Girl's Guide to Kissing Frogs

by Clayton, Victoria

  ‘Can you speak all those languages?’

  ‘Naturally. If I tell you I speak seven you will accuse me of boasting.’ He lowered his eyes in an assumption of modesty that entirely failed to convince as he added, ‘But I am not perfectly fluent in Mandarin. Here is a bookmark for you.’ He held out a long feather of brilliant blue, edged with flecks of vivid red.

  ‘It’s beautiful. Thank you so much.’ I ran my fingers gently along the delicate, clinging vanes. ‘Does it belong to a marsh harrier?’

  ‘No, you little ignorant. I visited the zoo when I was in Berlin. It is a tail feather from a scarlet macaw. I thought of you when I picked it up.’

  ‘Of me?’ I felt immensely flattered to know that I had figured in his thoughts while he was away. ‘Did you really?’ I put it carefully inside the book. ‘I shall treasure it and keep it always.’

  ‘Yes.’ He assumed an expression of severity. ‘On the perch was this magnificent creature, born to fly over mountains and through forests and when I put in my hand to pick the feather from the floor of the cage – it was spacious and had an artificial rock to represent the mountains and a branch for the forest but it was a cage, nonetheless – then I thought of you.’

  ‘Gosh, Conrad! You really know how to cut a girl down to size.’

  The scowl was replaced by a smile. ‘Yes, I have learned a thing or two since I knocked out that tooth. Now you must run along or you will be late for your gardening lesson.’

  *‘I hear the genie’s laughter at my fate; / Yet do I find all power of thinking fled / In sonnet-rage and love’s fierce ecstasy.’ GOETHE, Sonnet XI Nemesis, tr E A Bowring, 1853

  36

  ‘Really, Marigold, it’s easy to tell wild forget-me-nots from cultivated ones.’ Evelyn snatched up two, to me identical, seedlings. ‘Now look! The wild forget-me-not leaf is smaller and paler and hairier. It’s quite obvious!’

  I examined them carefully. ‘Small. Pale. Hairy,’ I murmured, thinking involuntarily of Kingsley.

  ‘What did you say?’ asked Evelyn a little snappily. Not five minutes before I had trodden by mistake on an emerging lily and it had taken a visible effort of will on Evelyn’s part to prevent an outburst of anger. ‘Now, Marigold, weed that section there to the left of the seat. And remember to give each proper forget-me-not a minimum of nine inches of bare earth – what do you think you’re doing?’ She darted over to inspect the contents of the barrow being wheeled along the path by a young man. ‘My Paeonia mlokosewichii!’ She held up a drooping collection of leaves. ‘Good heavens, how could you be so stupid! If you haven’t killed it you’ll have set it back years!’

  Evelyn was president of a charity concerned with the rehabilitation of ex-prisoners. She employed those with gardening experience at a pittance, then sacked them in a rage when they failed to measure up to her exacting horticultural standards. The young man stared into the middle distance while Evelyn lectured him. From time to time he ran his hand over his crewcut, as though enjoying the sensuous smoothness of its pile, while he waited for her to finish. I felt sorry for him being dressed down with no possibility of retaliation, but he seemed indifferent. The world had judged him and found him wanting in all potentiality and the feeling was clearly mutual.

  As soon as Evelyn had stalked off in a rage to replant what he had dug up, I gave the young man my Aurora birthday smile to show I believed in new beginnings and putting the past behind one. ‘Lovely morning, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘It’s so nice to be outside in the fresh air after being indoors so much.’ Then I blushed, afraid he might think this was a reference to his having been in prison. ‘All winter, I mean. My name’s Marigold. What’s yours?’

  He stared at me without returning my smile. Then he said, ‘It’s Crisp.’

  ‘Yes.’ I looked about at the shimmering greens of young leaves and the sharp blue sky. ‘Crisp is exactly the right word.’

  ‘Crisp’s me name.’

  ‘Oh, oh, I see.’

  ‘Gi’s a bit o’ the other leik while the aad blethorskite’s oot the way,’ said Crisp when Evelyn was out of earshot. ‘Tho’ she’s bonny enyuf. Aa’d fettle her, givvin haf the chance.’ By which I understood him to mean that, though Evelyn was an old windbag, he considered her attractive and wouldn’t mind giving her a good seeing-to. He put out his tongue and waggled the tip suggestively, then bent down and took hold of me by my waist.

  ‘Let go of me!’

  ‘What a gan-on aboot a wee fuddle—’

  He let go as Buster jumped on top of me, knocking me to the ground. Pinning me down with his front paws he gave my face a vigorous licking.

  I picked myself up in time to see Crisp aiming a kick at Buster, whose usually equable temper was inflamed to wrath by this treatment. He seized the leg of the young man’s jeans.

  ‘Here, boy!’

  In response to Isobel’s voice, Buster let go of the denimed leg and ran to greet her.

  ‘Good boy!’ She bent down to pat him. ‘Did the nasty man kick you then?’

  ‘He’s bit me!’ complained Crisp, showing us an area of torn ankle from which blood dripped.

  ‘You deserved it.’ Isobel’s voice was contemptuous. ‘Go up to the house and they’ll give you a plaster.’

  Crisp sloped off, cowed. Isobel’s assumption that man and dog would continue to defer to her as they had since the day she was born seemed to get much better results than my attempts to be ingratiating. I was certain he would never have dared to waggle his tongue at her.

  ‘Hello, darling.’ Isobel kissed my cheek before I had time to warn her about Buster’s spit. The white rose pinned to her lapel smelt deliciously of almonds. ‘So Mummy’s got you slaving away in the mud, you poor idiot.’ She looked dashing in a tweed hacking jacket and pale yellow jodhpurs. ‘Rafe and I’ve had the most marvellous ride. Once it stopped raining it was the most perfect day. We galloped for miles.’ Her short hair stood up in spikes and her cheeks were becomingly flushed by the exercise. ‘Rafe said to tell you he’ll see you at lunch,’ Isobel continued. ‘He’s had to go and see someone. O blissful day! It makes me realize why I like being in the country. Yesterday I was tramping the pavements of Bond Street inhaling BO and petrol fumes.’

  ‘I didn’t know you’d been to London.’

  ‘I went down for a couple of days to see if I could find something decent to wear. Conrad told me not to buy anything expensive, but I found this marvellous dress by Oscar de la Renta, strapless with a ruched taffeta skirt like a cream puff.’ She giggled. ‘Of course it cost an arm and a leg but I simply had to have it.’ This must account for her manifest good humour.

  ‘Where did you stay?’

  She giggled again. ‘At the Ritz, of course. When a girl’s got used to the good things of life, it isn’t easy to give them up … Oh, Lord! Here comes Mummy on the warpath. I’m going to hide in the Bear Hut. Bye!’

  She patted my arm in the friendliest fashion before running away in the direction of what Evelyn called the Wilderness and which I should have been inclined to call an overgrown field. On the edge of the Wilderness, beneath a circle of trees, was a thatched rustic building where a Victorian Preston had once kept a bear. It was charming outside but I had disliked its inside ever since Isobel shut me in there when we were children. She had used her skipping rope to tie the door handle to the foot-scraper and had run off howling with laughter. I had sat on the sofa for quite a while, eyeing a spider of extraordinary dimensions and getting sadder and sadder about the lonely bear being shut up in such a small dark place when it ought to have been romping on the steppes with others of its kind, until it occurred to me to try to escape through a broken window. I had made a dramatic entrance during tea in the drawing room, dripping blood, tears and cobwebs onto the Aubusson. I had told Evelyn the door had jammed. In gratitude Isobel had given me the skipping rope, a superior model to my own, with ball bearings in the handles. I had considered this a fair trade for half an hour of fear and sorrow and a few cuts.


  Evelyn returned. I could see why Crisp admired her. Her gardening coat of lovat green with suede revers had an indefinable chic about it. She was bien maquillé as usual and wore a fetching little gardening hat. ‘Didn’t I see Isobel a few minutes ago? I could do with an extra pair of hands.’ Without giving me time to answer she gave me a box of what looked like liquorice sticks. ‘You can plant these Cosmos atrosanguineus where you’ve just weeded. By the time they come out – they’re the most lovely velvety garnet colour – the alchemilla will be in flower. Plant associations are important. Dark red and lime green are so good together … in fact I think I’ll put in some green zinnias here and lime-green nicotiana as well. Now I think of it, we won’t have any blue here at all. White forget-me-nots would be much prettier. Mind out, darling, and I’ll just get rid of those.’ Obediently I went to stand on the path while Evelyn seized a hoe and advanced with eyes agleam on the little seedlings I had carefully weeded round, disposing of them with ruthless thrusts of the blade.

  ‘Telephone, Madam.’ Spendlove’s slippered feet had crept upon us unnoticed.

  ‘If it’s that ghastly little man from the planning department, he’ll have to call back—’

  ‘I don’t think so, Madam. The gentleman had a foreign accent. American.’

  Evelyn clicked her tongue with annoyance. ‘All right. I’ll come. Though I do think it’s inconsiderate of people to ring when I’m in the garden. Tell him I shall be a few minutes.’

  ‘Hello, Spendlove,’ I said, smiling. ‘Isn’t it a lovely day?’

  ‘Good morning, Madam.’ Spendlove stared at the space six inches above my head, his face frozen into immobility.

  This was so unlike the friendly Spendlove I had known all my life that I was nonplussed. ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked. ‘Are you feeling all right?’

  ‘Perfectly well, Madam, thank you.’ Without looking at me, Spendlove turned and started to hobble back to the house.

  ‘What have I done to offend him?’ I asked Evelyn in consternation.

  ‘Nothing, darling, but I overheard Rafe ticking him off this morning about being too familiar. Apparently he winks at you all the time. I hadn’t noticed it myself, but I agree that what was acceptable when you were a child is quite unsuitable now you are a member of the family. He’s a feeble-witted old man and you mustn’t encourage him to be impertinent. The same with tradesmen. It’s awkward for you because everyone knows you as the doctor’s daughter, so they’ll be only to ready to encroach if you let them.’ Glancing up and seeing my face, she added, ‘I’m not asking you to go about being arrogant and high-handed – that would be vulgar and horrid. You’ve just got to be a little distant, that’s all.’

  ‘I see.’ While she hoed I was silent for a while, thinking. The idea that I should crush the presumption of other people with my cool superiority was as unfeasible as it was hateful. ‘Evelyn,’ I said eventually, ‘if two people were going to be married and one of them decided that they weren’t very well suited after all, don’t you agree it would be better if she said so, even though their families would be dreadfully disappointed and lots of wedding plans had been made and money spent. Even if it meant that the other one who wasn’t very well – mentally, I mean – might get awfully depressed? I mean, it wouldn’t exactly help him to find that he’d married someone who was completely wrong for him, would it?’

  ‘Mm, perhaps some black opium poppies …’ Evelyn put her head on one side and half-closed her eyes, envisaging. ‘Rafe did tell me Conrad had been in some sort of sanatorium – some crise de nerfs, or perhaps he was tubercular, that’s far more likely. Anyway, he seems perfectly sane to me and I think it’s rather narrow-minded to hold this sort of thing against people. Two years ago Harriet Buchanan’s brother tried to throw himself over his own battlements, but after electric shock treatment he wrote a very successful book about royal hunting lodges, and last month he was asked to lunch with the queen mother. Of course, Isobel doesn’t confide in me, but at breakfast this morning she was more cheerful than I’ve seen her in ages. It’s sweet of you to be concerned, Marigold, but you must just accept that, while you know a great deal about ballet – and no one’s prouder of you than I am, my sweet girl – you don’t know much about life.’

  This was undoubtedly true. I experienced a painful confusion of ideas, as though my brain was being scrambled with a fork, like eggs.

  ‘Evelyn, I’m not talking about Conrad and Isobel—’

  ‘I suppose I’d better answer the telephone. You can dig out those celandines. Be careful. If you leave even one of those beastly little bulbils on their roots there’ll be a million in the same place next year.’ She walked off towards the house.

  When Evelyn returned some twenty minutes later, I could tell at once that something had happened to disturb her. She inveighed against the stupidity of gardeners, a familiar theme, but her heart did not seem to be in it. For some time she weeded and planted in silence, and when I asked her a question she didn’t hear me. The gong sounded for lunch. Evelyn straightened up.

  ‘When I think how much there is to do with only those two simpletons to help me – and you too of course, my pet – I can feel a migraine coming on.’ But her eyes were dreamy and the customary snap was absent from her voice. ‘Oh, well, it makes the tortures of old age, immobility and senility seem actually quite attractive.’

  So much for the therapeutic effect of gardening, I reflected, as we hastened indoors to dig the dirt from our fingernails.

  37

  As we crossed the hall on our way to the dining room, Rafe came out of the library with Kingsley. He had a firm grip on his father’s elbow, as though to restrain him from making a dash for the stairs or the front door. Kingsley looked at me with troubled eyes when I said hello.

  ‘How d’you do?’ he said with an attempt at his old manner. ‘So delighted to see you. Have you come straight from Paris? How is the dear old place? I remember the most wonderful costume ball at the Hotel Chambertin just before the war. I went as Lord Nelson. It was damned difficult to eat lobster single-handed. I suppose Nelson had that Hamilton woman to cut things up for him. She was a hot little piece by all accounts, big breasts and red hair …’

  ‘All right, Father, come and sit down.’ Rafe steered Kingsley to his chair at the head of the table. ‘Hello, darling.’ He kissed me affectionately. ‘Had a lovely morning in the garden?’

  As he smiled down at me, his blue eyes tender, a stray beam of sunlight etching more deeply those attractive lines each side of his mouth, I felt a physical pain at the idea of hurting him. ‘I don’t think I was much help.’

  ‘I know what Evelyn’s like when she gets the scent of earth in her nostrils,’ he murmured, putting his arm round my waist.

  ‘I bet those poor ex-prisoners’ll feel more kindly towards their gaolers the next time they go inside.’

  Evelyn had taken her seat at the other end of the table. She rattled a silver peppermill to check that it was full, moved her glass half a centimetre to the right, shook out her starched napkin and placed it across her knee, but all the time her gaze was unfocused as though her mind was elsewhere. ‘Rafe dearest.’ She pressed her finger and thumb between her eyebrows for two seconds, as though to bring her errant thoughts back into line, then set the breadbasket in motion. ‘Could you find time to give me a hand in the greenhouse? I’m surrounded by idiots and there are trays and trays of seedlings needing to be pricked out. You used to love doing it when you were a little boy.’

  ‘You aren’t calling my wife-to-be an idiot, I hope?’ He sent me a look of good-humoured complicity.

  I looked down at my plate, on which was an elegantly composed salad of melon, cucumber and baby tomatoes. When Rafe was in a good mood he was practically irresistible. And I so hated quarrelling. What woman in her right mind would not willingly make every sacrifice necessary to marry this handsome, charming, eligible man?

  ‘He also loved peeing out of his bedroom window on to your friends’ cars,
’ put in Isobel. ‘But I dare say that excitement’s worn off a bit now.’

  ‘Did you?’ Evelyn looked disgusted. ‘How dreadful boys are. I’d be delighted if Marigold could spend more time with me, but she’s so busy with her jobs at the surgery and that peculiar little café Dimpsie’s so keen on.’ She glanced at me, contracting the corners of her mouth into the beginnings of a smile. ‘And who is that odd-looking man with the grey ponytail I saw your mother walking down the high street with the other day? Is she going through another Beatnik phase? Last time it had a deplorable effect on her vocabulary. Much though I admire Dimpsie’s refusal to bow to the conventions, I object to being called “man”.’

  We all laughed and Evelyn looked pleased. She was rarely playful, being too busy making her life beautiful and combating the incorrigible slackness of her fellow men.

  ‘His name’s Jode,’ I said, ‘and I agree he looks alarming but he’s really very nice.’ She would know it all sooner or later, and it was better for Evelyn to hear the unvarnished truth from me rather than an embroidered version from someone else. ‘He makes cuckoo clocks and has a caravan on the moor and Dimpsie’s gone to live with him.’

  The smile was wiped from Evelyn’s face. ‘You don’t mean … a tinker?’

  ‘Of course it’s just a whim,’ said Rafe. ‘You know Dimpsie. She likes lame dogs and outcasts. And the good news is that Marigold’s giving up both the café and the surgery.’

  ‘Really? How sensible, darling. I shall make another appointment at once with Madame Merle. She rang yesterday to say she’s cut out the lace and wants a fitting. And we must decide what to do about the veil. You’re such a shrimp that mine swamps you.’

  ‘I don’t think Marigold likes being called a shrimp,’ said Isobel, laughing.

  If I looked resentful, it had nothing to do with hurt pride and everything to do with the feeling that I was being rushed to my doom.