by Susan Moody
‘What’s Aunt done?’
‘She’s put Glenfield up for sale, and is giving the proceeds to us, to buy the Mill House. She’ll come with us, of course.’
‘And Ava, and Bella?’
‘Yes. For as long as they want it, their home is with us.’
We looked at each other glumly. ‘I don’t know,’ said Callum. ‘Have you really thought about this, Mum?’
‘Of course I have.’
‘More to the point,’ said Orlando. ‘Is this definite?’
‘More or less . . .’ Fiona’s face grew vague. ‘Yes, I’m sure it is.’
Across the table, Orlando raised his striped eyebrows at me.
‘What exactly do we gain from the move?’ Callum asked.
‘We gain a lovely home – a home of our very own at last. We gain proximity to one of the most beautiful university cities in the world.’
‘You mean Cambridge?’ said Bertram, who was a King’s College man.
‘You know perfectly well, Mr Yelland, that I mean Oxford.’ Fiona beamed some more. ‘And best of all, it means we shall have Daddy at home, at last.’
‘And do I take it,’ asked Miss Vane delicately, pressing a table napkin to her mouth, ‘that we . . .’ she indicated herself, Gordon and Bertram, ‘. . . shall be staying here?’
‘I’m not going to turf you out into the street,’ said Fiona. ‘We shan’t move until after the children have gone back to school. That should give you plenty of time to find a place to your liking.’
‘I may use this chance to chuck up the whole filthy teaching business,’ said Yelland. ‘See it as a heaven-sent opportunity to do what I should have been doing for years. Move back to London, get serious about painting, and be damned to my father and all his works.’ He folded his napkin and tucked it inside the bone ring with his initials in silver relief. ‘This is excellent news, Mrs Beecham.’
‘I’m so glad you think so.’
Yelland rubbed his hands together. ‘I shall give my notice in immediately. Work until next half-term. Then hey ho, it’s the bright lights for me.’
‘What about you, Miss Vane? I do hope this won’t inconvenience you too much.’
‘As a matter of fact, it won’t. A friend – a colleague at the school – asked me recently if I was interested in rooming together somewhere. I said I wasn’t but the offer’s still open, because she mentioned it yesterday. And all in all, it might be . . .’ She looked round at us, her face slightly pink.
Fiona’s face softened. ‘And you, Gordon? Will you be able to find somewhere?’
‘I’m sure it won’t be difficult, Mrs Beecham. I’ll be sorry to leave all of you, of course . . .’ His eyes wandered vaguely across my brothers. ‘. . . but we must always be aware of fresh woods and pastures new, mustn’t we?’
‘Fields,’ said Orlando.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘It’s fields, not woods.’
‘Wood or field, what the hell does it matter, you cheeky little bugger,’ snapped Yelland. ‘Sorry, Mrs B, but that child would try the patience of a saint.’
‘Not that you’d know much about sainthood,’ said Orlando, so low that only Bertram and I heard him.
‘That’s quite enough from all of you,’ said Fiona. ‘Now, this may be the holidays, but I, for one, have work to do.’
‘I read your last story while I was in the hairdressers,’ said Miss Vane hastily. ‘It was really awfully good.’
‘Thank you so much. Which one was it?’
‘Something to do with a lonely little boy befriending an old lady . . . or was it an old man? I’m sorry, I can’t remember. But I know it was lovely.’
‘Good. Now, everybody, there’s one last thing.’
We stopped pushing back our chairs to listen.
‘In view of the coming changes, and since it will coincide nicely with Alice’s birthday, I thought we might have a party before the end of the holidays. Even a dance. What do you say?’
‘Great idea,’ said Callum.
‘Do you mean here?’ asked Ava.
‘We can push back the furniture in the drawing room, roll up the carpets. There’s plenty of room. Have food set out in here. A barrel of beer, cider, soft drinks.’ Her eyes softened. I knew that instead of plastic mugs and glasses from Woolworths, paper plates and picnic forks, she envisioned porcelain and silver, crystal goblets filled with the finest wine, groaning trenchers featuring roast birds, honey-glazed hams studded with cloves, sides of beef, dishes crowded with creamy mashed potatoes, tender vegetables, buttered peas, a swan carved from ice, the elaborately-decorated sort of dishes in the illustrated Mrs Beeton which was kept on the bottom shelf of the drawing-room bookcases.
‘Sounds terrific, Mum.’
‘Absolutely splendid. Are you talking about black tie?’
‘Don’t be silly, Mr Yelland. Do we look like black tie people? Though of course, before the war . . .’ She looked pensive for a moment. ‘Oh well . . .’
‘Who’s going to come to this party?’ asked Callum.
‘The rest of the family, for a start. I want you to think of all the people we might want to invite, and we’ll write out invitations this evening and you two . . .’ she nodded at Orlando and me, ‘. . . can deliver the local ones on your bikes.’
How did I feel about the prospect of leaving Glenfield? How did Orlando feel? When I asked him, he raised his zebra eyebrows. ‘Hmmm. I don’t know, really. Half of me thinks it exciting. I don’t like change, and this has been our home for a long time. But it’d be marvellous to be close to Oxford, all that music, and theatre and stuff. And C. S. Lewis lives there too . . .’
‘Daddy actually knows him.’
‘. . . so we might even get to meet him!’
‘And Mr Tolkien,’ I said. ‘Gosh, he said I must come to tea with him next time I was in Oxford.’
‘So all in all,’ said Orlando, ‘I think we’re quite pleased, aren’t we?’ He pulled at his zebra hair. ‘If it ever happens, that is.’
‘You think it might not?’
‘Don’t you?’
‘Hmm . . .’ So many of Fiona’s plans faltered at the last fence. ‘If it does, will we be sad to leave the boys, Julian and the rest of them?’
‘Not as much as we might have been.’
I didn’t even mention Nicola, knowing his views, but in spite of everything, I would be sorry to say goodbye to her. She was bad, even wicked, but she was exciting, vital, a breath of slightly fetid air blowing through our hitherto staid lives. But it would also be a relief to say goodbye to her. I could throw away the shoplifted stuff, I needn’t worry about her being mean to Orlando or—
‘Oh!’ I said. ‘But I wouldn’t be able to have lessons with Mr Elias any more.’
‘There are other piano teachers.’
‘But not any other Mr Eliases.’
Orlando looked at me oddly. ‘Who are we going to ask to your party?’
I didn’t want Nicola to come, but Fiona had other ideas. ‘You can’t leave the girl out,’ she declared, when I showed her my list. ‘It would be unkind not to invite her.’
‘I don’t really want her to come.’
‘Why not?’
‘She’s . . .’ Dangerous, was what I wanted to say, but if I did, I knew my mother would want to know what I meant. And I wasn’t prepared to mention the shoplifting, or Bertram Yelland. Or the way she had tried to damage Sasha Elias. ‘. . . not really my sort,’ I muttered.
‘Really? I wouldn’t have guessed.’ Fiona’s glance was too shrewd for comfort. ‘I like her mother well enough, but I agree the girl is a bit of a menace. Still, since you insisted on being around her so much this holidays, you can’t very well leave her out, so you’ll just have to put up with it. Obviously we’ll invite Louise Stone, and isn’t there a brother? Maybe they’ll be able to keep some kind of a check on her.’
‘Check?’
‘This is your party and I’m not prepared to accept any . . .’
My mother wasn’t usually at such a sustained loss for words.
‘Any what?’
‘Anything untoward.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Never mind.’
‘If she comes, I shan’t,’ I said sulkily.
‘Don’t be silly, darling.’
‘I mean it!’
But both of us knew that I didn’t. Parties were a rare enough event in our lives; a party in our own house was unheard of. We were such a large group that we rarely needed further company. Julian, Nicola and the rest spent time in our house, as we did in theirs, but for the most part, we remained self-sufficient, disconnected from the world beyond our own. Even when my father was home from Oxford, we never had people to dinner. Occasionally one of his undergraduates would show up, taking a detour from cycling round Kent or visiting Canterbury Cathedral. Sometimes my big brothers would bring home a friend from university or medical school, and very occasionally my mother would suggest I might like to invite a girl from school down for part of the holidays. The girl was always Erin Carpenter, an American from Boston. She spelled a kind of freedom – one quite different from Nicola’s wildness. I breathed more deeply when I was with Erin, saw the world in brighter colours, sensed wider horizons spreading below the edge of my own sea-encompassed limits.
‘Wow!’ she would say. ‘Great!’, ‘Okaaaay!’, the second syllable floating endlessly from her wide mouth, giving it quite a different sound from the word we had been forbidden to use. Mediated through Erin, America with its spacious skies, its purple mountains, seemed boundless, munificent, a land of plenty.
But Erin was in California, staying with her divorced father, and wouldn’t be able to come. A disappointment, especially since Fiona had promised that, as the party was partly to celebrate my birthday, I could have a new dress.
‘Can it be pink?’ I said.
‘Pink?’
‘Oh, please . . .’
‘I’ll see if I have something by me.’ This was a good start: Fiona nearly always had something by her.
And indeed, a few days later, she showed me a length of pink silk brocade. ‘What do you think, darling? I saved it from before the war,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it a beautiful colour?’
‘Pink,’ I breathed.
‘Not pink, Old Rose.’
Old Rose. My mother’s words transformed the cloth into something magical, straight from the middle of a fairy-tale forest full of white harts and questing beasts, where a sleeping princess lay in a golden castle deep at its crimson heart.
‘And Ava’s going to make it into a dress for you.’
‘It’s all very well,’ grumbled ever-cheerful Ava. ‘Dressmaking indeed, with all I have to do, where I’m going to find the time I really don’t know.’ But somewhere she must have found it for every evening I could hear the old Singer sewing machine whirring behind the closed door of the room she shared with Bella. I imagined her snatching handfuls of time from a bubbling cauldron of the stuff, spooning seconds from the brew, dipping in a ladle to measure out minutes, dragging hours towards her across the surface and stacking them beside her sewing table like pink clouds. I saw time, slippery as soap, glisten between her fingers.
A fortnight or so later, I was climbing into the pinned folds of a party dress more gorgeous than I could ever have imagined. ‘Keep still!’ commanded Ava. ‘Stop wriggling about, before I stick in a pin into you by mistake.’
And then the dress was over my shoulders and pulled down to my knees and Ava stepped back to admire her handiwork. Looking at myself in Aunt’s antique cheval glass, I saw myself transformed into a veritable beauty.
‘Very nice,’ she pronounced, ‘though I do say so myself.’
‘I say so too, Ava. It’s beautiful, absolutely lovely,’
On a hanger hooked over the picture rail was a petticoat, white paper nylon with layers and layers of stiff netting round the bottom, each layer bound in a different colour of bias binding. ‘My birthday present to you – mine and Bella’s,’ said Ava, nodding and winking.
‘Oh thank you, thank you!’ I kissed her, which turned her face red, for we were not a household given to demonstrations of affection.
‘Don’t thank me, thank your mother,’ she said. She picked up a snippet of the Old Rose silk and rubbed it between her fingers. ‘Though where she got it from I don’t know. I haven’t seen quality like this for years.’
The final numbers for the party slid forwards and backwards, now reaching towards forty, now sliding back towards thirty, once as high as forty-eight. Dougal and Callum arrived with friends from medical school and the navy. By the time the evening arrived, the numbers had stabilized at thirty-six.
The carpets had been rolled back, the furniture pushed back against the wall, a long table set up in the dining room, covered in an old sheet, threadbare from many washings. My big brothers had polished the drawing room floor by scattering it with crystals of soda bicarbonate and then dragging Bella and me back and forth in blankets until it had attained the slipperiness of an ice rink.
A barrel of beer arrived and was set up in the dining room on a wooden cradle. There was cider in brown bottles and the kind of neon-coloured fizzy drinks we were not usually allowed. Orlando and Julian had undertaken to make ginger beer, and the tightly-capped bottles stood on a table, looking like bottled dishwater. There were platters of corned beef, Fiona’s inexpert sausage rolls, sandwiches of tinned salmon and egg-with-salad-cream-and-cress. Miss Vane had produced dozens of small savoury tarts featuring melted cheese and onions. There were little pink fairy cakes topped with scatters of hundreds-and-thousands, or glacé cherries, and even a birthday cake covered in pink-tinted icing, and twelve candle holders in the shape of roses, each holding a small candle made of twisted pink wax. My name had been iced across the top,
ALICE
set with little silver balls which winked under the lights.
I couldn’t stop staring at myself in my new dress, with my shining cap of bobbed hair which had been pinned into kiss curls the night before. The waist was cinched with a black patent-leather belt Erin had sent from America, and which made me look very close to something out of the fashion pages in Ava’s magazines. My parents had given me a strand of pearls as a birthday present, and I thought nobody could have been luckier. Perhaps my destiny was not as the successor to Dame Myra Hess but as the new Jane Russell or Rita Hayworth, for no one could possibly look as beautiful as I did. My usually mocking brothers were complimentary, for once. Even Julian, Nicola’s faithful acolyte, told me I was looking awfully nice and ran a sweaty finger up my arm. All this, just for me. I’d never been so happy.
As we stood in the hall, waiting for the guests, Fiona put an arm round me and gave me an unaccustomed hug. ‘You look lovely, Alice,’ she said.
I was still smiling when Nicola arrived, on her own. She wore her everyday garb of a short denim skirt and a white broderie-anglaise blouse with puffed sleeves. She greeted my mother then turned to me.
‘Oh,’ she said, looking me up and down. ‘I didn’t realize it was meant to be that sort of a party.’
‘What sort?’ My stomach curdled, my dress turned instantly into Cinderella rags.
‘A fancy one.’
‘So what sort did you think it was meant to be?’ Orlando, looking marvellous in a white shirt and a pink silk tie of my father’s, had materialized beside me. I could feel his dislike of her in the tremor of his arm against mine and the set of his beautiful mouth.
‘I didn’t realize it would be . . .’ She eyed my new frock, my pearls, with disdain. ‘. . . a dress-up occasion.’
‘What a pity you misunderstood the invitation, Nicola.’ My mother’s voice was cold. ‘I do hope you won’t feel out of place, dressed so casually.’
Nicola’s face reddened, but even she wasn’t about to take on Fiona. ‘Of course not,’ she muttered.
‘Orlando, take our guest to the dining room and find her something to drink,’ said Fiona. As we
walked away, she repeated reassuringly, ‘You look lovely, darling.’
‘Sorry if I didn’t dress up,’ Nicola said as we moved away, attempting to regain lost ground.
‘It’s Alice’s birthday party. You jolly well should have.’ Orlando sounded as chilly as Fiona.
‘Well, with these kind of people here, it didn’t occur to me to put on something fancy.’ The sweep of Nicola’s arm took in Miss Vane, uncomfortably squeezed into slippery green rayon, Gordon Parker in his desert boots, Sasha Elias in a grey flannel shirt and too-short tie.
‘At least they’ve made an effort.’
‘So I can see,’ sneered Nicola.
‘Sorry if they’re not good enough for you.’ Orlando kept his voice low. ‘We looked hard but we couldn’t find any murderers to invite to make you feel at home.’
She went pale. ‘You bastard,’ she said softly. She turned and looked my dress up and down again, raised her eyebrows, said mockingly, ‘You look lovely, darling.’
Orlando smiled, wheeled me round and led me towards one of the ivy-wreathed marble fireplaces, where my father stood holding a glass of gin disguised with government issue orange juice. ‘How’s my pretty little daughter?’ he said. He put an arm round me. It was no use. A ring of cold had formed around my heart.
Sasha Elias came up and shook hands with my father, bowing from the waist. ‘Guten abend, Herr Doktor Professor,’ he said. His eyes grew mellow when he turned to me. ‘How very nice you look, Alice,’ he said. ‘That colour suits you well.’
‘Thank you.’ I had never blushed before in my life, but I felt the heat rising to my cheeks. From the corner of my eye I noticed Nicola standing at the top of the wrought-iron steps that led down to the garden, talking to Gordon. Despite my discomfiture, my social conscience was uneasy. Should I go and talk to her again, make up in some small way for Orlando’s rudeness? My mother had told me that it was my job to make sure that all my guests were at ease.
‘No!’ said Orlando.
‘No what?’
‘Leave her alone.’ He touched my shoulder. ‘Nothing you can do will change her, Alice.’ He turned to Sasha. ‘Are you going to play for us later, Mr Elias?’
