Privileged Children

by Frances Vernon

  Sebastian was in the drawing room upstairs. When he had finished two cigarettes he reckoned that he could fetch his parents, who were preparing to go out to dinner.

  He met them on the landing. ‘Miranda’s downstairs,’ he blurted.

  ‘What?’ they cried together.

  ‘She is,’ he said, nodding his head furiously. ‘She was on the bus. I brought her home.’

  ‘What cock-and-bull story is this?’ shouted Thomas Pagett. ‘You brought her home, just like that, after she’s been gone for two years? Don’t talk such nonsense, boy! The child would never …’

  ‘Oh no, it’s not possible,’ moaned Flora Pagett, and she rushed downstairs. She flung open first the study doors, then the dining-room doors. ‘My own darling girl,’ she murmured, standing in the doorway. ‘We thought you were dead!’

  ‘Don’t faint, Flora, for heaven’s sake!’ her husband shouted from behind her. He pushed past her and saw Miranda, nonchalantly sitting on the fender, her chin (famous for being like that of her Yankee grandmother) held high.

  Thomas Pagett blinked and said hoarsely, ‘What are you doing here? Who are these?’ He was almost crying.

  ‘Let me introduce Anatole Brécu and Liza Brécu,’ said Miranda, with her eyes tightly shut. ‘I’m here, Father, because I was found by Sebastian, and in a few minutes, when Alice arrives, everything will be sorted out for you, but for the moment, will you just sit down and be quiet and not ask any more questions!’

  ‘Alice? Who’s Alice? Another damned …’

  ‘Randa, I’m just so pleased you’re home,’ said Flora Pagett, very normally and deliberately. She embraced Miranda’s stiff body. ‘How you’ve changed, dear,’ she continued, dabbing at her eyes with the back of her hand, like a small girl.

  ‘Leave me alone, Mother, please.’

  They waited only a few minutes, twisting their hands in silence, until Alice arrived. Every time Thomas Pagett started to speak, Miranda glared at him, and his wife, looking at her daughter, hushed him. No one looked at anyone else.

  They heard Alice, after ringing the bell, arguing with the maid. Neither of the Pagetts attempted to open the door themselves. ‘Let her in, Betsy!’ shouted Miranda’s father.

  Alice came into the dining room. ‘We have been waiting for you, madam,’ said Thomas Pagett. ‘Now can you explain your part in all this?’

  Anatole got up. ‘My wife and I,’ he began, ‘had no idea that Laura — Miranda — was your daughter. We knew her as Laura Jones.’

  ‘Laura — Miranda — has been my model, you see,’ continued Alice, with wonderful earnestness. ‘For two years.’

  ‘And she lived with you?’ said Thomas Pagett.

  ‘Yes,’ said Alice.

  ‘Tell me, Mrs Brécu —’

  ‘Mrs Molloy.’

  ‘— are you in the habit of picking up children in the street and having them live with you for two years, modelling for you? Are you not curious as to where their families are? Or did my daughter tell you a pack of lies about all that? And did you not see a single one of the police notices which were pasted up all over London? Do you never read the newspapers?’

  ‘When your daughter and I met she was fourteen, which is old enough to leave school and take a job. She said she had no family. I lost my family at that age, so why should I question that? She had no home, and we live in a communal household, so she joined us. I don’t look at posters in the street, Mr Pagett, and I only ever read the Daily Worker.’

  ‘I don’t believe any of this,’ he replied. He paused to decide what he did believe.

  ‘Randa,’ said Flora Pagett in this interval, ‘were you happy with — Monsieur Brécu and Mrs Molloy?’

  ‘Very, very happy, Mother.’

  ‘Well, Thomas, I don’t see why she shouldn’t go back to these people. As Mrs Molloy said, she’s old enough to leave school and have a job.’ Mrs Pagett stood with her back absolutely straight and her hands clenched by her sides.

  ‘Good God, Flora! Now listen, Mrs Molloy. Whatever the truth is, Miranda has made it quite clear that you are the ringleader in this business. I want to speak to you in my study. Flora, take these people upstairs. Miranda —’ he hesitated, ‘— go with your mother, my dear:’

  He took Alice into his study, sat down at his desk and fiddled with his pens. ‘I can prove nothing against you, Mrs Molloy. In fact, I believe that you knew perfectly well who she was, and you have been concealing her from the police. Possibly you even kidnapped her. However, let that pass. I am Miranda’s father, and I am responsible for her. She is here to stay.’

  ‘Five years you’ll have to keep her in misery. Then you can’t stop her coming to us,’ said Alice, standing near the door.

  ‘Please let me finish, Mrs Molloy. I will not allow Miranda to communicate with you, and I will censor her letters myself.’ He walked over to the window and then turned to face Alice, but he looked at her hard face only briefly. ‘You have misunderstood me. I don’t want to keep my daughter in misery, as you put it. I want to see her happy in her own home, her natural surroundings. I don’t think Miranda will find happiness in some sort of Bohemianism. I realise that I have made mistakes in bringing up Miranda. I wish to rectify those mistakes. I care about my daughter and I want what is best for her. She’s not a child any more, but she’s a very young girl and she can’t know yet what sort of life is right for her.’ He finished with a great sigh.

  ‘Oh, don’t be such a hypocrite. You just want her because you think of her as property.’

  ‘I have tried to explain my position, Mrs Molloy, and I see that you are not amenable to reason. Very well, you can think what you like, but the position is as it is. Goodbye, Mrs Molloy.’

  Alice took a few steps and then stopped. ‘But what will you really do to her? she asked.

  ‘I will arrange for her to go to a finishing school — either in Paris or in Lausanne. Then, of course, she will come out when she is seventeen.’ He was holding the back of a chair very tightly as he spoke.

  Alice turned round and walked out. There, at the bottom of the stairs, was Flora Pagett.

  ‘Randa’s with Monsieur Brécu and Miss Brécu,’ she said. ‘I left them alone together in the drawing room. Please, Mrs Molloy, let me talk to you for a while.’ She held the dining-room door wide open. Flora Pagett was a small woman who, after twenty-four years in England, still had an American accent. Her face was heavily made-up, and her hair was hennaed. She had once had Miranda’s figure, but it had sagged and softened with age and childbearing. She made Alice sit opposite her, and looked at her intently. ‘I do think it’s right that Randa should stay with you if that’s what she wants, but —’

  ‘You can imagine what your husband said to me.’

  ‘Well, yes. You see, if she only had a choice, she might choose to come home. Oh, Mrs Molloy, I always knew she wasn’t happy, and really it did worry me so! Thomas always said she had plenty of people to look after her, the best, trained people, so I shouldn’t trouble myself about her.’ She broke off. ‘You can’t imagine what it’s been like, these last two years. She was driven to do this terrible thing to us. Maybe we deserved it. Did we?’ she said, gazing tearfully at Alice.

  ‘Yes,’ said Alice.

  ‘Everyone says that the upbringing we gave Randa never did them any harm. In New Orleans, now, we don’t treat children like they do here — oh, Thomas always says I mustn’t talk so much about life back home! I’m sorry. Mrs Molloy, I’m so selfish, pouring out my troubles to you at a time like this. I’m sure you’d like to go and see Randa now. The drawing room’s on the first floor, on the left.’

  ‘I don’t think it was really your fault, Mrs Pagett,’ said Alice suddenly.

  Alice found Miranda crying in Anatole’s arms, choking and screaming and red in the face. She flung herself upon Alice when she came in. ‘It’s too terrible, too terrible to happen!’ she cried. ‘What did he say to you, Alice? What did he say?’

  Alice could not an
swer. ‘Oh my little one, my own darling,’ she whispered. ‘He didn’t say anything much. But he won’t be sending you back to Radfield, that’s for sure.’

  Miranda calmed down a little. Liza and Anatole sat on a sofa by the fireplace, looking at their feet while Alice and Miranda clasped each other. In a way, they were all quite glad, momentarily, when after five useless minutes the Pagetts came in and Thomas Pagett asked them to say goodbye to Miranda.

  They all kissed her before they left. Miranda stood there woodenly even after the door was closed behind them. Her parents said nothing.

  Outside the house, they watched, as though expecting to see Miranda tearing through it, the heavy, gleaming black door. ‘She might as well be in Holloway,’ muttered Liza.

  ‘Oh God, don’t say things like that!’ cried Alice.

  ‘We must get home quickly,’ said Anatole. He walked them to Oxford Street, where they hailed a cab.

  Alice sat in the corner of the taxi, blank-faced and shrunken. She resisted Anatole’s attempt to hold her, though he needed comforting as much as she did. He wished that he could go and talk to Kate, who now lived with Richard in Hampstead; but he felt that he could not leave Alice tonight.

  Alice went up to her room, and she was left alone. Supper was very silent.

  ‘She had such a lovely body,’ cried Charlie suddenly. ‘Her waist asked you to put your arm round it.’

  ‘How can you be so crude about her today of all days?’ cried Anatole.

  ‘Don’t pretend you’re not thinking the same as we are,’ laughed Charlie. Volodya was silent. ‘She rejected your attentions too, didn’t she? Or gave you just a tiny taste? None of us ever made it with her.’

  Anatole said nothing. It was, however, less disturbing to concentrate on his unsatisfied desires than on Miranda crying her heart out in a stately bedroom in Bryanston Square once again with no one to love her and no one to love.

  Miranda was at that moment simply trying to think of a detective-proof method of murdering her father.

  CHAPTER 20

  BRAMHAM GARDENS

  EARL’S COURT

  September 1926

  Dearest, darling Alice,

  This is the first letter I’ve been able to write. Father has censored all my letters and I can’t get hold of stamps to write to you in secret. However, he didn’t check that the letters are censored at this place!

  This finishing school is very old-fashioned. We don’t learn anything remotely useful, like typing. Dancing, Italian, French, deportment, drawing and etiquette are what Mademoiselle believes is necessary. Not quite the ‘use of the globes’ as Jane Austen has it, but almost. Still, we are quite free. We can go out into Lausanne in the afternoon. My main problem is boredom and loneliness, and missing you. I read a lot. Father sends me books from London. I was so amazed. He said to me: ‘I know you like books, Miranda, so do take any of those in the Library. I’m afraid they haven’t been much appreciated since my mother died. I don’t expect they’ll have any of the stuff you like reading at the school, so write to me and I’ll order any books you want.’

  I was sent to Lynmore with my mother two days after the disaster. We were alone together up there for about two months, and we became rather friends. I used to hate her as much as I hated Father, because although I knew, in a confused way, that she didn’t altogether believe that what was being done to me was right, she never tried to stop it. But I know now that she did try. She wanted my nice governess to stay, when Father sacked her. She’s told me about herself, too. She’s had a sad life. Her mother took her to England when she was seventeen, intending to marry her off to an English gentleman. She was almost forced to marry Father. Grandmother didn’t really know about the English gentry: she couldn’t tell the difference between a born landowner and a rich industrialist turned landed gentleman like my grandfather, with whom she got on very well. Father is very ashamed of his father’s only being a Northern businessman who made his packet, like so many others, in the great days of Free Trade.

  When I was young I couldn’t see my parents like this: as worried, snobbish human beings. I can’t hate them any more, now that I’ve been forced to understand that they’re not monsters — nothing so interesting — but only the dull run of humanity. They still bore me, though, and I resent my father’s assumed right to tyrannise over me, benevolent though he’s making that tyranny now.

  I lie in bed at night and I imagine that I’m sitting in the kitchen with you, with Palmerston on my lap. It’s frightening, Alice, but the longer I’m away, the less clear the image of our life is to me, the further it recedes into a blur of friendly muddle. I try to imagine your faces, one by one, and whereas they used to be photographed on my mind so clearly that I would cry, now I can hardly visualise them. It’s terrible, treacherous, in a way, that wounds do heal. One thinks they’ll last forever, but they don’t however painful they are and however much one hates the pain. Dull acceptance takes over in the end. There aren’t any Miss Havishams in real life, though one feels there ought to be. I ought to be sadder, but I’m not any more; I’m only bored and lonely and missing you all, I’m not ravaged by grief. I don’t feel passionate about anything. I don’t think I ever will do again.

  I’m coming out in May. I’ll be able to see you after that, because one isn’t chaperoned any more. (I only found that out this summer. I had awfully vague ideas about débutante life when I was shut away from the adult world.) Perhaps that’s partly why I’m not a figure of tragedy.

  All my love, Alice, and write back soon.

  Alice slowly folded the letter, creased it, and then unfolded it again. It had been written without a break, scrawled in places, and hastily shoved into the envelope and posted. She got up and went downstairs with it. Anatole was practising on the violin in his room.

  ‘Never come in when I’m playing!’ he shouted as the door opened.

  ‘Letter from Miranda,’ Alice said.

  He read it standing, with the bow in his hand. ‘It’s not very passionate or very sorrowful, is it?’ she said.

  ‘As she comes near to explaining, you’d have got passionate and sorrowful letters if she’d been able to write in May and June. Did you know that she’d be coming back and coming out so soon?’

  ‘I thought she would be. I wasn’t sure.’

  ‘Sainte Vierge!’ he screamed, throwing down the letter, which Alice picked up. ‘You mean that you have been like this — maudlin and flying into rages with us all every day — when you knew that you’d see your little darling so soon?’

  ‘Soon! She might be dead by May. I didn’t know, did I? I wasn’t sure. That was the worst thing. I presumed that she’d be chaperoned everywhere, like my mother was when she was a débutante.’

  ‘Get out. I can’t endure you any more. If you really loved her, you’d be glad that she’s content enough; not angry because she isn’t in a continuous paroxysm of grief and anger such as you’ve worked yourself up into.’

  Alice turned pale. Anatole watched her walk woodenly upstairs almost with glee, but when she had disappeared from view he returned, frowning, to his violin, and half hoped that Alice would come back quite soon.

  Alice paced round her studio, looking at the many pictures of Miranda on the walls. She sat down, eventually, in front of a piece of foolscap, holding a pen. She looked at the paper and wrote: Dear Miranda.

  Then she continued:

  Thank you for your letter. I hope you are well. I am glad you feel all right now. I have been utterly dejected, but I needn’t be now you are all right. It has been terrible without you. I miss you in bed.

  She wrote each sentence individually, with large full stops between every one. She began a new paragraph.

  I think your parents are trying to buy you off. Don’t forget what they did to you even if they aren’t monsters (which I don’t believe).

  With much love from Alice.

  PS Come here as soon as you can, won’t you?

  She folded it, put it in
an envelope, and went to post it. She stood in front of the pillar box for a few moments, in the dark, vaguely tracing the letters ‘VR’ above the slot with her finger. She would write another letter tomorrow, a cheerful, sympathetic, newsy letter which might provide some enlivenment in Miranda’s life.

  ‘Anatole says Miranda wrote!’ said Jenny, as Alice slowly opened the front door. Liza was behind her. ‘Show us the letter. Has she been sent back to boarding school?’

  Alice gave them the letter and went upstairs. ‘I’m sorry I said that, Alice,’ said Anatole, coming out of his room. ‘It was cruel.’ Alice shook her head.

  Jenny, in the kitchen, absent-mindedly gave the letter to Finola to read. ‘See?’ said Finola. ‘She’s all right. I bet she was making it up about how cruel her parents were to her.’

  Liza took the letter away from her, thinking that she heard Alice’s footsteps on the stairs.

  CHAPTER 21

  BRAMHAM GARDENS

  EARL’S COURT

  June 1927

  Miranda had to wait until she knew enough about parties to tell those from which she would be missed from those which she would be able to miss without being noticed before she could go to Alice. She went to some sort of party or ball almost every night.

  One evening, she dressed in short black taffeta to go to a rather avant-garde party on the borders of Chelsea. Her parents smiled to see her coming downstairs, looking so happy, so handsome, such a credit to them. ‘Enjoy yourself,’ her father said.

  ‘I’m sure I will,’ she replied, and swept out of the front door.

  Her parents had given her a small car for her seventeenth birthday, which the chauffeur had taught her to drive. Almost no other girl of her age was able to drive herself around London as Miranda was.

  Miranda had had her hair shingled, because she wore fashionable clothes, with which heavy hair in a bun looked very odd; but she knew that her previous hairstyle had been more becoming to her strong-featured and intensely female face. She was peculiarly conscious of the missing weight on the back of her head as she drove to Bramham Gardens. She still had her own key to the house, which she wore round her neck, together with her other, more necessary keys.