‘Eat up, dear,’ said Mrs Blentham. ‘You must get a bit fatter, you know.’ She had been staring at Alice for a minute or more, worrying that she would begin to cry. Alice ate.
‘What about a riding lesson this afternoon, Alice?’ asked Mr Blentham. ‘I want you to be a credit to me in the hunting field this season.’
‘That would be lovely,’ she said, nodding vigorously.
‘The more you practise, the less your muscles’ll ache,’ continued Mr Blentham, ‘and if you want to hunt you’d better get in plenty of practice before the end of the month, when the governess is arriving.’
After lunch, Mrs Blentham gave Alice a piano lesson. Mrs Blentham wondered a great deal about what Alice’s life with the infamous Diana had really been like, but when she had tried to ask tactful questions about it, Alice evaded them. Mrs Blentham put this down to a temporary desire on Alice’s part not to evoke sad memories. However, the fact that Alice could only play the first four bars of ‘Brian Boru’s March’ on the piano with one finger had convinced her that her upbringing must have been extraordinary indeed.
Alice did not want to learn to play the piano, but she obediently did so. For she feared that, if she once came into conflict with the Blenthams, the soporific effect of the new life she was leading (which Diana had correctly predicted) would vanish, and she knew that life would then become unbearable. Only once had she defied the Blenthams. That was last week, when her uncle had hinted that she ought to become a member of the Church of England. She had simply said ‘no’, and looked him straight in the eyes, and he had not raised the matter since. She felt that exaggerating her Catholicism and her Irish accent would warn the Blenthams that, while she was prepared to be a good girl, she was never going to be exactly as they would like her to be.
She dressed up in a riding habit to have her riding lesson. It was even stiffer and more uncomfortable than were the starched, pinned, belted and pleated clothes which the Blenthams made her wear every day. She did not saddle her own horse. This was done by the groom and gardener’s boy. Alice waited on the mounting block, feeling useless, for him to bring her horse to her.
The groom was a muscular boy of nineteen. He had red curly hair, gentle brown eyes, a fresh complexion and a snub nose. Alice liked his slow Dorset accent.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked him.
‘Luke, Miss Alice. Luke Cobbold.’ He touched his cap. Alice rode off to the paddock. She supposed that she was expected to make some kind of response when the village men touched their caps to her, but she did not know what.
Mr Blentham yelled at her to keep her back straight, her legs in and her hands at the base of the horse’s mane as she trotted, sitting sidesaddle, round the paddock. She wanted to giggle when she saw him stamping his plump gaitered legs in the mud and waving his arms about. He was a bald, short pasty-faced man of fifty, who had thick, very red, very wet-looking lips.
His wife was a blonde woman who had a greyish papery skin. Her nose was always pink. She wore a locket round her neck, and bobbing watch-spring curls over her ears, which hairstyle had been becoming to her when she was eighteen.
‘I’d like to go for a walk,’ Alice said to Mrs Blentham when she came in from riding.
‘So much exercise? Why, the country air must be doing you good‚’ said Mrs Blentham, snipping her embroidery thread. ‘Where to, dear?’
‘Oh, just round about. Perhaps over to those trees,’ she said, pointing out of the window.
‘Don’t point, dear, it makes a hole in the air,’ said her aunt, choosing a new skein of silk. ‘But I don’t see why you shouldn’t. That’s Badger’s Spinney over there, though I don’t know if there are any badgers in it.’
‘What’s a badger?’ asked Alice.
Mrs Blentham looked up. ‘Why, a sort of animal, dear. A rather pretty animal. It comes out at night, and I think it does a lot of damage. It has a black-and-white striped face.’
‘Oh,’ said Alice.
She went out for her walk after tea, and promised not to go as far as Badger’s Spinney, because it would soon be getting dark.
Alice walked along the lane towards Shaftesbury, where she went to Mass on Sundays. She peered into the hedgerows, where there were still a few damp tasteless blackberries and the hips of wild roses. She saw a deserted bird’s nest, and wondered what it was until she remembered a painting she had seen somewhere. It was the sky which, of all things in the country, surprised her most. In London it always had a grey or yellowish tinge, even on the clearest days, but here it could be pure blue, a blue which no painting she had seen had ever truly depicted.
Alice wrote to her Aunt Caitlin, and agreed to meet her after Mass on Sunday, and to go back to the place where she was staying for Sunday lunch. They ate with the family. After lunch, Alice and Aunt Caitlin went up to her little sitting room.
Aunt Caitlin’s face had aged greatly since 1906, but she moved in as sprightly a way as ever. She was blue-eyed and stocky, and had thick white hair.
‘Well, Alicky, how is it, living with your uncle?’
‘It’s all right. I’m adjusting to it.’
‘Don’t adjust too far,’ said the old lady, narrowing her eyes. ‘Listen: if you ever find it becoming intolerable — and you may do, when all the shock has worn off, for it’s not quite two months since Diana died — you can come and stay with me at King’s Norton for as long as you like. I’ll fight your uncle if you want. I’ve as much right to have you live with me as he has.’
‘I’ll remember that, Aunt Caitlin.’
‘Mother of God, child, the clothes they’ve got you up in! Aren’t you itching all over?’
‘I am, yes,’ sighed Alice.
Aunt Caitlin sucked in her cheeks. ‘What are they like, your uncle and aunt?’
‘He couldn’t be more different from mamma,’ began Alice. She stood, frowning, in thought. ‘Aunt Cicely is very anxious not to upset me. She treats me as though I were about six. I think she thinks of me as a poor street waif. Uncle Roderick wonders how far I’ve gone down mamma’s road.’
Aunt Caitlin laughed. ‘How do you feel about the countryside, though?’ she asked.
‘It makes me feel that I’ve seen enough of the world beyond London,’ said Alice.
CHAPTER 5
MELTON BALBRIDGE
DORSET
December 1913
‘Really, Alice!’ said her governess, Miss Rendlesham. ‘You ought to be ready by now. Go up and change at once, and then come here and let me inspect your appearance.’
‘You really think I’d go with dirty fingernails, don’t you?’ said Alice, not getting up from the schoolroom armchair which it was her governess’s privilege to use.
‘You are one of the most insolent girls …’
Alice walked out of the room. She dressed herself in the pale pink party dress which Mrs Blentham had thought would pad her out with its bows and flounces, but which in fact made her look taller and more gaunt than ever. Recently, her breasts had swollen. They had sprouted when she was twelve and had remained tiny and conical for nearly four years.
In the schoolroom, Miss Rendlesham, whom Alice towered over, twitched Alice’s dress this way and that, sniffing. ‘Skin and bone,’ she said, poking her. ‘No one wants to look at skin and bone.’ She picked up Alice’s hand and declared that she must cut her fingernails before going out to lunch, a child ought to have short fingernails. Alice slapped her old, yellow face so hard that Miss Rendlesham was sent staggering over to the table and was left, gasping, unable even to shout: ‘You’ll be on bread and water for a week!’
Smiling, her eyes closed, Alice went downstairs. ‘Hurry up, dear,’ said Mrs Blentham. ‘We can’t be late for your first lunch party.’
Alice had only seen her uncle’s friends at the Meet during the hunting season or, occasionally, in the village. People of her age hardly ever went out: they were too old for children’s parties and too young for grown-up ones. Lady Stopsford, who lived at M
elton Hall, believed this to be a problem and held, just before Christmas every year, a party to which those aged between eleven and seventeen could come with their parents. This party had not been held last year because Lord Stopsford had wished to spend the winter in the South of France.
Luke drove them over to Melton Hall in the old four-wheeler. Alice watched the movements of his shoulders and the red hair on his neck. During the winter of 1912, she had made friends with Luke, who saddled her horse whenever she went out hacking along the lanes. In the spring and summer of 1913, Alice was considering ways of persuading her uncle to let her go either to Aunt Caitlin’s or to the Woods’. One night, she had gone for a walk round the garden and stables, and met Luke, with whom she had talked it over. He had begged her to stay. Shortly afterwards, they had begun to make love, late at night, in his room near the stables. It was easy for Alice to leave her room by the back stairs, for everyone was asleep by midnight. Though Miss Rendlesham frequently extolled Alice’s faults to Mr Blentham, and he allowed her to be punished by being put on bread and water or sent to bed at six o’clock, she was trusted to stay in her room when she was sent up to bed.
Yesterday Alice had told Luke, for whose sake she had already remained at Melton Balbridge for six months, that she would be going back to London. Her uncle did not yet know this.
‘Alice, Miss Rendlesham said yesterday that recently you’ve been very rude to her again. If you can’t get along with your governess I shall have to send you to school.’
‘It would hardly be worth it, Uncle Roderick. I’m sixteen already.’
‘Well, you could go to finishing school, dear,’ said Aunt Cicely firmly. ‘In Switzerland, perhaps.’
‘Nonsense, much too expensive,’ said Mr Blentham.
They arrived at Melton Hall, a solid Regency building on top of a hill, where the winds blew cold through the trees which were designed to shield the house. Getting out of the carriage, Alice avoided Luke’s furtive, puzzled gaze.
Lady Stopsford received them in the hall. ‘Hello, Alice my dear. Clarissa, introduce Alice to your friends.’
‘Come on,’ said Clarissa, a flaxen-haired, pink-cheeked girl, and she led Alice into a small, informal drawing room where the children were chatting before lunch, drinking lemonade. The girls were grouped round the fireplace, the boys near one of the windows. The youngest sat on the outside of the small circles, not talking to each other but listening to their elders. Alice was the oldest and tallest of the girls, for most of the other girls were Clarissa’s friends, aged fourteen or just fifteen. She was glad of this, for as a child she had never met other children, though she had occasionally got into fights with them in the street; she had never had toys, or a proper nanny, or been to school. She was studying other young girls’ faces at close quarters for the first time. She wondered at them. Had she set out to draw the face of a girl of six, she would have drawn a face very like that of Lucy Carlyle, who was fourteen, and very pretty. Some of the girls, and the boys, had spots on their faces. Alice had only ever seen these at a distance, and knew them only to be reddish. She did not know that they could be such greasy, oozing, white-headed things. She had always imagined that this was the appearance that leprosy would give one.
The girls were talking about school, chiefly about schoolmates who were not present. ‘Tom Sanders’s an awful fibber. She says she’s kissed a boy on the mouth,’ said one girl, dropping her voice. ‘I call it jolly bad to say things like that. I mean, I know it’s not true.’ The others agreed that it couldn’t be true. The girls called each other Charlie, Luce, Henry, Johnnie. Most of them wore white dresses.
‘Where do you go to school?’ one girl suddenly asked Alice.
‘I have a governess,’ Alice replied.
‘A governess! Aren’t you awfully lonely?’ Some of them giggled at the effeminacy of having a governess at sixteen.
‘No, not very.’
‘I say, where do you come from?’ asked Lucy Carlyle.
‘Ireland. But I was brought up in London.’
‘You’re the Rector’s niece, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you’re Irish?’
‘My father was Irish.’
‘Are your parents dead?’ asked another girl, and then she blushed.
‘Yes.’ They left her alone after that. Alice thought that they were shunning her because of her background and her accent, and sat stiffly, ignoring them.
At lunch, the children ate at a separate table from their parents. If Alice had been one year older, she would have been at the other table. They entered the dining room in age and sex groupings, but Lady Stopsford had arranged their places at table and had placed every girl between two boys. Throughout the first course there was silence at the children’s table. Alice too concentrated very hard on her food. She now had something in common with the others. When the main course arrived, and the parents were quite oblivious of the other table, the young ceased to be polite and talked across one another. By the end of the meal, the sexes were exchanging remarks. Alice remained quite silent. The boy on one side of her considered trying to make conversation, but saw that she was concentrating very hard on the talk at the other table.
‘But my dear Mrs Carlyle,’ Lord Stopsford was saying, ‘don’t you see that the Ulstermen are loyalists? They may be a minority, but just as patriots die for their country, so a country must spend blood for its patriots!’ He sat back and wiped his mouth with a flourish.
‘Lord Stopsford,’ said Alice, ‘if the Unionists have their way, their beloved country may well die struggling for the Orange patriots, as you call them. Home Rule died with Parnell, and don’t you be deceived by Redmond. Ireland will be a free and Catholic and Gaelic country, and the Orangemen can get back to Scotland where they belong. And may I point out that you’re being tactless? My father was a Fenian.’
She spoke in a low and clear voice, and when she had finished she started to eat her pudding, while everyone sat quite still and silent. Her uncle’s face was purple and Lady Stopsford was afraid that Mrs Blentham would faint. Suddenly, as soon as conversation began again, Alice burst into tears. Mrs Blentham, her face now rigid, got up and took Alice quite gently by the elbow. She bade goodbye to Lord and Lady Stopsford, and led Alice outside. ‘Now then, here’s a handkerchief. Alice, what on earth can have come over you? Lord Stopsford is your host. Oh dear, what will Roderick do?’ she wailed.
‘Mother of God, Aunt Cicely, if I’d been thirty years old and rich and if he’d known about my father, as I’m sure he did, for everyone seems to know everything about other people in the country, he’d never have dared puff and blow about Carson and the Orangemen like that, in front of me!’
‘Alice!’ was all Mrs Blentham said.
Mr Blentham came out of the house and fetched Luke from the stables. They rode home in horrible silence. Alice was no longer crying. Mrs Blentham looked from her husband’s face to her niece’s and back again.
‘Come in here,’ he said to Alice when they were back, opening his study door. His wife stood there, biting her lip. ‘Go and do your sewing, Cicely,’ he snapped at her.
He closed the door behind Alice. ‘If you were just a few years younger, I’d whip you!’ he-roared at her. ‘How could you shame me in that fashion? Not only did you answer your host back — a chit of a girl, no, a child, like you — but you actually brought into the open the fact that your father was — was — a traitor!’
Alice ignored this. Her legs were shaking terribly, but she forced herself to look casually round the room.
‘Aren’t you even ashamed?’
‘Well, I’m sorry I’ve upset you so,’ said Alice, ‘but I’m not sorry I let Lord Stopsford know my mind. Uncle Roderick, can I sit down, please? I’ve got something very important to tell you and Aunt Cicely. Please.’
‘It can wait.’
‘It can’t. The chair can’t, anyway.’
Noticing that she was very pale, Mr Blentham pointed o
ut a chair to her, into which she sank. He watched her for a moment, and then put his head outside the door to yell: ‘Cicely!’ His wife came quickly. ‘Alice has a confession to make, I suppose,’ he said. ‘She wishes you to hear it too.’
‘Yes?’ said Mrs Blentham.
‘I’m pregnant,’ said Alice.
‘You — are — what?’ whispered her uncle.
‘Pregnant. With child. Enceinte. In the family way.’
‘How can you be, girl?’
‘I had a lover in London. He was staying at an inn at Saddledown and I went out to meet him at night. He was here for about a month.’
‘But Alice — when you came to us you were only fourteen,’ said Mrs Blentham.
‘When I was thirteen I was a year past menarche,’ said Alice, ‘which is old enough to have lovers and old enough to have babies.’
‘Dear God!’
‘Right, girl, if that’s how it is you can go and lead your mother’s life. Now! Go on, get out!’
‘Roderick …’
‘I don’t care what happens to you or your brat. You won’t get a penny from me.’
‘You’ve got to use the money in trust for me for my benefit, by law,’ said Alice.
‘Roderick, don’t get so upset. Alice can go and have the baby somewhere, and then she can come back to us. It’s our duty to look after her. We promised Diana. Alice, dear, don’t worry, we’ll sort it out for you.’ It was Alice’s turn to stare.
‘Diana! Diana knew damn well that the girl could look after herself according to the corrupt way in which she was brought up. I expect she’ll go and have the child scraped out on a backstreet. According to people like that – all the Fenians and Suffragettes and Socialists and Bloomsbury pansies — certain types of murder don’t count. Eh, girl?’
‘Roderick!’ cried his wife.
‘For heaven’s sake, Cicely, the little tart’s heard all the swearing there is in the English language years ago.’
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