Judy made a face. ‘Father’s always complaining of how much it costs to keep in repair. But of course he’d do without anything else to keep it. He’s a farmer. There’s always something that needs improving, or rebuilding. He always wants to buy better stock, new equipment … all that. And then he has this gang of children to bring up and educate.’ She lowered her head and stared hard at the last picture of the house. ‘It costs a lot for me to come here. Really more than Father can afford.’
‘Why did you come, then?’ Nicole asked. Judy’s talk almost seemed to invite the question.
‘Oh, hell, I might as well get it out now. I’m such a crybaby. If you find me in tears some day … Well, look ‒’ She produced the last snapshot, one inserted in the leaves of the album, not given a permanent place. ‘Him,’ she said. ‘Stupid, isn’t it?’ Nicole leaned forward to inspect the blurred photo of a masculine figure on a horse. ‘You know, it couldn’t be sillier,’ Judy went on. ‘I fell in love with him. A crazy schoolgirl crush. Only it doesn’t seem crazy to me.’
‘Well, perhaps …’
Judy flung her head up. ‘No “perhaps” about it. He’s twice my age, he’s married, and he’s no intention of breaking up his life and mine to do anything about a thing so crazy as a puppy love. He was nice to me. He used to buy me drinks when we were having the hunt meet at some pub. He watched to see that I was all right on the field. At the hunt balls he danced with me. There was nothing more. But I …’ She gave a painful little gasp. ‘I had to make believe it was something much more. On my side it was. It just became all too obvious. For the sake of everyone I just had to ask to go away somewhere. So Mother found this place. I’m supposed to be “finished”.’ She flung her head. ‘I intend to come out of here a perfectly grown-up woman, not a schoolgirl. And yet ‒’ She snapped the album shut. ‘I’m nearly dying from homesickness right now, and I’ve only just arrived. I’m a fool. I know I’m a fool. And Mother and Father were so good about it …’
Nicole made some comment, something that seemed to reassure Judy, and once again she was conscious of a sense of envy. Even if it was, as Judy said, puppy love, at least she had had that. And she’d had parents who knew about it, and tried to help her. The strength this girl could call on from a family and a house, a way of living that had evolved over centuries, was something Nicole could only imagine, but not completely understand. She wanted this girl for a friend. Like Charles, she represented an anchor in a new world, and one which Nicole badly wanted. For the first time in her life she was ready to make changes in herself to try to accommodate someone else.
The weeks of the gusty autumn fled into the early winter. Judy got up early every day to go riding in the Bois; she had begun to take dressage seriously. Nicole got up just as early. They would have a cup of coffee and a brioche, before going their separate ways. For Nicole it was two hours in the big graceful room, which was cold at that early hour, to practise at the grand piano. Another two hours were squeezed in in the late afternoon. In between were busy hours of cooking lessons, visits to galleries; there were evenings at the Opera, and the Comédie française. Despite the arranged visits to the kitchen of Maxim’s, and the ritual eating of the dishes they were supposed to have cooked, Nicole never worked up much enthusiasm for cooking. Her dishes, if not downright failures, were never outstanding successes. More than the cooking she liked the weeks when it was her turn to accompany the housekeeper early in the morning to the market of Les Halles. She loved the smell of the food, the sense of bargaining enjoyed for its own sake, the onion soup with fresh bread when the shopping was done. She loved the armfuls of flowers; she had less enthusiasm for the long task of arranging them.
Nicole learned, to some degree, the art of small talk, and how to cover what she didn’t want to talk about. At Madame Graneau’s they dressed for dinner every night, as if this would be normal in the homes they returned to; they were invited to discuss the wines they tasted nightly, and what they had read in that day’s newspapers. Nicole found herself inventing things that happened at the Conservatoire, or embellishing them, repeating little jokes. Judy talked about horses, and she and Nicole went, with six other girls and a mistress, to Longchamps. Nicole followed Judy’s tips blindly, and knew a satisfaction she had never tasted before when she ended the afternoon with modest winnings. She and Judy bought champagne for the other girls with the winnings, and it was all gone. That night Nicole skipped her two hours of practice, and didn’t feel guilty. And Christmas came.
‘I wish you were coming to Fenton Field,’ Judy said as they parted. ‘Christmas is wonderful at home.’
Nicole went back to Elgin Square and then to a house party at Mowbray over Christmas. Iris had taken trouble to include some people of Nicole’s own age, and they all drove down into Kent for the Boxing Day hunt meet. Because of Judy, Nicole found she could murmur what passed for the right remarks about the horses ‒ and the people. Everyone sounded suitably bored. At the party that night she was kissed with expertise by a man who danced her out into a dim passage. Ronnie someone … she couldn’t remember his name. She felt it was absurd that it was the first time she had been kissed in that way. Next day she packed and went back to London, telling Iris simply that she couldn’t miss any more days from practice. Charles came back before the New Year’s Eve party which Iris had planned. ‘Your aunt is very upset with you,’ he said. ‘I think we should both go down for the New Year’s Eve party …’ Nicole, working on a Mozart piano concerto, had barely time to register what he said. ‘I have to have this in pretty good shape before I go back to Professor Lermanov. He wouldn’t hesitate to throw me out if he thought I’d spent weeks away from the piano.’
But she did go down with Charles for the party on New Year’s Eve, and actually found herself enjoying it. For one thing, it was so crowded that it was possible to escape Iris’s scrutiny. At midnight everyone kissed everyone else. Nicole joined in without feeling too foolish. Several men, without knowing who she was, offered to drive her home. She said ‘yes’ to all of them, and then made sure that she was with Charles for the drive back to London. The first pale light was creeping over the grey cold street when they arrived at Elgin Square. ‘This year I’ll be eighteen,’ Nicole said and yawned. ‘What a long time it seems until I’ll be twenty-one.’
Charles didn’t reply, and Nicole sensed she’d hurt him. She didn’t know what to say, but as she went up the stairs, almost stumbling in her weariness, she turned back to him. ‘I hope it’s a good New Year, Uncle Charles.’
Winter went, and spring came to Paris. Nicole was hardly conscious of the weeks passing. Her life seemed to be lived less at Madame Graneau’s, and more at the Conservatoire. She was behind other students of her age; she had to hurry. She faced Lermanov with this one day when the budding of the chestnuts forced on her the fact that the planned presentation at Court in London, and the coming-out, was almost upon her. Iris had even been over to Paris to make the choice of clothes for her, and left her to the ordeal of the long sessions of fittings. ‘Professor,’ she said, ‘am I going to be any good? Am I too late with it all? ‒ should I be much further on?’
‘You should be, but you can afford to wait,’ he said. ‘Unlike some of my other students, some of whom have more talent, you have the money to wait. You may be better for a few more years of maturity before you make your début.’
She thought then that he hadn’t the faintest concern or notion of the début that was planned for her that year in London. The storm burst when she wrote to Iris and Charles and announced that she wouldn’t be returning to London that summer, that the presentation at Court and the coming out must be postponed, better still, abandoned.
Charles come over to see her. ‘Your aunt is furious. She’s gone to a lot of trouble, Nicole … can’t you just fall in with her for these few months? ‒ and then you can come back here in September. She’ll have her parties, and you’ll still have your music. Humour her …’
‘I can’t, Uncle Charles
. If I take a summer away from music, if I get myself mixed up at this stage, I’ll never come back. Lermanov won’t take me. If I go now, it’s all finished …’
‘But even Lermanov takes the summer off.’
‘He does, but he doesn’t expect his students to. A month perhaps, no more.’
Charles argued for hours, and then left her in peace. He privately thought her notion was an excuse for avoiding all the things that Iris had arranged, a declaration of independence that she had to make in order not to be turned into some object that Iris simply regarded as a vehicle for her own ambition. He explained as best he could to Iris, and found no understanding there.
‘It’s outrageous, Charles. She can’t do it!’
‘I don’t see how you can make her do anything different. You would be hard put to make a case to the trustees of the estate that she wasn’t furthering her education ‒ exactly as her grandfather’s will stipulated.’
‘Oh, you! ‒ you encourage her in this! Well, she needn’t think I shall bother with her again until I’ve had an apology and her agreement that she will do exactly as I say.’
‘It will be some time coming, Iris. Nicole has been doing, so far as I can see, exactly what she’s been told all her life. One must expect at some time …’
So Nicole didn’t return to London that summer. She and Charles moved around the cities of Europe ‒ Rome, Venice, Florence, Vienna. They did their daily stint of sightseeing, and at night there was the theatre and concerts. And always there was some place found where Nicole could hire a rehearsal studio for at least four hours a day. Charles wearily following her in the dusty heat of the Italian summer, wondered again where she found her energy. She could appear so perfectly, deliciously idle when she chose, such as the times when they sat at sidewalk cafés eating ice-cream and sipping coffee. None of the men who openly stared at her could imagine behind that smooth façade the driving energy that got her from bed before seven every morning.
Judy Fenton joined them for the last month, when the August heat drove them to a chalet with a piano in the Alps high above the Rhône. ‘It’s no good,’ Judy confessed to Nicole. ‘I’m just not ready to be back permanently at Fenton Field yet. I still make a fool of myself over … over him. I thought it was all finished, but if we happen to meet anywhere I still can’t stop myself coming out in goose-pimples. It’s so stupid …!’ She flung herself down in the long grass of the high meadow and turned her back on the view.
So Judy also was back at Madame Graneau’s, but this year as an assistant teacher. She spent half her day working for the riding stable which took Madame Graneau’s pupils on their morning ride in the Bois, and the rest helping to supervise the cookery classes and any other task she could be fitted to. ‘I never imagined,’ Judy said, ‘I’d have any bent for Cordon Bleu, or help anyone to know how to stock a cellar. But I’m earning my keep, at least. Father doesn’t have to pay for me any more. And they can tell people at home that I have a job in Paris. A job … it sounds grown-up, the way I want to be. I’m not Little Judy Fenton any more. Come to think of it, you and I are the oldest here, Nicole. The odd ones …’
Nicole didn’t care; it didn’t seem very different. She had always been odd, but she’d never had a companion in her oddness. When Christmas came around again there was an invitation to join Judy at Fenton Field, but no word from Iris. So she refused Mrs Fenton’s invitation, and shut herself up with the piano in the mirrored drawing-room at Madame Graneau’s, one of three other pupils who had nowhere to go that Christmas. She felt almost as she had felt during the holidays when she had remained at St Columba’s. But this time it wasn’t lack of money which was the cause, but the presence of money. She began to recognize that money was cushioning her from the worst that her decision to hold out against Iris might have entailed; she began, just faintly, to glimpse the course of her own rebellion. Charles came over to Paris for the New Year, and took her to Maxim’s. ‘Had enough yet, Nicole?’ he said. ‘Haven’t you shown what you can do? You’ve made your point with Iris. Are you really sure you want to spend the rest of your life tumbling out of bed at the crack of dawn, travelling all over the world to play in strange concert halls, live in hotels, have managers and secretaries ‒’
She cut him short. ‘I’d only have those things if I were really good. A success. I want to be a success, Uncle Charles.’ She raised her glass to him. ‘Happy New Year,’ and she was thinking of her mother, who had walked out of her life so that she might sit in this very place, might be able to dream of giving concerts. She wondered if it was all because she had some ill-defined, confused idea of her name on a billboard in some city where her mother would see it. And suddenly the New Year champagne tasted flat. It was too flimsy a foundation on which to build a whole life. ‘What shall I do, Uncle Charles?’ she said simply. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
He shook his head. ‘This time I’m not going to try to tell you. I wish you could be more like Judy Fenton. She’ll doubtless be married, and have a family …’
‘We’re on the outside of all that, Uncle Charles ‒ you and I, and Aunt Iris. We don’t know what families are all about.’
It was cold in Paris that winter, but Judy Fenton’s mood was exuberantly warm. ‘I’m going home for good at Easter, Nicole! It’s all over. I can go back. I met him at two parties during Christmas, and he was at the meet on Boxing Day. I didn’t turn a hair. But I’m not sorry about it ‒ he’s still nice. But he just seems like any other man now.’
‘You’re going to leave …’ Nicole said. A sense of loneliness engulfed her.
‘I can’t stay here for ever,’ Judy said. ‘I’ve been good, and learned things, and I’ll be useful at home. But I’ll never be Madame Graneau. I don’t want to be Madame Graneau!’
Charles took Nicole to Cannes that Easter. A cold wind blew off the Mediterranean, and they bundled into thick coats to walk the promenade. At the end of four days Nicole said, ‘I give in, Uncle Charles. I’m ready to come back to London now. I’ll do everything Aunt Iris wants me to do. How do I tell her?’
‘I’ll tell her. You’ll have to apologize.’
The letter was written, and a stiff answer came back. It was late to start making arrangements, but it could be done, if Iris had Nicole’s promise that there would be no further changes of plans. ‘You have made me look a fool,’ the letter read, ‘I shall expect just that much more from you to compensate.’ And Nicole had given her promise. She went back to Paris and the trees were starting to bud along the boulevards. It was, at last, her own springtime. A kind of formal reconciliation with Iris was made as they discussed the new clothes she would buy. ‘You will be a rather elderly débutante,’ Iris said witheringly. ‘The dresses of a very young girl aren’t suitable.’ Nicole took her advice on most of the clothes, and affected subtle alterations in the style when Iris had returned to London.
The scene with Lermanov was memorable. His face went white with rage. ‘You insult me, Mademoiselle. Who told you you could give up your studies? Did I tell you? Did I?’
‘No ‒ I just decided I wasn’t good enough.’
‘You decided! It is I who decide such things. Well then, you are right. You are not good enough. You have wasted my time. You are that worst of all things, a dilettante. You have taken the place of those more deserving than you, and now you come and say you have decided. No ‒ don’t apologize. I have been mistaken. I seldom make mistakes, but with you I have. You wouldn’t have made it. You aren’t big enough. So go off and play your little pieces in drawing-rooms. Amuse yourself. And you can always boast that you were a pupil of the great Lermanov in Paris. But for me, I never knew a Mademoiselle Rainard. Now please leave me to continue with my serious work. There are others waiting!’
Before she left Paris Nicole did what she had not had the courage to do before. She walked the cemetery of Père Lachaise until she found the grave of her grandmother, Katerina Andreyevna Tenishevna. She remembered that Anna had told her that even when
Katerina lay dying she would never permit a practice session of Anna’s to be missed. She laid the spring flowers that she had brought with her on the grave with a mute apology. She was the product of two generations of music students and teachers, and she had walked out on the great Lermanov. He would not forgive her. She wondered if those two women would have.
That was her last task in Paris, one she had not been able to steel herself to until the very moment of leaving. Then she went back to London and decided that there was something else she could be a success at. She could have a try at being a young woman enjoying herself. It couldn’t be so hard. It was more than a year since she had seen the coast of England emerge from the mists of the Channel. She had capitulated to the English dictates. She could carry it all through with the grace Madame Graneau expected of her, and the lack of regret that Lermanov despised. She would not look back.
Chapter Three
Elgin Square seemed unchanged; the April leaves were in full spate on the plane trees, the last of the daffodils were in bloom, the square drowsed in the spring sunshine which showed the gleam of its shining paint and brass doorknobs and number plates. There was a scent of wallflowers from the window-boxes. It seemed a world unchanging and unchangeable. Nicole felt a surprising surge of excitement as the cab came to the door, and Adams responded at once, welcoming her back, and seeing to her luggage. Charles was out on the pavement, and Iris stood, a rare gesture of welcome for her, on the top of the steps. It was close to two years since Nicole had first seen No. 14 Elgin Square, and had bottled her nervousness within herself. Now she approached it as if it were not precisely a friendly place, but at least a familiar one.
The Lynmara Legacy Page 11