‘What will you do if you do leave school in the summer?’
‘That’s the problem,’ said Finola.
‘What do you want to do eventually? Do you still want to live in the country and have lots of children?’
‘Yes, of course. Why should I change my mind?’
‘Well, very few people are as constant in their ideas as you are. I had absolutely no idea of what I wanted to do until I was fifteen or sixteen, and plenty of people go to university and still don’t know what they want to do after that. Do you know why you’ve always wanted that so much, Fin?’
‘I suppose loving children is just nature,’ said Finola, ‘not just children but helpless things. Everyone responds to people who need help.’
‘So long as they know they need it. Most people never see people, or things, who are badly off. That’s the problem.’
Finola forestalled her. ‘Now don’t start talking about socialism and the class system again,’ she said. ‘I was saying that I don’t really know why I want children so much. But I want to live in the country because I so adored those holidays at Aunt Caitlin’s. I know,’ she said. ‘I want to be like Aunt Caitlin. I want to support people.’
Aunt Caitlin had died in February.
‘It’s odd you should say that,’ said Jenny. ‘I’d never seen Caitlin as a matriarch before. But she was, wasn’t she? We all used to go up to King’s Norton when we were fed up, and we all came back feeling better. And yet we never really appreciated it while she was alive. You don’t think that it was Caitlin rather than the place itself that made King’s Norton have that effect on you, Fin? Just because you didn’t really feel her influence directly?’
‘Maybe,’ said Finola, ‘but knowing that isn’t going to stop me wanting to live in the country.’
‘Do you know, the other day Liza told me that she wants to live in the country.’
‘Liza? She’s never said anything about it.’
‘I know, but Liza never says much. She used to talk to Alice a bit before …’ Jenny paused.
‘I know what you’re talking about,’ said Finola. ‘Liza thinks Alice jilted her, sort of.’
‘So you do know.’
‘I’m not a baby. I was actually around when Miranda was here, too.’
‘Yes, you must have been hurt by it all.’ Jenny wanted to see whether Finola would talk.
Finola shrugged. ‘I’m going to give all my love to my children,’ she said. ‘All of it. So,’ she finished as she got off the bed, ‘you think I ought to go to Queen’s?’
‘Well, I didn’t actually say so, but I think you ought to try it. The only thing I really would say to you is that you should remember that you’re going to be a woman of means when you’re twenty-one; Caitlin left you quite a bit. You won’t have to marry for money to obtain your leisured life in the country.’
‘Not for the money, no.’
‘Liza’s had to earn money,’ said Jenny, ‘and she hates it. You won’t have to do that, either.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Finola, ‘I’m privileged. Everyone’s privileged in one sense or another. By the way, do you want anything from downstairs?’
‘No, I don’t think so — oh, you couldn’t get me an apple, could you?’
‘Hot-water-bottle?’
‘That’s a good idea.’ She gave a luscious sniff and wriggled in the bed, realising at Finola’s suggestion that she was actually cold.
‘You know,’ said Finola, ‘I’m sure you’re not really a distinguished lady academic. You just don’t look right.’
Jenny laughed. ‘Wait till I get grey hair,’ she said, and then added, ‘but the bit about “distinguished” is certainly true.’
‘Oh, they just won’t give you a lectureship because you’re a woman and probably better than most of the doddery old men. They don’t want to be put to shame.’
‘You’re a darling,’ said Jenny, and she meant it, but Finola thought that Jenny didn’t believe her.
She went down to the kitchen, filled a hot-water-bottle and took it up to Jenny together with the apple.
‘You could always be a nurse, you know,’ said Jenny with a smile as Finola tucked in her sheet.
‘Yes,’ said Finola, as she left the room, ‘that’s quite a good job for a girl who’s not very clever.’
Finola was due to meet her friends, Stephanie and Marianne, in a quarter of an hour at Marianne’s family’s house in the Little Boltons, before proceeding to the West End for the matinée. She had rarely seen either of them since they had left Cressida Lake for St Paul’s last summer; but Marianne had rung her at short notice with a spare ticket.
Finola looked up at the large, white, ornate house. The garden in front, bounded by a wall instead of railings, was just beginning to come to life. Two solid pillars enclosed the wrought-iron garden gate, which was left ajar; and a black and blue and white tiled path ran up to the front steps. A gleaming knocker was fixed on the dark green door. Finola could see nothing of the inside save the edges of the curtains in the windows, which were lighter in colour and weight on each ascending floor.
Finola thought firstly of the large, dirty, orange-brick house in Bramham Gardens, with its awkward gable and grey peeling window frames, and secondly of the country equivalent of this house, which would be smaller and more comfortable than King’s Norton but which might well have a Victorian greenhouse in the garden. She set her hat on her head at an acute angle, marched up the path and firmly rang the bell, which was answered by a maid.
‘Fin!’ Marianne shouted from over the second-floor bannisters, which were painted smooth clean white. ‘We’re upstairs — second door on the left.’
Finola had been here once before, and remembered the house quite well, but Marianne had forgotten this.
‘I say, devastating lipstick,’ said Marianne, when Finola came in, in a very good imitation of her elder sister’s manner, which Stephanie recognised.
‘Thanks,’ said Finola. She peered at them both to see if either of them looked really sophisticated. They had both turned fifteen.
‘Steph, do please finish those chocolates, you know. I’m banting and I simply can’t resist,’ said Marianne. Stephanie was sprawling on the bed. ‘Fin, do finish them. Steph’s so fat anyway and you’re quite a skinny little thing still, aren’t you? Just wait a year or two before you have to start worrying!’
She sighed and plumped herself down at her dressing-table as though she had been covering up wrinkles there for years. She searched in a little bag at the back of one drawer for her one lipstick: it was such a discreet colour that her parents never noticed when she was actually wearing it.
‘Am I fat, Fin?’ asked Stephanie, holding the chocolates out to her.
‘Oh no,’ said Finola, looking at the bulge of flesh which poked over Stephanie’s waistband, ‘not really. Just puppy fat,’ she added.
‘Puppy fat is babies and children,’ said Stephanie, looking up.
‘No it isn’t,’ said Finola eagerly. ‘It’s fat which you lose automatically as you get older. At any age.’
‘I think its’s about time my sister lost some of her puppy fat, then,’ said Marianne. ‘Just look at this dress. Miles too big round the hips. And if I don’t wear this I’ll have to wear something about as flattering as my school uniform.’ She nodded at the open wardrobe which was full of new cashmeres and lawns and lace.
‘Your sister isn’t fat,’ said Stephanie, ‘she’s just developed.’ She pushed out her matronly bosom.
‘It’s not fashionable to be developed,’ said Marianne. ‘You can’t see how developed I really am because I’ve been banting so hard recently. It’s taken all my weight off. Honestly, parents are the lousiest bore. I’m just as mature as Celia — where’s the difference between fifteen and eighteen? But they behave as though I’m an absolute child. They even say I’m too young to bant. It really is absolutely crymaking. I have to eat simply masses and then make myself puke.’ She sounded very cheerful.
Finola stared at her. ‘You make yourself sick after every meal?’ she said.
‘Il faut souffrir pour être belle,’ said Marianne. ‘Then I eat my diet afterwards. Oranges and brown bread.’
‘I think that’s plain silly,’ said Finola.
‘I’d forgotten,’ said Marianne, turning towards her. ‘You always start talking with an Irish accent when you start criticising people.’
‘I never do,’ said Finola. ‘Never. Even my mother hardly has an accent. She isn’t really Irish at all, she’s a Londoner.’
‘A Cockney born within the sound of Bow Bells, you mean?’ said Marianne, laughing.
‘Yes I do,’ said Finola, and flushed.
‘Come on,’ said Stephanie, ‘we’d better be going. I suppose your mother will insist we take a taxi, Marianne. That’s an awfully nice hat, Finola,’ she added. She smiled brightly as she looked at Finola and used her formal name, and then she led the way downstairs.
After the film the girls went to have tea at Fuller’s. Then they took a taxi back, but even so they were later than they should have been.
At Marianne’s house they were scolded, as Marianne had said they would be. ‘I don’t know how I’m going to explain this to your parents,’ Marianne’s mother said to Finola. Finola looked, then, as though she had parents who were like Marianne’s mother.
Marianne’s mother looked at Finola’s painted mouth. ‘I hope they won’t mind too much,’ she said.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Finola.
‘Well,’ said Marianne’s mother, ‘what about a glass of lemonade before you go, Stephanie and Finola?’
They went into the drawing room. The drinks had already been brought in, and Marianne’s father and her brother Jeremy, a Cambridge undergraduate, were sitting there, drinking whisky. They were too deep in argument to pay any attention to the girls. Marianne poured out some lemonade for the three of them.
‘God, what a bore,’ she said. ‘They never seem to stop arguing. Honestly, neither of them will ever persuade the other one that he’s right, so why do they bother?’
‘You’re talking as though unemployment was some sort of accident,’ said Marianne’s brother. ‘Of course, as a pillar of the Establishment, you’ve got to talk like that. Anyone who hasn’t got a vested interest in the social order can see that unemployment is a deliberate weapon of the ruling class, used to keep the workers where they’ve always been. Goodness me, one couldn’t possibly let the lower orders join one in conspicuous consumption of non-necessities, could one? One might erode class differences.’
His father, who appeared to be an old man, slowly shook his head and peacefully finished his tumbler full of comforting golden whisky. Finola watched him. She had not paid any attention to Jeremy after she had heard his first comment, but she was surprised to note that his father did not look outraged or frightened at being made aware of ‘the threat of the people’.
‘I think,’ said Marianne’s father, ‘that where you’re really going wrong — in the sense that if you misinterpret this you’ll never achieve your revolution, granting for the sake of argument that the actual facts are as you say — is in your interpretation of people’s motives. There isn’t any conscious desire on anyone’s part to oppress the workers. The only conscious desire of the class you hate so much — of which, I may say, you’re still a member — is to cling to tradition. Possibly it is a form of cowardice, but it’s not an evil intention. You mustn’t exaggerate. I’d like you to tell me what you’d put in place of our system, Jeremy.’
‘The classless society. It’ll come in any case after the revolution,’ he snapped.
‘A society in which the classes aren’t separated by income differences, you mean?’
‘Of course.’
‘But how can you tell that other sorts of class oppression won’t come into being? Perhaps old people will be a persecuted group. Why shouldn’t the categories be made according to other criteria?’
‘Because all that stuff — religion and education and sex differences — is the result purely of economics. Abolish economic distinctions and all the other distinctions will vanish.’
‘I can’t quite accept the third instance you gave,’ smiled his father, ‘but still, I think you may be right if after the revolution you can stop everyone from believing in the soul. Then you might achieve your uniformity. But you’d have to do it by force, I think. You can’t just abolish thousands of years of religious tradition like that. And I’m afraid I really don’t believe that uniformity is desirable. People ought to be able to hold their own views and go their own way.’
Jeremy sighed deeply and opened his mouth to refute an argument which was familiar to him. Stephanie was looking in puzzlement at Finola, who, it seemed to her, looked as though she had never heard anything of this kind before.
‘But are you a real Conservative?’ said Finola to Jeremy’s father, and then she blushed and did not know herself quite what she meant. ‘I’m sorry,’ she stammered. ‘I really am. I shouldn’t have been listening but you just don’t sound at all like what I thought a Conservative would sound like and Jeremy was saying that you were one and …’
‘Good heavens, my dear, you’re getting quite upset. It’s nice to see a pretty girl who takes an interest in things, you know. As to your question, I’m afraid I’m not sure myself. All I can say is that I won’t destroy what we’ve got until I can be sure that a replacement will be better.’
‘Oh, by a better replacement you just mean “the greatest happiness of the smallest number”,’ said Jeremy, who had just been noticing how very pretty Finola was. He did not recognise the child he had met eighteen months ago.
His father closed his eyes briefly, but not as though he were attempting to control his temper. ‘I think that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds” expresses my views rather better. Who said that, my dear?’ he said to Finola. Finola did not mind his exceeding benevolence, though she blushed again, because she thought she knew the answer.
‘Leibniz?’ she hazarded. Anatole was fond of Voltaire’s comments upon Leibniz.
‘Quite right.’
Marianne and Stephanie were staring at her, as though she were just as eccentric and radical as the rest of her family.
‘I must be going. I really must, thank you for the lemonade,’ she said, standing up.
‘I say, are you walking? Shall I walk you back?’ said Jeremy suddenly and he too blushed in front of Marianne and Stephanie.
‘Oh, don’t bother — oh, thank you,’ said Finola and they both hurried out of the drawing room.
They walked very fast along the pavement, in silence for about a hundred yards.
‘I suppose you’re at school with Marianne?’ he said at last.
‘No,’ said Finola, and she paused very slightly, knowing that she must look at least sixteen if he was walking her home. ‘I’m at Queen’s College. We were at prep school together.’ If Marianne found out that she had said this it would not matter, because Finola was sure that she would not be seeing her again. But if Jeremy discovered that it was a lie he might abandon any plan he might possibly, vaguely, have of taking her out one day. Finola shook her head, like a dog shaking itself free of water. ‘What are you going to do when you leave school?’ he said.
‘Oh, I’ll have to get some sort of job before I get married.’
‘Working-class women have to work after they get married, even when they’re pregnant,’ he said. It suddenly occurred to him that Finola might be shocked, or made giggly, by the use of that word: she simply looked irritated, as though she were quite used to that sort of statement. But she was relaxing, he thought; she was not quite so far apart from him on the pavement.
‘Yes,’ said Finola, ‘and so did my mother, though she has seven hundred a year. She’s an artist,’ she added.
‘Really? I say, what’s her name?’
‘Alice Molloy. You won’t have heard of her.’
‘Oh
, I have. A chap who’s up at Oxford with me’s got one of her paintings in his rooms — I think it’s awfully good. It’s of a young girl in silhouette — you can’t see much of her but you can tell the model must have been beautiful. It’s just called “Miranda”.’
‘Here we are,’ said Finola. ‘Goodnight. Thank you for walking me home.’ Her voice was gracious, cheerful, and final.
‘Oh — er — goodnight then.’ He just brushed her cheek with his lips and hurried off, casting a backward glance at Alice Molloy’s house.
Finola threw her hat on to the table in the hall. So Alice had sold one of the pictures of Miranda which crowded her studio — though she had said nothing about it to anyone. True love, thought Finola, might hurt oneself and one’s love object and everyone else, but it was noble and forever: the pain caused by true love was forgiveable. The pain caused by a passing fancy, such as Alice’s passion for Miranda now seemed to be, was not. To Alice, of course, Finola thought as she walked upstairs, all the faults of a pretty model twelve to fifteen years old were forgiveable.
Recently Alice had been seeing and listening and talking to Finola more often than she had used to, and she had painted an exceedingly unflattering portrait of her which she said showed up Finola’s interesting points quite well. Soon Finola would grow up — and then, she supposed, her feelings, like her body, would become as unacceptable as they had been when she was eight. Finola sat down on her bed and did not cry, but she hugged herself very tightly with her cold hands as though she were afraid that, unless she held them in, her reflections upon the unromantic truth would escape her, to become objects of public contempt and denial.
CHAPTER 24
WATERLOO PLACE
ST JAMES’S
May 1931
Privileged Children Page 19
