White Feathers
Page 3
Mr Shandlin raised his eyebrows. ‘You have read it? Let me tell you, Miss … ah, Downey, that would be a first.’
‘Sir, I want to know why we are reading the work of a man who advocates the eradication of an entire race. I’m talking about Ireland,’ she continued, as Mr Shandlin looked ever more incredulous. ‘Irish monks kept Europe alive through the Dark Ages when Mr Spenser’s race were still living in huts and fighting with clubs!’
A murmur of dissent began making the rounds. ‘She’s not got any call telling us we live in huts!’ one girl cried, and soon all was mayhem, everyone shouting at Eva, including Sybil, while Mr Shandlin leaned on the edge of his desk, arms folded, regarding them all with a half-smile.
It was not long before Miss Hedges came sprinting down the corridor and launched into the room. ‘Girls!’ Immediate silence fell. She looked icily at the teacher. ‘Mr Shandlin, perhaps you could demonstrate the correct manner of seating for the benefit of these ladies?’
Mr Shandlin, with a huge sigh, got off the table and sat down in his chair, keeping his posture as slovenly as possible. Some of the girls tittered at his defiance. Miss Hedges left, but all was in disarray, and Mr Shandlin dismissed them.
‘I’m sorry,’ Eva said dismally as she shuffled past him on her way out. ‘I ruined your class.’
Mr Shandlin broke into an unexpected grin. ‘Oh, don’t be. You’re the first person in this school who has expressed the slightest interest in anything other than being fattened for the altar. Try to get out of here, if you can manage it at all.’
‘I can’t,’ Eva said. ‘I was lucky to get in here in the first place.’
‘You never know,’ said Mr Shandlin, and he looked like he was about to say more, but there was a knot of girls behind Eva, poking her in the back, and she had no choice but to murmur a goodbye and move on.
Rhona Lewis cornered her later that evening. She followed Eva to the dormitory, where Eva had gone to retrieve her copy of Sturm’s translations of Baudelaire, and she and her friends circled Eva’s bed. ‘I always knew there was something about you,’ she said. ‘Never telling us your background and always so careful with your accent. I could tell you were a bit fishy.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘I’m not impressed, Downey.’
‘I don’t care whether you’re impressed or not,’ Eva retorted with some spirit.
Rhona’s smile got thinner and wider until she was a Cheshire Cat in the middle of the room. ‘Do you find it very different here, after all the potatoes and boiled cabbage you’d get back home? Oh, look, she’s pretending to read. Pretending we’re not here.’
Eva said nothing. Baudelaire’s poor swan dragged its broken wing around the streets of Paris. Like the swan, she knew when she was outnumbered. She put the book down.
‘Then again, perhaps you’d prefer some whiskey. Do your parents drink much of the stuff? Do they fall down at night?’
‘You’re being ridiculous,’ Eva said, trying to sound solid, but her voice was full of doubt and Rhona heard it.
‘Really. I don’t see anyone else here thinking I’m ridiculous.’
‘Sybil would, if she were here.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Rhona said, in a sing-song voice, ‘run to Lady Muck and hide under her skirts. You could be her maid. Irish girls make very good maids when they’re of a mind to do as they’re told. My mother had one once, but we had to dismiss her because she drank.’
Eva flushed and balled her fists by her sides. If she were involved in a fight, chances were Miss Hedges would not take her side; indeed, she might expel her. Besides, she did not want to give Rhona Lewis the satisfaction of thinking that all Irish girls were thick peasants who knew no better than to lash out. But that only prompted Rhona and her cronies to try and rile her for a long time after that, only stopping when Sybil came back into the room. They kept quiet when she was there, oddly enough.
‘You did bring it on yourself, you know,’ Sybil told her at lunch the following day. ‘You didn’t have to show off and blather about Edmund bloody Spenser. It’s not done to be too clever around here.’
‘So I’ve noticed,’ Eva said. ‘You would think those people were eight, not eighteen.’
‘You can tell them that till you’re blue in the face, darling, and play Miss Superior, but there is only a limited amount I can do to help you if you insist on digging yourself into a hole.’
Eva nodded miserably. She could tell that Sybil was beginning to lose patience with her. She was beginning to lose patience with herself too. She put her hands into her smock pockets and looked down at the plain, wooden table.
‘Oh, don’t take on so,’ Sybil said. ‘They’ll get bored soon enough. The clock’s on already.’
‘The clock?’
‘Countdown to marriage. One o’clock, two o’clock, three – by the time the small hand hits six, it’s ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, wifey! This place is a huddle of spinsters manufacturing wives, nothing more.’
‘Spinsters? Are none of the teachers married?’ Eva asked, grateful for the chance to change the subject.
‘Almost none,’ Sybil answered. ‘Miss Hedges certainly isn’t, as you know. Bit of a die-hard women’s-rights person, or so she says. I’m not convinced. I think Miss Dunn was once, but her husband died. If I had to live with her, I’d die too.’
‘And the men? Do they have wives?’
‘No, neither Mr Shandlin nor Mr Duncan. Mind you, we all know why Mr Duncan isn’t married.’
Eva contemplated the round-faced Mr Duncan with some puzzlement. ‘Well, he is no Adonis, but plainer men than he have married perfectly happily.’
‘He’s not the marrying kind, Eva.’
Eva looked at her, nonplussed.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ Sybil hissed, ‘he’s an invert.’
‘You mean he likes standing on his head?’
‘Eva,’ Sybil said, putting an arm around her shoulders, ‘we need to talk.’ Then she whispered into Eva’s ear so none of their lunch companions could overhear.
‘All right,’ Eva said after she had finished whispering. ‘I think I understand. So an invert is a man who falls in love with a man, or a woman with a woman—’
‘Keep your voice down! Yes. That’s it. Though it’s very rare for women. Usually it’s men – and please don’t say it aloud about Mr Duncan, he could go to prison. Eva, what were you told about life? My mother wasn’t much use, I grant you, but I had a wonderful nanny. Told me and Bo everything.’
‘Bo?’
‘George. My brother. Though I’ve never called him that, and he never calls me Sybil. To him I’m Pinkie.’
Eva looked at Sybil. She could have been a model for Ophelia in the Millais painting. ‘Pinkie?’
‘Obviously,’ Sybil said. She looked offended, so Eva quickly said, ‘Of course. But back to this invert business. Mr Duncan is one, you say. And Mr Shandlin, is he …?’
‘Shandlin? You must be joking!’ Sybil laughed. ‘He likes girls all right, I’d say, he just doesn’t have enough money to marry one.’
‘But does he not earn from his teaching?’
Sybil laughed, sweet and low. ‘Not enough for someone respectable, dear.’
‘I suppose a house and servants and all that does cost quite a lot,’ Eva agreed, ‘and the function of this place is to make us worthy of a man’s paying for it.’
‘Now you have it, Eva,’ said Sybil approvingly. ‘You’re learning fast.’
3
November 1913
When the knock on the study door came, Roy Downey was sorely tempted to swear aloud. It was never any of their four servants; he had them well trained by now. No, the cranky little rap-rap-rap was always Catherine, pestering him about something trivial. Why did she do it, especially when he was so preoccupied with his clients in Ireland? He had built up a good accountancy practice in Cork, Downey & Collins, just off Church Street – and for Catherine’s sake he had abandoned it all. One would think she would be more understanding.
The door creaked open.
‘What is it, Catherine? Can’t you see I’m busy?’
She charged in, paying no attention to his choleric glare. ‘There!’ she cried, placing a letter on his desk.
‘What? Am I to read this?’
‘No, ye’ve to frame it and put it on yer wall! Of course ye’re to read it!’
‘You were here half an hour ago and not a word about this.’
‘It came on the evening post. He has written again! He’s received no answer for months now, and ’tis not on, sir.’ Her face was red from being out of breath, her cheeks pink and showing the first signs of broken veins. It was those cheeks that had first endeared her to him, the way they flared with high colour when he looked at her a certain way. Her hair bound back in a strict, mousy bun, her Irish beauty, her combination of modesty and emotion – all these had undone something in him in those terrible months after Angela’s death.
But her calling him ‘sir’ brought back too many memories. Memories of her attending both him and Angela as they sat in their drawing room back in Cork, he taking his cigar and Angela tea. Angela had died of typhoid fever in 1902; it had been long and drawn out. He had married Catherine soon afterwards. She had been poor, proud and Protestant, the widow of a butler called Nelius Connolly, with a daughter, Grace, the same age as his Eva, who had taken Angela’s death particularly hard.
His sudden passion for his late wife’s maid had been the one irregularity of Roy’s life, causing enough scandal for him to decide to leave Cork on the night of their marriage, all three daughters in tow, none at the age of reason – and just in time, for things had gone to hell in a handbasket in Ireland since then.
He took the paper out of the open envelope, which was postmarked Limerick. It was folded into quarters, bulging uncomfortably in its pouch. The handwriting was square and unformed. Roy caught sight of the signature, ‘Joseph Cronin’, and sighed.
‘Is this Eva’s fellow? Am I to understand they’re still corresponding?’
Just six months ago, in this very study, he had interrogated Eva about Mr Cronin’s proposal, after much nagging from Catherine. All that morning it had been promising rain and finally the heavens had broken. Eva was silent: the room betrayed no sound but the scratch of his pen, the rather stertorous rattle of his inward breath (he was spoiling for a cold), the hard attack of rain on the long, narrow, churchlike windows and the occasional protesting crackle of a damp log on the fire. Strange, on recollection, to have it burning in midsummer, but there was a chill in that north-facing front room that could not be dispersed.
‘I hear,’ he said at last, folding the paper he had been scribbling on and putting down his pen, ‘you have decided not to accept Mr Cronin’s offer of marriage.’
‘Yes, Papa.’
‘Hmmm,’ Roy said. ‘And what made you decide to refuse him? It is a big thing, you know, for a man to declare himself.’
‘He seemed too old, Papa.’
‘He is, what … ten years older? Hardly excessive, I would think.’
‘Fourteen,’ Eva corrected him.
‘What?’
‘He is fourteen years older.’
Roy opened a drawer and pulled out his pipe. ‘Ten, fourteen, what matter? He seems well able to provide for you. A good job, clerk with the Waterford and Limerick Railway … what is missing?’ In reality, he knew well what was missing. Joseph Cronin was a friend of Catherine’s cousin Fred, and both men would occasionally come to visit them in London. Roy had seen enough of Cronin to be unable to fathom his wife’s attachment: his glaucous, stained coat, the sound he made with his lips and tongue when he was eating something, the slow, high-pitched, grating way he spoke, as if he were perpetually on the verge of making a complaint to the deputy stationmaster of a provincial railway about a timetable mishap. Roy could not claim to know his second daughter well, but even he could see this fellow was not a match for Eva.
Besides, he was Catholic – as Catherine’s forebears had been, but in the forties it was take the soup or starve, so they had converted to Protestantism for convenience. On his second marriage, keeping London society in mind, Roy had found it politic to follow suit and convert his daughters with him. Imelda’s embarrassingly Romish name was the only reminder of their past.
Not that it had done much good. Catherine, for all her determination, had not mixed well. Occasionally Roy felt guilty for lifting her up socially as for all her protestations it was obvious she was not comfortable with her new status. On other occasions he felt irritated that she could not make more of an effort. Why was she so bent on matching Eva and Cronin? Because determined she was.
‘He’s writin’ an’ writin’ and not a word out of her.’
Roy winced; he hated when she dropped her ‘g’s.
‘Catherine, I wrote her refusal to him six months ago. In God’s name, why are we even having this discussion?’
‘Because she’s not one to be saying no to a decent man.’ Catherine went from pink to red. ‘I have to be balancin’ – balancing – the accounts, and keeping her on is expensive. She should be well married by now.’
‘She’s barely seventeen,’ Roy said, ‘and we’re not keeping her. She’s not even here!’
‘No, she’s not, is she?’ Catherine was not to be headed off at the pass. ‘She’s off gallivanting in that finishing school when it should be our Grace!’
Roy put his head on his steepled hands, felt his own sweaty fingertips press on his brow. He should have known. ‘We have discussed this already, Catherine.’
And they had. Ad nauseam. Ever since Eva had left for that school, Catherine’s every gesture, her constant interruptions, the way she clattered angrily through a room without touching anything in it, had indicated her displeasure. Through trickery and bad behaviour, she declared, Eva had been rewarded with a legacy to a finishing school while Grace, Catherine’s natural daughter, whose behaviour was unimpeachable, had not. As long as Eva was being finished and Grace was at home, he would never know a moment’s peace. He made a palms-up gesture of defeat to Catherine. Eva’s behaviour, not just consorting with the suffragettes but writing about it, had disgusted him as much as it had Catherine, but the funding had not been his, so he’d had little power to stop her. ‘It’s a matter of chance. That’s all.’
‘Well,’ Catherine replied, her face now bloodless, ‘if Grace has to submit to this, it’s only right that Eva marry Joseph. That’ll be her “finishing”. I’ll see it happen, mark my words. I’ll break her, if it’s the last thing I do!’
Roy sat upright at that. ‘You be careful,’ he said, alarm flaring his unsmiling features, ‘it’s illegal to cause injury to a minor nowadays. I’m not having the police come around. Not after the last time.’
Catherine folded her hands in front of her, and once more Roy saw her in her former servitude, with all its false compliance, its eagerness to please that had once beguiled and now trapped him. Her eyes, once green and luminous and sharply reckoning, now looked like dried elderberries. When she spoke, it sounded far away. ‘Illegal now, yes.’
When she left the room, he lit his pipe, warm relief flowing through him with the first inhalation of bitter tar. By God, these days he needed it more than ever.
4
As the months passed, Eva got used to some aspects of life in The Links, like the mediocre food and the custom of spending an entire class walking across a room with a book balanced on her head. Deportment was a thing with Miss Hedges. She took it very seriously. Imagin
e a fine string, she would say, suspended from a height, by which the back of your neck and spine should hang, in a long, graceful line. Imagine you are Coppélia, the doll in the window. Adopt that stance every time you enter a room and when you cross it, and men would respond to that inner grace. Eva, who had thought Miss Hedges a feminist, and who more often than not would find the book sliding off her head and hitting the floor with a thump, took a while to become accustomed to remarks like that. But if other girls’ fathers paid seventy pounds a year to have their daughters do this, it must work …
What she couldn’t get used to was the nonchalance of the girls around their teachers; girls like Ada Barton and Rhona Lewis appeared to delight in responding lackadaisically and without respect. It felt wrong to stay seated and only rise at the last moment when a teacher entered the room. One rainy January afternoon, in Mr Shandlin’s class, she forgot to be like the others; she leapt to her feet the minute he somewhat belatedly rushed in, his collar looser than decorum advised, flinging his damp coat on the hook. A brace of titters immediately followed in her wake, and Eva sat back down, red-faced, feeling like an utter fool.
‘Good afternoon, ladies,’ said Mr Shandlin. ‘Nice to know at least one of you is glad to see me.’ Eva could happily have throttled him. ‘Now. The Tennyson. Page thirty-four.’ The class groaned, as they had groaned their way through Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden and the Romantics. One time – it might have been during Paradise Lost – Sybil had so irritated Mr Shandlin that he had shouted at her, ‘Tell me, Miss Destouches, does it take diligent practice to become this stupid? For I refuse to believe you were born that way.’ Today, he merely shrugged and muttered, ‘Pearls before swine.’