by Eva Ibbotson
‘Go and sit at the other end of the lab, Jenkins,’ he ordered now, and the huge muscular Welshman ambled off obediently to sit beside Dr Henderson, a refugee from the crowded Botany lab, who was bubbling carbon dioxide through a tank in which an elderly parsnip silently respired.
Edward demonstrated the recti muscles of the eye and began on the tricky dissection of the cranial nerves. The best time to propose to Harriet, he had decided – and for them to become officially engaged – was at the St Philip’s May Ball. The Mortons’ permission for him to take Harriet (in a suitably chaperoned party of course) was tantamount to an expectation of this sort. He had set aside an adequate sum of money for a ring and after the engagement would be able to work for at least two years without further interruptions before it was necessary to make preparations for their wedding. The thought of waltzing with Harriet brought a faint smile to his long and studious face. He had seen her first at a performance of the B minor Mass in King’s College Chapel and been much taken by her stillness and concentration – been much taken too, it had to be admitted, by her delicate profile and the way one pointed ear peeped out between the strands of her loose hair. Of course it had been gratifying to find that she was the daughter of the Merlin Professor – it would be hypocritical to pretend otherwise – but the knowledge that his feelings for her were basically disinterested gave him an enduring and justifiable satisfaction.
Half an hour later the students had dispersed and were bent over their own dissections while Edward, his hands behind his back, walked slowly between the benches, putting in a word here, an admonition there. Even Jenkins had recovered and was working busily.
‘Please, Dr Finch-Dutton, I don’t know what this is?’
Edward flinched. It was a girl who had spoken – an unsuitably pretty brunette who worked with two other Girtonians on a separate bench. The girls were the plague of his life. He was almost certain that they taunted him deliberately, for his detestation of women students was as well-known and as strong as that of his future father-in-law. Last week’s practical, when the class had dissected the reproductive system, had been a nightmare. Though he had particularly instructed Price to give the girls a female fish, the technician had failed in his duty as so often before and they had called him incessantly to demonstrate organs whose names it was quite atrociously embarrassing to pronounce in the presence of ladies.
But today there was no danger and having explained to the brunette, on whose slender neck a cluster of escaping curls most disconcertingly danced as she bent over her work, that she was in the presence of the trigeminal nerve, he retreated to the shelter of Henderson’s parsnip.
At five, the practical concluded, he made his way along the corridor to his corner of the research lab where a neat row of black boxes – each containing a hundred perfectly mounted microscope slides of flattened fleas – awaited him. He had classified (mainly by means of the bristles edging the head capsule) some eighteen species, but this work would take a lifetime. Not that he regretted taking on the Aphaniptera . . . his supervisor had been perfectly right when he said that fleas were virgin territory . . . but before he placed the next slide under his binocular, Edward allowed himself a long and lusting look at the serried rows of butterflies pinned in cases on the wall above him. Fleas were Edward’s bread and butter, but the Lepidoptera were his passion.
Punctually at six thirty, he tidied up and bicycled back to his rooms. But before he prepared to shave and change into his dinner-jacket, he sent one of the college servants to the buttery for a pork pie. Edward had not yet dined at the Mortons’, but he had twice taken luncheon there and knew that it was best to be prepared.
It was to be a rather special dinner-party – the first time that Edward had been to dinner and the first chance for Marchmont (the new Classics lecturer) and his young wife to meet the Professor in the relaxed informality of his home.
So Louisa was taking trouble. In the dining-room grate, behind the iron grille of the fireguard, at least half-a-dozen coals were actually alight, constituting by the standards of Scroope Terrace a blazing fire. Moreover she had permitted the maids to replace the electric light bulbs which she had removed, for reasons of economy, from the central chandelier. The carpet, with its squares of brown and mustard, had been freshly brushed with tea-leaves, the Professor’s portrait in cap and gown hung straight above the sideboard and though she had baulked at the purchase of flowers so early in the year, the cup that her brother had won as an undergraduate in the Horatian oratory contest made, she thought now, an excellent epergne.
Descending to the basement, she found in the kitchen a similar air of festive abandonment. To her everyday soup of turnips and bacon bones Cook had added chopped carrots, giving the broth a pleasant yellowish tint. A cold codling waited in liquid for its sauce tartare and the leg of mutton (a real bargain from an enterprising butcher who specialised in cheap meat from injured but perfectly healthy animals which had to be despatched in situ) was already sizzling in the range.
‘That seems to be all right, Cook. What about the dessert?’
Cook motioned her head towards a large plate on which a coffee blancmange, just turned out of its mould, still shivered faintly.
‘I’m going to stick glacé cherries round it,’ offered Cook.
‘I must say that seems a little excessive,’ said Louisa. She frowned, thinking. Still, it was a dinner-party. ‘All right, then – but halve them first.’
She made her way upstairs again and was just in time to encounter her niece coming in from her dancing class.
It was always difficult for Harriet to leave the friendly, interesting streets and re-enter the dark house where the temperature generally seemed to be several degrees lower than that outside. Today, with Dubrov’s words still sounding in her ears, she stood more forlornly than usual in the hallway, lost in her unattainable dreams – and justifiably annoyed her aunt.
‘For goodness sake, Harriet, don’t dawdle! Have you forgotten we have dinner guests? I want you changed and in the drawing-room by seven o’clock.’
‘Yes, Aunt Louisa.’
‘You are to wear the pink crêpe de chine. And you can put up your hair.’
In her attic Harriet slowly washed, changed into the hideous dress her aunt had bought in the January sales and embarked on the battle to put up the long, soft hair which only curved slightly at the tips and needed a battery of pins to keep it in the coronet of plaits which the Trumpington Ladies had deemed suitable. She would have given anything for a quiet evening in which to relive what had happened . . . anything not to face Edward with his pompous and proprietary manner and the underlying kindness which made it impossible to dislike him as one longed to do.
When she had finished she went over to the bookcase and took down a volume of poetry, turning the pages until she found what she was looking for: a poem simply called ‘Life’:
I asked no other thing,
No other was denied.
I offered Being for it;
The mighty merchant smiled.
Brazil? He twirled a button
Without a glance my way
‘But Madam, is there nothing else,
That we can show today?’
She stood for a long time looking at the verses in which Emily Dickinson had chronicled her heartbreak. Loneliness had taught Harriet that there was always someone who understood – it was just that so very often they were dead, and in a book.
Two hours later the dinner-party was in full swing, though this was perhaps not the phrase which would have occurred to pretty Mrs Marchmont, supping her soup with a slight air of disbelief. She had been warned about the Mortons’ dinner-parties, but she had not been warned enough.
At the head of the table, the Professor was explaining to Mr Marchmont the iniquity of the latest Senate ruling on the allocation of marks in the Classical Tripos. Edward was valiantly discussing the ‘dreadful price of everything’ with Aunt Louisa, while in the grate the handful of smouldering coa
ls – kicked too hard by the underpaid parlourmaid – blackened and expired.
The soup was cleared. The cod, whose sauce tartare surprisingly had come out slightly blue, arrived.
‘Well, Harriet, and how did you fare today?’ asked the Professor, addressing his daughter for the first time.
‘All right, thank you, Father. I went to my dancing lesson.’
‘Ah, yes.’ The Professor, his duty done, would have turned back to his neighbour but Harriet, usually so silent, spoke to him once more.
‘A man came to see Madame Lavarre. A Russian. He’s going to take a ballet company up the Amazon to Manaus. To perform there.’
Edward, assessing his piece of fish, which did not, after all, appear to be a fillet, said, ‘A most interesting part of the world, one understands. With a quite extraordinary flora and fauna.’
Harriet looked at him gratefully. And possessed by what madness she did not know, she continued, ‘He offered me a job . . . as a dancer – for the length of the tour.’
Her remark affected those present profoundly, but in different ways. Her father laid down his fork as a flush spread over his sharp-featured face, Louisa opened her mouth and sat gaping at her niece, while Edward’s shirt-front – responding to his sudden exhalation of breath – gave off a sharp and sudden ‘pop’.
‘He offered you a job?’ said the Professor slowly. ‘You? My daughter!’ He stared incredulously at Harriet. ‘I have never in all my life heard of such an impertinence!’
‘No!’ Harriet, knowing how useless it was, could not resist at least trying to make him see. ‘It’s an honour. A real one. To be chosen – to be considered of professional standard. And it’s a good thing to do – to take art to people who are hungry for it. Properly, objectively good like in Marcus Aurelius.’
‘How dare you, Harriet? How dare you argue with me!’ His daughter’s invocation of the great Roman Stoic, clearly his own property, had dangerously fanned the flames of the Professor’s wrath. He glared at Louisa; she should have been firmer with the girl, taken her away from that unsuitable Academy years ago. Though actually Louisa had said often enough that she saw no point in wasting money on dancing lessons, and it was he who had said that Harriet could continue. Was it because he could still remember Sophie waltzing so gracefully beneath the lamplit trees in that Swiss hotel? If so, he had been suitably punished for his sentimentality.
‘Please, Father. Please, let me go!’ Harriet, whom one could usually silence with a look, seemed suddenly to have taken leave of her senses. ‘You didn’t let me stay on at school, you didn’t allow me to go to France with the Fergusons because they were agnostics . . . well, I understood that – yes, really, I understood. But this . . . they take a ballet mistress, it’s absolutely respectable and I would be back in the autumn.’ She had pushed away her plate and was gripping the edge of the table, the intensity of her longing turning the usually clear, grave face into an image from a pietà: a wild-eyed and beseeching Magdalene. ‘Please, Father,’ said Harriet, ‘I implore you to let me go.’
A scene! A scene at the dinner-table. Overwhelmed by this ultimate in disasters, Louisa bowed her head over her plate.
‘You will drop this subject immediately, Harriet,’ barked the Professor. ‘You are embarrassing our guests.’
‘No. I won’t drop it.’ Harriet had become very pale, but her voice was steady. ‘You have always thought dancing was frivolous and silly, but it isn’t – it’s the most marvellous thing in the world. You can say things when you dance that you can’t say any other way. People have danced for the glory of God since the beginning of time. David danced before the Ark of the Covenant. . . And this journey . . . this adventure . . .’ She turned imploringly to Edward. ‘You must know what a wonder it would be?’
‘Oh, no, Harriet! No, the Amazon is a most unsuitable place for a woman. For anyone!’ From the plethora of dangerous diseases and potentially lethal animals, poor Edward – meaning only to scotch this dreadful topic once and for all – now had the misfortune to select the candiru. ‘There is a fish there,’ he said earnestly, ‘which swims into people’s orifices when they are bathing and by means of backwards pointing spines becomes impossible to dislodge
A moan from Louisa brought him to a halt. Orifices had been mentioned at dinner, and before ladies. Orifices and a scene in one evening! Casting about in her mind, she could not see that she had done anything to deserve such a disgrace. And as poor Edward flushed a deep crimson and Mrs Marchmont suppressed a nervous giggle, the Professor rose and faced his daughter.
‘You will leave the table immediately, Harriet, and go to your room.’ And when she did not rise instantly: ‘I think you heard me!’
‘Yes.’ But she remained perfectly still, looking at her father, and in a moment of aberration he had the mad idea that she was pitying him.
Then she gave a little nod as though some transaction was now completed, and with the fluid grace that was her legacy from that damnable dancing place, she rose, walked to the door and was gone.
Everyone now made Herculean efforts, but it had to be admitted that even by Morton standards the dinnerparty was not proving a conspicuous success. Edward, torn between fear lest Harriet after all should turn out to have ‘ideas’, and regret that she had been punished like a naughty child, was not his usual self. Mrs Marchmont in her thin dress was so busy trying not to shiver that she contributed little. It was left to valiant Mr Marchmont to sustain the conversation, which he did heroically until, biting into his mutton, he inexplicably encountered a lead pellet and broke a tooth.
Alone in her attic, Harriet threw herself down on the bed. Growing up in this gloomy house, she had taught herself a discipline for survival in which the weakness of tears played no part.
Yet now she cried as she had not cried since her mother’s death. Cried for her lovely, lost adventure, for the unattainable forests and magical rivers she would never see; cried for the camaraderie of fellow artists and a job well done.
But her real grief lay deeper. She was honest enough to admit that few girls in her position would have been allowed to travel to the Amazon. It was not her father’s refusal that so devastated her now; it was his bigotry, his hatred, his determination not to understand. And lying there, her hair in damp strands across her crumpled face, Harriet gave up the long, long struggle to love her father and her aunt.
It was for this loss above all that she wept. She had learned, during the long years of her childhood, to live without receiving love. To live without giving it seemed more than she could bear.
2
Harriet had always loved words: tasted them on her tongue, thought of them as friends. The word serendipity was one she valued especially, its meaning rooted in the world of fairy tales: ‘The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.’
It was this word she thought of later when she remembered her encounter with a small boy called Henry in the maze at Stavely Hall. All her subsequent adventures stemmed from this one meeting and from the trust she saw in the child’s eyes; nothing she experienced afterwards was more unlikely or more strange.
The visit to Stavely, which occurred a week after the ill-fated dinner-party, was the climax of the year for the ladies of the Trumpington Tea Circle. Weeks of preparation had gone into the expedition, for Stavely was forty miles to the west in the rolling Suffolk countryside and had awaited the benison of motor transport to make it a comfortable day’s outing. Letters had been sent, the substantial fee mentioned by Mrs Brandon for a tour of the house and permission to picnic in her gardens had been agreed. Now as they waited outside the house of their president, Mrs Belper, for the arrival of the charabanc, the ladies found it necessary to remind Harriet again and again of her good fortune in being included in the party.
These ladies of the Tea Circle had presided over Harriet’s young life like a flock of black birds in a Greek play. There were some thirty of them who had met originally in the home of Hermione Belper, the full-bosomed wife
of St Philip’s meek and undersized bursar, in protest against the carryings-on of the Association of University Wives, which not only admitted coloureds, foreigners and Jews, but had raised money – in a series of coffee mornings – for the purpose of enabling the Fitzwilliam Museum to buy a painting which had turned out to be of a lady not only nude, but crudely and specifically naked.
Mrs Belper had proposed the formation of a new Tea Circle to uphold the values of old-fashioned womanhood and of the Empire, and since her house – only a stone’s throw from Louisa’s – was named Trumpington Villa, the unsuspecting suburb of Trumpington found itself lending its name to the new association.
It was the Tea Circle ladies who, through Louisa, decided what Harriet should wear, which families were suitable for her to visit and where she could go unchaperoned; it was they – scattered like an army of secret agents through the town – who reported to Louisa when her niece removed her gloves in public or had been seen talking in far too friendly a manner to a shop assistant.
In the eyes of these ladies, Harriet’s good fortune was all the greater because Edward Finch-Dutton, too, was to come to Stavely Hall.
The decision to include a man in the party was one which Mrs Belper and Aunt Louisa had debated for hours. The advantages of inviting Edward were clear: his mother had been on visiting terms with old General Brandon (the owner of Stavely) when he was alive and this fact, if mentioned in advance, would greatly increase their chances of being welcomed in person by his daughter-in-law, who in the continuing absence of her husband was Stavely’s reigning mistress. Both Mrs Belper and Louisa were passionate visitors of stately homes and lived in constant hope of converting a mere ‘sighting’ – that of a distant marquis crouched over his herbaceous border or a viscountess entering her carriage, for example – into an actual meeting during which sentences were exchanged. And Isobel Brandon, a grand-daughter of the Earl of Lexbury, was rumoured to be red-haired, beautiful and elegant beyond belief.
