2
‘I think, Iris, it’s barely decent, when she’s only just got here, to be planning to send her away. After all … she’s your niece. And your father’s will expressly said ‒’
‘A European education, Charles. The school in Paris is just what she needs to become accustomed …’
‘… accustomed to English ways in Paris.’ His tone was acid.
‘Charles, you don’t understand. She’s just out of a very odd sort of school. She’s not used to anything. This school in Paris is filled with all sorts of girls ‒ many English. They’re all trying to get over the awkward stage before they come out. Of course … well, she will be older than most, but one extra year doesn’t matter. We’re far too late for this season. Let’s be in very good time for the next. I have to arrange a presentation at Court. That isn’t done in five minutes …’
Charles looked at his wife unhappily, but didn’t argue further. Iris no doubt was right. She usually was, when it came to the ordering of the social scene. He thought rather bitterly that none knew it so well as those who had had to learn it. So he gave way, and retreated, as he had so many times before, into his newspaper, and left Iris to her letters, and her invitations.
But he didn’t read the print before him. He was thinking of what these last few weeks had been. Before his eyes a young girl had responded to the passing show that was London. Because of her he had done things he had never done before. He had looked on the Crown Jewels at the Tower, had stood, his bad leg aching almost intolerably, for the time that it took to change the Guard at Buckingham Palace, had walked the halls of Hampton Court and Greenwich, had even, heaven help him, taken a punt out on the Thames at Marlow, and almost made a complete fool of himself. And all of this just to see some light of enjoyment, of recognition, of awareness come into that disturbingly calm little face. And his reward had been the beginning of a smile, and a quiet, ‘Thank you, Uncle Charles.’ And best of all, ‘And what will we do tomorrow?’
So like a child she seemed, and yet she was no child. He hadn’t missed the very nearly unconscious coquettishness in the way she sometimes talked to him, and the eyes of men which had followed her, of which she pretended to be unaware. She was either a fool, or a very clever girl, and he didn’t think she was a fool.
And now Iris was proposing to pack her off in September to a finishing school in Paris. There, he supposed, she would learn the dreary things Iris had been taught ‒ how to arrange flowers and cook. Iris had never cooked again in her life. And what did this young girl need to know of manners, when her own were so self-contained, so watchful that she would never put a finger wrong? When he had expressed this to Iris, she had a ready answer.
‘That’s the whole trouble, Charles. She’s too watchful. She looks as if she’s rehearsed something. She needs to learn to relax with people. She needs some confidence …’
‘And will she get it with a lot of giggling girls?’
‘If she could learn to giggle just a little herself, she mightn’t stand out so much.’
Charles privately thought it would be a pity if Nicole ever learned to giggle. ‘Well, she says she wants to keep on with her music …’
‘Very admirable, I’m sure, Charles. Nice that she has some accomplishments, so long as they’re not so formidable as to frighten off the young men. Naturally I’m making arrangements for her to continue her music. But I wish … well, I would have supposed she was past the time of those wretched scales. I wonder if it’s really necessary to have to listen to them for an hour every morning?’
‘I’ve always heard,’ Charles answered, ‘that all serious musicians play scales all their lives. You know … exercising like a dancer.’
‘My dear Charles, I hope you don’t suppose Nicole is going to be a serious musician. Why, that would spoil everything ‒ the presentation, the coming-out. Young girls like Nicole don’t have careers. They marry.’ She paused just a moment before returning to the correspondence on her desk. ‘I wish though she’d play something … well, something entertaining for a change. It won’t do when she comes out to have to have everyone sitting around listening to her play. She should be able to manage the sort of thing young people dance to these days … so amusing and helpful at a house party, don’t you think?’ But she didn’t wait for his reply, and he didn’t offer one.
The weeks of the summer went swiftly for Nicole. There was one weekend when Iris entertained at Mowbray, the place so conveniently close to London. Nicole was part of the house party, but there was no one of her own age there, and she was expected to stay in the background. Iris commanded her once to perform on the piano in the drawing-room which was just slightly out of tune, then dismissed her briskly. ‘Nicole’s not coming out until next season.’ Nicole felt as if she had been put back in a bottle and re-corked. The next weekend party she asked to be excused from, and Iris rather too readily agreed. She found it disconcerting to have a silent girl around when the conversation flowed easily over the drinks. Yet she didn’t want Nicole to talk; she was afraid of what she might say.
So Nicole and Charles fell into the habit of going down to Dencote Lodge, at the end of the back avenue of the estate which was leased, and might, he confessed, have to be sold. The weekends were the best time, better than the sightseeing in London, better than buying the new clothes with Iris. Here there was silence also; she and Charles didn’t talk much. They drank wine together with their meals, and he read her bits from the newspapers. By the fire at night, or in the garden in the long twilights when it was warm, he sometimes talked about things that interested him; he talked about money ‒ not her money or Iris’s money, but what he thought had gone wrong when the world money market had crashed, and why there were dole queues on the streets; he talked about the rise of dictators, the banning of books, the trouble brewing in Spain. Nicole listened in a growing wonder. She had never thought of these things, had never been asked to think of them. It was amazing to her that behind the shy, rather bumbling exterior Charles presented to the world, was a man who thought and worried about these things, who read extensively ‒ the small lodge at Dencote was made almost uninhabitable by the bulk of his books ‒ and had literally nothing else to do. He had given a good and honoured name to Iris and her great step up the social ladder. Nothing else was required of him, and no one seemed to need an ex-soldier when far younger men were walking the streets hunting for jobs. So they drank their wine and talked together and were companionably silent together. At last Charles said it.
‘Do you want to talk about your mother?’
‘I don’t want to talk about her, but if you ask me, I will.’
She gave the details, very sparingly. She found she couldn’t talk about Lucky Nolan. ‘She said in her letter that it would be better if I told people that she was dead. It would save explanations.’
‘Will you?’
‘I don’t know. It seems wrong. She isn’t dead.’
‘Will you try to see her again?’
‘I’ll try. If she’ll let me. She will have to let me know where she is. My mother is a very determined woman. If she has decided to vanish for ever, I’m sure she’ll make a very thorough job of it. That man ‒ my grandfather ‒ no, I don’t want to talk about him. There’s nothing good I could possibly say about him. If he’d only met my mother ‒ just once. He didn’t even give her a chance …’ She had got up then and poked the fire. There was no other light in the room. ‘Uncle Charles, will you give me something? Will you give me a brandy? I’ve never had brandy before. I’ll have to try these things. I would like the first time to be with you.’
He had hastened to do as she asked, pleased almost beyond his own believing that she had made the request of him. He also didn’t want to talk of Iris’s father, because the talk might lead on to Iris herself, and that was best left alone. He touched glasses with Nicole as she cautiously tasted the first brandy of her life, and already he was beginning to dread the coming of September, and the terrible gap which this
not yet matured girl’s going would leave in his life. He was quite aware that he had been lonely for many years, but when she was gone, there would be a special kind of loneliness. So he savoured the fleeting days of summer, and did everything in his power to bring the rare smile of pleasure to the girl’s face, the enigmatic smile that was both innocence and terrifying knowledge.
Chapter Two
It was Charles who accompanied her to Paris. ‘Really quite unnecessary, Charles. Nicole can be met at the station by someone from the school. She’s quite of an age to travel by herself.’
‘Oh, I don’t know …’ he had answered vaguely. ‘Hell of a long time since I’ve been in Paris, Iris. I thought we might go over a few days early. I wouldn’t mind a spot of sightseeing. Taking Nicole around London has made me realize what I’ve been missing …’
She had shrugged. ‘As you wish, Charles.’ Iris would be glad to have Nicole gone. For some reason the girl made her uncomfortable; Iris was not used to being watched, perhaps watched critically. The ambition she had once felt for her own self, and then for the children she did not have, might have flared again when she had seen Nicole, but that did not mean that she also had to like the girl. She simply wanted to make a success of her; that was something quite different.
So Charles and Nicole spent the first dusty, dry days of September wandering the boulevards of Paris, doing the obvious things that tourists always did. Charles spent a pensive half-hour looking down on the tomb of Napoleon, reciting, with a military man’s love of such names, the places of the great battles, the road of the long retreat from Moscow. ‘He shook the whole of Europe, Nicole, and he almost had us at times. But at Waterloo we finally beat him ‒ but only by the skin of our teeth. We don’t admit it, but we only hung on by the skin of our teeth in the last war, too. And if our blockhead politicians have their way, we won’t have any skin on our teeth by way of armaments when the next war rolls around.’
She had looked at him, startled. ‘There won’t be another war, Uncle Charles. There can’t be!’
‘There could be, there quite easily could be if people don’t wake up.’ He had gestured to the faded flags of Napoleon’s campaigns. There have always been wars, and men to wage them.’
One other thing was settled before Charles left Paris. On the appointed day they had gone to Madame Graneau’s school near the fashionable Rue Martin. It was a splendid old house whose main doors opened into a courtyard which had once received coaches. The noise of the traffic now was remote. Nicole and Charles waited for Madame Graneau in a room decorated with long gilt-framed mirrors and Louis XV tapestry-covered chairs; here the windows looked into a smaller courtyard, where pear trees were espaliered against a sunny south wall. There was an air of calm and dignity about the place, and, to Nicole, the scent of money. That smell was now something tangible to her, and it differed ‒ it was what she had experienced that night at Lucky Nolan’s; it was the puckering of her nostrils when she had viewed the private beaches in Maine; it was the smell of flowers and Chinese tea in the drawing-room at 14 Elgin Square and the scent of wax in this hushed room and the pears ripening on a wall in the heart of Paris.
Madame Graneau entered, a handsome, tall figure whom Nicole knew instinctively would command respect from her students. She was dressed in black, but it was a dress that might have come from a quietly elegant salon of the haute couture. She talked in perfect, precise, almost accentless English. ‘We shall concentrate on your French,’ she said to Nicole, ‘although I understand you are already quite fluent. You should also undertake some German ‒ we have some German students here, who, of course, come to learn French.’ She laughed a little. ‘You will find us a mixed lot, all anxious to learn from each other. We like to send you from here a confident and well-rounded young woman. It is as important to know how to shop carefully in the market as it is to choose one’s dressmaker. No one who leaves this school should ever be helpless in the kitchen, or unable to handle a needle, no matter how many servants there are at home.’ She looked directly at Nicole. ‘The world is a place of change. Fortunes rise and fall. We like to think we give our girls a chance to grow up. We hope they will be useful as well as graceful women.’
Charles nodded. ‘Graceful …’ Spoken thus by this elegant Frenchwoman the word had a different meaning from the one he usually gave it. Grace implied a lot of things other than the lack of clumsiness; he suddenly sensed tranquillity in that word and in this woman, and he hoped with all his heart that when she returned to London, Nicole’s tightly-closed face might reflect some of this tranquillity. Madame Graneau had had a report from St Columba’s; she talked of Radcliffe, Bennington and Vassar. ‘I understand that your special gift is the piano, and that you want to continue it.’
‘Seriously,’ Nicole said, speaking almost for the first time. ‘It’s very special.’
‘We have an excellent music mistress here … but perhaps …’
It ended with the mistress, Mile Boucher, being summoned to the room. Nicole was invited to play at the grand piano. After rubbing her suddenly cold hands to relax and warm them, Nicole chose the Chopin Ballade in G. When she had finished, Mile Boucher nodded quietly. ‘Do you have any Mozart from memory? That or Beethoven.’ Nicole licked her lips and began the first movement of the Waldstein sonata.
Mile Boucher interrupted when the movement came to an end. ‘That will be sufficient for the time, Mademoiselle Rainard.’
She spoke quietly with Madame Graneau and Charles for a few minutes. The next day Nicole accompanied her to the Conservatoire. There she played, after waiting a nervous hour, for Professor Lermanov. He listened without comment as she played, gave her a sight-reading test, brought three other students to perform one movement of a Brahms quartet with her. When the ordeal was over, he merely nodded. ‘I will accept you. Do you understand what that means, Mademoiselle? I know what sort of school you are attending in Paris. Excellent in its way, but not for professionals. I say to you this. I will have no dilettante wasting my time. Students are lined up. I will take only the most promising. Unless you are prepared to give more than you think you can, we will end this interview now. How hard can you work, Mademoiselle?’
‘Very hard.’
His grey, seamed face almost relaxed into a wintry smile. ‘I think you have yet to learn what very hard means. You will learn, or you will go.’
Charles was permitted to take Nicole to dinner that last night, a night when most of the other students were arriving and classes had not yet begun.
‘Are you sure you really want the Conservatoire, Nicole? It’s a damned hard bash to go through. It seems to me you play wonderfully now.’
She smiled, and he was glad to see some sense of excitement in her expression. ‘I haven’t begun,’ she said.
She found that the girl she was to share a room with was English. She was thankful that it wasn’t one of the German girls, whose language she didn’t understand, nor one of the French, who seemed to her, for their ages, strangely sophisticated ‒ or was it that they had the ease of being at home, and speaking their own language? The girl’s name was Judy Fenton. She was pretty, in a soft blonde way, with a beautiful complexion and teeth, and strong, capable-looking hands. She seemed shy, and a little awkward, and her clothes were plain and sensible, rather than decorative. Quite unselfconsciously she put a photograph of a horse on the mantel. ‘Do you mind?’ she said to Nicole. ‘Old Trooper reminds me of home almost more than anyone else. He practically brought me up …’ She looked at Nicole’s side of the room, neat and almost bare, the new luggage, the new clothes. ‘Haven’t you any photos of your own? It’s your room, too.’
Nicole found herself repeating the lie about her mother that Iris Gowing had told anyone who had asked. Her mother was dead; she was the ward of Iris and Charles. She despised herself as she listened to the words come out. She already seemed to have thrown her lot in with the twisted old man who had made that will, to have declared herself to belong to the English side of
her. She felt herself flush with shame. Judy Fenton mistook it for distress, and her sympathy was instant and generous.
‘Oh, I’m sorry. What a rotten thing to happen. You’ve hardly any family, then, just this new aunt you hardly know.’ She shook her head. ‘I find that hard to imagine. I’ve got so much family ‒ Allan and Richard and Ross. And cousins. I’m the only girl in the family. No wonder I look like a horse.’ In an eagerness to share that Nicole found oddly touching, she dragged out the photo album. ‘Well, might as well get it over … Might as well bore you in the beginning.’
Nicole didn’t find it boring. It struck her that all the years she had been at St Columba’s she had never been able to share in this fashion in anyone else’s life; it occurred to her that she hadn’t wanted to share because of what they might ask in return. For this Judy Fenton she suddenly found she wanted to give what she could. It didn’t, at this moment, seem she had very much.
The album was pictures of people, dogs, horses, pictures of hunt meets and gymkhanas. There were many pictures of her mother, a beautiful woman generally wearing a battered straw hat and pictured in the garden, her hands busy among plants. Nicole was suddenly aware of the lack of photographs in her own life. There had never been a box Brownie on those summer vacations in Maine. She now remembered that the only photograph she had ever seen of Anna had been of the nightclub pianist on the board outside Lucky Nolan’s. Not a picture to display at Madame Graneau’s.
The backgrounds of Judy Fenton’s pictures were often of the house she lived in ‒ a low, half-timbered house of the Tudor period Nicole thought, a house of rambling roofs and old brick chimneys, a house that looked as if it had been sunk in its earth for ever. ‘It’s called Fenton Field,’ Judy said. ‘It’s mentioned in the “Domesday Book”. Of course this house couldn’t have been there then ‒ it’s sixteenth-century, they think. But there was probably a cow byre and a pigsty which belonged to some remote ancestor, and they wrote it down as Fenton Field.’ And Nicole was aware, at that moment, of envy, almost jealousy, of someone who could speak, not boastfully, of ancestors who went back to the time of William the Conqueror. ‘It’s very old,’ she said, and the words almost stuck in her mouth. ‘Very beautiful.’
The Lynmara Legacy Page 10