Privileged Children

by Frances Vernon

  Mrs Morton blinked. The other day, she was quite certain she had heard Julia, in the bathroom, say ‘bugger’.

  ‘What’s your father’s job, dear?’ She sat down. She no longer thought it important that the little girls be left alone together to chat.

  ‘He’s a musician. He plays the piano in a nightclub, and he composes, too. My mother’s an artist.’

  Julia suddenly asked: ‘What did he do in the war, Fin?’

  Finola pushed a crust of bread into her egg. ‘He wasn’t able to fight, he’s too small.’

  ‘Did he work in munitions, then?’ asked Mrs Morton. ‘Or perhaps an office job?’

  ‘No, he didn’t do anything to help kill people. He carried on giving music lessons. After all, you need ordinary people in a war, don’t you, as well as soldiers? But Alice — my mother — she worked at the War Office at the end of the war. Kate was a doctor in St Thomas’s hospital, but she was in France for a time too.’

  ‘Who’s Kate, dear?’

  ‘She lives with us. She used to be sort of married to Anatole — my father — I mean she lived with him for years — but now she’s going to marry someone else.’

  Julia was beginning to think that her mother was being nosey, and she sat silently eating. Mrs Morton said brightly to Finola: ‘Have you any brothers and sisters?’

  ‘Two sisters. They’re nineteen — twins. Jenny’s reading chemistry at Cambridge and Liza works in publishing. They’re my father’s daughters by his first marriage.’

  ‘Dear me, well, I shouldn’t be interrupting your little tea-party, girls. I’ll go now. Julia, when Finola’s gone, you must do your homework before bedtime.’ Bedtime was at half past seven for Julia. It was five already. Mrs Morton left and the girls helped themselves to bread and butter.

  Julia took off her spectacles. She had pretty blue eyes. ‘Are you going to carry on at school after fourteen?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Alice wants me to leave school, because she says the education is bad. Well, she says it was pretty bad at Cressida Lake, where Liza and Jenny went. She wants to give me lessons at home but I’d rather be at school.’

  ‘I’m going to Kilbride Private School for Girls when Dad gets promoted,’ said Julia. ‘They wear red hats and proper gymslips there.’

  ‘Is it a day school?’ asked Finola.

  ‘Yes,’ sighed Julia. ‘Oh, wouldn’t you like to go to boarding school?’

  Julia had lent Finola several school story books by Angela Brazil. Finola rubbed her nose and thought of Miranda. A sturdy glamour clung, for Julia and Finola, to the country boarding schools in books. From them they heard of match teas, dorm feasts, house colours and cosy yet lofty seniors’ studies. These things which they had never seen or done were described in detail in school stories and comics, but casually, as though everyone really knew all about them. Julia really felt that she did know all about boarding school. Finola did not, because of Miranda’s description of it.

  Finola and Julia discussed school, other girls, the hatefulness of boys, and hopscotch. Julia showed Finola her doll, who had real hair and rolling eyes, and who wore a fashionable dress of pink silk with a low waist. Julia had made a string of long beads for her neck, and told Finola that it had taken her an hour to thread them, and that the beads had cost sixpence. Julia got threepence a week pocket-money. She knew that Finola’s parents were too poor to give her pocket-money. She hoped that her mother would excuse Finola’s table manners because of this.

  Mrs Morton came in again. ‘You must practise your new piano piece, Julia,’ she said. She smiled at Finola, who grinned back — cheekily, Mrs Morton thought. Finola saw a book which was on a shelf near the door.

  ‘Oh, Julia, can I borrow this? I haven’t read it.’

  ‘Oh, yes, if you like. There are some ever such good stories in it, except there’s a long one in the middle about love.’

  It was a thick, blue book, with a girl’s sweet face on the front, called the The British Girls’ Annual.

  ‘Well, I’ll see you tomorrow, Jules. Goodbye, Mrs Morton.’ Finola flattered herself about her politeness. She did not, Mrs Morton noticed, say, ‘Thank you very much for the lovely tea.’

  Finola put on her coat, which was an old jacket of Anatole’s with the sleeves rolled up. On the way home she remembered what Alice had told her about being diplomatic about oneself with people who lived in a different way. Mrs Morton had wanted to know quite a lot about Finola. Perhaps one ought to have said that Anatole played in an orchestra. Mrs Morton did not look as though she would fit into the nightclub which Anatole had described.

  To be polite, Finola would have to ask Julia back. No doubt she could rig up a lace-covered tablecloth in the cold drawing room at Bramham Gardens, which was only ever used for entertaining the odd stranger, and guide Julia past the kitchen. The only thing Finola had been told about courtesy was that you ought to make people feel at home in your house.

  Finola wondered what the little forks had been for. She ought to have them, for ornament presumably, when Julia came. Julia had, in the middle of conversation, eaten her cake with her fingers like Finola.

  ‘Hello, where’ve you been?’ asked Alice from the kitchen as Finola came in.

  ‘Oh, having tea with Julia Morton.’ Finola was usually home by five. She went over to the stove and sniffed. ‘Ugh, not that beetroot soup again.’

  ‘Have cocoa if you want,’ said Alice. She glanced at the title of Finola’s new book. ‘Did Julia lend you that?’

  ‘Yes.’ Finola felt Alice’s contempt on her shoulders as she hunched them and sat down to read the book.

  ‘Do you really find that book interesting?’

  ‘Yes. It’s fun.’ Finola twitched over a page. ‘I do like it! It’s about nice, ordinary people who can be — jolly! They don’t have people wanting them to be interested in things like art and politics!’

  ‘Our life is very ordinary,’ said Alice. ‘We just try to live with the minimum of fuss and convention in a world which is full of unnatural and cruel social pressures of the kind which Miranda ran away from,’ Alice lectured.

  ‘What is the book?’ asked Miranda.

  ‘The British Girls’ Annual of 1920,’ said Alice.

  ‘All about ordinary middle-class people happily conforming to their safe little savage world, yes.’

  ‘You’re as bad as Alice! You’re worse!’ screamed Finola. ‘You’re so like her it’s not true. You even talk with her accent, only hers is faint and yours is much stronger, because you want to be just like her, and you’re as bad an intellectual snob and as fanatical a hater of ordinary people, so much so that you’d neither of you ever dream of talking to someone who’s clean and tidy and has a maid …’

  ‘Clementina’s very tidy, and she has two maids and a cook,’ Alice pointed out. But she looked crestfallen. Finola stormed out with her Annual.

  ‘She’s right,’ said Alice. ‘We were awful about it. I’ll never comment on what she does again.’

  ‘Oh, Alice, don’t talk nonsense. Anyone would think you’d tried to confiscate the book. All you did was make it clear that she’s reading rubbish.’

  Jenny had been reading and listening in the corner. ‘You know,’ she said, and Alice looked surprised to see her, ‘it’s a bad idea to send Finola to the Council school if you want her to pick up proletarian attitudes, or liberal ones. All the kids who go to that school live in Baron’s Court, places like that. They’re all petit-bourgeois, frightened, competitive and conservative. Finola’s drinking in the spirit of the lace curtains and the aspidistras, and she’s certainly learning nothing. If she wants to go to school, why don’t you send her to Cressida Lake?’

  ‘We can’t afford it, that’s why. When Kate and Richard go off and get married there’ll only be three of us earning in the house. We’ve got to get some more people somehow.’

  ‘Don’t tell me Caitlin hasn’t been bullying you to let her pay for Finola’s education!’

 
; ‘She has, yes. Actually, I did suggest it to Fin, but she said she was quite happy at the Council school. And she won’t consider letting us teach her.’

  ‘She wants friends of her own age. How’s she going to meet them if she doesn’t go to school?’

  ‘What do you mean, she wants friends of her own age?’ asked Miranda. ‘Nine-year-old girls are utterly vile, stupid little bullies on the whole, or else scared nincompoops. It’s not their fault, it’s their training, but they are. It’s absolutely impossible to have friends of one’s own age if one’s got any brains.’

  ‘Let’s admit that Fin’s not very brainy,’ said Alice.

  ‘Of course she’s got brains!’ said Jenny. ‘Anyway, I think you should persuade her to go to Cressida Lake. Lots of the girls there go to Queen’s or St Paul’s or North London Collegiate afterwards. Fin certainly ought to learn something if she goes there. And the fact that the girls have money makes them less snobbish, not more so. I mean, girls of that class are not the market for that ghastly book Fin’s got at the moment.’

  ‘All right, I’ll have another go at her. But Anatole feels badly about letting Aunt Caitlin pay.’

  ‘You and Miranda could persuade him. Well, I must go and do some proper work.’ Jenny left.

  ‘It sounds odd, hearing her talk about work. All the time she was at school she messed around,’ said Alice. ‘She always did well, though, unlike poor Liza.’

  ‘Why did you find Liza attractive?’ said Miranda suddenly, her chin poised on her smooth white hand.

  ‘I don’t any more. But she had such charm at fourteen, you don’t know. Just like a snowdrop. She still looks her best in January and February, don’t you think?’

  ‘She’s so colourless.’

  ‘It can be enchanting.’

  Miranda stroked her own delicately coloured cheek. She was the best dressed person in the house, and took great care of her appearance. ‘Don’t look like that, Miranda. You know very well that all other girls are ugly compared to you.’

  ‘But you like ugly people. Look at Anatole!’

  ‘That’s different. He’s a man.’

  Their conversation was interrupted by the entrance of Liza. Liza was smaller than Jenny. She now wore her thin blonde hair in a bun, like Miranda, and for work she wore tidy print dresses. Her face had become very thin. She had brought a friend with her.

  ‘This is Volodya,’ she said, putting a pile of papers on the table. ‘He needs lodgings, so I thought perhaps he could move in when Richard and Kate go.’

  Alice looked him up and down. He was tall, brown-haired, scruffy-looking, with a short, small, curved nose. He was aged about thirty. ‘Of course you can if you like. From April, did Liza tell you? We share all our money here.’

  ‘I’ve warned him,’ said Liza. ‘He was in favour of Kerensky, you know; he only got out of Russia to save his life,’ she added.

  ‘Oh, I hope you can tell us something about what really happened,’ said Miranda. ‘We only get information through the capitalist press.’

  Volodya laughed nervously, and stood twisting his hat in his hands.

  ‘Sit down and have a drink,’ said Alice. ‘Whisky, gin or beer?’

  ‘Gin, please,’ he said. ‘I think your system of dividing the income is most just.’

  ‘Good,’ said Alice. ‘You’re staying for dinner, aren’t you? There’s enough to feed an army,’ she said, stirring the soup.

  ‘Yes, Liza invited me,’ he said, looking at Liza.

  Leo, Clementina, Michael and Mr Tuskin were also coming to dinner.

  All thirteen people sat packed round the long deal table in the kitchen. Alice, looking at the faces of those around her, wondered for the first time at how much they had aged since she had first met them. Clementina and Leo were both grey-haired, and Clementina’s spectacles were now so thick that her eyes could hardly be seen behind them. Leo’s massive figure had sagged and spread, so that he was now enormously fat. Even just after the war, he had looked very young for his age. Michael Wood was ten, and Alice suddenly saw in him a resemblance to Luke. Perhaps it was the way in which his hair curled over his forehead. My son, she said to herself. She felt nothing. Anatole had aged considerably in the last few years. His pale skin was still smooth, but when he laughed his face became riddled with tiny lines. His hair was entirely grey at the front, and still dark in a long stripe down the back. Kate, too, was in her forties, and looked it. She dyed her hair to keep it black, and her blue eyes were now folded into her face by swarthy skin. Of all the adults at the table, only Mr Tuskin looked exactly as he had done in 1904, when he had first begun to teach Alice. Alice herself was nearing thirty, but she had changed little in comparison with the others.

  The house had aged with its inhabitants. It had not been redecorated since 1912, and the paint on the kitchen walls was chipped and peeling. The kitchen had once been the dining room: it would have looked very proletarian, with its laundry steaming over the crowded table, had it not been for the elaborate carved cornices.

  ‘Leo, you carry on as though nationalisation would end all the miners’ problems,’ Alice interrupted when she started to listen to the conversation again. ‘I can’t for the life of me see how you can improve conditions by replacing several capitalists by a huge bureaucratic state.’

  ‘Do you suggest then that you leave the mine owners alone? Let them scrape up a few more pounds by allowing them to leave insecure pit props, and put hundreds of men at risk?’

  ‘Of course I don’t. I suggest that the miners own and manage the mines. If they dig the coal out, the coal belongs to them by right. And ownership by the miners isn’t the same thing as nationalisation, whatever Fabians say. The State isn’t the same as the people, and never can be.’

  ‘Indeed it cannot,’ said Volodya.

  ‘It might be if it were sufficiently decentralised,’ said Clementina. ‘But honestly, I can’t see how cooperative ownership of the mines, if it could work, could bring the miners a decent wage, in the present economic crisis. Do we agree that the miners ought to get at least £8 a week? Good. Well, the only way they’ll get it is if the government pays them that out of public money.’

  ‘But the Tories aren’t going to do that,’ said Alice.

  ‘No more will Ramsay Macdonald, for that matter,’ said Kate.

  ‘Well,’ said Leo, ‘let’s hear the mine owner’s case. Come on, Miranda, you can be Devil’s Advocate. What would your father say?’

  ‘Oh, of course, he thinks privately that any form of barbarity which increases his income is a Good Thing,’ said Miranda, ‘but he wouldn’t say so. Actually, I’m not sure quite what argument he would use to justify his position. Naturally, I never knew him as a person.’ She helped herself to more macaroni. Her face took on a shut look. She only talked about her family to Alice.

  Leo turned away from her. Miranda listened, half-smiling, to Finola’s eager questioning of Volodya. He was very indulgent.

  ‘So what did the Reds do with your family jewels?’

  ‘Oh, I expect they sold them and used the money for some Bolshevik purpose.’

  ‘Didn’t you escape with anything?’

  ‘One sapphire, which I hid in the heel of my boot, and a hundred and twelve roubles,’ he smiled. He was making it up about the sapphire.

  ‘Did you used to be a prince?’ said Finola.

  ‘No, no,’ he laughed. ‘Only a little provincial landowner. Most of my land was mortgaged anyway.’

  ‘Oh, but you’re still romantic!’

  ‘You’re incorrigible, Finola,’ said Miranda.

  ‘Where did you go when you escaped?’ continued Fin.

  Miranda gazed up at the rails of airing clothes and sheets which were suspended by ropes and pulleys over the kitchen table. The rooms in this large, dilapidated, rusty brick house formed, she felt, her first real home; and yet it too was an enclosed world. She met only everyone’s oldest friends. Liza had given her many assurances about Volodya yesterday
. She had only gone out of the house a few times since November, when she had first ventured outside. Here, she could always be alone if she liked. If anyone was occasionally hostile to her, Alice was always at her side. Naturally, Bramham Gardens was no more like boarding school than it was like the mansion in which she had been brought up.

  Miranda felt dizzy from drinking too much gin. She excused herself, and left the table. She climbed the stairs to her small room on the second floor. It was bare, except for a bed, a table, a chair, some books and her clothes. It was cold in the room, and she put the eiderdown round her shoulders. She went over to the window. She saw a taxi drive up to a nearby house, and a man in a bowler hat, who was carrying the evening paper, got out. Oddly enough, things from the outside, like delivery vans and bowler hats and the Daily Telegraph, surprised her when she saw them from this house, just as they had made her feel cold and strange when she had seen them within the grounds of her boarding school.

  CHAPTER 17

  BRAMHAM GARDENS

  EARL’S COURT

  October 1925

  Alice stood at her easel, scowling, with a cigarette hanging from her lip, her hair strained back out of her way. Anatole sat under one of the windows, obstructing the light which fell on Miranda as little as possible. He hummed to himself and very occasionally scribbled on the music paper before him.

  Miranda was posing nude on Alice’s bed. Light fell on her from in front and from behind. She looked sleek and utterly contented. In the painting, Alice had made the room darker than it was, so that Miranda’s body seemed irradiated. Alice had already completed one picture of Miranda naked. That one showed only hints of her body and face: round white curves on which the light happened to fall in varying degrees of strength, only hinting at the remainder.

  ‘Do you remember the young beech trees at Caitlin’s, the summer Finola was born?’ asked Anatole suddenly. ‘In the evening? Miranda, if you were a tree, you would be one of those.’

  ‘Really, Anatole, you ought to take up poetry,’ Miranda replied with an exquisite smile.