The Season

by Charlotte Bingham

The old Georgian door swung open all too easily, and ahead of them stood a short flight of stairs, uncarpeted, and now barely painted. The sides of the stairs proclaimed that they had once been painted brown, and then old white, but inevitably each had flaked off in places to reveal the original wood.

  ‘Wait for me here, Evie.’

  As Portia nodded, her maid’s grasp on her mistress’s handsome old gamp tightened.

  ‘I can poke whoever’s eyes out with this, Miss Portia, don’t you ever worry yourself about that.’

  Portia nodded. It was true. An umbrella was a very useful weapon, and many a redoubtable woman had found it to be so, from its carved wooden or silver head to its heavy silk body and the steel tip at the end.

  ‘I will not be long, I hope.’

  ‘And so do I hope, and more than that, I pray for it, Miss Portia.’

  Portia mounted the stairs, hardly believing that she had found herself in such a place. The smell of damp, the feeling of a building not properly lived in, was overwhelming. She wished that she had not come. She hoped against hope that the person she was meant to be visiting would turn out not to have given her the right address, that it was all a great mistake, and that when they did come face to face it would be at quite another address, with a gay interior filled with firelight and pretty things, and the sound of servants cooking and laughing together in the basement, and that the lamp over the door would be shining, and polished bright, and the first floor drawing room redolent of all pretty first floor drawing rooms at all good addresses all over London – a little over-crowded, a little too curtained and with slightly too much chintz and silk.

  But it was not to be. The person for whom she was looking was there, and he was slumped in a dirty armchair, and his face was scarlet from the cold of the room, and his eyes were as red as any man’s will become who has been drinking far too much for far too long. Portia stared for some seconds at the man she had loved as a young girl and thought of so often since.

  ‘Richard. It’s me – Portia.’

  The eyes stared blearily up at her. ‘So sorry, cannot get up. I am not quite myself, do you see, madam, just not myself?’

  Portia’s heart, already overburdened with the sadness of her widowhood, now experienced a piercing dart of pain of a quite different kind. It did not seem possible that Richard, handsome Richard Ward who had done everything that could have been required of him for both king and country, and had married his childhood sweetheart, the beautiful Miss Cecil, of impeccable lineage – that her Richard of such dear memory should have come to this, a slouched wreck of a man in a derelict building.

  ‘Richard.’ Portia knelt down in front of his chair, despite the awful dust on the filthy floor. ‘I am – I am Portia Tradescant, that was. I married Lord Childhays, but you knew me as Portia Tradescant. I heard that you were a little down on your luck from your cousin Selina Ward, Richard, and so here I am. To help you – to help you get better, my dear. To help you recover your proper personality.’

  ‘How do you do, my dear. Very nice, I am sure.’ The love of her youth smiled vaguely down at her, and then stood up, swaying and holding out a hand to Portia, who also stood up, but did not take the hand, which was pointing in somewhat the wrong direction.

  ‘I don’t suppose you remember me, Richard, but we used to sail together in the dear old days at Bannerwick—’

  Portia stopped suddenly, realising that she sounded ludicrous. How could a man in such a state and after so much time possibly either understand or remember her? And so, in a matter of seconds, possibly from having grown up with a number of eccentric relations, Portia immediately resolved that she could and must deal with her old friend’s very evident predicament, and with this in mind went quickly back down to the hall to collect Evie.

  ‘We have to take this gentleman back to Miss Tradescant’s house, and send for a doctor. He is not at all well, Evie, not at all the thing, as you will see for yourself, but I think we can manage him between the two of us. We are not after all made of fine sewing cotton, are we?’

  But as soon as Evie saw him she rolled her eyes at Portia and their urgent conversation, conducted in low voices, continued.

  ‘I sees what you mean, Miss Portia. Not at all the thing, is ’e? No, more like parted from his senses some two bottles ago, I’d say, if you was asking me. Who is ’e anyways, when ’e’s at home, may I ask?’

  ‘’E’s – he is – er, Admiral Ward, Evie. Well, Vice Admiral really, but I cannot be bothered with that bit. An old friend of my family. The Tradescants and the Wards knew each other quite well, in the old days. The Wards holidayed near our house, and we all sailed. You might not remember. It was a long time ago.’

  ‘Course I remember! Well I never, Miss Portia, Master Ward, of all people. This is Master Ward?’ Evie pointed at poor Richard as if he was a prime exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum. ‘Well I never! And him the talk of the neighbourhood and everyone sweet on him, so handsome, and so clever, and in the Navy and all, and decorated too, I believe. Come to this!’

  She stared in some disgust at the middle-aged man now seated back in his chair.

  ‘There is no need to go too far, Evie. He has only drunk too much, as so many gentlemen do.’

  Portia was attempting a diplomatically low tone, but her maid would not adopt the same discreet note. Indeed so deep was her disgust at seeing a former friend of her mistress in such a state that she actually seemed to raise her voice.

  ‘He’s not just drunk, my lady. He is perfidiously intoxicated.’

  Inwardly Portia raised her eyes to heaven. A part of her admired her darling old maid’s long term determination to educate herself by learning a new word every day, but another part of her wished that Evie would keep her verbal experiments for her day off.

  ‘Well, so be it, Evie. Perfidiously intoxicated or hopelessly drunk, either way we have to try to get him downstairs to the hackney carriage.’

  ‘I will remain …’ interrupted the object of their mutual concern at this point, ‘I will remain here. You all go on without me.’

  He said this so many times in the next few minutes as the two women dithered about him that it was all Portia could do not to beg him to keep quiet until they were safely away to Aunt Tattie’s house.

  Happily Evie, being quite used to dealing below stairs with drunken butlers and footmen and the like, took no more notice of his interruptions than if he were a canary in a cage singing too loudly and too long.

  ‘Well, but, Miss Portia, we can’t do this on our own, really we can’t. If there is one thing I know it is that a dead drunk man can be as much of a dead weight as a corpse, if not more so, and that is as much a fact as the fact that the Vice Admiral here is as pixilated as any common sailor on his shore leave.’

  ‘In that case you had better fetch the hackney driver,’ Portia told her, immediately seeing the truth in what Evie was hissing at her.

  ‘The driver won’t leave his cab in a neighbourhood like what this is, Miss Portia. Lord, they’d rather have their arms cut off of them than that. It’s the ’orse, you see. Someone’ll pick it out of the shafts and run off with it sooner than you can say disruptive, and that will be that.’

  ‘In that case, you hold the horse, and I’ll help the driver.’

  Vice Admiral or no Vice Admiral, Richard Ward might as well have been any drunken sailor, as Evie had so caustically observed, and as Portia and the reluctant hackney driver discovered when they took an arm each and helped him down the uncarpeted stairs, and then thankfully out into the street, and up into the hackney cab.

  ‘You know what I’m now looking forward to, Miss Portia?’

  Portia shook her head, thankful for the veiling hiding her feelings of impatience from her maid. Nevertheless she waited, expecting to hear that Evie was looking forward to a nice cup of cocoa.

  ‘I am looking forward,’ said Evie, panting from the effort of trying to keep the esteemed Vice Admiral somewhere near his seat, clutching on to
one part of his body while Portia clutched on to another and all the while their victim switched between partial consciousness to low talk of an embarrassingly male nature, ‘I am looking forward to Miss Tradescant’s face when she sees what we’ve brought home to her.’

  Portia half closed her eyes, despite the protection of her veil. As always Evie was completely right. Aunt Tattie would doubtless take one look at Richard Ward weaving about her drawing room and ring a bell for her butler and have him taken out and put in a home for derelicts. For ‘bohemic’ though Aunt Tattie might be, a longtime and very ardent supporter of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and a very recent convert to Rome, she would never be able to tolerate such a smelly trampy sort of person in her house, and who could blame her?

  Tradescant House, the London home of Miss Tatiana Tradescant, although only round the corner from Piccadilly, despite having its own private ballroom was a great deal less grand than Medlar House, where Emily and Edith O’Connor were staying for the duration of the London Season. As it happened this was something that greatly appealed to Portia, more particularly, strangely enough, since her widowhood. She had no wish to return to the Childhays town house at this moment in her life, and frankly she did not think it worth the expense to open it up for Phyllis’s London Season. As far as Portia could be objective about her daughter – always a difficult stance for a mother to take – she could not see Phyllis being the toast of her Season, any more than she could see her being swept off her feet by May’s son, a future duke.

  No, Phyllis was Phyllis, and while she was a brilliant horsewoman and was kind to animals and children, she was so awkward, so difficult, so contrary to the poem after which she had been so fondly named by her parents, that it would be a miracle if she married at all. In fact so difficult, so contrary, so awkward was she that it occurred to Portia that she might be the perfect person to deal with Richard Ward. After all, it often took a particularly brilliant rider to understand a particularly awkward horse, so it might be that it would take someone like Phyllis, so hoydenish and so determined to stand on the outside of everyone, to bring Richard Ward to his senses, in every way.

  Portia tucked away this thought, as she so often did. She frequently had small thoughts upon which she sometimes acted, and sometimes did not. It was in this, as in so many other ways, that she missed her husband so much. He had always been so wise. Older than herself by some years, more experienced in every way as he was, she had always found that she could go to him with her problems and he would set her on the right path to doing or saying the proper thing. It was for this reason that she sometimes found herself praying to him, up above the skies, begging him to send down some good old common sense and plant it into her poor head.

  As she looked up the stairs to Aunt Tattie’s drawing room, and tried to prepare herself to witness the shock that she must be bringing home to her beloved relative, Portia wondered, albeit very briefly, what exactly her darling late husband, the wholly perfect Childie, would have done in her circumstances. Would he have brought the less than admirable Vice Admiral home? A few minutes later Aunt Tattie’s expression of amazement told her niece all.

  No, was the short answer, her dear Childie would never have brought Richard Ward, Admiral or Vice Admiral, home. He would have dealt with him in a proper place of restitution. He would never have brought this tall, still slim but red-faced inebriate home draped across his wife, her maid and a hackney cab driver. Childie never did have much time for such impetuosity.

  ‘Dearest,’ Aunt Tattie managed to say, speaking in a low, shocked tone. ‘Is this a friend of yours? Because if so I think he seems a little – a trifle, let us say – unwell, to say the least.’

  ‘He is a friend of both of us, Aunt Tattie. An old acquaintance from childhood days at Bannerwick, I am sorry to tell you.’

  Aunt Tattie’s expression, one of permanently heightened sanctity since her recent conversion to Rome, assumed a puzzled air.

  ‘To both of us, dearest?’

  ‘Yes, Aunt Tattie. This is Richard Ward. Do you remember, I used to go sailing with him at Bannerwick, in the old days?’

  ‘My dear!’ Aunt Tattie’s expression quickly changed from heightened mysticism to one of all too human amazement. ‘Never say so, dearest! This is Richard Ward? Whatever has happened to bring him to this pretty pass?’

  At that moment Richard Ward, once more slumped and smiling vaguely, if amiably, was to be seen staring into the middle distance, the stupefaction on his face really only too evident.

  Portia lowered her voice, and drew Aunt Tattie down the lower half of her drawing room towards the windows.

  ‘It is since the tragedy, apparently, of losing his wife and daughter last year. The Titanic, you know.’

  There was a long shocked silence. The disaster of the Titanic, of a ship so splendid that it had been boasted that it had been unsinkable, was still a stark and terrifying reality in everyone’s minds. Hardly a family that they knew had remained unaffected by it.

  ‘Dearest!’ Aunt Tattie’s hand went to the crucifix around her neck and she sighed. ‘How too terrible.’

  ‘Yes, it was too terrible, for as I understood it from his cousin, Selina, he had made a present of the voyage to his wife and only daughter, and they were both lost, Aunt Tattie. Both of them! Can you imagine? One moment they were a family and the next there was just him, all alone in a dark, desolated world.’

  Portia was silent for a second, momentarily turning back to look over her shoulder at her own recent past and the loss in her own life. But she at least had been left with her children to sustain her in her grief.

  Aunt Tattie’s eyes softened as she stared at Richard Ward. ‘How can we ever understand the pain of human grief except through God’s eyes?’

  ‘I know, darling. So you do see? Why he became so very – er – unwell as a result, Aunt Tattie? He is vastly unwell most of the time, I understand. Which being so, I wonder if we could take him to one of the upstairs rooms and lay him down?’

  The two women stared at the slumped figure, his long legs stretched out in front of him, and then back at each other.

  ‘We have to do something, dearest. When my brother, your Uncle Lampard, is prostrate like this, we usually find it best to drape the top half and let the legs take care of themselves.’

  Aunt Tattie rang the bell for her butler, and between him and the hall boy, with Portia following on, they managed, somehow or another, to help the still rambling Vice Admiral up the stairs to a bedroom, where the butler and one of the footmen had no hesitation in locking him in. Meanwhile Aunt Tattie had retreated back to her drawing room, much as a general might retreat from the battlefield to his tent.

  Once she had seen her old friend into the room, closely attended by the male servants, Portia came downstairs and told her aunt, ‘he is not at all himself. But how providential that I should meet his cousin at Medlar House and she should tell me of his plight. Is it not providential?’

  Aunt Tattie nodded, her stitching staying unsewn on her lap, the expression in her eyes changing from bewilderment to that of a person who wants to believe that helping a soul in distress is admirable but at the same time is fighting the very real idea that he may be going to be a great deal more of a nuisance than even the most intensely Christian person would desire.

  ‘His cousin said that he came to this pass because he did not look after himself sufficiently, after – after the disaster, and the result is that he contracted a fever that affected his brain, apparently,’ Portia repeated a little hopelessly.

  Aunt Tattie started to twist the new amber-beaded rosary at her waist around her fingers, much as in the old days, before her conversion to Rome, Portia remembered that she had used to twist her Arts and Crafts necklaces around her long neck. Sometimes the necklace was twisted so tight that, as a child, Portia would become convinced that Aunt Tattie was going to leave herself without any breath at all, or that she would pass out from the pressure of the tightly wound necklace.r />
  ‘Oh, dear. Then is he not just an inebriate but also – how can I say – insane, dearest? For if that is so, would it not be better if he was taken to a place for lunatics and such like?’

  ‘We have locked him into his room, until morning, when the doctor could visit. That would be the best thing, would it not?’

  Aunt Tattie raised her eyes to heaven, her lips moving, and was silent for a few seconds. It occurred to Portia that, unlike the clasping of beads, this was a new way of expressing her aunt-like emotions, giving her beloved relative a look all too reminiscent of a painting of some medieval saint. But happily for Richard Ward her decision turned out to be saintlike, and therefore entirely in keeping with her appearance.

  ‘Very well, dearest, let him be locked up until a physician can pronounce on him. But after that it might be better if we found him somewhere more suitable.’

  Portia nodded. It might indeed, she agreed to herself, silently. On the other hand, she thought next, where?

  ‘Or,’ Aunt Tattie added, hope suddenly using a stronger tone for the first time since Portia had arrived back with Richard, ‘dearest, being a sailor boy, he might decide to go to sea again, might he not?’

  The look of hope in her eyes was most touching, whereas the look in Portia’s eyes was one of confusion. Admittedly there had been times in her life when she had longed to see Richard Ward again, but not, never like this.

  Phyllis, fresh from Lady Devenish’s critical hands, and only newly arrived back from her ladyship’s Ascot house, had no idea of the latest arrival at Tradescant House until her mother passed her in the upstairs corridor the following morning. Portia, wearing a grey silk skirt and half skirt – she was determined to remain in demi-mourning for her husband – together with an embroidered waistcoat complemented by a large-sleeved white blouse and a cameo brooch, was hurrying ahead of the doctor, a comfortingly unfashionable sight in her old if classical clothes, or so it seemed to Phyllis.

  ‘There is never a good time to call a doctor out, is there?’ Portia had asked of the solemn-faced gentleman when he was shown into her aunt’s drawing room, and judging from the frosty look in his eyes which was his reply it seemed that the doctor could only agree with her.