The Bohemian Girl

by Frances Vernon

  ‘Such an amusing girl you are,’ said Edward. ‘Love.’

  ‘Well, what else did he say?’

  ‘Well, darling, he pointed out that I wasn’t under age, and he said of course he wouldn’t attempt to do as Clancarty did with poor little Dunlo last year. Dashed good of him, wasn’t it!’ said Edward into her lap. ‘Doesn’t want more scandal than is strictly necessary. Besides, my love, he never liked Clancarty.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kitty. ‘And I’ll have him know that I’m not such a namby-pamby creature as Belle Bilton, with her bastard kid, and her self-pity, and marrying Lord Dunlo while living with that other poor chap! Oh, I don’t deny she was innocent of adultery proper – I’m glad they gave her flowers at the Empire, I’m sure. But talk about a girl with no character!’

  ‘Yes, darling love.’

  ‘And now she’ll be moping herself to death in Ireland. Well, I’ve no intention of doing that, Teddy-love. We’re going to be in Society. Are we not, sir?’

  ‘’Course we are!’

  ‘Pity your Mater didn’t quite commit herself to presenting me at court, ain’t it?’ said Kitty, putting her hands on her hips and raising one eyebrow up to her hairline.

  ‘A damn’ shame.’

  ‘Yes, well, we shan’t let it trouble us.’

  Edward raised his head from her lap. ‘You’ll win her round, Kitty, in time. She’s a grand old girl in her way, don’t you know, and less of a snob than many women.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Fact is, the only thing she can’t stand is what she calls impropriety. Once she knows you’re not that way inclined –’

  ‘That I wasn’t your mistress before I married you?’ said Kitty, swinging round from the waist. ‘But who’ll make her believe that? Or anyone believe it – though we could hardly have lived more respectably, I made sure enough of that! Look at this house, let to Deans and whatnot – I’m not sure it wouldn’t have been better for us to have made a splash from the start.’

  ‘They’ll have to believe it,’ said Edward.

  ‘There’s one economy we’re not going to make,’ said Kitty, getting up from the bed. ‘No more hired broughams and hansoms, Teddy. We’re going to Long Acre tomorrow to buy a carriage – a victoria – and you can go to Tattersalls’ for a nice pair of tits. You and I are going to drive in the Park, my boy, morning and evening, I’ll learn to ride, and first thing of all, you can send the notice of our marriage to the newspapers. After which I’ll start leaving cards. And now,’ she said, ‘you can help me dress, as I said, and then get yourself ready for Frascati’s!’

  ‘Dear Kitty, I do so love you,’ said Edward after a slight hesitation, in which both stood quite still, and looked at each other. He turned away, put his monocle in his eye, and whisked Kitty’s evening dress off the bedroom screen.

  *

  Lady Blentham’s vision of Kitty’s physical appearance was remarkably accurate. She guessed at the large breasts, black hair, little features and big dark eyes, but in her imagination the actress was not a small creature, but as tall as her son. She could not quite decide whether Kitty would have some influence over Edward or would, one day, be a whining overweight crying at her husband’s every subtle snub.

  Diana, who had gone to visit her mother in her boudoir after Edward’s quitting the house, and had been allowed to stay, watched Angelina making little dabs at her blotter with a dry pen. She herself was sitting as upright as her mother, with her hands folded in her lap. They had barely spoken and did not intend to speak; Diana because she did not know where it would be tactful to begin, and Lady Blentham because the subject of actresses and Edward could not be discussed with a girl. If Diana tried to talk about it, she would have to be silenced. In spite of this, the two women did not want to separate, and they continued to sit in silence, thinking about Kitty.

  Diana’s picture of Edward’s wife did not resemble Angelina’s. She imagined her to be fair and slim and graceful, with a light foreign accent and deep grey eyes. The question of whether Edward was to rule Kitty, or the other way about, did not occur to her: she thought only of how brilliantly charming the woman must be to marry above her station at her age. Diana wanted quite fiercely to meet and impress her, but she knew she would not for years, unless her mother gave way.

  Idly, but almost seriously, she considered becoming an actress herself. It must really be possible to run away and go on the stage, as Kitty Dupree must have done. She was learning, she thought: it was not, after all, like going to another planet. Diana’s lips formed the words, ‘I would be good at it’, but not enough sound came out to distract Angelina.

  For years, Diana had happily imagined herself running off to sea disguised as a boy, or fighting in an old-fashioned battle without guns, or becoming a second Miss Nightingale; and her picture of herself as a very dashing actress had been much like these other visions: shining, but suitable only for bedtime. She had never seen any play but an undistinguished matinee performance of Macbeth, of which she had not understood the whole though the roll of the words had inspired her to write several poems. The real theatre had seemed a rather dull place in a way; for she had heard too many rumours of the stage’s being golden, wicked, and gay, to be altogether pleased with acted Shakespeare.

  Now someone from that other theatre-world, which it seemed did really exist, had stepped into her family; and the thought could only elate her. Smiling awkwardly at her mother’s back, grateful to Angelina for allowing her to be there, Diana enjoyed a realistic fantasy of finding out where Kitty lived with Edward, of slipping out of the house, taking a hansom and going to call on her alone. ‘I will,’ she whispered.

  Angelina turned. ‘Did you say anything, Diana?’

  ‘No, Mamma!’

  Angelina thought of asking her to go and do something suitable, but she was so much distressed at the moment that no occupation for Diana came quickly to mind.

  She remembered the scandal there had been last year, when Lord Dunlo had married an actress and his father Lord Clancarty had hired detectives to try and prove that the woman was not only fallen before marriage, but an adulteress as well. No one had admired his behaviour: Angelina herself had thought him vulgar and tyrannical. Her hand trembled, as she wildly imagined being vulgar, hiring detectives herself.

  She had read a few detective stories by Arthur Conan Doyle in the Strand Magazine, and rather enjoyed them in spite of her proud out-of-date suspicion of all that was made up. Now she pictured herself going to Mr Sherlock Holmes in Baker Street. She saw herself explaining that she did not want to bring any case, or do anything at all: that she only wanted to know perfectly, exactly, whether the actress was in fact technically virtuous, for that would make a very great difference to the Blenthams and Society. Female unchastity did not so much shock Angelina as fill her with shivering rage. She knew she ought not to abominate others’ vice quite so intensely, and she made resentful apologies for her intensity in church.

  Flushed at the thought of her own nonsensical fantasy about detectives, Lady Blentham turned to Diana and said: ‘Thank you for sitting with me, Diana. Now – do go back to Mademoiselle, please darling! I’m sure she’s in the blue room, and will provide you with something to do.’

  Diana jumped up and murmured a cross, ‘Very well, Mamma.’

  Her mother did not correct her, and when the door shut behind her daughter with rude slowness, she got up herself, went through to the bedroom and looked down at her wide stiff bed. Suddenly, as she stood there, Angelina no longer felt tired or cursed by the world. She had work to do in crushing a scandal. She would not crush a person, that would be unkind.

  Diana’s irritation and disappointment lasted only till she reached the top of the main stairs and sat down. She had no intention of going to the improvised schoolroom where Mademoiselle lived: she hoped none of the maids would discover her here, and make a sympathetic nuisance of herself. Diana glanced at the roof-window above her, and noticed that the rain was over, and that dark but very clear yellow sunlight
was striking through the filthy glass. Her face was warmed by it.

  Although she so longed to come out into Society and cease to be an innocent, Diana had until today thought she was weary of life itself, sceptical of all she was told though she had little material with which to fight it. Now, Diana thought, it was rather nice to discover that one was still truly young, and had ideals, ambitions, curiosity and enthusiasm for unconventional things; and she even wondered how many other possessing states of mind might turn out to be as unreal as the cynicism of clever sixteen.

  CHAPTER 4

  AT THE QUEEN’S DRAWING-ROOM, AND IN ROTTEN ROW

  Diana was standing in a crowd of other debutantes and chaperones, some twelve feet past the top of the stairs. For the second time since her arrival at Buckingham Palace, she allowed herself to look about her instead of merely peering ahead, and she turned her face carefully to avoid disarranging her headdress. She could see nothing but women dressed exactly as she was, shafts of unflattering daylight, and details of decoration much like that of a new hotel. Diana took a deep breath, and looked down at her corsage.

  She wore an evening dress of cream silk so deep in colour it was almost yellow, with short puffed sleeves, a low neck, and a trimming of seed pearls. A three-yard-long train lay over her arm, and a white veil hung down her back, pinned to her head by three little ostrich plumes. Her dress was new, but the feathers, train and veil had been worn both by Violet and by Maud.

  Diana had not lost her looks in the past year, as she and Lady Blentham had once feared she would, but she was a handsome girl rather than a beauty. She was five feet nine inches tall, with wide rounded shoulders, a deep bosom, a long waist, and legs and arms like well-turned columns. During the last few months, she had grown an inch and had put on weight, though her mother had frowned on this.

  Her long sloping neck was perfect, and so was the classical nose which she had inherited from her mother, but Diana’s other beauties were more original. Her eyes were oval and full-lidded, and their irises were a rare, deep auburn brown, rimmed with a line of black. When she smiled, the outer corners of her eyes dipped downwards in two odd little wrinkles. She had straight, rather thick black eyebrows which contrasted with her ruddy hair. Her mouth was wide, full and red, too heavy for fashion, and beneath it there was a round cleft chin. She had a white skin with correctly-coloured cheeks, but across the bridge of her nose there were several tiny freckles which nothing could remove. She was sometimes criticised for being a very big girl, Junoesque, statuesque, and decidedly the goddess type, which was an excellent thing in a woman of thirty, but not in a girl of eighteen. Diana did not object to being large as she would have done to being a little slender thing; although occasionally she lacked dancing-partners because shorter men did not like to be seen standing up with her.

  ‘What’s the time?’ said a small skinny girl with freckles like Diana’s, to her twin sister who was examining a mark on her train.

  ‘However should I know, Sylvia? Oh, heavens, do look at this. I told you you stepped on it when we were getting into the coach!’

  Her sister was not disturbed. ‘Do you suppose it’s too late for the Queen?’

  ‘Oh, it can’t be more than half-past two,’ said Diana, who knew them both slightly.

  They turned to her in surprise, then the smaller twin said quite confidingly: ‘I do so hope the Queen won’t have retired by the time we do get to the Presence Room, or the Throne Room, or whatever it is one calls it! Don’t you? Whatever is the point of going through all this, and then not being presented to the Queen herself?’

  ‘Well, in a way, I rather hope it is the Princess,’ said Diana, ‘because then we’ll simply have to curtsey. I’ve been dreading having to be kissed by the Queen for weeks. I am so big, you see, I’ll have to bend down to her, and it will look very odd. I suppose!’ Talking about it made her feel nervous: she had not been very nervous before.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said the small girl. ‘Oh, that doesn’t apply to us, we only have to kiss her hand, don’t we, Mabel?’

  ‘I suppose your mother’s presenting you, Miss Blentham?’ said the twin with a black mark on her train.

  ‘Yes. Is yours not?’

  The girl looked at the ceiling. ‘Oh yes. You see, although our cousin Lady Mount Colber has the entrée at Court, she’s been unwell lately, and couldn’t present us although she was to have done so.’

  Her sister said: ‘Yes, we were so looking forward to driving down Constitution Hill! Now I’ll have to marry a Cabinet Minister, or something, if I want to do that!’

  ‘I’m sorry she’s not well,’ said Diana. ‘I think I was introduced to her only the other day.’

  ‘Oh, Mrs Lyon, I’ve lost my ticket, my card!’ another girl behind her whispered frantically. ‘I’m sure I’ve lost it!’

  ‘You gave it to me, my dear, here it is. Now put it in your glove, your left glove – remember you’ll have to remove your right.’

  Lady Blentham, who had been separated from her daughter by the careful pushing of the crowd, pressed gently past this couple and rejoined her. ‘It isn’t altogether elegant, is it, Mamma?’ murmured Diana.

  ‘No, Diana. Hush,’ Angelina replied, smiling, as they shifted forward into another one of the anterooms, guided by fussing male courtiers.

  Both were thirsty, but otherwise not too uncomfortable. Lady Blentham had insisted on their drinking nothing before setting out from Queen Anne’s Gate: the journey down the Mall had taken over an hour, they had been waiting in the Palace a long time already, and it would be hours more before they were at home and able to use a commode.

  *

  Diana walked forward, with her train at last spread out behind her, thinking of the moment when she would have to step back on it. It was the Queen sitting there, a tiny fat black-and-white old figure with the blue ribbon spread across her bosom and a veil on her head as in all the prints made of her since the Prince Consort’s death. Diana felt her diaphragm thumping inside her and her cheeks turning red. The Lord Chamberlain’s announcement of her name was still sounding in her ears.

  Diana carried on. She had not, she thought, expected the Queen to look so ancient and so sad and bored, and yet so like her portraits. The Princess of Wales was beside her, the Prince of Wales was standing some way away, laughing in the way everyone said was rather German, and there was another royal lady, whom her mother had whispered was Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll. Courtiers were everywhere and none seemed to be watching.

  The Queen smiled just as Diana manoeuvred into position before her, then put her face close to the girl’s and murmured something. Then Diana, still very hot, stepped backwards, did not trip, curtseyed to the other members of the Royal Family, and received a broad compliment from the Prince of Wales which angered Lady Blentham.

  In the supper-room, where there were in fact no refreshments, only a crowd of over-relaxed people, Diana turned to her mother and opened her mouth. ‘You did very well, darling,’ said Angelina, before her daughter could speak.

  ‘Oh,’ said Diana, looking round. ‘It’s supposed to be the climax of one’s life, isn’t it, of one’s Season, at all events – rather like getting married. I supposed it was rather like that.’ She rubbed her cheek hard with her gloved knuckles. ‘Better than a ball in many ways. I –’

  Diana at times had a deliberate awareness of herself and her surroundings, which her mother said was unusual in a girl of her age. She wondered now whether she would ever have a daughter to present at Court, and what Court would be like in twenty years or so. She thought, quite unnecessarily, for it was so obviously true, that now this ritual was over she could never go back to the idle peace of the schoolroom. Because she was thoroughly free of the boredom of the schoolroom, adult parties would never be so interesting to her again as they had been these past few months. Holding her eyes wide, Diana thought suddenly that she must now think of something else to do, but she did not know what.

  ‘Don’t scrub your face li
ke that, Diana. You don’t want it to smell of cleaning-petrol, surely?’

  ‘It’s been kissed, Mamma.’

  Angelina frowned. ‘My dear, I never expected you to be so ill-at-ease.’

  ‘No. It’s – I had a very odd – vision, of a kind, when I was curtseying just now. I thought I was you, and that one of those men behind her – must be the Prince Consort. He wasn’t yet dead, was he, when you were presented?’

  Lady Blentham was quite pleased with this fancy of her daughter’s.

  ‘No. I came out in eighteen fifty-eight, as you know. I can tell you that it was very much more difficult when one had to manage a crinoline, as well as a train!’

  Diana smiled with her mother.

  Friends came up to them, and separated them, and Diana had to listen to other girls’ descriptions of their fears and imaginings and what had actually happened. One very silly young woman, whose particularly strict mother was out of earshot, then mentioned the Prince of Wales’ appearance at the Drawing-Room, and spoke in a whisper about his involvement in the recent Tranby Croft scandal.

  Her attempt to shock raised Diana’s spirits to a point of high gaiety. She changed the subject in an obvious manner and, to illustrate a point about lawn tennis, took one of the plumes out of head-dress and threw it in the air. She watched it tumble down among the upturned pink faces of nice girls who, laughing, thought she must be very odd. Diana wondered then why she had done it but reflected that at least Lady Blentham had not seen, and would probably never know.

  *

  Violet peered up at the chestnuts overhanging Rotten Row, and wished that she were as beautiful as Diana. Her thick nose, too-curly hair and plumpness had not improved with time, but people said she had a very sweet, lively expression. ‘Didie, why am I not as pretty as you, do you suppose?’ she said, and smiled.