Daughter of the House

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘Neelie, you don’t have to do that. Ma needs you here, and you are much better at looking after her than I am. This job’s only temporary anyway, until we think of something else.’

  ‘Pa will work one of his tricks.’

  ‘I expect so.’

  They didn’t laugh.

  The draper’s shop was a friendly place and the manageress had been an early suffragist. As spring turned into early summer Nancy grew to respect her colleagues, and felt at home amongst the bolts of cloth and spools of satin and velvet ribbons. She was a good enough saleswoman, but she came to the conclusion that Eliza had given her the best advice years ago. Her likeliest prospect was to become a personal assistant to a businessman, so she enrolled in evening shorthand typing and language classes at the City Institute. Her typing improved quite quickly although she struggled with the strokes and hooks of Pitman’s shorthand. It was difficult to study at the end of a day’s work and she had little time in which to practise, let alone to try to recover any of her forgotten French.

  Eliza seemed confused. In one of her dreamy, abstracted moods she asked, ‘Aren’t all these classes you go to very expensive, darling?’

  ‘Not really. I can manage.’

  In fact it was Lizzie who paid for the lessons.

  She said to Nancy, ‘Go on, you might as well have a bash. I liked secretarial work when I did it. God, but that time of my life seems so long ago. I had nothing to worry about beyond my clothes and who admired me most.’

  ‘It’s just a loan, then,’ Nancy insisted.

  The cousins saw each other frequently in Islington or at Bavaria and Lizzie had also drifted back into the loose group of WSPU friends they held in common, including Jinny Main. Lizzie’s son was growing into a solemn child who closely resembled his grandfather. Matthew and Faith both adored Tommy, and they looked after him while Lizzie spent her days telephoning or directing the shippers and the recalcitrant warehousemen and carriers who imported and packed and distributed her exotic produce.

  ‘It’s an uphill bloody struggle, darling. If I had only women to deal with it would be a different business.’

  Lizzie hadn’t yet made her fortune, but she insisted that she would in the end. She spent money on her appearance, she smoked and drank like a man, and she was good fun in a brittle way. Lizzie had a series of shadowy boyfriends, none of whom seemed to interest her particularly.

  ‘I like the sex, you see,’ she said to Nancy. ‘Otherwise, what is there?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Nancy admitted. Lizzie made her feel like a nun. She wished she hadn’t rebuffed Lion Stone at Whistlehalt.

  It seemed, though, that that wasn’t to be the end of the story. One day, six weeks after the party when the memory of it had almost faded from her mind, a letter came.

  Lion wrote that he hoped she didn’t mind his asking Jake Jones for her father’s address. He apologised for not having written earlier and explained that he had been marooned in the country with no prospect of escape. However, the good news was that he now had a job in London.

  Lion wondered if it might be jolly to meet up one evening.

  Thinking it over, she realised that she did want to see him. He didn’t inhabit her consciousness in the pervasive way Gil Maitland still did, but she had liked him. She wrote back to tell Lion that most of her evenings were taken up with efforts to master shorthand and French, but she was quite often free at weekends.

  They met one Saturday in a coffee shop near Fleet Street and ate their dinner together. Afterwards Lion took her hand as they strolled along the Embankment. The Houses of Parliament and Big Ben turned dark against a sunset fleeced with cloud before Lion kissed her on the corner of Westminster Bridge. Then he pressed his hands on either side of her face and looked down into her eyes.

  ‘Was that all right?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘Oh, good. I wondered, you know, after the night at Jake’s place.’

  ‘That night was too soon.’

  ‘And tonight wasn’t quite soon enough,’ he laughed.

  He kissed her again and they wandered across the bridge to lean over the smooth stone parapet. They watched the khaki swirl of the river as Lion told her about his new job in an advertising agency. He wrote paragraphs of copy in praise of fountain pens and laxatives.

  She said in surprise, ‘You went to Eton and you’ll inherit a big house some day. I have to earn my living, but surely it’s different for you?’

  ‘Not a bit. Stadling is mortgaged and falling down, and it sucks up money the way an electric vacuum cleaner sucks up dust. “It beats … as it sweeps … as it cleans.” Don’t you love that for a slogan? I wish I’d come up with it. No, my father’s at his wits’ end because no one wants to work on the land any more, or in the house, and he can’t afford to pay the same as the factories in Reading and Swindon, and there’s no money in agriculture nowadays anyway. He rattles around in one draughty wing of the place and asks me what we won the war for if this is how it has turned out for us all.’

  Lion had been in France, like Cornelius and Arthur, and like them he didn’t speak of it.

  He said cheerfully, ‘I’ll probably have to sell Stadling in the end. Can’t see how to keep it going and there are no decent pictures or anything of much value to flog so as to put off the day until my own sons have to deal with it. I don’t want my old man to be around to see it go, though. So in the meantime, it’s sweating over slogans for me. Which is much easier and more fun than many things, I’m sure. I mean I couldn’t learn shorthand, for a start. I was always useless at lessons. The school beaks gave up on me.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  Lion seemed to Nancy to have a sharp mind.

  ‘Perfectly true. I was nearly sacked. It’s quite lucky the army gave me something to do because I was never going to get into Oxford or anything useful like that. Come on, it’s getting cold.’

  They linked arms and walked back the way they had come. Nancy said she would take the bus the short distance to Islington and Lion held her tightly as it trundled towards them, before asking if he might see her again.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, feeling shy in a way she hadn’t done all evening.

  They met again a week later, and the following week too, and each time she saw him Nancy liked him better.

  Jinny Main also had a new friend, a young woman called Ann Gillespie. Ann was Scottish, striking with her red-gold hair, and she was as round and soft as Jinny was angular. Appearances were deceptive, though. Ann was a communist, Jinny explained, with serious views about the future of the nation.

  Both girls were interested in bicycling, and they were pioneering members of the new London Women’s Cycling Club. This organisation ran club rides on summer evenings, and weekend excursions into the Kent countryside, renting out machines to those who didn’t have one of their own. Under Jinny and Ann’s tuition Nancy made her first attempts at learning to ride on two wheels. She wobbled up and down the paths in London Fields while Jinny held the bicycle saddle and shouted at her to steer or to pedal harder. It was a proud hour when Jinny finally let go and Nancy careered the whole width of the park without once falling off or veering into a flowerbed. Her riding abilities improved and she began to accompany Ann and Jinny to club meetings. Once or twice Lizzie came too, although she complained afterwards that she couldn’t see the real point of any club that had no men in it. The other two only laughed at her.

  In July Arthur wrote with the good news that he expected to be returning home with his regiment before winter came. The grim work in Flanders would be over before too long. The Wixes were all delighted, and Nancy was especially happy when Arthur confided in a separate letter to her that he was longing to come home not only to see his family but because he had fallen in love. She was the sister of his school and army friend Harry Bolton, and her name was Isabella.

  She is the most beautiful creature in the world and I will be the luckiest fellow if she will even think of me. I do beli
eve she might, though. Am I foolish? There’s a ton of practical problems to solve, but when was there ever not? I look forward to the day when I can introduce her to you, Nancy darling. I know you will love each other.

  She smiled at his exuberance, although she was sure there would be problems if Arthur was hoping for the daughter of a family like the Boltons. She didn’t know them, or Harry, but most of the friends from Arthur’s separate world were grand and these people were unlikely to be the exception.

  Financial anxieties apart, it was a happy interval for Nancy. She was still troubled by the spectre of the small, soaking child who appeared in odd corners of the house, and by more frequent occurrences of the Uncanny, but for the time being there seemed to be no threat in these manifestations. The places she saw were benign and empty landscapes, quite unlike the premonitory battlefields. There were lanes garlanded with dog roses and poles twined with hop bines, and the smells that heralded her immersions were the thick waft of mown hay or the fecund stink of farm animals. In one vision, as vivid as any she had ever had, she saw a lane rising between hedges whitened with summer dust and a gate leading into a broad empty field shaded by elm trees. She was sorry when the picture faded, as if it was a place she might be happy in. She supposed these rural associations had been triggered by the drive to Whistlehalt, and that time had twisted again in one of its inexplicable and porous loops.

  Jinny and Ann proposed a cycling excursion for the im-minent August Bank Holiday.

  ‘Come with us – it will be two whole heavenly days out of London. We are going to camp. You can borrow Beryl’s cycle. Ann has already asked her for you and she has said yes.’

  Nancy laughed. ‘I’ve never camped out in my life, and I can hardly ride. I’ll hold you up, won’t I?’

  Ann had a ripe, suggestive laugh. ‘Not a bit. You can cook, which gives you a distinct advantage over Jinny as a campfire companion. In fact we might leave Jinny be-hind, eh?’

  Nancy rather enjoyed the way she flirted with her because she knew there was no meaning in it. It was Ann’s way, to be franker than the world expected her to be, and it was also a part of her teasing of Jinny. Nancy didn’t try to fathom the relationship between the two of them, not believing that it was any of her business, but she couldn’t help noticing it hummed with sex. She felt jealous.

  ‘If it’s just you two and me I’ll feel like a sad chaperone.’

  Ann snorted. ‘A chaperone? For Jin and me? That’s a comic notion.’

  ‘No, I mean it. So can I bring someone?’

  Ann stared. ‘Who? Who is she?’

  ‘It’s a he. My boyfriend.’

  Jinny looked up. She had been squatting beside her bicycle, with spanners and an oilcan neatly laid on the ground as she performed some maintenance task on her Sturmey-Archer gears. She wiped her hands on her overalls.

  ‘Your boyfriend? You are a dark horse, Nancy Wix, I must say. He isn’t one of your figments, is he?’

  Nancy reddened. ‘Of course not. You’ll see. His name is Lycett Stone but everyone calls him Lion.’

  The idea had come to her as the solution to a problem. She was beginning to tire of the way another man’s face and voice defined her dreams, and she told herself that she should put Gil Maitland out of her head and concentrate instead on a flesh-and-blood individual. Lion was certainly that, she reflected, reddening at the private admission. He had implored her to come to his lodgings but she had resisted. If she were to go as far as to cement their relationship, a tent beneath a hedge, perhaps with the sound of a brook trickling close at hand, would be a safe and innocent shelter.

  ‘Of course he can come. Does he ride?’ Jinny asked.

  ‘I expect so. He went to Eton. Chaps like that can do anything, can’t they?’

  ‘He what?’ Ann’s eyes popped. ‘Is he an English bloody lord or something?’

  ‘Of course not. He’s not like that at all. He joined in the ranks and came back a sergeant.’

  She had found out these details almost by accident. When they were together they had other things than war and politics to occupy their thoughts but Lion’s beliefs were in their own way almost as radical as Ann Gillespie’s.

  ‘My old man’s world is finished,’ he had shrugged. ‘I don’t want to acknowledge it to him, because it breaks his heart as it is, but it’s the truth. And anyway I would like to bring up my children under a more equitable system. Wouldn’t you?’

  Ann said, ‘He sounds all right, I suppose. Bring him if you want.’

  Lion agreed to the plan immediately. Nancy had to work on the Saturday morning so the four of them arranged to meet at two o’clock at the ticket barrier at Charing Cross station. As she hurried from the underground Nancy looked along the Strand towards the Palmyra. The cupola was just visible between the rooftops. There had been constant talk at home of selling the theatre to pay off the debts, with Eliza strongly in favour and Devil furiously insisting that there was no need to let it go. He had plans, he said. Their raised voices were often audible behind closed doors. Once Nancy and Cornelius heard their mother throwing the scent bottles off her dressing table, one after the other. Devil must have ducked because a missile hit the door panel and the crash was followed by the sound of breaking glass.

  Nancy turned away from the distant glimpse of the theatre and dashed towards the platform for the Folkestone train. Jinny and Ann were waiting for her with three bicycles between them, all with loaded panniers. Lion was there too, leaning on the handlebars of his own cycle. Damn and blast. She had meant to get there before him, to make the introductions, but Mrs Lloyd had kept her back to tidy shelves.

  ‘At last, Wix. C’mon, we’ll have to skedaddle,’ Ann cried. They raced to the guard’s van to load the cycles and then tumbled into the nearest carriage. The whistle blew and a thick pall of steam and smoke poured in through the open window. Lion hauled on the leather strap and secured it shut.

  ‘This is Lion Stone,’ Nancy puffed. The train clattered over the river.

  ‘Thanks for asking me to join you,’ Lion meekly said to the two girls. ‘I’ll make myself suitably inconspicuous.’

  Nancy knew at once there was nothing to worry about. The three of them had already made friends. Lion had the knack of fitting in here as seamlessly as he had done at Whistlehalt. Social ease was one of the gifts of a highly privileged upbringing, she thought, although she knew she was being unfair to him.

  He hefted his khaki rucksack on to the luggage rack, suggesting by a faint lift of the eyebrow that he would be ready in the unlikely event that the three women couldn’t handle their own. His nose and forearms were sunburned and he was wearing corduroy breeches and a tweed cap pulled down over his thatch of curls. He looked as if he had been working in a hayfield all week rather than at a desk in an advertising agency.

  Before they reached Croydon Jinny had the map spread out on the seat and she and Lion were studying it together. She said the campsite was in a field belonging to a farmer who offered it for club use, but it wasn’t easy to find. Everyone was laughing, in anticipation of the challenge and the ride and the little holiday, even though Nancy still felt slightly put out that Lion had made himself already so much a part of everything when she had imagined how she would be the one to draw him in. Lion glanced up and winked at her. Remembering the way this day might conceivably end, Nancy forgot everything else in a shiver of anticipation.

  ‘Did you bring those sandwiches?’ Ann demanded. ‘I’m famished.’

  Dazedly Nancy said that she had them somewhere. She fished in her bag for a greaseproof-wrapped package.

  Jinny peered from Nancy to Lion. ‘Look at you two,’ she smiled.

  They left the train at a deserted halt amidst apple orchards. They slung their bags on their backs, secured the panniers and set off down a rutted lane. Jinny led the way and Lion meekly pedalled at the rear. It was a sultry afternoon, the sky shawled with haze and the shadows of trees no more than a faint dapple on the dried earth. The crimped leaves
of the roadside oaks already showed ochre rims, and the hawthorn hedges were subdued with dust. Today was the first day when high summer admitted the certainty of autumn, and so the glory of it was intensified.

  They passed beyond the orchards into open cornfields. The bicycles crunched over loose stones or a twig snapped in someone’s spokes. Occasionally a skylark twirled over their heads, but otherwise there was silence. After struggling at first Nancy found a rhythm in the steady effort of pedalling and she fell into a trance as the miles went by. They stopped at a tiny crossroads with a slanting fingerpost and again Nancy recalled the drive to Whistlehalt. Jinny studied her map and Ann gulped water from a metal flask.

  ‘Is this right?’ Ann asked, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

  Lion mopped his forehead with a red handkerchief. ‘Hot work, eh?’

  Jinny folded the map and pointed. ‘This way.’

  As they cycled onwards Nancy felt an ease and lightness that were new to her. The countryside as it unrolled seemed as perfectly recognisable as if she had grown up surrounded by golden fields of corn. Each corner seemed to reveal a homely view, lovely in its known contours. There was no thought of getting lost, no fear of loneliness, no anxiety for the future. Now, and this world, were all that mattered.

  She was startled out of her reverie when Jinny braked again. She pushed her cap to the back of her head and scratched her damp hair.

  ‘Sorry. I think we should have turned back there. There’s a stream alongside the field so climbing this hill can’t be right.’ She spread the map on her handlebars and Ann and Lion dropped their cycles into the grass and nettles of the verge to examine it with her.

  Nancy shaded her eyes and looked west. The air was clouded with gnats.

  ‘This is the way,’ she heard herself saying. ‘The lane goes up this hill for about a mile and turns a corner, where there is a gate on the left into a field. There is a line of elm trees.’