bag, from a former parlour maid to a millionaire’s daughter as bolshie as herself. In the evenings they either darned their socks in the chilly farm kitchen, until there was so much darn and so little sock that they qualified for a new pair, or changed into the WLA walking-out uniform of greatcoat, green jersey and gabardine breeches and cycled off to the nearby Sergeants’ Mess.

  Mrs Pinkerton-Hobbs trembled at the hideous possibility of Winifred contracting marriage with some unsuitable working-class soldier, and wept internally as she surveyed her daughter’s wind-reddened face, cracked lips, broken fingernails and dirt-engrained hands. How was the wretched girl ever going to catch a suitable husband? Her father would not have stood such nonsense, and would have more or less discreetly bribed and bought a husband, with a lucrative job or even hard cash. But what could she, a widow, do with so uncooperative a daughter? Her friends eyed Mrs Pinkerton-Hobbs pityingly.

  Fortunately, only the day after Winifred had unwillingly signed the Bureau’s registration form under the eagle eye of her mother, there bounded up the stairs her destined man – for yes, it was destiny, Heather and Mary unanimously decided, destiny needing only a skilful little nudge.

  Gyles Hopwood was a Lincolnshire landowner, producing quantities of grain and vegetables on the ancient family estate. ‘Gent,’ Heather wrote on his record card: ‘Merry twinkle. Fine big country type. Not the sharpest of tacks but nice. Knows his own mind.’ Gyles’s application to join the navy at the outbreak of war had been rejected on grounds that supplying vitally needed food for a nation certain to be increasingly deprived of imports was a reserved occupation. Disgruntled, for he was a man of spirit and of action, Gyles had returned to his farm to work flat out, helped only by three aged labourers, greatly missing the four young, fit ones who had all been called up to fight.

  Living alone in an imposing farmhouse, Gyles was receptive to the suggestion of an old girl-friend that he try his luck with the Marriage Bureau. Within five minutes of meeting Winifred he decided that she would make him a fine wife. She was practical, fond of the simple life, unperturbed by hard work, unaffected, blunt in her opinions, a lady and – a quality so desirable that he had underlined it on his registration form – she wore no make-up and confessed to a horror of painting her fingernails.

  Decision was translated into action at top speed: after two hours, Gyles asked Winifred if she would do him the
honour of marrying him.

  ‘Why not?’ she retorted. ‘I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but now you ask, it sounds a jolly good idea!’

  Mrs Pinkerton-Hobbs was shell-shocked but overjoyed. Heaven had answered her prayers (no doubt Mr Pinkerton-Hobbs had cunningly bribed an influential angel). She sent an ecstatic letter and great sheaves of hothouse flowers to the Marriage Bureau, and set about organizing an elaborate church wedding complete with six matching bridesmaids and a choir of ten. Despite the limitations of rationing – food, clothes and petrol were all heavily restricted – her plans were lavish. In such a sublime cause she was prepared to turn a blind eye to the black market source of champagne and wedding cake. She made an appointment with her dressmaker to choose the wedding dress. Not for nothing had Mr Pinkerton-Hobbs made a fortune out of steel before he expired. Money was to be no object in making this remarkable, long-longed-for occasion one to make her the envy of her friends.

  But Mrs Pinkerton-Hobbs had reckoned without Winifred’s new-found confidence, with which she obstinately confounded her mother’s plans.

  ‘No, Mama, I don’t want all that fuss and flummery, and neither does Gyles. We don’t want to be some kind of sideshow, and I flatly refuse to look like a big white duck with a meringue on its head. We are going to be married in a register office with a good party afterwards. I can’t wear slacks so I shall be in my green frock, you know the one. I haven’t got time to organize anything – I’m full-time and more on the farm – so I’ve talked to Miss Jenner and she will sort it all out.’

  Given a generous budget, Heather had done Gyles and Winifred proud, and had deflected a potential calamity when a doddery relative, clutching a bottle of champagne in each hand, had tried to reawaken his youth by demonstrating the whirling of dervishes he had so admired in Cairo. Swiftly assessing the damage which whirling bottles would inflict, and the risk of the ruddy-faced relative having a heart attack, Heather had smoothly de-bottled him, enticed him to a quiet corner, sat him down with a dish of cooling ice cream and questioned him with intensely flattering interest about his Egyptian soldiering days. Mrs Pinkerton-Hobbs had noticed this small pantomime, thanked her lucky stars and, brimming over with champagne and emotion, added a hefty ‘thank-you’ tip to Heather’s account.

  Mary listened and laughed as Heather described the wedding, then held out an opened letter: ‘Now, here’s another job right up your street! In fact, there are two jobs, this written one and one from a telephone call I’ve just answered. You’ll never guess who it was.’

  ‘In that case I’ll start with the letter.’

  A forty-five-year-old surgeon, Percival Gordon, living in Coventry, a widower who had just become engaged to Florence, a hospital almoner in London, had written to ask Heather if she would make his home more welcoming to his bride-to-be. The house, he wrote, was an ordinary one, but he was thankful to have anywhere at all to live since the Luftwaffe had flattened the city. Even before the war Coventry had been attacked: an IRA bomb had knocked Percival’s pregnant wife Amelia to the ground with such force that five weeks later she died. ‘As you know,’ wrote Percival,

  I was aware when I came to see you six months ago that it might seem premature, indeed callous, to seek another wife scarcely a year after the death of Amelia and our unborn child. However, you listened sympathetically to me and I felt reassured that you understood how the circumstances of war alter everything. They bring all aspects of life into sharper focus, so that in a curious way they simplify matters. When you are acutely aware that you may well not exist tomorrow, you do today what before the war you might have contemplated for months before taking any action. Moreover, as a surgeon I frequently confronted death before the war, so that, although not immune to it, I have a greater familiarity with it, and can better accept it as an integral and inevitable part of life than can most people.

  In Florence you have found for me a perfect wife, not only because she is so loveable but also because through her work she too has much experience of death, and consequently an understanding of my situation (as well, I am happy to say, as a love for me which fills me with joy). We are jointly anticipating a new departure. After our wedding she will come and live with me here; but my house was made into a home by Amelia, and I want Florence to know that it is her home. I have very little time for matters other than my work, since there are so many sick and injured in Coventry that the hospital is always at full throttle. In addition, it is difficult for me to know what may most strike a woman’s eye. So I should be most appreciative if you could see your way to visiting me with the aim of making some changes, and advising me generally. I should of course pay your fees.

  ‘Certainly I’ll go,’ said Heather, ‘though, heaven knows, it will not be an easy journey to Coventry. It could take me all day after the appalling bomb damage to the railway lines. I’ll write to him. Now, what about the telephone call, dear Mary? Who was the caller I’ll never guess?’

  ‘Mrs de Pomfret!’ Mary burst out. ‘Mrs Etheldreda de Pomfret! Dearest friend of the WI Lady Chairman at the baby show, remember? She’s disposed of three husbands and wants victim number four! She spoke as if her mouth was full of sour grapes which she was trying to spit out at the same time as talking, and what she said was truly frightful. I told her the first step was to come in for an interview, and she made indignant exploding, swallowing, gurgling, spitting noises and let fly that she would do no such thing, who on earth did I think she was, only servants go for interviews! I bit my lip – you would have been proud of me, Heather – and with extreme calmness I explained to her that if, due to exceptional circumstances, someone was unable to come to the Bureau, you or I would, if convenient, visit the person at home, for an extra fee. She jibbed at the idea of paying, but I think she’s desperate, since she agreed to an appointment with you next Monday.’

  So when Heather rang Mrs de Pomfret’s bell outside a solid Victorian block of mansion flats in Kensington, she was prepared for a haughty reception. However, staring up at Heather, Mrs de Pomfret knew that she had met her match. Heather was a good foot taller than Etheldreda, who could have been mistaken for a vividly painted talking doll. She greeted Heather warily, but in exactly the strangulated tones Mary had described, ushering her through a narrow hall into a spacious and gracious drawing room.

  Heather caught her breath, raising her shoulders and drawing her elbows in close to her sides. The room was a veritable museum. On every horizontal surface lay arrayed a multitude of precious objects: bejewelled presentation cups jostled with ostrich-feather fans, ivory chess sets sat on boards of ebony and mother of pearl, dishes edged with turquoise and gold were piled with silver fob watches. Candelabra of pink Venetian glass shone down on the enamelled lids of tiny snuffboxes; a carved wooden monkey leered at a silver-framed photograph of an Edwardian patriarch.

  The tops and shelves of the tables and cabinets bearing this dizzying collection were as invisible as the walls, which were concealed by a profusion of paintings, mirrors, light sconces, elephants’ tusks, daggers and shields, the mantelpiece dominated by a manky but still intimidating tiger’s head, mouth yawning open in a long-silenced yellow-fanged growl.

  ‘It’s my husbands, you understand,’ drawled Mrs de Pomfret, clearly accustomed to the stupefaction of any newcomer and ready with the explanation. ‘They were all connoisseurs, men of great taste and of course wealth too. All three were collectors, and they were all besotted with me, so in their memory I like to display all their treasures.’

  With extreme caution, Heather threaded her way through the Aladdin’s cave, only to stop dead in her tracks at sight of a large black cat which uncurled itself from a deep chair. Heather’s cat allergy kicked straight in, she snorted and sneezed so energetically, bent almost double, and wept so copiously, that Mrs de Pomfret, understandably misunderstanding, exclaimed: ‘Oh, please do not feel sorry for me, I am quite happy without my past husbands. It is most kind of you to sympathize so.’

  Between sn
eezes Heather explained the cause of her suffering, whereupon Mrs de Pomfret led her into a small room. Recovering, Heather drew up sharply when faced with a stuffed brown bear, standing upright on its back legs. She put out a hand to steady herself, but jerked it back as she noticed a slight movement among the grizzly hairs.

  Mrs de Pomfret launched into a potted history of her matrimonial life. She had married at eighteen, straight from her Swiss finishing school, a pleasant man but weak – she dismissed Clarence as if he were a cup of under-brewed Earl Grey. She had been so devastatingly pretty that weeks after Clarence was killed in the Great War, she had accepted the proposal of Leopold, on leave from his regiment.

  Alas, Leopold proved no more bullet-proof than Clarence, and hours after his return to the fighting in France he was fatally shot. Once again Etheldreda donned her widow’s weeds. Black suited her, especially black lace, and it was when wearing a particularly fetching Parisian chapeau noir with a spotted veil that her carriage had broken down in Hyde Park and Everard, taking his usual restorative morning promenade after a convivial evening, had rushed to the rescue. They had lived a life of content, with Etheldreda organizing all their activities, which admirably suited Everard’s indolent and pleasure-seeking nature.

  True to himself, Everard was knocking back whisky on a grouse moor when, conforming to the pattern of Etheldreda’s husbands, he was felled by a fellow sportsman’s stray bullet. Etheldreda shed tears of irritation and set about finding a husband who might break the pattern. But the few men who had crossed her path since 1938 had not been attracted by the fading looks and sharp tongue of a middle-aged shrew. Etheldreda had confided her troubles to her ever-helpful dearest friend the Lady Chairman.

  As Heather walked back to the office, deep in thought, she felt a tickle on her wrist. As she scratched, the skin reddened, and more tickles expanded into itches, which started to throb. Looking closely she was horrified to recall her early knowledge of animals and to recognize the unmistakable signs. ‘Fleas!’ she yelped as she opened the office door. ‘That appalling, snobbish, conceited, heartless female has a cat with fleas! And they hop about on the bear too! A dead bear,’ she added hurriedly as Mary put a protective hand to her throat. ‘Not as horrific as the Sheikh’s live falcon, granted, but certainly enough to deter any suitor. It is imperative that we find her a husband or we’ll never get shot of her.’