The Champagne Girls

by Tessa Barclay

  Instead, Nora suddenly turned back and ran downstairs. She went through the groups of girls to the headmistress’s room. Mademoiselle Hermilot was just sitting down to her desk when she rushed in. ‘Madame, Madame, I must speak to you!’

  ‘Nora! What’s wrong ‒’

  ‘Is it a punishment? Am I sent away because ‒’

  ‘A punishment?’ Elvire Hermilot went quickly round her desk to put an arm about the child. ‘Of course not, dear. What made you think ‒’

  ‘Didi said she was sent away ‒’

  ‘Oh, Didi … she likes to make herself the heroine of a drama. She was sent to board because it was thought she might work harder, that’s all. Nora dear, you mustn’t let yourself get in a state about it. Cousin Marc just thought you’d like a few nights in school while Cousin Gaby ‒’

  ‘What’s really wrong with Cousin Gaby?’ Nora interrupted. ‘I don’t really understand ‒ it’s something about the baby, but …’

  Mademoiselle Hermilot disagreed with the fashion of keeping young girls ignorant. In a year or so, Nora would be asking questions about her body that would have to be answered, so why not tell her the rest, instead of these fables about babies being found among the vine rows or brought in the doctor’s little black bag.

  She knew, in fact, that all sorts of stories about sex circulated among the older girls. If she had had her way, she would have had them all into her office in small groups, for a short sensible lecture giving them the truth. But she knew most of the parents would object violently. They wanted their daughters given enough education to hold their own in polite society, to do the household accounts and supervise the staff. Once that was done, they would go to finishing school to be taught how to be attractive to young men.

  Somewhere between that and marriage, a girl was expected to learn all she needed to know about the physical side of sex. Hints from her mother which gradually grew more detailed, or conversations with an experienced older woman … Or sometimes direct experiment, greatly frowned upon by the more rigid families but known to be more and more common these days.

  Somehow the system worked. Yet Mademoiselle Hermilot wished that in cases such as this, she could take a more direct line. Little Nora Tramont was in a state of extreme distress heightened by the secrecy that convention demanded.

  Elvire Hermilot was an old friend of the Tramonts, bound to them by suffering they had shared at the time of the Dreyfus Case. They had kept in touch intermittently, and it was due to their financial backing that she had been able to open this little school in Rheims.

  She suddenly decided to take matters into her own hands. Friendship gave her the right. ‘Close the door, Nora,’ she said.

  When the child had done so she beckoned her to a chair in front of her desk. She herself took up a position half-seated on it, so that her linen coat-dress showed rather more leg than she would have approved of had she been aware of it.

  ‘Nora, I’m going to tell you what I was told on the telephone this morning. Your cousin is in danger of losing her baby.’

  ‘But how can she lose the baby? She hasn’t gone to fetch it yet.’

  ‘Ladies don’t really go to hospital to fetch babies, Nora. Cousin Gaby has carried the child inside her for eight months now ‒’

  ‘Ah,’ breathed Nora. Now so much was explained ‒ the change in her cousin, the unfashionable clothes she’d been wearing recently. She looked expectantly at the headmistress.

  ‘Something’s gone wrong. It happens sometimes. The doctor is trying to help your cousin keep the baby safe. So you see you’ve been sent to me just so that they don’t have to worry about you for a few days. The house will be disorganized, I expect, and then everything will settle down again and you can go back. But I want you to understand that you’ve done nothing wrong, that you haven’t been sent away because they’re displeased with you. It’s just … you know …’ She sought in her mind for an everyday comparison. ‘When we have the school repainted, we wait till the holidays, when all the girls have gone. That’s because it wouldn’t be very nice for them, would it, trying to do their lessons with dustsheets over the desks and the carpets taken up. That’s a bit what it will be like at home for a day or two, everybody very busy and perhaps being very anxious and preoccupied. You understand?’

  Nora nodded in thankfulness. The relief at having some certainty at last was like a tide of warmth. To Mademoiselle Hermilot’s surprise, she jumped up and threw her arms around her. ‘Thank you, Madame,’ she whispered. ‘I was so afraid it was something terrible …’

  But in a day or two she learned that her relief had been mistaken, that in fact it was something terrible. Jacques came to take Nora to the hospital, looking very solemn. ‘Your Cousin Marc is waiting for you. I’m afraid it’s pretty bad, minnow.’

  ‘She’s not … she’s not …?’

  ‘Touch and go,’ said Jacques. He’d heard that a priest had been called, the premature baby had been baptized at once because its chances were almost nil, and Madame herself had received the seventh sacrament. And this poor kid ‒ banished from home, looking lost and scared, white as a sheet. ‘Trust in God, little finch,’ he said, he who since the war had no faith himself. ‘Trust in God, He’s watching over them.’

  When she reached the hospital she was taken by a tall nursing sister in a long white apron to a little ante-room on the first floor. Cousin Marc rose to his feet as she came in. She rushed to him. One look at his face was enough to tell her there was bad news.

  ‘What is it?’ she cried, her voice coming out in a stifled gasp.

  ‘I’m afraid there will be no little brother, Nora. He’s left us already.’

  ‘Oh, Cousin Marc! And Gaby? Is she ‒?’

  ‘She’s still fighting back. She asked for you a while ago but …’

  But the doctors had decided it wasn’t yet time to give up and allow relations to come to a deathbed. They had lost the baby, yes, but the mother could perhaps still be saved. There had been a tremendous loss of blood. Luckily, since the War, there was this new possibility of blood transfusion. A suitable donor had been found among the nursing staff, arrangements were now being made to collect her blood in the prescribed bottle containing 3.8 per cent of sodium nitrate solution to prevent coagulation. This would be administered at once, while further supplies were obtained from the Central Surgical Stores in the city’s main hospital.

  The doctors didn’t want to raise unjustified hopes. Madame Tramont was a very sick woman, with surgical repair work recently carried out and suffering from extreme shock. But she was strong-willed and determined to live. She’d murmured to her husband, only an hour or so ago: ‘Never mind, dear heart. Better luck next time.’

  Better luck next time ‒ when she had just lost a longed-for baby. ‘Such a woman must be saved,’ growled Dr Saumuche, and began the grim battle.

  All that day there was no good news to give to the grey-faced husband and the little girl who clung to his hand. When the June daylight began to fade, Saumuche suggested the child should be sent home to bed.

  ‘Oh no! No, let me stay! I’m not tired, not the least bit tired.’ This although her eyelids were so heavy they drooped like grey curtains over her eyes, and her whole body sagged with fatigue.

  ‘You need your bed, Mademoiselle,’ said the doctor, shaking his head at her.

  ‘No, I don’t. I shouldn’t sleep even if I went to bed!’ She clutched at her cousin, staring up at him.

  ‘Let her stay,’ he said, finding some small comfort in having her there with him. ‘She can nap in the armchair ‒’

  Saumuche sighed. ‘Sister, fetch a pillow and a blanket. How about you, Monsieur Tramont? Would you like us to give you a bed ‒’

  ‘I’m all right, thanks.’

  ‘Some coffee? A bite to eat?’

  ‘No, thank you. But Nora should have some milk.’

  Nora drifted off to sleep in the leather armchair, her head pillowed on one arm and the blanket tucked about her.
She woke with a start in the early morning to hear a blackbird singing with June time vigour on the cherry tree outside.

  For a moment she couldn’t think where she was. Then she saw her cousin through the inner door of the ante-room. She untangled herself from the blanket, tumbled forward to greet him.

  ‘Marc! What’s happened? Is she ‒ is she all right?’

  ‘Yes, thank God. Very weak, and scarcely able to move a muscle. But she wants to see you, Nora.’

  All at once the great dark clouds rolled away. The sun came out for Nora. She pulled down the creased skirt of her grey cotton dress, made tidying gestures at her mousy hair. ‘Can we go at once?’

  ‘Yes, dear, but I want you to be very quiet and good. She’s ‒ you’ll see, she doesn’t look like the Cousin Gaby you know ‒ you mustn’t cry or be upset.’

  ‘No, no, of course not. No, I understand.’

  ‘Very well.’

  He took her hand. He went to the door and tapped. It was opened by a sister holding her rosary in one hand. She put a finger to her lips as she let them pass.

  Cousin Gaby was lying in a bed around which stood Dr Saumuche, a junior doctor, and another nursing sister. By the bed a strange gantry rose, holding a bottle from which a tube went down to Cousin Gaby’s arm.

  The figure in the bed looked very small and, to Nora’s childlike memory, very flat after the plumpness of the last few months. That was because, she told herself quickly on remembering what Mademoiselle Hermilot had said, the baby was gone. She felt tears well up at the thought, but clenched her teeth to hold them back. She had promised Cousin Marc.

  ‘Only a moment,’ Dr Saumuche murmured.

  Marc nodded. He made a little movement with the hand Nora was holding, so that she was urged forward towards the bed on the side not occupied by the blood transfusion.

  ‘Gaby …’

  Her cousin opened her eyes. For a moment it seemed that she didn’t know who had spoken, then her gaze focused, the great dark eyes held recognition.

  ‘My little girl,’ she said, the words like a whisper of wind over grass.

  ‘Everything’s going to be all right,’ Nora said, trying not to let her voice tremble. ‘You’ll be home soon.’

  The faintest of smiles curved the pale lips.

  ‘It’ll be school holidays in a week or two. I’ll be at home all the time. I’ll do everything ‒ I’ll tell the gardeners what you want done and take messages to Monsieur Coubet and ‒’

  ‘Ssh …’ cautioned Saumuche.

  ‘No, let her,’ said Marc. ‘Gaby understands ‒ don’t you, Gaby?’

  Gaby smiled again. Nora arranged her mouth so that she smiled back. She didn’t know if she had the strength to keep this up much longer. Gaby looked so different ‒ so ill, so fragile, so defeated. It was impossible to believe life had treated her like this. Gaby was the mistress of the House of Tramont, the moving spirit, the will that caused everything to have its being. How could she be lying here in a hospital bed at the mercy of strange doctors and a piece of equipment that dripped red liquid into her?

  ‘Go now,’ Gaby whispered. ‘Be good.’

  ‘Yes, Gaby.’ She hesitated. ‘Can I go home instead of school, so I can look after Cousin Marc?’

  Something that might almost have been a laugh came from Gaby Tramont. ‘Of course,’ she said.

  The nursing sister came to take Nora out of the room. Marc Auduron-Tramont remained for a moment longer at the very faintest of movements from his wife. He leaned over to hear what she had to say.

  ‘She’s all we have now,’ Gaby murmured, ‘all we ever shall have.’

  For that was the final verdict. Gaby was going to live, but there would be no more children.

  Marc took her thin hand. ‘We’ll give her all the love we would have given Robert,’ he said. For the child had been a boy, named after Gaby’s father.

  ‘She’s the House of Tramont. It will all belong to her, Marc.’

  All the love, all the possessions …

  Continue reading The Last Heiress by Tessa Barclay …

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