The Granville Sisters

by Una-Mary Parker

  ‘Where are you going, Mummy?’ Rosie asked in alarm. ‘For goodness’ sake, don’t leave us.’

  ‘I have to go ahead of you, darling. You’ll follow, with the rest of the girls, in due course.’

  They took their seats and watched for what seemed ages as their mothers disappeared through the far doors into the adjoining Throne Room. Then it was the turn of the débutantes.

  Rosie moved with determination to be in front of Juliet, her blue taffeta dress and train echoing the colour of her eyes, her cheeks flushed, and her hands trembling with nerves.

  Moments after, it was Juliet’s turn.

  ‘Miss Juliet Granville,’ boomed the usher.

  This was it. Juliet’s moment of glory. With her head held high, she swept forward to present herself before the King and Queen of the British Empire, an Empire so vast it was said the sun never set on it.

  Gripping her bouquet, she dropped into a deep curtsey before the King, and then moving on, curtsied to the Queen. And suddenly it was all over.

  She found herself in the Blue Drawing Room, where Rosie and her parents, looking proud, were waiting for her.

  ‘What now?’ Juliet asked.

  ‘When the King and Queen leave the Throne Room, there’s a champagne supper, and then the car will come to collect us,’ Henry told her.

  Juliet’s face fell. ‘Is that all?’

  ‘No, we’ve been invited to a party at the Savoy, where, if you’re lucky, you can dance the night away,’ he replied, smiling.

  ‘Oh, Daddy, how wonderful!’ she exclaimed loudly, flinging her arms around his neck to kiss him, much to the horror of the other girls and their parents.

  ‘I think we’ll reserve the hug for later, sweetheart,’ Henry said, good-humouredly extricating himself.

  ‘We mustn’t forget where we are, dear,’ Liza said in a stage whisper.

  Juliet looked unabashed. ‘Well, I don’t know about you, but I feel absolutely at home here.’

  On arrival at the Savoy, the cloakroom was crowded with mothers and daughters shedding their trains and feathered headdresses, bouquets and gloves. The formality was over. The mothers were dying for a strong cocktail; the debutants were dying for a strong man to sweep them on to the dance floor.

  Seated at a long table for thirty, Liza took a quick look at the other guests, congratulating herself on having cultivated Lady Carmichael for the last twenty years, including making her Rosie’s godmother. She’d known all along that Trudie Carmichael, having a daughter the same age, would be entertaining lavishly during the season of ’35. Whilst the Carmichaels weren’t as rich as the Granvilles, they seemed to know a large number of ‘young things’, and so it was with satisfaction that Liza noted that both Rosie and Juliet had eligible young men on either side as they took their seats for supper.

  Carroll Gibbons and his band livened the atmosphere with romantic popular music, and couples crowded on to the dance floor to the strains of ‘I Cover the Waterfront’, and ‘Dancing in the Dark’.

  Juliet looked sparkling and confident, Rosie looked hopeful.

  ‘Isn’t this a dashed good party?’ remarked the young man on Juliet’s right, who had introduced himself as Archie Hipwood. ‘Been to Buck House, have you?’

  Juliet nodded. ‘Do you think I can have a sip of your wine? My parents are here, and I’m not allowed alcohol yet. Such a dreadful bore,’ she added, imitating his drawl.

  ‘How dashed unsporting of them. Here, swapsies!’ He pushed his glass surreptitiously towards her, and took her orange squash.

  ‘How angelic of you!’ Juliet said flirtatiously.

  The man on her other side leaned towards her. ‘Hello. I’m Colin Armstrong. You must be Juliet Granville.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘News travels, when there’s a new beauty on the scene. Like to dance?’

  Juliet took a quick sip of wine. ‘I’d adore to. I just love this tune.’ And away she skimmed in her ivory satin dress, with his arm around her waist, as she looked up laughingly into his plain but charming face.

  Further down the table, Rosie was talking to someone called Charles Padmore.

  ‘So where do you live?’ he asked.

  ‘In Green Street.’

  ‘Enjoying your first season?’

  ‘Yes. It seems to be great fun.’ She looked towards the dancing couples with envy, especially when she saw Juliet swinging past as the band played ‘Let’s Make Hay While the Sun is Shining’.

  ‘Do you ride?’

  ‘Not so much now, but we had ponies when I was young,’ Rosie replied, looking towards her mother for help. Why wasn’t she having as much fun as Juliet?

  She turned to the man on her other side, hoping for better luck. ‘Hello, I’m Rosie Granville,’ she introduced herself shyly.

  ‘Hello there. I’m Peregrine Carnegie.’ He smiled affably.

  ‘And … erm … do you go to lots of these parties?’

  ‘Not really. Aunty Trudie roped me in for the evening. I’m at Oxford, reading economics, actually. I don’t have time to go to parties. Isn’t your sister Juliet Granville?’

  ‘Yes,’ Rosie replied icily.

  ‘Thought I recognized the name. Word’s already got around, according to my aunt, that she’s a smashing beauty who might become the Deb of the Year!’

  ‘I’m never ever going to go to the same party as Juliet again,’ Rosie exploded, on the verge of tears, as she and her mother went to powder their noses later on.

  A look of panic floated across Liza’s face. This was only the first night of a season; another twelve weeks lay ahead of them.

  ‘There’s your joint coming-out ball next week, darling,’ she stammered, flustered, knowing now she had a real family crisis on her hands.

  The atmosphere in 48 Green Street was charged with a mass of conflicting emotions on the morning of the ball.

  Liza was up early, nauseous with a mixture of nerves and excitement. She looked at herself wistfully in the mirror.

  Why was it that the way she thought she looked and the way she actually looked widened with every passing year?

  Downstairs was all hustle and bustle. Boxes of flowers were borne aloft into the house like floating herbaceous borders, and the caterers had already delivered a load of little gilt chairs with red velvet seats.

  In the kitchen, Mrs Fowler, the cook, was casting a beady eye over the food being prepared for breakfast for the two hundred guests, while she remained jealously in charge of the menu for the dinner party for twenty-five before the ball. She was a whippet-thin little woman, with a tired face framed by whisps of ginger hair, and when she smiled, she bared her teeth in a canine grin.

  ‘Put the hired crockery and glasses in the passage outside the skullery,’ she commanded in a rasping bark. ‘Don’t go bringing no crockery in here.’

  Meanwhile Parsons, the butler, cast a worried eye over the dozens of cases of champagne, and wondered how long they’d last.

  To add to the chaos, removal men had arrived to clear the drawing room and morning room of furniture, so there were frequent collisions in the hall between what was going out and what was coming in.

  Even the nursery was in turmoil, as Charlotte kept jumping up and down, exclaiming, ‘I want to dance with Daddy tonight!’

  ‘We are going to be allowed to watch people arriving, aren’t we?’ Louise asked anxiously.

  ‘We’ll see what your mother says,’ Nanny retorted.

  ‘But I want to dance with Daddy,’ Charlotte wailed.

  Louise said comfortingly, ‘I’ll dance with you on the landing, where no one can see us.’

  Charlotte’s bottom lip quivered. ‘But Daddy won’t be on the landing,’ she gulped.

  Nanny spoke crisply now. ‘Charlotte, if you don’t eat up your cereal, you won’t be dancing with anyone.’

  The triumphal cascade of pink champagne, flowing from the top of a pyramid of wine glasses into a base of white marble, drew
gasps of delighted amazement from the guests who arrived to have dinner before the ball. It was the pièce de résistance of the evening, and the first time anyone had seen the like at a débutante ball.

  ‘It’s too, too divine!’ exclaimed Lady Sibyll Lygon, who wrote articles about society parties for Harper’s Bazaar magazine.

  Lady St John of Bletso, gazing at the sparkling pink display, agreed. ‘Too marvellous for words, my dear. Do you suppose it will keep flowing all evening?’

  Behind her even the Aga Khan looked impressed, while the Duke and Duchess of Rutland ‘smiled appreciatively’, according to a report in the Tatler magazine.

  At the top of the stairs, Louise, Amanda and Charlotte, in white organdie party frocks with blue sashes, peered down through the bannisters, fascinated by what was going on.

  ‘They all take after you, Liza,’ Lady Diana Cooper, a famous beauty herself, remarked. ‘You really must get them painted by Philip de Laszlo. He’s done an exquisite portrait of Princess Elizabeth, you know.’

  It seemed to Rosie, beautiful in a white lace dress and long white gloves, that the whole of London was taking part in her coming-out ball tonight.

  Unfortunately, she raged inwardly, so was Juliet.

  It had all started to go wrong before the dinner-party guests had even arrived. She was waiting with her parents to receive the guests when Henry spoke.

  ‘Where’s Juliet?’

  Rosie shrugged. ‘I haven’t the faintest.’

  ‘She’s ready, isn’t she?’ Liza asked, fanning herself nervously.

  ‘I’ve no idea, Mummy. She’s been cooped up in her room all afternoon.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake …!’ Henry sounded rattled.

  ‘I wanted her to see the champagne cascade and the flowers before anyone arrived,’ fretted Liza. ‘She must be ready.’

  She herself had been made-up, hair curled, and tiara in place for hours.

  ‘Juliet!’ she called, a touch frantically.

  ‘She’ll never hear you, darling,’ Henry pointed out. He strode over to the bottom of the stairs, a distinguished figure in white tie and tails.

  At that moment they heard footsteps and, looking up, saw Juliet descending at a leisurely pace.

  For a moment Rosie looked bemused. Juliet looked taller than usual and glamorous like a Hollywood film star. A spray of white velvet roses, which certainly hadn’t come from Norman Hartnell, but more likely the bargain basement of Selfridges, lay over her left shoulder, the central rose so large that when she lowered her chin, all you could see were her aquamarine eyes, which seemed to be heavily fringed in black.

  ‘What have you done to your face, Juliet?’ Liza remarked in horror. ‘And where did you get those dreadful flowers?’

  At that moment Juliet turned to face them, and to her mother’s shock she saw Juliet had cut what had been the modest V-line of her dress into a plunging ravine, which exposed her deep and provocative cleavage.

  Liza gave a thready scream. ‘You can’t appear like that!’

  But Juliet smiled, her scarlet-painted mouth so voluptuous that Henry felt quite taken aback.

  ‘Go and scrub that muck off your face at once,’ he whispered angrily, ‘and cover yourself up with a scarf or something.’

  ‘You look like a tart!’ Rosie stormed, tears rising, cheeks flushing.

  ‘That’s better than looking like a washed-out drab!’ Juliet snapped back.

  ‘Now, girls …’ Henry began agitatedly.

  As Juliet told Louise the next morning, ‘I was literally saved by the proverbial bell. Lady Astor arrived at that moment in one of her five tiaras, so Mummy and Daddy had to shut up.’

  That night, Juliet seemed to reach a new peak of beauty and allure. Watching, Liza realized with disappointed pang, that her precious Rosie really was going to be overshadowed by her sister. Rosie might be blonde and exquisite in a gentle way, but Juliet had something else. An indefinable charismatic quality, and sexuality that made her outstanding.

  ‘Isn’t Juliet a stunner,’ people kept saying. The older men eyed her wistfully and wished they were thirty years younger, and the young men gazed into her eyes and wondered if they were in with the chance of a kiss.

  But Liza frowned worriedly. Bringing the girls out together had been a dreadful mistake.

  ‘It’s so unfair, Mummy,’ Rosie had whispered, when they went upstairs to powder their noses.

  ‘Oh, sweetheart …’ Liza sympathized.

  ‘Can’t you stop her?’

  ‘What can I do?’

  Mother and daughter looked at each other blankly, racking their brains to think of a way Juliet could be stopped … but stopped from doing what, exactly? Being her natural self?

  Liza was about to tell Rosie to be more assertive, but what was the point? Rosie wasn’t the assertive type. ‘I should have forced her to wait until next year,’ she said lamely.

  Rosie’s pretty pink mouth drooped at the corners. ‘Well, it’s too late now. She’s going to spoil the whole summer for me. I just know she is.’

  Liza had a sinking feeling Rosie was right.

  As Henry watched the proceedings anxiously, he saw his mother, Lady Anne, taking a seat with a group of other dowagers.

  ‘Hello, Mother. You’re looking very splendid.’

  ‘Thank you, dear.’ She nodded as Juliet swung past in the arms of her partner. ‘She’s a little minx, isn’t she? But so enchanting,’ she observed, amused. ‘I’ve always liked her spirit.’

  He smiled, raising his eyebrows. ‘She’s unsquashable.’

  ‘But there’s a lot of good in her. She’ll be much happier now that she’s growing up.’

  ‘I’ve never thought of her as being unhappy.’

  ‘Haven’t you, Henry? Oh, I have. The child hasn’t been happy for a long time.’

  ‘Mother, what do you mean?’

  Lady Anne shook her head, her drop diamond earrings trembling.

  ‘The child’s been troubled by something since she was quite small.’

  ‘I can’t think what,’ he replied doubtfully.

  Lady Anne patted his shoulder with her gloved hand. ‘Don’t worry about it, my dear. She’ll be all right.’

  ‘Yes, Mother. But will Rosie?’

  The next edition of the Bystander dubbed Rosie and Juliet Granville as The most beautiful débutantes to grace the London scene since Margaret Whigham in 1930; while the Sketch summed up the party as The coming-out ball of the year. The Tatler went even further: Rosie and Juliet Granville, the sublimely exquisite débutantes of 1935, are destined to make brilliant marriages.

  ‘Look at all these thank-you letters!’ Liza exclaimed. ‘Aren’t people sweet?’

  ‘Look at all these bills!’ Henry said drily. ‘How can the hire of a hundred and fifty gilt chairs come to almost as much as if we’d bought the damned things?’

  In the aftermath, bickering in the family kept flaring up at intervals because everyone was tired. A sense of anticlimax was permeating through the house like an epidemic of influenza.

  Nanny complained the young ones had become ‘spoilt little brats’ overnight; Mrs Fowler had thrown a saucepan at a scullery maid because it hadn’t been cleaned properly, and even Parsons, normally calm and measured, had a sharp word for a parlour maid because she laid the table for luncheon incorrectly.

  To top all this, the servants were clamouring for time off to go and watch the Silver Jubilee celebrations of King George V and Queen Mary.

  The streets of London suddenly blossomed in a flurry of Union Jacks and bunting. Patriotism swept through the city like a contagious and feverish euphoria. Liza and Henry were invited to the Jubilee Ball at Buckingham Palace, but, to Juliet’s fury, she and Rosie had not been asked.

  ‘It’s for the grown-ups, darling,’ Liza explained. ‘You’d be dreadfully bored.’

  ‘So when can I go to the palace again?’

  ‘I expect you’ll be invited to one of the garden parties, in due course.
’

  Nanny was determined though, that Louise, Amanda and Charlotte should see the King and Queen travel in procession in their golden carriage from the palace to Westminster Abbey. Liza was doubtful because of the vast crowds. The children might so easily get lost.

  ‘You must take Parsons and Ruby with you, Nanny,’ she said firmly.

  ‘Very well, ma’am,’ Nanny replied obediently, though she knew there was no need. Once the children were dressed in their best pale-blue linen coats, red shoes and white socks, in the style of the King’s granddaughters, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose, they’d be given special treatment by the crowds, who would doubtless think they were the offspring of some European monarch.

  Her scheme worked. Flanked by the butler and the nursery maid, Nanny managed to manoeuvre the girls to the front of the crowds, so that when the procession passed them in the Mall, they were in a perfect position to appreciate the magnificent carriage, with the elderly King and Queen sitting inside.

  ‘Look!’ Charlotte screamed with excitement.

  ‘Hush,’ remonstrated Amanda.

  Nanny said nothing at all, because by now the tears were streaming down her plump cheeks.

  ‘Well …!’ she said, when she could say anything at all. ‘Did you ever …?’

  ‘Beats the cinema any day, if you ask me,’ Ruby agreed.

  ‘Quite,’ said Parsons.

  Nanny blew her nose. ‘Children,’ she said as they walked home through Green Park, ‘this is something you can tell your grandchildren about. You’ll never see a grander sight, not nowhere in the world,’ she added with stout patriotism.

  ‘Holland Villas Road is so out of town,’ Liza observed. ‘Who has invited you to dine with them there?’

  Rosie glanced at the letter asking her to join a dinner party before Lord and Lady Heysham’s ball. ‘It’s signed Cynthia Bartlett. The dance is at Holland House, so that’s very convenient, actually. Who’s Juliet dining with? Not with the same people, I hope?’

  Liza hesitated. Juliet had actually been invited to dine with the Londonderrys. It was rather a feather in Juliet’s cap because the Marchioness of Londonderry was one of the most spectacular hostesses of the era, only rivalled by Lady Astor.

  Rosie looked at her mother anxiously. ‘Who is Juliet dining with?’