Gentlemen and Players

by Frances Vernon

  ‘I wonder where they’ll be married,’ said Susan. ‘It will have to be a Catholic marriage, of course, as Miss Fitzwilliam’s a Roman. I wonder if they have a chapel here? Or perhaps they’ll go to Manchester.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Sarah.

  ‘She’s a fine-looking woman, isn’t she?’ Susan continued, thinking that she had used a rather bold expression and also made a mistake by bringing up the subject.

  ‘No,’ said Sophie. ‘She’s a perfect fright. Not even Aunt Hannah is as fat as that. And I never saw a worse complexion in all my born days.’

  Susan laughed. ‘We’ve heard your views already, Sophie. I do think you might try to be polite.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we don’t want to start off on the wrong foot, do we?’

  ‘Why do you always talk like a governess?’ said Sophie.

  ‘I do no such thing!’

  ‘You do!’

  ‘I don’t! You’ve got a nasty, pert tongue, Sophie.’

  ‘She doesn’t,’ said Sarah, ‘she just wants to be nice to Miss Fitzwilliam because she has such a sweet nature.’

  ‘Thank you, Sarah,’ Susan replied, in a voice as sarcastic as she thought Sarah’s to be. ‘I think I will go out now, though it’s very chilly,’ she added. ‘I don’t suppose either of you would care to come? Sophie, it would do you good.’

  ‘She said we didn’t have to.’

  On her way out Susan put on her dark flannel overcoat, her untrimmed pork-pie hat, pigskin gloves and greyish galoshes. She dressed carefully, frowning. Then she realised that she would have to ask the way into the garden of one of Miss Fitzwilliam’s servants and, because she had already asked where her outdoor things had been put, she was distressed and angry with herself. She waited in the hall until the butler passed through and then, without stammering, told him to show her out onto the terrace. Susan was sure that the servants at Lynmore thought them all very ill-bred, though she and her sisters had no trace of a Lancashire accent.

  It was not damp outside but frosty, and she could see her breath just as she could inside the house. At Alderley Edge all the rooms were properly heated and had been ever since her mother died, more than two years before.

  The garden ran down to the pond at its foot in a series of five terraces, each one less carefully tended than the one before. On the first two, there were unkempt yew hedges, intricately planted, and many pieces of stonework, and on a rise in the park beyond there was a Regency Gothick folly. Susan, who was interested in plants and gardens, suspected that even in summer there would be few flowers, for there were no real beds or borders, and those flowers there were would be of the kind which did not need much cherishing: she imagined thick shrubs, dog-roses and Michaelmas daisies. Of all the girls, Susan had taken most interest in the proposed new house, and Nicholas had several times listened to her when she suggested colour schemes and patterns for the interior. He was going to give her a little garden of her own at Lynmore, so tiny that it could be nothing but a bower, with an iron seat, a trellis, clematis and rambler roses, stocks and carnations and blue-flowered borage. She would close it in with laburnum or box. She would also be allowed, like her sisters, to decorate her bedroom exactly as she wished.

  Susan sat down on the high rim of the empty lily pond on the second terrace, beneath its fountain which did not play. She looked about her, trying to decide where, given the choice, she would put her garden, and for a while thought happily about it, as she had for weeks at Alderley Edge before she had seen Lynmore and Miss Fitzwilliam. Then she began to worry, which she did not want to do, and had stopped herself from doing until now. She wondered how she and her sisters would fare, the daughters of a self-made man, when they came out into the world and joined the Upper Ten Thousand with the help of Miss Fitzwilliam, an eccentric.

  Susan knew that Augusta was impoverished, and that Nicholas was in love with her these facts worried her exceedingly, though she did not quite know why. She had never met anyone of whose body she had been so conscious as she had been of Augusta’s, and she believed that she would still have felt its strong presence had Augusta not worn minimal corsets and the loose skirt which, when she walked or sat, moved in such a way that her thick, hard thighs were outlined.

  Susan shivered in the cold. She did not stay and wonder about how the estate would now be run, and by whom, and whether her father would soon become bored here. Walking back to the house, she planned to talk politely and cheerfully to her sisters again, and possibly to her father and Augusta, and think about everything later, at home.

  The stone steps leading from the second terrace to the first were crumbling, and there were thin, dark patches of ice. On the top step she slipped and, with her numb hands, could not stop herself stop herself from falling down the whole flight. She twisted her ankle at the bottom, and gave a sharp cry. As the first shock of the pain eased, she began to think that she would be left there for hours, and sobbed. But Augusta and Nicholas had heard her from the library, and her father came out and helped her indoors. She was scolded, and put to bed with a poulticed ankle and some hot milk to drink.

  Susan delayed the Pagetts’ return to Alderley Edge by some two hours, during which time the others saw more of Augusta and of Lynmore.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE LONDON SEASON

  Susan was about to go to town and enjoy everything she had heard about: balls and breakfast parties and rides in the Row, morning calls and titled men and compliments and flowers. Three years had passed since her father’s marriage.

  Although she was looking forward to her London Season, on her last day Susan went for a slow walk in the Lynmore gardens, to take pleasure in the place just before she left. Her chief memory was how, a year before, she had been left behind while Sarah was taken to be presented to Society: though she, Susan, had been seventeen and old enough to come out herself. She had spent the whole of that summer here with her father and Sophie. She had been granted the privilege of dining downstairs, alone with him, whenever there was no company. Susan smiled.

  As though she were about to marry and live far away from Lynmore for always, instead of going to London for a few months, Susan thought further back. She remembered her first disappointment in the village, which was not pretty: a string of square, grey cottages with little dark windows, and a church with a squat tower not a steeple. There had been no village green, no merry inn, and no front gardens with hollyhocks. Nicholas had added some superior four-roomed cottages of meat-red brick with baize-green garden fences. Some of these were visible from a corner of the terrace.

  From her own little garden, which last year Susan had attempted to tend herself from time to time, she looked up at the new Lynmore Hall. Against the pale sky and damp, bare garden of early spring, it stood out, yellow brick and red tiles and a little coloured glass. The house was built in the Elizabethan style, with gables and twisted chimney-stacks and several mullioned windows. At the eastern end there was a glass conservatory like the Crystal Palace. This hid the old chapel, which had not been demolished, from the south front. Creepers had been planted, but in the year they had barely climbed a foot up the skirting of the wall.

  From behind her, Nicholas spoke: ‘Yes, it hits one in the eye, doesn’t it? But it’ll mellow. That’s what I intended it to do, mellow into a gracious residence. All these old houses were once new and crude, Susan.’

  Susan, who had jumped badly, said in a shaking voice: ‘Father, how you startled me!’ He had never before come upon her unawares.

  ‘I want a brief word with you before you set off, my dear. Let’s go in.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’ She hurried after him, for though he was old and portly he was walking very fast.

  Nicholas was not going to London. Susan, watching him, a frown on her face, thought something was wrong. She had done nothing, she was sure. He might have quarrelled with Augusta. They had quarrelled often since the weeks when Augusta had nearly died at the time of her son Thomas’s birt
h, more than two years before – usually about changes Nicholas wished to make in running the estate and the house. For months this had terrified the young Susan. Now she thought they enjoyed fighting. She was old enough to understand. When her father spoke to her in his study, she would react with discreet sympathy, whatever it was he said.

  Susan sat down on the edge of the club fender and smiled steadily at him as she looked round the study, which was not very familiar to her. It contained nothing which might be called pretty. The carpet was billiard-cloth green, the walls were tobacco brown, and there were panels of dark stained glass in the upper half of the windows.

  She was neither warned of something, nor scolded. Nicholas talked lightly, and gave her good news: she was to have pin-money of sixty pounds a year, which was to cover no large item, and when she married, she would have thirty thousand pounds. This Susan knew.

  He talked with a little more difficulty when he came to tell her that he would allow her to marry no one at all until she was twenty-one years old, although after that date he would bless any marriage which could be considered possible: to an army officer without expectations, for example, or to a clergyman. He spoke as though he were expecting Susan to confess her love for some young man and her intention of marrying him that very Season. He told her that he had said exactly the same thing to Sarah a year before, and would say it to Sophie in five years’ time.

  Susan thanked him. When he had finished he kissed her forehead and pressed a velvet box into her hand, just as he might give a wrapped-up sovereign to a son going off to school for the first time. In it there was a coral bracelet, just like Sarah’s. She wondered if he had yet bought Sophie’s but she thanked him beautifully, and was pleased with the gift, which became her round white wrist and dimpled hand very well. She wore it to London.

  Susan knew that her first weeks in town would be nerve-racking. She would be tongue-tied, fierce dowagers and supercilious young men would make her blush and look more countrified than ever, she would gaze at golden ballrooms with big wide eyes: but she would have a certain charm. This would be the case for the next three years, because there were now no strange possibilities of married life with any number of different men. Susan had seen one girl go straight from the schoolroom to her husband’s arms.

  Susan, pacing in the hall and waiting for her family, felt a little jump of excitement above her diaphragm at the thought of going to town. She enjoyed these uncomfortable turns because they reminded her of the delight she had known as a child at the onset of Christmas. These spasms, and her reputation for being sensible, comforted her as she thought of her long spinsterhood on the dull, disagreeable journey to London.

  *

  The house in Bryanston Square was tall and narrow with iron railings, a plain London house. Long black windows looked out over the trees in the square. When they arrived it had been raining and the stucco front looked dirty, darkened by water.

  At first, everyone attended to Sophie, who had been allowed to come down with her governess. She had felt sick throughout the journey, but had been unable to vomit, and she had been very brave about it. Augusta was pleased with her. Sophie staggered out of the carriage and walked feebly up the steps, leading the procession into the house.

  She did not want too many people fussing over her, so her sisters, after visiting their bedrooms, found their way to the drawing room. They sat down, and listened to the thumps and crashes outside in the street and on the staircase, as trunks and portmanteaux and bandboxes were carried in. They were tired and shaky, and smiled at each other over the china tea with sandwiches which was brought in to them. Sophie’s grown-up sisters joked politely and sympathetically about how she would be quite angry at the sight or this food, but would eat a hearty supper.

  The house was cold and the fire, very recently lit, gave out little heat. ‘You’d never think it was spring,’ said Susan.

  Like the larger, grander rooms at home, the drawing room resembled part of a hired mansion. The rosewood and satinwood and mahogany furniture was unmarked, its ormolu was golden, and it smelled of beeswax and vinegar. All the books were carefully arranged in cases. There were no vases of flowers, but an aspidistra on a lace mat stood on the grand piano, and there was a rubber plant in one corner. The trellis-patterned carpet, dotted with fat rugs just like those at Lynmore, was unworn. Most of the furniture was new, but there were a couple of very good eighteenth-century chests of drawers which had come from the old house at Lynmore. Above the mantelpiece there hung a portrait, a Hoppner, of Augusta’s grandmother when young and a beauty. It had a black and gilt label which read ‘Ly. Theresa Woodforde’.

  Susan’s bedroom did not resemble her comfortable, modern room at home. It was filled with slightly battered pieces from the old Lynmore Hall, the mirror was liver-marked and the brocade curtains not of the first quality. On the walls there were prints of girls who were pretty in a commonplace way. No fire had yet been lit there and while taking off her hat and coat Susan had shivered.

  ‘This room is elegant, don’t you think?’ she said, looking round the drawing room.

  ‘Oh, it’s just like home,’ said Sarah. When he had bought the house, in 1873, Nicholas had come down to see to the furnishing and decoration. He had not visited it since. ‘Many people, you know, don’t seem to care for modern furniture. Everything is antique, you know, and it’s not merely because they economise. You will see.’

  ‘I daresay I will.’

  Preparations for the Season began that evening. At home, Augusta had hardly spoken to Susan about her entrance into Society. At dinner she told her about her presentation.

  ‘Tomorrow I will take you to have your Court dress fitted.’

  ‘Oh – is it already made?’

  ‘It needs to be fitted.’

  ‘What is it like?’ murmured Susan. ‘That’s what I meant.’

  ‘White,’ said Augusta. ‘Pearls and lace, modest decolletage, train. It’s the same as Sarah’s.’

  ‘I have not seen Sarah’s.’

  ‘It is in my wardrobe,’ said Sarah.

  ‘What happens – when I go to Court, I mean?’

  ‘If you are a peer’s daughter, the Queen kisses you,’ said Sarah.

  ‘I am not a peer’s daughter, Sarah. Aunt Augusta, don’t I have to walk backwards from the Queen’s presence? How can I manage that, if I have a train? I’ll fall flat on my back, won’t I?’

  ‘There is no need to be worrying about that yet, Susan. You are not to be presented until next month. Don’t worry, it happens to every girl, you know.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now, your ball.’

  ‘My ball? I didn’t know …’

  ‘You are to share a ball with my cousin John Woodforde’s daughter. Your father is paying for it. It’s been fixed for the thirtieth.’

  ‘Thank you – for arranging it all, Aunt Augusta.’

  A little later, when Sarah chanced to be out of the room, Augusta asked her kindly: ‘Well, what are you thinking of, Susan?’

  ‘About Manchester – and my mother.’ She blushed and hurried on, for this was trite. ‘I can remember when we lived in a terraced house in the west of town, you know, when my mother was in good health, but we were not very rich, only comfortable. She’d never have believed a daughter of hers would go to Court.’

  Augusta decided she was not displeased. ‘Oh, I have something for you, Susan. Something to wear – yes, I did bring it down.’

  She gave her a box, in which there was a choker of five strings of seed pearls, clasped in front with an amethyst. ‘Oh, Aunt Augusta – thank you – you as well as father – it’s lovely, truly!’

  ‘Good. Tell me, Susan, would your mother have approved of your going to Court?’

  ‘To tell you the truth, Aunt Augusta, I don’t believe she would have done.’ She gazed at Augusta. ‘She disliked idleness and she thought all “fine folk”, as she called them, were idle.’

  ‘Dear me,’ said Augusta.

&
nbsp; ‘But I am so very glad to be coming out in such style.’ She spoke apologetically.

  Susan was busy from the very next day. During the winter, she had been to one or two small dances in Cheshire, and had enjoyed them whenever she had been sitting quietly. There were no dances for her in her first few hectic weeks as a debutante: she saw milliners and dressmakers, matrons and old gentlemen who teased her, and she met many other girls. But she did not meet as many young men as she had expected, and she never was in trouble with her stepmother for refusing eligible offers, as she had thought she might be.

  *

  Sophie came down to the dining room one morning, where she found Augusta writing replies to invitations.

  ‘And what are you doing downstairs, Sophie?’ said Augusta, without turning round.

  ‘Miss Tapwoth has a headache.’

  ‘I see. I expect you did something to give it to her.’

  ‘She doesn’t know how to handle me, Aunt Augusta.’

  ‘You are impertinent. Do you want to come riding in the Park this afternoon?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘I’m not sure that you ride well enough yet to display yourself in public.’

  ‘You know I ride better than my big grown-up sisters. And if I can be allowed to go out hunting, I can surely trot sedately in the Row.’

  ‘That is another matter. Sit down and stop chattering. If you must be in here – read an improving work.’

  ‘Yes, Aunt.’ Sophie sat down in the window with a copy of Middlemarch, which bored her; but she sat still, because her fidgeting would annoy Augusta, who would then send her back to the schoolroom. She looked very pretty in the window, with her light golden-brown hair slightly tangled on her shoulders. She had recently persuaded one of the maids to cut off a foot of her hair. Her plain, dark green school dress became her well, but Augusta reflected that the girl should wear pumps, not button boots, which concealed her ankles. Sometimes she considered telling Sophie that she loved her more than she did the son who had caused her so many hours of pain and had deprived her of her sexual life, but she never did so; Sophie knew well enough the compliment implied in words like ‘pert’ and ‘vain’ when applied to such a lovely and clever girl as herself. She was very bold.