by Kelly Doust
‘Look at this!’ Tabs had said in awe, holding up a divine silk duster embroidered with chinoiserie-style birds and flowers.
‘Oh my God, it’s so beautiful,’ said Sylvie. ‘Wait a sec, I’ll just get a photo of it.’
They stopped for a breather and a cup of tea late on Sunday afternoon, Tabs resting her eyes while laid out on an old velvet chaise longue they’d dragged out from a dark corner. Sylvie took a deep breath and logged into her long-ignored Instagram feed.
She had deliberately neglected Instagram since Dearlove had gone bust, because she had been feeling too bruised and broken to look at it. Instagram had been something she had loved, updating it daily with fashion inspirations and musings, and little things which caught her attention. Something as innocuous as the detail in a vintage dress, or edible violets strewn across her breakfast bowl . . . Whatever made her heart sing. She had even insisted on curating it herself, long after she’d acquired an assistant and marketing people who could have helped her to do so.
As she clicked on her profile, Sylvie noted that she had some correspondence. It was overwhelming, seeing the hundreds of messages waiting to be read. There would be fans of the label, sad to see it go, of course, but there was also no doubt in her mind there’d be trolls as well. Ignoring the urge to explain where she’d been, she instead pulled out one of the photographs from her camera folder. It was a grey sequinned dress, hung up against the attic’s rafters. Tabs had draped a 1920s beaded scarf, probably from the same era as the dress, lightly around the hanger, and pinned a bunch of faded silk flowers to the filmy shoulder strap. In the picturesque half-light, the camera picked up dust motes dancing in a sunbeam before it. Sylvie added a pretty filter to give it a romantic feel and started typing.
Back in ol’ Blighty again, working on a new project. Stay tuned, lovelies! She clicked ‘Post’ before she could change her mind, feeling a rush of excitement.
As the picture uploaded to her feed, several ‘likes’ popped up in an instant. Stalwart followers of Dearlove – people like fashiongirrl, nychicita and the editor-at-large from Marie Claire magazine, Katerina Smythe . . . Sylvie had gulped down a flutter of nerves at that last one and quickly clicked out.
‘Do you really think they’ll go for it?’ Ben was saying on the phone, talking about the V&A proposition. ‘Sounds unlikely to me.’
‘Don’t say that,’ she said, twirling a lock of hair between her fingertips. She suddenly regretted calling him, but Ben carried on talking regardless.
‘Hey, I found a flight for next Monday, arriving in the evening. Would that work for y’all?’
‘No!’ Sylvie sat up. ‘I mean, not yet – we’re right in the middle of things . . . Can’t you wait a couple of weeks until we get ourselves a bit more sorted?’
‘A few weeks, huh? You didn’t say how long you were going for . . . I guess I thought you’d be back sooner. You do want me to come over, babe, don’t you?’ he asked suddenly.
Sylvie gulped. She wasn’t ready to see him, she just wasn’t.
‘Of course I do. It’s just that everything’s so up in the air at the moment,’ she said, biting down on her lip. ‘I wasn’t expecting all this to happen, but I feel I should stay and help them out, especially since they’ve asked. I want you to come out really soon. I promise. But can I let you know when . . . please?’ She pulled at another thread on the coverlet beside her, causing a run in the creamy white damask. Sitting up, she nervously scratched at it, trying to pull it back into shape.
‘Hey, honey, no probs. Whatever suits you,’ Ben said easily. She heard voices in the background, and Ben’s muffled response. ‘I’d better go. Talk to you soon.’
How long could she put him off? she wondered as she hung up the phone with relief. Sylvie knew she was being unfair, but she needed time to think, and there was no way she could do that with Ben around, charming the pants off her parents and friends and generally confusing her with his kindness and dependability.
Sylvie felt a stab of guilt. What was wrong with her? Anyone else would be thrilled to have such a perfect boyfriend. Ben was so kind, so supportive, and full of great advice about her business when she’d needed it. He had wonderful manners and the sex was . . . well, fine. A memory suddenly popped into her head, unbidden, of that night in the bar with Josh. How he’d made her laugh. How obviously attracted to her he’d been. And how impressed by her daring and talent, when she’d been feeling worse than dirt.
Beers had quickly devolved into shots, and the way Josh was looking at her seemed to knock all the sense from her brain. She remembered him walking her home, and up the steps to her apartment. Lingering by the door. Something had just snapped between them, crackling in the air with its intensity, and Sylvie recalled the wild way she’d reached up and torn at Josh’s shirt, ripping two buttons clean off as she pulled him towards her, laughing as they popped and skidded across the tiled floor. They hadn’t even made it inside.
Sylvie groaned out loud, throwing her phone on the bed. She was disgusted with herself. Where was her loyalty? Ben was too good for her. She didn’t deserve him.
To distract herself from thoughts of Josh, she reached out to pick up the book that was sitting on the bedside table. Sylvie still hadn’t taken up Gigi on her offer to come visit her in the gatekeeper’s cottage. She was mostly avoiding her grandmother, but Gigi had come up to the house recently to press a book upon her. ‘Here, my darling – I thought this might help. He’s very wise, is Deepak.’
Sylvie managed to read the first few pages, before giving up in despair. ‘Ask yourself, who am I? What am I here to do?’ But Sylvie had no bloody idea who she was, or what she was here to do, did she? She’d thought she was meant to be a fashion designer, but then she’d turned out to be completely wrong about that. She’d thought she could be someone’s girlfriend, do the whole monogamous thing, but she’d failed at that too. She had no real confidence in anything any more.
Closing the book, Sylvie stood up and gave herself a little shake, like one of her parents’ dogs. With Lizzie asleep, and Wendy in town, she decided that she might as well go back up to the attic.
Since Tabs had left, Sylvie had spent most of her time either up in the attic, helping out her mother or catching up with Lizzie, wheeling her around the lawns and taking over some of the burden of caring for her. She had come to realise that Wendy was being run ragged – Lizzie kept her perpetually running backwards and forwards from the ballroom. Sylvie had also been venturing into some of Bledesford’s many unused rooms while Lizzie was sleeping – various bedrooms, parlours and the music hall, where a grand piano sat mouldering under dusty sheets. She wanted to understand how bad it was before they got down to brass tacks. Pretty bad, was the answer.
The agent – a slick realtor from Frome, with a supercilious air and a top-of-the-range silver Mercedes sports car – confirmed it. ‘It will need a quick clean and further decluttering – see what you can manage,’ he said, looking down his nose at them with what seemed, to Sylvie, awfully like contempt. ‘I’ll start putting together the contract and advertisements, and I’ll consult with my colleagues. It’s a bad time to sell properties of this sort . . . What with the economy and all the upkeep required, you’re mostly looking at developer interest.’
Was he really the best person in the area to sell Bledesford Manor? Sylvie had her doubts. And it would take a damn sight more than a quick clean and declutter.
She thought of how they must look through his eyes. He had been initially impressed by the Dearlove name, she could tell from her first phone call with him, and from his eagerness at the start, when he’d driven up to the front of the house, sending gravel flying all over the place in his flashy sports car. But as they’d toured the house and grounds with Robin and Wendy, he’d become more and more gloomy about their prospects. It had thrown Sylvie back into that familiar feeling of being nothing more than a failure and a fraud.
She’d felt like this for most of her life, she realised. Never q
uite knowing if she was being accepted for who she was, or for her family name. She never knew if she’d managed to secure the backing for her first collection because of her talent, or because of the cachet of her name, and remembered vividly her meetings with Garrison Hartley, a venture capitalist who’d backed her first three collections. In those early days he’d been so excited about using the Dearlove name in all their marketing materials and his company’s own prospectus. She’d wanted to call her company something else, something dreamy and exotic, but instead he’d insisted upon using Dearlove. She’d felt so thrilled to have an actual real-life backer, she’d agreed. Of course she now realised that it was all about leveraging her family’s status and connections – the Yanks loved Britain’s upper class, even as they professed to favour égalité. Sylvie cringed now to remember the interviews they encouraged her to do, insisting she try to work in a mention of her grandmother, and her father.
As Sylvie walked through the echoing corridors, the old floorboards squeaking under her feet, she thought of her parents and how they had crammed themselves into one of the smaller bedrooms on the first floor. The room was comfortably furnished – cosy, in its way – but they had chosen the tiniest one of all, originally designed as a dressing parlour for the lady of the house, when Bledesford had been updated sometime back in the early 1900s.
‘We don’t mind – it costs less to heat than one of the bigger rooms,’ Robin had told her, blowing on his blue fingertips as he’d come in from the barn, warming them over the Aga. The kitchen was the only room in Bledesford that wasn’t frigid with cold.
Sylvie opened one of the doors on the third floor on a whim and peeked in. Crossing the room, her footprints appeared in the thick layer of dust coating the floorboards, and she lifted a ghostly white sheet. Underneath was a bed with a carved wooden head from the Jacobean era. The dust sheets were a necessity – the bed probably hadn’t been slept in since before the term ‘weekend’ was coined back in the 1920s (it had been all Saturday-to-Monday parties, back then). Even her father and his artist buddies had found it hard to fill all of Bledesford’s many rooms.
There was a picture she used to stare at as a child, Sylvie remembered now as she climbed up the stairs towards the attic. It had lived in the music room for years, but didn’t seem to be there now. The photo had been taken by the society photographer Cecil Beaton, during one of the many balls held at Bledesford. A regular visitor back in the twenties and thirties, Beaton had snapped it from a balcony on the second floor, not far from her current bedroom. People had spilled from the festivities out onto the terrace, and the darkened valley below was visible in the distance. With a starlit night twinkling above their heads, perhaps a hundred or more people were drinking and dancing and laughing in the moonlight. Pomaded heads glistened and heavily beaded dresses caught the light, but her great-great-grandmother Rose was clearly visible in the middle of the crowd. Of all the people on the terrace, only she was glancing up towards the photographer, as if she knew he was seeking her out. Her head tilted upwards, a secretive smile trembling at the edge of her lips, and with the light glancing off her great silver headdress, it was as if she was glowing, the moon’s silvery luminescence like an elaborate halo.
Sylvie hadn’t thought of that picture in ages, but now she’d remembered it, she couldn’t get it out of her mind. The way her great-great-grandmother looked, that enigmatic expression she wore, her starry headdress . . . Beaton seemed to have captured something essential, something mercurial about her, and for a moment Sylvie wondered what was behind that mysterious smile, and whether Rose had any inkling of the tragic early death that awaited her.
FOR SALE
A Rare Opportunity – Grade II-listed Estate, Somerset
Bledesford Manor sits in an unrivalled position with beautiful views over the Colm Valley. With 6 principal reception rooms, ballroom, grand hall, 37 bedrooms, 12 bathrooms, wine cellar, attractive gardens, cricket pitch, croquet lawn, 2-bedroom gatekeeper’s cottage, traditional buildings and extensive range of farm buildings, there is great potential for improvement. Bordered by the River Colm. Orchard and orangerie. Fishing, pheasant and partridge shoot, mixed woodland, pasture and arable. About 762.78 acres.
For further information, please contact Mark Rutherford of Rutherfords, Frome.
17
Checking the time on her phone, Sylvie was startled to realise that it was close to four o’clock. Nick was due to arrive at any moment.
Earlier in the week, irritated by her mother’s insistence that she ring him, she’d contacted him and had been surprised at the deep timbre of his voice.
‘Nick, it’s Sylvie . . . Dearlove. From next door . . . How are you?’
‘Little Sylvie Dearlove, as I live and breathe. What are you doing back here?’
Falling back easily into the familiar banter of their old friendship, they’d agreed to meet a few days later at Bledesford, so Sylvie could talk to him about what they needed.
Sylvie examined herself in the tall gilt-framed mirror she’d asked Robin to drag upstairs. What a mess, she thought, flinging on a starched white Victorian nightdress over her singlet and dark leggings. The dress had a long hemline that fell to the floor, floaty and ethereal, so she paired it with a structured waistcoat, burgundy and black silk velvet, which was embroidered with gold thread. She’d found the waistcoat in an old trunk – it looked like a circus costume, or a child’s fancy-dress item – but it fitted her easily and she loved its threadbare appearance. She rubbed her palms against the weave and admired its softness. Sylvie pulled her hair up into a topknot and slipped into her soft suede moccasins. There – the whole outfit made her feel like a gypsy. This was what she absolutely adored about fashion: being able to shift into another character at a moment’s notice and feel how it subtly changed you, inside as well as out.
Hearing the bell chime – right on time, damn it! – Sylvie licked her finger and rubbed at her face, which had a sooty mark on one cheek. She would have to do.
Dancing lightly down the steps, she swung the big door open just as the bell rang out again.
‘Quicksilver,’ said Nick. ‘Good to see you.’
‘Nichol-arse!’ she said and smiled, reverting automatically to the old childish nickname she had for him. She reached up to give him a hug and did a little double-take when she realised how tall and broad he’d become, how solid under her fingertips. All trace of his boyishness erased, a man had turned up in the place of the friend she used to climb trees with or hang out with on weekends home from college, with granite-like features and a nose he’d finally grown into. But just as she felt a wave of uncertainty, a familiar grin transformed his face, and he was suddenly Nick again.
‘Nichol-arse. That’s charming, that is,’ Nick said, swatting her on the shoulder. ‘People tend to treat me with more respect these days.’
Sylvie laughed. ‘Forgive a lowly Dearlove her impudence,’ she said, curtseying. ‘Would you prefer Mr Henshaw?’
‘God, no.’ Nick grimaced. ‘Then I’d feel properly old . . . How long has it been? I was trying to work it out.’
‘Six years?’ she asked, squinting as she pretended to calculate on her fingers. ‘Give or take a few months . . . How are you doing?’
‘Good, good,’ Nick said, eyes looking somewhere just above her head, which admittedly only came up to his armpit. ‘Hey, about last time . . .’
‘Forget it,’ Sylvie said quickly. ‘Water under the bridge.’
Nick grinned and a lock of hair – golden blond from so much time spent in the sun – flopped down over his face. She had always lorded her advanced age over him when they were kids, using it as an excuse to boss him about. He looked too big to boss about now, though, and somewhat intimidating.
‘Thanks for coming,’ she said. ‘I know I warned you over the phone, but how about I give you the tour so you can see the state of the place for yourself.’ Sylvie grabbed Robin’s old Barbour from a coat hook and pulled it on over her shoulders, t
hen swapped her moccasins for a pair of wellies.
‘Sure, happy to help . . . Um, Sylv?’ Nick said, looking her up and down, a smile playing at the corner of his mouth. ‘What are you wearing?’
‘Oh – this?’ she asked, touching the nightdress’s high frilly neckline. ‘You like? I know it’s a bit yellow but I reckon it’ll come up roses with a good soak . . . Sorry, I’ve been hanging about in the attic too much – do I look like a bag lady?’
‘Maybe just a bit.’
‘Ah well. It’s just you who has to see me . . . Let’s go check out the orangerie first, shall we?’ she said, pulling him outside. ‘It’s a mess, but I wonder if you can come up with some ideas? It can’t be too expensive, of course, but just so it doesn’t look so bloody dire . . . Or let us know where we might find someone, if you can’t – I know you must be flat out, I do really appreciate you coming over, you know,’ she said, suddenly serious.
‘Like I said, it’s no trouble. I might even be able to get a friend to help out as well.’
‘Hey,’ said Sylvie, as they passed the veggie garden. ‘Do you remember that time when we nicked those bottles from Dad’s wine cellar and made a potion to sell to passing motorists?’
‘Oh my God,’ said Nick, smiling. ‘I remember. Three bottles of Chateau Lafite . . . I’m surprised he didn’t throttle us. What little buggers we were.’
‘Hah! I still don’t think Mum’s forgiven me.’
‘We made some nice labels, though, didn’t we? What did we call it?’
