After Clare

by Marjorie Eccles

  He said he hated London, and for the most part steadfastly refused to accompany Mama when she made her periodic visits there, to stay with her sister, Mrs Arbuthnot. Why waste his time there, where Uncle Laurence, a dull stockbroker, could talk of nothing but making money and his stamp collection, when he, Anthony, could have been pruning, grafting, planting? As for Aunt Lottie, her kind of life was beyond his comprehension; she never came home before two a.m., conducted her correspondence from her bed until noon the next day, and then filled the rest of the time with as many social events as she could fit in.

  Unlike Clare, Emily loved the occasional times when they were allowed to accompany their mama to stay with the Arbuthnots, in the house from where you could hear Big Ben, two years older than Emily, booming the time across London. On the notably rare occasions Anthony could be persuaded to join them, both parents would come and say goodnight before they went out to dine, or to the theatre, Mama smelling delicious in a whispering frou-frou of taffeta skirts, and Papa miraculously transformed into a smooth and well-brushed stranger in a stiff shirt with a gardenia on his lapel.

  But mostly, Leila made her visits alone, while Leysmorton counted the days before her return. The girls played with their friends, the Markham girls, and Anthony let them roam the countryside on their ponies, galloping along the rides through the great beech woods and up to the high chalk escarpment on the Downs, from where you could see over three counties. Sometimes they rode through the village and bought ginger beer in bottles with a glass marble stopper from the pop-bottling factory, or they might go by way of the gaunt red-brick convent. Back home, there was the little house in the Hecate tree, their special place where no one else was ever invited, not even the Markham girls; Dorothy would have taken charge and wanted things done her way, and Jane would have been too timid to climb the ladder.

  When Leila returned, the house came alive again: presents for everyone, tissue paper everywhere as she unpacked the new hats, shoes and gloves she had bought, her hair worn in a new style, her eyes sparkling as she told them of the amusing plays she’d seen, the opera, dances, suppers she’d attended.

  Emily lapped it up eagerly. It was what she herself longed for – wasn’t it? To be grown up, to put one’s hair up, be presented at court, become the beautiful Miss Vavasour and eventually marry a handsome man, possibly a young lord. Yes, of course it was. Except that sometimes, as they grew older, she began to wonder if Clare had a point when she continually asked, would a life of such undiluted pleasure be enough?

  Her daughters were in danger of becoming little savages, running wild and with dirt beneath their fingernails from grubbing in the earth like their father, Mama suddenly decided. Moreover, the teaching they received from the genteel but ineffectual spinster who had followed Miss Jennett amounted to little more than the three Rs, and though too much education was unnecessary for girls, it was time lessons were supplemented with a few accomplishments and social skills designed to help them grow into young ladies.

  The solution was a young art student named Christian Gautier, half French, who was engaged during his vacation from his London art college to tutor them in drawing and painting, and to improve their French. A good-natured, gangling young fellow with a shock of untidy hair, he was something of a clown and made them laugh, though his efforts to teach them did not make too many obvious inroads into their ignorance. Yet he had an ability to capture with a few pencil strokes everything Emily laboured to do and never remotely succeeded in achieving. Clare, on the other hand, lost interest in the garden, her pony grew fat with too little exercise, and her hands became grubby with oil paint and charcoal, rather than earth. Her sketches and watercolours earned her praise and much attention from their young tutor, which seemed to overwhelm her and sent her into furious blushes. The French of both girls remained of the schoolgirl variety, Christian being more interested in improving his own English.

  He was with them for only two or three months, after which he returned to obscurity as far as they were concerned, but he had sowed the seeds of ambition in Clare. She had always sucked up knowledge of any kind as if she were drinking it through a straw, and from then on, she persisted in the notion that she wanted nothing more than to devote her life to becoming an artist.

  Ambition and everything else, though, receded into the background when their world collapsed without warning. One day Mama was there, chatting and smiling, telling them stories and letting Emily adorn herself with her jewellery and totter around in her shoes, pretending to be grown up, with Clare looking on with disapproval – she was fifteen by then, beyond such childish activities, if ever she had been interested in them – and the next, Mama was gone.

  Emily hadn’t known there was to be a baby. She was young for her years, though very much aware that there were things connected with being married that she mustn’t ask about. Clare said she had known about the baby. How? Emily desperately wanted to know, but she wouldn’t say.

  In the desolate time that followed Leila’s death, Anthony was unreachable, and the girls were left to their old nurse, Nanny Kate, now upgraded to the post of housekeeper. Kate Bunting was a woman who covered a soft heart and an all-embracing love for children with a matter-of-fact exterior and a refusal to accept any silly nonsense about Hecate trees.

  Perhaps it was her firmness which in the end finally brought about Clare’s silence on that subject. Even she had been shaken by Miss Jennett’s abrupt departure after that curse – it was a curse, Emily knew, not just a spell as Clare had called it at the time, maybe because a spell didn’t sound so evil – and perhaps she still felt guilty and was afraid the dark magic really was potent, and dangerous, and that was why Mama had died. At any rate, she dropped any mention of the Hecate tree and its arcane attractions as completely as she had given up messing about in the garden, and from then on any spare time she had was concentrated wholly on her painting and drawing, with the fierce absorption and intensity she had previously given to magic lore and dark secrets.

  Inevitably, when the time was approaching for her eldest niece to come out, to be presented at court, Aunt Lottie arrived, eager with plans and intentions. Clare listened and then politely said no thank you, she would rather attend one of the art schools in London, preferably the Slade, scandalizing Mrs Arbuthnot who, childless herself, had been looking forward to supervising both girls’ coming out, that most important rite of passage, and had constantly badgered Anthony about it ever since her sister’s death.

  ‘Art school? Painting? Models?’

  ‘Female students are not allowed to draw or paint them undraped, Aunt Lottie.’

  Her aunt paused, silver teapot in hand, and stared at Clare, trying to believe she was not being impertinent. ‘So I should hope, miss.’

  Lottie had a mental list of young men whose mothers she knew, who were of the right age, had been born into the required station in life and with sufficient wealth, whom she had already earmarked for one or other of the girls. Now she turned her attention to this, more important than any mere girlish whim of the moment. Clare stiffened when, regardless of what had just been said, their aunt began to outline her plans.

  ‘Not just now, Lottie,’ Anthony pleaded, as little anxious to hear this as Clare. Though he had at last roused himself somewhat from the dazed disbelief which had followed Leila’s death, he had grown increasingly grey and stooped, and more than ever wished for nothing to disturb his quiet life.

  ‘Yes, now. The child cannot possibly know what’s best for her. This is one thing you cannot close your eyes to, Anthony. Your girls won’t stop growing up – and I’m quite prepared to give up my time and see them both through their first season. It’s what Leila would have wanted,’ she finished, incontrovertibly.

  When this conversation had taken place, Victoria had still been on the throne. Women had magnificent bosoms and wasp waists, due to the corsets they wore, and Mrs Arbuthnot was no exception, though her whaleboning was not allowed to creak like Nanny Kate’s did when
she moved, or a roll of fat to appear across her shoulders where the stays ended. She stood in front of Anthony, adamant, as upright as if she had a ruler down her back, as indeed she might have had as a child, to improve her posture.

  Anthony said evasively, ‘Lottie, don’t you think it might be more of a question of what Clare really wants?’

  ‘Nonsense! Clare is barely eighteen years old, she cannot possibly know what she wants. I’m afraid you are spoiling your girls, Anthony – don’t you wish them to make the most of their chances? Do you want to see them condemned to become spinsters? Even you must allow that one is simply nothing without a husband!’ If she had had a fan with her, she would have rapped his knuckles smartly.

  ‘Well, of course, everyone knows that’s what it’s all about,’ Clare observed. ‘Why else would parents spend so much money on a mere girl, if not to get them married off?’

  She looked particularly angelic as she spoke, almost childlike, with her pale, soft skin and the fall of her flax-blonde hair. It was impossible to believe the remark had come from her, until you saw the expression in those green-gold eyes. Mrs Arbuthnot, for once, was rendered speechless.

  ‘My dear,’ said Anthony, looking helpless, or as helpless as a big, shambling bear could look, bewildered at these signs of defiance in this child who was perhaps his favourite, but whom he had never really understood. ‘My dear Clare.’ But he was wavering, and after a week of Clare’s determination not to give in, he put up no more opposition. He had always been a man easy to persuade, and easily defeated. And paradoxically, like many such people, he could be stubborn once he had made his mind up. Clare was, as all her family knew, already a talented artist, and she mattered more to him than Aunt Lottie. Foiled of her role of chaperone and matchmaker, Mrs Arbuthnot washed her hands of the whole business and departed in a huff to take the cure in Marienbad.

  Clare, then, had not been forced into enduring the ritual of coming out. No presentation at court in a white silk dress with Prince of Wales feathers in her hair, no hours spent learning to curtsey and walk backwards from the royal presence without tripping over one’s long train, no parties and dancing with perspiring, eligible young men whose duty it was to find a presentable young woman to marry and give them heirs. Instead she was enrolled at the Slade, as she had wished. There was, however, no question of her being allowed to live alone and unchaperoned. She must go home each night to stay with Aunt Lottie, who was to some extent mollified by the assurance of being able to keep an eye on any flighty tendencies her niece might show while away from the parental home.

  For consolation, Anthony, as always, lost himself in his beloved garden. Life continued to be tolerable only because of his garden, especially his roses.

  By the time it was Emily’s turn to be launched into society, she too had grown less enamoured of the prospect. For one thing, she had been impressed to see how Clare had blossomed in her exciting new life, in the freedom she’d found amongst those unconventional Bohemian young people, her fellow art students, whom she now called her friends. For another, Emily was appalled by the willy-nilly shunting of the Markham girls into the marriage market; horrified at seeing Dorothy wedded to a rich but incredibly dull young peer with an impeccable family history – though Dorothy herself made no objection, and indeed preened her feathers at being so fortunate – she did her best to comfort the wretched Jane when her tentative romance with the curate from Lower Kingsworth was nipped well and truly in the bud and she too was hustled into marriage with a rich man thirteen years older than herself.

  And in any case, by then Emily was basking in the warm certainty that the man who wanted to marry her was already present in her life. He had not asked her yet, but she was under no delusions that he would, soon.

  She had always been there, somewhere in the background of Hugh Markham’s life, Emily, the youngest Vavasour sister, an impulsive and happy child with bouncy dark curls, quite unlike her elder sister, Clare, that odd, secretive and somewhat fey girl, who made him uneasy.

  As a student at Oxford, like most of the other undergraduates revelling in their first taste of freedom, Hugh had drunk too much and taken part in certain youthful, reprehensible escapades they had thought amusing at the time. He rowed for his college, played a good deal of rugby, joined several clubs and societies, and with all this, regrettably neglected his books to the extent that he received warnings about being sent down. But since he was basically a conventional young man, in his second year he pulled his socks up, and by the time he left he was reckoned by his tutors to have turned out promising enough, all things considered, and a rattling good fellow by his friends. He had had one or two skirmishes with girls from the town, and nearly been caught by the daughter of one of the history dons, but when he came home and rediscovered Emily, now blossoming with the quick warmth, gaiety and generosity she had inherited from her mother, he fell headlong in love with her and knew that here was the girl he must marry.

  He was astonished, and delighted, when he dared to hope she might feel the same. He knew, however, that he would have to wait for the right time to ask for her, until she had come out and had her London season. Her immediate future was inescapably mapped out for her, just as his own was.

  Hugh had always known he would go into the family publishing business with his father, and eventually take over. What many of his friends looked down on as a rather mundane prospect did not dismay him. He loved books, and the thought of producing them gave him pleasure. In the event, he found himself head of the Peregrine Press sooner than he had expected. His father, ailing for some time, died suddenly within a few months of Hugh joining the firm, in the summer Paddy Fitzallan arrived at Leysmorton. And with the winding up of his father’s affairs, and implementing the changes he hoped would put the business back on a firmer footing than it had been of late, Hugh did not see what was going on under his nose until it was too late.

  Clare had been at the Slade for almost two years, and when she came home that Easter the announcement that she was not going to return dropped like a stone thrown into a still pool.

  ‘It’s better to leave now rather than waste any more of my own time, and everyone else’s,’ she said flatly, as if no further explanation was needed, as adamant about abandoning her training as she had been about starting it. Her disappointed family weren’t content with that. They wanted to know what had gone wrong.

  ‘It’s no use,’ was all she would say. ‘I’m not going back and that’s all there is to it. It doesn’t really matter, you know.’

  ‘That’s not all there is, and it does matter.’ Emily, closer to Clare than anyone else, felt that there had to be more to it, that this arbitrary decision must conceal a bitter disillusionment, and maybe something more that she couldn’t put a name to. ‘What else is wrong?’

  ‘Nothing, why would there be?’

  ‘Because I know something is, for you to give up like this.’ Clare had grown very thin, and was even paler than usual. She didn’t care what she wore and scraped her hair back unbecomingly. That elusive attraction of hers had been quenched.

  ‘I’ve done the best I can,’ Emily got her to admit at last, ‘and it’s not enough. I’ve done no work fit to be seen, according to the tutors—’

  ‘But might that not be just to spur you on? They’re not there just to praise.’

  ‘—and according to myself. I can see it now. Compared with most of the others, I shall never be anything more than a talented amateur, so why try to be anything else?’

  Emily felt there was some flaw to this logic, but she couldn’t see what it was. After all, perhaps it was true, perhaps Clare was exceptional only in the eyes of her admiring family. What was certain was that Clare would never be able to bear being thought second-rate.

  ‘Leave her alone,’ Nanny Kate said sensibly, ‘she’ll find something else. She always has. She needs something to knock the nonsense out of her.’

  ‘This, Anthony, is what comes of letting her have her own way!’ dec
lared Aunt Lottie. ‘If we had found a husband for her, none of this would have happened – and please don’t tell me again, Clare, that you’ll never want to marry, because that is something I refuse to believe of any young woman.’

  ‘Even if it should happen to be true?’

  Lottie pursed her lips, but Emily believed Clare had meant it when she’d said, ‘I’ll try anything once – anything except being married. Once you’ve done that, there’s no going back.’ She had never cared for boys, except perhaps that young tutor, once, and did not like any man except Anthony.

  ‘She’ll change her mind,’ he said hopefully, ‘won’t you, Clare, when the new term starts?’

  But when that time came, she was still at Leysmorton and Anthony, baffled, retreated into a hurt silence. Clare retreated too, to the room she had called her studio, where she spent a great deal of time alone, and where Emily was very much afraid she was destroying much of her work. When she emerged she was preoccupied and spoke sharply to anyone who tried to talk seriously to her. At that, Nanny Kate took matters in hand and berated her soundly for what she called the sulks, and at last this had some effect. She began to make the effort at least to put up a front of normality. But it was a miserable time for everyone.

  Until Paddy Fitzallan breezed into their lives, and everything changed.

  Nine

  He was something of a protégé of their aunt’s, Paddy Fitzallan, whose father, Daniel, son of an impoverished Anglo-Irish family, had been an old friend of Lottie’s – perhaps an old flame, judging from her reminiscent smile when she spoke of him. A slight young man whose eyes were a blaze of blue beneath unruly dark hair, with mobile features and engaging manners, Paddy came with her recommendation. He had pretensions to journalism and was, he said, writing a series of articles on gardens, and eager, with Anthony’s permission, to write about Leysmorton.