Tyringham Park

by Rosemary McLoughlin

  She held the youngest child’s sticky hand away from her to prevent it touching her new frock and hoped it would go away before she lost patience and bent back the little fingers with more force than was necessary to teach it a lesson.

  Some days, after Dixon returned from the Rossiter home, she would think how lucky she was to be treated as one of the family by people she admired so much, and how lucky she was to be able to walk away from all that noise and confusion when it got too much for her, returning to her organised office in the Waratah. On other days she would race to her bedroom and howl into her pillow at the injustice of Norma having a lovely mother, an admirable husband (though not as admirable as Manus), and three children (who would be of a superior mould if they were hers), and a beautiful house, whereas she had no one and nothing except a growing bank account. Was the pain she was feeling the pain that old Lily East and middle-aged Teresa Kelly had suffered? Was this the child hunger that she had been so scornful of when she had been young and in love with Manus?

  42

  Paris

  1927

  In the finishing school in her eighteenth year Charlotte was in a class with fourteen other aristocratic girls who all knew each other and were socially confident. She tried to take an interest in flower arranging, etiquette, table settings, personal grooming, fashion, deportment, curtseying, dancing, sketching, the use of watercolours and spoken French, skills that would help catch an aristocratic husband provided there was money to go with them. During all these classes she kept seeing Cormac’s mocking smile, especially when she was painting botanical specimens in a constrained, ladylike way, and could hear his voice urging “Don’t hold back. Let fly. Get stuck in,” and knew how unacceptable those words would be in this establishment. The girls were resentful when they heard how fluent her French was, so she became hesitant in her delivery and used incorrect words at intervals to appease them.

  She became isolated and unhappy and took larger portions of food to console herself. Her cheekbones and jaw line began to lose their definition again. All this she could bear as she knew the year would soon be over and it was necessary for her plan, but what she couldn’t bear was how she had unwisely confided in her roommate and suffered the consequences. Having read in books that confiding was an essential ingredient in friendship and, never having had a friend to know if this were true or not, she took the theory on trust and told her roommate that she intended to marry the first man who asked her so that she could have a baby as soon as possible to replace her lost sister to please her mother whom she was responsible for crippling. Instead of praising her altruistic ambitions, the girl screamed that she couldn’t stay around a person who was cursed with such bad luck, called her a freak, and picked up her things and went off demanding to be allotted another room.

  While her former roommate was socialising with the other girls after dinner she lay on her bed, looking at the ceiling, imagining how much louder the girl’s screaming would have been if she had told her the full story.

  The next day one of the other girls came up to her and said, “I know who you are. I thought I’d heard the name before. Everyone knows about the lost Blackshaw, but they didn’t make the connection. You’re her sister, aren’t you? And it was you who was expelled from school in England for attacking a girl and putting her into hospital.”

  For taunting me. For accusing me of crippling my mother and being such a bad rider that my horse had to be shot. That pupil deserved what she got, Charlotte believed, staring dumbly back at her accuser.

  “We don’t want your sort around here. Why don’t you go back to the bogs where you belong?” the girl concluded before returning to join her group.

  To avoid the risk of repeating her past behaviour, Charlotte packed her bags and returned home, telling her mother the course bored her and she had no intention of returning. Edwina knew from experience that there was no point in trying to force her to change her mind.

  Charlotte learnt her lesson. From now on she would never again confide in anyone. She would block the past from her mind and keep her old secrets hidden so deeply that even she wouldn’t be able to gain access to them.

  When her turn came to be launched into society at the traditional ball she didn’t know how to behave around men. The joking informality that she used in her conversations with Cormac caused them to look askance at her, so she switched to speaking in the clipped cadences favoured by her mother. Before she had time to gauge if that yielded more success, she noticed three girls from her finishing school mingling easily with the established crowd and knew any chance she had of finding a husband in this company was now gone. She saw the girls looking towards her as they whispered, and noticed the horrified looks on the faces of those who listened to them. After she wasn’t asked for a single dance during the length of the ball, she admitted defeat and retired from the social scene.

  43

  Dublin

  1934

  When Charlotte turned twenty-five she came into the fortune left to her by her paternal grandmother, the Dowager. She wished the old lady had had the sense to specify eighteen rather than twenty-five as the age to inherit, to give her marriage prospects some chance before she had become a joke. By now she was the only girl of her rank and age still unmarried.

  Washington Square, whose plot had been related to Charlotte by Aunt Verity as a cautionary tale, became Charlotte’s guide. The heroine in that novel would have been better off taking a chance and marrying the fortune-hunter she loved, Aunt Verity believed, rather than settling for the colourless, dreary life of a spinster, filling her life with dutiful tasks and second-hand experiences under the eye of a sneering parent. All one had to do was look at the inconsequential life of poor Aunt Verity to agree with that conclusion.

  Any suitor who approached Charlotte now that she was rich would, by definition, be a fortune-hunter. When such a man presented himself, she planned to accept him. All she had to do was wait for the news of her vast wealth to reach the receptive ears of the appropriate man.

  She didn’t have long to wait.

  Peregrine Poolstaff, with his lack of purpose and wit, had reached the age of thirty-eight unhampered by a wife. If the large bulge on his forehead had been filled with brains he would have been a genius, but since it evidently wasn’t, it was regarded instead as an example of nature’s propensity for irony. His estate in County Donegal was much in need of funds – if nothing was done soon he would have to sell off more land and art treasures and eventually be left with only the house, and even that was in jeopardy. His younger, married friends convinced him that marriage needn’t alter his way of life – he could still lead the life of a bachelor, just as they did. Meanwhile, they would coach him in the finer points of courtship and induct him into the secrets of what made a man irresistible to a woman. He was no oil painting, but then neither was Charlotte in her present blown-up state.

  Everything went according to their plan. Peregrine became a frequent and welcome caller to the townhouse. Charlotte wondered why everyone had been so dismissive of him when, after she got to know him, she could see he was entertaining and insightful. He even charmed Edwina who said looks weren’t everything and beggars couldn’t be choosers. Waldron was impressed by his family lineage.

  An engagement seemed imminent, and the night of the Hunt Ball at the RDS an ideal place to announce it.

  The pair agreed to arrive separately and meet there. Charlotte was accompanied by her cousins up from Cork and her brother Harcourt, seventeen years old, six feet tall and strongly built.

  Peregrine arrived during a lull between dances in the company of two young, handsome, jocular men and a thin, pretty, unknown woman, not the wife of either, whom he partnered in the next dance. She must be a visiting cousin of one of them, Charlotte thought, and he is being well-mannered, doing his duty. The woman’s gown, similar in style and fabric to all the other silky creations being worn by all the other women at the ball, was sleeveless, low-cut at the back, and had a
n elegant drape to it. Her own long-sleeved outfit of stiff grey satin with its high neck, made by an eighty-year-old dressmaker who charged very little, was unfashionable and unflattering by contrast. Why did she assume she knew what was suitable to wear without consulting anyone? Why didn’t she have a friend of her own age who could advise her? Considering she was now wealthy, why hadn’t she thought to seek out a modern dressmaker who used expensive fabrics and flattering patterns? In agony during the space of three dances, she waited for Peregrine to deposit the girl and claim her, but he continued to dance with the stranger and didn’t once look her way. He was the only one who didn’t. All the others – she recognised two finishing-school contemporaries who had married Irish peers – were watching her to see how she was taking it. She tried to avoid their scrutiny by staying backed up against a column. Choosing not to dance in a show of solidarity, Harcourt and the cousins stayed beside her in a tight protective ring.

  When the fourth dance began Charlotte felt ready to expire and indicated she wanted to leave. She didn’t even go to the cloakroom to collect her stole. Silence followed the little group as it left the ballroom.

  “That cad deserves a jolly good hiding,” said Harcourt.

  “No, no. It’s not his fault. I must have misread the signals.” Charlotte was holding herself as if she were in severe physical pain. Her plan to replace Victoria would never come to fruition. She was a failure. Even her mother couldn’t like her, so why would anyone else?

  At the door of the townhouse she thanked Harcourt and her cousins for their support and urged them to return to the ball as she didn’t want to spoil their entire evening. She closed the door on them, went to her rooms and rang for Queenie to come and help her take off her dress. When there was no immediate response, she continued to ring the bell at intervals for a long time, crying with frustration, thinking Queenie could hear the bell but was deliberately and selfishly not answering it. In the end she took a firm hold of the tapestry bell pull and, employing her full weight, yanked it from the wall. Charlotte heard the sound of crunching and of metal snapping, before she landed on the floor on her rear end with the detached bell pull in her hands. She lumbered to her feet, reached behind her back and tore at her dress, until all the button loops down the back ripped open, and she was able to step out of the monstrosity and hold on to it until she fetched the scissors and cut it into pieces. While she had the scissors in her hand she let down her long brown hair and hacked it all off.

  She didn’t hear that Peregrine had been relieved of his dancing partner by a rival after the fifth dance and had received a thrashing in the early hours of the morning by an unnamed assailant and that his two friends were disgusted that he had thrown away the chance of an advantageous marriage just because he wasn’t man enough to be seen in public with an overweight woman in an unfashionable gown.

  An overweight woman in an unfashionable gown who happened to be extremely wealthy in her own right.

  Part 3

  THE STUDENTS

  44

  Dublin

  1937

  Charlotte’s lunch hadn’t been delivered. She opened the door of her sitting room for the fourth time to see if the tray was in its usual place on the side table in the anteroom, but there was nothing there.

  Since the disastrous Hunt Ball three years earlier she had lived in self-imposed isolation, with her maid Queenie as her only contact with the rest of the house. Today was Queenie’s day off so Charlotte had no way of finding out why the tray hadn’t been delivered. She hadn’t had her bell reconnected as she couldn’t face the thought of having a man coming in to fix it. She was fully reliant on Queenie calling at her fixed times.

  Six hours until the next meal. What would happen if the cook were sick or absent and dinner wasn’t delivered either? How could she bear to miss two meals in a row? With Queenie away there was no way of finding out if there was anything amiss in the kitchen. Of course, later she could sneak down to the kitchen using the back stairway, but she made a point of never moving out of her rooms during the day for fear of running into her brother who shared the corridor with her. He hadn't as much as laid eyes on her for months and she wanted to keep it that way.

  She imagined her tray being delivered by a new maid to the wrong door. All the doors along this corridor were identical and the upper floors of the house looked much the same. Tuesday’s offering of roast lamb with rosemary and garlic accompanied by onion gravy and mashed potato followed by bread and butter pudding with custard might be unclaimed and spoiling in the wrong anteroom.

  She picked up last week’s paper to finish the crossword but still didn’t have answers to eleven of the clues. A paragraph about the war in Spain caught her eye but she was bored by the time she started the fourth sentence. The Ambassadors was in the same place beside her chair as it had been for the last month – reading a page at random, she didn’t take in a word. White smoke from her fourteenth cigarette of the day mixed with grey smoke from one already smouldering in the ashtray.

  Would she chance a quick trip to the kitchen? Harcourt would be studying for his exams, but would he be doing it at college or at a friend’s house, or here?

  She opened the sitting-room door and stood in the anteroom, listening for footsteps. Silence. Each time she put her hand on the doorknob she lost her nerve and stood to listen more intently. After what seemed an age she heard the familiar sound of Harcourt’s footsteps.

  Hearing them fade away and thinking she was safe, she opened the door and found herself looking up at the most handsome face she had ever seen.

  For a second his beauty made her forget her fear of being on display. He looked back at her, and inclined his head in a friendly way as if he were about to speak. She saw him clearly, even though he was standing in front of a long window and the back lighting was creating a halo effect around his dark hair, putting his face in soft shadow.

  A second face, similarly lit, appeared beside him.

  “Manus, what are you doing here?” she said at the same moment as the face said, “Christ Almighty, Charlotte. What have you done to yourself?”

  She whipped the door closed and leaned against it.

  “Charlotte, let me in to talk to you,” a voice called gently from the other side. “It’s me. Harcourt.”

  Harcourt, not Manus? How could she have made a mistake like that? The three years of isolation must have addled her brain. But the shape of the head and the way it sat on the shoulders? She couldn’t be mistaken. She remembered the outline so well.

  “Not now,” she managed to answer. “I’m not prepared. But soon, I promise, soon.”

  “I’ll hold you to that,” Harcourt replied. “Come on . . .”

  Charlotte didn’t catch the name of the friend.

  There was a murmur of voices, and then the sound of footsteps retreating along the corridor.

  Turning away from the door, she hit her shin against an antique tub chair and gave it a kick for being in the way even though it had been in the same place for years.

  Six hungry hours later, Charlotte retrieved the tray from the anteroom after the cook’s maid tapped on the inner door to let her know that high tea had arrived — there would be no dinner tonight, the cook’s maid said, as the cook was feeling poorly and young Florrie had to fill in and this was the best she could do.

  “Tell her she’s done well,” said Charlotte, not knowing or caring who Florrie was, concentrating on controlling her impulse to snatch the tray out of the maid’s hands. “Put it down there, thank you, and close the door after you.”

  Charlotte felt so ravenous after missing lunch that as soon as the door closed she ate two sausages and one rasher before she even lifted the tray. With her free hand she manoeuvred the soft fried eggs, flicking them on to thick slices of toast that had already soaked up the savoury juices. She sat and devoured the egg on toast. Grease trickled down the front of her dress. A sausage rolled from the plate onto the floor. Charlotte looked at it with regret but did
n’t attempt to retrieve it as bending was too difficult – Queenie could pick it up in the morning.

  After she finished the meal with a cup of tea and her thirty-second cigarette of the day she stretched out on the couch for an after-dinner nap. Usually she dreamed of banquets, but tonight she experienced the terror of falling in slow motion from a cliff. An archangel with dark hair and enormous wings swooped down to catch her in his powerful arms but was unable to take her weight and let her slip through his hands. He flew off without making a second attempt to save her, and she was left only seconds away from crashing to the ground before she woke.

  45

  Queenie looked as if she was about to start purring. “There’s someone to see you, Miss.”

  “Who is it?” asked Charlotte.

  “He told me not to give his name.”

  “Then tell me what he looks like.”

  “He asked me not to say anything.”

  Could it possibly be Harcourt’s friend, curious to meet her after their wordless exchange the previous day?

  “Ask him to wait a minute, will you please, Queenie?”

  “Shall I open the curtains, Miss?”

  “No, leave them. I can do without all that glare.”

  She tried to comb her hair into some kind of shape. Since the night of the Hunt Ball she had kept it short, snipping away at bits that annoyed her, not caring how it looked. She now tried to hide the gaps and jagged edges under a band, but they poked out no matter which way she tried to arrange them.