‘They just might,’ Lloyd said slowly. ‘The League of Nations is a shambles. Italy’s eating up Ethiopia. Germany’s bursting with illegal armaments. Hitler’s ranting on … And no one gets any wiser. Wars become more vicious, but no one gets any wiser.’
Nicole wanted to scream at them to stop, to finish this wrecking of the idyll. It was only men who ever talked of war. At this moment she hated them all.
And then, as if on cue, Andrew and Allan came from the direction of the stables, Allan rolling down sleeves over freshly scrubbed hands and arms. Margaret Fenton emerged from the house wearing her enchantingly battered garden hat and carrying a tray of food. Behind her Wilks carried the heavier tray with the teapot and jugs of hot water. Ross scrambled to his feet and began to run to take the tray from his mother. For an instant Nicole held the scene as if frozen for ever ‒ the figure of the woman walking on the clipped velvet lawn, the three male figures converging on her, the perfect house in its perfect setting, the deep shade cast by the oak.
It was Lloyd who spoke the lines as he extended his hand to help Richard to his feet:
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?
His eyes met Nicole’s, and she knew that somehow he had known and shared her longing that it should always be just as it was now.
The next morning under a dull sky Nicole drove with Lloyd back to London, and as they approached the outskirts of the city, it began to rain.
4
The last fittings were made, the rehearsals were attended, everything went to a precise schedule mapped out by Iris. Nicole, dressed in the regulation white and with three ostrich plumes in her hair, went to Buckingham Palace to be presented. She could afterwards remember feeling nervous seated beside Iris as the car slowly moved up the Mall, waiting its turn to set her down at the entrance where pale-faced débutantes, and the sometimes incredibly ancient ladies who were presenting them, were shaking out trains and adjusting long, white gloves. At the moment though of moving forward to make her deep curtsy, the nervousness departed. She knew the only terrible thing she could do at this moment was to fall flat on her face before Queen Mary, which at least would make her slightly more memorable than all the other girls similarly dressed. But she didn’t fall; she had no intention of falling. It had all been rehearsed so many times. She twisted her right leg behind her in the approved fashion, went down sufficiently low, remained steady with a straight back. On rising she backed away and managed the train without awkwardness. It was over; she was free. Charles welcomed her back to Elgin Square with champagne.
‘Very nicely done, my dear,’ Iris said. It was the warmest praise she was capable of. ‘And as a coming-out present, you are to keep the pearls. They will make a nice memento of the occasion.’
Nicole fingered the three strands of beautifully-matched pearls with the diamond clasp which belonged to Iris. She also wore a finely wrought diamond tiara which Iris had loaned to her. ‘But ‒ but what will you do without your pearls?’ Iris was seldom dressed without them.
‘Oh, it’s always possible to buy more pearls, but I think it’s always nicer if the first ones are given to you. In ordinary circumstances we would have been giving you pearls on each birthday until your necklace was complete. In your case ‒’
‘Thank you, Aunt Iris. It’s very generous of you. They’re magnificent …’
And over her champagne glass her eyes met Charles’s and she recognized the admiration and the sadness there. She felt she would have liked to stretch out a hand and say, ‘It’s all right, Uncle Charles. I’m not going away.’ But that would not have pleased Iris. For her, the real satisfaction had not come on this night, nor would it come on the night of the coming-out ball next week. It would come when she could announce Nicole’s engagement to a spectacularly eligible young man. The triumph of Iris’s life would come when she could announce, arrange and preside over the wedding of the year. This presentation at Court was only the first step. So Nicole could not reassure Charles she was not going away. If she did not go away, did not achieve the marriage Iris expected of her, she would have failed. So she said nothing beyond thanking Iris again for the pearls.
Henson had a velvet-lined jewel box ready for them. ‘Well, Miss Nicole. I expect that’s only the first of many. You’d look very well in emeralds, Miss. I always say a lady needs a very white complexion for emeralds. They don’t look at all well on sallow types.’
She brushed Nicole’s hair out of the rather rigid coiffure needed for the tiara. ‘Well, Miss, a time to remember all your life. Next thing we know you’ll be presenting your own daughters at Court.’
Nicole closed her eyes wearily and for once was grateful for Henson’s ministrations. Presenting her own daughters at Court … was this what Anna had sent her here for? Was this the almost ruthless good sense in that final letter? She had expected no less of Nicole than Iris did.
Iris had new pearls for Nicole’s coming-out ball, and she wore her tiara. Mowbray had been transformed for the party. To its straight Georgian lines a London designer had added two curving plywood colonnades hung with pink and white silk leading to two wall-less circular rooms capped with cupolas. These also were hung with pink and white silk, and with pink and white canvas ready to draw across in case the June evening should be chilly or wet. Each of the two rooms had its own orchestra. The inside of Mowbray had been converted into a series of supper rooms, and even a card room for those who didn’t care to dance. Iris was determined that there should be people of every age, not just Nicole’s, at this, the best excuse she had had so far in her life, for a well-managed display of taste and style. She could not admit to herself as she scanned the bills which poured in, that she was at last having her revenge on the Yorkshire mill-owner who had given her a second-rate coming-out party at a London hotel, served bad champagne grudgingly, and severely limited her dress allowance for the season. The Yorkshire mills and the successful reinvestment of the money which had come from them provided all this, and Iris did not count the cost. She surveyed Mowbray that night, just as the first of the bands began to play, and was satisfied. It was the perfect June evening. It would be daylight until almost eleven, when the specially installed lighting in the trees and through the shrubbery would come on. The manicured lawns were set with white chairs and tables with pink cloths. Great sprays of pink roses were set along the colonnades, and through the rooms. The herbaceous border had been specially replanted so that at this time only various shades of pink would be seen. Tubs of forced pink hydrangeas stood about at any point which might seem to lack colour. The waiters wore pink jackets. Nicole looked at it all and thought, for Iris’s sake, that it was a pity that she was not a pink and white English girl, with blonde hair, to go with all this spun-sugar fantasy. At least Iris had not insisted on her wearing a pink dress, though she had complained that Nicole’s choice of a white dress was rather too simple and severe.
The cars began arriving. Iris, Charles and Nicole stood in the receiving line. The trickle of guests became a rush. Names were announced, Nicole smiled endlessly at people she could only vaguely remember having met before, and many she had never seen in her life. The music was very good, everyone said. How clever to get the two best London bands on the same night. Charles’s relations seemed to have emerged from some back cupboard where they kept dirty diamonds and ancient boas. But they were a distinguished family, and so were able to wear what they liked, without regard to fashion. ‘Handsome gel, Charles,’ one deaf great-aunt shouted. ‘Glad to see you’ve got something worth looking at this time.’ Iris flushed at the remembrance of old snubs, but kept smiling and obviously was triumphant in at last showing Charles’s family what she could do.
‘Shouldn’t be surprised if you make a good match, my gel,’ the terrible old woman shouted. ‘Good-looking fillies are short this season, they say. Watch out for the breeding lines, though. Always tells. Breed up, gel. The Rainard blood could stand some improving. Don’t
know about your mother’s line. Americans are such a mix, aren’t they …?’ She wandered on to greet old friends, mothers and aunts and grandmothers of other débutantes. She and some cronies seemed to spend the rest of the evening dividing their time between the supper tables, and long enjoyable stretches seated out on one of the colonnades making cruelly sharp assessments of the dancers and the strollers on the lawns. Towards two o’clock when she took leave of Charles, the great-aunt shouted, ‘She’ll do very well, Charles. Has style. Bit out of the ordinary. But the young ones now can’t touch what the girls used to be in my day. Then we had figures …’
Nicole danced with young men who seemed to look extraordinarily alike, and spoke of the same things. She went in to three suppers, nibbling at pink salmon and delicately sweet strawberries. She drank champagne at one of the pink-covered tables with the eldest son of a duke. ‘You mu-must come up to Scotland in Aug … August,’ he stammered. ‘We’ve some ra … rather good shooting …’ She watched Iris struggle to hide her supreme satisfaction when the Countess of Denby, one of the social arbiters of London, and with whom Iris served in a rather humble capacity on a famous charitable committee, said in a voice loud enough to be overheard, ‘My dear, such a success. Everyone’s here …’
And Judy said, grinning at Nicole, ‘Everyone’s here ‒ including the Fentons.’
Lloyd Fenton, however, was not there. Nicole guessed he had attended too many Bostonian Back Bay débutante parties to want to be drawn into any more. Richard danced with Nicole. With the cast off his foot he was supremely graceful. ‘Now you wouldn’t call this serious,’ he said to her. ‘And you look too beautiful for all this pink stuff. You’ll never wear pink, will you, Nicole? You look like your pearls. Quite, quite beautiful.’
It seemed a number of people that night had told her that she looked beautiful, but she could only remember the time Richard had told her so.
At about five o’clock the bands packed up. A very few, very young people lingered at the pink-covered tables, and a few tired chaperones had fallen asleep in the drawing-room. One was stretched out snoring on the chaise-longue in the newly decorated pink ladies’ cloakroom. Charles had limped upstairs. Iris was giving the last directions to the catering people, and deciding that those who had stayed could be served another breakfast. Nicole found herself wandering alone along one of the colonnades. The round dance-room was quite deserted, the musicians gone. The delicate pink roses had blown to fullness in the heat that the dancers had created. A crumpled pink napkin blew in from the lawn in the little breeze that was stirring in the dawn. The floodlights had been switched off, and the birds had begun to sing in the sudden quiet. A girl’s laugh floated across the garden. Nicole went idly to the piano. Only one theme came to her restless fingers. She was calm and angry at the same time. How little of the money spent that evening would have kept herself and Anna comfortably in New York. There need never have been those all-night sessions at Lucky Nolan’s ‒ nor any Lucky either. All evening long she had played out the fraudulent role she and Iris ‒ and Anna as well ‒ had devised. She had appeared to be what she was not. But what was she really? The theme her fingers had quite unconsciously wandered into was ‘Für Elise’. She let it go on; she didn’t try to stop herself. This was for Anna. She heard again the old deaf great-aunt’s words, ‘Watch out for the breeding lines. Breed up, gel.’ Her fingers became angry on the keys. She didn’t play softly any more. And when she finished, one of the famous band-leaders was leaning against a silk-coated plywood column, sipping whisky.
‘So you’re a pretty good musician, Miss Rainard?’
She shrugged. ‘Depends on what you like.’
‘Play any jazz?’
‘Not the way you’d approve. I haven’t much …’
He smiled. ‘Want to try “]elly Roll Blues”?’
And without waiting for her answer he picked up his saxophone and gave out the first notes. She found herself following. The rhythm wasn’t always right, but she fell in with him in a way she hadn’t thought possible. For the first time she knew that the discipline of the classical knowledge, or else an inborn knowledge, was essential before one could seem to throw it away in this effortless fashion. The man led her on, and she responded. The notes wailed out over the dawn garden. Couples drifted towards the dance-room, not to dance, but to listen. It was afterwards said in London to those who had not been present, that the best time of Nicole Rainard’s coming-out party had been that half-hour in the summer-morning garden, when an expert had led a beginner along, and they had made music together.
Charles had sighed over the newspaper and fashionable magazine reports and pictures of the party, which were lavish and detailed. ‘I rather wish it hadn’t got so much attention, Iris. It doesn’t seem right, in times as hard as these, to be seeming to spend so much on a party ‒’
She cut him off swiftly. ‘Nonsense, Charles. We’re creating employment, aren’t we? Where would the catering people be, and the florists and the dressmakers be if we all decided not to entertain? Walking the streets looking for work. Nicole can’t go back and have her season ten years from now, when things may be prosperous again. What good will it do anyone if the money just stays in a bank, earning interest …?’ Her ambition, he reflected, aroused once again by Nicole, had taken her a long way from the frugal strictures of the Yorkshire mill-owner. He could tell she was very pleased with it all. She was pleased with Nicole. She was especially pleased with the coverage in the Tatler which began, ‘The surprise débutante of the year is undoubtedly American-born, Paris-educated Nicole Rainard, whose splendid coming-out ball was held at the Surrey mansion of her aunt, Lady Gowing …’
One of the gossip columns of an evening paper put it differently, ‘There are those who wonder if the dark-horse entrant, Nicole Rainard, may not sweep past all the more likely entrants in the débutante stakes this season …’
To coincide with her coming-out party Nicole had had the usual full-page portrait in the front of the Tatler. At first the society photographer had tried her in the usual poses, long dress, pearls and flowers. Something strange in her personality kept breaking through, and he knew that the photographs would not have the usual rather lifeless, but acceptable quality. He had shaken his head. ‘Do you ride horses, or something? Perhaps we should …?’
In the end the photo was of Nicole, seated at the piano, in a very plain dark dress, without jewellery, hands wide-spread on the keys in a double chord. She looked preoccupied, not with the camera, but with the music. ‘Miss Nicole Rainard, niece of Brigadier Sir Charles and Lady Gowing, has temporarily left off her studies at the Paris Conservatoire …’
5
The mailman who served the small block of efficiency units in Santa Monica had often wondered why Mrs Maynard had subscriptions to several glossy English magazines, but then he wondered why she had subscriptions to other publications, like the Wall Street Journal. They were all in the name of Mr N Maynard, who had been, he supposed, her dead husband. People often kept subscriptions on for sentimental reasons, he knew, without ever looking at the contents of the journals. He also noted that Mrs Maynard never received a personal letter ‒ just what he recognized as the occasional bill, and the renewal notices for the subscriptions. It puzzled him a little because the few glimpses he had had of Mrs Maynard she had not seemed the sort of person who would be so completely alone that no one ever wrote to her. She was very attractive, he thought, though pushing forty now; she dressed quietly in inconspicuous clothes, and drove an ageing Ford. She gave him a generous present at Christmas, and always made sure that she spoke to him herself at this time, asked about his family, and wished him a good New Year. Her accent was nothing he could place ‒ not English, not American, but with none of the betraying sounds of the Italians or the Germans. He liked her for her courtesy, and was therefore very disinclined to gossip about her with any of the other tenants of the efficiency block. She was obviously the sort who kept herself to herself, and so far as he wa
s concerned, she had the right to.
She was now an expert driver of the old Ford. One weekend in the month she left behind the books and papers, the study courses she had set herself, and drove towards the great pass between San Bernardino and San Gorgonio which led out to the desert. Small cabins which could be rented overnight, and which they called motels, were beginning to appear. She could never explain to herself why the desert fascinated her, and drew her so constantly. It was nothing like what she had seen in the East; it had not the mysterious enchantment of the woods around the estate of Prince Michael Ovrensky, where she had spun childish fantasies. There were no fantasies left for Anna Rainard. She wondered if she loved the brutal harshness of the desert because it seemed to have come down to the very bones of life itself; with all softness gone, what beauty she found there was not deceptive; the long shadows on the mountains, the burning, blinding quality of the light, these were things she felt she could touch and almost hold. The seared emptiness of the spaces found an answer in her own aloneness. She responded to it as if it were a place of her own heart. It was almost a shock of deception each spring then, when the miracle of the carpets of wild flowers spread over the valleys and cloaked them briefly with softness. ‘The false smile’, she always called it to herself, and was rather glad when the familiar bone rock hardness returned.
But she also learned that the mythical oases of the desert existed. A clump of trees, at first like a mirage, would appear. When she drove the old Ford to them, there would be a spring and a green pool of sweet water, rocks cooled from the afternoon heat by the overhanging branches. She shared it with the creatures of the desert, the rabbit, the lizard, the prairie dog, the snake. Sometimes, when no other traveller shared that space with her, she took off her shoes and stockings and waded in the strangely cool water. Sometimes, at night, when the desert grew cold, she would return to these places and watch the stars blaze in the night sky with an intensity that the sun had had at three o’clock.
The Lynmara Legacy Page 15