Enchanter's Nightshade

by Ann Bridge

  “Papa! Marietta says Zia Suzy says Princess Asquini says—”

  “Says! Says! Says! And the cat said!” said the Count.

  “Papa caro! Will you be quiet! Princess Asquini says she knows the family, and they are very comme il faut; and the governess is very learned—she has been at Oxford!”

  “How at Oxford? Women don’t go to Oxford.”

  “Yes they do! In England now they do since many years! They learn like men. Marietta will end by knowing everything.”

  Giulio turned to Fräulein Gelsicher. “Gelosia, your nose will be quite out of joint with this colleague of so much learning!” he said.

  “Will it not? But since your sister now knows all that she needs to know, this matters less,” the governess answered in the same tone. She was pleased that Giulio had recovered his equanimity. The young man was, in fact, considerably exhilarated by Elena’s news. If this new governess of Marietta’s really was an educated woman, had really studied at Oxford—magical word!—there was no telling what might not come of it. At least he could take regular English lessons with her; his experience of how much schoolroom work went on at Odredo in the summer did not lead him to think for a moment that his cousin’s own lessons would be much of an impediment. His imagination lit up—he saw himself on his bicycle flying over daily to Vill’ Alta, to spend long industrious hours with a learned woman in spectacles, who would introduce him to the English philosophers, to Locke and Hume and Bentham; coming back laden with books to write English essays, and above all talking with the Englishwoman, till his English would be good enough to go to Oxford. He came down out of the clouds when they moved into the salone, which looked on to the courtyard, for coffee, and began to cross-examine Elena as to the academic qualifications of the new governess with an interest as marked as his previous indifference had been. Elena could tell him little more—she had shot her bolt of information at once, as she usually did. There remained only speculation, in which, when the Count went off to his study, they indulged delightfully.

  Giulio was really very fond of his sister; his ascetic disapproval of most of her interests and pursuits was apt to disappear in her actual company, when her merriment and folly, her high spirits and her mischief, above all the thousand links forged by a childhood spent together, the common stock of standing grievances and recurring delights, of jokes old and new and adventures shared, drew him to her in an easy affectionate companionship which, for all his passion for philosophical stocktaking, he had not yet begun to analyse. They sat on together, the pair of them, in the high bright salone, on the spindly walnut settee, exercising their fancy in wilder and wilder flights of nonsense over the unknown governess, with peals of laughter. Umberto, coming in to remove the coffee-tray, shook his head at them, silently, in indulgent recognition of the inevitable folly of youth.

  Elena eventually confided to her brother her successful forgery of the morning. Giulio shook his head—he had been a victim of this gift more than once, and disapproved of it.

  “I thought you had given that up,” he said.

  “Only for six months! But this was a beauty. I wish you had seen it.”

  “Did you send it?”

  “No—Gela took it. She might have it still.”

  As a matter of fact Fräulein Gelsicher was at that moment in her room, whither she had retired immediately after coffee, lying—to rest her feet—on the straight armless couch, and pondering over Elena’s letter to Marietta. It was rather disconcerting. She re-read the closing sentences: “Your cousin Aspasia and I have often felt that you have lacked, in the past … any steady model at hand on which to mould yourself.” “Your Mother’s household is so social!” “You may well expect your life to be different from hers—indeed I dare almost say that I hope this will be the case!”

  Indefinite, veiled, prudently expressed as it was, the letter contained a very wealth of possible innuendo; it could be construed as hinting at very little beyond social frivolity, or at almost anything! It was very clever. The question was, how much did Elena mean by it? It was a question that Fräulein Gelsicher could not answer.

  Chapter Three

  To be young is always a difficult, dangerous and confusing business—but it can seldom have been so difficult and so dangerous, and above all so confusing, as in England during the first ten years of the twentieth century. Those years were witnessing the earlier stages of a change-over from one social order to another, a change which was completed by the War. The Victorian ice was beginning to break up, but a great deal of it was still fairly solid, especially away from the centre of the stream, along the banks and in the backwaters. Even there, however, the movements of the central current were disturbingly felt. Cracks began to shoot through family life, and the firm Victorian faith in the inevitability of family affection; large chunks of the cruder forms of religious belief broke off and were carried away; ominous shivers ran through the sanctity of marriage, filial obedience, the complacent acceptance of social inequality, and other solid-seeming structures. Above all the moral conventions, those delicate tacit assumptions of what constitutes desirable behaviour, on which each generation stands, were in motion—they shifted under your feet, pushed by some unseen force they tilted sideways, and threatened to plunge you into unknown waters. The greatest disruptive force of all, Sigismund Freud, had not yet fairly got going in England —Die Traumdeutung only appeared in 1900, and it was a good many years before these remarkable theories filtered, by way of the psychological works, those little potted abstracts for the general reader, awe-struck conversation, and eventually the novelists, into the general consciousness. All the emotions were still taken at their face value, touched up with a dash of idealism; in those days, in England, sons could love their mothers and mothers their sons without any fear of being secretly disreputable, and the most respectable women would admit unblushingly to having dreamt of root vegetables. But the things one could not do, or say, were still a good deal more numerous than the things which one could; and many of the staples of modern conversation in mixed company were hardly even to be thought in secret at the time when Almina Prestwich went off to be governess to Marietta di Vill’ Alta.

  A few days after Giulio and Elena di Castellone, out in Gardone, were so gaily discussing their cousin’s future governess, that personage herself, in her bedroom in England, was occupied in packing, while her younger sister May looked on. The bedroom was full of clothes and luggage. A large black leather trunk, still empty, stood on the once handsome, now rather worn carpet, which bore a disappearing design of maroon roses on a brown and yellow ground; neat piles of underclothing were laid out on the bed, which like so many English beds then was double, and had shiny brass rails and bars and knobs at head and foot. The long mirror door of the wardrobe was open, revealing dresses hanging inside; so were two drawers in the chest of drawers, which like the wardrobe was of highly polished ash picked out with mahogany; the dressing-table, which had a fringed white cover of honeycomb dimity on it, and a fixed mirror, matched them both—so did the washstand, which had in addition a white marble top and a sort of small wall of brown and yellow tiles, representing sunflowers, round the back and sides—so indeed did the four cane-seated chairs which stood round the room with jackets hanging over their backs and piles of tissue-paper on their seats. The furniture of Almina’s room was in fact a suite from Maple’s, bought some thirty years before and still, after the manner of Maple suites, in perfectly good order despite the lapse of time—doors and drawers closing smoothly with a little puff of air, so closely did they fit, so admirable was the joiner’s work. The walls of the room were papered with the Morris marigold, in yellow and white. There was also an armchair. Except for the wallpaper everything in the room was rather ugly, but Almina did not think so—the fad for distemper, plain rugs and rather tumble-down antique furniture had not yet gripped England with any thoroughness; all the things in her room were either solid or handsome, and above all “matched”—she took constant pleasure in t
he fact that the ewer and basin, and even the lids of the soap and toothbrush dishes bore a design of brown and yellow sunflowers to match the washstand tiles. And she would not really have been wrong in thinking that the whole room gave an impression of pleasantness and comfort, with just enough of a well-worn air about it to mellow it.

  “I think we’d better begin on the hats,” Almina said to May. “Mother doesn’t seem to be coming, and I must get on. But she won’t want to see them.” May agreed, and both girls bent consideringly over the hatbox, a very large square affair in the new greenish canvas, with round projections fastened to the sides, bottom and top. The crowns of the hats were placed over the projections, and then pinned in positions, but to prevent conflict between plumes and bows and other lofty erections on the crowns, the hats had to be carefully placed. After some thought—“I should put the green at the bottom,” said May.

  “Right. Hand it out, will you?” said Almina, taking a box of long steel hatpins with round heads of black or white glass off the dressing-table, and sticking them into the projection on the lid, ready for use. May opened the door of the hat-cupboard, a central compartment of the ash wardrobe, which had more drawers below it, and pulled out the green hat, a huge thing of drooping silky horsehair, the crown smothered in yellow and white roses. She held it up. “It is lovely” she said, gazing at it with envy. “Whatever did it cost, Al?”

  “It’s my best,” said Almina, rather repressively. “It was two-and-a-half guineas,” she added.

  “Gracious! Do stick it on, Al, just for a second, and let me see.”

  Almina, taking the hat, moved to the dressing-table. It was obvious before she put it on that it would suit her very well. She was small and rather pale, with a great deal of very fine soft hair almost the colour of raw silk—what we now call “ashen blonde” and admire greatly, but which was then called “flaxen” and considered rather dull. In addition she had a neat straight little nose, a neat firm little chin, rather a large pale mouth and large greyish eyes set very far apart under eyebrows much darker than her hair. Today these things would make her the envy of all her acquaintances, but Almina was not considered in the least pretty by her family— not nearly so pretty as May, who in spite of rather rough-and-tumble features had a bright colour, vivid blue eyes, a red mouth, and proper golden hair, which curled by itself. In an age when women had to take what God gave them in the way of hair and complexion girls like May started with a great advantage. Very fashionable married women crimped their hair with tongs, a few dowagers with peculiar reputations painted, Queen Alexandra enamelled her lovely singular face; but among ordinary God-fearing gentlepeople, in town or country, for a girl to have put any extraneous colouring-matter on her countenance would have been unheard-of. Secretly, those whose noses shone bought little cardboard cases containing minute sheets of something called papier poudré, which they rubbed over the offending member, usually with most unhappy results; but their mothers confiscated these, if they found them, with a lecture on the appalling effect of getting “talked about”—a calamity which was certain to overtake any girl who was seen with a powdered nose.

  Almina’s lack of the accepted standard of prettiness did not trouble her quite as much as it would have done most of her contemporaries. She had been to Oxford for three years, and had there become serious-minded and slightly dowdy; she had taken a first in Modern Languages, which had given her a good deal of self-confidence independently of her appearance; she was become ambitious, had views on the economic independence of women, and hoped to have a career. It is true that she did occasionally study her face in the glass, half-critically and half-wistfully—she usually decided privately that her features were really rather good, except for her mouth, and that if her hair wasn’t as curly and golden as it might have been, at least it was very fine and silky, and there was a great deal of it. And anyhow there were more important things than looks. But now, when she combed up the fine pale stuff before the glass and placed the big green hat on her head, she could not resist a little tremor of pleasure at the image which confronted her. The yellow and white roses brought out the creamy paleness of her skin, making it not a blemish, but something like a beauty in itself; under the soft green of the fine crin brim, the pale gold of her hair looked almost lovely. And when she swung round to face May, that young person gazed at her with most flattering astonishment before she said—“Al, it does suit you! You really look quite—”

  “Quite what?” Almina asked, pleased, and anxious for more.

  “Well, nearly beautiful. It’s rather like that last picture of Edna May—she had a hat like that.”

  “You don’t think it looks actressy, do you?” asked Almina anxiously. There was no deeper condemnation then for clothes, however becoming, than that they should look “actressy.”

  “No-o—not that. Only you look so extra nice in it,” May reassured her.

  “It will go with a lot of things,” said Almina, turning to look in the glass again; “the green, and the white, and the white-and-yellow.”

  “Are they very smart, these people? I suppose they are,” said May, “if she’s a Marchioness.”

  “She isn’t a Marchioness—she’s only a Marchesa—it doesn’t mean the same abroad,” said Almina, with fine British deprecation of foreign titles. “But I expect they are very smart— foreigners always are. The Princess told Mother they entertained a lot.”

  “Shall you go to their parties?” May enquired, seating herself on the bed.

  “Look out! Don’t squash my petties! Not much, I don’t suppose—but I don’t really know exactly what governesses do abroad,” Almina said. “I wish I did know more. But I gather I have to take the child about wherever she goes, so I shall go to children’s parties, I suppose, and church, and things like that.”

  “You will have fun,” May said, enviously.

  “I hope I shall be able to make a success of it, and do all they want,” said her sister soberly.

  “P’raps you’ll marry an Italian Count,” May was beginning —her mind always ran to the social aspect of things—when the door opened and her Mother came in.

  Mrs. Prestwich was a woman for whom life over a long period of years had been a little too much, and her face, under her smoothly-dressed grey hair, showed it. Her father had been a poor but rather popular Baron, of a decent and well-established creation untainted by trade, her Mother the daughter of a very minor Welsh peer; she herself, in spite of the perpetual lack of money in her family, had been brought up and launched on the world in what still seemed to her the only normal and proper way: that is to say she had been presented at Court, had had one complete London season and one long visit to an Aunt the following year, and had then lived at home in the country, knowing the whole county and going to such gaieties as it afforded, in the shape of croquet parties, archery tournaments and a few balls, till she married. Her marriage and subsequent life typified that gradual swallowing-up of the lesser aristocracy in the middle class which was such a feature of the latter part of the 19th century. Tom Prestwich came of excellent yeoman stock in the North-country; his grandfather had made a modest, his father a very considerable fortune in trade; the latter kept horses, sent his sons to public school and joined a London club. Young Thomas, who had his full share of the harsh shrewd intelligence which was the birthright of his family, and more than his share of its cool independence, took up medicine, and with success. He had money behind him, and when he met Louisa Heycote, swept her off her feet and married her, he was able to take her home to a largish pleasantish Victorian house, in a largish pleasantish garden, on the outskirts of a large and not unpleasant South of England town in which he had already a large and growing practice. There Mrs. Prestwich had spent the rest of her life—there she had given birth to her two sons and her five daughters, the births punctuated by several miscarriages; there she had brought up her children; there, last year, buried her husband; and there, at this moment, Almina was packing her clothes to go out to Italy a
s a governess.

  It was perhaps this last circumstance, more than any other, which had forced on Mrs. Prestwich the full realisation of how far she had failed in her attempts to shape life as she wanted it—which was, after all, only what seemed to her the very modest desire that her children should live as she had lived herself, and be brought up as she had been brought up. She had expected when she married that Thomas’s brains and good looks and charm, their easy circumstances and her own social position would make this aim quite easy of realisation. It had in fact proved otherwise, to her surprise and disappointment. Thomas never lost his brains, but his good looks and his charm diminished at a surprising speed; as his reputation increased his leisure for social activities, and his inclination for them, diminished also, and as the expense of educating a family of seven was gradually borne in upon him, his prudent bourgeois unwillingness to spend good money on needless frivolities became more and more marked. Mrs. Prestwich, even at first, had never taken quite the place in society in and round Beamington that she expected, and as the years went on it became more of a struggle. In a perfectly well-bred way, with a touching and innocent faith in the value and meritoriousness of her efforts, she worked away at her social activities for her children’s sake—calling at the right houses in her neat brougham, giving dinner-parties, garden-parties, tea-parties; making correct advances to “worthwhile” people, forming connections; and clinging, just a little, to connections accidentally formed; economising on the house-keeping to contrive the right clothes, more and more for her daughters and less and less for herself. On the whole she had done very well— the Prestwich family lived in a nice “set”; Almina and May had both been presented, they went to quite a number of balls, and were on visiting terms with several of the county families. But the “set” was a rather more of the town and less of the county than she had hoped; their position needed holding on to, instead of simply happening; there was a good deal of rather careful keeping in touch with her own old friends, of making the best of people, of reminding herself that the So-and-Sos were really very nice. It was, in fact, all very different from the effortless and arbitrary correctitude of her mother’s entertaining, in her own youth.