Finding the jumper proved a problem, until she hit on where it would be.
Jane winged down the stairs that had once given her so much trouble and launched herself into the drawing room. The chest of drawers in which her mother kept her sewing materials and wools was pushed against the wall under the window and, most weeks, Prue liked to put a vase of fresh flowers on the top. This week, she must have forgotten for the flowers had died. A smell of decay pricked at Jane’s nose and she wrinkled it in disgust. Some water had been spilt accidentally on to the wood beside the vase, bleaching a stained whorl of grain into the dark wood. Knowing her mother would be upset, Jane scrubbed at it with the cuff of her cardigan but it was too late.
She opened the drawer.
A couple of hours later, Molly spotted Jane trudging up the main street and hailed her.
‘Enjoying the holidays?’ Her briskness faltered as Jane turned a blotched and stained face towards her.
It was as if, Molly informed Keith over a supper of mince and cabbage, the child had grown up, almost aged, overnight.
‘There was such a funny, bleak look in her eyes,’ she said. ‘It made me shiver.’
After she had cleared the dishes, Molly got on the phone to Kate.
At the same moment, Max was in a partners’ meeting being invited, in addition to his usual duties, to take over administration of the Brussels and Madrid offices. Would he have any objections?
Various thoughts chased through Max’s mind, among them pleasure at the recognition. Aware that the purity of a response is often debased by the second thought (in this case, were they offering it to him because no one else would take it?) he concentrated on savouring the sensation before replying that, yes, he would be delighted.
His subsequent thought was that he would be spending less time at home.
Was it worth waiting for? Prue enquired over their after-dinner coffee. Oh, yes, he replied. I’m no saint and, believe it or not, ambition is not necessarily diluted by age. Of course not, said Prue, eyes fixed on his face. Of course not.
At that moment, the telephone rang and Max got up to answer it. Prue went out to make more coffee.
‘How nice to hear you, Molly,’ said Max, at his most impassive.
‘It was you I wanted to talk to, Max.’ Molly was uncharacteristically hesitant. ‘I’ve just had a word with Kate.’
‘Have you?’ Max knew at once that the conversation had a subtext, and he marshalled strategies to protect his wife. ‘But why ring me up to tell me this fascinating fact?’
‘We’re both worried about Prue. She’s sort of gone off.’
‘You make her sound like a dairy product. What do you mean precisely?’
Although not intimates, Molly and Max knew each other well. At least, Molly reckoned she knew Max well enough to take the bull by the horns. ‘Stop being the lawyer, Max. You know what I mean. Do please persuade Prue to do the Christmas concert as normal. Kate is quite upset at having to do it on her own.’
‘Why doesn’t Kate talk to Prue?’
‘She will, she will.’ Molly sounded impatient that Max should fasten on peripherals. ‘But I thought I would drop a word in your ear first. It’s better if you talk to her.’
Is it, my God? Max extracted his tartan handkerchief from his lapel pocket and folded and refolded it. These two women had discussed and weighed and analysed his beautiful, private Prue, and his mood darkened.
‘Look, Molly. It was kind of you to ring. But Prue must do as she wishes—’
‘There is the village to think of and we’re not so large that we can afford slackers.’
‘Perhaps she’s done enough? There are others.’
‘Goodness me!’ Molly’s exclamation contained genuine outrage at the idea that anyone should sign off Dainton - and Max, folding and refolding the tartan material into patterns, had to concede that Molly’s brand of - irritating - integrity was the stuff of heroines. Boudicca and Florence Nightingale probably said much the same things. And, of course, the wretched Joan.
‘You know as well as I do, Max, it’s only a certain type that does things and Prue’s one of them.’
‘Perhaps she’s changed type.’
‘Well, she can’t.’
‘Prue’s owed a break, but I’ll see what I can do,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to leave it at that, Molly.’
Max terminated the conversation and gave a little smile as he returned the handkerchief to his pocket. Whatever pain she caused him, at least Prue was his, not theirs.
What happened to Joan? asked Jamie on the phone. Many things, said Prue. Abandonment, martyrdom, rediscovery, deification. By the time of her capture, she had become an embarrassment to the Dauphin, whom she had helped to crown, and he made no effort to ransom her. That, she added, in an age when ransoming was as commonplace as presenting a credit card is today.
Poor, wonderful, blazing, sincere Joan who wanted to kick the English out of France, what must she have thought in her miserable cell?
Never trust anyone, said Jamie. She should have known that. Politics always rate higher than religion and morality.
Not always, Prue threw back. They paused at this point to savour the erotic frisson engendered by this tiny disagreement, and became sidetracked.
Whatever happened, said Prue later, this time to Max (these days all her conversations seemed to be conducted three ways, but at different times), it was clear the English were not going to be cheated of their bonfire. ‘We like bonfires, don’t we?’ said Max. ‘Guy Fawkes and all that.’
Prue looked at him. ‘You don’t understand about Joan, do you?’ she said. ‘Not really.’
‘Perhaps not.’ Max sighed as he conceded the point.
The Church fell over itself to condemn Joan as a heretic, that most tricky of states to prove and requiring intimate knowledge of the accused.
‘How did they do that?’ Max asked.
Prue found herself breathing very quickly. The Church’s insurance policy was the presumption that the accused is always guilty until proved innocent, this a priori conviction being useful in a case like Joan’s.
‘Ah,’ said Max. ‘Yes, I see.’
‘But,’ he queried after a long pause, ‘did this not mean that the King of France had been crowned by a heretic?’
‘Let us say,’ replied Prue, ‘that, having ennobled her brothers, the King ordered a certain Guillaume Bouillé in 1450 to prove that the English had rigged Joan’s trial. It was the first of many procedures to rehabilitate her - for complicated political reasons, not because she was a saint and a heroine.’
‘What else happened to her?’ Jamie took up the subject again when he next telephoned.
Her image got used, and by her immediate family too, Prue told him. And the irony is: it was their greed and smallness, admittedly harmless, that ensured, rather like advertising a product, the spread of the story about Joan’s extraordinary career. Five years after her death, her brothers pitched up in Orleans leading a woman in armour on horseback. She was, they maintained, Joan risen from the fire. People loved it. They were exposed but, unabashed, the brothers were present in Notre Dame in 1455 to aid the touching tableau of their mother begging a papal commission with cries and groans to rehabilitate her daughter.
In later centuries, when Joan’s life and death had faded into a footnote, and she had been almost forgotten, descendants of her brothers used her unimpeachably chaste and chivalrous image to prove that the family was, in essence, noble, and published books to that effect. As a result, Joan was again talked about and the interest in her led, eventually, to her canonization.
‘No service to France,’ wrote one of these impeccably noble authors, ‘can be compared to the Maid’s.’
‘But he was right, wasn’t he, Jamie, even if it was for the wrong reasons?’
It was almost laughable, Prue thought. Except it wasn’t. You do not have to ride out to battle with your precious standard streaming behind you and your courage screwed to its limit .
. . You do not have a to be burnt at the stake in front of a howling crowd to be immortal. You do not have to be in almost daily conversation with God and bring off feats of the near miraculous and boot the English out of France. To save you from a second death you merely required some peripheral players to the drama which, in this case, were a bandy-legged, pendulous-nosed king who could sign and stamp a piece of paper which ennobled Joan’s no-good brothers.
Autumn
Chapter Twenty-One
‘Legs apart,’ ordered the beauty therapist.
Violet obeyed. She was shivering slightly, having been ordered into the shower to wash off the exfoliant which the therapist had rubbed - a little too enthusiastically - all over her with a loofah. Now, in the tricky part of the operation, Violet was being wrapped in wet bandages, wide flannel ones used in hospitals to conceal gaping wounds but now moulding the contours of Violet’s (imaginary) cellulite to her hip.
‘You’re a lovely colour, Mrs Beckett.’
‘Yes,’ she said with a degree of satisfaction. ‘We were in Italy in June and the tan seems to have stayed.’
‘Wider,’ said the therapist, whose own face and body glowed electrified and slender, and extracted a roll of plastic wire from the clutter on the shelf. Beginning with the right leg, she coiled it round Violet’s bandaged body and a prolonged tussle ensued to anchor it properly. Keeping her legs obediently apart, Violet closed her eyes while hands invaded parts of her body not normally in the public domain and summoned a composite image of Hollywood A Listers as a compensation for the indignity.
‘Hop up on to the table, Mrs Beckett, dear.’
Hop! It was doubtful if Violet was in the running for breathing. Nevertheless, she wriggled herself as best she could into a horizontal position.
‘Fine,’ she said faintly.
The therapist attached electrodes to what, Violet devoutly hoped, were the correct areas of her body, and wrapped her in a length of plastic sheeting which she anchored with clothes pegs. Thus, like a chicken on a supermarket shelf, Violet lay and gave up her soul - and a lot of her money - in yet another pursuit of the body beautiful.
‘Coming up now, dear.’ The therapist busied herself with the machine, punching in numbers and flicking switches.
A sensation remarkably like the first stages of labour invaded Violet’s torso, which shuddered under the impact. Neither the sensation nor the memory it engendered did she care to dwell on. Reinforcing her unease, an extra strong charge of electricity shafted through her pelvic region and she winced.
‘Bear up, Mrs Beckett.’ The therapist patted her face. ‘Are we all right?’
At least, the injunction was not ‘Bear down.’ Anything but that . . .
Violet closed her eyes and visualized electric worms - no, centipedes digging with busy legs through her dimpled cellulite and tossing it aside into her drainage system. Gathered up like Nile silt, it surged past pink muscles and vitreous green and red organs the colour of thirties china ... to where? Not quite sure of the process of excretion, Violet and her Pilgrim’s Progress of fat came to a halt. It would be disgorged somehow, in a glistening, creamy flood into the pipes bisecting London.
Bliss.
‘We are very quiet at this point, Mrs Beckett, in order to work on our serenity.’
Eyes tight shut, Violet worked on her serenity and counted numbers with a miser’s loving, lingering relish: one centimetre, two, three even, off the hips.
The telephone shrilled in the tiny room. The therapist clicked her tongue with annoyance and squeezed past the table on which Violet lay to answer it. Violet tossed one more centimetre into the equation.
‘Yes, she is here,’ said the therapist with some surprise. ‘But my client is undergoing a treatment and cannot be disturbed.’
There was a long pause, interposed by several ‘buts’ from the therapist. Violet’s eyes snapped open. Her first thought was that the auction she was conducting had gone wrong. Her second that Gardener’s, the American publishing house who was bidding in the auction, had backed down. If nobody was going to come to the ball she would look pretty damn foolish. Her priorities established, only then was a further thought at liberty to form: Perhaps there’s something wrong with Edward?
‘Well, if you must,’ said the therapist in icy tones. ‘Just a minute.’
There was a great deal of jerking and pulling of telephone flex and the receiver was inserted under Violet’s chin.
‘Hallo,’ she said in a manner designed to disguise the fact that she resembled a mummy in the British Museum. An evening breeze of electric current played up and down her stomach.
‘Violet, it’s Lavinia. Gardener’s have faxed in with what they say is their best offer of a hundred thousand. I thought you ought to know. They want our answer this afternoon otherwise they’re withdrawing it.’
There was no apology from Lavinia for the interruption, neither did Violet expect one. ‘They seem dead keen,’ continued the voice, which was all breathy and excited. Bound to her sides, Violet’s fingers twitched. She nudged the receiver with her head.
‘Any more come in?’
‘Nope.’
‘Right. Tell them I’ll get back to them in a couple of hours’ and could you tell Hayden where it’s at, and say I’ll be in the office to deal with it in an hour.’
‘Yup.’
Almost too late, Violet realized she had made a strategic error. It was not a good idea to let it be known to the managing director that she was out enjoying a long lunch — at least, not these days. She changed tack.
‘Scrub that, Lavinia. Just ring Gardener’s and say we’ll be back to them before close of play, our time.’
The evening breeze switched location and shifted to her bottom where it rippled in and out of the creases.
‘OK, Violet.’ Lavinia sounded suitably impressed by Violet’s decision-making qualities. The phone went dead.
‘Sorry,’ said Violet, who was anything but at having her status so satisfyingly confirmed, if only to a beauty therapist.
‘Well, dear, it seems you can’t have much peace.’ The therapist returned to dial-twiddling and did not look particularly impressed. She had witnessed this sort of thing many times. ‘Not very good for the stress levels.’
‘How much longer have I got on?’
‘To get the real benefit, I should keep you here for another three-quarters of an hour.’
A brief but violent battle was waged in Violet’s head. Three-quarters of an hour on the machine, half an hour to get back -leaving only the minimum to ring round and whip up from other bidders in the ring. If she was going to perform prodigious feats and pull in maximum dollars — and therefore the maximum kudos - she needed to be at the end of the telephone.
On the other hand, there had been an outrageous wait to get on this machine and she wanted to extract every ounce. Correction: she wanted every ounce extracted from her.
‘Everything all right, Mrs Beckett?’
Lianas of fat roped Violet to the table. Pound and dollar signs glinted on the ceiling where a fan whirled. What if a decision was taken in her absence? The memory of the disastrous meeting when she had annoyed the managing director had left its scars, and others — notably that prat Sebastian Westland - were keen to gobble up Violet’s territory. In addition, the MD was hot on observing good corporate behaviour and had made it clear he thought it would be proper to sell the book to their mother house in the United States. Their mother house was not offering as much as Gardener’s but it was just possible that the corporate view would throw a spanner in the works she had so carefully orchestrated.
‘Turn the machine off, please,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got to go.’
‘Well . . .’ The therapist’s expertly tinted skin turned pink with annoyance.
‘Don’t worry. I’ll pay. Do you have another appointment?’
‘Except for Monday at seven thirty nothing for two weeks.’
‘Fine,’ said Violet, and waited
to be un-shrinkwrapped. ‘Book me in. I’ll come on from the office.’
What about Edward? said a voice in her ear as she flagged down a taxi. You’re already going out two evenings next week.
Emmy will cope said a second, louder, one. And Edward is far too young to notice whether I’m there or not.
Violet emerged much later that evening from the office, elated. Clever negotiation — a combination of insinuation, nerve and tricksiness - had ensured a deal thirty thousand dollars up on the Gardener’s offer, and Violet had been congratulated all round.
‘I’ll get Julia to run out to the offy and buy a bottle of wine,’ said Sebastian, flicking his expensive patterned tie in Violet’s direction. ‘Or has the little woman to run home?’ Sebastian was given to comments like that. He thought they were funny. Violet, who had perfected the art of pretending to scratch her left arm so that she could check her watch without seeming to do so, rubbed at her wrist. Six o’clock. Just OK.
Julia, his secretary, told Sebastian to run his own errands, thank you, which resulted in a sharp little exchange. Eventually, a couple of bottles of chardonnay were opened and the office got stuck in.
Violet did not drink much: alcohol had never appealed to her, and she distrusted its power to make one lose control. She did not mind others losing control, providing they were not too disgusting -it was all grist to her mill. Rather, Violet did not care to let her guard slip but she was happy enough to watch her colleagues make inroads, and concentrated on sparkling. Tonight, however, she felt that her store of energy - which she had come to realize was finite -was being depleted. After a while, she slid off the desk on which she had arranged herself for the others to take advantage of her short skirt.
‘Must go, folks.’
Sebastian also disengaged himself from a group. Violet’s nostrils flared slightly, a wildebeest having been given a warning signal. ‘I’ll share a taxi with you, Vi.’ He inflected the ‘Vi’. ‘We go in the same direction,’ he said and gazed blandly into her face. It was the look he always assumed before he contradicted someone in a meeting.
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